#fictional man as having interiority and depth but struggle to see that in any fictional woman then it adds to the things society is already

[rpgsandbox]

When humanity falls, when nations and authorities collapse, only the most basic human bond remains – family. While the world burns, the powerful industrial and financial dynasties Warburg, Zubov, Kruger, and Kilgore form a covenant called Elysium, after the meadows of eternal Spring of Greek mythology. Deep down in the bedrock, they build the enclave named Elysium I, designed to weather the long atomic winter.

Decades later, after the devastating Enclave Wars, Elysium I is a gilded prison, a lonely outpost in a sea of quiet destruction. Within the enclave’s dim halls, fear and suspicion grow unchecked. The Houses turn on each other, and after a violent confrontation, the heads of the four ruling Houses create a force of judicators, with the authority to strike against anything that threatens law and order in the enclave.

You are one of these judicators. Alongside agents from the other Houses, it is your duty to investigate any misdeeds. But never forget that your strongest loyalty is always towards your family. You are the true heirs of doom. The enclave is in decline, and you must struggle to ensure that your House gains influence over the dwindling resources that remain. When humanity sets foot on the surface again, it will be your House that leads the way into the new dawn. Your family.

This is the third major expansion to Mutant: Year Zero, the award-winning postapocalyptic tabletop roleplaying game by Free League Publishing.

But Mutant: Elysium is no mere supplement - it stands on its own and can be played as a complete game in its own right. Get ready for the final fall of humanity!

Note: Mutant: Elysium is a game that tackles some sensitive subject matters. In the game, players represent the ruling Houses that control the Elysium I enclave. The players start the game in positions of power, and a part of the challenge of the game is how to handle that authority when society starts to unravel around the player characters and they find themselves on the wrong side of history. This game does explore potentially sensitive themes, but it's not trying to make any political point.

Mutant: Elysium tells the origin story of the enclave humans, seeing themselves as the last torchbearers of human civilization. The four Houses of Warburg, Zubov, Kruger and Kilgore struggle for power in the Elysium I enclave, oblivious to a rising power that threatens to end their reign forever.

The expansion, which also introduces non-mutant humans as a playable class in Mutant: Year Zero, includes:

New rules for creating and playing enclave humans, including their web of contacts with rich and powerful allies. The book includes all the rules you need to play!

A detailed description of Elysium I, the mother of all Elysium enclaves, including a beautiful full-color map.

The complete campaign Guardians of the Fall, that will settle the final fate of the enclave. The campaign incudes unique game mechanics that give the players themselves control over the four Houses of the enclave, thus partly controlling the events of the campaign.

An overview of how the enclave humans can adapt to life in the Zone, and join the mutants, animals and robots of Year Zero, Genlab Alpha and Mechatron!

The cover image of Mutant: Elysium is painted by the acclaimed scifi artist Simon Stålenhag, known from his amazing Tales from the Loop artbook. The interior art is made by the skilled Reine Rosenberg, who has been the lead interior artist for Mutant: Year Zero from the very beginning.

Worried about backing a Kickstarter with Christmas approaching? We have you covered! We aim to finish a Beta PDF of the game and send it to all backers before Christmas Day! So, why not let the Mutant: Elysium be your Christmas gift for yourself or a scifi-loving friend? We expect to ship the printed game in April.

Mutant: Elysium is a full game in its own right, but if you’re new to the Mutant: Year Zero universe there has never been a better time to get started!

You can get the Mutant: Year Zero Starter Bundle at a discounted price as a reward in this Kickstarter, and most previous products in the Mutant: Year Zero line are available as addons.

Mutant: Year Zero is the latest version of the classic Swedish tabletop roleplaying game Mutant, first published in 1984. Mutant: Year Zero was published in 2014, and was an instant hit. Watch the release trailer here. Mutant: Year Zero was named Best RPG at UK Games Expo 2015 and it was awarded a Silver ENnie for Best Rules at Gencon 2015.

The first expansion for Mutant: Year Zero was Mutant: Genlab Alpha, telling the story of the mutant animals, released in 2016. The second expansion was Mutant: Mechatron, launched earlier this year, introducing the robots into the Mutant universe.

Praise for Mutant: Year Zero:

“Mutant: Year Zero blew me away on a personal level. I did not know of its existence, and suddenly I realise that I am holding a masterpiece, probably the best post-apocalyptic game on the market.”

