Spring 2001 Winners

Original: Spring2001 Winners

Spring 2001 Winners

Initiative Grants to Network Christian Scholars

Gender, Genre, and Faith: Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer

Pamela Corpron Parker
Project Director
Assistant Professor of English
Whitworth College

Alexis Easley
Assistant Professor of English
University of Alaska Southeast

Maria LaMonaca
Lilly Fellow & Lecturer in English
Valparaiso University

Julie Straight
Graduate Student and Instructor
University of North Carolina

Kathleen Vejvoda
Assistant Professor of English
Metropolitan State University (St. Paul, MN)

PROJECT ABSTRACT:

Victorian preoccupations with gender, religion, and nationalidentity permeate the works of a variety of familiar and unfamiliarauthors. Gender, Genre, and Faith focuses on Christian womenwriters of nineteenth-century Britain. Religious beliefs not onlyshaped the lives and identities of thousands of English women fromevery economic class, but also were foundational to the ongoingprojects of nineteenth-century imperialism and feminism. All toooften, existing studies ignore, oversimplify, or distort women'sreligious experiences and expressions, representing them aspsychological aberrations or mere rhetorical tools. This projectseeks to provide a more accurate, amplified account of the literaryhistory of the nineteenth-century by illuminating the broadercultural and religious contexts in which individual women writersworked. Using the theoretical lenses of feminism and culturalcriticism, the project will document women authors' innovations ina variety of literary genres. It will trace their explorations ofgender identities and clarify their contributions to the debatesover religious dissent, the establishment of the English Empire,and the role of the woman writer. Participants will readrecognizable literary works, such as the novels of Charlotte Bronteand poems of Christina Rossetti, alongside non-literary and lesscanonical texts, such as Harriet Martineau's political journalismand Hannah More's biblical treatises. Collaboration is not onlydesirable, but essential to the success of the project. Questionsregarding the intersections of gender, genre, and faith arecomplex, and they require the ecumenical breadth and combinedexpertise provided by a group of scholars with varied religious andtheoretical training. Initial collaborations promise both aspecialized scholarly context as well as a rich spiritualcommunity. With support for extended summer research andcollaboration on annual conference panel presentations, such as theBritish Women Writers Conference, the research should producesignificant contributions to the fields of nineteenth-centuryBritish literature, religious history, and women's studies. As theprojects get underway, participants will incorporate otherinterested scholars into the project, invited promisingundergraduate and graduate students to assist in research. At theconclusion of the grant, we hope to plan an additional conferenceentitled, "Gender and Faith in the Christian Liberal Arts College."

Modes of Design Reasoning

Stephen Meyer
Project Director
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Whitworth College

Robin Collins
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Messiah College

William Dembski
Associate Professor in the Conceptual Foundations of Science
Baylor University

Robert Koons
Professor of Philosophy
University of Texas

Timothy McGrew
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Western Michigan University

Lydia McGrew
Independent Scholar
Kalamazoo, Michigan

Paul Nelson
Senior Fellow
Discovery Institute

Del Ratzsch
Professor of Philosophy
Calvin College

PROJECT ABSTRACT:

Arguments for design in nature were revered for millennia in theWest, and were a long staple of Christian theology and philosophy.With the criticisms of David Hume, however, and especially with thepublication of Darwin's Origin of Species, these arguments becameless and less common, not only in biology, but in philosophy andtheology as well. In the last few years, however, design argumentshave begun to reemerge in physics, cosmology, and even biology. Atthe same time, the philosophers have begun attempts to formalizedesign inferences. These developments are important, since arigorous and empirically sensitive design argument would create newopportunities for the Christian and theistic view of the world infields as diverse as philosophy, theology, biology, physics, andpsychology. An important recent attempt as such formalization isThe Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998) bymathematician and philosopher, William Dembski. His proposal, whichdepends on a non-Bayesian statistical analysis, has met with bothapproval and criticism among scientists and philosophers, bothwithin and outside of the academic world. A number of Christianscholars have already begun applying his method in theirdisciplines. Others share Dembski's motivation, but profoundlydisagree with his proposal. (See, for example, the forthcominginterchange between Dembski and Christian philosopher Robin Collinsin Christian Scholars' Review.) Still, others argue for a differentbut complementary method to Dembski's, appealing to such notions as"inference to the best explanation". Regrettably, despite thepublic debate on "intelligent design', there has not yet been anopportunity for certain Christian scholars to consider andcollaborate on different models for inferring design. This projectwould do just that. First, it will convene a small symposium tointeract, and where possible, resolve some of these technicaldisputes. After a preliminary exchange of papers concerned with thetopic: Models of Design Reasoning: How do we infer in the realworld?, the group will meet at Calvin College (Grand Rapids,Michigan), on May 22-24, 2001, to interact and respond to eachother's proposals. A number of lines of inquiry are likely toemerge from this meeting. Timothy McGrew will edit and publish thepapers and official responses as a single volume entitled Models ofDesign Reasoning. Before the volume is published, panelpresentations on the same topic will be proposed for the annualmeetings of the American Philosophical Association, the Society ofChristian Philosophers, and the Evangelical PhilosophicalSociety.

