Finding Hope in Literary Study

It was interesting to hear Tiffany Everly Kriner's discussion about her connection between literary scholarship and Christian faith. This is a prevalent issue for an English major at Messiah. I always find that my greatest questioning of the practical value of this major arises when I'm writing a paper that critiques literary works. Such a great deal of scholarly literary papers have been written that I begin to question if they hold real importance in life. Kriner's emphasis on the theological virtue of hope within literary scholarship shed some meaning for me. She described the way that texts and language are incomplete in a way that acknowledges the brokenness of the world, but they have a place in the world's redemption. I appreciated her image of texts as fragments that will become final in the whole of creation. We are participating in the knitting up of the fragments of language, but we are incapable of doing it with completion. God can and will.