-RPG.Net Playtest Review

“The book and supporting products are high quality and it uses unique, quirky mechanics that really bring its themes of desperate survival to the forefront.”

-The British Fantasy Society

“If you are into post-apocalypse RPGs you definitely should give Mutant a chance!”

-Stargazer’s World

Mutant: Elysium includes several more roles to play, introducing them to the overall Mutant: Year Zero setting. Here's one example - the Investigator. Description:

They say that Elysium I is the paragon of society. The type the world will be modeled after once humanity returns to the surface. But you know better. On the enclave’s underbelly, behind the polished facade of the Houses and in the depths of the tunnels bloom dark dealings, corruption, and violence. It is your job to reveal the criminals for what they are, and bring the truth to light. You are an Investigator.

The four ruling Houses of the enclave and their power struggle is the core of Mutant: Elysium. This is how the four houses present themselves:

To be a Warburg is to build and create. You make sure that food is always on every table, that materials are available when repairs need to be carried out, that new goods are manufactured, and that the energy the enclave needs is produced. Without House Warburg, Elysium will stand still.

House Zubov is Elysium's first and last line of defense against any enemy. Loyalty, pride, and justice are words you live by. Everyone knows that you always follow orders and are ready to make the difficult decisions sometimes needed to combat threats to the enclave.

For a Kruger, life is a blend of enjoyment and laziness, refinement and creativity. You provide Elysium with the pleasures, culture, history, and art at your disposal. Celebrations and entertainment, decadence and tradition – all are mixed in the whirl of impressions that is your House.

To belong to House Kilgore is to be an explorer, a researcher or scientist seeking answers or even new questions. It was a Kilgore who created the first xenogenetic creatures and took the decisive steps to combine man with machine. There is power in knowledge, of course. And with every new discovery you make, the greater your House’s influence grows.

Free League is a Swedish publisher dedicated to speculative fiction in various forms. We publish games, art books and novels set in strange and wondrous worlds. Our first English-language RPG, the post-apocalyptic Mutant: Year Zero, was awarded a Silver ENnie for Best Rules in 2015. The Tales from the Loop RPG, based on the retro scifi universe created by Simon Stålenhag, won no less than FIVE Gold ENnies at Gencon last year, including Best Game and Product of the Year.

Read more on our website.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, December 13 2018 8:00 PM UTC +00:00

Website: [Free League Publishing] [Modiphius Entertainment]

[glitterysummerkitty]

Dr Bombshell & Mr Hollywood

Please check Master List for direct links to the chapter

Chapter 12

         Candice didn’t need the GPS to know that they were nearing the restaurant. She and Mabel had been frequenting this place since their days together at New York University, where they had completed their doctorate degree together. The Red Dragon was a cosy, well established eatery whose owners Mr and Mrs Zeng have been serving the students and residents of the Greenwich Village for nearly twenty years now. They are a lovely pair, who were always warm and friendly towards their patrons. On those glorious end of term, when stressed out students would be buried deep in their books, the Zeng’s would always close late and even post their closing time their kitchen would remain available and students could call the restaurant, at any time to order food.

      Candice had always adored them and sought comfort in the fact that she would at least get to meet them tonight. The Red Dragon was her comfort nest away from home, one could say.

      As Claire drove them to their destination, she did think about how unfair it was for her to change the destination at the last moment. Their original plan had been to meet Naomi at Central café but she had changed it to the Red Dragon after careful consideration. One would point out that Candice had almost a week to consider it but with each passing day Candice had found herself growing fickle, her mind vacillating between wanting to meet and not wanting to meet.

      Nobody, except Melanie, could comprehend her anxiety about the whole meeting. There was a reason why Candice’s friend circle didn’t extend much beyond her Mabel and her sister. Only recently she had come to be a little more comfortable around Dave and that was, essentially, because she was forced to share an office with him.

      People, in general, made her nervous and the prospect of having to meet someone for the first time always left her nerves shattered. What was Candice so afraid of? People being cynical, hypocritical, judging unfairly when their own lives couldn’t be cited as an example in an ‘A complete Guide to How to lead a perfect life’, if there was one. Ironically, Candice met more of such people in the place she would least expect to find any- the Church.

