Introducing: Sing Me Hwæthwugu

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Anglo-Saxon, Poetry

A new addition to A Christian Thing; here is a taste of what it is about:

About: Toward a Justification of This Site.

Why I Am a Doctoral Student: A Response to the Slate’s Thesis Hatement and Thesis Defense

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academia, Academics, Anglo-Saxon, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctorate, Facebook, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Donne, PhD, Slate, Thesis Defense, Thesis Hatement, Tolkien

According to the recent Slate article “trending” among academics on Facebook, we should resist the temptation of getting a PhD in literature. This for the reason that the job market for graduates is terrible. As a literature scholar who is quasi on the market myself, I have experienced enough of this, and I will no doubt experience much more. In response to this, another Slate article suggests that there are particular skills one gets from a Ph.D, even if one doesn’t get an academic job. But in my opinion, this response is in places a little one-sided; it kind of makes the lifestyle of the graduate student sound like that of a poor bohemian activist. You may not end up an academic for the rest of your life. But the skills you learn can be applied in a variety of professions. And you might as well enjoy “that brief, blissful time cultivating your Idea.” Or, as the article concludes, “The inefficient path has its joys and largesse.”

The interesting thing about both articles is that both seem to gauge the worth of a Doctorate by what it does for one’s self. They are in many ways self-focused, cost-benefit analyses, one concluding that the price is too steep, and the other concluding that, all things considered, the price is as reasonable as many other life choices. But here’s the question I have. What if you are not one of those students who thinks they are going to change the world? What if you are writing your dissertation knowing that there is a good chance that the most people will care about it is a few months before your defense, and that because it is part of their academic duty? What if what you say won’t change the world, even when all your peers are going around (allegedly) doing life altering things for {insert favorite special minority here}. What if it is fairly clear that you will probably not get a job in your field, and if you do you are lucky? And let’s raise the stakes. What if the work you are doing does not come easily? What if it is painstaking and mind-breaking, hardly the kind of romanticized flight of fancy that people imagine when they think of someone doing a degree in something as “useless” as literature. What if, to make matters worse, you have moderate levels of OCD and depression that complicate these things. The second article defending the PhD begins to look a little too romantic. And the other more pessimistic article begins to look like the only option – the only option, that is, if one factors out love.

By this I do not mean some sentimental attachment to things; and I am certainly not saying we need to study these things to save our country, or our generation, or Western civilization, or oppressed minorities, or whatever else wants saving. Some of these things are beyond saving; some have become not worth saving; and some should be left to the choices they have made, free will being what it is. In some cases, where saving needs to be done, it may not be our discipline or the academy entire that is the solution. I am not even here talking about self-love, unless in terms of the way that a Doctorate disabuses us of our pretensions about how much we matter. No, what I am talking about is that thing that at bottom that cannot be explained, the thing that draws us to care for certain things and people at the cost of great sacrifice over against the jeers and laughs of the rest of the world.

Of course, both of the articles I draw attention to are in some ways grounded in a kind of love. At their worst they may be grounded in selfish ambition, at their best, perhaps a love of humanity and progress, a sense that we can actually contribute something to the world around us, and that a Ph.D. may or may not further this. Neither author seems set against sacrifice – each just wants it to be pointed in the right direction. But neither explains the love. Neither explains why we feel the need to care for modern humanity, or progress, or success, or any of those things. They are cited as categorical goods, but I’m not sure what scale is being used to determine this.

Having said this, I am not in any way claiming that I will replace these unexplained assumptions with anything terribly clear. But knowing that they are unexplained assumptions does level the playing field a little. The modern person will make sacrifices and take pains to succeed in a system he or she does not know how to justify. And the doctoral student studying obscure works does something very similar. The real question, of course, is about the end and purpose of life, something we postmoderns are far too fashionably cynical to engage seriously. And for my money (or lack of it!), whatever the results, I guess that the reason I have done a Ph.D. is for love – not so much the “I feel in love with a poem and got all swoony” kind of love, but the John Donne “Batter my heart” kind of love, the love that costs. If my relationship with literature were a marriage of convenience, I would have walked away long ago.

