Page 2803 – Christianity Today (2024)

Kit Kittredge is a spunky ten-year-old who is fiercely loyal to her friends, great at solving mysteries, and determined to become a reporter. If you have a daughter between the ages of six and eleven, you likely already know all that. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is inspired by the Kit Kittredge books, which are based on one character in the wildly successful American Girl line of historically set dolls. But don’t let the connection between a movie and a doll franchise scare you. This film is artistically light years beyond Strawberry Shortcake cartoons or the nonsense that was Bratz: The Movie. In fact, the doll connection is in some ways unfortunate (despite the tween girl audience it guarantees), because, given a chance, this film will appeal to girls—and boys—of all ages.

Kit Kittredge is set in 1934 Cincinnati. Kit (Little Miss Sunshine‘s Abigail Breslin) is happily occupied with secret meetings of her Tree House Club, not to mention hours at the typewriter diligently working on stories she hopes to pitch to the local newspaper. All is well until the Great Depression begins showing up in the neighborhood. When a family next store to Kit loses their house to foreclosure, it becomes clear that this is one children’s movie determined to treat gritty subjects with non-patronizing realism.

Before long, Kit’s comfortable middle class life evaporates. Her father (played with all-American heart and everyman charm by Batman and Robin’s Chris O’Donnell) loses his car dealership and is forced to temporarily relocate to Chicago in search of work. Kit’s mother (Sabrina’s lovely Julia Ormond) keeps a brave and resourceful face, opening her home to a quirky assortment of boarders and, much to Kit’s initial chagrin, selling eggs and vegetables to help pay the mortgage.

Despite the hard times, Kit and her mother are still prone to taking in strays, including an abandoned basset hound named Grace and a pair of young hobos willing to work for food. When the Kittredge home is robbed and one of the hobos is unfairly incriminated in the crime, Kit and her friends hastily become ad hoc detectives to save the day.

Screenplay writer Ann Peaco*ck (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) rather miraculously manages to keep things resoundingly sweet and wholesome without sugar coating realities like poverty, class injustice, and bigotry. Her cause is aided by a fine cast of veteran actors, who bring comedic chemistry to portrayals of the boarders at the Kittredge house. Stanley Tucci’s sardonic vaudeville magician, Jane Krakowski’s husband-hunting dance instructor, Joan Cusack’s befuddled mobile librarian, and Glenne Headly’s prudish and burdened mother all add depth and humor. Wallace Shawn (the villainous Vizzini in The Princess Bride) brings his signature lisping bluster to the role of the curmudgeonly newspaper editor, while young Willow Smith (daughter of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith) and Max Thieriot (showing the same acting chops and heart-throb potential he revealed in The Pacifier) make achingly winsome hobos. And, at the centre of this acting storm, Abigail Breslin meets expectations as a likeable and believable heroine.

The film has a warm, Rockwell-esque look and feel to it, no small feat considering director Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park) reportedly had only 27 days of filming and a modest budget with which to recreate Depression-era Cincinnati. For the most part, Rozema manages to mine real pathos from the story without weighing the film down into too much melodrama. Occasionally the movie’s pacing does seem a touch uneven, languishing a bit in the moralistic parts and racing rather suddenly when the action-adventure plotline comes to the foreground. Even still, my six-year-old daughter remained mesmerized throughout the whole film.

Kit Kittredge has many of the classic ingredients of a successful family tale, including a heroine who achieves her dreams through hard work and perseverance, a group of kids who outsmart the adult villains, and a resoundingly happy ending. But the film’s most notable success is in the unusual themes it brings to the children’s table. In many respects, Kit Kittredge is about the ways people adapt, or don’t adapt, to new kinds of normal when life doesn’t turn out as planned. It’s also about finding identity in something other than your ability to earn or provide, a challenge that proves daunting for many of the fathers in the film. Most importantly, it’s about the power of love and relationship, and the refusal to let shame or disappointment estrange families in the midst of hard times. Who knew one little American Girl could teach all that?

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. What parallels do you see (if any) between the Great Depression and the present day economy? Is there someone in your neighborhood who could use some extra help?
2. Kit’s dad tells her that when life throws you an obstacle, you “can’t let it beat you.” Is there an obstacle currently defeating you? How might you overcome it?
3. Kit’s dad almost loses his family over his own shame in not being able to bring them good news, but in the end it means so much more that he is present with them than that he can provide for them. Have you ever let a reluctance to reveal something about your situation cause you to become distanced from someone you love? Is there someone you need to simply be there for, regardless of the circ*mstances?
4. Many of the people in Kit’s life prejudge others based on their financial status. Does that prejudice exist in your circles? How might you work toward eradicating it?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Kit Kittredge is rated G and is remarkably wholesome. There are a few scenes of mild peril likely to frighten only very sensitive young children.

Photos © Copyright New Line Cinema

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Ministering to people who are being subjected to “spiritual warfare” requires:

First, discernment. The Scripture teaches that human beings are alienated from God. They also live in an environment called “the world,” which has created institutions and structures that militate against spiritual development, and they are infected by a “spirit of disobedience” that emanates from the “Evil One” and are captive to a “sinful nature” that warps and twists “desires and thoughts.” Humanity adrift from God is subject to the nefarious pressures of “The world, the flesh and the Devil” (see Ephesians 2:1–3.) We live in a war zone, and spiritual warfare is normative! People need to gain this insight and understand why they experience what they experience.

Next, diagnosis. The next task is to assist in identifying the specific areas of conflict. Is it a matter of being sidetracked or even persecuted by a “world” system? Or could it be that carelessness has led to warped desires and thoughts being acted out? Or is the believer being subjected to evil attacks leading to disobedience? These are all possibilities.

Third, direction. Difficult as this approach may be, it should lead to positive direction and encouragement to draw on the resources of the Spirit, who fights the flesh, to reckon with the Risen Christ, who has overcome the world, and to bear in mind that the devil was defeated at the cross and operates on a tight leash.

Since the beginning of philosophical speculation, there has been controversy over the existence of God or gods. Among the Pre-Socratics, Democritus denied all deity and affirmed a materialist philosophy of atoms in the void, and nothing more. Other early metaphysicians discerned traces of the divine in the natural world. For Heracl*tus, beyond the perpetual flux lay the mysterious Logos, which provided order and a kind of moral ecosystem for the world. Anaxagorus attributed the order of nature to something immaterial, Nous (Mind). Although the Pre-Socratic philosophies were inchoate and their theologies (or a-theologies) were metaphysically minimal, we find in them the first philosophical debate over whether anything transcends the natural world.[1]

The debates have continued ever since. Atheism gained ground philosophically and culturally in the West, especially after the Enlightenment. However, atheism has been losing ground in recent decades due to the rise of academically rigorous philosophical defenses of theism and critiques of atheism from luminaries such as Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, William Alston, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and others. The publication in 2004 of Sam Harris’ pugnacious and polemical The End of Faith catalyzed a brand of atheism that didn’t so much refute theism at its philosophical best but rather condemned religion in toto.

The Twilight of Atheism was written by the prolific Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, just before the rise of the New Atheism. Instead of looking at the intellectual reasons that atheism might be in decline, McGrath focuses on cultural and historical forces. McGrath writes in a graceful and knowledgeable manner, but he is unphilosophical in his approach to the debates between atheism and Christianity. While we should not expect a historical theologian to glean every nuance from technical philosophical debates, McGrath fails to explain or assess any of the pertinent philosophical issues regarding the existence or nonexistence of the deity. Instead he surveys the intellectual and cultural climates that led to the rise of atheism, from the Enlightenment until its recent twilight. (The book lacks footnotes or endnotes. Instead there is a long list of “works consulted” at the end of the volume.)

McGrath claims that much of the atheism of the Enlightenment was more a rejection of corruption in the church than anything else. He argues that Enlightenment rationalism and secularism seem to be in crisis for various sociological and historical reasons; the pluralistic conditions of postmodernity are breaking down the hegemony of unbelief as the only rational approach to life. However, many readers, especially those with more than a passing interest in philosophy, will be left wondering whether these trends away from atheism and toward theism are intellectually justifiable. That is, what are the best arguments for and against God’s existence both today and in Western history?

On this, The Twilight of Atheism has next to nothing to say. Indeed, McGrath injudiciously asserts that philosophical argument for and against God’s existence has “ground to a halt.” If he means that philosophers have reached no consensus as to the rational status of arguments for God’s existence, he is surely right. But then philosophers seldom reach consensus on anything, especially the great matters of metaphysics. This is no reason to conclude that these debates are dead.

If McGrath means that new lines of inquiry on the existence of God have failed to emerge in recent decades, he is also mistaken. In a long and distinguished line of books defending natural theology, Richard Swinburne has shifted theistic arguments from deductive forms to inductive forms using sophisticated probability reasoning not previously employed in metaphysical arguments. Alvin Plantinga’s modal version of the ontological argument (using the semantics of possible worlds) has breathed new life into an ancient and alluring argument first invented by Anselm and subsequently advanced by a who’s who of philosophers. In the last thirty years, William Lane Craig has revived and repeatedly defended—both in popular and academic settings—an even older theistic argument, based on the impossibility of the universe having an infinite past (as I will discuss below).

By summarily affirming methodological naturalism in his chapter on the “warfare” between science and religion, McGrath also ignores the significant challenge to naturalism (and boost for theism) posed by the Intelligent Design movement, which claims that certain features of nature are explained better by intelligence than by merely material causes. While the Intelligent Design movement is more a critique of naturalism in science than a positive program of natural theology, its method of design detection contributes significantly to the design argument for God’s existence. But McGrath is silent about all of this.

Nor does The Twilight of Atheism have anything to say about the rise of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the significant impact made by Christian philosophers in the academy in the last thirty years. Yet the book offers an entire chapter recounting the dysfunctional machinations of famed atheist Madelyn Murray O’Hair and her fractious disciples—events having little to do with the intellectual issues at hand.

When McGrath does deal with the rational assessment of natural theology, he says nothing more than that God’s existence cannot be proved, since faith is required for Christian belief.[2] Having dismissed all progress in theistic arguments, McGrath claims that belief in God is determined more by the imagination than by rational argument. The role of imagination in religious belief cannot be disputed nor should it be avoided, but as Pascal warned in a memorable fragment in his Pensées, imagination can often lead us astray when untethered from knowledge. Some of the best apologetics invoke the imagination liberally (think of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton), but the imagination must illustrate and amplify what reason declares. If reason cannot decisively inform the debate between theism and atheism, then one wonders how a Christian can claim to have any knowledge (justified true belief) about the object of supreme significance (God).

The Twilight of Atheism gives a diagnosis that the patient (atheism) is failing, but offers no philosophical argument as to why the patient should be failing. It claims only that, philosophical arguments for God having petered out, we need a new infusion of religious imagination to do the job. As such, it does little to advance the great debate one way or the other.

Indeed, philosophically inclined atheists seldom take the refusal to engage in natural theology as anything other than intellectual capitulation. Hard-headed philosophers have little patience with appeals to the religious imagination as somehow decisive regarding religious claims such as the existence of God or the afterlife. But when logical arguments for God’s existence are proffered, they leap into battle, eager to show that reason can strike the decisive blow. Besides Bertrand Russell, Anthony Flew (now an octogenarian) was probably the most prominent philosophical defender of atheism in the 20th century. While not as famous (or infamous) as Russell, Flew defended atheism more systematically and repeatedly than Russell, who wrote little more than his famous Why I Am Not a Christian.

Flew notably contributed his essay “Theology and Falsification” to the 1955 volume New Essays on Philosophical Theology, published when natural theology had probably reached its nadir in the Western world. His book God and Philosophy, published in 1966, was a rigorous if somewhat ponderously stated analysis of the meaning of theological language, the cogency of natural theology, and the credentials of divine revelation. Flew rejected fideism as intellectual decapitation, and inspected the best arguments he could find in support of God’s existence. He claimed that the theist bore the burden of proof in these arguments, since the material world is clearly real, while the spiritual world (if it exists) is not. (He later called this “the presumption of atheism.”) He had grave doubts that talk of a disembodied agent such as God made much sense, since all our notions of actions performed by persons rely on empirical factors not applicable to God. (Of course, if mind/body dualism is defendable, then we have plenty of good evidence for immaterial agents being real, since we are among them.[3]) Nevertheless, he investigated the constructive case for God by subjecting ontological, cosmological, design, and moral arguments to philosophical analysis. All failed to carry conviction, he argued. The claims of divine revelation fared no better.

Flew’s work became a fixture in the philosophy of religion and a treasured resource for many atheists. Natural theology was dead; therefore, theism was intellectually bankrupt. Flew, an expert on David Hume, carried on the skeptical work that Hume had advanced in the 18th century. But Flew did not rest on his laurels. As part of a prolific career of publications, he debated evangelical philosopher and resurrection expert Gary Habermas concerning the resurrection of Jesus in 1987 and again more recently.[4] Flew remained unconvinced, but honestly interacted with Habermas’ strong evidential case for the resurrection in both debates. Moreover, Flew debated William Lane Craig on the existence of God.[5] Despite Craig’s carefully constructed argument for God, the debate did not end with Flew on his knees. Yet in the last several years, I began to hear strange, hopeful rumors: Flew had converted to theism!

In 2005, Philosophia Christi released an online interview of Flew by Gary Habermas, in which Flew acknowledged that recent, scientifically oriented arguments from design had indeed convinced him of the existence of a designer outside of nature. However, Flew denied becoming a Christian. He was more of a deist, and did not believe in the afterlife. (Flew researched the paranormal early in his career, concluding that human “survival” was untenable.[6])

Many skeptics and atheists were stunned. Some doubted what they read. When Prometheus Books announced a reissue of God and Philosophy with a new introduction by Flew, many anticipated that the record would be set straight. However, the result was somewhat anticlimactic. The original text of the book was unchanged since its original publication in 1966. The failure to revise meant that Flew did not interact with the flood of new, philosophically rigorous arguments for God’s existence and the rationality of divine revelation that have appeared in the interim (some of which were mentioned above). But the hot item was the much-awaited introduction. Flew’s comments are detached from any personal conversion to theism. Rather, he writes programmatically and somewhat elliptically that any successor to God and Philosophy must take into account several developments in philosophy, some friendly to theism and some unfriendly. On the friendly side, Flew mentions the fine-tuning argument for theism and the “argument from the order of nature to God as its Intelligent Orderer” made in Roy Abraham Varghese’s The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God. But Flew also claims that the “multiverse theory is now a leading view among cosmologists today” (a view that avoids the theistic implications of the standard Big Bang model)[7] and that “protobiologists” are now able to produce adequate naturalistic theories of how living things came from non-living matter. Flew’s confidence in such theories exceeds their rational warrant, especially on the likelihood of the richly informational structure of life coming from nonlife, but he says very little about either one of them.

So, in the final analysis the latest (and Flew says the last) edition of God and Philosophy offered an ambiguous preface and an outdated (but historically significant) text. That hardly carried the debate to a new level, however much it might have frustrated die-hard atheists and tantalized Christians.

But this was not Flew’s final word. Two years later, There Is a God (written with Roy Abraham Varghese, a longtime interlocutor) was released. This helps clarify Flew’s positions and why he holds them. He begins with his intellectual autobiography and does not commence to defend his new views until page 88. But it is worth the wait, because Flew is willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. He no longer takes the idea of God as a disembodied agent to be problematic, and he presents four reasons why he now embraces theism: the consistent and rational laws of nature, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of the universe at the Big Bang, and the organized, information-rich nature of life. Flew rejects the multiverse theory he toyed with in the new introduction to God and Philosophy as extravagant and desperate. He rejects atheistic accounts of the Big Bang as less rational than the theistic explanation that God was the creator. Flew argues that naturalism faces an insuperable philosophical problem in trying to coax life from non-life without a designing mind. Flew presents these arguments rather briefly and without the kind of rigor that many philosophers might desire. Nevertheless, he lucidly makes his case, presents many salient points and apt illustrations, and gives references to other sources for further study.

Although Flew unambiguously argues that “there is a God,” he makes no confession of Christian faith and denies the afterlife. He affirms that his intellectual journey has been guided by reason, not by faith. Reason has now led him to believe in an omnipotent God, who could reveal himself personally. The book concludes with a “dialogue” between Flew and the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, in which Flew claims “that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honored and respected.” Flew then explains the basic reasons he has given for not accepting Jesus as the self-revelation of God. He gives Wright 26 pages to argue for the history of Jesus, his identity as “the embodiment of the God of Israel,” and for his resurrection. Flew concludes by writing that he finds Wright’s arguments “impressive” and “fresh.” Flew says he is open to hearing God’s voice. I hope and pray that the Logos (John 1:1) will continue to speak to him.

In November 2007, The New York Times Magazine published an article suggesting that the aging Flew had been manipulated by Christians (particularly co-writer Varghese, who was responsible for the actual writing of the text), who wanted him to appear in the book to be more convinced of theism than he really was.[8] Even if this were so, the arguments stated would stand on their own merit. In any case, it seems unlikely that Flew, his family, and his publisher would have allowed such an egregious exploitation. Moreover, Flew has published statements on the Internet denying any foul play concerning the contents of There Is a God. Instead of a literary hijacking of an aging and enfeebled atheist by solicitous Christians, what we are faced with is an intellectual conversion of great significance.

William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist will not disappoint readers in search of stimulating contemporary debate over God’s existence. Although the book is introductory, the philosophers take the reader into deep waters. Craig first presents the case for God, receives rebuttal by Sinnott-Armstrong, and then responds to the rebuttal. The order is reversed in the second section.

Instead of developing one theistic argument in detail, Craig advances five short arguments, providing a brief cumulative case argument that aims to secure several divine attributes. He begins with the kalam cosmological argument, which has a simple deductive form: (1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence. (2) The universe began to exist. (3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

To make his case, Craig must explore the nature of the infinite. An actual infinite is a set of items that is literally limitless. But the concept of the actual infinite generates contradictions. For example, if you subtract all the odd numbers (1, 3, 5, … ) from the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, … ) you are still left with an infinite number of numbers. Thus, infinity minus infinity equals infinity. But if you subtract all the numbers greater than two, you are left with three numbers. By this reckoning, infinity minus infinity equals three. Craig comments: “In both of these cases we have subtracted identical quantities from identical quantities and come up with contradictory answers. In fact, you can get any answer you want from zero to infinity. This implies that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that exists in reality.” Thus the actual infinite exists only in the mathematical world,[9] not in the real world of space and time. Consequently, the number of past events cannot be actually infinite; it must be finite. So, the world must have a beginning. Furthermore, the beginning of the universe is scientifically confirmed through Big Bang cosmology, which claims that the universe exploded into existence out of nothing about 15 billion years ago. Since it is illogical to think that the universe—or anything—could pop into existence without a cause, Craig infers that the cause of the universe was a timeless “personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions.”

Craig offers four more crisp arguments: the existence of God gives the best explanation for: (1) the fine-tuning of the universe, (2) the existence of objective moral values, and (3) the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This makes Craig’s argument specifically Christian and not merely theistic in a general sense. He concludes by arguing that (4) “God can be immediately—and without argument—known and experienced as ‘properly basic.'” He also warns: “We mustn’t so concentrate on the proofs for God that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our own heart.”

Sinnott-Armstrong responds in the tradition of Hume by claiming that even if Craig’s arguments succeed, he has not established the existence of an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, effective, and personal God.[10] In fact, the creator, the designer, and the moral lawgiver may be different finite beings. He substitutes naturalistic explanations for all the data from which Craig derives theistic explanations. He responds to the kalam argument by claiming that the actual infinite is commonly employed in transfinite mathematics and poses no problems. He disputes Craig’s interpretation of the Big Bang by invoking other speculative possibilities that do not require an ex nihilo creation. And he finds it extremely implausible that a timeless and changeless cause (God) could effect a change at the beginning of time (the creation of the universe).

Craig rebuts Sinnott-Armstrong by defending his cumulative case approach, which collects several important theistic attributes from several different arguments. If successful, these arguments establish a being who is a personal Creator, uncaused, eternal, changeless (at least sans creation), immaterial, enormously powerful, inestimably intelligent, concerned with his creatures, good and loving, who exists by metaphysical necessity, is the God and Father of Jesus Christ, and is knowable. Craig does not directly critique the claim that each argument may refer to different deities. But Sinnott-Armstrong’s charge seems ill-advised, since the divine attributes won through Craig’s arguments are those classically affirmed by monotheism. An argument for polytheism would look quite different. Further, one should not multiply entities beyond what is required for a simple and sufficient explanation.

Craig seems to come out on top concerning the origin of the universe. He responds by reiterating that while actual infinites are allowed in transfinite mathematics, this is an abstract, conceptual discourse that abides by certain artificial rules, and that the actual infinite cannot exist in space-time reality. (Craig usually drives this home by arguing that even if an actual infinite exists, it could not be traversed in time—that is, produced through successive addition—since there would always be an infinite distance left to travel. But he does not make that point here.) Craig also convincingly counters that the alternatives to Big Bang cosmology presented by Sinnott-Armstrong are either outdated or too avant-garde to refute his arguments. While Craig defends the idea that a timeless being can produce an act in time—an argument I have never found persuasive—he also admits the possibility that God existed in “undifferentiated metaphysical time” prior to the creation, a view that fits with the kalam’s conclusion and deflects the claim that the timeless cannot create something in time.

