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As a young man growing up in the 1960s, I was involved in everything that is stereotypically “’60s”—psychedelics, rock, communes, free love, and that anarchical spirit that viewed tradition as dead and stultifying. I was also deeply involved in Eastern mysticism and even followed a guru in India, seeking esoteric knowledge that Western culture and Christianity seemed powerless to give. In college I slept through lectures on 15th-century Italian painters, steeped as they all were in Christendom and its aims and stories.

I slept through those lectures partly because I viewed most of art history as irrelevant—at best a dusty memento that held little gravitas either for me or for my generation. My fellow art students and I wanted to make images that carried emotional weight, and for the most part we were all expressionists—that is, we were less interested in art for the sake of any particular community of shared ideas or values, and more concerned with evoking the personal angst of our existential predicament. I saw my art as a means of deepening my own personal spiritual quest—a path that lay largely outside the precincts of settled religion.

At that time my graduate advisor Philip Guston, a prominent New York painter, gave an intimate lecture to nine of us painters holed up in our warren of art studios in an old car warehouse in Boston. He told us a story from his life that helped galvanize my own sense of purpose as a painter. While on a tour of Italy, Guston had visited the masterpiece of his hero Piero della Francesca—a mural cycle called The Legend of the True Cross in the Cappella de San Francesco in Arezzo. Guston had looked up at the magnificent and complex set of images surrounding the little chapel and wept. When a friend had asked him what was wrong, he had replied, “We don’t have a story. These Christians … they had a story.” Guston said to us, “So go and paint from your hearts. Be like those early Christians who went underground and were willing to stake everything on what they believed.” Of course, he wasn’t advocating that we actually become Christians.

What he didn’t know, however, was that I was already beginning to read the Bible and consider converting to Christianity. Later that year, I received a grant from Boston University to live and travel in Italy for a year like my mentor had done. That time in Italy was pivotal for both my faith and my life as an artist. My visits to the Monastery San Marco in Florence that housed the famous frescoes of Fra Angelico became an island of sanity for me in a tumultuous inner life of spiritual conflict. The quiet, unassuming style of the master, combined with his luminous color palette and contemplative imagery, moved me beyond what words can say.

History and tradition suddenly began to seem like a refuge from the meaninglessness and angst of the 20th century.

Ten years later, after my conversion, I found myself again in Italy with a small group of Christian artists on a grant-funded art trip. Providentially, our studio was a block away from Monastery San Marco, and several of us visited Fra Angelico’s lovely murals nearly every day. In one memorable conversation, Tanja Butler (one of the artists in the group) pointed out that Fra Angelico’s servant heart and deep personal faith in Christ had prompted him to acquire his skills as an artist and to serve his community of fellow monks by painting the famous murals. The thought of an artist being given an opportunity to use his gift to build up a body of believers struck me like a lightning bolt.

That conversation and that month with fellow Christian artists in Italy changed my life and continues to nourish me artistically and spiritually as I attempt to do literally what Philip Guston had meant only metaphorically—to paint from the heart and “go underground” in an art world that largely ignores sincere sacred imagery in this age of shock tactics and mere novelty. I am still looking for those opportunities to serve as my hero Fra Angelico did so long ago, but many more come my way every day.

Thanks be to God.

Bruce Herman is an artist living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. To see more of his work, go to www.brucehermanonline.com.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

For years, many linguists—myself included—have been eagerly awaiting the publication of what we call “the wals,” and last year the great day finally came when we could hold in our hands—or, given its heft, more likely on our laps—what non-linguists will see as a big, pretty book of unclear utility called The World Atlas of Language Structures.

The layman will page through the wals and find 142 world maps festooned with multicolored dots standing for languages. Each map addresses a particular aspect of grammar, prefaced by an essay on the variations on that feature that the world’s 6,000-plus languages display. For example, many of us have wrestled with the annoying genders in European languages, such as French’s masculine le bateau (“the boat”) and feminine la maison (“the house”). There are, in fact, many languages with multiple genders to learn (Swahili features six main ones), while just as many other languages have no gender at all (the language I am writing in is one example). The “Number of Genders” map, surveying 256 languages across the globe, shows that languages with way too many genders are concentrated in Africa, while languages with none are most common in Southeast Asia and in the Americas.

The layman is to be pardoned for wondering just why one might care about such matters. To begin with, this massive project reminds us that many human languages are counterintuitively different from English, Spanish, French, or German—the languages we learn most often, and which we are disposed to regard as normative—and different as well from ones farther afield (Arabic and Chinese, for instance).

Take the “Order of Subject, Object and Verb” map: it shows that the word order we Anglophones feel as “normal,” the subject-verb-object sequence of The boy fed the dog, is less common worldwide than subject-object-verb, such that in Japanese it would be The boy the dog fed. And then a handful of languages put things exactly in the reverse of English: in the South American language Hixkaryana, spoken by a few hundred people in the jungles of Brazil, The jaguar grabbed the man is rendered as “The man grabbed the jaguar.” Just why most of the few languages with this order are spoken by small groups in South America is as yet unknown, but there it is.

Still, what I have described so far may leave with you the impression of a coffee-table book, full of neat but inconsequential factoids. Is The World Atlas of Language Structures a linguist’s version of one of those bulky art books or the National Geographic World Atlas, lovely on the end table but almost never opened?

In fact, no. For example, many of these maps have crucial implications for the ideas of none other than Noam Chomsky. I refer not to his political activism but to his day job in linguistics. Forty years ago Chomsky founded a still thriving school of linguists hoping to find imprinted in our brains a “Universal Grammar.” The idea is that we are born with a neurological endowment for speaking and processing language, much of it consisting of “switches” that can be set “on” or “off.” Which are “on” and which are “off” presumably makes the difference between, say, Navajo and French or Japanese and Hebrew. So, some languages use a subject pronoun with a verb (he talks), while others can drop the pronoun, like Spanish habla for he talks, where the pronoun él is optional and usually absent. Another switch would make the difference between The jaguar grabbed the man and Hixkaryana’s The man grabbed the jaguar.

However, linguists outside the Chomskyan orbit have long noticed that in some ways, this “Universal Grammar” looks suspiciously like English and other languages of Western Europe, while excluding other languages—that is, those indigenously spoken by most of the world’s human beings. Take relative clauses, like who ate the cake in The man who ate the cake went home. Most versions of Universal Grammar assume that our brains are configured to produce relative clauses more or less like the ones in English. But in the wals, the “Relativization Strategies” chapter shows that the only people in the world who would put it as The man who ate the cake went home are Europeans, except for speakers of one tiny Native American language in New Mexico. Everywhere else, people render such concepts in other ways. The Turk would say “the cake having-eaten man went home.” The Amazonian Pirahã tribesman would say “The man went home, the man ate the cake.”

To stipulate The man who ate the cake as the “default” type of relative clause implies that Europeans, natives of a peninsula of Eurasia, are somehow “default” humans. The wals gives us a vast amount of data reminding us of what “language” writ large really is, not how language happened to come out on a damp little island across a channel from France.

I haven’t even mentioned the accompanying cd-rom, which has so much extra data that the book is more a companion to the cd-rom rather than vice versa. One of the cd-rom’s handiest built-ins allows you to search for two grammatical features at a time, finding which languages, for example, have three genders and also place the verb after the object.

Correlations like this—although probably not that particular one—can help chart how languages develop over time. Until recently, linguists had to rely on memory and shelf searches to do this kind of work. But since no one can be familiar with 6,000 languages, the results could only be so reliable.

For example, in my own research ten years ago, I needed to know which languages lacked: 1) prefixes and suffixes to mark things like case and tense and 2) tones. I actually knew of several already—creole languages such as Haitian Creole and Papiamentu, which were created only a few centuries ago by African slaves who learned European languages incompletely and then filled out what they had learned into a new language entirely. But what interested me was that creoles seemed to be the only languages that had neither conjugations nor tones nor various other bells and whistles that make most languages so hard for foreigners to learn.

Position of Pronominal Possessive Affixes.
Coding of Evidentiality?
Periphrastic Causative Constructions.

To me, it seemed predictable that creoles would be like this. Creoles started out as makeshift lingos with only some hundreds of words, and little “grammar” at all. Eventually slaves turned the lingo into a real language, as structured and nuanced as any. But things like suffixes and tones only develop over time, and creoles haven’t had much.

Suffixes, for instance, start out as separate words. The past marker –ed in walked likely began as the word did—“I walk-did”—and wore down into a mere ending (technically, this would have happened in the ancestor to English and its closest relatives like German). This process takes several centuries at least. Tones take just as long. In Mandarin Chinese, ma can mean “horse,” “mother,” “hemp,” or “licentious” depending on its pitch. This starts with something hard to even perceive: the pitch you utter a vowel on varies depending on what consonants are nearby. Say pet and then peg, and notice that you will tend to say the e with a slightly higher pitch in pet than in peg. Now, imagine if over time the t and the g wore away, as the t in often has for most people. Without the t and the g, the only difference between the two words is that pitch difference: “high” pe and “low” pe. After a while you’ve got a language like Mandarin.

Any language that has been around for a long time cannot help but develop such subtle distinctions. But creoles, unsurprisingly, have little to none of these refinements. They are the world’s “cleanest” and most streamlined languages.

Non-linguists would be surprised to observe the shock and horror that my pointing this out elicited among specialists. Or maybe not so surprised. Certain familiar currents in modern academia led certain parties to propose that I was insulting the intelligence of creole speakers, etc. Then others insisted that even an old language could just happen to end up as streamlined as a creole, and that I was, as it were, stereotyping creole languages.

The wals gives me new ways to respond to such objections. Heretofore, no one has presented me with an old language with a grammar like a creole’s. But no one knows all 6,000 languages of the world, including me, and so the possibility always looms that one, or several, are out there that I just happen not to have come across.

How nice, then, that with the wals’ cd-rom, in just a few seconds I can search for languages that lack 1) prefixes and suffixes and 2) tone. Other than creoles, the cd-rom coughs up a mere seven. And since the cd-rom also includes a handy description of each of the 2,560 languages in its database, I can see whether these seven are truly as structurally uncluttered as creoles.

Three of them are no problem because the scholars who did the suffix map actually addressed only prefixes and suffixes that mark case or tense, whereas these three languages have plenty of other prefixes and suffixes that do different things.

Then the deeply obscure Amazonian language Wari’ only comes out in the tally as having no prefixes or suffixes because it did once have them, but melted them into overloaded little clumps that carry almost a sentence’s worth of meaning by themselves. For example, na– in Wari’ means “he, when referring to a concrete event and in the present or past but not the future.” This is a kind of “mega-affix,” and was the product of eons of the kind of drift that in English turns Did you eat? into Jeet?

I have observed in my work that there are only two places where old languages lack prefixes, suffixes, and tone, the South Seas and Southeast Asia. That is exactly where the remaining three languages the wals came up with are spoken. And what distinguishes them from creoles is that they have words that do the same work as prefixes and suffixes and took just as long to develop. Some languages are like fastidious people who prefer to keep foods clearly separate from one another on their plate: instead of making something into a prefix or suffix, such languages allow this or that bit of speech to remain as a separate word, even if it has the same meaning that a prefix or suffix would. One of the languages in the wals’ database is Khasi of India. It has gender just like French, but marks it with little words before each noun. The cabbage is masculine—‘u kubi— while butter is for some reason a lady—ka makhan. So Khasi takes us right back to French 101, but with separate words instead of endings.

Now, the wals does not cover every language in the world, and each map only refers to at most 500 or so languages and often just a hundred, since no researcher could thoroughly study 6,000 or even 2,500. But each author’s sample covers the entire world as evenly as possible, and thus it is significant that the work as a whole reveals no old language with a grammar as tidy as a creole’s. This is the kind of finding that linguists with an affection for numbers are especially receptive to, and the wals lends me the tools to reach people like this more easily in the future.

Yet I suspect that many linguists will not be able to resist curling up with this massive volume on rainy days just for the fun facts. For example, a great many languages spoken along the southern margin of the Sahara don’t have a p sound. It’s one thing if a language doesn’t have click sounds or umlauts, but something as meat and potatoes as p? Interesting, then, that cosmetic modification of the lips has been widely practiced among people in just this area, such that p would be the hardest sound to make. I doubt if that has any larger implications for much of anything, but I’m glad to know it anyway. (And just in case—no, as streamlined as they are, creole languages do have p sounds.)

John H. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author most recently of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham Books). Among his other books is Defining Creole (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

And after Abimelech there arose to defend Israel Tola the son of Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar, and he dwelt in Shamir in mount Ephraim.
And he judged Israel twenty and three years, and died, and was buried in Shamir.
And after him arose Jair, a Gileadite, and judged Israel twenty and two years.
And he had thirty sons that rode on thirty ass colts and had thirty cities, which are called Havoth-jair unto this day, which are in the land of Gilead.
And Jair died, and was buried in Camon.
And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord, and served not him.
And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hands of the Philistines, and into the hands of the children of Ammon.
—Judges 10:1–7 (KJV)

If the mention of Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar, elicits a glimmer of recognition; if you remember being tantalized by the enigmatic sons of Jair, who rode on thirty ass colts and had thirty cities—then you should award yourself a gold star such as our Sunday school teachers gave us fifty years ago when we had successfully completed our memory work for the week.

