Gerard Manley Hopkins's extant religious prose, compiled in its entirety for the first time, and with material not seen since Hopkins's death, is of value to theologians, church historians, and Victorianists scholars and critics. The Sermons and Spiritual Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins features the thirty-two sermons and fragments Hopkins preached between the 1870s and 1880s, personal meditations on biblical passages and religious occasions,
undergraduate notes on Henry Parry Liddon's Sunday evening lectures, marginalia in the authorized version of the Bible, vows made in the Society of Jesus, private meditations written during his Dublin years, and the
Commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. The sermons represent the only texts Hopkins prepared for public performance, and show his creative engagement with classical oratory, patristic scholarship, pastoral theology, and the social and religious controversies of his day. The spiritual writings, stylistically similar to his diary entries, reveal the spiritual consolations and inner struggles of a Victorian Jesuit with remarkable sensibilities. A sometimes vexed and invariably
complex spiritual life emerges from the volume, one that encompassed both the 'grandeur of God' and the 'forepangs' of suffering. The new introductions and notes provide expanded historical and theological
commentary. The edition also includes new annotations, complete translations of Latin and Greek texts, definitions of Jesuit customs and terminology, a biographical register, and a selected bibliography of key studies on Hopkins sermons, religious writings, and spirituality.
Author Biography:
Jude V. Nixon is Professor of English, former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Salem State University, and habilitated Professor in the Polish Academy. His teaching and research interests are Victorian literature and culture and Anglo-Phone Caribbean literature. Professor Nixon is author/editor of Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries: Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater (Garland, 1994), Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in
Criticism (AIAA, 2004), and Science, Religion, and Natural Theology (Pickering & Chatto, 2011). His publications appear in such journals as Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, Times Literary Supplement, and The Hopkins Quarterly. Noel Barber has been Principal of Belvedere College, Dublin, Gonzaga College Dublin; Rector of Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy; and Assistant Provincial Superior of Irish Jesuits. He is also a Visiting Lecturer in Education at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Visiting Scholar at The Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and has given papers on the poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins (1845-1889) over the past 23 years at Monastereven, Ireland; Regis University, Denver Colorado; The Gregorian University, Rome; Milltown Institute, Dublin; Oxford University; the University of Roehampton, London; and St.
Beuno's College, Wales. Dr Barber has published on Hopkins in Hopkins Quarterly, Studies--An Irish Quarterly Review, and Milltown Studies.
