Reason, Faith, and Revolution

[Dave Monroe]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Dave Monroe<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the
> God Debate.(New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2009), Ch. 1, "The Scum of the
> Earth," pp. 1-46:
>
>   "The only authentic image of this violently loving God is a
> tortured and executed political criminal, who dies in an act of
> solidarity with what the Bible calls the anawim, meaning the destitute
> and dispossessed....  The anawim, in Pauline phrase, are the shit of
> the earth ... Jesus himself is consistently presented as their
> representative.  His death and descent into hell is a voyage into
> madness, terror, absurdity, and self-dispossession ..." (p. 23)
>
> http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300151794

Thomas Pynchon's novel "Gravity's Rainbow" uses the Orpheus myth as
one structure, with Slothrop as Orpheus and postwar Germany as Hades.
There are many references to the afterlife in Slothrop's "descent"
into the continent, the yacht the Anubis being one example

Thomas Pynchon also uses the Death of Orpheus as a motif in his novel
"Against the Day", making several allusions to the tale and having his
characters discuss Orpheus' looking back, in relation to a larger
theme of the search for (and absence of) music, Orpheus' art, in the
face of global expansion and warfare.

http://wapedia.mobi/en/Orpheus?t=6.