Love and Good Reasons
Postliberal Approaches to Christian Ethics and Literature
Love and Good Reasons
Postliberal Approaches to Christian Ethics and Literature
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Hardback
£94.00
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330530
Number of Pages: 277
Published: 14/01/2003
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.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Literary Criticism and Christian Ethics in Service to One Another 9
2. Toward a Christian Ethics of Reading, or, Why We Cannot Be Done with Bartleby 49
3. The "Best Blessing of Existence”: "Conscious Worth” in Emma 83
4. Honor, Faithfulness, and Community in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and He Knew What Was Right 126
5. The "Very Temple of Authorised Love”: Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady 169
6. A Light That Has Been There from the Beginning: Stephen Crane and the Gospel of John 212
Afterword: Postliberal Christian Scholarship: An Engagement with Rorty and Stout 251
Notes 271
Bibliography 297
Index 307
Introduction 1
1. Literary Criticism and Christian Ethics in Service to One Another 9
2. Toward a Christian Ethics of Reading, or, Why We Cannot Be Done with Bartleby 49
3. The "Best Blessing of Existence”: "Conscious Worth” in Emma 83
4. Honor, Faithfulness, and Community in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and He Knew What Was Right 126
5. The "Very Temple of Authorised Love”: Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady 169
6. A Light That Has Been There from the Beginning: Stephen Crane and the Gospel of John 212
Afterword: Postliberal Christian Scholarship: An Engagement with Rorty and Stout 251
Notes 271
Bibliography 297
Index 307
"Fritz Oehlschlaeger shows that there really is something called a Christian knowledge that can make a difference for how one reads texts. Hopefully Love and Good Reasons will be read widely. I know of few accounts of reading that more enrich the discussion."-Stanley Hauerwas, author of The Hauerwas Reader "Fritz Oehlschlaeger's postliberal approach offers a potential way beyond the impasse of the bifurcation of conservative and liberal in the cultural wars of contemporary literary criticism without asking participants to relinquish their deeply held ethical convictions."-Brian D. Ingraffia, author of Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God's Shadow
