Christianity and Literature articles from January 2003

Christianity and Literature archives from January 2003

From the editor.(Editorial)
January 1, 2003... In this space I again summarize portions of my most recent report, presented at the MLA Annual Convention, to the Conference on Christianity and Literature's Board of Directors. That document always includes statistics on the submissions...

Erratum.(Correction Notice)
January 1, 2003... In William V. Davis' "'Talked to by silence': Apocalyptic Yearnings in Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris" published in the Autumn 2002 issue, ellipses indicating that passages quoted from Gluck's poems are not continuous were inadvertently omitted....

In memoriam.(Joseph M. Schwartz, )(Obituary)
January 1, 2003... Joseph M. Schwartz, In Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More urges Richard Rich to be a teacher. When Rich asks who would know of his success as one, More replies: "You, your pupils, your friends, God... not a bad public, that"...

"Our own periodical pulpit": Thomas Carlyle's sermons.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... For more than a century and a half, literary scholars have drawn on the imagery of prophecy to describe the writings of Thomas Carlyle. The authoritative commands, the wholesale denunciations, the exhortations to understand "the times" the...

Making Christ: Alice Meynell, poetry, and the eucharist.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... We too (one cried), we too, We the unready, the perplexed, the cold, Must shape the Eternal in our thoughts anew, Cherish, possess, enfold. --"To the Mother of Christ The Son of Man" Alice Meynell, whose poetry is seldom read or...

Pilgrimage.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Pilgrimage We never knew the way, couldn't get there for the going. All day the sky had been grey with a light mist falling. Not knowing what we were looking for or finding had found, we were anxious to finish...

Relieving Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea: semiotics, suicide, and the search for God in Walker Percy's The Second Coming.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... Walker Percy's interest in existentialism and especially the work of Jean-Paul Sartre is no secret among literary critics. Kathleen Scullin has argued that Lancelot is "in effect Percy's response to Sartre in fiction" (110); other scholars such...

John Updike as theologian of culture: Roger's Version and the possibility of embodied redemption.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... 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...

The River Remembers. (Poetry).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... The River Remembers (for my father) You took two big quick last breaths Like a Japanese pearl diver breath- Holder beneath the surface swimmer Reaching underwater reef breathless Diver down after shells in the...

Hawthorne and Sin.
January 1, 2003... [This solicited essay is published with the kind permission of its author, Henry James Professor of English and American Letters and University Professor at New York University, who presented it on 29 December 2002 at a session in his honor...

Reading English Renaissance Literature in Its Church Contexts.("Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric" and "Wrestling with God: Literature and Theology in the English Renaissance. Essays to Honour Paul Grant Stanwood")(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Cunnar, Eugene R., and Jeffrey Johnson, eds. Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8207-0317-6. Pp. viii + 408. $59.00. Henley, Mary Ellen, and W. Speed...

The Cedar Waxwing. (Poetry).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... The Cedar Waxming It took sheer plod this morning to head uphill in cold rain to teach "The Windhover," scapes, inscapes, stress, instress, great stress, Duns Scotus, this-and-thatness in a mind all mish-mash like...

The Book: a History of the Bible.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Christopher de Hamel. London: Phaidon Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7148-3774-1. Pp. xi + 352. $39.95. Christopher de Hamel's claim that there is "no single source for the breadth of the subject covered by this book" is bold but accurate (330)....

Grammars of Creation.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By George Steiner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-300-08863-9. Pp. 344. $29.95. To survey the fields that George Steiner traverses in any of his books is daunting intellectual exercise. To evaluate his positions entails...

Satan Unbound: the Devil in Old English Narrative Literature.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Peter Dendle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8020-4839-0 (cloth), 0-8020-8369-2 (paper). Pp. xii + 196. $50.00 (cloth), $22.95 (paper). A considerable body of scholarship on the devil in the Middle Ages has been...

Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Walter Stephens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN 0-226-77261-6. Pp. xv + 451. $35.00. In the ten years since my last review of witchcraft scholarship for Christianity and Literature, several books have challenged the...

The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350-1642.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By John D. Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-521-79090-5. Pp. x + 257. $60.00. Scholars have given various accounts of the transition in England from sacred to secular drama. For all their variety these accounts...

Shakespeare's Twenty-First-Century Economics: the Morality of Love and Money.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Frederick Turner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-512861-3. Pp. viii + 223. $35.00. William Shakespeare's writings are laden, we know, with references to the realms of commerce and the marketplace. The vocabulary of...

Romance and Reformation: the Erasmian Spirit of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Robert B. Bennett. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. ISBN 0-87413-671-7. Pp. 189. $36.00. Robert B. Bennett skillfully and judiciously explores one of Shakespeare's most challenging scripts in a study that argues for the...

