Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Where to find …

… Faith in Fiction — First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Fiction is primarily about fiction. It may – and often does – engage faith, but it is not a substitute for faith. Flannery O'Connor's faith informed her life. Hence, it informed her fiction. That is how it works. If faith seems missing from contemporary fiction, perhaps that is because it is missing contemporary writers' lives. I thought Joshua Henkin's The World Without You had an undercurrent running through it that had something do with faith. The same could be said of Tan Twan Eng's two novels – The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists. 

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