As a devout midwestern Catholic in the first two decades of the Cold War, Andrew Bacevich imbibed the Manichean mythology of American good and Soviet evil. After graduating from West Point, Bacevich became a seasoned and learned warrior in the holy cause: combat service in the Vietnam War, duty in Germany and the Persian Gulf, teaching at his alma mater while completing a doctorate in history at Princeton. Shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, having served for 23 years as a professional soldier and officer in the U.S. Army, Bacevich retired at the rank of colonel. The American Century could not have had a more courageous and scholarly member of its legions.

Washington Rules (American Empire Project)

Andrew Bacevich (Author)

304 pages

$7.60

Yet all along Bacevich was growing wary of the faith, and in the elegant, wise, and sardonic memoir that opens Washington Rules, he recounts how he slowly and painfully realized that “orthodoxy might be a sham.” The inept and butcherous prosecution of the Vietnam War had triggered his initial suspicions; but, as Bacevich tells it, he was too ambitious to let his doubts mature into sustained intellectual and moral reflection: “Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick tendencies.” (Pursued out of the same careerism, graduate study was “a complete waste of time”—a claim that’s belied, I should note, by the historical erudition of his work.) But then he saw the shabby state of the former East Germany after the fall of Communism: the ragtag remnants of the fabled Red Army (Russian soldiers were peddling their shoddily-made medals, watches, and uniforms), a physical infrastructure that had clearly not recovered from World War II. Like General Smedley Butler—a decorated Marine Corps veteran who had confessed in War Is a Racket (1935) to being “a high class thug for Big Business”—Bacevich began to wonder how he’d fallen for the hype of the Evil Empire.

Now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Bacevich has become one of the most incisive critics of U.S. imperial folly. (His articles, it’s worth noting, have appeared across the spectrum, from New Left Review to The American Conservative.) In an indispensable historical trilogy—American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits to Power (2008)—Bacevich narrated the steady expansion and corruption of our national hubris, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. In Washington Rules, a kind of capstone to the trilogy, he traces the origins of this madness to the end of World War II. Since the early years of the Cold War, a Beltway-Wall Street axis—”Washington,” in Bacevich’s shorthand—has constructed and expanded a constellation of institutions that comprise the imperial state. Headquartered in the Imperial City, it embraces the upper reaches of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal government; the tentacles of the national security establishment; the clerical archipelago of think tanks and policy wonkery, from Cato and American Enterprise to Heritage, Brookings, and RAND; the pecuniary-industrial complex of finance capital, defense contracting, and high-tech manufacturers; the imperial mandarins at the Council of Foreign Relations and the Kennedy School of Government; and what C. Wright Mills once called the “cultural apparatus”: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the major television networks, all serving as the imperial Ministry of Truth.

Not all Americans have genuflected before the Washington rules, and Bacevich points to a thin but resilient lineage of apostates and heretics. He rounds up the usual suspects: Randolph Bourne, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Christopher Lasch. (I missed A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan.) I’m surprised by the absence of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Bacevich has taken as a spiritual preceptor in some of his recent work. Nor is there any mention of William Appleman Williams—like Bacevich, a military veteran, diplomatic historian, and public intellectual. But the most compelling witnesses against the American Century are those who once labored in its service. George Kennan, who coined the term “containment,” came to bitterly excoriate the insatiability of American powerlust and consumerism. David Shoup, Marine general, Medal of Honor recipient, and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the protests against the Vietnam War.

The two most unforgettable dissenting insiders are Eisenhower and William J. Fulbright. We all know of Eisenhower’s warning, in his 1961 farewell address, about the “military-industrial complex.” What most of us don’t know is Ike’s earlier warning, given shortly after the start of his presidency. Call it the “Cross of Iron” speech, and it’s far more absorbing and morally substantial than any of Obama’s fulsome homilies. Every gun, warship, and rocket signifies, Eisenhower asserted, “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Such a way of life, he rued, is “humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Fulbright, the learned and cantankerous Democratic senator from Arkansas, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1960s. A meticulous and unwavering critic of the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies, Fulbright routinely exposed their moral and strategic inanity in his hearings, speeches, and essays. Despite the dated quality of its immediate concerns, his 1966 remonstrance, The Arrogance of Power, has lost none of its urgency. Surveying the poverty and desolation of American cities and rural communities, Fulbright declared it “unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades … while neglecting the needs of its own people.” Adding that a “great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations—to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image,” Fulbright warned that any nation setting out on “self-appointed missions to police the world” will bring “misery to their intended beneficiaries and destruction upon themselves.”

To counter the Washington rules, Bacevich urges Americans to revisit “the anti-imperial origins of the Republic.” “The proper aim of American statecraft,” he asserts, is to “permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a ‘more perfect union.'” Echoing Eisenhower and Fulbright, he reminds us that “fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit.” Well aware that isolationism is impossible, he sketches an alternative credo, redolent of Niebuhr and the Abraham Lincoln of the Second Inaugural Address: we cannot know God’s purposes, we cannot master history, and we should try to change only what we know best, and even then fitfully: ourselves. The military, he insists, is for defense and nothing else; American soldiers should be stationed here, which would require the withdrawal and dismantling of the base system; and force should be employed only as a last resort, in accordance with “just war” criteria.

Bacevich’s counsel is so eminently wise that my skepticism may seem churlish. But his account of the American Empire and its rules is open to several objections. As Bacevich surely knows, what Williams once called “the contours of American history” have always been violently expansive. The American drive for global dominion was not a fall from republican grace that occurred in 1947. And precisely because our imperial present is deeply rooted in our liberal republican past, I cannot agree with Bacevich that we can appeal to an anti-imperialist heritage. To be sure, King and Fulbright and Williams have an ancestry as well—most illustriously, the Anti-Imperialist League that emerged after the Spanish-American War, graced by the imperishable examples of Mark Twain, Jane Addams, and William James. Still, venerable as their dissenting tradition may be, their failure is evident; American history is not on Bacevich’s side. From Puritan divines to frontier trappers to today’s suburban shoppers, Americans have repeatedly affirmed what Williams dubbed “empire as a way of life.” In short, “Washington” rules because Americans want it to rule.

Proposing alternatives to the consensus may seem “a fanciful exercise,” Bacevich writes. But “before the movement comes the conviction—an awareness of things amiss combined with a broad vision of how to make them right.” His modest prescriptions might ensure our safety and prosperity, he suggests, perhaps even fulfilling “the mission that Americans persist in believing God or Providence has bestowed upon the United States.” Yet isn’t the notion of divine anointment precisely one of the “things amiss”? The covenant theology of American anointment is exactly what we need to renounce.

Williams posed the question squarely: “Is the idea and reality of America possible without empire?” If one says yes, Williams wrote, one is “a pioneer on the ultimate American frontier.” The creation of a post-imperial America is the most urgent—and potentially most liberating—adventure for Americans in the 21st century. What will Americans make of their country if they lose their conviction of an exalted destiny? Resistance to the waning of the white American imperium will surely be widespread and adamant—witness the descent of the Right into nativist and fundamentalist lunacy. But relinquishing empire as a way of life, giving up the delusion that the world will fall apart without the ordering of our money and armaments, presents a moment of possibility: we could embrace the decline of our global supremacy with a joyful sense of emancipation. If we are weaker and poorer, we’ll also be freer to arrange our common life by wiser and saner standards—perhaps by standards that reflect our professed belief that the poor are blessed, and that the meek, not the strong, will inherit the earth. If that unlikely but not impossible reformation transpires, Andrew Bacevich will be among those who deserve our thanks for their service.

Eugene McCarraher is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

During a semester abroad in Mainz, Germany, in the mid-1990s, I sampled lectures on the New Testament from the university’s Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät. Fifteen years later, I can only remember two things the professor said in the course of the semester. First, when discussing a gospel account of a healing, he commented that “only some people in America” believed that such miracles actually occurred. Later on, he observed that when American theologians—he at least conceded that such rarities existed—happened upon an idea, they did so unaware that German theologians had fully vetted it several decades earlier. He might have added that few American Christians wanted their ministers to stumble upon any recent theological insights, from Germany or anywhere else. Die Amerikaner: superstitious, backward, ignorant.

