Dear Reader,

Toward the end of 2019, the Inklings & Inspiration crew began praying about our scheduled “Dystopia and Longing” theme for our January/February 2020 issue. Around the world, we had seen the hard rise of progressive socialism and the counter rise of nationalism, the power politics, the media manipulation, the cover-ups, the pressure to conform, the suppression of religion and the forced compliance to religion, the growing gap between the privileged and the unprivileged, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the distrust of governments and institutions, the abuse of technology, the abuse of power, and the devaluing of human life—and we wanted to address how these issues play out in art.

But as the impeachment trial got underway and, with it, heavy hitting partisanship, we shied away from a topic we thought was surely rife with landmines. We booted the theme to the end of 2020, hoping to bypass the noise. Little did we know what was coming next.

Like you, our team has endured anxiety, pain, illness, disorientation, disbelief, grief, and anger in these past months. We have pivoted and adjusted. We have changed our business model. We have sought out truth and been confused by it.

But we have also noticed a common thread to the outrage and pain expressed nationwide: the sure expectation for something better than death and destruction and anger and loss. We as the human race have an innate longing for the Good Life, where justice and love, goodness and self-sacrifice, joy and purpose, and community prevail.

None of us want to be the lone survivor. None of us want to win alone. All of us know in our deepest parts that we long for something better. We feel that pull to the Good Life so strongly that we feel entitled to it and rage against any challenges that seem to be stripping it—however we define it—away.

And so despite the challenges of this year of reckoning for our identity, especially the American identity, I offer thanksgiving for the lessons of a pandemic and social upheaval. Because in the midst of suffering, I am discovering this is what it means to be human: to seek after the Good Life with every cell of our being because we know it must exist. Imperfectly, mistakenly, even blindly, we rise up to claim our share in hope.

In this issue, we explore how dystopian fiction teaches us to be human, the neurological need of suffering expressed through the arts, and as a new feature for our Guest Voices section, a Theology in Process conversation about tragedy, redemption, and the artist’s responsibility. I pray that our humble offering will strengthen the hold hope has on you.

The Hold Hope Has on Us

Lessons from Dystopian Fiction

by Kelli Sallman

If you could take a pill that would remove pain and suffering, would you? What about the regulation of crime and violence? If you could control thoughts and wills to short circuit the impulse toward violence, would you take the opportunity to do so? Dystopian literature has for a hundred years capitalized on our temptation to say yes to those questions and others like them. Wildly popular, and especially growing in the young adult category, dystopian sales took a hit with the arrival of our own year of science fiction. As society as we knew it began changing moment by moment in March 2020, who wanted to crack open the pages of another odd, darkly perverse, and possibly post-apocalyptic universe where human survival depends on the wisdom, the moral uprightness, and the sacrificial generosity of others? Who wanted to read a type of story where humans are proven, again and again, to be greedy, power-hungry, short-sighted—and even as heroes, flawed? We were living our own version of that story.

And yet, dystopian literature asks us the same central questions as this year of viral scourge, racial unrest, and governmental showdown: What does the Good Life look like and how do we attain it? Why do death, destruction, loss, injustice, lies, subjugation of people groups, unequal privilege, revisionist histories, and the exercise of strength and force—essentially functions of natural selection in a natural world—shock us and cause us to rail against it? Why do we long for more? Whenever humanity is in charge, we can’t help but think the world should be better than it is.

This Is Your Brain on Suffering

A Neurological Need and a Cathartic Role

by Callie Johnson

If you’ve ever watched a BBC TV show, you know that some writers love to torment their characters (looking at you, Steven Moffat). Sometimes I walk away from a film or a book wondering what the point of the torment was. Did Pierre really need to experience a volcano, hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, and nuclear warfare? Surely just one crisis would have gotten the point across. The question “Why suffering?” is a hard one, both in life and in story. The millennium-old tradition of angsty and sometimes macabre tragedies argues that there is something in suffering-filled stories that calls to the human nature.

As psychology and neuroscience have developed, especially in the last centuries, so has our understanding of how the brain interacts with story. When we encounter story, the experience is active and dynamic. Even the reading of a novel, less visually stimulating than a film or theatric performance, is far from passive. Our interactions with stories that showcase suffering affect us in a unique way. While characters’ suffering shapes and enriches their ability to experience life fully, our experience alongside them changes us, too.

The Responsibility of the Artist

a Theology-in-Process Conversation

with Kelli Sallman, Wes McMillan, and Callie Johnson

Through the chaos and tragedy of 2020, we here at Kelli Sallman Writing & Editing have felt a stirring to pursue conversation. Like you, we long for rational discourse, for a safe space to theorize and guess and sort out our ideas. A place where we can exchange ideas without the vitriol that often suffuses modern discourse. To that end, we are creating “Theology in Process,” a dialogue on what we believe, what we are unsure of, and where the two intersect. We want to start that conversation with you, too. This is a place for ill-formed ideas and undefined theories, a place for doubt and a place to search for truth.

This month, we discussed offshoots of the age-old dilemma, what is the responsibility of the artist? What responsibility do they have to their audience and to their art itself? Looking especially at how we resolve stories and how we express artistic vision, here are some thoughts on what it looks like to be an artist in our ravaged world.

Callie: How much resolution should a story have? Are Christian stories required to end with hope?

This is something I ran into a lot doing theater at a Christian university because the people who come to our shows expect resolution. We’re Christians and God is redemptive, so every story has to be redemptive, right? And so there’s this question, can we be good Christian storytellers and not redeem a character? What does that look like? How is that glorifying to God? When you look at Death of a Salesman, is there redemption there? We performed Doubt; is there redemption there or is there not?

But even for tragedies, depending on how you study them, some people will always find hope even at the end. So is there such a thing as the more tragic tragedies that don’t have any hope? And if so, are the extreme tragedies still glorifying to God, or should we stick to the ones where we can mine a little bit of hope out of them at the end?
Wes: One of the things that I look to is Jonah. That particular story has all kinds of selfishness and tragedy in it. Even when it ended, it didn’t end at all the way we want it to. Or look at some of the prophets in the Bible; they didn’t have the ending we would want them to, yet the overall purpose for what they were doing was, from a theological perspective, fulfilling God’s purpose. And I think we do a disservice when we finish every story positively. We reaffirm the Western culture of storytelling when we constantly say, “Oh look, the hero won, or the bad guy got what he deserved” or that kind of stuff. And that’s a sad part of our culture. We need to reaffirm that not everything is perfect, but in the big picture and in the eternal purpose from a theological perspective, it’s the way God designed it to be.