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The Spiritual Authority of Literature in a Secular Age
Abstract
This essay argues that literary studies has a vital role to play in secular studies through its analysis of literary texts, whose intricate representations of the subjective experience of secularity often defy historical narratives and social science theories. Drawing on Boaz Huss’s definition of spirituality as a phenomenon intimately linked to the dissolution of the mind/body dualism under late capitalism, the essay maintains that literary texts from at least the nineteenth century forward assert a spiritual authority essential to the study of secularity and to contemporary self-reflection.
This Prisma-compliant review summarises the intersections of faith, grief, and sexes, or sexualities. Following the protocol, the authors searched 11 electronic databases and three publisher collections. The search was limited to empirical research published in English between 1980 and July 2020 that explored the impact of faith, religion, or spirituality on the grief experiences of sexually diverse individuals. After reviewing abstracts and full texts, from a total of 5,670 papers, five met the selection criteria and were systematically reviewed and quality assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme. Thematic analysis found that rituals and rites of passage were seen to assist the sexually diverse bereaved in maintaining valuable connections with the deceased, accepting the finality of the loss, accessing social support, and making meaning through bereavement. Prominent in the reviewed literature were the strategies of spiritual coping, primarily by facilitated personal and spiritual growth, beliefs in spiritual transcendence, and spiritual resources. Of particular note, was that all the studies were conducted in the ‘90s and did not include transgender or nonbinary participants leading to significant gaps in our understanding. Further research is needed to investigate the current interplay between faith and grief across gender identity and sexuality spectrums.
The present article examines spirituality as an emergent new cultural category that challenges the binary opposition of the religious and secular realms of life. The article probes the cultural significance of the popular phrase ‘spiritual, but not religious’ and examines the emergence of New Age spirituality within the framework of late capitalism and postmodern culture. It offers a new perspective on the debate of the secularization theory and re-examines the notions upon which this debate hinges. The article also examines the assessment of New Age spirituality as disguised neo-liberal ideology and proposes that the disparaging condemnations of contemporary spirituality can be seen as a response to its challenge to the entrenched notion that the religious and the secular are universal distinct categories.
Three Questions for American Literature and Religion - Volume 51 Issue 1 - ABRAM C. VAN ENGEN
After surveying the literature related to college students' religious expectations and experiences, Braskamp concludes that a majority of students want to explore questions of faith and meaning. His portrait of college spirituality is complex, including the acknowledgement that three different subgroups (described as millennials, postmoderns, and the missionary generation) exist side by side on campus. Braskamp argues that a full picture of religion on campus has to include attention to the culture and community of the institution as well as to the curriculum and co-curriculum.
Sara Frear is a graduate student at Auburn University and is currently completing her dissertation comparing the religious thought of domestic novelists Augusta Jane Evans Wilson and Marion Harland [Mary Virginia Terhune].
She would like to extend warm thanks to Grace Jones Middleton of Fort Walton Beach, and Mary Ann Pickard, archivist at the Methodist Archives Center at Huntingdon College. Their generosity, close cooperation, and careful attention to detail made this article possible. She would also like to thank the anonymous readers of The Alabama Review for their helpful suggestions and improvements to the introduction and especially the annotations of the Evans letters.
1. In 1868 Evans (1835-1909) married Lorenzo Madison Wilson of Mobile. Her works published prior to her marriage appeared under various forms of her maiden name. After her marriage, her writings were published under various forms of her maiden and married names, including Augusta Evans-Wilson, Augusta J. Evans, and Augusta Evans Wilson (Augusta J. Evans). In modern reference works and scholarship, her name usually appears as Augusta Jane Evans and Augusta Evans Wilson.
2. William Perry Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835-1909: A Biography (Tuscaloosa, 1951), 214.
3. Ibid., 47-55.
4. Fidler noted that the letters were "in the possession of Mrs. R. F. Smith of Oakhill [sic ], Alabama." He gave the dates as January 29, 1856; April 22, 1856; October 12, 1856; and October 29, 1856. Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson, 49n31. The last letter, however, was probably written in 1858 or perhaps 1859. Mrs. R. F. Smith was Annie Smith of Oak Hill, Wilcox County, a great niece of Walter Harriss. She left the Evans letters to her daughter Mrs. Earle (Adele Smith) McBryde, who in turn willed them to her cousin, Grace Jones Middleton of Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
5. This list is compiled from Evans's correspondence and her semi-autobiographical novel Beulah (New York, 1859).
6. In a letter to her close friend Rachel Lyons (Heustis), Evans explained her heroine Beulah Benton thus: "The preponderance of the Rationalistic element in 'Beulah's' organization, necessitated her speculative career; she searched all creeds and systems, rejected all, because in all she found inscrutable mysteries, which reason could not pierce and elucidate." This description applies well to the author herself. Augusta Jane Evans to Rachel Lyons (Heustis), October 17, 1859, in A Southern Woman of Letters: The Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, ed. Rebecca Grant Sexton (Columbia, Mo., 2002), 2.