Chances are, though, that you haven't read the Book of Judges in a very long time—maybe never. America may be a religious nation, America may even be, in some sense, a predominantly Christian nation, but as Boston University religion scholar Stephen Prothero and a number of others have observed, America today is also a nation of biblical illiterates. And that's especially true when it comes to knowledge of the Old Testament, which makes up about three-quarters of the Bible. Even among many evangelicals, who fervently proclaim their devotion to the Word of God, large chunks of the Old Testament are terra incognita, seldom or never explored, much less pored over.

There are hopeful signs of change. Influential evangelical pastors as various as Kent Hughes at College Church in Wheaton and Rob Bell at Mars Hill in Grand Rapids are preaching with great effect from the Old Testament. And as Philip Jenkins points out in his book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (coming in September from Oxford Univ. Press), "the experience of the emerging churches must make us rethink the role of the Old Testament… Southern readings can help us exorcize the stubborn ghost of Marcion, a task that Christian churches need to repeat with some regularity."

But help is also on the way from another—most unlikely—source: a novel by a Jewish feminist, bitterly contemptuous of the God of Jacob. Thanks to this book, the genre of Old Testament fiction has been reinvigorated.

Fiction set in the world of ancient Israel is nothing new, of course, though it has always taken a back seat to biblical stories surrounding Jesus and Paul. In the dusty bookstores I frequented when I was old enough to hunt, there were invariably a few secondhand copies of Dr. Frank G. Slaughter's pious potboilers. While his New Testament tales are better-known, Slaughter didn't neglect the Old. Among his books in this vein were The Scarlet Cord (about Rahab the harlot, a favorite of ot novelists), The Curse of Jezabel, and The Song of Ruth. ("Against the Moabite leader's massive ugliness Boaz seemed small, but the sinews of his torso were smooth and rippling compared with Hedak's bunched muscles and huge limbs.")

At the other end of the spectrum are fables such as Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage, first published in Canada in 1984, a deliberately anachronistic, self-consciously blasphemous retelling of the story of Noah and the Flood; and David Maine's The Preservationist, published in 2004, another Noah's ark tale, considerably more whimsical and less axe-grinding than Findley but equally irreverent.

While ot fiction has never gone entirely out of fashion, it's fair to say that a decade ago the genre was enfeebled. Then came The Red Tent, Anita Diamant's 1997 novel centered on Jacob's daughter Dinah, who appears fleetingly in the 34th chapter of Genesis in one of those episodes that most preachers prefer to ignore. (When was the last time you heard a sermon on this text?) From Jacob's sons, of course, came the 12 tribes of Israel, but who remembers that he even had a daughter? As the kjv relates,

And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.
And his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and he spoke kindly unto the damsel.

The honorable son of a not-so-honorable Canaanite ruler, Shechem wants to marry Dinah. Jacob's sons treacherously agree to the match on the condition that the young man, his father, and all the menfolk of their city will be circumcised, and while the Canaanites are still sore and weak, Jacob's sons kill all the men, take their wives and children captive, make off with all their goods, and ravage what remains of the city. Immediately thereafter Jacob is told by God to return to a place called Bethel and build an altar there. Before they depart Jacob instructs his household to "put away the strange gods" that are among them.

This episode caught the eye of Thomas Mann, who devoted a chapter to it—heavy with his characteristic irony—in Joseph and His Brothers. Whereas Mann's narrative is aloof, urbane, Diamant's Dinah tells her own story. Her chronicle is plainspoken, intimate, woman-to-woman. The red tent of the title is the place where the women go when they are menstruating. It is also the place of childbirth, of storytelling, and of pagan ritual. (The women, with their spells and amulets and alternative creation stories—like the story of the goddess Uttu that the young Dinah hears—are not particularly attentive to the exclusive claims of El, the jealous God of the Old Testament.)

In Diamant's novel, all of the values of the biblical narrative are inverted. The Canaanites are morally as well as culturally superior to Jacob and his people, their polytheism preferable to the harsh narrowness of monotheism—though all talk of God or gods, the novel concludes, is ultimately but a puff of wind. "There is no magic to immortality," Dinah says: what endures is family, ordinary joys and ordinary sorrows, the common human heritage handed down from generation to generation, better represented in the modest traditions of women than in the boastful sagas of men.

The Red Tent wasn't an immediate success. But word of mouth, complemented by Diamant's own vigorous and savvy promotion (she was an agent before she became a novelist), kept it alive, and in time it became one of those rare books that publishers dream about, selling and selling for years. Today, almost a decade later, reading groups centered on Diamant's novel continue to flourish—even where I live, in the heart of the Midwest—and her success has inspired a mini-genre.

"In the tradition of The Red Tent," these imitators hopefully proclaim. India Edghill's Queenmaker, for instance, is the first-person narrative of Michal, King Saul's daughter and one of David's wives, whose bitter account seeks to cut the giant-slayer, psalmist, adulterer, and king down to size. Queenmaker has the flavor of a contemporary divorce-novel, transposed to a biblical setting and translated into the excruciating, faux-primitif idiom that many ot novelists adopt.

Most of the women in our small group at the evangelical church we attend (my wife included) read Diamant's novel, and they are not alone. Without a substantial audience among evangelical women, The Red Tent would not have enjoyed such a sustained success. These are women who take the Bible seriously, and there's far more at stake for them in such a retelling than there is for readers who regard the Bible as merely a collection of fables about an odious patriarchal deity.

Publishers have taken note. Last year, the paperback publisher Signet (a division of Penguin) launched a series called "Women of the Bible" with Abigail's Story by Ann Burton. Like Queenmaker and The Red Tent itself, this story—about another of King David's wives—decries the exploitation of women and features a Strong Woman as protagonist while simultaneously mining the erotic potential of its setting. (Both Queenmaker and Abigail's Story, for example, include a scene in which David surprises the protagonist while she is bathing.) But in Burton's book, romance is unambiguously triumphant. On the cover, Abigail stands proudly, staring into the distance, her lovely but keenly determined features framed by a luxuriant mane of windblown hair. Her dress leaves her shoulders bare, but a shawl is draped fetchingly across one side; one hand rests firmly on a staff. (Burton followed up with Rahab's Story and, earlier this year, Jael's Story.)

Abigail's Story is clearly intended for Bible-believing readers, evangelical and otherwise. In that respect it hardly differs from the ot novels issued by evangelical publishers in the wake of The Red Tent, such as Ginger Garrett's Chosen: The Lost Diaries of Queen Esther (NavPress) and Lynn Austin's series "Chronicles of the Kings" (Bethany House; in other ways, however, Austin departs from the conventions we've been following: her series largely eschews quasi-feminist romance). Surely, one might suppose, these books—which, in marked contrast to The Red Tent, accept Scripture with no revisionist spirit—will find an even wider audience among evangelical women.

Maybe—but I'm not so sure. Fiction creates an imaginative space in which alternative ways of seeing the world can be entertained and tested. The questions raised by Diamant's radical retelling of Dinah's story—questions about the fierce demands of the One God and the harsh fate of those who were not his chosen people; about all that is between the lines of the spare biblical narrative; about the women in a tale told by men—are ones that will occur to many who read the Old Testament with the eyes of faith. Many evangelical women have read The Red Tent precisely for such questions. They've laughed and cried and nodded in recognition even as they've measured their faith against Diamant's very different convictions. And they've returned to Scripture, not with all their questions answered but with their faith stronger. That may not be exactly what Diamant had in mind when she was writing, but books have a way of taking on a life of their own.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Who among us has not flared to sudden anger (perhaps accompanied by some indelicate international hand gestures), prompted perhaps by the actions of a rude driver yakking on his cell phone? Have we not all been roused to anger at news reports of child abuse or brutal murder or “ethnic cleansing”? That we are moved to anger by matters small and great, inconsequential and grave, is commonplace. Less common is knowing when, if ever, our anger is justified and what affects it has on our character.

And that being so, we should attend to Robert A. F. Thurman when he maintains that all anger is unjustified, merely adding to the total amount of evil in the world. Hearing him out, readers are likely to clarify at least a bit their own understanding of anger, whether or not they are persuaded by his central contention.

Anger is Thurman’s contribution to Oxford University Press’ series on the Seven Deadly Sins. A former Buddhist monk and a personal student of the Dalai Lama, Thurman holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Colombia University. But to understand and to be able to control anger is not merely an academic concern for Thurman. He confesses to having struggled with anger personally, and he believes that his felicity in this life and the next depends on successfully conquering anger.

Thurman’s contribution to Oxford’s series is part of a revival of interest in moral and intellectual virtues and the past masters of virtue ethics, including Aristotle, Plutarch, John Cassian, Evagrius of Pontus, Seneca, and Aquinas, among others. This revival has not, however, contributed much to cross-cultural analyses of central concepts of virtue and vice as they find expression, for example, in the moral outlooks of Confucianism, Buddhism, Aristotelianism, Christianity, Stoicism, and Nietzscheanism. Although virtue terms such as “compassion,” “generosity,” and “courage,” and vice terms such as “greed,” “folly,” and “anger” are common to various virtue traditions, they are seldom synonymous; they take on their distinctive conceptual shadings when set against differing metaphysical beliefs about human nature and the conditions for human flourishing. Unsurprisingly, the dramatic differences between Buddhist and Christian descriptions of the world and human nature are evident in their respective analyses of anger.

The first part of Thurman’s book discusses the growing problem of anger in contemporary Western culture, evident in road rage, outbursts of violence between players and spectators at sporting events, and in popular movies such as Kill Bill (which stars Thurman’s daughter, Uma). Here Thurman quickly surveys various Western accounts of anger—chiefly those of Aristotle, Seneca, and Jesus—in order to contrast them with the Buddhist view. Invariably, in Thurman’s telling, the Western views suffer by comparison. Of the God of Israel: “In the Jewish Bible, the angriest person around seems to be God himself.… He’s a real punisher.” Jesus fares somewhat better, if a distant second to Buddhist sages. The Sermon on the Mount earns Jesus the compliment of having discovered what Buddhists already knew for half a millennia, while the insights of Christian monastics are “reminiscent of the Buddhist Abhidharmic psychology.”

Thurman acknowledges that the East has its share of angry deities—Indra and Kali among them—and that Eastern cultures too succumb to delusional thinking leading to anger, but he nevertheless thinks they have surpassed the West in cultivating an “Inner Science psychology” that allows mastery over anger:

In short, to the astonishment of the Western, militarism-lens-tinted historians, in the East there is a record of a real, progressive demilitarization of societies that were once just as violent as the Europeans or Americans, and of the attainment of relatively higher levels of peacefulness.

Since Thurman doesn’t specify, we can only guess what countries he is talking about. North Korea? China? Vietnam? Burma? Cambodia? Japan? All of these nations and their cultures have been deeply influenced by Buddhism, yet none seems to fit Thurman’s description.

The second part of the book offers a running commentary on numerous passages of the Buddhist sage Shanideva, through which Thurman offers a sustained prescription for overcoming anger’s grip on one’s thoughts and behavior. Buddhist psychology, Thurman tells is, translates the Sanskrit dvesha as the compound “hate-anger,” which captures the more conceptual aspect of intense dislike along with the “energetic aggression” of anger. Thurman very briefly acknowledges that anger can be both good and bad depending on the objects or situations to which it is directed, but this acknowledgement isn’t put to work in later chapters, and indeed is contradicted elsewhere in the book. “Anger happens,” Thurman writes,

when irritation, annoyance, disapproval, and so forth suddenly burst into an irresistible impulse to respond in a harmful manner to the perceived source of those feelings. You are no longer the master of the mental, verbal, or bodily acts then committed. You have become the involuntary instrument of your anger.

Anger is likened to a “madness” or “insane fury.” Any degrees anger might be said to have are all beyond the boiling point, making the notion of “mild anger” oxymoronic. So defined, it is not surprising Thurman believes that “anger is inevitably destructive, never justified or useful.”

Let’s unpack the notion of anger to see how Christian and Buddhist concepts of anger differ.1 Anger consists chiefly of two parts: construing someone as having culpably injured or offended against you or things that matter to you, and an accompanying desire that the offender be punished for having so offended. Justifiable anger adds the requirements that you have correctly construed your circ*mstances, that your desire to see the offender punished is proportional to the gravity of the offense, and that you are in a position rightly to take offense.

Suppose as a parent you walk outside for the umpteenth time to tell your son and his friends not to conduct batting practice in front of the picture window. Minutes later you hear the shattering of glass and dash into the living room only to see kids, like so many illuminated co*ckroaches, skittering off in all directions, and your son standing there, bat in hand, guilt written all over his face. Your child’s having offended against you by blatantly ignoring your instructions, and your viewing him as a most worthy candidate for punishment, combine in the emotion of anger—in this case, justifiable anger.

