Practical Gods: Carl Dennis’s Secularized Religious Visions

Abstract

This paper examines Carl Dennis’s secularized religious visions in his Pulitzer-winning poetry collection, Practical Gods (2001). Dennis’s secularized religious visions can be quite understandable in the context of the ascending trends of secularization, diversification, and globalization of religion in America, and they demonstrate affinities with literary predecessors such as Wallace Stevens, with his aestheticized religion under the influence of Nietzsche, as well as with the innovative religious thinking of William Blake, Kazantzakis, and Oscar Wilde, and with certain aspects of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This paper addresses Dennis’s perception of theological controversies, such as the contradiction between the omnipotence of God and the existence of evil, theological determinism vs. human free will, theological view of history vs. New Historicism, divinity in man, aestheticized religion, and earthly paradise through the focused lens of Dennis’s “practical religion”. Despite the breadth of the theses in Dennis’s conceived practical religion as examined in this paper, they are all tied up with the core of the phenomenological study of religion: that religion is important to believers of the religion irrespective of the objective truth of the religion or the actual existence of God. In Dennis’s views, as accorded with the phenomenological study of religions, God maybe an idea and a fiction, but it is a necessary fiction for humans. Thus, Dennis humanizes gods with the flaws and fragility of humanity while deifying ordinary humanity in the contemporary context. Contrasting what he views as theological determinism with its view of linear history and the apocalypse of grand events, Dennis embraces human free will, a non-teleological, aestheticized living with necessary fiction, and a transient paradise on earth. Carl Dennis’s religious vision reveals a poststructuralist (even though he did not brand himself so) abolition of the absoluteness of a transcendent signifier as well as binary opposition (between God and man, good and evil, religious/historical truth and fictionality), and it manifests an affinity with New Historicism and the phenomenological study of religion.

1. Introduction

Carl Dennis’s Practical Gods (2001) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2001. In this book, Dennis greatly rewrites and fictionalizes the original tenets of many schools of religions as he understands them. In other words, Practical Gods is an interaction between a poet’s literary imagination and his subjective understanding of religions in rather “broad, general terms” rather than the more detailed, “meticulous” understanding of a religious scholar citing from religious texts. Being a contemporary poet, Dennis has rarely been studied beyond one or two book reviews, which do not deal with his religious visions at all. Biographical information about him and interviews with him are also quite scant; therefore, rather than speculating on the context of his writing, the paper focuses mainly on a close-text reading of his poetic work itself in the methodology of the school of New Criticism in addition to the methodology of the phenomenological and poststructuralist study of religion. Apart from citations from Dennis’s poetry, this paper also cites from St. Augustine, Calvin, Darwin, Buddhist and Taoist texts, etc. I am very well aware that these citations present long-standing religious controversies, and I am not that naïve as to believe that just by citing them, I am resolving the controversy or even pushing it toward that resolution. Neither is that my intention. Instead, I introduce these citations as a context Dennis possibly reacts to in his process of forming his own opinions against “a mottled background”. Moreover, in the context of the overall ascending trends of the secularization and diversification of religions in America, followed by the examples of “aestheticized religion” held by such poets as Wallace Stevens and a humanized and flawed Christ as depicted by Kazantzakis, Dennis’s secularized religion is quite understandable and representative. In the following, I will briefly contextualize Dennis’s secularized religious visions in the religious background of America.

The United States has a historical tradition of religious belief. Religion helps maintain social moral order, alleviate social conflicts, relieve poor people, and stabilize social structures. There are many religious denominations in the United States, showing diversified characteristics and combining with secular culture. The most important denomination in American religion is Protestantism. The United States is the first country in the world to implement the separation of church and state. Despite such implementation, religion still has a great influence on American politics and social life. In Max Weber’s view, Protestant ethics and the capitalist spirit have an isomorphic relationship, both emphasizing hard work at the stage of primitive accumulation of capital (Max Weber 2002). Before the 1950s, the religious and political circles in the United States were relatively stable. However, this dual political–religious public opinion also has limitations: in terms of values and morals, Catholicism and Judaism often had to make some concessions to Protestantism to make their religions conform to the American situation. Black Christian denominations were also discriminated against, and Eastern religions were marginalized. After the 1960s, the religious circles in the United States underwent drastic changes. The number of Americans participating in church activities began to decrease, mainstream denominations showed signs of decline, and the Pentecostal denomination arose and spread widely in South America, Africa, and other places, becoming the fourth major Christian denomination after the Orthodox Church, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism. After the 1960s, the spirituality of Americans also developed in the direction of secularization, globalization, and diversification. The younger generation began to deviate from the religious rules and pursue individual freedom. The original limitations of American religion influenced, to a certain extent, the Vietnam War after the 1960s, the urban black movement, and the youth’s resistance movement (Gu and He 2006, Issue 6, p. 90). An important change in the interaction between religion and society and politics in the United States is the gradual strengthening of the influence of marginal religions (denominations) on American society and politics since the 20th century. The evolution of religious pluralism in the United States allowed some marginal denominations to gradually enter mainstream society in the 19th century. After World War II, marginal churches such as Catholicism and Judaism were deeply integrated into mainstream American society, and their influence in various industries in the United States gradually became prominent. They began to be regarded as an integral part of American traditions like Protestantism, and the United States thus formed a multi-religious structure dominated by multiple denominations (Cohen 2013, p. 47). The influence of Christianity also changed in the 20th century. Due to the development of science and technology, the progress of the economy, the outbreak of the two world wars, and the prevalence of various theoretical schools, Christianity lost considerable influence in the fields of politics, economy, literature, history and philosophy in the 20th century, except for church organizations and seminaries. Nietzsche’s God is dead shattered some Christians’ beliefs in God. After the outbreak of the worldwide capitalist economic crisis in 1929, the entire West was filled with an apocalyptic sentiment. The intensification of various contradictions in the 20th century made many people lose their faith. However, many writers were still faithful Christians, and they attributed the chaos and impetuosity of modern society to the wavering of religious belief (Dong 2004, pp. 60–70). Other writers turned to Eastern religious beliefs. The peaceful and unified vision of Taoist and Zen philosophy influenced many American writers after World War I and World War II, such as the inheritance of Taoism and Zen by the Beat Generation, Robert Bly, Wallace Stevens. and W.S. Merwin.

Thus, Dennis’s alternative secularized religious visions and his rewriting of traditional religions are quite understandable in the religious context of an America that had undergone the trends of diversification and secularization in the past century. For a rarely studied new poet, a broad picture of his awarded work is more valuable than a narrowly focused approach. Therefore, this paper examines multifarious aspects of his religious vision in Practical Gods, which, however, are all tied up with the core of the phenomenological study of religion: that religion is important to believers of the religion irrespective of the objective truth of the religion or the actual existence of God. God may be an idea and a fiction, but, in Dennis’s views, he/she is a necessary fiction for humans; thus, Dennis freely revises traditional religions and humanizes gods with the flaws and fragility of humanity while deifying ordinary humanity in the contemporary context. Contrasting what he understands as theological determinism with its view of linear history and the apocalypse of grand events, Dennis embraces human free will, a non-teleological, aestheticized living with necessary fiction, and a transient paradise on earth. All the subtitled motifs in the following, such as “Dennis’ Conception of Humanized and Flawed God,” “Dennis’s opposition of Theological Determinism and Human Free will”, “Problem of Evil”, “Dennis’s Perception of the Divinity of Ordinary Humans”, “Dennis’s embracing of Transient Paradise on Earth”, “Dennis’s Aestheticized Religion—God is an Imagination and Necessary Fiction of Life”, and “Dennis’s Aestheticized Religion—the Art of Life without Purpose”, are tied up with the phenomenological study of religion, which does not emphasize the transcendent signifier of God and the objectivity of religious truth and theological determinism but examines instead the subjective impact of religion on each believer, in other words, each believer’s potential fiction-making in his religious belief.

In this collection of poems, Dennis freely fictionalizes and secularizes the images and teachings of gods in Christianity, Greek religion, and other pagan religions with a humorous and sarcastic style. Dennis’s practical gods have the flaws and fragility of human nature, empathizing with human beings (at least more so than an infallible God in Dennis’s eyes), and ordinary humanity in the contemporary context is endowed with a divine nature. Between theological determinism (as Dennis conceives it) and human free will, Dennis affirms human free will, even if it could bring suffering consequences. In Dennis’s views, theological views of history are usually characterized by a strong religious purpose and a deterministic trajectory, but Dennis affirms a purposeless devotion and concentration—an artistic “idle” spirit. Unlike Christianity’s strong ethical purpose, linear history, and apocalypse of grand events, Dennis’s practical religion embraces the unspeakable beauty of mind-opening leisure, digressions, episodes, and small events. Between eternal life in heaven and the ephemeral human world, Dennis chooses an eternal return to the changing seasons of the earth and the human world. Influenced by Nietzsche and Wallace Stevens’ proposition that God is an idea or an imagination, Dennis extols the god of art—a necessary fiction in life to elevate our mundane lives without being bound by the absoluteness of religious truths. This essay examines Dennis’s fictitious transformed views of the images and teachings of gods in Christianity, Greek religion, and paganism as he understands them in the light of the recent trends of religious study—poststructuralism, New Historicism, and the phenomenological study of religion—so as to explore the richness of his practical religion and its relevance to contemporary life.

2. Dennis’s Conception of Humanized and Flawed Gods

The inconsistency between the omnipotence of God and the existence of evil has been a long-standing theological controversy in such monotheistic religions as Christianity and Judaism. In Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion (1779), the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), quoting the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus (341-270 BCE), expressed the problem in this way:

Is he [God]willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence is the evil?

(Hume 1990, p. 63)

According to the logic, if God is omnipotent, he can prevent the existence of evil and its suffering consequence. If evil exists in the world, such an omnipotent god does not exist. One kind of theodicy contends that the Christian God allows evil to exist for the greater good, as St. Augustine expressed it: “since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless his omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” (Hinnells 2004, chp. xi). In responding to the question of evil, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “No quick answer will suffice…. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the problem of evil.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2022) According to the Catechism, God does not obliterate devils after their fall. God created devils originally as good angels, and their choice to turn away from him does not cause God to destroy them. He also does not obliterate us human sinners. Even when God’s own son became man and was crucified by evil forces by our sins, God did not obliterate his creation. He showed that the horror imposed on Jesus could be used for our salvation. In fact, it is by “his wounds we are healed” (Isa 53:5). When we experience evil, it is an invitation to be united with Jesus, “to fill up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ” (Col 1:24). In other words, the Christian God allows the existence of evil to grant mankind free will to choose good.

To ameliorate the contradiction between an omniscient, omnipotent God and the existence of evil, Dennis’s personal choice is different from the approach of the traditional Christian belief in suffering, free will, and salvation. Dennis chooses to humanize gods—in Dennis’s practical religion, gods are endowed with the flaws and fragilities of humans and are secularized to the extent that they can become friends with humans in the secular realm.

The book begins with “A priest of Hermes”. Hermes is one of the Olympian gods in Greek religion and mythology. According to legend, he is the messenger of the gods, as well as the messenger and protector of human beings, especially of travelers and businessmen. He travels freely and swiftly between mortals and gods in his winged shoes, and he is also the patient guide of the souls of the dead into the afterlife, irrespective of the moral character of the dead. In this poem, Dennis chooses Hermes, the god who travels between mortals and gods, to express his conception of a secular religion and a practical god. The imagery that runs through the poem interweaves the world of the gods and the otherworldly (shrines, stars, the underworld) with the mortal world on the earth (plants, wine, oats, the warmth of home), and the journey of mortals into the underworld after death is also comforted by Hermes’ company.

In this poem, Dennis rejects the Christian ethical vision of the afterlife with its clear rewards and punishments in heaven and hell. The gods in Greek religion demonstrate enlarged human passions. They are more secular and exhibit less asceticism and antithesis of good and evil than the Christian gods. The Olympian gods would fall in love, start wars, fly into anger, jealousy, and revenge, just like humans. The Greek gods were often the incarnation of the inexplicable, awe-inspiring force of Nature that primitive humans could not explain, as opposed to the Christian idea of original sin rooted in Nature and human nature (such as sexual nature), as Dennis expresses in his poem “The Serpent to Adam”, in which Adam’s fall is termed by Satan as a “fortunate fall” that procures Adam ”knowledge”. Among the Greek gods, Hermes is the closest to an ordinary human being. Compared with Greek religion, Dennis’s practical religion rejects the supernatural power of the gods and recognizes the common flaws of man and god, seeing divinity in ordinary human nature and the fragility of human beings in the image of the gods.

Dennis adopts a poststructuralist abolition of the absoluteness of a transcendent signifier and a dismantling of the binary opposition between God and man, omnipotence and fallibility, seeking an “in-betweenness”. The influence of post-structuralism can be seen now in almost every aspect of the study of religion. We can see poststructuralist ideas in biblical studies, the study of Buddhism, feminist theory, and religion, and in the study of Islam, Judaism and the psychology of religion. It utilizes Derrida’s deconstruction of logo-centrism and Foucault’s discourse of power, as well as Lacan and Kristeva’s psychoanalytical theories of divided subject (Hinnells 2004, pp. 283–84). For example, in his “Buddhism, Poststructural Thought, Cultural Studies: A Study of Faith”, Edwin Ng uses Derrida’s “Différance” and “free play” to examine the Buddhist idea of impermanence, non-self, and collapse of the body–mind binary opposition (Nig 2012, pp. 109–28). In “Postructuralism and Trinity: A Reading of the Brand New Testament”, Anne Verhoef uses Derrida to shed light on the “religion without religion”—faith in a religion that has done away with a transcendental signifier of God and is devoid of the certainty of beliefs (Verhoef 2019). The poststructuralist study of religion, diverse in its branches of thoughts, has the common recognition of the contingency of truth and knowledge-making, the rejection of a transcendental, ultimate signifier, and the disruption of a stable binary opposition. In religious terms, it is the rejection of the absoluteness of religious truth, the transcendent signifier of God, and the binary opposition between the omnipotence of God and human fallibility, between good and evil, and between religious truth and fictionality. With the decline of traditional religion in the modern world, Dennis’s practical religion provides an alternative religious vision and a seasoned, down-to-earth wisdom.

In the poem “To a Pagan”, Dennis likewise humanizes the gods, both Christian and Greek, and endows them with the fragility of humans. The context of the poem is an imaginary conversation between the poet and the pagan who believes in the Sun God. Even though the Sun God is “willing to help/other gods more potent decide against him” (Dennis 2001, p. 143). This fictitious situation shows that there is a lot of strife even among the gods, and that the gods are sometimes as powerless as humans. The poet imagines the conversion of this pagan into a Christian, but the process of conversion is unorthodox. The poet imagines this pagan praying to a Christian angel. The angel assigned to his parish was happy to help, but the journey was full of trials, and the angel suffered hardship and loneliness, her wings frozen in the cave. In short, the angel was as fragile as humans. It was the pagan’s sympathy for the angel’s plight, not the other way around, that enabled the pagan to acquire the quality of self-sacrifice—of putting others’ suffering above his own—and to convert to Christianity. The poet imagines the pagan’s sympathy for the angel: “dwelling on her, your heart will fill with compassion/And you will want to cry out, ‘Great friend, I’m thankful/For all you suffer for my sake, but I’m past help./Help someone more likely to benefit,’ the prayer/of a real convert, which is swiftly answered.” (153) Unlike Wallace Stevens, Dennis does not overthrow the old religions, but humanizes the gods, deifies ordinary people, thus making both the gods and men share the fragilities of human nature, and synthesizes a humanistic and practical contemporary vision of religion. He dismantles God as a transcendent signifier of omniscience and omnipotence, rejects God-oriented historical determinism, makes religious truth uncertain, but he does not do away with the need for religion. Even though his gods are modified and secularized, they are still gods that fulfill the human need for religion. In fact, it is this faith deprived of the certainty of belief that creates what Derrida termed as “the desert within the desert” and sharpens man’s longing for a spiritual home. In his article “What Is Our Poetry to Make of Ancient Myth”, Dennis discusses how T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Emily Dickinson use ancient myth, particularly Christian and Greek religions and myth, not only ironically but also to lend the modern situation a deeper meaning and enlarged vibration (Dennis 1997). Therefore, Dennis does not overthrow the traditional myths and religion; rather, he adapts it to new interpretations.

In the poem “Sunrise”, Dennis imagines a new sun god who is more like a “father than a lender”, and, unlike the sun god worshiped by the Aztecs, he does not require the sacrifice of human blood to repay the harvest he bestows. “For a god so loyal, his people were willing/To overlook his inability to protect them.” (646) The sun rises, radiant and unworshipped, illuminating an unprotected, earthly realm of freedom, a realm of both danger and possibilities. In Dennis’s practical religion, God is as flawed and non-omnipotent as human beings. Divinity is rooted in fragile humanity, and religious feelings also derive from a compassion and love that arise from universal flaws and vulnerabilities rather than from the supremacy of God’s Word.

In the poem “Guardian Angel,” the guardian angel of Dennis’s practical religion is a practical guide, empathetic and friendly, who understands that happiness “is not on the front of things, but on the back.” When one sympathizes with others instead of seeking happiness for oneself, the company of others will come unexpectedly. This is how guardian angels give us unexpected rewards.

3. Dennis’s Opposition of Theological Determinism and Human Free Will

In many religions, the trajectory of historical development is determined by the will of God. There is a great number of theological arguments about the apparent contradiction between predestination determined by God and the assertion of human free will. Calvinism, for example, emphatically believes that most people’s predestination is going to hell after death, a fate that cannot be redeemed by good works alone. Calvinists hold that at the beginning of time, God selected a limited number of souls to grant salvation, and there is nothing that any individual can do during their mortal life to alter their eternal fate. In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God “freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass.” (Westminster Assembly and Confession of Faith 2023) God appointed the eternal destiny of some to salvation by grace, while leaving the remainder to receive eternal damnation for all their sins, even for their original sins. The former is called “unconditional election”; the latter, “reprobation.” To justify his double predestination, John Calvin pointed to the parable of the sower—“it is no new thing for the seed to fall among thorns or in stony places”, “All are called to repentance and faith”, but “the spirit of repentance and faith is not given to all.” (Calvin 2008) Baptists, in contrast to Calvinists, believe that Jesus died to save all instead of just a few elected. Roman Catholicism believes that God’s will and human free will are not incompatible. The Catholic teaching on free will recognizes that God has given men and women the capacity to choose good or evil in their lives. The bishops at the Second Vatican Council declared that the human person, endowed with freedom, is “an outstanding manifestation of the divine image.” (Vatican Council 2017)

Buddhist reincarnation states that a man’s present life is determined by karma through many lifetimes, which makes man’s choice in this life, to a certain extent, inadequate to avert his fate, since it subjects him to the conditions of previous karmas over which he has no control.

Lacking the subtlety and nuance of such theological debate, Dennis’s understanding of major religions might have somewhat simplistically opposed theological determinism and human free will. His poem “History” refutes historical determinism and challenges the idea that there is only one true history. Dennis believes that in Christianity, history is God-determined, expressing the purpose of God and having a lineal progression. Historical development is characterized by inevitability, purpose, and rationality. This poem of Dennis adopts New Historicism and Foucault’s discourse about power to argue that history is written by the winners, not losers. History does not develop rationally according to a prescribed course but was only fictionalized as such by the victors. Foucault uses the term “power/knowledge” to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding, and religious “truth”; as he said, “truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.” (Foucault 1991, p. 125) New Historicism believes in the textuality of history, and Foucault contends that the play of power went into recorded history. Official history was broadcast by the powerful while alternative dissident accounts of history were suppressed. History is not objective and is not in a singular form. The grand history is fictionalized as objective by the powerful and thus can be splintered into many small, contradictory histories. The ideas of New Historicism “divert theology from the non-historicist modes of Augustine and Calvin, which treat history as finally a function of divine determination” (Hinnells 2004, p. 158). Dennis clearly echoes New Historicism in the following passage:

• I too could agree we aren’t pilgrims
• Resting for the night at a roadside hermitage,
• Uncertain about the local language and customs,
• But more like the bushes and trees around us,
• Sprung from this soil, nurtured by the annual rainfall
• And the slant of the sun in our temperate latitudes.
• If only history didn’t side with survivors.
(156)

In the above passage, Dennis argues that we are not natives growing out of the soil of historical determinism; we are just pilgrims, encountering history in all its accidental occurrences. History speaks a language and speaks in customs we are uncertain about. If history was written by the losers, the War of Independence led by Washington and the Gettysburg Battle between the merchants of the North and the cotton plantation owners of the South would lose rationality and determinism. How does the view of history in this poem reflect Dennis’s practical religion? Dennis rejects the god-determined view of history in traditional religions, Christian or pagan. In his view, history is a fictional text written by the victors. Therefore, Dennis deconstructs the authoritative interpretation of history, both in the religious and secular fields, and thus also deconstructs the authority of traditional religion.