Sinnott-Armstrong marshals a threefold argument against God. He claims that the existence of certain types of evil are incompatible with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God; that an eternal God could not produce effects in the temporal world; and that the prevalence of unbelief does not comport with the existence of a God who supposedly wants to be known. The last issue is a subset of the problem of evil (sometimes called “the hiddenness of God” objection). His first argument seems the most challenging.

In his response to Craig’s moral argument for God, Sinnott-Armstrong (rather unconvincingly) affirms that moral propositions such as “rape is wrong” are true without further justification. This is pivotal to his argument against God, because without the existence of objective moral properties, the problem of evil cannot get off the ground. Sinnott-Armstrong builds a thorough argument from evil against God by critiquing each of ten possible strategies for justifying evils (such as the compensations of heaven, that suffering may produce better character, and so on). He limits his selection of evils to natural evils (such as infant deaths), so that the free-will defense cannot directly address them. His arguments are nuanced, thorough, and impressive. They attempt to put a crushing burden of proof on the theist to show that all evils are adequately compensated by some good that could not occur without them. For Sinnott-Armstrong, if any evil is uncompensated or pointless, this counts decisively against the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God, who surely would justify any evil that God allows. Sinnott-Armstrong grants that some evils are compatible with God’s existence, but not the kinds he discusses.

Craig retorts by arguing that a combination of possible justifications for evils may cover all of them, even natural evils affecting innocents. In this way he sketches a positive theodicy, instead of merely charting a defense that would only render the existence of God and evil logically possible. However, Craig rightly notes that given our finitude, we cannot identify the reasons for every particular evil. Sinnott-Armstrong claims in his response that the mere possibility of these justifications offers a much less plausible argument than the idea that actual evils are simply inadequately compensated for.

The nub of the argument over evil seems to boil down to Craig’s argument: (1) If God exists, gratuitous suffering does not exist. (2) God exists. (3) Therefore, gratuitous suffering does not exist.[11] Craig’s strategies for God’s possible justification of evils are merely speculative unless one has previously made a strong argument for a metaphysically and morally thick theism through natural theology. That is, background knowledge weighs crucially here. Since Sinnott-Armstrong denies the success of Craig’s arguments for God, Craig’s explanation for evil rings hollow and desperate to him. But if one takes Craig’s overall, fivefold case for God to be strong (as I do), this defangs Sinnott-Armstrong’s objections. A transcendently intelligent, good, and powerful God would have a vast arsenal of reasons and strategies to employ with respect to justifying evils. Since Craig argues forcefully—if briefly—for the resurrection of Jesus as part of the cumulative case for God’s existence, it might have served him well to invoke Jesus’ resurrection as part of the solution to the problem of evil as well. If Jesus has been raised victorious over death and sin, the world is not without hope. Evil does not have the last word.

While Christians believe that God will have the last word, the arguments for and against God’s existence will likely continue apace until then. As for me and my house, we will continue to hold up our side of the debate.

Douglas Groothuis is Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and co-editor (with James Sennett) of In Defense of Natural Theology (InterVarsity Press, 2005).

1. But Greek philosophy, even in its most theistic modes, never affirmed the creation of the universe out of nothing, as does the Bible.

2. In The Science of God (Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 71-91, McGrath redefines natural theology so as to remove the possibility that it provides evidence for the existence of God independent from the Bible. This move is both theologically novel and philosophically suspect. For another view of natural theology (or theistic proofs), see Douglas Groothuis, “Theistic Proofs,” in New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (InterVarsity Press, 2005), pp. 698-703.

3. For a careful defense of mind-body dualism, see J.P. Moreland and Scott Rae, Body and Soul (InterVarsity Press, 2000).

4. Terry Miethe, ed., Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? The Resurrection Debate (Harper and Row, 1987); John Ankerberg, ed., Resurrected? An Atheist and Theist Dialogue (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

5. San Wallace, ed., Does God Exist? The Craig-Flew Debate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003).

6. This was subsequently published in Philosophia Christi, new series, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2004), pp. 197-212.

7. For a critique of this view see Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Baker Books, 2004), pp. 232-233; 238-240.

8. Mark Oppenheimer, “The Turning of an Atheist,” The New York Times Magazine, November 4, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/ 04Flew-t.html

9. How the actual infinite functions in the world of mathematics is contested as well, as Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong note.

10. For a recent volume that critiques this and other Humean moves against natural theology, see James Sennett and Douglas Groothuis, eds., In Defense of Natural Theology (InterVarsity Press, 2005).

11. Some Christian philosophers, such as Michael Peterson, Keith Yandell, and William Hasker, believe that the existence of God and the existence of gratuitous evils are compatible, but Craig does not address this.

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Larry Woiwode’s 1975 novel Beyond the Bedroom Wall is one of the great American books. Focused on the Neumiller family—Alpha and Martin, and their children Jerome, Charles, Tim, Susan, and Marie—but ranging back a number of generations and forward to the children’s adulthood, the novel is a lyric exploration of time’s heart-stopping thefts and quiet restorations. Its central event is the death of Alpha at 34, just a few months after the family had moved from the small town of Hyatt, North Dakota—its smells and rhythms and intimacies painstakingly re-created by Woiwode—to an improvised, disorienting stab at a new life in Forest Creek, Illinois. Alpha’s death opens an abyss. The family stays intact, but Martin almost buckles under the pressure of continuing on, and the children splinter and piece themselves together in various and richly imagined ways.

Charles, the second son and nine at the time of the disaster, is convinced that his hateful thoughts about his mother brought about her death. Echoing passages in the book where, as children, both his grandfather and his older brother Jerome stilled themselves in the dark and re-created a world far beyond their bedroom walls—their parents’ room, the yard and fields, North Dakota, North America, drawing ever closer “to a vast source of power” beyond it all—Charles wakes one night turned the wrong way in bed. It is the last night he will see his mother, a night filled with phone calls and stricken faces, something terrible and unspoken being withheld from the children:

I woke to darkness, twisted in the blankets, my heart beating hard against the mattress. I had to see my mother right away. I started out of bed and struck the wall. The wall was on the other side of the cot. I tried again, and again I struck it. There wasn’t a wall on that side of the cot, and not all the logic in the world, or the wall itself, could convince me otherwise. Being reversed in bed never occurred to me. I tried again and again. I called for Jerome and there was no word. Was I outside the room? Finally I fell back on the cot, exhausted, and my left arm stretched out into blank space. If there was a wall where I knew there was none, then what lay in this emptiness where the wall should be? I pulled my arm onto the safety of the cot and held it over my chest, afraid to move, afraid of the dark.

In the morning, without having to be told, I knew my mother was gone.

It’s a brilliant passage, suggesting that after the disaster of Alpha’s death, there would be no passage outward into the nested communities of family, village, and nation. There would be no movement, as Emily Dickinson puts it, “out upon Circumference” and into the presence of God. An impenetrable wall holding one alone within a sickening blank space—that’s the world each member of the family is plunged into.

This is a wound that there is no final recovery from, and it is the great strength of this novel that it charts, beautifully and openly, the hungers and insights—physical, emotional, and ultimately spiritual—that such an acute awareness of brokenness brings one to. A presence is continually felt around the edges of many scenes: the children’s mother, a lost world whole again, God himself. The presence takes various forms and is called different names. Characters shape and define themselves in the way they respond to it. Some block it out, others tentatively approach what blinded eyes allow them to see. I’m reminded of similar moments in the Gospel of John, a resonance Woiwode would surely have welcomed if not have fully understood at the time.

That wound also creates artists, of course, and Charles, who is very much the Woiwode figure, both being second sons in families with similar histories, sketches a vision of a novel which, though he despairs of ever writing it, has much in common with the book we are reading. Charles imagines a novel split by an abyss. One half of it would be a journal written by his mother, describing her early years and leading up to her life in Hyatt, its path moving in an “earth-colored, unbroken line.” The other half would be a series of “multicolored pieces about North Dakota and Illinois, … each piece complete in itself, whole and unshakeable, bearing no outward relationship to any other piece, … each moment, each year sealed off because it’s escaped destruction and has to buttress the chaos battering at it.” What would happen, Charles asks, if the pieces could somehow shift and rearrange themselves, no longer sealed off from each other or from the lost world across the abyss? It would be as if his mother were signaling him from across that great divide, the edges of things permeable and no longer fixed, his mother urging him to move forward and live. Impossible, Charles admits, eyes on his own “tongue-tied paragraphs.” Perhaps not, the novel suggests, offering, splintered sentence by splintered sentence, the first steps of just such a work.

Woiwode has published two memoirs that document his attempt to bring the lost, “unbroken” line associated with his mother into productive tension with the sealed-off, walled-in pieces of his adult life. The two books share a distinctive form. What I Think I Did (2000) tells the story of the winter of 1996 on Woiwode’s southwestern North Dakota farm, two hundred miles from where he had grown up. The family moved there in 1978, and found themselves, eighteen years later, caught in “the worst winter in collective memory.” The major drama is the desperate struggle to keep an outdoor wood-burning furnace going despite bitter cold, terrible storms, and a woeful lack of preparation. The book-length narration of these events is interleaved with Woiwode’s memories of first coming into language, discovering his core material, and writing his early stories. We might call this the story of his becoming a writer, culminating with the publication of his first novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think, in 1969.

The second memoir, A Step From Death, just published, recounts a terrible accident suffered by the author while baling hay in 2005. His clothing became entangled in the tractor’s PTO, its power takeoff, and he broke three ribs and almost lost the arm around which his caught jacket knotted itself. That tale—the accident and his recovery—is broken into by a series of flashes and glints that eventually combine to tell the story of the next phase of his writing life, coming to a head with the publication of Beyond the Bedroom Wall in 1975. The form is really the point of the two memoirs. In both present-tense stories, the author is plunged into a blank, whited-out state. He is almost erased, and to make himself visible again, he must sort through the various memories and insights that rise up into consciousness. Wallace Stevens describes poetry as “the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice,” and Woiwode would agree, making a kind of prose poetry out of the act of remembering and testing and sorting out, the two memoirs rising up out of Charles’ heart-stopping plunge into an inexplicable blank space yawning open just where stability should have been.