At bottom it is very hard to explain. Why do I feel the need to love dead Old English people by listening carefully to them, trying to hear what they are saying and not what I want them to say? Why does it bother me when they are misrepresented and caricatured? Why have I been drawn to love a particular tract of the universe carved out by Anglo-Saxon sages and so unfashionable in an age that has lost its appreciation of wisdom? I know and I don’t know. There are myriad reasons, too many to count, in some ways. But there is also the mystery. This is something I have been given to do. No one promised that one would be able to justify the ways of one’s vocation.

Does this mean that I think that what I am doing will have no effect or implication for modern thought? Of course not. But it does give me a reason to keep going whether or not I see effects or implications. Some things that we think important will eventually be shown to be empty. And some things we think empty will eventually be shown to be important. And it is hard to tell at the moment which are which. Part of the problem is that I cannot make promises about how “revolutionary” my work will be. If I am doing proper research, I do not know how it will come out, and so I cannot say how it will affect the world.

Perhaps the best way to sum up how I feel about these things is to turn to J. R. R. Tolkien, a paradoxical figure because he had a degree as useless as mine and has probably done a good deal more for the modern world than most practically minded people. This, though, is not why I appeal to him, but rather because I like his model of love for little things that don’t matter. In his most popular work, Lord of the Rings, this is seen in Gandalf’s interest in Hobbits, the creatures so insignificant that they are generally not mentioned in the broader histories, and are certainly not the interest of those who care about things that matter, like Saruman. But Tolkien also explores such love in one of his lesser known but one of my favorite works, “Leaf by Niggle.” The story is basically about two neighbors who get on each other’s nerves and potter away at their respective interests; Parish like gardening, and Niggle, the main character, is a painter. The story is about how both characters end up in purgatory/heaven and learn to appreciate each other. Both of their earthly interests are seen to have been an anticipation and longing for a heavenly reality. But what I find most interesting is the fate of Niggle’s art at the end of the story. Though the love he shows in his painting is in fact good and perhaps even part of salvation, his painting is only mediocre, and its fate is to be destroyed except for a small piece that ends up as a misunderstood curiosity on a museum wall. His love mattered in a way that could not be gauged on this side of the world – much like the love one might put into the subject of one’s doctorate. I am not of course claiming that doing a Ph.D. is the only way to practice this kind of love, but it is one way, and a way that is simply not being acknowledged in the ongoing debates over the worth of higher education.

Dantean Peregrinations

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Anglo-Saxon, Beatrice, Bible, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Edward Scissorhands, God, Hunger Games, Lent, mental illness

Nearly ten years ago now, I took a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Much has changed since then. Since then, I have gotten married, become a father, experienced the deaths of two friends, one of whom was as close as family. I have encountered various forms of mental illness in myself and others to a degree I don’t think I had experienced before. I have completed an MA on Paradise Lost, and am nearly finished a PhD in Old English literature, a kind of literature very different from Dantean allegory. Now, during the season of Lent, I am returning to Dante via a study group through our church; we meet weekly, and so I consider it fitting to report weekly on thoughts emerging from our reading and discussion.

Reading Dante after being steeped in Old English poetry for many months is a shocking thing indeed; it is a little like reading Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon back to back. Both OE poetry and the Comedy baptize, as it were, a particular aspect of secular (by which I mean not churchly, rather than necessarily evil) life. Old English poetry baptizes the heroic tradition, and there is little that is romantic here – indeed, the most emotively affective relationship in OE poetry is arguably the relationship between one’s one and one’s lord, a relationship that comes to be a way of talking about our relationship with God. The poetry is spare and it is haunted by doom and vanity. There are battles.  Moreover, I would add that the OE imagination is hardly anti-Biblical, for it simply elaborates upon seeds of images it finds in the Bible. The description of Christ as lord is so Biblical that we even talk about Him as such in an age when the term “lord” has come to be a rather hollow title. Doom and vanity are thoroughly Biblical themes, as evident in texts such as Ecclesiastes and Job. And battle is found literally in the Old Testament and figurally (against powers and principalities) in the New Testament.

Against the backdrop of OE poetry, Dante can seem (and I only say seem, because I know he is not) decadent, with a love of material, place, and romance. Certainly, the primary thing baptized here is the courtly love or fin amor tradition, so very odd from both an Anglo-Saxon and modern perspective. After the tonic of OE poetry, it does not feel stern enough; from a modern mindset, we need only imagine how surprised we would be if we asked for someone’s testimony of their relationship with Christ and they began, “Well, you see, I was at this party, and there was this girl…” To be fair, though, Dante’s chosen theme has Biblical seeds as deep as those of the Anglo-Saxon imagination; one need only consider books like Song of Solomon, and the celebration of the wedding feast upon Christ’s return at the end of time.