      Naomi had no reason to judge her. Maybe her book but not her? The judgement of her book wouldn’t be a reflection of judgement of own self, or would it be? Writer’s tended to allow a part of themselves, consciously or unconsciously, to slip into the pages, into their characters. Hence, there was always this apprehension they faced that, maybe, they might have allowed, unknowingly or knowingly, something more of themselves to escape the reeking depths of their own personal Tartaurus and made itself known to the world, a part of them, that should never feel the light of day against it and thereby, giving the imperious world the power to judge unfairly what they would never begin to grasp fully.

      Candice tapped her feet nervously and fidgeted with the hem of her suede skirt. They were literally only two blocks away from their destination. The very familiar sight of the flashy sign of ‘Joe’s Watering Hole’ it’s neon coloured lights flashing into the night sky sent unpleasant tingles in her stomach. ‘Maybe this is a very bad idea and I ought to turn around right now!’, she thought to herself and curled her fingers against the palm of her hands.

“Candice. Relax. Please. Everything is going to be perfectly fine.”, Candice sensed a mild irritation in Claire’s voice as she re- assured the blonde for possibly the millionth time that week. A part of Candice felt bad for Claire while the other part was mad at her agent for not understanding why she was panicking.

“I know. But I just can’t stop thinking that this is a very bad idea. What if she doesn’t like my views or my ideologies? What if she wouldn’t want to waste another moment of her life on this book and then all of this will be over. There would be no more e- mails from ‘An Avid Reader’.”, Candice mumbled. Claire turned into the parking lot and as she did she, very discreetly, widened her eyes in exasperation and then schooled her features to profession mode before pulling the gear.

“First of all, I spoke to Naomi personally and she sounded excited and very much interested. Second of all, I don’t think that a woman of such importance would have flown across the country in such a hurry to meet you if she didn’t see something in the story. You want to over- think about something, think about that.”, Claire went for her skull cap which she had placed on the dashboard and wore it before stepping out into the drizzling night. The petite woman with her jet black hair let lose, was glad that it wasn’t pouring any longer like it had been all morning.

      Candice frowned as she stepped out of the car and put on the fedora cap over her head. Claire had a point but it wasn’t enough to satisfy her irrationality. Anxiety and fear were never rational.

“Ok then. I will try to be calm.”, she grumbled as she trudged alongside Claire, who seemed to have an unusual skip in her step today and why not?

      The struggling agent seemed to have finally found her golden egg. Candice was a brilliant writer with a very out of the box thinking. Maybe rough around the edges, but that was alright considering the young blonde wasn’t trained to be a fiction writer. Claire had read some of her short stories. They were absolutely brilliant. A few were crime/suspense and a few were horror or mystery. Claire had first been very intrigued by them when Melanie had first sent them to her but when she met Candice personally for the first time she had been left baffled by the seemingly sweet, soft spoken girl who wrote stories of such dark themes. One would expect such a girl to write stories about life being all about rainbows, fluffy clouds and happy endings. After a few meetings, thou, the gnawing questions were somewhat answered when Candice revealed to her, bits of her past.

      Her past... Reminded of it, Claire felt guilty and looked at Candice as she chewed on her bottom lip, that were swollen already since the blonde had been doing that all day.

“Candice.”, she said silently.

“Hhmm”

“Everything’s alright. I am here for you.”, she promised. Candice looked down at her agent and saw real compassion and something akin to pride.

“Thanks.”, she mumbled as the all too familiar heat began to spread along her cheeks.

“Candice!”, came a nasal voice as soon as the duo stepped in. “Dishi! Come look who’s here.”

      Marie’s excitement attracted other patron’s, at the restaurant, attention making an already antsy Candice to want to pull into the shadows but she pushed her chest slightly forward and tilted her chin marginally up and walked towards their host, Marie Zeng.

      When a short, lumpy man with a prominent limp on his left leg stepped out the large kitchen double doors, only then did Marie let go of Candice from her bear hug. The warm gush of air emerging from the kitchen engulfed the group.

“Candice. Is that you?”, Dishi Zeng was still wiping his hands on a cloth as he walked towards the group. He pulled Candice into a hug and Candice had to slightly bend down to receive him. Dishi was a couple of feet smaller than his pair. They were one of those rare pairs who didn’t make a lot of fuss about each other’s height.

