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.
2025 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
Announcement of the 2025 Christianity and Literature Book Award
It is with pleasure that the Conference on Christianity and Literature announces the winner of the 2025 winner of the Book of the Year Award as Ralph C. Wood for his book, Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible: A Revolutionary Witness for the Sake of the Gospel. In the opening chapter of his book, Professor Wood issues “a call to make the Church visible by offering its ever-old, ever-new Gospel in compelling literary ways.” He then argues that “Flannery O’Connor is our strongest example of this salutary mission.” The committee would argue that Professor Wood’s book on O’Connor is a strong example of that mission in itself.
Wood’s book, in clear and coherent chapters, details the ways in which O’Connor’s fiction provides a confessional and sacramental alternative to the vague and subjective pietism that she inherited from the Protestant literary establishment of the 19th century. In her writing, Wood argues, O’Connor takes on the spirit of what she called “nihilism,” the empty positivism of modernity that dismisses the power and mystery of sacramental Christianity as outdated and irrelevant. Wood shows how O’Connor’s characters embody variously both the embodied discipline of holiness (Father Finn, Lucette Carmody, Mason Tarwater) of those who follow the call of God and, conversely, the embodied evil (Francis Marion Tarwater, Hazel Motes) of those who reject it. Thus, Wood argues, through her vivid, if peculiar, characterization, O’Connor renders the dogmas of the Christian church as real and visible to her 20th century readers.
Professor Wood’s book is perhaps especially timely to our present day, one in which self-definition is perhaps more of an urgent cultural issue than it has ever been, insofar as it makes a compelling case that catechetical submission to a confession is as much an exercise of the will as is radical independence from any creed. In any case, Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible exemplifies the best of scholarship that explores the intersection between Christianity and Literature, which is to say that the one’s understanding of both O’Connor’s fiction and the Christian faith are very much deepened by a reading of this book. Hence, the Conference is happy to present Professor Ralph C. Wood with the 2025 Book of the Year Award.
The Book of the Year Committee also sees fit this year to award an Honorable Mention to Katherine Calloway’s book, Literature and Natural Theology in Early Modern England. Building on Peter Harrison’s landmark historiography, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science, Calloway’s literary criticism demonstrates how seventeenth century poets such as Donne, Herbert, Vaughn, Marvell and Milton work against the grain of Reformation privileging of the written word of God as the only book of revelation to continue to read the Book of Nature as revelatory. Calloway shows how seventeenth century “poetry…[accesses] insights and audiences simply out of the reach of expository prose” and thereby “[shows] rather than [tells] how nature points to theological truth.” Calloway’s work is important not only for the meaningful reading of the matrix between Christianity and literature in seventeenth century poetry, but also for its pointing to the ways that imaginative literature, by its polysemous nature, continues to offer theological meaning in an increasingly materialist and empirically determined cultural context.
Book of the Year Previous Recipients
2023
Shaun Ross
The Eucharist, Poetics, & Secularization: From the Middle Ages to Milton
University of Toronto Press
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