The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture

The Sacred Desert is a fascinating and original work, which reflects on the role of the desert in theology, history, literature, art and film.

Engaging with figures as diverse as Jesus, the early Christian Desert Fathers, William Blake, T.E. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Georgia O Keeffe, Wim Wenders, Bill Viola, and Jim Crace, author David Jasper explores deserts as real places, as interior spaces and as they feature in numerous texts. He makes connections across millennia of desert texts, meditating on the mystical, religious and theological meanings that emerge. Underlying these interdisciplinary wanderings in the wasteland is the author s quest for a new form of religious thought and language. Lively and lucid, this outstanding work stretches from the Bible perhaps still the greatest of our desert texts through to contemporary experiences of the desert. It is truly an original work of theology, and a captivating journey through the history of religion.

Foreword by David E. Klemm.

Preface.

List of illustrations.

1. Introduction: Meeting Points.

2. The Bible, Schoenberg, and Heidegger.

3. The Desert Fathers: Wandering and Miracles.

4. Time and Memory, Wind and Space: The Desert and Mysticism.

5. Mysticism and Modernity: Thomas Merton meets Don Cupitt.

6. The Literature of the Desert: Travellers and Poets.

7. The Literature of the Desert: Novelists.

8. Artists: Georgia O′Keefe, Bill Viola and Abstract Expressionism.

9. Films of the Desert: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wim Wenders, Claire Dennis.

10. Desert Theology and Total Presence: Poets William Blake, T.S. Eliot and Yves Bonnefoy meet Hegel and Altizer.

11. Conclusion: Meeting Point.

Postscript: The Desert and the Recent Wars in Iraq.

Bibliography.

Index

David Jasper is Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow, and was the founding editor of the journal, Literature and Theology. He is the author of The Sacred and Secular Canon in Romanticism (1999) and co–editor of The Bible and Literature: A Reader (edited with Stephen Prickett, Blackwell Publishing, 1999) and Religion and Literature: A Reader (edited with Robert Detweiler, 2000).

One of the really significant things about this work is how widely Jasper ranges in his exploration of the spiritual meaning of the desert. He considers classic religious sources that have focused their attention on the desert ideal... But he also explores the works of a range of artists, poets, writers, and filmmakers... The result is a playful, interdisciplinary rumination upon the myriad ways the desert has shaped and continues to shape often by undermining expectations of meaning the religions imagination. Recommended. Upper–level undergraduates and above; general readers.
Choice

"The Sacred Desert is a marvellous and truly integral conjunction of seemingly every dimension of that ultimate desert which is at once our deepest beginning and our deepest ending. Theological and poetic at once, and critical and historical simultaneously, it offers us a vicarious voyage into our most ultimate ground, a ground beyond God but nontheless embodying the totality of the Godhead. If that Godhead is an absolute nothingness, it is a truly actual nothingness, and most actual for us in that desert which is here so powerfully and so comprehensively evoked." Thomas Altizer, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the State University of New York and Stony Brook

"The Sacred Desert provides a journey into the innermost core of the self––where the soul stands alone before an unknown God, who is both darkness and light. David Jasper has written a magnificent theological reflection on the depth of spiritual meaning sought and found by desert pilgrims in literature, art, film, history, and sacred scripture. A tour de force!"
David Klemm, University of Iowa