Jane Austen and the Liturgies of Ordinary Life, with Karen Swallow Prior

This episode features a conversation we hosted on Friday, May 21st with author and Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Karen Swallow prior on Jane Austen and her novel approach to virtue. Speaking of Austen’s Christian faith, Prior says, “Hers was the restrained, quiet, and personal faith of her Anglican tradition. Her novels are less altar calls than liturgies of ordinary life.” Austen’s world may feel quite removed from ours, but her focus on such everyday liturgies illustrate the importance of the seemingly mundane and illuminate the path towards repaired and rightly ordered relationships. 

We hope you enjoy this conversation!

Learn more about Karen Swallow Prior 

Watch the full Evening Conversation and read the transcript from May 21st, 2021.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility,   by Jane Austen
Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman
Praying with Jane, by Rachel Dodge  
Alasdair MacIntyre
William Shakespeare

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• Pride and Prejudice, a Trinity Forum Reading by Jane Austen
• Bulletins from Immortality, a Trinity Forum Reading by Emily Dickinson
• Revelation, a Trinity Forum Reading by Flannery O’Connor 
• God's Grandeur , a Trinity Forum Reading by Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Dr. Karen Swallow Prior is Professor of English at Liberty University, where she has won multiple teaching awards. She writes frequently on literature, culture, ethics, and ideas. Her writing appears at Christianity Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, Books and Culture and other places. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist , and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Literature, and her most recent work Sense and Sensibility: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting. 

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for the artwork and Andrew Peterson for the music!