Frank Burch Brown

Biographical Statement

Teacher, author, and musician, Frank Burch Brown is Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.  He holds degrees from Georgetown College (KY) and the University of Chicago, where he earned a Ph.D. in Religion and Literature.  Since 1987 he has been a Fellow of the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture.

Dr. Brown is author of many articles and of five books: Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983), The Evolution of Darwin's Religious Views (Mercer Univ. Press, 1986), Religious Aesthetics (Princeton Univ. Press and Macmillan Press, 1989), Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), and Inclusive Yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully, the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies (Eerdmans, 2009).  

Brown served for four years as Editor in Culture, Arts, Media & Religion for an entirely new edition (German and English) of the 8-volume encyclopedia Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Religion Past and Present). For the second, revised edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference), he contributed a major article on “Religious Music in the West” and another on “Poetry and Religion.” His chapter “Music and Emotion” appears in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2008). Beyond Christianity, he has particular interest in the arts of Hinduism and Buddhism and regularly teaches in the area of world religions. He is currently editing the 700-page Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts for publication in 2010.

Director of the Master of Arts in Church Music program at Christian Theological Seminary, Brown has been choral director, keyboard artist, and composer for various churches.  Among his compositions are twenty commissioned works, including Ritual Compass - a quartet for piano, oboe, violin, and cello in honor of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, commissioned by the American Academy of Religion for its 75th anniversary celebration in Chicago.  In 1996 he and Daniel Pinkham were both commissioned by the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture to compose works in memory of James Luther Adams-Brown's contribution being a half-hour composition for soprano and chamber ensemble entitled Canticles and Exhortations, which was later performed at Princeton Theological Seminary (1999).

Brown has lectured widely, having given multi-media presentations at institutions such as the University of Chicago Divinity School, Northwestern University, Cambridge University, Glasgow University, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Union Theological Seminary, and the Berkshire Institute for Theology and the Arts.  In 1993 he delivered the Walter Hussey Lecture in the Church and the Arts at Oxford University.  In 1997-98 he gave the inaugural series of Henry Luce Lectures in Theology and the Arts at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and at Andover Newton Theological School. 

He was appointed a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 1996-97, in the area of Theology and the Arts.  For the fall term of 2000 Brown was at Cambridge University as a Visiting Fellow/Scholar in the Faculty of Divinity's Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies, and is serving on the Board of Advisors for its program unit Theology Through the Arts, now also at St. Andrews University, Scotland.