"The work presented in this book is very important. It offers a useful bridge between art history and religious studies, opening up the insights of each to the other. By offering a workable set of analytical categories to be used in studying religious images, Morgan's excellent scholarship promises to advance the current move toward more sophisticated understandings of religious material culture by leaps and bounds."--Jeanne Halgren Kilde, author of "When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America""The Sacred Gaze is a seminal book--it goes further than anything else I know of in placing religious aspects of the field on a firm foundation of scholarship. Morgan has almost single-handedly defined the subfield of religious visual culture studies, and the present volume moves the conversation to an impressive new level."--Jay D. Green, Professor of History, Covenant College"The Sacred Gaze is of fundamental importance for the relations between images and religious belief, and is a major contribution to the burgeoning field of visual studies. Morgan's wide-ranging book moves from the contested status of images between cultures, to the history of current American attitudes towards them. A notable achievement."--David Freedberg, author of "The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response"This book is a tonic. It's just what visual studies needs: a sensible, ecumenical, interdisciplinary, multicultural consideration of the place of visuality in religion, and the place of religion in all images. It should help start conversations that can go back and forth between the secularized debates of the university andthe religionist discourse that still predominates outside it."--James Elkins, author of "The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
