Christianity and Literature articles from January 2009

Christianity and Literature archives from January 2009

From the editors.
January 1, 2009... At the end of each year, we prepare a report for the Board of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, providing details about subscriptions and submissions to Christianity and Literature during the previous twelve months. We would also...

The American "Lives" of Jesus: the malleable figure of Christ as a man of the people.
January 1, 2009... The religious culture of late nineteenth-century America involves a curious combination of theological debate and popular social reform rhetoric. A battle for cultural authority emerges in print culture between church leaders and social reform...

Cold Easter.(Poem)
January 1, 2009... Cold Easter Not even early, but the weather's all turned around; this April's colder than last December. Every day, a sputter of snow that turns the air white, but the grass burns its green fire, and nothing sticks. Nothing...

Queen Esther's Name Change.(Poem)
January 1, 2009... Queen Esther's Name Change With one word they have hurled me to the heavens. I cannot believe in these creatures that flicker to their deaths each morning like the palace lamps. Better the myrtles I used to visit...

Meursault's dinner with Raymond: a Christian theme in Albert Camus's L'Etranger.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... As most readers of Albert Camus's masterpiece, L'Etranger [The Stranger] are aware, Camus conceived his protagonist Meursault as a type of Christ figure. In his famous introduction to the 1955 American University edition, he wrote, "[this is]...

Catechism.(Poem)
January 1, 2009... Catechism What sort of belief would you say is yours? Porous. Calibrated to the times. The week. In what ways has superflux affected you? Too much esteem. Tuned finely to the body's work. What do you fear has not...

My Fellow Creatures Do A Better Job Than I.(Poem)
January 1, 2009... My Fellow Creatures Do A Better Job Than I Everything shuts down in the hummingbird when it must endure extreme cold in paradise, where there is always a price to pay. To survive the icy nights it shuts down everything but...

A seminar on Christian scholarship and the turn to religion in literary studies.
January 1, 2009... Early in 2005, Stanley Fish roused his slumbering colleagues with a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "One University, Under God?" The title was provocative; the question mark rhetorical. For Fish suggested that the old...

Subjectivity, revolution, invention.
January 1, 2009... The turn to religion in theory--and I think particularly here of the recent work by Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek on St. Paul--is potentially a great boon to literary studies. Theology matters in a way that it hasn't in a long time in...

Behind the barricades with Lenin? Making sense of the Marxist turn to Christianity in the literature classroom.(Vladimir Lenin)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2009... During the spring semester of my third year in graduate school, I began hearing strange grumblings from the underground about two notable Marxist scholars of the early modern and premodern periods converting to the Christian religion. Why, so...

Postsecularism and a prophetic sensibility.(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2009... Recent fiction signals a shift in orientation with regard to the religious. Many contemporary novels depict the performance of a "turning" in the lives of characters or the introduction of moments of mystery and religious possibility, such as...

African American literature as spiritual witness: the poetic example of Margaret Alexander Walker.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... Birthed during the watery baptism of the Middle Passage between Africa and the New World, African American literature is the product of hybrid cultures, hybrid worlds, and hybrid religions. The experiences and memories of traditional African...

The challenge of Christianity for gay and lesbian criticism--and vice versa.
January 1, 2009... The current turn to religion in literary criticism is a return--a repetition, but one with critical differences. Arguably two of the most important differences are, first, that literary critics today are generally less knowledgeable about even...

Seeing "That of God" in texts: Christian practices for training in perception.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... The diversity of submissions for the seminar on the turn to religion in literary studies makes it clear that there are in fact many contemporary turns to religion. My article is concerned with the study of religious practice as part of that...

The Jouissance of belief: devotional reading and the (re)turn to religion.
January 1, 2009... In part, the contemporary critical interest in religion derives from epistemological and not ontological concerns, meaning that ideas about God aren't what contemporary scholars find compelling so much as the knowledge of what religious people...

The practices of faith: worship and writing.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2009... What has been characterized as the turn to religion in literary studies has arisen, I believe, at least in part from a recognition among new historicist and cultural studies critics that producing historicized and culturally astute analyses of...

