Christianity and Literature

Explorations of Tolkien's latent theology abound, but very little focused scholarship proposes to discuss how Tolkien's legendari-um portrays an understanding of the Holy Spirit, especially in light of Tolkien's Roman Catholicism. This essay explores three major features of Tolkien's work that provide insight into this ghostly person of the Trinity. The Silmarillion provides detailed insight as to the exact identity of the " Flame Imperishable, " while its characters demonstrate the indwelling of this Flame. St. Paul explains the gifts of the Holy Spirit in his first letter to the Corinthians and Tolkien seems to mimic many of these gifts in the characters of the nine members of the Fellowship. Lastly, the Great Eagles represent the workings of the Holy Spirit, both as servants of Manwë and as agents of eucatastrophe.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, July 8, 1741, the Northampton pastor Jonathan Edwards began to preach a sermon at the second meetinghouse in the town of Enfield entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Following George Whitefield’s visit earlier that year, the neighboring town of Suffield was experiencing a significant revival, with ninety-five communicants added the previous Sunday (Medlicott 218). Such enthusiasm, however, had not reached Enfield. In response to this spiritual lethargy, a number of clergy had banded together to stoke the fires of revival by instituting a series of weekday services, traveling back and forth between pious Suffield and impious Enfield (Marsden 219-20). Those weekday services included a visit from Northampton’s pastor. What greeted the Enfield congregation was a sermon of unparalleled logic and vivacious imagery delivered by an orator known not for theatrics, but for a pulpit voice characterized by “a powerful sense of restraint, authority, and discipline” (Buckingham 139)....

This essay presents a case for ecocriticism as a viable critical method for Christian scholars. It begins with an historical overview of the method, then examines common ground shared by ecocriticism and Christianity~ including what amounts to a kind of critical realism, and the belief in the inherent goodness of creation. Two potential obstacles are then addressed by way of Lynn White, Jr.'s famous essay, "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis." These include the relationship of the Bible and the environment, and the charge of anthropocentrism. I believe White is partly right, but contend that neither objection is fatal for Christian scholars who wish to employ ecocriticism.

For a very long time, the transformations that have taken place in the history of the Mizo is mainly derived from the writings of the colonizers and the Christian missionaries. The entirediscourse which was dominated by the white male perspective was slightly altered when the
natives began to write their own history. However, women writers were still absent. It wasonly in the last decade of the twentieth century that women began documenting their history.This paper is an attempt to look at the place of the Mizo women in the narrative through a span of a little more than a century and how they have been representedin the history making process. Women have not always been absent but have always had some sort of'place' in the narratives. But even in the more modern historical writings, they have beendepicted as mere subjects of history rather than actor or maker of history.

This essay explores the category of “mystery” in the theology of Rowan Williams. There is, or should be, an ongoing strangeness to Christian speech in that it never ceases questioning, probing, and unsettling. Williams finds the logic for this in the resurrection narratives. The resurrection is for Williams an event that upends, overturns, and re-forms the cosmos; it establishes a form of Christian community and a distinctive cadence for Christian language. The essay investigates this cadence as it appears in Williams’ writing on theological method, his work on the resurrection of Christ, and his engagement with the fiction of Dostoevsky and Marylinne Robinson.

In an epigraph to Roger's Version, John Updike quotes Soren Kierkegaard: "O infinite majesty, even if you were not love, even if you were cold in your infinite majesty I could not cease to love you, I need something majestic to love." Not unlike Paul Tillich and other ...

John Paul II's “Letter to Artists” identified two ways artists, particularly literary artists, can help reveal the nature of man to himself by showing both 1) the threat to human dignity from humans themselves, as well as 2) the possibility of transcendence and redemption as achievement and divine gift breaking into this life. We offer close readings of two contemporary novels as examples. The first way is illustrated by Robert Clark's In the Deep Midwinter, a novel at whose centre is an illegal abortion in the 1950's. We argue that the novel's portrait of suffering and abiding loss effectively shows the devastating effects of moral evil. The characters are conflicted in their desires and chosen actions, and they defend different positions; however, the plot in particular underscores the harm humans can inflict on themselves and others. The second way is illustrated using Hansen's Atticus. We argue that the character of Atticus serves both as an example of a virtuous Christian everyman and as an allegorical representation of God the Father. Redemption becomes possible for the dissolute son Scott when he turns to Atticus, his loving father, for forgiveness.

