Good News Resounding

Essays on Literature and Theology in Honor of Ralph C. Wood

Rachel Toombs

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781481322539
• eBook ISBN:
  9781481320795
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism

Ralph C. Wood's teaching and writing career over fifty years helped readers and students be attentive to the way literature renders the theologically abstract concretely. Wood has modeled serious theological engagement and robust literary reflection in his writing on G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Flannery O'Connor, among others. His books have shaped current and future generations of literary critics and theologians alike. Not as easily measured, Wood formed generations of undergraduate and graduate students in candid, sometimes brash, often comedic, and always critical engagements with theology and the arts. Avoiding what Flannery O'Connor deemed the two great follies of theologically oriented literature in the forms of pornography and sentimentality, Wood draws out theological themes without watering down the reality of suffering or the costly nature of the gospel.  Good News Resounding honors Wood's contribution by continuing to follow in his footsteps, reflecting theologically on literature to draw out the very Good News of the gospel amidst very real suffering, evil, and sin. The collection assembles a diverse group of scholars--former students, colleagues, and friends of Wood--to demonstrate the multivalent approaches to and richness of reading literature theologically. Written for academically inclined readers of theology and the arts,  Good News Resounding extends Wood's legacy and testifies to the power of the classroom to shape future generations of readers, theologians, and Christians.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• For Ralph Wood
• 1 Dante’s Holy Tears
• 2 The Biblical and Pastoral Imagination of George MacDonald
• 3 The Long Defeat
• 4 “I am Christ’s back”
• 5 Freeing the Waters
• 6 The High Cost of Good Readers
• 7 Flannery O’Connor’s Prophets Are Not Fundamentalists
• 8 Under Every Green Tree?
• 9 The Power of St. Thérèse’s “Little Way” in Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins
• 10 Knoxville, Summer 2022
• Bibliography
• Index