Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010: Your Top 10 List

Welcome back to our contributor to Everett Hamner, who's been goofing around doing research and teaching at Western Illinois instead of spending time on the all-important business of blogging. Below are his thoughts on ten recent pieces of American literature, of all genres, which show the vitality of religion in American literary culture. Feel free to add your own suggestions for a top ten list in the comments section.

Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010
by Everett Hamner

As one of the literary types haunting this blog, and in small recompense for all I learned about American religious history from my just-graduated Young Scholars in American Religion cohort, I thought some of you might appreciate these recommendations of 21^st-century novels and graphic narratives to teach, reference, or just enjoy. Beyond their individual quality, my only criteria for inclusion was that they significantly engage religious questions and that they had not been discussed before at Religion in American History. The resulting list is neither exhaustive nor even my own “top ten.” But it is relevant and eclectic, featuring postmodern doorstoppers and plot-driven page-turners, science fiction and realism, with main characters ranging from African American Protestants to a Catholic-Islamic-Hindu syncretist. I hope many of you discover something intriguing.

1) E. L. Doctorow, City of God (2000). The back cover promises “a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a Lower East Side church only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue.” That just scratches the surface. This postmodern collage of literary forms, including emails, jazz lyrics, free verse, and prayers, is definitely about something missing, but not so much the cross as the God presumed to have hung upon it. Yet this is not merely another expression of Dover Beachian despair. Featuring dark matter and quantum physics, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, Tillichian theology and “Evolutionary Judaism,” and early Christianity and modern filmmaking, the novel is worthy of its namesake. As an early passage has it, “That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated … is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.” A.

2. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001). Martel’s novel is one of only a couple on this list that is neither by an American writer nor about American religion. Instead its settings are India, Mexico, Canada, and most of all, the Pacific Ocean. At one level, this is a fairly simple adolescent adventure story, a tale of shipwreck and survival. The twist is that the ship in question was carrying a zoo, so Pi’s lifeboat companions include an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger. Too fantastic, you say? Then let me assure you that this half-comedic narrative is framed so as to render the entire novel a study in epistemology and an inquiry into the nature of fiction, allegory, and metaphor. Oh, and because the main character believes that “religion is about our dignity, not our depravity,” he assumes that a loving God won’t mind if a growing boy is simultaneously a pious Catholic, Muslim, and Hindu … even if he doesn’t tell his priest, imam, or pandit. Pluralism, anyone? A-.

3) Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, and José Marzán, Jr. Y: The Last Man (2002-08).

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative is thriving in the new millennium, and I don’t just mean Left Behind. Now collected in book form, this widely-acclaimed comic series will turn off some with its graphic violence and sexuality, but those who tackle it will be rewarded with much more to ponder than the average superhero tale. Utilizing a premise going back to Mary Shelley, this globetrotting narrative interrogates potential mutations of feminism, homophobia, racism, genetic engineering, US nationalism, global terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. True to the genre, there is plenty of hyperbole, special effects, and tongue-in-cheek humor, but these lush panels are as consistently evocative as the plot is relevant. Surgeon General Warning: strangely addictive. B+.

4) Joe Sacco, Palestine (2002). And now for something intensely historical, just to counterbalance the colorful future of that last entry. Joe Sacco does in-depth reporting through immersing himself in the world’s least stable environs. Rather than a feature in The New York Times Magazine, however, the result is graphic narrative. This account of two months in the Occupied Territories in 1991-92 is an effort to uncover the personal dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. There are certainly references to larger-scale political maneuvering, but the core of this work is its on-the-ground tales, which come from both sides of the fences. The wounds of rock-flinging juvenile operatives, the devastation of a neighborhood’s olive trees (and thus some residents’ primary sources of income), the torture of political prisoners, women’s feelings about the hijab, and the obliviousness of Western tourists … material religion, indeed. B+.

5) Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2003). Richard Powers is best known for his mastery of scientific detail and his insights about human responses to new technologies. Like his stellar National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2005), this novel foregrounds evolution,but here the transformations are primarily of music, race, and religion. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the civil rights movement and its legacy, this is not only a 600+ page meditation on jazz, opera, and classical music, but a compelling argument about America’s need to embrace racial hybridity, confront class divisions, and search deeper than religious labels. With a Jewish immigrant father and an African American mother, the brothers who are the novel’s main characters face the same sort of dilemmas observed by their father decades earlier. Among them: “If I want to get ahead, I must become a Christian. But if I use Christianity to get ahead, I lose my soul!” A-.

6) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). “Faulkner without the pretension,” I thought upon reading Gilead’s last sentence. The Pulitzer selection committee must have felt similarly, and among these recommendations, Robinson’s interwoven novels are the most certain to appear on future American literature syllabi. But greatness is only one element of their appeal. If you need antidotes to megachurch spectacles or clergy sex scandals, these quiet works consider far more mundane matters. Very little occurs plot-wise, and even some of the major events take place offstage. What we do get is immense theological depth, attention to ordinary beauties and graces easily overlooked. We find main characters who are largely admirable andindeed wise rural Iowan pastors. Seriously, this is possible. Need more? Well, race plays a major role. And in covering the same events from the two old men’s perspectives, the novels become a single, very successful narrative experiment. They are also full of understated humor, as in this description of a home health care book: “It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus.” Taken as a whole, what Gilead’s narrator says of a verse in the gospels may be what even the most informed readers feel about American Protestantism after finishing these masterpieces: “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completelyignorant of it.” A+.

7) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2007). I debated listing this novel, as I’m not sure it says anything explicit about religion, at least not if defined narrowly. But a single scene from its sparing journey through a barely recognizable, post-apocalyptic American wilderness should be enough to convey the work’s significance. Having walked for days with little to eat, a father and his small son find an underground emergency bunker in the yard of an abandoned home. If the reader has not already accompanied this pair through the bleakness of the preceding hundred pages, the sensory impact of the moment is impossible to fully convey, but suffice it to say that I will never look at a tin of canned fruit the same way. “He turned and looked at the boy crouched above him blinking in the smoke rising up from the lamp and then he descended to the lower steps and sat and held the lamp out. Oh my God, he whispered. Oh my God. What is it Papa? Come down. Oh my God. Come down. Crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. […] He held his forehead in his hand. Oh my God, he said. He looked back at the boy. It’s all right, he said. Come down. Papa? Come down. Come down and see.” A-.

8) Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2010). Speaking of food, here is one of the best science fiction novels of the decade, and the problem here is calories. Imagining a twenty-third century in which international oil obsessions have given way to scarcities of food production, the setting and artificial beings involved are remindful of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, but the setting is Thailand. As in Life of Pi, the religion here is syncretistic, but the strange combinations in play—Buddhists overlapping with Grahamites, with stories about “Noah Bodhisattva, who saved all the animals and trees and flowers on his great bamboo raft and helped them cross the waters”—are taken for granted. This is a compelling contribution to the cyberpunk tradition that invites readers to extrapolate from current religious, ethnic, and global economic tensions and then to reinvest in that future’s history. B+.

9) Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting … (2010). Ralph Ellison worked for more than forty years on his follow-up to Invisible Man, but never could bring himself to finish. The reasons were legion, and have recently been thoroughly explored in Adam Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress and Arnold Rampersad’s biography. Scholars of race and American literature are well aware of this struggle, but as I will likely argue in a future essay, those who study American religion should be, too. This 1100-page volume contains a wealth of archival material painstakingly organized and introduced by Bradley and John F. Callahan, including the most coherent 300+ pages of the second novel (which were originally published in 1999 as Juneteenth). Such an unfinished monstrosity may prove too massive for some to engage, but be not afraid: it includes many bite-sized excerpts that deal powerfully with civil religion, African American Protestantism, and the increasingly hybrid religious realities evident at the turn of the millennium. See especially the eight excerpts published by Ellison during his lifetime that appear at the volume’s conclusion. A-.

10) Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010). I’m cheating with this one, as I just discovered it myself and am only a hundred pages in. Given the praise garnered elsewhere, though, that’s enough to recommend it. With the 36 chapters receiving such titles as “The Argument from the Improbable Self” and “The Argument from the Irrepressible Past,” philosophers and theoretically-oriented historians of religion and science may be most immediately attracted, but this is compelling reading for anyone in the humanities whose afternoons are commonly devoted to faculty meetings and university lectures. Although several main characters are unapologetically brilliant, Goldstein holds nothing back in critiquing the posturing and petty divisions that characterize too much of academic life. Meanwhile, the novel’s equally serious and humorous reflections on the relationship of faith and knowledge and on modern dynamics of religion and secularism suggest an ear very close to the ground. A-, so far.

"The change is not in itself, but in them"

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Look out at that ocean, that sky, the fish, the birds, wild and wicked out in the chaos. Is there a god that can deliver us from the chaos of nature?”

--Reverend Carlton in the film Glory at Sea

This is an appropriate question to ask on a day when the Army Corps of Engineers opens a floodway that will displace at least 2,500 people, devastate thousands of acres of farmland, and destroy hundreds of homes and businesses in order to avoid the same tragedy in more populated areas like Baton Rouge (my home) and New Orleans.

Morganza Floodway (under normal conditions)

Morganza Floodway (1973)

Glory at Sea, according to its creators, is a 30-minute film about "a group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades [who] build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea."

Glory At Sea! from Court 13 on Vimeo.

From my perspective, Glory at Sea is a film about religion. It is about living in a broken world, seeking order in chaos, and finding meaning in suffering. It is about a people in exile, a people lost at sea, a people without a home. Recently, students in my “Religion in Louisiana” course watched the film and wrote an essay relating its themes to several other books about life in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta, including Brenda Marie Osbey's collection of poems All Saints, Tennessee Williams’ play Vieux Carré, and William Alexander Percy’s autobiography Lanterns on the Levee. They hated me for it. But they also got it.

What we’re watching along the Mississippi River is indeed about the chaos of nature, but it’s the kind that comes when we engineer nature in order to delivery us from chaos. William Alexander Percy knew a little something about the Mississippi River when he wrote, “The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey. As a thing used by men it has changed: the change is not in itself, but in them.”

Ferocious Morality and the Infinite Jest of Solitude: Two Etudes on David Foster Wallace

Paul Harvey

By chance a couple of fine pieces about David Foster Wallace passed my way over the past few days; and more than just about Wallace (and appropriate for the wide-ranging and philosophical/quasi-religious writer), they suggested to me an awful lot to reflect on about the nature of love, companionship, solitude, and the “endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.”

First is David Masciotra’s “The Ferocious Morality of David Foster Wallace,” at popmatters.com (HT Scott Poole). The first part of this essay focuses on Wallace’s short non-fiction essays, where I have connected with him most, the fiction being just a little too bewildering for me to take in:

Wallace examines how the entertainment ethic is corrosive and destructive to an important, and perhaps sacred, part of the human experience. He did it with subtlety, humor, and complex insight. He wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone preacher, but it’s impossible to read [his essays] . . . without mourning the damage inflicted on sexuality, animal rights, and politics by the popular belief that nothing is intrinsically important, that nothing is sacred, and that everything is fair game for measurement according to the market-driven calculation of the lowest common denominator in the entertainment for entertainment’s sake world of decision-making.

Wallace’s application and assignment of dignity was the polar opposite of big business, big government, and big media. The bathroom attendant’s life [in a short story collection] was boring, inglorious, and at times, humiliating, but it might benefit us to consider how his life may be more respectable that that of a brilliant millionaire. It’s a very Christ-like worldview that places someone that everyone walks by in a room built to hold and deposit human waste at the moral center and a contemporary superstar at the periphery.

