Tender Morsels

Theology needs the literary imagination and, indeed, will not survive without it. However, a responsible imagination is never imagination for imagination's sake, for it is connected to the gendered, ethnic, class, national, and postcolonial realities of identity, of real people living in the world. The essays collected here show where, when, and how the creative forces of literature can meet theology, and how such an intersection makes a difference for that practical mode of thinking we call ethics. --S. Brent Plate, author of Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics, editor of Religion, Art, and Visual Culture <br> These essays in Theology and Literature enable their reader to discover how a strongly centrifugal effect, produced by a rich array of texts, locations, and issues, can coincide with the centripetal effect of securing reading as moral, spiritual practice. --Professor Wesley A. Kort, Chair, Department of Religion, Duke University In this new millennium, where the question of responsibility - personal, corporate, national, global - hits us with new force, the old jouissance of textual engagement has given way to a renewed ethical imperative. It is reassuring to see a volume like this take seriously the question of reading, and indeed writing, responsibly, not by tossing out the last fifty years, but by provoking us into new ways of appropriating the textual concerns of yesterday for the new ethical demands of today. This is a timely and important book, therefore: diverse in its range of genre and tradition, yet singular in its focus on what it means to be responsible with the texts and theories that we have inherited and that we now employ. --Andrew W. Hass, University of Stirling <p>