This Saturday the 16th at 6:00 pm, Friends of L’Abri Nashville will hold a dinner in Cane Ridge, Tennessee, followed by a lecture by Mary McCampbell on the desire to worship in modern and postmodern fiction. Click through for more information about Mary and this event.
In his oft-quoted graduation address, “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace argues that “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
Following on from Wallace’s crucial comments, Mary McCampbell will look at the ways in which the fiction of a group of modern and postmodern authors explores a desire to worship an often unnamed, supposedly unknown, sacred source of joy and life. Even though the authors and their fictional characters are writing within and for a supposedly post-God cultural space, they are, as Paul Maltby claims, “haunted by the idea of the salvational moment,” the moment when an unnamed longing becomes a present joy through the act of worship.
Mary McCampbell serves as Associate Professor of Humanities at Lee University. Her doctoral work at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne focused on the relationship between postmodern fiction, late capitalist culture, and the religious impulse. She writes regularly on faith and the arts in general audience publications such as Image Journal, Christ and Pop Culture, The Curator, and Christianity Today. Mary was the Summer 2014 Writer in Residence at the English Branch of L’Abri Fellowship and a Spring 2018 Scholar-in-Residence at Regent College in Vancouver. Mary has a forthcoming book entitled Postmodern Prophetic: the Religious Impulse in Contemporary Fiction.