John Gatta
Biographic Data
| ID | 997402 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Gatta |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Gatta |
| SIGNATURE | GATTA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Sewanee: The University of the South |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7639-0311 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Eucharistic Feast of Creation
The Eucharist, a gospel sacrament and central feature of life in the Christian church, also bears considerable relevance for growing concerns about the “green” complexion of contemporary faith. Yet traditional forms of eucharistic liturgy may not seem initially to address these concerns satisfactorily. What, then, to do? One approach involves pursuing new, experimental alternatives to existing liturgical forms. Such innovations are unlikely, howe…
Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild
Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 280 pp., $45 (hbk)
Speaking with the Dead in Early America, by Erik R. Seeman
The Saving Grace of America's Green Jeremiad
By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they perceived to be the betrayal of New England's godly "errand into the wilderness." In election sermons they mourned the community's backsliding from its global mission as a "city upon a hill." Such doomsday rhetoric echoed the lamentations of decline intoned by ancient Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah. Yet this "Jeremiad" discourse characteristically reac…
Sacramental Communion with Nature
For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the soul toward experiencing moments of otherwise unpredictable, ecstatic encounter with the divine soul of Nature. But the eye alone was not the sole sensory pathway toward receiving such revelations. Especially in later writing, Thoreau focused special attention on eating and drinking as key bodily-yet also spiritual-modes of experiencing communion with…
Learning to Love Creation
Unlike most environmental prose, present-day “ecopoetry” centers its imaginative attention on praise rather than protest, love of earth rather than rage. It reflects newfound awareness of nature’s violence, as seen in Mary Oliver’s poems; or of what science discloses about nature’s unseen and unfathomable intricacy, as seen in Pattiann Rogers’s poetry. Surprisingly, though, the meditative temper of contemporary ecopoetry often sustains a religiou…
Landfall
During the colonial era, British settlers only gradually allowed North America’s actual physical environment to shape their idea of the New World they inhabited. Although New England Puritans were generally fearful of unsettled land, they were also disposed to regard the wild continent as uncorrupted space—and even, on occasion, as a sacred site of regeneration by contrast with the rejected Catholic emphasis on locally consecrated church edifices…
Imagined Worlds
Every landscape is exotic, from the standpoint of those who stand apart from it or cannot know it fully, so that encounters with strange or forbidding landscapes may have sacred rather than escapist meaning. The exotic terrain of Southern swamps nurtured a distinctive form of religious life for maroon communities of African Americans, a spiritual legacy recalled in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Quest of the Silver Fleece. In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez shows h…
“Revelation to US”
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freed…
Intimations of an Environmental Ethic in the Writings of Jonathan Edwards
Although the renowned Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards scarcely fits the conventional image of a nature writer, his work embodies a theology of Creation that has important implications for environmental ethics. As such, his ethical philosophy anticipates--in several surprising but instructive ways—the twentieth-century “land ethic” set forth by Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac. Edwards’s notion of “benevolence to Being in general,” as art…
Reclaiming the Sacred Commons
Wendell Berry’s creative nonfiction has been chiefly inspired by the author’s longstanding relation to his home place in Kentucky. It embodies his religious conviction that land should be understood not as commodity but as divine gift and sacrament, and that human community is organically wedded to the rest of nature’s ecological household. Confronting the problem of theodicy raised by the apparent cruelty and waste of Creation, Annie Dillard end…
Meditating on the Creatures in Early American Life and Letters
The longstanding European tradition of meditating on creatures of the phenomenal world carried both religious and ecological significance for New England Puritans, who were peculiarly disposed to ponder the relation between earth’s visible and invisible domains. This disposition is exemplified by the poetry of meditation composed by colonial writers such as Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet’s meditative poem “Contemplations” is interp…
Afterword
Author Webpage When John Cheever's character of Lemuel Sears asks “Is nothing sacred?” he means the question rhetorically, to deride those who would tolerate ruining a lovely pond for profit. And yet, in the current cultural climate, the question must also be entertained in earnest. It is no longer clear to what extent society at large recognizes any space, time, or being as authentically sacred—that is, as inviolately preserved from ordinary hum…
Post-Darwinian Visions of Divine Creation
Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Darwinism had a varied impact on American sensibilities. John Muir, for example, studied science and accepted the transmutative premise of evolutionary theory--but retained a biblically colored piety that saw God’s presence inscribed “in magnificent capitals” at places like Yosemite. During this extended period, writings by Mary Austin and Black Elk reflect their encounters with versions of …
“Rare and Delectable Places”
