S12 E12: Remixing The Grand Narrative with Tara Isabella Burton

At one time, religious identity and the Christian narrative formed the social imaginary of our western world. To be a part of a local church or to identify with some aspect of the values of traditional faith was an assumed part of American life. But today, autonomy, self-fulfillment and individual expression seem to have taken the forefront of how a generation defines themselves and lives out the search for meaning and deeper purpose.

My guest today is novelist and prolific writer, Tara Isabella Burton. Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and the forthcoming Here in Avalon (S&S, January 2024), and the nonfiction Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.

She has written on religion and culture for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and more. She received her doctorate in Theology from Oxford in 2017, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

In our conversation, Tara shares about how modern society has not so much abandoned it’s yearning for transcendence in favor of a secular world view but has rather simply re-mixed the grand narrative to fit the values of expressive individualism. Tara also shares about fiction as a catalyst of embodying truth and how fandom, religious affiliation and art play into the shaping of identity.

You can pre-order Tara’s upcoming novel here.

You can join the Makers & Mystics creative collective here

You can get tickets to The Breath & the Clay creative arts gathering here! March 22-24, 2024 in Winston Salem, NC.

Art & Identity, Author, authors, Culture Care, theologian, transcendence, novelistStephen RoachOctober 31, 2023taraisabellaburton, Novelist, theology, fiction author

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.

Artist Profile Series, authors, Faith and Art, Inspiration, storytelling, TerrorStephen RoachOctober 11, 2019flannery o' connor, fiction author, Artist Profile Series, southern fiction, gothic writer, Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Southern Fiction, Catholic Writer, Women Writers, hazel motes