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Finding Christ in Literature, Part 2
Back in 1996 as my husband and I sat eating with a group of doctors in the former Soviet Union, several women from their equivalent to NOW approached us with a strange request: Would someone from our group be willing to teach them the Bible? Through reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian greats, these feminists had encountered references to stories about a burning bush, a man swallowed by a great fish, and a carpenter from Galilee. And they knew they lacked understanding because of their unfamiliarity with the Bible. Would we teach them? In Chuck Colson’s book, The Body, I read of a poet who came to faith while imprisoned…
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Surprised by Christ in the Pages of Literature
Because I teach writing and write novels, one-third of the emphasis in my PhD studies has been the “aesthetics of the novel.” As part of my exam prep, I have spent the past eighteen months reading a ten-page-long list of classic books. One of the great surprises has been finding Christ, Christian characters, and/or Christian theology in unexpected places. People have been asking to know my favorites, so here’s an annotated list in “alpha” order by author. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. This one’s overt—an allegory of the Christian life with a protagonist named (what else?) Christian. It is for good reason this one has endured. Fanny Burney, Camilla. This…
