Could God have taken on the nature of a woman, or the devil, or an ass, or a cucumber, or perhaps a piece of flint? I wonder then how the cucumber would have preached, performed miracles, and been nailed to the cross?
Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat is the story of four ship-wrecked men struggling for survival against forces well beyond their control. Their ship sunk, the cook, the correspondent, the oiler and the captain are forced to float their lifeboat close enough to land to see it, but far enough away to escape the sharp, rough, crushing and ice-cold waves and surf guarding it.
A classical short story titled The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne raises a few very important questions concerning the relationship between religion, theology, ethics, and science.
Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe does incredible justice to the Faust myth in his own Dr. Faustus. Dr. Faustus is a poem (blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter) about a learned, intellectual, German scholar who sells his soul to the devil in effort to gain ultimate wisdom and the ultimate power accompanying it.
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is so much more than an entertaining novel; it is a philosophical and theological fable built upon a conceptual struggle between good, evil, and our God-given and human ability to choose one over the other freely.