Francis Philip S. When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind

Oxford University Press, 2017. — 240 p.The memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic field notes gathered in these pages lay bare the power of the arts to unsettle and rework deeply ingrained religious beliefs and practices. This book bridges the gap between aesthetic theory and lived religion by grounding its narrative in the accounts of eighty-two former evangelicals who underwent a sea change of religious identity through the intervention of the arts. As their stories unfold, participants describe the arts as sites of, by turns, “defamiliarization,” “comfort in uncertainty,” “a stand-in for faith,” and a “surrogate transcendence.” The book thus interrogates the complex interrelationship of religion and art in the modern West, while contributing to ongoing debates about the role of the arts in education and social life.