Hello. No show notes today–the topic lends itself to your being surprised. Enjoy!

General Introduction
- David’s new baby
- Last weeks of the semester
- Bewildering listener feedback
- A plug from Homebrewed Christianity

Historicize!
- 9/11
- Bush vs. Gore
- The rise of Fox News
- The origin of red and blue states

The Division
- Haves and also-haves
- City and country
- Religious divides
- Humility and egotism

Ten Years On
- The spread of NASCAR
- When partisanship gets dangerous
- High-spending Republicans
- Who’s driving the party?
- Regional differences

Good and Bad Partisanship
- Stuff can’t get done
- Why gridlock is good

Blue Islands in Red Oceans
- Students and professors
- Where professors live
- Who else votes democrat?
- The UGA suburb machine
- Why don’t college students vote?

The Upcoming Election
- Blurgh
- Nathan’s endorsement
- Who will win in November?

General Introduction
- Where’s Grubbs?
- Tornados in Kansas
- Pronouncing Karamazov
- Translations

Historicize!
- Dostoevsky’s last novel
- Biographical information
- Connections to previous work

The Brothers
- Alyosha: The Christian
- Ivan: The Intellectual
- Dmitri: The Walking Urge
- Smerdyakov: The Lackey

The Grand Inquisitor vs. Father Zosima
- Rebellion
- Ivan’s maltheism
- Jesus comes back to 16^th-century Spain
- Love and power
- Response to Utilitarianism
- Father Zosima lives and speaks

The Children
- Baby Ivan
- Dmitri’s trail of carnage
- Our dog argument
- The cruelty and wonder of children

Miracles and Knowability
- Competing ideologies
- What a narrator
- Central ambiguity
- Can you believe Ivan believing Smerdyakov?

What You Need to Understand It
- A basic understanding of Orthodoxy
- Knowledge of Utilitarianism
- Robin Feuer Miller

Cultural Echoes
- Religious rebels
- Tyler Durden
- American Psycho

General Introduction
- Where’s Grubbs?
- Listener feedback
- Thanks to CWC

What’s So Outrageous?
- Empirical verifiability
- The problems with this model
- A rabbit trail about rhetoric
- Everyone else’s assumptions
- Scientism in the 21^st century
- Self-policing, not persecution

How Viable Is Postmodernism?
- Depends on your discipline
- Poststructuralists’ aging out
- Interdisciplinary cultural studies
- Critical theory vs. poststructuralism
- Internalization

The Golden Rule of Scholarly Discourse
- Cut the slack to others you would want cut for yourself
- Decrying atomism
- Potshots galore!
- Gilmourism vs. atomism
- Nothing buttery on either side

Methodological Secularization
- Methodological naturalism
- Specialization
- Chicks dig the long ball
- Historicize! Historicize!
- The abuse of subjectivity

What We’d Add
- The role of Christian colleges
- The role of scholarship in the Christian college

Prognostication and Evaluation
- Christian networks in secular schools
- But how will the Academy change?
- The state university in decline
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

—. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

—. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2000.

Marsden, George. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

General Introduction
- David’s baby
- On Philip Cary
- Toccoa Falls vs. Emmanuel

Autobiography Pre-Augustine
- Caesar in the third person
- Presenting the self as persona
- St. Paul’s miniature autobiographies
- Marcus Aurelius thanks his friends
- Old Testament sources

Augustine’s Confessions
- God and the I
- Starting at the beginning (the very beginning!)
- Arrogance and humility
- Theological reality as context
- The philosophical books
- The self as allegory

Biography, Autobiography
- The inward turn
- Memory and conscience
- Competitive urges
- What authority?

The Enlightenment Autobiography
- Reason and faith
- Didacticism
- The social biography
- The slave narrative
- Empiricism

The Contemporary Memoir
- What should we expect from it?
- The memoirist’s obligation to his readers
- The memoirist’s obligation to his friends
- To what does the autobiographer owe allegiance?
- The didactic novel

Our Recommendations
- Stanley Hauerwas
- C.S. Lewis
- Margery Kempe
- Frederick Buechner
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Buechner, Frederick. Now and Then. New York: HarperOne, 1991.

Douglass, Frederick and Harriet Jacobs. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Modern Library, 2004.

Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Anchor, 2005.

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2012.

Julius Caesar. The Gallic Wars. Trans. Carolyn Hammond. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Hauerwas, Stanley. Hannah’s Child. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010.

Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. New York: Norton, 2000.

Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. New York: Simon and Brown, 2012.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Trans. Duncan Large. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. New York: Penguin, 1953.

