Page 1815 – Christianity Today (2024)

Editor’s Note: In this issue we feature a guest column by Baylor University’s C. Stephen Evans. This tribute to longtime Wheaton College philosophy professor Arthur Holmes, based on a eulogy Evans gave at the memorial service, will appear in slightly different form in Wheaton’s alumni magazine.

It is impossible to say all that should be said about Arthur Holmes in the brief time I have, since Arthur made such a profound impact in so many areas, several of which I can only mention. But I want to begin by paying tribute to the crucial role Alice Holmes played as his partner, confidante, encourager, and so much more. I know from my experiences in their home that Art would not have achieved what he did without Alice.

Now to Arthur. Of course something must be said about Art’s role in making Wheaton College the institution it is today. Not only did Art create a first-rate philosophy program; he constantly worked to make the college as a whole both academically first-rate and deeply Christian in every way.

Next, consider Art’s contribution to Christian philosophy. Many of you have heard of Art’s dream of sending 100 students into philosophy to give the profession of philosophy a solid Christian presence, a dream that with God’s help was substantially fulfilled. Art not only sent generations of Wheaton students to graduate school, but made considerable contributions to the field through his own publications. He also played a key role in the establishment of the Society of Christian Philosophers, which today has more than a thousand members.

What about Art’s contributions to the whole community of Christian higher education? Many of the brightest Christian scholars in many fields, such as Mark Noll in history, David Jeffrey and Roger Lundin in literature, Marianne Meye Thompson and Walter Hansen in biblical studies, were transformed by being Art’s students. And that is not to mention the contributions Art’s students have made in theology, biblical studies, the law, medicine, and even the business world. In lectures given all over the country, as well as in his writings, Art labored tirelessly to give Christian colleges a vision for excellence and an understanding of what it might mean to integrate faith and learning.

Above all, Art was a great teacher. Of course he had all the tools you would expect: great learning, intellectual brilliance, passionate enthusiasm, dedication to his students expressed in hours of preparation and even more hours of one-on-one office sessions. I will share two examples of that personal counseling. I was struggling to decide which church I should attend, and came in to Art for advice. In a matter-of-fact tone he told me, “Steve, remember that when you choose a church community you are choosing the people you want to have around you when you die.” A second story: My wife Jan, at that time my fianceÉ, came to Art’s office have a talk about what it would be like to be the wife of a Christian philosopher. When Jan posed her question, Art said, with a twinkle in his eye, “I think you will need to talk with Mrs. Holmes to find out about that.” But then he went on to patiently explain for her benefit how philosophy was then perceived in the evangelical world. We shared that story with Art during our last visit and it was delightful to see the smile of recognition on his face.

I want to single out two qualities of Art whose presence together might seem paradoxical, but which made his teaching, especially his teaching of the history of philosophy, unique. On the one hand, Art—more than any philosopher I have ever known—had a marvelous ability to empathetically enter into the mind of every philosopher he discussed. When Art taught Plato or Aristotle, you felt that you were listening to Plato or Aristotle. Even deeply non-Christian philosophers such as Nietzsche or Spinoza were treated in such a way that you felt that Art had gotten inside these thinkers. There were no straw men; every point of view was explained in the most charitable and sympathetic way possible. This characteristic of Art as a teacher stemmed from a deep personal virtue. Roger Lundin noted that in over 40 years he had never heard Art disparage or demean or degrade another human being. I would say the same; Arthur had an amazing ability to see the good in everyone he dealt with.

The second quality was this: Art exhibited the most deeply Christian mind I have ever encountered. He did not just talk about Christian perspectives; he embodied them. Now you might think the first quality is incompatible with the second. But I think that it is precisely because Art was so fair-minded and honest in his treatment of other philosophers that his Christian perspective was compelling. When he criticized another philosophical perspective, you knew the criticism was earned. He provided a fearless example of a Christian intellectual unafraid to encounter the world of thought, and many times he showed those of us fortunate enough to study with him that, before writing off or refuting a perspective, there was much that we as Christians could learn from that view.

Both as a teacher and as a colleague, Art, more than any other person, helped me gain an understanding that I had a calling from God to do Christian philosophy. Repeatedly he asked me, “Steve, how can you invest your life strategically for the kingdom of God? What is it that God wants you to do?” He never tried to answer those questions for me; indeed he constantly preached that you could serve God in whatever calling you had: business, missions, church ministry, medicine, whatever. But in his life he modeled a more specific answer for me: I was called to be a Christian philosopher with a double mission: to represent Christ in the world of philosophy, and to bring my gifts as a philosopher to the service of Christ’s church.

Art did not merely help me gain this sense of calling; he taught me what it meant. He helped me see that the intellectual life is a place where faith makes a difference. Philosophy is not a purely neutral quest for truth; it is an expression of the whole person and is ultimately shaped by the heart. The task of the Christian philosopher is to learn to look at the world through the eyes of faith.

In helping me to see philosophy in this light Art gave me yet another priceless gift. Once one sees the spiritual battle being waged in the intellectual world, it is all too easy to demonize unbelieving philosophers and withdraw into a Christian intellectual ghetto. Art refused to allow his students to take this way out. All truth, he insisted, is God’s truth. God’s common grace sends rain on the godly and the ungodly. Nor are Christian philosophers exempt from error. Triumphalism is out of place, for Christian philosophers remain finite creatures and they remain sinners, even if they are redeemed sinners. I learned that my task was to think Christianly—to develop an authentic Christian view, but not to think of my own work as the Christian view.

The final gift I received from Art may be the most significant of all. Having taught me that I was called to invest my life strategically for the kingdom of God, Art also taught me to leave the results in God’s hands. In assessing the meaning of my life, the question that matters is not “what have I achieved?” but “have I been faithful?” Success in any external sense is completely up to God. So my task in the classroom is to give of myself to my students. What they will become must be left to them and to God. My task in the study is to do the best thinking I can do, to write the best books and articles I can. Whether anybody else notices any of that is ultimately not my concern nor my responsibility. Art also taught me that seeing the scholarly life as a calling to faithfulness rather than success is not an excuse for mediocrity. We cannot give God less than our best.

Through God’s grace we have received great gifts from the life and work of Arthur Holmes. I hope that we will show our gratitude for those gifts by renewing our own commitment to the ideals Arthur embodied. We best honor Arthur Holmes by continuing to work to actualize the vision with which God blessed him. Thank you, Arthur, and thanks be to the Lord who blessed us with your presence.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In “Revelations in the Key of K,” poet Mary Karr is in the midst of recalling a childhood experience when, she says, “the instant went, the month, and every season / smeared, till with a wrenching arm tug / I was here, grown.” That “wrenching arm tug” that makes us come awake is what we experience over and over in Teju Cole’s stunning debut novel, Open City. First we’re dropped into the middle of everything, jolted awake in the middle of a sentence: “And so,” the narrator begins, “when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set into the city.” He then sets into the city—New York City—and we follow at his heels, dodging traffic and dogs and tourists as we try to keep up.

Then the arm tugs, again and again, as Julius’ story unspools as a sequence of scenes and memories, Proustian in its propensity for letting small occurrences spark stories and stories-within-stories that layer into a whole man. And yet there are holes in that whole—bits Julius may be forgetting or suppressing, but that rise up and startle us, and Julius too.

Unlike his narrator, whose year of wandering coincides with the final year of a fellowship, Cole is not a psychiatrist (he’s a historian of Flemish art). But, like Julius, he was raised in Nigeria and lives in New York City. Off and on, he has posted Twitter updates (based on the French genre of faits divers) that compress an entire story of death or corruption, absurdity or surreal tragedy, into 140 characters. (Example: “There’s no arguing about taste. But the Supreme Court still wants to know why Edet Mbang enjoys pepper soup with human flesh.”) After reading these “small fates,” it’s not surprising to learn that Cole has also worked as a street photographer. Open City feels a bit like overlapping snapshots of the personalities and places—and thoughts and emotions—that make up the fabric of the city. To be a street photographer, one must wander the streets, which makes us wonder if Cole has followed Julius’ path himself: from that beginning in Morningside Heights (the neighborhood that surrounds Columbia University), through most of Manhattan, out to Queens, and then, without warning, to Belgium for a bit before returning to nail it all down.

Open City also has a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy in it, in which stories—like lives—are not exactly directed at an obvious point. They don’t so much “add up” as they accumulate scenes and encounters and realizations along the way. Julius is Baudelaire’s flaneur, who “walks the city in order to experience it,” intensely observant and yet detached. This stance comes naturally to him; he is self-consciously the Other, almost to the point of self-parody. He was an outsider in his home country, since his mother is German; in the United States, he is an outsider, not African American but simply African, and he seems to feel like he’s always on the perimeter, looking in.

But it’s not clear he wants in. In one early, important passage, Julius hails a cab outside the American Folk Art Museum after a long afternoon spent contemplating art—when he leaves the museum for the rainy sidewalk, it is with the “feeling of someone who had returned to the earth from a great distance”—and gets in without greeting the cabbie, who, as it turns out, is African and takes offense at his manner of entering. Julius is not impressed: “I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.”

But in truth, he doesn’t like anyone to have claims on him, which would destroy his outsider status. His girlfriend has recently moved away, and their relationship is fizzling from the distance. He meets prisoners and store owners and fellow airline travelers and shares a conversation, a story, a history, even once a sexual encounter, but then he moves on. Only a few characters recur: the fading girlfriend; a former professor who acts as a sort of solid foundation, only to fade as well; and a sudden intruder, the younger sister of a friend he once knew, who connects him against his will to his past.

All of this may suggest a terribly narcissistic narrative, a ramble through Julius’ (or maybe Cole’s) psyche, and a pretty dull one at that. On the contrary: Open City is exceptionally compelling, a tribute to the freshness of Cole’s vision. His descriptions of the cityscape are perfect enough to jolt the arm of both visitor and native, who come awake in the shock of recognition: “The big buildings of the trading district were lined up on an invisible perimeter like animals jostling for space on the edge of a lake, taking care not to pitch forward.” All of his historical digressions on artists and thinkers and countries and ideas would be tedious if they weren’t so personal to Julius’ experience. We all have our own versions of these things.

Oddly, though we’re in his head, Julius himself remains a mystery, one that is only slowly revealed as he interacts with his fellow wanderers and those more solidly rooted. Despite being a psychiatrist (or, perhaps, because of it), Julius’ grip on his own decision-making process and his past is still full of gaps in both judgment and memory. When we reach the only sudden revelation of the novel, it’s almost painfully shocking. Cole’s narrator spends most of the book noticing everything about everything, thoughtfully examining every inch of his being in solitude, but he’s missed the giant hulking tree for all the leaves and branches.

This is what takes Open City from simply beautiful to haunting, even indelible: if such a narrator has (perhaps conveniently) lost this part of his memory, giving us a self who is only half truthful, how much more might we do the same? Julius’ story is entirely different from and yet entirely the same as ours. Cole shows us the insides of our own heads, and warns us of the danger of paying the sort of attention to humanity that lets us forget to love particular humans.

Alissa Wilkinson edits Comment and teaches English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City. Her articles and criticism appear in Christianity Today and other publications.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

For an author who has been dead since 1817, Jane Austen remains remarkably hot. Though George Eliot observed that “[Austen] will doubtless be read as long as English novels find readers,” Eliot (and no doubt Austen herself) could scarcely have imagined the attention that continues to surround Austen’s work. Movies, miniseries, and mashups keep on proliferating: the latest film adaptation, a Latina retelling of Sense and Sensibility set in East L.A., entitled From Prada to Nada, was released in winter 2011, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is currently in production. Austen’s birthday was marked this year by the ultimate pop culture tribute, a “Google doodle”—a Regency couple walking in the English countryside in the shadow of the Google search bar. Austen features as an action figure and as a finger puppet, perhaps so that one can play Austen trivia or the Pride and Prejudice board game. Or choose-your-own Austenian adventure in the interactive Lost in Austen book, all while listening to recordings of music marketed as contemporary to her time period. Austen herself becomes a detective in Stephanie Barron’s mystery series, and in the just-published Death Comes to Pemberley, the great P. D. James essays a sequel to Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennet becomes embroiled in a murder mystery. In addition to all the prequeling, sequeling, and imaginative manipulation of Austen and her characters, Austen has been repurposed as a “lifestyle brand,” able to assist her fans with cooking and tea (with at least four cookbooks), sewing and fashion (Jane Austen’s Sewing Box: Craft Projects and Stories from Jane Austen’s Novels), gardening (In the Garden with Jane Austen), and, of course, manners (Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners: Compliments, Charades & Horrible Blunders). To complete it all, readers can furnish their lives with all manner of Austen-related tchotchkes: jewelry, candles, cross-stitch patterns, tea towels, key chains, tote bags, fragrance defusers, and crockery of all varieties.

As silly as some of this may appear, Austen clearly continues to resonate—and strongly. Interestingly, this is equally true in the academic realm: in the first decade of this century, almost 1,400 pieces of scholarship were devoted to Austen, according to the Modern Language Association’s database. The investment in Austen is so high that even scholarly debates make headlines: just last fall, Kathryn Sutherland, an English professor at Oxford, caused a media kerfuffle when she claimed that Austen’s style was not naturally polished and pristine but was as much the work of her editor, William Gifford, as her own.1

The two books under review here, then—Joyce Kerr Tarpley’s study of Mansfield Park and Patricia Meyer Spacks’ gorgeous annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice—join a rich conversation. Although they may initially appear as quite different sorts of books, they share a common interest in helping us see anew these two very disparate novels. Indeed, in her introduction to her excellent compendium, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, Susannah Carson argues that “[o]ne way of sifting through the wealth of literature on Jane Austen is to make a rough distinction between those who explain why Austen, her characters, and her world seem so familiar to us, and those who insist we appreciate the differences.” Kerr Tarpley and Meyer Spacks both fall into the latter category.

Kerr Tarpley has perhaps the harder job of the two with Mansfield Park, the Austen novel which probably divides and disappoints readers more than any other. Few seem to know what to do with the pious, passive, and dutiful heroine, Fanny Price: Patricia Rozema in her 1999 film turned Fanny into a feisty character who seems to be based half on Pride and Prejudice‘s Elizabeth Bennet and half on Austen herself. Others simply dismiss her as a prig. But like Louis Auchincloss when he claims, “Fanny Price is surely the least loved of Jane Austen’s heroines, but she has grown on me steadily through the years,” Kerr Tarpley finds much to admire in Mansfield Park, and her provocative arguments and rigorous scholarship will make readers reconsider their opinions of the novel too.

Grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Kerr Tarpley contends that constancy—”whose primary ethical function is to ground the practice of virtue by regulating other virtues common to Austen’s heroines, including self-knowledge, love or genuine affection, gratitude, and humility”—lies at the heart of Mansfield Park and its ethical system. In fact, Kerr Tarpley maintains, constancy functions for Austen like Plato’s justice, Aristotle’s phronesis, and St. Thomas Aquinas’ prudence, and helps Austen define the “good life” for the Christian. Thus, readers who are displeased with Fanny, Kerr Tarpley argues, fail to understand (or simply resist) Austen’s complex moral philosophy. Drawing easily and impressively on figures including not only the aforementioned Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, but also Dante (with whom she makes some especially intriguing comparisons), Bahktin, and Augustine—as well as the range of Austen scholarship itself—Kerr Tarpley demonstrates that Austen’s aim is to “separate piety from prosperity” and thereby to confound our readerly expectations. No longer is it enough for Austen to marry the heroine into property. Virtue may be rewarded, but it is with a life of “tolerable comfort” instead of the wealth of Pemberley. Austen’s articulation of constancy, especially as expressed by the virtuous life, then, becomes the aim that Kerr Tarpley hopes we will come to appreciate in this often criticized novel.

By contrast, for many readers it is hard to imagine appreciating Pride and Prejudice more than they already do. Yet, Patricia Meyer Spacks’ annotated volume will only increase fans’ love for the novel—and she’ll probably create a few new fans along the way too. The oversized volume is truly lovely, from its beautiful cover to its elegant endpapers, and it has a nice heft as well. The contents are equally handsome, the design winsome. The text, bordered by copious footnotes and crisp, well-chosen images, is not only readable but quite inviting. This is a volume suitable for both intense study and casual perusing. Wherever you happen to open the book, you are likely to find something fascinating, even if you’ve read the novel many times.

And that’s no surprise, since Meyer Spacks, in her fine introductory essay, admits to having read Pride and Prejudice “forty or fifty times” herself and to having taught the book innumerable times as well. In fact, she says she initially thought she could annotate the novel “out of [her] head,” but as she began the project she came to realize the extraordinary richness of Austen’s work. Hence, this annotated edition combines Meyer Spacks’ clear enthusiasm for the text with her immense knowledge of Austen and her time and the scholarship surrounding Pride and Prejudice as well. It is such a helpful combination that the next time I teach the novel, I fully intend to use this edition.

The metaphor of the “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory” that Austen once (perhaps facetiously) used to described her work is equally apt in terms of the level of attention Meyer Spacks pays to Pride and Prejudice. The notes, for example, provide elucidations of individual words, call attention to Austen’s linguistic and rhetorical choices, and sketch historical details that would have been assumed by contemporary readers. The notes, too, provide numerous explanations of Regency culture, including money, meals, and many modes of conveyance. At the same time, Meyer Spacks rightly points out that “notes can illuminate the question without deciding it”; here they prove a judicious and even-handed introduction to the most important currents in criticism of the novel. With each new footnote, I found myself reading more slowly, savoring the novel as if I were reading it for the first time. In some very real ways, I was.

The copious illustrations, interspersed throughout the text, allow us to imagine more fully what the period looked like, with pictures of everything from day bonnets, dresses, and military uniforms to furniture and fireplaces. The reader can visit dances, circulating libraries, and schools, including Edward Francis Burney’s witty 1805 painting An Elegant Establishment for Young Ladies. Featured, too, are places Austen lived (or was perhaps inspired by), authors (such as Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney) she enjoyed and admired, and relatives and friends, including two of the men with whom she was romantically linked, Tom Lefroy and the unfortunately named Harris Bigg-Wither. In our increasingly visual age, students, scholars, and general readers alike will find the addition of these images compelling.

Both of these books are erudite, carefully researched, and densely supported. Joyce Kerr Tarpley and Patricia Meyer Spacks have done Austen’s readers a great service by enriching our understanding of a writer who grows only more delightful with each new meeting.

Jennifer L. Holberg is professor of English at Calvin College and founding co-editor of Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture.

1.Readers interested in learning more about this controversy—and Austen’s style more generally—should investigate the wonderful new online resource, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, at janeausten.ac.uk/index.html.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Last summer I read The Girl with … /The Girl Who … trilogy by Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson. If you’re looking for a fast-paced international thriller with a modicum of social critique, it’s hard to beat Larsson’s books. But if you’re in the mood for something a bit more introspective, if you enjoy reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading marvelously turned phrases, stunning imagery, and wholly original figurative language, then I’d like to recommend the work of another Scandinavian writer, the Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935-2009). New Directions has released a fourth collection of her work, and in doing so they complete a project to make all of Christensen’s poetry available to U.S. readers.

As the title suggests, the book includes three distinct collections: Light, the poet’s debut collection from 1962, Grass, her second collection published a year later, and Letter in April, which appeared in 1979, after Christensen’s intervening work had established her as Denmark’s preeminent contemporary poet.

Christensen was 27 and a few years into her marriage to literary critic Poul Borum (also an important figure in 20th-century Danish literature) when her first volume of poetry appeared. Light announces the themes that Christensen would go on to explore throughout her career—love, otherness, nature—and reveals her fascination with modern painters such as Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, and Marc Chagall. In fact, the first poem in the volume owes its imagery to Chagall’s Clock with Blue Wing, a key point that translator Susanna Nied shares in her helpful introduction. Other poems hint at Christensen’s literary inspirations, including two of her favorite poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Rainer Maria Rilke. The symbolism of the first and the rapid metaphorical associations of the second can be seen in this brief, untitled poem midway through Light:

Like slate-gray sea
my winter-flattened brain
sways in space

a flying lighthouse swings
my fall-eyes
around

what we called land is the nearest stars

For me, that poem has a pleasingly mysterious quality; after several readings I only half get it, but its lines intrigue me more than they baffle me. I rank it among the best in Christensen’s first collection. Others, I admit, leave me feeling a bit clueless. Some readers might find meaning in the poem “Deep Within,” which appears later in the volume, but it struck me as overly vague—”what is it we have what is it we lack / what is it where are we what do we see / with a beacon’s anguish, a beacon’s anguish”—as well as melodramatic. But these are the poet’s earliest published poems, and it would be an unusual first collection if it didn’t have a few weak spots. And, as her next volume shows, Christensen’s later verse led to more uniform success and the emergence of a distinct voice.

As a collection, Grass exhibits great care in organizing and ordering its individual poems. Its first eighteen poems are short, most of them less than a quarter of a page, and headed by brief titles. Then follow three longer poems, between a page and three pages long, and finally a seven-part, eighteen-page poem closes out the collection. At the same time as the poems grow longer down the page, their line lengths also increase, and for the first time Christensen makes use of wraparound lines, the kind that are so long no printer could produce a book wide enough to accommodate them, so a single “line” might run anywhere between two and six lines of a page. Reading these last poems reminds me of Whitman or Ginsberg, poets who sustained long breaths, whose passion and energy forced their lines beyond the bounds of any reasonably set margin. Here are two examples from the poem “Meeting”:

I think we have sought wings on the back, I think we have sought light in the eyes, sought places, along roads, each other, God / this sloppy dishrag smack across the mouth, this vindictive face, the grin and slamming doors—the pupil that lies in wait in the dark and always claws the homecomer ….

down in the street the snow is a dirty border around a very common Scandinavian house with books, bath, and central heating, with only a slight contempt left over for what we have lost and heaped up / up here in the living room I search and search for my third hand; perhaps, hidden by snow, it has dug its way singlehandedly, fumbled its way to the heart of this, is meeting my resistance in the innermost center of a poem ….

Lines like those make it easy to see how the poet, in writing her poem, was bursting with ideas; they also make it easy to forget that Christensen wrote in Danish, not English. For phrases that retain the immediacy and naturalness of their original—”sloppy dishrag smack across the mouth,”—readers must thank the poet’s longtime translator, Susanna Nied. In the second passage quoted above, Nied faced two challenges. First, how to reproduce the link between the end of the one line and the beginning of the next. The Danish reads, “hobet op / heroppe,” literally “heaped up / here up,” but that would sound like nonsense in English. Nied solves this problem by giving us “heaped up / up here,” which is natural enough and keeps the echoed sound while losing, admittedly, the exactness of its pattern. Later in that same section of “Meeting,” she faced a harder decision: how to translate the word pair “hånd … egenhændigt,” literally “hand … personally” or “hand … in one’s own hand.” I think Nied made the perfect choice by rendering Christensen’s “egenhændigt” as “singlehandedly” even though the meaning is slightly different from the original: the effect, the play on language, is what mattered more. I could mention several other places where Christensen’s translator impressed me, but for readers who are unlikely to draw comparisons between the Danish and English, and since the book doesn’t include the poems in their original, I’ll just say that Nied is more than a trustworthy translator—she’s a masterful one. Her translations of Inger Christensen’s poetry, which have been Nied’s lifework for several decades now, have earned her the Translation Prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and, more recently, the PEN Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

Letter in April, the third volume collected in this book, originally appeared over a decade after the first two and is typical Inger Christensen—”typical,” that is, of what she became known for with her other books, it (1969), alphabet (1981), and Butterfly Valley: A Requiem (1991), works that built on intricate patterns borrowed from philosophy, linguistics, and mathematics. One could say that after her second collection, Christensen stopped writing poems and started writing poetry books. Each book after Grass follows a particular “system”—in alphabet, for instance, she makes use of the number system of medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. Likewise, Letter has its own distinct system, one based on dualities and informed by the serialism of French composer Olivier Messiaen. Containing seven main sections and multiple subsections, Letter can be read straight through as one long poem, or it can be read by jumping around among the subsections, each of which carries forward a particular motif. If the structure of the book sounds daunting, the poetry itself will strike readers as uncomplicated, intimate, and lovely. A simple narrative carries the whole poem forward: a mother and her child travel to a foreign city and live there for a while, experiencing the most common things—playgrounds and kitchens and spider webs. Christensen writes in short lines, such as these: “I unwrap the pomegranate / from its purple paper / and slice it / in half. / It looks like / a kind of brain / different from ours. / Who knows, / maybe the pomegranate / itself is aware / that it’s called / something else. / Who knows, / maybe I myself / am called / something else / than myself.”

Accompanying the poems throughout Letter are drawings by the poet’s friend, Johanne Foss. In her introduction, Nied explains how the two shared an interest in Etruscan art and decided to work on a collaborative project in which Foss passed her charcoal-on-parchment drawings to Christensen, and Christensen wrote poems in counterpoint to the images. The relationship between poetry and art adds another level of meaning, and pleasure, to this the final work in the book.

Although this gathering of three books is unlikely to receive the sort of attention that Scandinavian crime fiction is getting these days, its publication is very much a cause for celebration. Set it next to Christensen’s other three books—all translated by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions—and this major voice in 20th century European poetry can now be read in English, from start to finish, and with plenty of enjoyment in between.

