In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.

Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do Theology'. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.

This series of essays provides thumbnail biographies of key figures in Christianity's last thousand years. The entries provide basic information about the person's life, development, era and ideas. The towering historical figures include mystics, reformers, theologians and church leaders.

A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry

In a masterful blending of lyric and narrative, Sea of Faith ranges across interior states and external worlds. From the Sierra Nevadas to New York City subways, from an imagined friendship with Lao Tzu to a meditation on Coney Island, from a comic and poignant classroom discussion to a sexual fantasy, John Brehm's poems explore the human predicament with tenderness, compassion, and humor.

Conceived as a convenience to those readers concerned with doubt and faith, Denise Levertov's 34 selected poems originally were published in seven separate volumes. The poet presents a selection of thirty-four of her own poems culled from previously published volumes, tracing her movement from agnosticism to Christian faith and her oscillation from doubt to affirmation along the way.

Organ and piano duet teams will appreciate Billie Nastelin's skillful arrangement of the beautiful "How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place" from the Brahms Requiem. Each player has opportunities with both melody and accompaniment, and congregations and audiences will request this over and over. Two copies of the music are included. Also arranged for organ/piano duet by Nastelin: "And the Glory of the Lord," from Messiah (GOPD9901),