BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD RECIPIENTS

2020

Brian Doyle 
One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder
Little, Brown & Company

2019
Michael Mears Bruner
A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O'Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth 
InterVarsity Press

2018
Micheal O’Siadhail 
The Five Quintets
Baylor University Press

2017
David Marno
Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention
University of Chicago Press

2016
Michael Tomko
Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien
Boomsbury Academic

2015
Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2014
John Drury
Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
University of Chicago Press

2013
Sharon Kim 
Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950: Constellations of the Soul
Palgrave MacMillan

2012

Clare Costley King'oo

Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
University of Notre Dame Press


2011
Aidan Nichols

The Poet as Believer: A Theological Study of Paul Claudel

Ashgate

2010

Sarah McNamer

Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion

University of Pennsylvania Press

2009

James Kearney

The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England

University of Pennsylvania Press


2008

Jessica Brantley

Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance
in Late Medieval England

University of Chicago Press


2007

Scholarly Work:

Lori Branch

Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

Baylor University Press

Honorable Mention
:
Christine Baur

Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation: Passages to Freedom in the Divine Comedy

University of Toronto Press

Belles Lettres:

Tania Runyan

Delicious Air

Finishing Line Press

2006

Arthur Kirsch

Auden and Christianity

Yale University Press


2005
Susannah Brietz Monta
Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England
Cambridge University Press

2004

Rod Jellema

A Slender Grace

William B. Eerdmans

2003

Paul Elie

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2002

Jeffrey Knapp

Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England

University of Chicago Press



Julia Kasdorf

The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life

Johns Hopkins Press



2001

Ramie Targoff

Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England

University of Chicago Press



2000

Velma Bourgeois Richmond

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance

Continuum Press



Honorable Mention:
Peggy Rosenthal

The Poet's Jesus: Representations at the End of a Millennium

Oxford University Press



1999

Ruth Coates

Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author

Cambridge University Press

1998

Jaroslav Pelikan

What Has Athens to Do With Jerusalem?: Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint

University of Michigan Press

Honorable Mention:
Roger Lundin


Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

William B. Eerdmans

1997

Robert M. Ryan

The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824

Cambridge University Press



1996

David Lyle Jeffrey

People of the Book: Christian Identity in Literary Culture

William B. Eerdmans



Madeleine L'Engle

Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols

Harold Shaw Publishers



1995

Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.

Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision

Continuum Publishing Company

Honorable Mention:


Denise Nowakowski Baker

Julian of Norwich, Showings: From Vision to Book

Princeton University Press

1994

David Norton

A History of the Bible as Literature, 2 volumes

Cambridge University Press



1993

David Lyle Jeffrey

The Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature

William B. Eerdmans



Frederick Buechner

The Son of Laughter

Harper and Row

1992

Ricardo J. Quinones

The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature

Princeton University Press



1991

Michael Wheeler

Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology

Cambridge University Press



1990

Harriet Guest

A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart

Oxford University Press

Honorable Mention:
Leslie Brisman


The Voice of Jacob: On the Composition of Genesis

Indiana University Press

1989

John Gatta

Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor

University of Missouri Press



James Farl Powers

Wheat That Springeth Green

Alfred A. Knopf



1988

Michael G. Hall

The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather

Wesleyan University Press



1987

Stephen Prickett

Words and 'the Word': Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation

Cambridge University Press



1986

Chana Bloch

Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible

University of California Press



1985

Michael Joseph Colacurcio

The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales

Harvard University Press



1984

Richard E. Brantley

Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism

University Presses of Florida



1983

Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich



1982

Northrop Frye

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich



1981

George Hunt

John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things

William B. Eerdmans



1980

James Dougherty

The Fivesquare City: The City in the Religious Imagination

University of Notre Dame Press



1979

Flannery O'Connor

The Habit of Being

Farrar, Straus and Giroux



Barbara Lewalski

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric

Princeton University Press