Contemporary Authors

• Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories Bloomsbury Academic (New York, NY), 2015

1. Cormac McCarthy and the signs of sacrament : literature, theology, and the moral of stories LCCN 2015008543 Type of material Book Personal name Potts, Matthew L., author. Main title Cormac McCarthy and the signs of sacrament : literature, theology, and the moral of stories / Matthew L. Potts. Published/Produced New York : Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2015. ©2015 Description vii, 224 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781501306556 (hardback) Links Cover image http://www.netread.com/jcusers2/bk1388/556/9781501306556/image/lgcover.9781501306556.jpg Shelf Location FLM2015 260670 CALL NUMBER PS3563.C337 Z83 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• Harvard Divinity School - http://hds.harvard.edu/people/matthew-l-potts

  Matthew L. Potts

  Assistant Professor of Ministry Studies
  Matthew Potts
  HDS professor Matthew Potts / Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva
  Education
  BA, University of Notre Dame
  MDiv, Harvard Divinity School
  PhD, Harvard University
  Profile
  Matthew Potts joined the faculty of Harvard Divinity School in 2013. He studies the thought and practice of contemporary Christian communities through attention to diverse literary, theological, and liturgical texts.

  In particular, he seeks to analyze and interpret Christian ethical and sacramental practices while employing the resources of literature, literary theory, and Christian theology. His first book, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) uncovers in contemporary fiction a moral framework that is deeply indebted to traditions of Christian sacramental theology. His current book project examines the problems and possibilities of forgiveness through diverse and interdisciplinary readings of theory, theology, and literature. Other interests include theories of narrative, contemporary Anglican theology, postcolonial Christianity (especially in Japan), homiletics, and sacramental and liturgical theology.

  Professor Potts is ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church and has served several parishes in Massachusetts.

• Author C.V. - http://hds.harvard.edu/files/hds/files/matthew-potts-cv-102016.docx

  THE REV. MATTHEW L. POTTS, PH.D.
  Assistant Professor of Ministry Studies
  Harvard Divinity School
  45 Francis Ave.
  Cambridge, MA 02138
  mpotts@hds.harvard.edu

  ________________________________________

  Education

  Ph.D., Harvard University 2013
  The Study of Religion

  M.Div., Harvard University 2008

  B.A., University of Notre Dame 1999
  English cum laude

  Academic Appointments

  Assistant Professor of Ministry Studies 2013 – present
  Harvard Divinity School

  Publications and presentations:

  Books

  A Different Forgiveness: Writing and the Remission of Sin (in progress).

  Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

  Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

  “Demons and Dominion: Possession and Dispossession in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” (in progress).

  “‘The world will be made whole’: Love, Loss, and the Sacramental Imagination in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Christianity and Literature (forthcoming).

  “‘A landscape of the damned’: The Devil, Damnation, and Nothingness in Outer Dark.” In The Hermeneutics of Hell, ed. Gregor Thuswaldner and Dan Russ (Palgrave McMillan, forthcoming).

  “Imagination.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

  “Ragged Biblical Forms: Misogyny, Materiality, and Identity in Suttree.” Religion and Literature (Summer 2015).

  “Giving an account of God: Possibilities for a sacramental presence in preaching.” In Preaching and the Theological Imagination, ed. Zachary Giuliano and Cameron Partridge (Peter Lang, 2015).

  “‘There is no god and we are his prophets’: Cormac McCarthy and Christian faith.” Christianity and Literature (Summer 2014).

  “Preaching in the Subjunctive: Towards a Ritual Homiletics.” Practical Matters (Spring 2014).

  Reviews and other essays

  “Narrative Wounds and Livable Fictions.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Winter/Spring 2015).

  Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), in Christianity and Literature (Summer 2013).

  Presentations

  “The Sight of Memory: Rankine, Morrison, Certeau.” To be presented at the panel “Mystery, Memory, and Time” at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Antonio, TX (November 19, 2016).

