Library & Online Resources
Dr. Edith M. Humphrey is the William F. Orr Professor Emerita of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, retiring in 2021. Prior to her service at PTS, she taught at several colleges and universities in Canada, and was professor of Scripture at Augustine College, Ottawa, Canada, from 1997-2002, where in her final year she served as dean. She earned her bachelor’s (with honors) from Victoria University (University of Toronto) and received her doctorate from McGill University, Montreal, where she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. The author of numerous articles on the literary and rhetorical study of the Bible, she has also written eight books: Further Up and Further In: Orthodox Conversations with C. S. Lewis on Scripture and Theology (St. Vladimir’s Press, 2017), Scripture and Tradition: What the Bible Really Says (Baker Academic, 2013); Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven (Brazos, 2010); And I Turned to See the Voice: The Rhetoric of Vision in the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2007); Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit (Eerdmans, 2005); the Sheffield Guide to Joseph and Aseneth (Continuum/Sheffield, 2000); The Ladies and the Cities: Transformation and Apocalyptic Identity in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and The Shepherd of Hermas (Sheffield, 1995); and Beyond the White Fence (Ancient Faith, 2021).
In her popular writing she has addressed such subjects as the Jesus Seminar, the Trinity, sexuality and the human person, music and theology, the authority of Scripture within the Great Tradition, and Christian spirituality. Humphrey is a also co-author, along with other members of the Primate’s Theological Commission (Anglican Church of Canada), of a series of theological workbooks for congregational use, titled Wrestling with God. She is currently working on two research projects: Mediation and The Immediate God and the reading of the Church fathers on justification language in St. Paul’s letters. An active member of the Orthodox Church (attending St. George’s Antiochian Church, Oakland), she retains strong ties with friends in various denominations, and is a well-known as a popular speaker at church retreats, ecumenical conferences, and seminary events. An accomplished musician who was the musical director and organist at St. George’s Anglican Church in Ottawa, she now helps with her parish choir and plays oboe in the North Pittsburgh Symphonic Band. She and her husband, Chris, have three grown daughters and 20 grandchildren.
Visit her blog at blogs.ancientfaith.com/alampfortoday.
Click on the links below to perform subject/author searches in the library catalog:
Christianity and literature
Christianity in literature
C.S. Lewis (Author)
C.S. Lewis (Subject)
C.S. Lewis - Religion
Edith Humphrey (Author)
Jesus Christ in literature
J.R.R. Tolkien (Author)
J.R.R. Tolkien (Subject)
J.R.R. Tolkien - Religion
Madeleine L'Engle (Author)
Spiritual life in literature
Storytelling - Religious aspects - Christianity
Theology in literature
Select Bibliography
The links below will take you to either Bookshop.org (which supports local bookstores) or Amazon.com, where you can purchase the book.
Burns, Terry and Linda Yezak. Writing in Obedience - A Primer for Christian Fiction Writers. Raleigh, NC: Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas, 2014.
Eager, Edward. Knight's Castle. New York, NY: Clarion Books, 2016.
Gerke, Jeff. The Art and Craft of Writing Christian Fiction: The Complete Guide to Finding Your Story, Honing Your Skills, and Glorifying God in Your Novel. Blue Ash, OH: Writer's Digest Books, 2014.
Hein, David. C. S. Lewis and Friends: Faith and the Power of Imagination. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011.
Hein, Rolland. Christian Mythmakers: C. S. Lewis, Madeline l'Engle, J. R. R. Tolkien, George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, Dante Alighieri. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998.
James, P.D. Children of Men. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1992.
Kotar, Nicholas. The Song of the Sirin. Waystone Press, 2017.
L'Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. New York, NY: Square Fish, 2012.
Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Lewis, C. S. The Chronicles of Narnia. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1994.
Lewis, C. S. On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007.
Vodolazkin, Eugene. Laurus. London, England: Oneworld Publications, 2015.
Williams, Charles. War in Heaven. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1930.
Books in Barbour Library
Print books below may be checked out by PTS students, faculty, and staff, as well as local area patrons who have library accounts (requires an annual fee). Ebooks are indicated by asterisks, and are available to current PTS students, faculty, and staff only.
