Resources
Grace in Literature
Writing is a powerful way for us to deepen our understanding of our own faith. It helps us reflect on our relationship with God, how we are nurturing it towards living out purpose-driven lives that glorify God and His kingdom.
Are we allowing the Holy Spirit to move us in all that we do? Are we constantly going back to God, reaching out to Him, fully relying on His almighty power, infinite mercy and abundant love?
Our spirituality often brings us on a journey that surprises even us. It can be a journey of drift and sudden turns, strange detours, even deviations. These can be deeply affecting, edifying and transformative.
In an effort to understand our particular life station, we may choose to carve out some time for ourselves, in order to think more deeply about where we’re at, to engage with our thoughts and emotions through the beautiful act of contemplative writing.
For an all-in-one resource for matters of the Catholic faith, Laudate is a free Catholic app for Android and iOS, available in different languages. Laudate includes a complete Bible, daily Mass readings, prayers, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Stations of the Cross, daily mediations, a ‘saint of the day’ feature, and a broad range of other resources.
Below are also various faith-based journals that publish some compelling Christian works.
Following these recommendations is a fascinating list of scholastic readings that allow for deep study into various aspects of the faith.
JOURNALS
American Christian Fiction Writers
ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies
Crux: A Journal of Christian Thought & Opinion
Ecumenica: Performance and Religion
Edge of Faith: Arts & Culture Through a Christian Lens
Emmanuel: The Magazine of Eucharistic Spirituality
Faith & Form: The Interfaith Journal on Religion, Art & Architecture
Imaginatio et Ratio: A Journal of Theology and the Arts
Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry
Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith
Second Spring: International Journal of Faith & Culture
SEEN Journal: Christians in the Visual Arts
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality
The Other Journal: An Intersection of Theology & Culture
Transpositions: Theology, Imagination and the Arts
Verge: A Journal of the Arts + Christian Faith
BOOKS
Augustine, Saint. City of God. Trans. Marcus Dods. Rpt. in A Select Library of the
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff.
Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 519-97.
____________. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine Coffin. Middlesex, England and New
York: Penguin Books, 1961.
____________. Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love. Trans. J.F. Shaw. Rpt. in A Select
Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 237-76.
____________. Expositions on the Book of Psalms. Trans. A. Cleveland Coxe. Rpt. in
A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church.
Ed. Philip Schaff. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993.
1-683.
____________. Letters to St. Jerome. Trans. J.G. Cunningham. Rpt. in A Select Library
of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff.
Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 251-3, 272-5.
____________. Of Virginity. Trans. C. I. Cornish. Rpt. in A Select Library of the Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Grand
Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 417-38.
____________. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. J.F. Shaw. Rpt. in A Select Library of the
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Grand
Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 519-97.
____________. On Lying. Trans. H. Browne. Rpt. in A Select Library of the Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Grand Rapids,
Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 457-77.
____________. On the Trinity. Trans. Arthur West Haddan. Rpt. in A Select Library of
the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff.
Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 457-77.
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward.
London and New York: Verso, 2001.
______. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1982.
Bourke, Vernon J, ed. The Essential Augustine. New York: The New American Library,
1964.
Catechism of the Catholic Church. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. In The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. F.N.
Robinson. Boston Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. 17-265.
Damrosch, Leopold Jr. God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional
Imagination from Milton to Fielding. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Dodaro, Robert and George Lawless, eds. Augustine and His Critics. London and
New York: Routledge, 2000.
Dupree, Robert S. Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination. Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
Eggenschwiler, David. The Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1972.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 1934.
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. Two Poets of the Oxford Movement: John Keble and
John Henry Newman. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.
Evans, G.R. Augustine on Evil. London: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Faber, Geoffrey. Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement. London:
Faber and Faber, 1933.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1964.
Francis, W. Nelson, ed. The Book of Vices and Virtues: a Fourteenth Century English
Translation of the Somme le Roi of Lorens d’Orleans. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.
Friedman, Melvin J. and Lewis A. Lawson, eds. The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind
of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Fordham University Press, 1966.
