When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind

The stories gathered in these pages lay bare the power of the arts to unsettle and rework deeply ingrained religious beliefs and practices. This book grounds its narrative in the accounts of 82 Evangelicals who underwent a sea-change of religious identity through the intervention of the arts. There never would have been an undoing of my conservative Evangelical worldview confides one young man, without my encounter with the transcendent work of Mark Rothko on that rainy afternoon in London's Tate Modern. The characters in The Brothers Karamazov began to feel like family to me, reports another individual, and the doubts of Ivan Karamazov slowly saturated my soul. As their stories unfold, the subjects of the study describe the arts as sources of, by turns, defamiliarization, comfort in uncertainty, a stand-in for faith and a surrogate transcendence. Drawing on memoirs, interviews, and field notes, Philip Salim Franics explores the complex interrelationship of
religion and art in the modern West, and offers an important new resource for on-going debates about the role of the arts in education and social life.


Author: Philip S. Francis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 03/01/2017
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780190279769

About the Author

Philip S. Francis is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College and Melon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum. His research explores the shifting interrelationship of religion, art, and sexuality in the modern West.