Through a Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination

John Charles Hawley

Jan 1996 · Fordham Univ Press

About this ebook

These essays, interdisciplinary in their approach, demonstrate the variegation of the religious imagination from the broadest historical and denominational scope. By examining the works of philosophers and theologians, of poets, painters, and novelists - from Saint Mark to Jacques Derrida and from Erasmus, Loyola, and Milton to Rouault to Andrew Greeley - the essayists seek to answer the question Jesus posed to his disciples: "Who do you say that I am?" and to anticipate the equally contentious query: "How do you say who I am?"

The essays together explore the religious imagination through the question of transcendence, using both the age-old Christian imagination and the contemporary world wherein the divisions between religious cultures are less fixed, an age of imaginative permeability where the absence of God is as present as the presence of God.

About the author

John C. Hawley is a Professor of English at Santa Clara University. He has served on the executive committee of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, and the MLA's executive committees on Literature and Religion, on Literature in English Other Than British and American, and on Postcolonial Studies, and served on its Delegate Assembly. He has been President of the Faculty Senate here, and has served as President of the U.S. chapter of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. His research interests include victorian and postcolonial literatures, gender studies and the intersection between religion and literature. He has edited a number of books including The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial, Queer, and Divine Aporia.