This panel convenes an introduction and three critical responses to The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (Notre Dame Press, 2025), followed by an author’s reply. The book argues that religion and theology, though deeply entangled with modern and contemporary art, have been rendered structurally invisible within dominant art-historical narratives. Respondents engage the work from diverse perspectives, raising questions about interpretive communities, disenchantment, political theology, aesthetic norms, religion’s “strangeness,” and the status of theology as discourse. The author’s response clarifies the concept of multiple interpretive “horizons” and defends a dialogical, non-totalizing approach to theological criticism. Together, the session advances methodological reflection on how religion and theology function within contemporary art studies and explores future directions for scholarship at the intersection of art history and religious studies.
This panel engages Jonathan Anderson’s forthcoming book, The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), a major contribution to contemporary debates at the intersection of art history, religious studies, and theology. Anderson argues that religion—particularly theology—has been rendered functionally invisible within dominant narratives of modern and contemporary art. Through historiographical analysis and close readings, he proposes new methodological approaches for interpreting contemporary art in more rigorous dialogue with theology. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, this roundtable examines the book’s central claims, its implications for art-historical method, and the broader question of whether “contemporary art and religion” can be understood as a coherent field. Panelists will address key tensions concerning theology, criticism, judgment, and disciplinary boundaries. The discussion concludes with Anderson’s response, opening a broader conversation about the future of art history and religion.
This presentation responds to Jonathan A. Anderson’s The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), a landmark study that reframes contemporary art’s engagement with religion and theology. While Anderson argues that theology has been rendered hermeneutically invisible within dominant art-historical narratives, this response explores the political stakes of that claim. If contemporary art history prioritizes power, ideology, and critique, might political and liberation theologies provide a more direct point of contact than Anderson’s broader theological horizon? Focusing on Anderson’s analysis of Kris Martin’s Altar, the presentation asks whether theological interpretation can persuade secular art historians or whether it risks speaking primarily to theology itself. By pressing the question of whether the theological horizon is already a political horizon, this session extends Anderson’s field-defining intervention and probes the future of contemporary art and religion as an interdisciplinary domain.
Toward the end of The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan Anderson transposes TJ Clark’s analysis of four methodological “taboos” for historical engagements with art into a theological key. This paper suggests that not only are these methodological approaches not exactly “taboos” (a qualification Anderson and Clark both make), but they bear ambivalent potential for the contemporary art and religion discourse. They are, that is, both promises and temptations for establishing the conversation Anderson promotes and commends. This paper traces that ambivalence in relation to the achievement of Invisibility and raises a number of questions that bear on both Anderson’s project and the future of contemporary art and religion, including: What are the conditions for how the four approaches function in these different ways? What happens when disgust arises, and how can our interpretations register without being arrested by our disgust? And finally, why is interpretation so difficult—for theologians, art historians, and art critics alike?
What is it, exactly, that constitutes “religion” in modern and contemporary American arts? This appreciative response expands upon Anderson's book to argue for complexification of the concept and subject while also aiming for a kind of precision. What are we seeing and sensing in twentieth and twenty-first-century artistic production that elicits from us the terminologies of “religion”?
This paper responds to four critical reviews of The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). Addressing questions about interpretive communities, the political and theological horizons, the status of theology as discourse, and the risk of totalization, it clarifies the book’s central claims and corrects several misunderstandings. The theological horizon is presented not as a disciplinary enclosure or ontotheological system, but as a hermeneutical field of questioning open wherever the question of God remains live. The response defends the dialogical, nontotalizing aims of the project and reiterates that its purpose is to expand contemporary art history’s interpretive resources rather than to supplant them. Ultimately, the paper argues that the book’s value lies in its capacity to provoke further inquiry, sustaining rigorous dialogue about religion’s visibility and intelligibility within contemporary art discourse.