Monday, January 10, 2005

One of the difficulties with the Christian fiction market is that publishers seem to have focussed themselves on a small subset of the Christian population. It is fine to target books for those Christians who enjoy the cloistered, fifties era sort of book that contains nothing that might cause any disturbance in perfection as imagined. However, I suspect the majority of Christians do not fit into that small subset and that the Christian publisheres are simply missing that market altogether. A Christian publisher is unlikely to bring out a book like Gibson's, The Passion, or the movie Bruce Almighty, and yet both movies appeal to Christians. But because of the violence, or the "bad language" no Christian publisher would dare touch them. Innovation, cutting edge, new, trend setting are not words that are commonly used for the current Christian publishing world. Instead, they mostly play catchup and immitate. Which is odd, given that Christianity historically was radical in its origins, dangerous, and contributed much to human civilization. Little that actually impacts the culture, or changes the culture, seems to come from the Christian world now. Where today is the great art, literature, poetry and music that we used to produce that changed the way the world did things? It seems no longer to come from the Christian community, sad to say.

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