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This monograph explores the ethics and religious sensibilities of a group of the hibakusha (survivors) of 1945's atomic bombings. Although the atomic bombings of 1945 have been studied from the points of view of various disciplines, the survivors' ethic—not retaliation, but reconciliation—emerging from their experiences and supported by their religious sensibilities, has never been addressed sufficiently in academic discourse. Rather their ethic has been excluded from the atomic bomb discourse or nuclear ethics. In examining Hiroshima city's “secular” commemoration, Hiroshima's True Pure Land Buddhist understanding, and Nagasaki's Roman Catholic tradition, I argue that the hibakusha's ethic and philosophy, based upon critical self-reflection, could offer resources for the constructing ethics based upon memories, especially in the post-9–11 world. Thus, this monograph, responding to this lacuna in scholarship, invites readers to go beyond the mushroom cloud where they encounter actual hibakusha's ethical thoughts.

The metaphor of the Church as a “body” has shaped Catholic thinking since the Second Vatican Council. Its influence on theological inquiries into Catholic nature and practice is well-known; less obvious is the way it has shaped a generation of Catholic imaginative writers. This is the first full-length study of a cohort of Catholic authors whose art takes seriously the themes of the Council: from novelists such as Mary Gordon, Ron Hansen, Louise Erdrich, and J. F. Powers, to poets such as Annie Dillard, Mary Karr, Lucia Perillo, and Anne Carson, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley. Each of these writers encourages readers to think about the human body as a site—perhaps the most important site—of interaction between God and human beings. Although they represent the body in different ways, these late-twentieth-century Catholic artists share a sense of its inherent value. Moreover, they use ideas and terminology from the rich tradition of Catholic sacramentality, especially as it was articulated in the documents of Vatican II, to describe that value. In this way they challenge the Church to take its own tradition seriously and to reconsider its relationship to a relatively recent apologetics that has emphasized a narrow view of human reason and a rigid sense of orthodoxy.

This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. It shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself “lifestyle” attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.

This book examines philosophical, religious, and literary or artistic texts using methodologies and insights that have grown out of reflection on literature and art. In them, the phrase “material spirit” becomes a point of departure for considering the continuing spectral effects of religious texts and concerns in ways that do not simply call for, or assume, new or renewed forms of religiosity. In other words, the chapters here seek to examine religion beyond traditional notions of transcendence: religion, for them, is a problem of immanence. Their topics range from early Christian religious practices to global climate change. Within the broader focus on religion, some of the chapters explore religious themes or tones in literary texts, for example, works by Wordsworth, Hopkins, Proust, Woolf, and Teresa of Avila. Others approach—in a literary-critical mood—philosophical or para-philosophical writers such as Bataille, Husserl, Derrida, and Benjamin. Still others treat writers of a more explicitly religious orientation, such as Augustine, Rosenzweig, or Bernard of Clairvaux.

Sodomscape presents a fresh understanding of Lot’s wife in the reception history of the Sodom story. Premodern biblical cultures found in the scene of abortive flight a monitory sign of improvident curiosity and rooted inhospitality. This book’s cross-cutting array of texts and images—a fifteenth-century illuminated miniature, a group of Counter-Reformation devotional paintings, a Victorian lost-world adventure fantasy, a Russian avant-garde rendering of the flight from Sodom, Albert Memmi’s career-making first novel (The Pillar of Salt), and a contemporary excursion into the Dead Sea healthcare tourism industry—shows how the repeated desire to reclaim Lot’s wife, across millennia and diverse media, turns the cautionary emblem of the mutating woman into a figural laboratory for testing the ethical bounds of the two faces of hospitality – welcome and risk – in diverse cultural locations. Sodomscape—the book’s name for this gesture—revisits touchstone moments in the history of figural thinking (Augustine, Erich Auerbach, Maurice Blanchot, Hans Blumenberg) and places these in conversation with key artisans of the hospitality question, particularly as it bears on the phenomenological condition of attunement to the unfinished character of being in relation to others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt). The book’s cumulative perspective identifies Lot’s wife as the resilient figure of vigilant dwelling between the substantialist dream of resemblance and the mutating dynamism of otherness. The radical in-betweenness of the figure discloses counter-intuitive ways of understanding what counts as a life in the context of divergent claims of being-with and being-for.