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Or in the space and the freedom given me for this column. In various ways, I try to bring forward the work of powerfully imaginative individuals who are not officially counted as theologians. My first nominee this time is Arnold Benz, Professor of Astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. he is a cosmologist-one who studies the birth and death of stars, the formation of planets, and the origin of the visible universe at the Big Bang. In The Future of the Universe: Chance, Chaos, God?, he forthrightly engages the religious challenge posed by what his discipline now tells us about the origin and ultimate fate of our planet. In doing so he reviews astrophysics for general readers and with the eyes of a poet, regarding all this relatively new scientific information as a potential source of metaphors whereby to reincarnate the reality of God for our own times. From start to finish, The Future of the Universe impressed me as scientifically rigorous, theologically nuanced, and adeptly literary. Thinkers like this are rare.

Religion requires participation just as science demands objectivity, IJeuz contends: we are involved, even complicit, in a relationship both with God and with the cosmos we observe. At the core of religion (as he understands it) is the uncanny but common, momentary experience in which all this weary world blurs and we find ourselves intimately belonging to a cosmos that is overwhelmingly gorgeous and profoundly, mysteriously coherent. Such "participatory knowledge," Benz contends, is prerequisite to the only kind of meaning with moral value: science and religion must be understood as separate domains of knowledge addressing or trying to understand distinctive categories of human experience. As Coleridge explains this issue, imagination calls the whole of our complicated humanity into coherence with itself, with the due subordination of its powers to one another.** As a result, the truth to which imagination testifies cannot, like the truths of science itself, be wholly independent of us and our choices. The objectivity of science cannot generate the moral significance for which we yearn nor can it deconstruct what faith provides J

More specifically, Benz argues, "the reality that appears through science can . . . serve as a metaphor that makes perceptions intelligible on a wholly different level. On that other level of perception, personal participation and faith are essential" (p. 122). Although scientific results on their own do not provide a basis for hope, they "can offer a metaphoric ground for helping believers as well as others to appreciate the religious character of humanity's hope for newness" (p. ). Benz wrote this hook at least in part to reconcile his own objective, scientific perceptions with his participatory, religious experiences but without fudging either one. He turns to metaphor and to deeply literary symbolic thinking to do so: what we have here is a poet who also happens to be a physicist.

Benz made clear to me what I had never understood quite so directly before: if one takes a long enough view, the cosmos itself is fabulously dynamic. "The new arises in the universe repeatedly, in many ways and forms," he explains (p. 157). Nothing is fixed or static except on the short and narrow view. We are made ol stardust, he explains (pp. 32-33), which is to say we are not only kin to the Milky Way, but like it subject to the repeated cosmic outbreak of the new and the unpredictable-but-not-disorderly. The natural world as known by astrophysics is clearly not a closed, absolutely determined causal network in which everything can at least in theory be accounted for. In physics at this very sophisticated level, much happens that cannot be accounted for until afterwards, in hindsight-which is to say the accounting remains in formal ways incomplete.

The Easter event, he argues, can be understood metaphorically as yet another instance, so familiar to astrophysics, of how the new arises not out of nothingness, but out of existing material whose structure is in decay. By extension, then, "Good Friday and Easter revolutionize the traditional conception of God. God is recognized now as one who takes part in the suffering of decay and, at the same time, as one who creates new form and order" (p. 123). The eventual extinction of the earths sun is not, then, necessary or objective proof that existence is absurd or that the glories of the earth will trail away into meaningless ashes and dost. The paschal event makes hope possihle-not objectively, of course, but through or by our willing partJcipation in the relationship to God to which iaith (and mystical experience) testifies.

That is hardly a new claim theologically. But I was astounded to see just how well it also accords metaphorically with central observations and theories in astrophysics. What Benz offers is not "natural theology" in its ordinary naive and sentimental form. This is physics turned to poetry, and then poetry rendered symbolic in a very delicate and convincing way.

