Mending a Tattered Faith: Devotions with Dickinson: 6 (Art for Faith's Sake)

Although Emily Dickinson is sometimes seen as a religious skeptic she never gave up on God struggling with issues of faith and doubt throughout her life. Many of her poems depict such struggles sometimes with humor and sometimes with despair. Reading and reflecting on these poems can be a powerful way to listen to and experience God through the arts. Mending a Tattered Faith presents first an accessible introduction to the mysteries of Dickinsons life and poetry considering her relationships to her family and the church the significant poetic strategies she employed and the dramatic family struggle over publishing her poetry that began soon after her death. It then offers twenty-nine carefully selected poems by Dickinson each with an accompanying meditation. By helping readers unpack Dickinsons intense but brief poems supplying absorbing historical background and information and relating some personal stories and reflections this book encourages readers to embark upon their own meditative journey with Dickinson whose engaging struggles with faith and doubt can help illuminate our own spiritual questions sorrows and joys. Whos afraid of Emily Dickinson? Not me when Ive got Susan Emily VanZanten at my side. Precise elegant and evocative VanZanten guides the reader through the spiritual tangles of Dickinsons verse in ways that enlighten and refresh the soul. This is a book to keep and to treasure. --Paul J. Willis author of Rosing from the Dead: Poems Ive never read a book quite like this and Im hoping it will inspire a new genre: engaged reading slow reading deeply informed by scholarship but inviting to all. --John Wilson Editor Books & Culture Susan VanZanten is Professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. She is the author of Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature (2002) the editor of Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call to Justice (1994) and co-author (with Roger Lundin) of Literature through the Eyes of Faith (1989).