Change either the structure of one’s concerns or the terms of one’s perceptual grasp of the situation, and one is no longer talking about anger. Your elderly neighbor across the street, relaxing on his front porch with a cold beer, watches the whole incident unfold. Far from being angry himself, he chuckles with mild amusem*nt, relishing the fact that his own parenting days are behind him. While the neighbor’s take on what happened coincides with the parent’s, he’s not angry, for the structure of his concerns is not the same as the parent’s. It isn’t his kid; his orders weren’t ignored; nor will his pocketbook cover the cost of replacing the window. Similarly, imagine a perceptual shift: You hear the crash, anger rises quickly on the supposition that the kids are the culprits, but as you enter the living room, you see a dead duck lying on the living room floor, whose errant last flight ended badly for all. Almost instantly, you find that you are no longer angry, merely surprised, and also maybe even a little amused.

The physical accompaniments of anger are obvious. The veins in your neck pop out, your face flushes, your heart rate accelerates, and your blood pressure spikes. Paradigmatically, we feel our anger, though one mustn’t confuse anger with these bodily perturbations. These same bodily states, after all, might also accompany a roller coaster ride or the nail-biting climax of a playoff basketball game, but in neither case is one angry. Besides, if anger were identical to these bodily agitations, we could cure it with a couple of timely Valiums. But anger is not reducible to mere physical states. It is a spiritual problem. Moreover, one can sometimes be angry without feeling angry. One might retain a cool, brooding anger long after the physiological accompaniments are gone. Anger, contrary to Thurman, thus comes in degrees, from blind rage to a slow simmer, and lots of gradations in between.

Thurman’s contention that it is possible to eliminate anger completely from one’s personality follows from a Buddhist understanding of human identity. Anger, he tells us in chapter 5, is rooted in the delusional belief in a substantial self, a self that is enduring and distinct from other selves and the rest of the world. So deluded, we believe that others get in the way of our gratifying our desires, and thus we are angry with them. The central insight necessary for combating anger, Thurman suggests, is to realize that the self whose desires you are at pains to gratify, as well as the others who interpose themselves between you and your desires, don’t really exist!

Long before David Hume’s similar experience, the Buddha peered inward and failed to locate a substantial self, finding instead just a succession of discrete, transitory, conscious episodes giving the illusion of belonging to some underlying permanent self. Buddhists often liken the self to a candle’s flame. Although the identity of the flame appears to persist over time, in reality the gas molecules constituting the flame are constantly changing. And just as a dying taper might be used to light another with no physical transfer, so a stream of causally connected transitory conscious events might lead into a reincarnated existence, and so on, ad infinitum.

The opposite of anger is love, Thurman tells us, but one cannot turn instantaneously from anger to love. One must go through a series of intermediary strategies of self-management whereby one cultivates successively greater degrees of patience and, ultimately, forgiveness toward those that offend against you. Chapters on “tolerant patience,” “insightful patience,” and “forgiving patience” outline the progression.

Tolerant patience allows one to bear up well under frustrations, to view them as occasions to become inured to the world’s enticements. One must do more than merely endure, however, one must learn to reconstrue the circ*mstances that arouse anger. Again, the Buddha’s core insight proves crucial. One must, says Thurman,

see through the reified perception of free agency… and see things as the inconceivable network of impersonal causes and conditions. The network of interconnected things and processes lack any personalizable agency that intends you harm and so have no real target for your anger that you can consciously pick out as the ultimate source of your suffering and so realistically gain happiness by destroying.

In this view, each “mechanical phantom,” as Shantideva refers to persons, is but the inevitable outgrowth of inescapable karmic causes stretching back to previous lives.

Thurman anticipates the obvious rejoinder: Why should I bother disciplining anger if I and the one who offends against me are ultimately unreal? While neither of us exists “absolutely,” we do exist “relatively,” says Thurman. And while we don’t have substantial selves or souls, we do have “relative souls” that need to be tended pretty much as do real souls. Thurman doesn’t unpack the notion of a relative self and soul, but they might be thought of as analogous to an amputee’s “phantom limb”; while there really isn’t a leg, we nevertheless feel as though there is one, and it causes us to suffer, and thus must be tended to despite the absence of a real leg.

“Forgiving patience” arises out of the further realization that not only is there no difference between the self and the others who provoke our anger but that “they are merely the creation of our own negative actions in previous existences. We should be angry only with our own negative evolutionary actions.” The yahoo who just passed me on the road, horn blaring, aforementioned hand gestures in angry display, all because—or so he supposes—I am creeping along at the speed limit, is really angry because I mistreated him in a past life, not because I interfered with his getting to work on time. “So,” Thurman explains, “we not only are not to be angry with them,” those maddening others, “we should feel remorse that we affected them so negatively in the past, which conditioned their ending up in such a state as their present one. The deeper cause of his harmfulness toward you is your harmful actions and anger toward him in previous existences.”

But if my fellow-commuter’s anger is due to my having mistreated him in a past life, perhaps my anger in a previous life was conditioned by his having mistreated me still further back in evolutionary history. Just so. Hence I should take our confrontation as an occasion to practice transcendent virtue, returning love and forgiveness for hate: “Thus, an infinite vicious cycle of enmity and injury is ended&#133 when the bodhisattva does not react to injury, but embraces the harming person with patience, love, acceptance, forgiveness, and even appreciation.”

At first glance, Thurman’s Buddhist treatment of anger appears to have many points in common with its Christian counterpart. Anger often disrupts human relationships, seriously harming those in whom it becomes habitual. Every Christian who squarely faces his own sinfulness will find the ground on which he condemns another a bit slippery. Virtually every occasion of my being angry at another can be correlated with my having offended someone else in similar ways. And so on. The doctrine of non-self, however, undermines much of the common ground.

It is metaphysically absurd for one non-entity to get angry with another non-entity.

For Christians, both divine and human anger consists of a person seeing another as having culpably offended against one, and as deserving of punishment. But if, in reality, neither offender nor offended exists, then anger (like other emotions, for that matter) isn’t a genuine part of one’s emotional personality, since there is no enduring personality to which it belongs. It is metaphysically absurd for one non-entity to get angry with another non-entity. Buddhist anger becomes some sort of odd emotional simulacrum of genuine anger that arises out of the transitory continuum of discrete mental episodes that Thurman calls a “relative self.” If the doctrine of non-self is true, anger is not real, but is swept away with a single metaphysical stroke.

Thurman is correct to think that emotions can be irrational. To be afraid of air travel while simultaneously believing it to be the safest form of transportation is to have an irrational emotion. But Christians deny that we necessarily err about the central terms of our construals when angry; there really are enduring persons who have offended against us. So whatever emotion Buddhists experience (in Thurman’s account) is not anger as conceived of by Christians, but rather some distant analogue thereof.

Christians who reflect on God’s anger over the infidelity of his people Israel—and Jesus’ scourging of the moneychangers in the temple—will probably dispute Thurman’s claim that anger is never justifiable. Christians thus adapt their concept of anger to these divine exemplars and, despite our sinfulness, strive, albeit imperfectly, to imitate them by ensuring that our anger is righteous. Thurman’s contrary view seems to lead to the implausible conclusion that the Jews in the concentration camps were really reaping their just deserts for having injured Hitler and his Nazi cohorts in a past life. Such an outlook depreciates both the true sufferer and his justifiable anger.

Thurman claims that Abhidharmic “clear science” psychology has superior resources for gaining mastery over anger. Christians, he says, “don’t try that hard to challenge anger, since they believe God models anger… and that it would be the sin of pride to think they could alter their own nature.” But Thurman’s summary of the Christian view is flawed. Yes, Christians admit that they need God’s help to conquer anger. And it’s true that Christians think forgiveness is available for sins of anger that one truly repents of. (How superior, to my mind, to the notion that every occasion of anger will cling to you in the next life as inescapable karmic debt.) But it is fatuous to claim that Christians generally fail to take anger seriously. Recall that just anger requires that the one who is angry is in an appropriate position to get angry, and on many occasions we are not suitably situated. It is simply not our job to judge and punish all the persons in the world who, for whatever reason, provoke us to anger. To think otherwise is to arrogate to ourselves a prerogative only God possesses, and this makes vicious anger a very serious matter indeed from a Christian perspective—hence, for example, St. Paul’s injunctions against this sin.

In sum, while Thurman’s book provides a useful opportunity both for cross-cultural analysis of central moral concepts and for introspection, it will be viewed by those who do not share his Buddhist assumptions as an idiosyncratic treatment of a traditional deadly sin. Unless one shares his doctrines of reincarnation and the unreality of the self, one cannot accept his analysis of anger, his account of how anger adversely affects us, or his remedy for conquering anger. For a detailed analysis of anger that more closely conforms to Western philosophical and religious assumptions, one must look elsewhere.

1. Here I am indebted to the work of Robert C. Roberts. See his Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 202 ff.

W. Jay Wood is professor of philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author of Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous (InterVarsity).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In the normal course of athletic affairs, 92 yards is nothing. It’s a nine-second dash for some sprinters, and a mere one-minute stroll even for those of us nursing old sports injuries. But when the San Francisco 49ers stepped onto the field at Joe Robbie Stadium in Super Bowl XXIII, it must have looked like a mile. They had three minutes and 10 seconds to traverse the distance, and most spectators thought time had, for all intents and purposes, run out.

What stood in the 49ers’ way were eleven massive and lightning-quick Cincinnati Bengals, one of the best defensive squads in the nfl, sitting on a 16-13 lead a mere 200 seconds from their first Super Bowl ring. They were prowling like lions, in no mood to give any ground. They’d heard the hype about the anointed Joe Montana (who already had two Super Bowl rings), but it was clear that he and the 12-6 49ers were past their prime.

But Randy Cross, who spent his Sunday afternoons that year hiking the ball to Montana, didn’t hear the fat lady even warming up. Before the 49ers trotted on to the field for the last time, their center walked up and down the sidelines telling—make that screaming at—anybody he could find. “You gotta believe! You gotta believe!”

The mood in the huddle was businesslike—except for Montana, who wasn’t nicknamed Joe Cool for nothing. As the players gathered in the huddle, Montana turned to tackle Harris Barton. “Hey, Harris,” he said. “Check it out. There’s John Candy.”

The drive began with a couple of short passes and runs—Montana was, as usual, taking what the defense gave him, faithful in little. It wasn’t much, and with 1:49 left, the 49ers had managed only to cross midfield. Another pass put them on the Cincinnati 35, but the next pass fell incomplete, followed by a penalty: Cross was downfield on a pass. Now it was second and 20 on the Cincinnati 45, with only 1:17 left.

“The crowd was so loud that I had to scream every word,” Montana remembers. “And the excitement was just overwhelming. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was dizzy. I should have called timeout, but it kind of faded away. All I could do was throw the ball out of bounds.”

Joe Cool, fighting Bengals without and demons within, caught his breath, then threw to Jerry Rice for 27 yards, and Roger Craig for another eight. The 49ers were 10 yards from the end zone, with 39 seconds left on the clock.

“When we got to the 10, we were going to score a touchdown,” Cross said, “even if we had to throw Joe through the air 10 yards to do it.”

With the defense smothering Rice, Montana looked for his secondary receiver, John Taylor, in the back of the end zone. “I knew he was open when I threw it,” Montana said, “but I got hit when the ball was halfway there and couldn’t see what happened.”

When the crowd of 75,000 roared, Joe Cool knew he’d triumphed, completing what is now known as The Drive.1

Meanwhile, this 49er fan sat in his living room, staring at his tv through misty eyes, repeating the mantra, “I don’t believe it.”

Joe, we believe. Help thou our unbelief.

As a culture, we give time, space, and money to sports in ways unparalleled in history. We wear our athletic heroes’ jerseys, our moods fluctuate with the fate of our team, and sports stadiums dominate the skyline of many modern cities, architecturally signaling our highest devotion.

Annually, the 256 National League Football games draw an average of some 67,000 fans per game. On a per-game basis, only one other sport comes close, at some 56,000 fans per match: Europe’s Six Nation Championships of rugby. For total annual attendance, nothing even approaches Major League Baseball, which draws some 72 million fans. ncaa Division I football and basketball come in for a respectable second and third at 30 and 25 million respectively.2

Financially the numbers are equally telling. By 2009, according to calculations in PricewaterhouseCooper’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2005-2009, the worldwide sports market will achieve sales of $111.1 billion. That includes gate revenues, broadcast and cable rights, merchandising, sponsorships, and so on and so forth. I beg to differ in one respect: $111.1 billion is not a sales figure; it’s an economy.

This confluence of time, space, and money has led many scholars to conclude that sports constitute not so much a diversion as a form of devotion, a set of myths, beliefs, and ritual behaviors that make it look very much like religion.3 Does anyone doubt that as a culture, as a world, we believe in sports? I certainly didn’t—until I caught a whiff of heresy in, of all places, The Best American Sports Writing 2005.

