The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture.David Jasper David Jasper is an Anglican priest and theologian, currently Professor in Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is an influential writer and speaker within the fields of Christian hermeneutics and post-modernity. The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture Blackwell, 2004, 204pp. The subtitle gives it away: there's much too much going on in this breathless, encyclopedic en·cy·clo·pe·dic adj. 1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of an encyclopedia. 2. Embracing many subjects; comprehensive: "an ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition" tour of the spiritual dimensions of "the desert." (Which points to another problem: despite the many ecological differences between the Sinai and the Australian outback, the Egyptian Thebaid, Charles Doughty's and T.E. Lawrence's Saudi Arabia, Saint-Exupery's Sahara, or the deserts of the American Southwest--not to mention the metaphorical wastelands traversed by St. John of the Cross, Blake, Van Gogh, Kafka, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and various other film-makers-the visionary Jasper conflates them all into one vast generic landscape of the mind.) A professor of "Literature and Theology" at the University of Glasgow The University of Glasgow (Scottish Gaelic: Oilthigh Ghlaschu, Latin: Universitas Glasguensis) was founded in 1451, in Glasgow, Scotland. , Jasper observes that the myth of Oedipus is every bit as "valid" as scriptural myths (the Gospel of Matthew The Gospel of Matthew is a synoptic gospel in the New Testament, one of four canonical gospels. It narrates an account of the life and ministry of Jesus. It describes his genealogy, his miraculous birth and childhood, his baptism and temptation, his ministry of healing and in this case). Well, o.k., but some distinctions have to be drawn; and Jasper is swept away by his lyric enthusiasm for all things kenotic, apophatic Adj. 1. apophatic - of or relating to the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not (such as `God is unknowable') , desolate, and paradoxical, particularly death-of-God theology. Jasper lavishly praises "Tom" Altizer (who lavishly praises him back on the book jacket). Jasper is fabulously knowledgeable; and the more's the pity. Perhaps he should simply have written a much shorter, provocative essay--or else a multi-volume magnum opus. One can't, in fewer than 200 pages, zip back and forth from St. Antony to Edward Abbey, Moses to Leslie Marmon Silko Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon on March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. ; one can't productively engage the philosophy of Hegel, Heidegger, Foucauld, Levinas, and Derrida; the spirituality of Meister Eckhart and T.S. Eliot; the art of Giotto, Constable, Defoe, Wim Wenders, and Michael Ondaatje; then throw in a postscript about "the recent wars in Iraq"--and hope to create coherence. |
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