John Wilson
Books & CultureDecember 16, 2014
Once again I feel like a character from Philip K. Dick’s Now Wait for Last Year. Did someone slip JJ-180 into my buttermilk? At least I know that in this particular time-stream, I’m supposed to be listing my Favorite Books of 2014.
The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith
Timothy Larsen (Author)
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
266 pages
$48.30
As usual, this list makes no pretensions to identify the “best” books, nor even to include all of those that dazzled me in the course of a year of reading. But these ARE the ones that came most readily to mind when I entered the requisite trance and began writing semi-automatically on the back of an envelope—in this case, one I’ve not opened, from the Social Security Adminstration (#theagingbrain).
I should add that—also as usual—it was a good year for Books & Culture writers. It seems churlish to mention only a handful of their books here, but let these stand for a much larger number: David Skeel’s True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World; Karen Swallow Prior’s Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Like of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist; David Martin’s Religion and Power: No Logos Without Mythos (excellent to read alongside Andy Crouch’s 2013 book Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power); Tiffany Kriner’s The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading; Daniel Taylor’s novel Death Comes for the Deconstructionist; Scott Cairns’ Idiot Psalms; and Glitter Bomb by Aaron Belz.
So, here’s the list. The titles are mostly in alphabetical order (and the logic of departures from that will be clear), followed at the end by the Book of the Year. For additional thoughts on the Books of 2014, keep an eye out for a piece I’m doing for First Things (assuming it passes muster there).
America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of the Nation. Grant Wacker. My only objection to this superb book—even David Hollinger, who positively loathes Graham, calls it far and away the best thing ever written on its subject—is its faintly grandiose subtitle, which can be overlooked as a convention of the trade. I’ve been waiting for years for Grant Wacker to finish it, and the wait was worth it.
Arts & Entertainments. Christopher Beha. Enough of the handwringing over the long-gone heyday of “the Catholic novel,” whenever that Golden Age is supposed to have been. (And let it be noted that Walker Percy, whom I revere, was very much hit-and-miss as a novelist.) I hope that reading this novel—Beha’s second—will send you on to his first, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, which I was directed to by the late D. G. Myers.
Back Channel. Stephen Carter. Set around the Cuban Missile Crisis, Back Channel (as I wrote in my review) “is a spy novel, a Washington novel, a JFK novel; and the latest installment in Carter's fictional history of ‘the darker nation.’ . . . Carter's uncompromising lucidity is tonic, but Back Channel is also simply a delight to read. (How odd that a book which soberly considers the threat of nuclear annihilation should also be so funny! But we are strange creatures, aren’t we?)”
Breathturn to Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry. Paul Celan. Translated and with commentary by Pierre Joris. The greatest writers can survive even the hyperbole of their fawning admirers. Put this massive bilingual volume in a stack by your bed and read it throughout the New Year.
Cover. Peter Mendelsund. + What We See When We Read. Peter Mendelsund. Books—the old-fashioned kind, with paper and binding and such—are dinosaurs, headed for extinction. Or so we’re told. Who knows. Meanwhile, handsome books continue to appear, and some of the most seductive feature covers by Peter Mendelsund, who is not only an endlessly inventive designer but also an exceptionally perceptive reader of the books he designs and of books more generally. (Maybe there’s a connection.)
From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story. Mark Noll. + A Patterned Life: Faith, History, and David Bebbington. Eileen Bebbington. Mark Noll and David Bebbington are two of the finest living historians. Almost exact contemporaries, they are both deeply evangelical (they’ve done more than their share to form the evangelical mind), and they are good friends as well. It’s a treat to have these two books appearing in the same year: an unusually personal narrative by Mark, and a witty and affectionate account of David’s life and work by his wife, Eileen. (Not to be missed: the photo of David “in secondhand bookshop, Eastbourne, Sussex, 1983.”)
The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany. Donald E. Westlake. Edited by Levi Stahl. Because he mostly wrote crime fiction (some of it under the name “Richard Stark”), and—even worse, from the standpoint of the guardians of our literature—a lot of it very funny, Donald Westlake (1933-2008) is almost never mentioned in canonical accounts of contemporary fiction. But that hasn’t prevented countless readers from savoring his sentences. This nonfiction miscellany, lovingly edited by Levi Stahl, will give those readers a clearer sense of the man behind the books while providing a good deal of instruction and delight.
The Girl Next Door. Ruth Rendell. Here I’ll quote from my review in Printers Row: “Rendell is 84. Her first novel, From Doon With Death, was published 50 years ago. Since then, she has written more than 60 novels (14 of them under the pen name Barbara Vine) and several collections of stories. Like her contemporary P.D. James, she is one of the finest writers of her time.
“In The Girl Next Door, Rendell is not only writing from the perspective of old age; she’s writing explicitly about old age — about the way diverse individuals experience it, and the way it’s perceived by people who haven’t yet reached that stage in life. (Her wit, always mordant, has never been sharper than when she skewers patronizing assumptions about the ‘elderly.’)”
Glimmerglass. Marly Youmans. And here I’ll quote from my review on the website of Books & Culture: “Some years ago, I described the novelist and poet Marly Youmans as ‘the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers.’ That's still true today (so I think), and if you haven’t tried Youmans yet, her new novel, Glimmerglass, is a very good place to start.
“There’s a long tradition of stories and novels that have an imaginary painting (sometimes paintings, plural) at their heart: Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece,” Henry James’ “The Real Thing,” Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ross Macdonald’s The Blue Hammer (his last novel), Andrew Klavan’s The Uncanny, and many more—you could make your own list. Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure, one of the most interesting novels of 2014, centers on a lost painting.
“Glimmerglass also centers on a painting. If the title sounds familiar but you can’t quite place it, you must have been a reader of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales sometime in your youth. Glimmerglass was Cooper’s fictional name for Ostego Lake, near the present-day village of Cooperstown—‘Cooper Patent,’ in Youmans’ novel, another allusion.”
By the way, having mentioned (in connection with Peter Mendelsund) the pleasures of beautifully designed and made books, I should note here (as I did in the review) that Glimmerglass is gorgeous.
The Leaning Girl. Benoit Peeters and Francois Schuiten. Photography by Marie-Francois Plissart. Translated by Stephen D. Smith. This is one of my favorite “graphic novels” (or whatever you want to call them) from the last decade. It is connected in my mind both with Glimmerglass and with Station Eleven (see below). In a note to readers of this English translation, Benoit Peeters writes that it may be precisely “because The Obscure Cities”—the Schuiten-Peeters series in which this volume belongs—“is fundamentally so full of holes and destined to remain incomplete that it invites so much outside participation from our readers.” I can attest to that, since I came to this installment without any context—and was drawn deeply into it.
Love and Treasure. Ayelet Waldman. This novel is Waldman’s best book to date (or so I think), a triptych in three times: at the end of World War II in Europe; in the US and Europe (with excursions to Israel) in the present; and early in the 20th century in Europe; a prologue is set in the US in the present. At the heart of the story is a (fictitious) painting, powerfully enigmatic. One way to describe the book is to say that it wrestles with disillusionment and hope. How can we live honestly, not deceiving ourselves yet not giving way to cynicism or despair?
Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science. Daniel P. Todes. It turns out that most of what people think they know about Pavlov is wrong. This massive biography (855 pages, counting the notes and the index) sets the record straight. But why should anyone want to read it, outside a small circle of specialists? In part because the story of a determinedly “materialist” account of life and of human beings in particular did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In part because Todes gives us another chapter in the re-writing of 20th-century Russian intellectual history that is being carried on independently by scholars in a number of fields coming from very different angles (including a new understanding of the fate of science in the Soviet era). And in part simply because Pavlov was a fascinating man.
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. Hermione Lee. One of my favorite novelists, written about by one of the best biographers now at work. I was so eager for this one, I read the British edition when it was published a year ago. Keep an eye out for my review forthcoming in Commonweal.
The Second Sex. Michael Robbins. For my money, Michael Robbins is the most interesting new American poet in a long time. His 2012 debut Alien vs. Predator put him on the literary map in spectacular fashion, though I had the sense that many of the people buzzing about that book had misread it—a judgment confirmed by the response to The Second Sex, which doesn’t fit in any of the boxes with which Enlightened Opinion c. 2014 sorts things out. There are 36 poems in this new collection, and not a wasted word. “You’ll never understand. / You’ll never undersea. / I feel like a natural woman / is just too real for me.”
Station Eleven. Emily St. John Mandel. Forget the emphasis on “dystopia” and “genre fiction” which has muddled many accounts of this book (including some that have been quite appreciative). Yes, the premise is a pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population and leaves the survivors without all the stuff that we take for granted. But this is really a book about imagination and art and how we find order and meaning in our lives. We follow a doughty band of performers on their circuit from one tiny settlement to another in the upper Midwest, performing Shakespeare and music. The title alludes to a fictitious comic or “graphic novel,” and here I’ll quote something I said about Glimmerglass: “The notion of a painting—an imaginary painting [or an imaginary comic]—described in a work of fiction may seem rather odd. You can't google it—you can't view the image anywhere. And yet the very fact that it exists only in the shared imagination of the writer and reader seems crucial to its power.”
