Christianity & Literature

This special issue of Christianity & Literature celebrates Irish writing from the eighteenth-century Belfast Presbyterian poet William Drennan to canonical writers such as James Joyce, C. S. Lewis, Brian Friel, and Seamus Heaney to lesser-known writers such as Flann O'Brien and Hubert Butler, along with contemporary authors such as Sally Rooney, Micheal O'Siadhail, John F. Deane, and Gail McConnell, all of whom have deeply engaged with Christianity in their work. While there have been academic studies considering Irish writers and Catholicism, or, less often, Protestantism, there has been a relative critical reluctance to consider faith and Irish writing together, apart from denunciations of, say, some of the baleful legacies of Catholicism, including the Magdalene Laundries, in which many young girls and women (anywhere from ten to thirty thousand) were held for years after having babies out of wedlock. One of the most sensitive and moving accounts of the Laundries that nonetheless privileges the main character's (Catholic) Christian faith as the primary factor in making a momentous ethical decision to save one young woman is Claire Keegan's novella, Small Things Like These (2021), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Yet recent critical developments arising from the general turn to literature and religion in the last twenty years herald a rising awareness of Christianity's importance to Irish writing. Consider the example of James Joyce, raised Irish Catholic, but who left the faith and his country by 1904, decamping to various locales in Europe. Joyce remained curiously and deeply engaged with both his cradle faith and his birth country, however, writing about both incessantly. Contemporary studies such as Michael Mayo's James Joyce and the Jesuits (Cambridge, 2020), Gregory Erickson's Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2022), and my own James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality: Postcritical and Postsecular Reading in Dubliners and Ulysses (Edinburgh, 2023) demonstrate Joyce's thorough immersion in various Jesuitical practices, the intricacies of Christian heresy, and familiarity with the Lukan narratives of the New Testament, respectively.

I know of no collection, however, that takes as its sole remit Christianity and Irish writing, not to mention one with so wide a compass, and thus I am most grateful for having been given this opportunity by Editor Mark Eaton and Associate Editor Matthew Smith to put together this special [End Page 105] issue of Christianity & Literature, which explores how issues of Christianity have always fascinated, frustrated, and inspired Irish authors, even to this day, despite the decline of Christian faith, particularly Catholicism in the Republic of Ireland.

The first contribution, by Achill Island native John F. Deane, is a lovely poetic sequence that touchingly enters the lives of an old shepherd, a nun, retired missionaries, John the Evangelist, and Christ Himself on the Cross, held there by His love. It offers compassionate insight into these different lives voiced falteringly, waveringly, hesitatingly. And yet a persistence wins through: the flesh may fail, but our Savior, now triumphant in heaven, will not.

Apart from Deane's contribution, this collection moves chronologically from the past into the present. Belfast-born poet and musician Adrian Rice, now based in Hickory, North Carolina, has written a stirring examination of William Drennan's poetry in the context of his New Light (Unitarian) Presbyterianism. The longest essay in the collection, this article constitutes Rice's decades-long attempt to examine the long-neglected poetry of this important dissenter in the North of Ireland, who pushed for Catholic emancipation and civil rights and whose poetry still teaches us lessons about the importance of remaining true to one's conscience. Martin Lockerd's contribution situates George Moore in the Decadent movement of the 1890s while also meditating upon Moore's rejection of proto-antinatalism, the movement toward rejecting childbearing for humans, which is currently popular in certain materialist circles. Moore left Catholicism and converted to a curious Anglican Protestantism shorn of belief in central tenets of the Christian faith such as Christ's divinity, but his belief in the inherent dignity of human beings emerges in his portraits of the fictional characters in...