Description
Book SynopsisReligion and Pastness examines the implications of the Augustinian concept of time as favoring a-causality over linear continuity. From this viewpoint the various essays address problems of dynamics and stasis in texts, paintings and music ranging from Augustine to Abelard, Eriugena, Thoreau, Calvin, Shakespeare, Rubens, Bach, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Virginia Woolf, Cavell.
Trade ReviewThis creatively eclectic volume launches a bold experiment in exploring what it might mean to take Augustine’s aporetic and non-linear understanding of time and eternity seriously. The questions posed are simultaneously historiographical and literary, on the one hand, and philosophical and theological, on the other. In exploring the relation between religion and pastness, the authors shuttle backward and forward in time, traverse theological and religious differences, and consider works of music and painting alongside those of literature and philosophy. At their best, the essays are fresh, insightful, moving--and challenging.
---—Virginia Burrus, Drew University“At once precise and polyphonic, On Religion and Memory takes both terms in a wonderfully wide range of senses. Language, music, and art; meditation and monasticism; memory and oblivion; time’s contraction and its extension are interconnected and played off one another. This provocative anthology deserves to be read widely in philosophy, theology, religious studies, literary studies—indeed, across the humanities—to create and continue conversations about the curious structures and experiences of memory.”
---—Karmen MacKendrick, Le Moyne College
