This volume is a collection of essays that explains how literature, philosophy and theology have explored the role of wonder in our lives, particularly through poetry. Wonder has been an object of fascination for these disciplines from the Greek antiquity onwards, yet the connections between their views on the subject are often ignored in subject specific studies. The book is divided into three parts: Part I opens the conversation on wonder in philosophy, Part II is given to theology and Part III to literary perspectives. An international set of contributors, including poets as well as scholars, have produced a study that looks beyond traditional chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, both within the individual essays themselves and in respect to one another. The volume’s wide historical framework is punctuated by four poems by contemporary poets on the theme of wonder. An unconventional foray into one of the best-known themes of the European tradition, this book will be of great interest to scholars of literature, theology and philosophy.

This innovative book aims to create a ‘poetics of Church’ and a ‘religious imaginary’ as alternatives to more institutional and conventional ways of thinking and of being ‘Church’. Structured as a spiritual and literary journey, the work moves from models of the institutional Catholic Church into more radical and ambiguous textual spaces, which the author creates by bringing together an unorthodox group of thinkers referred to as ‘poet-companions’: the 16th-century founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola, the French thinkers Gaston Bachelard and Hélène Cixous, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, and the English playwright Dennis Potter. Inspired especially by the reading and writing practices of Cixous, the author attempts to exemplify Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine—‘feminine writing’—that suggests new ways of seeing and relating. The project’s uniting of Ignatian spirituality with postmodern thinking and its concern with creating new theological, literary and spiritual spaces for women both coincide and contrast with Pope Francis’s pastoral and reformist tendencies, which have neglected to adequately address the marginalisation of women in the Church. As Francis has called for ‘a theology of women’, of which there are, of course, many to draw from, this volume will be a timely contribution with a unique interdisciplinary approach.

The book offers an interpretation of a posthumously published poem by Edwin Muir (1887-1959), beginning The heart could never speak / But that the Word was spoken. The poem is read as summing up Muir's lifelong struggle with fundamental questions about the meaning of existence, questions often developed in dialogue with such figures as Nietzsche, Hslderlin, and Kafka. These references allow us to bring Muir into conversation with modern existentialist philosophy and theology, and Muir's poetic thought is seen as both illuminating and as illuminated by such existentialist thinkers as Heidegger, Bultmann, Kierkegaard, and Berdyaev. Themes such as death, time, love, the nature of language, and the alienation brought about by technological mass society, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe are central to the poem's subject-matter and are dealt with by Muir in such a way as to make possible a Christian version of existentialist thought. The perennial nature of such questions in modern society makes the poem as relevant to contemporary issues in religious thought today as when it was written. For all its simplicity, it is the argument of the book that it makes an abiding contribution to human self-understanding.

The following volume is composed of a number of papers written at various times and already partially printed; they are now revised and gathered together in the hope that they may lead the reader, from somewhat different points of approach, to a single idea. This idea is that religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry. It would naturally follow from this conception that religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and of the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul, when it seeks its sanctions in the sphere of reality, and forgets that its proper concern is to express the ideal. For the dignity of religion, like that of poetry and of every moral ideal, lies precisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit rendering of the meanings and values of life, in its anticipation of perfection; so that the excellence of religion is due to an idealization of experience which, while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science. Its function is rather to draw from reality materials for an image of that ideal to which reality ought to conform, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in the world we crave.

Poetry, including a chapter of blessings and prayers, a section of small, haiku-inspired poems, and an homage to Pulitzer Prize-winner poet Mary Oliver. The sound / of a bell / still reverberating. Or a blackbird / calling / from a corner / of a / field. Asking you / to wake / into this life / or inviting you / deeper / to one that waits. Either way / takes courage, / either way wants you / to be nothing / but that self that / is no self at all.

This book offers a critical edition of arguably the greatest work of English theology in the 20th century: Austin Farrer's Bampton Lectures published as The Glass of Vision in 1948. Farrer was an interdisciplinary genius who made original contributions to philosophy, theology, and biblical studies, as well as to our understanding of the role of imagination in human thought and Christian doctrine. According to Farrer, the three primary themes of these lectures are 'scripture, metaphysics, and poetry,' individually and in relation to each other. The lectures defend his famous theory of divine revelation through images rather than propositions or events, a provocative account of the place of metaphysical reasoning in theology, and a literary approach to the Biblical text that was decades ahead of its time and is still controversial. The Glass of Vision has generated a rich and interesting interdisciplinary conversation that has lasted for decades, starting with commentators such as Helen Gardner and Frank Kermode. In addition to Farrer's full text, this critical edition also contains an introduction to the significance and context of Farrer's thought, and a selection of thirty-years' worth of commentary by leading British and European theologians and literary scholars: David Brown, Ingolf Dalferth, Hans Haugh, Douglas Hedley, David Jasper, and Gerard Loughlin. Of interest to literary and biblical scholars, theologians, and philosophers, this book holds particular value for those exploring the nature of imagination in contemporary thought and scholarship.

“Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.”—Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry the life and times of one of America’s best-known scientists, the father of the atomic bomb who later lobbied for containment of nuclear weaponry. In brief, elegant stanzas, Kelly Cherry examines Oppenheimer’s inspirations, dreams, and values, visiting the events, places, and people that inspired him or led him to despair. She finds his place among scientists of his own time, such as Alan Turing and Albert Einstein, as well as his connections with historical and mythological figures from John Donne to Persephone. “Of course he had blood on his hands. Who did not?” says Cherry, in “The Nature of War.” Again and again in the course of this remarkable poem, Cherry’s narration of Oppenheimer’s life compels her readers to contemplate the vagaries of science, guilt, and our responsibilities to each other. “Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer is a book length poem in which the architect of the atom bomb comes to embody America and the West’s Faustian control of nature and the paradoxical helplessness and guilt which that control entailed. Oppenheim is marvelous, complicated, flawed and admirable character, and these poems read like chapters in a novel without in any way abandoning the intensities of feeling and image or delight in language we associate with lyric poetry. A terrific achievement and a compelling read.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Life Pig and Reel to Reel