In a letter to me and in the acknowledgement section, Benz offers his thanks to julia Gatta, an Episcopal priest, and to her husband, English professor John Gatta. They encouraged him to write the book and then translated it into English (a translation he checked and revised himself). It seems to me that our thanks are due to them as well: Benz has obviously enjoyed long and rigorous arguments with theologians who must have imaginative capacity no less remarkable than his own. I should note that The Origin of the Unuverse has been through four editions in German and translation into five other languages. A summary essay written by Benz and titled "Theology in a Dynamic Universe" can be found at .

Cary Eberle s Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning is yet another imaginative exercise in recognizing infinity in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. Eberle, chair of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, lightly sketches the Western evolution of two different attitudes toward time: we can imagine time as a linear sequence of moments to be used, HUed, and so on. Or we can imagine or experience time as an eternal present moment. As we have progressively lost our understanding of the eternal present, he argues, we have trapped ourselves on the impossibly narrow ledge of a "here and now" that is always immediately plummeting into "there and gone."

We feel forced, he says, "to do something with our time, to make it productive, to make every minute count. We feel we must 'make' the future, for it will not simply unfold according to fate or Gods will" (p. 14). Surely this oppressive anxiety is far distant from the imaginative perception of Gods immanence within the clutter on our desks and the shrill demands of our lists of things to do. As Coleridge warns, if we want more "Than that inanimate cold world allowed / To the poor, loveless, ever-anxions crowd," then we have to develop our own imaginative capacity to perceive how much more then; can be to life than an oppressive list of things to Otherwise, as Coleridge and Eberle both agree, our ever-more-frenzied effort somehow to control the linear onrush of time generates the characteristic malaise of our era: too many people are chronically depressed, anxious, fearful of failure, driven by competition, socially isolated, and distrustful (p. 15).

Eberle contrasts our contemporary ever-hurried world with cultural forms and practices that deliberately slow us down and open us out to the eternal present, which is to say to the experience of a place outside of time altogether. I particularly enjoyed his astute analysis of the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a famous illuminated calendar and daily prayer book from the fifteenth century. As he explores in detail, such devotionals offer a vision of time massively different from that purveyed by Day-Timers and PDAs. En route to this analysis there are other delights-Hesiod and the Greek myths of Kronos, for instance. Another gem is how the Benedictines coped with their rule in the absence of clocks-and how the mechanical measure of the clocks they invented quickly transformed their rule into something less humane, less organic, and less flexible than Benedict originally intended. The nifty details of the history he recounts helped to persuade me that he is right: the nanoseconds and megahertz of our own technologies are indeed driving us to try to live at an inhuman pace that would have appalled our ancestors.

Eberle is not alone in pointing out our troubles with time. Other people have of course argued that that we face a time famine-Arlie Hochschilds îTig ]img Binif comes immediately to mind, as does Dorothy Bass's Receiving the Day. Eberle contends that our problems derive not simply from socioeconomic development beyond our control but more complexly irom the ways in which we understand the nature of time itself-specifically, how we have lost any ability to step out of successive chronological time into the eternal present. Getting outside of time, he argues, demands much more than simply "doing nothing." Doing nothing is usually quite boring, and of course it once regarded as the sin of sloth. What we need is not "nothing to do" but rather contemplative and celebratory ways to reach out to eternity.

We reach outside of time, he contends, through liturgies and spiritual disciplines from a variety of traditions. Such wise habits help us to escape (rom-and to leam to control-the oppressive constraints of sequential time. Pondering all this, he sets out in his last chapter to observe the Sabbath for a year, returning to his Roman Catholic roots after long sojourns in Eastern thought and practices.

Here, for the first time, I was a bit disappointed in the book. This last chapter moves thoughtfully and intelligently through the church year he rediscovers, and that much was wonderful. But how did he spend Sunday afternoons so as to sustain his awareness of the realities encountered at Sunday morning liturgies? Brother Lawrence called this the "practice of the presence of God;" Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi calls it "How." But I wonder what it felt like to try to sustain that quality of mind all day every Sunday for a year. How did he resist the urge to "get something done" in the usual, frenzied sense of that phrase?

