John Wilson's Prayer for Kurt Vonnegut

John Wilson, the editor of Books and Culture, was on IWU's campus today as part of our "Celebration of Scholarship" extravaganza. He had been on the road and hadn't heard yet that Kurt Vonnegut, who was actually from Indianapolis, had died.

There were two things about Wilson's comments that I found striking.

The first was Wilson's sense that despite the virulent anti-theism of Vonnegut and others like Salmon Rushdie, they could not have given birth to such art apart from the common grace that we all enjoy as humans made in the image of God. He seemed to think that their creations reflected the image of God in them, even though the content they created was sometimes vile.

The second was even more striking. He prayed for Vonnegut, sorta. He made some prefatory remarks about how much we are uncertain of, and mentioned that there was one stream of Christianity that believed a person's eternal destiny might be changed even after death. He did not think the evidence for this was ultimately very good.

But then he prayed. He did not exactly pray for Vonnegut, as I remember. But he thanked God for His great mercy, in fact, had to stop in the middle of the prayer to regain his composure.

It was a profound prayer to me, even though I remember hardly a word from it.