Beautiful Bodies
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Beautiful Bodies
Author: Margaret R. Miles
language: en
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Release Date: 2024-05-28
St. Augustine was known as a theologian of feeling for many centuries. Renaissance painters pictured him holding his passionately blazing heart in his hand. In Augustine's society and education, feeling was considered an intimate and integral aspect of thinking, so intimately interwoven that philosophers struggled to distinguish these activities. Thus, Augustine was also committed to learning throughout his passionate and thoughtful life, from his early conviction that "God and the soul" can be known through the meticulous use of reason, to mature sermons in which he quoted "God is love," and commented, in effect, that is all you need to know about God. The role of feeling in his understanding of the effect of Christian doctrines on present life has been less noticed. This book proposes that changes in his perception of the value and significance of human bodies--from objects of rapacious lust to rapturous admiration of their beauty--form the nexus within which Augustine's thought and feeling cohere. The old Augustine's understanding of the theological significance of present bodies informed his acknowledged speculations on the qualities and capacities of beautiful bodies, nunc et tunc.
Beautiful Bodies
This book explores the role of material culture in the formation of corporeal aesthetics and beauty ideals in different past societies and thus contributes to the cultural relativization of bodily aesthetics and related gender norms. The volume does not explore beauty for the sake of beauty, but extensively explores how it serves to form and keep gender norms in place. The concept of beauty has been a topic of interest for some time, yet it is only in recent times that archaeologists have begun to approach beauty as a culturally contingent and socially constructed phenomenon. Although archaeologists and ancient historians extensively dealt with gender, they dealt less with it in relation to beauty. The contributions in this volume deal with different intersections of gender and corporeal aesthetics by turning to rich archaeological, textual and iconographic data from ancient Sumer, Aegean Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, ancient Athens, Roman provinces, the Viking world and the Qajar Iran. Beauty thus moves away from a curiosity and surface of the body to an analytic concept for a better understanding of past and present societies.
Beauty
Author: Natalie Carnes
language: en
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Release Date: 2014-11-13
Beauty engages fourth-century bishop Gregory of Nyssa to address beauty's place in theology and the broader world. With the recent resurgence of attention to beauty among theologians, questions still remain about what exactly beauty is, how it is perceived, and whether we should celebrate its return. If beauty fell out of favor because it was seen to distract from the weightier concerns of poverty and suffering--because it can even be a tool of oppression--why should we laud it now? Gregory's writings offer surprisingly rich and relevant reflections that can move contemporary conversations beyond current impasses and critiques of beauty. Drawing Gregory into conversation with such disparate voices as novelist J. M. Coetzee and art theorist Kaja Silverman, Beauty displays the importance of beauty to theology and theology to beauty in a discussion that bridges ancient and modern, practical and theoretical, secular and religious.