Literature and Idealism: Or, How The Bible Is A “Thick” Story (Karen Swallow Prior) Ep. #213

Dru (00:00)
Are romantic ideals dangerous for us to hold on to? Join me with Karen Swallow Pryor, a literary scholar, as we talk about why she’s not so hip on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, controversial point, ⁓ and what she thinks about vocation and romantic ideals, literature, how literature works and forms us and shapes our imagination, and then how the Bible works as a piece of literature. It’s an exciting and fascinating talk. She has gems of wisdom.

thrown all over the place. Stay tuned.

Karen (00:35)
do, I mean, for me, my passion for reading literature and teaching literature is because literature teaches us about life, right? So that everything’s wide open. I just think that we learn more about life than we could on our own by reading literature. And we also learn it more deeply just because of the nature of language and

and literary art. ⁓ And so I do cover, when I teach literature, especially because I have taught primarily in a Christian context, I’m teaching my students how to think about the world, how to feel, the posture to have in the world, how to understand and empathize and enlarge our perspectives and think about the themes and stories that happen. so…

that leaves nothing out. And so for me, literary criticism is also cultural criticism. And I do write a lot of cultural criticism. And there’s a lot right now in our particular cultural moment that we could criticize. And so then we land at conspiracy theories. How’s that?

Dru (01:27)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. Well,

no, I I think when you teach biblical studies, it’s a very similar. You have to do literature, ⁓ a little bit of literature, but also the biblical authors address everything in life. So you end up talking about everything. Yeah, it actually becomes ⁓ the job is to constrain what you’re going to talk about, right? ⁓ Yeah. So you are, ⁓ would you consider yourself a literary critic or a literary scholar? I mean, I don’t know if this is for you.

Karen (01:49)
Everything in life, yes.

Right, right.

Yeah,

that’s good question. I mean, I’m a literary scholar, I would say. Some of the works that I write are literary criticism, but it’s more at the popular level. So I mean, I do write for some academic journals, ⁓ but also there’s a little baggage with that in the sense that ⁓ the realm of literary theory is kind of, has for a long time, mean, it’s…

Dru (02:18)
Okay.

Karen (02:34)
correcting itself been almost detached from literature. Like I just love to read literature and talk about literature. And so ⁓ that’s why even on my short bios that you find almost anywhere, ⁓ the first word thing I say about myself is I’m a reader. I’m a reader, even before a writer and before a teacher, I’m a reader. So I just love literature.

Dru (02:37)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I get the sense, I only spent a few days with you, but I read a lot of your stuff online as well. I get the sense that you’re OK with gritty literature as well, stuff that’s really earthy and real. OK, me too. I’m an Old Testament professor. We have to love this stuff. You also said the most controversial thing I’ve ever heard any Christian say in a room. Do know what I’m referring to?

Karen (03:04)
Well, I prefer it actually. So, yeah.

no, no. Well,

go ahead, yes, I think so.

Dru (03:21)
In a room full

of Christian scholars, where you just kind of, well, there’s some Jewish scholars in there as well. ⁓ You just kind of casually said like, yeah, J.R.R. Tolkien’s, you know, Lord of the Rings. It’s like, no literary scholars think that that’s real.

literature if I remember you said and you could see everybody’s heads whip up and I was with you I wanted to hear more because not that I’m a hater of Tolkien I don’t think you are either but you just were making a distinction of high literary art versus you know just literature in general so maybe you could back up that claim a little bit now because people are shocked when I say like I’m not really into Tolkien and they’re like but you’re a Christian and I was like I don’t understand how those two things mix

Karen (03:43)
Hmm.

Right, right, right, I’m-

Yeah,

hearing you say back what I said, I’m like, ⁓ the hate mail is going to come. ⁓ I think the context for that was, or at least the context in my head, whether it was at the conference or not, is ⁓ that all of my Christian students who love Tolkien and Lewis as well, you know.

Dru (04:09)
You

Karen (04:25)
for decades I taught them and they all wanna do their papers on Lewis and Tolkien and these are literature classes. so, there are times when I could allow it and when I did, but I would tell them, you’re not going to, I’m asking you to do academic research and you’re not going to find a lot of academic research on these writers because they aren’t.

Dru (04:29)
Mm-hmm.

Karen (04:45)
in the literature canon. Now the canon, that’s a whole other controversy. I tend to be conservative, so I like the canon, but I’m also, you know, it’s okay to expand the canon. But students need to know these are not writers considered in the canon, and maybe someday they will be more. But they are very beloved by Christians for their Christian thinking and for their writing, ⁓ but that doesn’t necessarily put them, you know, in the crosshairs of…

Dru (04:49)
Right.

Karen (05:14)
literary critics. And so there’s that issue. And then the just the other thing, like because I tend to teach very traditional literature and surveys of literature and and and and historical literary periods, students would sometimes be surprised, like, how can you teach a course in this and not have Lewis or not have Tolkien? I’m like, we don’t have them in in in the canon. ⁓ And so that, yeah, that’s very shocking to a lot of

Christians and then I just don’t like fantasy so there’s that.

Dru (05:48)
Well, I’m right there. I was so shocked because I’d never heard anybody say out loud what I always think in these conversations. And you’re a literature professor, so I felt like triply confirmed in my own. But again, this is nothing against Tolkien or Lewis’s writings. You’re just making a distinction of where they kind of fit in the broader literary landscape.

Karen (06:04)
Right, right, right, right, right. And

so fantasy is considered what’s called genre fiction. And the world has changed. live in very, you know, postmodern age, so anything goes, I get that. But still genre literature is sort of considered, is a, ⁓ not great literature, generally speaking. Yeah.

Dru (06:27)
Not the greatest, yeah. So what would

be an example, I won’t say British, but like for American authors, who would be in the canon there are easy works that everybody would recognize that are part of the canon.

Karen (06:37)
okay, well, I’m not

an Americanist, but I can name some. John Steinbeck, ⁓ Nathaniel Hawthorne, ⁓ Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, those are the American greats. And there are many more than that that are more modern. mean, my area of expertise is 18th and 19th century British literature specifically. even for me, I have to bring myself up to date. ⁓

Dru (06:39)
I’m

Amen, amen.

Karen (07:03)
to read more contemporary literature. again, people will fall, I remember one time getting great criticism from someone because my book on reading well had like all but one white author. And this was going back several years and a person asked me why. I said, 30 or 40 years ago when I was a PhD student, this is what I was studying, this is what I know.

Dru (07:19)
Mm-hmm.

Karen (07:31)
maybe if I could go back and redo a PhD and maybe I would do something different, I’m not doing that. So I’m like writing about my expertise and I am very sorry that my expertise is not politically correct right now, but it’s my expertise. Now I do personally, I try to expand and read a lot more and even write about more, but I still can’t go back and become as much of an expert in the things that I studied 30 and 40 years ago.

Dru (07:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, it strikes me that this is the, reaction to Tolkien was, it’s kind of like my reaction when people say like Neil Peart from Rush, the drummer of the band Rush, is like, yeah, it’s a common claim that Neil Peart, the drummer, is the greatest rock drummer of all time, right? ⁓ Or, you know, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, Nirvana fame. And as a drummer, I’m just like going.

Karen (08:23)
I know the band Rush, yeah, but I don’t know the other guys in it, but.

Dru (08:38)
I know eight-year-old Japanese girls that play better than these guys and can play a wider range of music than these guys. ⁓ And it’s not that they’re bad and they repurpose, but they’re of a particular genre of music. they’re not session musicians. They’re not studio musicians. They’re basically serving the Utah just like I did when I was in a punk band. I served the purpose and then I moved on. ⁓ So I wonder if that’s kind like, yes.

Karen (08:46)
Right, just.

Some of us never move on.

Dru (09:07)
Is that a similar feel to what you’re saying about Tolkien in ⁓ the canon and his position outside of the canon?

Karen (09:15)
⁓ Yeah, probably, yeah, it’s no, and again, no, no, no, it’s fine, it’s fine. I mean, so a little explanation for myself. So the 18th century is very big on genres and categories and terms and definitions. That’s just what, you know, it’s part of the modern age but in the literature, that was very much about genres. So I just, that’s where I come from. Like I wanna know what the genre and what the category is.

Dru (09:17)
I did not intend this to be a whole discussion of motion. ⁓

Karen (09:42)
⁓ so that we can judge something by its category. And I know that’s a very modern as opposed to postmodern thing to do, ⁓ and it’s not complete, but it’s just one way of looking at things. And as far as people enjoying it, that’s fine. ⁓ But I also, since we’re on a roll here, I have written about and linked to, I do worry a little bit about ⁓ a whole

Dru (09:47)
you

Karen (10:11)
generation or two of adults who, you know, just completely, they just like children’s literature and comic books. I don’t, I don’t, there are a lot of names, but yeah, but yeah, I don’t understand that. yeah, so. Okay, great.

Dru (10:17)
You don’t have to say the names. Yeah.

Okay, so look, I am heading somewhere with this line of questioning, by the way.

And part of it is, one of the things we’re worried about in the center of our Hebraic thought, but more just in general in the American and Western church, is people just don’t read, right? So I run into this problem of we’re trying to help people understand what the biblical authors are, how they conceptualize the world. But then we realize very quickly, well, you have to actually kind of just be familiar with what they say.

in order to follow the arguments that you want to make about what they might mean by what they say. ⁓ And people don’t know what they say. And I know this because I teach introduction to biblical studies to freshmen and students who tell me they read the Bible every day of their lives walk in the class and we just start reading it and they’re shocked at what’s in there. And I’m like, well, I thought you read this like seven days a week. Like, why are you shocked by this? ⁓ And so, I mean, do you buy the arguments?

that if you want to read the Bible better, just need to good literature or difficult, I wouldn’t say even good, just difficult literature in general, or do you think that that’s a canny move?

Karen (11:34)
No, I think that there’s a way of reading ⁓ thick texts. You the Bible’s a thick text. Literature is a thick text. I mean, Tolkien is probably thick. And when I say thick, mean, ⁓ you know, something other than, you know, I will confess, I picked up a paper book novel at an airport bookstore that was just a mindless suspense novel that I read at the time and finished up and put in the recycling bin because by then it had fallen apart.

and it did its purpose, was just like nothing I would ever read again and it’s just, know, the words on the page dance along quite quickly as I find out who actually did do the murder or whatever. But thick texts have, you know, use language and perspective and imagery and ⁓ literary figures of speech in a layered resonance elusive way. And so more is there than what’s on the surface. ⁓ And so,

Dru (12:28)
Mm.

Karen (12:34)
Developing a skill for reading those kinds of texts well translates from text to text. So I think that if you are reading great literature and learning how to read it well, you’re going to read the Bible better and vice versa. But the problem is, and this is, mean, I have the problem too. We all have the problem. We spend so much time reading things that are written and designed to be read quickly.

like emails and newspaper articles and social media feeds. mean, that is a different kind of writing. And we use our brain so much to do that kind of reading that it’s counterintuitive to pick up a thick text and realize we actually have to read it in a different way. It’s different muscles, it’s different areas of the brain that we’re using. And if we try to skim a biblical text or War and Peace we’re not reading it.

Dru (13:32)
Mm-hmm.

Karen (13:32)
We’re not reading

it at all, really.

Dru (13:35)
No, that makes sense. And I think one of my concerns when I hear the critique of Tolkien, my instinct is that a lot of people love Tolkien because of his world building is what they say. He created all these languages. I’m like, ooh, OK. ⁓ Great. mean, I’m, yeah.

Karen (13:53)
Latin and I love French

and so like I don’t need to create a new language I just want to you know I love them.

Dru (13:57)
Yeah, I mean,

I’m glad it was something that worked out for him and his whole enterprise. And it was great. And people find great joy and fun in it. ⁓ But at the same time, hear if there’s a critique or Tolkein I can see someone turning to the biblical text, especially the Hebrew scriptures, and saying, well, this is very terse, trite, simplistic. He went here, then he went there, and he went there. So I wonder. And you talk about thick text. And of course,

The biblical literature is thick because there is all this elusive interconnection and meta-leptical reasoning going on between text. ⁓ However, you can read long parts of Genesis and be like, why am I talking about the sheep herder moving from here to here, pimping out his wife and then going there and doing? So I wonder if you just drop down into something like Genesis or Exodus, which I think are thick text. ⁓ What’s the hurdle to get people to see that?

Karen (14:55)
Hmm.

Dru (14:56)
I have my own ideas, but I bet you have better ones. How do you get people to see Exodus as a thick text and the Prince of Egypt as a gross simplification and misunderstanding of the book of Exodus, even though it’s beautiful movie?

Karen (14:59)
Yeah. ⁓ yeah.

no, is a beautiful movie. No, this is a great question and I have a couple different things to say about it. So ⁓ let’s use visual art as an analogy. ⁓ I mean, anyone can go to the museum and appreciate like the Dutch masters ⁓ or the French impressionists that maybe, or even, know, ⁓

Dru (15:17)
Okay.

Karen (15:35)
the medieval art, I mean, it’s all very different, different stylistically. ⁓ And most of us, if we’re honest, we will look at it and think, wow, you know, I have no, I, you know, I could never even begin to do that. We can have a deep appreciation for it. And then we come to someone like Jackson Pollock, who’s, and his splatter paints. And someone, you know, and you know, you probably know, it’s just literally splatter on a canvas. And people think, well, a second grader could have done that. Well, you know what, a second grader didn’t do that.

And Jackson Pollock actually has an entire body of work that’s much more traditional, a whole history behind it. So a little bit of education, even just Googling it, you’ll find out what he was doing with that. ⁓ And most of us don’t even have a barn or big rolls of canvas that we would even know how to unfurl and splatter paint on. It looks easy and it’s not the same thing as a Dutch masterpiece. You know, it probably does take less skill, objectively speaking, but he still had a lot of skill that he brought to it, a lot of context. And so,

to understand the significance of that painting, we do have to have a little bit of knowledge about art and art history and about the artist to appreciate it because it is abstract. And the same might be true of a text that, know, such as the accounts in Genesis that seems simple ⁓ on the surface. And yet if we study even outside the text or in community with other people,

We will learn, read the footnotes. We will learn more. ⁓ so simplicity can be deceiving. And I’ll give one other example. I’m sorry, you, you. So one of my favorite novels is Jane Eyre.

Dru (17:10)
No, this is great, this great.

Karen (17:14)
which of all the 19th century novels is probably one of the ones that’s the easiest to read because the narrative voice sounds so real and genuine and she’s a young girl and so her language is much more similar to someone talking to you. ⁓ One of my most memorable teaching moments was teaching that novel ⁓ and we began it on the first day and spent 20 minutes talking about the opening sentence.

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

Simple sentence, just filled with all kinds of illusions and meaning and accumulated significance about journeys and possibilities and subject matters and narrators. mean, there’s just so much to say about that, but that doesn’t happen on the first glance. That happens in thinking and bringing other knowledge to the text and doing that in community.

Dru (18:08)
Yeah, if I could draw a parallel. Those are great examples. By the way, I use the You Couldn’t Do That painting. There’s a great PBS video. It’s like a five minute thing saying, here’s why you couldn’t paint. Your third grader couldn’t paint these modern pieces of art, and neither could you. And then actually kind of go into the skills that you label. ⁓

Karen (18:28)
did not

know that existed. I’m going to Google it and find it. ⁓

Dru (18:30)
Yeah, if you can’t I’ll send

it to you. It’s great. I’d never thought about applying that I use that in hermeneutics But I never thought about applying that actually to these simple texts ⁓ which build up layers of meaning by accretion and You know a similar phrase would be you know because you listen to the voice or listen to the voice of your wife or listen to like that phrase does a ton of work in Genesis and throughout the rest of the Pentateuch and even it’s it’s quoted at the transfiguration, right?

But it just doesn’t, you know, it comes off as garden variety language. And I think that’s one of the geniuses of ⁓ much of the Hebrew scripture. But even given that, and I wonder because I don’t read ⁓ much or any British ⁓ literature, ⁓ maybe I’ve lived in the UK one too many times to, like it would drive me crazy. But ⁓ there is a style in like, so.

even storytelling in the Hebrew Bible is done, narrative and prose are done very differently than modern English writing, poetry is done radically differently, the legal texts are written in different, they’re similar to ancient Near Eastern legal texts but not identical to ancient Near Eastern legal texts. So, you know, kind of taking modern literary savvy and bringing it to a thick text like the Bible, ⁓ do you see any ways in what…

I always think like you have to open your mind and say they’re doing things in very different ways, but don’t it’s very sophisticated and don’t ever for second assume that it’s not. Do you have a way of cracking that nut of helping people listen for the style when it’s even a very radically different style of literature?

Karen (20:03)
Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I mean, really, the first thing that comes to my mind in all of these ⁓ questions that we’re addressing is humility first is just ⁓ the, you going back to the you couldn’t do this in a third grader couldn’t either. That’s a statement of humility. And I think so often we don’t come to something with that. Like if we don’t understand it, we think, it’s…

Dru (20:14)
Hmm.

Mm.

Karen (20:32)
it’s the problem is with the text, not with me, or we don’t appreciate it. ⁓ You know, there are certain styles of music that I don’t appreciate, but I also know it’s because I don’t have an understanding of it. And so maybe I wouldn’t if I did, but I still I’m very ignorant about music in general. So I’m hesitant to make any kind of judgments. But we just live in an age that, you know, because of our subjectivity, you know, we just think, we don’t see the difference between

Dru (20:34)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Karen (21:01)
the statements, I like it and it is good. We think, if I like it, it is good. And if it is good, I will like it. And those are not the same statements at all. So tips is to come with humility, ask questions. ⁓ We do have the gift of Google, which I’ve already mentioned. ⁓ And so it’s easy to at least get a little bit of information that can just open up our eyes and be like, there is a little something more going on here. ⁓

Dru (21:03)
Hmm.

Google.

Karen (21:30)
You know, we don’t all have to be experts in literature or the Bible. That’s certainly not the case, but at least the humility to say, don’t really understand what’s going on here. But then you can still enjoy it. You can just still enjoy it. And all the while knowing that there’s probably something more going on and just get out of it what you can if you don’t have any more to invest in it. ⁓ don’t wanna take, I mean, enjoyment and pleasure in reading. ⁓

Dru (21:36)
Hmm.

Karen (21:58)
And benefit, obviously, when we’re talking about the Bible is foremost, but there’s so much more than that.

Dru (22:04)
Yeah. And I think with thicker text enjoyment obviously comes with multiple exposure. with the Bible, we built that into what it means to be a Christian is being multiply exposed. But maybe with great literature, we think you read something once and you’re done. And I remember when I was done with East of Eden, I just thought like, I can’t wait till I read that again. And I bet I’m going to understand 20 % more maybe.

Karen (22:09)
Right, right, right.

It was so good. only, yes,

yes. I only read it for the first time a few years ago and I was just completely blown away. I thought if I had read this in college, I might’ve been an Americanist, but instead I, no, I was gonna say instead I got Moby Dick and I just, I still have to go back and finish that.

Dru (22:36)
My thought was… sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

Well, I finished East of Eden, again, about 10 years ago, when I finally read it. ⁓ I thought, well, I don’t really need to read any books anymore because there’s not going to be one better than that, at least not an Americanist, right? And I think that simplicity that you talked about and the humility… ⁓

I read fiction very reluctantly because I’m afraid I’m going to waste my time on a bad book. So I always wait to get until three people tell me to read the same book. And then I’m like, okay, now it’s time to read that book. I finally read Shusaku Endo’s Silence, ⁓ maybe five years before the movie came out or something like that. Because I had a missiology professor that said, read as much Shusaku Endo as you can. And I remember reading it about halfway through going, man, that professor was really smart, like a really intelligent person, really well read.

had lived in Japan and I’m reading this going like maybe you have to live in Japan to really appreciate this book because I’m not seeing it. It seems so simple. And then about halfway through you realize like ⁓ wait this is this is very economical use of language and storytelling but he’s doing a lot of things all at once and I think that’s how I feel when I read the biblical text is they’re doing so much at once ⁓ and and they’re also respectful of a tradition as well.

is part of a tradition. OK. I want to pivot from literature to your other new love, vocation. ⁓ If I were to guess why you wrote a book on vocation, I think you told me why, but I don’t remember what it was, the reason why. ⁓ But if I were to guess why you wrote a book on vocation is because you worked with a bunch of young people for a long time.

and you see all the wonky ways in which they think about themselves, the world around them, and how they participate in it. And you thought, like, I can do better than that. And then you probably read some books on vocation. You’re like, I could do better than that. There’s some good ones out there. There’s some questionable ones out there as well. So why did you write that book?

Karen (24:37)
Well, that, yes.

Yeah,

no, I definitely was drawing on my decades of teaching college students and it’s not their fault though. I mean, they have been given so many distorted messages about work and income and passion and all of these things that I saw them, you know, holding up these really unrealistic dreams and visions for what they would be able to do. ⁓ But then, which is, you know, that’s not bad in itself except for the

Dru (24:51)
No.

Karen (25:12)
unnecessary despair and anguish and disappointment that comes when it turns out the world doesn’t work that way. So yes, I was drawing heavily on those kinds of conversations and kind of trying to speak into this moment. ⁓ One of my big ⁓ points in the book is to counter the bad advice to pursue your passion. ⁓ And so again,

Dru (25:34)
Yeah.

Karen (25:36)
in the context of work and calling it. And I have a whole chapter on passion and talk about why it’s good and what it’s for and how it might, for some very few people who’ve lived on God’s green earth, overlap with their income. But for most it does not. And how passion is a wonderful thing to pursue like, you know, in your spare time after you’ve fulfilled your responsibilities, you can develop, you know, loves for hobbies and so forth. And.

Again, it can happen that the thing you’re passionate about is what brings you lots of money, but that’s just not something to expect. ⁓ But I also was, you know, coincidentally going through my own sort of vocational shift ⁓ in the process of writing this book that was unexpected and hard and caused me to revisit these conversations that I really had been having for.

years with students. So it applies not just to them, it applies to me, it applies to all, I think many, we’re living in a time now where because our institutions are shifting and changing so fast and meeting unexpected challenges and unprecedented challenges, a lot of us are being caught up in some of these things too and are probably asking some of these same questions that we wouldn’t have imagined we had to ask 10 or 20 years ago.

Dru (26:46)
you

Yeah, unless you’re a plumber or a nurse and you’re like, the world hasn’t changed at all. Everything just keeps trucking. ⁓ What do you think the role of, I’m thinking of the advice I typically give students. ⁓ What do think the role of jobs you hate are? And like, how long do you stay in a job that you hate? And I mean, job that’s like thankless and just maybe even mildly demeaning or you’re, know,

Karen (27:01)
No, exactly, we are still going to need those things.

Dru (27:26)
requires high humility and putting up with lot of nonsense.

Karen (27:30)
Yeah, mean, and I think the first thing is to understand, ⁓ again, this is the drum I keep beating, is the perspective that most of the people who have lived in the world in human history have had jobs that were like that. ⁓ And the jobs were means of putting a roof over their heads and feeding their families and providing safety. ⁓ And so if we have something better than that, then we’re in the very privileged small percentage.

of humans who’ve lived on the earth. And I don’t want to take that away from anyone. Like the fact that we live in a place and time where we can actually have these conversations and make these choices is wonderful, but we still need to have that perspective. And I would say, and I do, I have a short section in the book where I define some terms, drawing on some sources. So I define ⁓ job versus career versus calling. And ⁓ the definition of job is just that, that it is just something that’s

providing income for you. And if you get a better job, take it. That’s what its purpose is. Other times we’re doing work, like if we might be wanting to form a career, which has a longer trajectory. And so one job might be a stepping stone if it’s a career, but understanding the difference between career and job is important and understanding the difference between calling, which could be our job. It could be something that we get paid to do, but a calling can also be just.

a role we play in our family or in our community, and we have multiple callings throughout our lives. But to go back to your, more directly answer your question about the menial jobs that we hate, ⁓ you know, we’re all going to hold those at some point, or most of us are, even if it’s just, you know, while we’re a student or while we’re in between things. And we shouldn’t do it longer than we have to if we have a better opportunity. Like there’s no reason to.

to keep something that is so negative. But we still, if that’s the only opportunity we have, we still, we have to think about the responsibility and the freedom that comes from being able to pay the bills and support ourselves. ⁓ And so we should, we have to understand that will likely happen, but still develop the skills and the longevity and the character qualities.

