6/28/2023 0 Comments Mary doria russell's the sparrow![]() ![]() The story begins with a literal case of Deus ex machina (God from the machine), as the plans for a secret Jesuit mission to the newly discovered planet Rakhat fall into place with all of the predictability of a bad children’s story. Like many interesting stories, then, The Sparrow allows readers of any faith-position to meditate on how meaning subsists-or doesn’t-in life, suffering, and death, forcing us to come to grips with the locus of meaning, be it objective (meaning as subsistent, that is, in God) or subjective (the thing in itself). But beyond this, it suggests interesting, and perhaps surprising, questions of theodicy, from the epistemological challenges to revelation to the insurmountable evil that swallows up all hope by the story’s end. ![]() The novel is a theological meditation on the classic question of evil. ![]() The Sparrow relates the discovery of and Christian mission to a distant planet that emanates a kind of singing, the melodies of which first attract the earthlings. A few years ago I read The Sparrow, an interesting, rather heady first novel by Mary Doria Russell. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |