Christianity and Literature articles from September 2006

Christianity and Literature archives from September 2006

From the editors.
September 22, 2006... With this issue, the Editors are very pleased to present a new cover design for Christianity and Literature. Our title is presented in new font, and our cover is graced by the image of a tree. Each season will bring a different color to the...

Christian typology and social critique in Melville's "The Two Temples".(Herman Melville)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... "The Two Temples," like Melville's other short fiction of the 1850s, is notable for its multi-layered symbolism, allusive density, and subversive thematics. As one of the three so-called "diptychs" from this period featuring paired sketches of...

Words.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Words The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure...

An idolatrous imagination? Biblical theology and romanticism in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte explores from a biblical perspective the ways in which imagination is involved in idolatrous desire and eschatological anticipation. The novel "invokes imagination.... [It] is informed by the energies of high...

Unsaid.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Unsaid So much of what we live goes on inside--The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches Of unacknowledged love are no less real For having passed unsaid. What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. ...

Wingless chickens or Catholics from the Bayou: conceptions of audience in O'Connor and Gautreaux.(Flannery O'Connor, Tim Gautreaux )
September 22, 2006... The critical receptions of Flannery O'Connor and Tim Gautreaux are at very different points, with O'Connor's stories clearly seen as canonical and Gautreaux still in the midst of his writing career. Yet they also have obvious connections, as...

Planting a Sequoia.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Planting a Sequoia All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, ...

"If any fire endures beyond its flame": an interview with Dana Gioia.(SPECIAL FEATURE)(chairman of National Endowment for the Arts )(Interview)
September 22, 2006... Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts since 2003, has been noted for his work as a poet, critic, and anthologist. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in...

Counting the Children.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Counting the Children I. "This must have been her bedroom, Mr. Choi. It's hard to tell. The only other time I came back here was when I found her body." Neither of us belonged there. She lived next door. I...

On Approaching Forty.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... On Approaching Forty The thought pursues me through this dreary town where the wind sweeps down from the high plateau and where a diving chimney swift can cut the slender thread of mountains far away. So soon come...

Of beauty and a father's love.(SPECIAL FEATURE)(Pleasures of the Harbor by Phil Ochs)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: praise Him. --Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty" Like many academics, I am a bit of a pack rat. One of the things I have allowed to collect dust and still be lugged around is a box of old...

Words made flesh: poetry and the eucharistic feast.(Little Low Heaven)(Radiance)(A Slender Grace)(Rebekah Orders Lasagna)(Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Little Low Heaven. By Anthony Butts. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University Press, 2003. ISBN 1-930974-26-4. Pp. 60. $14.00. Radiance. By Barbara Crooker. Cincinnati, Ohio: Word Press, 2005. ISBN 1-9323-3991-4. Pp. 85. $17.00. ...

Speaking of Love.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Speaking of Love Speaking of love was difficult at first. We groped for those lost, untarnished words "[hat parents never traded casually at home, The radio had not devalued. How little there seemed left to us. ...

The wound as memory of ineffable touch: four poets offer a way through.(Compass of Affection. Poems New and Selected)(Common Life)(Weeknights at the Cathedral)(Deaths and Transfigurations: Poems)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Compass of Affection. Poems New and Selected. By Scott Cairns. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006. ISBN 1-55725-503-2. Pp. x + 172. $25.00. Common Life. By Robert Cording. Fort Lee, NJ: CavanKerry Press, 2006. ISBN 0-9723045-7-6. Pp. xv +...

The Litany.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... The Litany This is a litany of lost things, a canon of possessions dispossessed, a photograph, an old address, a key. It is a list of words to memorize or to forget--of amo, amas, amat, the conjugations of a dead...

A California Requiem.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... A California Requiem I walked among the equidistant graves New planted in the irrigated lawn. The square, trim headstones quietly declared The impotence of grief against the sun. There were no outward signs of human...

Prisoner of Conscience: John Bunyan on Self, Community and Christian Faith.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Prisoner of Conscience: John Bunyan on Self, Community and Christian Faith. By Galen K. Johnson. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2003. ISBN 1-84227-223-3. Pp. xvi + 235. $27.99. Galen Johnson, theology professor at John Brown University in...

Wailing Walls.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Wailing Walls. By Philip C. Kolin. Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania: Wind and Water Press, 2006. ISBN 0-711420-2-5. Pp. 52. $9.98. Readers of Christianity and Literature will no doubt be familiar with Philip C. Kolin's scholarship and poems that...

Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode.(The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode. By Malcolm Woodland. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. ISBN 0-87745-928-2. Pp. xix + 256. $37.95. The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie. Edited by J. Donald...

The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy. By Robert Baker. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. ISBN 0-268-02182-1. Pp. xvii + 405. $30.00. Roughly speaking, philosophical aesthetics since Kant...

Lessons of the Masters.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Lessons of the Masters. By George Steiner. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN0-674-01207-0. Pp. 198. $19.95. In 2002 George Steiner delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University on the art and lore of...

The Decline of the Secular University.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Decline of the Secular University. By C. John Sommerville. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-19-530695-3. Pp. 147. $22.00. Criticisms of universities and professors have been around for some time. One such is that...