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Overview
In his BYU Speech "Bound by Loving Ties," Elder Jeffrey R. Holland listed great religiously-influenced pieces of non-LDS literature he read while in college. I have a personal goal to read them all, but I thought I'd make it a public goal in case anyone else wanted to as well. Credit for the list and all quotes go to Elder Holland.
This is a "prompt" challenge because Elder Holland named some books specifically and others he just named authors, so my hope is to accommodate both.
Excerpt:
This is a "prompt" challenge because Elder Holland named some books specifically and others he just named authors, so my hope is to accommodate both.
Excerpt:
"I begin by noting the majestic literary—to say nothing of the theological—influence of the King James Bible, what one of the professors I knew later at Yale called “the sublime summit of literature in [the] English [language],”21 the greatest single influence on the world’s creative literature for the last 400 years. I think also of what is probably the most widely read piece of English literature other than the Bible: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Five decades after I first read them, I am still moved by the magnificence of two of the greatest poems ever written by the hand of man: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Certainly the three greatest American novels I read at BYU were Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—each in its own way a religious text and all more meaningful in my reading of them now than when I was a student on this campus so long ago. So too it is with my encounter with Russian writers, especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.
Then—to name only a handful—you add British giants like George Herbert, John Donne, William Blake, and Robert Browning; throw in Americans like Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor; then an American who became British, like T. S. Eliot, and a Briton who became American, like W. H. Auden; and for good luck throw in an Irishman like W. B. Yeats and you have biblical imagery, religious conflict, and wrenching questions of sin, society, and salvation on virtually every page you turn."
...
"Brothers and sisters, my testimony this morning, as one observer recently wrote, is that 'over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.'22 Roman Catholic scholar Robert Royal made the same point, reaffirming that for many, 'religion remains deep, widespread, and persistent, to the surprise and irritation of those who claimed to have cast aside [religious] illusion'23—to those, I might add, who underestimated the indisputable power of faith.
"The indisputable power of faith. The most powerful and enduring force in human history. The influence for good in the world. The link between the highest in us and our highest hopes for others. That is why religion matters. Voices of religious faith have elevated our vision, deepened our human conversation, and strengthened both our personal and collective aspirations since time began."
Great Religiously-Influenced Pieces of Literature
1 participant (65 books)
Overview
In his BYU Speech "Bound by Loving Ties," Elder Jeffrey R. Holland listed great religiously-influenced pieces of non-LDS literature he read while in college. I have a personal goal to read them all, but I thought I'd make it a public goal in case anyone else wanted to as well. Credit for the list and all quotes go to Elder Holland.
This is a "prompt" challenge because Elder Holland named some books specifically and others he just named authors, so my hope is to accommodate both.
Excerpt:
This is a "prompt" challenge because Elder Holland named some books specifically and others he just named authors, so my hope is to accommodate both.
Excerpt:
"I begin by noting the majestic literary—to say nothing of the theological—influence of the King James Bible, what one of the professors I knew later at Yale called “the sublime summit of literature in [the] English [language],”21 the greatest single influence on the world’s creative literature for the last 400 years. I think also of what is probably the most widely read piece of English literature other than the Bible: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Five decades after I first read them, I am still moved by the magnificence of two of the greatest poems ever written by the hand of man: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Certainly the three greatest American novels I read at BYU were Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—each in its own way a religious text and all more meaningful in my reading of them now than when I was a student on this campus so long ago. So too it is with my encounter with Russian writers, especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.
Then—to name only a handful—you add British giants like George Herbert, John Donne, William Blake, and Robert Browning; throw in Americans like Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor; then an American who became British, like T. S. Eliot, and a Briton who became American, like W. H. Auden; and for good luck throw in an Irishman like W. B. Yeats and you have biblical imagery, religious conflict, and wrenching questions of sin, society, and salvation on virtually every page you turn."
...
"Brothers and sisters, my testimony this morning, as one observer recently wrote, is that 'over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.'22 Roman Catholic scholar Robert Royal made the same point, reaffirming that for many, 'religion remains deep, widespread, and persistent, to the surprise and irritation of those who claimed to have cast aside [religious] illusion'23—to those, I might add, who underestimated the indisputable power of faith.
"The indisputable power of faith. The most powerful and enduring force in human history. The influence for good in the world. The link between the highest in us and our highest hopes for others. That is why religion matters. Voices of religious faith have elevated our vision, deepened our human conversation, and strengthened both our personal and collective aspirations since time began."
