“David Marno’s Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention is, indeed, a challenge to death, or to be precise, to a long-dead Christian devotional tradition: the tradition of holy attention. Marno resuscitates a long-gone knowledge, the art of prayer as a personal mental meditation rather than a formulaic recitation. Beautifully written and extremely humble in its presentation, Marno’s claims are bold, far-reaching, and relevant to a number of fields, among them religious studies, philosophy, spirituality, and, of course, literature. It is also a short book that covers a lot of ground, as Marno’s discussion contributes not only to the study of John Donne, around whom (or, in fact, about one of his poems) the book gravitates, or early modern devotional literature in general, but also to an on-going re-examination of Christian spirituality in the early church, the Middle Ages, and early modernity, as well as to the anthropology of religion and devotion.”

Read the rest of Moshe Sluhovsky’s essay here. He will be joined by scholars from various fields to discuss Death Be Not Proud and the larger contributions it has to many fields, including literature and religious studies.