This book explores current trends in the interdisciplinary study of literature and theology - an area of academic activity that has developed dramatically in the past twenty years. The field of study originated from the impetus to embrace the richness of imaginative resources in theological reflection and was stimulated by the re-emergence of the sacred in contemporary theory. Since the mid '90s critical theory has undergone a number of significant transformations, theology has become a subject of public concern and the boundaries between sacred and cultural texts have become increasingly...

Discipleship is one of the key words used in the churches today and there are many initiatives in the mainstream churches to enable people to grow as disciples of Christ. Much of this happens in small groups, yet there has hitherto been very little written about this phenomenon. Roger Walton seeks to speak from research and theological reflection into the growing small group movement in the churches. In the midst of a cluster of recent 'how to' books on Christian Small Groups this book attempts to set the phenomenon in the broader context of research and theological reflection. It can be...

Concentrating on female modernists specifically, this volume examines spiritual issues and their connections to gender during the modernist period. Scholarly inquiry surrounding women writers and their relation to what Wassily Kandinsky famously hoped would be an `Epoch of the Great Spiritual' has generated myriad contexts for closer analysis including: feminist theology, literary and religious history, psychoanalysis, queer and trauma theory. This book considers canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf while also attending to critically overlooked or poorly understood figures such as...