Reading the Margins

Michael J. Gilmour

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781506469362
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism

The Bible and theology are contested spaces, battlegrounds where participants guard entrenched beliefs against perceived threats. But literature, observes novelist Salman Rushdie, opens the universe. It expands what we perceive and understand, and ultimately what we are. Writers make our world feel larger and more inclusive. When other forces push in the direction of narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism, and war, fiction encourages understanding, sympathy, and identification with others. Reading the Margins invites readers to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds, and to pursue visions of justice and compassion. Whether stories about poverty, empire, war, or the environment, the writers considered raise moral questions and often, in the process--even unwittingly--deepen our understanding of biblical calls for kindness and mercy.

Reading the Margins offers a kind of commentary on biblical ethics. Using Matthew's Beatitudes and sheep and goats parable as an organizing principle, Gilmour argues there is much to learn about Jesus's "peacemakers" and call to feed the hungry from aspirational fiction and poetry.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself
• 1. Poverty and Woody Guthrie’s Train Bound for Glory
• 2. Anne Brontë Confronts Domestic Unrest: Reading Wisdom’s Diary
• 3. Daniel Defoe’s Shipwrecked Bible and Jean Rhys’s Cardboard World
• 4. Joy Kogawa and Salman Rushdie “Verses” Racism
• 5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Rock Star: Bob Dylan in Narnia
• 6. An Old Curiosity Shop and an Old Copy of Bunyan’s Progress
• 7. The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth: Richard Adams’s Rabbit Theologians
• 8. The Gospel of the Imagination, or the Imaginary Gospel
• Afterword: Censorship and The Far Side of Religion
• Works Cited
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects