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The Charge of God: Laudato Si’ read through Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-10-22 Michael D Hurley
G. K. Chesterton, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are set in conversation with Pope Francis’s Laudato Si (2015), to show how far those writers anticipate its animus against technocratic capitalism, but also, more surprisingly, how far Laudato Si challenges the progressive assumptions of contemporary eco-activism. Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins do not merely foreshadow and clarify
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SUPERMAN AS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS: BLACK GODS AND WHITE SAVIOURS IN WATCHMEN AND DOOMSDAY CLOCK Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-09-06 J Laurence Cohen
While the groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen (1986) responded to Cold War paranoia with a nihilistic critique of a benevolent God, recent spinoffs have taken radically different approaches to race and Christology in the Trump Era. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen has spawned two unlikely and unauthorised—by Moore, at least—quasi-sequels in different media: HBO’s limited TV series Watchmen
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The Living Spring: A Comparison of Jacob’s Well and the Well Hexagram Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-08-05 Tze-ki Hon
Water is a master metaphor in literature, appearing in many writings around the world. In some cases, water is stormy, vicious and destructive; in others, water is calm, steady and enriching; in yet other cases, water is reachable, manageable, and replenishable. In this essay, I will examine the different meanings of ‘a well of water’ by comparing Jacob’s well in the Gospel of St John and the Jing
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The Yijing as Inspiration in Raymond Queneau’s Morale Élémentaire III (1975): An Intermingling of the Particular and the Universal Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-08-05 Marie-Julie Maitre
The third part of Raymond Queneau’s last work (1903–76), Morale élémentaire (Elementary Morality, henceforth EM3), a collection of prose poems published in 1975, is composed of 64 poems like the 64 hexagrams of the Yijing. Having found his notes on Philastre’s translation of the Yijing during the writing of EM3, one can wonder by what mechanisms the Yijing inspired Queneau’s creation. This article
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Decay, Death, and the Return of Light: The I Ching Yin-Yang Cycle in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-08-05 John T P Lai
Through a critical investigation of Philip K. Dick’s best-selling novel The Man in the High Castle, this essay attempts to unearth deeper levels of characterisation and motifs in the novel by discovering the implicit and nuanced symbolisms of the I Ching (Book of Changes) incorporated within it. The article scrutinises the influences of the I Ching upon Dick’s literary creation, particularly how the
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‘A Light in Sound, A Sound-Like Power in Light’: Coleridge’s Phenomenal Invisible Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-07-01 Abigail Rogers
In a reading of ‘The Eolian Harp’ that draws briefly on ‘Frost at Midnight’, this article discusses Coleridge’s quest to do justice to the epiphanic potentialities of visual experience. In response to critical accounts of his metaphysics as imposed heavy-handedly upon reality, I reread Coleridge’s speculative reflections as both heuristic and responsive to something unequivocally real. Across these
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What If God is a ‘Pagan Amalgam’: Marilynne Robinson and historical BIBLE SCHOLARSHIP Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-06-27 Christopher Douglas
Marilynne Robinson is one of the most influential Christian writers and public intellectuals alive today, and her views on a range of topics should be taken seriously. In her 2015 essay entitled ‘Memory’, she argues that the ‘liberal side’ of American Christianity has retreated from scriptural theology under pressure from academic biblical criticism. Her dismissal of Hebrew Bible scholarship is centred
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Cain Furens: Imitations of Virgil and Ovid in Canto Six of Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Russell M Hillier
The article examines Lucy Hutchinson’s treatment of Cain and Abel in Canto Six of her biblical epic Order and Disorder. Hutchinson mobilises the classical tradition to elucidate the psychodrama of the fratricide Cain. Her imitation of four similes from Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics, and the allegorical figure of Envy from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, helps to convey the dramatic shifts in Cain’s psychological
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Intersections of Forgiveness and ‘Queer Use’ In T.S. Eliot’s ‘Marina’ Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-03-18 Tanya Kundu
Recent literary and theological accounts of forgiveness have appealed to the poetic as offering an ‘ambiguous’ space appropriate to the complex process of forgiving. In this article I will texture these accounts with a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Marina’, which is well-placed as an example of this style of poetics. Beyond ambiguity, however, ‘Marina’ communicates an account of forgiveness that can
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Making Strange: Teaching 19th-Century Gothic and Fantastic Literature Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Alison Milbank
