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Roger Lundin

Author of The Promise of Hermeneutics

14+ Works 909 Members 7 Reviews

About the Author

Roger Lundin is the Arthur F. Holmes Professor of Faith and Learning at Wheaton College. His other books include Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, and The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World.

Works by Roger Lundin

Associated Works

Liberal Arts for the Christian Life (2012) — Contributor, some editions — 113 copies
Hermeneutics at the Crossroads (2006) — Contributor — 41 copies
The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology (2010) — Contributor — 38 copies

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Summary: Using two essays by Emerson, "Nature" and "Experience," traces the shift in American moral and cultural authority during the last two centuries.

Roger Lundin was an English professor at Wheaton College until his death in 2015. In this work, he left us with a masterful literary and intellectual history of 19th and 20th century America. He structures this treatment around two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" and "Experience," tracing the shift in authority from Nature, that is the external world ranging from physical reality to Christian revelation to Experience, the perceptions of the individual know-er.

Lundin traces this intellectual movement through the American pragmatism of Dewey to the post-modernism of Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. Along the way he engages philosophers like Nietzsche and intellectuals like Henry Adams. He also traces this intellectual shift through the lives of literary figures like Emily Dickinson, of whom he wrote in a separate work, a short story of Stephen Crane, and William Faulkner. And he brings all these in dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth.

The movement he traces is one from a nature that is enchanted, connected to a transcendent God, to disenchantment, and from a reality and truth rooted outside oneself to subjective glimpses of reality and truth reduced to what works. I've probably stated this summary far more polemically, and with less nuance than does Lundin, who shows a deep acquaintance with and respect for the intellectual and artistic power of each of these figures, with whom most of us, including this reviewer have a passing acquaintance. For that reason, his invoking of Christian sources, and the transcendent vision of authority they represent, comes off as careful scholarship and rigorous argument rather than polemics or proselytizing.

What Lundin does instead is model Christian scholarship at its best, of engaging the minds of one's discipline with a thoughtful Christian mind. He also offers more. In a culture suspicious both of science and anyone else's claims of truth, and an academy witnessing the self-inflicted eclipse of the humanities, Lundin's discussion offers hope for the retrieval of the sources of authority lost to academy and society alike. Sadly, this work, still in print, does not enjoy the circulation it deserves. My own search to find the book in our state's libraries only turned up a single copy. Perhaps calling renewed attention to Lundin's work may both serve as fitting tribute to his scholarship, and invite a new generation to take up his work.
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BobonBooks | Mar 25, 2020 |
Originally, I read part of this work for a term paper I wrote on Fyodor Dostoevsky. After I finished that paper, I decided I wanted to read the whole work and see if I could draw any benefit from it.
In Believing Again, Roger Lundin explores the tension between faith and unbelief as it developed from the French Revolution to World War I. Auden outlines three components to his analysis of the topic: historical context (the nineteenth century), cultural analysis (primarily Europe), and the theological response (namely, Protestant individualism and one's own journey through unbelief). Throughout the work, Lundin analyzes faith and doubt from historical, scientific, and literary perspectives. He provides a good survey of the topic. His use of technical and academic language make clear that the work is intended to be a detached body of information on the topic, rather than one about how to apply lessons from the people and culture studied to one's own faith. I would recommend it for one who wants to study Europe's theological milieu in the nineteenth century.… (more)
 
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ohthehumanities | 2 other reviews | Dec 31, 2019 |
I liked this book a lot, but the actual biographical bits were more interesting than the philosophical bits. He also seemed to reuse some of Dickinson's quotes a lot, which struck me as strange. Additionally, many of the concluding paragraphs in each chapter said the same thing in different ways which annoyed me. It's like he only had one main point (despite the diversity of the chapter subjects), and felt the need to reiterate it frequently.
 
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emilyesears | 1 other review | Aug 29, 2016 |
Lundin takes a look at literature and compares it to theology. Several years ago while visiting a church with a family member, the Sunday School class was exploring poetry and other literature and comparing it to the Bible. I really enjoyed the approach that Sunday School teacher had taken and was really hoping that this treatment would be of a similar vein. Instead, this book focuses far more on a philosophical and theoretical approach to theology and literature and is full of jargon that bogs down the narrative. Instead of being something that is likely to get an undergraduate or lay person interested in the topic, it is probably something that only faculty in theology, philosophy, and literature would find interesting and perhaps some graduate students in those fields. The author appears to be enjoy Emily Dickinson's poetry quite a bit because the book includes quite a bit. There are sections where the advance review copy omits poems due to license restrictions. It is well-written, researched, and documented. The indexing is fairly comprehensive. In addition to the end notes, there is also a works cited section. This review is based on an advance review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley with the expectation that a review would be written.… (more)
½
 
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thornton37814 | Jun 4, 2014 |

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