Sorensen is a professor of English at the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg and is married to a Lutheran pastor. Sorensen's marriage and long-term relationship with a pastor-husband, combined with her teaching literature in a university makes her the best person to right a book such as this one.
You probably don't think of pastors and clergy being smack in the middle of many television programs, films, or books, but we are there. Actually, according to Sorensen pastors seem to be everywhere! I remember watching the 70's TV hit MASH and seeing Fr. Mulchahey dressed in his battle fatigues and collar hashing it up with Hawkye and Pierce. Or perhaps you've watched the funny British TV program The Vicar of Dibley with a female Anglican priest as the star of the show or the new British comedy-drama Rev with it's drinking and smoking priest as the main character. The list goes on. It's actually quite eye opening when you sit down and make a list of all the central clergy characters that appear in our cultural legacy. Sorensen sifts through all of this and provides her readers with some examples of how clergy are portrayed.
Sorensen provides us with plenty of examples too, perhaps too much at times. Each chapter includes many examples of clergy characters and I found myself pausing to get my bearings. Some of course I've heard of, others, like the main clergy character in William Golding's The Spire, I have not. Like Will Willimon who wrote the Foreward to this book, I too have read many clergy novels and short stories, but after reading Sorensen's book I will be reading a few more really soon.
This is a type of book that seminary students or newly ordained pastors should read. While reading I kept on thinking of pastoral identity or identities, how each generation speaks about or showcases clergy. While reading Anthony Trollope for example one gets a very different feeling for clergy as one would if they would read A Month of Sunday's by Isla Morley or Give Us This Day by Jonathan Tulloch whose clergy are spiritually complicated and often conflicted. Life and faith is not black and white but all too often our culture and media portrays them as such. I cannot for example read a Jan Karon novel, I find her Pastor Tim too saccharine for my tastes, so too with the TV program 7th Heaven. All the characters seem one dimensional to me. I'd much rather watch Rev not just for the laughs, but for the real spiritual struggles that clergy go through.
I highly commend Prof. Sorensen for not only sifting through the thousands of pages of material that went into her research but for writing a succinct and clear analysis of her findings. The Collar is certainly a book that I will keep and will re-read sections of in the near future. I do hope however that Prof. Sorensen continue her work in this area, the field is very large and there is much more to say about clergy, culture, identity, about the role of clergy in the Church but also in the world.
For more information about The Collar click here
For more information about Professor Sorensen click here