King James I and the Religious Culture of England.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By James Doelman. Studies in Renaissance Literature 4. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. ISBN 0-85991-593-X. Pp. 184. $75.00. In the preface to King James I and the Religious Culture of England, James Doelman warns the reader that "this study...

Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Jeffrey S. Shoulson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-231-12328-0 (cloth), 0-231-12329-9 (paper). Pp. xi + 340. $52.50 (cloth), $19.50 (paper). Jeffrey S. Shoulson's Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and...

A Poetics of Jesus: the Search for Christ through Writing in the Nineteenth Century.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Jeffrey F. Keuss. Burlington (VT): Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. ISBN 0-7546-0627-9. Pp. 216. $69.95. After Enlightenment rationalism undermined the authority of the Bible and religious revelation, nineteenth-century European...

Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Christopher Herbert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ISBN 0-226-32732-9 (cloth), 0-226-32733-7 (paper). Pp. xv + 302. $45.00 (cloth), $17.50 (paper). Setting Protagorean thought against Platonic idealism, relativity against...

World as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Bernadette Waterman Ward. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8132-1016-X. Pp. x + 291. $59.95. After finishing this book, I could not think of any other major English poets for whom philosophical...

T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. New York: Palgrave-St. Martin's Press, 2001. ISBN 0-333-71567-5. Pp. xix + 238. $59.95. This fine volume should find a special place on every Eliot scholar's bookshelf. Originating as lectures at a conference...

Iris Murdoch: a Life.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... By Peter Conradi. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. ISBN 0-393-04875-6. Pp. xxix + 706. $35.00. Profoundly attentive, intellectually and sensually, to nearly all manner of individuals, male and female, Iris Murdoch poses quite a...

Rhetorical Faith: the Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish.(and "Justifying Belief. Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric")(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Rhetorical Faith: The Literary Hermeneutics of Stanley Fish. By Phillip J. Donnelly. English Literary Studies Monograph Series, No. 84. Victoria: English Literary Studies, 2000. ISBN 0-920604-75-7. Pp. 159. $15.50 (paper). Justifying...

Agony city. .(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Agony bless me, blisters tender me, friends carry me along and let me carry along this trail of tears that we will decorate with the music of our longings in the empty air between us and the space that gathers round us...

Annual CCL awards luncheon. (News And Announcements).
January 1, 2003... At the CCL luncheon held on 28 December 2002 at Shelly's Restaurant during the MLA Annual Convention in New York, Donald G. Marshall (University of Illinois, Chicago) offered the opening prayer. After the luncheon Janet L. Larson (Rutgers...

Book of the year award. (News And Announcements).(Book Award Committee of the Conference on Christianity and Literature gives award to Jeffrey Knapp)
January 1, 2003... The Book Award Committee of the Conference on Christianity and Literature is assigned the pleasurable yet daunting task of selecting a book published within the last year that "contributed most to the dialogue between literature and the...

Lionel Basney Award. (News And Announcements).(christian literary criticism award given to Sanford Schwartz)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... It is difficult to grow something new in the well-plowed fields of C. S. Lewis studies. However Sanford Schwartz has done just that by considering Lewis's complex and creative transformation of evolutionary thinking in his interstellar romance,...

Lifetime Achievement Award. (News And Announcements).(awarded to English Literature scholar Denis Donoghue)
January 1, 2003... This afternoon the Conference on Christianity and Literature presents its Lifetime Achievement Award to Denis Donoghue. When we give this award, we do more than recognize sustained accomplishment--a "lifetime," or in this case, it would seem,...

CCL Regional Meetings and calls for papers. (News And Announcements).(Calendar)
January 1, 2003... The CCL Southwest Regional Meeting will convene on 26-27 September 2003 at John Brown University. Kathleen Norris will be the keynote speaker addressing the conference theme of "Spiritual Geography." Submissions on that subject or other...

Shakespeare Institute conference. (News And Announcements).(Calendar)
January 1, 2003... Members of CCL are invited to attend the Shakespeare Institute to be held at Wheaton College on 5-7 June 2003. The conference's lectures and discussion will focus on the extent to which Catholic/Protestant teachings inform the tragedies Julius...

New journal. (News And Announcements).(rWp: An Annual of Robert Penn Warren Studies )(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Coeditors William Bedford Clark and James A. Grimshaw, Jr., wish to announce the founding of rWp: An Annual of Robert Penn Warren Studies. Subscriptions are $25.00 per year or $40.00 for two years. Orders may be placed with the Center for...

Ghazal: the marshes in winter. .(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Ghazal: The Marshes in Winter The shape of a day settles in shadow, hesitation, things we've forgotten: watch now the play of light upon faces as the last train leaves. A thought disturbs the air. The graygreen leaves of...