Scholar uncovers Virginia Woolf’s desire to ‘re-create sacred community’
Stephanie Paulsell is a scholar of religion and a person of deep faith, but when deciding on a subject for her latest research, she chose one of literary history’s most committed atheists. “Virginia Woolf was raised by Victorian agnostics to think that people who believed in God were not facing reality,” says Paulsell, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). “She once wrote to her sister that ‘there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.’ But her novels are full of religious language: consecration, revelation, soul, spirit. For me, she is a generative religious thinker.” Religious work is something Paulsell knows well. As the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies — a chair established through Swartz’s landmark 2012 gift to the Campaign for Harvard Divinity School (HDS) — she is a core member of HDS’s multireligious ministry education program....