Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS vii
3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
4. COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x
5. PREFACE xiii
6. I Some Theoretical Perspectives
7. 1 The Need for a Religious Literary Criticism 3
8. 2 Imagination’s Arc: The Spiritual Development of Readers 31
9. 3 The Gendered Imagination in Religion and Literature 59
10. 4 The Paschal Action and the Christian Imagination 73
11. 5 Moral Cross-Dressing: Contemporary Trends in Liberal Preaching and Literary Criticism 88
12. II Some Practical Approaches
13. 6 The Saint’s Underwear: A Postmodern Reflection on The Rule and Life of St. Benedict with help from Gregory the Great and Hildegard of Bingen 111
14. 7 Prayer, Poetry, and Paradise Lost: Samuel Johnson as Reader of Milton’s Christian Epic 126
15. 8 Reading Transcendentalist Texts Religiously: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Myth of Secularization 152
16. 9 Gender and the Religious Vision: Katharine Lee Bates and Poetic Elegy 171
17. 10 In the Churchyard, Outside the Church: Personal Mysticism and Ecclesiastical Politics in Two Poems by Charlotte Smith 195
18. 11 The Sacramental Vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins 210
19. 12 Reading Modem Religious Autobiographies: Multidimensional and Multicultural Approaches 226
20. 13 “Large and Startling Figures”: The Grotesque and the Sublime in the Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor 242
21. 14 Sour Grapes: Ezekiel and the Literature of Social Justice 271
22. 15 Wallace Stevens’s Spiritual Voyage: A Buddhist-Christian Path to Conversion 277
23. 16 Poetry, Language, and Identity: A Note on Seamus Heaney 305
24. 17 Stevie Smith: Skepticism and the Poetry of Religious Experience 319
25. 18 Acts of God: Film, Religion, and “FX” 331
26. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 355
27. INDEX 359