Date of Award

5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2024

Degree Name

Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL)

Director

Jerome P. Baggett

Abstract

Secular forces have thoroughly altered the conditions for belief. This thesis explores how three American Catholic novels astutely and soberly reflect how these secularizing forces shape us while offering a hopeful response grounded in Christian wisdom. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, each depicting desperate souls seeking hope on the roads of a pilgrimage, move from loss to discovery, from sin to redemption, from the dying gray ash-heap to life guided by the light of new fires. When read together, their voices share strikingly similar concerns even as they offer fascinatingly contrasting views of how we might move forward in hope.

This project relies heavily on the philosophical work of Charles Taylor, but also incorporates various sociological, historical, and theological voices as a means of fully entering into the world of these novels. Like Taylor, these novels do not count secularity as a total loss, even as each acknowledges that something has ruptured in the culture and in our selves—a modern malaise, a disorientation, a diminishment. Taken together, the novels offer a pluralism of responses to this cultural shift, itself a testament to the many ways of being Catholic in this new secular epoch. And yet each summons a similar story of hope that offers fresh perspectives on ancient faith: a sacramental imagination to break through the altar of rationalism, a plea for true community to counter our rampant, lonely individualism, and a fervent belief in redemption, that is, an expression of our desire for holiness amidst our sin and despair. Each novel also invites us to find our own story in their pages so that we too might recognize how we have been shaped by secularity and still seek a way forward with hopeful hearts.

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