The Conference on Christianity & Literature

MLA 2006

The Conference on Christianity is allied with the Modern Language Association (www.mla.org) and organizes sessions each year at the MLA Annual Convention. At the December 2006 convention, CCL presented the following awards:

Lifetime achievement:
John Updike
Text of citation

Book of the year:
Arthur Kirsch
Auden and Christianity
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Lionel Basney Award for the year's best article in Christianity and Literature
Scott McLaren
“Saving the Monsters? Images of Redemption in the Gothic Tales of George MacDonald”
Text of citation

Members also participated in two sessions organized by CCL

Stephen H. Webb and Kathleen Verduin presided over "Faith and Doubt in the Fiction of John Updike," with the following papers:

  •  “Updike Reading, Updike Writing,” presented by Kathleen Verduin, of Hope College

  • “Pagan Pleasures: Gertrude and Claudius and the Dawn of the New Morality,” presented by Marshall Boswell, Rhodes College

  • Updike’s Villages: Nostalgia, Faith and Sex,” presented by Stephen H. Webb of Wabash College

Susan VanZanten Gallagher presided over "The Next Christendom and African Literature," with  the following papers:

  • "Borders, Boundaries, and Bodies: Female Circumcision and the Politics of World Christianity in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between," presented by Tameka L. Cage, of Bucknell University
  • "The Rocks Cry Out: Muslim and Christian Writers in the 2001 Jos Crisis," by Deborah Klein, of Oklahoma Christian University
  • "The Impact of Christianity on Ethiopian Literature: From Past to Present," presented by Tsegaye Wodajo of the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York

    MLA 2007

    MLA 2005

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

In the Latest Issue of Christianity & Literature:


Night Reading

Franz Wright

Lights coming on
   in windows;
windows lit all
   night long
suddenly dark --

He seems to sleep,
   head nested
in crossed arms
on the desk,
   as he listens

to the first raindrops
striking the window,
the faint roar
   of aircraft just

vanishing with
   moonlit trail
past the horizon,
the underlined phrase.

      Summer 2009