How can we grasp the significance of what Jesus Christ did for us? Might literature help us as we seek to understand the Christian faith? J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has generated much discussion about the relationship between Christianity and literature. It is well known that Tolkien disliked allegory. Yet he acknowledged that his work is imbued with Christian symbolism and meaning. Based on the inaugural Hansen Lectureship series delivered by Philip Ryken, this volume mines the riches of Tolkien's theological imagination. In the characters of Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn, Ryken hears echoes of the threefold office of Christ-his prophetic, priestly, and royal roles. Guided by Ryken, readers will discover that they can learn much about the one who is the true prophet, priest, and king through Tolkien's imaginative storytelling. Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Does the Devil lie at the heart of the creative process? In The Devil as Muse, Fred Parker offers an entirely fresh reflection on the age-old question, echoing William Blake's famous statement: "the true poet is of the Devil's party." Expertly examining three literary interpretations of the Devil and his influence upon the artist--Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost, the Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust, and the one who offers daimonic creativity in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus--Parker unveils a radical tension between the ethical and the aesthetic. While the Devil is the artist's necessary collaborator and liberating muse, from an ethical standpoint the price paid for such creativity is nothing less damnable than the Faustian pact--and the artist who is creative in that way is seen as accursed, alienated, morally disturbing. In their own different ways, Parker shows, Blake, Byron, and Mann all reflect and acknowledge that tension in their work, and model ways to resolve it through their writing. Linking these literary conceptions with scholarship on the genesis of the historical conception of the Devil and recent work on the role of "otherness" in creativity, Parker insightfully suggests how creative literature can feel its way back along the processes--both theological and psychological--that lie behind such constructions of the Adversary.

Bring on the doodles

Zen doodle, that is In "Zen Doodle: Tons of Tangles," you'll find gorgeous images of the best doodle art from around the world. This collection of drawings and painted canvases from dozens of contributors features thousands of tangle patterns and doodle designs to inspire you to doodle anything and everything.

Create a mythical, doodled beast or abstract work of art. Draw an inspirational tangled card for a friend or add doodled intrigue to your art journal with patterned shapes. "Zen Doodle" provides you with the first steps toward creating unique tangled art, including traditional tiles, letterforms, Zendalas, landscapes, four-tile ensembles, paper quilts and more

Inside you'll find:

• More than 100 pieces of Zen doodled art from 42 artists.
• Step-by-step instruction to help you begin your own Zen doodles.
• Four chapters of doodle inspiration: Abstracts, Shapes & Objects, Animals & Beasts, and Friendship & Love.

Isn't it time you take your tangles to the next level?

Emile Male's book aids understanding of medieval art and medieval symbolism, and of the vision of the world which presided over the building of the French cathedrals. It looks at French religious art in the Middle Ages, its forms, and especially the Eastern sources of sculptural iconography used in the cathedrals of France. Fully illustrated with many footnotes it acts as a useful guide for the student of Western culture.

"A fine collection of probing and imaginative discussions on the relation between the Incarnation and the arts." -Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale Divinity School

ART"Grey's vision of a flawed but perfectible mankind stands as an antidote to the cynicism and spiritual malaise prevalent in much contemporary art." The New York Times "Alex Grey's art will bring you face to face with your soul and move you to a new level of enlightenment." Deepak Chopra, author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success "Alex Grey is making some of the most beautifully refined imagist work in the country today." Walter Hopps, senior curator, Guggenheim Museum and Menil Collection"Grey's work, like all great transcendental art, is not merely symbolic or imaginary: it is a direct invitation to recognize and realize a deeper dimension of our very own being." Ken Wilber, author of The Simple Feeling of Being Every once in a great while an artist emerges who does more than simply reflect the social trends of the time. Such an artist is able to transcend established thinking and help us redefine ourselves and our world. Today, a growing number of art critics, philosophers, and spiritual seekers believe that they have found that vision in the art of Alex Grey. Grey's art leads us on a transformative journey through the opacity and darkness of the material world to the recovery of our divinely illumined core. Images of becoming, of existential pain, search and confusion, love, death, and transcendence are icons in the long corridors of Grey's creative odyssey. From his earliest self-portraits and paintings of skeletons, to his most recent universal beings gridded with fire and eyes, Grey brings us an ever-deepening visual contemplation on the nature of personal and transpersonal identity.Transfigurations is a continuation of the dialogue between body and soul begun in Grey'sfirst book Sacred Mirrors--one of the most successful art books of the 1990s. Transfigurations includes all of Grey's major works completed in the following decade, presented here in 202 color reproductions and 93 black-and-white images. These works include the masterful seven-paneled Buddhist altarpiece Nature of Mind; World Soul, a bronze sculpture of a divine being that symbolically encompasses all realms of consciousness; and Cosmic Christ, a vision of Christ that embraces all religions and the countless dimensions of the universe. An essay by renowned author and transpersonal psychologist Stephen Larsen provides a biographical sketch of the artist's creative process, struggling with his demons and glimpsing the light of the beyond within. Grey's early forays into dark, transgressive performance art and his later theophanic installations are all documented in a special twenty-page performance section. Art critic Donald Kuspit elucidates Grey's primary subject, mystical light, as it manifests through his unique approach to the human figure. A conversation between noted philosopher Ken Wilber and the artist explores the exciting possibilities of art serving as a vehicle for transformation. Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, writes the foreword that places Grey's work at the conjunction of science and mysticism. Grey's paintings offer the viewer unforgettable glimpses of transfiguration, as bodies become translucent to the light of Spirit, transparent to the ground of being. The occurrence of beholding and becoming "the light" is a phenomenon that is described in all religions and wisdom paths. Grey's "X-ray" visions show the complex interplay of the anatomical body andthe glowing subtle energies of the soul, unveiling the relationship between our finite self and infinite spirit. Grey's quest is toward an integrative art that visually unites body, mind, soul, and spirit and helps heal the alienation and fragmentation felt between the individual and the world. ALEX GREY is the author of Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey and The Mission of Art. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at the New Museum and Stux Gallery in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Sao Paulo Biennial, and the ARK exhibition space in Tokyo. His art has also been featured in venues as diverse as album covers for the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, and Tool; Newsweek magazine; and the Discovery Channel. He lives in New York with his wife, artist Allyson Grey, and their daughter, actress Zena Grey.

Dale Ahlquist, the President of the American Chesterton Society, and author of G. K. Chesterton - The Apostel of Common Sense, presents a book of wonderful insights on how to "look at the whole world through the eyes of Chesterton." Since, as he says, "Chesterton wrote about everything," there is an ocean of his material to benefit from GKC's insights on a kaleidascpoe of many imortant topics. Chesterton wrote a hundred books on a variety of themes, thousands of essasy for London newspapers, penned epic poetry, delighted in detective fiction, drew illustrations, and made everyone laugh by his keen humor. Everyone who knew Chesterton loved him, even those he debated with. His unique writing style that combines philosophy, spirituality, history, humor, and paradox have made him one of the most widely read authors of modern times. As Ahlquist shows in his engaging volume, this most quoted writer of the 20th century has much to share with us on topics covering politics, art, education, wonder, marriage, fads, poetry, faith, charity and much more.

This book employs a new approach to the art of sixteenth-century Europe by incorporating rhetoric and theory to enable a reinterpretation of elements of Mannerism as being grounded in sixteenth-century spirituality. Lynette M. F. Bosch examines the conceptual vocabulary found in sixteenth-century treatises on art from Giorgio Vasari to Federico Zuccari, which analyses how language and spirituality complement the visual styles of Mannerism. By exploring the way in which writers from Leone Ebreo to Gabriele Paleotti describe the interaction between art and spirituality, Bosch establishes a religious base for the language of art in sixteenth-century Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, religious studies, and religious history.

The book investigates the aesthetic theology embedded in the Franciscan artistic tradition. The novelty of the approach is in applying concepts gleaned from Franciscan textual sources to create a deeper understanding of how art in all its sensual forms was foundational to the Franciscan milieu. Chapters range from studies of statements about aesthetics and the arts in theological textual sources to examples of visual, auditory, and tactile arts communicating theological ideas found in texts. The essays cover not only European art and textual sources, but also Franciscan influences in the Americas found in both texts and artifacts.

Books have been treasured for centuries in the Islamic world, as precious objects worthy of royal admiration. This was especially true in Muslim India, where generations of Mughal emperors commissioned and collected volumes of richly illuminated manuscripts and lavishly illustrated folios. They assembled workshops of the leading artists and calligraphers to produce the books that filled their extensive libraries. Today, those works remain a vibrant part of India's cultural and artistic history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this revised and expanded edition of his popular 1981 book, Dr Milo Beach presents the superb collection of Mughal painting in the Freer Gallery of Art. He adds many of the outstanding works that entered the collection with the opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1987. Together, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian's museums of Asian art, have the distinction of being one of the world's leading repositories of Mughal art. An introductory essay examines the Mughal art of the book and traces the contributions of a succession of rulers in Muslim India. Brief artist biographies and an extensive bibliography complete this updated volume.

Originally published in 1938, this book provides a history of the variety of forms of Buddhist art that grew up in Thailand from the 1st century AD to the end of the 16th century. Le May draws on his experience as part of the British Consular Service in Thailand to focus primarily on sculpture, how the trade routes in South and South-East Asia brought Thailand into contact with a variety of artistic styles and how the different areas of the country adapted these styles for their own use. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of Thai art specifically or of Eastern art more generally.

