Art, Imagination and Christian Hope

Just found out about this conference being held at St. Andrew's, which links it quite well to what this blog is all about.

Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts
Research Colloquium, Spring 2006

'Patterns of promise: art, imagination and Christian hope'

27th-29th March 2006
St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, Scotland UK

Hope is an inherently imaginative human disposition.

While securely rooted in something revealed, Christian hope nonetheless also engages our imagination.

In hope, faith reconfigures the shape of what is familiar in order to ‘pattern’ the contours of God’s promised future. In the process, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of ‘hopeful’ and expectant living.

In art, this same ‘poetic’ interplay between past, present and future takes particular concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an ‘ecology of hope’.

This colloquium will explore our imaginative engagements with the shape of things to come. In particular, we will attend to the contribution that literature, music and painting can make, as they trace ‘patterns of promise’ and so generate hopeful living.

Speakers

* Professor Richard Bauckham, University of St Andrews
* Dr Anna Williams, University of Cambridge
* Professor Paul Fiddes, University of Oxford
* Dr Daniel Chua, King's College, University of London
* Dr Patricia Bruininks, Hendrix College, Arkansas
* Professor Trevor Hart, University of St Andrews
* Professor Jeremy Begbie, University of St Andrews