Literature and Theology - recent issues

Towards A Judaic Milton: Translating Samson Agonistes Into Hebrew

Einboden, J. — 2008-05-22

Joseph Massel's 1890 translation of Samson Agonistes into biblical Hebrew represents a problematic amalgam of Christian poetics and Judaic scripture. Published as a means of promoting Hebrew language renewal, Massel's rendition succeeds in transforming not only the linguistic constitution of the Miltonic drama, but also its religious and cultural meaning. The following essay examines the implications of translating Samson Agonistes into the language of the Tanakh, proposing that this Hebrew rendition functions to amend the historical, theological and political significance of its English source.

The Daimones of C. S. Lewis

Sick, D. H. — 2008-05-22

The eldila of C. S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy hold a unique position in the author's cosmology. Lewis derived these spirits, angels or daimones chiefly from Apuleius’ De Deo Socratis, although the authorial voice cites medieval sources. He, moreover, acknowledged their existence in the material universe. His willingness to accept a pagan divinity results from his understanding of Graeco-Roman myth as a distorted revelation of truth and his own spiritual and intellectual relationship with Apuleius over many years.

Atonement and the Crime of Seeing: Patrick White's, Riders in the Chariot

D'Costa, G. — 2008-05-22

Patrick White's ‘religious’ vision in ‘Riders in the Chariot’ is explored. Against readings from a Jewish perspective, a Christian perspective or a secular non-religious perspective, this article proposes an alternative. It suggests that White brings together a synthetic vision in which three religious traditions are affirmed as complimentary—with a new fourth, the artist as religious visionary. In doing so, White respects the deep differences between these traditions while also drawing on an analogical commonality: the redemptive value of suffering and the nature of an unfinished atonement within our lives.

By the Waters of a Death Camp: An Intertextual Reading of Psalm 137

Plank, K. A. — 2008-05-22

To the Reader: The Structure of Power in Biblical Translation, from Tyndale to the NRSV

Glowacki, D. R. — 2008-05-22

This article investigates the mechanisms by which the ‘To the Reader’ essay that prefaces the NRSV constructs power. The mechanisms and strategies that characterise modern discursive structures of power are used as a theoretical lens for examining the prefatory essay's self-awareness of the forces associated with its arising. Unlike the manner in which power is manifest in earlier biblical translations, power in the NRSV's ‘To the Reader’ is more subtle—implying an autonomous, unified and unarticulated biblical message which is its own first cause. The analysis presented herein suggests that the construction of power in ‘To the Reader’ relies on obscuring the limits of its relationship with those forces that encompass the NRSV translation enterprise.

Theological Humanism as Living Praxis: Reading Surfaces and Depth in Margaret Edson's Wit

Wriglesworth, C. — 2008-05-22

This essay outlines and illustrates ways that ‘theological humanism’ provides methodological possibilities for scholars working in religion and literary studies. I suggest there is a need to investigate more humanistic methods of interpreting literature by exploring approaches that engage questions of sacred depth. After stressing the necessary paradoxes of theological humanism as an interpretive and lived stance in the world, I offer a reading of Margaret Edson's Wit that is shaped by these principles.

Peregrination, Hermeneutics, Hospitality: On the Way to a Theologically Informed General Hermeneutics

Huelin, S. — 2008-05-22

The recent and laudable revival of ethical criticism, both in its neo-humanist and postmodern forms, leads inexorably to either elitist exclusivism or uncritical relativism. We are, at present, lacking an account of general hermeneutics that can transcend this divide, one that takes seriously the dangers involved in opening oneself to the other while also maintaining the intellectual and moral necessity of hospitality to strangers. An analysis of this problem points, via St Augustine, to the possibility of a theologically informed hermeneutics of hospitality, and the essay goes on to limn the contours, in theory and practice, of such a hermeneutic.

Redeeming Time: T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. By Kenneth Paul Kramer.

Whistler, D. — 2008-05-22

Eating Beauty. The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages. By Ann W. Astell.

Pfeiffer, K. — 2008-05-22

Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. By Marilyn McCord Adams.

Knight, M. — 2008-05-22

God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited. By Francesca Aran Murphy.

Jasper, D. — 2008-05-22

Envisager Dieu avec Edmond Jabes, By Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller.

Davison, C. — 2008-05-22

Murder, Manners, Mystery. Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction. By Peter C. Erb.

Murdoch, B. — 2008-05-22

Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians. The Fantasy of the Real. By Alison Milbank.

Murdoch, B. — 2008-05-22

Notices and Reports

2008-05-22

From Holy Hostess to Dragon Tamer: The Anomaly of Saint Martha

Daas, M. M. — 2008-02-21

The official version of the life of Saint Martha depicts her as Christ's hostess and one of his first followers. Her popular appeal, however, stems less from her biblical role, than from her position in medieval legend. In the Middle Ages, Martha is reinvented as a Gallic saint whose most celebrated feat is taming a dragon. It is this legend that has often displaced Martha's original role, both in text and in iconography. Unlike most depictions of female saints, Martha's power derives from her soul, not from her body. The denial of corporeality as the source of holiness defies the traditional role of the mulier sancta. Martha, as depicted in the texts of the Middle Ages, is a holy person, not a holy vessel. In this article, I am positing a third ‘category’ of female saint: one not defined by her corporeality, that is, her virginity or her physical martyrdom, but by her character, which I claim is indicative of the influence of popular spirituality on the more formal teachings of the Christian church.

A House Divided Against Itself: Dostoevsky and the Psychology of Unbelief

Bullivant, S. — 2008-02-21

This is a study of Dostoevsky's writings in light of the work of several twentieth-century theologians who affirm the possibility of there being ‘pseudo-atheists, who believe that they do not believe in God but who unconsciously believe in Him’ (Maritain). In particular, the portrayals of three of his most famous atheist characters will be examined: Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), Kirillov (Demons) and Ivan Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov). Despite these characters’ explicit unbelief, Dostoevsky's use of dreams, visions and gratuitous actions suggests that at a deeper level (that of their inner double) they possess a profound and insuperable faith in Christ. As will be demonstrated, this interpretation of them as ‘pseudo-atheists’ or ‘anonymous Christians’ both illumines Dostoevsky's religious thought, and has fruitful implications for modern theology.

The Heart's Bower: Emblematics in Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876)

Virkar-Yates, A. — 2008-02-21

This article considers Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876) in the light of the emblematic practice of the seventeenth century. It examines Hopkins's poem as a meditative and mystical text, composed with deliberate reference to the School of the Heart emblems seen in both Francis Quarles's Emblems (1635) and, more particularly, Henry Hawkins's The Devout Heart (1634).

'The Angel Club': Allen Upward and the Divine Calling of Modernist Literature

Hobson, S. — 2008-02-21

This article focuses on Allen Upward's plans to form an Angel Club or an Order of the Seraphim as described in articles published in the New Age and the New Freewoman in 1910 and 1913. It interrogates the significance of these plans to a Modernist movement that is often assumed to be secular in outlook and reveals that, despite retaining some of the angel's traditional attributes, this figure is absolutely of its time, representing an unlikely alliance of art with Nietzschean philosophy and Modernist theology. Among the questions discussed in detail are the ethical distinction that Upward makes between his own artist-angel and Nietzsche's Overman, the role of R.J. Campbell's The New Theology in suggesting an evolutionary basis for the idea that man might evolve into an angel and the echoes of Upward's Angel Club in Ezra Pound's Order of the Brothers Minor and D.H. Lawrence's Order of the Knights of Rananim.

