ASHES TO ASHES

ATTICUS by RON HANSEN (1996) Being on something of a “crusade” of reading and discovering Catholic authors, I have been determined to discover as many contemporary Catholic/Christian writers of realistic fiction as possible. Tolkien, Lewis, Sayers, O'Connor and Percy have been written about elsewhere and are generally considered to be part of the 20th Century Christian writers cannon. But has anyone carried on this tradition? Are there Catholics who still write quality fiction? And are there writers who go outside the confines of a parish or monastery or church to grapple with modern problems of living a life of faith in an increasingly secular world? Writers who are, as I like to call it, “informed by their faith”, are those who bring a Catholic Christian world view to their writing much as Grahame Green and Evelyn Waugh did in much of their writing. While rarely writing directly about the Church and their faith from the inside, nonetheless, their writing was deeply Catholic i