Baylor grads claim near-sweep of Christianity Today book awards for culture/arts
Each December, Christianity Today announces the winners of its annual book awards, books CT deems “most likely to shape evangelical life, thought, and culture.” This year’s winners included a slew of Baylor alumni — especially in the “Culture, Poetry and the Arts” category.
Christianity Today recognized four books in this area — a winner, an award of merit, and two finalists — and three of the four honorees were written by a group of five Baylor English doctoral graduates:
- CT‘s Award of Merit for Culture, Poetry and the Arts went to Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress, by Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson (PhD ’09).
- One finalist in the category was Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation, by Dr. Lanta Davis (PhD ’13).
- The other finalist was Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age, by Drs. Rachel B. Griffis (PhD ’16), Julie Ooms (PhD ’14), and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts (PhD ’16).
Baylor alumni and faculty are often honored by CT (see below) — but rarely do they so frequently dominate a single category, and even more rarely do they all come from the same graduate program. So what prompted such a rush of excellent work from this one program?
“Many of us remember fondly the collegial atmosphere of the grad student culture and the many intense conversations in the TA rooms, the Writing Center, or the library basement over what we were reading and wrestling with,” Davis and another Baylor English graduate, Jeffrey Bilbro (PhD ’12), recently wrote. “The books we were reading and the ideas we were developing mattered, but the relationships they shaped and were shaped by mattered just as much. … At Baylor, we took texts seriously, as a whole, and as something worth reading.”
The five Baylor CT honorees are now on faculty at universities across the country. flinging their green and gold afar: Hooten Wilson at Pepperdine (Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books), Davis at Indiana Wesleyan (professor of honors humanities and literature), Griffis at Spring Arbor University (associate professor of English), Ooms at Missouri Baptist (associate professor of English), and Roberts at North Greenville University (department chair, English).
Sic ’em, Baylor authors!
[BONUS 1: These five Bears weren’t the only ones recognized by Christianity Today. Dr. Elesha Coffman, a Baylor history professor since 2016, had her book Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith named a finalist in the History/Biography category.]
[BONUS 2: As noted above, these aren’t the first Bears honored by Christianity Today‘s book awards. See write-ups of past Baylor honorees from 2008, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2022 — and even that probably isn’t a comprehensive list.]