About

Religion & Literature is a scholarly journal providing a forum for discussion of the relations between two crucial human concerns, the religious impulse and the literary forms of any era, place, or language. We publish articles, review essays, and book reviews three times a year. R&L began publication in 1984, succeeding NDEJ: A Journal of Religion in Literature (1977-1984). A program in the study of Religion and Literature is housed in the College of Arts & Letters of the University of Notre Dame.

Current Issue, Volume 43.2 (Summer 2011)

This issue features five excellent articles on topics as diverse as the legacy of St. Ephrem the Syrian and Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, a forum edited by Alicia Ostriker on the subject of contemporary Midrash, and book reviews. The forum, entitled “Turn It and Turn It: A Forum on Contemporary Midrash,” features essays by Rivkah M. Walton, Rabbi Jill Hammer, Eric Murphy Selinger, Merle Feld, Peter Pitzele, Norman Finkelstein, Monica Osborne, and Rachel Barenblat.

Article Authors

Joseph P. Amar, “Christianity at the Crossroads: The Legacy of Ephrem the Syrian”
Kevin R. West, “Julian of Norwich’s ‘Great Deed’ and Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe”
Felicia Bonaparte, “‘Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt and Misery’: The Ordination of the Text and the Subversion of ‘Religion’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park”
Susan E. Colón, “‘This twittering world’: T. S. Eliot and Acedia”
Andrew Hoogheem, “None of the Above: Walker Percy’s Postsecular Narrative”
Alicia Ostriker, ed., forum, “Turn It and Turn It: A Forum on Contemporary Midrash”

Other Contributors

Theresa Coletti, Nicole R. Rice’s Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature
Denise Despres, Helen Phillips’s Chaucer and Religion
Jesse M. Lander, David N. Beauregard’s Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays, John D. Cox’s Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith, and John Klause’s Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit
Sheila A. Spector, Fred Parker’s The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary
David K. O’Connor, Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance

James Matthew Wilson, Timothy J. Sutton’s Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists and Barry Spurr’s “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T. S. Eliot and Christianity
Tamas Dobozy, Michael G. Brennan’s Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith and Authorship
Mark Bosco, S.J., Mary R. Reichardt’s Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature
Gary Waller, David Gay and Stephen R. Reimer’s, eds., Locating the Past/Discovering the Present: Perpectives on Religion, Culture, and Marginality
Kenneth Womack, Wayne C. Booth’s The Knowing Most Worth Doing: Essays on Pluralism, Ethics, and Religion

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News and Events:

Religion and Literature Lecturer: Graham Ward
This year’s Religion and Literature Lecturer is Dr. Graham Ward, currently Professor in Contextual Theology and Ethics at the University of Manchester and from October 2012 the Regius Professor in Divinity at the University of Oxford. The title of his well-received lecture, given on September 9th, 2011, was “Read to Live: Miracle and Language.”

  • Recent Issues:
    Volume 42.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2010)
    This special double issue, guest edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Jonathan Juilfs and titled “‘Something Fearful’: Medievalist Scholars on the Religious Turn in Literary Criticism,” collects essays by a range of scholars reflecting on the challenges encountered by professionals whose religious views inform and shape the questions that anchor their own scholarly investigations.
    Learn more.
  • “What Is Religion and Literature?”
    Volume 41.2 (Summer 2009)
    This special issue brings together thirty-three scholars from varying literary and religious specialties to reflect on the study of religion and literature. Contributors respond to a brief prompt: "What does the phrase ‘religion and literature’ denote? May religion and literature be constituted as a field, and if so, how? What is, or should be, or could be, the relationship of studies in this area to other areas of literary, theological, and/or religious inquiry? Learn more.
  • Recent Conference:
    “The Hospitable Text”
    14-16 July 2011
    London Notre Dame Centre
    United Kingdom
    This conference will bring together a wide variety of scholars in order to enable and enrich contemporary explorations of religion and literature, recognizing the importance of talking further about different approaches to the field. Contemporary theorists and theologians have paid considerable attention recently to the idea of hospitality, recognizing among other things the value of actively hosting viewpoints different from their own rather than merely tolerating their presence. Learn more.
  • To receive announcements about the publication of new issues, join our e-mailing list.
    Send an e-mail to randl@nd.edu indicating your interest. Announcements will be sent 3-4 times per year.

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Upcoming Issue:

43.3, featuring “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Fifty Years Later—The Religious Dimension,” edited by Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson, and articles from

  • James Simpson on “No Brainer: The Early Modern Tragedy of Torture.”
  • Kay Young on “Kierkegaard’s Claim of Mutuality and Its Problem of Representation,”
  • James Matthew Wilson on “_The Rock_ against Shakespeare: Stoicism and Community in T. S. Eliot,”
  • Nathan Kilpatrick on “Singing a New Song from the Conqueror’s Music: Religious Hybridity in The Poisonwood Bible,” and
  • Benjamin Mangrum on “Democracy, Justice, and Tragedy in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men”