In the poem “Delphi”, Dennis argues that believing in an oracle denies the contingency of history and places man in the realm of the unknowable, making man blindly believe in an imaginary authority. Dennis cites an example as a symbol of this religious superstition. A farmer, imagining that the priestess answered his prayer, sent his son to study philosophy/theology instead of farming. Philosophy is the realm of the peasant’s utter ignorance, and the farmer’s belief in a superior realm of knowledge incomprehensible to him is no less than superstition. The poet himself would rather put the right to choose in his own hands, list the reasons for various choices, and rationally weigh the pros and cons instead of relying on the opportunities given by God: “If the arguments on the left-hand side/Outnumber those on the right, the left-hand path/At the fork ahead should be my preference.” (239) This reliance on opportunity is tantamount to believing in oracles and divine intervention rather than human choice and human agency. Dennis adopts the Agnostic view that even if there are gods/god, and even if the gods are powerful, people are ignorant of the intentions of the gods. The oracles are just as incomprehensible to humans as philosophy is to the farmer. It is better to rely on the rational judgment of human beings themselves. Dennis’s practical religion epistemologically recognizes the limitation of human cognition and does not countenance humans to act as spokesmen for God or as interpreters of oracles.

In “Jesus Freaks”, there is some ironical, vexed feeling but also genuine admiration in the speaker for the Jesuits in the street who forcefully stuff religious pamphlets into the speaker’s hands. But there is also an unmistakable pride in the speaker who, in his spiritual self-reliance, “stubbornly stand outside/Shivering in the snow, too proud/to enter a hall not of my own devising/And warm myself at a fire I didn’t light/And enjoy a meal strangers have taken pains with.” (309)

In the final poem of the collection, “The God Who Loves You,” Dennis imagines a God who loves mankind, who sighs at the “might have been” of those he protects—in that “might have been”, that person has a better house, career, and wife. This patron God is more like a friend than a god—a friend who can communicate by letters without interfering with human choices:

• Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
• No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
• No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
• The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
• And write him about the life you can talk about
• With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
• Which for all you know the life you’ve chosen.
(766)

Dennis respects a life full of imperfections and regrets but still has the dignity of human free will, even if that free will may bring about suffering consequences. The tension between human free will and the will of gods is often where religious ambiguity resides. The Christian God invented the snake, tacitly allowed the snake to seduce Adam and Eve and did not stop it, in order to allow people to exercise free will. However, in Dennis’s eyes, the Christian God, like the pagan gods, implements authoritative intervention on human beings more than attaching importance to human free will. Here Dennis rewrites the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, not with guilt but with an affirmation of man’s free will, even if the exercise of that free will has catastrophic consequences.

4. Dennis’s Embracing of the Ephemeral Paradise on Earth

Between the eternal heaven and ephemeral world of the earth, Dennis chooses the ephemeral human world. Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead” intends to divert people from seeking afterlife in heaven to focus on the open possibilities on earth and in this life. In The Necessary Angels, Wallace Stevens echoes Nietzsche and argues that since “God is an idea”, God is a fiction, and the necessary angel of artistic invention and fiction-making should replace the traditional God to elevate our earthly life. He celebrates an earthly paradise, whose poignancy of beauty is sharpened by its transience. As he describes beautifully in his “Sunday Morning”:

• Is there no change of death in paradise?
• Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
• Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
• Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
• With rivers like our own that seek for seas
• They never find, the same receding shores
• That never touch with inarticulate pang?
• ……
• Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
• Within whose burning bosom we devise
• Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
(Stevens 2011b)

In the poem “Eurydice,” Eurydice’s philosophy, according to Denis’s new interpretation, is an acknowledgment of compromise and transience. She did not blame Orpheus for losing her forever in hell; she could see that Orpheus’s obsession with eternal love was just imaginary. She did not deceive herself, she just cherished the short time he was still with her and knew in her heart that he was not a suitable man for her: “If I could speak, child of the sun,/I’d assure you I’m still your wife./That’s why I want you to stay as long as you can/Just as you are, the mistaken/Hopeful man I married.” (466) Dennis’s practical religion is a philosophy of compromise and generosity, saving the fleeting glimmer of life from transient, mistaken, and even catastrophic situations.

The Gelati in the poem “Gelati” is an Italian fruit ice-cream with mustard. The dessert seller hawks them in the streets of Rome, which are filled with churches and cemeteries. Churches and cemeteries symbolize Catholic asceticism, and the daily action of the poet sanding bookshelves symbolizes the “monkish” solitude of a scholarly career, both of which contrast the worldly pleasures embodied in the Italian ice-cream Gelati. What Gelati symbolizes elevates the poet’s joys of being on his spiritual scale, so the Gelati hawked among Roman churches and cemeteries is a manifesto of Dennis’s practical religion with its relish for earthly pleasures: “The wind-borne singing brightens the moment/however faintly it enters, however it might have improved/By the brighter acoustics of the New Jerusalem./And now it’s time for a string quartet in a new recording.” (135) Dennis’s Gelati is reminiscent of Stevens’ “Emperor of Ice Cream,” another poem that revises traditional Christianity and replaces it with an earthly paradise that not even death can hinder. In Stevens’ poem, the “Emperor of Ice Cream” is an euphemism for Death. The haggard old woman dying in poverty is transfigured by “the beam of light” of aestheticized religion, which makes mourning into an occasion of celebration.

