ABSTRACT
What is the role of spiritual experience in poetry? What are the marks of a religious imagination? How close can the secular and the religious be brought together? How do poetic imagination and religious beliefs interact? Exploring such questions through the concept of the religious imagination, this book integrates interdisciplinary research in the area of poetry on the one hand, and theology, philosophy and Christian spirituality on the other. Established theologians, philosophers, literary critics and creative writers explain, by way of contemporary and historical examples, the primary role of the religious imagination in the writing as well as in the reading of poetry.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |44 pages
Theology and Literature in Context
chapter |20 pages
Why Theologians Are Interested in Literature
part |98 pages
The Religious Imagination: From Thomas Aquinas to Wallace Stevens
chapter |20 pages
Law and Divine Mercy in Shakespeare's Religious Imagination
part |58 pages
Inspiration: Poetry and Poetry Reading
part |30 pages
Poets and Spiritual Experience: Mystical Gestures
chapter |12 pages
‘There Is a Verge of the Mind'
chapter |16 pages
‘The Pulse in the Wound'
part |20 pages
Poetry, Religious Imagination and Religious Belief