The papers published on this site are about Owen Barfield’s life and work or informed by a Barfieldian perspective. Most of them were presented in the Owen Barfield sessions of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. Beginning in 1998, an Owen Barfield session has been a regular feature of RMMLA’s annual convention. The Owen Barfield Society is an affiliate organization of RMMLA.
“A Second Earth: Owen Barfield’s Concept of Equity” formed the basis of Christopher Houghton Budd’s presentation in the conference on Owen Barfield and the Redemption of the Western Mind, held at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland on March 27-29, 2009. In this essay Dr. Budd discusses the relevance of Owen Barfield’s ideas to key economic questions of our time.
Jane Hipolito’s paper on "The Alchemy of Imagination and Love in Owen Barfield’s The Rose on the Ash-Heap" was given in the Owen Barfield session of the 2008 RMMLA convention in Reno, NV. The paper centers on two key themes of Barfield’s 1929 mythopoeia The Rose on the Ash-Heap – the transformative power of imagination in modern times, and the mysterious relationship of imagination to love.
Jamie Hutchinson’s “Imagine that: Allegories of the Soul in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces” is a Barfieldian reading of Lewis’s novel. Professor Hutchinson presented “Imagine that” during the 2008 Owen Barfield Session of the RMMLA.
David Joplin presented
"The Moral Quality of Wordsworth's Nature" in the Romanticism session of the 2007 RMMLA convention in Calgary, Canada. Professor Joplin's paper, which describes the moral dimension in Wordsworth's view of nature, is informed by a distinctly Barfieldian perspective.
Jeffrey Hipolito presented "Can Ideas Have Histories?" in the Owen Barfield session of the 2007 RMMLA convention in Calgary, Canada. In this paper Professor Hipolito provides the first formal description of the relationship between Owen Barfield's view of history and evolution of consciousness, and the work of the important twentieth-century historian R. G. Collingwood. In addition, "Can Ideas Have Histories?" investigates the general twentieth-century impulse called history of ideas, as developed most notably by A. O. Lovejoy.