Page 2840 – Christianity Today (2024)

Seated cross-legged on a grass mat spread upon the cool, smooth stone floor of a traditional Brahman house, we waited as aromatic basmati (“Brahman”) rice was doled out onto each stainless-steel plate. Tiny stainless-steel bowls of curry (dhal, sambar, rassam, vegetable, etc.), curd, chutney, and other delightful dishes followed. Only the fingers of one’s scrubbed right hand could touch the food. Our hosts hastened to make sure that each dish was constantly full. Yet they themselves ingested nothing, lest strictest protocols of purity be violated. “SNR” (S. N. Ramaswamy) was a strict Sri Vaishnava of the Tengalai (Southern) School. With a university degree in engineering and a high position in the largest motor transport firm of South India, he was an authority on automotive history—and an ardent admirer of the late John F. Kennedy. He also visited the huge temple complex of Sri Venkateshwara at Tirupati once each month to have his head shaved (hair being gifted to the deity), and scrupulously bathed in the Triplicane temple each morning before ever touching food. And, when he ate, he ate alone, accepting food and drink only from the hand of his beloved wife (or daughter), neither of whom ate until he had been fed. His mouth received food and drink without ever coming into direct contact with fingers, utensil, or vessel. His family ate what was left after he was fed. The family never ate together; nor were meals an occasion for sharing. Eating in any “public” place was unthinkable—restaurants were a modern invention and “polluting.” Indeed, while in my house for avid scholarly discussions, his hand never strayed close to the chai and biscuits I invariably placed before him. Cosmic purity of birth required no less. Pollution brought cosmic ruin. He could only take leftovers, ritually pure food, offered to the deity. His wife could take food left by him (her deity). We could receive food “given” or offered us. This was part of the hierarchy of prasadam: grace.

Such complexities, while not always fully explained in Lizzie Collingham’s story of curry as a cuisine and its conquests, lie just beneath the surface. The result is a superb combination of culinary, cultural, and political history. While “curry” itself is never fully defined, what is presented is an exquisitely enlightening intellectual curry. Curry is a spicy sauce or stew—or, rather, it is a category of sauces containing an rich array of intricately blended ingredients. What these pages contain is an intermingling and layering of entertaining, fascinating, and vivid anecdotes and narratives that, in themselves, convey a history of the entire subcontinent. It is hard to imagine a more delicious way to gain an understanding of India’s many cultures, peoples, and their history. Best of all, in almost every way, the fare is both pukka (genuine) and often insightful.

Discriminating between flavors and fragrances is not simple. Refined senses, sensations, and sensibilities—tastes—call for sophistication, a mingling of science and art. Cosmic properties and propensities are involved. Essentials of “heating” and “cooling” occur at three levels: physical, chemical, and cosmic (mystic or spiritual). Classical treatises codified over two thousand years ago in Aryuvedic principles govern what is a proper food for each occasion. “The idea of hot and cold foods to achieve a sublime blend of the six essential tastes (pungent, acidic, salty, sweet, astringent, and bitter)” lies at the heart of all cooking in India. Meat is heating. Milk, especially curd, is cooling—conducive to calm and cheerful contentment. Combining tamarind and pepper or chili peppers and condiments with hot water produces a hot broth or “pepper water” known as rasam, put on rice at the end of a meal but also drunk for health-giving or medical benefits (if only to clear sinuses). Curd and rice end the meal.

ÂCurries are a hybrid of cultural and culinary influences. Not long after Vasco da Gama arrived in India, Portuguese ships brought chilies they had acquired in America from the Spanish conquerors of Mexico. The indigenous spices of India, including their own black pepper and chili peppers, had been nothing like as hot as this new red pepper (or cayenne). But red chilies soon conquered India: no other country consumes as many. While Telugu-speaking people say that the hottest curries of India are in Vijayawada, a city in the Krishna Delta not far from Bay of Bengal, Vijayawada people say that even hotter curries can be found in Tadikonda, a few miles away. A visiting missionary executive from New York compared the taste to putting a Bunsen burner in one’s mouth—and when he tried to put out the fire with water, he found that this only increased the heat. What cools such heat is milk, curd, banana, or plain rice.

Vindaloo originated when tamarind and spices, especially chilies, were mixed with Portuguese carne de vinho e alhos. Cooks of the Grand Mughals, coming from nomadic encampments in Central Asia but already refined by Persian tastes, developed biryani. This combined fragrant forms of fried basmati rice, known as pillau (elsewhere known as pilaf), with pungent spices and meats, especially chicken or lamb, nuts, and raisins. In its finest form, a royal feast of diwani-biryani or nabawi-pillau was followed by sweets (halwa, mittai, or laddu) covered with purest gold or silver. Kormas (quararamas) of Lucknow, with meat marinated in curds, spices, and ghee (clarified liquid butter that does not spoil), evolved in the north and west. Fish curry dishes developed along the shorelines, especially in the Sundarbans of Bengal. Curries, in various forms, came out of a blending of Tamil and Telugu cultures in the south. Every local culture within the subcontinent, from Kashmir to Kaniya Kumari (Cape Comerin), evolved its own unique forms of cuisine—and its own curries.

Curry’s conquest of the world began with the conquest of India by the East India Company. Madras curry in its various forms (the word deriving from the Tamil kari and the Telugu kara, as also from similar sounding terms in Kannada and Malayalam), became the most hybrid and ubiquitous of all India’s spicy (masala) sauces and stews. Normally this was served with rice in the south and with soft wheat breads such as chapattis, parathas, puris, or simple nan in the north. The author is not quite correct when she says that the British invented curry: there is not a respectable household anywhere in the countryside that does not produce its own unique curries, with secrets handed down from mother to daughter. But it is true that, starting in Madras, a hybrid Anglo-Indian cuisine spread and became ubiquitous, not only throughout all of the subcontinent (including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), but gradually throughout the rest of Asia and Africa, and finally to Europe and the Americas.

ÂThe earliest, most elegant, and famous Indian restaurant abroad is Veeraswamy’s of London (just off Upper Regent Street), founded by a descendant of William Palmer, who flourished in Hyderabad in the early 19th century. But this fabulous eatery is a far cry from the “curry and chips” shops that spread into every high street and leaped the Atlantic to our own shores. The world conquest of curry became manifest in 2001 when Robin Cook, the then-foreign minister, declared chicken tikka masala to be the new national dish of Great Britain. In curry’s wake have come many other common condiments and relishes long since known in the West: chutney, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and various forms of curry powder.

ÂBut unsung was the conquest that accompanied curry: chai or tea. We all know that tea originated in China. We also know, from a famous “tea party” held in Boston Harbor over two centuries ago, that tea was exported from China by the East India Company. “Tea houses” had become fashionable for social gatherings even before American Independence. But few know that “Indian” or “black” tea, grown in Assam, Darjeeling, Niligiris, and “Ceylon” (as well as now in Kenya and many other places), not only conquered the world but also India itself. No country on earth consumes more tea. Moreover, India’s people not only drink garam masala chai (“hot spiced tea”)—the drink made with milk (sans water), mingled with spices and sugar—but also equal quantities of ordinary black (English) tea, which they also call chai.

When all is said and done, nothing can compare with the simple vegetarian curry made in a village household, prepared by someone whose curry lore has never been written down. Lizzie Collingham has produced a fitting tribute to this protean dish. While one might quibble over a few lapses within this history—such as the author’s confusing Arthur Wellesley (the sepoy general who became Duke of Wellington) with his elder brother Richard, as the Governor-General—these tiny errors in no way diminish the value of this truly delightful book.

Robert Eric Frykenberg is professor emeritus of history and South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest book is Christianity in India: Earliest Beginnings to the Present (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”—Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat

Thomas Friedman’s admonition to his daughters shows how distant lands are being re-packaged to Americans in the 21st century. In The World is Flat, the New York Times columnist describes a leveling of the economic playing field, where members of previously poor or stagnant economies are gaining greater access to global wealth through the power of information. India factors prominently in the flattening process, not least because its growing middle class ranks high in math and computer skills and fluency in English. But outsourced jobs and call centers are not the only images tied to the new India. In The Clash Within, Chicago ethicist Martha Nussbaum details how hypermasculine Hindu militants raped Muslim women and destroyed Muslim shops in their genocidal fury in the western state of Gujarat in 2002, threatening India’s sixty-year-old democracy. The key to this democracy, according to Harvard economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, is its ancient tradition of argument and reasoned debate. In The Argumentative Indian, Sen claims that Westerners have failed to appreciate this Asian tradition of public reason due to a preoccupation with falsely exotic notions of the East.

Sen, Friedman, and Nussbaum all describe India’s progress in terms of classical liberal values of free trade, the marketplace of ideas, and religious toleration. Each stresses the importance of choices—by individuals and states—in opening doors to growth and prosperity. Each author also levels a trenchant critique of rigid boundaries—economic, national, gender, and religious. Such dividing lines, they contend, especially those based on romantic nationalisms or religion, are the enemy of peace and impede the growth of democracy. But are boundaries themselves the real source of conflict, or is it how people interpret their beliefs and demonize others within the context of bounded traditions? While sharing a commitment to classical liberal values, these authors also inadvertently reveal some limitations of those values, especially when accounting for the persistence of religious violence in the subcontinent.

According to Sen, India’s democracy is not the product of two hundred years of British rule but rather is anchored in India’s ancient skills in managing pluralism. Spanning more than two millennia, India’s argumentative tradition has expressed itself through epic literature, heterodox religious movements, and public debates between members of different communities.

With elegance and clarity, Sen guides readers through a collage of events and anecdotes to illustrate his claims. The great Buddhist councils of the 3rd century BC (under the reign of Ashoka) drew delegates from different regions and schools of thought to settle disputes of doctrine. Dialogue between religions was accompanied by the interrogation of religion itself by India’s agnostics and skeptics. During the 16th century, while Europeans were hunting down witches or launching wars of religion, the Mughal emperor Jalalludin Muhammed Akbar supported dialogues between members of different faiths. For both Sen and Nussbaum, Akbar epitomizes the tolerant, harmonizing impulses from which South Asians can draw inspiration as they face new and more extreme forms of sectarian conflict. Yes, caste oppression and female subordination are among the undemocratic features of Indian society; but even these, Sen observes, have been subject to constant interrogation.

Sen’s picture of “argumentative India” challenges the notion that India’s cultural heritage relates primarily to religion and spirituality and not to virtues more typically associated with Europe’s Enlightenment. Logic, astronomy, mathematics, linguistics, and scientific inquiry have been constant features of the subcontinent, but an imperialistic reading of India’s past crediting only Europe with such advances veiled them behind more “arcane and non-material” virtues. Yoga, transcendental meditation, and otherworldliness thus became the defining marks of “Hindu civilization.”

Sen sharply critiques the notion of “clashing civilizations” espoused in the work of Samuel Huntington. Huntington stresses how post–Cold War politics are largely defined by cultural and religious differences. For Sen, assigning a single identity to any people distorts who they are and lays foundations for enmity and conflict. Sen’s critique of the “clash of civilizations” (even more so in his recent book Identity and Violence) challenges the notion that India is a “Hindu” nation with a Hindu majority, as members of India’s Hindu Right would have us believe. Their ideology of Hindutva, which pursues a theocratic state based upon Hindu identity, thrives upon hatred of Muslim and Christian minorities and violates the toleration epitomized by Akbar. Sen’s critique also thwarts any suggestion that democracy is the West’s gift to the rest. Democracy for Sen is not only the best political system; it can be achieved elsewhere without cultural imperialism or mimicry.

As much as Sen stresses the virtues of India’s argumentative tradition, the book could have been more forthright in identifying its limitations. Argument is most constructive when it leads to consensus that furthers the common good. Short of that, one is left with a sea of “conversations” that displace real action. India’s politicians are widely criticized for their corruption and inability to implement plans that secure basic needs such as public health, infrastructure, and education. The country’s legal system, presumably a venue for argument in the service of justice, is the most over-docketed system in the world. A woman who has been raped may wait as many as nine years to have her case heard. While argument is preferable to violence, Sen makes no compelling case that it ensures the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts, and administrative efficiency, qualities essential in today’s changing economic climate.

While Sen’s book focuses on Indian culture and identity, Friedman highlights the increasing skill, speed, and efficiency with which Indians and Chinese are competing for global wealth. Friedman is no stranger to questions about cultural roots. In his brilliant earlier book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he describes the challenge of going “glocal,” of staying rooted in cultural traditions (the “olive tree”) while participating in the global economy (the “lexus”). By and large, The World is Flat is Friedman’s discussion of the lexus without the olive tree.

Central to Friedman’s thesis is what he calls the “triple convergence” of forces that have been flattening the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first is the combined impact of ten “flatteners,” largely related to information technology, to facilitate unprecedented participation in the global economy. This has produced a “web-enabled platform” that enables collaboration by companies, universities, and individuals regardless of location. The next convergence is the historical shift from a world defined by vertical to horizontal relationships between people, nations, and businesses. Examples range from how companies create different departments worldwide that collaborate with each other to the sharing of security information by various national intelligence agencies. The third convergence is the dramatic surge in economic participation as economies opened up in places like China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

Friedman’s book introduces new paradigms for understanding India. No longer associated primarily with images of “snake charmers, poor people and Mother Theresa,” as he says, Indians have “recalibrated” their identity as partakers of knowledge-based wealth. During the dot.com boom of the late ’80s, Indians were recruited in large numbers to places like Silicon Valley. Even after the bust, when many returned to India, their skills were employed (especially during the Y2K scare) because of the fiberoptic cable that was laid during the boom. This allowed them to work for U.S.-based companies for lower wages from places like Bangalore. As much as these developments are part of recent history, it is arguably the discipline and skills acquired under socialist scarcity that continue to equip Indians and Chinese to compete in the global economy. While they hammered away at math, science, and engineering in pursuit of limited opportunities at home, American students, steeped in a culture geared toward having fun, exhibited diminishing interest in those subjects.

The problems with Friedman’s thesis lie not so much in what he presents through Horatio Alger-like anecdote after anecdote, but in his omissions. As his critics correctly observe—and as Friedman himself eventually admits (more than 500 pages into the book)—the world is not flat. Most people benefit little if at all from fiberoptic cables or workflow software. Those benefiting from his “globalization 3.0” are those who are skilled enough to do so. Others stuck in the “unflat” world are, in his words, “too sick, too disempowered and too frustrated” to make choices to improve their condition. Their economic salvation, for Friedman, lies in waking up and building bridges to the triple convergence.

This vision of trickle out economics, while satisfying to those who have always believed in or benefited from the free market, carries with it some rough edges. It does not sit well with American workers who lose jobs to outsourced labor and are told by Friedman that to flourish in the flattening world, they will simply have to work harder and learn new skills. Neither does it sit well with members of underdeveloped countries—whether heads of state or citizens is unclear—likened to “alcoholics” who have not come to terms with their own addiction. Over the past decade, thousands of farmers in India’s cotton belt have committed suicide due to sheer hopelessness created by global competition. As the international market compelled them to drop the price of their own cotton, they grew dependent on expensive, genetically altered, drought-resistant seed. Growing debts and lack of government support continue to drive many to take their own lives, often by consuming pesticide. Finally, Friedman’s thesis does not sit well with opponents of globalization, such as scholar activist Vandana Shiva, who raise their voices on behalf of India’s cotton farmers and others adversely affected by globalization.

Friedman’s flattening world creates opportunities not only for constructive interdependence but also for new forms of violence. Central to his discussion of terrorism are feelings of humiliation or hope tied to the ability to realize one’s dreams of economic prosperity. India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world. Why is it, then, that “there are no Indian Muslims that we know of in al-Qaeda and there are no Indian Muslims in America’s Guantanamo Bay, post-9/11 prison camp … . [or that] no Indian Muslims have been found fighting alongside the jihadists in Iraq?” India’s secular democracy and free market, Friedman contends, have enabled Muslims such as Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro and the richest man in India, to rise to positions of economic and political prominence. The capacity of some to reach such heights instills hope in the many and steers them away from despair driven terror.

The simplicity of Friedman’s formula allures, but misleads. It fails to locate the rise of militant Hinduism within his story of a flattening India. Hindu militancy has accompanied globalization without being displaced by it. If what he says is true of Indian Muslims (who tend to be among India’s most economically backward groups), we must ask why significant sections of the Hindu middle class have become radicalized, even as they partake of the economic opportunities of the flattening world. At best, Friedman’s analysis of globalization and terrorism confuses correlation and causation; more likely, it requires a stronger value base for explaining what leads people toward or away from hatred and violence.

Martha Nussbaum’s analysis fills some of these gaps. She would be the first to tell Friedman that those Gujarati entrepreneurs he raves about did nothing to prevent the slaughter of their Muslim neighbors in the 2002 riots. In The Clash Within, she applies insights from the social sciences, literature, ethics, and psychology to the complex forces that are shaping India. Nussbaum shares Sen’s appreciation for Indian pluralism and recognizes the advances in science and technology highlighted by Friedman. What distinguishes her book are the links she draws between cultural trends and educational philosophy.

Nussbaum claims that India’s advancements in math and science, hallmarks of Nehru’s legacy, while facilitating the current economic boom, do little to nurture vital skills of democratic citizenship. Critical thinking, debate, reasoned analysis, empathetic imagination and the arts (hallmarks of Sen’s argumentative India) are under siege because of the “disease of rote learning” in public schools: “Numbed by repetitive learning” from dated textbooks and uninspiring instructors, students leave India’s public schools ill-equipped to relate to a culturally complex and changing society. This leaves them particularly susceptible to simplistic solutions to India’s problems, such as those offered by advocates of Hindu nationalist ideology.

Nussbaum’s contention that a commitment to liberal learning can thwart fascist leanings in India needs to be scrutinized at many levels. Humanistic traditions in Germany and Italy clearly did not steer those cultures away from xenophobia or fascism in the 20th century. Neither has American education steered people toward the politics of empahty rather than fear. Furthermore, many of India’s so-called victims of rote learning are also capable of speaking three or more languages, an asset to civic dialogue not found within many Western democracies.

The greatest threat to democracy in India, Nussbaum argues, comes not from any clash with the West but from a clash between two incompatible views of nationhood. The Hindu nationalist view, ironically, is anchored in a “romantic European conception of nationalism, based on ideas of blood, soil, purity and the Voltgeist.” It stands at odds with a more civic concept of nationalism, which values secularism and respects differences of regional culture, religion and ethnicity. Deftly, Nussbaum traces the lineage of these opposing visions through an exploration of key people, novels, and debates within modern India’s politics and culture.

In contrast to Friedman, whose analysis ignores Hindu militancy, Nussbaum zooms in from many angles. In her chapter “The Human Face of the Hindu Right,” she discusses in depth her interviews of four prominent Hindus. Her analysis engages their life experiences and represents a range of views on the Indian political spectrum. But in the end, she blurs the line between scholarship and moral evaluation by distinguishing the good Hindus from the bad ones. “Somehow,” she observes of the latter, “life in a pluralistic democracy, and the education they received in that democracy, failed to cultivate their imaginative capacities and their capacities for sympathy.” While some have accused Nussbaum of reenacting the “civilizing mission” through such kinds of evaluation, others maintain that such incisive critiques of religious extremism are needed.

The launching point for her analysis is a series of events that took place in February 2002 at the Godhra train station in the western state of Gujarat. When Hindu pilgrims returning from the north Indian city of Ayodhya (another huge flashpoint of Hindu-Muslim conflict) stepped off the train at Godhra, fighting erupted with Muslim residents of a nearby ghetto. In the course of this skirmish, one of the train’s compartments—carrying more than 150 people—burst into flames. Fifty-two men, women, and children, nearly all Hindus, were burned to death. Hindus responded with a rampage that left more than 2,000 Muslims dead. The Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and the local police are widely held to have been complicit in the violence.

In a speech shortly following these incidents, the then-Prime Minister, Atal Biharee Vajpayee, insisted that it was Muslims who had initiated the conflict by conspiring to burn alive the Hindu passengers. To this he added, “where ever Muslims live, they don’t like to live in co-existence with others, they don’t like to mingle with others … they want to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats. The world has become alert to this danger.” A good portion of Nussbaum’s book challenges this perception of Indian Muslims.

Islamic fundamentalism, she argues, “has no grip in India,” and this is evident even in the events that unfolded in Gujarat. Most likely, she states, it was not Muslims who set the coach on fire. Forensic evidence, autopsies, and data from police reports have led experts to conclude that the fire was a tragic accident caused by other factors. Contrary to Vajpayee’s suggestion of a Muslim conspiracy, Nussbaum argues that the retaliatory rampage had been carefully premeditated, backed by local officials, and inspired by an ideology of hate that had taken root among Hindus. How such an ideology could fester within a nation that prizes tolerance is a question she addresses extensively.

Nussbaum’s psychoanalysis of the Hindu Right (in what she admits is the most speculative chapter of her book) stresses, as Friedman’s account does, the role of shame and humiliation in motivating violence, especially toward women. When militant Hindus stigmatize Muslim minorities, they are actually insulating themselves from qualities in which they take shame. The outcry over centuries of domination by foreigners has led Hindus to despise passive, feminine qualities that have led to their subjection. What results is a hypermasculine Hindu self expressed through sexualized violence toward Muslim women, all the while preserving its own sense of purity.

Yet neither Friedman nor Nussbaum adequately links the feeling of humiliation to the fact of being humiliated. In what ways have British or U.S. imperialism in Islamic or Hindu societies resulted in enduring feelings of humiliation or rage? What factors determine which groups will retain this rage or how and against whom they will direct it? India’s Muslims also were subject to British imperialism, that too as India’s former rulers. Why do they not respond like Al-Qaeda terrorists or Hindu extremists?[1] Addressing such questions requires greater attention to the role of history. It also requires attention to the hermeneutics of religion, more so than what these authors have afforded.

Both Sen and Nussbaum ignore the place of Christianity within India’s pluralist heritage. Their silence betrays a tendency, prevalent in South Asian studies, to view Christians as enemies, not partakers, of Indian pluralism. While Christianity often was accompanied by racism and imperialism, it was in other instances profoundly engaged with local knowledge systems in the spirit of Sen’s argumentative tradition (Jesuits too visited the courts of Akbar). Nussbaum’s book would have been well served by comparisons with Christians who also suffered at the hands of Hindu nationalists in the state of Gujarat and more recently in Orissa. Finally, both authors do everything they can to avoid the academic sin of essentializing another culture. And yet, by turning pluralism from a fact to a virtue that defines the “real India,” they come close to doing the same thing.

Chandra Mallampalli is associate professor of history at Westmont College. He is the author most recently of Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863-1937 (Routledge).

1. Bombings in Mumbai in 1993, Hyderabad in 2007, and growing concerns about terrorist networks among it and medical students suggest that a new trend may be developing.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Thoughtful academics have long been sensitive to the liberal origins of the Reagan Revolution. In the bestselling Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne emphasized just how easy it was for pot-smoking hippies to grow into espresso-sipping yuppies. The liberal heritage of the neoconservative hawks who have circled around Republican administrations since 1980 is even less disputed. These intellectuals, after all, hail from radical socialist and communist backgrounds, and they carried their youthful idealism with them in their various campaigns to spread democracy.

One significant faction of the modern Republican Party, however, is usually situated well outside what Louis Hartz famously described as the American liberal tradition. Indeed, the Religious Right routinely gets compared to the Taliban and the KKK. Even more sober observers regard the Religious Right as an illiberal reaction to the convulsions of the Sixties.

As its great title suggests, Hippies of the Religious Right sharply disagrees with the conventional wisdom. In Preston Shires’ rendering, today’s conservative evangelicals owe a great debt to the Sixties. Indeed, many of them participated in the counterculture. Like their radical counterparts, Shires contends, evangelical activists were marked by a “rebellious spirit,” a deep anxiety over the dehumanizing effects of modern life, and a commitment to a kind of modern freedom that he calls “expressive individualism.”

Shires deserves much credit for articulating such a bold and interesting thesis, and his discussion of “Jesus Freaks” is well worth the cover price. In general, though, his analysis of evangelicals feels underdeveloped. For example, he asserts that Focus of the Family “demonstrated the best melding of countercultural Christian ideals and traditional evangelicalism.” Perhaps this is true, but I am not sure why Shires believes it. Likewise, he has almost nothing to say about the rescue movement—the largest campaign of civil disobedience since the civil rights movement, and one that grew directly out of the anti-war Catholic Left. Here is a perfect test-case for Shires’ thesis.

So how did evangelicals change the rescue movement? Contrary to Shires’ thesis, they did so by rejecting some of the very sensibilities that made Sixties social protest so distinctive. For one, they dispensed with the term “sit-ins” precisely because it smacked of a tradition of liberal pacifism.

Moreover, evangelicals had little interest in the liberal thinkers that influenced the first generation of rescuers. According to James Risen and Judy L. Thomas’ fascinating account of the rescue movement in Wrath of Angels, the Catholic leftists who began abortion sit-ins in the 1970s found inspiration in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and especially Thomas Merton. Under their influence, John O’Keefe wrote A Peaceful Presence in 1978, a recruiting pamphlet that asked pro-life activists not to resist any police force so that they might experience and embody the “vulnerability of the unborn” and “solidarity with the child.” So ensconced were these early Catholic activists in the world of Sixties radicalism that they initially attempted to recruit their liberal pacifist friends. Only after their appeals were roundly rebuffed did they belatedly turn to conservative Protestants for help.

Evangelicals responded, but did not accept the movement’s early influences. Their lodestar was Francis Schaeffer, whose fiery Calvinism could not have been more different from the mystical pacifism of Thomas Merton. Randall Terry replaced O’Keefe as the movement’s leader and swept aside what Risen and Thomas describe as its “sixties leftist feel.” With Terry as its spokesman, the movement took on a new militancy and spoke in a much darker, apocalyptic language. By the 1990s, when anti-abortion activists descended deeper into violence, O’Keefe hardly recognized the movement he had pioneered. Michael Bray’s A Time to Kill, published in 1994, signaled just how far rescue had drifted from O’Keefe’s A Peaceful Presence.

To be sure, the same general narrative could be used to describe the civil rights movement: it too became more militant over time. But looking at the rescue movement this way obscures the kind of conscious breaks evangelicals made with the Sixties. The intellectual and sociological links between Sixties social protest and the rescue movement began to weaken precisely when evangelicals took it over.

Congruent with Shires’ thesis, however, evangelicals in the rescue movement did often sound like Sixties radicals. When evangelical rescuers talked about “breaking the system,” as even Terry did, it was not hard to hear echoes of the New Left. Like many Sixties movements, rescue attempted to push the frontiers of human freedom—indeed, it saw itself as a new civil rights movement. This self-understanding is constantly obscured by academic characterizations of the abortion conflict as a culture war.

If Shires continues his interesting work, I would encourage him to consider the possibility that the New Left in turn was deeply indebted to the larger Protestant culture in which it emerged. The radical egalitarianism and allergy to authority in the early New Left reflected a secular version of traditional evangelical doctrine. One might call it “the priesthood of all participants.” Unlike the hierarchical unions of the Old Left, the New Left sought a politics without coercion. Chapters of Students for a Democratic Society, for example, would not even agree to take a break unless there was perfect consensus among members.

Freed from hierarchical organizations that emphasized solidarity, the New Left quickly took on a sectarian character. Not unlike Protestant churches, New Left groups began to splinter as activists sought a purer and more authentic expression of leftist politics. As political scientist Hugh Heclo has emphasized, “the movement” fractured into many movements as young radicals were called to a “plurality of authenticities.”

Protestantism, after all, has always thrived in a state of protest. For this reason, evangelicalism has been a critical mainspring of American politics. It birthed the abolitionist, temperance, suffrage, anti-evolution, and civil rights movements. Today’s Religious Right must be seen in this context rather than as the bastard child of the counterculture.

Nonetheless I agree that the ideals of the Sixties influenced the Religious Right, though in somewhat different ways than Shires emphasizes. I would argue that the Religious Right embraced New Left ideals at a time when many liberals had forsaken them. The youthful leaders of the New Left fervently hoped that important moral questions would return to the center of American politics. They believed that only moral controversy could revitalize American democracy and inspire alienated citizens. In its more contemplative moments, the New Left sometimes even appreciated the necessity of a well-organized Right to a more ideological and participatory America.

Today’s liberals have largely lost their enthusiasm for “values voters” because too many of them turned out to have the wrong values. In other words, liberals have repudiated New Left ideals because the Religious Right was so successful at fulfilling them. While the Sixties Left built large public-interest groups dominated by checkbook activists, the Religious Right created grassroots organizations that mobilized disaffected evangelicals. This discrepancy prompted Robert Putnam to note in his otherwise grim account of American civic life, “It is, in short, among Evangelical Christians, rather than among the ideological heirs of the sixties, that we find the strongest evidence for an upwelling of civic engagement.”

Despite some important disagreements with Shires’ work, I think he deserves much credit for writing such an ambitious book. Others have taken a narrower cut at Shires’ subject matter. The historian Doug Rossinow has written on Christianity and the New Left, particularly focusing on radicals at the University of Texas in Austin, and political scientist Allan Hertzke has made fascinating comparisons between Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson. But Shires is the first to try and explore the ties between the Sixties and the Religious Right in a comprehensive way. Thus, Hippies of the Religious Right should be a useful point of departure for students of the Sixties and the Right for some time to come.

Jon A. Shields is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs and has a forthcoming book on the democratic virtues of the Religious Right from Princeton University Press.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In late 2003, Al-Jazeera anchorwoman Khadija Bin Qinna caused a stir among viewers when she appeared on-air wearing a brightly colored headscarf. The vast majority of Al-Jazeera anchorwomen and female reporters do not wear any head-covering, and previously Bin Qinna had been no different. In addressing public speculation on the matter, the Algerian newscaster later explained that, after a three-year struggle with “the devil,” she had been convinced of the necessity of donning the hijab by a guest on the station’s weekly Islamic program, Sharia and Life.

It is precisely this kind of rhetoric that troubles many non-Muslims. While most Muslim women who do not wear the headscarf themselves but defend those who do emphasize that the matter is one of personal choice, Muslim women who decide to conceal their hair (and more) tend overwhelmingly to cite divine mandate as their motivation. This would appear to leave uncovered Muslim women as dupes who have succumbed to the devil’s wily charms.

Whatever the case may be, it is one of many issues social anthropologist John Bowen does not sufficiently probe in his study of the March 2004 law banning students from wearing “conspicuous” religious signs—including Islamic headscarves, large crosses, Jewish kippas, and Sikh turbans—in French public schools. Although the author recounts instances “when, after I have talked about why and how the law came to be passed, people are still unsure what I think,” it would be wishful thinking to believe that this applies to the book itself; it is clear throughout that Bowen opposes the law. Fortunately, his arguments remain informed even when not wholly convincing, and his analysis of the headscarf affair simultaneously illumines the larger social context. Indeed, in many respects Why The French Don’t Like Headscarves offers a detailed and insightful study of the overall place of Islam in the French Republic, and of the increasing discord between religious Muslims and the avowedly secular state they call home.

Not so another recent book on the subject, The Politics of the Veil, by sociologist Joan Wallach Scott, who, despite her erudition, makes the tendentious claim that “the veil in French republican discourse is understood in racist terms.” Scott writes: “French universalism insists that sameness is the basis for equality”; yet “[t]he requirement of sameness underwrites and perpetuates racism.” Scott fails to recognize that, though the French Republican conception of national identity is indeed narrow, the sameness required is neither religious nor racial, but simply the privatization of religious belief and the non-politicization of ethnicity on the part of all French citizens.

Whereas Bowen tends to view those French politicians and intellectuals who supported the law as having been inspired by the naïve belief that it would curb Islamic radicalism, Scott is convinced that something far more sinister is at play. Though the law directly affects only the small minority of Muslim schoolgirls who wear the headscarf, Scott improbably claims that it is directed against all Muslims, qua Muslims: “By outlawing the headscarf, the state declared those who espoused Islam, in whatever form, to be literally foreigners to the French way of life.”

Perhaps because Scott’s book is “not about French Muslims, but about the dominant French view of them,” she does not bother to investigate the interplay between French Muslims’ self-perception and the aforementioned dominant French view of Islam, or the manner in which the former may have influenced the latter. For example, isn’t it possible that Western perceptions of a one-size-fits-all Islam—inaccurate, but not racist—take their cue from an outward insistence on the part of many Muslims that Islam is one and indivisible, and that Muslims the world over belong to a single umma, or nation?

For his part, Bowen does discuss Muslims’ perceptions of self but—like Scott—pays scant attention to doctrinal injunctions. On the issue of head and body coverings, for example, the Qur’an merits only a cursory mention, while the Hadith (the codification of the words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad) is completely ignored. The author’s intention here is to debunk preconceived notions concerning a supposed overarching ideology animating all headscarf-wearing girls. Bowen emphasizes the multiplicity of reasons motivating young Muslim women to cover their hair, and consequently the foolishness of considering the headscarf representative of a single socio-political orientation.

This is an important point—reductive explanations should always be avoided—but it ignores the conspicuous fact that most girls explicitly cite Islam as their motivation for wearing the headscarf. Moreover, varied motivations can nevertheless produce a cumulative effect. For example, many people hang crosses around their necks not out of any genuine sense of faith but owing to tradition, habit, or even superstition; this does not change the fact that the cross remains a symbol of Christianity. Indeed, however varied the reasons for wearing the cross, together they magnify the public visibility of Christianity. Similarly, tradition and familial pressure—neither of which by Bowen’s own account plays a major role—fail to dilute the Islamic symbolism of the headscarf. The latter’s visibility in public schools may not be evidence of threatening “communalism, Islamism, and sexism,” but simply of the increased presence of Islam in a sphere long regarded as secular and religion-neutral territory.

Bowen also fails to interrogate arguments in defense of the headscarf. For example, in discussing “modesty” as one factor impelling Muslim women and girls to cover up, he neglects to mention a popular notion underlying this idea. Muslim thinkers often portray women as intrinsic sex objects, for the simple reason that men cannot help but be sexually aroused by the mere sight of woman. For this reason, a woman must cover herself, interpretations varying as to whether part or all of her body should be obscured from view. When a woman does not take this precaution, she knowingly invites the lecherous and even violent actions of hopelessly agitated men who cannot be considered responsible for their conduct. For a country committed to equality of men and women, reinforcing such a peculiar concept of modesty would seem absurd.

There are other irritants as well. Bowen refers to the horrendous practice of female genital mutilation as “excision,” an inaccurate euphemism that fails to indicate the extent of the violence involved. He cites French Muslim thinker Mohammed Arkoun as “the only Muslim” on the 19-member commission that recommended the law against religious signs even as he refers to fellow members Hanifa Chérifi and Gaye Petek. The former is of Algerian and the latter of Turkish origin; both appear to be Muslim, albeit non-observant. Yet few other mistakes can be found, and in general the author is quite meticulous, especially when discussing various facets of the ideology upon which modern France is based.

French Republicanism, as it is called, derives much of its inspiration from The Social Contract and other writings of the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who tended to emphasize social harmony over individual rights. Indeed, French Republicanism has always included a totalitarian strain, at various times banning anything and everything—from proselytism to professional guilds and regional languages—that smacks of social specificity, all in the name of combating “communalism.” This is in large part a legacy of the state’s struggle against the Catholic Church, which historically interfered in virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives. In a sense, we are back to Hannah Arendt’s observation that any kind of total revolution will itself become totalitarian.

To be sure, the headscarf affair was overblown; “91 percent of all teachers in France had never even encountered a student in a headscarf at their current school.” In this respect, Bowen demonstrates the decisive role of the media, which were generally arrayed against the headscarf. (Interestingly, however, the courts were not; before the law was passed, girls who could prove that they had been expelled from school for no reason other than wearing the headscarf almost always won their cases.) Bowen and Scott both point up what is arguably the law’s chief weakness. The commission’s report, Scott observes, “took integration to be a prerequisite for education, rather than its outcome.” Indeed, the question of how to integrate students who are being expelled has no easy answer.

It is also imperative to bear in mind that other Islam-related issues remain unresolved. Various fears led to a law that will certainly reclaim public schools as secular territory but will do little to combat larger anti-social tendencies like rising “communalism, Islamism, and sexism.” Still, it would be incorrect to think that such issues are being ignored. Indeed, the state has sought to balance “a hard-line position on scarves with a willingness to control Islam by aiding it.” The idea is that, were the state to nurture an Islam de France, French Muslims could more easily be encouraged to assimilate, and would no longer have to rely on foreign funding for mosque construction, and foreign imams for religious instruction.

Until recently, such a move was deemed unacceptable according to the same two principles often cited as justification for a law banning headscarves from public school classrooms. Bowen explores the ambiguity of the terms laïcité, loosely translated as secularism, and “public space,” from which religious and communal signs are banned. (For all the confusion involved, the March 2004 law on religious signs should, if anything, further clarify the meaning of such terms.) He adds that Catholicism remains favored by the state in many ways, while Islamic institutions do not even receive the benefits accorded their Protestant and Jewish counterparts.

This is changing, however, with the recent creation of an umbrella Muslim organization to serve as interlocutor between the state and its Muslim citizens. Of course, such an approach carries its own dangers. Perhaps the biggest fear is that French Muslims, already neglected in terms of housing and employment by successive governments, will be completely abandoned by an indifferent state to the tender mercies of an Islamic body eager to assert control over its flock. In other words, French Muslims would become akin to non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who were forced to submit to their respective sects’ internal laws. Indeed, the worst-case scenario is that Muslim citizens of France end up being subjected to “soft” sharia by some official Islamic body charged with overseeing the community’s affairs.

This would appear unlikely. As Bowen suggests, the borderline-totalitarian aspect of French Republicanism has its benefits: “If the American insistence on freedom of choice assumes the possibility of choosing, and thus sees the matter as a private one, the French emphasis on autonomy and dignity sees it as the state’s obligation to take steps to create the conditions for meaningful choice.” Perhaps such eternal vigilance on the part of the state will serve to guarantee that concessions to religion do not translate into separate and quasi-legal fiefdoms for various religious communities. French Muslims must retain the right to ignore or contravene Islamic law, and even apostatize altogether from Islam, as is the case with adherents of other religions.

What we see in France today is an explicit recognition of the classroom—the crucible of education—as public space, and an effort to ensure that it remains a secular venue in which students of all faiths come together. Contrary to Scott’s argument, which claims that by passing the headscarf law France is actively rejecting Muslims, the French state is trying to include Muslims in the classroom while keeping Islam at bay. The French state cannot reinterpret Islam so that it recognizes a distinction between public and private, but it can certainly make Muslim citizens of France recognize this distinction. Ultimately, the issue of whether Islam can in fact be interpreted in such a manner as to allow for the privatization of religion is mooted by the realization that French law supersedes Islamic sharia, and that Muslims in France—like all French citizens—must give precedence to national allegiance.

Crucial, too, is the fact that the headscarf law applies only to primary and secondary (public) schools, not to universities. The rationale behind this is that students at primary and secondary schools are minors, whereas those at universities are adults able to make informed decisions concerning religious adherence. (Think of Anabaptist teachings on the inadmissibility of baptism for those who have not reached the “age of accountability.”) And the approach is working; Scott writes that “[t]he law has been in effect since 2004, and, it seems, most Muslims have accommodated to the rules” (though for her this is not a happy outcome). In a small way Muslims—especially religious Muslim girls—are being further integrated into French society. This is essential for achieving equality and social harmony in France.

In a larger context, of course, long-held assumptions about the demise of religion are consistently being called into question by the political ambition of compact and growing religious communities, be they organized evangelicals in the United States, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, Hindutva activists in India, or increasingly assertive Muslim minorities across Europe. In addition to political tension with the governing power, such groups often experience social friction with religious and non-religious rivals. The secular state remains the only arena where a range of these ideological factions can coexist, so long as none is invested with any coercive legal power, and citizens continue to be governed by a single secular code of law. This would seem to be the greatest legacy of Enlightenment France to its 21st-century self—and to a globalized world.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer based in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Christian Wiman is a poet and essayist and the author of three books, most recently Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press). His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times Book Review. He is married and lives in Chicago, where he is the editor of Poetry magazine, a position The New York Sun describes as “the equivalent of a bishopric in the American poetry world.”

Wiman has taught at Stanford, Northwestern, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. The concluding essay of Ambition and Survival is forthcoming in 2008’s Best American Spiritual Writing.

The Poetry Foundation, the publisher of Poetry magazine, made news in 2003 when philanthropist Ruth Lilly gave $200 million to what is now one of the largest literary organizations in the world.

This interview was conducted by email while Wiman was on a visit to Texas, his native state.

Many people have asked about the impact of Ruth Lilly’s $200 million gift to the Poetry Foundation. I’m sure that answers to that question are part of your mental FAQ, but I’m curious about this question from the other direction. What do you think is the economic impact of the art of poetry? I know this may sound like a crude question—poetry does not need to be justified by the bottom line, and its impact isn’t quantifiable—but what part does it play in the marketplace?

I don’t think poetry has any economic impact in this country. There are the occasional big sellers like Billy Collins or Maya Angelou, but this accounts for a tiny percentage of the poetry produced in this country, and even these instances don’t amount to much in the massive capitalist machine that is modern America.

I do think a life in poetry is a calling, but for a long time I was unwilling to admit that the call might come from God.

Some people have argued that this marginality is actually a strength, that it allows poets to “be free.” I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I’m appalled by the rampant greed and sharp disparities of our economic system and value the aspect of poetry that is both apart from and sharply opposed to this pure materialism. But on the other hand, I’m sick of the insular, coterie world of contemporary poetry and feel that it would be (and often is) greatly enlivened by ANY contact with the world at large. The Poetry Foundation might be said to exist at this crux: we want to preserve the powerful spiritual interiority of poetry while making that power available to many, many more people.

As the editor of Poetry, you were at the center of the literary controversy of the year in 2007, following the story that ran in The New Yorker. How has that controversy benefited Poetry and the art in general?

The article was primarily about the foundation, though the magazine was also part of the story. The thrust of the piece was mostly negative, I think, objecting to any sort of populism in poetry. I say “I think” because many poetry insiders understood it that way, though many outsiders thought the opposite, which indicates the sharp rift between poetry and the rest of the world right now. In any event, the major effect of the article has been a positive one for us. It has caused people to look more closely at our programs and to see how inclusive and wide-reaching they are. We’ve had major surges in growth since that article appeared—200,000 kids in our national recitation contest, millions of people coming to our website (poetryfoundation.org) to find poems and use our educational material, people all over the country tuning in to our programs on radio and television. I believe this is a pure good for poetry in general, but then I believe very strongly that poetry exists for the sake of life in general, exists to help people, all people willing to work at it, live their lives.

The title of your most recent book is Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Are the qualities of ambition and survival particular to the experience of certain poets like yourself, or are they more universal and inherent to the process of becoming a poet?

When I was young all I wanted was to be a great poet, and I went at it with an indefatigable fury. I thought that this ambition was “pure,” insofar as I knew that being published by the best magazines and presses and praised by the best critics wouldn’t ever answer this need. The only judgment that truly mattered was that of the great, dead poets I most admired, and they were unlikely to speak.

Now I’m not so sure. (About the purity of the ambition, I mean; the dead still aren’t saying a word about my work, though I do occasionally hear a disturbing kind of skeletal chuckling.) All ambition has begun to have the reek of disease to me, the relentless smell of the self. We want to stamp our existence upon existence, our nature upon nature. We are pursuing a ghost—even my image of the dead participates in this—rather than a god.

And that is the issue, at least for me. I do think a life in poetry is a calling, but for a long time I was unwilling to admit that the call might come from God. And if he is the one calling, then he is the only one who can ratify your response.

Which is to say: my thinking on this has evolved over the years. I don’t regret or renounce my early ideas—I do think a poet’s ambition ought to be aimed higher than any sort of worldly success—but clearly, since I myself have often been confused, I can’t claim to speak for all poets!

I was startled recently to learn about Josef Stalin’s secret poetic career. In a letter to a friend, Stalin explains why he gave it up: “I lost interest in writing poetry because it requires one’s entire attention—a hell of a lot of patience.” Stalin’s words were fresh in my mind when I read this at the beginning of your book: “I still believe that a life in poetry demands absolutely everything.” Obviously the people and circ*mstances couldn’t be more different, but this only emphasizes the central idea here. What does it mean for poetry to demand “absolutely everything”?

Stalin makes you think of me? I’m trying to feel flattered.

A life in poetry does have a high cost, and not simply because this country doesn’t value the activity (though this doesn’t help). If you have that particular fire in your head (to paraphrase Yeats), it’s going to play practical havoc with your life. It’s going to require a lot of the emotional energy that you might be giving to other people, it’s going to afflict you at odd and unpredictable times, and it’s going to afford no compensation except for the sweet relief you feel when, as a poem finds its form, that fire goes out. What a relief that is, though, and how close to the very center of being itself you can feel at that moment.

But it’s worth finishing the sentence you quote above. What I say in the book is, “I still believe that a life in poetry demands absolutely everything—including, it has turned out for me, the belief that a life in poetry demands absolutely everything.” Which is to say that the very belief that poetry somehow costs everything, which can become its own kind of comfortable deprivation (“I can’t give myself over to this relationship/cause/belief because I have to give myself to my art”), might be part of the cost and have to be renounced or moved beyond. Certainly this has been the case for me.

In the chapter on poetry and religion you start off by saying, “Art is like Christianity in this way: at its greatest, it can give you access to the deepest suffering you imagine.” Would you say this is why art resists sentimentalism?

Well, the adjective is important there: greatest. I was trying to point out how the highest moments of art can at once enact our deepest sufferings and provide a peace that is equal to them, and how this is similar to (though lesser than) what I understand to be the deepest truth of Christianity. The peace does not eliminate the sorrow or the tragedy: great art acknowledges intractable human suffering, and Christianity’s promise of resurrection is empty without a clear, cold sense of the cross.

So yes, art does resist sentimentality, as does, at its best, Christianity.

That said, there are all kinds of art, and all kinds of Christianity, that include sentimentality—and are not necessarily vitiated because of that. I love many novels, poems, and pieces of music that have obvious sentimental moments or characters in them, and it seems to me that the daily life of a Christian can’t be lived with the kind of austerity I’m describing above. Some people, those inclined to severity and sternness, actually need more sentimentality in their lives, and others who are over-inclined to frivolity and vapid cheerfulness need to be dropped more often into the depths of their beliefs. Art is a good means for achieving both of these.

In Ambition and Survival you talk about growing up in a fundamentalist family, and then go on to describe some of that experience, which included drugs, adultery, suicide, and divorce. When people talk about Christian fundamentalism, those activities are usually not the first things that come to mind. What role did your family’s Christianity play in the midst of all that?

It hasn’t been my experience that fundamentalist families—or religious families of any sort—are somehow immune to the problems that plague secular families. In fact I think a religion that defines itself chiefly with rules and rigid codes often causes emotional explosions that a saner spirituality would have helped to avert.

That said, my own family is full of highly intelligent, highly imaginative people, and I feel it would be patronizing for me to speculate about what effect our strict beliefs had on them individually—and in truth, as I say in the book, I’m not at all sure exactly what any of them believe anymore; certainly it couldn’t be said to be “fundamentalist.” I do think the emphasis we all had on sin and guilt was poisonous, and it has kept wounds fresher for much longer than they needed to be. But whether this was something inherent in our beliefs, or something particular to the kind of people we are, I couldn’t say.

As an undergraduate you attended Washington and Lee University, and at that point left the faith. What were one or two of the key factors that contributed to your leaving the faith almost effortlessly?

See above. The religion I grew up in was one of rules and order. In my mid-teens my life exploded, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to distinguish between the deep emotional and eternal truth of Christ and the temporal social codes in which that truth was trapped: it all just suddenly seemed a lie to me. It took the tiniest push—meeting my first atheist at college, trawling through all of Nietzsche with a kind of terrified elation—for everything to fall away.

The last chapter of your book narrates quite a dramatic convergence of recent events: your marriage, the end of a poetry writing drought, your return to the faith, and the diagnosis that you have a rare form of incurable cancer. At this point in time, what kind of poem would you say your life is?

The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh once wrote a very beautiful narrative poem called “The Great Hunger.” It’s fantastic, easily the best thing Kavanagh ever wrote, though he did write other wonderful things. The poem was written relatively early in his life, though, and later on he came to think of the poem as a failure because it was purely tragic, whereas he believed that the highest art was, at its heart, comic.

Now, by “comic” Kavanagh didn’t necessarily mean something that makes you double over with laughter. He meant comic in the sense that tragedy is overcome, or, more accurately, he meant that in the deepest human tragedy there is a seed of supernatural joy.

I would like that kind of life, that kind of death.

Aaron Rench received his B.A. from New Saint Andrews College, and is currently a graduate student at the University of Oxford in Creative Writing. He and his wife, Gentry, have one daughter, Eve, and make their home in Idaho.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The pearl of Celtic literature, the completed expression of the Cymric genius.” [1] So Ernest Renan on The Mabinogion. Renan is probably more familiar to readers of Books & Culture as the author of a controverted Life of Jesus (1863) than as an essayist on the Celtic races, but if we have misgivings about his Christology, let them not deter us from heeding these choice words. Nor do you have to be Welsh to say so, proud as the Welsh are of their literary tradition as of the antiquity of their spoken language. [2]

The Mabinogion is the name commonly used for a collection of eleven medieval Welsh tales which unveil for us a world of magic, mist, and myth, where there is no manifest boundary between what we might call the “natural” and “supernatural,” a space where heroes and maidens, chivalry and enchantment, love and death, war and friendship flower and flourish. What Feuerbach said mischievously of another world—”Nothing ever happened normally in Old Testament Israel”—can be said meaningfully of this one. The Mabinogion constitutes a magnificent and influential literature that has proved to be a vital and major tributary in European culture, one way or another. If “medieval Wales” conveys anything to non-medieval non-Welsh folk, it is doubtless the image of King Arthur and his gallant company. Arthur appears in a few of the tales of The Mabinogion, but he is neither a dashing nor even (overtly) a dominant figure by and large. Never mind. Enter this world and you will find more wond’rous things than Arthur.

A new translation invites us to make that entry. Its author, Professor Sioned Davies of Cardiff University, explains her rationale:

The overriding aim of this translation has been to convey the performability of the surviving manuscript versions … . The Mabinogion were tales to be read aloud to a listening audience—the parchment was “interactive” and vocality was of its essence. Indeed, many passages can only be truly captured by the speaking voice. The acoustic dimension was, therefore, a major consideration in this new translation.

This explanatory note is preceded by quite a long introduction and followed by a guide to the pronunciation of Welsh words, a short bibliography, and a map. So readers who are shortly to encounter arms and warriors, as they encounter these tales, are themselves well-armed for the encounter, and the equipment Sioned Davies supplies is adequate to the need. A further resource is provided at the end of the translation: over sixty pages of notes go into significant detail explaining allusions in the text and providing indices of personal and place names. The whole is usefully and pleasingly managed; the scholarship is detailed; the reader can thus both enjoy and enjoy knowledgeably.

The key question, of course, is whether the scholarship and textual care fortify a translation of commendable quality. Here, I have two reservations. First, Sioned Davies takes for granted that it is impossible to convey the literary force of the original in translation. She is certainly not to be faulted for any failure to do the impossible. But the stated description of her aim does not alert the reader to the extent to which she (or any translator) is bound to fall short. Her remark, quoted above, that “the acoustic dimension was … a major consideration in this new translation” is followed by the assurance that “every effort has been made to transfer the rhythm, tempo and alliteration of the original to the target language.” But if we survey the alliteration in the original, we shall see how non-transferable it is, and the original unity of rhythm and tempo is therefore not captured in translation. Take the very first lines of the very first story. “Pwyll, prince of Dyfed, was lord over the seven cantrefs of Dyfed. Once upon a time he was at Arberth, one of his chief courts, and it came into his head and his heart to go hunting.” The “h/d,” “h/t” effect in “head” and “heart” and “hunting” works as well as can be expected, and there are many lines in this translation, unexpected in the English, that are explained by comparison with the Welsh original. For example, from the story “How Culhwch Won Olwen”: “Knife has gone into meat and drink into horn, and a thronging in the hall of Arthur.” The choice of “thronging” is doubtless governed by the advantage of picking up “thr” in “Arthur,” and it reproduces what we find in the Welsh: “amsathyr y neuad Arthur.” [3] So a reasonable attempt is being made; but compare the opening lines of that first story, which I have quoted above, with the Middle Welsh text [4] (the italics give a rough guide to where the accent should fall in reading):

Pwyll, Pendefic Dyfet, a oed yn arglwyd ar saith cantref Dyfet.

“Pendefic” is “prince,” and we see how the “d,f” in “Pendefic” is picked up in the “D,f” of “Dyfed.” This is inevitably lost in translation, but the original produces a romantic poetic effect from the outset. The same thing happens even in the translated title of a story. “The Lady at the Well” renders the Welsh “Iarlles y Ffynnon,” but the words “Iarlles” and “Ffynnon” both have two syllables, the accent falling on the penultimate one, so producing a rhythmic effect; further, the “ll” (a single consonant in Welsh) is even capable, in this context, of an onomatopaeic reminder of flowing water. Of course, the translator will be the first to admit all this, but my point is that the extent of the contrast between translation and original will not be evident from what she says about the aim and ambition of this particular translation.

There is a second reservation. In an earlier translation of The Mabinogion, the translators remarked: “Any one translating from Welsh into English literally is confronted with the difficulty that arises from the differences in the structures of the two languages. It is much easier to render literary Welsh into literary English than it is to do so into literal English.” [5] This is certainly the case and probably conveys a more general truth as regards translation even into a language which is not so structurally different from the original. It is always desirable to translate into literary English, as best one can, writing whose distinction is precisely literary. True, The Mabinogion is not just of interest strictly as literature; the stories as stories, together with the historical, political and cultural significance of the writing, command attention. Sioned Davies’ ambition is entirely worthy: to convey the tales from the standpoint of orality and performance. Nevertheless, in executing this task, the original literary power has to be conveyed, as far as is possible. And here, however archaic some other translations; however inferior from the standpoint of scholarly information about the texts; however indulgent in their rendering, they occasionally read better in the English than this translation. [6]

Sometimes the English is awkward:

“Oh,” she said, “then what kind of uprising was it?”
“An uprising to break your fate on your son,” he said.

A comparison with other translations and with a fine version in modern Welsh indicates that the translator’s decision here is between something like “to avert the fate (or destiny) which you have sworn on your son” and “to break the curse on your son.” An alternative translation to the one Sioned Davies offers, even one that was slightly controversial, would have served better than “break your fate on your son.”

On other occasions a phrase which works tolerably well translated literally into Welsh needs a different idiomatic rendering in the English. In the present translation, we read: “If you hear a scream, go towards it, and a woman’s scream above any other scream in the world.” [7] “A woman’s scream, above all” or “above all, a woman’s scream” works better in English. And sometimes, despite her remark that the most “notable” earlier translation is “rigorously accurate, if overtly literal,” Davies seems too dependent on it, as far as I can judge. [8] For example, we read “the best suited to be emperor of all his predecessors,” where “better suited to be emperor than any of his predecessors” makes more sense. [9]

But I hope that the hard work done on this translation, and the care taken to produce it so as to bring out that peculiar characteristic of the Welsh which this translator wishes to highlight, even if not always with success, will stimulate interest in The Mabinogion. I am not sure that I can recommend any one translation without qualification, and my Middle Welsh is too wobbly to do so confidently. This does not mean that little can be said for any of them; on the contrary, much can be said for them all. However, it may be that what was said by a translator sixty years ago is still the case: the way “is still open for a rendering which should aim to convey literature in terms of literature and yet endure the most rigorous scrutiny of contemporary scholarship.” [10]

Sioned Davies’ translation should conduct us into an enchanting and enchanted world (or “worlds”; the stories differ somewhat from each other in atmosphere). Credit for bringing them onto the European stage on a significant scale goes to the 19th-century translator, Charlotte Guest, whose style, said Tennyson, was “the finest English he knew, ranking with Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.” [11] Tennyson was stimulated by one of the tales, “Geraint, son of Erbin,” to write his own “Geraint and Enid,” and one interesting way into reflective reading of The Mabinogion would be to read Tennyson’s poem alongside this tale and set oneself an examination question: “Tennyson’s ‘Geraint and Enid’ moralizes where ‘Geraint son of Erbin’ does not. Discuss.” This particular story is not actually representative of all The Mabinogion and illustrates their diversity, being a little short on the kind of magic we customarily meet elsewhere. But its treatment of female virtue, in particular, invites consideration of women in The Mabinogion as a whole, and once we start on that, we are well on our way into meditating on the whole corpus. The women, like the heroes and all the golden sights before us, are one reason why these tales should not be read at one sitting, but perhaps taken one a day over eleven days. For to be dazzled by several women—or sights, or heroes—all at once, each of whom or of which surpasses every other in beauty or grandeur, is more than mortals can ordinarily bear.

It is tempting to feel pressure to say something about Christian faith and the Mabinogion. It is a temptation rather easy to resist. For where should we begin? However, reflection on their relation is both a salutary historical exercise and a productive contemporary one in a culture where Harry Potter (not to be confused with The Mabinogion) has stamped his influence. Some readers of these medieval Welsh tales will experience what Etienne Gilson somewhere said in relation to Thomas Aquinas, to the effect that “he who has stepped into Thomas’ enchanted world will never want to step out of it again.” The Mabinogion belongs broadly to Thomas’ epoch, but its world is a rather different one. And the juxtaposition of Thomas and The Mabinogion conjures up a temptation that I shall not resist, which is to end where we started, with words of Renan: “It would be wronging God to believe that, after having made the visible world so beautiful, he should have made the invisible world so prosaically reasonable.” [12] I hear Arthur hoarily assent. Best leave it there.

Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast. He is the author most recently of The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity (BakerAcademic).

1. Ernest Renan, “The Poetry of the Celtic Races,” in The Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Studies (Kenniket, 1970), p. 3. “Cymric” here is “Welsh” or “British” in the older sense; these days, “British” is often associated particularly with “English.”

2. For the practically unique revival of Welsh in the contemporary world, note an observation in Preston Jones, “Endangered Species,” Books & Culture, March/April 2001, p. 26.

3. The text as edited by Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, Culhwch Ac Olwen (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1997), p. 4, line 90. Davies’ translation is not the only one that opts for “thronging.”

4. The following is from one of the two principal texts that contain the Mabinogion, but, generally speaking, any linguistic differences between the texts do not affect the points being made about their literary quality. I quote from Ifor Williams’ edition of Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (Cardiff, 1930). I modernize just one consonant above in order to bring out the effect.

5. T.P. Ellis and John Lloyd, The Mabinogion: A New Translation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929), vol.1, p. x.

6. Davies indicates these translations on p. xxxvii.

7. This sentence, from p. 66 of Davies, does not sound too bad in modern Welsh: see Dafydd and Rhiannon Ifans, Y Mabinogion (Llandysul: Gomer, 2001).

8. Davies, p. xxix. The phrase “rigorously accurate and literal” is applied to that same translation (by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones) by another translator, Patrick K. Ford, The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (Univ. of California Press, 1977), p. ix.

9. The phrase is from “The Dream of the Emperor Maxen,” p. 103; my alternative follows the translation by Jeffrey Gantz, The Mabinogion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

10. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, The Mabinogion (Dent, 1974; original, 1949), p. xxxi. I have not had the opportunity to consult in detail a new translation, The Mabinogi: Legend and Landscape of Wales, by John K. Bollard (Llandysul: Gomer, 2006), beautifully illustrated with photographs. This volume does not include all eleven tales; the word Mabinogi can strictly refer, as it does here, only to the first four stories that we find in Sioned Davies’ translation. Bollard notes the degree of similarity between the mode of narration in the Mabinogi (= Mabinogion) and the Hebrew of the Pentateuch, p. 14.

11. Quoted by Rachel Bromwich, “The Mabinogion and Lady Charlotte Guest,” in C.W. Sullivan III, ed., The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays (Garland, 1996), p. 13. Lady Guest’s translation can combine ideal descriptives with slightly inaccurate translations, as in her sentence concerning “the churlish dwarf” in The Mabinogion, volume 2 (London: Longman, 1859), p. 90.

12. Op. cit., p. 59.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Public intellectual.” If the term irritates you, get over it—or substitute your own coinage. What matters is the reality being pointed at, argued over, catalogued. Google the term and you’ll find what at first appears to be a lively conversation. On closer inspection, you may be struck by the narrow boundaries of most of the talk. Who qualifies for the title, and what kind of work counts in the public conversation: those crucial matters get defined in very cramped ways.

And contrary to some widely circulated jeremiads, the species is thriving. Consider Susan Wise Bauer, whose books The Well-Educated Mind (2003, written with Jessie Wise) and The Well-Trained Mind (2004) found a ready audience among homeschooling families and intellectually curious souls more generally, and who now is engaged on nothing less than a history of the world in four volumes, intended for the common reader.

Writing history in public is a bold enterprise, even when your subject is relatively modest in scope, but Bauer is up to the challenge. In the first volume of the series, The Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, she lightheartedly acknowledges the audacity of her project, clearly undaunted. Within the first few paragraphs she’s briskly taking charge: “I understand why many historians choose to use bce and ce in an attempt to avoid seeing history entirely from a Judeo-Christian point of view, but using bce while still reckoning from Christ’s birth seems, to me, fairly pointless.”

Perhaps her four-volume children’s series on world history was a necessary preparation for this text. In The Story of the World Series: History for the Classical Child (already in revised and second editions since 2003), she mastered the art of deciding “what to leave out.” And writing for children, a historian learns how to hold her readers’ attention. Pick up Bauer’s new volume on the ancient world and compare her treatment of Peisistratus, the tyrant who ruled Athens for several decades in the 6th century bc, with the account given of him in the reputable world-civ standard, The Heritage of World Civilizations, by Albert Craig et al. [1] First from Craig’s text:

Despite Solon’s reforms, Athens succumbed to factional strife that ended when the leader of one faction, Pisistratus (605?—527 B.C.E.), a nobleman and military hero, seized power firmly in 546 b.c.e. with the help of mercenary soldiers and made himself the city’s first tyrant.

And then from Bauer’s book:

In 560, Peisistratus and his club-wielding bodyguards stormed into the Acropolis [and lost] … . Peisistratus regathered himself in exile. He had tried sheer force; now he would try strategy. He made a secret alliance with the aristocratic Megacles, leader of the Men of the Coast, promising to marry his daughter … . [After enjoying some success, Peisistratus] annoyed his wife by “not having sex with her in the usual way,” as Herodutus puts it … . Megacles, informed of this development (and presumably already regretting his alliance with the rough and ready Men of the Hills), decided to switch sides again, and joined the Men of the Plain in driving Peisistratus back out.

Peisistratus had tried revolt; he had tried political alliance; his only path back into power was to buy it, and this path he took.

Writing a four-volume series rather than a single (if massive) volume, Bauer has the advantage of a larger canvas. But she also has a knack for narrative and an eye for human interest. Indeed, sprinkled liberally throughout the book are talking points that connect with readers in ways distinctive from many established texts.

Most of Bauer’s hooks are created through historic leaders. Her preface invites us into the human story of Antiquity—and it is a story, not a bloodless text that drones endlessly on, not a barrage of disconnected facts. Listen in on the book’s first sentences:

Sometime around 1770 bc, Zimri-Lim, king of the walled city of Mari on the banks of the Euphrates, got exasperated with his youngest daughter.

A decade earlier, Zimri-Lim had married his oldest daughter Shimatum to the king of another walled and sovereign city called Ilansura. It was a good match, celebrated with enormous feasts and heaps of presents (mostly from the bride’s family to the groom).

Within the first page the tone is set for a public discourse. The obscure Zimri-Lim has a socio-political context, along with a human dimension. Bauer unfolds the story with an account of his wives, the birth of twins, a disowned second wife, and the otherwise trite story of royal succession. This scenario doesn’t dispense geographic, economic, and cultural information in indigestible form, but neither does Bauer ignore these important aspects of her subject; rather, she works them into this prefatory case study, in which she lays out her approach for the entire volume.

Not one reader in a million will ponder the clay tablets that record the history of Mari. But being a public intellectual necessitates bringing such sources to the front while leaving the research-laden discussion to specialists. Whether in her discussion of Greek “Trading Posts and Colonies” (Chapter 49) or the Assyrian decline (Chapter 50), Bauer reaches into primaries like Homer, Herodotus, Livy, Dio Cassius, Plutarch, Tacitus, Josephus, I and II Kings, Xenophon, Hesiod, and a host of others. She also consults important secondary works like H. W. F. Saggs’ Babylonians. And her text is strengthened by drawing on key works from archaeologists, such as C. L. Woolley’s classic reports on Ur—and views on Akhenaton from that candid Canadian at Penn State, Donald Redford. Although she misses some important scholarly voices, especially Edwin Yamauchi’s work on the Scythians and Persians (I’m rather biased since he’s my mentor), she consults a host of others, such as Cyrus Gordon (Yamauchi’s mentor), Kenneth Kitchen, A. Leo Oppenheim, and Thorkild Jacobsen. (However, she overlooks Jacobsen’s wonderful Treasures of Darkness—a dialogue on the original Mesopotamian texts worthy of Bauer’s insightful attention.)

Ancient history has a way of turning up in curious guises. Not long ago I entered a packed lecture hall in the Natural History Building at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and two history interns had welcomed me with the following phrase scribbled large across several chalkboards—”MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, Creationism Is Death! Evolutionism Is Life!” Perhaps they knew a religious conference was renting their space, or that Edwin Yamauchi was my mentor. Nonetheless, they seemed unaware that this very passage describing Belshazzar’s Feast (Daniel 5:1-4), once considered as evidence of a biblical error, actually supports its veracity. The History of the Ancient World reveals the strong corroboration of the biblical account with primary sources. What sounds counter-intuitive on the surface, since Belshazzar’s father Nabonidus was the official king, is quite plausible in the light of the many intrigues Bauer creatively captures.

Indeed, the intermarriages, paranoia, and leadership styles among the 6th-century bc Persians and their kinfolk and neighbors, the Medes, Lydians, and Babylonians, could provide fodder for an HBO series. Herodotus, Bauer tells us, relates that the Median King Astyages, who also ruled over the Persians, became alarmed about a dream in which his daughter “urinated so much that she not only filled his city [Ecbatana], but even flooded the whole of Asia.” Troubled by his wise men’s interpretation, and in the light of no male heir, he chose Cambyses for his son-in law—mainly because he lacked ambition! Ten months later, Astyages thought he had disposed of his grandson, Cyrus, not knowing that the chief official tabbed to carry out the deed, his cousin Harpagus, had delegated the killing to a herdsman. (Harpagus felt it wouldn’t be prudent to have the blood of a child in the royal line on his own hands.) But the herdsman’s wife had just delivered a still-born child, which they exposed on a hillside (you see, we did as we were told), claiming the infant Cyrus as their own.

When Cyrus’ true identity was discovered and made public, he was ten years old—Astyages had no choice but to accept it. But he wasn’t pleased to learn that Harpagus had failed to do away with this potential rival ten years earlier. Pretending to accept his cousin’s apology, Astyages exacted his revenge. He had Hapargus’ son killed and then baked, to be served to his unsuspecting father as the main course at a feast. At the end of the meal, the king had the son’s head, feet, and hands brought out on a platter—and Harpagus remained calm, ackowledging the king’s prerogative. Bauer notes that “Harpagus, still serving his cousin quietly, was planning long-term revenge: a dish served cold.”

Above all, the story as related by Herodotus (likely embellished) reflects the serious strife between the ruling Medes and their vassals. This intrigue set the backdrop for Babylon’s fall. Bauer observes that when Medes turned to killing Medes, the struggle to maintain power had become irreversibly intense. And though Astyages still maintained an ally in Nabonidus, king of the vast Babylonian empire to the west and Belshazzar’s father, that ally had been weakened amid recent political upheaval and power changes.

When Cyrus took over the Persian rule upon Cambyses’ death in 559 bc, he remained loyal to Astyages and, in turn, his Babylonian allies. Nabonidus had strengthened his Babylonian network via a treaty with wealthy King Croessus of Lydia. But Cyrus began to shake the region’s foundations when he marched against Ecbatana, avenging Astyages’ attempt on his life during childhood. And perhaps the precursor to Marc Anthony’s joining his foes in Egypt, Harpagus convinced his Median troops to switch sides to the Persians when they met on the battlefield—finally avenging that horrific taste of his son’s death. Nabonidus seemed to have a false confidence in his allies when he put Belshazzar in charge—and left the city for ten years. (He went to the Arabian city of Tema, where he could freely worship the deity to which he was devoted, the moon-god, Sin.) Little wonder that, given the long ipso facto rule of Belshazzar, the Jews considered him the actual king—and had they been trying to forge the account, they would have ignored Belshazzar’s role altogether.

Nabonidus finally returned to help protect the city against Cyrus’ advance, but to little avail. After an initial defeat, Nabonidus retreated into Babylon. Bauer notes that the various texts overlap on this account, as it appears that the very night of Belshazzar’s feast, Cyrus rerouted the Euphrates (which she confuses with the Tigris due to Herodotus) and marched into the city (539 bc). Cyrus immediately venerated Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, and thus endeared himself to the city—but he also won the gratitude of the Jews through his support of rebuilding the temple (Ezra) as corroborated on the famous Cyrus Cylinder.

Bauer’s treatment of this episode—compelling, well paced, grounded in the sources—is characteristic of the book as a whole. Perhaps the most curious section of this first volume in her series is the very brief coverage of “a wandering prophet named Jesus,” who “annoyed a large and powerful group of priests in Jerusalem by challenging their right to control the religious life of the Jews.” I’m reminded of W. H. C. Frend’s otherwise powerful text The Rise of Christianity. He spends parts of only a few pages (of nearly 1,100) on the fulcrum of Christianity’s message, the resurrection. Likewise, Bauer spends less than a page on Jesus—whose life, regardless of one’s belief in his divinity, changed world history. Though the subject is ripe with biblical and extra-biblical sources (such as Pliny and Josephus), not to mention the archaeological bonanza, none such are cited. The relationship between Pilate and Sejanus, and the latter’s fall from Tiberius’ favor, is one of many events having direct bearing on the story and offering considerable narrative appeal. The very next discussion affords twice the space to the obscure Gondophernes of Kush and the Gnostic Acts of Thomas—and includes various primary citations. Christianity itself is introduced in less than a page. Perhaps Bauer decided that in this case, less is more.

Certainly the next volume in the series, on the medieval era, will provide ample room for reckoning with the legacy of that “wandering prophet.” We can be thankful that Susan Wise Bauer is on the job.

Jerry Pattengale is assistant vice president for scholarship and professor of history at Indiana Wesleyan University. His most recent book is Why I Teach (McGraw-Hill), with The Purpose-Guided Student (McGraw-Hill) among those in press.

1. Albert M. Craig, William A. Graham, Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, and Frank M. Turner, The Heritage of World Civilizations, 5th ed. (Prentice Hall, 2000)

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When I called a physician friend for advice on an adverse reaction to anesthesia after minor surgery, he made the offhand comment, “You know, veterinarians don’t have that problem. They measure out the dosage, give the injection, and the horse or dog or whatever responds according to the book.” That simple observation could serve as a summary of what prompted Harvard conveners to bring together molecular biologists, neuroscientists, pain clinicians, psychiatrists, anthropologists, musicologists, and scholars of religion for the conference that spawned this book. Physiologically, pain in humans may resemble that of horses and dogs, but there the similarity ends. In many ways, culture trumps biology.

Consider the phenomenon of Couvade, documented in many places worldwide. In some societies in Micronesia and the Amazon Valley, for example, the mother shows no indication of suffering during delivery. She may break from work a mere two or three hours to give birth, then return to the fields. By all appearances the husband bears the pain: during the delivery and for days afterward he lies in bed, thrashing about and groaning. Indeed, if his travail seems unconvincing, other villagers will question his paternity. A journalist or anthropologist who tried to explain, “Sir, there’s no reason for you to feel pain because, after all, it was your wife who bore the child,” would doubtless meet a hostile reaction. For months the father has struggled with such symptoms as nausea, weight gain, constipation, headache, and other signs of distress, not to mention the agony of the “delivery” itself. For him, the pain is as real as it is for the Manhattan socialite demanding her epidural.

Before attributing this cultural phenomenon to a primitive, unscientific world view, remember that placebos, nothing more than sugar pills and saline solutions, work well in developed countries. Around 35 percent of cancer patients report substantial relief after a placebo treatment, about half the number who find relief from morphine. Both cases, negatively with Couvade and positively with placebos, demonstrate that pain does not fit the Cartesian stimulus-response model that once prevailed.

Pain and Its Transformations reflects an admirable attempt to bring together experts who look at pain from the bottom up (neuroscientists, biologists) and those who look at it from the top down (anthropologists, scholars of religion). The Harvard conference, assembling 23 contributors from various disciplines, came as a climax to a two-year seminar series on the topic. The book includes fifteen main chapters as well as a series of discussions in which the other contributors get to respond. As in every compilation, quality varies. Some authors rely on the jargon of their specialty, whether science or theology. Mercifully, both points of view have presenters who can cut through the jargon and write in plain English.

One more complaint: Like most books on pain, this one gives a mere nod to pain’s essential role in protecting from injury and turns quickly to the problems it presents (the root word for pain means “punishment” or “penalty”). To the contrary, I learned a high appreciation for pain’s warning function while collaborating on three books with Dr. Paul Brand, the missionary surgeon who discovered that all the disfigurement that makes leprosy such a dreaded disease traces back to the loss of pain sensation. Theologians blithely attribute pain to the Fall, ignoring the marvelous design features of the pain system. Every square millimeter of the body has a different sensitivity to pain, so that a speck of dirt may cause excruciating pain in the vulnerable eye whereas it would go unreported on the tough extremities. Internal organs such as the bowels and kidneys have no receptors that warn against cutting or burning—dangers they normally do not face—but show exquisite sensitivity to distention. When organs such as the heart detect danger but lack receptors, they borrow other pain cells (“referred pain”), which is why heart attack victims often report pain in the shoulder or arm. The pain system automatically ramps up hypersensitivity to protect an injured part (explaining why a sore thumb always seems in the way) and turns down the volume in the face of emergencies (soldiers often report no pain from a wound in the course of battle, only afterwards). Pain serves us subliminally as well: sensors make us blink several times a minute to lubricate our eyes and shift our legs and buttocks to prevent pressure sores. Pain is the most effective language the body can use to draw attention to something important. The principle applies equally to animals, an aspect of pain for which C. S. Lewis had no satisfactory explanation.

Although not dwelling on pain’s contribution, everyone in this volume acknowledges the complexity and mystery surrounding our experience of pain, which provides a common ground for discussion. The reductionists describe how a stimulus at the most basic level—a cut finger or stubbed toe—begins a cascade of biochemical reactions which are then filtered through the spinal cord and referred to the brain. In a recent development, functional MRIs can even detail the brain activity responsible for phenomena such as phantom-limb pain, which involves no external stimulus. The brain has a representation, or mental picture, of individual body parts based on their sensory history, and interprets reality based on that picture; an amputation dramatically alters the representation, confusing the brain. Or, in the case of someone who has undergone a frontal lobotomy, the patient can describe intense pain in precise detail but have no emotional reaction: “Yes, the pain is acute and nearly unbearable,” she says with a broad smile.

To its credit, this collection provides a wide variety of cultural models for understanding and managing pain. A Harvard professor describes an operation in Shanghai in which a woman has a tumor removed from her thyroid with no anesthesia or medication, only traditional chi gong therapy. At one point the sheet covering her shoulder irritates her and has to be adjusted, but when blood spurts across the room onto the white coat of a surgeon, she gives no reaction. The devout in Sri Lanka dangle from hooks, and Shi’ites in Iraq flagellate and slash themselves with swords, giving no indication of pain sensation. In a fascinating section, two musicologists describe the analgesic quality of music and trance in Finland and Bali, Indonesia.

Religion, of course, plays a crucial role in ascribing meaning to the pain experience. At the risk of oversimplification, I might suggest the following pattern: acceptance (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism), mastery (advanced practitioners of Hinduism and Buddhism), and protest (Judaism). Christianity at various points reflects each of these streams. Early in its history martyrs sang in the flames, stylites sat on poles exposed to weather, and desert monks lived on a diet of bread and water. Later, fatalistic Christians argued against inoculations for smallpox, which would interfere with God’s will, and warned against relieving the God-given pain of childbirth. Sarah Coakley, one of the editors of this volume, contributes a chapter examining the relationship between pain and contemplation in the spirituality of two 16th-century Carmelites, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. She admits that in some ways these two reflect a strand of valorization of pain—a tradition familiar to parochial school students drilled on martyrs’ tales. Yet, paradoxically, meditation also offers its own analgesic possibilities, as Dr. Herbert Benson has long maintained. Perhaps most important, the Christian mystics presume that no pain is devoid of spiritual meaning. It can serve a redemptive purpose, and in that sense pain can be transformed.

The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff suggests that early Christian thinkers introduced a radical departure from their contemporaries, the Stoics and Neoplatonists, so much so that the two viewpoints on pain are profoundly alien. Stoics and Neoplatonists strove to live a life in which one’s well-being is not hostage to fortune; the absence of pain is thus not desire-worthy, being by and large outside one’s control. Citing Augustine, Wolterstorff points to a major divergence in approach: human beings should grieve over their miseries as well as those of their neighbors and friends. The word “compassion” means, simply, to “suffer with.” Augustine emphasized two ages, a present age and an age to come. The age to come holds out the promise of no suffering, death, or wrongdoing, which implies that their existence in the present age represents evil not yet overcome. Pain serves only a temporal purpose, by contributing to soul-making. Christ himself gave the template: ministering to the afflicted, embracing pain with both protest and acceptance, then transforming it through resurrection.

Complementing Wolterstorff, the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson affirms that “being happy in this world is not necessarily a good sign.” The believer lives as a sojourner, with eyes on a blissful world to come. He admits, “Moderns often think of the latter as pie in the sky, a crude consolation prize, rather like the candy bars that were dropped on a village during the Vietnam War after it was learned that the wrong site had been bombed.” Perhaps it is this modern myopia that makes pain such a problematic experience. If one has no hope in a future balancing of the scales, whether through reincarnation (Hinduism), absorption (Buddhism), or divine judgment (the Abrahamic faiths), one can only sort through the capricious and cruel distribution of pain and suffering in this life and strive to eliminate it.

Those who study pain from the bottom up keep uncovering layers of complexity, in the pain receptors themselves and especially in the networking systems within the human brain. Those who study pain from the top down have no easier task. For the Christian pain represents, at various times and from various angles, a design feature worthy of praise and gratitude, an affliction to be overcome, a potential vale of soul-making, and a spur to hope in a painless future. The Harvard seminar, and this book which resulted, hardly reduce the complexity, but at least the two sides are talking.

Philip Yancey is the author most recently of Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? (Zondervan).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In his book The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis wrote, “Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” Indeed, this is true in the world of medicine, for though technology and treatments continue to move ahead, we never really leave our infirmities behind. Each new generation of physicians must interpret current medical therapies in light of our perpetual physical illnesses and our varied emotional responses to them.

Consider the situation in Great Britain and America a few centuries ago. As Michael Flannery notes in the introduction to his finely prepared critical edition of Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician, even then—as today—there were alternative medical treatments for those who opposed “mainstream medicine’s attempts to create a monopoly through restrictive licensing and other regulatory measures.” Thus Culpeper (1616-1654) collected various pharmaceutical and botanical treatments to publish in books so that every man could be his own physician. Culpeper’s goal was not to pass on medical wisdom from one generation of physicians to the next but rather to make treatments accessible to each new generation of people, who could serve as their own physicians.

Naturally, Culpeper’s disdain for the medical establishment and his alternative therapies brought him scorn from the medical community. Looking backwards with the benefit of medical progress, it is indeed difficult not to smile when we read through some of the remedies in The English Physician. I doubt the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, would approve of Culpeper’s treatment for the cough in children: “Take 1 Ounce of Hog’s Grease, half an Ounce of Garlick, bruise and stamp them together, and anoint the Soles of the Feet at Night warm, & then bind a Plaister thereof on the Soles.” For the “falling sickness,” the reader is enjoined to “take that part of a Woman’s Skull, that groweth on the hinder part of the Head (it is whiter than the rest of the Skull) beat it very fine to powder, and give the party as much as a Pea at a time in Syrup of Violets.” (It is not stated if harvesting a woman’s posterior skull should be done when the donor is alive or dead.) As I was reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I mused: would fighting fire with fire (or in this case vitriol with vitriol), followed by a dose of grace, be helpful in calming a near apoplectic hatred for religion? “Apoplexy to Cure: Take of the best Aqua-vitæ well rectified from Phlegm one Pint, Oil of Vitriol one Spoonful, mix them and let him drink thereof one Spoonful first in the Morning, and another last at Night. Then let him Sweat in a Stove twice a week, and every time therein bathe him with Oleaginous Balsom. This is Excellent.”

The English Physician sallied forth in 1708 from the press of one Nicholas Boone in Boston, the very first medical book ever printed in the British North American colonies. This was not a genuine Culpeper production but rather the reprinting of a book of various remedies attributed to him that appeared in London in 1690 (36 years after Culpeper’s death) under the title Physical Receipts, or The New English Physician. In its long life The English Physician became many a printer’s cash cow, for it “filled a much-needed gap in health care for the poor—at only 3 pence per copy, written in plain English, with many simple and easily prepared remedies.”

Although many a book is still printed in order to make “every man his own physician,” the more accepted practice is for physicians to pass on clinical pearls of wisdom from one generation to the next. Thus, for example, Richard Selzer’s Letters to a Young Doctor, first published more than twenty-five years ago, consists of a series of chapters ostensibly written to someone beginning specialty training in the field of surgery. This was Selzer’s attempt to answer the question he had been asked so often, “What is it like to lay open the body of a fellow human being?” It’s a mulligan stew of a book with some chapters consisting of medical stories gleaned from his years of practice, others on matters obliquely related to medicine, and still others written without discernible purpose that I can only label as “weird.” Still, he does write with a light touch that at times left me shaking with laughter: in writing about how surgeons have their own fetishes for a particular surgical instrument or way of doing things during the combat of surgery to vanquish disease, he notes, “An even older tradition insisted that the victor in combat devour the heart, brain or testicl*s of his vanquished foe. By this ingestion the winner took upon himself the courage, strength and sexual prowess of his enemy. I shall say no more about this save that such behavior is altogether inappropriate at a teaching hospital.”

Selzer’s Letters to a Young Doctor is not so much a book of advice to a budding surgeon in training as it is a collection of vignettes that show what being a doctor involves and what being a patient is like. This is basically the goal of Dr. Perri Klass in her book Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor. Klass’ book is a collection of reflections based on actual patients she has treated as a pediatrician, written as a series of letters to her medical school-bound son. The book consists of a preface and ten letters of moderate length that are coherent, practical, not without humor, and printed in an easily readable font. Klass, a pediatrician and author of a number of books, including several works of fiction, discusses everything from the changing facets of medical treatment to patient confidentiality, balancing work with life outside the hospital, death and dying, making mistakes, and other assorted topics. It is just the kind of book that would be useful to anyone considering a career in medicine or to those already in training, and intriguing to those outside the field of medicine who want a glimpse of what it’s like on the inside. Klass is even frank enough to record what her college-aged daughter said after proofreading the manuscript: “It comes off a little like a congratulatory feel-good piece to make everyone who’s chosen to be a doctor feel great about how wonderful and important their job is, and to be honest I’m not someone who’s really eager to be convinced of that.” Treatment Kind and Fair is a wise book and a quick read, easily recommended.

If I were asked to add to the counsel of Culpeper, Selzer, Klass, Atul Gawande, William Nolen, and many others who have written about medicine, what would I say? Among other things, I think I would write about medicine’s struggle with the seven deadly sins. Some writing doctors (one thinks of Samuel Shem in The House of God) do depict the moral depravity among physicians, but overall few doctors write about how easy it is to lose one’s moral compass in medicine. When patients and hospital staff all address you as “doctor” on a daily basis, follow your orders, and solicit your opinions as an authority figure, pride has a way of inflating the ego that can lead to an unhealthy sense of importance, with disastrous consequences for yourself and those around you. For some, pride leads to wrath when they don’t get what they feel they deserve, and they throw adult forms of temper tantrums. Lust is an ever-present temptation (often succumbed to) in what is still a male-dominated profession, where co-workers often find themselves in intense, intimate situations (e.g., the emergency room or operating room) with members of the opposite sex. Gluttony might take the form of overeating (not uncommon in people who make a good salary but often don’t make time to exercise or eat well) or wasteful prodigality (throwing away perfectly good, unused/ reusable products, a practice I saw in every American hospital I ever worked in). Sloth is not physical so much as it is intellectual among doctors: the laziness to not examine or study their belief system, their religion, with the same vigor with which they study medical textbooks and articles. Socrates injunction “know thyself” is often ignored. At times envy rears its head among successful people who scrutinize each other’s accomplishments. Finally, greed plays a major role in how medicine is practiced in capitalist societies, especially in the United States, where competition for making more money is keen. (I’ve sometimes thought that a helpful lecture for first-year medical students would be titled, “All the really horrible, rotten, dastardly things you all are going to do to each other over the next several decades because of greed.”)

Sin, however, is hardly unique to the medical profession, and there are plenty of non-medical books that address this. (The Bible certainly has a word or two to say about the matter.) So apart from talk about temptation, what counsel is there for aspiring medical professionals? Well, there is the advice that comes from talking with experienced doctors. There are also numerous books that show the challenges and pitfalls of medicine. For my money, Perri Klass’ Treatment Kind and Fair is probably the best place to start.

David Graham is a physician working in Ecuador.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

One Sunday, my Methodist minister wife made a mistake in preparation. She didn’t glance at the assigned psalm text before she stood up, in worship, to lead the church in reading responsively.

Psalm 137 begins innocently enough, beautifully even: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” This is the kind of language church people expect from the Bible: pretty, exotic, comforting—in short, religious, in the modern sense of dealing with feelings. But by the end of the psalm things have taken something of a turn: “O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he … who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”

From my pew I watched my wife’s expression change from that of the non-anxious presiding presence they taught us to be in seminary to that of someone who’d just swallowed a frog. Then the organ struck up the doxology, she turned to face the cross, and led the church in praising the God whose Word just blessed the smashers of babies’ heads.

What was that all about? Christians are those who gather Sunday by Sunday not only to praise God but also to heed God’s word in Scripture and shape their lives around it. Most mainline churches end our ponderous biblical lections with the concluding phrase, “This is the word of the Lord,” and everyone mumbles, “Thanks be to God.” Evangelicals go further, calling Scripture “inerrant” or “infallible.” Catholics and Orthodox will process into worship with a gold-covered or otherwise splendidly decorated Bible just behind the cross, the priest will raise incense before the Word, and the people will bless themselves before hearing it. Our liturgical gestures suggest we are people with high esteem for this one book. So what do we do when the book is, well, not so edifying?

Ever since Martin Luther pulled the Bible and the traditions of the church apart by playing the former off against the latter, we have had problems. The Reformed tradition described the Scriptures as clear, “perspicuous,” intelligible to any reader. They meant, of course, to stand in contrast to a Roman Catholic suggestion that only ordained, Latin-reading, Mass-mumbling priests could read God’s word. But if Scripture were so perspicuous, why did Calvin have to write the multivolume Institutes and a library of commentaries to tell us what it meant? And why have subsequent generations of Protestants, each insisting they were following the Bible, shattered like so many pieces of smashed glass into a bewildering variety of denominations? It’s not obvious that the result is a more biblically literate population among Protestants. The Bible sits atop bestseller lists but often gathers dust on believers’ shelves.

Biblical hermeneutics is the scholarly discipline that attempts to wrestle with the intersection of the Bible, theology, history, pastoral practice, and everything else that matters. The books here under review suggest that there is something of a renaissance going on in the field. The narrow slice of biblical studies that has dominated hermeneutics for two centuries—historical criticism—is giving way to a proliferation of reading approaches, many sympathetic with the traditions Luther wished to cast away as so much obfuscating overlay. Intervarsity’s Ancient Christian Commentary volumes have been appearing for years now, followed by similar ventures from Eerdmans (The Church’s Bible), Brazos (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible), and Blackwell (Blackwell Bible Commentaries). Ventures like these show that we are learning again to read the Scriptures with the help of the ancient church fathers, and the result (ironically enough, given the ancient church’s anti-Judaism), is a more Jewish form of biblical hermeneutics. The Jews know they can’t approach Torah without doing so through the Writings, the Prophets, and centuries of midrash. In one famous image, the words of the rabbis are like the white space in between the black marks on the page of the Torah.

So too, growing numbers of serious Christian readers of the Bible have become persuaded that we can’t hope to know what Moses “means” without seeing how he was read by Jesus, Paul, Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Newman, and Barth. The particular lineup of midrashic commentators can change, of course. The point is the exegetical humility of reading the Scriptures through the saints—an appropriate response to the humility of a God who bends toward us in Christ and gathers his people in a communion of saints. The real question will be whether and how this way of reading takes root in local pastors’ preaching and in lay people’s expectations. For if it remains interesting only to scholars, then it deserves to be flicked away, like a barnacle on the hull of the church’s ship. But if we can add a few more saints to lists like the one I gave above (my grandmother, say, and a few old ladies from the churches I’ve served), then we may be on to something. As St. Athanasius famously said, “If you want to know the minds of the saints you must live the lives of the saints.” The church, thankfully, has never been deprived of saints. These and similar books will help us in the mind-department.

Baker’s Evangelical Ressourcement series seeks to show that the early church’s import for Protestants is not less “integral” than “it is for Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.” With D. H. Williams’ volume Tradition, Scripture, and Interpretation the series succeeds admirably. The book is a companion source-volume for Williams’ previous book, Evangelicals and Tradition, but is plenty readable on its own.

Williams is a highly esteemed patristics scholar teaching at the Baptist Baylor University, which makes him an odd duck on several counts. And in trying to introduce his evangelical readership to patristic biblical exegesis he’s taking on quite a task. Yes, the fathers were as devoted in their biblicism as any 20th-century evangelical. It’s not hard to find sentiments like Cyril of Alexandria’s throughout the patristic era: “Do not simply take my word when I tell you these things, unless you are given proof for my teaching from Holy Scripture.” But as Williams ably shows, the fathers not only didn’t believe in the Reformation slogan, sola scriptura, they wouldn’t even have understood it. From their perspective, “a radically Biblicist view might easily be driven by a desire to avoid the truth of the church’s teaching,” Williams argues, and indeed heretical groups in the early centuries were often eager to “prove” their points by citing chapter and verse.

In a fine introductory essay, Williams describes tradition as “the memory of the church.” As Augustine shows in his Confessions, we are who we are only through our memories. It is not less so with the church. Williams uses a historian’s scalpel to open this wound in his evangelical patient: the Bible is not actually older than church tradition. The writings of the first fathers precede the uniting of the biblical books in one volume as we have it today (the first list of the books of the Old and New Testaments that matches our own Bibles comes from St. Athanasius in 367, though the key books were in place long before). St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of “Scripture” simply as what we think of as the Old Testament, which for him demonstrably sets forth Christ without ambiguity! Even after the formation of the biblical canon, tradition still functioned as a hermeneutical rule: “an approach for interpreting the Bible by investigating and following the ancient consensus of the fathers.”

Not that that consensus is always clear. In fact, learning to read like the fathers should make our reading of the Bible a good deal more difficult. The fathers often affirm an “infallible Bible,” music to the ears of today’s evangelicals. But they also celebrated “points of obscurity or even contradiction” in the Bible—the very things many superficial readers today would prefer to ignore or iron out. The letter of Scripture is plain enough for all readers. But God has intentionally placed obscurities in the Bible as opportunities for spiritual growth for its readers: “because he only wants to open [the Scriptures] up to those who are prepared to look” for God’s mysteries, as Williams quotes St. Augustine. Scripture is here understood in dynamic terms, as that which moves believers from immaturity to maturity, from mystification before the opaque text of scripture to induction into its mystery. And that mystery is Jesus Christ: “He is the inner logic that ties the whole of it together.” Williams’ words reminded me of St. Irenaeus’ image of the words of the Bible being like so many tessarae in the hands of a mosaic-maker. They can be arranged so as to display something disgusting, like a fox or a dog. (Disgusting to Irenaeus and his readers, at any rate.) Or they can be properly arranged to show the image of a king. The interpreter is an artist, and Christians should judge her work on the basis of how well she has displayed the beauty of the one we worship.

Those in Reformation-based churches have often recoiled at allegory as one of the means by which the plain sense of Scripture is distorted. This is rooted in our revolt against our Catholic forebears: let them have allegory, and pretty soon they’ll find the Queen of Heaven in Revelation, or prayers to the saints in 1 Maccabees. Williams ably shows that the heartbeat of allegory for the ancient church was Christological. Allegory was a means to further the church’s passionate love affair with Christ through discerning his presence on every page of Israel’s Scripture. Like any interpretive practice, allegorical reading can go wrong and stand in need of reining in, sure enough. But without it, something dear to the heart of Protestants is lost: the chance to see Jesus anew, now refracted through the words not only of the New Testament, but of the Old as well. And there are so many more words in the Old! This is no individual venture, as Williams makes clear; it is an intensely ecclesial, communal one, to a point that our love for privacy is scandalized: St. Egeria writes in the 4th century that before baptism the bishop asks the neighbors of those seeking baptism whether they are indeed as good and decent as they claim!

An impressive collection of essays on The Bible in Pastoral Practice demonstrates the historical rootedness of ancient Christian biblical interpretation. Those roots can either help us to imitate our forebears or they might keep us from doing so. The volume’s editors frankly admit their “simple lack of knowledge” about the ways the Bible has been used in pastoral practice historically, so they’ve signed up an able group of historians to get them up to speed. Lewis Ayres, a patristics scholar at Emory, starts out with a bang by telling them the fathers will press against “how we characterize the boundaries of ‘pastoral.'” For the fathers are certainly interested in pastoral practice: Orthodox priest Demetrios Bathrellos demonstrates a patristic spirit when he writes, “The most important ‘pastoral activity’ in the Orthodox Church is worship and the most valuable thing an Orthodox pastor can offer to his flock is the daily services.” Ayres pushes even farther as he describes the reading of the Bible for ancient Christians as part of the process of purification and transformation of the reader’s soul so as to glimpse the vision of God. “Reading” for ancient Christians was an exercise in determining how any one biblical text relates to the mission of the incarnate Word. As the reader learns to make the exegetical connection between any given text and Jesus, her soul makes progress toward seeing and loving God and neighbor aright.

Ayres constantly has in mind modern exegetical practices as he describes ancient ones, though his polemic in this essay is light (it is much more bombastic elsewhere in a body of work that is impressive for a scholar so young). He uses the description “plain sense” rather than “literal sense” of a text, lest we think, as we are wont to do, that the “literal” sense is what a historical critic thinks the text “originally meant.” For Ayres, the plain sense in patristic context meant the sense a text had “for a Christian of the period versed in ancient literary critical skills.” Or, more simply, it is the intention of the author of Scripture: that is, God. Exegesis is necessarily a matter of scrubbing out any perceived gap between the world of the text and that of the reader. Indeed, modern hermeneutics’ obsession with the various “gaps” between the reader and the text is simply a misstep. Further, Ayres argues, texts should never be taken in isolation from each other. Biblical texts constantly interpret each other across the sweep of the canon as they direct our attention rightly toward Christ. Elsewhere Ayres often draws on the work of George Lindbeck and his influential formulation that the world of the biblical text “absorbs” the world of the reader. Ayres simply shows how it is so among the church fathers: “We can think of Scripture in the fourth century as ‘the fundamental resource for Christian imagination.'” In a lovely bit of exegesis of the desert fathers, Ayres helps us to see that their constant admonitions against judgment of others’ sins is a pastoral practice immediately applicable to our (or any) day.

An essay by a medievalist, on the other hand, shows this application may be more difficult than it sounds with Ayres. Roger Ellis concentrates on the life and work of Margery Kempe, the 15th-century mystic and freakish lover of Jesus who was often accused of heresy for daring to display her passionate devotion in church (of all places). Such was the life of women who challenged a bishop’s authority in those days. Several archbishops in fact demanded that she stop speaking in church (she never preached, she only admonished others as a lay woman). She daringly quoted Scripture at one prelate to explain why she would not. (Uppity women were not unknown in the centuries before women’s suffrage.) When Margery heard preaching she would often weep openly at the mention of Jesus’ name, or shout at descriptions of his passion. (Pentecostalism was not born, only revived, at Azusa Street.) On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Margery is anguished that no English-speaking priest is present to hear her confession. Not to worry: St. John the Evangelist appears in a vision to hear her confession, “highly strengthening her to trust in the mercy of our Lord.” Margery had powerful contemporaries who, like her, would have made admirable confessors themselves, had they been allowed. Her contemporary St. Julian of Norwich quoted St. Jerome to her: “tears torment the devil more than do the pains of hell.”

Ellis makes the point that Margery is just so odd, it would be difficult to apply her work or experience exactly to our own. In one way he’s right. Most obviously the status of women and the power of the church have changed greatly since her time. But I hope my asides above make clear that Margery may have more to teach us than Ellis lets on with his historian’s words of caution. For the saints, perhaps in their very oddity, help mediate to us the one whom Ellis describes, with a lovely borrowed phrase, as “the go-between God.”

The best historical volume of those reviewed here is by the great Rowan Greer, longtime professor of church history at Yale, chronicling Anglican Approaches to Scripture: From the Reformation to the Present. Greer tells us about a dean of Chichester Cathedral who was reading the first book of German higher criticism he had ever encountered. As he read, the churchman paused to look out of his window—precisely at the moment when the spire of the cathedral collapsed to the ground! Greer himself doesn’t take the lesson this far, but one might: Protestantism has always been inspired by the image of the church’s collapse, which it works to avert. Luther and Calvin sought to shore things up in an effort to restore the ancient church’s fidelity after centuries of faithlessness. Today many Christians, especially Greer’s own Anglicans, face collapse over questions of sexual ethics and identity politics—one more chapter in a series of collapses and narrow escapes. Greer casts a long historian’s glance back to note that questions of nature divided Christians in the 18th century, questions of history those in the 19th century. We’re not “over” any of these crises yet—Christians still take quite different perspectives on them, and occasionally resort to shouting. Greer’s book could calm the ranting for a bit, and not only among Anglicans.

Greer begins with Richard Hooker’s adage that the Anglicans did not mean to trade in papal infallibility for biblical infallibility. Anglicanism’s famous via media breathes through Greer’s work: the “chief characteristic of Anglicanism,” he declares, is a “horror of absolutes and of infallibility.” So, despite initial squeamishness, the Church of England has long embraced historical criticism. Greer cites F.D. Maurice: the church should not “take better care of His book than He has taken of it.” But the via media presented here is not—as it is all too often today, alas—an apology for evasiveness. Greer is actually fairly rough on historical critics, accusing them of a Gnostic bent in their constant effort to reconstruct some world “behind” the biblical text that is then used to judge the words in front of it (which imagined world is, of course, not provable from the text itself). And Greer has a limited, but substantial, place for dogma. Trinity and Christology are the only two dogmas he finds in the ancient church, and “I should argue that both of them leave room for a range of doctrines.”

Sure enough: standing firm on a few points of truth allows us flexibility to explore widely without floating off: “It would certainly be the case that one could show that certain interpretations of Milton’s Paradise Lost are incorrect, but it would not follow that we can speak of a single correct interpretation.” Historical criticism has a part to play as we pursue correct interpretation, so long as we remember the limits of the historian’s abilities: thousands of people witnessed JFK’s death, and millions have seen it replayed, but we still don’t know fully what happened. Greer acknowledges the problem of arrogance in the historian’s guild, though his indictment is couched in ironic understatement: “One begins to suspect that there are at least hints of what could be regarded as the captivity of the Bible by the academy.” Uh, yeah.

Greer is at his best criticizing the use of “reason” as a theological category. In the Anglican tradition it is one strand of the triple cord by which theological problems are solved, along with Scripture and tradition. But today it is often reified and played off against Scripture and tradition in unhelpful ways. Early Anglicans like Sir Thomas Browne were clear that the church and reason only weigh into theological dispute on “points indifferent,” on which Scripture is silent. The cord functions here more as “a method than a doctrine.” That is, one does not have to believe in something called “reason” as an Anglican, but this is one process by which theological and moral decisions are made and disputes are settled. Greer is pressing against the use of “reason” that crops up frequently today in my own Anglican-offshoot (Methodist) tradition, by which one can simply toss out Scripture or tradition because one’s “reason” tells one to. John Wesley wouldn’t have recognized this way of thinking. Indeed, Greer cites Wesley arguing that a “reasonable” Christian is one who has had the experience of justification! This is not the Enlightenment “Reason,” with a capital R, untutored by Scripture, unwashed in the waters of baptism, but rather the specifically theological habit of reasoning with the church. Or, as Coleridge put it, in the more poetic and less mechanical language preferred by the ancient church and the Anglican divines, “Scripture is like the sun, while reason is like the moon.”

Greer’s book is masterful at directing interpretation towards its telos in God and in the growth of holiness among God’s people. With a quiet demonstration nothing like the polemical tone in which I present him, Greer’s account fleshes out St. Clement’s claim: “The end of Christian philosophy is to make men better, not more learned.” To that end Greer closes with a long prayer from George Herbert about the Adam and Eve story. Historical critics will debate what culture this was borrowed from, fundamentalists will staunchly maintain that it really happened this way historically, liberals will muse that it reflects something about us, psychologically, deep down. But Herbert just prays: “Then didst thou place us in Paradise, and wert proceeding still on in thy Favors, until we interrupted thy Counsels, disappointed thy Purposes, and sold our God, our glorious God, for an apple.” We! Yet the story doesn’t end there: “Then did the Lord of life, unable of himself to die, contrive to do it. He took flesh, he wept, he died; for his enemies he died; even for those that derided him then, and still despise him. Blessed Savior! Many waters could not quench thy love.” Can we write and pray like that again, please?

Braced by these historical works we can turn to the most modernist of our volumes, Engaging the Bible: Critical Readings from Contemporary Women. The title is truth in advertising: one white woman, one black, one Asian, one Hispanic, and one lesbian write about how oppressive Scripture is, shoring up “religious and social attitudes about gender, race/ethnicity, class, and colonialism.” Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza of Harvard coined the term “kyriarchy” to cover all the various oppressions: “the domination/rule of the emperor, lord, slave-master, father, husband, or elite, propertied, educated man.” There’s a certain arrogance here, as women from what are indeed diverse personal backgrounds who now have the benefit of a Ph.D. and a professional teaching appointment describe for us how oppressed they are. Foucault would be quick to point out that all of us have power and oppress others in ways to which we’re blind, but these writers play themselves the victims only.

Carter Heyward of Episcopal Divinity School is the most explicit about this. Scripture simply is not the Word of God for her. It’s often just wrong, and to say so is liberating. For one cannot know God through dogma, creeds, or Scripture. Heyward is impatient with attempts to say hom*osexuality is not biblically prohibited: sure it is, and who cares? For “Our God loves strong, women-loving women; our sweet woman-loving God keeps opening the path before us.” That’s her dogma, and if Scripture doesn’t square with it, then Scripture be damned. Naturally Heyward praises those who’ve mustered the chutzpah to simply leave “the church and its bible and broken out of bondage to biblical authority.” Heyward concludes by quoting a previous book of hers for three full pages (!) in praise of the spirituality of equestrianism: a friend of hers and her horse “were generating this energy together, and it was sacred.” We are critical of everything but our own idols.

These feminist authors are clearly out of step with our historian-authors, but perhaps not as much as either party might think. The feminists’ cry against injustice, which as I suggest goes overboard more than once, can nevertheless provoke a properly Christian refusal to let the Bible become a historical artifact. “Intellectual neutrality is not possible,” Schüssler-Fiorenza insists, and she’s right to reject modernity’s fool’s gold of objectivity. Womanist theologian Cheryl Townsend Gilkes praises the way black slaves in the United States “saw themselves as the poor man laid at the gate” in the parable of Lazarus. No gap between the text and the reading community there. Indeed the very cry against injustice that animates this volume is a cry born of the gospel. The question to ask the authors is whether “liberation” here has been redefined solely along the lines of identity politics without reference to Jesus.

The essayists in Engaging have largely set aside the difficult work of interpreting Scripture. If it’s simply wrong most of the time, why bother? In contrast, the authors of Struggling with Scripture see the activities of “struggle” and “interpretation” as inseparable. The late William Sloane Coffin introduced the volume by raising the nagging suspicion among academic liberals that their benighted evangelical counterparts take the Bible much more seriously than they do. Walter Brueggemann, William Placher, and Brian Blount are nothing if not serious here. Brueggemann describes the difficult task of interpretation as a “God-given resistance to monologue.” Scripture already wrestles with Scripture within the canon, as Deuteronomy re-presents God’s early injunctions to the community in Exodus for Israel in a new day, for example. So too the church continues to struggle to interpret its ongoing experience as a community in love with Scripture. As we do that, the individual baggage and personal pain of the sort the feminists wrestle with can’t simply be put aside. But we can submit such passions “to brothers and sisters whose own history of distortion is very different from our own and as powerful in its defining force.” One ought not read this book alone.

Placher wrestles especially with biblical injunctions against hom*osexuality in light of the church’s past obstinance over issues like slavery. And he finds way back in the 19th century a surprising helping hand from none other than that master of stalwart, unchanging Reformed orthodoxy, Charles Hodge. Hodge wrote that the Scriptures are “infallible” only “for the special purpose for which they are employed.” That is, for matters doctrinal and ecclesial that lead to salvation, not for matters of science or chronology. Placher also points to the plank in the eye of those who hold the line on the church’s barring of gays from ordination. Do unrepentant gossips get similar treatment? “I don’t know about your congregation, but in mine back in Indiana, I am not sure we could get a session together if we enforced a limitation there!”

Struggling‘s authors might be broadly sympathetic with the “post-liberal” movement in recent theology, reacting against the categories of modernity to some degree. Our next two volumes react whole hog, to the point of embracing the description “postmodern,” much feared in more conservative or evangelical circles. Reading Scripture with the Church is something of a foodfight between its authors, A. K. M. Adam, Stephen Fowl, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson. Adam and Fowl are more positively disposed toward postmodernism and completely dismissive of any description of meaning as the original author’s intent, as though meaning were a thing beamed magically from the original pen to our brains. Adam never tires of pointing out that if this is a text’s one and only meaning, then everyone who disagrees with my account of it, both in church history and today, must simply be wrong. Fowl is adept at describing the sorts of virtues an interpretive community needs in order to be shaped in charity as it reads rather than contorted through vice.

Vanhoozer, on the other hand, speaks up for a soft view of authorial intent, set in a wide theological context: “As biblical interpreters, we are ultimately dealing with the Holy Spirit speaking and presenting Jesus Christ in the Scriptures … by means of what the human authors of Scripture have said.” Vanhoozer calls his hermeneutic one of Christus locutor: “The idea that Scripture is ultimately the Son’s own Spirit-borne commissioned testimony to himself, the means by which Christ exercises his lordship over the church.” Feathers fly as the authors reply to one another in ways that only friends of many years, and intellectual companions close enough to disagree passionately, can do.

Our final volume tries to show what a patristically informed, theologically sensitive hermeneutic would look like in actual practice. Brazos was wise to ask Stanley Hauerwas to write its volume on the Gospel of Matthew, for his colleagues and theological companions have often criticized him for his relative inattention to Scripture. And if he has been right over the decades in his insistence that the church should allow itself no loophole in following Jesus’ admonition to nonviolence, then Matthew should be his best friend. The result is the most satisfying work of Hauerwas’ in some years. Forcing him to attend to the Scriptures, line by line, is forcing him to do something uncomfortable: theologians in modernity are trained not to write commentaries, but to write books and articles, he says. What Hauerwas provides us with here is, in Ephrem Radner’s words, a “ruminative overlay” for the text: something to chew on to help us chew on Scripture better. Hauerwas hopes to leave us hungry to read more of Matthew and to do so better. Not surprisingly, writing the commentary has not changed his mind that the best way to read Matthew is to be a pacifist church.

Hauerwas avoids the standard historicist concerns about Matthew (i.e., the synoptic problem), though certainly he is not ignorant of these 19th- and 20th-century historical questions. He is hardly competent linguistically to write a commentary on modern grounds, yet his theological competence shines through all the more for those inabilities. He does not hesitate to elucidate a point from Matthew with a turn to John, or Hebrews, or the Psalter. Bonhoeffer is his favorite commentator here, not least because Bonhoeffer’s life exemplified the way of the cross that is Christian discipleship for Matthew.

Hauerwas comments on the opening of the gospel, “The book of the genesis of Jesus Christ,” by quoting the Martyrology of Jerome to the effect that on March 25, “Our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, and conceived, and the world was made.” That’s Christian eschatology: viewing all creation in light of Christ’s crucifixion. It’s the sort of eschatology that might make it a gift to give up possessions, not to marry, to find oneself in the company of the poor, and to suffer in the way of Christ. So also, Hauerwas comments on the Virgin Birth with little attention to the modernist question of whether such a miracle could happen. God created the cosmos ex nihilo. A proper reflection of this is his incarnation in a womb where there is nothing. Case closed! He refers with Robert Jenson to the resurrection not with modernist skepticism or apologetics but rather with Trinitarian reflection: “The Crucifixion put it up to the Father: Would he stand to this alleged Son? To this candidate to be his own self-identifying Word? Would he be a God who, for example, hosts publicans and sinners, who justifies the ungodly? The Resurrection was the Father’s Yes.” In this work, all of Hauerwas’ strengths—his Christocentrism, his theological passion, his rigorous and demanding love for the gathered church—are amplified through the words of the evangelist to serve as a resource for preaching and teaching in the church. I for one am much more likely to turn here than to any more typically modern commentary for help in preaching.

So what do we do with the sort of passage my wife read that Sunday morning from Psalm 137? Churchly interpreters of all ages would let the passage have its own say first, reading it in the plain sense: Israel is in exile and is crying out in anguish to God and against its enemies. But any Christian bound by Jesus’ injunctions to nonviolence (and, really, any interpreter from any faith with a modicum of a moral sense) would not take the biblical injunction literally. How to read it?

David Steinmetz, in a justly famous landmark essay in theological hermeneutics, asked this:

How was a French parish priest in 1150 to understand Psalm 137, which bemoans captivity in Babylon, makes rude remarks about Edomites, expresses an ineradicable longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem, and pronounces a blessing on anyone who avenges the destruction of the temple by dashing Babylonian children against a rock? The priest lives in Concale, not Babylon, has no personal quarrel with Edomites, cherishes no ambitions to visit Jerusalem (though he might fancy a holiday in Paris), and is expressly forbidden by Jesus to avenge himself on his enemies. Unless Psalm 137 has more than one possible meaning, it cannot be used as a prayer by the church and must be rejected as a lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel.

I’ve often heard Steinmetz commend C. S. Lewis’ allegorical reading, in which the Babylonian children represent the whining selfish desires in which we all wish to be seen as more important than we are. Seen in that light we should not hesitate to “bash the little bastards’ brains out.” Another reading from another teacher of mine at Duke: Hauerwas, in dialogue with Bonhoeffer, commends the psalms’ refusal to cover over Israel’s sins in piety or political whitewashing after-the-fact. There is no sweetness in the Psalter: just gritty, frank talk of Israel’s sin. Only people who speak this way with God have any hope of meeting a God of forgiveness (and they, and we, do). I’ve heard David Ford of Cambridge preach this passage as a reflection on the “multiple overwhelmings” experienced in Western culture in the last century, wars and rumors of wars, that caused us to sit down by a strange river and weep. These are all “spiritual” readings in a sense—the psalmist did not likely have them in mind. Yet they are all surprisingly “literal” readings in that they attend with passion to the letters on the page. That they do so in light of new spiritual situations is not surprising. That they do so in such different ways is glorious: who would dare to leash God’s word to one time and place and meaning that would necessarily exclude everyone else? And that the readers themselves do their interpretive work as Christians, reflecting on the words of Israel’s Scripture through the lenses provided in Christ, is more defensible than many modern scholars have been inclined to suppose. Perhaps there is room for my wife, and preachers everywhere, to preach on these words, and “hear” them preached back in lives of faithfulness. Who knew?

Jason Byassee is an assistant editor at the Christian Century. He is the author most recently of Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Eerdmans).

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