I'm sure overlooked with the news of terrible atrocities in France, Lebanon, Iraq, and too many other places, but the literary scholar Roger Lundin passed away Friday. I had the occasion to visit with him over the years, when we would be together at conferences. Maybe twenty-five years ago, we talked late into the night in the kitchen of Jim Barcus, then the chairman of the English department at Baylor University. Also involved in our conversations that evening was Joe Barnhart. Joe, who then taught at the same university where I taught but in another department, has written several books on matters of religion from his respectful but skeptical perspective, and I think maybe he had presented on Jonathan Edwards. I had given an overview of Bakhtin's ideas, suggesting an application of heteroglossia to Jesus's discourses in the gospel of John.

Lundin, long-time professor at Wheaton, was one of the foremost scholars on religion and literature, especially known for his work with American literature, and he had been a keynote speaker. I think his treatise on Emily Dickinson's poetry, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, is especially sensitive to that poet's spiritual rawness. This weekend, I have been thinking especially of one of Dickinson's poem, on visiting a field where a year before men had been slaughtered in battle, bothered at the cheerfulness of the chirping of birds she now hears, a seeming disregard for those who had fallen as people now go about their business.