Christianity and Literature articles from January 2002

Christianity and Literature archives from January 2002

Inviting a Friend to Supper.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Inviting a Friend to Supper These hills show evening, the day is spent, spent like lost coins spilled down a viper's hole, like stumbling sheep too far from Jacob's well, like blood run down a post, or down a spear in...

From the editor.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... As regular readers of Christianity and Literature know, in each winter issue I summarize portions of my annual report, presented at the MLA Annual Convention, to the Conference on Christianity and Literature's Board of Directors. Always...

Show and tell: George Herbert, Richard Sibbes, and communings with God.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... The poet George Herbert (1593-1633) and Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), a writer of sermons and religious treatises, were both authors whose works were "best sellers" in the 1630s. (1) Herbert wholeheartedly accepted the Church of England liturgy...

"Cain rose up against Abel": murder, mystery, and paradise lost.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... The originating text for the story of the first murder in Judeo-Christian history would initially appear to prohibit the development of any aura of mystery around the fratricide. The Genesis text straightforwardly states that "it came to pass...

Thinking.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... It would be like kneading dough, except that you would knead in the sky and the grains of shadow that collect in trees. You would knead in the cry of a man about to leave his country, the stars that turn within his body and lead him out of the...

Of sacred art and the artist: Henry James's "The Altar of the Dead".(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... In "The Altar of the Dead" Henry James examines the nature of both sacred art and the artist who creates it. His aesthetic gentleman, George Stransom, visualizes internal images, imagines types and frames, arranges objects, expects...

Endo Shusaku: death and rebirth in Deep River.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... Mention the name of Endo Shusaku (1923-96) in literary circles, and chances are that the cliched portrayals of him as "Japanese Christian author," or even as the "Japanese Graham Greene," will not be long in surfacing. On one level it is hard...

Easter Eve Vigil.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Easter Eve Vigil Awaiting baptism, our first-born son sleeps the sleep of the dead. Our insomnious daughter, all two-year-old insight and innocence, proclaims, "It's dark, dark, dark!" and "cross of...

Unwitting redemption in Margaret Edson's Wit.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, Margaret Edson's medical drama Wit has garnered nearly unanimous acclaim. The play's honors include the Drama Desk, Dramatists Guild, New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Los Angeles Drama...

Michel Tournier, Christian fiction, and homosexuality: a second response to John M. Dunaway. (Dialogue).(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... This is the last of four essays that, beginning as a discussion of French novelist Michel Tournier, has evolved into a debate on the qualities that fiction must have to be considered Christian. In the first essay John M. Dunaway argued that...

African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures.
January 1, 2002... Edited by Vincent L. Wimbush. New York: Continuum, 2000. ISBN 0-8264-1293-9. Pp. xx + 876. $99.95. John Calvin's doctrine of Scripture, which in scope and influence is unrivaled in the sixteenth century, is a doctrine of reading Scripture....

Love.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Love always love without punctuation but watch for those blank pages it's something as simple as this--one day you wake up and remember a snapped twig, and although you would reenter sleep to find it,...

The Uses of Darkness: Women's Underworld Journeys, Ancient and Modern.
January 1, 2002... By Laurie Brands Gagne Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. ISBN 0-268-04305-1 (cloth), 0-268-04306-X (paper). Pp. xiii + 223. $34.00 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). Operating at the intersection of literary criticism, psychology,...

Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England.
January 1, 2002... Ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8020-3517-5 (cloth), 0-8020-8403-6 (paper). Pp. xi + 270. $65.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). This book joins a corpus of recent work that considers...

Hamlet in Purgatory.
January 1, 2002... By Stephen Greenblatt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-691-05873-3. Pp. xii + 322. $29.95. This book is a something of a departure for Stephen Greenblatt. As the inventor of New Historicism, arguably literary criticism's...

Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661.
January 1, 2002... By Laura Lunger Knoppers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-521-66261-3. Pp. xiii + 249. $59.95. Laura Lunger Knoppers' wonderful new book, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661, contributes...

Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost.
January 1, 2002... By John N. King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-77198-6. Pp. xx + 227. $59.95. Written by one of the leading authorities on the Protestant context of English Renaissance literature, Milton and Religious Controversy:...

"Exiled from Light": Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes.
January 1, 2002... By Derek N. C. Wood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8020-4848-X. Pp. xxii + 247. $55.00. By ironic coincidence Derek N. C. Wood's study was published just two months before Muslim terrorists attacked the World Trade...

Imperfect Sense: the Predicament of Milton's Irony.
January 1, 2002... By Victoria Silver. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-691-04487-2. Pp. xiii + 409. $49.50. Although John Milton has always had admirers (Joseph Addison was an early one), his detractors have been plentiful too. In the...

The Complicity of Imagination: the American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture.
January 1, 2002... By Robin Grey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-49538-5. Pp. viii + 294. $69.95. Robin Grey's The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture is...

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: the Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot.
January 1, 2002... By Kimberly VanEsveld Adams. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8214-1361-9 (cloth), 0-8214-1362-7 (paper). Pp. 300. $59.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). It is widely known that the submissive social ideal of True Womanhood found favor...

Novel Theology: Nikos Kazantzakis's Encounter with Whiteheadian Process Theism.
January 1, 2002... By Darren J. N. Middleton. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-86554-624-X. Pp. xix + 256. $39.95. Many modern authors are currently being reassessed and reinterpreted in the light of postmodern literary criticism. Darren J. N...

