Literature and Religion

"Schiller and Aesthetic Catholicism". In Schiller’s work there are many passages drawing on experiences, beliefs, symbols and practices stemming from the Catholic religion. Word of his crypto-Catholicism (he was Protestant) spread during the whole nineteenth century. The central concern of this article is to show why and to what extent figures and subjects related to aesthetic Catholicism recur in his works, revealing an original approach to the fundamental question of Kunstreligion. Schiller is aware of the deep relationship between aesthetics and religion, which means that confessional diversity, to him, implies that art can perform a variety of forms and functions. Moreover, his insistence on the theme of suggestion and his fascination with Catholic imagery are features which bring him close to the writers of the Romantic movement. The first part of the paper highlights the great presence of Catholic subjects in Schiller’s poetic and dramatic work, in particular by focusing on Don Carlos, The Ghost-Seer and Mary Stuart, while the following parts, centred on philosophical and poetological reflections, describe the development of his distinct aesthetic point of view on religion.

Short chapter contribution to exhibition catalogue for  *California Dreams: San Francisco, ein Porträt",  the first exhibition of its kind in Europe about the eponymous city, debuting at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 12 September 2019--12 January 2020.

This article explores the ways in which the imagery at work within the poetry of Wang Wei (王維 699-761) expresses Mahāyāna Buddhist notions of emptiness. I initially provide an overview of the Buddhist philosophical heritage from which Wang Wei drew inspiration, and then describe the relationship between poetry and Chan Buddhism in Tang-dynasty literary circles, thereby introducing the religious and literary milieus from which Wang Wei’s poetic impulse sprang. Finally, I offer a reading of Wang Wei’s poems, arguing that the Chan emphasis on a transmission outside of explicit teachings led Wang Wei to eschew the exposition of doctrine in favor of a poetry which, in its simplicity and silence, embodies the very absence of the poet himself. I address this article not primarily to specialists of Chinese literature, but to those interested in the interplay of literature, religion, and philosophy generally, as Wang Wei offers an enthralling instance of the attempt to meld the literary and the religio-philosophical impulses in poetic form. In formulating my argument, I draw upon Western literary and phenomenological theorists in a bid to partially enact an integration of methodologies akin to the fusion of referents so subtly embodied in the imagery of Wang Wei.

Preface to Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 22:4 (Fall 2019): 5-19.  In this essay I discuss the peculiar appeal of the great 20th-century Catholic novelist Walker Percy, whose works attempted to convey the true depth of the human person over against both scientistic and irrational understandings. Percy, whose works focused on the peculiar nature of human language, the push and pull moderns feel against and toward community, love itself, and the message of the Gospel in its Catholic form, is particularly illuminated by several recent books that I discuss herein: Jessica Hooten Wilson's Reading Walker Percy; Wilson's Walker Percy and the Search for Influence (which argues for a better understanding of literary influence and demonstrates Percy's own influence from Dostoevsky); and Brian A. Smith's Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfaring, which emphasizes Percy's understanding of humanity as rough pilgrimage through life and the ways in which Percy's Catholicism and American southern identities affected his views.  Included, as with all of my prefaces, are brief introductions to the other articles in the issue.

Śāntideva's *Introduction to the Practice of Awakening* is often described as a philosophical and literary classic. But *is* it a work of literature? What would that have meant in medieval South Asia? What can it mean today? How do the literary qualities of the work interact with the philosophical and ritual aims of the work? I offer here a tentative answer, suggesting a new orientation to an altogether remarkable work.

Books & Culture (September-October 2009): 35-37.  In this essay I discuss the decline of Chesterton's reputation in the post-sixties era and his return to prominence in both academic and popular attention. In the course of this I discuss three recently (at the time) published books: Adam Schwartz's The Third Spring; Mark Knight's Chesterton and Evil; and volume VII of the Collected Works of Chesterton, edited and introduced by Iain Benson and including The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, and the Flying Inn.

The past century has witnessed a flowering of aesthetic and literary methodologies taking root within the soil of Christian theology.  Beginning with the writings of Henri Bremond, Jacques Maritain, and T. S. Eliot, through the mid-century works of Nathan Scott, William Lynch, and Amos Wilder, to the theological appropriations of literature by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Paul Fiddes,  theology has reached the point at which William Franke can write in his recent book A Theology of Literature that “the older practice of reading the Bible as literature has gone through a remarkable ‘conversion’ into reading literature as theology.”