Beyond the White Fence by
Katie discovers that the valley behind her grandmother's garden is more mysterious than it seems. After tumbling into tenth-century England and encountering Saint Edith of Wilton along with her wild animal menagerie, she is helped home, wondering whether her adventure was truly real. But after Katie, her cousins, and a neighborhood friend are drawn back in time once again, she realizes her grandmother's garden gate is a portal into faraway worlds, where patron saints are real people making real-life decisions.Join Katie and her cousins as they mingle with Rachel and Jacob, meet Saint Mary Magdalene up close, trek across the sand with the matriarchs Naomi and Ruth, and have a nail-biting adventure with the heroic Saint Katherine of Alexandria. In seeing the richness of the family of God, they glimpse how very much they are a part of it all.A chapter book for ages 9 to 15
Call Number: Stacks PZ7.1.H86 BE 2021ISBN: 1955890013Publication Date: 2021-09-28
Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real by
This book takes Chesterton's 'natural theology' through fairytales seriously as a theological project appropriate to an intellectual attempt to return to faith in a secular age. It argues that Tolkien's fiction makes sense also as the work of a Catholic writer steeped in Chestertonian ideas and sharing his literary-theological poetics. While much writing on religious fantasy moves quickly to talk about wonder, Milbank shows that this has to be hard won and that Chesterton is more akin to the modernist writers of the early twentieth-century who felt quite dislocated from the past. His favoured tropes of paradox, defamiliarization and the grotesque have much in common with writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce and their use of the demotic as well as the 'mythic method'. Using Chesterton's literary rhetoric as a frame, the book sets out to chart a redemptive poetics that first decentres the reader from his habitual perception of the world, then dramatizes his self-alienation through the grotesque, before finding in that very alienation a sort of pharmakon through paradox and an embrace of difference. The next step is to change one's vision of the world beyond the self through magic which, paradoxically, is the means by which one can reconnect with the physical world and remove the fetishism and commodification of the object. Chesterton's theology of gift is the means in which this magic becomes real and people and things enter into reciprocal relations that reconnect them with the divine.
Call Number: Stacks PR4453.C4 Z725 2007ISBN: 9780567040947Publication Date: 2007-12-01
The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing by
The Christian Imagination brings together in a single source the best that has been written about the relationship between literature and the Christian faith. This anthology covers all of the major topics that fall within this subject and includes essays and excerpts from fifty authors, including C.S. Lewis, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Sayers, and Frederick Buechner.
Call Number: Stacks BR115.A8 C44 2002ISBN: 9780877881230Publication Date: 2002-02-19
Christian Reflections by Call Number: Stacks BR123 .L67ISBN: 9780802871848Publication Date: 2014-10-22See especially "Christianity and Literature" (ch. 1)
Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit by
Foreword by Eugene H. Peterson Countering the generic "spirituality" so popular today, Edith Humphrey presents an authentic Christian spirituality that draws on Scripture and the profound riches of the Christian tradition -- Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Humphrey shows how Christian spirituality is rooted in the Trinity, in the ecstasy ("going out" of oneself) and intimacy (profound closeness with another) marking the relations between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The book embodies a banquet of excerpts from the greatest spiritual writers in history -- such luminaries as St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa of Ávila, the Wesley brothers, Thomas Merton, and Alexander Schmemann. Humphrey's elegant prose, laced with stories and images from her own life, beautifully uncovers the ways in which God's trinitarian life informs all human communion. Each chapter ends with questions for further reflection and discussion.
Call Number: Stacks BV4501.3 .H857 2006ISBN: 9780802831477Publication Date: 2005-12-13
Further up and Further In: Orthodox Conversations with C. S. Lewis on Scripture and Theology by Call Number: Stacks PR6023.E926 Z695 2017ISBN: 9780881415971Publication Date: 2017-08-01
Godric by
Frederick Buechner's Godric "retells the life of Godric of Finchale, a twelfth-century English holy man whose projects late in life included that of purifying his moral ambition of pride...Sin, spiritual yearning, rebirth, fierce asceticism--these hagiographic staples aren't easy to revitalize but Frederick Buechner goes at the task with intelligent intensity and a fine readiness to invent what history doesn't supply. He contrives a style of speech for his narrator--Godric himself--that's brisk and tough-sinewed...He avoids metaphysical fiddle, embedding his narrative in domestic reality--familiar affection, responsibilities, disasters...All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction [in a book] notable for literary finish...Frederick Buechner is a very good writer indeed." -- Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "From the book's opening sentence...and sensible reader will be caught in Godric's grip...Godric glimmers brightly." -- Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek "Godric is a memorable book...a marvelous gem of a book...destined to become a classic of its kind." -- Michael Heskett, Houston Chronicle "In the extraordinary figure of Godric, both stubborn outsider and true child of God, both worldly and unworldly, Frederick Buechner has found an ideal means of exploring the nature of spirituality. Godric is a living battleground where God fights it out with the world, the Flesh, and the Devil." -- London Times Literary Supplement "Wityh a poet's sensibly and a high reverent fancy, Frederick Buechner paints a memorable portrait." -- Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal
Call Number: Stacks PS3552.U35 G6 1983ISBN: 9780060611620Publication Date: 1999-12-22
The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Harry Potter by
In this title, Killinger examines all seven novels and observes how Rowling adheres to the Christian narrative. Examining all the Harry Potter novels, John Killinger points out the consistent way in which author J.K. Rowling follows the story of Christ in the Gospels with Harry as a Christ-figure. Rowling managed to keep this idea a secret to the end of the series, but was in fact following the Christian narrative from the beginning, which readers will recall involved Harry's being delivered amid extraordinary signs and wonders, following the death of his parents, to the home of his maternal aunt. Raised among ordinary mortals (or Muggles, as Rowling calls them), Harry doesn't discover the extent of his true powers until he attends Hogwarts School, where he is taken under the wing of headmaster Dumbledore, who is a sort of supernatural father to Harry and has an extraordinary scarlet and gold phoenix (representing the Holy Spirit) who periodically rescues Harry. The Potter stories appealed to young people all over the world with descriptions of witches and witchcraft, which outraged Christian moralists, who claimed that Harry was a poor example because he often behaved like a real schoolboy, cutting classes, telling little lies, and sometimes acting deceptively. Little did they realize that Rowling was actually following the outline of their own sacred story, a fact made clear in the final volume, where on Christmas Eve a stone statue in Harry's home town turns into a tableau of Harry and his parents (the Holy Family).
