These essays deal with four major themes: the relationship between belief and unbelief, the connection between religion and science, the interpenetration of theology and spirituality, and the nature and value of higher education within the Catholic context--themes that reflect the persistent quest to discern the presence and action of God within the multiple dimensions of human existence.

Compilation of 99 short essays previously published in Catatan pinggir coloumn appear weekly in the Indonesian language news journal Tempo.

Shakespeare’s plays are filled with religious references and spiritual concerns. His characters—like Hamlet in this book’s title—speak the language of belief. Theology can enable the modern reader to see more clearly the ways in which Shakespeare draws on the Bible, doctrine, and the religious controversies of the long English Reformation. But as Oxford don Paul Fiddes shows in his intertextual approach, the theological thought of our own time can in turn be shaped by the reading of Shakespeare’s texts and the viewing of his plays. In More Things in Heaven and Earth, Fiddes argues that Hamlet’s famous phrase not only underscores the blurred boundaries between the warring Protestantism and Catholicism of Shakespeare’s time; it is also an appeal for basic spirituality, free from any particular doctrinal scheme. This spirituality is characterized by the belief in prioritizing loving relations over institutions and social organization. And while it also implies a constant awareness of mortality, it seeks a transcendence in which love outlasts even death. In such a spiritual vision, forgiveness is essential, human justice is always imperfect, communal values overcome political supremacy, and one is on a quest to find the story of one’s own life. It is in this context that Fiddes considers not only the texts behind Shakespeare’s plays but also what can be the impact of his plays on the writing of doctrinal texts by theologians today. Fiddes ultimately shows how this more expansive conception of Shakespeare is grounded in the trinitarian relations of God in which all the texts of the world are held and shaped.

Emily Brontë's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written by Victorian women. This much-needed study reinstates Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. Last Things presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to its own inner experience of the world while seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. Last Things also brings the emotions and concerns that inform Wuthering Heights into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.