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.

2000 Catholic Press Association Award Winner! The claim has been made that we are gripped today in an aesthetic crisis" with considerable theological ramifications. Aesthetics, which has existed since the first human heart was moved by the influence of the beautiful, has played a major role, both implicit and explicit, in theological reflection. In The Community of the Beautiful Alejandro Garcia-Rivera draws from the North American philosophical tradition and Hispanic theological thought to propose a new aesthetic principle: a redemptive building of the community of the beautiful. The Community of the Beautiful focuses on the premise that religion and beauty go together. Yet today hundreds of theological treatises continue to speak solely of the "truth" of their claims. The Community of the Beautiful addresses this silence with a proposal about the relationship between God and the beautiful. It asks the question: How can the finite human creature name the nameless, perceive the imperceptible, make visible the invisible? The answer is what Hans Urs von Balthasar called a theological aesthetics. The Community of the Beautiful is not simply an analysis of Balthasar's theology; there exists a more personal and concrete reason for a reconsideration of the connection between God and the beautiful. The experience of a particular living ecclesial tradition, the Latin Church of the Americas, may be a guide to a world that lost its confidence in the religious dimensions of the beautiful. Garcia-Rivera recasts the question of theological aesthetics posed above in light of the religious experience of the Latin Church of the Americas so that the question becomes: What moves the human heart? To answer that question, Garcia-Rivera draws on along-ignored philosophical tradition. The philosophical semiotics of Charles Peirce and Josiah Royce enter into dialogue with the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar to describe the traditional transcendentals, the True and the Good, as communities. The final transcendental, the beautiful, enters into conversation with the semiotic aesthetics of Jan Mukarovsky and the religious experience of the Latin American Church to become the dazzling Vision of the community of the beautiful, God's community. Chapters are "Pied Beauty," "A Different Beauty," "Seeing the Form," "The Community of the True," "The Community of the Good," "The Community of the Beautiful," and "Lifting up the Lowly." Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera, a Roman Catholic lay theologian, received his doctorate in theology from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and holds degrees in physics from Ohio State University and Miami University. The author of numerous articles and winner of a Catholic Press Association award, he is assistant professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. "

This collection of essays by distinguished authors explores the present-day field of theological aesthetics: from von Balthasar’s contribution and parallel developments to correctives and alternatives to his approach. A tribute to von Balthasar’s own project expands into a dialogue with ancient and medieval traditions in search of revelatory aesthetics. The contributors outline challenges to his approach (including Protestant perspectives) and introduce new ways of viewing the field of theological aesthetics, which ultimately opens up to the idea of concrete cultural contexts and practical human needs determining the use of the arts and aesthetic sensibilities in theology.

A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology presents for the first time in English key passages from the Summa Halensis, one of the first major installments in the Summa genre for which scholasticism became famous. This systematic work of philosophy and theology was collaboratively authored mostly between 1236-45 by the founding members of the Franciscan school, such as Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, who worked at the recently-founded University of Paris. Modern scholarship has often dismissed this early Franciscan intellectual tradition as unoriginal, merely systematizing the Augustinian tradition in light of the rediscovery of Aristotle, paving the way for truly revolutionary figures like John Duns Scotus. But as the selections in this reader show, it was this earlier generation that initiated this break with past precedent. The compilers of the Summa Halensis first articulated many positions that eventually become closely associated with the Franciscan tradition on issues like the nature of God, the proof for God's existence, free will, the transcendentals, and Christology. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the ways medieval thinkers employed philosophical concepts in a theological context as well as the evolution of Franciscan thought and its legacy to modernity.

A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology presents for the first time in English key passages from the Summa Halensis, one of the first major installments in the summa genre for which scholasticism became famous. This systematic work of philosophy and theology was collaboratively written mostly between 1236 and 1245 by the founding members of the Franciscan school, such as Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, who worked at the recently founded University of Paris. Modern scholarship has often dismissed this early Franciscan intellectual tradition as unoriginal, merely systematizing the Augustinian tradition in light of the rediscovery of Aristotle, paving the way for truly revolutionary figures like John Duns Scotus. But as the selections in this reader show, it was this earlier generation that initiated this break with precedent. The compilers of the Summa Halensis first articulated many positions that eventually become closely associated with the Franciscan tradition on issues like the nature of God, the proof for God’s existence, free will, the transcendentals, and Christology. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the ways in which medieval thinkers employed philosophical concepts in a theological context as well as the evolution of Franciscan thought and its legacy to modernity. A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

'Aesthetics' and 'theological aesthetics' usually imply a focus on questions about the arts and how faith or religion relates to the arts; only the final pages of this work take up that problem. The central theme of this book is that of beauty. Farley employs a new typology of western texts on beauty and a theological analysis of the image of God and redemption to counter the centuries-long tendency to ignore or marginalize beauty and the aesthetic as part of the life of faith. Studying the interpretation of beauty in ancient Greece, eighteenth-century England, the work of Jonathan Edwards, and nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophies of human self-transcendence, the author explores whether Christian existence, the life of faith, and the ethical exclude or require an aesthetic dimension in the sense of beauty. The work will be of particular interest to those interested in Christian theology, ethics, and religion and the arts.