(urth) Religious writers and audiences

[David Stockhoff]

Well, as I suggested, it was a childish response. I think I regarded 
Middle-earth and Narnia etc. as my own personal escape from a mindless 
existence in which being dragged (sometimes literally) to church every 
Sunday played no small role. So finding that Narnia was no escape at all 
but rather, at worst, a trap set by the very people I resisted, 
represented exactly the betrayal you might imagine it to be in such 
circumstances. (Plenty of literary references I could draw on there...) 
On the other hand, I was able to find in Tolkien a fellow resister of 
sorts. Thank god for the Church of England and its ingrained 
agnosticism! ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Sat, 5 Jun 
2010 20:01:27 -0400 From: John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com> To: 
The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> Subject: Re: (urth) 
Religious writers and audiences Message-ID: 
<AANLkTimnooSNDRsyOfnWONyo2U9XNELCmvkUfXuFpZe5 at mail.gmail.com> 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Do people feel similarly 
betrayed by Doestoevsky? Again, I find it bizarre. I can't imagine 
thinking to myself "How dare Author X have different views than me!" I 
can imagine thinking "Well, I don't choose to spend time on this," but 
not a sense of betrayal per se. On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:58 PM, David 
Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> > The comparison is a personally interesting one. Perhaps the difference is
> > largely one of timing. I too felt somewhat betrayed by Lewis; I encountered
> > Narnia not long after Middle-Earth, around second and third grade.
> > Wolfe I discovered much later, and while I'm still waiting for the Great
> > Atheist Novel, I don't feel betrayed at all. And Rand was clearly insane
> > from the beginning.
> >
> > ------------------------------