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Playful Wisdom
Reimagining the Sacred in American Literature, from Walden to Gilead
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2020
Summary
Playful Wisdom examines how Henry David Thoreau’s thinking about religious “play” created a theological legacy in American literature—one that includes Emily Dickinson, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton, Annie Dillard, and Marilynne Robinson. Although these writers differ in many ways, they share with Thoreau an improvisational “looseness” or “mobility” in their thinking about the sacred, a sense that religious experience unsettles fixed belief and alters the very shape of the perceiving self. From this perspective, Robert Leigh Davis argues, unswerving orthodoxy is not as crucial to a life of faith as a light-handed responsiveness of spirit that constantly revises fixed assumptions in light of new experiences. Dickinson describes this responsiveness as “nimble believing” and Thoreau calls it “holy play.” Scholars of literature, religion, and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2020
ISBN-Print
978-1-7936-2628-8
ISBN-Online
978-1-7936-2629-5
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
242
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 34
Chapter 1 Play and Attunement No access Pages 35 - 68
Chapter 2 Play and Possibility No access Pages 69 - 104
Chapter 3 Play and Improvisation No access Pages 105 - 130
Chapter 4 Play and Nonsense No access Pages 131 - 158
Chapter 5 Play and Risk No access Pages 159 - 188
Chapter 6 Play and Understanding No access Pages 189 - 218
