Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons^™

Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Often referred to as the last Roman and first medieval, Boethius, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, has been widely received as an unoriginal philosopher who sought to preserve Platonic thought as the Western Roman Empire fell. However, this essay features an investigation into the literary originality of Boethius who initiates a line of Christian and Platonic literatures to follow in the medieval European tradition. Boethius demonstrates himself to be a poet who makes great use of philosophy rather than as a philosopher writing poetry. Boethius’ poetic influence is felt most strongly in major aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy and …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Bedeviled Beauty: My Journey Through White American Theater Institutions, J'Aila C. Price

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Game console: Oculus Quest

World: American Theater Institutions

Player: Minority

Place: United States

Level: “Ain’t no way.”

This thesis explores the contrast between the Westernized philosophies ingrained in my education and my identity as a Black female artist. It sheds light on the difficulties of pursuing higher education in the arts and the gaps that arise from limited exposure to culturally diverse Black resources, revealing the systemic issues in Western performance education. The paper also discusses the insights gained from my journey as a Black female artist, focusing on my thesis performance of Blood at the Root, which is …

Orpheus And The Harrowing Of Hell In The Tale Of Beren And Lúthien, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Critics have observed that Beren and Lúthien’s tale is a Christian retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The “Harrowing of Hell” tradition is widespread in Italy as attested by the mosaic of San Marco among others, but it is in France that the Ovid Moralized reconnects it to Orpheus who descended into the Underworld to save Eurydice (an already late antique parallel) and therefore attests a happy ending version of the story that can be found in medieval England and also in various classical sources, perhaps even in the original legend of Orpheus. The apocryphal Harrowing is also …

Miscellaneous, Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Announcements:

Call for papers (The Abolition of Man 80 Years On)

The C. S. Lewis Correspondence Project

The Inaugural Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference (George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon September 5-8, 2024)

Submission guidelines, style guide, copyright notice, and order form.

Review Of Further Up And Further In, Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Further Up and Further In. Written and performed by Max McLean. Phoenix, AZ: Herberger Theater, 18 March 2023.

Review Of Bareface, David Bates

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of C. S. Lewis, Bareface (Proposed title for Till We Have Faces). Produced by Ballet 5:8. Choreography and Lighting by Julianna Rubio Slager. Costumes by Lorianne Robertson. Props by Sarah L. Freeman. Chicago, United States: Harris Theatre, 22 April 2023.

Review Of The Nature Of Middle-Earth, Brenton D.G. Dickieson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of J. R. R. Tolkien, The Nature of Middle-earth, ed. by Carl Hostetter (New York: Mariner Books, 2021). 464 pages, including appendices and index. $32.00. ISBN 9780358454601.

Review Of A Narnian Vision Of The Atonement: A Defense Of The Ransom Theory, William Gentrup

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Charles Taliaferro, A Narnian Vision of the Atonement: A Defense of the Ransom Theory (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022). 134 pages. $37.00. ISBN 9781666796537.

Review Of The Lion's Country: C.S. Lewis's Theory Of The Real, David N. Beckmann

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Charlie W. Starr, The Lion’s Country: C. S. Lewis’s Theory of the Real (Kent, OH; Kent State University Press, 2022). 132 pages. $18.95. ISBN 9781606354537.

Review Of The Man Born To Be King: Wade Annotated Edition, Barbara L. Prescott

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King: Wade Annotated Edition, ed. by Kathryn Wehr (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2023). 464 pages. $43.49. ISBN 9781514005330.

Review Of C.S. Lewis In America: Readings And Reception, 1935-1947, Gina Dalfonzo

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Mark Noll, C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935 –1947 (Donovan Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2023). 176 pages. $20.00. ISBN 9781514007006.

Review Of Mere Evangelism, Monique Stam

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Randy Newman, Mere Evangelism, (Charlotte, NC: The Good Book Company, 2021). 160 pages. $16.99. ISBN 9781784986445.

Review Of The Case For Aslan: Evidence For Jesus In The Land Of Narnia, Brian C. Roden

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of David Marshall, The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia (Tampa, FL: DeWard Publishing Company, 2022). 219 pages. $14.99. ISBN 9781947929210.

Review Of Inkling, Historian, Soldier, And Brother: A Life Of Warren Hamilton Lewis, Crystal Hurd

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Don King, Inkling, Historian, Soldier, and Brother: A Life of Warren Hamilton Lewis (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2023). 193 pages, including Epilogue, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. $45.00. ISBN 9781606354506.

Review Of The Abolition Of Man: The Deluxe Edition, John Stanifer

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Carson Grubaugh, Midjourney AI, Sean Michael Robinson, and Luciano Floridi, The Abolition of Man: The Deluxe Edition (St. Paul, Minnesota: Living the Line, 2023). 228 pages, including an Afterword to each issue and essays. $35.00. ISBN 9781736860571.

Review Of The Major And The Missionary: The Letters Of Warren Hamilton Lewis And Blanche Biggs, Crystal Hurd

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Diana Glyer, ed., The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanche Biggs (Nashville: Rabbit Room Press, 2023). 277 pages, including “Afterword” and Index. $18.00. ISBN 9781951872205.

