Stephen E Lewis
Franciscan University of Steubenville, English, Faculty Member
- Twentieth Century Literature, Phenomenology, Translation Studies, Contemporary French Philosophy, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Continental Philosophy, and 30 moreMartin Heidegger, Philosophy of Love, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Marion, John McDowell, René Descartes, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, Alfred Stieglitz, Claude Romano, world war II occupation of France, Myth of the Given, Bullfighting in literature, Flesh and Body (in phenomenology), American modernism, Givenness, Marius de Zayas, Theory of Avant-Garde, Snooty Baronet, History of Philosophy, Theology and Culture, Émmanuel Lévinas, Literature and Philosophy, Georges Bataille, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Philosophical Theology, Jean Danielou, La Nouvelle Théologie, Paul Claudel, and Steven Crowelledit
Must we assume that a human being knows all there is to know about its being, its ends and its meaning, this side of death? Is it thinkable that the liturgical beyond overturns the stakes of its being? This paper explores Lacoste's work... more
Must we assume that a human being knows all there is to know about its being, its ends and its meaning, this side of death? Is it thinkable that the liturgical beyond overturns the stakes of its being? This paper explores Lacoste's work on de Lubac and connects it with Lacoste's liturgical eschatology and the notion of epektasis in Gregory of Nyssa. Lacoste's thought locates in historically situated human desire an aim beyond the world that intertwines the eschatological with the historical I.
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Amidst the teachings Jesus delivers in the Gospel of Matthew following the Sermon on the Mount are important instructions concerning prayer. Just before teaching the "Our Father," Jesus speaks of the "inner room" into which one must... more
Amidst the teachings Jesus delivers in the Gospel of Matthew following the Sermon on the Mount are important instructions concerning prayer. Just before teaching the "Our Father," Jesus speaks of the "inner room" into which one must retreat in order to pray. According to Jean-Louis Chrétien's multi-volume genealogy of "figures of interiority, and the way in which interiority becomes 'subjectivity,'" this inner room is one of two key biblical starting points for tracing the development of how we think about consciousness in the West, the other being the biblical "heart" in its relation to St. Paul's "inner man." Here I focus on Chrétien's investigations of the "inner room" and other spatial topoi or schemas that Christian writers and thinkers have employed in order to figure consciousness as a space in which the human being communes intimately with God, and which later writers, both Christian and non-Christian, have overturned by vacating God, transforming this inner space of divine encounter into a profane space of solitude. I explain how Chrétien makes the surprising connection between the inner room described by Jesus and related inner spaces developed in its wake, on the one hand, and, on the other, the modern narrative techniques for portraying human consciousness employed by such master of the modern novel as Gustave Flaubert and Henry James.
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Emmanuel Falque writes, "For Péguy, ... it will be necessary to begin _from below_: from _my_ time and _my_ flesh, rather than from eternity and spirituality, the claimed experience of which cannot safeguard my humanity."
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Malgré ses distances vis-à-vis le catholicisme, Maurice Merleau-Ponty estimait beaucoup l’œuvre de Paul Claudel. En prenant comme cible un passage caractéristique de la _Phénoménologie de la perception_ (1945) du philosophe, cet essai... more
Malgré ses distances vis-à-vis le catholicisme, Maurice Merleau-Ponty estimait beaucoup l’œuvre de Paul Claudel. En prenant comme cible un passage caractéristique de la _Phénoménologie de la perception_ (1945) du philosophe, cet essai montre que son texte emprunte non seulement concepts et vocabulaire de la _Traité de la co-naissance au monde et de soi-même_ (1907) de Claudel, mais se trouve profondément inspiré par l’événement séminal du texte du poète : l’Incarnation de Dieu en Jésus-Christ.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the religiously ambiguous, brilliant phenomenologist, highly valued the work of the Catholic poet Paul Claudel. Focusing on an exemplary passage from the philosopher’s _Phénoménologie de la perception_ (1945), this essay demonstrates that Merleau-Ponty’s text borrows not only concepts and words from Claudel’s _Traité de la co-naissance au monde et de soi-même_ (1907), but is deeply impacted even by the event at the root of Claudel’s text: God’s Incarnation in Jesus Christ.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the religiously ambiguous, brilliant phenomenologist, highly valued the work of the Catholic poet Paul Claudel. Focusing on an exemplary passage from the philosopher’s _Phénoménologie de la perception_ (1945), this essay demonstrates that Merleau-Ponty’s text borrows not only concepts and words from Claudel’s _Traité de la co-naissance au monde et de soi-même_ (1907), but is deeply impacted even by the event at the root of Claudel’s text: God’s Incarnation in Jesus Christ.
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Second part of a conversation between Emmanuel Falque and Laure Solignac on Franciscan thought and modes of being. The second part addresses includes a discussion of Scotus.
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A comparative focus on the experience of reading sample texts of Jean-Luc Marion (_The Erotic Phenomenon_) and Emmanuel Levinas ("God and Philosophy") suggests the importance of dramatic structures within philosophical texts for... more
A comparative focus on the experience of reading sample texts of Jean-Luc Marion (_The Erotic Phenomenon_) and Emmanuel Levinas ("God and Philosophy") suggests the importance of dramatic structures within philosophical texts for communicating fundamental relationships between affection and reason.
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Chapter 3 in Mark Bosco, SJ, and Brent Little, eds. _Revelation and Convergence: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition_. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017. 78-98. Discusses Flannery... more
Chapter 3 in Mark Bosco, SJ, and Brent Little, eds. _Revelation and Convergence: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition_. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017. 78-98. Discusses Flannery O'Connor's narrative approach to the possibility of a fictional knowledge of another person's heart by positioning her narrative ideas and practices within a debate (of which O'Connor was aware) carried out between François Mauriac and Jacques Maritain, and recently developed further by Jean-Louis Chrétien in his two volume _Conscience et roman_.
