ABSTRACT
Robert Detweiler was of a slightly younger generation than John Coulson, Peter Walker or Ulrich Simon, but older than the author, and his youth had been spent in Germany helping with the clearing up of the mess and massive human displacement after the Second World War. Prayer is, in his words, 'conversation with God in which the prayee can pour out one's heart, can empty oneself. The tone of the conference and the volume of essays was predominantly negative, moving from forms of nihilism and Thomas Mann to Eliot's The Wasteland, visions of hell in Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett and finally Detweiler's sense of the end of realism in apocalyptic fiction. It was the last time Bishop Walker was to address our conferences and the difference in tone, when set beside his first address on W. H. Auden's Horae Canonicae, given six years earlier, is significant.
