Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty. By CECILIA GONZALEZ-ANDRIEU.

Abstract

Bridge to Wonder is built on two key metaphors; the practical but also aesthetic connector which is a bridge, and the complex dynamism of interlacing in a multi-stranded rope. González-Andrieu argues that art and religion can be a bridge connecting us to beauty and that the diverse areas of inquiry in the arts and the religious are the strands which, interlaced, form the equivalent of a rope or cable. The two metaphors are brought together in the Golden Gate Bridge spanning San Francisco Bay, which is suspended across the Bay and able to move in response to its environment by means of its multi-stranded cables. In a similar way, the effectiveness of art and the religious as they work together in their bridging function is seen through the perspectives and collaborations of inquiries into art and the religious. These are valuable metaphors for the theological aesthetics which González-Andrieu unpacks throughout this book. In doing so, she is particularly adept at utilizing personal experiences in her writing, including of course the central experience of travelling over and under the Golden Gate Bridge. Her approach is also deeply rooted in her own cultural experience and therefore brings a vibrant strand of US Latino theology into the debate about theological aesthetics. This is apparent in those she holds up as exemplars of the approaches she articulates; the founder of modern Chicano theatre and film Luis Valdéz, the poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, and the artists John August Swanson and Sergio Gomez. She steps outside her own cultural milieu with instructive analyses of responses to the National Gallery’s Seeing Salvation exhibition and Germaine Richier’s Christ d’Assy crucifix at Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce in Le Plateau d’Assy.