Unveiling Bird Box: My Conference Talk on Apocalypse and Contemporary Culture at the International Conference on Religion & Film, Halifax, NS

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Brenton Dickieson

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting a paper this week at the 2019 International Conference on Religion & Film in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My talk title is “Unveiling Bird Box: Thinking about Genres of Apocalypse and Contemporary Culture.” I’ve included the abstract below.

I intend to have some fun with this presentation, and I am using Zombieland to set up the talk. There is a weird and probably accidental coincidence between the way the Bird Box film thinks about apocalypse and the way that ancient Jewish people wrote apocalypse. It might not be accidental, I suppose, and in terms of genre, apocalyptic film is the great-great-grandbaby of Jewish and Christian apocalypses (like Daniel, Revelation, The Apocalypse of Abraham, 2 Enoch, etc.). But there is a recovery in Bird Box of some peculiar ancient features, so that (in my mind) apocalyptic and postapocalyptic film is uniquely suited to recover that sense of what was going on when Jews started shaping this genre–even in a secular world.

I want to announce this not just to tell folks what I have been up to, but to invite local students to the conference. If you are a student living in Eastern Canada or New England, this is a unique opportunity. While there will be costs involved in going (unless you happen to live in Halifax), there are some great prices involved in this conference. It is FREE for undergraduate students, and only $30 for graduate students. That’s pretty cool, and shows a group of scholars intentional about raising up the next generation. You can register here.

I’m also looking forward to conversations about films that involve Mi’kmaq peoples, including Wi’Kupaltimk (Feast of Forgiveness), which I’ve linked below. Here is a brief description of the heart of the film, which is about food security issues for urban indigenous peoples:

The film [Wi’Kupaltimk] celebrates of the resilience of the Mi’kmaq, and Indigenous people in general; the rich landscape and resources which were available to them prior to colonization, the medicines and wild food that are still available and the sacredness of the food that sustains human beings spiritually, culturally, and physically.

If you are nearby, I would encourage you to join us! I’m presenting on Thursday morning.

Abstract: Unveiling Bird Box: Thinking about Genres of Apocalypse and Contemporary Culture

Bird Box has emerged as a pop culture phenomenon with ads warning the audience, “Don’t Look!” The supposal is basic: a global apocalyptic scenario of near elimination where the near survivors must veil themselves in order to survive. And yet, much of the speculative logic of the film is unknown. Despite widespread social media speculation, we do not know if the entity or entities that threaten human elimination are supernatural or natural. Despite the unknowns, and although the film presents itself as being about veiling, Bird Box is clearly about seeing.­ The tension of looking/not looking that film marketers captured in the ad campaign is not merely a challenge to the audience but is the essential diegetic crisis of the survivors.

While there are many unknowns about the speculative universe of the film, it is clear that it is an entirely post-religious world. And yet, to call the film “apocalyptic” is to recall the Jewish roots of the genre. Observation of themes of seeing in Bird Box reveals intriguing points of continuity and discontinuity with the religious roots of the genre, even in this post-religious film. In exploring definitions in John J. Collins’ The Apocalyptic Imagination and other scholars of Second Temple Jewish and Christian literature, and using examples in sacred texts like The Apocalypse of Abraham, this paper explores ways Bird Box invites us to think about apocalyptic films as revelations for contemporary culture.

Schedule

Thursday, June 13th 2019            

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.                   Morning Sessions One                 

Sobey 260

Amir Hussain, Keeping it Reel: Muslims Changing Images of Muslims in Film and Television

Rubina Ramji, Following the Route of The Muslim Djinn – From Arab Folklore to American Theatres

Serife Goktas, Discovering The Truth With Cinema

Sobey 265

Natasha Wright, The Devil Wears Prada and so does the Witch: Female Bodies as ‘Evil’ in Horror

Jason WM Ellsworth, Jurassic Constructions: What Dinosaurs in Film Can Teach Us About Religion

Brenton Dickieson, Unveiling Bird Box: Thinking about Genres of Apocalypse and Contemporary Culture

 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.                Morning Sessions Two                 

