Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art - Paperback

by Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (Author)

We are formed by the images we view. From classical art to advertisements and from news photos to social media, the images we look at mold our ideas of race, gender, and class. They shape how we love God and our neighbor.

This practical guide helps us look closely at and understand how a wide variety of images make meaning as aesthetic and cultural objects. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt teaches us how to learn from art rather than critique it and how to respond to images in Christian ways, allowing them to positively transform us and how we love.

The book includes twenty-three images, most in full color, that range from classical European paintings to Central African sculpture, from Chinese ink painting to political propaganda, and from stark anthropological photographs to unconventional installations.

Back Jacket

"Instructive, engaging, delightful"

We are formed by the images we view. From classical art to advertisements and from news photos to social media, the images we look at mold our ideas of race, gender, and class. They shape how we love God and our neighbor.

This illustrated resource provides a practical guide for Christian viewing, offering tools for closely looking at and learning from images we encounter in the media and art around us.

"I wish Redeeming Vision had been in my hands when I was a young Christian seeking to understand how to connect my faith, my love of art and beauty, and my mere humanity. This book isn't just for art lovers; it is for thinkers, believers, skeptics, wonderers, and all humans. Redeeming Vision is instructive, engaging, delightful--in a word, outstanding."
--Karen Swallow Prior, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

"Redeeming Vision is an erudite and yet wonderfully hospitable invitation for the layperson to engage deeply with art and art history through a profoundly Christian theological perspective. A vital contribution to the library of any sincere student of visual culture and its central importance in our lives."
--Bruce Herman, gallery director, Barrington Center for the Arts

"Providing a useful toolbox of interpretive tools and frameworks for faithful and generative engagement with a great diversity of artworks, Redeeming Vision is a welcome resource to help educators, students, and interested others develop their capacities for meaningful engagement with works of art informed by a vibrant and sound Christian faith. Well organized and illustrated, this book makes a compelling case for developing the transformative, redemptive power of learning how to look at art."
--Rachel Hostetter Smith, Taylor University

"Weichbrodt has provided what Christian discourse about the visual arts over the last fifty years has lacked: an on-the-ground guide to looking. Redeeming Vision is a remarkable text that will play a crucial role in helping to initiate countless curious but often confused seekers into the practice of looking at art."
--Daniel A. Siedell, The King's College, New York City

Author Biography

Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (PhD, Washington University in St. Louis) is associate professor of art and art history at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Weichbrodt has published on topics ranging from contemporary Black photographers to the patronage of Hawaiian landscape paintings to documentary photographs of Japanese Americans during World War II. She also enjoys writing for general audiences on the intersection of art history, politics, and pop culture.