How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in
America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in
contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works
of American literature from the past fifty years, "Postmodern
Belief" shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of
doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy
Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious
practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express
the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring
upon words a religious value independent of meaning.
Hungerford explores the work of major American writers,
including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni
Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to
the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's
chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of
Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the
Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why
Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how
literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief
can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford
corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in
understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief
itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious
act.
Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice
religion, "Postmodern Belief" highlights the claims of the
religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
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