Seeing God in Art: The Christian Faith in 30 Images
RICHARD HARRIES
(SPCK, 144 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

As a noted theologian, former Bishop of Oxford and frequent contributor to the Today programme’s “Thought for the Day”, Richard Harries has a lifetime of reflection on the mysteries of faith behind him. Here, he has found a skilful way of distilling the principal tenets of Christianity into 30 concise and elegant meditations, each centred on a carefully selected work of art (with one exception, all from the Western canon). We open, fittingly, with the Creation, bursting forth in a blaze of sun, moon and stars from the hand of omnipotent God in a twelfth-century mosaic from Monreale Cathedral, and weave back and forth through images from every century since to a reflection on the hospitality of God, for which the chosen illustration is by the great Russian icon-painter of the fifteenth century, Andrei Rublev.
Harries’ choice of artworks is eclectic, and can be refreshingly unpredictable.