Theology, Beauty, and Monsters

Catalog description

This is a course in “theological aesthetics." Its most fundamental question is, “How can or could God reveal himself in a world both beautiful and ugly?” It explores the Christian notion of faith as the gift of a response to God’s redemption of human history, a history that is not only beautiful, but also ugly, and indeed “monstrous.” Students will study Christian theories of divine revelation in history (“theology”), Western Medieval ideas of beauty and the grotesque (“beauty”), and contemporary theories of the monstrous (“monsters,” especially from literary theory). The course gives special attention to the Christian theological “supernatural,” to artistic works that grapple with the supernatural and with historical evil, and to scholarly explorations of the monstrous.