Innocence is a rich and emotive idea, but what does it really mean? This is a significant question both for literary interpretation and theology—yet one without a straightforward answer. This volume provides a critical overview of key issues and historical developments in the concept of innocence, delving into its ambivalences and exploring the many transformations of innocence within literature and theology. The contributions in this volume, by leading scholars in their respective fields, provide a range of responses to this critical question. They address literary and theological treatments of innocence from the birth of modernity to the present day. They discuss major symbols and themes surrounding innocence, including purity and sexuality, childhood and inexperience, nostalgia and utopianism, morality and virtue. This interdisciplinary collection explores the many sides of innocence, from aesthetics to ethics, from semantics to metaphysics, examining the significance of innocence as both a concept and a word. The contributions reveal how innocence has progressed through centuries of dramatic alterations, secularizations and subversions, while retaining an enduring relevance as a key concept in human thought, experience, and imagination.

This book traces the history of what it terms the “lie of innocence” as represented in literary texts from the late 18th century to contemporary times. The writers selected here – William Blake, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Cormac McCarthy – write at various points in which the western world was undergoing a process of secularization. This work commences with a study of the bible demonstrating the extent to which “innocence” is realized there as a lie. It identifies in the bible how “innocence” is used for political, social and ethical expediency, and suggests that the explications of each reference can be demonstrated to testify to an absence of innocence, to indeed the lie of its supposed meaning. In analyzing the selected texts, emphasis is given to the continuation of biblical relevance even when the described world of social behavior works outside religious and biblical notions of good and evil. Instead, this book embraces an interconnection between Nietzsche’s “innocence of becoming” and the biblical tree of life that had been rejected in western mythology. It is, this work argues, the choice to sanctify the biblical tree of knowledge that presumed to know what was good and what was evil that brought about the lie of innocence. The book focuses on the relationship between fathers and sons, arguing that it is the orphan son, cut away from paternal ties, who embodies the possibility for the world to embrace an “innocence of becoming”. It further shows, with some optimism, that in a post-apocalyptical world, as envisaged by McCarthy, the son can be freed to choose the tree of life over the tree of knowledge.

Ten true tales of people falsely accused detail the flaws in the criminal justice system that landed these people in prison

The essays collected in this volume provide a resource for thinking theologically about the practice of Christian prayer. In the first of four parts, the volume begins by reaching back to the biblical foundations of prayer. Then, each of the chapters in the second part investigates a classical Christian doctrine – including God, creation, Christology, pneumatology, providence and eschatology – from the perspective of prayer. The chapters in the third part explore the writings of some of the great theorizers of prayer in the history of the Christian tradition. The final part gathers a set of creative and critical conversations on prayer responding to a variety of contemporary issues. Overall, the T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer articulates a theologically expansive account of prayer – one that is deeply biblical, energetically doctrinal, historically rooted, and relevant to a whole host of critical questions and concerns facing the world today.

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.