Mark Bosco

Acts of Faith and Imagination wagers that fiction written by Catholic authors assists readers to reflect critically on the question: "what is faith?" To speak of a person's "faith-life" is to speak of change and development. As a narrative form, literature can illustrate the dynamics of faith, which remains in flux over the course of one's life. Because human beings must possess faith in something (whether religious or not), it inevitably has a narrative structure—faith ebbs and flows, flourishes and decays, develops and stagnates.Through an exploration of more than a dozen Catholic authors' novels and short stories, Brent Little argues that Catholic fiction encourages the reader to reflect upon their faith holistically, that is, the way faith informs one's affections, and how a person conceives and interacts with the world as embodied beings. Amidst the diverse stories of modern and contemporary fiction, a consistent pattern emerges: Catholic fiction portrays faith—at its most fundamental, often unconscious, level—as an act of the imagination. Faith is the way one imagines themselves, others, and creation. A person's primary faith conditions how they live in the world, regardless of the level of conscious reflection, and regardless of whether this is a "religious" faith.Acts of Faith and Imagination investigates the creative depth and vitality of the Catholic literary imagination by bringing late modern Catholic authors into dialogue with more contemporary ones. Readers will then consider well-known works, such as those by Grahame Greene, Flannery O'Connor, and Muriel Spark in the fresh light of contemporary stories by Toni Morrison, Alice McDermott, Uwem Akpan, and several others.

Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. His early books are usually described as 'Catholic Novels' - understood as a genre that not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In this book, Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art.