God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide

Thomas Albert Howard (Author)

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

272 pages

$56.04

In God and the Atlantic, Thomas Albert Howard analyzes the venerable history of European criticism and derision of American religion. “[Woodrow] Wilson talks like Jesus Christ and acts like Lloyd George,” French President Georges Clemenceau complained at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. No one accused George W. Bush of speaking like Jesus, but European dissatisfaction with his purportedly evangelical administration produced fresh discussions of a longstanding “transatlantic religious gap” between a religious United States and a secularized Western Europe.

The many sneering dismissals of America and American religion that Howard includes in God and the Atlantic are themselves worth the price of admission. They range across the span of U.S. history, from the French diplomat Charles de Talleyrand’s assessment of the early Republic (“The states of America are a country where there are thirty-two religions, but there is only one course at dinner—and it’s bad”) to the pithy judgment of postmodern critic Jean Baudrillard (“the only remaining primitive society”), none of them surpassing the loathing expressed by the philosopher Martin Heidegger (“[the] metaphysical essence of the emerging monstrousness of modern times”), who found Nazi ideology more congenial.

Howard’s foremost contribution is to historicize and categorize European animosity against American religion, dividing it first into traditionalist and secularist camps. Unapologetic for his focus on élite thinkers, Howard follows Charles Taylor in exploring a “social imaginary” largely created by intellectuals that filtered down to other strata of society. What emerges is first and foremost a sweeping and engaging intellectual history of Europe during the ages of revolution and reaction. While many European thinkers found backwoods revivalists, Shakers, Millerites, and Mormons inherently fascinating, their comments about the United States primarily interpreted events closer to home. Thus, traditionalists pining for the ancien régime regarded the American experiment in democracy with great suspicion and accordingly concluded that religious freedom undermined order and morality. More secular reformers and revolutionaries, meanwhile, saw the primitive vitality of American religion as a stumbling block to either a Comtean “religion of humanity” or the coming socialist state. Many Europeans on the Left absorbed a bitter anticlericalism through the heritage of the French Revolution.

Howard suggests that these rival tendencies of European thought occupied some common ground in their view of the United States. Both traditionalists and secularists argued that American society lacked conditions they regarded as normative but that Howard argues were merely specifically European. In short, America was anomalous or defective, lacking a feudal past and now locked into a bourgeois pursuit of material wealth. Also, many Europeans of all political stripes regarded the United States “at once as poor learner, oafish foil, and didactic counterexample.”

When encountering a book both far-ranging and brief, one cannot help but quibble on occasion. While Howard typically provides succinct introductions to the life and thought of key figures such as Frances Trollope and Karl Marx, similar material on intellectuals less familiar to non-specialists would assist such readers. More substantively, Howard comments at the outset that Great Britain presents a “special case,” given the religious “patrimony” of the United States, yet after an early section on 19th-century British traditionalists (mostly Anglicans), he only rarely returns to this special relationship.

Howard does not waste much time assessing wild European claims about American religion. After all, Europeans once asserted that New World dogs failed to bark and that Americans were degenerating into a race of sterile midgets. A 19th-century Catholic encyclopedia reported the existence of a literalistic American sect which allegedly required its adherents to pluck out their right eyes in fidelity to Matthew 5:29. Many critics of New World religion never crossed the Atlantic; many others happily misused the actions of small minorities as representative examples. Still, a good number of critics hit the mark. Anglican minister Isaac Fidler, who did visit the United States, observed that a minister’s dependence on his congregants’ good will and money created a great temptation to discard erudition and to compromise with local standards and tastes. Indeed, both traditionalists and secularists criticized American Christians—and Americans in general—for ignoring the life of the mind. While critics have always overstated this case, even sympathetic interpreters like Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the American preference for practical knowledge.

Of course, it still speaks ill of many cultured European despisers of American religion that they made so few attempts to acquire more than a superficial acquaintance with the object of their scorn. Thus, Howard spends the latter portion of his book introducing more knowledgeable and sympathetic voices into the dialogue. Because “one cannot live by Tocqueville alone,” Howard eschews the French aristocrat in favor of two somewhat less familiar interpreters of American Christianity.

At first glance, Reformed church historian Philip Schaff and Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain have little in common, separated both by time and ecclesiastical boundaries. Both men, however, spent many years in America while maintaining close connections with continental intellectuals, and they both concluded that Europe had much to learn from its New World child’s voluntaristic approach to religion. Schaff, who spent the bulk of his career at Mercersburg and Union seminaries, deplored America’s rampant sectarianism but predicted a future marked by “free unity in spirit and truth” that would transcend but not obliterate confessional differences.

For most of Maritain’s adult life, he spoke and published in the shadow of fin-de-siècle Vatican condemnations of “Americanism.” Thus, his praise of American democracy and religious pluralism took considerable courage. Howard briefly explores Maritain’s Thomistic emphasis on the imago Dei, focusing on his articulation of a humanism shorn of its anti-religious bias. In Howard’s paraphrase, Maritain’s “new Christendom” grounded the liberal state on “a common, supranational insistence on the freedom and dignity of the person qua person.” When Maritain left France in 1940 and took refuge in the United States, he found to his surprise that America realized his ideals in part. America, he suggested hopefully, displayed religious freedom without either anticlericalism or “antinomian perversion.” He admired the voluntaristic energy and dynamism of American Christianity, which still supported a benevolent empire of sorts without state control. And as Schaff had also done, Maritain praised middle-class American thrift and industry in contrast to a bourgeois thirst for aristocratic leisure.

Howard makes plain his appreciation of “mediating figures” such as Schaff and Maritain. He rejects secularization as a normative description of or prescription for the modern world, and he presumably would echo the balanced assessment of the American religious scene that his exemplars epitomize. Indeed, his book suggests that if Americans and Europeans alike were more familiar with their divergent histories, they would find the transatlantic religious divide less of a cause for mutual animus, derision, and contention. Making use of Ralph McInerny’s study of Jacques Maritain, God and the Atlantic implies that both Europeans and Americans should make a much deeper effort to discern the “lurking positive” in each other’s approach to religion and society. For believers and secularists on both sides of the Atlantic, that would be a worthy leap of faith.

John G. Turner teaches modern American history at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (Univ. of North Carolina Press). Currently he’s studying 19th-century Mormonism.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Commentaries stand on the shoulders of previous commentaries or, to shift the metaphor only slightly, they stand among other commentaries. The Gospels are just inside the century mark of being 2,000 years old and, while commentaries didn’t immediately show up in ancient bookshops, the trail of commentaries on each of the Gospels goes back 1,700 years and more. The Gospel of Luke was not the favorite of the Fathers—Matthew and John got the nods—but we have homilies from Origen (253), Titus of Bostra (378), and Ambrose of Milan (397); Augustine’s Harmony refers to Luke (430). After Augustine came Cyril of Alexandria (444), Philoxenus of Mabbug (519), and the Venerable Bede (735). The medievals, such as Bonaventure (1274), had an interest in Luke, as did the Reformers (Luther, 1546; Calvin, 1555). I will avoid a complete listing and jump, as we often do in the Protestant world, to modern scholarship: I think of T. Zahn (1913), Erich Klostermann (1919), B.S. Easton (1926), and J.M. Creed (1930). But it was in the 1970s and ’80s when Luke particularly flourished as a text for commentators, and thus one thinks of Heniz Schürmann (1969), F. W. Danker (1972), I. H. Marshall (1978), J. A. Fitzmyer (1981), L. Sabourin (1985), F. Bovon (1989), and J. Nolland (1989). In the ’90s some hefty volumes emerged, and Darrell Bock (1994) and J. B. Green (1997) remain among my favorites.

