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The arresting poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins arises from philosophical engagement with the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other mysteries of Christian revelation. No previous study has explored his poetry in the light of his philosophical theology. Hopkins's thoughts on justice and language challenge today's inhuman literary theories. With explications of more than twenty-nine of Hopkins's intricate poems and difficult prose, this study traces Hopkins's engagement with his age. New, philosophically rigorous definitions of Hopkins's key poetic terms--"inscape" and "instress"--detail exactly how he discovered the possibility of multiple true concepts of things, each grounded in reality but dem...
This collection of essays by distinguished authors explores the present-day field of theological aesthetics: from von Balthasar’s contribution and parallel developments to correctives and alternatives to his approach. A tribute to von Balthasar’s own project expands into a dialogue with ancient and medieval traditions in search of revelatory aesthetics. The contributors outline challenges to his approach (including Protestant perspectives) and introduce new ways of viewing the field of theological aesthetics, which ultimately opens up to the idea of concrete cultural contexts and practical human needs determining the use of the arts and aesthetic sensibilities in theology.
Rene Girard's mimetic theory opens up ways to make sense of the tension between the progressive politics of George Eliot and the conservative moralism of her narratives. In this innovative study, Bernadette Waterman Ward offers an original rereading of George Eliot's work through the lens of René Girard's theories of mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. It is a fruitful mapping of a twentieth-century theorist onto a nineteenth-century novelist, revealing Eliot's understanding of imitative desire, rivalry, idol-making, and sacrificial victimization as critical elements of the social mechanism. While the unresolved tensions between Eliot's realism and her desire to believe in gradual soc...
His Hiding Place is Darkness explores the uncertainties of faith and love in a pluralistic age. In keeping with his conviction that studying multiple religious traditions intensifies rather than attenuates religious devotion, Francis Clooney's latest work of comparative theology seeks a way beyond today's religious and interreligious uncertainty by pairing a fresh reading of the absence of the beloved in the Biblical Song of Songs with a pioneering study of the same theme in the Holy Word of Mouth (9th century CE), a classic of Hindu mystical poetry rarely studied in the West. Remarkably, the pairing of these texts is grounded not in a general theory of religion, but in an engagement with two unexpected sources: the theopoetics, theodramatics, and theology of the 20th-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the intensely perceived and written poetry of Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. How we read and write on religious matters is transformed by this rare combination of voices in what is surely a unique and important contribution to comparative studies and religious hermeneutics.
The book proposes a new way of understanding the glory of God in Christian theology, based on glory as sign.
"We need a new way of seeing!" --Jennifer Ferguson, South African musician & Former MP, African National Congress Is abortion on "demand" a woman's right, or a wrong inflicted on women? Is it a mark of liberation, or a sign that women are not yet free? From Anglo-Irish writer Mary Wollstonecraft to Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, many eighteenth- through twenty-first-century feminists have opposed it as violence against fetal lives arising from violence against female lives. This more inclusive, surprisingly old-but-new vision of reproductive choice is called prolife feminism. This book's original edition in 1995 offered brilliant essays on aborti...
What has Newman to say today, not just to Christians, but to those shapers of public opinion in education and the media for whom Christianity is no longer a point of reference, or to those for whom all religion is merely a matter of personal and subjective “opinion”? This is the central question of this volume. As it shows, Newman challenges us to think in an integrated way, “connecting” different areas of thought and experience. He invites us to reflect on the nature of the human “person” and the “self”, on the nature of conscience and its role in contemporary political life, and on the relationship between the individual and the community. The contributions here show that Newman challenges us to examine the relationships between different academic disciplines in the quest for a “connected view or grasp” of things. He invites us to see faith as not just a question of “believing”, but also as a quest for a personal, living relationship. His thought throws fresh light on the nature of inter-religious dialogue and contemporary evangelism.
What if the religious themes and allusions in modernist poetry are not just metaphors? Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity’s cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian th...
The landmark play A Raisin in the Sun takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem which poses the questions "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" Focusing on a working-class African-American family in Chicago who save enough to purchase either a business in a black neighborhood or a house in a white neighborhood, the plays exposes issues of racism and gender as the women of the family make important decisions that push against both racial and gender lines. This volume discusses gender in the play, looking at how the female characters fight both racism and male chauvinism, how the play is dominated by strong female characters, and how characters resist the stereotype of the emasculating female. The book also presents contemporary perspectives on race and feminism in the twenty-first century. Contributors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Jewelle L. Gomez, and Sharon Friedman.
All Wonders in One Sight compares the portrayals of the Christ Child in the Nativity poems of the greatest names in seventeenth-century English lyric.