Listening for God: Malamud, O'Connor, Updike, & Morrison

by Peter C. Brown

Overview

We live in a secular age, where the world and its ways seem to indicate the absence of God. The testimony of ancient and latter-day prophets requires more faith (or credulity) than most of us can manage. Can we still find spiritual truths that will restore a sense of a higher meaning to our lives? 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. Their engrossing stories are not just the moral parables or cunning plots they appear on the surface to be. Peter Brown offers a highly interdisciplinary examination of these four authors who represent four different faith traditions within Judeo-Christianity: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and syncretistic (blending Africanist creole beliefs with Catholicism). All subversive writers, they work in extraordinary ways to undermine their own stories and open us, their readers, to something more, something that transcends time and fate. The close reading this requires from us is part of the trick, and the pleasure. Brown invites us to reread them to listen for this elusive transcendence, a sacred mystery that rebukes both the atheist's weak humanism and the believer's naïve supernaturalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780881467680
Publisher:	Mercer University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter C. Brown taught philosophy and Great Books for over four decades at Mercer University. With a PhD from Emory University, his research interests are in ethics, religion and literature, and community building. Brown received the King Distinguished Professor Award in 1998 from Mercer, and in 2002 he was honored by Georgia State University with the Jimmy Carter Award for Campus-Community Collaboration. He now resides in Tallahassee, Florida.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Preface in Lieu of a Sermon 1

An Interpretive Strategy: Briefly 13

1 Malamud's Imagined Jews 19

"Armistice" 19

"The Cost of Living" 27

"The First Seven Years" 28

"The Magic Barrel" 34

"The Lady of the Lake" 38

"Jewbird" 43

"The Silver Crown" 50

The Natural 55

Imagined Jews 61

2 O'Connor's Sacramental Freaks 63

"Revelation" 67

"Everything That Rises Must Converge" 78

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" 85

Sacramental Freaks 100

3 Updike's Secular Puritans 101

Rabbit, Run 110

Rabbit Redux 128

Rabbit Is Rich 138

Rabbit at Rest 141

Rabbit Remembered 150

Secular Puritans 153

4 Morrison's Re-Membered Slaves 155

The Bluest Eye 173

Paradise 198

Re-membered Slaves 216

Philosophical Coda: Our Narrative Knowledge of the God of Good and Evil 219

The God of Science and Philosophy 220

The God of Testimony 222

Casting out the Idols 228

God as Creator 231

God as Ruler 232

God as Judge 234

Original Sin 237

Bibliography 241

Index 251