Andrew W. Hass

Heather Walton's highly imaginative approach to theological thinking has led to significant developments in the field of autoethnography, creative writing within theology and theology through creative practice. Her theological work is rooted in deep engagement with lived experience. Over her thirty years in the University of Glasgow she has been a leading figure in the fields of literature, theology and the arts, practical theology, and most recently theology through creative practice. The chapters in this book reflect the remarkable range of her teaching and writing, her gift for new discoveries in religious reflection and her brave and deep humanity in the face of our present chaos in the world. Colleagues and former students celebrate and engage with her work through reflections, poetry, and chapters about practical theology, ecology, theopoetics, feminist theology and postcolonial literature.

Title first published in 2003. Poetics of Critique breaks new ground in its pursuit of a formal and critical language of interdisciplinarity. The "founding" disciplines within the humanities - theology, philosophy, and literature - are brought together here in a shared space, but one that reconstitutes the very nature of each and any discipline. Readings alternate between discursive analysis and imaginative revisioning; texts alternate between those of the critical thinker (Kant, Nietzsche, Gadamer) and those of the novelist, the poet, and the playwright (Bulgakov, Goethe, Kundera, Sophocles). In this movement between traditions, a fusion, at once organic and dynamic, takes place: theologian, philosopher and artist become one, and a pure interdisciplinarity begins to emerge into view. Andrew Hass draws us into a new critical-poetic sensibility, by which we may explore the ultimate questions of human existence and divine reality with new vigor and sustain, or indeed revitalize, our deep passion for the fundamental question of truth.

Title first published in 2003. Poetics of Critique breaks new ground in its pursuit of a formal and critical language of interdisciplinarity. The "founding" disciplines within the humanities - theology, philosophy, and literature - are brought together here in a shared space, but one that reconstitutes the very nature of each and any discipline. Readings alternate between discursive analysis and imaginative revisioning; texts alternate between those of the critical thinker (Kant, Nietzsche, Gadamer) and those of the novelist, the poet, and the playwright (Bulgakov, Goethe, Kundera, Sophocles). In this movement between traditions, a fusion, at once organic and dynamic, takes place: theologian, philosopher and artist become one, and a pure interdisciplinarity begins to emerge into view. Andrew Hass draws us into a new critical-poetic sensibility, by which we may explore the ultimate questions of human existence and divine reality with new vigor and sustain, or indeed revitalize, our deep passion for the fundamental question of truth.

Explores the rise of the idea of nothing in Western modernity and how its figuration is transforming and offering new possibilities.Finalist for the 2014 American Academy of Religion Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, in the Constructive-Reflective category In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary history of ideas, Andrew W. Hass explores the ascendency of the concept of nothing into late modernity. He argues that the rise of the reality of nothing in religion, philosophy, and literature has taken place only against the decline of the concept of One: a shift from a sovereign understanding of the One (unity, universality) toward the "figure of the O"-a cipher figure that, as nonentity, is nevertheless determinant of other realities. The figuring of this O culminates in a proliferation of literary expressions of nothingness, void, and absence from 1940 to 1960, but by century's end, this movement has shifted from linear progression to mutation, whereby religion, theology, philosophy, literature, and other critical modes of thought, such as feminism, merge into a shared, circular activity. The writer W. H. Auden lends his name to this O, his long poetic work The Sea and the Mirror an exemplary manifestation of its implications. Hass examines this work, along with that of a host of writers, philosophers, and theologians, to trace the revolutionary hermeneutics and creative space of the O, and to provide the reasoning of why nothing is now such a powerful force in the imagination of the twenty-first century, and of how it might move us through and beyond our turbulent times.