Kate Mossman and Nick Cave at The New Statesman:
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently selected Faith, Hope and Carnage as his New Statesman book of the year. I asked him why he found it particularly moving. “There are various familiar ways of putting together the language of faith and the experience of appalling suffering,” he told me. “Some people simply treat faith as consolation: things look terrible but it’s going to turn out fine. Others say that the experience of atrocity negates all possible reference to the sacred or the divine. Nick Cave refuses both sorts of simplicity. For him, the extremity of pain and loss releases something; it pushes you over the edge of whatever limits you had taken for granted and uncovers a kind of imaginative energy, not always welcome.”
Cave’s book is perhaps unique in drawing connections between faith, grief and creativity. His God “lives here”, Williams told me, “where the God of the Book of Job or of Elie Wiesel or Dostoevsky lives, not consoling but overwhelming and generating. Not a rationale for suffering or an excuse for looking away but a resource for standing in the middle of it all without complete disintegration of mind and heart.”
more here.