• Close-up of a historical handwritten manuscript page in cursive ink, showing dense text on aged paper, held open by a person’s hand at the bottom edge.

Souvenirs of the Victorian Global Bookshelf

by Alexander Bubb It began with a case of mistaken identity. In 2016 I was growing deeply interested in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of short, pithy, epigrammatic poems translated from Persian by the Victorian man of letters…

C. S. Lewis and His Medieval Mirror

By Erik Eklund C. S. Lewis is best known for his introductory exposition of Christianity, Mere Christianity (1952), as well as his series of children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), yet, notwithstanding his numerous theological works, his identity as…

Walter Scott’s Seven Deadly Tales

by Daniel Cook Still revered as one of the world’s great historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott kept coming back to the supernatural, the eerie, and the macabre. Some of the novels even include extractable tales of terror: ‘The Fortunes of…

Theologies of Reading

By Laura McCormick Kilbride, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, and Simone Kotva Is reading a theological activity? This is a question which only invites further questions. How a person responds to it will reveal as much about their presuppositions and their training…

Photograph of the Breton coast, showing sky with sunlight through clouds on a grey sea with distant mountains on the horizon

Kenneth White on the Breton Coast (The Fundamental Field)

William Sharp evokes ‘those wild Breton coasts of the Tréguier headland’ with the ‘grey, muttering waste’ of the sea. Little did I realise, when I must have read these phrases at the age of 14 on a cliff overlooking the north end of the village of Fairlie, in Ayrshire, Scotland that years later I would be living in that self-same area.