Love and Good Reasons

Postliberal Approaches to Christian Ethics and Literature

Autor: Oehlschlaeger, Fritz
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330530
eISBN Pdf: 9780822384670
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2003
Mes: Gener
Pàgines: 328
DDC: 813.009/382
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

Insisting on the vital, productive relationship between ethics and the study of literature, Love and Good Reasons demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective. Fritz Oehlschlaeger argues for the study of literature as a training ground for the kinds of thinking on which moral reasoning depends. He challenges methods of doing ethics that attempt to specify universally binding principles or rules and argues for the need to bring literature back into conversation with the most basic questions about how we should live.

Love and Good Reasons combines postliberal narrative theology—especially Stanley Hauerwas’s Christian ethics and Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of traditional inquiry—with recent scholarship in literature and ethics including the work of Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, Wayne Booth, Jeffrey Stout, and Richard Rorty. Oehlschlaeger offers detailed readings of literature by five major authors—Herman Melville, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. He examines their works in light of biblical scripture and the grand narratives of Israel, Jesus, and the Church. Discussing the role of religion in contemporary higher education, Oehlschlaeger shares his own experiences of teaching literature from a religious perspective at a state university.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Literary Criticism and Christian Ethics in Service to One Another
2. Toward a Christian Ethics of Reading, or, Why We Cannot Be Done with Bartleby
3. The "Best Blessing of Existence": "Conscious Worth" in Emma
4. Honor, Faithfulness, and Community in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and He Knew He Was Right
5. The "Very Temple of Authorised Love": Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady
6. A Light That Has Been There from the Beginning: Stephen Crane and the Gospel of John
Afterword: Postliberal Christian Scholarship: An Engagement with Rorty and Stout
Notes
Bibliography
Index