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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - George Saunders and the Buddhist Order of Compassion

  • Jack Dudley, Mount Saint Mary’s University
  • Book:
    The New Believers
    Published online:
    03 July 2026
    Print publication:
    30 July 2026, pp 131-163

  • Summary

    This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.