Aesthetics and Contemporary Ethics

Abstract

This article provides a literature review on aesthetics and ethics, with a particular focus on how attention to aesthetics generates needed insights into ethical theory and the dynamics of moral practice.

At the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) annual meeting in 1999, Diane Yeager encouraged the guild to embrace “narrative and artistic approaches to ethical issues and to develop new ways of integrating them” into the annual gathering. ¹ The past twenty-five years have proven fruitful in this regard across the theological academy. The following overview will consider developments in theological aesthetics as they pertain to moral theology and Christian ethics in a variety of forms of artistic expression from theater and poetry to music and the visual arts, as well as from a range of theological starting points in moral and systematic theology. An esteemed colleague in aesthetics noted a growing bifurcation in the discipline between an embedded theological aesthetics with politically charged pragmatism and more philosophical explorations with esoteric orientations. In what follows I privilege works in the former, with particular gratitude for Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu’s model for doing so in Bridge To Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty in which she illuminates not so much works of art as much as the work that art does in transforming us into “wonder-filled beings” who can “face the difficult questions and answer these in ways that give us life.” ² That said, I incorporate those engaged in more philosophical pursuits who attend to the political or ethical implications of their more philosophical musing. I also highlight examples of scholars from other traditions whose work at this pragmatic intersection of ethics and aesthetics might spark similar engagement in Catholic circles.

I should say from the outset that in the past ten years or so there have scholars who, perhaps unknowingly, have attended to the rationale for Yeager’s call for more engagement with aesthetics. In his 2021 presidential address to the SCE, James Keenan emphasized the importance of style in building social trust so needed for reform movements in society and our church. Keenan suggests that style “is fundamentally about how we interrelate as we teach and research” and requires vulnerability or “a capacity to be open to and to recognize and respond to the other.” ³ As we will see in what follows, engagement with the arts preconditions us for precisely such openings, particularly in movements for change, which I take up in the final section. Similarly, Elise Edwards posits that engagement with the arts, in her case with jazz, offers theologians a kind of humility that opens us up to ongoing learning from others and an invitation to “subvert a plain meaning” of anything. ⁴ I curate several examples of precisely this kind of aesthetic sensibility from a variety of scholars and return to Edwards’s aesthetic sensibilities for theologians in the concluding section of this article.

Reframing Familiar Figures

I begin with scholars who continue to plumb the aesthetic dispositions or curiosities of foundational theologians whose ideas provide frameworks for moral theology and Christian ethics. In most, the turn to beauty or creative expression, either in their original thinking or more contemporary engagement with it, ensures that the Christian tradition is indeed a living one by illuminating new insights on moral formation and the moral life. I present contributions in this selection chronologically based on focal point.

Sarah Stewart-Kroeker highlights the metaphor of “pilgrimage” in Augustine’s thought, naming it as one of the touchstones for beauty in his corpus. In so doing, she illuminates Augustine’s ideas about moral formation, which she sees as a lacuna in Augustinian scholarship. Focusing on Augustine’s Christology, she unpacks the significance of his claim that “pilgrims are formed morally and aesthetically in Christ for loving God and neighbor” ⁵ by putting him in conversation with more contemporary scholars such as Elaine Scarry and Iris Murdoch, in order to illuminate the role of beauty in sparking those relationships. ⁶ Her insights are timely for the renewal of a peregrinatio ecclesiology currently experiencing a renewal through the global Synod on Communion, Participation, and Mission. In Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal, Mark Mattes attempts to revive the aesthetic theology of one of the more famous Augustinians despite his pragmatic emphasis on God’s justification as opposed to divine beauty. Mattes notes how Luther’s theology of the cross and ugliness of Christ’s suffering reframe beauty not as ascent to the divine but as the ability to perceive and avoid worldly desires and expectations and to seek Christ-centered ones instead. ⁷

In keeping with a focus on moral formation, Piotr Roszak and John Anthony Berry offer a short primer on Thomistic approaches to the imagination and their significance for cultivating virtue. Their explanation of Aquinas’s own distinction between two forms of imagination—phantasia (fantasy or the opposite of reality) and imaginatio or an “indispensable disposition to attain true knowledge”—provides a litmus test for navigating our image-rich contemporary context. ⁸ While fantasy might help us escape the world as it is, Aquinas reminds us that imagination “creat[es] images of things that help the soul to shape itself” by expanding our perception, whether of others, possible ends of our actions, or emotional responses available to us. ⁹ A cursory review of Aquinas’s own engagement with “imaginary art” leads them to conclude that “art has the potential of providing imaginative insights, due to which many experiences can become habits.” ¹⁰

