How does literature relate to the religion of its parent culture and the writer's personal experiences of what is holy? Are these two, along with everything else, merely part of the writer’s personal and collective memory reserve, or do they actually form his or her central working material? Does modern literature aim at creating new holy scriptures to exist alongside the old ones or even to replace them? Is literature the only remaining means we have of communicating with the invisible? Is it religiousness in the disguise of profanity? Or does everything depend on which writer we are talking about?

It may be claimed that literature is basically and inherently a pagan or secularising pro-ject to which "nothing is sacred", which has no preset limits and which regards nothing as forbidden or untouchable. Perhaps this limitlessness of literature actually forms its "holiness" proper?

No matter how we understand the "holiness of the book", literature has been the object of attacks and defensive wars similar to those of the holy scriptures themselves. The development of information technology alone makes it virtually impossible to hold on to the book's inviolability, its traditional distribution channels and the rights, privileges and duties attached to it. The holiness of the book is put to trial - as is the concept of holiness itself, or, indeed everything that
is "absolute".

What are the values, concepts, relationships that in the writer's view are inviolable, un-transferable, worthy of protection from incrimination? Love? Nature? Political justice? God - gods?

The theme "What’s holy? / Mikä on pyhää?" is not meant as an invitation to wail and wallow in the face of a vacuum of values, but for seeking different "holy" things, the actual forms of faith, punishment, singularity, mercy and damnation that the writer must trust, in him/herself, in his/her community, in the reader and in the invisible, in order to be able to write.

Let us study old and new gods, heavens on this side and beyond,techniques that help us bear the intermingling of things "holy" and "unholy" that is called reality.

Tuomas Nevanlinna
Juha Siltanen