BOOK OF THE YEAR
The Slain God: Anthropologists & the Christian Faith. Timothy Larsen. For the first time, we have a repeat winner. Timothy Larsen’s Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England was Books & Culture’s 2006 Book of the Year. Like Crisis of Doubt, which provided a counternarrative to the familiar story, according to which virtually every thinking person in late-Victorian England either lost his faith or maintained a pale simulacrum of genuine belief, Larsen’s new book, The Slain God, counters a staple of received opinion: the notion that just as surely as geology, say, undermines Young Earth Creationism, so anthropology fatally discredits the claims of orthodox Christianity. Larsen tells the stories of a half-dozen highly influential figures in the history of British anthropology, several of whom were themselves practicing Christians (while also showing how dubious were the conclusions of some anthropologists who thought they were indeed refuting Christian beliefs). Witty, penetrating, following the evidence where it leads, this book is a great delight.
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Stranger in a Strange Land: Amy Peterson
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This is a guest column by Amy Peterson, an ESL instructor at Taylor University. Her blog, Making All Things New, is at amypeterson.net.
Miracle on Voodoo Mountain: A Young Woman's Remarkable Story of Pushing Back the Darkness for the Children of Haiti
Megan Boudreaux (Author)
Thomas Nelson
204 pages
$14.82
It began with a dream. Not a Martin Luther King, Jr., kind of dream, but a literal one: Megan Boudreaux was dreaming about a tree. She'd wake, heart pounding, and wonder why a tree she'd seen once on a business trip to Haiti kept appearing to her as she slept. Eventually, she took it as a sign that she was called to return. Twenty-four years old, Boudreaux quit her marketing job in Louisiana, sold most of her possessions, and used her savings to move—alone, and without any clear agenda—to Gressier, a suburb of Port au Prince, Haiti. Miracle on Voodoo Mountain is the tale of the next three years.
With well-paced (if mostly unmemorable) prose, Boudreaux skims over her Catholic childhood and a re-dedication to faith during her studies at Tulane. On her third day in Haiti, she takes a walk up Bellevue Mountain. There she sees the tree from her dreams—and under it, a child.
That child, Michaelle, will become her first adopted child as well as her introduction to the world of restaveks. The Creole word restavek roughly means "stay with" and refers to the 200,000 children in Haiti who have been sent from their poor rural families to live with urban relatives as household help. Instead of receiving care and education, restaveks are often malnourished and abused, and increasingly, recruited by paid traffickers. Boudreaux becomes determined to help local restaveks attend school, and to help families find ways to change the restavek culture.[1]
While working to establish Respire Haiti, her nonprofit organization, Boudreaux also makes regular visits to the Son of God Orphanage. In the most thrilling story in the book, Boudreaux realizes that the orphanage, run by "Pastor Joe," is a scam to collect money from multiple American churches without ever providing food, clothing, or basic medical care for the children who are there. Working as part of a sting operation to imprison Pastor Joe, Boudreaux finds that corruption has infiltrated the highest levels of local government.
It's the most interesting part of the book because it's complex and nuanced, without a clear (and happy) resolution. In this it differs sharply from the bulk of the narrative. While Boudreaux criticizes the way that naive good intentions plus an influx of American cash went horribly wrong in the Son of God Orphanage, the rest of the book is an example of how naive good intentions plus an influx of American cash can go wonderfully right: Boudreaux herself goes to Haiti with little to no knowledge of the culture and language and no clear plan for what she hopes to accomplish there. Yet, through the leading of the Spirit, she is able to purchase land that had for many years been a major site of voodoo worship and found a school, a halfway house for teen moms, and a medical clinic, as well as starting sports education and free meal programs.
What's not to like about this? The problem is that Boudreaux, with the best of intentions, immediately began addressing needs she saw without understanding the ramifications of her actions. In other words, she began her work in Haiti doing the very thing she warns her readers against. (Some Christians, she notes, come for a week and give money to help the children they meet, innocently funding child trafficking. Others unwittingly support frauds like Pastor Joe.) Only later does she begin to realize how complicated her task will be.
Reading Boudreaux's stories of rescuing children from slavery, encountering machete-wielding voodoo practitioners, and witnessing healings, I'm transported back to the missionary biographies that I read as a child: Amy Carmichael saving girls from temple prostitution, Gladys Aylward quelling prison riots, and Elizabeth Elliott returning to the people who killed her husband. Miracle on Voodoo Mountain differs in interesting ways from the conventions of the missionary narrative I grew up with, though: the narrator is not driven by evangelistic goals so much as by a mystical call; we never see her preaching or teaching; and her writing contains very little Scripture or exhortation, only stories of dramatic personal experiences. In fact, the words "missionary" and "evangelism" never appear in the book, and only one story tells of a conversion. This difference is perhaps a distinctive of the millennial missionary narrative, prioritizing issues of social justice above conversions. Despite these departures from convention, in many ways the book falls squarely into a genre that's been popular in America since the 1750s. Perhaps it's time to question the value of the genre.
The missionary narrative as we know it today came into its own thanks to Jonathan Edwards. After the death of David Brainerd, who spent three years attempting to evangelize Native American tribes in the 1740s, Edwards edited and published Brainerd's diaries, transforming him into a saintly folk hero. The romanticized Life of David Brainerd was the most popular of all of Edwards' works, and it inspired the first generation of evangelical missionaries to come out of America as well as a growing body of public missionary memoirs.[2] It served as the template for a genre that continues to create bestsellers like Through Gates of Splendor and Kisses from Katie.
We might say that Edwards created the American "missionary myth." Myths aren't necessarily stories that are untrue; they are stories that are iconic and powerful, drawn from a society's history and, through repetition, coming to symbolize its deepest convictions about morality and the nature of reality. Our evangelical missionary myth grew up alongside the American myth of the frontier hero: in each, a rugged individualist is off to conquer a frontier for the good of a community.
In the missionary myth, an individual receives a special calling from God. She defies her family's expectations and cultural norms to cross borders, and perseveres against physical, spiritual, and emotional hardships to carry the gospel to a new frontier. Whatever trials she faces pale in comparison to the adventures she has and the wonders she sees. Through her cross-cultural work, she can reach the highest level of spirituality. Her everyday activities are imbued with more purpose and meaning than ours are, back home; she fairly glows.
It was this sort of missionary myth that sent me (and lots of my Passion and Urbana conference friends) overseas after college, certain that to be one of the super-spiritual, radical, glowing Christians I should be serving God in a foreign country.
While I still enjoy a good missionary story, my own introduction to cultural complexity and failure overseas have taught me to question the narrative. I don't question Boudreaux's experiences; what I question is the value for the church in telling these kinds of stories in these kinds of ways. Is this how we want the church to understand mission, as a series of thrilling experiences rivaled only by the tales told by Tom Clancy? Is this how we want the church to imagine missionaries, as idealized characters surrounded by people who are either good or evil? Is this how we want developing countries portrayed, as places where the darkness is somehow darker than it is here?
Thrilling stories help sell books. More people are likely to buy a book about an American prom queen who battles demonic forces in a foreign land than one about Pastor and Madame Charles, the Haitian couple who prayed under that tamarind tree every Sunday for twelve years, asking God to send someone to build a school there. And yet a life of faith and mission is more likely to look like that: like private, persistent prayers unnoticed by the wider world. Less like a grand, heroic gesture, and more like daily faithfulness in a quiet life.
Some scholars have argued that idealized missionary narratives serve an ecclesiastical function similar to icons: they inspire us even as we know they do not perfectly image physical reality.[3] But idealized stories fail on several levels. They fail to prepare young readers for the realities of a complex world populated by people who are more nuanced than stock characters. They fail to equip adult readers to understand the sacredness of all kinds of vocations. And they fail to assist scholars and missiologists in strengthening our understandings of the most effective ways to do cross-cultural work.
Doubtless Miracle on Voodoo Mountain and books like it have inspirational and devotional value. My hope for this book in particular is that it will open American eyes to the damage done by investing money without investing in relationships. Still, I dream of a day when the books that come to prominence will tell more complex, nuanced stories of God at work in the world. Stories where the heroes aren't always white. Where the people aren't either good or evil, but human. Where kingdom-building is as fraught with failure as it is marked by success. Where God is found in small moments and humble disciplines as much as in dramatic encounters and miraculous healings. Ultimately, Megan Boudreaux understands that small changes are miracles in their own right—as when she describes how her adopted daughters have transformed from "biting, scratching, and yelling to kissing, hugging, and whispering sweet prayers." Amen.
—Amy Peterson
1. More information at www.restavekfreedom.org/.
2. For a detailed history, see Joseph Conforti, "David Brainerd and the Nineteenth Century Missionary Movement," Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn 1985), pp. 309-329.
