Suffering, the sacred, and the sublime are concepts that often surface in humanities research in an attempt to come to terms with what is challenging, troubling or impossible to represent. These intersecting concepts are used to mediate the gap between the spoken and the unspeakable, between experience and language, between body and spirit, between the immanent and the transcendent, and between the human and the divine. The twenty-five essays in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, written by international scholars working in the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and history, address the ways in which literature and theory have engaged with these three concepts and related concerns. The contributors analyze literary and theoretical texts from the medieval period to the postmodern age, from the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to those of Endô Shûsaku, Alice Munro, Annie Dillard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Slavoj Žižek. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religion and literature, philosophy and literature, aesthetic theory, and trauma studies.

Holly Faith Nelson, associate professor of English at Trinity Western University, has co-edited The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, Of Paradise and Light, Eikon Basilike, and James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace.

Lynn R. Szabo is an associate professor and chair of the English Department at Trinity Western University where she teaches American literature and creative writing. She has written extensively on Thomas Merton and is the editor of In the Dark before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton.

Jens Zimmermann, professor of English at Trinity Western University and Canada Research Chair in Religion, Culture, and Interpretation, is the author of Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Approach to Interpretation, The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education (with Norman Klassen), and Theologische Hermeneutik.

Holly Faith Nelson's profile page

Lynn R. Szabo is an associate professor and chair of the English Department at Trinity Western University where she teaches American literature and creative writing. She has written extensively on Thomas Merton and is the editor of In the Dark before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton.

Lynn R. Szabo's profile page

Jens Zimmermann, professor of English at Trinity Western University and Canada Research Chair in Religion, Culture, and Interpretation, is the author of Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Approach to Interpretation, The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education (with Norman Klassen), and Theologische Hermeneutik.

Jens Zimmermann's profile page