To an Unknown Goddess

“One of this generation’s most ardent defenders of Christian agape here turns his hand to poetry, and with it those other Greek loves, too, eros and philia. Witty, profound, and endlessly absorbing, these verses trace the transfiguration of love found and lost, in conversation with writers across the ages–a latter-day knight of faith inviting us along on his quest for an unknown goddess.” –Jennifer A. Herdt, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics, Yale Divinity School “Jackson’s learned scholarship on Christian love is highly regarded for its rare combination of analytic rigor, theological depth, and literary imagination. To An Unknown Goddess is a gift that now expresses these traits in the prayerful voice of an American philosophical poet. Intense, honest, and provocative might best describe this rich collection of soulful verse that travels from Athens to Jerusalem.” –Eric Gregory, professor of religion, Princeton University “I found myself laughing out loud two pages after I was moved to tears. I cannot do justice to the muscular but gentle intelligence that suffuses these poems, not to pummel but to embrace. By the end of this astonishing book, he has answered his own question: yes, light does cast a shadow when struck by brighter beams, but the shadow, too, is light… . But here is the thing: the sometimes disconsolate counterpoint of passion and thought he uses, often erupting in the bawdy music of carnival, left me stunned when I closed the book and discovered his music showing up in my memory as a hymn.” –Raymond Barfield, MD, author of The Seventh Sentence and Dreams of a Spirit Seer

Timothy P. Jackson is Bishop Mack B. and Rose Stokes Professor of Theological Ethics, Emeritus, at The Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Jackson received his BA in Philosophy from Princeton and his PhD in philosophy and religious studies from Yale. He is the author of Love Disconsoled (1999), The Priority of Love (2003), Political Agape (2015), and Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism (2021).