If you’re here because you heard Jason Rennie’s interview with me in “Sci Phi Show Outcast #59,”1 (thank you, Jason) or my “7th Son Episode 17: The Story So Far” reading (thanks, Hutch!), you might still be wondering what’s going on here. Here it is, in a nutshell:
• Everything we do, say, or even think reflects our theology. I was taught this by a wise professor, and I firmly believe it. Why is it true? Because we’re whole creatures, not collections of separated components. We don’t compartmentalize our thinking, not completely (even though it seems we males compartmentalize our attention with embarrassing regularity). And our world-view — what we have decided about the universe around us — shapes everything else we think, even the way we see things. Call it our paradigm; call it our knowledge/opinion matrix; call it our philosophy; call it our theology … the words differ, but for this purpose they’re interchangeable. It’s how we answer the Big Questions in life.
• This includes the stories we tell. Yes, they’re “made up.” Nonetheless, good stories have guiding points, and ours come from our theology. Including those written by atheists: my book Harlan Ellison: Secular Theologian (any publishers out there interested?) discusses the American “modern gods” to which Ellison gave substance in his collection Deathbird Stories, plus a few others, and the real theological soil from which these metaphorical “gods” emerge.
With that in mind, you may wish to check out these articles, and please feel free to leave comments:
- Why Story is important to life; why SFF is important to theology
- The Soul of the 7th Son: Aleph; Beth; Gimel
- 7th Son Sidebar: The Soul of the Palimpsest
- Naturalistic Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: Paradigm Smackdown!
- Serenity and faith
- One universe. One GL Corps. One ethics? One could wish.
- On meaning
Thank you, and please enjoy your visit.
- Two errata in that interview, if I may:
(a) Evidently I had a Star Wars flashback moment when I identified Mal Reynolds of Firefly with the “Rebel Alliance” (still can’t believe I did that). We’re Browncoats and durned proud of it.
(b) The story by Elisabeth Waters and me had “An Army Marches” as its working title, but it’s now published as “Crosswort Puzzle.” It’s in Sword and Sorceress XXII, not XX. [↩]
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