David Jones And The Craft Of Theology

Elizabeth Powell offers an imaginative exploration of the art of David Jones while also addressing Christian teaching anew, through engagement with selected artistic works: a poem, a painted inscription, and a wood engraving. Powell's study helps readers not merely to understand Jones but to carry out this kind of loving attention themselves-arguably what Jones considered to be theology's most important task.

Through close readings of these material objects, Powell draws the reader into the participatory, performative and dialogical possibilities of the craft of theology. Harking back to an older style of theology framed in a distinctive and modern way, as a graced human practice, and a place of transforming relation with the divine; she argues that Jones's art works offer places of beauty in which to 'become beauty' along the way. Located at the cross-section of theology, literature and the arts, this volume shows how an interdisciplinary position is nothing other than finding ways for theology and humanity to be more richly itself.