DITA promotes a dynamic interplay between Christian theology and the arts within Duke Divinity School and beyond by exploring the contours of creative theological expression and enriching theological education within the church, the academy, and society. Through events, teaching, and research, DITA is dedicated to showing how the arts can be enriched by theology and theology in turn renewed through the arts.

At the heart of DITA’s vision is this key insight: the arts (including music, visual arts, and literature) do not just illustrate theology but are themselves modes of theological expression. The arts shape the imagination of the community and provide the forms through which many people most directly and compellingly encounter the message of the gospel.

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Theology, Modernity, and the Arts Research Project

In 2009, DITA began a partnership with Cambridge University, and out of that collaboration came the Theology, Modernity, and the Arts (TMA) project. Launched in 2015, TMA asks how the arts can contribute to the theological narration of modernity, particularly a narration that employs New Creation in Christ as a guiding integrative vision.

TMA undertakes research in three main areas: music, visual arts, and literature. For each area of research, a steering group of scholars and artists are brought together for an ongoing series of conversations around their research and work within the context of music, visual arts, and literature respectively. The goal is that each steering committee produces a series of publications, commissioned art works, and online resources over a four-year period.

TMA aims to demonstrate:

• Art bears witness to previously overlooked theological dynamics that have shaped modernity.
• Art gives voice to questions and cultural quandaries that call for response rooted in a theology of New Creation.
• Art addresses and moves beyond intractable dilemmas that have hampered modern theology.
• The theme of New Creation—as realized in Jesus Christ—has the potential to interrogate theologically trajectories of modernity that have been previously underdeveloped in existing accounts.