Thoughts on Poetry & Religion

Read Jason Derr on Poetry & Religion

 He begins with this quote:  "I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world." -Teilhard de Chardin, "Mass on the World" collected in Hymn of the Universe

In his very nice piece on poetry & metaphor as responses to fundamentalism, Derr writes:

"In her book Wisdom and Metaphor poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky argues for a poetic form of doing philosophy, one rooted in an understanding of metaphor. As she sees it, metaphor teaches us to see "X (as Y) and at the same time X is not Y." In her introduction she says we are not wise in a vacuum but are wise about things: people, situations and contexts. People who think metaphorically think truly, as their thinking follows the shape of the world.
Zwicky says that metaphor, as a philosophical device, is a form of seeing-as. Out in the Chinese wilderness de Chardin may have agreed. The poem -- in de Chardin's case his "Mass" -- opens up our longing and asks us to hold together a variety of images in their contradictions and similarities. Theologically it means that the theological task is less scientific-philosophical but more an act of seeing-as. The Mass de Chardin performed did not challenge Catholic liturgical authority, reform the church or introduce sweeping panentheist theological directions. But as a poem it drew its readers into a form of seeing-as that allowed a reimagining of the relationship between God and creation, and a meditation on the real presence of Christ in the elements as the story of God's relationship with all of material creation."

Read Derr's entire essay.
This, again, from Silliman's blog