Modernism And Christianity

Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

By theorising the idea of 'formative tensions' between cultural Modernism and Christianity, and by in-depth case studies of James Joyce, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, the book argues that no coherent account of Modernism can ignore the continuing impact of Christianity.

Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse stages an encounter between ‘Modernism and Christianity’ and ‘Apocalypse Studies’. Its nineteen contributions outline a distinct interdisciplinary field of study.

This is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. It shows that early-twentieth-century authors, poets, and critics, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz, actively engaged with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians raging across Europe. These debates contributed to developing new ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and literature, and informed contemporary critical writings on aesthetics and poetics.

Tradition and Modernity focuses on how Christians and Muslims connect their traditions to modernity, looking especially at understandings of history, changing patterns of authority, and approaches to freedom. The volume includes a selection of relevant texts from 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, from John Henry Newman to Tariq Ramadan, accompanied by illuminating commentaries.

Modernism's theological project was an attempt to explain two things: firstly, how faith might enable persons to experience their lives as hanging together, even in the face of disintegrating forces like injustice, tragedy, and luck; and secondly, how one could see such faith, and so a life held together by it, as self-expressive. Modern theologians such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, and Tillich thus offer accounts of how one's life would have to hang together such that one could identify with it; of the oppositions which stand in the way of such hanging-together; of God as the one by whom oppositions are overcome, such that one can have faith that one's life ultimately hangs together; and of what such faith would have to be like in order for one to identify with it, too. So understood, modern theology not only sheds light on faith's potential role in enabling persons to identify with their lives, but stands in unexpected continuity with contemporary 'contextual' theologies. This book offers clear, careful readings of modernism's key figures in order to explain their relevance to practical concerns and to contemporary understandings of faith.