 Sobey 260

Philip Deslippe, Yogis and Swamis in Early American Film

Harshita Yalamarty, “Wear the Turban, Pray to God, Beat up Bad Guys”: Religion, Masculinity and Superheroes in ‘Super Singh’

Sailaja Krishnamurti & Saira Chibber, Hindu normativity and South Asian American masculinities in diasporic cinema

Sobey 265

Adam Stewart, Framing Masculinity in Evangelical Film

Diana Abernethy, Worthy of Love: The Omission of Biblical Quotations in Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time

Zachary Ingle, A Heady Brew of Christian Science, Salvation Army, and the Social Gospel

2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.                    Afternoon Sessions                       

Sobey 260

Thomas Curran, Religion and Verisimilitude in Film

Johan Roeland & Miranda van Holland, “A more plausible Jesus”: the many faces of authenticity in the Jesus Christ Superstar phenomenon

Andrew Quicke, Christian Box Office: Why did Fox Fail, Sony Succeed?

Sobey 265

John Lyden, Sacred Death: Legitimizing Sacrifice in American War Films

Dan Brockway, A God of Violence and Nonviolence?: Imagining Hacksaw Ridge and The Birth of a Nation (2016) in a Shared Cinematic Universe

Kelly MacPhail, “Got to hate fences”: Authority and Spiritual Anarchy in Lonely are the Brave (1962)

Friday, June 14th

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.                   Morning Sessions One  

Sobey 260

Monisa Qadri, Locating the muslim woman’s identity in Shyam Bengal’s Cinema

Zainub Beg, Jodha Akbar: A Case of Interfaith marriage, Bollywood, and ‘Otherness’

Nadira Khatun, Constructing a New Identity of Bengali Muslims in Zulfiqar, Rajkahini, and Kabir

Sobey 265

Jeanette Reedy Solano, No Promised Land: Immigrant Realities in Independent Film

Darrell Varga, Indigenous Resistance and Popular Cinema: Rhymes for Young Ghouls and Maliglutit

Rebecca Makas, “Knowledge Belongs to All. You Do Not Understand That—You Are Just a White Man”

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.                Morning Sessions Two                 

Sobey 260

Lina Verchery, Temporal Density: Buddhist Perspectives on Temporality and Film

James H. Thrall, Song of the Other: Kon Ichikawa’s Biruma no Tategoto (The Burmese Harp)

Sobey 265

Michele Byers, After post-Jewish:  Memory, Mediation, and American Identity on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Chris Miller, What is Going on in Room 104?: Mormons and Shifting Mainstream Perceptions

Syed Adnan Hussain, Posthuman Creation in the Films of Alex Garland

Wi’kupaltimk Film

Wi’kupaltimk – Feast of Forgiveness from Kent Martin on Vimeo.

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My Disappointed Review of Greg Boyd’s “Cross Vision”

Posted on June 8, 2019 by Brenton Dickieson

Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament ViolenceCross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence by Gregory A. Boyd
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I approached Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence quite hopefully, for a number of reasons. Greg Boyd’s Letters to a Skeptic was really important to me when I was younger. I found his soft theodicy really compelling, and I admired his honest look at difficult passages while offering hopeful readings. I ultimately rejected Boyd’s theory of Open Theism in God of the Possible, but I was attracted to the concept–again, because I felt like he was unwilling to turn away from difficult aspects of Scripture. On a personal level, I admire how Boyd has been able to be a voice of nonviolence and social ethics while holding together pastoral responsibilities, cultural engagement, and academic research.

Finally, I am curious about the implications of what Boyd calls “the cruciform character of God” (43, 59) and his use of God’s self-sacrifice in the cross as the primary lens for reading Scripture, forming Christian thought, growing in spiritual life, and extending our witness of Christ into the world. It is what I am doing in my work on C.S. Lewis and the Spiritual Life, and I admire others who call for this point of view in their areas (like Stanley Hauerwas, who says the cross is the model of our response to violence, or Michael Gorman and Richard Bauckham, who see the cross in the stories that St. Paul tells about spirituality, or Jürgen Moltmann in how he envisions the transformation of society as it begins in Christian life, or L. Ann Jervis in how she imagines the Christian response to suffering). I want to see the consequences of what we call “crucicentric” (cross-centred) approaches to life. Boyd’s Cross Vision is about how we read the Scriptures, particularly the Hebrew Bible.