In “In the Short Term”, Dennis further expresses his affirmation of short-lived human passions. The poet comments that to a lot of people, even in the immortal world of Greek religious mythology, Helen’s beauty and Paris’ imperious desire are not worth fighting for, and Menelaus’s efforts to win back an unfaithful wife are not worth it. There is no need for Agamemnon’s war with Achilles as well. However, in the logic of Greek mythology, it is all worth fighting for, even if Helen’s allure is fleeting:

• All dust now, Troy as much as the flesh of Helen
• Though Homer never assumes they’re immortal,
• Just that you won’t be likely to forget them quickly
• ……
• Time enough to make clear that fault-ridden Paris
• Is loved by a Goddess, that Helen’s a gift
• Only a goddess could have provided.
• And who is he to deny a goddess
• Even if her gift only lasts a day?
(691)

Dennis’s practical religion holds that we do something because it brings us short-term happiness, and we do not need to question long-term goals and values to ruin our short-term happiness. Practical religion is the celebration of the ephemeral, the temporary, non-purpose, because our life itself is only a moment.

In the poem “Bishop Berkeley,” Dennis imagines events that could transform Berkeley’s philosophical propositions. “Maybe the material world have seemed to him/Real enough, his doubts mostly illusions,/If his boyhood had been less bookish.” (621) Berkeley believes that only the world we can perceive is real and everything else is unreal, and this is manifested in his famous saying: “To be is to be perceived or perceive.” (Berkeley 1982, p. 152) Berkeley advances the theory he calls “immaterialism” (or “subjective idealism”, as later called by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects such as tables and chairs are ideas perceived by the mind and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived. The poet imagines Berkeley’s childhood ranch, the farm workers there, and he contrasts the world as the farmer sees it with the world as the cows see it. The poet comments, not without irony, that the dreamed hometown of the farmer’s wife, Prague—a lost, imagined hometown—is more real and solid than the farm she is now on, mimicking Berkeley’s own cognitive fallacy, who thinks that human consciousness is more real than the objective world. The poet imagines the sensual details of cows moving and grazing on grass: “Few arguments then could have convinced him/That he merely dreamed the warmth of her fur,/The ripe barn smell, the weight of the pail/As he carried it. ” (625) Dennis suggests that the tangible world is more valuable than Berkeley’s conceptualized ghost world, that the material world can be real even when we do not perceive it. Dennis’s practical religion subverts the binary opposition of the physical and metaphysical entity and of body and soul in traditional religions and the dominance traditional religions give to the latter.

In the poem “Eternal life”, the souls in Dennis’s practical religion after death still return to “the springs, summers, autumns and winters” of our earthly world. Dennis’s religious stance of reconciliation and moderation determines that humans in his eyes are not so bad as to go to hell, nor so good as to go to heaven. “Odds are I’ll stay where I am, forever earthbound,/And face the problem of filling the endless return/Of earthly summers and autumns and winters and springs.” (734–735) Even after death they always return to the human world of regrets and joys. These souls made “cricket-like whispers” when talking about their past lives, drinking the water of Lethe and reincarnating: “No surprise if I’m ferried back,/Oblivious, to be born again in the flesh/Among strangers it will take me years to recognize”. (735) Such is Dennis’s imagination of immortality, his love of and dedication to an imperfect paradise on earth. Although Mahayana Buddhism and Chan/Zen Buddhism tend to identify samsara and Nirvana, Theravada Buddhism preaches about the necessity of transcending samsara and reaching Nirvana, as expressed in the prayer of Nyoshui Rinpoche, “rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind, beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought, like the relentless fury of the pounding waves in the infinite ocean of samsara.”1 In contrast, the Tibetan Buddhist Dalai Lama said, “samsara-our conditioned existence in the perpetual cycle of habitual tendencies and nirvana-genuine freedom from such an existence—are nothing but different manifestations of a basic continuum.”2 Contrary to the Theravada Buddhist teaching of transcending samsara and the cycle of reincarnation/karma, the souls Dennis imagined were reincarnated time and time again out of love—not in the heaven of Christianity, nor in the Nirvana of Theravada Buddhism, nor with the supernatural power of God. Rather, Dennis’s embracing of an earthly paradise has greater affinity with the Zen Buddhist’s identification of nirvana and samsara, expressed in the Zen phrase identifying void and being, “ten thousand years’ void, one morning’s wind and moon.” Such a phrase teaches that we should not, because of our intoxication with “one morning’s wind and moon”, be blind to the ontological void of “ten thousand years”; nor should we, because of our religious awareness of void, be unable to appreciate the secular beauty of “one morning’s wind and moon”.

5. Dennis’s Perception of the Divinity of Ordinary Humans

On the one hand, the gods of Dennis’s practical religion are humanized and have human flaws and weaknesses, and according to him, such human vulnerabilities make gods more empathetic to humans. On the other hand, the ordinary human beings in his writings are divinized, although Dennis often uses a playful tone to deify human beings. In the poem “Progressive Health”, the poet humorously imagines that he is no longer alive, that his organs are donated to six people. He imagines that his death is commemorated by those who received his organs, and that he is conferred a god status by them. It reiterates the deification of man and the humanization of God in Dennis’s practical religion. In Dennis, such deification of ordinary humanity is not high-sounding, and deified humans still retain the liabilities of human nature in an imperfect world. In Christianity, God’s human manifestation is Jesus. Jesus is human beings divinized. However, Jesus can suffer like human beings without human flaws and sins, which makes him different from Dennis’s practical gods. Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955), (Kazantzakis 1998) influenced by Nietzsche, has affinity with Dennis’s conception of humanized, flawed gods. The novel is a poignant depiction of a vacillating Christ in the grip of common human frailties, longings, and throes of doubts. In this novel, the last temptation of Christ is to go on living the ordinary life of a mortal man, with wife and children, rather than die on the crucifix as a savior, a much more powerful lure than Satan’s offering of wealth, power, and kingdom.

Greek gods exhibit enlarged human passions, whether noble or mean, but they possess supernatural powers much above those of humans. Divinity in eastern religions, such as Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism, is more immanence than transcendence, but the divinity in such traditions is likewise infallible and not subject to human flaws and vulnerabilities. Dennis’s gods are much humbler and more fallible.

Dennis’s poem “Just Deserts” is dedicated to the god of justice. Mr. Ruggieri in the poem is a humble high school sports coach who deserves a more prominent position. The “might have been” in Dennis’s poem enumerates the regrets in ordinary people’s lives and the misplacement of gods (who are not that just), but reconciliation with the past, patience, and even illusory hope are the antidote to life’s disappointment in his practical religion.

In “School Days,” Dennis secularizes and contemporarizes the figure of Odyssey in Greek mythology, making him into a symbol of the drifting experience of American immigrants. The poet wrote that when he was a child, he was far away in a foreign country in the United States. Only by learning to read could he sail far and wide in the sea (of spirituality) as Odyssey did. His immigrant mother did not understand what he had learned but still loved and supported him unconditionally. The lonely mother’s yearning for the lonely son, and the son’s nostalgia for the mother are all condensed in the myth of Odyssey, imbuing this ancient Greek mythology with the sorrow of contemporary American immigrants.

