Literature and Theology, septembre 2007

Literature and Theology provides a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue, inviting both close textual analysis and broader theoretical speculation as ways of exploring how religion is embedded within culture. Contributions, addressing questions of interest to both the disciplines of literature and theology, are encouraged to confront and challenge traditional modes of discourse within a wide range of related fields, encompassing biblical criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, history, cultural studies, and contemporary critical 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 betweenthe sacred and the secular are open to question and impact stronglyon how we conceptualise and materialise ‘sacred space’.This essay specifically relates thinking about sacred spaceto the meaning and future of cities. It explores classic Christianunderstandings of urban sacred spaces as well as of the cityitself as sacred. It then contrasts the thinking of Michel deCerteau and Le Corbusier concerning Modernist urban planning,and finally explores key ideas regarding the sacred in relationto 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, outsideof Cardross village in Scotland, is a place which challenges,and has the potential to refine, our understandings of sacredspace. Only in use as a Catholic seminary for fourteen years,the college now lies in disuse and ruin. At the architecturalheart of the complex, the sanctuary once functioned as a placeof ritual performance in the daily celebration of Mass. Thisarticle considers the college, and the chapel in particular,in context of the ethos of the community that first inhabitedthe buildings in the 1960s and 1970s, and in light of its subsequenthistory and current state. Theoretical issues surrounding thepractices and beliefs of sacred space are explored in relationto the desacralisation of space, or the process by which thereligious 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 scientifictheories 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 andPhilip Sheldrake, this article explores narratives of descentinto the underworld from classical and Christian sources, focusingon a contemporary version provided in Philip Pullman's The AmberSpyglass. Although Pullman is an avowed atheist who denies religiousideas of postmortality, it is argued that his version of thedescent into the Land of the Dead is an interpretation of theChristian Harrowing of Hell.

John D. Barbour
Edward Said and the Space of Exile
In his memoir, Out of Place (1999), Edward Said described thecondition of exile as the source of his most deeply held beliefsabout himself and the world. His use of exile as a metaphoris in several ways analogous to the ways in which diasporicreligious communities orient themselves in relation to spaceand time. Although Said was critical of the dangerous idea ofsacred space, the space of exile is in certain respects similarto a religious myth in its shaping influence on his life, asrevealed 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 archetypesof European civilisation into terra nullius served two opposingends: to make visible territorial claims and to conceal theillegitimacy of these claims. While aware of this ambivalence,modern texts re-enacting colonial spectacles of territorialconsecration are not always wholly critical of European cultivatingzeal but may also trace a genuinely idealistic impulse in it.The films Fitzcarraldo and The Piano and the novels Oscar andLucinda and Remembering Babylon are cases in point. They rewritecolonial history by telling intricately ironical stories offailure and ascribing special sacredness to the settings aswell 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 littledetailed attention has been paid to the poetic texture of hisprose. This neglect seems curious in Levinas's case as metaphor–orsomething like it–is such a governing influence in hisphilosophy. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas focuses on sensibleelements of human experience, particularly the subject's indwellingof her own body. This concentration leads him to a radical useof metaphors for the ethical exposure to the Other, which isbest exemplified by the unique indwelling, or incarnation ofthe-other-in-the-same, in the figure of the maternal body. Ultimately,the idiosyncratic metaphor of maternity is particularly appropriatefor representing what I shall call the ‘sensible transcendent’in Levinas. His concentration on the body, in particular itsvulnerability and exposure, gives scope for a new understandingof how it is that the human person can encounter that whichlies 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. Wright Theology Goes to the Movies. An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking. By Clive Marsh. Brian Murdoch The Monk and the Book. Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship. By Megan Hale Williams. Elisabeth Jay The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. By Michael Wheeler.