When people know they are encountering art, that awareness may change how they interpret what they experience. However, it is not clear how engaging with art affects cognition in everyday life. This collection of studies investigates how meaning-making in an art context influences semantic distance. Semantic distance involves connecting weakly-related concepts and plays an important role in cognitive processes such as memory and creativity. Across four studies, participants attributed meaning to semantically incongruent sentences (<< Most cats see well at court"), believing either that they were or were not created by artists. We then measured the effects on semantic distance using a network-based approach (Studies 1 and 2) and a sensorimotor distance-based approach (Studies 3 and 4). In Studies 1 and 2, participants decided whether two words were related or unrelated in word pairs with varying path lengths (e.g., ashtray-smoking, sea-survey). In Studies 3 and 4, participants made similar decisions for word pairs that were either closely associated ('to see' - 'colour') or distantly associated ('to see' - 'song') with different sensory modalities. In Studies 1 and 3, both prime and target words were presented without time limitations, and participants in the art condition evaluated distant word pairs as more strongly associated compared to those in the baseline condition. In Studies 2 and 4, participants performed similar tasks, but prime and target words appeared only briefly, reducing the influence of topdown deliberation processes and decreasing the observed effects. These findings suggest that meaning-making in an art context facilitates connecting distant concepts, offering insights into how art impacts cognition in everyday life.

The media occasionally reports instances where people mistake ordinary objects for art. This often happens in art galleries or museums and might suggest that people attribute meaning differently depending on whether the context is artistic or rooted in everyday life. In this manuscript, we investigate how people attribute meaning to seemingly nonsensical sentences and images when they believe they are made by poets or artists. We used a collection of sentences that conclude with semantically congruent and non-congruent words, and a collection of images where the object is either congruent or non-congruent with the background. We randomly assigned participants to the baseline and experimental (art) conditions, telling participants in the art condition that the sentences/images were created by artists. Studies 1 and 2 found that the art context increases the perceived meaningfulness of non-congruent sentences (“Most cats see well at court”), but not the congruent ones (“Most cats see well at night”), while Study 3 found a similar effect regarding non-congruent images (a lion in an office) and congruent images (a lion in a field). Additionally, we discuss how individual differences in aberrant salience and religiosity moderate the main effects of the art context on meaning-making. These results advance our theoretical understanding of how art contexts affect the interpretation of meaning and the importance of semantic non-congruency.

This article interrogates the role of the human imagination in ordinary perception and orientation, in encounters with art, and in practices of faith. Philosophers and psychologists have long argued that perception is irreducibly imaginative, in the sense that to perceive intelligibly is, in part, to integrate sensory data into forms or wholes that are not simply given. The ability to do this is what continental philosophy calls ‘the imagination’, and the imagination in this sense is central to how humans apprehend and orient themselves in the world. This centrality introduces an element of risk into all human apprehension of the world, other people, and the divine, which cannot be overcome by spiritual or epistemological safeguards. Rather, such risk is inalienable, not least to a life of faith. The article discusses ways to understand and engage this dynamic, especially through theological encounters with art.

Abstract: This article examines the role of the eschatological imagination in literature. It begins by arguing that eschatology, far from being abstract or outdated, shapes both individual and collective imagination and desire, orienting lives toward an implied or explicit end. In modernity, traditional religious eschatologies have often been replaced by political, technological, or psychological visions of fulfillment, many of which result in “eschatological antinomies”—the self-defeating pursuit of desire. Literature, Wolfe contends, provides a unique space to live within the tension between longing for resolution and acknowledging the impossibility of full closure. Works by Shakespeare, Eliot, Tolkien, and others embody a dual movement: they draw readers toward a sense of meaning while simultaneously letting go, resisting total narrative containment. This mirrors the Christian eschatological vision—a promise that is glimpsed but not yet realized. Such literature becomes a training ground for hope: not an escapist fantasy, but a way of preparing the heart to live well amid uncertainty. Like the liturgy, these works offer a moment of transformation that sends the reader back into life with both courage and humility.

