Paperback reissue of one volume of the English Dominicans' Latin/English edition of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae.

While interest in the relationship between theology and the arts is on the rise, there are very few resources for students and teachers, let alone a comprehensive text on the subject. This book fills that lacuna by providing an anthology of readings on theological aesthetics drawn from the first century to the present. A superb sourcebook, Theological Aesthetics brings together original texts that are relevant and timely to scholars today. Editor Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen has taken a careful, inclusive approach to the book, including articles and extracts that are diverse and ecumenical as well as representative of gender and ethnicity. The book is organized chronologically, and each historical period begins with commentary by Thiessen that sets the selections in context. These engaging readings range broadly over themes at the intersection of religion and the arts, including beauty and revelation, the vision of God, artistic and divine creation, God as artist, images of God, the interplay of the senses and the intellect, human imagination, mystical writings, meanings of signs and symbols, worship, liturgy, doxology, the relationship of word and image, icons and iconoclasm, the role of the arts in twentieth-century theology, and much more.

This is an approach to Christ's impeccability and temptation through exploring and evaluating the theological models that have been developed from the early church to the present day. Drawing from tradition and the relevant biblical evidence, John McKinley argues that Jesus was truly tempted in ways that are closely relevant to the temptations common to us. Having been tempted for us in this way, Jesus can provide true help as the credible example to follow and truly sympathetic ally in the fight against sin. Key to understanding how Jesus remained unable to sin and sharply vulnerable to temptation is the role of the Holy Spirit.

St. Thomas Aquinas' theology of Christ's human passions comes at the height of a medieval debate centering on the reality and extent of Christ's experience of affective suffering. Weighing in on the debate, Aquinas forges a defense of Christ's full humanity that stretches far beyond the inquiry into Christ's passions and seeks to uphold the realism of the dogma of the Incarnation. St. Thomas' doctrine of Christ's human affectivity owes much to patristic and medieval thought. Yet no less does it charter a course in Christology that stands out for its originality and depth of analysis.

Understanding the Person of Christ affects our understanding of all Christian theology. All ten contributors to this volume share a commitment to the orthodox theological tradition in Christology as expressed in the creedal heritage of the Christian church, and seek to explicate the continuing coherence and importance of that theological tradition. The book's ten essays cover such topics as prolegomena to Christology, the incarnation, the person and nature of Christ, the communicatio idiomatum, the baptism of Christ, the redemptive work of Christ, the ascended Christ, and New Testament Christology, and offers critical engagements with such diverse theologians as John Calvin, Charles Williams and John Zizioulas. The contributors, all leading academics, include: John Webster, Richard Burridge, Robert Jenson, Stephen Holmes, Douglas Farrow, Brian Horne, Murray, Douglas Knight, Sandra Fach, Christoph Schwoebel.

This book argues that Milton used innovative and cunning means to persuade readers in an age distrustful of traditional rhetoric.

Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.

This book is a study of the complex relationship between matter and idea that shaped the nineteenth-century culture of art, and that in turn determined the course of still-current accounts of art's nature and value. Fundamental questions about the effects of material conditions on the creation and reception of art arose as early as the nineteenth century, and put important pressures on later eras. The place of class distinctions in the making and reception of art, the relationship between copy and original, the effects of display on art appreciation, even the role of pleasure itself: this book treats these and related issues as productive conceptual challenges with an unresolved relationship to matter at their core. Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of art and its institutions, Material Inspirations places cultural developments such as the emergence of new sites for exhibition and the astonishing proliferation of printed reproductions alongside a wide range of texts including novels, poems, travel guidebooks, compendia of antiquities, and especially the great line of critical writing that emerged in the period. The study vivifies a dynamic era, which is still too often seen as static and unchanging, by emphasizing the transformations taking place throughout the period in precisely those areas that have appeared to promise little more than repetition or continuity: collection, exhibition, and reproduction. The book culminates with the two great critics of the period, John Ruskin and Walter Pater, but it also includes close analysis of other prose writers, as well as poets and novelists ranging from William Blake to Robert Browning, George Eliot to Henry James. Significant developments addressed include the vogue for the representation of Old Masters in the first half of the century, ongoing innovations in the creation and diffusion of reproductions, and the emergence of the field of art history itself. At the heart of each of these the book identifies a material pressure shaping concepts, texts, and works of art.

Denis Edwards was a theoloian concerned with the science and religion discourse and eco-theology. He died in March 2019. This book is a collection of his till now unpusblished talks and essays.