The Spirit of Freedom: South African Leaders on Religion and Politics
By Charles Villa-Vicencio
University of California Press
301 pp.; $40, hardcover; $14.95, paper.
In 1992 and early 1993, Charles Villa-Vicencio, a Methodist minister and professor at the University of Cape Town who has written several important books on the theological meaning of recent South African history, interviewed 21 leading opponents of apartheid. In each case he asked about the place of religion in the subject’s personal life and for the struggle against apartheid. The result is this book, which has one chapter for each of the activists. Villa-Vicencio’s roster includes names that have been prominent in the Western press, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Joe Slovo (head of the South African Communist Party), and Beyers Naude (who was expelled from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1963 for opposing apartheid).
Villa-Vicencio’s frank discussions are revealing. Mandela, for example, has long displayed an interest in religious matters. He was often a reader of Scripture at worship services during his 30 years as a prisoner on Robben Island, he speaks freely about how much he was nourished by receiving the Lord’s Supper from a Methodist minister (his own church) during those years, and he has nothing but praise for the devout Christians like Prof. Z. K. Mathews and Chief Albert Lutuli who helped found the African National Congress. At the same time, Mandela speaks with delight about attending Islamic and Jewish worship services and is very reluctant to talk about his specific religious beliefs: “It is not a matter I usually regard as open for public discussion.”
The most affecting reading in the book is from the chapters on figures who are largely unknown outside South Africa. The community organizer Neville Alexander grew up under sincerely Protestant parents and attended a Catholic school run by nuns of the Holy Rosary. Alexander, who is Colored, retains the greatest respect for this upbringing but is now an atheist-an atheist, however, who profoundly respects the sort of religion that moves its adherents to activity on behalf of the poor. In his own words, “I became a radical socialist because I was a radical and very sincere Christian. . . . I today still believe that there is a sibling relationship between the Judeo-Christian ethic and socialism in the sense that both draw on the same aboriginal ethic . . . both give expression to an ethic of ‘love thy neighbour.’ “
Albertina “Mama” Sisulu, wife of Walter Sisulu, who spent 26 years imprisoned with Mandela and other leaders of the anc and who was several times imprisoned and banned herself, gives voice to a more traditional Christian faith: “My husband was terribly worried, especially during the earlier part of his imprisonment, as to whether I was able to cope financially and otherwise. I told him not to concern himself because there was a man in the house who assisted me. He was taken aback and asked, ‘A man?’ I explained that I was talking about the Almighty God.”
Of Villa-Vicencio’s 21 subjects, six are atheists, eight are professing Christians, three are in the Christian camp more loosely, one is a practicing Jew, two are Muslims, and one Hindu. The most impressive thing about this book is the vitality of the voices that Villa-Vicencio captures. The most impressive thing about the lived history through which they have passed is the respect each of the 21 shares for religion, and usually for Christianity, despite the fact that the regime that declared all of them to be noncitizens, harassed each of them relentlessly, and put many of them behind bars for the crime of asserting the humanity of Africans justified its actions with Scripture. This is a moving book.
-Mark Noll
Nazi Germany: A New History
By Klaus P. Fischer
Continuum
734 pp.: $37.50
German-born and American-trained historian Klaus Fischer (now a professor in California) has produced the most comprehensive and readable one-volume history of Nazi Germany currently available. His familiarity with the vast literature about that tragic era is most impressive, he acknowledges the interpretive shifts that have occurred over the last 50 years, and he has his finger on the major historiographical controversies. This well-balanced discussion moves so quickly and smoothly from topic to topic that a reader will find it difficult to put down.
Fischer traces out the origins of Nazism and other totalistic systems in the troubled development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and the trauma of World War I. He shows how and why Hitler succeeded in coming to power in Germany by posing as the instigator of a national uprising that would restore the country’s greatness. In an almost breathtaking fashion, he moves from political to economic to social history. He touches on major and minor developments alike so that we get a feeling for what life was like during the Third Reich. He avoids romanticizing the period but at the same time does not place the entire load of guilt on the German people, unlike the seriously flawed Goldhagen book that is receiving so much (undeserved) attention at present [see “How German Was the Holocaust?” on p. 3 of this issue]. Fischer’s treatment of the Holocaust is quite sensitive and in accordance with the latest scholarship, and he does not sidestep the debate over German responsibility. If you only have time to read one book on Nazi Germany, this is the one I would recommend.
-Richard V. Pierard
C. S. Lewis Index: Rumours from the Sculptor’s Shop
Compiled and Edited by Janine Goffar
La Sierra University Press
678 pp.: $34.95
C. S. Lewis: Readings for Meditation and Reflection
Edited by Walter Hooper
Harper San Francisco
156 pp.: $12, paper
Samuel Johnson observed that most sermons do not teach so much as they remind listeners of what they already know. The same is true of many secondary books on C. S. Lewis, especially those of the kind reviewed here. These do not aim to shed new light on Lewis, but they remind us how much of his work continues to invite serious reflection.
If ever a reference work could be said to be a labor of love, it is the C. S. Lewis Index: Rumours from the Sculptor’s Shop. With nearly 14,000 alphabetical entries, this book combines elements of a topical index and a concordance covering 15 nonfiction works, including Lewis’s theological books, plus Surprised by Joy and the volume of letters edited by his brother, Warren.
This is a highly useful book, and I have had occasion to use it twice in the first week I have owned it. At the risk of quibbling, some of the indexing seems idiosyncratic: there are seven entries under the heading of “Abortion,” none of which touches on the issue directly but rather evokes moral principles that the indexer finds applicable. And Lewis’s provocative comment that the pleasure of singing hymns in church may be like that of crooning music-hall tunes in a tavern is classified generically under the heading of “Activities.” Overall, though, this is a welcome volume that promises to become one of the most well-thumbed on my bookshelf.
Readings for Meditation and Reflection is a collection of 154 excerpts from Lewis, ranging from a paragraph to two pages. The selections may be read as brief commentaries on Christian faith and practice, or as a stimulus to more sustained reading from Lewis’s works. This would make a useful gift book for someone unacquainted with Lewis, or perhaps a reminder of luminous passages buried in his less well-known essays. Seasoned readers of Lewis might dub this slim volume “Lewis Lite” and wish that his literary executors would focus more on bringing out as-yet unpublished materials instead of recycling works already in print. Yet these readings illustrate anew the clarity of Lewis’s vision and the felicity of his prose.
-David C. Downing
Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
By George J. Sanchez
Oxford University Press
367 pp.; $16.95, paper
In contrast to the intense emotions surrounding it today, prior to 1917 the border dividing Mexico and the United States meant very little either to the Mexicans who traveled freely back and forth or to the handful of U.S. officials who maintained a token presence in border towns. The significance of the border began to change with the tightening of U.S. immigration laws during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. New regulations created the Border Patrol, imposed crossing taxes, and required Mexican “laboring classes” to undergo a humiliating process of delousing, fumigation, and baths. Mexicans were first defined as “aliens” during this period, a legally precise but ironic descriptor from legislators in distant Washington, D.C., whose paradigm for immigration was Ellis Island rather than the circular traffic across the Rio Grande.
These immigration restrictions had the unintended consequence of encouraging many Mexican migrants to remain in the United States. Thousands of them made Los Angeles, California, their permanent residence. By 1930, some 97,000 Mexicans had settled there, giving Los Angeles the largest Mexican population of any U.S. city. In Becoming Mexican American, cultural historian George Sanchez analyzes this group to create a revisionist account of ethnicity and the immigrant experience in America.
Sanchez presents a fluid and complex picture of how ethnic identity is formed. He emphasizes that the Mexican American identity forged by Angelinos who had come from south of the border “was not a fixed set of customs surviving from life in Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged from daily experience in the United States.” After solid chapters exploring family life, religion, popular music, and economic opportunities, Sanchez argues that the decisive factors shaping Mexican American self-awareness in Los Angeles prior to World War II were events surrounding the Great Depression and the forced repatriation of one-third of the city’s Mexican community.
Becoming Mexican American is high-caliber social history and a powerful reminder of the limitations inherent in viewing Ellis Island as the defining symbol of the American immigrant experience. Sanchez’s exhaustive documentation of marriage patterns, union membership, home ownership, and the like sometimes threatens to overwhelm the book’s narrative flow. Nonetheless, readers should skim rather than stop when the details become too thick. Becoming Mexican American offers balanced historical background for the often ahistorical polemics surrounding current immigration debates, particularly those concerning legal and illegal Mexican immigrants, as well as a range of suggestive ideas for fresh understandings of the meaning of immigration in the late twentieth century.
