Old Books with Grace

East Coker with O. Alan Noble: Four Quartets, Lent 2025

Lent is a time of repentance, reflection, and reconciliation. These are actions that happen in time, facilitated by memory and love. So even though we, as followers of Christ, repent, reflect, and reconcile year-round, one hopes, we set aside a time to especially do so, to be as intentional as we can, to pay special attention to our blessed limitations as creatures of God. It is easy to let these things go.
This is what Lent is for. It so happens that these themes—love, memory, time, attention, repentance, creatureliness—are also themes extensively explored in T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece set of poems, the Four Quartets. Each episode in this Lent series, Grace will be discussing one of the quartets with a guest. Today Grace welcomes Professor O. Alan Noble for a thoughtful conversation on East Coker, the second poem.
Dr. O. Alan Noble is Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, and author of three books: On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, and Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age. Dr. Noble has published articles at The Atlantic, The Gospel Coalition, First Things, and Christianity Today. He lives with his wife and three children. 
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Burnt Norton with Paul Pastor: Four Quartets, Lent 2025

Welcome to Old Books with Grace! Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent 2025. And today begins the Old Books with Grace Lent Series, on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Lent is a time of repentance, reflection, and reconciliation. These are actions that happen in time, facilitated by memory and love. So even though we, as followers of Christ, repent, reflect, and reconcile year-round, one hopes, we set aside a time to especially do so, to be as intentional as we can, to pay special attention to our blessed limitations as creatures of God. It is easy to let these things go.
This is what Lent is for. It so happens that these themes—love, memory, time, attention, repentance, creatureliness—are also themes extensively explored in T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece set of poems, the Four Quartets. Each episode in this Lent series, Grace will be discussing one of the quartets with a guest. Today is the first, Burnt Norton, and poet and editor Paul Pastor joins Grace for a lively discussion.
Paul J. Pastor is Executive Editor of Nelson Books at HarperCollins, an essayist, critic, and poet, writer of The Rose Fire on Substack, and author of several books, most recently The Locust Years: Poems, from Wiseblood Books. He lives in Oregon. 
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Meeting Zwingli the Reformer with Stephen Eccher

Zwingli is one of those names that floats around the ether--but in comparison to his more famous reforming counterparts, like Luther or Calvin, he doesn't get brought up much. Grace welcomes author and professor Stephen Eccher to discuss this radical reformer and his sixteenth-century impact. 
Stephen Brett Eccher  is Associate Professor of Church History and Reformation Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where he has taught since 2012. His academic work focuses primarily on Reformation history and theology, especially at the intersection of the sixteenth century Swiss Reformed and Swiss Anabaptist traditions.
He is the author of numerous journal articles and chapters on the Protestant Reformation and the book Zwingli the Pastor: A Life in Conflict (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2023). Stephen and his wife Cara have four daughters and have been members at Open Door Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina for twenty-three years where Stephen serves as an elder.
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Talking Trollope with Susannah Black Roberts

In this episode Grace welcomes editor, writer, and reader Susannah Black Roberts to discuss one of their mutual favorites: the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. George Eliot loved him. Henry James hated him. What are we to think of this wordy man? 
Susannah Black Roberts is senior editor at Plough. She is a native Manhattanite. She and her husband, the theologian Alastair Roberts, split their time between Manhattan and the West Midlands of the UK.
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Advent III: His Mercy Hath No Superlative

Welcome to this week's episode in the Advent 2024 series, each featuring a sermon from the past. Last week we longed for the Second Coming of Jesus with Sojourner Truth, this week we long for Jesus's mercy in our hearts right now, with the seventeenth-century Anglican cleric and metaphysical poet, John Donne, in portions of a sermon preached on Christmas Day, 1624.
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Advent II: What Time of Night

Welcome to this week’s episode in the Advent 2024 series, each featuring a sermon from the past. Last week we longed for the historical arrival of the Christ Child with Bernard of Clairvaux. Today, we long for Jesus’s Second Coming with the nineteenth-century preacher, activist, and prophet, Sojourner Truth. 
 
Read Sojourner Truth’s narrative of her life.
 
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Advent I: Christ the Bee

Welcome to the first Advent episode of 2024 in Old Books with Grace! In this series, Grace introduces a thinker and a sermon of the past. Each week will focus on one of the advents, comings, arrivals of Jesus Christ: the first, historical coming in Bethlehem; the second coming in the Last Judgment; the present advent of His presence in our hearts. This week is St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on flowers and honey in Isaiah, on Christ the Bee.
 
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Reading the Bible with Medieval and Early Modern People with Erin Zoutendam

Today Grace welcomes Dr. Erin Risch Zoutendam to talk about how medieval and early modern people were reading and encountering scripture. Highlights include Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Julian of Norwich!
Erin Risch Zoutendam received her PhD from Duke University. Her research examines how late medieval and early modern biblical hermeneutics shaped Christian conceptions of mystical contemplation. She currently teaches at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.