Scandalous Truths

Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began to take her loyal following of gothic and family-saga readers into unexpected psychological and theological depths, while taking to an extreme, with a serious-novel format, the experiments begun in her family sagas. She also introduced to her readers a character only half-alive in Trollope, the Anglican Church.

Nikki Broussard hasn't always been saved, but she is now, and that's what counts. Happily married and raising an active young daughter, her past is tucked safely away—until a tragic turn of events threatens to unravel her idyllic life. When their daughter is diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, Nikki and William worry about how they will afford her treatment. Nikki's faith is tested as she considers returning to her old ways in order to pay for it. To add to their stress, William is thrust into the spotlight when he decides to run for mayor after a candidate—his pastor and mentor—winds up dead. Suddenly, every detail of their life is under scrutiny. As William struggles to live out the commitment he feels to his dead pastor, Nikki wonders if the details of her past will emerge and damage their relationship. When life spins out of control, the scandalous truth can be too much for anyone—even a Christian family—to bear.

We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in 'revelatory' terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, 'truth'. Otherswill be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet these 'ordinary' scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamental-and fundamentally rare-form of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such 'real scandal', but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy. From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this 'static' fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.

Thompson presents a re-appraisal of the 'scandalous memoirists' Costantia Phillips and Laetitia Pilkington, who feature with a cast of other 18th century apologists, and overturns scholarship's traditional discrediting of them.

Is the reform we have seen in the wake of the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church meaningful? Have our conversations about the causes of these scandals delved as deeply as they need to? For those questioning the relations between hierarchical power, secrecy, and sexuality in institutional religion, Mark D. Jordan's eloquent meditations on what truths about sexuality need to be told in church-and the difficulty of telling any truths-will be a balm and a revelation.