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Christianity & Literature
Number of Followers: 8  Subscription journalISSN (Print) 0148-3331 - ISSN (Online) 2056-5666 Published by Project MUSE  [305 journals]
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- Introduction: Forum on Christian Poetics
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Abstract: In May 2021, fourteen scholars convened a "consultation" on Christian poetics hosted by the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts at Yale University. Our gathering included literary scholars and theologians from across the U.S. and U.K., among whom were also poets and writers as well as journal editors and publishers. All gathered were also teachers. I mention this last occupation because some of the more fascinating (and unexpected) elements of our several hours of discussion were concerns over pedagogy, especially in the wake of various "crises" in the humanities that we witness today. More on this presently.Our initial guiding question was basic: What do we mean by a Christian poetics and why does it (or ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Seeing the Form: Denise Levertov's "The Jacob's Ladder"
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Abstract: Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful—the whole person quivers. He not only "finds" the beautiful moving: rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it. The more total this experience is, the less does a person seek and enjoy only the delight that comes through the senses or even through any act of his own; the less also does he reflect on his own acts and states.Can poetry be a means for a reader's spiritual transformation, a way to grow one's relationship with God' Even in our postsecular moment in literary studies, the question seems quaint. But it certainly wasn't for Denise Levertov. Her poems and essays insist that poetry has a unique and irreplaceable role to ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Teach Us to Care
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Abstract: Seamus Heaney's sequence "Clearances" from the 1987 collection The Haw Lantern speaks by its title of a space that is open, a clearing. But it also means the act of clearing things out or away, of making an open space, a desire returned to in the title for Heaney's 1966–1996 collected poems, Opened Ground.2 Opened Ground signals both depth, returning to history at the scale of family genealogy announced in his central poem "Digging" from Death of a Naturalist (1966), and an opened space at the horizontal level, an open ground or vista, after something had been cleared away, making way perhaps for new growth. The third poem in "Clearances," known by its opening line, "When all the others were away at Mass," was ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- "wrapt In flesh": An Encounter with Christian Poetics
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Abstract: This poem, which appears in George Herbert's 1633 collection The Temple, offers a seriously playful, or playfully serious, engagement with Herbert's source text in the biblical epistle to the Colossians.1 Its primary structural conceit is obvious—or rather, it is made obvious by the graphic emphasis of capitalization and italics: the printing of this poem ensures that we attend to the message embedded within the poem's lines as it unfolds line by line, and from lineal position to the next, until the poem's conclusion. Herbert's novel acrostic develops the substance of the biblical verse he cites: the original second-person pronoun from Herbert's source in the 1611 Authorized Version becomes, in this poem's ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Father Brown, Charity, and Christian Contributions to Critique
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Abstract: Approaching Christian poetics via one of G. K. Chesterton's literary creations may seem odd, the sort of mildly mysterious incident that features in many of the Father Brown stories. Why focus on someone who does not exist beyond the fictional page and our encounter with these stories' And why then proceed, as I am about to do, with linking the figure of Father Brown to recent debates about interpretation' One obvious answer is that any account of Christian poetics is determined by specificities of time and place, as we articulate how our interpretative practice is shaped by certain theological ideas and practice. Although reading is always a selective and personal endeavor, the insights it yields can still be ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Wonder and Care: A Christian Poetics for the Present Day
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Abstract: My college class for literary theory, taught by the mighty Susan Felch, met once a week in the evenings. Huddled in that Michigan darkness, we worked our way through difficult theoretical writings, pondering what constitutes a text, or an author, or a reader, and how all three together conspire to communicate or create meaning. In major anthologies covering literally thousands of years, a wonderful array of ideas shifted before our eyes and took shape in conversation. And yet, sorting through them, it was easy to notice that a powerful strain of interpretative thought had been, almost deliberately, lost. Biblical criticism and biblical hermeneutics, which formed so much of what became literary theory and ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- On Christian Spirituality and Criticism, or, Postsecularity after R. S.