Glenn Stout, the series editor, starts off well enough in his foreword. He recalls some of his favorite sports writing through the years, and nearly all the examples are game stories, in which the athletic contest is at the center of the piece: Dan Jenkins’ description of the 10-10 tie between Notre Dame and Michigan State in 1966, Jack Nicklaus’ failure to win the 1972 British Open, and so on. Stout then rehearses a key moment in the Red Sox-Yankee playoff series, which the Red Sox finally, miraculously won after a 3-0 deficit.

When Stout thinks of great sports writing of the past, he thinks instinctively about game stories. But when it comes to choosing stories for his annual, apparently another calculus is at play. Though Mike Lupica, New York Daily News columnist and the editor of the 2005 volume, made the final choices, it was Stout who sifted through the hundreds of entries and suggested the finalists.

I suspected something was amiss when Lupica described in the introduction the contents of the volume. “You will see an ambitious column by Richard Sandomir of the New York Times… [about abc’s five-second delay] speaking to the whole notion of censorship… and a touching story from Sean Flynn that is more about friendship than golf… There are pieces about race and steroids and rape and illness and hope and loss, all spendidly told.”

I began to wonder if I had mistakenly picked up The Best Social Issues Writing 2005. To be sure, the writing here is splendid, and, yes, a few pieces are about what happened in the games themselves. Gary Smith in “Running for the Lives” movingly describes the impact a committed white running coach has on his Hispanic cross country team. It begins:

There was silence when the footrace ended. Then Ayon threw his arms around the coach’s wife and cried, “Why did God do this? I don’t know why God did this” and the boys in red and white each staggered off to cry alone. They had failed the most successful coach in California school boy history.

The volume also reprints Michael Lewis’ New York Times Magazine piece, “The Eli Experiment,” on the latest Manning quarterback phenomenon. It’s a now-typical example of Lewis’ deep reporting, narrative skill, and flashes of insight:

[T]here is no way to react intelligently, in real time, to the chaos; you need to envision its pattern before it takes shape. You have to, in short, guess. A lot. Every time Eli Manning drops back and makes a decision, he’s just guessing. His guesses produce uneven results, but he is shockingly good at not making the worst ones.

But mostly there are stories about what goes on around the games. About how steroid abuse in high school and college led to the death of one young man (“Dreams, Steroids, Death—A Ballplayer’s Downfall” by Mark Fainaru-Wada); a coming-of-age story featuring David Shields’ reflections on the brash broadcasting of Howard Cosell (“The Wound and the Bow”). And there is a lengthy Washington Post piece by Steve Coll on the death of former nfl star Pat Tillman in Iraq.

In the Best Sports Writing 2005, sports are often merely an incidental backdrop to some social or political commentary—the investigation into Pat Tillmans’ death being the salient case in point. Sports plays no role in the piece; Tillman just happened to be a soldier who played in the nfl.

In this volume you won’t find a single game story, in which the sine qua non of sports—an athletic contest itself—is described or analyzed or reflected upon. And this in a year when the Red Sox pulled off what is arguably the greatest comeback in playoff history, when the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team (yes, hockey; yes, Florida) won the Stanley Cup; when the Detroit Pistons won the nba title over the 9-1 favorites Los Angeles Lakers (with Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Karl Malone, and Gary Payton in the lineup); when the dominating Smarty Jones came “this close” to winning the Triple Crown; when for the first time in ncaa Division I history one university, Connecticut, won both the men’s and women’s basketball championships in the same season; when Phil Mickleson—”the best player never to win a major”—won the Masters; when Lance Armstrong won his unprecedented sixth Tour de France; when Paul Hamm won the gold in gymnastics, and refused to give it back after the judges decided they should have awarded it to South Korean Yang Tae-young.

Are Stout and Lupica telling me that there was no stellar writing, reporting, commentary, or analysis of these magnificent sports events of 2004, or about the heroes of these events? What’s with that?

This struck me as so odd, in fact, that I decided to check out similar anthologies from an earlier era. I went to the library and randomly pulled off the shelf Best Sports Stories 1967: A Panorama of the 1966 Sports World With the Year’s Top Photographs, edited by Irving T. Marsh and Eward Ehre. It turned out to be a felicitous pick: I discovered that this collection contains what many consider to be the best sports article ever written, Gay Talese’s profile of Joe DiMaggio, “The Silent Season of a Hero.” More on that in a bit. That is not what caught my immediate attention.

First, there was the arrangement of the table of contents. After featuring the prize-winning stories for best news coverage, best news-feature, and best magazine story, the rest of the book was organized by sport, with headings for baseball, football, boxing, basketball, tennis, soccer, and so on. Sports themselves were pre-eminent.

Second, I discovered in this old volume a host of game stories. There were two pieces about Moe Drabowski’s unexpectedly stellar pitching display for the Baltimore Orioles against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the 1966 World Series; another about how Sam DeLuca, a lineman for the New York Jets, went about protecting team star Joe Namath from the wiles of oncoming defensive tackles; another about Roy Emerson’s tragic Wimbledon loss to Owen Davidson; another about Jack Nicklaus’ repeat win at the Masters. There was even a description of a demolition derby.

The volume also included colorful stories of events and people swirling around the games—one about gambling at Wrigley Field and another about the Milwaukee Braves moving to Atlanta, for example. But a large chunk of the book was dedicated to describing key moments of the year’s best games, as well as profiling famous sports heroes of the day: boxer Rocky Graziano, jockey Johnny Longden, and the great Joe DiMaggio.

In 1966, it seems, sports writers—or at least people who picked “the best sports stories”—were much more interested in the games and their biggest heroes than are the editors of the 2005 volume. And just to make sure the latter volume wasn’t idiosyncratic, I looked at the 2003 and 2004 Best Sports Writing volumes as well. While they contain a few of the 1967-type stories, the pattern is more or less the same.

The reasons for this shift are likely as large as a history of the late-20th century, but a subtle change in the titles of the books suggests one. The early volume is about “sport stories,” the latter about “sports writing.” Stout makes a point of this by saying his volumes are not about sportswriting but sports writing. But this just removes the question by one step: Why are Stout and his publishers more interested in sports writing than in sports stories?

Clearly this shift reflects a deep cultural ambiguity about sports, an ambiguity I see elsewhere, as well, and one that points to a deeper cultural anxiety. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a recent editorial said, “All of West Virginia should have been celebrating Tuesday, basking in the glow of a 38-35 Sugar Bowl victory over Georgia. Instead, a coal mine explosion in the Mountaineer state provided a sobering reminder of how little import should be attached to the games we play.”

This sentiment is echoed after every national disaster or world tragedy. I remember Al Michaels waxing eloquent on this point—and a number of baseball players waxing not-so-eloquent—after the earthquake-interrupted 1989 “Bay Area” World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. And others doing the same the Sundays after 9/11 and Katrina. At such times, sober sports voices tell us, we’ve been “tragically reminded” about “what’s really important” and how it “puts everything in perspective,” and how “it’s just a game.”

Then comes the moment of silence to remember the victims—followed by wild cheers “annnnnd, here’s the kickoff!” As a culture, we have lost the resources to intelligently cope with tragedy. After the ritual self-deprecation of the sportscasters, the games provide a handy way to escape for a few hours.

When it comes to writing about sports, this ambiguity has another dimension, as is made particularly clear in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam. A distinguished historian with a passion for sports, Halberstam contributes a long introduction, summarizing the recent changes in the genre. He points to what he considers the pivotal story, the one that set sports writing on a new course, Talese’s 1966 profile of DiMaggio. Talese and many of his peers in that decade, Halberstam reminds us, were “struggling to break out of the narrow confines of traditional journalism and bring to their work both a greater sense of realism as well as a great literary touch.” The New Journalism, as Tom Wolfe dubbed it, “stripped away the façade with which most celebrities protected themselves as they presented themselves to the public.” For Halberstam, the point of the new journalism was to take heroes down a notch, to make them share our foibles and sins so that they become people who are as common and unlikable as the rest of us.

In 1966, there were still major sports heroes to be found, and there was no shame in describing the joy of the games we play and watch. In 2005, heroes are to be taken down a notch, and what goes on behind the scenes becomes the main attraction. For the heirs of the New Journalism, there are no more simple games. “We have tried to emphasize very good writing and the human element in sports,” Halberstam notes; “as such there is less writing about teams’ winning varying championships as there is about the human complexity of the world of sports.”

A recent review by Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books (Jan. 12, 2006) hints at one of the conceptual problems in all this huffing and puffing about “human complexity.” In “The Great Black Hope,” a review of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink by David Margolick (Knopf), Buruma begins:

Sometimes a game is more than a game. In 1969, for example, when Czechoslovakia beat the Soviet Union in the ice hockey finals in Stockholm, less than one year after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. The exhausted Czech players were in tears as the Swedes cheered, “Dubcek! Dubcek!” and thousands of Czechs, defying the authorities, danced in the streets. On a night like that, when a humiliated people enjoy a moment of pride, revenge can taste sweet.

Sports as political commentary, sports as social release. But to Buruma, even these moments are ephemeral. By the end of his piece, he writes, “Alas, of course, these great events, however good for the morale of the moment, are fleeting, and their impact on the real world is little more than symbolic. The Czechs, after their famous ice hockey victory, still had to suffer through twenty years of oppression until they were finally free in 1989″ [emphasis added].

As if sports were not part of the real world. As if symbol is useless. As if the joy the Czechs experienced in 1969 had no intrinsic value, regardless of its social and political usefulness.

What Buruma and Halberstam and Stout and other “serious writers” have forgotten is that what goes on between the foul lines or end zones is real, and that the symbolic participates in a deeper reality. It’s easy to lose this meaning in a media-driven sports culture where money, sex, and power battle it out for pre-eminence. But for those who have eyes to see, the reality is plainly, blessedly there.

I’ve argued elsewhere that sports are a dimension of play, and play an expression of Sabbath, an activity that cannot have any socially useful purpose lest it become just another bit of work. Play is a celebration of the seventh day of creation, an activity in which we live out the imago Dei and create our own bounded but free worlds. Play points back to the culmination of creation and forward to the time when all existence will be nothing but a Sabbath.

Our ambiguity about sports is another instance of a widespread loss of transcendence, and specifically of Judeo-Christian faith. A culture which forgets the true nature of play is tempted to use sports as mere entertainment or as an addiction, a way to escape. Meanwhile, “serious writers” will try desperately to discover something socially useful in these frivolous contests. In either case, the joy of sports will be sabotaged.

To be sure, we need both sportswriting and sports writing. We need compelling stories about what goes on around sports—the good, the bad, and the ugly. And some athletes do need to be taken down a notch. But we also need stories about the games themselves, and their heroes, when men and women act out great dramas, games of tragedy and hope, meaningful precisely because they transcend the usual social calculus.

We need writers to help us remember the Red Sox miracle of 2004, the greatest pitching performance of the journeyman Moe Drabowski—and The Drive, when Joe Cool calmly destroyed an archetypal enemy when time itself seemed to have run out. Such moments are to be enjoyed precisely because they are symbolic, and thus precisely because they participate in a deep reality.

We do believe, Joe. Help thou our unbelief.

1. This story can be found in many places, but I depended on this account: “49ers’ Joe Cool Comes Through: Joe Montana launches 92-yard drive that gives San Francisco its third title of the 1980s,” by Bruce Lowitt, St. Petersburg Times, October 25, 1999: sptimes.com/News/102599/Sports/ 49ers__Joe_Cool_comes.shtml. See also usatoday.com/sports/nfl/super/superbowl-xxiii-plays.htm.

2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_league_attendances.

3. See especially Joseph Price, ed., From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Mercer Univ. Press, 2001).

Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today magazine. He is the author most recently of Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God, just published by Baker.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Our big question this year, you’ll recall, is How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? Addressing this question is more or less a fulltime occupation for Gene McCarraher, who teaches humanities at Villanova University. His first book (which belongs on the same shelf as the work of Christopher Shannon, profiled in our previous issue) was Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought, published by Cornell University Press in 2000. Long before the Democratic National Committee got religion, McCarraher was arguing that the American Left needed to rediscover its theological roots. He’s now at work on an anatomy of corporate capitalism and what he regards as the baleful spell it has cast on the American moral imagination.

A faithful Catholic and a fierce socialist—in 2006, socialism is about as countercultural as you can get; even anarchism is more fashionable—McCarraher here sets his sights on “the hopeless and infernal world of the capitalist round-the-clock workhouse” and “the cant of diligence and virtue” which, he argues, keeps us from recognizing that “the Work Ethic’s boss is Mammon.”

Let the argument begin.

Reflecting on the misery of industrial England in the 1840s, Thomas Carlyle mixed acute discernment with moralistic perversity. Capitalism, he wrote in Past and Present (1843), bore “the Gospel of Mammonism,” in which money, through its “miraculous facilities,” held its devotees “spell-bound in a horrid enchantment.” That’s a nice encapsulation of capitalism’s grotesquely religious character, akin to Marx’s later exposition of “commodity fetishism.” But in the face of that “Gospel”—whose fruits Friedrich Engels would judge in The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845)—Carlyle recommended, not the apostasy of revolution, but an evangel of Work. To his tired, hungry, sweated countrymen, Carlyle delivered a sermon on that “unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable and foreverenduring Gospel: Work, and therein have well-being.”

That’s quite an admonition to people already burdened with twelve-or-more-hour days, but Carlyle continued to bless the sweat of Adam’s curse as the beads of beatitude. A little later, in his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Carlyle recounted the character-building benefits of African enslavement with a sanctimonious sadism worthy of Christian Reconstructionists. Behind the racism lay the Gospel of Work, now preached with the brutal eloquence of the whip. “If it be his own indolence” that prevents a man from his “sacred appointment, to labor while he lives on earth,” then, Carlyle pronounced, every “wiser, more industrious person” had a duty to ” ’emancipate’ him from his indolence.” (Arbeit macht frei, as a later generation of the Wise and Industrious would put it.) The man who dubbed economics the dismal science was certainly a piece of work.

But such has been the cant of diligence and virtue from the Pharoahs to David Brooks, our suburban Hesiod, who tells us the current bourgeois ethic is “sweeter, and more optimistic” than its dour Puritan ancestor. Though instructed no longer in the ways of probity inscribed in McGuffey’s Reader, Americans still know the proverbs of exertion passed down by Puritan divines: “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop”; “Satan always finds mischief for idle hands to do.” These belabored mites of deception comprise the sentimentality of avarice, and the most eloquent refutation they merit is our yawning, carnal repose. Besides, the Devil’s workshops are now located in the world’s burgeoning slums, and Satan outsources his mischief to factories and offices around the planet. Thankful for the competitive edge bestowed by global capitalism, Lucifer now finds plenty of work for busy hands to do.

The Gospel of Work—better known as the Work Ethic—is the feature of our culture that most needs to be countered, and Christians should join William Morris in recognizing that Carlyle’s evangel is “a semi-theological dogma, that all labour, under any circ*mstances, is a blessing to the labourer.” Like the author of “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” Christians should demand for everyone their triune birthright of “hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself”—not the hopeless and infernal world of the capitalist round-the-clock workhouse.

So close the book on Steven Covey and those Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; spread the good news of Wallace Stevens and “the pleasures of merely circulating.” If you’re the sort who thinks that the Parable of the Talents is a primer for smart investing, you need reminding that its teller also beckoned to the lesson we should learn from the flowers. “Consider the lilies,” Jesus says. “They neither toil nor spin, yet not even Solomon was arrayed like one of these.” Draped in the sober raiment of industry, the Work Ethic’s boss is Mammon, a deity more demanding and less forgiving than the God who adorns the idle.

Like reports of Mark Twain’s death, announcements of the impending demise of the Work Ethic have been greatly exaggerated. Fifty years ago, David Riesman feared that Americans were about to be buried beneath “a dangerous avalanche of leisure.” Thirty years ago, surveying the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” Daniel Bell worried that a militant hedonism unleashed by the 1960s was eroding the personal discipline necessary for production. Apparently undermined by the very material abundance it created, the Work Ethic receded as the primary focus of cultural criticism. As Vance Packard put it, “consumerism,” not incessant labor, was “the great moral issue of our time.”

Thanks to Packard and his neo-Puritan descendants, “consumerism” has obscured the persistence and intensification of the Work Ethic. For two generations, the trashy delirium of consumer culture has been a welcome foil for would-be prophets, offering abundant opportunity for displays of impeccable righteousness and taste. But anti-consumerist cultural criticism has grown ever more facile and tiresome, and the fatigue stems, I think, from the shopworn and misleading moralism that condemns consumer “pleasure.” For one thing, despite furrowed brows about “instant gratification,” modern hedonism, as Colin Campbell has pointed out, looks a lot like delayed gratification. We window-shop, entertaining fantasies about numerous commodities that we never purchase or even touch. Like the “sex in the head” that bothered D. H. Lawrence, “consumption in the head” is a defining feature of the modern individual. As the vanity fair of the modern imagination, the consumer sensibility is a factory of idols producing at maximum velocity.

Thus, as the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture, consumerism is also a form of imaginative labor that fuels the political economy of accumulation. Conservative moralists in particular don’t like to acknowledge that the accumulation of capital requires the proliferation of consumer desires. We must spend money, we must enjoy ourselves, lest the whole apparatus of production and employment totter and collapse through attrition. Ask President Bush, whose clarion call to a stalwart citizenry after September 11 was—shop, travel, treat yourselves. (Cincinattus, drop that plough and pick up your Visa card.) So why not refer to our “free market” system as a command economy of pleasure? The transformation of leisure into commodities mandates an enormous expenditure of energy in product investigation; in keeping abreast of changes in brands and technologies; in the ambulatory and cognitive labor of shopping.

Attending to the political economy of consumerism opens our eyes to the volume of work that’s expended on consumer culture. On one level, consumerism might be better understood as the work ethic of consumption. People who want lots of stuff have to work harder, both to produce the goods and to acquire the money to purchase them. If they don’t have the cash, they’ll use credit cards and installment plans, both of which enforce a new brand of self-discipline: the monthly budget. Thus, the modern consumer practices a “this-worldly asceticism” every bit as genuine as the kind Max Weber attributed to Calvinist merchants.

On the production end of consumer culture—the part that’s routinely forgotten in the irrepressible urge to moralize—there’s the travail of advertisers, market researchers, and public relations specialists; the ranks of service workers, shackled in their compulsory cheerfulness; the cubicled proletariat ever-ready to take your order, assist you today, or field your petty complaint. (Not to mention the billion-strong anawim who, according to business apologists, should be downright thankful for the ill-paid privilege of sewing our shirts and sneakers.) The other name of Consumer Culture is the Republic of Customer Service, which is to say that talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism.

When confronted with these objections, the acolytes of the Work Ethic rehearse the boilerplate of Progress. Thanks to hard work, they scold, we’re richer, more comfortable, healthier, and technologically adept. As is so often the case with the apologists of Mammon, historical illiteracy passes for “realism,” and quantity becomes an intimidating surrogate for quality and morality. Talk of alternatives, ethics, or aesthetics is dismissed as the elitist bray of those who’ve never—select your cliché from the following menu—Worked Hard, Met a Payroll, or Had the Headaches that Come with Running a Business.

As for the bad history, there’s plenty of evidence that technical development and workplace organization could have taken any number of directions, and that the path on which they were set—subdivided factory labor, assembly-line machinery, managerial supervision and discipline—was determined by merchants and manufacturers bent on controlling the labor of dispossessed artisans. (The “free market” has always rested on similar coercions, erased from the historical memory of the economics profession.) Indeed, thanks to the Work Ethic, the moral economy of American capitalism has a distinguished lineage of mastery and surveillance: the Puritan curtailment and criminalization of formerly religious holidays; the time-clock and piece-work of industrial exploitation; time-motion studies and “scientific management,” that beatific vision of control freaks; and the “flexible,” “infomated” office of today, where “multi-tasking” and “empowerment”—”enabled” by cell phones, head sets, Palm Pilots, the new hardware and wardrobe of indenture—”permit” you to Get More Done.

What have these labor-saving devices achieved? More work for everyone. (That was always the purpose behind the technology: save labor on one task so you could perform some more.) Imprisoned in the free market, Americans now work longer hours, are more harried, tired, and distracted, and dislike their jobs and bosses more than they have in a generation. According to Juliet Schor, the average worker now spends a month longer at the job than in 1970. And that job follows them everywhere: as one executive proudly crowed to Jill Fraser in White-Collar Sweatshop, “I want my employees to have telephones in their bathrooms.” It will be a great day, brethren, when “wage slavery”—once fighting words for the Republican Party—re-enters our moral vocabulary.

As for “élitism,” this is the self-pity of the Entrepreneur disguised as moral umbrage. Rather than bow before this American idol and its bombast of “productivity,” we should defer to an “élitist” like John Ruskin, Romantic scourge of industrial bondage, and take to heart his prophetic rebuke to the pious bourgeoisie of his day. “I know no previous instance in history,” he wrote in Unto This Last (1862), “of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion.” Ruskin rejected the “occult” beliefs of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo—soon to morph into the amoral elegance of neoclassical economics—and posed an elementary distinction between “wealth,” or “the possession of the valuable by the valiant,” and “illth,” that which causes “devastation and trouble in all directions.” Note that moral and spiritual criteria are integral to Ruskin’s conception of economics, not tacked on as “externalities” or “values”—that last word always a signal of evasion and fraudulence. “The final outcome and consummation of all wealth,” Ruskin asserted, must be evaluated, not in the number of commodities or the size of portfolios, but in the volume of “full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures.” “Modern wealth”—that is, for the most part, the kind whose unbounded expansion is the summum fetish of capitalism—induced a “dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being.” That’s not a bad rendition of today’s workforce: rising without a good night’s sleep, vexed throughout the day, waiting for “the weekend,” that commodified surrogate for genuine Sabbath rest.

Ruskin also belies the nihilistic ideal of “productivity” so central to the creed of Work. However hard-nosed or realistic they portray themselves, business leaders and economists reveal their essential kinship with wizards and warlocks when they wave this rhetorical wand. Befogging distinctions between wealth and illth in the haze of quantification, “productivity” partakes of that mysticism of the measurable peculiar to “disenchanted” modernity. By Ruskin’s more exacting and more realistic standard, much that’s presently calculated as “wealth” is really a pile of “illth,” and the work that produces it (and consumes it) is a sinful waste of talent.

As a champion of the endangered artisan, Ruskin also helps us understand how the Work Ethic poisons creativity—the very thing it’s supposed to hallow and promote. When industrial capitalism dispossessed “backward” and “unproductive” artisans in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Gradgrinds cast their habits and techniques on the scrap heap of Progress and substituted calculable, unrelenting diligence. Indifferent to anything but the methodical, quantifiable, and profitable, the devotees of the Work Ethic have invented the assembly line, the speed-up, the office cubicle, the mandated smile, and overtime. Workplace power, technical design, and aesthetic prowess become the concerns of people called “engineers,” “managers,” and other “experts” devoted to “efficiency”—yet another obsession posing as a virtue. In a tragic feat of historical alchemy, the gold of craft—a union of mental and manual dexterity—became, in the crucible of the Work Ethic, the dross of “management” and “labor.”

Any new ethic of work must aim, in Morris’ words, to “stamp all labour with the impress of pleasure.” That wonderful day would arrive, Morris thought, only when workers declared apostasy from Carlyle’s mangy Gospel: that “hypocritical and false” doctrine, as Morris put it, that “all labour is good in itself”—”a convenient belief,” he added sharply, “to those who live on the labour of others.”

What new doctrine should they affirm? A generation after Morris, Eric Gill and Simone Weil suggested poesis—skill in making, the discovery and creation of beautiful forms for objects of daily use. Poesis is the goal of which “productivity” is the perversion. The most penetrating Christian students of work in the last century, Gill and Weil asserted that work and beauty embraced when what the worker “likes to do is to please God,” as Gill put it. Labor, in this view, is not only a means of subsistence but an education in beatitude, a “training of persons for the end envisaged by religion . . . to see all things in God.” Along with art and science, labor, Weil believed, allowed us to “enter into contact with the divine order of the universe.”

From this vantage, the Work Ethic, together with its minions “productivity” and “efficiency,” sponsors a massive assault on the integrity and dignity of the human person, even if conducted under the auspices of faith. (Bleating about “Christian” or even “enlightened” capitalists misses the point: good intentions don’t bridle the structural imperatives that dictate the substitution of productivity for poesis, along with the subsequent deskilling of labor.) Where workers enjoyed direct access to the means of poesis—not the access mediated, as under capitalism, by money—they could become artists. The artist is not “a special kind” of worker, Gill mused; rather every worker is “a special kind of artist.” For Weil, this artisanal and sacramental conception of labor entailed the fullest democracy in the workplace. “The fully skilled worker, trained in modern technical methods, resembles most closely the perfect workman,” and any factory or workshop blessed with such artists “could fill the soul through a powerful awareness of collective life.” By Weil’s standard, the modern regime of work and productivity was a literal desecration of labor, a blasphemy of its sacramental character. “It is sacrilege to degrade labor in exactly the same sense that it is sacrilege to trample upon the Eucharist.”

The probability that even those sympathetic to this vision may consider it quixotic is a sign of how effectively the Work Ethic has clouded our horizon of possibility. But as the Emilia-Romagna region of northeastern Italy demonstrates, the prospect is by no means utopian. Known as “the Red Belt” for its doggedly Left politics, the Emilia-Romagna features an economy dominated by cooperatives and worker-controlled industries, whose artigianti work fewer hours than Americans and maintain some of the highest standards of craftsmanship in the world. (If you must know, their “productivity” as measured by gdp is among the highest in the European Union—which is to say, in the world.) The political culture—a judicious combination of Catholic subsidiarity and socialist universalism—enables an abundant and exquisite provision of education, health, and other social services, while the culture of labor allows workers to emulate the artisan and the epicure.

