Ron Hansen is the author of five novels, including Mariette in Ecstasy, along with a short story collection, Nebraska. In this sterling collection of 14 essays, he reveals how his Christian faith has enriched his fiction, opened his eyes to the marvels of creation, and given him deep humility in the face of God's mysteries.
Early on Hansen salutes church-going and religion as being spurs to his vocation as a writer: "for along with Catholicism's feast for the senses, its ethical concerns, its insistence on seeing God in all things, and the high status it gave to scripture, drama, and art, there was a connotation in Catholicism's liturgies that storytelling mattered." The author's faith is muscular, imaginative, and expansive and, to use a phrase taken from Robert Frost, it offers a stay against confusion.
Hansen pays tribute to his mentor John Gardner, a generous writer who died young; the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins; the respected Saint Ignatius of Loyola; the novelist and short story writer Leo Tolstoy; and the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador. We were especially taken with the author's interpretation of the film Babette's Feast. In this excellent collection of essays, Ron Hansen's Christian faith shines.
