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18 Christianity and Literature
Get accessRalph C. Wood has been University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas (USA) since 1998. From 1971-97, he taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion. His books include The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (1988); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (2004); Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (2004); Literature and Theology (2008); and Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (2011).
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Published:03 February 2014
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Abstract
It is virtually impossible to discern the character of western literature apart from its relation to the various forms of Christian tradition, no matter whether this Christian literary presence is central or tangential, affirmative or hostile. Augustine, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hopkins, Joyce, and Eliot are obvious examples. Roughly considered, two kinds Christian theology have been recently employed in making such theological discernments. The first is represented by Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner. It seeks to discern both smaller and larger intersections between Christianity and secularity, detecting the Sacred even in such non-Christian texts as Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. The second approach is found in Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Their theologies are often employed in making both a prophetic critique and a sacramental reclamation of the Christian Gospel as it is present or absent in such authors as Flannery O’Connor.
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