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, see http://www.baylor.edu/baylorpress/splash.php. Inquiries should be directed to scl@baylor.edu.

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.

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 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:

  Thoughts
     on the
    Afterlife

            John Ruff  

Driving home Friday I
   pass a man
mowing the grass
in front of a small
   blue house
just north of
    the morturary--

a dead ringer for
   my dead
colleague, David,
   professor
and fomer chair
of the department
   of theology.

By the time I turn
   down Evans
I'm wondering what
   if it were
really him, an
   eminent liturgist
spirited back one
   hot afternoon

in August to be a
   procession
onto himself, straight
   row up
and straight row back,
   no music
but from the mower,
   no incense

but the smell of
   fresh-cut grass.
What a blessing
   it would be
to break a sweat again-
to dwell again in
   the ringing

of that inaudible
   bell when
the mower quits--
   it makes me
think the afterlife
   might not be
so bad if once in
   a while they

send us back do do
   some odd job.
Then I remember
   those refugees
from high school
   who come back
to watch the
   homecoming game

they starred in the
   previous year--
how lost they look
   in the twilight
beyond the end zone
   with no where
else they'd rather be.

     Winter 2008