Christianity & Literature

The Patience poet's choice of Jonah as his example of an impatient figure from Scripture has long puzzled scholars, given that Jonah is best known for his disobedience. Assuming that the poet was writing within a monastic context, however, the implicit link between patience, poverty, and obedience becomes clearer through the discussions of those virtues in the Rule of Benedict and the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux. Within that context, the poet retells the story of Jonah in a way that frames Jonah as a stereotypical fugitive monk whose disobedience is a direct result of his lack of patience.

This essay explores parallels between Shakespeare's Vienna and Corinth as it appears in Paul's letters. First Corinthians presents marriage as the solution for sexual license, a remedy the Duke also employs. Furthermore, the license of both cities seems to result from uncertainty about whether the law is still in effect. Shakespeare presents rival theories of the law through the Duke and Angelo. The Duke's approach of suspending the law, while merciful, tolerates the presence of unreformed elements in the city. The play's vision of society, while anti-puritan, is also indebted to Paul's letters to the church at Corinth.

In three poems written on the eve of World War I, French poet Charles Péguy (1873–1914) employed the character of Jeanne d'Arc to express dissatisfaction with doctrines of judgment and damnation, exemplified for Péguy in Dante's Divine Comedy. Péguy believed Christianity's dominant eschatological traditions promoted bourgeois individualism and apathy in the face of suffering. Péguy's rejection of these doctrines illustrates a paradoxical strategy of using Jeanne as an advocate in this struggle against expectation of a wrathful divine judgment. With help from theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), I explain how contemporary Christians can appropriate Péguy's eschatological alternative.

This article argues that Graham Swift's novel Last Orders addresses profound moral questions about what constitutes a person. The article takes its lead from John Habgood's question, “How complete does a human being have to be in order to qualify morally as a person?” and also draws on insights from other theologians to analyze the moral perspective of the novel. It shows how Last Orders looks for redemption in the face of broken relationships and radical crises of identity, and also shows how Swift defends the moral personhood of the disabled and the recently deceased.