The New Pantagruel Hymns in the Whorehouse 1.1 Winter 2004 Introduction Welcome to The New Pantagruel by Caleb Stegall Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square: A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh by Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S. J. Articles Let's Roll Over by Dan Knauss and Caleb Stegall Christian Intellectuals, Embedded and Otherwise by Eugene McCarraher A Tribute to Neil Postman by Read Mercer Schuchardt Carnival in New York by Christopher Shannon The Idea of a Sabbath Economy: A Theological Framework for Economists by Norman Wirzba Falling Towers by Gregory Wolfe Plastic Sinners, Plastic Sins by Caleb Stegall Review Essays The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson by Patton Dodd "Questions of Truth and Falsehood Never Entered His Imagination!": The Double Irony of Frank Turner�s John Henry Newman by Joshua P. Hochschild Personal Essays My Life as Bruce Springsteen by Garth Risk Hallberg Kentucky on My Mind by Eric Miller Poetry Four Poems by Erin Noteboom Three Poems by Brianna Brash-Nyberg Ursa Major by John Paul Davis Art by Andy Farkas Four Poems by David Wright Fiction Frog Song by Andy Farkas Contributors The NEW PANTAGRUEL, published by Pantagruel Press, a 501(c)(3) non-profit company, is a quarterly journal run by a cadre of intemperate but friendly Catholics and Protestants who have seen other journals run by Christians, and thought that while they might not be able to do better, they could certainly do no worse. EDITORIAL BOARD Caleb Stegall, Editor Dan Knauss, Associate Editor J. Clayton Johnson, Managing Editor John Paul Davis, Design and Arts Editor Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S. J., Inquisitor, Expectorator & Director of Polemics CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jeremy Beer, Bruce R. Berglund, Randy Boyagoda, Patton Dodd, Christi A. Foist, Annie Young Frisbie, Thomas Heilke, Jack Heller, Joshua P. Hochschild, Zachry O. Kincaid, Eugene McCarraher, Eric Miller, Scott H. Moore, E. J. Park, Read Mercer Schuchardt, Christopher Shannon, Gideon Strauss, David Wright (c) 2004 Pantagruel Press, Inc. * cum priuilegio Regis * Website: www.newpantagruel.com * Email: editors@newpantagruel.com * SnailMail: 11448 39th Street, Perry, Kansas, 66073 Welcome to The New Pantagruel by Caleb Stegall It is time to state clearly what many Christians sense intuitively, and what a few are saying: the Western church is in a historical period of dissolution; and Enlightenment Liberalism is both the engine of our dissolution and its logical end. Liberalism, not Christianity, is the dominant force of Western Modernity. Liberalism is the ideology that enshrines the Enlightenment ideals of a rational and egalitarian society; it seeks maximum individual freedom in politics and markets. As a system of government (democracy) and of material exchange (capitalism), it is the only legitimate ordering system left standing at the "end of history." It prizes above all else the liberty of an individual to define himself in a fluid environment, unimpeded by any outside constraint save perhaps the reciprocal consent of his fellow citizens---a consent which, by the perverse logic of Liberalism, can almost never be withheld. This freedom, left unchecked, has become endemically exploitative in both the political right and left today, though for a time the areas of exploitation have remained distinct. And it is manifested in a dehumanizing materialism which, in essence, denies the human soul. During such periods of transition, traditional religious particularism---with ordering principles hostile to those of Liberalism---finds itself either fighting a rear-guard action from within fortified ghetto walls, or seeking an arrangement with the new power structure which gives representatives of the old order some seats at the table, still clothed in ancient accoutrements but stripped of authority. However, neither rear-guard actions nor seats at Liberalism's table are attractive. Rear-guard actions are, by definition, doomed to fail, and all the sooner if they become entrenched and cynical. On the other hand, the newly fêted "Christian of influence" sitting at Liberalism's table will likely be regarded with a distant respect, as if she were an exotic native in strange garb. But it will be implicitly understood that while the vestiges of her tradition are acceptable in the category of "cultural diversity," she will be expected to discourse exclusively in the language of Liberalism, and she certainly will not be permitted to bring her ancient superstitions about the human soul to bear on any of the important decisions which must be made. The Western church, then, is hung on the horns of this dilemma. The pre-modern remnant of the Christian tradition reacts against the more obviously exploitative and soul deadening aspects of Liberalism, but the overweening temptation to be immediately relevant, to participate in Western "mass" culture, and to get a seat at the table has inexorably dragged the church forward towards its mass death. The Western church has become, in large part, a walking identity-crisis. Thus, we experience the frustrations of a schizophrenic who desires simultaneously to be the life of the party and to be left completely alone; we are continually demoralized by our failure to find a place where we can experience equally the pride of being different and the happiness of blending in. In essence, this crisis embodies the whole ailing left-right split of our modern era. The recognition must soon dawn on the church that no matter what one's political persuasion, there is no modern basis for achieving the true wealth that is life; no modern basis for the humane traditions of the Church; no modern basis for a real counterweight to the forces of the age. There is, then, both a historic need and moment for prophetic voices that treat the modernity-induced crisis of church and culture effectively. The New Pantagruel aspires to do just that, on whatever scale, large or small, is given us. It is namesake to the satirical, irreverent, jocular, and committed anti-materialist work of the 16th Century French Christian Humanist François Rabelais. Rabelais's time was much like our own: revolution and unparalleled expansion; avarice turned nearly into an art; soul deadening materialism; stifling political centralization; easy corruption in churches and governments; gross societal inequities; and tradition either ghettoized or seeking accomodation. In Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Pantagruel trips through life in the French countryside with his loyal but rascally companion, Panurge. Along the way, they drink deeply of the "triumphal, earthly life" (Erich Auerbach) and the "wild enormities of ancient magnanimity" (Thomas Browne). With this mirthful temperament towards all that is humane and with frightful anger directed against the forces that would squash such things, Rabelais used laughter, parody, and what the Russian Literary Critic Mikhail Bakhtin called "grotesque realism" as a means of subverting the pillars of official culture and the proto-totalitarian orders of society. Pantagruelism is, according to Rabelais, "a certain jollity of mind pickled in the scorn of fortune." It is that odd cast of mind which allows one to see the corruption everywhere, including in oneself, while still loving the world. Modernity (both at large and in the church) suffers a critical shortage of this spiritual temperament primarily because Pantagruelism is antithetical to the materialistic virtues of Western ideologies: centralization, efficiency, utilitarianism, and rationalism. It is, instead, a decisively pre-modern mode of discourse; an important way of combating what George Santayana called the "moral materialism" deadening our age. For Santayana, a healthy spiritual life was possible in this world only by looking to the "beauty and perfection that this world suggests, approaches, and misses." The singular disease of Modernity is to forget this; which is to say that modern man idealizes a priori. He carries with him not so much a distorted view of reality; but a disdain for it. Thus, the pursuit of an ideal devolves into idealism. For Santayana, though modern man may believe himself to be an idealist, he is actually "a materialist in morals; he esteems things, and esteems himself, for mechanical uses and energies." Idealizing a priori inculcates an over-calculation of one's ability to effect change in the world; to confront Power and wrestle it into submission, rather than the other way around. In contrast, the Pantagruelist is able to joyfully engage in earthly reality, insisting on seeing both the divine reflection and the demonic shadow. Drawing from Augustine's view of this age as a saeculum senescens (an age that will pass away), the Pantagruelist is content with the uncertainties of faith for knowledge of the Beyond. This, in turn, frees him to love the people and places he finds himself surrounded by; to see things for what they are: a suggested yet missed perfection. We moderns though, inflicted as we are with the disease of Liberalism, cannot suffer the Augustinian humility regarding the prospects of this age with grace. We chafe mightily against such restraint. We desire above all to endow this age with the fulfillment that Christianity has traditionally insisted lies over the horizon. Ironically, the harder we have worked at remaking this world into a suitable future home for humanity, the stronger is our sense of disenchantment, isolation, and homelessness in the present. This is because, as Eric Voegelin put it, Liberalism "destroys the oldest wisdom of mankind concerning the rhythm of growth and decay which is the fate of all things under the sun." It is this cadence of life lived in the profane sphere of the saeculum senescens that Pantagruelism celebrates and delights in; and it is the ancient traditions, ceremonies, institutions, and structures that hedge, protect, and sustain this sacred dance that it champions. Its enemy, however, is materialism of all kinds and those who seek to order life and society according to materialism's dictates. One fine Pantagruelist of the past century was the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge despised the deadening effect of modern media, and blamed it for many of society's ills. When asked why he participated in an institution with such a baleful influence, Muggeridge replied that he was "like a piano player in a brothel who plays his best and, from time to time, is able to slip in a few bars of 'Abide With Me' for the edification of the patrons." Such is the goal of The New Pantagruel. The New Pantagruel seeks the best kinds of writers from inside and outside the mainstream Christian media: those who do not feel compelled to wallow in excessively religious discourse, but share a Chestertonian commitment to a fully nuanced Christian humanism. A Christian humanism which is forward-looking, but also post-Liberal; one which can offer cultural-political critique of both the stereotypical modern left and right from within the Christian "great tradition" that is fundamentally anti-materialist, anti-positivist, and anti-utopian. The New Pantagruel will strive to steer clear of the terminal earnestness which dooms so many efforts and of the debilitating cynicism which dooms so many others. We take to heart Chesterton's comment that "the act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice." With that, I invite you to become an inaugural reader of The New Pantagruel. We will publish quarterly, in a web-only format for now. We will officially christen the ship with the publication of our first issue in January 2004. The issue will include ruminations on what it will mean to think and act Christianly from the belly of an empire by Eugene McCarraher; an exploration of the movie The Passion and the various reactions it has generated by Patton Dodd; an essay by Christopher Shannon on the early work of Ivan Illich in New York City which provided the basis for Illich's later critique of development and modernization, and inspired his own program for de-Yankification at Cuernavaca; new book reviews by Bruce Berglund and Joshua Hochschild, and much more. So sign up to receive our electronic newsletter. Make yourself familiar with the good folks on our editorial board. Contribute to the cause. Let us know what you think. Participate in the online forums. We are looking forward to seeing where we will go, and are pleased to have you along. Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square: A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh by Gassalasca Jape, S. J. "The people swarmed on the public squareAnd pointed laughingly at me,And I was filled with shame and fear."--Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov ContentsThe Situation is Very Good Evangelical Self-Fashioning If You Liked the Movie Just Out The Middle Mind What Would it Profit a Man The Situation is Very Good, it is Hopeless Irrepressible Hope Last November, introducing the inaugural issue of the Brandywine Review of Faith & International Affairs in his own journal First Things, Father Richard John Neuhaus noted that "a publication marked 'Volume 1, Number 1' is always bracing evidence of irrepressible hope." The publication of our own "Volume 1, Number 1" gives us good cause to reflect on Fr. Neuhaus's comment, both for what it says about journals of opinion and for what it says about hope. "Bracing" is one of Neuhaus's favorite words, and he isn't sparing in his use of it. "Bracing stuff, that," is a phrase often seen in his monthly columns in First Things. For all its Chestertonian gusto, Neuhaus's imprimatur "bracing stuff" is often a rhetorical genuflection toward something transcendentally good, but while the reader's gaze is directed upward, crucial questions go unasked. Neuhaus's comments regarding the advent of a new journal of Christian opinion are significant in that he gestures towards the transcendent good of "irrepressible hope" while at the same time avoiding the important question, which is: Hope in what? Certainly the proliferation of all manner of journals of opinion (such as this one) addressing themselves in some manner to the "crisis of this age" is evidence of a need for hope in something. The perception has been growing for some time that the order of Western Civilization is more vulnerable now than at any time since the Protestant Reformation: threats from without coinciding with threats from within seem, at times, to portend coming disaster. Enlightenment liberalism---the new consensus of "public truth" which emerged from the Reformation---is widely viewed by orthodox Christians (though not only orthodox Christians) as diseased: the principle of the autonomous individual having resulted in the widespread western sins of sexual licentiousness, abortion on demand, gross materialist consumerism, and the denigration of any serious effort towards religious faith. At the same time, the liberal western order is beset from without by increasingly aggressive competing ideologies, most notably, radical Islam. This situation puts religious conservatives in a difficult quandary. On the one hand, continued criticism of the liberal order feels like an act of disloyalty to the entire western tradition, which is still, after all, the tradition that Christianity built. Moreover, liberalism remains the only viable "public truth," and so continued dissent becomes a self-imposed exile into the wilderness of public irrelevance. But on the other hand, strengthening and restoring the liberal order feels, for the orthodox Christian, like giving aid and comfort to the enemy, for that is what liberalism has often become to the traditional Christian conception of what is good, true, and beautiful. It is this situation that Neuhaus has described as "the divided soul of American liberalism." J. Bottum, a friend of Neuhaus's and former editor at First Things recently put the problem this way: [As] liberalism's triumph worked itself out over the last two centuries, certain people have felt the desire to get off the boat. For some in America, for instance, the impetus was the disaster of socialist economics. For others it was an inability to stomach abortion. For others it was crime rates. For others it was euthanasia. For a few recent converts it is biotechnology and cloning. But, for all of them, a point is reached where they decide, "This is where I say, 'Enough.' This is a good place to stop." The problem with this approach, according to Bottum, is that "each disembarking group proves to have been seeking not to undo modernity but to freeze it at a particular moment---a moment when certain vestigial elements left over from the premodern world kept at bay the worst effects of modern times. And yet, lacking a coherent unmodern philosophy, we can offer no compelling reasons for modernity to stop where we wish it to." Thus, the argument goes, once the liberal motor of individual autonomy and choice is started, its momentum is too powerful to stop with merely passive "freezing" strategies; a stronger, opposing, premodern force must be brought to bear. Healing the Divided Soul Neuhaus and First Things are in the vanguard of a powerful movement to reconcile the disparate halves of this divided American soul, but, perhaps surprisingly, not on the grounds of a "coherent unmodern philosophy." Rather, Neuhaus founds his restoration project on the ground of liberalism itself. Importantly to Neuhaus, this project is not conceived as a "freezing" strategy; he doesn't want to either get off of the boat or stop it altogether, but rather to steer it safely back to calmer waters. Liberalism is, for Neuhaus, the wayward child of Christendom, in stern need of discipline to be sure, but still loved; still of "our" bloodline. Perhaps the most compelling and theoretically coherent voice from the forefront of this movement is that of David Walsh, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America. Walsh's central argument, most notably in The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is that the liberal order bequeathed to the west by the Reformation and the Enlightenment after the break up of old Christendom contains within it sufficient resources to mount a successful resistance to liberalism's own excesses. According to Neuhaus, of "particular note is [Walsh's] intelligently hopeful understanding of the liberal democratic tradition and the ways in which modernity, after a century of catastrophically wrong turns, may be fulfilling its aspiration toward transcendence." Walsh contends that liberalism's huge success in creating the modern world comes from its deep convictions about its own destiny and place as the only legitimate public truth; the only truth compelling enough to bind disparate factions which might otherwise make war into a unified society living at peace with itself. This "liberal construction" has functioned so fruitfully "because it embodies an authoritative moral truth that resonates with the deepest intimations of who we are." And chief among these "intimations," according to Walsh, is the notion that we are individuals with dignity, and that dignity demands liberty. Thus, in the political realm, liberal democracy is "the most appropriate form of government for human beings [because it is] . . . the form of order that speaks to our human dignity as rational, self-governing beings." For Walsh, the universal truth which liberalism proclaimed about the individual necessarily implies an intimation of transcendent good. In fact, without an intimation of transcendence, liberalism's belief in the universal dignity of the individual is undermined. So, Walsh writes, the order of liberty is an "order that, not being something that can be maintained indifferently by every human type, depends for its flourishing on the capacity to evoke those qualities in its citizens that are its living foundation." And, according to Walsh, the principle "quality" that is the living foundation of the liberal order is an openness to transcendent good, and an intentional directing of liberty towards that end. This is the notion of "ordered liberty," and it stands in contrast to the current understanding of liberty as unlimited license to do as one pleases. For Walsh, recent developments in the notion of liberty leave it "stripped of all intimations of direction." The individual is thus governed by nothing but its own appetite, and then, perhaps, by the appetites of others. Walsh's primary goal is to demonstrate that the liberal order was never intended to exist apart from openness to transcendent good and liberty ordered towards that end. For Walsh, there is hope that the liberal order itself will provide the necessary fortifications against the increasing disorder of the current western crisis. Importantly, this solution purports to resolve the dilemma of the "divided soul" because it permits one to keep one foot firmly planted in Christian orthodoxy and the other in a legitimate boosterism of liberalism over and against its non-western enemies. Particularly since September 11, these questions have taken on added urgency. If Walsh and Neuhaus are correct and liberalism does have within it the resources to resist the slide towards dehumanization and disorder, then the self-stated goal of the Bush Administration to export liberal democracy around the world (on the strength of a muscular global economy and a muscular American military) can be viewed as a reasonable, even laudable thing. However, if the mature sins of western liberal democracies are the irresistible end point of the march of liberalism, then our policies, seen in that light, are nothing less that the sowing of future disorder and disease around the world. Interestingly, Neuhaus and other prominently conservative Catholic intellectuals have been out front with Protestant Evangelicals in vigorous support of George Bush's neoconservative vision of "classical liberalism" spread around the world. In this, Neuhaus and his First Things cohorts have placed themselves at odds with their own Pope. In response to Bottum's forebodings, Neuhaus wrote: "On days when I am tempted to resign myself to the inexorable triumph of the modernism/liberalism nexus that Bottum describes, I wonder if it might not take a catastrophic wreck, after which, with heroic labor, a chastened world repairs the damage and lays tracks in a different direction. On better days, I hold to the promise of the ever ancient, ever new, and only coherent truth that the human project cannot fail, not finally. And that because the Word became us, and by his victory we already participate in the life of the One who, by definition, cannot fail. Our circumstance is too hopeless for any lesser hope." This sounds commendable enough, and Neuhaus is careful to hum all the correct religious notes. But his clever nonengaging-engagement with Bottum's argument conceals a failure to distinguish carefully enough between the one who cannot fail and the "modernism/liberalism nexus." Neuhaus's formulation of the matter tends to exclude the possibility that the fulfillment of our one great hope in the Word may not be delivered to us through the liberal order. Thus, when Neuhaus writes of his hope in the human project that cannot fail, the returning echo is heard as hope in a liberalism which must not be allowed to fail. For example, when President Bush said, during his New York City September 11 anniversary speech that "ours is the cause of human dignity: freedom guided by conscience, and guarded by peace. This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope drew millions to this harbor. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it," Neuhaus commented---while simultaneously recognizing and dismissing the danger that Bush might be confusing America with Christ---that "[Bush] understands, as many public figures have not and do not, that American virtues such as tolerance and resolve are grounded in religious, and mainly Christian, commitments." Here, then, is the central question: is enlightenment liberalism a legitimate reconstruction of what are essentially Christian principles of order for a pluralistic, "modern" age? or, is liberalism a deformation of those principles, destined by its internal logic of choice to slide into disorder and chaos? Culture of Choice vs. Culture of Heredity At this point, it might be suggested that purveyors of Christian journals of opinion and propagators of "irrepressible hope" pause to take counsel from T.S. Eliot, who cautioned us to "Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing." For both Walsh and Neuhaus, hope is all too often hope in liberalism itself, hope in "freedom guided by conscience;" specifically, hope in what Walsh has called a "robust debate" and what Neuhaus calls the "Public Square." This hope proceeds along two tracks. First is the explicit project of forcing open the access door to the public square so that everyone is admitted, regardless of their faith commitments. This track can proceed on the strictly liberal basis of neutrality: liberalism's prime directive to recognize the dignity of every individual requires that every person be given equal access to the public square---to the "marketplace of ideas"---regardless of their convictions, so long as they comply with the procedural safeguards of civility and tolerance. Therefore, Christians who take their faith commitments seriously must be entertained within the square. The second, and far more problematic track is the implicit hope that when (and if) Christians (as such) are admitted back into the public square, they will, by dint of argument and power of persuasion, be able to expand the field of "public truth" laterally and backwards in time to include an intimation of transcendent good and the ordering of liberty towards that end. Both Neuhaus and Walsh have clearly adopted this strategy. Walsh explains, taking the issue of abortion as a prime example, that when the transcendental openness of early liberalism is allowed back into the "robust debate," the pro-life camp will be able to argue, in sympathy with those who are pro-choice, that they too are concerned primarily with individual liberty. Abortion is bad, then, because treating a fetus as a thing which may be sacrificed for the convenience of another undermines the transcendental sanctity of all individuals which is the necessary foundation for liberty. Last September, Neuhaus likewise gave voice to his hope that out of the intellectual confusion and contradiction of the pluralistic public square could come "a culturally potent understanding of self and community that will modify the stark antimony between freedom as the freedom to do what one ought and freedom as the freedom to do what one wants." This understanding is made possible, Neuhaus believes, by "the prospect of individuality realized by an act of decision in obedience to a communal gift of grace." However, this prospect "depends in very large part upon thinkers, writers, and public exemplars who persuasively propose a more compelling ideal of freedom." In other words, Neuhaus and Walsh are pinning a great deal of hope on the ability of Christian marketers of "a more compelling ideal of freedom" to sell their product to people who neither want nor (in their view) need it. One is tempted to say that Neuhaus wants to preserve the Protestant genie "Choice" in the Catholic lamp "Obedience." For Neuhaus, at least, this is almost an autobiographical statement. More critically problematic, though, for Neuhaus's program for the recovery of order is the assumption that obedience will not be changed in any fundamental or significant way when it is hung with the accoutrements and baubles of choice. This assumption seems little more than willful blindness in the service of unlimited cultural access. For, of course, any persuasive proposal for "a more compelling ideal of freedom" must be dressed up in the clothes of choice before it is admitted to the public square. That is the price exacted by the liberal order in exchange for a neutral sphere of public activity. So even if the committed religionist is admitted on liberal grounds to the public square, his arguments are admitted only as propositions which may be freely agreed or disagreed with. The criteria for choosing between propositions remains a subjective value system which, due to the autonomous principle of choice, cannot be "wrong." Put simply, Neuhaus and Walsh overestimate the capacity of rational argument and propositional truth to sustain the structures of order. This overestimation is not surprising as it flows from what is a fundamentally liberal misunderstanding of the sources and character of order itself. For cultural order does not find its source principally in right judgments, but rather in a rightly ordered soul, or even better, in a community of rightly ordered souls. The rational argument of the liberal public square reinforces and entrenches a culture of choice. As such, it is a remarkably poor vehicle for communicating and passing on ordered liberty. Only an exceptional few can fashion an ordered soul from the aggregate of their choices. For most, order is something that must be received and nurtured to maturity, and passed on to those who repeat the process. This culture of heredity stands in stark contrast to the culture of choice, and the liberal public square itself has become one of the primary destroyers of the culture of heredity. In this situation it may make more sense for orthodox Christians to try to figure out ways to cultivate and support the accoutrements of heredity. Hope in the Waiting In that light, it is encouraging to note that in recent months, Nuehaus has himself shown signs of being conflicted and confused regarding the potential for success of his own project. There are indications that the long term results of Neuhaus's engagement with liberalism may result less in a healed liberal soul and more in a fracturing of Neuhaus's soul. In October, President Bush said: "There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced . . . This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us." Neuhaus noted that these words "deserve to be called historic." Yet when Tony Blair gave much the same speech in Congress, saying that "[w]e are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind . . . to be free; free to raise a family in love and hope; free to earn a living and be rewarded by your efforts; free not to bend your knee to any man in fear; free to be you so long as being you does not impair the freedom of others," Neuhaus asked: "Is the . . . freedom to be you . . . really at the heart of the beliefs that bind us together? Surely truth, decency, honor, and excellence-including moral excellence-somehow come into play." But, of course, Blair's "freedom to be you" is no different from Bush's "historic" reliance on the "voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced." Seeming to recognize this, Neuhaus concludes that "[p]erhaps the 'freedom to be you' is all that does hold us together. If so, it is understandable that many others, including millions of Muslims, are not enamored of the Euro-American 'beliefs' that Mr. Blair and others purport to be universal." What is our hope in, then, if the liberal order cannot be salvaged from within? Surely it must be in the Church and its Betrothed, the last bulwark and ultimate embodiment of heredity. But there is depressing evidence that the Church, at least in America, is distracted by another suitor. Alan Wolfe's recent book The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith argues, convincingly, that "[i]n every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture-and American culture has triumphed." In his book, Wolfe tells his non-religious friends to quit worrying so much about the "religious right," because they are really part of the gang. "Always in a state