Old Books with Grace
Listening to the past can help us to understand our present. Dr. Grace Hamman, medievalist and writer, guides listeners to approach often intimidating works of literature and theology and learn to ask questions of our current age. Let‘s read old books together and discover truths about God and ourselves.
Episodes
Wednesday May 04, 2022
Breaking Medieval Stereotypes with Beth Allison Barr
Wednesday May 04, 2022
Wednesday May 04, 2022
Beth Allison Barr, author of Making Biblical Womanhood, is here and we are talking about history and how it shapes us, resisting the urge to impose our norms and ideas back onto the past, about medieval women, gender-bending medieval saints, good places to start reading medieval texts, and more fascinating topics...
Larissa Tracy's Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints Lives
Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women's history, and church history. She recently served as president of the Conference on Faith and History (2018-2021) and is an active supporter of Christians for Biblical Equality. Barr is a regular contributor to The Anxious Bench, the popular Patheos website on religious history, and has written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, Religion News Service, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Her work has been featured by NPR and The New Yorker. She is also a Baptist pastor's wife and the mom of two great kids.
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
Contemplative Reading and Thomas Merton with Sophfronia Scott
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
Wednesday Feb 16, 2022
Grace welcomes Sophfronia Scott, author of The Seeker and the Monk, and director of the MFA creative writing program at Alma College. Sophfronia and Grace discuss learning to have meaningful dialogue with books as you read, even when they were written by long-dead writers, and Sophfronia shares her wisdom on reading Thomas Merton and on the practice of reading contemplatively.
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
Twentieth-Century Literature and Holiness with Jessica Hooten Wilson
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
This week, Grace welcomes Jessica Hooten Wilson to Old Books With Grace, to chat about her new book, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints, and the power of literature to reveal the subtleties of the good life. Sometimes holiness can be alarming, bizarre, and fascinating... and novels and their novelists, like Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, can help us to conceptualize the holy life in all its difficulty and otherworldliness.
Wednesday Jan 19, 2022
Prayer and Liturgy with Kayla Craig
Wednesday Jan 19, 2022
Wednesday Jan 19, 2022
Grace welcomes Kayla Craig, author of To Light Their Way, a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents, and the creator of the wonderfully helpful @liturgiesforparents instagram account. We talk prayer books, the definition of liturgy, how written prayers help us find words, and the wonderful, ecumenical prayer sources and books that Kayla has enjoyed and recommends.
Wednesday Jan 05, 2022
On Virtues and Fiction with Karen Swallow Prior
Wednesday Jan 05, 2022
Wednesday Jan 05, 2022
Grace welcomes Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, professor and author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. We talk about some of my favorite questions: How can virtue be learned and practiced through stories? How do narratives of the past change us? Why is fiction important in learning to live and love well?
Wednesday Dec 22, 2021
O Come All Ye Faithful: An Advent Meditation
Wednesday Dec 22, 2021
Wednesday Dec 22, 2021
A bit on the history and meanings behind the Christmas song, "O Come All Ye Faithful." How might we follow the invitation in the chorus, "O come let us adore him"? Dr. Grace Hamman thinks through that with the aid of medieval monk and theologian Bernard of Clairvaux.
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing: An Advent Meditation
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Grace meditates on the robustly theological hymn by Charles Wesley, music by Felix Mendelssohn, "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." What do we make of the gift of weakness in God laying his glory by? What do we make of the gift of our own weakness?
Wednesday Dec 08, 2021
The Coventry Carol: An Advent Meditation
Wednesday Dec 08, 2021
Wednesday Dec 08, 2021
In this episode, we encounter the Coventry Carol, which is the opposite of a holly, jolly Christmas song. It comes from medieval mystery plays, and is a lullaby sung by the mothers of the baby boys about to be killed by King Herod as the Holy Family flees to Egypt. Historically, Advent was not just a time of waiting and reflection—it was also a fasting time for repentance and mourning before the merrymaking feast of Christmas. Listen to learn more and meditate on the Coventry Carol.
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