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:
“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.”