When Writers Think Along Similar Lines

 

“What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.” – C.S. Lewis, God In the Dock

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. – Flannery O’Connor

…what we roughly call the Catholic novel is not necessarily about a Christianized or Catholicized world, but simply that it is one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by. – Flannery O’Connor

I think all these quotes reflect important and intertwined understandings of how Judeo-Christian writers should approach the craft of writing.  Also, they  bring to mind how exhilarating it is to encounter writers who heed the advice being offered. Such exhilaration is probably an artifact of the infrequency of such encounters.  Alas.

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