Instructor Biographies
Kevin Hart
Kevin Hart is the Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he also directs the Program in Religion and Literature and serves on the editorial board of the journal Religion and Literature. He is the author of The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge UP), A. D. Hope (Oxford UP), Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (Cambridge UP), Postmodernism (Oneworld) and The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago UP). With Geoffrey Hartman he has edited The Power of Contestation (Johns Hopkins UP), and with Yvonne Sherwood he has edited Derrida and Religion (Routledge). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (Oxford UP) and the forthcoming collection The Horizon of Modern Theology (Notre Dame UP). He has published several volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is Flame Tree: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe).
Henry Hart
I trace my interest in the religious aspects of literature to English classes I took as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College in the early 1970s. A devoted student of James Joyce at the time, I especially admired the often quoted statement by Stephen Dedalus that "the mystery of esthetic like that of material creation" was accomplished in the work of art. Having conceived of the artist as "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life," the idealistic, idiosyncratic Dedalus went on to declare: "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails." At Dartmouth , I was most interested in poets and prose writers who viewed the Creation as something ultimately mysterious and miraculous, and who thought the writer should be a creator who communicated the mystery and splendor of the Creation in literature. I had hoped to continue my Joyce studies at Oxford with Richard Ellmann, but when I first spoke to him about my plan to write a thesis on Joyce, he politely but firmly told me: "I'm tired of the Joyce industry." So I ended up working on the English poet Geoffrey Hill, whose esthetic views, religious and historical preoccupations, and expert craftsmanship in some ways resembled Joyce's.
Before going to England , a Dartmouth professor had recommended that I read Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation , a study of the influence of Christian spiritual exercises on English Renaissance poets. While working on Hill, I read widely in the literature of meditation, contemplation, and mysticism, and, using Martz as a model, tried to show the correspondence between this religious literature and Hill's poems. In my books on Hill, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, and James Dickey, I wrote chapters or parts of chapters on the way meditation and contemplation shaped their poems. More recently I have written essays on the "mystical" elements in the poems of Charles Wright and Charles Simic. I hope sometime to complete a study of the enormous influence of "mysticism" on many of the major twentieth-century poets from T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, to Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke, to Wright and Simic.
Cyril O’Regan
Cyril O'Regan is the Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to the areas of systematic and historical theology, his areas of interest include the philosophy of religion, continental philosophy, the history of mysticism and the history of the esoteric traditions, but also the intersection of theology and philosophy, and the relations between religion and literature. He is the author of The Heterodox Hegel, Gnostic Return in Modernity, and Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative, as well as dozens of articles on figures such as John Henry Newman, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Hegel, and on such topics as the Trinity, Christology, language about God, the nature of tradition, the relation of faith and reason, and postmodern theology. He is currently working on a book on the theme of memory and misremembering in von Balthasar, and on a book concerning Romanticism and the problem of God.
Regina Schwartz
Regina Schwartz is currently Professor of English, Religion and Law at Northwestern University . In early modern studies, she has authored a book on John Milton’s theodicy and poetics, Remembering and Repeating (Cambridge, rpt Chicago), which won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford’s Book Award and she edited, with Valeria Finucci, Desire in the Renaissance (Princeton), essays that focus on the inner life in English and Italian literature. In religion and literature, she is the author of The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago), which calls attention to the violent uses of religious resources, (while it may have generated controversy in 1997, the recent ways in which God and Allah have been invoked to justify recent acts of violence make it darkly prophetic). That book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She also edited the collection The Book and the Text, The Bible and Literary Theory (Blackwell) and co-edited The Postmodern Bible (Yale) which helped to open up the field of biblical studies to literary approaches and most recently, she edited a volume titled Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and Theology Approach the Beyond, a collection which brings critical attention to the place of transcendence in philosophy from Kant to Levinas, literature, including Shakespeare and Kafka, and theology, ranging from negative theology to sacramentalism. Contributers include Charles Taylor, Kevin Hart, Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek. Her forthcoming book, When God Left the World: Sacramentality at the Dawn of Secularism, returns to the literature of the early modern period. It explores the ways the religious impulses met by the Eucharist inflect the writing of the Reformation.