of transition, faith in the United States, especially in the last half century or so, has been further transformed with dazzling speed. . . . H. Richard Niebuhr documented the many ways in which Christ could become a transformer of culture. But in the United States culture has transformed Christ, as well as all other religions found within these shores." On December 30, 2003, David Brooks confirmed, as the conservative columnist for the New York Times, both Wolfe's thesis and Wolfe's conclusion that the domestication of Christian orthodoxy in the liberal order is a good thing. "[I]n the United States, we simply take it for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and we always have," writes Brooks. This means that "millions feel free to try on different denominations at different points in their lives, and many Americans have had trouble taking religious doctrines altogether seriously." As a result, "[c]hurches compete for congregants. To fill the pews, they often emphasize the upbeat and the encouraging and play down the business about God's wrath. In today's megachurches, the technology is cutting-edge, the music is modern, the language is therapeutic, and the dress is casual. These churches are seeker-sensitive, not authoritarian. . . . [E]vangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it." Neuhaus himself has recognized that this dynamic is not limited to Protestant churches, but has made significant inroads in the Catholic Church as well. Neuhaus quotes favorably Father Joseph Komonchak's observation that "the new individualism"---with its tendency to "reduce religion to one's own very personal, even private spirituality . . . which then becomes the criterion by which to decide what tradition, if any, to follow, what community, if any, to enter, what beliefs to hold, if any"---is widespread even among Catholics. If this is the situation, and it is, where does a "Volume 1, Number 1" such as this turn for wisdom concerning hope? First, perhaps, to Eliot, who, after warning against false hope, reminds us that "hope is in the waiting." Second, to the Hungarian dramaturg András Visky, subject to years of persecution at the hands of the Romanian communist regime before the fall of the iron curtain, who likes to say: "The situation is very good, it is hopeless." Bracing stuff, that. Back to top. __MTPAGINATE_PAGE_BREAK__ Evangelical Self-Fashioning Jonathan Edwards: Covenanter, Gnostic or Fellow Evangelical? The publication in 1994 of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind served as a much needed wakeup call to Evangelical scholars and institutions. Noll argued that Evangelical scholarship had too long remained bogged down in intramural disputes and arcane anti-intellectualism, and was becoming irrelevant in nearly every field of study. Since then, with an infusion of big grant money, young talent, and motivation born of desperation, Evangelical scholars like Noll have led what Alan Wolfe called, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, "a determined effort by evangelical-Christian institutions to create a life of the mind . . . [and to] establish a presence in American academic life." In recent years the resurgent presence of Evangelical scholarship has been the subject of a great deal of attention in both the Christian and the secular press. As an important and planned part of the movement, Evangelical scholars have used the occasion of Jonathan Edwards's tercentennial year, 2003, to reintroduce Edwards as the father of the modern Evangelical movement. Noll and George Marsden both recently published books on Edwards. As a result, Edwards has been in the national mainstream media spotlight of late. Both Noll and Marsden have been quoted widely, particularly in a U.S. News and World Report cover feature by Jay Tolson. Tolson's article imparted a message that Noll, Marsden and others have been trying to put out for some time: contemporary "American Evangelicalism . . . originated with the theology of Jonathan Edwards" and has much to learn from him. Edwards is especially recommended as a key model for combating the ills of modernity with a full-orbed application of faith and reason in the public square. James Skillen, however, draws attention to Edwards' Puritan, Calvinist, covenantal theology: New England Puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries saw "their whole society as standing in covenant with God," as Mark Noll explains ... The Puritans, however, never resolved the question of how, on biblical grounds, a politically organized community should be related to God when all of its citizens are no longer members of the church. For at the outset, New England covenantalism conditioned citizenship on church membership. Unlike contemporary conservative or "paleo-orthodox" Calvinists in the Anglo-Scottish tradition, Skillen rejects Edwards' covenantal theology. Skillen argues, as does Noll in America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, that "Puritan" covenantalism (Skillen declines to call it "Calvinist") has led Evangelicals to a private religious pietism as the covenanted people: "Individuals 'getting right with God' is more important than the maturation of the church as the visible community of God's people." If this does not lead to sheer withdrawal from the national public, Skillen says, it leads to the conflation of the state with the church: Evangelicals, leading the way for many Americans, have transferred the seal of "God's covenant people" to the American nation as a whole. Or to say it another way, Evangelicals retained the Puritan idea of the "city on a hill"---God's new Israel---as the designation of America rather than of the church. . . . [Thus], national politics becomes the means to ends known only by fathoming the hidden purposes of God. Meanwhile, the cause of public justice, domestically and internationally, and the health of the church, as a worldwide community of faith at work, both languish in America. Skillen takes on Edwards from a position of Dutch Neocalvinism---the widely credited fount of the Evangelical cultural-intellectual renaissance. The Neocalvinist tradition stems from key late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Calvinist thinkers such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd in the Netherlands who promoted a new Christian engagement of modernity, particularly its political scene. Kuyper's work in particular coincided with and was in part motivated by a similar movement in the Catholic church initiated by Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum, his encyclical on capital and labor. Unique among the conservative protestant traditions, the Neocalvinist or Kuyperian position claims to transcend the impasse Skillen sees in the Anglo-American development of Puritan political theology. In the famous formulation of H. Richard Niebuhr, Neocalvinism advocates neither "Christ against culture" nor "Christ of culture," but rather, "Christ transforming culture." This is clearly a key issue. Noll is at pains to distance both his subject and himself from Puritan covenantalism. Not only does Noll underemphasize the paleocalvinism of Edwards, he claims that Edwards discarded his belief in a national covenant. (See Gerald McDermott's comments on Noll's argument.) Interestingly, Skillen concludes his critique of Edwards by appropriating an argument about "gnosticism" most famously advanced by Eric Voegelin: "The Evangelical answer to the unresolved Puritan dilemma," writes Skillen, "is . . . radically in error, owing more to the gnostic tradition than to biblical Christianity." Popular among an older generation of American political conservatives whose religious confessions have often been Anglican and Roman Catholic, Voegelin is an interesting source for Skillen, a reconstructed Calvinist, since Voegelin contends that modern "political religions" (like Marxism) had their first strong precursor in Reformation Calvinism, particularly its English Puritan form. Historical Accuracy and Contemporary Agendas The preceding survey of inter- and intra-denominationally partisan religious historiography---paleocalvinists, neocalvinists, and evangelicals all claiming different constructions of Edwards---adds depth to Allen C. Guelzo's testy review of Marsden's biography of Edwards: Substantively, the 'largest theme' of this book is how 'a religion that claims universal and exclusive truth' can fit 'into a pluralistic environment.' This is, of course, the theme that dominates [Marsden's] The Soul of the American University and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, and it suggests that the biography's focus is not the Edwards of the 18th century but the evangelicals of the 21st, with Edwards as a stand-in and marker for them. . . . Marsden's Edwards will be remembered less as a biography and more as a period piece from the 'evangelical surge' in American academic culture. To be fair to Marsden, he is frank about his intentions with his Edwards biography in the last chapter: My belief is that one of the uses of being an historian, particularly if one is part of a community of faith, is to help persons of such communities better understand what they and their community might appropriate from the great mentors of the past and what is extraneous and nonessential. ... It should also be to help people see how to put things back together again. We need to use history for the guidance it offers, learning from great figures in the past-both in their brilliance and in their shortcomings. Otherwise we are stuck with only the wisdom of the present. Yet in the effort to fortify Evangelicals with timbers from the past so that they can gain power and influence within the dominant social and political structures of the present, one certainly risks parochialism at best (for what interest can such a project have for non-Evangelicals?) and an abdication of intellectual honesty at worst, if the project swerves toward confessional partisanship. Referring to D. G. Hart's similar charges of Christianity Today's own evangelical-boosting bias, Mark Galli writes (reviewing Hart's Deconstructing Evangelicalism in Books and Culture) that CT naturally has "a vested interest in seeing evangelicalism as broad and influential. CT is a movement magazine, the likes of the National Review or The Nation. . . . The real issue is whether we distort or even falsify our reporting beyond what the evidence shows." Galli does not offer a distinction between having a vested interest in seeing things a certain way and engaging in distortion. Having a vested interest means having a bias, which is a level of distortion, however inevitable it may be. The important question is, how much distortion is too much? CT is one thing, but the mere admission of substantial bias in it is problematic when one considers that CT is hardly self-contained. Galli is a managing editor for CT, which is published by Christianity Today International, as is Books and Culture. Books and Culture prints reviews of and by Christian scholars like Marsden. It too has a "movement" mission, and it strains credulity to believe that a vested interest in seeing certain things doesn't have a significant influence on "what the evidence shows--or what is even considered evidence." At least semi-conscious of the need to justify Marsden's approach to historical scholarship, Chris Armstrong writes in Christian History (also under the auspices of CTI) that "scholarship as ministry" is an idea and practice modeled by Edwards himself. Likewise, Douglas Sweeney suggests in Books and Culture that Marsden's approach may be justifiable within the context of longstanding ideological tit-for-tat among academics. Sweeney points out that secular intellectuals have preferred to claim Edwards for themselves. But is this the calling of the historian, let alone the "Christian" historian, where such adjectivalism has always threatened to be a mere parochial foray into contemporary culture warring--not to mention a convenient labelling that elides great diversity of identity and opinion under the word "Christian," even if we assume it is the usual code for "Evangelicals" or "Conservative Protestants?" Sweeney does gesture toward an odd synthesis, urging Christian Edwards scholars to attend to the "significance" their subject has "for the lives of non-Christians," presumably to avoid mere preaching to the choir. But, he vacillates: "Edwards' fate within the academic world has always depended in the main on the interests and funding of those who prefer to muffle his evangelical passion. . . . if evangelicals do not increase their support for Edwards scholarship, we had all better beware." If neutrality and objectivity are "myths," a claim widely employed to legitimize "Christian scholarship" in mainstream academic discourse, then what prevents perspectivalism from becoming subjectivism, parochialism, and ideologism? If "Christian scholars" and the institutions that support them have a vested interest in promoting unity and strength in a movement that actually contains disparate, competing voices, will the resulting conversation be an honest and edifying one? Is it really wise to promote "ministerial scholarship" in the manner of agenda and money-driven political think tanks? Perhaps these are foregone questions in the circles that need to answer them most. At any rate, be warned: if the foundation wells runs dry, Evangelicals will have to subsidize their own scholarly assaults against atheistical academic appropriations of "their" Edwards. Self-Doubt and the Not-So-Solid Middle Questions of the proper nature of scholarship aside, the Evangelical Edwards revisionist movement presents an intriguing phenomena worth critical scrutiny for what it reveals about the mind, or rather the discourse, that is contemporary Evangelicalism. Creative, revisionary (mis)reading of the past is the way western civilization, with its various peoples of the book, has always struggled to generate identities, traditions and a sense of united, shared purpose. Many scholars have paid a good deal of attention in recent years to how this process has been integral to the formation and dissemination of Protestantism in America and Europe since the Reformation. Likewise, "Evangelical scholarship" is not a body of discrete books and studies but rather a site of conflicted dialogue about group identity and purpose that also in good measure shapes group identity and purpose. It is a fascinating process to behold for what it reveals about how conservative, traditional, or tradition-seeking Protestants continually attempt to construct an identity and authority for themselves---a catholicity and unity that is neither Roman nor purely secular and rationalistic. The search for this middle ground is the Evangelical grail-quest. But the "solid middle" has proven to be elusive, and its existence might reasonably be questioned. The notion is assailed fore and aft: by pre-modern, medieval superstition; by modern rationalism or secular humanism; and now emerging from modernity, postmodern pragmatism and relativism. Yet any Protestant self-fashioning must be kept from view lest Protestantism itself become vulnerable to the old question, "Where was your church before Luther?" or, as is more likely nowadays, risk being demystified as a kind of pragmatic institutional self-preservation instinct acting without a coherent foundation and goal. Considering the phenomena of Protestant self-fashioning in the sixteenth-century, Debora Shuger examines Anglican divine Richard Hooker in her book, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture: "[I]n order to authorize tradition," writes Shuger, Hooker "must appeal to principles elsewhere put in question" by the Protestant break with the Catholic church. For instance, "the 'mystical communion' between different ages" no longer pertained in the original catholic sense, so what authority can be ascribed to would-be magisterial forbears? The conservative Protestant