Cassandra Nelson explores how Catholic literature, championed by Sister Mariella Gable (1898–1970s), defied church opposition to blend faith and creativity—even after her exile for including The Catcher in the Rye on a reading list. Drawing from Flannery O’Connor’s morally complex characters and Toni Morrison’s conversion under the name Chloe Wofford, she argues fiction must confront evil without losing redemptive purpose, praising Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street for its balance while critiquing Enora for sensationalism. Nelson’s Theology of Fiction aims to restore depth to modern storytelling, urging artists to meet audiences where they are while preserving truth and Christian optimism amid cultural decline. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Cassandra Nelson, the author of Theology of Fiction, which is a subject dear to my heart twice, once for theology and the other for fiction, and maybe a third time for the theology of fiction.
You know, we have been going through one of the worst cultural periods of my lifetime.
I've found almost everything for the last five or six years has been bad.
Movies, TV, music, almost everything.
That doesn't mean there haven't been good works done in that time, but when you compare it to times when art flowed and just seemed to be abundant, I think it's been a very, very dry period.
And I feel that period is coming to an end.
And one of the reasons I think we had such a dry period is because our art got taken over by philosophy, by wokeness, by propaganda, by small-mindedness.
And I think that as we want to move toward a grander, freer, more flowing art and more flowing psychology, the question comes up whether we can serve our creator by creating or whether theology actually weighs creation down as political philosophy does.
So I wanted to talk to Cassandra Cassandra as a visiting fellow in literature at the Luhmann Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and an associate fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
I really enjoyed the theology of fiction.
This is probably an arc.
Let's talk about it just from the beginning.
This is actually based on the work of a remarkable nun named Sister Mariella.
Tell us a little bit about her and who she was and why she inspired you.
First, thanks, Drew, for having me on the show.
I'm really excited to be here.
So Sister Mariella is, she was a very determined Benedictine nun.
She is from Wisconsin, as am I. I've jokingly told audiences here, you know, when we think about where did the mid-20th century American Catholic fiction renaissance begin, the answer is technically Wisconsin, and we need to take more credit for that.
So Sister Mariella was born in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.
I think it was 1898.
And then she moved to Minnesota, joined the, you know, Order of St. Benedict, the sisters in St. Joseph, Minnesota, and she began teaching at the College of St. Benedict.
And she did that for about 40 years.
And I came across her work when I was looking for a project to do a master's thesis in editorial studies.
And my prospective advisor at the time, Christopher Ricks, he knew I went to church.
He knew I was a churchgoer.
And he rummaged in his drawer and he pulled, you know, he sort of thought, you should look into the fiction of J.F. Powers.
Well, no one needed a new edition of J.F. Powers' work at that time because New York Review Books Classics had just published it.
But there was one paragraph in a biography of Powers that said his wife was a writer.
And so I started digging around in the New Yorker archives, which in 2005, 2006, you had to go to the library and use microfilm to do.
And I thought her stories were wonderful.
And it turns out that his wife, Betty Wall, actually, the person who played matchmaker between these two fiction writers when they were younger was Sister Mariella Gable.
And so that's how I came across her was just following a scholarly thread close to 20 years ago.
And then more recently, when there have been ongoing debates about wither Catholic fiction, where has it gone?
How can we bring it back?
It occurred to me, this is kind of an awkward word, but whence Catholic fiction, not just where is it going, but where did it come from?
And the answer turned out to be Sister Mariella was like a one-man band running around drumming up as much support as she could for the cause.
And taking a lot of flack for it from the church, really, which kind of directs me to the things that I'm thinking about or whether the church can be a sort of block toward creativity.
She didn't think so, but apparently they did.
Apparently the church actually did.
I think there is a tension.
there.
She had a four-year exile from the College of St. Benedict when The Catcher in the Rye appeared on a summer reading list as a recommended book.
So she didn't even teach it, but it was in there.
And someone flipped through and they found a four-letter word or they found a keyword that they didn't like.
And they said, she's someone has to pay heads after all.
So that obviously is not a good marker.
