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Causing Little Ones to Stumble: Paul Bailey and the Millstone of Religion
Author(s) -
Hardy Robert
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
new blackfriars
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1741-2005
pISSN - 0028-4289
DOI - 10.1111/nbfr.1402
Subject(s) - orthodoxy , faith , narrative , irrational number , religious studies , psychoanalysis , aesthetics , sociology , psychology , history , literature , philosophy , theology , art , geometry , mathematics
In Sugar Cane the novelist Paul Bailey describes what happens when someone is exposed at an impressionable age to religion in a brutally corrupt or merely stupid form and has to come to terms with that exposure: whether healing might be possible and what that healing might look like. Bailey suggests an alternative narrative, where, despite the suffering of his characters, the word ‘religion’ means more to him than it does to Irvin Yalom, who wrote of his belief after his own childhood exposure to the authoritarianism of his parents’ Jewish orthodoxy, that ‘faith, like so many other early irrational beliefs and fears, is a burden’.[Note 1. Irvin D. Yalom, ‘Religion and Psychiatry’, Acceptance speech delivered ...]