Literature and Theology

Immaculately Risen: Herbert Lomas' 'The Great Church, Helsinki' This article offers a close reading of Herbert Lomas’ 1984 poem, ‘The Great Church, Helsinki’. The poem, I argue, rejects nihilism by describing the Finnish Lutheran cathedral as an embodiment of resistance to the decay of Christianity. In the article I explore the philosophical underpinnings of the poem as a dialectic of the body–soul dichotomy, revealing that the poem privileges charitable action as of greater religious import than spiritual worship. In the course of the argument, I show Lomas' indebtedness to Swedenborg and Blake, and I set his poetic vision against the perspectives of W. H. Auden and Ted Hughes. Ultimately, the article also aims to serve as an introduction to the work of this critically underappreciated poet.

Bourdieu, Cavell, and the Politics of Aesthetic Value Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetic value has had significant intellectual purchase in its controversial assertion that critical judgments regarding culture and aesthetics necessarily occur in an arena of social inequality and symbolic distinction. I explore a specific set of problems in Bourdieu’s theory of aesthetics through the work of Stanley Cavell, drawing on the latter’s investigation of the natural/conventional binary and what I describe as a theory of action (as opposed to a theory of meaning) based upon his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The comparison of Bourdieu and Cavell yields a more nuanced account of aesthetic judgments, the politics of criticism, and the production of value or meaning.

Clones, Princes, and Beautiful Parodies: Rowan Williams' Negative Literary Christology This article traces in Williams’ thought a ‘negative Christology’ pursued through the examination of parodic Christ-figures. This is accomplished, first, through exploring a ‘negative-image’ of the virgin birth in James MacMillan and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Parthenogenesis, and then, more fully, through Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky’s protagonist in The Idiot. The latter is ultimately a parodic Christ-figure because he is what Hegel and Gillian Rose term a ‘beautiful soul’, a figure too pure to express its agency in time. In the difference between such a beautiful parody and its original in Christ, Williams finds fruitful theological data, which arguably inflects his more positive Christological presentation.

A 'Fine, Mysterious, Almost Sacred Fable'? Retelling the Grail Quest in Mary Butts' Armed with Madness This article scrutinises the critically overlooked interwar fiction of the British novelist Mary Franeis Butts (1890–1937). While textual scholars have canvassed her persistent flirtation with strains of anti-equalitarian harangue, comparatively little attention is paid to her literary–religious formulations, especially her ‘science of mysticism’, and her energetically eccentric approach to Grail lore. Her second published novel Armed with Madness (1928) situates the ‘Sanc Grail’ as the centrepiece of a dissident mythic vision in which troublingly violent encounters play out against an animistic backdrop of pre-Christian survivals. For Butts, the modern-day Grail Quest offers scant solace to pilgrims wishing to excavate the historic conditions of faith; rather it involves an experience of cleansing discomfort that reflects an age of post-war civic ferment.

Tim Winton's Poetics of Resurrection Through the fiction of Tim Winton, there runs a poetics of resurrection, a linguistic apprehension of the sacred implicated in human desires to test limits. Winton’s novels, including That Eye, the Sky, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, andBreath, are extraordinarily popular in Australia, set on school curricula, and often topping reader polls. Critically, however, Winton’s reputation is divided. Many critics are, arguably, uncomfortable with his publically expressed religious beliefs, slating home to them his perceived blindnesses: his masculinism; an overwhelmingly ‘white’ Australianness; and even misogyny. This article explores Winton’s strongly vernacular, culturally rich representations of the sacred entwined in an earthed, embodied, and material vision of the human.

An Existentialist Ars Moriendi: Death and Sacrifice in John Updike's The Centaur John Updike originally conceived his 1963 novel The Centaur as a companion piece to Rabbit, Run, published two years before. If the earlier novel was about a life-embracing man constitutionally unable to sacrifice himself for any person or idea, the later one is its opposite: a novel about a man obsessed with his own death who is nevertheless able to sacrifice himself for the betterment of his family. He thus exchanges his literal, physical death for a series of smaller, spiritual, daily deaths—the deaths of his dreams, his ambitions, everything but his love for his wife and son. What Updike is attempting in this novel, I will argue, is a 20th-century Ars Moriendi—an art of holy dying wherein George Caldwell will model a Christian attitude towards death and sacrifice. But Updike’s faith is always mixed with doubt, and thus his updated Ars Moriendi belongs firmly to the existentialist tradition wherein the black hole of death creates an inescapable anxiety. Updike implicitly adopts Martin Heidegger’s notion of Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death); to live authentically is to remember at all times that death is awaiting you. But, typically for Updike’s fiction, The Centaur charts a middle way: If Updike cannot resign himself to death with the calmness suggested by medieval Christianity, neither can he subscribe to Heidegger’s atheism. Caldwell’s daily sacrifices become a Christian response to this anxiety; by sacrificing himself every day, he prepares himself for the physical death that awaits him.

Come Now, Let us Treason Together: Conversion and Revolutionary Consciousness in Luke 22:35-38 and The Hunger Games Trilogy Reading together Luke’s ‘reversal of method’ pericope (Luke 22:35-38) and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy, this article argues that the Lukan Christ has insight into the kind of transformation that would drive a disciple to sell his garment and buy a dagger, and could also drive a young girl with only a backpack to steal a bow and arrow. It then suggests that not only could Christian love inspire a person to treason, but that such a transformation is exactly what discipleship entails in the face of imperial occupation, and that Luke has preserved for us a memory of Jesus who himself knew and taught conversion to revolutionary consciousness.

A Philosophy of the Unsayable. By William Franke.

Modernism and Christianity. By Erik Tonning

William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty. By Heidi J. Snow Consolation in Medieval Narrative. Augustinian Authority and Open Form. By Chad D. Schrock. Richard Morris's Prick of Conscience. A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text. Edited by Ralph Hanna and Sarah Wood. Bidding the Animal Adieu: Grace in J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace J.M. Coetzee’s focus on animals in Disgrace and The Lives of Animals forces his readers to question the contours of their ethical frameworks, including the distinction between human and animal realms and whether animals must necessarily compete for imaginative space with human beings. I argue that Coetzee asks us to envision what effect human and animal interactions can have in the midst of trauma, and offers the idea of grace as a surprising, if tentative, answer. Infant voices: embryonic and neonatal personhood in two recent French Catholic novels There are almost no literary or artistic representations that take the unborn or neonatal infants as their subject. Two exceptions to this as Claire Daudin’s Le Sourire and Antoine Beauquier’s Pavillon 7: la révolte des embryons. What these novels share is the ambition to frame such subjects as full and complete persons. Thus in their distinct ways both novels engage with the familial, social and biological problems that arise when personhood is attributed to embryos or neo-natal infants. Their creation of an embryonic or infant ‘voice’ associates the dignity of such subjects with divine origins. A Politics of Auto-Cannibalism: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale This article re-opens the debate concerning the biblical intertexts of The Handmaid’s Tale, turning to the analogy between the theocratic Gilead and Nazi Germany via the novel’s evocations of biblical sacrifices, including that of the Passover lamb – an intertextual entanglement which still remains unexamined today, in 2015, the year that marks the thirtieth anniversary of the novel’s publication. Both the Passover sacrifice and The Handmaid’s Tale, I will argue, present us with a figurative self-consumption that points to a politics of ‘autocannibalism’, which illuminates the parallel between Gilead and Nazi Germany whilst fleshing out its implications on Atwood’s treatment of the tripartite connection between politics, sacrifice, and eating. Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events. By Ryan Netzley. The Gospel According to Flannery O'Connor: Examining the Role of the Bible in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction. By Jordan Cofer. The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading. By Tiffany Eberle Kriner. Shakespeare and Religion (The Arden Critical Companions). By Alison Shell. God's Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-20th Century. Edited By Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt.