Jennifer L. Holberg

Humans are story-shaped creatures. We make sense of our world, pattern our lives, and reflect on what is ultimately significant through language and the words that compose our stories. But how does this relate to the narrative of the Bible and the story that God is writing through history? In Nourishing Narratives, writer and professor Jennifer Holberg engages with words from the likes of Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Flannery O'Connor, Marilynne Robinson, and more while also offering some of her own stories to reflect on the importance of story to our lives and our faith. Here, readers are encouraged not only to understand how stories nourish our faith, but to discover how our stories are part of God's great story.

This issue considers the sustainability of English studies and of the humanities as a whole in the context of shrinking budgets and job opportunities and of shifting resources. Exploring topics from academic freedom and globalization to digitization, diversity, and the value of a humanities-based education, “To Delight and Instruct” reexamines the work of the English professor and calls for a reassessment of the priorities and means that undergird it.Contributors examine the faculty’s fundamental responsibilities to classroom teaching, the university, and the community. Attending to the relationship between changing technologies and literacy in a global environment, the issue not only argues for a reassertion and reimagining of the humanities in the contemporary university but, perhaps as important, helps articulate a way forward.Contributors: Michael Bérubé, Martin Bickman, Marc Bousquet, Elizabeth Brockman, Sheila T. Cavanagh, Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Patricia Donahue, Gerald Graff, Donald E. Hall, Gail E. Hawisher, Jennifer L. Holberg, Colin Jager, Paul Lauter, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Julie Lindquist, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Mark C. Long, Donald G. Marshall, Richard E. Miller, James Phelan, Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, Robert Scholes, Cynthia L. Selfe, Marcy Taylor

This issue fuses theoretical approaches and practical realities with its two featured symposiums of articles on Gerald Graff and teaching conflicts and on how to teach Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in a week.