Jonathan D. Fitzgerald is a writer and educator whose work most often considers the various manifestations of religion in culture. He is an editor at Patrolmag.com and writes a weekly column for the popular religion website Patheos. As a freelancer, his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Religion Dispatches, The Huffington Post, Killing the Buddha, and The Jersey City Independent.
Blog Book Tour for Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right, Yale University Press
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The fallout continues. Evangelicals of all shades are showing their colors over Obama’s affirmation of gay marriage. The arguments are often predictable and not worth rehashing here. Rather, I’m always interested in the tangential quarrels that arise when we’re all provoked to debate. And many are happening out there, but I thought I’d briefly share just one in particular.
Over at “Ethika Politika,” the blog for the Center of Morality in Public Life, Andrew Haines, president and founder of the Center, takes on Rachel Evans’ massively popular post, “How to win a culture war and lose a generation.” Haines begins his critique frankly, stating that articles like Evans “tick me off.” From there he fumbles around a bit (he says Evans argument boils down to “ignorance and trepidation,” in one paragraph, but then insists “never does defending moral values entitle one to degrade or humiliate another person” in the next) until he finally lands on the brunt of his argument in the last couple of paragraphs.
Haines goes after Evans in much the same way Patrol has been attacked in the past. This line sums it up: “If Christianity is a cohesive and meaningful thing, then it must remain unified in the face of threats and challenges.”
There you have it, the tired, old argument that being critical of Christianity is the actual problem. It’s not, as Evans points out in her post, that we’ve elevated the culture wars above loving people; it’s that we’re not unified “in the face of threats and challenges.” I received this criticism en masse around my response to Jeff Bethke’s “Hate Religion” video this past January. The argument consistently went, So what if he’s not right on every theological point, it’s people like you who are critical of other Christians that show the world how much we suck, or something to that effect.
And here it is again being leveled against Evans.
Then, in his last paragraph, Haines goes one step further in assuring us that his ability to argue with Evans is limited to prepackaged attacks. Evans is not making a stand based on her faith, he claims. But rather, she is “bending to the whim of popular acceptance.” If Patrol earned a dollar for every time we were accused of “bending to the whim of popular acceptance,” no one here would have to work day jobs.
So, here’s the thing, religion is not above criticism, Christianity included. It is an actor within culture, and an extremely powerful one at that. It has the potential to do great good as well as great evil. History has shown us the effect of unchecked religion so many times that it has become the best argument atheists have against religion as a whole.
Further, if pointing out its flaws divides Christianity, so be it. We should strive toward unity, but it is better to be divided, with some people at least moving in the right direction, then to be united and all of us wrong.
No, when necessary let’s disagree; it’s for our own good.
It’s been busy (and controversial) week around here, so I thought I’d send us into the weekend with a bit of art. My wife and I had the opportunity to see the fabulous Regina Spektor in concert last night and it was incredible. I’ve always loved her song “Laughing With,” but to see it live was really quite moving. Though I can’t replicate that experience for you, I can share the song. Enjoy.
The morning after is always worse than the night before. Today is the Christian blogosphere’s morning after. Yesterday, President Obama gave his support for gay marriage, making him the first sitting president to do so, and this morning thousands of Christian bloggers took to their keyboards.
Yes, I’m here too.
Depending on the angle, the responses fit into a few categories. Most people say how not surprised they are. While the news was still breaking, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler offered a sarcastically parenthetical “again” after announcing the news of Obama’s support for gay marriage to his Twitter followers. This morning he too took to his blog saying, “No observer of this president could be surprised.”
In one of the strangest, and thus one of my favorite, responses, my fellow Patheos writer Bristol Palin quipped, “Is anyone really surprised by the fact that President Obama came out of the closet for gay marriage?” From there she went on to suggest that the president arrived at his opinion solely from listening to his teenage daughters and watching Glee.
And yet the challenge for the too-in-the-know-to-be-surprised crowd is to still make this seem like a matter of grave importance. Mohler again, “His call for the legalization of same-sex marriage yesterday is an historic and tragic milestone.” He goes on to say that this is a “sad day for America” and a “sad day for truth.”
Collin Hansen, at The Gospel Coalition, sees the president’s announcement as an opportunity for Christians to strategize on “How to Win the Public on Homosexuality,” as his piece is titled. He calls homosexuality a challenge “that threatens us all,” and goes on to argue that at the heart of the problem is the way we’ve redefined God into a granter of our desires.
It’s easy to agree with a lot of what Hansen says. Are American Christians redefining God in our own image? Yes. Have we come to believe that we should get what we desire? Yes.
But, as a response to the president’s announcement yesterday, Hansen’s piece fails because a discussion of sinful desires or our conception of God or any of the other nine scripture references that Hansen peppers throughout the last three paragraphs of his piece have nothing to do with legalizing gay marriage.
The issue of gay marriage isn’t a religious issue; it’s a political issue. Remember that what President Obama affirmed yesterday was the right of two consenting adults to be granted married status in the eyes of the state.
Of course this doesn’t mean that political views can’t be shaped by one’s faith; the president himself illustrated this in his interview with ABC. He said of he and Michelle, “we are both practicing Christians…when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.”
I believe that President Obama’s faith really has influenced his decision to support gay marriage, as it has mine. As I’ve written in many places, I don’t think a politician or a voter should be expected to separate his or her political beliefs from religious ones.
Likewise, when Christian bloggers like Hansen respond to the president’s declaration or to the issue of marriage equality in general, they are free to let their faith mold their opinion. But ultimately, in a pluralistic democratic society that opinion has to hold up to secular scrutiny.
Even in citing religion, President Obama modeled the kind of compromise that has to be made when using religious motivation to back up a political opinion. Note the way that he, like many people often do, changed the wording of Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” to the Golden Rule version, “treat others the way you would want to be treated.”
But those that argue against the legal marriage of two adults because they believe that gay sex is sinful, or as Hansen’s more evolved theology has it “the vain pursuit of self-fulfillment” is sinful, have the burden of proving why in secular society, a religious consideration like sin is a viable factor. Like the president, they must show how their religious views correspond to a secular argument.
They cannot. There is no way to argue against gay marriage from a religious standpoint because when it comes down to it, it’s not a religious issue. Even if Collin Hansen and his ilk convince the whole country that homosexuality is sinful, it will not hurt the argument that gay marriage should be lawful.
They will never “win the public on homosexuality.”
Illustration from Ludlow's article by Leif Parsons
My mother is reading a Marcus Borg book. This could be trouble, but if it is, it’s my fault. I gave it to her.
The book is “Putting Away Childish Things,” a novel. As a work of fiction, it’s not incredible. But, as a thinly veiled delivery method for Borg’s ideas, which are elucidated in a more straightforward manner in his other, nonfiction books, it’s a smashing success.
Case in point: my mom called this morning and asked, “What have you done to me?” She wants to throw the book down, and a few times has, but then she picks it up again to let Borg continue his assault on her orthodox Christian beliefs.
This is a good exercise, I think. It was for me when I read it. It is for me as I continue to read things that challenge me. But it is, of course, challenging, and so many people spend so much time avoiding challenging situations. Thus, we end up keeping to our own tribes. This is a bummer, but it’s true; it’s what we all do.
But one of the things that happens when any of us start to wander outside of our safer pastures is we begin to question things we once held for granted. If you’re reading this blog, I feel certain you’ve been there. As a person who has always been drawn to the written word, I’ll never forget when the thing I took most for granted, the sturdiness of words, began to crumble.
Honestly, I’m not sure why it took so long. As a kid in Christian school, subjected to year after year of Bible class, I always loved the verses and chapters of scripture that were difficult to understand. I distinctly remember being frustrated over the parts of the Gospels or Acts that just tell a story. I liked to think of scripture as a collection of wise sayings and sage advice. To my fortune cookie trained mind, the stories got in the way. They were too obvious. (Obviously, of course, they are not.)
But my favorite passage was and is the beginning of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the word” and so on. It was mysterious and yet I liked it precisely because I thought the point was to figure it out. Okay, I would think, Jesus is the word so this is saying that Jesus was there in the beginning. Got it. Check. Next?
When words have definite meanings, sentences and paragraphs become solvable puzzles. I like puzzles. But words don’t have definite meanings.
This is what being a junior in college and an English major teaches you. One class about literary criticism in which you finally discover what all the fuss about postmodernism is and you realize that Bill Clinton was only being kind of ridiculous when he questioned the meaning of the word “is.”
And I was reminded of this problem again recently in an excellent Opionator piece in the New York Times. In “The Living Word,” Peter Ludlow reminds us that not only do the meanings of words change over decades and centuries, they often change from conversation to conversation. Have you ever found yourself saying something like, “Ann Arbor is not a city,” as Ludlow does in his essay? He means, of course, that Ann Arbor is not a big city or a great city; it is, technically, a city. And if we can do this with a word like city, what happens to abstract words like love or peace or faith or hope?
Of course, Marcus Borg is relevant here too. In his most recent book “Speaking Christian,” Borg suggests that because we so often misunderstand the original Christian vocabulary, we misunderstand Christianity itself. Talk about an assault on orthodox Christianity.
But what do we do with this? Once we begin to understand that language is not static, that it is dynamic, as Peter Ludlow suggests, how can we ever claim a firm grasp on scripture, or on orthodoxy by extension?
We can’t. We have to wonder and question. We have to be humble interpreters and be gracious to those who come to different conclusions. We have to have what Brian McLaren called a “generous orthodoxy.” We don’t get to be right all the time, but we do get to be actively trying to be right.
And since we can never really know if we are right in any case, just trying to be right is good enough for me.
Last month I had the opportunity to see an advanced screening of the film “Blue Like Jazz.” I drove 45 minutes outside of Boston to an AMC Loews theater in Methuen, MA to join a modest crowd composed mostly of Christian youth workers. I collected my bag of “Blue Like Jazz” swag and found my seat. After a brief introduction, during which we were promised a Q&A session with the film’s director Steve Taylor and author Donald Miller, and a warning that the movie had “earned its PG-13 rating,” the wait was over, and the movie that almost wasn’t began.
Most readers will be familiar with the tumultuous journey of the film adaptation of Blue Like Jazz. It was the movie every young Christian who had read the book wanted made. It was rumored and then confirmed; it was on again, off again. When it seemed to be terminally off, a few young fans revived it via a Kickstarter campaign. And, after six years of drama, it is being released today nationwide.
I was one of those anxious young Christians looking forward to the film adaptation. I may have even contributed to the Kickstarter campaign – I can’t actually remember. But I’m also a critic, and I think that means I can’t just be a fan.
I was leery of Don Miller’s book back when it came out and every Christian I knew insisted I read it. But I finally did. “It’s like ‘Traveling Mercies’ Lite,” I concluded. But there was also a lot to like; it looked fresh and new against the backdrop of Christian publishing.
I was critical, too, of the trailer for the film version when it was released last June. In my Patheos column I wondered: Would the movie be good art, or just “Christian art”?
And as I watched the film last month, that remained the central question occupying my thoughts. But by the time the lights came up, it was clear: “Blue Like Jazz” is just another Christian movie.
As I noted in the Patheos column, it should go without saying that Christians can and do create good art, but they don’t call it Christian art because it is art first. That it was made by a Christian, that it may even in some way communicate something of Christianity, is secondary to its existence as a work of art. If this is not the case, if it is primarily didactic — or in the case of much Christian art, derivative — it cannot be good art.
“Blue Like Jazz” is not really derivative, at least no more than anything else: it’s a coming-of-age story in which young Don leaves his home and his church in Texas to attend the über-liberal Reed College. He loses some faith, hurts some feelings, and drinks some beers, but by the end, of course, he’s found his faith again.
But it is didactic. Do you remember Miller’s note at the beginning of the book? He first explains that he once disliked jazz music because it “doesn’t resolve” (apparently some jazz aficionados took issue with this), but then did come to like it, and concludes by applying the same assertion to God: “I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve.” What I liked best about his book was that he doesn’t go on to say, “God does resolve!” in the author’s note. Nor does he reach that conclusion at any point in the book. Miller didn’t feel the need to do that Christiany thing where all the loose ends are tied up and we are taught an easy-to-follow message in three simple steps.
The film version definitely resolves. Every loose end is tied up. Don gets his faith and he gets his girl…in the same scene, amazingly enough. The elements of narrative — setting, conflict, climax, resolution — act as an overly self-conscious guide through the movie (they play a part in the book as well). The result, though, is an ever-present awareness of the hands of the writers guiding a story not meant to resolve, to its inevitable resolution.
Sure, it pushes some of the limits of what can comfortably be called a Christian movie. There’s some cursing, drinking, a lesbian friend, and a giant condom, but even in this, the movie seems disturbingly aware of just how far you can get a young Christian audience to go. And, of course, this is because Miller himself pushed the limits in his book and arguably created the demographic for whom the movie was made.
During the Q&A session after the film screening, I asked the director Steve Taylor why he fought for six years, against all kinds of adversity and rejection, to make this film. He said he wanted to show that Christians could create better art than what was out there. He noted, remarkably, that Miller’s story felt real to him because it didn’t tie up at the end. (If I could have followed up, I might have asked why, then, his movie does tie up so neatly.)
Furthermore, Taylor remarked, he wanted to film the “confession scene,” in which Reed students enter a confession booth to hear a kind of reverse confession — a Christian confesses wrongs committed in the name of Jesus. He rightly noted the intense power of that scene in Miller’s book, and said it felt important to make because he wanted non-Christians to know Christians understand how they are perceived. I see two fundamental flaws with this reasoning, however: the scene already existed in the book, and, as a Christian film, it’s not likely many non-Christians will even see the film.
This, of course, is the problem with all so-called Christian art, be it film, music or books: it purports to carry a message for those outside Christianity, while appealing only to those within. Perhaps “Blue Like Jazz” will be the exception, but my guess is that today, and for however long the film is in theaters, it will be attended almost entirely by youth groups and Christian college students. I’m glad they will be exposed to a kind of Christian film that neither ignores nor bemoans the existence of gay people or alcoholic beverages, but I’m afraid pushing the limits of what Christian moviegoers find acceptable may be the film’s greatest accomplishment.
In the end, the movie does not supersede the genre of Christian film, and it doesn’t add anything to what Miller did in his book almost a decade ago. That said, go see it if it’s playing in a theater near you; decide for yourself. And then come on back here and let us know what you think. I’m not a film expert by any stretch, and thus there are a lot of aspects of the movie I haven’t touched upon.
As a parting note, it took me about a month to get up the courage to write this review. There is a part of me that wanted just to ignore the film, rather than offer a negative critique. I worry about a backlash of readers calling me a jerk, of course, but more than that, I worry about whether writing a critical review actually makes me one. But a good friend, a musician and a Christian who, if not actively, eschews the label of Christian artist, called me on this.
This is why Christians continue to make such subpar art, he told me, because we’ve decided it’s not nice for other Christians to critique it.
He’s right, and yet it is still difficult to do. I met Steve Taylor after the screening and thanked him for personally inviting me to the event. He sincerely hoped I liked the film and showed genuine appreciation for the work of Patrol. I was struck by his earnestness and inspired by his and Don Miller’s attempt to push the limits of Christian art, but I wish they could move beyond it entirely; I truly want to be both a fan and a critic.
Christianity is in crisis.
Andrew Sullivan seems to think so, and though I side more with Sessions in his response to Sullivan – that is, the answer to a perceived crisis-bound Christianity is not to imagine a completely depoliticized, internal, and individual faith – I’m more concerned with how Sullivan misses just what kind of crisis we’re in the midst of.
As a review, in Sullivan’s telling of it, the use of Christianity by politicians, the injection of political power into a naturally apolitical faith, has led to a crisis in which true Christianity has been supplanted by this new political mutant. The response, then, is to internalize faith or, as he further illuminates in his brief response to Sessions, we need an “interior faith but also a practice of Christianity in the social/civil sphere: helping the poor, tending to the sick, visiting prisoners, abandoning materialist motives.”
There are obvious holes here, and next to no one thinks that Jesus’ message is completely apolitical; though it is so radically counter to human instincts and urges that it can often feel that way.
But I think Sessions covered all of that. Sullivan misses the mark not only on his prescription for the crisis, but on his diagnosis of the crisis itself. It is not that Christianity has been politicized, but that a certain politicization of Christianity is quickly coming to stand for all Christianity. In light of this, Timothy Noah elucidated a better understanding of the crisis of Christianity last month in his column at The New Republic.
Responding to a description of the new film “October Baby” as “Christian” on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” he writes, “What NPR and Fox and Sony mean when they say ‘Christian’ is ‘Christian right’ or ‘Christian conservatives,’ terms that adherents don’t like because they think they’re pejorative.”
It’s not just NPR or Fox or Sony that use the word Christian to describe a certain kind of Christian (a minority of Christianity, as Noah points out), increasingly I hear it from everyone I talk to, even Christians themselves. Some people don’t want to be Christians because of other Christians. Others talk generally about the Christians who protest abortion clinics. Or the Christians who cling to their guns. Or the Christians who oppose birth control, same sex marriage, and Harry Potter.
Sure, they are all Christians, but so are the Christians who fight injustice here and abroad, the Christians who feed the homeless, the Christians who make it a point to announce to any seekers that “Everybody’s Welcome.” These kind of Christians are underrepresented in the media because they’re not as loud as their counterparts, their protests and works are not as sensational, they’re less concerned that you know they’re Christians.
I’m not mad about that; it kind of seems like the proper order of things. Jesus, after all, on several occasions took steps to minimize the amount of fame he attracted. The problem is, while quieter and perhaps more moderate and liberal Christians continue to gather in congregations around the country, our louder more visible brothers and sisters are coming to occupy the word Christian.
When I first learned that the churches I grew up in were being lumped in with a variety of other churches under the banner of evangelicalism, when I realized that the only thing those churches shared was a rightward political lean, I ran from the label evangelical. I know there’s a historical evangelicalism that was hijacked by the media, but I didn’t think it worth fighting for, so I bailed. But I’m not sure how to bail from the label Christian if that becomes necessary.
Sure, every young Christian who is disillusioned by manifestations of her faith by those she doesn’t agree with imagines abandoning the label; we all have friends on Facebook who respond with “Christ follower” to the question of religion. But we can’t really shake the label and, though I was willing to give ground to the label evangelical, I don’t think we should have to lose Christian identity to a certain kind of Christian.
This is Christianity’s real crisis – not that it is an actor on the political stage, but that it is only playing one part.
Should I not admit that? But I do. I like that a major part of the Christian story is a dark day when all feels lost. I don’t even just like it in the “I like it because I know Easter is coming in two days” kind of way. I like it for its darkness.
It’s sometimes hard to remember, in the midst of the crisis that is American Christianity (but not in the same way Andrew Sullivan thinks, more on that later), in the midst of the proliferation of health and wealth gospels and poppy praise songs that there’s a darkness — a brutal death — at the center of our faith. We gloss through Good Friday on our merry way to the open tomb. We don’t live with Good Friday.
So, naturally, I like things that help me live with Good Friday a bit, and this year I had a special treat. My good friend, the talented singer-songwriter Jake Armerding released a song called “Why Have You Forsaken Me” as part of his year-long Community Supported Art project. Each month he releases a new song, and this month’s is, appropriately, dark.
In just about five minutes Jake evokes the despair of Good Friday, waves away any of the pretty poetry about footprints in the sand and hands reaching down, and just lets us live in the darkness. I’m playing it on repeat today, and, tonight, when I attend Good Friday mass it will still be circling in my head and bumping up against the reading of Psalm 22.
Not a bad way to spend a Good day.
This past week a number of writers, including Rachel Evans and Christian Piatt, have taken to their blogs to elucidate why young people (in some cases themselves) leave the church (note the ever-important lowercase “c”). Coincidentally, this past Sunday The Daily published an op-ed by me about why I’m considering actually joining the Episcopal Church. Here’s that piece in full…
In a 2011 Gallup poll, independent voters made up 40 percent of the electorate, the highest ever. Politicians, and presidential candidates in particular, understand that while primaries are about appealing to a political base, general contests often come down to wooing the uncommitted. In other words, it is the independent vote that wins elections.
This move toward unaffiliation isn’t restricted to politics. In last week’s issue, Time magazine profiled the “10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life,” including trends like living alone, the “cloud” and food that lasts forever. Coming in at No. 4 was “The Rise of the Nones,” whom Amy Sullivan defines in her article as people who “have not given up on faith,” but “have given up on organized religion.” They are not atheists or agnostics; they believe in God, but they want to be able to express their belief in unorthodox ways. And, just as independent voters are on the rise, Sullivan reports that the Nones are the “fastest-growing religion group in the U.S.”
I was a None once. Growing up outside of Boston, where Irish or Italian heritage (both of which I have) all but guarantees Roman Catholic membership, I struggled to explain just what brand of Christian my family was. As a student at a Catholic high school in the 1990s, I sometimes simply called myself a Christian. But my Catholic friends would counter by saying that Catholics are Christians too. Then I tried saying I was Protestant and leaving it at that. But my friends inevitably asked what denomination I belonged to, forcing me to admit that I didn’t belong to one. Saying I was nondenominational, however, was never an option; it would have been more like identifying what I was not. In the end, I settled on something like “spiritual, but not religious,” the categorical antecedent to the Nones. (It was only later, in college, that we nondenominational Christians got neatly lumped together under the term “evangelical.”)
This classification endures. Earlier this year, a nondenominational Christian spoken word poet named Jeff Bethke uploaded to YouTube a video titled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” It went viral, and there was a backlash from those who don’t hate religion, including a Catholic priest who countered with his own video, “Why I Love Religion, and Love Jesus.” Nevertheless, Bethke connected with millions of people who shared his distaste for what he identifies as the hypocrisy of religious people who, among many other failings, claim to love their neighbors but fail actually to care for them.
Although I grew up sharing this sentiment, being a None failed me. My family learned the hard way that without some kind of denominational structure, without some measure of the order and tradition we had intentionally shunned as simply “spiritual” people, church authority can easily become centralized in one or two leaders. Often, their agendas become the church’s orthodoxy, and I witnessed more than my share of abuses of pastoral power. After experiencing this again and again in our tiny nondenominational congregation, my family left, and hopped around from church to church throughout most of my teenage years.
Looking back, I can see that our unaffiliated status was not evidence of a more true or original conception of Christianity as we imagined it, but a way around the difficulties that come from being subject to tradition. We believed we didn’t need the wisdom of the historical church fathers, and it followed that we didn’t need any of the strictures of organized religion. But we were wrong. We were aimless and lost, simultaneously reinventing the wheel and making up the rules as we went along.
Now, after spending much of my adulthood trying to find a place to belong, I’ve turned into the opposite of a None — I’ve become a proud Joiner. Since college, my own search has found me desperate to join. I have considered Roman Catholic confirmation, Presbyterian church membership and, most recently, Episcopalian identification. To that end, I have been attending confirmation classes at my local Episcopal parish since last month.
As I look around at my fellow Joiners, I see that it is specifically those who have lived the life of the unaffiliated who have decided, Sunday after Sunday, for several hours following Mass, to gather and discuss the rhythm of the liturgical calendar, the purpose of baptism, the history of the church and the beauty of the Book of Common Prayer. I’m not sure whether I’ll be confirmed when the class ends in eight weeks, but there is certainly something attractive about the prospect.
It would be foolish to think God requires affiliation as a means of access. We humans however tend to corral into formal groupings, whether it’s organized religion or political parties. In the absence of tried-and-true tradition, we begin to create our own. My guess is that, as the numbers of Nones continue to increase, they will begin to develop traditions, create rules and define their orthodoxy until, ultimately, something like a new denomination will arise. Perhaps in 2022 someone will declare “The Rise of the Joiners” as one of the life-changing ideas of the moment.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily.
Earlier this week, someone at my alma mater, Gordon College, was kind enough to share one of my recent Huffington Post blog pieces on the college’s Facebook page as an example of “Alumni in the News.” Suddenly, there on Gordon College’s wall, a place where the “Likes” far outnumber the comments, a comment war began.
Essentially, a couple of offended instigators listed the reasons why my piece wasn’t newsworthy and why it was an example of how Gordon College has derailed. In response, many more people (quite a few of my friends and acquaintances) defended the validity of my work and the reputation of their college.
This all got me thinking: I wonder how most people feel about their alma mater. What about you? If you’re an alumnus of some institution, how do you feel about your experience there, and what is your sense of the school’s ongoing legacy since you’ve left?
If you’re a current student, are you proud of your school’s alumni? Are you happy with the education you’re getting?
I’d love it if you’d be willing to share some thoughts here; I think we will find that reading of other people’s experiences will be helpful in gauging our own.
Early this week, the media-based activist organization Invisible Children launched a campaign to popularize the name of the ruthless Ugandan leader of the Lord Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony. Kony is an international criminal, and under his leadership the LRA has abducted thousands of children and forced them into his army. Invisible Children released a video online in which their founder Jason Russell explains that by bringing attention to Kony, he hopes that Americans will pressure celebrities and, in turn, politicians, to insure that the United States assists in securing Kony’s capture. Certainly it seems that Invisible Children has excellent and honest intentions, and yet a major controversy has arisen related to a number of issues from Invisible Children’s finances to their proposed methodology for dealing with Kony.
As I watched Invisible Children’s video, and then read about the controversy, I, like many people, felt torn. I said as much on Twitter this morning and asked my social network for help interpreting the situation. The first to respond was James W. McCarty, III, Director of the Ethics and Servant Leadership Program at Oxford College of Emory University and a PhD student in religion. McCarty’s response strikes all the right chords — it is thoughtful and charitable, and yet critical and prescriptive. With his permission, I happily share his post (which originally appeared on his personal blog) with you in full:
Christian Ethics, Invisible Children, Kony 2012, and International Advocacy
By James W. McCarty, III
I owe much of my activist history to Invisible Children. I saw their first documentary as an undergraduate student and, inspired by their story, got in touch with an organization and went to Uganda in the summer of 2006. My intention was to work in northern Uganda working on behalf of those “invisible children.” However, upon arrival I was informed that, due to contextual developments, northern Uganda was not where I was needed or necessarily wanted. Rather, I spent my time in Kampala working with refugees from multiple countries (DRC, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan) as they restitched their torn lives in Uganda.
I am quite grateful to Invisible Children for this early push into a life pursuing justice for the world’s most vulnerable. I’ve supported them financially in the past and promoted them by wearing their bracelets and telling their story. I am a living testimony that they are unbelievably skilled at telling stories and motivating young people to action.
However, because of life situations that led me to concentrate my energies on other social issues, I have only been an observer and supporter of the cause for justice and peace in Uganda from a distance. I have tried to stay informed about the situation, however, and have remained in serious conversation with activists on the complexities of the issue.
And I’ve heard two stories.
The first is that there must be international military intervention to capture Kony, bring him to justice, and begin moving towards a sustainable peace.
The second is that international efforts at demonizing Kony has made the LRA more intractable, spread their influence throughout other parts of central Africa, and tramples upon local efforts at justice-seeking and peacebuilding. There is quite a debate going on about whether the International Criminal Court has made matters better or worse re: the LRA.
Well, yesterday and today my twitter feed has erupted with people promoting this new video from Invisible Children.
My feed has also erupted with the “Africa people” I follow roundly criticizing (primarily) the campaign and (secondarily) the organization. For examples, see here and here and here and here and here and here and hereand especially HERE.
The most common critiques are that the narrative told by IC is too simple, that things have improved in Uganda in recent years, that the activism of IC denies agency to Ugandans to solve their own problems, that such advocacy is a new form of colonialism, that the simplistic representation of the complex realities on the ground in Uganda and the rest of central Africa perpetuates problematic stereotypes about Africa and Africans, that their suggestions won’t work, that the organization isn’t a good steward of their resources and allocates their funds in problematic ways, and that what the organization achieves more than anything is making white people feel good about “taking action” no matter whether that action is an appropriate one or not.
As noted above, IC makes a strong case for their work. In addition, there are multiple critiques already available that touch upon political, ethical, and practical problems some see in the “Kony 2012″ campaign. So, I won’t add anything necessarily new on those fronts. Rather, I’d like to enter the conversation by raising some things that I think are important for Christians to consider when thinking about partnering with the campaign.
The first is that Kony 2012 seems to be single-mindedly pursuing a military intervention. Problems with this are multiple: first, the war’s been going on for over 25 years, so there’s a good possibility a violent response to the LRA will be ineffective in ending the conflict; second, IC seems quite comfortable partnering with the Ugandan government to pursue this action, but this is problematic because the Ugandan military has been accused of its own, equally troubling, human rights violations – let alone the fact that Pres. Museveni is a really bad guy himself; and third, this action would likely result in the death of many people across multiple nations, many of whom would be children.
The fourth reason this is problematic for Christians, however, is a theological one. How does one justify the international use of force against a non-state backed army? Again, how does one live with the responsibility of attempting to push national and international government institutions towards the use of force? Drawing on recent developments in just war theory and international human rights law one can make an argument (see “responsibility to protect”), but it would be quite a new one in the history of Christian theology (and one that should be made only with the most careful consideration). Plus, there is a case to be made that the nonviolent responses of concerned Ugandans has been more effective in decreasing violence than any military response, Ugandan or international, to date. I know of several Christians who prefer the path of Christian nonviolence who are ready to justify the use of force in this situation. I urge them to take this consideration quite seriously. In addition to questions of faithfulness to the way of Jesus, there are only shaky reasons to think the likelihood of success is worth the risk to innocent human life (a core criterion of just war theory).
Plus, a military action against the LRA will entail the harming, and probable killing, of LRA victims – namely, the abducted children conscripted into Kony’s army. In loving some neighbors we must do all we can to avoid harming other neighbors, especially those that are the least of them.
Also, I have heard of multiple voices on the ground calling for forms of traditional justice and reconciliation rather than the single-minded pursuit of retributive justice because those who are in the LRA, willingly or unwillingly, are family members of those still in the affected communities. Christians must always keep the goals of reconciliation in mind in the pursuit of retributive justice. We don’t believe in a justice that is fulfilled with punishment. We believe in areconciling and restorative justice.
This is an important point because “Kony 2012″ has painted Joseph Kony as a monster. He has undoubtedly done horrible things that deserve punishment, but the narrative of IC ignores his early support in Uganda. His actions have not always been frowned upon by the people of northern Uganda. He didn’t arise out of nowhere. He was viewed as a freedom-fighter before becoming known primarily as a terrorist. As Christians we believe that terrorists, like the apostle Paul, are not to be vilified even as we hold them to the standards of justice. According to IC Kony is “the bad guy,” not unlike Darth Vader in Star Wars (according to a young child). This justifies his destruction, and it’s highly likely he would meet a similar fate as Osama bin Laden if IC’s recommendations are pursued. We remember the joy in another of God’s creatures killing after that event and Kony 2012 may be laying the seeds for another moment of raucous celebration at a tragic event.
I think IC is an organization that listens to the pain of vulnerable people and commits itself to working on their behalf to end their suffering. This is a wholly Christian action. However, I worry that this step in their work marks a shift toward a mistaken faith in the power of violence and the effectiveness of the ICC in Africa. I encourage Christians who have learned about the destruction of the LRA and the suffering of its victims to commit themselves to partnering with those organizations on the ground making practical moves towards restoring broken communities (Concerned Parents Association-Lira, Concerned Children and Youth Association, Friends of Orphans-Uganda, Art for Children-Uganda, and Mennonite Central Committee Uganda). If, upon much prayerful reflection, one comes to the tragic conclusion that an international military intervention is necessary both to capture Kony and to move toward peace and a justice that is restorative, please take each step in that direction carefully and with continual reflection.
Let’s just say the history of western intervention into the political affairs of African peoples has created the world in which the LRA was possible. Be very sure your advocacy of another such action won’t do the same…
My latest at The Huffington Post:
I get Rick Santorum’s beef with higher education. When he calls President Obama a snob for wanting to make higher education a possibility for all people or when he rants about the liberal professors who try indoctrinate students, I get where he’s coming from. I went to a Christian college for something very close to this reason.
Further, New York Times writers like Frank Bruni and Dick Cavett are right to draw a connection between Santorum’s remarks on higher education and his own decision to home school his children. I wasn’t home schooled, but I had the next closest thing: a private education at a tiny Christian school at which my parents, and the parents of many of my friends, served as the teachers. It was like a perpetual home school tupperware party.
The decision by my parents to give me this kind of education was part practical — the public schools in the city I grew up in were subpar — but also part reflective of Santorum’s desire to protect children from the corrupting influence of the secular world. So, too, was my decision to forego applying to any of Boston’s esteemed colleges and universities in favor of Gordon College, the small Christian liberal arts school 45 minutes north of the city that I ultimately attended.
And, you know, it kind of worked. Today, at 30 years old, I am still a Christian. My childhood and even teen and college years were relatively free of any of the kind of trouble that many of my peers find themselves in.
Although, come to think of it, Mr. Santorum might not see me as a success story of his educational philosophy after all.
I remember rather vividly the moment that I decided I never wanted to sing another contemporary praise and worship song again. Back in the church that my wife and I call home — the church in which we were married, where many of our close friends still fill the pews every Sunday — reading the lyrics to Chris Tomlin’s “The Famous One” projected onto the big screen at the front of the sanctuary and hearing the lyrics passionately sung by everyone around me, I checked out.
“You are the Lord / The famous one / Famous one,” goes the refrain. “Great is your fame / Beyond the earth.”
Undoubtedly, God is famous. He’s very, very popular. In fact, his book is a perpetual best seller. He’s the subject of songs and stories, the object of prayers and praise. Yes, God is famous.
But who cares?
It seems to me that emphasizing God’s fame week after week in churches across America by those singing this and other Tomlinist anthems, tells us more about ourselves than about our God. We love fame. It is so valuable to us in fact that we feel the need to remind God of his popularity. Certainly, there’s biblical precedence for this, “The Famous One” features some more traditional fame language as well, “Great is your name / In all the earth.” But, it’d be difficult to argue against the notion that our love for fame, and the importance we ascribe to it, has reached a crescendo.
So much of our culture reflects this emphasis — from celebrity reality television to award shows to the glossy magazines that scream from supermarket checkout lines — but perhaps nothing so brings our passion for fame home as social networking. Think about it: just by creating an account, an ordinary person can have followers, friends, and fans. Like celebrities, we needn’t know all these people. Upon accepting a request or gaining a new follower, the “friend” becomes a number — one more digit in an ever increasing follower count.
I’m not exempted from this, as I’m reminded every time I pridefully mention my Twitter follower count and my wife rolls her eyes. I know, in that moment, that I’ve been sucked in to the same sad cycle I often decry. There’s nothing inherently valuable about fame, and further, it often distorts a very natural desire to be loved by someone into an obsession with being loved by everyone.
This is why I quit singing songs that recast God’s glory in terms of our 21st century American ideals, and why I immediately felt squeamish when I opened a new book by Toni Birdsong and Tami Heim entitled @stickyJesus.
The book’s dedication states that it is “For J.C.” There was a moment, I confess, when I hoped they didn’t mean the J.C., not because he doesn’t deserve to be the subject of a book dedication, but precisely because he was hiply addressed by his initials. Painful memories of youth group chants, “Whose down with J.C.?” made me shudder. The next line in the dedication makes it clear who they mean, “The Only Famous One.”
Again with the famous one!
As I continued through the book, reading chapters that attempt to explain the significance of the times we live in, that tell the gospel story in the language of social media and marketing, that charge readers to take to the internet with their message, all before going into strange detail explaining how to actually use sites like Twitter and Facebook, it made perfect sense.
Evangelicalism is fraught with a desire to appropriate the world’s values — in this case fame and social media — for the purposes of sharing the gospel. And, in the hands of two skilled marketers, @stickyJesus is able to do it quite convincingly. Though, I’m not sure who their target audience is, except to feel certain it’s not me. The authors explain the benefits as well as the pitfalls of social media use in rather elementary terms; I can’t help but fear that they’re training up a whole generation of empty nesters who will take to Facebook en masse to intersperse Bible verses among pictures of their grandkids.
To their credit, the authors are aware of how their effort to market the gospel online might be perceived. In a section entitled “Just a little marketing 101,” they tell the reader that she is in the “Kingdom business,” before self consciously adding “No, we are not ‘selling’ Jesus, so pipe down and stay with the story.” But, of course, the story is selling Jesus. “Sticky,” the authors explain several times, is a hip marketing term: “It’s the secret sauce in an advertising message that helps it hit the mark, get attention, and move people to act.”
So, the Tomlin song and @stickyJesus, with their emphasis on recasting the gospel in light of fame and popularity, are two tiny drops in the gigantic bucket of evangelical sub-culture, the overall effect of which makes Christianity feel cheap and temporary rather than meaningful and lasting. Evangelical culture is mired by disingenuousness; the message may be “sticky,” but the culture is anything but.
Sometimes this is just kind of funny, as in Contemporary Christian Music, trend following books, or hokey movies. But, in other arenas, this shallowness can be very serious. In politics, for example, it often means that a politician with an eye for the evangelical vote can simply market himself to this shifting demographic, saying the right words and phrases, speaking out against the same wedge issues, modeling back to them the insincerity they propagate.
We all want to be famous it’s true, though not necessarily something we should be proud of. And, yes, God actually is famous. But, utilizing this desire for fame as the next big marketing tool in the J.C. campaign is at best disingenuous, and at worst potentially damaging to the goal it intends to achieve.
I get Rick Santorum's beef with higher education. When he calls President Obama a snob for wanting to make higher education a possibility for all people or when he rants about the liberal professors who try indoctrinate students, I get where he's coming from. I went to a Christian college for something very close to this reason.
Further, New York Times writers like Frank Bruni and Dick Cavett are right to draw a connection between Santorum's remarks on higher education and his own decision to home school his children. I wasn't home schooled, but I had the next closest thing: a private education at a tiny Christian school at which my parents, and the parents of many of my friends, served as the teachers. It was like a perpetual home school tupperware party.
The decision by my parents to give me this kind of education was part practical -- the public schools in the city I grew up in were subpar -- but also part reflective of Santorum's desire to protect children from the corrupting influence of the secular world. So, too, was my decision to forego applying to any of Boston's esteemed colleges and universities in favor of Gordon College, the small Christian liberal arts school 45 minutes north of the city that I ultimately attended.
And, you know, it kind of worked. Today, at 30 years old, I am still a Christian. My childhood and even teen and college years were relatively free of any of the kind of trouble that many of my peers find themselves in.
Although, come to think of it, Mr. Santorum might not see me as a success story of his educational philosophy after all.
While at Gordon -- while faithfully attending the required Bible classes and chapel services -- something strange happened. My politics, which, admittedly, weren't all that developed when I entered college, veered far left. Also, I began to understand the Bible primarily as a text, and to interpret it in much the same way I was taught to interpret texts in my literary criticism courses. My response to the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, which happened when I was a junior, was a sharp turn toward Christian pacifism. And, just out of Gordon, I ran straight to my first secular university to earn a Master's degree in creative writing.
Ironically, it was there, in my first public school, that I fully solidified my faith and finally made it my own.
So, what happened? Santorum thinks he understands why Obama pushes college. He explained his "snob" comment by saying, "[Obama] wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his." My politics and values certainly look a lot more like Mr. Obama's, than either of my parents. I did all the right things according to Santorum, and still I ended up liberal.
Perhaps it would dismay Mr. Santorum to know that I teach college students now. In each of my classes, ranging from freshmen composition to advanced journalism courses, I tell my students that college isn't so much about the things that they learn, but the process of learning itself. That is, the real purpose of a college education is to learn how to think, and how to successfully engage and evaluate new ideas and concepts. Any successful college, whether it's Hampshire College (which often tops "most liberal" lists) or Gordon College, will teach its students how to think.
And, though the results typically do skew more more toward the liberalizing nature of a college education, this is not universally the case. I have many good friends who graduated from Gordon and either strengthened the beliefs of their conservative upbringings or chose a more middle-of-the-road approach to politics. One of these friends recently asked me, somewhat sarcastically, if I thought his college education failed because he resisted becoming liberal, and I told him that I did not believe it failed at all. He's a much smarter, more thoughtful conservative than the young firebrand who entered as a freshman.
Indeed, parents, Rick Santorum among them, want their children to share their beliefs and values. This is natural. But more than that, I know that they want their children to grow and be challenged, to see more of the world than they have, and to ultimately live good and fulfilling lives. And, as a recent AP story reports, most American parents still believe a college education is the way to achieve this.
Bashing college or bandying statistics to scare potential conservative voters by attempting to show that college educators want to indoctrinate students and strip them of their faith is harmful to the welfare of our country. If anything, this should prove that the last thing we need is less education.
Yesterday, it happened. A student hit me with the question that many educators dread, "When are we ever going to use this in life?"
I love this question. I don't dread it at all. I eat it up.
I had just shown my freshman composition class part two of the incredible "Everything is a Remix" video series by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. The premise of the series is, as the title suggests, that everything comes from something else. The portion we watched yesterday shows side by side shots from the Star Wars films and the source material that George Lucas culled in order to create his movies. I'm not sure if Ferguson is aware of the textbook I use for this class, somewhat cheesily called Remix, but his video series provides the perfect multimedia companion to it.
But, based on the fact that my students read essays in Remix about celebrity culture, suburban living, video games, and Facebook, it's always just a matter of time before they question how any of this is relevant for their future. Oh, they enjoy the conversations we have in class, but I can always sense -- especially among the sharper students -- a growing worry that I'm wasting their time.
So, at some point in the semester (we're just about a week away from spring break at this point), someone will ask the inevitable question. She may have well lit a long cartoon fuse leading to a stack of TNT. I exploded.
"Why are you in college?" I asked.
"So I can get a job after," she answered.
"What's your major?"
"Social work."
"You want to be a social worker?"
"No," she said. "I'm switching to pre-med."
"You want to be a doctor."
"I don't know."
Got her. "Okay," I smirked, "assuming you decide you don't want to be a doctor, let's say you decide you want to go into banking or teaching or some other thing. Do you think you'll be able to get a job?"
"I guess. If I have a degree."
"So, even though your degree doesn't really apply to what you want to do, you still think it will get you a job?"
"I guess."
"I think you're right," I told her. "That is because the value of your college education isn't career training. No one is going to ask you what courses you took. That doesn't show up on your resume."
