Poetics of the Holy

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469640104
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetics of the Holy by : Michael Lieb

Download or read book Poetics of the Holy written by Michael Lieb and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With full attention to the classical, medievel, and Renaissance traditions that constituted the milieu in which Milton wrote, Lieb explores the sacral basis of Milton's thought. He argues that Milton's responsiveness to the holy as the most fundamental of experiences caused his outlook to transcend immediate doctrinal concerns. Acccordingly, Lieb contends that the consecratory impulse not only underlined Milton's point of view but infused all aspects of his work. Originally published in 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Poetic Theology

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Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 080286578X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (28 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetic Theology by : William A. Dyrness

Download or read book Poetic Theology written by William A. Dyrness and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the poetics of everyday life ? What can they teach us about God? Art, music, dance, and writing can certainly be poetic, but so can such diverse pastimes as fishing, skiing, or attending sports events. Any and all activities that satisfy our fundamental need for play, for celebration, and for ritual, says William Dyrness, are inherently poetic and in Poetic Theology he demonstrates that all such activities are places where God is active in the world. All of humanity s creative efforts, Dyrness points out, testify to our intrinsic longing for joy and delight and our deep desire to connect with others, with the created order, and especially with the Creator. This desire is rooted in the presence and calling of God in and through the good creation. With extensive reflection on aesthetics in spirituality, worship, and community development, Dyrness s Poetic Theology will be useful for all who seek fresh and powerful new ways to communicate the gospel in contemporary society. William Dyrness s bold invitation to a poetic theology shaped by Scripture, tradition, and imagination one luring us toward a fuller participation in beauty than argument or concept alone allow reminds us that truth itself is beautiful to behold and poetic to the core. . . . If poetry is in its deepest reflex an intensification of life, then Dyrness s call for a poetic theology is one we ignore at our peril, reminding us that faithful living is not only about proper thinking but also and, perhaps, more properly about the texture of our living and the quality of our loving. Mark S. Burrows Andover Newton Theological School Makes a strong case for aesthetics as one of the avenues used by God to draw human beings near to him and his glory. . . . A wonderful journey through Reformed spirituality and a wake-up call for Reformed theology. Cornelius van der Kooi Free University, Amsterdam

Holiness in Words

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Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438408358
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Holiness in Words by : Edward K. Kaplan

Download or read book Holiness in Words written by Edward K. Kaplan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel's Poetics of Piety is both an introduction to reading Heschel's works in English, and an in-depth study of the way his literary style can transform the consciousness of readers. Heschel's life and works respond to the contemporary crisis in religion, formulating positions on faith and despair, racism and social justice, the Holocaust, interreligious dialogue, and the availability of God's presence. We study Heschel's theory and use of literary language, his "poetics of piety," in order to elucidate his narrative strategy to teach God-centered (or prophetic) thinking. The book traces the major themes of his "depth theology," awe and radical amazement, the meaning of symbol, ritual, prayer, and mystical insight. Historical and biographical information clarifies Heschel's implicit polemic with Martin Buber and a supplemental study guide provides sources for each chapter and suggestions for further thought and discussion.

Looking in Holy Books

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780708318584
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (185 download)

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Book Synopsis Looking in Holy Books by : Vincent Gillespie

Download or read book Looking in Holy Books written by Vincent Gillespie and published by . This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume suggests new ways of reading and thinking about the religious culture of late-medieval England. It explores an unusually wide spectrum of Latin and vernacular religious texts, from catechetic handbooks to descriptions of mystical experience, and pays particular attention to the transmission and reception of these texts. The book collects together some of Vincent Gillespie's most influential and important articles from the last twenty-five years. In addition, the author offers a substantial introduction and commentary, which looks at changes in the field, as well as suggesting further reading and areas for future research. The first section "What to Read" discusses lay access to devotional materials; the second, "How to Read," looks at vernacular texts and the modes of reading those texts facilitate and encourage, while section three, "Writing the Ineffable," considers mystical writing's affective and imaginative engagement with the ineffable.

The Poetics of the Everyday

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231149301
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis The Poetics of the Everyday by : Siobhan Phillips

Download or read book The Poetics of the Everyday written by Siobhan Phillips and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Death Be Not Proud

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022641597X
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Death Be Not Proud by : David Marno

Download or read book Death Be Not Proud written by David Marno and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-12-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What might contemporary thinkers learn from prayer? The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche suggested a possibility: that prayer teaches us how to attend. This book explores the precedents of Malebranche s advice by reading John Donne s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the art of holy attention. This requires an understanding of attention s role in Christian devotion, which he provides by uncovering a tradition of holy attention that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals. Donne s devotional poems occupy a unique position in this tradition. Marno identifies in them a devotional model of thinking whose aim is to experience an affect of attention. Marno s argument is framed by compelling close readings of Death, be not proud, Donne s most triumphant poem about the resurrection. Elsewhere, Marno takes up Claudius s prayer in "Hamlet" and Saint Augustine s account of attention in the "Soliloquies" and the "Confessions." The book ends with a Coda on the aftermath of holy attention in the philosophies of Descartes and Malebranche."