How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the ‘immanent frame’ of a secular self-sufficient view of reality? This article describes two modules studying non-realist literary modes—Gothic and fantasy writing—which seek to do this. God and the Gothic reverses the psychological turn in 19th-century Gothic to examine the way Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of the fantastic hesitation can be used
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Questions We Share Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Karen Dieleman
For my Victorian literature course of autumn 2022, I set myself a goal of not privileging either the secularisation thesis or a potential sacramentalisation thesis, but of helping students see that serious writers almost always address the same set of foundational questions—even as, given their individuality and context, they respond to them differently, as we all do. In the Reformed Christian tradition
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Teaching 19th-Century Literature Beyond the Secularisation Thesis: Introduction to the Special Forum Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Joseph McQueen
The widescale revision of the secularisation thesis continues apace across the humanities and more specifically in 19th-century studies—a field that until recently often assumed the ‘subtraction’ story of secularisation in which, as Charles Taylor explains, modernity leads to the inevitable demise of religion. But how does this revised outlook inform the teaching of 19th-century literature? In other
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Dropping the Albatross: Teaching Religion and Literature in a Postsecular Age Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Jeffrey W Barbeau
Teaching literature after the ‘secularisation thesis’ requires both a critical recognition of the distinctly religious origins of the British Romantic movement and the intentional recovery of a wider range of authors and religious beliefs during the age. In this essay, I offer a brief consideration of disciplinary integration within higher education, with particular attention to the work of John Henry
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Religion, Reading, and Metacognition in the Victorian Literature Classroom Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2023-01-28 Aubrey Plourde
The Victorian literature course, ‘Victorians Reading Religion’, relocates the religious friction of the 19th century, focusing less on scientific threats, crises of faith, and schisms within Victorian churches, and more on how the shifting religious landscape of 19th-century British culture prompted Victorian thinkers to renegotiate their approaches to reading. Using Olive Schriener’s Story of an African
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Legal, Mythic, and Divine Violence: Post-secular Entanglements in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Toward the Critique of Violence’ Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-09-03 Stine Holte
Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Toward the Critique of Violence’ (1921) has in the past decades been central to important debates within post-secular philosophical thought. This article explores the intricate connections between legal, mythic, and divine violence in Benjamin’s essay, in light of some of his other theological, literary, and political works from the same period. It suggests that the idea of
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Religious Experience, Storytelling, and Ethical Action in Muhammad Iqbal’s Javid Nama and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-09-01 Maria Khan, Ulrike Wagner
This article brings Muhammad Iqbal’s Persian book of poetry, Javid Nama, into dialogue with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s drama Nathan the Wise. In conversation with Islam’s early history, narrative traditions, and debates over the status of revelation and reason, both authors, we argue, envision religious truth as an irreducible experience that no single doctrine can lay exclusivist claims to. We demonstrate
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A Sigh After Sleep: Poiesis and the Sacramentality of Nature in Annette von Droste-Hüshoff’s Late Lyric Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-08-09 Alexander Sorenson
Critics of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff have long pursued the dominant themes of natural depiction and religiosity in her poetry, and a more recent strain of scholarship has been drawing out the ecological implications of the former, though less so of the latter. The article brings these different lines of interpretation together by exploring how Droste’s late work presents the connection between nature
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‘The Name of God Has Priority’: ‘God’ and The Apophatic Element in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-08-09 Erik Eklund
However one might interpret Vladimir Nabokov’s self-styled ‘utter indifference’ to religion, mysticism, and theology, his 1962 metafictional masterpiece, Pale Fire, betrays a measured though nonetheless peculiar engagement with theological ideas and sources. Focusing on the novel’s theological centre—Charles Kinbote’s note to line 549 of John Shade’s poem (‘While snubbing gods, including the big G’)
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The Works of Lucy Hutchinson Volume II Theological Writings and Translations Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-04-05 Johanna Harris
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Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement: The Tractarian Social Vision. By Lesa Scholl Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Jasper D.
Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement: The Tractarian Social Vision. By SchollLesa. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. X + 216 pp. Hbk, £85.00.
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Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts. By George Corbett Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-02-10 Trischler E.
Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts. By CorbettGeorge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. vi–233pp. Hardback, £75.00. ISBN: 9781108489416.
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Early Modern Economic Theology and Oikonomia in The Merchant of Venice Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-01-29 Jaecheol Kim
The primary purpose of this article is to survey the issue of oikonomia and risk management in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in terms of economic theology. In the theology of the Apostle Paul, ‘oikonomia’ signifies God’s miraculous dispensation to guide human souls to salvation. Nonetheless, today’s economic theologians, including Giorgio Agamben, have demonstrated that its meaning has been
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Rethreading the Fabric of Mystery: Thinking Myth, Counter-Myth, and Christian Theology With Hortense Spillers Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Ed Watson
Hortense Spillers asserts the imperative for black writers to reconfigure the languages they inherit. One way of doing so is to craft counter-myths against dominative mythologies. Spillers casts myth as an integration of form and concept which overdetermines the significance of what it is used to talk about. One crucial effect of America’s racialising mythos has been to deny black women the ability
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‘Her body is divided from her head’: Beheading and Biblical Intertextuality in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-01-13 Daniel Cadman
Elizabeth Cary’s play, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), culminates with the execution by beheading of the play’s protagonist on the orders of her husband, the tyrannical Herod the Great. By executing Mariam, Herod attempts to re-establish his authority in Jerusalem after a rumour of his death has unleashed a wave of resistance and instability across his state. This article focuses upon the choice of beheading
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Inverting the ‘Gracelorn’ Father: Augustinian Notions of Evil and Goodness in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and The Road Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2022-01-08 Rachel B Griffis
Cormac McCarthy’s novels Outer Dark (1968) and The Road (2006) project different visions of fatherhood, yet both focus on men who travel dark, unnamed roads as they grapple with their responsibility to their children. The relation between the two novels indicates the possibility that fatherhood is the primary vehicle through which McCarthy explores good and evil. By drawing on Saint Augustine’s privative
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Introduction to Special Issue on Postcolonial Women's Writing and Material Religion: New Directions Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Fiona Darroch,Alison Jasper
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Belief and Doubt in the Landscape and Holocaust Poems of David Fram (1903–88) Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-10-28 Hazel Frankel
This study of Lithuanian South African Yiddish poet David Fram foregrounds poems in which he wrestles with issues of belief, observance, abandonment, and doubt. It juxtaposes Fram’s nature poems with those that encompass the impact of the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a distant observer, written before, during, and after the Second World War. Close analysis of the poems’ lyrical forms highlights
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Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-10-05 Illman R.
Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack. By CohenJudah M. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019. xiii+309pp. PB, £24.99.
