Coming to Our Sense: Art, Faith and Embodiment

This course will focus on the way art, whether religious or secular, articulates lived human experience as a way to gain more intimate contact with the world, each other and, ultimately, also with God. In order to do so we will discuss the crucial role of the body in our pre-reflective understanding of the world; the importance of the sense of touch for sensing nuanced textures and timbres; and the notion of beauty understood as unfolding in time rather than as a timeless, captured moment. The course will conclude by assessing the implications of this approach for a fresh understanding of art. The aim of the course is to enable participants to develop new Christian criteria by which to approach and evaluate works of art of our time.