Christianity and Literature articles from June 2007

Christianity and Literature archives from June 2007

Carnival in the "Temple": Flannery O'Connor's dialogic parable of artistic vocation.
June 22, 2007... Faced with a dreaded pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1958, Flannery O'Connor consoled herself by gleefully anticipating the conversations of her fellow pilgrims. They could not fail to be, as she put it, "professionally rewarding" (The Habit of Being...

Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Anglican Authority.
June 22, 2007... In my judgment, an epic poem must either be national or mundane. As to Arthur, you could not by any means make a poem national to Englishmen. What have we to do with him? --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833 The Arthurian Romance has every...

Feast of the Epiphany.(Poem)
June 22, 2007... Feast of the Epiphany That town along the tracks where trains no longer stopped had more bars than churches, but everyone kept Christmas so on January sixth, a day most of us could not name, volunteer firemen gathered at...

January Letter to Scooter.(Poem)
June 22, 2007... January Letter to Scooter You should have been here last night as I tried to take down the tree, the child so distraught she sobbed herself to sleep on the rug. I'd set out a special box for the bird family, but she...

"Take, eat": food imagery, the nurturing ethic, and Christian identity in The Wide, Wide World, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
June 22, 2007... Depictions of food and food preparation pervade American sentimental and domestic novels of the nineteenth century. Food and consumption imagery is ubiquitous in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,...

A Year After the Bushfire.(Poem)
June 22, 2007... A Year After the Bushfire from within the blackness of last summer's fire, grevilleas sprout and charred banksias bloom, and, stopping and looking (intently, near) I see God before me and witness his quilting, a grand,...

Peter Wimsey and Precious Ramotswe: castaway detectives and companionate marriage.
June 22, 2007... Introduction To the surly South African border guard who asks "How can a woman be a detective?" Mma Precious Ramotswe responds "with dignity, 'Many women are detectives.... Have you not read Agatha Christie?'" (McCall Smith 209). (1) This...

The Ballad of Cain.(Poem)
June 22, 2007... The Ballad of Cain Far from the place of serpent tricks and apples that my mother picks, the serpents here just crawl away for I've long since been led astray. The outcast's mark across my face tattoos the rage of...

The Desert.(Poem)
June 22, 2007... The Desert On the chapel wall, the words, quoting Hosea quoting God: The desert will lead you to your heart Where I will speak. Prayer, he means, is to be wrested from stillness; and it was the desert then, the desert...

Paganism and literature.(SPECIAL FEATURE)
June 22, 2007... I Christianity's encounter with other cultures is, originally and foundationally, the encounter with paganism. And it is the uniform thought of the early church, as far as we can discern it, that the literary arts belong to the pagan world...

Principle, narrative, commandment.(SPECIAL FEATURE)
June 22, 2007... The three words of my title are meant to refer to three chief ways in which the Bible has been appropriated for Christian critical discourse. And by that I mean both discourse about scripture and discourse about literature that is in some way...

In the Company of Demons: Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... In the Company of Demons: Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance. By Armando Maggi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN 0-226-50130-2. Pp xii + 244. $40.00. Armando Maggi, Associate Professor of Romance...

Enigmas and Riddles in Literature.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... Enigmas and Riddles in Literature. By Eleanor Cook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-521-85510-1. Pp. xix + 291. $75.00 "Clenched fists coming, open hands going." For the great folklorist and riddle collector Archer...

The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content. By Joe B. Fulton. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8142-1024-4. Pp. xiv + 228. $41.95. In Mark Twain's Religion (Mercer University Press, 2003),...

Flannery O'Connor's Radical Reality.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... Flannery O'Connor's Radical Reality. Edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. ISBN 1-57003-601-2. Pp. xvii + 196. $39.95. Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp, the...

Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction. By James W. Coleman. Baton Rouge, LA: University of Louisiana Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8071-3091-5. Pp. 252. $42.95. In...

From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy. By Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006. ISBN 1-58743-133-5. Pp. 272. $19.99. Dickerson and O'Hara have crafted a readable, well-organized, and...

Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith.(What the Light Was Like)(Book review)
June 22, 2007... Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith. By Jennifer L. Holberg, ed. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006. ISBN 10-0-8028-3229-6. Pp. xiv + 257. $15.00. What the Light Was Like. By Luci...

The Best Christian Short Stories.(Book review)
June 22, 2007... The Best Christian Short Stories. Edited by Bret Lott. Nashville: WestBow Press, 2006. ISBN 1-5955-4077-6. Pp. vii + 252. $14.99. Modeled on popular year-end anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories or New Stories from the South,...

MLA Allied Organization approval.(NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS)
June 22, 2007... The Conference on Christianity and Literature has recently been approved for another seven years as an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association. This status allows CCL two sessions at each MLA convention. In order to be approved,...

The 2007 Southwestern Regional Conference.(Conferences and Calls for Papers)
June 22, 2007... The 2007 Southwestern Regional Conference will be held Sept. 2829 in Arlington, Texas. "The theme of the conference will be "Alarming Necessities: Taste, Reading, and Theology," and keynote speakers will include Stephen Pricket and Frank Burch...

The 2007 Northeastern Regional Conference.(Conferences and Calls for Papers)
June 22, 2007... The 2007 Northeastern Regional Conference will be held Oct. 26-28 at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts. The theme of the meeting is "Making Peace in our Time." For more information, contact Dr. Mary-Anne Vetterling by email at...

By-Laws of the Conference on Christianity and Literature.
June 22, 2007... Preamble We, the members of the Conference on Christianity and Literature (herein-after called the Society), believing that distinct benefits may be derived for Christian teachers of literature and the institutions they serve, by a closer...