What I Think I Did has much to say about this process, arguing that the knitting together of incidents into story, making them matter, is an act of faith, an acknowledgment that “We are headed somewhere and it’s our story that carries us forward in its wake. If I weren’t headed toward eternity (as I see it at times), I wouldn’t have a story to tell.” If story is a pilot, drawing incidents into its wake and setting them free to jostle with and make swirling sense against other caught-up moments, memory is “a backseat driver who wants control,” insisting that its version of what once happened is what inevitably lies ahead. Memory is another name for the blank spaces we continually find ourselves suspended in: “It holds a lifetime store of every angle and declination of experience and sensation and fact we know.” Story is how we fight for ourselves there: “What we call a memoir is an attempt to tame memory’s takeovers into paths we tiptoe down toward truth.”

That fight, as Woiwode gradually comes to see while struggling for life in the desperate winter of 1996, is against the “immobilizing freeze that all the deaths that began with my mother’s have slammed into me.” Her death removed from his awareness any trace of the first eight years of his life in Sykeston, burying it deep in a trunk in an attic: “When she died the years in North Dakota tumbled into the attic, because we had moved to Illinois the summer before, and her death was like a guillotine across them. They went falling in folds into their place in the trunk and its lid slammed shut.” It was not until his early twenties that he began to sense the hold those blanked-out years had over him, but there seemed no way of moving back to them, breaking through her internalized “No” and his deep sense of guilt: “When I tried to get to the other side by every imaginative leap I could devise, it didn’t matter if I missed by a mile or an inch, I was in a dark deeper than dreams.” And if he did stumble back, pulled down by some remembered smell or turn of a road, there seemed no way to move forward, no way to bring the two worlds together: “Even after I made pathways to the trunk and dug deeper in it each time, no way was safe back to adulthood.” There was no story, no way of “writing my way out of [the early years] with my parents, into the space I would occupy as a young man.”

Much of this first memoir, then, composed against a winter two decades later, focuses on the discovery of a language that would allow the young writer to begin moving, breaking loss’s wintry grip on his soul. What he arrived at was a densely realistic style, grounded in sensual details that, handled and rehandled by a probing, pressing mind, continually opened channels and connections to other sensual details from other periods. It’s a kind of lyric, exploratory prose: story trembling always at the edge of metaphor. Woiwode was brought to this language by various guides and companions, many of them acknowledged in this first memoir. He originally saw himself as an actor, and Charles Shattuck at the University of Illinois helped him open the door whereby he could “leave myself behind and be somebody wholly other.” Shattuck’s friend William Maxwell at The New Yorker, an extraordinary writer in his own right and an editor of genius, not only kept the young writer alive in his early years in New York after college but eased him deeper and deeper into his charged material. And the young Robert De Niro, 19 to Woiwode’s 22, caught up as well in a struggle with the “energy of the inarticulate,” became a crucial figure, someone his own age working in tandem with him toward authentic forms of physical and verbal expression.

Maxwell’s influence was extraordinary and is surely part of what Woiwode has in mind when he ends What I Think I Did with an echo of John 1:16 (“For of his fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace”): “It has all been gravy, … and, better, grace and gracious people put in my way, and yet more grace.” Reading his early work, giving him writing exercises, sitting at a table with him and going over typed drafts (“I follow his trail of pencil marks, feeling chunks of words and paragraphs break free and fall from the ceiling of my mind”), Maxwell, who had also lost his mother at an early age, stood beside him as he entered the space controlled by his mother’s loss, pointing him toward words and guiding the ensuing torrent: “I bore inexpressible knots in myself, so deep and unreachable and sometimes malevolent that only words could release them, and he helped me find my way to the words. Set down right, they had the transfiguring power of love.” Woiwode imagines this again against the backdrop of his family’s struggle to hold each other up during an almost overwhelming series of storms. This transfiguring power, the basis for words, is made vibrant flesh in his desperate attempts to warm himself in bed with his wife and in his children’s patient bearing with his weaknesses and oversights.

What these guides helped him tap into, Woiwode suggests, was a relationship with language and landscape that had been with him since childhood. He describes long walks the summer he was twelve, after the death of his mother, mile after mile down dirt roads or alongside railroad tracks, caught up in his body’s rhythms and, for a time, moving beyond her absence. He remembers, in the silence, being filled with a pressure and presence that he could only describe as “the presence of God.” The light pulsing through the gaps between trees, he passed through the charged aisles and felt himself moving into a world “brimming with voices about to break into speech. I was in a grip greater than my mother’s hand, and tears of laughter leaped out like the presences I expected to see.” He was flooded with language from a source immeasurably far outside of himself, as in Psalm 19 which he read much later, a source calling language from him in ecstatic response: “Oh, beautiful trees!, Oh, sky above!” Remembering those days and those walks again—”listen[ing] to a language leaping past time and entering me in a way I couldn’t begin to explain”—he realizes that this experience had prepared him for the language pouring through him in his twenties, the sudden words sweeping him back to those lost childhood years and “launching” his career.

In his new memoir, A Step From Death, the base story is the accident in August 2005 and the author’s slow recovery over much of the next year. Woiwode’s wife and the last of his four children are with him at the time of the accident, although both are away during the accident itself and the two hours it takes him to free himself from the entanglement. His daughter leaves for college a day after the accident, and his wife takes a job in town, so the author is alone during much of his recovery—once again in a “displaced region” where memory continually overrides the present’s constrained, featureless blankness. Words begin rising to the surface, and he finds himself in a space where “the forces of silence, good and evil, contend.” If the struggle in the first memoir was to break out of the frozen immobility associated with his mother’s death, here the struggle is to tell the truth, to break free of entanglements, many of them self-imposed. To tell a story, it turns out, is to ask continually what really happened and what one really felt. There are many screens and self-protective barriers to work through. The accident forces him to look again at the story of his growth as writer. It “causes me to reassess everything before and after, as if I’ve returned from the dead and find I’m walking the world again … . A new person stepped from that entangling, and the ‘I’ that was is no more.” In that space, the author begins “building” a book addressed to his only son, Joseph, off to pilot a helicopter in Iraq—a book in which the father attempts to tell the truth about who he is and how he has failed, untangling dreams from fears and steps from missteps.

And here, as in his first memoir, Woiwode doesn’t simply tell the truth—he also reflects on what it is to tell the truth, bringing to life the costs of moving into true speech: “Every sentence is a question of who I am over its course, an assemblage of words sorting out my consciousness at the moment, recording a newly forming identity, just as every act we undertake proves or disproves who we think we are. The faults in my sentences, or my scars, then, might be the only truthful record I carry into the future.” What he offers his son is his own experience of walking a path—confessing, turning, asking for forgiveness—intending to draw both son and reader toward our own scarred, generative places: “My interweaving is on purpose, with the hope of holding you in one of its stopped-moments for a momentary glimpse of your own infinity … . Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them.”

The primary story he untangles has to do with the decade of working on Beyond the Bedroom Wall. It’s a harrowing tale, stretching from the early years in New York working under Maxwell’s guidance, through a series of moves, breakdowns, and a separation from his wife, to the forging of a new relationship with his father and the completion of the novel just before his death. Along with Joseph, we are privy to the pressures scarring and twisting the novel’s attempts to reach beyond the mother’s death and recover the world buried with her. Writing the novel, like the struggle with the PTO, takes him a step from death—darkness and despair needing to be passed through in order to be overcome.

My echo here of the gospel story—Christ passing through death in order to overcome it—is deliberate and is touched on a number of times by Woiwode. He describes, years into his work on the novel, passing into a state so dark that he felt himself tugged away from life. His wife attempted to intervene, crying out for some sort of “spiritual connection” and eventually helping him realize that he was turning away from life out of a “rage … at all that had gone wrong from my mother’s death to the mental smashup of last year.” Slowly, as much in his writing as anywhere else, Woiwode began to acknowledge “a presence I’ve sensed most of my life, which I’ve tried to drink or smother or mock or smoke away.”

More of this story is told in the memoir-like interleavings of his meditation on the book of Acts (1993) and in fictional form in the novel Born Brothers (1988), but what rises to words in this book is the painful moment, before he had reconciled with his wife, when he realized that the “generative focus of the book,” obscured over the years, was the “spiritual state of its people.” And with that, the novel comes together—a vision drawn out of his own acknowledgment of the reality he had been avoiding, a step taken almost simultaneously with his dying father, both of them, in different ways, breaking “through the membranous reality we know as life and [coming] down hard on that eternal reality that takes the best and worst of us for good, death.” The novels and the memoirs are brilliant books that call for a reading as attentive as their writing—their rhythms insistent and elusive, their words rising again and again out of death, as rose the broken, triumphant Word.

Thomas Gardner is Cutchins Professor of English at Virginia Tech. His most recent book is A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson (Oxford Univ. Press). He is at work on a book entitled Poets and the Gospel of John.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In January of this year, King College in Bristol, Tennessee hosted the inauguration of the Buechner Institute, a faith-and-culture center directed by Dale Brown. Frederick Buechner himself was present, and when he addressed the audience, there was an expectant hush.

The guest of honor, without much preamble, told his listeners that for about ten years he had been unable to complete any substantial writing project. A very quiet auditorium became quieter still. Buechner went on to say that each day he goes out to his “Magic Kingdom,” the separate place—set apart from the house—where for decades he has done his writing. There he is surrounded by his magnificent collection of first editions and assorted objects of significance to him. He writes, yet nothing comes to fruition.

Recently, he said, he had sorted through the accumulated fragments of the last few years and found some bits that seemed to stand up on their own, enough to make up a small volume, a miscellany, to be published under the title The Yellow Leaves. He quoted the relevant lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

He then proposed to read a couple of the pieces he had salvaged, and did so, to great applause. And now, six months later, as promised, the book has been published by Westminster John Knox Press. “I can still write sentences and paragraphs,” Buechner says in the half-page introduction, “but for five or six years now [or ten, perhaps], I haven’t been able to write books. Maybe after more than thirty of them the well has at last run dry. Maybe, age eighty, I no longer have the right kind of energy. Maybe the time has simply come to stop. Whatever the reason, at least for the moment the sweet birds no longer sing.”

It’s a very slim volume, mostly consisting of short reminiscences, but also including a scene from an unfinished novel (its incompleteness much to be mourned, since it would have added to The Book of Bebb) and, at the end, a gathering of “Family Poems.”

Please don’t suppose that I’m bringing this book to your attention dutifully, hinting that you might want to acquire it for old times’ sake and place it on your Buechner shelf more or less unread and tactfully unmentioned. I love miscellanies, and this particular miscellany—uneven, of course—has much to offer. The two pieces Buechner read that day at King College, “Our Last Drive Together” and “Presidents I Have Known,” are both superb, and the contrast between them—in the way they proceed, in their imaginative register—helps to illuminate Buechner’s distinctive appeal.

