Johanna Blanding-Koskinen’s forthcoming book, Resistance as Testimony: Essays on Literature, Theology, and the Moral Grammar of Story (anticipated 2027), introduces a new methodology of theological literary criticism. Developed from the premise that literature discloses more than artistic intention, the work argues that every literary work reveals the theological commitments that sustain it, whether those commitments are consciously acknowledged, resisted, or left unnamed.
The methodology took shape following Blanding-Koskinen’s return to seminary as an M.A. candidate in Theology and Biblical Studies at Belhaven University in 2025. An effort to integrate literary criticism with theological inquiry developed into the framework presented here as Resistance-Testimony criticism.
Central to this methodology is the Moral Grammar of Story: the moral vocabulary proceeding from Genesis 3, specifically the Protoevangelium (Genesis 3:15), identified by Blanding-Koskinen as the master narrative from which every subsequent story necessarily departs. From this originating narrative emerge the enduring categories through which literature understands human dignity, guilt, justice, sacrifice, judgment, hope, and redemption. Every literary work takes up this inherited moral grammar, consciously or not, in the construction of its meaning.
The Literary Apologetic serves as the working home of this developing methodology. The essays published here introduce, refine, and apply Resistance-Testimony criticism across a range of literary works, examining narrative as worldview disclosure and literature as a form of witness through both confession and resistance.
Each essay includes space for response, dialogue, biographical discussion, and related reading. Invited contributions may appear alongside the primary body of work as the project continues toward publication in 2027.
From the Archive • Featured Reading
Richard Matheson • 1956
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Relinquishing to Moral Capital
Wells made a man invisible and watched him become a monster. Matheson shrank a man to the subatomic and found him still capable of wonder. Both used physical impossibility to ask what remains of a human being when everything external is stripped away — and arrived at incompatible answers.
Wells’s answer was appetite. Matheson’s answer was to God there is no zero — the vision Wells’s materialism made structurally impossible: a universe in which smallness cannot extinguish worth, in which the image of God persists below the threshold of measurement.
TLA Podcast • Episode 1
Introduction to the Literary Apologetic
Ep. 2: Genesis 3:15 and the Shape of Every Story — Coming soon
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Outside the Bible, no single writer has covered a wider spectrum of human thought and left a deeper mark on the world that followed. The Wellsian Universe is this site’s dedicated space for everything pertaining to H.G. Wells — his theology, his influence, and the 130-year argument he started.
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Literary Theology • Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Author of Invisible Man (1952), one of the most theologically saturated novels in the American tradition — a work whose moral architecture depends on a claim about human dignity it never argues for and cannot, on its own stated premises, sustain.
“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
Literary Theology • Essay
Alan Jacobs
Cultural critic, Baylor University. The most serious living heir to C.S. Lewis as a literary-theological essayist. His The Narnian and Breaking Bread with the Dead demonstrate what it looks like to read literature as a Christian without reducing it to a sermon.
“To read is to be changed, or it is nothing.”
Fiction • Literary Theology
Marilynne Robinson
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Her Gilead trilogy is the finest body of theologically serious literary fiction produced in English in the last fifty years — Calvinist in its theology, Midwestern in its texture, universal in its reach.
“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
Fiction • Catholic Imagination
Ron Hansen
Novelist and Jesuit deacon. Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus place him in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene — writers for whom grace operates through the most ordinary and the most violent of human circumstances.
“Fiction at its best is an act of love toward the reader.”