Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation by Lanta DavisMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a fascinating read - there's so much about ancient religious practices that have been lost to time that Davis has laid out here.
It's really very hard to associate art in any form with the church as it is today, especially since the church is so often the most vocal against any form of artistic expression that deviates from "standard painting" or "literary novel" (with the emphasis on must be clean and family-friendly).
I was particularly captured by the potential meaning(s) behind the weird illustrations you often see laughed at in monastic/ancient texts, and how bestiaries were used more as devotionals than actual books about strange animals! It puts a lot of things in to context. As someone who could never get through Paradise Lost, it was also interesting to see the shifts in literature and our understanding of "the seven deadly sins" as opposed to what it was originally intended/written to be.
The only downside of reading this as a digital arc was that the images never made it through, so I had to do some side googling to see what was being talked about. The image descriptions in the book did help though!
This book is potentially a great resource for Christian artists in the current day who are looking to see how other Christians have expressed their faith artistically throughout the years.
Note: I received a digital ARC of this book from Baker Academic via NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.
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