Before the Renaissance and Reformation, holy images were treated not as "art" but as objects of veneration which possessed the tangible presence of the Holy. the faithful believed that these images served as relics and were able to work miracles, deliver oracles, and bring victory to the battlefield. In this magisterial book, Hans Belting traces the long history of the sacral image and its changing role--from surrogate for the represented image to an original work of art--in European culture. Likeness and Presence looks at the beliefs, superstitions, hopes, and fears that come into play as people handle and respond to sacred images, and presents a compelling interpretation of the place of the image in Western history. -- Back cover

In the spring of 2004, Eckhart Tolle lead an extraordinary weekend retreat at Findhord, Scotland, a spiritual community on the leading edge of personal and global transformation. The whole retreat was captured on video and edited to create two DVDs.

Explores how one group of Latin American artists express their relationship to American art, history and culture.

"Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, the first comprehensive survey of performance art by black visual artists. While black performance has been largely contextualized as an extension of theater, visual artists have integrated performance into their work for over five decades, generating a repository of performance work that has gone largely unrecognized until now. Radical Presence provides a critical framework to discuss the history of black performance traditions within the visual arts beginning with the "happenings" of the early 1960s, throughout the 1980s, and into the present practices of contemporary artists."--Publisher's website

The presence of God is meant to be more than just an occasional event during Sunday morning Worship---you are meant to live in God's presence! In The Lost Art of Practicing His Presence, James W. Goll uncovers ancient and nearly forgotten keys to deeper intimacy with Christ Jesus while revealing the ease of working with Christ instead of for Him. Through this book you will rediscover the lost precepts of Biblical meditation, contemplative prayer, and waiting on the Lord and learn how to apply them in your own life. Most importantly, you will gain inspiration for your own intimate walk and the courage to spread the fire His presence to everyone around you! The Lost Art of Practicing His Presence also includes a modern-language translation of The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. An inspiration to James Goll, this 15th-century believer has inspired generations of Christians with his simple life and profound writings on the nature and presence of the Lord.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name held at the Yale University Art Gallery, September 4, 2015-January 3, 2016.

Your self, aware presence, knows no resistance to any appearance and, as such, is happiness itself; like the empty space of a room, it cannot be disturbed and is, therefore, peace itself; like this page, it is intimately one with whatever appears on it and is thus love itself; and like water that is not affected by the shape of a wave, it is pure freedom. Causeless joy, imperturbable peace, love that knows no opposite, and freedom at the heart of all experience…this is your ever-present nature under all circumstances.

The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells. By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works. Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.

Between birth and death, many of life's most critical moments occur in hospital, and they deserve to take place in surroundings that match their significance. In this spirit, from the early Renaissance through to the modern period, artists have made immensely powerful work in hospitals across the western world, enhancing the environments where patients and medical staff strive towards better health. Distinguished art historian Richard Cork became fascinated by the extraordinary richness of art produced in hospitals, encompassing work by many of the great masters - Piero della Francesca, Rogier van der Weyden, El Greco, William Hogarth, Jacques-Louis David, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall and Naum Gabo. Cork's brilliant survey discovers the astonishing variety of images found in medical settings, ranging from dramatic confrontations with suffering (Matthias Grunewald at Isenheim) to the most sublime celebrations of heavenly ecstasy (Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in Venice).In the process, he reveals art's prodigious ability to humanize our hospitals, alleviate their clinical bleakness and leave a profound, lasting impression on patients, staff and visitors. -- Publisher's blurb.