Making Good: Creation Unfinished

Matt Jenson, Haein Park, and Jonathan Puls discuss Trevor Hart's new book Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry (Baylor University Press, 2014).

Dr. Matt Jenson, professor at the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, is a systematic theologian specializing in the doctrine of sin and ecclesiology. In so doing, he is motivated by a desire to understand what it means to be human in terms of the relationships for which we were created and in which we live, move and have our being. He holds a BA in literature and philosophy from Wheaton College and a Ph.D. in systematic theology from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), where he was part of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. He is the author of The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on 'homo incurvatus in se' and, with David Wilhite, The Church: A Guide for the Perplexed. Jenson is a happy and grateful part of Fountain of Life Covenant Church in Long Beach and a licensed minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Dr. Haein Park teaches courses in early and modern American literature, critical theory and world literature at Biola University.  She received her B.A. in English from Occidental College, and her Ph.D. in Literature from UC San Diego. After completing a dissertation fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, she was an assistant professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana. At Valparaiso, she taught courses in both the English department and Christ College Honors Program, specializing in religion and American literature. Professor Park approaches literature from an interdisciplinary angle and especially enjoys team-teaching with faculty from other departments.

Jonathan Puls received his B.S. in fine art from Biola University in 1998 and holds both an M.F.A. in painting and an M.A. in art history from California State University, Long Beach. Professor Puls has taught drawing, painting, and art history course in the Art Department since 2005. His areas of expertise are in figurative and observational drawing and painting processes as well as the history of 19th and 20th century painting. Professor Puls exhibits his drawings and paintings regularly, and he also enjoys curatorial opportunities and art historical research.

Dr. Trevor Hart has served as Professor of Divinity and Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination & the Arts at St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland, (one of the oldest universities in the world) since the inception of the institute in 2000. ITIA was established to bring imagination and the arts into constructive conversation with Christian theology and to pursue a more rounded theological vision of what it  is to be human in God’s world. Dr. Hart is currently completing a three-volume set of books dealing with aesthetics and the Christian faith. Literature and Language; Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry; and Patterns of Performance: Art, Imagination and Christian Hope will be released in late 2013 and early 2014.