Go back a moment to that ceremony at King College and put yourself in the crowd. You might well feel contradictory emotions, as I did, after Buechner’s opening confession. We expect this sort of candor from the author of Telling the Truth, and there was an irresistible pathos to the lines from Shakespeare, yet the prospect of hearing a writer we have much admired read fragments of unfinishable work is not exactly welcome. For a moment I was afraid for him and overcome by that awkward embarrassment which is in part, via empathy, a fear for oneself.

No need to worry, it turns out. “Our Last Drive Together,” which Buechner read with occasional asides, is a blackly, terribly funny account of a car-ride from Vermont, where Buechner’s aged mother (known as Kaki) had been visiting, to New York, where she lived. As so much of Buechner’s writing does, it touches on his father’s death “in a garage filled with bitter fumes when I was ten and Jamie [his brother] going on eight.” In his asides, as elsewhere, Buechner gave the impression that he blames his mother for his father’s suicide, though that isn’t explicit in this piece, which concludes with an account of Jamie going to their mother’s apartment after her death, having been summoned by the housekeeper. There is a mix of tenderness and savagery in Buechner’s account of his mother in old age—do the imperatives of truth-telling really extend this far?—and if, as I suspect, Buechner’s title is intended to remind us of Browning’s “The Last Ride Together,” there’s an extra twist to the sardonic knife. “What if,” Browning asks at the end of that poem, he and his beloved find themselves after death

Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,—
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, forever ride?

But if that twist is intended, certainly the writer feels the blade in his own gut.

“Presidents I Have Known” (the title delightfully self-mocking) is a dreamy piece that is driven by leaps of association and insight. Buechner’s encounters with three presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower—frame childhood memories that cover some of the same territory touched on in “The Last Ride Together,” but more expansively here and with a different tone. What’s most striking about the piece is the combination of an exquisite eye for absurdity with a lyric poet’s momentary ecstasy and an unabashed expression of feeling that 99 percent of all “serious” writers would avoid for fear of being dismissed as sentimental.

Ah, you say, I’m sorry that Buechner’s father killed himself, but another piece circling around that loss? I don’t think so. Well, I understand the reaction, and you’ll have to decide for yourself. But I’m awfully glad that this piece didn’t remain buried in a heap of fragments in Buechner’s hideaway. It’s full of the rich strangeness of our lives, beginning with his memory of seeing FDR in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C., when Buechner was about six years old. There was a moment when the president stood framed by the doors of an elevator, “standing between two men,” each of them supporting an arm. “He was the most important man in the world. But I could see with my own eyes that if he didn’t have those two men to help, he would be helpless.”

Then to Paris in 1956, where Buechner and his wife are taken by her parents for dinner at the fabled Tour d’Argent. At the restaurant there’s a sudden bustle, signaling the arrival of President Harry Truman and his wife, Bess, accompanied by a group of French dignitaries. The angle of vision is such that, after Truman is seated, Buechner finds that for a moment he is able to look through the president’s “thick-lensed glasses” and, “more wonderful still, … look through them at Bess.” And “the Bess he saw was of course not the Bess I saw”—”stout, dowdy, making the best of things as she tried to think of what to say next to their fancy hosts”—”but the fact that we were both seeing her through the same glasses made it almost seem so.” There’s a second revelation later in the meal, when all the lights in the restaurant are briefly turned off. Through the windows Notre Dame is visible, and the Seine, “like a river of stars. The glittering necklace of lights along the quai. The April moon”:

All in a moment it was laid out before us for the sake of that one small man from Missouri with his double-breasted suit and wire-rimmed glasses and the woman beside him he referred to as the Boss.

And finally Eisenhower, whose inaction as president on various fronts dismayed Buechner but whose smile charmed him: “It was an utterly spontaneous smile. It was a smile that held nothing back.” (Here you can imagine the scorn of sophisticates for Buechner’s sentimentality.) At an Exeter commencement where Eisenhower was the speaker (his grandson David was among the graduates), and where Buechner was to give the invocation, they talked about the stray dogs that manage somehow to make their appearance at such ceremonies: “We had our little laugh together, President Eisenhower and I, and for the last time I got to see that smile that made me almost believe that maybe everything would turn out all right in the end even so.”

That is our wildly improbable hope—that all will be well—and it runs through this miscellany from beginning to end.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Prior to reading this book, why did I know nothing, basically, about the Hutchinson family? And, dear reader, why (in all likelihood) don’t you? I’m a historian of social movements, including the anti-slavery movement; I study and love American musical history; and just about anything that involves the history of religion, race, and reform or civil rights will draw my attention. The Hutchinsons provide the perfect vehicle to weave together all those stories. Somehow, though, their history had escaped my attention.

Let us be thankful, then, that it caught Scott Gac’s eye. A double bassist as well as a historian (so the book jacket tells us), Gac sheds fresh light on the well-worn topics of the culture and politics of the anti-slavery movement—and utopian reform sentiment more generally—in antebellum America. He details the history of an antebellum northern Baptist family who “sang for freedom” in the anti-slavery movement of the 1840s, gaining some wealth and fame in the process. Like all good modern musical groups, they stirred listeners, counted their box-office take, slept around, quarreled, broke up, ventured on some ill-advised solo engagements (at one of which Lincoln slumbered), and then staged too many nostalgic reunion tours. Whatever their foibles and internal conflicts—of which there were certainly many—they played their modest part in emotionally invigorating the most important social reform movement of American history; and beyond that, they were about as close to being true racial egalitarians as it was possible to be in the antebellum era. They refused to play segregated halls, and their message was radical enough that they were never able to sing south of Baltimore. (Even Philadelphia proved dicey.)

I learned something on nearly every page of this book, no small praise given the familiarity of the larger topics Gac explores as he follows the saga of the large and extended Hutchinson family. The older brothers stayed at home on the New Hampshire farm, but they envied the success of Asa, John, and little sister Abby (known as “Angel”), the musical stars who got to tour northern cities and hang with the celebrities of abolitionism. The Hutchinson singers played on their image as wholesome farmers to further their professional opportunities and hype their singing engagements. Gac also tells us about the market revolution in antebellum New Hampshire, whose motto—”The Old Granite State”—provided inspiration for one of the Hutchinsons’ signature tunes. We learn much, moreover, about what it was like to be a professional musician in antebellum America. And we see how the Hutchinsons both coopted and resisted the rising racist culture of minstrelsy—to the extent that one minstrel group worked up a Hutchinson family parody in their act. Minstrelsy and anti-slavery (and anti-racist) musical acts battled in antebellum culture. I would have assumed minstrelsy won hands down, but the contest seems to have been closer than that, thanks in large part to the Hutchinsons. (That being said, I think Gac ultimately understates the vast and insidious influence of minstrelsy in antebellum northern cities. On the minstrel stage, even Uncle Tom, symbol of Christ-like suffering in the best-selling novel, was transformed into a happy darky).

The Hutchinsons took tunes from many traditions, religious and secular. Even the most seemingly apolitical of antebellum religious movements—the Millerites, soon to be gathering to await the return of Jesus—inadvertently contributed a tune (“The Old Church Yard”) that the Hutchinsons converted to antislavery purposes, to enormously popular effect. Whatever their Baptist theology, the Hutchinsons were not much interested in faith without works. They were obsessed with cleansing the body, personal and political: “Enslavement by calomel, rum, southerners, and every other abusive element demanded an immediate purge.” The Hutchinsons sang of resistance to all forms of slavery: “‘Let us, the Hutchinsons family, tune our voices for the cause of freedom, for the overthrow of slavery, for the promotion of Teetotalism and every moral and Christian act,'” Asa Hutchinson said. The last remaining singing Hutchinson even contributed an anti-cigarette tune in the early 20th century, decrying the “little white slaver.” Purification was a constant struggle.

What, ultimately, was the effect of the Hutchinsons? Gac expresses his argument with admirable clarity:

The magnitude of the Hutchinson Family Singers’ success during the 1840s suggests three generalizations: 1) that antislavery, though always a highly contentious issue, was nonetheless growing more popular in the North; 2) that the Hutchinsons’ medium, the parlor song, and the aesthetic of their music broke through ideology and political barriers; but at the same time, 3) that their performance (and its reception) revealed the limits of reform in song.

Those limitations already were becoming evident in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its genuine (albeit highly sentimentalized) anti-slavery message being watered down by a colonizationist ending, leading Asa Hutchinson to surmise that “the famous antislavery statement ‘Am I not a man and brother?’ had changed—’Am I not a man and Uncle?'” Nonetheless, Asa celebrated the book in his melody “Little Topsy’s Song,” which even Frederick Douglass commended. On occasion the Hutchinsons failed to heed the distinction between “pure” and “political” anti-slavery, at one point even singing at a meeting to drum up support for Kentucky compromiser Henry Clay (drawing a harsh rebuke from Garrison and Douglass), but they soon repented from this particular instance of backsliding.

What did the Hutchinsons’ music sound like? Even after reading this book, I’m not entirely sure. That could be a failing of the book; or it could be simply the difficulty of writing about music history in an era before recording. Gac writes that the family “created a new kind of ‘sacred music,'” an “antiminstrelsy that hushed critics who feared the immorality of entertainment, challenged the European bias of their listeners, and attracted throngs of fans with uplifting reform messages built around familiar tunes.” They took the “well-liked melodies of blackface minstrelsy and of church hymns,” added their own lyrics, and “harmonized chorus refrains, the standard in today’s popular music but quite new to antebellum America.” One longs for a bit more of the context of the music, especially church music, from the era, and more descriptive terms for the sound that emerged from all this. That’s a tall order for an author who already has accomplished much, but it’s frustrating that at the end of the work, I can’t hear in my mind the music of the family. Perhaps too that is because the music of the Hutchinsons gradually gave way to the sentimentalism of Stephen Foster, making it easier to imagine the sound of a kinder and gentler minstrelsy and harder to hear lyrics such as these, from the Hutchinson classic “Get Off the Track”:

Let the Ministers and ChurchesLeave Behind sectarian lurches;Jump on board the Car of FreedomEre it be too late to need them.Sound the Alarm! Sound the Alarm!>Sound the Alarm! Pulpit’s thunder!Ere too late, you see your blunder.

Or the following verse from “The Old Granite State,” which contemporaries of the Hutchinsons loved but which comes across to us like agitprop:

Yes we’re friends of emancipationAnd we’ll sing the proclamation,‘Til it echoes through our nation from the Old Granite StateThat the Tribe of JesseThat the Tribe of JesseThat the Tribe of Jesse are the friends of Equal Rights.

