Religion

Conversations with Ben Okri collects twenty-six interviews that range from 1986 to 2023 and reflect the international resonance of Nigerian writer Ben Okri's work. The reader is given access to the various phases of Okri's life and career, beginning with his childhood (b. 1959) and upbringing in Nigeria and the publication of his early short stories and novels. The interviews also explore the tremendous success of The Famished Road (for which Okri became the first Black African writer to receive the Booker Prize in 1991) and the dazzling creativity of his subsequent work in a multiplicity of literary genres. The volume offers insight into the writer's creative process and his unique views on literature, history, memory, politics, freedom, spirituality, and environmental issues. The conversations often veer into fascinating philosophical discussions about the nature of art and reality, the value of myth, and the dynamics of storytelling. Since the publication of his first novel in 1980, Okri has encouraged his readers to open their minds and eyes to new modes of perceiving reality. Convinced of the universality of art, he has been intent on redreaming the world from a variety of perspectives in poems, essays, short stories, novels, and plays written over a period of more than forty years. Throughout his career, Ben Okri has never stopped experimenting with new forms, creating the stoku (a mixture of short story and haiku), endowing his fictional and nonfictional creations with poetic undertones, and collaborating with visual artists, musicians, and dancers.

Some of the greatest works of Western literature have been inspired or influenced by powerful Christian themes. In this fresh evaluation of this relationship and its development over the last two millennia, Ambrose Mong studies a series of authors representative of the changing epochs. Augustine, Dante and Milton all wrote to serve the needs of the Christian community, and combine their religious themes with scholarly excellence. Meanwhile Shakespeare's plays and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, though not specific to the Christian faith, nevertheless betray the dominant Christian values and imagery of their time. Finally, in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Greene's The Power and the Glory, Christianity is put under scrutiny, reflecting the increasing insecurity of its place in society. Throughout, Mong also shows that the themes in these works are to a certain extent universal. Creation, sin, suffering and forgiveness are perennial human concerns, beyond the exclusive purview of Christianity, and these texts serve to challenge Christian assumptions as much as they are influenced by them. Always thorough and sensitive to the unique context of each writer, Mong's analysis provides an important grounding in the way Western literature has shaped and been shaped by the religion of its day.

How does one culture 'read' another? In Literature and Religion, two scholars, one from China and one from the West, each read texts from the other's culture as a means of dialogue. A key issue in such an enterprise is the nature of religion and what we understand by that term in a world in which ancient religious customs seem to be dying or under threat. Does a comparative study of religious literature offer a way towards mutual understanding - or merely illustrate our differences? Underpinned by their own friendship, these two partners in conversation show what is possible.

Public Religions in the Future World is the first book to map the utopian terrain of the political-religious movements of the past four decades. Examining a politically diverse set of utopian fictions, this book cuts across the usual Right/Left political divisions to show a surprising convergence: each political-religious vision imagines a revived world of care and community over and against the economization and fragmentation of neoliberalism. Understanding these religions as utopian movements in reaction to neoliberalism, Public Religions invites us to rethink the bases of religious identification and practice. Offering new insights on texts from the Left Behind series to the novels of Octavia Butler, Public Religions shows that the utopian energy of the present opens new opportunities for political organizing and genuine, lasting community building. Public Religions in the Future World presents a literary history of the political-religious present, arguing that the power of public religion lies in the utopian visions that underlie religious beliefs. It shows that contemporary literary utopianism is deeply inflected with religious ideas, with the visions, values, and ambitions of Christianity, Islam, nature mysticism, and other traditions. Further, Public Religions demonstrates that this utopianism's religiosity is in turn politically inflected, that it resonates with and underwrites a range of competing political projects: those of imperialism, globalization, neoliberal capitalism, deep ecology, and the pro-migration movement. David Morris constructs a working theory of how religion makes large-scale interventions in political debates. The novels in his study draw on religious traditions to articulate visions, programs, or missions for achieving some version of an improved world. In doing so, they undertake the work of literary postmodernism: to represent globality, to recover the voices of the underrepresented, and to imagine a future that escapes the destructiveness of global capitalism.

Catholic novelists enjoy greater visibility in American letters today than they did almost a decade ago, when Dana Gioia offered a sobering diagnosis of decline in "The Catholic Writer Today." Major contemporary authors have invoked Bernanos, Waugh, and other legends as their literary ancestors, and a small but active cohort of Catholic writers has answered Gioia's call to renew their tradition. This flourishing has coincided, however, with aggressive challenges to the basic tenets of Christianity in mainstream culture. In the words of Piers Paul Read, any writer known to hold traditional views on social and moral questions "not only limits his appeal among readers: he is even seen as an enemy of enlightenment and progress." Outside of a small subculture, it is rare to meet with the bold conviction-at once religious and artistic-that gave such works as Sword of Honour and Wise Blood their distinctive blend of moral seriousness and dark comedy.Under these perilous conditions, can today's writers bridge the divide between religious faith and the secular audience for fiction? In this swift yet comprehensive survey, Trevor Cribben Merrill considers the works of Martin Mosebach, Christopher Beha, Randy Boyagoda, and many others. Even as these novelists demonstrate the resurgent vitality of the Catholic vision in our era, their work also highlights the difficulty of combining theological weight and artistic skill in a cultural context that strongly encourages their separation.

"Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery. The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute."What does it mean to be an artist? To be an artist and a believer, in the midst of a world so steeped in utility, secularity, "science," and technology that it seems to have no time or place for either? What are the contrasts and parallels among art, prudence, morality, wisdom, and contemplation? These profound questions are asked by too few and answered by still fewer. If we could overhear a conversation about them, would we not find Jacques Maritain and Flannery O'Connor a surprisingly well-matched pair-the influential matchmaker of the wedding of "art and scholasticism" and the great fiction writer who nourished herself from the Summa? Equipped with intimate and sympathetic knowledge of each writer, Joseph Nicolello deftly weaves a dialogue between the French philosopher and the American storyteller, in which first he, then she, takes the guiding role, exploring grand themes of "mystery and manners," the interdependencies of doing, making, thinking, and feeling, theological poetics and connatural knowledge, the requisites and rewards of literary culture-all the while taking sniper-like shots at modern idols and idiocies. The "Gloss and Primer" in advance of the dialogue presents us with a vision of how the art of fiction, and particularly Catholic fiction, can regain its bearings and its inspiration.

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Godless is a compilation of wide-ranging texts, both hilarious and horrifying, on atheism, belief, and religion. The selections in the book appeared in various formats from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, and their authors were often active in the anarchist, Marxist, or radical leftist movements of their day. Derived from printed pamphlets, periodicals, and newspaper pieces that were mass-produced and widely distributed, these texts serve as freethinking propaganda in a media war against morbid authoritarian doctrines.With both a sophisticated analysis of inconsistencies in deistic beliefs and a biting satirical edge, Godless gives ammunition to those fighting fundamentalist bigotry—and more than a few reasons to abandon Christianity.Readers previously familiar with the authors’ political polemics will be rewarded in contemplating another side of their remarkable literary output. Contributors include Emma Goldman, Ambrose Bierce, Chaz Bufe, E. Haldeman-Julius, Earl Lee, G. Richard Bozarth, Johann Most, Joseph McCabe, Matilda Gage, Pamela Sutter, S.C. Hitchcock, and Sébastien Faure.

The great Victorian Christian author George MacDonald is the wellspring of the modern fantasy genre. In this book Colin Manlove offers explorations of MacDonald's eight shorter fairy tales and his longer stories At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, and The Princess and Curdie. MacDonald saw the imagination as the source of fairy tales and of divine truth together. For he believed that God lives in the depths of the human mind and ""sends up from thence wonderful gifts into the light of the understanding."" This makes MacDonald that very rare thing: a writer of mystical fiction whose work can give us experience of the divine. Throughout his children's fantasy stories MacDonald is describing the human and divine imagination. In the shorter tales he shows how the imagination has different regions and depths, each able to shift into the other. With the longer stories we see the imagination in relation to other aspects of the self and to its position in the world. Here the imagination is portrayed as often embattled in relation to empiricism, egotism, and greed.

'Among his associates no one loved him, many disliked him, and more feared him.' Father Schedoni is enlisted by the imperious Marchesa di Vivaldi to prevent her son from marrying the beautiful Ellena. Schedoni has no scruples in kidnapping Ellena and in undertaking whatever villainy will further his own ends. His menacing presence dominates a gripping tale of love and betrayal, abduction and assassination, and incarceration in the dreadful dungeons of the Inquisition. Uncertainty and doubt lie everywhere, in Radcliffe's last and most unnerving novel. Ann Radcliffe defined the 'terror' genre of writing and helped to establish the Gothic novel, thrilling readers with her mysterious plots and eerie effects. In The Italian she rejects the rational certainties of the Enlightenment for a more ambiguous and unsettling account of what it is to be an individual - particularly a woman - in a culture haunted by history and dominated by institutional power. This new edition includes Radcliffe's important essay 'On the Supernatural in Poetry', in which she distinguishes terror writing from horror.

GEKL

Rethinking religion and literature in a series of chapters by leading international scholars, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths opens up a dialogue between Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Post-Secular literary cultures.Literary studies has absorbed religion as another interdisciplinary mode of inquiry without always attending to its multifacted potential to question ideologically neutral readings of culture, belief, emotion, politics and inequality. In response, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths contributes to a reevaluation of the nexus between religion and literature that is socially, affectively and materially determined in its sensitivity to the expression of belief.Each section - Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Post-Secularism - is introduced by a specialist in these respective areas to introduce the critical readings of the texts and discourses that follow.

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God<BR><BR>In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.<BR><BR>Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."<BR><BR>A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.