This genuinely leisured state resulted from a prolonged struggle, not only over the means of production but also over the ends of production. Americans have engaged in that sort of debate only briefly and sporadically—during the 1930s and the 1960s—but the time may well have arrived when the very meaning of labor itself needs to be posed as a political, moral, and religious issue. I daresay that the labor movement will reverse its present march toward extinction only if, pointing to the success of places like the Emilia-Romagna, it can offer a bold alternative to the current regime of post-industrial toil. I daresay also that Christians will have nothing of real interest to say about work until they renounce their fealty to the Work Ethic and abrogate the Puritan covenant of redemptive diligence. In the spirit of Gill and Weil, they will have to write instead a covenant of the lilies, and the construction of such a moral economy—not the creation of ideological camouflage like the “soulful corporation”—should be the first task of business and professional schools in Christian higher education.

That covenant of the lilies should be leavened by the Euro-mandarin philosophy of Josef Pieper, whose Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1952) is a Thomist treatise that doubles as an ur-text of revolution—a call, as Pieper himself puts it, for a “de-proletarianization of the proletariat” and an Exodus from “the world of total work.” Pieper reminds us that leisure is not a “vacation” but rather a sacramental way of being in the world, the flourishing of a “celebrating spirit,” the enjoyment of an “approving, lingering gaze on the reality of creation.” Like love, leisure is most fully itself when it repudiates the performance principle. When, leisurely, we forego seeking to impress God with our talent for the strenuous life, it is possible to live untroubled by the “absence of preoccupation” and radiate “a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.”

That’s the same advice Augustine gave to his restless heart. The life of God, Augustine wrote in the Confessions, is simultaneously work and rest, because all God does, working and resting, he does with “the majestic ease of play.”

If salvation means sharing in the life of God so far as rational creatures may, then salvation must mean, in part, the marriage, or rather the remarriage, of work and play; and if we are already privy to foretastes of the Kingdom here and now, then signs of its fruition must appear in playful, felicitous labor. That’s emancipation, and the Gospel of Work is just another yoke from which the real gospel should relieve us.

Eugene McCarraher is currently a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In the days after September 11, 2001, Todd Gitlin did a strange thing: “My wife and I decided to hang an American flag from our terrace” in New York City. This hardly seems to have been a strange thing for a lot of other Americans. Commuting between Paoli and Princeton that fall, I saw flags festooning overpasses, flapping from car windows and antennae, even painted on bedsheets draped from houses. But it was strange for Gitlin, so strange that he was riveted by the spectacle of his own behavior. This, remember, was Todd Gitlin: one-time president of Students for a Democratic Society, chronicler of the Sixties, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, and one of the poster boys for David Horowitz’s “101 most dangerous academics in America.” The only flag sds had ever revered was the North Vietnamese one. In 1969, Gitlin admits, “the American flag did not feel like my flag.” And how could it, “when our people had committed genocide against the Indians, when the national history was enmeshed in slavery, when this experience of historic original sin ran deeper than any class solidarity, when it was what it meant to be American?”

And then, a few weeks later, Gitlin and his wife took the flag down. Between those two gestures lies the bulk of Gitlin’s book, The Intellectuals and the Flag, and much of the agony of the American Left.

The American Left has always had difficulty understanding its own history, largely because there has never been anything you could call an American Right against which it could define itself. There was serious dissension about banks, corporations, and government sponsorship of commercial projects (road-building, canals, tariffs) throughout the decades between Jefferson and Lincoln. But apart from the American Tories and the most radical Calhounites, there was no serious American political movement in the early republic which dissented from liberal democracy or the premises of the Declaration of Independence or which thought monarchy was a good thing. Most of what passed for political debate was accusation and counter-accusation that someone was not taking democracy or the Declaration seriously enough.

As a result, there could be no American Left until liberalism itself had been defined as “the Right”—in other words, until Lockean liberalism and Jeffersonian democracy had ceased to be the gold standard and a completely different way of understanding social organization became a possibility. If the American Left needs a birthday to celebrate, it might be 1877 and the Homestead Strike; but a better candidate is the Pullman Strike of 1894, since Pullman was what thrust Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party onto front stage. The socialists of the fin-de-siècle—Debs, Daniel DeLeon, and “Big Bill” Haywood—still saw themselves as down-home American realists. But a vast amount of the energy which fueled the socialists, the Progressives, and even the New Dealers was the conviction that liberal democracy had failed at promoting a good society because it had mistakenly identified the primary needs of society as political ones, when the real needs were economic and social. Political equality was a sham in the absence of economic equality, and the liberal premise that political equality would foster equal economic access was dismissed as a clever attempt at giving a stone when what was asked for was bread. And with that consciousness, the real history of the American Left begins.

Not that the Left hadn’t inadequacies of its own to explain. The most significant of these was the mysterious turn-out of the working classes to fight the European empires’ wars in 1914 rather than to stage their own revolutions. This was a mystery which Gramsci and the Frankfurt Schoolers struggled to explain in terms of the success of capitalist cultural hegemony. Perhaps, then, it was not the rising of the workers which would achieve the rise of the Left, but a Leninist vanguard of some other sort. The Old Left had never had much use for vanguards, which usually took the form of intellectuals who had little commonality with the working class. But by the 1950s, the Old Left looked tired and unsuccessful, and so the turn to a new Left vanguard began.

Locating that vanguard did not turn out to be difficult. The 1930s witnessed a flood of émigré intellectuals from Europe to Britain and America, fleeing fascism. This exodus included the major lights of the European Left, who were grateful to find security and employment in American universities but appalled at how the rampant consumerism of American life had dulled the revolutionary edge of the American working class. It was not until they looked out over their classrooms—especially the classrooms swollen by the post-World War II democratization of American higher education—that the émigrés suddenly realized where the new vanguard would come from.1

Todd Gitlin entered Harvard in 1959 (as a math major), four years after Herbert Marcuse published Eros and Civilization, three years after Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, and still in advance of Marcuse’s most savage attack on liberal democracy in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). In his elegant memoir, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), Gitlin remembered how it was at Harvard, rather than at the working-class barricades, that he was “swept up” into the New Left. In 1963, he became president of sds, the embodiment of the new student vanguard, with “the modest ambition of shaking America to its roots.” Six years later, sds imploded into “screaming factions,” and the New Left was as good as dead.2 Gitlin went on to take a master’s degree in political science at the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in sociology from Berkeley, and in 1980 began chronicling the rise and fall of the New Left in The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the Left. He had published three further books (including The Sixties), lamenting the self-immolation of the New Left and the everywhere-triumph of the Right, and had been at work on a series of nostalgic essays about three of his intellectual heroes—David Reisman, Irving Howe and C. Wright Mills—when the jets flew into the Twin Towers.

“To tell the truth, September 11, 2001, jammed my mental circuits,” Gitlin confesses. And well it may have, for 9/11 was the first time in Gitlin’s living memory that the United States had been clearly, unambiguously, and without the slightest warning the subject of an attack that made no strategic sense, made no distinctions between innocent or guilty (whatever “guilty” would have meant), and had no other purpose than to strike as savage a blow as possible at the United States. And at him. No matter how else Gitlin defined himself, the hijackers of 9/11 saw in him only another American, and if he had been in the Twin Towers that morning rather than a mile north around Columbia, the rejoicing on the part of the jihadists would have been no less gleeful.

But it was not fear at realizing that he was as much a target as the fund managers in the Towers which Gitlin was surprised to find welling up inside him. It was love. He walked the perimeter of the still-smoking ruins three days later, and “in those awful days I found people—and a people to whom I belonged.” The volunteers who showed up from hundreds of miles away astounded Gitlin, both for who they were and what they engendered in him: “I loved these strangers… and didn’t feel mawkish about it.” He read about the passengers and crew of Flight 93, who preferred to smash their plane and themselves into the earth rather than allow it to be turned into a weapon against their country, and it suddenly “dawned on me that patriotism was the sum of such acts.” Like Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale, who came away from his almost-liberating reunion in the forest with Hester Prynne asking himself Can this be joy?, Todd Gitlin was left wondering whether he was, for the first time in his life, experiencing patriotism.

This was a difficult awakening, as many other men and women of the Left made clear in the months after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. Once it was announced that the Bush Administration did not intend to treat 9/11 as police action but as war, the old instincts came back in like the tide. The day after the Twin Towers went down, Noam Chomsky declared that 9/11 was no worse than the Clinton administration’s 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory. Susan Sontag chimed in with the observation that the real terrorists were “those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky.” On October 1, The Nation insisted that the 9/11 was really about “US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia—paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally—hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.”3 If Todd Gitlin had been overtaken by one instinct, much of the Left had been overcome by a very different one.

It became so appallingly noxious that some on the Left recoiled in horror. Christopher Hitchens attacked “loose talk about chickens coming home to roost” as “hateful garbage.”4 Michael Walzer furiously attacked the mindless reach for “ideological apology.” Terror was not the “last resort… of oppressed and embittered people who have run out of options”; terror, he argued, was actually the first resort of terrorists. “Many of us on the American liberal-left have spent the bulk of our political lives opposing the use of violence by the U.S. government,” Walzer acknowledged, and unhappily, the habit of opposition had created a mentality in which “exaggerated and distorted descriptions of American wickedness” had been raised to a level of moral equivalence to terrorism.5Eventually, Walzer threw his hands in the air, and in the spring of 2002, he angrily asked, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” For half a century, he lamented, “the cold war, imperial adventures in central America, Vietnam above all” had produced “a pervasive leftist view of the United States as global bully, rich, privileged, selfish hedonistic, and corrupt beyond remedy.” It was a mentality which, Walzer concluded, was “stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate,” and which sprang from four sources: (1) the inability to let go of Marxism, (2) cultivating an illusion of powerlessness and alienation which, in turn, excused “willful irresponsibility and ineffectiveness,” (3) the “moral purism” of “blaming America first,” which for the Left acts as an effort to “lift ourselves above the blameworthy (other) Americans… standing as a righteous minority,” but also standing alone, isolated, unconnected and emotionally neutered, and (4) equating sympathy with the oppressed with silence and excuses when the “oppressed” turn out to be authoritarian brutes.

The result was that, by the time of 9/11, “Many left intellectuals” behaved “like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect.”6 No wonder Todd Gitlin was so surprised at Todd Gitlin.

The people who best exemplify genuine communalismin its most radically participatory and democratic forms are precisely the people with the least tolerance for “grooving on anything.”

But, of course, like Dimmesdale’s joy, it did not last long, and explaining why is what consumes most of The Intellectuals and the Flag. It is not a long book, and two-thirds of it actually sails by without a word on 9/11. But the parts are not unconnected. The first section is composed mostly of the essays on Reisman, Howe, and Mills, whose significance for this moment, Gitlin explains, lies in their willingness to translate Left political critique into practical political engagement. Since the mid-1970s (Gitlin explains in the second section), the Left has been outmaneuvered by an alliance of wealthy conservative plutocrats and right-wing Christian fundamentalists and has retreated to the Last Stand Hill of the universities and postmodernism. As a result, the Right has ended up holding most of the cards in the media and politics, while the Left digs itself deeper into academic irrelevance, and the culture has sunk ever more deeply into individualism, consumerism, and self-absorption. Real democracy is about civic engagement, “a community of mutual aid, a mesh of social connections” in which we have “to curb our individual freedoms” in which we put aside private interests to “build up relationships with other citizens.” (Not, one wants to add, about the self-aggrandizing individuals who populate the liberal democratic imagination, and who only grudgingly emerge from the Lockean state of nature for the furtherance and protection of individual interests.) Gitlin’s task in the third and last section of the book would be, somehow, to connect the dots between the social democracy he lauded in Reisman, Howe, and Mills and the patriotic epiphany he had experienced after 9/11.

Invocations of “community” always take us back (as they are intended) to the front-porch, town-meeting neighborhood of yesteryear, the kind of world Christopher Lasch described in his last book when he said that “self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society.”7 It is a kind of rhetoric which I have some difficulty crediting fully, since so much of the actual track record of the Left, from the Beats on forward, has looked surprisingly like an all-consuming obsession with the autonomous individual and scorn for front-porch, town-meeting life. Except that in this case, the individualism is cultural and moral, not political or, for that matter, very economic. (Marcuse, after all, had begun his critique of capitalist society by urging an attack on its Protestant-ethic foundations, and once the New Left’s foot was planted in the bucket of culture, it never got it out). Perhaps Todd Gitlin lived in a different Sixties in Cambridge, Ann Arbor, and Berkeley, but my experience of the New Left and sds was that the new student vanguard wanted to escape the bonds of community, not embrace them. As Susan Sontag put it in 1969, “America is a cancerous society” which will only cure itself by “Rock, grass, better org*sms, freaky clothes, grooving on nature—really grooving on anything”; such liberation “unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life,” and that, Sontag believed, was a consummation devoutly to be wished.8

So the New Left, while it had the feel of Esau, spoke with the voice of Jacob; it was the voice, as Allan Bloom tellingly remarked, of the bourgeoisie needing to feel that it was not the bourgeoisie after all but rather a bohemian élite yearning for “dangerous experiments with the unlimited.”9 By contrast, the people who best exemplify genuine communalism in its most radically participatory and democratic forms are precisely the people with the least tolerance for “grooving on anything”—the Amish, the Dokhoubors, and their spiritual kin. Bohemian (as well as Lockean) individualism will not sit comfortably beside social democracy. And to the extent that patriotism extends any further than sentimentality and in the direction of imposing real community responsibilities, the New Left always feared and resented it. Edmund Burke once said that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” That is precisely what a long line of the New Left, from Norman Mailer to Bernadette Dohrn, showed no “disposition” to do. “To live our patriotism,” Gitlin admits, “we would have… to overcome—selectively—some of the automatic revulsion we feel about laying aside for of our freedoms in the name of a higher duty. To be honest, it isn’t clear to me how much of my own initiative I would gladly surrender for the common good.”

