Old Books with Grace

Welcome to the third episode of the Lent series on Old Books with Grace, exploring literature, self-knowledge, and transformation. In today’s A Book that Changed Me, Grace chats with Kaitlyn Schiess about Madeleine L’Engle’s marvelous young adult novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Kaitlyn Schiess is the author of The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture has been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here (Brazos, 2023) and The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor (IVP, 2020). Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The New York Times, Christ and Pop Culture, RELEVANT, and Sojourner. She has a ThM in systematic theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and is currently a doctoral student in political theology at Duke Divinity School. 

Welcome to the second offering in this year's Old Books with Grace Lent series. “A Book that Changed Me” offers four different conversations with guests on a book of their choice that changed them, made them think deeply about transformation, brought them closer to truth. Today, Jason Baxter is the special guest, and Dante's Inferno is the special book.  Jason Baxter is a college professor, speaker, and author of five books, including A Beginner's Guide to Dante's  Comedy and, most recently, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. He now lives in South Bend, where he is teaching great books at Notre Dame.

Welcome to the first offering in this year's Old Books with Grace Lent series. “A Book that Changed Me” offers four different conversations with guests on a book of their choice that changed them, made them think deeply about transformation, brought them closer to truth. Today, Joy Clarkson is the special guest, and George Eliot's Silas Marner is the special book.  Dr. Joy Clarkson is the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, and a research associate in theology and literature at King’s College, London. She received her doctorate in theology from St Andrews University, where she researched the ways we can use art to prepare ourselves for a good death. She hosts a podcast, Speaking with Joy, and is the Books & Culture editor at Plough Quarterly.

Have you heard of the midcentury fiction writer, Elizabeth Goudge, author of classics like The Little White Horse or The Scent of Water? Julie Witmer, founder of the Elizabeth Goudge Book Club, comes on Old Books with Grace to talk about Goudge's life and writings, from her talent for writing children, to her love for her characters, to her mischaracterization as a romance writer!

Grace welcomes Dr. Anthony Domestico, author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period and chair of the literature department at Purchase SUNY, to Old Books with Grace today to chat about modernist poetry including my favorite twentieth-century poet, T.S. Eliot. Warning: this episode is slightly longer than usual episodes because Grace lost track of time in her excitement about Eliot! 

Today, Grace concludes the Advent series with some very, very old poetry. Poetry, in fact, that you’re already familiar with. You likely sing a form of it, or listen to it each year. Grace dives into Old English and Middle English translations of the Great O Antiphons, better known to us today as the foundation of the wonderful Advent hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Let’s look for the Dayspring, the Dawn, the Sun of Justice on this darkest day of the year.

Welcome back to this year's Advent series on Old Books with Grace. This episode meditates on Christina Rossetti's A Christmas Carol, and William Langland's Piers Plowman. An interesting duo, separated by 500 years--and you'll find out why Grace pairs them in a contemplation on nature imagery and incarnational love.

In this second installment of the Advent series on poetry, Grace meditates on  George Herbert's marvelous poem, "The Bag." Listen to Herbert command despair away as Christ becomes incarnate and carries our prayers in his very body.

In the first episode of the Advent 2022 series exploring Advent & Christmas poetry from the past, Dr. Grace Hamman meditates on T.S. Eliot's The Journey of the Magi and our status as pilgrims in the world. Read The Journey of the Magi.

Grace welcomes Robert Elmer, the editor of Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans and Fount of Heaven: Prayers of the Early Church, the first two books in the Prayers of the Church series from Lexham Press. Grace, a medievalist slightly suspicious of Puritanism, learns about the beauty of these prayers from the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries and about Robert's own processes of finding and selecting these historical and powerful prayers.