Today we’re looking at the religious aspects of Howl and Phaedrus, and how those affect and are affected by the rhetorical goals and strategies in each piece.

To kick us off, I bring you a passage or two from Andrew M. Greeley’s 1986 novel: God Game:

… the little kid’s plea, “Momma, tell me a story,” is really a desperate plea for meaning. The astonishing. amazing, and confusing phenomena which impinge on the child’s consciousness seem inexplicable, chaotic, terrifying. Momma’s story puts some order into the confusion, some cosmos into the chaos. Religion in its raw and elemental manifestation plays a “momma” function: it tells stories which suggest that there is order in the confusion, meaning in the terror, cosmos in the chaos. Religion, in short, is a cosmos-creating activity or it isn’t worth a damn and isn’t even religion. (pg. 8)

And one more:

Every theologian is a storyteller and every story is about God, one way or another, despite what the local Cardinal of your choice might tell you. (pp. 16-17)

Greeley is a Catholic priest, a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, and an unimaginably prolific author of fiction and non-fiction.