But an essay that struck me with tremendous force is the piece by Jonathan Franzen in last week’s New Yorker, “Farther Away: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude" (the link is just a short summary and a few nice quotes; you'll need to get the mag. to read the whole).

I’m not particularly a Franzen fan or follower, so I expected to skim this particular piece, be a bit amused and annoyed as I often am by his shorter pieces, and then move on, little affected one way or another.

Instead, I was moved, nearly to tears, by Franzen’s tale of secluding himself on the island far off the coast of Chile which inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. What appears at first to be a light New Yorker comic adventure tale (novelist meets wilderness, pratfalls ensue, wilderness wins, novelist learns that wilderness not all cracked up to be) soon leads to some fascinating explorations of the origins of the novel, and the novel’s connections to both psychological solitude and group entertainment – “the self had become an island, and now, it seemed the island was becoming the world.” These reflections then take Franzen to grappling with his unresolved feelings and anger over how and why his novelist-friend Wallace “killed himself in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most.” Somehow, the three tales of physical, historical, and psychological solitude come together into a powerful whole.

Franzen makes sense of Wallace’s final act in part through thinking about the role of the devil in The Screwtape Letters (which, according to Franzen, was one of Wallace’s favorite works, a surprise to me), and also “The Grand Inquisitor” of Dostoevsky. Only the kinds of internal dialogues carried on by the part of Wallace that Franzen “distrusted” could have taken “the person away from us and made him into a very public legend”; and only “in the act of making that legend Wallace could satisfy his own self-loathing “hunger for career advantage”; and yet, “because it would represent a capitulation to the side of himself that his embattled better side perceived as evil,” the act further confirmed “the justice of his death sentence.” The terrible irony was that “to the extent that each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island . . . we gratefully seized on each new dispatch from that farthest-away island that was David,” even despite the “near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love,” replaced instead by “characters scheming to appear loving.”

The first piece is a fine exploration of how, in Wallace's view, "everyone serves something" (his take on Bob Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody."). The second piece chilled and moved me more than anything I've read this year, or just about in any year. Franzen's reflections on the part of his friend that he distrusted made me remember, sadly, these sentences, from a 2008 commencement address of Wallace's which got widely reprinted:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Random Notes from the Religion Merry-Go-Round

Paul Harvey

The merry-go-round, or the tilt-a-whirl, of American religion keeps going. Just a little taste of it, from today's Times:

An entrepreneur follows in the model of JDate, the Jewish speed dating service, with his version of Muslim Speed-Dating:

At intermission, about half of the participants went to a back room to offer their prayers. A 29-year-old woman named Maria, who works as an art director for a major television channel, went to her parents to complain that some of her “dates” did not know what an art director was. “Some of the men are very removed from this culture, even though they live here,” she said. “I need a drink,” said one exhausted bachelor. He did not mean Kool-Aid.

Every college town (in this one it's Gainesville) is heaven for believers in The Gospel of Anarchy:

Taylor’s noble goal in “The Gospel of Anarchy” is to remind those of us long past our own difficult youths of the grace and beauty to be found even in a “bunch of drunkpunks in the armpit of Florida.

In House of Prayer No. 2, the southern writer Mark Richard goes all Apostle on us:

But maybe darkness is what Richard is after, the necessary prologue to the spiritual awakening that occupies the end of his book. Again, he is laconic about the epiphany; we learn simply that while he is walking alone in the Tennessee woods, he gets “the call to ministry.” After a few thwarted attempts to enroll in a seminary, he stumbles on an unexpected outlet for “this thing that has been placed on” his

heart: his Cajun, lapsed-Catholic mother has joined a black Pentecostal church in his hometown, and they need a new building. Richard finds himself deeply involved in making this a reality, holding regular consultations with the pastor, buying bricks and shingles and tools, ordering food for the convicts doing the construction. His story of how the House of Prayer No. 2 gets built — despite financial obstacles and legal setbacks, and with the help of multiple small miracles along the way — becomes his means of testifying, and it’s a powerful one. When the church is close to completion and the pastor’s elderly mother “lays her hand on your shoulder, and you, at last, are slain in the spirit,” I felt a shiver pass through my body, and suddenly the memoir’s reticence, its desultory movement, its use of second person, revealed their purpose to me. To understand the mystery of faith, you cannot be told it; you must experience it yourself.

And finally, there's a girl in New York City who calls herself a human trampoline, and of course there's a church specializing in the BOD4GOD:

New York may lag behind the rest of the country in the language of evangelical self-help, but when it comes to fitness obsession, surely few cities can touch us. Work out more rigorously, work out more gently; be proud of your body, be ashamed of your body. Whatever the message, New Yorkers have peddled it, consumed it, metabolized it and excreted it a thousand times over.

It’s surprising, then, that so few have thought to merge the discourse of God and the discourse of bod. Linking the two has a number of strategic advantages over the standard “look better in a bikini” sales pitch — most notably the chance for followers to outsource their motivation to a higher power.

It’s also an opportunity for the church to prove its value in something concrete — ounces and pounds — rather than the more intangible calculus of spiritual progress.

Ya'll be careful out there.

God-Fearing and Free: Reviews of a Cultural History of the Cold War.

Paul Harvey

A brief note, and a couple of excellent contrasting reviews, of a new book sure to draw a lot of attention: Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War, just out with Harvard U. Press.

This isn't your father's Cold War book, nor a foreign policy/diplomatic history such as Melvyn Leffler's For the Soul of Mankind. Nor it is one of those "all those crazy duck-and-cover drills, my weren't those funny" books -- not that I dislike those books, and students love them, but that territory has been covered. Rather, this is a searching cultural history of American thought and culture during the Cold War, focusing especially on the liberal elite Cold Warriors who provided much of the discourse from that period.

The link above takes you to a description, table of contents, etc. for the book. Here, I wanted to call your attention to two thoughtful reviews; both praise the achievements of the book, but the first provides some critical reflections and dissent.

Molly Worthen, " 'Counter-Modernism' and Cold War America," extensively reviews the volume, finds much to like, but dissents from portions of what she calls a "learned but highly theoretical intellectual history," one she finds too detached from the real world of policymakers.

By contrast, in The New Republic's online book review section The Book, Michael Kimmage finds God-Fearing and Free a "brilliant and original work of scholarship" in the best tradition of American Studies -- in other words, he likes most precisely what Worthen finds most problematic. The book discusses at considerable length the theme of "innocence," one a staple of American studies scholarship and one revived here to great effect.

I can't wait to dig into this text in more detail; in the interim, these two thoughtful reviews provide much food for thought.

Rereading Creation: Teaching About The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder

Rereading Creation

Everett Hamner

A good deal of my work has to do with questions of origins. I teach a liberal arts and sciences gateway course on evolution; I am writing a book about how science and religion have interacted in the last century’s fiction. But as a scholar of contemporary American fiction, one course I didn’t imagine teaching was Literature of the Bible. The first time I offered it resulted from a schedule fluke, but it impacted the students so deeply that this fall I’ll be teaching it for the third time. This canon still matters a great deal to students who self-identify both as religious and irreligious.

A key element of the course’s popularity, I think, is that it takes on modern controversies about the Bible and Christianity very directly. We discuss feminism, homosexuality, immigration, terrorism, stem cell research, and other topics alongside the biblical texts most frequently cited when Americans make normative claims. Using documentary films like Craig Detweiler and John Marks’s courageous Purple State of Mind and Daniel Karslake’s poignant For the Bible Tells Me So, I pursue an atmosphere in which students can rethink many of their foundational assumptions in relative safety. In our dominantly white, homogeneous, lower-to-middle-class, Midwestern context, the complicated wisdom that emerges can be life-altering.

I thought about this course while reading a new book Paul Harvey sent along recently by Columbia Theological Seminary Professor of Old Testament William P. Brown. I haven’t read a lot of biblical criticism since my own seminary days, but The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford, 2010) is a refreshing reminder of what such studies can provide. The book isn’t perfect—there are moments when its alliances of biblical and scientific metaphors feel forced—but it effectively opens what remains a crucial discussion of genre. In approaching intersections of eschatology and cosmology, of predestination and physics, it provides a thoughtful inspection of our hermeneutical lenses.

In past versions of Literature of the Bible, the primary text I have used to get at questions of genre and interpretation is Marcus J. Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally (HarperSanFrancisco,2001). Borg recommends that Bible readers adopt a posture of “postcritical naivete,” whereby one “hear[s] the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.” One of his best elucidations of this attitude builds on the way many Native American storytellers begin their performances: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true” (50). Like such narrators, Borg demonstrates that story-truth extends beyond factual evidence, that wisdom exceeds empiricism without countermanding it.

Why is this realization so important, yet so elusive? In my experience with Literature of the Bible, almost every student openly or secretly expects in week one that a choice must be made: either embrace the world of religious tradition and personal righteousness or adopt the route of scientific abstraction and intellectual integrity. And beneath their politically-correct facades, many of the students can only characterize opposing convictions with inflammatory terms. But a realization that consistently helps both groups is that religion is not just Christianity, and apparent tensions between the natural and the supernatural extend well beyond this tradition’s purview.

Consider the scientism critiqued in this paragraph from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, I invite them:

The spider came out first. She drank from the edge of the pool, careful to keep the delicate eggs sacs on her abdomen out of the water. She retraced her path, leaving faint crisscrossing patterns in the fine yellow sand. He remembered stories about her. She waited in certain locations for people to come to her for help. She alone had known how to outsmart the malicious mountain Ka’t’sina who imprisoned the rain clouds in the northwest room of his magical house. Spider Woman had told Sun Man how to win the storm clouds back from the Gambler so they would be free again to bring rain and snow to the people. He knew what white people thought about the stories. In school the science teacher had explained what superstition was, and then held the science textbook up for the class to see the true source of explanations. He had studied those books, and he had no reasons to believe the stories any more. The science books explained the causes and effects. But old Grandma always used to say, ‘Back in time immemorial, things were different, the animals could talk to human beings and many magical things still happened.’ He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop. (87, emphasis in original)

This passage shares a great deal with the mindset Brown’s book encourages: an openness to the possibility of meaning beyond factuality, of wonder beyond mastery, whether the facts to be mastered spring from religious or scientific sources. As the introduction to The Seven Pillars proposes, the book is “a tour of the biblical contours of creation conducted in conversation with science” (5), an expedition that looks beyond the obvious passages in Genesis to equally significant ones in Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Second Isaiah. While Brown may too easily equate “biblical” with “Christian,” his book models a wonder that usefully contests both religious and scientific absolutism. In this he stretches toward the same goal I pursue for my students: a sense that profound meaning has not disappeared with secularization, that not just “long long ago” but even now, there is great reason for awe. In fact this response remains the source of our best science, a point also made by a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I think biblical criticism like Brown’s may prove essential if our culture is to move beyond simplistic arguments about evolution, stem cell research, and genomics. So much of the resistance to biological knowledge and medical intervention is bound up with fear that God is being dishonored, and many Americans need to see either-or thinking about these issues give way to more complex both-and possibilities. By reading Genesis beside preexisting creation narratives like Mesopotamia’s Enuma elish, Brown’s book pulls readers toward active interpretations of their scriptures, much like those of other literature. In the process, he provides fresh images with clear implications for contemporary debates.

Two quick concluding examples: I like the way Brown wittily argues that instead of defining women in terms of men, “in Genesis 2, the separation of flesh makes possible gendered differentiation and, in turn, sexual union. Call it splitting the ‘adam. Through the creation of the woman, the groundling has become a man” (83). In other words, we Earth creatures only find gender identity in relationship; there is no “male” without “female.” Similarly—and unlike too many biblical commentaries—his book recognizes that the natural world of the Pentateuch is “red in tooth and claw” long before human beings appear on the scene, and that in representing “the quintessential ‘alpha male,’” Genesis is hardly attempting to refute concepts of biological evolution that would not emerge for thousands of years. I’ll be referring to Brown in my next version of Literature of the Bible for that reason alone: whether self-identifying as Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, or otherwise, my students need every opportunity to grasp that neither the Bible nor any other great wisdom literature is the enemy of scientific discovery.

Law, Literature, and the Fading of American Protestantism

Paul Harvey

American Protestantism remains deeply influential, if not always consciously then in terms of modes of thought and styles of literary and political discourse. Yet are we seeing the end of America's de facto Protestant establishment culture? Maybe not the end, but perhaps a significant diminution. Consider these examples from literary scholarship, and from the makeup of the Supreme Court.

First, and most obviously since it's in the news, supposing that Elena Kagan is confirmed, the Supreme Court will have no Protestants on it for the first time in American history. This may or may not be important in terms of jurisprudence -- there doesn't seem to be a Protestant jurisprudence in the same way one can find a Catholic natural law jurisprudence in Alito and others -- but it's an interesting piece of religious demography anyway. The impact of the pick in terms of the religious demography of American institutions is considered here, and Diana Butler Bass offers a lament for the passing of American Protestantism. John Fea adds the following:

Dan Gilgoff has written an interesting news piece on this development. Gilgoff quotes Boston University religion scholar Steven Prothero, who calls this "an amazing irony, given how central Protestantism has been to American culture." Most religion scholars, Gilgoff notes, believe that the lack of Protestant candidates is directly related to the "absence of a strong tradition of lawyering among evangelical Protestants." He continues: "For much of the last 150 years, evangelical Christianity has stressed an emotional theology of heart over head--not a recipe for producing legal scholars with eyes fixed on the Supreme Court." Yet another consequence of Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

This possible decline of the American Protestant center ultimately may influence our cultural language, literature, symbols, and metaphors more than any particular political or legal institutions. Adam Kirsch, "Heirs to the Throne," reviews Jonathan Alter's Pen of Iron: American Prose and The King James Bible. “It was in America that the potential of the 1611 translation to determine the foundational language and symbolic imagery of a whole culture was most fully realized.," Alter writes, and the book considers that argument most deeply in looking at three works of American literature:

At the core of Pen of Iron—the title, of course, is itself a Biblical allusion (“the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond” Jeremiah 17:1)—is Alter’s analysis of the Bible’s influence on three great American novels: Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom, and Seize the Day. In discussing these books, Alter shows that that influence cannot be measured strictly in allusions or verbal echoes. Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow do not simply use Biblical language, they think in Biblical categories—especially, Alter argues, when they are challenging the faith and morality that the Bible teaches.

Reviewer Adam Kirsch then concludes by wondering about the decline of that influence:

It would be interesting to try to read more recent American fiction through Alter’s lens: can you hear the Bible in David Foster Wallace’s prose, or Lydia Davis’s? “The essential point for the history of our literature.” Alter writes at the end of Pen of Iron, “is that the resonant language and the arresting vision of the canonical text, however oldentime they may be, continue to ring in cultural memory.” I wonder how faint the ring can grow before we stop hearing it completely.

I wish someone would write a book like Alter's focusing on American music. Don't look at me, I'm busy.

The Thoreau Diaries

by Michael Altman

John Summers has a review of the new edition of Henry David Thoreau's The Journal 1837-1861 edited by Damion Searls over at the New Republic. Usually, I'm interested in Thoreau because of his thoughts on the Bhagavad Gita or The Laws of Menu but Summers makes an interesting point contrasting Thoreau with his Puritan forefathers:

Thoreau’s “inner voice” did not sound anything like John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, or Samuel Sewell. “It is a certain faeryland where we live,” he recorded along a walk one June afternoon. “I wonder that I ever get five miles on my way, the walk is so crowded with events and phenomena.” Like the Puritans, Thoreau envisioned New England as an enchanted world; but unlike their journals and diaries, he did not suggest an unconscious conversing intimately with God, and he broke decisively from their Augustinian style of self-accusation.

In Walden, Thoreau sits at the side of the pond and reads his Gita. He delights in the thought that the water at Walden and the water flowing from the Himalayas are one and the same and that he and the brahman share a drink together:

I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug.I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

On one level, it would tempting to read Thoreau's vision of unity between Walden and the Ganges and he and the brahman through the lens of the Gita and an adoption of Indian mysticism--after all, Thoreau claimed to be an American yogi. But Summers' small point illumines that more is going on here. Thoreau is part of a larger American Protestant tradition that sees the world through eyes of enchantment. While the Puritans may have seen evil in the wilderness and Thoreau found enlightenment in the woods, both intimately connected the natural and supernatural worlds. What draws Thoreau to the Gita is not only its philosophical difference from American Christianity but also its similarities to his New England ancestry. Thoreau's reading of the Gita emphasizes its commonalities with Puritan thought. In this early period of encounter between America and other religious cultures it is too easy to focus on the ways Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson adopted and adapted Asian religious cultures without considering how they made sense of these new cultures as Americans (and a special kind of Protestant Christian American at that.) We have to really think through the American in American yogi.

Samson Occom's Dream

Paul Harvey

I blogged about this collection a couple of years ago, if I recall correctly, but time to do so again as I'm going through it now more carefully and thoroughly: Joanna Brooks, ed., the Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America (with a foreword by Native American scholar Robert Warrior) -- Oxford Univ. Press, 2006.

Occom is best-known as the student (and later critic) of Eleazar Wheelock, and Indian emissary for Moor's Indian Charity School in England for two years before returning to New England for a career as a minister, author of hymns, and increasingly bitter critic of the treatment accorded to himself and his people. He was the author of a short autobiography and a classic address at an eighteenth-century execution, "A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian," from 1772. Those are of course reprinted here (the autobiography in 2 drafts, showing the handwritten amendments that you don't see in other reprintings).

