Listening for God
About this book
For millennia, people have looked to literature, to scriptures, epics, poems, plays, novels, and films for insights into the human condition. In our increasingly rationalized world, some of these contemporary storytellers--like a Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, or Toni Morrison--stretch their art to find new words for the sacred. The God for whom they listen is elusive, a mystery. Their stories and novels are not make-believe accounts of a supernatural Being. They are stories that dig beneath all the ordinary ways we try to justify our lives to uncover in them the traces of a transcending judgment that both exalts and humbles us. Peter Brown offers an interdisciplinary examination of these four authors with different faith Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and syncretistic (blending Africanist creole beliefs with Catholicism). These writers work in extraordinary ways to undermine their own stories and their readers to something that transcends time and fate.