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Politics of Haya: Embodied Materiality of Piety as Everyday Resistance among British Muslim Women in Ayisha Malik's Fiction Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-09-30 Sumera Saleem
This article explores how an ethical practice of modesty, represented in Ayisha Malik’s novels Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged (2015), and The Other Half of Happiness (2017), serves as an act of everyday resistance in the context of the issue of gender inequality in postcolonial South Asian Britain. It attempts to understand how religious modalities of agency, shown in the form of wearing hijab, operate
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The Ghosts of Lilith: haunting narratives of witness and the postcolonial poetry of Shivanee Ramlochan Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-09-23 Fiona Darroch, Alison Jasper
This article discusses some of the themes and implications of Lilith’s story. After setting the figure of Lilith in an historical context of Sumerian demonology and first millennium CE Babylonian midrash, we reflect on the current critical, feminist, postcolonial, and poetic up-take of this curious tale of Adam’s first wife. We consider how Lilith’s story appears in these readings, woven through migrated
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postcolonial Racialisation of Gender and Religious Experience within the Settler Colonial Context: Ahed Tamimi’s Experience of a Racialised Practice Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-09-23 Magdalena Pycińska
Processes of racialisation and gendering take place within social relations and hierarchies that have an impact on bodies and inform people’s actions. ‘Material religion’ describes the exploration of how religion happens in material culture, that is, in different practices that draw on the category of religion or put it to work. In this article, I explore how the meaning of acting as a Muslim differs
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An Interview with Mayra Rivera: Postcolonial Women’s Writing and Material Religion Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-09-23 Mayra Rivera, Alison Jasper, Fiona Darroch
In this interview, Mayra Rivera talks about her own journey with literature and theology and what this relationship means to her. She talks about the distinct role that literature plays in a postcolonial context, and its ability to articulate painful losses, histories, as well as economic and environmental realities, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and South America, and the work of Sylvia
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Materiality, Postcoloniality, and the Phenomenology of Mental Health Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-09-22 Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan
This article approaches mental health of postcolonial bodies through the lens of colonial gender politics. Using postcolonial feminist writings on Hindu mythology as a starting point, I discuss how trauma has been imbibed into women’s bodies through concepts such as pativrata. This problematises our contemporary, uncritical understandings of the mind/body dichotomy posited by popular discourses on
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Reading the Materiality of Caste Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-09-20 Lucky Issar
Focusing on the material things in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, this article examines caste and its connection to sexuality. The brahminic obsession with caste hierarchies is based on controlling women’s bodies and Dalit exclusion. In everyday life, such control over women’s bodies and Dalit subordination is produced via material things. The practice of untouchability becomes real only
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‘A Word Of Song’: Reverberations of the Psalms in Christina Rossetti’s Roundels Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-09-11 Stephanie L Johnson
Christina Rossetti’s Verses (1893) collects poetry published originally in her devotional prose works, and 57 of its 331 lyric poems are roundels. Structured helically, the roundels use refrains to accrue meaning through repetition with a difference. While Rossetti follows Swinburne’s 11-line form, she uses the songs of the Word—the liturgical and wisdom psalms in particular—as the inspiration for
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Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe By Richard Holloway Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-08-20 Jonathan W Chappell
Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe. By HollowayRichard. Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd, 2020. xxiv + 248pp. Hardback, £16.99. ISBN: 9781786899934.
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‘Time is not all powerful’: the johannine eschatological vision in eugene vodolazkin’s laurus Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-08-17 Ewan Bowlby
Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus employs literary ‘distortion’ to capture and convey the eschatological paradoxes of the Fourth Gospel. Having outlined the complexity and contradictions of the Johannine eschatological vision, this article describes how Laurus meets the challenge presented by this vision. Rather than seeking to resolve the tension between vertical and horizontal eschatological dimensions
