Blood Meridian


Book Description

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.




A Gnostic Tragedy


Book Description




Why Religion?


Book Description

Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions. These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face. Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture. A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience.




The Gnostics


Book Description

Gnostics have always sought to “know” rather than to accept dogma and doctrine, often to their peril. This inquiry into Gnosticism examines the character, history, and beliefs of a brave and vigorous spiritual quest that originated in the ancient Near East and continues into the present day.Lawrence Durrell writes, “This is a strange and original essay, more a work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics lived and thought as D.H. Lawrence’s intuitive recreation of the vanished Etruscans.”




This Tragic Gospel


Book Description

This Tragic Gospel suggests that the "Gospel" of John intended to supplant the first three gospels and succeeded in gaining undue influence on the early churches. This study focuses on the tragic moment when Jesus prays for deliverance from his impending death in the garden of Gethsemane. Ruprecht contends that John rewrote this scene in order to convey a very different dramatic meaning from the one reflected in Mark's gospel. In John's version, not only did Jesus not pray to be spared, he actually mocked this prayer, embracing his imminent demise with godlike confidence. Ruprecht believes that this dramatic reinterpretation undermined the tragedy of Jesus's death as Mark imagined it and so paved the way for the development of a kind of Christianity that focused far less on compassion in the face of human suffering. John's Jesus offers the faithful food so that they will never hunger, water so that they will never thirst, and the promise of a world in which no faithful person ever sheds a tear. Mark's Christians do suffer, but they witness to suffering and death differently...with compassion. Mark's Christ suffers, like all Christians after him, but he embodies a tragic hope in the promise of a faith shored up by love and compassion.




Cormac McCarthy in Context


Book Description

Cormac McCarthy is a writer informed by an intense curiosity. His interests range from the natural world, to philosophy and religion, to history and culture. Cormac McCarthy in Context offers readers the opportunity to understand how various influences inform his rich body of work. The collection explores the relationship McCarthy has with his favourite authors, writers such as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Other contexts are tremendously informative, including the American Romance tradition of the nineteenth century as well as modernity and the modernist literary movement. Influence and context are of absolute importance in understanding McCarthy, who is now being understood as one of the most significant authors of the contemporary period.




The Orchard Keeper


Book Description

The acclaimed first novel from one of America's most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder–together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence–enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.




A Bloody and Barbarous God


Book Description

A Bloody and Barbarous God investigates the relationship between gnosticism, a system of thought that argues that the cosmos is evil and that the human spirit must strive for liberation from manifest existence, and the perennial philosophy, a study of the highest common factor in all esoteric religions, and how these traditions have influenced the later novels of Cormac McCarthy, namely, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Mundik argues that McCarthy continually strives to evolve an explanatory theodicy throughout his work, and that his novels are, to a lesser or greater extent, concerned with the meaning of human existence in relation to the presence of evil and the nature of the divine.




Cormac McCarthy?s Borders and Landscapes


Book Description

Cormac McCarthy's work is attracting an increasing number of scholars and critics from a range of disciplines within the humanities and beyond, from political philosophy to linguistics and from musicology to various branches of the sciences. Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes contributes to this developing field of research, investigating the way McCarthy's writings speak to other works within the broader fields of American literature, international literature, border literature, and other forms of comparative literature. It also explores McCarthy's literary antecedents and the movements out of which his work has emerged, such as modernism, romanticism, naturalism, eco-criticism, genre-based literature (western, southern gothic), folkloric traditions and mythology.




Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in the Novels of Thomas Hardy


Book Description

What role do novels, drama, and tragedy play within Christian thought and living? The twentieth century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar addressed these questions using tragic drama. For him, Christ was the true tragic hero of the world who exceeded all tragic literature and experience. Balthasar demonstrated how ancient, pre-Christian tragedy and Renaissance works contained important Christian concepts, but he critiqued modern novels as failing to be either truly tragic or Christian. By examining the tragic novels of Thomas Hardy on their own terms, we have an important counterpoint to Balthasar's argument that the novel is too prosaic for theological reflection. Hardy's novels are an apt pairing for examination and critique, as they are both classically and biblically influenced, as well as contemporary.The larger implication for Balthasar's theology is that his innovations in theological aesthetics and tragedy must be expanded in the light of modernity and the tragic novel.