{"title":"The Charge of God: <i>Laudato Si’</i> read through Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins","authors":"Michael D Hurley","doi":"10.1093/litthe/frad021","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract G. K. Chesterton, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are set in conversation with Pope Francis’s Laudato Si (2015), to show how far those writers anticipate its animus against technocratic capitalism, but also, more surprisingly, how far Laudato Si challenges the progressive assumptions of contemporary eco-activism. Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins do not merely foreshadow and clarify the theological stakes of a papal document. By making even single words expressive of a whole worldview (achieving what William Empson called a ‘compacted doctrine’), their writings prove more imaginatively affective, as well as–this essay’s boldest gambit–more theologically adequate than the communicative formalities available to the theological treatise as a genre.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Literature and Theology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad021","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract G. K. Chesterton, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are set in conversation with Pope Francis’s Laudato Si (2015), to show how far those writers anticipate its animus against technocratic capitalism, but also, more surprisingly, how far Laudato Si challenges the progressive assumptions of contemporary eco-activism. Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins do not merely foreshadow and clarify the theological stakes of a papal document. By making even single words expressive of a whole worldview (achieving what William Empson called a ‘compacted doctrine’), their writings prove more imaginatively affective, as well as–this essay’s boldest gambit–more theologically adequate than the communicative formalities available to the theological treatise as a genre.
期刊介绍:
Literature and Theology, a quarterly peer-review journal, provides a critical non-confessional forum for both textual analysis and theoretical speculation, encouraging explorations of how religion is embedded in culture. Contributions should address questions pertinent to both literary study and theology broadly understood, and be consistent with the Journal"s overall aim: to engage with and reshape traditional discourses within the studies of literature and religion, and their cognate fields - biblical criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, culture studies, gender studies, artistic theory/practice, and contemporary critical theory/practice.