This article looks at how Wendell Berry’s short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as ‘ordinary’ because of the way that they refuse a heroic mode of standing above the world and instead accept and live into the vulnerable connections that mark our materiality. I show also how this acceptance, and not any attempt to transcend the ordinary, is what opens these deaths up to the sacred, which I argue is a mark of belonging in love to the world and the love that moves the world. In the second section, I outline the relational role death plays in inaugurating and sustaining the gift-giving relational bonds that make up the life of affection in a place, such that there is a sense in which it is death that opens us up to love, even as death always marks an absence.
{"title":"Good Deaths in Wendell Berry’s Short Stories","authors":"Gerald Ens","doi":"10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article looks at how Wendell Berry’s short stories depicting good deaths offer a crucial exploration of the incarnate bonds of human affection. They do so, I argue, by pointing us to the vulnerable ordinariness of embodied love. I first describe these good deaths as ‘ordinary’ because of the way that they refuse a heroic mode of standing above the world and instead accept and live into the vulnerable connections that mark our materiality. I show also how this acceptance, and not any attempt to transcend the ordinary, is what opens these deaths up to the sacred, which I argue is a mark of belonging in love to the world and the love that moves the world. In the second section, I outline the relational role death plays in inaugurating and sustaining the gift-giving relational bonds that make up the life of affection in a place, such that there is a sense in which it is death that opens us up to love, even as death always marks an absence.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86535417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Current church debates and queer scholarship unearth Sodom as a site for contesting the relationships between sexuality, religion, queerness, and destruction. In John Rechy’s novels City of Night and Numbers, the Sodom story provides an archetype for the books’ hustler narrators, whose insatiable desires draw them repeatedly back into ‘the city of night of the soul’, and ultimately, oblivion. Drawing on Heather Love and Catherine Keller, I read Rechy as adapting the Sodom story rather than rejecting it in favour of progress or liberation, as do many queer biblical interpreters and theologians. Rechy’s hustlers display a sodomitic subjectivity in their refusal to be whole, which has made his relation to gay/queer and Chicanx literary canons uneasy. Precisely in his ‘backwardness’, Rechy illustrates how theological categories continue to shape gay/queer identities in the 20th century and today.
{"title":"JOHN RECHY’S SODOMITES","authors":"Samuel Ernest","doi":"10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Current church debates and queer scholarship unearth Sodom as a site for contesting the relationships between sexuality, religion, queerness, and destruction. In John Rechy’s novels City of Night and Numbers, the Sodom story provides an archetype for the books’ hustler narrators, whose insatiable desires draw them repeatedly back into ‘the city of night of the soul’, and ultimately, oblivion. Drawing on Heather Love and Catherine Keller, I read Rechy as adapting the Sodom story rather than rejecting it in favour of progress or liberation, as do many queer biblical interpreters and theologians. Rechy’s hustlers display a sodomitic subjectivity in their refusal to be whole, which has made his relation to gay/queer and Chicanx literary canons uneasy. Precisely in his ‘backwardness’, Rechy illustrates how theological categories continue to shape gay/queer identities in the 20th century and today.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91178397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment: Radical Gospels from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. By Jonathan C.P Birch","authors":"J. Greenaway, orcid","doi":"10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"75 1","pages":"100-102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75093543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses the romantic-Zionist poetry of Nina Davis Salaman, contextualising it alongside other fin-de-siècle Zionist poets to argue that she too similarly adopted bibliocentric, prophetic, and diasporic perspectives, particularly themes associated with the medieval Andalusian poetry of Judah Halevi. In doing so, Salaman, much like other Anglo-Jewish women writers, defined her own subjectivity in the context of nostalgic, romanticising religious and nationalistic discourses. However, uniquely, Salaman’s poetry adopts not only the themes of medieval Andalusian verse yearning for Zion-Jerusalem and the land of Israel, but also, as she put it, its diasporic ‘clothing of metre and rhyme’. Indeed, Salaman’s romantic poetry is populated with intertextual links recalling the biblical Prophets and Halevi’s exilic poetry, which offer historical and scriptural substantiation to support contemporaneous Zionist discourses. Songs of Many Days draws equally on her underlying belief that ‘metre and rhyme’, including in her own poetry, are a feature of diasporic existence.
{"title":"‘Zion, Memory and Hope of All Ages’: Nina Davis Salaman’s Romantic-Zionist Poetry","authors":"Luke Devine","doi":"10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/LITTHE/FRAB001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article analyses the romantic-Zionist poetry of Nina Davis Salaman, contextualising it alongside other fin-de-siècle Zionist poets to argue that she too similarly adopted bibliocentric, prophetic, and diasporic perspectives, particularly themes associated with the medieval Andalusian poetry of Judah Halevi. In doing so, Salaman, much like other Anglo-Jewish women writers, defined her own subjectivity in the context of nostalgic, romanticising religious and nationalistic discourses. However, uniquely, Salaman’s poetry adopts not only the themes of medieval Andalusian verse yearning for Zion-Jerusalem and the land of Israel, but also, as she put it, its diasporic ‘clothing of metre and rhyme’. Indeed, Salaman’s romantic poetry is populated with intertextual links recalling the biblical Prophets and Halevi’s exilic poetry, which offer historical and scriptural substantiation to support contemporaneous Zionist discourses. Songs of Many Days draws equally on her underlying belief that ‘metre and rhyme’, including in her own poetry, are a feature of diasporic existence.","PeriodicalId":43172,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Theology","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84890586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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