Critics' choices for Christmas Traveling widely, reading closely (even eccentrically), and judging perspicaciously, our panel of Christmas critics has put together a list of titles that includes everything from an obedient Lassie to God's brilliantly wayward "biographer" And then there's the poetry and the theology Please share the good words
Miles, Jack
BOOKS Critics' choices for Christmas Jack Miles Jack Miles is director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate School, Claretnont, California, and author of God: A Biography...
...Among the others, I might single out, quoting only in part, Davies: "It promises to be a wonderful book for the student and the browser and it should be of inestimable value to scholars, teachers, and writers...
...They were years well spent...
...The particular joy of Jeffrey's dictionary is that while demonstrating that, yes indeed, the Bible is everywhere in English literature, it takes you to places in English literature that you haven't been and, even better, to places in European literature that you have never thought of visiting...
...I go to it often and rarely come away without something wonderful that I hadn't gone in looking for...
...to about a.d...
...Bible scholarship of the usual historical sort is mostly trapped in a period from about 1200 B.C...
...The process by which the Bible made its way from its complex Eastern Mediterranean origins into European literature and through Europe into England- well, whoever teaches that, Bible scholars usually don't...
...BOOKS Critics' choices for Christmas Jack Miles Jack Miles is director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate School, Claretnont, California, and author of God: A Biography (Knopf...
...This is an opus magnum full of erudition, judgment, and mature humanity...
...I quite believe the jacket flap claim that the book was sixteen years in the making...
...A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, David Lyle Jeffrey, general editor (William B. Eerdmans, $75,960 pp...
...This has certainly been my experience...
...It is something of a commonplace that no book in English literature is more important than the Bible, a book that, of course, was originally not a part of English literature at all...
...But Jeffrey, one of whose several books is The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975), has written what I would call a Catholic book...
...To an extent, the usual biblical curriculum reflects a Protestant tendency to leap directly from Paul to Luther as one might fly from coast to coast, not much noticing the Mississippi Valley...
...William B. Eerdmans is a publishing house with a Protestant Evangelical tradition...
...The endorsements that this book arrived with in 1992 included some-I speak as a jaded erstwhile book editor- that are not to be had at any price: John Updike, Frank Kermode, Robertson Davies, John Macquarrie, Bruce Metz-ger, Walter Ong...
...Updike's measured superlative was: "A prodigious piece of scholarship, indispensable in the libraries of Anglophone Christendom...
...Figuratively speaking, Jeffrey spends plenty of time along the Mississippi...
...But how true is that claim, finally...
...is a book that re-establishes its premise with a kind of loving exuberance on every page...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 21
