The Uncomfortable Faith of David Eugene Edwards: Paste Magazine

Matt Fink talked with David Eugene Edwards about his latest Woven Hand project, Consider the Birds for the upcoming issue of Paste. Why couldn't you get this one, Dave? :^)

The gothic-folk master sees himself as doing a pre-evangelistic apologetic work, reminiscent of Flannery O'Conner's take on violence which is worth quoting at length here:

“My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. . . . Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

"The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Still, as his message is an uncomfortable fit for those who don’t share his faith, and his music is anathema to the comparably sterile contemporary Christian music establishment, he now assumes an unusual place in the modern musical pantheon. Rubbing elbows with artists who don’t share his view but have come to similar conclusions on the ethical deficits that define man’s condition, Edwards holds tightly to his idea of the uncomfortable truth. “They can see it. All men can see it,” Edwards says of the ugliness that colors man’s character and leaves him in need of redemption. “Whether they want to spend any time looking at it or not is another story. And I’ve always been drawn to those kinds of people, whether they were Christians or not, like Joy Division, Nick Cave, Tom Waits. There’s not a lot of hope there, but there is truth.”"

"“I feel the responsibility to speak truth, and speak it in love, even though sometimes it’s scary,” he laughs before turning deadly serious. “To evil, truth is harsh. To self, to be selfless is harsh. It’s unnatural and it’s distasteful. Otherwise, it would be easy. But it’s not.”"

Paste Magazine :: Feature :: Woven Hand :: The Uncomfortable Faith of David Eugene Edwards (Page 1)