Rachel Davis contributes to theological scholarship on Bonaventure to suggest a more positive embrace of embodiment even amid the “threatening unintelligibility” manifest through “embodiment, suffering, diminishment.” She considers Bonaventure’s ponderings of the relationship between body and soul, particularly in the aesthetic dimensions of his metaphysical musings on the point of Christ’s suffering. ¹¹ These include the “beautification” of human beings in our ability to become like Beauty, which for her, is a name for God. Davies unpacks the aesthetic significance of his Journey of the Mind of God to name beautification as a kind of becoming unified with or integrated into God, which for Bonaventure is our soteriological journey as humans. We integrate our body and soul via our ability to contrast that beautiful union with the ugliness of sin, made plain in the diminishment of the body in “death, fragmentation, disintegration.” ¹² “Bonaventure invites human being to ride the brokenness of their fallen humanity to its full existential limits, for to rush past the darkness of temporal experiences in search of God’s deeper truth might risk obscuring access to that truth,” Davies tells us. “It is only through visceral nakedness, honesty, and trust that the body’s brokenness can come to signify the beauty of the creature known by, and eternally adorning, the glorified Christ.” ¹³

Moving toward theologians of the twentieth century, Marthinus Johannes Havenga revisits Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theodramatics to plumb the relationship between beauty and justice evident in Balthasar’s Christology. As the “the form of all forms” and the “drama of all dramas,” Jesus is a witness to be believed and practiced. In light of the connection between beauty and goodness in Christ’s witness, “the more we see and are drawn to beauty, the more we become aware of the good that he does, the more we see and are drawn into his beauty.” ¹⁴ He unequivocally agrees with the claim that in Jesus we find a relationship between beauty and justice. “According to von Balthasar, it can thus be said that, where justice is done, the good comes to expression, and where the good comes to expression, beauty shines forth, and vice versa.” ¹⁵

Peter Joseph Fritz’s latest work in Karl Rahner’s theological aesthetic also unpacks the role of imagination, this time as it pertains to the notion of human freedom at the heart of Rahner’s fundamental option. Here he responds to critiques of his previous work in terms of an insufficiency in attending to conditions of suffering and injustice as limiting human freedom. In response, Fritz mines that aesthetic—particularly its sources in transcendental idealist philosophy, penitential theology, and Ignatian spirituality—to surface the notion of vulnerability as “exposure” in Rahner’s understanding of freedom. Fritz posits that in Rahner we discover exposure as a condition of human freedom because of dimensions of our “possible intellect” such as symbolism, affectivity, sensorial knowledge, and imagination. These render our subjectivity “at once receptive and active” and as such “exposed to being undone.” ¹⁶

Li Yongsheng also explores the aesthetic dimension of human reason in yet another Thomist, Jacques Maritain. After explaining creative intuition in Maritain’s thought, which Li defines as the ability through which we sense truth about ourselves and God through experiences of disclosure, she draws connections to the Chinese concept of “yijing” or poetic knowledge through which we grasp for deeper or spiritual understandings of the changing self and the world through empathetic encounters with beauty in images or nature. Yijing “inspires us to step out of the ego and enter into nature and the world, as it speaks to the spiritual unity between us and nature.” ¹⁷ Li illustrates with Chinese poetry the value of poetic expression for cognition and notes Maritain’s affinity for such forms of reason. “Through aesthetics, Maritain wanted people to get out of themselves, to know themselves through the world, to know the beauty created by God, to know God as beauty itself, and then enter into the world of God.” ¹⁸

Finally, a 2020 volume of essays—Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts—presents fascinating insights that arise when placing giants such as Edwards, Barth, and Kierkegaard or movements such as iconoclasm, modernism, and secularism in conversation with discrete artists and works from a variety of particular cultural contexts including Mexican, African American, and Korean. ¹⁹

Innovating Foundational Concepts

In addition to bringing fresh perspectives to familiar figures, we find examples of scholars turning to beauty and the arts to innovate the familiar sources of Christian ethics and moral theology, such as scripture, tradition, and categories of systematic theology.

