Love and Good Reasons: Postliberal Approaches to Christian Ethics and Literature
Author(s): Fritz Oehlschlaeger (Author)
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 14 Jan. 2003
Language: English
Print length: 328 pages
ISBN-10: 0822330539
ISBN-13: 9780822330530
Book Description
Insisting on the vital, productive relationship between ethics and the study of literature, Love and Good Reasons demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective. Fritz Oehlschlaeger argues for the study of literature as a training ground for the kinds of thinking on which moral reasoning depends. He challenges methods of doing ethics that attempt to specify universally binding principles or rules and argues for the need to bring literature back into conversation with the most basic questions about how we should live.
Love and Good Reasons combines postliberal narrative theology-especially Stanley Hauerwas’s Christian ethics and Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of traditional inquiry-with recent scholarship in literature and ethics including the work of Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, Wayne Booth, Jeffrey Stout, and Richard Rorty. Oehlschlaeger offers detailed readings of literature by five major authors-Herman Melville, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. He examines their works in light of biblical scripture and the grand narratives of Israel, Jesus, and the Church. Discussing the role of religion in contemporary higher education, Oehlschlaeger shares his own experiences of teaching literature from a religious perspective at a state university.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Fritz Oehlschlaeger shows that there really is something called a Christian knowledge that can make a difference for how one reads texts. Hopefully Love and Good Reasons will be read widely. I know of few accounts of reading that more enrich the discussion.”–Stanley Hauerwas, author of The Hauerwas Reader
“Fritz Oehlschlaeger’s postliberal approach offers a potential way beyond the impasse of the bifurcation of conservative and liberal in the cultural wars of contemporary literary criticism without asking participants to relinquish their deeply held ethical convictions.”–Brian D. Ingraffia, author of
Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow
From the Back Cover
“Fritz Oehlschlaeger’s postliberal approach offers a potential way beyond the impasse of the bifurcation of conservative and liberal in the cultural wars of contemporary literary criticism without asking participants to relinquish their deeply held ethical convictions.”–Brian D. Ingraffia, author of “Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow”
About the Author
Fritz Oehlschlaeger is Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is coeditor of Toward the Making of Thoreau’s Modern Reputation, coauthor of Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters, and editor of Old Southwest Humor from the Saint Louis Reveille, 1844–1850.
Wow! eBook
