On the True, the Real, and Critique in the Study of Religions

Without Mary, man had no hope except in Atheism, and for Atheism the world was not ready. Hemmed back on that side, men rushed like sheep to escape the butcher, and were driven to Mary; only too happy in finding protection and hope in a being who could understand the language they talked, and the excuses they had to offer. How passionately they worshipped Mary, the Cathedral of Chartres shows; and how this worship elevated the whole sex, all the literature and history of the time proclaim. If..

Fundamentalismos feministas

Este artículo ofrece primeramente una respuesta a Katha Pollitt, destacada voz pública feminista, la cual condenó (justo después del 11-S) a las principales religiones por subyugar a las mujeres, y colocó al feminismo en oposición al fundamentalismo. Esta postura, que refleja una limitación para entender por qué y cómo la religión es importante para las mujeres y para formular una crítica efectiva sobre este tipo de subordinación, emana de una supuesta superioridad de la modernidad, incuestionable para muchas feministas —un fundamentalismo feminista en sí mismo. La política estadounidense en Afganistán antes del 11-S, como se sabe, dañó la vida de las mujeres y usó el concepto de fundamentalismo islámico para justificar la guerra presente. La última parte se ocupa de la práctica corporal religiosa como constitutiva de la persona

Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets

This paper brings two WWII poems into dialogue: H.D.'s Trilogy and Eliot's Four Quartets. Both poems express a creative response to the destruction of war. My reading of Trilogy suggests a material mysticism in which vision and renewal are situated within the natural world, rituals and bodily experience. Bringing this understanding of mysticism to bear on Four Quartets reveals tension between transcendence and materiality. For Eliot, redemption comes through time and location, while for H.D., redemption lies within material particularity. Four Quartets oscillates between an apophatic discourse that seeks to transcend desire and history and an emphasis on material particularities

Haunting Angels

Many characters die twice in the nineteenth-century British and American novel, with protracted and repeated death scenes marking the profundity and inescapability of death, its communal nature, and the deep sentimentality associated with the loss of a beloved other. In Wings of the Dove (1902), Henry James repeats the trope of doubled death, but with a radical difference. His heroine, Milly Theale, initially stages her own death to represent less a death than an assumption, one James directly models on Swedenborgian accounts of the transformation of the human into an angel. That Milly dies again, although with an audience of one, suggests the complexity of James&#8217; relationship to this Swedenborgian scene, one he comes to through the legacy of his father&#8217;s writings and an early novella by Honoré de Balzac, the enigmatic Séraphîta. But what happens when communal forms shape a quintessentially modern novel? To what extent is community expelled? Or is it, instead, transformed into a community of readers? Amy Hollywood joined Harvard Divinity School in 2005. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (1995), which received the Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies from the International Congress of Medieval Studies; Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (2002); and Acute Melancholia and Other Essays (2016). She is also the co-editor, with Patricia Beckman, of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012). She is currently completing ‘Faith: Three Inquires on Religion, Literature, and Politics’, co-authored with Constance Furey and Sarah Hammerschlag. Also in progress is a book tentatively entitled, ‘Secular Death: Haunting Henry James’.Amy Hollywood, Haunting Angels, lecture, ICI Berlin, 5 May 2021, video recording, mp4, 49:13 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e210505