Religious writers and audiences

brunians at brunians.org · 06 Jun 2010, 20:33 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 16:33:13 -0400
Subject: (urth) Religious writers and audiences
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Shver tzan a yid, bubbeleh.

.


> I'm one who felt betrayed by /TLtW&tW/, and as David Stockhoff said,
> timing was important.  I read all the Narnia books eagerly when I was
> seven.  When I was maybe 10 or 12, I learned the story of Jesus'
> redemptive sacrifice, and at some point I connected that with Aslan (and
> the end of /TVotDT/).  So Lewis had tried to trick me!  These books I was
> attached to were a covert attempt to advertise that religion that besieged
> me and my family, that continually tried to blandish and harangue and
> peer-press and maybe, under the surface, even threaten me into submission.
>  It was an unpleasant moment.
>
> (This was in the early or mid '70s, by the way, a time when American
> Christians may have felt equally besieged.)
>
> It was just a moment, though.  I soon learned to see Christianity in
> fiction as an appealing fantasy, and I could enjoy it in the Narnia books
> and the Space Trilogy and many other books.  In /Crime and Punishment/ and
> /War and Peace/ I may have sighed "This again" when I got to the Christian
> message, but no more than that.  Otherwise it was in the same category as
> the Greek and Norse myths that I read when I was little, or Robertson
> Davies's Jungianism and Ursula Le Guin's attempt at an indigenous belief
> system in /Always Coming Home/.
>
> I went through a Rand phase around my last year or two of high school.  I
> don't mind preaching if it's done in a way I can enjoy.
>
>
> Jerry Friedman
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Sent: Sat, June 5, 2010 6:01:27 PM
> Subject: Re: (urth) Religious writers and audiences
>
>
> Do people feel similarly betrayed by Doestoevsky?
>
> Again, I find it bizarre.  I can't imagine thinking to myself "How dare
> Author X have different views than me!"  I can imagine thinking "Well, I
> don't choose to spend time on this," but not a sense of betrayal per se.
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:58 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> wrote:
>
> The comparison is a personally interesting one. Perhaps the difference is
> largely one of timing. I too felt somewhat betrayed by Lewis; I
> encountered Narnia not long after Middle-Earth, around second and third
> grade.
>>>Wolfe I discovered much later, and while I'm still waiting for the Great
>>> Atheist Novel, I don't feel betrayed at all. And Rand was clearly insane
>>> from the beginning.
>>
>>------------------------------
>>
>>Message: 4
>>>Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 16:53:02 -0400
>>
>>
>>From: John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
>>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>>Subject: Re: (urth) Religious writers and audiences
>>Message-ID:
>>       <AANLkTinjYKw22zcNqAXleQGE49YCYlD9jhZRTChMEgF5 at mail.gmail.com>
>>>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>>
>>
>>Personally I find the "betrayal" narrative bizarre whenever I hear it.
>>Secular writers and religious writers alike "color" their fiction to
>> reflect
>>their political, moral and/or metaphyiscal beliefs, yet one very rarely
>>>encounters this "betrayal" storyline outside of discussion of certain
>>Christian genre writers.  I guess in the right-wing fringe media we hear
>>about evil homosexual/pagan agendas hidden in works, but no one takes
>> that
>>>stuff seriously.
>>
>>I might ascribe this to the generally liberal or progressive attitudes of
>>most literary critics, academics, and, plausibly, much of the educated
>>reading class in the United States.  But that doesn't really wash in my
>>>experience.  I know countless people, many of liberal predispositions,
>>> who
>>have read and allegedly enjoyed The Fountainhead--and Rand is far
>> preachier
>>than Lewis, Wolfe, or even Card.  And Neil Gaiman has written about his
>>>feelings of betrayal as to Lewis's religiousity, but never expressed
>>> similar
>>feelings toward, for example, Kipling's imperialism.
>>
>>I think the problem (if there is a unique problem here and not just soft
>>>bigotry against religion in general or a particular religion) must be
>>> the
>>perceived deception.  The idea that Lewis might be planting ideas and
>> images
>>surreptiously in one's head that would act to soften one's views towards
>>>traditional Christianity can be conceived of nefariously.
>>
>>
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>
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