The New Pantagruel Hymns in the Whorehouse 2.1 Winter 2005 Editorial Statement on Terri Schindler-Schiavo by The Editors of The New Pantagruel 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. Features Resurrecting Caelum et Terra by Jeremy Beer Why Catholics Should Be Wary of “One Nation under God” : Richard Neuhaus in a Time of War by Michael J. Baxter Babel-On by Blyvyn and Screwtape Jonah "Jonah" by Barry Moser Articles Milosz’s Century by Bruce Berglund Slothward Christian Soldiers: Stuck in Traffic Between the Two Cities by Randy Boyagoda Scrutinizing a Scandal: A Christian Worldview Analysis of a Christian College Professor Who Flunks Christian Worldview Tests and Doesn’t Teach from a Christian Worldview by David Naugle Hollywood’s Evangelicals Read Alan Wolfe, and lo! They Are Angry! by Patton Dodd The Parliament of The World’s Religions and The Axis of Theism by Mustafa Akyol Crucifixion (detail) "Crucifixion (detail)" by Barry Moser Interviews Perfect Clumsiness: An Interview with András Visky by J. Clayton Johnson with András Visky Death and Transfiguration: An Interview with Barry Moser by Barry Moser Review Essays Reading Spiritual Memoir: A Reader’s Spiritual Memoir by David Wright So What? Theology and American History by D. G. Hart Creative Non-Fiction Dirt, What Have You Asked of Me? by Laurie Klein The Nativity "The Nativity" by Barry Moser Drama Juliet, excerpts by András Visky • translated by David Robert Evans Disciples, an excerpt by András Visky • translated by David Robert Evans Poetry From This Distance • Ghazal • after laughter by Ed Higgins Baby Born with Antlers • Real Life Cat Woman Found in the Ozarks and She’s Looking for Love • Smartest Ape in the World Goes to College by John Leax We Go Out Searching for Sermons in Stone • Advice for Walkers • Note from the Week After Next by Jeff Gundy Lean Enough • Belly Dancing by Jean Janzen 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 and Design Editor J. Clayton Johnson, Managing Editor Christi A. Foist, Managing Editor Annie Young Frisbie, Managing Editor Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S. J., Inquisitor, Expectorator & Director of Polemics CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jeremy Beer, Bruce R. Berglund, Randy Boyagoda, Patton Dodd, Thomas Heilke, Jack Heller, Joshua P. Hochschild, Zachry O. Kincaid, Eugene McCarraher, Eric Miller, Scott H. Moore, Read Mercer Schuchardt, Christopher Shannon, Gideon Strauss, David Wright © 2005 Pantagruel Press, Inc. * cum priuilegio Regis * Website: www.newpantagruel.com * Email: editors@newpantagruel.com * SnailMail: 11448 39th Street, Perry, Kansas, 66073 Editorial Statement on Terri Schindler-Schiavo by The Editors of The New Pantagruel Beginning March 18, 2005, Terri Schindler-Schiavo will be starved to death by order of the State of Florida. The gross injustices of the judicial decisions and the gross inequities of the actions of her husband and guardian, Michael Schiavo, leading up to this point have been well documented and are beyond dispute. It now appears that all legal recourse to save Terri's life has failed. As Terri's family and millions of people know, the State is wrong. There is a higher law. If last ditch efforts in the Florida Legislature and the United States Congress also fail, and the administration of Governor Jeb Bush fails in its duty to uphold the higher law, those closest to Terri---her family, friends, and members of their communities of care---are morally free to contemplate and take extra-legal action as they deem it necessary to save Terri's life, up to and including forcible resistance to the State's coercive and unjust implementation of Terri's death by starvation. The Christian community and all people of good conscience, rather than accepting the State's actions with the small consolation that "everything that could be done was done," should acknowledge the true horizon of morally acceptable responses, and should actively encourage and support all such responses when taken by those with immediate responsibility for Terri's care and wellbeing. Caleb Stegall, Editor in Chief and Attorney at Law Dan Knauss, Associate and Design Editor J. Clayton Johnson, Managing Editor and Attorney at Law Annie Young Frisbie, Managing Editor Christi A. Foist, Managing Editor Randy Boyagoda, Books Editor Jack Heller, Contributing Editor and Assistant Professor, Huntington College Jeremy Beer, Contributing Editor and Editor-in-Chief, ISI Books A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh by Gassalasca Jape, S. J. Having returned at last to his office in Crim Tartary, and availing himself of his superior's speediest carrier pigeons, Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S.J. (Pantagrueliste and Controversialist Extraordinaire giving aid and comfort to Misfit Traditionalists everywhere) has resumed his regular business of reformative suggestions for sinners and heretics all, hammer and tongs. He recounts at length his Amazonian sojourn with the Pirahã and subsequently with North American moralistic-therapeutic-biblical-experimentalists. Along the way, Fr. Jape exhorts the One True Church to learn to save souls from the abyss without recourse to mathematics. Next he inadvertently visits a "mega-church," gets lost and befuddled in its restroom facility, breaks the Buddhist monastic law against stehpinklen, and Gerhard Schroeder warns him of the penalties. Finally he opines on the Naugle-Heller debate and contemns the editors of Christianity Today and Books & Culture to a purgatorial reward amid mighty blasts of his trump against whiggish evangelicals, the therapeutic church, "worldview studies," and more. Understanding the Pirahã Lost in the Mega-Church: Sitzpinkeln oder Stehpinkeln? The World-View of A Gelical Prufrock A Mighty Blast of the Trump Against the Monstrous Rule of Evangelical Women The Outrageous Ideas of Mark Noll Understanding the Pirahã For roughly the last half of 2004, I found myself on a singularly bizarre mission, and I do not doubt I was sent on it for largely punitive reasons by my superiors who enjoy (as do I) the humor of Will Self's fiction, particularly "Understanding the Ur-Bororo" from The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Far more daunting than the fictional Ur-Bororo are the very real Pirahã. The main source of amazement about them to the academic world (and a stumbling-block to the Church) is their inability to count. The Pirahã lack numbers in their language. The most they are capable of is "one-ish" (which may mean one, two or three), "two-ish" (which may mean two, three, or four), "few," and "many." "More" or "less than" do not exist; they are alien concepts. Five can be distinguished from eight, but not five from six. Only one other tribe, the Mundurukú, has a similar facility, but they actually have a number--just one--"ebadipdip," but it may mean three, four, five, or six. (Usually it is just four.) Astonishingly, all the Pirahã adults have proved incapable of learning the most basic mathematics after months of lessons. Moreover, the Pirahã have no creation myths, no fictional tales of any kind, no memory of events that go back more than two generations, and no interest in the future. In one anthropologist's view, despite their efforts and expressed interest in learning, the Pirahã have evolved a protective cognitive barrier between their minds and any abstract thought. This barrier is based in a fundamental principle of survival: The principle is that the Pirahã see themselves as intrinsically different from, and better than, the people around them; everything they do is to prevent them from being like anyone else or being absorbed into the wider world. One of the ways they do this is by not abstracting anything: numbers, colours, or future events. This is the reason why the Pirahã have survived as Pirahã while tribes around them have been absorbed into Brazilian culture. Thus it is a calculated but unconsciously willful ignorance that has enabled the Pirahã to survive as a community with their linguistic-cultural integrity. This trait both disturbs and appeals, for it has crossed my mind that perhaps the Pirahã are, in some ways, superior to most Western Christians who are at once radically absorbed with the forces of secularism, materialism and the prevailing Culture of Death while also proving themselves incapable of much abstract reasoning. Indeed, they might be better without it, if knowledge only makes men unhappy, as it's often been said. But then again, the Pirahã are not ignorant in areas where most of us are. Few modern folk have the skill and familial-communal resources to build their own homes, hunt, farm, fish, procreate and raise their offspring in such ways that also sustain and renew the community and its skills and resources. Untoward influences on the radically dependent life are inevitable because so much is needed for its mere survival, and the business of living must be carried out on terms set by outsiders of one kind or another. Of course it is a devil's deal to choose between concrete skill and cultivated abstract thought. Tragically their glorious synthesis has not been seen since the first reformations of the church with the development of the various Monastic rules... But I shall tire you no longer with this nostalgia. Naturally I was not sent to the Pirahã simply to learn about them. The Church does not much care whether potential converts confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or variations of the same, however interesting that may be to the scholars. (Does language circumscribe consciousness, does it constrain the thinkable? Or vice versa? Are our thoughts determined by the language we inherit? Are great poets innovators in consciousness?) My humble mission was simply to save souls and to work with the small group of converts that was established among the Pirahã some years ago. As you might guess by now, the Pirahã present an ecumenical problem insofar as the Trinity is far less intelligible to them than it was to the Irish, previously the slowest learners when it came to Trinitarian dogma. (To their credit, the Irish really came around when they came around.) But lest we lose the Pirahã to the burgeoning independent charismatic sects of Brazil (which are short on abstract dogma and ritual requiring mathematical literacy), Mother Church must develop a Pirahãnic rite quickly; she must also find alternatives and aids for most traditional forms of individual devotion. For instance, the Pirahã are perpetually short on rosaries and are unable to make reliable rosaries of their own. Thus it is not unusual for a poor Pirahã to be found locked in endless repetitions of prayer, his beads having been worn out or traded for some tool. (Such is their love for the faith, they would rather continue than guess when they are done praying.) Partial indulgences are, understandably, a hard sell along with the notion of purgatorial punishment, but the Holy Father's announcement of plenary indulgences for 2005 are blessedly easy for the Pirahã to comprehend. Lost in the Mega-Church: Sitzpinkeln oder Stehpinkeln? When I had completed my required stint with the Pirahã, I procured a bargain ticket on a floating retirement home which brought me to the United States after a leisurely month of shuffleboard and burials at sea which are both economical, environmentally friendly, and approved by the Church. I have not preached in some time, but I believe the retirement community on board S. S. Alimento de los Pescados was soundly inspired by my memento mori series, "A King May Go A Progress Through A Shark." Following this brief respite, I spent late November trekking toward Alaska. (The short route back to Crim Tartary.) It was a mostly uneventful journey except for the unfortunate event of an inadvertent visit to what is evidently called, in Omaha, a "mega-church." A friendly trucker who had picked me up in Tucson dropped me off at a place that I assumed was an airport terminal. Hungry and in search of a restroom, I entered and found myself startled into silent observation of a wholly unexpected scene. At first I thought the place was a very successful business that produced corporate management training materials and organizational leadership seminars while also doubling as a church on weekends and evenings. Now I understand that there is not a real distinction between these "functions" in such a church. It is the most rationalized, organized form of religion I have ever witnessed. They had a "program" for everything you could imagine: daily programs for women, men, seniors, youth, children, handicapped people. They had Bible studies, book studies, and many other kinds of support groups. They had sports--one of their buildings housed a gymnasium. They had all kinds of ministries. They operated or supported programs outside the church from local to international groups. They were big enough to attempt to structure a whole community through the church's life and activities. A person could throw himself into the life of this church and find something for every member of his family and for almost every activity they could possibly desire on every day of the week. Later I realized that this "organization community" was really more of an abstract association than a real community which depends on the concreteness of geography (rather than a facility one commutes to) and normal life lived out in one's natural surroundings. Activities at the commuter-based mega-church, by contrast, is like "Quality Time"--that cheap solution to the guilt of compromised parenting and atomized households: Busy parents who "do not have much time" for their children frequently try to make the most of the time they do have by spending it as "quality" time with their children. It is very programmed time with many hopes and expectations for its "outcomes." The problem with such thinking quickly becomes apparent, for it is impossible to schedule "quality" time with children. They are very resistant to being sat down and told that now things are going to happen that are "quality." That is often the hardest time to get anything of quality going at all. Real quality time only comes in the context of a great quantity of time spent with others where there is not necessarily a plan or program. The real quality times often take one by surprise in the midst of what one thought was just ordinary time. In fact, some real quality time is totally unnoticed by parents, but their children remember it all their lives. These are the things I learned in the American mega-church of Omaha, but even as they are in some ways unfortunate, the misfortune that befell me there was far more concrete. As I made my way to the restroom--the destination that had brought me to this church in the first place--I found that it was, like the rest of the church, extremely busy. Several programs had just ended, and there was a line for the urinals. As luck would have it, I had tarried too long, and the flushing and rushing sound of water in a busy bathroom speaks directly to the body. I spotted an open, commendably large stall for handicapped persons, and I entered. In my haste, I thought I might relieve myself whilst standing in my robes. There are several ways that, in theory, this can be done, but I had not performed the feat in many a year. Custom and prudence are against it for self-evident reasons. In fact, Buddhist monks are charged never to make such an attempt, except in an emergency: "Not being ill, I will not defecate or urinate while standing: a training to be observed." Some modern, liberalized monks have decided that, as in my case, a monk "who needs to urinate, finds himself in a public restroom, and can no longer hold himself in while waiting for a toilet, would qualify as 'ill' here and so would be able to use a urinal without penalty." This seems a cop-out to me, but fortunately or unfortunately, I am no Buddhist monk and there are no rules for how a Jesuit may piss. Things were going swimmingly when suddenly an alarm rang above my head, and Gerhard Schroeder's voice called out! The message was roughly something like this: "Attention! Urinating while standing [stehpinkeln] is not allowed here, and will be punished with fines, so if you don't want any trouble, you'd best sit down [sitzpinkeln]!" After recovering and my curiosity piqued, I went out to the information kiosk to ask what the church had against stehpinkeln. I was told that I had run afoul of a technology developed in Germany to relieve people (mostly women, minorities, and unpaid church staff) from menial cleanup duties exacerbated by stehpinkeln. I was apologized to and assured that a kinder, gentler, English voice recording would be installed soon. Herr Schroeder was scaring "seekers" who are by nature "sensitive" and uninformed about the customs of the church. On that inauspicious note, permit me now to turn to even graver subjects. The World-View of A Gelical Prufrock "Now, we are living today in a civilization where the confusion of ideas is such that everything that Plato had rejected as philodoxie is called philosophy." -- Eric Voegelin Imagine my surprise, upon reading the recent "unpleasantness" between Jack Heller and David Naugle as they tussled over whose view of worldview was right, to learn that "Christian scholarship" is just now passing out of infancy and into adolescence, and that it recommends analytic tools of a personalist and subjectivist nature as fortification against the demon "postmodernism." I confess to confusion. But then, I am nothing but an unfrozen sixteenth-century Jesuit who heretofore believed "worldview" to be the startling space photography I have seen recently which undoubtedly proves my old enemies correct when it comes to the shape of the earth. Round---who knew? It appears, upon further study, however, that the worldview wars are an all too serious game in current Christian debates. It need not be so, for here is how the thing appears to me: The ancients taught us that there are two minds: one which loves wisdom (philosopher) and one which loves opinion (philodoxer). Philodoxie is not bad, per se. It serves a useful function. Aristotle classified the various philodoxies as topoi, or categories of thought that are not real things, but exist only on the level of existential rhetoric. The topoi are "values systems" which create a consensus of belief within a group of people bounded by ethnicity or geography or religious myth or statehood or what have you. But they do not penetrate to reality, or to the true experiences that engender the various values systematized. During periods of relative historical stability, the topoi tend to rigidify and the group enters what Aristotle called stasis, or dogmatomachy--the rule of opinions. Dogmatomachy fosters a degraded human spirit that is closed to the real problems of human existence because those problems have been concealed by wide agreement (or disagreement) over the topoi. According to the philosopher Eric Voegelin, quoted at the beginning of this section, those who enter the foray are limited to a discussion of existing institutions and an apology for their principles, which quickly devolves into a mere defense of the powers that be. The very act of putting a subject in the public's eye under the reign of dogmatomachy, is, in the words of Walter Baghot, "a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose it. It is an admission too that there is no sacred authority---no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey. . . . Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal and you can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free choice, and exposed to profane deliberation." As a remedy to the rule of opinion, at least as it pertains to men's souls, if not their society, is a recovery of the classic experience of reason. But I am getting ahead of myself. Voegelin classified Weltanschauungen (or "worldview") as one of Aristotle's topoi. I tend to agree with him. The back and forth between Naugle and Heller in these pages is not wrong, it simply exists on the level of existential rhetoric rather than penetrating to reality. And that is the problem. Having a "Christian worldview" gives parochial-and-anxious-about-it Evangelicals and various attenuated Protestants an ersatz catholicity and depth which they need for a variety of reasons---both to meet their honest and well-placed desires for membership, proper beginnings, and to keep the Times from lumping them in with Pat Robertson. Christians are urged to "articulat[e] a Christian worldview [of] . . . 'comprehensive and far-reaching power.'" (That is Nancy Pearcey quoting Abraham Kuyper.) Worldview, like all the topoi, is an identity tool. Its talk is all about the group and its characteristics and principles---a classic dogmatomachy. It is a game of self-fashioning. Here stands A. Gelical Prufrock before the mirror. Do I dare approve the worldview that elects President Bush? Do I dare admit the worldview that permits gay marriage? Do I dare, do I dare? I am being mean now, as I am wont, but it need not be taken so. Every group does this in one way or another. But it is necessary to health and good order and right reason to be able to recognize the pathetic Prufrock. Worldview studies suffer additionally from being both a child of, and a reaction against, the Enlightenment and especially its dominant epistemology of positivism. Worldview understandings are thoroughly corrupted with subject-object language. Worldview is both something "out there" which can be "possessed" by exposure to the right sources (witness the proliferation of Worldview studies programs at CCCU institutions) as well as something "in here" that can only be had by a personalist and subjective experience of conversion which brings a new "capacity" with it (witness chapter nine of Naugle's book, cited in his essay, which details the necessity of this kind of conversion for a proper worldview). Naugle exemplifies how a worldview theorist, especially a Christian worldview theorist, becomes quickly boxed in, when he writes, "Therefore, what a person understands a worldview to be is, interestingly enough, dependent upon that person's worldview! For this reason, I . . . unpack the implications of biblical faith on the concept of worldview." The positivist tale of conversion which entails the adoption of a certain opinion and requires none of the rigor and hard-to-swallow classical marks such as submission to an institutional order and denial of self is an inherently schismatic and liberalizing force which devolves into mere choice (of dogma), as noted by Baghot above. In response, Naugle insists in his book that "'worldview' must shed its relativist and subjectivist clothing and assume new objectivist attire," but only "within the framework of the Bible." This is hopeless! It is this kind of circular, rationalist literal hermeneutic which creates the very crises of philodoxa which, as Mark Noll puts it, "only bullets, not arguments" can resolve. Setting an inherently liberalizing, rationalist view of scripture--fortified by a mechanical understanding of conversion as the only timber against criticisms that worldview analysis is relativistic--necessitates, in turn, the "worldview arms race" being escalated by philodoxers at Worldview Weekend and the Nehemiah Institute (and many other places) as they create an ever rigidifying dogmatomachy to act as herbicide against the "postmodern" and liberalizing weed. The whole house is of cards. Either get out the rubber cement, or watch it all blow away. That is the conundrum my friends Naugle and Heller find themselves in. Let me end this with a recitation from C.S. Lewis, a favorite of many worldviewers: Scripture doesn't take the slightest pain to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are constantly represented as exciting the Divine wrath or pity---even as "grieving" God. I know this language is analogical. But when we say that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get in behind it to a purely literal truth. All we can really substitute for the analogical expression is some theological abstraction. And the abstraction's value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction "impassible" can get us nowhere. It might even suggest something far more misleading than the most naive Old Testament picture of a stormily emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or something which was "Pure Act" in such a sense that it could take no account of events within the universe it had created. . . . For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal, or chemical, or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture---light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag heaps. Here Lewis warns against the dangers of philodoxa; against the degraded and closed spirit which conceals, by substituting an abstract consensus of opinion, the engendering experience that is awakened by the immediate language. In contrast, he describes what the philosophers (such as Michael Polanyi, whom Naugle cites but who would never have approved of the worldview project Naugle is involved in) mean by right reason: the experience of openness to the mystery of transcendence which flowers when the soul participates with existence as it becomes luminous for a truth which if known and possessed would be lost. That is the adventure of faith. A Mighty Blast of the Trump Against the Monstrous Rule of Evangelical Women--and the CTI Horse They Rode in On Harvard President Lawrence Summers caused a mini-stir recently when he noted that innate differences between the sexes accounted for the relative lack of women in top university math and science positions. Simply put, Summers pointed out that few married women with children were willing to accept the sacrifice of punishing 80-hour work weeks which are typical for those in such positions. Predictably, Summers' comments prompted outrage and he soon issued a quasi-retraction indicating his "regret." Such is the strength of the liberal-capitalist junta in these late days that the suggestion---even one so thoroughly untainted by any sectarian or (saints forfend!) religious motive---that 80-hour work weeks are hostile to families and motherhood is cause for shock, outrage, and a quick and efficient campaign to force the heretic to recant. Even more disturbing to me, however, was the discovery of a different version of this same pathology on the pages of Books & Culture, the latest issue of which continues to display an alarming degree of un-Christian "tolerance." In "The Real Life of an At-Home Mother," Carla Barnhill, a former editor of Christian Parenting Today (part of the CTI "family" of publications) purports to expose the dirty secret that the fault for the "desperate housewife" phenomenon lies not with the hyper-sexualized and commercialized anti-family culture of egoism that is late modernity, but with Christian churches! Barnhill's argument is that the "cult of the family" is "killing" Christian women by, in the words of Christianity Today editor Steve Gertz, "allowing the perception to grow that the mother's role is the most fulfilling one for married women." This, according to Gertz, leaves "those parts of [a woman's] personality that don't fit with parenting" to a death of neglect. (Gertz's comments and commendation of Barnhill's article appeared in a CT e-newsletter and on the CT website.) Barnhill begins her assault on the "cult of the family" by marshalling several testimonials by women who, it seems, were bullied into giving up lucrative and rewarding careers to "stay home" with their offspring. (In their own words, it is always guilt before God that motivates these women, but in Barnhill's view it is clear the guilt comes from the church rather than from God.) Traci confesses that after deciding to "sacrifice the career she loved" to stay at home with her [only] child, she "missed work so much that sometimes it physically hurt." Alana [mother of two] complains: "I don't feel I have natural skills and abilities as a mom. I take care of their physical needs and keep the house organized and running smoothly, but I don't always know how to relate to my kids." Even worse for Alana, her "walk with the Lord has suffered since I became a mom. Spending time with God feels like another obligation---just one more person wanting something from me." Nora's children [two] are grown now, but one of her "greatest frustrations" as a parent was "having to put my dreams on hold. . . . What most stimulated and satisfied me was often not possible to have in my life." To this Barnhill adds the conclusion that Christian "stay-at-home" moms lead lives of loneliness, boredom, and depression because they have "been taught that this is the life God wants for us, that to want something more is selfish and worldly." Drawing Barnhill's ire in particular is Debra Bendis whose article, "Stressed-Out Mothers," in Christian Century Barnhill quotes: While [young professionals] have been able to achieve much in a professional world, which supplies a social life as well as a career, they seem not to have developed the capacities for family life. They seem never to have learned about sewing, gardening, cooking or puttering---the soft activities that can make a home a comfortable and welcome place instead of a prison of isolation. . . . Without a habit of being at home, the mayhem of a toddler lunchtime or the tedium of a rainy day makes a day at work look like rescue---while home is only a punishment. What Bendis is talking about here is what has been referred to in this journal as "practicing the discipline of place." It is the idea that to suffer one's place and one's people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: live in love with the frailty and limits of one's existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community--all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one's own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation. The Puritan heritage of America has long chafed against this discipline as it necessarily limits one to a small field of action in a world with seemingly little hope for eschatological fulfillment. Thus have American Evangelicals historically pined after their great mission of "giftedness" and "calling," forsaking that foolishness of the Gospel of our Lord which has ever lain at their doorstep, in need of nurturing care. So too with Barnhill. She is inured to sight and can only express shock and outrage at Bendis. She responds that "while it's true that many stay-at-home moms, myself included, think back fondly on the working-girl perks of hour-long lunches and coworkers who notice when you get your hair cut, it's ludicrous to assume that holding down jobs before we became mothers somehow ruined our ability to be happy homemakers." On the evidence of Barnhill's article alone, I should think she would rethink this conclusion. But more broadly, Barnhill fails to see those very tasks Bendis cites as occupations which, when leavened with skill, virtue, competence, and love, become---not drudgery---but the very fruit and flowering of a good home and a good life. In contrast, by way of a perverse advocacy of modern homelessness and existential alienation, Barnhill finds these tasks to be the "bane of our existence." Is it any wonder she and her interviewees are desperate housewives? There is, in fact, always a certain desperation to doing one's duty; desperation which becomes insurmountable when that duty is performed against a backdrop of isolation and self-defeating motives and mores. These mothers' choice to stay at home conflicts with everything they believe and practice about family, children, and themselves, all of which is profoundly mechanistic and materialistic. Instead of homes, they are running orphanages (albeit very small ones) in which the sole purpose is the housing, feeding, and entertaining of children until they are old enough to leave, at which point, presumably, the mothers will pick up with their "dreams" where they left off. And all the while, the economic and cultural activities spawned by this mind have but one systemic goal: to drive mothers back into the work force as quickly as possible. It is likewise telling that of the eight or nine women discussed by Barnhill, not one is reported to have more than two children. The duty to propagate the next generation at a rate to exceed replacement is an unlegislatable mandate that occurs only when a community is healthy and its members love it more than they love themselves. When the order of a community falls out of health in this way---when it chooses to deny its own fecundity at the expense of its offspring---it chooses death. The fact is that Barnhill and the women she reports on have been duped and have duped themselves into believing one of modernity's most insidious lies: they have submitted to the regime of what Ivan Illich called "economic sex." Economic sex is the "duality that stretches toward the illusory goal of economic, political, legal and social equality. Male and female are neutered economic agents, stripped of any quality other than the functions of consumer and worker." In contrast is what Illich referred to as "the reign of vernacular gender" which marks a "profoundly different mode of existence" wherein exists the "eminently local and time-bound duality that sets off men and women under circumstances that prevent them from saying, doing, desiring, or perceiving the same thing. Together they create a whole which cannot be reduced to the sum of equal, merely interchangeable parts; a whole made of two hands, each of a different nature." It is the latter duality that creates the discipline of place, which in turn fosters a local economy of scale within which humane relationships can develop and fructify and which coheres around the household as its locus, rather than around the impersonal, mechanistic, and dehumanizing hubris of the "global economy." Others such as Allan Carlson and the Howard Center have done salutary work on this front, and to them I heartily commend you. I cannot do justice to their work here, but let me offer something to whet the appetite from Carlson's recent speech to the World Congress of Families: [W]e are here to affirm the necessity of the Autonomous Home or Household. Marriage creates a new household. When gathered together, these households form the second institutional tier in natural social life and the one on which political life is properly built. The household will normally encompass the wedded man and woman, their children, and perhaps extended family. Successful households aim at a certain autonomy or independence, enabling their members to resist oppression, survive economic, social, and political turbulence, and renew nations after troubles have passed. The basic human need for functional independence dictates the vital importance of a household's bond to property, including land and various forms of capital. Autonomy requires, at the least, the capacity to secure a regular supply of food and the ability to preserve this bounty for consumption during adverse times. The dwelling or house where the family lives is another vital form of family property. This is where children are protected and nurtured, where love and economy merge together, where the future of nations takes form. . . . The autonomous household, rooted in family-held property, also builds its own home economy, including still important productive tasks such as child care and meal preparation. More broadly, it is true that the industrial revolution of the 19th century, dependent as it was on balky power sources such as flowing water and the steam engine, encouraged centralized factories and stimulated the "great divorce" of work from home. This weakened the traditional order of the family farm and village. The 20th and 21st centuries, however, have delivered successive waves of new technologies which have returned "power," in both senses of that word, to the household economy: from the small electric engine, to most recently, the household computer, linked to the internet. This extraordinary new tool, also once confined to large central work units, is now available for decentralized use. Where the competitive advantage in the 19th century clearly lay with the industrial factory, the productive homestead has improved prospects as the dawn of the 21st century. Just so. Salutary, as I said. This is the message that our Christian desperate housewives (and their husbands who labor far from home in economic servitude---they cannot be forgotten!) need to hear. For it is by these means that their desperation, loneliness, depression, and boredom will be banished and the recovery of the disciplines of place, which are the crucibles of holiness, can be restored. It is the old old sermon about mastering the appetites, denying oneself, and loving others as the anecdote to everything from wonderbread to serfdom. Instead, Barnhill urges a different route: Stay-at-home motherhood truly is a mission, one into which not all of us are led---those, for instance, who need constant support and opportunities for respite. . . . What we need from the church is not a set of unreasonable expectations but encouragement and prayer that God will keep giving us endless reserves of patience, compassion, wisdom, and love. . . . We need to know that we are free to listen to God's voice and follow God's leading---whether that is into our homes or into an office. We need to know that our efforts at parenting well are covered by God's rich grace and that, whether we stay at home or head to work, it is God, and God alone, who will fill our children with all that they need to love and serve in God's name. And later, Barnhill makes the clincher argument that a Christian woman needs to not be "forced to make a choice that doesn't fit her." Let me speak freely: this is blatantly anti-Christian propaganda that appropriates a weak theology of calling to be handmaiden to the politics of choice which is, in the end, the politics of death and ruination. I can only comfort myself with the surety that, for allowing Barnhill's article to pass under their editorial pens and into print, the editors of Christianity Today and Books & Culture will pay the purgatorial price. Meanwhile, Barnhill may as well cut to the chase and join Barbara Ehrenreich at The New York Times and own up to fact that she too is willing let her children play in the shadow of Moloch if it serves her freedom. In fact, Barnhill takes her revolt against God to a new height---if anything bad should happen, she wants to preserve absolution and assurance from the church that there was nothing she could have done. If there is any fault, it lies with God. Hogwash! The Outrageous Ideas of Mark Noll In 2001, Mark Noll sounded an optimistic note regarding Evangelicalism's "new and serious appropriation of classical Christian traditions" for its own fructification, by which he meant "classical," "traditional," or "confessional" Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Cited as examples were the resources of Thomism, Kuyperianism, Scottish realism, Anglican Augustinianism, Anabaptism, Catholic Social Doctrine, Radical Orthodoxy, Martin Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, "and (again) the principles of Abraham Kuyper." Then in his recent (October 2004) reflections on The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ten years after its publication, Noll emphasized the necessity of these resources and of tradition itself: Without strong theological traditions, most evangelicals lack a critical element required for making intellectual activity both self-confident and properly humble, both critical and committed. In order to advance responsible Christian learning, the vitality of commitment must be stabilized by the ballast of tradition. Tradition without life might be barely Christian, but life without tradition is barely coherent. D. G. Hart replied with a letter to FT, which stated: Most of the serious evangelical undergraduates I have met over the last several years are drawn to Roman Catholicism, which they find to be the most attractive outlet for their desire to unite faith and learning. There are several reasons for this, among them that Roman Catholicism possesses a tradition of learning and a body of teaching that has immediate appeal to students starving for a Christian faith that has intellectual depth and rigor. This may not be a problem for Professor Noll, who was one of the signers of "Evangelicals and Catholics Together." My own conviction is that historic Protestantism has its own theological and liturgical resources that, sadly, contemporary evangelicals have ignored and in some cases repudiated. We are thus left with the question that Prof. Noll's book originally raised and that remains unanswered today: Will evangelicals who become intellectually serious remain evangelical once they awaken from their pietistic slumbers? If not, is the "evangelical mind" really a possibility--or is it, instead, an oxymoron? Astonishingly, Noll's reply was that Catholicism does retain "considerable resources for nourishing intellectual life," and "Evangelicals ... remain open to at least some positive theological influences from the confessional Protestant past." BUT: "To imagine that a vigorous classical Protestantism, with well-constructed academic institutions and well-balanced Christian cultural instincts, could repudiate modern evangelicalism and thereby regain intellectual depth, gravity, and authority is to indulge in a romantic fantasy." This is a strange position that Noll has reached, not only because he seems to be biting the hand that feeds him, but also because he stresses tradition--which is not properly a grab bag open to the whims of individual choice--as mere "resources" and "influences." The vitally important "resources" of classical, confessional Protestantism are so much rubble--indigenously non-viable but of great utility in the hands of the Evangelical. Perhaps it is Noll's hope that--with the passage of time that he notes Evangelicalism needs--the fragments that it shores up from a past not its own will cohere into a new bulwark of tradition. Where this prospect leaves Hart's students isn't something Noll was willing to answer, and that makes his optimism begin to sound more like a mechanical reaction of team loyalty, the flipside of which is his negative, even despairing, projections for classical Protestantism. "Culturally adaptive biblical experimentalism," as Noll has in the past described the Evangelical ethos, has always sounded to me like "making it up as we go along and turning out to be just like everyone else." That idea can't have escaped Noll's attention. Alan Wolfe, Ron Sider, and Christian Smith (among others) have recently charted Evangelicalism's dipping into what Smith has called the "heresies" of "moralistic therapeutic deism." (Carla Barnhill might stand as a case in point.) And certainly Noll has chafed at Evangelicals' penchant for a right-wing politics that he found impossible to support in the past several presidential elections. In this regard Noll was not alone, and aside from my deep disagreement with Christians (including some of our compatriots at tNP) who abstained from voting or who opposed the incumbent (and despite my sympathy for their motives), it says something singularly significant that Noll finds himself so politically and ecclesially alienated from both his Evangelical brethren and his "classical" Protestant cousins. Wanting a "tradition" but not content with any particular tradition as it actually exists--including Evangelicalism as it is--Noll seems afflicted with the very poverty of coherence that he knows is the fruit of "life without tradition." What this impasse portends I cannot say, but perhaps it sheds light on the vigorously hostile and parasitic stance Noll and his likeminded associates have taken in their support for Baylor University's 2012 program (and its now former president Robert Sloan), which aims at developing a "Protestant Notre Dame." Predictably resulting in massive tensions and conflict, this great ambition has been directed in large part by (primarily Northern) Evangelical and Reformed ideas and personalities--rather than Southern Baptist ones. In brief, Baylor--a confessionally distinctive Protestant University--is to be saved from itself by becoming the grist for the Evangelical mill. I do not exaggerate; it has nearly been put as starkly by Noll, Richard Neuhaus, and many other sources who blame an odd coalition of both "fundamentalists" and secularizing "liberals" at Baylor for resisting a life-saving, mind and soul-nourishing program of Christian higher education--not to mention a design to attract superstar faculty capable of redeeming the culture. (I gather this means so profoundly impressing the New York Times with the torrent of genius arising from Waco that the newspaper of record ceases to patronize Evangelicals as a bunch of banjo-strumming crackers.) Perhaps because Southern Baptists are not "classical" Protestants (their legacy does not figure in Noll's list of admired "resources") their largest university is available for colonization by those chosen for future glory, in Noll's view, by history and Providence. Having some experience with the cure of souls, I will hazard a diagnosis: this sort of presumption and ambition is dangerous and rotten to the core. Arising from the quest of alienated Evangelical intellectuals looking for identity, tradition, influence, and intellectual credibility (all at once!) is a supreme arrogance and egoistic self-assertion that paradoxically derives from self-doubt, disaffection and even self-loathing. It is the false pride of "merit societies" and "gifted" groups whose members are also pleading for a kind of special preferment because of their minority and quasi-victim status. Such operations, religious or otherwise, serve in great measure to perform an identity of success and accomplishment with questionable substance and sustainability. At its worst, the ethos in question may end up requiring forceful takeovers of existing institutions (such as Baylor University) which have a measure of earned virtue, skill, and competence--but only because they were the particular, peculiar communities that bred the qualities that made them come into being and flourish. Thus Noll on the one hand expresses a need for time to mature Evangelicalism, yet he is impatient to push the process along by supporting the destruction (via a kind of social engineering) of what time has yielded at Baylor, however imperfect and imperiled it may be. It may be unpleasant and, in some material respects, disadvantageous for particularist Protestants to accept this diagnosis, but if they see and desire a future that is their own, Noll's contrary convictions and agendas can't be taken lightly. I realize that I have said much of this before, but I did not then grasp these underlying causes, and now it also occurs to me too that Noll's incoherence also has to do with a conveniently shifting ethic toward power and its use. This appears most clearly in Noll's aversion to many of the regnant neoconservative political agendas alongside of his acceptance of their underlying principles. For instance, prior to the 2004 presidential election Noll wrote: Since the United States is by far the strongest nation in the world--the new Rome of the early twenty-first century--it should ponder the over-extension, the short-sighted presumption, the failures of imagination, and the unilateral use of force that caused such difficulties in the latter phases of the Roman empire. Presumably, then, Noll would have reservations about supporting an invading force driven by whiggish imperial ideology that seeks to spread its enlightenment and establish a beachhead against a much weaker fundamentalist group of small, particularist bands of insurgents fighting on their home turf for the right of self-determination and the preservation of local customs and mores. The Bush Administration vs. Iraq? No--this is the story of the northern evangelical establishment as led by the likes of Noll, Marsden and others against Baylor. Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square: Resurrecting Caelum et Terra by Jeremy Beer IT is difficult, in retrospect, not to think of the end of the Cold War as a missed opportunity for orthodox Catholicism in America. The dominant school of Catholic political and cultural reflection since the collapse of the Iron Curtain has been of a neoconservative or neoliberal cast, orthodox in doctrinal and moral matters, progressive in most economic and some political ones (no matter that this progressivism is known as conservatism). Tracey Rowland, in her recent Culture and the Thomist Tradition, helpfully affixes the label "Whig Thomism" to this school. The adjective captures its flavor, politics, and perhaps even its intellectual antecedents nicely, even if the noun may credit its program with a philosophical precision to which it rarely ascends. One way to characterize the defects of the Whig Thomist project is to understand it as a failure to transcend the dichotomous categories of the Cold War, during which we were regularly reminded--by intellectuals and politicians alike--that our choice was simple: freedom or totalitarianism, capitalism or socialism, statism or individualism. Thus, though its first issue appeared in February 1990, not long after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, First Things, the flagship journal of the Whig Thomism, has nevertheless drawn on the dominant anticommunist narrative of the Cold War which holds that the Soviet defeat meant, necessarily, the triumph of liberal democracy--emphasis on liberal. On this reading, even John Paul II (as Richard John Neuhaus has argued) is a liberal, or at least sympathetic to liberalism properly understood, and the importance of his pontificate has been to prepare the way for a rapprochement between Catholicism and the liberal tradition.1 For Neuhaus and his fellow Whig Thomists, there is no going back from this liberalism, no viable alternative.2 There is only an argument--a vitally important one, to be sure--as to what precisely this victory of liberalism means, especially for religion. The Whig Thomists have, to their credit, voiced a number of misgivings about contemporary culture. But they have simultaneously refrained from undertaking any sort of deep critique of Western liberalism, arguing instead that the rejuvenation of religious faith can leaven liberal democracy sufficiently for its institutions and assumptions to allow for Christian flourishing. The important thing is that there not be a "naked public square" (Neuhaus's coinage) denuded of specifically religious content. As for the basic tenets of liberalism and its economic manifestation, capitalism, the Whig Thomists have had few qualms. In fact, they have typically argued that the American system of "democratic capitalism" is best for all concerned, including the Church, which can thrive in the new dispensation as it never could have under the only truly thinkable alternative, state socialism. Indeed, the liberal state acts as a guarantor against the Church's committing again the authoritarian blunders that stain its past. Unfortunately, the Whig Thomists' understanding of liberal democracy as a praeparitio evangelii has meant that they have had to leave a range of issues essentially unexplored. Thus, First Things has usually responded dismissively--or else with implausible optimism--to critics of technology, consumerism, mass society, modern warfare, and environmental degradation, especially when those critics have insisted on linking their concerns to the intrinsic logic of liberal capitalism. This response is understandable, for to the extent that such critics have sought to articulate fundamental critiques of liberalism, they hack at the root of the only genuine, historically available option for Christians today. If they are not cranks, they are knaves or fools. For instance, the Acton Institute's Fr. Robert Sirico--the Whig Thomist par excellence, just as his organization's namesake was the quintessential Whig historian--wrote recently that his organization's "prayer" for the "holiday season" was for the continued "integration of the world economy," since, after all, "free economies are the God-given means to help us all peacefully fulfill the ideal"--of what?--of "the division of labor." Some may see the Americanization of the entire world as lamentable, even imperialistic, but Sirico assures us that "until the Golden Arches in Paris or the Wal-Mart in Beijing closes because enough people choose not to go there, they will exist because of consent and will continue to bring jobs and prosperity to places in need."3 The much more thoughtful Neuhaus, conceding that there is an "element of truth" in complaints about Americans' "consumerism," nevertheless finds these complaints tiresome and overblown, applying to contemporary spending habits Johnson's dictum that "a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is busy making money."4 The theologizing of corporate capitalism comes easily to Michael Novak, who tells us that "solidarity is another way of saying globalization." He means it: "People find it increasingly hard to think only about local conditions. Is this not a major step in the direction of the realities of solidarity? Are human beings not planetary creatures, one another's brothers and sisters, members of one same body, every part serving every other part? These are the best of times for those committed to solidarity. . . ."5 In adopting positions such as these, Sirico, Neuhaus, and Novak are only giving voice to the neoliberal, Americanist prejudices widely shared among U.S. Catholics, high-, middle-, and lowbrow alike. The Whig Thomists have probably done less to shape those prejudices than they have to solidify them by providing intellectual ballast and cultural respectability. And to most committed Catholics they seem to be the only game in town in this post-Cold War era. After all, when the Berlin Wall fell, so also did the doctrinally unreliable, politically liberal "Commonweal Catholic" project and its interpretation of the proper relationship between America and the Church. For when it came to the question, "Where did you stand during the Cold War?" the Reaganite anticommunist intellectuals grouped around First Things have much the better claim to have been on the right side of history. Fortunately, even excepting those still clinging to the exhausted liberal Catholic project (who sometimes seem to be the only opponents that the Whig Thomists are willing to acknowledge), the Whig Thomist cultural project has been challenged in different ways by various Catholic thinkers during the last couple of decades. In her study, Rowland outlines the alternatives offered by David Schindler, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, among others. The New Pantagruel itself is impossible to understand except as a reaction to the dominance exercised by Whig Thomist assumptions and ideas not only in Catholic circles but among doctrinally orthodox Christian thinkers generally. It is worth noting, then, that a decade ago there was a short-lived magazine that also sought to challenge the hegemony of the Whig Thomist school: Caelum et Terra (1991-96), an uneven but vigorous and often wise lay magazine which pursued a brand of traditionalist radicalism that allowed it to see through the ahistorical Whig prejudices of Cold War Catholicism. Caelum et Terra had the courage to claim, against the grain, that the necessary project was not the Catholicizing of liberalism, but rather the articulation and creation of a traditionalism that was truly American while also authentically and fully Catholic. And it was a genuinely countercultural and communal magazine that embodied the principles for which it stood and profoundly affected the lives of at least a few dozen--which is to say, a startlingly high proportion--of its editors, contributors, and readers. Never well known, and now almost totally forgotten, Caelum et Terra deserves to be remembered. CAELUM et Terra was not marked by theoretic brilliance. It compensated with frankness, simplicity, and moral clarity. Founded by Daniel Nichols and Maclin and Karen Horton in 1991, C&T was for the most part written and edited by earnest, literate, and intelligent laymen removed from political power centers, academe, and the Church bureaucracy. Its contributors were not well known: only Juli Loesch Wiley, Thomas Storck, and Allan Carlson (one article) might be known to tNP readers. For the most part, C&T's writers consisted of stay-at-home mothers, adventurers, ranchers, activists, librarians, and, in the person of Daniel Nichols, one artist/mailman. Few religious wrote for the magazine, even fewer scholars. The east and west coasts were poorly represented; on the other hand, because its first issue was mailed to graduates of John Senior's famous Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, the magazine attracted many writers and readers from the plains states. Nichols, originally from Fenton, Michigan, was living in northern Virginia when he founded the magazine but moved to Wooster, Ohio, in 1994. The Hortons lived on Alabama's gulf coast. No one was using C&T to advance his career, least of all the editors. The result was a magazine brimming with honesty and directness, if not always originality. A Caelum et Terra cover by Daniel Nichols That honesty and directness was the fruit of Nichols's editorial guidance. Caelum et Terra embodied his ethos as much as First Things has embodied that of Neuhaus. As it did most issues, Nichols's art adorned the first number of C&T, published in summer 1991. Done in black-and-white, that issue's cover features a pen-and-ink drawing by Nichols: a church in a pastoral setting, while receiving divine grace from the hand of God reaching down from a cloud, is surrounded by a ring of anthropomorphized figures of the sun and moon as well as fish and doves. The image is both New Agey and wholly typical of the art to be found in each issue. The magazine's name was helpfully translated for the Latin illiterate as "heaven and earth," while at the bottom of the cover there appeared three pairs of words: "Grace and Nature," "Christ and Culture," and "Tradition and Renewal." The back cover contained only a simple, broadly drawn sketch of the back of a large, caped man followed by a much smaller cow. It was labeled "Three Acres and a Cow (after G. K. Chesterton)." Some reflection on all this would have revealed to the attentive reader much about this new magazine. First, as the masthead confirmed, C&T seemed to be, and was, a low-budget, cottage enterprise run by just three persons: editor Nichols, assistant editor Maclin Horton, and technical editor Karen Horton. It regarded art as essential to its mission; Nichols's distinctive, dreamy drawings and scratchboard prints--a sort of countrified iconography--would appear in virtually every issue. And it embraced an earthy, neo-hippie sacramentality that would continually perplex those of its readers who were certain that the flower children of the utopian Sixties had ruined everything. About all this, Caelum et Terra was quite up front. The editors' opening editorial, which they would later call with ironic self-consciousness their "manifesto," began with their claim, quoting Ratzinger, that the current era is best described as "an anti-culture of death." "Indeed, the shadow of death looms starkly over this society," wrote the editors, where few can remember a time when the innocent have not been targeted by the arsenals of mass destruction or the more selective weapon of the suction machine. And this shadow also extends its reach in more subtle and even seductive ways into all our lives: in the frenzy of consumerism, in the hurried pace which robs us of reflection, in the soul-numbing artificiality of the technological hum which pervades our days. Yet, paradoxically, the moment seems one of promise. There is a hunger in the heart of humanity and we as Catholics are heirs of the Wisdom and sharers in the Grace which humanity seeks--though most of us have proven unworthy servants. The editors attempted to carve out for themselves a cultural space not adequately represented by either the contemporary political Left or Right, claiming that the "whole Catholic, it seems to us, . . . would not consider the terms Catholic and radical or orthodox and prophetic to be mutually exclusive." Their new magazine's vision, they announced, would be guided principally by the great "personalist and distributist thinkers, saints, artists, poets and activists," a tradition of Catholic thought with which the editors saw their project "in creative continuity." Nichols and the Hortons also emphasized that their magazine would strive to be highly practical, seeking to flesh out the concrete ways in which the Christian life might be lived and authentic community be built. They made good on their promise "to publish articles on home schooling, family prayer and ritual, gardening, cooperative enterprise, and other very down-to-earth matters." Nor did they stray from their stated goal of attempting to once again make clear the indispensable relationship between the divine and the natural--between heaven and earth, with the latter term understood as necessarily including the land itself: We expect that the magazine will show a deep interest in the agrarianism which was prophetically recommended by Catholic and other thinkers in the earlier part of this century and which re-emerged as a conscious and practicing movement in the 1960s. At the same time, we believe that a well-ordered commonwealth includes both town and country and want to explore means of humanizing city life. We would also like to affirm the worth and examine the present state of that often-mocked but very valuable part of American life, the small town. These concerns, they noted, were of little interest to the politicians and pundits of mainstream liberalism and conservatism, and in turn, claimed the editors, these -isms were of little interest to C&T, since to their way of thinking both were ultimately committed to the assumptions of Enlightenment modernity. Although they claimed to seek nothing less than "personal, familial, and cultural transformation," the editors' expectations for their project were modest; they worried that "[t]here may not be much of an audience for this venture." That may have been true. But Caelum et Terra nevertheless helped to create a larger audience for their venture than many might have imagined possible. There is one more thing to note about that first issue of Caelum et Terra, and that is that the first two books reviewed in the magazine together identified the "left" and right-- poles of decentralist traditionalism between and around which the C&T discussion would continue. Maclin Horton's review of a reissue of Russell Kirk's Prospects for Conservatives faulted Kirk for promoting "the fitness of class as a natural ordering of society." But for the most part Horton found in Kirk a thinker whose conservatism could be built on. Kirk's "concern for community, for place, for order; the bias against the machine, the giant corporation and the giant state; the conviction that the severing of the person from nature will end in disaster; the desire, in general, to conserve, to re-establish the permanent things which have been displaced by industrialism," marked him as a penetrating cultural critic whose work could be used to build a bridge to the "erratically and selectively traditionalist left." Daniel Nichols, on the other hand, in his review of Wendell Berry's What Are People For? noted that Berry, though having an audience primarily at the "Green/Left/New Age end of the spectrum," was clearly "friendly to the western and biblical tradition." Berry's "critique of contemporary society," wrote Nichols, "is rooted in love of family, region and land and a hearty respect for what Buddhists call 'right livelihood.' . . . His criticisms of unbridled capitalism and consumerism, his respect for small land ownership and his embracing of the principle of subsidiarity (though he does not use the word) all echo the great Catholic tradition of social thought." THE differences between the Whig Thomist and traditionalist narratives of the relationship between American "democratic capitalism" and the Church were brought most clearly to the fore in the debate that arose between the two camps in response to John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus (CA), which was promulgated in May 1991. Not a few American neoconservatives responded to this encyclical by choosing to interpret it as a papal affirmation of their political and economic views--in short, of the Whig Thomist project. Neuhaus, for one, understood that the encyclical had been written "with specific reference to the world-historical experiences of this century"--that is, that the pope was attempting to delineate the Church's historic mission and prophetic role in the new, post-Cold War era. Yet he also saw it as a cautious and nuanced affirmation of the triumphant Western liberal democratic tradition, including its economic system. Novak went further in his discussion of the document, in which, somewhat oddly, John Paul emerges as a theorist of capital creation and convinced defender of modern corporate practice. In CA, Novak writes, "the pope sees that the market is, above all, a social instrument" and that "market systems shed practical light on Christian truth and advance human welfare." In Novak's account, the pope also argues "that markets generate new and important kinds of community, while expressing the social nature of human beings in rich and complex ways." The editors of Caelum et Terra, in contrast, were part of an orthodox Catholic coalition which came together to challenge this interpretation. Fifteen editors and writers--including David L. Schindler of Communio, Fr. Ian Boyd and Stratford Caldecott of the Chesterton Review, and Michael O'Brien of Nazareth--affiliated with nine different periodicals signed and published in their own pages a full-page response titled "The Civilization of Love: The Pope's Call to the West." Their statement, admirable but--like Caelum et Terra itself--now seemingly forgotten, deserves to be quoted in full: The collapse of international communism has destroyed one of the most obvious enemies of human freedom, but it has left the starving of the Third World in their misery, even while the moral anarchy of a mass popular culture prevails in the affluent West--destroying those "common things" (G. K. Chesterton) that lie at the root of social order and organic community. In the long run, communism itself may have had less power to destroy traditional morality and historic cultures than the disintegrative consumerism of the West. And so, when Pope John Paul II criticizes the complacency of the developed nations, and looks to them to make "important changes in established life-styles, in order to limit the waste of environmental and human resources" (Centesimus Annus, n. 52), this is no mere "vestigial rhetorical fragment that somehow wandered into the text . . . notable chiefly for its incongruity with the argument that Pope is otherwise making" (as one leading neo-conservative theologian has asserted). The Pope is setting out one of the most fundamental requirements of the new evangelization. The universal call to holiness, made concrete in the promotion of justice and leading towards a civilization of love, demands nothing less than a change of life-styles. The Pope goes so far as to question the "models of production and consumption" that dominate present-day economic theory, and even the "established structures of power which today govern societies" (ibid., n. 58). The need to respond to this call could not be more urgent. "Everyone should put his hand to the work which falls to his share, and that at once and straightaway, lest the evil which is already so great become through delay absolutely beyond remedy" (ibid., n. 56, citing Rerum Novarum). No one wrote more persuasively against the neoconservatives' tendentious interpretation of Centesimus Annus than did Daniel Nichols. Nichols first noted that American neoconservatives had chosen to interpret CA as "both a profound break with previous Catholic social teaching and a ringing endorsement of the American economic system and contemporary capitalism in general." He cited Novak's remarkable assertion that the pope's "vision of a free economy . . . is American in spirit and definition." But this sort of reading was as ideological as had been previous attempts of the Catholic Left to appropriate papal teaching for their own political ends. John Paul II's teaching on economics in CA was no different than that which he had promulgated in two previous encyclicals, Laborem Exercens and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, observed Nichols. The pope, in fact, had even said in an interview on September 9, 1993, that the Church "has always distanced herself from capitalist ideology, holding it responsible for grave social injustices." After noting that in fact the pope had called for nothing less than conversion, Nichols zeroed in on the response of Neuhaus, who had claimed that John Paul's call for "important changes in established life-styles, in order to limit the waste of environmental and human resources, thus enabling every individual and all the peoples of the earth to have a sufficient share of those resources" had "all the appearances of being a throwaway line" and was "most likely a vestigial rhetorical fragment that somehow wandered into the text." In other words, such an attack on consumer capitalism was not to be taken seriously; the subtext of Neuhaus's complaint seemed to be that it was inconceivable that the pope might think authentic freedom could exist outside such an economic context in the modern world. In fact, charged Nichols, both Neuhaus and George Weigel had included misleadingly edited versions of CA in books they had published. Their versions, for example, did not include the pope's statement on the injustices of capitalism: "Would that these words, written at a time when what has been called 'unbridled capitalism' was pressing forward, should not have to be repeated today with the same severity." Nor would the reader of the Neuhaus/Weigel versions have known that, after first praising worker cooperatives, the pope had written that "the worker movement is part of a more general movement among workers and other people of good will for the liberation of the human person and for the affirmation of human rights." A reader would not know that the pope had quoted Aquinas to the effect that "the Church replies without hesitation that man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all," nor that "the human inadequacies of capitalism and the resulting domination of things over people are far from disappearing." In addition, a lengthy section condemning economic oppression was omitted from the Neuhaus/Weigel versions of Centesimus Annus which is actually quite useful in understanding the pope's position: Ownership of the means of production, whether in industry or agriculture, is just and legitimate if it serves useful work. It becomes illegitimate, however, when it is not utilized or when it serves to impede the work of others, in an effort to gain a profit which is not the result of the overall expansion of work and the wealth of society, but rather is the result of curbing them or of illicit exploitation, speculation, or the breaking of solidarity among working people. Ownership of this kind has no justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man. Finally, Nichols noted that whereas the pope had written, "We have seen that it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called 'Real Socialism' leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization," the Neuhaus/Weigel version read, "It is unacceptable to say that the defeat of 'real socialism' leaves [the present operation of capitalism] as the only model of economic organization." This edit was no accident, for Nichols went on to quote Neuhaus as writing that "despite [the pope's] disclaimer, capitalism is 'the only model of economic organization.'" Apparently John Paul was too open-minded. Nichols's reading of the encyclical, on the contrary, was as a cautionary document. For unlike his neoconservative interlocutors, he instinctively realized that to maintain a credible witness in the world the Church must not be seen as blessing, or of being blind to, the "destruction of the world's economies, ecologies and cultures" that had been the fruit (if not the only fruit) of Western cultural dominance. "Americans must hear the prophetic word the Holy Father speaks to us," wrote Nichols, a word that calls us to conversion, conversion that remains incomplete until it includes a social dimension. A failure to recognize that existing social structures are in need of radical reform would be but another expression of the separation of faith from culture decried by successive popes as "the great tragedy of our times." Let us embrace the call to build the civilization of love, and let us return to an honest and faithful reading of the whole of Catholic doctrine, which continues to be a "sign of contradiction" and a call to reform, both personal and social. Caelum et Terra found itself in conflict with conventional American Catholic prejudices on much more than the economic questions that emerged with regard to the Pope's teaching in Centesimus Annus. On questions of war, in particular, Nichols was just short of being a pacifist; not believing much, if at all, in the moral superiority of the goals or ideals of Christian America, he saw little justification for what other Christians would describe as necessary military measures in Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden, or especially in Baghdad. Nichols and a number of contributors tried also to articulate what a realistic but meaningful Catholic response to modern technology might look like. After one gathering of a C&T reading group had examined Neil Postman's Technopoly, Nichols stated the group's cardinal principle, which was that the thoughtful Catholic ought to consider criteria other than mere efficiency, including ecological, social, and aesthetic criteria, when deciding whether to adopt a new technology. A not impractical approach, but a pretty radical one nonetheless. For many conservative Catholics then, as now, the Greens were merely the new Reds. Caelum et Terra, however, consistently published good articles on conservation, environmentalism, and the natural world. How wonderful to discover Will Hoyt's sensitive and intelligent article on the intense religiosity of John Muir's journey and vision. With the publication of such articles Caelum et Terra's editors demonstrated that they understood that the American nature writing tradition had been unjustly neglected by the Christian community, not to mention self-identified conservatives, for mostly superficial reasons. Muir, Sigurd Olson, Helen Hoover, Aldo Leopold, and the other masters of the genre may not have been orthodox believers, but they recall us, often with lovely and evocative prose, to the natural world that is the source of our religious longings. In this sense, Wendell Berry has written, even the anarchist Edward Abbey was a traditionalist, one whose reverence for nature made him the most religious of agnostics.6 Caelum et Terra possessed the same insight. In all this, C&T was trying to resuscitate the intellectual trajectory of the prewar Catholic revival and its "unclassifiable political equation" (a phrase used by historian Christopher Lasch to describe his own brand of heterodox radicalism). With the advent of the Cold War, this revival had become replaced, or conflated, among American Catholics with a spiritually flaccid, flag-waving nationalism. (The historian John Lukacs reports that "when in the 1950s I asked my then orthodox and rigidly catechized American Catholic students, 'Are you an American who happens to be a Catholic, or are you a Catholic who happens to be an American?' all of them chose the former, not the latter.")7 Caelum et Terra drew on and was inspired by a number of prewar Catholic thinkers, including Dorothy Day, Vincent McNabb, Eric Gill, E. F. Schumacher, Peter Maurin, Fr. Conrad Pepler, Christopher Dawson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Chesterton, Romano Guardini, Tolkien, Peguy, and Belloc.8 C&T even reprinted pieces of McNabb's in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his death in its winter and spring 1993 issues. But the writer that the magazine did more to recover than anyone else was Graham Carey, cofounder of the Catholic Art Association, whose articles were reprinted for eight consecutive issues beginning with the spring 1994 number. Carey had been the editor of an obscure Catholic journal himself some decades earlier, the association's Christian Social Art Quarterly, which eventually became Good Work. Boasting Gill, Dawson, Schumacher, and Thomas Merton among its contributors, Carey's periodical sought to overcome Fr. Sirico's vaunted division of labor by, in Nichols's words, "bridging the modern chasm between artist and workman." Traditionalist but not imitative, Carey's attempt to recover wholeness through the renewed integration of art and work, thought and life, strongly resonated with Nichols's vision for Caelum et Terra. And Carey understood well the nature of the challenge that American culture posed for Catholics. "In every way not actually forbidden by faith and morals," he had written in 1954 in the first piece of his to be reprinted in C&T, we accept the cultural forms of the secularism around us. We do this not maliciously, but because our education does not enable us to see the cultural forms of secularism for what they are--logical expressions of the secular ideology. This is not a stable situation. Either the Catholic body will prove unable to withstand the pressure of its cultural environment, and will be gradually absorbed by secularism; or it will build a cultural environment of its own, worthy of its inner principles. DOUBTLESS it was largely because of Caelum et Terra's refusal to identify the victory of liberal democracy with the victory of Catholic truth (while simultaneously rejecting collectivism) that a community of desperate souls was almost immediately attracted to the journal. The letters to the editor and the advertisements placed in C&T's classifieds section ranged entertainingly, and satisfyingly, along the hazy borderlands between mysticism and kookiness, orthodoxy and fanaticism, ground that most journals quite understandingly fear to tread. C&T never refused to publish a letter that was even partially coherent. A total of seventeen letters were printed in the second issue, for instance, including one from a collapsed Catholic who took the opportunity to vent some rage ("Sorry, but I fled the Catholic faith and the 'Mother Church' years ago"), and one from a reader from Richmond, Virginia, who advised the editors to "loosen up, baby." Indeed, for the editor of a journal that was trying to establish itself, Nichols was remarkably unafraid to print correspondence from his more hostile and possibly clinically insane readers. Among the more lucid correspondents in this latter category was one from Virginia who thought it his duty to write a letter after every issue, for which C&T charitably provided him space until he finally took his leave, with a flourish, in 1995. Fortunately, another exercised reader, this time from the Pacific Northwest, emerged soon afterwards. "An old friend passed through and left behind a fat stack of Caelum et Terra. Like wow man, so groovy! . . . All the uplifting chatter about Farming and Soul and Marriage and Worship etc. etc. etc. makes me want to puke. . . . If only you all would basically mind your own (pathetic) business." Every now and then a blue-stocking would write to express her moral objections. "I did not like your cover representation of St. Francis," scolded one such from Columbus, Ohio, troubled by the saint's scruffiness. "Your description of him made him look like one of the weird people one sees on the streets. He is one of our greatest saints and should be treated with reverence." (Please, Mr. Nichols, put St. Francis in a proper suit and tie next time, or at least a golf shirt and khakis.) And the prudes were not infrequently offended: "that nude drawing of Eve without even a fig leaf" troubled one from Wisconsin. For sheer entertainment, nothing could eclipse the fireworks when the magazine fell into the hands of America-love-it-or-leave-it types. "I had somehow come under the impression that Caelum et Terra was a serious magazine prepared by responsible grown-ups for thoughtful and faithful Catholic Christians," huffed one correspondent. "It appears, though, that Caelum et Terra is simply one more inane counterculture mouthpiece (albeit, one with an eclectic spiritual bent) published by and evidently for superannuated flower children. I had plenty of the '60s in the '60s, thank you." The first letter published by the magazine, in its second issue, came from John Senior, whose former IHP students composed a sizable proportion of the magazine's subscribers and contributors. "How good to hear again those names from the Second Spring of Catholic England--Belloc, Chesterton, McNabb and Gill, sprung up again in Virginia and the South Bronx." Senior's former student Scott Bloch first wrote a letter and then became a contributor, a path followed by several others, whether or not their letters had been critical (Bloch had taken Horton to task, and none too subtly, for his free-verse poetry). In fact, this was the path trod by Eric Brende, who would go on to become the author of the magazine's most successful running column, "Homesteader's Journal." Brende's first appearance in Caelum et Terra came in the third issue, when he wrote that he had been "overwhelmed when I (just now) read your summer issue." Brende, who had graduated from Yale, was then a graduate student in MIT's "Science, Technology, and Society" program. But what an odd sort of grad student he was, even by MIT standards. As he wrote in his letter, he was a Catholic convert who had been much influenced by both the Catholic Worker movement and the Amish, with whom he had worked during three summers and one fall. Furthermore, he was at MIT "to study the desirability and feasibility and philosophical credibility of alternatives to high-tech living. Some time soon (maybe this spring) I will leave Boston with my wife-to-be, and we tentatively plan to live near an Amish community I know, at least temporarily, so that we can learn more from and drink in the experience of their wonderfully wholesome (albeit a bit sectarian) way of life." Brende was serious, as Caelum et Terra readers would soon find out. His "Homesteader's Journal" began to appear in the magazine's second year and detailed the Brendes' experiences homesteading among a Kentucky Amish community. Romantic, nostalgic, utopian: these are the usual charges leveled against such efforts. Brende was not entirely innocent on these counts, but he was sufficiently cognizant of such traps to at least partially avoid them. Often enough, romanticism, nostalgia, and utopianism were present in their proper measures, in which case they manifested themselves as virtues that allowed him to transcend cramped rationalism, temporal provincialism, and an unduly accommodationist realism. With sharp and descriptive prose, Brende presented their life among the Amish as honestly as possible. The Brendes' life was hard, often frustrating, uniquely rewarding--just as one would expect, which doesn't make his accounts of their life any less fascinating: coping without electricity, their attempts to grow and sell produce, including pumpkins, sorghum molasses, and sweet potatoes; their twenty-six-mile round-trip commute to church, at first by bicycle, later by buggy; their often bemused but friendly Amish neighbors; their attendance at an Amish church service; the thousand-and-one things that go wrong when a Catholic couple from Boston tries to go Amish--like dropping the flashlight in the outhouse toilet. Nor is killing and cleaning a chicken as easy as it sounds: Our pot of boiling water for dunking chickens before plucking them turned out to be too small. The first time I plunged a fresh-killed chicken into it, the water overflowed all over the stove. This made for a gooey and unappetizing slime. So I poured out some of the water. This left us too little. The remaining bath did not cover the chicken. And we didn't have any more piping water on hand. So I tried ladling water from below the chicken over the feathers in hopes that this would loosen them. Mary, meanwhile, was becoming demoralized. Rivulets of lukewarm brown-bloody liquid coursing over the carcass of a zonked chicken--exuding a chicken death-smell--made her gag. Meanwhile, increasing death-rigors only added to the tenacity of the quill pores clutching the feathers. It was difficult enough fighting with the chicken when it was alive, and wanted to stay that way. Now that it was dead, the feathers were still hanging on. Most disastrous was their attempt to establish a small Catholic community by inviting other Catholic families to join them. "Catholic couple seeks to draw others to Amish area to be neighbors and learn more about Amish living. . . ." "Seeking priest who is interested in future chaplaincy for Catholic agrarian community. Write to Eric Brende. . . ." These rather extraordinary classified ads were run by the Brendes in several issues of C&T. Two families did move to Kentucky to join the effort, so beguiling had his articles been. Things didn't work out. There were happier times, though, enough that it would be unfair to characterize the Brendes' experiment as a failure. The experience of driving one's own horse-and-buggy into town, with the accompanying leisure to take in the countryside; of coming to appreciate the gentle light of the kerosene lamp; of understanding the charitable egalitarianism that lies behind the seemingly incomprehensible Amish rules regarding dress and hemlines; of initially resisting but finally longing for and finding silence, real silence; of being corralled by a heretofore unknown family and compelled to eat a dinner of "the most delicious smoked grilled chicken breasts, buttered noodles, cole slaw, pickled beets, mashed potatoes and gravy, and, the piece de resistance, peach upside-down cake with whipped cream piled on top. . . ." Pleasures and insights that most of us will never know, not really. Brende's accomplishment was to remind us of the goods, and the knowledge, that we moderns have lost. Or are losing. THE first indication that C&T would soon hoe its last row came in the summer 1996 issue. First, Nichols's editorial reported that a major benefactor had announced that his funding had come to an end. Furthermore, renewals of subscriptions continued to be frustratingly low and the money that C&T had poured into advertising had brought little if any return. Nichols was hard pressed not to conclude that "we are trying to articulate something that not too many people want to hear," words reminiscent of the fears expressed in the very first editorial back in summer 1991. But just as fateful was the ad that appeared on page forty-six, "snuck in by friends," congratulating the bachelor Nichols for his impending nuptials to a certain Michelle. Caelum et Terra would last only one more issue, and as much as finances, Nichols's marriage was the reason. He had never been one to separate ideas from life itself, and after five years of promoting the goods of marriage and family, he was ready to go down that road himself and would not hold anything back (he already had a full-time job, after all, and his fiancé had a two-year-old child). The magazine's readers, who had long since become aware not only of Nichols's bachelorhood but also of his tenderness towards children, cannot have helped but to have mixed feelings about the event. The genre of the Caelum et Terra story had not always been clear, but the matrimonial ending made it clear: a comedy, with the sort of honest hope for the world that comedy--despite and in the face of everything--always represents. Not only did Nichols, as the lead, get a wife and family, but supporting player Eric Brende got a book deal. His Better Off, which incorporates--without mentioning the magazine--rather loosely much of the material he first published in Caelum et Terra, was published by HarperCollins last July. Furthermore, there are signs, and not only here in the flourishing virtual environment of tNP, but even in the pages of First Things itself,9 that the hegemony of the Cold War--shaped Whig Thomist narrative among orthodox Christians will not go unchallenged. The verse from the Gospel of Mark that appeared on the masthead of each Caelum et Terra issue may have applied to the efforts of Nichols and the Hortons more than any of them had the right to expect: "The Kingdom of Heaven is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground and should sleep and rise day and night, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how." Notes See Neuhaus's essay "The Liberalism of John Paul II," a slightly revised version of which is included in Doug Bandow and David L. Schindler, eds., Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), 289-306. Unless otherwise specified, each of the Neuhaus quotes in this essay come from this article. Neuhaus writes that "we have not the luxury of imagining the reconstitution of [our] social and political order on foundations other than the liberal tradition." All of these quotes are from Acton Notes: The Newsletter of the Acton Institute, December 2004, vol. 14, no. 12. "While We're At It," First Things, December 2004, 78. Michael Novak, "Catholic Social Teaching, Markets, and the Poor," in Bandow and Schindler, eds., Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny, 55. Unless otherwise specified, all Novak quotes in this essay come from this chapter. See Berry's essay, "A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey," in What Are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990). The quote comes from chapter nine of Lukacs's End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993). Dietrich von Hildebrand, Balthasar, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, and Walker Percy were important interwar writers to Caelum et Terra's editors, while it is probable that no two living thinkers exerted more influence on the journal than did Wendell Berry and John Paul II. Neil Postman might be third. See the articles by Chris Shannon ("Catholicism as the Other," First Things, January 2004, 46-53) and Eric Miller ("Alone in the Academy," First Things, February 2004), both contributing editors to tNP. Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square: Why Catholics Should Be Wary of "One Nation under God" : Richard Neuhaus in a Time of War by Michael J. Baxter, C.S.C. This article appeared in the Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2005 and an earlier version appeared in God Is Not: Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist, D. Brent Laytham, ed., (Brazos, 2004). Reprinted with the author's permission. 1. �I always thought Jesus was an American� I know you're all going to think this is crazy, but I always thought Jesus was an American." This statement was uttered by a young woman in a seminar at the University of California at San Diego on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian era. The seminar was taught by Mark Slouka, who reported the incident in an article entitled "A Year Later: Notes on America's Intimations of Mortality."1 The main point of the article is that Americans think of themselves as separate from the rest of the world, that they imagine themselves living in a strange physical and metaphysical isolation, so that even after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon they had yet to come to grips with death. Americans only manage to absorb what Slouka called (in a variation on the poem by Wordsworth) "intimations of mortality," subtle hints that history is not, as they suppose, of their own making, under their own control. But such intimations are fleeting; they pass, allowing them to remove themselves from the filth, the rotted flesh, and the smoldering bones of the world beyond these shores. Thus, in the year following September 11, 2001, Americans dealt with the reality of death in their usual way: by denying it. "We erased it," he observed, "carted it off in trucks. It had nothing to do with us. There was nothing to learn. We were still innocent, apart."2 ...there is the related problem of the vague, unspecified identity of the deity to which Neuhaus refers when he states that "America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are 'one nation under God.'" This vagueness is reflected in his wizened concept of faith as "confidence that we are under His protection..." What makes Americans so resilient in their denial of death? This is where Slouka's article is most insightful. It is, in a phrase, American exceptionalism, the myth of "America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation."3 It is this myth of exceptionalism that the young woman articulated in the seminar that day. And this same myth, Slouka observes, has been articulated by a host of better known actors in American history: from John Winthrop, who in 1630 sermonized that the people sailing aboard the Arbella had been chosen for a special covenant with God to be "as a City upon a hill"; to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the nineteenth-century best-selling author who in 1854 wrote that "the whole world has been looking towards America with hope, as a nation specially raised up by god to advance a cause of liberty and justice"; to the evangelists of the Third Great Awakening, who envisioned an America "bounded to the north by Canada, to the south by Mexico, to the East by Eden, and to the West by the Millennium"; and to President Ronald Reagan, who drew on Winthrop's city-on-a-hill image for his first inaugural address in 1981. Slouka argues that "although the specifically Christian foundation of American exceptionalism had been largely buried by the years, the self-conception built upon it---however secularized and given over to Mammon---remained intact.4 America's national myth of exceptionalism is, so to speak, still Christian after all these years. An incident exhibiting the persistence of this Christian national myth arose in the summer of 2002, just in time for Slouka to be able to slip in a footnote reference to it. "Is all this talk of covenants and destiny," he asks, "merely a vestigial limb, a speechwriter's rhetorical trope?" he asks. "Hardly. We need only recall the recent reaction to the attempt by those godless liberals in the U.S. Court of Appeals to deprive us of our divine patrimony by excising the words 'under God' from the pledge of allegiance to understand the power of myth in America today."5 The incident to which he refers had to do with the ruling from the Ninth Circuit Federal Court that the phrase "under God" in the pledge is unconstitutional on grounds of the First Amendment's establishment clause, in that it compels some citizens to acknowledge a reality contrary to their belief, namely God. The connection Slouka made is an appropriate one. Given the state of the national psyche after 9/11, this ruling touched a raw nerve, and in light of the hue and cry that rose up in its wake, it reminded us how widespread is the notion that the United States of America was founded on religious principles, that it is "one nation under God." But this and similar expressions of America's national myth came into public prominence well before the pledge-of-allegiance controversy in the summer of 2002. Claims that the United States is a Christian nation could be seen and heard everywhere in the wake of 9/11, on billboards and business signs, on talk shows and TV programs, on email chains and internet websites. One of the most controversial claims along these lines came from Jerry Falwell, a leading spokesman for the so-called religious right, who, in a discussion with Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcast Network, suggested that the September 11 attacks were a divine judgment visited upon this nation for what is being done by gays, lesbians, feminists, abortionists, the ACLU, People for the American Way, and others who "have attempted to secularize America, have removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded."6 The problem with such statements is that they are so outlandish that many moderates, including moderate Christians, dismiss them as the talk of a few wacked-out religious fanatics from some backwater town in the Deep South who want to bring back the Scopes Monkey Trial. But the basic claim, albeit in more sophisticated terms, also comes from quarters that seem far removed from the regions of religious fanaticism. 2. "A nation under God" Barry Moser, "Jonah" Take, for example, the editorial published in the December 2001 issue of First Things, a "mainstream" publication edited by Richard John Neuhaus and published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City. Entitled "In a Time of War," the editorial begins with a bald descriptive statement: "This is war. Call it a sustained battle or campaign, if you will, but the relevant moral term is war."7 With the passion of one who witnessed the effects of September 11 firsthand, Neuhaus insists that "it is not, as some claim, a metaphorical war. Metaphorical airplanes flown by metaphorical hijackers did not crash into metaphorical buildings leaving thousands of metaphorical corpses. This is not virtual reality; this is reality. This [war on terrorism] is, for America and those who are on our side, a defensive war."8 In this last sentence, Neuhaus makes the further descriptive statement that this is a just war. Writing in the middle of October 2001, he invokes the traditional just-war doctrine to argue that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan meets the criteria for determining the justice of going to war (ius ad bellum). His one reservation pertains to the criterion of reasonable chance of success, but it is nothing more than a cautionary note: "not immediately," he writes, "but in due course, we need a clear statement on how we will know that the war is over and a just peace is reasonably secured."9 He also argues that one can reasonably hope that the United States will prosecute the war in keeping with the traditional criteria for just conduct within a war (ius in bello). Here too he allows a caveat: "It seems likely that unjust acts will be committed, also by our side, and when they are known they must be condemned. Known or unknown, they are wrong."10 But for Neuhaus, this does not make waging the war prohibitive, only risky, because, a "just war is undertaken in the awareness that its conduct and costs cannot always be anticipated or controlled."11 So Neuhaus employs the ad bellum and in bello criteria of just-war theory to arrive at the judgment that the United States' invasion of Afghanistan is just. This judgment itself did not spark much interest. Given how the preponderance of commentators across a wide spectrum rushed to support this initial campaign in the War on Terrorism, it is not very startling that Neuhaus and the neoconservative crowd at First Things came out strongly in support of war. What is interesting, however, is Neuhaus's portrayal of the role of God in this War on Terrorism. This portrayal comes to the fore in his account of President Bush's televised speech to the nation on September 20. "In the coda of that historic speech," Neuhaus suggests, "boldness is touched by humility," and to illustrate he quotes from the President's speech itself: "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war. And we know that God is not neutral between them. We will meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom and may He watch over the United States of America."12 Then, in the next section of the editorial, with the subheading "A Nation under God," Neuhaus offers a defense of the president's speech. In President Bush's words, Neuhaus writes, "some claim to detect not humility but hubris, an uncritical identification of our purposes with the purposes of God." To these critics, he delivers a blunt challenge. "Let them make the case," he writes, "that between freedom and fear, between justice and cruelty, God is neutral. Let them make the case that those who have declared war against us do not intend to instill fear by inflicting cruelty. Assured as we are and must be of the rightness of our cause, the President submits that cause in prayer to a higher authority. In a time of grave testing, America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are "one nation under God"---meaning that we are under both His protection and His judgment. This is not national hubris. Confidence that we are under his protection is faith; awareness that we are under His judgment is humility. This relationship with God is not established by virtue of our being Americans, but by the fact that He is the Father of the common humanity of which we are part. Most Americans are Christians who understand the mercy and justice of God as revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Recognizing the danger that the motto "For God and country" can express an idolatrous identity of allegiances, most Americans act in the hope that it represents a convergence of duties. All Americans, whatever their ultimate beliefs, have reason to hope that reality is not neutral in this war against the evil of terrorism."13 Neuhaus's argument here is problematic in several respects. For one thing, it casts the war on terrorism in the exaggerated terms of a struggle of freedom and justice against cruelty and fear. While it would be a dreadful mistake to treat the United States and al-Qaeda as moral equivalents, it is also a mistake to overlook the possibility, as Neuhaus seems to do, that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may be given to spreading cruelty and fear. Possibilities such as these do not appear when the world is viewed through the simplistic lens of Neuhaus and President Bush. For another thing, after identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice, Neuhaus employs a flawed argument to align both of these causes to the purposes of God. The argument is flawed because while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to freedom and justice, it is also true that God's purposes may well be aligned with a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor by al-Qaeda, but rather by some other political body or by the church itself. And then, in addition to these two problems, there is the related problem of the vague, unspecified identity of the deity to which Neuhaus refers when he states that "America has once again given public expression to the belief that we are 'one nation under God.'" This vagueness is reflected in his wizened concept of faith as "confidence that we are under His protection," which falls far short of a more traditional definition of faith as the virtue or habit whereby the person gives intellectual assent to revealed truths regarding the identity and nature of God, including, for example, the truths about the Trinity.14 This vagueness is also evident in his truncated definition of humility as "awareness that we are under His judgment," which is true, but which must be further defined as the virtue whereby the person is restrained in his pursuit of great goods by subjecting himself to God for Whose sake he also humbles himself to others.15 Now, both faith and humility are understood in Christian tradition to be theological or infused virtues, that is, virtues given by grace, and as such they are not normally realized apart from life in Christ and in the church. Therefore any definition of faith and humility must include an account of the concrete practices, specific virtues, and forms of life entailed in being Christian. But Neuhaus fails to include such an account, probably because this would render his argument too ecclesially specific to qualify as public discourse in a pluralistic setting such as the United States. So instead he ventures the claim that "most Americans are Christians who understand the mercy and justice of God as revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ."16 This is a deeply questionable claim and, without further explanation as to the criteria and method used to arrive at such a conclusion, it is an unwarranted one. But for Neuhaus it is nevertheless a very useful claim, inasmuch as it fortifies the notion of a "convergence of duties" to God and country, all the while never acknowledging that Americans worship strikingly different gods, whether it be the god of New Age crystal users in Seattle, Buddhists in the Bay Area, Black Bumper Mennonites in Ohio, Mormons in Utah, and so on. As for those who do not believe in God at all, Neuhaus provides the assurance that "reality is not neutral in this war on terrorism" either, thereby offering a variation on the for-God-and-Country theme: for Reality and Country.17 In either case, Americans can rest assured that as their nation goes to war, it does so under this all-purpose higher power that Neuhaus calls "God." All of which is to say that the god Neuhaus invokes is the god of American civil religion, a god of and for the United States. Thus, it is not surprising that he goes on from the above passage to describe the United States as "an overwhelmingly Christian nation rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian tradition,"18 a description that, for him, is verified by the remarkable display of patriotism in the wake of September 11. Specifically, Neuhaus notes "that following the attack, the first gathering of national leadership and the first extended, and eloquent, address by the President was in a cathedral; that Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" is getting equal time, at least, with the less religiously explicit national anthem; that children in public schools gather in the classroom for prayer; and that the fallen beams of the World Trade Center, forming a cross, are blessed as the semi-official memorial to the victims." In light of these hopeful developments, Neuhaus remarks that "that intellectuals are forever in search of 'the real America,'" and he goes on to announce proudly that "the weeks following the attack of September 11 provided one answer to that search. It is an America that Tocqueville would recognize, even if it surprised, and no doubt offended, many intellectuals."19 The claims Neuhaus makes here are again problematic on several scores. First, he cites the national prayer service and prayers being said in schools as evidence that the United States is "an overwhelmingly Christian nation," but the national prayer service, although it was held in a cathedral, included prayers recited by a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim Imam. Would they agree that they live in "an overwhelmingly Christian nation?" Would this be the view of Irving Berlin, the Jewish composer of "God Bless America"? And as for those who died in the attacks, is it true that the fallen beams arranged in the form of a cross is a fitting, semi-official memorial for them? Including those who were Muslim? Those who lived across the river in Williamsburg? What about the notion that America is a pluralist society? Moreover, Neuhaus suggests that the America that emerged in the weeks after the attacks is "an America that Tocqueville would recognize," but what he does not mention is that the "god" that emerged during those weeks is likewise one that Tocqueville would recognize. This is because Tocqueville's god, as scholars of his work have pointed out, is a peculiarly modern god, one that serves to keep society and the state intact in this disenchanted, post-Christian world. This god is not the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Who is named and praised in traditional Christian belief and practice.20 Driven by his enthusiasm for "the new patriotism," which he judges to be "all in all, a very good thing," Neuhaus does not address the complex and contested aspects of Tocqueville's "America" and "god." But the most obvious problem in Neuhaus's claim that America is a Christian nation is that it does not account for the fact that Americans in large numbers engage in practices that run clearly counter to the Christian way of life, practices related to marrying and having children. If the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to make of the fact that roughly fifty percent of all marriages in America end in divorce? Further, if the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to do with the fact that each year in America there occur more than one million abortions? This is not to say that Neuhaus is unaware that of these problems in the United States. He certainly is, as he has amply evidenced in his editorials of these and similar moral challenges facing the nation. Thus he attempts to clarify his position to commend the upsurge in patriotism following September 11. But he also attempts to clarify his position by drawing a distinction between rendering to God and rendering to Caesar, based on the question posed to Jesus by the Pharisees, "Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" (Matthew 22:15--22; Mark 12:13--17). After admitting that Christians will probably never get the relationship between God and Caesar exactly right, he notes that nevertheless "it is agreed by all that the emphasis falls on the second injunction---do not render to Caesar what is God's. Whether with respect to patriotism, wealth, family, or anything else, it is always a matter of the right ordering of our loves and loyalties."21 To elaborate on this point, Neuhaus directs our attention to the Letter to Diognetus, a second-century, anonymously-authored text. But as it turns out, his reading of this letter is most significant for what it leaves out. 3. A (mis)reading of the Letter to Diognetus The passage from the Letter to Diogetus that Neuhaus presents to his readers runs as follows: Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by either country, speech, or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they use no peculiar language, they do not follow an eccentric manner of life.* They reside in their own countries, but only as alien citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their homeland, and every homeland a foreign country.** They obey the established laws, but in their own lives they go beyond the law.*** In a word: what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body; just so Christians live in the world, but are not of the world.22 According to Neuhaus, this passage shows that "these 'alien citizens,' still far from their true home in the New Jerusalem that is history's consummation, have followed the course of Christian fidelity in accepting responsibility for the well-being of what is their home in time before the End Time." In other words, Christians have an ultimate love and loyalty toward God, yet a penultimate love and loyalty to their homeland; they have an ordered love both for God and country. On the basis of this quotation and his interpretation of it, Neuhaus then introduces "the doctrine of just war associated with St. Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries and further developed in what is aptly called the Great Tradition of Christian thought down to our own day."23 But what is noteworthy, and troubling, about this quotation is that in several instances it deletes significant portions with no acknowledgement of having done so, not even ellipses. In this important and admittedly delicate matter, only a display of the deleted portions of the text will suffice. There are three such deletions from the original text, each of which I want to present and then comment on. The first deleted section (located in the original text at the single asterisk) reads as follows: Their teaching is not the kind of thing that could be discovered by the wisdom or reflection of mere active-minded men; indeed, they are not outstanding in human learning as others are. Whether fortune has given them a home in a Greek or foreign city, they follow local custom in the matter of dress, food, and way of life; yet the character of the culture they reveal is marvelous and, it must be admitted, unusual.24 In this passage, Christian teaching is described as distinct from conventional wisdom and as not based on outstanding human learning. And Christians themselves are portrayed as both similar and different than others, similar in respect to their dress, food, and way of life, different in respect to "the culture they reveal" which is described as "marvelous" and "unusual." It is not clear what their being simultaneously similar and different means concretely in this passage, but some hints can be found in the two other deleted passages. The second deleted passage (located in the original text at the double asterisk) reads this way: They marry like the rest of men and beget children, but they do not abandon their babies that are born. They share a common board but not a common bed. In the flesh as they are, they do not live according to the flesh. They dwell on earth but are citizens of heaven.25 Here we see that Christians, unlike others of their day, do not "abandon"---that is to say, abort---children (or as another translation has it, they do not "expose" their children). And while they share a common board, they do not share a "common bed" (or as it is put in another translation, "they share their meals, but not their wives"). Avoiding these practices is seen as part of "not liv[ing] according to the flesh," part of their being "citizens of heaven." Thus, in light of this passage, Christians do not accommodate themselves into whatever country in which they live. They are different from others in important ways, such as in the way they marry and have children. There is a tension, in other words, between Christians and others and it is a sharp and costly tension, as can be seen in yet another deleted passage. The third deleted passage (located in the original text at the triple asterisk) reads as follows: They love all men, but are persecuted by all. They are unknown, and yet they are condemned. They are put to death, and yet are more alive than ever. They are paupers, but they make many rich. They lack all things, and yet in all things they abound. They are dishonored, yet glory in their dishonor. They are maligned, and yet are vindicated. They are reviled, and yet they bless. They suffer insult, yet they pay respect. They do good, yet are punished with the wicked. When they are punished, they rejoice, as though they were getting more of life. They are attacked by the Jews as Gentiles, and are persecuted by the Greeks, yet those who hate them can give no reason for their hatred.26 In this passage, the identity of Christians as "alien citizens" involves being condemned, put to death, impoverished, dishonored, maligned, reviled, insulted, punished, attacked, and persecuted. This is not their fault, the author makes clear, using a rhetorical pattern taken from the Apostle Paul (2 Cor 6:9--10; 4:12), in that they respond to persecution by loving, enriching, blessing, and paying respect to others. And yet mistreatment is often their lot. Each of these three passages quoted above, then, reveals that for the second-century author of the Letter to Diognetus, Christians are significantly different from others in both their beliefs, which derive not from human wisdom or learning, and their practices, such as marrying and having children. So much are Christians different that they are often at odds with people around them to the point of being regularly hated and sometimes killed. But when these passages are omitted, as they are in the quotation presented by Neuhaus, a different impression is created, the impression that ancient Christian teaching calls for the kind of love of God and country that is commended in the editorial. And this impression is put to the service of Neuhaus's more specific message that love of God and country is entirely fitting for Christians in the United States because it is, as he suggests in his subheading, "a nation under God," or as he puts it elsewhere in the editorial, it is "an overwhelmingly Christian nation rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition."27 To his credit, Neuhaus is aware of the potential problems with this claim; hence the qualification in the subordinate clause: "albeit sometimes tenuously." To understand his equivocation here, it is illuminating to grasp the broad storyline that shapes his thought, to which we now turn. 4. "An overwhelmingly Christian nation" This notion of the United States as "an overwhelmingly Christian nation" is an overriding theme in Neuhaus's thought, one that is best explicated by means of a broad storyline that shapes his thought. The storyline can be summed up as follows: Once upon a time in America, British colonists banded together to throw off the tyrannical rule of their king and founded a form of government designed to protect the rights of its citizens with respect to freedom of speech, assembly, the press, and religion. This last freedom listed was in fact "the first freedom," the all important one, for it prohibited the establishment of any one particular religion as the official religion of the land and instead guaranteed the free exercise of religion for all, thereby warding off the possibility that the nation would plunge itself into a New-World version of the Wars of Religion while at the same time ensuring that its public life would be guided by the moral and intellectual principles to which its Christian citizens (or the vast majority of them at any rate) subscribed. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, this ingenious combination of "ordered liberty," unprecedented in world history, proved to be a formula that brought the nation through the crisis of civil war, enabled it to welcome waves of European and other immigrants to its shores, and allowed it to afford greater measures of freedom to its citizens, particularly women and African-Americans. It also provided the nation with the fortitude needed to fight political tyranny abroad in the First World War, the Second World War, and the subsequent Cold War, all of which were waged on the strength of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, a moral and intellectual consensus that now included greater numbers of Catholics, Jews, and (some) secularists. But at some point in this more recent phase of the nation's history, another moral and intellectual perspective emerged, one that regarded any public profession of religious belief or a religiously based morality as constituting a threat to the rights of individuals whose religious or moral beliefs stand outside this supposed nationwide consensus. The emergence of this new perspective can be traced back to any number of cultural trends earlier in the twentieth century, but it gained political and cultural ascendancy in the sixties, when it became anathema to invoke religious and moral principles in public discourse. This constituted a threat to the very foundations on which the nation was founded. The main culprits were left-leaning politicians, journalists, intellectuals, church leaders, and other members of the so-called cultural elite, who also have been derisively labeled (in a recent book that Neuhaus has touted)28 "Bobos in paradise," that is, baby-boomers who sported a bohemian lifestyle and radical politics when coming of age in the sixties and then, in the ensuing decades, made their way into the higher echelons of U.S. society where they exercise an alarming degree of influence over the central institutions of the nation: the government, the press, universities, and the mainstream churches. This created what Neuhaus called "the naked public square," and in a book with this title (published in 1984) he called for a re-infusion of religious and moral principles into American public discourse, a re-clothing, so to speak, of this naked public square.29 This project had become possible thanks to the resurgence of conservative-minded Christians as a political force in the early eighties. Then, a few years later, it had become clear that the group most capable of making a difference in this effort was the Catholics, thus signaling what Neuhaus called "the Catholic Moment." In a book published under this title in 1987, he observed that history had taken a remarkable twist: Catholics, emboldened by the religious and moral vision of Pope John Paul II, were now the ones to embolden Evangelical Christians and others to bring America back from the precipice and restore it to its founding religious and moral principles.30 In light of this storyline, the significance of Neuhaus's claim that America is a Christian nation comes into fuller view. It is a claim that harks back to the founding of the nation and decries the recent betrayal of that founding by those who deny the nation's religious and moral roots. At the same time, it calls for a religious and moral renewal of America that can rescue the nation from its present malaise, a renewal to be led by the Catholics. Since the arrival of "the Catholic Moment," this has been a key theme in Neuhaus's writings, talks, and editorials in First Things. What is crucial to note is that this agenda can have a critical edge to it. This was most clearly demonstrated with "the end-of-democracy" controversy that erupted on the pages of First Things in late 1996. The controversy was over a string of judicial decisions ruling that the Constitution protects a range of asserted practices on the basis of an individual's right to privacy. In the background, of course, was Roe v. Wade (1973), but the immediate focus was on more recent decisions, especially the Casey decision (1992), with its notorious "mystery clause" that consigned religious beliefs and moral principles to a private realm into which state and federal government may not intrude.31 Another ruling along similar lines came in May 1996, when the Ninth Circuit found that the Constitution does not permit states to prohibit physician-assisted suicide.32 It was shortly after this second ruling that the editors of First Things charged the federal courts with arrogating for themselves the power to decide matters that, in the design of the framers of the Constitution, are to be decided by the people through legislative processes. This trend created what the editors called "the judicial usurpation of politics" wherein genuine democratic government was being thwarted by a lethal blurring of the separation of powers, signaling the possible "end of democracy" and the imposition on the people of an alien "regime."33 The symposium brought to the fore some striking arguments. One contributor to the symposium, Robert George of Princeton, identified the workings of "the tyrant state," a phrase taken from the recently promulgated encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995), in which John Paul II argued that democratic government is not good in itself but is only as good as the virtues of its citizens in enabling them to adhere to the natural law.34 Another contributor, Russell Hittinger, a philosopher from the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa, contended that if this trend of judicial usurpation continued, Catholics and other people of conscience would have only one recourse left to them: "civil disobedience."35 The issue sparked a vociferous controversy among conservative commentators, leading some on the editorial board to resign in protest and generating a rift that came to be characterized as "Neocon v. Theocon.36 Neuhaus defended the editorial stance for raising crucial and unavoidable issues, the kinds of issues, he insisted (quite rightly) that should be raised in a journal such as First Things.37 Commentators of a more radical Christian stripe (Scott Moore, for example)38 viewed the controversy as a sign that politics within the context of the modern liberal state had become morally incoherent and politically untenable, and took hope in the prospect of such a mainstream, quasi-establishment journal declaring that the Enlightenment assumptions on which the United States was founded had come into fundamental conflict with a genuinely Christian conception of political community. But for Neuhaus himself, as it turned out, the end-of-democracy controversy signified little more than yet another occasion to call for the religious and moral recovery of America. In subsequent years, particularly during and after the election of George Bush as president in 2000, editorials and articles published in First Things continued to express hope in a nationwide renewal. Most important among these was a twelve-part series of columns on the idea of "Christian America," the last of which came out in May 2001, coyly entitled "Something Like, Just Maybe, A Catholic Moment."39 All of which brings us up to Neuhaus's post-9/11 editorial in the December 2001 issue of First Things, and his statement that America is "rooted, albeit sometimes tenuously, in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition." The statement's subordinate clause---albeit sometimes tenuously---acknowledges that the nation's Judeo-Christian tradition at times has been obscured or attacked. But this is clearly outweighed by the overriding claim that it is "overwhelmingly Christian." But if this is the case, whatever happened to the end-of-democracy crisis? What about the courts? What about marriage in the United States? What about abortion? These questions are placed on the backburner by Neuhaus. With the help of his broad storyline, he can avoid looking at America in the present by focusing instead on an America of the past and of the future; of a glorious past, when America was founded and developed as a Christian nation, and of a promising future, when America will reclaim its legacy and return to its founding religious and moral principles. When it comes to the present, his argument only refers us to the struggle to bring the nation out of its current crisis. Rather than meet head on any challenge to his characterization of America as a Christian nation, it calls us to join traditional Christians and other religiously and morally conservative Americans in engaging in this current struggle. And a monumental struggle it is, for in the final section of the editorial, we learn that America is engaged in a "war of centuries," indeed "a war of religion." 5. Islam versus the "Christian West" Neuhaus is careful to insist that America does not wish to in war. "We of the West," Neuhaus assures us, "definitively put wars of religion behind us with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But that was a piece of the story of the West of which Islam was not part and for which Islam has no counterpart."40 As a result, a war of religion has been thrust upon America by the adherents of Islam who have stored up for decades, if not centuries, a burning hatred for the West and who have not integrated into their world view the values of Western democracy. To those who insist that Americans should embrace the otherness of Islam in the name of diversity, Neuhaus gives this rejoinder: "With respect to freedom, human rights, and the dignity of the person, their difference is not a diversity to be celebrated but a threat to be opposed. The terrorists have now unmistakably underscored their otherness, and with it the otherness of Islam."41 To those who insist that Islam is not antithetical to democratic values, he declares that it is up to Muslims to demonstrate this themselves. For the time being, however, what the 9/11 attacks indicates is that, as he puts it with remarkable bluntness, "They [Muslims] are other."42 And to back up this claim, he cites an article by Bernard Lewis in The Atlantic that underscores what is at stake in this two-sided struggle. "When Muslims speak of the West," he then explains, They mean the Christian West. They mean Christendom. Many in the West want to believe that ours is a secularized culture, but Lewis reminds us that most Muslims view secularization itself as a form of specifically Christian decadence. Today many in the West are asking, Who are they? We cannot ask Who are they? without also asking Who are we? More and more, as this war continues, we may come to recognize that we are, however ambiguously, who they think we are, namely, the Christian West.43 As Neuhaus tells the story, then, America has been drawn into a monumental "struggle between Islam and the Christian West, a struggle that is spurring Americans to reclaim their identity as citizens of a Christian nation. In this sense, the post-September display of patriotism can be taken as a hopeful development. The flags, the patriotic songs on the radio, the teachers and students praying at school, the upsurge in church attendance---all these are signs of America undergoing its restoration as a Christian nation. But what is significant in Neuhaus"s depiction of the nation is that only five years after the stormy end-of-democracy controversy, there is no reference to a "regime" in America, no mention of "the tyrant state," no talk of "civil disobedience." Whereas in the fall of 1996 Neuhaus & Company were raising fundamental questions about the tenuous state of American democracy, in the fall of 2001 democracy in America is the beacon of freedom, human rights, and human dignity for the rest of the world. There is nothing said about the sad condition of marriage in the United States, nor about the annual rate of abortion, nor any number of disturbing trends---not by Neuhaus at any rate, not now. How are we to explain this contradictory shift in thematics? Surely it has something to do with the election of President Bush in the intervening years, which, in the worldview of the neoconservatives, bolstered the condition of the nation. But this points to a deeper reason that strikes to the heart of the issue. The reason is that Neuhaus links the destiny of Christianity to the future of liberal democratic nations in the Christian West, in particular to the future of what he considers to be the leader of these nations, the United States of America. As a result, the struggle to reclaim America as a Christian nation gets transmuted into a struggle over the terrestrial future of Christianity itself, a struggle, so to speak, of almost ultimate significance, and in this context reservations about America quickly move into the background for the sake of prevailing in the broader struggle for the survival of America and the Christian West. To be fair, we should note that Neuhaus reminds us that Christians place their ultimate loyalty in no earthly city but in the city that is their final destination, the heavenly Jerusalem---an eschatological proviso, so to speak, meant to safeguard against an idolatrous allegiance to country. But no safeguard is effective without an accompanying ecclesiological proviso, without a positive and substantive account of the church. Interestingly, there is no such account in Neuhaus's editorial. There are plenty of references to God, to Christians, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to America-as-a-Christian-nation, but no clear references to the church. This is not surprising, of course, for to focus on ecclesiology would bring up a host of theological issues over which Christians in the United States have deep differences. It could generate division when what is needed in a time of national crisis, "in a time of war" as he describes it, is unity. Neuhaus would object to this characterization, of course, by pointing out that time and again he has not hesitated to tackle important ecclesiological issues in First Things and in his other published writings. Nevertheless, he does not do so when it comes to the nation going to war. This is because he conceives of political community in terms of the politics of nation-states, one nation-state in particular, the United States. In doing so, his terms must be tailored to the exigencies of a religiously pluralistic nation-state, the primary exigency being that ecclesially specific terms must be separated from politics. As a result, when he moves into the political sphere to take up political issues such as going to war, his references to God are cast in the general terms of civil theology, such as "religion," "Christianity," and the "Judeo-Christian tradition." In spite of his insistence that America is "under God," any and all references to the church---that is, the community of those baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit---recede to the background. And without any substantive reference to the church, he lacks the resources to provide an account of the one social body that is a sign of unity and peace in the world. 6. One Church under God To sum up my argument to this point: in his post-9/11 editorial, Neuhaus depicts the United States as "one nation under God," but it is the god of civil religion, whose function is to serve the aims and purposes of the nation. These aims and purpose are identified with "the Christian West," which, as Neuhaus sees it, is under attack from the forces of Islam. The United States has the obligation of countering this attack, both for reasons of self-defense, but also because it stands as the leading protector of Christian values throughout the world. In this vision, the nation is political body through which the God's will is carried out. The church has no real role in this political sphere, just as it has no real part to play in the world-historical drama depicted in Neuhaus's editorial. This is a dangerous vision, as I see it, for without an account of the church in this drama, the power and pretensions of the nation can all too easily go unchecked. And this danger is only compounded by the fact that we live, as Neuhaus entitles his editorial, "in a time of war." True, the editorial does list the traditional criteria for a just war and then applies them to the current situation. But given the way Neuhaus describes the United States as "a nation under God" with such a crucial role to play on the world stage today, it is difficult to see how its intentions, cause, authority, and so on, could be construed so as to render its going to war as anything but justifiable. The one issue about which Neuhaus raises a critical question has to do with establishing a terminal point for the war. "Not immediately," he writes, "but in due course, we need a clear statement on how we will know that the war is over and a just peace is reasonably secured."44 But have we received such a clear statement from the White House? Do we know when the war will be over? Questions such as these have not been prominent in subsequent editorials or in "The Public Square" section of First Things. To the contrary, the United States took its "War on Terrorism" to Iraq and Neuhaus gave overriding approval of it. Moreover, he delivered a lengthy critique of religious leaders who opposed the U.S. invasion, including some officials of the Holy See. Regarding this last group, Neuhaus criticized them for coming "unconscionably close to suggesting that Catholic Americans must choose between loyalty to their country and fidelity to the Church. If, as one curial archbishop has declared, the coalition led by the U.S. is engaged in a 'crime against peace' it would seem to follow that our soldiers are engaged in criminal activity."45 On this point, Neuhaus is right; this is precisely what follows. But Neuhaus is unwilling to acknowledge that "our soldiers" may be engaging in a "crime against peace," or better yet, he is unable to do so. This is because it would belie his claim that the United States is "a nation under God" whose purposes coincide with divine purposes. It would disrupt his vision of God and country working in fundamental harmony with each other. It would contradict his picture of Christians as living peaceably in the various cities of this world. To explain what I mean, it will be helpful to return to Neuhaus's selective reading of the Letter to Diognetus. In his citation of the Letter, the passage reads: "In a word: what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body; just so Christians live in the world, but are not of the world."46 The impression created with this quotation is that the relation between body and soul is peaceful and harmonious. Just as the soul is an incorporeal reality that gives unity and coherence to the body, so the church is an incorporeal reality that gives unity and coherence to the world. But here again, Neuhaus's citation of the Letter to Diognetus is misleading, for as we read on in the text itself, we learn that the relationship between body and soul is neither peaceful nor harmonious. From where the quotation leaves off, the Letter continues by observing that "Christians who are in the world are known, but their worship remains unseen," an allusion to the clandestine character of Christian liturgy and cult in the second century. Then it goes on to draw a parallel between the conflict of the soul and the flesh and the conflict between Christians and the world. The actual Letter reads: The flesh hates the soul and acts like an unjust aggressor, because it is forbidden to indulge in pleasures. The world hates Christians-not that they have done it wrong, but because they oppose its pleasures. The soul loves the body and its members in spite of the hatred. So Christians love those who hate them. The soul is locked up in the body, yet it holds the body together. And so Christians are held in the world as in a prison, yet it is they who hold the world together. The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle. So Christians sojourn among perishable things, but their souls are set on immortality in heaven. When the soul is ill-treated in the matter of food and drink, it is improved. So, when Christians are persecuted, their numbers daily increase. Such is the assignment to which God has called them, and they have no right to shirk from it.47 This passage depicts Christians, as often as not, coming into conflict with the world, with whatever "city" in which they reside. As the soul orders the unruly, pleasure-seeking passions of the body by revealing to it the love that emanates from God, so Christians order the unruly, pleasure-seeking cities of the world by revealing to them the peace that likewise emanates from God. On this (properly contextualized) reading of the Letter to Diognetus, the church is the one community in which the obligations of Christians to the cities of this world are properly ordered to the love of God. For this reason, the cities of this world are never "under God" in such a way that Christians may pledge their allegiance to them. Such an allegiance is proper only to Christ and the church. Indeed, in view of the entire Letter to Diognetus, it becomes apparent that the primary concern of its second-century author is to enjoin Christians to avoid worshipping the false gods of the world's cities, gods whose patronage are presented in the city's mythoi as essential to their security and flourishing. But this is always accomplished by shedding blood, the blood of those who protect the city from its enemies. Beyond the danger of worshipping the gods of various cities, there was also the danger of worshipping the gods of Rome, a particular concern in the Letter to Diognetus. These gods plausibly promised a peace that would reign throughout for the entire empire, the Pax Romana, and yet, like the many forms of civil peace in the ancient world, it was a "peace" founded on imperial violence that was, as the Christians saw it, not true peace at all, not the peace of Christ. All this talk of Christians worshipping the false gods of the Roman Empire would be quaintly irrelevant were it not for the fact that Roman civil religion, or what Augustine called "civil theology,"48 has its counterparts in modern conceptions of civil religion, such as the one articulated by Neuhaus, which promises, in effect, a Pax Americana. But unlike the Christians living under pagan Rome, Christians in the United States face the more challenging temptation of living in an imperium that claims to be Christian. This is why the warnings of "some officials of the Holy See" about our nation's preemptive warmaking are so important to heed.49 The fact that these warnings are voiced from a perspective lying beyond the narrow vision of a particular nation makes them all the more important. And it makes Neuhaus's dismissal of them all the more telling. What is lacking in Neuhaus's vision is an ecclesiology that relativizes the notion of "one nation under God" with the principle, so to speak, of "one church under God." Such an ecclesiology is evident in the Letter to Diognetus in the analogy of the church as a soul that gives the world with a unity it would otherwise not have. Like all analogies, this body/soul analogy must be carefully interpreted so as to underscore that the soul can never be detached from the body, but rather is the form of the body. In this sense, the church is a soul that gives form to a body whose members are united to Christ and to each other by the power of the Holy Spirit and whose communal life is marked by a bond of charity that extends throughout the world. This is why the Apostle Paul describes baptism as being engrafted into Christ's body. This is why he stressed the intrinsic link between the Lord's Supper and the unity that is a mark of the Christian community (I Cor 11:17--34). This is also why he exhorted the members of the church to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God and not to conform to the world (Rom 12:1--2). The image here is of the priesthood of the Levites, the tribe designated by God to make animal or cereal offerings for the sake of the reconciliation of all Israel; but now Christians unite themselves with the offering of the Son to the Father, so that through the power of the Holy Spirit they become "a chosen race, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people set apart" (1 Peter 2:10). But if Christians themselves are "a holy nation," then at times they will not conform to the aims and purpose of the modern nations, particularly when they claim to be objects of Christian allegiance in a time of war. There are morally serious choices to be made between competing versions of just war, especially between the version of preemptive just war put forth by Neuhaus, Novak, Weigel, and others, and the version of just war subscribed to by "some officials of the Holy See." There is an increasing number of U.S. soldiers who stand ready to defend their nation but not in an unjust war and not by unjust means. They too provide a powerful reminder of our call to be in the world but not of it. And third, proponents of just war can also live in an unreal world of utopian fantasy that has no basis in the Christian faith. Indeed, in a nation such as the United States, they can even rise to high office, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense, and from there orchestrate a disastrous policy based on the fantastic notion of an America that can pursue its interests and wield its power throughout the Middle East with impunity. In conclusion, let me offer a non-resistant Christian pacifist recommendation for how United States policy might be released from such a fantasy. We should consult with Christians in the Middle East, starting with the leaders of the churches there, in particular, with leaders of the Chaldean and Orthodox churches of Iraq. It would also behoove us to consult with the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, a Palestinian whose appointment by the Vatican in 1987 was opposed by the Israeli government. Such consultations would give Christians in the United States a perspective on this war on terrorism that we do not often find articulated in press statements by the Bush administration or in the pages of First Things. It would be a genuinely catholic perspective. And it would provide an important reminder that the most important contribution Christians can make while living in "one nation under God" is for them to be one church under God. Notes Mark Slouka, "A Year Later: Notes on America's Intimations of Mortality" Harper's 305 (September 2002): 35--43. Slouka, "A Year Later," 43. Slouka, "A Year Later," 36. Slouka, "A Year Later," 36, 39. Slouka, "A Year Later," 37, n. 1. This quotation is taken from http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/14/Falwell.apology. For a partial transcript of the broadcast in question, see http://www.beliefnet.com/story/87/story_8770_1.html. For an attempt to clarify the facts involved in the controversy, see http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/falwell-robertson-wtc.htm. First Things 118 (December 2001): 11--17. In my summary and critique, I attribute this editorial to Richard John Neuhaus himself rather than "the editors," for the sake of convenience and also because it bears his distinctive prose and thought patterns. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 11. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 13. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 13. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 13. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 11--12. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II/2, qq. 1--6; trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Vol 1 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II/2, q. 161. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 12. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 12. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 15. See for example Sanford Kessler, Tocqueville's Civil Religion (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994). Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 12. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 12. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 12. Letter to Diognetus, in The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Francis X. Glimm, Joseph M.-F. Marique, S.J., and Gerald Walsh, S.J., (New York: Cima Publishing Company, 1947), 359. This is not the same translation as Neuhaus uses, but the differences are of no matter to the criticism I am making. Letter to Diognetus, 359. Letter to Diognetus, 359--60. Neuhaus, "In A Time of War," 12. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984). Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). For the reaction of the editors (especially Neuhaus) to this decision see "Abortion and a Nation at War," First Things, 26 (October 1992): 9--13. The citation of the case is: Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (91--744), 505 U.S. 833 (1992). For the reaction of the editors to this decision, see "The Ninth Circuit's Fatal Overreach," First Things 63 (May 1996): 12--13. See "The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things 67 (November 1996): 18--20. 34. Robert P. George, "The Tyrant State," First Things 67 (November 1996): 39--42. The phrase "the tyrant state" can be found in an encyclical by Pope John Paul II entitled Evangelium Vitae, n. 20. Russell Hittinger, "A Crisis of Legitimacy," First Things 67 (November 1996): 25--29. See Jacob Heilbrunn, "Neocon v. Theocon," New Republic, December 30, 1996, 20--24. Much of the writing generated by this controversy has been published in Richard John Neuhaus, The End of Democracy? (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 1997). For Neuhaus's analysis, see his essay in this volume, entitled "The Anatomy of a Controversy," 173--267. Scott Moore, "The Inauguration of Extraordinary Politics," in The End of Demoracy? II, ed. Mitchell S. Muncy (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 1999), 183--228. First Things 113 (May 2001): 70--73. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 16. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 16. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 16. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 16. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 16. Richard John Neuhaus, "The Sounds of Religion in a Time of War," First Things 133 (May 2003):76--92. Neuhaus, "In a Time of War," 12. Letter to Diognetus, 360. Augustine, City of God, bk. 6 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 234--53. (book 6) . It is not clear who Neuhaus was referring to here, but the critics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the Holy See included the following: Cardinal Ratzinger, Cardinal Martino, Cardinal Sodano, and Cardinal Stafford. Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square: Babel-On by Blyvynand Screwtape Translated from the Pandemoniac by Eric Miller FROM: Blyvyn603@tartarus.org TO: Screwtape663@tartarus.org SUBJECT: PROJECT BABEL-ON UPDATE 6 April 2006 Good Friday My Dear Screwtape, A happy V-Day to you, old friend. I'm just back from the CCCU's 30th anniversary bash --- ur, "convention." But was it ever a bash for us! Things are going so swimmingly that I wanted to get right to this update while the exhilaration lingers. Then it's off to the evening's festivities, with marvelous tales to tell. I can think of no better way to put it, Screwtape, than to say that Babel-On has become a spectacle, hellish comedy in high form. After three days of collective giddiness (along with those assigned to attend, many of our associates chose to take vacation there) I fear that we may need to take action to keep our confidence in check. But that is more of a disciplinary concern than anything, Screwtape, because, at the risk of sounding obsequious, your brainchild has become a self-perpetuating success, sure to keep rolling along in devastating fashion for years on end (or, more precisely, until the end). I'll jot down some of my observations, though I'm sure you'll have anticipated each. But the devil is in the details --- and so the delight! Pure and simple, our lingua franca has become the common parlance of this sector of the Enemy's realm. Witness: Even our trainees at the conference, on hand mainly to learn their language, found themselves understanding so much of what was going on that their supervisors are scurrying to find another site for future training sessions. The mantras, of course, were amusingly chanted, as always. ("Integration!" "Faith and Learning!" "Christian Scholarship!") But deep and serious exchanges in their own tongue were rare, confined to the occasional threesome commiserating in a bar outside of the hotel somewhere, so cynically self-absorbed that they pose no threat at all. Yes, their silly old dream of a widely shared Christian grammar is history. Which is to say that the academic disciplines are thriving among them. Our Know Nothing epistemology is continuing to flower and bloom in unexpectedly useful varieties. When the evangelicals meet by discipline in their own "Christian" societies, their collective fervency is so amusingly sweet, as they unabashedly grope for blessing and promotion within the grand professional fiefdoms --- a yearning, I might add, that we have intensified by playing on their isolation from the circuits of professional power. In short, the CCCUers are not only seeing through their disciplinary frameworks --- they are feeling through them as well. You begin to sense the depth of our delight! When they do come together for larger, collective purposes, like this convention, the only groupspeak they know, increasingly, is that which the university itself uses to remain intact: Christian ethics lite. If their disciplines provide the CCCUers with the means to communicate with fellow historians, psychologists, engineers, et. al., the academy (!!) provides them with an increasingly common tongue --- and their accents are by now practically undetectable, perhaps the most heartening indicator of our recent gains. At occasions such as this conference they find themselves in a bedeviling quandary. They sense that the cacophony of their interfacing disciplines is potentially disruptive, so in order to achieve some semblance of unity (it is, after all, a "council") they resort to that lovely combination of sentimental pieties and misguided ideals that intertwine to keep the university itself churning forward. Foucault, Pocock, Gramsci, Chomsky, Douglas, Bloom, Gilligan, Hawking, Lacan, Wilson, and company could never survive a conference together, at least when made present through this variety of proxy, and so these wannabes end up resorting to whatever ethical crusades we've got charging through the academy at the moment just to give themselves at least some sense of purpose and direction. At this convention we witnessed a baptizing of the academy's pieties that was so energetic and sincere it made John himself look like an underachiever. I can hear you cackling, Screwtape. Read on --- it gets better. At this particular gathering the Diversity Charge was serving as the social glue of choice. One particularly ardent moralist went so far as to exhort her colleagues to "crush the tyranny of the c.v.!" (yes, churlish revolutionist tones and all!), and make "Diversity" the aim and end of hiring! Hell's bells, it was a blessed moment! They are actually beginning to buy Diversity as an epistemological solution, a way to give their colleges (and "universities" --- ha!) a more consequential role in the Enemy's realm. My respect for your vision grows deeper by the week, O Shrewd One. We have now effectively shielded their eyes from seeing that the language, the only language, that could possibly assimilate Gramsci, Derrida, and friends into their own enterprise is only in the most shallow of ways connected to that pious blather that we, quite successfully, have termed "evangelicalism." (If only Luther could see all of this --- he'd bolt back to the monastery in a heartbeat!) And it is precisely their self-conscious "evangelicalism" that will keep them from seeing the obvious, salient fact: that "diversity" without a deeply unifying grammar, studied intensively and spoken easily by all, leads to, ahem, just more diversity, with all of its delicious fruits. Yes, old boy, the banquet we are spreading before us is growing more and more rich. If we continue to divert them from gaining a genuine knowledge of their own tongue (with the usual time-honored tactics: huge teaching loads, accreditation requirements, professional allures, committee work, intra-denominational anarchy, doctrinalism, and so on) they don't stand a chance of glimpsing that common vision that could turn "diversity" into a real weapon, enabling the Enemy to infuse his power more fully into their efforts. I shudder to ponder that possibility. But trust me, Screwtape, they are a long way from that sort of dangerous movement, and the gap is widening all the time. Carl Henry is no doubt turning over in his recently dug grave. Those particularly dangerous Enemy seers --- MacIntyre, Milbank, Hauerwas, let alone Augustine, Luther, and Edwards --- seldom make it out of the "Bible Departments," if they even make appearances there. Even that old fool Lewis is becoming less and less harmful, as the evangelicals clutch at him as an icon rather than as an example of what they might become. So successful have we been in divorcing theology from "spirituality" that even if one of these CCCU academics were to crack open an Edwards or a Hauerwas they would no doubt find the texts impenetrable --- or, better yet, uninteresting! I could go on and on, but you get the picture. They are, truly, just babbling on, happy to be on their merry evangelical-professional ways, conditioned as they've become to the rewards that therein lie and reduced, unwittingly, to either the most pragmatic or the most sentimental of binding ties. They oscillate between a collective mushiness and a hard-headed "realism" that grasps for some means, any means, to maintain their continued raison d'être. And it's only this most holy union of America pragmatism and evangelical sentimentality that keeps them from simply dissolving into the blessed state of nature that the academy itself is fast becoming, the Hobbesian holy war of all against all. You may by now find yourself asking, How far are they from what they would perceive as catastrophe? It is indeed near, but so dim have their eyes become I doubt there is any chance of their detecting it. We never forget your rallying cry: "MISPLACED HOPE!" And so we continue to feed them enticements that they, in their soppy American way, find irresistible: not just Diversity, but Technology! Outcomes! Community! Service! Distance Learning! Assessment! --- anything to keep those touchingly naive hopes burning. We'll keep them busy trying to keep themselves intact under the illusion that they're actually pushing us back --- the very definition of farce! They are, at present, so harmless that we might as well keep them around for the near future rather than allowing them to disintegrate, if for no other reason than for their exquisite entertainment value. There's nothing quite so amusing, after all, as a follower of the Enemy who thinks she's accomplishing something when she's not. Their continual quiet preening at the convention gave rise to frequent and riotous fits of hilarity among us all --- as if articles in "professional journals" were moving the tectonic plates themselves! They decry their own "enclave" tendencies, with earnest, unctuous hand-wringing, while failing to see that the real enclave (so pivotal for our purposes) is that of their own location in the professional class! The thrill it gave me to see how much they actually despise the actual communities in which they live --- hankering like moon-eyed adolescents for Berkeley, Cambridge, Oxford, Manhattan --- is well nigh indescribable. Their condescension? Almost enviable. They mouth "Christ Transforming Culture" rhetoric while snootily turning aside from the only real "cultures" (you were on the day you came up with that splendid little piece of jargon, old boy) that they will ever really have a chance to "transform." Fortunately, they can't see that, in the words of one of their own shrewdest observers, one can be "regional without being provincial." As you might guess, they dismiss him as near-kin to the Amish. Such obtuseness, in the name of the Enemy himself, is truly what makes our work so rewarding --- and our final victory so certain. Yes, this crowd, and the millions they represent (if these are their best and brightest, may their kind increase!) are much more than harmless. Their usefulness to us, in fact, is steadily on the rise. The "students" they produce, after four years of that welter of "theory," "method," and schlocky piety, are excellent fodder for The Economy --- not to mention effective builders of it. After such conditioning what else could they be? Their high levels of cognitive congestion, coupled with their sappy and shallow sense of identity and purpose, blinds them to the Final Solution. Not surprisingly, they can't see the obvious: that as the earth goes, so goes the race. Slightly more remarkable is the fact that most of their own leaders are actually embracing the Final Solution as their own, going so far as to dignify it with euphemisms like "globalization"! (They fancy themselves "realists" --- how right they are!) Order itself will soon be dissolved like so much styrofoam in fire. Triumph is at hand! You are no doubt wondering if all is sweetness and light. I could point to a few troubling nuisances---the fact, for instance, that some CCCU colleges have begun to welcome Catholics and Orthodox into their numbers---irksome because these lonely souls at least have communal recourse to the tradition of their realm. And, yes, the loud-mouths from Grand Rapids continue to spout off, although I think we've sufficiently diverted their attention away from their own realm so that they are often beyond earshot of their own potential followers. Many of the big shots don't even bother to attend the conferences of the CCCU-related professional societies (attending such a conference would, happily, feel embarrassing to most of them). The departures of these "stars" into the "real" academy actually works to our advantage because it perpetuates the subtle, commonly believed if not actually spoken lie that it's in "the academy" that the real action is happening. And of course once their stars make it to the academy our homogenizing and fragmenting pressures begin to do their work with even more success. In fine, Screwtape, the level of danger has never been lower. In my judgment, we have eliminated this threat. The CCCUers are babbling on to Babylon, as planned. In fact, I am pleased to report that we are able to reduce the number of our associates in these districts even beyond what you requested, freeing larger numbers of them to move into more needy areas. It is truly a day for jubilation, dear friend. We continue to stand at allegiance, inspired by your example and nourished by your large and looming presence. I shall lift a toast to you tonight, for I remain, Yours Truly, Blyvyn Milosz's Century by Bruce Berglund When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset. The true meaning, ready to be decoded. What never added up will add up, What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.1 One of most important poets of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz, died on August 14, 2004, at age 93, in his home in Cracow. Milosz's long life spanned nearly all of the past century, and the circumstances of that life brought him in contact with the century's most destructive currents: nationalism, authoritarian ideology, genocidal violence. Born in a village in the Lithuanian countryside, the young Milosz traveled the Russian Empire with his father, a noble officer in the army of Tsar Nicholas. He studied law at the centuries-old university in Wilno (present-day Vilnius), one of the most ethnically mixed centers of the interwar Polish republic, a space in which faiths and tongues overlapped. Indeed, the environment of Wilno, with its diversity of languages, literatures, religions, and ideas, had profound effect on Milosz, and it remained throughout his life the ideal of what Europe could be. In a century that brought unprecedented human destruction, so many catalogues of body counts, a poet like Milosz was needed, someone who observed firsthand the turmoil of history but who also had the clarity of vision to recognize that, in the turmoil, there were matters far greater than death. He spent most of the war years in Warsaw, contributing as a writer and editor to underground publications. Day-to-day existence under the brutal German occupation plunged Milosz into spiritual crisis; he was shaken by what the noble schemes of the modern age had wrought and edged back toward the Catholic faith of his youth. He watched the fall of the Iron Curtain from a safer distance: in Paris, he served in the embassy of the postwar Polish government. As the Stalinist empire tightened its hold on Eastern Europe, he chose to remain in the West, staying first in Paris and then, after 1960, in Berkeley. Milosz's reputation in the West was first established with his volume The Captive Mind (1953), one of the earliest exposés of Communist oppression in Europe. Other prose works followed---rigorous essays, an autobiographical novel, a portrait of his native Lithuania, a history of Polish literature, the diary of a year of his life---but it was for his corpus of poetry, written wholly in Polish (unlike Brodsky or Nabokov, Milosz never adopted for his pen the language of his exilic home), that Milosz earned the Nobel Prize in 1980. Milosz's career as a poet had begun in 1931, as a law student in Wilno, with a 20-year-old's visions of a civilization on the brink of catastrophe, a scene of "machines throbbing quicker than the heart," of "lopped-off heads" and "cats floating on their backs," of red banners, military trains, and the cries of children.2 A decade later in Warsaw, Milosz saw this vision come to life, as he witnessed firsthand the inhumanity that consumed 20th-century Europe. His wartime poetry offers scenes of the end of the world. It was not the end that Europeans had anticipated for centuries, an end announced by thunder and trumpets. Instead, the end had come while the world tended to its business. People remained absorbed in their individual lives, oblivious to the cosmic events around them. "No believes it is happening now," he wrote in 1944.3 Even those amidst the carnage did not understand its weight: They are dragging a guy by his stupid legs, The calves in silk socks, The head trailing behind. And a stain in the sand a month of rain won't wash away. Children with toy automatic pistols Take a look, resume their play.4 In his wartime writing, Milosz wrestled with the responsibility of being a poet---at the end of the world. What was his task? Was it possible to write verse that met the moral challenge of his times? "What is poetry that does not save/ Nations or people?" he asked in the poem "Dedication." A connivance with official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls.5 Milosz returned to this question throughout the next five decades. Many times he repeated the lament that his duty, the duty of a poet in the 20th century, was too great a burden. In "Preparation," published in 1984, four years after he had been awarded the Nobel, Milosz confessed his inability to write the words that the century demanded. Barry Moser, "Jeptha's Daughter" Still one more year of preparation. Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book In which my century will appear as it really was. . . . No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years. I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked with heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy. I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.6 In this struggle with his duty as a poet, which, for him, was as much a struggle of vocation, Milosz recognized that the proper response to the tragedies of the 20th century was not simply a matter of depicting bodies broken in violence. His poetry does speak of acts of violence with the authority and immediacy of a witness, but, more importantly, it pierces through and looks beyond the carnage of such scenes. Yes, that man, every man, bulldozed into a mass grave was the child of a woman, a boy clutching a teddy bear or a toy truck, an infant birthed in tears and conceived in a moment of delight. Milosz understood that this was the tragedy, that a mother's beloved child would come to his end, with a crushed skull, alone at the bottom of a pit. The tragedy of his century was not the ridiculous corpse being dragged over the gravel, it was the children undisturbed by such a sight. How many times have we now seen that image, photos of boys with their own toy guns, stoic witnesses to the violence in Bosnia and Iraq, Central America and Central Africa? It has been repeated so many times in the newspaper pages of recent decades that we pass it over, ourselves numbed. But Milosz's lines from Warsaw remind us that there is a cosmic incongruity in seeing children so inured to violence. In a century that brought unprecedented human destruction, so many catalogues of body counts, a poet like Milosz was needed, someone who observed firsthand the turmoil of history but who also had the clarity of vision to recognize that, in the turmoil, there were matters far greater than death. In perceiving the deeper tragedies of the century past, Milosz also understood that his time had brought a definitive end to patterns of life, to human communities, to ways of thinking and understanding the world that had been passed down for centuries. He had experienced these traditions as a boy growing up in Lithuania, where he moved both in the villages of pre-modern Europe and the refined company of the aristocratic age. Like the carnage of 1944 Warsaw, the disappearance of these worlds was cause for mourning. In 1968, that most turbulent year of the postwar era, Milosz looked from Berkeley to an age extinguished by industry, war, revolution, and by his century's expectation that man would be enthroned as God. Unexpressed, untold. . . . Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts, giggles above a railing, pigtails askew, sittings on chamberpots upstairs. when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch just before the mustachioed ones in wolf fur enter. Female humanity, children's snot, legs spread apart, snarled hair, the milk boiling over, stench, shit frozen into clods. And those centuries, conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night instead of playing something like a game of chess or dancing an intellectual ballet. and palisades, and pregnant sheep, and pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters, and cows cured by incantations. 7 Here witness the sensuality of Milosz's poetry: his longing to reveal---and preserve---the elusive details of a whole reality, of worlds existing only in fading memory. In its 1980 citation, the Swedish Academy highlighted this element of Milosz's verse, his reveling in the simple delights of this world. He wrote as if surprised by these delights, finding in the small details of the empirical world things to be loved and cherished. But more than that, the memory or imagining of these artifacts, and their reconstruction in verse, opened a connection to, and a bulwark around, distant traditions and fellowships. In drawing to himself the reality of his past, the Academy stated, Milosz sought "a defense against the destructive forces that hold sway in the world to which we are delivered against our will." 8 ...according to Milosz, he---and we---are not simply the sums of these individual particulars. There is a cohesive force, which binds the varied particulars of our own, separate lives and connects us, mysteriously, with the Universal. We are created beings. We are, in Milosz's words, "the king's children." We see Milosz building this defense in "Capri," a meditation by the then 80-year-old poet on the long span of his life, from the villages and burgs of his youth, separated from each other by days-long carriage rides, to the world of the late 20th century. "I am a child who received First Communion in Wilno and afterwards drinks cocoa served by zealous Catholic ladies," the poem begins. "I am an old man who remembers that day in June." The memory of that distant celebration is bright, illuminated by the "sinless, white tablecloth" and sunlight reflected on vases filled with peonies. But the darkness of the 20th century, Milosz's century, is always just over the horizon, and it will overwhelm the joyful scenes of his youth. Of my century, in which, and not in any other, I was ordered to be born, to work, to leave a trace. Those Catholic ladies existed, after all, and if I returned there now, identical but with another consciousness, I would look intensely at their faces, trying to prevent their fading away.9 Milosz the poet admits that, early in life, when his calling had been incomprehensible and the destructive forces of the century had not been recognized, he had not looked intensely enough. He had been foolish. Still, he can capture moments from the span of his life: the rumps of horses pulling carriages, huts without chimneys set deep in pine forests, the eyes of camp inmates watching the sun rise upon another day of torture. Then, he is an old man, flying from San Francisco to Rome, tended by civilized stewardesses, flying to a grand celebration, whose participants believe not in Heaven and Hell but only in proofs of the flesh, "a tumor in the breast, blood in the urine, high blood pressure." He will soon depart this world, Milosz acknowledges. He and his age will become as phantoms. But, before he leaves, he must again face the question: What does he have to show for himself, as a poet of the 20th century? If I accomplished anything, it was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the lost Reality. After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the same time bread and wine. Hearing the immense call of the Particular, despite the earthly law that sentences memory to extinction. 10 Milosz answered the call of the Particular. As the Swedish Academy pointed out, the poet embraced the substance of everyday life, the details of concrete reality. These objects and words and faces and passing gestures, these are the stuff of lifetimes, of existence. For Milosz, the artifacts of his life were the Catholic ladies in Wilno, the huts in the Lithuanian forest, the riverside where he caught two young lovers. In the words of a Polish commentator on Milosz, the poet defined himself, in his writing, by fixing upon the "individual, momentary, and unique."11 Yet, according to Milosz, he---and we---are not simply the sums of these individual particulars. There is a cohesive force, which binds the varied particulars of our own, separate lives and connects us, mysteriously, with the Universal. We are created beings. We are, in Milosz's words, "the king's children."12 And a principal theme of Milosz's practice of philosophy---or, more precisely, theology---in verse was his tracing of this intertwining of our created lives with the Creator, the Particular and the Universal. Milosz understood that we glimpse that Universal, that lost Reality, in seizing the experiences of our lives, in apprehending a detail of our surroundings (whether vivid or commonplace), in recognizing that to take joy in the simplicity and beauty of those things, the substance of our lives, is to discover a pinhole opening to the light of God's Eternity. As I read Milosz's confession, "My Lord, I loved strawberry jam,"13 his beholding of a translucent apple tree from his window, his memory of parking the car by a yellow bicycle leaning against a tree, as I read his remembrances of Caffé Greco in Rome and Rue Descartes in Paris, of the long-johns he wore as a child, of Wilno during his student days, as I read these lines, I recognize his regret at being unable to recapture, to caress, these moments and faces in their complete light. I recall moments of my own life, moments in which, even as they were unfolding, I caught the hint of eternity and felt at the same time the sting of my temporal, fractured existence. This sting reminded me that despite my longing to possess a moment, it was bound to extinction. If I could be a poet, if I had the gifts of vision and voice, these are the moments I would seek to retrieve and revive from the imperfect light of memory. I would hope to linger there, in that Particular, and recapture a glimpse of the Universal. Milosz's struggle against the earthly law that extinguishes memory is a struggle that grips me as well, that grips all of us. I see in Milosz's constant doubt---his fear that he had failed to look, to gather, to comprehend the particulars of his life---a universal caution. In a life that spanned the last century, the instruments of that earthly law were occupying armies, bestial violence, the tumult of exile. But in our time the instruments, despite their technologies of convenience, might be even more effective at blunting our memories, our individuality. We believe that video screens, picture phones, and e-mail serve better to preserve our particulars, our "cherished moments." In truth, those aids cause us to fail to look intensely enough. And in that failure, we lose sight of the Particular, which, Milosz's verse testifies, can open to the Universal. Notes Czeslaw Milosz, "Meaning" (1991), New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001 (Harper Collins, 2001), p. 569. All citations of Milosz's poems will be from this volume. "Artificer" (1931), p. 3. "A Song on the End of the World" (1944), p. 56). "Songs of Adrian Zielinski" (1943-44), p. 70. "Dedication (1945), p. 77. "Preparation" (1986), p. 429. "City Without a Name" (1968), pp. 218-19. Lars Gyllenstein, Presentation Speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1980. "Capri" (1995), p. 585. "Capri" (1995), p. 588. Alexander Fiut, "Czeslaw Milosz's Search for 'Humanness,'" Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 31 (1987): 66. "Elegy for Y.Z." (1986), p. 443. "A Confession" (1985), p. 461. Slothward Christian Soldiers: Stuck in Traffic Between the Two Cities by Randy Boyagoda On the other hand, to look upon some worthwhile good as impossible to achieve, whether alone or with the help of others, stems from extreme depression, which sometimes can dominate someone's affections to the point where he begins to think that he can never again be given aspirations towards the good. Because acedia is a kind of sadness having this depressive effect upon the spirit, it gives rise to despair. -- St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, II-II, 20, 4. Gay marriage is the new abortion. We've been provided with this helpful shortcut by the New York Times and other major media organs. Culture interlocutors across the spectrum seem generally content with such an explanation, since it economically delineates the terms of the issue and anticipates the opposing camps. Pro-lifers, we can readily assume, are pro-marriage, particularly those of traditional religious persuasions; supporters of abortion --- with some qualifications --- are predictably sympathetic to the gay cause. The story, in a sense, is already told, since the plot-line is immediately on-hand. With the culture wars dragging through their fifth decade, the antagonists are well-defined, as are their respective "bases" and intellectual engines. In the present moment, gay marriage quickly and smoothly assumes its spot on the "life issues" roster, and a new front opens. Cue passionate denunciations, cacophonous rallies, dueling op-ed pieces; memorize the talking points, counterarguments, statistics. Once more: once more to the breach, dear friends. Ready? Excited? Thoughtful, younger conservatives engaged in contemporary intellectual debate are prey, I would like to suggest, to a subtle type of acedia, that "form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, [and] carelessness of heart," as defined by the Catholic Catechism. Lacking the automaton zeal of the recklessly rabid ideologue, and resisting the upwardly mobile indifference of the secular twenty and thirty something professional crowd, those who are actively and dispassionately committed to the renovation of our public square may find themselves, on occasion, overwhelmed into sloth. We seek to redeem the age, though we are perhaps too immersed in its chronicles. In Grammars of Creation, George Steiner provides an acute description of the intellectual and spiritual maladies debilitating the West at the turn-of-the-twenty-first century: "There is, I think, in the climate of spirit --- a core-tiredness. The inward chronometry, the contracts with time which so largely determine our consciousness, point to late afternoon in ways that are ontological --- this is to say, of the essence, of the fabric of being. We are, or feel ourselves to be, latecomers." I'd like to re-position this premise --- an elegant articulation of the general problem that many have noted --- to appraise the current situation among younger intellectuals with orthodox religious commitments. By this stage in our thinking lives, we know well the ills that have befallen our world. We have heard and learned from the elite minds of the intellectual and spiritual Right as they have bemoaned the situation. Responsibly and often sympathetically, we seek to add our voices and ideas to their efforts, yet in attempting as much, we are greeted with cold comfort, boredom and disillusionment, which in turn can lead to laxity, to less vigilance, to careless hearts. To sloth. This condition occurs when we sense how well-grooved are the tracks we are expected to run in, and how crowded the traffic already is. Consider: the Times runs a stomach-turning op-ed that encourages women to take proud comfort in loving their "actual, extrauterine" children and to "get past the guilt" of their aborted counterparts (July 22, 2004). We feel it incumbent upon ourselves to compose the "bearing witness" letter, but why take the time to do it? Within a couple of days, missives of that sort and their opposites are dutifully and unsurprisingly printed, largely saying the same things that we would have written, or that we have read so many times before. Core-tiredness. Likewise, inevitably someone else will organize a letter-writing campaign to the ostensibly Christian Congressman with a questionable voting record; someone else will initiate a boycott of the popular company guilty of unseemly production practices. The daily bulge of pleas, offers, and warnings that breaches the readerly Christian's mailbox suggests as much. One fears the lines of the interminable arguments aren't shifting, though the volume grows louder and the tone shriller; the output faster and ideas thicker. As emergent intellectuals, we are expected to energize our established and aging cohort in the culture wars; more importantly, we are called to help bring the fray to a just conclusion. Yet at times, the tightly-wound news cycles and intellectual circuits of our age seem to render the debate over why and how we ought to live together the intellectual equivalent of a stationary bike: predictable in its direction, sterile in its motion, discouraging in its lack of forward movement. (See James Nuechterlein's farewell editorial in the February 2004 issue of First Things, in which a similarly tired mood draws on a much deeper storehouse of experience). Given our religious commitments, we must confront a conjoined intellectual and spiritual form of sloth that arises not from the sadness of knowing how hard it is to do the good (Aquinas), but from the sadness of knowing that decades dedicated to as much by hundreds of fine minds has brought us only to what feels like, at times, a static agon that we are fated to perpetuate, ad infinitum. Sloth, onward to despair. In responding to this difficulty, there are at least three options. The easiest, we can understand as the "typist at tea" choice. In Eliot's The Waste Land, a listless young woman, representative of a lost generation, shares an afternoon tryst with a "young man carbuncular." She is "bored and tired," and passively allows her amorous and hideous assailant to "[make] a welcome of indifference." No matter how tiresome we might find the culture wars, we cannot grow so careless of heart, lest contemporaries in opposition to our first principles sense this ennui and pounce. Nor, however, should we given in to the easy temptation of "ideologuery." Reflexive and un-reflective cultural engagements --- those daily belches that shudder through the blog world --- are a rather easy way to commit to the struggle, but to choose this route, with its characteristic rash exuberance, might provide personal advancement and cheap glory at the expense of adding to Babel's din. The third way I am proposing is far less exciting; it requires patience, humility, and integration. During this time in-between the first fires of the life of the mind and the smoldering commitments of the aging polemicist, we can enter into rigorous hibernation to avoid the sloth of indifference and the sloth of ideology. This choice demands that we avoid the lax presumption that to follow and contribute to the thrust-and-parry amongst the chattering classes is alone enough of a commitment to solving our cultural predicament. It requires instead a willingness to engage our friends and family on the most pressing issues of the age, with a total openness about our commitments and intentions. We must do this when it is easier to avoid ugly truths for social niceties, or to sidestep them out of situational charity, or to ignore them through pride-filled noblesse oblige to the less-engaged, or to reserve them for more potentially dramatic and attention-winning arenas. But by fully immersing ourselves in the most immediate and natural, if the least-romantic and exhilarating, fronts of the culture wars --- the chat with a neighbor, the argument with an uncle --- we are reminded of the personal and personalist stakes of the debates we know too well in their dry ink forms. Alasdair MacIntyre's end declaration from the rapidly aging After Virtue remains in need of constant fulfillment, in every direction of our lives: "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us." Agreeing with his recommendation, we must look beyond MacIntyre's gloom. To do more than endure the age of the ever-widening gyre, to in fact prevail over it, we must consciously and constantly order intellectual discourse to its proper horizon: the acting and reacting human persons in our everyday midst. Now and then, and especially when we find ourselves bored of the public front of the culture wars, we need to remind ourselves that to be responsible, engaged religious intellectuals means more than maintaining subscriptions and having faith-informed positions on the latest book, controversy, and broadside. It means joining the free-traveling life of the mind to the local embodiments of human community. The demanding solution to intellectual fatigue and its sloth-inducing consequences is a total integration of one's personal relationships, cultural interests, professional ambitions, intellectual aims, and spiritual development. To move in this direction might mean accepting that an overemphasis upon intellectual pursuits, even those with religious, charitable, and sacrificial principles behind them, can lead to disillusionment, sloth, and despair, especially when we sense how close-shouldered, expected, and internalized the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly skirmishes of the culture wars tend to be. Eventually, it will fall to us to lead (or write) a column. This will likely occur at a time when the wider world will be so far removed from core principles as to be not even tired of them anymore, but simply strangers, despite the best efforts of our predecessors. In such a situation, we will need a deep reserve to draw upon if we aim to make peace across the divide and heal our wounded culture. This effort will need more than an encyclopedic knowledge of editorials and articles and book reviews, interests that can too often sap our spirits instead of enlivening them. It will need fully integrated intellectuals formed by their faith and ideas as these take shape their everyday relations: well-read Samaritans, humble, patient, and willing to travel the back-roads to the greater glory. Scrutinizing a Scandal: A Christian Worldview Analysis of a Christian College Professor Who Flunks Christian Worldview Tests and Doesn't Teach from a Christian Worldview by David Naugle Jack Heller's articles in the last two editions of The New Pantagruel --- "Christian College Professor Flunks Christian Worldview Tests" and "Further Scandal: Christian College Professor Doesn't Teach from a Christian Worldview" --- offer formidable challenges to the "worldview tradition" in evangelical Christianity. As a Christian and a professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University, I have had a long-term interest in all things "worldview," and have recently written a book on the history of the concept.1 My interest in this discussion grows out of this background and will form the basis of my remarks. In short, while I agree with Prof. Heller's critiques of the so-called "worldview tests" administered by the Nehemiah Institute and by the Worldview Weekend para-church ministry (these groups do, in fact, make positive contributions otherwise), I have serious concerns about his arguments in the second essay on teaching from a Christian worldview. In this response, I will comment rather briefly about the former issue, and offer more extensive remarks on this latter concern, in an attempt to speak the truth, as I see it, in love. I first learned about the "free online worldview test" administered by Worldview Weekend through a Yahoo discussion group comprised of past and present students of mine who were/are members of the Pew/Paideia College Society, an academic organization for intellectually gifted students at Dallas Baptist.2 I logged on in anticipation of finding a helpful method for worldview analysis. But after reading and answering just a few questions, I became frustrated with their content and orientation, and never finished the exam. Several of my students, and even a faculty member or two who completed the test, failed it, just as Prof. Heller did. The rather jocular follow-up discussion about our experiences with this assessment tool resembled Prof. Heller's own summary of its shortcomings: "limited subject matter, limited test result possibilities, problematic historical statements, and questionable theology and biblical interpretation." All of us were less than impressed with this approach to measuring worldview commitment, and we were concerned about its impact. However, none of us went away from it eschewing the value of the precious concept of a biblical worldview and its significant role in the Church, in Christian life and mission, and in institutions of Christian education. None of us concluded that the abuse of the concept barred its proper use, anymore than, say, occasional medical malpractice undermines the generally good work of hospitals. If anything, this experience prompted internal resolve, at least on my part, to develop and apply a Christian Weltanschauung with a greater degree of Spirit-bred humility, prudence, and maturity. If Prof. Heller is inclined otherwise, I hope he will reconsider. In my attempt to read Prof. Heller's second article carefully, I perceive that he is concerned about six important issues related to the matter of Christian worldview: (1) the lack of specificity about "what it means to teach from a Christian worldview"; (2) the lack of specificity regarding the content of "a distinctively Christian worldview"; (3) the diversity of definitions of the very concept of "worldview" itself; (4) the lack of reflection regarding the various forces that shape a person's worldview, especially a Christian one; (5) the imposition of a reductive "'Mere Christianity' worldviewism" on writers as culturally diverse as the Beowulf poet and Flannery O'Connor; and (6) the proposal of Debora Shuger's notion of "habits of thought" as an alternative to worldview. These items contain some valid points, and also call for pertinent criticisms. The lack of specificity about "what it means to teach from a Christian worldview." Because of his institutional address at Huntington College, students, parents and administrators rightly assume that Prof. Heller teaches from a Christian worldview. After all, Huntington is "an evangelical Christian college of the liberal arts,"3 and is also a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities which promotes Christian worldview development as a chief goal of its allied institutions. But what does teaching from a Christian worldview mean? Prof. Heller's concern is pedagogical in nature, about how to teach maturely from a given slant --- in this case, a Christian one. This legitimate question may arise because of the dubious manner in which teaching from a Christian worldview is sometimes undertaken. Should Christian professors simply seek to critique literary texts from a doctrinal perspective to see if they match up? Prof. Heller asks in regard to Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome: are his goals (1) to identify the unacceptable naturalistic worldview and the accompanying immorality of the chief character, (2) to contrast this with Christian belief in order to reject the former and embrace the latter, all leading (3) to a rejection of the ethos and issues of Wharton's novella because of its worldview orientation? For Heller, this kind of "worldview criticism" depends on "facile labeling" (that is, on cheap worldview identifications), and the text itself and its artistry become an excuse for "amateur philosophizing" (that is, for cheap apologetics). Instead of this balderdash, Prof. Heller asserts that his method is to respect and discuss the "fictional world" present in the text, and let the students themselves analyze its validity. I agree with this assessment. All too often, worldview advocates, despite good intentions, fail to treat texts and other artifacts with the integrity they deserve. All too often they rush to worldview judgments that short circuit a fuller hermeneutic and critical process. There is much more to say about human poiesis than its worldview origin, content, or impact. Despite the legitimacy of this criticism, however, at least two things must be said in response. First, while worldview criticism might be one-dimensional and pursued rather frantically out of religious or apologetic interests, this does not make it an illegitimate aspect of critical analysis. Indeed, it was a significant component to G. W. F. Hegel's own aesthetic philosophy.4 Nonetheless, this approach does need to be supplemented with other forms of interpretation and analysis in order to provide a more complete understanding of the work under consideration. On the other hand, simply to let a text speak for itself and allow students to process the moral world it creates, as Prof. Heller proposes, seems deficient and unwise. Impressionable students need the hermeneutic and philosophic guidance of seasoned Christian professors to help them understand and critique texts and their implications, recognizing the power of stories (and other objets d'art) to shape consciousness and conscience for better or for worse. Second, though Prof. Heller fails to acknowledge this, a considerable amount of intelligent work has already been done on the subject of faith-discipline integration that relates a Christian worldview to academic enterprises in sophisticated ways. One resource among many is a book titled The Reality of Christian Learning: Strategies for Faith-Discipline Integration, edited by Harold Heie and David L. Wolfe.5 It spells out a clear line of demarcation between integration and pseudo-integration, articulates the role of substantive and methodological presuppositions, value commitments, and systematic schemata (worldviews) in scholarly endeavors, and explains and illustrates compatibilist, reconstructionist, and transformational integrative strategies across the academic disciplines. The approaches detailed in this volume are considerably more advanced than the rather superficial approaches of the various ministries with which Prof. Heller seems to be preoccupied. To be sure, more work needs to be done in this area, and individual scholars and particular institutions can certainly improve the depth and quality of their worldview-based educational efforts. Much of Christian scholarship is still at an adolescent stage of development. To suggest, however, that there is a lack of specificity in the available literature about what it means to teach from a Christian worldview is simply false. Be that as it may, Prof. Heller still has trouble accepting commonplace descriptions of the tasks of Christian professors who are supposed to teach from a Christian worldview. For example, he is befuddled by Claude O. Pressnell's way of articulating the task of Christian scholars that includes a reference to the deleterious effects of the fallen human intellect and a call for intimacy with Christ as an academic prerequisite. If the intellect is fallen, and Heller believes that it is, then how is it at all possible to have confidence in a Christian worldview? Furthermore, what does intimacy with Christ have to do with capable teaching, say of Shakespeare or Wharton? In response to these two concerns, let us remind ourselves, first of all, that the reason why it is possible to have epistemic confidence in a Christian view of the world is because the created though fallen human intellect has been redeemed and renewed in Jesus Christ. The noetic effects of sin are adequately, though not perfectly, reversed through the noetic effects of eschatological redemption which is "already" but "not yet." In place of a previous ignorance and foolishness, believers are given the gift of the mind of Christ along with the significant task of developing this new spiritual and cognitive "sense" (Jonathan Edwards) based on the Spirit-taught Word of God. Obedient disciples of Christ graciously know revealed truth, which is not only soteriological but also cosmological in scope, and it is this all-embracing truth that sets them free. Christian conversion and sanctification, then, have profound implications on the effective operation of the human mind. As Bernard Lonergan states, "It directs a person's gaze, pervades his imagination, releases the symbols that penetrate to the depths of his psyche. It enriches his understanding, guides his judgments, reinforces his decisions."6 Prof. Heller's worldview agnosticism, therefore, is biblically unwarranted and contrary to the epistemic implications of the Christian gospel. Second, in contrast to Prof. Heller's embrace of a modern anthropological dualism that separates will from intellect and allows for a division between a scholar's moral condition (values, faith, private life) and cognitive function (facts, reason, public life), a biblical anthropology rooted in the Hebraic concept of the imago Dei is holistic in character, and ties together ethics and epistemology. Who we are in character and conduct affects what we know and how we teach, for as Jesus states, "the mouth speaks out that which fills the heart." Significant voices in the Christian intellectual tradition substantiate this integrated vision of the faculties of the human person and the ethics-epistemology nexus. In Augustine's terms, "Now whosoever supposes that he can know truth while he is still living iniquitously is in error" (De Agone Christiano).7 Or as Thomas Aquinas states, "unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of spirit."8 And as contemporary Maritain scholar Ralph McInerny argues, "The virtuous life is a necessary ... condition for the successful theoretical use of the mind."9 Thus Prof. Heller's Enlightenment-based fact/value dichotomy is contrary to the holism of a biblical anthropology and is rebuffed by leading thinkers in the Christian tradition. Intimacy with Christ, that is, a scholar's spiritual and moral condition, has much to do with teaching and impacts academic output. The lack of specificity regarding the content of "a distinctively Christian worldview." Not only is Prof. Heller flummoxed by the lack of specificity regarding Christian worldview pedagogy, but he also registers complaint about the lack of clarity regarding Christian worldview content. Claude Pressnell's comments are again disappointing for Heller because he "evades a question that his description of the Christian scholar's task begs to have answered: What does he mean by "a distinctively Christian worldview'?" There is a Catch-22, however. On the one hand, if the notion remains substantially undefined, it is amorphous and presumably unhelpful. On the other hand, if its content is clarified significantly, the discussion changes from Christian worldview pluralism ("a") to Christian worldview exclusivism ("the"), and the specific worldview formulation becomes subject to a plethora of sociological, historical, and theological criticisms. According to Heller, worldview thinkers are damned if they do and damned if they don't. But sooner or later what is excluded and included in the notion must be spelled out. All that Prof. Heller is able to marshal from his sources on this matter are the exclusion of anything that undermines a modernist, objectivist version of truth (so David Dockery), and the inclusion of objective moral standards rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition (so the Nehemiah Institute and Worldview Weekend). But, Heller concludes, if the gaps aren't filled in and "if that's all there is" (apologies to Peggy Lee) to a Christian worldview, then the concept is left open to political aggrandizement by conservative Christians. But Prof. Heller surely knows that others have certainly filled in the gaps regarding biblical worldview content --- David Dockery does in his other writings10 --- and there is much more to it than what he is admitting. A number of Protestant Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox writers have spelled out the essentials of the Christian vision, and among them there is a rather amazing consensus.11 The basic elements of the narrative of Scripture --- namely God the Father's creation of very good world that subsequently falls into sin because of a primeval human rebellion whose comprehensive effects are overcome by the fulfillment of a plan of salvation through the incarnation of the Son of God who provides a cosmic redemption that renews all things through the Spirit-empowered Church and will be consummated at Christ's second advent in the establishment of the new heavens and earth --- forms the specific content of the Christian worldview. These worldview "pillar points," as I like to call them, have constituted classic Christian orthodoxy, found embodiment in historic statements of faith, provided the framework for the theological reflections of the leading doctors of the Church, and supplied the meaningful context for the lives and service of the saints and martyrs throughout the ages. To be sure, detailed interpretations of these basic worldview themes have varied from tradition to tradition. This is why it is important to refer to "a" rather than "the" Christian worldview. But this Christian worldview pluralism --- Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical --- should be regarded as a cross-pollinating source of enrichment for the worldview tradition in which one stands, rather than as the root of a nascent liberalism or an unhealthy Christian elasticity, as Prof. Heller claims. At least, that is the way it has worked for me and others I know. Nonetheless, if this much of biblical faith is clear --- creation, fall, salvation history, incarnation, redemption, church, consummation --- then is there any real reason for Prof. Heller to complain about a lack of understanding what constitutes a distinctive Christian worldview? 12 The diversity of definitions of the very concept of "worldview" itself. Prof. Heller is also dismayed over the lack of an exact definition of the worldview concept itself. When he asks, "What really goes into the composition of one's worldview?" he cites three alternative definitions of the term, including my own. But for the most part, he comes away from the discussion dissatisfied by the notion's apparent elasticity and asks: "Is it helpful?" Prof. Heller obviously intends a negative response to his question. Now if a definition of "worldview" as a concept is what Prof. Heller is concerned about, then a basic dictionary definition like "a comprehensive interpretation or image of the universe and humanity" (Encarta) should suffice to get the essential point of the word across. That said, a couple of additional points need to be made here. First, the fact that a lengthy and rather vibrant discussion persists among worldview theorists who seek to put finer points on the definition of the term suggests that "worldview" is a crucial idea worthy of extensive discussion and refinement. After all, other concepts in the history of thought have also been the subject of intense scrutiny and undergone significant development. Shouldn't the same linguistic grace we grant to the genealogy of other ideas be extended to "worldview" as well? Second, it is important to recognize the sociological relativity of worldview theorizing and definitions. The recent post-Enlightenment re-humanization of the intellectual process shows that it is not feasible for anyone to approach any topic apart from the conditioning presence of a worldview. There simply is no impartial ground upon which to stand when attempting to develop a thesis about any concept, including this one. Worldview definitions are not the result of presuppositionless thinking, but reflect the perspectives and interests of their originators. Therefore, what a person understands a worldview to be is, interestingly enough, dependent upon that person's worldview! For this reason, I devoted chapter nine in my book to unpacking the implications of biblical faith on the concept of worldview , and James Sire has recently done something similar in his new work titled Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept.13 Ironically, then, a little worldview savvy on Prof. Heller's part would enable him to understand the reasons for the elasticity of worldview definitions and why they differ. __MTPAGINATE_PAGE_BREAK__ The lack of reflection regarding the various forces that shape a person's worldview, especially a Christian one. Prof. Heller also faults the evangelical worldview tradition for its failure to think carefully about the "specific confluence of influences that go into [forming] a Christian worldview." He wants to know, for example, how a person's mental, emotional, and behavioral processes shape a worldview, and which, in fact, comes first --- a person's psychological state, or a person's worldview? I appreciate the fact that Prof. Heller credits me with anticipating the importance of these matters in my own work through my considerations of the worldview concept, not only in philosophy and theology, but also in the social sciences --- psychology, anthropology, and sociology. There may very well be hints in my analyses of various thinkers in these disciplines about how worldviews are formed. In this regard, Michael Kearney's discussion about worldview formation from the Marxist vantage point of cultural materialism vis-à-vis cultural idealism is especially helpful.14 How the liturgy of the church is influential in the process of worldview formation is a project I am currently exploring. In any case, Prof. Heller's criticisms (or observations) at this level do not damage the notion of worldview per se, or its utility. They merely suggest that there may be a need for more work to be done in regard to factors influencing worldview formation. The imposition of a reductionistic "'Mere Christianity' worldviewism" on writers as culturally diverse as the Beowulf poet and Flannery O'Connor. I see this as the crux of the matter for Prof. Heller, even though it is a subspecie of the first of the six issues he raises in his article, namely "what does it mean to teach from a Christian worldview?" Prof. Heller is justified in asking whether or not the notion of a Christian worldview is capable of uniting "such historically, culturally diverse writers" as the Beowulf poet all the way up to Flannery O'Connor (if each of these were Christians, then presumably they had some kind of Christian view of reality). He is rightly concerned about the possible imposition of a rather rigid, "one-size-fits-all" interpretation of the Christian faith upon a diversity of authors in the Western canon that would cloud their idiosyncrasies and other important aspects of their lives, transform them into contemporary evangelicals, and reduce intelligent criticism to an enforced "'Mere Christianity' worldviewism." Undoubtedly, some educators "armed" with a Christian worldview employ this strategy. But for Heller, it is woefully monochromatic and too definitive for his taste. Mine too. Once again, however, a question must be raised: Is this a liability of the Christian worldview concept per se? Does a Christian worldview in and of itself demand this kind of teaching? Or is this not the fault of a faulty worldview pedagogy that is rather unsophisticated in technique, and/or employed with too much apologetic zeal? While Prof. Heller may assert that the trouble is inherent in the "abstracted and naive certainty of a worldview" itself, the history of the concept shows that it actually embodied relativistic connotations as the product of German idealism and romanticism. For this reason, both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger contrasted the subjectivist character of worldviews with their respective scientific philosophies, arguing that the former supplies its advocates with values, while the latter is the source of unadulterated facts. The modern scientific attitude, not the phenomenon of worldview as such, is the source of epistemic stridency along with its prejudiced pedagogical consequences. Hence, the solution to the "worldview problem" is not to be found in its dismissal, but in an overhaul of what it means to know and teach.15 The proposal of Debora Shuger's notion of "habits of thought" as an alternative to worldview. Since Prof. Heller believes that "worldview" is a product of the German Enlightenment that brings with it "the secularizing insistence that the search for truth can terminate on proper positions and principles," he proposes Debora Shuger's more relaxed expression "habits of thought" as a useful substitute. This notion suggests that individuals and societies organize their thinking around certain dominant tropes or various rhetorical and figurative devices. By avoiding the alleged dogmatism fostered by worldview, it is a good way to convey, say, the rough-and-ready mindset of the English Renaissance and the tentative attitude of St. Paul toward his own belief system. The notion of "habits of thought" is intuitively impressive for Prof. Heller, fits his own experience, and squares with biblical injunctions to examine one's way of thinking. Hence, he believes it is best to equip students with mature "habits of thought" rather than burden them with the abstracted, naive certainty of a worldview. I have no grouse against the notion of "habits of thought" per se, and I can see it being used nicely as a stylistic alternative to "worldview" in appropriate contexts. It also reminds me of the lovely phrase --- "the well-worn grooves of thought" --- used by C. S. Lewis in his poem "In Praise of Solid People."16 When compared, one wonders just how much real lexical difference there is between "worldview" and "habits of thought." Nevertheless, the way Prof. Heller recommends this expression manifests a possible weakness.17 In his concern to avoid what for him is the unattractive certitude associated with the evangelical worldview tradition, Heller's term "habits of thought" seems to convey the opposite nuances of uncertainty and perhaps a little bit of skepticism. Just how much uncertainty and skepticism he wants to pour into "habits of thought" is the crucial question. When he claims that St. Paul's "habits of thought" caused him to think rather poorly of his current view of the world based on 1 Cor. 13:12, it seems that he attributes quite a bit of epistemic slippage to the notion.18 If so, we might ask if Heller resides in the epistemic camp of the postmodernists? A responsible position like that of critical realism acknowledges the imperfections of human knowledge and the need for correction to be sure, but without capitulating to skepticism or relativism or anti-realism. Truth exists and is knowable, but sometimes we fall short, and need help in order to move closer to the truth. If this is what Prof. Heller wishes to communicate through the "habits of thought" concept, well and good. If not, then we have a problem from the vantage point of Christian conviction. He would serve himself and his readers well if he would articulate more clearly the epistemic position he intends to communicate by his use of this expression. Overall, I believe that Prof. Heller's protest against the evangelical worldview tradition is in some sense a straw man argument. Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender say this fallacy is committed when "we misrepresent an opponent's position --- and go after a weaker opponent or competitor while ignoring a stronger one."19 Now I don't think that Prof. Heller has misrepresented his opponent's position --- his descriptions of certain evangelical worldview ministries are fair, accurate and even helpful --- but I do think he has gone after a weaker opponent and ignored a stronger one. The stronger one he has ignored is the vibrant, mature, sophisticated, and historic worldview tradition represented by the likes of James Orr, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd, Gordon Clark, Carl F. H. Henry, Francis A. Schaeffer, Alexander Schmemann, Arthur Holmes, James Sire, Brian Walsh, Richard Middleton, James Olthius, Albert Wolters, Charles Colson, Nancy Pearcey, Os Guinness, Michael Wittmer, and dare I say it, even myself. Would the specific critiques that Prof. Heller levels at the Nehemiah Institute and Worldview Weekend hold water in this company? Unlikely. Wouldn't this rather distinguished group of thinkers have decent responses to the majority of Prof. Heller's worldview concerns? More than likely. Until Prof. Heller also interacts with this larger constituency about the questions at hand, then the only scandal that remains is the scandal of debunking the invaluable notion of a Christian worldview and its crucial role in promoting the kingdom of God and His glory. Notes David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). For information: http://www.eerdmans.com/shop/product.asp?p_key=0802847617. For personal and professional information, and a variety of lectures, papers and other resources, see www.dbu.edu/naugle. For information on the Pew/Paideia College Society at DBU, see http://www.dbu.edu/naugle/paideia.htm. http://www.huntington.edu/default.htm (December 27, 2004). Naugle, Worldview, pp. 71-73. Harold Heie and David L. Wolfe, eds., The Reality of Christian Learning: Strategies for Faith-Discipline Integration (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004). See also Robert A. Harris, The Integration of Faith and Learning: A Worldview Approach (Eugene: Cascade Books, A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004), and David Claerbaut, Faith and Learning on the Edge: A Bold New Look at Religion in Higher Education (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004). The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities has assembled a helpful bibliography that, in part, addresses faith-discipline-worldview issues and is available at: http://www.cccu.org/resourcecenter/resID.2492,parentCatID.215/ns_rc_detail.asp (December 27, 2004). Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 131. Quoted in James W. Sire, Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), p. 97. Quoted by Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1965), pp. 19-20. Ralph McInerny, Art and Prudence: Studies in the Thought of Jacques Maritain (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), p. 5. David S. Dockery, "Introduction: Shaping a Christian Worldview," in Shaping a Christian Worldview: The Foundations of Christian Higher Education, ed. David S. Dockery and Gregory Alan Thornbury (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2002), pp. 1-15. In chapters 1-2 of my own book, Worldview: The History of a Concept, I survey the "wonder of worldview" in the Protestant evangelical, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. In addition to works on the content of a Christian worldview discussed in chapters 1-2 of my book, I also summarize additional evangelical worldview contributions in Appendix A. To this list, I would now add the following: Michael E. Wittmer, Heaven is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004); Philip Greenslade, A Passion for God's Story: Discovering Your Place in God's Strategic Plan (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster Press, 2002); Tim Chester, From Creation to New Creation (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster Press, 2003); Vaughn Roberts, God's Big Picture: Tracing the Story-Line of the Bible (Leicester, England: InterVarsity Press, 2003); Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004). Also consult the works of the canonically-shaped biblical theology by Graeme Goldsworthy and William J. Dumbrell. James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2004). In this new work, Sire builds upon his previous understanding of the term and adds some new insights as well, resulting in this new, updated definition: "A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the human heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live, move and have our being" (p. 122). Michael Kearney, Worldview (Novato, California: Chandler and Sharp, 1984), chapter one. There is considerable literature on the relationship of psychology and worldview formation already available if one cares to consult it. See pages 21-22 in my "Worldview Bibliography" available at http://dbu.edu/naugle/papers.htm (December 22, 2004). Michael Polanyi's epistemic vision in my estimation is one of the best alternatives to modern ways of knowing and teaching and is presented in his books Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966). I also highly recommend Esther Lightcap Meek's Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, Baker Books, 2003) who draws significantly on Polanyi's thought as a basis for her own relevant epistemic insights. For a discussion of Polanyi's pedagogical significance, see Ronald Lee Zigler, "Tacit Knowledge and Spiritual Pedagogy," Journal of Beliefs and Values 20 (1999): 166-67. C. S. Lewis, "In Praise of Solid People," Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount Paperbacks, Harper Collins, 1994), p. 199. Here is an additional critique worth pondering: what is to prevent "habits of thought" from calcifying and taking on the ideological connotations that Heller earnestly seeks to avoid in worldview? Fascist "habits of thought" and "Fascist worldview" convey the same meaning for all practical purposes, so the former expression fails to secure any real advantage over the latter. The problems that Heller ascribes to "worldview" could also afflict his notion of "habits of thought." This assertion, I contend, is based on a misreading of 1 Cor. 13: 12 and the tension created by the "already/not yet" framework of eschatological redemption. Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life, 9th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002), p. 59. Hollywood's Evangelicals Read Alan Wolfe, and lo! They Are Angry! by Patton Dodd If Hollywood knows anything about religion, evangelicals are mad as hell. And they aren't going to take it anymore. Those crazy evangelicals: they trash anything stinking of science; they thump their Bibles and worship their Ten Commandments monuments; they judge and condemn everyone. Worst of all---and really, this is the main problem---they're prone to rape, pillage, and kill. If we think for a minute about Hollywood films and the representation of evangelical Christians, the evangelical support of stomach-turning violence makes ironic sense. Evangelicals, especially the fundamentalist-leaning, tongues-speaking kind, are a murderous brood. America has gone wrong, and if Hollywood knows anything about it, the Christians are willing to shed blood to make things right. Last year saw the coming out party of conservative Christians in Hollywood, as Mel Gibson rolled out the red carpet and welcomed believers everywhere to the inner-workings of his studio, Icon Productions. If the production of The Passion of the Christ was a pre-Second Vatican Council experience, the marketing of the film was thoroughly evangelical. Gibson may have attended a Latin Mass every morning before shooting, but in the months leading up to the movie's premiere, he went ecumenical. He may have told the New Yorker that non-Catholics were doomed to hell, but he told evangelicals that The Passion was our kind of evangelistic sermon. (Wait a minute. Did that mean he was trying to evangelize us?) He visited our churches and conferences. He asked us to pray that he could find a distributor. And we welcomed him. We fought for him. We shook our heads at Frank Rich and The New Republic. We hadn't even seen the film yet, but we were excited (and justifiably so) that a talented moviemaker had turned his eyes upon Jesus. And he had turned to us for help. Public concerns about anti-Semitism notwithstanding (and I am sympathetic to those concerns), everything came up roses for evangelicals who supported the movie. The Passion was the third-highest grossing film of the year, largely as a result of church pastors who bought out multiple screenings and high-profile Christian leaders such as Billy Graham, who called it "a lifetime of sermons in one movie." And even if the film does mostly preach to the converted, stories of new confessions abound. But as soon as the movie was released, the terms of the debate largely switched from bigotry to violence in entertainment. And now that Gibson's bloody epic has made the rounds, it has been a mystery to many that evangelicals so eagerly became associated with this decidedly brutal film. Millions of evangelical Christians supported the film before they saw it, but after seeing it they largely reported that (in the Pope's purported words) "it is as it was," a Saving Private Ryan for Jesus. Still, this is not the kind of Jesus movie one would expect from evangelicals. Gibson is no Warner Sallman, and his Jesus movie surely won't replace Campus Crusade's tamer version. Of course, evangelicals didn't make The Passion; they just made it successful. And in doing so, they made it their own. If we think for a minute about Hollywood films and the representation of evangelical Christians, the evangelical support of stomach-turning violence makes ironic sense. In the Hollywood representational rubric, evangelical characters are often contextualized by aggression. They are, in fact, forces of violence: they inspire it, enact it, relish in it. Hollywood films turn on shorthand, and the dominant trope for evangelicals is hostility: dogmatic and opinionated in the Falwellian mode, yes, but also ready to wield an axe. Watch a Hollywood flick with a conservative evangelical character, and the screen will splatter with blood --- or at least a close ideological approximation. We don't hear much about this because these representations are conventional, not shocking. They fit squarely into the public imagination about conservative Christians as antagonistic types---reinforced in recent debates about the religious delineation of America evidenced by national events such as the presidential election and, yes, The Passion. Contra convention is the work of scholars such as Alan Wolfe, whose The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (Free Press, 2003) amounts to a defense of conservative Christians as good democratic neighbors in spite of their public persona as vociferous Republican brutes. Wolfe's book is an ethnography-informed survey of contemporary religious believers in America, including Muslims and Jews, but it is mostly devoted to evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (the two are not always distinct, and will not be throughout this essay, because the Christians in question are arguably both). His contention is that America has changed these Christians much more than these Christians have changed America. Wolfe's Christian adherents are too narcissistic to get much beyond their own needs, too New Age-y to be judgmental, and too intimidated to evangelize. "The biggest challenge posed to American society by the popularity of megachurches and other forms of growth-oriented Protestantism is not bigotry," Wolfe argues, "but bathos." In short, evangelicals are nice, suitable members of a pluralist democracy. Wolfe shows several examples of this, including a Cincinnati megachurch pastor whose church evangelizes with random acts of kindness---cleaning toilets in a local mosque, washing car windshields. Such caring, says Wolfe, is the real character of American evangelicalism. Wolfe knows he is swimming upstream. His version of evangelical Christianity is rarely reflected in the national media, popular culture, high art, or academic journals, and the election and its aftermath (which has been punctuated with hard-right comments from James Dobson and others) have offered little support for Wolfe's thesis. Neither has the fallout from The Passion, because both the obstreperous public debate about the movie and the content of the movie itself testify to an essential cultural antagonism in evangelical Christianity---one that expresses itself through aggression, virulence, and even violence. True to form, in 2004 Hollywood gave us an emblematic example of Christians chewing up the silver screen. In Brian Dannelly's Saved!, moviegoers were introduced to evangelical vixen Hillary Faye, played with great relish by Mandy Moore. The queen of her Christian high school, Hillary struts and frets her hour upon the stage, using her Bible as a flamethrower to take down homosexuals, fornicators, cigarette smokers, and other members of the unconverted class. The movie, which was a mild critical and commercial success, was notable for its spot-on depiction of some aspects of evangelical culture: the praise-and-worship services and prayer groups of the high school were, if exaggerated, rooted in the kind of verisimilitude that could only come from a filmmaker who know what it's like to be an evangelical insider (writer-director Brian Dannelly attended a Christian high school). And from one who knows what it's like to resent evangelicalism. As Hillary and the movie sail toward a ham-fisted ending, Saved! descends into a caricature of religious extremism: here's Hillary vandalizing her school in an attempt to trap the infidels; here's Hillary literally throwing the Bible at a wayward friend; here's Hillary, crazed with religious fervor, crashing her van into a gigantic cardboard Jesus. She's self-righteous and shrill, vindictive and violent, and completely dismissible. But Hillary is good comedy because she is part of a tradition of representation. Take Bob Walker from The Big Kahuna (1999), a narrow-minded salesman-turned-evangelist (this movie wonders if there is a difference between the two). Bob, who is at a sales conference with decidedly secular counterparts, is a zealous Baptist who is willing to mix business with witnessing about the love of Christ, and he goes to blows to defend his right to do so. Or take Elmer Gantry, who, in the 1960 film of the same name, first appears on screen in an angry drunken revelry, yelling in a speakeasy about his masculine savior: "Jesus was a real fighter! The best little scrapper, pound for pound, you ever saw. And why, gentlemen? Love, gentlemen. Jesus had love in both fists!" There are many more such characters, either as major roles or minor flashes on the screen --- Christians whose most dominant trait is their belligerence. Each character may not amount to much alone --- the Hillary Fayes may be mere hypocrites, the Bob Walkers mere assholes, and the Elmer Gantrys mere crooks --- but their shared corrosive behavior amounts to a narrow representational groove that warrants attention. In Hollywood's America, evangelicals are fanatics with a chip on their shoulders. These movies foreground Hollywood's discomfort with evangelicals, and, as the characters unravel in movie after movie, they give audiences easy ways of dealing with that discomfort. That the depictions are stereotypical and predictable does not make them false, of course; it just makes them caricatures. But these raging saints are mild compared to the harder edge of the Hollywood tradition for representing conservative Christians. In many films, evangelicals are not just socially aggravating; they are sociopaths. When I mentioned this to a friend recently, the first thing he said was, "Cape Fear." Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of the noir classic features a Pentecostal slasher who is part missionary, part murderer. The story is about a paroled convict who hunts down and persecutes the defense lawyer who failed to get him acquitted, but the meta-story is about an evangelist who terrorizes sinners with the gospel. Robert DeNiro's Max Cady is "from the hills" of North Carolina, "a Pentecostal cracker," says Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden. As Max taunts, pursues, and attempts to kill Sam and rape his wife and daughter, he invokes the language of evangelization. "I pray for your dad," Max tells Sam's daughter. He advises Sam to read the Bible, preaches on sin and judgment, and offers a path toward salvation. This paper-thin joke is carried assiduously throughout the film---even as Max prepares to rape Sam's wife, he spouts Christian rhetoric: "You ready to be born again, Mrs. Bowden? A few minutes with me, and you'll be speaking in tongues." Such language abounds particularly throughout the climactic scenes, and when Max is defeated and is beginning to drown, we hear him shouting in tongues. Max has many friends. He is, in fact, a direct descendent of Harry Powell, Robert Mitchum's preacher/serial killer in The Night of the Hunter (1955). With his hands tattooed with the words "love" and "hate" so he can use them for sermon illustrations, Powell is the inspiration for the similarly tattooed Max Cady. Mitchum also played Max in the original Cape Fear, and his cameo appearance in Scorsese's version is a reference to both classic films: "I don't know whether to look at him or read him," Mitchum says when seeing DeNiro's tattoos. Not surprisingly, Scorsese's Cape Fear is religiously inflected in ways that the original is not, but while other Scorsese films seek to do justice to the affectional (if often traumatic) depth of religious belief and behavior, Cape Fear parodies religious extremism as a specifically fundamentalist horror show. Consider also: Robert Duvall's Pentecostal preacher in The Apostle, whose murderous rage bubbles just underneath his zeal for the Lord's work, Bill Paxton's enraged demon slayer in Frailty, and Benicio Del Toro's guilt-ridden hit-and-run murderer in 21 Grams. Some such characters are repentant of their violence, but all are inexorably drawn to it---aggression and violent behavior is their mode of engaging the world. Quentin Tarantino, who never filmed a scene that wasn't in quotes, makes reference to this representational tradition in Pulp Fiction (1994), where Samuel L. Jackson's gangster character Jules Winnfield delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon before executing victims. With his black suit and tie, well groomed Jheri Curl, and, most importantly, crescendo-laden speech, Jules resembles nothing so much as an African American preacher. He misquotes scripture as he guns down a victim, but he also quotes --- verbatim --- a black Christian tradition by way of a Hollywood stereotype. These are Hollywood's conservative-evangelical-fundamentalist Christians: given to violence not in spite of their faith, but because of it. These are also --- it seems crucial to point out now --- Blue State depictions of Red State inhabitants. Cape Fear's Max Cady has two bumper stickers: "You're a VIP on EARTH---I'm a VIP in HEAVEN" and "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God." Saved!, 21 Grams, The Apostle and most of the rest are set in the hinterlands, and they are inherently us-them movies, striving to reinforce the aggrieved differences between religious and secular perspectives. Now, what say we get these characters in a room with Alan Wolfe, lock the doors, and, you know, see what happens? Wolfe's book has a lot to teach Hollywood about conservative believers, and a lot to teach conservative believers about themselves. Wolfe gets some things wrong---in one chapter, he defines "spiritual warfare" as treating nonbelievers as enemies, misreads marginal Christian rock bands such as Stryper and Steve Taylor, and, most fatuously, claims that the media is not embracing "Christian themes as a way of tapping into new sources of advertising revenue"---but he gets one big thing right. Major sections of evangelical Christianity increasingly mirror the world around them; the strong, often uncritical desire of evangelical institutions to be attractive to the greatest number of people threatens the evangelical character of those institutions. So far from reacting against the world aggressively and violently, argues Wolfe, many Christians find themselves quite at home in the world, protecting the status quo, not railing against it. "We are all evangelicals now," says Wolfe, because evangelicals have become just like everyone else. Wolfe's thesis seems quaint when "Meet the Press" features roundtable discussions (okay, insensible debates) pitting Jerry Falwell against Jim Wallis and Al Sharpton against Richard Land, and when evangelicals vehemently defend a violent Passion Play against the cries of their secular neighbors. But just as Hollywood does not speak for Christians, neither do all conservative figureheads. Wolfe's thesis has the virtue of breaking through the morass of typical representations and describing evangelicalism from the perspective of those practicing it rather than from the perspective of the New York Times. And in fact, his characterization is the more disturbing one, the one more challenging for anyone who cares about the sustainability of evangelicalism. As Slate reported recently, marketer Paul Lauer, who helped design the marketing apparatus for The Passion, followed that job by aiming a new marketing campaign at Christians---this time for The Polar Express, a saccharine movie about a little boy who does not believe in Santa Claus, and a movie that did not have Jesus on its mind until the marketers decided it should. That Christian radio stations and churches agreed to take part in the campaign (really, we should see the movies we choose to support), is testament to the validity of Wolfe's claim that some Christians adapt to culture---in this case, crass consumer culture---more readily than they change it, or even question it. In the months and years ahead, we might prefer violent caricature to sentiment, faith-crazed murderers to Christians made complacent by shopping and self-fulfillment. Coming soon to a theater near you: tame evangelicals. They could be scarier than anything we've seen so far The Parliament of The World's Religions and The Axis of Theism by Mustafa Akyol On July 7-13, 2004, in the beautiful city of Barcelona, there was an extraordinary international meeting that gathered some seven thousand people from all over the world. The meeting was for The Parliament of the World's Religions and the attendees were believers from all different kind of traditions. From many denominations of Christians, Jews and Muslims to Buddhist, Sikhs, Hindus or even self-proclaimed pagans, it was truly a global coverage of the world's faiths. During the seven days of the Parliament, hundreds of lectures, workshops, panels, concerts, prayers and rituals were performed. You could see Sikhs chanting with their orange tunics and curved swords in one auditorium, and then watch the whirling dervishes of Sufi Islam in another and then rush to catch the interactive workshops with titles like "The Methods of Interfaith Dialogue" or "Which Islam?" The proceedings of the Parliament will definitely be a valuable source for many years to come. Yet, even the very existence of such an event is a remarkable phenomenon, since it implicitly manifests the fall of the modernist vision. That vision, which was basically the product of 18th century Enlightenment and 19th century positivism, defined religion as a superstition that would die out with the progress of science and human knowledge. Based on the philosophies of atheist thinkers like Nietzsche, Comte, Feuerbach, Marx or Engels, and supported by the theories of Darwin, Spencer or Freud, the modernist vision foresaw a totally secular world. However, in the last quarter of the 20th century, religion surprisingly emerged as a very powerful force in human lives and world affairs. The causes of this world-changing phenomenon --- like the inadequacy of modern life to satisfy the human soul or the unexpected scientific discoveries that supported the theistic cosmology --- is being studied by many scholars. The bitter fact for the modernists is that we are living in a "de-secularizing" world as social scientist Peter Berger --- formerly a strong supporter of the "secularization theory" --- calls it. The Parliament for the World's Religions, which gathered so many "modern" yet religious scholars and intellectuals, has been a picturesque demonstration of this de-secularizing globe. However, the return of "religion" per se does not necessarily mean a return to God. I have sensed this strongly at the Parliament of the World's Religions. There was a big hall reserved for publishers and exhibitors and at least half of the booths presented a "spiritual" worldview in which there was little, if any, room for God. From Unitarians to Scientologists, or from pagans to Hare Krishna folks, there were many cults that disagreed with the shallowness of materialism but tried to fill it with exotic faiths in vague deities. I felt something similar to what St. Paul felt in the Areopagus of Athens. Like the "Unknown God" of those ancient Greeks, most of these post-modern spiritualists believe in a mere "universal energy". Of course, "energies" don't give us moral codes or listen to our prayers. Yet God does and He is real. This is why theists have to reach out to the spiritualists and help them to realize "The God that made the world and all things therein" (Acts, 17:24), or "He Who has created the heavens and the earth with truth" (Koran, 6:73) In fact, the distinction at this point can be interpreted as the difference between humanism and theism. According to the former, religion has to be a set of beliefs and practices that we produce or at least modify to give us comfort in our lives. According to the latter, religion is a set of beliefs and practices that God has ordained to lead us to the truth. They may not be "comforting" at all times, they even ask for a lot of self-sacrifice, but they give us a deeper comfort by knowing that we are gratifying our Creator and Lord by following them. The problem with humanism is not only that it ignores the truth, but also that it does not keep its promise to make us happy. As C. S. Lewis once well explained, "if you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth---only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair." Non-theistic spiritualism, like materialism, is a way that promises comfort but leads to despair. Theists have to deal with them both. Another message that I inferred from Parliament of the World's Religions is the inadequacy of the famous --- or notorious --- thesis of "the Clash of Civilizations" put forward by Samuel Huntington a decade ago and has been shaping many minds since then. The most provoking part of Huntington's thesis was the presumed conflict between the so-called Western and Islamic civilizations. As noted by many critiques, the diversity of both of the "civilizations" in question negates this clear-cut scenario. Another fact that further negates Huntington is the existence of different axes which cut across his civilizational borders. The axis of theism, as one might call, is the most notable one. Faithful Christians, Jews and Muslims have so much in common that they could in fact present a common global culture against the materialism and hedonism of modernity. In one of the workshops at the Parliament, I noted the possibility of such an axis and gave a figurative example: Years ago, the most popular TV series in Turkey among the conservative families was "The Little House on The Prairie." Every religious person I knew was a fan of this American story of a devout family with strong moral values. Nowadays, the same people zap "Sex and The City" with disgust, as many conservative people in the US would do. Doesn't this symbolize an "intercivilizational" common ethic among theists, whether they be Christian, Muslim or Jewish? Why would we have a clash between us, while we all worship the same God, the God of Abraham? We, if anything, should be on the same axis against unbelief. (For the unbelievers, there is good news too: We don't seek a clash with them either; we wish to help them. For they know not what they do.) I am sure this idea of an "axis of theism" will raise questions: Is this a Machiavellian proposal? Moreover, does it imply concessions from our faiths for the sake of co-countering a powerful enemy? My answer is a bold "no." The reason is that the very doctrines of our faiths include the notion of recognizing the righteous in other communities. For Christians, the tale of the Good Samaritan is always there and Jesus Christ is also on the record for declaring, "He that is not against us is for us" (9:40). We Muslims, on the other hand, are reminded in the Koran about the godly Jews and Christians (Koran, 3:113) and ordered to call them to an "equitable proposition" of worshipping only God (3:64). Worshipping and loving God is such a blessing that deserves respect regardless of creed. If we gain this consciousness --- unfortunately lacked by many contemporary Muslims --- then we will assess and judge the world not only in terms of our specific creed, church, nation or civilization, but also in the broad vision of theism. This vision will have many implications. For example in February 2003, officials in Brussels have omitted the word God from the European Union's future constitution, along with a reference to Christian values. Turkish officials welcomed this, since they thought that a fully secular Europe would be more lenient to accept the Muslim Turkey. As a Turkish Muslim, and a global theist, I would prefer my government to support the mentioning of God and Christianity and to pursue a rapprochement between the latter and Islam. Turkey's entry into EU will be significant only when it serves that greater good. Indeed, I would prefer to enter an EU which proclaims itself to be "under God" --- as the US gallantly does. Thus, maybe the next great theistic mission will be to help European societies to recognize and praise the Lord that their leaders neglected. At the Parliament of the World's Religions in Barcelona, I saw many Europeans in search of that Lord. Hence, I felt, for them and for Europe, there is still hope. Perfect Clumsiness: An Interview with András Visky by J. Clayton Johnsonwith András Visky Edited by Ailisha O'Sullivan András Visky spent his early childhood in a Communist gulag along with his mother and six brothers and sisters, while his father, a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church, was in prison elsewhere, sentenced by the Romanian Communist government to 22 years for alleged crimes and subversion. As an adult, he became a political dissident and incurred the attention of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police. Now in his forties, András is a published poet, playwright, and essayist, and is the founder of the Koinónia publishing house. He is the dramaturg of the State Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, Romania, and an associate professor in aesthetics at the University of Babeş-Bolyai, also in Cluj. His play Juliet has been playing in Budapest since fall of 2002 at the Thália Theatre. Two newer plays, The Escape and The Alcoholics are premiering later this year in the Romanian cities of Târgu Mureş and Sepsiszent György respectively. His most recent play, The Unborn, is a stage adaptation of Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész (winner of the Nobel prize for literature, 2002). He lives in Cluj with his wife and four children. Recently, András sat down with Clay Johnson from The New Pantagruel and was kind enough to answer a few questions. The New Pantagruel: I know that your father is a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church and your entire family suffered for religious reasons under the Communist regime in Romania. How were you led from this background to the theatre? Barry Moser, "Ecce Homo" ANDRÁS VISKY: It was the Church which led me to the theatre and then from the theatre I got back to the Church. My father's sermons became the theatre for me, in the holiest sense of the word, for I couldn't find an explanation for what was going on in the church during his sermons. I heard great sermons from him, many that I can remember, even now, and I still feel the great joy of hearing his voice and of seeing him. It is something that keeps me near faith. I only got to know my father when I was seven years old and he was released from prison where he had spent exactly seven years. He knew me but I didn't know him. As a child, I was also a prisoner and I was released about the same time. I spent five years in a Romanian gulag, a village which had been built by the prisoners and which -- I know this from the older prisoners -- was built in the shape of a hammer and sickle right on the eastern side of the Romanian desert and next to the Danube Delta. Our relationship was not a traditional father and son relationship. I would say it resembled that relationship which we all have with God. He knows us but we don't know Him, yet after a while an encounter happens and we come to know Him. My father stepped out of the "there is" into the "I am." Our getting to know each other is equivalent for me with the event of the liberation, of being set free. The New Pantagruel: So you grew up listening to your father preach. ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes. It was in listening to my father in the sounding and resounding space of the church, I suddenly realized that the words were happening, they were coming true, and that they could be as real as the pews or the windows through which one could see a part of the sky. And not simply because passages from the Bible were interpreted in different ways in different sermons -- this was also interesting, of course; it spoke to me about the text as something inexhaustible and endless and unfathomable. But what was even more interesting was the way in which the repeated liturgical formulas, the blessing of Aaron for example, were always the same and at the same time totally different. My father raised his hand to give the blessing and then he began to recite the text. In this moment something real happened, just in the moment when he made that gesture and spoke, something which enthralled me and in which I recognized the evidence of God's existence. One could not separate the word from the gesture, the gesture from the word, the sound from the silence and the message from the form of the message. An amazing moment: terrible and at the same time consoling. It could be seen and felt and experienced clearly that creation was good, was full of love, and that there was a purpose in it that took care of all. That's what I wanted to know more about. No, not know, I'd rather say, I wanted to expose myself to it. The New Pantagruel: How did you get from there to the theatre? ANDRÁS VISKY: You know, if we want to know something about God's almightiness, the church is the place where we'll find out the least about it. In the church and in the congregation, almightiness is only a word that is explained by other words, words that are themselves explained by still other words, and so on. The speaker, of course, sooner or later says "amen" because, maybe, he gets hungry or because he has to perform the same speech somewhere else or because his time has run out and he cannot stretch the word. (laughs) The New Pantagruel: But can words be explained without words? ANDRÁS VISKY: According to the idea of the classical Reformation -- sacra scriptura sui ipsius interpres -- Holy Scripture is its own interpreter -- we might think, yes, with words, of course, how else? But I would say that holy scripture can only be interpreted by holy scripture. Everything else is just talking around the point, purposely, in such a way as to avoid it. The New Pantagruel: Explain that a bit more. ANDRÁS VISKY: I was afraid you would say that! You know, we are interpreting the Bible as a text. We don't interpret the Bible as a revelation. What does revelation mean? We need a revelation to interpret revelation. We always need it. Always. You know in John's Gospel, the story of how John and Peter run to the tomb on Easter Sunday and at the end it says that John believed the scriptures. But what does it mean that he believed the scriptures? He didn't believe them before? It's not true. But something miraculous happened. A total and deep, essential changing of their relationship with the scriptures. We don't believe the scriptures. We know the scriptures. It's great to know the scriptures, I'm convinced of this, but knowing, we don't believe the scriptures. For example, there is a parable of the man who is spreading the seeds. Do you remember? The New Pantagruel: The parable of the sower? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, the most clear and most simple parable of the Bible. Because other parables, you know, like where there are ten coins and one is missing -- the meaning is not so clear. But the parable with the seeds, it's very clear, very straightforward. These seeds fall here, and those there, and this soil means this and so on, and Jesus explains all of this very clearly to those around Him. But afterwards, His disciples come to Him and say, explain the parable to us. Why? Why? Because if Jesus says something, I cannot understand it without Him. Because He is telling Himself, you know? The New Pantagruel: He is telling Himself? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, He includes Himself in the words. In other words, I cannot understand Him without being in communion with Him. If I understand Him, and am not in communion with Him, I don't understand Him. This is the Judas story. The Judas story is to understand Him without being in communion with Him. For me, it's so great that the disciples realize that they understand this parable in a suspiciously easy way. "Let's ask Him," they say. "It can't be that simple. Let's ask Him." To be frightened by the simplicity and to tell Him, "No, this is not so simple. I can see in my life that this is not so simple. Not so simple at all." It's so simple in our life? It's not. Give us Your whole body. Give Yourself to me together with this parable. To believe the scriptures, what does it mean? To not believe so easily my understanding of the scriptures. Not to be so speedy. (laughs) The New Pantagruel: This means to believe in the scriptures and not to believe in "what the scriptures tell us", but to believe in the scriptures themselves, saying, "we don't know what this is but we believe"? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, because I believe in You. The New Pantagruel: Because when you say you believe in what the scriptures told you, you're reducing the revelation to some idea that you can hold. ANDRÁS VISKY: And you are using the scriptures as a tool. But I am a tool in the hand of the scriptures. I am the tool. I am the tool through the grace of the Spirit. I am always the tool. Let's take Hosea, for example. Many consider him the greatest poet of the Old Testament and I'd add to this that, along with Ezekiel, he's one of the greatest performers. He has to live in the most absurd and scandalous way. As a prophet of God and of the chosen people, he has to marry a prostitute, Gomer, whom he is not even allowed to touch. Then he has to give horrible names to his children, his children whom he loves as much as we love our children, even as Mary loved Jesus. But perhaps the most shocking thing is that Hosea's book is part of the canon, it is one of the holy books of the Scripture. In Hosea's story, God makes a performance before the eyes of the people in which word and person, speech and act cannot be separated. The word happens, actually takes place, and this has nothing to do with a comforting, sleep-inducing, and euphemistic morality. Hosea has to once and for all step out of the drowsiness of words, of dogmatics, of definitions and also, out of his own comfort. He must expose himself -- I want to emphasize this -- he must expose himself to the attacks of his aggressive and power-mad contemporaries who think that they are chaste and pure. The New Pantagruel: The man chosen by God, God's prophet, has to live as a sinner and so the church rejects him. It's completely upside down. ANDRÁS VISKY: Completely upside down! I'm always looking for those places in the world where God, almightiness, love, meaning, form, death, resurrection and redemption are not just words, but are non-words; that is to say, where they are related to another kind of reality. The idea that the Scripture interprets itself is not self-evident at all. And if there is anyone for whom it is self-evident, then he or she has no idea what the speaking text means, has no immediate experience of it. So, he is compelled to put the commentary, the dogma, the archeology above the text and the text above God. The self-interpreting text is nothing but "text-olatry" if a person, the "I am," does not show up to interpret it and whose voice can be heard in the text and who is, by His essence, the reality itself. The New Pantagruel: By text-olatry, you mean worshipping the text? ANDRÁS VISKY: Worshipping the text and worshipping my own understanding of it. Theology, theo logus is to be in dialogue with God. How can we be in dialogue with God without feeling our limitation in this dialogue? And how can we be transformed without being touched by the Holy Spirit and receiving the gift of understanding? You know what I mean? But for us, understanding is the starting point. For us, understanding is something very natural, a given part of being human. I don't believe this. Understanding is the work of the Holy Spirit. It comes from outside. And by not speaking about the limitations of theology, we spread messages about a limited God. You know, I believe that Derrida is a very important mirror for Christianity, a very important mirror. And we have to accept this mirror. The way he speaks about the dissemination of the meaning, the disappearing of the meaning -- it's a very important teaching about not trying to keep back the meaning and to use it again. Don't use it again because you will get another, a fresh one. Like in the Old Testament, how they had not to keep the manna for the next day. It is the same image. You cannot use it. I can smell the overused manna in our churches. It's very smelly, you know, like a lot of very smelly preachings. (laughs) The New Pantagruel: Talk to me some more about this other kind of reality. We shouldn't think for a moment that if Christ was our contemporary we wouldn't censor Him or we wouldn't kill Him. Especially since we know that we did kill Him, and not only on the cross, but in Auschwitz, in the death camps that are patented as products of the industrial development, of the modern, civilized society. ANDRÁS VISKY: In the theatre, or more generally speaking, in our encounter with art -- or let's take my earlier example: during the sermon that happens to us -- we have the possibility of sharing in the gift of the present time. We become contemporaries of God and of Creation. That is to say, we suddenly feel our everyday life, which is so fragmentary and fragile and exposed to suffering and death, to be eternal. For me, the "Christ-event" is also a kind of experiment by God to make His people and of course, the whole creation, His contemporaries. The Hungarian word "contemporary" is a compound word in which time and fellowship are joined together. The gift of the present. If we are brave enough and afraid in the proper way, we can see that His grace means that we become fellows of God in Christ who showed us His humanity in His suffering and weakness. The New Pantagruel: How does this inform our interaction with the secular world? ANDRÁS VISKY: Well, the repeated appeal of Christian theology and mission is that we should exercise an influence on non-Christian and secularized culture and art. Some of my English speaking friends are using a very strong word for this: we are supposed to impact the culture. But if we take a work of art for what it is, that is, simply a work of art and not for, let's say, a kind of tactical weapon, like a Trojan horse, then we must admit that we as Christian people have rejected the aesthetic understanding of the world. Or we might say that we have become rather abstinent, aesthetically, for the sake of our false comfort. My experience is that if theological and aesthetical ways of speaking come into conflict with each other, nothing good results. They become enemies and, what's more, they censor each other. I am convinced that Christianity or Christian faith should expose itself to be impacted by the surrounding world and culture. If God is almighty, we don't experience this the most in the church, but in such places where there is no room for Him. Where His almightiness shines through the events like a flash of lightning. You know, the church is not God's censor, but it seems to me that nowadays, this is how it acts. It behaves as if it is God's censor. So we say that art outside of the church is not art for a Christian. But inside the church you cannot find art. You cannot, for the most part, find art. Christian culture is simply not present in the contemporary artistic or literary scene so one cannot expect to exercise an influence on it like, let's say, with a bomb. According to the English-Hungarian dictionary, to impact means to hit, like with a bomb, for example. To hit with a bomb! (laughs) The New Pantagruel: So you think this idea of impacting the culture doesn't work? ANDRÁS VISKY: You know, I believe that when Jesus is present, the world is not divided in two, we here, together with Jesus, and those people over there who don't believe in Him. It's divided in two in a different way. Jesus is here and all of us we are on the other side and it's His grace to invite us to be with Him. This is the Gospel. The Gospel speaks about this. It's not my idea. If you are invited by Him, by Jesus, I am sure that you would not be prepared and you would not believe that He invited you. "Me? I visited You as a prisoner? I don't remember this." In other words, the church life has to speak about this, that I don't believe that I believe. And to "impact the culture" -- this is not a real issue now for Christianity. My message to Christianity now is not to impact the culture. My message to Christianity is to be impacted by the culture, to offer itself a little bit to be impacted. How can we impact the culture without ourselves creating a valuable culture, without having valuable artists? How can we impact the culture by just reacting to Derrida and Levinas? First of all, we need to read them and understand them in a deep way, to put them in the tradition of their narrative and try to understand them. It's not the time to impact the culture. We would impact the culture only if we would accept to be impacted by the culture. And in being open to being impacted by the non-Christian culture, there is a possibility that we can meet the almighty God. You know, I am sure that if Mozart was our contemporary we would keep his music out of the reach of our children, we would surely not play his songs in our churches. Are we ready to receive from a modern day Mozart? The New Pantagruel: To receive what? ANDRÁS VISKY: The sovereignty of God. God gives talent where He wills. Do we have a sovereign God? If we do have a sovereign God, we can see very well that this sovereign God creates amazing works of art through uncommitted Christians or through those who are not members of my church. And? And I can't be the censor of God. The whole church was a censorship of Jesus. All the people around Jesus were His censors, except those who were blind, who were lepers. Who are those who don't censor Jesus? Only the blind, the lepers, the mute, the prostitutes, because they have no reason to do so. But we do. The New Pantagruel: They have no reasons? ANDRÁS VISKY: They have no reasons because they are at the edge of their lives, the edge of their existence. Help my unbelief. I believe, but help my unbelief. Do we believe? Help my unbelief. We shouldn't think for a moment that if Christ was our contemporary we wouldn't censor Him or we wouldn't kill Him. Especially since we know that we did kill Him, and not only on the cross, but in Auschwitz, in the death camps that are patented as products of the industrial development, of the modern, civilized society. I will not talk about the Romanian gulag because that was an atheist experiment. But Auschwitz was a Christian "experiment" and more than that, as the archives show, it was an ecumenical one. To kill the chosen people is a clear sign that we would kill Jesus. The church is not the club of those who would not kill Jesus. Our instinctive identification, as Christians, is always with the disciples and not with the betrayer. But no one betrays Jesus but the church. A non-Christian doesn't betray Jesus. A non-believer doesn't. It's not possible. Logically, it's not possible. Who betrays Jesus? The church betrays Him. The church is Judas. The New Pantagruel: Let me bring you back to the theatre again, okay? ANDRÁS VISKY: Okay, for me, it's very okay. You know, Leonardo DaVinci says about the church building that it is teatro da udire messa, that is, the theatre where we hear the mass. To hear the Word: the condition for this is that first, we must be cured of our deafness. And this is not a single, one-time event, it's not a condition that can be fulfilled once and for all. Hearing begins with healing. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear," but the one who is addressed usually does not hear. How many congregations from the book of Revelation survived, remained alive? If I remember correctly, not even one. We should notice that God's word here also refers to writing -- "Write in a book," John is commanded -- but understanding refers to hearing: he who has ears to hear, will hear. Barry Moser, "Crucifixion" The New Pantagruel: And the theatre ... ANDRÁS VISKY: And, okay, the theatre. (laughs) In the theatre, we have the possibility to experience the present in its perfectness: our own present. To experience that the infinitive "to be" as not just a part of speech but as something that happens, is happening, personally. That He has revealed Himself as "I am." Remember Hamlet's monologue? God changes the question of "To be or not to be" into the question "Should I be or should I not be" and finally into the declaration, "I am." Jesus goes into death in such a way that He applies the parable of the sparrows to Himself, interpreting the passage in question in a very subtle way. God takes care of the little sparrows. But this doesn't mean that "not one of them will fall." The emphasis is put on the continuous present tense of His care, on the grace of His eternal providence, and not on the triumphant survival. And the theatre, the theatre produces works that don't exist and that cannot be stored or preserved. They can't survive, if you will. They cannot even be studied, because he who tries to examine them becomes a part of the performance as a viewer. And as soon as the performance has ended, the work of art ceases to exist and disappears. The next performance is not the same as the previous one. The audience is always changing and the state of mind of the performer as well. The context of the text can also change, depending on how the world changes around us, or on the news and false news that the media like to throw between us and the world. So the greatest gift of the theatre is that it still believes in the present, in its own present and in the present of others. This is what I like about the theatre, the fragility of the work of art, the work of art that lets itself fall apart. The New Pantagruel: Does this kind of theatre really exist? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, for sure, it exists. I can see this everywhere even in the worst theatrical performances. Do you know why? Because however good or bad a performance, it cannot eliminate an inherent clumsiness or awkwardness, neither from the creative process nor from the creation itself, which is the performance. János Pilinszky calls this "perfect clumsiness" and it is always present in the theatre because the theatre is a community made up of the performer and of the viewer who is present. The New Pantagruel: Perfect clumsiness? ANDRÁS VISKY: For example, in theatre, the choreography of aggression is clumsy. Murder on the stage is always a little ridiculous just because the blood is not real blood and the weapon is not a real weapon and the poison is utterly healthy -- it's a cup of herbal tea, let's say! Bearing this in mind, the debate around the image in the European history of ideas is very interesting because the image and especially, the moving image, film, is really "perfect" and takes the place of real life and of the person claiming to be real. In contrast, the word or writing is "imperfect." It's weak. It is always personal and its aim is the personal existence, the voice, the sound, something that is uncertain and whose coming into existence is never guaranteed. Like the Torah. The Torah has no vowels and needs someone to speak it into existence. It doesn't exist in an objective way. And it wants to be alive. To read the text aloud is to make a liturgy of it. You know, Kierkegaard asks his readers to read his sermons aloud. It's related to the idea of presentation and representation. In the representation there is an "I". But in the presentation, the "I" has to disappear because the text presents itself. That's why I like so much the show, the performance. It's very weak, like the Bible text. The Bible text is not strong in itself. It's just a text. We can say it's a perfect text but the perfectness of the Bible text is only strong in its perfect dependency on God, on the Holy Spirit. It needs the Holy Spirit to make it alive and we need the Holy Spirit to understand it. The New Pantagruel: Talk a bit more about this idea of presentation and representation. ANDRÁS VISKY: Oh, it's very difficult! But -- okay, I will try. The problem of representation is that something happened in the past and the representation is repeating what happened. There is the work of art which disappears and the work of art which is framed. The work of art which disappears, it is a presentation. The work of art which is an object and remains, it is a representation. And the presentation requires my participation at a much higher level than the representation. The presentation tries to destroy the border between the work of art and the receiver, to try to invite the receiver to be a part of the work of art. The presentation of a work of art is very connected to what Attila Tordai [of art studio PROTOKOLL in Cluj, Romania] and his group of people are doing. You know, to not to have a work of art in an objective way, but just in a present way, -- The New Pantagruel: You mean, in a present tense way, it exists just for right now? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, it exists for right now and then it disappears. Like in the theatre. The theatrical performance, it's a work of art but it doesn't exist. It exists only in the present time. I am here, you are there, and then it's over. Completely ephemeral. No frame. It can't be mounted on the wall. It can't be done again. If you record it, you get a different work. It's just a document of the performance. Or like the difference between being at a concert and just listening to a recording. Gadamer speaks about -- The New Pantagruel: Who is this? ANDRÁS VISKY: Hans-Georg Gadamer, the most important hermeneut of the twentieth century, in his book -- I am sure it must have been translated into English -- Truth and Method. He says you cannot separate the truth from the method because the method would also influence the truth. The New Pantagruel: Like Heisenberg. ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes. And he speaks about preaching. It's a very interesting part. There is a chapter titled, I don't know the English, something like "The Aesthetic Object is Always in Time." Which means that it requires me, the receiver, in order to exist. It doesn't exist in an objective way and the theatre speaks about this because if no one would go to see the performance, the performance would not be presented to the empty theatre. But a film could be presented to an empty theatre. You could leave it running all the time, but not the performance. Because for the performance, the audience is an organic part. The theatre is at least two people, one performing to another. This is presentation. The presentation is a total other form [sic.] than the representation, you know what I mean? Which allows the work of art to disappear, to not exist. Like the meanings. To disappear and to re-begin. To recreate the meanings. To offer yourself, as audience or actor or viewer in order to be recreated through the meanings and so on. The New Pantagruel: So, it's very weak and free at the same time? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, it's very weak. That's why I like so much the show, the performance. It's very weak, like the Bible text. The Bible text is not strong in itself. It's just a text. We can say it's a perfect text but the perfectness of the Bible text is only strong in its perfect dependency on God, on the Holy Spirit. It needs the Holy Spirit to make it alive and we need the Holy Spirit to understand it. The New Pantagruel: This takes us back to text and language. So what's the reason that the language of the Christian faith can not be easily understood so that it might even be considered worthless? ANDRÁS VISKY: You know, Christianity, or if you like, Jewish-Christian thought, is an "event," it is not just words. More precisely, it's an event or an act of liberation, of being set free. Only in this way is it legitimate. This event can become a story that can be told. When the event is no longer present, the stories, even if they are about liberation, become empty. They become empty or simply recede into the past. They become fictions, myths. The event is the best interpreter of the scripture, not theology or hermeneutics. Of course we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that we don't need theology. We need it, but it is completely useless if it doesn't spring from such an event. Theology for me is not the art of understanding but rather of conversation, of amazement that the bush burns but it doesn't burn away, it is not consumed. There is no explanation for this and theology is not called to explain this wonder, this is not the task of theology. And when I say that theology is the art of conversation, I also say that it is a conversation that goes on between God and man and in such a way that a third person cannot be shut out of it. The New Pantagruel: What might this look like in an everyday way? ANDRÁS VISKY: I really don't know. But there is a short -- very short! -- period in history where I like to stop, to linger. This is Good Friday. Only at this point can the work of art and the interpretation of the scripture come into existence, come alive, in order to force the hand of God -- there is no other possibility -- to contact God, the personally existent, and to entrust the work of resurrection to Him. The New Pantagruel: How do you mean, to force the hand of God? ANDRÁS VISKY: Because, look at the disciples on Good Friday. The Messiah is gone. And they don't know what to do, they hide. Because Friday afternoon, the afternoon of the crucifixion, all of our thoughts are about death and we forget every promise about the resurrection. It is unbelievable. The New Pantagruel: That we forget the promises about the resurrection or that the resurrection happened? ANDRÁS VISKY: That we forget the promises. It is unbelievable but this is our life, to forget all the promises. Those three chapters from John where He talks about His departure and return -- how can they forget this? They forget because the death is so obvious, so real, so natural, so present, that you can feel it. It seems that we, today, don't feel the death. And the question is, if we don't feel the death, do we feel the resurrection? It seems to me that we, the church today, have forgotten those three days in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We never speak about those three days because the Gospels are mainly silent about them. As if to cut out from the history of the cosmos those three days. And it seems that we today have forgotten them totally. But from my perspective, a good and accurate representation of the already-not-yet could be that period. To touch with one hand, if you want, Good Friday and to touch with the other hand, Easter Sunday. The New Pantagruel: To touch with faith or belief, or with what? ANDRÁS VISKY: To touch with our hand (laughs), because these other words are too nice. Faith is a good word but we have to add something to it. In this period, in these hours after the crucifixion and before the resurrection, there is no faith. There is a coming faith. Faith is on the way. But it's not there yet. There's a secret in this disciples story. Why, for example, do they stay together? It is not a logical thing to do, to remain together when you are being persecuted. I remember during the time of persecution in Romania, the worst situation always was to be found together. Because this was seen as a conspiracy by the authorities. I just want to underline something. It seems that we, the church, know very well the end of the story and this is very suspicious to me. To know very well the end of the story is to forget the beginning of the story. To focus so much on the end of the story, is to consider myself as a natural partner in, or character of, the end of the story. But according to our doctrines, this is known only by God. THE NEW PANTAGRUEL: Why He would choose me, for example? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, for example. In what way am I a character of this Gospel story? Or not? There is a lack of fear and trembling, and because of this lack of fear and trembling there is no openness toward someone who lives in fear and trembling for other reasons. What kinds of other reasons? Ecological reasons, for instance. For me personally, for example, the ecological future of the earth today is a source of fear. I asked my wife recently, was it wise to have children or not? Why bring children into such a world? When everything in this garden is destroyed and poisoned. When it is very hot and everything is so dry and I can see from my study window this suffering of my garden, of nature, not suffering because of itself but because of me. For me it's a real problem, a real fear, and this fear and trembling is a possibility of the real encountering. The New Pantagruel: Between ourselves and other people? Or with God as well? ANDRÁS VISKY: With God as well, but we talk about other people now. You know, we are so superior. We see someone living in a sort of fear, or angst, and tell them it's because of sin, because of their sin. Which is not sure -- maybe it's because of my sin. We don't share our fears with the world. We share only our triumphs. And for me, this is suspicious. I don't see in our church life that there are so many reasons to not go out and represent in the life of the world this journey in the wilderness. We are living in a desert and the church is a representation of the journey, of the exile, of in-between-ness. It's a representation of going out and maybe that's why the church in this age or in the age of classical modernity had or has big problems with art in general. Because the work of art represents this in-between-ness always. Always. The New Pantagruel: So we're frightened. ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes. The New Pantagruel: In other words, the work of art recalls this fear and trembling with which we are uncomfortable and with which we are now out of touch? ANDRÁS VISKY: And that's why in our churches there is no room for art. It's very interesting that in the church we would accept only those artists who do not seem dangerous for us. It seems to me that the history of the church and also the Bible, the canon, speaks about at least two possible approaches of the problem of revelation: one theological and one aesthetical. Why can we find the Songs of Solomon in the Bible, these love songs? Why are they included in the canon? Or if we consider the book of Romans -- which is a theological explanation of the unity of revelation from Genesis until the book of Romans -- if we consider Romans together with, say, the book of Revelation, which is an aesthetical approach of the end times. There is a sort of balance, it seems to me, the theological with the aesthetical, and they have to go together, for each to be a mirror to the other, however poor the mirror. The New Pantagruel: So, the theological and the aesthetical correspond in a rough way, to say, the Torah and the Talmud? To the written tradition and to the oral tradition of Judaism? ANDRÁS VISKY: On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the approach of revelation through terminology, through abstractions, through the language of science, which is how modernity considers theology -- as a science -- which is today a little bit problematic after Heidegger, for instance. It's a little bit problematic to focus on terminology, to define, to make a definition and to use it in an accurate way. This can be great but all theological description of the revelation has to speak about its own limitations. Do you understand? To speak about the limitations. Because, if it would speak about its limitations, there is a possibility of receiving messages from outside. I had a discussion with a young man in Chicago about Derrida and someone writing in reaction to Derrida, in response to Derrida, and I suggested to not respond to Derrida, but to integrate Derrida. I know that at first glance this might seem very heretical. Could we integrate postmodernity in our theological thinking? But how were we able to integrate modernity? I cannot understand why modernity is more acceptable to us than postmodernity. Modernity created science as a god against a personal God. It was not postmodernity which did this. Maybe for theological thinking, this temptation is obvious, the temptation to create a structure without speaking about the limitations of this structure. Theology is a narrative of the limitations. THE NEW PANTAGRUEL: Okay, I want to go back to Good Friday. ANDRÁS VISKY: And this is what we always have to come back to. You know, we are living in the period between Good Friday and the day of resurrection. I've come to the conclusion that the theatre, the work of art in the largest sense of the word, knows something about Good Friday which we have forgotten. Samuel Beckett, who was perhaps the only Christian writer of the second half of the last century, speaks very much about this place. He reformulated Christian eschatology, our hopeless hope of waiting, and he did this with unbelievable sharpness and objectivity. I had a commission from a State Theatre in Hungary a few years ago to write a play about Easter. And this idea came to me to write a play about the disciples in this period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. [Disciples.] The Messiah has gone, they don't know where, and they are very scared and confused and they are waiting for something or someone. They have some memories of things Jesus said and did, but these memories seem meaningless now. They have to re-begin. The New Pantagruel: Re-begin their faith life -- or what? ANDRÁS VISKY: Their life, their whole life. You know, they had suffered some things when they were with Jesus, when He was still with them, and He had taken care of them but this is all in the past. They have to convince God to enter into this present moment with them. So they try to piece together what happened, to try to understand how they got to this place. And they stage a series of little plays inside the main play as they try to reconstruct their life with Jesus. Was He real or not? Was He who they thought He was or not? Did any of the things they remembered actually happen? And retelling their stories to one another, they realize, "This was very real. This actually happened with me. I can't deny this. But He is dead. We saw Him die. What to do now?" Good Friday is the place where we should return, again and again, so as to depend only on God, letting all knowledge and all stories go. This is the place and the state that invites God to act, to intervene in our lives. Good Friday is the best time for this meeting in history which shows God as an acting, active God. The New Pantagruel: I can see why Good Friday can be a "good" place to be, but why should we purposely go back there? ANDRÁS VISKY:You know, Jesus is resurrected, yes, but Jesus is also still on the cross. And if I want to be with Him, I have to go where He is. To arrive at a Good Friday is a gift from God, an invitation from God to re-begin my life with Him. It's a big gift from God if I realize that I have to re-begin my life. God is so rich that He doesn't permit us to use blessings from the past. He wants to share with us blessings from the present. His presence is out of time, which means it is a continuous presence. He overcomes time in this way. And even those experiences of past blessing are nothing when you are in a new trouble. It doesn't help. You have to tell God, these past experiences are not tools in my hand. My hands are empty again and again and again. Why doesn't God speak to us through the Bible? Because we know everything and our hands are not empty. We cannot listen to His voice because between Him and me there is a Bible passage. My hands have to be empty. To say to God at the beginning of the day, I will open the Bible and I want to be taught by You, not by my knowledge about the Bible. The New Pantagruel: And the theatre is somehow speaking about all of this? ANDRÁS VISKY: Yes, yes. You know, the history of European theatre begins with the empty tomb. The first theatrical representations used the liturgy as a starting point. Or more precisely, the visiting of the empty tomb. In these early plays, the Marys are going to the tomb in order to meet the dead Jesus and they are asking the angels where the dead body is. And we, we too cannot find the resurrected body so we are always looking for a dead body, returning to the tomb. This is our general condition, to search for dead bodies. Because we have to go back to the beginning. Always re-beginning. Where is the Messiah? What happened? John and Peter run to Jesus' tomb in their desperation. They don't know what they will find there. And John himself tells us that when they entered the tomb, the scriptures were resurrected. Had they not understood anything of the scriptures before this? But they had to throw out all of their previous understandings and re-begin. Death and Transfiguration: An Interview with Barry Moser by Barry Moser Barry Moser of Pennyroyal Press is best known as the designer and illustrator for the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, a limited, 400-copy, hand-letterpress edition of the Authorised (King James) Version that took 5 years to complete. Prior to becoming a bookmaker, Moser had an interest in biblical studies and held a preacher's license in the Methodist church. A few of Moser's illustrations for the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible appear with this interview and other texts in this issue of tNP. They have described in Newsweek as "engravings with the brooding power of magical realism." Moser's Pennyroyal Caxton Bible artist proof prints are currently showing at Signs of Life Gallery in Lawrence, KS, and are available for purchase through the gallery. At a recent showing there, Moser answered questions asked about his work. The New Pantagruel: How would you describe the style of your Biblical engravings? Does that style reflect a particular view of the Scriptures? Barry Moser, "Potiphar's Wife" Barry Moser: Style is a tricky term for me. I can look at the whole of my work and see, over the span of decades, a change in style, but I am not sure that this means much more than a record of my learning how to do what I do. If we look for style in terms of content and we look at a more recent cross-section of my work I see an obvious tendency towards the dark and the grotesque, of death and transfiguration — most of my work for children's books to the contrary. If, on the other hand we are looking for "style" in terms of the "look" of the work I will also have to fall back on "dark." But in this case it is the nature of the medium that proffers that darkness, not my intention or personality. Wood engraving is a dark medium, period. And when I make watercolors I tend to work, not as the old traditions have it (from light to dark), but from dark to light. Somebody once commented in the New York Times that my watercolors have "the intellectual muscle of the burin." I take this to be an affirmation that both media, as I use them — and especially engraving — are literary media and lend them selves happily and naturally to illustration. If I have a particular view of the Scriptures it would be as literature, and in the main, dark literature. This is not to say that I am unmindful of the overarching redemption and light that the Scriptures offer to those that seek it. Again, it's largely a matter of death and transfiguration. The New Pantagruel: How do you see yourself in relationship to the tradition of Western art? Are there influences on your work that come from outside this tradition? It is always a bit of a shock for me to see my illustrative prints out of context. They were invented and designed to be seen in a cradle of type. They were designed to be held in the lap, seen more or less from above, and to pick up the light that falls on a curving surface, that is, the page of a book. Barry Moser: In terms of spontaneity, of seizing the happy accident, of thinking of myself as merely a part of the whole process, of having unusually high regard for my tools and materials, and of seeing my work as a part of some purpose more important than my own ego, then yes, I do see myself outside the typical Western tradition. I am not sure it's exactly Eastern, but it sure as hell ain't Western, at least as I understand that term. However, in that there is a strong narrative mode in my work, I see myself very much a part of the Western tradition, especially that period from the early Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. Most of what happened after that leaves me pretty cold — with marvelous and wonderful exceptions like Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko and too many others to mention. I do not, however, belong to their tradition except in that we all share a commonality in some Eastern thought. In either case, it's not something I brood over. I just get up in the morning and get down to work. "Work, work, work," as my friend Donald Hall often says. That is the ethic I subscribe to and the tradition to which my mind, hands, heart, and soul belong. The New Pantagruel: Can you describe how your art gives viewers the opportunity to see an old text with new eyes or experience the familiar as unfamiliar? Barry Moser: It's nothing profound. I try to spot the typical and the expected and avoid them as if they were a pair of rabid dogs. For instance, why on earth would I want to make my Alice look like the Alice that Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel invented? My Scarecrow to look like Ray Bolger? My Frankenstein monster like Boris Karloff? My Jesus like Warner Sallman's? I see no need to feed an audience more of the same old stuff. It would bore me to death to do that, and I figure that if it would bore me it would surely bore my audience too. And since it is really not all that hard to cut a new path to the waterfall why not bring out the machete of the imagination, and the old axe of invention, and clear a new way? I am not sure that this guarantees the viewer an "opportunity to see an old text with new eyes or experience the familiar as unfamiliar," but I am certain it will neither certify nor verify familiarity as verity. There is, after all, no one way to see things. No one way to imagine what, after all, is merely imagined. Barry Moser, "David" The New Pantagruel: By all accounts, Biblical illiteracy in the West is on the rise. Do you see the visual arts having any role in reversing this trend? Should they? Barry Moser: Insofar as the art of our time having any real sense of responsibility other than to its own mongrel existence, its own petty preoccupation with the slightest injury of its ego, its preoccupation with shock and "originality" (as if anything is really shocking anymore, or as if all things don't have antecedents somewhere) I see the visual arts promising at best a very small role in reversing the trend of which you speak. Not only Biblical illiteracy, but literacy on all fronts. Lost is the narrative mandate — at least so far as I can tell. Should they? Perhaps. From my small vantage point, certainly. Those of us with voice need to speak. Some of us do. But I am afraid that the emancipation process, that is the emancipation from responsibility beyond the arrogantly narcissistic, has already gone so far that all we have to look forward to in the near future is happy indulgence and nonjudgmental criticism — with notable exceptions, of course. I am reminded of the answer Albert Camus gave when he was asked what the responsibility of the artist was. If I recall correctly, his reply was that the artist has no responsibility but to work. But "as a man" he said, the artist has a responsibility to speak for those who have no voice to speak with. The New Pantagruel: As works of art in their own right, how do you think the prints work without the text of the Bible around them? Barry Moser: It is always a bit of a shock for me to see my illustrative prints out of context. They were invented and designed to be seen in a cradle of type. They were designed to be held in the lap, seen more or less from above, and to pick up the light that falls on a curving surface, that is, the page of a book. To see them divorced from these constructs deprives them of their proper environment. But that's just me speaking — their daddy. If I step side and consider each its own individual merits, then I think they work well in that alien environment, especially if a copy or a reproduction of the original environment is handy. The New Pantagruel: One final question: Why the Bible? Were there any unique hurdles to overcome on this project? How, if at all, did the work of illustration change your view of the Bible? Barry Moser: I taught myself the arts of typography and book design. If you do that you find out very quickly that all the great monuments of printing have been Bibles. As a friend of mine put it, you can walk the history of printing on the spines of Bibles. I simply wanted to join the club, you might say. I was also aware that no artist in the twentieth century had undertaken the entire thing as a book in the codex form. Salvador Dali did a couple dozen prints for a Biblia Sacra (a Latin Bible), but they were literally stuck in after the book was printed. Also he did most of his images for the new Testament which seems a mite off-balance to me. And of course Marc Chagall did a suite of etchings for the Tanakh, the Jewish form of what Christians call the Old Testament. But the Chagall images never appeared in codex form, only as a boxed portfolio with scriptural quotations, again, so far as I know. I figured somebody ought to have the gumption to do it, so why not me? Barry Moser, "The Nativity" The biggest hurdle was overcoming the fear of appearing to be arrogant. I mean what, after all, can I bring to this monument that others before me have not brought to it? Who am I to presume to have anything of value to offer? That, and the interior fear of knowing that every time I made an image I would be taking a theological postion and that would expose me not only to charges of arrogance, but also of naivety and stupidity. That makes an old country boy like me a mite nervous, and for this reason I assembled a committee of advisors, people who are experts in Judaica, theology, New Testament, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and the like. On the practical side of things was the finances. A project like this does not come cheap, and as Flannery O'Connor said, neither God nor posterity is served by ill-made objects. If you are going to do a Bible it has to be done to the nines, as it were. You cannot skimp on anything. I was fortunate in having sound financing from a single individual: Bruce Kovner, CEO of the Caxton Corporation and bibliophile. He was the bank for the project and funded it to the tune of two million dollars. You can do the math. That's just at five grand a book just to build it. I cannot say that my perception of the Bible changed much. I entered into the project with an enormous respect for it and if anything my respect deepened, especially with the writings of Paul, who until my re-encounter with him, I had held suspicious. Reading him again showed me that he was a very smart and perceptive writer. Reading Spiritual Memoir: A Reader's Spiritual Memoir by David Wright Books mentioned in this essay: Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Albert C. Outler.     Online at: http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html Augustine's Childhood: Confessiones Book One. Trans. Garry Wills. (Viking, 2001). Betty Smartt Carter, Home is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace (Paraclete, 2003). Lauren Winner, Girl Meets God: A Memoir (Random, 2003). Lauren Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath (Paraclete, 2004). Mea Culpa Last spring, for the first time in my life, I read Saint Augustine's Confessions. Actually, that's not completely true. I read all the way through Garry Wills' translation of Saint Augustine's Childhood: Confessiones Book. Then I read Wills' biography of Saint Augustine. If you're an academic, it's not hard to say that reading two books, mostly about something, qualifies as having read something. And then, after saying I would write this essay, this confession, I went to the Outler translation and read a lot more. Most of it. Really. But back to last spring. Here's what's most lamentable about my first confessions reading: I was reading as an angler, trying to catch what I could use for a paper at a conference and a few funny poems that would clinch it all. (One poem was going to be called "Confessions Augustine Should Have Made.") I had, in my usual postmodern and less-than-as clever-as-I-like-to-think-it-sounds way proposed a canned reading of a text, a really important text from a language I don't speak, a text that I'd only glanced at vaguely, taught a few portions of in an introductory lit class. My smart-ass proposal quoted Levinas, and Adorno, and Frost, and made claims about the social nature of the private voice in Augustine. Augustine was constructing a fully rhetorical self that would do political, theological, and psychological work in the guise of honest confession, a self that only "seemed" private. In my paper, I could be hipper than the Bishop of Hippo by pointing out how "constructed" and "social" was his voice. But, dear reader, as any good spiritual memoir must contend, I was converted, changed, convicted by what I had not expected. "Pick up and read, pick up and read." It's good advice, wherever you hear it. WHAT led me to Augustine (and to my conversion), was not merely my academic bad habits. Instead, it was my growing interest (and that of many, many contemporary readers) in spiritual memoir. Augustine may have started it all in Latin, but for American readers, Annie Dillard, Frederick Beuchner, and Henri Nouwen have garnered plenty of love lately for their closely examined spiritual lives. Someone else's candor, self-revealing failure, and redemptive time with nature, family history (and the paintings of Rembrandt) fills spiritual voids many of us seem to have. And then comes Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies, attempting to swear her way to holiness in ways previously unimaginable. I love all these writers, have tried to be them. Sadly, the swearing comes easier to me than the honesty or the holiness. My writing students also want to write this way -- to tell the truth, so far, of their lives with God, of their struggles to believe and their struggles to tolerate the rest of God's failed creatures. Sure, they could do this in poems, or as thinly veiled fiction, but more and more of them tend toward creative non-fiction (the genre's most-recent label). What compels these young writers to offer their lives this way in language? And what draws contemporary readers of all sorts, especially Christian readers, into this both ancient and all-too-contemporary kind of writing? The answer lies, in part, in scholar James J. O'Donnell's description of the Confessions as writings that "assume that the soul is a scene of narrative, and that the narrative of the soul is the deepest and truest story of the person." Or in Augustine's words, we desire to believe that we matter to God. Here Augustine inquires why God attends to his life: Why do you matter so much to me? Pity me enough to let me say. Why, indeed, do I matter so much to you that my loving you is something you require, that you should be angry and threaten me with heavy punishments if I love not? Then can my not loving you be a slight thing? Not it cannot, to my sorrow (Wills, Childhood 35). So to what ends do we take up the act of examining and representing, through language these scenes of narrative? And to what ends do we read such deep and true stories of people? Boy Meets Girl Meeting God Among the spate of recent spiritual memoirists, few have received the praise, especially from evangelical readers, that has been directed towards Lauren Winner. I'd heard so much about Girl Meets God that I was recommending it to students for months before reading it myself. They needed models of young writers talking about themselves, especially young Christian writers. And in her early twenties, Winner seemed closer to these earnest young Christians than Lamott, and much more accessible than icons like Dillard or Buechner. I wasn't wrong. These students liked Winner's book. But how did this story of a young Reformed Jewish woman, who becomes Orthodox and then converts to Christianity become a bestseller in the broader market? Published initially in 2002 by Algonquin, Winner's memoir proved so successful the paperback was picked up by Random House and garnered praise from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, and The New York Times Book Review, among countless others. I'm not sure, but I think Winner's secret is this: she tells the truth about herself. And Winner's revelations are not a mere talk show kind of confession -- "this is my story, so you all have to respect it" -- not the narcissism of people who unburden themselves in public and leave their audience speechless (because, frankly, they don't want us to say anything except, "oh, you poor thing"). Instead, Winner describes her inner journey in terms of the world; her interior landscape is, as she narrates it, not separated from the exterior settings and relationships that have shaped her. Certainly there are private, intimate moments of introspection and prayer in Girl Meets God, but just as often readers will find Winner in conversation, in worship, or inside the covers of a book. In fact, when she converts from Judaism to Christianity, Winner characterizes the experience as a divorce with all its attendant relational entanglements. Just as her parents' divorce requires them to still reckon with one another, Winner realizes that she cannot ignore her Jewish past. She writes: I gave away all my Jewish books and let go of all my Jewish ways, but I realized, as I spent time with other Christians, that Judaism shaped how I saw Christianity. It shaped the way I read the Bible, the way I thought about Jesus, the way I understood what He meant when He talked about the yoke of the law. I found my heart sometimes singing Jewish songs. I thought I had given away all my Jewish things, but I found that I hadn't. I'd just given away some books and mezuzot and candlesticks. I hadn't given up the shape in which I saw the world, or the words I knew for God, and those shapes and words were mostly Jewish. This tug between the Jewish past that has shaped Winner and the Christian community to which she has turned creates much of the memoir's tension and interest. And that's what I mean by telling the truth -- the truth of the whole self, which, truth be told, is social, is shaped by all sorts of communal and cultural forces. Annie Dillard and her praying mantis may find the truth alone, but most of us find it in conversation with someone else, at least in conversation with a book or two. That's another thing about Winner. She loves to read, everything from Jewish commentary and history to the church fathers to Jan Karon's kitschy Mitford books. At one point, Winner even confesses that, given her life's various broken friendships, she prefers books. "I can't remake all those relationships," she writes, "but I can rebuild my library." For Winner, these texts also have been part of the social world that has shaped her life and her new found Christian faith. In fact, when Winner considers what she might give up for Lent, a friend challenges her to give up books for six weeks. Winner discovers what perhaps many of my own generation suspect -- we're afraid of something, and, mostly, of being alone. Not only does she save money, but without her books, Winner finds she is left "starkly alone -- I read, I think, for many reasons. I read for information, I read for pleasure, I read because I want to figure out the craft of putting a sentence together. But I also read to numb any feelings of despair or misery that might creep my way. Even before Lent I had suspected that I used reading this way, as a tonic or escape route." If she's suspicious of anything, Winner is most suspicious of escape routes. While she's candid about her own failings and her conversion story's atypical arc ("I had no epiphanic on-the-road-to-Damascus experience. I can't tell my friends that I became a Christian January 8, 1993, or on my twentieth birthday"), she also exhibits what I would describe as a "harsh eye," toward herself and toward the rest of us who indulge in either escapist belief or in the fantasy of escaping belief altogether. While some reviewers mention her "refreshing" humor and candor, I don't think she's funny, and I don't find her honesty refreshing. Rather, I find Winner's gaze withering (and all too familiar). "I am just as likely as the next person to consign people to tidy categories," Winner says, "and, without much evidence." So take up Girl Meets God at your peril. You won't find a straightforward conversion narrative. As Winner says, "A literature scholar would say there are too many 'ruptures' in the 'narrative.' But she might also say that ruptures are the most interesting part of any text, that in the ruptures we learn something new." Rupture seems a rather painful way to learn. I suspect, though, that such lessons remain, and are truer than a narrative shaped in a more prefigured way. Among such ruptures, you also won't find in Winner's memoir a feel-good romance between a lover and her God. Winner suggests she's lost, at the mere age of 24, the ability to have lovely dreams of God or to fall in love again with a religious tradition. If she's to have a sustained faith, she concludes, "It will have to come from God's place of faithfulness, not from some pot of faithfulness all my own. ... How to fall in love is not, now, what I need to learn. What I need to learn, maybe what God wants me to learn, is the long grind after you've landed." Uncomfortably Close Another confession: though I lead off this essay with Winner's book, I didn't read it first. Instead, I read Betty Smartt Carter's Home Is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace, a book that Winner, even with her harsh eye, saw fit to blurb, despite its unspeakable title (and I really do mean unspeakable---just try to say this awkward thing aloud). I picked up the book because it was in the Wheaton College bookstore, on the alumni shelf, and because, standing in the bookstore, I laughed out loud when Carter described her arrival on campus in 1983, how she found her "cynical self" in Edman Chapel being addressed by "evangelicalism's finest: Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer, Charles Colson -- all the great heroes of our branch of Christendom drifting over the chapel stage like floats in a slow motion parade." When her parents leave her in her room, the strains of Amy Grant's "Father's Eyes" resonating in the dorm, she says, "I've died and gone to Christianity hell." That's a promising mixture of candor and humor. But this is not a funny book. Betty Smartt Carter's memoir begins in a poignant and decidedly serious way as she describes her childhood. She is the daughter of a prominent conservative Presbyterian pastor, very often away on preaching engagements, and his wife who "complains to herself (if not to Daddy) that our kind of Presbyterianism is too intellectual." In truth, it's Carter's childhood, and her father in particular, that haunts the entire narrative -- much like those giant evangelical "floats" haunt her in Wheaton's chapel. Carter writes lovingly but critically of this upbringing. The narrative has an immediacy to it; it seems at times as if she's surprising even herself by what she recalls. While drawing a picture of Jesus for a school project, Carter feels dissatisfaction with what she's made. Thinking that something is missing, "I found a red marker and went to work, lovingly adding rosy sores and lacerations, broad streams of blood from hands and feet." All her kindergarten teacher can say: "Thank you Betty ... That's a very vivid picture." Obsessed, in a sweet, childlike way, by this suffering Jesus, Carter describes how she feels inspired one Sunday afternoon to tie herself to a lamppost in front of her home, reveling for a time in the sensation of being suspended until her parents and siblings untie and pull her down. She can't tell them why she's there, but she suspects she was playing at the cross, remembering Jesus, trying to show the Lord's death till he comes. Although I loved the story of Christ's death, I could only see it through the eyes of a well-loved child. I hardly knew what suffering was. Blood took its color from plums in the front yard; a cross was a place you climbed up to by yourself. Here my family came now to rescue me from my own little cross -- dust me off, set me up straight, spank me soundly, and send me off to play. Having spent part of my own childhood in a strict Presbyterian congregation, and having taught at Wheaton for nearly four years, I found this section of Carter's memoir to be helpful and telling, offering a "very vivid picture" of how the language of Christian faith might translate in the mind of a young girl trying to become a woman. Carter's distance from this period of her life gives the prose a sense of both courage and restraint. We understand that her father is compelling and difficult to figure, that his version of God is frightening. We understand that her mother's steadiness keeps Carter going and offers a vision of God as "a selfless servant of small children, old people, and rowdy teenagers. He was a busy and efficient world manager who held everything together with tireless ambition." What gets less clear as the memoir progresses is how Carter's own sense of God, and of herself in relation to God, has grown. The restless longing of the book's title refers not only to her father's travels in her youth but also to her own constant dissatisfaction with her life's circumstances. She wants something, and she knows it ought to be God, but she desires it here and now. She turns to, yes, Augustine and his insight that desire, any desire betrays a longing for the Divine. As Carter summarizes it, "Desire is our map, and restlessness is our compass. Their accurate destination is heaven." However accurate this insight, though, Carter still stops at many rest stops on the way to heaven. A crush on a Wheaton professor, her courtship with her husband, and her intense friendships with other women all demonstrate her insatiable need to be connected to someone earthly. She tells a friend that she thinks, "In heaven, we'll all be completely connected -- no barriers anymore, no distance. We'll be like one person." Her friend responds, "That sounds like hell." While Carter spends her first ten chapters taking us through childhood and college, she marries, moves from Wheaton (and learns, at a distance, to appreciate it) and has a baby or two all in the space of the book's final two chapters. At this point, I find myself growing more and more uncomfortable with Carter's writing. What is the end of her memoir, its goal? It's hard to tell. While in Winner's memoir, she shows how she relates to God and to the world, Carter seems to collapse that space. It's as though she wants me to take care of her -- not me personally, but her readers. Winner extends herself into the social world and names the ways that world resides inside of her, but Carter loses that perspective in these final two chapters. Now I recognize this impulse from my own writing, the urge to invite the reader not into a poem or story but into my daily living. But it's an urge to resist. How does Carter expect her reader to stand in relation to her story, especially when she tells us that she's developed an obsessive addiction to a friend, a woman who doesn't really want to be "worshipped" and who tells Carter on the phone to stop acting "like a stalker?" Carter claims this experience woke her up. She discusses obsession, depression and grace, but it's impossible to tell where we are to dwell as readers in any of this, and she doesn't offer much explanation of how her actual community, her spouse, or her children view this development. It's quite claustrophobic, and as she talks on the page to herself, I realize that I'd rather not be eavesdropping on Carter, at least not yet. Where Winner seems to know we're listening, looking for analogues, and perhaps standing in judgment at times, Carter loses this sense, almost as if she's waiting for her readers to come take her down off the pole and save (or spank) her. Or perhaps she's trying to get us to connect to her with no barriers or distance. Whatever our spiritual narratives might do to foster insight and community, they can't -- and probably shouldn't -- collapse the distinctions between us. Expectatio Mea Perhaps the popularity of spiritual memoir has developed because, as my colleague Alan Jacobs has written, for all the development recently of narrative theology, we have neglected to figure out how to engage "the narrative dimension of individual Christian lives." Jacobs goes on to suggest that if one can pierce through the layers of narcissism and sentimentality ... these popular writers are reminding us of something that many previous generations of very sober Christians, from Augustine of Hippo to the Puritans of seventeenth-century England and America, would have warmly endorsed: each of us does indeed have a unique personal narrative, one whose essential shape is not always easily discerned." There is no precise formula, I think, for how to shape such stories. However, because there is no formula does not mean there are no forms that might be useful, for showing us what we might not otherwise see. In Winner's newest book, Mudhouse Sabbath she mourns for the spiritual rituals and disciplines of her Jewish past, the observances that gave her life rhythm, and "to be blunt, spiritual practices that Jews do better." What she suggests is that, yes, Christians will view such practices differently from their Jewish neighbors. As Winner puts it, "Spiritual practices don't justify us. They don't save us. Rather, they refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gives us on the cross more fully our own. ... Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not make us Christians. Instead, the practicing teaches us what it means to live as Christians. ... The ancient disciplines form us to respond to God, over and over always, in gratitude, in obedience and in faith" (xiii). So, to paraphrase Eliot from Little Gidding, what is the use of memoir, how might it be such an ancient, informing form, a spiritual discipline? Let me return to Augustine's Confessions, Book Eleven where he meditates on time, hoping, in part, to enter into that mystery as a way of entering into God's mystery. At one point, he offers this description of how memory and anticipation work (the translation here is from Wills' biography of Augustine): Say I am about to recite a psalm. Before I start, my anticipation includes the psalm in its entirety, but as I recite it, whatever I have gone over, detaching it from anticipation, is retained by memory. So my ongoing act is tugged between the memory of what I just said and the anticipation of what I am just about to say, though I am immediately engaged in the present transit from what was coming to what is past. As this activity works itself out, anticipation dwindles as memory expands, until anticipation is canceled and the whole transaction is lodged in memory. And what happens with the whole psalm is equally what happens with each verse of it, each syllable -- and with the whole liturgy of which the psalm may be a part, or with the whole of any man's life, whose parts are his own acts, or with the whole world, whose parts are the acts of men. Confessions 11.28.38 For both readers and writers, it seems, Augustine suggests that entering into the mystery of memory in language shows us how our lives, like the sounds of liturgy, do not exist merely for ourselves, but connect to the acts of the "whole world." And so, the point of such reflection is not to face backwards or forwards, but to teach us how to exist in expectatio mea, which O'Donnell calls "the tension between distention and attention (time-as-lived and eternity-as-sought)." Our readings, then, might convert our attentions from ourselves alone, to live our lives in relation to those of others, and to figure out how we might attend to the attentions of the Divine. So What? Theology and American History by D. G. Hart E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). xi +617 pp. $35.00 (cloth). Mark A. Noll, America�s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). ix + 622 pp. $35.00 (cloth). A funny thing happened on the way to the White House--that is for students of American Christianity, anyway. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the support he attracted from evangelical Protestant groups such as the Moral Majority, faith became a going and relevant concern. Of course, Christian devotion had mattered to the civil rights movement, but white politicians accustomed to a naked public square, whether Republican or Democrat, applied a different standard to African-American political leadership and their arguments. But the rise of the Protestant Right was different--not in its appeal to equal rights for all but in its indictment of secularism as a form of oppression that turned religious Americans into victims without meaningful participation in debates about the nation's well-being. Accordingly, as faith became a leading predictor of political behavior--the recent spin of the 2004 election reinforces the point--students of Christianity in America suddenly went from irrelevant scholars of the obscure to pundits capable of interpreting the transfer of power in the mightiest nation since the coming of Christ. The outpouring of scholarly books and articles on American religion since 1980, especially evangelical Protestantism, only confirmed the importance of faith, demonstrating that editors and readers were trying to figure out what had happened to turn roughly twenty-five percent of the American population (as some estimates have it) into the GOP's most reliable voting bloc. Theology in America by E. Brooks Holifield Yet, the boom in scholarship on American religion, whether explaining the dynamics of evangelical political engagement or the religious roots of born-again Protestantism, has not entirely been a boon for understanding American Christianity. For at the same time the tide of American Protestant historiography swelled, denominational history went belly up. This is not to say that the study of American Protestant denominations was always exceptional. But from the 1930s to the 1960s, when the mainline Protestant denominations regained stability after the fundamentalist controversy to resume their status as the Protestant establishment, the history of American Christianity paid deference to the differences, however slight, reflected in denominational headings. After the rise of the Protestant Right, however, the greatest nuance generally speaking in the literature on Protestants was that spiritual something that distinguished "born-again" Christians from mainline Protestants. James Davison Hunter's Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991) was emblematic of new studies on American religion. As Hunter himself argued, conservative Jews, Catholics and Protestants had more in common with each other than they did with liberal members of their own communions. Of course, that sort of analysis might make sense of electoral results. However, it hardly does justice to differences among Presbyterians, Baptists and Lutherans, let alone Orthodox, Reform or Conservative Jews. The publication of recently of two beefy books by important university presses written by senior religious historians on American theology, consequently, represents something of a watershed in the scholarship on American Christianity. After all, theological differences have generally been at the heart of denominational variations (theology here being construed with sufficient breadth to encompass ecclesiological matters that affect church polity and orders of worship, e.g. liturgy). What is more, the study of theology proper has languished amid efforts to account for believers' political preferences or the influence of religion on society. Forays into "God-and . . ." topics have been easier to pitch to editors looking for relevant titles than studies merely of God. America's God by Mark A. Noll and Theology in America by E. Brooks Holifield thus offer the possibility of a return to an older style of religious scholarship, the kind conducted by Sydney Ahlstrom, Robert Handy, Sidney Mead, and Winthrop Hudson, when denominational differences mattered because the beliefs regulating those communions mattered as well. Splitters and Lumpers THE overwhelming conclusion generated from these narratives is not so much that theology separated Americans into different churches but that the doctrinal convictions of American Christianity has declined in vigor, insight and truthfulness. Declension was a primary theme of the older religious history, especially the many volumes on the Puritans. Because both of these books begin with New England, perhaps these authors cannot resist seeing failure as American theologians left behind the rigor of Puritanism. Still, the cumulative effect of America's God and Theology in America is that American theology (mainly Protestant) prior to the Civil War makes most sense not as a cacophony of different churches but as a departure from the solidity of New England's Puritan order. The study of theology proper has languished amid efforts to account for believers' political preferences or the influence of religion on society. Forays into "God-and . . ." topics have been easier to pitch to editors looking for relevant titles than studies merely of God. One adage about historians is that they may be divided in two between the lumpers, the ones looking for consensus and continuity, and the splitters, the ones reveling in diversity. Of the two historians, Holifield shows the greater knack for splitting and hence gives greater attention to denominational differences. His book is divided into three sections, the first on Puritans, the second on what he calls "the Baconian Style," and the last on the non-Baconians. This arrangement reveals Holifield's own strategy for finding a lump amid the splits, but it does bring out the diversity of American Christianity before the Civil War in a manner that contrasts strongly with Noll. Consequently, Holifield's section on New England Puritans expounds the diversity of views from the start of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the controversy over antinomianism all the way down to the disagreements that separated the New Divinity men, Old Light Calvinists and the proto-Unitarians. The middle section of Theology in America devoted to those who tried to square Protestantism with the scientific ideals of Sir Francis Bacon's empiricism includes a spectrum of theologians, both professional and amateur, running from fringe expressions (Deists, Unitarians, Mormons and African-Americans), to Protestants with origins in English dissent (Methodists and Baptists), to the respectable mainstream views of Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. The final third of Holifield's book surveys those antebellum Christians who could not find room under the Baconian umbrella--Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Transcendentalists, and a variety of unclassifiables such as Horace Bushnell (the only person to merit a whole chapter aside from Jonathan Edwards), Philip Schaff, John Williamson Nevin, Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson. The danger Holifield runs in trying to include such a range is the one that attends most catalogues; by including almost everyone (though women do not even show up in cameo roles) no particular group or figures stand out as worthy of special attention. In fact, Holifield could have roped in some of this diversity by attending only to scholarly theological expressions, thus focusing on the groups that engaged in formal learning, a decision that would have harbored elitism but also given room for greater depth. Instead, to achieve some order out of this remarkably diverse lot of theological expressions, Holifield resorts to the theme of Christianity's reasonableness. He includes other themes such as theology's practicality, its ethical dimension, the legacy of Calvinism, ties between North America and Europe, and denominationalism. But rationality is the dominant theme, thus accounting especially for the division between parts two and three. This decision is not without merit, but Holifield does not explain it sufficiently. The reasonableness of the faith was not original to North American Christianity prior to the Civil War but has been a feature throughout church history with various apologists giving accounts in the hope of making Christians plausible to non-Christians. At the same time, the period covered in Holifield's book is one in which the Enlightenment did set the terms for most thinkers, theologians included. Yet, Theology in America is remarkably free from interaction with secondary sources that would indicate science's rise to prestige and the need for theologians to adjust. This is not to say that Holifield neglects the Enlightenment; his discussion of Scottish and German philosophy is reliable and helpful. Still, he does not adequately define reasonableness or why it makes sense of antebellum Christian theology. (For example, classic Christian doctrines like the Trinity and original sin were significant items of debate and reflection during these years, but these receive scrutiny primarily through the lens of rationality when cosmology or human nature might have worked better to sustain the investigation.) In contrast to Holifield's underdeveloped interpretive choices, Noll leaves little doubt about the significance of his decision in America's God to lump all Antebellum American Christian theology under the larger rubric of Christian republicanism. For Noll, this unique constellation of ideas and intuitions combined both the enthusiastic zeal and doctrinal reductionism of revivalist Protestantism and a republican conception of politics that nurtured suspicion of centralized power, resentment of hierarchical authorities, and fear of vice among citizens. America's God is the history of words such as freedom, virtue, benevolence, slavery, vice and selfishness, specifically how the meaning of these terms evolved between 1730 and 1865, thanks to Christian theologians who imbued these political concepts with religious significance. Noll admits that his contribution to the history of republicanism in antebellum America is one among many, and his text and notes are jam-packed with references to and interaction with an incredible range of secondary sources. But where Noll sees America's God making a singular contribution is in the following manner: how unexpected, in the longer historical view, the emergence of this synthesis was; how much the American intellectual story differed from Protestant developments in parallel societies; how intimately the republican-evangelical-commonsense synthesis was woven into the fabric of American public life through the time of the Civil War; and how powerfully both this intellectual synthesis and Protestant participation in American public life shaped the writing of Christian theology. America's God by Mark Noll Within this interpretive strategy Noll finds most Protestant theologians fitting neatly into the Christian republican mold, hence executing a work of historical lumping. To be sure he includes a section of contrast between Calvinist and Methodist appropriation of America's political philosophy, thus showing attention to particular patterns of variation. Noll also distinguishes among evangelicals, noting polarities between anti-formalists and formalists, whites and blacks, North and South, and men and women. He includes as well the minority of dissenters, from Deists at the time of the Revolution to such critics of the American theological consensus as Bushnell or Nevin. Still, these are exceptions that prove the rule that American theology (again mainly Protestant) embraced republican political theory and in so doing helped to Christianize the new nation while also losing its bearings. The outline of the book, from colonial theological developments, the ingredients of the Christian-republican synthesis, evangelical mobilization, case studies of Calvinism and Methodism, to the crisis of slavery and the Civil War, indicates well the pieces of Noll's argument. One question that keeps returning, however, is whether America's God is truly a history of theology or rather a history of theologians doing political philosophy. (Academic specialization had yet to cordon theology off into its current intellectual ghetto, so theologians were public intellectuals who wrote on practically everything). As with Theology in America, Noll's book does not run through developments in the classic loci of Christian dogmatics. In fact, the chief theological heading to emerge from Noll's argument is anthropology, or the doctrine of man. America's Man would make for a less attractive title for a work on the history of theology than America's God. Still, because the central question raised by America's politics is not the deity of Christ, the application of redemption, the ministry of word and sacrament, but whether men and women are capable of maintaining virtue in the context of unprecedented political liberty and social dislocation, Noll's effort to cover theological developments from Edwards to Lincoln falls short. Narratives of Decline DIFFERENCES between interpretive choices aside, Noll and Holifield render American theology before the Civil War as a body of thought in decline. This is not surprising given the attention each book grants to the new views about knowledge and society that the Enlightenment encouraged. But it is a bit startling, and a welcome development, in an era when most historians consider declensionist narratives passé. Finding the theme of declension in these books is not always easy, and harder in Holifield than in Noll, but even seemingly unprejudiced interpretive choices reveal a body of American divinity veering ever so steadily from the course set by New England's Puritans. For Noll, the evidence of decline, like his argument, is hard to miss. The reference to Edwards in the subtitle is key, though Abraham Lincoln also receives high marks for recognizing the mystery of providence in a manner more profound than his theologically trained contemporaries. At the end of America's God Noll admits that if he had to recommend "only one American theologian for the purposes of understanding God, the self, and the world as they really are," he would reply as the Congregational minister Israel Holly did when engaged in theological debate: "Read Edwards!" "Read Edwards!" "Read Edwards!" But signals of Noll's regard for the older divinity over the antebellum expression are also evident in his interpretation of the rise of republicanism. He underscores how republicanism usually found support from Deists and Socians in England. But to avoid the genetic fallacy Noll also shows that republicanism was decisive for departures from Christian orthodoxy, particularly for revising estimates of human sinfulness while making virtue possible apart from divine grace. Even so, this line of reasoning does seem to beg the question of what form of government is finally compatible with orthodox Christian teaching. Someone has to rule, and that person (or persons) needs to be fit for rule, a necessity that suggests a certain amount of virtue. If that virtue belongs to a non-Christian, it raises the possibility of affirming that people outside a state of grace have sufficient goodness to govern, whether as monarchs, senators, or democrats. Still, Noll's final verdict is far from straightforward. On the one hand he credits Christian republicanism with civilizing and Christianizing the new nation. He writes, "the theologians translated the historic Christian message into the dominant cultural languages of politics and intellectual life so successfully that these languages were themselves converted and then enlisted for the decidedly religious purposes of evangelism, church formation, moral reform, and theological construction." On the other hand, this success arguably corrupted the faith once delivered. Here Noll lets Dietrich Bonhoeffer be the bad cop: "American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world." As Noll explains, "The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America," thus molding the gospel "in the contours of [the nation's] own shape." Is it any wonder that Noll, as he wrote in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, is "a wounded lover" of evangelicalism? Holifield is less direct about declension and may even find it unfair to be accused of adopting it as a narrative device. Because his book is mostly descriptive and inclusive, the pattern of degeneration is not self-evident. But his arrangement leaves clues. Consider that the first third of the book covers New England Calvinism down to the first generation of so of New Divinity men. In contrast, he covers all of Lutheran theology in roughly twenty pages, and Roman Catholic teaching in approximately the same space. A reader might responsibly conclude that theology after Hopkins and Bellamy was all downhill. Notwithstanding Holifield's treatment of Puritanism, he is explicit in arguing that theological debates over slavery did signal the demise of American theology. According to Holifield, the slavery controversy "revealed . . . the inability of theology to unite Americans or to help them transcend the pull of economic and political interests." He adds that the "cultural language that supposedly united Americans proved itself able to contribute even more forcefully to their division." This is a curious way to interpret the controversy over slavery, since Holifield's very outline suggests that Americans were hardly united by theology. Perhaps Holifield's insistence on attending to an allegedly common "cultural language" causes him to miss a deeper discussion of theological diversity and its impact on Antebellum America. Does Theology Matter? BECAUSE both books end with the Civil War and the division among Christians over slavery (not over preserving the Union), they do little to deter the idea that theology is relevant or, at least should be, to national life and political affairs. Of course, this is the obvious point, even if highly nuanced and complex, that Noll makes by demonstrating the mingling of Protestant convictions and American political thought from the War of Independence to the Civil War. In fact, he could not be more ready to answer that most difficult of historical questions: so what? The peculiar brew that blended born-again Christianity and republican political theory was, according to Noll, "profoundly significant" for "the articulation of Christian theology" in the United States. "The process by which evangelical Protestantism," he writes, "came to be aligned with republican convictions and commonsense moral reasoning was also the process that gave a distinctively American shape to Christian theology by the time of the Civil War." To be sure, Noll is sufficiently ambivalent about the mixture of piety and politics. He laments the secular turn in American intellectual and political life, but also credits the antebellum synthesis of Christianity and republicanism with making American religious beliefs and practices "so relatively vigorous as they remain to this day." For Noll, clearly theology mattered in the early republic. The desirability of theology's significance for public life is almost as clear in Noll's [Holifield's] narrative, more so for the cause of ending slavery, less so for the cause of American autonomy from England. Holifield is less concerned with the question of significance. On the one hand, his insouciance is admirable because Theology in America seems to indicate a resolve to tell the history of the nation's theology whether or not readers find it important. On the other hand, Holifield misses an opportunity to cultivate among religious historians at least a palate for theological discourse. At a time when the field shows a doctrinal illiteracy that is remarkable for scholars who are supposed to be specialists in religion (theology included), Holifield could well have provided some instruction not simply on the finer points and variety of Christian teaching but also why such theological learning is important to understanding religion. The most he can muster in the Afterword is a series of historical reflections by prominent American liberal theologians from the early twentieth century on the old theology that had passed out of favor. One was George Gordon, who, according to Holifield, in his 1903 Beecher Lectures "could look back at the older theologians and recognize the force that they had once exerted on the religious culture of the nation." Holifield adds, "[Gordon] thought it was a history worth remembering." That line finishes the book. Unfortunately, the worthiness of that older theology remains buried in the subtext for the eye of perceptive beholders. Even so, by ending his story with the debates over slavery, Holifield shows some sign of feeling compelled to refer outside theology's internal developments to larger questions regarding whether theology is relevant to American society and politics, and whether it ought to be. Trying to distinguish the descriptive "is" from the imperative "ought" is difficult today when believers have returned to the public square with a vengeance and secularists have insisted with equal vigor that the public square remain naked and unashamed. If historians are by nature reluctant to render normative judgments, historical knowledge can be instructive for describing the "is" to see if arguments for the "ought" hold up. This is no less the case for the books under review. For if ever a time in American history existed when theology mattered to public life it was the antebellum era, when for Noll theology was a prominent voice in political debates and for Holifield it was dominant in religious culture. So if theology should matter to the current scene in national and religious affairs, perhaps the antebellum era offers assistance for contemporary ruminations on faith and society. Both books show that theology provided very little assistance for the public discussion of slavery. (A cynic could argue that theology took a bad situation [e.g., constitutional impasse] and turned it into a mess [e.g., civil and religious war]). Holifield, following the lines of his own themes, concludes that slavery "raised questions about the practicality of theology, the interpretation and authority of the Bible, and the Baconian ideal of theological rationality" (495). In other words, during the public crisis over slavery, Christianity lost its hold on the American public and the churches entered an era of trying to recover their former glory, either with the renewed relevance of the Social Gospel or the heightened certainty of fundamentalist Protestantism. What is a bit puzzling about the damage that slavery and war did to the churches is that these matters were equally revealing of the inadequacy of politics, and yet rare is the historian who says that after the Civil War the American people gave up on their political system. Because Noll has political philosophy in view throughout his entire book, his assessment of the damage slavery did to theology is more nuanced than Holifield's. Here is Noll's version of Holifield's conclusion: Many Northern Bible-readers and not a few in the South felt that slavery was evil. They somehow knew the Bible supported them in that feeling. Yet when it came to using the Bible as it had been used with such success to evangelize and civilize the United States, the sacred page was snatched out of their hands. Trust in the Bible and reliance upon a Reformed, literal hermeneutic had created a crisis that only bullets, not arguments, could resolve. Noll adds details to this compelling point that raise questions, however, about how well the Bible really had been used to civilize and evangelize the United States. For instance, in a chapter on interpretations of the Civil War Noll demonstrates