Provost receives CCL Lifetime Award

Provost David Lyle Jeffrey has joined the ranks of distinguished scholars, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners and acclaimed writers who have received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature. 
The conference is an international organization allied with the Modern Language Association that encourages scholarly exploration of the relationship between literature and the Christian faith. Jeffrey, who joined the Baylor faculty in 2000 as Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities, received the award in December at the MLA's national convention in San Diego, where he also gave a plenary address titled "Can Faustus Be Saved?"
"He was chosen because, in a brilliant way, he meets all of the criteria," said Maurice Hunt, research professor, chair of Baylor's English department and a CCL board member. "He richly deserves it for his many publications in the field."
Jeffrey, who published Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture through Baylor University Press last year, has received three CCL Book of the Year awards. He assumed the role of provost and vice president for academic affairs in June 2003. "I am happy to have any of our professors be recognized for good work, and to make some contribution to the collective work of the faculty is a source of particular gratitude for me, now that so much of my time is devoted to administrative matters," he said. 
Members of CCL's board of directors choose award recipients based on their service to the organization through outstanding publications and teaching in the fields of Christianity and religion and service as a board member or officer. Previous recipients include Owen Barfield, Doris Betts, Wayne Booth, Cleanth Brooks, Denis Donoghue, Rene Girard, Denise Levertov, Barbara Lewalski, Louis Martz, Czeslaw Milosz, Walter J. Ong, S.J., Paul Ricoeur, Nathan Scott and Richard Wilbur. 
As a longtime Christian scholar in the secular realm, Jeffrey said he is "honored to be part of the witness of Baylor to the international community." Much of his scholarly work, he said, "explores the Christian religious foundations and intertextual relationships in Western literature as well as the literary and artistic influences of the Bible."