Thom Satterlee, poet and translator, is Writer-in-Residence at Taylor University. His most recent book is a translation of the Danish poet Per Aage Brandt, These Hands (Host Publications).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A significant portion of modern Anglo-American literature is missing in action. Some decades ago, critics decided that the process of canon formation was arbitrary and elitist, and that we must pay proper attention to genre fiction—fantasy, romance, detective stories and thrillers, comic books—besides so-called literary works, and to some extent, academic departments reflect that shift. From time to time, genre and pulp authors like Philip K. Dick and H. P. Lovecraft are retroactively promoted to the canon, which usually means that their works are reprinted in much pricier new editions. Yet for all this canonical reshuffling, an astonishing number of older works remain unknown outside their particular genre. They are cited neither by modern literary scholars nor—still more damaging—by social and cultural historians, for whom they would provide a goldmine of information about the evolution of ideas. In the case of science fiction, the neglect of older works means that historians radically misdate the emergence of ideas and cultural themes that were quite familiar to a mass popular audience in the mid-20th century, although they only gradually penetrated high culture much later.

It amazes me that a 1953 novel like Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man does not enjoy classic status. This extraordinarily rich work is at least equal to anything by Philip Dick in its deconstruction of consciousness and personal identity, although any modern reader will be taken aback by some elements that seem wildly anachronistic. We seem to be dealing with a pioneering hypertext novel, where radically innovative typography is used to represent telepathic conversations at a co*cktail party, an assemblage of floating phrases that uncannily resemble modern electronic chat exchanges. Other contemporary themes abound. Imagine, asks Bester, a society where everyone is telepathic. How could you keep a secret, like planning a murder? The answer, of course, is designing repetitive catch-phrases or jingles, earworms that take over and confuse the consciousness of inquisitive minds. We use the same concept today electronically, and we call them viruses and trojans. These futuristic ideas were quite familiar to readers of mass market paperbacks in a year when Winston Churchill was still prime minister of Great Britain.

You might legitimately wonder what influence such science fiction books might have had, outside the world of dreamers and nerds. Actually, their sales figures could be astonishing, particularly so in the case of one piece of prophecy originally published in magazine form in 1952, namely The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, which is now celebrating its sixtieth birthday. (First appearing under the title Gravy Planet, the full-length novel appeared the following year. A lightly updated edition of the novel has just been published; readers should be aware that, while the story is the same, the text of this version differs in some respects from the original.) Translated into 25 languages, the book has reputedly sold ten million copies worldwide, so we can reasonably claim a sizable global impact—actually, far beyond that of most acclaimed mainstream "literary" novels.

Both Pohl and Kornbluth were major talents in their own right, and Pohl himself continues to publish at the age of 92. (Kornbluth, a sardonic and brilliantly creative writer, died in 1958 at the absurdly young age of 35.) Space Merchants may be the best of their several collaborations, but reading it today, the main problem is deciding what the fuss is about. At first sight, the book presents a tried and true post-1960s message that is anti-corporate, anti-consumerist, and environmentalist, stiffened with a heavy dose of 1980s cyberpunk sensibility. And then you remember that this extraordinary satire on consumerism and advertising appeared in 1952, at the height of the Korean War, when Harry Truman was still in the White House. This is even before the world in which Mad Men is set.

According to our prevailing historical mythology, The Space Merchants dates from a time when the threat of Stalin and the Red Menace had cowed most Americans into uncritical conformity. Again according to this vision, crude consumerism reigned unchecked and uncriticized, while environmental concerns lay in the far future. At a time when many baby boomers were first seeing the light of day, The Space Merchants was cataloguing what would become their adult concerns and fears.

Like many a modern bestseller or popular film, Space Merchants concerns the sinister mis-deeds of overmighty transnational corporations. The hero, Mitch Courtenay, is an ad executive in a world dominated by rival corporations. His primary loyalty is not to a nation but to his agency, Fowler Schocken, and his sole ideology is "For Company, and for Sales." Governments as we know them have virtually ceased to exist except as clearing houses for pressure groups and lobbyists: major corporations like Du Pont and Nash-Kelvinator have their own U.S. Senators. The corporations operate in a semi-feudal order, settling their disputes by literal warfare, vendetta, and assassination. Ordinary people exist not as citizens but as consumers.

In this dystopian world, advertising agencies are enormously powerful, vying with each other to sell goods by any and all means, including the use of potent subliminal ads ("compulsive subsonics"). The ad men are already planning to project commercials directly on the retinas of unwary passersby. Food and drink are routinely dosed with addictive chemicals. Eating the snack food Crunchies leaves you with withdrawal symptoms that can be resolved only by drinking Popsie soda, which in turn creates an insatiable demand for Starr cigarettes—sending you back to a physical need for Crunchies. (Young smokers are targeted with Kiddiebutts.) And the respectable admen of Fowler Schocken gaze with horror on the still more intrusive and salacious commercials produced by rival companies, which they see as lying quite beyond the ethical pale.

The agencies play an essential role in keeping consumers in a constant state of mass delusion on an ecologically devastated and wildly overcrowded planet, where basic notions of privacy are extinct. Ordinary people suffer painful shortages of basic resources, including water and fuel. Soya protein has replaced meat; all food is processed, tasteless, and generally disgusting; and cars have given way to pedicabs. (More prosperous consumers pedal Cadillacs.) Yet consumers must never stop believing that their world is constantly improving. The book's main crisis arises when corporations wish to organize human settlement on Venus, a hellhole lacking even breathable air. Just how can gullible consumers be tricked into finding it attractive?

Meanwhile, all right-thinking people despise and fear the vicious Consies, the Conservationists, a group of wild-eyed fanatics who hold the ludicrous idea that corporate civilization and unrestrained consumption are somehow "plundering" the planet. Despite constant vigilance by the loyalty police, the proto-hippyish Consies spread their vicious advocacy of population control, reforestation, topsoil restoration, and deurbanization. Through protest and sabotage, they seek to end "the wasteful production of gadgets and proprietary foods for which there is no natural demand." Consie fanatics even reuse and recycle goods, rather than fulfilling their civic duty always to buy new.

Beyond its radical central theme, Space Merchants overflows with ideas, especially through its linguistic inventiveness. It's scarcely surprising today to encounter a book using a term like R and D (for research and development), or to find characters eating soyaburgers or listening to muzak: but those words, and many other neologisms, find very early usage in Space Merchants.

But here again, so much of Space Merchants today seems familiar, even clichéd, that it is difficult to recall how startlingly new it was in its time. To put the book's chronology in context, a modern-day historian interested in the emerging critique of corporate America and its abuses might cite several landmark publications of the mid-1950s. These works would include Sloan Wilson's novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and William H. Whyte's sociological study of The Organization Man (1956). C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite (1956) gave currency to the idea that a military/corporate/industrial complex was supplanting democracy, the threat later signaled by Eisenhower. Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) exposed the advertising industry, while his The Waste Makers (1960) denounced planned obsolescence. All, therefore, postdated Space Merchants by several years. Popular environmental awareness would have to wait for Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and the developing national movement that swelled mightily after 1970's Earth Day. By 1975, Ed Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang was imagining ecology-minded radicals turning to sabotage and violence. The real-life Consies known as Earth First! mobilized in 1979. Our hypothetical historian, however, certainly would not know or refer to the much earlier Space Merchants, which is not even a blip on the canonical radar. Respectable historians would be embarrassed to read trashy science fiction, still less cite it. After all, who ever read this stuff?

Obviously, I believe Space Merchants deserves to be vastly better known, as does The Demolished Man, but just in the science fiction genre alone, there are plenty of other novels and stories that cry out for rediscovery. Together, they make nonsense of many widely accepted assumptions about what ordinary readers thought or believed in bygone years, and when particular ideas gained currency. So much of what at the time might have seemed like sensationalistic pulp fiction was in fact discussing genuinely important ideas at a remarkable level of sophistication. A re-evaluation is long overdue.

On a related theme, I offer a request to the teacher who confiscated the worthless SF novel with the ridiculous cover illustration that I was admittedly reading in school time in 1966. Can I have it back, please? It was by J. G. Ballard, and that edition is worth quite a lot now. Not that I am bitter.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author most recently of Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses (HarperOne).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Pat Gehrke’s brief history of speech communication has a good eye for oddity. Take, for example, his account of speech teachers’ claim, early in the 20th century, that public speaking fosters good mental hygiene. Hygiene? Oratory as the cognitive equivalent to flossing twice daily? These teachers, Gehrke explains, were seeking to curb a discipline given to aggressive metaphors—defeating arguments, turning tables, and overcoming audiences—by claiming that their courses would foster psychological wellness. They were groping for scientific legitimacy; they were also positing a connection between speaking and living well. Reviewing hundreds of speech articles in a century of rhetoric journals, Gehrke demonstrates that a discipline seemingly obsessed with efficacy has continually, if unwittingly, touched on questions about what it means to be human, how choice operates in a seemingly impersonal cosmos, and how generous community takes shape. The dark correlations pundits now ponder between public rhetoric and mental imbalance—remember the criticisms of talk radio in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting?—suggest these questions register perennially.