That will enable us to get that better job once it comes along. ⁓ So that’s the kind of advice I give.

Dru (30:01)
Yeah, mean, menial work in the United States means I had to put a footnote in for a book I was working on. It’s at minimum wage in the United States. It still puts you at like greater than 83 percent of the people in the world income wise and even probably quality of life wise. Does it again that, you know, that’s it’s hard to relativize that if you’re not talking to an agrarian subsistence farmer in Africa right now, like you’re not sitting over there looking at from that perspective.

One of the other things that I ran into, and it might have been the institution I was at, and I was kind known as the guy who crushed dreams. ⁓ Dream crusher, yeah. Yeah, well, and I came, I was a pastor first, which was great for me because it was kind of a form of a menial job. It was a difficult job for me. Some people would find life in it. ⁓ But I remember dealing with people.

Karen (30:38)
Wait, that’s what I call myself in the book, a dream crusher. Dream squasher. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dru (30:59)
God love him, who had very romantic ideas about what marriage should be, what career should be, what life should be. And then they kind of held everybody in their life hostage to their ideas about what they should be. so I struggle with this because I feel like I go a little overboard. But I only see the destructive power of romanticism. Or think you were telling me to call it sentimentality, I think, at one point. ⁓ And I’m wondering, do you find any redeeming qualities in romanticism?

Karen (31:23)
Right.

Dru (31:28)
And not the German movement, but just the kind of general, high in the sky, like, wouldn’t it be great if, if, you

Karen (31:28)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, it’s funny because I think ideals are so important and in some ways I am an idealist, but I think it’s again, having the right words, knowing the definitions of words. if I have idealized notions, if I know that they’re idealistic,

Dru (31:47)
Mm.

Karen (31:54)
then that helps. The problem is when we don’t know that these are unrealistic or idealistic or romantic notions. I mean, that was advice I gave my students for many years as well about marriage, as I would say, I think the leading cause of divorce is unrealistic expectations. ⁓ And often that can be as simple as like expecting, you know, our spouse to be someone that they aren’t, ⁓ you know, and that doesn’t work. And then there are also all kinds of other ways that unrealistic expectations.

Dru (31:55)
Mm.

Hmm.

Absolutely.

Karen (32:23)
Now, I don’t mean high, we should have high expectations of everything, but that’s different from unrealistic ones. ⁓ And so I think, again, if we know what we’re talking about and we know that this is an idealized notion or this is a romantic notion, ⁓ then at least we can hold it in tension with the reality of the world. ⁓ yeah, but again, going back to…

the whole gritty literature thing. just, like, I think grittiness keeps us more grounded. And so I find more value in that than I do in, you know, romantic ideas.

Dru (33:06)
Yeah, guess hearing you talk about this, certainly keys off my imagination. Where is your imagination formed? So again, I’m not throwing any shade, but it will come as no surprise that the kind of students that came in with very unrealistic expectations about their future life or their future spouse or whatever tended to like fantasy. Right? Like that was a genre that now, again, I’m not saying those are directly correlated. I don’t know if they are.

But certainly, I think ⁓ a case could be made, or maybe you could make a case that we should be developing our imaginations on gritty as much as anything. I mean, again, I’m a biblical scholar, so it’s all gritty. Like, you know, sometimes at the end of a book, like we just finished the Gospel of Mark, and I have to go like, okay, I know that was a hard reading. The disciples were idiots all the way through, and they never, ever got better. That’s pretty gritty and dark and dour. And that’s the good news, like, right? So you kind of have to adjust it.

Karen (34:01)
Hehehehehe

Dru (34:05)
So, I mean, and I guess I’m looking for, do you think there should be this kind of balance of forming our imaginations through the grit and also through, you know, this other lens of idealized world, utopian, the way that it could be?

Karen (34:20)
Yeah, I mean, I do think that we should. I want to say something a little bit more compassionate before I go on. I do think that our young people today have been through personal and cultural and sociological hell, broadly speaking.

