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Lucas E. Morel

Ralph Ellison and the music of American possibility

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Ralph Ellison, author of the instant classic Invisible Man, once likened the creation of fictional characters to a chief aim of democratic society: “the development of conscious, articulate citizens.”1 Both the writer and a free society are responsible to give voice, to give “eloquence,” to their respective dramatis personae.2 And as Ellison liked to remind us, the American cast of characters has always included the Negro. Ellison saw in the Negro American culture, displayed in the verve and elegance of “jazzmen and prize fighters, ballplayers and tap dancers,” an “affirmation of life beyond all question of our difficulties as Negroes.”3 So for Ellison, “individuality is still operative beyond the racial structuring of American society.”4

When critics chastised Ellison for preaching individualism to blacks instead of racial solidarity, he referred them to the jazz giants of old, whom he called the “stewards of our vaunted American optimism.”5 Ellison argued that blacks took pride in Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges “not because they were anonymous bumps within the crowd, but because they were themselves.” He reminded the critics, “If the white society has tried to do anything to us, it has tried to keep us from being individuals,” and noted the irony in black leaders decrying black individualism while they themselves were “doing all they can to suppress all individuality but their own.”6 Proud to be a Negro American, Ellison still did not believe true freedom or human excellence would be found down the road to color consciousness: “I recognize that we are bound less by blood than by our cultural and political circumstances.”7

Speaking of the American character, Ellison drew upon jazz to explain its development: “In this process our traditions and national ideals move and function like a firm ground bass, like the deep tones of your marvelous organ there in the chapel, repeating themselves continually while new melodies and obbligatoes sound high above. In literature this is the process by which the values, ideals, assumptions and memories of unique individuals and groups reach out across the divisions wrought by our national diversity and touch us all.”8

In his introduction to Living with Music, Robert O’Meally recounts asking a question of Ralph Ellison that gets to the heart of Ellison’s literary project: “Don’t you think the Harlem Renaissance failed because we failed to create institutions to preserve our gains?” To which Ellison replied, “No. We do have institutions. We have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And we have jazz.” Ellison implied that the Harlem Renaissance, or any other attempt by Negroes to put their stamp on American fine arts, needed no extra vehicle for securing its successes beyond the oldest and surest institutions of social freedom in America—the Constitution and Bill of Rights—and the musical genre of jazz. Without the Constitution and Bill of Rights as political touchstones for freedom of expression, even within a racially prejudiced society, the Negro’s scope to create great art would be even more limited. Ellison was always quick to remind his audience, black or white, not to overlook what Negroes already possessed and could claim as their own.

But why the Constitution and Bill of Rights? How were these the possession of a historically marginalized segment of America? Ellison believed these pillars of American government must be claimed by and for black Americans to the same extent as whites in order to affirm the equal humanity and American-ness of the Negro. Ellison’s dream, like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” No white bigot’s ignorance of the text of his own nation’s political charter—an ignorance of the very basis of his own freedom—ought to stand in the way of Negro Americans claiming and acting upon that same charter of freedom. That would give up the struggle before it even began, to say nothing of neglecting the effort and sacrifice of “many thousands gone” who had a literal hand (and head and heart) in establishing the American regime.

As for jazz, it was an art form that antedated and survived the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison saw jazz as both a means and an end of Negro American freedom: it not only existed as a body of musical expression, with its own techniques and traditions, but also testified to the capacity of black Americans to thrive as artists within segregated America. By creating music that gave opportunity across the color line to excel, black Americans offered a beacon of hope to others who would dare to succeed in what little or great scope of freedom the majority-white society permitted.

And as black musical excellence made itself known to wider audiences, but especially to black audiences, interests beyond musical ones were piqued. The young Ralph Ellison could, at first, strive to become a world-class trumpeter and classical composer, only to be emboldened further to try his hand at writing. As Ellison once shared, he became a writer “because I had gotten the spirit of literature and had become aware of the possibilities offered by literature—not to make money, but to feel at home in the world.”9

In an online interview with “Jerry Jazz Musician,” Robert G. O’Meally explained how he came up with the idea for an Ellison jazz anthology:

Every time I give a course that touches on Ellison or on jazz in American literature … I put together a handout for my students that consists of Ellison’s writings on music. About five years ago, it struck me that that stack of Xerox’s was the best book on jazz I knew … I was sure that Ellison was right in the league with Whitney Balliett and Albert Murray and perhaps beyond them, as arguably the most eloquent writer that jazz has ever had.10

As author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991), editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1997), and founder and director of the interdisciplinary Center for Jazz Studies, O’Meally has his jazz bona fides in order.

For Ellison, “living with music“—the title of his 1955 High Fidelity essay—meant literally living with and sometimes in spite of music (the latter being the racket produced from a neighbor upstairs who sang arias that Ellison tried to drown out with his own hi-fi set). O’Meally, the Zola Neale Hurston Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, borrowed Ellison’s essay title for a medley of Ellison’s reviews, essays, interviews, letters, and fictional excerpts that exhibit his devotion to jazz. All but the Juneteenth (1999) excerpt were originally written or published between 1945 and 1976. Moreover, most have already been published as collected essays or short stories in Shadow and Act (1964), Going to the Territory (1986), The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), and Trading Twelves (2000).

O’Meally gives brief, insightful background for each jazz piece, and includes a letter and two interviews—one he conducted with Ellison in 1976—not previously published. His interview of Ellison, part of his research for his biography The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980), is especially revealing of Ellison’s religious upbringing and his opinion of Malcolm X, the Communist Party of the 1930s and ’40s, and Africa from an American Negro perspective.

Jazz country: ralph ellison in america provides a long-overdue introduction to Ellison’s literary legacy that is both learned and highly readable. Horace A. Porter, chair of African American World Studies and professor of English at the University of Iowa, paints a jazz-lensed portrait of Ellison in America. Specifically, he shows how jazz influenced Ellison as a human being, writer, and self-appointed “custodian and conscience of American culture.”

To understand America as a “jazz country,” Porter highlights salient themes of Ellison’s oeuvre that reflect the modes of both jazz and the American regime: freedom, unity, ambiguity, possibility, improvisation, discipline, and transcendence—all of which contribute to what Ellison called “the sheer unexpectedness of American life.” Ellison saw jazz as a “branch of our national culture,”11 and this not merely as a homegrown musical genre but as a vital chronicle of the nation’s development toward the equal protection of its citizens regardless of color. He believed that “the true subject of democracy is not simply material well-being, but the extension of the democratic process in the direction of perfecting itself. The most obvious test and clue to that perfection is the inclusion, not assimilation, of the black man.”12

By “placing jazz in the foreground” of Ellison interpretation, Porter gives due attention to the music that inspired Ellison’s early ambition to master the trumpet and eventually the craft of the American novel.13 For example, in the central chapter of Jazz Country, Porter shows how reading Invisible Man as a “jazz text” mimics “the musical process and form of democratic culture.” Add to this a chapter on Ellison’s close friends and kindred spirits—writer Albert Murray and painter Romare Bearden—and one that evaluates Ellison’s most formidable critics (past and present), and Jazz Country amounts to a compact commentary on the Ellisonian project.

Unfortunately, for a book devoted to the centrality of jazz to Ellison’s vocation, Jazz Country falters in its assessment of Juneteenth, the novel John Callahan culled from the three-part saga of race, religion, and politics that Ellison left incomplete upon his death in 1994. Although the dust jacket boasts that Jazz Country is “the first book to assess Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published novel Juneteenth,” Porter does not live up to his billing. In a chapter titled “Jazz in Progress: Juneteenth, Ellison’s Second Novel,” Porter’s “assessment” is hardly more than a verbatim excerpt of a negative critique by Louis Menand from The New York Times Book Review. Porter qualifies Menand’s critique by adding how difficult Callahan’s job was in editing Juneteenth from the 2,000-plus pages that Ellison left behind. He then spends the lion’s share of the chapter interpreting “Cadillac FlambÉ,” a short story published in 1973 and part of Ellison’s sprawling second novel-in-progress. (Callahan left “Cadillac FlambÉ” out of Juneteenth for narrative reasons—its inclusion would have introduced two key characters who appear nowhere else in the coherent narrative that became Juneteenth.)

The closest Porter gets to an interpretation of Juneteenth comes in the following chapter, entitled “Jazz Preaching: Reverend Hickman and the Battered Silver Trombone.” There one finds not the promised interpretation of the novel but an examination of a “Juneteenth” sermon14 by the novel’s protagonist, a former jazz trombonist-turned-preacher. This chapter works as far as it goes, interpreting the sermon through the lens of jazz, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the preaching of C.L. Franklin and Martin Luther King, Jr. But a more expansive introduction to the central figures and themes in Juneteenth is found in Robert J. Butler’s essay “Juneteenth: Ralph Ellison’s National Narrative,” published in his edited volume, The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison (Greenwood Press, 2000). Notwithstanding the puzzling omission of a more extensive treatment of Juneteenth, Porter has written the next best thing to a primer on Ellison and his “jazz-shaped” writing.15 Of course, the best place to start is with Invisible Man and Juneteenth themselves, and The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (edited by John Callahan).

O’Meally and Porter demonstrate that Ellison’s significance as an American writer should derive not only from his classic work, Invisible Man, and now the deservedly published fragment of the unfinished novel Juneteenth but also from essays and interviews that present a more robust picture of how the American regime has perpetuated itself in a world prone to revolution and tyranny. Jazz, what Ellison described as “an art of individual assertion within and against the group,”16 serves as a fitting analog for the society of free individuals that the American republic was intended to secure.

Ellison’s jazz writings center on the music and its seminal performers and composers. But given his convictions about the artist’s responsibility to his society, he usually managed to address the social and political implications of a musical genre that provided an escape and field of dreams for an oppressed segment of the American community. These writings not only increase our understanding and appreciation of jazz music but also improve what Ellison called our “moral perception” vis-À-vis the American quandary of race. Gleaning from Handel’s opera Rodelinda, Ellison mused: “Art thou troubled? Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee.”17 In this fiftieth anniversary year of Invisible Man’s publication, all Americans should take note.

Lucas E. Morel is assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University and editor of a forthcoming book, Raft of Hope: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the Politics of the American Novel.

1. “Introduction to the Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man,” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (Modern Library, 1995), p. 482.

2. “The Constitution is a script by which we seek to act out the drama of democracy, and the stage upon which we enact our roles.” “Perspective of Literature,” Collected Essays, p. 773.

3. “Introduction to Shadow and Act,” Collected Essays, p. 54. Recalling his early friendship with Richard Wright, Ellison remarked that Wright’s literary expertise “gave me something of that sense of self-discovery and exaltation which is implicit in the Negro church and in good jazz.” “Remembering Richard Wright,” Collected Essays, p. 672.

4. “A Completion of Personality,” Collected Essays, p. 799.

5. “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,” Collected Essays, p. 678.

6. “Indivisible Man” (December 1970), Collected Essays, p. 394.

7. “‘A Very Stern Discipline'” (March 1967), Collected Essays, p. 750.

8. “On Initiation Rites and Power: A Lecture at West Point,” Collected Essays, pp. 533-34.

9. “What These Children Are Like,” Collected Essays, p. 550.

10. “Jerry Jazz Musician,” www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML. cfm?page=interviews.html.

11. “The Charlie Christian Story,” Collected Essays, p. 272.

12. “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Collected Essays, p. 582.

13. Ellison wrote, “I had learned from the jazz musicians I had known as a boy in Oklahoma City something of the discipline and devotion to his art required of the artist.” “Living with Music,” Collected Essays, p. 228.

14. “Juneteenth” stands for June 19, 1865, when Texas slaves first heard of their emancipation under Lincoln’s famous proclamation—which was announced on January 1, 1863.

15. For a more biographical look at Ellison and his work, in addition to O’Meally’s somewhat dated The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980), see the forthcoming Ralph Ellison: Emergence of a Genius by Lawrence P. Jackson, or wait another year for the authorized biography by Arnold Rampersad, who has already written well-received biographies of Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson.

16. “The Charlie Christian Story,” Collected Essays, p. 267.

17. “Living with Music,” Collected Essays, p. 236.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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W. Dale Brown

A conversation with novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry

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Elizabeth Dewberry’s first novel, Many Things Have Happened Since He Died (1990), introduced a distinctive voice to American fiction. That novel and her second, Break the Heart of Me (1994), both of which were published under the name Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn, were followed by several plays, including Flesh and Blood and Four Joans and a Fire-Eater, as well as a stage adaptation of Many Things Have Happened.

In February, Dewberry’s third novel, Sacrament of Lies, was published by Blue Hen/Putnam. In one sense, it marks a new departure for her, crossing into the territory of the psychological thriller—though it’s not strictly a “genre” book. It is also a natural continuation of her earlier work, particularly in its attention to spiritual reality. And like Jane Smiley’s novel, A Thousand Acres, which retells and revises the story of King Lear, set on a farm in Iowa, Sacrament of Lies tranposes Hamlet to contemporary New Orleans and makes the protagonist a young woman. Dale Brown, who has been following Dewberry’s career from the beginning, talked with her about the new book.

There was a gap of eight years between Break the Heart of Me and Sacrament of Lies. Did you have to write a bad book or two to get to this new novel?

Sort of. For a while, I was working on a book about a woman who set her house on fire while her husband was asleep inside. Then I started writing about a woman who thinks the Virgin Mary has appeared in her bathroom window. But neither of those went anywhere. I didn’t even give them titles. Sacrament of Lies was first conceived about six years ago, while I was working on other things. I guess I actually worked on it for maybe three or four years, depending on what you count as work.

And you were writing plays during those years, too.

Yes, I did several one-acts and two full-length plays, Flesh and Blood and Four Joans and a Fire-Eater. Four Joans is about a group of friends who decide to do past-life regressions under hypnosis, and they all come out of it believing that they used to be Joan of Arc. It’s a comedy that asks questions about whether it’s possible to have a mystical experience today— whether it’s ever been possible, for that matter. I’m working on one right now called Goddesses in Distress. It was inspired by the true story of a student in England who ambushed Germaine Greer, the once-radical feminist who wrote The Female Eunuch. The student broke into her home and tied her up for three hours. I read about that and kept wondering what happened during those hours. When I started writing the play, though, I found that the dynamics became more interesting and more flexible when I changed the characters from a radical Seventies-style feminist professor and her disgruntled student to the author of a New Age feminist self-help book and a disgruntled reader. The author herself recognizes that the book is banal, but it has become a bestseller, and the reader who ambushes her has taken its bad advice too literally, so now she’s blaming the mess she’s made of her life on the author.

How do you shift from playwright to novelist?

They are two very different modes of discourse. One is solitary, and for your solitary endeavors you get the benefit of having complete control. And you get a book, this sensual, lasting object that you can hold in your hands and look at on your shelf and smell and, of course, read, which is a tremendous pleasure. And the other is collaborative, which is more fun, but you don’t always have control. You have other artists contributing, and sometimes they contribute things that aren’t what you want them to contribute. Though, of course, sometimes they bring it to life in ways that are just exhilarating. There’s no thrill for novelists like the opening night of a play, but there’s also no heartbreak like closing night. Going out of print feels bad, but at least your book still exists. So I find pleasures both places.

There must be some cross-fertilization. This new novel certainly has the influence of a play. Did the Hamlet connection emerge as you worked on Sacrament of Lies, or did you start there?

I started with Hamlet. That’s probably one reason the book took me so long to write, because I was learning structure and some elements of character and plot development from Shakespeare. It took a while for the characters to come into their own lives, their own voices, their own souls. The book had to move beyond Hamlet and come to life for itself.

As with your earlier novels, I was struck by your preoccupation with the spiritual. In so many ways, this is a book about prayer. The protagonist, Grayson, wants to pray, wants to believe, but she finds the church “locked and empty” and there are “no guides.” Am I pushing too hard to call it a book about prayer?

I wouldn’t say prayer is its primary subject, but a quest for truth is always a prayer, in a sense, and clearly, Grayson is looking for truth. She wants to know who killed her mother, but she also wants to understand the nature of good and evil. She’s asking, “What do you do when confronted by evil in your own family, and even in your own heart?” Those questions are always forms of prayer. I see writing itself as a form of prayer, a way of trying to connect with something powerful and loving that is both within and beyond myself, that Mystery at the center of the universe.

I remember a line from Break the Heart of Me, where Sylvia is described as being “shy around God.” I felt that same thing with Grayson. And there’s that business of her confusing her father with the Old Testament God and thinking she can’t believe in either anymore. Where does that come from?

I think it would be fair to say that I’ve been on a spiritual journey myself. In the past few years, I’ve been trying to find a new way to approach God, a way toward a God who is less mean than the one I grew up believing in. So, maybe there’s a sense of shyness in myself there, of feeling like I’m looking for God in places that I haven’t looked before. I’m not sure.

I grew up immersed in Scripture and memorized a lot of it. It was part of my daily life. I went to a very religious school; my parents were very religious. And I was very sincerely, devoutly religious, believing, as I was taught to, in the literal truth of the Bible, so I spent a lot of time trying to make literal sense of Scripture. I remember being bothered as a child by the lines “In the beginning God,” and “In the beginning was the Word,” and thinking, “Well, which was it?” Later, of course, I would learn about metaphor. But maybe that’s where my tendency to wrestle accepted sentiments to the ground comes from, my early belief that I had to figure out the literal truth in order to understand any other kind of truth.

There’s a loss of faith in the church in this book, perhaps, and even something like satire on the institutions of religion. But there’s a larger conversation about faith, and Grayson seems to get there. Still, despite a certain affirmation at the end, you refuse to tidy everything up.

I think of satire as being detached and mocking, and that was not my attitude. I hope it didn’t come across that way. When you’re searching for truth and for God, and when you grow up in a religious environment, the church is usually the first place you look, but Grayson’s search had to take her beyond that. The church holds some truths, but the institution of religion is not the same thing as individual spiritual experience with God. Sometimes that takes place within the church but certainly not always.

Grayson has insisted on truth. She has decided not to live with lies, not to live with evil, and not to look the other way when she’s being asked to participate in lies. So yes, she’s come to a good place, a hopeful place. But it’s also a messy place because life is messy. It didn’t feel true to try to wrap everything up and claim she’s going to live happily ever after.

Has September 11 changed the way you write?

If you had asked me this a month or two after it happened, I would have said yes. But now that the first major shock is starting to wear off and now that it’s looking like we’re going to be able to be safe again, it’s different. This is obviously a major turning point, but in some very basic sense, the human heart remains the same century after century, and we’re always going to want to tell stories and understand our own souls better through those stories. So essentially, I’m still doing what I did before.

On the other hand, I’m more aware now of my own mortality and the mortality of buildings and institutions and countries and the vulnerability of people who don’t seem at first glance vulnerable at all. I think we’ve all changed in that way, and that kind of awareness can’t help but inform what I write.

W. Dale Brown is professor of English at Calvin College, where he also directs the biennial Festival of Faith & Writing. His book Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk About Their Vision and Work (Eerdmans, 1997), includes an earlier conversation with Elizabeth Dewberry as well as interviews with Frerderick Buechner, Garrison Keillor, and Will Campbell, among others.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Philip Jenkins

Religion and the new immigrants

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Anyone who has traveled in a bus or a subway in a major American city in recent years knows that the ethnic face of the country is changing dramatically. Once upon a time, when Americans spoke of ethnic diversity, they were usually referring populations derived from Europe. Of course, black-white relations constituted the intractable American Dilemma identified by Gunnar Myrdal, and immigration from China and then Japan began in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the melting pot that attracted so much attention in the 1930s or 1940s looks in retrospect like a rather limited affair.

Matters changed fundamentally with the 1965 Immigration Act, which effectively removed any ethnic or racial barriers preventing immigration and duly opened the United States to a floodtide of newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The raw numbers are staggering. About five percent of U.S. residents today have immigrated just within the last decade. According to the Census Bureau, by 2050, a quarter of all Americans will claim Latino roots, and another eight percent will be of Asian stock. Mexican Americans alone should make up one-eighth of the U.S. population. Within just two or three years from now, both California and Texas will be “majority-minority” states, in which no single group constitutes an absolute majority of the population. The term may sound strange now, but get used to it: it represents the coming reality for much of the nation.

If, as Martin Marty famously declared, ethnicity is the skeleton of American religion, then this continuing revolution in our racial and linguistic identity should have immense consequences for the nation’s religious beliefs and practices. Indeed, some observers have been tempted to imagine a thorough transformation in America’s traditional religious coloring.

At first glance the notion is not entirely implausible. Immigration can sometimes cause a substantial increase in the adherents of a religion hitherto little known in a given country, as is demonstrated by the striking growth of America’s Jewish population in the previous great wave of immigration, between 1880 and 1924. (The “Judaeo-Christian” concept was an innovation of the 1940s.) Isn’t it conceivable, then, that our emerging polychrome nation might come to acknowledge Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism just as wholeheartedly (if only grudgingly, and after a great deal of discrimination) as it has come to accept the Jewish presence? And wouldn’t this bring about the eclipse of the well-known “Judaeo-Christian” scheme with which we have been so familiar for the past half century?

According to some writers, this is already happening; we simply haven’t noticed it yet. So argues Diana Eck in her book, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. Coming at a time when many Americans have been eager to affirm the tolerant, inclusive character of the nation, Eck’s enthusiastic vision of a new religious landscape has achieved wide and almost uniformly favorable publicity.1

However attractive one finds this notion, it suffers from one crucial defect: it is simply not accurate as a description of the state of things. In religious terms, the United States is not now, and never has been, a terribly diverse nation, nor are any likely changes going to make it so. When we boast of our Judaeo-Christian character, we are speaking of a land in which Jews make up perhaps two percent of a population that is overwhelmingly Christian. When Eck envisages “the world’s most religiously diverse nation,” she is contemplating an America that, within 20 years or so, may include a non-Christian population of at most six or seven percent, a figure that includes all Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and Sikhs. That is about as diverse as most European lands, and far less so than the pattern that prevails in much of Africa or the Middle East.

Political factors go some way to explaining why Americans need to exaggerate their religious diversity. For liberals and secularists, the reasons are obvious enough, since the prospect of future growth by non-Christian religions can be used to deter Christian activists from trying to breach the wall of separation between church and state. In effect, Christians are under warning: today you may want to see a pastor leading graduation prayers, but just wait 20 years. Do you really want an imam or a Taoist priest fulfilling the same role? Far better to retain the neutrality of the public sphere.

There is, too, a quite innocent popular tendency to exaggerate the impact of the exotic, to see a few mosques, for instance, to note some women in their all-covering chadors, and to assume that Islam must be the religion of the American future. Yet the absolute numbers are often less impressive. I still treasure the scare-mongering title of a book that Wendell M. Thomas published as long ago as 1930: Hinduism Invades America. Thomas’s claim about the imminent Hindu upsurge was not true then, nor can we legitimately speak today of the United States as the world’s most religiously diverse nation.

All of which is not to deny that the mass immigration which began in the 1960s may have a transforming effect on American religion—but that impact will be most strongly felt within the Christian community. What one would never guess from Eck’s book is that the new immigration is substantially Christian, and hence is bound to change the face of the American church.

If such an ethnic change had occurred 40 or 50 years ago, white Anglo Christians would have viewed the new arrivals in terms of their potential as subjects for mission, but today, that presumption seems inappropriate. Often, it is the immigrants themselves who come from confident Christian societies, and if anybody is going to be doing the evangelizing, it may well be the new arrivals. Many of these new Christian communities are marked by a more traditional and charismatic kind of faith, with an emphasis on direct supernatural involvement in everyday life. As such new populations grow, so also might their particular styles of faith and worship.2

These potentially far-reaching changes can be glimpsed in several of the essays in the superb collection New York Glory, which takes a potentially off-putting format (the edited collection of scholarly essays) and turns it into a lively and quotable anthology of the urban religious experience. The book’s two dozen chapters cover themes such as denominational restructuring, issues of assimilation and conversion, and the changing role of gender, all viewed across a broad interfaith spectrum. Apart from the usual suspects—the so-called Great Religions—the book also covers less familiar religious communities, including the Yoruba and Rastafarian. Yet we are never allowed to forget that even here, in Babylon-on-the-Hudson, the new ethnic presences are predominantly Christian. As coeditor Tony Carnes notes at the outset, over 70 percent of new immigrants to New York are Christian; over half of all Asian immigrants are churchgoers.

My main criticism of this gem of a collection is that not enough of the essays explore the life of the new Christian congregations, but even what we have is highly suggestive. Excellent case-studies explore the dilemmas of the Mormons and the Seventh-day Adventists in absorbing the new immigrant faithful and accommodating their social and linguistic needs. Several other chapters explore Catholic issues, inevitably given that church’s traditional strength in the New York region.

One key pressure point in years to come will be the struggle for Latino souls between Catholics and Pentecostals, a conflict that will decide the Catholic Church’s political and social influence in the changing city. Will that church try to keep the Latino faithful by respecting their traditions and cultural identity? Much is to be learned, perhaps, by observing the difficulties past bishops had in keeping older ethnic communities within acceptable bounds, an issue that emerged especially with the Italians. But while we know older ethnic communities would eventually assimilate and Americanize, we can be far less certain of this prospect where the newer migrants are concerned. Conceivably, much of what we think we know about the gradual mainstreaming of immigrant churches over time is no longer relevant.

Since relatively few of the essays in New York Glory address the rising churches that will obviously play such an important role in decades to come, it is a little baffling that so much of the specifically Christian material relates to denominations that are well-established but (frankly) declining. It is difficult to justify a chapter on New York’s Episcopalians while not including something on (say) the Assemblies of God. Another chapter is devoted to the theme of “Feminists, Religion, and Ethics.” The topic sounds promising, since women’s attitudes are likely to be pivotal in shaping the fortunes of the newer churches, but Susan Farrell’s chapter is actually a survey of anti-hierarchy Catholic polemic, very much an expression of Élite academic liberalism. It could usefully have been replaced by a case-study of a new Chinese or Korean church.

This criticism apart, at least the contributors to New York Glory recognize the central importance of religion to the city’s very diverse cultures, and treat the phenomenon with respect for faith and its adherents. One of the near miracles of the burgeoning scholarship on the new immigration is the number of academics who deal with every aspect of cultural and social diversity but still manage to ignore the religious outlook by which so many immigrants define themselves. This especially applies to literary studies of the new immigrant fiction, in which faith and the faithful are so much in evidence.3 Even when personal religious identification might not be strong, churches and other religious institutions are still critical loci for immigrant social organization—just look at the crucial political and financial role played by New York’s Korean American churches in Chang-Rae Lee’s best-selling novel Native Speaker (1995). So why are most academics unable to recognize the phenomenon? Are they embarrassed to discuss it?

The lack of attention to matters religious is particularly startling in Nancy Foner’s From Ellis Island to JFK, which compares the immigration experience in New York City during the two great waves of human movement, at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. The idea is well conceived, and the book writes itself in terms of the subjects for discussion—the nature of work, transnational ties, encountering prejudice, and so on. But the index contains no entries for churches, religion, Catholics (or Roman Catholics), or any related term. Religious schooling merits just a footnote. Jews are discussed, presumably because it was too difficult to find a way of referring to them that obliterated their religious identity. Conversely, I count almost 40 entries under “race.” Based on what we know about the role of places of worship in immigrant life, whether in 1902 or 2002, this kind of omission goes beyond eccentric. (To appreciate the full significance of religious expression in the New York immigrant world, just read a classic of modern scholarship like Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street.)

Religion likewise features little in Mary Pipher’s The Middle of Everywhere, an otherwise sensitive and rewarding account of the experiences of refugees on American soil. The religious factor would be all the more significant in this instance, because the very diverse exiles described (from Sudan and Kosovo, Afghanistan and Vietnam) find themselves in the deepest Midwest, in Nebraska, and it would be enthralling to trace the encounter between the various faiths, native and imported. It is also difficult to see how any account of the travails of refugees could omit the very significant role played by churches nationwide, but Pipher remains resolutely secular. (Encountering liberal intellectuals and the U.S. media, it is scarcely surprising that migrant newcomers see the country as a godless society in urgent need of the fires of conversion!)

Pipher reminds us—as Eck does—just how widely dispersed is the new immigration. Both New York Glory and From Ellis Island to JFK quite understandably take as their subject New York City, which perhaps more than ever can claim to be a truly global metropolis. (Pope John Paul II has called it “the capital of the world.”) Yet in some ways, it is in other regions of North America that immigration is having its most profound effects on religious life. This is most evident on the West Coast, where Asian American Christianity has to be seen in the context of the wider Pacific Rim region.4 And any plausible account of ethnic transformation must give pride of place to the growing Latino presence, which is even more evident in California or the Southwest than in New York City. Some cities in particular also deserve accounts of their own particular “glory.” Houston, for instance, is the subject of an exemplary collection of congregational case-studies edited by Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz.5 Houston’s experience is all the more important since this city is the center of several African-derived churches with an overpowering drive to evangelize the nation.

Taken together, these local snapshots of American religion cast a rather surprising light on the whole notion of globalization. In one respect, Eck is right. Far from being merged into an undifferentiated stew, America’s cities and communities are in some ways demonstrating quite as much local particularism as ever, though these local differences are often the product of diverse immigration patterns. To some extent, a knowledgeable observer can already identify the ethnic heritage of a given community by the pious symbols displayed on shops and cars: the Mexican Virgin of Guadelupe is already a familiar figure in much of the nation, but equally distinctive is the Cuban Virgin of El Cobre, or her Ecuadorean counterpart of El Quinche.6 Local ethnic distinctions are incomprehensible unless we pay due attention to the religious factors. In summary, American religion cannot be understood except in the context of the nation’s immigration history, and vice versa. That truth seems so obvious that only a dedicated academic would be capable of missing it.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author most recently of The Next Christendom: The Coming Global Christianity (Oxford Univ. Press).

Discussed in this Essay:

» Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis, editors, New York Glory: Religions in the City (New York Univ. Press, 2001).

» Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

» Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (Yale Univ. Press, 2000).

» Mary Pipher, The Middle of Everywhere: The World’s Refugees Come to Our Town (Harcourt Brace, 2002).

1. I have already published a detailed review of Eck’s book in Chronicles, January 2002, pp. 27-28.

2. R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner, editors, Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Temple Univ. Press, 1998); Jeffrey M. Burns, Ellen Skerrett, and Joseph M. White, editors, Keeping Faith: European and Asian Catholic Immigrants (Orbis Books, 2000).

3. Gilbert H. Muller, New Strangers in Paradise (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999).

4. For Asian American churches, see Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999); Ho Youn Kwon, Kwang Chung Kim, and R. Stephen Warner, editors, Korean Americans and Their Religions (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2001).

5. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, editors, Religion and the New Immigrants (AltaMira Press, 2000).

6. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Michael G. Maudlin

If Jesus is who he says he is, then Jesus should be where he says he will be …

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Harold Fickett’s The Living Jesus is based on a premise as uncomplicated as a two-by-four: If Jesus is who he says he is, then Jesus should be where he says he will be—that is, in his church. “Jesus’ prophecy of continuing to abide among his followers meant far more than the usual elegiac memorializing,” Fickett writes. “He gave us reason to believe that his very personhood—who he is—would invest itself in those who chose to follow Jesus’ way.” Fickett goes so far as to warn that if the church does not display Jesus’ “holiness, or perfect love,” then the world has reason to doubt the resurrection.

A novelist, ghostwriter, editor, and journalist, Fickett has spent a lifetime in the bowels of the church’s subculture and knows its unseemly side all too well. What he is after in The Living Christ is what emerges out of all the muck, what rises above the personality cults, the glitz, the wunderprograms, the spectacular failures, and the everyday sins. He wants to see Jesus.

Where to look? Shouldn’t Jesus be known to us today in the same ways he was known when he walked the earth? Yes, Fickett says:

I began doing spadework, thinking through what I knew of the various aspects of Jesus’ personality as we see him in the gospels. I became convinced that the most illuminating way of looking at Jesus centered in the roles he played in the lives of those who met him, whether followers or opponents.

The result of that “spadework” is an interesting though idiosyncratic menu: Jesus as wayfarer, healer, man of prayer, liberator, prophet, and martyr.

The first category is the most forced: while Jesus was certainly a wayfarer in that he traveled far by foot, there is nothing revelatory about this attribute. A hobo is not Christlike simply by being a hobo. But this is Fickett’s excuse to talk about Chaplain Ted Keller at Transport for Christ, a 24/7 truckers’ ministry in Columbia, South Carolina. Keller and his volunteers counsel, problem-solve, befriend, encourage, and evangelize the lonely truckers who come their way. Exhibit a is 25-year truck-driving veteran Troy. Grandfather Troy has lost most of his family ties. One night, after drinking too much, visiting his favorite pornographic website, and almost picking up a homeless teen-turned prostitute, he begins to realize just how lost he is. He stumbles into Whispering Hope Chapel and finds Chaplain Ted.

Then we witness a true miracle: Troy hears and receives the gospel and discovers that at this late date he can truly change. Troy’s first act is to reach out to the lost teen he had met earlier.

The “healer” is Father Peter Rookey, an eightysomething priest in the Servite order who travels the world putting on Pentecostal-styled healing services. Father Rookey became a priest after having his eyesight miraculously restored after 18 months of blindness. He first began to suspect he might have a vocation in healing after he administered last rites to his 16-year-old cancer-stricken nephew—who, to the surprise of his uncle, was healed. Based in Chicago, Father Rookey is in Mexico when Fickett catches up with him. Fickett sees thousands line up, many carrying cripples and acutely ill family members to the services. After the Mass, Father Rookey spends almost six hours anointing and praying for individuals. Some are “slain in the Spirit” Benny Hinn-style, some get up out of their wheelchairs, but most are not healed. Where Jesus is in all of this is hard to grasp. Fickett concludes, “I have a much greater appreciation for how people in the gospels could witness the miracles of Jesus and not know what to make of these wonders and the person who performed them.”

Our model for Jesus-like prayer is Barbara Matthias, who, during the day, cleans the toilets of a McDonald’s in Santa Maria, California, and in the evenings has ecstatic visions of and conversations with Mary—along with Joseph and Jesus. Matthias, a tiny woman (her physical development stunted by Turner’s syndrome), received communications from heaven early in her life. The day before her father was to die of a heart attack, God spoke to her to prepare her for what was going to happen. She wanted to be a nun from age 10. But her timing was off. In the Sixties she was discouraged from joining a convent. A long, twisting path led her to a California roadside where another woman had seen Mother Mary. Matthias did, too, and on a daily basis. Now people come to her to hear what the holy family has to say and experience their comfort. Fickett admits that “visionaries, strictly speaking, add nothing to our understanding of the Christian faith. In fact, their messages, when authentic, tend to be boring: a long series of religious admonitions that we have already heard a million times.” But he feels “Barabara’s experiences bring the transcendent so close, give us such reason to hope for an eternal destiny.”

The “liberator” is Lauran Bethell, an American Baptist missionary who rescues Thai country girls from the slavery of the sex trade and either returns them to their families (if they are still wanted and if it was not the family who sold them into prostitution) or houses and cares for them. Through Bethell we hear the story of Malee, an Akha tribal girl who lost her mother while still young. Her father, an opium addict, sells his daughter and two sons to a local opium dealer who treats them as house servants. As a young teen, Malee hears about opportunities to make money so that she can support her younger brothers. A former fellow villager “helps” her come to the city, where he sells her to a local pimp who rapes her and chains her to a bed. After being “conditioned,” she becomes a prostitute. A year later, straddled by yet another customer, she realizes that he is mumbling in the Akha language. She begs him to tell the village leaders of her plight. Bethell is contacted and Malee, since she is underage, is freed by the authorities. After Bethell’s care and support of Malee, we last see her as a happy, married Christian mother living in a village. Who can argue that this is not an example of profound liberation?

After the eclecticism of his earlier choices, Fickett’s pick for “prophet” is surprisingly predictable: John Paul II. Since Fickett is an adult convert to Catholicism, we can forgive him the exuberance of this nomination. And given the pope’s record fighting communism and shaping the church, he is certainly one of Catholicism’s most prophetic popes. Here Fickett focuses on the pope’s emphasis on repentance for the church’s Jubilee 2000 celebration and describes what influenced Karol Wojtyla to make this stand. We hear of his clandestine seminary days fighting Nazis and of his role at Vatican II in shaping the church’s understanding of religious liberty. If the bureaucratic head of a billion-plus-member religious body can be a prophet, then there is hope for us all.

The last modern icons of Christ we encounter are Iranian pastors who are martyred for their faith. Near the site where Daniel was thrown in the lion’s den, we meet Mehdi Dibaj, an Assemblies of God minister who spent nearly ten years in prison for his faith. A convert from Islam in 1955, Dibaj is given every opportunity by the authorities to regain his freedom. First, he is asked to sign a paper admitting he was wrong and that he wants to return to Islam. When this fails, he is beaten and tortured and put through mock executions. His wife succumbs to pressure, converts to Islam, and is married off to another man, though Dibaj’s children refuse to renounce their faith. Next Dibaj is offered freedom in exchange for admitting that he is mentally unstable. It is only after fellow pastor Haik Hovsepian-Mehr, chairman of Iran’s Protestant Council, courageously sends out an open letter to Western media publicizing Dibaj’s plight, that he is freed. Not long after, Haik disappears and his murdered body is found. Still, Dibaj refuses to flee and continues his pastoral ministry; soon he meets the same fate. What is the result? “In 1977 there were only twenty-seven hundred evangelicals in Iran out of a population of 45 million. Of these only three hundred were former Muslims. Today, there are close to fifty-five thousand believers, of whom twenty-seven thousand are from Muslim backgrounds.”

Certainly Jesus can be found in these well-told stories, though his image is not always clear. The most compelling testimony is found in the lives he has touched. Who but Jesus could turn an aging and selfish truck driver into a pious disciple or a twice enslaved girl into a happy wife and mother? Who but Jesus could bring about the astonishing growth of the church in Iran?

One unintentional lesson of these stories is how difficult it is to fulfill a true religious calling in this day and age. Chaplain Ted started out as a songleader and revivalist, but careerism and personal ambition drained the meaning from his profession and he eventually left it. Only after a dramatic near-death experience does he rediscover his vocation to preach the gospel. After the young Father Rookey finds success as a healer in Northern Ireland, the church clamps down and transfers him to Rome to become a bureaucrat for the next 33 years. Barbara Matthias knew from a young age that she had a religious vocation for a life of prayer, but no one wanted her and she stumbled through three marriages before finding her niche. Lauran Bethell endured many years of aimless work in Asia and suicidal depression before she discovered her calling. Only those leaders formed in an explicit context of persecution—Pope John Paul II and the Iranian martyrs—seem to have direct vocational paths.

While these dramatic stories make for wonderful reading, they are not in themselves compelling arguments for the faith. As Fickett would surely agree, the book depends on the same ingredient the church needs to succeed: God’s Spirit. If the Spirit is moving in you, teaching you, enlightening you, revealing himself to you, then The Living Christ may be an instrument by which he does his work. Then again, he may use your local church.

Fickett closes the book with the story of Saint George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita, Kansas, as it prepares to celebrate Easter in 2001 amid coming storm. Various vignettes profile different members and how their lives have been shaped by the church. His point seems to be that we do not need to go very far to see Jesus at work in his church. If the living Christ is active among the Lebanese of Kansas, then Jesus is close at hand wherever you are. Amen.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

    • More fromMichael G. Maudlin

Peter T. Chattaway

The impossibility of being celibate

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Chastity—that’s Cher’s daughter, right? And then there’s Virgin Records. It hardly comes as news that we live in a time when once-prized Christian virtues survive chiefly as vehicles for irony. Still, there are moments when a celibate person realizes afresh just how profoundly out of step he is with the world.

Several months ago, David Letterman mentioned in one of his monologues that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, one of Hollywood’s more celebrated couples, had reportedly not had sex with each other until after they had gone out for nine months. As one who has always associated sex with lifelong commitment, and as one who has always assumed that I would have to know someone for at least a year before making such a commitment (to see how we handle all the holidays, if for no other reason), I thought it didn’t sound so odd to wait that long. But I was brought back to earth by the huge collective gasp that came from Letterman’s audience. Apparently the thought of a couple—especially two hot young actors—putting off that kind of intimacy for so long was one of the more shocking things they had ever heard.

I had another one of those moments a few months ago when the ads for 40 Days and 40 Nights, which declare that it is “unthinkable” for someone to give up sex for little more than a month, began popping up. Forty days? I wanted to laugh. Try 30 years!

40 Days and 40 Nights stars heartthrob du jour Josh Hartnett (currently best known for playing military types in Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down) as Matt Sullivan, a twentysomething dot-commer whose girlfriend dumps him and becomes engaged to a guy higher up the corporate ladder. Unable to cope with the breakup, and egged on by his sybaritic roommate, Ryan (Paulo Costanzo), Matt runs through a series of one-night stands, hoping in vain that each sexual encounter will distract him from his romantic woes. But these flings always end with Matt overwhelmed by the “vast emptiness” of his promiscuity and shaking from panic attacks. Desperate, he turns for advice to his brother John (Adam Trese), who is studying to be a priest, but John cynically questions Matt’s ability to control himself. Lent is about to start, and Matt decides to prove John wrong, vowing to give up all sex-related activities for 40 days.

Of course, it isn’t easy for a man like Matt to quit sex cold turkey—not when he’s the sort of guy who can apparently bed a girl without even trying to seduce her. His coworkers set up a gambling pool over the Internet, taking bets on how long his vow of celibacy will last; a few of his female colleagues set out to tempt him on days when it will help them to win the jackpot; and since Matt’s vow covers masturbation as well, one of the guys in the office dangles a copy of Penthouse before him and sends him marching to the bathroom, like a recovering junkie anxious for a place to shoot up. (In a different scene, Matt insists he isn’t a sex addict, but at times he sure acts like one.)

All these attempts to compromise Matt’s integrity fail in the end, but an even bigger threat to Matt’s resolve appears when he meets Erica (Shannyn Sossamon) at the laundromat. Matt and Erica go out on a few dates, but his reluctance to immediately hop into bed with her is a stumbling block for their relationship. Erica wants to have sex pretty much right away, but Matt insists on sticking to his vow, which is due to expire in a few weeks anyway. So instead of actually having sex, they talk about the fact that they aren’t having sex. Without intercourse to keep them occupied, Matt and Erica don’t really know what to do.

Better films than this have succumbed to the idea that couples should just naturally fall into bed, and it is especially disappointing to see how easily even the most creative films can fall back on these conventions after exposing their hollowness. The recent French hit Amelie is an interesting case in point.

As the narrator tells us early on, the title character (Audrey Tautou) doesn’t find sex all that rewarding, so she looks for more interesting ways to spice up life for herself and her neighbors. One of the people she helps from afar is Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), who works at a sex shop and seems to be bored with his job; Amelie also prods two people into an unlikely affair that includes some furious sex in the back of the cafe where she works, but the relationship in question falls apart not long after. So the film establishes that sex, in and of itself, is no guarantee of happiness. Yet when it comes time to wind the story up, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet presents Amelie and Nino under the covers. After everything else we have seen, the final shot of these two lying beside each other feels utterly cynical and contrived.

The idea that it is wrong or abnormal to go without sex can be found throughout pop culture, and it even surfaces in films that are meant to appeal to very young audiences. Crossroads, the new movie starring pop idol Britney Spears, makes the point on a few occasions that people who have not lost their virginity by the time they finish high school are open to ridicule. The character played by Spears resolves this problem in her own life when she goes to bed with a sexy young man just days after meeting him.

For better or worse, sexual attraction is a fact of life, and there is nothing inherently wrong with films that try to find humor in the subject. By exaggerating our sexual frustrations through books and films, we can learn to laugh at them and distance ourselves from them, and when this is done right, it can be a healthy thing. But 40 Days and 40 Nights exaggerates the significance of sex to the point where it eclipses just about every other way of relating to people; abstinence itself becomes just another way of making sex more kinky. Matt and Erica could spend their time getting to know each other on some deeper level, and at first, they do make a few efforts in that direction, but in the end, they start looking for loopholes in Matt’s vow.

One incident sees Matt and Erica half-naked and stroking each other with flowers; Erica even has an “immaculate orgasm,” as her friend calls it, when Matt blows a petal into her panties. For a man who swore he would not do anything “sex-like,” this is pretty sensual stuff, but since he never touches her skin, his conscience is clear; he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

40 Days and 40 Nights stands out from the usual run of romantic comedies for its use of religious themes, but it never gets past the level of caricature. Matt and his brother have dinner with their parents at one point, and it’s clear from her modest attire and timid demeanor that we’re supposed to think of their mother as a prim, proper, conservative woman who would rather not talk about sex at the table. But it doesn’t take much prodding from her husband for her to open up and discuss it. Matt and John look shocked—this is the payoff of the comic reversal—but their mother talks about sex so naturally it’s hard to believe this could really be the first time they have seen their parents raise the subject. Later we learn that John the seminarian is having an affair with a nun. Naturally.

Director Michael Lehmann and writer Rob Perez also miss a great opportunity to explore the spiritual, character-building significance of Lent. “This is growth, this is self-denial, this is sacrifice,” says Matt when he first makes his vow. But what sort of growth actually takes place over the course of the film? When Matt takes the vow, he doesn’t do so as part of a larger faith community; he doesn’t pray or fast or do anything else to indicate any sort of belief on his part, unless you count the Bible verse he quotes when his sex deprivation causes him to hallucinate.

In fact, once his ordeal is over, Matt tells Erica that he “screwed up” by sticking to his vow: “I should have just done this,” he says, and then they kiss. The next and final scene has Matt and Erica making up for lost time, as they embark on the 36th hour of a marathon bedroom session. And that, of course, is how a comedy is supposed to end: normality is restored, the values of the community are reasserted, and all is well.

Peter T. Chattaway lives in Canada and writes about films.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

    • More fromPeter T. Chattaway

James Turner

The unconversion of a Victorian prophet

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Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man’s attributes.” So goes one of the best known of William James’s obiter dicta. It is not so widely known that James wrote those words in reference to John Ruskin, provoked by the appearance in the July 1904 Atlantic Monthly of some letters that Ruskin had written to their mutual friend, Charles Eliot Norton.

James was writing to Norton four years after Ruskin’s death and 15 years after he slipped into silent insanity following a long period of mental unstability. Indeed, well before James penned his famous observation, Ruskin had receded into that limbo set aside for great authors the reasons for whose greatness no one can any longer quite explain, since almost everyone has stopped reading their books.

Ruskin’s status has not altered fundamentally since 1904. Everyone knows he is a Revered Writer; but he is one who, unlike such very different contemporaries as Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, is known to the general reader today by his halo alone rather than by his books. Students who take courses in English literature still meet snippets of his prose in anthologies; and scholars of Victorian literature and culture of course read him more extensively, but as a rule still spottily (his output was vast). They are well rewarded for their effort—though also often puzzled. Ruskin was a master of supple, inventive, coruscating, heart-rending, evocative, tender, volcanic prose, so highly original a writer that the reader caught up on the stream of his words is often dumped out at the end without knowing exactly where she has been.

Ruskin wrote endlessly about art, but was not an art historian or art critic in any conventional sense. He drew and painted beautifully (the Tate Gallery recently mounted a Ruskin exhibition) but rarely gave his work finish and never sold it. He expounded political economy at exhausting length but spouted doctrines impossible to take seriously as plausible economics or practical politics. His later writing was half autobiography, but students of Ruskin know better than to trust his stories of himself.

More than anything else, he was a prophet, in the mold of such self-conscious sages of nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture as Coleridge, Emerson, and Carlyle. Carlyle is the closest analogue, a writer whom Ruskin deeply admired, whose fiery radical Toryism and suspicion of everything modern he shared, and after whom he to some extent patterned himself. In Ruskin’s heyday, prophets were honored in their own country, despite what the Bible tells us, as well as abroad, at least where English was spoken. They are not much anymore, especially when their deliberate obscurity makes it hard to figure out what they are trying to say. For 13 years, Ruskin addressed the more-or-less monthly letters called Fors Clavigera “to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain” (vanishingly few of whom can be imagined to have read them); the very titles of the issues of Fors send the most erudite reader off on a desperate (and usually fruitless) hunt for their meaning. No wonder Ruskin is to us more a name than a presence.

From this peculiar but real oblivion Tim Hilton strives to rescue Ruskin, to resuscitate him and his eruption of words for the advantage of twenty-first-century readers. Hilton even believes the impossible and endless Fors Clavigera to rank as perhaps Ruskin’s greatest work, a judgment most readers will regard as eccentric, to put it mildly.

Nevertheless, Hilton is in key respects ideally equipped for the job of rehabilitation. Himself an artist, he has taught both painting and art history and written extensively about art. Among his previous books is a lucid study of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the school that Ruskin famously championed and whose members loomed large in his personal life. (One of them, John Millais, ran off with their paladin’s wife Effie when she could no longer endure her sexually mute but psychologically domineering husband; another, Edward Burne-Jones, became one of Ruskin’s closest friends.) Not surprisingly, Hilton handles with ease and insight Ruskin’s own artwork and the art-historical contexts of his life and writing. Indeed, in the first volume of this biography (John Ruskin: The Early Years, published originally in 1985 and reissued in paperback to coincide with the publication of the second and final volume), Hilton illuminated as never before the association between Ruskin and the older genius who became his friend, the painter J.M.W. Turner, an affinity critical in forming both Turner’s reputation and Ruskin’s thinking.

But Hilton brings more to his encounter with Ruskin than technical acumen and art-historical knowledge. Like any serious biographer, he has immersed himself in Ruskin’s published writings and manuscript remains. More, he has immersed himself, if one may say so, in Ruskin. It should be said at once that this biography is not a “life and times”; the perspective on Ruskin is very much a view from within his own world. Hilton does not seriously attempt to situate Ruskin’s writings and influence within the larger context of Victorian intellectual life, nor does he seem to have the background of learning to do so. To say this is not to criticize, only to indicate the kind of book Hilton writes, and writes with panache and sensitivity.

Hilton is an amateur in the root sense of the word. His love for his subject goes back decades, and in his middle age it is still tinged with the enthusiasm of youth. In general, this affection does not cloud his eyesight: he sees pretty clearly Ruskin’s faults, which were at least as numerous as his virtues. But he does perhaps minimize the heedlessness of others’ feelings that was characteristic of Ruskin—too often amounting to cruelty—and he certainly overestimates his hero’s magnaminity. But one is all the more ready to forgive these peccadillos, not simply because biographers commonly admire their subjects to excess, but even more because of Hilton’s own generosity of spirit, which pervades the book and only rarely fails him. If one merited a biography of oneself, one would want this man to write it.

And yet. And yet. Ruskin was not a mature and well-rounded person but a genius who never fully grew up. He had astonishing strengths and equally amazing deficits; and Hilton’s book, for all its admirable qualities, can resemble its subject in the lopsidedness of its insight and its charity. For instance, Hilton is, like many biographers, given to psychological speculation about his subject; and his speculations can be both acute and well informed. Yet the subjects which he selects for exploration seem almost random.

Ruskin was a pedophile, though not of the physically predatory type—psychological predation being another matter. Hilton does not blanch at recognizing pedophilia as central to Ruskin’s psyche, but he does seem blind to the psychological predation that was Ruskin’s bent and at least insensitive to the fairly gross differences between a middle-aged man’s falling in love with a 12-year-old girl and with an adult woman. Hilton describes repeated cases in which Ruskin strove to infantilize grown women (perhaps most bizarrely in his communication with his cousin Joan Severn even when she was 40) but fails to recognize the phenomenon as chronic and significant. He is happy to speculate on the psychological meanings of details of Ruskin’s most protracted pedophiliac “romance” (carried on mostly in his own head), with the unfortunate Irish girl Rose La Touche, but he feels no need to explore the far more vital question of the nature and sources of Ruskin’s pedophilia itself.

Or consider Hilton’s abuse of Charles Eliot Norton, whom Ruskin famously called in his autobiography Praeterita “my first real tutor.” The close friendship between these two strikingly different but highly complementary personalities is not hard to explain, and in fact John Bradley and Ian Ousby did so perceptively in their admirable 1987 edition of the immense Ruskin-Norton correspondence, a book to which Hilton frequently recurs. Nor can Ruskin’s fondness for Norton be counted among his eccentricities. Many of Ruskin’s friends knew Norton, most notably perhaps Thomas Carlyle and Edward Burne-Jones; they also found him admirable and immensely likeable (the sole exception was, I think, James Anthony Froude, whom Norton distrusted and disliked from their first meeting). Hilton knows all this. But Hilton detests Norton and ipso facto finds nothing to understand, only to denounce. It is Hilton’s own likings that matter to him, not Ruskin’s—a crippling stance for a biographer.

An especial bÊte noire for Hilton is Norton’s characteristically Victorian attempt to protect his friend’s reputation, after Ruskin’s death, by burning his more compromising and embarrassing letters—of which there must have been a vast trove, given Ruskin’s childlike openness about his liking for pubescent girls. (Ruskin’s will gave Norton charge of his unpublished manuscripts.) Hilton rails repeatedly against this supposedly disgraceful act. Oddly, though, Ruskin’s secretary Sara Anderson also “efficiently removed the evidence of Ruskin’s more embarrassing behavior” without losing Hilton’s admiration; nor does Ruskin’s analogous service for his friend J.M.W. Turner (destroying Turner’s obscene drawings) draw any fire from Hilton. He writes as if his own dislike for Norton licenses him to apply a different standard to Norton than to Ruskin himself or Ruskin’s other friends—and to shirk altogether the biographer’s duty to understand his subject’s personal relationships. This sort of idiosyncrasy was typical of Ruskin but does not give the reader entire confidence in his biographer.

We are left, then, with a rich but sometimes puzzling lump of a book. It is (taking the two volumes together) far and away the best biography of Ruskin. We understand the man—or at any rate many key aspects of the man—better in Hilton’s pages than we have ever understood him before. This is especially true of his relations to artists, dead and living, and of his filiation with his parents, a loving dependency which remained Ruskin’s primary emotional affinity long after the time when most young men would have stood on their own or transferred their deepest affections to a wife. It is hard to imagine we will ever have a fuller account (or ever want one: the book does have its longueurs) of the painful but crucial attachment to Rose La Touche, who was nine years old when they first met. At the same time, this second volume rambles on at times in a way that can only be called self-indulgent (in marked contrast to the carefully controlled pace of the first volume). And because Hilton lets himself be guided by his idiosyncratic interests, he leaves the reader with only a feeble grasp of some of the most important of Ruskin’s connections and commitments.

In no case is this truer than in that of Ruskin’s religion. Hilton recognizes the centrality of Ruskin’s faith to his life and work; he describes the divigations that led Ruskin from his mother’s orthodox evangelicalism to his mature (if one can ever apply that word firmly to Ruskin) and highly personal version of Christianity: diaphonous, labile, but intense; and he does both with an appealing evenhandedness and generous effort to understand. Other writers on Ruskin tend to scold. They either scorn the rigid (but in reality far from cheerless) evangelicalism in which Ruskin was raised or frown on the admittedly sometimes wacky religion that he evolved for himself. Everyone from post-Christian secularists to the most orthodox Christians has always been able to find plenty to dislike somewhere in Ruskin’s changing beliefs. It is to Hilton’s credit that usually, and certainly in this case, he is more interested in understanding than condemning. If he appears to prefer his hero’s later faith, he is not really hostile to the earlier evangelicalism. For all the reader can tell, Hilton may be a religious man himself.

And yet he has a tin ear for religion, at least the Victorian varieties. In volume 1 he tells us much about the religious practices in the Ruskin household as John was growing up and about the preachers the family frequented, but he never seems to grasp the meanings and resonances of evangelicalism for the faithful in late Georgian and Victorian England and Scotland. Indeed, some comments lead the reader to suspect that Hilton thinks evangelicalism in 1830 pretty much the same thing, culturally speaking, as evangelicalism in 1930 or 2002.

Likewise, in volume 2, he makes clear that Ruskin read a good deal of or about the biblical critics of his day; and he recounts Ruskin’s frequent references, after his “unconversion” in the 1850s, to his inability—or, as Ruskin wrongly supposed, the inability of any contemporary educated person—to read the Bible as telling a literally true story, as opposed to a compelling myth. The corrosive effect of biblical criticism on the Christianity of many Victorians is a commonplace among historians, Yet neither Hilton’s explanation of the unconversion from evangelicalism in the first volume nor his episodic references to Ruskin’s evolving beliefs in the second integrates Ruskin’s encounter with the biblical critics of his epoch into the explanation of his ongoing religious development. Too often, Hilton leaves the reader familiar with the literature of Victorian religion shaking her head.

This is a shame; for at the end of the day Ruskin may be best understood in terms of the shifting meanings and consequences of religion for the Victorian intelligentsia—and Hilton himself may even recognize this. Ruskin’s upbringing in the Bible-based evangelicalism that decisively shaped the Victorian middle classes also decisively formed him as an intellectual. Long after he had left his mother’s faith behind (his father’s is a more complicated question, and not at all easy to penetrate), both Ruskin’s prose style and his symbolic imagination continued to reflect that lost world. His exploration in the early volumes of Modern Painters of the spiritual reality to be found underlying nature is a chapter in the story of the transference of once Christian faith to less doctrinally and historically specific sites—and possibly part of the grounding of his own unconversion several years later (though Ruskin certainly would not have suspected any such outcome at the time).

The faltering of his faith in the Bible, and hence in evangelical Christianity, under the impact of historical criticism of the Scriptures makes Ruskin an unusually visible instance, not only of the influence of German criticism, but more broadly of the transformation of Western culture by historicism, the idea that all we think and believe is the product of the particular history that has produced us. His recommitment in the 1870s to Christianity, but now a nondoctrinal Christianity stripped of its historicity and without stable foundation, is an almost textbook case of the transition from what may be called precritical orthodoxy to modernism.

Perhaps above all, Ruskin’s self-conscious adoption of the stance and manner of prophet marks both the continuing centrality of religion for him and the recession of Christianity from the center of Anglo-American high culture. For Ruskin’s often scorching denunciations and exhortations—as well as his haphazard and hapless stabs at organizing a better world—showed how Christianity had devolved into a secular faith, even for someone like Ruskin who believed fervently in a transcendent God.

Institutionally, he assumed the mantle of moral and spiritual authority traditionally worn by the clergy, yet he eschewed all connection or concern with any church. Substantively, his prophetic voice spoke not of saving souls, nor of a reformed society that would more profoundly glorify God, but of creating conditions of work and life that would allow men and women to use to the fullest their talents and express their ideal natures. This was far from a contemptible goal, but its connection with Christianity or with anything transcending the human is not obvious. The term “self-realization” was foreign to John Ruskin’s ears, but its utterance was not far distant.

All of this Tim Hilton misses in a book otherwise notable for its intelligence and acuity, for its generosity and warmth. There are a great many pleasures and rewards in this deeply felt and often superbly achieved work of the biographer’s art. But there is also much that one regrets not finding, lacunae that are not a scholar’s quibbles but real holes. Too often, Hilton allows himself to indulge in his favorite’s weaknesses: idiosyncrasy, lopsidedness, inconsistency. Perhaps, after all, mere sanity is not the most unimportant of a man’s attributes.

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. Among his books are The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999) and Language, Religion, Knowledge, forthcoming from University of Notre Dame Press.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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David A. Skeel, Jr.

Enron claimed to be a business unlike any the nation had ever seen

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Enron claimed to be a business unlike any the nation had ever seen—the ultimate exemplar of a world where (in then-chairman Kenneth Lay’s words) “the rules have changed” and “what you own is not as important as what you know.” Almost every analyst on Wall Street seemed to agree.

In the wake of Enron’s spectacular fall and the scandal that followed, we know that Enron wasn’t as different from other American businesses as we’d been led to believe. Indeed, Enron’s trajectory fits a very old pattern. All too often, the success of America’s most brilliant entrepreneurs has been followed by an equally dramatic collapse. Why is this so? To answer this question, and to see what we can learn from the Enron mess, consider a few of these predecessors.

One of the most remarkable was Jay Cooke. Although largely forgotten now, Cooke achieved great fame in the nineteenth century as a financial innovator who, like the architects of Enron, was the first to recognize the potential of a new market. Cooke began his career selling U.S. war bonds to ordinary citizens during the Civil War. After the war, he realized he could use the same door-to-door strategy to raise money for railroads and other private companies. Whereas businesses had always raised money solely from banks and rich investors, Cooke showed that corporate bonds, like other products, could be sold to large numbers of ordinary Americans.

Cooke’s ingenuity opened up a new source of financing for American business, and he quickly became fabulously wealthy. But he overexpanded, and within a few years numerous competitors were vying for the same markets. The end came in 1873, when the American markets were stunned by the news that the famous entrepreneur and his business had been thrown into bankruptcy by one of his creditors. Cooke’s demise helped to usher in the Panic of 1873, one of the worst depressions the nation has ever seen.

The infamous robber barons emerged during the same era, and many met a similar fate. Realizing that the railroads held the key to the nation’s economic future, men like Jay Gould bought up large swatches of track and built new ones. As often as not, they too overexpanded and their empires came crashing down, with claims of improper political influence or outright fraud swirling around them.

The twentieth century brought new examples of brilliant innovation that ended in shocking failure. Most eerily similar to Enron was the collapse of Samuel Insull’s vast energy company, Middle West Utilities, during the Great Depression. As with Enron, Middle West’s expansion had been fueled by a transformative insight. Insull realized that he could minimize the costs of generating electricity by building enormous, centralized power plants and keeping them running 24 hours a day. Insull then built up his customer base by selling the energy at astonishingly low prices. Through this process, which he referred to as “massing production” long before historians gave Henry Ford credit for the term, Insull easily outcompeted traditional suppliers, whose costs were much higher because their equipment lay idle much of the day.1

Unfortunately, Insull expanded much too far and too fast—sound familiar?—gobbling up numerous small energy companies and branching from utilities into manufacturing, construction, and other businesses. In the early 1930s, his empire collapsed amid allegations of fraud and misleading accounting. During the hearings that led to wide-ranging securities and utility reforms, Congress accused Insull of duping vulnerable investors by withholding information about the true liabilities of Middle West Utilities.

Much closer to the present was the spectacular collapse of Michael Milken and his investment banking firm Drexel Burnham. Milken pioneered the use of junk bonds—bonds that have a high risk of default and do not qualify as “investment grade,” usually because the company that issues them has a great deal of debt. Although investors traditionally had steered clear of junk bonds, Milken realized that their high yield, together with investors’ ability to reduce much of the risk through diversification, made junk bonds a promising new source of financing. Milken’s discovery quickly transformed the world of investment banking, and junk bonds were used to finance nearly all of the high-profile takeovers of the 1980s. Drexel threw an annual party, the “Predator’s Ball,” at which the leaders of Wall Street hobnobbed with Washington politicians. Yet, in less than a decade, Milken found himself in jail, and Drexel Burnham filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter.

Why is it that, throughout American history, today’s brilliant innovator so often becomes tomorrow’s disgraced failure? One explanation is simple hubris. “Pride goes before a fall,” we are reminded in Proverbs. Very frequently, the same qualities that make entrepreneurs special—brilliance, self-confidence, visionary insight—also bring them crashing down. Brilliant innovators often underestimate their own limitations, and think that everything they do is destined to succeed. Enron’s “Darth Vader,” former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, is a vivid example of the type. Shortly before Enron’s bubble burst, Skilling sneered at any analyst who dared to question Enron’s business plan.

The second crucial ingredient is competition. Although entrepreneurs make enormous profits when they create or discover a new market, their success is sure to attract competitors—and the more spectacular the success, the fiercer the efforts to get a piece of the pie. As competitors enter their market, innovators often see their lavish profits begin to slip away. Spurred by a dangerous combination of pride and desperation, they may take misguided and even illegal risks as they attempt to replicate their early success.

If anything, the remarkable market innovations of the past two decades have magnified the risk of future Enrons, both by enabling competitors to respond ever more quickly to new advances and by creating new financial devices that desperate innovators can use to place enormous bets on the future direction of the markets. Drexel Burnham’s collapse was precipitated, in part, by competition from lenders who could provide quicker and more complete financing for takeovers. Only a few years later, Long Term Capital, a hedge fund masterminded by several Nobel laureates, created a worldwide liquidity crisis when its massive bets on esoteric securities turned sour.

Enron has all of the attributes of these previous scandals and more. Enron’s energy trading business was a brilliant innovation, but its managers took more and more gambles as competitors emerged. They then tried to obscure Enron’s true condition through their now infamous off-balance-sheet partnerships.

What should Christians make of the Enron mess? The most important point is to recognize the limitations of legal solutions to the problems that made Enron possible. There is a tendency, among Christians and non-Christians alike, to assume that we can use legislation to force people to act morally. This impulse has inspired many of the reforms that have been proposed in the wake of the Enron debacle. The problem, as legal scholar William Stuntz has pointed out, is that these kinds of reforms often have effects precisely the opposite of what they intend. Prohibition is the most obvious example, and there are many others.

The risk that regulatory solutions will prove counterproductive (that law causes sin to increase, to borrow a concept from Paul) does not mean that we should simply move full steam ahead with deregulation. While advocates of deregulation recognize the dangers of governmental intervention, they often underestimate the misbehavior of individuals and businesses in the marketplace. Clearly it was a mistake to leave the derivatives contracts that were traded in Enron’s energy business almost entirely unregulated.

What this suggests is that lawmakers should fill in the regulatory gaps, but that we must avoid the temptation to try to prevent future Enrons by enacting a tangled web of precise new regulatory rules. Indeed, it was regulation—not the absence of regulation—that made Enron’s off-the-balance-sheet partnerships (many of which seemed to comply with the existing accounting rules) possible.

There is another, related lesson as well. One of the most stunning revelations about Enron concerned its flagship energy trading business. When Wall Street analysts came to Houston, Enron’s employees pretended to be engaged in vibrant energy trading operations. They made fake telephone calls and negotiated imaginary trades. This incident shows just how deeply sin can work its way into an institution. Rather than involving only a few executives at the top, Enron’s misbehavior extended all the way down through the organization.

Some of the excesses of Enron can be addressed by regulation. But the rest comes down to business ethics and individual morality—the commitment of ordinary men and women to resist the often subtle temptations to sin. Although few of us work for brilliant innovators like Michael Milken, Kenneth Lay, and Jeffrey Skilling, many of us work in organizations that have a similar structure. This means that the lessons of Enron are lessons for every one of us.

1. See Rebecca Smith, “Enron’s Rise and Fall Gives Some Scholars A Sense of DÉjÀ vu.” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2002. Insull’s techniques are described in more detail in Forrest McDonald, Insull (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 97-99, 104.

David A. Skeel, Jr., is professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the author of Debt’s Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Lauren F. Winner

What has really changed for women since the Fifties

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A copy of The Bell Jar has gathered dust on my bookshelf for at least a decade—that old Bantam paperback, with a black-gloved, feminine hand and a dark, dying rose melodramatically unfurling on the cover. The review quoted on the back is from The New York Times Book Review: “The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath’s twentieth year: about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue.” This Bantam edition was released in 1972, nine years after it had been pseudonymously published in England, and nine years after Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven and killed herself.

This edition of the novel concludes with a biographical sketch of Plath by Lois Ames. Ames tells us bluntly what, exactly, that distorting, suffocating bell jar was: “As she became increasingly conscious of herself as a woman,” writes Ames, “the conflict between the life-style of a poet/intellectual and that of a wife and mother became an increasingly central preoccupation.” One does not actually have to read The Bell Jar to know that Sylvia Plath (and her fictional alter ego, Esther Greenwood) cast a long shadow over subsequent discussions about how women should go about shaping their lives.

Sylvia Plath was not the only storied woman suicide of the era. A less ballyhooed death was that of Anne Parsons, gifted psychoanalytic thinker and daughter of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, perhaps the most influential social scientist of his generation. Anne Parsons, whose essays were posthumously published under the title Belief, Magic, and Anomie, has never gained anything like the cult following of Plath (or fellow poet-suicide Anne Sexton), and indeed is almost entirely forgotten except by those who knew her, but her 1964 suicide has nevertheless been elevated to metaphor by feminist sociologist Wini Breines.

Breines’s Young, White, and Miserable investigates the origins of feminism: how did a generation of middle-class girls, raised in the 1950s to be Harriet Hausfrau, turn into the bra-burning radicals who, in the 1960s, pioneered the movement for women’s liberation? Breines, one infers, finds unsatisfactory the increasingly narrow focus on the “radicalization” of women via their participation in the civil rights movement and the New Left, dominant in many current accounts of women’s liberation. Instead, she retrieves the premise that white, middle-class girls growing up in the 1950s were, well, miserable—a view that would be scorned as “undertheorized” by many feminist academics—and attempts to give it greater depth.

The misery of talented but oppressed females who grew up in the 1950s, Breines suggests in her last chapter, found tragic expression in Parsons’s suicide. That chapter, the reward for the stalwart reader who manages to stick with Breines’s otherwise whiny and unpersuasive book, is riveting. Breines quotes extensively from Parsons’s writings, and, without too much editorial intervention, tells a stunningly sad story. Born in Cambridge in 1930, educated at Swarthmore and Harvard, the brilliant young Parsons won a Fulbright to Paris, where she wrote a thesis on psychoanalysis and studied with Lacan, Piaget, and Levi-Strauss. She returned to Boston and “desperately wanted to get married,” but found herself too old (at 25!) and too intellectually accomplished to find a mate. She began training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, only to be dismissed two years into her program. In 1963, she was hospitalized at the Yale Psychiatric Institute, where she stayed until killing herself nine months later.

Breines convinces us that Parsons labored under “the familiar feminine conflict between work and love,” and that she was, in some sense, “a victim of the … culture of the feminine mystique that considered marriage and motherhood the only legitimate goals for white women.” One can go along with Breines’s suggestion that many white women in the 1950s wrestled with that same conflict, and perhaps even that their “misery … was a central factor in the development of the women’s liberation movement.” The argument comes apart, however, in the last step: that second-wave feminism provided the solution to this marriage/work problem that had made young white women miserable and caused Anne Parsons’s suicide. If only Anne had been born 15 years later, everything would have come up roses!

It’s a lovely thought. Unfortunately, it’s hogwash. To be sure, much has changed for women—some of it for the better, some of it for the worse—thanks to feminism’s second wave. But neither the National Organization for Women nor Emily’s List, never mind Planned Parenthood or naral, has provided women an answer to the question of Sylvia Plath.

The writings of Jill Ker Conway offer one example of how a woman can do intellectual work and hold together a marriage. Before settling down to write her memoirs, Conway served as a history professor and vice president at the University of Toronto, and then as the first female president of Smith College. In her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, Conway describes her oppressive childhood on a sheep farm in New South Wales: she is ground down by the deaths of her father and older brother, suffocated by her relationship with a mother who seems to have walked off the pages of Jung, and constrained by the “stereotypes of gender,” a fiery intellectual expected to apply for jobs as a receptionist. Conway transcends these barriers and pursues, with dazzling success, an advanced degree in history at the University of Sydney. Still, she articulates her own version of Plath’s problem near the end of The Road from Coorain: she describes a visit, in 1959, to the home of her brother, sister-in-law, and just-born nephew. “They seemed so happy in their tiny house in Charleville,” writes Conway, “that my own life seemed rather empty. Its fulfillments all seemed to lie in the direction of work.”

Her second memoir, True North, finds Conway doing doctoral work at Harvard, where she comes into her own. She meets and marries historian John Conway, a war hero old enough to be her father, and begins to rest easy in the skin of her intellectual calling:

I realized that I was serious about being a historian … Thirty-three might seem late for such a discovery, but a woman develops her sense of her working self on a different time trajectory from that of a man. Because society defines children as a woman’s prime responsibility, she needs to clarify what her reproductive life will be, and whether she is to be single or a member of a partnership. She may be working to the limit of her capacity throughout her twenties, but, when her inner discussion on these subjects arrives at a firm resolution, her working self blossoms, and she enters a highly productive stage of life.

True North ends like a feminist fairy tale: Conway is offered the presidency at Smith, and her ever-supportive husband urges her to take it, insisting warmly, “I’ve had my ten years in Canada … It’s your turn now.”

A Woman’s Education chronicles Conway’s decade at Smith. She assumes her post in 1975, presiding as Smith navigates the development of Women’s Studies, the rise of identity politics, and the explosion of the gay rights movement. Conway’s feminism does not always sit well in Northampton; she’s too radical for the old-guard male professorate, too traditional for a younger generation of feminist scholars and activists. But, a skilled politician and a guileless leader, Conway manages to build consensus, raise money, and, perhaps most critical, convince potential students and donors that all-women’s colleges, far from having outlived their usefulness, are essential in a seemingly coed world.

As Conway tells it, one of her most important achievements at Smith was helping students think carefully about vocation. “I knew from my own life,” writes Conway,

how intense an existential crisis settling the place of work and family in a woman’s life could be … It was great to have the feminist movement of the 1970s persuading women that serious work was an important aspect of human creativity from which women had been shut out. But there was still the question of … how one filled the page that was blank in most women’s life scripts about how work was to be meshed with family.

But if Conway articulates a professional women’s “existential crisis” with convincing, calm even-handedness, there is something unsatisfying in what passes as her answer to that question. When she recalls a baccalaureate service at which she talked about “the double roles of women and the ways I thought they were best managed,” her insights seem faintly dated. (Worried about housekeeping? Hmmph: “dust has no moral significance.”) And her own life, while vaguely inspiring, does not provide much guidance either: Conway made a May-December marriage with a man who was secure enough to let her explore, develop, and become the person she needed to be; and the Conways did not have children. For most women, that model is no model at all.

Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions provides another restatement of Plath’s problem. Having followed Wolf’s tortured relationship with makeup (in The Beauty Myth) and eavesdropped on her adolescent sexual escapades (in Promiscuities), we now get to watch as Wolf becomes a mother. Part memoir, part muckraking, Misconceptions provides a harrowing look at an obstetric world in which prospective parents are given next to no information and physicians perform unnecessary episiotomies and C-sections just to make a buck.

Many women, whose experience has happily been quite different, will find Wolf’s account overwrought, but few will be able to resist her dissection of the popular pregnancy tome, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. This cheery guide, charges Wolf, is full of inaccurate information. It understate the risks of amniocentesis, “vastly overstates” the number of fruits and veggies expecting moms should eat “because the goal is to get you to eat some healthful foods,” and forbids even the teeniest sip of alcohol even though studies show that pregnant women can drink moderate amounts of alcohol without harming the baby. Why? Because, says Wolf, pregnancy professionals believe a woman “can’t be trusted with moderation … [G]iven the facts and left to draw sensible conclusions, a pregnant woman would veer like the sense-glutted harlot she really is into the slough of sugary desserts and the dark forest of wantonly emptied bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream.”

These Jessica Mitford moments are sprinkled throughout Misconceptions, but the heart of the book is Wolf’s record of her own experience of pregnancy and motherhood. She feared “losing [her] identity” once her daughter was born. Granted there is something self-indulgent about Wolf’s middle-class wallowing, but there is also an arresting bravery in her bluntness: she’s a good mother, she loves her kid, and yet she felt downright ambivalent about becoming a mom.

That ambivalence has to do mostly with the effects of motherhood on women’s working lives. Drawing not just on her own experience but on that of friends and colleagues and on psychological studies of married couples with small children, Wolf describes a generation of “strong, progressive” women who, upon having babies, found themselves having conversations with their husbands about “whose career ‘would take the hit’ … always with the same outcome.”

Wolf is unclear when it comes to posing solutions to this problem. Insisting that “Good politics is the bedrock of good love,” she suggests that perhaps legislation is the answer. If new parents could find part-time jobs with decent benefits, if employers granted fathers flextime or paternal leave without “radically setting back their prospects,” then parenting could proceed in a more egalitarian fashion and women could embrace motherhood without worrying that they were going to morph overnight from an interesting, accomplished person to a mind-numbed dairy bar. In the same breath, however, Wolf admits that most men “are never going to sacrifice a career opportunity.”

So Wolf’s real conclusion is that equality, as initially envisioned by the generation of women who teethed on the assumptions of second-wave feminism, is not all it’s cracked up to be. “Our great romance was with the belief in equality itself,” she writes. But the egalitarian, bargains struck by feminist husbands and wives, while perhaps sufficient when it was just the two of them, were not “as reliable a foundation to support the sweet, heavy weight of a baby in a new family as was the staunch adhesive our grandmothers knew all about: submissiveness, tolerance, strategy—and a mother’s yielding heart.” This, of course, was what sparked Wolf’s maternal ambivalence in the first place. Here is the problem, the feminist enfant terrible seems to be saying. We’re just sort of stuck with it.1

One book is guaranteed to leave readers feeling somewhat more sanguine. Debra Rienstra’s Great with Child chronicles, Anne Lamott-like, a year-plus of pregnancy and motherhood. Rienstra and her college-beau-turned-husband decide that though it’s financially irresponsible and downright impractical, they will have a third child. We read about miscarriage and labor, breast-feeding and postpartum depression. By about page ten, most readers will wish they could sit down with Rienstra and have a heart-to-heart, and most readers will also feel a little bit of awe: here is a woman who seems, profoundly, to have her act together.

But even for this professionally accomplished woman (she teaches English at Calvin College) in what looks like a pretty terrific marriage, there is a hard, depressing balancing act. Rienstra has Virginia Woolf epiphanies in which she “looks[s] around this house and suddenly realize[s] that nothing here is exclusively mine, except maybe this little table in the corner bedroom where I write.” She sometimes despairs of being able to both tend to her children’s needs and say anything coherent from the Calvin lecture podium. The pressures are real, yet they don’t prove to be Rienstra’s undoing.

There are, I think as I close this book, at least two possible interpretations, not necessarily mutually exclusive. First, maybe I should have married my college boyfriend. Second, maybe I should, in that hackneyed phrase, let go and let God. Rienstra reminds us that, though having her third child was a reckless decision, it was recklessness in God, not “recklessness in a void.” And that is a lesson that applies whether you have children or not; it is the beginning of any true answer to Sylvia Plath’s question.

Argument by anecdote is risky, and one would do well to remember the criticisms hurled at Danielle Crittenden before one assembles anecdotes that have anything to do with women being unhappy. Though I could fill every page of Books & Culture with relevant vignettes, all I can speak to with absolute authority is myself. I, myself, often feel just what Conway described feeling half a century ago. Depending on what day of the week you ask me, I’ll put the Plath-Parsons-Conway question somewhat differently. Some mornings I’ll tell you that the problem is the nature of My Work, that this Work requires that I live, ultimately, in my head, and that living in one’s head is at odds with the requirements of sustained, intimate relationships. Other mornings, I will roll my eyes and say it is the men; I will tell you (with, admittedly, a touch of both exaggeration and arrogance) that most of the men I’ve dated wound up marrying women who don’t seem to need, as it were, a room of their own—marrying women, in other words, not like me. Some days I will admit that I am being a little melodramatic, but other days I’ll tell you that I feel like I have a choice, My Work or Marriage, and on those days I feel sad.

Last week I had dinner with a high school classmate, a very accomplished young woman with cover stories in major magazines and a novel already published. She’s pretty, and witty, and serves a mean tennis ball. We might have talked about any number of things we have in common—religion, politics, books. Instead, we spent most of dinner talking about why we aren’t married. We said things we’d said a thousand times before: maybe we’ll never meet men who aren’t intimidated by our rÉsumÉs; maybe we’re actually crazy/repulsive/gruesomely disfigured, and no one has had the heart to tell us; maybe, only a few years out of college, we are already too wedded to our independent, writing-filled routines to make space for anyone else.

“I think,” my friend said, peering at me over her arugula salad, “that it’s because we’re really the first generation of women … ” She trailed off, perhaps realizing that every generation of American women since 1900 has said that, and every generation has been, to some extent, right. “What I mean,” she continued, “is that I can’t ask my mom or any of my aunts how to do this part. They all left college to get married and have children.”

My response was pretty unhelpful. I told her not to expect a lot of guidance at Barnes & Noble. The books she’ll find there are poignant with question marks but short on answers. Taken together, they don’t offer much wisdom about how women should organize their lives. They simply demonstrate that second-wave feminism has not vanquished the bell jar. Times have changed, but the bell jar is with us still.

Discussed in this Essay:

  • Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992, 2001).
  • Jill Ker Conway, A Woman’s Education (Knopf, 2001).
  • Debra Rienstra, Great with Child: Reflections on Faith, Fullness, and Becoming a Mother (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002).
  • Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (Doubleday, 2001).

1. But Wolf’s ambivalence pales in comparison with the attitude expressed toward motherhood by another confessional writer of her generation, Lauren Slater. In her recent essay, “Noontime” (in Nell Casey, ed., Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression [Harper Perennial, 2002]), about her first pregnancy, Slater looks at motherhood as she looks at everything else, through the lens of her depression. She has been on Prozac for over a decade; ssris are as necessary to her normal functioning as water. When she and her husband decide to have a baby, she goes off Prozac, and the results are disastrous—spiraling depression and anxiety, so much so that Slater contemplates having an abortion. Thanks to a knowledgeable doctor and Slater’s ever winsome husband, Ben, she decides to have the baby. The doctor explains about estrogen and antenatal depression. Slater goes back on Prozac, this time with a little Lithium mixed in, and Ben assures her that, should motherhood ever prove too much for her, she can opt out for a while and simply be the baby’s aunt.At the end of the essay, Slater writes, “This is not maternal love I’m feeling … no coos or cuteness, it’s saner than that, I’m sane for now, and I am not my mother … and I look at Clara and I feel the best of what a woman has to offer. I feel friendship.” It is a curious solution (though an improvement over Sylvia Plath’s): create the space in which you can become a mother by insisting that what you are doing is not really motherhood. One wonders what Clara will have to say about her mother when she writes her own memoir 30 years hence. And one wonders who, exactly, is raising the next generation of children. Ben Slater can’t be looking after all of them.

Lauren F. Winner is a doctoral candidate in the history of American religion at Columbia University. With Randall Balmer, she is the author of Protestantism in America, forthcoming in July from Columbia University Press.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

    • More fromLauren F. Winner

Carla Barnhill

And why they need to take responsibility for the spiritual nurture of their kids.

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Instead of being an icon of homegrown terrorism, John Walker Lindh may go down in history as a poster child for baby-boomer parenting—the legacy of a generation that could not just say no. Lindh grew up in Marin County, California, home of great wealth and great liberalism. Jeff Jacoby wrote in The Boston Globe how again and again Lindhs’s parents “affirmed” his decisions: at 14, when he collected the nastiest hip-hop cds; at 16, when he decided to drop out of his alternative high school; and finally, when he became a Muslim after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “grew a beard, and took to wearing long white robes and an oversized skullcap.” Indeed, Jacoby writes, “his father was ‘proud of John for pursuing an alternative course’ and his mother told friends that it was ‘good for a child to find a passion.'” The Lindhs even paid for John to move to Yemen to learn “pure” Arabic and then to Pakistan to join a madrassah of radical Muslims.

“Even when it was clear that their son was sinking into Islamist fanaticism,” Jacoby writes,

they wouldn’t pull back on the reins. When Osama bin Laden’s terrorists bombed the USS Cole and killed 17 American servicemen, Walker e-mailed his father that the attack had been justified, since by docking the ship in Yemen, the United States had committed “an act of war.” Lindh now says that the message “raised my concerns”—but that didn’t stop him from wiring Walker another $1,200. After all, says Dad, “my days of molding him were over.”

The Lindhs represent an extreme version of the baby-boomer permissiveness that is coming home to roost in a generation of teenagers and young adults who seem more troubled, more lost than previous generations. The case of John Walker Lindh raises the question of parental responsibility: to what extent are parents to blame when their children commit crimes, beat up their classmates, or turn away from the family’s faith? It’s the same question we asked after the shootings at Columbine High School. It’s the same question we whisper to each other when we find out a friend’s teenage daughter is pregnant.

The question is more complex than it seems. Parents can do all the “right” things and still end up with prodigal children. And for all the years social scientists have carried on the nature vs. nurture debate, we are no closer to a definitive answer. In the last ten years alone, research has suggested that peers, not parents, are the major influence on a child’s moral development; that violent video games are the primary cause of school shootings; that passing out condoms in schools has led to a higher rate of sexual activity in teens. Blaming parents for the ills of our youth may seem too obvious and too easy a target, but just because a target is easy to hit doesn’t always mean it’s the wrong one.

Harsh reality TV

Last summer, my husband and I got hooked on a rerun of the 13-part pbs documentary series American High. The series followed a group of suburban Chicago high school students for a year to get a glimpse of the real life of today’s teenagers and their interaction with their families. For us as parents, the insights were sobering.

My favorite kid was 17-year-old Morgan—who, I must admit, is the sort of guy I would tell my teenage daughter to avoid, if I had a teenage daughter. Morgan is loud, hyper, obnoxious, sarcastic, and hysterical. (In one episode, his dad inquires about Morgan’s girlfriend. Morgan replies, “Come on. You’re supposed to be this dysfunctional family who doesn’t care about me.”) On the surface, he looks and acts like he couldn’t care less about anyone but himself. But behind the super-gelled hair, the enormous jeans, the attitude of complete disdain for life in general, Morgan is an intelligent, thoughtful boy who aches when he’s no longer allowed to see his girlfriend, who teaches gymnastics to kids with Down Syndrome, who actually talks with his parents on a regular basis—and that is not true for most of these kids.

There is Pablo, whose mother came to the United States from Ecuador when Pablo was young. Watching his mother’s third marriage fall apart, Pablo has become an angry, deeply troubled young man with a drug problem. He has a little sister, whom he wants desperately to save from his fate, and a substantial chip on his shoulder.

Then there is Anna, a sweet, intelligent, strikingly beautiful girl who seems destined for great things. But she, too, feels alienated and rejected by her parents, spending most of her senior year not speaking to her controlling father.

Allie, a senior whose parents are newly divorced, faces an uncertain future as she tries to recover from her own mistakes, including skipping out on most of her junior year. As she struggles to hold on to some kind of relationship with her father and his new wife, so she also battles daily with her mother, who is emotionally raw, still angry and confused by her husband’s rejection.

Week after week, we watched as these young people butted heads with their parents, their friends, their teachers. All the rotten things teenagers do—lipping off to adults, manipulating their way out of trouble, slacking off whenever possible—were played out in front of our eyes. It was obvious why teenagers often get a bad name. But something else was painfully obvious as well. All the teenagers featured in American High craved an intimate, loving relationship with their parents. And nearly every one of the parents—whether consciously or unconsciously—prevented such a relationship from happening.

Pablo’s heart was broken because, as he put it, “One of the things my mother sacrificed to make a new life after moving here was us. All I want is for her to be there for me.” And indeed, Pablo’s mother seems intent on pushing him away, forcing him to take more responsibility than he is ready for, and focusing her energies on her own struggles, not his.

Anna was desperate to talk with her father, to seek his counsel on her future plans. But she felt burned by the pressure he put on her to succeed—well-intended though it might be. She believed he didn’t listen when she did try to express her desires. We could almost see her shut down a little more each episode.

And Allie, whose face was already aged by stress and cigarettes, was actually kicked out of her mother’s house for a time because, as her mother said, “I needed her to go away.” That’s a message a kid will take to heart in a minute, and it certainly wasn’t lost on Allie, who continued to spiral into a pit of depression, fear, and self-doubt.

When the series ended, these kids were moving on to college, to summer jobs, to an unknown future. But only a select few seemed to approach that future with any sense of joy or excitement. For most, the promise of life on their own was appealing only in that it had to be better than life at home. Many of the parents seemed more than a little eager to get their kids out of the house. But the underlying message was not “I can’t wait to see you spread your wings and take off.” Rather, their attitudes—and in some cases their words—suggested feelings of “You have been a thorn in my side for 18 years. I can’t wait to get you out from under me.”

Sadly, the chasm between teenagers and their parents isn’t limited to this handful of students. Anyone who has raised a teenager will tell you it’s hard, hard work. But what we don’t often recognize is that the teen years are pretty darn tough on teenagers, too. Research from the National Institute of Mental Health suggests that the teen years are second only to early childhood in terms of the amount of brain activity taking place.

As puberty hits, the hormonal shifts in the body signal all kinds of new connections in the brain. And just as toddlers respond to the busyness of their rapidly developing brains with tantrums, teenagers respond to their brain changes with sullenness, insecurity, and emotional outbursts. Add to that the constantly shifting cultural climate of middle school and high school, the transmogrification of the body from something small and manageable to something with big feet and big hips, the developmental desire for increased freedom, and the spiritual transition from the family’s faith to a more personal belief (or nonbelief) and you’ve got a kid who needs help.

Terri Apter, a Cambridge social psychologist and author of The Myth of Maturity, points out that “[Parents] think their children are ready to fly the nest, when they are simply moving away temporarily and are all the more in need of support. Parents assume their daughters and sons want to push them away—when they simply need a different kind of closeness.” Too often, parents allow their teens to set the emotional temperature of the relationship, believing that doing so will give their children the “space” they seem to crave. But what teenagers really crave is the consistent presence and support of the adults in their lives.

School lessons

It’s not that adults haven’t tried to do right by their children. But ironically, some of our best efforts have only contributed to the problem. Take America’s schools, for example.

In the wake of Columbine, journalist Elinor Burkett spent a year at Prior Lake High School in the suburbs of Minneapolis. The resulting book, Another Planet, offers a scathing look at high school life. Like American High, Burkett’s book paints a painful picture of youth culture run amok. But as she looks at the ways modern education has tried to rein in teenagers, Burkett makes no bones about the outright failure of the “system” to develop students who are ready for life after high school.

In Burkett’s mind, the biggest culprit in the schools is the shift from classical learning to the emphasis on self-esteem that came about in the 1970s. The whole idea was to get rid of the perceived “Élite” class of students by eliminating intelligence testing and ability-based groupings, creating an “open society” that would allow underperforming students to thrive as they worked side by side with their more accomplished classmates. If students feel good about themselves, the thinking went, they’ll live up to their potential, and every child has potential.

But over time, this well-meaning approach simply flattened the playing field so that everyone, from the kid who couldn’t really read in tenth grade to the kid with the genius iq, ended up drifting along in complacency. Burkett says, “The feelings soothed weren’t those of students locked out of the highest-level courses, but those of parents who no longer had to confront the reality that their children were not among the intellectual Élite. Their children neither craved nor needed that consolation. They knew who the smart kids were, and it didn’t bother them in the least since, in the social geography of American schools, the ideal wasn’t to be smart, but to be popular.”

But the most heartfelt jeremiads against today’s educational philosophy come not from critics like Burkett but from the students themselves. As a group of the school’s most intelligent students gather in a classroom, their conversation turns to their disappointment in—and disdain for—the way they’ve been forced to conform. We often assume that the kids who hate school are those who are barely passing from grade to grade. But the real tragedy of this systemic failure is what it has done to the motivated students who come to school begging to be challenged and stimulated. One student, Katie Keough, complains, “How could anybody rise to my level when I have no idea what my level is because nobody ever forced me to find it? Instead, we’re bored because we’re pulled down to the level of the least intelligent and the least interested.”

As for the self-esteem of teenagers, the vaunted aim of this whole movement, it too has suffered at the hands of adults. A student named Jake Anderson points to an unintended disparity: “If they’re so worried about making less intelligent people feel bad, why don’t they apply that same principle and eliminate the A Squad of the basketball team?” Reilly Liebhard, by far the school’s brightest student, wraps the whole issue in a nutshell, saying, “The problem is that the school is so focused on protecting the egos of students that it breeds mediocrity. If you never let anyone fail, how can they not be afraid of failure?”

Burkett’s barbs are not limited to teachers and administrators. Boomer parents are taken to task for undermining the school’s efforts to hold kids accountable for the work they do, or fail to do. One teacher says, “[The parents] are this antiauthority generation and they’re still mad at authority figures from when they were in high school. So now we’re that authority and they have to protect dear little Muffy from the mean teachers who don’t appreciate her.” Burkett reports a parent calling a teacher to scold him for the way he treated her son. “When you wake him up in class, it’s humiliating,” the mother chided.

In talking with the teachers, Burkett finds a common thread of frustration in dealing with parents. One teacher is accused of ruining a child’s life because she made the student redo an assignment. The school’s attendance secretary has grown so accustomed to parents calling to lie about the reason for their child’s absence that she has a well-established repertoire of sarcastic comebacks. Parents complain that a member of the history department has higher grading standards than the other teachers in the department. The teachers feel stymied by the contradictory message from parents: Make my kid smart enough to get into an Élite college, but don’t make him work too hard to get there. Burkett believes changes in our schools can only come from parents who are willing to let teachers teach, even if that means their children receive poor grades now and then. She says, “In a world of local funding and control of education, schools have become a popularity contest, and who wants to provoke two thousand parents who will decide whether you’ll have money for a new building?”

Passing on faith

Burkett’s report makes it clear that we are failing our children academically. Tragically, we are failing them spiritually as well. Tony Jones is the minister to youth and young adults at Colonial Church of Edina in Minnesota, as well as the author of Postmodern Youth Ministry. For Jones, the failures of Christian parents are tantamount to neglect.

Jones tells of a father who came to him troubled about his son’s college choice. When Jones suggested the father set some ground rules with the son, the father replied, “I don’t have the kind of relationship with my son where I say no to him.”

Sadly, this was not a unique conversation. Over and over, Jones meets with parents who can’t understand why their kids are in trouble, but who refuse to set the necessary limits needed to solve those problems. Jones says, “The kids I minister to are the ones whose parents are disconnected for one reason or another. Parents say they don’t understand their kids, but the kids tell me their parents don’t ask about their lives because they don’t really want to know if their kids smoke or drink. Parents choose naÏvetÉ because it allows them to pretend that their kids are perfect.”

Jones says, “Columbine should have been the World Trade Center attack of family life. It should have been a wake-up call, but parents are still unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to raise children. They are unwilling to say no to their children, to say no to cable or a computer in their kid’s room.”

More to the point, far too many of the parents Jones sees fail to make time to invest in the spiritual lives of their children. Jones says, “I asked my kids what kind of spiritual disciplines they see in their families. One girl—one—said she and her parents read the Bible and pray together every morning. In the five years I’ve been at Colonial, this is the first kid to ever have an answer to that question. Parents have outsourced the discipleship of their kids to someone else.”

This, too, sends a powerful message to children. When even their souls are a commodity to be shopped out to someone else, it’s not surprising that teenagers feel their parents are too busy for them or unsure of their ability to parent. And teenagers can smell fear. As soon as they sense that they’ve gained control, as soon as they believe that adults are afraid to challenge them, it’s human nature for them to push until they find the boundary. They may complain about the limits parents set on them, but several studies, including one from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, show that teens desperately need and want the sense of control and safety that healthy boundaries provide.

Growing grownups

For some reason, we have come to believe that our duties as parents cease, or at least decrease, once our children become teenagers. We invest a great deal of time and money in becoming “good” parents when our children are young. We read the books, take the classes, subscribe to the magazines. But once kids hit 13, parents tend to shift into autopilot. Maybe we figure that the decade-plus we’ve invested in them ought to be enough. Maybe it’s because we’re deservedly tired by the time our kids hit their teens. Or perhaps it’s because we, like our kids, have come to believe the cultural myth that kids today are more sophisticated than we were as teens and that they are right when they tell us we don’t get it. So slowly, without really meaning to, we become more passive, gradually relinquishing our role as parents. Sadly, this tends to happen just when our teenagers need us most.

In The Myth of Maturity, Apter focuses most of her research on late adolescents—18- to 24-year-olds. Yet her findings have much to tell us about our expectations of younger teens. She notes that because children now reach puberty significantly earlier than past generations—sometimes as early as nine—and seem more culturally savvy than we were as teens, we assume that they reach emotional maturity more quickly as well. But Apter notes, “Though they grow up more quickly, they do not so quickly become grown-up. Children may race into puberty, but they take longer than ever to reach adulthood.”

Despite our assumption that teens are desperate to become adults, it will be years before they truly become independent. Apter cites one study which reports that 58 percent of young adults between the ages of 22 and 24 are living with their parents. In the meantime, Apter makes clear, the process of growing up, of becoming independent, is psychologically wrenching. She writes, “[Young people] fear that in creating this new distance between themselves and their families, between childhood and adulthood, they will never again be protected by their parents’ emotional holding. In the early stages of this transition from adolescence to adulthood, the ambivalence (both wanting to leave and panicking at being away) is often intolerable … A young adult continues to be dependent on his parents’ love, admiration, and approval to define and stabilize his sense of self.” If this is true for 20-year-olds, how much more true is it for 15-year-olds?

If we do get involved in their lives, we try to be their friends, to be the sympathetic listening ear we think they want. But in Jones’s experience kids don’t simply want adult sympathy, they want adult help. He says, “I’ve got a girl in my group, Emily, whose friend is Jewish. This friend thinks Emily is cramming her faith in her face. When Emily comes to me, she’s not looking for sympathy. She’s asking me what to do. I do her a real injustice if I don’t give her my opinion.”

In a broader sense, the church has done its own damage to today’s youth. Jones believes that the church has sold kids short emotionally and intellectually. Like the quagmire of public education so clearly on display in Burkett’s book, many modern youth programs have become little more than social clubs centered on wacky games and mini-worship services that are like microcosms of high school, complete with the cool kids leading praise choruses and the fringe kids goofing off in the back row. Youth leaders, like so many of their fellow pastors, have to deal with the pressure to create a seeker-sensitive environment that can still offer the depth even established Christians need to grow. And they have to accomplish all this with few adults to help. Don’t believe we’ve left our kids to fend for themselves? Ask your youth pastor how easy it is to find adult volunteers.

Jones is convinced that kids are more than willing to ask tough questions and have them answered. “We can’t dumb down the faith for kids,” says Jones. “We can and should teach them about worship, the creeds, the doctrine of justification. We need to inhabit the narrative of the Scriptures. The richness and fullness of the Bible needs to be recovered, not boiled down to ‘Jesus is your best friend.'” Just as the students at Prior Lake High School admitted they wished their teachers had been tougher on them, Jones finds that his students thrive when they are challenged to think about the deeper issues of faith.

The church has also failed to prepare parents for the arduous task of raising Christian children. As part of the confirmation process for eighth graders, Jones holds a class for the parents, answering any questions they have. He says he’s been surprised at how little these adults know about the basics of the faith. “We go through the Apostle’s Creed and I tell parents how I’ve explained it to their kids. When I get to the part about the holy catholic and apostolic church and I explain what that means, I’ve had parents—people raised in our church—say, ‘I always wondered why we talked about Catholics.’ I find that parents have the same questions as the kids. Small groups are great, but adults need to be taught the depth of the gospel.”

Few churches emphasize accountability, especially within the family. We tend to hold the contemporary cultural values of discretion and privacy over the Christian values of helping our brothers and sisters live out the faith. Jones tells a story that’s all too rare. He and his wife are part of a small group. One of the other men in the group was an investment banker who spent several days a week on the road, leaving his wife at home with three small children. One Sunday, the woman showed up at the small group meeting exhausted and emotionally spent. She explained that her husband had just returned from one trip and was at his office preparing for another the next day. Jones and the other men in the group hopped in a car, drove to the banker’s office, and took him out for coffee where they confronted him as his brothers in Christ, asking him to consider the toll his work was taking on his family. The man has since switched to a less time-consuming job. The willingness of these men to involve themselves in someone else’s business might seem shocking to some, but it is precisely the kind of loving conversation we need to be willing to have with one another if we want families to thrive.

If we want to see our young people stand up to the immense pressures they face each day, we must equip them with our belief that they are capable of doing so. That means helping them identify their gifts and talents and helping them nurture those gifts. It means remaining emotionally present in their lives even when they seem to be pushing us away, not shying away from their tough questions, looking beyond their seeming disrespect, their hyperactivity, their baggy pants, and seeing children who still need the guidance and love of caring adults.

Carla Barnhill is the editor of Christian Parenting Today magazine.

Discussed in this Essay:

» American High, directed by R. J. Cutler (pbs, 2001).

» Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School, by Elinor Burkett (HarperCollins, 2001).

» The Myth of Maturity: What Teenagers Need from Parents to Become Adults, by Terri Apter (Norton, 2001).

» Postmodern Youth Ministry: Exploring Cultural Shift, Creating Holistic Connections, Cultivating Authentic Community, by Tony Jones (Zondervan/Youth Specialties, 2001).

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

    • More fromCarla Barnhill

David Lyle Jeffrey

Spiritual exegesis and the retrieval of authority

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It occasionally happens that a passage of Scripture comfortably familiar from youth comes back much later to haunt us with an unfamiliar severity. This can especially be so when rereading those teachings of Jesus typically cashed out in childhood as “sword drill” verses and Sunday school songs.

“The wise man built his house upon the rock … The foolish man built his house upon the sand … “—I can still hear the rollicking pentameter and anticipate the final, thunderous clap and clomp which nearly shook down the lights of our Baptist church when “the house on the sand went flat (splat).”

But before me now, in a somewhat more tentative middle age, is the whole text, the concluding sentences of the toughest teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; And it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.”

Now, the cheerful singing of my childhood notwithstanding, I have to admit that I have been one of those who from the time I learned that song until now have said “Lord, Lord” quite a lot and heard his sayings many times but have put them into obedient practice far less often than counts in this tough text as “wise.” When now I read or remember that last sentence, it’s not the church hall lights that get to shaking.

Anyone who teaches for a living notices further that it is the matter of authority which immediately sets the teaching of Jesus apart for his first hearers: “And so it was, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matt. 7:28-29). Attempting both to acknowledge and assuage my guilt when teaching this passage to the mostly cheerful pagans in my erstwhile secular university, I sometimes mischievously paraphrased this last as “He taught them as one having authority, not like our professors.” The students’ typically generous laughter indicates, their appreciation of both points: they had already learned about the gap between first-order and second-order discourse, and, without being taught it, that many who practice the second kind, in their second-hand fashion and self-interestedness, have lost what little authority they might once have had. As with the scribes in Jesus’ day, lost authority has become a fact of contemporary life—in our universities as in other public institutions.

Even in the church.

Teaching now at a historically Christian university still rooted in the Baptist tradition, I have found the loss of authority in general an occasion for frequent reflection. Recently, as a background for our consideration of the modern British novel (from Joyce and Wilde to Rushdie and Julian Barnes), my students and I read and reflected upon Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future (1961). Famously in this book Arendt declared that, as a viable concept, “authority has vanished from the modern world.” She defines authority as “that which implies obedience in a context of freedom,” not of coercion. What Arendt concludes about modernity is that foundations, or tradition, have little or no power to constrain either anarchic impulse or pragmatic temporizing; we have divorced ourselves from mutual obligations to objective, mind-independent realities wherever possible. As a lamentable result, we know a great deal about power and very little of authority.

Confusion of authority with power persists with a vengeance in our putatively postmodern world. But when we still speak of “authority figures” we dutifully echo Freud, and typically mean to identify persons whose tacit or explicit standards, or censure, are perceived to constrain or critique our absolute personal freedom. That is, we are not much different from early moderns like Samuel Butler (1835-1902), author of the (appropriately enough) posthumously published semi-autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903). Butler’s rebellion against his parson father and his father’s religion is, summarily, the story of his life. For him, rebellion grew readily into hatred, first for his father and his faith, then for even those prominent intellectuals whose resistance to Christianity he first shared and whose favor he often shamelessly curried (e.g., Sydney Smith, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold). In the end, Butler even turned on his greatest hero, Darwin, with such vehemence as to prompt one of his biographers to observe of him what could be said of many moderns, that “his attitude in fact was as authoritarian and narrow as his father’s, only exercised upon a different set of prejudices.”