  “The Imagination of Sacrifice: Toni Morrison and Christian Memory.” Keynote lecture presented at the Literatures and Linguistics Undergraduate Colloquium at Gordon College, Hamilton, MA (April 2, 2016).

  “Remaking American Monsters: Race and Religion in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction.” Presented at the panel “Between: Liminality as Creative (Re)Source in American Religion, Literature, and Art” at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Atlanta, GA (November 23, 2015).

  “‘A landscape of the damned’: The devil, damnation, and nothingness is Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.” Presented at the conference “The Hermeneutics of Hell,” Gordon College, Hamilton, MA (November 8, 2014).

  “Suffering Stories: Witness and sacrifice in Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter.” Presented at the workshop “The Sacrifice of Children on the Altar of Capitalism: Bearing Witness in the Writings of Russell Banks” (November 5, 2014).

  “Reading a Stranger: The Road to Emmaus and the Work of Theology.” Presented at the panel, “A Celebration of the Humble Sublime,” at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School (May 5, 2014).

  “‘There is no god and we are his prophets’: Cormac McCarthy and Christian faith.” Presented at the panel “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Baltimore, MD (November 24, 2013).

  “Presence and Re-presentation: Some thoughts on sacramental realism.” Presented at the panel “Ronald Thiemann: In Memoriam,” at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Baltimore, MD (November 23, 2013).

  “Ties that bind: Eucharist and Baptism in Paul and Protestantism: A response to N.T. Wright.” Presented at the public forum Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Divinity School (November 15, 2013).

  “Giving an account of God: Possibilities for a sacramental presence in preaching.” Presented at the 2012 New England Anglican Studies Conference, Cambridge, MA (April 21, 2012).

  “Sharing words and wafers: Signs and sacraments as hosts in Derrida and McCarthy.” Presented at the conference “The Hospitable Text: New Approaches to Religion and Literature,” University of Notre Dame, London, UK (July 15, 2011).

  Courses Taught

  Love, Death, and Nothingness (Fall 2016)
  Introduction to Ministry Studies (Fall 2015, Fall 2016)
  The Death of Jesus (Fall 2015)
  Christianity and Contemporary American Literature (Spring 2015)
  Sacrifice and Atonement (Spring 2015)
  Forgiveness, Ritual, and Reconciliation (Fall 2014)
  Preaching in Public (Fall 2014)
  Sign, Symbol, Sacrament (Spring 2014)
  The Sacramental Imagination (Spring 2014)
  The Word of God: Narrative theory and Christian theology (Fall 2013)
  Introduction to Christian Preaching (Fall 2013)
  Estrangement and Enchantment: Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and the Quotidian (Junior tutorial, Spring 2013)

  Professional Service

  Religions and the Practice of Peace Faculty Search Committee (2016-present)
  Masters of Divinity Committee, Harvard Divinity School (2013-present)
  Board of Trustees, Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard (2016-present)
  University Rights and Responsibilities Committee (2014-2015)
  Admissions Committee, Harvard Divinity School (2013-2015)
  Editorial Assistant, Harvard Theological Review (2011-2012)
  Consulting Theological Reviewer, Standing Commission on Liturgy of the Episcopal
  Church, (2011)
  Editorial Assistant, Religion and Literature (2004-2005)

  Fellowships

  Williams Fellowship, Harvard Divinity School, 2005-2008
  Graduate Fellowship for Diversity, University of Notre Dame Graduate School, 2004-2005

  Ministry

  Theologian-in-residence, St. Barnabas Memorial Church, Falmouth, MA (2013-present)
  Assistant rector, St. Barnabas Memorial Church, Falmouth, MA (2009-2013)
  Priest associate, Church of Our Saviour, Brookline, MA (2008-2009)
  Seminarian, St. Peter’s Church, Cambridge, MA (2005-2008)

Potts, Matthew L.: Cormac McCarthy and the signs of sacrament: literature, theology, and the moral of stories
E. Hage
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1168.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Potts, Matthew L. Cormac McCarthy and the signs of sacrament: literature, theology, and the moral of stories. Bloomsbury, 2015. 224p bibl index ISBN 9781501306556 cloth, $110.00; ISBN 9781501306563 ebook, $98.99

