• Can a novel be Christian even though the author is not?

  
  

• What makes us consider Pilgrim's Progress and The Brothers Karamazov to be Christian novels? Is it because the authors professes certain beliefs or because the novels possess certain features of form or content?

  
  

• Is a novel Christian because it presents morality and mortality in a particular way?

  
  

• Should we accept Alastair MacIntyre's suggestion in After Virtue that Jane Austen and Dante wrote comedies precisely because of their Christian faith?

  
  

• Could a novel never be truly Christian if its story is a tragedy?

The Centre for Theology, Law, and Culture at Pusey House would like to organise a conference to discuss these questions on Wednesday 13 May in Oxford.

We will invite academics from English studies to speak about how they might answer some of these questions by talking about a particular novel or novelist. We also invite novelists to discuss how they consider some of these questions in their own writing and what it means to be a Christian novelist today.

Tickets must be purchased to attend. The booking page can be found here.

More details about the conference are available here.

Speakers:

1. Professor Randy Boyagoda (University of Toronto): What is seen, what is believed: Belief in/and the Novel.

   
   

2. Professor Bonnie Lander Johnson (Downing College, Cambridge): Mysticism and the Modern Novel.

   
   

3. Professor Alison Milbank (University of Nottingham): What makes a Gothic novel Christian: From Dracula to Sarah Perry's Melmoth.

   
   

4. Dr Grace Oliver (Wilson Hill Academy): Elizabeth Gaskell and the Christian Imagination: Prayer, Scripture, and Character Formation in Gaskell’s Works.

   
   

5. Professor Lori Peterson Branch (University of Iowa): What if the Novel is Secular? The Novel as Secularism’s Theology.

   
   

6. Professor Holly Ordway (Word on Fire Institute): ‘Fundamentally religious’ – or Not? J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the Question of Authorial Intent.

   
   

7. Ms Beatrice Scudeler (Fairer Disputations): The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Eschatological Hope in Dorothy Sayers' Detective Fiction.

   
   

8. Professor Clare Walker Gore (Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge): Revealed Truths and Reserved Plots: Charlotte M. Yonge and the Tractarian Novel.

The conference will be followed by evensong at 5:30pm at which The Rev'd Dr Michael Ward will preach.