What is especially fascinating here, though, are not the pieces that have dominated reprintings of Occom's work elsewhere, but the extensive letters, petitions, tribal documents, diary entries, and sermons, which document the daily texture of Occom's life. Brooks provides a splendid introduction which sets Occom in a different context than we see him in other literature:

Occom thought of himself first as a Mohegan with profound responsibilities to his own tribal community and to American Indian people in general. He was an herbal doctor, a hunter, a fisherman, a father, a husband, a tribal leader, and an intertribal political figure as well as an ordained Presbyterian minister, a schoolteacher, and an itinerant minister. . . . He could write a letter, preach a sermon, or tell a story by carving a box. . . Occom's elm bark box reminds us that English language literacy did not cancel out other forms of Native writing. It emblematizes the fullness, the richness, and the complexity of the thought-worlds inhabited by Occom and other early American Indian writers and intellectuals.

Occom left behind the "largest extant body of writing produced by an American Indian author before Santee Sioux intellectual Charles Eastman (1858-1939) began his writing career . . . " This volume is a much purchase for your university library, and a painstaking work of scholarly/literary recovery that brings to life a figure who often frustrates or disappoints readers who encounter him in the sparse documents reprinted in many anthologies.

Just as a taste, here is Occom's recording of a dream he had in 1786, of his friend George Whitefield, the famous evangelist and "divine dramatist" of the Great Awakening:

Last night I had a remarkable dream about [Mr] Whitefield. I thought he was preaching as he use to, when he was alive, I thought he was at a certain place where there was a great Number of Indians and Some White People - - and I had been Preaching, and he came to me, and took hold of my wright Hand and he put his face to my face, and rub'd his face to mine and Said, -- I am glad that you preach the Excellency of Jesus Christ yet, and Said, go on and the Lord be with thee, we Shall now Soon done, and then he Strechd himself upon the ground flat on his face and reachd his hands forward, and mad a mark with his Hand, and Said I will out doe and over reach all Sinners, and I thought he Barked like a Dog, with a Thundering Voice.

Here's a description of the work from its Oxford page:

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom's writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

Students, Masons, and Witches

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

It’s the second week of the semester, and already three students with questions about Dan Brown’s forthcoming bestseller The Lost Symbol. I tend to shrug off most references to the world’s most famous symbologist, Robert Langdon. “It’s certainly entertaining,” I’m apt to say, “and definitely more historical than ‘Ice Road Truckers’.” I’ll even admit to the student (or the odd friend or family member) that I read The Da Vinci Code during a beach vacation after a long year of graduate school. But that’s it… I’m not going there… Moving on…

Until now. Based on the recently released cover of The Lost Symbol, it looks like we’re in store for a rise in the number of queries about the influence of Freemasonry in American history and its lasting impact in the 21st century. Move over National Treasure Part One and Two (and Three?), there’s a new Grand Master in town.

Fortunately, there’re also a couple of books that can help us (or at least me) speak about Freemasonry without too much sarcasm and with at least a little confidence. Steven Bullock’s Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (UNC Press) is a good place to start. More recently, Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion associates Freemasonry with the likes of Mormonism, Universalism, and Transcendentalism because of their common preoccupation with the power of the mind and the democratizing effects of their respective societies. Here are a few more books on the subject, though I can’t vouch for their quality (I’m just the messenger): Corey Walker, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (Univ. of Illinois Press); Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927 (UNC Press); William Moore, Masonic Temples: Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes (Univ. of Tenn. Press); and Clyde Forsberg, Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture (Columbia Univ. Press).

However, if the new semester’s already got you down and you’re looking to avoid another rough read of the latest must-read monograph, then you might consider Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Now, I’ll be the first to admit my guarded skepticism at the academic quality of any book to be reviewed in the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, and the Christian Science Monitor, not to mention a book with a trailer, an author interview on ABC’s Good Morning America, and a few weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Is it that I don’t trust popular taste? Or am I just jealous?

But here’s the kicker—Katherine Howe’s one of us. She’s a doctoral candidate in American and New England Studies at Boston University with a dissertation entitled (at least according to the program website) “Witchcraft in North America through Primary Sources.” Okay, so the dissertation doesn’t sound all that sexy (isn’t it a rule that dissertation titles are supposed to sound uninteresting?) But the first chapter of Physick Book is the scene of a Harvard grad student’s comprehensive examinations in history, during which, for a moment, I thought I saw a footnote to David Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, John Demos’s Entertaining Satan, and Carol Karlsen’s Devil in the Shape of a Woman. Did I mention that Physick Book is about the Salem witch trials, a subject with a reputation for silliness that might even surpass that of masonry?

Howe writes Physick Book with one foot in the academic world and the other in the bookselling world. Those who’ve read the standard dozen or so books on Puritanism will know when Howe is waving the scholarly flag. There's even a bibliography for further reading on the Physick Book website. Grad students (and the recently graduated) might get a kick out of the main character’s confrontations with her dissertation committee members and source materials. And most everyone should be entertained. "But you don’t have to take my word for it…"

Faulkner, Dirty Harry, and My Disappointing Summer Break

Art Remillard

Summers always begin with high ambitions, and end with crushing disappointments. Case in point: this summer—as a “side project”—I had hoped to read a handful of Faulkner novels. Yet last week, I managed to finish only one, The Unvanquished. I started here since, as Faulkner once remarked, it is “the easiest to read.” (I have the “lazy gene”—don’t judge me.) Born from a series of short stories, Faulkner introduces the names (Sartoris and Snopes) and places (Yoknapatawpha County) that populate his other novels. More significantly, The Unvanquished is an accessible entry into a central theme in Faulkner’s body of work, that people posses, as he summarized in his Nobel Prize speech, “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

Indeed, in the novel’s opening pages, as the Civil War rages, we find the twelve-year-old Bayard Sartoris “playing war” with Ringo, his black slave-friend of the same age. This image of youthful ignorance represents a moral point of departure for Bayard, who would slowly resist many of the norms of the white “southern way of life.” When he first sees a “Yankee,” for example, he remarks with incredulity, “He looks just like a man.” The “stranger” is thus humanized, if only for a brief moment.

The final chapter punctuates Bayard’s moral transformation. His father, Colonel John Sartoris, had been a Civil War hero and a “redeemer” during Reconstruction. But Sartoris the Elder is murdered by his rival Ben Redmond. And Sartoris the Younger is bound by an Old South honor code to enact vengeance. Earlier in the novel, Bayard avenges his grandmother’s death, killing off the “murdering scoundrel” Grumby. But the war had since ended, and a new era was emerging. Even Colonel Sartoris, whose past was defined by death and warfare, tells his son before his murder, “I am tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end.”

So Bayard confronts his father’s murder, armed only with a “turn the other cheek” ethic, cultivated in part by his deceased grandmother. In a surreal series of events, the surprised Redmond stands, fires two shots into the air, and “went away . . . from Mississippi and never came back.” A gathering of bloodthirsty men witness Redmond departing, dumbfounded yet also aware that “maybe there has been enough killing.” They see in Bayard a new kind of courage, which is both counterintuitive and effective. Still, lingering in the background is Ringo, whose skin color puts him on the periphery of Bayard’s imagined sacred community of the New South. Ironically, Bayard’s moral code—and by extension the moral code of the New South—alienates his black friend, but acknowledges the humanity in his father’s murderer.

Alongside this irony, The Unvanquished left a powerful image of active non-violence in my head. Fortuitously enough, a day after finishing the novel, I watched Gran Torino. For those who haven’t seen Gran Torino, I will only say that Dirty Harry's film is sufficiently Faulknerian. Keep an eye out for two contrasting confessions at the end—one is perfunctorily delivered through a confessional screen to a pasty and persistent Catholic priest; and the other is passionately delivered through a screen door to his young and astute Hmong neighbor. These scenes in themselves capture the film’s close inspection of compassion, sacrifice, and endurance.

So perhaps my summer of crushing disappointment wasn’t so disappointing after all. Oh who am I kidding, of course it was.

Healing Waters and Streams of Joy

John Turner

Sixty-four weeks on the NYT trade paperback bestseller list and counting (#3 last time I checked). Reason enough to catch up on popular evangelicalism during an end-of-the-summer vacation.

W. Paul Young's The Shack has generated -- by my inexact estimation -- more excitement and sales than any evangelical offering since Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. It must be fun to have five million copies of one's book in print.


While The Shack certainly affirms Warren's signature "It's not about you" opening, when it comes to the church Young inhabits a very different, anti-institutional stream of American evangelicalism. Young belongs to no church, and much of his first novel rails against the regulations, responsibilities, expectations, and judgments of church-based Christianity.

Last year, several prominent evangelicals, such as Albert Mohler of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, publicly criticized The Shack's purported heresies: a strong suggestion of universal salvation, a thoroughly equal and relational Trinity, and his depiction of God the Father ("Papa") as female. Those interested in theological discussions can find ample opportunities elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Young's book unfolds in roughly two parts. First, he begins with a tight, compelling narrative about a man emotionally stunted at the hands of an abusive father (Mackenzie "Mack" Allen Philips) who then endures the kidnapping and murder of his beloved young daughter. Theodicy, in a nutshell, the timeless question. Second, Mack travels to the scene of his daughter's murder (a shack with the bloodstains still visible) and meets God, an embodied, loving, and relational Trinity.

As a scholar of evangelicalism, it's hard to simply enjoy popular evangelical fiction (frankly, this is probably difficult for a large chunk of humanity). Moreover, The Shack generates obvious objections. The encounter with God often devolves into overly didactic theological lessons which interrupt almost any sense of narrative. Young's answer to the problem of evil is hardly original -- that God is working through human events for the ultimate good. Mack grows spiritually, and plays a role in the divine economy of redemption, by forgiving both his abusive father and his daughter's killer.

Those objections aside, The Shack is nevertheless hard to set aside. Young's imaginative portrayal of the Trinity is engaging, and his anti-institutional presentation of God appeals to a generation of evangelicals yearning for a more authentic and relational Christianity.

The veneer of machismo that graced the Promise Keeper's movement created a false sense (in my view) that evangelical men were eager and domineering patriarchs (partly put to rest by Brad Wilcox's Soft Patriarchs). Mack's conversations with God lead to divine weeping, tears that are "healing waters and a stream of joy." Regardless of complementarian niceties, evangelicalism is not moving in a patriarchal direction.

Perhaps The Shack's success augurs a shift in the mentality of American evangelicals. The Left Behind series originated in the mid-point of the Clinton presidency, a particularly beleaguered moment for evangelicals. Its apocalyptic narrative eventually ended in triumph. Rick Warren is hardly a triumphant evangelical, though both his massive institution-building and last year's presidential forum suggest a confidence about the role of contemporary evangelicals. Young, ultimately, suggests a far more quiet and subversive role for Christian believers -- agents of reconciliation seeking to heal relationships in a broken world.

The Doubt, the Faith, and the Satanic Origins of Harry Potter (Egads!)

As a follow-up to Phil Sinitiere's posting last week about novels in history classrooms and related heresies, here's the beginning of a pre-press book review in Literature and Theology from RIAH's real literature scholar, Everett Hamner. The book in question is Conversations with American Writers: The Doubt, the Faith, the In-Between, by Dale Brown, published last year by Eerdmans.

by Everett Hamner

ABOUT A decade ago, I walked into my local Family Christian Store®. This US chain’s website claims to represent ‘the largest brand in the Christian retailing market,’ and I was curious about its literary wares. After a half an hour in the fiction section—in which themes of apocalypse, sexual purity and political insularity figured heavily—I carried a book entitled something like The Satanic Origins of Harry Potter to the front desk. Upon politely inquiring as to criteria by which books were selected, I was told with equal politeness, ‘whatever sells’.

