Michael Bishop

My obliviousness never fails to astound me. I recall reading one story by Michael Bishop that had a religious theme (it was about a computer simulation of the trial of Judas) but somehow, until recently I remained unaware of his broader interest in religious ideas, or that he considered himself a Christian.

This is from an interview in 2000 with Nick Gevers:

NG: Considering your work as a whole, your authorial philosophy seems liberal and humane, very moral in its emphasis much of the time. Is this assessment accurate? And what influences -- personal and literary -- have made you the writer that you are?

MB: "Let me confess real discomfort talking about my "authorial philosophy" because so much of what I do strikes me as intuitive and situation-directed, even though I agree with the much more dogmatic Flannery O'Connor -- long a personal icon -- that fiction should not hold up evil as good or good as evil. I part company with her, though, in seeming to suppose that the distinctions between the two are hard-edged and self-evident, or unequivocally laid out for study and acceptance in Judeo-Christian scripture. I classify myself after a lot of literal soul-searching (some, I know, would call that phrase oxymoronic) as a Christian, but a skeptical one who often picks up in prayer the whisper of the void. (John Fowles once wrote, "An answer is always a form of death," and I believe that.) In any event, it outrages me to see people treat other people as something less than human for any reason at all: race, class consciousness, religious differences, sex or sexual orientation, intellectual pride, etc. But because the human condition, along with ignorance and/or greed, continually triggers brutality, I have no shortage of outrage, and outrage often fuels my fiction.

...

"Earlier I mentioned outrage as a motivating factor for a lot of my work. The novel Stolen Faces exemplifies an early, rather bitter examination of the same theme, and yet I firmly believe -- as a Christian, as a humanist, and as a writer -- that we have it in our capacity to rectify the unjust situations and attitudes that inevitably produce outrage in the righteous. If the ground under my literary ambition has any solidity, it -- the solidity -- derives from this belief."