How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America
today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary
religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American
literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how
belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an
answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how
imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists,
poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in
transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent
of meaning.
Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen
Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne
Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they
touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes
the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines
the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible,
and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how
literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can
escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent
efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious
life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular
reading and writing into a religious act.
Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion,
Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination
in twentieth-century American culture.
