Hi all, thanks for being patient as I put off blogging in favor of other pursuits.
This panel included Emily Louise Zimbrick, Scott Cairns, Janet Peery, Nicole Mazzarella, Farideh Goldin, and Josh Allen.
When we encounter inconsistences in scripture and religion, we can ignore them, discard them as irrelevant, or acknowledge and study the complexities. If they're in God's word, maybe God wants us to consider these things, difficult questions, moral complexity. Real faith confronts the trouble and the troubling head-on. Bad literature, religious or not, avoids it. Dickinson wrote, "On subjects of which we know nothing, we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble."
Scott Cairns started by talking about the ressourcement movement, a French Catholic movement to recover patristic wisdom that had been excised from writings. He used the phrase "squandering tradition" to describe what the people were doing when they originally cut out parts of those religious writings. Cairns introduced (to me) the terms cataphatic, for a theology of attributes in which we say things about God as if he were a person and we knew him, and apophatic, the via negativa, the theology of unsaying and the way of unknowing, in which we think and speak of God in terms of what he is not. The two traditions usually balance each other out. For example, many people think of God as a king, but acknowledge that he is not king in the way we normally think of human kings. Cairns talked about Gregory of Nyssa (or someone else) meeting God in light, then in cloud, then in darkness. He said poetry is not a matter of waying what we think or want readers to think, or redacting experience, but an experience of trusting language and the words on the page. "If I only wrote what I know, I wouldn't have ever made tenure. So what I do is write in order to know."
Josh Allen talked about his fiction in which a husband notices his wife coming home later than usual from work and finds that she is stopping at a Mormon church to pray. He discussed the importance of multiple valid points of view and quoted John Garder, who, in On Moral Fiction, said "True art is too complex to reflect the party line." Allen quoted someone else who said, "We have to safely leave evangelism to the evangelist....Art transcends its boundaries by staying within them."
To an extent, all literature is about a spiritual journey.
Examine truth without examining dogma.
A happy ending, like any ending, has to be earned. The character has to make choices to resolve the story, not just feel despair and go up on the roof and have a transcendent experience. It must stem from choices the characters have made, not grace we don't understand. Offering readers only one emotional response means the piece will tend toward sentimentality.
Things they mentioned in the panel:
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
David Kurzon, ed., Modern Poems on the Bible
The Classic Midrash from Paulist Press
E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel talks about the difference between preaching and prophecy. Music critic and writer Greil Marcus, talking about Van Morrison on NPR, says that Van Morrison breaks through his own defenses and thus breaks through his listeners'.
Thanks for reading! The next post will be about the keynote address by Michael Chabon and, possibly in the same post, a panel on journalism and CNF. Good stuff.
In other news, I've just taught my last class, and had my last class as a student last week. It's a very weird feeling, like I'm losing part of who I am. Only part, though, and I can be a student of life whatever my career turns out to be.
I set the inside of my oven on fire the other night. I preheated the oven to make sweet potato fries, and the bottom of the oven had some butter-and-sugar residue from pecan rolls which had overflowed a little (or perhaps more than I thought). Funnily, I was more upset about not being able to bake the sweet potato fries than I was about the actual presence of a small fire in my house. Go figure. I've bought a new drip pan and am now about to install it and retry those fries. Nothing if not adventurous, this life.
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