An Unexpected Journal: Medieval Minds: Exploring the Mind and Imagination of the Medieval World
About this ebook
The medieval period was a time of greats: great courage, great words, great light, and great darkness. The writers, philosophers, and artists of the time still touch and influence our lives today.
This volume celebrates these masterpieces that merged the physical and the spiritual into meaningful, incandescent truth.
Contributors:
C.M. Alvarez: “Death, Grief, & Hope in Pearl” on progressing through grief as illustrated in the Gawain poet’s medieval poem Pearl.
Donald W. Catchings, Jr.: “The Dream of the Crown,” a medieval inspired poem on the piercing of Christ’s brow and “Chronological Snobbery: In Reply to Contemporary Petrarchs” on valuing the past.
Annie Crawford: “Hogwarts in History: The Neo-Medieval Vision of Harry Potter” on our love of the medieval and “Cosmos” on holy wonder.
Alison Delong: “A Call to Lament: An Apologetic Study of the Anglo-Saxon Elegies” on comprehending struggle and responding to it.
Karise Gililland: “Wearing One’s Habits: Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Making of a Virtuous Man” on the ancient and medieval views on cultivating goodness and “The Quest of the Golden Queen,” a heroic poem on the Lady and the dragon.
Sandra G. Hicks: “Death and Redemption for the Modern Heart: What We Can Learn from the Anglo-Saxon Elegy” on Christ, the Warrior-King illustrated in the medieval elegy, “The Wanderer.”
Alex Markos: “Christ, Our Hero at Calvary: Meaning and Metaphor in Beowulf and ‘The Dream of the Rood’” on understanding the resurrection.
Korine Martinez: “An Unlikely Witness” on the perspective of the cross illustrated in The Dream of the Rood.
Jacqueline Medcalf: “The Book of Kells,” a medieval influenced poem on seeing a wonder.
Seth Myers: “Dante for Moderns” on serving our fellow man and “Francis of Assisi” on medieval relevance.
Annie Nardone: “The Venerable Bede: Following the Medieval Christian Footpath” on preserving history and “Thomas Aquinas: Understanding Evil” on darkness and life.
Cherish Nelson: “The Gravity of Sin: Truth in the Grotesque in Dante’s Inferno” on the depths of evil.
Holly Ordway: “Memento Mori: A Reflection on ‘The Ruin’” on the question of progress.
Ted Wright: “Hagia Sophia and the Evidential Power of Beauty: Divine Architecture as Apologetics” on truth in stone.
About the Cover
Our cover illustration was provided by Chilean artist, apologist, and physician Virginia De La Lastra depicting the vibrant imagery of medieval illuminations. Vigorous and verdant green life battles against the dragons symbolizing evil, while the peacocks give the promise of the hope and power of the resurrection.
Fall 2020
Volume 3, Issue 3
310 pages
About the author
Carla Alvarez is a mother to three and a graduate of HBU's Masters in Apologetics program. Her philosophy in both business and apologetics is if what we think affects what we do, then the "how" is just as important as the "what." As actions have a lasting impact, it is of utmost importance to develop right thoughts. She creates effective communications for clients at Legacy Marketing (www.legacymarketingservices.
Donald W. Catchings, Jr. is Founder and Board Chair of Street Light Inc. and Pastor of The True Light Church in Conroe, Texas since 2009. Also, Donald is a Literature and Theology teacher at Kepler Education (kepler.education). As a writer, Donald regularly contributes to An Unexpected Journal and his own blog: www.donaldwcatchingsjr.com. Donald recently released Joy Through a Wardrobe — a book of poetry and reflections on C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Annie Crawford lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and three teenage daughters. She currently homeschools, teaches humanities courses, and serves on the Faith & Culture team at Christ Church Anglican while working to complete a Masters of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.
Karise Gililland has a BA in English from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Imaginative and Cultural Apologetics from Houston Baptist University. She consumes copious amounts of time (and coffee!) shuttling her teenagers to and fro, rescuing her cats from impending peril, and writing for An Unexpected Journal. She currently teaches the most amazing third graders at a classical Christian school in Fort Worth.
Sandra is a Texas girl, through and through and has lived from the Gulf Coast to the mountains of El Paso and many spots in between. She currently resides east of Austin on a small horse farm with her husband of 38 years, and Joseph the Dog. She recently earned a BA in English/Technical Writing from Texas A&M Corpus Christi, and a MA in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Baptist University. She wrote a bi-monthly newspaper column for 10 years on faith, family and parenting for the El Paso Times; and was a writer for the University of Texas at El Paso for two years producing press releases, commencement speeches, and journalistic pieces for the E-Newsletter, as well as feature stories and faculty bios for the university magazine and Continuing Ed department. She has been published in Southwest Parent Magazine and Borderzine online magazine. Her special interests are children's literature and she is currently exploring how to bring her interests in all things Medieval to that genre.
