- Home
- Veritas
- religion
- language arts & disciplines
- literary criticism
- Hide and Seek
As bearers of the divine image, all of us are storytellers and artists. However, few people today believe in truth that is not empirically knowable or verifiable, the sort of truth often trafficked through direct forms of communication. Drawing on the works of Soren Kierkegaard, Benson P. Fraser challenges this penchant for direct forms of knowledge by introducing the indirect approach, which he argues conveys more than mere knowledge, but the capability to live out what one takes to be true.
Dr. Fraser suggests that stories aimed at the heart are powerful instruments for personal and social change because they are not focused directly on the individual listener; rather, they give the individual room or distance to reconsider old meanings or ways of understanding. Indirect communication fosters human transformation by awaking an individual to attend to images or words that carry deep symbolic force and that modify or replace one's present ways of knowing, and ultimately make one capable of embodying what he or she believes. Through an examination of the indirect approach in Kierkegaard, Jesus, C. S. Lewis, and Flannery O'Connor, Fraser makes a strong case for the recovery of indirect strategies for communicating truth in our time.
Benson P. Fraser is the Westminster Canterbury Fellow of Religious Studies and Lifelong Learning at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. His academic and research interests are in the area of media effects, celebrity influence, indirect communication, and entertainment-education. Dr. Fraser is also a partner and consultant in Brown, Fraser & Associates, a communication research firm in Chesapeake, Virginia. He has conducted over one hundred national media studies in more than forty countries.
“Hide and Seek takes us to some strangely familiar, but forgotten, places, reminding us of that old proverb that it is ‘the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings to search them out.’ Fraser generously gives his readers hints, clues, and whispers, in the death of a son or teaching potty-training, that help us discover the treasures of indirect communication to convey the gospel in a loud, busy, and fallen world.”
—Terry Lindvall, Virginia Wesleyan University
“This is an essential book for everyone who cares about communicating wisely and well in our age. Indirect communication gets to the heart of the matter—and to our hearts. Without imagination and story, we all will be spiritually impoverished.”
—Quentin Schultze, Calvin University
“Fraser offers a fresh and practical indictment of the American evangelical Christian penchant for reducing religious truth and religious persuasion to a stilted and superficial formulaism. In offering his dialogic alternative of ‘indirect communication,’ Fraser provides theological and practical insights—grounded in Kierkegaard and reflected in writers like C. S. Lewis and Flannery O’Connor—that should animate more humane and more effective religious discourse and religious witness.”
—Mark Allan Steiner, Christopher Newport University
“If you want to ‘think Christianly’ about communication and subvert worldviews that malign biblical truth, then this book will be your guide. As a wise and gracious insider, Fraser explains how embracing indirect, ambiguous communication opens doors to deep theological conversations with those who are religiously indifferent. This book helps to chart a new evangelistic direction for twenty-first-century digital citizens who recognize the possibility of unassailable truth in the midst of apparent ambiguity.”
—Robert H. Woods Jr., Christianity and Communication Studies Network
Related Titles
