Literature and Faith

At Seattle Pacific University, I teach a course called Literature and Faith for the English department with which I am free to do more or less whatever I like. I love the course because it allows me to talk about my favorite things: poetry and Christianity. But also I love how much is possible under those headings. I never teach the same class twice, so I’ll be mixing up the reading list and likely the course structure for next year’s iteration—maybe reading Dostoyevsky, Dillard, and Dante? Bailey and Milton on Devils? But this year I had the readings and lectures grouped around the various genres that I think Christians have contributed uniquely to, ones that wouldn’t exist, I think, apart from believers. For the curious, here’s what we read under those headings.

NB: most of these we read in excerpt. The idea is to give students a familiarity with these many works that they might see the diversity of authors and styles available under such a rubric and that they might build respectable reading lists.

NBII: We do read CS Lewis Screwtape Letters in its entirety; all poems come from Ryken’s Soul in Paraphrase (Crossway).

Introduction and Method

C.S. Lewis, Experiment in Criticism

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

St. Francis of Assisi, “Canticle of the Sun”

Gungor, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”

Hymnody

C. Phillips, The Hymnal

Charlotte Elliott, “Just as I Am”

Getty/Townsend, “In Christ Alone”

Bridges/Thring, “Crown Him with Many Crowns”

H.Lyte, “Abide with Me”

In-class screening of Amazing Grace (dir. Pollack, 2018) 

John Newton,“Amazing Grace” 

H. Constable, “O Gracious Shepherd”

Spiritual Realities

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, part 1

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, part 2

Dante trans. Mary Jo Bang 

Dante trans. Clive James

Drehrer, How Dante Can Save Your Life

Sermons

F. Beuchner, “Magnificent Defeat”

P. J. Bailey, Festus

Anne Bradstreet, “Burning of our House”

Bp. Michael Curry “Royal Sermon”

Billy Graham "How to Live"

G. Herbert, “Redemption”

Allegory

Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress

Spenser, The Faerie Queen

Spenser “Most Glorious”

Donne, “Batter my Heart”

Spiritual Autobiography

James K.A. Smith, On the Road

Augustine, Confessions

E. McCaullie, Reading While Black

Milton, “When Faith and Love”

Blake, “And did Those Feet”

Devotionals

Elizabeth Elliot, Streams in Desert

Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage

Katherine Parr, Meditations

Herbert, “The Collar”

Donne, “Death be Not Proud”

Apologetics

Spufford, Unapologetic

Chesterton, Everlasting Man

Final Thoughts

Christina Rossetti, “In the Bleak Midwinter”

First Nations Version: Indigenous New Testament