Karen Swallow Prior / Life, Literature, & God

Karen Swallow Prior is a Reader, Writer, and Professor in that order, which was discussed in this conversation along with the power of language, the Word becoming flesh, the connection of imagination with logic and reason, empathy, trauma, the theodicy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and love being the center of our conversations. Karen also shares about getting hit by a literal bus and how she grew in her understanding that her life is in God’s hands.

QUOTES

“We express our sense of ourselves and our experience through language and even before we express it, we understand it that way.”

“Language helps us interpret our experiences…what stories we tell ourselves or what we tell other people about what happened to us. It's an interpretive frame for the rest of our lives.”

Regarding the Word became flesh: “To think about words as symbols and even that idea is also a metaphor but also literal… I can’t even understand it on a literal level but the possibilities and the implications are endless and it should shape everything that we think and we do.”

“What I’m trying to understand better about God… is how we relate to God through the church and in the church that is so imperfect and fallen…”

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