Inklings of Reality Essays Toward a Christian Philosophy of Letters Dr Donald T Williams K R Melton Dr Brian C Melton Books
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Christians were once known as "people of the Book." In Inklings of Reality, Dr. Donald T. Williams explores the real meaning of what it is to be an intelligent Christian reader, writer, and critic and in doing so rediscovers a trove of forgotten intellectual treasures that reveal much about life, the world around us, and how we learn about it. This second edition includes resources for college, high school, and home school students.
Inklings of Reality Essays Toward a Christian Philosophy of Letters Dr Donald T Williams K R Melton Dr Brian C Melton Books
Wish it was on audible. Great book to just read but keeps on giving the more and every time it's read. Thanks.Product details
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Inklings of Reality Essays Toward a Christian Philosophy of Letters Dr Donald T Williams K R Melton Dr Brian C Melton Books Reviews
To ask a question, Kuhn and others have told us, requires a paradigm or mental model from which to ask it. Without the model, the honest question will not be generated. Without the question, the answers will seem trite or irrelevant. Inklings of Reality is an apology and plea for reading of a certain type, a purposeful availing oneself of great works of literature. Such reading can build the imaginative framework within which questions and answers of what it means to be fully human are generated and hold fruitful conversation. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) throughout this book is the argument that the authors of literature and poetry intended specific meanings when they wrote through the specific words they chose and that these meanings are reliably accessible to readers today through those same words. We are asked to go beyond the cynical dismissing of the author from his or her writing and to listen with care and respect to what is being said by words which can be trusted.
I bought this book many years ago while attending Toccoa Falls College. It wasn’t until several years later while teaching English that I realized what an awesome resource this was. This is a must have for any true lover of literature!
Wiiliams' book is an exercise in sanity, clarity, insight and wisdom. Written by a theologian/poet/professor/pastor/literary critic, Inklings of Reality escorts the reader knowingly and affectionately through the history of Christian literature and criticism, better enabling us to understand (and therefore to enjoy) Augustine, Dante, Herbert, Sidney, Spenser, Lewis and others with the same passion and appreciation with which Williams himself understands and enjoys them.
I have assigned this volume multiple times as a textbook in my college literature courses, and students are unfailingly impressed with its humanity. They especially value not only its readable and accessible scholarship, but also its autobiographical flavor and the generous portion of Williams' own excellent poetry interspersed throughout the volume.
Though the chapters are arranged chronologically, they are complete in themselves and can stand alone. Because Williams is himself a Spenserian scholar, his chapters on English Renaissance literature and thought are excellent. As well, his work on Tolkien and Lewis is both readable and reliable.
Unlike too many modern literary critics, Williams concerns himself with the texts and writers at hand, not with the passing fads that too often mar and misdirect contemporary theory. He knows that the great books, and the great ideas that make them great, are the real stuff of literature, and not every idiosyncratic theory that comes down the pike. Turn here for a widely-informed interdisciplinary introduction to the great Christian books and the great Christian authors, not for a survey of quirky interpreters or interpretations.
As an introduction to Christian literature, its meaning, its presuppostions and its content, this modest and self-effacing volume is by far the best thing of its sort, bar none.
I was required to read this book in Dr. Williams Class, yes the Dr. Williams. He is a very intelligent and creative man, and his writtings reflect that. If you are unable to take a class with him, his books reveal his character.
He has a passion for books, especially classics and that is revealed in this book. The long lost conversation of reading. How older books, more learned authors of yester-year has to say to us today. In a society of seven steps to this and ten steps to that, Dr. Williams stops and smells the roses, if you will. If you are willing to read this books to, he may instil that same love of reading the classics.
Take the time to read something different. Partake in the conversation of reading.
To be in the company of Dr. Donald T. Williams is to be with a man of devotion, wit, culture and generosity. One finds much of the man in this book, first published 20 years ago, but it also suffers from certain crucial limitations. Subtitled "Essays Toward a Christian Philosophy of Letters", throughout the book the word "Christian" is used as if interchangeable with "Evangelical", and it might have been more suitable to have used the latter word in the subtitle. His love of literature is rich and real, but the tendency of the book is to see all of literature as edification and broadening for Evangelicals. Gerard Manley Hopkins is allowed to have been a Jesuit (p. 58) but a couple of laudatory paragraphs about Flannery O'Connor and an entire chapter about Tolkien manage to avoid the word "Catholic" altogether. The crucial non-fiction works for understanding post-Renaissance Christianity and integrating it with works of the imagination are, it seems, Calvin's INSTITUTES and FOXE'S BOOK OF MARTYRS. Because the Renaissance is discussed primarily as the seed-bed of the Reformation, we get little hint of the abundance of artistic growth (literature, music, painting and sculpture, architecture) that the Renaissance brought to non-Reformed locales like Italy, France and Spain, Nor does he note the oddly specific development of these things where Protestantism triumphed -- literature in England, painting in the Netherlands, music in Germany, little or none in Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland (the only western European country where the populace as a whole failed to conform to the faith of the ruler despite three centuries plus of grinding and intermittently focused oppression) or, of course, Calvin's Geneva. (A famous Protestant architect does arise in England in Christopher Wren at the last half of the 17th century, as the English church becomes less Calvinist, along with some painters like Lely. Of course there was an architect of note, Inigo Jones, in Queen Bess's time, but like the composers Tallis and Byrd, he was a randomly tolerated papist.) In his chapter on Foxe, Dr. Williams is willing to challenge and nuance some more or less dated components of the author's ideology, but he is insufficiently critical of the idea of martyrdom as a seal of truth. Martyrdom proves the sincerity of a person's convictions, but not their truth. But Foxe is also the occasion for Dr. Williams to deliver himself of a great maxim, touching on predictions of the End of the World -- "Only one such attempt (at most) will be correct, and by the time we know which one it is, it will be too late to argue about it " (p. 125). That deserves widespread quotation. At the end of the book, Jonathan Edwards is cited in asserting the cathartic born-again experience which Evangelicals term "conversion". There is no recognition that most of the Christian world, past and present, neither anticipates nor experiences that catharsis. Of course I am not debating the doctor's main thesis, that Christians should be open to literature and other arts, or that wide reading experience is a plus for the Christian life. And I am pleased to note that the book's cover features a portrait of a reforming Catholic who rejected Reformer separatism but also hated persecution and war -- Erasmus of Rotterdam. A copy of that Holbein portrait is also in my living room.
Wish it was on audible. Great book to just read but keeps on giving the more and every time it's read. Thanks.
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