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Full Description
Playful Wisdom 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 share with Thoreau 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. From this perspective, Robert Leigh Davis argues, unswerving orthodoxy is not as crucial to a life of faith as a light-handed responsiveness of spirit that constantly revises fixed assumptions in light of new experiences. Dickinson describes this responsiveness as "nimble believing" and Thoreau calls it "holy play." Scholars of literature, religion, and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.
Contents
Acknowledgments
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