“It’s been so long. So good to see you.”, he said, while his shrewd eyes assessed the woman standing next to Candice.

“It’s nice to see you both as well. This is my friend Claire. Claire, this is Marie and Dishi Zeng. They have been running this hotel for the past twenty years.”, Candice introduced.

      As they interacted some more, with Marie complaining about Dishi’s ever piling waistline, Candice began to feel a little better. The weight of the whole reason, why she was here seemed to lighten a bit in the warmth of the familiar surroundings and Zeng’s.

      Thankfully, Marie and Dishi had put Candice well back in the spacious, L- shaped dining area. Candice sipped at her water and looked around nervously, anticipating the elderly woman.

 “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”, Jake held an umbrella, protecting himself and his mother from the mild drizzles. The umbrella was totally unnecessary, as Naomi had pointed out, but Jake still held it over them.

      He eyed the restaurant dubiously. From the outside it looked just like any other regular establishment but Jake didn’t like it. Or more particularly he didn’t like the last moment change of the venue. Or maybe he just didn’t like this whole idea of his mother planning to meet a faceless author. Jake had tried to look up Lynne Brooks and came up with zilch except for the record of her book and a website of the same. Even the website hadn’t been able to tell much about Lynne Brooks and there weren’t any pictures of her. Not a single one. The whole thing screamed shady to Jake and he didn’t like not knowing what his mother was walking into.

      But Naomi was stubborn. She shooed Jake away and mischievously chastised him for fussing over her as if she were child. Naomi checked her wrist- watch and saw that she was ten minutes late. She hated being late.

“Besides you are already catching people’s attention.”, she quickly placed a kiss on his cheek and walked into the restaurant.

“Ok. Call me. I will come pick you up. And keep your phone in your hand. And don’t...”, Jake would have gone on to recite even more instructions had his mother cared enough to stop and listen. He sighed and just as he saw a group of teenagers approaching him he dashed off towards his car.

      Naomi was met by a cheerful slim and tall woman at the front of the restaurant. Upon mentioning Lynne’s name, she informed that they had already arrived and ushered the elderly lady to the back of the restaurant. With some fascination Naomi admired the interior of the restaurant.

      One look from the outside, no one would have guessed how lovely it would be on the inside. It had just the right amount of lights, with a more sublime Chinese music floating in the air. The simple white washed walls were decked with several photographs. Some looked very old while some looked more recent. Naomi guessed, from the prominent NYU t- shirts and hoodies sported by most in the photos, that they were the many students through the years. She could see in the photos, how much the people owning this place adored the students and vice versa. As she followed the lithe Chinese woman, she wondered if Lynne Brooks was an alumni of NYU.

      Naomi had been searching a fairly recent looking photo wandering if Lynne was in one of these when Marie, as the woman had introduced herself at the reception, came to stop before a table and Naomi turned her attention away from the photos. A petite woman with jet black hair stood up confidently with a beaming smile.

“Ms Achs. It’s such an honour to be finally meet you in person.”, the woman said as she extended her hand forward, which Naomi took in hers immediately. “I am Claire.”

“Oh hello Claire. It’s so nice to meet you too.”, she said and turned to look for the woman she had been wanting to meet.

      For a moment Naomi forgot about everything as she stared at the woman, who stood before her meekly. Her eyes swept from the flowing golden ringlets that framed her enigmatic face to down to her near to perfection figure. The woman before her was, for lack of better words, stunning.

“I am assuming you are Miss Brooks.”, she finally spoke and pulled her into a hug. Why she did that she didn’t know and so did the poor woman, who very awkwardly returned the hug.

      Soon they settled in and their host Marie rushed off to get her drink. All the while Naomi couldn’t stop staring at the gorgeous woman and could barely stop herself from pulling her phone out and calling Jake back to the restaurant. She cussed herself silently for not letting Jake join her when he had offered it.

      While Claire made small talks, the blonde sat quietly sipping at her water and making no more eye contact than necessary. Every time she met Naomi’s gaze, she blushed, gave a small smile and looked away. For some reason Naomi found that endearing.

“So Lynne... Can I call you Lynne?”, Naomi leaned back and took a small sip of her own water.

“Actually Ms Achs I have to tell you something.”, she began and Naomi carefully set the glass back on the table. That voice! Smooth like silk, sweet and soothing as honey, soft and pleasant to listen to.

“What is it dear.”, she coaxed as the young woman looked extremely nervous.

“My name... I mean Lynne Brooks is my pen name. My real name is Candice.”, she replied. Naomi didn’t understand the nervousness. There was nothing wrong in that.

“Oh. That’s alright. Besides, the name Candice sounds more apt to such a beautiful girl as you, if I say so.”, she said. Marie set a glass of Cosmo and then proceeded to take orders.

“So Candice, tell me something about yourself. Are you originally from New York?”, she asked once Marie left.

“No. Actually I am from S--”, Candice stopped herself and looked alarmed. Naomi frowned.

“She’s from Chicago originally.”, Claire smoothly covered for the blonde and Naomi looked between the two.

“Yes. That’s right.”, Candice spoke up and gave a smile. Naomi knew that the smile was to cover something up but didn’t dwell on it.

“Wow! You are a long way from home. What made you chose NYC?”, she continued.

“I moved here to do my PhD from NYU.”, her reply was short and didn’t give much details. Naomi could also notice how much effort the young woman took to answer the questions more carefully.

“Oh. That’s great! So you have a PhD in Creative Writing?”, she asked curiously. Seductively beautiful with brains. Candice couldn’t be single, could she be?

“No.”, there was that blush again. Was she embarrassed? Why? “Clinical Nutrition. I am actually a Nutritionist by profession.”

“Wow! That’s great. Wait so... You aren’t a professional writer?”, Naomi was more curious and fascinated.

“No. I started writing as I was very passionate about it. I never really thought I would actually publish one until I met Claire.”, Naomi could see the spark of enthusiasm enter her mesmerizing blues as she spoke about writing. She truly was passionate, nobody could fake that, Naomi decided.

      After she made this observation, Naomi steered her conversation more to that direction, asking her more and more about her other works. Slowly Candice had loosened up and was slowly opening up, which was good to see. Every new thing she learnt made her more fascinated.

      By the end of the meal Naomi had made up her mind about two things. She was going to make this book into a movie and also Candice was the sort of woman that Jake needed by his side. But, even as she thought these things in her mind, out loud she said,

“Well Candice. I am somewhat convinced by your ideas but I still would like to think over it a little before I come to a final decision. Why don’t we meet for dinner tomorrow night at my place and I can let you know of my decision then.”

[oosteven-universe]

Strange Skies Over East Berlin #1

Strange Skies Over East Berlin #1 Boom! Studios 2019 Created & Written by Jeff Loveness Illustrated by Lisandro Estherren Coloured by Patricio Delpeche Lettered by Steve Wands     Herring is a disillusioned American spy stationed on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, struggling with his role in a Cold War that seems to have no end. But when he's sent on a mission behind enemy lines to infiltrate East German intelligence, he soon learns the Soviets have a secret weapon that could change the tides of the conflict: an alien monster that they don't understand, and can't control. The Soviets are about to learn that they’re not in charge of the monster – it’s already in their minds and has twisted them to its will. Now Herring must find a way to understand the impossible – before it transforms him into a monster unlike any other.     Well I wasn't quite sure what to expect with this but I am here to tell you that it is so much more than I could have hoped for! I love a good spy take and when you take that and put in the East German setting before the wall came down and then just for shits and giggles add in some science fiction well I am chuffed. The way that Jeff has gone about telling this is pretty damn spectacular and combines elements of Mad Men and X-Files to create this extremely unique offering.     The story & plot development that we see here is really something special. I like the way that information is revealed and how ambiguous everything appears and while the opening is pretty spot on with what might have been going on back then it doesn't clarify anything for the reader. Instead it makes you desire to keep reading to see just what the hell is going on here and before you know it your knee deep in quicksand and don't care. The character development is equally as slippery and since we're dealing with spies that's the way to go about it. Throw the pacing into this and the revelations, twists and turns this book takes and you've got yourself one heck of read going on.     The ebb & flow of the book is sensational and while this isn't a day by day kind of tale that they sleep and wake or it's days later doesn't harm how we view the story. Never do we feel like we've missed anything important also I have to say that amount of narration that we get makes complete sense in terms of who the characters are.     I love the interiors here. The linework is gorgeous it has this really interesting quality to it that just seems ethereal. How the lines are there grow softer then disappear and in some cases to see how images reflect in water or just off the street is stunning. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a stupendous eye for storytelling. The way we see the composition inside the panels and how backgrounds are utilised created scale and depth perception is almost sensual. The colour work here too is just beyond belief as we see the colours and their hues and tones being utilised to create shading and shadows enhances everything giving this an almost romantic feel. ​     Everything about this feels amazing to me. There are very few times when you feel lost or confused and that's extremely nice to see. We more often than not see films and books where the spy is like James Bond with gadgets galore and fights like a lifelong trained martial artist so to see a more realistic approach and to have it work so damn well makes me so very happy. It is long past time we started to tell stories that feature the mind and man that made the fantasy possible. This may be one of the best things you'll read this week.  

[theconservativebrief]

Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household in Michigan by parents who, at one point, believed the apocalypse was imminent. In fact, the family stored up so much nonperishable food in the event of the end of the world that they ended up subsisting for months on “colorless suppers of dried meat and powdered mashed potatoes,” refusing to admit their error.

O’Gieblyn writes about her upbringing, and the influence of religion in her life, in the 15 essays that comprise her debut essay collection, Interior States, which comes out this week. Diverse in subject — in one essay, she writes about the way critics of Alcoholics Anonymous are uncomfortable with its spiritual character; in another, she analyzes a theme park devoted to biblical creationism — the writings are consistently, exquisitely thought-provoking. In all, the collection of essays is at once challenging and lyrical, and portrays a nuanced, complicated look at faith, secularism, and evangelical culture in 2018.

While O’Gieblyn writes, frequently and movingly, of losing her faith in adulthood, her criticisms of evangelical culture and Christianity are filled not with polemic but with yearning: a spiritual and moral hunger for what Christianity could and should have been, and the “missed opportunities” for faith in a capitalist, secular age.

I spoke with O’Gieblyn about American evangelicalism, her own faith, and her process. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Tara Isabella Burton

In a lot of your essays, you talk about different elements of what you call your “deconversion” experience, out of a quite extreme form of evangelical Christianity. Can you tell me a bit more about your faith journey?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I was raised in a fundamentalist home in Michigan. I was homeschooled until 10th grade. And when I was 18, I went to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which is a very small, very old, conservative Christian college founded by Dwight L. Moody in the 19th century. And it was while I was there — while I was studying theology and really getting in depth into the Bible for the first time in a way that I hadn’t as a child — that I started contending with a lot of problems. Particularly the theology surrounding hell, predestination, the problem of evil, that I didn’t really think about in any depth until I was at that school.

I was also driven by the cultural problems within Christianity — a lot of the hypocrisy in that culture, the way that women were regarded. So I ended up leaving Moody after two years of a four-year program, and spent many years still struggling. I didn’t call myself an “atheist” when I left. It wasn’t a clean break. But writing was one of the ways that helped me make sense of these questions and forge a new identity. All of my essays are in different ways trying to make sense of that experience.

Tara Isabella Burton

Something I find really striking about your work is that while you absolutely do criticize much of the faith tradition you come from, you’re also similarly critical of a secular world (and media) that fails to understand that faith tradition. Throughout your essays, you reserve harsh words for magazine articles that refer, say, to the idea that the Western world “stopped believing in hell” sometime around the European Enlightenment, or scholars who refer to Satan as an “antiquarian relic of a superstitious age,” as biblical scholar Elaine Pagels did. What does the secular world get wrong about evangelicalism and fundamentalism?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I think the thing they get wrong most often is that it’s a very simplistic worldview and that it depends upon wishful thinking and faith. Faith is obviously a big part of Christianity, and a lot of believers do defer to that, no question. But the type of Christianity I grew up in was a very intricate worldview that depended upon rational principles, that functioned within that world sort of separate from secular rationality. So you know we were taught apologetics as children. We were taught to defend our faith, to use Scripture as evidence to respond to these common attacks on Christianity.

When I was at Moody Bible Institute, the intellectual culture there was very intense and academically rigorous, even though we were studying the Bible from a literalist point of view. We weren’t studying liberal theologians. It was a very insular world. But we read the Bible with a kind of attention and depth that I think would be familiar to academics. It’s hard to explain that to a secular audience because a lot of the things we were studying in depth sound insane to a secular audience. We’re talking about how to prove that the Earth was actually created in six days based on all of these theologically arcane methods. But it did function within its own insular world as a system of rational thought.