I warmly recommend Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning for parish discussion, especially where the congregation includes many timeconstrained high achievers, or where parish leadership is on a drive to help people understand why weekly worship matters. The book would provide a sure foundation for a Lenten series: it speaks clearly to what is both wrong and painful in our lives, and it has seven chapters that could easily be discussed in six sessions. I think the book would also succeed brilliantly as the first reading assignment in a liturgies course, or as a book to give the utterly unchurched spiritual seeker who is drawn to liturgy but entirely ignorant of it. The book doesn't explain the eucharistie liturgy, of course. But it does make clear, one way or another, why someone might want to understand the liturgy more fully and to engage it more deeply.

An equally challenging, equally visionary book is Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life. Like Eberle, Simmons is-or was-an academic literary critic and onetime Roman Catholic. He died recently of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), and this book is about spiritually surviving the long, slow decline of an inevitably fatal neurodegenerative disease. he is not interested in giving advice, he explains, not even good advice like "count your blessings" or "don't wait for a tragedy to start appreciating the little things in life" (p. 7). Such advice presupposes that life is a problem for which such techniques are the solution. But what if life is not a problem? What if life is a mystery? The "falling" to which his title refers is "learning how to live fully, consciously in the presence of mystery" (p. 11).

The mystery that interests him is not an ontological construct or a theoretical claim. It is a depth available to us only as we open up to the inescapable frustrations, failures, and limitations that shape our lives. Mystery dwells in spring mud and the biting black flies of summer, in our unfinished home improvement schemes as well as in our frustrated self-improvement schemes. But "a flawed life can still be a full one," he demonstrates, and "broken dreams can bring us more fully awake" (p. 28).

Religion is central to his quest to grapple with what life he has left: "Of all the resources of insight available to me, I turn to religion in particular because it is with religious language that human beings have most consistently, rigorously, and powerfully explored the harrowing business of rescuing joy from heartbreak" (p. xiv). Although at one point he says that Christianity has proved increasingly important to him over the years, his sharp-eyed search for wisdom at any cost leads him to bring many varieties of religious experience and discourse into conversation with the issues he engages. This is "ecumenism" in a new key-no dovetailing of doctrines nor fussy efforts to convey a scrupulous respect for the outlandish specificity of one another's beliefs, but rather laying hands upon whatever anyone has to say about how to rescue joy from heartbreak.

Few of us live with tragedies such as ALS, but plenty of us live with something. Most of us, I suspect. If we accept these difficulties as a challenge to our deepest imaginative resources, then with effort and energy we can leam to see our ordinary worlds in very different ways-as resplendent with mystery, not merely as beset by woes. Learning to Fall is not a book for cowards, but it is ideal for all those moments in which the spirit yearns to rise high above self-pity and chronic misery and defeatism. It has earned a place in my very small collection of books to be reread every few years or so.

Equally bracing but in quite a different way is Flannery O'Connor; SpiriiMuZ Writings from the Orbis Modem Spiritual Masters Series. Editor Robert Ellsberg neatly juxtaposes thematically organized excerpts from letters and from formal essays with related snippets from her stories and novels. These themes are "Christian Realism," "Mother and Teacher" (on the church), "A Reason to Write," and "The Province of Joy" (on suffering). I've never seen a book about a writer organized this way before, but its great fun-especially for those who are already familiar with O Connors fiction. For newcomers, the collection offers a delightfully engaging introduction to O'Connor's work. This slim volume could also serve as the cornerstone for a course in the theology of O'Connor s stories.

In her stories, O'Connor explains, "the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by" (p. 98). But she understands that we are not inclined to see the world by that light, and so her fiction commonly represents grace as a dark, even a violently disruptive force. "There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment," she explains, and continues: "Story writers are always talking about what makes a story 'work.' From my own experience in trying to make stories 'work,' I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been an unwilling instrument of grace" (p. 128). Eberlc, Simmons, and Benz would no doubt concur with O'Connor's blunt recognition that grace is seldom gracious.

Furthermore, O'Connor repeatedly and variously explains that her faith is not a prior commitment or a burden she must work around but rather the key to her creative success. The effort to explain this fact leads her to remarkable reflections upon the imaginative, creative resources which faith offers to all of us.

There is no reason why Rxed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery. The Bction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. The Catholic Action writer is entirely free to observe. . . . Open and free observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is meaningful, as the Church says. The fiction writer should be characterized by his kind of vision. His kind of vision is prophetic vision. Prophecy, which is dependent on the imaginative and not the moral faculty, need not be a matter of predicting the future. The prophet is a realist of distances (p. 97).