-Kathryn T. Long
Visions and Longings: Medieval Women Mystics
By Monica Furlong
Shambhala
248 pp.; $20
Mystics are not normal people,” opines British novelist and biographer Monica Furlong in this introduction to ten mystics and one wronged woman from the high Middle Ages. Furlong’s mystical women defy parents, loathe sex, obsess over distant sins, hear voices, seek pain, and occasionally strip themselves bare in public places. But their abnormalities are not incapacitating-they also establish monastic communities, confront popes, and produce literature that is still published today, centuries after their normal contemporaries have been forgotten.
Furlong, whose previous biographical subjects include John Bunyan, Therese of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, and Alan Watts, writes not as a scholar but as one who has been personally touched by the medieval mystical vision: “the conviction that there is a reality, a profound meaning, behind or beyond or within the world of appearances.” These strange women fascinate her; she wants to introduce them to readers who might be intimidated by dusty original sources. And so, in her own words and theirs, Furlong sketches rebellious Heloise (the one nonmystic in the sorority), runaway Christina of Markyate, visionary Hildegard of Bingen, three lovesick Beguines, sickly Clare of Assisi, joyful Angela of Foligno, strong-willed Catherine of Siena, mad Margery Kempe, and optimistic Julian of Norwich.
Visions and Longings is an anecdotal introduction to mysticism; Furlong has no interest in providing theological history or analyzing these women’s stories in light of their tumultuous political contexts. Rather, despite her assertion that her heroines are “bizarre and extraordinarily unlike ourselves,” she holds them up as contemporary role models: autonomous, subversive, powerful, independent, and adamantly antihierarchical. If this approach occasionally leans toward anachronism, it may also facilitate appreciation and understanding of times past. It may even stimulate critical thinking about today’s popular spirituality titles that promise improved health and happiness-a kind of mystical wholeness-as a side effect of divine union. By contrast, the mystical women of Christian tradition sought nothing of the sort, finding union with God in spite of-or even through-illness and suffering. “It may be,” Furlong suggests, “that through wounds in the psyche, cracks in the personality, neurotic or psychotic traits, through depression and hysteria and paranoia, a way is made for the transcendent to reach into the human condition.”
-LaVonne Neff
The Galton Case
By Ross Macdonald
Vintage
242 pp.; $11, paper
The Far Side of the Dollar
By Ross Macdonald
Vintage
247 pp.; $11, paper
The Underground Man
By Ross Macdonald
Vintage
273 pp.; $11, paper
Twenty-six years ago, in February 1971, Knopf published Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man, his sixteenth novel featuring private detective Lew Archer. The book was given front-page coverage in the New York Times Book Review (unusual for a mystery, though Macdonald’s previous novel, The Goodbye Look, also received front-page treatment: that was his breakthrough book). Eudora Welty’s review of The Underground Man was of the sort that causes readers to make haste to the bookstore, and the novel jumped onto the bestseller list. Macdonald (in private life Kenneth Millar, husband of mystery writer Margaret Millar) was 55 years old and at the height of his powers. The late-coming fame was well-earned, and readers had every reason to expect that some of his best work was still to come.
It was not to be. Macdonald wrote just two more books before the onset of Alzheimer’s disease silenced him. While he is still known to mystery addicts, he is in danger of losing the larger audience he had won by the end of his career. So it’s an occasion for rejoicing that Vintage is reissuing the Lew Archer novels.
If you haven’t read Macdonald, these three books are an excellent place to start. In each you’ll find the economical prose and the trademark metaphors and similes that make his style unobtrusively unforgettable, and in each you’ll find a near-biblical sense of the ramifying consequences of actions from one generation to the next. On the side, these books and the others in the Archer series-18 in all-offer a social history of postwar California unmatched in contemporary fiction. Don’t miss them.
-JW
David C. Downing teaches English at Messiah College and Elizabethtown College. Katherine T. Long is assistant professor of history at Wheaton College. LaVonne Neff is a writer and editor. Richard V. Pierard is professor of history at Indiana State University.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 38
7B2lm7B20387224