{inverted question}Cuanto falta para Jerusalen?: Lorca's Apocalyptic and the Paradigms of Peace in Poeta en Nueva York and El publico

Costa, D. — 2008-02-21

Many of Federico García Lorca's best readers have noted a distinctly apocalyptic tone in Poeta en Nueva York and drawn inaccurate conclusions from it. This article maintains that a specific set of images from the Apocalypse—constituting an ‘irenic’ discourse concerning peace in the midst of violence—is Lorca's measure or paradigm for what can be said to be most true. What can be said to be most false is any image or reality that confusingly mimics such paradigms of peacefulness. Like the Johannine ‘revelator’, Lorca unveils not only the world's violence but also the curious stance of those who are enduring patiently in the midst of it. Lorca's verse exists so that such people—blacks, impoverished immigrants, dying children at the moment of their deaths—may be envisioned as taking the measure of everyone else.

I identify a class of adverbs in these poems (echoing adverbials in Revelation) that seek to give the lie to a universally accepted norm according to which New York's Harlem could never be considered to anticipate the ‘new Jerusalem’.

Lorca's imaginative project of a ‘theatre underneath the sand’, announced in the unfinished play El público, requires that genuine community, like the primitive Christians, go underground in order to ‘play’. The verbs sostenir (to endure) and resistir (to resist, to parry), taken from the irenic lexicon of Revelation, define how the actors must play their parts, enacting ‘an incalculable love’ at the risk of their own lives.

Killing Oneself, Killing the Father: On Deleuze's Suicide in Comparison with Blanchot's Notion of Death

Osaki, H. — 2008-02-21

Deleuze appropriates Blanchot's notion of the second death, the pure form of the event, which never happens. Hence Colombat interprets Deleuze's suicide as an act of joining this pure form. But, if we consider Deleuze's difference from Blanchot, the importance of the first death, an incident which actually happens, stands out. Deleuze's thought of the inseparability of the two deaths illuminates the necessity of his suicide. His suicide is their junction, which resists both their separation and the reduction of the second death to the first. Revealing the former in the midst of the latter, his suicide turns out to be the act of killing God as the Father and Deleuze himself as the father of his philosophy of life, in order to free the multiplicities of life from unifying paternal authority.

Edmond Jabes, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God

Franke, W. — 2008-02-21

The work of Jabès calls to be read in a tradition of apophatic discourse that reaches back to Neoplatonic sources on the ineffable One, as well as to the tradition of reflection on the Name of God as the Ineffable par excellence that one finds in the Kabbalah. Such modes of thinking and writing prove to be key to the significance of Jabès's project as a whole. His oeuvre is exemplary of new forms that this type of discourse can assume in its revival underway today. Jabès contemplates ineffability in language in the first instance in the Name of God. But all language is engendered by the divine Name, and consequently language in general proves in Jabès's work to be inhabited by a silent instance that it cannot name or say. The Name of God thereby emerges as the vanity of language in the heart of every word.

After the Death of God. By John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo. Edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins, with an afterword by Gabriel Vahanian.

Price, D. — 2008-02-21

La consistenza del passato: Heidegger Nietzsche Severino [The consistency of the past: Heidegger Nietzsche Severino]. By Alessandro Carrera.

Price, D. — 2008-02-21

Transforming Talk. The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England. By Susan E. Phillips.

Murdoch, B. — 2008-02-21

Gilte Legende II. Edited by Richard Hamer with the assistance of Vida Russell.

Murdoch, B. — 2008-02-21

Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. By Mark Knight and Emma Mason.

Wright, T. — 2008-02-21

Identifying the Remains: George Eliot's Death in the London Religious Press. By K.K. Collins.

Jay, E. — 2008-02-21

Notices and Reports

2008-02-21

Ritual, Ostension and the Divine in the Stuart Masque

Demaubus, T. — 2008-02-21

Introduction

Hass, A. — 2007-11-26

An Absolutely New Space

Altizer, T. J. J. — 2007-11-26

This article engages with the initially scientific, and then philosophical and theological, transfigurations of space that have occurred since the seventeenth century, as they lead us towards a radical praxis of a nihilistic space. It is the epic poets, such as Dante, Milton, Blake and Joyce, who provide the parameters of an absolutely new space, a revolutionary transfiguration of space and God; it is the great epics that intimately influence real space through an enactment of universal liturgy and ritual. Such enactment draws us inescapably into a uniquely apocalyptic nihilism, but one to be affirmed and embraced rather than denied.