Blank stares from the class, so I continue, sounding more and more like a fiery Southern Baptist preacher but with a decidedly more liberal message.
"The value of a liberal arts college education -- to you, to employers -- is that you've spent four years in a place where you were forced to consider new ideas, to meet new people, to ask new questions, and to learn to think, to socialize, to imagine. If you graduate, you will get a degree, but if you are not a very different person from who you are today, then college failed."
I think they were shocked to hear me talking like this. But, I think they liked it a little too, to have someone put their entire experience in perspective.
I told them that by the time I graduated from my own Christian liberal arts college I was a changed person, a better person than the one who entered four years prior.
"What kind of person were you before college?" a particularly inquisitive student asked.
"A knucklehead," I replied.
I really believe this stuff. I know that this isn't a universal view about the value of college, but it's the reason I teach. I went on to explain the practical side of what we were doing as well. Because I teach writing, I can insist that the skills they pick up in my class will serve them well throughout the rest of their college careers as well as whatever jobs they end up in after. I made it clear -- as I have many times already throughout the semester -- that the concept of remix (studying the work of others, combining it with their own thoughts, and outputting a new creation) is how all good writing works. But all of that, I insisted, is secondary to the importance of changing and growing as a person in college.
This group of students caught me at a particularly pertinent time to launch into this lecture about the value of college; I just finished one of the better novels I've read in a long time, Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot. If you're unfamiliar with the novel, it's best summarized by saying it's about a love triangle between three college students at Brown University. Madeleine is an English major who loves Romantic literature, Mitchell is a religious studies major who is in love with Madeleine but is hopelessly one of those guys that girls always consider "just friends." Leonard is Madeleine's boyfriend. He's a biology major and he suffers from manic-depression.
The Marriage Plot shows college as a time when students do precisely what I insisted college students do. In a review of the novel for Books and Culture, my friend and sometime editor Naomi Schaefer Riley writes this of college, "It was time that was supposed to be (at least in part) spent in pure intellectual pursuits, time to read the books that you probably wouldn't get to when you had a family to support. Time to think about big ideas and talk about them with friends in the middle of the night. And even, clichéd though it may sound, time to search for meaning in life."
Riley, who has written extensively about contemporary higher education, thinks this description refers to a distant past, "However college students are spending their time these days, they are not, generally speaking, engaged in this search."
Though Riley's probably right in the global sense -- she has, after all, been researching this stuff for over a decade now -- this belief about what college is supposed to be remains my inspiration to teach. It's what makes me want to push my students, stretch their minds, and even -- sometimes -- make them uncomfortable.
I believe in a college education for the same reason anybody believes in anything -- because it has worked for me. To be certain there is a lot that is wrong with higher education, but I take this as a challenge. To try to be something that is right about it.
I imagine that my inquisitor thought about what I said for a minute or two yesterday, and then I dismissed her, and then she went to lunch, and didn't think about it again. Which leads me to my favorite thing about this process of transformation that happens in college: it is magic. It's not quantifiable, there's hardly ever a specific moment when everything changes, it happens slowly over time. But if my colleagues and I do our work well -- the magic will happen.
This post originally appeared at Patrolmag.com.
Election seasons are prime for considering the relationship between religion and politics -- Kennedy's Catholicism, born-again Carter, Bush and the evangelical vote, Obama's pastor problem, and so on. But few campaigns in recent memory bring about as much hand wringing over religion as the current contest for the Republican nomination.
From Michelle Bachmann's reading list of obscure, purportedly "dominionist" authors, to Rick Perry's preemptive prayer service before announcing his candidacy, to Mitt Romney's Mormonism, the current slate of candidates gives rise to a plethora of fascinating religious considerations. Some, like Bachmann and Perry, use their religious affiliation -- evangelical Christian in both cases -- to their political advantage, rallying likeminded supporters with evangelistic fervor. While others, like Romney, downplay their affiliation in an effort to avoid alienating voters.
In the past, no matter what one's religious affiliation, there was a supposed general agreement among voters, politicians, and members of the press that all parties should remove their religious views from consideration in the political arena. That is, the so-called "separation of church and state" should apply equally to government officials as to the government itself.
This stance is rooted in Reformation and Enlightenment thinking and, as far as it applies to government, has served Western democracies well. The problem is, while it is possible to separate church and state in a ruling body, it is both impossible and undesirable to do so in a human body. Maintaining a pluralistic society and a secular state does not require citizens to divide themselves into believers on certain days and irreligious citizens on others.
Yet, we are told, this is precisely what politicians must do in order to keep from appearing to violate the separation of church and state. Take, for example, the proposal, issued a couple of months ago, by The Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan of a kind of "libertarian Christianity." This, he suggests, is the opposite of what he has long referred to as "Christianism," which is marked by "the fusion of politics and religion for the advancement of political goals."
Consider, also, the New York Times op-ed from August by David Campbell and Robert Putnam in which they suggest that what marks the Tea Party is not their insistence on smaller government, but their desire to "mix religion and politics." They write, "this infusion of religion into politics" is precisely what "most Americans increasingly oppose."
But is it the mixing of religion and politics in general that Americans oppose, or could it be what R. R. Reno, editor-in-chief of First Things, identifies as "mingling certain kinds of religion with certain kinds of politics?"
Surely this is what most Americans mean when they say they don't want their politicians' religious beliefs to affect their political convictions. Politicians shouldn't be expected to fragment themselves, to somehow isolate their religious convictions from their political views. What should be expected, however, is for politicians to answer for their beliefs, as Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times suggested albeit somewhat harshly. Offering a more generous explanation of Keller's suggestion, Times columnist Ross Douthat followed up, "The separation of church and state in the United States has never separated religion from politics, and the 'private' beliefs of politicians have often had very public consequences."
Douthat's view marks a reeducation of the American public on what separation of church and state means when it comes to the religious identities of politicians. And, it would seem that this changing view is taking hold even among politicians themselves. In the recent Republican debate in Las Vegas, the moderator, CNN's Anderson Cooper, asked the candidates directly whether it is "acceptable to let the issue of a candidate's faith shape the debate." The question was prompted by yet another criticism of Romney's Mormonism, this time by a pastor affiliated with Rick Perry.
The candidates unanimously agreed that questions regarding the role of religion in the formation of one's values and the influence on decision-making are fair game. Newt Gingrich, who has had a somewhat rocky relationship with the religious right, said, "There's a very central part of your faith in how you approach public life. And I, frankly, would be really worried if somebody assured me that nothing in their faith would affect their judgments..."
But, Mitt Romney added, one's religious affiliation shouldn't be the deciding factor in one's candidacy. He concluded, "The founders of our country went to great lengths, and even put it in our Constitution, that we would not choose people for public office based on their religion."
Indeed, we can consider a politician's religious views without elevating them to the level of deciding factor, but acknowledging the link and using it beneficially is key. So suggested University of Notre Dame professor R. Scott Appleby in a recent panel discussion considering the spiritual impact of 9/11 at the Templeton-Cambridge seminars on Science and Religion. When reached for further comment, Appleby wrote, "There is a growing awareness not only that religion is not going away, but that many of the world's greatest challenges will not be addressed effectively without partnerships between governments and religious communities." We must stop pretending that politicians can or should be willing to divide themselves into religious people on some days, and political people on others.
Professor Appleby is right; most Americans value religion, and thus it is not a pretense of separation we want from our politicians, but honest dialogue about how their religious beliefs can and should influence their political convictions.
There are two thoughts swirling around and around in my head today -- two seemingly opposing view points, voices from members of my generation who see the world as it is and call foul. The first voice belongs to Thomas Day, an Iraq war veteran and graduate student at the University of Chicago. Last Friday he wrote a powerful essay for The Washington Post's "On Faith" section entitled "Penn State, my final loss of faith." The faith he lost is not in God, but, as he plainly states, "I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents' generation."
Day grew up in State College, benefitted from the work of Jerry Sandusky's Second Mile foundation, and, though he notes that he was never harmed by Sandusky, writes from a place of frustration and hurt, to great effect. He lists a litany of reasons that the leadership of our parents' generation has failed us. He notes that in the wake of September 11 when we needed strong direction, what we got instead was encouragement to shop. He references the downgraded credit rating, the millions of unemployed members of our generation, and the gargantuan debt we are strapped with. He offers these all in service of his point that the world we are inheriting is nearly unrecognizable from the one our parents were born into.
Day pledges to continue to respect his elders, but wants to "politely tell them, 'Out of my way.'" He is not looking for a Joshua figure to emerge from our parents generation as, he concludes, "They've lost my faith."
The other voice I've been entertaining belongs to Rachel Signer, a friend of a friend who wrote a moving piece about her experience with Occupy Wall Street for the religion website "Killing the Buddha." Signer's starting point, a position of skepticism, very much mirrors my own initial posture regarding the Occupy Movement. But when Signer began attending Occupy Wall Street's General Assemblies and marches, she found a kind of community in Zucotti Park that she had been unable to find elsewhere. Though each night she returns home to her apartment, she notes that, for her, the OWS community is her true home. She writes of the park, "This place where there is nothing to do but occupy, which is really everything we need to do and everything you want to be; it's everything."
Day's reflection, which grows out of the events at Penn State, and Signer's, prompted by the Occupy Movement, start from the same place, the dissatisfaction that my generation feels with the world we inherited. Day's piece, however, seems to end on a pessimistic note. There are moments wherein it seems he may be rallying his peers, but he doesn't quite get there. Signer's piece, on the other hand, tries to land on an upswing, a found community in an otherwise fragmented world.
But the truth is that they are both equally pessimistic.
The Occupy Movement, which suffered a serious blow with the police sweep of Zuccotti Park, embodies the frustration that Day expresses, but it only gives off the appearance of doing something about it. We all agree that the world is not as it should be and so we write and occupy, we argue and complain, we chant and sing and march and, in the end, we don't actually try to change anything. Perhaps the most oppressing legacy of our parents' generation is that despite their best efforts to encourage us to be whatever we want to be and to follow our dreams, we turned out to be mostly pessimistic.
Thus, these two voices harmonize our frustration, but their song, which once carried promise, is coalescing into a drone, a monotone chant.
But then a third voice sounds. I begin to hear the words of my parish priest who, just this past Sunday, amidst the cries of brought-to-be-baptized-babies, taught on Jesus' parable of the talents, sometimes called the parable of the investors. In this difficult and depressing parable, a master entrusts three servants with some money. Two of the servants invest and reap a profit, but the third, afraid to invoke the wrath of the master by potentially losing his money, buries it in the ground. When the master returns he is pleased with those who have invested, and angry with the servant who did not.
It is easy to misunderstand this parable as an approbation of Wall Street and investment banking, but, as my priest explained, it is actually about one's outlook. The third servant takes stock of his situation and is afraid; he chooses to do nothing rather than risk facing his master's anger. And he is punished.
My generation, whether writing critical essays about our parents' generation, or choosing "nothing to do but occupy," are burying our master's talents when the times call for us to invest our gifts. I've come to believe in the promise of the Occupy Movement, and I've long advocated for more of my generation to take to their keyboards in an effort to write change into effect. In both cases, however, we have to go beyond complaining and camping, we need to find a way to advocate and to act. Admittedly, this won't be easy; it will require creative solutions often found in unexpected places.
This piece originally appeared at Patheos.com.
As another summer comes to a close, so too does another music festival season. The fans are left only with memories of bodies packed tightly together before a glimmering stage, rock gods screaming into microphones the words they've so longed to hear, new friends made in sprawling autograph lines and hot-off-the-press merchandise featuring slogans such as, "I like girls that love Jesus."
Wait, what?
Sure there are plenty of mainstream summer rock festivals, but I'm talking about Christian rock. I'm talking about the Creation Festival, held in Pennsylvania since 1979, and Cornerstone Festival, in Illinois since 1984. Or, in my neck of the woods, the relative newcomer, SoulFest, which set up camp in New Hampshire in 1998.
Back in 1996, when I was a freshman in high school, my best friend and I, my sister and her friends, and, of course, our parents, trekked down to Pennsylvania for the Creation Festival. My mom and dad, old Jesus People from the 70s, had attended the very first Creation, so for them it was a kind of homecoming. But the music of the mid-90s was a far cry from the hippie/folky sounds of their day. In fact, 1995-1996 was arguably the pinnacle of Contemporary Christian Music, or CCM.
In 1995, DC Talk, perhaps the most popular Christian rock band of all time, released their earth-shattering (well, by Christian music standards) album "Jesus Freak" on which they once and for all showed what CCM was really all about, mimicking the trends of secular pop music. DC Talk to that point had been, to the best of anyone's reckoning, a rap and R&B group. But, with the release of "Jesus Freak," DC Talk ceased to be a rap group. The title track of the record is decidedly a shinier, hyper-produced version of Seattle grunge. But it's the only "grunge" song on the album; the rest borrows from every other genre or artist popular in the mid-90s. Did you love "Kiss From a Rose"-era Seal? DC Talk did that. Covers of Broadway show tunes your thing? They had that too. To that point, imitation was the essence of CCM.
But, another significant record was released that same year. Jars of Clay, a band from Illinois, was distinctly different from the previous stock of Christian artists, and, at least for a while, it seemed that their brand of honest folk-rock had appeal even outside of CCM; "Flood," the first single off their 1995 self-titled debut, was somewhat of a crossover hit.
In 1996, in Pennsylvania, standing in the disabled persons section (my father had just undergone a surgery, and we capitalized) looking up at Jars of Clay, it was clear that they were taking Christian music in a different direction. Amongst swirling rumors of CCM's "Jesus' per Minute (JPM)" standard, which meant that lyrics had to meet a certain number of Christian references, Jars' lyrics were far less overt, even subtle at times.
As history would have it, the mid-to-late 90s wasn't just a tumultuous time in the Christian music industry, but in the music industry as a whole. The decade that ended with Napster, also, for all intents and purposes, ended the way the music business had been run, and CCM had an especially difficult time with the transition.
Though the festivals continue, and many of the major labels have survived, in recent years a number of young Christian and formerly-Christian writers have memorialized the music of their youth. A couple of months ago, in Guernica, Megan O'Gieblyn wrote of "a childhood in Christian pop." Her article made laps around my circle of friends for its frightening familiarity; we all lived it. And, in November 2010, my friend Joel Heng Hartse, a music critic, published Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll in which he shares his experience as a lifelong music lover and Christian.
Though the genre known as CCM is irrevocably changed, many see this as a good thing. Another friend, Kevin Gosa is a saxophonist in the Roots-Chamber Music outfit, The Fretful Porcupine, with collaborator (and Boston folk scene celebrity) Jake Armerding. The two recently performed three sets at this past summer's SoulFest and reported better than expected crowds at the smaller venues they played, far away from the main stage where many of the popular acts from the mid-90s were still playing the hits of their heyday.
DC Talk has dissolved, but their lead singer, Toby Mac, has a successful solo career and performed at Creation this past summer, and Michael Tait, another DC Talker has joined with Newsboys, also a mainstay of 90s CCM. But, as the burgeoning success of less mainstream bands like The Fretful Porcupine -- who perform instrumental music (no lyrics, no JPMs) -- can attest, another breed of Christian music, created more in the image of Jars of Clay than DC Talk, is still very much alive and well. Just as in mainstream music, the do-it-yourself model reigns, and talent and steeliness, rather than marketing and mimicry, determine long-term success.
So, see you at next year's SoulFest?
Nine years ago, in 2002, I got on a bus bound for New York City to take part in a protest against the Iraq war. About a year before I had found pacifism, and that transformative experience was, by then, starting to manifest itself in my life in myriad ways. Upon arriving in Manhattan, I walked east from the Port Authority bus terminal and tried to get as close as possible to the UN headquarters, the epicenter of the protests. But the police blocked the growing crowds at Third Avenue, so right there 33rd and 3rd I joined the Asians for Peace and we chanted and sang and drummed and prayed that the clouds of war that were growing on the horizon wouldn't become a reality.
And we all know how well that worked out.
So, I don't mind saying that I was jaded by that whole experience. I also don't mind saying that I'm easily jaded. But, I'm also hopelessly optimistic. I want to be a part of a movement for positive change that works, that takes hold, that has effect.
That's why, last Friday afternoon after I was done teaching for the day, I took the subway to downtown Boston to see Occupy Boston for myself. I exited at the South Station T stop expecting to find a raucous crowd of protesters like I'd seen in footage from New York. I don't know if I imagined that the protest was ongoing, all day and all night, or that musicians and other popular figures were just hanging out, but what I found was a rather subdued tent community, organized neatly around a statue of Mahatma Gandhi. I wandered up down the makeshift "streets" reading signs posted on tents, eavesdropping on conversations, and trying to get a handle on the character of this protest.
I first heard of the Occupy Wall Street Movement last month, a few days before it was set to begin. My friend and sometime editor Nathan Schneider was participating in and covering the event for his website Waging Nonviolence, as well as for other media outlets like Democracy Now. I read his reports hungrily, eager to ascertain the group's intentions and demands. I resonated with their anger and frustration. I understood their complaint, but I still wasn't sure what they intended to do about it. But if anything, I thought, it would be helpful to put a consistent reminder outside of the offices of Wall Street, to let those who work there, most of whom are honest and decent people, know that their greedy actions and those of their colleagues, bosses, and subordinates were having a tremendous and often negative effect on too many working Americans.
Attention to the occupation was slow going at the start. Those few Twitter friends in my feed who knew about it complained about this lack of attention in those early days. But, sure enough, over time the media's attention shifted in their direction and, as Occupy Boston indicates, the idea caught on in other cities.
But, for me, the questions that I had in the beginning still remained. I wasn't sure what the plan was. What were they trying to accomplish? I hoped that by visiting the Boston site for myself, I would have the opportunity to learn.
Some of the people I saw gathered in Dewey Square in Boston fit the stereotype that has been cast on them in the media. I saw dreadlocked college kids, veterans -- perhaps war veterans, but definitely protest veterans -- playing folk songs, as well as a few less obvious peaceniks. In snippets of conversations I heard oft-repeated refrains, "Because of the media . . ." and ". . . then we'd have all the energy we need!" And I sympathized. I agreed. But I didn't join.
It occurred to me that all the criticism of the movement, both from people like me who are sympathetic to their general cause, as well as from those on the right, is rooted in the sad fact that the protesters are trying to be something that they are not. Take a look or a listen to the consistent criticism. Many point to the fact that the occupiers are inconsistent. There is an image floating around online contrasting the anger they direct at corporations with the plethora of brands that the protesters are wearing and using. On the other side, the occupiers are accused of not having a clear goal, and thus causing disruption without providing any way to satiate their concerns.
Both of these criticisms stem from the fact that Occupy is a mid-20th-century protest staged in the 21st-century. Sure, it incorporates social media, but aside from that, it is very much an imitation of '60s protests -- another piece of nostalgia from a generation that loves to look back almost as much as we like to look inward.
Their concerns are right on, and no one is really unsure as to the kinds of things they would propose, if they got around to proposing things. But they aren't telling a compelling story because chants aren't a very good storytelling medium. Neither are tweets. In fact, Twitter is a natural partner to protests such as this one (not to mention the Arab Spring) because tweets work in much the same way as chants: short, pithy, and most effective when repeated by a number of people. But, ultimately, tweets and chants function like bumper stickers; they allude to a greater story but fail to tell it. In the 21st century, we need stories, not slogans.
In the '60s, getting the attention of the national media was the only way to get your message heard by people across the country. But this is no longer the case. Rather than sitting in tents, holding handmade signs and occasionally chanting, the occupiers should be occupying the Internet -- using the countless avenues that technology has made available to them to tell compelling stories. Fortunately, some are doing this as a companion action to the physical protest, "We Are the 99 Percent," for example.
At Occupy Boston I noted that many of the young people there are around my age. This is my generation's time to speak up, but we're doing it the way our parents' generation did. In the 21st century we have better options than pitching tents in public parks and getting arrested.
Take to the internet. Take to the airwaves. Let's get out of the tents and onto the web. We know what we want and we have the means to say it. We have 21st century problems that need 21st century solutions. I would love to see my peers in the Occupy movement join us here.
This post originally appeared at Patheos.com.
Osama Bin Laden was killed last night. My wife and I were just about to go to bed when one last cursory glance at Facebook and Twitter told me the news. We turned on the television in time to see President Obama finishing his speech, and then it was back to the social networks for commentary.
I know why Americans were celebrating. I've seen the pictures of the people outside the White House, and, just over a mile from my apartment, I know there was a large group gathered at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. Bin Laden has been America's enemy for more than a decade, and now he is no more. It feels like justice, and certainly it is a form of human justice. We understand justice to be giving someone what he deserves. But for Christians who believe that the wages of sin are death, this is a precarious definition.
Sarah Pulliam Bailey, an editor for Christianity Today, put up a very quick roundup of Christian responses she'd gathered from around Twitter as the news unfolded. The posts were predictable. Derek Webb, in his measured way, tweeted, "Don't celebrate death, celebrate justice." Jordan Sekulow suggested some celebration music, and Mark Driscoll wrote that the cheering crowds should remind us that "justice is glorious & comes ultimately through Jesus cross or hell," before taking an ill-timed and shameless jab at Rob Bell, "Justice wins."
It is clear that, from all angles, the killing of bin Laden is understood as justice, but I am going to suggest that we've conflated our human understanding of justice with God's justice. That Osama bin Laden is dead does not make the world a better place. It does not make us safer. It does not somehow magically remove a quotient of evil from the face of the earth. Russell Arben Fox, writing on the religious and moral implications of bin Laden's death for Front Porch Republic says it well, "The moral plane of the universe is not somehow improved by the killing of a man."
Death begets more death. Killing creates more killers. True, bin Laden will never again mastermind a plan to kill anyone, but someone else will. Someone else just did in the time it took to write that last sentence. And again. And again.
If we could accomplish God's justice by killing people, if the death of an evildoer at the hand of another human is what would bring about justice, Jesus would not have come to die, but to kill. If we could eventually eliminate evil from the world and mete out justice by the sword, Jesus could have wielded it wildly during his brief stay on earth and then, rather than leave us with the Holy Spirit, he might have empowered his disciples with some futuristic weaponry.
But that's not how God's justice works. And it's a good thing, too. If the punishment for evil was physical death, we would all be dead. In fact, death is the consequence of evil, but for saving grace in the person of Jesus. Death at the hands of another human is not God's justice. It was Jesus himself who warned, "All who draw the sword will die by the sword." This is not metaphorical language. This is a truism that was true before Jesus came, and remains true long after.
Thus, we don't exercise God's justice by issuing out the death we believe evildoers deserve. In fact, we hardly ever exercise God's justice at all because it is so counterintuitive to our construction of the concept. I'll be the first to say that I fail in this regard, so I'm not going to ask any readers to do better. But, I believe that what I can ask, what we can do, is understand the difference and stop conflating the two.
Osama bin Laden was evil. I still twinge with pain when I remember the way I felt for months after Sept. 11, 2001. Here on earth, he deserved to die. But, then, here on earth, so do I.
This post originally appeared at Patrolmag.com.
Last Thursday was a bad day. Two powerful blasts of bad news damn near knocked me off my feet, coming as they did within minutes of each other. Two deaths, and an unfortunate connection.
A good friend of mine from high school passed away Wednesday night. We haven't had much contact since graduating; we reconnected on Facebook not long ago and, in viewing our interactions there, I see that most communication we've had was his yearly "happy birthday" messages to me. Unrequited, I'm afraid.
Back in high school, he and some of the other guys used to go to youth group with me. They weren't evangelical Christians like I was; they were raised in Catholic families and were fellow inmates at our all male Catholic high school. None of them really liked going to my church, I don't think. It was too strange for them. I was too obviously evangelizing. But we didn't have many friends outside of each other, and I'm sure that's why they came.
My friend was bisexual. This all came out years after high school, and in the time since we reconnected he lived his life right out in the open on Facebook. He had some trouble with drugs and alcohol in those intervening years, too, but seemed to have it under control. Ultimately, from the time spent in the homophobic halls of an all-male Catholic school through the rest of his too-short life, I get the impression that due to the competing pressures regarding his sexuality, he was never comfortable in his own skin. He described himself, casually, as "a lil bit of this and a lil bit of that."
I don't know what he thought about me after all those years of trying to "witness" to him, of being judgmental about petty teenage taboos like swearing and smoking. There is a lot I regret about the kind of Christian I was in high school. I can only hope he didn't think I judged him still, or thought any less of him after he came out. I can only hope, but I'm not so sure.
Also on Wednesday night, in Uganda, a country I visited while living in Kenya, another man, David Kato, died. He was murdered. Though the police are blaming his death on a robbery, those who knew him and knew his story are drawing the obvious connection between his death and the fact that his picture was recently featured on the front page of a Ugandan newspaper under the headline "Hang Them."
He was gay.
Already, people are assigning blame for Kato's death to the U.S. evangelical preachers who visited Uganda a few years ago and stoked the fire of anti-gay ire in the country, and to the groups in the U.S. that continue to support that cause. It has been widely publicized that after the evangelical preachers visited Uganda, hosting rallies and talks, some Ugandan legislators proposed a bill that would make hanging the penalty for a person found to be homosexual.
The extent to which the preachers who have been frequently accused by name are guilty of Kato's death is unclear and probably immeasurable. But what is clear is that Christians, and evangelicals in particular, are guilty of demonizing homosexuals. We are told -- despite Jesus' example -- that it is up to us to throw the first stone of judgment at those we deem sinners. In fact, on Thursday, with unfortunate timing, Albert Mohler wrote, responding to Joel Osteen's nearly forced pronouncement that he believes homosexuality is sin, that "those who express confidence in the Bible's teaching" will have to make such a judgment.
But when we do this, we put an unbearable burden on the shoulders of our gay brothers and sisters. Even the most "love the sinner, hate the sin" believer among us is guilty. We have mistakenly labeled homosexuality as an unforgivable sin, a malfunction, a distortion or a disease. And we are guilty of a million counts of making life miserable for so many people, and of making life unlivable for countless others.
I'm calling for an end to this life threatening judgmentalism. I'm calling for a moratorium on debates over what qualifies as sin in other peoples' lives. I'm calling for a change in priorities, a shift back to what we should have been doing all along. I'm calling for love, acceptance and a global admission that we have wronged so many people. Ultimately, I'm pleading with my fellow Christians to change -- to make a marked transition from being the most judgmental and angry to the most accepting and loving. From being the police of others' morality to the bearers of others' burdens. Peoples' lives, it's clear, are at stake.
Originally published at Patrolmag.com.
When I was a kid I knew The World was going to Hell in a hand basket. I didn't know what that phrase meant, still don't really, but I knew that it was one of the only times I could get away with saying hell, because it wasn't swearing. The World was actually going there.
Perhaps a couple definitions are necessary here at the outset. In my conservative, evangelical-before-we-knew-what-evangelical-was upbringing, Hell meant that very literal -- perhaps underground -- place where real flames burn real, bad people forever. And The World meant non-Christians, as in "be in the world, but not of it." Evangelicals often refer to any not-usses, any thems, as The World.
So, The World was on a steady decline to the pits of Hell, which began, well, when it all began, when the literal Adam and Eve ate the literal apple, handed them by the literal snake who literally was Satan in disguise and sin entered into the previously pristine world. The thing about this decline though, is that we were all okay with it. It's not that we wanted to live in a world that was getting worse; it was just that we didn't want to live in The World at all. And though there are many variations of this belief, typical evangelical eschatology says that in order for Jesus to come back the world has to get so bad that the only solution is to scoop up his followers, burn the whole place down and start again.
This being the case, we knew that what we were seeing around us, the fact that more and more swear words slipped through the FCC's slackening grip and made their way into our homes via our televisions, that more magazine covers revealed more skin, that PG movies were more like PG-13 movies, that a Democrat got elected, and then had a public affair, and then stayed in office; these were all signs that things were going according to plan.
The only problem, as far as my 8-year-old self was concerned, was that things weren't moving along quickly enough. My parents used to tell me stories about how in the 1970s they were certain that it was all coming to an end. But then Reagan became president and, I guess, things started looking up again for the good guys. I had to do something to help speed up the process.
My solution came in the form of one of the greatest evils of the 80s: MTV. I wasn't allowed to watch music videos, not even the harmless VH1 variety. Clearly, I concluded, the more viewers MTV had, the sooner Armageddon would happen. Therefore I resolved to make any and all of my non-Christian friends tune in often, and sometimes, even, when I was sitting on the couch beside them. I would hand a friend the remote to my family's old JC Penney television set, tell him to type in 3 and 6 and when MTV blinked on the screen and Axl Rose screamed "Take me down to Paradise City..." my friend would turn to me with a horrified look on his face and say something like, "But we're not allowed to watch this." To which I would respond, "I'm not, because I'm a Christian, but I think it's okay for you."
Diabolical, wasn't I? In the end, all this accomplished for me was a few spankings and an uncompromising love of popular culture.
Certainly this is religion as seen through a child's eyes, but it is also emblematic of the kind of Christianity I grew up in -- one so concerned with individual salvation that its very standards of morality are a means toward that end. This is the same morality that cares nothing for the earth because it will eventually be destroyed, or for those who are not receptive to evangelism as their fates are sealed.
This morality really is amorality, a void where actual care and concern for what is right should be -- rules and regulations in place of grace and virtue. If there is a list of activities that one must do or not do in order to achieve personal salvation, this list must necessarily trump everything else. I must do whatever is necessary to secure paradise for myself. My morality matters most; yours, very little.
As much as the people in my church hated the idea of relativism -- which they saw as a kind of ultimate evil that, if ever it were to take hold, would assure that there would be no ultimate evil - the relative nature of the preferred evangelical morality seems to have gone completely unnoticed.
But, Christianity is not really about personal salvation. As a Christian, my life should matter less to me than the lives of others. In this way, too, my sense of morality must reflect this understanding: it is not what I can do for myself that is of value, but how I can make life better for those around me. Or, as Hegel prescribes in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, striving toward spiritual perfection in one's own life is not enough, rather the Christian believer must actively transform the physical world into a place more habitable for "free, spiritual beings."
This shift fortunately corresponds to a larger shift that is taking place among evangelicals, or post-evangelicals as many of us who have walked away from the warehouses and former department stores that served as the evangelical churches we were raised in are often identified as now. If evangelicalism was concerned, first and foremost, with personal salvation, we must make a conscious effort to shift our attentions outward; not to police the morality of others but to mind how our own actions help or hurt them, to ensure our motivations are right.
Granted, this outlook isn't going to speed up the onslaught of the Apocalypse, but it might make the time between now and Armageddon that much more pleasant for everyone.
A few weeks ago, the religion website Patheos.com featured a conversation on the "Future of Evangelicalism." The discussion was the sixth in their series on the future of religion, which had already considered two other branches of Christianity, Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism, in addition to Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. To that point, however, the evangelical series is slated to have the most contributors, 32, a good deal more than its close cousin and nearest competitor, the Mainline Protestantism series.
That there are so many opinions on the future of evangelicalism is telling. Compared to the other faiths considered, it is the most amorphous, and, some would argue, the most in danger of becoming extinct. On Easter Sunday in 2006, Michael Luo published an essay in The New York Times that shed light on what then were growing fissions between evangelicals. He referenced a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which separated evangelicals into three camps: traditionalist, centrist and modernist. The piece concludes with the assertion that some evangelical leaders had been discussing whether to dispense with the title "evangelical" altogether.
Over the next couple of years, much was made of the fissions and cracks that were beginning to show on the surface of evangelicalism, most often along the lines that the Pew Forum survey highlighted. Not long after, many writers and pundits, both within evangelicalism and without, began to pronounce evangelicalism dead. Among those tolling the death knell was the late Michael Spencer, better known as the "Internet Monk," and the magazine I edit, Patrol Magazine, in an editorial entitled "Get Over It."
Certainly those of us whose who perceived evangelicalism to be in decline were onto something, but a closer look reveals that it may not be as simple as proclaiming, "Evangelicalism is dead." In order to understand what is really going on, it is important to understand how we got to this point.
Though evangelicalism has been around in some form or another since the Reformation, by most accounts contemporary evangelicalism, or what Harold Ockenga, founder of the National Association of Evangelicals, called "neo-evangelicalism," is understood to have begun in the 1940s as a kind of middle ground between the fundamentalism of mainline denominations and the liberalization of Christianity. Never at any point in the movement's history has their been a unified definition or set standards that mark evangelicals; though some have tried to create rigid classifications, evangelism has remained fluid.
So amorphous was the movement that many of us who grew up in what now are considered evangelical congregations didn't even know we were evangelicals. The rash of so-called non-denominational churches, which evangelicalism made way for and the Jesus Movement of the 1970s spawned, spent much of their existence as free-floating, undefined entities until that other amorphous grouping of Christians, the religious right, began to absorb them, making it possible, in the early 80s, for the term religious right to become synonymous with evangelical. I sat for a total of 16 years of Christian schooling, including four years at an evangelical college, before I even knew I was an evangelical.
But then, as soon as I knew I was identified as such, a funny thing happened that was not unique to me: I began to resist the classification. The period around the 2004 presidential election and the couple of years that followed, arguably the height of evangelicalism's political power, may have been the closest that the movement ever came to being definable. Even then, however, the mainstream media defined the term with no regard for the theological and traditional criteria that people within the movement often considered. Drunk on the power, however, what evangelicals believed was of less importance to them than what they stood for or against politically. And it is this identity, created not from within but from observers on the outside, that most people in the United States recognize as evangelical.
By this account, evangelicalism began its rapid decline at the very moment it reached its most crystallized form. It was then that many within the movement had to reconcile their beliefs and values with an external set of criteria, perhaps for the first time. Though many evangelicals fit neatly within the new popular perception, large swaths, defined in the Pew poll as Centrists and Modernists, began to pull away. The result of this was the infighting, to which many periodicals and bloggers brought attention, over new hot-button issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the environment.
By the time the 2008 elections rolled around, the right-pulling political power for which politicians had depended on evangelicals in previous decades was barely seen, stretched as the movement had become. For the first time since Jimmy Carter, and in a far greater magnitude than back then, young evangelicals rallied around a Democratic candidate, and as a result it became a lot more difficult to talk about the "evangelical vote."
Inasmuch as evangelicalism as most people understand it today really came into being after the mainstream media sanctioned its existence, it has died. Thus, it was dead the moment it was most alive. What we see in conversations like the one that took place at Patheos.com is the awkward struggle to define a unified future by people who share a common faith but not a common practice. Perhaps the greatest good that will come from this kind of consideration will be the realization that one evangelical future is not possible, for one evangelicalism never actually existed.
So much of the way we talk about religion and science in the West is about reconciliation. Some great injustice has torn the two asunder, and the debate rages on between those who think they should meet again on a level playing field, and those who say they should remain in their own dugouts, each eyeing the other suspiciously. This debate results in individuals who are also torn, divided between their religious and scientific selves.
Many great words have been issued here to bring understanding between the two "sides"; scientists and religious scholars both have illuminated the darkest corners of this ongoing conversation. But recently I have found that there are, in fact, people out there for whom this debate is non-existent, or at least unnecessary.
Since January, I have been working in the Writing and Communications Center (WCC) at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. Many of the students I see on a daily basis are international students; a great number of whom hail from China. These students come to the WCC seeking editing assistance for technical documents they have written in English, a language they are still learning. They also come for conversation practice, tips on pronunciation, or sometimes just to listen to native English speakers talk.
In my interactions with the Chinese students, I have been surprised to learn that many of them possess strong Christian faiths. I learn this about them in a variety of ways. In some cases, it comes out in conversation practice as we search for a topic we can discuss with relative ease. Other times I learn about a student's faith when I ask if he or she does any reading for fun. On more than one occasion I've learned that the only book a student reads in English outside of her field is the Bible. On another occasion a student bristled at my suggestion that he listen to talk radio to familiarize himself with American accents, but jumped at the alternative, audio books. You can guess what book he wanted to listen to.
Perhaps this should not have surprised me, as some estimates say there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants or, as a recent NPR story pointed out, more Christians than Communist Party members. But, how is it that these students, brilliant scientists in the making from a country that has a tumultuous history with religion, live at such relative ease with what many of us in the West might call their "two selves"?
One explanation actually comes from religion itself, though not the Christian faith. Unlike Christianity or Islam, neither Taoism nor Buddhism, the traditional religions of China, preaches exclusivity. For this reason many faiths can and do grow alongside one another in China.
This ability to live in harmony with other religions may also allow for seemingly disparate ideas to coexist, says Tim Sigman, the New York Metro Area Director of International Students Inc., a Christian ministry that reaches out to international students studying in the United States. Sigman meets regularly with several of the Chinese students whom I work with in the writing center.
"Asian culture is generally pragmatic," he says. "It is also circular in reasoning whereas we in the West think more linearly." He suggests that the Chinese students "can embrace things that may seem contrary, if they are pragmatic."
Sigman also noted that in his experience Chinese students who convert to Christianity "deal with many of these issues on the front-end." He explains that before they make the decision to become Christians, they have already thought through much of what that decision might entail.
One of Sigman's students, Wenlin, a Ph.D. candidate at Stevens conducting research in the field of Automatic Control has been trying on Christianity for some time. He agrees with Sigman's assessment that Chinese people tend to be more open to differing viewpoints, but goes on to say that in the West, science seems to be on equal ground with religion. In China, he says, "Science is a tool to change one's condition, to fix a problem, or make a living." It is not held in as high esteem as religion is. As to any potential conflict between scientific theories in his field and his beliefs, he explains, "They are not on the same level of understanding about the world."
Wenlin says that his first encounter with Christianity came on a college campus in China when he met some very charismatic new converts. Indeed, many Chinese Christians come to the faith in their twenties, often because they meet an evangelist at a university, either in China like Wenlin, or abroad. This was the case for Dr. Z, a Christian Chinese scientist and professor who, like many of his colleagues, according to the recent book Science vs. Religion by Elaine Howard Ecklund, prefers anonymity when it comes to matters of religion and asked that I not use his real name. He explains that the age at which a person converts is very important, as the tenets of Christianity and what it teaches about the world add depth and fill in the spaces in one's prior education, explaining things that the sciences do not. In this way, the two work as partners, as opposed to antagonists, to create a cohesive worldview.
Whatever the reasons, there are certainly lessons to be learned by those of us in the West. If being more open allows for seemingly disparate ideas to co-mingle, and if understanding the value of a comprehensive worldview that comes from merging religion and science gives rest to the debate, perhaps it is time we follow our Chinese colleagues into these spaces in between our "two selves."
Paul Simon isn't sure about God, and that's what makes him such an excellent "God chronicler" in his latest album, "So Beautiful or So What."
Why are evangelicals throwing their support behind Rick Santorum, a Catholic?
On the similarities between the "Young, Restless, Reformed" movement and The Empire.
What does the absence of a strong evangelical contender in the Republican presidential primaries reveal about the current American religious landscape?
Millennials are marked by a certain "niceness," but is it all just a marketing scheme?
The oft-used phrase "new evangelical" is often applied to people who aren't evangelical at all.
A few weeks ago, after 10 years of running a bed and breakfast, my parents sold their inn, their home. In a way, that was always part of the plan. A ten-year plan.
I was a freshman in college when they called me with the news that they were considering buying an inn. I think I laughed at them, not because I didn’t think they could do it; I was sure they could. Rather it struck me as funny, I suppose, because, who does that? Who compensates for an impending bout of empty nest syndrome by filling the nest with strangers?
The Sally Webster Inn
And yet they were serious. Within weeks, my sister, then a junior in high school, and I were visiting beautiful old houses in the town of Rockport, Massachusetts. We had family in Rockport, had spent summers there, and the fact that my parents wanted to live there was perhaps the least surprising thing about the whole ordeal. I don’t remember the specific factors that led to their choice, but my folks eventually chose an old gray colonial with maroon shutters on Mount Pleasant Street. The Sally Webster Inn it was called, after the last surviving child of the house’s builder.
My parents were natural innkeepers. Even before they moved to the inn, they were known for their hospitality. My mom is an ever-flowing fountain of conversation. She has a particular penchant for eliciting the most intimate of details from her conversation partner, never in an “I-can’t-believe-I-admitted-that” kind of way, but rather a “thank-God-I-have-an-outlet-to-speak-what’s-on-my-mind” way. This is why many visits to the Sally Webster, for many travelers, ended with a hug from the innkeeper. My dad, though less of a conversationalist, knows how to turn it on. He’s a charmer who can transform his whole body — facial expressions, posture — into a welcome sign. Though, most often, the smile became more real when he was no longer required to wear it.
For our part, I’m sure my sister would agree that being in college and having an inn for a home had many benefits, and a few downsides. The downsides were obvious and easily overcome: strangers in your house, the necessity to be quiet. But the benefits were enormous. As my college was a 20-minute, scenic drive from the inn, my friends and I were there often — to hang out, do laundry, eat free meals, and for many of us, to work. My parents employed nearly every one of my friends in college and, in some cases, for years after as well.
During those years and the several that followed, the most significant, as well as many seemingly insignificant, events of my life played out against the backdrop of the Sally Webster Inn. In college there were late night conversations that launched lifelong friendships, cigarettes smoked on the roof to the rhythm of college-deep thoughts, beach days that had their beginning and end at the inn, annual parties when the business was closed in January, and even concerts in the living room. Later, graduation parties, birthdays, and weddings of friends and, eventually, of me to my wife, and my sister to her husband, happened at the inn.
In my memory, the inn was more than the location of these stories; it was a character in them. And, of course, there’s a great tradition of houses as actors in literature. From the insidious house in Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart,” to the summer house in Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse, and into film like the great building in Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums, or the analogous father/house in Life as a House.
Sally, as we affectionately referred to the inn, was alive with anthropomorphic personality. There was a picture that hung in the living room of Sally Webster herself, mean as hell and scary. And each of the rooms were named for her and her siblings, Caleb and Rhoda, Esther and William, Prentiss, Apollo, and Hannah, and decorated in such a way that gave each a unique persona.
An artist's rendering of Mount Pleasant Street and Sally Webster
Over the years my parents redecorated each of the rooms, keeping with the décor of the time period, but infusing Sally with a bit of Kathy and Fitzy. In this way, the inn provided the most physical embodiment of home possible. When my wife and I visited we sometimes felt like we had gone back in time due to the age of the house and the antiques, but more than that, we felt that we were literally inside our family, living within my parents. Certainly there is some Freudian satisfaction in this, but call it what you want, it felt like home.
The last time we visited, I found myself inadvertently avoiding the inn. I didn’t drive by it if I could help it, which meant I only saw it once. Already, I noticed, it felt less like home. My parents stayed in town, moving only a few houses down the street, and it was as if that Old Testament cloud that represented the spirit of God to the Israelites had lifted and begun to move on. Over the time, I suspect, this feeling will grow as the new owners remake Sally in their image, and my parents settle into their new home.
And that is one of the great things about old New England houses — every individual or family that inhabits them leaves their impression on the place. Maybe it’s something about the materials used, perhaps wide plank pine floors absorb personality better than the composite materials used in many new houses. There could be something to the old adage, “They don’t build them like they used to,” if the way they used to build them had some kind of mystical quality. Maybe that’s not it at all, but there was something extraordinary about the Sally Webster Inn, I think, something not quite explainable.
There will be other houses that live like characters in my life; I suppose when my wife and I finally get around to buying a place of our own, that’ll be a big one, but I find it hard to imagine a place with more personality, more spirit, than the Sally Webster Inn. Goodbye, Sally Webster.
For most of my life I have delighted in my identity as a New Englander. At different stages, this meant different things. When I was very young it meant I came from the place in America where the history was made. I remember feeling prepubescent pride as my Cub Scout troop traveled to Plymouth, Massachusetts to see the Mayflower and Plymouth Plantation, a replica of the pilgrims’ settlement there. In my backyard I dug for what I hoped would be arrowheads from Native American tribes, and even created short stories about the history of my hometown.
There is life on the other side of the Hudson.
As I got a bit older I loved being from the same place as John F. Kennedy. I loved that my name referenced his. I was proud of my part-Italian, part-Irish ancestry and fancied myself the very embodiment of a Bostonian — not the Boston Brahman type, of course, but the working class, fresh-off-the-boat-and-now-we-own-this-town kind of Bostonian.
In college I moved further north of Boston and claimed the beaches, the rocky cliffs, the wooded forests, and open fields as my own. In autumn there was apple-picking; sledding in the winter. The spring couldn’t be appreciated, I was sure, without having lived through a Nor’easter or two, and the summer brought with it boiled lobster dinners and night walks on the beach.
When my wife and I moved to New York City (well, Jersey City, really) over two years ago, I felt strongly about bringing New England here with us. We proudly told visiting friends as we toured them around the city that our favorite places were those that most reminded us of Boston. And in the summer and fall we made near-weekly trips back to our former home so as to not miss what we loved best.
Recently, though, a change is beginning to take place in my perception of my identity. It’s not that I’m becoming a New Yorker. No, in fact I probably have a stronger aversion to that word now then I ever did while living in Boston. I could never feel pride in being a New Yorker as, it seems to me, I could never truly be a New Yorker. None of us transplants can. The only New Yorkers are those people who were born and raised here. But those aren’t the people who like to tell everyone that they’re New Yorkers. Rather, it’s the transplants who so perpetually self-identify. They come to the city, spend a few years dressing up and going to work, before returning home, back to the South or Midwest to live out the rest of their days reminiscing about when they were New Yorkers.
I could never be a New Yorker. Rather, there’s something about living in New Jersey. There’s something about living in a place that is always the brunt of a joke — a punch line — that really grows on you. I’m tempted to say that this effect is particularly felt by a former self-deprecating Bostonian, but I see it taking hold in all kinds of people that move here from all over the country. I never cared much for Springsteen, but I love him now. My wife and I admire the raw and unexpected beauty of the rows and rows of those shipping cranes that hunch over Newark Bay as we drive south down the New Jersey Turnpike.
There’s a dull shine to the people who were born and raised here, like brushed metal. They’ve heard all the jokes but, at the end of the day, they love living in a place that has easy access to New York City and Philadelphia, the Shore and the Poconos. Mock all you want, they say to the rest of the country; it is your aversion that keeps us pure.
Here in Jersey City this “Jersey-ness” manifests itself in not quite a chip on the shoulder, but an understanding: we are all here for the same reason. We don’t need to feel cool. We want more space. We love to have a good time, but want it quiet where we sleep. And, most importantly, we’re here for the long run. People in Jersey City aren’t here to fulfill a life-long dream of living the city life, or, if they were, they’ve changed their mind. You don’t have access to any of the superficial benefits of living in New York City. If someone asks you where you live and you say New York, you’re lying. If you say New York City, you’re within your rights (I say I grew up in Boston though I grew up ten minutes outside the city), but the follow-up question is always “What part?” and Jersey City is never the right answer. If you live here, it’s not for the cool factor.
And yet, there’s plenty to feel cool about. Read Junot Diaz or marvel at the way life-long Garden State resident John McPhee describes his home state. Listen and identify with any of the angsty Jersey performers, from the original, Frank Sinatra, to Springsteen, to the punks like The Misfits or Patti Smith, the Fugees to The Gaslight Anthem. Hell, if angst ain’t your thing, Jersey even gave us the Jonas Brothers.
But none of that is really the point for Jersey residents. You can see this in the way they welcome newcomers. I’ve heard stories of how people never fully integrate into some states, Maine for example. I used to try to convince my wife that we should move to Portland, Maine until a friend who grew up there advised against it. “They’d never accept you,” he assured us. Jersey residents, on the other hand, have this subtle kind of welcome. It says, “Okay, you’re here now. Don’t make a big thing of it.” This is precisely why we hate “Jersey Shore.” We get it. People come from all over to vacation on the shore — just be quiet about it.
Eventually, my wife and I often think, we’ll head back to our beloved New England, back to Massachusetts. That is, after all, where our families live, where our roots are. But I can say with a hint of certainty: if, by some chance two years ago, we hadn’t made the decision to forego Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Queens, if we had spent these past couple of years trying, fruitlessly, to convince ourselves that we were New Yorkers, we would’ve packed up and moved home by now. Instead, we find ourselves identifying with the families more and more that have made Jersey City their permanent home; we visit open houses “just to see” and spend lazy afternoons browsing real estate websites, thinking, We could start our family here, maybe.
The other night I found myself in a conversation that I may have found rather ordinary between 2004 and 2007, back home north of Boston or some other semi-cosmopolitan place, but which felt completely irregular in 2010, in mid-town Manhattan. A friend was trying to decide if he should join Facebook.
“I only entered my email address and name and somebody already found me,” he complained.
His wife, my wife, and I, all of whom have been on Facebook for years, played along. We worked through the pros and cons. Keeping in touch with old friends that so frequently come and go in New York City: pro. Inevitably losing countless hours of productivity at work due to incessant status-checking: con.
In due time, the conversation moved to the inevitable gripes of those of us who are Facebook junkies. We complained about the users who are guilty of indulging too much information, the moms who don’t understand the difference between a public wall post and a private message, and the “friend invitations” you’d rather not receive. Aloof to all of this, our newest potential member listened in and asked the question that really is at the heart of social media: how do I know what I should and should not post on Facebook?
A recent essay in The New York Times Magazine considers this question, though in a round about way. The article, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” by Jeffrey Rosen, laments that the Internet has made it next to impossible for a person to control his or her identity or identities.
The piece begins with the oft-told story, well on its way with a few years and a few embellishments to becoming urban legend, of teacher-in-training Stacy Snyder who, weeks before she was supposed to be certified as a teacher, was booted from her school because salacious photos showed up on her MySpace page (this was 2006, so, okay). From there, Rosen goes on to identify the crisis: the difficulty in this brave new world of redefining oneself, particularly in different contexts. He follows his exegesis of the problem with a variety of potential solutions; from something called “reputation bankruptcy” to expiration dates for files so that after a number of years troublesome photos like those that got Ms. Snyder kicked out of school, will just disappear.
Facebook Morality isn’t an attainment of the ideal good; it is a reach toward our collective survival.
Rosen takes the reader through a brief survey of humanity’s relationship to self-identification, explaining that throughout most of human history, it was nearly impossible for one to change the way he was perceived as his identity was wrapped up in community, occupation, or class. Then came the blessed Enlightenment. Finally mankind could free himself of the pesky need for community and stand on his own as the “self-made man.” Equipped with this new ability to easily identify and re-identify one’s self, scores of Europeans emigrated to the United States, stuck flags in the ground, built McMansions and office buildings, put up fences, created cubicles, kept secrets, had affairs, and got away with it.
When the Internet arrived on the scene, some thinkers began to imagine how this network of connected computers could continue to keep us apart. But the opposite has proved true. The social network is the new village and a collection of photo albums, blogs, status updates, tweets, and fan pages have unified our disparate identities, even matching rather accurately our offline selves. With this, the public square, once a literal location but most recently the stuff of nostalgia has been resurrected, albeit online.
The bulk of Rosen’s article is dedicated to ways to fix this perceived problem. How can we get back to the good old days when I could be one person to my family, another to my friends, and yet another to co-workers? How can we regain the ability to redefine ourselves as often as desired? He wonders will the solution be “technological? Legislative? Judicial? Ethical? A result of shifting social norms and cultural expectations? Or some mix of the above?”
Did you catch that one right in the middle, ethical? Note it, because it’s nearly the last time a solution that involves personal responsibility is mentioned. What expiring files, companies hired to monitor one’s online identity, and even an onscreen anthropomorphic widget giving stern glances as a reminder to be careful online, have in common is: outsourcing responsibility. There’s nary a suggestion that amounts to if you’d be embarrassed if your co-workers saw you doing this, don’t do it, or, at least, don’t post it online. Rather, Rosen suggests that the Internet’s memory should be erased, noting that even the God of the Talmud forgives and forgets. Here, he nears an ethical answer, suggesting that our society could benefit by being more forgiving. And perhaps we will, not despite our permanent online identities, but because of them. We’ll all have one or two embarrassing pictures in our wake.
But what truly is missing from Rosen’s article, and indeed, from much of the conversation surrounding our new online identities, is the opportunity that this presents us to enter into a new morality. Call it Facebook Morality. When my friend who is considering joining Facebook asked how he should know what is appropriate to post online, I offered him this methodology:
“Imagine Facebook is a room filled with everyone you know,” I suggested. “And then imagine shouting whatever it is you consider posting at the top of your lungs. Or,” I continued, “think of the person in your life who is most likely to be scandalized by a picture or a link, a grandparent or former teacher, and then imagine showing it to him or her.”
This new morality, then, is not one dictated by individual conscience. You may think, “Sure I had a wild night last night, but I don’t regret any of it.” But that is different from thinking,”I had a wild night last night and I think everyone should have to experience it.”
In her essay “On Morality,” from her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion writes of a kind of “wagon-train morality.” This she defines as the social code that dictates our collective responsibility to each other. To Didion, morality is not created in an individual’s conscience and thus relative from one person to the other, rather it is “a code that has as its point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good.”
Facebook Morality isn’t an attainment of the ideal good; it is a reach toward our collective survival. Perhaps it is wrong to drink to excess, but Facebook Morality is not primarily concerned with that. Rather, it is concerned with the way in which the portrayal of a person drinking to excess may compromise his or her community. Therefore, Facebook Morality makes the decision to post or not to post, a moral question. It also opens up the opportunity to question behavior, providing a practical standard for one’s actions before sharing is even an option.
There is a new morality on the rise in American culture. It goes hand in hand with a new sincerity. And it is these, rather than new technology, which will provide the solution to our “collective identity crisis,” as Rosen calls it.
Here a parting word, a kind of benediction from a great moral teacher, the late Kurt Vonnegut, from his last collection of essays before he passed away, A Man Without a Country, seems fitting:
“Save our lives and your lives, too,” he writes. “Be honorable.”
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been teaching arguing, or persuasive, essays in my freshmen composition courses. I save this format, along with evaluating essays, for last because in some sense they utilize all the skills that the students have picked up through the practice of writing, remembering, observing, and explaining essays in the previous weeks and months.
That’s one reason why I save these types for last, and it’s the better reason. The other reason is that I know from experience that it’s hard to keep everybody’s attention – the students’ and my own – focused in the waning weeks of a semester, particularly a spring semester when the weather is warming and summer vacation is on the horizon, and arguing and evaluating essays are my, and often my students’, favorite types to read and write.
I assign several readings for each essay form, chosen because they are prime examples of the particular type and though they often change, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” has a permanent home in the arguing section of my syllabus. For those readers who have not sat through a semester of class with me (or any countless other composition courses that utilize King’s classic text): it is an epistle written while King was in the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama after being arrested for taking part in non-violent protests there. The letter is a response to “A Call For Unity,” a statement published by eight white Alabama clergymen in which they conceded that injustices were taking place, but that protest, even non-violent, was not appropriate and that proper, legal means should be pursued.
King states his case in no less than nine points (he even apologizes at the end for writing so much and makes reference to the fact that there’s not much else to do when one is in prison). There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the greatest arguing essays ever written, offering some of the most airtight arguments ever made. The now famous line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” appears in this text.
What I have never known about this essay, and still to this day cannot say for certain, is what effect this text had first on its intended audience, the signatories of “A Call for Unity.” I know that every time I read it I get chills and that most of my students come to venerate it, but as far as I can tell from my admittedly very limited research on the topic (Google “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and, most unfortunately, over 95% of the results are for free term papers on the essay) there is not much written about whether or not it “worked.”
Now, of course, to a certain extent it did work, as did MLK’s social action, speeches, and sadly, his death, in addition to the work of countless other civil rights advocates, but whenever I think specifically about the impact of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I can’t help but wonder if it actually changed any of the clergymen’s minds, or had a life-altering affect on any residents of Birmingham.
And I wonder about this in regard to many arguments I hear made, debates I witness, and apologists I read. Do all these words, all this time spent building a case, ever actually work to convince somebody that the position that they hold is wrong and that they should exchange it for another, more correct stance?
And yet, I know that people do change their minds. I don’t know how I would describe myself politically prior to 2001, but I know that whatever it was (must’ve been somewhere between far right and right of the center, as that’s where my parents, church, and educators were coming from), by 2002, my views were very different from those of the people that had an influence on me in my youth. I can point to a few definitive books I read (Franny and Zooey, On the Road . . . yeah, I know), and some very important people I met, conversations I had, and things I experienced (studying in Kenya was big in this regard), but I can’t point a finger to any one thing as the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I’ve come to realize that, for the most part, I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, semester after semester I make my students read and write arguing essays. And then I evaluate them on the clarity of their writing, certainly, but also on their ability to form a cohesive point and defend it. I teach them about three different kinds of arguments: traditional (I’m right, you’re wrong), constructive (I’m right, and I want to help you see why you’re wrong), and Rogerian (I’m right, but you may also be right, let’s compromise), but more often than not they choose the traditional style. And I’ve had some good writers over the years, but not once has one of them convinced me of anything I didn’t already believe. Nobody wins the argument, yet I still make each student do it.
Why do I continue to believe that learning how to make an effective argument is important when I really think it’s not a good argument that changes a person’s mind but a series of events, experiences, and lessons learned? Perhaps some of those influential books, essays, and stories that I read back in 2002 were argumentative in nature, and certainly my views grew more nuanced and I became more certain of what I was coming to believe through arguments, but not to the point where I feel comfortable saying an argument changed my mind.
It’s a scary thing to change one’s mind, to admit that the beliefs and values one clings to may not be as deeply held as once thought. And for a person so often prideful as I am, it is also a deeply humbling experience to reevaluate and to be found wrong. I know this is the case not simply based on 2002, or even on any of the hundreds of minor changes and course corrections that I’ve made in the years since, but because I fear it may be happening again.
I’m halfway through famed (infamous?) evangelical author Brian D. McLaren’s latest offering, A New Kind of Christianity. The book has attracted a lot of attention, mostly because of the overwhelming wave of extremely negative reviews it is garnering from other evangelicals. I’ve read McLaren before but, based on some of the commentary I’d heard about this book, even I approached it with some trepidation, with a bit of fear that he may have gone too far.
McLaren’s book is an argument, an apologetic. If I had to classify it for my class I would say it’s somewhere between a traditional and a constructive argument. The details of his case for a new kind of Christianity are the subject for a different sort of essay, but suffice it to say, his argument is made well. His points are clear and rational and, most importantly in an arguing essay, he appeals to what the reader may have already thought or believed though may never have given voice to.
This is a tactic I encourage my students to use, one that Martin Luther King, Jr. used miraculously. It involves knowing your audience and making an appeal to them that is both respectful and transformative. McLaren knows me. Like King knew his fellow clergymen, McLaren knows his left-leaning evangelical.
I can’t say where this will all end up, or where I’ll be when the pieces land. But I can say that I’m beginning to believe more fully in the power of the arguing essay. I can say that I’m beginning to change my mind.
When I was a child, I wore many hats – in precisely the way the clichéd expression means. Early photographs show me sitting on my father’s lap, arms outstretched, driving a pretend fire truck with the red, oversized backward cap of a fireman digging into my dad’s chest with each imaginary bump that my truck encountered.
Other days I was a policeman, my grandfather’s old Massachusetts Registry police cap balancing precariously on my tiny head. As I grew older, the hats became more creative. Gone were the days of occupations that I could actually grow to become; the hats turned to masks of Spiderman, Optimus Prime, Batman, and so on. And there were costumes as well, for those characters that didn’t don a hat or mask. I was Luke Skywalker, Michelangelo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, an officer on board the Enterprise, Peter from the Ghostbusters, and at one point I even brought back the hat as Dick Tracy.
I wore these hats, sometimes several within the same day, but there was one rule that I never broke. When I was wearing my Batman mask, I couldn’t also be Spiderman. When dressed like Luke Skywalker I would never encounter Captain Picard. The Ninja Turtles and the Ghostbusters, though both inhabitants of New York City, would never meet. This is all to say that I was only ever able to understand my identity as one character at a time.
If you ask Steph, my wife, not much has changed from this little hat-wearing boy to the present day me. I still wear many hats, and as was the case then, often all on the same day. At any given time I can be a writer, professor, web developer, scholar, or tutor. But just as two characters from different stories could never meet when I was playing dress up as a child, so is it near impossible for me to join my many identities today, an awkward situation since they all are, obviously, linked. With the exception, perhaps, of web developer, there is a direct correlation between each of these hats, and yet I still struggle to self-identify.
I constantly ask myself that familiar question: What do I want to be when I grow up? Which of these hats will win the day and define me throughout life? I actively ignore what I know to be true every time Steph insists that how I live now, with all my various identities, is probably how it’s going to be.
I fall victim to a situation that plagues many more of my generation. In his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman explores this problem in light of what probably is its actual cause: popular culture. For Klosterman and his generation the source of this desire to typecast oneself is the long-running MTV series The Real World.
His essay “What Happens When People Stop Being Polite” explores the way in which people he knows have become more and more like characters on that hit television show as the years went on. He gives some leeway to the first season as perhaps the only time when the characters didn’t start out as a certain type, but acknowledges that it is precisely those first cast members who, by the end of the season, set up the archetype that the would define future casts, and, eventually a generation.
Klosterman rightly identifies the heritage for the “Real World” brand typecasting as the films of the recently deceased screenwriter and director John Hughes. Certainly the teenagers that shared a Saturday detention in The Breakfast Club were written not so much as fully realized, complicated people, but as specific character types which, through a strange intermingling of their continued use in movies, television shows, and books, and the easy adoption of these stereotypes by actual people, have come to represent the sum of personality types for Americans under 35 years old.
The advent of these character types (and arguably they have been around in some form or another long before Hughes or MTV crystallized them and made them fixtures of the 20th century) has created a reality in which genuine, living, breathing people do not need to ever go through the life-long process of discovering who we actually are.
Rather, I can simply choose: “I’m the rebel.” Presto! All I need is a new wardrobe, which, fortunately, costume designers have already created and a certain demeanor, which can be adopted, and suddenly I am the Rebel. And, just as I was only ever one character as a child, so too, need I only ever model one archetype.
Since the 1980s, we can probably identify successful media by the extent to which they introduced a “new” character type to the popular consciousness. Certainly we have come a long way since those five Hughesian character types. The Real World created variations on them, as have many other popular books, movies, musicians, and television series. Now, if everyone around you fits into some variation on the “jock” model, by following the “artist” model, you can actually feel like an individual.
Though in America it is perhaps easiest to illustrate this identity crisis in light of popular culture, I am particularly interested in the way that it manifests itself in other parts of the world. I am currently immersed in the long process of writing a paper to be presented at an academic conference (that’s my scholar hat you’re seeing) about the various “new” cultures that are emerging among contemporary African youth as seen in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of, most famously, Purple Hibiscus.
Very generally speaking, for post-post colonial Africans, this struggle to self identify is certainly tinged with influences from American popular culture, as it is throughout the rest of the world, but more seriously it involves the reconciling of long-held traditional cultures with the imposed culture of whatever colonial power occupied a particular African country until, in most cases, the 1960s. In many ways, this tumultuous struggle is also embodied in the lives of immigrants who must work out the way in which their former selves can coexist with their adopted country and new identity. But it is particularly interesting to see this play out in African countries, as the new identity was not chosen, but thrust upon people. And the implications of this continue to be dealt with almost half a century later.
In Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, the way in which her characters interact with Catholicism, the religion of their former occupiers, is particularly fascinating. Throughout the novel, it is clear that those characters that can more fully connect Catholicism with their cultural heritage live more balanced and fulfilled lives then those who cannot find a point of reconciliation. These characters recognize that they are never just one thing. At any given moment they embody the traditional culture that is their inheritance as well as the imposed Western culture that is slowly taking over. Rather than struggle to resist and allowing several selves to occupy one body, these characters and the generation of Africans for whom they are avatars adapt and in the process create a new, hybridized culture and, often, language. A fantastic example of this is Kenya’s “shang,” which mixes Swahili with a kind of street-English.
So it must be, albeit less dramatically, with us, with me. Despite the fact that it is easier to adopt one archetype or another as the starting point of my identity, I am not just one thing or another. I, too, am made up of several selves.
In the late 1980s, a popular ad campaign created by the advertising agency Weiden + Kennedy transcended its given purpose of selling sneakers and lodged itself permanently in the annals of popular culture.
Just Do It.
But what it did was more, even, than become a household phrase. For many in the United States, including those in the small, charismatic church my family attended when I was growing up, it synthesized all that was wrong with the world into three short words.
And Nike wasn’t the only company to turn the sixties credo – “If it feels good, do it” – into a marketing slogan. To this day, the refrain, “Why ask why, try Bud Dry,” echoes in my head, long after Budweiser ceased production of the beer the ad was hawking.
These ads and the countless others espousing the same kind of “don’t think, act” mentality, coming as they did as the twentieth century came to a close, illustrate perfectly what the Irish philosopher George Berkeley put forth in his rather bizarre book entitled Siris, written in 1744. Berkeley suggested, as many others have since, that philosophy, though it may be considered and debated in academia, far from popular culture, actually rises from and informs the culture at large.
Berkeley said it thusly:
Prevailing studies are of no small consequence to a State, the religion, manners, and civil government of a country ever taking some bias from its philosophy, which affects not only the minds of its professors and students, but also the opinions of all the better sort, and the practice of the whole people remotely and consequentially indeed, though not inconsiderably.
That is, “If it feels good, do it,” “Just do it,” and “Why ask why, try Bud Dry” rose to such popularity precisely because they captured he prevailing philosophical wind of the day: modernism. We need not ask the hard questions or consider our actions – the consequences, if there indeed are any, are irrelevant in the face of our desire.
In art, film, and literature, this mentality translated into a visual aesthetic disinterested in beauty, movies that settled deep into the despair of a Cold War world, and books that reveled in the kind of freedom and carelessness that only comes from acting on impulse.
Many fault postmodernism with opening the door to moral relativism, but this “whatever floats your boat” mentality was born of modernist philosophy, and then exposed by those responding to the later movement. The line between modernism and postmodernism, both in theory and in time, is blurred, but one thing is certain: in the last decade, we’ve subtly begun to move away from the lack of interest in morality and the relativism so prominent in the twentieth century.
Is this a result of the simple pendulum swing that writes history? Is it a response to the events of September 11, 2001, when something so evil happened that a moral reaction was necessary, if not inevitable? Has the moralizing of religious fundamentalists – Christian, Muslim, and Jewish – taken hold?
Whatever the reason, the evidence is undeniable. In every cultural corner, moral questions are asked – in film and television, visual art and advertising, comic books and cartoons and literature.
In the last month or so, Paste has published “Best of the Decade” lists on its website (and in its most recent print issue). Surveying the lists confirms this assertion: many of the most critically acclaimed books, movies, albums, and television shows all dared to raise questions of morality.
A couple of standouts from the best books list are notable because, in some ways, their attention to questions of morality is what exactly what makes them noteworthy. As Paste points out in its synopsis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is both “meditation on the human condition” as well as post-apocalyptic “adventure book.” But each adventure is underscored by the weight it carries, raising questions of morality to the literal level of life and death. As in his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, McCarthy creates a space that is devoid of any sense of right or wrong, in which his characters struggle to reclaim their morality and, ultimately, their humanity.
McCarthy’s books explore questions of morality through fiction, but number 10 on Paste’s list, the late David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction collection, Consider the Lobster, parses the issue in essay form. Until about halfway through, the title piece is a beautifully crafted but otherwise standard bit of reportage of the Maine Lobster Festival. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Wallace asks his reader (the piece was originally published in Gourmet Magazine) if it is “all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure.” And with that, a conscience is thrust into the reporting and the actual feelings of a crustacean are considered.
A more recent release (not on Paste’s list),Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, extends Wallace’s question to include all living things and, along with “Consider the Lobster,” illuminates one of the more interesting aspects of this trend toward moralism. This is not a return or a pre-modern kind of soul searching. The questions that are being considered in the twenty-firstcentury are very postmodern concerns. Look to the places where claims of morality are made the loudest, and often most convincingly, and you will find that they are not necessarily voiced by the traditional sources of moral indignation: religious organizations. Rather, the questions at the forefront are about the environment, treatment of homosexuals, access to health care, and the responsibilities of wealthy countries to their counterparts in the developing world, to name a few.
Though these questions make their way into the mind of Americans through books, they enter the popular psyche more forcefully through the more readily-consumed media such as television, film, and music. Paste‘s top twenty TV shows reveal intense interest in questions of morality played out in diverse genres from science fiction (Battlestar Galactica, which dealt weekly withissues ranging from discrimination to suicide bombers), to animation (The Family Guy filled the space that The Simpsons occupied in previous decades), to talk shows (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report;Oprah did not make the list, but is another prominent example). And, of course, standout, thought-provoking dramas such as The Wire, Lost, and Mad Men make the list. What did not make the list: any “show about nothing.”
As for film and music, Paste offered fifty of each, but the list-toppers serve to illustrate the point. In film, Fernando Meirelles’ City of God took the number one spot, and in music, the album Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens claimed top ranking.
I don’t pretend that the first decade of the twenty-firstcentury is somehow a more “moral” decade than its predecessors. (I’m not even sure how one would make that assessment.) But while in the recent past, questions of morality have been the exclusive territory of religious organizations, a veritable non-issue in the ivory towers of academia and the popular imaginations of American artists, they are being asked again with increasing fervor and a tremendous range of concerns.
A recent visit to Nike’s website turned up no sign of the old “Just Do It” mantra. Rather, a different kind of urging (in support of the Product Red campaign) is prominently displayed. It prods the viewer to “Lace Up Save Lives.”
My grandfather is dying again. I know because my mom called. And she knows because Aunty Cathy called her. This is the fourth time in two years my mom has called me with this news; the fourth time, she got the call from Aunty Cathy.
He’s not well – there’s no doubt about that. Papa’s battled just about every kind of cancer and has come out the victor each time. He’s tough. Small, but tough. Everyone in my family is small. Papa’s 5’1″, like me. My dad, the giant, is a mere 5’6″.
But not all of us are as tough as Papa. When I close my eyes and say his name I see us sitting at the kitchen table in the house that my dad grew up in, that Nana and Papa still live in. Papa’s holding his fists up in front of his face and kind of grunting. He wants me to do the same. I’m six. I raise my hands like his, my little knuckles sticking out like the tiniest mountain range.
“No, not like that,” he says releasing his stance to fix mine. “Here, higher. This is your shield. This keeps you safe. ”
I follow his lead, elevating my fist until he’s satisfied and resumes his stance. “Good. Now punch me.”
I look at him cockeyed. He answers before I ask, “C’mon, do it. You won’t hurt me, I’ll show you. C’mon. When I was a boxer in the army I could block anything.”
So I do it. I let one fly. A quick shot with my . . .
“Left! What are you throwing your left for?” he says as he blocks my slow motion punch. “Are you a lefty? Dot!” he shouts to my grandmother who’s only a few steps away at the stove, stirring sauce or something. “Dot, I think Jonathan’s a lefty.”
He’s laughing at me and I’m not sure why but he tells me its okay. He can teach a lefty to fight. He takes a swig of beer, Budweiser then and now, and resumes my lesson.
Papa was never a boxer in the army. This came out some years later. Nor did he see any action in World War II. The round scars on his stomach and chest that he said were bullet holes were not. Burns from working all those years at the naval shipyard, but not bullet holes.
He used to draw ninjas. This is a skill he told me he picked up from drawing the real thing, when he was stationed in Asia – which, of course, he wasn’t. But he could draw them well. Masks with slits for the eyes and bandanas waving in the breeze. He could draw long sharp kitana blades that gleamed with the light of a distant sun. I tell this to my wife as we drive through Boston to visit him in the hospital.
“How did he know what a ninja looked like, then?” Steph asks as we drive. I don’t know.
When we get there, Steph leads the way. I hate hospitals, but she was working with the elderly at the time. We make our way to the third floor where my mom told us we would find him. Room 313. We peek around the corner of the doorway to see him sitting up with one of those trays-on-wheels set over his legs. He has a plate full of food in front of him but he’s only eating yogurt.
“Yogurt as an appetizer?” I ask, assuming his food has just arrived.
“No.” He answers without looking up. “As dinner.” And finally his eyes lift from the nearly empty cup he’s been scraping with a plastic spoon. “Paul,” he calls out to me.
“Ah…” Is all I get out before he says, “Jonathan. I mean Jonathan.” And to himself, “Why did I call you Paul?”
He urges us to sit and so we do, I directly below the television and Steph beside his bed, nearer to him. We ask him how he’s feeling, how they’ve been treating him in the hospital. He answers that he’s not feeling so great but the hospital staff is nice. He tells us about a nurse that’s been taking care of him. He’s convinced she has a thing for him. I don’t doubt it; he’s a charmer.
There’s a side of Papa that resembles your typical Irish-American – think the characters of Frank McCourt or, more regionally accurate, Dennis Lehane or James Carroll. One of our family’s favorite stories involves beer, whiskey, and a bar fight between my dad and Papa. And he probably would have been that stereotype to a tee, if it weren’t for my grandmother. For all his Irish-ness, she’s every bit Italian, bubbling with emotion and energy and, over the years, her passion for life has leaked through the cracks in his old Irish skin. When they got married in 1940s Boston, theirs was considered an inter-racial marriage.
Sitting with Papa in the gray light of his hospital room, I suddenly become painfully aware that, despite all appearances, this is the same man who tried to teach me to fight all those years ago at the kitchen table. I stare at him. He’s small now. Not the same muscle-bound, beer-bellied man I remember. He looks like the skin of that man – the skin of a once great, although not actual, boxer in the army. The skin of that man is hanging on a smaller man’s frame, like mine, perhaps.
Steph jumps in to fill the awkward silence. “So who has come to visit you, Papa?” She calls him Papa. I don’t remember he or I ever inviting her to do so, but she does. And I love that.
“Oh, they’ve all been here,” he says. “Jane, and Jilly. Jilly comes often. Jennifer’s been here…” These are my sisters. He says their names first, making sure I know I’m the last to come. I’m about to say something when he realizes what he, consciously or subconsciously, has done. “But they don’t have so far to travel as you do,” he says to me in the way of consolation.
“Dolly and Sean, Eddie, Kristen, and the kids.” My cousins and their families. “Your father’s come down a few times.” I had hoped he wasn’t actually keeping count, but it seems clear now that he was.
I change the topic and though I’m not sure how we get there, suddenly we’re talking about his mother and brothers. We’re talking about Ireland and the plot of land he signed away years ago, sitting at that kitchen table at his house in Roxbury, to cousins in Ireland after his father passed away.
“Jonathan, whenever we went there and saw what I blindly gave up,” he looks, for a moment, regretful. “Ahh, we could never live there. Boston’s our home.”
When it’s time to leave we tell him that we’ll see him soon, but hopefully at home. He looks doubtful. He looks, in fact, like he’s thinking we won’t actually see him again. He kisses Steph on the cheek and tells me how beautiful she is. He says goodbye and calls me Paul again.
In perhaps the most memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured by the ruthless symbiotic alien race, the Borg. The Borg assimilate Picard into their collective, making him part machine and all evil. I remember sitting too close to the television, watching nervously from the floor in the living room of my family’s apartment in Malden, a working class suburb of Boston. Clutching a Star Trek action figure in each fist, I was transfixed; what would become of my beloved captain? It was a two-part episode, a cliffhanger. Part One ended the season in the spring and Part Two didn’t air until September. It was a long, nervous summer.
As one might expect, Picard was heroically rescued by his crew and returned to his ship. The ship’s medical officer, Dr. Beverly Crusher, removed the creepy electronics that the Borg had installed in Picard’s head and by the end of the episode he looked himself again, save for some strange pigmentation where the metal had been.
But Picard was never really the same. He had experienced the Borg collective, and having done so, a bit of the Borg’s mentality was permanently etched onto his consciousness – a trait that the show’s writers exploited in the following seasons and in the 1996 feature film First Contact.
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My first contact came when I was seventeen years old. I was a senior in high school when I started dating Sarah. She was this sweet blonde girl with freckles all over her face. She always wore jeans or corduroys and a button up shirt – always.
Her family, the Borgs, were originally from Texas. Mr. Borg brought the family to New England when his company moved here. They settled in a large cube-shaped house in a small town about an hour west of Boston. Sarah went to school with my sister which, embarrassingly, is how we met. We only dated for six months but in those months I found myself in locations and situations I had never experienced before. And by the time they moved back to the South, back to the Collective, I was a changed man.
Growing up, and right through high school, the geographical layout of my world stretched no further than a few miles outside of Boston. I had been on airplane once (to Florida, to visit my grandparents); McDonald’s was my favorite restaurant; and just about every item of clothing I owned was a hand-me-down. My closest friends and I spent our time listening to rap, rapping, reading rap magazines, and trying to live the life of rap stars. Our parents had not been to college, though most finished high school, and their greatest accomplishment to that point was securing their sons a place in a private school, a move that, they hoped, would lead directly to college.
The Borgs were rich. They owned two Ford Explorers before every soccer mom in the world had a sport utility vehicle. They went out to dinner more often than they cooked, didn’t buy anything that they hadn’t first seen in a catalog, and had poodles. The most tangible indication of their wealth to me at that time was the over-sized towels that hung in their bathroom. These towels were huge and plush and after using them I found it nearly impossible to go back to the threadbare towels, barely bigger than hand towels, which my family had been using since before I was born.
The Borgs didn’t know what to do with their daughter’s new boyfriend other than attempt to assimilate me. A month or two into our relationship, they started buying me clothes, taking me out to dinner, introducing me to their friends, and inviting me to stay over so I didn’t have to drive “all the way home.” They managed to be surprisingly subtle as they squeezed out my humble, blue-collar background and replaced it with their upper class bravado. Some things went easier than others; my Boston accent was their top priority.
“Did it take long to get here?” Sarah’s mom politely asked the first time I visited their house.
“Yah. This is wicked fah from weah I live. I’ve nevah been out heyah befoor.” I said as both Sarah’s parents visibly took a step back in horror before returning polite smiles to their faces.
To look at pictures of myself over those six months tells the story. In the photo from my first date with Sarah I’m wearing a baseball cap, an oversized shirt and baggy jeans – my dad’s actually – sagged so the crotch was near my knees. The pictures from New Years Eve show me in my first item of clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch, a sweater Sarah bought for me for Christmas. And finally, in May at my high school graduation I stand flanked by the Borgs, cap and gown slung over my arm, in Dockers khakis, a tucked-in white collared shirt, and a blue sweater vest.
Within a month it was over and they were gone. They hated Boston and hated the cold, and so Mr. Borg jumped at the first job that opened up anywhere in the South. They moved to Atlanta, selling their house with all the furniture still in it.
It was only a few months, so many years ago. But like Picard, being absorbed into the Borg collective for even a short time left me changed forever. On the outside, my clothes were different and more expensive, I purged myself of the Boston accent, and had shorter hair, but something deeper, more fundamental to who I was, had changed as well.
Growing up in Malden, surrounded by friends and families who were like me in just about every way that mattered, I hadn’t had much contact with many affluent people. It’s not that I didn’t know they existed – surely I must have come across some families like the Borgs before Sarah – but they hadn’t left any kind of impression, and I hadn’t deemed it necessary to form an opinion. But I had seen the other side. I knew now what was wrong with the way I grew up, and my friends, and the way they grew up. I knew how uneducated my parents sounded when they talked. I was embarrassed.
I spent my first semester of college hiding in my dorm room as often as possible, emerging only to go to class or dinner. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I couldn’t stop myself from trying to figure out where I fit in, and where others fit in. What was my roommate Seth’s family like? They were from Long Island. Did that mean they had money or were they just too poor to live in Manhattan? What about Dave? He came from Santa Barbara. I had never been there but if Saved by the Bell was any indication of life in Southern California, he must be rich. And who, after all, was I? Only a relatively short distance from where I grew up, but at college, in the country.
Jay, my best friend from high school, went with me to college, but he didn’t seem to have any of the same problems fitting in. He made plenty of friends and never seemed to recognize that they came from places very different from Malden, places where everyone’s parents had gone to college, where unemployment checks are rarely collected, and where cars are given as birthday presents. And that was the difference. He hadn’t been abducted by the Borgs. He hadn’t been made to feel uncomfortable by the other side, made to feel inferior. So he was able to blend in like I would have, if I wasn’t sure it was impossible to mesh so easily with people from such different backgrounds.
I almost transferred to a college in Boston, thinking if I went to school in the city I may be able to reconnect with the person I was before the Borgs made me into somebody else. But I had the clear sense that running wasn’t an option; the problem was inside of me. The remains of the Borgs’ implants were still fixed deep, and no matter where I went, the way I saw people was permanently altered. It was the feeling that I no longer had a home. College felt foreign; I felt like an imposter. But how could I go back to Malden, back to that second floor apartment I had grown up in?
Ordinary college-sponsored activities, like bowling or the movies, left me perplexed. At the end of a seemingly endless night of searching out a group that I could belong to, I would lie in bed scratching at my temples. “What had gone wrong? Why is every conversation I have with everybody so awkward? Why can’t I just be me?”
And that, I found in time, was the key. Somewhere inside, perhaps laying dormant, was the kid from Malden who had always had friends, who was always up for anything, who was fun. I had to find him, bring him out, try with everything in me to set aside the filters I had been applying to every person and situation I had encountered since arriving at college.
It’s a continuing process. Several years after Captain Picard’s assimilation and subsequent rescue, he reencounters the Borg in First Contact and has to come to grips, all over again, with his onetime abductors. I’ve not seen the Borgs since they moved, but all these years later the strange pigmentation from their machinery still lingers. I remain caught between two worlds. Ill at ease in Malden, I chose to remain in that college town for a while. I tried for a year, in graduate school, to return to Boston, but I found that even there, in a somewhat familiar environment, I was far too changed for it to ever be the same.
Memories of my time on the other side haunt me – the towels, the poodles, the sweater vest. I’ve left those behind. Until moving to New York City not that long ago, I never seemed to have a reason to travel west of Boston. I’ve traded those things for Birkenstocks, corduroys, and wool hats. I’m somewhere in the middle now. Different, and aware. Suburban, and educated. And yes, somewhat assimilated.
Every time I fill my car with gas I think, “I could go anywhere.”
I know it’s silly. I know I can’t really just up and go. But to me a full tank of gas means possibility – the chance to throw some essentials in the backseat and take off. That spindly orange needle pointing at the big “F” suggests the freedom of the open road.
This all has a very definite origin – well, an origin and an inspiration.
The inspiration is the road novel. Chief among them in my mind is Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, but all stories of travel are perennial favorites because the best of them make this feeling – this experience of freedom, excitement, and corroboration – tangible. Like the “buddy comedy,” the “coming-of-age novel,” and the “rags to riches” story, a travel story – a road novel – captures a feeling that is impermanent and fleeting and makes it last, available on demand.
To discover the origin of my wanderlust we must travel back in time seven years to 2002, when I was a junior in college. That spring I participated in a semester abroad, but I didn’t go to Oxford as many of my fellow English majors did, or France or Italy, or anywhere in Europe that students tend to. No; I joined a small group of American students at Daystar University in Nairobi, Kenya.
There is not space here to describe all that that trip meant, how it shaped my life and set me on a course that has already led me back to Kenya once and will undoubtedly land me on the African continent several more times. I’m hooked. That happens.
But this isn’t about Africa. Rather, this is to say that when I returned home from Kenya in the summer before my senior year, I had a lot to think about. I had seen the extremes of utter poverty and absolute beauty often reported by those who have been to East Africa. I had to reconcile my beliefs with all of this, and my attitude about money and possessions. There was much to think about.
There was one thing I was certain about, however – one privilege among many to be grateful for that I did not need to force myself to reconcile with what I had just experienced. That is, specifically, the knowledge that having a car with a full tank of gas is one of the greatest gifts my short life in the United States had afforded me thus far. Of course, I was grateful for my family, for all of my freedoms, so on and so forth, but the freest free I could feel was found behind the wheel of my ailing 1988 Volvo sedan.
Last weekend, my love for the freedom of the open road – and that love’s origins – came to a wonderful nexus when I reunited with some of my fellow students from our 2002 semester in Kenya and we took to the road together.
My friend Brian came from Boston and met Jason at his parents’ home in Nyack, New York, before collecting me from my apartment in Jersey City. From here we drove out of New Jersey, the Manhattan skyline dissolving into dusk in our rearview mirror, across the East Coast Mammoth that is Pennsylvania and up to Cleveland, Ohio where we were joined by Courtney, who flew in from Seattle, Washington (surely, a tank full of jet fuel must invoke a similar, probably stronger, feeling in pilots).
