Jason Myers will be leading Novel Theology with Dr. Claire Miller Colombo. The discussion of Beloved will take place on Sunday, October 27, 4-5:30 pm in Founders Hall.
“We need to be each others’ storytellers – at least we have to try. One wants to know what the beautiful strangers were like – one needs to know.” – Mary Oliver
What is the human need for storytelling? Both to tell and to be told, to imagine and to proclaim, to fill in the blank that comes after “Once upon a time.” Perhaps it is part of our imago dei, one of the ways we reflect being made in the image of God. The fabulous storyteller – and onetime Writer-in-Residence at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York city – Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “We have points of view; God has View.” Literature, then, is the prism through which these points of view shimmer. Through the light of stories we come to know strangers and, in the process, become less strange to ourselves.
In Novel Theology we will read (mostly novels but occasionally story and essay collections) books that grapple with perennial and perplexing questions: why does evil exist; who is my neighbor; what is the source of joy; how should we respond to suffering; what is the meaning of life? To the last question, our first novel theologian, Toni Morrison, posed the following suggestions in her speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
As even a casual acquaintance with scripture demonstrates, what we do with language reveals how we relate to God. The names of people and places, the wordplay that makes connections between dirt (adamah) and man (adam), the inclusion of poetry/song within narrative to signify moments of ecstasy or otherwise exceptional moments within the lives of God’s people are all literary devices that the authors of scripture deployed to record matters of faith and encounters with the divine. Great storytellers imagine worlds as complex and vibrant as the one we inhabit. They provide windows into cultures that might be different from our own, and mirrors for us to see our wonders and our wounds, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Beloved, our first novel, takes us into the immediate aftermath of American slavery. Based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who killed her daughter rather than see her endure slavery, Toni Morrison hews close to the harrowing history, while inventing characters who are captivating and, yes, beloved. In attending to the horrors of slavery and its legacy, Morrison also offers hope through the beauty of her language and the tenderness of her gaze. We hope you will join us as we become reading Jacobs, wrestling with the angels of great literature.