What connection does living well actually have with speaking well? The Roman rhetorician Quintilian defined the orator as a good person speaking well. But because it’s unclear that virtue actually does breed eloquence, or eloquence virtue for that matter, Quintilian evades what Richard Lanham calls the Q Question: Is the good speaker necessarily a good person?[1] Gehrke locates places in liberal democratic discourse where the Q Question makes incongruous appearances—such as the federally sponsored “Four-Minute Men” making congenially propagandistic speeches to U.S. theatergoers. The connection between supposedly hygienic rhetoric and military action became especially troubling when Allied rhetorical strategies against fascism proved nearly impossible to distinguish from fascist rhetoric against democracy (hence Gehrke’s renaming the Q Question as the Hitler Question). Despite our hopes for speech communication to foster mental hygiene and moral excellence, Gehrke writes, “we always seem deep in examples of rhetorical skill void of such excellence.”

The intractability of the Q Question has made speech communication a discipline both restless and resourceful. After the early decades of the 20th century, speech teachers shifted emphases from public oratory to group discussion on the grounds that discussion was more balanced, more objective, and less triumphalist—only to bump, once again, into the ethics/efficacy dualism. As it turned out, mental hygiene, not to mention rational group discussions, provided little stay against the coerciveness of mass-mediated messaging. The result was a shift in speech communication from the quasi-scientific approach of the 1920s and 1930s to the existentialist philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s. But even while challenging essentialist accounts of speech—especially those treating communication as the transfer of meaning from self to self—existentialism ran into its own variant on the Q Question. For all their ethical sophistication, existentialist-inflected speech theories proved just as preoccupied with efficacy as their essentialist counterparts. The final decades of the 20th century only sharpened the irony as philosophical relativists in speech communication behaved more and more like political absolutists.

Gehrke’s story makes no claim to be the Authorized Version: “The point is not whether this work is a comprehensive or synoptic account of the history of a field of thought—it is not—but rather whether it carefully documents the possibility of conceiving of that field of thought or the particular questions within that field in a compelling and viable way.” In the final chapter of the book, Gehrke shows how the discipline has deployed aggressively postmodern idioms to wrestle yet again with perennial questions of ethics and politics.

First, the ethics. If it is true that speech does not come from the self, but rather the self from speech—and Gehrke believes the discipline’s conversations bear out that contention—then such a speaking self must negotiate an “ethics that cannot privilege oneself or what is common between oneself and others but must privilege something that comes before anything that might be shared or common.” He calls what “comes before anything” the event of “being-communicating,” an ongoing encounter with the Other that is always bringing the self into existence: “However, it is not any specific or particular relationship that brings the ‘I’ into being but rather the sheer fact that there is any relation at all.” Accordingly, being-communicating occurs in encounter after encounter in which the Other enlivens and confronts the self with an endless series of ethical choices for which no certain criteria obtain. This ethic has political consequences: we should not “seek to achieve an end state or to realize an ideal vision” but rather make “small moves within the gaps and ruptures in existing political sensibilities.”

Compelling and viable the book proves to be, even for those who disagree with Gehrke’s immanentist ethical and political sensibilities. Not least, the book suggests that the routinely despised basic speech course belongs in the curriculum. Simply learning how to deliver a speech well, it turns out, confronts us with vital questions about agency and otherness. Further, Gehrke’s history offers a welcome alternative to the worn cardiocentric trope, “It’s what in your heart that counts.” Shifting moral analysis from the heart to the tongue, he weaves ethics as closely to speech as St. James does. Finally, the book serves as a corrective to those whose “just do it” approach to cultural engagement collapses ethics into efficacy. Gehrke’s “small moves” may evoke for some readers what James Davison Hunter calls “faithful presence.”[2]

Still, I wonder if it would help to pull at a different seam, not that between ethics and effi-cacy, but rather between ethics and eloquence. Gehrke tends to treat eloquence as a spe-cies of efficacious communication. But what if eloquence is the genus, and efficacy simply one thing that eloquence occasionally brings forth? Eloquence can seem shallow, a matter of surfaces, in contrast with the depths where being-communication is felt. But those depths can also be a place to avoid the particulars of the Other’s life and speech, the very particulars that eloquence can awaken us to. This entails more than being pulled up short by an encounter with difference. It is, or can be, a coming-alive to a sense of the Other’s capacity to astonish.[3] St. Paul summons the Corinthians to such an awakening when, in his first letter, he writes, “I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1Cor. 2:1-3). What’s interesting about this eloquent repudiation of eloquence is that Paul completely sidesteps the Q Question: Does good speaking lead to good living? Of course not. We are each of us too run through with contingency ever to be manageable by speech. Instead Paul’s speech is a kind of articulate listening, a bearing witness to an artful word that is also a faithful life. To his astonishment—hence, the weakness, fear, and trembling—he finds that word and life in God’s folly whose eloquence groans like suffering and whose faithfulness looks like folly. Gehrke’s fine book helps us to appreciate those incongruities but cannot wholly account for them.

Craig Mattson is professor of communication arts at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois.

1. My discussion of Quintilian’s question-begging is indebted to Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 154-156.

2. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010).

3. I am indebted for this critique to David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 20-28. What Hart says about beauty and surfaces, violence and peace, has deeply shaped what I think about eloquence.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As a child I used to picture Jesus coming again the way Bible illustrations showed him, his white robes molding the air around him, his eyes staring out at the viewer instead of looking down at the awestruck crowds on the ground. Thus, one of my chief childhood worries was that I would be in the bathroom at the critical moment and miss the whole thing or be caught, literally, with my britches down.

In my teens, the picture became a little fuzzier and more remote. Gradually I began to figure out that, if Jesus appeared in the sky above Walker County, people in neighboring counties would only be able to discern a descending spot, like a high-flying hawk. As the dot came closer it would begin to take on more visual definition, but only for a smaller area on the ground. For the people in neighboring counties it would sink below the horizon. And if the Second Coming happened above, say, China or Patagonia, citizens of Walker County would miss it altogether. Such are the seductions of trigonometry.

Decades later I listened sadly as my mother, a Parkinson’s patient, begged the Lord to come before she lost her mind. I have listened to other sufferers make the same appeal. I used to point out the biblical passage in which Jesus tells his anxious disciples that he himself doesn’t know when he will come again. Usually such instruction falls flat. And quoting that passage to such desperate people makes me feel crummy, as if I’m telling a four-year-old there is no Santa Claus.

Yet every Sunday I affirm with relish what the prayerbook calls “the mysteries of faith”: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Personally, I’m content to leave it at that.

Others have not been, striving for a good bit more detail. Cotton Mather, the 17th-century Puritan, predicted that the world would end in 1697. Unperturbed when this forecast turned out to be mistaken, he prophesied the end twice more. John Nelson Darby, the father of dispensationalism, got around the problem of mistaken predictions of the end of the world by coming up with a new eschatological strategy: the Rapture, sometimes known as “the secret rapture,” during which God’s chosen would suddenly be plucked up to heaven. Everyone else would be left to endure a lengthy period of tribulations.

These days, apocalyptic tales are a dime a dozen. Many of them—novels, movies, TV shows—are detached from any explicitly theological framework, but they are crystal clear about the end of the world, and it’s not a pretty picture. Lots of people disappear, whether via a natural disaster (an earth-aimed asteroid, a virulent plague), a manmade catastrophe (nuclear war, environmental collapse), or some intergalactic invasion that begins what can surely be called an extended tribulation.

Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers is different. True, millions of people of all ages, genders, and faiths or lack thereof suddenly disappear all over the world, including the pope and Vladimir Putin. But the question of what caused their disappearance is never answered. Perrotta himself confesses that he doesn’t know the cause of what his characters call either the Rapture or, more circ*mspectly, the Sudden Departure. I’m not giving away an essential aspect of the story, since Perrotta has revealed this in many print and broadcast interviews. (The Leftovers has already been optioned for a TV series; his novels Election and Little Children have been made into movies and a film version of The Abstinence Teacher is in development.)

The citizens of Mapleton, the author’s generic small town in the northeastern part of the country, for the most part are unfamiliar with millenarian distinctions. All they know is that on October 14, three years ago, a number of people from their town suddenly vanished, some right before the eyes of friends and family. In an updated version of Matthew 24, a mother goes to the kitchen to fetch water and returns to find the dining table empty of husband and children. Trains careen off tracks with no one at the controls. A teenager watching TV with her friend is suddenly alone on the couch. The apparent randomness of the selection of those snatched away defies any easy explanation for their disappearance. No wonder it leaves the remaining population feeling like leftovers, as the novel’s smirky title has it.

Admittedly, this scenario is rather mild when compared with Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). After all, most of Mapleton’s population is still there. And they are precisely the people Perrotta is concerned to portray, in all their guilt, grief, and confusion. He focuses on the town’s mayor, Kevin Garvey; his wife, Laurie; daughter, Jill; and son, Tom. After initially denying that this mysterious event has a religious dimension, Laurie, deeply saddened by her best friend’s loss of her daughter, leaves the family to join her friend in an ascetic cult, the Guilty Remnant, hoping to find comfort for her own emptiness. Cult members dress in white robes, go barefoot even in winter, eat little, and, as a sacrament and outward sign of their disgrace, smoke cigarettes to show their contempt for life on earth. They are Watchers, silently and spookily bearing witness to the great catastrophe lest anyone forget.

Laurie’s defection from her own family leaves Jill, the teenage daughter, feeling understandably abandoned. In a typical adolescent angry reaction, she hangs out with Amy, a homeless and sexually experienced classmate for whom classes have been re-placed with truancy, sexual exploits, and drugs.

Then there’s Tom, the Garveys’ son, a college student who falls under the spell of Holy Wayne. A blue collar worker who has lost his own son, Wayne discovers he has a gift for healing the anguish of others left behind: when he hugs them, their pain is transferred to him. His gift is never explained, but neither is it explained away. Regrettably, though, Holy Wayne, initially a humble healer, falls prey to pride and promiscuity, taking on several teenage “brides” from whom, he prophesies, a messianic descendant will come. As one of his earliest and most reliable followers, Tom is given the task of secretly conveying a pregnant 16-year-old girl from the cult’s ranch on the West Coast to their headquarters on the East Coast so she can give birth with maximum media exposure. They travel disguised as members of the Barefoot People, latterday hippies living it up during the last days.

Meanwhile, Kevin, the mayor, grieving the loss of Laurie and his inability to reach his own children, must try to control the town’s disparate groups. He is a decent but quietly desperate guy, looking for comfort himself. And despite the inexplicable interruption three years earlier, the people of Mapleton for the most part seem to be trudging on with their lives, pretty much as usual. They go to work and school, take care of their families or not, and pay little attention to what may be going on in the wider world.

Their insularity leaves this reader, at least, unsatisfied. We never learn how anyone outside whitebread America is handling the global situation. Are there conspiracy theories? Do the disappearances cause wars? How has the global economy been affected?

As the story unfolds, there is some sense of a spectrum of responses within the United States, as evidenced by the weird cults that invade Mapleton (and by the range of responses within a single family, the Garveys). We will all experience losses one day, Perrotta explained in an interview, though perhaps not in such a dramatic fashion, and we will all deal with the resulting grief in many different ways. Why then use the device of the Rapture? Is it just a gimmick? An interesting way for the author to get agnostics like himself to pick up the book? An easy mark for satire, a genre for which Perrotta is known?

Perrotta has said that The Leftovers shouldn’t be read primarily as a satire. He admits he may have had that in mind when he began writing, but as he grew more involved with the characters and their pain, he says, that intent was laid aside.

Certainly there are comic scenes in the book. One of the town’s ministers is highly offended that he wasn’t “raptured,” judging that he should have been first in line while the unworthy, promiscuous, and downright atheistic have jumped to the head of the disappeared. But the minister’s revenge is not so funny. He starts a newsletter, printing every bit of dirt he can dig up on the departed, adding to the pain of their left-behind loved ones.

The seemingly haphazard nature of the disappearances matches Perrotta’s view of life as random. This is the burden skeptics bear, he says. They have no story that explains and gives a shape to life, such as religious believers of whatever stripe possess. And as he must know, the author’s principled refusal to offer any explanation for why, how, or where his vanished have gone will frustrate most readers. It breaks a fundamental law of storytelling. If a fiction writer constructs a self-contained reality, shouldn’t he know it thoroughly? Or is Perrotta’s novel like those weavings or sand paintings that intentionally leave some flaw in order not to tempt the gods with their perfection?

Perrotta dismisses such questions. The randomness of life, he says—whose teenager gets killed in a car wreck, who gets cancer, why marriages break up—is indeed the great mystery we all must contend with.

True enough. The sturdiest believer is sometimes stymied, even shaken, by what we often call life’s unfairness. Faith, any faith, is by definition without ultimate evidence. It’s always a choice. As is unbelief.

Contrary to the agnostic’s estimation, irresolution is the easiest choice, easier than either belief or rejection. Without evidence of things hoped for, how can skepticism go wrong?

For Perrotta, the constructed world of fiction answers his spiritual needs. It reflects undeniable truths about life. Thus he substitutes fiction for faith.

Not long after listening to an interview in which Perrotta made that claim, I heard the words of Somali rapper K’naan, whose country has been torn apart by war and afflicted by famine. “Sometimes,” he said, “there isn’t enough poetry that can hold the scope of the tragedy.”

In the case of The Leftovers, there isn’t enough fiction either.

Virginia Stem Owens, a novelist, essayist, and poet, is the author of Caring for Mother: A Daughter’s Long Goodbye (Westminster John Knox).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Within the fixed positions and steps of classical ballet, many of its finest practitioners found freedom—from their own flawed bodies, from repressive regimes, from turmoils, public and private. Marie Taglioni, the beloved 19th-century ballerina, practiced relentlessly, acquiring such mastery over her own movement that she became beautiful onstage despite her unlovely face and figure. Her daily six-hour workouts included, among other feats, holding poses while counting to one hundred. A century later, Galina Ulanova, an upstanding Soviet citizen and cultural ambassador, still managed to be an artist first through her poignant renditions of socialist-sanctioned roles. Jennifer Homans highlights these two compelling performers, among many others, in Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, her sweeping account of how revolutions, upheavals, nationalities, and personalities have shaped a highly ordered art form over four centuries.

Homans danced professionally for a time, and if she danced as well as she writes, she must have been very good. We already knew, for example, that Anna Pavlova was important, but Homans tells us why, and does so superbly. Like Taglioni, Pavlova—skinny and frail—seemed physically unsuited to ballet. Her liabilities became assets, we learn, because her “tremulous, fragile” style looked “spontaneous and elusive, as if painted from nature—like Impressionism applied to dance.” Moreover, Pavlova’s legendary performances as the Dying Swan gave rise to the new naturalistic manner of dancing championed by the Swan’s choreographer, Mikhail Fokine. “[Pavlova] skimmed the floor on pointe or stepped through an arabesque, bending deeply at the waist or through the back, arms fluid but broken-winged,” Homans writes. “The power of the dance lay uniquely in the expressive quality of her movements and in the way she showed the expiring life force, the draining of energy and spirit from a creature of great strength and beauty …. As Pavlova slowly weakened, gave in, and folded into a gentle heap, the old ballet, it seemed, died with her.”

While Homans the dancer turns particular ballets inside out, deconstructing, point by point, Homans the scholar (she earned a PhD in modern European history) surveys them from a distance, with the larger world as their backdrop: the societal forces—political, economic, literary—that impacted each piece. The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), for example, premiered at a “very particular and dynamic historical moment” in London, when aristocrats and commoners met together in coffeehouses for lively debates, while new translations of The Iliad (Alexander Pope’s in particular) reflected a burgeoning interest in the classics. English ballet master John Weaver believed that he and his colleagues “were uniquely poised to cut a path between the senseless and immoral displays of the French and the raucous tricks of the Italians …. They could have their own—distinctly English and very polite—kind of ballet.” Weaver responded with Mars and Venus, a restrained pantomime rooted in Greek and Roman theater that “seemed to achieve the impossible: it was both serious and a box office success.”

But the history of ballet starts much earlier than that, in 1533 to be precise, when a French king married Catherine de Medici from Florence and the aristocratic customs of France and Italy began to entwine. It was under the reign of Louis XIV in the 17th century that ballet evolved into a genuine art form. The milestones follow quickly thereafter, at least in Homans’ narrative: ballet’s five positions are codified by page 23; the first modern corps de ballet coalesces on page 113; and, by page 138, Italian ballerinas are dancing on their toes. Homans ornaments this timeline with anecdotes and bright bits of trivia, describing how the Duke of WÜrttemberg celebrated his birthday with fountains that spouted sparkling red wine, and how opera-goers in 18th-century Milan dined in private salons attached to their boxes, parting the draperies between bites to hear their favorite arias.

Apollo’s Angels is more than just chronology shrouded in context, however, thanks to Homans’ ability to tell stories, large and small. The book is divided into two sections: the first half explores France’s central role in the origins and spread of ballet throughout Western Europe, while the second half focuses on Russia and its dominant influence in the 20th century. Homans explains how ballet is passed down from person to person, and this overarching story of transmission permeates and thematically links the two sections. We learn how Western Europeans such as Enrico Cecchetti and Marius Petipa moved to Russia in the 19th century, influencing a generation of Russian dancers who, in the 20th century, revitalized ballet in Europe and America by touring and opening studios in Paris, London, and New York. “Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations,” wrote C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love. “[B]eing alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” Across the centuries, dancers moved from city to city, continent to continent, carrying their heritage with them, in their minds and in their bodies.

At times Homans loses her way in a clutter of details, such as in her discussion of 18th-century Vienna, but for the most part she tells her larger story by compiling charming smaller ones. Particularly delightful is her evocation of 19th-century Copenhagen, where a gawky dance enthusiast named Hans Christian Andersen courted Jenny Lind, while August Bournonville, removed from the tumults roiling other capital cities, developed an unpretentious style of ballet that thrives to this day. He created works that celebrated the Danish experience—trolls, elfin maidens, scenes of warm domesticity—and still found time to write his memoirs, reorganize schools, advocate for dancers, and stroll with Kierkegaard.

The book’s second half is both more and less satisfying than the first, mainly because the history is more familiar, to the author and to us. Homans attended the School of American Ballet, organized in 1933 by Russian émigré George Balanchine, and she obviously reveres him. “Balanchine was a world apart,” she declares, and she is right. In parts of two chapters, collectively titled “The American Century,” she chronicles his rise and extols his genius. But ballet existed in the United States before Balanchine arrived, and Homans might have made “The American Century” chapters a bit more, well, American. Her summary of the native dance scene before World War II spans only four pages. With an additional paragraph, she might have introduced George Washington Smith, America’s first premier danseur, who partnered Austrian starlet Fanny Elssler during her triumphant U.S. tour in the early 1840s. The enterprising Smith eked out a 60-year career in a country without a classical dance tradition, without serious ballet schools, few teachers, and a limited audience. The Elssler-Smith partnership represents an Old World vs. New World dynamic worthy of Homans’ attention. Equally disappointing is her careless treatment of America’s first blockbuster musical, The Black Crook. This extravaganza was first produced in 1866, not by the Hungarian Kiralfy brothers, as she asserts, but by two American promoters, Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer, who, after a fire destroyed a theater they had secured for an elaborate spectacle, sent the sets, costumes, and ballerinas over to nearby Niblo’s Garden, melded them into a melodrama about an evil sorcerer with a crooked back, and had themselves a hit.

Instead of celebrating these examples of American pluck and self-reliance, Homans seems eager to cast government as the savior. She traces the origins and growth of America’s two leading companies, the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet, both borne of Russian-American collaborations and personal wealth, insisting that “although both companies depended on private patronage, their real guardian angel—the thing that finally lifted them from the constant threat of bankruptcy—was the U.S. government.” True, perhaps, but even tax-paying balletomanes might object to subsidizing a work such as The Cage, premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1951 and depicting insects that vomited, strangled, slashed throats, and ate each other. This ballet, one of Jerome Robbins’ finest, according to Homans, “ends with a frenzied group feeding and an org*smic thigh-rubbing satisfaction.” By the book’s epilogue, Homans is openly scornful of one particular donation, complaining that the New York State Theater—”named for the people it served”—has been renamed the David H. Koch Theater “for the millionaire whose ego and resources substitute for the public good.” Hmm.

But back to Balanchine. He and Robbins were colleagues, and, in a sense, foils. Balanchine was adaptable and famously generous, Robbins inflexible and often hostile. Work sustained them both, but Robbins never found complete freedom from his personal demons, even in dance. Balanchine, on the other hand, possessed an inner calm, grounded in his Russian Orthodox faith. “God creates, I assemble,” he would say. While Homans incisively explores the interplay between Balanchine’s faith and art, she does not address the apparent disconnect between his faith and his personal behavior—he had multiple marriages and countless sexual relationships, at least one involving an abortion. Though godlike to his dancers, he was as mortal and sinful as the rest of us.

But he was vastly more talented. This self-identified servant of God dutifully employed his gifts to distill beauty, however momentary. With Apollo’s Angels, Homans gives him and his art a fitting and permanent tribute.

Sharon Skeel is a ballet historian currently at work on a biography of 20th-century American choreographer Catherine Littlefield. She dedicates this essay to the memory of Samuel Hsu (1947-2011).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Psychologist Neil Clark Warren used to say that when he did therapy with married couples, his primary goal was simply to see a 10 percent improvement in their relationships. It doesn’t sound like much, but he found it made a tremendous difference for one reason. It gave them hope. And hope is the great difference-maker.

Warren always believed in hope, even before he started eHarmony and made millions. He found that if people have hope, it is a tremendous reservoir of energy. Hope will keep people moving when they would otherwise quit. Hope is the single most indispensible, non-negotiable, irreplaceable resource required for big challenges and noble battles.

So, how’s your supply? How are you doing at hope-management?

I suppose pastors and church leaders have always needed hope, but I have been reflecting on why in particular it is needed in our day. It seems to me that hope matters uniquely in our day because many of the social structures that used to prop up what we do are fading. Pastors used to be honored as educated thought leaders in their communities. Historian and Pastor Jim Singleton told me that as recently as 1950, 10 percent of all Phi Beta Kappa’s went into church ministry. Today it is 0.01 percent.

Another friend, John Huffman, recently retired as pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. If you’ve ever visited Newport Beach, you might think anyone who lives there doesn’t need hope, since they’ve pretty much arrived at God’s favorite location. But as John was reflecting on half a century in pastoral ministry, he listed some of the most frequent complaints he would hear over the years—every one of them a hope-stabber. I’ll paraphrase a few. You’ve probably never heard any of these about your own ministry; I share them simply so you can pray more intelligently for your less gifted pastoral friends.

“I’m just not getting fed.” I always find this one a helpful constructive criticism, because it is both clear and easily corrected.

“Why can’t you preach like …?” John notes that there is always the nearby “church of what’s happening now.” He says what he did not realize for many years was that there will always be another more popular preacher within 20 minutes of your church. The important thing is to accept this truth. That way you can find who he is, track him down, hurt him, and then you’ll be the most popular pastor within 20 minutes of your church.

“Why don’t we pay more attention to …” (fill in the blank: foreign missions, prayer, spiritual warfare, the Kardashians)?

But complaints are not the only hope-robbers. Those of us in church ministry also face the reality of our own inadequacy, family pressures, financial crises in difficult economic times, an increasingly polarized culture where faith often seems to be perceived as nothing more than a proxy for political conflict, people we love who slide away from the faith or whose marriages wind up in a ditch. We wrestle with disappointment when people don’t come to church—and complacency when they do. We wrestle with being defined by our successes and self-condemned if we are not successful enough.

A very wise person suggested a great image to our staff recently. I asked him what he thought is the primary barrier people in church ministry face to finding spiritual health. I thought he would speak about how hard church leadership is, but he immediately said that our challenge is no different than anyone else’s: “Learning to depend fully on God for every moment of your life, right where you are.”

The image was this: Remember Atlas, that old character from Greek mythology who carried the world on his shoulder? Put it down. Refuse to carry the weight of the world anymore. Rely on God’s love this moment for your identity and well-being, so that they no longer hinge on outcomes.

I am a recovering Atlas.

When I remember to do this, when I take the world off my shoulders, it always results in life and hope. Hope, after all, is very different from getting myself to believe that things will turn out the way that I want them to. Hope means, among other things, a joyful dying to my need to have my life turn out any particular way at all. Hope comes when I live in the reality that the world is in better, larger, more capable hands than mine.

The ancient Greeks loved virtue, and believed deeply that suffering would produce character. But in the ancient world, only a Paul would top this list (suffering, perseverance, character) with “hope.” The Greeks were not big on hope; they did not believe the universe was kindly disposed to humanity. Paul did, because Jesus did. So Paul said hope “does not disappoint.”

Hope-management may be the single most important thing you do today. No circ*mstance or person is allowed to siphon it from you. When you took this job, when you answered this call—you signed on for hope. It’s much bigger than you are. Rest in it a little while.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership Journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Not so long ago, from even the better-informed writers on American musical theater scores one expected the boulevardier more than the scholar, especially on the older works. Typical: a classic survey’s complete take on Jerome Kern’s superhit Sunny of 1925 was that its “value was enhanced more by the bounding Jack Donahue and the Tiller Girls than by any superior qualities in the score.”

Yet Sunny was in fact bursting with music of near-operatic scope. The problem is that the authors of that survey had no way of knowing it. In the old days, Broadway theater music was thought of not as art but as commerce for the moment, no more worthy of preservation than the pit music for television variety shows. Show music was still America’s pop music. 45-minute recital lps of the kind Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald pioneered were technically impossible before the Fifties; before this, even the great song-writers had no sense of contributing to an eternal “songbook.”

