On Religion and Memory

Babette Hellemans (Edited by), Willemien Otten (Edited by), Burcht Pranger (Edited by)

9780823251629, Fordham University Press

Hardback, published 8 April 2013

288 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.478 kg

This 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

This volume takes up the challenge implied in Augustine's paradox of time: How does one account for the continuity of history and the certitude of memory, if time, in the guise of an indivisible "now," cuts off any extension of the present? The thinkers and artists the essays address include Augustine, Abelard, Eriugena and Thoreau, Calvin, Shakespeare, De Rance, Stravinsky and Messiaen, Rubens and Woolf.