398 research outputs found

    Dorothy L Sayers: creative mind and the holy trinity

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    Human beings have no language with which to speak about God and their experiences of God except that language which they also use of themselves and of their experiences of each other. The doctrine of the Trinity points to the presence and action of God in the world through Jesus Christ. The search for human analogies with the doctrine of the Trinity has occupied the minds and hearts of theologians and philosophers since earliest Christian times. Many of the attempts made to provide a paradigm by which the Holy Trinity might best be articulated in human thinking have fallen short of the ideals at which they aimed. As a result, there is a paucity of material from which the teacher of theology may draw in explicating this apparently most complicated of doctrines. While the search was confined to the field of pure theology, it seemed fruitless. Dorothy L Sayers, a writer of detective novels, engaged in that search almost by accident as she moved from detective fiction to religious drama in the second phase of her writing career. By using her own experience of creative activity, she saw a striking resemblance between the creative activity of God and that of God's creatures. That this activity possessed a threefold structure allowed Sayers to discern a human analogy with the doctrine of the Trinity which would serve where others had failed. Her thinking was set out in her book The Mind of the Maker in 1941. However, her achievement in this volume has largely been ignored. It is time for a re-appraisal of that achievement in order both to re-present it to those engaged in theological deliberations now and to investigate how it was received in its own day and why it may have been overlooked hitherto

    Session E: Dorothy Sayers

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    Sayers and the Responsibilities of a Christian Writer - Christine Fletcher Charles Williams: Priest of the Co-Inherence - Susan Wendling Dorothy Sayers and the Wiles of the Wicked One in \u27The Devil to Pay\u27 - Paul Fetter

    Expectations_Proforma_appendix_1 – Supplemental material for Patients’ expectations: is there a typical patient?

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    Supplemental material, Expectations_Proforma_appendix_1 for Patients’ expectations: is there a typical patient? by Mark S Sayers, Susan J Cunningham and Tim J Newton in Journal of Orthodontics</p

    Banquet Keynote: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Wages of Cinema

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    Awards, Recognitions, Keynote Dorothy L. Sayers and the Wages of Cinema - Crystal Downing Biographers have long assessed Sayers’s concern with the wages of sin. None, however, discuss how wages from cinema shaped her response to sin. This lecture, based on archival research at the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois, offers a whole new way to think about the montage of Sayers’s life. Employing images from the history of both Sayers and cinema, it demonstrates how moving images moved Sayers, transforming her from detective fiction author to one of the most important influences on the spiritual life of C. S. Lewis

    Kleinians: Psychoanalysis Inside Out

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    Kleinians is a compelling account of the extraordinary revolution in psychology pioneered by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and nine of her colleagues and followers, including Susan Isaacs, Joan Riviere, Wilfred Bion, Frances Tustin and Hanna Segal. Drawing on her experience as a professor, writer and therapist, Janet Sayers tells the story of this revolution through an account of the personal and public lives of its main architects, their families and patients. The result is a lively mixture of biography, psychoanalytic theory and individual case studies. The author begins with Klein's pioneering extension of Freud's theories to the analysis of very young children. This led to her claim that from birth onwards children internalize figures from their outer world, resulting in an interaction of inner and outer factors which then govern our psychology. Sayers shows how, sometimes with bitter controversy, this radical insight was variously developed, and is still being developed by Klein's followers, thereby enormously enhancing our understanding of the creative and destructive factors shaping our everyday lives. Kleinians continues the engaging biographical approach of Sayers's previous successful collections, Mothering Psychoanalysis and Freudian Tales, and will be appealing and informative to all those interested in psychology -- to students and specialists (in psychiatry, psychotherapy, counselling and social work), and to general readers alike

    Theology in suspense : how the detective fiction of P.D. James provokes theological thought

