Page 3450 – Christianity Today (2024)

As you walk down Seattle’s Fourth Avenue, the new Central Library jumps out at youliterally; its third-story jaw juts out over a ground-level plaza. Encamped amid nondescript beige and black boxy buildings, this gangly greenhouse, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and opened last May, grabs the gaze of passersby from all of its many angles. On the outside, its polygonal form, cloaked in aqua glass, is arresting. Inside, the sights are just as striking: neon yellow escalators, video art installations behind glass, potted plants dotting spacious reading areas with foam chairs. When Seattle does see the sunshine, as it did on the summer day I visited, the building yanks in the surrounding rays and chases away all the dreariness usually associated with both the city of Seattle and the institution of the public library.

According to reviewsincluding Paul Goldberger’s in The New Yorker, which called the building “the most important new library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating”Koolhaas designed the Central Library to be both more inviting and more logical than the usual library building.1 His unorthodox design achieves both goals. The soaring, see-through walls make the building enticing, in contrast with the stuffy, sarcophagal structures of the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, the floors that hold the library’s collection are set on alternating inclines, each floor rising to meet the next, zig-zagging their way to the top and allowing the collection to continue unbroken from beginning to end. You can thus walk the length of the entire Dewey Decimal System without setting foot on a stair. (For the sake of your calves, start in the 900s with history and travel and work your way down to computers and reference in the 000s.) “It’s a hard building to map,” apologizes an attendant at the information desk.

The cynical take on Koolhaas’ architectural feat is that it is a desperate attempt to sell the idea of books and reading to a hopelessly distracted culture. The optimistic view is that the Seattle Central Library is a triumphal statement about the relevance of books in a digital age, not a tombstone but a keystone of a new information era. The library did, after all, open ten years after the publication of Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, when the future of text printed on paper was considered to be in doubt. The day was surely soon to come when anyone at a computer could pull up any text they wished, and a building filled with shelves of books would stand unoccupied and obsolete. Libraries found themselves, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote, approaching the end of “a century in which the institution has more or less languished in the public consciousness, and at a moment when many people think the library has no future at all in the age of the Internet.”2

Instead, libraries are “busier than ever,” Wheaton [Ill.] Public Library director Sarah Meisels told me last year, as she stood surveying the scene in her bustling building.3 Visits to public libraries doubled in the 1990s, according to the American Library Association, up to over 1.1 billion in 2001, while the number of items checked out rose from about 1.4 billion to about 1.8 billion. And despite the dominance of diet fads and other fatuities on the bestseller listsand despite a much-ballyhooed National Endowment for the Arts study this summer called “Reading At Risk,” which found that Americans are reading less fiction than they were 20 years agothe fact remains: we are a culture that still loves our books.

Still, libraries have stayed alive in part by reinventing themselves as multipurpose, multimedia information centers, whose art galleries, audio and video materials, auditoriums, coffee shops, gift shops, and, of course, Internet terminals are becoming as essential to their purpose as books are. Who would have thought that it would be the audio book that would come of age in the 1990s, while the much-hyped e-book went down in flames? The Wheaton Public Library expanded its book holdings from 40,000 to 55,000 books from 1978 to 2002; during the same period, it increased its audio-visual holdings from 5,000 to 45,000.

The act of eating would earn you a scolding in the library of yesteryear; now, more and more, you can buy a scone and latte. The library used to feel like a museum; today it feels more like a mall. The circulation desk on the ground floor of the Seattle Central Library resembles the check-out counter of an Old Navy. There’s a Microsoft Auditorium and a Starbucks Teen Center. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer raved that the library “is going to be a huge hit with the mass audience that is its principal customer.”4

If that kind of talk is a departure from the public library’s august heritage, the idealismPlace of Learning, Place of Dreams is the title of a book about the new Seattle library in the gift shopis not. Although the public library system, like the interstate highway system, is, when you think about it, one of the most socialist operations this nation maintains, it continues to be associated with our noblest civic principles. Conceived in the late 19th century in a fit of optimism about the plausibility of social progress through public discourse and mass literacy, public libraries appeared by the thousands across America by the turn of the 20th century.

Their proliferation owed a great deal to the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, who pronounced that the library “outranks any other one thing that a community can do to help its people.” While the role of the library has changedit is no longer the sole ambassador of books to the public, but butts heads with bookstore chains and online retailersits reason for being, in the eyes of librarians, remains the same. “I think of libraries as the cornerstone of democracy,” Carol Brey-Casiano, director of the El Paso Public Library and president of the American Library Association, told me. “You can’t have an informed citizenry without access to the information that is available in the library.” If Brey-Casiano is guilty of hyperbole, than so was T.S. Eliot. “The very existence of libraries,” he once said, “affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for man.”

Part of Brey-Casiano’s job as ALA president, which she began last July, is convincing legislators of Eliot’s belief at a time when many state and local governments are running budget deficits. An ALA report released in April 2004 found that 41 states had cut their library budgets over the past year, and over 600 staffers had been laid off. Many libraries were reducing hours, trimming programs, buying fewer new books, and relying more on “Friends of the Library” fundraising for operating expenses.5 Seattle’s new library will be an achievement not only for its architecture but also by simply staying open year-round; in the past few years, Seattle saved nearly $1 million a year (and the jobs of over 20 people) by closing all city libraries for a week at a time, twice a year.6

The saddest symbol of the nation’s library crisis may have been the public library in Franklin, Mass., founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1790 and touted by the town as the nation’s oldest. Last year the town made national news by threatening to close the library for lack of funding, before it received a new infusion of state aid and was saved.7 (The situation is worse in Britain, where, in contrast to the United States, library visits are lagging. A publishing analysis firm called Libri has predicted all of Britain’s public libraries could close by the year 2020.8) Although the latest news is encouragingCongress appears ready to increase federal library funding for its 2005 budgetBrey-Casiano has launched a “Save America’s Libraries” campaign through ALA, distributing promotional materials on its web site that read, “The future is at your library, so make sure your library has a future.”

The sales pitch for libraries in the age of Amazon.com and Google is twofold: technology may provide information, but libraries provide people and they provide places. The first message is, don’t give up on the value of the reference librarian. Students who are lazily content to search Google while writing a paper are shut out from the so-called “deep web”: the private databases and catalogs of libraries and colleges that restrict remote access.9 Meanwhile, they are flooded with thousands of search results, some of them irrelevant and many of them unreliable. “While you can go on Google and find a ton of stuff, the question is how efficient have you been, and how thorough have you been,” Gordon Welles, director of the Glen Ellyn [Ill.] Public Library, told me. “The issue for libraries at this point in our evolution is to help people separate out what’s useful and what isn’t.” He added: “We have to integrate the old technology and the new and recognize there are places for both.” Although the computer terminals tend to be the busiest area in the library these daysand remain the only place where people who do not have internet access at home, which includes half of all households in Brey-Casiano’s district, can use the internet for freelibrarians maintain that the internet should supplement, not supplant, traditional sources.

The second message is delivered by the fantastical face of the new Seattle Central Library. The building makes a bold statement that libraries can be dynamic public places. As Goldberger wrote in The New Yorker, “the building conveys a sense of the possibility, even the urgency, of public space in the center of a city.” Just across the Canadian border, the downtown library in Vancouver makes this point even more emphatically; its dramatic emulation of the Roman Colosseum, collared by a public plaza and a row of food shops, subtly merges indoor and outdoor space. Brey-Casiano says the endurance of public libraries proves that people still value civic places. She cites John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene’s 1982 book Megatrends, which predicted that as technology isolated people they would crave connectedness all the more. Welles, who oversees a magnificent new building designed in the English Tudor style, a trademark of the village of Glen Ellyn, says one of his biggest tasks is divvying up the library’s public meeting rooms for group gatherings.

Just as electronic reading will never replace the paper kind, it seems the personal computer will never replace the public library. “I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents,” Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies; so too, we may value the state a library puts us in as much as what it contains. Among the shelves and study carrels, you can hear yourself think, clearing out the mental clutter of the frenetic Internet experience, with its instantaneous tangents of the constantly clicking mouse. As Matthew Battles writes in Library: An Unquiet History, libraries are where we enjoy both “the sacrosanct space of inner thought” and “the dusty physicality of books,” in contrast to “evanescent digital media.” They are also where we experience the grand moment of the serendipitous, stumbled-upon discovery, the treasure you weren’t looking for. The difference may come down to this: at the computer, you grab a mouse. The books in a libraryand these days, the buildings themselvesgrab you.

Nathan Bierma is an editorial assistant at Books & Culture. He writes the weekly “On Language” column for the Chicago Tribune.

1. Paul Goldberger, “High-tech Bibliophilia,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2004.

2. Geoffrey Nunberg, “Will Libraries Survive?”, The American Prospect, November/December 1998. Also see Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (Univ. of California Press, 1996).

3 Nathan Bierma, “A tale of two busyvery busylibraries,” Chicago Tribune, August 20, 2003.

4. Regina Hackett, “With its glass skin and odd angles, Koolhaas’ design is fun on a grand scale,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 20, 2004.

5 American Library Association, “National study finds library funding cuts in 41 states.” Press release, April 19, 2004. www.ala.org/ala/pr2004/april2004/funding.htm

6. Stuart Eskenazi, “U.S. libraries in a squeeze between budgets, needs,” Seattle Times, February 25, 2004.

7. Elizabeth Mehren, “They Need More Ben Franklins Now,” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2003.

8. John Ezard, “British libraries could shut by 2020,” The Guardian, April 28, 2004.

9. Kate Hafner, “Old Search Engine, the Library, Tries to Fit into a Google World,” New York Times, June 21, 2004.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It has been more than a century since the death of William Gladstone, four-time prime minister of Great Britain (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94) and widely regarded as the great Christian statesman of his age. One might have expected a reasonably complete and satisfying assessment to have emerged by now. Gladstone served in the public eye for more than 60 years. His views on the widest array of topics were regularly reported in the press and Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. He was also a great controversialist who published widely. Though a master of political qualification, Gladstone always attempted to be honest, and generally was. What he could not, or would not, say publicly about family, sex, or other sensitive issues he often recorded in his diary or private letters and memoranda. His library remains intact, including thousands of annotated volumes dealing with all the most controversial issues regarding his career and personality. The opportunities for insight are staggering. Yet biographies of Gladstonemost notably by John Morley (3 vols, 1903), Colin Matthew (2 vols. 1986, 1995), and Richard Shannon (2 vols., 1982, 1999)have all foundered in some way upon religion, particularly in its relation to his mental and moral choices. Just as Victorian cartoonists could never quite locate the visual characteristic necessary to successful caricature, so biographers have struggled to distinguish the active elements of Gladstone’s faith from those that were largely matters of form, and thus less important to understanding his sometimes baffling behavior.

David Bebbington’s The Mind of Gladstone takes a large step forward. It is not a study of his religion per se, nor a full intellectual biography, but a “case-study in the evolution of Gladstone’s thinking” on the foundational subjects that were most important to him: politics, religion, and Homer. Bebbington judiciously balances evidence drawn from Gladstone’s public and private papers, personal library, and published writings, as well as from the most recent scholarly research. He is the first scholar to make significant use of some 200 sermons prepared by Gladstone and delivered to his household between 1840 and 1866, and the first to examine the significant evolution of Gladstone’s views on the Homeric question. This is an important book that succeeds in highlighting the interdependence of received Christianity and rational humanism in the mind of Gladstone.

Early in the book, it becomes clear that Gladstone will not be satisfied by religious explanations that do not embrace both the traditional historicity of God’s work in the world through Christ and the rational use of his intellect. In the opening chapter on “The Foundations of Gladstonian Conservatism,” Bebbington demonstrates, not surprisingly, that the Bible was an important source of Gladstone’s earliest conservatism. On the following page, however, one learns that “the preponderant” influence was Aristotle. In the next chapter on “The Emergence of Church Principles,” Gladstone is characterized as “militantly Anglican,” though his “ideal of state-church relations” is shown to have “rested on the holistic premise that he had learned from antiquity.” When Gladstone’s first book, The State in its Relations with the Church (1838), was savagely attacked by Thomas Macaulay, Gladstone turned to Aristotle for a defense. For Gladstone, faith was “an intellectual act.” Though it is true that the fundamental elements of traditional Christianity were always present to Gladstone’s mind, his appeal to antiquity in resolving intellectual problems eventually became habitual, with the Greeks often being dragged into controversies by the ears.

Gladstone’s early religious struggle, roughly corresponding to his movement from a kind of early evangelicalism to Anglo-Catholicism, involved a reconciliation of the methods of rationalism and the goals of humanism with traditional claims of revealed truth and the historic evidences of God’s work on earth through the Church and Holy Scriptures. The key figure in this reconciliation was the 18th-century Anglican bishop Joseph Butler. From the mid 1840s, Gladstone progressively passed every aspect of belief and practice through Butler’s doctrine of probability. Gladstone came to believe, as Butler argued in Analogy of Religion (1736), that Christians must eschew certainty in religious matters, but nevertheless be ready to act on the “balance of probability.” In Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, published just two years before his death, Gladstone was still promoting Butler’s work, and held that the value of his method was even greater than the content. Butler was “a collector of facts, and a reasoner upon them.” More importantly, he “chose for his whole argument the sure and immovable basis of human experience.” Butler gave Gladstone two important tools. First, he provided a rational and systematic intellectual method that enabled Gladstone to reconcile his high understanding of human worth and achievement with the Church’s teaching on sin and degradation. Closely related but more personally, Butler offered him a justification for elevating the role of intellect, a justification made all the more attractive by being couched in terms of moral obligation. Called to high moral purpose but freed from irrational religious obligations, Gladstone was free to explore all religious doctrines, practices, and tendencies.

Bebbington, as a good churchman, gives Gladstone every benefit of the doubt regarding the unique conjunction of views and practices that defined his religion, emphasizing the orthodox and heightening evidence that bolsters the generally held impression that Gladstone was a heroic defender of the historic Christian faith. The list of Gladstone’s religious “eccentricities” is, however, long and substantial. The largest in terms of time was his devotion to the works of Homer and his attraction to the humanistic culture they describe. From a careful study of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Gladstone came to believe that the Greeks “inherited elements of a single body of truth given to humanity as a whole in its earliest days,” and that the “Greek divinities represented degenerated forms of an original illumination by God at the dawn of history.” But Gladstone was so “eager to rake in any scrap of evidence” supporting the view that the early Greeks were animated by the remnants of divine revelation, that he often misread evidence. As generous as Bebbington is in demonstrating that Gladstone was willing to change particular views regarding Homerand this is one of the most important achievements of the book he still finds the prime minister consistently subordinating his literary judgment “to his apologetic purpose.” Gladstone was so deeply attracted to the early Greeksto their courage, their sense of honor, and their physical beautythat he refused to believe that their best qualities might have been developed outside the providential design of God.

The extent to which Gladstone accepted God’s providential design in history was also unusual, extending to social institutions in all branches of the human family. In 1887 Gladstone published an article, “Universitas Hominum; or, The Unity of History,” in which he spoke as an old man who, through long experience, could help others “bring the various and separated movements of growing minds into relation with one another, and to give them their places as portions of the general scheme of life.” He presented to the young the question, and its implied answer, that had animated his religious quest throughout most of his adult life:

Torn and defaced as is the ideal of our race, yet have there not been, and are there not, things in man, in his frame, and in his soul and intellect, which, taken at their height, are so beautiful, so good, so great, as to suggest an inward questioning, how far creative power itself can go beyond what, in these elect specimens, it has exhibited?

There was little doubt in Gladstone’s mind that the Greeks had perfected the human ideal. Greece had been given by God the “office” of “making ready the Gospel feast,” supplying both the language and “mental culture” which enabled it to be received. Of the four great objects of “human quest,” the Hebrews had been entrusted with training man to be “good.” Greece had been given the “principal share” in developing the sense of what was “great” and “true.” “With respect to the beautiful,” Gladstone wrote, “her office was supreme, almost exclusive.”

Nor was God’s providence limited to the Greeks and Hebrews. In Islam, Buddhism, and even animist religions, Gladstone perceived “the care of the Almighty Father.” In “On Authority in Matters of Opinion” (1877), he clearly expressed a long-held view suggesting that no one should depart “except upon serious and humble examination” from the religion in which they were raised, “even though non-Christian,” for it was “the school of character and belief in which Providence” had placed them. These were precisely the principles he had employed in a letter to Colonial Secretary Lord Kimberley regarding a possible extension of British authority in West Africa in 1873:

You will be amused at my pleading, so to speak, on behalf of human sacrifices. I am of course all for getting rid of them. But: 1. They are not crimes under the moral law as recognized in Africa. 2. They were not crimes under the moral law as recognized by the most civilized nations of antiquity, though the Greeks in early days had a strong & laudable repugnance to them. 3. They were only put down by the influence of Christianity, & that slowly.

The view that God providentially dispensed benefits to the whole of humanity through cultures whose practices were in direct contradiction to Christian teaching was not an aberration or a convenience or a matter of religious compromise, as his critics often suggested when he proposed policies or made statements that seemed to contradict traditional Christian teaching. It was a reasoned, integral part of his faith. The degree to which “treasures of true piety,” “devotion to duty,” and “negation of self may have been reared within the field of religions less favored” than Christianity was a question he was perfectly willing to leave to the “All-just and All-wise” (“Universitas Hominum”).

Finally, Gladstone’s view of Holy Scripture was unusual for one who so fully embraced its ultimate truths. He began his 1892 book, The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, with an extensive disclaimer, carefully explaining that impregnability had its limits:

These words sound like a challenge. And they are a challenge to some extent, but not in the sense that might be supposed. They are a challenge to accept the Scriptures on the moral and spiritual and historical ground of their character in themselves. …

But all these assertions lie within the moral and spiritual precinct. No one of them begs any literary question of Old Testament criticism. They leave absolutely open every issue that has been or can be raised respecting the origin, date, authorship and text of the sacred books, which for the present purpose we do not require even to call sacred. Indeed it may be that this destructive criticism, if entirely made good, would, in the view of an inquiry really searching, comprehensive, and philosophical, leave as its result not less but greater reason for admiring the hidden modes by which the great Artificer works out His designs.

Knowing that many pious Christians who accepted the “full doctrine of literalism” would resent even the suggestion of error in the Bible, Gladstone fell back upon Butler’s “balance of probability.” “We are not entitled,” he wrote, “to require when the Almighty, in His mercy, makes a special addition by revelation to what He has already given to us of knowledge in Nature and in Providence, that special gift should be unlike His other gifts, and should have all its lines and limits drawn out with mathematical precision.”

If one thinks of Gladstone as a conventional Christianwhether Anglo-Catholic with evangelical tendencies, High Churchman with Broad Church sensibilities, or any other hybrid of generally recognizable denominational speciesit is difficult to address what has so often from Gladstone’s own day to the present appeared to be inconsistency, opportunism, or self-delusion. Gladstone’s religion was coherent but esoteric, combining heavy reliance upon reason with unlimited faith in God’s providential design; a relatively low view of Scripture with a high regard for historical process and natural law; all mediated by Butler’s “balance of probability.” Bebbington himself draws upon this improbable mixture of intellectual forces to suggest that Gladstone, like Matthew Arnold, “came to see Christianity by itself as an insufficient foundation for modern society.” It was only through “the Hellenism of Homer” that “the dignity of human beings” was vindicated. While it is possible to retreat from and contextualize this truth, emphasizing the preponderant external structure of orthodox Christian belief and practice, the idea of the social insufficiency of traditional Christianity was fundamental to Gladstone’s religion, and it was this that led to his extraordinary openness in receiving alternate explanations. God had set aside the Hebrews, but in doing so had temporarily removed them from the ordinary human experience, and thus as an example for modern society.

Gladstone’s theological liberalism was what it was, and from a biographical point of view needs no defense. He only seems to require defending when one believes that an open mind and reliance upon reason will inevitably lead to unbelief, or at best, to belief in only symbolic forms of Christianity. Gladstone was, however, a man of true faith who provided one possible model for meeting the challenges of an increasingly secular and pluralistic world. The essence of his faith can be found in one of the last articles he wrote, “Soliloquium and Postscript” (1897), in which he expressed both his faith and its incumbent social responsibilities:

If, out of every hundred professing Christians, ninety-nine assert amidst all their separate and clashing convictions their belief in the central doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation … will not the candid unbeliever be disposed freely to admit, that this unity amidst diversity is a great confirmation of the faith, and a broad basis on which to build our hopes for the future? … In the face then, of the assailants of religion, there is a broad ground to occupy. But it does not cover the entire field of battle; and as the divisions of the Christian Church are its chief source of weakness in the contest, must we not deem those happy who, without compromising truth, seek to make that ground of union wider still?

In our day, when the term “liberal” is frequently reserved for those who employ the traditional language of faith to explain their unbelief, one should naturally be reluctant to apply the word to Gladstone. But Gladstone lived a century ago, when liberalism meant quite a different thing.

John Powell is associate professor of history at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A torrid affair, resulting in an illegitimate child and a clandestine wedding, followed by banishment and the occasional book-burning: no, it’s not an episode of The Days of Our Lives, but the story of the 12th-century monastics Heloise and Abelard.

The pair met in Paris, where Abelard, one of the greatest medieval logicians, was teaching. Heloise, a prize pupil, was living with her uncle Fulbert, a canon at Notre-Dame. Heloise and Abelard quickly began a passionate love affair, which, despite their moony ardor, they managed to keep secret from the uncle. When Heloise got pregnant, Abelard whisked her away (disguised as a nun) to his relatives in Brittany. Upon return to Paris, Abelard knew he had to pay the piper. He approached Heloise’s uncle, and they determined that the young couple should marry. Initially, Heloise was opposed to matrimony, which she feared would ruin Abelard’s career. But Abelard and Fulbert were adamant, and the couple was wed, albeit in secret, shortly after the birth of their son.

Still, scandal continued to rumble, and eventually, at Abelard’s insistence, Heloise entered a convent at Argenteuil. Whether her initial intention was simply to rest and find a bit of solitude or actually take orders is unclear. What is known is that Heloise did not herself desire to become a nun; she did so simply out of deference to Abelard’s wishes. She wept while taking her vows, and, in the middle of the solemn ceremony, she recited a snippet from the poet Lucan: “O noble husband, too great for me to wed, was it my fate to bed that lofty head? Why did I marry you and bring about your fall? Now accept the penalty and see me gladly pay.”

Until 20 years ago, the story of Heloise and Abelard rested almost entirely on a lengthy autobiographical letter by Abelard and the brief ensuing correspondence between the two, all written more than a decade after Heloise entered the convent. In 1980, scholar Constant Mews made a path-breaking discovery while studying a 15th-century Latin treatise on the art of letter writing. The treatise, which was full of examples of great epistolary style, featured a correspondence between two unnamed lovers. As Mews read on, he saw more and more similarities, both stylistic and substantive, between Heloise and Abelard’s extant correspondence and that of these two anonymous epistlers. Mews studied the letters for almost 20 years before publishing a bilingual edition of them in 1999. By then he was confident that he had found, as his title indicated, The Lost Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Though discovered much later, these are actually among the lovers’ early letters (and I use the term lovers advisedly, as the letters make an erotic, amorous read), from the period during whichby their own accountthey wrote to each other every day. They tell of the young Abelard and Heloise’s great passion, their secret assignations, their yearning for one another. (“Have mercy on your beloved,” wrote Abelard, “wasting away and almost fading away unless you come quickly to help me… . Ask the messenger what I did after I wrote this letter: there and then I threw myself on the bed out of impatience.”)

This winter, two new books, drawing on the recently discovered letters, retell the story. Abelard and Heloise is by Mews himself. Heloise and Abelard was written by documentary producer James Burge. For those weary of the usual seasonal effusions, this pair of books offers alternative Valentine’s Day reading.

Burge’s account will have the greater appeal to popular audiences. He tells the story of the love affair with the flair of a novelist. His account is detailed and exciting but never tawdry, and he sprinkles the book with lots of luminous quotations from the letter-writers themselves. Mews, by contrast, offers a detailed reading of the letters he discovered in the 15th-century style-guide, arguing forcefully, if also with a light touch, that these are, indeed, letters between the young Heloise and Abelard. He then skims over the ending of their affair, to which Burge devotes four full chapters, in a few paragraphsHeloise’s flight to Brittany, childbirth, the secret marriage; Heloise’s entry, at the wishes of Abelard, into a convent; the vengeful middle-of-the-night castration of Abelard, ordered by Fulbert.

Until 20 years ago, the story of Heloise and Abelard rested almost entirely on a lengthy autobiographical letter by Abelard and the brief ensuing correspondence between the two, all written more than a decade after Heloise entered the convent.

In short, if you want the juicer version, pick up Burge’s book. (Not that Mews is entirely fastidious; both writers report that Heloise and Abelard had sex during Holy Week in the refectory of Heloise’s convent.) But if you want a fascinating and entirely accessible scholarly argument about not only the early letters, but also the poetic, theological, and liturgical projects on which Heloise and Abelard collaborated in later years, turn to Mews.

After Heloise took the veil at Argenteuil, Abelard became a Benedictine monk, and removed to the Abbey of St. Denis, where he wrote a controversial treatise on the Trinity (see the aforementioned book-burning). Retreating after this brouhaha to a parcel of land near Troyes, he founded an oratory and school that he named the Paraclete. He stayed there for some years before leaving to become abbot of St. Gildas-de-Ruys in Brittany. At the same time, the convent at Argenteuil was disbanded, and Abelard invited Heloise, who had become prioress, to bring her community to Paraclete.

And so Heloise and her sisters headed to Troyes. Initially, Heloise had little or no contact with Abelard; but then she received a copy of his 20,000-word autobiographical essay, which, inter alia, recounted their affair in unflinching detail. This lengthy account was ostensibly written to a friend in need. It exemplifies the medieval genre of the “letter of consolation,” in which the writer recounts his own trials and travails so that the recipient might, by way of contrast, conclude that her own lot is not too bad. Scholars have disagreed about the identity of the original recipientwas there really a third party, a distressed friend, or was that friend merely a literary stand-in for Heloise herself?

Whatever the case, Abelard’s letter eventually made its way to Heloise, and their correspondence resumed. Heloise freely expresses her own emotional turmoilshe was still very much in love with Abelardand both writers outline their understanding of and expectations for the religious life. It is this exchangefive letters from Abelard, and three from Heloisethat made the couple famous. (Heloise is perhaps best remembered for her claim that she would rather be Abelard’s whor* than Augustus’ empress.) The first person to write about Heloise and Abelard was Jean de Meung, who immortalized them in his 1270 poem, Le Roman de la Rose. As Burge notes, “From then on the tale of Abelard and Heloise begins to diffuse into the consciousness of the Middle Ages.” When Andre duch*esne and Francois d’Amboise published the couples’ letters in 1616, readers heralded them as monastic humanists. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, layfolk enjoyed reading Heloise’s reflections on romantic love. And on and on grew the reputation of the star-crossed lovers, one a brilliant philosopher, the other a woman ahead of her time.

Mews shows that Heloise and Abelard’s literary partnership went far beyond love letters. By the mid-1130s, Heloise and Abelard had found a new grammar for their relationship. Whether they still spoke ofindeed, whether Abelard still felterotic ardor is hard to know. What we do know is that Abelard began to contribute quite actively to the liturgical life at the Paraclete. Heloise was a trenchant critic of many of the existing hymns; she wondered, in Mews’s words, why so many hymns “speak of ‘rising at night’ or ‘the dawn ris[ing],’ even though they are sung at the wrong time, effectively forcing the singer to engage in a lie.” And she worried that many people at prayer proclaimed psalms of repentance, even when they were stubbornly unrepentant. In response to her urgings, Abelard composed new hymns and chants for the nuns. He also wrote evocative Easter musings about Mary Magdalene, and a series of sermons to take the nuns through the liturgical year. In his examination of their creative collaboration, Mews asks whether certain hymns or liturgies were, in fact, written by Heloise, and attributed to Abelard. “Whatever the case, it is clear that the liturgy … constituted a collaborative effort.” The creative collaboration continued in a series of laments that Abelard wrote for Heloise and her community in the 1130s. Focusing on biblical figures like Dinah and David, these laments are somber but encouraging meditations on long-suffering heroism. And in the Problemata Heloissae, Abelard addressed 42 questions about Scripture many of them dealing with sinthat Heloise had put to him.

Over the last few decades, feminist scholars and liturgists have heralded Heloise as a foremother who trenchantly criticized the patriarchal strictures of her church and society, and who subversively reveled in the erotic. Mews avoids this polemical quagmire, but his Heloise is, it seems to me, much more satisfying (not to mention plausible) then Heloise-the-proto-feminist-slu*t. Mews has done us a great service in examining Heloise not just as a lover but as a writer, liturgical collaborator, and theological thinker in her own right.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God (Algonquin). Her new book, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Brazos) will be out in April.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

1.The bowls are filled with offerings. One holds the azurite, One malachitethe other things Are unguent, gold, and light

Or rather, crystals still unsealed By mortar and pestle, Their inner nature unrevealed Like a stoppered vessel.

2.He steps into a finished work As if into a hall Of mirrorsarts, randomness, quirk Each have a right to call

His name: his face is everywhere, He’s center, edge, and four Corners; and yet, he’s lost, not there Dispersed in rock like ore.

3.Who unwound this labyrinth Of noonday mystery? And what white figure on a plinth Ordained its history?

Some forty layerings of paint Refract the sunthis way The jewelled landscape, like a saint, Goes saturate with day.

4.Names of God, in silver script, Are tarnishing with time, The golden words of God encrypt His keys to the sublime.

The facets of the painter’s soul Are glittering like glass. In shattering he yields the whole Brokenness like the Mass.

Marly Youmans is the author most recently of Claire (LSU Press), a sequence of poems, and The Curse of the Raven Mocker, a Young Adult novel. Its sequel, Ingledove, will be published in May by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

At first we said, “it will help to pay for the funeral,” Nokukhanya’s final gift after an age of pensioned usefulness. Umnqandi did it with a kitchen knife quickly before the thumb was cold. Brandy kept it fresh so that the pension official, behind his brown table and book of matching prints, gave a little sniff and suspected nothing.

After the funeral, which boasted two cows for more than 600 visitors singing hymns in the hot sun, we sat around the jar and stared in silence. “One more month,” Sinoxolo said and we nodded, quieting our consciences that grandmother’s digit was kept thus occupied while shethumblessmet the ancestors. Then it was school fees, and then our mealies failed, and then the truck needed a new tire … until it became a kind of twelve-year pact. We fooled ourselves into thinking she would be proud of her productivity at such an age.

But on her 110th birthday the mayor arrived with his councilors to pay their respects to the oldest woman in the province. They brought a white cake and a photographer. They found the jar and its tired occupant and after that grandmother’s thumb got to rest.

John Shaw is a an American physician who worked in a district hospital in South Africa from 1994 through 2000.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

There were a few things that Ginny Brereton couldn’t stand: preternaturally clean kitchen counters, rooms without bookcases, absolutely everything about Disney World, and long undisciplined sentences beginning with phrases like “there were.” But those were incidental passions. Anyone who knew Ginny remembers her more for what she loved: her wonderful family, trips to hike in the French Alps or to climb in the neighborhood rock gym, music of every type, and books of every description.

Ginny’s tragic death last September, the consequence of an early morning fire that destroyed her third-floor apartment, was an immeasurable loss to many people. To me she was a treasured intellectual companion and an irreplaceable friend. We laughed about something every time we talked to each other, no matter whether weeks or only hours had lapsed since our last conversation. For many years, as two independent scholars living mostly on the fringe of the academic establishment, we enjoyed the freedom to pursue ideas just because they were interesting. Together we edited a collection of essays, and wrote grant proposals, book reviews, and a scholarly article. We even dared each other to work through turgid books of postmodern theory, figuring it all out over saag paneer at Indian restaurants near our homes in Cambridge and Brookline, Massachusetts.

Of course, Ginny was not your average bookworm. I can’t recall her ever going to a scholarly conference without an extra suitcase of books and a pile of Zagat guides. Many a time she and I ducked out of more serious matters to climb a mountain, find a walking tour, visit museums, search for offbeat restaurants, and of course browse bookshops.

But I’m not the only one who will miss her. Ginny is deservedly known as one of the top scholars of American evangelicalism, the world’s leading expert on Bible schools many years before fundamentalists claimed their spot in the scholarly sunshine. Her first book originated as part of a Lilly-funded project, based in Auburn Seminary, on the history of Protestant theological education.1 With encouragement from project director Bob Lynn and the sharp young scholars he had assembled, Ginny developed the paper into a Columbia doctoral dissertation under Lawrence Cremin. She finished it just as Ronald Reagan was about to define a new era in American social history.

Even the most cursory glance at the table of contents, the many pages of footnotes, and the bibliographic essay confirms her zeal for what was then an obscure, and in many ways taboo, subject. Sympathy for conservative Protestants of any type did not run high in scholarly circles during the decade that produced Tammy Faye Bakker and Jerry Falwell. But as a young scholar, Ginny delved deeply into turn-of-the-century fundamentalist lore, with its “gap-men” and “Bible women,” sideways statutes on dispensational charts and bitter disputes over the pre- or post-tribulation rapture. She traced the careers of eccentric and unglamorous people with the care more normally reserved for theologians and seminary presidents.

Ginny also wrote a book about conversion, taking on almost two centuries’ worth of personal accounts by women who were deeplysometimes deservedlyobscure.2 But near the end, New England maidens seeking salvation from novel-reading and gossip give way to a rag-tag group of women on the path of personal transformation: cowgirl sidekick Dale Evans Rogers, Manson disciple Susan Atkins, writer Eugenia Price, and, of course, Marabel Morgan, the woman who made Saran Wrap famous.

A staple of evangelical bookshelves a few decades ago, these stories rarely received serious scholarly treatment. Ginny did not, however, let respectability stand in the way of inquiry. In fact, she finished the book with yet another unlikely turn, a chapter on modern conversion narratives composed of feminist epiphanies and lesbian “coming out” stories.

Few of Ginny’s readers, or even her colleagues, knew how unlikely these scholarly interests were. Raised in a nominally Protestant, middle-class New England family, she was in many ways a thoroughly secular person, to whom Ruth Bell Graham and the Moody Bible Institute were no less exotic than Starhawk or a Buddhist temple in a third-floor San Francisco walkup. I’m only exaggerating a little bit here: unlike many of the scholars who write about American evangelicals and fundamentalists, she had no memories of a traumatic hell-fire sermon or an overbearing Sunday school teacher to exorcise. Simply put, Ginny found religionand all kinds of religious peopleprofoundly interesting.

That honest curiosity is worth pondering these days, when scholars and pundits are working overtime to define the depths of our religious polarization. We hear endlessly about red and blue, liberal and conservative. Consciously or unconsciously, many scholars of American religion have, like myself, found themselves reifying these differences, working through the taxonomy of fundamentalists, Pentecostals, holiness, and evangelical Protestants for a confused reporter staving off a deadline on the other end of the phone line.

Nor is the academy itself immune to polarization. Recently, some evangelical scholars have grown bold and articulate enough to mount protestssometimes in these pagesagainst the offhanded, sometimes inordinately hostile treatment they have received in the secular academy. These charges are certainly true enough, and perhaps long overdue, but they shouldn’t eliminate the possibility that the seemingly solid rank of secular scholars might contain a wonderful friend, perhaps even an ally.

The danger is that all of those unending arguments about what distinguishes an evangelical from a mainliner or a fundamentalist from a Pentecostal obscure the remarkable fact of our common human experience. Sometimes against all odds, all kinds of people find ways to change, to become better, stronger, kinder human beings. That is the fundamental mystery of every religious tradition, whether fundamentalist or Shaker, Mormon or theosophist, Buddhist or Congregationalist. And sometimes it takes the genuine empathy of a noncombatant like Ginny to bring us back from the barricades toward a sense of perspective.

For many years, I kept a file simply entitled “Ginny musings.” I’d thumb through it from time to time when I had written myself down a blind alley or simply run out of ideas. She had a wonderful habit of nurturing budding thoughts on paper and passing them along to me in neat, often footnoted, first-person paragraphs. To my mild frustration, she finished them less often, especially as rock climbing began to absorb her time and energy.

Words like “eclectic” do not even begin to describe this scholarly trail. When I first met Ginny, she was reading soldiers’ memoirs from World War I, mining them for spiritual content. Just this past summer she was working on a project about the spirituality of mountain climbing, and she told me she had made it through an entire book in French. Along the way she wrote about urban religion, black gospel, and secularization theory, and regularly handed me new novels to read or articles to add to my latest bibliography. She audited a course in “Black Britain” from a colleague at Tufts, where she taught freshman writing courses, and developed a love for a new array of Indian, Caribbean, and African novelists. She co-wrote books about writing with her husband Jack and co-edited one about Protestant women with me. She lived in an apartment absolutely strewn with books covering every subject imaginable, lying together in lopsided piles and packed onto bulging, bursting shelves.

One of the most fundamental injustices of her deathand there are manywas its abruptness. She spent the last hot weeks of August at her family cabin in rural central Massachusetts, frustrated by a broken foot that kept her out of the rock gym and off her bicycle. With help from Jack she would hobble over to the local pond, remove the temporary cast, and swim slowly back and forthanything to keep from just sitting and doing nothing.

How could anyone not mourn the loss of a person like that? Ginny’s life argues back against the simplistic dichotomies so easily imposed on the complex legacy of religion in this country. It encourages us to stay curious and in love with the world, to keep learning something new even when the act becomes an effort, up through the last possible moment.

Margaret Bendroth is executive director of the American Congregational Association in Boston, Massachusetts.

1. Virginia Lieson Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880-1940 (Indiana Univ. Press, 1990).

2. From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Indiana Univ. Press, 1991).

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Waking, he tells his woe About his sistertwelve And slender like a bow, Taut as the silk an elf

Is stringing. Glints of light Declare he’s lame to halt The arrow of her flight. Birds say it’s not her fault.

The little sands imprint Her passing feetshe is More lovely than the tent Of dawn. She is not his.

Sea pours against the world As she transforms to fish And leaves behind all girl. The boy is caught by wish.

The sea’s a wilding stream Of tears. Inside a shell Like a recurrent dream, Her name echoes its spell.

Marly Youmans is the author most recently of Claire (LSU Press), a sequence of poems, and The Curse of the Raven Mocker, a Young Adult novel. Its sequel, Ingledove, will be published in May by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I am a registered Democrat, consider myself “progressive,” and I’m a divinity school graduate who in 1991 marched in a Washington, D.C., anti-war rally, my “No Blood for Oil” T-shirt gleaming white and brand new on my back. I am also the wife of an Army captain who returned last spring from 13 months in the Middle East as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I threw away that T-shirt a few years ago, and when my husband Rob was sent to Iraq, I discovered phrases like “the military wives’ group” creeping into my conversations. I couldn’t shake the feeling that places I used to consider “home”like liberal politicswere no longer, while the new places that had been forced into my lifelike the Armyweren’t a good fit for me either. I felt ideologically homeless. What a mess.

The artist who reached me the most during that dark period was Richard Shindell, whose latest album, Vuelta, was released in August. Shindell is ok with the mess. He is a storyteller and an observer. A one-time seminarian, he doesn’t write about religion or politics per se, but he acutely communicates through his songs an awareness of forces in the universe greater than himself or any of his characters. He is a writer as I wish I could be, striking precisely at the emotional heart of a person’s individual story and giving voice to ambiguity, confusion, and strugglewhich felt last year like the watchwords of my faith.

Shindell’s eye for both human frailty and strength is sharp in this new album, his fifth studio recording. Set down in his adopted home of Buenos Aires, Argentina (he was born and raised in New Jersey), the album has Latin musical flares and even a song in Spanish, a self-deprecating love song about an English speaker’s struggle with a foreign language. The narrative arc of the album, which begins with a song about a woman whose husband is leaving at dawn for war and ends with a father’s lullaby to a newborn child, speaks to the experience of being carried along life’s current.

One of the triumphs of the record is the very first song, “Fenario.” I couldn’t listen to the track right away; it hit a little too close to home. As Shindell has done so well on previous albums, he manages here to get inside a woman’s life for the five-minute span of the song.

“The Bonnie Lass of Fenario” is an old Scottish folk song, which both Joan Baez and Judy Collins recorded to some acclaim. The last verse of Shindell’s version, which alludes to the same mythical battle, is a quote from “Break of Day” by the metaphysical poet John Donne. Such rich texturing is typical of Shindell’s songs, yet they rarely lose their emotional immediacy. Rob left at 5 A.M. on Valentine’s Day for a war that we wereand aredeeply confused about. (The third verse in particular seems to brush up against the current crisis. “Brave my love, but false the king / False his wars, and false his dawn / Damn the gray that gains the sky / And damn the sun, the king’s cold eye.”) The song captures such a familiar feelingthe hope that the dawn won’t come, that he’ll be all right, that the time will pass quickly. The military spouse has to acknowledge that war, like so much else, is beyond our control.

I gravitated next toward “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” Shindell’s version of the Pete Seeger classic. While Seeger’s version has always struck me as lyrically rich but musically simple, Shindell homes in on the anger in the song, the way a soldier feels when he’s made to follow a “damn fool” who’s leading him to certain doom. The brilliance of the song is in its narrator’s helplessness as he records the dialogue between the misguided captain and the assertive sergeant, leaving the rank-and-file out of the conversation altogether as they observe the struggle for leadership and its grim results.

The anger that flashes in “Fenario” and fuels “Waist Deep” peaks there, though. The middle of the album is a series of snapshots, some simple, others that linger and deepen their subjects. “Hazel’s House” is one of the most direct songs I’ve ever heard, an uncomplicated ode to a woman whose crumb cake and attention are warm blankets of comfort and welcome. However, while the simplicity of “Hazel’s House” is something to wrap yourself up in, I found that “The Island” errs a bit too much on the plain side. I suppose the song is about our inability to control nature, the fact that despite our super-developed resort culture, the cliffs erode and the ocean has its way. An interesting point about impermanence, but too platitudinous for Shindell at his best. The song leaves us without a lingering image, like Hazel waiting for you as you climb her front steps.

Shindell returns to his greatest strength in “Che Guevara T-Shirt,” in which he manages to tell a very large storyabout a stowaway coming to Americain a very small way, by focusing on how a photo of a true love can both reassure and terrify. I heard Shindell perform this song, which is a bit unusual in form. The song has no chorusinstead, it’s an ever-building series of verses that give the impression of a large ship slicing through the ocean with increasing speed.

One of Shindell’s most noted earlier songs, “Fishing,” crafted a story about an immigration officer interrogating and manipulating an illegal immigrant, threatening deportation if the man does not divulge information about where other family members are hiding. Listening to the end of “Che Guevara T-Shirt,” I felt the chill of “Fishing” haunt this new character as he too faces an interrogator brimming with vague threat. It’s another testament to the fullness of Shindell’s storytelling.

Shindell’s previous albums have shown his fondness for recurring themes, most notably trucking, and Vuelta is no exception. There are two “bird songs” on the album that raise listeners’ eyes upward. “There Goes Mavis” is a quaint and sweet story about a little girl at the beach who wants to see her orange canary Mavis fly free from her cage. The story is doubly powerful, because it is told from the perspective of a parent who is building a sandcastle with his or her sons while Mavis’ drama unfolds around them. The family tends busily to the castle, and to their own lives, oblivious to anyone else’s problems until Mavis literally lands on their driftwood flagpole.

The song follows the story as a crowd gathers and the little girl struggles against her mother’s efforts to re-cage Mavis. The mother is no doubt right to say that the bird would not survive in the wild. But isn’t risky freedom better than safe imprisonment? Summarized baldly in this way, the scenario sounds bathetic, yet in Shindell’s hands it is charming. The song offers no lyric judgment of whether Mavis chose well or poorly, only channels the narrator’s observation, “there goes Mavis.” But the music tells a different story, with tension resolving as the bird flies off “on the long horizon” into a soaring yet still fragile phrase.

The other bird song, “So Says the Whipporwill,” also takes up images of freedom from imprisonment, whether literal or figurative. When I interviewed Shindell a while back, he said that the song was a tribute to his friend, folk legend Dave Carter, who died of a heart attack at age 49 in the summer of 2002. (Carter’s widow, Tracy Grammer, plays violin on the track.) The song talks about suddennessthe line “The change could happen any day” opens each versebut it also talks about the courage required to actually make a change, the leap of faith we all need to take in order to live each day to the fullest.

“The Last Fare of the Day,” Shindell’s 9/11 tribute song, ignores politics and anthem-like statements in favor of a picture of a taxi driver who clings to what he knows of his city while recovering from the trauma of that terrible day. His fare, a couple at first numb with grief but, months later, giddy with their newborn baby, can trust the cab driver to bring them home.

And, unpredictable as the journey might be, we can trust Shindell to do the same.

Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a writer and a folk junkie in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It seems to me that the historical study of human beliefs,” the British philosopher Henry Sidgwick wrote in 1886,

does tend to be connected with a general skepticism as to the validity of the doctrines studied. … [Skepticism] partly tends to result from the historical study, because of the vast and bewildering variety of conflicting beliefs … which this study marshals before us. The student’s own most fundamental and cherished convictions seemed forced, as it were, to step down from their secure pedestals, and take their places in the endless line that is marching past. … Thus to the historian … the whole defiling train of beliefs tends to become something from which he sits apart, every portion of which has lost power to hold his own reason in the grip of true conviction.

Sidgwick summed up a sentiment felt by many in the late 19th and early 20th century: the realization that historical study had a corrosive effect on the plausibility of religious belief, that history or, more properly, modern “historicism” introduced a vertiginous relativism into human affairs, toppling with gale-like force religious verities, natural laws, moral absolutesanything that sought to don the mantle of universalism and rise above the caprice of time, place, and social location. The theologian Ernst Troeltsch would famously define this as “the crisis of historicism.”1

The 19th century, particularly in Germany, was the age of historicism par excellence. From the historical writings of Leopold von Ranke, to Hegel’s philosophy of history, to the historical biblical criticism of Ferdinand Christian Baur and David Friedrich Strauss, modern thought appeared to make a fundamental break from the Christian insistence on timeless creedal truths and from the Enlightenment belief in transhistorical human reason. The effects of this break live on todayin aspects of Western jurisprudence, in postmodern theories of interpretation, and in historical study itself. One will find it in the pages of Thomas Kuhn and his disciples, from the lips of Richard Rorty, and from countless, obeisant graduate students in the humanities who have learned that exposing something to be a “historical construct” often pleases instructors and opens career paths. Historicism and its problemsalthough themselves products of distinct historical circ*mstancesappear as durable fixtures in the contemporary intellectual landscape.

But powerful countervailing and reactionary tendencies are also afoot. The Enlightenment tradition of universal human rights seems alive and well; today it’s arguably the only viable global currency of moral discourse. In the academy, in fact, one often finds that the most thoroughgoing historicists can also be the most zealous defenders of universal human rights. (Emerson’s lesson on hobgoblins has apparently been well heeded.2)

In modern Christian thought, several strategies of resistance to historicism have proven salient. One strategy might be dubbed that of subtle co-option. The archetypal case here is John Henry Newman, especially in his famous book, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), in which Newman sought to tame the historicizing forces of the 19th century by conceptualizing Christian doctrine as always in a state of providential “development.” This line of thinking, many have argued, eventually paved the way for rapprochement between Catholicism and modernity at the Second Vatican Council. Another tactic against historicism comes closer to root-and-branch rejection: the position that the sacred truths of revelation can be known by faith alone, immune from profane historical knowledge. One sees this most prominently in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and, later, in Karl Barth and many of his “neo-orthodox” associates. One recent scholar has even suggested that 20th-century neo-orthodoxy and its extensive influence in modern Christian theology are best understood as an “anti-historical revolution,” an attempt to rescue dogma and creedal commitment from the excesses of 19th-century historical criticism and historical theology.3

If the Christian confrontation with historicism is well documented, much less is known about that of Judaism. For this reason alone, David Myers’ recent book represents an important contribution to contemporary understanding; his work should elicit interest from students of Jewish, Christian, German, and modern thought alike.

While the lion’s share of his time is devoted to exploring the anti-historicist thought of four major late 19th- and early 20th-century Jewish intellectualsHermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac BreuerMyers does a commendable job of providing relevant background material. The reader thus gains valuable general knowledge of European-Jewish intellectual history, the emergence of historicism in the 19th century, the social and political contexts of fin-de-siècle German Jewry, and the relationship of Jewish intellectual life to German university culture. In the book’s last chapter, Myers offers an insightful critique of the “influence-based model” of doing Jewish history, preferring instead a model that explores “the dynamic process of negotiation, mediation, and translation that defines interaction between two groups”German Jewish and Christian thinkers in his case. As is invariably true of good historians, Myers renders the complexity of this material intelligible, neither oversimplifying nor belaboring tangentially relevant detail.

Two things are particularly noteworthy about his four principals. The first is the degree to which, though critics of historicism, they all found themselves embedded in historical ways of thinking. To extricate themselves from, or at least to criticize, modern historicism, each to varying degrees had to rely on historicist patterns of thought. In Myers’ words, “their best anti-historicist intentions were tempered by deeply ingrainedand ultimately inescapablehistorical impulses.” Second, each developed a different solution to the “crisis of historicism,” even if they were motivated by a similar understanding of the problem. Accordingly, the reader gains insight into the rich breadth of early 20th-century Jewish thought in its loud and contentious confrontation with various forces of modernity, historicism foremost.

Hermann Cohen is often numbered among a group of fin-de-siècle intellectuals who, against the trends of the time, sought to return to the universalist ethical rationalism associated with Immanuel Kantthe “back to Kant” movement as it has sometimes been dubbed. For Cohen, Judaism was not a matter of statutes and rituals but rather a “historically developing concept” that transmitted a “universal ethos,” relevant to all peoples and ultimately consonant with many other thinkers throughout history who had championed reason, enlightenment, and freedom. Cohen traced the lineage of his ideas from the Hebrew Prophets and Plato, through Maimonides and (surprisingly perhaps) Martin Luther, to Immanuel Kant, the quintessential champion of modern universalist ethics. Aloof from the Orthodox Judaism of his day and a critic of the particularist and nationalist implications of Zionism, Cohen sought to define Judaism as “ethical monotheism” or “the ideal of ethical universalism,” rescuing it “from the ever-advancing reach of historicism that sought to consume it.” His major work expressing these sentiments, The Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919), has exerted considerable influence.

Franz Rosenzweig and Isaac Breuer staked out different intellectual grounddifferent from Cohen and from one another. Having grown up in a thoroughly assimilated household and having almost converted to Christianity, Rosenzweig believed that historicism and Kantian rationalism were both manifestations of a modern cultural malaise; each stood in the way of authentic human existence and genuine religious expression. Eventually, Rosenzweig came to the conclusion that “a vibrant new Judaism” offered the way forward, a conviction he elaborated in his major work, The Star of Redemption (1921), and sought, often unsuccessfully, to realize in a number of educational initiatives. His was no conventional Orthodoxy, however, but a complex amalgam of traditional Jewish thought, neo-orthodox Christian theological motifs, and an incipient philosophical existentialism that exhibited considerable common ground with the early writings of Martin Heidegger.

Isaac Breuer grew up in a separatist Orthodox community in Frankfurt am Main, founded by his grandfather, Samson Raphael Hirsch. An unwavering observer of Halakhah, or Jewish Law, until his death, Breuer was much more of a traditionalist than either Cohen or Rosenzweig, even if he valued engagement with secular intellectual culture. He encountered historicist thinking during his university studies between 1902 and 1913 and perceived it as a threat to Judaism or to any religious interpretation of the world. The only possible deliverance was to locate Israel beyond the plane of mundane history.

Jews were “the people of history”; their existence took place in what Breuer called Metageschichte (meta-history), a realm of time and being known by religious insight but undetectable by the methods and techniques of the modern historian. A critic of Zionism, Breuer believe that the metahistorical destiny of the Jews was best realized in exile, which in fact was God’s special gift to the Jewish people: “What a special history! No state or military history, nor cultural or economic history in the usual sense. It is messianic history,” he wrote.

For many American readers, the most interesting figure in Myers’ foursome will be Leo Strauss, the celebrated author of Natural Right and History (1953), a major inspiration behind Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and the intellectual godfather of neo-conservatism, which has elicited so much public attention in recent years. Because Strauss’ writings and influence after his emigration to the United States in 1938 are fairly well known, Myers’ treatment of Strauss in the context of Weimar Germany is particularly valuable and informative. Not unlike Rosenzweig, Strauss came to believe that Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century historicism were two sides of the same coin. Both betokened the failure of modernity; both facilitated a shallow, atomistic individualism easily susceptible to relativism and nihilism.

Given Strauss’ well-known predilection for Plato and Aristotle, it is interesting to note that the greatest of modern anti-Platonists, Friedrich Nietzsche, exercised tremendous influence over Strauss’ early intellectual imagination. “Nietzsche so dominated and charmed me between my twenty-second and thirtieth year,” Strauss once wrote to Karl Löwith, “that I literally believed everything I understood of him”a piece of self-revelation that becomes more understandable in light of Nietzsche’s famous essay, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” perhaps the most compelling criticism of historicism ever written.4

Another surprise, given his own guarded atheism and sympathy for ancient pagan philosophy, was the degree to which Strauss followed theological discussions in the 1920s. Some 40 years after the collapse of the Weimar Republic, he mused,

The reawakening of theology, which for me is marked by the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig, appeared to make it necessary to investigate how far the critique of orthodox theologyJewish and Christiandeserved to be victorious. Since then the theological-political problem has remained the theme of my investigation.

In light of the “Straussian tenet” that criticism of religion threatens to leave the masses (judged incapable of true philosophy) bereft of noble aspirations and appetitive restraint, one wishes that Myers had lingered on this point. Indeed, while Myers admirably contextualizes Strauss within Weimar Germany, one wishes that he made a few more connections between Strauss’ distinctive brand of anti-historicism in the 1920s and 1930s and the political philosophy developed in his later years in the United States. To what extent can the universalist assumptions behind much present-day Strauss-inspired neoconservative thought still be interpreted as a reaction to 19th-century historicism?

The book’s conclusion also merits a brief, critical word. Although Myers engages sympathetically and learnedly with each figure, he often suggests that their reactions to historicism are overdrawn, even naïve, for “modern historicism,” he insists, will remain with us “unless or until a vast epistemological paradigm shift occurs.” If the chandeliers began shaking, indicating such a shift is upon us, my point here might be thrown into question. But it warrants asking whether in fact historicism, at least in its faith-threatening guise, is in fact a wholly modern phenomenon. Myers (like many others) seems to associate historicism with relativism. But the problem of relativism is at least as old as Socrates’ debates with the Sophists. If one concedes this point, one might further wonder whether the tension between universalist and relativist approaches to knowledge and ethics is itself indicative of something fairly consistent about the human condition: our simultaneous finitude and freedom, our lowly particularism and our angelic ability to transcend it. In this scenario, the “crisis of historicism” might be construed as a species of a much older human dilemma. But wouldn’t this at least suggest that there are some permanent realities worth talking aboutrealities immanent in our experience of time and not merely conditioned by it; realities that impinge upon our imagination and not simply constructs of it; realities that, though through a glass darkly, point to the heart of things, and the heart of man?

Thomas Albert Howard is the founding director of the Jerusalem and Athens Forum at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts and the author, most recently, of Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming).

1. Troeltsch, “Die Krisis des Historismus,” Die neue Rundschau, Vol. 33 (1922), pp. 572-90.

2. Cf. Thomas Haskell, “The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in an Age of Interpretation,” in Haskell, Objectivity is not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998).

3. F.W. Graf, “Die ‘antihistorische Revolution’ in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre,” in Jan Rohls and Gunther Wenz, eds., Vernunft des Glaubens: wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), pp. 357-76.

4. Cf. Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

While virtually every day of the adult life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been scrutinized, there has been little attention in studies of the civil rights movement to the years following the death of Dr. King, the dispersal and collapse of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the dissemination of the movement into inchoate forms of protest and confrontation. It is true that by the end of the 1960s, the white and black volunteers who had worked in the deep South had moved on to other concerns: women’s liberation, free speech, the pursuit of an alternative consciousness and above all, the war in Vietnam, which imposed vast demands on the activist energies of the counterculture. Intensified warfare in Southeast Asia made the pace of southern racial progress tedious by contrast in what is often a zero-sum equation for the nation’s moral attention. Racial peace in America was still a dream deferred, but the struggle (now “the black struggle”) seemed a lot less urgent in view of the daily body counts in Vietnam.

No doubt, the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Alexander vs. Holmes County was a landmark case, and deserves greater attention in civil rights scholarship. The accompanying mandates of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered immediate integration of sixteen school districts in Mississippi and effectively ended legal segregation in the South. Public school districts could no longer avoid compliance with the Brown vs. Board decision by seizing upon the phrase “all deliberate speed” as a means of deferring implementation indefinitely. Still, it was hard to keep America on the edge of its seat with discussions of a “unitary non-discriminatory school system” and the drafting of guidelines for redesigned school districts in rural jurisdictions.

To be sure, a decade of dramatic legal victories had changed forever the public face of the South. In 1970, not only were all remaining school districts finally integrated, but the Ku Klux Klan found itself persona non grata in its own playgrounds, as most of its wizards and henchmen began serving time in federal prisons. In southern towns and cities, black people could take their meals in white-owned restaurants, spend the night in motels and hotels, and borrow books from the public library. Even in Mississippi, the movement “had won significant victories” and a “degree of civility” finally arrived, as the historian John Dittmer wrote in his book, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.1 Dittmer’s hopefulness is cautious, however, as the significant victories concealed the secret that little had really changed in the racial shape of daily life. Not even the University of Alabama’s Bear Bryantthe head coach determined to win football games by any means necessaryhad yet shown any interest in breaking the unlegislatible color line of college sports. That would have to wait until 1971, one year after a black halfback named Sam “the Bam” Cunningham at the University of Southern California ran for 135 yards and two touchdowns against the Crimson Tide defense and humiliated Bryant on national television. The color bar was broken over the objections of George Wallace.

White racism in America did not end with the collapse of legal segregation in the South, as many northern liberals had naively hoped; but southern segregation did not really end with the collapse of segregation either, if one wanted to press the point. When Lillian Smith wrote in her 1949 memoir, Killers of a Dream, of the tutelage of every white southern child in the triangulation of race, sex, and religion, she could not have foreseen how Jim Crow’s inheritance would long survive its legal demise. Perhaps the prospects were simply too unbearable to entertain. Southern school children might become teammates on the playing fields or sit next to each other in classroomsthough they would not sit next to each other in churchbut apart from dramatic moral transformations nowhere in sight, the new familiarity only called attention to the distressing fact that every bridging of the gap deepened the chasm between black and white. Somehow, too, in the course of the fourteen years since the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the two years since King’s assassination, the popular impression had formed that the civil rights movement was more about rhetorical provocation, unleashed desire, and perpetual liberation than the difficult work of community building; more about high moral and sometimes highly scripted drama than legal justice and transforming the heart and soul of white people.

The new decade began with America’s invasion of Cambodia, the killing of student protesters at Kent State University and at Jackson State University, George Wallace urging his fellow southern governors to defy federal integration orders, and hopes of racial peace deferred. The promised land glimpsed on that fateful April evening in Memphis had vanished into a pale horizon, and the moral reserves of a nation that had once applied its energies to racial equality and reconciliation were now extended elsewhere, and they were running on empty.

For years the civil rights preacher Will Campbell had complained about the civil rights movement’s priorities: why had organizers been singularly concerned with access to public bathrooms, coffee shops and waiting rooms in bus stations?2 Why make these places the battlefield for racial equality? They were the last places you could expect to find the men who controlled the social arrangements. If white power was the real culprit, Campbell insisted, then stage sit-ins at the Rotary Club or during the mid-summer debutante cotillion; then seek to reform the culture of the white church. Forcing a short-order cook at the five-and-dime lunch counter to remove the “colored-only” sign was too easy a target; and, in any case, it was not going to bring electricity and plumbing to needy families, alter the subterranean world of feeling and opinion, or halt a retreat of the sentiments and of white people to the suburbs.

The rise of the private “Christian” seg-academies was but one manifestation of an expanding range of creative options that fortified the walls of social segregation. The claim recently set forth by some African American intellectuals that the real winners of the civil rights movement were the white Republicans who came into power during the 1980 presidential election may be an exaggeration, but it is also a completely understandable response to the depressing fact that the shifting legal landscape of race left unchanged too many of the supporting structures of white supremacy. The movement had unsettled the world of working and middle class whites even as the privileged classes continued their bridge games without interruption. “The ultimate solution to the problem of race,” King had said, “lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable.”3

National conviction for racial peace languished. As something called a civil rights establishment emerged in response to diminished public concern for racial justice, the piecemeal work of social reform and renewal was largely abandoned. Activists seeking the hard-earned rewards for years of sacrifice and struggle abandoned the poor neighborhoods and communities that had once been at center stage of the civil rights story. One could not really blame these men and women for cashing in on their overdue promissory notes. Nonetheless, as members of a generation of creative and skilled black (and white) activists moved out of poor communities and into networks of political influence, non-profit work, cultural and academic leadership and corporate boardrooms, no one took their place in the freedom houses and community centers.

“In America of the late 1960’s, with its congested cities and streets, its high crime rates, its guns and knives, its instant communications that pipe reports of civil disturbances into every household, its divisions and strife, its overbearing technology, its mass culture, mass education, and mass government, history seems to cry out for a new tradition that would provide a nonviolent means for change and for expression and protest.” This was the observation of New York Times reporter John Herbers in his essential book, The Lost Priority: Whatever Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in America?, published on the eve of 1970s. Herbers continued, “Martin Luther King and his nonviolent armies seemed for a time to have implanted this kind of tradition. Anyone who followed the civil rights movement could not escape the feeling that here was a spirit that could enlighten the country. In those days they talked of saving not only themselves but the soul of America as well, and after some of the great movements they would talk about saving the world with nonviolence. But nonviolence as a national and mystical movement … died.”4

No doubt, some of the missionary zeal needed to die. The presumption of a chosen few saving the nation and the world with nonviolence seemed but a progressive Protestant rendering of Billy Graham’s saving the world for Jesus, minus the football stadiums and altar calls. The real hitch was that while redeeming the soul of America may have sounded like a good way to capture the nation’s moral imagination, short of illuminating the spaces of repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation, the call seemed increasingly to lead no where in particular.

Other banners flew in the chaotic winds. For a few humorless children of the movement, the emerging culture of sensitivity-training configured the zones of white redemption. In and out of the seminar room with tears shed and minds “conscietized,” absolution had never been so easy. A few wasted hours and a declaration of white depravity was a small price to pay for the centuries of slavery and American apartheid. But not only was the new race therapy a lot easier than organizing in poor communities, it presupposed the utter naiveté of King’s vision, as it coolly dismissed the vision of beloved community as an illusion of the unanalyzed soul, now consideredin the case of the white soulracist all the way down. No one was quite sure where to go from here.

But one thing seems clear to us now. If America is ever to renew its search for beloved community, the nonviolent armies will have to return to those abandoned places of the nation and the heart where the “mystical” remains alive. The convictions and commitments that animated the movement will need to be rescued from ambiguity and equivocation. Dr. King’s final eschatological intensities”Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools”confront us with a severe and chastened hope.

Yet the story will never be complete until we confront the difficult truth that King’s final apocalyptic judgments also register a slight demurral on his own sinfulness and complicity in violence. Like the biblical prophets, King had called the nations to repentance; they shall see and be ashamed of all their acts of oppression, he said with unforgettable fury. But King kept the finger pointed on the dark powers around him while mostly avoiding the prophet’s harder truth: that the sin outside remains always the co-conspirator of the sinner standing here. “There is none upright among men, they all lie in wait for blood,” says the prophet Micah, who beckons us to “go up to the mountain of the Lord”, so that the Lord might teach us “in his ways” and we may “walk in his paths.” The prophet Amos lists the sins of Israel’s neighbors and the terrible judgment awaiting them”For three transgressions of the Ammonites, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have ripped up women with child in Gilead, that they might enlarge their border”but he does not stop until he also lists Israel’s own. “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoesthey that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted.”

The same God who preaches the “good news to the poor” and proclaims “release to the captives,” “recovery of sight to the blind,” and “liberty to those who are oppressed,” also “desireth truth in the inward being.” It is not only the “great house” that is smitten into fragments but the “little house” as well. Let us not forget that Jesus did not call prophets but disciples, ordinary people willing to lay down their nets and journey through dust-ridden towns. The dream, unanchored in the disciplines of repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation, becomes an evasion of love’s duty in the everyday.

Charles Marsh is professor of religion at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology. This essay is excerpted from the book, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today, by Charles Marsh. Copyright 2005. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.

1. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 424.

2. Will D. Campbell, Interview with the Author.

3. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper & Row, 1967), p. 100.

4. John Herbers, The Lost Priority: Whatever Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in America? (Funk & Wagnalls, 1970), p. 207.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.