No comments about Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production.

1 comments about Selectscripts: Marriage (Selectscripts).

1. My wife and I do dramas on accocion for our church and we have to find ones that are 2 people based. This book was just that to help us when we run dry of creativity. With my wife and I having met them we can truely say that Paul and Nicole are truley blessed in this and their ministry let's it show in this title.

   Great Work indeed.

No comments about Evolution of the Garbhadhatu Mandala.

1 comments about Youth Ministry Drama and Comedy.

1. This book is a must have for anyone who is going to be a youth dramics director and for church libraries. This book has great insight. It tells how to put on plays from groups who cannot afford costumes and or props to those who can. This book covers all areas of youth dramatics, and even includes skits. Also, this book contains all resources needed for finding what one needs for their youth dramatics program.

   I highly recommend this book to anyone who is going to be the director of youth dramatics in a church!

1 comments about The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature).

1. This interesting but challenging book examines the disciplined mental habits of Christian monks in the period from late antiquity to the early middle ages. Christian monastic traditions evolved in a world quite alien to modern sensibilities. The monasteries themselves were isolated and insular. Daily life was austere and focused on paying homage to God through meditative prayer. Over time, the monks developed a meditative technology that included memory skills, emotional control, and creative expression. These practices are what Professor Carruthers means by The Craft of Thought, and she does an admirable job of helping moderns appreciate the accomplishments of these diligent and inventive ancients.
   
   The book argues that monastic practices were rhetorical devices that lead their followers step by step to a point where they were able to meditate in ways that illuminated the canonical teachings of their faith. Her point that cultural practices can serve rhetorical functions is well illustrated in the book.
   
   The monks were highly disciplined. They developed specialized memory techniques and applied them to learning scriptures. They were skillful in creating and recalling visual images. Meditation put these skills and others in play. First the monk established facilitating conditions - prostrating oneself while weeping, for example - then he recalled scriptures and used them to devise new visions to better capture the glory of God.
   
   The book was a difficult read for me because of my weak background in medieval studies. Professor Carruthers wrote primarily for her colleagues in this area, and so she omitted contextual and historical background information. I also found the organization of her chapters somewhat loose so that the various bits and pieces did not always come together for me. However, overall I was pleased with the book. It gave me a learned scholar's insights into the cognitive techniques of medieval monastic life.

No comments about The Holy Family in Art and Devotion.

1 comments about Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Religion and Postmodernism Series).

1. If you are reading Disfiguring to get a survey of art in the 20th century, you are, for a lack of a better word, misreading Taylor's meditation on the connections between art,architecture and religion. Taylor discusses the development of European artistic modernism and its relation to philosophical and theosophical issues to reveal their interlacing connection with one another. Modernism stems, Taylor argues, from German Idealism and its attempt to totalize the world in a promise of a better life. This, combined with theosophy--a mystical, universalizing type of religion--are from the outset at the heart of modernism and modern art. He consequently expands on this position and follows its development up to the present period. Taylor appears to view the creation of art and architecture as being fundamentally religious acts. If this is the case, what does modernism say about who we are in the West? Taylor claims commodification and an obssessive fascination with the rational seem to be a part of what modern art says the West worships. As a "post-modernist" thinker, Taylor examines how we can live religiously without the totalizing claims of modernism, the violence that often comes with a society bent on rationalizing the world, and the deepening relationship between money and identity...He lays out a few suggestions and dicusses how some artists and architects are struggling with the fractured--the torn--condition of the West. A rupturing of the state of affairs in a modernist culture, he appears to say, is not a bad thing--it's maybe even necessary in order for us to understand "spirit" apart from some of the objectives of modernism. This is a remarkable book.

No comments about Buddhist Art and Tibetan Patronage: Ninth to Fourteenth Centuries (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library).

No comments about An Iconographer's Pattern Book: The Stroganov Tradition.

No comments about William Kurelek's Huronia Mission Paintings (Canadian Studies).