released 4/1/2009
Literary critic and C. S. Lewis biographer Alan Jacobs has enriched our understanding of Christian faith and its consequences with his thoughtful book Original Sin: A Cultural History (2008). The book looks at beliefs about human waywardness and its sources through much of Western history, and how those beliefs have affected literature, politics, music, education, and other spheres of human culture. In this Conversation, Jacobs explains how belief in original sin (in its Augustinian form) offers resources for comfort and community.
60 minutes
PREVIEW
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More to hear . . .
What do Ann Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles have to say about human nature? Critic Alan Jacobs illuminates the deeper moral questions raised by Rice’s first novel, Interview with the Vampire, in which she skillfully presents the struggle between passion and morality, leaving it to the reader to decide for one against the other. Is human life a sacred mystery? Should vampires feel conflicted about their need to kill in order to live? What is the nature of evil? However, Jacobs argues that the subsequent novels in the Vampire Chronicles abandon these questions and also push the grotesque elements of the vampires’ existence to the background, amounting to an uncritical celebration of their physical, financial, and seductive power and freedom. In Jacobs’s view, this makes the story and the vampires themselves much less interesting. However, the success of the series (and the corresponding screen adaptions) speaks to the audience’s enjoyment of fantasies of power without moral constraints. Ken Myers and Jacobs end this Conversation discussing whether or not Rice’s choices spring from cynicism about human nature, as well as what the moral duty of a novelist is when treating significant moral questions.
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