ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains about the three most significant papers from the first three conferences of 1982, 1984 and 1986, all held in the University of Durham. It explores entitled Images of Belief in Literature(1984), 7he Interpretation of Belief(1986) and The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe (1989), all of them edited by DavidJasper though in the last case with a co-editor, T. R. Wright. The first two conferences in 1982 and 1984 established the theological sense of what we were trying to do, after the Holocaust and after Vatican II, as well as the hermeneutical roots in English and German Romanticism, the third conference in 1986 moved us inevitably into the nineteenth century. The fourth conference of 1988, which was almost the last to be held in Durham, were published in a volume entitled European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century: Ends if Time(1990).
