James M. M. Francis – författare

Eschatology is an understudied theological topic in Dietrich Bonhoeffer studies. It is a doctrine that is either acknowledged in passing or ignored altogether. This is primarily due to the apparent drastic shift in the theological posture, language, and terminologies used by Bonhoeffer later in life, dovetailed with the dramatic circumstances surrounding his involvement with the conspiracy to overthrow Adolf Hitler’s regime and his subsequent imprisonment and execution. However, this book provides a detailed examination of the contours of Bonhoeffer’s key doctrines – Christology, ecclesiology, and the Christian life – and reveals that the eschatological concept of the kingdom of God is, in fact, an underlying thread that permeates, animates, and sustains his entire corpus.

Literature and theology have long been conversation partners. The great themes of human existence form the subject matter of their shared discussion. However, comedic literature has often been overlooked as a serious means to fostering such theological engagement. This book seeks to rectify this imbalance. By examining selected works of the eighteenth-century playwright and novelist Henry Fielding, we are shown that a comedic world has much to say that is of true theological significance. Recognizing the value of much traditional Fielding research, the author departs from its inherent determinism which, he believes, stifles more fruitful opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue. Key to his desire to engage the comedic in this conversation, he introduces the interpretative tool of misplacement. By this is meant a continuous parting with the ineffable – the perpetual recognition that in comedic writing there is always a fragile sense of the other. Setting Fielding’s fiction alongside works of contemporary philosophical theology and postmodern works of fiction, the author allows common critical zones such as epistemology, ethics, mimesis, canonicity, and revelation to be investigated. In all these areas, the novel, in Fielding’s hands, displays a powerful comic resonance with a less deterministic theology, and subverts those assumed securities regarding the status of the individual in the world before God. Ultimately, the book offers the challenge of recognizing that the nature of the novel is inescapably theological and that theology itself is, indeed, fictive.

John Donne’s family were committed Catholics. His two uncles were Jesuits. One of them, Jasper Heywood, was the leader of the Jesuit mission in England, while Donne’s mother was a recusant who was forced to leave the country in 1595. In this detailed and historically contextualized study, the author argues that Donne was greatly influenced in his journey from militant Roman Catholicism to ordination in the Church of England by Ignatius of Loyola’s religious ideals and in particular by his Spiritual Exercises.The book describes the pervasive influence of the Spiritual Exercises on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Catholicism and Protestantism. In this light, it offers a close reading of Donne’s preordination religious poems and prose with constant reference to the sermons. These works are usually read through the tinted lenses of ‘Catholicism’ or ‘Protestantism’ or other religious ‘-isms’. The reading proposed here argues instead that Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises were for Donne a means to transcend the simplistic and perilous divisions of contemporary Catholicism and Protestantism.