Luke: 2-Volume Set

Philip Graham Ryken (Author)

Philip Graham Ryken

1488 pages

$55.99

Sorting through what others have said leaves the commentator weary, wondering if the task can be done by one person and in manageable length, but the fresh commentary both sums up briefly what has gone before and takes us into new territory. Frequently enough it is a methodological approach that provides fresh light, as Howard Marshall subjected tradition criticism to withering scrutiny and Darrell Bock examined Luke through the lens of a biblical theology, while Joel Green read Luke through the lens of a literary approach alongside a judicious use of social-scientific discoveries about the ancient world.

Preachers need commentaries the most: their daily labor in the Bible and the need to say something faithful and insightful every Sunday drives them to those who can help them. The freshest commentary often provides the most nutrients. We can express our gratitude to scholars who have spent a decade or more in research in Luke and then put the results down on paper so others could reap the benefits of their labor.

But what happens when a pastor puts his hand to a commentary? Philip Graham Ryken completed this two-volume commentary on Luke shortly before he became president of Wheaton College, while still serving as pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. The strength of this commentary is that Ryken reads Luke for himself, in light both of his Reformed theology and of his pastoral task, relying very little upon the scholarship of others. (That, too, is its weakness.)

Departing from what has become for commentary writers the ever more daunting tradition of writing a comprehensive introduction, Ryken plunges right into the Gospel: Luke begins at 1:1 and so does Ryken. His commentary is lucid, intelligent, theologically informed, and fair to the text in light of the pastoral task. His eyes are always on his congregation, and so whether he calls us to respond to the Word by taking God at his word; or by reading the Beatitudes as a challenge (are we blessed by God?); or by accepting the challenge to follow Jesus; or by attending to the question “Who is the person that needs your help?” in the famous Good Samaritan parable—whatever the local emphasis, to the very end of the commentary, Ryken’s intent is to apply the whole text and apply the text wholly.

The pastor can’t afford simply to be a historian; theology comes into play, and Ryken knows when to bring it up. Many have said Mary could not have uttered the Magnificat (Luke 1:49-55), for she was too young. Ryken responds: “This objection overlooks the doctrine of inspiration, which teaches that Mary’s words came from God the Holy Spirit.” Well, I was nurtured in a school that might have said “prophecy” here and would have reserved “inspiration” for what Luke wrote, but Ryken soon makes amends: “If we wonder how she was able to write such a famous poem, the answer is simple: Mary knew her Bible!” I don’t know if this undoes his inspiration comment, but it does force the reader to think about the magnificent memories of ancient Jews who heard the Bible’s stories over and over and over in home and synagogue and so would have been able to create a pastiche-like poem of one’s favorite YHWH-promises.

His reading of the Friend at Midnight, Luke 11:5-8, is an excellent example of theological care. He avoids the special pleading of Kenneth Bailey’s appeal to the word anaideia as a one-of-a-kind meaning of “desire to avoid shame” and stands with solid scholarship in saying it means “shamelessness.” Then he weaves in and out of the potential problems and genuine insights that this parable offers about God: God does not need to be badgered; God does not respond to keep us from badgering. Ryken sees the logic: God, in fact, is not much like this man in bed at all; God is so much better!

Entitling the Pharisee and Tax Collector parable “The Sinner’s Prayer” (Luke 18:9-14) is perhaps a tip-off. Ryken sketches the Pharisee over against the Tax Collector through the lens of personal salvation and then in “be merciful” finds atonement theology, even substitutionary atonement with expiation and propitiation and justification at work: “This is what the tax collector was praying.” I doubt this was at work in the imagined Tax Collector (it is a parable, after all); Ryken is stretching here to find in the one Gospel that has comparatively little atonement theology an atonement theology that is far more crisp and clear than the text itself. But as I said, this overly theological approach is rare. I find his discussion of atonement theology in, say, Luke 23:44-49, to name but one example, insightful and solid, though probably more Reformed than many who will use this commentary.

The strength of this commentary, as I’ve said, is also its weakness: Ryken reads Luke for himself, but he has ignored too much valuable work by others. The methods of scholars and the insights of scholarship just don’t appear enough, and their absence weakens this commentary. I don’t know how one can write about the Beatitudes (Matthew’s list has several more); or the Lord’s Prayer (where Ryken says we need not be troubled by the differences, for the prayers are basically the same, and anyway Jesus taught the prayer more than one way [“clearly”], and the Lukan prayer is later in the ministry, hence Jesus gave a shorter version to remind the disciples of his earlier version, and the two versions show us we need not repeat only the one [Matthean] version); or the Centurion’s servant without some discussion of Q or at least the Lukan parallels with substantial discussion of the differences, their redactional pedigree, and the light source and redaction critics have thrown on Luke’s Gospel. I understand the pastoral task, but this is a commentary, and pastors (and students) will have questions that emerge from careful reading of the Bible itself that avoidance can’t resolve.

The “theology” of Luke has been a hotbox for nearly six decades now, and this commentary doesn’t sufficiently engage with scholarship on the salvation-historical plan (ever since H. Conzelmann’s famous study), the potency of absorbing and fulfilling Old Testament expectations—in light of how Judaism read Scripture, as well as the special attention Luke gives to the marginalized—and what that might say about kingdom theology and Christian praxis. In other words, there are central themes that have been examined in detail in Lukan scholarship, and Ryken does not give these themes a clear theological profile in light of Luke’s special emphases. For example, I. H. Marshall showed how holistic salvation is in Luke’s theology, yet Ryken too often wants to refocus to personal soteriology. A more robust view of political and economic salvation could be exploited for Christian living today. Nor is there enough attention to the literary parallels between Luke and Acts or the numerous and insightful studies on the purpose of Luke-Acts. These themes are not only central to Lukan scholarship today but also can be dynamically reshaped for preaching. Pastors and Bible students need someone who knows the text well, as Ryken clearly does, to weigh in on these topics in summary explanations and theological evaluation.

Pastors go to commentaries not only to prepare sermons but also to find help in interacting with other commentaries. They won’t find that here, for there is almost no interaction with our generation’s most significant commentators. Had he chosen to interact with these, Ryken would have done pastors even more good than this excellent exposition of Luke provides.

Scot McKnight is Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University. His commentary on James (NICNT) was published earlier this year by Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Born in 1936 and raised by Italian American immigrants in the Fordham section of the Bronx, Don DeLillo is one of the preeminent American novelists of his generation. His eighth novel, White Noise (1985), was a breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him the National Book Award and a place in the academic canon of contemporary authors. White Noise was followed by a string of highly acclaimed works, including Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), and, most recently, Point Omega (2010). Hal Bush talked with DeLillo at Saint Louis University, where he received the St. Louis Literary Award in October 2010.

When did you start thinking of yourself as a writer, and what you got started as a writer?

I wrote some short stories in my early twenties and sent them to magazines, and to my amazement, when I was around 23, one of these stories was accepted. It stunned me, I remember receiving a letter in the mail. And I wanted to say, “Wait a minute. I was only kidding, I can do better.” That was my immediate response. And the story was published. But I didn’t get around to working on my first novel until quite a while later, for reasons that are not so easy to explain. I was living under ideal circumstances for a writer: I lived very cheaply; I quit my job, I was free; I was paying 60 dollars a month rent; and I was going to the movies instead of writing. Eventually I realized the importance of working every day—I’m not sure why it took me so long, but eventually it happened. And I was two years into my first novel when it occurred to me that I was a writer. That’s when I knew. I was perfectly willing to believe that this novel would never get published, because I was writing in the dark, in many ways, but I was learning things about writing that I hadn’t realized before. And it happened—I am not exaggerating—a little like a revelation. I remember where I was, which street I was on, walking along, when I knew I would be a writer, and I knew I would keep going, whatever happened with this particular book. It took me two more years to finish it, and eventually it was published. And here I am.

So what street was it?

It was Second Avenue, around Thirty-Sixth Street, in Manhattan. There’s a plaque.

Talk a little bit about your craft as a writer—and specifically, how do you envision the purposes of your art? What do you try to achieve?

I suppose what I do in the simplest sense, which is also perhaps the most important sense, is to write clear, interesting sentences. This is where it all starts. One has an idea, and it begins to develop, and I may take notes every so often, write down possible names as characters begin to develop; but it doesn’t really mean much until I put words on paper. Hemingway’s old dictum is still strongly in mind, which is “get black on white”; and that’s what I do. I have an old manual typewriter; I hit the typewriter keys and march the words forward. Words not only have meanings, they even have visual elements. I can see words that connect in a sentence by what they look like, not only by what they mean, and by the sound they have. And that’s what I do, sentence after sentence, day after day. And as I do this, I begin to understand the characters more, I begin to sense the structure of whatever it is I’m writing. Sometimes this takes a long time, other times it’s apparent very soon. And it’s all a mystery. I think of fiction as a mystery, and I wait for answers.

When you talk about writing great sentences, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the American or other writers that you encountered as a young person or a student—writers who wrote great sentences.

The first name I have to mention is Hemingway. He was inescapable back then, in a positive sense. A friend and I, when we were at Fordham, used to walk across campus speaking to each other in Hemingway dialogue. And it was part parody of Hemingway, but it was also part tribute. And this friend of mine used to write like Hemingway, and could not break himself of the habit—he’s now on safari. And there was Faulkner. Too difficult to imitate, actually. But in a way, overwhelming everything, was James Joyce. And I remember clearly my reading of Ulysses, the first three chapters in particular, just the language itself that seemed to fill the room with sunlight. I don’t consider that any of these writers were a direct influence on the way I write, but simply on making me want to write, which is more important, perhaps.

So what about those who were more direct influences on the way you write—particularly postwar novelists. I know before you’ve mentioned people like Norman Mailer or Saul Bellow.

In the ’60s, as I started to write and became increasingly serious, I led a fairly quiet life. Of course I had friends, but I rarely traveled, and I spent a lot of time working, reading, and seeing movies—serious movies—and during all this time, as I was almost semi-cloistered, there was Mailer, out in the middle of everything: politics, religion, sex—every imaginable subject in that very energetic decade passed through Mailer and got the benefit of his comments and his books and the trouble he caused and the attention he got. I felt like Mailer’s secret shadow. Of course nobody knew who I was, and that’s the way I liked it, but I admired what he wrote. The nonfiction, the articles he wrote, the poems he wrote, the letters he wrote, and of course the novels. I never considered Mailer a model for my own work, but I considered him an invigorating presence who seemed just around the corner.

Bellow was another important writer in that time—again, not a direct influence, but he brought a new voice to American literature. And many others—too many to remember.

Some readers say …

They’re wrong.

… that you are a dark and pessimistic writer.

I don’t feel dark and pessimistic. I feel I’m painting a portrait of the world that I know, not one that I’m creating out of sheer mental invention or for the sake of effect. This is the world around me, this is the world that I see. And of course it may be quite different from the world that others see. I lived a while in Greece, in Athens, and there was an overhanging sense of terror and threat: plane hijackings, wars in the general area, revolutions. And in Athens itself you could stand on your terrace, if you had one—and nearly everyone did—and hear a boom somewhere in the distance: another car had been blown up by a group called November 17, a leftist group. So this found its way into the novel I was writing at the time, The Names. I was influenced by everything I saw and heard then, because I was in a new environment, and it informed my work in rather immediate ways.

White Noise is probably your most famous book. On college campuses like this one, it gets taught a lot, and has probably been assigned more often than any of your other works. I would argue that it has become one of the most iconic American novels of the past 30 to 40 years. What do you think accounts for its wide appeal?

This is a question I could not answer honestly. I don’t know. I just know what went into the book. I never know how people are going to respond to a particular book.

Was there a particular scene or event or episode that got you thinking about “white noise” as a subject?

I returned from three years in Greece. I returned because I needed to feel like an American writer again, I needed to get back into this culture. And one of the things I noticed when I got back was the sort of dazzle, the brightness, the vividness of an ordinary American supermarket, which I hadn’t glimpsed in over three years. So I saw it with fresh eyes, and it had an effect on me. I felt I was learning the culture all over again, listening to people speak and the manner in which they spoke. And I felt the urge to start writing. I found myself describing a street in a town somewhere.

But as things began to develop, I became aware of the frequency of toxic spills. Seemed to be happening everywhere. You know the way the media treat certain events: an event becomes reported, and then over-reported. Everybody reports it. And you get the impression that there’s nothing in the world happening except this particular event or situation. And then they just drop the matter, and you get the impression that the event has stopped happening. Which is not the case, of course. And so this was a period in which they were reporting toxic spills, something I hadn’t thought about in years. And no one else seemed to pay any attention, because it had been reported and reported and over-reported. And a toxic spill eventually became the centerpiece of the novel.

In an interview, you once said this: “I think as time has passed, the novels Libra and Underworld seem more meaningful to me. They say something essential about the conflict in our culture.” What is that essential something that these two novels together tell us about conflict in our world today?

Libra comes out of the ’60s, of course, and in a sense so does Underworld. But Libra focuses on a single disaster: a single event, caught on film, which people are still challenging—seven seconds of gunfire which we haven’t yet unraveled. Writing a piece of fiction about it, I never believed that I was writing something more truthful than a historian’s work, or a journalist’s, but just something that searches for the impact of history on intimate lives. And it occurred to me that not only in writing about that moment, but about what started to happen after that moment throughout the ’60s and into the ’70s—assassination attempts, Vietnam protests, racial violence, crime in the streets—a theme was beginning to build in my work, simply that we live in dangerous times. And Underworld—of course, it’s about a huge, overarching sense of disaster, the possibility of nuclear war, the Cold War, cities destroyed. In fact I was writing a novel about conflict, but it took me a long time to understand this. The novel begins with a baseball game, a field of conflict, of competition. And then there is the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which is alluded to one way or another. And perhaps most important, the conflict in the main character’s heart about the disappearance of his father—what is the nature of his disappearance? Was he taken away and murdered, because he owed money to men in organized crime? Or did he abandon his family, which the character, Nick, does not want to believe and refuses to accept, and this is the conflict that ultimately drives the novel.

Let’s talk a little bit about Mao II, and the first scene. That’s one of my favorite passages in all of your writing: a mass wedding conducted by the Unification Church, the Moonies, in Yankee Stadium, which was based on an actual event. That first section ends with the famous line, “The future belongs to crowds.” Can you talk a little bit about some of the book’s themes?

I clipped photographs. There was a photograph in a newspaper, I don’t remember where, of a Unification Church wedding: many hundreds of people in regimental form, lining up to get married. The photograph was perhaps five inches by six inches or even smaller and was just crammed with people, and I wondered why a wedding scene would resemble an army going into battle. And roughly at the same time, as I remember, I saw another photo in the New York Post. A couple of photographers had staked out a town near where J. D. Salinger lived. I suppose they had a general idea of Salinger’s appearance. And of course he was a figure who’d become perhaps more famous for not being visible than he had been as a writer. And this made him someone to be stalked, and that’s what they did. They found him, and they snapped his photograph, and he charged the camera. He was outraged. And this was the photo that appeared in the Post. The juxtaposition of the Unification Church wedding and the photograph of the reclusive artist seemed worth thinking about and eventually writing about.

For a long time you had a bit of a reputation as a reclusive writer. The writer in Mao II may be like Salinger, and he is often compared to Thomas Pynchon. I think some readers think of that writer as being a lot like you. But in recent years, you often come to public events like this, and you’ve done interviews much more than in previous times.

For many years, nobody wanted to talk to me. And I didn’t want to talk to them. We were all very happy.

And then that changed. Perhaps when that changed was Libra. When I wrote a novel about the assassination of the president, I did feel a certain responsibility to say something and to answer whatever questions would be asked. And I agreed to do just a couple of interviews, that’s all. But I’ve never been a recluse. It’s just a story that people repeat because other people have repeated it before them.

One more question: What are the questions that you wish interviewers would ask, but that they never ask?

One of these would be: Are we finished now?

Harold K. Bush, Jr., is professor of English at Saint Louis University. He is the author most recently of Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (Univ. of Alabama Press).

