Daniel Ritchie

Job Title

Professor of English Emeritus
English and Journalism, College of Arts and Sciences

Highlight

During his 37 years at Bethel, Daniel Ritchie taught English literature and (in 2002) guided Bethel's efforts to begin a multi-course Humanities Program. During his career, he won grants from the the Newberry Library (2017) and from the National Endowment for the Humanities Program (2007 and 2013) to support the Humanities Program and an interdisciplinary course on leisure. He led seven study-abroad courses, including five of Bethel's "England Term" semesters. In 2001, He won Bethel's Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching in 2006.

Started at Bethel

1985

Education

Amherst College - B.A. in Greek, 1978
Rutgers University - M.A. in English, 1980
Rutgers University - Ph.D. in English, 1985

Publications

"Is Great Art Ahead of its Time?" National Affairs. No. 59 Spring 2024.

"Isaac Watts's Poetic Hymn to Christ's Sacrifice" Wall Street Journal. 8 April 2023.

"No Justice, No Peace? Rene Girard and our Endless Rivalries." Front Porch Republic. 9 December 2022.

When Was Culture Invented? National Affairs 52. Summer 2022.

"A Comedy with a Sad Ending: #MeToo and Pope's Rape of the Lock." Front Porch Republic 21 June 2021.

"Christians Should Be in the News Cycle but Not Of It." Christianity Today 20 April 2021. (May-June 2021 print version).

"Fashioning a Free People." National Affairs. No. 34. Winter 2018. 161-76.

"Choosing Rest in Paradise Lost." co-written with Jared Hedges, '15. Christianity and Literature. 67.2 (2018): 271-93.

"Anthony Trollope and the 'Trouthe' about Manhood." Law and Liberty. 31 August 2018.

"The Fault Lies in Ourselves: Coriolanus at the Royal Shakespeare Company." Public Discourse. 12 November 2017.

"Is the Party Over?" National Affairs. No. 31, Spring 2017. 101.114.

"Powerful Sympathies Powerfully Restrained." review essay of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke by David Bromwich, vol. 1 (Harvard UP, 2014). Law and Liberty. 23 January 2017.

Presentations

Conference Director, "American Political Parties and Ordered Liberty." Liberty Fund Colloquium. April 4-7, 2019, Indianapolis, IN

Conference Presentation, with Kelsey Widman, '16. "The Problem of Naming God in Walker Percy's Novels." Conference on Christianity and Literature, "The Problem With God." March 29-30, 2019. Harvard Divinity School.

Conference Director, "Liberty and the Sabbath," Liberty Fund Colloquium. July 16-19, 2017, Santa Fe, NM

Chair, "Fashioning a Free People." Panel SS126. American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies annual Meeting (Minneapolis 2017).

Conference Director. "Educating the Free Citizen in the Modern World." Liberty Fund Colloquium. April 2016, Chicago, IL.

Areas of expertise

Daniel Ritchie specializes in 18th century literature and has a broad interest in the relation of faith and literature. He has edited two books on Edmund Burke and has written two books of literary criticism, "Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age" (Eerdmans 1996) and "The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer" (Baylor 2010).

Quote

"Art is man's nature." Edmund Burke, "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" (1791)