Beauty, the heart of a radical theology and how our existence is transformed into living

Abstract Title of Thesis: Beauty, the heart of a radical theology and how our existence is transformed into living David. E Carnish M.A., Humanities; May 2020 The Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg Glen A. Mazis, Ph.D., First Reader This thesis asserts a pastoral theology that espouses the beauty of embodiment of all life on this living world as theologically crucial. The work explores an emphasis on embodiment through the theological method of theopoetics in dialogue with phenomenology. Theopoetics is a theological reflection that is interdisciplinary: drawing on art, literature, philosophy, history, psychology and various theologies (i.e. political, narrative and process as a corrective to systematic and apologetic theology). This method of theological reflection will be in dialogue with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a central expression of embodiment and depth by examining their shared concepts of ambiguity, embodiment, imagination, and depth within our apprehension of the world and others. This thesis asserts Merleau-Ponty’s work is an asset to rendering embodiment and imagination as a focus of theopoetics. This thesis combines the theopoetic work of Rubem Alves and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approaches into a radical theology of embodied beauty. Alves defined beauty as our liberation, which was encountered in materialism, history, and embodiment. The thesis will expand on Alves’ core theopoetic foundation, “Outside of beauty there is no salvation.” Merleau-Ponty seldom wrote about beauty explicitly. However, as Galen Johnson observes, “his works are all about beauty, in that he wrote about depth, rhythm and the radiance of Being itself.” Merleau-Ponty articulates the depth of the body, its rhythm with the nature as manifestations of Being. This thesis instead of the traditional rationally conceived rendering of the real shows embodied beauty informed by the rhythm of living and dying in an affirmative spirituality.

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Work Title Beauty, the heart of a radical theology and how our existence is transformed into living
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Penn State
Creators
  1. David E. Carnish
Keyword
  1. Theology Phenomenology Literature Art Embodiment Theopoetics
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives)
Work Type Masters Thesis
DOI doi:10.26207/9678-2p32
Deposited April 29, 2020

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