Fiction and Religious Education: Be Not Afraid

Abstract

This article is the conversion story of a university professor and voracious reader who has always been afraid to incorporate fiction into her classes. It maps her journey from believing that novels and short stories are effective pedagogical tools only when they are in the hands of competent English professors to recognizing the innumerable benefits of including fiction in the enterprise of Religious Education. The author begins with an examination of the catalyst and foundation of her journey and then proceeds to look at some of the relevant scholarship that has helped her to recognize the inextricable connection between the sacramental quality of fiction and the experience of conversion. Finally, the author imagines some ways to include works of fiction into her courses and shows how fiction requires and cultivates ways of reading and thinking that make conversion possible.

Cate Seijk is an associate professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

¹ I understand the term sacramental as the abiding presence and action of God in our everyday experiences.

² Anticipations of narrative theology appear in H. Richard Niebuhr's book, The Meaning of Revelation, written in 1941, in which he argues that revelation took narrative form not only in the gospels but also in the religious communities who appropriated them.

³ My understanding of conversion is based on Bernard Lonergan's (1972) understanding of what constitutes religious, intellectual, and moral conversions. For Lonergan, religious conversion enables a person to love unconditionally; moral conversion does not restrict persons' actions to what benefits them; intellectual conversion allows a person to investigate reality with a readiness for the discovery of anything. Lonergan believes that human wholeness and integration are contingent on one's experience of conversion (see Lonergan 1972 237–245).