Rebellion against authority, symbiotic passion that it is, remains an almost intractable feature of our fallen condition. But in our time it has come to be regarded as a virtuous condition, even the signature of what it means to be authentically modern. The Death of the Father (Freud), the Death of the Author (Barthes), and the Death of God (Nietzsche) are, after all, projections of a single impulse—a desire for the elimination of any authority that might constrain or inhibit our personal freedom, perhaps especially our sexual freedom, but also our “freedom” to make “truth” what we want it to be. That the concept of truth thus suffers from the same syndrome as the concept of authority is clear enough.

Truth is, effectively, authority, and nowhere more explicitly synonymous than where biblical religion is the context. This is so obviously the case in a proto-Reformation reflection such as John Wyclif’s De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae that translators are understandably divided as to whether Veritate in the title should be translated “Truth” or “Authority.” In Wyclif’s understanding, these were in respect of Scripture practically indistinguishable in the term.

Among the Reformers a century after Wyclif, resistance to ecclesiastical and magisterial authority was construed as obligation to still higher authority, or truth, which the institutional church was, with some warrant, no longer perceived as serving (Luther, Tyndale). Intermediation of the authority of the Church in restriction of access to the sources of the Church in Scripture had become at last an exercise of raw, sometimes brutal power. Resistance here too became rebellion (and divorce) and because it was “of the Church” its implications were far-reaching indeed. To the degree to which the Reformation celebrated the shift from the authority of the institutional Church to the authority of the individual (“Hier stehe ich”) it liberated an individualism previously unknown and unanticipated. But this too, in its turn, has occasioned further confusions of authority and power.

Protestants in general have usually presented individualism—even in biblical interpretation—as pretty much an unmitigated good. John Bunyan’s conviction that the Bible by itself is far better mental furniture than the entire libraries at Oxford and Cambridge without it became a sentiment both shared (and narrowed) among his evangelical and Baptist successors; his conviction that freedom to interpret Scripture by and for himself was the purest form of access to the truth was to be no less warmly embraced by that wing of the Reformation most successful in America.

Now, with radical individualism and the autonomous interpretation of Scripture having grown to proportions of anti-authoritarianism, general biblical illiteracy, and theological incoherence no Tyndale or Bunyan could have imagined, there is at last some evidence that Christians in the evangelical tradition are willing to reconsider the role of authority in relation to biblical interpretation. What was already clear enough to a thoughtful Puritan like Richard Baxter is apparent now to the most modest reflection of anyone who is willing to think about it: loss of authority of the Church, de jure, has led inexorably, on these lines, to the de facto loss of authority of Scripture.

To put it as plainly as possible, the hackneyed adage among some adversaries of the faith, that Christians can make any verse of the Bible mean anything they want it to, is almost perfectly mirrored in the proclamation of some believers that the highest religious good is their right to interpret Scripture in whatever way they see fit. (This most unbiblical notion strikes me as a kind of churchy equivalent of the general tendency in our culture to behave as though personal sexual freedom were the highest possible public good, and it is probably just as pernicious.) When an insistence on absolute interpretative independence is coupled, as increasingly it is, with an almost staggering loss of biblical literacy among its champions, then the actual authority of Scripture can become so negligible as to make any claim to a biblical foundation either comic or tragic, depending upon your point of view.

All of these factors make the governing ideas about biblical interpretation and the life of the Church before the Reformation of timely interest, and help to account for the recent turn of a hallmark Reformed and evangelical publisher like Eerdmans to their remarkably rich production of major works of Catholic theology and hermeneutics. Along with other signs of the times, such as the heavy emigration of educated evangelicals to Anglican (Episcopalian), Orthodox, and Catholic churches and educational institutions, Eerdmans’s Ressourcement series, mostly translations of formative French Catholic theologians of the mid- to late-twentieth century, in its “Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought” is a kind of voting with the feet by which the felt need of credal Christians of evangelical as well as Catholic heritage is perceptibly taking new direction—a retracing of steps back to the fork and the road not taken.

In the first two translated volumes of Henri de Lubac’s magisterial Medieval Exegesis, we can measure the advantages of this retracing of our common journey, and not just as children of the Reformation. For Catholics still more profoundly this scholarship is a retracing of steps, and it has led, perhaps especially because of the work of de Lubac and those biblical scholars influenced by him, to a dramatic revival in biblical scholarship and biblical teaching among Catholics today.

In fact, as Pope John XXIII, Vatican II, and most recently Pope John Paul II himself made clear in his encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth, 1993), it is by means of such careful rehabilitation of the teaching of Scripture in the historic Church that the Catholic magisterium of today (as notably evidenced in his own writing) has become so remarkably articulate about the centrality of Christ, “the decisive answer to every one of man’s questions,” for “it is He who opens up to the faithful the book of the Scriptures and, by fully revealing the Father’s will, teaches the truth about moral action.”

Whatever we choose to make of it, while many evangelicals were doing their utmost to be “seeker-sensitive” and, in the Church of the Blessed Overhead Projector, “moving on” to a kind of piety lite, prominent Catholic biblical scholars and theologians were retracing their own way back to the fork in the road. It was they who saw more clearly, ironically, the necessary interconnectedness of the authority of Scripture and the authority of the Church. (It is worthy of note that Danielou and de Lubac were elevated to the rank of cardinal, de Lubac in 1983.) Eerdmans’s Ressourcement series, and de Lubac’s volumes in particular, are an indispensable guide for those who would wish to meet them on the road, so to speak, because they have as their common goal the recovery of Scripture’s authoritative voice in the life of the Church.

As Susan Wood demonstrates in her lucid and helpful companion study, Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac, for the group of Catholic theologians of whom de Lubac (1896-1991) was a member, the road first forked for Catholics not at the Reformation but earlier. In the rise to preeminence of scholastic theology with Bonaventure and Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and the subsequent shift away from the direct study of Scripture to a more abstract philosophical theology and the analytical study of systems of reflection on the Gospels such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Catholic theology had moved away from the scriptural rock to a less secure, though impressive, philosophical foundation. Aquinas ruled. Whereas medievalists like de Lubac, Louis Bouyer, M.-D. Chenu, and Jean DaniÉlou might thus have been expected to follow in the dominant neo-Thomist tradition of their guild, in fact they surprisingly joined forces with Henry Brouillard and the younger Hans Urs von Balthasar to go back behind the thirteenth century to the early church and patristic writers in particular. (One wishes that Wood had told us more about their promptings.) What they discovered there was a vitality in relationship to Scripture itself which renewed for them also the life of the liturgy.

The key to the intimacy of Scripture and worship in the early church and in the Fathers was, for de Lubac and his colleagues, the vital place of spiritual exegesis in their practice as readers of the Bible. Here is how it is explained by Bouyer:

Spiritual exegesis, which is supposed by the whole liturgy, is an exegesis dominated by two principles. The first principle is that the Bible is the Word of God, not a dead word, imprisoned in the past, but a living word addressed immediately to the man of today taking part in the celebration of the liturgy. The second principle is that the Old Testament is illumined by the New, just as the New only discloses its profundity once it is illumined in the Old. We must be still more specific: the bond between the two is determined by allegory in the precise sense given to that term by antiquity.

The rehabilitation of allegory in the hermeneutic of de Lubac and his confrÈres, so far from displacing the foundation of the literal and historical sense of Scripture, gives back to history the charged sacramental resonance it had for Augustine, Ambrose, and the early Church. As Wood shows, de Lubac cites authorities from Clement of Alexander to Scotus to show that for the whole tradition:

Scripture is neither an exposition of abstract doctrine, nor a collection of myths, nor a manual of interiority, but the narration of a series of events which really happened. It is essential that these events really happened since revelation not only took place within time and history but has, itself, a historical form.

The allegorical sense, rooted in history and seeking no referent apart from God’s action in history, simply points all of that history to Christ. Allegory is preeminently the application of Scripture’s meaning to the life of the Church, moving through the ages, looking unto the end, awaiting the Bridegroom. What was needed for a true revival in contemporary worship, de Lubac reasoned, was not so much continual dogmatic insistence upon Thomist and post- Tridentine formulations as a return to the Source, Scripture itself, and a reestablishment of continuity with the pilgrim company of its great interpreters.

Accordingly, when de Lubac published his four-volume ExÉgÈse mÉdiÉvale in 1959, it was truly an epoch-making moment, even as Fr. Joseph Lienhard, s.j., has suggested, for the “life of the Church” in the fullest sense. Among other things, ExÉgÈse mÉdiÉvale continued de Lubac’s rehabilitation of one great ancient interpreter of the Bible whom Catholics had long dismissed as heretical, a rehabilitation begun with his earlier Histoire et Esprit (1950). Origen (c. 185-254), first supported by St. Jerome and later opposed vehemently by him (yet always supported by Gregory Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom), was as much through misinformation as anything else condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople (in 553). This dismissal was sufficient to perpetuate his oblivion until de Lubac’s careful and remarkable rectification of the misinformation and hence judgmental misunderstanding.

It turns out that works were sometimes attributed to Origen that were written by someone else, while all along and “much more often, Origen [has been] copied, summarized, amplified, adapted, or plagiarized, sometimes in the most massive way” by persons whom political skills had made more successful and yet were only too glad to have secretly an advantage in interpretative acuity borrowed from the out-of-favor Origen. Thus, a scholar of Scripture whom de Lubac shows to have been extraordinarily insightful, powerfully instructive, and almost overwhelmingly orthodox, by reason of the dishonest appropriation of many, was unjustly maligned and obscured. The story, painstakingly yet beautifully documented by de Lubac, is broadly instructive.

In the first volume, de Lubac sets out to show us, however, something of still greater significance, namely, that the interpretation of Scripture in communio was the principal educational activity in the life of the pre-Scholastic Church. Before the twelfth century there was no such thing as systematic theology—all theological erudition was concentrated on exegesis. Hermeneutics, the establishment of method and coherent ruling principles for interpretation, became the basis of organization for all other systems of education.

This is particularly evident in the cathedral schools of the twelfth century which were midwife to the rise of Christian universities. Hugh of St. Victor, who was first an exponent of Scripture, made principles of biblical interpretation (grounded in Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine) foundational both to his theology of the sacraments (De sacramentis) and his philosophy of education (Didascalicon); in Hugh, each are in turn so natural an application of hermeneutics as to make the modern Christian educator regret our loss of what our medieval forbears called disciplina. For Augustine the Christian life itself was “the discipline of Christ,” a student was a disciple to “the Lord’s discipline,” the teacher to the “discipline of the Church,” to “evangelical and apostolic discipline.” This set the standard.

De Lubac does not overstate the matter when he writes that all the great theologians “acknowledged that it would be sheer vanity to suppose that one could become holy without submitting oneself to disciplina, or that one could achieve sanctity by resisting the ‘goad of discipline.’ ” The word evoked both good morals and practical virtues perfected by mutual submission, in communio, to the teaching of Christ. In his twelfth-century Didascalicon, Hugh applied the term to the divisions and methods of academic study—now far removed from their foundation in the principled reading of Scripture—and here the term has stuck. That is, at least in our academic disciplines there persists some notion, however diminished, of self-transcending interpretative authority.

For Bonaventure and Aquinas, the terms “sacred Scripture” and “theology” were still to be regarded as synonymous. With them as for St. Augustine, knowledge of the faith amounted to knowledge of Scripture. This did not imply a narrow view of Scriptures, but the contrary: as with the various levels of interpretation (generically “historical,” “moral,” “allegorical,” and “anagogical”), pluralism is justified where all interpretation is, in the final analysis, directed at the same object—a text possessed by and authoritative for all. Polysemeity is Scripture’s way of mediating God’s abundant truth to the myriad members of the Body; it is, as Aelred of Rievaulx says, therefore “capable of harboring innumerable modes of thought.” But all find their coherence in the whole together, the common Body, the Church independent of any merely synchronous manifestation of it. The “four senses” are thus Scripture’s way of mediating what happened once in time to all times and all places spiritually, and it is the Church reading Scripture attentively together, against and across time, which keeps the errata of any given moment—its politics and fallen, self-justifying motives—from eclipsing the authority of the Truth for all time.

The famous “four senses of Scripture” thus may be acceptably understood, as does Rabanus Maurus in his commentary on Galatians, as having just two greater aspects: historical interpretation and spiritual understanding (cf. Gal. 4:22-27). As later in Alexander of Hales (thirteenth century), the three spiritual senses are “understood and comprehended under the literal sense,” and only predicated upon them. Vol. 2 of Medieval Exegesis is dedicated to showing how this great pedagogical schema was worked out in the teaching of the pre-printing press Christian Church. Clearly and exhaustively, de Lubac’s magnificently learned recollection shows how the foundation of early Christian exegesis is the text as history, how allegory becomes the “sense of the faith” or self-understanding of the Church as Body of Christ, how the moral understanding is not only a matter of practical ethical instruction but of charismatic, mystical experience, and that, finally, anagogy, the “upward leading” sense of the text, is the framework of the Church’s eschatological intuition.

The translations—in vol. 1 by Marc Sebanc, the novelist, and in Vol. 2, by E.M. Macierowski, are, though slightly differently cadenced, both fluent and readable. As one who read these volumes first in the French in 1965 and for whom they have been a frequent resource ever since, I can say that in their way the translations are about as good as one might hope for—de Lubac is not only densely scholarly, magisterial in his own knowledge, but lexically and stylistically complex in the way one associates with the compression of prodigious learning. Thus, it is not just in the great good judgment of publishing them in English that Eerdmans is to be commended; the translations themselves are no small triumph. Vols. 3 and 4, yet to come, will take anglophone readers through the scholastic age to Erasmus; all who cherish the work of Scripture in the historical life of the Church will be eager for a speedy completion by the translators of this genuinely magnificent history of pre-Reformation interpretation.

Magister, magisterium—the teacher and the community of interpretation from which each teacher derives a greater authority: here is an idea about the Church in its largest sense, and hence about the normative trajectory of faithful contributions to our understanding of Scripture which is well worthy tracking once again. Individualistic interpretation always runs the risk of being shallow, for it is necessarily partial. Interpreting in conversation with the wider Church—reading the Sermon on the Mount, for example, with Augustine, Chrysostom, and Martin Lloyd-Jones—can by its inculcation of disciplina lead to much deeper, better grounded reading and practice in any of us.

For the sake of its constraint of excessive individualism alone, de Lubac’s work is of value for evangelicals; for a rehabilitation of authority both for Scripture and for its community of interpretation in the Church, it is of value for every Christian. The foundation alone for both Church and Scripture, that rock of wisdom which is the actual teaching of Christ—seems sometimes in grave risk of being ignored in these trendy times, and not only by our scribes and Pharisees. As we scrabble to build our various edifices upon easier and easier stuff, we should maybe think again of the old Sunday school song in its full scriptural context. In the end, that second kind of house still goes “splat.”

David Lyle Jeffrey is University Professor and associate provost at Baylor University.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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