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Sadie Jones's The Snakes (2019) examines the overlap between secular capitalism and religious thought. Jones contemplates how Christianity and capitalism have shaped the moral economy, blending wealth and virtue to create a modern system of values. The essay first examines the responses of Jones's characters to this system: the protagonist, Bea, renounces her family's fortune to live the life of a saint, whereas her brother Alex sees himself as a sinner, attracted to the annihilation of self in Keats, Rumi, and Weil. The essay's second half focuses on how Jones disrupts this economy by strategically incorporating elements from ancient Greek culture. The Greek gods reject the transactional logic that underpins capitalism, so that not even Bea's virtue can prevent her brutal murder. No amount of credit, moral or financial, can move the amoral sovereignty of the world, as implacable as the rocks and trees Bea contemplates in her final moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing the content of the parable of the Grand Inquisitor from Fyodor M. Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov allows us to identify the root ideas and consequences of a program for reorganizing society aimed solely at transforming the external material environment. Historical experience has confirmed Dostoevsky's warning that implementing this kind of program requires permanent violence against nature, society, and man. The temptation of the powerful by their own power can be countered by a program for forming social harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Chinua Acebe's 1951 story "In a Village Church." It asserts that the story is an exploration of an on-going process of transforming Christianity into a crucial part of the social and cultural fabric of contemporary African societies across the continent during the mid-twentieth century. Also discussed is the story's depiction of the traditional Igbo culture through the setting, the characters, and the seating arrangement in the church.

The article talks about the concept of money in the book "The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield". Topics discussed include the protagonist converting the natives to Christianity, critics accusing the book of coding imperial plunder and cultural desecration in the name of missionary benevolence, and the author's view that the protagonist reorganized the conditions of her island society so that the fetishizing of gold could be made impossible.

A literary criticism of the novel "Remembering" by Wendell Berry is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the symbolic significance of these characters. The themes of the novel are analyzed which include nightmares, dependence on Christianity, and pagan mythology. An overview of the novel is also given.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road takes place not before or during but after the end. The novel follows a man and his son as they seek to survive in what remains of the world after some unspecified cataclysmic event. There is almost nothing left: no society, no food, no animals, no hope. Many readers will feel that the question the novel poses is why anyone would wish to continue living under such circumstances. But although that question might be more urgent post-apocalypse, it is in fact one that can always be asked: what, if anything, makes human life valuable and worthwhile? The novel provides answers to these questions, but these answers are contradictory. The reader is left with a choice between powerful arguments for both faith and despair. In The Road, hope is associated with Christianity and hopelessness with an atheistic understanding of the world. Nonetheless, the novel makes it clear that faith is no easy option. This article will begin by discussing the importance of Christian imagery in the novel, focusing on the key symbolic dimensions of fire and darkness, before going on to show how both Christian and atheistic readings are not only made possible, but actively put forward by the text. It will be argued that the novel presents a powerful challenge to both Christian and atheistic views of the world, without ever actually rejecting either. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender bending has been a staple of the medium of shōjo manga, Japanese girls’ comics, as best exemplified by cross-dressing “girl knight” characters and “Boys Love” stories, whose plots focus on romance between effeminate beautiful young men. The imaginary space created through the representation of these figures shares many traits in common with another typical feature of shōjo comics, namely their exoticisation of Europe. Both have been used as simultaneously escapist and subversive strategies, as a refuge from contemporary social norms and a platform for critical reflection. In this article, I aim to problematise our understanding of the connection between gender bending and exoticism in shōjo manga through an analysis of the representation of one specific aspect of European culture – namely, the Christian religion – in the genre of Boys Love manga. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Henry Hallywell was a minor Cambridge Platonist who was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, while Ralph Cudworth was master, and Henry More was a fellow. Hallywell's tutor was George Rust, and he was responsible for preserving and publishing several of Rust's discourses. Hallywell was later associated with Benjamin Whichcote's centre of liberal preaching at St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London. All of Hallywell's writings show the influence of these Cambridge Platonist authors. He accepted Cambridge Platonist ideas on the immortality of the soul, the deiform life, enthusiasm and atheism, the paranormal, millenarianism and the public and private usefulness of rational religion. His special contribution to Cambridge Platonism was his simplified presentation of the circle's main theological themes in his pastoral role as a parish priest. This introduction to Hallywell's published and manuscript writings complements the author's account of his career as a Sussex clergyman, which is published elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early modern travel discourse, exploration of 'distant' or 'other' lands is typically configured as some aspect of the female body. Power relations between East and West were often described in terms of conquest or ravishment, the site of which is typically the female body, as might be seen in early modern English literary response to the Ottoman. Couched in terms of the menace the Ottoman poses to the Western Christian, Massinger's The Renegado courts parallels between sexual license, female rebellion, and religion to address domestic threats at home–not from the Ottoman Empire, but rather from the rebellious English women, who represent a clear danger to the patriarchal hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical consensus agrees that Slaughterhouse-Five, forty-three years old this year, remains Vonnegut's canon masterpiece. In the 1960s and '70s, the novel was perceived as commenting on World War II, America's putative “good” war, through the lens of the controversial Vietnam War and proving that no war is ever fully righteous. Billy Pilgrim's story, an Everyman saga, condemns American apathy and the defeatist notion that the lone individual is the helpless plaything of juggernaut forces. Vonnegut vehemently argues that individual agency can still influence events in humanistic ways. Currently, in post-September 11, 2001, America, Billy's static meekness may be even more representative of the nation's mood than it was forty-one years ago. If America's current fascination with apocalyptic scenarios is any indication, the psychological exhaustion of the two-front War on Terror, the economic crisis, and disillusion with a new President's inability to reverse everything overnight has led to a near national death wish. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Ramón Pérez de Ayala is widely regarded as a leading liberal with strong anti-Catholic and indeed anti-religious views, a close examination of his novels reveals a more ambivalent attitude to religious experience. Indeed, his liberalism could be said to embrace religion in its spiritual, as distinct from its temporal, dimensions. This article examines a number of Pérez de Ayala's major novels and discusses his views on, among other things, his knowledge of biblical criticism, his views on transcendence, pantheism, education, Church and State, scholasticism, neo-Thomist aesthetics, sexuality, women and marriage. Perez de Ayala makes extensive use of the Bible and religious texts in his works and, in his advocacy of a return to the values of early Christianity, could be said to show affinities with religious or theological modernism, which is conventionally held not to have any impact within Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses biblical references and religious imagery in "La Celestina" (or "Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea"), published in 1499 by Spanish author Fernando de Rojas, to try to determine whether it should be considered a work of Christian didactic literature, or a subversive text. The scriptural quotations and allusions in the work are found to be incompatible with the Catholic orthodoxy of 15th- and 16th-century Spain, but used rather in the service of earthly love.

