Mary Ellen von der Heyden Lecture

Inflections of Belief

Writer Ayana Mathis was raised in a Black evangelical church; her young life was circumscribed by the mores, doctrine, and rituals of faith in a God of contradictions: loving and generous on one hand, inscrutable and wrathful on the other. Mathis left the church long ago, but its influence has never fully dissipated: Religious practice opened into an inclination toward the mechanisms and mysteries of belief and a deep interest in the ways in Western morality, aesthetics, and culture—literature in particular—grapple with religious impulse and logic. Even as mainstream culture moves away from religious affiliation, contemporary literature in the United States continues to engage, implicitly and explicitly, with iterations of religious ideas not dissimilar from those of the tradition in which she was raised. In this talk—more exploration than analysis—Mathis discusses the religious inflections, for better and for worse, in the fiction she reads, writes, and critiques.