mind since the sixteenth century has shied from the implicit relativism of salad-bar Christianity where one picks and chooses because everything is up for grabs. But despite the desire for an authoritative ground, generating a salad bar is increasingly what "culturally adaptive biblical experimentalism" (Noll's definition of Evangelicalism) excels at, as Tolson noted in the opening of his U.S. News feature. Alternatively, one might follow Bishop Hooker and resort to rational argumentation and persuasion as a way to install authorities and thereby establish a tradition. Yet as Shuger notes, "the argument for tradition rests precisely on the failure of reason to deliver certainty." Anyone can make rational arguments that disturb consensus about what constitutes tradition and authorities within it---indeed, "the attempt itself discloses the inability of rational method to provide an epistemic ground; instead it opens onto the rhetorical arena of competing possibilities, which can only be established by supposedly excluded authoritarian principles." Therein lies the fractured history of Protestantism up to the present time, and on it must go. The desire for a solid, established, robust foundation runs deep enough that in Evangelical intellectual circles, it is difficult to differentiate genuine crypto-Catholicism (which supplies a steady stream of converts) from a condescension for Mega-Lo-Mart evangelicalism or a desire to reap all the benefits but none of the negative side effects of Chesterton's "thick steak, glass of stout, and good cigar." Galli himself, in his review of Hart's critique of Evangelicalism, was able to sympathize with some of Hart's views because Galli is, "after all, a member of the Anglican communion, which has a rich liturgy and theology." Galli writes that he is an Anglican because he doesn't "believe evangelicalism by itself can sustain a deeper Christian life." Galli's overall view of Evangelicalism seems to be that it does not need and is unfit to use a "mind" or a movement to "transform the culture" because "'evangelical' is only a secondary identity." With friends and defenders like these, Evangelicals for whom "evangelical" is a primary identity may not need enemies or Hart to deconstruct them. Alan Wolfe raised his own doubts about the strength of Evangelicalism when it tries to stand on a tradition uneasily cobbled together from sources that are both attractive and repulsive to Evangelicals. Thinking of writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, Wolfe observed that "Without a literature that is in one way or another a product of Catholicism, Wheaton [College] could not aspire to a life of the mind. A college that would not allow on its faculty authors whose letters are welcome in its archives has a problem it needs to resolve." Wolfe might also have noted the phenomena of evangelical and reformed churches in and around both Wheaton and Calvin College that are unique in their use of classic Anglican and Lutheran liturgical forms. In a review for Books and Culture Timothy Larsen mentions these very churches as he muses over several recent books on the history of schism in the Church of England. Then he cautions, "Anglican worship without all the baggage of the Anglican communion continues to be an alluring prospect for some evangelicals. Nevertheless, . . . secession was the road to oblivion." Larsen means secession from the Anglican communion, but that is not the only way to read his comment or to understand the principle of unity and integrity he is defending. Even in the odd passing comment in Christian History (another CTI publication), as when an author compares Edwards' planned but unwritten "great synthesis of Christian doctrine" with Aquinas' Summa, rhetorical ecumenism is more than a show of broad-mindedness; it expresses the latent desire of the Evangelical also-ran to remain in the running under his own banner of non-Catholic catholicity. Though it is very late in the day to begin anew an old effort to shore the fragments against their ruins, this is what the Evangelical academic insurgency intends to do as it revisits classic Protestant strategies to construct a tradition, an order, a subcultural metanarrative. In this movement, perhaps "history" can be as effective as it was for "Christian scholar" John Foxe in the early days of the Reformation, albeit with confessional prejudices comparatively muted in our more tolerant, but no less conflicted, pluralistic society. Loving, sympathetic (though partial and partisan) renderings of selected heroes of the faith may show some of us that men like Edwards were essentially one of us. Christian History and Christianity Today typically assume this kind of discourse, inviting a spiritual identification between the reader and the historical other. G. K. Chesterton, Aquinas, C. S. Lewis (of course--the Evangelical St. Jack) and even the BVM are all revised to some degree for re-presentation as, if not Evangelical, then Evangelical-friendly figures. All for the good, perhaps, but utterly artificial from another perspective, and certainly a strange, studied preservation of division at a time of great weakness for all churches. Back to top. If You Liked the Movie, You Might, uh, Like the Book Last summer and fall, Mel Gibson, attempting to drum up support and staunch early criticism, made the religious rounds with his new movie The Passion of Christ. The film tour had its desired effect, and now it seems virtually every conservative church leader has come out with ringing endorsements of its power. And by all accounts, The Passion looks to be a remarkable filmic achievement, perhaps even worthy of the name of Gibson's studio, Icon Productions. I haven't seen the film and have no reason to dispute the critics on this count (see our own review by Patton Dodd, who has seen it). I have, however, seen the numerous blurbs from Influential Christians about The Passion, and they are symptomatic of a disturbing disease in the western Church, which is its predilection to denigrate its own traditions in favor the Latest Thing. Often, particularly in Evangelical circles, this tendency grows out of a genuine desire for evangelism: if a JumboTron brings people in the front door of the church, hoist it high. In this, the Evangelical church tends to forget the pastoral wisdom that what the people want may not be what the people should have. More damaging still is the inherent universalizing quality of mass media which tends to quiet (or often mute) any particularist message. The Evangelical church has engaged in precious little real thought about what happens to the Gospel message when it is projected onto the big screen. And in the case of The Passion, such thinking has seemed doubly overwhelmed by the apparent skill of the artists and artisans who made the film. Such quality is a double-edged sword, of course, capable of magnifying both good and bad. Instead, we get initiatives such as "The Passion Outreach," which is a massive attempt to coordinate "church response" to the thousands (if not millions) of converts and seekers this film is expected to produce. Spearheaded by Outreach, Inc., one of the largest church marketing firms in the country, The Passion Outreach considers The Passion to be "the best outreach opportunity in the last 2,000 years. . . . This is an incredible opportunity for Christians everywhere to help their non-believing friends and neighbors understand the meaning of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, and ultimately receive Christ as their personal Lord and Savior." This kind of thing is to be expected in the Evangelical world; however, an equal and opposite disappointment comes from a Roman Catholic cardinal. In September, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, praised Mel Gibson's The Passion in an interview with La Stampa, claiming that the film will inspire people to "want to love more, to forgive, to be good and strong no matter what, just as Christ did even in the face of such terrible suffering." Hoyos said he "experienced moments of profound spiritual intimacy with Jesus Christ" while watching The Passion, which he sees as "a tool for explaining the person and message of Christ." Hoyos remarked that he would gladly trade some of his homilies on the Passion of Christ for scenes in The Passion of Christ. He is "confident that [the film] will change for the better everyone who sees it, both Christians and non-Christians alike." The Passion "will bring people closer to God, and closer to one another. . . . It . . . draws out from . . . the Gospel narratives sentiments of forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation." All well and good, perhaps, but Hoyos assiduously avoids saying anything about people being moved to become Christians. He does not say he expects or hopes Christians and non-Christians will, like him, experience a "profound spiritual intimacy with Jesus." Coming closer to "God" and "others" has the subtle benefit of being open to broad interpretation. One suspects a creeping Liberalism lying behind Hoyos's description. The universalism of the mass media of film encourages this kind of response in viewers and discourages a participatory engagement with the particulars of the Christian tradition---precisely the point at which the Church is called to minister! In fact, the whole concept of The Passion as a ministry and evangelization tool makes the movie into a Hollywood version of the Church itself. One would expect a Catholic Cardinal of all churchmen to recognize this. For the Church itself is to be the place where people are drawn in to be "moved" by an encounter with the Real Presence of the crucified and risen Christ. Most disturbing is Hoyos's suggestion that he would gladly trade his own homilies on the Passion for the effectiveness of the film. His willingness to denigrate his own role in the Church and his eager grasping for a filmic "tool" suggests a too-easy demoting of the word and of the liturgical drama of the mass. Hoyos's admissions are no incentive to go to a church stuck in musty old orality! The Passion is Even Better than the Real Thing. Apparently, the much more sensory, communal, participatory experience of the mass can't touch sitting in a dark theater watching buckets of fake blood: the Terminator one Saturday, Jesus Christ the next. On the contrary, I would expect Hoyos---especially given his position---would think to say: "If this film moves you, you should realize that is why we have retold and re-enacted the Passion daily for two millennia." The Church does not (or should not) need to prepare a "response" to The Passion; rather, the Church is and always has been the living, continuing response to the (original) Passion, and The Passion is a mere artifact, twice or thrice removed from reality. Artifacts can be good; they can help people become "better" in some way. But the Church ought to more jealously protect its role as the real Body and Passion of Christ in the world, not merely its cheerleader.Back to top. Just Out from Emergent Village Press A new children's book just released by Emergent Village is intended to introduce children to the revolutionary ideas of the Emergent movement. The Lobster and the Wildebeest tells the story of B-Mac, an aging but still hip lobster in the Chesapeake Bay. B-Mac is fed up with the sheer lobsterliness of his life, frustrated with the way his lobster friends can't see the big picture. "Most lobsters are stuck in a world where having a red back, six legs, and two oversized pincher-claws is all that matters," B-Mac grumbles. Everything changes for B-Mac, however, when he encounters Neophyte, a Jamaican Wildebeest with a sonorous accented voice and cool dreds. By drawing elaborate charts on table napkins, Neophyte teaches B-Mac that if lobsters are to stay relevant, they must learn to be more like the wandering wildebeests, free from old ways of thinking. Throughout their relationship, Neophyte imparts wisdom such as, "Lobsters must understand that though my horns look different than their pinchers, they serve the same purpose." The friendship between the two pilgrims matures and survives bumpy spots (like the time B-Mac accidentally used Neophyte's marked-up napkins to wipe seaweed off his face) until, by the end, Neophyte triumphantly tells his diminutive friend, "That's it B-Mac! You've figured it out. You're a Gnu kind of Crustacean!" Back to top. The Middle Mind and the Culture of Death In The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves, Curtis White tries to steer clear of the "poverty in the left-wing critique" as he engages in his own explanation of why so many Americans are immune to the idea that their nation and way of life might be oppressive to the point that radical resentment in other countries, particularly in the third world, is substantially justified. White is attracted to Chalmers Johnson's "plausible deniability" in Blowback: "We didn't know. We were out of the loop." Yet White finally dismisses this theory as incredible. How could we not know? "Are we dupes of propaganda? Is the truth censored?" Not quite. White claims that Americans are victims of their own complicity in a "New Censorship"---a culture of what might be called "self-conscious denial." Through historically unprecedented news media access, "everything [is] known and naked" but to such an extreme that what we know is "paralyzing." (Just think of a normal night of network television: "emergency" shows with visually and psychologically realistic renderings of trauma followed by the decontextualized 10:00 news-more trauma locally, nationally and globally.) So we surrender to "the inevitable," "the necessary," and "the way things are," perhaps with a gritty sense of false realism enabled by Panglossian provisos: we live in the best of all possible worlds, but there are unfortunate, unavoidable incidents. White observes that the unpleasant "incidents" Americans are responsible for are usually "clarified" further as "accidents." He asks, "Is there anyone who doesn't understand that the Sudanese pharmaceutical lab that Clinton blew up with eighty cruise missiles was producing pharmaceuticals? Is there anyone who doesn't understand that this was an act of state terrorism and a violation of every principle of international law?" Here the shrill Chomskyian voice overtakes White---"state terrorism" is a bit of a stretch. However ethically compromised and careless in intention and execution, and however evil the result, Clinton is not bin Laden. Do we really want our leaders to err on the side of ethical restraint when faced with threats? Is it not the state's responsibility to wield the amoral, if not immoral, sword? Yet White has a strong point to make in directing us to look at how easily we turn our vision away from the terrible risks and awful reality of great power. The Sudanese pharmaceutical lab was destroyed in an "accident" from the American point of view, much like "collateral damage" and other horrors we would never accept as "accidents" on our own soil---unless we can blame our machines rather than hostile or unduly careless human intentions. White's greatest insight is in noticing how "terrorism has seized upon our own technology as its weapon of choice. Our airliners are bombs. . . . Our bureaucracies (like the postal system) are bombs. . . . In short, terrorism has seized upon the 'accidents' (plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, misplaced or stolen anthrax, plutonium, nuclear secrets) that have always slumbered within technological rationality." Immediately following the deadly November 12, 2001 airliner crash in Queens, White recalls the concern in the media that terrorists were the cause. But soon we learned that it was a mechanical accident, a category of massive destruction we accept in "absolute distinction" over against "terrorist acts of war." The distinction is valid to a good extent, and it is worth asking, as White does, why Americans and the media should find it reasonable to avoid air travel for fear of terrorism rather than because jets "have always had a tendency to plunge into the ground in a statistically predictable manner." Indeed, as White observes, we accept massive, horrifying accidents "through expressions of faith in the calculations of actuarial science and cost-benefit analysis, and by faith in the raw ideology of technical progress." People of religious faith---and indeed anyone opposed in principle to such a reductionist view of human life---should take pause at its real consequences: 42,000 deaths each year just in traffic accidents in the US. 3,236,000 people killed or injured on our roads between 1985 and 1999. 3.2 Million! Enough casualties in a decade to "wipe out the population of four cities the size of . . . Bloomington-Normal, Illinois." These numbers are dependable, predictable, and variable based on things like auto design and speed limits. Even if the American attitude toward highway travel were not "bigger, faster, more," are the losses engineered into our way of life intrinsically less worthy of lament and resistance than the losses caused by abortion, capital punishment, or any similar concern to people of faith? Whether they are conscious of it or not, "pro-lifers" may not be consistently pro-life---opposed in principle to elective death for some for the alleged convenience of others. Except perhaps for the odd recluses, we are all complicit in the "culture of death." Violent death and dismemberment are inevitable on a daily basis only for the purposes of material convenience calculated according to the logic of cost-benefit ratios and, most commonly, the belief that lightning won't strike me. Looking to the global scene, White wants to ask, "Whose cost, and whose benefit?" He is right that at bottom, it is a human rationality rather than a mechanical one that creates the conditions and structures of life in the modern, first-world. One must ask, then, how critics of the culture of death expect to stand against their enemy if they daily endorse it by joining, for instance, "the march of commuters caught in the same sad and strange necessity of 'rush hour'" It would be a start, at least, to bear the burden of heightened moral and spiritual consciousness that White finds so absent among Americans. Back to top. What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his penis? In October of last year, just prior to a state visit by George Bush to Thailand to promote, among other things, free trade policies with that region of the world, an alliance of Thai farmers hired a traditional voodoo elder to perform sacred rites that trapped Bush's soul in a clay pot. The pot was then chucked into a river where, presumably, the President's soul couldn't get into much mischief. "This is a traditional northern Thai ceremony aimed at keeping his spirit down on the riverbed so he could not come and exploit our natural resources or suppress our (farming) brothers with his superior influence," said Weerasak Wan-ubol, a leader of the farmers' alliance. Perhaps the scheme will work on President Bush---time will tell. But clearly, the Thai farmers have demonstrated a crucial misunderstanding of their western oppressors. One trembles to guess at the choice most American leaders would make when weighing between free trade and their souls. We humbly suggest that next time the Thai farmers want to threaten western potentates, they hire a voodoo doctor from the West African nation of Gambia---these guys understand the real pressure points of the western mind. Let's Roll Over by Dan Knauss and Caleb Stegall This article was to appear in re:generation quarterly's Fall 2003 issue--an issue that was never published due to that magazine's sudden demise after more than ten years in print. In many ways, this article and online publication are indebted to RQ. Around 2002, the New Pantagruel's founding editors first encountered each other in RQ's online discussion forum. There, in the crucible of many arguments, the basic ideas and aesthetics behind tNP developed, and the collaboration that produced this article took root. With the cooperation and support of other people--many of whom had been connected with RQ in some way--the New Pantagruel came into existence in August 2003 and put out its first issue in January 2004. :: Eds. On the night of September 10, 2001, Doug MacMillan's best friend, Todd Beamer, had just returned from a European vacation with Lisa, his wife of seven years, and their children. MacMillan stopped by the Beamer house that evening to welcome the travelers home. After a friendly visit, and realizing that Todd was flying out early the next morning on a business trip to San Francisco, MacMillan left before it got too late. Backing down the Beamer drive, he was surprised to see Todd trotting down to his car. "He stopped me," MacMillan recounts, "and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, 'I'll talk to you later buddy.'" Of course, MacMillan never saw his friend again. The rest of Todd Beamer's story---how he and his fellow passengers on Flight 93 rushed the cockpit over the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania and brought the plane down---is, by now, an American legend. It remains a remarkable account: ordinary folks going about the business of America, making things work for themselves and their families, rising up to spontaneously oppose a sudden evil in their midst and perhaps saving thousands of lives; Todd Beamer reciting the Lord's Prayer with a phone operator and then entering into battle with the now famous words, "Okay, let's roll." The mix of religion, can-do optimism, self-sacrifice, and incredible success met the immediate need of a nation still reeling from shock, needing to relate somehow to a sense of decent resistance which the government, at that early stage, was unable to provide. "Let's Roll!" was taken up as a rallying cry by the press. Lisa Beamer, a poised and articulate widow, quickly became a media darling. Appearances multiplied, from Larry King to Oprah to the network morning shows back to Larry King to Christian radio to the network news magazines and back to Larry King again. Though the exact number of such appearances is unclear, some published accounts put the figure near 200. President Bush seized on "Let's Roll!" as a fitting phrase to sum up the sentiments he hoped to instill in the American people with his State of the Union address in January of 2002, and Lisa Beamer was his special guest, taking it all in from her spot next to the first lady. In the long-term, Todd Beamer and Flight 93 have remained potent symbols through which Americans relate to and understand the watershed events of September 11, 2001. But more than a uniquely American story, those closest to Todd have actively sought to shape his story as a uniquely Christian one. Over and over in the aftermath of September 11, both Lisa Beamer and Doug MacMillan used the public attention given to Todd Beamer's story to articulate a specifically Evangelical confession: that Todd was able to do what he did because, as MacMillan put it, "whatever he was involved in he gave it 100% because . . . he knew what he was called to do, he knew he was called to honor, first and foremost his faith in Christ, and he did that." According to MacMillan, for Todd, honoring his faith in Christ meant honoring first his family, and then those around him. Imbuing Beamer and MacMillan's efforts was the sense that their opportunity to witness on the public stage was the "reason" for Todd's presence on Flight 93 to begin with. The lesson repeatedly cast by those close to Todd Beamer is that life is short and should be spent working to serve others rather than pursuing worldly ends. In the past few decades, American Evangelicals have been increasingly energized and creative as they have risen to this very challenge. But as Evangelicals are slowly discovering, active engagement in the world is fraught with dangers, difficulties, and ethical quandaries, as the efforts of Doug MacMillan and Lisa Beamer poignantly illustrate. As early as September 18th, 2001, just a week after Todd's death, MacMillan put forward the idea for the Todd Beamer Foundation, a charitable institution dedicated to honoring Todd's memory and teaching his values. From the beginning, promotion of the Beamer Foundation was accomplished without a great deal of central planning. With national attention being paid to Lisa Beamer by the press and prominent politicians the Foundation achieved, virtually overnight, the kind of "branding" companies spend years trying to attain. An outpouring of financial generosity quickly found its way to Lisa Beamer's front door. Money in envelopes marked only "Lisa Beamer, New Jersey" was being delivered to her by the Post Office. MacMillan decided to quit his job as a medical products salesman and take over the Foundation full time. MacMillan admits the change required a pay cut, however, he did not want to disclose to us the salaries of the Beamer Foundation's executive employees apart from saying they were in the "low 60s to low 100s." He added that being in New Jersey, "you have to pay commensurate with what the market is offering." Others in their circle of friends made similar commitments. In the spring of 2002, Tyndale House Publishers announced plans to publish Lisa's memoirs---a book titled, not surprisingly, Let's Roll! The book was written "with" Ken Abraham, an apocalyptic fiction writer, celebrity biographer and ghost/co-writer of such books as Jim Bakker's Prosperity and the Coming Apocalypse. Tyndale's first run of Let's Roll was a million copies. Now, with a fully conceived operating program, the money generated by the memory and final words of Todd Beamer supports Heroic Choices, a "free program anchored by a high-impact retreat, one-on-one long-term mentoring and asset-based training for children and their families." MacMillan expects that with a variety of celebrity and corporate fund raising efforts, the Foundation's endowment will quickly reach the stated goal of 100 million dollars. The Foundation's program "aims to help build resiliency in traumatized children through fun activities and experiences." Having identified "40 assets kids need to succeed," the Foundation has contracted with external evaluators to measure the program's progress towards its stated goal: "50% of children who averaged less than 18 assets will have at least 30 measurable assets" after going through the Heroic Choices program. With such apparent divine favor and the immediate gifts of a large institutional structure, massive publicity, and overflowing capital accounts, it seemed that MacMillan and the Beamer Foundation had been given a unique opportunity for Christian ministry. Indeed, there was a feeling that to decline the opportunity would deprive Todd's death of a measure of its meaning. But with the overnight flowering of benefits that came with burgeoning success by commercial standards came also its trappings. The Beamer Foundation was now a player in the high-stakes world of big-time charity. With salaries to pay, public appearances to make, a steady stream of giving to maintain, and charitable work to do besides, MacMillan recognized early on that he was running a commercial operation, and if the Foundation couldn't compete, it would go under. Seizing on the potential value of the "Let's Roll!" moniker, the Beamer Foundation filed a trademark application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for sole rights to the phrase---rights which were eventually granted. Further, the Foundation began instructing anyone else using the phrase without the consent of the Foundation to cease and desist. "Others were using [the phrase] for pure profit," MacMillan explained. "They just want it to sell merchandise." The Foundation, on the other hand, felt that if money was to be made, a portion ought to come back to the charity, and the rest should be had by "those companies and people who are behind what we are doing and want us to succeed." The decision raised eyebrows in many quarters. Reason Magazine's editor-in-chief, Nick Gillespie, noted that the Beamer Foundation "has done more than just sell its own 'Let's roll!' paraphernalia as a fund raising tool. It's pursued a series of odd licensing choices that strain the credulity of even the least cynical observers." Gillespie was wryly unconvinced by MacMillan's statement that his decision to license the phrase for use at a Wal*Mart shareholders' meeting was "an inspirational use of 'Let's Roll,'" and a real "call to action." Even more critical was Steve Perry, writing in The Rake, a Twin Cities monthly, in April 2002. "The media's incessant flogging of [Todd] Beamer's story, and [Lisa's] eager collaboration in it, amount to a grotesque comment on the very idea of grief and loss. They take catastrophic personal tragedy and cheapen it by making it feel like a publicity stunt---a set of gestures repeatedly enacted for the cameras." In August, when Florida State University football coach Bobby Bowden appropriated "Let's Roll!" for his team's 2002 slogan, there was a considerable amount of criticism in the media. Bowden was not helped by his ineloquent attribution of "Let's Roll!" to "That guy, on that plane." In Bowden's estimate, Todd Beamer showed a spirit applicable to a football team that "got bad last year." "And then, of course," coach Bowden added, he wanted to "honor the people who died on that plane." But when MacMillan announced that the Foundation was "honored" that coach Bowden chose "Let's Roll!" "as a way to motivate and inspire . . . athletes," the critics were silenced. As Keith Olbermann put it in Salon, "Just keep mumbling, 'If it isn't tasteless for them, then it isn't tasteless for me.'" But MacMillan bristles at criticism. In fact, he views his prior corporate training as intended in preparation for this very moment. "Instead of selling a physical product, I am selling an emotional product," MacMillan told the Columbia News Service, "it is the same business principles that you apply to both entities." He views his decisions simply as those of a good CEO. "We're not acting any differently than any other organization. In order to help children we must raise funds, and align with organizations that want us to succeed." Warming to his own defense, MacMillan goes on: "Todd died in pursuit of capitalism, you know. We need to understand that we are in a capitalistic structure. That is what makes this country so great. The only way we can raise the support we need is to offer the corporations that do the leg work a chance to make money. This is the best way to do it in these circumstances, and it is driven by the demand that the public has." MacMillan has made it clear that the Beamer Foundation is very sensitive to the possibility of financial mismanagement or impropriety. In order to hedge against those possibilities, the Foundation has taken active steps to prevent them. These steps include having a diverse board of directors, including people from outside the business and financial world, and being transparent with their financial records. MacMillan was open and eager to share the Foundation's 2001 financial documents with us, which revealed nothing irresponsible or questionable. Each year, beginning with the Foundation's first full year of operation, MacMillan plans to have an independent audit performed, and will make that report available to the public. MacMillan's desire for the Foundation to be very open and public reflects his personal openness to self-reflection and self-disclosure. As the CEO of a nationally recognized organization, which he sees as having an opportunity "to become a cutting-edge 21st Century non-profit," MacMillan's life has changed radically. "The difference now is obvious," MacMillan told the Tester, a military newspaper at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent, MD. "I've taken a different career path and a job that