Bernard Shaw on Religion
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The Critical Shaw: On Religion is a comprehensive selection of renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shawâs pronouncementsâmany of them deliberately inflammatoryâon all facets of religion and belief: on Christianity and the Church; on various religions, among them Protestantism, Catholicism, Quakerism, Christian Science, Fundamentalism, Calvinism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam; on atheism and agnosticism, atonement and salvation; the crucifixion, the resurrection, transubstantiation, and the Immaculate Conception; on the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church. And much more. In speeches, essays, and prefaces, Shaw relentlessly scrutinized and critiqued scores of religionsâonly to find most of their doctrines in need of exhaustive reform. And yet, in keeping with his many other paradoxes, though Shaw was fond of calling himself an atheist, he nonetheless recognized the importance, indeed the necessity, of religion.
The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shawâs voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shawâs life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.āĻ˛āĻŋāĻāĻā§° āĻŦāĻŋāĻˇāĻ¯āĻŧā§
Michel W. Pharand is general editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies. He is author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2000), editor of Bernard Shaw and His Publishers (2009), and advisory editor to Palgrave Macmillanâs book series Bernard Shaw and his Contemporaries.