In this book, Neta Stahl examines the attitudes adopted by modern Jewish writers toward the figure of Jesus. Stahl argues that twentieth-century Jewish writers reconsidered Jesus' traditional status as the Christian Other and looked to him instead as a fellow Jew, a "brother," and even as a model for the "New Jew."

Other and Brother analyzes the work of a wide array of modern Jewish writers, beginning in the early twentieth century and ending with contemporary Israeli literature. Stahl takes the reader through dramatic changes in Jewish life from the Haskalah (or Jewish Enlightenment) and Emancipation, to Zionism, the Holocaust, and the formation of the state of Israel. She shows, for example, how the emergence of quasi-messianic Zionist ideas about returning to the land of Israel, where the actual Jesus was born, helped make the figure of Jesus a source of attraction and identification for Hebrew and Yiddish writers in the first half of the twentieth century, and how the fateful events of that century brought about a major transformation in the Jewish attitude toward Jesus.

This paper considers the hermetic objects that are at the centre of three of Charles Williams's early novels: War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1931), and the Greater Trumps (1932).  It argues that Williams used these objects as more than furniture around which to build compelling narratives, but as material artifacts imbued with mystical and magical properties to illustrate his own deeply held Christian belief about the fundamental relationship that exists between goodness and mere being itself.

This article examines the falls of Satan, Eve, and Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost, arguing that these characters demonstrate neither sincere theology nor genuinely sincere behavior in their initial transgressions and continued unrepentant behavior. In analyzing matters of sincerity concerning these characters, this article interacts with numerous voices in the history of Paradise Lost criticism, particularly those critics who, advocating a Romantic understanding of sincerity against traditional Christianity, have defended the decisions of Satan, Eve, and Adam to transgress against God’s commands. This article also examines Adam and Eve’s sincere repentance later in Milton’s epic.

In the ruined landscape of twenty-first-century California, Lauren Olamina, the main character of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, founds a new religion, Earthseed. Earthseed deifies the cosmic pervasiveness of change with a simple statement: "God is Change." While several scholars have usefully explicated the religious origins and affective qualities of the Earthseed community, I argue that Earthseed goes further, challenging the 1990s utopian imagination to invent new modes of organization that can work within new social and material realities. As a religion, Earthseed aims at changing humanity as a whole species, a goal so large that it requires radically new models of social and political organizing. In the second novel, Olamina changes Earthseed from a local, sustainable community to a decentralized movement that parasitically draws energy from social ruin. In doing so, Earthseed offers a challenge to the utopian thinking of the 1990s: fidelity to utopian goals requires new methods that can allow a utopian movement to thrive even in the absence of the robust public sphere that supported revolutionary social movements of the 1960s.

That's the title of our new Hajim School recruitment brochure, and we can all take pride that we are now preparing record numbers of students to do just that. Thanks to the collective efforts of our Hajim School faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends-efforts that I am deeply grateful for-we have more than doubled our undergraduate enrollment in the last seven years, from 744 students to 1,543. F. Douglas Kelley, associate professor of chemical engineering, was chosen as the Engineering Professor of the Year by the Students' Association.

Lawyers love to write about To Kill a Mockingbird, which they believe to have been written by one of their own, but as the recent publication of an early draft of Harper Lee's best-selling novel reveals, there is more to her Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the American South than an exhilarating trial scene and an exemplary lawyer. This article attends to the importance of grace in the development of Lee's artistic vision through a close reading of the novel's morally compromised conclusion, where an incarnational ethic of love ultimately (though perhaps imperfectly) fulfills the purpose of the law.

made explicit in the final words of the poem: ''my pages scatter in the wind'' (71). By the time Charles is taken from the world, he has already left it. Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse shows that contemporary poetics can be used in the service of story-telling. In fact, it shows that a contemporary poet can contribute to one of the oldest story-telling traditions in the church: hagiography. Woolfitt's preface puts the poems in a devotional context, and the book concludes with a compact biography of the martyr. The poems are richly imagined, often detailing Charles' spiritual quest with startlingly vivid images, as when he says ''I crucify the sinful flesh, as men drive / crows from the orchard with torches and stones'' (48). A book that is so satisfying as story, as devotional aid, and as lyric poetry is a rare accomplishment.

