Description: "What brings religious scholars Constance Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood together in Devotion is a shared conviction that "reading helps us live with and through the unknown." For them, the nature of reading raises questions fundamental to how we think about our political futures and modes of human relation. Each essay suggests different ways to characterize the object of devotion and the stance of the devout subject before it. Furey writes about devotion in terms of vivification, energy, and artifice; Hammerschlag in terms of commentary, mimicry, and fetishism; and Hollywood in terms of anarchy, antinomianism, and atopia. They are interested in literature not as providing models for ethical, political, or religious life, but as creating the site in which the possible-and the impossible-transport the reader, enabling new forms of thought, habits of mind, and modes of life. Ranging from German theologian Martin Luther to French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman to American poet Susan Howe, this volume is not just a reflection on forms of devotion, it is also an enactment of devotion itself"--
Brief description: Constance Furey is professor of religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters and Poetic Relations: Faith and Intimacy in the English Reformation.
Review Quotes: "The book argues that the ways in which we negotiate freedom and authority between a text and its reader impact how we interact with the world intellectually and politically. The book's originality lies in its novel conceptualization of devotion. Furey, Hammerschlag, and Hollywood use the term to characterize a way of reading that is liberating in creating a safe space for intellectual, existential, and political experimentation . . . an act of reading that demands both fidelity and suspicion. Thus, objects of devotion are extended beyond religious texts to other genres of writing, including literature and philosophy."-- "Political Theology"