Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith

by Richard Harries

Overview

W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, William Golding, Elizabeth Jennings, C. S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, Stevie Smith . . . These are some of the great poets and novelists whose struggles with faith find expression in their works, and who demonstrate the fascinatingly different forms that faith can take in different times and places.

Richard Harries considers the work of twenty of these writers, painting vivid pictures of their lives and times. He also provides numerous critically sympathetic insights into the spiritual dimension of their writings.

The result is a book for readers of all religious persuasions, especially those who are fascinated by the ways in which faith is refracted through the lens of great poetry and fiction.

Also by Richard Harries:
The Beauty and the Horror (SPCK, 2016)
‘A major new defence of Christianity that does not flinch from asking difficult questions about the kind of God who could have created our world.’
The Bookseller

‘A heartening book, confronting the hardest questions with wide knowledge and deep wisdom.’
John Carey, Chief Literary Reviewer, Sunday Times

‘An eloquent, honest and engaging case for Christian faith.’
The Tablet

‘A deeply interesting book.’
Mary Warnock

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780281079353
Publisher:	SPCK Publishing
Publication date:	09/20/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	447 KB

About the Author

Richard Harries is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. After nineteen years as Bishop of Oxford he was made a Life Peer (Lord Harries of Pentregarth) and he remains active in the House of Lords on human rights issue. He is Emeritus Gresham Professor of Divinity and a Visiting Professor of Theology at King’s College, London, where he was formerly Dean. His voice is well known to many through his regular contributions to the Today programme.

Among his many highly commended books are The Beauty and the Horror (SPCK. 2016), described by Mary Warnock as 'a deeply interesting book', The Re-enchantment of Morality (SPCK, 2008), shortlisted for the Michael Ramsey Prize, and Art and the Beauty of God (Continuum, 1993), selected as book of the year by Anthony Burgess in The Observer.

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction ix
1 Fyodor Dostoevsky: trough a furnace of doubt 1
2 Emily Dickinson: A smouldering volcano 15
3 Gerard Manley Hopkins: 'Away grief's gasping' 32
4 Edward Tomas: The elusive call 47
5 T. S. Eliot: Out of hell 61
6 Stevie Smith: A jaunty desperation 75
7 Samuel Beckett: Secular mystic 83
8 W. H. Auden: 'Bless what there is for being' 97
9 William Golding: Universal pessimist, cosmic optimist 112
10 R. S. Tomas: Presence in absence 123
11 Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown: Light from the Orkneys 140
12 Elizabeth Jennings: Poet of pain and praise 155
13 Grace in failure: Four Catholic novelists - Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo and Evelyn Waugh 164
14 C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman: Competing myths 178
15 Marilynne Robinson: Christian contrarian 193
Notes 205
Acknowledgements 227
Index 229

Editorial Reviews

In this enormously engaging book, Richard Harries shares with us his reading of many of the great writers of modernity, inviting us to attend with him to their wrestling with the hardest questions of human existence before God – and sometimes before the apparent absence of God. These are enriching and provoking reflections, testimony to the way that the Christian gospel continues to be a vehicle for the most serious thinking and imagining in our culture.

A compelling narrative of the modern quest for meaning and the expression, in literature, of our age’s deep wrestling with faith.

Richard Harries sweeps through writers from Dostoevsky to Marilynne Robinson, including Emily Dickinson, Samuel Beckett and Evelyn Waugh – and points out how their Christianity was sometimes submerged and often neglected by critics and readers. This book rightly and authoritatively, without beating the drum, resurrects the profound spiritual tradition of Christianity over a century that often claimed to have stamped it out. Here, see it alive and well, subtly and with fine scholarship unveiled.
This is a rich and important book. I hugely enjoyed it.

From the Publisher