God Turns a Blind Eye: Terrifying Angels before the Apocalypse

Price, D. — 2007-11-26

Thomas J. J. Altizer's apocalyptic voice defies standard academic discourse because it sets itself against the demands of merely understanding what is and insists on living in the demand to sweep away being and all its nostalgic comforts. This paper attempts to forefront the consequences of that apocalyptic voice, beyond post-modern criticisms of both apocalyptic tones and the idea of voice itself, in the refiguring of the sacred amid the difference between ‘space’ and ‘place’. Rilke's ‘terrifying angels’ from the Duino Elegies serve as a case study for understanding the shape of an individual response to the apocalyptic demand, and help to make sense of the type of sacred engagement Altizer's apocalyptic voice calls forth.

A Triptych on Schleiermacher's On Religion

Borgman, E., Kate, L. t., Philipsen, B. — 2007-11-26

The following three texts form a triptych in the classic meaning this term has in late medieval painting. They are independent panels with their own themes, arguments and disciplinary background (literary theory, philosophy and theology); and still they ‘live’ from constant reference to and dependance on one another. They were first presented at the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture's conference ‘Sacred Space’ in Stirling, Scotland, October 2006, and later reworked thoroughly.

There common focus is a series of new readings of Friedrich Schleiermacher's (1768–1834) famous On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799). In the first article, Bart Philipsen explores the intellectual context of this book, especially Schleiermacher's relation to the Early Romanticists, and focuses on the hermeneutical, rhetorical and poetical questions and strategies through which Schleiermacher's performative concept of religion is developed. In the second article, Laurens ten Kate treats a key concept in Schleiermacher's account of the meaning of religion in modern culture, that of intuition; he investigates the relation between intuition and performativity, and analyses the influence of Kant's philosophy at this point. In the third article, Erik Borgman studies and evaluates the central notion of melancholy in Schleiermacher's views on religion, and, comparing these with the thought of Rudolf Otto and Edward Schillebeekx, he pleads for a new understanding of the way Schleiermacher should be called a modern thinker.

Mourning to Death: Love, Altruism, and Stephen Dedalus's Poetry of Grief

Balsamo, G. — 2007-11-26

Joyce writes Ulysses during the first two decades of the 20th century, first in Trieste and then in Paris. In this period two distinct concerns about the psychology of mourning flourish in Paris. The gradual publication of Proust's In Search of Lost Time promotes an interconnection between voluntary and involuntary memory on the one hand, and the psychology of mourning on the other. In turn, the anthropologists guided by Émile Durkheim devote several coordinated studies to the funerary rites prevalent among the aboriginal tribes in Australia. Joyce contributes to this cultural climate with the representation of Stephen Dedalus's sense of loss after the death of his mother. This essay discusses the relationship between Stephen's mourning and his poetic agenda, aimed at the poetic expression of inconsolable grief.

In Memoriam Nathan A. Scott Jr. (1925 2006)

Jasper, D. — 2007-11-26

An Unsuitable Book: The Bible as Scandalous Text. By Hugh S. Pyper.

Ziolkowski, E. — 2007-11-26

Towards a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline. Edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller.

Jasper, D. — 2007-11-26

Rituals of Spontaneity. By Lori Branch.

Robertson, S. — 2007-11-26

Myth: A Very Short Introduction. By Robert Segal.

Darroch, F. — 2007-11-26

Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden.

Hamner, E. — 2007-11-26

There Before Us: Religion, Literature, and Culture from Emerson to Wendell Berry. Edited by Roger Lundin.

Michaud, M. — 2007-11-26

Notices and Reports

2007-11-26