Points for honesty, Todd, but no cigar. In the end, Gitlin took down his flag. It was too much, he explains, to see the Patriot Act dispose of civil liberties (although I am not sure how many Black Marias Gitlin has counted rolling through Manhattan), too much to see a “lazy ne’er-do-well, this duty-shirking know-nothing who deceived and hustled his way to power” in the Oval Office, too much to see “a supine media” bending over backwards to accommodate “apocalyptic Christians and anti-tax fanatics” (and what bubble must Gitlin live in, that he imagines “the media” to be even slightly accommodating to “apocalyptic Christians”). We now know how much automatic revulsion is actually required before Gitlin junks the “common good,” and it doesn’t seem to be much.

Can there be a decent Left? Walzer thought this would only happen (a) if the Left stopped turning the world into a cheap economic melodrama and went back to the 18th-century basics of “secular enlightenment, human rights, and democratic government,” (b) if it stopped regarding “good bourgeois values… like temperance, moderation, and cleanliness” as the enemy of “radical politics or incisive social criticism,” and (c) if it would, for once, treat other Americans as fellow citizens (“We can be as critical as we like, but these are people whose fate we share”). It is a hopeful sign that 9/11 could shake Todd Gitlin free to consider these possibilities seriously. But it is not encouraging that even such a catastrophe could only shake Gitlin free for a little while.

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of the Civil War Era Studies program at Gettysburg College. He is at work on a book about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.

1. John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (Norton, 1992), pp. 218-238.

2. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987), pp. 2-5.

3. Peter Beinart,” Fault Lines,” The New Republic (October 1, 2001); Gregg Easterbrook, “Profiles in Courage,” The New Republic (online edition, October 2, 2001); Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Two Years of Gibberish,” Prospect (September 2003).

4. Christopher Hitchens, “Against Rationalization,” Minority Report (October 8, 2001).

5. Michael Walzer, “Excusing Terror,” The American Prospect (October 22, 2001).

6. Michael Walzer, “Can There Be A Decent Left?” Dissent (Spring 2002).

7. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (Norton, 1995), p. 8.

8. Susan Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” Ramparts (April 1969).

9. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 78.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Americans are doubtless a religious people, but we don’t believe in the hard stuff any more. Certainly not in the doctrine of sin, original or otherwise, which seems to have gone missing, even among evangelicals, sometime around the time hell disappeared.

Still, we seem to gravitate, in fascination if not faith, to the Seven Deadly Sins, those transgressions classified by Catholic thinkers from Pope Gregory the Great on as particularly hazardous to our spiritual health. Perhaps it is the enumeration. (Why seven?) Or the parlor game of ranking them. (Is lust worse than gluttony? Is pride the worst of them all?) For whatever reason, books on the Seven Deadly Sins appear with some regularity—far more often, to be sure, than books on the Seven Cardinal Virtues.

The latest contribution to this genre is a series of books on the Seven Deadly Sins from Oxford University Press, each initially delivered as a lecture at the New York Public Library. The series runs from a Buddhist meditation on anger by Columbia University Buddhist Studies professor Robert A. F. Thurman to a raucous satire on sloth by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein (who died in January from cancer). Indulging the other sins are Francine Prose (gluttony), Simon Blackburn (lust), Joseph Epstein (envy), and Phyllis A. Tickle (greed), and, in the recently published seventh volume, Eric Michael Dyson on pride.

One of the more entertaining subplots of these books is the tendency of each writer to cast his or her subject as the King of All Sins. Greed, Tickle boasts, “is the mother and matrix, root and consort of all the other sins.” Envy, Epstein insists, is the “subtlest” and “cruelest.” Gluttony, claims Prose, is the “most widespread.” Pride, Dyson asserts, is “the most deadly of the seven sins.”

The volumes also channel a broader cultural tendency to metamorphose their respective sins into mere sicknesses, and then into virtues. In Envy, for example, Epstein diagnoses his “sin” as just “poor mental hygiene.” After informing us that pride is “the fundamental sin,” Dyson tells us that it may well be the “crown of the virtues.” Wasserstein’s satire on Sloth—cleverly gussied up as a self-help book, complete with chapters on “Success with Sloth” and “Uberslothdom”—is actually an ode to the same.

Blackburn, a University of Cambridge philosophy professor, takes a more straightforward approach in his rehabilitation of lust (not coincidentally, the fattest volume in the series). “Lust gets a bad press,” Blackburn writes in his introduction, and he devotes the rest of the book to puffing it as “not merely useful but essential.” In the gospel according to Blackburn, the real sinners are those—Catholics mostly—who want to regulate our sexual hydraulics, damn up its “freedom of flow.” Blackburn even suggests that we might want to “take our lust neat, without the fantasies and crystallizations of love.” So when he asks of prostitution and p*rnography, “are they quite as bad as normally painted?”, we know that the correct answer is no.

Blackburn’s conflation of lust, sex, the sex drive, and sexual desire illustrates another flaw of some of these books, namely a refusal to discriminate with care between their subjects and related malefactions. Tickle, for example, lists acquisitiveness, covetousness, avidity, cupidity, and avarice as greed’s aliases, but does not distinguish carefully among them. One of the ways that Dyson gets around to praising pride as “a boon” and “a stroke of moral genius” is by conflating it with self-respect, self-esteem, self-love, self-regard, and self-love. Thurman, by contrast, discriminates helpfully between anger and hate, describing the latter as “more a conceptual or mental attitude” and the former an “emotional state.” Epstein distinguishes between envy and wistfulness, envy and resentment, envy and revenge, envy and jealousy. “One is jealous of what one has, envious of what other people have,” he writes.

Epstein also provocatively divides the sins into the cold (pride, greed, sloth, envy) and the hot (lust, anger, gluttony), recalling Blackburn’s very different but equally intriguing typology of the sins of youth (his beloved lust) and the sins of middle age (envy, anger, gluttony).

Of all these books, Dyson’s Pride is the most frustrating, Epstein’s Envy the smartest, and Thurman’s Anger the most intriguing. Dyson seems to be content to channel a combination of Jesse Jackson and Gordon Gekko (of Wall Street fame), whispering—shouting actually—not “Greed is good!” but “PRIDE IS GOOD! I AM SOMEBODY!”—throughout. To put it more pointedly, he fails to fulfill his assignment, first by declining to think much about the perils of pride at all (except in the cases of racism and nationalism), and, second, by riffing repeatedly on entirely unrelated topics—from the Bush Administration’s policies on electronic surveillance (bad) to international courts of justice (good). Who knew?

Epstein offers a host of insights that seem obvious once he has expressed them (for instance, the fact that envy tends to crop up among the sexes rather than across them). And he excels at seeing the big picture. Much intergenerational conflict is rooted in envy by the old of the young (“envy tinged with regret,” he calls it). Feminism is built on envy, he argues, as is Marxism. (Greed is capitalism’s sin, he notes; envy is socialism’s.) Even the tabloids come under Epstein’s envy eye—as purveyors of Schadenfreude charged with the enviable task of bringing the rich and the famous to heel.

Oddly, the only book that really seems to treat its subject as a sin (sans scare quotes) is written by an adherent to Buddhism, a religious tradition that has not classically preached this doctrine. “I am angry at anger—I hate it,” Thurman’s book begins. And in the chapters that follow he provides an antidote to this “poison.”

To his credit, Thurman sees his sin as social. War, he says, is “organized anger,” and he criticizes Hollywood’s action/adventure genre (including Kill Bill, which stars his daughter Uma) for glorifying anger-turned-violent-turned-deadly. The centerpiece of this book, however, is Thurman’s step-by-step exegesis of classic Buddhist teaching on the psychology of anger and its antidote: patience. Readers unfamiliar with Tibetan Buddhism’s distinctive style of argumentation may find some of that exegesis rough sledding, but the reward for those who mush on to the end is a glorious trek—with the 7th-century Tibetan Buddhist scholar Shantideva as their wizened guide—down the middle path between “resignation to anger” and “resignation from anger.” Thurman also includes a riotous one-page distillation of the havoc he believes was wreaked—in Eden, Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Egypt—by the angry God of the Bible.

Flannery O’Connor, the sin-obsessed novelist of the once sin-obsessed South, wrote, “The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way.” The Seven Deadly Sins series was written for this modern reader. But what has been lost as sin has been sacrificed to freedom?

The stock answers are close at hand. What has been lost are guilt and fear, Catholic bishops who worm their way into our bedrooms, Puritan divines who take sad*stic pleasure in dangling us over a fiery pit. But such answers are too pat.

What is missing from these books—and from contemporary American culture—is a sense that something is missing from this world. With the notable exception of Thurman’s Anger, there is little awareness here of the incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness that Augustine took for evidence of another life, and that saints from Mary to Mother Teresa have taken as a charge to make this life conform to our imaginings of the next. Quoting Baudelaire, O’Connor once wrote that “the devil’s greatest wile …is to convince us that he does not exist.” If so, this is a wily series indeed.

Say what you want about the vices of the dogma of sin, one of its virtues has always been to remind us that we—all of us—live between the animals and the gods, that one of the underappreciated challenges of human life is to somehow become a human being. Of course, there are myriad ways to avoid this task, one of the most popular being to imagine that you are in some important respect (morally perhaps?) superior to your fellow human beings. The doctrine of sin reminds us that this path leads to individual and collective ruin.

But this doctrine need not only humble us. It can embolden us, too, lend us the power to talk back to power, to remind those who denounce others—other races, other nations, other religions—as evildoers that we are all evildoers. This is a hard truth for any culture, harder still for an optimistic culture tethered only to the sky. But it is one that we ignore at great cost.

Stephen Prothero is chairman of the Department of Religion at Boston University. His book Religious Literacy is forthcoming from HarperSanFrancisco.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Last January at the International Builders’ Show in Orlando, amid the granite countertops, palatial bathroom suites, and other requisite components of the fully equipped American life, a 300-square-foot home stole the show. “The Katrina Cottage,” as it is affectionately known, is a modest, traditionally styled home with a generous front porch and a distinctly Southern feel. It was designed by Marriane Cusato as an alternative to the fema trailers that are routinely used to offer temporary housing to disaster victims. Cusato had designed the structure in response to what a number of displaced residents of hurricane-torn towns said they wanted in a home. Although it is getting rave reviews from native Mississippians and is priced competitively with the fema trailer, the Katrina Cottage has been rejected as part of the disaster relief package because of a technicality in fema rules which allows only the provision of temporary housing to victims. Some have suggested that the real issue is whether we are comfortable offering disaster relief that doesn’t look sufficiently grim. This story speaks volumes about our instinct to protect and repair the American Dream in response to tragedy, as well as the often ironic role the government can play in that process.

Six years earlier, the U.S. Energy Department announced a “Solar Decathlon” to see which school of architecture could design the most efficient and livable solar-powered house. The tragedy for which this competition would ultimately provide some kind of response came when two 747s toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Although the Energy Department could not have foreseen such a turn of events, this particular crisis invested the competition with new meaning. In her introduction to Trojan Goat: A Self Sufficient House, Karen Van Lengen, dean of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, makes the claim that after 9/11, “many Americans recognized the need to become more self-sufficient and visionary in their design of sustainable environments for the future.” Probably the Energy Department had had a broader purpose in mind when they planned the competition, but there’s nothing quite like playing the national security card to add a sense of urgency to an environmental issue.

Notwithstanding this somewhat alarmist preamble, John Quale narrates an engaging story. He recounts how the University of Virginia’s schools of Architecture and Engineering participated in and eventually won the design and livability award for the contest with their entry, curiously named the Trojan Goat. At one level the book is significant simply for putting a much-needed spotlight on the complicity of buildings in our current energy crisis. I’ve always assumed the automobile was the chief culprit in our addiction to fossil fuels, but apparently “buildings account for half the total energy burnt each year in the U.S.”

Those who know a bit about the temperament of architects and the ethos of the architectural institutions over the past 50 years or so will find Trojan Goat particularly intriguing. As unremarkable as it might seem to the lay reader, the idea of architects collaborating with one another, engaging in genuine dialogue with engineers, and spending some time actually occupying the building that they designed is nothing short of astounding.

