Hey, it's Andrew Clevon.

Welcome to this week's interview.

Today, we're going to talk to a rare bird, a Christian artist.

That's pretty rare in itself, but we're going to talk to somebody even more rare, an extremely

talented Christian artist, Jonathan Peugeot.

Recently on the Friday Andrew Clevon show, I did a segment on deleting Jesus, this persistent

habit among intellectuals, reviewers, filmmakers, some artists of taking Jesus out of places

where he belongs.

Anything from explaining his presence away in the novels of Dostoevsky to denying his

existence and the thinking of the founding fathers, editing them out of biopics like the

one about Johnny Cash or Louis Zampereini.

One place where this happens a lot is in critical readings of William Shakespeare, of course,

one of my heroes, one of any writers' heroes.

The Shakespeare experts, Stephen Greenblatt, once spoke about Shakespeare as a secular writer,

the critic Paul Cantor has tried to tease Nietzschean atheism out of reading the Roman trilogy

by Shakespeare.

But for me, Shakespeare's treatment of religion is a model for how to write as a Christian.

That is, he includes all the Christian truths, he includes Christian believers, but he never

preaches, and he even makes fun of those who preach in a kind of stuffy way.

He allows life to play out the way it actually plays out in the real world with all its tragedy,

reality, grotesque-ery, cruelty, without trimming it to look like one of today's faith-based

movies where Jesus makes everything all right.

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