The Experience of the Sublime – Grant Horner

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Workshop Talk | | Art & Music, Philosophy, Theology & Bible

Summary

Building on Longinus’s classical theory of the sublime in nature and art as “that which transports us out of ourselves,” I will make a case that this kind of exceptional and disorienting experience of beauty, awe, terror, and the infinite is actually a quintessentially theological experience—one that, when handled properly, will set the classroom (and the students’ souls) on fire for truth, goodness, and beauty.

Speaker

Grant Horner (PhD) is a senior rank Full Professor of Humanities at The Master’s University, just north of Los Angeles, where he specializes in the Renaissance, Reformation Historical Theology, Art History, and Classics. He was educated at Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, the University of Alabama, and Claremont Graduate University. He has been teaching at the university level for 30 years and has published numerous articles and books on Renaissance literature; 16th and 17th century theology; the Puritan John Milton; Classical learning; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and film and theology. He is a National Council Alcuin Fellow in the Society for Classical Learning, and is Founder and Director of two academic programs at Master’s: The TMU in Italy summer abroad program based in Florence, and the BA program in Classical Liberal Arts. He lives in northern Tuscany every summer with his wife and a group of very eager students, in a villa built in 1409. He and his wife have three
children and eight grandchildren.

ghorner@masters.edu

Additional Materials

The Association of Classical & Christian Schools presents Repairing the Ruins, the ACCS annual conference, copyright ACCS. You may make additional copies of this recording for use by your school but please do not sell any copies of the recording, or post it on the internet.