The New Believers

Jack Dudley is the Delaplaine Distinguished Teaching Professor and Associate Professor of English at Mount St. Mary's University (MD). His articles have appeared in a range of journals. He was one of twelve invited consultants for the Christian Poetics Initiative (Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts, Yale University).

• Introduction: the new believers; 1. Margaret Atwood and the better story; 2. J. M. Coetzee, curious belief, and the life of contemplation; 3. Junot Díaz, cosmic vision, and radical hope; 4. George Saunders and the Buddhist order of compassion; The spiritual life of the novel: ontology, subjectivity, collectivity, teleology.

'Combining inventive close readings and rigorous archival research, The New Believers: Religion and the Contemporary Novel offers a gripping, authoritative, and meticulous account of the important position and function of spirituality in the contemporary novel. The focus is on the twenty-first-century novels of Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders, but so many other texts and voices enter the conversation: from Augustine to Auden, Stephen King to Jack Chick, St. Matthew to Melville and The Matrix. Dudley's book is as impressive as it is inspiring.' Christos Hadjiyiannis