So my wife is getting involved in a book club at our church and she is looking for a suggestion for fiction that women would like that deal with matters of faith. However, she’s having problems finding books because most “Christian” fiction suffers from the same problem as Christian music: the authors (and audience, for that mater) see the message (Jesus is great) as more important than the writing, so the end result is a stilted, poorly-written propaganda piece (see the Left Behind series and Pat Robertson’s attempts at Christian fiction).
Most of the women are very well educated and it’s not a fundamentalist church, so crap like the Left Behind series won’t fly. Books like The Da Vinci Code aren’t good, either. Does anyone have any suggestions for books they may like? Basically she’s looking for good fiction that takes faith seriously and yet isn’t part of the “just put Jesus in the story and it’s literature” genre.
“The Gospel According to Gameliel Crucis,” by Michael Bishop about an alien Jesus figure.
“Journals of the Plague Years” by Norman Spinrad has a very powerful religious element, showing a sympathetic portrayal of a born-again Christian.
Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy springs to mind. She wrote other books with faith as a major theme, too, but that’s the only one I’m positive has been translated to English.
Description:
“In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being “human.” When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong… Words like “provocative” and “compelling” will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer.”
I enjoyed the book and felt it’s sci-fi approach made questions about religion and faith easier to frame.
Susan Howatch has written an excellent series of books known as The Starbridge Series, all set within the Church of England. The dominant theme is that of dealing with various spiritual crises.
Well, The Last Temptation of Christ (Nikos Kazantzakis) is a very famous fictional account of Jesus’s life. It may not be proper for a church group, though.
Maybe The Robe (Lloyd C. Douglas) would be better. It’s about a Roman soldier who wins Jesus’s robe gambling. The rest of the story is about his journey to find out more about Christianity, Jesus, etc. I haven’t read it myself, but I hear good things.
Sawyer’s novel is an excellent exploration into the nature of God, the value of Faith versus Proof, and the place of religion in the universe. All wrapped up in a crackin’ good read.
In a nutshell: An alien lands at the Royal Ontario Museum, and demands to speak to an archaeologist. Their joint work reveals that various epoch-type events, like mass extinctions, have occured at precisely the same time on various worlds throughout the galaxy. This seems to indicate a powerful guiding hand…
Great book. My athiest friends and anglican mother both equally enjoyed it.
thwartme
(heh heh… just spell-checked my post and realised I had referred to ‘athiest fiends’ instead of ‘athiest friends’. Not a Freudian slip, honest!)
The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory. Both have strong religious (specifically Catholic, although there’s a lot that applies to any Christian denomination) themes, and both are among the greatest modern novels in English. Or the greatest novels ever written, period. Greene is often thought of as the greatest “Catholic” novelist there’s ever been.
Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven, Black Robe and Catholics all contain religious (again, mostly Catholic) themes.
There’s a lot of Reformation stuff in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (and its sequel, which just came out, although the title escapes me).
Anthony Burgess wrote a fictional version of the Acts of the Apostles, although I can’t remember the title right now.
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is basically a pretty ordinary mystery novel, but it’s set in a monastery in the Middel Ages and there’s a good deal of religious stuff in there.
Malachi Martin’s Windswept House is full of all kinds of Vatican conspiracy stuff, you know, Masons, the anti-Christ, cardinals in league with Satan, that kind of thing. Martin’s religious views probably make Mel Gibson’s Catholicism look like Unitarianism, but if that’s your cup of tea, you might enjoy his books.
Over and out – that’s all I can think of right now.
How about A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr.? Possibly the best post-apocalyptic novel ever written – I mean that in the nuclear war sense rather than the scriptural sense, but it is set in a monastery and it certainly addresses issues of faith…
Perhaps not the first things that would come to mind, but apropos nonetheless, in my opinion:
While there’s hardly any explicit treatment of religion in it, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon is ultimately entirely about the nature of certainty and the inevitability of excluding certain areas of truth from the things we can be certain about – i.e., things that have to be taken on faith. The extensive use of the contrast between digital and analog communication and signalling systems serves as just one example of this: digital representations of reality rely on the ability to designate things as entirely one thing or another: a zero, or a one, while analog representations allow for reproduction of the infinite gradations in between, at the cost of introducing a much higher likelihood of error. The degree to which things may actually be neither one thing nor another, or both at the same time, is an important theme throughout, mirroring the question of whether humanity is material, divine, neither, or both. The nature of miracles as the interposition of another world into ours is another analogue to this, and the book treats of this as well. The protagonist is forced to confront time and again the impossibility of knowing anything important with absolute certainty, and must choose what to believe in, what to take on faith, with only the most imperfect and incomplete evidence. It’s also short (around 275 pp) and a realtively easy read (particularly by the standard of Pynchon’s other novels.
One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita does explicitly deal with religion and matters of faith, redemption, etc.: the premise of the book is that Satan himself turns up in Moscow in the 1920s, wreaking havoc with the lives of many but also serving as an instrument of redemption for certain characters. Interspersed with the chapters set in the Moscow of the 1920s are chapters from an unpublished novel by the otherwise unnamed “Master” of the title about the trial and crucifixion of Christ. It’s also a lot of fun to read and quite funny in many places. I should point out that there would no doubt be much for people to take offense at if they’re inclined to do so, but that’s true of nearly any worthwhile work.
I entered this thread to recommend the exact same book. It’s far from the happiest book you’ll ever read, but it is well written and is an interesting exploration of the risks of gambling with your faith by looking for signs and a purpose that God never promised.
If they are willing to try a sci-fi book there is A Case of Conscience, by James Blish. It’s about a priest dealing with an alien race that apparently is inherently innocent, without being religious. Are they for real, or are they an illusion?
C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. There is a third novel in the trilogy as well (That Hideous Strength) but it is not as strong as the first two.
The first thing I thought of—and I’m suprised it hasn’t been mentioned yet—is A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving.
Others I’ve liked that might work:
[ul]
[li]Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler[/li][li]Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos[/li][li]the short stories of Flannery O’Connor[/li][li]the fiction of G. K. Chesterton, especially The Man Who Was Thursday (though it may be too far-out for some)[/li][li]Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton, and its sequel, Killer Diller[/li][li]Christy by Catherine Marshall[/li][li]and if you really get ambitious, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky*[/li][/ul]
I’m sure there are tons more. (Caveat: I’m not a woman, but I think the books listed above would appeal to women as well as, or in some cases more than, to men.)
I was going to recommend Calculating God and The Sparrow, the latter much more strongly than the former. The Sparrow is one of the most uniquely thought-provoking books on religious faith I’ve ever read. I’m not as impressed with the sequel, though: Children of God. It’s still worth reading, but it’s nowhere near as good as the first one.
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