The Grace of Indirection and the Moral Imagination: Learning from William Spohn and Literature

The author mines William Spohn's notion of the grace of indirection as it relates to the potential impact of the arts on the moral imagination. The article moves beyond exposition of Spohn's idea, first, by showing how the grace of indirection is a concept with deep connections to long-standing Christian convictions about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; and second, by offering an extended example of what the grace of indirection might look like relative to a contemporary short story by Tim Gautreaux.