Art is often viewed as being inherently spiritual. But what does it mean to describe an experience of art or beauty as "spiritual"? Is there a relationship between the spiritual experience a person has in the presence of a work of art and the Holy Spirit of Christian faith? Skilled theologian, musician, and educator Steven Guthrie examines areas of overlap between spirituality, human creativity, and the arts with the goal of sharpening and refining how we speak and think about the Holy Spirit. By exploring various connections between art and spirituality, he helps Christians better understand the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and offers a clear, engaging theology of the arts. The book includes a foreword by renowned theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie.
Steve Guthrie is Associate Professor of Theology at Belmont University in Nashville, where he leads Belmont's major in Religion and the Arts. Before coming to Belmont, Dr. Guthrie was Research Fellow, and then Lecturer in Theology at the University of St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland.
Dr. Guthrie earned an undergraduate degree in Music Theory from the University of Michigan, and worked for several years as a musician before becoming disoriented on the way to a gig and stumbling into the world of academic theology. In his spare time, he enjoys playing his Fender Rhodes, eating pizza, or simply quietly meditating on the goodness of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Above all, he enjoys writing breezy, faintly humorous autobiographical paragraphs for the internet; always written in the third person, so that the casual reader will believe that they have been penned by some devoted chronicler of his life and work.
Dr. Guthrie is married to Julie and has four extraordinarily clever and impossibly good looking children. On weekends you will find him playing around the Nashville area with the band "SixtyFour."