is much more fulfilling and much more focused. I go through periods of euphoria." Yet coming into the limelight as a result of tragedy is clearly a difficult issue for MacMillan because of the mixed emotions it raises. In an address to the Naval Officers' Ball, MacMillan talked about how the enjoyment he has often experienced is tinged with sadness. "[T]he one friend I would love to share it with most is Todd, and I don't have that relationship anymore." MacMillan finds comfort in the fact that whatever he experiences, it can't match what Todd must be experiencing. Thinking of what it would be like to talk to Todd and tell him he just talked with Bobby Bowden on the phone, MacMillan imagines Todd would say, "Doug, I'm walking streets of gold." If MacMillan were to say, "I just got to speak to the Red Sox and the Yankees," he imagines Todd would say, "Yeah, but I'm up here sitting at the feet of Christ." What about an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show? Todd would say, "Doug I just touched Christ's face." For a long time, questions about propriety have produced morally charged controversies within the Evangelical community. How should Christians relate to popular culture through commercial and mass media venues? How, really, ought Christians to deal with the Red Sox and Oprah if they truly believe they will one day touch the face of Christ? For its perceived failure to thoughtfully answer these and other questions, prominent Evangelical writers from Charles Colson to John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, have criticized the culture of pop Evangelical retail. Within the CBA, the international trade association of Christian retailers and product suppliers, classical works and dead authors are eschewed in favor of "chicken soup for the soul," according to former re:generation quarterly editor Andy Crouch. "The prominently displayed books by youthful, good-looking authors offer little morsels of relevant cheer, the literary equivalent of bite-size Oreos," writes Crouch in Christianity Today. Making similar observations about the 2002 CBA convention, Os Guinness remarked, "Who speaks for evangelicals? No one. It's just chaos." "In many ways it's held together by this," Guinness said, gesturing at the convention floor, which his interviewer, Stephen Bates, described as "the Jesus Market," in The Weekly Standard. Whatever their intentions, MacMillan and the Beamer Foundation have become part of the chaotic Jesus Market. If they did not know it before September 11, since that time the multi-billion dollar Evangelical media and culture industry has discovered that tragic, professionally-processed faith-stories are a renewable resource. Ben Taylor, writing for Focus on the Family's CitizenLink website, observed that "Each time America is hit with tragedy, key people seem to step up to remind us of the comfort found in turning to God." Of course, when they "step up," a massive commercial structure is ready to amplify the message, with processing, packaging, advertising and possibly lateral merchandising development: CDs, Bible-study guides, and other paraphernalia. The biblical phrase about being called "for such a time as this" is recited so often that it strains all credulity. But even though it was the biggest media sensation since Left Behind, Evangelical culture-critics have been conspicuously silent regarding the Beamer phenomenon. One might think that this silence is due to a widespread opinion in the Evangelical community that there is nothing to merit criticism. After all, the Beamer Foundation is working for a good cause. Good intentions and good ends justify the means, even if this entails "not acting any differently than any other [commercial] organization" in a capitalist structure. To engage the world, the Christian must play a transformative role within the world's structures, re-directing otherwise neutral institutions closer to, and back towards, their normatively "good" state. Right? Peter J. Hill, George F. Bennett Professor of Economics at Wheaton College thinks so. He remembers Lisa Beamer as a quiet, unassuming, hard-working student from her days at Wheaton and in Professor Hill's classes. "Lisa could have turned down many or most of the requests for interviews," notes Hill, "however, if one wants to take opportunities to testify to one's faith, her actions seem quite appropriate." Hill went on to say that he had no "problems with [the Foundation's] participation in the capitalistic economy." While admitting that the decision to trademark "Let's Roll!" was "problematic," Professor Hill remarked that, "not doing so would have meant numerous uses of the phrase for less than desirable means, and for purposes far from Todd's goals. I find the alternatives less attractive." In the final analysis, says Hill, MacMillan and Lisa Beamer "could have decided not to involve themselves at all with our modern, media driven, capitalistic culture, but that would have meant complete withdrawal from interactions about their faith." However, not everyone agrees---even within the family of conservative Protestants---but few feel safe saying so. Of the many we contacted for comment, few were willing to speak on the record. Privately, some conceded that due to a culture that emphasizes emotion over discernment, any critical statements could cause serious damage to themselves and their institutions. John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, has condemned this aspect of Evangelical culture as a "world of Extreme Niceness" in which the "commissars of evangelical correctness dictate what can be said and what can't." Wilson remarked that the situation was nearly "unbearable," especially in "the way it is couched in references to Scripture." Similarly, Eugene Veith worried in World Magazine that dissenting voices within Christian industries "legitimately fear a kind of excommunication," if they speak out. Still, some skepticism has been expressed. Syd Hielema, Assistant Professor of Theology at Dordt College, cautioned that the Beamer Foundation "reflects the character of a media event." According to Hielema, the "mass" structures of media and marketing "generated 'free advertising' and an economic windfall. But these structures . . . contribute to the very traumatization of kids which the Foundation seeks to minister to." Hielema thinks that resolving this tension is the biggest challenge facing the Foundation. It would be "naive" not to recognize the problem, he says, though he remains hopeful that the Beamer Foundation will be able to survive the challenge and mature into an effective ministry. We could, at this point, merely add to the abundance of Christian hand-wringing over what counts as proper cultural engagement. However, such wrangling rarely gets past debating standards of propriety or "taste." And the threat to authentic, socially engaged faith is much stronger and much more serious than might be supposed from a discussion over mere style. To us, the root of the problem, and the threat, lies in the fact that in a deeply liberal environment, the only important questions are questions of style. In fact, it is one of the primary functions of our open society to reduce the public sphere, as much as possible, to choices of taste and style. Very few people are willing to kill you because they don't like the clothes you wear. By providing a nexus between identity politics and niche marketing, liberal democracies give each "faction" what they appear to want in exchange for the tacit admission that what they want is, in public at least, only a "choice" or "style," and not inherently better than whatever it is that other factions want. "'Let's roll,'" as Lisa Beamer/Ken Abraham explains in Let's Roll "is not a slogan, a book or a song; it's a lifestyle." Who or what is included or excluded from that lifestyle? Success in the mainstream rests on leaving that question unanswered. But while convincing someone that they are wrong is tacky (and possibly grounds for having one's citizenship in the pluralistic state revoked), convincing people that without the right choices they are not "cool" or "with it" or "in style" is encouraged; in fact, required. Appealing to the widest possible market is the prime directive of advertising in a market society. It is also the stated goal of most Christian commercial entities which see broad appeal as a missiological as well as an entrepreneurial calling. Of course, aiming for the widest audience is tantamount to trying to please everyone and offend no one. This is what keeps Stone Phillips' plastic smile firmly intact when people like Lisa Beamer talk about the importance of their faith on Dateline NBC. As long as they don't start out-and-out proselytizing---a word that embarrasses more and more Evangelicals---they're fine. Just another viewpoint among many under one liberal pluralist state. As the iconoclastic Stanley Fish has written in First Things, a Christian may sit at "liberalism's table, . . . but it will still be liberalism's table . . . and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers." Similarly, you can make an "Evangelical" or "Christian" labeled product, but it will just be another product in a market full of products. In a consumer economy, the product, like "the message," in Marshall McLuhan's famous saying, cannot transcend its medium--the structures that direct its construction, packaging, delivery and reception or consumption. In this view, Christian products in the form of books, clothes, music, etc., are ultimately nothing more than the artifacts of a niche market in the contemporary cultural scene, and like all the other artifacts, they bear the stamp Liberalism. Even when the niche market seems to be making exclusive claims or cohere around a relatively exclusive identity, this is just business as usual in the game of identity politics. Look at it this way. There is Country Club Barbie, and Secretary Barbie, and Doctor Barbie, and Lawyer Barbie. There is also Black Barbie, Asian Barbie, and Hispanic Barbie. So why not Evangelical Barbie? Everyone gets to have their kind of Barbie and think it is the best. This pride is not just indulged, it is encouraged, because it is the bait required to exact the price liberal democracy requires. Exclusivist claims and preferences for one thing over all other things are neutered once packaged. You can proclaim the superiority of Evangelical Barbie all you want, but at the end of the day, people have choices, and Neopagan Barbie is moving off the shelves pretty fast. The mistake Christians often make in this deeply liberal environment is to exchange critical engagement with the world's structures for a spot at liberalism's table, preferably a spot in the limelight. Now it's Evangelical Barbie ahead by a nose---clearly God's work. Vox populi, vox dei. Evangelical Christians are certainly not the only identity groups making this exchange. Andrew Sullivan and the British Leftist newspaper, The Guardian, made their own post 9/11 fuss over Mark Bingham, a gay man who rushed the cabin of Flight 93 with Todd Beamer. Finally, a gay media icon that doesn't represent an effeminate gay lifestyle! Maybe in her description of "Let's Roll" as a lifestyle, Mrs. Beamer meant that her husband had a unique belief that makes exclusive claims about ultimate truths and the ultimate destiny of all human beings. In many of her public engagements, this idea seems to be present. But ultimately, this is not what "Let's Roll" means to the wider culture. It's certainly not what "Let's Roll" means in Wal*Mart shareholders' meetings or in the Florida State football team's huddles. And at the end of the day, it is not what "Let's Roll" means for the Beamer Foundation. Pointing out that Todd did not assume the hijackers of Flight 93 were middle-eastern, MacMillan says this was due to Todd's faith, which models love rather than hate. In this, MacMillan is only one of a chorus of Christian and Muslim leaders who, after September 11, have rushed to the defense of all "true" religion as tolerant and anti-hate, thus demonstrating their eagerness to re-signup as good citizens of the liberal state. In keeping with this, the Beamer Foundation's Heroic Choices program aims to help children value things like schooling, a good work ethic, and tolerance. MacMillan hopes that the resilience and courage the program will foster in children will help them say no to smoking and drugs. This is all unobjectionable as far as it goes, because Heroic Choices has been rendered a safe commodity in a deeply liberal environment. What about a child who has questions about homosexuality---possibly her own or that of others? What does the "Let's Roll" lifestyle say about that? Is the "faith" behind it an exclusive kind that makes very imposing claims, or is it more of a one-size fits all affair? Again, these are questions more and more Evangelicals don't want to face in public, and they are increasingly ill-equipped to conceive a coherent answer. But what are the alternatives? Is the choice as stark as Professor Hill represents it to be: either withdraw from the culture or be willing to accept, on some level, the rules of liberalism? Stanley Fish gives another possibility. "The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch." Trimming liberalism's overgrown hedge certainly seems desirable, but destroying it root and branch? There are plenty of reasons for the Christian, just like everyone else, to be thankful for liberal democracies. Fundamentalisms of every stripe---secular, nationalist, Islamic, and Christian---have shown themselves to be even less desirable than liberalism. What then? Consider, again, the Beamer Foundation. Professor Hielema's caution, that the Foundation's outward success is enabled by structures that are, in the end, hostile towards what should be the Foundation's goal, should serve as a prod to consider these questions more deeply. The "mass" methods being used by the foundation (communications, business/management structure, and marketing) are far removed from and even hostile toward the incarnational, "personalist" spirit of Christ in the Gospels. Evangelicals need to reconsider the meaning of the incarnation: it is word made flesh, not word made product, or word made style. Far better for a few kids to be impacted by a quiet, unknown "foundation" (or better yet, neighborhood) in which adults walk and talk with them, passing on a real faith, than for many kids to run a ropes course and then have their "assets" professionally evaluated by a media and consumer driven twenty-first-century cutting-edge non-profit corporation. The latter seeks an accommodation with the free-wheeling openness of liberalism and enjoys its riches. The former is more sacrificial, and is able to speak a quiet rebuke to the excess of enlightenment society without either withdrawing from public life or resorting to revolution. Negotiating the tension between liberalism and true faith is the great challenge facing the American church today. And it must be negotiated through the church---not merely by the church---as the very body of Christ present on the Earth, laying down its life for the sake of the world. Christian Intellectuals, Embedded and Otherwise by Eugene McCarraher Writing in opposition to American entry into the First World War, Randolph Bourne reminded his fellow dissenters of the impending vituperation. "In an age of faith," he mused, "skepticism is the most intolerable of insults." As we witness, in the invasion of Iraq, an extension of the American Empire that is unprecedented in its arrogance and hypocrisy, we should recall that skepticism can also be the most indispensable of virtues. With our own terms of skepticism, and with a harsh and dreadful love, Christians must openly disparage the martial and pecuniary faith which animates history's richest, most well-armed, and appallingly parochial superpower. But we can't shout with any force or effect until we take the measure of the Empire we inhabit. Two years ago, Ari Fleischer, the Bush Administration's bland and haughty press secretary, anointed the culture of American capitalism "our blessed way of life." Combined with the President's frequent references to the providential character of American power, Fleischer's assertion now appears as much more than the eloquence of an apparatchik. It's time to realize that the American Empire is a sacral order, a newer, bolder, more beguiling and more frightful incarnation of the earthly city described by Augustine in the City of God. I mention Augustine with some hesitation, for it's been depressing to watch the bishop of Hippo yet again conscripted into the intellectual battalions of Empire. He's been drafted by a group of Christian intellectuals who are as "embedded" in imperial culture as the "journalists" accompanying the invaders. A few weeks ago, on ABC's Nightline, Michael Novak---always a reliable shill for corporate and imperial ambition---had a ten-second spot as the "Catholic voice" on the "just war" tradition. After Novak came Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller professor at the University of Chicago, who has apparently applied for the position once held by an earlier embedded intellectual, Reinhold Niebuhr: Unofficial Conscience of the State. Both Novak and Elshtain interpreted Augustine in a manner siren-sweet to the ears of the Pentagon. Neither one questioned American motives; neither one displayed the slightest concern with the sordid history of U.S.