Alison Milbank

Zoë Lehmann Imfeld

Peter J. Hampson

"This volume deploys theology in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism, to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following post-modernism and post-modern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and explanatory power of theological readings across a various texts and literary genres. Theology and Literature after Post-Modernity explores a reconstructive approach to reading and literary study in the university setting, with contributions from interdisciplinary scholars worldwide" --

Theology and literature after postmodernity

Few other books have caused as much stir in the Church of England in recent decades as has For the Parish. Twelve years on from its publication, in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the ‘Save the Parish’ movement much has changed, but much has stayed the same. In this follow up to this influential and controversial book, new and already familiar themes are newly inflected in the debates of the present time: principally minster hubs, the ‘Emerging Church’ programme and the Strategic Development Fund. Alison Milbank challenges the ecclesiology, models of theological anthropology and the analysis of secularism that are present (explicitly or implicitly) in these movements, and offer a striking and encouraging vision of what the parish model could offer to our anxious world.

The Once and Future Parish

In this ground-breaking book, Alison Milbank explains why a comprehension of the Victorian reception of Dante is essential for a full understanding of Victorianism as a whole. Her focus on this much-neglected topic allows her to reconfigure the British nineteenth-century understanding of history, nationalism, aesthetics and gender, and their often strange intersections. The account also builds towards a demonstration that the modernist perpetuation of the Dante obsession reveals an equal continuity with many aspects of Victorianism. The book provides not only an authoritative introduction to these important cultural themes, but also a re-reading of the genealogy of literature in the modern period. Instead of the Victorian realism challenged by Modernist symbolism's attempts to transcend linear time, Milbank offers us a contrary, continuous "Danteism." For both the Victorians and the Modernists Dante is the first writer to historicize, fictionalize and humanize the eternal role, and he becomes paradoxically the means by which history, secularized fiction and a positivist humanism could be reconnected to a lost transcendent. Dante and the Victorians provides the first comprehensive account of why the reading of Dante was central to nineteenth-century British language and culture.

Dante and the Victorians

Offers a new reading of Tolkien in terms of Chesterton's literary and theological project.

Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians

Andrew Davison

Gemma Simmonds

Philip North

Anna Matthews

Ric Thorpe

Rowan Williams 

God’s Church in the World: The Gift of Catholic Mission presents a confident and joyful assertion of the Catholic character of Christian mission and its sacramental nature, exploring the transforming role the Catholic tradition can play in the evangelism. A range of outstanding contributors explore the gifts that the Catholic tradition - formed by a conviction that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist intensifies and motivates an awareness of the sacramental presence of Christ in the world – can bring to the church’s engagement with the world. Chapters include: • Mission and the Life of Prayer • Mission and the Sacraments • Catholic Mission in Practice • The Virgin Mary and Mission • Vocation and Mission • The Sacraments as Converting Ordinances • Social Justice and Growth in Anglo-Catholic Churches • Reflections on Scripture and Catholic Mission • Catholic Mission: Historical Perspectives The contributors represent the breadth of Catholic traditions and identities in the Church of England today.