General Introduction
- Disappointing David Grubbs
- Listener feedback
- Stroking and broking the ego
- (Yeah, my math is off)
- A correction
- Theologico et Ratio

Translations
- Old Lady Sayers
- End notes, not footnotes
- Reproducing rhyme and meter
- Ciardi’s middle ground
- Musa, king of Dante
- Wikipedia as savior
- The advantages of reading in translation

Footnotes
- C.S. Lewis gets snobby
- Thundercats and Plutarch
- Spreading our ignorance

Poet and Persona
- It gets better
- Guelphs and Gibilines
- Who is Beatrice?
- How much biography is necessary?
- The pleasures of rereading

Poet as Synthesizer
- Dante’s debt to the Nicomachean Ethics
- How approachable is Aristotle?
- The Philosopher says these things
- Looking up the footnotes
- Nathan’s favorite Thomist
- Social virtue

Medieval Cosmology
- David lectures
- What Lewis says
- Hierarchies and boundaries

Virgil
- The Guide
- Soul-sorting in The Aeneid
- Violating the social contract
- Dante’s poetic furniture
- How good is The Aeneid?
- David defends Orlando Furioso

Mythological Sources
- The absence of Homer
- The venerable Edith Hamilton

Later Dantes
- Hart Crane goes underground
- Cheever’s suburban inferno
- The Burial of the Dead
- O’Connor’s Purgatory
- Who hears Prufrock’s story?

Our Advice
- Read the other two!
- Don’t try to understand every reference
- Train yourself
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. New York: Hackett, 1999.

Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Crane, Hart. The Bridge. New York: Liveright, 1992.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: NAL, 2003.

—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandlebaum. New York: Bantam, 1982. 3 volumes.

—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. 3 volumes.

—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1955. 3 volumes.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. New York: Norton, 2000.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Back Bay, 1998.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.

—. The Great Divorce. New York: HarperOne, 2009.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1998.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2010.

General Introduction
- What song is in David’s heart?
- Good Monday
- When does Spring Break start?
- Listener feedback

Moses in the Desert
- God’s three names
- What tense is God’s I in?
- Self-definition, inscrutability
- Ground of being
- The past and the future
- The Tetragram
- Jewish humor and the Hebrew Bible

The Historical-Critical Method
- Starting with close reading
- Classical philology
- The witness of the Divine Name
- Wellhausen’s conscience
- Our exposure to JEPD

The Conservative Reaction
- The global scope of The Fundamentals
- Mocking Canadians
- How fair is The Fundamentals?
- What offends Fundamentalists?
- Why R.A. Torrey is not a hillbilly

The Liberal Approach
- How Higher Criticism conceives of freedom
- Anti-authority
- Uber-Protestantism
- Sapere Aude!

JEPD and the Middle Ages
- Grubbs can find nothing
- Was Spinoza the first?
- A brief history of the names of God in Medieval theology

The Liberal Mono-Voice
- Other Guilty Parties
- Poisoning the Well
- Ehrman’s logical leaps
- Why historicity and argument matter
- The Club on the Straw Man

Our Advice
- David Grubbs talks Beowulf
- What does inspiration mean?
- A reasonable disagreement
- Rethinking the method of transmission
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Friedman, Richard Elliott. Who Wrote the Bible? New York: HarperOne, 1987.

Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? New York: Penguin, 2010.

McDowell, Josh. More Evidence That Demands a Verdict. New York: Campus Crusade for Christ, 1975.

Torrey, R.A. and A.C. Dixon. The Fundamentals. Ada, MI: Revell, 1994. 4 volumes.

Weaver, Richard. Language Is Sermonic. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State UP, 1985.

Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. Seattle: Bibliolife, 2009.

General Introduction
- Listener feedback
- Who’s listening?
- What’s on the blog?
- Formatting a dissertation

The Patience of Job
- The patience of Job?
- Gregory the Great (again!)
- Shall we blame his friends?
- The plurality of wisdom literature
- Interrogating James
- Humility and patience

New Testament Patience
- Fruit of the Spirit
- Macrothumia: “being long of will”
- Perseverance and endurance
- The time between times
- Multiple patiences

Augustine and Patience
- Yeah, it’s in there
- Good temper
- Patience as species of anger
- Patristic adaptations
- Nathan beats another dead horse

Stoic Patience
- Implication rather than statement
- Thinking clearly about reality
- Our arbitrary world
- One thing leads to another
- Stoicism and Christianity
- Self-control and love

Literary Exemplars
- The patient Griselda
- Abusing patience
- Fabius Maximus as patient dictator
- Olaf, glad, big, and patient
- Defending Booker T. Washington

Learning Patience
- Practical, not intellectual
- Personal virtue
- The Greek and the Christian
- Modeling God’s patience
- Interconnectedness

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. New York: Hackett, 1999.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Cummings, E.E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. New York: Liveright, 1994.

Epictetus. Enchiridion. Trans. George Long. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.

Gregory the Great. Morals on Book of Job. Trans. John Henry Parker. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2010.

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. New York: Simon and Brown, 2012.