3. See, for example, Gerald L. Sittser, "Protestant Missionary Biography as Written Icon," in The Christian Scholar's Review, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2007), pp. 303-21.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Mark Noll
The inner life of an 18th-century Protestant capitalist.
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Matthew Kadane's "watchful clothier" was Joseph Ryder, a merchant who spent his entire life (1695-1768) in the north of England at the center of Britain's emerging textile industry. As a dyer in Leeds, Ryder worked at a crucial midpoint in the complicated "putting out" system that structured the industry. He relied on money-lenders for the capital to purchase unfinished cloth, which had been transformed from wool on the spinning wheels and looms of outlying villagers. Ryder stood to make a better living than his suppliers when the cloth he dyed found buyers in Leeds' Mixed Cloth Hall (and its predecessor markets). At the end of his active but stressful career, Ryder enjoyed a local reputation as a figure of more than average wealth and higher than common probity.
The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
Matthew Kadane (Author)
Yale University Press
312 pages
$38.00
Joseph Ryder's place in recorded history does not rest on his mercantile success, but rather on the diaries that he kept from May 1733 to almost the end of his life 35 years later. In 41 pocket-sized notebooks of over twelve thousand pages and approximately 2.5 million words, Ryder left an extraordinary record of his internal life that, until Matthew Kadane's meticulously documented book, lay mostly under-studied in the John Rylands Library of Manchester University. While others had exploited these materials for their own research interests, no one before Kadane, a professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, had studied the diaries primarily for themselves and their author. The results are every bit as instructive as from Matthew Lundin's recently published study of a similarly massive personal archive left by the 16th-century Nuremberg lawyer Hermann Weinsberg.[1]
Kadane's explanation for why "watchfulness" best summarizes the life of this "eighteenth-century Protestant capitalist" reveals a great deal about Nonconforming Dissenter church life in a tumultuous era of economic, intellectual, and religious transition. Even more, with the diaries' nonpareil record for the inner life of a dedicated lay Christian, the book charts the particular challenge that "modernity" has posed for believers of all sorts and in all places.
This admirably pious Dissenter maintained exquisitely detailed watchfulness for his soul in the midst of its business activities, but almost no watchfulness about the ways and means of those practices themselves.
Throughout his life, Ryder remained, in Kadane's words, "a compulsive church-goer." Yet religion meant far more than regular worship with the Call Lane Independents (or Congregationalists) and the Mill Hill Presbyterians, two Leeds chapels that had arisen in the late 17th century as Dissenting holdouts against the Anglican conformity imposed by the Restoration in 1660 after civil war and the rule of Oliver Cromwell. In Kadane's careful definition, the "watchfulness" recorded in the diaries (it was a term Ryder used often) meant "a relentless, self-perpetuating, and salvational examination of the self, the external world, the divine, and the very process of examination." For Ryder it was the Puritan's traditional "doctrine of providence put into daily, diligent, and often written practice." As the diaries reveal, Ryder ordered his life around his faith, disciplined his thoughts by Christian precepts, studied the Scriptures ceaselessly, reflected constantly on the spiritual meaning of his daily round, and sought by every psychic means possible to assess his day-to-day standing before God. The approximately five thousand worship services Ryder documented supported his daily devotional existence, rather than the other way around.
Ryder's comprehensive record-keeping sheds much light on important 18th-century developments that are usually narrated from the top down. The diaries show a serious layman, eager to maintain the Puritan vision he had embraced but buffeted from many directions. Because his own lifelong devotion to the Bible remained a personal spiritual anchor, he was distressed when liberal theological innovators pushed biblical interpretations toward the Enlightenment and away from Puritanism. Toward the end of his life, the Mill Hill Presbyterians welcomed a young Unitarian minister named Joseph Priestley, who later became famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his chemical experiments but also for his decidedly unorthodox dismissal of the Trinity. At the Leeds Presbyterian chapel Ryder was witnessing a momentous intellectual transformation, which Kadane describes as "a watchful God" become "a watchmaker."
On the other side of the religious ledger, Ryder never found the new evangelicalism of George Whitefield and John Wesley particularly appealing. While he appreciated any effort to promote a biblical message of salvation, he worried that the revivalists' constant travels betrayed a dangerous instability. Ryder wrote with great concern about attacks on original sin and predestination that became more common in the Dissenting chapels he frequented, but his innate conservatism and melancholic personality also left him cold to evangelical innovations.
Kadane skillfully highlights the reasons why "Old Dissent"—the Puritan-descended Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists that predated the rise of Methodism—could retain such a strong emotional hold on its adherents. A primary reason was mortality. Ryder's diaries record hundreds of deaths among his fellow Leeds Dissenters and in the wider circles touching these two congregations. A "junkie for funerals," in Kadane's phrase, Ryder was buoyed up by his strong personal faith through the often premature departures of so many who were near and dear, including his own wife Elisabeth, who died in 1754. That same faith also moved him to many acts of altruistic care for families who bore these losses. In Kadane's depiction, Ryder's life is a beacon illuminating a sturdy cohort of British Christianity that the excitements of theological conflict and evangelical awakening have obscured.
The wider importance of Ryder's story concerns his watchfulness as a merchant. Kadane's account of a mid-level Protestant at work in the early stages of modern consumer capitalism deals, as all such studies must, with Max Weber. Kadane's careful research into the circumstances of Ryder's life equips him for discerning judgment about Weber's famous claim concerning an "elective affinity" between Calvinist theological conviction and modern capitalist instincts. If Ryder's life does support Weber's general picture of religious and economic interaction, Kadane finds that interaction far too complex for simplistic assessment of religious cause for economic effect, or vice versa.
For Christian assessment, the important questions lie elsewhere. Joseph Ryder's life underscores the astute conclusions of Mark Valieri's recent study of New England's economic life in the 17th and 18th centuries.[2] In his splendidly researched book, Valeri showed that as New England's history unfolded, personal piety, biblical conviction, and general religious seriousness remained strong. Yet, crucially, as the decades passed, these Puritans more and more accepted the structures of British economic development without a further thought. They remained dedicated students of Scripture, but—in contrast to the first New England generations—they did not bring Scripture to bear for assessment or discipline of the mercantile practices that had come to prevail in the expanding British Empire.
Joseph Ryder seemed much the same. His diaries overflow with watchfulness concerning the effects of his business on his personal standing before God: Is he more concerned with worldly achievement than his eternal destiny? Has he taken unwarranted pride in his mercantile success? Is he using his wealth for godly purposes or hoarding it selfishly for himself? "Considering with what pains & difficulty I see many persons Obtain the means of Livelihood" (to quote one of many such entries, p. 96), has he kept himself unspotted from the world?
What the diaries do not record, however, are questions about the system that provided his livelihood. He did not, for example, seem to worry about the justice of the military ventures that expanded Britain's empire, and thus expanded the trading opportunities from which a diligent clothier could profit. He never commented on the crucial role that slavery and the slave trade played in stimulating the international exchanges that fueled the demand for finished cloth. Although Ryder displayed unusual generosity in opening his home to several generations of apprentices, he did not comment on how the increasing centralization of cloth manufacturing squeezed out small-scale operators and brought distress to their families. In other words, this admirably pious Dissenter maintained exquisitely detailed watchfulness for his soul in the midst of its business activities, but almost no watchfulness about the ways and means of those practices themselves.
Readers should not expect Matthew Kadane to address such broader concerns. His deeply researched and gracefully written volume stands very well on its own. Among those who read it with appreciation, some may conclude that Ryder's personal watchfulness offers positive traits to emulate, along with a few (especially obsessive introspection) to avoid. But they may also go further to wonder about what it would have taken to bring a similar watchfulness to bear on the economic and imperial systems that Leeds' pious clothier, as a Christian merchant at home in the modern economic system, simply took for granted—and what it would require of a believer to exercise such watchfulness today.
Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author most recently of From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian's Discovery of the Global Christian Story, just published by Baker Academic.
1. See the review of Lundin's Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes his World (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012) by Ronald Rittgers, Books & Culture, November/December 2013, pp. 36-37.
2. Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), reviewed by Lauren Winner in Books & Culture, November/December 2010, pp. 27-29.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Timothy Larsen
Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “Robert Elsmere.”
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The back cover of this critical edition of Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888) makes the staggering suggestion that that it "was probably the biggest selling novel of the nineteenth century." Alas, the introduction by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein does not discuss the evidence for why a novel you have probably never heard of might have beat out Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and the rest of the gang. One of the appendices, however, reprints a preface Ward wrote for an Edwardian edition in which the author claimed that the copies already in circulation were close to a million. At any rate, it is beyond dispute that it was a Victorian blockbuster. It was such a sensation that even the prime minister, W. E. Gladstone, decided to review it.
So why has it dropped out of sight? One banal, partial answer is its length. Victorian novels are notoriously bulky, and this one is almost twice the size of their already formidable average. The original version was spread over three volumes and this edition invites the reader to persevere through 600 pages.