One may wonder if such imaginative elaborations of Biblical imagery are not dangerous, and all I can say to that is that it is indeed a dangerous thing to play with a double-edged sword. Too often in the church past and present the heroic imagination of the Old English type has metamorphed into something it is in its best instances not – a means of justifying violence unjustifiable on Christian grounds. Similarly, we need not look far to find places where spiritual experience and romantic/erotic love are being mistaken for each other in unhealthy ways; I think of the kinds of youth groups I grew up in, where the boundaries between hormones and the Holy Spirit were not always clear – I also think of Heloise and Abelard. Such dangers, of course, are why we learn swordsmanship, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in the training grounds of the traditions and disciplines of the Church past and present. Nonetheless, I do think the instance of Dante is interesting insofar as it is simply odd; put another way, had I been Dante’s friend, I would have advised him to get over his silly infatuation with Beatrice and focus on God – advice for which the church would have been much poorer.

The last time I read Dante, I think I was too cynical to understand such odd “Beatrice moments.” I think this was in part because I was exposed to too many poor ways of understanding them by my Evangelical background. Generally, speaking, it was understood (though never overtly stated) that the “Aha” moment we were all looking for was one of pure, personal experience with God. This happened through worship, prayer, reading one’s Bible etc. There was little room for those who had such “aha” moments elsewhere. There was also little room for those for whom “aha” moments were scarce or non-existent. As someone with OCD and depression, I fell largely into this latter category, though I tried very hard to have such experiences. The day I realized that Christianity was about much more than such a very limited Evangelical “aha” experience was a very freeing day indeed, though it did not of course happen in a day. And I still struggle to know where such experiences and emotions fit in the spiritual practice of someone who also has mental illness.

So, last time I approached Dante, I think I was suspicious of this instantaneous experience that changed Dante’s life, given how much it resembled the suffocating conversion and experience stories I had heard and tried to force in myself in Evangelical circles. What I am seeing this time around is that Dante’s experience is different from this. Dante finds grace in an odd and unexpected places, or at least what would seem so in terms of an Evangelical conversion narrative. Moreover, his experience is always open rather than closed. It always felt to me as if there were a number of things vying for my heart, and they were mutually exclusive – if I were to experience God, I should be careful not to experience other things. Dante’s love, however, is one that embraces rather than excludes other “aha” moments. Rather than avoiding them lest they distract one from the “aha” moment one is supposed to have with God, one allows them to be absorbed into the higher love of God. For Dante, we avoid idolatry, not by closing our eyes, but by looking up.

I think another thing that has changed for me is my general recognition that “aha” moments really can have worth. Being an older brother type (from the parable of the prodigal sons) and having been burned by a pressure cooker environment that expected God to appear as personal experience, I tended toward a dark-night-of-the-soul kind of theology, informed far more by the kind of loyalty and commitment prized in OE poetry than by an experiential faith, Evangelical or otherwise. What I have begun to see is that there are watershed moments; there are moments that matter. But they are not earned. Grace spills unexpectedly out on those who have not sought to experience it. And it can elude for a lifetime those who seek it very earnestly. Christian life is not about making these grace-experiences happen, nor is it about assuming that we are not Christians if we don’t have them. Rather, it is about being open to discovering them, thankful to God when they are there, and patient and prayerful when they are not. We must neither scorn them for their brevity nor cling to them as an anchor.

I do have one final thing to say, and that regards the very weird experiential faith of Dante involving Beatrice. I have been thinking about it, and I think that in a postmodern age we may in fact stand a chance of understanding this better than those in modernity, though perhaps not quite so well as a premodern person. There are two examples that come to mind of similar “Beatrice moments” in modern popular culture. Admissibly, they are much further away from blossoming into an allegory of faith, though there is the potential there.

The first is the Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands. What is related in this film is an experience the narrator had as a child. She loved Edward, but clearly married someone else (she has a granddaughter), and Edward is still in exile making snow. In any case, the narrator at the end of the film says with poignancy of her experience of snow (which reminds her of Edward), “Sometimes I still catch myself dancing.” I don’t think this takes away from any relationships or loves that the narrator had after Edward. But the complicated relationship she had with Edward led her to an “aha” moment that stuck with her the rest of her life.

The second example is from The Hunger Games (warning: spoiler alert). The “aha” moment in this series is Katniss’s early encounter with Peeta, when he conspires to give her bread and thereby hope. The love here does in fact end in marital love, but for a while the series suggests that it need not. Katniss is conflicted between her love for Peeta and her love for Gale. In an alternate version of the story, Katniss could presumably have ended up with Gale and had no less appreciation of the earlier effect of Peeta’s love that was something different than simple romantic love. Though not perfectly analogous, I think these two modern narratives might give us a glimpse of what Dante is about in his love of Beatrice.

An Apology for My Post on the U of R English Department: Thinking About Christian Things With Anglo-Saxons, Christian Humanists, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

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academia, Academics, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, Beowulf, Christian, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Creation, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Liberal Arts, Old English literature, U of R, University of Regina, Viking

As someone who often wishes that the Exeter book compilers had left a note explaining the connections between the works they compiled, I feel that it is only fair not to leave anyone reading this blog in the dark about the puzzlement of my last post: “What does the University of Regina Arts department have to do with the stated purpose of this blog? How is that in any way a “Christian thing”? I would like to respond by talking about three instances of literature that, for me, embody the way Christians should interact with the liberal arts. In all three instances I see the attempt to protect the Liberal Arts, and by extension what is good, true and beautiful (or all three together) in creation.

It is I think first worth noting that all three of these approaches are grounded in a strong sense of the goodness of creation. Imaginary art is, it seems to me, a subsidiary creation dependent on the primary creation, and if this creation is not good (as declared by God in Genesis) and not redeemable (as declared in Christ’s resurrection), then what is secondary to it is also not good. Though I think Plato himself was more sophisticated about it than he often gets credit for, his expulsion of the poets from the Republic is the natural outworking of a philosophy or theology that is trying to escape creation, and after Plato it appears in much less sensible forms in gnostic theology. All this to say that the poets I am about to discuss, working within a long tradition of Christian theology, presupposed the goodness of creation, and so understood matters like the liberal arts as the task of working with the things of creation. One did not of course even need to know about Christianity to discover this goodness – it is of course as accessible as creation itself, so that even pagan and secular observations of this goodness were readily adopted by Christians where they in fact reflect goodness, truth, or beauty – though with the caveat that such natural philosophy only goes so far.

What I see in the three examples I am about to discuss is the strong belief that protecting creation and its aesthetic subsidiaries is one of the most important tasks of the Christian. It is so because both creation and the arts are easily lost, whether in fact physically marred or rhetorically appropriated for unjust or selfish purposes. The Christian call to Charity encompasses a deep love of creation and the things humans have found in it and formed from it, insofar as these things are in fact the product of the deep God-given capacity for imagination woven into our hearts and not the shallow parody instigated by sin (the “vain imaginations” so often lamented in the Bible). The love of the Arts is thus in fact an extension of our love for our neighbour.

I do not know the names of those involved in my first example, which is Old English poetry. The names of those who originally thought of these poems, passed them down orally, and then finally wrote them down remain anonymous. But what has been passed down – and what we know about the context in which it was passed down – makes for a riddle that testifies to a Christian love of variegated literatures. It is almost undoubtedly certain that, in their final forms, the Old English poetry we have was preserved by clerics in monastic scriptoria. This of course leaves us with the puzzle of what monks were doing with Beowulf or the double entendre riddles, though the latter is hardly a new puzzle as the Biblical canon itself contains the Song of Solomon. Of course, it is impossible to know beyond a doubt what these monks were doing with these texts, and some criticism inflected through a particularly modern kind of lens sees this as evidence that Anglo-Saxon Christianity was not in fact as Christian as all that – the monks of course had to be monks because of the institutional oppression etc., but below all this their libidinous id longed for these more bawdy earthy things, so they are testimonies to a heroic proto-secularism practiced under the very thumb of the church. The alternative, however, and the explanation I would suggest, is that what we are encountering here is not poor oppressed monks just trying to have some fun, but a sophisticated theology that loves things, even the things of one’s enemies, and so considers them worth preserving – perhaps one can find something in them (and if this sounds far-fetched, consider that Beowulf itself is a story telling the heroic past of the Vikings responsible for attacking the Anglo-Saxons). I don’t of course want to pretend that these monks were sophisticated 21st Century liberals, but, considering the alternative – the Viking raids that, at least in Anglo-Saxon accounts, were no respecters of persons, things, ideas, or books – they did pretty well. Between the constant threat of Viking raids and the great expense of books, the preservation of things – not only Biblical Commentaries and theological works, but poems – was a great and risky sacrifice worth making because the things preserved were made from the stuff of creation, and the stuff of creation is good.