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Editors in the Victorian period wielded enormous influence over the texts they published, often printing radically altered versions without the author’s permission. An outraged Thomas Hardy, for example, once threatened to withdraw his serial fiction Hearts Insurgent from the American magazine Harper‘s because of his more conservative editor’s emendations. Hardy would later reinsert many omitted or obscured details—such as clarifying that the orphans of the magazine version were really Jude’s illegitimate children—when he republished the novel as Jude the Obscure. Jude then shocked many reviewers, and a bishop declared that he had burned a copy.

The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition

Oscar Wilde (Author), Nicholas Frankel (Editor)

Belknap Press

304 pages

$47.47

The publication history of another controversial late Victorian novel, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, is marked, surprisingly enough, by increasing restraint. Also solicited by an American literary journal, this one called Lippincott‘s, Wilde’s text was deemed to contain several “objectionable” passages by its editor, J. M. Stoddart. His editorial team excised some five hundred words before printing the novel in 1890. After the novel’s appearance in the magazine, Wilde further amended provocative sections before republishing it as a book with Ward, Lock, and Company. Until now, editors have based their texts on either this 1891 “book version” or the earlier Lippincott‘s version. For Harvard University Press’ new “annotated, uncensored” edition of The Picture, editor Nicholas Frankel has turned back to the typescript that Wilde sent Stoddart in 1890, restoring the five hundred words found in the typescript but omitted from the later published versions.

Reintroducing these words, Frankel argues, makes The Picture “a more a daring and scandalous novel, more explicit in its content.” The key word here is “more”: even without the omissions, the book was decried in the press, as Frankel’s introduction vividly recounts. The restored passages do not drastically transform the novel (not, at least, as Hardy’s changes to Jude did), yet Frankel is right to observe that they would have heightened the risk that Wilde took in flouting the period’s familiar moral standards. The restorations reduce the ambiguity, for example, surrounding Dorian’s womanizing as well as the painter Basil Hallward’s homoerotic feelings for Dorian. The most intriguing restorations, in my view, speak to the power of what is hinted yet left unsaid. Lippincott‘s editors systematically eliminated references to a fictitious French novel titled Le Secret de Raoul, the reading of which profoundly affects Dorian. (In the magazine and book versions, the captivating book is left unnamed.) French fiction was then notorious for graphic depictions of vice. The removal of the foreign title and references to Dorian as “Raoul” betray an anxiety on the editors’ part about the danger of inviting the reader to engage with the text as if it had a secret, such a secret made all the more suggestive by its French flavor.

In an appendix, Frankel lists Stoddart’s emendations alongside Wilde’s in the 1891 book version, and one cannot but be struck by the greater degree of censorship that the author applied to his own work, particularly in reducing the homoeroticism of early chapters. That Wilde had good reason to revise extensively is shown in Frankel’s examination of the novel’s reception history. Frankel breaks the “code” of reviews of the Lippincott‘s edition that used the languages of filth, illness, and madness to condemn indirectly the novel’s treatment of sexuality. A review in The Scots Observer, for example, claimed that Wilde could “write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.” The reviewer was alluding to the “Cleveland Street Affair,” in which London police had broken up a male prostitution ring staffed by telegraph messengers and patronized by Lord Arthur Somerset, a member of the Prince of Wales’ inner circle.

The reviewers, however, were not the only ones speaking in code. Frankel also examines various references embedded in The Picture to the homosexual underground in which Wilde was increasingly active at the time of the novel’s composition. The name Dorian Gray, for example, is a double reference—referring to “Greek” or “Dorian” love, contemporary labels for the classical Greek practice of pederasty, and to a young man with whom Wilde was then seeking such a relationship, the poet John Gray. (Playing along, Gray would at one point sign a letter to Wilde, “Yours ever, Dorian.”)

The Lippincott’s version would trouble Wilde again a few years later. In 1895, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry (father of Wilde’s lover, Alfred Douglas) for libel. The libel trial pitted one of the best writers of the English language against one of the worst: Queensberry had left a card at Wilde’s club accusing him of being a “posing somdomite [sic].” Queensberry’s attorney, E. A. Carson, sought to defend his client against the libel charge by citing passages from The Picture as evidence that Queensberry’s claim was true. (Frankel’s notes alert the reader to the passages Carson cited.) Both Wilde and the judge at his later criminal trial argued that a work of imagination could not be used as evidence of the author’s real-life activities. Art, simply put, should not be confused with autobiographical fact.

In his correspondence, however, Wilde described The Picture as a reflection of his personality and sexual desires. He wrote of The Picture: “[the novel] contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” In the novel, Basil makes a similar claim regarding his portrait of Dorian: “I have put too much of myself into it.” One might be tempted to dismiss such expressions as spurious artist-speak (Lord Henry laughs at Basil’s comment), yet Frankel’s notes helpfully situate these remarks within the contemporary debate about portrait-painting. Along with prominent artists like Sargent and Whistler, Wilde the critic was reconceptualizing portraiture, declaring that the artist’s interpretation of the sitter was what finally mattered, not the accuracy of the representation. On this line, Wilde argued in his criticism that the “only portraits in which one believes” feature “very little of the sitter and a great deal of the artist.” Several portraits—by Whistler, Sargent, Millais, and others—frame Wilde’s text in this edition and thereby offer opportunities to consider this theory in practice.

Frankel also implicitly invites the reader to reflect on Wilde’s biography while reading the novel by placing photo-portraits of the author, his friends, influences, and enemies in the margins as well. The lavish portraits, moreover, affect how one comes to envision the canvas for which the novel is named, which one may then compare with frontispiece and movie-poster renderings of Dorian also collected here. Altogether, this exposure to the 1890s “renaissance” of portraiture—to Whistlers and Sargents and Napolean Sarony’s elegant photo-portraits of Wilde—provides a useful vantage for imaginatively engaging with the aesthetic world of the novel.

There is thus much to be appreciated in this handsome scholarly edition, even if the source text is not quite as revelatory as Frankel contends and the marginalia occasionally become unwieldy. (Many scholars will nonetheless envy the freedom the press has given the editor to dedicate as many as two pages of notes to a half-page of the novel.) On one point, however, Frankel’s portrait of the artist strikes me as wanting: his handling of Wilde’s relationship with Catholicism.

In their Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006), Mark Knight and Emma Mason challenge the reflexive skepticism among Wilde scholars on this issue. Knight and Mason argue, instead, that Catholicism—particularly its sacramentalism—answered Wilde’s imaginative and spiritual needs (albeit often in an unorthodox way) and, in turn, informed his artistic vision. Among the Aesthetes, Wilde was not unique in this attraction; several members of Wilde’s circle converted, including the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. As Frankel observes, the aforementioned John Gray was in the process of converting to Roman Catholicism while Wilde wrote the novel. He would later join the priesthood. Frankel’s introduction, however, suggests that Wilde’s deathbed conversion took place merely to ensure his burial on sacred ground, despite reasons to think the conversion sincere or, at least, debatable. Wilde had flirted with the idea of going over to Rome since his Oxford days. After his imprisonment, he visited the Vatican, attending masses and papal audiences. Shortly before his death, he told friend Robbie Ross—himself a Catholic—that he wished to convert. Meanwhile, Frankel’s marginal notes describe Basil Hallward’s last words—cries to Dorian to join him in repentance in a religious language he struggles to recall from his boyhood—as “pathetic” and signs of the “superficiality” of his faith. In Knight and Mason’s reading, by contrast, The Picture is suffused with the language of Catholic Christianity. This perspective helps us to listen with greater sophistication to the novel’s ongoing reflection on appropriate and inappropriate confessions and objects of worship, issues that Basil’s repentant last words quite meaningfully confront.

One can, in other words, productively acknowledge that a Christian ethical and sacramental vocabulary animates this work (in fact, much of Wilde’s oeuvre, particularly after the trials) without converting Wilde into a Victorian philistine. But if the introduction and notes are hesitant on this issue, obscuring one layer of the novel, Frankel remains an accomplished guide and this edition an elegant resource that enables us to admire all the more deeply the portrait and the artist.

Richard Gibson is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I am grateful to be given this honor: an honor that is symbolic of the commitment to the arts that Belhaven University, Dr. Roger Parrot, and your Board of Trustees have made. You are making a statement; that the arts are fundamental to the core of higher education. The arts are not a luxury for the few but rather a necessity—how a civilization is to be defined, and how our humanity is to be restored. The arts, like the spring flowers all about Belhaven this day, bring the aroma of the New.

I have just returned from Japan, where I saw firsthand the enormous devastation from 3/11—the massive earthquake, the tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear disaster. I visited the small fishing village of Ishinomaki in northern Japan, a beautiful coastal town swept away by a series of tsunamis, one of which reached 30 meters high. My friend Emiko, who grew up in Ishinomaki, now finds her home and her parents’ business gone, though they themselves were spared, having been in Tokyo at the time. The aroma—the stench—of death filled the air as I walked about the region. I saw rice fields inundated with salt water, fishing vessels in the middle of streets, trucks still fioating in the river. A month after the disaster, volunteers with masks and orange overalls were still helping residents salvage what they could, one house at a time.

One 17-year-old, whose parents and grandparents were swept away by the tsunami, returned home to find nothing worth salvaging. She came to the House of Prayer while I was visiting. A team of missionaries had been giving out basic necessities, and they had just set up shower stalls. This met a supreme need for the tsunami-stricken Japanese, whose culture celebrates, and demands, cleanliness. I could not imagine what she felt as the hot water washed over her for the first time in a month.

But even though the aftershocks still continue and everyone, whether up north or in Tokyo, is traumatized, the Japanese have been stoically clearing their beloved villages and towns of debris and rubble. Wherever outward cleanliness can be had, they work for it. One major street had many restaurants whose interiors were damaged and will have to be gutted. Still, workers had cleaned up the outside and turned on the neon signs. For a short while, even if the restaurants are not safe to open, what people see is perfection.

As I was driven back to Tokyo, we went through Fukushima prefecture, staying far west, away from the dark shadow of the nuclear power plant as much as the road would allow. The Zao mountain range appeared beyond the clouds, with cherry blossoms in full bloom, enchanting the villages tucked away in the crevices between the mountains. It was hard to see scenes of such beauty—the trunks of the trees, with their wet-darkened bark—when the disaster was freshly etched in my mind. Thousands were still unaccounted for. My heart felt numb, and the beauty I saw seemed cruel.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

So begins T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922. April is indeed cruel with the lilacs or the cherry blossoms at the peak of their beauty, invading the “memory and desire” of our ravaged hearts. We are awakened to horrors and terrors, but nature does not wait until we stop grieving. It moves on, as does the world, without empathy or knowledge of what really happened. My visit to Japan echoed Eliot’s lament: beauty and trauma are forced to dwell together.

Today, you begin a new journey, and for you it is a bright April, full of hope. But we must also remember that for many April has been the “cruellest month.” We must learn to engage with such intractable realities—to engage our creativity within the harsh confines of our broken world and the wide spaces of creating the “World That Ought to Be.”

It occurred to me as we were driving back that the stark contrast between the beauty of nature and the tragic nature of our lives was nothing new to the Japanese. Poets in Japan anticipated Eliot’s lament as early as the 10th century, when Saigyo expressed the beauty of death in the falling cherry blossoms. Japan is an island subject to hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Terrifyingly unpredictable, they are nevertheless as constant as the cherry blossoms. Seeing devastation on one hand and the beauty of nature on the other is fundamental to the Japanese experience. Japanese aesthetics grew out of this uneasy dance between the destructiveness of nature and her beauty.

After 9/11, I had pondered Eliot’s words, looking over our “backyard” of Ground Zero in New York, where smoke still rose like incense over mounds of twisted metal, and stadium lights were set up to find the bodies. This, I thought, must be the ultimate Waste Land of our time. But that proved to be wrong. Ground Zero has since then continued to expand, moving from one place to another—from New Orleans to Christchurch, and beyond. I’ve come to realize that, theologically, we are born into the Ground Zero of the Fall, whether we live in New York or Fukushima, Darfur or Indonesia. Despair hangs over them all.

My own paintings have become a lament of sorts over the years, weaving in and out of our Ground Zero conditions into what Eliot, in Four Quartets, calls “the still point of the turning world.” I use the traditional Japanese materials of Nihonga to paint with—pulverized pigments, gold, silver, and platinum. These materials themselves have to be pounded to become beautiful. It seems that the refiner’s fire continues to burn, and we have no choice but to go through the process. And in such a journey, every ideology is tested and found wanting. Our faith in God, too, is tested.

My effort to develop the International Arts Movement has become an effort to seek the World That Ought to Be at a grassroots level. This may come across as inconsistent to some—how can you seek the ideal while lamenting? Should you not be honest, and paint despair? Isn’t the world limited to the reality of what IS? In the heart of creativity, such tensions exist; artists are often said to live in a liminal space between the ideal and the reality. To many, the “Ought” is a trope to be suspected, but as a good Presbyterian, I hover between what “is” and what “is not yet.” I want to exhort you not to be afraid of such ideals and dreams, or to work with those who believe in them.

Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist, has suggested that postmodernity is “liquid,” constantly shifting. The old solidities of modernity are now replaced by pervasive uncertainty. Our foundations are shifting under us. We have seen in recent times the seeming solidity of our economic system collapse in front of our eyes. We are facing urgent questions about the safety of nuclear power. We are finding that in every sphere—in the arts and sciences, business and politics—there has been a tsunami of sorts. Paradigm shifts are taking place. How many times have we heard the word “unprecedented” in the news lately? Bauman writes:

It would be imprudent to deny, or even to play down, the profound change which the advent of “fluid modernity” has brought to the human condition. The remoteness and unreachability of systemic structure, coupled with the unstructured, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics, change that condition in a radical way and call for a rethinking of old concepts that used to frame its narratives. Like zombies, such concepts are today simultaneously dead and alive. The practical question is whether their resurrection, albeit in a new shape or incarnation, is feasible; or—if it is not—how to arrange for their decent and effective burial.

Because of this uncertainty, we will have to confront increased cynicism and despair. The path of despair is what I am afraid many Japanese will choose in the coming years—to give up hope, imbibe despair, and end their lives. If we do not teach our children and remind ourselves what we imagine and hope for, if we do not seek to define that elusive “world that ought to be,” then the culture of cynicism will define our time for us. We are awash in apathy and terror. To create in such waters, we must have more than an optimist’s escapism. Today, to create is to hope. To create is to live.

In my field of contemporary art, the tsunamis of ideologies have washed away beauty, goodness, and truth in the past century. Art has chased after novelty and fame, becoming synonymous with greed. Meanwhile, the business of art danced with Wall Street and suffered from the financial collapse, with nearly half of the galleries closing after the Lehman shock. But the marketplace of art had long been dehumanized. If you speak of “creativity” in the MFA crits today, let alone truth, goodness, or beauty, you will be told to mend your ways. We have lost the essence of what it means to be an artist.

True Art does not chase after novelty—it is a sensory quest for the new order of what God is creating, toward fully realized humanity. Using our senses, Art poses deeper questions rather than giving easy answers. To be truly human in a liquid reality, we must resist the culture of fear and cynicism. The World That Ought to Be is not a utopia, an unrealizable fantasy; it is instead created out of sacrificial love. To love is to quest for the World That Ought to Be. Love is enduring, and love uses all of our senses. Love is generative, and will create the stage for the New to appear. The role of the artist in a liquid reality is to awaken all of our senses through creativity and love. Our quest will be to live more fully in the liminal zone between heaven and earth, the old and the new.

Mary of Bethany, the quintessential artist, brought the extravagant nard to anoint Jesus, as related in John 12, transgressing against the cultural norms of the day. The wedding perfume she poured upon Jesus anointed him as king, prepared him for death on the cross, and anticipated what is still to come. A sacrifice of love co-mingled with the aroma of the New, it created a liquid reality that transcended the chaos of the darkest day of Jesus’ journey. The aroma anticipated a Wedding; a royal, cosmic wedding.

The best of the arts, then, probe through our senses to “memory and desire,” hovering between life and death, despair and hope. And yet, the best of the arts also point to, or even redefine, the World to come, causing us to rise up, like Lazarus, from the dark tomb of cynicism and despair.

What if there is a Reality behind the reality we know? What if there is a Stage behind the stage of our life?

My wife and I recently went to see a production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York City. David Cromer, the founder of the theater, played the role of the narrator magnificently. On the spare, dark stage, the famed story of a small New England town was brought to life. One scene in particular stood out to me. Young Emily, who died giving birth, is caught somewhere between life and death, fighting to recover her memory. She is given the opportunity to move back in time to her 12th birthday.

At this point, the stark colors of the small stage begin to change. And faintly, we in the audience begin to detect an aroma. At first, we think that it is a nearby restaurant cooking their dinner for customers. But the aroma of bacon and eggs continues to fill the theater. The producers have a surprise in store for us. The entire back stage opens up to reveal yet another stage, filled with color and light. Real bacon and real eggs are being cooked by Emily’s mother. Emily’s memory, though fading away, is depicted as more real than the “reality” of the main stage, or even of the gravesite where the other characters stoically sit. Before Emily returns from her vision to die, she is given, perhaps for the first time, a full experience of Reality—fully engaging our senses in the process.

What if there is a Reality behind the reality we know What if there is a Stage behind the stage of our life? What if our “memory and desire” point to a greater Reality? What if Emily’s liminal state can be reversed from Death to Life, at least in the audience’s experience? The smell of the bacon is REAL, and poses powerful questions about the nature of reality, and the nature of art.

Of course, the effect on the audience is that we witness Emily’s memories fading away, and we are made to feel the coldness of the earth. She settles comfortably into the graveyard with the others, losing herself in the process. This is a lament for what is lost, what is being washed away. It’s a comment on the modern condition—that even before death, we are sense-less, only half alive.

For Emily, the memory fades. But for the audience, her memory has become a new reality, full of the aroma of the New. That is the power of the arts. The arts can remain a fresh experience, even though memory and desire fade.

In our liquid time, art needs to become the aroma of bacon and eggs. It is not the art that strives for novelty but the art of the familiar that awakens our memory to the core of our lives, to the morning of our twelfth birthdays. With all solid notions being washed away, as new fears creep into our consciousness, we must insist on reminding people that there is a Stage behind the stage, a Reality behind the reality. And instead of reminding people of the cold earth, we need to awaken them to recognize the deposit of what is to come. There is a banquet waiting for us beyond the veil. If all is in flux, our task is to touch the fragile earth with the promise of heaven, creating the “still point of the turning world” in the eye of the storm of life. The gospel of Jesus makes this possible.

Think of John 21. Here Jesus, in his post-resurrection glory, is cooking breakfast on the beach, and he invites his disciples to partake. Think of the fish he is cooking. Where did he get this fish? Did he simply create the fish at will? Or cause it to jump into his fire? And he is eating in his post-resurrection body. So was the fish resurrected as well? The aroma invites his incredulous disciples to partake, not only in a conversation with the resurrected Savior, but in a meal—a post-resurrection meal. The new kingdom arrives with an aroma, the aroma of the New.

What the producers of Our Town touched, perhaps unconsciously, was a chord of realization, a hunger, that points to what is to come. C. S. Lewis called it Sehnsucht, a German word that can be translated as “a longing.” In The Weight of Glory, Lewis writes that art and music “are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited.”

I am going to go a bit further than Lewis here. I am convinced that art and music, while not “the thing itself,” contain the aroma, the actual aroma, of the New. Artists, whether cognizant of Christ or not, detect this aroma. Bacon and eggs point to that reality. Therefore, you, graduates of Belhaven, have already tasted the aroma of the New. When you dance, when you play your violin, when you draw; what you see and hear and smell and touch: it all invites you into the aroma of the New. The two worlds, the old and the New, are connected in the arts. Typically, we stop to think about such “idealistic” enchantment and dismiss it by saying something like, “Well that performance was glorious … but we must now return to reality and do something useful with our lives.” Pragmatism will merely send us, like Emily in Our Town, back to cold earth and deadened senses.

The World That Ought to Be is that which is already imbedded in our senses. God’s hand touches us, even through the cold earth of death and despair, even though we are being washed away in the sea of Liquid Modernity. The gospel is an aroma, the aroma of the New. And the aroma will reach us, even in the darkest despair.

Tolkien knew of such a world: “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater,” says Haldir of Lothlorien.

Love, my friends, is today mingled with grief. And yet love grows greater. Create in and through that love. Calm the seas of your anxiety and infuse new life deep into the poisoned wells of culture.

“There are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair.”

Come and dance, play and paint upon your Ground Zero ashes. That is how we must now love the world. Step into the receding waters filled with poison, but do it with faith. Then the stench of death will be replaced by the aroma of the New. The Stage behind the stage will open up, and instead of being forced to surrender to the cold earth, we will dance upon the waters, hear new sounds, and create new colors.

Makoto Fujimura, an artist based in New York, is the founder of the International Arts Movement. His illuminated edition of The Four Holy Gospels was published by Crossway in January. This essay is based on his commencement address delivered on April 30 at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1974, I was working at a bookstore in Eagle Rock, California. In the fall of the previous year, I had started a PhD program in English at Claremont Graduate School. Improbably, it was the fourth grad program in which I had been enrolled—a little like having been married four times by the age of 25. Living in South Pasadena while attending classes in Claremont, I had taken a part-time job at the bookstore, a branch of a venerable Pasadena institution, Vroman's, where I had spent many hours (and many dollars) as a customer. The Eagle Rock store was located in a brand-new mall (this was the heyday of malls). Soon they were asking me to work full time. Within several months, I withdrew from Claremont.

Parts of a World: A Novel (Tdriquarterly Fiction)

A. G. Mojtabai (Author)

Triquarterly

204 pages

$20.95

One of the inducements of working at Vroman's was the 40 percent discount on books. The main store—which still exists today, on Colorado Boulevard—featured an excellent selection of new fiction. I was browsing there one day in 1974 when a book with a strange title caught my eye: Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai. From my point of view, the novel had a couple of strikes against it. I looked cautiously at the inside flap (sometimes jacket copy reveals too much ahead of time) and saw that the book (the author's first novel) was described as "a brilliant self-contained reflection of schizophrenia." I generally avoid books and movies about mental illness. The reality of it is terribly dreary, and imaginative treatments of the subject (so I thought, and still feel) are almost always loaded with false emotion. Then there was the cover art, a reproduction of Magritte's The Lovers. On the other hand, the information about the author was intriguing:

A. G. Mojtabai was born in Brooklyn in 1937. She graduated from Antioch College in 1958 with a B.A. in philosophy and a minor in mathematics.

Soon after graduation, Ms. Mojtabai married and moved to Iran, where she lived with her husband in a large, extended family. They later moved to Karachi, Pakistan, and then to Lahore.

When she returned to the United States, Ms. Mojtabai did graduate work at Columbia University, receiving an M.A. in philosophy in 1968 and an M.S. in Library Science in 1970. She lectured in philosophy for two years at Hunter College and is now a librarian at City College. Ms. Mojtabai lives in New York City with her daughter; she is at work on a new novel.

And—another plus—the narrator of Mundome is himself a librarian, an archivist. I turned to the first sentence of the novel:

When I think of our library I think of nothing less than the archive of the human estate, the house of the memory of man, and more than a house, memory itself, and more than memory, the slow cess of the spirit: vanity and devotion, illusion, and the martyred rose of prophecy—torn, yet living still.

I've been reading Mojtabai ever since, as her slim and potent novels have appeared at intervals over the years. Even if we concede that every interesting writer is in a sense sui generis, Mojtabai has had a career that distinguishes her as one who follows her own path. In some respects, she could be said to have had an anti-career, as stubbornly resistant to literary fashion as to the imperatives of the marketplace. Her books are not like anyone else's. She hasn't been taken up by critics as an example of this or that tendency or school. In addition to novels, she's published a very fine book of stories based on her experience as a hospice volunteer, Soon (1998), and a work of nonfiction, Blesséd Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas. For some time she taught at the University of Tulsa.