Worse, it is a didactic novel crammed with theological debate. Robert Elsmere is a bright young Oxford graduate who is ordained and makes a promising start in a rural parish but then experiences a crisis of faith and leaves the Church of England. Ultimately—spoiler alert!—he establishes in a poor London neighborhood a Theistic congregation devoted to following the example of a purely human, demythologized Jesus. Let's just say that most modern readers are not sufficiently interested in the precise intellectual route Elsmere takes from orthodoxy to modernist Unitarianism to want to track its every bend across several hundred pages.
Being a novel, however, it is also a romance. Robert falls for Catherine, a woman who holds rigidly to the Puritan verities of a past generation (one character exclaims, "She is the Thirty-nine Articles in the flesh!"), and the principal drama revolves around whether their religious differences will thwart their love.
Alas, not even this human interest can readily entice in the 21st century. Ward herself already thought it so old-fashioned as to be almost incomprehensible to her readers that a woman might let a little thing like heresy give her pause. Late Victorians, Ward assumed, had already sided decisively with "the sacredness of passion and its claim." Certainly people today are supposed to be impatient with Catherine's concerns: "I thought of what it would be like to have to hide my prayers from you—my faith in Christ—my hope of heaven. I thought of bringing up the child—how all that was vital to me would be as superstition to you."
The contemporary way of seeing things is actually a major difficulty for plotting romantic comedies. The genre requires some objection keeping the pair apart, but people today simply cannot imagine any claim so important that it might stand in the way of their personal fulfillment. A classic romantic comedy such as Sabrina (1954) could take seriously the possibility that something as abstract as class distinctions might mean that Humphrey Bogart would have to get along without Audrey Hepburn. By the 1990s, however, the sacred right to share a bed with whomever you wish as soon as the desire arises was so taken for granted that Sleepless in Seattle (1993) was driven in despair to creating a plot in which the obstacle was that the two principal characters had never met. The Wikipedia list of romantic comedies from our current decade is replete with the-way-we-live-now titles such as Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached.
Yet Gladstone, who loathed the book's message, nevertheless conceded that it was "not dull," and Burstein is right to defend it as "absorbing." Many of the characters are drawn with wicked precision and mouth mischievous lines. There is the skeptical Oxford don, Edward Langham, whose scholarly temperament has made him constitutionally incapable of pronouncing decisively about anything:
If you could have got at his inmost mind, it was affirmed, the persons most obnoxious there would have been found to be the scout, who intrusively asked him every morning what he would have for breakfast … . [T]he wags of the college averred that when asked if it rained … it was pain and grief to him to have to affirm positively, without qualifications, that so it was.
A complacent aristocrat is summed up thus: "It is a great thing to be persuaded that at bottom you have a good heart. Lady Charlotte was so persuaded, and allowed herself many things in consequence." And an Oscar Wilde-like poet, complete with a velvet coat: "His extravagance, however, was of the most conventional type. Only his vanity had a touch of the sublime."
With the novelist Mrs. Darcy, Ward gamely turns the satire on her own breed. Prince Albert had personally asked to borrow a copy of Mrs. Darcy's novel. She reverently preserved the turned-down page which indicated where he had given up on finishing it. Robert Elsmere, of course, follows a Victorian trend of naming novels after their lead (usually male) character. Dickens did so half a dozen times. Darcy announces that she has given her current effort the gripping title, Mr. Jones.
Still, the religious discussions date badly. While ostensibly being bravely rational, Elsmere actually ends up with a deeply assailable and contradictory set of beliefs that only seemed plausible for a cohort of readers at the time because they all chimed in with the zeitgeist.
Working-class men did not attend church regularly because it was not how they wanted to spend their time—a disinclination toward such organizational commitments that is still a driving force behind the so-called secularization of Britain today. Ward and Elsmere irrationally imagine that all that is keeping laborers away is that they cannot find a rational form of religion. (In the real, late Victorian London, it was not anti-supernatural Theism that was reaching the poor but rather the old-time religion of the Salvation Army. Robert Elsmere is a fairytale in which the thoughts of the urbane Unitarian thinker James Martineau mysteriously generate the results of William Booth.) Things are rigged so badly towards the end that Ward pretends that orthodoxy is docetic and therefore only a Unitarian presentation of Christ's passion could move an audience: "there was no comforting sense of jugglery by which the suffering was not real after all."
The concluding fantasy entails working-class roughs not only becoming highly committed congregational members but even leading daily family devotions. My point is that the novel resonates less today because what Ward never doubted we find highly improbable: namely, that like sleeping and eating, urban workers feel a natural need for corporate worship and church membership.
Ward makes much of facing honestly the critiques of doctrines she wishes to see abandoned, but everything she wants to keep is given a complete pass from scrutiny. Thus, Elsmere's great crisis leads to the conclusion "miracles do not happen!" His new, rational self still believes "in God the Father Almighty" but merely confesses this dogmatically without ever explaining the warrant for such a belief (let alone why the "Almighty" is unable or unwilling to do miracles). The Victorians liked the idea of the fatherhood of God, so it somehow seemed self-evident.
Even more problematic are the reasons for his doubts. They emerge from his study of the records of late antiquity and the medieval period, which lead him to conclude that people in the past were irrational, "non-sane." This means that all human testimony before the Renaissance cannot be trusted. Out go the biblical miracles, the resurrection of Christ, and so on. The whole view is based on a very smug, ethnocentric assumption of superiority that an introductory course in anthropology would thoroughly dissolve.
Oddly, having concluded that ancient testimony is throroughly unreliable, Elsmere nevertheless insists that members of his New Brotherhood are called to obey the words of Jesus. This suggests that his inability to believe in miracles must be grounded in some other reason than the one he has given.
With this critical edition, Burstein has done heroic labor. The text itself is not flawless, however. I noticed a handful of transcription errors, my favorite of which is the young man who agrees—in what is almost a Wildean witticism—to see a vivacious beauty "safely off the promises" (alas, my Victorian edition of the novel has "premises").
Creating annotations is inevitably a thankless, impossible task. Readers want the things that they don't understand but wish to have explained, but as the preexisting knowledge of each reader is unique and varies wildly, what is a poor editor to do? For example, Burstein is valiantly committed to elucidating every real person named in the text. Thus John Henry Newman is identified as "a leader of the Oxford Movement," but I have a hard time imagining a reader who knows what the Oxford Movement was, but not who Newman is. This is not a criticism of Burstein but rather a prayer of gratitude that I have never agreed to attempt a critical edition.
I was, of course, most pleased with those notes that told me what I did not know. For example, a room decorated with "Liberty stuffs" is expounded: "textiles sold by London department store Liberty and Co., a store whose marketing appeal 'emphasized the aesthetic over the functional qualities of material goods.' " I also enjoyed generating imaginary notes of my own. The fictitious work of coarse atheism, Comic Life of Christ, for example, is clearly an allusion to the Comic Bible Sketches by G. W. Foote, a leading light of the National Secular Society.
One senses toward the end of the novel that maybe even Ward herself doubted the efficacy of her modernized faith. Twice within three pages she enthuses about the "magic" of rational Christianity, but replacing miracles with magic hardly seems to accord with her teleology of Enlightenment progress—it suggests she feels a loss that needs to be covered over. In the end, Robert Elsmere is canonized in the hearts of all right-thinking people: "And we go prating that the age of saints is over." The version of that saying I've always heard is dismissive of those who think the age of miracles is past.
Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College. His sixth monograph, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith, is just out from Oxford University Press.
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Malcolm Forbes
A genially revisionist biography.
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One day in April 1838, the writer Thomas Carlyle saw the "poor little Queen," then eighteen, passing through London in an open carriage. In a letter to his mother he praised Victoria's healthy appearance but noted that she appeared "timid, anxious, almost frightened; for the people looked at her in perfect silence." After her death in 1901, Henry James wrote, "I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl."
The beginning and end of a reign; a journey from callow youth to protective grande dame. On that journey, Victoria became the mother of nine and grandmother of 42 children, and not only Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland but also the matriarch of royal Europe. The biographer and novelist A. N. Wilson gave her only a cursory glance in his 2003 bestseller The Victorians, his main focus being on her subjects and her country's social, political, and economic transitions and upheavals. Now, in Victoria: A Life, he devotes a whole book to a woman he numbers "among the most fascinating and self-contradictory of all British monarchs."
Wilson opens not with a birth but a background. In a chapter amusingly entitled "Zoology" (after Karl Marx's assertion that "the secret of nobility is zoology"), he unravels the tangle of 19th-century royal lines, revealing the interconnectedness of the international monarchical systems and Victoria's dynasty-building forbears. Although her father, Prince Edward, died shortly after her birth, Wilson questions Victoria's claim that she had a "melancholy childhood." Growing up in Kensington Palace, she was cossetted by her German mother and various female attendants and played with a half-brother and half-sister. She developed a talent as a watercolorist and, more important, a candid and lively journal-writer.
