Project MUSE®: Christianity & Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Christianity & Literature.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 59 (2009) through current issue
Latest Articles: Christianity & LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Christianity & Literature2056-56660148-3331Latest articles in Christianity & Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Who Is The Author?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982265
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The author is irrevocably tied to not only the beginning of Western literary culture but also to its later developments. According to Ruth Scodel, the ancient Greeks were fascinated by (literary) authors. They worshiped them, identified their texts, and established canons. Allegoresis, the basis of the ancient Greek interpretation of a literary work, was seen as a process of uncovering the author’s hidden intention, his hyponoia. The oldest exegetical commentaries on the Iliad, preserved as annotations in certain manuscripts, often include the following expressions: “the poet thinks” or “the poet teaches” (for instance, commentaries on the Iliad I, 5c; I, 193b; I, 430a; I, 512c). In their view, the text and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallWho Is The Author?2026-02-05text/htmlen-USWho Is The Author?2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®903372026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Conduct Literature, Pauline Christianity, and Othello’s Disobedient Women
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982266
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In William Shakespeare’s Othello (ca. 1603–1604), Othello demands of Desdemona, “Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write ‘whore’ upon?” (IV.ii.71–72)1 His metaphor casts Desdemona as a text to be interpreted, her body and behavior subject to the same kind of scrutiny that women faced within early modern conduct literature, which outlined proper feminine behavior as opposed to deviant behavior that could lead to the label of whore.2 As such, Desdemona becomes a site of anxiety for Othello, who grows increasingly concerned with “reading” her body and behavior for proof of chastity or infidelity. Othello’s claim of Desdemona’s body as a “goodly book” also evokes the Bible, or the Good Book, which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallConduct Literature, Pauline Christianity, and Othello’s Disobedient Women2026-02-05text/htmlen-USConduct Literature, Pauline Christianity, and Othello’s Disobedient Women2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®978632026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05“This Stone has Something Great to Teach”: Epitaphs, Literature, and Belief in Early New England
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982267
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Scholars of early New Englanders’ religious beliefs have long paid “close attention to the changing vocabularies, grammars, tropes, idioms, and story frameworks they inscribed in their diaries, letters, devotional writings, and other personal papers.”1 The epitaphs carved on their gravestones should be added to this primary source list. Too often dismissed as sentimental doggerel or overlooked entirely, these verses constitute an extensive record of eighteenth-century attitudes towards life, death, and eternity. Indeed, there are few places where contemporary religious worldviews are more clearly documented than in the burying grounds, where messages of great personal significance are literally carved in stone.In
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmall“This Stone has Something Great to Teach”: Epitaphs, Literature, and Belief in Early New England2026-02-05text/htmlen-US“This Stone has Something Great to Teach”: Epitaphs, Literature, and Belief in Early New England2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®931672026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Phenomenology of Reading and Spiritual Formation: Global Christians Reading Crime and Punishment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982268
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How does a book shape a person spiritually? A surge of recent interest in the place of reading in spiritual life—and the larger problem of Christians’ relationship to the cultural and political conflicts of our societies—have helpfully shifted this question’s focal point from the content of literature (and away from censorship debates over the “edifying” or “corrupting” influence of this or that text) and onto the inward experience of a text: onto the spiritual dynamics of the phenomenology of reading, by which a text that can leave any reader (with or without faith commitments) deepened, challenged, inspired, or even transformed.A better understanding of that inward experience, and how it can prompt lasting change
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallThe Phenomenology of Reading and Spiritual Formation: Global Christians Reading Crime and Punishment2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Phenomenology of Reading and Spiritual Formation: Global Christians Reading Crime and Punishment2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®997732026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Memory, History, and Displacement: Modern Subjectivity in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor Trilogy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982269
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The final volume of Evelyn Waugh’s magnum opus, Sword of Honor—a trilogy consisting of Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961)1—marks the entry of “displaced persons” into the vernacular during the final stages of World War II. The protagonist, Guy Crouchback, first encounters the phrase in an official telegraph while serving in Yugoslavia:UNRRA research team requires particulars displaced persons. Report any your district. . . .“What are ‘displaced persons?’” [Guy] asked the Squadron Leader.“Aren’t we all?”He replied: Displaced persons not understood, and received: Friendly nationals moved by enemy. He replied: One hundred and eight Jews.Next day: Expedite details Jews