The extensive Visual Commentary on Scripture website, launched in 2018, offers a remarkable tool that “provides material for teaching, preaching, researching, and reflecting on the Bible, Art and Theology.” ²⁰ In every page of this stunning website, visitors encounter scholarly interpretations of a curated collection of more than nine hundred paintings and sculptures from antiquity to the present. Clearly articulated “theological and hermeneutical principles” guide contributors’ shared central premise that three worlds—the world of “experience and action that the Scriptures describe,” the world “to which art has responded in every epoch,” and the world of contemporary interpretations of both—overlap in a way that reveals that humans inhabit one world “though never” with “one perspective on it.” Weekly exhibitions curated by more than one hundred authors present an array of images depicting passages and stories from both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament via a “three way conversation” among scholars of the visual and written text and related theological content. The site also offers short videos to visually explore themes or moments in biblical texts from collections in partnering museums.

Perhaps one of the most popular of Christian images, with an extensive set of commentaries in the Visual Commentary on Scripture, is the cross. In “Their Cross Problem and Ours: Thoughts on the Aesthetic of Crucifixion,” Mark Heim engages in what he calls a “cleansing of the imaginative palate” in order to disentangle the cross from a problematic “cultural aesthetic” in which its prophetic meaning is often lost. ²¹ He notes the absence of the cross in Christian art in the tradition’s first four centuries, “a void in the visual record” that does not match the textual one. He leans on the work of Tom Holland, an antiquities scholar, to consider why the absence and resurgence occurred and suggests a shift in cultural understandings of it from “revulsion, disdain or rage”—sensibilities of first-century Christians toward crucifixion that mirrored the society of which they were a part—toward “compassion, pity, and a certain kind of guilt, an uneasy sense of their own moral failings.” ²² He wonders how much has changed and whether, in light of James Cone’s prophetic insights in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, we tend to appropriate the cross much as Romans appropriated the crucifixion. “The Roman option remains close at hand,” he warns us, in a way that might sharpen our ability to receive the message of the Gospel in its contemporary manifestations and retrieve it from Christian and secular aesthetics that empty it of its meaning. We can also resituate ourselves in the original cultural meaning of the cross for early Christians: its significance lied in its insignificance in the eyes of empire.

In Beauty’s Vineyard: A Theological Aesthetic of Anguish and Anticipation, Kimberly Vrudny illuminates the vineyard analogy of the Kingdom of God, which appears in the prophet Isaiah as well as Jesus’s teachings, by using a variety of modernist paintings that offer different insights into foundational concepts in theology including anthropology, sin, Christology, soteriology, and pneumatology. She notes how works by Joel-Peter Witkin, Mark Rothko, Samuel Bak, Kehinde Wiliey, and Sefedin Stafa often reveal the absence of what the vineyard promises: attention to loving kindness. Informed by personal explorations in South Africa to better understand ethical responses to the AIDS epidemic, her aesthetic schema for mapping out Dolores Williams’s “systems of jeopardy” offers a unique approach to social sin. ²³

In the field of theological anthropology, Susie Paulik Babka contends that the arts provide interruptions to theological approaches that ignore or sidestep vulnerability as the primary condition of God and therefore humanity. She pulls from Emmanuel Levinas and Rahner to present vulnerability as the antithesis of fearful or even certain responses to the unknown and uses the works of painters of Abstract Expressionism such as Rothko, Jackson Pollack, and Käthe Kollwicz to interrupt what she considers to be homogenous interpretations of the God in Christian history. Their works, as well as some of Jesus’s own “artistry in illuminating [his] vision of new life and new society,” suggest self-emptying as the ideal posture for encountering mystery and for firing the imagination to contend with the “catastrophic suffering” of our time. ²⁴

Grace Mariette Agolia innovates liturgical theology with exploration of the aesthetic dimensions of sign language in the Catholic liturgy. ²⁵ Moving beyond arguments for the canonical appropriateness of signing, she highlights that the bodily movements of this language amplify the participatory knowledge that liturgy seeks to impart on communities of the faithful. Using the movement theory of Paul Souriau and the theology of von Balthasar and Jean-Luc Marion, she contends that, “because of its bodily and relational nature, communication offered to God in sign language facilitates a profound entrance into the mystery of Christ’s kenotic act” and as such, those who use sign language “become icons or ‘signs’ of God’s love” by virtue of making that love manifest to those who can’t audibly receive that gift. ²⁶

Holding Place and Space

A flurry of works turn to the arts to make the case for the viability of arriving at universal principles or insights by attending to the particularities of place and space—that is, to the geographical and physical loci of theological reflection and ethical reasoning.