The Gift of Catholic Mission

God's Church in the World

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

Religion, Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition

God and the Gothic

John Hughes 

Arabella Milbank

Since its beginning in the 1990s, Radical Orthodoxy has become perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most controversial, movement in contemporary theology. This book offers an introduction to the Radical Orthodox sensibility through sermons preached by some of those most prominent figures in radical orthodoxy. Accessible, challenging and varied, the sermons together help to suggest what Radical Orthodoxy might mean in practice. Contributors include Andrew Davison, John Milbank, John Inge, Catherine Pickstock, Martin Warner, Graham Ward and Stanley Hauerwas Contents I. Reclaiming Time: Advent Lifting the Veil on the World - Ian Boxall 11 The Christ Who is Coming - Arabella Milbank 15 Waiting and Birthing - Kirsten Pinto Gfroerer 19 II. Preaching Paradox: Christmas to Candlemas Nativity: Words and the Word - Alison Milbank 27 Epiphany: Surprised by Joy - Alison Milbank 30 Music and What Matters Most - Andrew Davison 33 Christ’s Baptism: The Cold Water of Baptism - Joseph Vnuk 37 Amiably Drawn Edmund Newey 41 Conversion of St Paul: The Road to Insight - Silvianne Aspray 45 Christian Unity: Splendour with no Bounds - Martin Warner 49 St Thomas Aquinas: Beatific Theology - Jeffrey Phillips 52 Presentation of Christ: Out of the Dark Time - John Milbank 56 III. Unfolding the Story: Lent to Easter Sunday Ash Wednesday: On Being Dust - Anthony Baker 63 Living in the Rhythm of Worship - David Moss 67 God and Nature - David Neaum 72 Passion Sunday: A Wondrous Exchange - Rachel Greene 76 Palm Sunday: Inside the Story - Melanie Marshall 80 Maundy Thursday: Food Enough to Triumph - Jeffrey P. Bishop 82 Good Friday: Passionate Actions - John Muddiman 87 Easter Sunday: Death’s Name for Love is Resurrection - David Widdicombe 92 IV. Real Resurrection: Eastertide to Trinity Sunday Disturbing Faith - Ruth Jackson 99 Being Witnesses - Peter Groves 104 Heaven is Other People - Jeremy Morris 108 Love is the only Politics that Matters - Matthew Bullimore 112 The Tangled Vine - Jennifer Strawbridge 117 Ascension: Becoming Heaven-bent - Simone Kotva 121 St Philip and St James: Love’s Labour - Graham Ward 126 Pentecost: Language of Joy - John Inge 129 Trinity: Finding Ourselves in the Trinity - Alison Milbank 134 V. For the Time Being: Trinity Season and Christian Lives Corpus Christi: Consume and be Consumed - Gregory Platten 141 The Sound of Silence - Stanley Hauerwas 145 St Mary Magdalene: Witness to the Depths of God - Stephen Conway 151 Transfiguration: The Beauty in the Ugliness - John Hughes 156 Assumption: Mary, Battered and Glorious Vessel - Melanie Marshall 160 Challenging Christians? - Fergus Kerr 164 Michaelmas: I Believe in Angels - Robert Chapman 168 Lord of the Harvest - Michael Northcott 171 Dedication Festival: The Feast of You and Me - Richard Stanton 176 Holy Fear, Holy Play Frances Ward 181 Remembrance: Remembering Well - Philip Krinks 186 Baptism: Higher than the Angels - John Hughes 189 Confirmation: Divine Athletes - Stephen Platten 192 Confirmation: God’s Designer Label - Nigel Peyton 195 Marriage: The Abundant Economy - Simon Oliver 198 Ordination: Are You Real? - Anna Matthews 202 First Mass: Overlapping Gifts - Catherine Pickstock 206 Funeral: Repeating Ourselves- James Robinson 211

Preaching Radical and Orthodox

This book takes Chesterton's 'natural theology' through fairytales seriously as a theological project appropriate to an intellectual attempt to return to faith in a secular age. It argues that Tolkien's fiction makes sense also as the work of a Catholic writer steeped in Chestertonian ideas and sharing his literary-theological poetics. While much writing on religious fantasy moves quickly to talk about wonder, Milbank shows that this has to be hard won and that Chesterton is more akin to the modernist writers of the early twentieth-century who felt quite dislocated from the past. His favoured tropes of paradox, defamiliarization and the grotesque have much in common with writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce and their use of the demotic as well as the 'mythic method'. Using Chesterton's literary rhetoric as a frame, the book sets out to chart a redemptive poetics that first decentres the reader from his habitual perception of the world, then dramatizes his self-alienation through the grotesque, before finding in that very alienation a sort of pharmakon through paradox and an embrace of difference. The next step is to change one's vision of the world beyond the self through magic which, paradoxically, is the means by which one can reconnect with the physical world and remove the fetishism and commodification of the object. Chesterton's theology of gift is the means in which this magic becomes real and people and things enter into reciprocal relations that reconnect them with the divine.

John Rylands Research Institute Fellow Alison Milbank

Milbank (English, U. of Cambridge) argues that an understanding of Victorianism's reception of Dante is essential for understanding its notions of history, nationalism, aesthetics, and gender as well as the often strange intersections between any two or more of them. She offers a new genealogy of literature in modern times, substituting a continuous Dantism for the conventional tale of Victorian realism and historicism challenged by modernist symbolism. She also finds Dante to be the first writer to historicize, fictionalize, and humanize the eternal realm, and therefore the route through which history, secularized fiction, and positivist humanism can be traced to a lost transcendent. Distributed in the US by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Alison Milbank

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