English literature of the early modern period generally portrays Islam as a sensual religion, and Muslims are often depicted as idolaters. This is strange, because English people of the period were, in fact, keenly aware of Islam's iconoclastic credentials. "Puritans" in particular were often interested in, and sometimes sympathetic to, Islam for this reason. However, it would have been culturally and legally unacceptable to represent Islam as superior to Protestant Christianity in any religious regard. Consequently, early modern English writers often displace Islamic iconoclasm onto spheres such as the economy. The fact that they were able to do this shows that they conceived of the economic and religious spheres as parts of an interdependent social totality, each element of which affects all the others. This kind of totalizing approach can be useful even in the modern world, as it helps to understand the ethical implications of usury and exchange-value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the general mapping of the genre of the Romantic verse tale and introduces some poems by Sarah Pearson of Sheffield, a household servant who published two collections of essays and a novel, to comprehend the writer's gender- and genre-specific use of the verse tale. In her poems, Pearson deploys a version of the female, conservative Gothic that encourages Christian faith rather than rationalism as a means to overcome superstition. An examination of the ideological implications of Pearson's use of the Gothic, contextualized in terms of the reception of her poems in periodical reviews, facilitates a sophisticated reading of a writer whose experimental handling of genre offers an alternative version of the Romantic verse tale fashioned in the works of Coleridge and Keats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a historical perspective, the United States has, from its inception, been a country where religion, politics, and literature were closely linked. Early publications were religious tracts and children learned to read using the Bible and other religious works. Religious influence into the culture and politics of the country has increased dramatically since the 1980s and the question arises as to whether this influence is being seen in young adult literature of the period. Therefore, a look at modern realistic fiction must begin by looking at the history of children's and young adult literature produced by mainstream publishers in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miura Ayako (1922–99) rose from obscurity to literary stardom on the basis of her first novel, Hyōten , published serially in 1964–5, and became in the process not only one of Japan's best-selling novelists but also one of its leading Christian voices. Hyōten (Freezing point), one of the best-known and most widely read novels of the past few decades, follows the travails of one family in Hokkaido as they struggle with marital infidelity, death, deception and betrayal, and was written to illustrate the Christian notion of original sin. It fails fully to address this notion, however, with the intended religious theme muted in favor of achieving success as a serialized novel. The novel thus raises interesting questions regarding the nature of so-called ‘evangelistic literature’ and the continuing debate in Japan over the relationship between ‘pure’ and ‘popular’ literature. This article argues that it is only in the sequel to Hyōten , Zoku Hyōten (serialized from 1970 to 1971), that Miura, now firmly established as a Christian novelist, returned to the characters and situations in her first novel and adequately depicted the religious themes of sin and forgiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticizes the novel "The Plague," by French novelist, essayist, and dramatist Albert Camus. Description of the characters; Symbolism of 'seats' as secular humanism; Knowledge of Camus on the difference between fanciful and theatrical representations and perceptions of Christian orthodoxy and the true redness of Christ's redemptive blood.

First published in the Church Times, 5 November 2004. Reprinted here by kind permission of the Church Times and Dr Shell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]