Christopher Tirres integrates liberation and liturgical theologians in his exploration of the ethical dimensions of lay-led Good Friday rituals at the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. The ritual, more popular than Easter Sunday, invites congregants to offer condolences to a grieving Mary who responds with a liturgical dance. He contends that that dance “ignites not only a visceral aesthetics of sense but also a more encompassing aesthetics of the moral imagination” given its ability to conjoin seemingly disparate aspects of individual experience and populations in the community. ²⁷ In so doing, this participatory art form gives rise to an understanding of morality as a “continuous, reflective response to a life that is inevitably unstable, precarious and tragic.” ²⁸

Lloyd Barba engages another aspect of Mexican American heritage in his examination of sanctuaries designed and maintained by Mexican Pentecostals in primarily agricultural communities of California in the 1940s and 1950s. He names the ways in which these spaces, often adorned with flowers and other handmade crafts as part of Mexican material culture called rasquache, blur a number of boundaries: between Catholicism and Pentecostalism, private and public places, and the sacred and the profane. As such they acted as a “borderland aesthetic” anchored in “Mexican American bicultural sensibilities” where all who participated, whether as creators or visitors, exercised an “imaginative impulse to displace some semblance of cultural vibrancy in contexts where Latinos are denied public space.” ²⁹

Aesthetic practices for claiming and defending space against forces of assimilation also feature prominently in Susan Bigelow Reynold’s People Get Ready. In this theological and ethnographical account of St. Mary’s of the Angels parish in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Reynolds describes her own participation in a variety of sacred activities—particularly integrated into the parish’s successful campaign to resist closure in 2004—that illuminate to the imaginative, creative, connective, deeply relational, and empowering ad intra and ad extra dimensions of ritual such as song and public activism. In terms of cultivating the moral agency of people within a multicultural parish context, Reynolds notes that “ritual does not unify people by erasing their differences or making questions of power irrelevant. If anything, ritual magnifies and clarifies those distinctions and renders aesthetic verdicts.” ³⁰ Ritual, particularly its aesthetic dimension, is a kind of “embodied dialogue” that “gives people who would otherwise view one another with indifference, suspicion, or hostility a way of practicing life together.” ³¹ As such, it is critical for solidarity.

Nichole Flores deepens our understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of solidarity with two place-based works. In “Beyond Consumptive Solidarity,” she examines Florida’s Modern-Day Slavery Museum, an effort of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), to make visible trafficking and enslavement of migrant agricultural workers in the southeastern US. As an expression of aesthetic solidarity, Flores follows CIW’s lead in naming the unfreedoms that migrant workers in our global economy experience as enslavement and privileges their interpretations of the symbols and narratives they use to interrupt a consumerist framework that sustains their exploitation and suffering. “Aesthetic solidarity envisions a way to empower those victimized within the global economy and to restore a social solidarity constituted by human equality and participation.” ³² She builds on this concept of aesthetic solidarity in her monograph, The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy, by lifting up Latine theological aesthetics as a corrective to two well-developed schools of thought in political liberalism that to her mind are most promising for cultivating democracy: the Rawlsian approach to justice via the original position and the Nussbaumian approach to the same via the capabilities approach. ³³ She tells lo cotidiano or the little stories of the Guadalupe narrative as it continues to be encountered in four specific contexts: a hillside outside of Mexico City in the 1530s, the Su Teatro Chicano community theater in Denver in the 1970s–90s, the SOURCE African American theater company in Denver in the twenty-first century, and her own hometown of Charlottesville in the summer of 2017. She argues for an “aesthetic solidarity” that “asserts that aesthetic experience can promote communal encounters that affirm dignity both within and across broader society” through its ability to cultivate imagination and affection, relationships of mutuality, and equality and participation, and by operating “on interpersonal and social levels to promote justice.” ³⁴

Several thinkers explore that aesthetic link between space and solidarity, particularly racial solidarity. Melanee Harvey takes up “racialized Madonna iconography” of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, catalyzed by a mural and photographic campaign at the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit in the 1960s. She presents the images, and its progeny in other congregations and by a variety of artists as late as the 1980s, as critical components of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. ³⁵ Eboni Marshall Thurman identifies the parallel aesthetic dimensions of movements for racial justice in the Civil Rights Movement, via the I AM A MAN placards of the Memphis sanitation workers’ campaign and the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, thanks to the significant contributions of Black women to both. Her project explicitly challenges the “viability of masculinity and manhood as the guiding frame for Black freedom” and the “moral managers of prophetic Black Christian traditions” by asking a critical intersectional question: “How are black women intracommunally disappeared alongside their often very public spiritual and social witness?” ³⁶ Answering that question involves naming the aesthetic dimensions of and responses to anti-Black sexism or misogynoir in both movements. “Engaging the central icon of the Memphis campaign alongside a more contemporary icon of the Black Lives Matter movement illuminates how black women continue to be challenged by intracommunal invisibility, even as they are consistent progenitors, mobilizers, sustainers, and intellectual architects of movements for social change.” ³⁷