It’s not hard to imagine the music’s power, though. As a religious newspaper noted of their early singing at antislavery conventions in 1843, “The music of the Hutchinsons carries all before it … . Speechifying, even of the better sort, did less to interest, purify and subdue minds, than this irresistible anti-slavery music,” garnering interest in the movement as well as followers for the Liberty and, later, Free Soil political parties. Here, one immediately leaps to the freedom songs of the civil rights era, with the SNCC Freedom Singers serving as the analogue to the Hutchinsons. The way powerful music can embolden a social movement comes across clearly, from the 1840s to the 1960s.

But even the most sublime music harnessed to the most righteous purposes cannot bring about the millennium. The Hutchinsons learned the lesson of another musical sensation from a much later era: you can’t always get what you want. Like many other utopian reformers, the Hutchinsons had condemned slavery as the root of all evils, and considered its extirpation a means to the millennium. Eventually, and to their sorrow, Gac writes, they saw that the end of slavery had “removed a foundational evil from American society without bringing about the apocalyptic change that the Hutchinsons and many of their antislavery friends had once predicted.” The end of slavery did not bring justice for African Americans, and the antislavery cohort “downsized their vision of emancipation,” still recognizing it as “part of a national story of progress, but no longer a story of eternal salvation.”

By the 1890s, when “talk of the millennium had suddenly become quaint,” the dreams that inspired antebellum utopian reform had run out of steam, Gac argues. In their place came latter-day forms of utopianism (left unmentioned by Gac) with more of an eye toward political economy (as seen in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as well as in the emerging social gospel of Washington Gladden). In their place, too, and more emphasized in this book, arose the kind of skeptical pragmatism outlined in George Frederickson’s Inner Civil War and, more recently, memorably described in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. As Gac sees it, the distance from William Lloyd Garrison to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ambrose Bierce was more than the few decades that separated their major works. Like many of their abolitionist generation, the Hutchinsons lived from the first era to the second, moving from the vanguard in the 1840s to the nostalgically quaint (at least in the eyes of some northeastern intellectuals) by the time of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. But the music of idealism, including social gospel hymns, carried forward some of the tradition of harmonizing utopia. And the tradition of singers and groups mixing social reform with professional opportunity survived the Hutchinsons. Listen to the Staples Singers, or to Mavis Staples’ recent CD My Own Eyes, and you’ll hear their echoes.

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is the author most recently of Freedom’s Coming: How Religious Culture Shaped the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press). He runs the blog Religion in American History at http://usreligion.blogspot.com.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

What can Christian theology bring to music?” In chatty theological circles, a lot of folks seem to be asking that kind of question, but no one is asking it in greater breadth, with more enthusiasm—and footnotes—than the British theologian and pianist Jeremy Begbie. In the twenty years since his Aberdeen dissertation (Theology, Ontology, and the Philosophy of Art), Begbie has prodded this discussion with Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (1991); Beholding Glory: Incarnation through the Arts (2000); and Theology, Music and Time (2000); as well as numerous articles, chapters in other books, and lectures on both sides of the Atlantic. He is also the founder of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. Housed at Cambridge, the Institute’s purpose is to “discover and demonstrate ways in which the arts can contribute toward the renewal of Christian theology.” In January 2009 he will take up a post at Duke Divinity School as the inaugural Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology.

Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music is in many ways Begbie’s magnum opus. Incorporating expanded versions of passages he first presented elsewhere along with new materials, the book received prepublication endorsem*nts from Rowan Williams, N. T. Wright, and Nicholas Wolterstorff (among others), and their enthusiasm testifies not only to their admiration for Begbie’s writing but also to the importance Begbie’s subject carries for many influential figures today. They are convinced that Christians should think hard about the arts in general and music in particular. There needs to be a theology of it, and Resounding Truth is Begbie’s outline of what that theology might be, or how “God’s truth might ‘sound’ and ‘re-sound’ in the world of music.”

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about all that reverberation. Begbie is an important writer who has thought about this subject for some time. His work merits careful consideration. But while Resounding Truth contains sections of real interest, its factual missteps and blinkered view combine to weaken the book’s central points. Indeed, at least for me, Resounding Truth is a good argument for why the whole business of “theology and the arts” needs to be greeted with more skepticism than it has generally received.

Begbie’s thought largely grows out of two areas: his understanding of the role music plays in contemporary life, and the notion of a divinely ordained “cosmic order”—a notion combining the Pythagorean/Platonic “Great Tradition” and the acoustic phenomenon of the overtone series. But his analyses in both areas are problematic. Take this passage, for example:

Few doubt that music can call forth the deepest things of the human spirit and affect behavior at the most profound levels. Anyone who has parented a teenager will not need to be told this—study after study has shown that music often plays a pivotal part in the formation of young people’s identity, self-image, and patterns of behavior.

Well, no. Not really, or not quite. Music’s proven effect upon behavior isn’t profound; it’s actually pretty trivial. The tempo of particular kinds of music played in particular kinds of grocery stores can affect the speed in which shoppers will generally move through the aisles (but it isn’t particularly good at selling individual products: funny animated critters are better—think of that lizard selling car insurance). And like the Chippendale furniture and brass sconces in the law office that suggest sober stability, music can be used as décor. As décor it can do all the things that décor can do: set mood, play upon cultural memory, suggest appropriate behavior—but music cannot dictate behavior any more than the furniture can get you to sign a contract if you don’t want to. And relationships between parents and peers play the pivotal role in an adolescent’s formation, not music. Music is a means of expressing those relationships.

The idea that music profoundly affects behavior is part of the “Great Tradition.” Begbie’s discussion of Greek ideas about music is much better than many: he recognizes that what modern readers understand as “music” isn’t necessarily what is meant when we read “music” in translations of ancient texts. Many times “music” refers to notions stemming from the mythology of divine number (divine because they are changeless) and has nothing to do with the world of musical pieces that is familiar to us (or to the Greeks themselves). But he slips in his understanding of the mechanics of Pythagorean intonation and fails to deal with its inherent contradictions (for instance, the tuning system is not concerned with pitch but instead with the intervals, and the system yields two differently sized half-steps, not one). While he gives a glance to the complaints musicians have leveled at the Pythagoreans since Aristoxenus, he fails to grasp that these complaints are not arguments between sensualists and intellectuals but between people of rival intellectual positions. (Begbie relies heavily for much of his argument about the legacy of the Pythagoreans on the work of Daniel Chua—perhaps best known for describing the opening chords of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as “the testicl*s of the hero”—and his topic would have been better served with a more skeptical use of Chua’s problematic analyses.)

The overtone series is an acoustic phenomenon. Produce any pitch, and that pitch will itself generate a series of pitches above it. It is for musicians what the color spectrum is for artists. Believing that a Christian theology of music should grow out of a “full-blooded doctrine of creation that recognizes our embeddedness in a given, common, physical environment,” Begbie seeks to ground Christian music in the overtone series. But here he again missteps. He seems to believe that the overtone series produces the same tones as are constructed through Pythagorean tuning. It doesn’t. The thirds are markedly different. While being careful not to argue that the harmonic language of Western Europe has a kind of theological superiority to music of other cultures, Begbie does suggest that there is direct relationship between the overtone series and the harmonic syntax of tonal music—that the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords so important in harmonic tonality are implicit in the overtone series itself. But this is not at all the case. Put very simply, if C is our fundamental, a pitch a perfect fourth above that C, or F, isn’t found within the first sixteen partials of the overtone series at all. Without that F, we have neither the dominant seventh chord (upon which the whole syntax of harmonic tonality is based), nor the subdominant chord. Instead of an F, we find an “out of tune” F sharp at the eleventh partial, flat from an equally tempered F sharp by almost a quartertone. In order for the pitches of the overtone series to be musically useful in tonal music, at least one very important pitch must be altered according to purely culturally derived aesthetic criteria. We have to flatten that eleventh partial. It’s not too far off the mark to say that tonal music exists in spite of the harmonic series, not because of it.

For most of its existence, the music of Christianity hasn’t been tonal, but modal. Except for discussions of several contemporary composers, Begbie limits his musical world to that of harmonic tonality, or the music of Western Europe composed from the 17th to the beginning of the 20th century. There is no mention of the motets of the Ars Nova (perhaps our culture’s most sophisticated musical/theological artifacts), Pope John XXII’s 1324 bull against polyphony, Docta sanctorum partum (which helps contextualize Zwingli’s complaints about music two centuries later), or the Council of Trent’s long debate over music. Begbie is not only largely silent about music in medieval Christianity; he also ignores more recent important Roman Catholic materials about theology and music. No mention is made of either Pope Pius X’s 1903 motu proprio “Tra le Sollecitudini” (which lays out the character of sacred music) or the reforms of Vatican II.

Because his purpose is to show how Christian wisdom can deepen our understanding of the world of music, and vice versa, Begbie’s readers would have been helped if he had discussed two occasions before the 17th century where theologically grounded interventions dramatically affected musical content. Around the middle of the 12th century, the Cistercians began to edit the Gregorian chant they had inherited from the Benedictines, purging a number of chants of their extended melismas and suppressing accidentals in others, thinking that the music exceeded the ranges of the ten-stringed harp mandated in Psalm 143:9. The notes themselves violated Holy Writ, or so they thought. In 1570, at the urging of his Catholic intelligentsia, France’s Charles IX created the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, one of the purposes of which was to conform music in his kingdom to the dictates of Begbie’s Great Tradition. The Cistercian reforms resulted in a repertory of chant that can only be called mutilated. With the exception of the works of the Calvinist Claude Le Jeune, the mandates of the French Académie resulted in works of leaden dullness.

As these instances suggest, we don’t need a Balkanized theology, theologies of “this” and “that.” Theology is for the most part ill equipped to dictate the proportions between a post and lintel, or rotating sorghum with alfalfa, or the size of the interval of a major third. Instead its purpose, as Paul Holmer frequently said, is to make things like belief in God, and repentance, and faith and hope and love plausible.

Like the Cistercians and the members of the Académie before him, Begbie argues against the position that understands music as “essentially a human construction and human expression, earthed in nothing bigger than the ideology of a culture, a social group, or the desires of the individual.” But I think Begbie is wrong. Like grass huts and Coca Cola bottles, music is something we humans construct out of our environment. And what is and what is not considered to be a musical sound, a kind of sound that is found in a piece of music and distinguishes it from noise, is a cultural function.

Contra the “Great Tradition,” music isn’t a privileged form of communication that unlocks mysteries nothing else will reveal. Certainly music is a powerful medium of emotional self-discovery and expression, but so too are poetry and storytelling. And the Chinese have an ancient and sophisticated tradition of porcelain appreciation.

Michael Linton is professor of music at Middle Tennessee State University.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The essays collected in Geography and Revolution explore two broad themes: the geography of revolution and geography in revolution. The former uses the discipline of geography to better understand the processes at work in various revolutions—technological, social, political. The latter focuses on how geographic knowledge and concepts are used or presented in the context of the various types of revolution. The volume’s editors, David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, argue persuasively that while economic, political, and sociological explanations abound for revolutions, these explanations have been lacking when it comes to questions of place and geography. In fact, most revolutions have been portrayed as virtually “placeless.” This collection of papers offers a corrective.

Geography and Revolution is divided into three parts. Most of the chapters in the first section, “Geography and Scientific Revolution: Space, Place and Natural Knowledge,” will be accessible only to those with a background in the history of science. The chapter by John Henry is of most importance for setting the context for the rest of the volume. Arguing that scientific practices develop within specific cultural contexts, Henry compares the national scientific institutions and practices of the English and French in the 17th century and ties their differences to the distinct religious and political histories of the two nations. In England, experiments were perceived to simply reveal matters of fact absent any theorizing on cause. This perspective was identified with the philosophy of the Church of England, which supported a notion of doctrinal minimalism and “common sense.” Under this philosophy, experimentation was seen to produce knowledge that all parties could agree upon, not going beyond undeniable claims that were obvious. In contrast, French science advanced through the use of experimentation that served the purpose of building larger theoretical constructs. And these national differences played out in contrasting perspectives on the nature of matter and force, but also on the nature of God and such metaphysical concepts as causality. This particular chapter fits well within larger debates over epistemology in the sciences, providing an example of how cultural context shapes the practice of what has been considered the “universalistic” practice of science.

The second part of the collection, “Geography and Technical Revolution,” is the most interesting and accessible and builds on the perspectival theme. These chapters illustrate how what is taken to be “obvious” or “factual” is to some degree dependent on the physical place from which the viewer sees the world. Jerry Brotton presents a case study on the impact of the printing of maps on depictions of the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. Unsurprisingly, portrayals of the indigenous people of the Cape were framed by the purposes of the Europeans doing the framing. At the time of the initial maps, the Cape of Good Hope was seen as a commercial end, peripheral to early European travelers with no discrete identity. Maps were not neutral when they depicted this region, but consistently portrayed the Khoisan people of the area as dangerous, based on their failure to participate in the purposes for which Europeans came to the Cape.

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift push the reader further in self-consciousness of perspective and “place” in their discussion of “Revolutions in the Times.” Sharply critical of technological determinism, they suggest that changing conceptions of time—and changes in the technology associated with measuring and marking time—were closely connected to “communities of practice,” the real-life contexts where people lived and worked and negotiated the meaning of their lives. Glennie and Thrift capture the non-static nature of the relationship between technology and the practice of living but also show how practices can become “reified”—how, for example, familiar practices such as those that involve time become so “deeply grooved into the body” that they seem intuitive, natural, universal.

In the last paper in this section, James Ryan addresses the impact of photography in the Victorian era—a revolutionary era in visualization. Victorian science saw the photograph as a new form of evidence. A photograph, unlike a painting, was regarded as “true.” Furthermore, photography appeared to dissolve the perceived distance between “there” and “here.” Ryan’s case study shows, however, that this new technology, far from being neutral, served as a tool and extension of the culture, particularly in furthering the exploration and conquest of territory—the extension of scientific empiricism in the justification of Western imperialism.

These three papers will nudge readers to be more self-reflective about the place from which they see the world, something always needed by those who sit in the seats of powerful nations. Brotton’s case study pushes us to become more self-conscious of the place in which we stand when we see and portray other people and places in the world. My colleague Barbara Omolade speaks of “the Ephesians moment” in Scripture, where it is evident that we need all Christian perspectives from around the world to grasp the full richness of the gospel. Glennie and Thrift make us more self-conscious of those “communities of practice” that have become reified. Through their case study we can gain insight into our potential for mistaking what is relative for what is universal and unchanging. Ryan makes us more self-conscious that the technology we use is never neutral. Whenever we use technology, we stand in a particular place and have a particular purpose which frames its use. These three chapters are humbling in making us aware that we have only partial knowledge—that in this present age we see “through a glass darkly,” as the Apostle Paul wrote.

Part 3, “Geography and Political Revolution,” reinforces the overarching attempt of the book to delve deeper into the complexity of the perspectival nature of knowledge. Robert Mayhew’s chapter on geography at Oxford in the 1600s, Michael Heffernan’s work on geography in the period of the French Revolution, and David Livingstone’s analysis of geographical writings in the era of the American Revolution all illustrate that geographic understanding is always embedded within the context of place and time. Early geographical writings and methods at Oxford reflected theological debates going on in Europe between Calvinist and Arminian perspectives as well as contested political alliances. French geographer Edme Mentelle’s writings appeared sterile and descriptive, with no explanation or theoretical perspective, in an effort to avoid politically controversial theoretical issues within the unpredictable setting of the French Revolution. American geographical writings at the time of the Revolution, in some respects quite diverse, share a common theme: the unique nature of North America as a place for the development of a superior culture and morality. Here geography was appropriated to forge a national identity, distinct from that of Europe and indeed superior in its landscape. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was an apologetic for American nature and human nature on the North American continent. Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography gave prominence to New England culture as the model for American character. Timothy Dwight valorized American landscapes in which the qualities of the New Earth could be seen. Unsurprisingly, this grandson of Jonathan Edwards believed with Jedidiah Morse that the landscape and culture of New England best expressed the American identity. This last section of the volume illustrates the theme of geography in revolution, the use of geographic information for the purposes of a particular revolution. Certainly we could easily find contemporary examples to illustrate the same point, and these chapters offer models with which to assess the agendas framing geographic information in the present.

Geography and Revolution is a challenging book. Primarily intended for a specialized academic audience, these essays will also profit the interested general reader, providing a glimpse into the way the discipline of geography views the world and insights into the roots of contemporary debates on the perspectival nature of knowledge.

Janel Curry is professor of geography and Dean for Research and Scholarship at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If ever there was a true David and Goliath story in American business, this was it. A scrappy investigative reporter, a woman no less, took aim at John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s richest and one of its most powerful men. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was the greatest of the monopolistic trusts of the late 19th century, a company that crushed its competitors, pressured the railroads to give it special rates, and generally strode like a colossus across American business life. When other oil companies or even ambitious state prosecutors whined, Rockefeller simply brushed them off. But Ida Tarbell, armed only with her pen and dogged persistence, somehow nosed her way inside his company, penetrating its code of silence and exposing the ruthless and at times illegal methods it had used to dominate the oil industry. Her 1904 exposé, disarmingly entitled The History of the Standard Oil Company, laid the groundwork for the first serious challenge to Rockefeller’s hegemony and for the Supreme Court’s epochal 1911 decision breaking the company up.

In Taking on the Trust: How an Investigative Journalist Brought Down Standard Oil, Steve Weinberg, himself an investigative journalist, recounts this great story as a tale of intertwined destinies. Both hero and villain were shaped by the wilds of Western Pennsylvania—and the rush to capitalize on the black gold that seemed to ooze from every pore in the landscape in the late 19th century. Eighteen years older than his future nemesis, Rockefeller was the son of a ne’er-do-well father who moved from job to job and town to town, selling the latest patent medicine and secretly marrying his housekeeper-mistress without ever divorcing Rockefeller’s mother. Rockefeller left high school shortly before graduation to help support his family, working with a firm that arranged deliveries of commodities and eventually starting his own firm. When the oil rush began, Rockefeller jumped in, and by the late 1860s he had made it his exclusive focus. He soon started buying up refineries, offering his competitors a choice of cash or stock in his growing company.

Tarbell’s family didn’t exactly come from the other side of the tracks, but they ended up there. Tarbell’s father moved by himself to Iowa hoping to make a better life for his family, but his plans were thrown into turmoil by the 1857 depression. When oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, he hustled back. Recognizing that the oil would need to be transported, he started a business that made wooden barrels for Pennsylvania crude. Although he prospered at first, the advent of steel barrels diminished his market, so he shifted to buying and leasing oil wells. It was this business that brought him into conflict with Rockefeller. Tarbell’s father refused to sell to Standard Oil, siding with the ragtag band of independents who protested Rockefeller’s arm-twisting methods. As Tarbell recalled many years later, her once light-hearted father turned increasingly sullen and depressed. He “no longer played his jew’s harp,” she wrote, “nor sang to my little sister on the arm of his chair the verses we had been brought up on.”

One the most complicated features of Rockefeller’s very complicated character was his deep, lifelong, Baptist faith. The same man who could be utterly ruthless in his business relationships spent a portion of each day on his knees, devotedly attended church and kept the Sabbath, and gave generously to Christian causes. According to Weinberg, Rockefeller believed that his business success was an earthly reward for his faith, and that he knew what was best for his industry. Although Weinberg occasionally drifts into caricature—as when he repeatedly and anachronistically applies the 20th-century term “fundamentalist” to Rockefeller’s 19th-century youth and early manhood—there is no question that Rockefeller’s deep faith stood in awkward tension with his business ethics.

Tarbell too was surrounded by religion, but her relationship to the Christian faith of her family was far more ambivalent. She developed a fascination with biology during her college years at Allegheny College, which raised questions for her about the creation accounts she had heard in church. After teaching high school for two years in Poland, Ohio, Tarbell started writing small articles for The Chautauquan, the magazine published by the Chautauqua Assembly, a center of Christian learning in New York state that regularly featured talks by evangelical luminaries. (Although Weinberg does not mention this, a few years later Chautauqua would be a regular stomping ground for William Jennings Bryan). At Chautauqua, Tarbell worked closely with the magazine’s editor, a Methodist minister named Theodore Flood, but she later abruptly quit following a mysterious falling out with Flood so painful that even her closest friends never learned the details. Something “unspeakable” happened, Weinberg says, speculating that it “was probably of a sexual nature.” This can’t have helped her wavering faith, and she seems to have been an agnostic for the rest of her life.

After The Chautauquan, Tarbell sailed to France to research Madame Roland, a French noblewoman from the Revolutionary period whom Ida had become fascinated with. Weinberg speculates briefly about whether Tarbell, who never married, had romantic attachments to men, women, or both in Paris, but he focuses on her development as a writer. Her first big break came when Scribner’s accepted one of her short stories, and she started writing articles for McClure’s, the famous progressive era magazine with which her name will forever be associated. She later wrote gushing but painstakingly researched biographies of Napoleon and Lincoln that were first serialized in McClure’s, then published as books, and made her famous. But she never stopped thinking about Rockefeller. In a letter to her parents, she described the buildings she saw from her ship along the coastline of Belgium as looking “exactly like Standard Oil tanks.” She “grew pale to think of that combination swallowing Belgium too.”