Flannery O'Connor's Religious Imagination: a World with Everything Off Balance.
January 1, 2002... By George Kilcourse. New York: Paulist Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8091-4005-5. Pp. viii + 328. $24.95. This is an engaging and useful book in spite of the fact that the author is overly given to the recounting of Flannery O'Connor's stories and...

The Bop Apocalypse: the Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs.
January 1, 2002... By John Lardas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. ISBN 0-252-02599-7. Pp. x + 316. $39.95. Among themselves the Beat writers represented the three mainstream American religions: William Burroughs was a Protestant, Jack Kerouac a...

The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse.
January 1, 2002... By Herman Rapaport. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-231-1234-2 (cloth), 0-231-12315-0 (paper). Pp. xxi + 188. $44.50 (cloth), $17.50 (paper). Theory is dead! Long live theory! Offering a well reasoned history of the...

Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue.
January 1, 2002... By Robert K. Johnston. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000. ISBN 0-8010-2241-X. Pp. 236. $16.99 (paper). Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue is a book that evolved. It began in a course at Fuller Theological Seminary cotaught by...

Finding Cuba.
January 1, 2002... By Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner. Valparaiso (IN): Chimney Hill Press, 2001. ISBN 0-9627300-3-3. Pp. 64. $12.95 (paper). The lure and image of a Promised Land, a homeland, can take many forms, from the physical to the spiritual. In Leaving Cuba...

John's Head.(Poem)
January 1, 2002... John's Head "John's disciples came and took his body and buried it. Then they told Jesus." (Matt. 14:12) We told him the story as we ourselves had heard: big party at the palace, music, wine, Herod's niece gets up...

Election Results. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Based upon a plurality of mail ballots cast this past fall, the following candidates have been elected to CCL office with terms indicated in parentheses: Treasurer-Lloyd G. Davies, Western Kentucky University (2002-03); Director at...

Annual CCL awards luncheon. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... At the CCL luncheon held on 28 December 2001 at Arnaud's Restaurant during the MLA Annual Convention in New Orleans, Paul Delaney (Westmont College) offered the opening invocation. After the luncheon Ralph C. Wood (Baylor University) spoke on...

Invocation. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The Lord be with you. Let us pray. Dear Lord, as we gather to break bread with old friends, and to share a meal with new friends, our hearts are filled with gratitude. Knowing that all good gifts come from you, we thank you for this...

Teaching and living and dying "as if nothing had happened": the example of Tolkien. (News and Announcements).(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... "The world is all grown strange, [declared Eomer]. Elf and Dwarf in company walk in our daily fields; and folk speak with the Lady of the Wood and yet live; and back to war comes the Sword that was broken in the long ages ere ...

Lifetime Achievement Award. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? The work of Paul Ricoeur lets us answer in our first Paul's words, "Much in every way" (Rom. 3:2). Since its beginnings Christianity has sometimes adopted and sometimes rejected elements of the...

Book of the Year Award. (News and Announcements).
January 1, 2002... The annual selection of the Book Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature was made, in this fateful year, in the shadow of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. Following those events, we on the committee continued...

Recipient's response: Ramie Targoff. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... I am very honored to receive this award, in part because Common Prayer was designed to explore the ways in which religious practice not only informs but also helps to shape literary practice. Religion here functions not simply as the...

Lionel Basney Award. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Emily Griesinger's "Why Baby Suggs, Holy, Quit Preaching the Word: Redemption and Holiness in Toni Morrison's Beloved" convincingly argues for the profoundly Christian affirmation of human life found in this 1977 novel. Griesinger shows that,...

CCL regional meetings. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Bryan College will host the CCL Southeast Regional Meeting on 11-13 April 2002. Focused on the theme "Toward a Christian Approach to Literature," the conference will feature a keynote presentation by Patricia A. Ward (Vanderbilt University) and...

Festival of Faith and Writing. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Calvin College's biennial Festival of Faith and Writing will be held on 18-20 April 2002. Registration for the three-day conference is $140. All inquiries and correspondence should be addressed to Conference 2002, Department of English, Calvin...

Mennonite/s Writing: an international conference. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Successor to the conferences Mennonite/s Writing in Canada (1990) and Mennonite/s Writing in the U.S. (1997), this symposium scheduled for 24-27 October 2002 will bring together creative writers, literary critics, and appreciative readers from...

C.S. Lewis Summer Institute. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The C. S. Lewis Summer Institute, an interdisciplinary conference that serves as a focal point of the C. S. Lewis Foundation's efforts to encourage a renaissance of Christian scholarship, will be held at Oxford University on 14-20 July and at...

Thomas Merton conference. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... "The Hawk's Dream" was the provisional title of Thomas Merton's journal for 1968, his final and highly active year. The image comes from Robinson Jeffers' poem "The Torch-Bearer's Race" and refers to the survival of a primordial consciousness,...

Spiritus: a journal of Christian Spirituality. (News and Announcements).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, affiliated with the American Academy of Religion in 1992, has launched an ecumenical and interdisciplinary journal titled Spiritus. Edited by Douglas Burton-Christie (Loyola Marymount...

Chagall's "White Crucifixion".(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Chagall's "White Crucifixion" A single nail overturns the universe sends the minnow of the moon scurrying into the dry river of its voice. Christine L. Turczyn received her Ph.D. from...