Description: We live in a world that calls for the separation of church and state, and the separation of religion and the arts is of a piece with this divided culture. However, this long-standing breach between Christianity and the arts narrows in view of the notable development of mutual interest and conversation between theology and literature. Dr. Wilder discusses this historic cleavage and then sets forth, first from the side of imaginative literature and then from the side of the church, the evidence for an emerging bridge of this gulf. The most significant arts of our time have dealt with metaphysical and moral themes as well as existential concerns by drawing on the great religious mythical patterns of the past. Yet the church, in many respects, has become conscious of its aesthetic shortcomings and is increasingly aware of the modern arts. Dr. Wilder discusses the basic dilemma of Christianity's relationship to the aesthetic order of experience, emphasizing that religious art and symbols should not be viewed as merely decoration, but rather as bearers of meaning and truth and therefore as critically important to the religious tradition. Dr. Wilder examines particular examples of the treatment of religious subject matter in modern works by Jeffers and Faulkner. He reflects on Jeffers' adequate and inadequate views of the central Christian theme of vicarious atonement, and takes Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as opportunity for consideration of the attenuation of Christian culture. The book aims to inform readers interested in modern literature and the arts of relevant developments in church circles that may both surprise and gratify, even as it introduces churchmen and theologians to features of modern writing that very much concern them.

Description: The graphic artist Margaret Rigg met Amos Wilder through The Society for Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture (ARC), of which Wilder, together with such figures as Joseph Campbell and Paul Tillich, was a founder in the early 1960s. In 1978 Rigg published Imagining the Real, a limited edition (350 copies with designs) as an expression of ""homage"" to Wilder with a special emphasis on his poetry. This unusual publication includes an extensive interview between Rigg and Wilder covering his upbringing and its influence on his life as a writer and poet; an original essay by Wilder on themes suggested by the interview (""A Comment . . .""); six poems by Wilder selected to depict shifting sensibilities over his six-decades-long career as a practicing poet; and a lively self-annotated overview of his life and career (""Wilderiana: Dates and Places""). The volume concludes with poems dedicated to Wilder by Stanley Romaine Hopper and Arnold Kenseth. Long known only to students of Amos Wilder and his family, the republication of Imagining the Real makes available to a broader public an unusual window on the story of Amos Wilder, poet.

Description: In Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition, Wildler examines this movement in poetry in relation to the direction in which our culture is moving. He interprets the significance of modern poetry and shows its relation to the ""traditional."" He gives attention to the representative poets of our time (including Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and others); he notes the wider implications of their work and assesses from them the impulses and trends of our age. As a poet of considerable ability, as a student of literary criticism for many years, and as a teacher, Wilder is in a position to know and understand his subject. The result is a book of permanent value to all concerned with the deeper meanings of civilization and Christianity.

Description: "The one great and telling charge made against Christian religion in the modern period," writes Amos Wilder, "is that it is otherworldly, escapist and irrelevant to the problems of life." There is a good deal of truth in this charge, Dr. Wilder feels--whether we look at Catholicism or Protestantism, orthodoxy or liberalism. Christianity, in one way or another, has given the impression of being mainly concerned with the next world or with private religious experiences, to the neglect of the needs of men in everyday life. Here is an answer to the charge. Our common human experience, Dr. Wilder shows, cannot be cut off from its transcendent aspects, but neither can it be cut off from the pressing needs of life here and now. Dr. Wilder goes into biblical history for his answer. Jesus spoke directly to the social dilemmas of his people. The power of the Gospel in the Roman Empire had much to do with the answer it supplied to the social and cultural cravings of that age. Recent trends in New Testament study exhibit the attacks made then, as now, on false spirituality and theological obscurantism. This is a stirring and impressively documented call to application of the Gospel, to the practical and secular problems of men. Otherworldliness and the New Testament is alive with flashing insights into a crucial modern theological problem. But it does much more in apprising both the serious thinker and the casual reader of the tangled strands of a complex situation in religious interpretation, as it relates to the arts, to social justice, to religious education, and to many diverse fields.

Description: What was the faith behind the proclamations of Jesus, the message of Paul, and the Johannine witness--and how can it be recovered today? This penetrating and provocative book seeks to probe the various formulations of religious faith in the New Testament with a view to recovering the real essence and genius of Christianity today. Dr. Wilder sees three principal strains--often harmonious but sometimes disparate--in New Testament faith: the proclamations of Jesus, the message of Paul, and the witness of John the Evangelist. First, he studies what has happened to our faith since its original message emerged from the concrete historical act and the resultant community of experience. In the time since, flesh and spirit, as well as humanity and divinity, have come to be regarded as mutually exclusive, making it necessary for scientific humanism to develop a language of its own--for religion has lost communication with it. Jesus' message, however, was a total claim and a total hope, a prophetic forecast of human destiny. Paul, though he spoke a different language and used different symbols, laid the groundwork for an epochal revolution of the race. John, for his part, emphasized eternal life here and now and previsioned a Christian freedom. Dr. Wilder ends with a stirring plea for a postliberal viewpoint that will recover the insights of the past without its mythology and terminology.

Description: An illuminating New Testament study depicts the power and beauty of language that speaks with the words of God and man. Words call man to battle or summon him to prayer. More and more, today man is analyzing his language and asking: What is the purpose of language? What do the words we speak mean? What is their religious significance? Dr. Wilder's extraordinary work attempts to answer these questions and, in particular, to study the qualities of the language that ushered in a new religion, the early Christian faith.