This paper argues for a revised approach to religious literacy that I call the interreligious attentiveness (IA) approach. I argue that this approach is better than those endorsed by other scholars in the academic study of religion – namely, knowledge, analysis, and skills approaches. I draw attention to the limitations of these approaches by virtue of three challenges: conversion (exclusivist groups), multiple religious belonging, and motivation. I then argue that the IA approach offers a more effective response to these challenges and should be regarded as the preferred approach.

Pusey is perhaps best known for his sacramental doctrine and his emphasis on the early Church fathers. His appointment as Regius Professor of Hebrew, therefore, may well seem an oddity given this reputation: it is easy to assume that, at most, his work as a biblical scholar was parallel, and unrelated to, his more familiar work. But in fact, Pusey’s biblical scholarship is intrinsically involved with the better-known aspects of his thought. This article examines Pusey’s engagement, as a biblical scholar, with three sets of questions: hermeneutics (which led to his engagement with the Fathers), philology and the nature of language (which informed his sacramental theology) and the centrality of the reader in interpreting Scripture (which is linked to his concern with Christian spirituality and sanctification). Appreciating Pusey’s perspective as a biblical scholar is therefore essential to understanding his theological project.

Classical philosophy listed art as a virtue perfecting the intellect’s practical activity (recta ratio factibilium). As virtuous, human art or skill must follow a measure or mean of its activity. For classical thought, the natural order provided this measure. This is the origin of the dictum that ‘art imitates nature’. Yet, the claim that the work of creative artists must imitate nature has not gone unchallenged in modernity. This essay claims that a retrieval of the robust notion beauty as integrity, proportion, and clarity not only provides an anchor to tether the work of the creative artist to the natural order but also liberates the artist’s creative intuition from the isolation of mere taste and into the realm of the transcendent. For the creative artist, the integrity, proportion, and clarity of the natural world opens a window into a beauty that unites into one community all those who see it.

Jacques Maritain’s contributions to the philosophy of art and beauty are of great historical and philosophical importance. Art and Scholasticism (1920) in particular brought unprecedented attention to the place of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and provided other substantial insights on the relation of the fine arts to being. Maritain’s account of beauty, however, emphasizes the invisibility or ‘secret’ nature of ontological form, however, in a manner that shows the influence of modern European romanticism and modernism and that does not accurately reflect the thought of Aquinas or that of Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius, both of whom are the chief sources of Aquinas’s discussion of the nature of beauty. This essay argues for a Dionysian account of integrity, harmony, and clarity that suggests a closer relationship between Aquinas’s three conditions of beauty than Maritain’s discussion indicates.

Discussion of the relationship between art and liturgy is nearly as old as the Church itself. At root it is a matter of the theological seriousness of the liturgy, balanced against the distinctive aesthetic demands of art making and those individuals gifted with the ability to produce works of art. Notwithstanding a glorious heritage of sacred art and music in the Church, tensions have historically manifested, and still do. Equally, the stipulation that art must serve the liturgy can engender a sense that it is an addendum: helpful, even beautiful, but ultimately subservient. In this essay, I set aside more familiar arguments as to why the Church and art need each other. Instead I consult three important twentieth-century figures: Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), Joseph Ratzinger (1927–2022), and David Jones (1895–1974), who provide a range of complementary reasons why the two spheres should be intimately connected. For Maritain, who holds an expansive view of Christian art, liturgy is a transcendental archetype. Ratzinger insists that art and music should apprehend and portray the cosmic significance of Christ in the liturgy; and Jones gives an anthropological basis to the uniquely work-making character of the person – supremely articulated in sacramental action.