The Editor: Shirley A. Stave received her B.A. in English (speech/theater) from Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, and her Ph.D. in English from University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Decline of the Goddess: Nature, Culture, and Women in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction (1995), co-author of Living Witchcraft: A Contemporary American Coven (1994), and editor of Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth (2001).

• Contents: Shirley A. Stave: Introduction – Beverly Foulks: Trial by Fire: The Theodicy of Toni Morrison in Sula – Nancy Berkowitz Bate: Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Psalm and Sacrament – David Z. Wehner: To Live This Life Intensely and Well: The Rebirth of Milkman Dead in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – Beth Benedrix: Intimate Fatality: Song of Solomon and the Journey Home – Ágnes Surányi: The Bible as Intertext in Toni Morrison’s Novels – Sharon Jessee: The «Female Revealer» in Beloved, Jazz and Paradise: Syncretic Spirituality in Toni Morrison’s Trilogy – Benjamin Burr: Mythopoetic Syncretism in Paradise and the Deconstruction of Hospitality in Love – Anissa Janine Wardi: Jazz Funerals and Mourning Songs: Toni Morrison’s Call to the Ancestors in Sula – Jennifer Terry: A New World Religion? Creolisation and Candomblé in Toni Morrison’s Paradise – Shirley A. Stave: The Master’s Tools: Morrison’s Paradise and the Problem of Christianity – Rebecca Degler: Ritual and «Other» Religions in The Bluest Eye.