In addition to her previously mentioned piece on theology and a jazz aesthetic, Elise Edwards considers the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and other African American justice movements on built environments. Incorporating insights from African American religious thought, womanist ethics, and ecowomanism, she finds in the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture examples of three spiritual principles that can be accredited to these movements: liberation, inspiration, and healing. While not the only such principles that can be drawn from contemporary justice movements and applied to architecture, she contends they offer a compelling vision of a different way to shape community life in that they are interconnected and inseparable. “Inspiration promotes acts of liberation and liberative thinking, which aim to heal the effects of racial hierarchies.” ³⁸ She sees ecowomanism as the key ingredient that makes both the African and religious dimensions of her other two sources more explicit. The entire project suggests the importance of creative placemaking for theology and ethics. “Creative placemaking is about cultivating an authentic feel to a built environment, one that resonates with the community’s sense of itself and its aspirations. It is a process of laying out intentions for the present and future.” ³⁹

Two pieces take up that practice of placemaking. In “The Witness of Central American Martyrs: A Social Justice Aesthetic at U.S. Jesuit Colleges and Universities,” Tim Dulle reviews three different expressions of remembrance of a people and an event central to the self-understandings of Jesuit institutions of higher education: a series of portraits by a Rockhurst University student, a Memorial and Peace Garden at Xavier University, and an annual prayer service at the Ignatian Solidarity Teach-In for Justice. The participatory nature of each speaks to their power in forming members of these communities, now a full generation removed from the events that inspire them, in a kind of anamnesis. “These aesthetic iterations of the martyrs’ legacy have a function that is not reducible to the ideas informing them,” Dulle contends. “That is, rather than advancing a set of propositions with which participants may more or less agree, aesthetic commemorations invite participation into the martyrs’ legacy.” ⁴⁰ This variety helps us move beyond engaging such pieces as isolated art objects or rituals and rather as touchstones for a participatory culture. My own contribution to the College Theology Society’s annual volume in 2022 considers the potential contributions of clinical psychologist Dr. Mindy Fullilove to the transformation of spaces on and around campus communities to create “mesh and prosper” cultures. I note the way that Fullilove’s “elements” of placemaking can animate our understandings of central principles of Catholic social teaching and highlight examples of institutions that have harnessed them to turn areas of campuses from spaces we pass through to places we come to build and participate in community. ⁴¹

Crossing Boundaries

In a way that seems to contradict the previous section’s attention to rootedness in particular place, several scholars have used beauty and the arts to transgress socially constructed and often aesthetically reinforced boundaries that limit human flourishing, most notably features of human embodiment such as race, gender, and ability.

Jeania Ree Moore, one of the few artists among this group of theologians I have curated, examines the African American tradition of quilting as a locus for theologically engaging intersectionality. The latest of a long ancestral line of fiber artists, she “know[s] intimately the manifold meaning quilting holds as labor, art, heirloom, and tradition—that is, as both historic symbol and as live act” and brings that sensibility to her theological reflection on the practice. She builds on Alice Walker’s musings on gardening in order to “examine quilting as both an analytical touchstone for the struggles and successes of black women,” and as a creative space where black women have been “ordering the universe in [their] personal conception of Beauty.” ⁴² Embedding “quilt codes” into their pieces is a form of agency for Black quilters, celebrating the power of those on the margins and the efficaciousness of Black women in “overcome[ing] collusions of race, class and gender” by witnessing to “an inner world of the quilter’s own making, a world where she is a Creator of meaning and being—a world that endures, despite the tumult of the outside.” ⁴³

