Cartoons and Christians: Do cartoons have a place in religion

Michel de Certeau, a French Jesuit who died in 1986, describes the mystical as ‘a reaction against the appropriation of truth by the clerics’. The mystical, he said favours the illuminations of the illiterate, the experience of women, the wisdom of fools, the silence of the child’. Cartoonists are sometimes wise fools whose task it is to ‘put down the mighty from their thrones’. Occasionally they might also ‘exalt those of low degree’. This article suggests that cartoons have a valuable place in religious discourse.