The contemporary Christian church is in critical decline, both in membership and finances. All attempts at reversal are failing, primarily because of the consuming socioeconomic-secular dynamic in which society is immersed in its self-destructive course. Consequently, Christian imagery is losing its conceivability and credibility, and past motivations that once encouraged belief have lost their appeal. Without these as points of contact, the demise of the institutional church will be relentless, despite all efforts to halt it. Yet, as at other crisis points in history, the divine promise has been to raise a “faithful remnant” with sufficient promise to outlast whatever the societal demise. After carefully analyzing the ingredients of our societal crisis, the author develops the contours of a “Remnant Church” to be set in place now within the present institutional churches. This necessitates distilling a vital spirituality and discerning the heart of a preservable tradition, sufficient to claim both personal and communal commitment. Thereby prepared for the long haul, the Remnant Church can emerge as a prophetic alternative.

A concluding chapter examines the significance of the corpus of Catholic American writing in the years 1940 to 1980, considering it parallel in substance to the body of Jewish American literature of the same period.

The contemporary Christian church is in critical decline, both in membership and finances. All attempts at reversal are failing, primarily because of the consuming socioeconomic-secular dynamic in which society is immersed in its self-destructive course. Consequently, Christian imagery is losing its conceivability and credibility, and past motivations that once encouraged belief have lost their appeal. Without these as points of contact, the demise of the institutional church will be relentless, despite all efforts to halt it. Yet, as at other crisis points in history, the divine promise has been to raise a “faithful remnant” with sufficient promise to outlast whatever the societal demise. After carefully analyzing the ingredients of our societal crisis, the author develops the contours of a “Remnant Church” to be set in place now within the present institutional churches. This necessitates distilling a vital spirituality and discerning the heart of a preservable tradition, sufficient to claim both personal and communal commitment. Thereby prepared for the long haul, the Remnant Church can emerge as a prophetic alternative.

This book focuses on two twentieth-century American epic poets - Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Charles Olson (1910-1970) - in the context of multiculturalism. Pound deployed the cultural resources of the Other to deflect Western imperialism's absolutizing of the self and opened new poetic and cultural spaces beyond T. S. Eliot's closed Anglo-American tradition. However, he fell short of discarding modernist Enlightenment epistemology reifying the Other. Olson followed in the tradition of Pound's open poetics but rejected his Eurocentrism. By deconstructing Pound's epistemology, Olson forged a postmodernist and postimperial multicultural perspective that reconfigured Otherness through an unmediated, self-decentered discourse.