The Conference on Christianity & Literature

Welcome to CCL

The Conference on Christianity and Literature is an interdisciplinary society dedicated to exploring the relationships between Christianity and literature. Organized formally in 1956, CCL is dedicated to both scholarly excellence and collegial exchange and includes hundreds of members from a variety of academic institutions and religious traditions from the United States, Canada, and more than a dozen other countries.

The Conference publishes a journal, Christianity and Literature, which appears quarterly. Each issue includes scholarly articles, book reviews, news items, and poetry.

CCL also has begun publishing a monograph series with Baylor University Press called Studies in Christianity and Literature. This series will publish peer-reviewed, scholarly manuscripts that explore the complex relationship between Christianity and literature and enhance the larger academic conversation about the role of religion in cultural life. The books to appear in the series will be sensitive to historical contexts, alert to theoretical implications, and informed by theological concerns. For more information, you can download the brochure here or see http://www.baylor.edu/baylorpress/splash.php. Inquiries should be directed to scl@baylor.edu.

Travel Grants

CCL will award grants to help cover travel expenses to scholars and writers and who are members of the Conference on Christianity and Literature and need financial support to help cover travel needed to support research and writing. These grants will be awarded for 2010; applications are due by September 1, 2009. More details and applications on the Scholar Travel Grant Page.

CCL is also offering graduate-student members travel grants of up to $500 to meet travel expenses and registration fees for regional CCL meetings and the annual meeting of CCL at the MLA convention. More details are on the Graduate Student Grant page.

 

Modern Language Association

CCL is allied with the Modern Language Association and sponsors sessions each year at the annual MLA Convention. In addition, CCL is divided into seven regional organizations that host regular sessions on a wide variety of authors and themes.

Annual Awards

Each year the CCL awards citations for lifetime achievement, book of the year, and best article of the year in Christianity and LIterature. The society also sponsors a student writing contest of essays, poems, and stories that address matters of Christian thought, experience, and practice.

Membership

Membership in CCL includes a subscription to the journal and the opportunity to participate in activities sponsored by the conference as a whole as well as all regional organizations.

Questions to Tammy Ditmore (tammy.ditmore@pepperdine.edu)

 

In the Latest Issue of Christianity & Literature:


My Fellow Creatures
Do a Better Job
Than I

Mary Kennan Herbert

Everything shuts down
in the hummingbird
when it must endure
extreme cold in
paradise, where there
is always a price
to pay.

To survive the icy
nights it shuts down
everything but brain,
heart, and liver, yields
itself to the cold,
and keeps a nugget

of life safe until dawn,
when all systems
are go. I'm not
that good
in the scheme of
things. My ticker
insists on keeping
the pace,

and extremities keep 
on pulsing,
everybody wants
to get into the act.
Hands and feet
could freeze because
of poor decisions
at command

central. The wolf licks
its chops, thinking
of a warm,
gutsy dinner.
Lucky hummingbird.
Tiny perfect jewel,
who can fail to be
impressed

with your efficiency,
your aesthetic
lessons for us,
your captured
sunlight, your mission
to deliver nectar
like a bee,
pleasing the Deity.

Wolf, you can quickly
take me now,
an old body
from the freezer.
Little things,
however, may
escape your notice.
Small, warm,
dazzling.

Winter 2009