Out of the Dark

In Patrick Pacheco's interview with Tony Kushner--in which Pacheco has the chutzpah to quote longtime nemesis Andrew Sullivan to the voluble playwright--I was struck most by the conclusion, in response to the inevitable question of whether Kushner feels he's "preaching to the converted":

"A great preacher starts with the doubt and uncertainty and skepticism that are the necessary concomitants of faith," he says. "He starts in the scary places, in the places where God is silent, in the places where God seems cruel, in the places where the world is not just and where people are ground to dust by monstrous, even satanic, forces where God doesn't intervene. Or where you ceaselessly betray God in your heart and your actions. You start there and progress toward whatever hope for change and light you can find. It's true of the prophets, it's true of John Donne, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King. And it's true of artists."