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Scholars of Christian spirituality are always speaking into what Charles Taylor has termed a “Secular Age,” in both the Academy and the wider culture. How then to identify and claim a discourse for exploring the central Christian mystery of the “Word made flesh”? This volume, the third in a series of conferences on the “Power of the Word,” proposes poetic language as a way of exploring the revelation of the divine in history and everyday life, probing the relationship between language and the “flesh” or bodily experience. Its subtitle, “Word made flesh made word,” suggests the play of ideas among poetics, theology, and philosophy that this feast of conversations offers.
This volume’s three sections are each introduced by one of the conference’s keynote speakers, with succeeding essays responding to issues raised in the opening essays. Sir Michael Edwards begins by framing an experiential theology of Revelation based on the “bodied” nature of poetry, its ability “to make us aware of the flesh-ness or corporeality of language: by its concentration and its unconcern simply to convey a message, a poem invites us into the life of words” (21). The revela-tory experience of reading and writing poetry guides the rest of this section. Kevin Grove explores Augustine’s approach to the the Psalms as a way of “participating in Christ,” while Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga constructs a dialogue between George Herbert and Stanislaw Herakliusz Lubormirski, two poets who understood poetry as in some way mediating the mystical experience of God. Edwards’s theme of the corporeality of language is taken up again in Sonia Jaworska’s essay on the “flesh” as a key focus of Richard Crashaw’s poetry, stressing...