Call Number: Stacks PR6068.O93 Z7375 2009ISBN: 9780881461626Publication Date: 2009-09-01
Madeleine L'Engle, Suncatcher: Spiritual Vision of a Storyteller by Call Number: Stacks PS3523.E55 Z6 1995ISBN: 9781880913086Publication Date: 1995-08-01
A Mercy by
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved. There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness. A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
Call Number: Stacks PS3563.O8749 M47 2008ISBN: 9780307264237Publication Date: 2008-11-11
Scripture and Tradition: What the Bible Really Says by
In some of the church's history, Scripture has been pitted against tradition and vice versa. Prominent New Testament scholar Edith Humphrey, who understands the issue from both Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox perspectives, revisits this perennial point of tension. She demonstrates that the Bible itself reveals the importance of tradition, exploring how the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles show Jesus and the apostles claiming the authority of tradition as God's Word, both written and spoken. Arguing that Scripture and tradition are not in opposition but are necessarily and inextricably intertwined, Humphrey defends tradition as God's gift to the church. She also works to dismantle rigid views of sola scriptura while holding a high view of Scripture's authority.
Call Number: Stacks BS522 .H86 2013ISBN: 9780801039836Publication Date: 2013-04-15
Select Bibliography
The articles below without links are not available in the Barbour Library journal collection - please check your local library for interlibrary loan services in order to obtain copies of these.
Mattix, M. (2010). “On Christian Literature,” Comment, 3 December 2010, https://www.cardus.ca/comment/ article/on-christian-literature/.
Tolkein, J. R. R. "On Fairy Stories." Calvary Georgetown Divide, https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf. Accessed 3 November 2021.
Articles in Barbour Library
Articles that are available online have links, and are only available to current PTS students, faculty, and staff. Articles without links are in the print journal collection.
Daigle, M. A. (1985). "Dante’s Divine Comedy and C S Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles." Christianity and Literature, 34(4), 41–58.
Elie, P. (2012). “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” New York Times Book Review, 23 December 2012, 15.
Griesinger, E. (2002). "Harry Potter and the “Deeper Magic”: Narrating Hope in Children’s Literature." Christianity and Literature, 51(3), 455–480.
Madueme, H. and Barham, R.E. (2021). "Stories that Gleam like Lightning: The Outrageous Idea of Christian Fiction." Themelios, 46(2), 375-390.
Read, P. P. (2016). "What the Novelist Knows." First Things, 267, 33–38.
Spufford, F. (2017). "Christian Fiction after Christendom: Three Ways of Writing Faith." Christian Century, 134(21), 12-13.
- American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW)Professional organization devoted to the craft of Christian Fiction.
- C. S. Lewis and Inklings SocietyThe C. S. Lewis and Inklings Society upholds and promotes the advancement of scholarship, teaching, writing, and other professional activities related to the life and works of C. S. Lewis and the Inklings.
- A Lamp for Today (podcast)Join Dr. Edith Humphrey in reading Old Testament passages designed to bring to life the weekly Gospel and/or Epistle reading for the Divine Liturgy. Discover how the apostles and the New Testament writers followed the pattern of Jesus in their understanding of the Holy Scriptures of the early Church—the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.
- Society of Children's Book Writers and IllustratorsThe international professional organization for authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults.
Below, you'll find a list of Barbour Library books that were used in a book display to complement Dr. Humphrey's Book Talk. Feel free to download it and use it to find more resources!