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This book explores the relationship between religion and the visual arts–and vice versa–within Christianity and other major religious traditions. It identifies and describes the main historical, theological, sociological and aesthetic dimensions of "religious" art, with particular attention to "popular" as well as "high" culture, and within societies of the developing world. It also attempts to locate, and predict, the forms and functions of such art in a changing contemporary context of obligation, modernity, secularism and fundamentalism.

"It is sometimes said these days that art galleries are the new cathedrals, or that art is the last refuge of the sacred in our society. In this very lively and accessible book, Graham Howes explores the sense in which this might be true, and the sense in which it leaves the most important questions unanswered. He takes us with sympathy and skill through a number of case studies tracing the interweaving of creativity with patronage and wider cultural trends, and offers a fresh and challenging account of why neither religion nor visual art can finally rest in the assumption that the abstract is the ideal. The Art of the Sacred makes a genuinely new contribution to a vital debate." –Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
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