Swift Hall
1025 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Tel: (773) 702-8200
Fax: (773) 702-6048

Frank Burch Brown

Alexander Campbell Visiting Professor of Religion and the Arts

M. A. (University of Chicago)
Ph.D. (University of Chicago)

Frank Burch Brown will be offering a three-course sequence, one course per year over the next three years, on religion and aesthetics.

Brown works extensively in the field of religious and theological aesthetics, with additional interests in literary theory and in the discernment of emotion and meaning (communal and personal) in the musical and visual arts. His wide-ranging books are Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and Religious Belief; The Evolution of Darwin's Religious Views; Religious Aesthetics; and the award-winning Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life. For five years Brown was Area Editor in arts, media, culture, and religion for a new edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, now appearing in English as Religion Past and Present. For the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion, he contributed a major article on "Religious Music in the West" and another on "Poetry and Religion." His chapter "Music and Emotion" appears in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion. Currently he is editing the Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts while concluding a book on the arts and worship. A composer with twenty commissioned works to his credit, he recently fulfilled a commission from the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir. In addition to holding a Divinity School appointment, he is the Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological Seminary.