To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. This is a deeply troubling book. Boyd is honest about his commitment to what he calls a “conservative hermeneutic,” a way of reading Scripture that believes it to be God-breathed and inspired, and therefore true regardless of its genre or whether a particular story refers to something that happened in history. This is a good approach, overall, and Boyd is able to trace the growth of how God is revealed to God’s people as it connects with their capacity to see the truth, beauty, and goodness of God in their cultural moment. Ultimately, this leads to God’s self-revelation the cross.

I agree that God reveals God’s self perfectly upon the cross, and there are others who talk sensibly about the growth of understanding in God’s people (like Henry Webb). But it is not twisting Boyd to say that God lies about who God is to a people that can’t bear the full reality of God. It isn’t just that we don’t see God fully in the Exodus or the giving of the law or a particular prophetic or worship moment. Do we ever? But that God pulls on a cloak of evil in order to, ultimately, show good. The Bible is intentionally misleading when picturing God as a violent God, not just limited or foggy or that something else is going on textually (though he uses each of these solutions at times).

Primarily, Boyd is focussed on violence, and I’ll return to his evaluation of that in a moment. But the distance between the New Testament portrayal of God and the Old Testament portrayal is drawn out to absurd differences in this book. Frankly, the picture is deeply troubling as it portrays the Hebrew people, and Boyd seems ignorant of how deeply anti-Jewish (and sometimes antisemitic) biblical interpretation has been in academia. I did a masters degree on Christian antisemitism, and it was hard for me to read this book at points because Boyd doesn’t seem to be able to answer the question of what deep and meaningful truth, goodness, and beauty Israel is given from God that is particular to Israel. If God is a self-sacrificial God–which I believe is true–then Israelite and early Jewish religion as given to them in Scripture bears that out faithfully for them–not just a feint or stop-gap religion. Though this book is meant to defend a “violent portrait of God in the Old Testament,” I am now left with a deceptive God who fakes a religion for a while until some of God’s people capture the vision of the cross. It could be a chapter in the book could have addressed this, but that chapter isn’t there.

On the question of violence and God, Boyd is no doubt correct to speak to it. The two stars on this review (instead of one) is because of his desire for honesty, and for his affable way of translating what are two complex volumes of exegesis into a popular-level book. And I have said I admire his evangelical social ethic.

But he pushes this too far sometimes and leaves other questions open. For example, at one point Boyd rejects any violence by God, including violence against animals. This is an intriguing point, as God set up an entire system of animal sacrifice, used a meat-based meal in Jesus’ last supper, and used animals cut in half to confirm the covenant with Abraham. In his admirable animal rights stance, Boyd presses too far in saying that “we later learn that God doesn’t actually approve of animal sacrifices” (73). That’s certainly a too severe representation of prophetic criticism of empty sacrifice, and Christian and Jewish theologians in history have talked about how worship and community formation ultimately moves past animal sacrifice.

Beyond this, Boyd argues that God perpetuates no violence at all. But I think this isn’t a good enough statement as:
1) at times God has given the job of violence to others (Boyd is correct that much of this is the natural, organic violence that emerges from the community, but not all);
2) God has gifted people, entities, and empires with powers to perpetrate violence of a special kind (like fireballs from heaven, earthquakes, superhuman strength, genocide, etc.); and
3) God has designed this world as one soaked in violence.

I suppose a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim will respond and say (in their own words) that the world we have is broken because of choices we make. I think that’s true, though God leaves us a historical record in the earth of untold violence before the first humans awoke to see the choice of sin before them.

But the “Fall of humanity” is not a surprise to God. Contrary to Boyd’s argument in God of the Possible, God does not live in time, rolling with the punches, so that the temptation of Adam and Eve could go either way. God spins no theoretical wheels; there is no “what if?” in God’s character. In loving and being love, God makes; and in making, God lovingly introduces violence to the world. In the moment of your reading this line, there have been a billion deaths on this planet, from the microscopic to the catastrophic.

