Suggestions for novels about characteristic experiences of religion

[altariel]

The friend of a friend is going to be teaching a comparative religion course at a community college, and has asked for suggestions for reading for the students. Can anyone help? Friend writes:

The intention is to teach the course through literature that shows how religious experience is oriented towards dealing with death. Particularly interested in perspectives from Hindu, Islamic, and Christian (especially Catholic) religious experience...

Further discussion has led to the clarification that the novel need not be "about" death in any obvious sense, but it should give a sense of a religion's characteristic influence on how a character approaches his or her situation. Non-proselytizing works are also high on the list. So far, "Siddhartha" (Hesse) and "The Chosen" (Potok) are on the list, if that helps by way of example.

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Gore Vidal's doorstop novel "Creation". Cracking read, about a man whose travels take him to India, Greece and China, at a time when rather a lot of great religious founders are alive or recently dead at once... He meets Confucius and gets to know him quite well, has some fascinating experiences with Hinduism and, if memory serves, Buddhism, ending up in Greece not long after the death of Socrates. The hero himself is a man of no fixed faith at all, trying to make sense of life and death. It could have been written for that course!

[(Anonymous)]

(Katlinel at work)

These immediately spring to mind for a Catholic viewpoint: Frost In May, The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass, all by Antonia White.

I'll ponder and see if I can come up with anything else.

[crossbow1.livejournal.com]

Were any of C.S. Lewis's christian books novels?

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Yup. There's a trilogy, which gets worse as it goes on (Out of the Silent Planet is quite fun, Perelandra starts well and ends as a long lecture and That Hideous Strength is misogynist rubbish).

[lame-pegasus.livejournal.com]

I highly recomment I heard the owl call my name by Margaret Craven - which shows how a special culture of american indians deals with death (and how a young catholic priest is affected who has to question his own opinions about the matter). The book is extraordinarily good. I read it about 25 years ago for the first time and never forgot it.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

That sounds extremely interesting for things I'm researching at the moment, actually... *wanders of to library catalogue to reserve* Thanks!

[halimede.livejournal.com]

That rec seconded by me. I have a lump in my throat just remembering, and I read it years and years ago too.

My rec, The Fifth Sacred Thing (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553373803/qid=1122586583/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/104-3425878-5243948), which deals with an eclectic pagan perspective. I liked it a lot, but judging by the reactions of other people who've read it, I'm not completely sure it works equally well for people completely unfamiliar with pagan symbolism.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Diary of a Country Priest (the source of the Bresson movie--I don't know who wrote the novel)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (well, OK, that IS about death)
There must be something by Flannery O'Connor that fits the bill

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all these excellent suggestions - I must track down the Rumer Godden myself.

Oddly enough, I just finished Karen Armstrong's memoir the other night; I thought it was very good: the writing was a little artificial here and there, but I thought it was honest and didn't attempt to shock.

I loved The Sparrow; my reading group loathed it.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The novel is both entertaining and thought-provoking. An SF writer dies and goes to what seems to be Hell, which is just as Dante described it. Naturally, being an SF writer, he thinks that it can't really be Hell, but must be being run by aliens of enormous power for some strange purpose of their own. Naturally, this being a novel by Niven and Pournelle, the reader goes along with that assumption too. It gradually becomes apparent that we're wrong.

[hardrada.livejournal.com]

The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James

[kerravonsen]

Well, there isn't a lot in it, but there's touching on death and Heaven in "The Last Battle" (C. S. Lewis, the last Narnia story)
Then there's "The Great Divorce" by Lewis, which isn't so much about death as a fantastical allegory about Heaven, so it's probably not what you want.

Maybe biography is better... like "The Hiding Place" by Corrie Ten Boom.

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

I'll see what else I can think of. It's amazing how quickly my brain can go blank when I set it to a particular task like this. I always manage to think of a dozen appropriate titles well after the need has passed!

[aervir.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure whether this fits your friend's requirements, but spirituality and the different perceptions of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism from the outside perspective of the agnostic English empirical author/the novel's narrator do play a certain role in E.M.Forster's A Passage of India, too.