Herein lies the apparent dilemma for US novelists like many featured in Dale Brown’s most recent book of interviews, Conversations with American Writers—which might just as well be subtitled, The Inseparability of Faith and Doubt. In pursuing wide audiences for stories with theological elements, how does one reach both (i) the dominantly secular and liberal market catered to by most US booksellers and (ii) the dominantly religious and conservative market served by ‘Christian’ suppliers? Some might immediately reply that this is an impossible or even unworthy goal; an author may choose (i) or (ii), but not both. However, Brown’s book may be most valuable for the way it deconstructs the binary itself. Again and again, we hear from authors who cross such perceived boundaries without hesitation. If categories were necessary, most of Brown’s interviewees would be more easily filed as religious liberals or secular conservatives than as straightforward fundamentalists or atheists, and many of them are managing to straddle the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ markets described above.

Taken as a whole, Brown’s book of conversations offers what could be a startlingly diverse collage of perspectives on US Christendom—particularly its more evangelical regions—and on lived experiences of the faith–doubt dynamic.

Continue the review here, including its engagement with such tantalizing subjects as epistemology, literary mysticism, Jan Karon, and David James Duncan (whose The Brothers K, despite its length, really should be added to the many comment-recommendations affixed to Phil's post).

A Novel Approach to Teaching American Religious History

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

For my American Religious History class this fall, I'm considering revamping the course by assigning 3 or 4 novels (and perhaps a memoir). As I've done in the past, Religion in American Life will serve as the main anchor text for the course, and I'll have a host of other primary and secondary readings for students to examine.

I once assigned a memoir, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), and asked students to consider Baldwin's ideas about the relationship between race, religion and democratic society. Students enjoyed the book--partly because of its relative brevity--but mostly due to its deep and hefty subject matter and Baldwin's engaging and accessible writing. I will probably assign it again at some point.


Some have suggested using Black Robe (1985), and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952). Malcolm X's Autobiography seems to be a mainstay. For me, the fact that each of these books have been made into a movie makes them compelling assignments--rich ground to discuss interpretive vantage points via text and film--but certainly there are many other worthy choices. I'd like to assign novels (or memoirs) that cover multiple time periods and address a variety of themes.

So, what are your experiences using novels (or memoirs) to teach American religious history? What novels (or memoirs) have worked best for specific periods? What novels (or memoirs) work best to address topics such as gender, immigration, race, ethnicity, class, unbelief, or sexuality? What novels (or memoirs) explore lived religion or popular religion, or even religious pluralism? What are the possibilities, promises, and peril of the novel (or memoir) approach?

Paul Harvey and John Updike: Religion in American Culture

Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey, the voice of a conservative, midwestern Protestant, genial radio populism, has died, while Rush Limbaugh, bombast intact, has risen to be unofficial head of the GOP. Makes me wonder if libertarianism is supplanting moralism in the struggle for the soul of the right. For the record, I shared an Oklahoma birthright with Paul Harvey, but nothing else, so you so-called friends of mine can stop sending me your smart-ass emails as of now, k?

Paul Harvey wove homespun stories amidst brief dollops of conservative commentary so deftly that most associated him with the rest of the story, not with any political messages.

Limbaugh's populism largely accords with Harvey's views, but is comparatively areligious, and his humor is as deliberately obnoxious as possible (to put it charitably) in contrast to Harvey's Reader's Digest style of gentle ribbing.

It makes me wonder if a national figure dispensing religious-themed homilies could ever again rule the airwaves a la Father Coughlin, Charles E. Fuller, or the many others who were such a part of American broadcasting. For more on Fuller in particular, see Phil Goff, "We Have Heard the Joyful Sound," available on J-STOR (institutional subscription required). Heck, even 'Reinhold Niebuhr did some very successful radio broadcasts, something impossible to conceive of today.

I've never connected John Updike and Paul Harvey before, but will do so now. Both came approximately from the same era, and Updike's perfectly pitched prose reached a New Yorker audience as deftly as Paul Harvey's genial stories attracted those who had never heard of the New Yorker, and wouldn't have read it if they had.

I felt some distance from both, perhaps more suprisingly from Updike. John Updike was never a writer I could love; it seemed as though his work, especially his reviews, often lingered over not-so-interesting subjects, or expressed not-so-interesting views on interesting subjects (such as in his review of Matt's Sutton's biography of Sister Aimee), in a highbrow Paul Harvey sort of way; and his most memorable character, in the Rabbit novels, just seemed a little too Sinclair-Lewis-like for my tastes. Philip Roth was more my man -- American Pastoral and other novels perfectly exploring the rise and unraveling of a certain segment of American life, as well as being tremendous family chronicles of Jewish Americans, the Faulkner of New Jersey both in terms of being rich in local history and in prose full of passionate intensity.

But then, in fairness, I read Updike now and again, in bits and spurts, and often found myself annoyed at his beautifully written but seemingly somewhat vacuous reviews in the New Yorker. Ian MacEwan has me rethinking Updike, by placing him also as a novelist for whom religious questions were central. Seemingly more comic than angst-ridden, his characters somehow, in ways they could never figure out themselves, found themselves perplexed by the most religious of questions, even amidst the most mundane of circumstances. A brief excerpt:

This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God. When it suited him, he could easily absorb and be impressed by physics, biology, astronomy, but he was constitutionally unable to "make the leap of unfaith." The "weight" of personal death did not allow it, and much seriousness and dark humor derive from this tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread

This is the finest eulogy for Updike I think I have seen, and makes me want to go back and pick up some of his work that I deliberately avoided before.

As for Paul Harvey -- well, he does have a son, Paul Harvey Jr, who broadcasts, albeit now in competition with Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee, who are also vying for the spot of Head Folkster Persona:

And so, as Journey sang on the final scene of that great classic of American religious drama, The Sopranos,

well the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on . . .