who's Christian?

[Doug Millison]

Please restate the position you're attributing to me here, what it is you
say you don't agree with, and I'll correct you where you've got it wrong, if
that's the case.

I've been quite clear to state that I don't know if P is a practicing
Christian or religious believer of any stripe.

I think he writes about religion in his novels because religion interests
him. I don't know what people in this forum mean when they say "religious
writer" and I'm not sure that that phrase has any particular meaning other
than the general descriptive, "a writer who writes about religion."  Pynchon
obviously doesn't write "Christian fiction" or religiously-oriented
self-help books, or Christian apologetics, or Christian tracts designed to
convert unbelievers, nor is he a Bible scholar (to mention just a few of the
categories of books that some people write).  But, in his fiction, and in
his non-fiction, he does take on serious questions of religious influence in
culture, he quotes and alludes to Scripture and material from other major
faith traditions.  Lacking a definition of  "religious writer" it's
difficult to understand the bogus objections that have been aired to the use
of this phrase.  

The few biographical facts that we know suggest that P was, as you say,
raised a Catholic. 

-Doug


Terrance 
Do you accept that Pynchon
was in fact baptized, confirmed, a Roman Catholic,  and that
he was a practicing RC? I don't agree with Doug on this. I
do not read M&D or any P novel as the product of a mind that
has 60s post-modern secular eclecticism or  syncretism.