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London and Melbourne:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Frye, Roland Mushat. God, Man and Satan: Patterns of Christian Thought and Life in
Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress and the Great Theologians. Port Washington,
New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Giannone, Richard. Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love. New York: Fordham
University Press, 1999.
Haberman, Charles G. et al. Catholic Encyclopedia, The. New York: Robert Appleton
Co., 1912.
Harrison, Carol. Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine. Oxford:
Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Idema, Henry III. Before Our Time: A Theory of the Sixties from a Religious, Social
and Psychoanalytic Perspective. Lanham, Maryland and London: University Press
of America, 1996.
Irwin, William, ed. The Death and Resurrection of the Author. Westport, Connecticut
and London: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Jay, Elizabeth, ed. The Evangelical and Oxford Movements. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Jerome, Saint. Letter XIV. Trans. W.H. Fremantle. Rpt. in A Select Library of the Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993. 13-8.
John Chrysostom, Saint. Trans. Talbot Chambers. Rpt. in A Select Library of the Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993.
Josipovici, Gabriel. The World and the Book. London: Macmillan Press, 1994.
Jung, Carl G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1933.
Kazin, Alfred. God and the American Writer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition
for Upbuilding and Awakening. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H Hong. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Kilcourse, George A. Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with
Everything Off-Balance. New York: Paulist Press, 2001.
Kirwan, Christopher. Augustine. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
Labrie, Ross. The Catholic Imagination in American Literature. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 1997.
Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. London: Oxford
University Press, 1936.
Madsen, Deborah L. Allegory in America: from Puritanism to Postmodernism.
London and New York: Macmillan Press, 1996.
_______________. Rereading Allegory: a Narrative Approach to Genre. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Marrou, Henri-Irenee. A History of Education in Antiquity. Trans. George Lamb. London
and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956.
________________. Saint Augustin et la Fin de la Culture Antique. Paris: E. de Boccard,
1938.
Matthews, Gareth B, ed. The Augustinian Tradition. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Muller, Gilbert H. Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Grotesque.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.
Murphy, James Jerome. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: a History of Rhetorical Theory
from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Nelson, William. Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973.
O'Connor, Flannery. Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, The. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1975.
_______________. Collected Works. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Library of America,
1988.
_______________. The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys.
Ed. C. Ralph Stephens. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.
_________________. The Habit of Being: Letters. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1979.
_______________. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally and Robert
Fitzgerald. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
Pomerius, Julianus. The Contemplative Life. Trans. Sis. Mary Josephine Suelzer.
Westminster, Maryland and London: Newman Press and Longmans, Green and Co, 1947.
Pope, Alexander. Collected Poems. Ed. Bonamy Dobree. New York: Dent Duttton-
Everyman’s Library, 1924.
Reade, Winwood. The Martyrdom of Man. London: Jonathan Cape, 1927.
Schaff, Philip, ed. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian
Church. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993.
Smith, Molly. The Darker World Within (Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His
Successors). London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991.
Stevenson, Kay Gilliland. Milton to Pope: 1650-1720. New York: PALGRAVE, 2001.
Stock, Brian. Augustine The Reader (Meditation, Self-knowledge and the Ethics of
Interpretation). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1996.
Stromberg, Peter. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian
Conversion Narrative. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1993.
Stump, Eleonore and Norman Kretzmann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Augustine.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Tinkle, Theresa. Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics and English
Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Wetzel, James. Augustine and the Limits of Virtue. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
White, Hugh. Nature, Sex and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Wills, Garry. Saint Augustine. New York: Viking Press, 1999.
ARTICLES
Arva, Eugene L. “Life As Show Time: Aesthetic Images and Ideological Spectacles.”
Wickedness.net. June 2003. <http://www.wickedness.net/ejv1n2/ejv1n2_arva.pdf>.
Ando, Clifford. “Signs, Idols and the Incarnation in Augustinian Metaphysics.”
Representations. 73 (2001), 24-53.
Coulthard, A.R. “From Sermon to Parable: Four Conversion Stories by Flannery
O’Connor.” American Literature 55.1 (Mar. 1983): 55-71. March 2000
<http://www.jstor.org/fcgi-bin/jstor/viewitem.fcg/00029831/dm990217/>.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In The Death and Resurrection of the Author.
