Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art

by Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

Publisher:

Baker Academic

, 2023

Overview

We are formed by the images we view. From classical art to advertisements, news photos to social media, the images we look at mold our ideas of race, gender, and class. They shape how we love God and our neighbor.

This practical guide helps us look closely at and understand how a wide variety of images make meaning as aesthetic and cultural objects. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt teaches us how to learn from art rather than critique it and how to respond to images in Christian ways, allowing them to positively transform us and how we love.

The book includes 23 images, most in full color, that range from classical European paintings to Central African sculpture, from Chinese ink painting to political propaganda, and from stark anthropological photographs to unconventional installations.

Key Features

• Teaches us how to learn from art rather than critique it and how to respond to images in Christian ways
• Helps us look closely at and understand how a wide variety of images make meaning as aesthetic and cultural objects
• Includes a wide variety of images

Contents

• Introduction: For People Who Look at Pictures

Part 1: Foundations

• The Toolbox
• The Archive
• The Frame

Part 2: Love the Lord Your God

• Confessing Our Idols
• Wondering at God’s Transcendence: Abstract Art
• Delighting in God’s Presence: Representational Art

Part 3: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

• Growing in Curiosity: Portraiture
• Sharing Our Space: Landscape
• Allowing for Complexity: Art of the Everyday
• Learning to Lament: The Art of History
• Redeeming Vision

Praise for the Print Edition

I wish Redeeming Vision had been in my hands when I was a young Christian seeking to understand how to connect my faith, my love of art and beauty, and my mere humanity. This book isn’t just for art lovers; it is for thinkers, believers, skeptics, wonderers, and all humans. Redeeming Vision is instructive, engaging, delightful—in a word, outstanding.

—Karen Swallow Prior, research professor of English and Christianity & Culture, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

While I enjoy going to art museums, I often have no idea how to have a meaningful experience with what I see. Weichbrodt’s book provides what I have been missing: a set of tools I can take with me as I engage with art. Weichbrodt applies the same principles to art that I often use as a Bible teacher, such as considering historical and cultural context, observing objectively, keeping in mind the author or artist’s intent, and making appropriate applications to our lives today. I welcome Weichbrodt’s exhortation to practice redeeming vision, and I hope you will too.

—Kristie Anyabwile, Bible teacher and author

Product Details

• Title: Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art
• Author: Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt
• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2023
• Logos Release Date: 2023
• Pages: 266
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subject: Christianity and art
• ISBNs: 9781540965974, 9781493440207, 9781493440214, 154096597X, 1493440209, 1493440217
• Resource ID: LLS:REDEEMINGVISION
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2023-03-21T17:18:19Z

About Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (PhD, Washington University in St. Louis) is associate professor of art and art history at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Weichbrodt has published on topics ranging from contemporary black photographers to the patronage of Hawaiian landscape paintings to documentary photographs of Japanese Americans during World War II. She also enjoys writing for general audiences on the intersection of art history, politics, and pop culture.