To say that these deaths and the actions in the Hebrew Bible are not caused by God is to say because God is one or two degrees removed is, in my mind, like saying the general who commanded the gassing of people in Auschwitz was innocent because he never killed a single Jew, Polish person, disabled child, or homosexual. This pass-the-buck spirituality in secular life is our generation’s most consequential sin.

I wonder, can we ever say that “violence” is something other than a spectrum? It is violent to restrain a knife-wielding terrorist rather than submit to his violence. Childbirth is violence, and even loving sex that produces those children is a kind of violence at times, even minute. Agriculture, engineering, policing, medicine–all these vocations involve a kind of violence to them. The most loving zoologist brings death, lovingly, in its season.

Chagall's White CrucifixionIt is true that we each have moral responsibility within our sphere. It is also true, I believe, that human sin has caused great unnecessary human suffering that grieves all who are good. Moreover, I believe that in God’s self-sacrifice on the cross–a moment of significant violence–God is taking violence upon God’s self not just in that moment but in all history. Thus, we are to live differently because of it, so that being Christlike is a radical life choice. But Boyd’s theodicy is not convincing.

I am very disappointed, and I am perhaps overly sensitive about popular antisemitism, so there is heat in this review that may be unwarranted. Greg Boyd is a Christian brother whom I admire and who has taught me much. Boyd is trying to do a good thing, but I think the problem of violence in the Bible remains. I don’t find his “cross vision” convincing as he applies it here, though it is largely the approach I adapt. I just don’t think a cross-centred Bible reading makes the problem of violence go away totally.

But I do think it gives us new meaning. I think we are meant to live in these troubling Scriptures as we are meant to live in the troubling world, where death is all around and mortality a constant, heart-breaking, and transformational truth.

And there is our cultural moment, too. We believe as a society that death is an evil itself, and yet we bring death with our lifestyles, or politics, our fight for individual rights, our desire for comfort, and our certainty that we need the next coffee, car, semi-detached house, avocado, running shoes, or whatever. Was it Rafael Rodriguez who laughed at our culture that says “look at your violent God” and then obsesses over Game of Thrones? There’s that.

And, of course, I may be wrong. Ultimately, I think we need to turn to Boyd’s two-volume Crucifixion of the Warrior God. Matt Lynch of Westminster Theological Centre has done a careful, four-part review of Boyd’s academic version of this approach. I would encourage you to follow up as part of the problem with the book is the breezy way it moves through questions that are centuries in the making.
http://theologicalmisc.net/2017/08/cr…
http://theologicalmisc.net/2017/09/cr…
http://theologicalmisc.net/2017/09/cr…
http://theologicalmisc.net/2017/12/cr…

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My Discussion with Diana Glyer about the Tolkien Biopic on William O’Flaherty’s All About Jack Podcast

Posted on June 6, 2019 by Brenton Dickieson

I have recently had the opportunity to be part of a few different dialogues about the Tolkien biopic. I wrote a review for Forefront, where I talked about the Problem of Beauty and some of the struggles that Christian artists have in this age. I also posted a response to the film–almost a reaction to it rather than a review. “My Defiant Appreciation of the Tolkien Biopic” was also a plea to Tolkien-lovers to judge the film on its own merits as a biopic, and my own desire to love something that brings me more of Tolkien’s world. Both responses created a lot of discussion, but I was pleased when Dome Karukoski, the director of Tolkien, retweeted my review and called it “my favourite to rule them all.”

On the weekend I also recorded a podcast with a couple of friends. C.S. Lewis lovers should know William O’Flaherty’s “All About Jack” podcast, which for the last few years has brought dozens (hundreds?) of great author interviews, reviews, and features related to Lewis and the Inklings. William hosted me and Diana Glyer for a conversation about the Tolkien biopic. Diana is well known to lovers of the Inklings. Her magnum opus The Company They Keep is an essential text for people who study book creation or for folks interested in how the Inklings as a group managed to change the world of literature. More recently, her Bandersnatch provides a readable and resourceful guide for creators and writers–particularly those interested in collaboration, and guided by the Inklings and the stories they told.

