Things from of Old Kristin Fay University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations May 2018 Things from of Old Kristin Fay University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Biblical Studies Commons, and the Other Religion Commons Recommended Citation Fay, Kristin, "Things from of Old" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 1797. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1797 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THINGS FROM OF OLD by kristin fay A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee May 2018 ABSTRACT THINGS FROM OF OLD by kristin fay The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 2018 Under the Supervision of Professor Liam Callanan In his 2012 New York Times article “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?,” Paul Elie notes how Christian belief glimpsed in contemporary U.S.-American literary fiction functions in a social or sociohistorical manner within the narratives. If indeed assigned to an individual, the set of beliefs and their development are so difficult to determine, Elie contends, that the character no longer serves as a believer. This story collection responds to that critique and challenge by introducing characters who live out, live with, and live in consequence of their Judæo-Christian faiths. These stories take faith seriously—as the reason for everything to know about the characters in them. Beliefs drive values, attitudes, and behaviors. So here, faith makes a difference in lives, and lives of faith make a difference in the world. Since the stories’ content engages with what it means to be a 21st-century Christian in the global, transcultural, postcolonial Church body, each character must choose the way s/he will follow, all the while losing, surrendering, or assuming spiritual leaders and authorities. It is not their faiths with which they struggle, but with building support networks for their faiths. In addition, the stories’ formal properties engage styles and approaches of Biblical Scriptures; literary modes of speculative fiction, as they are used to pose supernatural motifs; and, genre elements of folktale, as they are used to socialize and inculcate. The purpose of the collection is to elucidate the spiritual expressions and experiences of the characters. ii © Copyright by kristin fay, 2018 All Rights Reserved iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Critical Introduction………………………………………………………………………….....v Works Consulted……………………………………………………………………….xxxi Craftsmen.....................................................................................................................................1 Still…….......................................................................................................................................38 Les Cousines Souris.....................................................................................................................66 Ex Nihilo......................................................................................................................................112 Appendix: Curriculum Vitae……………………………………………………………………145 iv Introduction Part I. The Theoretical: Making It Up This collection of stories engages the logos of Greco-Judaic understanding. It preserves the ancient mythological view of the spoken and written word by keeping language powerful and trustworthy. Here, words matter, because matter is words. They embody and participate in beings. Owen Barfield thought “every word carried some implication of the animate” (Carpenter 42, fr. Poetic Diction), hinting at how this is possible. Spirit expresses thought by word; word is spirit. Word is sent out with intention to accomplish a purpose and never loses that involvement. The eternal Logos reveals Self, diachronically and synchronically, as and by perpetual utterance: general revelation through creation, master narrative, and prophecy; and specific revelation through faith; preparations and provisions; divine actions and abstentions; promises and covenants; signs and miracles; judgments and deliverances; shekinah and dream-visions; angelic messengers, and poetry; theophanies and Immanuel; testimonies and dialectics; tabernacle-temple, and ruach ha’kodesh / pneuma hagion; songs and sermons; chokmah / sophia, and theopneustos prayers and callings; text; readings, and responses to questions torah, and basar / euaggelion; and challenges; rhema and graphe; parables and literary conventions. Dialogic in substance and nature, the Logos never ceases conversing and remains responsive to conversing. This extension (in terms of identity and action) of communication invites communion; this extension of relating invites relationship. v Additionally, as the above examples of self-disclosure demonstrate, and as Frederick Buechner observes, they are made “through the medium of what in Hebrew is called dabbar, which means both word and deed—the word that is also a deed because it makes things happen, and the deed that is also a word because, through it, is revealed meaning” (36). Word and deed are commingled and coequal. Word is as dependable as deed, and deed is as inspired as word. Words have the same effect as deeds done, and deeds speak and read as words. With these understandings, I approach scriptural logos as “living and active” (Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible, Heb. 4.12)—at work, effective, and agential. G. K. Chesterton saw all language as “material and actual,” or “object” and “event” respectively, so “the words have life in themselves in a performative sense” (Milbank 89). Likewise, the logos is engaging, open to engagement, and able to be engaged. This is because the ruach ha’kodesh / pneuma hagion [RH/PH] utters the logos, breathes it out upon us, makes it new each time through us, and is present with it and with us as they surround us and as we take them into ourselves. To have them is to have the heart and mind of the Logos. The three are alive in and through each other. They are about (in terms of identity and action) each other’s acts and activities. The story of the Logos comes “not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit” (1 Thess. 1.5). Together, they desire to indwell, inspirit, and enliven us; they desire we remain within them. It is a way to belong to one another, to tabernacle with one another, to make of each other a home. For me, the logos becomes a manifestation; it is a theophany. In the traditions of Augustine and Calvin, my response—whether my writing/action/deed, or my writings/beings/words—becomes the Logos made visible. Since the logos is central to my identity and work, and to my work’s identity and work, it is crucial for understanding and interpreting what my writings say and do. All four lives are vi caught up together: those of the Word, the Spirit, me, and my stories. My stories are in conversation with the logos, made alive to me by the RH/PH, so I read it with my own spirit of expectancy. In line with religious literary theorist Wesley Kort’s concepts, I have both “centripetal” and “centrifugal” moments in my engagements with the logos: I draw into myself the knowledge imparted through my meditative study by the power of the RH/PH; it penetrates my heart and mind; and, I turn and apply what I have learned outward to life (28–31). My stories change in potential, because their interrelationship with the logos activates and vitalizes them. They, therefore, satisfy Buechner’s ideal for “religious” fiction, both in their substance since they are “about the religious experience” and in their nature since the reading of them “is a religious experience,” which occurs when a work of fiction “is entered here and there” by the RH/PH (21, emphasis in original). By these relationalities, the logos transpierces “with the sword of the Spirit” (Eph. 6.17b), passing through and through writer and reader, until an alteration is realized and the new is revealed—as bloody as births and rebirths. This ancient Weltanschauung, to which I subscribe, resists the dual movements in the Modern Age of Greco-Eurocentric cultures toward George Steiner’s “retreat from the word” and Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world.” Correspondingly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge outlined an intricate and esemplastic transaction in the imagination that gives “birth to a system of symbols, . consubstantial with the truth of which they are conductors” (Jackson 660). Religious literary theorist Roger Lundin notes, “The romantic theories of language promoted . that the human imagination had the power to unify nature and spirit, words and things, in such a way that the modern world would see the ancient unity of the Christian Logos restored” (46). Coleridge’s “consubstantial” idea of language is exemplary for me, and my ascription of it to my own understanding of language aids readers in locating my perspective among the range of vii Christian views. It follows the Reformation doctrines of impanation and invination (i.e., the coexistence of the Logos with the eikon, without replacing or changing it), as well as the Chalcedonian doctrine of hypostatic union (i.e., the coterminous combination of the fully human and fully divine natures within the incarnate Logos). Also, to distance it from contemporary usage, I must emphasize Coleridge’s “incarnating” definition of

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