Faith In Writing: Essays In Honor Of Jack L. Knowles

I’ve now seen photos in which Jack is holding this book, so I can announce it without ruining the surprise.  Since the Table of Contents is not available on amazon.com yet, I figured I’d reproduce it here.  Readers of the Christian Humanist should find at least one name familiar, and those who have ties to east Tennessee might just find several familiar names:

Faith in Writing: Essays in Honor of Jack L. Knowles

Introduction

“The Dream of the Rood”: A Model for Christian Meditation

Patricia Magness

Dante and Desire, or What an Evangelical Youth Group Kid Stands to Learn from a Walk
through Purgatory

Nathan Gilmour

Dancing for Joy

Jeffrey J. Knowles

“Like the Ooze of Oil/ Crushed”: A Christological Clue in Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”

Lee Magness

Journey of the Magi: A Personal Meditation

E. LeRoy Lawson

I Loved My Children’s Bodies

C. Robert Wetzel

Friendship and Beauty in the Midst of the Mundane: Reflections on Crossing to Safety

Philip D. Kenneson

Faith in Writing/Writing in Faith

J. E. Knowles

Alright, I’ll stop being coy: those of you who didn’t go to school at Milligan College or Emmanuel School of Religion (now Emmanuel Christian Seminary) should know that I’m by far the least among these: the other contributors are veteran professors, folks who teach and who have retired as named chairs of theology and humanities, current and former seminary presidents, published novelists, and otherwise very distinguished company.  How I got invited to this party is beyond me.

But listeners to the podcast know that I’m Forrest Gumping it through my academic career, so no surprise there.

Jack Knowles, in whose honor we all wrote, taught the first college class that I ever attended.  (Yes, it was also the first class on my schedule.)  He taught me Virgil and Dante, and he also introduced me to Herodotus and Thucydides and Plato and Aristotle and Calvin.  He was also the first to teach me King Lear and Othello, though certainly he wasn’t the last to teach me better to read those plays.  Knowles remains, in my imagination, the picture of even-handed, responsible learning, and he was one of those who most influenced my own desire to be a specifically Christian intellectual.  I’ve only read my own essay in this collection (I wrote it too), but I have to think that those who taught alongside him likewise value his career.

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
- 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
- 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.

General Introduction
- What’s not on the blog?
- Thus begins the triptych of spring 2012

New Testament Humility
- The ethics of humility
- The Golden Rule, further
- Christ’s kenosis and ours
- Greatness requires great humility
- Gregory the Great Servant

Thomist Humility
- Aristotelian balance
- Seven virtues
- The interconnectedness of virtue
- Humility as check on magnanimity

Dante’s Terrace of the Prideful
- Exemplary statues
- The triple humility of the Annunciation
- David’s humble showmanship
- Trajan as model for Christian humility
- Justice needs humility
- The trials of the proud

Nietzsche Deconstructs Humility
- Return to pagan morality
- Inversion of master and slave
- Socratic and Christian humility
- Freud’s Neurotic Humility
- Modern self-esteem

Literary Humility
- The quiet hobbit
- Whitman’s egotheism
- Rebel rebel angels join the chorus

Humility as Tool of the Powerful
- Philippians as cure
- Quiet oppression
- The example of Africa
- Thomas’ pre-solution
- What isn’t humility?
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Christian Classics, 1981. Five Volumes.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. Three Volumes.

Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. New York: Norton, 2012.

Milton, John. The Complete Poems. New York: Norton, 2004.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Adrian del Caro. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Seattle: Mariner, 2005.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Modern Library, 1993.

General Introduction
- Welcome back, Professor Grubbs!
- Welcome back, respectability!
- How did Nathan blog so much?

What Is Romanticism?
- Not the sentimental relationship
- Not the genre
- Not the global mindset
- The Romantic movement and the Enlightenment
- Searching for a starting date
- The problem with Romantic innovation
- Particular over universal
- Post-Enlightenment, not anti-Enlightenment

Political Revolutions
- American and French Revolutions and the Enlightenment
- Tempering the Enlightenment
- Where the French Revolution went wrong
- The Cult of Reason
- The Cult of the Supreme Being
- The Reign of Terror
- Napoleon’s Takeover

The Grimms
- Fairytale as new genre
- The rise of national consciousness
- Folklore
- From particular to universal
- The invention of childhood

“Self-Reliance”
- The one-sided Emerson
- The individual! The individual! The individual!
- Trust thyself
- Impulses from the devil
- And how is your Oversoul today?
- Consistency and contradiction
- Nietzsche and Emerson

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
- The individualistic epic
- Byron as Jackson Browne
- Byron’s satisfied unhappiness
- Model for the New Evangelicalism

Romantic Literary Criticism
- The rise of the English department
- Art as personal expression
- How the Romantics ruined Shakespeare
- The mirror and the lamp

The Good and Bad of the Romantic Legacy
- Individual experience
- Learning about emotion
- The apologetics of desire
- Originality and authenticity in religion
- Church traditions as folklore and baseball teams
- Subjectivity
- Existentialism Is a Romanticism
- The Christian Imagination
- Turning to the small town
- Nationalism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 2007.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam, 2000.

Kalevala, The. Trans. Keith Bosley. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. New York: Penguin, 2007.

General Introduction
- Still in the decimels
- Grubbs and the yearbook

Who Is Philip Cary?
- And who designed his book cover?
- Eastern University
- Anxiety and the Protestant tradition
- Academics and popular writings

Why read Cary?
- The prevalence of the New Evangelicalism
- Taking the New Evangelicalism seriously
- Counseling students

What Is the New Evangelicalism?
- Consumerism + Protestantism
- Novelty, desire, lack of responsibility
- I’m only human
- Keeping up with the Joneses
- Anxiety enters in

Hearing God’s Voice in Your Heart
- Getting psychological
- Why you can’t necessarily trust your interior voice
- Biblical illiteracy
- Making up your own God
- When you can trust your instincts

Don’t Miss Heaven by Fourteen Inches
- Hebrew vs. Greek
- Thinking about feelings
- Reflecting unanxiously about your motivations
- Proper sequences
- Emotions as perception
- Who’s to blame?
- Revival preachers and advertising

Tedious Imperatives
- Bible-shaped imagination
- Applying literature
- Application, and then application

But What Can Professors Do?
- Why teaching literature helps
- The peasant women
- Using your authority
- Don’t just assign it

What We Would Add
- Well, my Bible says that . . .
- Theological trump card
- Deliberation
- Shaping the affections

General Introduction
- The end of the semester
- Freudian slips

The Surplus Population
- Scrooge and Thomas Malthus
- Enlightenment optimism
- Population checks
- Tiny Tim as a check on Malthus’ checks

Victorian Ghost Lore
- The chains
- The teleology of ghosts
- Conventional skepticism
- Gravy and graves

Dickens and Capitalism
- Fezziwig vs. Scrooge
- Misers vs. capitalists
- The capitalist as the life of the party

Tiny Tim
- Symbol or character?
- Wise children and noble cripples
- Christ the healer of the lame
- Tiny Tim as Pelagian Christ figure

Christmas Yet-To-Come
- Where Disney gets it wrong
- Imagining your funeral
- Scrooge’s conception of fate
- Does the reality of the vision matter?

Dickens and Advent
- Gilmour’s doubleminded Christmas
- Conversion story
- A Christmas Carol as somewhere in between
- How to live in both worlds
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Norton, 1976.

Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Pliny the Younger. The Complete Letters. Ed. P.D. Walsh. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Scott, Walter. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Arden, 2006.