Uneasy Catholicism: Two Novels of Graham Greene

(1 Credit Hour) · Undergraduate

This Spring’s 1-credit “book club” focuses on two works by the English novelist Graham Greene: “The Power and the Glory” (1940) and “The End of the Affair” (1951). As one critic remarked, Greene’s was an “uneasy Catholicism.” His novels present “a landscape filled with lonely, pathetic, and sometimes malevolent characters [who] live as exiles or on the extreme edges of society, conscious of their failure and their betrayals of one another and, often, of their faith in God.” And yet, such “Failure is,” paradoxically, “the one legitimate form of victory in Greene's Novels” for it is in such moments that they meet Him who emptied himself for our sakes and who became poor that we might become rich. As one character confesses, “You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You.” I hope you’ll join us as we explore themes of grace, mercy, hope, and forgiveness in these wonderful novels.