Christianity and Literature articles from March 2003

Christianity and Literature archives from March 2003

Hamlet and Protestant aural theater.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Over the past half-century many Shakespeareans have argued that either Protestantism or Catholicism informs the general Christian ethos of Hamlet. John Dover Wilson, Raymond Waddington, and Roland Mushat Frye are among the many who find in King...

Angels Are Everywhere (and Nowhere).(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Angels Are Everywhere (and) Nowhere) The angels are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Plotless drifters. Which means we ought not to call omnipresent random creatures angelic, no, not at all. These ones are...

Tertullian's Pandora and John Milton's The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... John Milton alludes to the classical myth of Pandora several times in his writings. His earliest reference is in his third prolusion, "On the Harmony of the Spheres," which he wrote while a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, between 1625...

Herman Melville, immortality, St. Paul, and resurrection: from Rose-Bud to Billy Budd.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... In "The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud," Chapter 91 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, second mate Stubb swindles the inexperienced French captain of the Bouton-de-Rose out of a blasted but extremely valuable whale carcass. The chapter opens with an...

Surprise.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Surprise See. There. Quick. The humingbird still on the dead spruce branch above the bee balm flame. She is no blur of wings. And look. Her long nectar- loving beak-- She has...

Vow.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Vow The need to work this land to fit my wants I yield. I vow no more to walk with plans like gossip falling from my mouth. I choose to go in silence, learning, in my sure refusal, the truth that yields to yielding. ...

Hallowed ground: landscape as hagiography in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Two fleeting glimpses of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop have eluded the critical attention of scholars. The first of these two epiphanies appears three-quarters of the way into the...

Turning radius.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Turning Radius When God shifted direction steered into a new heading bringing him in line approximating Abraham's plea, how many new galaxies were formed as he swung about? How many black holes exhaled ...

The Cold-War Christian humanism of Francois Mauriac.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... One would be hard-pressed to find an era more inhospitable to either Christianity or humanism than that of the nascent Cold War in France, which severely tested affirmations of both perspectives. First, and doubtless most formidable, was the...

Requiem.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Requiem I. The Procession The world teeters to contain the images: stone, metal, glass dissolving into dust, a building dropping into itself, the chalky air breathed in like smoke by those who will live ...

Love and Good Reasons: Postliberal Approaches to Christian Ethics and Literature.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... By Fritz Oehlschlaeger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8223-3053-9 (cloth), 0-8223-3064-4 (paper). Pp. x + 313. $59.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). Roughly twenty years ago Alvin Plantinga wrote a seminal article titled "Advice to...

God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... By Claude Rawson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-818425-5 (cloth), 0-19-925750-7 (paper). Pp. xvi + 401. $35.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). Evoking the genocidal last century, Kurtz's "Exterminate all the brutes!" from...

Slavery and the Romantic Imagination.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... By Debbie Lee. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8122-3636-X. Pp. xii + 296. $55.00. Generally speaking, I think, British Romanticists have been content to dispatch concerns with chattel slavery and the slave...

Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: the Spiritual Dimension in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... By Christopher Garbowski. Lublin (Poland): Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press, 2000. ISBN 83-227-1512-9 (paper). Pp. 231. Euro 29.50. Persistent in Tolkien criticism is the question of to what extent, if any, Tolkien's Middle-earth...

Flannery O'Connor: A Life.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... By Jean W. Cash. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. ISBN 1-57233-192-5. Pp. xii + 356. $30.00. In preparing her biography of Flannery O'Connor, Jean W. Cash has spoken with just about everyone who knew O'Connor and who is...

Revising Flannery O'Connor: Southern Literary Culture and the Problem of Female Authorship.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... By Katherine Hemple Prown. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. ISBN 0-81-392012-4. Pp. xi + 201. $35.00. In Conversations with Flannery O'Connor (1987), Richard Gilman reports visiting the author in 1960 at Andalusia and...

North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Roger Greenwald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN 0-226-39035-7. Pp. xxviii + 328. $35.00. In "Epilogue" the speaker describes a beautiful but "pilotless" world, "heavily laden...

With Averted Vision.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... By Hannah Main-van der Kamp. Toronto: St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2000. ISBN 0-9685339-5-7 (paper). Pp. 48. $9.50. Yes, Virginia, that sovereign provenance of beatitude and conflict that is the human soul can still be rendered poetically....

Seeing through.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Seeing Through Cormorants stitch their shadows to a silver pane. A spray of fine-ground cobweb, mist hides distances and makes them limitless. Eighty-year-old Ed in his red plaid shirt cuts and hauls beached logs...

Waves.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Waves The waves are His Chronometers for the world. The blue carpet of heaven Unfolding to the expectant shore. A baptism for each New womb-dwelling soul. Time capsules filled with tears Wearing...

Precisely what this ole boy cain't get a handle on.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Precisely What This Ole Boy Cain't Get a Handle On Some say your god's too little, Your god's not big enough. I like a local god myself. I like the smalltown stuff. A god who's in the details, Who's at the five...