Melissa Schubert

Recent Essays

April: An Argument in Poems

Melissa Schubert | Literature | 05.01.2009

April is the cruellest month. So begins, famously, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, a prophetic and incisive poem (albeit abstruse and alienating), capturing in word and image some of the losses and decadences that marked the m... Read More...

Behold Your King: Reflections on a Palm Sunday

Melissa Schubert | Theology, Literature | 04.06.2009

Christians remember on Palm Sunday the triumphal entry of Christ to Jerusalem—the King of Glory riding to the ostensible seat of his political and religious power, received as victor and Lord with shouts of Hosannas. But... Read More...

High Table: Luther

Melissa Schubert | Misc., Education, Theology | 01.26.2009

Our reading assignment: Martin Luther’s “Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation,” “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” and “The Freedom of the Christian” from Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings. Faculty tra... Read More...

The Prodigal Holiday

Melissa Schubert | Misc., Theology | 11.24.2008

I will be bringing (among other things) dessert number four to our Thanksgiving feast. I may make a pear tart. It’s strategic, making a light and fruity dessert number four. How else should I expect it to be eaten, after th... Read More...

Housekeeping

Melissa Schubert | Misc., Literature | 09.22.2008

Like her biblical namesake, the Ruth of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) is a sojourner among strangers. The almost misleading title of the novel suggests that the novel will be concerned with the daily habits that ... Read More...
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Miscellaneous Notes

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Collected Quotations

"There's a special providence in the fall of every sparrow."
Hamlet in Hamlet
"Christian, what is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but I belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ."
The Heidelberg Catechism
"And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs- Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."
G. M. Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"
"And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where started And know the place for the first time."
T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding"
"Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven."
St. Paul, I Corinthians 15:49
"My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise, and Reepicheep will be head of the talking mice in Narnia."
Reepicheep in Voyage of the Dawn Treader
"Indeed, was it to increase the wine at poor weddings that he came down to earth?"
The Brothers Karamazov
"Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak."
Rosalind in As You Like It

Biographical Sketch

Biographical Sketch

If old school philology came back in style, Melissa Schubert would aspire to join its ranks. For now, she happily teaches and studies great literature, especially Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She is an assistant professor in the Torrey Honors Institute, and she won't let it go to her head that she is the prettiest member of the Scriptorium team.


Favorite Books

Homer's The Odyssey
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale
John Milton's Paradise Lost
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
Antoine de St. Exupery's The Little Prince
J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings
Flannery O'Connor's Collected Short Stories
T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

Schubert's Songbank

Beethoven "Sonata Pathetique"
The Beatles "Twist and Shout"
The Old Hundredth "All Creatures that on Earth do Dwell"
Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2
Sufjan Stevens Come on Feel the Illinoise
The Mamas & The Papas "Dream a Little Dream of Me"
Jeff Buckley "Hallelujah"
U2 Joshua Tree
Gillian Welch "Orphan Girl"
Queen & David Bowie "Under Pressure"
Morten Lauridsen "O Magnum Mysterium"
Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suites
Arcade Fire Funeral