Course Description

This course explores the histories of Christian art as domains of vital theological thinking through the centuries. Structured historically, rather than topically, this course moves in a loosely chronological way to seek understandings of traditions and developments. Our aim is to conduct a study that is simultaneously a history of art and a historical theology, investigating the ways that visual and architectural arts have been means of faith seeking understanding through visual-spatial reasoning (for better or worse), amidst and alongside written, oral, and liturgical theologies. Together, we will explore how this has happened through multiple Christian traditions—Early Church, Orthodox, Church of the East, Catholic, and Protestant—and across a variety of geographical and cultural contexts. Our twofold purpose is to retrieve and develop greater theological intelligence within art history and to retrieve and develop greater visual-spatial intelligence within theology, generating deeper resources and understandings across these disciplines.