(cc) 53-3407

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2015-8543 CIP

Cormac McCarthy's work is fraught with Christian imagery, but often Christianity becomes a dark, moral undertow in the works, seemingly designed to highlight a nihilistic, violent view of the world. Churches most often lie in ruin, talismans scattered. Prayers go unanswered. The morally "good" often brutally die. Though Potts (ministry studies, Harvard Divinity School) acknowledges the validity of Gnostic, nihilistic, and existential readings of the novels, he systematically and deliberately guides readers through a theological approach, examining McCarthy's frequent invocations of sacrament (the Eucharist in particular) in a nonreductive context and using postmodern theory as critical ballast. In doing so, Potts provides a revelatory bright stroke in the rapidly expanding field of McCarthy scholarship. Of particular interest is Potts's reading of The Road, as he casts, for example, new light on the baptismal images in the text. In places, Potts's mode could be more integrative: he tends to use subheadings within chapters to "flip" between direct textual analysis and contextual development (rather than intertwining these modes). For example, a discussion of the father and son in The Road stops dead in its tracks to develop subsequent sections on "divine dispossession" and "narration and incarnation." Overall, however, Potts's immersion in McCarthy yields fresh insights and previously unexplored theological angles. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--E. Hage, SUNY Cobleskill

Hage, E. "Potts, Matthew L.: Cormac McCarthy and the signs of sacrament: literature, theology, and the moral of stories." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1168+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661538&it=r&asid=2f1ca0751be803ae3089ceb7597bbcc9. Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.

• Reading Religion
  http://readingreligion.org/books/cormac-mccarthy-and-signs-sacrament
  Word count: 1186

  Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament
  Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories
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  Matthew L. Potts
  New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic , September 2015. 232 pages.
  $110.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9781501306556. For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.
  Review
  To those interested in the dynamic relationship between theology and literature, the work of novelist Cormac McCarthy has long been begging for a sustained critical treatment. With the recent release of Mathew Potts’s Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, we are treated to such a book—a study that is to be particularly commended for mining the theological content so prevalent in McCarthy’s work. By and large, and with some qualification, Pott’s beautifully written text makes choice contributions not only to sacramental aesthetics, but to the fields of ethics and narrative theory as well.

  Drawing on an impressive scope of (mostly) modern and late modern critics, philosophers, and theologians (from Aquinas to Luther, Nietzsche, Barth, Arendt, and Judith Butler), Potts sets out to propose various ways in which “McCarthy’s routine and extensive use of sacramental imagery means to deploy” a precisely “cruciform” logic—a literary enfleshment of Luther’s theologia crucis—that analogically develops in McCarthy’s fiction “a distinct moral vision, a sacramental ethics.” Potts tracks sacramental elements and imagery in innovative ways, paying focused attention to how sacramental signs emerge through representative postmodern means and themes: identity, dispossession, agency, and narrative, to name a few.

  Clearly, many contemporary critics are interested in sacramental aesthetics as well. Early in the text, Potts engages one such critic, Regina Schwartz, a literary scholar whose recent foray into sacramental poetics seeks to trace divine presence. Schwartz argues that since the time “God left the world” in the Luther-begotten English Renaissance, traces of the sacred have been dislocated from mainly ecclesial settings to primarily aesthetic productions or cultural artifacts. Potts takes aspects of Schwartz’s argument to task by beginning a promising consideration of how the tension between consubtantiation and transubstantiation that undergirds this phenomenon might be arrogated in literary spaces, but the conversation is moved aside too quickly. The reader wants more of this kind of thing—particularly the reader for whom the relationship between such doctrinal dynamics mean everything to the development of a theologically-astute literary criticism.