The childhood birthday party that the poem “Glory” recalls was endowed with a religious “glory” (“a kind of honesty and humility”): the boy was surrounded by his poor and thrifty parents, who struggled to support their family but still wanted to give the child’s birthday a luxurious moment. Such is a precious memory that can “defy time’s arrow”, (198) a memory that can create value “from nothing”. In this poem, Dennis reiterates the theme of secular religion, and the family affection in ordinary human nature is endowed with the glory of religion.

In “Eternal Poetry”, Dennis extends his focus on ordinary humans full of flaws and a human world filled with impermanent events to the realm of art. Traditional poetry is about the immortality of art, so that “local” practical difficulties, such as poverty, prison reform, and the process of aging without dignity, rarely enter the temple of poetry, because solving these problems often requires negotiations with human frailties and fortuitous, shady situations, and thus cannot enter the glorious palace of “eternal poetry”. However, in Dennis’s view, this is exactly what a person of practical religion should face when writing poetry, which requires his honesty and courage.

6. The Problem of Evil

Like most theologians, Dennis attempts to reconcile God’s omnipotence and the paradoxical existence of evil that is not prevented by God. One way of him doing this is to make the omnipotent gods fallible. Another way is to re-examine the conceptualization of evil, assigning it to be the dialectic energy of negation that completes historical progression. “The Serpent to Adam” rewrites Adam’s fall from Satan’s perspective and has a distinctive Blakean tone. Satan tried to persuade Adam to admit that denying Satan was not worth the gain. By denying Satan, Adam lost his access to knowledge and his homeland. Satan compared himself to Prometheus, the titan that defied God to steal fire and benefit mankind: “Just as Prometheus, the compassionate god,/Stole to deliver man from darkness,/So for your welfare I named the forbidden tree. The tree of knowledge” (310) Dennis is not so radical as William Blake as to be a spokesperson for the devil; he only ridicules the spiritual imprisonment brought about by unconditional obedience to God. In William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, evil is not a concept in the moral realm but a creative energy similar to that of Dionysus. The fall of mankind brings knowledge; it is a “fortunate fall” that brings about the spiral of cognitive ascent through negation.

Dennis also modernized the perception of evil in Christianity by rewriting the Ten Commandments of Moses, making it only reveal the weakness of human nature—not to criticize it harshly but to show a kind of tolerance while mocking it. In the poem “Infidel”, Dennis shows that the modern infidel is insatiability—the mental illness of the modern man who covets what he does not have and does not cherish what he has. Covetousness is an obstacle to happiness. This secular teaching, which Dennis raises to the level of religion, fits particularly well with the materialistic modern society. Pride is denounced as one of the seven deadly sins of Christianity; it is the sin of Satan. For Dennis, as can be seen in his poem “Pride”, the contemporary manifestation of this sin is the lack of understanding of one’s own insignificance, covetousness and envy of other people’s better housing and other possessions, and self-deception and smugness in rejoicing in his public reputation and conquest in love. Dennis places the Christian perception of sin in the context of contemporary life, ridiculing material greed and the petty psychology of competition in modern society.

In “The Fallen”, the poet illustrates the deep-rooted selfish nature of man from his own personal experience in order to suggest that moral requirements stipulated by religion cannot be forced too much. He felt weighed down by his friend’s serious illness, and when his friend finally passed away, he secretly felt relief, though he admitted it grudgingly to himself. Dennis acknowledges that human beings are inherently petty and selfish and are often unable to selflessly provide lasting comfort and support in times of crisis for others. In his view, the fall of man lies in the selfishness of human nature and the lack of enduring empathy for others. He accepts the fallen nature of man, acknowledging that since all people are fallen, we should forgive others as we forgive ourselves. Clearly, Dennis’s practical religion undercuts the strict ethical demands of Christianity and shows a degree of reconciliation with man’s fallen nature.

The poem “Department store” places the ninth and tenth Commandments of Moses—“do not covet your neighbor’s wife” and “do not covet your neighbor’s property”—in the context of contemporary society and considers it in terms of his own personal experience. The humorous self-derogatory tone expresses the temptations that people (including the poet himself) are subjected to in the materialistic modern society, such as envy over the neighbor’s mansion, expensive gifts, and even his beautiful wife. However, Dennis removes the harsh tone of religious admonition. Toward the narrow-minded greed of ordinary humanity, Dennis adopts a playful attitude of tolerance even as he is mocking it. Dennis’s practical religion reveals an underlying compromise and a self-deprecating, self-forgiving humor that differs from the steadfast adherence to doctrine and the principles of traditional Christianity.

“Prophet” is a slightly harsher criticism of human evil. In this poem, Dennis rewrites the biblical story of Jonah and Nineveh. In the biblical story, Jonah was swallowed by a whale for three days and three nights because of his disobedience to God, and then was spit on the shore by the whale. After Jonah repented, he was sent to Nineveh to preach and persuade the people there to turn to God and Christianity. The inhabitants of Nineveh were evil and faced the punishment of God. Jonah, ignorant of God’s boundless mercy and forgiveness, fled to another city in the hope that God would destroy Nineveh. In this poem, Dennis rewrites the biblical story, arguing that modern prophets face harder situations than what the biblical prophet Jonah faced. Although there is no devouring whale, modern prophets have to face flea-infested hotels, indifferent crowds, dark cells of modern prisons more formidable than the belly of a whale, and modern prophets will question religious belief itself: why does God forgive such a bad crowd? Dennis presents the bewildered spiritual world of contemporary people, placing traditional beliefs about God’s punishment and forgiveness in an ambiguous context. Such ambiguity, in a way, also reflects the potential fallacy of Dennis’s overly clear-cut opposition of theological determinism and human free will. God forgives sinners, because he allows them to choose good rather than prescribing a cut-out life of the necessity for them to live like a robot. He not only grants humans the capacity to choose but also allows for their mistakes and provides a second chance for choosing good and acquiring salvation.

