Seeing into the Life of Things: Essays on Religion and Literature Book

	Acknowledgments
	Copyright Acknowledgments
	Preface
1	The Need for a Religious Literary Criticism	3
2	Imagination's Arc: The Spiritual Development of Readers	31
3	The Gendered Imagination in Religion and Literature	59
4	The Paschal Action and the Christian Imagination	73
5	Moral Cross-Dressing: Contemporary Trends in Liberal Preaching and Literary Criticism	88
6	The Saint's Underwear: A Postmodern Reflection on The Rule and Life of St. Benedict with help from Gregory the Great and Hildegard of Bingen	111
7	Prayer, Poetry, and Paradise Lost: Samuel Johnson as Reader of Milton's Christian Epic	126
8	Reading Transcendentalist Texts Religiously: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Myth of Secularization	152
9	Gender and the Religious Vision: Katherine Lee Bates and Poetic Elegy	171
10	In the Churchyard, Outside the Church: Personal Mysticism and Ecclesiastical Politics in Two Poems by Charlotte Smith	195
11	The Sacramental Vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins	210
12	Reading Modern Religious Autobiographies: Multidimensional and Multicultural Approaches	226
13	"Large and Startling Figures": The Grotesque and the Sublime in the Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor	242
14	Sour Grapes: Ezekiel and the Literature of Social Justice	271
15	Wallace Steven's Spiritual Voyage: A Christian Path to Conversion	277
16	Poetry, Language, and Identity: A Note on Seamus Heaney	305
17	Stevie Smith: Skepticism and the Poetry of Religious Experience	319
18	Acts of God: Film, Religion, and "FX"	331
	Notes on Contributors	355
	Index	359