Tony Woodlief is writing on Christian writing again.

There is not redemption . . . without a fall, nor grace without sin. For O’Connor and other serious Christian writers, this reality led them to write books that would never be allowed on the shelves of a typical Christian bookstore.

This leads to an interesting possibility: that our local public library has more genuinely Christian literature — which is to say books that tell a truer story of the fall of man and his redemption by Christ — than most Christian booksellers.

In his follow-up post, he writes:

[B]ad Christian art cripples our compassionate imagination. When the bad guys practically have signs in a novel or movie labeling them as such, and the soon-to-be saved characters are similarly cordoned off, we lose sight of the wickedness that inhabits saints, and the despair that inhabits the hearts of the lost. Instead, we have our natural tribal mentality bolstered, that pernicious instinct that prompts us to think in terms of God’s saints on the one hand, and hell-bound heathens on the other, which is always accompanied by the delusion that we can spot them easily.

This second point is dead-on to use a cliché. But how does a writer or editor get away from this critique, especially as our world’s culture is being pornographified every year? Writers like Tony could be read as arguing for more vice in otherwise moral stories, even though he isn’t, but the preception and the reaction to it is the reason we have the art and stories we have today–mostly shallow and either sanitized or unsanitized.

What does the good stuff look like? It can’t be only literary or of high culture.