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