As the discourse of contemporary cultural studies brings questions of race, nationality, and gender to the center of critical attention, there is a strong sense that religion, and religious experience, should command the attention of the academic and wider reading community. Seeing into the Life of Things is a response to that need. By combining the theoretical and the practical, this book serves as both a pioneering scholarly contribution to a developing field and a guide for those who read, reflect on, and discuss points of intersection of religion and literature.