Ron Hansen on Faith and Fiction

The PBS program “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” recently featured a segment on novelist and Catholic deacon Ron Hansen:

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Hansen says writing is “a witness to what God is doing in the world. We’re supposed to worship and praise, and I can’t think of a better way of worshiping and praising than to write poetry or fiction.”

He’s generally not an admirer of “Christian fiction,” which “is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing,” but he still believes that literature can serve a moral purpose: “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.”

For the full segment, including Hansen’s reflections on several of his novels, watch the video above or read the transcript here .

h/t The Deacon’s Bench