Navigating Deep River

An interdisciplinary dialogue with Shūsaku Endō’s last novel offering new perspectives on Japanese culture, Christian doctrine, Hindu spiritualities, and Buddhist worldviews. In Navigating Deep River, Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton have curated a wide-ranging discussion of Shūsaku Endō’s final novel, Deep River, in which four careworn Japanese tourists journey to India’s holy Ganges in search of spiritual as well as existential renewal. Navigating Deep River evaluates and probes Endō’s decades-long search to find the words to explain Transcendent Mystery, the difficult tension between faith and doubt, the purpose of spiritual journeys, and the challenges posed by the reality of religious pluralism in an increasingly diverse world. The contributors, including Van C. Gessel who translated Deep River into English in 1994, offer an engaged and patient exploration of this major text in world fiction, and this anthology promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endō, within and beyond the West. “This volume contextualizes, delineates, and articulates the complex religious/theological/spiritual dimensions of Deep River and its rich intertextual, interpersonal, psychosocial, and literary aspects. There are few edited volumes in which so many experts focus on a single Japanese text in this sustained manner, and this stands as a model of how to do so deftly and productively.” — David C. Stahl, author of Social Trauma, Narrative Memory and Recovery in Japanese Literature and Film

As mythos and metaphor, the river has played an important role in the struggles of African Americans in a racist society. After three decades as a pastoral family therapist with African American families and families of other cultures, Archie Smith draws on the spiritual and cultural richness of such metaphors to construct an "ecological approach" to pastoral care, which takes seriously American history, democracy, racism, the environment, and black experience within a multicultural context. Smith's compelling guide demonstrates how pastors and social workers can tap the spiritual wellspring of the African American family in order to counter a deepening sense of despair, to provide hope, and to offer strategies for transformation.