My second examples are the Christian humanists of the Renaissance. My own primary engagement with Christian humanism has been through Donne and Milton, so I will speak what I know from these poets and see whether it accords with More and Erasmus etc. once I have read them. Sidney would fit well here, too, though his work is not fresh enough in my mind to comment. Where the monastics were more involved in the physical preservation of things to do with the arts, the Christian humanists, I would argue, were interested in saving them from the power plays of church and state. We are in our own age very well aware, thanks to Foucault, of the ways the arts can become instruments of power. What we are not very well aware of is that in order to usurp the mantle of beauty, goodness, and truth, a tyrant must as far as possible eliminate the real things – the first casualty of hypocrisy is reality, and I think most of the people of my generation have swallowed whole the idea that all there is is hypocrisy and power plays. What the Christian humanists saw was that, among other things, one of the primary ways of protesting such tyranny and hypocrisy was to preserve goodness, beauty, and truth; it was in any case much better than simply deposing the tyrant, for without such goods another would rise in his place. Loving and protecting the weak and vulnerable reality preserved in the best instances of the arts was the first line of defense against the Leviathan of the nation state. And again, in the best instances of the arts, one could hear the stones – that is, the stuff of earth and nature – cry out at moments when the church herself remained silent.

Perhaps you are wondering where exactly in the Christian humanists I see this protection of goodness, beauty, and truth from abusive power. I think probably the best example, of the people I have read, is Donne. We can see this in all his work – his refusal in sermons to cater to a populist mentality; his scansion of the universe in the Devotions informed by personal digestion of large amounts of philosophy, theology, and poetry; and of course his poetry. Indeed, I would suggest that metaphysical conceits are one of his most prominent means of doing this – through these he forces us to consider, and consider carefully, things that we are used to instrumentalizing and objectifying. By forcing us to step back and look at the reality he helps us observe, he causes us to realize that the things we take for granted are in fact so many sites of choice – things could in fact be imagined other than the way we see them, and things could in fact be done differently.

The other place I see this protest against power is in Milton. One of the more contemporary reads on a Leibnizean theodicy is that, in the form it appears during the Enlightenment, it is not so much a philosophical answer to a philosophical problem, as it is a way of justifying the  cruel negligence of early capitalisms – if free will is a justification for God to wind up the world and let it go, evil and all, it is surely a justification for those with power and money in capitalism to do the same. Make an economy that works, and the invisible hand will take care of the rest – no need for the kind of intervention demanded by ethics or the Christian idea of incarnation.

Milton is of course pre-Leibniz, but I feel as if he anticipates this sophistic use of theodicy and fights hard against it. Part of the way he does this is by writing poetry rather than philosophy; by writing poetry, he acknowledges the felt needs and desires other than bare reason that must be acknowledged when discussing theology. And though some think the many stammering caveats, safeguards, and loopholes that he works into Paradise Lost make for a confusing system that can be dismissed as a Puritan neo-Scholasticism, his reason for doing this is because (if you will pardon a pun) he wants to make sure nothing gets lost. He does not want an easy theodicy, or an easy defense, or an easy dramatic flair that will win his audience over should reason fail. The task he undertakes is gargantuan and in those places where he fails his failure is because it is impossible to fit the better and more complex answer to theodicy – hundreds of years of Scriptural/Christian tradition – into a single poem written by a single person. But behind all the stories of the crabby, misogynistic Milton strutting about like a know-it-all is someone who sees the complexities of a world God made, and sees these complexities in danger of being pared down into the simplistic instruments that would write the history of modernity in blood. And for all his crabbiness, Paradise Lost is his response.

