God in the Landscape: Studies in the Literary History of Australian Protestant Dissent
Ebook
This book shows how creative writing gives voice to the drama and nuance of religious experience in a way that is rarely captured by sermons, reports, and the minutes of church meetings. The author explores the history of religious Dissent and Evangelicalism in Australia through a variety of literary responses to landscape, from both men and women, lay and ordained.
The book explores transnational themes, along with themes of migration and travel across the Australian continent. The author gives insight into the literature of Protestant Dissent, concerned as it is with travel, belonging, and the intersection of national and religious identity. Much of the writing is situated on the road: a soldier returning from the Great War, a child on a lone adventure, a night-time journey through urban slums; all of these are in some way dependent on the theme of “walking with Jesus” as the Holy Land travelogues make explicit.
God in the Landscape draws the links between landscape, literature, and spirituality with imagination and insight and is an important contribution to the historical study of religion and the environment.
Tells the multi-stranded history of Protestant Dissent and Evangelicalism in Australia through the creative writing of women and men of faith as they engaged with their environment.
The first religious history through the lens of Australian landscape and literature
The book interprets well-known texts and artifacts (eg. The Salvation Army's groundbreaking film-making) with religious insight that makes sense of the writers' evangelical intentions and worldview
The book has international appeal as a history concerned with trans-national religious movements and the reinterpretation of their beliefs
1. Looking Out Across the Terrain: Surveying the landscape and a map for the journey
2. The Story They Brought With Them: Dissent's British Origins and Colonial Australian Experience
3. Landscape of Scepticism and Belief: Churches of Christ travelogues from the Holy Land to Australia, 1889 to 1896
4. Landscape of Urban Transformation: Salvation Army publicity and performance in the parish of the streets, 1890 to 1909
5. Landscape of Here and Elsewhere: Congregationalist poetry at home in war and peace, 1914 to 1920
6. Landscape of Adventure: Methodist novels and imagination on the mission fields, 1915 to 1948
7. Landscape of Timeless Beauty: Quaker essays on beauty in art and the painting of nature, 1922 to 1963
8. Conclusion. Writing the Australian Landscape
Bibliography
Index
This imaginative exploration of spirituality and place is a notable contribution to the history of Christianity in Australia.
Kerrie Handasyde's account of God in the Landscape is beautifully written and elegantly conceived. It shows us how the human experience of faith is essentially 'placed'. This is a profound, challenging and evocative book.
From Balcatta Gospel Hall, to the Liquor Shops of Melbourne, and from The Friends' School Archive, to the sculpture of William Ricketts, this book is a historically rich study of little-recognized Australians-the Protestant Dissenters of colonial Australia, Congregationalists, Salvationists, Churches of Christ, Quakers, and Methodists. It is the story of how men and women of Protestant faith, and of beliefs not known in Australia, learned to find 'God in the landscape.'
Each of the Christian denominations of Australia possesses a distinct ethos, which is rarely evoked in standard accounts. By exploring how their members depict the phenomena of the landscape in various literary genres, Kerrie Handasyde has vividly revealed the character of a whole sector of Australian religion.
Kerrie Handasyde has made a distinctive contribution to Australian religious and literary
historiography.
Kerrie Handasyde's historical work is fascinating in its focus on fiction, poetry, novels, travel writing and dramatic performance, rather than denominational histories, to get inside the lived experience of Protestant Dissent. In so doing, it uncovers insights that might otherwise go overlooked.
- Title: God in the Landscape: Studies in the Literary History of Australian Protestant Dissent
- Author: Kerrie Handasyde
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350181502, 9781350252127, 1350252123, 1350181501
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350181502
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-09T05:49:41Z
Kerrie Handasyde is a Senior Lecturer in religious history at the University of Divinity, Australia.