Page 2813 – Christianity Today (2024)

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 endorsements 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.

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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 testicles 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.

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

Not many sociologists enjoy name-recognition outside the confines of their profession. Sudhir Venkatesh is an exception. His 2008 book Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, published by Penguin Press, has made him an academic celebrity of sorts. But before this popular book, Venkatesh published academic studies of the drug trade, high-rise public housing, and—in 2006—”the underground economy of the urban poor.” Indeed, the last of these, Off the Books, could be regarded as a companion volume to Gang Leader for a Day. Between 1995 and 2003, Venkatesh gained the trust of residents in an area of ten square blocks that he calls “Maquis Park,” a ghetto neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. During this time he walked the streets, interacting with store owners, drug dealers, pastors, street hustlers, and other interesting characters.

The world that Venkatesh describes in Off the Books has surprising similarities to middle-class America. People struggle with numerous constraints, but they find that production and exchange are at the heart of survival and that entrepreneurial talent and the ability to deal with complex social situations lead to success. This is not a world in which there is no order, or where most people simply while away their time waiting for someone else to meet their needs.

Many descriptions of ghetto life focus on certain pathologies that create economic and social problems, and those may well be important in explaining why life in Maquis Park differs in certain respects from much of the United States. Certainly the high number of female-headed households and the lack of male commitment to children and family have had a significant effect on the economic situation in this neighborhood.[1] Venkatesh reports that in one block, 16 out of 21 inhabited housing units are headed by females, and in another only two of 22 households have a nuclear family arrangement. A number of commentators have argued that pervasive attitudes toward work and social relations hinder economic development among inner-city African Americans, and they would find plenty of evidence to confirm their views in Venkatesh’s account.[2] Nevertheless, Off the Books is replete with examples of entrepreneurial energy and what Robert Putnam calls “social capital.”

In Maquis Park, the border between licit and illicit behavior is murky, and many residents operate in both the legal and illegal sector. Yet much of what is technically illegal—for instance, taking jobs “off the books”—would be considered legitimate in other settings. Take the example of James Arleander (a pseudonym, as are most of the names in the book). James has an alley-based car repair business, patronized both by residents of the community and by people from outside. He is able to do oil changes, brake replacements, and other minor repairs despite his lack of a permanent facility or even a secure place to store his tools. But the city of Chicago has no record of his business, and there certainly are no OSHA inspections. A woman in the neighborhood supplements her welfare payments by producing soul food in her kitchen for numerous members of the community, without meeting any of the multitude of health regulations governing food preparation. There are “legitimate” businesses in the region—a hair salon, a hardware store, and another car repair business that has a fixed location, although it takes most of its payments in barter rather than in cash—but even all of these draw heavily on the informal market for labor services. Several restaurants and convenience stores survive, and there are also the drug dealers and places where guns can be purchased, as well as the pimps and prostitutes who frequent the area. Even the homeless are often engaged in economic activity, sometimes sleeping in a store in order to prevent theft, at other times performing menial tasks for shopkeepers or selling goods in the local park.

The most impressive thing about the economic activity of Maquis Park is the social order that is both produced by and necessary for such a functioning underground economy. Informal enforcement of codes of conduct and contract fulfillment occur through repeat dealings that strongly reinforce the importance of reputation. Local pastors serve an important arbitration function among residents, and the local drug lord uses his power to prevent anarchy. The overall picture is one of a thriving, functioning economy where informal rules and extralegal enforcement mechanisms have created enough order for a reasonable level of production and exchange to occur.

This small-scale society, like much larger societies, struggles with the perpetual problem of creating a structure that can employ coercion when necessary to maintain social order while yet limiting that coercive power to its appropriate function. Marlene Matteson, a widowed mother of three, is one of the local community leaders who enlists the services of a local pastor to arrange a weekly group meeting with Johnny “Big Cat” Williams, the leader of the neighborhood gang. Marlene wants Big Cat to keep his drug dealers out of the local park in the afternoon when the children are coming home from school, and also wants to limit the areas in which pimps and prostitutes work. For several years Big Cat, who depends upon a certain degree of community trust for his activities, is willing to use his coercive power to enforce the extralegal arrangements that Marlene, her friends, and Pastor Wilkins want to see in place. Unfortunately, over time Big Cat decides that he needs more power and more revenue and starts to extract larger payments from legitimate businesses. He also becomes less willing to enforce the agreed-upon rules with regard to the local park and the streets, where much of the community activity takes place. The other informal third-party arbiters find that Big Cat’s desire to extract more from the community gradually destroys their ability to enforce contracts and secure order.

In this respect Maquis Park turns out to resemble the underdeveloped parts of the world. These societies, like Maquis Park, enjoy a thriving internal trade and rely upon a set of informal rules that govern exchange. Unfortunately, despite the proximity of much richer societies, localized exchange networks in the undeveloped world typically lack a governance structure that enables access to the world of impersonal exchange, a world that allows for the specialization and gains from trade that move people out of poverty.

Maquis Park seems to get the worst of its relationship with formal government at two levels. The police enforce certain rules within the community, dealing with crimes of major theft and murder, but don’t seem to be trusted enough to play much more than a minimal role. It is clear that formal government is failing to perform its basic functions of protection of life and property and enforcement of contracts. At the same time, the heavy hand of the regulatory state extends deep into the community. Minimum wage laws, requirements for contributions to pension funds, workplace safety and workman’s compensation legislation, and the like have the effect of making legal jobs cumbersome and costly. Hence, every legitimate business finds a major part of its labor supply in the illegal sector; it’s much easier to hire people under the table than to fulfill numerous requirements for hiring a legal worker. In short, Maquis Park gets the costs of modern government with few of the benefits.

Perhaps another scholar will take up the challenge implicit in Off the Books, teasing out the lessons of Maquis Park and similar neighborhoods for American society more generally. The result might be different from what we’ve been taught to expect.

Peter J. Hill is professor of economics at Wheaton College.

1. For a recent discussion of the role of the family in economic success, see Kay S. Hymowitz, Marriage and Caste in America (Ivan R. Dee, 2006).

2. See for example Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (Encounter, 2005); and Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, 2001).

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

Reissue! Repackage! Repackage!Reevaluate the songs,Double-pack with a photograph,Extra track, and a tacky badge.—Morrissey

One benefit of a “collected poems” is that it allows us to read a poet’s work in context of his or her larger vision. A collected can reveal strengths, poems that haven’t received much attention, and it can reveal weaknesses. A collected, like a box set with B-sides, can prompt a sudden, sad realization: I don’t like everything this poet has done; in fact, it seems that what I do like is something of an anomaly. A collected might well lead to the disposal of individual works, either because they have been made redundant, or because they are no longer cherished. A collected has a way of shaking the tree.

The physical presence of a collected can be intimidating or even discouraging. The Collected Poems of Charles Olsen, a handsome volume published a few years ago by the University of California Press, defies even the average attaché case—and that volume doesn’t include Olsen’s massive Maximus Poems. Tempted to slip a collected into your backpack, you need to remember that the unusual weight of the thing often leads to ripping of the dust cover. Indeed, some collecteds are like cinder blocks wrapped carefully in Kleenex. This changes the reading experience from one of possible momentary pleasure to one of carefully planned engagement.

For publishers, a collected represents a new way to market an author, an opportunity to schedule readings and lectures, and possibly to cultivate a new readership. A collected can be a good way to cash in on a legacy. It’s easy to become a bit jaded about this whole “collected” business—for a business it is. Of course, Bibles are big business too.

Of the four new collecteds and two selecteds under review in this essay, Allen Ginsberg’s is the heftiest and at $39.95 the most expensive, despite the fact that he often denounced consumerism. In “America” he asks, “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” Not yet, rings the answer fifty years later. “America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe,” he announces, and it’s hard not to wince at the irony, especially in light of Ginsberg’s sale of his papers to Stanford for around a million dollars just a few years before his death. Columbia, his alma mater, had been outbid.

But it’s unfair to hold Ginsberg to the impossible standard of pure communism he himself espoused. He was, as he says, “a famous sissy … and the American public’s sissy too.” We’ve all made concessions to capitalism. Perhaps Ginsberg earned the right to late-life mercenary indulgence by writing so eloquently about America’s besetting materialism during the Fifties and Sixties. One virtue of this book is that it includes the classics “Howl,” “Supermarket in California,” and “Kaddish.”

It may also be unfair to hold Ginsberg to his own reputation as a Great American Poet, heir to Whitman, cultural revolutionary—standards Ginsberg himself would have likely resisted. Ginsberg’s primary concern, or so it would seem perusing this volume, is sex. And he often wanders unnervingly close to NAMBLA territory. “I needed a young musician take off his pants sit down on the bed sing me the blues,” begins one poem; another, in its entirety, reads, “How lucky we are to have windows! / Glass is transparent! / I saw that boy in red bathingsuit / walk down the street.” More often the poems are “graphic,” as the euphemism has it. Check out “The Guest” on your own.

Ginsberg’s poetics are toned and muscular. The lines of these poems sparkle with verbal juxtaposition, wild shifts in tone, and rapid movement through a montage of visual images. Sometimes Ginsberg’s language is as slippery as Gerard Manley Hopkins’: “Green horned little / British chickweed, / waxlight-leafed black / seed stalk’s / lilac sweet budcluster / Ah fluted morning / glory bud / oped / & tickled to yellow / tubed stamen root / by a six legged / armed mite / deeping his head / into sweet pollen / crotches.” More sexually charged than Hopkins, granted, but just as verbally remarkable.

By contrast Zbigniew Herbert, whom The New Yorker blurbs on the back cover as “one of the greatest Polish writers of [the twentieth] century,” is known for his world-weary irony. The poetics are slower, quieter, more understated. The dust jacket of this book is shiny black, featuring a striking black-and-white photo of Herbert lighting a cigarette. It seems we’re in for something rather serious.

Herbert’s poetry is full of images of bleak mid-century Poland, of entwined family and political histories, and it focuses on physical objects as symbols of larger spiritual realities. Herbert’s poems are is shot through with allusions to figures from Greek mythology, comically reduced to the proportions of 20th-century man. They circle persistently around the subject of war.

Herbert teaches that war is useless, comical, its characters pawns. The prose poem “Attempt at the Dissolution of Mythology” begins, “The gods gathered in a barracks just outside town. Zeus gave his usual long and boring speech. The final conclusion: the organization had to be disbanded; enough silly conspiracies; it was time to enter rational society and somehow make do. Athena was sniveling in a corner.”

He shows us that war is also heartbreaking. “When my older brother / came back from war,” begins “The Rain,” “he had on his forehead a little silver star / and under the star / an abyss.” His brother had been badly injured in a shrapnel blast and his health quickly deteriorated: “into musical shells of ears / entered a stone forest / and the skin of his face / was secured / with the blind dry / buttons of eyes.”

But war is the basis of history—especially, it would seem, for Eastern Europe. “The End of a Dynasty” describes the last moments before the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family: “The windows had been painted over with lime. His Majesty was improving the regulations of the Holy Trinity regiment, the occultist Philippe was trying to soothe the Queen’s nerves by suggestion, the Crown Prince, rolled into a ball, was sleeping in an armchair, and the Grand (and skinny) Duchesses were singing pious songs and mending linen.”

Dark, yes, but not exactly dismal: there’s a hopefulness in Herbert’s poetry that shows itself as comedy, the myth made cartoon, radical social failure redeemed by the simple absurdity of everyday life. A clock, for example, is inherently absurd: “Rap a knuckle on the wall— / a cuckoo will jump / from a block / of oak,” just as war is inherently absurd: “the bullet I fired / during the great war / went around the globe / and hit me in the back,” he writes.

On the cover of C. K. Williams’ sensibly packaged retrospective is a color photograph of the author, smiling, in a red turtleneck, pleasant brown v-neck sweater, and winter coat—navy blue with plaid lining. He looks as though he’s been foraging for firewood and has just returned to recite a few poems. His eyebrows are slightly raised. “Ah, you’re just in time,” he seems to be saying, with “COLLECTED POEMS” printed in large white letters across his chest.

The poetry is accordingly earnest and narrative-based, probing the psychological and ethical contours of human relationships, mostly romantic. Williams has a fondness for long lines that break just after reaching the page’s right margin—this is the most distinctive feature of his poetics—and if you leaf through this volume, you’ll notice the half-blank lines. At first glance, the pages resemble erroneous computer printouts.

But the poetry, if you’re patient, usually delivers. Williams moves in and out of a conversation with himself, his shifting inner monologue carefully pinioning observed external action. Here are observations made during dinner with a married couple: “My friend’s wife has a lover; I come to this conclusion—not suspicion, mind, conclusion, / not a doubt about it, not a hesitation, although how I get there might be hard to track; / a blink a little out of phase, say, with its sentence, perhaps a word or two too few; / a certain tenderness of atmosphere, of aura, almost like a pregnancy, with less glow, perhaps.”

Williams analyzes like a psychologist—almost, one might say, like a psychic. He knows what he’s observing, and his burden is to provide evidence. His approach is reminiscent of Henry James. He’s concerned with the surface, the movement, the phrase, the ocean that lurks beneath those things, and the aura that the surface projects.

Here is a sampling of random lines from throughout the book: “He’s telling her in too much intricate detail about a film he’s seen: she tries to change the subject”; “But now comes an intimation of distraction; might the moment already be lost?”; “the vibrations, though, as subtle as they were, crystalline, were tearing me apart”; “How was he to know that what he’d taken as playful after-intercourse endearments were threats?”; “All she was really doing of course was mouthing my words a split second after I’d said them myself.”

If those sound like lines from the same guy-being-overly-sensitive poem, you’re beginning to get a sense of what reading Williams is like. But he’s won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, is widely extolled with all manner of superlatives, and many respectable poets embrace him as one of the greats. Those might be reasons enough to warrant giving Williams a look.

Ted Berrigan’s collected, now in its paper edition (the hardcover came out in 2005), has a more user-friendly price point, a pleasing squarish trim, and modernist/minimalist cover design. It has a chunky heft. It looks basic, like an instruction manual. The poetry inside, however, is anything but basic; it might be more accurately described as oddball: “She comes as in a dream with west wind eggs, / bringing Huitzilopchtli hot possets: / Snakeskins! But I am young.” And Berrigan might be described as an inheritor of Wallace Stevens. He has been associated with the New York School—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and company.

Hence one reads Berrigan as one would read the text of a dream, or would gaze at an abstract painting. “Vast orange dreams / Are unclenched,” he writes in one of his early sonnets, as if predicting his entire oeuvre. “Sleep half sleep half silence and with reasons,” begins the next, “For you I starred in the movie / Made on the site / Of Benedict Arnold’s triumph.” The movement in these poems is mostly visual and often disorienting, like a film running loose through its rollers. And, in keeping with the New York School approach, Berrigan’s poems contain plentiful references to popular culture.

Berrigan excels in the short form, whether in individual poems—”Meanwhile the papers were reporting masochists shooting / tacks, with rubber bands, at apes in zoos” (“A Proverb”)—or in longer fragmentary works, such as “Erasable Picabia,” which contains numerous small sections divided by asterisks: “I have always loved / a serious jackoff scene”; “There is no death / there is only dissolution”; “me, I disguise myself as a man / in order to laugh.”

Present, always, is the information age anxiety with which most of us are familiar. As we click around the internet or flip from text message to text message on our cell phones, the bonds of rational continuity dissolve until all that’s left are self-contained informations—instances of language. We begin to be defined by the ephemeral. “I’m interested in / anything,” writes Berrigan in “Around the Fire”; “Like I could walk out the door right now and go some- / where else. I don’t have any center in that sense.”

Mark Strand’s poetry represents a comforting counterpoint. For one thing his new selected is much smaller and easier to tote around than those already discussed, looking a bit like a first-edition trade novel. For another, the poetry is not dissociative but associative, with a strong homing instinct.

From the first lines of the first poem we’re introduced to the theme of safety: “Unmoved by what the wind does, / The windows / Are not rattled, nor do the various / Areas / Of the house make their usual racket.” The storm re-enters in the third poem, in which “the rain / Beats down in gales / Against the roof. We sit behind / Closed windows, bolted doors, / Unsure and ill at ease.” Registering threats to equilibrium, Strand has a way of putting the reader right at ease and ready to listen.

Most of the imagery in Strand’s poetry is domestic and deals with questions of identity and safety. That sounds like too sweeping a generalization, but even Strand’s “outdoor” poems—those that seem conscious of not being indoors—are in a sense domestic. Or at least pastoral. Early poems suggest this thesis, and later poems bear it out in subtler ways.

The fourth poem, “Old People on the Nursing Home Porch,” concludes, “These tired elders feel / The need to go indoors / Where each will lie alone.” The sixth poem describes the world seen through a living room window, the seventh begins “A man has been standing in front of my house,” and the speaker of the eighth invites a flustered mailman “inside.” Several pages later a poem begins, “I walk down the narrow, / carpeted hall. / The house is set.”

Not to reduce Strand to a poet of domesticity: his poetry is funny, smart, and formally polished, in spare, easygoing stanzas. The syntax is remarkably simple, and so is the action. Some of the poems almost sound like children’s verse: “It is cold, the snow is deep, / the wind beats around in its cage of trees.” Almost every poem begins with a description of someone doing something and then expands to provide some context.

Soon into a Strand poem, however, something strange is bound to happen, and what had seemed simple becomes complicated. “On the eve of my fortieth birthday / I sat on the porch having a smoke / when out of the blue a man and a camel / happened by,” begins the aptly titled, “Man and Camel.” In a successful Strand poem, those simple images begin to glow with possibility, suggesting ultimate questions of human existence. We shouldn’t hesitate to regard Mark Strand’s poetry as “comfort poetry,” as if to do so were to patronize him. Comfort is a pretty important thing, and undervalued in contemporary culture.

Still in his forties, Carl Phillips is too young to publish a collected but too popular not to publish some kind of overview of his small oeuvre. Quiver of Arrows selects 84 poems from Phillips’ first twenty years of publication, the fewest poems from the shortest span of time of any of the books under review (and, at 25 cents apiece, the most expensive). The book’s gold and black aqueous-finished cover conveys rarity, significance, dignity. A small photo of the author is reserved for one of the inner pages.

There’s an air of profundity in Phillips’ writing that, at its best, gives his poems the kind of gravitas one expects from post-Confessional American poetry. Phillips describes rooms “fraught with light” and laces his poems with Latin tags. Reading Phillips is like having an appointment with a man who is soft-spoken but well dressed and intent on articulating so precisely that sometimes, just occasionally, he resorts to academese. He is a professional poet. His job is to speak to you clearly and carefully.

A poem begins: “Thank you for asking— / yes, / I have thought on the soul.” The reader might notice that “thought on the soul” is not exactly street jargon. The poem continues:

I have decided
it should not be faulted for
its indifference. That is as it

must be.
How blame
the lantern whose limits

always are only the light of
itself, casting the light
out?

That the body enjoys
some moment
in that light, I regard

as privilege.

Only a third of the way through and we’ve had at least two instances of upscale rhetoric—”it should not be faulted” and “I regard // as privilege”—and one downright archaism—”how blame / the lantern?” How blame the lantern? That Phillips is so successful, I regard as an indication that readers don’t mind these high old tones. Maybe they even like them. Perhaps Phillips’ old-fashioned style gives him an air of authority that readers find, well, as irresistible as that cute English professor who always wears a bow tie and whose lectures always seem deep.

Is it wrong to pigeonhole Phillips as an academic poet? Let’s read more and see if we can expand our view. Here’s a poem, “Late Apollo”: a classical reference. The first image is of “two boys, throwing a ball between them” “in the light of a streetlamp.” It is a winter scene in which “snow” is regarded as “unoracular,” which as far as I can tell is not even a word; if it were, it would mean “non-oracular”—laid back, unassuming. Later in the poem Phillips writes, “You’re in a garden / you’ve trellised the dwarf cherry.” A bit esoteric, but seeable. Even later he writes, “this is / how, in the old, illuminated paintings, / the saints can be most easily picked out // from the crowd around them.” In a poem titled “Bright World,” Phillips describes his body as having been “cast … aegis-like” over people, which, in addition to being a rather effete phrase, is nested in such complex syntax that it is hard to interpret exactly what he’s lamenting—something about his past, it would seem. A few lines down, magnolia flowers are compared to “miniature versions of a lesser / gospel deemed, over time, apocryphal, or redundant.” So, if this poetry is not to be termed “academic,” if that adjective carries too many negative connotations, it must at least be characterized as allusive, private, coy. Sort of the opposite, one might point out, of Ginsberg’s. Ginsberg described verse like Phillips’ as “high teacup.”

In an overall appraisal, the selecteds are more reader-friendly than the collecteds, at least when it comes to actual reading. Their lighter weight, smaller trim size, and more manageable contents make them conducive to subway perusal and fireside dozing alike. Of course collecteds serve a purpose, but caveat emptor—everything (or more likely close to everything) the poet published is in there, from first-book follies to the self-contentment of dotage. It might be wise to trust an editor’s selective eye if you hope to enjoy the book you’re reading rather than use it as a reference tool.

Aaron Belz is assistant professor of English at Providence Christian College. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Bird Hoverer (BlazeVOX), and he has a new collection forthcoming from Persea.

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

When my son Clark was little, he was prone to upper respiratory infections. I used to call him over, pull out my handkerchief, and tell him to blow. Now and then, I commented, “Wow, you’re leaking a lot of brain lubricant.” The poor guy. Years later, he told me he had taken me at my word. As a result, he’d gone around sniffing to keep his brain from losing all its lubricant. I wonder what would have become of him if I’d told the truth about the teeming masses of bacteria in his runny nose.

Clark, now age 19, has long ago forgiven, if not forgotten, my doctor humor. He was recently home on his college break when I received for review Jessica Snyder Sachs’ Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World. Before I get to the book, I’ll digress a bit more. Over Clark’s school break, he asked me to go see the movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith. As it turns out, Clark’s movie choice was rather providential. Next fall my son will start medical school. I’m not sure his generation of doctors has more to learn from Good Germs, Bad Germs or I Am Legend.

The film begins with a scene from a TV newsroom. Karen at the health desk is interviewing Dr. Alice Krippen about her medical invention. “Give it to me in a nutshell,” Karen prompts. “The premise is quite simple,” Dr. Krippen begins. “Take something that is designed by nature and reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it.” We learn that Dr. Krippen’s team has done clinical trials on 10,009 patients using a genetically altered measles virus. In follow-ups, all are cancer free. The doctor is asked if she has found the cure for cancer. “Yes. Yes. Yes, we have,” she says—as the scene shifts to a post-apocalyptic world a few years later.

Will Smith, in the role of virologist Robert Neville, is the last human inhabitant of Manhattan Island, except for a bunch of ghoulish, bloodthirsty cancer-vaccine “survivors.” It seems the cancer cure has left everybody dead—or “undead”—except for Neville, who is immune to the vaccine’s side effects. About thirty minutes into the film, Neville injects a captive, unconscious vampire girl. She lunges toward him, and that’s when I told Clark I had to leave the theater.

In my first year of residency, I’d been surgically inserting a right subclavian line on a comatose, near-death patient when my needle must have hit a nerve. The unconscious patient sat bolt upright, opened his eyes, and stared at me just like the zombie Neville injects. Decades later, the memory of this patient still undoes my composure.

Now to Sachs’ fine book. It begins with a real-life prologue about a college student who is well one day, and the next day rapidly goes into septic shock and dies. Throughout her narrative, Sachs interjects stories such as this, and herein lies much of the book’s hold on the reader.

In Part 1, “The War on Germs,” we meet the Renaissance physician Girolamo Fracastoro, whose 1530 text on “the French disease” was composed in Latin hexameter. His poetic treatise on syphilis was ahead of its time, correctly postulating a microbial vector and setting the stage for a branch of modern medicine.

Sachs does not mention that one of the early cures for syphilis was to have patients contract malaria—the subsequent high fever proved too much for the pesky spirochete—but she does trace other toxic cures, and then pauses at Paul Ehrlich’s 1908 introduction of Salvarsan, which was effective against syphilis. From there she moves to the modern antibiotic era with Alexander Fleming’s 1928 serendipitous observation of Penicillium mold, which had contaminated and thus inhibited the growth of colonies of Staphylococcus aureus.

In the chapter “Life on Man,” Sachs provides a fascinating description of the bacterial colonization of the human landscape. Just 24 hours after birth, our skin sports one thousand bacteria per square centimeter. At 48 hours, the number jumps to ten thousand. We hit the hundred thousand mark by six weeks. It is this dense forest of one hundred billion friendly bacteria on our skin that guards us from the rare, unfriendly sorts. Fifteen trillion essential bacteria line and protect our empty digestive tracts. We learn that the type and count of bacteria are affected by emotional states and, even more intriguing, that the bacteria can, and do, signal our cells to enhance these symbiotic relationships.

One of the book’s strong points is its blend of the highly technical with the everyday. There is enough of the nonscientific to keep all but the most unrepentant technophobes slogging along. Hang on through some subjects that just cannot be made any simpler, and you will be rewarded with stories that no one taught us in med school. For example, in 1959, while filming Cleopatra, Liz Taylor fell ill with a deadly, resistant form of staph pneumonia. An experimental batch of methicillin saved her life. Thousands of her fans and dozens of her husbands owe a debt of thanks to the antibiotic maker. If that’s not enough to pique your interest, there is even a lurid description of how bacteria, once thought to be asexual in their reproductive life, have sex. This is one of the mechanisms whereby bacteria transfer antibiotic resistance from one to another and— shockingly—from one species to another.

Transferring and developing resistance to antibiotics is what much of Sachs’ book is about. It is a frightening subject that has made many a headline. But the untold side of the story is that many bacteria simply stop being harmful. Strep throat no longer carries the death sentence of resulting rheumatic heart disease and glomerular nephritis that it once did. Smallpox has been eradicated and, for the most part, tuberculosis is no longer the scourge of European cities. For unknown reasons, the plague ceased to be the threat it was even before the advent of antibiotics. There is some good news.

Sherlock Holmes, the fictional invention of a physician, was a clever investigator. He taught his pupils to look for clues; he also taught them that some clues were telling by their absence. If I have one criticism of Good Germs, Bad Germs, it is that one of the great infectious disease tales is missing—that of HIV/AIDS. The disease, the introduction of antiretroviral drugs, emergent resistance to them, and the use of antibiotics in treating immuno-compromised patients: this story, so apt for Sachs’ theme, is mysteriously absent from her book.

We come now to what I believe is the single most important story in Good Germs, Bad Germs. In 1986, Michael Zasloff, a researcher at the nih, stumbled upon a chemical that helps frogs fight off bacteria. The substance consists of short chains of amino acids. These antimicrobial peptides also are made by humans. They bathe our eyes and skin with their protective activity. Zasloff realized that the amphibian version of these chemicals was particularly potent.

