David Morgan is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, [1] in Durham, North Carolina, with an additional appointment in Duke's Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies. Morgan served as the Chair in the Department of Religious Studies in Trinity College of Duke University from 2013 to 2016. [2] He is the author of numerous books, including The Forge of Vision (2015), The Embodied Eye (2012), and The Sacred Gaze (2005).
He holds a BA in Studio Art (concentration on sculpture) at Concordia College (1980), a MA in Art History at the University of Arizona (1984), and a PhD in Art History at the University of Chicago (1990), He taught at Valparaiso University from 1990 to 2007, where he was the Duesenberg Professor in Christianity and the Arts, in the honors college of Valparaiso University.[ citation needed ]
Morgan’s writing has focused on the history of Protestant visual culture since the eighteenth century. He has also studied Catholic devotional images, the history of art theory, and religion and media. He was co-founder and is co-editor of the journal, Material Religion, and co-edits two book series at Routledge (London): Religion, Media, Culture, and Research in Religion, Media, and Culture. [3] He is an Elected Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University and Elected member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Morgan is a recipient of the Annual Book Award from the Association of American Publishers in Professional and Scholarly Publishing for 1999 in the category of Religion and Philosophy for the book Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. [4] His edited volume Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman received the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 1996 from the American Library Association. [5]
His books include:
His edited volumes include:
The history of religion refers to the written record of human religious feelings, thoughts, and ideas. This period of religious history begins with the invention of writing about 5,200 years ago. The prehistory of religion involves the study of religious beliefs that existed prior to the advent of written records. One can also study comparative religious chronology through a timeline of religion, or the interrelationships and historical diversification of religious ideologies through the use of evolutionary philosophy and broad comparativism. Writing played a major role in standardizing religious texts regardless of time or location and making easier the memorization of prayers and divine rules.
Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.
Idolatry is the worship of an idol as though it were a deity. In Abrahamic religions idolatry connotes the worship of something or someone other than the Abrahamic God as if it were God. In these monotheistic religions, idolatry has been considered as the "worship of false gods" and is forbidden by texts such as the Ten Commandments. Other monotheistic religions may apply similar rules.
Religious art is a visual representation of religious ideologies and their relationship with humans. Sacred art directly relates to religious art in the sense that its purpose is for worship and religious practices. According to one set of definitions, artworks that are inspired by religion but are not considered traditionally sacred remain under the umbrella term of religious art, but not sacred art.
In sociology, secularization is a multilayered concept that generally denotes "a transition from a religious to a more worldly level." There are many types of secularization and most do not lead to atheism, irreligion, nor are they automatically antithetical to religion. Secularization has different connotations such as implying differentiation of secular from religious domains, the marginalization of religion in those domains, or it may also entail the transformation of religion as a result of its recharacterization.
Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct from artistic style. The word iconography comes from the Greek εἰκών ("image") and γράφειν.
In Indian religions, a darshan or darshanam is the auspicious sight of a deity or a holy person.
Visual culture is the aspect of culture expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, media studies, Deaf Studies, and anthropology.
John Corrigan is an American religion scholar and historian, known for being the author of a number of books on the history of religion and emotion, and the digital humanities. He is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of History, and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University (FSU). He is a leader in the academic study of religion and emotion and in the field of the spatial humanities. His narrative histories of religion in America are widely adopted in university courses.
American civil religion is a sociological theory that a monotheistic nonsectarian civil religion exists within the United States with sacred symbols drawn from national history. Scholars have portrayed it as a common set of values that foster social and cultural integration. The ritualistic elements of ceremonial deism found in American ceremonies and presidential invocations of God can be seen as expressions of the American civil religion.
The Head of Christ, also called the Sallman Head, is a 1940 portrait painting of Jesus of Nazareth by Warner Sallman (1892–1968). As an extraordinarily successful work of Christian popular devotional art, it had been reproduced over half a billion times worldwide by the end of the 20th century. Enlarged copies of the work have been made for churches, and small pocket or wallet-sized prayer cards bearing the image have been mass-produced for private devotional use. The painting is said to have "become the basis for [the] visualization of Jesus" for "hundreds of millions" of people.
Postsecularism refers to a range of theories regarding the persistence or resurgence of religious beliefs or practices in the present. The "post-" may refer to after the end of secularism or after the beginning of secularism.
The archaeology of religion and ritual is a growing field of study within archaeology that applies ideas from religious studies, theory and methods, anthropological theory, and archaeological and historical methods and theories to the study of religion and ritual in past human societies from a material perspective.
Christian culture generally includes all the cultural practices which have developed around the religion of Christianity. There are variations in the application of Christian beliefs in different cultures and traditions.
Ellen Spolsky is Professor Emerita of English at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is a literary scholar and theorist who has published several monographs that deal with topics such as early English literary history, Shakespeare, history of literary theory, word and image relations, cognitive cultural theory, iconotropism, performance theory, and some aspects of evolutionary literary theory. Her books and essays discuss both the universal and historically local aspects of Renaissance art, poetry and drama.
Affective piety is most commonly described as a style of highly emotional devotion to the humanity of Jesus, particularly in his infancy and his death, and to the joys and sorrows of the Virgin Mary. It was a major influence on many varieties of devotional literature in late-medieval Europe, both in Latin and in the vernaculars. This practice of prayer, reading, and meditation was often cultivated through visualization and concentration on vivid images of scenes from the Bible, Saints' Lives, Virgin Mary, Christ and religious symbols, feeling from the result. These images could be either conjured up in people's minds when they read or heard poetry and other pieces of religious literature, or they could gaze on manuscript illuminations and other pieces of art as they prayed and meditated on the scenes depicted. In either case, this style of affective meditation asked the "viewer" to engage with the scene as if she or he were physically present and to stir up feelings of love, fear, grief, and/or repentance for sin.
David Alfred Martin, FBA was a British sociologist and Anglican priest who studied and wrote extensively about the sociology of religion.
Feminist art criticism emerged in the 1970s from the wider feminist movement as the critical examination of both visual representations of women in art and art produced by women. It continues to be a major field of art criticism.
The Carolingian Cross is but one variation in the vast historical imagery of Christian symbolic representations of the Crucifixion of Jesus, going back to at least the ninth century. All crosses and Christian symbols have an inherent meaning arising from a multitude of sources and distinct features that set them apart from other religions. From both a design aspect and a theological perspective, the Carolingian Cross consists of a mixture of Christian and pre-Christian concepts built over a long history of cultural adaptation, religious iconography, liturgical practices and theological premises. German graphic designer Rudolf Koch in 1932 published a collection of 158 plates of drawings of Christian symbols. Under the heading of "Cross", this includes twelve drawings of Christian cross variants. One of these, the "Carolingian Cross" shows a cross of four triquetras.
Margaret Ruth Miles is an American theologian and historian who was president of the American Academy of Religion in 1999 and dean of the Graduate Theological Union from 1996 to 2001. A 1982 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written and edited dozens of books, including Augustine on the Body (1979), Image as Insight (1985), Immaculate and Powerful (1985), Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture (1987), Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (1997), Plotinus on Body and Beauty (1999), Carnal Knowing (2006), Desire and Delight (2006), and A Complex Delight (2008).
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