-Iraqi relations; neither one presented "just war" thinking as anything other than an easily-filled checklist of conditions. Speaking with that wizened gravitas symptomatic of imaginative paralysis, they confirmed what my friend and colleague Michael Hanby has long contended: that "just war" rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Augustine's purpose. While certainly culpable in the Constantinian conversion of the Church, Augustine's thinking on "just war" was not, Mike maintains, a "theory" or even a set of criteria. Rather, Augustine's remarks on war constitute a reflection on the nature of war in general, as well as a meditation on the sort of character required so as to fight "justly." In short, here's what you have to be like to fight a just war---now try waging one. With all due deference to theologians---the question begged being, of course, how much deference is due---I write as a historian convinced that just war thinking has been far too elastic and accommodating to make any Christian difference in deliberation about conflict. Exactly which wars have been avoided thanks to its counsel? Exactly how has violence been restrained because of its power? Which theologians did the Bush regime consult on the niceties of ad bello and in bello? (Stalin may have had a more pertinent point than we acknowledge when he asked how many divisions the Pope had. Certainly the current Holy Father has no control over American troops such as George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, embedded intellectuals who otherwise make flamboyant displays of their devotion to the pontiff.) My answers to these questions would not be reassuring, and I suspect that the just war tradition's primary historical significance has been to provide rulers with theological camouflage, and prelates with tickets to prayer breakfasts. So rather than frame the issue of this war in terms of "justice," I would shift attention to Augustine's account of "earthly felicity" in Book II, chapter 20 of the City of God. There, the earthly city---epitomized in imperial Rome---encompasses the entire range of human gifts and achievements, "the blessings bestowed by God," all perverted by libido dominandi, the love of domination which corrupts everything we are and create. "So long as it enjoys material prosperity and the glory of victorious war," the citizens of the eathly city are happy. "We should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day." The earthly city is a boundless marketplace mastered by "providers of material satisfactions" who cultivate not the honor and morality but rather the "docility of their subjects." This managerial paradise rests on a culture of individualism whose first and only commandment is that "anyone should be free to do as he likes about his own, or with his own, or with others, if they consent." Written as a scathing survey of Roman imperial culture, Augustine's account of earthly felicity now reads like a premonition of late capitalism in the American Empire. Surely, many Christians will object, isn't this comparison old and moldy? I've expressed tedium with this analogy myself, and I would reiterate caution against facile parallels between Rome and the United States. (Such parallels are, recall, staples in the rhetorical arsenal of reaction.) But I must now perform the penitential---but also, I hope, illuminating---exercise of affirming this oft-belabored analogy. What else is the fuel of "democratic capitalism" but the urge to "get richer all the time"? How else do we judge our rulers than by their provision of commodities? What other word but "docility" describes a populace which, indifferent to the corporate franchising of democracy, supports the invasion of Iraq while admitting to incomprehension about its rationale? And why else does this "free people" accept this corporate coup d'etat, if not because it allows us the latitude of "choice" in our "private lives"---in the realm, that is, of commodified leisure, enjoyed when not tethered to the office or cubicle? And what---to allude to Augustine's demolition of the gods of the Roman civil religion---is the American Empire but another "nation with the soul of a church" as G. K. Chesterton once wrote with bemusement and horror? Augustine is indeed the most relevant theologian for our time, but not in the hackneyed fashion of our embedded Christian intellectuals. It's worth considering, for our embarrassment and our instruction, that secular political intellectuals have perceived the sacral character of Empire more keenly than Christian thinkers still blinded by the smoke of Constantine's incense. In his unfinished 1918 essay "The State," Bourne recognized the modern state as a surrogate for the salvation once offered by the Church. Struck by the verbal and visual pageantry of war propaganda in world War I, Bourne concluded that the state was primarily "a mystical conception." In a portrait of modern state fetishism which recalls Augustine, Bourne wrote that the state was the "invisible grace" of which the government was "the visible sign, the word made flesh." Likening the State to an ecclesia, Bourne summarized what in theological terms would be its soteriology: "As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of men," he wrote, "so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation." Or damnation, he might have added, for the cultural and military strength of the modern nation-state enable it to dissolve or destroy all rival devotions. "The State is a jealous God, and will brook no rivals." (Recall Hobbes---the commonwealth is "a mortal god.") The State's jealousy extended to the taking and sacrifice of war. By offering the individual a sense of existential completion through sacrifice on the battlefield, war "achieved almost his apotheosis" and preserved its own facsimile of eternal life. Thus, war is not a "failure" of the state system; rather, it is the agonistic liturgy of the state's soteriology. (Similarly, there was no "bungled" or "failed" diplomatic effort by the Bush regime. Imperial unilateralism was the only course ever considered.) Justified by President Bush as the culmination of a providential evil (the Romans, Augustine pointed out, needed the iniquity of their enemies to underscore their virtue), the invasion of Iraq is also a perverse imperial Eucharist, a sacrificial slaughter of human beings to the everlasting life of a deity. As Bourne put it in a maxim often quoted by Dorothy Day---and never cited, I might add, in all our grave and ponderous just war commentary---"war is the health of the state." Among Christian theologians, William Cavanaugh has put it best. The modern state, he writes, is "a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ" which offers "an alternative soteriology to that of the church." "Extra republicam nulla salus," as he wittily encapsulates this perverted theology. What is to be done? First, we must demolish unrelentingly the illusions promulgated by Novak, Elshtain, Weigel, Neuhaus, and other embedded Christian intellectuals. Whether ignorant or heedless of American hubris, they sanitize their accounts of the imperial order; pervert the critical intelligence of Christian faith; and bivouac in the discursive parameters drawn by the corporate regime. Stale and obscurantist, their rendering unto Official Sources merits rebuke and inattention. It's time for regime change among Christian intellectuals. Second, we must recover the theological idiom of our Christian criticism; bring to a new fruition the critical potential of its political and cultural intelligence; and suggest, without prescribing, conceptions of the good life unbeholden to Caesar and Mammon. We have to be, in other words, disembedded intellectuals, freer in our thoughts than those who ride with the legions of Empire. While we must always insist on the theological integrity of our opposition to the Empire---remembering, with John Milbank, that modern theology's greatest sin was its false modesty before secularity---we shouldn't be chary about joining hands with the disembedded of other traditions. It should come as an inspiring scandal when, for instance, Marxists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude Empire with affirmative gestures, not only toward Augustine's "two cities," but toward the unlikely revolutionary figure of St. Francis. Discovering in poverty "the ontological power of a new society," Francis, they write, "refused every instrumental discipline" and "posed a joyous life" against the skinflint and accumulative ways of power. In doing so, they remind us, Francis did not speak and act as a vox populi, a "representative" of people too mired in misery and resignation to know the truth of their oppression. Rather, Francis' ministry was "not representational but constituent activity"---that is, it aimed to shape and not simply reflect the consciousness of his audience. Francis is not a bad model with which to begin the recovery of our mission as intellectuals. I'll confess that I have little or no idea what "sharing the condition of the poor" could mean for most of us who inhabit, however uneasily, the precincts of the middle class, other than some vague and ineffectual sentimentality about "simplicity" or "downshifting". But we can discover a transformative "ontological power" in prayer, liturgy, and other practices of penance and charity, rightly understood as self-expenditure for the sake of the Gospel. If we're academics, we can "refuse instrumental discipline" by disrespecting the protocols of professionalism---writing reflective essays rather than polished articles, for a start. And, at least in our writing, we can imagine a world free from the imperatives of incessant production and purchase. Indeed, the reconstruction of the Christian moral imagination---it's redemption, that is, from the imperial, pecuniary prison into which it's been thrown by Novak, Neuhaus, and the embedded scribblers at First Things---is indeed a necessary and joyous labor. Moreover, Francis and Augustine are models for Christian intellectuals who speak, not as "representatives" of a Church now in disarray, but from a wealth of intellectual, moral, and spiritual tradition which challenges all humankind---including if not especially "the faithful." But I'm afraid we have to remember Bourne's reminder that any skepticism of imperial convention---even one leavened by Christian faith---will always appear as an insult. It should be an insult, and I see no reason why disembedded Christians should pull any punches for the sake of "civility." Much of what passes among Americans, Christian or non-Christian, for argument, historical wisdom, and moral sense is sheer stupidity and avarice. However insistent they are on a "moral clarity" that disguises a will to obfuscation and forgetting, embedded Christians merely add to the corruption of moral imagination by supporting this immoral war, and they do so with the lamest standards of evidence and argument. Thus, our criticism needs, not only wide and impeccable erudition, but flair, wit, and a withering sarcasm in the face of venality and chauvinism. (Augustine displayed no pious decorousness when dissecting venerables like Cicero and Varro.) In these times, when death is so readily offered as the solution to inconvenience, loss, injustice, or death, the affirmation of life is our most urgent and emancipating duty. From poverty, unemployment, and alienation, to abortion, capital punishment, and war, the Empire thrives, not only on death, but on our bogus ways of evading or sacralizing it. A freedom purchased with death is really a servitude; a homeland so secured is really a prison; a security so leveraged is really a terror. Worshippers of death in the midst of plenty, the imperial populace marches to the crack of the Devil's riding crop. It's time to emerge from the catacombs, shake the foundations, make a spectacle unto the world. A Tribute to Neil Postman by Read Mercer Schuchardt Neil Postman, social critic, media scholar, cultural commentator, and intellectual disciple of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, S.J. Jacques Ellul and others has died. He passed away in the early evening of Sunday, October 5, from complications relating to lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with two years ago. Postman was the author of over 20 books, including the perennial best-sellers as Teaching As A Subversive Activity, The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves To Death, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, and The End of Education. Yet Neil's influence on the world of scholarship, popular culture, and religion was much more than that of a "talking head" on PBS, or a gravelly voice on NPR, or a dinner-and-debate companion to Camille Paglia in Harper's magazine. Neil ate with vice-president Gore, spoke to the assembly at Davos Switzerland, and was the direct influence on Roger Waters' (the former Pink Floyd lead-singer) stunning solo album, Amused to Death, a fact which single-handedly increased the enrollment numbers at NYU's Media Ecology program. In the Master's and Ph.D level of that program, Dr. Postman influenced hundreds of lives, directly contributed to dozens of communications departments, and has been a father and grandfather figure to many through his teaching, his generosity of spirit, and through thirty years of hosting the annual Media Ecology retreat in upstate New York. The term media ecology was coined by Marshall McLuhan, the guru of the electronic age and the preeminent media theorist of the 20th century and a devout Catholic whose first published essay was on his own intellectual hero, G.K. Chesterton. According to the best of anyone's recollection, Neil Postman first uttered the phrase media ecology in public to a lecture audience in November of 1968, a fact I've always appreciated, since it was the month and year of my birth. What the phrase actually means, of course, is something you can spend the rest of your own life pondering, but here's a starter. I was fortunate enough to study under Dr. Postman from 1995 to 1996, in the Master's Degree program at NYU, and then again, from 1997 until his death this past October, in the Ph.D. program in Media Ecology. Since my area of interest was the intersection of media and religion, Neil took me under his wing in a way that was gracious, personal, and meaningful. Neil was not only the department chair; he was also my academic advisor and my dissertation