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Literature and Theology, septembre 2007

Literature and Theology, septembre 2007

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la revue)


Literature and Theology provides a forum for interdisciplinarydialogue, inviting both close textual analysis and broader theoreticalspeculation as ways of exploring how religion is embedded withinculture. Contributions, addressing questions of interest to both thedisciplines of literature and theology, are encouraged to confront andchallenge traditional modes of discourse within a wide range of relatedfields, encompassing biblical criticism, literary criticism,philosophy, politics, history, cultural studies, and contemporarycritical theory or practice.


Vol. 21, no 3 (septembre 2007)


Fiona Darroch
Introduction

Philip Sheldrake
Placing the Sacred: Transcendence and the City
What do we mean by the sacred? Classical polarisations between the sacred and the secular are open to question and impact strongly on how we conceptualise and materialise ‘sacred space’. This essay specifically relates thinking about sacred space to the meaning and future of cities. It explores classic Christian understandings of urban sacred spaces as well as of the city itself as sacred. It then contrasts the thinking of Michel de Certeau and Le Corbusier concerning Modernist urban planning, and finally explores key ideas regarding the sacred in relation to contemporary architecture and urban values.

Karen Wenell
St Peter's College and the Desacralisation of Space
The purpose-built seminary complex of St Peter's College, outside of Cardross village in Scotland, is a place which challenges, and has the potential to refine, our understandings of sacred space. Only in use as a Catholic seminary for fourteen years, the college now lies in disuse and ruin. At the architectural heart of the complex, the sanctuary once functioned as a place of ritual performance in the daily celebration of Mass. This article considers the college, and the chapel in particular, in context of the ethos of the community that first inhabited the buildings in the 1960s and 1970s, and in light of its subsequent history and current state. Theoretical issues surrounding the practices and beliefs of sacred space are explored in relation to the desacralisation of space, or the process by which the religious meaning of space is unmade.

Graham Holderness
‘The Undiscovered Country’: Philip Pullman and the ‘Land of the Dead’
The place of the dead is a sacred space. But modern scientific theories of life and death concede no meaning to immortality. Using paradigms of place and non-place from Marc Augé, and ideas on sacred space from Mircea Eliade, Albert Rouet and Philip Sheldrake, this article explores narratives of descent into the underworld from classical and Christian sources, focusing on a contemporary version provided in Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass. Although Pullman is an avowed atheist who denies religious ideas of postmortality, it is argued that his version of the descent into the Land of the Dead is an interpretation of the Christian Harrowing of Hell.

John D. Barbour
Edward Said and the Space of Exile
In his memoir, Out of Place (1999), Edward Said described the condition of exile as the source of his most deeply held beliefs about himself and the world. His use of exile as a metaphor is in several ways analogous to the ways in which diasporic religious communities orient themselves in relation to space and time. Although Said was critical of the dangerous idea of sacred space, the space of exile is in certain respects similar to a religious myth in its shaping influence on his life, as revealed in his autobiography.

Helga Ramsey-Kurz
Tokens or Totems? Eccentric Props in Postcolonial Re-enactments of Colonial Consecration

During colonial expansion the ceremonial insertion of archetypes of European civilisation into terra nullius served two opposing ends: to make visible territorial claims and to conceal the illegitimacy of these claims. While aware of this ambivalence, modern texts re-enacting colonial spectacles of territorial consecration are not always wholly critical of European cultivating zeal but may also trace a genuinely idealistic impulse in it. The films Fitzcarraldo and The Piano and the novels Oscar and Lucinda and Remembering Babylon are cases in point. They rewrite colonial history by telling intricately ironical stories of failure and ascribing special sacredness to the settings as well as to the mementos of the defeats they recount.

Kathryn Bevis
‘Better than metaphors’? Dwelling and the Maternal Body in Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas once described his own textual practise as ‘mieux que les metaphores’. Yet surprisingly little detailed attention has been paid to the poetic texture of his prose. This neglect seems curious in Levinas's case as metaphor–or something like it–is such a governing influence in his philosophy. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas focuses on sensible elements of human experience, particularly the subject's indwelling of her own body. This concentration leads him to a radical use of metaphors for the ethical exposure to the Other, which is best exemplified by the unique indwelling, or incarnation of the-other-in-the-same, in the figure of the maternal body. Ultimately, the idiosyncratic metaphor of maternity is particularly appropriate for representing what I shall call the ‘sensible transcendent’ in Levinas. His concentration on the body, in particular its vulnerability and exposure, gives scope for a new understanding of how it is that the human person can encounter that which lies beyond herself.


COMPTES RENDUS DE LECTURE

Matthew Forrest Lowe
Blake, Nation and Empire
. Edited by David Worrall and Steve Clark.


Brian Murdoch
The Truest Fairy Tale. An Anthology of the Religious Writings of G. K. Chesterton
. By Kevin L. Morris.

Melanie J. WrightTheology Goes to the Movies. An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking. By Clive Marsh. Brian MurdochThe Monk and the Book. Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship. By Megan Hale Williams. Elisabeth JayThe Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. By Michael Wheeler.