Religious art's religious (?) evocations

When is art religious? When is art religious art?

According to some recent reviews, the religiousness of art resides in its ability to put an audience in a particular emotional state, a state similar to that of a church service. Art is deemed religious, by these critics, because it has the power to move people in ways similar to how people are moved in a church.

One example of this: Morgan Meis, writing on the recent art installation "Aten Reign" at the Guggenheim in New York City, finds a link between art and church in the way the art turns observers into practitioners. Meis writes:

The direct connection between [James] Turrell’s art and the practices of Quaker worship are obvious.

So obvious, that I’d like to suggest that the best way to approach and interpret Turrell’s installation at the Guggenheim is to say it is a Quaker meeting. Observe, if you will, what happens when people enter the ground floor of the museum. They stop and look up. They see that the spirals of the Guggenheim have been transformed into a glowing light installation. They roam around for a minute or so looking up. Then they find a space to lie down on the floor. Generally, they stop talking. They watch the glowing lights and the luminescent egg. This silent watching goes on for many minutes. More than ten minutes. More than fifteen minutes for many people, and more than that for others.

In other words, James Turrell has managed to get people in New York City to lie on the floor silently meditating.

For his part, Turrell has been more hesitant on the "obvious" connection between his faith and his art. I share that hesitancy. It seems to me to be too easy to make too much of the connection.

In a 2003 interview Turrell said, "I’m not sure whether that has impacted my art-making, because my work is not about specific issues -- perhaps being a Quaker influences how I live my life and what I value. People tend to relate any work in light to the spiritual. I don’t think this is actually correct."

Meis persists, though. It's not the issues that make this art religious, it's the effect:

It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether the people who view 'Aten Reign' believe in Turrell's Quaker God. It is not even clear exactly what are Turrell's beliefs regarding this God. The point is to sit or lie down and submit to the light. If you allow yourself to stare at that light for a few minutes you will inevitably have some experience of meditation. You will enter a quieter, more contemplative space. The light will do its work.

Emotional efficacy is also cited as key to the religiousness of Robert Randolph's "sacred steel" music. This is another example. Randolph is quoted as saying in the Pittsuburgh Tribune-Review last week, that his music has an energy "that's kind of from my background, growing up in church, where music was like this big rock 'n' roll show. We were all singing and dancing. Everybody singing together and interacting and having the music bring about this joyous feeling."

The New York Times went to Randolph's church, a black Pentecostal church, in 2001. The reporter, Neil Strauss, also made note of the evocation of joy:

The loud, unmistakable sound of vintage rock 'n' roll blared one recent Sunday afternoon from the open windows of an unlikely location, the House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth Without Controversy Inc., in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.  

Inside, parishioners banged tambourines against their palms and hit drumsticks against church pews in perfect rhythm. Even the children joined in on toy tambourines and plastic drumsticks. In front of the long, narrow, wooden-floor room, just to the right of the pulpit, Robert Randolph sat alongside a large purple pedal steel guitar, fingers flying across the strings to tease out lead lines that sounded like John Lee Hooker and rickety rhythms reminiscent of Bo Diddley, two musicians whom he claims never to have heard.

According to Strauss, Randolph's music also had the effect outside of church of bringing people into a church-like experience, even if there were differences. The "churchgoers made noise to praise the Lord, the clubgoers to express their individuality and enthusiasm."

Are those experiences so radically different?

In a review of the latest album from Randolph and The Family, PopMatters critic Neil Kelly says this steel guitar music only makes sense as "the fury of true black gospel music," and that it's success is its ability to induce religious states in the not-church-going crowd.

"I've seen them live," Kelly writes.

The gospel-infused funky rock roots band that commandingly whips a crowd of drug-laced earth muffins and hopheads into some sort of a revivalist frenzy ... that’s the Family Band I’ve seen. If you haven’t witnessed the fury of true black gospel music (from ANY denomination) in the church house on any given Sunday morning in the South, then think of the effect James Brown had on Joliet Jake in The Blues Brothers .... This ability to move the crowd to that level of excitement is why Randolph’s name is frequently in huge font on the posters of the festivals he and the Family Band play. This is the bread and butter of what makes him a superstar.

The "frenzy" of the crowd, for Kelly, is religious, or religious-like, and that response makes the music religious, not in and of itself, but in its effect. In its evocation.

