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As this chapter shows, the parable of the Dishonest Steward is the prime example of Jesus’ narrative strategy of comparing God to morally unsavory characters and thus forcing the hearer to actively search for the hidden message of a parable. The story calls for a positive response to one's sense of failure, and it shows that in a personal crisis one can and should search for solutions and “never lose heart,” keeping one's trust in God. The chapter argues for the contemporary relevance of all these themes, despite various recent objections to the value of this parable for contemporary audiences.

As we reflect on life in the 21st century, we surely must hope that goodness and mercy will be preserved. Traditionally, it has fallen to the church to pass on such ethical ideals. In the future, the social role of the Christian will hopefully include an ethical life, a life of caring and compassion for those in need. But how can the ethical ideals of the past be transmitted effectively to the coming generation? Stories of brave people are a very important feature of American culture. People can learn how to be caring even if they do not have warm, loving parents who provide role models. In the American population at large, having experienced a personal crisis yourself does appear to be associated with being a more caring and compassionate person. What then is the role of Christianity in all this? An ethic of love and compassion is of course central to the Christian gospel. The stories of caring that we experience in our own lives are an epiphany.

Can we expect to find that female-dominated religions not only reflect women's identities (for example, as mothers), but also actively serve their interests? Women, like men, join religious groups and perform religious rituals for fundamentally religious reasons. In most contexts in which female-dominated religions occur, individual women have some amount of free choice. Women's religions are rarely the only available religious option. Social deprivation and personal crises undoubtedly lead some individuals to seek a “better” or more convincing belief system—one that more adequately explains why things are the way they are. Many kinds of non-religious organizations can meet women's needs for social interaction, group support, networking, empathy, even healing, yet it does seem that religious organizations have a unique role—even in terms of meeting women's secular needs and furthering women's secular interests. This connection has been made explicit by Spiritual Feminists.

This chapter analyses DeLillo's Falling Man, which is focused on a marriage. This novel also deals with the impulses of the characters towards helping others during a time of personal and national crisis. The chapter shows how DeLillo uses one of the characters to voice out certain political and philosophical ideas, and describes the novel as sometimes essayistic.

This chapter aims to set Donne as a plague writer into the context of the fatal and memorable year and, by doing so, correlate the epidemic crisis in London with a transformative personal crisis for Donne, occasioned by his own near-fatal illness two years before. The central texts include three works not usually taken together but all part of Donne's engagement with disease: his own, London's, and the world's. The Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published the year before the plague as a meditation on his recent illness, would be in the bookstalls during the plague year, along with the 1625 edition of the “Anniversaries.” These earlier poems, with their prolonged lament for a “sicke World,” would now likely be reread in the light of the plague, and in the context of Donne's writing, as a prelude to the Devotions.

There is a series of exemplary texts in the history of early modern English plague writing, which form a series in that each responds, in turn, to the three pandemics that ravaged London between 1603 and 1665. They are exemplary in that they speak immediately to moments of personal crisis—the death of Jonson's son, Donne's recovery from a near-mortal illness—and to the crises of their times. In 1665, Pepys offered something new, the perspective of a walker in the plague city, while Defoe reconstructed the same epidemic many years later from an amalgam of childhood memory and journalistic research, at a moment in 1722 when London seemed again vulnerable to an outbreak of plague. Over the century that separates Jonson's epigram on his son and Defoe's Journal, the discourse of infectious disease was gradually, though incompletely, passing from the province of the divine to that of the physician (who was to assume something of the priestly aura of his predecessor, along with the warrant of the new empirical science).

This chapter depicts a shift in Rebecca's character as detailed in two journals that hold information of her time aboard the clipper ship, Challenger. Her prose describes a woman whose main concerns are for her own health, the safety of the crew and ship, the condition of her own soul, and her family at home. Rebecca no longer wrote herself as a character who loved the sea, but as a woman extremely homesick and burdened with worries. The log Rebecca kept during her voyage from London to Chile tracks William's health, which most likely consumed both her time and attention in the summer and fall of 1856. Together these two journals suggest that Rebecca perceived herself as a woman in deep spiritual and personal crisis who felt she had to maintain control over the ship in late 1856.

Trevor Pearce examines Mead’s early intellectual development and shows in detail how difficult it was for a young Christian at the time to integrate Darwin into his worldview. Pearce explores the deep existential crisis that resulted from these difficulties. Based on new and newly reevaluated biographical material, Pearce traces the development of Mead’s views through his years in college, in a longer phase of existential reorientation, and as a student of philosophy and psychology. Pearce also shows how Mead’s education with Josiah Royce at Harvard and Wilhelm Dilthey in Berlin—both authors who saw the doctrine of evolution as a means to come to a better understanding of the human being’s “spiritual” nature—was key to resolving his early intellectual and personal problems and continued to form the center of his later work.

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood worked through grief while writing multiple drafts of the novel that was to become A Single Man. Isherwood wrote the drafts during a particularly turbulent period in his relationship with his lover Don Bachardy, in which a breakup seemed imminent. In these drafts, he recounts a journey from shock to resignation, as he contemplates the loss of his beloved life partner. Engaging in an artistic process that parallels the psychoanalytic process Sigmund Freud alludes to in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Isherwood proceeds from pain and incomprehension through an increasing understanding of personal crisis and novelistic potential to ultimate insight and artistic realization. In contemplating the loss of love, Isherwood recalls and works through multiple previous losses—the loss of innocence, of homeland, of youth. Thus he comes to confront the ultimate loss, that of life itself.