In his book The Catholic Imagination in American Literature, Ross Labrie makes the following important observation about religious writers: Clearly, for the writer who is a believer, the temptation to distort experience in order to accommodate a religious vision must at least be taken into account by both writer and reader, as it must be in the case of any writer whose point of view has been shaped by a powerful ideology. The best writers will be those who test their ideologies against experience, something that Catholic writers, with their incarnational theology and consequent dedication to the world, ought to,…