Books in the Amos Wilder Library series

Description:"The one great and telling charge made against Christian religion in the modern period," writes Amos Wilder, "is that it is otherworldly, escapist and irrelevant to the problems of life."There is a good deal of truth in this charge, Dr. Wilder feels--whether we look at Catholicism or Protestantism, orthodoxy or liberalism. Christianity, in one way or another, has given the impression of being mainly concerned with the next world or with private religious experiences, to the neglect of the needs of men in everyday life.Here is an answer to the charge. Our common human experience, Dr. Wilder shows, cannot be cut off from its transcendent aspects, but neither can it be cut off from the pressing needs of life here and now.Dr. Wilder goes into biblical history for his answer. Jesus spoke directly to the social dilemmas of his people. The power of the Gospel in the Roman Empire had much to do with the answer it supplied to the social and cultural cravings of that age. Recent trends in New Testament study exhibit the attacks made then, as now, on false spirituality and theological obscurantism. This is a stirring and impressively documented call to application of the Gospel, to the practical and secular problems of men.Otherworldliness and the New Testament is alive with flashing insights into a crucial modern theological problem. But it does much more in apprising both the serious thinker and the casual reader of the tangled strands of a complex situation in religious interpretation, as it relates to the arts, to social justice, to religious education, and to many diverse fields.

About the Contributor(s):Amos N. Wilder (1895-1993), New Testament scholar, poet, literary critic, and clergyman, received all earned degrees from Yale. His teaching career included posts at Andover Newton Theological School, Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, and Harvard Divinity School. Special honors included the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club (1943) and the Bross Prize (1952). Wilder also received the Croix de guerre for service in World War I. He was the brother of playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder.

Twee en ''n half jaar lank was die werk van die Waarheids- en Versoeningskommissie op almal se Iippe, het die koerante en radio daagliks oor die kommissie verslag gedoen, het die gesigte van slagoffers en oortreders op miljoene televisieskerms verskyn.In KRONIEK VAN DIE WAARHEIDSKOMMISSIE lig Piet Meiring die sluier oor die werk van die kommissie ... die verhale en getuienisse van slagoffers, die amnestie-aansoeke van oortreders wat hulle aan menseregteskending skuldig gemaak het, die konfrontasie met die verlede, die strewe na versoening en vergifnis ...As motief vir hierdie besinning oor die Waarheidskommissie het die skrywer die trek gekies, ''n epiese trek terug na die verlede en dan verder na die toekoms, ''n groot trek wat nie een van die inwoners van Suid-Afrika onaangeraak sou laat nie.

The republication of this book resurrects a landmark volume hailed when published as "the first major effort to assess modern poetry from the point of view of its contributions to the spiritual life of our times." Resting on the assumption that poetry offers "a mirror in which the world can know itself and in which it can read its deepest dilemmas and its deepest omens," Wilder explores the work of W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, Kenneth Patchen, and Robinson Jeffers, among others. Wilder investigates the ethical and religious attitudes behind these works, the sources behind them, and their importance for religious and spiritual life in the modern era. The author also discusses the work of leading critics and provides a guide and bibliography to the sources of modernism's roots in America and abroad, as well as biographical sketches of the poets and critics discussed.

Amos Wilder's poetry drew from an inexhaustible well of his Christian belief in the destiny of man and nature, seeking always to find fresh ways and language to invoke the imperatives of faith and spiritual life in a modern era. This collection of thirty-five poems, the third of Amos Wilder's four books of published poetry, appeared in 1942 in the midst of World War II. Shaping it to speak to a world in crisis, Wilder included five poems republished from his first volume of poetry (Battle-Retrospect, 1923) and twelve poems from his second, (Arachne, 1928, with two major poems revised), both conceived under the long shadow of World War I, a war in which he had fought. The last poem written for this collection, "Homage," is dedicated to his bother Thornton ("to T. N. W., 1942"), then serving with US Army Air Force Intelligence in North Africa.

Description:In recent years, studies in the eschatology and ethics of Jesus have provoked an unusual interest among Bible students. When talking about the coming of the kingdom, did Jesus mean that there would be a divine intervention or a catastrophe? If so, were his ethical teachings intended for an emergency situation--interim ethics?This book provides an admirable introduction to eschatology in general. Dr. Wilder argues for an interpretation of the evidence that maintains the full significance of Jesus: that his eschatology, far from being a liability, represents a true disclosure of human destiny, and that there is no contradiction between it and his ethical principles, which are of permanent validity.

