Christian Realism

Touchstone Magazine is a source of many things interesting and good. The September 2007 issue has an article called Writers Cramped, Three Things Evangelical Authors Can Learn from Flannery O’Connor, which has popped up on a few blogs.

Why aren’t Christian writing great literature?

Christian writers are falling into the trap of simply dressing up and repeating their own beliefs, rather than using those beliefs to inform their exploration of the world and human behavior.

Which pointed to:

How literary are evangelicals?

As I glance at IVP’s list of authors, I see quite a diversity - Anglicans . . . Baptists . . . Methodists . . . Presbyterians . . . Anabaptists . . . megachurches . . . Of course, none of these are “literary” writers in the vein of a Flannery O’Connor. So why don’t contemporary evangelicals tend to produce literary works? Are we too concerned about efficacy of evangelistic message and clarity of doctrine to bother with the mysteries of art and literature?

And the article in Touchstone:

Writers Cramped

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

James Harleman, one of the pastors at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, gave a lecture on May 31 at MHC’s West Seattle campus, entitled ‘Christianity and Culture.’ Notes are here. Quite a bit to chew on and think about.

SF/F author Liz Moon on literary snobbishness:

What literary snobbism does hurt is the public–people who are taken in by the ignorant assertions of “experts” who don’t even read what they claim to despise (or read it so carelessly that they might as well be reading a cereal box.) It hurts the students who think their natural taste for plots that are plots and characters who are interesting is the literary equivalent of original sin and must be excised before they’re fit to be called educated.

If we as Christians believe that creativity and imagination is a gift from God, why have we neglected it for so many years?

An article on forbes.com about the changing relationship between evangelical Christianity and the arts. The author automatically gets +10 points for mentioning Hans Rookmaaker.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/07/26/ap3956405.html