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Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Iconography, subjects depicted in art > Religious subjects depicted in art
Smile of the Buddha explores the influences of Asian world-views
and particularly Buddhism on the art of Europe and America in the
modern era. In an informative and perceptive introduction and
essays on twenty well-known artists, Jacquelynn Baas analyzes how
the teachings of the Buddha offered alternatives to Western
intellectual conceptions of art and traces the various ways this
inspiration materialized in artworks. The influence of Buddhism on
art from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the present
has been greater than historians and critics generally recognize,
Baas claims. Considering essential questions about the relationship
of art and life, this timely and beautifully illustrated book
expands our perspective on how spirituality and creativity inspire
and inform one another. Baas's insights and the images she presents
give the reader a new understanding and appreciation of a diverse
array of Western artworks.
Learning about the ancient Jewish tradition of midrash, a rabbinic
form of textual interpretation that seeks and imagines answers to
unanswerable questions, felt to Amy Bornman like a poetic
invitation to re-engage with the Bible in a new way. There is a
Future: A Year of Daily Midrash - an award-winner in the Paraclete
Poetry Prize competition - grew from a yearlong project to read the
Bible daily, and write daily midrashic poems in response to the
readings-to honor the text by wondering about, and struggling with,
it. By engaging particular passages of scripture across the Old and
New Testaments directly, these poems imagine new dimensions of the
text, and make vivid connections to the world as it is now and to
the author's own life-emerging at year's end with new hope in a
future that at times feels impossible, as the days pile on days and
the text's enduring questions continue to ring.
Art as Biblical Commentary is not just about biblical art but, more
importantly, about biblical exegesis and the contributions visual
criticism as an exegetical tool can make to biblical exegesis and
commentary. Using a range of texts and numerous images, J. Cheryl
Exum asks what works of art can teach us about the biblical text.
'Visual criticism' is her term for an approach that addresses this
question by focusing on the narrativity of images-reading them as
if, like texts, they have a story to tell-and asking what light an
image's 'story' can shed on the biblical narrator's story. In Part
I, Exum elaborates on her approach and offers a personal testimony
to the value of visual criticism. Part 2 examines in detail the
story of Hagar in Genesis 16 and 21. Part 3 contains chapters on
erotic looking and voyeuristic gazing in the stories of Bathsheba,
Susanna, Joseph and Potiphar's wife and the Song of Songs; on the
distribution of renown among Jael, Deborah and Barak; on the
Bible's notorious women, Eve and Delilah; and on the sacrificed
female body in the stories of the Levite's wife (Judges 19) and
Mary the mother of Jesus.
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