Adolescence brought a crucial revelation and a critical stage: the former, the discovery that court life was "a snakepit of mutual hatred and slander"; the latter, early maneuvers in the "gruesome warfare" between conflicting parties to select rival marriage partners for her. The life-changing turning-point arrived in 1837, when, after the death of her uncle, William IV, Victoria inherited the throne.
Wilson presents a teenage queen who was, in the words of one army officer, no more than an "ignorant little child." And yet she was both keen and quick to learn—which must have been a relief to the man who groomed her for her role as head of state, her prime minister, Lord Melbourne. After Victoria marries her Coburg cousin, Prince Albert, in 1840, the narrative shifts to a decade dominated by childbirth. Wilson remarks, primly but correctly, that "each coition was not only an act of love, but a gesture against the swell of European republicanism."
In the following decade, Victoria's reign was rocked by war in Crimea, mutiny in India and unrest in Ireland. On the domestic front, the pressures of her mammoth workload impinged upon her motherly duties and, as a consequence, impaired her maternal instinct: "It is indeed a pity," Albert wrote to her in October 1856, "that you find no consolation in the company of your children." Violent mood swings and bouts of weakness led doctors to worry that she might have inherited her grandfather George III's insanity. But her real annus horribilis was 1861, when she lost both her mother and her husband. In her desolation, she became a secluded, sable-clad widow. Even so, Wilson goes against the grain of previous biographers by arguing that while there were dark moments when she could barely function, for the most part she remained politically engaged.
The queen's personal attendant, John Brown, became a source of solace during her widowhood, much to the consternation of family, courtiers, and politicians—although Wilson admits he is unable to make up his mind as to whether there was anything stronger than a monarch-and-servant relationship. Her popularity with her people waned as she shunned society but surged in her later years, especially in 1896, when she was declared Britain's longest reigning monarch, and in 1897, when she was paraded through London in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee.
Since her death in 1901, Victoria has been a popular choice for biographical study. Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria (1921) was one of the first, and Elizabeth Longford's Victoria R.I. (1964) one of the best—a book Wilson magnanimously, if hyperbolically, calls "a gigantic achievement which will never be replaced." His own telling of the story is an excellent work which ranks high not only among previous Victoria biographies but also among Wilson's previous biographies. The secret to his success is his decision to go back to basics and use as often as possible the queen's letters, journals, and diaries as primary source material. Through these personal accounts we get unexpurgated thoughts and emotions. In her journal during her time as Melbourne's protégé, she seems to Wilson much younger than her eighteen to twenty years. In her letters of 1869, Wilson finds "a vast disparity between the letters in which Victoria, however strong-willed and contradictory, was in control of herself and commenting upon affairs, and those in which she is hardly able to wield a pen." She describes her wedding as "the happiest day of my life!" The Great Exhibition of 1851 renders her ecstatic: "God bless my dearest Albert, & my dear Country which has shown itself so great today. One felt so grateful to the great God, whose blessing seemed to pervade the whole great undertaking." She feels "a good deal agitated" on the morning of the Diamond Jubilee and almost as nervous on her first daughter's wedding day.
Wilson is astute in his analysis of the men of Victoria's life. He subverts the conventional wisdom that her marriage to Albert was the defining fact in her "personal mythology," rightly declaring that she lived for over eighty years, and was married for a mere quarter of that time. In many ways, he continues, "we can say that we see her most clearly being herself in those platonic male friendships which were based on shared humor," with John Brown, Melbourne, and successive prime ministers Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli.
The book is at its best when we see Victoria stripped of pomp and circumstance and acting not according to royal protocol but on human impulse. Unlike her predecessors, whose excursions into parts of their kingdom involved visiting one stately home after another, Victoria and Albert explored mines, factories, farms, and the industrial north. This, for Wilson, was Victoria extending the function of the monarchy, "demonstrating the Royal Family as interwoven with the new destiny of Britain." When Jack the Ripper terrorized London, she upbraided the government for not providing adequate street lighting in the East End, insisting that "these courts must be lit and our detectives improved" and, for good measure, compiling a checklist of procedures for the police to consult. "[I]t is fascinating to think of the Queen herself as a detective," Wilson adds.
The Victoria that emerges from Wilson's book is a flawed but noble individual. She is indiscreet, capricious in her tastes, and, for a large chunk of her reign, politically inarticulate. She has a limited supply of maternal affection and emotionally neglects her needy mother to concentrate upon her marriage and the duties of a constitutional monarch. Perhaps most surprising is her "strongest aversion for the so-called & most erroneous 'Rights of Women.' " But she was also deeply patriotic, incredibly robust and self-assured, and endowed with a valuable intuitive sense of national mood and feeling. On several occasions Wilson offers glimpses of her lighter side: dancing in the Scottish Highlands, gleefully defying the Establishment, and delighting in customary flattery from Disraeli ("Dizzy").
Wilson has done a thorough job of trawling Victoria's surviving correspondence (many of the journals and letters "in which the Queen expressed herself so forcefully, so freely"' were destroyed after her death by her daughter Beatrice) and thus furnishes us with as rounded a picture as possible. Complementing—or at times contradicting—the queen's views are numerous quotes from those around her. Particularly effective is Wilson's liberal scattering of references to or quotes from eminent Victorians: Tennyson, Hardy, Darwin, and—a favorite of the queen—Charlotte Brontë. (In one neat artistic touch, Wilson depicts John Brown as a composite of Walter Scott heroes.) All that is lacking is commentary on Victoria's own literary achievement, her two-volume Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. Wilson also overlooked the verse of Elizabeth I when compiling a detailed portrait of the Virgin Queen in his 2012 book The Elizabethans. In both cases a pity.
But such a minor omission cannot blight Wilson's informative and immersive biography. It is satisfying to see him working again on a large canvas. Size matters with Wilson: his shorter biographies such as Jesus (1992) and Hitler (2012) can be slight and shallow, whereas in-depth doorstops like Tolstoy (1988) are not merely longer and more detailed but much deeper, yielding substantial insights. As befits its subject, Victoria: A Life is a long book, meticulously researched and comprehensive in scope. It is also entirely convincing. Closing it, we banish the standard image of a starchy taciturn widow perpetually in mourning and side with Wilson in believing Victoria to be "one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous and unconventional women who ever lived."
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Lisa Ohlen Harris
A truth-telling memoir.
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Nine months before Joe Wilkins was born, his parents briefly escaped the harsh, arid landscape of Eastern Montana, known as the "Big Dry," for an idyllic camping trip. His mother tells of fishing and swimming in the clear lake, of late nights around the campfire. This is an origin story replete with a mess of trout and a cooler of Rainier beer. And, reminiscent of another origin story, the couple finds their garden "crawling with rattlesnakes. Snakes sliding through the tall grass, snakes curled in the outhouse, snakes draped like question marks across the rocks." His father sliced off snakes' heads with a shovel; his mother carried a stick to fling snakes out of her path. Decapitated snakes were piled away from the camp to keep the flies and stench at bay.
Wilkins ponders why his mother's storytelling includes the snakes. Why not tell of the sweetness and leave out the shadow? Because, he realizes, "To tell the story without snakes would be dishonest. Snakes complicate and foreshadow, shift like a crawling wind, hide in plain sight." This young family will grow—they will receive a longed for second son and later, a daughter. Their joy will be full—until, years later, sorrow overtakes them. The children will be left fatherless. Clearly, this origin story must be told with snakes.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how a Christian worldview can exist in writing that is not necessarily Christian, while our own literature often lacks the bite and angst our worldview ought to embrace. Flannery O'Connor observes, in "The Church and the Fiction Writer," that many readers of faith prefer to enter into a false world of simplicity—with an overemphasis on innocence. O'Connor writes, "We lost our innocence in the Fall and our return to it is through the Redemption, which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite."
When he was nine years old, Wilkins lost his father to cancer. His mother raised him with the help of her elderly father. One night, Wilkins and his brother stay up late playing cards with their grandfather. The grandfather tells of another card game long ago: he nearly killed a man but was saved from committing murder when his own uncle cold-cocked him. Great father figure, right?
Late that night the grandfather stops the card game. "It's time," he says. The boys follow their grandfather out to the sheep shed, where a ewe is straining to give birth. Grandfather washes his hands and rolls up his sleeves, then kneels beside the ewe. "Talk to her," he tells the boys. The grandfather reaches gently into the birth canal and takes hold of the unborn lamb while the trusting ewe "lays her head on the straw, closes her eyes to the pain":
My grandfather pulls and pulls—and the lamb slips into his hands, hands that nearly took a man's life, and there's blood and after-birth steaming on the straw, on his arms, everywhere. He runs a finger through the lamb's mouth and sets it near its mother's warmth.
The "innocent" lamb is born into a broken world, into the very hands of a near-murderer. This stable scene is anything but sentimental, and I think Flannery O'Connor would approve. Isn't this the stuff of a biblical "hero"? Hands capable of taking a life can also be the means of grace.
