What happens when poetry deals explicitly with a serious theological issue? In Poetry Does Theology, Jim Rhodes seeks one answer to that question by analyzing the symbiotic relationship that existed between theology and poetry in fourteenth-century England. He pays special attention to the narrative poems of Chaucer, Grosseteste, the Pearl-poet, the author of Saint Erkenwald, and Langland. Rhodes' careful analysis describes how the relationship between theology and poetry underwent a radical transformation as the latter half of the fourteenth century progressed.

Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do Theology'. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Emily Dickinson, Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud and the Tao Te Ching are just some of the influences evident in this book which brings poetry to bear on theology. An atmosphere of wonder and vision is created - as when, for example, through the magic of Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast, Alves evokes a picture of `words which are good to be eaten' - which in turn leads to a meditation on politics, prophecy and the theme of resurrection.

What if the religious themes and allusions in modernist poetry are not just metaphors? Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity’s cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian theology: for them, religion involved intellectual and emotional assent, doctrinal articulation, and ritual practice. Domestico reveals how an important strand of modern poetry actually understood itself in and through the central theological questions of the modernist era: What is transcendence, and how can we think and write about it? What is the sacramental act, and how does its wedding of the immanent and the transcendent inform the poetic act? How can we relate kairos (holy time) to chronos (clock time)? Seeking answers to these complex questions, Domestico examines both modernist institutions (the Criterion) and specific works of modern poetry (Eliot’s Four Quartets and Jones’s The Anathemata). The book also traces the contours of what it dubs “theological modernism”: a body of poetry that is both theological and modernist. In doing so, this book offers a new literary history of the modernist period, one that attends both to the material circulation of texts and to the broader intellectual currents of the time.

A defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

The theology and the poetry of Welch poet R.S. Thomas.

Poet and essayist Sheila Bender tells the story of her family and the family of her son's fiancee coming together, understanding that 25-year-old Seth Bender would be taken off life support. She writes about the months they faced together before the upcoming day that would have been his wedding day, and she tells the story of using poetry to write her way out of grief and find a way of carrying her son's life in her own, a way of understanding mortality and immortality. A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief is accessible, absorbing, and a bringer of peace to those who mourn."

George Herbert (1593-1633) was an Anglican priest, poet and essayist--truly one of the most profound spiritual masters in the English tradition. His spirituality was a synthesis of Evangelical and Catholic piety.

This volume is a collection of essays that explains how literature, philosophy and theology have explored the role of wonder in our lives, particularly through poetry. Wonder has been an object of fascination for these disciplines from the Greek antiquity onwards, yet the connections between their views on the subject are often ignored in subject specific studies. The book is divided into three parts: Part I opens the conversation on wonder in philosophy, Part II is given to theology and Part III to literary perspectives. An international set of contributors, including poets as well as scholars, have produced a study that looks beyond traditional chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, both within the individual essays themselves and in respect to one another. The volume's wide historical framework is punctuated by four poems by contemporary poets on the theme of wonder. An unconventional foray into one of the best-known themes of the European tradition, this book will be of great interest to scholars of literature, theology and philosophy.