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Coleridge and Newman: Four Aspects Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Gabriel Insausti
The influence of Coleridge on Newman has often been cited, but it has also been disputed. Newman himself sometimes denied it or simply expressed his surprise at the ‘coincidences’. In this article I focus on different aspects of Newman’s thought where such influence is apparent: the idea of a ‘sacramental system’, the Church of England as a via media, the theory of development in dogma, and the self
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Phenomenal knowledge and martyrdom: endŌ’s silence Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-07-01 Nicholas O Pagan
This article examines Endō Shūsaku’s Silence from the perspective of ‘phenomenal knowledge’, which can only be derived from experience. First turning to philosopher Michel Henry’s discussion of phenomenologies of Christ, the article traces Endō’s protagonist Sebastian Rodrigues’ initial failure to access the phenomenology of Jesus-as-the-Christ. While the all-important fumie tests in Silence appear
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Buddhist Reception in Pulp Science Fiction Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-07-01 Jim Clarke
Science fiction has a lengthy history of irreligion. In part, this relates to its titular association with science itself, which, as both methodology and ontological basis, veers away from revelatory forms of knowledge in order to formulate hypotheses of reality based upon experimental praxis. However, during science fiction’s long antipathy to faith, Buddhism has occupied a unique and sustained position
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Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. By Jayna Brown Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-06-07 Daniel Boscaljon
Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. By BrownJayna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. ix + 212pp. Paperback, $29.95 ISBN: 9781478011675
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The ‘Strange Fruit’ of Flannery O’connor: Damning Monuments in Southern Literature and Southern History Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-06-08 Jordan Rowan Fannin
This article revisits Flannery O’Connor’s racialised Christophany in her short story, ‘The Artificial N*’, in light of contemporary tensions over Confederate monuments in America. It explores her grotesque Christ (manifest in a suburban lawn jockey) that mysteriously acts as a means of grace and effects repentance and reconciliation. It teaches us how to read this racist statuary within the grotesque
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The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Elizabeth Ludlow Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-06-02 Kathryn Poole
The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by LudlowElizabeth. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xvii + 276 pp. Hardcover: £79.99, ISBN: 978-3-030-40081-1, E Book: £63.99, E-Book ISBN: 978-3-030-40082-8.
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Literary Representations of Christianity in Late Qing and Republican China. By John T. P.Lai Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-05-16 Zhixi Wang
Literary Representations of Christianity in Late Qing and Republican China. By LaiJohn T. P.. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xii + 199 pp. Hardback, $166. ISBN: 978-90-04-39411-7.
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THE LOGIC OF SECULAR SENSE IN CENDRARS’ EPIC TRILOGY Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Daniel Whistler
Engaging with Graham Ward’s contention that literature can never be entirely secular, I argue that some pieces of literature can, in fact, tell us a great deal about the conceptual logic of the secular. I turn, in particular, to three poems by Blaise Cendrars—Les Pâques à New York, Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, and Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles, written during
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The Place, and Problems, of Truth Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Tonstad L.
AbstractThis article takes up some questions, and problems, of truth, relating both to the place of theology, the study of religion, and the humanities in the academy, and to the lives within which scholarship happens. Looking at the university, the challenge of religious language, the limitations of the confessional, and the shattering effect of lost lives, the article places loss, desire, and ongoingness
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The Disappointing, Parenthetical Providence of God in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-04-16 Kevin Seidel
Daniel Defoe’s fictional narrators talk often about God’s providence but not usually to appeal to an overarching social or natural order, to solve problems of theodicy, or to claim special divine attention. In the Bible scene near the beginning of Defoe’s novel Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a passage of scripture opened to by chance convinces the narrator, H.F., to stay in London and protect his
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Teaching Religion and Literature. Edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Alan Levinovitz Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-04-12 Hannah Holtschneider
Teaching Religion and Literature. Edited by BoscaljonDaniel and LevinovitzAlan. New York: Routledge, 2019. Paperback, £34.99.