Josef Sorett’s Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics challenges narrow boundaries of what it means to be Black via engagement in African American literature with Black identity and Christianity. Amid denominational diversity, Sorett sees a through line in “racial aesthetics” or the attempt to “define or dispute” what it means to be Black by paying attention to Black experiences and articulations of the beautiful made evident when Black literary and religious traditions converse with each other. “Racial aesthetics” becomes a new way to “reimagine the study of religion in America” in order to understand what Black people were thinking about religion at different times and to see what religion was offering to political movements around race at various times as well. ⁴⁴ His third chapter explores this question in the context of Black Catholicism via the work of convert Claude McCay, as well as Ellen Tarry, Theophilus Lewis, and Mary Lou Williams. Ultimately, he sees the book as “an invitation to wrestle with a set of questions about the relationships (real and imagined) between the aesthetics of black churches . . . and appeals to ‘the spirit’; a notion of spirit that, from black traditions, ‘knows no boundaries.’” ⁴⁵

In keeping with Keenan’s invitation that we pay attention to style, Devan Stahl uses an autobiographical style to demonstrate how her sister’s artistic engagement with MRI scans, related to her unfolding diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, helps her to “rescue [her] body from medicine’s reductionism” and to relate to her body in entirely different ways. ⁴⁶ Through creative reappropriation of these black-and-white images, the artist also provides ways for “the Church to faithfully attend to persons with disabilities and to live into a new ethic of communion.” ⁴⁷ As such, “disart” or disability art functions in a “theopoetic” way that allows us to resist reduction, certitude, and “the cult of normalcy” and to cross over into more wounded and yet unbounded understandings of the self. “In Darian’s art I am transformed, simultaneously more human and more inhabited by God. The image invites you too, to be transformed, to see yourself as a holy temple and to see otherness, even the otherness within yourself, as a site of divinity.” ⁴⁸

In a more philosophical vein, D. J. Louw considers ways that different images of God invoked during the COVID-19 pandemic made it possible for some to cross the boundary between “pathological thinking,” rooted in an economic framework of meaning that gives rise to fear and despair, and the “paradigm of hopeful meaning-giving” that can supplant it. He notes how images of the Divine can move us from loneliness to solitude, from loss and grief to silence and contemplation, and from ugliness of the pandemic to the “beauty of the virus.” On that note, he contends that “the most threatening question is not about death and dying; it is about life and flourishing” and how during the pandemic we saw examples of people who responded as “homo aestheticus” or as creators of meaning. ⁴⁹ “Facing the ugliness of a suffering God is to face, within the ugliness of suffering human beings, the beauty of comfort: Divine compassionate being-with.” ⁵⁰

Finally, the arts continue to provide viable contexts for crossing the boundaries of faith traditions in respectful and impactful ways. Brent Plate edited an entire volume of CrossCurrents on “Interreligious Aesthetics” that gathers nine contributors to explore his central question: “What if we begin our approaches to interreligious connection through the basic religious activities of bodies, their encounters, and interactions?” ⁵¹ In so doing he shifts the focus from dialogue to aesthetics through essays that take up “the performances, material objects, and sensual dimensions of differing traditions as they are enacted through food, architectural design, music, images, poetry, the arts, smells and bodily interactions.” ⁵² He contends that doing so makes visible ways in which social justice gets enacted across traditions. Of particular interest in that collection of essays, Fatimah Mohammed-Ashrif offers the concept of adab or the “ongoing refinement of one’s behavior” from the Mevlevi Sufi tradition as an effective way to hold space for others and deepen capacity to embrace our own full humanity. ⁵³ A practicing member of an interfaith Rumi Circle “concerned with creating deeper understanding of the world’s faith traditions among those of faith and no-faith through an exploration of ‘inter-religious aesthetics,’” she explores ways in which practicing hospitality by attentively preparing the space for traditional Mevlevi Semas, more commonly known as performances of whirling dervishes, can “activate a deep appreciation, admiration, and even affection” not only for the other but for the deepest parts of ourselves, “allowing the possibility of a transformation of some sort.” ⁵⁴

Teaching and Learning

A number of colleagues consider the pedagogical dimensions of engaging with the arts in our discipline. Through insights gained from a series of interviews with young adults, mostly affiliated with Reformed congregations often reticent to engage the arts, as well as an extensive literature review by notable scholars of religion who focus on young people, Katherine Douglass underscores the importance of decentering the “linguistic” preference in Christianity in favor of a “more embodied form of practical reason” that resonates with their lived experience. Her conclusions are important for all of us attempting to connect in impactful ways with the young adults in our classrooms who are at once aesthetically aware given their saturation in visual stimuli and yet who struggle with meaning making: they seek to participate in embodied ways in their faith communities in order to be seen and known, they desire expressive and experiential activities in order to sense God’s presence in their lives, and imagination is an embodied experience for them. A key contribution the arts bring to practical reason is the capacity for wonder as opposed to “mastery or replication.” ⁵⁵ “Young adults are interested not merely in abstract forms of knowledge of God but in embodied, physical forms of connection that highlight the immanent, communal and incarnate dimension of the Christian life.” ⁵⁶