The Holy Forest

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520932258
Total Pages : 558 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (322 download)

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Book Synopsis The Holy Forest by : Robin Blaser

Download or read book The Holy Forest written by Robin Blaser and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-08 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene. The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317001060
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation by : Abigail Brundin

Download or read book Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation written by Abigail Brundin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vittoria Colonna was one of the best known and most highly celebrated female poets of the Italian Renaissance. Her work went through many editions during her lifetime, and she was widely considered by her contemporaries to be highly skilled in the art of constructing tightly controlled and beautifully modulated Petrarchan sonnets. In addition to her literary contacts, Colonna was also deeply involved with groups of reformers in Italy before the Council of Trent, an involvement which was to have a profound effect on her literary production. In this study, Abigail Brundin examines the manner in which Colonna's poetry came to fulfil, in a groundbreaking and unprecedented way, a reformed spiritual imperative, disseminating an evangelical message to a wide audience reading vernacular literature, and providing a model of spiritual verse which was to be adopted by later poets across the peninsula. She shows how, through careful management of an appropriate literary persona, Colonna's poetry was able to harness the power of print culture to extend its appeal to a much broader audience. In so doing this book manages to provide the vital link between the two central facets of Vittoria Colonna's production: her poetic evangelism, and her careful construction of a gendered identity within the literary culture of her age. The first full length study of Vittoria Colonna in English for a century, this book will be essential reading for scholars interested in issues of gender, literature, religious reform or the dynamics of cultural transmission in sixteenth-century Italy. It also provides an excellent background and contextualisation to anyone wishing to read Colonna's writings or to know more about her role as a mediator between the worlds of courtly Petrachism and religious reform.

Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma

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Author :
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268101655
Total Pages : 636 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma by : Curtis A. Gruenler

Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma written by Curtis A. Gruenler and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman. Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking about reading and writing obscure literature that was widely shared across the Middle Ages. The poetics of enigma links inquiry about language by theologians with theologically ambitious literature. Each sense of enigma brings out an aspect of this poetics. The playfulness of riddling, both oral and literate, was joined to a Christian vision of literature by Aldhelm and the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Defined in rhetoric as an obscure allegory, enigma was condemned by classical authorities but resurrected under the influence of Augustine as an aid to contemplation. Its theological significance follows from a favorite biblical verse among medieval theologians, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Along with other examples of the poetics of enigma, Piers Plowman can be seen as a culmination of centuries of reflection on the importance of obscure language for knowing and participating in endless mysteries of divinity and humanity and a bridge to the importance of the enigmatic in modern literature. This book will be especially useful for scholars and undergraduate students interested in medieval European literature, literary theory, and contemplative theology.

Homer and the Sacred City

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780801482021
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis Homer and the Sacred City by : Stephen Scully

Download or read book Homer and the Sacred City written by Stephen Scully and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of the polis in Homeric literature is most evident in the Iliad, a poem concerned in large measure with the holy city of Troy. Stephen Scully here deepens our understanding of both the poetic and the social significance of the city in Homer through a close analysis of the poem's formulaic language. Drawing on scholarship in literary studies, archaeology, and comparative religion, Scully demonstrates that it is the urban setting of the Iliad, as well as the collision of the individual fates of its characters, which generates its most profound tragic themes.

This Holy Alphabet

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Publisher : Paraclete Press
ISBN 13 : 161261275X
Total Pages : 81 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (126 download)

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Book Synopsis This Holy Alphabet by : Margaret B. Ingraham

Download or read book This Holy Alphabet written by Margaret B. Ingraham and published by Paraclete Press. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deepen your conversation with God—in the nuances of the most complex Psalm. Throughout the centuries, writers have retranslated the Psalms, trying to keep alive the beauty of its images and the depth of its message, for each generation. Psalm 119 is the greatest of them all: the longest, most complex, and the one that most rewards close attention. This Holy Alphabet is a cycle of twenty-two original lyric poems which—like Psalm 119—follows the alphabetic pattern of the twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alphabet. These meditations are rich with image and abundant with praise. Each of them strikes an intricate balance between traditional form and modern expression. Designed for both personal study and public prayer, they evoke a new sense of awe and wonder in the power of God’s word, fashioned on his alphabet, to bless, instruct, and console. Ingraham writes as a Christian, but her musical reflections capture the heart of a wisdom tradition shared by Christians and Jews alike.

