Did My Fiction Just Become Reality?

As some of you know, a couple of months ago I published a novel called The Divinity School – thanks to those who have read it so far – which follows the drama and comedy of an interfaith studies center and its faculty at the fictitious Hamilton University in North Carolina (“let the reader understand”). Much of the story follows Fr. Andrew Stevens, a Catholic priest, who the administration is trying to remove because the campus LGBTIQ group have been complaining about having a Catholic priest on campus. There’s other stuff in the novel too including terrorists, naked nuns, and cookies from Colorado, but most of the spotlight falls on Fr Andrew Stevens.

Well anyway, I just read on the American Conservative (I don’t subscribe, it just came up on my FB feed) that a Catholic Duke professor named Paul Griffiths is facing disciplinary procedures for – as far as I can tell – expressing politically incorrect views about the school’s purpose.

Let me be clear, I take no position on this matter for or against Prof Paul Griffiths, while his open letter certainly does make me sympathetic to him, I also know that there are two sides to every story, I’m not privy to all the details, so I reserve judgment, and simply pray that collegiality and mutual respect wins in the end.

But it is interesting that my novel about a Catholic professor at a North Carolina Divinity School, receiving complaints driven by the divisions fostered between traditional religion and identity politics, might actually be a reality here.

Did my fiction just become reality?