Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on literature along with the visual and performing arts, Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences understanding the ways in which things are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay.
Trade Review“Religion isn't what people do but how they interpret, Anthony B. Pinn argues in this provocative work. Building on years of scholarly insight, Pinn asks readers to see how in their human relationships and their exchanges with the material world they embody religion. A must-read for scholars of religion.” -- Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
“Anthony B. Pinn’s exploration into the interplay among religion, spirituality, and the performance of black creativity is a force to behold. Writing with probing insight, Pinn underscores the liminal spaces and edges where the bodily and the embodied blur the lines between the pedantic and the spectacle, imploding along the way the artifice of the sacred in exchange for the sanctity of artistic liberation.” -- Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
"A significant contribution to the subfield of art and religion, probing in thought-provoking ways the relationship between the two. . . . Readers will find the book a rigorous training in developing the hermeneutical 'eyes to see,' that do not guarantee, but are essential for, any meaningful action." -- Michael D. Nichols * Religious Studies Review *
"Anthony B. Pinn’s
Interplay of Things is a rich, sophisticated, and deeply rewarding meditation on the phenomenological structure of the human encounter with things in the world." -- Donovan Schaefer * Material Religion *
Table of Contents Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Definitions and Considerations 1
Part I. Meaning
1. Things 25
2. The Art of Placement 45
Part II. Interplay
3. Artistic Expression of Transience 59
4. The "Stuff" of Performance 83
5. The Art of Elimination 108
Part III. Restricting
6. Pieces of Things 133
7. "Captured" Things 148
8. Problem Things 172
Epilogue. Confronting Exposure, or A Psycho-Ethical Response to Openness 187
Notes 201
Bibliography 249
Index 265