In their endeavors to persuade their readers and hearers to conversion and godly living, Puritan writers and preachers in early modern England make use of the three modes of persuasion identified by Aristotle: logos (appeal to rational argument), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (appeal to the perceived credibility of the speaker). Although deploying rhetorical techniques, Puritan writers seek to manifest a Spirit-wrought sincerity, understood as earnest expression flowing from doctrinal conviction, inward spiritual experience, and a heartfelt desire to persuade others. This article explores these dynamics in the works of William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter, and John Bunyan.

J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) propose levelling critiques of secular humanism. Through his intertextual dialogue with Gabriel García Márquez's The General in His Labyrinth (1991), Coetzee tacitly questions the epistemological, ontological, and temporal consequences of the humanistic political "vision" that has been absorbed by postcolonial discourse in the academy. Coetzee shows how this vision ends in an amnesiac posthistory. If reluctantly, he posits that we must revive mystical and transcendent possibility to avoid this fate. Coetzee's openness to religious consciousness tracks with recent announcements of the postsecular age (Jurgen Habermas, among others) yet radically challenges their abiding progressive temporal frame. Coetzee implies that remembrance should form the foundation of a "postsecularity" that strives to ontologically preserve the radical potential of the present moment.

This is a review of Darren Sarisky’s Reading the Bible Theologically. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Sarisky's leading idea is that the Bible is best understood as a set of signs for depicting God and God’s actions. He develops this semiotic position in a reflective and painstaking style that he terms a “via media” between the theological interpretation of Scripture movement, on the one hand, and the set of historically based views on the other hand. His primary concern is to diagnose the main problem with biblical scholarship, which is its methodological naturalism.

In 2012, the Christian evangelical organization Focus on the Family published Escape to the Hiding Place, the ninth book in Adventures in Odyssey’s Imagination Station book series. This short children’s book is a creative reimagining of Corrie ten Boom’s Holocaust memoir The Hiding Place (1971). Corrie was a Christian who lived in Haarlem during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Corrie and her family helped hide Jews and non-Jews from arrest and deportation at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Corrie’s story has played a significant role in the evangelical Christian encounter with the Holocaust. Like every Imagination Station story, Escape to the Hiding Place features two cousins, Patrick and Beth, from the fictional town of Odyssey. They travel back in time to help Jews escape the Nazis, all so they can learn a lesson about their ability to aid others in need. A harrowing adventure ensues. This paper does not criticize the valuable rescue work undertaken by Christians during the Holocaust, nor does it criticize the contemporary evangelical desire to draw meaning from Christian rescue work. Rather, the fictional narrative under consideration skews toward an overly simplistic representation of the Christian response to the murder of Jews during World War Two, contains a flat reading of Dutch society during the war, and fails to address antisemitism or racism. This paper situates Escape to the Hiding Place within a wider evangelical popular culture that has struggled with the history of the Holocaust apart from redemptive Christian biographies.

A climactic expression in Western culture of the personal evolution that is made possible, and indeed today demanded: from the depths of tragic romance into a future-oriented initiation-experience ...
Cf. Shakespeare's own prophetic evolutionary experience in this regard (see my "Remembering Shakespeare").

(Some advice for the Reader who may find Chapter 2 of the present book rather a hurdle without some passion for the philosophy in which Novalis was enagaged from very early on; if so, the Reader is advised simply to jump to Chapter 3 and carry on, where Novalis's life-themes become more generally accessible.)