As O'Connor struggles to explain her faith to skeptical friends, she becomes an articulate apologist of the faith-and yet one who is never remotely apologetic. Her correspondents, like her characters, hold her respect, which is to say she speaks her mind without flinching or equivocating or worrying that someone will think her a fool. In this regard I admire the editors choice to include the whole text of her story "Revelation." It is an often-anthologized piece that brilliantly-at times hilariously-demonstrates not only what O'Connor means by the disruptive encounter with grace but also how clearly she saw the human limitations of the church to which she offered such cleareyed, absolute allegiance.

At first I was startled and at first put off by her strong account of church authority, but as nuance accumulated around her position I found myself persuaded. "If the Church is not a divine institution," she shrewdly cautions, "it will rum into an Elks Club" (pp. 76, 78). It's hard to argue with that. Or with her prescient description of the fate of a religion that remodels its ultimately mysterious and transcendent dogmas into "respectable" propositions. At times she sounds a lot like Stanley Hauerwas: "One of the effects of modem liberal Protestantism," she explains, "has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeh'ng instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention" (p. 93). After you have read O'Connor herself, do take time to read Richard Giannone's long introduction. His account of her thought is nuanced in both theological and literary ways.

All the books I have been discussing to this point make the same argument: the function of religion is to help us to grapple with the mystery, the suffering, and the overwhelming grandeur of an apparently indifferent cosmos-all of which can annihilate our souls. As difficult as the human predicament is, rising above it can at first scorn to he even harder. Philip Simmons and Flannery O'Connor portray that vividly; in their own ways, so do Benz and Eberle. Grace is not simple and seldom immediately comforting. We get up limping if we get up at all.

Yet with sufficient imaginative effort, we can grapple with grace and come up blessed. Our efforts to accept grace are called "faith." Faith, according to Coleridge, is neither a choice to believe nor the "knowledge" of God. It is the activity of imagination penetrating to the depth and the height of human consciousness or self-aware human experience. Such knowledge is dangerous and painful, but it liberates us from illusion. It rescues us from building false lives upon mistaken foundations. It follows, I contend, that religion is more richly sustained by storytellers than by systematic theologians. Stones portray the uncanny human encounter with grace more skillfully than do arcane Only stories can convince us that grace is worth what it costs. And so I would like to conclude by recommending several collections ol literary works.

For months now I have been slowly working my way through two spectacular collections of short stories: God: Siories, edited by C. Michael Curtis, senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, and A Celestial Omnibus: Short Fiction on Faith, edited by fiction writers J. P. Maney and Tom Hazuka. Both collections are stunning: I have read a fair number of short story collections in my day, and I have never found any collection assembled with such exquisite taste and literary acumen as either of these.

I know I am a far better person for an evening spent in the company of snch storytellers. I need help making sense of my life, and by "making sense" I don't mean reducing or denying life's complexity. Here we have a glorious stack of stories, all of which make sense of life in richly satisfying, nonreductive ways.

God: Stories offers twenty-five selections arranged in alphabetical order, including pieces by such major figures as James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, Bernard Malamud, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Eudora Welty. In six of these stories, the rich, well-developed main character is a priest, minister, or rabbi: we see their struggles with their congregations, with odd individuals, with each other, and with themselves. A seminary class or clergy conference might have a wonderful time discussing the issues these stories raise. Eleven stories (four of which include characters who are clergy) depict an encounter with grace as costly and disruptive as what O'Connor or Simmons describe.

Taken collectively, these stories support O'Connors claim that what we call "dogmas" or "doctrines" are best understwxl not as propositions hut as labels for mysterious, disruptive, powerful experiences. In the hands of a skillful discussion leader, God: Stories should work spectacularly well as the basis of an adult catechumenate or a serious faith development program. In these stories we see all of life, but as O'Gonnor says, we see life in the light of the storytellers faith that the human encounter with God is one of the very best stories of all. As Episcopalian and Macarthur Fellow jack Miles comments in a blurb on the back cover, "Yon don't believe in him [GodJ. You have no use for it [religion]. Shouldn't that end the discussion? It should, but, gallingly or disgustingly or mercifully or thrillingly, it doesn't. This collection of stories . . . gathers together some of the reasons why."

