Such visits enrich the curriculum and provide models of how Christian scholars and writers have integrated their faith into their professional work. Recent visitors have included Jeanne Murray Walker, Carl Dennis, Robert Siegel, Mary Brown and Susannah Childress, among others. Information on the most recent conference is posted below.
Jointly sponsored by the Departments of English and Biblical and Theological Studies of Wheaton College, the "Words of Delight" conference will bring together theologians, literary scholars, and historians to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible and to honor Leland Ryken, who has for many years taught and written on the Bible as literature.
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Conference speakers
- Jeffrey W. Barbeau is Associate Professor of Theology in the Wheaton College Graduate School. His books include Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Coleridge's Assertion of Religion (ed., Peeters, 2006). He is currently writing and teaching on transatlantic developments in theology and literature during the Romantic period; global Methodism; and the theology of Sara Coleridge.
- A. E. Elmore is Professor of English at Athens State University. He is the author of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: Echoes of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), which shows how Lincoln consciously echoes with every word the language of the King James Bible. A former prosecutor and public defender, Elmore has published numerous essays on literature and law and has won six grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
- David Lyle Jeffrey is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University. He is also Guest Professor at Peking University (Beijing). His books include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992); People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996); and Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (2003). He has also co-edited The Bible and the University (2007) and edited a forthcoming book entitled The King James Bible and the World It Made (Baylor UP, 2011).
- Alister McGrath is Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education at King's College London, having been Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University for many years. His interests include the translation theories of the Renaissance and Reformation, as well as debates initiated in recent years by the "New Atheism." He is the author of In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (2001). He is presently working on a biography of C. S. Lewis, to be published in 2013 to mark the 50th anniversary of Lewis' death.
- Craig Mattson is chair of the Communication Arts Department at Trinity Christian College. He studied oral interpretation at undergraduate and graduate levels, and rhetoric at the doctoral level (Regent University). In addition to performances from the works of Coleridge, Browning, and Twain, and original one-man plays based on the lives of Martin Luther and Oswald Chambers, Mattson has also read for radio, including works by Bunyan and George MacDonald.
- Mark Noll, an emeritus faculty member of the Wheaton College History Department, is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author or editor of some two dozen books, chiefly on the history of Christianity. A major focus of his research in recent years has been the history of the Bible in America. He has lectured on the King James Bible at Cambridge University and Baylor University.
- Leland Ryken has been a member of the English Department at Wheaton College for 44 years. His three dozen books have covered a broad range of topics, but the Bible as literature has been the dominant interest, supplemented in recent years by issues in Bible translation. He is the author of The Legacy of the King James Bible (Crossway, 2011).
Conference Schedule
Download the conference flyer
For more information:
(630) 752-5051
English@wheaton.edu