Our conversation was a lot of fun and, I think, created a thoughtful and careful response to the film. Whether you have seen the film or you are waiting for the DVD release this summer, I hope you enjoy our Tolkien biopic podcast.

Or click here: https://allaboutjack.podbean.com/e/discussion-of-tolkien-biopic-glyer-and-dickieson/.

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Thesis Submitted!

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Brenton Dickieson

Well, the time has come. Last Thursday, just after noon, I submitted my thesis for a PhD in theology and literature at the University of Chester. I spent the Friday cleaning my digital and actual desk–a task with a few days more ahead–and the weekend with family. But I wanted to take a brief moment to celebrate and share with you why I have been sequestered away for these last few months.

The thesis is titled:

“The Great Story on Which the Plot Turns”:
Cruciformity in C.S. Lewis’ Narrative Spiritual Theology

I include the abstract below. I argue that there is an image that was central to C.S. Lewis’ conversion, and that image orients his entire thought process about life. The image is death and resurrection, patterned in the cross as a way that we are to live. When we refocus our lens of reading Lewis upon his vision of spiritual life–rather than, specifically, Lewis as apologist or critic or whatever party people want to align him with–we can see this image not just in his Christian teaching, but in the heart of his fiction and even his approach to literary theory and cultural criticism. It is this idea, I believe, that integrates all of Lewis’ thought.

I will spend the next three months preparing to defend this thesis, and at some point it will be a book–either in a dissertation series, or rewritten for more popular audiences. We will see!

The Deets

  • 73 months since I first registered, though I began “pretending” I was in a PhD in August 2011, which was 2,884 days ago; that means I will have been at this for 8 years when I defend
  • 110,269 words including bibliography and front matter; 99,969 words of body text
  • 279 pages at A4/1.5 space; 348 pages at 8.5×11/2 space
  • 1,334 footnotes; 445 bibliographic entries–92 of which are C.S. Lewis’ materials
  • 6 chapters (I didn’t count the sections) made up of 2,579 paragraphs

The Dedication and the Blog

I will wait until I actually pass the PhD before I share the full dedication, but I wanted to say that I included you readers in my brief dedication. I really have used this blog to test out my ideas, knowing that if I haven’t clarified my ideas in writing them, the audience of book fans, scholars, and students who read this blog would work on my blunt edges. I mention some of the senior scholars in Inklings studies who have reached out to me personally for support, but also this “strange” blog that I write. Some of my colleagues have looked at part or all of the thesis, and I thank them, but then I note some people–some of you–who have read parts or all the thesis:

“the online forum at A Pilgrim in Narnia, which I have used as a thesis sandbox over the years. Others in that community have also read portions or all of this thesis, including David, Yvonne, and Dana—who revealed all of my typographical oddities.”

Thanks so much, folks, for your strong reading and thinking.

I have found it increasingly difficult over the last seven months to multitask–as I have always done well in the past. In the last three months, I have failed to keep up with comment conversations and the many places this blog has been shared in digital forums. At one point, I grew quite impatient and left a conversation in our comment section; other times I am told I sounded grumpy: what were happy and short comments from me, unfortunately came out as brusque or dismissive (I tried to fix the ones I recognized as such, but my apologies to others whom I’m sure I’ve missed). I’ve realized that I have also come to loathe public controversy, and found myself worrying at night about this space. I used to relish in the classroom and dinner table spaces of battle and friendship, but when I can’t see people’s eyeballs I now know that I don’t love it. This experience will shape my writing, I think.

I suspect that this blog space will still be pretty speculative and playful over the summer and early part of the fall term–including some lessons learned from this process. But I think it will settle in again to more familiar patterns. I hope to have a Narnia series in Winter 2020, another L.M. Montgomery series in Spring 2020, and later that year something about a book.