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    Electronic redacted version excludes material for which permission has not been granted by the rights holderThe following dissertation argues that the detective fiction of P.D. James provokes her readers to think theologically. I present evidence from the body of James’s work, including her detective fiction that features the Detective Adam Dalgliesh, as well as her other novels, autobiography, and non-fiction work. I also present a brief history of detective fiction. This history provides the reader with a better understanding of how P.D James is influenced by the detective genre as well as how she stands apart from the genre’s traditions. This dissertation relies on an interview that I conducted with P.D. James in November, 2008. During the interview, I asked James how Christianity has influenced her detective fiction and her responses greatly contribute to this dissertation. However, James’s novels should be interpreted and explored in the manner that they are received by the reader. How the reader receives and responds to the novels, not only how James writes the novels, is what causes her stories to provoke theological thinking. By examining Christian symbolism that is present in setting, character, the Detective Adam Dalgliesh, and plot, this dissertation seeks to assert that James contributes to a theological conversation through her popular detective fiction

    Concurrent Paper Session 2A: The Theological Imagination of Sayers

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    \u27Christ Walks the World Again\u27: The Image of Christ in Sayers\u27s Catholic Tales - Barbara Prescott As a Christian apologist, Dorothy L. Sayers is little appreciated as religious poet. Yet in her early years, Sayers considered herself first and foremost a poet, and a large portion of this poetry was an expression of Christian romanticism in myth and legend. In her twenties, Sayers published a collection of poems in sonnet and ballad structure which reflect and interpret the heroic roles of Jesus the Christ. Within this small book, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs (1918), we are given a glimpse of those imaginative, unusual, and unfamiliar images of Jesus Christ. We are given the varied faces of Christ as a legendary folk and mythic Hero. Sources include the published version of the text, earlier manuscript of the book, as well as Dorothy L. Sayers’s notes and unpublished letters from the archives of the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton, IL. The First and Second Wave of Dorothy L. Sayers - Hannah Stumpf Snyder Reading Lewis Reading Sayers - Alan Snyder While Dorothy L. Sayers was not an official Inkling, she was of the same spirit, having an Oxford degree, contributing an essay to the volume commemorating Charles Williams, and carrying on a personal correspondence with C. S. Lewis. Although Lewis had no interest in detective stories, in which Sayers made her name as an author, he nevertheless developed a great love of some of her other works: The Man Born to Be King, The Mind of the Maker, and her translation of Dante, in particular. What was it about those writings and Sayers herself that Lewis appreciated? This paper will examine his perspective on Sayers via both their personal correspondence and his writings to others about her and her works. In addition, I will compare my own perspective on Sayers’s writings with Lewis’s. The Theological Aesthetics of Dorothy L. Sayers as Interpretive Key to the Fantasy Worlds of Lewis and Tolkien - Gary L. Tandy In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L. Sayers suggests that all artistic creations are threefold. Specifically, all creative works contain the Creative Idea (the image of the Father), the Creative Energy (the image of the Word), and the Creative Power (the image of the indwelling Spirit). Throughout her book, Sayers applies her theory to various literary artists and works, demonstrating how a Trinitarian view of the creative or faithful imagination helps explain their artistic successes or failings. I aim to explore how applying Sayers’s theory may open new avenues of understanding and appreciation for Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Among other observations, I will suggest that Sayers’s theories are especially appropriate windows into the works of fantasy writers or world builders like Lewis and Tolkien, for in their efforts to craft worlds outside our earthly experience, we can see clearly how these authors became the gods of their own creations. In the process, I also hope to demonstrate that Sayers provides a useful “theological aesthetic” for Christian readers and literary critics—the kind David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet call for in their Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice (2011)

    An Introductory Paper on Dorothy Sayers

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    Considers Sayers as the Inkling-related author who best articulates the theme of man as sub-creator. Finds this theme manifest in the Lord Peter Wimsey novels—the criminal plotting the crime and the detective re-creating it are both practicing sub-creativity—as well as more explicitly in her religious plays. Also discusses the themes of academic and intellectual honesty essential to the novel Gaudy Night. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.

    Books, Theology, and Hens: the Correspondence and Friendship of C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers

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    That Lewis and Sayers had much in common and that their lives intersected in a number of interesting ways throughout their careers is common knowledge for even the casual follower of either author. What does not seem to have been appreciated or explained sufficiently in the scholarship to date is the nature of the friendship between these two influential Christian authors. Therefore, it is this friendship we wish to shed light on, using as our primary source the correspondence between Lewis and Sayers from 1942-1957. In addition, we look at what the biographers of each author have to say about their relationship
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