{"title":"Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering by Cynthia R. Wallace (review)","authors":"Sara Judy","doi":"10.1353/rel.2020.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2020.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"32 1","pages":"167 - 169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80249451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community by Daniel Shank Cruz (review)","authors":"M. Kennel","doi":"10.1353/rel.2020.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2020.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"7 1","pages":"164 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84392895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare ed. by Katherine Steele Brokaw and Jay Zysk (review)","authors":"Richard C. Mccoy","doi":"10.1353/rel.2020.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2020.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"34 1","pages":"147 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77525937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley (review)","authors":"E. Fenton","doi":"10.1353/rel.2020.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2020.0013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"34 1","pages":"149 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79229953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein (review)","authors":"Maeera Y. Shreiber","doi":"10.1353/rel.2020.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2020.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"47 1","pages":"162 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90782161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"God's Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws by John Bugbee (review)","authors":"N. Klassen","doi":"10.1353/rel.2020.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2020.0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"62 3 1","pages":"144 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86392382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"My Dharma…Was That of the Householder\": \"Ethic of the Householder\" in Oxherding Tale","authors":"Houliang Chen","doi":"10.1353/rel.2021.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2021.0033","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:A distinctive feature of Charles Johnson's \"platform work\" Oxherding Tale is his deliberate adoption of Eastern religions including Hinduism, Taoism and especially Zen Buddhism. While many studies have been made about the presence of Buddhism in the novel, it is still necessary to make further efforts to understand, and hence to justify, Johnson's adoption of Zen Buddhism as a source of moral enlightenment for promoting \"the Buddhist way of seeing the world\" and a new understanding of the lives of the people of color. For Johnson, Zen Buddhism is not only important for its religious wisdom and philosophical depth, but more essentially for its moral teachings which are tentatively summarized as \"ethic of the householder\" in this essay. In the first three sections, I explain what the main points of the Buddhist laymen ethics are and how they are dramatized by Johnson in Oxherding Tale, so as to explicate in what sense performing the ethic of the householder is one kind of civic engagement in itself. In the final section, I identify the ethic of the householder as a recurrent motif in many of Johnson's works, as well as a moral code he incorporates into his real life as a layman. By doing so, I hope to cast new light on the scholarship about Johnson's novel's ethics.","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"2 3","pages":"63 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72584378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Discerning Love, Recuperating Hope: The \"Search for God\" in Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter","authors":"Matthew L. Helm","doi":"10.1353/rel.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Even though Carson McCullers described the act of writing as a \"search for God,\" much of the scholarship concerning her debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is suspicious of the role that religion plays in maintaining political acquiescence and hopeful self-deception. Adopting a charitable hermeneutic, this essay takes seriously McCullers' faith as well as the particular religiousness of the text. Therefore, I encounter the novel in terms of McCullers' written \"search for God,\" in which the \"search\" takes the form of loving discernment and \"God\" refers to the recuperative power of hope located within the relationships between persons. First, I posit that the novel's implicit critique of both secularism and religion is postsecular because it acknowledges their joint imbrication in perpetuating racialized segregation without reducing religion to a Marxist opiate of the masses. The novel takes seriously spiritual consciousness as a means of overcoming social and spiritual isolation. Second, I re-read the loving relationships in the novel with the understanding that love is not a resource in rare supply, nor does it place limits on personal freedom. Love between persons is mutually revitalizing and is the novel's primary source of hope. Finally, I stress an attunement to the moments in the novel in which characters have spiritual experiences—revelations during which they glimpse the horizon of God and consider the dialogic interrelatedness of all being. Far from self-delusions, these scenes of spiritual experience build on the novel's themes of relationality and answerability.","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"48 1","pages":"123 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84685616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Close Encounters of the Victorian Kind: The Sci-Fi Fundamentalism of Philip Henry Gosse","authors":"B. Grainger","doi":"10.1353/rel.2021.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2021.0034","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:It has been common to associate Victorian speculative literature—a broad literary genre characterized by supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic themes—with liberal religious movements, such as deism. Despite the cultural significance of evangelicalism during the Victorian era, evangelical works have been excluded from the genre. The late religious works of Philip Henry Gosse, especially his collection The Mysteries of God (1884), expand our understanding of speculative literature in late 19th-century British culture. At a time when the rapid pace of political, scientific, and technological developments spurred Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to imagine the future of human civilization, evangelicals such as Gosse turned an alternative speculative lens on the deep future. In essays such as \"The Colonization of Worlds\" and \"The New Jerusalem,\" Gosse fused emergent narratives of secular progress and technological mastery with older eschatological traditions anticipating the millennial reign of Christ. While many late-Victorian evangelicals abandoned postmillennial hope for premillennial anxiety, Gosse exuded confidence in his ability to harmonize biblical literalism with speculative schemes of interplanetary colonization directed by Providence. This visionary spirit drew upon habits of spiritual eclecticism common to 19th-century evangelicalism, which combined biblical literalism, natural science, poetic imagination, and even esoteric traditions, such as pyramidology. Gosse's writings also illuminate broader cultural tensions of the period, between Romanticism and rationalism, observation and imagination, naturalism and supernaturalism, revelation and naturalism. For all of these reasons, his fantastic and idiosyncratic literary visions deserve to be remembered alongside other works of Victorian speculative literature.","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":"83 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79799477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 by Janet Schrunk Ericksen (review)","authors":"Jacob Riyeff","doi":"10.1353/rel.2021.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rel.2021.0025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43443,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION & LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":"145 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79797756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}