Alex Markos, who holds a degree in ancient history and classics from Hope College (Holland, MI), teaches Latin at the Geneva School of Boerne, Texas. He is currently pursuing a Masters of Apologetics with a Cultural Apologetics Emphasis at Houston Baptist University.
Korine Martinez is a full-time High School English teacher and part-time writer. She holds a BS from Liberty University and an MA in Apologetics from Houston Baptist University.
Jacqueline Medcalf is a professional educator and an amateur Medievalist. She recently graduated from the University of Dallas, and now lives in Texas with her husband.
Seth Myers completed his MA in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Baptist University in 2017. As a power systems engineer, he has been involved with transformer diagnostics and rural electrification projects by partnering with NGOs in West Africa. A volunteer with international students through local churches, he enjoys conversations with friends from all cultures. He considers himself rich in friendships across time and space, including but not limited to C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Bede the Venerable, Augustine, Ravi Zacharias & friends, and many student friends (chess-playing when possible, but not required) typically from throughout Asia. He has recently begun taking online courses in Faulkner University’s Doctor of Humanities program.
Annie Nardone is a two-year C.S. Lewis Institute Fellow with a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Baptist University. She has homeschooled her three kids for twenty-five years and taught art and humanities at her local co-op. Her heart is for Rohan, Narnia, and Hogwarts, far fairer lands than this. Annie contributes and edits for An Unexpected Journal at www.anunexpectedjournal.com. She publishes online at www.literarylife.org, www.theperennialgen.com, and most recently began writing for the online magazine Cultivating at www.thecultivatingproject.com. She also wrote an historical cookbook for Bright Ideas Press.
Cherish Nelson is an adjunct professor of World Religions at Kankakee Community College and the Director of Youth Ministries at Kankakee Asbury United Methodist Church. She has a B.A. in English from Olivet Nazarene University and a M.A. in Apologetics from Houston Baptist University, where she specialized in Cultural Apologetics. Cherish also creates and shares apologetics curriculum for youth groups. Her apologetic interests include the historicity of the resurrection, the problem of evil, and imaginative apologetics.
Cherish has a long-standing passion for building a confident faith in her students. She integrates Christian education and discipleship into the retreats, mission trips, and outreach events she organizes. Cherish is particularly interested in integrating the arts into youth ministry to supplement traditional propositional teaching. Throughout her time in ministry and academia, Cherish has written apologetics curriculum for youth groups related to fiction and poetry, science and faith, the resurrection, and the problem of evil.
Holly Ordway is Fellow of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is the author of Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith. She is also a Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, a Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies, and a published poet. Her academic work focuses on imaginative apologetics, and on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Her forthcoming book is Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (Word on Fire Academic, 2021). Her website is hollyordway.com.
Ted is independent scholar, writer, and founder of EpicArchaeology.org. For over a decade, Ted has been a speaker on Christian apologetics as well as Biblical Archaeology across North America & internationally. In addition to public speaking, Ted was the former Executive and Teaching Director of CrossExamined.org. Ted has also appeared on numerous television and radio programs including the History Channel’s TV miniseries – “Mankind: The Story of All of Us,” as well as CNN’s documentary on the historical resurrection of Jesus, “Jesus: Faith. Fact. Forgery.” Ted has also served as adjunct professor of apologetics at Southern Evangelical Seminary as well as Charlotte Christian College and Theological Seminary, where he has taught for over a decade. Ted has a B.A. in Anthropology from the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University. As an undergraduate Ted worked as research lab assistant on Phase III (1992-1999) of the Lahav Research Project from Tel Halif. In 2014 Ted served as assistant square supervisor in the excavations at Khirbet el-Maqatir in Israel (the Biblical city of Ai) with ABR (Associate for Biblical Research), where he is a professional associate and researcher. Ted is currently a team member of the Agri Regional Archaeological Survey in Eastern Turkey, co-sponsored by Andrews University in the U.S., and Istanbul University in Turkey.
Virginia de la Lastra is a physician, illustrator, and apologist. In 2015, while studying a Master’s degree in Apologetics at HBU, she discovered a love for drawing and has been doing it ever since. She has illustrated several books, and she regularly illustrates for The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, An Unexpected Journal, Teen STAR, and of course, for her medical students, nieces, nephews and little neighbors.