In 1995, Mojtabai published an essay in The Wilson Quarterly, "Religion and the Writer," based on a conference presentation. The papers from that gathering, revised and expanded, were published in book form as The Writer and Religion, edited by William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco (Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2000), and it would be worth your trouble to track down that volume, not only for Mojtabai's essay (here titled "A Writer and Religion: Musings, Interrogations, Avowals") but also for the responses to it from panelists and audience members. Mojtabai argues that too many writers of fiction (herself included in her first several books, she says) have been guilty of "shutting out the voices we don't want to hear," voices expressing "a religious hunger in our country and in our world so widespread that writers ignore or disdain it at our peril." She speaks, rather allusively, of her Jewish ancestors, and seems to place herself among those who have "lost much of the traditional language of religious belief" yet "haven't lost the yearning for that belief." Her argument is (mostly) received with a mixture of incomprehension, condescension, and barely suppressed anger. Marc Chénetier, a French professor of American literature, lays down the law: fiction, you see, is "all about doubt." (These primitive Americans!)

Mojtabai's new novel, Parts of a World, just published by Northwestern University Press, is one of her finest. In certain respects it harkens back to her first novel, for it too centers on "mental illness." But where Mundome flourishes its virtuosity, Parts of a World is at once simpler, deeper, and more genuinely mysterious.

The character at the heart of the novel is Michael, a 28-year-old street person, "St. Francis of the Dumpsters" as some wit dubs him, a wandering soul whose "absolutism" is yoked with a Christlike "mildness." An unprepossessing figure, stoop-shouldered, with "flat affect," Michael was abandoned in a dumpster after his premature birth. A policeman found him, wrapped in newspapers, and took the baby to a hospital, where—against the odds—he survived. His mother, a 14-year-old who'd been in and out of institutional care, hadn't even known she was pregnant. Nothing about her subsequent life is included in Michael's file.

Michael's story is told by Tom Limbeck, a social worker in his forties who has become obsessed with Michael's "case." Michael has often been hospitalized—shortly before his first appointment with Tom, he has been beaten, raped, and left for dead by another street person, a stranger—and he can recite a long list of medications he's taken over the years. When he's not in the hospital, he lives on the street. Tom's job is to get him off the street: place him in a halfway house, help him find a job, and keep an eye on him. It sounds straightforward enough, and at first all seems to be going reasonably well.

But there are signs that Michael is unwilling to conform to this regime—most conspicuously, his refusal to eat his meals at the church-sponsored shelter where Tom has placed him. Instead, he continues to find his food—and other treasures, as he sees them—in dumpsters. What nettles Tom most deeply is Michael's air of serenity, despite his circumstances, an enigmatic confidence ("I know where I am," he says).

The source of that confidence, Tom finally discerns, is Michael's belief that his mother, whom he has never met, is leaving food and other gifts for him in the dumpsters where he scavenges. Tom determines to "cure" him—to give him "a dose of reality, after which, his bluff called, his delusion in shreds, he might begin to see the world as it is and come to terms with it. In short: begin to grow up."

Tom is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unlikable narrator—unlikable above all in his own eyes, though his compassion for the down-and-out is clearly heart-felt. His father, he tells us, was "a devout atheist," and the family followed suit. But Tom himself lacks his father's certainty: "I learned to breathe within his strictures, to 'suppose that' or 'for the sake of argument assume' but as a result, to this day, I cannot say I believe—anything. Always, always, I hedge my bets. I shift from foot to foot."

Books that wrestle with the claims of faith and skepticism come pouring into my office every week. This one is a keeper. Not stylistically, but in its combination of clarity and enigmatic power, Parts of a World reminds me of Tolstoy's "Master and Man," a late work in which a lifetime of writing pays off.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, published earlier this year by Random House, New York Times columnist David Brooks explores “the new sciences of human nature” and their implications for everyday living. David Michael talked with Brooks via phone in March.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

David Brooks (Author)

Random House Books for Young Readers

448 pages

$15.34

Your book is in many ways descriptive—a survey of findings in psychology and neuroscience. Is it also prescriptive in any way?

The main goal is to give people a different viewpoint, to draw their attention to things that are happening below the level of awareness, both in themselves and others. Above all, that we’re not primarily the products of our conscious thinking.

In which cultures do you see an acknowledgement of the importance of emotion and thinking more fluidly?

It was present until the methodologies of physics were embraced by social scientists. John Maynard Keynes was perfectly attuned to the complex realities of human nature, and then the physicists took over economics. I do think that psychologists have a handle on this as well as some parts of the education world. And then the world that you guys write about—the world of theologians and poets and people like that. The broad sweep of the humanities.

You write that “Philosophy and theology are telling us less than they used to. Scientists and researchers are leaping in where these disciplines atrophy—they’re all drilling down into an explanation of what man is.” I’m wondering where you’re thinking theology and philosophy failed, and what their role is now?

Both fields—philosophy more than theology—have been caught within an internal logic and maybe an insular logic. Especially in philosophy’s case, building ever more complicated logical structures, which has divorced it from the wider public. That’s less true of theology, but I do think it’s fair to say that there are very few theological thinkers today playing a role in the popular culture as Niebuhr and Heschel and Buber did in their day.

Is someone who has these traits of fluid thinking and emotional sensitivity and flexibility actually going to be valued by society? Your character Erica is decidedly less emotionally in tune than the other character, her husband, Harold, but she finds more success.

Google did a gigantic study in their own ranks of who were their best executives. They found that technical skill was at the bottom of the list, and the ability to coach people one-on-one was at the top of the list of what they needed. I think Google started with a macho mentality that writing code was the key to success, but even they, who are the least likely to embrace these sorts of messages, have been driven there by the data.

Late in the book, you discuss how the political sphere could benefit from an awareness of neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and anthropology. Is epistemological modesty possible in Washington, where politicians—and television pundits— find that their jobs depend on appearing knowledgeable at all times and on all subjects?

There does seem to be a demand that you never admit error. I remember President Bush complaining that he could never admit any mistakes because if he did that, then the news for the next six weeks would be about those admissions. In private, of course, every sane person knows about their mistakes. Some people in Washington are pretty good at understanding their own biases and their own shortcomings, though I wouldn’t say this is a large group. When Larry Summers was at the White House, he was not famous for being socially smooth, but when you would talk to him, before he would answer a question, he would give a little speech about how to think about the question. Often he would show an awareness of the cognitive pitfalls one is likely to fall into and try to steer around them.

Given that the researchers whose findings you highlight often make sweeping claims that seem to lack epistemological modesty, should we be as skeptical of them as we are of politicians?

I’m very wary of their arrogance toward the humanities and their unwillingness to acknowledge that there are certain things that can’t be counted but that nevertheless matter quite a lot—that not everything is replicable according to a certain social science model of human nature. But social scientists, neuroscientists, geneticists, and the like have a high degree of intellectual integrity compared to people in politics. They are swayed by evidence, and you do see them moving with the facts. I find them less rigid than people I deal with in my regular job.

Should we aspire to be virtuous because it creates social opportunity and better societies, or should we aspire to virtue for virtue’s sake, that is, because it is good?

I think we do it more because we want to be admired. Adam Smith suggested that we try to be virtuous because we seek the approval and sympathy of others. But not only that—we seek the admiration of an imagined objective observer who is looking at us from an independent vantage point. So there will be times when we do things that the people around us hate, but we imagine this observer judging us. Of course, a simpler version would be God. I do think that we rarely act virtuously on the basis of individual Kantian reason, but more on the basis of being drawn by certain social norms that we’re trying to live up to.

Do you see hope for creating a more fluid conversation on who we are as humans?

I do. I think this work, what I’m calling the new sciences of human nature, will move us away from some of the materialistic determinism of the 20th century. Scientific revolutions have tremendous effects on the culture at large, and we’re only at the beginning of this one.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you. I really like the magazine.

David J. Michael is the editor of Wunderkammer Magazine, a web-based journal of cultural criticism. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Lund University, Sweden.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.