faith & fiction

flannery o'connor writes repeatedly that the first job of a writer--or any artist--must be to tell a story.  tolkien makes it eminently clear in his forward to  Lord of the Rings that he is writing not an allegory or a fable or anything else other than a story.  to Christians, especially Catholics, the imagination of such writers clearly has a sacramental formation.  to others, though, they are primarily stories, and we do any work of fiction a disservice when we begin to moralize, instead of enjoy.  art cannot "teach," anyway, if it does not first entertain.