Book Review: The Collar: Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film

Abstract

The Collar: Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film. By Sue Sorensen. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2014. xii + 306 pp. $37.00 (paper).Most books on literary criticism rarely live up to the works they discuss, but Sue Sorensen's book The Collar: Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film defies the usual trend. An associate professor of English, Sorensen manages to transcend the usual drudgery of literary dissection and instead presents us with an engaging and thought-provoking work that takes an otherwise dreary topic (the role of clergy in fictional print and visual literature) and makes it interesting. Her Canadian perspective provides a well-positioned vantage point for examining American or British portrayals of clergy: she is outside the smoggy atmosphere that breeds Hollywood homogeny and the grey clouds that inspire London literaries.Sorensen undertook this study because literature about the allows us to explore as lived by individuals, not as stipulated by denominational handbooks (p. 8). Consequently, she writes, Two of my motives for this study are to unpack some of the cultural factors that might make the such a hard sell, and to determine whether literary and cinematic works have been misrepresentative, misleading, or even harmful. I do want this book to be of practical use to the church and helpful for my often beleaguered friends in the ministry (pp. 10-11). Although the second objective seems to be more conceptually valuable to Sorensen than practiced (usually any attention given to the characters with this intention seems pasted on to the literary examination at hand), overall she achieves both goals.Under the deft and engaging writing style of her pen the characters presented in Sorensen s study become alive and interesting. She presents a clear understanding of how to write with an awareness of literary academics yet within the grasp of the average reader, who is (likely) unfamiliar with many of the texts and characters being referenced. She elucidates on each of her chosen clerical examples with great detail, and her linguistic choices provide rich colors and insights into why these characters were chosen as examples. They have vivacity that the average reader might miss when reading the actual texts in which the characters appear, yet Sorensen manages to make their visages appear so clearly that one wonders why these characters are not presented as paradigms more regularly. Further, her study is so wellresearched and has such a wide range of material to examine that one gets the sense that she has read or watched nearly everything ever created that had a pastor, priest, vicar, or other Christian leader in it. She even goes so far as to examine authorial word choices to describe ministers: for the word exemplary usually suggests a example, but could also mean a person or thing that opposes a positive or beneficial application; any understanding of Reverend Primrose in Oliver Goldsmiths The Vicar of Wakefield, Sorensen writes, should have this perspective in mind (pp. 73-74).The Collar is structured around literary archetypes. Each chapter examines clergy who are presented in some homogeneous fashion. There are chapters on clergy as heroes or those who suffer; as counselors and social workers; as truth-telling fools, in the manner of a court jester; as clerical detectives (think Father Brown or Brother Cadfael); and as clerical disasters who are bad examples of the ruinous madness, mendacity, and devastation (p. …