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallMemory, History, and Displacement: Modern Subjectivity in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor Trilogy2026-02-05text/htmlen-USMemory, History, and Displacement: Modern Subjectivity in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor Trilogy2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®939862026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable by Kevin Killeen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982272
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In The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, Kevin Killeen successfully takes on an ambitious project: to trace the patterns of apophatic thought in the early modern period. Just one of these ideas—early modern philosophy or the apophatic tradition—would be fertile enough ground, yet Killeen merges them in a beautifully written and executed work of scholarship. While the early modern period is often considered a time of Protestant reason, strict scriptural hermeneutic, and scientific schemas, Killeen contends that it was simultaneously haunted by the Unknowable. With his consistently elegant prose, he defines the Unknowable as instances of “the buckling of logic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallThe Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable by Kevin Killeen (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable by Kevin Killeen (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®116812026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Everlasting People: G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations by Matthew J. Milliner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982273
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In his latest book The Everlasting People: G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations, Matthew J. Milliner paints a unique picture of the historical art and literary traditions of North America’s indigenous peoples. Milliner’s expertise as an art historian and theologian provides a unique frame for Chesterton’s life and work. Milliner considers Chesterton’s noteworthy work The Everlasting Man along with some of his obscurer poetry, weaving in his Anglophilic affection for his native England, as well as his fascination for the First Nations peoples during his visits to America.This book provides non-First Nations people (perhaps even Anglophiles like Chesterton), an appreciation of indigenous culture, literary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallThe Everlasting People: G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations by Matthew J. Milliner (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Everlasting People: G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations by Matthew J. Milliner (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®106122026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947 by Mark A. Noll (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982274
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One of my favorite books is a cheap thirty-five cent paperback edition of a 1946 pulp classic titled The Tortured Planet. Beneath the image of a pockmarked moon scoured by deadly laser beams is a curious detail: the author is none other than C. S. Lewis. It is the abridged American edition of That Hideous Strength (Avon 1946), trimmed to 252 pages and tailored—one presumes—for the American midcentury pulp-fiction market: a fascinating artifact of reception history. Yet, in Mark A. Noll’s meticulous and highly footnoted C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947, this abridged version is conspicuously absent. The Macmillan edition of That Hideous Strength, published earlier that same year in May 1946
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallC. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947 by Mark A. Noll (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USC. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947 by Mark A. Noll (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®119232026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art by Fr. Damian Ference (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982275
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In his Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art, Fr. Damien Ference seeks to illuminate the philosophical understanding that underpins Flannery O’Connor’s narrative art. Fr. Ference argues, mainly on the basis of O’Connor’s Catholic upbringing but also on the basis of her expressed affection for Aquinas, that O’Connor’s philosophical foundation was a thoroughly Thomistic one. He then offers, in successive chapters, broad overviews of some essential components of Aquinas’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, concluding each overview with an example of how—in his view—that philosophical foundation is made evident in O’Connor’s fiction. The book
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallUnderstanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art by Fr. Damian Ference (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USUnderstanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art by Fr. Damian Ference (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®113322026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982276
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bell hooks is that rare theorist whose work is both intellectually rigorous and deeply personal. In response to hooks’ death in 2021, the European Journal of Women’s Studies published a roundtable of Black feminists discussing what hooks’ work meant to them. As scholar Ann Phoenix put it in that 2022 roundtable, “what I particularly like about her work is that it is not abstract or abstruse but informed by acute observation of the commonplaces and contradictions of gendered/racialised/classed/historically located everyday lives” (368). hooks’ work on the intersectional oppression of what she termed “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” lends itself to a multiplicity of academic applications.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/751/image/coversmallbell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USbell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®142852026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05