Because I am a professor of English and a Christian, people often ask me to recommend a Christian novelist or poet. Mostly, I am happy to oblige, but sometimes these requests make me uneasy. This is because what people often seek is not so much a work by a Christian novelist or poet but a Christian novel or a Christian poem. While Christian novelists or poets are real enough—though not always very plentiful—it is somewhat more problematic to speak of Christian, as opposed to pagan, literature. This is because, as I hope to show, all literature is Christian in a limited sense. Instead of asking whether a novel or poem is "Christian" or not, it would be more helpful to speak of all literature in terms of value.
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