This pioneering study investigates the connection between Shakespeare and Catholic education. Its authors contend that Shakespeare’s plays explore Catholic understandings of human life in ways that remain relevant for Catholic educational institutions today.Through chapters focusing on ethical and existential themes – love, desire, the body, marriage, virginity, evil, finitude, jealousy, and lies – the authors demonstrate Shakespeare’s wide-ranging engagement with early modern Cath...

This book considers the connection between the world of mental health in the twenty-first century and the traditional concept of desire in Christianity and the Arts. It draws parallels between the desire for rest from anxiety among mental health sufferers with the longing for peace and happiness in Religion and the Arts. The author presents Biblical, philosophical and theological insights alongside artistic ones, arguing that desire for rest remains at the heart of spiritual living as well...

This is the first book to examine the body in training in the context of religion, sport and wider physical culture, offering important insight into the performative, social, cultural and gendered aspects of somatic discipline and exercise.The book presents a series of fascinating thematic and case-study led chapters from around the world, examining topics including the martial discipline and symbolism of artistic gymnastics; religious interpretations of body vulnerability in the c...

Contemporary culture is rediscovering the importance of beauty for both social transformation and personal happiness. Theologians have sought, in their varied ways, to demonstrate how God's beauty is associated with notions of truth and goodness. This book breaks new ground by suggesting that liturgy is the means par excellence by which an experience of beauty is communicated. Drawing from both secular and religious understandings, in particular the mystical and apophatic tradition, the bo...