Book Blurb:

Recent translations of Novalis’s work into English should occasion fresh endeavours in the field of Novalis studies, aimed at English readers who are without German. In this book John O’Meara presents his own understanding of what Novalis offers to these readers, who have been given firmer access to his life and to his philosophical works than ever before. O’Meara traces Novalis’s philosophical development meticulously, finishing up with an in-depth analysis of his Hymns to the Night, the Spiritual Songs, and his main and unfinished novel, Henry von Ofterdingen. Emphasis is on the process by which Novalis’s literary works manifest as direct expressions of his philosophical explorations, which bear fruit, eventually, in visions of sweeping majesty and annunciatory grandeur.

“O'Meara is to be commended for his grasp of the philosophical questions that profoundly motivated Novalis and for his ability to integrate Novalis's life and thought into one narrative.”  {Bernhard Radloff, from a book review in 'Studies in Romanticism,' Vol.55, no.4, Winter 2016}

Visit the author's website at http://johnomeara.squarespace.com/

The Unfamiliarity of the Cliché, or the Calculable Sightlessness
In Dialogue with the Monograph of Tibor Bónus on Édes Anna

In my paper, I begin a critical dialogue with the monograph of Tibor Bónus entitled A másik titok (The other Secret). Acknowledging its interpretive advantages and force, I question the study (mis)reading the novel Édes Anna regarding the sacred elements that appear in various forms within the novel. along these lines, I mention possible interpretations that could have enriched the results of the study, and also reveal the possible causes of the continuous misreading of the interpretive starting point frequently mentioned by the author, in his words, of the theological or Christian
cliché.

A literary criticism of novelist William Faulkner's works is presented. The article explores subtle references to Jesus Christ and biblical narratives in Faulkner's works, including "The Sound and the Fury", "Light in August", and "Go Down, Moses". The article also mentions commentators including Donald Kartiganer, who analyze what they believe is a connection between Faulkner's works and Christ-like figures.

Preface to Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 20:2 (Spring 2017): 5-15.  Many have called for a new Catholic Literary Revival akin to the one that took place in the mid-twentieth century.  In this essay I discuss the real strength of that 20th-century phenomenon, obstacles that oppose any kind of literary revival as well as those specific to Catholic culture, and what might bring these about.  As with other prefaces I also give short previews of the articles in the issue.  A revised and adapted version was printed at Catholic World Report on March 27, 2017.

Resumen: En El sobrino del mago, la primera de sus crónicas, C.S. Lewis
narra la creación de Narnia por Aslan –fi gura de Cristo– a través de la música.
Esta alegoría funciona no solo porque la música, forma pura, es belleza
captada por el sentido fundamental, sino ante todo porque es una cabal
analogía de la perfección trinitaria del Dios cristiano.
Palabras clave: C.S. Lewis, Narnia, alegoría, creación del mundo, música,
Santísima Trinidad.
Abstract: In the The Magician’s Nephew, fi rst of his chronicles, C.S. Lewis
tells the creation of Narnia by Aslan –fi gure of Christ– through music. This
allegory is true not only because music, as pure form, is beauty captured by
the fundamental sense, but foremost because it is an accurate analogy of the
perfection of the Trinitarian Christian God.
Keywords: C.S. Lewis, Narnia, Allegory, Creation of the World, Music,
Holy Trinity.

This project uses the "not of this world" motif to examine Christian literature as by definition a minority literature, even when Christianity is the majority religion. I look at the multicultural aspects of the biblical Book of Daniel and the Gospel of John, as well as the polycultural aspects of Christian history and missions, noting the early diversity of the church as it made quick inroads into Africa and Asia before becoming Europeanized, and noting the cultural challenges faced by the church in the modern era as it encountered the Americas and returned to Africa and Asia. I also look at three theologians who discuss the separation of the church from the political world: Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard. Finally, I examine six devotional authors in terms of concepts borrowed from contemporary ethnic studies: Saint Patrick and exile; Richard Rolle and minor literature; Saint Catherine and borderlands; George Fox and nationalism v. tribalism; Thomas Merton and contact zones; and Kathleen Norris and diaspora.