Tara Isabella Burton

That makes a lot of sense within the paradigm of your work, which treats religion and the ideas behind it extremely seriously, and with depth, even when you’re criticizing it. And at times, you still see the value in it. In your essay on the differing ways hell has been treated in contemporary Christianity, for example, you talk about how there is a potential within the narrative of hell to find “a sober counternarrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue.” What elements of your religious upbringing would you like to see preserved, and why?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

When I was writing many of these essays, my biggest criticism of the church is that it didn’t provide an antidote to capitalism. And it could have! I grew up in the 1990s during the megachurch era. There was still this idea that they could compete with secular youth culture. I have an essay in here, for example, about the phenomenon of Christian music, and how a lot of Christian artists in the 1990s were trying to compete with bands, which were on MTV, to compete with whatever was popular and add a Christian “twist” and sell whatever was popular. It leads to an inauthenticity.

There was a missed opportunity to offer an alternative to this culture of consumerism, of capitalism, that a lot of us were already disillusioned with, and the church was doing the exact same thing. It wasn’t providing an escape. It was marrying the culture.

I talk about this in my piece on hell. In the 2000s, people stopped talking about hell to appeal to a larger audience. Pastors started running churches like a business. They did market research and found that hell made people uncomfortable. People didn’t want to hear about hell, or how they were sinners. But the gospel message doesn’t really work if there’s no stakes, nothing to be saved from. And I think there was a missed opportunity to reinterpret hell — as a metaphor for evil, for these difficult experiences that people go through, like addiction or war.

Tara Isabella Burton

Let’s home in on that a little bit more. In Interior States, you talk a lot about the evangelicalism of the late ’90s and early 2000s. In the past few decades, how have you seen that world change? Where has evangelicalism gone in America?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

It’s become much stranger, I think, than it was even when I was a Christian. It’s interesting watching the movement evolve now, as an outsider. With the Trump presidency, and the overwhelming amount of white evangelicals who voted for him — that was an incredible disillusionment for me. The narrative of when I grew up at school during the Bush years was, “He’s one of us; he’s a good man.”

And then to see the church do a total 180 and support someone like Trump, who is not a Christian, who is an adulterer, who totally goes against all their values — it makes it clear that [Christian politics] were about cultural dominance, Christian nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. I think the Trump presidency sort of revealed the extent to which maybe Christian politics were always about those issues.

And there’s been a rift, too, within evangelicalism. I think a lot of Christians, particularly younger evangelicals, have become really disillusioned with that label, or are calling themselves “ex-evangelicals” or gravitating toward mainline Protestant denominations that are more concerned with things like social justice.

Penguin Random House

Tara Isabella Burton

Let’s talk a little bit more about your own work and your process. In your essay “On Subtlety,” you talk about how your experience of faith informs your writing on a narrative as well as content level. You talk about how a kind of sense of meaningfulness pervading the world, and a compact of trust between a narrator and a reader that mirrors that between God and creation, made you more prone to writing “subtle” pieces, where you trust the reader to get it. Can you expound further on how your faith tradition informs your writing as well as your subject matter?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I actually started off as a fiction writer. And one of the criticisms I always got in workshop with my work was that I wasn’t being explicit enough — that I was forcing the reader to make connections that I should have been making as a writer. And I’ve gotten criticism even as a nonfiction writer. It started to seem like it was larger than a craft problem — like it was actually a problem with the way I looked at the world.

When I was growing up in the church, there was this whole narrative of “you have to pay attention. God can speak to you in mysterious ways.” And you have to be careful in calling attention to those connections. Christians were always looking for signs, like, “God is speaking to me through the words of a popular song.”

There’s also this interpretative vigilance that we were taught as children. We were taught that the secular world was kind of this unified ideology that was trying to dupe us, and we had to deconstruct these messages and be vigilant guarding ourselves against it. And I think that was a useful education in a lot of ways, because it taught me critical thinking.

Also, there’s a way in which that idea of religious mystery is something that has informed my writing. I do sometimes think of writing as a very mystical process. A lot of writers do. Sometimes you don’t understand the way your subconscious works — the way the ideas rise to the surface. It can feel like a religious experience at times.

Original Source -> How Christianity can be an “alternative” to consumerism

via The Conservative Brief