Tom & Alissa

It must be Flannery O’Connor day again; first I read this article about what evangelicals can learn from O’Connor, then I find out that John Piper chimed in with a rousing agreement (hurrah!). And I’ve been thinking about her a lot again. In the end, I seem to always come back to her work.

Piper:

Fiction and poetry provide authors a unique way to glorify Christ that more overtly intellectual genres, like theology, simply can’t. These genres that aim directly for the heart and soul—rather than aiming at the heart through the mind—do not argue for belief, they show what it looks like and make you feel it. Theology, devotionals, and other books in the “Christian Living” section of the bookstore talk about belief explicitly. Their goal is to explain truth as clearly as possible. Fiction and poetry, on the other hand, tell the truth, but tell it slant. They offer an author a way to give his beliefs flesh and blood by enacting them in the confusion of the real world. In fiction, belief is not what you look at, but what you look through.

(My own article on O’Connor was published earlier this year in Radiant’s e-newsletter.)