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INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT

BIBLIOGRAPHY
with links to on-line articles

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© 1999-00 John W. Dixon, Jr.
MAIL TO: jwdixon@email.unc.edu

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John W. Dixon, Jr.

I N T R O D U C T O R Y _ S T A T E M E N  T

What Makes Religious Art Religious?

In the nature of religion, there can be no definition of religion. Definitions can be accurate only to the epiphenomena of religion, not to religion itself. Without such a definition, there is no way of deciding when art is and is not religious.

It follows that, however necessary it may be, the academic study of religion (together with its inevitable journal articles, including this one) is impossible.

The accessibility of its objects makes the academic study of art a little, but only a little, more possible than the academic study of religion. There is a more agreement on why some objects are something we call art than there is on why a variety of acts, attitudes, beliefs, and symbols are something we call religion. Consequently, it is not possible to say why religious art is religious. The best we can do is define ways in which we might approach the answer.

The attempt to answer the unanswerable question divides in two:

  1. How do we identify, define and interpret the religious dimension of past art?
  2. How do we make and interpret a religious art for our own day?
The distinction does not lie in any presumed difference between ourselves and our predecessors, for there is none. We are all human; we can (and must) learn from what they did. The distinction lies in our different historical situation. For its adherents, a religion is true as an account of the real, not as mere belief. Therefore, religious art should be the embodiment of the truth. It would be useful at the beginning to say something about how art is true.

These paragraphs, the title and the beginning of one of the papers to appear below suggests the problems of dealing with religion and art. For the scholar in art, religion provides subjects and programs for works of art. For the scholar in religion, art is a useful illustration of things and practices or expressions of religious feelings. All are legitimate enterprises; neither resolves the problem of how art can be, in itself, a religious act, or why it is that art has so often been a necessity for religious people.

There are three aspects of the problem:

  1. A definition of art that can make it posssible to understand it as a religious act.
  2. A definition of religion that can see art as ingredient to it.
  3. Exemplary analyses of works of art as manifesting these definitions.
The articles below and those yet to be posted on this site are forays into these several aspects of the interaction of religion and art. Since the interests of readers will vary, I will append a short introductory statement to each one to indicate where the center of gravity lies (inevitably, most of the articles draw on more than one of these issues).