Tag: John Updike

Finally the NTJ

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Here is January 2022 (woops). And here is how the NTJ will operate in a post-USPS environment (from the current issue with a little help from Scribd):

The new iteration of the NTJ comes with fewer strings and but a couple wrinkles. The journal will be available as a PDF attachment at Oldlife.org and Nicotinetheologicaljournal.org. It will be free initially and then move to a subscription basis through the latter of the two websites (for now that’s the plan but technology being what it is and editors being the age they are, who knows?). The reason for subscriptions is mainly to cover expenses of websites and the small print runs of the journal we will produce for the sake of publicity. This means that readers who want a print copy will need to produce their own.

Do Poets Write Verse this Good?

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky, like the blue bell of a vacuum, lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city. (John Updike, “In Football Season” from Olinger Stories)

The Protestant Novel?

Published on by D. G. Hart35 Comments

This post got me thinking about whether Protestantism has produced novelists the way that Roman Catholicism allegedly has. For instance, several months ago Dana Gioia wrote about “the Catholic writer”:

Catholic literature is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent. Catholics generally prefer to write about sinners rather than saints. (It is not only that sinners generally make more interesting protagonists. Their failings also more vividly demonstrate humanity’s fallen state.) John Kennedy Toole’s ? A Confederacy of Dunces , for example, presents a huge cast of characters, lost souls or reprobates all, who, pursuing their assorted vices and delusions, hilariously stumble toward grace and provisional redemption. The same dark comic vision pervades the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, and Muriel Spark. Ron Hansen’s Atticus begins with the investigation of a murder. Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is full of resentment, violence, and anger. “Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine,” she observed, and violence is “strangely capable” of returning her characters “to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace.” When Mary Karr titled her poetry collection Sinners Welcome , she could have been describing the Catholic literary tradition.

Perhaps the problem is that Protestants are too devout and guard what qualifies as genuinely Christian while non-Protestant Christians are more used to the big tent of mixing and matching. That old irony of Roman Catholics accusing Protestantism of antinomianism when three fingers are pointing back at the accuser.

But what about John Updike? The Wikipedia page on Protestant novelists includes him under Congregationalists along with Jonathan Edwards; I had not realized that Religious Affections was fictional. (I feel better.) But David Lodge thought otherwise:

David Lodge suggested that “If there was ever such a species as the Protestant novelist…Mr. Updike may be its last surviving example.” His preachers, as literary characters, certainly reflect the diversity and complexity of late-twentieth-century mainstream American Protestantism while continuing an American literary tradition of problematic preachers, a lineage extending at least from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale to Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry to James Baldwin’s John Grimes, to highlight but a few examples. Consider the dueling conceptions of ecclesiology and clerical authority represented in the Lutheran Fritz Kruppenbrach (a Barthian in no uncertain terms who appears in Rabbit, Run) and his foil, the young, personable, and disconcertingly pastoral Jack Eccles (who turns up throughout the Rabbit Tetralogy). Consider Updike’s conflicted lothario Tom Marshfield (whose own relationship to a certain “Ms. Prynne” invokes Dimmesdale and the Scarlet Letter) in A Month of Sundays (1975), or the Presbyterian preacher Clarence Wilmot from In the Beauty of the Lillies (1996), who undergoes a crisis of faith and yet continues to peddle both “the word” and “cosmology” as an encyclopedia salesman. Updike’s preachers are ordained to God’s service, yet continually compelled by the messy, and corporeal, limitations that confront humankind. For an author whose sexually charged narrative communicates a coherent and strident theological vision, one can’t help but find some kindred sympathy between Updike as a wordsmith and his own ministers of “the Word.”

Or maybe the paucity of Protestant novelists is really a vindication of 2k. Protestants intuitively know (but often refuse to admit) that novels don’t need to be Christian, that the question of whether a novel is Christian is actually silly. Some of the worst novels have tried to be redemptive, while some of the best don’t make the slightest reference to religion, let along sin and grace.