<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style=""><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="">Here's a short piece from the Harvard Gazette about a new book on Virginia Woolf and religion: </font></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/scholar-uncovers-virginia-woolfs-desire-to-re-create-sacred-community/" style="color:rgb(5,99,193)"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/scholar-uncovers-virginia-woolfs-desire-to-re-create-sacred-community/</font></a></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><span style="color:black;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">In her forthcoming book, “Religion around
Virginia Woolf,” Paulsell explores the ways that the novelist’s engagement with
religion went far beyond the question of belief to include “studying the
history of religions; reading the Bible … studying religious art and thinking
about her own art in relation to it; drawing in complex ways upon religious
language and religious themes both in her novels and in her reflections on the
practices of reading and writing; and creating a literature that did, and
continues to do, a kind of religious work.” Moreover, Woolf was an insightful,
often scathing critic of clergy who failed to deliver in ritual the kind of
transcendent, meaningful experience she strived for in art, and in life.</font></span></p>

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 15pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><span style="color:black"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="">“Virginia Woolf was raised by Victorian agnostics to think that
people who believed in God were not facing reality,” says Paulsell, an ordained
minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). “She once wrote to her
sister that ‘there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire
and believing in God.’ But her novels are full of religious language: consecration,
revelation, soul, spirit. For me, she is a generative religious thinker.”</font></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt"> </span></p>

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