Scholarly interest in theological aspects of Iris Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy was slow to develop. It was thirty years after her writing debut that the first work taking detailed notice of the theological language deployed by this overtly atheist author appeared when, in 1983, Peter S. Hawkins wrote The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch; and it was a further decade before theologians began to engage with Murdoch’s work together. Following a conference at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 1994, Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker edited Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (1996). This remained, for many years, the most important work on Murdoch’s theology, contains vital work by renowned scholars such as Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum and Charles Taylor and is still much cited today. The following year Dominican Fergus Kerr’s work of 1997, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity, includes Murdoch. But it was not until the twenty-first century that this aspect of Murdoch’s thought and imagination began to receive sustained attention. In 2000 Robert Hardy published Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction and in 2001 Benedictine Mark Patrick Hederman revealed the depth of her influence on his life and community in The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future.