Religious Books - Page 12

Windows into the Soul: Art As Spiritual Expression

Michael Sullivan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Beautifully Written 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Michael Sullivan has written an engaging book that opened my heart to seeing both art and prayer in new ways. The exercises offered are easy access points for those who don't feel creative and would hesitate to call themselves artists. At the same time, experience artists will be inspired by Sullivan's story. The beautifully written chapters offer a wonderful glimpse into the author's spiritual journey. His authenticity and passion were very inspiring.

Editorial Review:

Working with clay, paint, crayons, or pencils, artists have long known that the act of creating art can help people explore the deepest recesses of their hearts - and bring about real change in their lives. Michael Sullivan discovered the power of art for himself in the midst of grieving the loss of a young parishioner. Ever since, he has been using simple art projects as a form of prayer and a way of helping others explore what God may be saying to them. "Windows into the Soul" is a practical, hands-on resource for those who want to explore this means of prayer and contemplation for themselves, approaching the process not as an artist but as a spiritual seeker. Readers will find projects in various media, including clay, charcoal, and acrylic, including not only technical directions, but a gentle guide to the spiritual gold to be mined from the experience.

One Hundred Saints: Their Lives and Likenesses Drawn from Butler's "Lives of the Saints" and Great Works of Western Art

Bulfinch Press

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Outstanding Coffee Table Book on the Saints 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book from a used book shop and was thoroughly impressed by the beautiful selection of pictures and pieces from Butler's Lives of the Saints. If you are looking for an introduction to the saints, this is well worth the money.

a Beautiful Book 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book is a wonderful addition to our pleasure-reading stack. While obviously not very thorough in its list of saints, this book contains easy-to-read, well-written bios (usually just 1 page) explaining who each saint is and why they are famous, accompanied by full-page, full-colour images of famous artworks depicting the saint in action. While this would certianly not pass as an academic source book, it is certainly informative (especially for a protestant like me) and a delight to flip through.

Editorial Review:

In street and city names, churches and other, more personal associations, the saints are always with us. This text presents saints in all their splendour - in both word and image. The selection reflects contemporary interest and patronage. All the apostles are featured, as are the Church Fathers. Also included are saints whose lives and works provide fascinating glimpses into ther holy lives and the traditions and beliefs that have grown because of them. We see Bernini's sculptural representations of Teresa of Avila in ecstasy; Debastian's martyrdom as pictured by Titian; and El Greco's penetrating rendering of St. Martin and the Beggar.

Holy Cards

Sandra di Pasqua, Barbara Calamari

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Holy cards offer comfort, consolation, and encouragement to Catholics, who often carry these portable images of their favorite saints with them and use them in daily religious ritual. Given as remembrances at wakes and funerals, communions and confirmations, holy cards are also a widely popular, and highly collectible, form of folk art. This handsome volume, the only book available on the subject, is both a rich illustrated survey of this devotional art and a gallery of saints organized thematically along with brief biographies, attributes, and powers. Prophets and angels, disciples and evangelists, martyrs and hermits, visionaries and mystics are among the religious figures in Catholicism represented here, in exquisite turn-of-the-century depictions that are at times dramatic or disturbing, at times moving or comforting. Barbara Calamari and Sandra Di Pasqua, who also collaborated on Novena and Holy Places, explain the often enigmatic symbolism in these cards in a beautiful book that makes an ideal gift for first communion, confirmation, or graduation.

Symbols of the Christian Faith

Alva William Steffler

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a good start 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This book covers many of the major Christian symbols and has a short discription of each one that is typically concise and sometimes only a few sentences long. The pictures of each symbol are all black and white but usually pretty large with only one example of each. I think this book is worth it for the number of symbols it covers. It also has decent references if you are interested in more information.

Editorial Review:

Symbols of the Christian Faith is an illustrated guide to the major visual symbols used by the Christian church throughout history. These stylized illustrations, designed by artist Alva William Steffler, are intended to provide usable, up-to-date resources for contemporary church worship and Christian education.

Throughout church history symbols have been used to aid worship and to communicate difficult spiritual ideas. Steffler here collects these symbols, from early Christian catacomb art to the present, offering fresh graphic interpretations of old visual forms. The accompanying text notes the biblical sources for the various symbols and traces their use in church tradition and their links to Greco-Roman culture.

