[Vwoolf] Religion around Virginia Woolf

[Michael Schrimper]

Here's a short piece from the Harvard Gazette about a new book on Virginia
Woolf and religion:



https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/scholar-uncovers-virginia-woolfs-desire-to-re-create-sacred-community/



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.



“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.”
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