Markus, R.A. Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Tertullian. The Writings of Tertullian. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologicae. New York: Christian Classics, 1981. 5 volumes.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. New York: Tribeca, 2011.

General Introduction
- Talking weather
- Listener feedback

The Roots of the Episode
- Who studies the Alamo?
- Davids Grubbs, Crockett, and Bowie
- Stories, not definitions

The Courage of Joshua
- Be strong and courageous
- His previous courage
- Courage as species of faith
- Obeying the law as precondition of courage
- Linguistic curiosity

Thomistic Valor
- How did Thomas adapt Aristotle?
- Fortitude, not manliness
- Martyrs over soldiers
- Daring vs. fortitude

Homeric Bravery
- Courage in the face of absurdity
- Courage as the highest virtue
- The greatest courage in the poem
- Is Achilles invincible?
- Crappy movies

Anglo-Saxon Bravery
- Tolkien weighs in
- The dreary ending
- Nathan complicates matters
- Lost cause-ism

Two Eras of Poetry
- Tennyson’s ambivalent skepticism
- The living dead become the dead dead
- Owen returns the ticket
- Dulce et decorum est pro amico mori

Other Examples
- Camus twists Thomas
- Crane twists Aristotle

Average Everdayness Courage
- The lessons of Joshua
- Spoiling Lord Jim
- Nathan dodges the question
- Platonic rather than Aristotelian courage
- Can courage be allegorized?

Girlchild: A Novel
By Tupelo Hassman
277 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24.

In her debut novel, Girlchild, the improbably named Tupelo Hassman tells the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, a girl in her early teens who lives with her mother in a trailer park in Reno, Nevada. The Hendrixes exist near the bottom of the social order, living their lives between a Nobility trailer, a truck stop, and one of the myriad casinos that pepper Reno. Their lives are focused almost entirely on survival, and the conditions under which they live are bleak.

The Hendrixes and their neighbors are, in other words, a group that most of the civilized world has given up on. Even their neighborhood, which Rory refers to as “the Calle” throughout the novel holds in its history a promise and a betrayal:

At the first curve off the I-395 a promise was erected of what was to come, bold white letters against a gold background, calle de las flores—come home to the new west. But soon after the first sewer lines were laid down and the first power lines were run up, the investors backed out because the Biggest Little City in the World was found to be exactly that, too little. With its dry, harsh climate and harsher reputation, Reno could not support suburbs of a middle-class kind, and the new home buyers needed to make the Calle’s property values thrive never arrived. Once the big money figured that out, the big money said adios and Calle de las Flores ended before it’d begun.

Eventually, “de las Flores”—“of flowers”—rots off the sign, and all that’s left is the “Calle,” suggesting that the characters who people this novel live out on the street, regardless of how warm their trailers get.

Even so, Rory and her mother and grandmother are for a time able to form a sort of feminine bower out in the high desert, with most men being unnamed, absent, or ineffectual. And yet it seems that the Hendrixes have tragedy and poverty in their bloodline, making it only a matter of time until what sad and miniature blisses they can form in the Calle are blown to pieces.

This description makes Girlchild sound either like poverty porn or like a vehicle for Oprah Winfrey-style uplift. Hassman flirts with the latter, and at times her novel threatens to collapse into sentimentality and melodrama. She is saved by a streak of experimentalism that runs throughout the book, which features very short chapters written in a variety of styles. The major voice is Rory’s, of course, which at its best recalls Alice Walker’s Celie in its simplicity and pathos—but other chapters are composed as dispassionate sociology, blackly humorous mathematical equations, and parodies of the language of the Girl Scout handbook. Hassman’s narration stubbornly refuses to stand still, much to its credit.

The charge of poverty porn, meanwhile, shouldn’t gain much traction among people who read the novel. Hassman refuses either to romanticize the lives of her characters or to gawk at them. We’re invited into Rory’s world, and we see things that horrify and delight us, but Hassman loves and understands these people too well to allow us to treat them like tourist attractions.

And yet, while Girlchild is an emotionally rich and moving novel, Hassman cannot quite hold onto it. She introduces elements—child molestation, girl scouts, the sad case of Vivian Buck, who was sterilized for being “feeble-minded”—in a way that suggests she intends to wrap them all together, and yet these connections never get made. Rory’s autobiography remains a bit of a jumble, not in the skillful way suggested by the changing narration, but in a way that suggests Hassman wanted to include everything she possibly could. This is not an uncommon problem among first-time novelists, of course, and Hassman clearly has a great deal of talent.

In the end, Girlchild is at its most effective in its emotional fullness and in its ability to stir reader sympathy for a group that most novelists largely stay away from—the group of lower-class whites often pejoratively called “trailer trash.” Hassman’s deep understanding of and clear affection for even the most indolent people in the Calle raises them into the subject of something approaching high art.