Dru (34:31)
you

Karen (34:44)
And so there’s an escapist element to fantasy and to unrealistic ideas. And so they’re getting these distorted messages about what life and work and income will look like. And by the way, I also want to say, since we’re both in the field of higher education, that the biggest romantic dream that has caused them to stumble is that you can spend $100,000 on a college education and then go get a job where you can pay it off in two or three years.

Dru (34:46)
⁓ yeah.

Right,

right.

Karen (35:12)
And that is not their fault. That is a pipe dream that has been sold to the students and to their parents. ⁓ And so that is also a big part of this picture, I think. ⁓ So I think that there are reasons why current younger generations feel a greater need to escape. ⁓

Dru (35:35)
Mm.

Karen (35:40)
until we address those, ⁓ like at a real level, on an individual basis, but on a cultural and social basis as well, ⁓ then I’m going to be more careful and a little bit more hesitant to assign the gritty literature that might hit. I mean, what I say to people when I try to explain my love for dark literature is, know,

up until a few years ago, I lived a very Pollyanna life. It took the church to hurt and wound me to make me confront the real grit in life. And so I think for me, it was just kind of balancing out. I could handle that. I needed that gritty literature to bring balance. But we may have generations of students who’ve experienced, I mean, even a broken family is something that wounds the soul ⁓ in a way that many of us who haven’t had that.

Dru (36:14)
same.

Karen (36:36)
don’t understand and then we get into the kind of, you know, sexual abuse and victimization and spiritual abuse that many have experienced and understand it to be such. It’s harder to read, for example, Tests of the D’Urbervilles, one of my favorite 19th century novels about a young girl who is raped ⁓ and they’re then rejected ⁓ because she’s no longer pure, she’s ruined. ⁓

Like for me, that was just a great story and very tragic and I loved it and loved to teach it. And then I had students who experienced very similar things and hearing their stories and how that novel affected them personally, I had to enlarge my understanding of what it’s like to read a text like that. ⁓ so there’s a lot going on in these issues, but I, you know, I… ⁓

Dru (37:16)
Mm-hmm.

Karen (37:33)
definitely think we have to be careful about the escapism and the fantasy and temper that with more realistic expectations and maybe more realistic reading.

Dru (37:42)
Yeah, even as you say that, there’s gritty reading that’s unredemptive. at least with the biblical literature, not all of it, there’s long portions where it doesn’t feel very redemptive. redemption is buried in the storyline itself. And so yeah, I had not thought of the trials and tribulations they’ve gone through as to why they might react differently to literature where…

Karen (37:54)
You

Dru (38:07)
I feel like the gritty makes me feel not crazy. Like, ⁓ yeah, see, the world is a little bit hairier than… And that’s part of my own story is I had that kind of awakening where I thought everything was fine. And then I was involved in some things and I was like, wait, people are way worse than I thought they were. I’m way worse than I thought I was, right?

Karen (38:10)
Yes, yeah.

No.

was reading

all that bad literature and gritty literature, mean, and to find out how bad the world was and then shocked to find out it really was. So I guess I had my own romantic ideals as well.

Dru (38:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

well, ⁓ Karen, thank you so much for your time, your wisdom. I’m sure people are itching to hear more from you. So the name of the book is what? I don’t have the book with me.

Karen (38:46)
Yeah, yeah,

no, that’s fine. have a calling, finding your vocation in the true, good, and beautiful. And there’s a lot of literature interspersed throughout the pages. ⁓ And it lands on the transcendentals, the true, good, and beautiful. But in the mire, that’s where we can find ⁓ the most beautiful things, I think.

Dru (38:50)
Hey, there you go.

Hmm.

it’s a beautiful cover as well. Is it a painting?

Karen (39:15)
Yeah, it is a 19th century painting that was in the public domain and it captures, I can’t remember, it’s like an artist from the Netherlands, but it captures the spirit of the book ⁓ in so many ways. I love the cover, thanks. And I will get you a copy, I’m sorry I didn’t know you didn’t have one. ⁓ Thank you for the conversation, it was excellent.

Dru (39:19)
⁓

Okay.

I love a good cover. look forward to I’ll buy a copy. I look forward to reading it. All right, thank you, Karen, for your wisdom.