originally published 12/24/2020

English Professor Christopher N. Phillips discusses hymnals as physical artifacts and how these “lived-with books” have formed devotion at church, school, and home. While teaching through Susan Warner’s nineteenth-century novel The Wide, Wide World, Philips noticed how hymnbooks kept appearing in the text. This led him to focus on the “subplot of the hymnbook” within the novel, and how it “traces a growth of the self.” Making application beyond the novel, Phillips highlights how physical things like hymnbooks are deeply formative, in fellowship with practices and rituals. Philips also explores how the poetic form of hymns — sometimes disparaged as conventional — actually “enabled and empowered” some poets (such as Cowper, Frost, and Dickinson) toward original creative expression. Phillips is the author of The Hymnal: A Reading History.

18 minutes

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