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Abstract: This essay addresses spiritual transformation, the ways literary texts evoke such experiences, and the transformative critical practices that potentially follow. It explores the degree to which modes of critical engagement like postsecularity and postcritique enable such practices and how (and why) they may not. Because transformation is this essay's subject, it undergoes a shift itself, beginning as a standard exhibit of literary criticism before taking a more personal and reflective turn. I do not present my approach as a model for how literary scholars moved by experiences of Christian conversion should undertake their work, far from it: Christ plays in ten thousand discursive forms. But I do wish to remind ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Toward a Practical Definition of Theopoetical Poetry
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Abstract: In September of 2016 I attended a lecture given by Thomas Caraway about what I thought was going to be poetry of witness. Instead, Caraway asserted that poetry of witness belonged under a larger umbrella term, "theopoetics," which he described as a mercurial collusion between theology and aesthetics that promised a way to participate in God. In September of 2016 I attended a lecture given by Thomas Caraway about what I thought was going to be poetry of witness. Instead, Caraway asserted that poetry of witness belonged under a larger umbrella term, "theopoetics," which he described as a mercurial collusion between theology and aesthetics that promised a way to participate in God. I had studied under Caraway for some ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Sentimentalism, Realism, and Secularity in Edith Wharton's The House of
Mirth-
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Abstract: Critics have been perplexed by the conclusion of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, noting that the "rhetorical excess" associated with Lily's dramatic death and the sentimentalism placed within the Nettie Struther subplot threaten to undermine the novel's realism.1 Toward the end of the novel, Wharton describes Lily's chance encounter with Netty Struther. Lily is strangely moved as she hears the story of Nettie's sudden reversal of fortune: George Struther, a childhood friend of Lily's working-class protégée, rescues Nettie by marrying and socially rehabilitating her after she has been abandoned by her lover. Wharton connects Nettie's story and Lily's death by featuring Struthers's infant child, Marry Anto'nette ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Chesterton's Decadent Theology: Redeeming Sin with Oscar Wilde
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Abstract: Little has been written regarding a non-pejorative relationship between Oscar Wilde and G. K. Chesterton, and perhaps with good reason. To suggest that Wilde should be considered an ally of Chesterton seems not only misguided, but contrary to the work and spirit of both. Despite their shared predilection for paradox, Chesterton denies even a stylistic kinship, drawing a distinction between what he views as his honest attempt to articulate "extraordinary truths,"1 and Wilde's "snobbish bluff."2 It is hard to imagine Chesterton at ease with an author who committed to paper the view that "an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."3Moreover, William Oddie, in his biography of Chesterton's ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- "Hiding In Plain Sight": Seeing and Forgetting Reality in David Foster
Wallace's Oblivion-
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Abstract: In 2014, Martin Brick assessed the critical discussion of David Foster Wallace and faith this way: "Since his death in 2008, the question of his faith and its influence on his writing … has been largely pushed to the side by mainstream biographers and scholars."1 Extensive work by Brick and others has addressed this gap, culminating in a 2019 collection, David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction.2 The collection made it hard to see why Wallace and religion had been overlooked. It was not as though there were no references to faith in Wallace, even if those references were explicitly or implicitly negative. God was there the whole time: in throwaway lines in short stories, questions about Jesus ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Somewhere to Follow: Poems by Paul J. Willis (review)
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Abstract: In his latest poetry collection, Paul J. Willis invites us into the worlds of both past and present. Willis implicitly urges us—by means of various reminiscences and wilderness treks—to consider what narratives and landscapes have shaped him and by extension those moments that have forged us into who we are today. I admit that I am a relative newcomer to Paul J. Willis's work. Nonetheless, in my brief and engaging foray into it, I feel like I have just eaten lunch with an old friend who has regaled me with his formative experiences in clear, precise language.Willis's most recent book, Somewhere to Follow: Poems, divides into four sections: Then, Now, Near, and Far. While the section titles appear to be opposites ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- A Poetics of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation by
Benjamin P. Myers (review)-
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Abstract: When I was asked to review A Poetics of Orthodoxy, I assumed in my haste that this would be another one of Benjamin Myers'' rich collections of poetry, a worthy addition to his volumes Lapse Americana, Elegy for Trains, and Black Sunday. Myers is a former poet laureate for the state of Oklahoma and one of the finest poets of faith writing today. Imagine my surprise, then, when I received in the mail a book of prose. What I should have remembered is that Myers is also the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature at Oklahoma Baptist University. As such, he is not only someone who writes poetry but also someone who thinks in a disciplined way about the relationship of poetry to Christian belief. A Poetics of Orthodoxy is ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Forgotten Futures: A Memoir by Bonnie Thurston, and: Not Sonnets:
Observations from an Ordinary Life by Bonnie Thurston (review)-
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Abstract: Poet Bonnie Thurston's two most recent volumes of poetry, the first, a chapbook, and the latter, a beautifully imagined paperback, share the integrity of their writer's voice. Both reveal a consciousness and conscience aware of their arousal in the interstices of intuition and intellect, the incorporeal and the anima/us/l, and the spiritual and natural spheres in which the examined life is lived. Both collections reveal a speaker whose eye is the window to soulish revelations and epiphanies, laying the ground for engagement and interpretation that is often deceivingly simple and provokingly complex. The striations of layers incumbent in Thurston's poetry invite literary, theological, and hermeneutical ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Shared Witness of C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer: Friendship,
Influence, and an Anglican Worldview by Philip Irving Mitchell (review)-
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Abstract: It seems the world can scarcely contain all the books written about C. S. Lewis. On the other hand, Austin Farrer, especially in America, is known only to a small number of mostly Episcopal clergy and academics and to an even smaller number of laypersons. More's the pity, for as Rowan Williams recently noted, Farrer was "the subtlest and most eloquent Anglican thinker of the last century." We welcome, therefore, Philip Irving Mitchell's work of intellectual history focused on these mid-twentieth century Ox-Bridge friends. Mitchell's study is far more than a comparison of Lewis and Farrer. He discusses them against the intellectual backdrop of their time with special attention to the philosophers, theologians ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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- Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of
German Idealism and Platonic Realism by Alexander J. B. Hampton (review)-
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Abstract: The last comprehensive study of religious aesthetics during the German Romantic movement was The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche by George S. Williamson in 2004. Now, fifteen years later, Alexander J. B. Hampton has released his comprehensive study of religious aesthetics during the German Romantic movement. Where Williamson's 2004 study emphasizes the Romantic writer's searching for new mythology and a new religion, Hampton's Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism argues that the German Romantics were not only attempting to usurp the old mythology and religion with a new mythology and ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-12-25T00:00:00-05:00
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