Fathers tell stories—at least mine did. My brothers and I loved to hear Dad tell how his sister once dared him to paint not the barn, but the pig. My father reached his paintbrush through the barnyard fence and glopped red paint across the back of the pig. When my grandfather arrived home, he saw the pig dripping with red and imagined blood rather than paint. Dad's story always ended there and I was left to imagine the conclusion: my grandfather coming close, smelling the paint, and falling into gales of laughter.
The thing is, my grandfather was an alcoholic. When he drank, he became angry. The end of the story most likely unfolded differently than I imagined. My father's storytelling leaves out just enough to protect the reputation of my grandfather (who was sober for the last decade and a half of his life).
We do the same with Bible stories, sanitizing and simplifying—removing the story from its context. The story of Noah becomes a sweet means of counting by twos instead of a story of apocalypse. Our Sunday school lessons on confronting our giants stop with the victory. But we grownups know that the boy-king will one day take wives and concubines and even kill to get yet another woman who catches his eye. Why are we afraid to let our heroes fail? We forget that all heroes do fail—except one. Our patriarchs point ahead and beyond themselves. They tell a larger story.
Wilkins may or may not be a Christian, but his memoir does so much that Christian writing should do—and that Christian readers should appreciate. Wilkins doesn't sentimentalize the long, slow road out of boyhood without a father.
The year his father dies, Wilkins is taken under the wing of a compassionate teacher. Mr. Hollowell drives him home, takes over the spring planting, and teaches the boy to flood the parched fields with water so the crops will grow. "I am delirious with his attention. I take seed. I sway and rise." Back in the classroom, Wilkins blooms under Mr. Hollowell's challenges and approval. On his tenth birthday, Wilkins travels to the Hollowell family home along the Yellowstone River, where he walks and fishes and sits by the fire sipping hot cocoa while Mr. Hollowell strums the guitar and sings:
And so, when Mr. Hollowell moves away at the end of the year, I will more than need someone to take his place, someone—no, some man—to throw me the football and hand me a book, to fill the space made gaping not by my father's death but by Mr. Hollowell's merciful and immoderate attention.
I will look, I still look, I am looking for a father.
Wouldn't such a realization drive Wilkins to the Father who will not fail? The evangelical reader will want the answer to be yes and amen, clearly articulated in a prayer to receive Christ. But Wilkins, like Flannery O'Connor, doesn't tie up his story tidily:
In childhood, when I could not sleep, when the world troubled me and set my mind to racing, my mother would tell me to say a prayer, to pray for those I love until sleep took me—for when it did the angels would finish my prayers. "The angels," she would say, "cannot refuse a sleeping child." But I am no longer a child, and I do not believe all I believed as a boy.
Wilkins rejects his mother's sentimentalized expression of faith. And yet his writing is haunted by the disappointment and pain and longing that mark our slow participation in the sufferings of Christ. Biblical cadences echo across the pages.
By the final chapters in this memoir, Wilkins himself is a father—and he knows he, too, will fail: "I have heard the sound of my own son's grain-of-sand heart; that tidal surge and lunge; that whoosh and susurrus, a slight wind whispering that some warm and ripping storm is building, has begun."
A child born into this world is not born into innocence. We are born, helpless, into the hands of killers. We yearn for resurrection, for all things to be made right. We want the happy ending, and we want it now. So we do our best to fast-forward through the ugly bits, in art as in life. What we end up with is sentimental stories and sentimental faith. We can learn a lot from a writer like Joe Wilkins.
When Wilkins asks for more stories about his father, his mother tells of her courtship. She speaks of carefree youth, of two-dollar champagne poured into soda bottles, of driving together until sunrise. She tells the story isolated from the larger narrative of her life:
She was caught up yet in memory, a bride on her happy, hopeful way to the rainy Pacific Northwest, but I was watching her step through the dry stalks of a drought-killed field, my little brother crying on her hip. I was wondering how the world goes so wrong, how this mountain of joy ends up in acres of sun-blown dust.
Theodicy, believers call it: the wondering and explaining, the wrestling with what one must understand as God's justice, with the fact that a good and knowing God has chosen for some of us this, and for some of us that, has said, I give you life. I give you life. And you, I give you pain.
The reader who does trust God may resist Wilkins' honest questions, but they are questions well worth asking. Wilkins continues, "Can we trust any God fickle and vicious as this? And what are we to do then with our fathers and our mothers, our first and mightiest gods?"
Wilkins is not afraid to remember the snakes and the pain. He holds his many failing fathers and himself up to the light and finds every one wanting. In this way his worldview is absolutely biblical, as is his storytelling.
We settle for too little when we avert our eyes from the failings of our heroes and suppress our hardest questions. As Flannery O'Connor observed, Christian readers are too easily satisfied with sentimental tales that don't descend into the valley of the shadow of death. Without the valley, our happy endings ring false and empty. Isn't our happy ending yet ahead?
Here Wilkins gets it right. You won't find in these pages a perfect king or father or even a perfect God. What you will find in The Mountain and the Fathers is authenticity in the valley of the shadow and occasional glimpses of light.
Lisa Ohlen Harris teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Southern New Hampshire University. She is the author of The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law's Memoir of Caregiving and the Middle East memoir Through the Veil.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Andrea Palpant Dilley
The story of a marriage.
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My grandfather passed away recently. A few weeks before his death, I spoke with him on the phone and found myself caught between the trivialities of small talk and the significance of knowing that I would never speak to him again. His voice was gravelly, distant. My five-year-old huddled next to me. "What are you studying in school?" he asked her. "Math," she said. "What did she say? What did she say?" he kept asking. "Maybe he's already dead," she whispered.
During the conversation, I found myself remembering a man whose greatness as a veteran, entrepreneur, and civic leader was contradicted by his intermittent cruelty. He took me out for Dunkin Donuts and taught me how to drive a tractor, but he also chastised me for changing the radio station without his permission, belittled my grandmother (and other women) in such a way that I credit him in part for my feminist sympathies, and ruled my father and his siblings with enough severity that as adults they vowed: We will not parent the way our father did. And yet in that moment on the phone, I found myself choking up. "May the Lord bless you," he said. I felt grief welling at the back of my throat, overwhelmed by the prospect of his death, the power of our shared lineage, and the simple realization that, flawed as he was, I needed his love. I needed him.
In Timeless, a memoir of her marriage, journalist Lucinda Franks writes about family pain and the deep spiritual and psychological needs—unmet by a parent (or grandparent)—that persist past childhood into the full arc of a person's life. "We look inside our partners for our fathers, our mothers," she writes, "for the chance to complete what was started but never finished." Franks seeks completion through her marriage to a man named Robert Morgenthau, district attorney of New York County. He is "Methuselah marrying Little Bo Peep," if Methuselah were a fiftysomething lawyer and Little Bo Peep a twenty- something peacenik who chained herself to the White House fence in protest of the Vietnam War.
Their love story offers a sweeping view of New York City high life through four decades of American history—from Vietnam to 9/11 and beyond—and reads a bit like The Godfather from the perspective of the establishment. Morgenthau plays the counterpart to Vito Corleone, a man of power and empire who as da looks after his people with lawful (rather than vigilante) justice. He wins convictions against major operatives in the Mafia, prosecutes a watershed case of Nazi art theft, and employs "half the luminaries in Manhattan," including Mario Cuomo. Franks is the young family matriarch who comes of age amid the ferment of the feminist movement. She takes a bullet to the foot while reporting in Northern Ireland and gets an urgent call from a Times copyeditor right before she's wheeled in to a hospital room to give birth to her first son.
Together, their lives are a series of snapshots ripped from Time magazine. In the book's photo gallery, we see Franks with Robert Redford; Morgenthau with JFK; Franks and Morgenthau as a couple, arm-in-arm with Ariel Sharon. And yet, for all the public spectacle, their story is a simple drama of two people and their private pain (as well as happiness). Morgenthau suffers from ptsd, both as a war veteran and as a widower whose first wife died of cancer. Franks suffers from memories of a bipolar mother and a remote father. Their marriage becomes a working out of their respective suffering.
For a woman who might hide behind her prominence, Franks writes with great transparency and slips with ease into self-disclosure that most of us would save, ahem, for the hush-hush murmur and hum of a therapy session. "Why had I fallen in love with a man who doled out his comfort sparingly?" she asks. "The answer was obvious. We marry our fathers." Her dad came back from World War II "broken, full of secrets," emotionally absent, and alcoholic. The ache of his absence translated into spiritual pain for Frank: "I had lost interest in Jesus," who "knew my suffering and had refused to help." But after years of agnosticism, she regained belief through a reconciled relationship with her dying father. She writes,
My earlier passion for Jesus Christ … rose up from the weakness of my faith. He had been buried deep within me, much as my father had. When Dad finally became real, almost sacred to me, so God did in a way he never had before.
