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A bold exploration of how hyperbole—language that exceeds limits—reveals religion as an intensified experience of love, sacrifice, and divine meaning.
What if the deepest truths of religion are not found in moderation—but in excess?
In Blessed Excess, Stephen H. Webb offers a bold and original vision of religion as an intensification of ordinary experience, arguing that hyperbole—language that goes "too far"—is not merely decorative, but essential to theological thinking. Moving beyond traditional studies of metaphor and analogy, Webb reveals how exaggeration, overflow, and surplus shape the way we speak about God, love, sacrifice, and grace.Engaging a rich and diverse range of voices—from the First Epistle of John to Kierkegaard, from Georges Bataille to Flannery O’Connor and G. K. Chesterton—Webb demonstrates how hyperbolic imagination stretches the limits of reason, inviting readers into a more expansive understanding of faith.
With intellectual rigor and creative insight, Blessed Excess opens new pathways for exploring both Christian theology and comparative religion. It challenges readers to reconsider the boundaries between logic and paradox, devotion and excess, the finite and the infinite.
Provocative, illuminating, and deeply original, Blessed Excess is essential reading for anyone interested in theology, philosophy, and the power of language to transform belief.
"This book builds on existing theories of religion and identifies hyperbole as a characteristic of religious understanding. Until now, no one has explicated hyperbole systematically in relation to other tropes—irony, metaphor, analogy, understatement. In so doing, Webb brings genuinely new insight into religion as an intensification of ordinary experience. His choice of texts to illustrate different ways in which hyperbole can function in theological reflection is felicitous. 1 John 4:7, Kierkegaard, Bataille, O'Connor, and Chesterton provide a broad range of test-cases: classical and contemporary, Protestant and Catholic, male- and female-authored, and multiple genres." — Mary Gerhart, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
"Webb's approach makes possible important and wonderfully fresh ideas on old theological questions, such as evil, God's love, sacrifice, redemption, and grace. The approach suggests a new and very fruitful way to think about various religions. I am eager to spend some time comparing Taoism and Buddhism with respect to their hyperboles, for I suspect I'll finally be able to see just where the real difference between the two styles of thinking lies. I suspect that Taoism's hyperboles are much more like Christianity's than like those in Buddhism." — David B. Greene, North Carolina State University
Stephen H. Webb is Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Wabash College. He is the author of Re-figuring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl Barth, also published by SUNY Press.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Re-Figuring Religion: Toward a Hyperbolic Imagination
1. The (Il)Logic of Excess: The Test Case of "God is Love"
2. More Than Too Much: Kierkegaard's Works of Love Revisited
3. Sacrifice as Surplus: Georges Bataille and the Economy of Excess in Itself
4. Life Over the Edges: Flannery O'Connor's Dis-Grace-Full Extremity
5. Excess (Un)Bound: G. K. Chesterton and the Question of Orthodoxy
6. Figures of Excess: Going Too Far
Epilogue
Notes
Index