Reproaching the Divine: Poetic Theologies of Protest as a Resource for Expanding the Philosophy of Religion

Engaging with works of poetry is one effective, yet hitherto underdeveloped, means of diversifying the philosophy of religion beyond the standard preoccupations with narrow formulations of theism. This article explores and exemplifies this potential in relation to two major poetic figures, namely R. S. Thomas and Rāmprasād Sen. Despite their locations in very different religious contexts—Anglican Christianity in twentieth-century Wales, in the one case, and Hindu Goddess devotion in eighteenth-century Bengal, in the other—each of these poets voices sentiments that are redolent of a theology (or thealogy) of protest. Such protest is exhibited not in an outright rejection of the divine but in a troubled relationship through which the deity is questioned, reproached, and sometimes railed against. Attending to such materials affords the philosophy of religion, and the study of religion more broadly, an enriched appreciation of the possibilities both of religious viewpoints and of conceptions of divinity.