Unaccommodated Religion

Abstract

Shakespeare's King Lear offers later writers a scaffolding on which to construct do-it-yourself religions that emerge when intentional and unintentional pilgrims venture, abdicate, or are expelled from existing institutional orders and discover the covenantal core of religion when they encounter Other dispossessed people. Shakespeare's play, in dialogue with the Book of Job, develops the idea of a suffering God that is latent in the Hebrew Bible. When students at the University of Michigan-Flint adapted the play to their contemporary environment, they began their own pilgrimages into a wounded city and family traumas. Without biblical literacy, they instinctively reached for John Keats’ Lear-inspired ‘Vale of Suffering’ letter and the Bible-belt inflected stories of Flannery O'Connor to reassemble Lear as a religious play for today.