Summer Reading

With fewer evening meetings and less work pressure in general I tend to read more fiction in the summer. I am almost finished the latest novel by Jim Crace called The Pesthouse. I was introduced to Crace's writing through his intriguing novel about Jesus' forty days in the wilderness, Quarantine.

The Pesthouse is set in an unspecified time in the future when North America has collapsed into a new Dark Ages, perhaps because of disease. This is gloomy world of marauding robber gangs and wary people forced into a perpetually nomadic life. The only safe place in the novel is a compound created by a strange religious group called the Finger Baptists. This sect believes that human hands are the Devil's playground, so the holiest members have atrophied arms and fingers, depending on others to meet their every need.

There are few utopian novels these days. Stories such as The Children of Men by P.D James and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood paint a bleak, dystopian picture of the future with religion as dark and controlling. Our growing concern for the health of the planet certainly feeds into that anxious perspective. Religious extremism is also troubling.

I would like to believe that faith in God can nurture hope, although not necessarily cheery optimism. As a Christian I want to be thoughtful and willing to do some of the hard work of searching for solutions. Rather than choosing mindless absolutism and escapism I can be part of a present and future which respects God's creative and redemptive action in the world.