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Posts Tagged "Fashion and Belief":

Changing Fashions In Belief: Dorothy L Sayers

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Ray of Light in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, Israel by Eldad Yitzhak

Few things are more striking than the change which has taken place during my own lifetime in the attitude of the intelligentsia towards the spokesmen of Christian opinion.

When I was a child, bishops expressed doubts about the Resurrection, and were called courageous.  When I was a girl, G K Chesterton professed belief in the Resurrection, and was called whimsical. When I was at college, thoughtful people expressed belief in the Resurrection ‘in a spiritual sense’,  and were called advanced; (any other kind of belief was called obsolete, and its professors were held to be simple-minded. When I was middle-aged, a number of lay persons, including some poets and writers of popular fiction, put forward rational arguments for the Resurrection, and were called courageous. Today, any lay apologist for Christianity, who is not a clergyman and whose works are sold and read, is liable to be abused in no uncertain terms as a mountebank, a reactionary, a  tool of the Inquisition, a spiritual snob, an intellectual bully, an escapist, an obstructionist, a psychopathic introvert, an insensitive extravert, and an enemy of society.

The charges are not always mutually compatible, but the common animus behind them is inescapable, and its name is fear. Writers who attack these domineering Christians are called courageous. (i)

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God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the crucifixion: He rose from the dead. (ii)


(i) The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, London 1963, p.69

(ii) A Matter of Eternity: Selections from the Writings of Dorothy L Sayers, London 1973, p.12

Both extracts are anthologised in ‘Invincible Spirits: A thousand years of women’s spiritual writings’ by Felicity Leng.

 Dorothy Leigh Sayers

Source: Wikipedia:

Born in Oxford, Sayers graduated at the university there, specializing in medieval literature. Although she became highly successful as a writer of detective stories, she decided to relinquish that career and turn to weightier topics. While hiding in an air-raid shelter during World War II, she read Dante’s Divine Comedy and, stunned with its greatness, promptly began to learn Italian to savor it in the original. Later, she translated this monumental work into English. She had not totally completed the translation at the time of her death, so her friend Barbara Reynolds completed the task.

People who love her detective works and her translation of Dante do not always know that Dorothy L. Sayers was also a Christian writer. Her best-known Christian work is The Man Born to be King (1941), twelve dramatic episodes in the life of Christ. Though it ran into strong objections at first, the main one being the use of Christ actually speaking, the drama became so popular that it was broadcast over the BBC, Christmas after Christmas. Her long play The Emperor Constantine (1951) is an effort to show this Roman emperor’s complicated relationships with Christianity and especially his involvements with the Council of Nicea. Other Christian dramas she wrote are The Zeal of Thy House (1937) and Four Sacred Plays.

She also produced many profitable Christian essays, including “The Other Six Deadly Sins”, “What Do We Believe”, “Strong Meat”, and “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”. She was concerned about the relationship of Christianity and the arts and wrote “Towards a Christian Aesthetic”, “Creative Mind”, and “The Image of God”. Undoubtedly one of her finest works is The Mind of the Maker (1941), based on the proposition that “. . . every work of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly” ; the creative idea being the Father, the creative energy being the Word, and the creative power the indwelling Spirit.

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