David Jasper

This book examines a number of landmark shifts in our account of the relationship between human and divine existence, as reflected through the perception of time and corporeal experience. Drawing together some of the best scholars in the field, this book provides a representative cross-section of influential trends in the philosophy of religion (e.g. phenomenology, existential thought, Biblical hermeneutics, deconstruction) that have shaped our understanding of the body in its profane and sacred dimensions as site of conflicting discourses on presence and absence, subjectivity and the death of the subject, mortality, resurrection and eternal life.

"The Sacred Desert is an original work, which reflects on the role of the desert in theology, history, literature, art and film." "Engaging with figures as diverse as Jesus, the early Christian Desert Fathers, William Blake, T.E. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Georgia O'Keeffe, Wim Wenders, and Jim Crace, author David Jasper explores deserts as real places, as interior spaces, and as they feature in numerous texts. He makes connections across millennia of desert texts, meditating on the mystical, religious, and theological meanings that emerge." "Underlying these interdisciplinary wanderings in the wasteland is the author's quest for a new form of religious thought and language. This work stretches from the Bible - perhaps still the greatest of our desert texts - through to contemporary experiences of the desert. It is a work of theology, and a journey through the history of religion."--BOOK JACKET.

This book focuses on some of the greatest writers and artists of European Romanticism, including S. T. Coleridge, Wordsworth, J. M. W. Turner, Goethe, Holderlin and, in the later nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold. Concluding with a discussion of the significance of Romanticism for our understanding of postmodernity, its various chapters explore the place of the biblical canon as the central element in the shift from the sacred to the secular, and the place of the Bible in the development of our concept of Weltliteratur, or world literature, as definitive of culture. This book will be of interest to all concerned with art, literature and the development of biblical criticism and religious thought.

Religion and Literature contains selections from more than seventy sources, ranging from the ancient classics, the Bible, Western masterpieces, and contemporary literature, including Augustine of Hippo, Samuel Beckett, William Blake, Jacques Derrida, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Franz Kafka, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, Thomas Merton, John Milton, Flannery O'Connor, Ovid, Paul Ricoeur, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Paul Tillich, Mark Twain, John Updike, Simone Weil, Elie Wiesel, and many others. Study questions for each chapter appear at the end of the book.

Poets, in times of great faith and times of doubt, have expressed for us their sense of both the presence and the absence of God in language that is sometimes almost sacramental in its weight of beauty, love, fear, anger or despair. The poets considered here all relate, in some way, to the traditions of Anglicanism through the centuries, reflecting both a common humanity and a wide breadth of human experience as it struggles with God. 'Heaven in Ordinary' is deliberately autobiographical in approach, as it is grounded in David Jasper's own lifetime experience of reading poetry since his school years, and over four decades as a priest. The poets he so beautifully discusses have related both positively and negatively to the Christian faith and the Anglican tradition. Some are deeply religious, others are haunted by God and the divine mystery.