nobody but the baby

Notes on Putnam's American Grace Tanner Lectures At Princeton, 2010

Notes on Robert Putnam's American Grace Tanner Lecture #1 Notes on Robert Putnam's American Grace Tanner Lecture #2

It has been a while. Look, we've been raising a kid!

"The Literary Practice of Belief" and my response

This month's Religion and Culture Web Forum, hosted by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School is centered around a wonderful article by Yale literature professor Amy Hungerford. I was asked to give a response.

Check out the article and the responses, including mine, in the archive here. 

 

 

My review of Thomas Kidd's "The Great Awakening" in the Journal of Religion

I have reviewed Thomas Kidd's book, The Great Awakening for the Journal of Religion.

You can download the PDF here, or you can read the review below.

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Kidd, Thomas S.

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity In Colonial America.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xix+392 pp. $35.00 (cloth)

 

The debatable coherence and explanatory significance of the Great Awakening is now a standard trope in the study of American religious history. Chastening revisionist accounts from such scholars as Jon Butler and Frank Lambert have reminded all historians who study the revivals to tread lightly when unpacking the use and interpretive implications of an eighteenth-century phenomenon called the “Great Awakening.” Gone is the de facto usability of Joseph Tracy’s Whitefield-centered, New England-dominated, unified movement that exploded between 1740 and 1743, “important in itself” and “universally acknowledged” in its influence on “the subsequent state of the churches” in their inclination towards Calvinistically inflected evangelical theology of the New Birth. (The Great Awakening, Boston, 1841: iii) Put bluntly, Tracy’s “Great Awakening” has been historicized and pluralized. A wide range of scholarly attention to regional distinctions, theological and ideological discontinuities between revivalists, analogous spiritual practices, as well as race, media, gender, and economic analysis in the revivals have all contributed to the undermining of a singular, simple rendering of “Great Awakening.” This pluralizing has also ended any use of the Great Awakening as an explanatory “black box”; all accounts of the causes, phenomena, and effects of the revivals must be woven into the detailed grain of their particular contexts to retain interpretive value.

Against this backdrop, the audacity of Thomas S. Kidd’s recent synthetic study is revealed. To undertake the work under review, he had not only to show the unifying characteristics of a much-contested, demonstrably diverse movement, but also to show the way that those characteristics are manifested in a plurality of contexts and communities that avoids the provincial chauvinism of many prior accounts. In order to make his case he has to restructure some crucial terms of the debate, and in doing so he makes at least three important contributions to the study of the period.

First, Kidd insists that, though there was certainly a peak of revival activity in the colonies between 1740 and 1743, there were colonial and transatlantic revivals that were fundamentally similar taking place throughout the eighteenth century. Thus, he suggests that the typical periodization of the Great Awakening is largely a historical fiction. He offers an account of evangelical revival theology, spirituality and practices that begins in the 1670s and closes at the end of the American Revolution in 1783. Kidd conceives of this movement as constituting what amounts to a “long First Great Awakening,”(xix) an era of revivalism connected by resonant ideology and practice that ran continuously, albeit piecemeal, for the better part of a century. This historical reconstruction contributes the outline of an organic tradition of eighteenth century American revivalism that is deeply influenced by, but in no way contingent upon, Whitefield and Edwards.

Secondly, for Kidd, the chief characteristic of “the long First Great Awakening” was its formulation of the roots of evangelicalism. As his subtitle suggests, he sees the two as essentially continuous. At first blush, this seems an innocuous claim, but Kidd deftly transforms it into a redefinition of evangelicalism itself. He begins his identification (of course) with David Bebbington’s vaunted quadrilateral of conversionism, crucicentrism, biblicism, and activism, all of which he finds present in the revivals. But, argues Kidd, this perennial rubric passes over a major aspect of early evangelical identity, namely a deep concern for the present work of the Holy Spirit, particularly in revival. This missing dynamic becomes an overarching theme of Kidd’s historical narrative as he shows countless examples both of the importance of the activity of the Holy Spirit for all the revivalists and the very diverse directions that such an emphasis took them. Kidd convincingly reveals the way that characteristic emphasis on the sovereign regenerating action of God led in those days to a flowering of apocalypticism, mysticism, miracle-working, and sacred historical metanarratives which do not belong to the typical portrait of New Light religion.

Third, part and parcel with this emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its variegated manifestations, Kidd shows that the contest over the revivals cannot fit into the standard trope of Old Lights vs. New Lights, but must rather be viewed on a fluid continuum between antirevivalists, moderate revivalists, and radical revivalists. Much of the historical wealth in this book is a exposition of the dramatic implications of the great plurality of revivalist views among the evangelicals who supported the revival.

Kidd establishes these three major contributions by undertaking the herculean task of synthesizing vast quantities of primary source data from all of the colonies throughout the eighteenth century. He presents a compelling, clear narrative, oriented in the service of his interlocking rubrics of “the Long Great Awakening,” the importance of the Holy Spirit, and the diversity among evangelical revivalists. In so doing, he reveals a single resonant tradition that does not oversimplify their difference but refuses to let them be unduly atomized by their diversity. Kidd devotes chapters to revivals in the Carolinas and Georgia, as well as among African-Americans and Native Americans in which this synthetic method is especially valuable.

One might quarrel with Kidd’s suggestion, given the wide range of radical revivalism that he so deftly portrays, that moderate Jonathan Edwards continues to occupy pride of place as the chief intellectual exponent of the revivals. If Edwards’ interpretation remains the evangelical gold-standard, are the radical revivalists who often constitute the majority report in Kidd’s account unjustly destined to occupy an imagined margin?

Also, while crucial revisionists like Lambert and Butler are acknowledged positively in the book, it is sometimes disappointing that Kidd is not more directly engaged in theoretical argument with them in the text, given that they are his presumptive historiographical interlocutors. Disappointing as it may be, Kidd’s lack of engagement is clearly in service of his synthetic goal. Rather than defending a methodological argument for the “long Great Awakening” against those who would dismiss the notion of an ideologically coherent mass movement among American evangelical revivalists, he avoids theorizing, attempting instead to absorb the force of their critiques and then outnarrate them. He succeeds dramatically.

On learning from Leon Kass, and "a more natural science"

The pursuit of a more integrated account of nature and the supernatural has become increasingly important to me over the course of my life. The deadly Scylla and Charybdis on either side of this pursuit are a magical account of the supernatural and a materialist account of the natural. The wrong kind of supernaturalist is a world-denying, ahistorical gnostic, and the wrong kind of naturalist is a utilitarian or pragmatist who believes that the correlation of unusual brain chemistry to visionary genius is enough to explain its causation.

One person who has thought long and well about this matter is Leon Kass.

If I could claim at all that Leon Kass was a mentor of mine, it would only be at a distance, through imitation and awe. I was certainly in his orbit as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago studying in the Kass-designed Fundamentals: Issues and Texts program. He was a member of the Committee on Social Thought, a collection of scholars that appeared in my youthful estimation to exist in the unsullied empyrean of pure thought, in endless rigorous reflection on the good, true, and beautiful. I have since, ruefully, learned better about the character of some of the Committee, but Mr. Kass has never disappointed. If anything, Kass existed in my world as something of a demigod, a hero, an archetype whose outlines could be approximated but never truly imitated, much less exceeded. In retrospect this is of course utterly embarrassing, but nonetheless true.

I learned three things in his class on the Nicomachean Ethics, but only one had anything to do with Aristotle. The first was how to recognize gravitas. When a boisterous, misguided undergrad burst through the door, loudly demanding to know the number of the classroom while we were in midst of trying to pummel some significant dialectical point out of our cloudy minds, Mr. Kass regarded the boy, and with unmalicious but entirely impatient intensity he expelled the phrase, "Sir. Please!" The molecules in the air ceased their motion. There was no choice in the matter. The undergraduate returned to his proper station, in search of his classroom, silently, outside of ours.

The second was that there are times in a person's life when, for whatever reason, he or she literally cannot understand a given line of philosophical inquiry. In my case, it had to do with a kind of intellectual immaturity with which Kass unwittingly forced me to come to grips. This is in part, I suppose, a more literate riff on George Bernard Shaw's aphorism that "youth is wasted on the young." When I sat in Mr. Kass's legendary Aristotle seminar, and pored over my Loeb translation at night, week in and week out, it gradually dawned upon me that I didn't have a clue what I was reading. I was bewildered, befuddled, resentful, incredulous. Surely Aristotle didn't believe that mediocrity (which was, youthfully, how I was understanding the famous "golden mean") was the most virtuous road to human flourishing. Surely he was wrong to suggest that courage was anything other than the self-abnegating sacrifice of total surrender to the needs of others, without regard for one's own interests or telos. I was not Christian enough at the time to see the psychological naiveté of this stance that I had imputed to the character of Jesus Christ. And so on and so on.

So I had a problem. My inability to read Aristotle slowly, carefully, on his own terms, without condescending interruptions from the vast annals of my just-post-adolescent life experience, caused me to be unable to complete my writing assignments for the class. One day, I went to see Mr. Kass, to express my frustrations at my predicament, and some of my incredulity at the things that Aristotle seemed to be try to teach us. When I say that I "went to see Mr. Kass," I didn't just go, I went in fear and trembling. Even though I thought Aristotle was a barking madman, Mr. Kass was on the Committee on Social Thought! My palms were sweating, my stomach had butterflies, but what could I do? I was unable to complete my assignments and I needed help.

Help I received, but not in the form I expected. When I entered Mr. Kass's office, pushing harder than I wanted to on the vast hundred-year-old oak door, I was greeted not only by his familiar, sober visage, but also by a print hanging on the wall behind him which seemed to have been hung there with the explicit purpose of breaking me. It was a World War Two era image of Winston Churchill in a bowtie pointing at the viewer, and under it was written the phrase "Deserve Victory!" Suddenly I began to feel alienated from myself, as some people say that they do when they have a brush with death. My reasoning soul began to come loose from my body and flee, outgunned, leaving me stranded under the bicameral laser gaze of Kass and Churchill. I began to sweat more, and then, internally, I utterly crumbled. I did not deserve victory. I did not even deserve to be in the room. I forgot all of my arguments against Aristotle, and why Jesus was better, and all of the reasons why I couldn't seem to complete the assignments. I am sure that I asked some questions, received some gracious help like "Just start writing..." or "Find a quotation and begin there..." but I was just counting seconds till I could hit the doorhandle and have my paltry, unrenewed nous back. Too many more minutes in there, and I might have been doomed for good. For reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Kass (who it turns out is a kindly advocate) and everything to do with the way that God helps a person to grow up and become wiser, I felt like Isaiah in the sixth chapter, beholding the glory of the Lord. I was totally undone. I did not have what it took.

Which leads me to the third thing that I learned from Leon Kass's class on the Nicomachean Ethics, the shocking value of compassion in the classroom. Just a couple of weeks after the encounter with the Churchill poster, I realized that I was not going to be able to develop my capacities sufficiently quickly to be able to undertake the challenges that the course required by term's end. I needed to drop the class. However, there was no way that I was going to face Churchill a second time and, naturally, Mr. Kass did not "do" email. So I called Mr. Kass's office, to leave a message that "I very much appreciated the chance to take this class, but circumstances were such that I would need to drop it, thank you so much, etc. etc." To my horror, Mr. Kass answered the phone, and I was thus forced to stammer out my explanation in person. As is my wont, I revealed more than I intended and basically told him that I couldn't figure out how to read Aristotle so I had to drop the class.

I will never forget his response. He said that he was grateful that I had enrolled, that I had shown courage in facing these circumstances, and that I should feel absolutely no shame whatsoever about this decision. That word, spoken to a student who would eventually figure out how to read Aristotle but for the time being was doing much better with Dostoevsky and Bernard of Clairvaux, was a staggering event of pedagogical mentoring. I saw, and have continued to see on more mature reflection, that the goal of teaching Great Books is not merely the explication of canonical tradition of reflection on life and death, but rather the maieutic process in which the teacher stands both with and above the student, helping him or her in the struggle to bear out from within and express in the necessary ways those things that are most fundamentally human. Kindness, mercy, dignity, charity are not at odds with intellectual midwifery or its fruits, but rather part and parcel of them.The goal, in the end, is the realization and celebration of a human being.

This much-longer-than-intended reflection is simply an introduction to a wonderful excerpt of Leon Kass's 2009 Jefferson Lecture which I read last night. In it, Kass gives a fine interpretation of some of the crucial dynamics what would amount to more humanizing account of nature and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, the body and the soul with which I began this essay. As I read the piece, I realized how many of my instincts, how much of what I take to be intellectually crucial in this moment I have learned from him.

I am deeply grateful.

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from Leon Kass's 2009 Jefferson Lecture, "Looking for an honest man: Reflections of an unlicensed humanist."
(Read the whole lecture here.)

Finding a “more natural science” would serve two important goals. First, by doing justice to life as lived, it would correct the slander perpetrated upon all of living nature, and upon human nature in particular, in treating the glorious activities of life as mere epiphenomena of changes in the underlying matter or as mere devices for the replication of DNA. Second, and more positively, by offering a richer account of human nature faithful both to our animality and to the human difference, it might provide pointers toward how we might best live and flourish. Toward both goals, a “more natural science” examines directly the primary activities of life as we creatures experience them; and it revisits certain neglected notions, once thought indispensable for understanding the being and doing of all higher animals.

    Against the materialists who believe that all vital activities can be fully understood by describing the electrochemical changes in the underlying matter, I saw the necessity of appreciating the activities of life in their own terms, and as known from the inside: what it means to hunger, feel, see, imagine, think, desire, seek, suffer, enjoy. At the same time, against those humanists, who, conceding prematurely to mechanistic science all truths about our bodies, locate our humanity solely in consciousness or will or reason, I saw the necessity of appreciating the profound meaning of our distinctive embodiment. So, for example, I learned from Erwin Straus the humanizing significance of the upright posture: how our standing-in-the-world, gained only through conscious effort against the pull of gravity, prefigures all our artful efforts to overcome nature’s indifference to human aspiration; how our arms, supremely mobile in our personalized action space, fit us for the socializing activities of embracing, cradling, pointing, caressing, and holding hands, no less than for the selfish activities of grasping, fighting, and getting food to mouth; how our eyes, no longer looking down a snout to find what is edible, are lifted instead to the horizon, enabling us to take in an entire vista and to conceive an enduring world beyond the ephemeral here and now; how our refashioned mammalian mouth (and respiratory system) equips us for the possibility of speech—and kissing; and how our expressive face is fit to meet, greet, and sometimes love the faces that we meet, face-to-face, side-by-side, and arm-in-arm. From Adolf Portmann, I discovered the deeper meaning of the looks of animals, whose intricate surface beauty, not fully explained by its contributions to protective coloration or sexual selection, serves also to communicate inward states to fellow creatures and to announce, in the language of visibility, each animal’s unique species dignity and individual identity. I even found evidence for natural teleology in, of all places, The Origin of Species, in which Darwin makes clear that evolution by natural selection requires, and takes as biologically given, the purposive drives of all organisms for self-preservation and for reproduction—drives the existence of which is a mystery unexplainable by natural selection.
    But the greatest help came, most unexpectedly, from studying pre-modern philosophers of nature, in particular Aristotle. I turned to his De Anima (On Soul), expecting to get help with understanding the difference between a living human being and its corpse, relevant for the difficult task of determining whether some persons on a respirator are alive or dead. I discovered to my amazement that Aristotle has almost no interest in the difference between the living and the dead. Instead, one learns most about life and soul not, as we moderns might suspect, from the boundary conditions when an organism comes into being or passes away, but rather when the organism is at its peak, its capacious body actively at work in energetic relation to—that is, in “souling”—the world: in the activities of sensing, imagining, desiring, moving, and thinking. Even more surprising, in place of our dualistic ideas of soul as either a “ghost in the machine,” invoked by some in order to save the notion of free will, or as a separate immortal entity that departs the body at the time of death, invoked by others to address the disturbing fact of apparent personal extinction, Aristotle offers a powerful and still defensible holistic idea of soul as the empowered and empowering “form of a naturally organic body.” “Soul” names the unified powers of aliveness, awareness, action, and appetite that living beings all manifest.
    This is not mysticism or superstition, but biological fact, albeit one that, against current prejudice, recognizes the difference between mere material and its empowering form. Consider, for example, the eye. The eye’s power of sight, though it “resides in” and is inseparable from material, is not itself material. Its light-absorbing chemicals do not see the light they absorb. Like any organ, the eye has extension, takes up space, can be touched and grasped by the hand. But neither the power of the eye—sight—nor sight’s activity—seeing—is extended, touchable, corporeal. Sight and seeing are powers and activities of soul, relying on the underlying materials but not reducible to them. Moreover, sight and seeing are not knowable through our objectified science, but only through lived experience. A blind neuroscientist could give precise quantitative details regarding electrical discharges in the eye produced by the stimulus of light, and a blind craftsman could with instruction construct a good material model of the eye; but sight and seeing can be known only by one who sees.
    Even the passions of the soul are not reducible to the materials of the body. True, anger, as ancient naturalists used to say, is a heating of the blood around the heart or an increase in the bilious humor, or, as we now might say, a rising concentration of a certain polypeptide in the brain. But these partial accounts, stressing only the material conditions, cannot reveal the larger truth about anger: anger, humanly understood, is a painful feeling that seeks revenge for perceived slight or insult. To understand the human truth about anger and its serious consequences, we must instead listen to the poets, beginning with Homer’s Iliad: “Wrath, sing, o goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, and the woes thousand-fold it brought upon the Achaians, sending to Hades strong souls of heroes but leaving themselves to be the delicate feastings of dogs and birds.” And to understand how we come to know this or any other truth, we can never stop wondering how—marvel of marvels—Homer’s winged words carry their intelligible and soul-shaping meanings, hitched to meaningless waves of sound, from the soul of genius to the hearts and minds of endless generations of attentive and sympathetic readers.

My review of Signs and Wonders by Paul Alexander

I have reviewed Paul Alexander's book Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism Is The World's Fastest Growing Faith for Pneuma, the journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. It will appear in the forthcoming issue, but is available online now.

You can download the PDF here. Or, you can read the review below...

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Paul Alexander, Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism is the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). xiv + 175 pp. $24.95 cloth.

With the publication of Philip Jenkins’ academic blockbuster, The Next Christendom (2002), Pentecostalism became the undisputed “Next Big Thing” in the study of Christianity. Jenkins’ work was perceptive and synthetic, standing atop an ever-growing tower of scholarly research into the persistence of global Christianity in the wake of the moribund “secularization thesis.” Most members of this society were probably not surprised by  Jenkins’ conclusion that global Pentecostalism (and its genealogical relations) represents the majority future of Christianity. The Pentecostal future has been taken as a fact for decades by those with “eyes to see.” Jenkins’ book, arriving as it did among the urgency of post-9/11 debates about religion and America’s global position, simply served to make the point loudly and clearly to the average New York Times reader.

But once awakened, surprised and alarmed, to the widespread beliefs and practices of Pentecostalism, the average New York Times reader still did not know why this movement was growing at such a rate all over the world. This is the question Paul Alexander attempts to answer in his recent book, Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism is the World’s Fastest Growing Faith. Complete with larger than average print, a winsome, anecdotal writing style, and the rare imprimatur of a glowing foreword from Martin Marty, Alexander takes on the role of a self-disclosing tour guide who wants to show the curious reader, from a comfortable distance, what the appeal of Pentecostalism is.

This distance does not mean Alexander is cold to Pentecostalism. On the contrary, he challenges his reader to maintain a generous, open mind, with such comments as “For who knows, maybe miracles really do happen” (p. 18), or “Tongues issue from the depths of the human experience and open up new ways of living, being and doing” (p. 58). For Alexander, this tour is personal. One of the great merits of the book is that he is open about his own experiences with phenomena associated with Pentecostalism.

However, though he has had many experiences that he names “Pentecostal,” Alexander is ambivalent about the application of the category Pentecostal to himself. He writes, “I went from being an arrogant Pentecostal to an embarrassed and shame-ridden Pentecostal to a non-Pentecostal to an anti-Pentecostal—and now I’m just trying to be a faithful follower of Jesus who also prays in tongues sometimes” (p. 98). This categorical evasion is illustrative of the strategy Alexander employs throughout the book. He plays on a distinction between historical Pentecostalism and Pentecostal experiences. Alexander spends no time developing either a historical or a theological definition of Pentecostalism. Rather, he offers a description of Pentecostalism that is entirely rooted in the embrace of particular phenomena. Each of his eight chapters (miracles, music, tongues, prosperity, testimony, angels and demons, prophetic experience, and emotional hope) deals with the particular appeal of a certain type of experience that Alexander classes as typically Pentecostal. Thus, in his hands, the category “Pentecostal” has little necessarily to do with particular history, theology, or culture, and far more to do with a presentized set of spiritual experiences typically associated with historic Pentecostalism but which, through “mere” participation, can leave Pentecostal fingerprints on a wide variety of faith traditions. 

As such, the best and most explanatory parts of the book are his stories about Pentecostal experience. The pages are redolent with real-life stories of miracles, demons, prophecy, and healing. Alexander says he has no interest in proving their reliability but rather in showing their attraction, that is, the attraction of having a life full of practical hope for God’s intervention in the face of struggle. Such stories are, he believes, ultimately why Pentecostalism is exploding because they are, in some significant way, what Pentecostalism is. Alexander rehearses the contested chestnut that modernity (and, by extension, most evangelicalism) has advanced a practically disenchanted worldview that forecloses on such experiences. But, according to his sociological sources, disenchantment fits with neither a biblical outlook nor the outlook of an average Global Southerner nor even the average American. Thus Pentecostal practices are, in his view, already resonant with the outlook of most people in the world, though they run counter to the worldview of those Alexander calls “American Evangelicals,” bound as they are by modernity (113-4).

My response to this approach is mixed. I have little doubt that Alexander would admit that the twentieth century Pentecostal expression of these phenomena can be thoroughly historicized, located in a tradition that reinforces their validity through theologies and practices. I have even less doubt that the explosive growth of historic Pentecostalism has significantly contributed to the fact that the phenomena Alexander describes have become commonplace in a wide variety of “non-Pentecostal” denominational traditions, e.g., his story of the shy Baptist who speaks in tongues. However, I question the validity of explaining Pentecostalism simply by it’s characteristically emphasized experiences, particularly given that those experiences have been variously shared by Christians throughout the history of the church, even “American Evangelicals.” It seems that there is a far more complicated story to be told than Alexander’s conclusion that Pentecostalism has grown because it offers emotional freedom, dynamic spiritual experiences, and equality before a provider God. These are among the stated offerings of a wide variety of religious communities, but for some reason, Pentecostalism has been particularly apt to grow. As to why that is, Alexander does not offer a compelling answer. He cites a Pentecostal pastor saying that “people are tired of dry religion. They are looking for a relationship” (p. 133). This could have been said by any evangelical, and has little explanatory power. One wants deeper explorations of the dynamics of race, class, nationalism, the rising stock of the therapeutic, Western primacy in globalizing culture, the spiritual cosmologies of the Global South, and so on. Perhaps those are the cultural concerns of a historian, and perhaps this is not the book that Alexander has set out to write. Nonetheless they are issues crucial to adequately answering the question posed by his title.

Caleb Maskell
Graduate Student
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Isambard Kingdom Brunel has one of the best names ever given in the English language. He was also an incredibly interesting and accomplished person, a genius innovator of the first order. And he looked pretty cool doing it. If Bob Dylan was an engineer, he'd be Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Check him out.

Metaxas on Bonhoeffer (and my blurb)

I have written an endorsement for Eric Metaxas's forthcoming biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is coming out in April, and you can pre-order it here. It is vintage Metaxas: witty, passionate, and About Something. Bonhoeffer, like Wilberforce before him, is an ideal subject for Eric's trenchant pen. There are a few things in the book with which I take issue, and if I write a full-fledged review after the book comes out, I'll address them. None of my quibbles, however, would take away from the fact that this is a fantastic book on a crucially iconic life that should become standard fare for people concerned about justice, power, the cross, and the Kingdom of God in the 21st century. Buy your copy today.