Poetics of Liveliness

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231552564
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetics of Liveliness by : Ada Smailbegović

Download or read book Poetics of Liveliness written by Ada Smailbegović and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.

Holy Feast and Holy Fast

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520908783
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Holy Feast and Holy Fast by : Caroline Walker Bynum

Download or read book Holy Feast and Holy Fast written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988-01-07 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.

A Poetics of Church

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351396382
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (513 download)

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Book Synopsis A Poetics of Church by : Jennifer Reek

Download or read book A Poetics of Church written by Jennifer Reek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book aims to create a ‘poetics of Church’ and a ‘religious imaginary’ as alternatives to more institutional and conventional ways of thinking and of being ‘Church’. Structured as a spiritual and literary journey, the work moves from models of the institutional Catholic Church into more radical and ambiguous textual spaces, which the author creates by bringing together an unorthodox group of thinkers referred to as ‘poet-companions’: the 16th-century founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola, the French thinkers Gaston Bachelard and Hélène Cixous, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, and the English playwright Dennis Potter. Inspired especially by the reading and writing practices of Cixous, the author attempts to exemplify Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine—‘feminine writing’—that suggests new ways of seeing and relating. The project’s uniting of Ignatian spirituality with postmodern thinking and its concern with creating new theological, literary and spiritual spaces for women both coincide and contrast with Pope Francis’s pastoral and reformist tendencies, which have neglected to adequately address the marginalisation of women in the Church. As Francis has called for ‘a theology of women’, of which there are, of course, many to draw from, this volume will be a timely contribution with a unique interdisciplinary approach.

Death Be Not Proud

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Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022641602X
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Death Be Not Proud by : David Marno

Download or read book Death Be Not Proud written by David Marno and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-12-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend, wait, and be open for what might happen next. Death Be Not Proud explores the precedents of Malebranche’s advice by reading John Donne’s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the “art of holy attention.” If, in Malebranche’s view, attention is a hidden bond between religion and philosophy, devotional poetry is the area where this bond becomes visible. Marno shows that in works like “Death be not proud,” Donne’s most triumphant poem about the resurrection, the goal is to allow the poem’s speaker to experience a given doctrine as his own thought, as an idea occurring to him. But while the thought must feel like an unexpected event for the speaker, the poem itself is a careful preparation for it. And the key to this preparation is attention, the only state in which the speaker can perceive the doctrine as a cognitive gift. Along the way, Marno illuminates why attention is required in Christian devotion in the first place and uncovers a tradition of battling distraction that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals.

Inspiration and Utmost Art: The Poetics of Early Modern English Psalm Translations

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Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN 13 : 3643908180
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (439 download)

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Book Synopsis Inspiration and Utmost Art: The Poetics of Early Modern English Psalm Translations by : Janina Niefer

Download or read book Inspiration and Utmost Art: The Poetics of Early Modern English Psalm Translations written by Janina Niefer and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2018 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is concerned with Early Modern English psalm translations. It focusses on the connection between inspiration and formal perfection as it appears in George Wither's "A Preparation to the Psalter", Philip Sidney's "The Defence of Poesy", "The Sidney Psalter" and "The Bay Psalm Book". Taking into account theological, philosophical, and literary contexts of the time, it reveals the struggle to find a suitable language in praise of God as a main concern of Early Modern religious writers, and presents concepts which are highly relevant for the religious poetry of the time. Dissertation. (Series: Religion and Literature / Religion und Literatur, Vol. 5) [Subject: Religious Studies]

The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019103407X
Total Pages : 725 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology by : Edward Howells

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology written by Edward Howells and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology provides a guide to the mystical element of Christianity as a theological phenomenon. It differs not only from psychological and anthropological studies of mysticism, but from other theological studies, such as more practical or pastorally-oriented works that examine the patterns of spiritual progress and offer counsel for deeper understanding and spiritual development. It also differs from more explicitly historical studies tracing the theological and philosophical contexts and ideas of various key figures and schools, as well as from literary studies of the linguistic tropes and expressive forms in mystical texts. None of these perspectives is absent, but the method here is more deliberately theological, working from within the fundamental interests of Christian mystical writers to the articulation of those interests in distinctively theological forms, in order, finally, to permit a critical theological engagement with them for today. Divided into four parts, the first section introduces the approach to mystical theology and offers a historical overview. Part two attends to the concrete context of sources and practices of mystical theology. Part three moves to the fundamental conceptualities of mystical thought. The final section ends with the central contributions of mystical teaching to theology and metaphysics. Students and scholars with a variety of interests will find different pathways through the Handbook.