This collection of essays is the third volume in a series called Religion and the University, published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark, and is a welcome addition to the scholarly, interdisciplinary engagement between literature and theology, particularly in how this conversation can help reimagine the nature and purpose of today's university. Indeed, the introductory essay suggests that a “hospitable” conversation between the theologian and the literary critic can create a public space at the university to understand what it means to be human. These essays aim, on a variety of levels, to “un-silo,” if you will, the disciplinary specializations that have often truncated broader concerns that affect human flourishing. This space is distinctly a post-postmodern conversation because the essays aim not merely to deconstruct and delineate the gaps and slippages that prevail in some contemporary theological and literary criticism, but attempt to reconstruct a virtuous and meaningful dialogue between them. The authors suggest that only in this respectful space can we understand what it means to be human.

Part 1 focuses on pedagogical principles that nourish this intellectual space, whether it be the configuration of literary study in relationship to, not in competition with, theology; or whether it be the challenge of religion to reveal the latent fideism that lurks in its theological arguments. In these first essays of the volume, the authors illustrate that whether it is poetry or prayer, human purpose and feeling are explored in often complementary fashion. Vittorio Montemaggi's essay, for instance, “Theology, Literature, and Prayer: A Pedagogical Suggestion,” sees this schooling in humility at work in three texts valuable to both theologians and literary critics alike: Gregory the Great's Moralia in Iob, Dante's Paradiso, and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Part 2 comprises the bulk of the essays, which are acts of reconstruction, for each argues for a hermeneutical revision of postmodern categories in a quest to reimagine the human condition. Here the postmodern discourses on vulnerability, deconstruction, and suspicion find counterdiscourses on vulnerability as openness to love, deconstruction's instinct for dramatic integration, and suspicion leavened in a horizon of hope. This dialogical space for paradoxical human expressions opens up the possibility for transcendence. Of the many essays that illustrate this well, Jeffrey Keuss’ “Love among the Ruins: Hermeneutics of Theology and Literature in the University after the Twentieth Century” stands out as exemplary, offering four methodologies of interpretation that continue to quarrel within the modern university. He states explicitly what other authors in the volume illustrate: that a “theological hermeneutics adds to the manifold disciplines of human flourishing” because its aim is “to point and reference the infinite depth of meaning in the structure of literary, philosophical, or for that matter, scientific hermeneutic as an outsider that is also of the heritage of all these” (176).

For any student or scholar interested in ways to move beyond contested theoretical spaces of academia for a more hospitable space of dialogue, these essays embody one way forward. In a world in which the political sphere no longer allows for any depth of reflection on the human condition, these authors suggest that theology and religion, like artistic and literary production, can become the public square for this conversation.