But big theories have a way of riding roughshod over pesky little facts. As a culture we may lack a shared, unifying story, but I don't believe that the old, old story has gone away. What interests me are the ways in which the biblical story continues to be told, even in the strangest of guises. Like the Tar Baby that Brer Fox sets out in the road for Brer Rabbit to encounter, the story can be punched, shattered, inverted, buried, and even trivialized, and like ol' Tar Baby it tends to stick to those who touch it, and never more fiercely than to those who seek to overcome it. Beckett may present us with a world bereft of divine presence, but try comprehending Godot without God.
Popular culture offers examples galore of biblical transmutations.
Among his examples were Andy Warhol's celebrity silk screens, works that are widely derided but which no less a critic than Richard Rodriguez admires as a vestige of Warhol's childhood Catholicism. Warhol, Rodriguez writes, had an incarnational perspective. Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,' Andy Warhol famously said. Fisher also singled out the films of Kevin Smith, including Clerks. There is much to bemoan about the state of our culture, and in a different mood I might complain about the dethronement of the biblical story and the fragmented world we inhabit.