Originally fostered as a counterweight to theologies that critics deemed overly rationalistic and abstract, Christian theologies of literature have made common cause with postliberal theologies that have emphasized the irreducible particularity of Christianity.  George Lindbeck’s 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine paved the way for a generation of scholars who promoted cultural-linguistic theologies as a preferable alternative to doctrinal or experiential expressions of religious belief.  Imaginative literature escaped cognitive abstractions that threatened to domesticate the gospel within universalist categories, and so literature proved to be a valuable medium for Christians seeking to explain how human encounters with the transcendent God could overlap with unique narratives, symbols, and images.

In the twenty-first century, however, Christian theology has continued to be challenged by a subaltern critique that claims to expose the manner in which Christians throughout history have made common cause with structures of power and domination.  Pioneers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, and Rosemary Reuther have pointed out Christian theology’s collaboration with colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, and patriarchy, a charge amplified in recent books on postcolonialism by Kwok Pui-lan and Catherine Keller.

Are the Christian theologies of literature developed over the last century complicit with the targets of liberationist critiques?  Does theological aesthetics aid those on the margins who struggle to maintain personal and collective identities in the face of globalization and neoliberalism?  Or are Christian theologies of literature too indebted to neoplatonic and ahistorical understandings of transcendence to be of use for such Christian praxis?

This issue of Religions, “Christian Literary Imagination: Seeking Transcendence in an Age of Identity,” is open to theologians and scholars of literature who desire to take a stance on any side of these questions.  Literary, historical-critical, and theological methodologies are welcomed in the quest to broaden current scholarship in the theology of literature.  Our goal will be to bring voices from different academic specializations together to examine whether the contemplative and aesthetic roots of Christian theologies of literature can find common ground with identity politics in the twenty-first century.

Gilbert 22:6 (July/August 2019): 11. A biographical sketch of the 20th-century American comic novelist and essayist Peter De Vries, culminating in an examination of Chestertonian themes in two of his most famous novels, Slouching Toward Kalamazoo (1983) and The Blood of the Lamb (1962).

Christ's Subversive Body offers a fascinating exploration of six historical examples of politically or culturally subversive usages of the body of Christ. Shining a light on the enabling potential of religious rhetoric, Solovieva examines how in moments of crisis or transition throughout Western history the body of Christ has been deployed in a variety of discourses, including recent neo- and theoconservative movements in the United States.

Solovieva’s survey includes the iconoclastic polemics of Epiphanius at the moment of struggles for supremacy between the Roman state and the Christian church, the mystical theologico-political alchemy of an anonymous treatise circulated at the Council of Constance, Lavater’s counter-Enlightenment visions of the afterlife expressd through physiognomy, Dostoevsky’s refashioning of ethical communities, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s attempts to provoke the “scandal” of Jesus’s mission once more in the modern world, and the elaboration of a political theology subordinating democratic dissent to the higher unity of a corporately conceived “unitary executive” in early twenty-first-century America.

Solovieva presents her findings not as an entry into theological or Christological debates but rather as a study in comparative discourse analysis. She demonstrates how these uses of Christ’s body are triggered by moments of epistemological, political, and representational crisis in the history of Western civilization.

This essay argues for the role of instrumental thinking in cultural and literary criticism, practices sometimes thought of as naturally anti-instrumental. Focusing on the work of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, it shows a shared instrumental defense of Christianity but also how, for situational reasons, this defense has made instrumentalism harder to locate within the Anglophone critical tradition. Arnold promoted adherence to the national church on openly civic and functional grounds, though to do so he had to derogate the idea, widely held by British Christians, that the metaphysical truth of Christianity outweighed practical considerations. Eliot, in a career of apologetics that consciously emended Arnold’s, offered a similarly effectual sense of Christianity’s value but enfolded this valuation into a model of cultural holism that forbade individual acts of if/then calculation, avoiding the appearance of bad faith. Eliot’s holism becomes part of Raymond Williams’s conception of the agency of the cultural despite Williams’s lack of interest in the specifically religious project. In brief, the rhetorical difficulty of instrumentalizing Christianity drives instrumental calculation underground, making it illegible against the larger backdrop of romantic anti-utilitarianism in cultural politics. This essay suggests that, when the object is not belief, instrumental approaches to culture present fewer contradictions than is often assumed and that it may be an opportune moment to reconsider them.

This is a pre-copyedited version of an article published in Criticism 61.2, Spring 2019. P. 167-189 following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available from Wayne State University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.13110/criticism.61.2.0167.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents