Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel
Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel

Author: Ryan S. Kemp

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1350106976

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In her five novels and many essays, Marilynne Robinson develops a distinctive Christian vision animated by a powerfully affirmative and sacramental attitude toward the physical world and everyday human life. An in-depth philosophical exploration of her work – from Gilead to her extensive non-fiction writing – Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel reads the author's theology as articulating a compelling response to the claim that Christianity is an otherworldly religion whose adherents seek through it to escape the misfortunes of this life. Ryan Kemp and Jordan Rodgers argue that Robinson's work challenges the modern atheistic tradition dating back to Friedrich Nietzsche to present a unique form of contemporary faith that seeks to affirm the world rather than deny its claims.

The Givenness of Things
The Givenness of Things

Author: Marilynne Robinson

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2015-10-27

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0374714312

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The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations. Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.

Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel
Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel

Author: Ryan S. Kemp

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 135010695X

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In her five novels and many essays, Marilynne Robinson develops a distinctive Christian vision animated by a powerfully affirmative and sacramental attitude toward the physical world and everyday human life. An in-depth philosophical exploration of her work – from Gilead to her extensive non-fiction writing – Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel reads the author's theology as articulating a compelling response to the claim that Christianity is an otherworldly religion whose adherents seek through it to escape the misfortunes of this life. Ryan Kemp and Jordan Rodgers argue that Robinson's work challenges the modern atheistic tradition dating back to Friedrich Nietzsche to present a unique form of contemporary faith that seeks to affirm the world rather than deny its claims.

Absence of Mind
Absence of Mind

Author: Marilynne Robinson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 0300166478

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In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.

Balm in Gilead
Balm in Gilead

Author: Timothy Larsen

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0830872965

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Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson is one of the most eminent public intellectuals in America today, and her writing offers probing meditations on the Christian faith. Based on the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, this volume brings together the thoughts of leading theologians, historians, literary scholars, and church leaders who engaged in theological dialogue with Robinson's work—and with the author herself.

Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination
Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Author: Denae Dyck

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 135033538X

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Examining the creative thought that arose in response to 19th-century religious controversies, this book demonstrates that the pressures exerted by historical methods of biblical scholarship prompted an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. During the Victorian period, new approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts called into question traditional ideas about biblical inspiration, motivating literary transformations of inherited symbols, metaphors, and forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Denae Dyck considers how Victorian writers from a variety of belief positions used wisdom literature to reframe their experiences of questioning, doubt, and uncertainty: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George MacDonald, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. This study contributes to the reassessment of historical and contemporary narratives of secularization by calling attention to wisdom literature as a vital, distinctive genre that animated the search for meaning within an increasingly ideologically diverse world.

Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative
Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative

Author: Chad Schrock

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-10-17

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1350417432

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Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author. Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry – its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions. Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.

Theologies of Pain
Theologies of Pain

Author: Lucas Hardy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-10-17

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1350400386

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With the arrival of Puritan settlers in New England in the middle decades of the 17th-century, accounts of sickness, colonial violence, and painful religious transformation quickly emerged, enabling new forms of testimonial writing in prose and poetry. Investigating a broad transatlantic archive of religious literature, historical medical science, and philosophies of sensation, this book explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing. By weaving the experience of pained bodies into popular public discourse, Hardy shows how Puritans imagined the pained Christian body, whilst simultaneously marginalizing and vilifying those who expressed suffering by different measures, including Indigenous Americans and unorthodox colonists. Focusing on pain as it emerged from spaces of inchoate settlement and colonial violence, he provides new understandings of early American nationalism and connected racial tropes which persist today.

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature
Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

Author: Matthew Smalley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1350400076

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With seemingly obsessive regularity, American authors, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evoke the sermon at culturally loaded moments in their works, deploying the form to underscore the cultural work they imagine their novels or poetry to perform. Examining this longstanding tradition of “literary preaching,” this book draws on literary applications of design theory to provide a nuanced account of American literature's complex, anxious, and persistent engagement with the Protestant sermon. Analyzing literary preaching as a transhistorical form that simultaneously attracts and repels authors, Smalley demonstrates how major US writers–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison–have subverted the sermon's predominantly religious content in order to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, and aesthetic mode. This study elucidates new lines of literary kinship, offers fresh readings of familiar works, and establishes literary preaching as an undertheorized but significant tradition in American literature.

The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology
The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology

Author: Charles Andrews

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-01-11

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1350362050

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Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.