Apologetical Aesthetics
In my last decade of teaching for SBTS, I headed up the doctoral program in theology-and-the-arts and supervised a number of dissertations in the field. In August of 2019, a month after my retirement from Southern, I was in Southeast Asia with a group from the seminary doing some teaching in two of the schools served by our missionaries. Our team included a couple of men who’d done their theses under me (Elkins and Stark), and they suggested that we “get the band back together” for a book. So we settled on this title and went looking for volunteers from among our aesthetics crew, and beyond to four professors, two from Southern and two from other schools.
The articles fell out into four sections—The Doubtfulness of Naturalistic Ethics; The Testimony of Nature; The Lived Aesthetic Testimony of Christ and Christians; Insight from and for the Arts. And then my Closing Thoughts. Through its seventeen articles, the book features the contributions of, in order, William Elkins, Daniel Blackaby, Eric Williamson, Paul Shockley, Michael Haykin, Mark Warnock, Matt Crawford, Brian Watson, George Scondras, Ann Ahrens, Steve Halla, Matthew Raley, Rod Miller, Daniel Cabal, and myself.
The cover features three illustrations by Harrison Watters, chosen from the nineteen which are spread throughout the book.