The emotional state of Randolph's audience is pretty markedly different than that of Turrell's. One wouldn't mistake the one audience for the other. Contemplation and meditation wouldn't easily exist in the same space as concert enthusiasm and a whipped-up crowd. But both of these responses are seen as "religious," for producing responses similar to those of their creators' respective religious traditions.

That biographical info might be key to these interpretations, though.

Unless all art, any art, is going to be judged religious for evoking emotions and moving audiences, it's hard to see how these emotions thus moved are specifically religious.

Interpreting Turrell via reference to Quaker practice makes sense because he's Quaker. But there are many art exhibits by many non-Quaker artists that cause similar reactions in the museum-going public. Randolph's music is certainly Pentecostal, and it's useful to think about it and talk about it in that context -- but that's a historical fact one couldn't deduce just from watching the audience. Many other concert crowds could be described in the same way as the crowds dancing and singing with Randolph, and if all of them are thought of as religious, then that's not really a meaningful description anymore.

People tend to relate certain works that evoke emotions to religion, but that doesn't seem right. They use the creator's biographical information to make claims that, while they're not wrong, seem to be too strong.

Visual art produces a response that's analogous to the response one gets at a Quaker meeting. Music in a secular space produces a response that's pretty similar to the response that the same music gets in a dedicated religious space. It's possible to make too much out of these similarities.

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The triumph of Darwin's Doubt

One might think that getting a negative review of a recently released science book in a high-profile magazine would be a bad thing for that book. In the case of Darwin's Doubt, though, it's not. Getting trashed in the New Yorker is actually something of a triumph.

Gareth Cook writes in the New Yorker that this book, the latest big splash for Intelligent Design, has an "inspired-by-true events feel," and is a "masterwork of pseudoscience." For author Stephen C. Meyer, for the Discovery Institute where he works, and for advocates of Intelligent Design and criticisms of evolution more generally, this is a good thing.

The negative review is a positive sign.

As David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, wrote:

What's important is the way the logjam against intelligent discussion of intelligent design in the mainstream media is finally unjamming .... Real scientists and thoughtful, open-minded laymen are paying attention right now to a genuine and fascinating disputation about biological origins. The endorsements from scientists in relevant fields that Darwin's Doubt has already received is itself confirmation of that. I've said already that I don't know how the debate will be resolved, if it ever will. But make no mistake: the debate is happening.

Debate has long been the immediate goal of the Intelligent Design movement. The goal has been to legitimate the possibility of the Intelligent Design position by generating controversy. Meyer's book, which looks at the "Cambrian explosion," a relatively rapid diversification of organisms in the fossil record, where new and more complex forms of life appeared, will be seen as achieving that goal precisely to the extent that there's public pushback, take-downs and criticism.

Controversy -- such as claims the book is "holed beneath the waterline on the key issues of Cambrian paleontology, phylogenetics, and the information argument" -- are opportunities for Intelligent Design advocates. They're opportunities for rebuttal, but more, they serve as evidence that there's a controversy. And if there's a controversy, then there are sides to that controversy, and the rules of fairness dictate that both sides should be taken seriously. The case can be made for "teaching the controversy," which doesn't resolve it or end it in the way Intelligent Design proponents might want, but does give them a public hearing.

Meyer has long been a proponent of teach-the-controversy. This book isn't a break from that modus operandi. 

Since the late '90s, organizations such as Meyer's Discovery Institute have explicitly pushed the policy of "teach the controversy," a phrase Meyer apparently coined. Intelligent Design advocates have not mainly sought to debunk evolution and neo-Darwinian understandings of life, but to start a debate, and make the case there is a debate.

The strategy has been clearly outlined in Discovery Institute policy documents, including the "Wedge Document," a fund raising proposal that was leaked in 1999. In the "Wedge Document," the outlined ultimate goal is "To defeat scientific materialism and it's destructive moral, cultural and political legacies." The first objective, in accomplishing this, is to start a "major public debate between design theorists and Darwinists."

Meyer has been one of the very public advocates pushing for that objective, though he generally argues that he doesn't want to start a debate, put get some acknowledgement that a debate is happening.

In 2002, he wrote, "When two groups of experts disagree about a controversial subject that intersects the public school curriculum students should learn about both perspectives"

In 2003, he wrote, "Teaching both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory will engage student interest and teach them to weigh evidence -- a key skill in scientific reasoning. "

In 2005, he co-authored an opinion piece repeating the argument. It said,

We encourage teachers to present the case for Darwin's theory of evolution as Darwin himself did: as a credible, but contestable, argument. Rather than teaching evolution as an incontrovertible 'truth,' teachers should present the arguments for modern neo-Darwinism and encourage students to evaluate these arguments critically. In short, students should learn the scientific arguments for, and against, contemporary evolutionary theory.

The negative review of Meyer's book on Intelligent Design should be understood in this context. Victory, for Meyer and his compatriots, does not necessarily look like convincing people, though of course they're interested in that too. The main goal, the primary goal, is for there to be a debate.

Mostly, the advocates of Intelligent Design have pushed for this debate to happen in public schools. As the New York Times reported in 2005, they "mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive." That same strategy works in the public square -- and is possibly even more successful there, given the commercial possibilities of controversy.

This book is being promoted prominently at 300 Barnes & Nobel stores, where there are special displays of Darwin's Doubt. That's not inconsequential in getting on the bestseller lists and stirring up controversy. The book also, like Meyer's last one, was published by a mainstream commercial publisher, HarperCollins, through the imprint HarperOne. Jerry Coyne, an active opponent of Intelligent Design, has critiqued the publisher for its participation in this, asking "have they no shame"?, but the publisher, along with the booksellers, are obviously mostly interested in the question of profits. They stand to quite literally gain from the very same public debate that Meyer and those who agree with him wants to generate.

Negative and even hostile reviews will likely help that cause.

According to Klinghoffer, the generated controversy, and the fact that a mainstream publisher is happy to contribute to this specific controversy, may be the true triumph of Darwin's Doubt. He writes:

The publication of Meyer's book marks the moment when the theory of intelligent design -- love it or hate it -- has solidly joined the mainstream discussion about biological origins. We of course can't say how the debate will ultimately be resolved. No one can. But we take great satisfaction in knowing that it is definitively engaged. The hunt for a replacement theory for Darwin's noble but crippled idea is now unmistakably on -- not only in the professional, peer-reviewed scientific literature, as Stephen Meyer documents, but in the public square as well. 

Even if one agrees with the New Yorker that Meyer's work and Intelligent Design generally are matters of pseudoscience, it's hard to dispute that the debate over evolution has entered the mainstream of American culture. The Discovery Institute and others have been quite successful, perhaps not at changing minds, but at starting a debate than can then be pointed to as justification and legitimation for "hearing both sides."

As Rick Santorum, then a US senator, said in 2005, "My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had." The debate, as it's happening, validates the debate happening.

With Darwin's Doubt, this long established strategy can be seen at work.

On Sunday, Darwin's Doubt made the New York Times bestseller list, coming in at number 7. It has also made Publisher Weekly's bestseller list, where it is ranked 10th in sales for the week, with more than 6,000 copies of the more than 400-page tome sold.

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What 'Mormon' means to the media when you're murdered

Travis Alexander was a Mormon.

He converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in high school. He did his two-year mission in Denver. He abstained from alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, in keeping with the common understanding of the church's health codes, and cared about eating nutritional meals, which isn't always true for financially successful 30-year-olds. He wanted to live in a community with a strong Mormon presence. That was part of why he moved to Mesa, Az. He wrote a spiritual self-help book, titled Raising You, and was trying to get it published when he died.

When he died, the Arizona Republic said Alexander was a "a devout Mormon." It was the first sentence of their first story about how he was murdered in his shower: "Travis Alexander was a young, successful businessman, a well-known motivational speaker and a devout Mormon."

It's never really clear what news reports mean by "devout." It's often a kind of content-free intensifier, like "really" or "literally." The stylebook for religion reporters discourages use of the word, since "It's a subjective term without a precise meaning to all readers." Sometimes it seems to mean the person adheres more to a religion's teachings than others do (with the journalist sweeping right by the always-present internal struggles over the right understanding of a religion's teaching). Sometimes it seems to mean measurable practices, like prayer or proselytizing, are practiced by this person -- practiced, sometimes, vaguely more, or a lot, or even at all. Sometimes it doesn't even mean anything observable, but is a gesture at how the person presented themselves as if religion and religiousness were important. Or maybe the word works to justify religion's inclusion in a story, since after all the vast majority of people in America identify with

In any case, it's all very hand-wavy.

When Travis Alexander was murdered, though, the Arizona Republic made mention of his Mormonism and did the hand waving, and dubbed him "devout."

That was five years ago, though. In more recent stories, covering the high-profile trial of Alexander's girlfriend, who is charged with murdering him, the man's Mormonism has been described a bit differently. On Jan. 2, for example, as the trial began, the paper summed up the court case this way:

An outwardly religious young man is shot down and slashed apart by the angry young woman who was his secret sex partner. Prosecutors call it first-degree murder; [...] defense attorneys call it self-defense. The network TV news magazines call it the trial of the year.

On Jan. 30, as the defense phase of the trial began, the Arizona Republic repeated the description of the murdered man as an "outwardly religious Mormon." The story reads:

[Jodi] Arias is on trial in the 2008 killing of Alexander, 30, an outwardly religious Mormon who was found shot and stabbed in the shower of his home. Arias, his secret sex partner, admits killing Alexander but claims it was in self-defense.

Presumably Alexander's piety -- his Mormon-ness -- has not changed in five years of being dead. How the major Arizona paper describes that piety has changed, however.

Why?

It is still true that Alexander converted in high school, did a mission, didn't smoke or drink alcohol or caffeine, wanted to live in a place where there were lots of other Mormons, wrote a spiritual self-book, etc., etc. What's different now is that with the trial, information about Alexander's relationship with Arias have come out, and there's lots of evidence that lots of that relationship did not conform with his church's teachings. There's evidence, too, that he lied about the church's teaching in order to manipulate his girlfriend, a new convert, to perform certain sex acts.

As the Associated Press reported, "Alexander's religion and sex life have been a constant theme throughout the trial."

More precisely: the contradiction between how this man apparently believed he should live and how he did live, have been a critical aspect of the accused's defense. And a critical aspect of the trial. The very first witness called in this case -- herself described as a "devout" Mormon by the Arizona Republic -- was grilled about "what constitutes sin in the Mormon religion."

She ranked sexual immorality the second worst Mormon sin, right after murder.

Whether or not Arias is guilty of the worst sin is still up to the jury to decide, but there's a lot of agreement that Alexander was definitely guilty of the second worst sin. In one report, Alexander is said to have convinced his girlfriend that sodomy was not frowned on by the church. Arias testified "She believed the Mormon vow of chastity, based on Alexander's interpretation, meant that most sexual acts were 'more or less OK' as long as they did not involve premarital vaginal intercourse -- which they eventually engaged in." In the accused's testimony, she further said Alexander gave her her own copy of the Book of Mormon the same day he asked her to perform oral sex on him in a parking lot. He had sex with her the same day he baptized her into the faith. He apparently also lied to another girlfriend about being a virgin, and pursued multiple women at the same time.

There was also a phone sex recording, nude photos, and claims of public sex, acted-out fantasies, pornography, and day-long trysts. Alexander and Arias were, of course, also unmarried.

As the Arizona paper glosses this: "although they both professed to be faithful Mormons, their relationship was anything but chaste."

This is what it means, in the paper's estimating, to be only outwardly Mormon. Inwardly -- or, perhaps, better, privately -- Alexander wasn't really Mormon, because he behaved in ways disapproved of by his church. When they didn't know about his sexual behavior, the paper deemed Alexander devout. Now that they know, his faith is seen as just for show.

It's certainly true that the Latter-day Saints actively teach against the behavior that this murdered man was engaged in. Alexander likely would have agreed, if asked by his bishop, that he was sinning. The church does not teach, though, that one somehow ceases to be Mormon when one sins. Acting badly, by ones own lights and even in the judgement of the church, doesn't delegitimize one's conversion, or undercut one's Mormon-ness. The church teaches morals, but it doesn't simply equate being a part of the church with consistently living in accordance with the morals that are taught.

Inward and private struggles to live up to the standards of one's religion do not mean that one only has that religion outwardly, at least not in Mormonism, not in how it's understood by Mormons or by the church hierarchy.

The paper, however, has confused a moral code for the whole of a religion. Adherence has been interpreted as hypocritical, or even fraudulent, unless it means perfectly doing what you say you believe you're supposed to do. This is a misunderstanding of Mormonism, and more than that a gross overreach on the part of the paper, going well beyond the bounds of what a newspaper has the authority to say.

Alexander himself could have said whether or not his was a devout Mormon, or whether he was only one outwardly. Other Mormons could judge his piety, based on their understanding of Mormonism. The church has authorities who, as part of their job, do make such judgements.

A newspaper, though, is not a religious authority, and shouldn't pretend to speak as such. According to the rules of American newspapers, reporters are only allowed to say what's verifiable, what's known to be fact or can be attributed. Really, in this case, the Arizona Republic should have avoided the evaluations of the murdered man's piety, and kept it simple:

Travis Alexander was a Mormon.

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Partial & elusive truths: The aestheic values of Ron Hansen's 'Christian fiction'

Ron Hansen is a Christian fiction writer. Except, with him, the sense of "Christian fiction writer" is that he's a Christian who writes fiction and a writer who writes fiction that's informed by and shaped by his faith, not that he belongs to the genres or markets generally referred to by the term.

He has, perhaps to make that exactly that distinction, criticized the genres of Christian fiction with criticisms that are fairly broad, fairly sweeping. Hansen has said he dislikes Christian fiction because it "is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing."

In another context, Hansen has expanded that critique, and challenged, even, the Christianness of Christian fiction. In A Stay Against Confusion, he writes: 

"So-called Christian fiction is often in fact pallid allegory, or a form of sermonizing, or is a reduction into formula, providing first-century, Pauline solutions to oversimplified problems, sometimes yielding to a Manichean dualism wherein good and evil are plainly at war, or offering as Christianity conservative politics. We cannot call a fiction Christian just because there is no irreligion in it, no skepticism, nothing to cause offense."

Whether or not that's a fair critique of Christian fiction, it does get at the sense of the aesthetic expression of Christianity that Hansen values.

Or rather, doesn't value: Pallid allegory, sermonizing, formula and over-simplification are the negative terms. On the other side, the positive terms of his specifically Catholic aesthetic measures are more ambiguous. Not that he doesn't or hasn't articulated them, but that they're still pretty vague, even articulated, and it's just not really clear what these values would mean in the context of a novel -- or how they work out in the context of his novels.

In a PBS segment, Hansen talks about how attending mass is part of his writing process and he views his fiction as sacramental, in a certain sense, in that "It's a witness to what God is doing in the world."

Speaking specifically of how one of his better known works, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is a "witness," in this way, he says, "I wanted to have this sense of, how do you, once you've done that, how do you redeem yourself?" The PBS interviewer notes that there are allusions in the work to the Biblical story of Cain and Able, implying the work is religious at least in that sense, but asks, "Does Bob Ford really find redemption?"

Hansen says, "He doesn't, no."

That's true -- he doesn't. And it's exactly this ambiguity that undercuts the clearly articulated aesthetic of fiction that's Christian that Hansen holds.

The Assassination is a good book, but, as literature, is very open-ended, short through with ambiguities, and often rather uncertain, actually, about the possibility of redemption in human history.

Hansen holds that "Fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons." In The Assassination, though, who the models are and what they show is not at all clear.

It's not clear, for example, why Ford killed James, what his motivation was.

Ford tells himself and those around him a continually shifting set of self-justifying stories. In one late scene, the aging Ford says he killed James because he had to, because James was going to kill him. Then adds that also there was the reward money, that that was the reason. Then adds that he "thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery" and he thought he'd be hailed as a hero for killing James, and that that was why he did, because he wanted to be famous. "I thought they would congratulate me," he says, "and I'd get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn't see how it would look to people." The reader, at the end of this, does not really know why Ford killed James, nor does it seem that Ford knows either.

If anything, the text endorses the idea that the human heart is mysterious, most especially to itself.

There's good Catholic doctrine backing up that idea, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions about where, exactly, Ford went wrong. It would seem he's to be the example of immorality, of what not to do, but what he does is conflicted and confused. He idolizes James, and that seems to be the error, but then he reverses course and goes after the outlaw like an iconoclast with a hammer. And that seems to be error too. In some parts of the story he is self-aggrandizing. In others, he supplicates and grovels. He uses violence. He eschews violence. He longs for glory. He accepts his lot. He accepts abuse. He resists abuse. He snivels and whines that the universe is just slated against him, and then attempts actually to take control of his life and his fate, and both courses of action, like everything Ford does in this story, take him further and further from redemption.

The character is prone to self-delusions, and the story, told in the third person, never offers the sort of omniscient account of the assassin's real reasons that a reader could latch onto. Even at the moment it seems like the reader is being offered a good explanation, a way clear of Ford's confusion, it's then framed as, most essentially, the way Ford is justifying himself. Hansen writes, for example, that Ford

"was ashamed of his persiflage, his boasting, his pretensions, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case: that he truly regretted killing Jesse, that he missed the man as much as anybody and wished his murder hadn't been necessary."

What starts out as Ford's seeming moment of self realization, and possibly a kind of confession and moment of redemption, turns out to be only Ford offering another insufficient account of things. The moment of clarity turns out to be just another set of self-justifying delusions, more of the same shifting, shuffling confusion.

The same non-conclusion.Which, in the work, is presented as the better interpretation. It's contrasted with the cheap, false stories Americans told themselves about Ford, where

"Everything was exaggerated and magnified -- if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course the consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and stinging judgement of history -- even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning."

The same confusion is at work with the other characters. James is no less conflicted. No less confused a model or more a witness to anything clear.

This is not to criticize the ambiguity of the morality and immorality modeled by Ford. It's the character's confusion and self-delusion and subverted realizations and general messed-up-ness that make this book good.

Bob Ford is, here, human.

He's human precisely in the way that those promoting and making claims for literature would want a literary character to be. He is, that is say, human in a way that demonstrates important aspects of what it means to be human, that can show or teach readers "what it's like to be human." He has real psychological depth. It's these literary qualities of the character that make him a really terrible model for morality, though.

Because it's all so ambiguous.

In The Assassination, this is depicted again and again by contrast, as the story Hansen is telling references or repeats other stories of the era about the same situation and subject. The narrative without a clear moral or model for morality contains numerous representations of narratives with unambiguous points. These other stories are always clear. They have morals. They have pointed lessons, and the sermonizing Hansen will criticize as not really Christian in the aesthetic sense he wants to use that word, but also in the sense he'll make use of when wanting to argue for the right way for fiction to be Christian, as a "witness" and "model." Those stories that take James and Ford as models for morality, though, are consistently contrasted to the story Hansen is telling, which is about humans and the confusions of human life, priveledging complexity over the neatness of allegory. 

Hansen, one could even argue, takes the authorial position in this work as the antagonist, the opponent of the historical author who heroized Jesse James, John Newman Edwards.

Edwards was an avowed and unreconstructed Confederate who wrote up James as a folk hero, a savior and avenger of Southern whites, a model for moral resistance to the regime that freed slaves, undercut the "birthright" of white privilege, and supported the corporate interests of railroads and the burgeoning of capitalism over and against the agrarian and yeoman ideals of late fuedalism. In Hansen's account, Edwards is willfully blind to the complexities of humans and history, always casting his characters in terms of models and witnesses. Edwards writes, after the assassination, that James' only real transgression was that he "refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters." Edwards, in Hansen's novel, writes that "such a cry of horror and indignation" at the way James died "is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself."

In all this, Edwards is the prime example of the aesthetic of Christian fiction Hansen opposes, with weak and easy allegories and wrought-up sermons supplanting story. He is, however, also an example of the sort of aesthetic Hansen says he supports: Edwards is very interested in exactly the kind of "show[ing] you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life" that Hansen, though he affirms this, never really gets around to in The Assassination.

His aesthetic, in practice, in this novel, whether one considers it "Christian" or not, is different from the positive values he articulates to PBS and in essays on how fiction can be sacramental. If his work works as a witness, it's not a very clear one. If characters are supposed models from which to take lessons, Hansen failed.

It's possible, though, to put aside what he says he thinks he likes, and detect a different set of aesthetic values in The Assassination. Hansen values complexity and ambiguity. He prefers his themes oblique. He wants to render the humanness of characters, their confusions and self-contraditions, their intermingled wheat and tares. He represents them as, most essentially, born concupiscent and morally deformed and also bearing within themselves, at the same time, the divine. He values showing humans as creatures mystified by themselves, and the world as a place also thus mystified. History, for him, is best presented as a stage where humans act on their inveterate, incontrovertible belief in personal redemption and beatification -- redemption and beatification they do not easily find. 

Hansen will say, if you ask him, that fiction "helps us to know we believe," that it "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretations, seem all too secret, partial, and elusive."

In practice, though, in this book, his aesthetic seems rather to value the partial, the elusive, the truths that are not simple, so easy to turn into sermons. Whether that means his books, his aesthetic values and the fiction he writes, are more or less Christian than the genres that go by the name "Christian fiction" is probably a matter of personal tastes and definitions.

This is the alternative sense of "Christian fiction" one finds, though, in the worked-out aesthetic preferences of the faith Hansen has that shapes and informs his stories.

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Žižek's favorite film

Slovoj Žižek listed The Sound of Music among his top 10 favorite films for the BFI's 2012 critics list.

He said, "This is what I really enjoy – no compromises for high quality or good taste."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the critics' final top 10 list didn't include any of Žižek's picks.

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