Hey, everyone's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Cassandra Nelson, the author of Theology of Fiction,

which is a subject dear to my heart twice, once for theology and the other for fiction,

and maybe a third time for the theology of fiction.

You know, we have been going through one of the worst cultural periods of my lifetime.

I've found almost everything for the last five or six years has been bad.

Movies, TV, music, almost everything. It doesn't mean there haven't been good works done in that time,

but when you compare it to times when art flowed and just seemed to be abundant, I think it's been a very,

very dry period, and I feel that period is coming to an end. And one of the reasons I think we had such a dry period is because our art got taken over

by philosophy, by wokeness, by propaganda, by small-mindedness.

And I think that as we want to move toward a grander, freer, more flowing art and more flowing

psychology, the question comes up whether we can serve our

creator by creating or whether theology actually weighs creation down as political philosophy

does. So I wanted to talk to Cassandra. Cassandra is a visiting fellow in literature at the

Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and an associate fellow at the University of Virginia's

Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. I really enjoyed the theology of fiction. This is probably

an arc. Let's talk about it just from the beginning. This is actually based on the work of a

remarkable nun named Sister Mariella. Tell us a little bit about her and who she was and why she inspired it.

First, thanks, Drew, for having me on the show. I'm really excited to be here. So Sister Mariela

is, she was a very determined Benedictine Nunn. She is from Wisconsin, as am I. I've jokingly told

audiences here, you know, when we think about where did the mid-20th century American Catholic fiction Renaissance begin, the answer is technically Wisconsin, and we need to take more credit for that.

So Sister Mariela was born in St. Croix, Wisconsin. I think it was 1898, and then she moved to Minnesota, joined the order of St. Benedict,

the sisters in St. Joseph, Minnesota,

...