Poetry and the Religious Imagination

"What is the role of spiritual experience in poetry? What are the marks of a religious imagination? How close can the secular and the religious be brought together? How do poetic imagination and religious beliefs interact? Exploring such questions through the concept of the religious imagination, this book integrates interdisciplinary research in the area of poetry on the one hand, and theology, philosophy and Christian spirituality on the other. Established theologians, philosophers, literary critics and creative writers explain, by way of contemporary and historical examples, the primary role of imagination in the writing as well as in the reading of poetry"--

Theology and literature in context. -- Theology and literature in the English-speaking world / Michael Kirwan -- Why theologians are interested in literature: theological-literary hermeneutics in the works of Guardini, Von Balthasar, Tillich and Kuschel / Georg Langenhorst -- The religious imagination: from Thomas Aquinas to Wallace Stevens. -- Identifying a religious imagination / Michael Paul Gallagher SJ -- Religious imagination and poetic audacity in Thomas Aquinas / Olivier-Thomas Venard OP -- Dante and the indispensability of the image / John Took -- Law and divine mercy in Shakespeare's religious imagination: Measure for measure and The merchant of Venice / Paul S. Fiddes -- Wallace Stevens on God, imagination and reality /John McDade -- Inspiration: poetry and poetry reading. -- Poetry as scripture, poetry as inspiration / Jay Parini -- The poet as worldmaker: T.S. Eliot and the religious imagination / Dominic Griffiths -- Non tantum lecturi sed facturi: reading poetry as spiritual transformation / Antonio Spadaro SJ -- Reading as active contemplation / Jennifer Reek -- Poets and spiritual experience: mystical gestures. -- There is a verge of the mind: imagination and myst…