While Franks has rekindled the Christian faith of her youth, Morgenthau, a German Jew, remains wary of God. His lost faith hovers at the edge of their otherwise transparent marriage. "Please, for once, tell me what you believe in," Franks pleads with him. He deflects the question. She persists: "It's because of the Holocaust, isn't it?" Over the span of their marriage, Franks sees in her husband what he doesn't yet see in himself, namely, that his life's work—defending the tired, the poor, the huddled masses—betrays a dormant theism. He believes in justice. And he seems to yearn for the God of justice, too.
As a reader, I found myself drawn to this memoir for the same reason that I'm drawn to a Vanity Fair profile on the mental health of Jackie Kennedy Onassis—I want to know that famous people are flawed and human. The man who strides out the door as district attorney is the same man who drools on his pillow and has nightmares; the woman who wins a Pulitzer for her reporting is the same woman who suffers from chronic insecurities about her self-worth. Yes, the book has defects. It reads at times like a journal. Certain figures (including Franks' kids) feel extraneous. The narrative needs a corset. Even so, there are insights worth waiting for, and the fallout of family lineage is one of them.
For both Morgenthau and Franks, their familial pain—an absent father for her, the Holocaust for him—affects their ability to lay claim to the lineage of faith. Morgenthau, in particular—as someone who is leery of religion but still plagued by longing—seems to epitomize the fate of belief in a secular age.
This yearning for faith plays out in one particularly poignant story. After being granted special permission by Israel, Franks and Morgenthau climb Mount Sinai before it's given over to Egypt. They stand together at the pinnacle of the mountain, searching the far horizon for the Red Sea. Franks takes Morgenthau's hand: "His eyes are welling up." He says to her, then, "Do you remember when Moses asks God his name? God replies, 'I am who I am.'" As Morgenthau stares out into the distance of the Sinai desert, he seems to name two deep, simultaneous needs that hound their lives: a homeland for himself, the Diaspora Jew, and a Father for them both.
Andrea Palpant Dilley is the author of Faith and Other Flat Tires: Searching for God on the Rough Road of Doubt (Zondervan).
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Kimberlee Conway Ireton
A curiously selective look at evangelicals and sex.
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I am a straight, white, evangelical mother of four children, whom I homeschool. If that's all you knew about me, you might think I was a card-carrying member of the Quiverfull movement—assuming you'd actually heard of the Quiverfull movement, which I hadn't until I read Amy DeRogatis' Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in Evangelical America. DeRogatis also introduced me to Titus 2 women, purity balls, sexually transmitted demons, and God's healing sperm.
Let's take those in order.
Quiverfull is not simply a delightful Trollopian pun. It's a bona fide movement which, according to DeRogatis, believes in populating the kingdom of God by having lots of kids and bringing up children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Birth control is bad, large families are good, homeschooling is encouraged if not required, and marriage is ministry. Wives and husbands minister to each other, wives by submitting to their husbands ("especially sexually") and husbands by, one assumes, loving their wives as Christ loved the church, though DeRogatis doesn't actually say as much. In fact, she says very little about the husband's role, but perhaps the Quiverfull folks themselves say very little about the husband's role beyond that he is the "head" of the family.
Titus 2 women are similar to Quiverfull wives in that they submit to their husbands, stay home to raise the kids, and believe that marriage is ministry. They emphasize the sacrificial nature of marriage, the giving up of self for husband and family, as a way—or even the way—to serve God. And they encourage older Christian women to mentor younger ones and help them to understand and live out "biblical womanhood."
Purity balls exist somewhere else in the evangelical world. They're a particular expression (in my view, an extreme one) of the purity movement. At purity balls, dads and daughters promise to love and honor one another, the dad by protecting and providing for his girl, the daughter by vowing chastity until marriage. It's sort of like a wedding dance, only there's no groom. The part of the purity movement that throws these balls envisions young women as princesses awaiting their Prince Charming—a marked contrast to the Titus 2 women, who emphasize that marriage isn't a fairy tale happily-ever-after but rather a relationship of sacrificial love and sometimes just plain sacrifice.
Still elsewhere in the evangelical world are charismatics who talk about things like stds (sexually transmitted demons) and God's healing sperm. For these folks, bodily orifices are portals for demonic possession; as DeRogatis puts it, "The body … is a fertile womb that will be filled with either good or evil seed." Demons can be passed from person to person via sexual encounters and passed down from generation to generation, but if a possessed person becomes open to God's healing sperm, which impregnates the soul, that "holy pregnancy" will evacuate the demons.
If any (or all) of this sounds a little (or a lot) odd to you, you're not alone: I felt baffled through most of this book. I kept wondering, who are these people? Where are they? Are their ideas limited to a small subculture or do they reach out into evangelicalism more broadly?
DeRogatis' analysis of these groups and their beliefs makes for an interesting, and at times eye-popping, read. Unfortunately, nowhere in the book does she make distinctions like the ones I made above. Instead, all of these various groups appear to be representative of (white) evangelical culture as a whole. A careful reader will discern from the book that subcultures exist within evangelicalism—the fact that Titus 2 adherents critique both the writers of evangelical sex manuals and the Prince Charming narrative of the purity movement sheds light on the differences that exist within evangelical views of sex. It would have been helpful if DeRogatis had highlighted such differences and stated the implications, namely, that evangelicalism is not a monolithic entity and therefore cannot have a monolithic view of sex.
My real concern about this book is that it focuses on subcultures within evangelicalism (and to my mind, mostly extreme ones) and paints them as evangelicalism itself. DeRogatis claims that she "restricted this study to a few of the most visible spokespeople and some of the representative topics and schisms among evangelicals when it comes to sex." Yet she mentions (but does not quote) James Dobson only twice in the book, and never mentions influential evangelicals like Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, or any of the Grahams, all of whom have surely said something about sex. Perhaps they were not included because they haven't written books specifically about the topic. But Lauren Winner, who has written a widely read book about sex, and who has spoken on many evangelical college campuses, is never mentioned either. Taken individually, let alone together, these preachers and writers have influenced or reflected evangelicalism far more than the text about demonic possession and God's healing sperm, which DeRogatis admits is "marginal" and to which she nonetheless devotes the better part of an entire chapter, in a book that only has five.
To be fair, DeRogatis points out in her introduction that she could not possibly cover the breadth of American evangelicalism. One could not expect her to. But I do wish she had included some quantitative analysis of the topics she did cover: how many copies, for instance, of that "marginal text" that is the centerpiece of Chapter 3 have been sold? How does that compare with other evangelical texts on the topic of sexual healing? With popular secular books about sexual healing? The pattern held throughout the book; on almost every page I wanted to know: how many copies of the book she's discussing have been sold? How popular is this blog she's referencing? How mainstream is this?
Unfortunately, DeRogatis never tells us, and thus she conspicuously fails to establish the reach and impact of the ideas she so carefully studied. This, combined with the fact that I found so many of the topics completely foreign, left me scratching my head—and shuddering to think what non-evangelicals who read this book are going to think of us.
With one exception: the final chapter, which discusses black evangelical views on sex. The black preachers and teachers discussed here seemed much more gracious and generous than their white counterparts. They seem more balanced—even though they're saying things similar to the white people quoted in the first four chapters. For the first time in reading this book, I could catch glimpses of the Christians I know—people for whom sex or chastity or fidelity are to be taken seriously but not hysterically, people for whom sexual sins are not pathways to demonic possession or generational degradation but opportunities for repentance, healing, forgiveness, and restoration. I found myself hoping that these black teachers' views would expand beyond black evangelicalism and seep into the white evangelical subcultures that, as DeRogatis paints them, are desperately in need of both common sense and a whole heaping of grace.
Of course, if evangelicals, especially white ones, come across in this book as graceless, clueless, and sometimes ridiculous, that is not entirely DeRogatis' fault: many of the writers she's quoting condemn themselves to such conclusions. But her choice of "spokespeople" leaves evangelicals almost without exception looking foolish, extreme, and very unlike the God-man we claim to follow. Some are. The rest of us will want to duck and cover.
Kimberlee Conway Ireton is the author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year (InterVarsity Press) and Cracking Up: A Postpartum Faith Crisis (Mason Lewis Press). She lives in Seattle with her husband and four children.
Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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News
Morgan Lee
Deadly disease brings a bit more accuracy to much-maligned Band Aid advocacy song.
West African nativity display
Christianity TodayDecember 15, 2014
Courtesy of robinelaine/Flickr
The lyrics to a popular yet much maligned Africa advocacy song are now a bit more defensible, given that Ebola has led Sierra Leone to ban Christmas celebrations.
"Do they know it's Christmas time at all?" asks the chorus of Band Aid's 1984 fundraising success, rerecorded this year by Bono, One Direction, Chris Martin, and other artists to raise money to combat Ebola in West Africa. In hard-hit Sierra Leone, the government just banned public gatherings that celebrate Christmas and New Years amid anxiety about the spread of the deadly disease.
“Ebola is hitting us very hard because we are a very close-knit society,” said President Ernest Bai Koroma in a Sunday address. “We are in very close proximity to each other, we can reach each other's towns and villages in record time; our relatives are everywhere seeking jobs, businesses and other opportunities. That is why a tragedy anywhere in Sierra Leone is a tragedy everywhere in this country.”
Reuters reports that Sierra Leone intends to send out troops to enforce the measure. Religion News Service reports that the general secretary of Sierra Leone’s Council of Churches believes Christians should be allowed to attend church on both holidays.
Sierra Leone currently has the highest number of cases of Ebola. Since the outbreak began, it has suffered more than 8,000 cases and roughly 1,900 deaths, reports the BBC.
Victor Zizer, a Sierra Leone theologian supported by ScholarLeaders International, describes the "typical celebration" of Christmas in Sierra Leone:
Christmas is first and foremost, always a family time – a reunion of close relatives. Because Christmas falls at rice harvest, the day is celebrated with a special feast – usually, rice meals served with chicken stew, beef or goat soup. Most people do their cooking very early in the morning so they can send dishes for loved ones and neighbors, as a symbol of sharing and thanksgiving for God’s blessings. The early catering also helps them to be ready to receive guests who may visit. Families, especially children, dress in new clothes, footwear, and Christmas make-ups; all these constitute their special Christmas gift. For many in typical rural settings, this much anticipated day marks the New Year when they buy or are provided with new outfits. The next stage in the celebration picks up in the afternoon with various masquerades, traditional dance performances and sometimes parties. Children also go around during this time visiting relatives and close family friends receiving little presents.
Zizer then told the John Stott-related ministry how Ebola will make this year an "atypical commemoration":
Christmas in Sierra Leone will be very different this year. The ravaging effect of the Ebola outbreak has created a very unfriendly and unwelcoming environment. Whole areas have been quarantined to limit peoples’ movement. Friends and relatives outside of Sierra Leone who plan their annual visits around this period have all been scared off. As the Ebola disease continues to rear its deadly head in defiance to all efforts to mitigate it, claiming lives, with the rate of new infection soaring over 500 per week, we see a murky picture of Christmas in 2014.
The only consolation comes as Sierra Leoneans reflect on what Christ’s birth, and His coming into the world – (to Africa especially) means for us even in our kind of scenario. In the context of Mk. 1:30, we see Jesus visiting the home of one of His disciples, Simon Peter, where he was told of Peter’s sick mother in-law. Finding the woman, he healed her and she “began to wait on [serve] them.” His healing of her also became an occasion for many more healing and deliverance miracles to be performed in the lives of other sick and oppressed people; thus, His visit to Peter’s family became a blessing to many more.
Meanwhile, the latest iteration of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (first recorded to fight famine in Ethiopia) has come under fire from some African church leaders who see it as “patronizing and demeaning to Muslims” who live in the region but don’t celebrate Christmas, reports RNS. Of the 5.7 million people in Sierra Leone, 60 percent are Muslim and 10 percent are Christian, while the remaining 30 percent practice indigenous beliefs, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Others, such as Ebola survivor and nurse William Pooley, have called its “cultural ignorance a bit cringeworthy.”
“There exists a paternalistic way of thinking about Africa, likely exacerbated by the original (and the second, and the third) Band Aid singles, in which it must be ‘saved’, and usually from itself. We say ‘Africa’ in a way that we would never say ‘Europe’, or ‘Asia’,” wrote Bim Adewunmi for The Guardian, pointing out that Nigeria had successfully halted the spread of Ebola relying solely on local support.
Despite the criticism, the song sold 312,000 copies in its first week.
In a 2007 interview, Jars of Clay's Dan Haseltine explained how the Christmas song "looms over everybody's head." "That was such a terrible way of expressing what goes on in Africa in terms of objectifying it," he told CT. "That album took a broad brush and says this is what the Westerners think of people who certainly must not be as smart or aware of what goes on in the world."
CT reviewed a 2008 Compassionart effort by 11 leading Christian artists to make a tangible difference in poverty-stricken countries. A 2009 CT cover story examined "why Christian musicians are embarking on a different kind of world tour."
More recently, CT examined how ministry leaders in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea are responding to the Ebola pandemic. The three countries are home to approximately 8,600 churches and ministries.
“Churches don’t have a lack of desire or a lack of motivation. But the complications of getting involved are very difficult. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to figure out logistics,” Kim Kargbo, the founder of Women of Hope, a ministry working with disabled women in Sierra Leone, told CT. “It’s hard to know what to do in this complex situation. How to work around the risks and regulations that hamper the ability to work? The church in Sierra Leone is small. But what if it were mobilized to act? The goal would be to get each believer thinking about his or her biblical responsibility in this crisis.”
CT also noted how medical missionaries are helping Ebola-striken countries meet health care needs.
[Photo courtesy of robinelaine – Flickr]
News
Ruth Moon
‘Heavy-hearted’ but ‘incredibly proud,’ advocacy group plans to shutter most operations by end of 2015.
A 2007 Invisible Children rally.
Christianity TodayDecember 15, 2014
Lauren Manning/Flickr
Before the "Ice Bucket Challenge" and "Gangnam Style," there was "Kony 2012." The controversial campaign targeting Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) which has long plagued Uganda, remains an advocacy game-changer and a virality record holder. But the organization behind it, Invisible Children, will significantly downsize this month and likely shutter most operations by end of 2015.
“It’s the end of Invisible Children as most people know it,” CEO Ben Keesey told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview this weekend. He also explains the changes to GOOD magazine and via Nicholas Kristof's column today for The New York Times.
In 2015, the organization will operate in the US only through political advocacy, lobbying Congressional support for ongoing anti-LRA investments, and will halt the short film productions and events it had become known for, Keesey said. The organization plans to transition its Africa programs to local communities over the coming year.
Invisible Children started small in 2004 with a traveling campaign to show a video shot by founder Jason Russell and two friends in Uganda about the atrocities committed by Kony’s LRA. (In 2006, CT reported on why Ugandan children were killing each other in the name of the Lord.)
But after netting about $12 million from the “Kony 2012” campaign, Invisible Children stopped fundraising and focused on investing in Africa, Keesey told GOOD. When the funds got low, raising them again was virtually impossible. “We’ve done everything we can,” he said.
“Our prayers go out to Invisible Children,” International Justice Mission tweeted Monday morning, calling the group a “premiere justice org.”
While the organization is not Christian—The Atlantic noted that the filmmakers “believe in Christ, but do not want to segregate themselves”—it has roots in the Emergent Church, and founder Russell talked about his Christian mission at schools around the country.
“It was too delicate of a choice to put the cross on our website, or to put a fish on the website,” Russell said in a 2010 Relevant Magazine podcast, “because, you're honestly dealing with the truth.”
Invisible Children saw enormous success with Kony 2012, an Internet campaign centered around a 30-minute YouTube video that garnered more than 100 million views in its first six days and “set a new bar for all things viral” according to Time. Its annual revenue skyrocketed from $8 million to $13 million in the years before the video to $28 million in 2012, reports Fast Company.
Shortly afterward, Russell gained notoriety for a run-in with San Diego police, who found him allegedly naked and ranting on a sidewalk near Pacific Beach. Religion News Service reported his attempt at a comeback. (CT discussed what his mental breakdown shows us about ourselves.)
The video also garnered criticism over its approach to social justice. After it went viral, CT discussed why Kony 2012 was trending and how to best tell other people’s stories as advocacy leaders and political scientists debated the film’s value. More than two years later, opinions are still divided on its true impact, the Washington Post reports.
Responding to similar criticism in 2010, Russell argued that there’s value in “trendy” social justice. “There’s a lot of other things that could be trendy that aren’t as important as global justice or social justice,” Russell told Relevant. “In the grand scheme of things, how amazing is it that even if it is a fad or a trend, at least it’s cool to help other people?”
Fast Company noted that “in a world where the next ice bucket challenge is a tweet away, how the organization handled the rush of cash, rode a wave of criticism, and dealt with the subsequent attention vacuum can be a lesson to every organization hoping for its own viral hit.”
Invisible Children could have spent their Kony 2012 millions differently to maintain US operations longer, the organization notes on its website. “But our mission has always been to end LRA violence. Therefore, we have and will continue to strive to operate in a way that best serves the communities affected by the LRA, prioritizing investments into the programs that most effectively bring us closer to that goal.”
Since Invisible Children started, the LRA’s fighting force has been reduced by 75 percent, LRA-related killings are down 92 percent, and the US has dedicated more than $200 million to ending LRA violence through Invisible Children-supported policies, the organization states on its website. In addition, Invisible Children has invested more than $65 million directly to U.S. and Africa programs.
“The paradox of running a nonprofit is that the closer you get to achieving your mission, the closer you get to putting yourself out of a job,” Keesey wrote on Kristof's NYT blog.
“We are heavy-hearted because we hoped that all of our programs, both stateside and in Africa, would continue until the day that the LRA was completely dismantled and Joseph Kony was captured,” the organization’s website states. “But we are also incredibly proud of what we have been able to achieve together.”
CT has previously reported on the Lord’s Resistance Army, Africa, and technology.
[Photo courtesy of Lauren Manning – Flickr]
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