Previous research has investigated how the context of perception affects emotional response. This study investigated how engagement with perceived fictional content vs perceived everyday-life content affects the way people experience negative emotions. Four studies with an experimental design tested how engagement with perceived fictional content vs perceived everyday life content affects the intensity of negative emotional response to negative emotional content, the motivation to decrease negative emotions, and cognitive reappraisal. Participants were presented with negatively valenced images and were asked to imagine either that they were witnessing them, or that a bystander was witnessing them, or that they were viewing a movie including these scenes. After the manipulation, all participants observed a different set of negatively valenced images or a set of negatively valenced videos and reported their emotional response. We found that the intensity of negative emotions and motivation to decrease them was lower among participants in the fiction condition compared to participants in the everyday life condition. Although perspective-taking had a similar effect on negative emotions, fiction condition was more successful in decreasing negative emotions. This might indicate that fiction plays a buffering role in decreasing the negative emotions people experience when facing negative emotional content.

How can we live truthfully in a world riddled with ambiguity, contradiction, and clashing viewpoints? We make sense of the world imaginatively, resolving ambiguous and incomplete impressions into distinct forms and wholes. But the images, objects, words, and even lives of which we make sense in this way always have more or other possible meanings. Judith Wolfe argues that faith gives us courage both to shape our world creatively, and reverently to let things be more than we can imagine. Drawing on complementary materials from literature, psychology, art, and philosophy, her remarkable book demonstrates that Christian theology offers a potent way of imagining the world even as it brings us to the limits of our capacity to imagine. In revealing the significance of unseen depths – of what does not yet make sense to us, and the incomplete – Wolfe characterizes faith as trust in God that surpasses all imagination.

Everyday objects have often been used in contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp introduced the concept of the ready-made. However, it is not clear how everyday objects are perceived in art contexts in comparison to everyday contexts. We investigated how individuals interpret pairings of images of everyday objects as artworks and as objects in everyday life. In Study 1, we found that participants evaluated pairings of unrelated images of objects as fitting together more under the art condition compared to the everyday condition. In Study 2, using the thought-listing technique, we found that participants ascribed symbolic meanings to everyday objects more often under the art condition. In Study 3, we found that associating unrelated images of objects under the art condition primes cognitive access to symbolic meanings of visual scenes. Overall, the studies show that everyday objects are interpreted differently in an art context as compared to an everyday context.

To ask the question of the relevance of Christian theology, we first have to ask what Christian theology is. At its simplest and widest, as Thomas Aquinas put it (or nearly), it is the study of God and all things in relation to God.1 In particular, it is the attempt to understand, probe and build on the basic Christian confession of one God in three persons, revealed in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son. This definition outlines a particular subject matter: theologians ask questions about the doctrine of God, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of salvation; they ask questions about the Scriptures in which their convictions are rooted, and other texts in which they are transmitted. At the same time, the definition both demands and enables a particular way of asking questions, because God, of course, is not simply an object of enquiry; if he is anything, he is the source and end of all being. As Kierkegaard showed so meticulously, humans’ relations with God are necessarily subjective and personal, because God defies objectification.2 To assume an ‘objective’, disengaged standpoint from which to investigate God’s existence and character therefore misses an essential part of what one seeks to understand, namely that there is no such standpoint. And so theologians ask (always tacitly, and sometimes explicitly): – What object or objects does our enquiry have in view? – Who does the enquiring, and how are they related to these objects? – What form does knowledge or understanding take within this relationship? – How is such knowledge acquired, expressed, and transmitted?

