The result of a dialogue between poets and scholars on the meaning and making of the sacred, this book endeavours to determine how the sacred emerges in sacred script as well as in poetic discourse. It ranges through scholarship in areas as apparently disparate as postmodernism and Buddhism. The perspectives developed are various and without closure, locating the sacred in modes as diverse as patristic traditions, feminist retranslations of biblical texts, and oral and written versions of documents from the world’s religions. The essays cohere in their preoccupation with the crucial role language plays in the creation of the sacred, particularly in the relation that language bears to silence. In their interplay, language does not silence silence by, rather, calls the other as sacred into articulate existence.

Poet and scholar, E.D. Blodgett has published seventeen books of poetry two of which were awarded the Governor General’s Award. He is an Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. His research has varied from mediaeval European romance to Canadian Comparative Literature and his publications include Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003) and Elegy (2005).

Harold Coward is Professor Emeritus and the past director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria where he continues to be involved as a research fellow.

E.D. Blodgett's profile page

Harold Coward is a scholar of international reputation with distinguished contributions to both the University of Victoria and University of Calgary throughout his extensive career. After retiring from the University of Victoria as director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, he continues to be involved as a research fellow. He is currently a member of the Genome BC Board of Directors, where he serves as a specialist on ethics and biotechnology. In June 2002, Dr. Coward was also selected as one of the twenty-five power thinkers in British Columbia by BC Business Magazine.

Leslie S. Kawamura is an Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, Alberta. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, in Far Eastern Studies (1974). He has studied at the Kyoto University (Japan) and has taught at the Nyingma Institute (Berkeley), Institute of Buddhist Studies (Berkeley), and the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon). His publications include Mind in Buddhist Psychology (with H.V. Guenther, Dharma Press, 1975) and Golden Zephyr (Dharma Press, 1975). He was a founding member of the Honpa Buddhist Church of Alberta and the Canada-Mongolia Society.

Harold Coward's profile page