This essay was the keynote address at the 13th annual North American Christian Foreign Language Association (NACFLA) Conference at Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA, April 3-5, 2003.  The author contends that the best argument for language study is not the pragmatic one that dominates contemporary rhetoric, but a liberal one—an argument grounded in the liberal arts tradition.

A key thematic strand in Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) is the role of the future.  In the poem, Mena (1411-1456), anticipates the goal of a unified Spain by way of a reinvigorated Reconquest.  The pseudo-epic invites the comparison of the expectation of a united Spain with the dynamic theological concept of the kingdom of God.  Mena’s work does not overtly demonstrate a sophisticated eschatology, but nevertheless appears to have absorbed and recast the background theology in his own terms, combining Augustinian realized eschatology with a general apocalyptic awareness.  The “already-not-yet” aspects of the kingdom of God, particularly as expounded by theologian George Ladd, inform the structure of the analysis, showing how the expectation of the kingdom of God colors the proto-nation-founding project in the Laberinto.                                                                                

Flaubert’s “Hérodias” from Trois Contes is marked by an aura of secrecy, confinement, and mystery.  While many readers have endeavored to explain the text’s images and spatial significance, the relationship between these various formal attributes and the Christological content of the text has not been thoroughly treated.  In this paper I show how the word is valorized in the text as a sign and how, along with the images of circle and space, it forms a nexus of signs with Christological import that illuminate the “paroles mystérieuses,” the “grande nouvelle” and the “réponse si longtemps espérée” announced in the text.                                                                                                 

Like the diary and private letters, the woman-authored devotional of the nineteenth century has been acknowledged but undervalued as a literary genre.  This study examines the important connection between religious discourse, emancipative ideals, and the construction of the masculine and the feminine in Gómez de Avellaneda’s Manual del cristiano (1847) and Devocionario (1867).