The present study investigated cross-modal associations between a series of paintings and sounds. We studied the effects of sound congruency (congruent vs. non-congruent sounds) and embodiment (embodied vs. synthetic sounds) on the evaluation of abstract and figurative paintings. Participants evaluated figurative and abstract paintings paired with congruent and non-congruent embodied and synthetic sounds. They also evaluated the perceived meaningfulness of the paintings, aesthetic value and immersive experience of the paintings. Embodied sounds (sounds associated with bodily sensations, bodily movements and touch) were more strongly associated with figurative paintings, while synthetic sounds (non-embodied sounds) were more strongly associated with abstract paintings. Sound congruency increased the perceived meaningfulness, immersive experience and aesthetic value of paintings. Sound embodiment increased immersive experience of paintings.

I am grateful to Paul and David for allowing me to provide a further counterpoint to this polyphonic history of providence.It is a book that only Fergusson could have composed, showing and sharing his immense generosity of mind, which greets and engages ideas wherever it finds them, and especially among the great 18 th -and 19 th -century Scotsmen, who are treated almost like family.The book is a historical overview over past understandings of providence, both remembered and widely forgotten, issuing in a new account of the doctrine that Fergusson variously calls 'chastened' and 'polyphonic'.As we will see, the tension between images of extravagance and restraint here is not accidental, but indicative of his project. 1 The two main emphases of Fergusson's constructive account are distribution and description.Fergusson argues for providence as a distributed doctrine.Interpreted at its most basic as 'the actions and permissions of God', providence is to be found in irreducibly different modes and registers in the creation, preservation, redemption and completion of the world: 'Advent is not Lent, Christmas is not Good Friday, Easter is not Pentecost, and Harvest is not Ascension.Yet each displays some aspect of God's providence towards the world'. 2This also means it is not merely or primarily the work of the Father (as in most traditional accounts), or even that of the Son (as in Barth's account), but also and equally the work of the Spirit.This emphasis on the Spirit is one of Fergusson's key contributions to the constructive debate, enabling him to present divine providence not so much as pro-vision or fore-ordination, but as God's responsive, improvisational action around, within, with and for us.Fergusson also argues for a descriptive account of providence.This is partly a consequence of his understanding of the providential role of the Spirit.If God as Spirit dynamically responds to human action, rather than prescriptively guiding it, then our own doctrine of providence needs to be descriptive rather than normative; in other words, it needs to seek to find God's work in the world as we encounter it, without over-confident claims that it must take a particular form or follow a particular pattern.Fergusson's account is 'polyphonic', in other words, not only in incorporating many different theological voices, but also in seeing providence itself as 'polyphonic'.Providence, for him, is irreducible to a single mode or 'voice' of divine action, although its cantus firmus is, unwaveringly, divine love.The intellectual ambition of Fergusson's constructive contribution to the doctrine of providence bursts its textual scope, which extends to little more than ten percent of the book.This presents challenges of interpretation: there are, for example, underlying assumptions about process theology at work in his account which would have to be made more explicit before they could be properly engaged.Matthew Levering's contribution to this symposium discusses some such implicit claims.

Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach is by renewing their characters’ and readers’ imagination. The texts do so not inexorably but in a similar way as (other) works of art. This paper therefore investigates the ways in which works of art engage and develop the imagination, and thereby enable renewed perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world. The paper introduces predictive processing as a helpful psychological theory for analyzing this dynamic, and outlines questions for further research.

