I warmly recommend Brendon Sammon's impressive contribution to theological aesthetics. The work is engaging, lucid, insightful, and well laid out in fitting structure. It importantly responds to the surprising lack of full treatment of beauty as a divine name. Informed about Greek philosophical sources, it offers a rich narration of beauty as a divine name in the work of Dionysius and Aquinas, also impressively bringing to our attention the crucial place of Dionysius in the thought of Aquinas. Sammon recuperates the metaphysical-theological dimensions of beauty, while not being inattentive to more 'aesthetic' treatments in the post-Kantian mode. The ambiguity he detects in Greek treatments as oscillating between the spiritual and material he sees as more fittingly resolved in the Christian thought of Dionysius and Aquinas where justice can be done to the truth of beauty as a middle between the spiritual and the material, a saturated between. An admirable debut by Sammon with a significant contribution to the field of theological aesthetics. --William Desmond, Villanova University

About the Contributor(s): Brendan Thomas Sammon received his PhD in systematic theology from The Catholic University of America and is currently an assistant professor of systematic theology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the forthcoming Theology and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics