Are We Still of Any Use?
The Audacious Hope of the Engaged Scholar
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In the opening scene of the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, one of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s three English-language films, a contentious debate between black and white student activists is underway on a California campus. As the camera surveys the scene in a documentary fashion, the students speak in tired revolutionary clichés. Angry black men in Che Guevara berets and army fatigues punctuate violent mantras with seething street wisdom. “Molotov cocktails are a mixture of gasoline and kerosene. White radicalism is a mixture of bullshit and jive.” Read More |
The Terrible Pangs of Compromise
Racial Reconciliation in African-American Literature
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Reconciliation. What does that word mean? Ostensibly, the word makes us think immediately of something good. It usually means that folks who have dramatic differences have come together in some sense of understanding and willingness to see each other’s points of view. It means that a stalemate has ended, disparate voices are heard, and the future seems less tangled than it did before the newly forged agreement. It could mean that a husband who was vehemently opposed to his wife’s choice of a university for their high-school youngster now sees the value of the choice she has put forth. Read More |
Framing the Secular
A Review Essay
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"I think religions all go to the same path, you know I think it’s all religions are a way of how to live your life and they all kinda lead to the same goal" (145). Thus did one young American recently express a bedrock principle of liberal Protestantism—the conviction that beneath the formalities of “organized religion” lies a natural substratum of human yearning and experience, one common to all the major spiritual traditions. This breezy description of religious equivalency represents one of many voices captured in Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition (2009), a magisterial study of the religious lives of college-aged, or “emerging,” adults in the United States. Read More |
"I Am Then Another Self"
Looking at Montaigne
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Who was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne? Was he a French nobleman, mayor of Bordeaux, who lived from 1533 to 1592? Was he the author of Essais, a collection of 107 “tries,” “experiments,” or “tastes” of understanding? Was he Shakespeare’s inspiration for the character of Hamlet, immobilized by his constant weighing back and forth of options? Was he listed on the Index of Prohibited Books from 1676 to 1854 because the Essais attributed too many feelings and understandings to animals? Read More |
Three days before my first year of graduate school began, my father helped me lug two suitcases and a few boxes up the stairs to the room I’d rented in a house owned and refurbished by a psychology professor. A month earlier, when I’d signed the lease, I’d been relieved to find a room that came with a kitchen to share, but with my father standing in the room, it began to shrink. Read More
Lutheran and Yet Not Lutheran: A Church School Tests the Dilemma of Church and State
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Even from the emails, one can sense the growing desperation. Concordia Lutheran School, a ministry of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church (LCMS) in suburban Detroit, has been waiting for its called teacher, Cheryl Perich, to come back from disability leave that officially started in the fall of 2004. She has had unexplained fainting spells for several months, starting at a golf tournament in June 2004. Read More |
A Kierkegaard in Fishnet Stockings?
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Lady Gaga, age twenty-five, is perhaps the planet’s biggest and most flamboyant pop singer and performance artist. Her second album, 2009’s The Fame Monster, received six Grammy nominations this past year including in the coveted “Album of the Year” category and won awards for “Best Female Pop Vocal Performance” for the single “Bad Romance” and “Best Pop Vocal Album.” Her follow-up album, 2011’s Born This Way, received nods for “Album of the Year” and “Best Pop Vocal Album” as well as “Best Solo Pop Performance” for the song, “Yoü and I.” Read More |
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It's December again, and I'm thinking of death. The morning frost has sharpened each blade of brown grass as it juts upward toward an ashen sky. My garden is naked now—stripped of its green garments by my harvesting hands and by the killing frost. And the raised beds, warm and loamy in May, are like rows of new burial mounds—seven heaps of earth testifying to some terrible family tragedy. Read More |
Dark Clouds: Don DeLillo and
the Age of Terror
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When recently revisiting the novels of Don DeLillo’s “major” period (roughly 1985–97), the first thing that I noticed was the foregrounding of terror. These pre-9/11 novels provided a clear forewarning of the cultural paranoia that came to characterize our lives after 9/11. Twenty years ago, when his tenth novel Mao II appeared in 1991, DeLillo already had his binoculars trained on the Twin Towers. Already, he was discerning that the power of high art was slipping away and that terror was quickly invading mass media and becoming a primary means of voicing revolution in a fallen world. Read More |
The Christian Right and the Tea Party
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Few phenomena in American politics over the past forty years have received more attention in the popular media than the Christian Right. From the time of its rise in the late 1970s, through Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign and the emergence of the Christian Coalition in the 1990s, to the 2008 vice presidential candidacy of Pentecostal Christian Sarah Palin, this movement has been the subject of constant scrutiny from the media and academia. Read More |
Somewhere on the Road to Freedom
At the heart of Valparaiso University’s public statement of identity and mission stands a phrase that describes a necessary pre-requisite, perhaps even a foundation, for a church-related institution of higher learning, namely “the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith.” These days, as the various Lutheran bodies in the United States grow ever smaller and more distant from each other, many at Valparaiso want very much to assist the Lutherans in this country, and perhaps elsewhere, to find both common ground for shared ministry and a more clearly communicable notion of what it means to be Lutheran in today’s world. Read More
Suffering Unto Salvation in
Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow
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Students at the university where I teach are, for the most part, willing to suffer (at least a little) for the sake of the environment. In support of campus efforts to “go green,” many students report taking shorter showers than they took at home as high schoolers. Most struggle, uncomplaining, to balance plates and glasses in the dining hall; getting rid of cafeteria trays has resulted in both lower water consumption and less food waste. Members of a student-led group, Earthkeepers, haul the food scraps we do produce to a designated area behind the Science Center and, months later, transport compost to the campus garden. Read More |
Reaching for the Impossible
Neil Burger's Limitless
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Hollywood has always had a love affair with happy endings. Disney made a fortune by spinning grisly fairy tales into the purer gold of films like The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel wins the prince, gets her voice back, and lives happily ever after instead of dissolving into foam on the surface of the ocean. What screenwriters and directors decide to change says a lot about what Americans go to the movies to see, and about how we are willing and unwilling to be challenged. Read More |
Instructions for the Vocationally Challenged
Begin with Mrs. Muffler, in second grade who announces she is leaving to be an astronaut and, since training begins next week in Florida, St. Valentine’s will be her last day with you. This is the year you write an essay about what you want to be when you grow up and every other girl in class chooses Teacher. Even your best friend David Hallgarth lands on Guitar Teacher, not Cop like most of the boys. Read More
On Happiness and the Committed Life
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Do not be fooled by the title of David Brooks’s latest book, The Social Animal. (Random House). What sounds like a sociology text book is really “the happiest story you’ve ever read… about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives.” This is a good story because it is about happiness, which means it is about everything and relevant to everyone. In particular, it is a story about the lives of Erica and Harold, about their early childhood and schooling, their becoming an above average yuppie couple, their careers and personal ups and downs, their political involvements, Erica’s remarkably boring one-night stand, and ending with Harold’s uneventful death. Read More |
The Place of Scripture in the Modern Christian University
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For a historian to consider the place of Scripture in the modern Christian university is to be drawn immediately to two conclusions. The first is that the place of Scripture poses a real problem in the modern Christian university. The second is that the Lutheran tradition contributed a great deal to creating that problem. Read More |
Does the Way of Improvement Lead Home?
Recently a thoughtful and influential blogger wrote a post addressing the subject of institutional loyalty among academics. When I first came across this post, I had a pretty good hunch about what to expect. The blogger, an Ivy-league trained American historian, began her post on loyalty with a picture of Buddy, Bill Clinton’s chocolate lab from his White House years. And the rest went downhill from there. Read More
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When people ask about my daughter’s birth, I usually describe the weather. I tell them a story, a true one, about the blizzard that raged the day she came—about my prayers that the baby woulfd stay put during the storm and the telling pains that nevertheless arrived, with no warning, to wreak havoc on my body, just as the blowing snow made mischief for the cars that slid by my window. I tell them about my husband’s frantic shoveling to free the car from the mountains of snow in the driveway and our harrowing ride to the hospital, during which we made cautious haste—cautious so that the car would be able to stop, haste so that we would make it in time. Read More |
