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Title: Literature and the Christian Child
Description: University of Toronto Deals with themes of novels: Water Babies, The Princess and the Goblin, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Bridge to Terabithia, Fire Eaters.

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SMC217 Final Exam Notes
Change and Development: Child characters permit an exploration of the themes of loss of innocence, higher innocence, moral formation, faith
formation and reason
...


Book

Passage

Analysis

Author: Charles Kingsley
Title: Water Babies

Child characters function/novels use of children to explore the theme of belief: Children as Sinful and in Need of
Salvation—Puritan/Janeway’s Brand of Hell
...
The state of
your soul is reflected in the shape of your body
...
Reflected physically in cleanliness
...
She begins her
journey by helping Tom; he needs to grow up before
he can help Grimes
...
Moral and faith development are
intertwined
...


TOLKIEN FS: Bridge/propaedeutic
- Belief: this theme is propaedeutic to Christian faith
...

- Curdie’s strong devotion to his mother brings his to
accept the truth Irene is trying to teach him
...

- MacDonald sees his book as preparing audiences for
Christian truths

- Milk= goodness of God he is longing for/OR he is a kid, given milk because
cannot spiritually eat solid food
...

- Water= baptism
...


Child characters function/novels use of children to explore the theme of belief: Romantic child, Blake—the journey
inwards and imagination; She is a model of belief
...

Ch
...
83:
- Second time Irene visits
grandmother
“She was not sure if she was
dreaming, but if I am dreaming
I’ll be more likely to find her…”
Ch
...
84:
“I thought you were a dream, why
couldn’t I find you before
...

Ch
...
103
- The cat comes into her room,
she runs away from it, saved by
a great silvery globe
...
She is still
going beyond herself to find truth/answers
...

- Sacramental idea
...

- Grandmother hopes that one day she will understand
...
Teach only at their
level
...
Example of Irene as a true believer
...


Ch
...
116
“Never doubt the thread, when
you hold it I hold it too
...
20, p
...


Ch
...
169 (164)
Curdie not believing
...
22, p
...
S Lewis
Title: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
TSF: Stories create desire
- C
...

- Lewis thought belief and desire were not too
different, and matched these terms with another:
“SEHNSUCHT”= nostalgia/longing…a longing that
cannot be satisfied in this life but still brings a joy
mixed with a kind of aching
...

- Lewis says you teach children what to desire, unlike
Locke= no desire
...
Blake says
let kids desire whatever they want
...


Peter and Susan talking to the
Professor Kirke

When the kids first hear the name
Aslan
...
117 “Edmund for the first time
felt sorry for someone other than
himself,”

- Main image of faith, chapter called Irene’s Clue
- Curdie’s thread can only bring him back, but Irene goes forward, leads her where
she hasn’t been
...
Sometimes there is fear, but with faith comes safety
and growth
...

- She doubts her thread and her great grandmother, the string is all she has, thread
goes into wall of rocks, if she loses it, she will have nothing—feelings of doubt,
anger, forsaken
...
It was a
trial…her trust will grow because of this experience
...
Faith is shared and collective
...

- Irene gives directions to Curdie, like the grandmother
...
A gift God/Grandmother “hopes everybody
will have”
...
faith as
gift
...

- You have to accept the gift
...

Child characters function/novels use of children to explore the theme of belief:
Enlightenment—reason through the senses
...
P & S learn to use reason, so as they learn the reader learns how to reason
...
Lucy is not typically
a liar or crazy, so their assumption that Lucy is lying is based on nothing
...
Lucy is special, “luce” means light, she is the light of the world and
stands by the truth throughout the novel
...
Edmund feels something off-putting
...
For Lewis, belief and faith come through
emotion not knowledge
...

- Desire: trumps morality
...
Pursuit of joy
...
Edmund is a
model of what not to do and to show that conversion is possible for everyone
...
He sees

- Children play an active role in the magic that
happens, they are the ones who are to ruin the
witch…they are Messiah-like
...
Christ is the new
Adam
...


how bad the witch is
...

- The consequences for their actions increase their moral awareness—Edmund sees
the evil and moves from loving Turkish Delight to loving Aslan
...

- Aslan is the bridge-builder between worlds, he bridges world & heaven
myth & gospel

- Child characters function/novels use of children to explore the theme of belief: Christian key to help people find
God/models of faith
...
She is more a Christ-figure dying for
TSF: stories as consolation
- Not a fairy tale
...
This is when he finds rest
...

- She doesn’t attempt to write to make people good
...

- There are a range of opinions about God
- Fear is a big theme* affects the plot differently
throughout the novel
...
Myers

Jesse
...
She teaches him other stories that prepare his to receive the faith
...
Her stories are the bridge
...
****
Ch
...
84-85
Leslie after mass
...
12, p
...
After Leslie’s death, Jess
talking to his father
...
13, p
...


- Encounter between 3 characters, diff
...

