EXTRA: Re-Enchanting Podcast with Justin Brierley and Belle Tindall
How to Re-Enchant Evangelicalism
Justin Brierley is known worldwide for hosting fascinating and thoughtful conversations with thinkers, believers, and atheists from his home in the U.K. He is author, most recently, of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers are Considering Christianity Again.
Today, I’m honored to have this conversation I had on the evangelical imagination with Justin and co-host Belle Tindall go live.
Listen or watch here:
Listen: https://pod.link/1682867001
Watch:
Read: https://seenandunseen.com/karen-swallow-prior-re-enchanting-evangelicalism
I have an idea for a Txitter thread that can follow from this conversation. The interviewers ask you what might be neglected sources of other images that can positively reshape and reform the social imaginary. You answered the parables, and I would definitely be willing to explore that further. However, the question comes just after discussion of Victorian literary images, and I think your online community can answer with works of literature that Christians have much neglected. I think this is kind of what Jessica Hooten Wilson's The Scandal of Holiness is about.
On YouTube where this is video is posted, I have recommended to one of your responders that he read Crime and Punishment. I wasn't necessarily too kind to him, I confess, but if he is serious about learning, he has an opportunity to do so. (I am the "drunkenpolitician," a name which I hadn't realized is still active that I used on a defunct Bob Dylan discussion board.)
My Christian imagination, such as it is, has been deeply influenced by two writers I think most evangelicals don't know at all. One is Shakespeare's contemporary dramatist Thomas Middleton; my deep study of his plays for my dissertation completely reshaped my thinking about many current issues of theology, human sexuality and sexual activity, gender (not the same thing), grace, crime, and political engagement. If anyone wants to take me up on reading Middleton, I'll recommend his plays A Trick to Catch the Old One, Michaelmas Term, A Mad World My Masters, and The Changeling. If a person is able to find it, my book Penitent Brothellers (2000, U of Delaware Press) might help, but get it from interlibrary loan. Twenty-four years later, I would revise the way I make some points, but it can lead to seeing how Middleton can contribute to our current thinking.
More contemporary, I'd say for myself Ernest Gaines's 1993 novel A Lesson before Dying. I've taught this novel many times at the Christian university I've retired from, and it really puts to us the question of what a person's life is worth. For anyone interested, Jessica Hooten Wilson recorded a video with me about the novel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtWdXz_J34.
One recommendation especially for you, Karen. It's sort of niche and scholarly and readable: Jeffrey Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe. He argues that Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists imagined their dramatic production as engaging, almost as a ministry, in their religious culture. He doesn't say much about Middleton, alas, but there's a lot good in that book.
I went on too long here. Sorry about that.