In his latest foray in theological aesthetics, Christopher Pramuck explores the significant questions of life in the creative musings and self-expressions of a variety of artists to offer “tools for critical and contemplative appreciation.” Throughout this classroom-friendly text, he identifies himself as a translator of stories germane to the human experience that illuminate paths to the transcendent when communicated through the arts. He translates the biographies of Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen in the haunting intonations of their arrangements, songs, and voices. He translates the historical context of pre–civil rights America, apartheid South Africa, and post-9/11 America into the anthems such as Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” or Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” He features the lives of artists (the world behind the text) as well as their creative self-expression (the world within the text) in order to summon the reader to consider musical, visual, and literary muses for their own journeys of self-discovery and self-expression (the world in front of the text). He implicitly defends this method with frequent references to theological insights his students have shared, often directly quoting them. To that end, he models for educators how to invite and then reverence the process of consciousness raising and purposefulness that the arts can evoke and to make space for it in our lives or in those of others.

Susan Ross fills a lacuna in Catholic feminist studies with her examination of the impact of congregations of religious women on the Christian tradition through their commitment to integrating the arts into moral education offered through the 190 Catholic women-only institutions of higher education established in the US between 1919 and 1968. ⁵⁷ She notes the ways in which religious women transformed the “double marginalization” in education of both women and the arts via their understanding of beauty not as some kind of social refinement or container for the affective but as a legitimate field of study that animates students’ agency for creating good. Ross highlights three pedagogical contributions: the sacramental quality of both the content and instruction of these courses, the embodied nature of this formation, and the agency it unleashed. ⁵⁸ “The kinds of practices that later feminist ritual theorists would write about—involving the circle, honoring the ordinary, women’s crafts, community, and memory—were all part of the aesthetic and ritual practices of the girls’ and women’s schools and colleges, guided by women religious.” ⁵⁹

In keeping with the notion of wonder, Melinda McGarrah Sharp’s exploration with her seminary students about the role of presence as a form of “pastoral aesthetics” in health-care contexts makes a critical distinction between explaining suffering and expressing it. Again, in a more autobiographical tone, she walks us through her attempt to make precepts from Carlin’s Pastoral Aesthetics: A Theological Perspective real for her students by inviting them into imaginative exercises intended to grow their capacity for staying with those they seek to accompany with postures of “unknowing, curiosity, self-awareness, and openness to the learning required for empathetic presence.” ⁶⁰ As such, she reminds us that “pastoral aesthetics is both a sensibility and a willingness to be moved, changed, and transformed in well-being. Here, paradox, mystery, and unknowing are experience-near resources for an expansive moral imagination.” ⁶¹

Finally, the Wabash Center on Teaching and Learning in Religion and Theology overhauled its gold standard Journal of Teaching in order to privilege creative nonfiction as the preferred style. Under the direction of managing editor Donald Quist, a relational submission process now amplifies that commitment. Cohorts of writers learn creative nonfiction skills in intensive colloquies with professional writers and then are paired with members of the journal’s editorial board, of which I am one, in honing their voice in their submissions and cultivating a pedagogical sensibility in the writing process itself. This reflects an intentional shift in the guild to both embrace creativity in scholarship and to make the process of generating knowledge more relational, inclusive, and, in the end, beautiful.

Catalyzing Transformation

I’m struck by a variety of examples of the arts or engagement with beauty that might touch off processes of social change. A. M. Coates explores the relationship between beauty and justice through the concept of “fit” or “fittingness.” He notes that the connection between aesthetics and ethics can often be strained by either overemphasis on beauty’s transcendent qualities that sidestep its ethical implications or insistence on its this-worldly nature that diminish its call to something more. As a solution, he builds on Kierkegaard’s claim that aesthetics is ultimately about working harmoniously with Christ, who beautifully integrated the transcendent and the profane, noting that Christ’s beauty was a relational one “attund[ed] to right relationship as lived existence” or understood as shalom or the way things ought to be. ⁶² He presents this equilibrium as “fittingness,” an aesthetic criterion related to symmetry and balance and color but that, using Bonhoeffer’s musical metaphor of polyphony, he contends is essential for ethical discernment. “The aesthetic-ethical commitment to shalom is not simply a theoretical affirmation, but a mode of Christian life, a holistic following after Christ, or this-worldly attunement to a life of discipleship.” ⁶³

