Haunted by Christ

W H Auden, T S Eliot, William Golding, Elizabeth Jennings, C S Lewis, Flannery O'Connor, Stevie Smith. . . These are among some of the great poets and novelists whose struggles with faith finds expression in their works, and whose works have helped countless readers to appreciate the different forms that faith can take in different times and places. Richard Harries considers the work of twenty of these writers, painting vivid pictures of their lives and times, and providing us with numerous critically sympathetic insights into the spiritual dimension of their writings.

In this enormously engaging book, Richard Harries shares with us his reading of many of the great writers of modernity, inviting us to attend with him to their wrestling with the hardest questions of human existence before God – and sometimes before the apparent absence of God. These are enriching and provoking reflections, testimony to the way that the Christian gospel continues to be a vehicle for the most serious thinking and imagining in our culture., A compelling narrative of the modern quest for meaning and the expression, in literature, of our age’s deep wrestling with faith., Richard Harries sweeps through writers from Dostoevsky to Marilynne Robinson, including Emily Dickinson, Samuel Beckett and Evelyn Waugh – and points out how their Christianity was sometimes submerged and often neglected by critics and readers. This book rightly and authoritatively, without beating the drum, resurrects the profound spiritual tradition of Christianity over a century that often claimed to have stamped it out. Here, see it alive and well, subtly and with fine scholarship unveiled. This is a rich and important book. I hugely enjoyed it.

Richard Harries is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. After nineteen years as Bishop of Oxford he was made a Life Peer (Lord Harries of Pentregarth) and he remains active in the House of Lords on human rights issue. He is Emeritus Gresham Professor of Divinity and a Visiting Professor of Theology at King's College, London, where he was formerly Dean. His voice is well known to many through his regular contributions to the Today programme.Among his many highly commended books are The Beauty and the Horror (SPCK. 2016), described by Mary Warnock as 'a deeply interesting book', The Re-enchantment of Morality (SPCK, 2008), shortlisted for the Michael Ramsey Prize, and Art and the Beauty of God (Continuum, 1993), selected as book of the year by Anthony Burgess in The Observer.