Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America

Introduction

1 = Introduction Roger Lundin Invisible Conversations adapts its title from works by two American writers, one of them being the greatest theologian this culture has produced and the other an excellent scholar whose untimely death cut short a promising career. The first of these two is Jonathan Edwards, and the passage in question is to be found in his “Apostrophe to Sarah Pierpont,” the young woman who eventually became his wife. After a lengthy tribute to the “strange sweetness” of Sarah’s love of “almighty Being,” Edwards concludes with a winsome tribute to her love of nature and nature’s hidden God: “She loves to be alone, and to wander in the fields and on the mountains, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her.”1 From the first exploration of this continent to the present day, countless men and women of all types and inclinations have carried on their “conversations with the invisible.” This has been true for Jews and Protestants, Catholics and Hindus, Muslims and Eastern Orthodox believers alike, just as it has also proved to be the case for many who doubt whether Sarah Pierpont’s “almighty Being” even exists. In Chapter 10 of this book, Andrew Delbanco reminds us of the pogrom survivor in Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March: “After the things he had seen, this character admonishes his friends and family not to dare to ‘talk to me about God.’ And yet, as Bellow remarks, ‘it was he who talked about God, all the time.’” For understanding those conversations to and about that “invisible God,” the literature of the United States offers exceptional resources. From their discussions of Emily Dickinson and Andre Dubus to their analyses of Frederick Douglass and Flannery O’Connor, the chapters in this volume move over a 2 Roger Lundin broad historical and cultural landscape that has become, over the history of this culture, packed with private meditations and public reflections on the existence of God, the nature of religious experience, and the place of faith in public life. Often lively, sometimes divisive, and invariably illuminating, these conversations have been central to American culture for centuries, and they will be at the center of attention throughout this book. There is, however, another sense of “invisibility” that Invisible Conversations seeks to address. It has to do with what the late Jenny Franchot once described as the “invisible domain” of religion in American literary studies . Writing more than a decade ago, Franchot observed that, even though “America has been and continues to be manifestly religious in complex and intriguing ways,” a thorough “lack of interest in religion . . . has produced a singularly biased scholarship” in the academic study of the literature of the United States. In recent decades, this bias has manifested itself most frequently as a stubborn refusal to engage religious questions on anything like their own terms. “Religious questions are always bound up with the invisible,” she wrote, and they “are therefore peculiarly subject to silencing—whether through an outright refusal to inquire” or through the rush to translate “the invisible” into what are for the contemporary intellectual the more visible (and obvious) “vocabularies of sexuality, race, or class.” In using these vocabularies to avoid “America’s engagement with ‘invisibles,’” Franchot concludes, “we have allowed ourselves to become ignorant.”2 Invisible Conversations is an effort to dispel such ignorance. This book grew out of the fruitful collaboration of one group of scholars that was made possible by the visionary determination of another group. The visionaries happened to work together for a decade at the University of Notre Dame, where one of them, Nathan Hatch, led the Evangelical Scholarship Initiative, and another, James Turner, served as the founding director of the Erasmus Institute. (These two are also professors of history, and at the time, Hatch was serving as Notre Dame’s provost.) The initiatives led by Hatch and Turner supported numerous scholarly projects that explored the interplay of religion and the major academic disciplines. As one of those projects, the American Literature and Religion Seminar had a straightforward goal, which was to assemble a team of scholars from various religious backgrounds to study the intersection of religion and literature in the United States from Ralph Waldo Emerson to the present. At a time when acrimony and suspicion have often marked the academic discussion of religion and American studies, the work of the seminar unfolded in a spirit of civil and vigorous dialogue. Seminar members held...