Elise Edwards addresses theologians in her essay pondering what jazz can teach us about “how to think and write about theology.” She provides us a compelling example of how aesthetic sensibilities dispose us to the work of transformation. A jazz aesthetic can remind theologians (1) of the agency of creators who make existing traditions their own and the importance of critical and yet empathetic listening to others, (2) of how communication is affective and embodied, (3) of the space that must be allowed for a multiplicity of interpretations, and (4) of theology’s capacity to “subvert a plain meaning” of anything. ⁶⁴ Given the timing of these “Notes,” between the first and second General Assemblies of Bishops for the “Synod on Synodality,” I can’t help but lift up the wisdom of a jazz aesthetic for the transformational work of becoming a listening church at every level. “The assertion of one’s self is balanced by dependence on others. This attitude of respect and desire for balance would become a key feature of a theological jazz aesthetic,” she notes. “A theologian who writes or teaches with this principle will locate his or her work among contributions of others; it is not a denigration of one’s own work, but humility in discourse; it is a recognition that the individual’s work is limited and emerges through interactions with others, and insight acquired from mentors, instructors, and great thinkers.” ⁶⁵

In the area of environmental justice, Matthew Eggemeier lifts up Balthasar as a resource for ecological theology by suggesting that his notion of glory—divine beauty as manifested in creation—might help us resist reducing our natural environment to something “to be controlled and mastered.” ⁶⁶ Eggemeier explores his thesis in the theological aesthetics of Dionysius the Areopagite and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems “God’s Grandeur” and “Hurrahing in the Harvest.” Dorothy Dean makes a similar attempt by lifting up the unfinished work of Canadian philosopher and theologian Grace Jantzen on the topic of biodiversity. She notes Jantzen’s fascination with beauty inherent in verdant ecosystems precisely because they are “maximally filled with life and are networks of a vast range of special living beside, within, or by way of each other.” ⁶⁷ Experiencing such relationality can spark “biophilia” or “the desire to seek out and be close to living things.” ⁶⁸

In an examination of artworks attending to situations of conflict, most notably 9/11, Küster Volker contends that artists “function like a seismograph, and their reactions are often in the vanguard of the reflections and theories of society in general.” ⁶⁹ He invokes the Metzian concept of dangerous memory, given the ways in which “images and symbols” often determine the tone and focus of public discourse and too often in a way that does not sufficiently turn and face the realities of suffering. He uses works from a variety of contexts—migratory Arab Muslims Walid Raad and Shirin Neshat, German Jew Rebekka Horn, Chilean Afredo Jaar, American social critics Susan Sontag and Toni Morrison, and South Africans Sue Williamson and Paul Stopforth—to propose “emerging ethical criteria” of “vision, distance and unscathedness.”

Conclusion

Aesthetics exercises atrophied moral muscles needed for the work we need to do as theologians a quarter of the way into the first century of the third millennium: somatic muscles that remind us of the bodies about, with, and through which we do our ethical reasoning. The arts rouse affective dimensions of our cognitive capacities, particularly those emotions that swirl around seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience—acute suffering and resilient hope.

They stretch us with several practical reminders. First, our vocation is not simply a thought exercise but a constructive one through which we collaborate with others in literally creating new things. Second, through the pedagogical dimension of our vocation, we accompany others in maturing their capacities for a thick moral sense and agency for change in their communities. And finally, the moral life is a deeply relational endeavor—only in the context of relationship can we creatively collaborate with God in building the kin-dom. Beauty and the arts continue to sound the call to conversion of the theologian, particularly in thinking with a more synodal church, and to provide a space for us to work that process of conversion out, especially when we understand it not so much in terms of an unfolding process of self-, other- and collective self-realization. I conclude by returning to the thoughts of Yeager, who first presented us with the challenge in her 2019 essay: “How shall we love the distorted world and the flawed, destructive people in it if we cannot see both as something to be cherished in spite of the pain, the stupidity, the failures, and the malice? The poetry that seems most thoroughly useless to the ethicist might be the very poetry that offers us that slash of light, that makes visible the wild gift of possibility hidden in unexpected, and perhaps even despised, places.” ⁷⁰