Lionel Basney

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Lionel Basney (December 2, 1946 - August 21, 1999) was a poet and professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Basney was interested in Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, and Ned Ludd, the origin of the Luddite movement. He is the author of An Earth-Careful Way of Life: Christian Stewardship and the Environmental Crisis.

In 2000, The Conference on Christianity and Literature at Pepperdine University began awarding the annual Lionel Basney Prize "to the article deemed by the CCL Publications Committee to be the most outstanding article of the year in Christianity and Literature". According to the website, "the award...commemorates both the scholarly career and the personal character of a teacher, scholar, poet, and essayist who, during nearly two decades of affiliation with Calvin College, was deeply committed to CCL and all that it seeks to promote."[1]

According to Basney,

Any change deep enough to protect life on the planet will have to be a repentance. It will have to be that concrete. No 'deepening' consciousness, no change in 'perspective,' no keeping back with the Joneses will do. We have to turn around in the places where we stand. Realistic confession, honest repentance, concrete restitutions. Small, specific, practical turnings.

—An Earth-Careful Way of Life: Christian Stewardship and the Environmental Crisis

Wendell Berry's Life is a miracle: an Essay Against Modern Superstition is dedicated to Basney.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Basney Award - The Conference on Christianity & Literature

[edit] Works

  • "Myth, History and Time in The Lord of The Rings" in Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism By Rose A. Zimbardo, Neil David Isaacs 2004 Houghton Mifflin ISBN 0618422536
  • An Earth-Careful Way of Life: Christian Stewardship and the Environmental Crisis, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994 ISBN 0830813225
  • "Five Notes on the Didactic Tradition, in Praise of Wendell Berry" in Paul Merchant, editor. Wendell Berry (American Authors Series). Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1991. 174-183.
  • "Technolatry Unmasked". The Other Side 33.3 (May/June 1997)
  • "Questioning Progress: The Resurrection of Ned Ludd". Books & Culture 4.5 (September/October 1998): 18
  • "Meditations for Lent 1999". The Banner February-March 1999
  • "Immanuel's Ground." The American Scholar: 68.3 (Summer 1999): 109-120
  • "'His Proper Business': Johnson's Adjustment to Society." Texas Studies in Literature and Language: 32.3 (Fall 1990): 397-416
  • "Prudence in the Life of Savage." ELN: 28.2 (Dec. 1990): 17-24
  • "Narrative and Judgment in the Life of Savage." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly: 14.2 (Spring 1991): 153-64
  • "Having Your Meaning at Hand: Work in Snyder and Berry", in: World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the Jubilation of Poets, ed Leonard M. Trawick. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990, pp. 130-143.
  • "Review of Collected Poems 1957-1982" Chri and Lit, 25 (Summer 1986), 31-32.
  • "Mia California: An Opera Journal" in Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1996
  • "Ecology and the Scriptural Concept of the Master"; III:1
  • "The Balanced Mind: Johnson's Christian Empiricism"; III:3
  • "'Lucidus Ordo': Johnson and Generality" Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 39-57
  • "The Snow Plough Man" (Christianity and Literature 50:3)

[edit] External links