Philosophical Myths of the End Judith Wolfe This essay traces the course of eschatology in the modern West as a site and tool of secularization, but also as a powerful resource for its resistance, one that Christians cannot ultimately do without. First, though, a set of definitions. By "eschatology," of course, I mean the study of the last things. Traditionally, these have been itemized as death, judgement, heaven, and hell. But my use of the term is inflected structurally. I am interested specifically in thought about the "last things" as they relate to present systems of life and action; and about those systems insofar as they are seen as determined by their end. This delineation of eschatology admits of a widening of the term (one that is not mere obfuscation) beyond the four traditional loci, to capture wider thinking about the shape and end of human life and history. In this domain, eschatology goes beyond teleology in that the end-relatedness it envisions is often other than simply teleological: many eschatological accounts involve a peripeteia, whether this "turn" be that of divine judgement, Tolkienian eucatastrophe, or Ragnarök. Eschatology does, however, require that the "last things" be thought of as relating to, and in some sense determining, the system they cap. The pragmatic prediction that a nuclear war may end the world is not in itself eschatological; a narrative of the human condition as an arc of human progress that bears the seeds of its own ultimately inevitable destruction is. Eschatology in both its traditional and this wider sense, perhaps more immediately and starkly than any other theological field, reflects the state and role of the Christian Church in the world at any particular time. For Christians of the first to third centuries, as for their Jewish forebears, political oppression and persecution found their correlate in vivid apocalyptic [End Page 55] visions of liberation, triumph, and a messianic kingdom of peace. During periods of secular Church government, much theological effort and imagination were invested in intricate maps of the next world, detailing eternal rewards or punishments for moral and civic obedience or subversion. This is not to suggest that eschatological beliefs have merely been a product of social and political circumstances; indeed, they have often contributed to such circumstances. Still, it is undeniable that eschatology often projects onto the screen of eternity the concerns, priorities, fears, and hopes of the present. Eschatology is therefore a good "weather cock" for the state of Christian culture in different periods, and its course over the last few hundred years charts remarkably incisively both the causes (or at least contours) of modern secularization and the potential of compelling Catholic responses. This is particularly true because eschatology acts as the framing device for the way we understand and experience the shape of the world, and our place within it, more broadly. For most of Christian history, the biblical promise of Christ's Second Coming, followed by the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgement, and the advent of the heavenly Jerusalem, guided people's understanding both of their own actions and of the times they lived in. That promise had both a moral and a historical dimension. Morally, it set all actions within the purview of an omniscient judgment to come: regardless of current inequalities and deceptions, at the last the all-seeing God would weigh all deeds and judge all people equitably. Historically, it ordered all events within a divine drama leading through anguish to triumph: suffering, humiliation, and persecution were no more than the biblically foretold birth pangs of the messianic kingdom. Throughout Christian history, religious conflicts arose from disagreements over how rightly to map biblical prophecy onto the present time: whether, for example, the pope should be understood as the vicar of Christ presiding over the thousand-year messianic reign preceding the Second Coming, or as the antichrist beguiling the faithful. But these disputes did not touch the explanatory framework itself. The pressing religious question, in other words, was not how the drama of life and history was plotted, but only what role each was playing in it. The Enlightenment, challenging the reliability of revelation as a source of historical and...

Modern TheologyVolume 35, Issue 1 p. 3-4 Editorial Philosophy and Theology in Germany, 1918 to 1933: Editorial Introduction Judith Wolfe, Corresponding Author Judith Wolfe judith.wolfe@st-andrews.ac.uk St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9JU UK Email: judith.wolfe@st-andrews.ac.uk **Email: pfau@duke.eduSearch for more papers by this authorThomas Pfau, Corresponding Author Thomas Pfau pfau@duke.edu English Department, Duke University, Box 90015, Durham, NC, 27708-0015 USA Email: judith.wolfe@st-andrews.ac.uk **Email: pfau@duke.eduSearch for more papers by this author Judith Wolfe, Corresponding Author Judith Wolfe judith.wolfe@st-andrews.ac.uk St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9JU UK Email: judith.wolfe@st-andrews.ac.uk **Email: pfau@duke.eduSearch for more papers by this authorThomas Pfau, Corresponding Author Thomas Pfau pfau@duke.edu English Department, Duke University, Box 90015, Durham, NC, 27708-0015 USA Email: judith.wolfe@st-andrews.ac.uk **Email: pfau@duke.eduSearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 November 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12456Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume35, Issue1Special Issue: Themed Issue: Philosophy & Theology in Germany, 1918-1933January 2019Pages 3-4 RelatedInformation