Description
Book SynopsisPlayful Wisdom: American Literature and Ludic Faith, from Walden to Gilead 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 all share Thoreau’s idea of 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. Robert Leigh Davis argues that from this perspective, unswerving orthodoxy is not as crucial as a light-handed responsiveness of spirit that constantly adapts to new perspectives and revises fixed assumptions in light of new experiences. This perspective, Davis posits, gives one the ability to respond to unstable moments of spiritual illumination that come and go by forming belief, then erasing it, and reforming it again in a spiritual practice that Dickinson refers to as “nimble believing” and Thoreau calls “holy play.” Scholars of literature, religion, and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.
Trade ReviewThis beautiful book is a paean to the love of free and spontaneous expression which saturates the work of Thoreau, Dickinson, and many other American writers. This is scholarship at its best: deep and wide-ranging storytelling, by someone who intimately knows his subjects and draws the reader into that intimacy. Davis sees PLAY as spiritual liberation, reflected in some of the great art of our culture. His book reminds us why culture and literacy are worth fighting for.
-- Stephen Nachmanovitch, author of The Art of Is and Free Play
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: This is Play
Chapter 1. Play and Attunement: The Spirituality of Walden
Chapter 2. Play and Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Theology of Perhaps
Chapter 3. Play and Improvisation: Jack Kerouac’s Singing Theology
Chapter 4. Play and Nonsense: Thomas Merton’s Last Poem
Chapter 5. Play and Risk: Annie Dillard’s Daredevil Faith
Chapter 6. Play and Understanding: Marilynne Robinson’s Religious Hermeneutics
Bibiliography
About the Author