- Jesse and MayB see God as a vengeful God because of their reading the Bible,
their preparation for the Gospel affects how they read it
...

- Leslie sees painful crucifixion as beauty
- MayB= Puritan
Jess= on the fence
...

- Throws the paints, paint represents his creativity (they were both creators) paints
going to the bottom is like Leslie going to the bottom and dying
...

- When he asks if God will send Leslie to hell in this scene it is no longer a
theoretical question, the answer will affect Jess much more
...
This scene sets up a new
healing between earthly father and heavenly father—God does not send little
girls to hell
...
” It provides hope that her death does not
mark an end, as in the passion narrative
...

- p
...

- Leslie was the way, like Christ
...

- Terabithia is not a place of escape but of renewal—they enter the fantasy to
become more human and alive
...


Author: David Almond
Title: Fire Eaters

Ch
...
106-107
Experiment of pain

- More explicitly Christian than any book so far
- Bobby prays and wonders about God
- Everything stop when Bobby looks into McNulty’s
eyes
- McNulty carries the world on his shoulders, accepts
his burden of pain to help others
- Theme of substitution
- McNulty dies and nuclear threat clears, not certain if
this is a causal relationship—Gospel is clear about
JC’s death saving the world
...

- BUT Bobby makes the connection between him and
Christ and this is Bobby’s story…he is the narrator
...
He sees endurance of
pain as a means to salvation
...
B’s faith development is unanswered
...

- He tries to imagine being McNulty
- Like a laboratory experiment trying to understand his beliefs, building a bridge
between McNulty and JC through stories of saints
...

- Purpose: he sees pain as salvation, not death
...

- He brings together physical and spiritual knowledge
“I wanted to break free…” p
...


Bobby and Ailsa praying

- They go to edge of chaos and void…
- Like Locke, don’t give kids more than you can handle
...
But she also confuses the idea of belief in God, she says it doesn’t matter
that you doubt—doubting won’t help
...

Keep it simple
...


Harry Potter Paper
Grace- in the novel is strength or help that comes from an external source
...
Harry doesn’t do all of this on his
own
...
Several deaths marked by grace and teaches Harry of grace
...
HP
struggling to decide which to choose to follow: the hallows or the horcruxes
...

Voldemort’s thoughts in Harry’s mind act as temptations to seek the hallows instead of the horcruxes
...
The horcruxes were created in Voldemort’s attempt to avoid death
...
This dilemma is a window into the
well-known Christian message of discernment
...
Harry’s grief and love for Dobby makes him true to himself; there is no more obsessive longing for the hallows and Harry is able to focus
on the destruction of the horcruxes which will, in turn, destroy the villain, Voldemort
...
The
memories describe how Lily Potter, Harry’s mother, was a grace for Snape
...
This pain led Snape to find interest in the Dark Arts, but
when Lily died, his loyalty changed and he joined the order of the phoenix
...
For Lily’s sake,
Snape was to protect Harry
...
As she was a grace for
Snape, he became a grace for Harry
...
The Doe is grace
...
This gives him the strength to finally conquer Voldemort
...

HARRY’S DEATH: Harry is the best know child character who has walked knowingly and willingly towards death to save the world
...
Harry learns he is the final horcrux and in order for Voldemort to be conquered,
Harry must surrender his life for the rest
...
These people include Lily and James, his parents
...
This in itself is a grace—having the strength not to fear death
...
When Harry dies,
he is greeted by Albus who teaches Harry that a life without love is the thing to fear, not death itself
...
Harry does not die because, as Harry learns, his blood is in Voldemort and as long
as it is there, it sustains Harry
...
The child is taught that trying to conquer death is not living
...
The reader learns of the tale of the three brother in the deathly hallows
...
The third brother, like Harry, accept death and walk with death as equals through grace
...
The love of others nurtures in him an instinct for goodness and because of this love
and grace, Harry is able to live and defeat evil
...

INNOCENCE=NATURALVIRTUE
-

too simple

Denied original sin—children are not corrupt
...

Wanting to shelter the child
...
HP- how they shelter Arianna, could be dangerous
...


INNOCENCE=IGNORANT
-

-

too simple

Resolution is education; we can mold them into whatever we want, ignore their own identity
...
They can be lead astray if they don’t get correct information
...
Ms
...
Do-as-you-would-be-done-by form Tom’s desires correctly so he
can get to purity
...
Keep them in ignorance…not teaching them too much
...
Dangerous
...
Innocence wouldn’t equal ignorance here, it means virtue and
sinlessness
...
BLAKE
...
H’s true
virtue comes from the choices he makes—choosing the right choices, through experience he receives a higher form of innocence
...
**think our purity, it’s not that we do not have desire…through experience we learn how to control our purity
Title: Literature and the Christian Child
Description: University of Toronto Deals with themes of novels: Water Babies, The Princess and the Goblin, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Bridge to Terabithia, Fire Eaters.