Ahh, the wonders and the riches of a city like London, replete with bustling sidewalks, mind-numbing traffic, meandering trails through luscious city parks, puzzling aromas from multi-ethnic restaurants, and dazzling neon signage throughout the West End. And the glorious museums: seemingly never-ending loot representing every corner of the globe, with amazing special exhibitions: the “Cult of Beauty” at the Victoria and Albert (my favorite, featuring the Pre-Raphaelites, most prominently Dante Rossetti); the “Treasures of Heaven” at the British Museum, with its extensive showing of relics of the saints from Medieval Europe; the absorbing “Out of this World” book exhibition at the British Library (a very thorough history of science fiction); and the “Devotion by Design” presentation at the National Gallery, featuring Italian altarpieces prior to 1500. All exhibits which, in disparate ways, gesture powerfully toward the transcendent and the spiritual.
It’s summer in London, the crowds are indeed overwhelming, and the mild English summer (68 and partly cloudy) is a huge relief from the 110-degree heat index I left behind in Missouri. At times it also seems as if I’ve left behind my native tongue: like the museums, the streets of London are filled with scores of perplexing languages—a concrete illustration of our postmodern condition, if you will.
This blessed though brief sojourn in the U K represents one of the key perks of my profession: I’m here for a conference, that most academic of phenomena, easily chided and often lampooned. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the relationship between religion and literature, with a broader critical return to religious concepts and categories throughout the arts and humanities. Recognizing the importance of talking further about our different approaches to the field, a few key leaders in the field began organizing a large international conference, to be held in summer of 2011, that would bring together a wide variety of scholars engaged in contemporary explorations of religion and literature. In due course a venue was secured: the imposing edifice of the Notre Dame Center in London, just a block off of Trafalgar Square and two buildings away from the massive National Gallery. And a theme & title: “The Hospitable Text: New Approaches to Religion & Literature.” The setting was near-perfect, and the kind staffers at the Notre Dame Center were splendidly hospitable as well.
For literary scholars, the much ballyhooed “turn to religion” has already reinvigorated an interdisciplinary field that has been well served through the work of several journals, and in particular the three sponsoring organs, all considered to be on the cutting edge of this field (or intersection of fields): Christianity and Literature, Religion and Literature, and Literature and Theology. The conference program began, in fact, with an interesting panel featuring the editors of these three journals—Paul Contino, Susannah Monta, and Andrew Hass—sharing the spotlight in an informative panel on the state of the field. Among other things, the discussion illustrated how, despite the similarity of the titles of their journals, these editors viewed their tasks in crucially different ways. It was most clear to me, for example, how American scholars differ widely from the theoretical concerns and even the vocabulary of our European counterparts.
It was my honor to present the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s Lifetime Achievement Award to the Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams is a noted and prolific writer on a variety of literary figures and modes, and in particular his work on Dostoevsky is much esteemed. For me, and for a number of others whom I asked, the keynote address by the archbishop was one of the highlights of the entire conference. He received the award with humility and generosity, and then his legendary oratorical brilliance kicked in. I sat mesmerized as he discussed one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, and in particular her two novels about a small town in Iowa, Gilead (2006) and Home (2009). His message to us was about finding comfort and refuge in a place called home, and the difficulties posed by our general lack of a common language, or “native speaking.” Both novels recount from different perspectives the return of the prodigal son Jack Boughton to his elderly father’s home, and the unease with which this return is punctuated. Jack, said Williams, desires powerfully to feel at home, with his admiring family, but he lacks the ability to plug into the habits and lingo of the town. Such are the challenges of life in a post-secular world, Williams suggested: we find it hard to reconnect to those “native tongues.”
Williams’ wise account was echoed in other sessions. I was a member of a seminar titled “American Literature: Religion, Pluralism, Secularism.” Our lengthy session included extensive conversation about the papers we had circulated beforehand, and often through the lens of the major shared text: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Soon enough, it was evident that many of us had found Taylor’s magisterial account of the “conditions” of the secular age, with its multiple languages and habits, to be largely convincing and useful. Taylor writes of a massive recent shift, “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”
For the members of my seminar, the major living American authors dealing with spiritual issues appear to be Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and a smattering of others. The ur-text of post-9/11 fiction dealing with spiritual themes, very surprisingly, seems to be McCarthy’s The Road, trumping perhaps even Gilead. It seems that everyone has read The Road, and everyone has something insightful to say about it; its magnetic appeal is hard to deny. I ended up presenting on The Road, Gilead, and another recent novel I consider to be underrated: Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. All three share “spiritual” themes, and today’s students commonly view the humanities classroom as a place for spiritual discovery, I argued.
Among the many critical works that seem to be most on the minds of the seminar’s participants are several that have become quite prominent for Americanists: specifically, Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief, John McClure’s Partial Faiths, Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind, Slavoj Zizek’s recent meditations on religion such as On Belief, sociological works by Christian Smith and Robert Wuthnow, and James Woods’ The Broken Estate. Also mentioned repeatedly were two excellent issues of the journal Religion and Literature, one called “What Is Religion and Literature?” edited by Susannah Monta [Volume 41.2 (Summer 2009)], and another featuring a special section on the concept of “Locating the Post-Secular” [Volume 41.3 (Autumn 2009)]. I was delighted to learn at the seminar that this concept of the “post-secular” is even now causing some hand-wringers to speak creatively (if not annoyingly) of the “post-post-secular” (!?!), although it’s not entirely clear that anyone has yet even defined the first term. Such are the obsessive gyrations of English professors at large international conferences, I fear.
Overall, there were many excellent presentations, some good debates over coffee, and some very fine thinking on display from those practitioners on hand, all of whom appeared genuine in their interest in these issues, whether they themselves were professors of any sort of personal faith. The talk at this conference also had some interesting relations with those multicultural sidewalks of the greater city: I was struck foremost with the problem of language itself. It often seemed as though we were lacking a consistent central vocabulary, and this took me back to some of the foundational texts of my grad school years, such as Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah et al., and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue—books that warned us, decades ago, of where we might be heading, should we continue to reject a native language.
Professors love to wrangle over words, but Scripture does warn us about such activities. Back home now in Missouri as I write this little essay (July 25, 2011), a newsflash from CNN.com comes across my inbox: “Norway terror suspect Anders Breivik ‘acknowledges’ carrying out a bombing and mass shootings that left scores dead on Friday, Judge Kim Heger said Monday, but Breivik said the attacks were necessary in light of the ‘treason’ of the victims in promoting multiculturalism.” It reminds me of the wages of paranoia, that there are extremists bending over backward to “save” us from the fragmentation of our world, even at the cost of mass destruction, evidently. Treason, he says: but against what?
Like Jack, the prodigal son character of Gilead and Home, perhaps we too are just waiting for another St. Benedict to arrive on the scene, and set us all straight—and to give us, in our brave new post post-secular world, the beginnings of a new, common language. I miss civilization, and I want it back, as the Rev. John Ames puts it in Gilead. But I also want those passionate, curious, multilingual sidewalks of London, and those dazzling museum exhibitions of the Other. They sing with sheer novelty, and of cultures and concepts I’ve never even dreamed of. And so did that wonderful, hospitable conference inside the Notre Dame Center. I can’t wait for the sequel.
Harold K. Bush is professor of English at Saint Louis University.
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