Our turn now? Imitation and the theological turn in literary studies.
January 1, 2009... Under a starry sky I was taking a walk, On a ridge overlooking neon cities, With my companion, the spirit of desolation, Who was running around and sermonizing, Saying that I was not necessary, for if not I, then someone...

What counts as Christian criticism?(Essay)
January 1, 2009... As the title of my article suggests, I am concerned to determine what Christians can contribute to literary studies that non-Christian critics cannot. It is not unusual today for some Christian literary scholars to assume because they are...

Lost in inculturation: on the invisible and fragmented body of Christ in literary studies at the present time.(Essay)
January 1, 2009... "The turn to religion" describes a recent surge in papers, books, and panels on religion or a religious subject. This marked increase seems to come from three different factors: 1) 9/11 and the post-9/11 climate, which have foregrounded...

Concluding questions.
January 1, 2009... Kim's conclusion gestures to the bounty and the frustration of this seminar, its plenitude and its fragmentation. It seems fitting then to conclude with a set of questions that may help to generate productive Christian scholarship in the...

Afterword.(Essay)
January 1, 2009... This first set of reflections hosted by the MLA on the "turn to religion in literary studies" gives us a wide range of questions and issues that could be discussed for a very long time. We hear of new texts that are invited to come under the...

Report to the Sabbatical Committee.(Poem)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Report to the Sabbatical Committee The sabbath of the land itself shall feed you... (Leviticus 25:6) I have taken to heart the ban on cultivation. I have not plowed, planted, pruned, or harvested. Neither plan nor...

A tribute to Robert Detweiler (1932-2008).(In memoriam)
January 1, 2009... On Sunday, August 31, 2008, Robert Detweiler, a leader in the field of Religion and Literature, a contributor to and friend of Christianity and Literature, passed away. Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature in the Graduate Institute of...

The New Testament and Literature: A Guide to Literary Patterns.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The New Testament and Literature: A Guide to Literary Patterns. By Stephen Cox. Chicago: Open Court, 2006. ISBN 0-8126-9591-7. Pp. ix + 394. $36.95. This book begins by linking Christian concepts to certain literary devices (chapter 2). It...

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. By Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-674-02314-5. Pp. 384. $31.50. The...

From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic. By Tobias Gregory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN 0-226-30755-7. Pp. 240. $30.00. The Greek and Roman gods have always been amenable to literary...

The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism. By Adam Potkay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0521-87911-8. Pp. xiii + 304. $99.00. My Funk & Wagnalls office dictionary provides this definition of "joy": "A...

Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction. Eds. Joanne Halleran McMullen and Jon Parrish Peede. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-88146-055-1. Pp. 230. $22.95. This...

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. By Jarlath Killeen. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7546-5813-9. Pp. viii + 194. $99.95. Jarlath Killeen introduces his allegorical approach to Oscar Wilde's two...

Teaching C. S. Lewis: A Handbook for Professors, Church Leaders, and Lewis Enthusiasts.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Teaching C. S. Lewis: A Handbook for Professors, Church Leaders, and Lewis Enthusiasts. By Richard Hill and Lyle Smith. Newcastle, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ISBN 1-847-18149-X. Pp. xiv + 165. $59.99. Drs. Hill...

The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good. By David Parker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8014-4561-3. Pp. x + 195. $35.00. David Parker, Chair and Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong...

The Strategic Smorgasbord of Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Strategic Smorgasbord of Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic. Edited by Deborah C. Bowen. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ISBN 1-84718-161-9. Pp. xi + 344. $79.99. The essays collected in Deborah...

The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar: Redeeming the Soul, Redeeming the Mind.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar: Redeeming the Soul, Redeeming the Mind. Edited by William Lange Craig and Paul M. Gould, with a foreword by Habib Malik. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-58134-939-9. Pp. 200. $18.99....

CCL officer.(NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS)(Conference on Christianity & Literature's Joe Fulton)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Joe Fulton of Baylor University has been appointed as Director At Large to fill the remainder of the term vacated by Susan M. Felch when she became CCL Vice President.