Testimonies: The Stories of the Christian Life

Alan Jacobs
Professor of English, Wheaton College

November 7 & 8, 2006
Calvin Theological Seminary Chapel

Looking Before and After

(begins at 5:15 of the recording)

Despair, Presumption, and Hope

(begins at 7:35 of the recording)

Tuesday, November 7: "Looking Before and After"
The theme of the first lecture is retrospection and prospection: looking back into the past in order to make sense of experience and projecting oneself forward into a future. The faculties of memory and imagination are crucial to the Christian life, but individual Christians, and Christian communities of faith, do not think often enough about the disciplines and virtues necessary to the proper exercise of those faculties.

Wednesday, November 8: "Despair, Presumption, and Hope"
The second lecture explores the pitfalls of both memory and imagination, the constant temptations to assign false meanings to the stories of our lives: to discern unreasonably comforting narratives, or to write for oneself a false tragedy, or to fail to discern any narrative at all. We will conclude with a meditation on hope as, so to speak, the narrative virtue — the virtue that enables us to tell the right stories about our lives and to tell them wisely, for our benefit and that of our fellow Christians.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. His chief research interests lie at the intersection of literature and Christian theology. Recent publications include Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling, a series of essays that explore how hard it is to tell the truth about the world of culture — and how central that task is to the Christian life, and A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love.