A Voice Without End

The past fifty years have seen a strong interest in the shape and the message of the book of Psalms. In A Voice Without End, Andrew C. Witt evaluates the significance of Psalms 3–14, and in particular, the presence and function of the figure of David. Using representative interpreters and canonical and literary approaches, Witt uncovers how the book of Psalms develops its own speaking personae. He argues that the introduction to the book in Psalms 1–2 and the association with David in the superscriptions set up the figure of David as the principal voice within Psalms 3–14, constructing a Davidic persona who can speak as an ideal and representative figure, as well as a typological figure, in expectation of the establishment of a just kingdom in the context of the Davidic promises. In addition to its original analysis of Psalms 3–14, this study contributes to Psalms research by sharpening our understanding of the Davidic voice and by showing that key themes and motifs at the seams of the Psalter and in its thematic center are already active and engaged at the very beginning. Further, it helps to bridge premodern and modern psalm interpreters by demonstrating the ongoing value of premodern conceptual models for analyzing voices in the text. Pathbreaking and eminently readable, this book changes both the way we read the Psalter and how we understand its relationship with David. It will appeal to biblical studies scholars and seminarians.

Christopher Seitz has assembled a collection of his essays which call for Christians to reappropriate the Old Testament as the Scripture of the Christian church and to interpret it theologically in the interest of the functioning Christian community.

In Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, Vincent P. Pecora elaborates an alternative history of the twentieth-century Western novel that explains the resurgence of Christian theological ideas. Standard accounts of secularization in the novel assume the gradual disappearance of religious themes through processes typically described as rationalization: philosophy and science replace faith. Pecora shows, however, that in the modern novels he examines, "secularization" ceases to mean emancipation from the prescientific ignorance or enchantment commonly associated with belief and signifies instead the shameful state of a humanity bereft of grace and undeserving of redemption. His book focuses on the unpredictable and paradoxical rediscovery of theological perspectives in otherwise secular novels after 1945. The narratives he analyzes are all seemingly godless in their overt points of view, from Samuel Beckett’s Murphy to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus to J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus. But, Pecora argues, these novels wind up producing varieties of religious doctrine drawn from Augustinian and Calvinist claims about primordial guilt and the impotence of human will. In the most artfully imaginative ways possible, Beckett, Mann, and Coetzee resist the apparently inevitable plot that so many others have constructed for the history of the novel, by which human existence is reduced to mundane and meaningless routines and nothing more. Instead, their writing invokes a religious past that turns secular modernity, and the novel itself, inside out.

In the nineteenth century, many American Protestants expected almost limitless, orderly progress as Christianity and democracy spread and as technology and prosperity increased. Yet they also believed that, many centuries hence, after progress had run its course, the Second Coming of Jesus and a supernatural End to the world would occur. If these Protestants had one foot in the world of steamships and the telegraph, the other remained firmly planted in the cosmos of the Apocalype--a universe where angels poured out vials of wrath, where the dead would rise again, and where the wicked would be cast forever into a lake of burning fire.

In ‘Connectivity’ a retired bureaucrat’s telephone line is accidentally connected to that of a grieving man’s; while a heart surgeon helps his patient across the great abyss in ‘Song without End’. The skilful grooming of a poet is described in ‘A Lane in Lucknow’; and a senile old nawab finds himself a stranger to an altered world in ‘The Taste of Almonds’. In ‘Through the Looking Glass’ a man losing his sight finds he can get to the heart of all the books in his library by an inexplicable miracle; and in ‘Play’ the roles an actor enacts are a source of important life lessons. Song without End and Other Stories is a collection of fifteen captivating short stories by Neelum Saran Gour that amuse and absorb by their lively engagement with people; places and ideas in an unforgettable way. Funny; humane and culturally vibrant; these tales portray characters who are challenged by life and who arrive at their own individual truths.

An exploration of the possibilities of hypertext fiction as art form and entertainment

A sleep deprivation bet careens out of control when a group of friends get together over spring break. One seasoned reporter, caught by chance in this maelstrom, attempts making sense of the carnage, though entirely out of his realm. While beginning as a lighthearted lark, what he encounters eventually finds him ruminating on our current worldwide climate, and its parallels to this insane odyssey.

This play revolves around John Loving. John Loving is in a psychological struggle with the sniggering, pessimistic element of his psyche that poisoned his previous life, made him a victim of false gods, and now wants to destroy him through suicidal behavior. Will he succumb to the pessimistic element of his psyche and commit suicide?