Thus after an old show closed, all that was left was sheet music of the songs the producers hoped might become hits—only a fraction of the 14 or so songs in the show. Dance music and underscoring were never published as sheet music, and even if a fullish piano-vocal score was published—which was only for the biggest hits—often not in them.

Once a Sunny was off the boards, it was largely unknowable beyond the sheet music, some photos, and scattered recollections—until 1982. This was when the original performance materials for hundreds of Broadway musicals were discovered in a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey. Since then, some dozens of projects have used this material to create recordings of the old shows as they were originally heard, and writers can now explore the actual scores of these shows rather than their isolated musical souvenirs. This more comprehensive approach to America’s musical theater heritage has also spurred a similar approach to more recent theater music. A writer whose book on a composer thirty years ago would likely have been heavier on psychobiography than music is now more likely to at least balance the two.

The Yale Broadway Masters series is dedicated to this new style of coverage, and has already shed fascinating new light on Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Sigmund Romberg, Frank Loesser, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Andrew Lloyd Webber? Yes, even him—it had never occurred to me that when Mary Magdalene sings “I never thought I’d come to this” in Jesus Christ Superstar‘s “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” the music entails “assertive fourth relationships including the modal flattened VII major chord,” but I’ll take it from Lloyd Webber’s chronicler in the series, John Snelson.

It should be said that analysis this musically dense dominates neither Snelson’s nor any of the entries, all of which are accessibly written and include ample biographical information. However, I am struck by the fact that the books, intended as celebratory works bringing to light undersung capacities, leave me with a feeling ultimately describable as sobered. This is due to two running themes, hardly intended as such by the authors, but crucial just the same.

One is a sense of loss. The Secaucus find notwithstanding, a massive amount of American theater music from before about 1960 is now lost to the ages—which becomes especially poignant when we learn from books like these how good a lot of the less-er-known music for these shows was.

For example, earlier verdicts on Sunny were based on the sheet music songs, which happened not to be Kern’s most interesting work. However, as Stephen Banfield tells us in the book on Kern in this series, over a quarter of that score was instrumental, and also included sequences such as a smashing wedding scene first-act finale beginning with a vocally challenging operatic-style trio, continuing through three fine songs the best of which happened not to be published as a sheet, and ending on a spectacular high note for the female lead.

Certainly there were at least flashes of “superior qualities” here. Consider also the case of Sigmund Romberg, who wrote frothy operettas like The Student Prince and The Desert Song, and whose time in the spotlight was largely over by 1930. Romberg’s chronicler in the series, William Everett, explains that this has helped keep Romberg obscure, since traditional musical theater historiography charts the genre as becoming truly interesting only with Show Boat in 1927. Everett, going on to give rather studied, historically oriented reasons why we should care about Romberg now, is in my view a tad timid: full-scale recordings reveal that the man wrote smashing music, period. In isolation, songs like “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise” and “Stouthearted Men” can seem corny eighty years after they were written. However, performed amidst narrative, underscoring, and more nuanced songs unpublished as sheets, they become parts of lush, stirring scores which anyone who likes classical music, in particular, can enjoy.

In this light, it is sad to read that, for example, Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s score for the 1934 The Three Sisters (no, not the Chekhov play!) survives only in pieces. It, too, had elaborate underscoring for lengthy stretches of the narrative, and, almost as if to tempt future aficionados, one of these scenes was for some reason recorded in full on two sides of a 78 by the original cast—an extremely rare practice at the time—leaving us wondering how the rest of a score sounded which, even in its sheet music, included quirky and deathless songs like the classic “I Won’t Dance” as well as a deeply obscure one which I have seen make a grown woman cry when performed.

We can play pieces Mozart wrote when he was a child, and none of his operas are lost. Yet countless lyrics for Rodgers’ early shows with Lorenz Hart are gone forever. For A Connecticut Yankee, a big hit my late grandfather-in-law fondly recalled seeing in 1927, series chronicler Geoffrey Block notes that a whole song is missing, while for several, the melody is lost and only Hart’s lyric survives.

Of course, in no era is even most pop for the ages. It is hardly a tragedy that every bit of stage music people heard long ago is no longer available to us. However, Rodgers and Hart wrote top-rate material; their scores that survive in full are ear-candy of Godiva grade. As the pianist and producer for a group cabaret show, as I write this I am planning to include in the next show one of their duets (“The Heart Is Quicker Than The Eye” from On Your Toes) which I will accompany playing the original stage scoring with all of its musical bells and whistles—including things equal to the splendor of modal flattened VII major chords.

The Yale series is also sobering in requiring a mental adjustment in our sense of who created this music in the proper sense. Recent research makes it increasingly clear that most Golden Age Broadway composers were characterizable as auteurs of a kind: their contribution was decisive to the essence of the production, but was only possible with a great deal of help from other people, often more musically expert than them.

For example, almost none of these composers scored their music for orchestra. There was barely time, and most of them were not trained for it in any case. Stephen Citron’s 2004 book Jerry Herman, also from Yale, is not part of the series but performs a similar service. Citron praises Herman, who plays piano by ear, for furnishing Hello, Dolly‘s “Love, Look in My Window” with “minor chords” and “flatted ninths,” but this is like praising a cook for using salt and pepper. Minor chords and flatted ninths are central to doing what any show music fan would call playing the piano. Herman’s genius, and it is that, is for creating deathlessly memorable melodies. It’s others who fashion them into numbers.

The bells and whistles I referred to above in the song I will be using in my cabaret, for example, were mostly the work of Rodgers’ first favorite orchestrator Hans Spialek. Later, it was orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett who created much of what we cherish about Rodgers’ songs, such as the “O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A” ending of the song of that title. Rodgers’ house dance pianist, Trude Rittmann, composed—uncredited—the music for The King and I‘s “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet, such that Bennett, scoring it for orchestra, naughtily wrote on the first page “by Trude Rodgers.” Rittmann also wrote the famous middle sequence of The Sound of Music’s “Do Re Mi” (“Do-mi-mi, mi-so-so …”).

New treatments like the Yale ones, submitting the music to scholarly scrutiny, bring these obscure facts increasingly to light, revealing that much of what one comes to love about a recording of a musical was created by the unsung orchestrators and dance pianists. Especially striking is seeing photos of actual music submitted for processing by the composers, with the scoring so telegraphic and thin that the orchestrators and dance pianists come to seem more like co-authors.

A Connecticut Yankee is useful again: it was revived in 1943, with about half of the 1927 score replaced with new songs. Materials from that version, closer to us in time, happen to survive in full. It was the basis of one of the first full-length cast albums, long a favorite of mine, and this 1943 version was performed in New York in the Encores! series in 2001, which yielded a full piano-vocal score that has gotten around among fans. These days, I can know how much of the delight of the thing is Rodgers and Hart’s work versus that of the unsung assistants. One song is most infectious for a quirky vamp that begins it and continues into the vocal; that was the orchestrator Ted Royal. The song bringing on Morgan Le Fay has a marvelous extension involving dance music and chorus boys’ extra lyrics—this was the work of vocal director Buck Warnick and the unidentified dance pianist. And so on.

To be clear, Robert Russell Bennett wrote music of his own, and it was unremarkable. He could not have written even sketches of songs as infectious and deft as Rodgers’. Yet in the end, The King and I is less Rodgers than Lucia di Lammermoor is Donizetti, and the same went for Kern and Frank Loesser in particular.

None of this detracts from the genius of these composers in the end, however, and it is a mark of the maturation of their print coverage that books like the Yale series leave readers with impressions more mature than the mere unfocused admiration that earlier sources were designed to stoke. A final example also involves my cabaret show. One of my singers will be performing “Loads of Love” from No Strings, which Rodgers wrote both music and lyrics to after Hammerstein died. I’ve always loved the tune.

Block teaches me, however, that its appeal can be traced to a key point in the melody, a dissonant tritone above the C chord, which summons jazz harmony newly fashionable in the early Sixties, when the show premiered, and quietly complements the fact that the character singing it happens to be black. I had never thought about that, but such subtle touches are the mark of top-quality songwriting.

We’ve come a long way from “bounding Jack Donahue and the Tiller Girls” indeed, and Geoffrey Block, who also edits the series, is to be commended for what I hope will be a long run of volumes in which authors approach these composers as scholars rather than as fans or dishers of dirt.

Yale Broadway Masters Series

George Gershwin • Larry StarrAndrew Lloyd Webber • John SnelsonKander and Ebb • James LeveFrank Loesser • Thomas L. RiisSigmund Romberg • William A. EverettJerome Kern • Stephen BanfieldRichard Rodgers • Geoffrey Block

John H. McWhorter teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor of The New Republic. He is the author most recently of What Language Is (Gotham).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.