Dialogue between people of faith and the secular world has been promoted in the Catholic Church at least since the Second Vatican Council. But what if, instead of conversing about issues of common concern, we were to explore the role of the imagination in the face of mystery, whether it be the mystery of God, whose full reality lies beyond our earthly horizons, or the deepest mysteries of life hinted at in the work of serious fiction? Paul Lakeland s book attends to a series of novels, proposing serious fiction as an antidote to the failure of the religious imagination today, and asking if fiction might not lead the secular mind at least to the threshold of mystery. He demonstrates that the wounded angel of our imagination and the dogged helpfulness of the two earthly boys conspire in the creation of a mysterious beauty.

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