But I do think she really balanced her duties to the church as an institution with her duties to truth.
And she paid a heavy price, which, you know, a prophet is without honor in his or her hometown.
Everywhere else, people say they're wonderful.
And she really experienced that.
But in terms of whether religion in general or the church in general is antithetical to creativity, when you were speaking, what came to mind was a line from G.K. Chesterton where he describes the faith as kind of a walled garden.
And so I think if you're a bishop, like you have to hold the line, like you're the decision maker or you're the pope or a priest.
But within that walled garden that the church kind of builds this little fortress, people can actually play and have fun and have festivals and rejoice.
And I think right now you were talking about the emptiness of culture.
The people outside the garden are not having fun.
So I'm grateful for the rules.
W.H. Augen said, no fun tennis without a net.
So I think I can have more, you know, more fun as long as I observe certain rules.
And I think Sister Mariella really showed that the tough part is changing minds.
The tough part is convincing people who think they have no interest in faith that they might want to take an interest in faith.
And the tough part is convincing clergy who might have a knee-jerk reaction and think she was being anti-clerical or threatening authority that there could be something true, good, and beautiful in even stories that have some dirt, some grime, some ugliness in them.
Yeah, I mean, when you think of like great, specifically Catholic writers, I mean, immediately someone like Flannery O'Connor comes to mind, who's writing about the scum of the earth a lot of times and writing about people who do terrible things.
And you can easily read her stories and not think there's anything redemptive about them whatsoever.
What makes that Catholic fiction?
Geez, I don't know.
If you buy my book and read it, you'll find out that everything good is Catholic fiction.
And also nothing's technically Catholic fiction.
And there's a third thing that where you can sort of define it.
But I think where O'Connor, because I've had a real roller coaster of a relationship with about my views on O'Connor, and I think where she runs into trouble sometimes is that she almost never gives us a picture of kind of normative, healthy reality and behavior.
And if you read the novel Wise Blood, the only place that you'll find the goodness of creation really, really a moment of beauty.
Again, it's like one paragraph is in a description of the sky.
And I can't quote it, but the stars are sort of moving.
And there's this whole eschatology of salvation unfolding in the sky.
But if you look down in the city of Talkingham and you walk around and you look at those people, you're like, these people are horrible.
They're terrible.
I don't want to be anything like them.
I don't recognize myself in them.
And I think she really believed that, you know, she's got that line, to the heart of hearing you shout, for the blind you draw large and startling figures.
And I think that approach works sometimes.
And I think other times we need more of what a recent edition of her letters showed she aimed for at the end of her life.
We need more of that, oh gosh, was it Elijah?
Like the fire goes by and the thunderstorm goes by and it's not God and all the all the loud crashing things go by and they're not God.
And then that still small voice, that whisper is God.
And I think she did a lot to clear the brush to sort of clear the ground of all that cultural detritus, all the idols that we've built up.
But then I think the voice of God, like when he speaks to conscience or whatever, not like a voice, I think that voice is often quite subtle and quite comforting.
And you don't necessarily get subtle or comforting from O'Connor's fiction.
You do from Betty Walls.
So stay tuned.
I'm working on her stories now.
Okay.
I mean, one of the things when you describe that, you describe a city full of terrible people with the sky beautiful above it, though.
This is kind of, no, this is something that I think about.
Actually, this is why I wrote my book about this is that I have found with all people who become Christians.
I became a Christian very late in life.
But I find with all people who are serious about their faith, there comes a point when you look around at the world and realize it's really a terrible place.
I mean, you know, people are really doing terrible things all the time.
And all these people who stand up and say, we're living on stolen land, you think stolen land.
That's like, to think about it.
You know, I think about that movie, The Zone of Interest, where they're living in a house next to the death camps and they're living this kind of putatively normal life in a house attached to the death camps in which they're participating.
And I sort of think we're all kind of living in that.
And what I notice, we're all living in this zone of interest with evil.
And what I've noticed in Christian people is that they reach that realization and some of them go dark.
You know, they become very dark about life.
They become very cynical or pessimistic where we're commanded to rejoice.
So I'm wondering, how do you do that?
I mean, I have this real antipathy toward Christian movies.
Everybody's happy, you convert and everything's fine.
And most of them aren't Catholic.
They're probably mostly evangelical.
But still, where is that?
How living in this walled garden can you write about a world that mostly exists outside that walled garden?
What is the trick there?
That is such a good question.
And I like three different things came into my head.
And so the last one with the walled garden was Jeremiah, that we're sort of living in exile, but we have to still build gardens and or build houses, plant gardens, live in them, get married, raise our children.
And that the welfare of, because this is exile, right?
Like we're not home.
This is our pilgrim journey.
But we have to seek the welfare of the city that we're in, even if it's sort of hideous at times.
And I think Sister Maryla would agree with you that too simple of a good is not a true good.
Like that's never existed.
Read Genesis.
Like we had like five minutes and then we couldn't listen and like stay away from that one tree, you know?
Like we love to mess stuff up.
We think we've got it.
We think we know better.
We think we can, you know, right?
Like do better than, we know more than God.
We'll become like him.
But I think you're right that there are different reactions to evil.
I think you probably have a greater tolerance for it than I do.
And I think, you know, like I could never work on Cormac McCarthy.
Like, I just can't do it.
I don't have the temperament for that.
It scares me too much.
When I think about a response to evil that I admire, Toni Morrison is the first person that comes to mind.
And Tony, her name is actually Chloe Wofford, and Tony is her confirmation name.
She converted to the Catholic Church at age 12.
And St. Anthony of Padua was her confirmation saint.
And so Toni Morrison, she is not scandalized by anything.
I mean, she can look into the abyss and not laugh in a cold-hearted way, but laugh with that courage that ought to come from the Christian conviction that this, again, this is exile.
This is not our home.
And there's no such thing as a Christian tragedy.
Like, you know, I mean, the only tragedy is to not become a saint is a quote, but like, but like we believe in a God who's stronger than all the evil, right?
So there's no, like at the end of the day, if you give into that fear, you're placing something above God.
Like it turns into idolatry.
And I say this as someone who is not temperamentally courageous.
That's why I can't read Cormac McCarthy.
But I think there are different responses to it.
And I actually have a friend who's like a local news reporter.
And he said, have you ever thought about a theology of nonfiction?
And I was like, no, but now I, now I want to.
And so, but I think you do have to cover the dark stuff because if you don't cover it, then it's going to flourish in the dark, right?
Like we have to bring things to light.
I think as long as we're living in the city of man, we need like a functioning fourth estate.
That's as far as I've got on my theology of nonfiction.
We do need the media and storytellers and watchdogs, but I think we can't slip into despair.
I think that's the danger.
And there's so much despair.
I mean, you were talking earlier about the way that ideology is sort of strangling, strangling the study, strangling the arts.
And I think it's such a shame.
I think that ideology wants to tell you what to think and it doesn't really tolerate dissenters.
And I actually, see, this is what I'm like, I keep thinking about new stuff, that I think interpretation, the indeterminacy of literature is such a beautiful gift from God in deference to our free will.
Like he could have made it so like we had no doubt.
Like if you and I saw an angel, we would hit the deck.
Like there would be no room.
Like everybody's afraid when, you know, the metaphysical world touches into this one.
But he doesn't come in that form.
He comes in the Eucharist.
He comes in a little piece of bread.
Like he lets us decide.
And I think if you look at the parables, like Jesus is always saying things that could be taken two ways.
And it's not a test of how smart you are.
It's a test of how humble you are.
And I think fiction does kind of the same thing.
Like, are you willing to put the work in?
Are you willing to be a little bit scandalized by O'Connor, but not give up and not leave it at that?
Well, that's, I think it's, yeah, it's all about free will.
No, but that's, that's very, I think that's really insightful.
I mean, there's a physicist.
I think it was Niels Bohr who said the mark of a truly great truth is that the opposite of it is true as well.
And I'm not quoting him exactly, but that was basically what he was saying.
And it is interesting to me that, you know, Jesus speaks in stories in the same way that Socrates asks questions.
They never actually say this is the way it is, which is kind of like life.
And I think that artists are peculiarly skilled at dealing with that, at dealing with that amorphous way of looking at things.
The Complexity of Truth00:03:02
You can read Macbeth and when he makes that despairing speech thinks, oh, well, Shakespeare despairs, but you don't.
You think, no, Macbeth despairs because he's done a terrible thing.
And that's a different, that's a different point of view.
I think you're exactly right about the like two complicated truths.
Like, and this is something I first learned from my advisor, Christopher X. Want to give a shout out to some of the book is dedicated to Christopher as my advisor and my daughter Evelyn as the two people on either side of me in the game of whisper down the lane that is sort of cultural transmission, as far as I can tell.
But it was at a lecture he gave years ago where he said, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder and out of sight, out of mind.
Like both things are true.
They're just true at different times.
And but when you only focus on that one truth, I think Sister Mariella would call it heresy.
You or I could also call it potentially ideology or idolatry, where we're like, it's got to be that one all the time.
Well, no, like reality is actually quite complicated.
And there are things bigger than you and I.
And I do think that I don't understand how, because I'm not a physicist, that quantum physics ties into all of this.
That particle wave drought, like there's something we can't pin down about even physical reality that I think is fascinating.
And then you take into account like the soul or what happens when you read a book or what happens when you care for another person.
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Searching Stories Matter00:12:48
I'm talking to Cassandra Nelson, the author of Theology of Fiction.
I think it's just a really important topic at this moment when fiction, the arts, are either going to come back to life or I think the society itself is going to go down the drain.
I'm actually betting it'll be the first of those because I can sort of feel it happening already.
Is there?
I mean, the arts are sort of at the center of my life and I just love them all.
But I also, among the arts, I don't just love classics and even great stuff.
I love dumb stuff as well.
And we'll go to the movies and to be entertained.
Do you ever go to modern?
Is there modern entertainment that speaks to you in such a way that you think like, oh, yes, I am hearing this theology and you're allowed to say no?
I'm just asking.
No, I'm a very boring person.
I gave a talk recently about technology and sort of what it's, you know, that there's that expression, don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle.
I think the technology that electronic technology is selling us the sizzle of like transcending our human limits.
And we can, it's basically Genesis 3 again, like our eyes will be open and we'll become like God.
And all my references were from like 2012 and like 2011 when I was working on my dissertation.
It's like 10 years ago.
I loved reality TV.
I could have told you all about it, but now I'm kind of a Let A. What speaks to you?
Is there anything that people should do you find salt and light?
Well, the latest thing that has spoken to me has been some of the TV series that have come out that have seemed to me to actually speak in the ways that novels used to speak over long periods of time.
I have been.
put off by the fact that they were mired.
It was fine with me that they started in the world of the anti-hero and I was always the sopranos and breaking bad and all these corrupt men because the only way that men could be men in a world that was constrained by this ideology was by being outlaws.
And I thought, okay, that's a place to start.
But then where do you, how do you transition in, so to speak, into that next world where now men can be men, but they can also do what's right and find what's right.
And I find that this is what bothers me.
I mean, what bothers me is so far, Christian movies and Christian fiction have been really bad, you know, and okay, it attracts an audience.
And I think that's good because an audience attracts talent.
So maybe now people will come and the way Jane Austen kind of moved into this dumb form, the novel that, you know, was just a throwaway thing and turn, use genius to transform it.
I think that can happen in Christian stuff as well.
But there does seem something inherently closed off about a theology of fiction that I worry about.
I'm not sure I don't have a solution to it.
Take, for instance, Dante.
You write about Dante in the theology of fiction.
And I'm interested to know, do you find that as great as other people do?
I've had a hard time getting into Dante.
I can see how great a poet he is.
I was going to say like, oh no, like all my bona fides are going to go out the window.
Like I pushed my eyes across Dante in college and I haven't revisited it.
So I'm like, I don't, yeah.
So I'm like, oh, and I also, I'll just get it all out.
I haven't read Middlemarch and I haven't read the Brothers Karamatsov, but I really want to read The Brothers Karamatsov.
I need more Dostoevsky in my life.
But yeah, Dante's on my list, but he's not there.
And I don't, I think the Holy Spirit will find you.
I think go in wherever you need.
Like I just, I just did the, it used to be the scholastic book fair and now it's like literati and you got to do it on the internet for my daughter.
And she's getting like mixied mixlings, mixlings or something.
Like I don't know what it was, but I'm like, I don't care if it catches your eye and it's about, you know, fairies, like start there.
I started with Goosebumps.
I started with Fear Street and I didn't start with little women.
I didn't start with any classics, you know, but then I got into the hard stuff and I was like, oh, Dickens is good.
And then Thomas Pynchon and then Kierkegaard.
And, you know, now all I want to read is like Athanasius' life of St. Anthony the Hermit.
So like, I think just let people come where they are and they'll get where they need to go eventually.
But it almost sounds to me like you're saying the world needs a sister Mariella Gable for the film industry because people are taking more things in with their eyes on screens.
I don't like it because I can't think about it.
Like it never goes at the right speed for me.
Either people speak too slowly or they speak too fast and I'm like, whoa, I'm still assimilating that.
And so I love print, but I know that I'm a dinosaur in that regard.
I know that most people don't share that view.
And so I do think that there is a need to reach people in the media and the formats that where they are.
So what I find more disturbing is how do you get them into physical spaces?
I work at a Christian studies center.
I've heard it from other people.
It's at the flagship campus of a major state university.
And everyone is just having a hard time getting people out into events, into the, you know, it's like everyone's in their room on their device.
That's, that's what I miss is in-person community.
So but maybe we reach them through film.
I want to go back to something you said earlier because it actually speaks into what you just said.
And there's part of this in your book, A Theology of Fiction, the idea that anything good is Christian fiction and anything that's not good is also Christian fiction.
And I feel that there's a truth to that.
And yet at the same time, I also feel that I watch things.
I mean, I watched the movie Enora, which was about the prostitute who like thinks she's getting married to a Russian, you know, the actress won the Oscar and all that.
And she got up and I think actually the film won the Oscar now that I think about.
And she got up and thanked all the great sex workers, wonderful people they were.
The first 40 minutes of this film is pornographic by any stretch of the imagination.
It's very graphic, sex.
And yet the passage of the main character is her seeking after a man who will cherish and take care of her.
And that's an interesting combination.
But at the same time, I thought, do I really have to sit here and watch this 40 minutes?
Was there no way?
I mean, a pastor once, I'm a big Dostoevsky fan and you should read Brothers Garamazov, but a pastor once said to me, Dostoevsky showed you the worst in life, but never wrote a four-letter word.
And there was something about this film that I thought like it failed somehow to show me this woman's path because once you're showing me two people naked, graphically having sex, that kind of triumphs over everything else.
And so I'm wondering, so to go back to what you said, everything good is Christian fiction and everything that's not good is Christian fiction.
And if and you and anywhere you find people can lead them in the right path.
Do you in fact believe that?
Is there nothing you can watch that degrades you or?
No, no, no.
So Sister Mariella is saying that all the best fiction of the world is Catholic fiction because it must derive in some way from the source of the good, God.
And then at the same time, all fiction of the world is like not Catholic fiction.
It actually goes to the two parts of a truth because fiction has to be about particulars, particular people, particular place, particular time.
Because it's one part of the whole, not the whole, it's necessarily like heretical.
It's going to show you that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it's not going to show you that sometimes out of sight is out of mind.
And so it's not that all stories ever told are Catholic fiction.
It's that she's showing how slippery the good is and who you attribute it to and what you qualify as Catholic or not.
But I think for me, an important thing about a story, and that's where I never got into the like golden age of television, the new golden age, because I watched all those people like watch loss.
And then at the end, they were like, what happened?
And I was like, I don't want to hang in there for seven seasons and then find out like nobody knew where this was going.
Like that seems silly.
And it seems like that trend is repeated itself where like it's like captivating, captivating.
And then you're like, huh?
And so Walter Benjamin says that counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom and that any storyteller worth his salt or worth her salt should provide the reader with wisdom.
And Aristotle and the poetics would call these universals.
They're rules of probability or necessity.
If you do X, then Y necessarily or probably follows from that.
And so I think that's where I'm like, the fiction and storytelling in whatever medium have the potential to warn us about danger.
And instead of us making the mistake, we can see the characters make the mistake and maybe learn from it.
Maybe not.
Like maybe the most we'll do is be like, oh, he was dumb, just like my neighbor.
And we don't actually apply it to ourselves.
But we, maybe it starts that work of like judgment in our mind in a, in a way that if all goes well, eventually we start judging ourselves, not the other people around us.
But I think your point about gratuitousness, I wish I knew more Latin because I think grace is so important and it's so superfluous and it's overflowing.
It's all around us.
And again, with Christopher Ricks, he's not Christian, but he's got this beautiful line about good art ought to make us feel grateful.
Like there's something gratifying about it and we're thankful.
And that joy and that gratitude is the union of it seems so right for art.
But then there is a version of, oh, like I didn't need that much vice to get the picture on.
It's bad, you know, I didn't need that much temptation to understand that like, you know, there are temptations of the flesh or whatever.
I haven't seen it.
I won't.
I'm glad that's not my beat.
But other people should be on it.
But I think the fiction that I love does have some of those elements.
Right now I'm teaching a class or it's like a it's like adults on their lunch hour.
It's like pretty low maintenance, but they want to they want to be there.
And we're reading these books and it's called Picturing the Good.
And last week someone was like, why did you give us all these horrible stories?
And I said, well, I guess the good in my mind is like the hard one and still kind of off-putting good.
And I think that that's really the only good we can get as Americans in the 21st century.
Like we're going to have to get through a whole lot of cultural confusion and temptation to find that good.
But what you were saying about Enora, I think we were saying yesterday in a classroom about Saul Bellows sees the day.
Like the main character is searching for something.
He's searching for love.
Actually, speaking of men, he's searching for his father's love.
And, but he doesn't know what it looks like.
So he doesn't know when he's found it.
And he's trusting the wrong people.
And, you know, all these things follow from that.
And so I think we are in this cultural moment where people, they know that they need and hopefully deserve something better, but we don't even know what it looks like anymore.
That's really interesting.
Yeah.
So I think I like the searching stories, but I also think before I'm going to open my mouth and tell a story, I want to have some wisdom for my for my reader.
You know, it's really interesting.
As you were speaking, I was thinking of a film by Martin Scorsese called The Wolf of Wall Street, which has all the sex, graphic sex in it you could want.
But I have to say, at the end of the film, it made you never want to do anything bad ever again.
You never want to.
It was amazing.
It was amazingly different from Enora, which made you think like, let me scroll back and watch that scene over again.
And in this, you just thought it had the most beautiful actress, that Margot Robbie, you know, completely new.
And yet you were thinking, this guy's life stinks, you know, and it's an amazing talent that he has being a lapsed Catholic, I think, or maybe he's not a Laps Catholic.
I don't know.
He certainly was a Catholic at some point.
It's all about how the vision of the artist and the wisdom involved.
Cassandra Nelson, the author of A Theology of Fiction, really interesting talking.
I could have talked to you for a long time, but not here because I only have a certain amount of time.
You know how to find me now.
Thank you.
Yes, I know how to find you.
And I hope you'll let me know if you have more stuff coming down the pike.
I'd like to read it.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Tre.
Thank you for coming.
Wow, I hope everybody found that as interesting as I did.
I know that fiction and the arts are not everybody's cup of tea, but they are mine.
And I think as while we're making America great again, we should make America beautiful again.
And a theology of fiction by Cassandra Nelson gives you a lot to think about in how to do that.
Meanwhile, if you want to make America even more beautiful than that, you can come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.