G.K. Chesterton devotes the first section of his treatise The Everlasting Man to what makes people special. He begins with a simple image: cave paintings. Through images like the one below, he asks us to reimagine the caveman. Far from being a savage, the caveman was an artist. Why does this matter? It’s telling thatContinue reading “Art and Humanity”
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Reflections on Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989) accounts for the embattled state of Christian missions in the last 50 years. As a longtime missionary to India, Newbigin sees how the gospel’s call has been relativized, and he wants to give an account of the gospel that lets the pluralist culture see itself evenContinue reading “Reflections on Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society”
Augustine vs. Augustine
Any Christian consideration of literature has to reckon with Augustine. Namely, we have to reckon with Augustine’s contradictory stance on pagan literature. On the one hand, Augustine decries it. His Confessions opens with him weeping over how he wept for The Aeneid’s Dido instead of for himself. Virgil’s epic deceived him, and he wishes he’dContinue reading “Augustine vs. Augustine”
Litteratura vs. Scriptura
In his essay “What is Literature?” Rene Wellek provides a historical survey of the term. The most interesting fact, from my perspective? We have to go to Tertullian and Cassian in the second century A.D. to find the term [‘litteratura‘] used for a body of writing. They contrast secular, pagan writing, litteratura, with scriptura, theContinue reading “Litteratura vs. Scriptura”
Religious Poetry
In the editorial introduction to a book called George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (1978), Mario Di Cesare discusses how he put the book together. His talking points are revealing. First, Di Cesare finds the title “metaphysical” for the five poets less convincing than “the school of Herbert.” The book only puts Herbert’s nameContinue reading “Religious Poetry”
“What is Literature?”
As I begin to write lessons for the Covenantal Literature curriculum, I keep returning to the question, “What is literature?” It’s a subject of immense importance for a Christian understanding of literature. Is “literature” merely imaginative or fictional writing? If we say that the Bible is “literature,” what are we saying about its content? InContinue reading ““What is Literature?””
Covenantal Symbols in Psalm 37
I read Psalm 37 for my devotions this morning. I knew it best for the promise of its fourth verse: if we delight in the Lord, He’ll give us the desires of our hearts. A closer reading of the Psalm reveals specific declarations about ethics and succession. Those two covenantal points are connected with specificContinue reading “Covenantal Symbols in Psalm 37”
Representation
W.J.T. Mitchell’s article on “Representation” in Critical Terms for Literary Study begins with this observation. Man, for many philosophers both ancient and modern, is the “representational animal,” homo symbolicum, the creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs—things that “stand for” or “take the place of” something else. For Christians, human beingsContinue reading “Representation”
Values and Language
From the introduction to the University of Chicago Press’s Critical Terms for Literary Study: Theory isn’t difficult out of spite. It is difficult because it has proceeded on the premise that language itself ought to be its focus of attention; that ordinary language is an embodiment of an extremely powerful and usually unquestioned system ofContinue reading “Values and Language”
BRC: Murder on the Orient Express
Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie Take the English cozy murder mystery and set it on a train, while having the justice-meting detective let the guilty go free because he decides the murder itself was justice. That’s what Christie does with this classic Hercule Poirot mystery. Christie’s detective is an expert at readingContinue reading “BRC: Murder on the Orient Express”
Experiments in Criticism 