committee chair. He was more than just a good teacher; he was a good listener, a good questioner, and a good encourager. He was a great storyteller, and many of his stories are ones that I still tell my own students. While Neil was not himself religious, he was nevertheless a friend to religion, and to those who were believers. Like so many things, he was surprisingly good at contributing to those fields in which he was not a specialist. His Jewish background, race, and overall mensch-ness allowed Dr. Postman to particularly enjoy the irony of being most widely read and revered in, of all places, Germany. This was but one of many implicit ways that he taught his students to value the position of the outsider as the one who could best see in and through the semantic environments created by media and technology. He wore as a badge of honor the fact that he never once published a scholarly (refereed) article, while at the same time he was quoted by all those who were published in the official journals. He saw, as most communication departments historically have seen, that the real motivation behind studying communication media and its effects was to prevent another holocaust. As he understood it, social science was simply a form of moral theology under a different name, and a theory was only useful insofar as it had "explanatory power" and a "connection to some identifiable moral purpose." Despite once telling me his feeling that God was perhaps nothing more than a word, Neil was published in First Things magazine ("Science and the Story That We Need") and said that he received more invitations for guest lectures at Christian universities and institutions than anywhere else. He also said that he enjoyed speaking at these places more, not because they believed, but because their belief gave them a ground upon which to stand, which led them to ask better questions than their secular counterparts. For Neil, having a good audience was always as important as having something good to say, because he far preferred a good question to a correct answer. This humble and profound insight was one of the most deeply ingrained lessons that he taught his students---by example, by his writing, speaking, and teaching style. His most famous question, which became the litmus test aphorism for any new technology or medium, was that we always ask of it, "To what problem is this particular media or technology a solution?" In most, if not all cases, Postman believed that technology was a Faustian bargain, in which you do gain something, but only at the expense of losing something else. In the story of Faust, however, the thing you lose is of infinitely more value than the thing you gain. And Faust's story was, of course, a dramatization of Jesus Christ's most-famous question: "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?" Postman was never actually a Luddite, as many accused him of being, but he was deeply suspicious of the definition of progress that science and technology had wrought in human affairs. He didn't get an office computer until late in the 1990's, and he only used it as a glorified secretary, dictating his messages to his assistant who would then key them in and send them. He only sent one e-mail in his life, which is worth reading. Perhaps the most quoted piece of Postmania from American pulpits is this insight from his 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves To Death: In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making any concrete images of anything, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations. That last sentence, where Neil acknowledges the possibility that he may be mistaken, with the phrase, "even if I am wrong in these conjectures," was the essence of what made him such a great force in teaching. He felt things strongly, and articulated them wisely---often with a wink and a smile---but was always willing to concede the possibility that his feelings were stronger than his facts, which made us all the more likely to agree with him, and admit, that at the end of the day, we largely felt the same way about the world. I remember what he said about marriage in his class Language and Human Behavior---that what made a good marriage was neither a set of gender roles nor a pretense to equality in all things, but an agreement by each spouse with themselves and each other on just what roles each would play. He illustrated this by telling us of his dinner with Al Gore. The then-Vice President was standing in the middle of three or four guests, exchanging political quips when his wife came up to him and said, "Do you hear those kids? Go upstairs and tell them to quiet down." Whereupon, Neil related, Mr. Gore's VP hat came off and his agreed role as father and household lawgiver took over: far from being humiliated by his wife in public at a politically significant moment, the Vice President immediately bounded upstairs and took care of his children. Neil said he thought it was that kind of flexibility that made for a good marriage. His lifelong marriage to his wife Shelley, who I only met once (at the 5th anniversary of the Media Ecology Association at Fordham University, a month before Neil died), seemed to have a similar flexibility and underlying commitment. Neil Postman put me on the path of my life. There are many in my shoes, and many whose lives he impacted in other significant ways. To those he inspired by thought, word, book, and deed, his own life was a gift, for which we are all grateful. Carnival in New York by Christopher Shannon The Puerto Rican Day parade is second only to the St. Patrick's Day parade as the biggest privately sponsored public event in New York City. One of the earliest expressions of what would come to be known as identity politics, the parade achieved its current prominence in the Puerto Rican community only after supplanting one of the last successful attempts to revive an earlier cultural tradition, that of the fiestas patronales, or the patron saint's day festival. The story of that transition reflects in microcosm the imposition of a rationalized modern existence on formerly tradition-minded American ethnic minorities. During the 1950s, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York attempted to reach out to the Puerto Rican immigrants who flooded New York as part of the Great Migration by inaugurating a Fiesta de San Juan in honor of the patron saint of Puerto Rico, St. John the Baptist. The mastermind behind this missionary tactic was Ivan Illich, a Catholic priest who would later gain fame in secular circles for his radical critique of modern capitalist society. Illich saw his countercultural star fade in the late 1970s when the traditionalist basis of his critique of modernity became more apparent. But for those who refuse to accept the nostalgia police's equation of tradition with fascism, Illich's early career offers a genuine model for a politics of carnival, one in which symbol, myth, and ritual serve less as tools of resistance than as the vocabulary of an alternative way of life. Father Ivan Illich arrived in New York City in 1951. Born in Vienna in 1926 to a minor Dalmatian Catholic noble and a Jewish mother, and educated in the highest European tradition, Illich was hardly an immigrant priest in the typical nineteenth-century mold. Still, Illich came of age intellectually at a time in the Church when academic training was more likely to reinforce than subvert orthodoxy. At the University of Salzburg, where he received a doctorate in the philosophy of history, Illich was profoundly shaped by the triumphant medievalism that served as the Church's official response to modernity in the years prior to the Second Vatican Council. But his study of the history of liturgy led him to develop his own particular view of Catholic antimodernism. Anticipating the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, Illich came to see the decline of ritual---not the moral (i.e., sexual) laxity routinely cited by the clergy in the preconciliar American Church---as the greatest threat to the survival of the faith in the modern world. Cosmopolitan, urbane, and theologically orthodox, in Rome Illich found himself being groomed for service in the Vatican diplomatic corps. He decided instead to go to New York City. Stories circulated that he went to New York on a dare from the American seminarians; for all his intelligence and erudition, they teased, Illich would never survive in a tough, urban American parish. Illich himself later insisted that he came to America primarily to flee a career in the Vatican bureaucracy. In 1951, while studying in Rome, he received an invitation to postdoctoral study in medieval philosophy at Princeton University. As a condition for the freedom to pursue his studies, Illich accepted an assignment to Incarnation parish, a historically Irish-American enclave in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Illich quickly discovered that his assignment had placed him at the center of the single most significant ethno-demographic upheaval in postwar America: the massive influx of Puerto Rican immigrants into New York that would come to be known as the Great Migration. Between 1946 and 1964 over half a million Puerto Ricans came to New York. But while the American clergy tried to incorporate Puerto Ricans into the Church according to models of assimilation developed through the pastoral care of earlier European immigrant groups, Illich looked to the indigenous traditions of Puerto Rican Catholicism as the basis for an alternative not simply to Americanization, but to modernization in general. The firmly ensconced Irish, not the newly arrived Puerto Ricans, presented Illich with his initial pastoral challenge. "Ivan sounds Communist, we'll call you Johnny": thus declared Monsignor Casey, pastor of Incarnation, upon meeting his new priest. "What in heck did you come here for?" asked his parish colleague Father Joseph Connolly. For centuries, people of Illich's class have sought spiritual redemption by serving the poor; few have sought it by working for the lower middle class. Most men of Illich's breeding would have been hard pressed to imagine a spiritual fate worse than submitting to the authority of the grandsons of the famine Irish; fortunately, Illich was not like most men. Personally charming and extremely adaptable to unfamiliar surroundings, Illich quickly overcame the suspicions of his fellow parish priests. Indeed, whereas French missionaries in nineteenth-century America looked down on the Irish, Illich envied their impeccably working-class roots. Connolly had grown up in Hell's Kitchen and left school after the fifth grade to work in a slaughterhouse. Illich once turned and confessed to him: "I wish like you I had been a slaughterhouse butcher, because I could be closer to the other priests." Connolly answered: "You were not cast for the role of shepherd, but for empire." In Cardinal Francis Spellman, archbishop of New York, Illich found the most powerful empire-builder in American Catholicism. At first glance, Spellman and Illich would appear the strangest of bedfellows. Spellman, the archconservative anticommunist whom some have accused of personally engineering the Vietnam War; Illich, the left intellectual who would later criticize the Marxist-inspired liberation theology movement for being insufficiently radical. Illich nevertheless came to New York highly recommended by Spellman's contacts in Rome, and Spellman saw Illich's Vatican connections as a way to expand his own power and influence. Illich was, moreover, impeccably orthodox in his theological orientation. Personally ascetic, committed to traditional devotions such as the rosary, he impressed and intimidated his more easy-going Irish-American colleagues. Connolly, for one, feared his zeal was inspiring too many women to join the sisterhood: "Lay off that stuff," he would tell Illich, "You're pushing them in." Still, Illich would perform his most valuable service to Spellman less through his theological rigor than through his simple ability to master Spanish. When Spellman was not preaching the need to protect Catholics from communist oppression in the Third World, he focused his energy on the plight of Third World Catholics in America. In New York during the 1950s, Puerto Ricans provided the most visible face of the Third World; in America, the danger was not communism, but modernism understood as a synthesis of secularism, materialism, and of course, cultural Protestantism. The shared antimodernist inclinations of Spellman and Illich obscured serious ideological differences, but they proved sufficient for Spellman to place Illich in charge of the Puerto Rican apostolate. The Puerto Ricans presented a special challenge to the Church. The earlier model of Catholic Americanization succeeded largely because immigration restrictions drastically reduced the contact ethnic Catholics had with their culture of origin. In contrast, Puerto Ricans were American citizens with access to cheap air travel, which enabled them to move freely back and forth between Puerto Rico and America. They were therefore able to maintain their ties to their native cultural traditions. Spellman's initial efforts to Americanize Puerto Rican Catholics had been perfectly consistent with the integrationist ethos of the emerging civil rights movement; however, while African Americans conceived their struggle as an effort to reclaim a four-hundred-year-old birthright, Puerto Ricans saw America primarily as a place to work and had no particular interest in assimilating into American culture, or even into the American Catholic subculture. Spellman's initial efforts at outreach, including his attempt to have the Irish-American sons of hog butchers learn Spanish, were stymied by an inability to recognize or accept this cultural reality. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s Spellman realized the need for a new strategy. Illich came to this situation with several advantages over his Irish-American counterparts. First, and perhaps most important, he was able to learn Spanish quickly. His education and cosmopolitan upbringing certainly helped in this effort, but so too did his general ease with and openness to people different from himself. After quickly mastering the Berlitz Spanish-language program that Monsignor Casey had struggled with in vain for years, Illich took to mastering Spanish by standing on street corners and asking questions of Puerto Ricans he would encounter in Washington Heights. Second, Illich understood that effective ministry required a commitment not simply to help the poor, but to be poor. To help break down the physical distance between the institutional Church and its Puerto Rican congregation, Illich rented an apartment in a tenement and turned it into El Cuartito de Maria (The Little House of Mary). As a service project, El Cuartito provided free child-care for the women of the tenement, but Illich saw the primary purpose of the apartment as the establishment of a neighborly presence for the Church in the Puerto Rican community. For Illich, ministry to Puerto Ricans required a complete surrender of one's own cultural values. He understood this surrender in explicitly Christian terms, equating it with the surrender of the will that precedes the reception of grace in traditional Christian theology. Although he was familiar with modern social theory, Illich nonetheless understood this surrender of cultural assumptions not in terms of objectivity or tolerance, but as "a beatitude of cultural poverty." Illich spent vacations in Puerto Rico, walking and hitchhiking across the country, performing priestly duties and soaking up the peasant culture of the people; he became convinced that the future vitality of Puerto Rican Catholicism depended on the maintenance of Puerto Rican cultural traditions. One commentator on Illich has claimed that "if he had had his way he would have totally transferred the church of the campesinos, with its