Bøker i Studies in Religion and Culture-serien

Offers a critical attempt to restore the fundamental role that religious experience could play in shaping nineteenth-century American approaches to natural space. Devin Zuber illuminates the complex dynamic unfolded between the religious, the literary, and the ecological.

In Vigilant Faith: Passionate Agnosticism in a Secular World, Daniel Boscaljon takes up the contemporary challenges to faith by skepticism and secularism. He proposes a model of faith for believers and unbelievers alike-a passionate agnosticism-that is rooted in a skeptical consciousness. Skepticism and faith are structurally similar, he writes, in that they share an "e;unknowing"e; quality. The author argues that vigilance-the act of keeping watch, a spiritual practice in its own right-is as necessary a precondition for the structure of faith as it is for the structure of skepticism. A suspension in uncertainty and an openness to possibility require vigilance, he attests, if faith and skepticism are to avoid the often dogmatic tendencies of both theism and atheism to cling to their own brands of certainty and knowledge. Boscaljon has three aims: to expand the current, post-theistic definitions of God for greater relevance to human beings on an individual and existential level; to integrate skepticism into faith so that it will restore the importance of faith to current theology and recover it from anti-intellectual bias; and to conceptualize the vigilance of faith in such a way that can provide a vocabulary for distinguishing "e;good faith"e; from "e;bad faith."e; He offers a variety of cultural examples ranging from film to poetry to represent a life of faith and to show how its components come together in practice. As an alternative to the prevailing fundamentalisms in today's world, his book proposes a paradigmatic understanding of faith in which theism, atheism, and agnosticism refuse to differ.

In the first book to consider the study of world religion and world literature in concert, Zhange Ni proposes a new reading strategy that she calls "e;pagan criticism,"e; which she applies not only to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary texts that engage the global resurgence of religion but also to the very concepts of religion and the secular. Focusing on two North American writers (the Jewish American Cynthia Ozick and the Canadian Margaret Atwood) and two East Asian writers (the Japanese EndA ShA saku and the Chinese Gao Xingjian), Ni reads their fiction, drama, and prose to envision a "e;pagan (re)turn"e; in the study of world religion and world literature. In doing so, she highlights the historical complexities and contingencies in literary texts and challenges both Christian and secularist assumptions regarding aesthetics and hermeneutics. In assessing the collision of religion and literature, Ni argues that the clash has been not so much between monotheistic orthodoxies and the sanctification of literature as between the modern Western model of religion and the secular and its non-Western others. When East and West converge under the rubric of paganism, she argues, the study of religion and literature develops into that of world religion and world literature.

Essays previously published between 1987 and 2012.

Considered a wonder of the ancient world, the Newark Earthworks have been a focal point for archaeologists and surveyors, researchers and scholars for almost two centuries. The first book-length volume devoted to the site, this text reveals the magnitude and the geometric precision of what remains of the earthworks and the site's undeniable importance to history.

Examines the emergence of the concepts of "religion"and "religions" on colonial frontiers. The book offers an analysis of the ways in which European travellers, missionaries, settlers, and government agents, as well as indigenous Africans, engaged in the comparison of alternative religious ways of life as one dimension of intercultural contact.

A study of the much debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's "indirect communication". It approaches the problem in a new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy.

Offers a new critical history of the way seventeenth-century religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment influenced the formation of subsequent American writing. This shaping was dependent on their pragmatic refiguration less as systems of belief and thought than as frames of reflection and structures of feeling, what Giles Gunn calls spiritual imaginaries.

Given its affinity with questions of identity, autobiography offers a way into the interior space between author and reader, especially when writers define themselves in terms of religion. In his exploration of this "e;textual intimacy,"e; Wesley Kort begins with a theorization of what it means to say who one is and how one's self-account as a religious person stands in relation to other forms of self-identification. He then provides a critical analysis of autobiographical texts by nine contemporary American writers-including Maya Angelou, Philip Roth, and Anne Lamott-who give religion a positive place in their accounts of who they are. Finally, in disclosing his own religious identity, Kort concludes with a meditation on several meanings of the word assumption.

Why do we travel? Ostensibly an act of leisure, travel finds us thrusting ourselves into jets flying miles above the earth, only to endure dislocations of time and space, foods and languages foreign to our body and mind, and encounters with strangers on whom we must suddenly depend. Travel is not merely a break from routine; it is its antithesis, a voluntary trading in of the security one feels at home for unpredictability and confusion. In Bewildered Travel Frederick Ruf argues that this confusion, which we might think of simply as a necessary evil, is in fact the very thing we are seeking when we leave home.Ruf relates this quest for confusion to our religious behavior. Citing William James, who defined the religious as what enables us to "e;front life,"e; Ruf contends that the search for bewilderment allows us to point our craft into the wind and sail headlong into the storm rather than flee from it. This view challenges the Eliadean tradition that stresses religious ritual as a shield against the world's chaos. Ruf sees our departures from the familiar as a crucial component in a spiritual life, reminding us of the central role of pilgrimage in religion. In addition to his own revealing experiences as a traveler, Ruf presents the reader with the journeys of a large and diverse assortment of notable Americans, including Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Mark Twain, Mary Oliver, and Walt Whitman. These accounts take us from the Middle East to the Philippines, India to Nicaragua, Mexico to Morocco--and, in one threatening instance, simply to the edge of the author's own neighborhood. "e;What gives value to travel is fear,"e; wrote Camus. This book illustrates the truth of that statement.