Review Of The Chronicles Of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey With C.S. Lewis, Josiah Peterson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Leonard J. DeLorenzo, ed. The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2022). 251 pages. $17.95. ISBN 9781621645351.

Surprised By Similarity: C.S. Lewis And Thomas Merton On The Self, John M. Gillespie

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Although they never corresponded, and they never met, the Anglican professor C.S. Lewis and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton nevertheless wrote in strikingly similar terms of the “true self,” or a person redeemed by Christ, and a “false self,” the rebellious person one believes themselves to be, but is not. There is very little academic work on the confluence of Lewis and Merton, and none thus far that specifically addresses their shared concept of the self. The aim of this paper is to address this gap in scholarship and, through an intertextual investigation of each man’s major works, fill it. …

“A Noise Of Great Good Coming”: C. S. Lewis’S Dymer As A Spiritual Autobiography, Norbert Feinendegen

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

C. S. Lewis is no doubt one of the most recognized Christian prose writers of the twentieth century. The same, however, cannot be said about his pre-Christian attempts to make a name for himself as a poet. His two volumes of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926), received few positive reviews and found even fewer readers at the time of publication, and sadly they didn’t receive much attention after Lewis became famous as a Christian apologist and novelist.

I am going to argue that Dymer is a symbolic narrative in which every event on the level of the …

Frontmatter (Volume 17, Issue 1), Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

General Editor's Note:

This year’s Table of Contents requires some explanation. As a young man, C. S. Lewis aspired to make his mark as a poet. His first two books remain testaments to that unrealized dream: Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919) and his narrative poem, Dymer (1926). Don King has done much to refocus scholarly attention on the poetry of Lewis through C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (2001) and more recently in The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition (2015). Jerry Root first advanced his own theory regarding the …

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati

Theses and Dissertations

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …

Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology Through Mythology With The Maker Of Middle-Earth By Austin M. Freeman, Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltsev

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The powerful and highly informative definitions that Freeman applies to Tolkien’s Middle-earth phenomenon in the title of his book create a productive interpretational framework. Myth and mythology in Inklings’ writing were always understood, in an almost Jungian way, as a cultural paradigm flexible enough to embrace the free creativity of the playful human mind and a philosophical postulate, or credo, of the humanistic religious intuition of Christianity. In Freeman’s interpretation, Tolkien’s literary myth in some ways requires a theological background, which, in its turn, leads to inevitable dogma, a statement that reveals the sensitive mechanics of literary myth as it …

Otherworldly But Not The Otherworld: Tolkien’S Adaptation Of Medieval Faerie And Fairies Into A Sub-Creative Elvendom, Elliott Thomas Collins

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Through a comparative analysis of Lothlorien and the medieval stories of Lanval and Sir Orfeo, this article attempts to shed some light on how the inherently pessimistic and recursive nature of Tolkien's sub-creation affects his adaptation of medieval Faerie into a sub-creative elvendom born of the creative instincts of the elves. In doing so, the article also questions Tolkien's adherence to parameters of Faerie and characteristics of elves as laid out in OFS.

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

Review Of C. S. Lewis’S Mere Christianity: A Biography, Bruce R. Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of George M. Marsden, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography, Lives of Great Religious Books Series (Princeton, 2016). 262 pages. $24.95. ISBN: 9780691153735.

Review Of The Pilgrim’S Regress, Wade Annotated Edition, Arend Smilde

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Wade Annotated Edition, ed. and introduced by David C. Downing; illustrated by Michael Hague (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2014). xxiv + 239 pages. $25.00. ISBN 9780802872081.

Evaluating The Efficacy Of The Christian Reformational Transcendental Model Of Art Criticism As A Literary Theory Through Albert Camus’S The Stranger, Elizabeth Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The subfield of art criticism and theory within Christian reformational philosophy, a descendent of the neo-Calvinist theology developed through the work of Dutch Reformer Abraham Kuyper and others, is becoming increasingly diverse. Recently, scholars such as Leland Ryken, Glenda Faye Mathes, and Philip Graham Ryken have built upon twentieth-century theologian Francis Schaeffer’s worldview approach by popularizing a transcendental model of art criticism, an approach that applies the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty to works of art. However, the transcendentals, while widely discussed in the fields of philosophy, theology, and, to a lesser extent, art theory, have not been explicitly …

The Continuing (Ir) Relevance Of C.S. Lewis, Robert Macswain

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

found myself profoundly frustrated with the polarization that became evident between Lewis’ friends and foes, devotees and detractors. At the extremes of this debate were those who apparently regarded Lewis’ work as, for all intents and purposes, Holy Writ; at the other end of it were those who, for whatever reason, regarded Lewis with disdain and contempt. Sane, balanced, objective, sympathetically-critical and critically-sympathetic assessments seemed so rare as to be almost non-existent. The devotional attitude was largely characteristic of the United States, where I had grown up; and the disdain and contempt seemed especially prevalent in England, where I was …