We had some calls to make around Ohio, people to visit, universities to tour, and years worth of living on which to catch one another up. There is hardly a better place to reconnect with old friends and share stories and reminiscences than the road.
And this is precisely what the road novel teaches us. Whether it’s Sal and Dean speeding their way across the Midwest in On the Road or Jonathan Safran Foer’s quest through the Ukraine in Everything is Illuminated, being in transit paradoxically allows us the opportunity to pause as it is a temporary state acted out between here and there, two places where, presumably, the business of life awaits.
On the Road is a definitive travel novel, and certainly among my favorites, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Many other great road stories come to mind: Into the Wild by John Krakauer, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thomson, many books by Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson – and for the post-apocalyptic traveler, there’s Cormac McCarthy’s recent masterpiece, The Road.
These books and the many, many others in the genre succeed precisely as they nail down the very unpredictability of travel, the adventure waiting, literally, around every turn.
Several years ago, in what could be called a rehearsal for this most recent, more comprehensive reunion of fellow travelers who met in Africa, Jason and I drove through the night, again from Nyack to the same destination in Ohio: a tiny town called Medina where every August a pig roast is held and friends from far and near are reunited. On that trip, as Jason drove and I tried, fruitlessly, to sleep in the passenger seat, we came across a car wreck that had occurred only moments prior to our arrival.
We found a teenager, just slightly younger than we were at the time, barely conscious and bloody in the mangled shell of his Volkswagen hatchback. He had fallen asleep and collided with the back of a tractor-trailer. Jason, a trained paramedic, cared for the man, who we learned was on his way to college, and I called the police. When the police and ambulance arrived and Jason’s help was no longer needed, we returned to our car, resumed our trip, wordless as we continued to drive through the misty Pennsylvania morning.
It was a reminder of what makes the road so alluring and potentially so dangerous and what makes books that capture the experience so wonderfully engaging. Anything can happen on the road. The freedom one feels while traveling overland at 80 miles per hour, with a full tank of gas and only a vague sense of what lies ahead, is directly related to the mystery, the unknown, the potential joy as well as the danger.
Courtney, Brian, Jason and myself all made it to our homes safely. We sped around Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. and New York with windows down, listening to music, telling stories, and laughing. For three days we reveled in the freedom of the road. But on the fourth day, back at home with an empty tank of gas and work waiting in the morning, I scanned my bookshelves for The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms, a collection I had purchased years ago after returning from another trip for precisely this reason – to make the trip last just a little while longer.
This was going to be a very intelligent article. After using this space previously to gush about summer blockbusters and iPhones, I meant for this month’s subject matter to be smarter – or, at least, headier.
I fully intended to go for that most of academic of topics, the kind of thing you would have to read in one browser tab with Wikipedia open in another. Nothing less than the plays of the Bard himself – and, specifically, his comedy Twelfth Night – as recently and majestically performed by The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park in Manhattan’s Central Park was, you must know, my starting point.
Except, it’s Monday night and Monday night is (for those of you who still pay for cable) the night that the SciFi Channel airs four hours of back-to-back episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
So I have Star Trek on the brain, and yet I do very much want to share thoughts on this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park. And, if you’ll bear with me, I think we will find more connections between the works of Gene Roddenberry and those of Shakespeare than just the actor Patrick Stewart.
I assert that the plays of Shakespeare are heady and academic with my tongue in my cheek. The way Shakespeare is taught in high schools – and in some cases, colleges – is a misreading of what the man’s purpose was, what he meant for his plays to do. In this way, and without too much uncomfortable stretching, we come to our first similarity between Shakespeare’s plays and the continuing mission that is Star Trek: they are dramas performed in distinct acts, and they have it as their purpose to entertain, enlighten, and engage their audience.
It’s just as difficult to summarize the plot of Twelfth Night as it is to attempt to explain how time travel works in the Star Trek universe. I will say that Twelfth Night involves not one but two cases of mistaken identity, cross-dressing, possible homosexual relationships, and one of the greatest and least understood phrases Shakespeare ever wrote, at least contextually:
Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.
As it turns out, in the context of Twelfth Night these words are not spoken by way of motivation, as they often are used in our culture; rather, they are part of a ruse, a plot to embarrass a character that neither the audience nor the other characters much like. And, in the hands of the excellent cast of The Public’s presentation, this line actually carried with it the appropriate measure of innuendo as well. In short, even this most inspiring of moments, this most serious and heavy charge is, in context, a joke, a bit of entertainment.
Another very important similarity: both works are heavily influenced by their predecessors. At one time among so-called Shakespeare scholars it was very popular to actually try to debunk the Bard. People saw obvious similarities between Shakespeare’s plays and a number of sources that came before him (or, in the case of Christopher Marlowe, works written contemporaneously) and drew conclusions, painting Shakespeare in many shades of crook from plagiarizer to front man to myth.
These days (read: postmodernity) most accept that every story is a re-telling of some story that came before it, or, as my mother and King Solomon like to say, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” And this is fine with us. It is expected. We don’t and shouldn’t tolerate plagiarism, but we also do not fly off the handle every time something seems like something else.
For a more recent example, see the almost-conspiracy around that other widely read British author, J.K. Rowling. At the height of her fame (is she still at the height? will she ever come down?) many people accused her of lifting her tale from Adrian Jacobs’ The Adventures of Willy the Wizard. This is still being worked out in the courts, but barring some major shift, in perpetuity no one will care much that there once was a story about a wizard named Willy that bears many similarities to the more famous Harry.
Star Trek, too, is packed with other people’s stories, be it highly inventive retellings of Greek classics, verbatim performances of Sherlock Holmes and even, it turns out, many examples of Shakespeare’s plays being appropriated and adapted to the twenty-fourth century.
Shakespeare’s plays can be crude and funny, sad and moving, mystical and romantic, and any combination of these things. Mostly, though, they do what the best stories do. Elizabethan English makes them seem untouchably highbrow, but even this would have been funny to Shakespeare because much of his language, to his contemporaries, would have seemed base and coarse, as it suited the characters.
Imagine what the English language will sound like 400 years into the future; imagine how the works of Gene Roddenberry will sound to readers then. Will they be any more “highbrow” because they’re old? Certainly not.
Admittedly, Star Trek probably won’t be read or performed like Shakespeare’s plays are today. I don’t see there ever being a “Roddenberry in the Park.” Shakespeare is certainly on a higher level, but let’s not put him too high up on the pedestal.
Twelfth Night in Central Park ended its run on July 12, back here in the 21st century. It was truly fantastic, with an amazing cast that featured Anne Hathaway opposite several well-regarded Broadway actors. If you missed it, take heart: Shakespeare in the Park will be back next summer with Othello, and in the meantime The Public Theater’s next production, The Bacchae by Euripides, begins August 11.
And Star Trek: The Next Generation is on the SciFi network every Monday night. Make time for both, make time for it all: the plays of Shakespeare, the space operas of Gene Roddenberry, the blue notes of Miles Davis, and the crooning of Duncan Sheik. Find entertainment, enlightenment, and engaging stories wherever you can; really, they’re all around us.
When you see the cover of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ 2010 memoir Losing My Cool, you’ll find it difficult to believe that he has, in fact, lost it. And even more so if you have the chance to meet him in a hip SoHo café, as I did a few weeks ago. With a knit hat on his head and a scraggly beard wrapped around his chin, Williams has still got it. And yet it’s not the kind of cool he grew up admiring.
As a mixed-raced child — Williams mother is white and his father is black — a pivotal early experience in which he was perceived as white and rich by a black woman in a “working class section” of Plainfield kindled in him a strong desire to be black. And it wasn’t enough to just be black. What he learned from the other boys in the barbershop that he patronized twice a month was that he had to learn to talk, walk, and carry himself with a particular kind of swagger, as defined by the 1990s hip-hop artists he and the other boys came to idolize.
But Williams, who is speaking tonight at NJCU, was different from those boys, and from the rappers they admired, in more ways than simply his mixed race; Williams’ father — who they called Pappy — held a PhD in sociology. His parents moved from the West Coast, where they met in what Williams describes as “the West Coast front of what at that time was called the War on Poverty,” to Newark, where Pappy ran anti-poverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese before opening his own academic and SAT preparation business out of their home in Fanwood. Pappy’s instruction was not limited to paying customers; from a very young age both of his sons, Thomas and his brother Clarence, were subject to a rigorous extracurricular study schedule.
It was Pappy’s persistence and his love, Williams says, that made it possible for he and his brother to escape the fate that befell so many of his peers who bought fully into the lie that is manufactured and sold to them by hip-hop culture. Hence, the subtitle of Losing My Cool is “How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture.”
Williams doesn’t hate hip-hop culture, and he’s careful to prove that it is still a part of his life. (See, for example, the playlist that he posted on his website.) But, he is critical of it. His memoir, in fact, began not as a memoir at all, but as a bit of cultural criticism. Back in 2007, while a student in NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism graduate program, he was asked to write an op-ed piece as a class assignment. The essay he wrote, which was eventually published by The Washington Post, sought to separate black culture from hip-hop culture, as he noted, they had become conflated since the 1980s.
His professor at NYU, the author and journalist Katie Roiphe, was impressed with her student’s work and suggested that the argument he was making — that what many perceived to be black culture was really just street culture, and that street culture was not the best representation of black culture — could be more thoroughly expressed in a book-length work. With her encouragement, he took a semester off from NYU to write a proposal. After several months of writing and rewriting he secured an agent and then interest from no less than eight publishers.
As he composed his argument, he found that an effective way to flesh out each of his points was with a bit of personal narrative, anecdotes from his days growing up in North Jersey. It became clear as he worked with his agent on his proposal that these stories were the most captivating moments. The publisher he ended up choosing agreed that, as Williams puts it, “It’s probably not that interesting to read a whole book that’s an op-ed, or just an argument.”
As he shifted the direction of his book, he matched his reading to the style and tone he sought for his argument. He read a lot of James Baldwin, who he aptly describes as a “serial memoirist,” as well as fellow Jersey writer Junot Diaz, and Joan Didion and Ralph Ellison. From Ellison, he says, he learned how to approach his own argument effectively. In addition to his literary influences, the voices of his professors Roiphe and Paul Berman, and that of his father, informed his style and, he notes, allowed him to teach himself to write a memoir as it was happening.
From the very first chapter of Losing My Cool, New Jersey is more than just the setting, it becomes a character itself, informing and creating the world in which Williams came of age. Williams attributes this to what he calls Jersey’s provincialism. That is, even though it is at the heart of a major metropolitan strip that runs from Boston to D.C., one can feel rather insulated in the suburbs. He notes that the limited engagement he experienced with outside cultures, beyond the immediate hip-hop culture he and his friends adopted, is necessarily a result of place.
But more important to Williams than place is circumstance. He acknowledges that many people do not have the same advantage that he had in his highly educated and strict father, and yet he acknowledges that to a certain extent, an individual must be responsible for bettering him or herself. Quick to offer a helping hand, however, Williams acknowledges that as a writer he has the opportunity to put forth a positive example.
“As a black writer, it’s almost a moral obligation to show that there are different ways of being black than you’ll see on Black Entertainment Television,” he says, acknowledging that he doesn’t have the perfect answer, but hopes to be one of many positive examples.
The heart of Williams’ argument is actually inspired in no small way by Plato’s notion of “Allegory of the Cave,” the idea that many people are like prisoners trapped in a cave staring at the shadows on the wall and believing that what they are seeing is reality. The philosopher, Plato says, has the ability to see from outside the cave, to recognize that the shadows are cast by events happening behind the prisoners and the true form of reality is more than just the shadows.
“There are good things and there are real things and it takes thought and sense of purpose to seek those things out,” Williams says. “Kim Kardashian is on the cover of every magazine right now, and that’s a shadow.”
His Platonic reading carries into hip-hop culture as well. He has come to believe that the best way to encounter that culture is with an ironic tone — not ironic in a funny sense, but in the sense that “there is a difference between what is being said and what is meant,” he explains. “You don’t actually have to believe that keeping it real means that if someone looks at you the wrong way you have to respond in a violent manner.”
Though many already look at hip-hop with this detachment, it was a lesson Williams had to learn with the help of his father and his insistence on education.
Williams will be speaking on this very topic this evening at New Jersey City University. Additionally, he will be reading from his book and talking a bit about how he came to write it. This is one of many speaking engagements for Williams since the book was published last year; in each lecture he makes an effort to be the positive example that he insists young people need. He talks, particularly, to young men and women of color and reminds them that there are many ways to “be black.”
“Young people respond to that,” he says. “They’re happy that someone who is not 75 years older says that to them.”
THE DETAILS
Thomas Chatterton Williams will be speaking at the Michael Gilligan Student Union at NJCU tonight at 5PM. His book, Losing My Cool, will be released in paperback on April 26.
All photos: Edwin Hadi
Earlier this month, thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses descended on Journal Square for their annual convention, this year centered on the theme “Remain Close to Jehovah.” Similar meetings will take place at a variety of locations all around the world throughout the rest of 2010 and into 2011. In the tri-state area the gatherings will continue through September.
At the Jersey City location, however, attendees had the unique opportunity to meet in a very special place, the historic Stanley Theater.
The Witnesses acquired the Stanley in 1983 and renovated it in time for the formal dedication of the building in 1985. Remarkably, because no one in the organization is paid, all the work was done by thousands of volunteers.
Though the Stanley is used regularly as the Assembly Hall for Jersey City Witnesses, it was especially effective in providing an elegant as well as spacious setting for the convention, which gathered an estimated 3,000 attendees on each meeting day, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Nearly every space of the expansive theater was put to use for the convention, with the main events taking place in the auditorium. There, on any given hour of each day, attendants could hear symposiums and sermons relating to the theme, as well as experience some special events such as baptisms and a drama production.
According to Howard Carroll, a news service overseer for the Hudson County circuit of Witnesses, an effort was made to make non-members in the area aware of the conference and to welcome them, via a flier emphasizing the free admission and the lack of collections taken. “How can you draw close to God?,” it read.
Although it is unclear how many guests responded to this invitation, if they did attend, they’d likely be easy to spot. Even on the balmy Saturday afternoon when I visited the convention, all the Witnesses were dressed in formal attire — suits for the men and dresses for the women. Carroll explained that Jehovah’s Witnesses dress up to show respect, similar to the way people used to dress up for ball games and, appropriately for the venue, movies.
Yet, despite the serious, solemn dress, every Witness I spoke with was full of joy and excitement for the conference.
Many, like 19-year-old Britney from Paterson, cherished the opportunity to reconnect with old friends that they may not have the opportunity to see often. She was born into the organization and baptized 11 years ago.
“I get to see a lot of the friends that I only get to see on these occasions,” she said. “Even if you don’t get to personally talk to them, you do feel a certain kind of spirit just being around them.”
Shawn from Clifton, another lifelong Witness, expressed a similar sentiment.
“Getting to see all the people who are doing the same thing as you is very encouraging,” he said, adding that the actual information was a big draw as well. Many of the other attendees referred to the support that comes from the various speakers, who give them tips and advice on how to be a better Witness.
Perhaps one of the most striking things about the convention from the perspective of an outsider was the diversity represented by the attendees. People of all ages and races filled the theater and the adjoining rooms, including overflow seating for those who could not find a seat in the main auditorium.
Bobby Irvin, a Jamaican musician and old friend of the late Bob Marley, summed up the experience of the convention using a famous phrase of Marley’s.
“Everybody is just in one love,” he said. “In Oneness.”
Irvin looked around the theater as crowds began to pour out of the auditorium and as a line of new converts shuffled into a shallow pool for baptism.
“It’s very beautiful,” he added with a smile.
It may seem unlikely, but I’m a hip-hop head. Old school. From the time I can remember listening to anything, rap was there. I didn’t grow up in the inner city, but I didn’t grow up in the suburbs, either. If there was such a thing as the outer city, that’s where I’d be from. But even there, in the outer city of Boston, in my mostly white neighborhood, I got into rap.
Obviously, I don’t say this to make the case that I’m some kind of early rap adopter or that my musical tastes, even as a young child, were extremely overdeveloped (or, underdeveloped, depending on your view), rather I note that to indicate that by 1987, less than a decade after hip-hop’s inception, it had reached me where I was, and taken hold.
Hip-hop is just over 30 years old now, only slightly my elder and that of the millennial generation, but the impact that it has had on the world, and specifically on the United States, is immeasurable. It has reshaped our country’s landscape, revolutionized race relations, redefined popular culture, and, according to Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, it has given rise to a new majority.
This and much more will be Chang’s topic when he comes to speak at New Jersey City University on Monday, April 19. As a featured guest in NJCU’s University Lecture Series, Chang will give a lecture entitled “Hip-Hop and The Colorization of America.”
Jeff Chang has been described as a “radical historian,” and this is true, as long as the full meaning is attached to both words. That is, by covering topics most often overlooked by academia, Chang has cut out a niche for himself conducting serious (but not stuffy) academic research in areas traditionally labeled and looked at as simply popular culture. The Chicago Sun-Times called Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop “the best-argued, most-thoroughly researched case for hip-hop as a complete and truly American culture.”
In addition to his work in history, Chang also writes for several magazines, including Vibe, for which he covered the 2008 presidential election and penned the magazine’s cover story on Barack Obama. Additionally, he has written for The New York Times, Mother Jones, and The Nation, and he served as the Senior Editor of 360hiphop.com. On top of all of this, Chang is credited with founding the independent hip-hop label SoleSides (which became Quannum Projects) and launching the careers of several of underground hip-hop’s most influential MCs and DJs.
The NJCU lecture will combine the focus of Chang’s study of hip-hop from Can’t Stop Won’t Stop with the subject of his forthcoming book Who We Be: The Colorization of America, which investigates the change in American culture after the civil rights era.
You can bet I’ll be at this event (and not just because I teach at NJCU). In my hand I’ll hold a notebook and pen to vigorously take notes, and on my feet, of course, will be My Adidas.
All photos: Edwin Hadi
On Tuesday night many of Hudson County’s business owners gathered at the former Jersey City Medical Center (or as it is now known, The Beacon) for the inaugural event of the Hudson County History Series.
The evening began with a short lecture by Changing Jersey City authors Cynthia Harris and Leon Yost, in a newly restored lecture hall. Ulana Zakalak, The Beacon’s Historic Restoration Consultant, explained that the hall, like much of the complex, had been in a state of complete disrepair. Water stains and faded paint marred the walls and ceilings where now, due to meticulous research including analyzing samples to determine the original paint colors in the room, shimmering golds and rich blues recreate the art deco look of yesteryear.
After the lecture and then some socializing and snacking on hors d’oeuvres, guests were treated to a tour of some the more intricately rehabilitated features of the Beacon, followed by a sneak peak at the ongoing restoration and development of the property.
Zakalak headed up the historical portion of the tour, showing locations such as the original entrance to the hospital which boasts a bas relief sculpture lining the room entitled “From Myth to Medicine,” the lobby, the new community library and perhaps most exciting, notorious former Jersey City mayor Frank Hague’s office on the ground floor, which has been converted, appropriately, to a poker room.
From there, George Filopoulos, president of Metrovest Equities, the real estate company that owns and operates The Beacon, treated guests to a sneak peak of the newest renovation to the complex, the Mercury Lofts building. The tour included a look at a 3,700 square foot sample loft that covered half of the space on the building’s second floor as well as a walk through much of the yet to be renovated space.
This event was the first in a series that promises to go above and beyond the kind of affairs that the Chamber of Commerce regularly hosts by offering business networking opportunities with a side of history.
James Fisher is the kind of history professor you wish you had. Sure, he looks the part, round glasses and floppy hair, but what most recommends him is his energy. Not energy as in some kind of new age-y good aura, but literally his enthusiasm and passion for his subject, whether that be history, theology or the subject of his latest book — wherein all his other interests seem to merge — the Port of New York.
As a New Jersey native, the often-untold stories of the mostly Irish waterfront workers on both sides of the Hudson River are a source of endless fascination to Fisher, and, whether talking to him about it, or reading his book, his excitement about the subject is contagious.
On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, Fisher’s fourth book, was published last year by Cornell University Press and is the result of over ten years of research, interviews and writing begun when Fisher and his wife lived in the Midwest and completed after they moved, with their son, back to New Jersey.
In many ways, Fisher sees the composition of On the Irish Waterfront as a joining of often-disparate fronts. In addition to the backing of Cornell University Press, the book was funded by a grant from the University of Notre Dame and joins two disciplines that don’t often meet, American Catholic studies and American history.
The book chronicles the lives of the major, predominantly Irish, politicians, gangsters, union leaders and priests whose combined stories inform the broader history of the region in the early half of the twentieth century. Fisher points out that due to an almost unbreakable code of silence on the docks on either side of the Hudson, prior to the writing of this book not much of this story has been told; the most notable exception being the Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando. And the film itself factors into Fisher’s book in a large way as he details the true story behind the movie, that of “labor priest” Father John Corridan, depicted in the film by Karl Malden.
“I’m one of those characters who …” Fisher pauses briefly to consider his words before continuing. “I’m probably a little quirky and I do these off-beat kind of things, but I like the idea of being part of a communal enterprise. I like the idea that it was part of a series at Notre Dame which was designed to put the Catholic American stories into the mainstream of American historical narrative more than they ever had before.”
And certainly this “communal enterprise” is one of the features that make the book most accessible to a wider audience. There is plenty of rich information for history buffs and those with interest in Catholic social teaching, but there is also a particular appeal for those of us whose lives, like those of the characters he profiles, straddle the Hudson.
The importance of Jersey City on the culture of the waterfront is not lost on Fisher. Pointing out that it was often ignored by the New York media, he posits that the most powerful figures in the history of the waterfront were those, like infamous Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, that had controlling stakes on both banks of the river. This fact, he adds, was really only ever known to Hudson County residents.
“People like Hague and others who were here, they always had a lot of action going over there,” Fisher says. “It never worked the other way. Nobody from the West Side of Manhattan ever said, ‘I want to get into the Jersey City market.’ But if they had, they would have understood that that was, of course, the key to control and authority in the port.”
As Fisher sees it, the importance of Jersey City in the region has not dwindled since the heyday of the waterfront, though it has changed. The legacy of that time, he says, can be seen not only in the fact that Irish-Americans have always played a part in Hudson County politics, including our own Mayor Healy who Fisher says is a “kind of liberal incarnation of the old school,” but also in the influence that Jesuit education has had in the region.
“In every American city like this there was pressure on the Jesuits to move their schools and colleges out of these urban settings, but in almost every case they refused. They dug in,” he explains. “So the Catholic scene in Jersey City really did help make this transition. To make the change,” he says, referring the city’s urban renewal.
James Fisher, himself, has become a part of the story through his role as professor of American religious history in the Theology Department of Fordham University, a Jesuit school. And he uses his classes as an opportunity to inform his students not only of the significance of Catholic education in the region, but also the important place of Manhattan’s West Side on the story of the port, which he does by taking his classes to the piers.
More personally, Fisher also fits into the Irish-Catholic history of the port as a kind of outsider-insider. His family has strong roots in the area, his mother grew up in Hudson County and his father attended Saint Peter’s Prep in Downtown Jersey City, though Fisher did not grow up in Hudson County and, for that reason has always felt “somewhat estranged.”
“I grew up in eight counties in New Jersey,” he adds. “My family was the upward mobile Irish descendancy, post-war. But all my relatives grew up around here, so there’s a little bit of that distance. I don’t make any claims to being an insider. But I’m the product of it in a way … Spiritually, emotionally as an Irish-Catholic, this is where I’m from.”
Last fall I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Fisher at Saint Peter’s College in which he tailored his talk toward his Jersey City audience and affirmed the place of the city in not only the region’s history, but also in the story told in his book. That evening, Fisher was particularly personal about his family life as well, perhaps because he was in the company of many friends and colleagues (he taught for a while at SPC and his wife teaches there still), or because his son, who is autistic, was in attendance.
“This book would not have been written without Charlie,” Fisher said of his son.
“Seeing my son’s experience and some of our experience advocating for him and his education got me out of myself for the first time in a way that I could look more broadly at political systems,” he says when I talk to him later. “It offered a broader perspective, gave me a little more compassion and humility.”
“I just know it made me a better person, so there had to be some consequence,” he concludes.
This compassion and humility is evident not just by Fisher’s preference for talking about his family or his subject matter over himself, but it’s also evident in his writing. Reading his book, it’s clear that Fisher is aware that he is dealing with the lives of real people. He never reduces them to caricatures or stereotypes.
James Fisher’s success in the On the Irish Waterfront is a direct result of his passion for history and theology, yes, but also for education, art, and, ultimately, for the people of the region.
This holiday season you’ll have plenty of opportunities to revisit the classics, whether for you that means A Charlie Brown Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, or, as it is in my family, the musical version of A Christmas Carol starring Albert Finney and simply titled Scrooge. And when there are days where the temperature reaches into the mid-60s in early December, these old standbys are often the most tangible manifestation of the season.
Here in Jersey City a new, if not somewhat unlikely, story is quickly climbing to “classic” status: today marks the opening night of local “theater in the raw” group J CITY’s third-annual performance of “A Tuna Christmas.” This play, with its funny name and Texas setting has proven to be the perfect addition to the holiday season, like the amusing Southern cousin you only get to see around Christmastime.
The plot centers around an annual yard decorating contest in the little town of Tuna, Texas. It would seem that the contest is the victim of a saboteur, referred to by the locals as the “Christmas Phantom.” The town’s people of Tuna are represented by 22 unique and hilarious characters, played entirely by the two male cast members, Kellis Carroll and Clay Cockrell. As I sat and watched the play during dress rehearsals this week, I met a couple of little people, two very well-endowed women and their love interests, a couple of old ladies and, of course, the town’s passionate — and high maintenance — theater director.
Our town’s theater director is J CITY’s Sandy Cockrell who, with her husband Clay, and Kellis, are the three founding members of J CITY, which officially launched in 2006. Sandy and Clay moved to the area thirteen years ago and began performing and producing plays in New York City. It wasn’t until about four years ago, however, that they made the decision to make their theater company’s home here in Jersey City. Homeless for several years, the theater company staged plays wherever there was space.
“We were doing shows when a space opened up,” Clay says. “They invited us to the courthouse, in the rotunda. When a space opened up, that’s when we would get to do a play.”
They also performed at Grace Church Van Vorst before landing in their new home at St. Michael’s Church in Hamilton Park. Meeting the pastor of St. Michael’s, Father Vic as he’s commonly called, was a “miracle,” Sandy says.
“[During] Cinco de Mayo at The Merchant, we met Father Vic,” she continues. “He’s been so generous in saying, ‘Come down, and when you got on your feet a little bit you can donate to the church, what you can.’”
For “A Tuna Christmas,” J CITY transformed the church basement into a stage onto which the actors and audience cast their imagination and, in short time, are able to see whatever the scene calls for, be it the inside of a small restaurant or the living room of a house.
This will be the third year that J CITY has performed “A Tuna Christmas” and the third time Sandy has directed and Kellis Carroll has acted in the production. Clay explains that when they first produced the show, J CITY had just started up and his responsibilities as executive producer took precedence. But when the other actor moved away, he took over and, as Carroll notes: “He fit all the costumes!”
When this trio chooses the plays they will perform in any given year, Carroll explains, they select scripts that contain a universal truth. “Everyone can know there is a truth being told,” he says. “We tell a story simply, but in a sophisticated way.”
Clay adds that when Sandy reads through scripts, she picks those that she not only wants to do, but ones “she has to do.” He points to the group’s last production, a jarring piece about marital infidelity entitled “Passion,” as an example.
“This is too hard,” he says he cautioned Sandy. “It’s a really scary script that’s so raw.” But, he says, each time she responded: “We have to do this.”
“A Tuna Christmas,” on the other hand, is more lighthearted and fun, more suited to the holidays.
“It’s a total comedy, almost to the point of farce.” Carroll, who is originally from Texas, explains. “[But] there are also these small poignant moments that come out of nowhere and grab you.”
“A Tuna Christmas” opens tonight at 8 pm at The Underground Theater at St. Michael’s Church (252 9th St.). The show runs Wed.-Sat. until Dec. 19. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased online.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in Jersey City one might wonder what to do. Extend brunch well into dinnertime? Stay home and catch up on missed episodes of your favorite shows on Hulu? Venture out into the rain to get going on the Christmas shopping you’ve neglected to start?
Sure. Yes. Those are all good options, but this past Saturday there was a better option, and one that, I’m afraid, not as many of us took advantage of as we should have — “Designer Days: Handmade for the Holidays” at the Jersey City Museum.
The atrium section of the museum was transformed into a veritable shopping mall of gift ideas — all local, green and artsy — from members of the Jersey City Craft Mafia and _gaia. There was a wide assortment of jewelry, clothing, hats, ornaments and original artwork on sale, all expressing the diversity and vivacity of our little city.
And if that wasn’t enough, I had the chance to attend a lecture by Leon Yost and Cynthia Harris in which they showed slides and commentary from their new book Changing Jersey City, A History in Photographs. The slideshow took the audience on a tour through long-forgotten rooms in the old Jersey City Medical Center, on a ride on the old elevated train, to the locations of the oldest public schools in JC and face to face with many of the people that made our city what it is today. (Unfortunately, I missed our mayor’s musical performance of holiday tunes — but you can’t win ‘em all.)
The overwhelming impression I had as I walked back home through the rain to my apartment is that there is so much here in Jersey City that many of us don’t know a thing about. There’s the history which some great writers and historians are doing their best to make us aware of, from Bob Leach to Yost and Harris to James T. Fisher, an author I’ll be profiling here in a couple of weeks.
But in addition to the history, there’s an entire present that too many of Jersey City’s residents know too little about. There are events like “Designer Days” going on all over the city, there are artists and craftspeople, musicians and writers, theater groups and scholars doing work here that is worthy of so much more attention than they receive, due, in no small part, to our proximity to our overbearing big brother.
But the good news is we can remedy this. Check the calendar here at JCI for the latest on events, read the daily News Roundups and Best Bets, read the other local media, and get involved in what is going on in our city.
In her presentation, Harris showed pictures of well dressed young people sitting around a checkers board at one of the city’s many athletic clubs of yesteryear. She noted that in lieu of anything better to do, this is how our historical counterparts passed the time. And she showed a picture, and explained the use of, a dance card.
But we don’t need checkerboards and dance cards; there’s so much going on, all we need is to be a part of it all.
Photo: Tatsuro Nishimura
Flood Warning! If the New York Times is to believed, residents of Jersey City should be prepared for high waters beginning today.
Sure, the forecast calls for rain, but that’s not the half of it. Today is also the opening night for The Attic Ensemble’s presentation of Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2006 tear-jerking play, Rabbit Hole.
The play is rooted in the deep sadness that comes from the death of a small child that takes place months before the play’s opening scene. “[It] inspires such copious weeping among its audience that you wonder early on if you should have taken a life jacket,” the Times noted in 2006.
The Attic Ensemble’s presentation marks the directorial debut of Brendan Applegate, a native of Elizabeth, and three-season veteran of the theater group. Applegate joined the Ensemble after losing his job and subsequently responding to an open casting call. He joined the show and, as he says, “I haven’t left since.”
In the intervening years Brendan has participated in all aspects of producing a show, both onstage as well as behind the curtain. He is particularly excited about staging Rabbit Hole, because of “the cast and the wonderful material that we get to work with.” Plus, he quips, “It’s a real comedy.”
The Attic Ensemble has been putting on plays, poetry readings, stand up comedy nights and fund raisers in Jersey City for 39 years. From its humble beginnings in an attic space in Jersey City the group continued to grow and relocate to various venues around town, now taking up residency at the Barrow Mansion on Wayne Street.
It’s not always easy for the Attic, or for any arts group in Jersey City, to lure residents out of their homes, or, in many cases, away from Manhattan, to see a local performance. But, as Applegate points out, “It’s a lot cheaper to come to your backyard and see a great, high caliber show, instead of going to the city.”
With this performance, the ensemble sought a play that would challenge not only the audience but the performers as well. Typically, Applegate says, when a play is selected a few things factor into it: will it bring variety to the season, will it help the theater group reach new goals and higher artistic pursuits, and does it introduce a new and exciting challenge? Ideas are submitted to artistic director, Art Delo, and he proceeds to put together a schedule for each season.
As the second show in the Attic Ensemble’s 2009-2010 Mainstage Season, Rabbit Hole “is a vehicle for a strong season,” Applegate explains. “It holds up.”
There was a strong turnout in response to the casting call for Rabbit Hole and from that field three actors who are new to the company join two Attic alumni in the production. At a dress rehearsal just a couple nights before the play was set to open this week, the inside of the Barrow Mansion was transformed into a modest, quaint home. It is in this home that Lindsay-Abaire’s story of overcoming heartbreak unfolds. And it is there that the audience, as Brendan Applegate puts it, “gets two spend two hours outside of their lives, and in someone else’s.”
Rabbit Hole
Written by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Brendan Applegate, presented by The Attic Ensemble.
Opens at the Barrow Mansion (83 Wayne St.) in Jersey City on Friday, Nov. 13.
Tickets are available by clicking here or visiting www.atticensemble.org.
Cynthia Harris and Bob Leach chat with festival-goers (Photo courtesy the Jersey City Free Public Library)
This past weekend’s rainy weather did little to dampen the spirits of the city’s bibliophiles as evidenced by the consistent stream of traffic flowing through Saturday’s second annual book festival held at Van Vorst Park.
“Surprisingly, it turned out well,” Jersey City Free Public Library assistant director and festival chair Sonia Araujo said on Saturday, noting that people turned out despite the weather. “It seems to be flowing. People stay awhile … they’ve spoken to the authors. And the authors have sold their books and did their signing. Bottom line is we’ve done well. We met our goal.”
Though some of the authors and attendees made longing references to last year’s beautiful weather, they too shared Araujo’s optimistic outlook. “The rain sort of dampened things down, so to speak,” Steven Hart, author of The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway, punned. “But we’ve had a pretty steady flow. I’ve sold a few books.”
This year’s festival was titled “A Tale of Our City,” and surveying the broad range of topics covered by the writers in attendance certainly tells a story about the varied interests and the diverse population of Jersey City. Meandering from table to table, one was likely to come across super-hero children, teen prodigies, African belly dancers, recovering workaholics and, of course, corrupt politicians.
The variety didn’t stop with the subject matter however. This year’s festival hosted authors in such varied genres as memoir, narrative nonfiction, self-help, fiction, children’s stories and even a couple of graphic novels.
In addition to selling and signing books at their individual booths, most of the writers in attendance had the opportunity to read from their works. These presentations had the quality of making even more personal the authors’ words. In some cases this meant interjections in between written sentence to explain or simply orate tangentially, in other cases the weight of the words in some of the more intense works brought the author to tears. Such was the case with Patricia Je, author of The Long Road Here, a moving account of Pherrys, a victim of child abuse.
Each author was extremely willing to engage their readers and potential readers, cordially thanking them for their interest and answering any questions that might arise. The Independent took advantage of this opportunity for full access to Jersey City’s best and brightest authors. What follows is a brief survey of the writers in attendance on Saturday and their works, organized by subject matter.
Our Storied Past
The most popular subject matter at the book festival was, without a doubt, Jersey City history. And perhaps the most popular author to write on the subject in Van Vorst Park on Saturday was Helene Stapinski. Her book, Five Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, first published back in 2002, is in its ninth printing, is used as a textbook for college courses on New Jersey history and garnered her a modicum of celebrity on its release.
“It’s about corruption in Hudson County,” Stapinksi explains, “and all of the small time criminals in my family.” She says the book asks the question: “Is it because of the corrupt nature of the town that people steal stuff, or is it that people who do illegal things put those people in office?” She works through this question by weaving her own family’s history into the fabric of the history of the area at large.
On Saturday, however, she read from her new book Baby Plays Around, which tells of her days playing in a rock band on the Lower East Side in the 80s. She showcased a passage about her first true love — which we found out was not a person but her brother’s drum set.
Stapinski says a third book is in the works. “I got two kids too,” she says. “And I freelance; I do stuff at the Times. It’s hard to keep all these things in the air at one time, but it will be out.”
Stephen Hart says The Last Three Miles tells the story of “the first superhighway project in America, which was the Route 1 extension. The last portion of it was what is now known as the Pulaski Skyway.” A bloody labor war erupted around the construction, involving none other than Jersey City’s most notorious mayor, Frank Hague.
“It also deals with the rise of the automobile,” Hart continues. “This really was the first superhighway in America. And for that reason it was designed along engineering principles from the railway.”
This, he reasons, explains why the Skyway has traditionally been considered such a treacherous drive, a fact he got to know well while living in Jersey City during the 80s and working in Hoboken later.
The fascination, particularly in the Hudson County area, with the subject matter of his book has prompted Hart to consider writing a “full length biography of Hague, a real serious, straight out and thoroughly researched” account of the famous political boss’ life.
Other writers making Jersey City’s history their focus were Charles Caldes, author of a number of books about railroading and two in particular that deal with local matters in both pictures and text. Jersey City’s Journal Square tells of, as Caldes puts it, “the greatest 12-14 acres in the world, in its day.” Caldes is also the author of Jersey City’s Hudson River Waterfront, Book One: The Pennsylvania Railroad. Both books are full of amazing photographs that tell the city’s history in brilliant visual detail.
And of course local storyteller Bob Leach made an appearance at the festival with his book Frank Hague and the Lucky Horseshoe as well as two new books entitled The Parade of the Shantytown Dead and How Frank Hague Became a Hero. Leach was joined at his table by Cynthia Harris, manager of the library’s New Jersey Room and the co-author (with photographer Leon Yost) of the forthcoming Changing Jersey City: A History in Photographs, to be published later this month by Schiffer Publishing.
City Comics
Perhaps two of the most interesting offerings at this years book festival were from authors in a non-traditional media, the graphic novel. Amy Bogin, who moved to Jersey City several years ago from Central Jersey, has been documenting the past year of her life as a web comic at www.glassurchin.com in which she appears as a spiky hedgehog and her friends and family appear as other animals.
She recently compiled the first 140 comics into a book entitled The Glass Urchin, Book 1: Milkshakes and Highways. “This book has a story that anyone can read, but it also has a little bit of a local flavor,” Bogin says. “I love Jersey City. It inspired me.”
The book will be available on Bogin’s website as well as the original web comics and she continues to update the site twice a week with new installments.
The Glass Urchin will appeal to a mature comic book reader, young adults who can identify with her characters’ job struggles, relationships and outlook on life. Another author at the book festival, however, had more of a traditional comic book reader in mind for his audience: children.
Anthony Fletcher, who signs his work Artoni, was at the book festival to promote his entertaining and educational comic, C2 and Posse: Inner City Heroes. “It’s the first of its kind to portray inner city teenagers of different ethnicities as heroes,” he says excitedly. “They’re heroes because they’re embracing, developing and using human attributes, which become their superpower … And there are no guns.”
Artoni has lived in Jersey City for about 12 years, working out of his apartment doing graphic design for several Manhattan fashion companies, but with the debut of C2 (pronounced C Squared), he is “going national,” with national distribution and trying to build up his company Artoni World Productions.
The C2 mission statement is “Waking up mankind, one mind at a time,” and this mirrors Artoni’s goal to use his comics as a means not only of education for children, but also for education.
Here to Lend a Helping Hand
Several authors at the book festival were promoting self-help or inspirational books. Dustin Dumas Weeks worked in the investment banking, currency trading and technology fields in Europe, New York and Silicon Valley. In a short period of time she lost her job, found another and then was laid off from that job as well. The experience offered her a moment to take stock of her life.
“I reflected on ‘What can I do differently?’,” she says of that time. “I was working 80 hours a week.”
She began by making a list of the things that “will never happen to me again.” That list became her book, Lessons from a Recovering Worker Bee. It features 26 lessons “on how to maintain your work/life balance while also accelerating your career.”
Weeks self-published the book and had influence on every aspect of its creation from the manuscript to the layout to the cover design. She was fortunate enough to receive endorsements from real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran and BET founder Bob Johnson.
Sheila Allen knows something about work/life balance as well. As the wife of a local pastor, Allen made it a priority to manage her time in such away that neither her family nor the church was shortchanged. Her book, Career, Ministry and Family: Can They Complement Each Other? explores this tension and offers suggestions for people struggling to find that balance between a profession, a family and even a ministry.
Several more authors at the festival were promoting works of fiction, like Jessica F. Baggett, a New Jersey City University sophmore, aspiring filmmaker, musician and writer who garnered attention from the local media when she recently published her first book The Keys to Life, which is about a teenage musical prodigy.
Sandra Catena, author of The African Belly Dance, crafted a tale about an Italian American from Newark who shocks her family be becoming a belly dancer. The book meticulously describes the art of belly dancing before taking a turn toward mystery novel set against an exotic West African backdrop.
New to the writing scene was Jane Pedler, who was at the festival as a first attempt to share her writing with the world. She had several homemade short story packets on sale, each story inspired by tintype photos of anonymous people that she buys on the internet.
Early in the day Mayor Jerramiah Healy could be seen perusing the authors’ tables and meeting attendees, himself braving the rain to appreciate Jersey City’s burgeoning literary scene. (The event was a joint effort between Healy’s office, the library, the City Council and the Division of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with the Van Vorst Park Association.)
Plans for next year’s book festival are already in the works and, according to Sonia Araujo, seven authors have already signed on.
“Jersey City needs this kind of thing to promote the arts and literacy,” Araujo says. Continuing with a proud smile she added: “This is a wonderful event.”
Ahh, September: the air is getting cooler, the kids are going back to school and local authors are making their way out of the Free Public Library and into Van Vorst Park for the second annual Book Festival, or “A Tale of Our City,” as it’s being called.
Authors with areas of expertise ranging from rock and roll, baseball, Jersey City history and folklore will be reading from their work and answering questions. In addition there will be a special area for children, an opportunity to sign up for library cards several vendors, music and even belly dancing.
The Independent, which is a sponsor of the festival, will be there meeting and interviewing as many attendees and authors (including Bob Leach, who we featured a few months ago and who will be in attendance), culminating in a full rundown of the day’s events.
Come out to Van Vorst Park on Saturday between 10 am and 4 pm to celebrate Jersey City’s rich literary heritage and meet the authors that are writing us into the future.