Creation's Beauty as Revelation
Toward a Creational Theology of Natural Beauty
Foreword by David Brown
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
With an interdisciplinary approach, Edwards utilizes literature, aesthetics, world religions, and continental philosophy as avenues into the theology of natural beauty. This is an epistemological look at our aesthetically charged knowing of God through nature. Emphasizing our embodied experience of the world, Edwards examines the phenomenon of perceptual beauty, while questioning traditional notions of God's metaphysical "beauty." Drawing upon Michael Polanyi's philosophy of science, Edwards explores the human aesthetic and religious interface with the natural world. This philosophical approach is then linked to the poetic: Polanyi's "tacit knowledge" and Jean-Luc Marion's "saturated phenomena" give support to Wordsworth's "pregnant vision" of the natural world. This approach culminates in a re-envisaging of John Ruskin's typology of natural beauty: Ruskin's vision of the world can be adapted toward an understanding of natural revelation. Edwards brings this Romantic theology back across the Atlantic in dialogue with American nature writers and the uniquely American experience of wilderness and "frontier."
L. Clifton Edwards is Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at Hawai'i Pacific University. His work has appeared in Theology Today, Irish Theological Quarterly, and American Theological Inquiry. He grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and since then has lived in other beautiful places including Alaska, Scotland, and currently, Hawai'i.
"Edwards' creative work gives needed nuance to the burgeoning frontier of beauty's role in aesthetic theology. His contribution, namely that beauty is a docent leading us into the divine, certainly has its place, and his critique of Augustine's theology is as stimulating in perspective as it is well-researched in substance."
--Christian T. George, Oklahoma Baptist University
"It is rare to find a theologian who is both willing and able to triangulate the study of theology, philosophy, and aesthetics, and even more rare to discover that task done with depth and care. Edwards has provided renewed impetus to take beauty seriously as a category for theological reflection. This is not a call to reject propositional thinking, but to consider the created context in and from which our thinking progresses. Here we are pressed to recognize that in doing theology beauty is more than implied--it is required."
--David Hogg, Samford University