'Tikkun Olam' -To Mend the World: A Confluence of Theology and the Arts

Tikkun Olam--To Mend the World is premised on the conviction that artists and theologians have things to learn from one another things about the complex interrelationality of life and about a coherence of things given and sustained by God. The ten essays compiled in this volume seek to attend to the lives burdens and hopes that characterize human life in a world broken but unforgotten in travail but moving towards the freedom promised by a faithful Creator. They reflect on whether the world--wounded as it is by war by hatred by exploitation by neglect by reason and by human imagination itself--can be healed. Can there be repair? And can art and theology tell the truth of the worlds woundedness and still speak of its hope? Artistically sensitive theologically rich and eminently readable--this is a rare combination but it is amply demonstrated in this fascinating set of essays. --Jeremy Begbie Duke University Emerging from a theological symposium and an art exhibition the essays in this book show in glorious profusion and profundity the marks of this double origin. Theologians artists literary scholars and musicians combine to bear witness to a world that is broken and yet is also the stage for a decisive event of divine love and healing. These are essays full of insights about order and disorder beauty and tragedy. Their achievement is to make the reader think and above all imagine. --Paul S. Fiddes University of Oxford The contributors to this book seek to stay alive between the questions and the answer. They have labored to offer us their reflections on realities that have been made and that are still being made anew. The result is a prayer to stir us awake. We need such books. --From the foreword by Alfonse Borysewicz Jason Goroncy is Lecturer and Dean of Studies at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership in Dunedin. His publications include Hallowed Be Thy Name: The Sanctification of All in the Soteriology of Peter Taylor Forsyth (2013) and Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P. T. Forsyth (Wipf and Stock 2013).