Trevor Hart, Jeremy Begbie, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Robert Jenson, Carol Harrison, Bernard Beatty, and Patrick Sherry … apart from the obvious omission of Forsyth, who else could you possibly want at a conference on such a theme? Anyway, here’s the blurb:
The colloquium takes place at a time of considerable and growing interest in the intersections of theology, beauty and the arts. Its particular concern is with the concept of beauty, and what a Christian theological perspective on beauty might have to offer to the arts today.
In recent decades, among those who practise, think and write about the arts, the notion of beauty has often come under deep suspicion. For many who have not dismissed it as irrelevant, it has even become a matter of offence.
For some, beauty is an offence against truth, a lie in the midst of a world that is so obviously not beautiful. The quest for beauty in the arts is the quest for an illusory consolation, signalling a primal human urge for order in a world we cannot bear to admit is destined for futility.
The pursuit of beauty has also been seen as an offence against goodness. In the hands of the comfortable and powerful, the love of beauty – in the arts as much as anywhere else – is a luxury that can easily muffle the howl of those who know little or no beauty, distracting us from our obligations to those in need. Or, from the other side, beauty dulls the oppressed to the injustice of their predicament.
Beauty is also distrusted insofar as it is assumed to ‘harmonise away’ the evilness of evil. In particular, there has been a distrust of theories of beauty in which the notions of balance, symmetry and equivalence predominate, where evil’s irrational, intrusive quality is suppressed, where it is subsumed into a harmonious metaphysics of necessity and seen as part of the necessary balance of things. Art, it is said, must never collude with such schemes.
Undoubtedly, the Church and Christian theologians have been as responsible as any others for generating and encouraging these suspicions. The question arises, however: can there be a theological perspective on beauty that takes these suspicions seriously, while at the same time refusing to set aside the notion of beauty altogether? More particularly: in what ways can attending to the triune God of Jesus Christ, and this God’s gracious, reconciling, self-revealing activity in and for the world, inform and transform our conceptions of beauty? In this light, are there ways in which it might be quite legitimate to speak of the ‘offence’ of beauty – especially in relation to the ‘scandal’ at the heart of the Christian faith, the vindication of the crucified Jesus? And – the focused concern of this colloquium – what might such theological construals of beauty imply about the way we practise, interpret and enjoy the arts in the twenty-first century?
ten a brief review of a book from an earlier conference 
jasongoroncy.com 