The Outline

The thesis has six chapters. I’ve included the Table of Contents below, and I probably should have split the conclusion, but here’s the outline:

  1. Introduction: Cruciform Spirituality in the Works of C.S. Lewis
  2. Where the Secret of Secrets Lies Hid: C.S. Lewis as Spiritual Theologian
  3. “Die Before You Die”: C.S. Lewis’ Logic of Cruciformity
  4. The Shape of Cruciformity: Narrative Patterns of the Cross in Lewis’ Fiction and Nonfiction
  5. The Long Shadow of the Cross and the Cruciform Heroic in C.S. Lewis
  6. Conclusion: The Inversive Shape of C.S. Lewis’ Theology of the Cross

Abstract

This thesis presses in on C.S. Lewis’ extremely diverse corpus to explore his integrative narrative spirituality of the cross. Chapter one argues that attention to the concept of spiritual self-death and resurrection in Lewis is lacking critical treatment despite the spirituality of the cross that I argue is deeply woven into the fabric of Lewis’ poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and letters. This cross-shaped spirituality, what Michael Gorman calls “cruciformity,” is central to Lewis’ understanding of Christian life. Though neglected because of reductive readings of Lewis as an apologist, chapter one surveys occasional notes about this death-and-resurrection motif in Lewis scholarship and provides definitions for methodological approaches to the study. Following definitions of spiritual theology by Eugene Peterson, chapter two turns from systematic theological explorations of Lewis to consider him as a spiritual theologian, a move that is organic to his theological enterprise, his epistemology, and his fiction. Chapter three explores Gorman’s biblical-theological approach to Pauline cruciformity, arguing that there is a six-point Logic of Cruciformity in Lewis’ so-called apologetics writings that moves past and refocuses Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. As Lewis’ spirituality is embedded in narrative form within poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, chapter four explores “The Shape of Cruciformity” in Lewis’ œuvre, using Northrop Frye’s narratology and J.R.R. Tolkien’s theory of eucatastrophe to argue that there is a comedic, U-shaped pattern of cruciform imagery in Lewis’ fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Chapter five interrogates Lewis’ integrative, normative narrative cruciformity with feminist theological critique, provoked by Anna Fisk’s concerns about cross-shaped spiritualities in women’s experiences. A response to this problematisation reveals an inversive quality inherent to Lewis’ thought that is itself U-shaped, comedic, and eucatastrophic. This thesis concludes by exploring this inversive U-shaped thinking central to Lewis’ theological project, arguing that the shape of cruciformity in Lewis is the shape of his spiritual theology. I conclude with “sacred paradoxes” in Lewis’ thought that invite further work and deepen our understanding of Lewis’ concept of spiritual life, thus inviting a prophetic self-critique for Christian believers.

Table of Contents

Abstract          i
Declaration     ii
Table of Contents       iii
Abbreviations vi
Acknowledgements    vii

Ch. 1: Introduction: Cruciform Spirituality in the Works of C.S. Lewis        1

Introduction: Accounting for the Integrative Nature of C.S. Lewis’ Thought 1
Definitions as Methodological Approaches   7
Death is at the Root of the Whole Matter     16
“The Macdonald Conception of Death”         20
A Brief Survey of Lewis’ Theology of the Cross          27

Ch. 2: Where the Secret of Secrets Lies Hid: C.S. Lewis as Spiritual Theologian    34

Introduction   34
An Approach to Spiritual Theology: Eugene Peterson and “Living, living fully and well”            34
C.S. Lewis as Spiritual Theologian      38

Secondary Literature on Lewis and Spirituality         39
Social Thought and a Spirituality of the Cross in Conversation         42
A Tilt of the Head: From Systematic to Spiritual Theology    51
The Great Divorce: Eschatology to Spirituality          53
Lewis’ “Meditation in a Toolshed” as Epistemology 56
Mere Christianity: Lewis’ Emphasis on the Spiritual Life       57

An Experiment in Narnia: From Atonement Theory to Spiritual Theology   64

C.S. Lewis and The Cross Event          64
Aslanic Sacrifice as Imitation Motif    69

Conclusion      75

Ch. 3: “Die Before You Die”: C.S. Lewis’ Logic of Cruciformity        77

Introduction   77
Michael Gorman as Conversation Partner for C.S. Lewis       77
C.S. Lewis’ Logic of Cruciformity        80