It seemed that Zasloff had found a safe new form of antibiotic that bacteria could not adapt or mutate to resist. The New York Times lauded the discovery and pronounced, “Dr. Zasloff will have produced a fine successor to penicillin.” Zasloff and investors rushed to license the new wonder drug. Despite the approval of the Times editorial staff, the FDA demanded more clinical trials.

Enter two heroes: biologists Graham Bell and Pierre-Henri Gouyon. They published an opinion piece calling for restraint. Bacteria have the habit of becoming resistant to antibiotics once those drugs are in widespread use. They reasoned that, even though antimicrobial peptides operate differently than penicillin or other antibiotics, resistance could happen again. (In the United States alone, 25 million pounds of antibiotics are given to animals and three million pounds to humans annually.)

Zasloff replied in the press, calling Bell and Gouyon’s logic “fundamentally wrong.” What ensued was the equivalent of a wrestling match. Zasloff dared Bell to grow bacteria that could develop resistance to his patent medicine. Bell took up the challenge and, with his tag-team assistant, grew 22 colonies of resistant E. coli and pseudomonas.

What is so significant about this? If Zasloff, Smithkline Beecham, or others interested in the peptides had brought the drugs to market, the result might well have been bacteria resistant to our natural lines of defense. A “boo-boo” on the knee could have become an almost certain “bye-bye.” To his credit, Zasloff admitted the error of his own thinking and the validity of Bell and Gouyon’s.

Zasloff meant well. But, as my maternal grandmother was fond of saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Today’s technology has the capacity to do great harm. Genetic engineering and the development of microbial, antimicrobial, and chemotherapeutic agents already have met with disaster and near disaster. If the past has anything to teach us, it is this: “First, do no harm.”

I’ve passed out many prescriptions for antibiotics. Some, I’m sure, were not needed, but in the er setting, I could not be confident that the infection would go away without medicine, and I worked for individual patients. The role of those who regulate new therapies is to protect society in general. They cannot be swayed by anecdotal sentiment, no matter how compelling.

Good Germs, Bad Germs and books like it have something to teach a society dizzy with the hubris of science. I was able to walk out on I Am Legend when it got too scary, but if a Pandora escapes from the gene-splicing lab, it will not be so simple. May God grant the next generation of doctors and scientists—including my son—a greater wisdom than ours.

Matthew Sleeth, a physician, is director of Blessed Earth (www.servegodsavetheplanet.org). He is the author of Serve God, Save the Planet (Chelsea Green/Zondervan).

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

At a time when evangelical leaders were slobbering over Richard Nixon, Ronald Sider’s voice was tonic—especially for a college student still puzzling over how a tradition once identified with social justice could have negotiated such a radical right turn. By the time Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger appeared in 1978, Sider had emerged as one of my evangelical heroes. Here was a man who had organized Evangelicals for McGovern in 1972 (whose entire caucus, I suspect, could be tallied on two hands), and who had been the guiding force behind the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern the ensuing year.

In light of the rise and the eventual dominance of the Religious Right later that same decade, the sentiments expressed in the Chicago Declaration seem quaint now. But it was a remarkable statement. “We deplore the historic involvement of the church in America with racism,” the declaration read, adding that evangelicals must “challenge the misplaced trust of the nation in economic and military might.” At the instigation of Nancy Hardesty, then an English professor at my Christian college, the Chicago Declaration included a passage that, harking back to the rich tradition of evangelical feminism in the 19th century, rebuked evangelicals for having “encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity” and called “both men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship.”

Following the Chicago Declaration, Sider went on to form Evangelicals for Social Action and to write a number of books (including Rich Christians), which generally fall under the rubric of evangelical social ethics. His latest contribution is The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World?—a book that, on the whole, is as disappointing as Rich Christians was bracing.

Sider notes that the “absence of any widely accepted, systematic evangelical reflection on politics leads to contradiction, confusion, ineffectiveness, even biblical unfaithfulness, in our political work.” Reviewing the political ideologies of various Christian thinkers through the centuries, from Augustine and Aquinas to Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the Anabaptists, Sider makes the point, echoing Luther, that the primary function of the state is the restraint of evil so that the gospel can flourish. Sider also considers, and finds wanting, the ideas of John Rawls, though I wish he had spent some time—any time at all!—on Jeffrey Stout, especially his Democracy and Tradition.

All of this is useful, and the author renders his thoughts cogently and persuasively. But as Sider moves from what he calls a “solid framework” to an “evangelical political philosophy,” he suffers a disheartening—and uncharacteristic—failure of nerve.

