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Fiction and Religious Education: Be Not Afraid

Abstract This article is the conversion story of a university professor and voracious reader who has always been afraid to incorporate fiction into her classes. It maps her journey from believing that novels and short stories are effective pedagogical tools only when they are in the hands of competent English professors to recognizing the innumerable benefits of including fiction in the enterprise of Religious Education. The author begins with an examination of the catalyst and foundation of her journey and then proceeds to look at some of the relevant scholarship that has helped her to recognize the inextricable connection between the sacramental quality of fiction and the experience of conversion. Finally, the author imagines some ways to include works of fiction into her courses and shows how fiction requires and cultivates ways of reading and thinking that make conversion possible.