Ed. William Irwin. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2002. 9-22.
Guroian, Vigen. “The Iconographic Fiction and Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor.”
The Intercollegiate Review 36.1-2 (Fall 2000): 46-55.
Harrison, Carol. “The Rhetoric of Scripture and Preaching.” In Augustine and His Critics.
Eds. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 214-30.
Kellogg, Alfred L. “An Augustinian Interpretation of Chaucer’s Pardoner.” Speculum 26
(1951), 465-81.
Miller, Robert P. “Chaucer's Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner's Tale.”
Speculum 30 (1955), 180-99.
Monroe, William F. “Flannery O’Connor and the Celebration of Embodiment.” In The
Good Body: Asceticism in Contemporary Culture. Eds. Mary G. Winkler and
Letha B. Cole. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. 171-88.
Neuhaus, Richard John. “A Continuing Survey of Religion and Public Life.” First Things.
January 1994. <http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9401/public.html#cupid>.
Nichols, Stephen G. “Amorous Imitation: Bakhtin, Augustine, and Le Roman d’Eneas.”
In Romance: Generic Transformation from Chretien de Troyes to Cervantes. Eds. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985. 47-73.
Prior, Sandra Pierson. “Virginity and Sacrifice in Chaucer’s ‘Physician’s Tale.” In
Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages. Eds. Cindy L.
Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 165-80.
Price, Martin. “Character and False Art” In Alexander Pope. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York,
New Haven and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 51-60.
Robertson, James Alexander. “Catholicism in the Philippine Islands.” The Catholic
Historical Review 3.4 (Jan. 1918): 375- 391. October 2021
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/25011532>.
Schaub, Thomas Hill. “Christian Realism and O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’
In American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 116-36.
Taylor, Dennis. “The Need for a Religious Literary Criticism.” Religion and the Arts 1.1
(Fall 1996) <http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/relarts/DennisTaylor_essay.html>.
Tracy, David. “Charity, Obscurity, Clarity: Augustine’s Search for Rhetoric and
Hermeneutics.” In Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader. Eds. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 254-74.
Williams, Rowan. “Insubstantial Evil.” In Augustine and His Critics. Eds. Robert Dodaro
and George Lawless. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 105-23.
Wills, Garry. "Religion and the Arts." In Crossroads: Arts and Religion in American Life.
Eds. Alberta Arthurs and Glenn Wallace. New York: The New Press, 2001.
Wood, James. “’Speaking of Beauty': Value Judgments.” The New York Times.com.
September 14, 2003.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/books/review/14WOODLT.html>.
WEBSITES
Catechism of the Catholic Church. Ed. Jim Crawley. December 1995. USA. April 2000
<http://www.christusrex.org/www1/CDHN/healing.html#CELEBRATION>.
Catholic Encyclopedia. Ed. Kevin Knight. 2000. Colorado, USA. 2000
<http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/>.
Catholic Church and the Philippines. 2015. TV9, Philippines.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=refK5ZVNv2I>.
Catholicism in the Philippines. Harvard Divinity School. Massachusetts, USA.
<https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/catholicism-philippines>.
Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000. 1997. Redmond, Washington. 2000
Washington. April 2000 <http://encarta.msn.com>.
Fascinating History behind Why Hougang Has So Many Teochew Catholics. Singapore.
2020. October 2021<https://mothership.sg/2020/11/hougang-teochew-catholics/>.
History of the Catholic Church in Singapore. 2021. Singapore. October 2021
<https://history.catholic.sg/>.
Manalo, Ricky. A look at 500 years of Christianity in the Philippines—and counting! 2021.
Singapore. October 2021 <https://catholicreview.org/a-look-at-500-years-of-christianity-in-the-philippines-and-counting/>.
Our Catholic Light: The Story of the Church in Singapore. 2021. Singapore. October 2021
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC5qEue_LQU>.
Smith’s Bible Dictionary. Ed. William Smith. 1996. Chantilly, Virginia. April 2000
<http://www.biblestudytools.net/Dictionaries/SmithsBibleDictionary/>.
