Ralph C. Wood – författare

Focusing on specific theological issues in the work of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries, The Comedy of Redemption boldly unites Christian faith in dialogue with comic fiction. Ralph C. Wood demonstrates that all four writers are comic artists in the theological sense of the term, although their fiction echoes the laughter of the Gospel in radically different ways.Wood explores tragedy and comedy in terms of theological as well as literary categories. After a brief discussion of the tragic vision as it bears on the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, he offers an interpretation of Karl Barth as a theologian of the Christian comedy of redemption. Barth's theology is seen as disclosing what is profoundly comic in God's reconciliation of the world unto himself in Jesus Christ. Barth thus becomes-against the popular view that he is a despiser of culture—the basis for a positive theological estimate of contemporary literature. His theology also serves to reclaim the eschatological gladness of Christian faith amid the gathering despair of the late modern age.In light of these claims, Wood then offers literary interpretations of O'Connor, Percy, Updike, and De Vries. In a variety of ways, and not without ambiguities, there are reverberations of the Gospel to be heard within these four contemporary American writers. Sometimes against their own willful purpose, the rumor of revelation resounds within their fiction. Such literary analogues of the Gospel serve to demonstrate that the ear of faith, having first heard the redeeming comedy in scripture and the church, can also hear its parabolic echo in some of the best comic fiction written in our time.

It has long been recognized that J. R. R. Tolkien's work is animated by a profound moral and religious vision. It is less clear that Tolkien's vision confronts the leading philosophical and literary concerns addressed by modern writers and thinkers. This book seeks to resolve such uncertainty. It places modern writers and modern quandaries in lively engagement with the broad range of Tolkien's work, while giving special attention to the textual particularities of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings.In ways at once provocative and original, the contributors deal with major modern artists and philosophers, including Miguel de Cervantes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Iris Murdoch, and James Joyce. The essays in Tolkien among the Moderns also point forward to postmodernism by examining its implications for Tolkien's work. Looking backward, they show how Tolkien addresses two ancient questions: the problems of fate and freedom in a seemingly random universe, as well as Plato's objection that art can neither depict truth nor underwrite morality. The volume is premised on the firm conviction that Tolkien is not a writer who will be soon surpassed and forgotten—exactly because he has a permanent dwelling place "among the moderns."

Readers have repeatedly called The Lord of the Rings the most important book of our age--absorbing all 1,500 of its pages with an almost fanatical interest and seeing the Peter Jackson movies in unprecedented numbers. Readers from ages 8 to 80 keep turning to Tolkien because here, in this magical kingdom, they are immersed in depth after depth of significance and meaning--perceiving the Hope that can be found amidst despair, the Charity that overcomes vengeance, and the Faith that springs from the strange power of weakness. The Gospel According to Tolkien examines biblical and Christian themes that are found in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Follow Ralph Wood as he takes us through the theological depths of Tolkien's literary legacy.

Flannery O'Connor was only the second twentieth-century writer (after William Faulkner) to have her work collected for the Library of America, the definitive edition of American authors. Fifty years after her death, O'Connor's fiction still retains its original power and pertinence. For those who know nothing of O'Connor and her work, this study by Ralph C. Wood offers one of the finest introductions available. For those looking to deepen their appreciation of this literary icon, it breaks important new ground.Unique to Wood's approach is his concern to show how O'Connor's stories, novels, and essays impinge on America's cultural and ecclesial condition. He uses O'Connor's work as a window onto its own regional and religious ethos. Indeed, he argues here that O'Connor's fiction has lasting, even universal, significance precisely because it is rooted in the confessional witness of her Roman Catholicism and in the Christ-haunted character of the American South.According to Wood, it is this O'Connor -- the believer and the Southerner -- who helps us at once to confront the hardest cultural questions and to propose the profoundest religious answers to them. His book is thus far more than a critical analysis of O'Connor's writing; in fact, it is principally devoted to cultural and theological criticism by way of O'Connor's searing insights into our time and place. These are some of the engaging moral and religious questions that Wood explores: the role of religious fundamentalism in American culture and in relation to both Protestant liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the practice of racial slavery and its continuing legacy in the literature and religion of the South; the debate over Southern identity, especially whether it is a culture rooted in ancient or modern values; the place of preaching and the sacraments in secular society and dying Christendom; and the lure of nihilism in contemporary American culture.Splendidly illuminating both O'Connor herself and the American mind, Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South will inform and fascinate a wide range of readers, from lovers of literature to those seriously engaged with religious history, cultural analysis, or the American South.

Testifies to the presence of God as both our post-earthly hope and our present-world existence. These thought-provoking sermons by Ralph Wood, a layman who has taught religion and literature for many years, seek to till new soil in the fertile field of Christian faith and life. They draw on a wide range of reading not only in Christian theology but also in both classical and contemporary literature and culture. And they also mine Wood's own professorial and personal experience in dealing with both the old and the young amid "the chances and changes of life."  Wood squarely engages the American "culture of death" by wrestling with such vexing questions as sexuality and marriage, war and peace, abortion, racial injustice, and abuse of the elderly. By grounding his homilies in specific times, places, and quandaries, Wood demonstrates that Christianity remains a vigorous set of doctrines and morals precisely as preaching and ethics give shape to our worship and living in the here and now. Focusing not so much on our "getting to heaven," Wood's Preaching and Professing shows concretely how the gospel "gets heaven into us."

In this book Ralph Wood calls for churches to offer a sustained an unapologetically Christian witness to a postmodern world. Wood carefully chronicles how the church is watching the complete destruction of post-Christian institutions and practices that once shaped human character toward fulfillment in goods larger than humanity's own self-interest - the chief of these being the worship and service of God. Wood contends that Christian existence can never be taken for granted, and so the church itself must seek to create a Christian culture that offers the world a drastic alternative to its own cultureless existence.

G. K. Chesterton famously claimed that America is "a nation with the soul of a church." He was wrong. In Flannery O'Connor and the Church Made Visible, Ralph Wood argues that our churches have the soul of a nation because they have come to identify their mission with the American project. They have made the Church (understood as the visible form of Christ himself) virtually invisible.Wood seeks to restore the Church's visibility by showing how its ever-old, ever-new Gospel is embodied in the life and work of Flannery O'Connor. He gives careful attention to her Bible-soaked Augustinian politics, her surprising kinship with Saint John Henry Newman, and her saving friendship with the lesbian intellectual Elizabeth Hester. Wood also focuses on O'Connor's violent prophets. One of them wields a gun, another blinds himself, a third drowns a child. More often, they turn their wrathful judgment against themselves for their manifold sins and wickedness. Far from being grotesque freaks, O'Connor's heroes are fiercely seizing or spurning the kingdom of God. O'Connor's real freaks attempt to confine themselves within the hell of their own self-sufficiency.Wood also reveals that O'Connor based her self-portrait, included on the cover of the volume, on the sixth-century icon of Christ Pantocrator from the monastery on Mt. Sinai. It is no pious self-salute. It reveals, instead, her profound concern with the largely undetected demonry at work in a post-Christian culture sliding rapidly into nihilism. Thus does Flannery O'Connor's radically Christian fiction make her the most important Christian writer this nation has produced, chiefly because it serves to make the Church visible once again.