Mere Christianity: Incarnational Necessity and the Echo of God      80
The Problem of Pain: Lewis’ Six Point Logic of Cruciformity 82

Cruciformity in Lewis’ Fiction 89

The Great Divorce (1944-45)  90
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)       93
Till We Have Faces (1956)       98

Conclusion: Clarifying and Moving Past Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ        104

Ch. 4: The Shape of Cruciformity: Narrative Patterns of the Cross in Lewis’ Fiction and Nonfiction           107

Introduction: Recognisable Narrative Patterns of Spirituality          107
Lewis as Imagistic Mythmaker: “It All Began with a Picture” 108
Lewis’ Imagistic Story-making and Frye’s U-Shaped Pattern 111
Dive: U-Shaped Cruciform Imagery in Lewis’ Life and Writing          114
The Fairy Tale Form in Lewis’ Fiction 121

Eucatastrophe and Fairy Tale 121
The Pilgrim’s Regress  124
Narnia 126
That Hideous Strength           128
Descent and Ascent in Planetary Journeys    136

Death Restored to the Baptised Imagination 141
Conclusion: The Zenith of the Cosmic Story  150

Ch. 5: The Long Shadow of the Cross and the Cruciform Heroic in C.S. Lewis        155

Introduction: A Black and Scarlet Cord: Violence and Death in the Shadowlands   155
The Long Shadow of the Cross: A Feminist Critique of Crucicentric Spirituality       160

Approaches to Feminist Christologies           160
Anna Fisk and Images of the Cross     164

Kath Filmer and the First Generation of Critics on Lewis and Women          170
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen and the Second Generation of Lewis Gender Critics    178
Integrative Cruciformity and Inversive Qualities in Lewis’ Life and Work     183

Ann Loades and Lewis’ Christological Inversion        183
Inversive Cruciform Elements in The Four Loves and A Grief Observed       184
The Cruciform Principle and A Severe Mercy 187
Lewis’ Deepening Cruciform Inversion of Hierarchy in Love 192

Monika Hilder and the Lewisian Spiritual “Feminine” Heroic           194
Lewis as Conversation Partner in a Cruciform Spirituality of Sex and Gender          199

Ch. 6: Conclusion: The Inversive Shape of C.S. Lewis’ Theology of the Cross         202

Introduction: The Shape of Lewis’ Spiritual Theology           202
Comedy, Satire, and Ironic Inversion in Lewis’ Work 204
The Screwtape Letters as Moral Inversion    208
Comedy and Inversive Thinking         213
“As High as My Spirit, As Small as My Stature”: C.S. Lewis’ Theology of the Small   214
Criticism as Conversion: Active Surrender in C.S. Lewis’ Spiritual Theology 224

C.S. Lewis’ Experiment in Criticism    226
On A Grief Observed  229

Sacred Paradoxes: Limitations and Invitations to Further Work       232

Bibliography   243

C.S. Lewis Bibliography          243
Secondary Source Bibliography         247
Primary Sources and Archival Material          271

 

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“The perils of enchantment: Tolkien’s Lay of Aotrou and Itroun”: Reblog of John Garth’s Thoughts on the Book

Posted on June 1, 2019 by Brenton Dickieson

tolkien aotrou and itrounI am reblogging this post by John Garth for three reasons.

Reason the first, I have meant to review Tolkien’s Lay of Aotrou and Itroun for some time, and I just never seem to get to it. I read it months ago, and still no review.

Reason the second, it is only so often that John Garth shares his ideas on his blog, but when he does it is worth paying attention. Garth’s blog is filled with great material that he gives away for free. Much of his work is in book form or hiding behind paywalls at leading media outlets, and you should hunt it down (especially his Tolkien and the Great War). But in the blog you also get strong thoughts about Tolkien-related materials with punch and precision. This is what we do as academic bloggers: give away our material so everyone can learn with us. Public intellectuals can’t always do this, so take advantage of it when it comes.

And, reason the third, it is Saturday, and someone somewhere needs something super to read.

For the full piece, see The perils of enchantment: Tolkien’s Lay of Aotrou and Itroun

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