Book of the Year Award
The award committee for the 2025 Book-of-the-Year Award will consider entries from the category of literary criticism and biography. The CCL Book Award does not apply to volumes written to explore general links between Christianity and politics, or Christianity and history. We consider only volumes that relate Christianity and literature.
The CCL, an interdisciplinary association allied with the Modern Language Association (MLA), has been engaged since 1956 with exploring the relations between Christianity and literatures throughout history and across national traditions. The Conference now includes hundreds of active members from a variety of religious traditions and academic institutions in the United States, Canada, and more than a dozen other countries; it publishes the quarterly journal Christianity and Literature.
Publishers, not authors, initiate all submissions; and publishers may nominate any number of eligible books. Please note that any work within the categories of literary criticism and literary biography published during the last two year period will be eligible for the award. To be considered for the 2025 award, the original date of publication must fall between September 1, 2023 and September 1, 2025.
To ensure that judges have adequate time to evaluate the entries, copies of nominated books should be sent as soon as possible, and before September 1, 2025, to each of the three Book Award Committee members listed below:
Cory Grewell
Attn. CCL Award
10 Patrick Henry Circle
Purcellville, VA 20132
Patricia Brown
Attn. CCL Award
5385 Declan Street
Riverside, CA 92504
Heather Hess
Attn. CCL Award
2922 Brownwood Dr.
Chattanooga, TN 37404
Books received after September 1, 2025 will not be eligible for consideration. Access to a digital copy, when feasible, would be appropriate, to the email addresses clgrewell@phc.edu, plbrown@apu.edu, and heather.hess@covenant.edu.
See our Guidelines for more information about nominating a book for the award.
2023 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
The Conference on Christianity & Literature is very pleased to announce that its 2023 Book-of-the-Year Award goes to The Eucharist, Poetics, & Secularization: From the Middle Ages to Milton, by Shaun Ross (Victoria College, U of Toronto).
We contend that this book performs two rare, exemplary tasks extremely well, tasks that the CCL Book-of-the-Year Award is designed to honor. It takes historical texts seriously, charitably, and graciously enough to refuse to reduce them to chapters in a triumphalist narrative that culminates in the present day of the reader. Relatedly, and even more importantly, it receives sophisticated religious texts as artefacts of sophisticated, hard-won religious belief worth hearing on those terms, not merely artefacts of sophistication from which the chaff of simplistic, outmoded belief must be sifted out.
Intervening in a crowded field of monographs on the Eucharist and early modern Protestant poetry, most of which situate Donne’s and Herbert’s poetry as liminal between a medieval Catholic poetics of real Divine presence and a modern poetics of real Poet presence, Ross complicates that field in two ways: by demonstrating that an inquiry into Eucharistic poetics in English began far earlier than Herbert, Donne, and the Reformation, and by exploring the various subtle modes and gradations of Eucharistic presence as theologians and poets alike described it, not a simple binary between real Presence and not-Presence. The diverse enquiries into Presence the book tracks – named in chapter titles as ‘Medieval Sacraments’, ‘Southwell’s Mass’, ‘Herbert’s Eucharist’, ‘Donne’s Communions’, and ‘Communion in Two Kinds: Milton’s Bread and Crashaw’s Wine’ – justify the book’s central claim that ‘the eucharistic poetics of late medieval and early modern England . . . can be thought of as an incarnational counter-impulse to the contemporary forces of disembodiment at work in Reformation-era Europe, forces which were important precursors to (but not efficient causes of) the “disengaged stance of rational analysis” that become both epistemologically and ethically normative in the Enlightenment’ (p. 22).
These enquiries, by the end of the book, pay off in both disciplines the Conference on Christianity & Literature represents. ‘Rather than imagining the sacrament as newly destabilized during the Reformation, we should instead treat the eucharist as the focal point of Christianity’s longstanding effort to synthesize its excarnational, “secularizing” impulses (towards the disciplining of the body, doctrinal clarity, interior devotion, etc.) with the incarnational investments simultaneously at the heart of the faith (the full humanity of Jesus, the resurrection of the body, the communion of saints understood as the body of Christ)’ (p. 254): Christianity. ‘The poets in this study turn to the eucharist as a way of understanding their own words as a mode of presence that gives itself as gift, both back to the poet and to its reader’ (p. 258): literature. But the book’s last sentences bring these disciplines together, as the title of our organization does, as the Eucharist brings Christ & His Body together: ‘If we take [these poets] at their words, rather than pathologizing their work as the product of an unconscious secularity, we will call into question the tendency to treat poetry as the rival of religion, and to see literary scholars as the new interpretive priesthood of a disenchanted age. We might thus free poetry from the burden of having to be a new secular liturgy, and see it instead as a mode of presence with something still to learn from the religious accounts of meaning that, so far, refuse to depart from the world’ (p. 258).
Interested members of the CCL who would like an account of these ideas intermediate between this email and a close reading of the entire book may resort to the substantive interview with the author found at Christian Humanist Profiles 251: The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization – The Christian Humanist.
Chad Schrock (chair), Patty Brown, Jonathan Sircy
2023 CCL Book-of-the-Year Award Committee
Book of the Year Previous 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
Bloomsbury 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