A Celestial Omnibus: Short Fiction on Faith offers five stories each on an excellent array of themes: mystery, doubt, evil, the supernatural, and reconciliation. Like God: Stories, the collection includes both stones by famous writers-Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, John Updike, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Vladimir Nabokov, Reynolds Price, E. M. Forster, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isaac Bashevis Singer-and many wonderful pieces by people I had never heard of. Given its thematic organization, this anthology would be an inventive complement to any course in systematic or ethical theology. I think it would also be a smash hit with youth groups (or confirmation classes): adolescents are deeply involved in struggling with these issues, and yet they have limited philosophic or theological tools for doing so. Stones raise the issues brilliantly by showing how they shape human experience-and none of that demands fancy vocabulary or complicated conceptual apparatus. I'd also hand this book to Education for Ministry graduates who want somehow to stay together and keep reading: the format of analysis used in EFM should work very nicely for these stories. I also recommend that you do as I have: keep a copy by your favorite armchair, consuming one story with a cup of tea after dinner each evening: Zeciio (Ziuma, literary style.

I also call to your attention a delightful novel: Dragons Lair by Sharon Kay Penman. I picked it up because I wanted a closer look at its lovely cover. I didn't expect to read it-it should have been sent on to Bill Harrison, the ATR book review editor. But I had five minutes to wait before a meeting, so I stood in the mail room and read the first few pages. I confess I didn't read much of anything else for the next several days: it's that kind of book.

The novel describes efforts by Eleanor of Aquitaine to raise a king's ransom for her imprisoned son, Richard the Lionhearted. A shipment of the required taxes was hijacked on its way from Wales, and the Queen dispatches the young Justin DeQuincy to investigate. Although Dragon's Lair forth-rightly subtitles itself "a medieval mystery," Penman is a terrific storyteller who takes great care to get her medieval details straight and to deploy wisely the dramatic potential of the medieval social order. Weeks later T find myself still thinking about her story.

Over and over again, young DeQuincy pieces together hits of crucial information because he is both a shrewd judge of character and, in a pinch, willing to trust his own sense of someone rather than what conventional wisdom might say about them. He also abides by the elementary rules of honor and restraint, offering a costly respect even to those who apparently don't deserve it. As a result, other people come to trust him as well, and their trust shapes the unfolding of his inquiry. Yet all along this trust and decency are for him no small struggle: he has far better reason to be suspicious, bitter, and hostile.

Penman is as delicate with this theme as she is with building her historical context, delineating her lively characters, or weaving her plot. But I was intrigued to watch my own response to courage, daring, and well-scarred selfpossession portrayed in these quite astute psychological and moral ways. Distrust, as Gary Eberle argues, is central to the characteristic malaise of our times; the hermeneutics of suspicion have done us in. And as Philip Simmons demonstrates, suffering that does not open us out to mystery and to courage will instead close us in on ourselves in bitterness and chronic hostility. And so, although OrMgon's Lm'r is straightforwardly entertaining, it is also honestly crafted storytelling by an intelligent, thoughtful woman. Reading this novel should count as a worthy way to spend those Sunday afternoons we all want and need to spend neither in sloth nor in "doing."

Another literary candidate for lectio divina is Eavan Boland's new volume Against Love Poetry. Here's the jacket copy: "These powerful poems are written against the perfections and idealizations of traditional love poetry. Against Love Poetry is Eavan Boland's exploration of how time erodes the surfaces of love-the body and memory-while deeply refreshing the source of passion. The man and woman in these poems are husband and wife, custodians of ordinary, aging human love. Time is their essential witness, and not their destroyer." For instance, Boland retells an Irish version of the familiar legend whereby a wizened crone begs shelter for the night from a variety of handsome young knights, all but one of whom are repulsed by her. The one who accepts in the morning finds that she is now a beautiful maiden. She will be his forever on condition that "he could not say that she had once been old and haggard" (p. 10). Boland is reading this story to herself while her husband sits beside her, reading something else of his own. "You have no interest in this," she quietly observes. And then:

I made this fire from the first peat of winter.

