DUE IN 5 HOURS!!!!!!! 700 WORDS ATE LEAST For this week’s blog post, draw on the reading that we’ve done about Christianity and literature, and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, to make an argument about the challenges and the opportunities that exist for Christians who are interested in literature and creative writing. You should quote from at least one of the essays we read (Ryken, Robinson, or Kriner) to highlight something that Christians can gain from reading On Such a Full Sea. What have you learned from focusing your attention on several works of fiction over the past six weeks?

READ THIS AND ANSWER PROMPT ABOVE IN SUMMARY: Alongside our reading in climate fiction during the second half of our course, we’ve also been reading essays that offer different perspectives on why reading and discussing literature is important for Christians. We started with Leland Ryken’s essay, “Thinking Christianly about Literature,” in which he observes that literature “is built on a grand paradox: It is a make-believe world that nonetheless reminds us of real life and clarifies it for us” (25). Ryken argues that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, of divinity becoming embodied in flesh and blood, is an important one for thinking Christianly about literature. “The Christian doctrine of the incarnation and the Christian sacraments have provided a convenient analogy to literature, and perhaps even a sanction for it. Like the incarnation of Jesus and similar to the sacraments, literature embodies meaning in concrete form” (27). The next week, we heard from Marilynne Robinson, who argues in “Imagination and Community” for the importance of community, and for the way that literature can help us connect with the experiences of others. “As individuals and as a species,” she asserts, “we are unthinkinable without our communities” because it is in community that we live, and develop language, and tell our stories (22). Our communities help us understand who we are. Community, though, “consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly” (21). Whether it is in our home towns, our churches, or on a college campus, we cannot know everyone, but yet we will often think of ourselves as part of the same group. Robinson is a writer of fiction, at least in part, because of her belief in the power of community. “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification” (21). When we read fiction, we imagine what it is like to be someone other than ourselves — perhaps someone of a different gender, or class, or race, or religion. In doing so, we develop our ability to do the same with the people we encounter in the world. Community, Robinson teaches, is “work of the imagination” and “he more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be” (29-30). This week we read Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s article, “Hopeful Reading,” in which she suggests that a Christian understanding of hope might help us understand the place of literature and creativity in the world. Christian hope, Kriner argues, “incorporates both the sense of hope as individual desire/expectation and the sense of hope as a basic feature of reality” as it “subsumes all individual, mundane hopes under the ultimate hope made possible by Christ’s resurrection” (104). As she describes it, Christian hope “trusts God’s imagination is capable of inventing far greater outcomes than those offered by the individual or historical situation,” while simultaneously “insist[ing] on trust in the God of promise (and his Other-directed agenda) rather than trust in the self or the possibilities of self-achievement” (108). So what does a hopeful reader do, exactly? Kriner offers several possibilities. First, and most importantly, the hopeful reader “considers texts, religious or not, as part (if only a small part) of God’s continuing kingdom. Creativity, after all, is God-ordained, as the scriptures demonstrate” (109). Kriner asks us to read with a new orientation: “Hopeful critics read with the expectation that their work will help a text glorify God and participate in His kingdom, that the addition of contexts gives space and time for a text to continue becoming” (109). The hopeful reader therefore “facilitates the ever-expanding possibility of the text,” and in this way her work might be usefully compared to the initial human tasks in the garden before the fall. Reading, for Kriner, can be an activity closely related to theology and Christian action; we do not read texts out of escapism, or to kill time, in her view, but rather we read to participate in community with texts and authors as we all, imperfectly and incompletely, play our respective parts in God’s redemptive work in the world. FOLLOW THIS: Respond directly to the question I’ve asked Have a thesis statement (that you format in bold) at the end of your first paragraph that makes an argument about our texts. Good arguments about literature usually do two things well: (1) They make an interesting observation about a text, and (2) they make an argument about why that interesting observation matters (the “so what?” element). The chapters we read in Schilb & Clifford’s A Brief Guide to Arguing about Literature will be our guide to succeeding in this assignment. Consult them regularly! Organize your ideas into well-developed paragraphs. Blog posts that consist of one giant block of words will always earn an Unsatisfactory grade. Support your argument with well-chosen evidence from our texts. Blog posts that do not quote from the text(s) they are discussing, or do not offer analysis/commentary about the quotations they include, will always earn an Unsatisfactory grade. Use the rules of MLA style for citation and documentation. This includes parenthetical citations to cite quotations — for example, (Blair 47) — and a Works Cited list at the end of the post. I recommend consulting the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide regularly to learn and apply the rules of MLA style.