Weinberg is at his best chronicling Tarbell’s innovative efforts to uncover new information about her subjects: setting up shop in the Washington, D.C.-area house of a man who had assembled a trove of Napoleon memorabilia; drinking tea with Lincoln’s son Robert; persuading a Rockefeller associate to talk about the internal workings of Standard Oil. Her exposé on Standard Oil, Weinberg points out, reflected a shift in McClure’s and other magazines toward the aggressive style that Teddy Roosevelt, who was initially a critic, dubbed “muckrake” journalism.

Weinberg doesn’t delve quite as deeply into Rockefeller and Standard Oil. He never really explains, for instance, just what a corporate trust was. The trust was a clever legal maneuver perfected by Rockefeller’s lawyers to circumvent state law restrictions on the multistate Standard Oil behemoth. Because states could only regulate business within their borders, and corporations were not permitted to own stock in other corporations for much of the 19th century, Rockefeller could not set up Standard Oil as a single giant corporation. His lawyers solved this problem by creating a separate corporation in each state. Voting control in each corporation was then transferred to a separate entity, the trust, whose trustees were Rockefeller and his associates. Rockefeller converted the trust to a New Jersey corporation after New Jersey (which was the Delaware of this era) kindly changed its corporate laws to make them more hospitable to the Gilded Age monopolies.

Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was a true monopoly. It put the squeeze on competitors, threatening to destroy them unless they sold out. It negotiated for rebates from the railroads, which wasn’t by itself problematic, but it “brazenly also received a separate, secretly negotiated, unpublicized rebate from the railroads for every barrel of competitors’ barrels they carried.” When it became clear that oil pipelines were a cheaper way to transport oil than the rails, Rockefeller took control of the pipelines and cut off his competitors’ access.

Although Weinberg doesn’t actually get to Tarbell’s confrontation with Standard Oil until late in the book, his account of her quest is electrifying. So persuasive were her findings that when the government finally took on Standard Oil, starting with a federal antitrust action filed by the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis in 1906, it used Tarbell’s book as a roadmap, relying on many of the incidents she had uncovered. Nearly five years and 12,000 pages of documentation later, the Supreme Court lowered the boom, holding that Standard Oil had violated the antitrust laws and must be broken up. The decision hardly left Rockefeller impoverished (selling his stock actually may have made him richer), and the separate oil companies that emerged from Standard Oil avoided competing with one another for many years. But Tarbell’s work transformed Rockefeller’s public reputation. And the breakup of Standard Oil is still seen as one of the signal achievements of American antitrust law.

Do investigative reporters like Tarbell still exist? The answer, happily, is yes. A gutsy, skeptical story in Fortune magazine by reporter Bethany McLean was the first hint that Enron was not the upstanding company it purported to be. The spreadsheets of finance scholars further confirm that reporters still follow the lead of their patron saint. In a recent analysis of how corporate fraud comes to light, Alexander Dyck, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales found that, even in a corporate environment now policed by plaintiffs’ lawyers, whistle blowers, and government regulators, journalists are the first ones to detect corporate fraud 14 percent of the time.

The oil companies haven’t disappeared either, and as they rake in near-record profits during the current economic crisis ($10.9 billion for Exxon Mobil, the successor to Standard Oil of New Jersey, in the first quarter of 2008 alone), they are being attacked from all sides. The most popular response, imposing a tax on “excess” profits, would make things worse, not better: developing nations sometimes try this kind of strategy, and it usually encourages companies to disguise how much they earn. Ironically enough, back in his own era, Rockefeller might have taken matters into his own hands, cutting the price of his oil for the benefit of his hurting customers, much as J.P. Morgan personally steadied the markets by providing liquidity during a financial crisis in 1907. But now that we no longer have devout monopolists atop American business, the only realistic solution to our oil woes may be to invite the oil companies to keep charging as much as the market will bear, in the hope it will force the rest of us to finally get serious about using less oil.

David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author most recently of Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

For generations people have hated economists, who seem to smile when delivering the bad news that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you increase the minimum wage by X percent, they warn, Y percent of teen workers will lose their jobs. If you expand government subsidies to families without health insurance, like Scrooge they caution that millions will stop buying health insurance on their own and let taxpayers pick up the tab. If you cut interest rates to spur investment, you’re liable to unleash the beast of inflation, they admonish.

At the same time many people stand in awe of economists. If a slew of economists sign a petition saying that some public policy will have a host of dire side effects, the media and even politicians are likely to pay attention. If sociologists, anthropologists or even psychologists were to do the same, it’s possible that no one would take note. (The U.S. President has a Council of Economic Advisors but not a Council of Sociological Advisors.) If a survey says four out of five economists recommend a policy, it’s almost like hearing that four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum to their patients who chew gum.

Why do people pay attention to economists so much? Perhaps it’s because economists deal with big, important things that people really care about—money, for instance—or because economists seem so analytical, unswayed by passion, letting empirical evidence and formal models answer questions for them. Rather than relying on gut feelings or using a lot of fuzzy adjectives, they tend to give precise magnitudes when they offer advice—and their tools seem to be pretty good at plausibly isolating cause and effect. Perhaps people pay attention simply because most economists are extremely smart. To receive a Ph.D. in economics you’ve got to earn a stratospherically high score on your gres, learn a lot of advanced math and statistics, and endure a gauntlet of grueling graduate courses. The hurdles to entering the profession are plainly daunting, and only obviously intelligent people with an immense amount of sheer mental stamina can clear them.

In The Making of an Economist, Redux, David Colander of Middlebury College takes a close look at how the nation’s top economics graduate programs turn a select group of bright students into the analytical economists that society has come to hate, yet revere. The results will be of special interest to undergraduate students who are contemplating graduate work in economics. In fact, the book updates an earlier (1990) work that became must reading for those considering taking the plunge. But the volume also provides fascinating fare for the general reader. Colander proceeds by analyzing a survey administered to graduate students at seven top schools—Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale—comparing these results to an earlier survey and then sitting down with small groups of students to probe their experiences, attitudes, and observations in greater detail. The closing reflections include blunt observations on the process and profession by Colander; the widely respected macro-economist Robert Solow, a Nobel Laureate; and Arjo Klamer, a disgruntled “heterodox” critic of mainstream economics.

The first finding that may surprise many outsiders is that economists are not politically conservative—although they are far more conservative than other academic social scientists. Other social sciences implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) ban political conservatives from their ranks. If you admit to being a conservative or show the telltale signs, you will be actively dissuaded from entering these professions at many key steps, and your odds of getting an academic job will be slim. Economists don’t engage in this form of abuse. Rather, as Colander puts it, the field’s uncivil behavior is “mathematical hazing”: setting needlessly high mathematical standards, lauding them, and using them to show off and to keep out less analytical thinkers. This hazing apparently favors neither political party, so graduate economics programs attract a spectrum of intellectuals, although they actually tilt to the left. Among the students surveyed by Colander, 48 percent consider themselves to be liberal, 24 percent moderate and 16 percent conservative. (Surveys of the political affiliations of professional economists show a similar range.) Colander finds that these students become more conservative as they progress through their graduate economics training—and are more politically conservative than their cohorts from two decades ago, who included a noticeable contingent of self-identified radicals.

This relative balance may be the key reason the public pays more attention to economists than to other social scientists: the field has meaningful debates. Keep this in mind the next time you hear, for example, that 80 percent of economists favor eliminating or cutting ethanol subsidies, that almost 90 percent advocate eliminating existing barriers to international trade, that 90 percent are against policies to restrict outsourcing of work to foreign countries, that by almost five to one economists believe that the typical Wal-Mart generates more benefits to society than costs, or that two-thirds of economists favor granting parents vouchers that can be used at any school, public or private. (I found these very results in two recent surveys.) Given the ideological diversity of economists, such instances of consensus are all the more impressive.

Ironically, these points of consensus have been reached mainly by using fairly simple economic models and straight-forward empirical evidence. Yet the whole point of graduate school is to learn how to come up with newer, cleverer models and statistical approaches—and, it seems, to look down one’s nose at the low-brow economics taught in undergraduate textbooks. You thought that economics was all about Milton Friedman vs. John Maynard Keynes? Think again. Mundane issues like monetary and fiscal policy aren’t abstract enough to attract much attention from graduate faculties and students. In fact, Colander’s respondents explain that macroeconomics is in danger of losing its identity in the core of the graduate economics curriculum as it becomes merely “another subfield” of micro-economics. The payoff in economics is for novelty and cleverness. It’s not just yesterday’s headliners like Keynes and Friedman who are forgotten. The field is about articles, not once-important books like The General Theory or A Monetary History of the United States—and articles that are more than a decade old are often considered fossils. The incentives are to show that you are “smart,” not necessarily that you are wise or learned.

To me the most intriguing part of the book is the student interviews. These budding economists come across as intelligent and candid, occasionally spoiled (fellowships and other opportunities can pay students up to $30,000 or so per year and tuition is waived), often overworked (many put in 70- to 80-hour workweeks: doing economics is the “default activity”), and frequently anxious. They know the rules of the game, and most are itching to turn into the professors who have shaped them. They know they aren’t normal. As one survey respondent put it, “normal people solve crosswords; economists write papers (of which 80 percent are never read).”

One of Colander’s chief laments is that graduate training produces economists whose capacity to use their judgment is underdeveloped. Still, he isn’t as pessimistic as he was two decades ago, seeing many signs that graduate training has become less focused on disconnected, rarefied economic theory and more empirically grounded. But this leads to another important worry. It appears that the glue which has traditionally held the field together—Marshallian or Walrasian microeconomic price theory—matters less and less now, as the field turns into a branch of applied statistics.

The economist in me wonders how many readers of Books & Culture will read or even skim The Making of an Economist, Redux, no matter how much it has to offer the interested outsider. For all but a tiny handful, I suspect, the expected benefits of reading it will be far too low to overcome the huge opportunity cost. To read Colander’s book you’d have to give up reading one of the other fascinating books reviewed in this issue. Then there are all those classics that have been lingering on your to-do list for years, the ones that “every intelligent person should read before they die”—like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Well, it turns out that there may be little point in reading Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, Mill, Marshall, Veblen, Keynes, Robinson, Hayek, Arrow, or Friedman. After all, graduate students in economics haven’t read them—or even heard of all of them, it seems. When Colander asks a group of MIT students whether their courses include any discussion of Keynes, the response is … laughter. This appears to be the division of labor in society today: Economists write narrow technical papers, with mathematical models outsiders cannot penetrate and empirical estimates that educated laymen must take on faith. At best non-economists can read the abstracts to these articles and glean a little understanding. However, the task of thinking about the big economic questions is left for everyone else (including a few economists over age fifty).

Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University, is director and book review editor for EH.Net, which provides electronic services for economic historians.

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