Look at me in the last, burnished light of it.

Toll me that you feel the warmth still.

Tell me you will never speak about the ashes.

And there the poem ends. The built Ore is both the literal one in the grate, her love for him or their love for one another, and her awareness that both of them are aging, each of them providing shelter to the other as the noble hero Diarmuid sheltered the aged crone. She and her husband do so without remark, without reminder, simply accepting the beauty of the gift each offers and each receives-gifts both given and received through noble generosity of heart. Logically spelled out like this, that's complicated. But emotionally it's simple: emotionally the warmth of the fire is rich and deep and comforting.

This last stanza carries quite a burden of meaning, as good poetry always does. But Boland always carries that burden lightly and gracefully. Her poems leave me feeling I've been welcomed by the side of her fire, given a good place to sit and to listen and to think, to relish the richness of words so well chosen. Poetry like this is good for the soul. It nourishes the imagination.

If your soul yearns for more of such poetry-not simply the incomprehensible stuff so often appearing in magazines-let me suggest Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, edited by the poets Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. It's a sequel to their earlier Americans' Favorite Poems (New York: Norton, 1999), which arose as a Library of Congress project inviting Americans to nominate their own favorite poems, along with a short explanation of why, to Pinsky as poet laureate. Like its predecessor, this new volume includes nominees both by these ordinary folks and, once in a while, by one of the editors as well. The wealth is organized thematically, but the chosen themes are simply images from one of the poems-phrases such as "either whom to love or how" or "I made my song a coat."

Most poems in these collections are introduced with the sentence or two of explanation provided by those who submitted them. There's nothing profound about these comments, but they add a dimension to the anthology that I have come unexpectedly to enjoy. Maggie Dietz once in a while offers four or five sentences providing some useful and necessary background to one of the poems either she or Pinsky selected. The collection includes everything from Sappho to classics by Ben Jonson, Herbert, and Herrick on out to Eavan Boland and a wonderful array of contemporary figures I had never read before. All of these are poems that make some clear sense even at first reading, poems that meet the reader halfway and generously reward the further attention we offer. Like Molly Peacocks marvelous little book, How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle (New York: Riverhead, 1999), this collection left me feeling that there is hope for our civilization after all.

Hope itself, of course, is the work of imagination. Literal-mindedness yields nothing but despair. And if we are not to succumb to the pressures and the temptations of literal-mindedness, our spiritual practices need to include regular encounter with the transforming power of imagination-with the fire of God in us, making all things new. That's a rare but very real part of the deepest Anglican tradition, a tradition cherished and preserved by Jim Griffiss, by the ATR, and by the quirky collection of us who are its regular readers and supporters. Fit audience we be, though few, and so it is a good and holy thing that we meet together from time to time on these pages.

1 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9.

2 For an excellent, detailed review of the evolution of theories of imagination from Hobbes through 1820 or so, see James C. Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). The best quiek introduction to the theological resonance of Coleridge's theory of imagination remains J. Robert Barth, SJ., The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1977; New York: Fordham University Press, 2001 [2d ed.]). The second edition has a prologue reviewing scholarly work since the first edition. I particularly recommend the first two chapters.

3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, in two volumes, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series LXXV (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 1, 304.

4 Biographia Literaria, vol. 2, 11-17.

5 Biographia Literaria, vol. 2, 15-18, compare vol. 1, 80-82, on "the union of deep feeling with profound thought."

6 See above, noie 5.

7 Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 199-203.

8 These lines are from Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," a poem widely reprinted in anthologies.

9 I have argued this point before in the ATR. See "Storytelling, Doctrine, and Spiritual Formation," Anglican Theological Review 81 (Winter 1999): 39-59, and "Faith and Fiction: Literature as Revelation," Anglican Theological Review 78 (Summer 1996): 382-403.

CATHERINE M. WALLACE*

* Catherine M. Wallace is writer in residence at Scabury-Western Theological Seminary. Her most recent book is Selling Ourselves Short: Why We Struggle to Earn a Living and Have a Life (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2003).