Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to the Divine Comedy. Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the...

"Shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Textual Study of Religion" Amy Hungerford is professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works...

Public Religions in the Future World is the first book to map the utopian terrain of the political-religious movements of the past four decades. Examining a politically diverse set of utopian fictions, this book cuts across the usual Right/Left political divisions to show a surprising convergence: each political-religious vision imagines a revived world of care and community over and against the economization and fragmentation of neoliberalism. Understanding...

'A Will to Believe' is a revised version of Kastan's 2008 'Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures', providing a provocative account of the ways in which religion animates Shakespeare's plays.