John Updike and Religion
John Updike and Religion

Author: James Yerkes

Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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Since then his literary production of more than fifty books in four main genres - novels, short stories, poetry, and critical essays - has consistently and insightfully explored a wide range of religious issues. The essays collected here evaluate the religious dimension of Updike's prodigious literary vision, looking broadly at Updike's understanding of religion in ordinary human experience, in the context of historic Christianity, and in contemporary American culture."--BOOK JACKET.

On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-12-15

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1135879702

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Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life," but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief? On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art. This book will enable you to walk into a museum and talk about the spirituality that is or is not visible in the art you see.

Roger's Version
Roger's Version

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-03-13

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0679645918

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As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God’s existence is irresistibly accumulating. The theological-scientific debate that ensues, and the wicked strategies that Roger employs to disembarrass Dale of his faith, form the substance of this novel—these and the current of erotic attraction that pulls Esther, Roger’s much younger wife, away from him and into Dale’s bed. The novel, a majestic allegory of faith and reason, ends also as a black comedy of revenge, for this is Roger’s version—Roger Chillingworth’s side of the triangle described by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter—made new for a disbelieving age.

Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Redux

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2010-08-26

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 0307744086

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In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.

Terrorist
Terrorist

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2007-07-26

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0141921803

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In his extraordinary and highly charged new novel, John Updike tackles one of America's most burning issues – the threat of Islamist terror from within. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Terrorist traces the journey of one young man, from radicalism to fundamentalism to terrorism, against the backdrop of a fraying urban landscape and an increasingly fragmented community. In beautiful prose, Updike dramatizes the logic of the fundamentalist terrorist – but also suggests ways in which we can counter it, in our words and our actions . . .

Self-Consciousness
Self-Consciousness

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2012-03-13

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0812982967

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John Updike’s memoirs consist of six Emersonian essays that together trace the inner shape of the life, up to the age of fifty-five, of a relatively fortunate American male. The author has attempted, his foreword states, “to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.” In the service of this metaphysical effort, he has been hair-raisingly honest, matchlessly precise, and self-effacingly humorous. He takes the reader beyond self-consciousness, and beyond self-importance, into sheer wonder at the miracle of existence.

Pigeon Feathers
Pigeon Feathers

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-09-18

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0679645764

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When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”

Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike
Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike

Author: John McTavish

Publisher: Lutterworth Press

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0718847644

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Big on style, slight on substance: that has been a common charge over the years by critics of John Updike. In fact, however, John Updike is one of the most serious writers of modern times. Myth, as Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike shows, unlocks his fictional universe and repeatedly breaks open the powerful themes in his literary parables of the gospel. This book also includes a personal tribute to John Updike by his son David, essays by pioneer Updike scholars Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, and an anecdotal chapter in which readers share Updike discoveries and recommendations. All in all, weight is added to the complaint that the master of myth and gospel was shortchanged by the Nobel committee.

In the Beauty of the Lilies
In the Beauty of the Lilies

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2009-07-22

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 0307421333

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In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son, Teddy, becomes a mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism, religious and otherwise, into a life of studied ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter, Esther, who becomes a movie star, an object of worship, an All-American goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, is possessed of a native Christian fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late 1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple, a handful of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence, John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of his later novels.

John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things
John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things

Author: George W. Hunt

Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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Hunt explores three strong currents in Updike's fiction: sex, religion and the notion of art, as these are opposed, confluent and indistinguishable. He devotes most of his space to the religious theme, and one of the most intriguing parts of this study concerns the idea of "Nothingness' and man's response to it in religion.