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Chapter from the book: Mathieu S. Cesar and Pietro Rossotti, eds. _American Dream: In viaggio con i santi americani_. Genova: Marietti, 2016. pp. 89-119.
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This is the unpublished English text of an essay on the Franciscan friar and saint Junípero Serra that was translated into Italian, edited, and published as "Junípero Serra (1713-1748): Il padre delle mission della California," trans.... more
This is the unpublished English text of an essay on the Franciscan friar and saint Junípero Serra that was translated into Italian, edited, and published as "Junípero Serra (1713-1748): Il padre delle mission della California," trans. Donatella Brown and Irene Sorensen, in _American Dream: In viaggio con i santi americani_. Genoa, Italy: Marietti, 2016. 87-119.
The published Italian text is available above.
The published Italian text is available above.
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A commentary on Paul Claudel's poem "Le Chemin de la croix," focused on how the poem conveys Claudel's sense of the inexhaustibility of the finite and definite. Accompanies John Marson Dunaway's translation of the poem in the... more
A commentary on Paul Claudel's poem "Le Chemin de la croix," focused on how the poem conveys Claudel's sense of the inexhaustibility of the finite and definite. Accompanies John Marson Dunaway's translation of the poem in the "Reconsiderations" section of the Spring 2016 issue of _Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture_.
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Translation of Paul Claudel's poem "Le Chemin de la Croix," commented on in my short article "Claudel's Way to the Inexhaustible"--published in _Logos_ 19:2 (Spring 2016).
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Discusses Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of givenness in relation to the treatment of 'the given' in the philosophy of Wifrid Sellars and John McDowell.
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In The Bible and Poetry, the poet and scholar Michael Edwards seeks to transform how the Bible and Christianity are understood, arguing that poetry is not an ornamental or accidental feature of the Bible but is central to its meaning. The... more
In The Bible and Poetry, the poet and scholar Michael Edwards seeks to transform how the Bible and Christianity are understood, arguing that poetry is not an ornamental or accidental feature of the Bible but is central to its meaning. The creative use of words that is poetry is the necessary medium of the Creator’s word, and belief emerges not from precepts and propositions but out of the lived experience—this is what the Bible offers above of all—of the power of that word.
https://www.nyrb.com/products/bible-and-poetry
https://www.nyrb.com/products/bible-and-poetry
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A translation of Jean-Luc Marion's 2014 Gifford Lectures
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This special issue of Religions seeks to present outstanding examples of recent developments in the study of the Bible in literature. Literary scholars today find themselves equipped with an array of significant approaches to and methods... more
This special issue of Religions seeks to present outstanding examples of recent developments in the study of the Bible in literature. Literary scholars today find themselves equipped with an array of significant approaches to and methods for studying literary engagements with the Bible. A generation of scholars—among them, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, Robert Alter—has produced books of major importance that, amidst years of debate, some of it ongoing, have set out typological, narratological, formal, translation, and cultural questions that can be said to constitute the parameters of the field of “the Bible and literature.” At least in the English-speaking world, many earlier difficulties in conceiving the range of relationships between literature and the Bible have been addressed. Overlapping with this development have been ground-breaking philosophical approaches to the Bible that promise or have already realized consequences for the study of literary engagement with the Bible: the phenomenological work of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricœur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Kevin Hart; or the semiotic and Thomistic thought of Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP. And then there are the contributions of poets, fictions writers, and dramatists, some of whom are also scholars of literature, the Bible, or both (among poets, one might think of Paul Claudel, T.S. Eliot, Jean Grosjean, Czesław Miłosz, Denise Levertov, Michael Edwards). And these lists are in no way meant to exclude the many articles and books produced by scholars working on a wide range of authors and periods in order to investigate endless literary appropriations of the Bible. In particular, the so-called “religious turn” of the last two decades in scholarship devoted to various authors and literary periods has produced important studies addressing our topic.
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A review-essay on Marie-Aimée Manchon's book _Alentour du verses: Petite phénoménologie des mystères_.
Manchon's response is available in _Crossing: The INPR Journal_, vol. II (Dec. 2021) at https://inprjournal.pubpub.org
Manchon's response is available in _Crossing: The INPR Journal_, vol. II (Dec. 2021) at https://inprjournal.pubpub.org
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The success of Peter Connor's Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin derives in no small part from his awareness that anyone choosing to write about Bataille in English has a special responsibility to come to grips with "the... more
The success of Peter Connor's Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin derives in no small part from his awareness that anyone choosing to write about Bataille in English has a special responsibility to come to grips with "the arbitrariness of […] cultural chronology" that has been ...
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Since the late 1980s, much scholarship concerned with Samuel Beckett's relationship with philosophy has argued that postmodern or post-structuralist theory, rather than existentialist philosophy, is the proper context for... more
Since the late 1980s, much scholarship concerned with Samuel Beckett's relationship with philosophy has argued that postmodern or post-structuralist theory, rather than existentialist philosophy, is the proper context for understanding Beckett's work, particularly his trilogy of [End Page ...
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The central claim in Giorgio Agamben's latest book to be translated into English (the Italian original was published in 1995) is extremely provocative: the concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for the exercise of power in... more
The central claim in Giorgio Agamben's latest book to be translated into English (the Italian original was published in 1995) is extremely provocative: the concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for the exercise of power in western politics, including contemporary liberal democracies. ...