Surprising Beauty: The Body Broken/The Body Whole

Bruce Herman
Project Director
Professor of Art

Gordon College
David Goa
Curator Provincial
Museum of Alberta (Edmonton, AB, Canada)

Eric Grimm-Vance
Assistant Professor of Art
Trinity Western University (Vancouver, BC, Canada)

Edward Khippers
Artist
Arlington, Virginia

Patricia Jones
Art Patron Director
Ogilvy Public Relations (Cambridge, MA)

PROJECT ABSTRACT:

We propose an exhibition by Christian artists of nationalstanding to be displayed alongside the works of secularcounterparts, and centered upon the human form and its expressivepossibilities in the post-culture. The exhibit will bring to thepublic square powerful examples of art addressing beauty revealedin the human body in diverse circumstances: bodies broken bydisease, age, accidents of birth, or martyrdom; bodies presented inthe classical mode of wholeness and health; bodies presented aspolitical territory, exploited, sub-divided, humiliated, orexalted. The exhibition will unapologetically address a livingreligious-art tradition, which directly or indirectly referencesChrist's incarnation, passion, and resurrection as a radicalcritique of human categories of beauty and meaning-especially inits understanding of the physical body. The western tradition ofbody representation has been thoroughly revisited and critiqued inrecent years. Contemporary artists, particularly feminists, havebeen referencing the body for more than twenty years now as abattlefield of political and social consciousness. Artists such asFrancis Bacon, Alice Kneel, Lucian Freud, and others have given usraw images of the body that would seem to lay the axe to receivedtraditions of the body beautiful. What has been lacking incontemporary body-art (and the critical analysis attending to it)is a careful examination of a crucial subtext to nearly allfigurative representation: an underlying shared vision of humanbeauty and significance. To many this undoubtedly seems too loadeda concept; too fraught with the danger of sentimentality on the onehand, or elitist pretense on the other. To others it might seemhopelessly naïve. We do not think so. Th Christiansacred art tradition may offer an alternative to the polarities ofsaccharine prettiness (19th Century European realism) or thedeadpan, raw representations of the human visage often seen inmodernist body-art. This alternative centers upon the passion ofChrist and the implicit critique it sets in motion over againsttypical human understandings of power, success, and beauty. Whereasthe Greco-Roman vision postulates an ideal form, exalting youth,strength, and social superiority-the Christian art traditionreveals meaning and beauty in the apparent failure, weakness, andpathos of the Cross. Broken human beings for twenty centuries havediscovered an unsentimental hope in this image of a body broken onthe wheel of human power. The passion of Christ has always beenseen as a point of transcendence in its poignancy; a powerless,innocent man lays down his life in the face of political power andreligious bigotry, and ends by becoming the undisputed fulcrum ofwestern history. It goes without saying that Christian theology andchurch traditions have not always fully understood or honored theimplications of this alternative vision-and, in fact, often havebeen chief antagonists to it. However, it is our contention thatthe Christian sacred art tradition provides a possible third way: agenuine alternative to the cloying nostalgia of traditionalistconcepts of beauty on the one hand, and the endgame despair of themodernist attack on bourgeois sensibility on the other. Thistradition of religious art is alive and well though largely ignoredby contemporary art culture (and by its own Christian community aswell). Religious art continues to be a vital arena of investigationand expression and our exhibition attempts to prove this to betrue. Moreover, it is hoped that fruitful dialogue for the commongood can be stimulated by placing contemporary religious art (whichutilizes the human form as central) alongside secular and feministbody art, both of which may hold more common ground than iscurrently imagined. At the very least it is hoped that, bypresenting differing visions of the body and its meaning inculture, we can enliven the public square with fruitful discussion,stimulating scholarly attention and leavening public discoursearound the issue of human beauty in its full and surprising rangeof expression.