Walden Pond, the obvious focal point of Thoreau’s worship and spiritual discovery, qualifies thereby as a sacred place in the author’s celebrated account of “where he lived.” Thoreau’s place-centered spirituality is both active and contemplative, with the contemplative dimension vividly conveyed through his description of morning meditation in the chapter “Sounds.” Thoreau, despite his elusive and inconsistent theology, sometimes confirms belief …
Variations on Nature
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace…
Making Nature Sacred
Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. In this book, the author suggests that the religious import of environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson’s words, of “someth…
George Perkins Marsh
The Anglican Aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe
HE moral passion energizing Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is widely known, proceeded from Harriet Beecher Stowe's strong Christian convictions, convictions nurtured by an extraordinary family teeming with clergymen. Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gained national celebrity as an evangelical, revivalistic preacher in the Calvinist tradition. All seven of her brothers, including the famed and ultimately notorious Henry Ward Beecher, likewise became Congrega…
American Madonna
Sinful Self, Saintly Self
Pious Impostures and Unproven Words
Pious Impostures and Unproven Words applies deconstruction to nineteenth-century American romances and to the concept of the traditional liberal arts education. Offering new readings of such American classics as The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn, this volume shows that deconstruction is not necessarily antagonistic to traditional readings of literary texts. By establishing a clear relationship between deconstruction and the concept of a lib…
Gracious Laughter
Increase Mather, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards were important figures in seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England, their lives and contributions overlapping in significant ways: Mather and Taylor were close contemporaries, with Edwards's birth occurring when other two men were in their sixties; all three were Puritan ministers; Edwards and Mather were college presidents and influential in their own time; and three together represent c…
Gracious Laughter
Little Lower than God
Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originality as a theologian. Apparently this New Englander's mind was no match for that of Jonathan Edwards: most of Taylor's theological ideas were not only orthodox, but commonplace. Yet the poet's religious anthropology would seem to be one notable exception. In both prose and verse, Taylor is continually breaking into chants of heartfelt wonder over the ex…
Making Nature Sacred
Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. In this book, the author suggests that the religious import of environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson’s words, of “someth…
Progress and Providence in The House of the Seven Gables
T HE PROSPEROUS CONCLUSION of The House of the Seven Gables would seem to suggest that there is nothing so permanently forbidding about an ancestral curse, or even perhaps about that more ancient human curse of Original Sin, that the combined benefits of money, marriage, and a new house in the country cannot solve. True, it is possible to read Hawthorne's ending ironically-or to recognize, at least, that the monetary fortune bestowed so abruptly …
Progress and Providence in The House of the Seven Gables
T HE PROSPEROUS CONCLUSION of The House of the Seven Gables would seem to suggest that there is nothing so permanently forbidding about an ancestral curse, or even perhaps about that more ancient human curse of Original Sin, that the combined benefits of money, marriage, and a new house in the country cannot solve. True, it is possible to read Hawthorne's ending ironically-or to recognize, at least, that the monetary fortune bestowed so abruptly …
Little Lower than God
Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originality as a theologian. Apparently this New Englander's mind was no match for that of Jonathan Edwards: most of Taylor's theological ideas were not only orthodox, but commonplace. Yet the poet's religious anthropology would seem to be one notable exception. In both prose and verse, Taylor is continually breaking into chants of heartfelt wonder over the ex…
Gracious Laughter
Pious Impostures and Unproven Words
Pious Impostures and Unproven Words applies deconstruction to nineteenth-century American romances and to the concept of the traditional liberal arts education. Offering new readings of such American classics as The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn, this volume shows that deconstruction is not necessarily antagonistic to traditional readings of literary texts. By establishing a clear relationship between deconstruction and the concept of a lib…
Gracious Laughter
Increase Mather, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards were important figures in seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England, their lives and contributions overlapping in significant ways: Mather and Taylor were close contemporaries, with Edwards's birth occurring when other two men were in their sixties; all three were Puritan ministers; Edwards and Mather were college presidents and influential in their own time; and three together represent c…
Sinful Self, Saintly Self
American Madonna
The Anglican Aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe
HE moral passion energizing Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is widely known, proceeded from Harriet Beecher Stowe's strong Christian convictions, convictions nurtured by an extraordinary family teeming with clergymen. Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gained national celebrity as an evangelical, revivalistic preacher in the Calvinist tradition. All seven of her brothers, including the famed and ultimately notorious Henry Ward Beecher, likewise became Congrega…
George Perkins Marsh
Learning to Love Creation
