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Longing for an Absent God
Longing for an Absent God unveils the powerful role of faith and doubt in the American literary tradition. Nick Ripatrazone explores how two major strands of Catholic writers--practicing and cultural--intertwine and sustain each other. Ripatrazone explores the writings of devout American Catholic writers in the years before the Second Vatican Council through the work of Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, and Walker Percy; those who were raised Catholic but drifted from the church, such as the Catholic-educated Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, the convert Toni Morrison, the Mass-going Thomas Pynchon, and the ritual-driven Louise Erdrich; and a new crop of faithful American Catholic writers, inc...
Digital Communion
Marshall McLuhan was the greatest prophet of the digital age. In the 1960s, McLuhan, a Canadian literary theorist reared on Elizabethan satire and the labyrinthine novels of James Joyce, turned his attention toward the budding and befuddling electronic age. Like most prophets, McLuhan became one through a fascination with God. Prophets divine their wisdom from a source, and Digital Communion shows that McLuhan's was his own Catholic faith. In other words, the greatest prophet of the digital age was an ardent Christian. A reconsideration of his vision can change the way we view the online world. A Catholic convert, McLuhan foretold a digital age full of blessings and sins: a world where infor...
The Fine Delight
Endorsements: ""Where are all the Catholic writers? is a popular question these days. In his beautifully realized new book The Fine Delight, Nicholas Ripatrazone offers an answer: they are among us, writing. With skill and care, he explores the artistry of three superb writers--Ron Hansen, Paul Mariani, and Andre Dubus--as well as several other contemporary Catholic authors. In the process he reveals . . . how reading can be sacramental, enabling us to discover God's presence in our modern world."" --James Martin, SJ, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything ""The Fine Delight is a text of scholarship and personal consideration of American literature that is marked by and built from...
The Age of the Crisis of Man
A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury America In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chi...
Thick and Dazzling Darkness
How do poets use language to render the transcendent, often dizzyingly inexpressible nature of the divine? In an age of secularism, does spirituality have a place in modern American poetry? In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O’Leary reads a diverse set of writers to argue for the existence and importance of religious poetry in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. He traces a poetic genealogy that begins with Whitman and Dickinson and continues in the work of contemporary writers to illuminate an often obscured but still central spiritual impulse that has shaped the production and imagination of American poetry. O’Leary presents close and comprehensive readings of t...
In a Sentimental Mood
Ivana Bodrozic's In a Sentimental Mood is emotional, but never woeful, deliberate, yet playful poetry capable of reaching both the highest and deepest registers of expression. From abstract jazz-inspired musings to bedroom intimacies, these poems converse with the idea that being alone is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. To lose your dignity and the dignity of your words - that is the worst thing.
This Darksome Burn
Fiction. Sprung from the first line of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, THIS DARKSOME BURN is a fierce rendition of our feeble attempts to control nature's obstinate force. Indeed, for one man, toughness and tenacity prove no match for the unpredictable wilderness of the shadowing Siskiyou Mountains or his own bereft emotional frontier. Coursing through Luke's life, sweeping away emotional touchstones and spiritual ballasts, the prophetic stream in Nick Ripatrazone's grim novella comes "roaring down" and wends its devious way into the reader's psyche, where it punishes and pardons.
Being Here
“What is prayer? It’s not a passport to heaven. If anything, it’s a way of seeing here, a way of being here.” In Being Here, acclaimed poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama offers a thoughtful collection of prayers and essays to focus attention in a world full of distractions. Featuring thirty-one collects—an ancient five-fold form of prayer—this unconventional devotional invites readers into a daily rhythm of connection and creativity. “The hope is that you can turn to a prayer with the story of your life, and in the little emptiness you create there, hear something, discern something, feel something that’s connecting you to other things seeking out connection with you.” E...
Acts of Faith and Imagination
Acts of Faith and Imagination wagers that fiction written by Catholic authors assists readers to reflect critically on the question: "what is faith?" To speak of a person's "faith-life" is to speak of change and development. As a narrative form, literature can illustrate the dynamics of faith, which remains in flux over the course of one's life. Because human beings must possess faith in something (whether religious or not), it inevitably has a narrative structure?faith ebbs and flows, flourishes and decays, develops and stagnates. Through an exploration of more than a dozen Catholic authors' novels and short stories, Brent Little argues that Catholic fiction encourages the reader to reflect...
Wild Belief
"Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark." Dante's Inferno begins with imagery of the wilderness marked by darkness, fear, and the unknown. In folktales, legends, and children's stories, the wilderness is a place of conflict and exile. Yet there is another spiritual tradition that embraces the complexities of the wilderness as a place of rejuvenation and wonder--a place where Thomas Merton said "man purges himself of 'sediments of society' and becomes a new creature." A book for those of us who revel in the beauty and mystery of the natural world, Wild Belief brings together poets and prophets, saints and storytellers from across the ages who share a common search for the spirit. Their explorations of forests, wetlands, and deserts expose the wilderness as both a fearful and a sacred space--a tension that aptly captures the unknown and surprising elements of belief. As we join them on their search for the divine, our eyes open to the possibilities of transformation, to our most fundamental stories, and to a fertile spirituality we can only find in the wild.
