A dis-integrating, unconverted Christian gnosticism gets mistaken for the gospel: it’s a story easy to identify with and profoundly in need of telling–perhaps, not least, in a contemporary art form like the graphic novel. It is about being a kid, a teenager, a young adult, and finding no place in God’s economy to draw pictures, to love a human Christ, or to be a desiring body. It has done for them what many Sunday School classes, unfortunately, have not.īlankets is so effective as a theological entry point because, like Augustine’s Confessions, it is the story of a life which illustrates, in often heartbreaking detail, a movement into and out of the Christian faith alongside a movement into and out of a first romance.

And this book has been important to many people I have known-writers, artists, seminarians, clergy, former Christians-in helping to name and visually recognize some of the deepest matrices of sexual and spiritual yearning in their own lives. But a spiritual autobiography is exactly what he has produced, significantly, I think, in the form of a comic book, a piece of art. His claims to Christianity are only prior claims-the book is in part about his leaving the church-and since his conservative Evangelical upbringing, he has had no active connection with Christianity.

But if Thompson intended his book to be a spiritual autobiography, I am not sure. There is much here to support Coakley’s research, as Thompson is working right in the middle of the mess and drama of his own desire, and like Augustine, finds that this is where the central struggle with God, self, memory, and communion really take place. And it is where the rubber meets the road that God meets us.īut along with Coakley and Augustine, I want to offer a third resource for reflection on the relationships between sex, art, and yearning for God: the spiritual autobiography of American graphic novelist Craig Thompson, entitled Blankets. They are the rubber that always, always meets the road. Imagination and desire play out in our bodies, in our practices, in our histories. It ought, in fact, to make a kind of strong, intuitive sense: sex, art, and relating to God are categories of experience which speak deeply to one another. And to anyone who has read Augustine’s Confessions, or to any artist who has kept an honest journal for any length of time, the connection shouldn’t be so strange.

In Sarah Coakley’s new book, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’, you may not expect a chapter devoted to devotional art, following a chapter of interviews with charismatic Anglicans on prayer, to help drive a thesis on sex.

Blankets craig