Articles, chapters, and reference works in systematic theology, theological aesthetics, hermeneutics, architecture, visual art, and music.
Dom Hans van der Laan on Culture and Sacrament in Architecture
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 29.4
A theological reading of Dom Hans van der Laan’s architectural theory through the categories of liturgy, play, and culture. The article considers how human making mediates between the given world and constructed form, opening a sacramental account of architectural practice.
A Visual Pneumatology from Kandinsky to Newman
with Taylor Worley
in The Spirit and the Sketch: Pneumatological Reflection on Visual Art · Lexington Books
An exploration of modern art through pneumatology, asking how theological claims about spirit might illuminate—and be tested by—the aesthetic ambitions of modern artists. Moving from Kandinsky to Newman, the chapter examines the possibilities and dangers involved in identifying artistic experience with spiritual presence.
Theology, Temporality, and Flow in OutKast’s “Rosa Parks”
in Hip Hop Theology: Speaking God in Public · Wipf & Stock
A theological reading of musical flow as an experience of temporality. Through OutKast’s “Rosa Parks,” the chapter brings hip-hop performance into conversation with eschatology to consider how rhythm and cadence can disrupt ordinary time and open imaginative relationships between present and future.
The Contribution of Christoph Schwöbel for Theology and the Arts
in Christoph Schwöbel: Theology in Conversation · De Gruyter
An examination of Christoph Schwöbel’s account of transcendence and divine identity and its implications for theology and the arts. The chapter considers how a theological account of God’s transcendence might both enable aesthetic encounter and resist attempts to identify artistic transcendence too readily with divine presence.
An introduction to Van der Laan’s distinctive approach to sacred architecture, examining the relationship between liturgical life, proportion, perception, and architectural form.
An exploration of architecture as a problem of human freedom. The essay asks whether creativity requires liberation from inherited limits or whether meaningful acts of making depend upon the constraints, materials, traditions, and worlds that precede us.
St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology
A substantial account of hermeneutical theology as a distinctive theological movement emerging from Barth, Bultmann, the New Hermeneutic, and particularly Ebeling, Fuchs, and Jüngel. It argues that hermeneutical theology concerns more than the interpretation of texts: at its center is the claim that God's self-revelation occurs as an event of self-interpretation in language.
The Function of Narrative in Eberhard Jüngel’s Divine Ontology
in The Freedom of Christianity: New Studies in Dialogue with Eberhard Jüngel · Lexington Books
An investigation of narrative as a theological category in Jüngel’s doctrine of God. The chapter asks how God’s identity can be understood through history and narration without reducing divine being to the history of the world.
A Hermeneutical Aesthetics of Outlaw Country
in Music and Spiritual Realities: New Methodologies and Perspectives on “the Most Spiritual of the Arts” · Open Gate Publishers
An exploration of music as a mode of meaning rather than simply an object requiring interpretation. The chapter considers how musical experience complicates distinctions between form and content and what this might contribute to theological accounts of understanding and transcendence.
in Twentieth Century German Protestantism
Lutheran Forum
A reconsideration of the place of aesthetics within twentieth-century Protestant theology. The essay identifies aesthetic concerns within a tradition often characterized by suspicion toward beauty and provides a broader context for understanding the emergence of theological aesthetics beyond its better-known Catholic trajectories.
Contemplation and Proportion in Dom Hans van der Laan
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 23.2
An examination of silence, contemplation, and proportion in Van der Laan’s architecture. The article considers how architectural space can order perception and bodily experience without reducing contemplative encounter to an architectural effect.
The Image of Hope: Time, History, and Hope in the Theological Aesthetics of Eberhard Jüngel
Journal of the Oxford Graduate Theological Society 3.1
An examination of the relationship between aesthetics and eschatology in Jüngel’s theology. The article asks how the future can acquire perceptible form in the present without ceasing to remain genuinely future.
Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon
A biographical and bibliographical introduction to Eberhard Jüngel, situating his life and work within twentieth-century German Protestant theology and identifying the major trajectories of his theological contribution.
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Hermeneutic of Place and the Possibilities of Absence for the Theological Imagination
A study of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting that develops the relationship between place, perception, presence, and absence. The article argues that Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions provide resources for thinking about the theological imagination precisely through what is removed, inaccessible, or no longer present.
Cult, Worship, and the Kingdom of God in Wolfhart Pannenberg
Pannenberg and the World · International Pannenberg Series · Karl Alber Publishing
An examination of festival and worship in Pannenberg’s theology, arguing that cultic celebration provides an anticipatory experience of the Kingdom of God. The chapter considers the relationship between ecclesiology and eschatology through play, temporality, and the possibility of experiencing the future within the present.
The Comparative Ontologies of Erich Przywara and Eberhard Jüngel
in God as the Mystery of the World? Conceptions of the World in Hermeneutical Theology · Mohr Siebeck
A comparative study of Przywara and Jüngel on the relationship between God and world. The chapter uses the striking proximity of their formulations to investigate two distinct ways of maintaining divine transcendence while accounting for God’s presence within creaturely reality.
The Forsakenness of God: Suffering, Memorial, and Existential Strife in Post-War Stations of the Cross
in Stations of the Cross · Libreria Editrice Vaticana
An examination of the transformation of the Stations of the Cross in post-war art, particularly where the traditional devotional form becomes entangled with memorial, historical catastrophe, and existential abandonment. The chapter asks what happens when Christ’s cry of forsakenness becomes a means of articulating modern experiences of divine absence.