Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Gives serious attention to the relationship between the religions and literatures of the East (a feature no other anthology like this can claim)...a welcome addition to books exploring the boundaries of art, literature, and religion."
Synopsis
These essays, interdisciplinary in their approach, demonstrate the variegation of the religious imagination from the broadest historical and denominational scope. By examining the works of philosophers and theologians, of poets, painters, and novelists - from Saint Mark to Jacques Derrida and from Erasmus, Loyola, and Milton to Rouault to Andrew Greeley - the essayists seek to answer the question Jesus posed to his disciples: "Who do you say that I am?" and to anticipate the equally contentious query: "How do you say who I am?"
The essays together explore the religious imagination through the question of transcendence, using both the age-old Christian imagination and the contemporary world wherein the divisions between religious cultures are less fixed, an age of imaginative permeability where the absence of God is as present as the presence of God.
About the Author
John C. Hawley is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University. He is the editor of several books, including Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Colonial Borders and Writing the Nation: Self and Country in Postcolonial Imagination.