Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent van Gogh to Emily Carr

"'The Second Book of God': Protestant Mysticism." Rebekah Smick. In Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent Van Gogh to Emily Carr Ed. Katharine Lochnan. Art Gallery of Ontario & Musée d'Orsay. DelMonico Books - Prestel. November 2016.

Find it at: Random House

Publisher's Overview:

This richly illustrated volume explores mystical themes in European, Scandinavian, and North American landscape paintings from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Beautifully illustrated with works by Emily Carr, Marc Chagall, Arthur Dove, Paul Gauguin, Lawren Harris, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeill Whistler, among others.

Common to their work is the expression of the spiritual crisis that arose in society and the arts in reaction to the disillusionments of the modern age, and against the malaise that resulted in the Great War. Many artists turned their backs on institutional religion, searching for truth in universal spiritual philosophies. This book includes essays investigating mystical landscape genres and their migration from Scandinavia to North America, with a focus upon the Group of Seven and their Canadian and American counterparts.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d’Orsay, this book offers a penetrating look at the Symbolist influence on the landscape genre.

Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship

ICS is pleased to announce the publication of Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship by Robert Sweetman, ICS's H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy. This book is the first in a new series incubated at ICS's Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics, entitled Currents in Reformational Thought. Tracing the Lines explores what Christian scholarship is and should be, with an eye to locating historical resonances with the rich varied tradition of two thousand years of Christian scholarship. Locating his own thought within the reformational intellectual tradition, Sweetman shows how a variety of historical streams of Christian thought have all contributed to informing a contemporary understanding of Christian scholarship. In the end, Sweetman offers an understanding of Christian scholarship as scholarship attuned to the shape of our Christian hearts.

Find it on: Wipf and Stock

Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation: Essays in Reformational Philosophy

Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation: Essays in Reformational Philosophy. Lambert Zuidervaart. McGill-Queen's University Press. April 2016.

Find it at: McGill-Queen's University Press

Also see: Ground Motive symposium responding to the book

Publisher's Overview:

Reformational philosophy rests on the ideas of nineteenth-century educator, church leader, and politician Abraham Kuyper, and it emerged in the early twentieth century among Reformed Protestant thinkers in the Netherlands. Combining comprehensive criticisms of Western philosophy with robust proposals for a just society, it calls on members of religious communities to transform harmful cultural practices, social institutions, and societal structures.

Well known for his work in aesthetics and critical theory, Lambert Zuidervaart is a leading figure in contemporary reformational philosophy. In Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation - the first of two volumes of original essays from the past thirty years - he forges new interpretations of art, politics, rationality, religion, science, and truth. In dialogue with modern and contemporary philosophers, among them Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and reformational thinkers such as Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and Hendrik Hart, Zuidervaart explains and expands on reformational philosophy’s central themes. This interdisciplinary collection offers a normative critique of societal evil, a holistic and pluralist conception of truth, and a call for both religion and science to serve the common good.

Illustrating the connections between philosophy, religion, and culture, and daring to think outside the box, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation gives a voice to hope in a climate of despair.