Sider speaks eloquently about the possibilities of peacemaking and invokes the “just war” tradition, but he neglects to mention that the invasion of Iraq meets few or any of these criteria. He rails against no-fault divorce, which is a defensible argument, though it ignores the fact that vindictive spouses can “game” the system to punish entire families with protracted divorce proceedings. He asserts that a “strong evangelical support for global human rights (especially religious freedom) led to what some have called a new evangelical ‘internationalism,’ ” but he fails to note the current “evangelical” president’s demonstrated disregard for human rights.

On homosexuality, Sider unblinkingly employs the Religious Right’s preferred incendiary term, “gay lifestyle,” implying that sexual orientation is simply a matter of volition. (As a gay friend of mine once asked, incredulously: “Why would anyone choose to be gay?”) On the separation of church and state, Sider dithers before finally lending his endorsement to the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment. But he misses his best arguments: Religion has flourished here in the United States as nowhere else precisely because the government—for the most part, at least—has stayed out of the religion business, and the collusion between church and state ultimately trivializes the faith. Sider can’t bring himself to take a position on taxpayer-supported vouchers for religious schools, however, and at times his ducking and weaving borders on comical. What about “In God We Trust” emblazoned on our currency, government-supported chaplains, or references to the Deity in the pledge of allegiance? “I doubt that either retaining or abandoning these practices would be very significant,” Sider concludes, “although the debates will undoubtedly continue.”

Sider does make some good points. He argues that the importance once ascribed to the holding of property should be reconfigured as equal access to education; knowledge, he writes, “is the primary source of wealth creation.” He also warns, in a distant echo of the Chicago Declaration, that “Christians must be extremely vigilant against the ongoing temptations of idolatrous nationalism.”

By the time I finished reading The Scandal of Evangelical Politics, however, I was scratching my head. Where’s the scandal? Sider’s criticisms are so measured and his proposals so tepid that the book reads more like an endorsement of evangelical political behavior over the last several decades than a critique. What happened to the author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, who boldly summoned us to heed Jesus’ injunctions to care for “the least of these”? Surely, those of us who profess allegiance to the scandal of the gospel cannot simply accede to the status quo or the tired playbook coming out of Colorado Springs.

So what is the scandal of evangelical politics? The persistence of hunger in a land of plenty? The fundamental contradiction between pressing for “intelligent design” in public school curricula and utter indifference to the handiwork of the Intelligent Designer? The failure to purge misogynists and white supremacists from the highest echelons of evangelical leadership? The failure of evangelicals to rise up in collective moral outrage over the present administration’s persistent and systematic use of torture?

I returned to Sider’s preface in search of a scandal. The best that I could determine was that evangelicals had failed to “move from a commitment to Jesus Christ and biblical authority to concrete political decisions that lead us to support or oppose specific laws and candidates.” Fair enough, though it’s not clear how the book helps us address that scandal.

What made me even more uneasy was the triumphalism that tinges the conclusion to Sider’s preface. “All around the world,” he writes, “evangelical thinkers and politicians are wrestling at a deeper level with how to act politically in faithfulness to Christ.” And the payoff? “If even a modest fraction of that rapidly growing number of 500 million evangelicals and Pentecostals would develop a commonly embraced, biblically grounded framework for doing politics, they would change the world.”

Change the world by “doing politics”? That’s a remarkable statement, especially from someone who hails from the Anabaptist tradition. Anabaptists understand better than most Jesus’ renunciation of earthly power and his declaration that his kingdom was not of this world. The cautionary lesson from the sorry saga of the Religious Right lies not in the movement’s political ineptitude, egregious as that has been, but in its devaluing of the gospel in the quest for political influence. The New Testament suggests that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power—a principle strongly reinforced by an overview of American history. Whenever people of faith begin grasping after power, they lose their prophetic voice. This was no less true of mainline Protestantism in the 1950s, tethered as it was to white, middle-class Eisenhower suburbanism, than it has been of the Religious Right in the decades surrounding the turn of the 21st century.

Am I arguing that people of faith should not make their voices heard in the arena of public discourse? On the contrary: I believe that public discourse would be impoverished without those voices. But we should never delude ourselves into thinking that “doing politics,” to use Sider’s phrase, represents the highest or the best or even a proximate expression of our prophetic mission. A prophet always stands at the margins, calling the powerful to account. Misplaced allegiance to political power represents a form of idolatry, and the failure of evangelicals generally and the Religious Right in particular to call politicians to account, especially those politicians they propelled into office, is the stuff of, well, scandal.

In a very real sense, albeit in a backhanded way, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics attests to the frightful potency of the Religious Right. The fact that one of our clearest, most prophetic voices has been reduced to equivocation may not rise to the level of scandal. But it is a tragedy.

Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush (HarperOne).

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