Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty

by Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu

It is often difficult to describe beauty or even justify attempts to experience something beautiful. Yet if artists--whether painters or poets, actors or musicians, architects or sculptors--teach us anything, it is that the pursuit of beauty is a common feature among all humanity. As Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu contends, these varied experiences with artistic beauty are embedded with revelatory and prophetic power that not only affects a single individual but allows for communal formation. Named one of America magazine's most promising young theologians, Gonzalez-Andrieu seeks to engage art in order to reveal its religious significance. Bridge to Wonder proposes a method of theological aesthetics allowing readers to mine the depths of creative beauty to discover variegated theological truths that enable greater communion with each other and the One source of all that is beautiful.

Genres: Theology

258 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2012

Reviews

[Connie Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and original take on how art elucidates and nurtures the Christian's life of faith. Loved it.

[Alane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, but a very interesting read. A call to find divine revelation in art.

[Sooho Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

**teetered between 3.75 and 4 stars. I relinquished at 4 because of her proposed methodology, which is by far the most interesting development.

Cecilia González-Andrieu, named as one of America's promising theologians, embarks on an ambitious theological exploration in methodology connecting art, experience, beauty, wonder, and gospel. Prior to modernism, the arts and the religious were intimately intertwined. Yet now, the arts (especially fine arts) carry an air of exclusivity or absurdity: either it is incomprehensible or ridiculous. Rather than abandoning the sector in its entirety, González-Andrieu proposes an immersive theological dialogue between the art, the artist, the viewer, and the viewer's community. What this enterprise demand is, first, expanding arts beyond fine arts to include creative works or arrangements by an individual(s) for a community(s). Then, the receiving community engages with the art and critically analyzes beyond the mere initial "love or hate (or don't get)" reactions. What this communal-theological exercise does is to create a bridge to wonder (asombrado), which beauty mixed with the good and the true. On this bridge to wonder, we experience wonder through beauty--we experience God, who is Wonder and Beauty.

cf. www.sooholee.wordpress.com

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gonzalez-Andrieu sketches a stunning, compelling theology of art as revelatory wonder, recovering the aesthetic power which continues to be undervalued and misunderstood in the evangelical tradition.