  But, as Potts discloses early, he is not on a mission to “enlist” McCarthy as a theologian. However, he is on a mission, at least implicitly, to recover the connection between aesthetics and ethics in the “godspent” worlds that McCarthy renders with such lyrical, God-haunted beauty. As Potts observes, in McCarthy “the sacramental and moral are deeply related,” and Potts’s project is to track this connection in a group of select texts, mainly Sutree, Blood Meridian, The Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Potts’s work is explicitly theological and aims to develop a theology of narrative that is sacramental from the ground up. Following Butler, narrative promotes mutuality and community; narrative “does not ground us in ourselves,” but in others, which is “its primary ethical relevance” (138). However, unlike Butler (who eschews supernatural transcendence), Potts seeks to extend this vision theologically, to a critical account of “God’s signs and wonders,” and to the transcending mysteries implicit in Christian ecclesiology and sacramentality.

  However, a critical question also emerges: is the nearness of God implicit in a sacramental imagination actually present in McCarthy’s novels? Does McCarthy’s vision, a vision that has been legitimately characterized as “Gnostic,” make credible space for the theological intimacy and implicit grace proper to sacramentality? The answer, as Potts does well to illustrate, is a qualified “yes,” and the postmodern context out of which McCarthy writes becomes key in this consideration. The abandonment of God, a topic that has preoccupied the literary imagination in writers as disparate as Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace, is also a trademark preoccupation of postmodern theology. But it is sacramentality (focusing as it does on mediation of phenomena through the finite, through the “material turn” of created “bodies”) that is becoming of increasing interest to critics of all stripes. It is in this spirit that Potts tracks the empty spaces—tracks dispossession and abandonment—and the ways that the Christian sacramental tradition, a tradition founded upon the empty space of a tomb and fixed upon transcendent carnality, might credibly respond to and aesthetically represent these phenomena.

  Potts is not the first to critically contemplate such an aesthetic, as is claimed; but he is the first to articulate a book-length postmodern sacramentality in McCarthy, a critical contribution that resonates constructively with others in this field and expands the conversation substantially. Still, there is also another kind of an “elephant in the room” in Pott’s text. His “analogical” case for a sacramental vision in McCarthy derives more from Luther’s theologia crucis than it does from the analogia entis, a normative trajectory central in traditional sacramental theology. Potts neglects this discourse, and the needed distinctions between the “dialectical” (i.e. Protestant) and “analogical” (i.e. Catholic) imaginations that ponder God’s immanence and transcendence—distinctions based largely on competing theories of sacramentality (articulated by David Tracy and others)—are missing. Potts integrates many Catholic interlocutors (Metz, de Certeau, and Chauvet), but his reticence to name such theo-critical approaches as “Catholic” (a word that is sparingly used in the text, if at all) can be viewed as intellectually myopic. It’s not clear whether or not Potts is sidestepping such distinctions in order to cultivate a more integrated Christian ecclesiology, but the gap is conspicuous in its absence and creates a kind of critical fog.

  In any case, Potts’s theologia crucis runs deep. He is particularly adept at articulating how McCarthy works with the corporeal “signs”—works with bodies—and how God-made things, to borrow from Hans Urs von Balthasar “vibrate with a ‘mysterious more’.” For Potts, McCarthy’s theological aesthetic derives precisely from the body—precisely from the finitude of created things—a “transcorporeality” as Graham Ward has it, whom Potts engages. While other readers may not detect anything benign (theologically or otherwise) in McCarthy’s dark vision, Potts sees through the blood and dust to the grace that bubbles-up from the “deep glens.” Even in violence and ecological degradation, all creation still hums with ancient “mystery,” to turn to, as Potts does, McCarthy’s rhapsodic apparition that concludes The Road. But, for Potts, while the finitude of all things—indeed their “mystery” and their redemption—is reconciled in Christ, we are not quite so sure this is the case for McCarthy. For Potts, there is a decidedly cruciform sign-theory, a sacramental algebra where all things sacrifice meaning “to the signs of the crucified Christ.” For McCarthy, the plot is only thickening.

  About the Reviewer(s):
  Michael Murphy is an Instructor of Theology and Director of the Catholic Studies minor at Loyola University Chicago.

  Date of Review:
  May 26, 2016

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