Architects have long struggled for liberation from the various contingencies of their vocation. Beginning around the time of the Renaissance, they went to great lengths to prove that theirs was a liberal not a mechanical art. They wanted to show that they were autonomous artists and not base craftspeople. Architects in the 20th century often sought to extricate themselves from history, local conditions, and even the wishes of their clients in order to make a more pure gesture with their work. Current architects continue this trend by waging heroic battles against geometry and physics. It’s telling that within the past decade, a “post-occupancy evaluation” (or, translated into everyday speech, inquiring whether the building actually works) had to emerge as a radical concept.

In this context, then, the reader is invited to imagine the audacity of an architectural school setting up a project so that “everyone would have an equal hand in the design.” We discover further that Engineering and Landscape Architecture students were invited into the process early enough to actually collaborate on the design as well as to integrate the mechanics and ecological setting of the building with conceptual ideas. To have such a disparate group agree on one particular plan would have been a significant achievement in itself; to require the students to go ahead and build the structure with their own hands feels truly revolutionary. As part of the competition, students had to spend about a week preparing food and performing tasks of daily life within their building.

Quale’s narrative, along with the student quotes sprinkled throughout the text, provides a good account of the kooky collaborative process that led to UVA’s victory. One gets the sense that the student camaraderie and interdisciplinary understanding achieved in the process will have an impact far greater than that of the actual structure that was built. It certainly gave me hope that the architectural vanguard is capable of making a turn in the right direction.

Having said that, the stipulations of the Solar Decathlon and this account of one of the winning teams are as interesting for what is not said as for what is. In many ways this radically different building is as much a reflection of our current values as it is a challenge to them. The ecological features of the building are both expensive and high-tech. Nowhere in the book is it hinted that most vernacular building styles of a particular region tend to use less energy—and can achieve energy efficiency less expensively—than ones that are built (as this one was) for a universal setting.

Nor, in this same vein, does Quale point out that the siting of a building will ultimately have more impact on its energy use than the form of energy that powers it. In other words, it is less expensive to heat and cool attached buildings (apartments, townhouses, etc.) than detached ones. Furthermore, when buildings are placed in exclusively residential zones or on the fringes of town, the extra automobile trips generated increase the energy outlay significantly. Even an environmentally sensitive “little cabin in the woods” spells ecological disaster when multiplied by 280 million Americans. And yet, it is precisely that ubiquitous motif that continues to drive the American housing industry.

Such quibbles aside, Trojan Goat is both an entertaining read and a possible harbinger of a warming trend in the frigid waters of the architectural academy. Of course, institutions being what they are, this change won’t come quickly. There is a telling moment in the narrative, where the UVA team is scandalized by the discovery of “a vague reference in the rules to ‘consumer acceptance'” as one of the evaluative criteria. The disgust implied by Quale’s scare-quotes is palpable. Imagine consumer acceptance as a relevant factor in sustainable building! Apparently, it’s not just fema that likes to dictate what’s best for us.

Eric O. Jacobsen is the author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (Brazos Press).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Like other Americans, Christians have called for legal solutions to every conceivable question, from abortion and gay marriage, to Terri Schiavo and end-of-life questions, to gambling and corporate responsibility. Law isn’t so pervasive in other developed countries, but the American perspective seems to be spreading. If asked to identify the objective of all this law, Christians and Christian lawmakers often say “promoting morality.” But can or should secular law enforce every moral obligation? What might a more rigorous Christian perspective on faith, morals, and law look like?

Legal scholarship, the most obvious place to turn for reflections on these issues, is just beginning to address them in earnest. In 2001, Michael McConnell (then a law professor, now a federal appellate judge) and several others published Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought, a collection of essays by 28 legal scholars. The essays range from historical studies of classical liberal theory and marriage law, to Calvinist or Anabaptist or Catholic perspectives on particular legal issues, together with a great deal of shop-talk: Christian assessments of legal academia and the various movements that have dominated secular legal scholarship in recent years. A few of the essays are excellent, and Christian Perspectives is a pathbreaking experiment in possible Christian approaches. But the essays do not develop any particular thesis or set of theses.

The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics & Human Nature, a massive two-volume set edited by John Witte and Frank Alexander, takes a different and more unified tack. For the principal volume, Witte and Alexander selected twenty figures from the three major Christian traditions—seven Catholic, eight Protestant, and five Orthodox—and commissioned essays exploring the legacy of each. (The second volume lets the twenty speak for themselves, providing a medley of excerpts culled from their writings.) The essays—which treat thinkers as various as Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 Rerum novarum ushered in modern Catholic social thought; the brilliant Russian Orthodox scholar Vladimir Soloviev; Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and even John Paul II—take roughly the same form: an overview and brief biography, followed by an explication of their subject’s teachings by word or deed on “law, politics, and human nature.” For structure and context, The Teachings of Modern Christianity includes a thoughtful introduction by Witte, introductory chapters at the outset of each of the three major sections, and “afterward” chapters by prominent legal scholars Kent Greenawalt and Harold Berman.

Mindful that most American readers know little about the Orthodox tradition, Paul Valliere threads helpful pointers through his introduction to Orthodoxy and his chapter on Soloviev, best known for influencing Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. Many of the Catholic and Protestant figures will be familiar to all, but others will come as a revelation to many readers outside their given tradition. John Courtney Murray, whose writings on democracy and religious freedom were vindicated by Vatican II, and social activist Dorothy Day are too little known today even among fellow Catholics, while William Stringfellow, who wrote eloquently from Harlem on the role of the church during the civil rights era, is largely forgotten except in certain mainline Protestant circles.

The twenty succinct intellectual biographies tell one story more than any other: the great 20th-century struggle to define an appropriate stance of the church toward the state. “The problem of the state was the crucible in which the Catholic Mind was sharpened,” Russell Hittinger writes in his introduction to the Catholic tradition. For Catholics, the chastening lessons of totalitarianism paved the way to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, championed by the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, and flowered further in Vatican II’s endorsem*nt of democratic freedoms and a measure of separation between church and state. Among Protestants, the rise of Nazism spurred the great Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was authored by Karl Barth and implicitly rebuked the churches that aligned themselves with Hitler. Surveying the state’s dominance of the church in much of the Orthodox world, Valliere quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who “lamented ‘our ingrained and wretched Russian tradition: we refuse to learn how to organize from below, and are inclined to wait for instructions from a monarch, a leader, a spiritual or political authority.’ “

Perhaps inevitably in a volume of intellectual biographies, the theologians and philosophers fare better in the telling than the “doers,” the activists. Barth and Maritain leave a vivid impression, while Day and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who made their mark through their lives rather than through pathbreaking contributions to constructive theology, are not seen to full advantage. With its reliance on bold-faced lives rather than broad trends, the collection also neglects the most important development of the past three decades, the rise of contemporary evangelicalism. None of its leading figures, from Carl Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today, and Billy Graham to Chuck Colson or even C.S. Lewis, has the heft of Barth or Niebuhr, but evangelicalism has transformed American politics and law.

Far more surprising for a project whose principal focus is law, and whose two editors are law professors, is that none of the twenty figures is a legal scholar, and the essays only rarely grapple with particular legal issues and legal systems. (The chief exceptions come from the ranks of the doers: Susan Anthony’s campaign for women’s suffrage, King and the Civil Rights movement.) Why so little law? Witte’s introduction hints at one possible explanation: legal positivism. For the legal positivists, law is nothing more or less than the rules that a sovereign lays down. Starting in the Harvard Law School of the 1890s, positivists sought to establish law as a science, a self-contained system disconnected from the messy world of politics, culture or religion. The success of this perspective, Witte suggests, left little room for Christian inquiry into law, politics, and society in the scholarly legal literature.

But legal positivism cannot fully explain the remarkable absence of Christian legal scholarship for much of the 20th century. As Witte points out, competing scholarly movements (starting with “legal realism” in the 1930s, and later including feminism and race-based perspectives) have long brought sociological, economic, and other insights to bear. Some prominent legal philosophers, such as Ronald Dworkin, have insisted on the inherent morality of the law. But religion was different. When Harold Berman, one of the few scholars studying law and religion thirty years ago, sent his 1974 book The Interaction of Law and Religion to fifty Harvard Law School colleagues, not one even acknowledged the gift.

The disdain did not run in one direction only. From the early 20th century until the 1940s, evangelical Christians disengaged from American public life. Law schools were hostile territory, generally to be avoided. As a result, the few evangelical legal scholars tended to operate under cover, assiduously separating their faith and their scholarly life. By the 1970s, Presbyterian minister and apologist Francis Schaeffer and other evangelical leaders, building on the efforts of predecessors such as Carl Henry and Harold Ockenga, had begun asking why there weren’t more Christian lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. The evangelical re-engagement that followed has spread to academic circles, but more slowly than to business and the professions. Even now, it is an unusual law school that has more than one or two scholars who identify themselves as Christians, and whose faith explicitly informs their scholarship.

The publication of The Teachings of Modern Christianity, and the major Pew Charitable Trust funding that launched the project, signifies the major change underway. With the visible influence of Catholic intellectuals and evangelical leaders on the current White House, there suddenly is a deep interest in perspectives on religion, politics, and law. Legal scholars are not oblivious to these developments, as reflected in the increasing numbers of law review articles with “Christianity” in the title. Much of the new scholarship, too much perhaps, emphasizes philosophy and philosophical theology at the expense of other methodologies. The bias is understandable. For a generation chastened by Mark Noll’s brilliant indictment, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, it’s hard to resist the assumption that philosophy must be the truest and highest scholarly end.

There obviously is a place for this—John Finnis’ elaboration of natural law theory is and will be essential—but Christian scholars must branch more fully into other areas to address pressing questions: How much can and should the secular law do? (This is particularly pertinent to the battles over gay marriage, abortion, and corporate responsibility.) What are the mechanisms through which religious individuals and organizations influence lawmaking? (Think of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which requires the U.S. to monitor religious freedom and drew on an unlikely combination of grassroots religious support and the efforts of secular human rights groups.) And so on.

Cezanne famously vowed to “do Poussin all over again from nature”—to reinterpret Poussin’s color and form for Cezanne’s own era. The new scholarship on law, politics, and society will, one hopes, draw on the giants portrayed in The Teachings of Modern Christianity, and do them all over again in the light of new insights in economics, political science, and sociology. The “growing end” of the Catholic tradition, as John Courtney Murray put it, surely will draw on work by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, among others, on democracy, rights, poverty, and growth. Orthodox scholars may combine the rich Orthodox tradition of theosis (the Spirit-infused process of becoming more like God) with institutional analysis of the criminal justice system, a project one young legal scholar has already begun in work exploring the role of apology and reintegration in criminal law.

Protestantism cries out for a systematic rediscovery and “redoing” of Abraham Kuyper and Reinhold Niebuhr. Prime minister of the Netherlands and founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, Kuyper developed a theory of “sphere sovereignty,” under which government (and by implication, law) should intervene in the family or church or other local institutions only so far as necessary to police abuses. Niebuhr, countering the Social Gospel’s visionary optimism, insisted that politics, law, and international relations must be informed by a realistic assessment of the corrupting effects of sin. Kuyper wrote at a time when religious diversity in the Netherlands was primarily within Christianity rather than between Christianity and other religious (or non-religious) views. Both Kuyper and Niebuhr predated the sophisticated new political and legal literature known as public choice, which explores the role of interest groups and institutions in law making and law enforcement.

Attention to pluralism and the institutional consequences of sin suggests an important limitation on the use of secular law to enforce morality: because both ordinary citizens and those who enforce the laws are sinful, the law must play a double game: it must restrain the worst sins of the citizenry, but should not be so broad that it gives unfettered discretion to those who enforce the laws. Moral legislation that is too broad to systematically enforce—such as Prohibition and much gambling regulation—has tended to backfire, inviting discriminatory enforcement that undermines the very morals the law was designed to promote. In our era, these lessons suggest that a ban on partial-birth abortion might make more sense than an all-out campaign to criminalize abortion, and that the Supreme Court was right to outlaw anti-sodomy laws.

Kuyper and Niebuhr might also inform distinctly Christian insights into the institutional dynamics of religious influence. In Europe, the recent campaign to forgive the debt of impoverished nations was grounded in the established churches and related organizations, and achieved extraordinary prominence. Why did this international movement draw so much less attention in the United States, whereas Irish rock star Bono, working through a very different network and preaching that debt relief is a matter of “justice not charity,” persuaded the United States to forgive billions of dollars in debt and inspired the Millennium Challenge Account, which promised $15 billion to aid highly indebted poor countries?

To answer these questions, we need to think about the different institutional structures of the church in Europe and the United States, and the role that “norm entrepreneurs” like Bono play in coordinating the commitments of a large number of otherwise diffuse citizens.

Others will find inspiration elsewhere in The Teachings of Modern Christianity. What matters most, given the urgency of these issues for 21st-century life, is that the project get underway. As the Apostle Paul said of salvation: “Now is the needed time.”

David A. Skeel, Jr., a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is working on a book on Christianity and American law.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.