ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book offers a broad range of perspectives on aesthetic thought and artistic practices that were unleashed in the centuries after the Protestant Reformation. Just as the field of Christian aesthetics may therefore mask a great deal of confessional diversity, so can studies of “Protestant” aesthetics and the arts cloak the multiplicities residing within the religion’s different faith communities. The book suggests that themes and tendencies that reveal certain strains of aesthetics and the arts as being distinctly Protestant—and “Protestant” rather than simply Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, or Quaker. Further complexities within a generalized “Protestantism” are revealed along racial lines, whether in Nannie Helen Burroughs’s contribution to a “black Protestant aesthetics,” examined by Rufus Burnett, or with the African American jazz tradition as explored by Jason Bivins.