Description:What was the faith behind the proclamations of Jesus, the message of Paul, and the Johannine witness--and how can it be recovered today? This penetrating and provocative book seeks to probe the various formulations of religious faith in the New Testament with a view to recovering the real essence and genius of Christianity today.Dr. Wilder sees three principal strains--often harmonious but sometimes disparate--in New Testament faith: the proclamations of Jesus, the message of Paul, and the witness of John the Evangelist. First, he studies what has happened to our faith since its original message emerged from the concrete historical act and the resultant community of experience. In the time since, flesh and spirit, as well as humanity and divinity, have come to be regarded as mutually exclusive, making it necessary for scientific humanism to develop a language of its own--for religion has lost communication with it.Jesus'' message, however, was a total claim and a total hope, a prophetic forecast of human destiny. Paul, though he spoke a different language and used different symbols, laid the groundwork for an epochal revolution of the race. John, for his part, emphasized eternal life here and now and previsioned a Christian freedom. Dr. Wilder ends with a stirring plea for a postliberal viewpoint that will recover the insights of the past without its mythology and terminology.

Description:We live in a world that calls for the separation of church and state, and the separation of religion and the arts is of a piece with this divided culture. However, this long-standing breach between Christianity and the arts narrows in view of the notable development of mutual interest and conversation between theology and literature.Dr. Wilder discusses this historic cleavage and then sets forth, first from the side of imaginative literature and then from the side of the church, the evidence for an emerging bridge of this gulf. The most significant arts of our time have dealt with metaphysical and moral themes as well as existential concerns by drawing on the great religious mythical patterns of the past. Yet the church, in many respects, has become conscious of its aesthetic shortcomings and is increasingly aware of the modern arts. Dr. Wilder discusses the basic dilemma of Christianity''s relationship to the aesthetic order of experience, emphasizing that religious art and symbols should not be viewed as merely decoration, but rather as bearers of meaning and truth and therefore as critically important to the religious tradition. Dr. Wilder examines particular examples of the treatment of religious subject matter in modern works by Jeffers and Faulkner. He reflects on Jeffers'' adequate and inadequate views of the central Christian theme of vicarious atonement, and takes Faulkner''s The Sound and the Fury as opportunity for consideration of the attenuation of Christian culture.The book aims to inform readers interested in modern literature and the arts of relevant developments in church circles that may both surprise and gratify, even as it introduces churchmen and theologians to features of modern writing that very much concern them.

Description:An illuminating New Testament study depicts the power and beauty of language that speaks with the words of God and man.Words call man to battle or summon him to prayer. More and more, today man is analyzing his language and asking: What is the purpose of language? What do the words we speak mean? What is their religious significance? Dr. Wilder''s extraordinary work attempts to answer these questions and, in particular, to study the qualities of the language that ushered in a new religion, the early Christian faith.

About the Contributor(s):Amos N. Wilder (1895-1993), New Testament scholar, poet, literary critic, and clergyman, received all earned degrees from Yale. His teaching career included posts at Andover Newton Theological School, Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, and Harvard Divinity School. Special honors included the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club (1943) and the Bross Prize (1952). Wilder also received the Croix de guerre for service in World War I. He was the brother of playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder.

Description:In Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition, Wildler examines this movement in poetry in relation to the direction in which our culture is moving. He interprets the significance of modern poetry and shows its relation to the ""traditional."" He gives attention to the representative poets of our time (including Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and others); he notes the wider implications of their work and assesses from them the impulses and trends of our age.As a poet of considerable ability, as a student of literary criticism for many years, and as a teacher, Wilder is in a position to know and understand his subject. The result is a book of permanent value to all concerned with the deeper meanings of civilization and Christianity.

Description:In The New Voice, Amos Wilder carries forward and combines two areas of activity represented in his earlier, groundbreaking publications. One of these is that of the theological critic, concerned with modern literature as it illuminates the quests of our age and the vicissitudes of our religious tradition, as found in his Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition and Theology and Modern Literature. The other area is that of biblical scholarship, especially in its recent concern with hermeneutics and the modes of language, as represented by his volume on early Christian rhetoric, The Language of the Gospel.Wilder seeks in the present book to deepen and correct the approach of the theological critic by urging that rhetorical criteria should receive primary attention and that language should be explored in new ways. Wilder therefore examines certain aspects of biblical genre and style as ways of illuminating modern rhetoric and its underlying assumptions. It is a main theme of the work that the disorders and travail of our time should be construed in a positive light, and that the most significant writing of the period not only illuminates contemporary reality but fashions a language in which the abiding legacies and archetypes of the past can again be brought to speech.Writers specially discussed in the book range from Musil, Proust, Eliot, and Gide to Sartre, Perse, Beckett, Lowell, David Jones, and the exponents of open verse. The work of many others is brought into relation with the task defined by Pound as naming things accurately and by Stevens as ""making the bread of faithful speech.""

Description:The graphic artist Margaret Rigg met Amos Wilder through The Society for Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture (ARC), of which Wilder, together with such figures as Joseph Campbell and Paul Tillich, was a founder in the early 1960s. In 1978 Rigg published Imagining the Real, a limited edition (350 copies with designs) as an expression of ""homage"" to Wilder with a special emphasis on his poetry. This unusual publication includes an extensive interview between Rigg and Wilder covering his upbringing and its influence on his life as a writer and poet; an original essay by Wilder on themes suggested by the interview (""A Comment . . .""); six poems by Wilder selected to depict shifting sensibilities over his six-decades-long career as a practicing poet; and a lively self-annotated overview of his life and career (""Wilderiana: Dates and Places""). The volume concludes with poems dedicated to Wilder by Stanley Romaine Hopper and Arnold Kenseth. Long known only to students of Amos Wilder and his family, the republication of Imagining the Real makes available to a broader public an unusual window on the story of Amos Wilder, poet.

Description:Amos Wilder is widely known as a pioneer of an indigenously North American approach to biblical interpretation which takes language to be an expression not only of psychological but also of sociological and concrete reality. Recording the history of his interest in eschatological language, Wilder further advances the literary and rhetorical criticism of Scripture, especially by alerting interpreters to the deeper modes of language and communication often overlooked.The essays in this volume, recaptured and edited to clarify their relatedness, are presented in two groups. The first group includes essays that situate the parables of Jesus within the broader context of the biblical narrative. The second is a series of essays dealing with the problem of adequately interpreting the ""kingdom language"" of Jesus. The book includes an essay in which Wilder chronicles and advances his long interest in the task of doing justice to the imaginative dimension of biblical language. Wilder develops a contemporary hermeneutic that combines the full range of historical-critical methods with approaches generated by various modern disciplines which attempt to do full justice to the interrelationship of language and reality. The preface by James Breech offers an exposition of the main features of Wilder''s hermeneutic, together with a discussion of Wilder''s understanding of parabolic narrative and Jesus'' symbolics.

Description:Amos Wilder, a distinguished New Testament scholar and poet, was only a youth when he volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver with the American Field Service during World War I and then became a corporal in the Army''s 17th Field Artillery of the 2nd Division. His journals and letters home (including correspondence with his younger brother, Thornton Wilder) form the basis of this book of reminiscences about his experiences, one of the few wartime memoirs that eloquently articulates and interprets the common soldier''s point of view.As an ambulance driver, Wilder traveled from the western front to the mountains of Macedonia, where his memoir sheds light on the many nations, races, and religions involved in the conflict in that turbulent region. After the United States entered the war, Wilder, now the soldier, participated in the decisive 1918 actions at Belleau Wood, Soissons, and the closing Argonne drive. His journals provide a brilliant panorama of the activities and people behind the lines, an often arresting portrayal very different from the scenes of death in the trenches that others have described. Throughout, Wilder explores in a fresh and provocative way larger questions about the enduring meaning of a shattering event in world history remembered by himself and others as an encounter with ""Armageddon.""

Description:Thirty-one poems, the great majority written and published in the 1950s and 1960s in such magazines and journals as The Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis, as well as a selections from two of his earlier collections. His important poem, ""A Hard Death,"" the last Wilder work to appear in Poetry (1965), is also found here. The volume''s foreword, addressed to alert Christians and congregations, is an important and forthright statement of the poet''s artistic world view. ""Old words do not reach cross the new gulfs,"" Wilder writes, adding, ""Does not the New Testament itself promise new tongues, new names, new songs?"" In recognizing a faith that ""the ancient covenant mortised in the foundations of the world still holds,"" readers of Amos Wilder''s poetry encounter a distinguished student of the New Testament who wrestled with fresh idiom and metaphor in his search to make the scripture of the past ""speak to us anew.""

Description:Thornton Wilder, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, remains to many people an enigma. Malcolm Cowley indicated that ""in point of intelligent criticism, Wilder is the most neglected author of a brilliant generation,"" and the Times Literary Supplement once observed that ""Thornton Wilder has successfully resisted any kind of classification as a novelist or playwright.""In this revealing, incisive study, Amos Wilder, Thornton''s older brother, seeks to situate his brother''s vision and art. Much criticism, dominated my modernist canons, has not known what to do with Thornton Wilder and finds suspect his wide popularity and what is seen as his traditionalist or ""mid-brow"" outlook informed by ""Puritan"" antecedents and rearing. The present essay, however, documents Wilder''s full initiation into the ""modern"" experience, only insisting that he absorbed its iconoclasms into a deeper and more universal humanism.Critical circles, in their view of the American Writer in our day, commonly neglect and disparage those legacies, cultural and religious, which shaped Wilder''s outlook. Therefore, the central section of this essay is devoted to biographical detail, illustrating those creative factors and faiths that undergird American society and its promise. Many readers will be aided in their understanding of Wilder by this book''s description of the special circumstances of his education, formative influences, and family life.Thornton Wilder and His Public offers rare, intimately informed, and helpful illumination on the life and art of one of America''s greatest literary figures.

Amos N. Wilder (1895-1993), New Testament scholar, poet, literary critic, and clergyman, received all earned degrees from Yale. His teaching career included posts at Andover Newton Theological School, Chicago Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, and Harvard Divinity School. Special honors included the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club (1943) and the Bross Prize (1952). Wilder also received the Croix de guerre for service in World War I. He was the brother of playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder.