[DOWNLOAD] "Afterword (Essay)" by Christianity and Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Afterword (Essay)
- Author : Christianity and Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Religion & Spirituality,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 60 KB
Description
This first set of reflections hosted by the MLA on the "turn to religion in literary studies" gives us a wide range of questions and issues that could be discussed for a very long time. We hear of new texts that are invited to come under the shelter of "religion and literature," while "religion and literature" itself is invited to take a step or two outside its traditional borders and experience some new possibilities. All this is good. By way of response, I would like to point out a couple of opportunities that have been missed and add a caveat or two about some things that have been said. For a theologian, it can only seem odd that these first reflections on the "turn to religion" in literary criticism make no reference to its forerunner, the "theological turn" in phenomenology. When Dominique Janicaud first used the expression, "theological turn" was said with something of a sneer, as though the adjective was code for a patent embarrassment; and now the heavy hint of disparagement can hardly be heard. Catholics of a scholarly leaning may well find a parallel in an event in 1942. That's when Pietro Parente, working for the Holy Office, threw the expression la nouvelle theologie at Marie-Dominique Chenu and Louis Charlier, whose work had been critical of the rigid Thomism of the day. (True Catholic theology, it was implied, can never be new.) Over the following years, though, especially with the writings of Henri de Lubac, la nouvelle theologie was partly vindicated (in its questions, if not always in its answers). Without it, there would not have been the aggiormiamento of Vatican II.