Broadly inclusive and sensitive to the perspectives of every church tradition, this volume will be an invaluable resource for churches using Christian art as well as for general readers curious about the meaning of common Christian symbols.

Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Building a Discourse 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

The intent of this volume was to construct a coherent history of the idea of regionalism from its many many supporting texts and ideas. It is an important collection of writing that covers the entire 20th Century intellectual history of Regionalism in Architecture and includes such authors as: Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, David Williams, Mary Colter, Pietro Belluschi, Christopher Alexander, Wendell Berry, Kenneth Frampton, Sigfried Giedion, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Richard Ingersoll, Benton MacKaye, John Gaw Meem, Richard Neutra, Paul Ricouer, Alan Colquhoun, Juhani Pallasmaa, among others (44 in all). Further, it considers Regionalism in an international context, particularly the developing world through the writings of Suha Ozkan (Middle East), Balkrishna Doshi (India), and Kenza Boussora (Algeria). In it are provided contextual introductions to each text and an introduction that attempts to place the discourse, as a whole in reasonable framework. The topics include: Regionalist theory, Referential Regionalism (1920s & 30s), Regional Modernism (1930s-1960s), Regional Planning, Bioregionalism, Critical Regionalism, and a set of essays that update and extend the discourse into the future via performativity theory, sustainability, and the socially-critical work of the Rural Studio.

Editorial Review:

In this rapidly globalizing world, any investigation of architecture inevitably leads to considerations of regionalism. But despite its omnipresence in contemporary practice and theory, architectural regionalism remains a fluid concept, its historical development and current influence largely undocumented. This comprehensive reader brings together over forty key essays illustrating the full range of ideas embodied by the term. Authored by important critics, historians, and architects such as Kenneth Frampton, Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Alan Colquhoun, Architectural Regionalism represents the history of regionalist thinking in architecture from the early twentieth century to today.

Forgiven The Painting by Thomas Blackshear II

Roy Lessin, Thomas Blackshear II

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Faith-promoting reflections 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Thomas Blackshear's painting, which is the central focus of this book, is famous to most Christians. It's symbolism carries deep resonance to anyone who has embraced the message of Christ. Here, the complete painting and numerous detailed insets are complimented by Roy Lessin's tender and insightful reflections and excerpts from the Bible. Lessin has examined twelve symbolic elements of the painting as keys to understanding the individual path to repentance and forgiveness. As a devotional, this book offers great comfort to those struggling with their own human failings.

Editorial Review:

Centered on Thomas Blackshear II's eponymous painting, this devotional gift book explores the topic of forgiveness-a subject fundamental to Christian belief. In each chapter, Roy Lessin presents a specific aspect from

Blackshear's painting, a relevant selection of Bible verses, and a prayer.

Finally, he offers a reflection based upon a truth revealed in both the scripture and the painting.

FORGIVEN focuses on twelve key concepts in all, including grace, holiness, darkness, guilt, strength, and redemption. Each chapter supports Lessin's affirmation that forgiveness is one of the greatest joys, and one of the most profound gifts, that we can experience.

I'll Be Home for Christmas (Lighted Path Collection®)

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Seasonal inspiration from America's "Painter of Light" 4 out of 5 stars.
90 of 90 people found this review helpful.

Anyone not aware of Thomas Kinkade's artwork hasn't been paying attention in stores for the last five years or so. With his old-fashioned images of a romantic yesteryear that probably never existed, Kinkade has become America's most-published artist. In "I'll Be Home for Christmas," he specializes in snowy landscapes, glowing cottages with smoke coming from rock chimneys and horse-drawn sleighs bringing visitors for Yule festivities. Text for the book comes from seasonal writings by Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Washington Irving, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Kenneth Grahame, Isaac Watts and, of course, the Gospel of Luke. The artwork is the most notable feature: Large scenes are mixed with close-up details that reveal Kinkade's brushstrokes. People familiar with Kinkade's work know that he hides little letter 'N's throughout his paintings (the number that appears under his signature indicates how many are in that particular painting) in honor of his wife, Nanette. The printing in "I'll Be Home for Christmas" is so good that they are visible on almost every page. This isn't a thick book, nor heavy Christmas reading, but it certainly sheds some beautiful light on the spirit of the season.