7. Dennis’s Aestheticized Religion—God Is an Imaginary and a Necessary Fiction of Life

Wallace Stevens believed that “God is an imagination”, (Stevens 1965) so he proposed replacing the traditional God with the spirit of art. As he famously proclaimed, “God and imagination are one,” in his “Final Soliloquy of His Interior Paramour,” a moving poem crouched in the elevated metaphor of a paramour:

• Light the first light of evening, as in a room
• In which we rest and, for small reason, think
• The world imagined is the ultimate good.
• This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
• It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
• Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
• Within a single thing, a single shawl
• Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
• A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
• Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
• We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
• A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
• Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
• We say God and the imagination are one...
• How high that highest candle lights the dark.
• Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
• We make a dwelling in the evening air,
• In which being there together is enough.
(Stevens 1965)

Dennis is less romantic than Stevens, but he also keeps reiterating the need for fiction in a playful tone. Dennis, however, unlike Stevens, is less atheistic than phenomenological in his religious vision. The phenomenological study of religion adopts the approach that is based on the belief that the study of religion is not to focus on whether what the believer believes is true or untrue, but on how such beliefs impact the believer. The phenomenology of religion concerns the experiential aspect of religion, describing religious phenomena in terms consistent with the orientation of worshippers. Therefore, for a believer believing in a religion, even if the religious doctrines might be untrue, they are “true” in the sense that they are held to be so by the believer. As Ninian Smart puts it, “God is real for Christians whether or not he exists.” (Smart 1973, p. 54) William Brede Kristensen argues that phenomenology seeks the “meaning” of religious phenomena. He clarifies this supposition by defining the meaning that his phenomenology is seeking as “the meaning that the religious phenomena have for the believers themselves”, (Kristensen 1960, p. 111) instead of for the critics and disbelievers of religion. Being a phenomenologist, Kristensen was less interested in philosophical presuppositions than in his concrete depth research into the incidental religious phenomena. Such an approach is also called methodological agnosticism. We do not know whether the religious doctrines are true or not, we do not know whether God exists or not, but we have to bracket off our own disbelief and investigate what spiritual influence exert on the believers believing in its truth. It emphasizes, in other words, the believer’s potential fiction-making and the impact of such fiction-making on his life. “More Art” is a poem dedicated to the god of art. The poet watched a TV show in which a mediocre businessman was called upon in an emergency to act as a replacement pilot in a plane crash, which makes him a hero. There is a stark contrast between real life and a drama on TV, and perhaps one way to elevate our mediocre way of life is through the adventurous, artistic spirit of making fiction. In “Basho,” the poet makes fun of his mixed genes to explain his erratic, incoherent character. He mentions his Norman ancestors, ancestors who were slaves, merchants, and Hebrew prophets, and the poet jokes that the Japanese haiku poet Basho may also be his ancestor. “Even in Tokyo, I still miss Tokyo when I hear the cuckoo’s chirping.” Basho’s famous line quoted by Dennis conveys his desire to rise above the lack of daily life by playing on his fictitious genes.

The “improbable world” depicted in “Improbable story” is an imaginary alternative world parallel to our real world where dinosaurs did not die from the suffocating dust of the star collision, and when I wrote Martha a love letter, there was no “dizzying haze of change”. But, in a “probable world,” the dinosaurs died out, and the letter to Martha did not even begin. Dennis once again probes into what “might have been” and returns to all the imperfections of the human world, and his practical religion is exactly what makes us accept this imperfect life. His “Improbable story” expresses the human need for fiction.

The poem “On a bus to Utica” imagines the science-fiction scene of the poet being hijacked by aliens and criticizes contemporary people’s complacent outlook on life that makes them lack imagination and fear unexpected strangeness. The poet enjoys alien beings. This poem suggests that religions and gods are often the products of anthropomorphic-centered imagination. In the Bible, God makes humans in his own image, so man resembles God and is the master of all living things. There may be more advanced creatures in space that will subvert our traditional religious and moral values. Since the Age of Enlightenment, religion and science have often been antagonistic. For example, Darwin’s evolutionism contradicts biblical creation myth. According to his groundbreaking work, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, life on Earth has evolved through natural selection, a process through which plants and animals change over time by adapting to their environment (Darwin 2003). Such conviction is in direct contradiction to the view of creationism held by some Christians, who believe that the creation story in the Old Testament Hebrew Bible book of Genesis is literally true, that God created the world in seven days, and that all animals and plants were created in the same form then as they are now. For more than a century, Darwin evolutionism fought Christian theology in public education, as manifested in the famous 1925 Scopes’ “monkey” trial. Science denounces religious truth as lacking empirical evidence, while religion denounces science as reductionistic and depriving people of the wonder of divine mystery, as well as being politically dangerous; for example, the social Darwinist belief in the “survival of the fittest”, as some argue, might lead to eugenics movements and mass genocides.

Dennis does not reject religion; instead, he revises traditional religion, Christian or pagan, by highlighting the potential fictionality of religion (such as shown in his quite random revision of gods’ images and teachings) and by complementing potentially reductionistic science with the spirit of fiction-making, such as shown in the science-fiction mode of narration he adopts in this poem. We all know that many science-fiction visions were actualized and proved by science in later years, and many have become the inspiration of important science inventions and projects. Dennis fictionalizes both religion and science so that they may cohere into the same purpose for enhancing life and may be cognate with his practical religion and art of life. In his emphasis on fictionality/art, Dennis accords with Aestheticism in Europe in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and Wallace Stevens’s aestheticized religion under the influence of Nietzsche. Dennis’s contribution to such thoughts is his incorporation of science into his project. His emphasis is on fiction-making attempts to cohere religion and science in the spirit of art.

“Halfway” explains his attitude toward truth (both religious and literary). The speaker would rather distort reality than stick to the harsh facts of life and would rather fulfill the wishes of the fictitious protagonist, even if the unlikeliness of his invention might anger the god of art: “Ripeness is all, that is the truth my friends abide by,/Which I admit I’m willing to bend if it helps the lovers/Enjoy more years together.” (368) Here, Dennis plays on the idea of author-as-God, but like his vision of God, the author appears waywardly pampering toward his fictional characters. The core gesture of Dennis’s practical religion is relativism, moderation, reconciliation, and compromise, because he does not absolutize the truth of human cognition, including their understanding of religious truth.

In the poem “Audience”, the poet commented on Karenin’s empty pain after hearing about Anna’s extramarital affairs in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, and he believed that Karenin used respectable moral rhetoric to cover the abyss in his heart and spiritual collapse. Dennis commented that Karenin did not know he was a fictional character and did not need to be dignified, but that he should be crying unabashedly. “It’s a shame no one enlightened steps forward/To tell Karenin he’s a character in a novel/Where no one is commended for preserving his dignity,/Only for shouting and weeping and tearing his hair,/For throwing a book of philosophy out of the window.” (392) Dennis cites an episode in this literary classic as an exhortation to put aside the mask of religious morality and to live honestly. Just as Karenin does not know that he is a fictional character, we do not know that ideological/religious truths are just human fictions. Dennis highlights the textuality of his created characters in order to highlight the textuality of religious beliefs.

8. Dennis’s Aestheticized Religion—The Art of Living without Purpose

As Dennis conceives it, theological determinism and theological historical views believe that everything in the development of history is driven by the will and purpose of God. Dennis did the opposite, preaching a mind unruffled by human intervention and a non-purpose living style similar to those beliefs espoused by Taoism. Laozi said, “为无为，事无事，味无味。” (Laozi 2009, chap. 63) (It is the way of Tao to act without thinking of acting; to conduct affairs with non-action; to taste those without flavor). Zhuangzi said, “至人无己，神人无功，圣人无名。” (Zhuangzi 2013, chap. “Free and Easy Floating”) (The perfect man has no self; the divine man has no achievements; the sage has no name). In the poem “Saint Francis and the Nun”, Dennis gave an alternative interpretation of Christian allusions and reinterpreted the image of saints in Christianity. The allusions of St. Francis feeding the birds and preaching the gospel of God to the birds, in the context of traditional Christianity, show the piety of Christian saints to God and benevolence to all things. In this poem, Dennis writes about a nun who embodies the suffering and self-immolation of Christ, but Dennis does not approve the nun. He weakens the ethical dimension of Christianity and expresses the joy of life that is compatible with natural life (birds), demonstrating an unintentionality: “what a relief for Saint Francis these birds are/Free of the craving for explanation, for certainty/Even in the winter, when the grass is hidden.” (83) In this poem, the dying nun wants to see divine revelation in her suffering, hoping that her extreme ordeal has at least the noble purpose of reducing the suffering of others. When she could not see such a divine revelation and affirmation of a religious purpose, she felt lonely, abandoned by God. Yet, Dennis writes, the birds fed by St. Francis are not bound by the need for interpretation, purpose, or divine revelation but are only free to sing a song of thanksgiving to creation. Even in the harsh and barren winter, these birds can find seeds on the ground and be full of joy. Through the contrast between the bird and the nun, Dennis extols a down-to-earth way of living; a practical religion that rejects religious doctrines, embraces life’s simplest pleasures, and endures life’s great ordeals without any need for explanation and purpose.

Unlike what Dennis understands as Christianity’s strong ethical purpose, linear history, and apocalyptic events, his practical religion embraces open-minded leisure, digression, interlude, and the indescribable beauty of small events. “The Lacemaker” is similar in meaning to Dennis’s “Saint Francis and the Nun”, both expressing self-absorbed concentration and immersion without explanation and purpose, be it the weaver in the poem or the painter who painted the weaver, or whether it is art or the art of life. The poet observes the lacemaker and the painter’s “self-forgetful beauty of service”, which “increases the number of beautiful/Useless things available in a world/That would be darker and smaller without them.” (474) Such belief in “useless” and “purposeless” art accords with the belief of “art for art’s sake” in Aestheticism—to the exclusion of the moral, social function of art. As Oscar Wilde proclaims to a letter correspondent after his publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, “a work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it.”3 The flower to Wilde is analogous to St Francis’ birds in this poem of Dennis’s. Dennis’s emphasis on non-purpose and uselessness has also affinity with Taoism, which strongly influenced aestheticists such as Oscar Wilde, as can be seen in Wilde’s A Chinese Sage (Wilde 1997). Taoism advocates non-purpose and the virtue of “being useless”; not interfering with Nature with the human will. As Zhuangzi expressed it, “巧者劳而智者忧，无能者无所求。饱食而遨游，泛若不系之舟” (The clever work hard while the wise worry, and the incapable have nothing to ask for. Satisfied and roaming, they float like untied boats) (Zhuangzi 2013).

In conclusion, in Dennis’s practical religion, God is secularized and has human frailty and flaws which, according to Dennis as much as Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, allows God/Christ to have deeper empathy with human beings. At the same time, flawed humanity can achieve the status of divinity. Dennis’s dismantling of the transcendental signifier of God, and the antithesis of God and man and of omnipotence and fallibility is distinctively Poststructuralist, although he has not thought of branding himself so. By accepting the fallibility of God and by humanizing evil as human foibles, or as the active, dialectical force of negation that drives a spiral ascending as William Blake sees it, the core gesture of Dennis’s practical religion reveals itself as reconciliation, a reconciliation between gods and men and between men, who are tolerant of and compassionate toward each other due to their shared vulnerabilities. Even with highlighted human limitations and compromises, Dennis still insists on human free will, as opposed to what he understands as theological determinism, and still embraces an imperfect paradise on earth, as Wallace Stevens celebrates in his poem “Sunday Morning”. With his New Historicist belief in the textuality of history and his Foucaultian power discourse, he refutes what he sees as the religious view of history as a predetermined trajectory reflecting the purpose of God. Like Stevens and other Aestheticists and aestheticized religious thinkers, he extols ephemerality (as Stevens says in his poem “Sunday Morning”, “Death is the mother of beauty”), non-purpose, and necessary fiction to enhance our earthly lives and does not adhere to the absolute “truth” of religious teachings. His love for transience and fiction is a metaphor for his art of poetry and art of living, because the statement he did not explicitly make is that God himself is also a fiction of men to console themselves, and that all of our lives are but a moment, a moment of poignant beauty precisely because it is fleeting; a fiction that is exalted by Stevens as the final belief and religion: “The final belief is belief in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” (Stevens 2011a, p. 244) Dennis’s views of traditional religions are understandably subjective and may not have the precision and meticulousness of a theologian or religious scholar who cites frequently from religious texts, and his adaptation of these religions into his practical religion (based on his subjective understanding) may also be rather imaginative and free, but he does provide a new, thought-provoking religious vision with a poet’s sensibility and insight. The “truth” of religious teachings in this paper is as Dennis understands it (an understanding as reflected in his poetry) rather than what an orthodox theologian may approve. True, gods from most religions are conceived as empathetic, but in Dennis’s and Kazantzakis’ eyes, gods with human frailties are more empathetic to human plights than infallible and omnipotent gods. True, unlike Calvinism, Baptists and Roman Catholics have a much greater belief in the compatibility of human free will and God’s sovereignty, and in the God-granted human free will to choose good through him allowing the existence of evil. But in Dennis’s poetry, as much as in Stevens’, he tends to oppose theological determinism with human free will for the development of his “practical religion” and “aestheticized religion” (as many renowned writers also do, including John Milton and William Blake). We are not judging whether Dennis is “right” or “wrong”, but how his peculiar understanding of traditional religions and his imaginative transformation of them qualify him as a great poet and an innovative religious thinker. Dennis’s emphasis on “ephemerality” and “non-purpose” also accords with the tenets of Taoism, which have been of growing interest and important influence in the West in the past century. Furthermore, Dennis’s emphasis on “fictionality”, “non-purpose”, and “the art of life” accords with the Aestheticist movement in Europe and the aestheticized religion of Wallace Stevens and others under the influence of Nietzsche. Most importantly, Dennis’s religious visions exemplify important new trends in religious studies, such as the poststructuralist and phenomenological study of religions as demonstrated in this paper, which assist the methodologies of this paper in addition to the close-text reading methodology of New Criticism. Moreover, his secularized, syncretic, alternative religious visions reflect the overall change in religious belief in America with its increasing trends of diversification, secularization, and globalization. Therefore, despite the idiosyncratic and unorthodox nature of Dennis’s practical religion, his religious visions, in addition to his literary achievements, are truly valuable and in-depth as they accord with, reinforce, and innovate some major and profound modern and contemporary religious thoughts and trends in religious study.