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124 Recent Books
twenty-first centuries. Pozzo’s observers could ‘see’ the illusion at certain
points and not at others, in effect giving them the sense that the illusion
was switched on and off, depending on the viewer’s position in the church.
This idea of transitional illusion is central to the art of video installation, in
which a moving image is installed by an artist in a public space. The
modern artist relies on current technology, which allows projection of
moving images on walls, ceiling and floor—unlike Pozzo, who was
restricted to the painted surface—but in both cases the observer enters
into the space, moves through it and becomes part of it. Burda-Stengel’s
theory is that video art transgresses boundaries between the art space and
the observer in the same way that Pozzo’s painted surfaces did.
This is a complex and challenging book, which intelligently and
thoroughly makes the case for a link between the Jesuit artist of the
seventeenth century and the installation artist of the twenty-first century. I
recently visited Bishop Auckland Castle where a powerful installation by
Bill Viola, Earth Martyr, Air Martyr, Fire Martyr, Water Martyr, had been
placed in the bishop’s chapel. With the arguments of this book clear in my
mind, the conjunction of image, movement, illusion and holy space
suddenly worked for me. I left wondering what further marvels Pozzo could
have achieved with a video camera.
Jan Graffius
Claire E. Wolfteich, Invitation to Practical Theology: Catholic Visions and
Voices (Mahwah: Paulist, 2014). 978 0 8091 4890 5, pp.352, $29.95.
What is ‘practical’ theology? The question has recurred ever since
Schleiermacher coined the term, and this volume aims to shed some
Catholic light on it. It enters a much needed conversation with the more
dominant Protestant practical theology tradition, in the same spirit as the
book edited by Heythrop College staff, Keeping Faith in Practice (2010).
Claire Wolfteich has assembled an impressive line-up of North American
authors (and a single European), some of them very well known, such as
David Tracy and Thomas Groome. The fourteen chapters and editorial
introduction and conclusion explore two dimensions of practical theology:
the practical fields of theological enquiry (liturgy, work for justice and
social solidarity, spirituality, mission and so on); and the fundamental
underlying topic of practical theology ‘in itself’.
Given how largely ‘context’ figures in practical theology, it would be
surprising were this volume not to reflect the particularities of the United
States. It has important chapters drawn from Black Catholic Studies