The Artist and the Trinity

The Artist and the Trinity aims to create a Christian theology of work based on Dorothy L. Sayers' analogy of the Trinity to the process of artistic creation. Sayers' analogy gives us an account of the person that does not collapse into the atomism of the individual of modern liberal capitalism, but is fully relational. By putting Sayers into dialogue with Alasdair MacIntyre, the book develops a fully Trinitarian theology of work that accounts for the interdependence of human beings, and for the ethical requirements of caring for the weak, the young, and the old in a way that is gender neutral.Dorothy Sayers was one of the bright stars of the Anglo-Catholic literary firmament in England. . . . Among Sayers's great gifts was the ability to show the light orthodox Christian doctrine sheds on both artistic 'making' and the everyday 'doing' for which we need ethics in a workaday world. Christine Fletcher's typically robust yet engaging study succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating for a new generation what Sayers was about. --Aidan Nichols Blackfriars, CambridgeProfessor Fletcher has written in an engaging style about a neglected dimension of the contribution of Dorothy L. Sayers to serious thinking about work (demolishing some myths about gender on the way). Moreover, she confidently displays Sayers's theological versatility in being at once faithful to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, while illuminating it for the meaning of work, so central to the lives of human beings.--Ann LoadesUniversity of DurhamKarl Barth was right: Dorothy Sayers was one of the best and most lucid lay theologians of the twentieth century, especially on that difficult topic of the Trinity. Christine Fletcher has not only given us a book on Sayers that is as clear and as illuminating as the books by her subject; she has also done something more: she has given us a practical theology. This is a book one can actually put to work.--Edward T. Oakes, SJUniversity of St. Mary of the LakeChristine M. Fletcher is Assistant Professor of Theology at Benedictine University, Lisle, Illinois. She is the author of numerous articles on the ethics of work and on Dorothy L. Sayers.