Chapter 2 notes at the outset that there is a growing interest among biblical scholars in reception history that has spawned considerable theological attention to paintings, music and novels. This chapter is more personal in character, suggesting a number of artistic works where the author could not imagine, at the time, how they could have been done better – the first a complete performance by Yo Yo Ma of Bach’s Cello Suites at the 1995 Edinburgh Festival, the second an astonishing painting, the race-horse Whistlejacket by George Stubbs, featured in London’s National Gallery, and the third an ancient bronze sculpture, The Boxer at Rest, in Italy’s Museo Nazionale Romano. It also looks at a celebrated novel, The Bell, by Iris Murdoch that features a fictional sermon on Matt. 5.48 and raises significant issues about artistic and moral human perfection and the contentious distinction between Murdoch’s novels and her philosophical writings. The chapter also looks at the debates about the theological relevance of the arts variously by David Jasper, Paul Fiddes, David Brown and Jeremy Begbie today, with reference also to Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich of the previous generation.

This chapter examines the way in which Irish writing throughout the middle decades of the century negotiated a national identity in tension with a European sensibility. The Continental dimensions of many key Irish texts, such as Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), or the European locations of Irish émigré writers such as Samuel Beckett and Thomas McGreevy, need to be expanded into a full account of the country’s brokerage of European ideas, philosophies and intellectual stimuli. The Ireland that ‘froze for want of Europe’, in Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 ‘Lough Derg’, emerged over these decades towards integration of various kinds, as reflected consistently in the work of writers such as Hubert Butler. In 1973, Ireland’s accession to membership of the European Economic Community marked a stepping stone in diplomatic and trade relations; how, in turn, does the writing examined in this chapter support the concept of the ‘Irish European’, and what implications does this have for outlines of a ‘national’ literary tradition?

This chapter reconsiders the cultural condition of 1940s Ireland in the context of wartime neutrality, exploring the literary response to the hostilities in Ireland itself, north and south, and the complex positioning of the writers involved who treated its effects on a domestic landscape, including Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Benedict Kiely. How did Irish writers respond to the aftermath of the Second World War and, in particular, the filtering of information about the Holocaust? The Irish author and playwright Denis Johnston, a BBC correspondent in the Middle East for much of the conflict, represents one of those with direct experience of the action and its diplomatic fallout. This chapter challenges a historical acceptance that Ireland became increasingly insular and detached as a result of its wartime political neutrality, and identifies instead a set of important literary engagements driven by the wider horizon of the conflict.