Pandemonium: An Illustrated History of Demonology presents for this first time Satan's family tree, providing a history and analysis of his fellow fallen angels from Asmodeus to Ziminiar. Throughout there will be short entries on individual demons, but Pandemonium will be more than just a visual encyclopedia. It will also focus on the influence of figures like Beelzebub, Azazel, Lilith, and Moloch on Western religion, literature, and art. Ranging from the earliest scriptural references to demons in the New Testament through the Enlightenment and Romantic eras when our devils took on a subtler form, Pandemonium functions as a compendium of Lucifer's subjects from Dante's The Divine Comedy to John Milton's Paradise Lost, and all points in between. Containing rarely seen illustrations of very old treatises on demonology as well as more well-known works by the great masters of Western painting, this book will celebrate the art of hell like never before!

Published in 1848, this two-volume work was received with great praise. During a celebrated career, Anna Brownell Jameson (1794 1860) produced Shakespeare criticism, travel writing, biography, and art history, and was admired by contemporaries such as Mary Shelley and Thomas Carlyle. Taking an aesthetic rather than religious approach, the work is a study of the legends represented in Western art of the Middle Ages, ordered taxonomically. Though Jameson is considered the first professional female art critic, this is a reductive label; she was, rather, one of the great art critics of her age and her work is still of importance to art historians. Volume 1, which is richly illustrated, covers the literary origins of the legends and surveys the representation of angels and archangels, the Four Evangelists, the Twelve Apostles, the Doctors of the Church, and a number of significant saints, including Mary Magdalene.

Published in 1848, this two-volume work was received with great praise. During a celebrated career, Anna Brownell Jameson (1794 1860) produced Shakespeare criticism, travel writing, biography, and art history, and was admired by contemporaries such as Mary Shelley and Thomas Carlyle. Taking an aesthetic rather than religious approach, the work is a study of the legends represented in Western art of the Middle Ages, ordered taxonomically. Though Jameson is considered the first professional female art critic, this is a reductive label; she was, rather, one of the great art critics of her age and her work is still of importance to art historians. Volume 2, which is richly illustrated, examines the Patron Saints of Christendom, the Virgin Patronesses, the early martyrs, the Greek and Latin martyrs, the early bishops, the hermits, and the warrior saints.

Alexander Lindsay (1812 80) was the head of an aristocratic family who owned vast coalfields in Lancashire, generating enormous wealth. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent the majority of his time travelling in Italy, collecting, and writing on a variety of subjects, including art, the Indo-Aryan race and the Etruscans. This important work, published in three volumes in 1847, surveys Christian painting and sculpture. Addressing Romance literature of the Middle Ages, iconography and legends of the saints, the book's historical narrative is infused with the author's strong moral approach to the subject. Volume 1 covers philosophical method, Christian symbolism and mythology, Roman art, and Byzantine art, which Lindsay sees as having stimulated the Western revival. Though derided by John Ruskin, the work strongly influenced aristocratic collecting, and remains relevant to readers interested in the Victorian construction of morals and artistic taste.

Alexander Lindsay (1812 80) was the head of an aristocratic family who owned vast coalfields in Lancashire, generating enormous wealth. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent the majority of his time travelling in Italy, collecting, and writing on a variety of subjects, including art, the Indo-Aryan race and the Etruscans. This important work, published in three volumes in 1847, surveys Christian painting and sculpture. Addressing Romance literature of the Middle Ages, iconography and legends of the saints, the book's historical narrative is infused with the author's strong moral approach to the subject. Volume 2 covers Gothic architecture; the art of the Lombards; Pisano and Giotto, and their schools and followers. Though derided by John Ruskin, the work strongly influenced aristocratic collecting, and remains relevant to readers interested in the Victorian construction of morals and artistic taste.

Alexander Lindsay (1812 80) was the head of an aristocratic family who owned vast coalfields in Lancashire, generating enormous wealth. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent the majority of his time travelling in Italy, collecting, and writing on a variety of subjects, including art, the Indo-Aryan race and the Etruscans. This important work, published in three volumes in 1847, surveys Christian painting and sculpture. Addressing Romance literature of the Middle Ages, iconography and legends of the saints, the book's historical narrative is infused with the author's strong moral approach to the subject. Volume 3 covers the schools of Siena, Florence and Bologna, then moves north to look at Cologne, D rer, and Cranach, the Van Eycks and the Netherlandish School. Though derided by John Ruskin, the work strongly influenced aristocratic collecting, and remains relevant to readers interested in the Victorian construction of morals and artistic taste.