Lands of Likeness

Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, theology, and criticism, including Morning Knowledge, Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry and The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, which was also published by the University of Chicago Press.

"[An] arresting invitation to stop and see. Lands of Likeness . . . could not be more timely. For what it commends is nothing other than a way of being in the world that is neither grasping nor hurried, that is minutely attentive to the particularity of things rather than forever looking past them or behind or beneath, that constrains egoism in order to create space for the kinds of encounter that leave us transformed in their wake. It is a book that means to stop us in our tracks, permitting us to look, to linger, to wonder at what is. Or, as Hart rather touchingly writes, for all its theoretical sophistication and immense learning, Lands of Likeness is finally a book ‘about leaves and trees, birds and snails’."

• Note on Citations and ConventionsIntroduction1: From Templum to Contemplation2: The Sabbath of the Idea3: Hermeneutic of Contemplation4: Contemplation with Kestrel5: Fascination6: Consideration7: From Supreme Being to Supreme Fiction8: Contemplation with Noisy Birds9: Contemplating "the True Mystery"10: "On Course but Destinationless"11: Mystère and Mystique12: "To Contemplate the Radical Soul"Afterword: Poem as TemplumAcknowledgmentsGlossaryNotesIndex