S12 E02: A Social Imaginary with Karen Swallow Prior

What role does the imagination play in shaping the identity of a culture?

Our collective imagination provides metaphors, stories and symbols that bind people groups together and create a common understanding of the world.

But what happens when those metaphors no longer carry the same meanings? Or even worse, when those stories and metaphors no longer create unity but bring division and harm?

Professor and writer Karen Swallow Prior addresses these concerns in her book The Evangelical Imagination.

She tells us, contemporary American evangelicalism is suffering from an identity crisis - and a lot of bad press.

In this episode, Karen discusses what Charles Taylor called ‘A social imaginary’ and how artists and creatives can respond to the evangelical crisis of identity and bring healing to our cultural fractures.

Transcript

S6 E14: The Art of Memoir with Cinelle Barnes

Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South (Hub City Press, 2020).

In this episode, Stephen talks with Cinelle about memoir as an agent of healing and how her process of writing helped navigate the difficulties of childhood trauma.

**Patrons of the podcast can enjoy an additional interview segment with Cinelle outlining practical steps of memoir writing for any of you writers out there who are interested in learning what it takes to get your story from the pen to the page.

Art As Healing, authors, storytellingStephen RoachFebruary 12, 2020memoir, Women Writers, Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion, Malaya, writing

Artist Profile Series 24: Flannery O' Connor

Flannery O’ Connor was a Southern, fiction writer and essayist born March 25th 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She was a devout Roman Catholic with a penchant for satire, dark humor and wild, religious imagination. Today, O’Connor is considered to be one of America’s greatest fiction writers and an apologist for the Catholic faith.

Her stories are far from what you might imagine coming from a Southern Christian writer in the 1950’s. They are full of shocking scenes of violence, depravity and shady, sometimes comic Christian characters such as a bible salesman who steals a prosthetic leg or a pseudo-prophet who steals mummified dwarfs. Her character’s twisted views of reality warps the basic tenets of the faith they profess. Their situations often end in bloodshed.