7. Fidler asserts, without citation, that Walter Harriss directed Evans's theological studies for Inez. Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson, 48.
8. Religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom refers to the antebellum years as "the most violent period of religious discord in [America's] history," while David Reynolds has described the popular anti-Catholic novels of the 1830s and 1840s a product of "xenophobic outrage." Evans's Inez may be seen as a late and relatively benign example of anti-Catholic fiction. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 555, 559; David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 180-86.
9. The villain of Inez, the Jesuit priest Mazzolin, is portrayed as a non-believer who uses the church as a vehicle for his personal ambitions. In addition, Mazzolin's warped character is due to his mother's bitterness at having been abandoned by his father, a religious skeptic. Augusta Evans-Wilson, Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (1855; repr., Chicago, n.d.), 24, 27, 128.
10. According to the New York World, Beulah sold twenty thousand copies in the first nine months, and the novel received plaudits from many of its reviewers. Publication figures for the antebellum era are unreliable, and the World's editor, James Reed Spaulding, was Evans's fiancé at the time. It is clear, however, that Beulah was highly popular. Its first publisher, Derby and Jackson, announced with the appearance of their final edition (1860) that twenty-five thousand copies had sold, making the work a bestseller. After the Civil War, Beulah was republished by Evans's new publisher, Carleton. In an 1893 study of American lending library records, Beulah ranked...
During the past decade, literary scholars have produced an impressive list of books and articles in the emerging field of Atlantic literary history. Atlantic historians, however, rarely acknowledge this work and have moved away from the issues of identity and expression that made literary scholarship attractive and central to Atlantic historiography ten or twenty years ago. This phenomenon is a local manifestation of a wider problem affecting the market for literary scholarship in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns within history and the resurgence of historicism within literary studies; call it a "correction" of sorts. While literary studies once served as a major exporter of ideas and methods to the human sciences, especially history, literary scholars now import more from historians than they export to them. To put the point in figurative terms that do not disguise the economic stakes involved, a trade deficit now exists on the side of literary studies. Even as literary scholarship has become markedly more "historical," it has apparently become less marketable to historians.
This essay charts the changing status of literature in recent historiography by focusing on historians as much as on literary scholars. It is designed to be descriptive and prescriptive, to diagnose what I see as a problem for historians and literary historians alike, and to offer some suggestions for better field integration and dialogue. Atlantic studies offers a compelling case study because literary scholars are clearly producing more scholarship in this area while historians seem to be consuming less of it. Yet my evidence base will turn at times to the fields represented by the primary readers of the journals in which this essay appears, early American history and early American literature, and my remarks will occasionally refer to disciplinary shifts within the larger enterprises of history and literary studies. Attending more to practice than theory and focusing on scholarship published in English about colonial and early national North America, the essay invites readers to reflect on what historians and scholars of literature do when they encounter each other, when they interpret literature, and when they use literature to interpret something else. Though early Americanists seem more divided now than ever before, the real division may not be between history and literary studies so much as it is between competing concepts within history and within literary studies about what texts are and do.
The three sections of this essay address different ways of conceiving of disciplinary relations. The first section briefly examines the growth of Atlantic literary history and the declining citations to literary scholarship by historians. The second section uses a decade of cross-disciplinary book reviews (that is, reviews in which historians evaluate new books by literary scholars and vice versa) to see what historians and literary scholars actually have to say about each other and how individual readers have constructed disciplinary commitments by confronting work in another discipline. The third section examines the use of literature as evidence in recent documentary collections edited by historians who have been interested in the recoverability of the voices, epistemologies, or subjectivities of Native American peoples described in and by European-authored texts. I conclude by suggesting a few ways of overcoming the growing trade gap in Atlantic scholarship, directing my remarks to both historians and literary scholars.
In the past few years, historians have produced histories of the Atlantic world, histories of histories of the Atlantic world, and arguments about the utility of the concept of an Atlantic world, but they have done so largely without reference to current or past literary scholarship. The rise of the Atlantic world as an object of analysis and a site of scholarly contestation is surely one of the most significant developments in the historiography of the last decade. Though the phrase "Atlantic world" appeared in a handful of books and articles in the 1970s and early 1980s, it began to take hold of the historical profession as a phrase repeated annually in the titles of books, articles, and dissertations in the late 1980s, following the publication of Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden's edited collection of essays Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World. But the real acceleration began only in 1999, when...
The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession
On how literary studies as a discipline has historically defined itself against religion, see
Michael Kaufmann, ''The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the
Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession,'' New Literary History 38.4
(2007): 607-27.
This Detail, This History: Charles Taylor's Romanticism,'' in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age
- Colin Jager
Colin Jager, ''This Detail, This History: Charles Taylor's Romanticism,'' in Varieties of
Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig
Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 179.
The Crisis in Secular Studies
- Jacques Berlinerblau
Jacques Berlinerblau, ''The Crisis in Secular Studies,'' Chronicle of Higher Education, 8
September 2014.