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"Religious articles Fiction."
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Feasting at the Threshold
Diane Duane’s ongoing fantasy series The Tale of the Five (1979–present) is set in a world marked by constant bodily transgressions and surprises, where a human and dragon can occupy the same body and become lovers and a one-night stand can bring one face-to-face with God. This essay will argue that Duane’s series articulates eroticism in a manner comparable to Linn Marie Tonstad’s (2016) queer revisioning of transubstantiation and bodily and spiritual transformation through the Eucharist. Acts of eating and drinking serve to highlight how characters’pansexual, polyamorous relations with each other and the love of the Goddess spill over into and amplify one another, constructing a theology premised on transformative pleasure. These aspects of Duane’s worldbuilding, however, exist in uneasy tension with the series’ increasing narrative concern with the maintenance of noble bloodlines and divinely sanctioned hereditary monarchies, which transforms a potentially radical queer eucharistic theology into something uncomfortably close to what Jasbir K. Puar (2007) has described as ‘homonationalism’. These tendencies in Duane’s writing highlight the need for fantasy’s queer theological imaginaries to be attentive to the ways religious identity, desire, and nationhood serve as mutually constitutive and socially regulating forces, lest queerness become recuperated as an extension of Western theological triumphalism ratherthan its dissolution.
Journal Article
Western esotericism, Chinese religion, and the supernatural fiction of Gustav Meyrink: Buddhism and Daoism in The Golem and The White Dominican
This paper analyses two novels by Gustav Meyrink—
The Golem
(
Der Golem
, 1915) and
The White Dominican
(
Der weiße Dominikaner
, 1921)—through the lens of Chinese religion. Although Meyrink is an influential author in German Modernism, occult and supernatural fiction, the paper shows that his literary vision was strongly influenced by Chinese religion, particularly Buddhist and Daoist traditions, mediated through contemporary Orientalist scholarship and the religious activities of the Theosophical Society and related Western esoteric movements. By examining the previously neglected elements of Buddhism and Daoism in Meyrink’s work, the paper sheds light on how the growing popularity of Chinese religious traditions in wider Western society influenced literary production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The paper highlights the need for greater attentiveness to the intellectual connections between China and Europe when undertaking critical analysis of fiction from this period.
Journal Article
The huaca
Ellie struggles with normal high school life after the death of her mother, until the day loner Gabe de la Cruz shows what his sacred Incan huaca can do.
Book
Do religious fictionalists face a problem of evil?
Much of the literature on religious fictionalism has emphasized that religious fictionalists employing a theistic fiction cannot just leave evil out of the fiction, and that on the contrary, they face worries that very closely parallel the worries raised by the problem of evil. This article argues that when religious fictionalism is construed most charitably, these worries do not arise. It explores three fictionalist approaches to evil (Excision, Completeness, and Inconsistency), shows that each can serve religious fictionalist ends, and recommends a pluralist stance towards them.
Journal Article
Trees and the “Unthought Known”: The Wisdom of the Nonhuman (or Do Humans “Have Shit for Brains”?)
Drawing on Richard Powers’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Overstory (2018), this article explores the limits of human wisdom (or why humans persist in denying what we know about the earth, especially what we knew as children) and wisdom’s bounty within the wider world, unknown, untapped, unprotected, and disrespected, with a particular focus on trees. It asks how people (the author included but especially white westerners) have come to disbelieve the intelligence of the nonhuman and, as a consequence, resist the ecological disaster wrought by our cherished obliviousness, and it argues for tree knowledge as a reasonable Christian claim, despite warnings that such claims reflect heresy. Influenced by Powers and Lewis Rambo, the essay asks about conversion—what will it take to convert us?—and suggests that pastoral theology’s responsibilities include an embrace of seeing more through fiction and trees.
Journal Article
Colonial India in a Crusades Mirror: Fantasy and Reality in a Nineteenth-Century Urdu Novel
This article extends Georg Lukács’s theorization pertaining to historical fiction by considering a novel written in response to colonial conditions. It treats Abdulhalim Sharar’s Urdu Malik al-‘Aziz and Virginia (1888) as a case where a fictional version of the encounter between Muslims and Christians during the crusades in the twelfth century is used to counter the colonial Indian present in the nineteenth century. I suggest that novels such as Sharar’s exemplify a vein of global thought since the nineteenth century that resisted historicism but without abandoning the notion that the past was real. Deploying a genre that came to the fore in colonial conditions, Sharar imagines an alternative future by narrating the past otherwise via fiction.
Journal Article
The Fiction of the Seven Letters in the Apocalypse: Representing Heavenly Authority in the Shadow of Paul
While scholars have traditionally taken Revelation’s “letters to the seven churches” (Rev 2–3) as documentation for the experiences of the Christ-movement in those cities, this article argues that the letters amount to a fictional device—that the Apocalypse appropriates epistolary forms in response to the increasing authority of early Pauline collections among the late first-century Asia Minor Christ-movements. With its divine epistolary authority and heavenly sevenfold “collection,” the Apocalypse attempts to exceed and denigrate Pauline authority in the Christ-movement, and it elevates a Jewish Christ-devotion based in priestly apocalyptic traditions. In the end, we can see John of Patmos both as a competitor to the Pauline tradition and as a witness to the earliest circulation of Pauline collections.
Journal Article
Science v. Fiction: Gen Z’s Skepticism of Disinformation Used to Justify Anti-Trans Legislation in the USA
Introduction
US state legislatures introduced more than 500 anti-LGBTQ + bills in 2023, many of which specifically target trans youth. Anti-trans legislation is often supported by disinformation on topics such as gender-affirming healthcare. This study examined the extent to which Gen Z young adults believe such disinformation and the factors that predict belief.
Methods
Surveys were used in late 2022 and early 2023 to measure disinformation belief in a convenience sample of
n
= 103 undergraduate psychology students of different gender identities, SES, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and political views. Predictors included measures of conventionalism, such as social conservatism and religiosity, as well as transphobic attitudes, news consumption, and trust in government.
Results
Large majorities of participants doubted several pieces of disinformation, such as the pernicious “grooming” assertion; expressed uncertainty about some, such as the gender/sex distinction; and were split on others, such as the alleged athletic advantage of trans girls. Male, socially conservative, and religious individuals tended to exhibit stronger disinformation belief, as did those who expressed more trust in government. Regression analysis showed transphobic attitudes to strongly predict anti-trans disinformation belief, above and beyond demographic factors.
Conclusions
The results are consistent with prejudice-driven reasoning, stressing the need for prejudice reduction along with misinformation mitigation strategies like fact checking.
Policy Implications
The USA should reform media policy to counter the threat of disinformation and more widely adopt trans refuge policies that protect access to care and freedom from prosecution, and education policies that normalize gender diversity beginning in childhood.
Journal Article