Page 2840 – Christianity Today (2024)

There are two very different approaches to church leadership today. One is practical, focused on measurable outcomes, and concrete. Call it “left-brained.” The other is intuitive, focused on process, and organic. Call it “right-brained.” From these two mindsets have emerged two effective, respected church leaders with two new books. Andy Stanley is founding pastor of North Point, a megachurch near Atlanta. Tim Keel is founding pastor of Jacob’s Well, an emerging church in Kansas City.

Even their book titles reveal their divergent views of leadership. Stanley’s title, Making Vision Stick, communicates the pragmatic, how-to nature of his book. Keel, in contrast, declares, “This book is not a manual.” Instead, Intuitive Leadership is all about story. Keel shares large portions of his own story, moving us from his childhood, through college, seminary, and into pastoral ministry.

Making Vision Stickby Andy StanleyZondervan, 2007

Keel then takes the reader through a sweeping story of world history to explain how we arrived at Postmodernity. Not until page 228 does he give any practical application regarding these cultural shifts. And even this is not in the form of concrete action steps, but rather nine changes in “posture” important for ministry in this new world.

While the right-brained Intuitive Leadership is all about story, the left-brained Making Vision Stick is all about steps. Stanley’s book is so short, so practical, it doesn’t even need a table of contents. From “State the vision simply” to “Live the vision personally,” he gives handy instructions with examples from North Point.

The differences between Keel and Stanley go beyond style, however. They have very different views of the leader’s role. For Stanley, the leader is central to a church’s vision, responsible for creating it, communicating it, and maintaining it. “When a leader blames the follower for not following, the leader has ceased to lead,” he writes.

Keel, by contrast, presents a decentralized approach in which direction is discovered from within the community. In this setting, the leader’s primary role is that of environmentalist, not program director; one of asking questions, not giving answers. “Such a move requires that you trust the people with whom you dialogue enough to listen to what they have to say.”

While Stanley clearly believes in the importance of a central visionary leader, he does not advocate North Point’s vision as normative for everyone. He shares his own church’s story but never suggests that vision is best for another church. Both Keel and Stanley understand the importance of context.

Keel emphasizes contextualized leadership. Stanley ideas of contextualization are more subtle, but both clearly understand that their churches’ unique callings should not be generalized.

Both authors also understand systems and what can sabotage their effectiveness. Stanley writes, “It’s tough to make vision stick. Time has a way of eroding the adhesive.” Keel agrees, “Organizations, as they mature, often lose sight of the original spirit that animated them.”

Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaosby Tim KeelBaker, 2007

As for the criticism of the emergent movement being anti-structure, Keel plainly states, “Structure is not a bad thing. Structures support or inhibit life.” But he adds that settling for mere programs “relieves the people from stretching and doing the hard work of building relationships.”

Both books are worth reading, but they have very different objectives. Keel wants to change how leaders think. He seeks to convince readers of the need for a massive shift in how leadership looks. Stanley keeps the goal simple: to make vision stick.

Taken together, the two books with their divergent perspectives, provide a full and complementary picture of effective leadership today. That’s some real brain power.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

ABC’s report of Wheaton College professor Kent Gramm’s resignation was an example of sloppy journalism and weak analysis.

The original headline was simply false: “Professor Fired for Getting a Divorce.” Gramm was not fired. He resigned because he declined to talk with the college about his divorce. (The image to the right is a screen shot of an earlier version)

Later today, ABC changed the headline to “Professor Loses Job Over Divorce.” The headline is still not quite accurate. To lose your job generally indicates that someone took it away from you. However, Gramm voluntarily resigned. And according to the Chicago Tribune, the college offered him another year of employment while he searched for another job.

Also, student Emma Vanhoozer’s name was misspelled. Most journalists are extremely careful about getting basic facts like these correct. But reporter Russell Goldman bypassed whatever fact-checking system ABC has set up, if they have one.

Not only are there factual errors, but Goldman imposes his own strange analysis on the situation.

“If the school is free to impose its beliefs on divorced family members where does the law draw the line? Could the school just as easily impose arranged marriages?” Goldman writes.

Yes, that’s the big looming threat here: forcibly arranged marriages. Someone has been reading too much coverage of the raid on the polygamist sect’s ranch in Texas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes the English is awkward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Davies indicates these translations on p. xxxvii.

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

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

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

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

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

12. Op. cit., p. 59.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then from Bauer’s book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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