A 98 page, 38 full color image, monograph produced with the "Patrick Graham: 30 Years - The Silence Becomes the Painting" Exhibition shown at Meridian Gallery in February to April of 2012. This catalog from Patrick Graham: 30 Years- The Silence Becomes the Painting contains essays & a "Foreword". Essays: "Return to Monaghanstown Bog in County Westmeath", "Patrick Graham and Irish Art", "Patrick Graham: Waiting for the Silence", "Alphabet of our Humanity": A Patrick Graham Lexicon, & "Patrick Graham on Patrick Graham." Contributors are the following: Anne Trueblood Brodzky, Patrick Graham, Peter Selz, John Handley, Jarrett Earnest.

This publication was supported by a grant from CARE.

At least since the time of Paul (see Acts 18), Christians have wrestled with the power and danger of religious imagery in the visual arts. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that there emerged in Western Christianity an integrated, academic study of theology and the arts. One of the pioneers of that movement was H. Wilson Yates, emeritus professor at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, to whom this volume is dedicated.

Here, fourteen theologians and Yates himself examine how visual culture reflects or addresses pressing contemporary religious questions. The aim throughout is to engage the reader in theological reflection, mediated and enhanced by the arts. This beautifully illustrated book includes more than fifty images in full color.

Robin M. Jensen is the Luce Chancellor's Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches both in the Divinity School and the Art History Department, and directs a program on Art, Religion, and Contemporary Culture. She has written several books, articles, and essays on the subject of early Christian art and its intersection with Christian theology and practice. She is currently president for the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies.

Kimberly Vrudny is associate professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she also serves as Project Director for HIV/AIDS Initiatives. She is the author of Friars, Scribes, and Corpses: A Marian Confraternal Reading of The Mirror of Human Salvation (Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming); and coedited, with Wilson Yates, Arts, Theology and the Church: New Intersections (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005). She is interested in the intersections of art, theology, and politics.

Why should the church be involved in the arts? What are the roles that the arts play in the religious life? How does art reveal the presence of God? What is the relationship between the spiritual and the aesthetic? What is the connection between Christian symbols and their artistic expression? How can the arts be used in the practice of ministry and worship?

A renewed interest in this fertile and provocative interplay between religion and the arts is causing these questions to be posed more persistently now in both academic and church settings. The essays in Arts, Theology, and the Church provoke and ponder such questions and combine to create this foundational work that offers new understandings about the relationship of the arts to theology, history, and the practice of ministry in the church.

Contributors:
• Doug Adams
• Mary Farrell Bednarowski
• Bruce Birch
• Frank Burch Brown
• Sid Fowler
• Robin M. Jensen
• Cindi Beth Johnson
• Deborah Haynes
• Don Saliers
• Kimberly Vrundy
• Jann Cather Weaver
• Wilson Yates