{"id":44309,"date":"2018-06-20T05:48:22","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T09:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=44309"},"modified":"2018-06-19T14:58:22","modified_gmt":"2018-06-19T18:58:22","slug":"science-fiction-and-the-imitation-of-the-sacred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2018\/06\/science-fiction-and-the-imitation-of-the-sacred.html","title":{"rendered":"Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I still recall when I first spotted a first very early mention of Richard Grigg\u2019s forthcoming book\u00a0Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>I shared a link, commenting on how interesting it looked. Someone left a comment under the link, asking why the title referred to \u201cimitation\u201d of the sacred, rather than simply the sacred.<\/p>\n

Not long after, the publisher contacted me to ask for an endorsement of the book, and so I was delighted! Here\u2019s what I wrote:<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"In Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred<\/em>, Richard Grigg explores the question of whether sci-fi can mediate a genuinely transformative experience of transcendence. Where most have been content to merely compare and contrast themes in religion and speculative fiction, Grigg brings impressive clarity and creativity to bear on the question of where sci-fi offers a pale\u00a0shadow of\u00a0that which historic human traditions about the sacred have offered \u2013 and where it might actually exceed those offerings, at least when considered within the framework of a postmodern secular outlook.<\/p>\n

Let Grigg take you on an\u00a0adventure to strange new worlds of challenging questions, seeking new and\u00a0alien light on humanity\u2019s quest for meaning, and you will\u00a0find that his insightful probing\u00a0in this book offers the reader\u00a0an opportunity to understand and\u00a0appreciate in new ways\u00a0what the sacred has meant to human beings in the past,\u00a0and might mean to us in the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The entirety of that doesn\u2019t appear on the book\u2019s back cover or dust jacket flap, of course. You can read the much shorter endorsement that is on the book itself on the publisher\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The answer to that early commenter\u2019s question is that the book is indeed about precisely the fact that science fiction regularly offers the quasi-sacred, something that seems at once both to emulate and yet to either deliberately distance itself from, or unintentionally fall short of, the offerings of classic expressions of the sacred. That isn\u2019t articulated as a case for the alleged superiority of the \u201ctruly sacred,\u201d but rather in terms of a nostalgia for something that humanity once fostered but which it has since let go of. I will leave it to readers to decide whether what science fiction offers is the best alternative to some of those no longer tenable or popular forms of sacred that we can embrace in our time. But the book certainly does an excellent job of framing the key issues and of exploring them in helpful and thought-provoking ways.<\/p>\n

Finally, here I am holding my copy of Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred<\/em><\/a>, in my office, where you should just barely be able to see the faces of Capt. Kirk and Dr. McCoy looking over it\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I still recall when I first spotted a first very early mention of Richard Grigg\u2019s forthcoming book\u00a0Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred. I shared a link, commenting on how interesting it looked. 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