The otherworld and the here and now: An introduction to religious themes in Chris Arthur's essays

Abstract

This article examines religious themes in the work of Irish essayist Chris Arthur. Robert Welch's analysis of the religious instinct, which he sees as a continuous awareness of the otherworld that acts to sharpen our sense of the here and now, is used to bring a key feature of Arthur's writing into focus. Underlying the article is the view that if religious studies wishes to avoid confining its attention to simplistic abstractions that have little do with actual forms of contemporary religious expression, it must be open to the existence of religiousness outside the formal confines of a few particular faiths. In exploring such religiousness it needs to deploy a variety of interpretative strategies rather than rely on any single mode of procedure.