Reading Suggestions for Religious Fiction
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By John Williams
Partly inspired by a recent interview with Ross Douthat, who argues in his new book, “Bad Religion,” that great art inspired by religion is vital to the culture, I asked Times staffers and contributors to describe their favorite works of fiction that have prominent religious themes or settings. The answers are below. On Twitter, I’ll be asking readers for their own suggestions, a selection of which will be shared on this blog in the coming days.
By John Williams
Partly inspired by a recent interview with Ross Douthat, who argues in his new book, “Bad Religion,” that great art inspired by religion is vital to the culture, I asked Times staffers and contributors to describe their favorite works of fiction that have prominent religious themes or settings. The answers are below. On Twitter, I’ll be asking readers for their own suggestions, a selection of which will be shared on this blog in the coming days.
- I considered revisiting “The Nun,” Denis Diderot’s scathing classic about an innocent teenager forced into a convent and systematically corrupted there.
- Anyway, Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” is easily my favorite religious novel. Written as a series of letters from an aging Congregational minister to his young son, “Gilead” covers the territory from family to work to doubt to death to Bible study.
- “The Chosen,” by Chaim Potok, is on one level about a boyhood friendship — between the Hasidic boy Danny and his more secular friend, Reuven — but it beautifully illuminates the seductions of both Hasidism and modernity.
- The scenes of holy-rolling Pentecostal worship in James Baldwin’s semiautobiographical “Go Tell It on the Mountain” are positively goosebumpy.
- “Love, Death and the Cheeseburger.” And “Minyan,” the last short story in David Bezmozgis’s 2004 collection “Natasha,” is only a few pages long, but I can’t think of a more moving testament, in print or out, to the spirit, religious or literary.
- Published in the 1950s and expertly translated by Ivan Morris, one of the great Western interpreters of Japanese literature, Yukio Mishima’s novel “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” was inspired by the true story of the destruction, just after World War II, of one of the country’s most famous religious buildings, an act of arson by a troubled young man studying to be a Buddhist priest
- Iris Murdoch’s fourth novel, “The Bell,” published in 1958, is set in a lay community led by Michael Meade, a former schoolmaster who once aspired to be a priest.