that none of the theological programs can account for the different perceptions of the war's meaning. Christian republicans continued to mix and mangle providence and national purpose, dissenters followed with similar patriotic excess, while Lincoln in his Second Inaugural allegedly propounded a view of providence unparalleled by any contemporary theologian. I write allegedly because I am not sure Lincoln, who was executing a war with the power of the federal government behind him, was all that uncertain or magnanimous at other points in the conflict. Was he, for instance, so concerned about the inscrutability of divine providence when deciding in 1861 whether to retake Fort Sumter, or in 1863 whether to manumit the slaves? Yes, Lincoln was an intelligent and at times sensitive man, but that is not always how the losers saw him. Of course, theological systems rarely hold up under conditions like those endured during the Civil War. But what doesn't seem to occur to Noll is that the failure of Christian republicanism or the theology of its critics to make sense of the war may stem from a prior problem of assuming that the task of Christian theology is to interpret politics and society. A related point is that the mingling of theology and political philosophy in the Christian republican synthesis may really have been one way, with politics dictating the terms of engagement and theology providing the baptismal water, to consecrate the nation's politics (or as H. L. Mencken might have said, give them uplift). In other words, Christian republicanism may have been the last gasp of an older western European ideal, namely, Christendom, which however noble its dreams and worthwhile its achievements, failed to consider that the reason Christ and the apostles died (in the former case, atonement; in the latter case, martyrdom) was not for the sake of Western Civilization (or Eastern Civilization for that matter). If theology is irrelevant to politics--in the sense that it doesn't speak to the subject, not in the sense that believers continue to long for heaven on earth and so impute eternal purpose to their temporal arrangements--then perhaps Holifield's avoidance of the "so what" question was the right interpretive strategy. For theology maybe no answer exists. In the section from which Noll quoted Bonhoeffer's observations of the United States, published in No Rusty Swords (1947), the German pastor, who by no means would agree with the last assertion, offered a comment that is still relevant to the point. Bonhoeffer noticed that the American revolution derived from Puritanism a fundamental conviction about human sinfulness, but that this Puritan vision easily morphed into "spiritualism," that is, the idea that "the kingdom of God on earth cannot be built by the state, but only by the community of Jesus Christ." This notion gave the church in the American setting "clear pre-eminence over the state." As such, the church "proclaims the principles of social and political order, the state merely provides the technical means of putting them into effect." More preferable, in Bonhoeffer's estimate, was a separation of church and state that rested on the Reformation's distinction between the "two offices or the two realms, which will remain ordained by God until the end of the world, each with its own duty fundamentally different from the other." The lesson implicit in Bonhoeffer's remarks was that both the ecclesial order and the political order in the United States remained underdeveloped thanks to the heavy hand of Christian thinking. As much as Noll and Holifield have failed to return to an older style of religious history, one in which Christian thought was the dominant trope for understanding religion, culture, and politics, their books have the virtue of reinforcing, even if only implicitly, Bonhoeffer's point. At a time when faith is supposed to be so important to public life, Noll and Holifield provide healthy cautions to that supposition. Dirt, What Have You Asked of Me? by Laurie Klein What fertile fields our lives become for the slow growth of grace. --G. D. Watson For me, to work earth, even briefly, is to become an artist of silence. By turns I am creator, work-in-progress, and beholder. Regardless which role I inhabit, assorted strata beckon, some fertile, some less productive. Sister Wendy Beckett, art historian and contemplative nun, subdivides silence into categories: relative, reflective, and waiting silences. But this sounds mystical. I do not tiptoe through Stargazer lilies, swathed in unbleached gauze and patchouli. I have yet to intone Gregorian chant while pulling pigweed. And while I performed Paul Simon's "Sounds of Silence" in high school, flower-child-throwback I'm not. Uprooted city-chick was more like it, back in 1991 when Will and I moved to the country to revive our gasping marriage. As an artistic director, work ran my world and ideas kept me awake nights. I loved it, but resigned. Goodbye bookstores, galleries, gym, and symphony. "Kill your darlings," William Faulkner wrote, describing editing, and surely not including one's spouse. Reinvention may cost no less than everything. We hosted one killer yard sale, then enlisted friends to help transfer the remains, which included three islands of lupine much too large to be moved. That evening after everyone left, I lingered outside, transfixed in that moment when twilight proposes silence. What spilled across fields and lawn was the throaty coo of a mourning dove, a song I hadn't heard since grade-school days at Gram's. I was home. To this day a mourning dove's call ushers me into a daydream-like state that Sister Beckett calls relative silence. There's an inner shift, and surrounding noise dims. I am buoyed on the surface of my senses with an ease that's thoughtful, but not revelatory, as it lacks "the muscle of attentiveness." Burying my face in lilacs or sliding into a hot bath triggers it. Breathing deepens. The heart slows. Relative silence ambushes you. Consider aspens rustling like taffeta, a laid-back sound with no real rhythm, no groove to make you snap your fingers or swing your hips; it's background, scored for dreamers. Charmed, but not yet enchanted, I'm still tethered to wristwatch, easily irked by a mate's casual edging, or crabgrass between the pavers. I remain hinged to my own concerns, like petals that flex to unsettle a bee. But I do relax. That initial country dove foreshadowed an ensuing education in silence. Bird of luck to the Japanese, the acceptable sacrifice to Jews, cherished by Muslims, and for Christians, a manifold symbol for peace and the Holy Spirit, doves inspire multitudes in quest of quietude. In the wake of its call that night, a hush rippled inward, auspicious on the eve of reinventing home. When a girl hears the first dove of spring, superstition decrees she take nine steps forward, nine back. To complete this nostalgic ritual that night, I would have searched my shoe for one hair of the man I would marry. But no, I'd stick with Will, unpacking indoors and whistling, one of my pet peeves. He does it so loudly. "Come hear this," I called. The liquid notes quieted him, too. Now, I think of Coleridge, who penned what the dove says: "I love and I love!" The reason we were standing there at all. Subsequent mornings, however, renewed reasons to mourn. In sacrificing work that had been my life's passion--even for love--grief was inevitable. It wasn't that my former life was wrong, but letting go meant closure, respecting what had been good to embrace what we hoped would be better. Like iris rhizomes, over eighteen years we'd become enmeshed. Needing healthy space and a dream to build together, we renewed our vows, then began remodeling our cedar rancher, marrying Euro-eccentric decor with latent post-granola tendencies. Work indoors supplied its potpourri of latex enamels, glues, and sawdust. Outside, I planned blowsy, herbaceous borders like Gram's. I didn't realize I'd be tending low desert terrain atop endless rock in a mini-snowbelt. In my new digs, I had dialed into an alien ecosystem. Nevertheless, I ferried in plants by the carload. As spring segued into summer, death would continue to coach me. Hapless perennials would croak by the dozens, victims of an earnest but grieving gardener. Mis-planted, over-pruned, and under-watered. The lupines thrived, and therein lay another silence, albeit a smug one as I gloated over leafy mounds, bright with dew. I anticipated floral spikes like Roman candles. Within days the lupines disappeared, and I sank to my knees, speechless. Cue panpipes and muted strings to underscore sheer bewilderment. I was approaching relative silence's dark side. Daydreams turn surreal there, and once-dependable emotions mutate, like marital stalemates resurfacing, sprouting runners. I stared, horrified, as a stem of lupine trembled, then vanished, sucked into the bowels of the earth--or some rodent. I yelled. I swore. I wrung my hands. I may have jumped up and down. Dirty, root-sucking vermin, how dare they! My vendetta was immediate, focused, comprehensive: I scouted gopher holes, blocked and flooded them, lit pesticidal bombs to smoke 'em out, even considered pushing pins in dolls. The lupines died. I planted more. Will suggested saying Uncle as a less obsessive response. I conceded, through clenched teeth, that perhaps I was overreacting. Ever-so-slightly. The gophers, meanwhile, multiplied. This gnawing away at the roots mirrored my past. I'd always felt driven to make an impact. If I paused to behold my projects, it was with momentary pride or dismay at their outcome before moving on. I relished creativity's noise, its spectacle, surprises. In marriage, as in my garden, wasn't artistic control the ideal? I was, of course, attempting to reshape both gender and nature's innate chaos, infinitely stubborn and intricate. Yet trowel in hand, I preferred scratching away at topsoil, ignoring the double digging that gardens and relationships alike require. Now, this country quiet felt hostile, rife with subterranean munching. Who would save me from silence's rogue side? Then again, what if those wretched gophers were sent as mentors? A sick thought, I decided, and brushed it away. In those early years of working the earth, guilty stillness always permeated the site of horticultural corpora. I felt as if Mother Eve and all my ancestors were glaring. Like most gardeners, I have killed, and will again, plumbing the silent secrets of green. II True silence is the speech of lovers . . . a garden enclosed . . . " --Catherine de Hueck Doherty WHO needed those thumping protestant hymns? As a kid, "My Father's World" was my favorite: the morning light, the lily white, God's voice everywhere. The lyrics also hinted at celestial harmonies first postulated by Copernicus. "And to my listening ears," the first stanza reads, "all nature sings, and round me rings, the music of the spheres." Lying in the grass at dusk, I would sometimes sense an eerie, hovering, crystalline tone, like a wet finger circling a snifter's rim. Was that it? "Oh, honey, I don't know," Gram said, when asked. De-clumping daylilies always distracted her. I pitied those bulbs she wrenched apart and sunk into new orbits around the mother plant. My father scoffed, waving a hand. "Airy-fairy. Is your homework done?" But I had sensed something. Who else could I ask? I would walk to Draper Hall, the downtown convent where, occasionally, nuns ghosted between three-story columns. They'd never spoken to me, but a good question might rouse them. Now I realize they were probably practicing Lectio Divina, wherein a sacred text is held in mind until, like groundwater, illumination seeps into the spirit. This exemplifies Sister Beckett's reflective silence, meditative, imaginative. It engages memories. Recalling the sisters, who smiled but never did answer my question, I suspect this kind of silence withholds its deeper rewards for those who search, and this seduces me. Books on spirituality claim nothing kindles faith and creativity like envisioning. To meditate on poetry, conversations, creative projects--especially while doing rhythmic, repetitive work--frees intellect for insight. I've had mixed results. While grubbing up thistles, I imagine trumping past arguments, one-upping adversaries with verbal zingers. I compose dazzling blurbs that expose the ignorance of editors who have rejected my work. Then again, if, while clearing out rocks and old resentments, I role-play wise and loving answers, even fictionally, mind and tongue are primed for future success. Reflective silence employs language. Working alone amid the static of grasshoppers in the zinnias, calm interior dialogue, like a pressure valve on a hose, monitors stress. Author Catherine de Hueck Doherty notes the word solitary means "alone" in English, but "with everybody" in Russian. Through prayer, our spirits can become an intercessory hospice. Apparently, I should bring all humanity with me into this silence, although that feels crowded for starters. I un-kink the hairpin fence instead, and pray for our marriage. Will and I have been redefining ourselves, individually, and as a couple. We're minding our tongues, often biting them. An ancient proverb says: "In much speaking one cannot avoid sin." I resolve to ration my remarks. Then, while amending soil I spy a rodent and, fuming over it, deplete my newly imposed word quota. I light more gopher bombs. This is my garden, and I want it the way I want it. For myself. Like hummingbirds that swivel and joust at feeders, I'm simultaneously letting off steam and staking out territory. Ideally, though, reflective silence shapes me: I am the work-in-progress. If I tell Will this, he'll smile knowingly and lead me to bed. Humility is sexy at the end of a day spent with water, wind, and the patient flowers. We fold into one another like petals. Doherty likens falling in love to spiritual union with God. Talking is optional. Maybe intimacy and awe are muscles, atrophied by fast-lane living. A cross-section of urban drone may include jackhammers, radios, engines, horns, canine commentary, and 747s. One source estimates 16,000 separate sensory impressions bombard Americans daily; another declares I get more information in a day than Gram did in a month. Even rural life can be fraught with traffic: cyber, vehicular, relational. Concentration and love affect hearing, too. They help me observe myself and others with bemused compassion. What I need is the ear of a bride or new mother, attuned to every silence. If I'm honest, though, I'd rather be the maker than the made. Sometimes I find passivity excruciating. Might as well be a daylily bulb in the hands of Gram. So what's a conflicted, co-dependent, Type A, budding contemplative to do? On a whim, I forked out two bits for a used garden gate: seven pickets braced by a sturdy Z and fitted with hardware, bent and rusting. The genius of the thing is its dis-attachedness. Prop it anywhere and, via imagination, invent an entrance. Currently lashed to an arbor, my gate creates a point of departure to realms beyond, where something grander suggests itself. It's an icon, a corridor through which I can move: physically, intellectually, and spiritually. What if I mirror its opening, make myself more available to Will? To God? Through inhabiting reflective silence, I can, perhaps--in the manner of garden dioramas once arranged in pharaohs' tombs--erect an alternate world. I am still waiting to hear the music of the spheres. III These feet of clay. And now, the rain. DIRT, what have you asked of me? I've returned to city grime and din. Subwoofers in adjacent lanes rattle me, sitz bones to fillings. I wince at flourescent hums and neon sputters, cringe over the asthmatic wheeze of bus doors. After harvesting lavender at dawn, vibrating with soused bumblebees, civilization's noise squares itself, exponentially. It seems the larger I've grown within, the smaller I feel. When I worked with children I used to lock eyes with them, lower my voice and whisper: "It takes every person in this room to make silence." Surprised, enchanted, they would. Amid city cacophony, now I think of the poet W. S. Merwin who wrote "In the silence / one note is missing." Maybe it's me. I'm jangled, cross with Will at the list of errands. Yet even here at Costco, a crowded wholesale warehouse, true contemplatives claim I can surrender to waiting silence. Another poet, Li-Young Lee, describes silence as primal, pregnant, a saturation of presence. If it's available here, it's located somewhere near the Spokane Aquifer that snakes off to Idaho: deep, slow, and circuitous as roots. I should emulate hummingbirds. At dusk they tank up, offsetting heartbeats that will slow drastically enough to allow sleep. Of course, sometimes they don't wake up. Sister Beckett describes waiting silence as both an emptying and an immersion, "a directed stillness which receives rather than acts." Prayer comes through you instead of from you. I can't prune the apple tree without studying it first, allowing the mute limbs to show me where air is wanted. Some branches, rather than reaching out, jackknife into the tree's center. After beholding them, with the sure bite of steel I can free that tree to dance in its own space. In waiting silence, listeners move beyond language and ideas. Something secluded and Eden-like ticks within. Call it garden time wherein seeds, like spring-sown Houdinis, have picked their own locks and now pause, resting before a lone sprout muscles toward light. It's transformative: gophers are cousins, griefs are gifts, and husbands, best friends. Saints of old called this silence ecstasy. Is it any wonder people pander a street drug by that name? At home, deep breathing helps me enter waiting silence, but I also close doors and light sandalwood candles as talismans. Then grace takes over. Now, dwarfed by floor-to-ceiling wares, I push my cart down the gardening aisle. I am but a beginner: one shovel, one leaking hose. To enter deep silence in public unnerves me. Checkout lines seem endless. I want to run away, or rant. Suspend language? How? "The truest prayer," Doherty writes, "is simply union with God." Entering a new orbit. I must power down the satellite dish of the senses, let the intellect gently fold its wings, and risk the soul to nothingness, trusting a greater power sustains it. Rest, surrender, detachment--these are thresholds to the final artistic act: beholding. In short, I become my own gate. IV Weed and harrow the soul; uproot self; sow the word within. --Catherine de Hueck Doherty CHRISTMAS is coming. I stake paperwhites, water the amaryllis. St. Joseph haunts me today, the silent one who adopted God and was never heard from again in the gospels. He just lived them. "The more I speak," Henri Nouwen wrote, "the more I will need silence to remain faithful to what I say." Every detachment is taxing. Goodbye hurts more when you've raised that lupine from a peat pot, even though pain is both blight and potential root-boost. Regardless of weather, rodents, and anemic soil, why not aim to grow, throw wide the gate, cultivate silence? To partner the dance that powers the seasons, that's my hope, Will's hand in mine, God's breath on the scruff of my neck. Juliet, excerpts by András Visky• translated by David Robert Evans Edited by Ailisha O'Sullivan Juliet is a monologue, a one-woman performance. The title character, along with her seven children, is a prisoner in a 1950's Romanian Communist gulag, while her husband has been imprisoned elsewhere. She has no idea where he being held is or whether or not he is even still alive. A woman came to us one night in Nagyszolonta Flee Flee They are going to arrest the priest What are you saying, good lady? My husband told me A big-wig from Nagyvárad from the secret police paid us a visit He told us By then the undercover men were always attending services my husband this is God's curse he delivered the word from the pulpit to them with zest "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." There you are The seeds fall on a rocky place I said to him Among thorns Which strangle them Then strangle us And the birds come and pick at the seeds then pick at us That is not a matter for us said my husband God's farmhand there are seeds aplenty The sower just sows, sows That's his lot The undercover men sat in the last pew and listened to the service The children gave them a hymnbook I can't read, said one of the men I haven't got my glasses The children took him glasses, borrowing them from the bell-ringer The undercover man sang or moved his lips up and down, at least You see, said my husband You see, he said happily God's curse, you? I said to him That's it, he replied I hope so He turns to me You don't love them? he asked I turned to him No But it's easier then he said Easier? I asked Easier he said Simple as that It's the same with God he said If you love him it's easier And it's easier that he exists I remembered the children And if he doesn't? Is that easier, too? Yes, easier Easier if he doesn't exist, too God's curse, you? I said to him That's it, he replied I hope so Thy staff and Thy rod they comfort me We'll see Where should we flee, good lady? We asked the woman Just flee, the woman said Don't cry, we told her The woman left We look at each other in silence If God be for us, who can be against us? I told my husband so I wouldn't be overtaken by fear Everyone, my husband said Everyone, don't be afraid I'm not afraid I'm afraid I'm not afraid I'm afraid I said to him Me too There, there [Later in the play. . .] If you divorce your husband your kinship with a political prisoner will be dissolved and you will be freed I said nothing You would only be divorced on paper Only in the eyes of the law You would instigate the divorce Which, in these circumstances, would immediately be approved I said nothing You can even wait until he is freed and marry officially again If you still want to If you both still want to Said the lawyer In that moment my whole body was filled with a surge of heat I felt happiness the likes of which I hadn't felt since my husband was convicted I could hold it back no more I let out a scream You see, I am the bearer of good news, madam said the lawyer on the mattress of straw He stood up and lit the candle on the table Then returned to the mattress Good news, good news, I thought to myself The best there is He's alive My husband's alive My husband's alive, alive This is the first news of him you've sent me It's five years I haven't heard a thing about him Just the two rings on my finger You've well and truly starved me I looked at the lawyer as one might at an angel at your angel bearing good news for me at your request (Laughs) Maybe I took that looking a bit too far (Laughs) The lawyer was pleased as Punch at the progress of events He took off his jacket Loosened his tie Let's get the formalities over with, shall we? Sign here, and here The rest is my job And yours too, of course, if you know what I mean the lawyer smiled that charming smile Our job, the both of us We will officially forward this to the prosecutor And inform your husband in prison And you are free to leave You are free Even before the Franciscans I looked at the document I read the prepared text which said that I was showing contrition for not having recognized my husband's subversive and treasonable activities in time that I wanted to begin a new life and to raise my children in the same spirit Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? Juliet asks the nurse I went to the table and held the form above the candle only for it obligingly to catch fire and be destroyed in an instant There was a great light in the room The children ran in like a well-trained troupe They stood side by side and gazed at us without a word I see I see, said the lawyer in uniform He picked up his jacket and walked out We put the straw mattress out in front of the building I made the mistake of telling the children the news He's alive, he's alive, he's alive Hope (Sardonically, ironically) And then began the era of hope Mistake, big mistake Wasting away in hope While still nothing happens He's alive, he's not He's alive, he's not He's alive, he's not Disciples, an excerpt by András Visky• translated by David Robert Evans Commissioned a few years ago by a State theater in Hungary to write a play about Easter, András Visky decided to write a play about the disciples in the period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The Messiah has gone, they don't know where, and they are very scared and confused. They are waiting for something or someone. They have some memories of things Jesus said and did, but these memories seem meaningless now. They have to begin again: Bartholomew [who is mute and uses sign language] takes out the Scriptures. EVERYONE: (shocked; cacophony of noise as they interrupt one another) This is completely ridiculous. He's the one who's going to read aloud the Scriptures! (brief laughs, chuckles) PHILIP: (to Bartholomew's defence, matter-of-factly) Forgive me, sorry --- I remember quite clearly now. He was the first to be healed by the master. THADDEUS: (with a frown) The first. It's an interesting account of events, at any rate. Philip's homily about Bartholomew's miraculous recovery PHILIP: We were in Gadara --- that's where we first met him. At that time there were only seven of us around the Master, maybe even fewer. Bartholomew stepped up to the Master and said: BARTHOLOMEW: Master, I am afflicted by a terrible disease, it runs in the family, but it is in me that it has become complete. PHILIP: "What's wrong with you?" the Master asked. BARTHOLOMEW: The words, Master. PHILIP: ...he replied, with a strained expression. BARTHOLOMEW: They are breaking out of me unstoppably, word after word, sentence after sentence, explanation after explanation, and everything becomes like a dust storm in the desert that nothing can withstand. PHILIP: "What shall I do with you?" the Master asked. BARTHOLOMEW: Make me mute. PHILIP: ...the afflicted asked. BARTHOLOMEW: May I be silent as a fish. PHILIP: "...you are the teacher of Gadara, a hermeneut famous in distant lands, yours is the best school in the region, students flock to you, even the sons of neighbouring peoples come to you, and you ask me to make you mute?" the Master asked, surprised. BARTHOLOMEW: Give me your help. And give them the gift of silence. They don't know what they want, that is why they come to me. They hunger for words: many, many words. And words flow out of me at their beck and call, unremittingly. They give more credence to my explanations than I deserve. PHILIP: So said Bartholomew. "And your words, what will happen to your words?" the Master again asked, once Bartholomew had finally stopped speaking. BARTHOLOMEW: Turn them into a rain of benediction in the desert. PHILIP: "Then be mute," said the Master, smiling. "Be mute as a fish." Soon after, a storm came up, dark clouds gathered above the city, and it began to rain. Bartholomew beamed, and we haven't heard him speak a single word ever since. Silence, then music starts to play. ALPHAEUS: And they came at us as one --- that's where we had got to. SIMON: Heaven knows. JOHN: No. We haven't got that far yet. ANDREW: Let's get out the Scriptures. PETER: Someone take out the Scriptures. PHILIP: (encouragingly) Go on, do it. Bartholomew prepares to read out loud. He tries to find a spot where everyone can see him. Finally, he stands next to the window. He reads out loud. John stands next to him to translate. BARTHOLOMEW: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." JOHN: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. PETER: Do not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. JAMES: We haven't got that far yet...! MATTHEW: Where are we then, smart guy, where are we? JOHN: Here: In the beginning God created... SIMON: (indignantly) Who? JOHN: God. MATTHEW: Dead. ALPHAEUS: He took the words out of my mouth. Both of them: God, dead. JOHN: That's what you think. Here he is, in black and white. PETER: More like white and black. ANDREW: That just depends on your point of view. From This Distance • Ghazal • after laughter by Ed Higgins From This Distance Yes, I can imagine it now how we could each disappear completely connected only through memory's fault lines, subduction zones all our own, lie-protected over time's distance surfaces sliding under recollection as overlaying sediments accumulate transform into anthracite or other hardened evidence under pressure of ages ago. Remembering itself long since fading at some lost premise: We once sang so goofily out of tune we may actually have laughed out loud. Uncertain too are favored wines: zinfandel, chardonnay, oaky pinots we declared made just for us--- Little suspecting some later taste like treachery, say, calculated or maybe only through regret conveniently overlooked while staring into one another's eyes. So somewhere now in middle-age uneven embarrassment draws me back to where memory no longer techtonically shears along fault lines long past each other. Whole continents have drifted slowly to their present locations built up and worn away, tracing rifts in the crust still. Ghazal Again, again late February's daffodils everywhere, their daft yellow and clown's ruffle there, there, and there. Down the hospital sidewalk to see dying refused I hurry past all this sunshine, the spring ground suffused. Voices, voices fumbling, buzzing as wakened bees quietly into the ears of friends, lovers, family, doctors anxiously: Will our paths be outward from winter's harsh leaven, forward to spring's lectionary and longed for haven? You only are the haven of all my mirth unfeigned. When will your pale yellowed arms hold me once again? after laughter our dachshund who was so fat she had to be helped up onto the couch although mother didn't allow this ever would first eat the wet cigar stub dad had left in the endtable ashtray beside where he'd left his dentures the dog would ease an upper or lower plate between her teeth jump down and run off to the back bedroom burying them under my brother's pillow we three brothers would laugh and laugh and later listen thru the bedroom wall as dad in a drunken rage wondered where the hell he left his teeth this time. Baby Born with Antlers • Real Life Cat Woman Found in the Ozarks and She's Looking for Love • Smartest Ape in the World Goes to College by John Leax Baby Born with Antlers Might we assume that he is a he? Perhaps not. That the buck shining in our head lamps is antlered may be a fact of our peculiar place not an absolute of nature. We may, however, assume the mother bore her child in pain. Look at those things! Eight points, a rack for Boone and Crockett. Let's hope the antlers were soft and malleable, floating like golden locks during the passage down the dark canal, only hardening at the shock of air. Or perhaps the birth was breech. Either way, we may assume the child cried at the slap of birth. There's nothing new in that, nothing to report. But did the mother cry? What did she think when the midwife placed the child, wet and wriggling in her arms? did she scream, blurt out, "Monster!" and push the double-natured thing away? I think not. I think she recognized her image in its flesh and loved him, though she'd no warning of how, when she nursed, she'd have to guard her eyes from the sudden lifting of his head. I think, when she first held him tenderly exploring his small body, her hand touched a tiny hoof-- a baby born with antlers would have, at least, two hooves-- and she thought, almost absently, that she would purchase him a flute. Real Life Cat Woman Found in the Ozarks and She's Looking for Love She's down and dirty in a lace bikini. Where she found it is anybody's guess unless she tore it from a budding rival walking unsuspecting hand in hand with some dull partner in the woods. Don't think on that. Consider this: It does nothing flattering for her tail. Though for the feline litheness of her thighs, it does all a lusting voyeur could desire. Her whiskers, dark and thick as a mustache, twitch with eagerness. Her fingers, reaching out to knead a lover, are clawed to tear. Her lips curl back revealing saber teeth. No one would call her smile becoming or say how kittenish she looks. Nor would a gentleman invite her long body to coil into a purring pile of fur upon an unprotected lap. She is danger daring the tame to play. Think with what ferity she will meet her lover. Think what fierce offspring might suckle safely at her breast. Could any child nursed on that wildness grow to find a place in any world you want to know? Think carefully. Some rank infusion--- In wildness is the preservation of the world--- might be the needed shot, the Yes humanity has feared to speak to every other calling from the brink. Are you the one? Will you be her mate Smartest Ape in the World Goes to College Knowing the admissions department was by law committed to a policy of nondiscrimination, he applied. His test scores were excellent and no campus visit was required. In reply to the question, "What do you expect to gain from a liberal arts education?" he wrote, "It is my goal to become fully human." His ambition led, of course, to admission in an honors section. Orientation caused him fear-- he wasn't sure how to dress, and housing worried him--he couldn't decide if coed or single sex was best. He went with coed, figuring life in the presence of women might be uplifting. On-line registration allowed him to avoid actually meeting with his advisor, though he felt the exchange of e-mails valuable and enlightening. Concerned that classmates and professors might find his vocalizations awkward, he chose large lectures over the intimacy of smaller classes. But he could not hide. He moved with an animal grace that attracted women. Even his speech, though slow and often withheld, worked against him, his reticence projecting a deep vulnerability and awakening needs he meant to rise above. He received many invitations. Shyly he made excuses. He invented a girl at home and retreated to his books. He studied hard, played no sports, and told no tales of conquest or betrayal. Men thought him a bore. For many months he was happy, undisturbed in his belief he could, by thought, add cubits to his stature. He read Thoreau: I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. Then a darker unsung poet troubled his upward dream of mobility. Descent with modification suggested all was chance. To be human marked no final elevation, no end achieved. Still the inward cry of aspiration kept his soul in motion. If Thoreau had found within himself a half-starved hound, a pilgrim saint and learned to reverence both, he too could be a husband of the wild and walk at peace in the sun-bright wilderness of his division. One day in Spring, invited by a sprightly girl to picnic in the college woods, he took his chance in hand. Beneath the trees they touched a wisdom not at all provincial. The baying of the hound, once lost, returned to town. The saint inscribed a poem in the bark. We Go Out Searching for Sermons in Stone • Advice for Walkers • Note from the Week After Next by Jeff Gundy We Go Out Searching for Sermons in Stone The slender branch lifts in the wind as the tour guide explains at length what the world will teach. Turkeytail fungus won't hurt this dead tree or any other. See the bark-colored moth, a wing missing. Notice the three-legged toad, the tracks of deer and golf carts, the stump sprouts of the tulip poplar, stubborn but doomed. A plant without a face is hard to name. Tired of looking where I'm told, sick of explaining, I walk fast and faster until the voices die away. Orange-cap mushroom in a log gone to coarse dust. The ridge trail tips down toward the promise of a view. More wind, traffic, three-note birdsong almost in rhythm with my steps. When the trail ends on a high knob I follow a deer path downhill, clamber through deadfalls thinking of falling, dreaming of flight. When the path dwindles I find a sitting log above the dim valley, the noisy invisible road. Men and women are hard at work while I loiter and wander and pity myself. The grapevine goes up thirty feet before it touches wood, and how did that happen? These slips of wild rose and poison ivy could be grafted into any poem and take good hold and prosper, green and noxious, not our friends. The world says many things, most of them sad and hard. The world has lost many things and they all will return, but not as what they were. From here the trail goes to fantasy and nostalgia, nirvana and Neil Young. The lesson for today duplicates and defies the one for yesterday. The tourist train clanks up the valley and the driver blasts the whistle. There is a way home from anywhere, past the nurse log and the wolf tree, over the deer droppings fresh and dried, under one deadfall and through the next. The squaw root and Indian pipe suckle gently from the beech roots, taking just enough for bloom and seed. Advice for Walkers Watch your step. You could fall any minute through the hard skin of rock, the soft skin of dirt. You could find yourself floating to an awkward reunion with the debris you've been trailing behind you all these years. Watch carefully. There are some who burn so bright even a glance will leave you whirling. Watch the ground at your feet and the last stretchy sky. There is much in the mucky spring that you don't want to bring home on your shoes. No one knows where the miracle will begin, or where the disaster will start. No one knows the name of the beloved until it is spoken, perhaps gently when asked how to say it, Maria, or Kaitlin, or Grace. The earth is a mirror. The sky is a lens. The trees are an echo of their own roots, of your own roots, your lost fathers brooding on shades of black in the quiet caves, your mothers counting the one breath they manage each month, praying thank you, praying goodbye. Watch your step, not the women who glow like stars and are just as much your business. Consider the small brick porch where your son lost his balance years ago, where he fell hard, dizzy with love and hunger. When your eyes have drunk a million shots of splendor and turned back for more, when your heart has packed and hidden every wonder, every slender ankle, every head of curling invitations to the wrong feast, when desire elbows memory into the bushes and runs headlong downhill smack into the creek, when the creek closes icy and astonishing over you, all your clothes soaked and useless, the last veils of your secrecy torn open like the car door after the crash, when you clamber up dripping mud and snowmelt and the most obstinate futility since second grade, when you fumble at the bank, scrape knuckles on the frozen roots, on the slabs of broken ice, oh my friend, lift your dripping useful boot and press it to the ground, press and push and even now the world will hold you up. Note from the Week After Next The dawn is gray now, night and day, and we are no more pleased than the roosters and the finches. Their whistles and squawks annoyed us, especially when we had frittered the night away with bottles and companions, but now we have lost even the sad thrill of carousing while the honest folk drowse. The solid citizens have started to show up at Wal*Mart at all hours, to fill their carts with lawn ornaments, wrapping paper, bottles of oil treatment. They haunt the laundromats, smoke in clumps on streetcorners, astonished by their own transgressions. The songbirds, herons, and crows gather unevenly on the public lawns, exchanging conspiratorial chirps and flutters. Before he disappeared, the secretary of hours insisted that the absence of both sun and darkness was neither unexpected nor cause for alarm. Given the vicious and barbaric nature of our enemies, he stated, the casualty level is tragic but within acceptable parameters. He pledged firm action, soon. Rumors of crash programs--to adjust the rate of continental drift, to utilize vast engines to reshape certain orbits, to rekindle subtle stellar processes--spring up like mushrooms, and blacken just as fast. Each time we assemble, at intervals ever more arbitrary, a few more are coughing quietly into white rags. Lean Enough • Belly Dancing by Jean Janzen Lean Enough A small lizard lifts his wise head and eyes me basking in early spring light. He tastes the air with his tongue, slithers into the fern, comes back. I tell him that his mother was caught in the house, that I raised her from the dead after months behind the bookcase. He tells me that deprivation feeds the soul, little Desert Father with his bulging gaze, both of us feasting on the generosity of the sun. And I admit that I carried her, that's all, to the light and warmth which will take us both in the end after we grow lean enough, and loose, and unafraid. Belly Dancing I was onstage reading poems about my lost family in Russia before the dancers came on. The Wild Blue Yonder cafe, glasses clinking, espresso machine drowning the words. The audience clapped politely, none of us knowing real hunger, suppers of boiled rats, or walking barefoot in the blinding snow. It's an ancient art, the dancers say, hips swinging, navels swirling as the belly muscles undulate. Tambourines and wailing melodies celebrate the bared and severed connection to our mothers. Or is it loss, the way we are set free to drift and seek our own salvation? My cousin laughed remembering how he, a boy, tried to make shoes out of camel hair, twisting and tying, two porous baskets for his growing feet. This music is in a minor key, spare and open. Not enough to hold us close, to keep out the ice and snow. Contributors for Volume Two, Issue One Blyvyn Blyvyn is a junior devil who graduated cum flammans from the Tempters' College. His dissertation, Triumphing Over the Evangelical Mind, outlined a plan that was successfully implemented in concert with his mentor Screwtape's "Project Babel-on." Blyvyn is currently leading experiments on the Coalition of Evangelical Colleges and Wannabes at the Center for Advanced Research in Pride, Snobbery, Envy, Vain Ambition, and Ressentiment. Mustafa Akyol Mustafa Akyol is a political scientist, columnist and writer from Turkey. He is also a director at the Intercultural Dialogue Platform, based in Istanbul. Michael J. Baxter Michael J. Baxter is assistant professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. This article is reprinted from the Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2005. An earlier version also appeared in D. Brent Laytham, ed., God is Not . . . Religious, Nice, "One of Us," an American, a Capitalist (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2004). David Robert Evans David Robert Evans lives primarily in Hungary where he is a translator of contemporary Hungarian literature into English. Jeff Gundy Jeff Gundy's most recent collection of poems is Deerflies (WordTech Editions, 2004). He is also the author of three other poetry collections and two works of creative non-fiction, Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye (SUNY, 2003) and Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara (U of Illinois, 1996). Next year, Cascadia Publishing House will publish Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing, which gathers much of his thinking and writing about Mennonite literature. D. G. Hart D. G. Hart is the Director of Academic Projects and Faculty Development at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Previously he was dean of academic affairs and professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in California where he remains an adjunct member of the faculty. Earlier still he directed the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and taught American history at Wheaton College. Dr. Hart is the author of many books, such as Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Era of Billy Graham; Recovering Mother Kirk: The Case for Liturgy in the Reformed Tradition; The Lost Soul of American Protestantism; That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century; With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (co-author); The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies and American Higher Education; Fighting the Good Fight: A Brief History of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (co-author); and Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America. In addition to many periodicals, Dr. Hart has been a guest several times with Mars Hill Audio. Ed Higgins Ed Higgins is Professor of English at George Fox University and a part-time farmer. His writing has appeared in Yankee, Commonweal, Bellowing Ark, Oregon English, Mobius, Sisters Today, Christianity & Literature, Christian Century, His, and College Composition and Communication. Jean Janzen Jean Janzen is a poet living in Fresno, California. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Piano in the Vineyard (Good Books, 2004). Her poems have appared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Image, The Christian Century, and many others. She is also a past recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laurie Klein Laurie Klein's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, New Letters, Commonweal, Mars Hill Review, Best Catholic Writing 2005, The Mennonite, The Presbyterian Record, and others. She won the 2004 Owl Creek Chapbook Competition for "Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh." Laurie works as consulting editor at Rock & Sling, a new literary journal of Literature, Art, and Faith. John Leax John Leax is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Houghton College where he is also a resident faculty member in Houghton's environment and culture program in Adirondack Park. Most recently, he has published an expanded and revised edition of Grace Is Where I Live (WordFarm, 2004). His Tabloid Poems will also appear from WordFarm in 2005. Barry Moser Barry Moser is a book designer and illustrator known for his hand-crafted, letterpress Pennyroyal Caxton edition of the King James Bible. Only 400 copies were printed. David Naugle Dr. David K. Naugle is chair and professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University. He is also the director of the Paideia College Society (formerly the Pew College Society) the purpose of which is to educate intellectually gifted students into their true nature as the image of God. The overall goal is not only the transformation of students, but also the reformation of the Church and the renewal of the various aspects of cultural life into which God has placed them providentially by calling. Dr. Naugle serves as a "Fellow" for the Wilberforce Forum, the Christian worldview think tank sponsored by Prison Fellowship in Washington, D. C. He serves as an associate editor of Findings, a quarterly journal produced by the Wilberforce Forum on worldview issues. He is also the editor of The Worldview Church E-Report published by the Wilberforce Forum as an information source designed to encourage Church leaders to implement a Christian worldview in their congregations. Dr. Naugle is the author of Worldview: The History of a Concept (Eerdmans 2002). Dr. Naugle's book was selected by Christianity Today magazine as the 2003 book of the year in the theology and ethics category. Ailisha O'Sullivan Ailisha O'Sullivan is an editor at Koinónia Publishing in Cluj, Romania. James Schaefer James Schaefer is the Gallery Director at Signs of Life Gallery in Lawrence, Kansas. Screwtape Screwtape is a senior devil in the Lowerarchy of Our Father Below. András Visky András Visky is a poet, playwright, and essayist who spent his early childhood in a Communist gulag along with his mother and six brothers and sisters, while his father, a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church, was in prison elsewhere. Visky is the founder of the Koinónia publishing house. He is the dramaturg of the State Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, Romania, and an associate professor in aesthetics at the University of Babeş-Bolyai, also in Cluj. His play Juliet has been playing in Budapest since fall of 2002 at the Thália Theatre. Two newer plays, The Escape and The Alcoholics are premiering later this year in the Romanian cities of Târgu Mureş and Sepsiszent György respectively. His most recent play, The Unborn, is a stage adaptation of Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész (winner of the Nobel prize for literature, 2002). Visky lives in Cluj with his wife and four children.