Anne Rice’s new poetics

Over the last few days I re-read Anne Rice’s latest book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

After finishing the noteworthy read I was again drawn to the author’s notes in the back (a new one was added to the paperback edition).

She writes:

As Christians, I feel most of us in the creative community must seek to be more than scribes. If Diarmaid MacColloch is right in his immense history, The Reformation, we had plenty of Christian scribes on the eve of that enormous and painful upheaval. But it was the printing press that enabled the great thinkers of that time, both Reformer and Catholic, to transform our “assumptions about knowledge and originality of thought.” I suggest now that we mus see the revolutionary media of our age in the way that those earlier Christians and Catholics seized the printed book. We must truly use the realistic novel, the television drama, and the motion picture to tell the Christian story anew. It is our obligation to tell that story over and over and to use the best means that we have (349-51).*

Rice’s next book in her Christ the Lord series comes out in 2008.

Learn more about her and her writing at www.annerice.com

*quote taken from:

Rice, Anne. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Toronto: Seal Books.