Glossary of Terms

Worldview Disclosure — describes the way a narrative experiment can expose an author's underlying assumptions about human nature.

Borrowed Moral Capital — identifies moral concepts retained by a literary culture after the metaphysical framework that originally grounded them has been rejected.

Inorganic Dignity — describes dignity constructed or conferred by social recognition rather than grounded in the nature of the person.

Imago Dei — names the contrasting Christian account in which human dignity precedes social recognition because it derives from humanity's creation in the image of God.

Compelled Testimony — describes the phenomenon in which a narrative continues to bear witness to an order of meaning that its explicit worldview cannot adequately explain.

The Grotesque — developed in conversation with Flannery O'Connor, identifies moments when grace, judgment, or moral reality becomes impossible for the narrative to domesticate.

Glorious Ruins — describes fallen humanity as still bearing the image of God while every human faculty remains distorted by the Fall.

Sub Rosa — identifies the cultural normalization of the curse through collective hiddenness.

Wellsian Theology / The Wellsian Blueprint — an operative anthropology in which human behavior is governed substantially by external constraint, the autonomous individual stands as the final authority over his own purposes, and the removal of social restraint exposes rather than creates the underlying appetite.

The Order of Intelligibility — names the structure within which human narrative becomes morally and metaphysically coherent, extending from Genesis 3:15 through the redemptive order of Scripture and, in theological terms, finding its center in the Son in whom all things hold together.