Editorial Review:

Nearly half a million gift–givers have brought the light of Christmas into the heart of someone special with Thomas Kinkade’s I’ll Be Home for Christmas. This new, more compact, caseside–printed edition will appeal to the more price–conscious admirers of America’s beloved “Painter of Light^®.”

More than 20 of Kinkade’s radiant Christmas paintings—favorites from the Victorian Christmas and Home for the Holidays series—are highlighted by stories, quotes, poems, and carols that evoke the spirit of the season.

From elegant white sparkles woven throughout snow–covered treetops...to colorful, glittering lights decorating a Victorian gingerbread house...to a tree shimmering with candles and framed in a glowing window...this very special book will fill heart and home with Christmas dreams and memories.

Inuit Art: An Introduction

Ingo Hessel, George Swinton

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Wonderfully enhanced with full color photography 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Inuit Art: An Introduction by Ingo Hessel (Inuit art consultant and former Special Projects Officer and Coordinator of the Canadian Inuit Art Information Centre of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs for the Canadian government), is wonderfully enhanced with the full color photography of Dieter Hessel. Inuit Art covers its subject matter from an historical, cultural, and aesthetic perspective beginning with the roots of Inuit art in prehistoric times, through the arrival of Europeans and their influence on Inuit art beginning in the sixteenth century, down to the mid-twentieth century when Inuit art began attracting a world wide audience. Of special interest is Ingo Hessel's informative discussion of the techniques and materials employed by Inuit artisans in the creations of their unique and distinctive work. Inuit Art is an impressive, superbly presented and welcome contribution to the growing library of Native American Studies in general, and Inuit art history in particular.

Editorial Review:

Although the Inuit have lived in the Artic since prehistoric times, Inuit art as we know it only came about in the late 1940s. This contemporary art form is appreciated around the world for its power and exquisite beauty, an art that embodies the Inuit’s harsh artic environment, unique way of life, and traditional beliefs. This historical, cultural, and aesthetic exploration of Inuit art features examples of Inuit drawings, prints, textiles, and sculpture through 125 color photos, 35 black-and-white photos, and maps.

Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals (Phoenix Poets)

Roland Recht

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Editorial Review:

Developments in medieval science that elevated sight above the other senses found religious expression in the Christian emphasis on miracles, relics, and elaborate structures. In his incisive survey of Gothic art and architecture, Roland Recht argues that this preoccupation with vision as a key to religious knowledge profoundly affected a broad range of late medieval works.
            In addition to the great cathedrals of France, Recht explores key religious buildings throughout Europe to reveal how their grand designs supported this profusion of images that made visible the signs of scripture. Metalworkers, for example, fashioned intricate monstrances and reliquaries for the presentation of sacred articles, and technical advances in stained glass production allowed for more expressive renderings of holy objects. Sculptors, meanwhile, created increasingly naturalistic works and painters used multihued palettes to enhance their subjects’ lifelike qualities. Reimagining these works as a link between devotional practices in the late Middle Ages and contemporaneous theories that deemed vision the basis of empirical truth, Recht provides students and scholars with a new and powerful lens through which to view Gothic art and architecture. 
 

Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Genial Wisdom 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Pope Benedict's longer theological works can be difficult to follow, not because the Pope is trying to be obscure but because he deals with realities (not opinions or moods) and never patronizes the reader. Images of Hope is more accessible because it is a collection of short essays, moving and even entertaining meditations on the Feasts of the Church. A great little book for the thinking Christian.

Editorial Review:

In Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) masterfully weaves together Scripture, history, literature and theology as he reflects on major feasts of the liturgical calendar. In each chapter, he examines works of sacred art that illustrate the hope we celebrate in our most important Christian holy days.

What do the humble ox and ass at the manger of the Christ Child tell us about Christmas? In an icon of Christ's Ascension, what do the Savior's hands held in blessing promise us? What is the meaning of the sword held by the great statue of Saint Paul before the Roman church that bears his name?

These and many other questions are explored with depth and sensitivity in this collection of meditations by the man who became Pope Benedict XVI. Several beautiful colored images of the relevant paintings, mosaics and sculptures accompany the rich and detailed text.