Unlike most environmental prose, present-day “ecopoetry” centers its imaginative attention on praise rather than protest, love of earth rather than rage. It reflects newfound awareness of nature’s violence, as seen in Mary Oliver’s poems; or of what science discloses about nature’s unseen and unfathomable intricacy, as seen in Pattiann Rogers’s poetry. Surprisingly, though, the meditative temper of contemporary ecopoetry often sustains a religiou…
Landfall
During the colonial era, British settlers only gradually allowed North America’s actual physical environment to shape their idea of the New World they inhabited. Although New England Puritans were generally fearful of unsettled land, they were also disposed to regard the wild continent as uncorrupted space—and even, on occasion, as a sacred site of regeneration by contrast with the rejected Catholic emphasis on locally consecrated church edifices…
Imagined Worlds
Every landscape is exotic, from the standpoint of those who stand apart from it or cannot know it fully, so that encounters with strange or forbidding landscapes may have sacred rather than escapist meaning. The exotic terrain of Southern swamps nurtured a distinctive form of religious life for maroon communities of African Americans, a spiritual legacy recalled in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Quest of the Silver Fleece. In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez shows h…
“Revelation to US”
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freed…
Intimations of an Environmental Ethic in the Writings of Jonathan Edwards
Although the renowned Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards scarcely fits the conventional image of a nature writer, his work embodies a theology of Creation that has important implications for environmental ethics. As such, his ethical philosophy anticipates--in several surprising but instructive ways—the twentieth-century “land ethic” set forth by Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac. Edwards’s notion of “benevolence to Being in general,” as art…
Reclaiming the Sacred Commons
Wendell Berry’s creative nonfiction has been chiefly inspired by the author’s longstanding relation to his home place in Kentucky. It embodies his religious conviction that land should be understood not as commodity but as divine gift and sacrament, and that human community is organically wedded to the rest of nature’s ecological household. Confronting the problem of theodicy raised by the apparent cruelty and waste of Creation, Annie Dillard end…
Meditating on the Creatures in Early American Life and Letters
The longstanding European tradition of meditating on creatures of the phenomenal world carried both religious and ecological significance for New England Puritans, who were peculiarly disposed to ponder the relation between earth’s visible and invisible domains. This disposition is exemplified by the poetry of meditation composed by colonial writers such as Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet’s meditative poem “Contemplations” is interp…
Afterword
Author Webpage When John Cheever's character of Lemuel Sears asks “Is nothing sacred?” he means the question rhetorically, to deride those who would tolerate ruining a lovely pond for profit. And yet, in the current cultural climate, the question must also be entertained in earnest. It is no longer clear to what extent society at large recognizes any space, time, or being as authentically sacred—that is, as inviolately preserved from ordinary hum…
Post-Darwinian Visions of Divine Creation
Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Darwinism had a varied impact on American sensibilities. John Muir, for example, studied science and accepted the transmutative premise of evolutionary theory--but retained a biblically colored piety that saw God’s presence inscribed “in magnificent capitals” at places like Yosemite. During this extended period, writings by Mary Austin and Black Elk reflect their encounters with versions of …
“Rare and Delectable Places”
Walden Pond, the obvious focal point of Thoreau’s worship and spiritual discovery, qualifies thereby as a sacred place in the author’s celebrated account of “where he lived.” Thoreau’s place-centered spirituality is both active and contemplative, with the contemplative dimension vividly conveyed through his description of morning meditation in the chapter “Sounds.” Thoreau, despite his elusive and inconsistent theology, sometimes confirms belief …
Variations on Nature
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace…
Making Nature Sacred
Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. In this book, the author suggests that the religious import of environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson’s words, of “someth…
Sacramental Communion with Nature
For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the soul toward experiencing moments of otherwise unpredictable, ecstatic encounter with the divine soul of Nature. But the eye alone was not the sole sensory pathway toward receiving such revelations. Especially in later writing, Thoreau focused special attention on eating and drinking as key bodily-yet also spiritual-modes of experiencing communion with…
Speaking with the Dead in Early America, by Erik R. Seeman
The Saving Grace of America's Green Jeremiad
By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they perceived to be the betrayal of New England's godly "errand into the wilderness." In election sermons they mourned the community's backsliding from its global mission as a "city upon a hill." Such doomsday rhetoric echoed the lamentations of decline intoned by ancient Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah. Yet this "Jeremiad" discourse characteristically reac…
Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild
Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 280 pp., $45 (hbk)
Art (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · History (16 works) · Literature (13 works) · Theology (13 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Art history (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works) · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics (6 works)