Regina Schwartz

Regina Schwartz is Professor of Literature and Law at Northwestern University. She writes on the Bible and it legacy, and religion and its secular afterlife, in volumes including The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (University of Chicago Press), Remembering and Repeating: On Milton's Theodicy and Poetics (University of Chicago Press) and, most recently, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford University Press). She has edited Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and Theology Approach the Beyond (Routledge). Her recent essay "Holy Terror and Holy Law," at SSRN, is on biblical law and justice.

Posts by Regina Schwartz:

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Sacramental poetics

By its very nature, mystery is much more difficult to speak about, and certainly to track.  But religious ritual claims to offer mystery as well as sociality. It claims to make the transcendent immanent, and transcendence—whether vertical or horizontal, above or beyond—is the sphere of the sacred, of what is beyond our comprehension, control and use. We can point to it, sign it, and by doing so, evoke it. But that “beyond” is more than we can say, hear, touch, taste or even understand.

Read the rest of Sacramental poetics.

Posted in Rethinking secularism | 3 Comments » |