We are very pleased to share that our new MLitt in Sacred Music has launched and we are accepting applications for Fall 2020 entry.
The MLitt in Sacred Music offers a unique interdisciplinary formation in Sacred Music for musicians, scholars, and leaders in artistic ministry.
It is taught jointly by the School of Divinity’s Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) and the University of St Andrews Music Centre.
For more information, see the following links:
With a new academic year beginning in ITIA, TheoArtistry researchers Mariah, Marjorie, and Michael consider how poetry, visual art, and photography have helped them to shape new theological insights.
Can a photographer take a snapshot of wonder? And how does creative collaboration deepen the artist-theologian’s awareness of self and others?
Check out the link, here, to read on!
On Friday, 13th of September, Professor Judith Wolfe will be speaking on ‘Eschatological Being’ at Cambridge University’s New Trinitarian Ontologies Conference. To read the abstract of her paper and see the conference schedule, click here.
Our ITIA postgraduates are often traveling within the UK and far beyond, sharing their research at conferences, workshops and other events. We are delighted to spotlight five of ITIA’s students who recently took part in the ‘Theology, Creativity and the Arts’ Postgraduate Study Day, hosted by the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology at the University of Cambridge.
Participants and paper titles are as follows:
Annemarie G. Konzelman, ‘Long Play Liturgies: Capacious Forms and Religious Experience in The 1975’s Sophomore Album’
Sarah Moerman, ‘Reclaiming ‘Spirituality’: John Adams’ Agnostic Approach in Gospel According to the Other Mary‘
Ashley Mowers, ”A People and Their Stories’: A Style Analysis and Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints’
Jen Schmidt, ‘The Discipline of Interdisciplinarity’
Mariah Ziemer, ‘Colour, Perception and the Hue of Heaven’
Transept was a co-sponsor of, and contributed artwork to, the 2019 Theology and Trauma conference at the University of St Andrews. Other sponsors included the LOGOS Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology here at St. Mary’s.
This conference took place between 12-13 of July 2019 at Holy Trinity in St Andrews and was free for all registrants.
Further details regarding the conference can be found here.
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In March 2019, Professor Judith Wolfe (ITIA) and Professor Thomas Pfau (Duke) convened a four-day colloquium on R.M. Rilke’s Duino Elegies and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Comprised of a small gathering of theologians, philosophers and literary scholars, the colloquium included ITIA’s Director, Dr. Gavin Hopps, Christoph Schwöbel (St. Andrews, Divinity), Rowan Williams (Cambridge), Malcolm Guite (Cambridge),Kevin Hart (Virginia), and David Wellbery (Chicago).
For further details, see the following reflection on the event, here.
A major work on music and religious experience brings new insights to the field of theology and the arts.
Professor David Brown and Dr Gavin Hopps examine the overlooked theological dimensions of music in a new publication entitled The Extravagance of Music.
The volume is available in hardback and e-book formats, with a free online preview on the publisher’s website.
Excerpt from the publisher’s description:
“This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an ‘excess’ or ‘extravagance’ in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities.”
David Brown and Gavin Hopps, The Extravagance of Music, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Foreword by Frank Burch Brown (pp.v-xvii).
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-91817-4
e-Book ISBN: 91818-1
As part of ITIA’s innovative research, we are pleased to share the following call for participants for a survey on progressive rock and spirituality.
Hello! My name is Kimberley Anderson and I’m a PhD student in Theology and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. My thesis explores how certain forms of progressive rock might be connected to spiritual or religious experience. To make my project as accurate as possible, I am gathering first-hand accounts of how listeners experience this music, and I would be delighted to hear from you if you have anything to say about this combination of ideas.
This month I am running a survey that is open to people of all backgrounds, beliefs and persuasions, as long as they are over 18 years of age and interested in progressive rock. My definition of progressive rock is very flexible, so please do not be put off if you only have experience with a few bands which fit loosely into this category.
It starts with some quick, general questions about how you perceive and experience prog rock, and moves on to ask participants to describe, where possible, specific kinds of experience related to progressive rock and spirituality. It can be completed online via the link below and, all in all, should only take 15-20 minutes of your time. Your answers will be treated confidentially, but there is also the option to leave your email address in case you are willing to keep in touch and perhaps answer any more questions (this would be extremely helpful!).
We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Rebekah Lamb to a new lectureship in Theology & the Arts at the School of Divinity, University of St Andrews, starting in August 2018.
Dr Lamb is currently a Gilson post-doctoral fellow at the University of St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. Her research specialization is in Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry.
She is currently completing a book with McGill-Queen’s University Press on boredom as a distinctive, emerging modern experience of time in the Victorian period, and on theological and aesthetic dimensions and responses to that experience. She has recently published on Christina Rossetti’s theology of boredom, Chesterton and the Distributist Movement, and Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Liturgy and Personality.
Dr Lamb will be working in the School’s Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts alongside Dr Gavin Hopps (Senior Lecturer in Theology and Literature), Prof. Judith Wolfe (Professor of Philosophical Theology), and Dr George Corbett (Lecturer in Theology, Imagination and the Arts). She will contribute to the Institute’s expanded provision in undergraduate teaching and graduate distance learning, and to its creative and outreach initiatives.