ABOUT

Dennis Kinlaw is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Institute at Erskine College. His research focuses on literature and religion, with a particular interest in narrative engagements with religious experience and secularism in 20th and 21st century literature. His current research investigates the spiritual dimensions of literary reception. Supported by a Templeton Religious Trust grant, “Truth in Fiction: A Cognitivist Approach to Literature as a Source of Spiritual Understanding” is an empirically aimed exploration of the narrative and experiential variables by which literary texts—poems, short stories, and novels—elicit spiritual responses within the lives of readers.

His work on this project has been aided by a team of advisors and research assistance from scholars in literary studies, communications, art history, psychology of religion, and theology.

Dennis F. Kinlaw

“We have been ignoring the deeper nature of fiction. That it is inwardly experiential, intransitive, a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different, where mind and imagination can freely combine, where memory and sensation can be deployed, intensified through the specific constraints that any imagined situation allows.”

- Sven Birkets