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On White Theology … and other Lies: Redemptive Communal Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-04-12 John J. Allen
Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be read as a decidedly theological work, particularly in its expression of redemptive communal unity through narrative re-telling. Morrison’s imagined community in Beloved moves from fragmented isolation to liberative solidarity with each other, dramatically exemplifying a postcolonial theological vision, which draws from African traditional cultures. Although often rejected
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Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith. By David Newheiser Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-04-05 Maxwell Kennel
AbstractThis article takes up some questions, and problems, of truth, relating both to the place of theology, the study of religion, and the humanities in the academy, and to the lives within which scholarship happens. Looking at the university, the challenge of religious language, the limitations of the confessional, and the shattering effect of lost lives, the article places loss, desire, and ongoingness
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‘Warma Kuyay (Amor de Niño)’ By Josê María Arguedas: A Dialectic Prelude to Liberation Ecotheology Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-31 Moisés Park
José María Arguedas’ Peruvian short story ‘Warma Kuyay (Amor de niño)’ culminates with the punishment of a calf, as a result of the white landlord’s sexual violation of Justina, an indigenous woman. This article argues that that theoretical discussions in ecotheology offer fruitful tools for analysing the story, resonating with Andean cosmologies and enabling us to think more seriously about Arguedas’
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Toward A Second Theology: Avant-Garde Art and Theopolitics Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Petra Carlsson Redell
This article introduces the conceptual couple first theology and second theology as an answer to J. Kameron Carter’s call for a theopolitical approach beyond the proper practice versus malpractice dualism in Western political theology. In order to find sources to further renegotiate the relationship between the material, the spiritual and the political, the article turns East to Russian avant-garde
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Judaism and Temporary Community: Moses Mendelssohn on imperfection and truth Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Dustin N. Atlas
Moses Mendelssohn’s work on imperfection might cause us to rethink the concepts of truth which follow from the Kantian tradition; he offers an alternative, if repressed, way of thinking about truth—one oriented by imperfection, rather than the structure of appearance. Understanding Mendelssohn as a philosopher of imperfection should affect how we read the word ‘truth’ in Modern Jewish philosophy: if
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‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’: A Novel Account of Beauty, Bildung, and Truth in Hegel and Thomas Mann Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Deborah Casewell
Both Thomas Mann and G.W.F. Hegel accord beauty a particular role in their work: that of revealing truth. However, both differ in its particular stature and effectiveness. For Hegel it is an essential part of Bildung, a step to fuller knowledge of the Absolute Idea, whereas for Mann it is revelatory of the failures of Bildung, of knowledge, and self-control, and doing so it unmasks an existential truth
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Make-Belief Translation: Fictive Truths and World-Building from The Lord of the Rings to Theological Institutions Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Mark Godin
This article explores the relationship of truth and fiction through three case studies of imagined translation used to construct worlds. The first is The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, who presents the work as a translation of an ancient text. The second and third are both theological metaphors: imagining teaching as translation, and offering translation as a model for inter-religious dialogue
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Introduction: The Place of Truth Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Martinson M.
The world is changing, and so is the truth. Or is it? The last half decade or so has been turbulent, not least in the questions it has raised about truth. During those years Donald Trump and his mendacious strategies have come and gone, but not before leaving us to think again about the dark and frightful effects of those strategies through the attacks in Washington DC at the beginning of January 2021
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Creation and Beauty in Tolkien’s Catholic Vision: A Study in the Influence of Neoplatonism in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Philosophy of Life as “Being and Gift”. By Michael John Halsall Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-02-27 Daniel Fishley
Creation and Beauty in Tolkien’s Catholic Vision: A Study in the Influence of Neoplatonism in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Philosophy of Life as “Being and Gift”. By HalsallMichael John. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2020. 294pp. $35.00 Pbk. ISBN 9781532641107.
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Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment: Radical Gospels from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. By Jonathan C.P Birch Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-02-07 Greenaway J.
Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment: Radical Gospels from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. By BirchJonathan C.P. London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2019. 493pp. Hardback, £64.99.
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‘Free to act by your own lights’: Agency and Predestination in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-03-02 Alex Mouw
This article explores Marilynne Robinson’s attempt to reconcile the doctrine of predestination with a commitment to human agency by reading her novels Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack alongside their intertextual companion, John Calvin. I argue that, rather than attempting to penetrate the enigma of predestination and agency through theological treatises, Robinson embodies the tension between them in fiction
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Good Deaths in Wendell Berry’s Short Stories Literature and Theology Pub Date : 2021-02-03 Gerald Ens
This article looks at how Wendell Berry’s short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as ‘ordinary’ because of the way that they refuse a heroic mode of standing above the world and instead accept and live into the vulnerable