Overview

Contrary to the widespread belief in Ireland's rapid secularisation, religion continues to play a significant role in twenty-first-century Irish culture, though not in the familiar forms of Catholicism and Protestantism. This volume seeks to redress the balance and demonstrate that religion intersects with and informs past and present Irish culture. While writers from Sean O'Casey to Edna O'Brien have challenged religious oppression, Joyce's heresy, Patrick Pearse's fusion of Christian and pagan sacrifice, and Yeats's pan-Asian eclecticism are among the manoeuvres by which the Irish have sought to push beyond the prescribed limits of spirituality. This book takes an interdisciplinary and global approach that encompasses the affinities of Celtic thought with Asian philosophy, the legacy of Irish missions in Africa, new ways to see the religiosity of canonical works, and Irish cultural engagement with traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, and Shinto.

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9781009191623

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Willa Murphy lectures in English at Ulster University. Murphy's publications explore the intersection of theology, literature, and culture, from the eighteenth century to the present day. She is the recipient of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Research Fellowship and of the Keough–Naughton Hesburgh Library Research Award. She is also Assistant Editor of the Steinbeck Review. Chris Murray is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. With interdisciplinary interests in transcultural exchange, his writing includes the books China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome: Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism (2020); Tragic Coleridge (2013); and a memoir, Crippled Immortals: Shaolin Enlightenment on a Singapore High-Rise (2018). He serves as Treasurer for the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand, is an editor of the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

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