Here's my endorsement, just submitted. In the copy, this might be boiled down to "radical!" We'll see:

Eric Metaxas has given us a portrait of Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose prophetic life in troubled times will chasten, clarify, and challenge our own. Readers will be caught up in this vivid, lucid story that draws deeply from the intellectual wells and poetic energy that inspired Bonhoeffer himself. In these pages we come to know a Bonhoeffer who chose radical Christian discipleship in the context of spiritual community over all other options, whether the safety of institutional orthodoxy, the self-satisfaction of ideological narcissism, or the political evasion of otherworldly pietism. This is also a deeply humanizing book, full of vignettes that reveal Bonhoeffer as a son, as a lover, a pastor, a friend, all in the context of the deadly work for which he is most remembered: resistance to the growing menace of Nazism.

Some readers may not agree with all of Metaxas's arguments about Bonhoeffer, but that is not the point of this book. The point is to unsettle, to provoke, and to inspire. Crammed with insight, outrage, and urgency, this book is an attempt to position Bonhoeffer where he belongs, in the ranks of the great Christian humanists who have struggled against the prevailing winds of culture to faithfully and bravely interpret Christianity for their historical moment.

Caleb J. D. Maskell
Doctoral Student, Department of Religion, Princeton University
Associate Director, Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University (2004-2007)

Emerson on Nature and the Pursuit of Truth

I am thrilled to be taking a course of the thought of Emerson and Baldwin this term with Jeff Stout and Eddie Glaude. In some of our earliest readings, Emerson suggests a kind of typological spiritual structuralism that I find very intriguing, especially given his reflexive stance against orthodoxy.

"There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection.  The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Language" in Nature

Andrew Chignell's "Whither Wheaton?" article, and a response

Cornell philosophy professor Andrew Chignell has just written a fascinating article that lifts up the hood on some of the institutional politics at Wheaton College, his alma mater and the flagship school of American evangelicalism. It definitely has the voice of an immanent critic, one who writes motivated more by love than bile. But it is not the story of a jilted lover as much as an impatient one. The dynamics he reveals have been getting old for a long time, and one can hear that in his tone. Furthermore, the murky backstory of the squelching of the article that required it to be published online, as opposed to in Books and Culture, only serves to advance his point.

Read the article here, at the SOMA Review

As it is not possible to post extended comments in an unbroken fashion at the SOMA website, I will re-post my comments on the article here.

This stuff is so disappointing. I often struggle to believe that it is actually possible for such things go down, but indeed they do, and Andrew Chignell has chronicled them brilliantly here. What is more, if there was any remaining doubt about the backdoor skullduggery that he names, his "Story Behind The Story" at whitherwheaton.org confirms it with relentless clarity. In my view, this is yet another reason why trying to defend the name "Evangelical" in America is, at present, a unilateral waste of time for believers who hope to remain faithful and in the camp of historic orthodoxy. Even articulations of the core social and religious commitments of "historic Evangelicalism" are totally undermined by this kind of double-speak from the people who aim to uphold the tradition.

As one who studies American Religious History, I wonder how Evangelicalism got to this ironic point where the preservation of integrity looks like subversion and anti-Catholicism requires magisterial regulation. Is this "mere" sin and will to power, or are there other social and spiritual dynamics at work that need to be grasped and interrogated from the inside? Naturally, I believe that there are systemic issues here that must be addressed.

Until there is a serious moral reckoning about the deeply-rooted protectionism and politicking that makes the socially conservative crypto-Fundamentalist evangelical system work, there can be nothing approaching a renaissance of evangelical intellectual life. In its absence, and perhaps long after, evangelicals will continue to see their young fleeing in droves  to Orthodoxy or Canterbury or Rome or the Mainline or any number of Emergent church projects. While such transitions are not (in my view) such bad things in and of themselves, it would be a real shame if this was the manner of death that the evangelicalism of Edwards, Blanchard, Henry, and Noll was forced to suffer.