Perhaps the best way of imagining this Christian humanist impulse is the figure of Thomas More. Undoubtedly, someone so vastly intelligent and well-educated could  have easily have achieved promotion rather than execution if he had been willing to bend his knowledge and rhetorical skills to answer the will of Henry the VIII. He refused, however, and it cost him his life. He refused to deploy the arts as a handmaid to deception, trickery, and untruth, and so preserved his own and their integrity.

The third person I want to talk about is Gerard Manley Hopkins. The power that Hopkins resists is that of a weary imminence, the sort of thing that came about imaginatively after the shock of the this-worldly Romanticism had worn off and been institutionalized by Victorian society. This had the effect of making it very difficult to talk about the wild otherness of God in polite society; matters of faith were confined to certain forms of discursive piety in which they could readily be contained, and they were not to mix with the more important matters of business, finance, and politics. The world predicted in Pope’s Essays on man – where “the proper study of mankind is man” – had come to be, and its absorption of faith in the broader societal milieux was a far better means of controlling it than active suppression or persecution.

Of course, Hopkins is by no means the only one to protest this; others attempting to re-sacralize this Victorian world include members of the Oxford movement, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, and presumably a good number more that only a Victorian specialist would recognize. But I will speak of Hopkins because I have studied him. Accompanying the this worldly turn of most poetry in Hopkins time was that curious idolatry of art known as doing “art for art’s sake.” Hopkins had no idea what that might mean and to be quite honest neither to I, but it conjures the image of a narcissistic asceticism lusting after its own image in a mirror. The opening lines of one of the only poems actually published during Hopkins’ lifetime – The Wreck of the Deutscheland -is a direct challenge to this autoerotic poetry: “Thou mastering me, God…” In a world far more interested in a faith kept neatly separate from (or contained within) the matters of the nation-state, Hopkins cry was from the exilic Ecclesial ship being martyred on the reefs and rocks of a smug modernity. What sets Hopkins apart for me as a particularly inspiring example is how this cry and challenge came not in spite of religion with its institutions and liturgies, but in fact through it. Hopkins is not a Blake for whom religion becomes a language wherewith to express his emotions. He is tied to the strictness and rigor of the Jesuit order, and his matter is mined with effort from the depths of Catholic tradition. He needed Scotus – more of a rebel and less of a systematician than Aquinas – to challenge his society, and it is perhaps fitting that his challenge came out of a Catholicism once banned in England. He refused the shallow categories and languages of his time that permitted theology only to speak when spoken to – God was not for Hopkins the distant psychological vaguery of Tennyson, but was rather, like His mother, as close and palpable as the air we breath. Hopkins refused to stop speaking well of God when doing so in anything other than benevolent platitudes was growing less and less fashionable. In a sense, he covertly discovered what both the Christian humanists and the Anglo-Saxon monks took for granted, that when one seeks first the kingdom and God’s righteousness one finds the arts added to one’s bounty as well. Conversely, poetry that neglects God eats itself from the inside.

I realize that, in the above examples, I have said a number of things that very few English scholars would agree with wholeheartedly, and in part I understand very well why. I have seen concepts like truth, beauty, God, and the common good twisted and manipulated for use by selfish and cruel people, and one becomes reluctant to speak of them after a few experiences with such people. But I would like to hope that what I encountered in these experiences were not the real things, but parodies, and it is not these parodies I mean when I speak of these qualities. I also realize that, in a summary as general as this, I am at some points not careful enough in my assertions; I fear particularly regarding my statements on the Victorian period. I am not a Victorianist, though I know a number of them, and it would would be a dreadful thing to wake up one day and find myself being pursued by a gang of Victorianists. To be more serious, though, I am happy to take correction from any quarter provided it can be substantiated, but I do think that more than ever in a world that leaves such general overviews to the image-factories of shallow politicking, it is probably right to provide an alternative, even if an overview such as this is only a starting point rather than an end point.

This, finally, is the reason that I do in fact consider it a “Christian thing” to defend the University of Regina English department. The department itself is not of course Christian or any other religion for that matter, nor should it be. It is comprised of varying people from varying perspectives, some of faith, and some not. But having taken classes in this department, I do see happening many of the same things that people like the Anglo-Saxon monks, the Christian-humanists, and Gerard Manley Hopkins were trying to protect. And it would be a shame if these were lost to powers more interested in image than truth.