“We should, however, approach Augustinian aesthetics not in medieval but in Reformation terms, taking account of the important new factor introduced by the Reformation — an overwhelming emphasis on the written word as the embodiment of divine truth. In this milieu the Christian poet is led to relate his work not to ineffable and intuited …
Spasms of Self-Righteousness
“There is nothing so absurd, wrote Macaulay in the middle of the nineteenth century, as the spectacle of the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality; but now the spectacle is sinister as well as absurd. To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to …
Away or To?
“Our ability to drive an hour to get to church has more often than not created distance from our next door neighbors, and it has done this without really creating closeness to those we worship with when we are done with our drive. For various reasons, we do more driving away than driving to” (Mother …
Deep Roots
“My contention [is] that the poetics of much seventeenth-century religious lyric derives primarily from Protestant assumptions about the poetry of the Bible and the nature of the spiritual life” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 5)
Double Witness
“This brings us at last to the fifth aspect of Christian witness, which concerns the preacher . . . We may summarize the biblical view of Christian witness by saying that it is borne before the world by the Father to the Son through the Spirit and the Church . . . This double witness …
Don’t Know What We Think Anymore
“Thanks to the sexual revolution, current confusions are manifold. In a society that forms sexual liaisons with scarcely a thought, a passing suggestive remark can result in a lawsuit; the use of explicit sexual language is de rigeur in literary circles, but medical journals fear to print the word ‘prostitute’ and use the delicate euphemism …
Imagine
“In the ancient world, it took some explaining to show the, in the command to love our neighbor, a despised alien fell under the biblical definition of neighbor. But in the modern world, it takes some explaining to show that our neighbors are our neighbors” (Mother Kirk, p. 224).
From Donne to Taylor
“Specifically, my concern here is with the biblical, Protestant poetics informing a major strain of English seventeenth-century religious lyric: the chief characteristic of that poetics can, I suggest, be clearly discerned, and the history of the literary impact traced with some precision — from the quickening of Donne to the developing theory, to the exhaustion …
Confused Enlightenment
“If there is one thing of which modern man is utterly convinced, it is that he has reached a state of sexual enlightenment . . . Yet, as enlightened as we believe ourselves to be, a golden age of contentment has not dawned—very far from it . . . The sexual revolution has not yielded …
The Siren Call of Weirdness
“A cult mentality is ‘obviously’ exhibited by anyone who does not want to live in the prescribed atomistic and detached way — one who does not want to be just another loose ball bearing rattling around in modernity’s machine. The contemporary standards will beckon with a siren call — any kind of weirdness is accepted …