Last Sunday, we pointed to an interview with the Catholic poet Dana Gioia, in which he mused that there “is a great essay waiting to be written on the differences between observant and cultural Catholic writers.” Dreher picks up the question:
From the outside, my guess is that culturally Catholic writers are more likely to be reacting against something. Their imaginations were formed by the culture and rituals of Catholicism, even if they’ve rejected the religion. I am skeptical, though, about whether there is anything identifiably or meaningfully Catholic about any culturally Catholic writer whose imagination was formed after the postconciliar dissolution of that strong and distinct American Catholic culture. I could be wrong about that; there is certainly something distinctly Jewish about culturally (but not religiously) Jewish writers. Then again, Jews are a minority in America, whereas Catholics are members of the largest church in the country — though an increasingly assimilated one.
Noah Millman offers an explanation for the distinctiveness of such Jewish writing:
Judaism is simply less theology-centric than Catholicism, and as a consequence you can be a religiously observant Jew who writes books about religiously observant Jews and your fiction may still be Jewish primarily in the sociological sense. Take, as an example, Kaaterskill Falls, by Allegra Goodman. This is a very good novel to read if you want to get a feel for the dynamics of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. It’s also a good novel qua novel. But it isn’t god-haunted in the way that, say, Graham Greene’s or Flannery O’Connor’s work is. Or, for that matter, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s – even though Singer was less observant than Goodman is. I’d say similar things about Nathan Englander: that he’s interested in Jews and Judaism, but if he’s haunted by anything, it isn’t by God. History, maybe.
An interesting phenomenon to end on is Jewish writers who, in search of a spiritual inspiration, wandering into foreign fields precisely because that’s the best way to find their way home. Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America, for example, is fascinated by Mormonism precisely because of its link to archaic Judaism, which (though politically very problematic) appears more spiritually nourishing than the Judaism that actually exists in the contemporary world.
