Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death, and the Things that Matter

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

Douglas Todd, religion and ethics writer for the Vancouver Sun,
discusses “life’s big religious and moral questions” with
prominent North American writers and artists in the 28
interview–profiles that make up this gracefully written and
thought-provoking volume.

Todd divides his subjects into four general categories. “The
Atheists” consist of Mordecai Richler, W.P. Kinsella, Bill Reid, Jane
Rule, and Robert Munsch. “The Doubters,” or agnostics, include John
Irving, Evelyn Lau, and Douglas Coupland. Among the “The New
Ancients” (those who “maintain some loyalty to organized faith”)
are Bruce Cockburn, Lynn Johnston, and Robertson Davies. Included in the
largest group, “The Emerging Mystics,” are Timothy Findley, Peter C.
Newman, Robert Bly, Sylvia Fraser, Loreena McKennitt, Farley Mowat, Alex
Colville, and Carol Shields.

Acute differences are evident not only between the groups, but also
between subjects within the same group. Some of Todd’s “creative
souls” defy expectations. The cynical, right-wing, and
“disturbing” W.P. Kinsella, for example, is the polar opposite of
the whimsical characters that populate his fiction. From all his
subjects, Todd elicits deeply felt meditations on subjects ranging from
the meaning of love to life (or not) after death. Carol Shields on
“moments of transcendence,” Farley Mowat on artificial intelligence,
Robertson Davies on Gnosticism and astrology, and Robert Bly on
“ritual space” are among the many special moments captured in Brave
Souls, a book that admirably fulfils its author’s stated intention to
“help [readers] see the world anew.”