Page 2876 – Christianity Today (2024)

Is there an English major who hasn’t thrilled to the story of what is undoubtedly the most famous literary friendship in English letters? The account of two young poets plotting “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in order to raise five pounds for a walking tour, while rambling over the Quantock hills, is the very stuff of Romanticism. Add to this the tale of William with his sister Dorothy (“his eyes,” the poet called her) visiting the valley of the Wye, creating in his head all 159 of the “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” while they walked—not writing them down for a week—and you have literary magic.

While I was teaching in London, a student of mine from Wisconsin, after reading “Tintern Abbey,” impulsively rented a car and spent the weekend alone in its “wild secluded scene.” His strong reaction is hardly unique, and may remind us of Charles Lamb’s moving in a “trance” for a week after hearing Coleridge’s hypnotic “Rime.”

Adam Sisman has taken upon himself to retell in depth the story of this fascinating friendship—without partisanship, as he declares in his introduction. Here he refers to the tendency of biographers to favor one poet over the other, given the bitterness that followed their unfortunate quarrel. I believe he succeeds in this attempt by focusing on the early and best years of their friendship.

These two young men of undoubted genius, when their friendship first began, were about to be the authors of the Lyrical Ballads—a book which, after many years and much abuse by the reigning critics, would change the direction of English poetry and the way we see the world. Sisman has fleshed out their unique friendship in exquisite detail, thoroughly consulting recent scholarship and primary sources and giving us an almost daily or weekly account of their halcyon days.

The two poets are surrounded by other friends, and Sisman finds much in their correspondence to add to the letters and notebooks left by the principals. He digs even to a third level, examining the letters of friends of friends, where these pertain to his subject. (Indeed, my only complaint about the book is that two-fifths pass before the friendship truly begins, so thoroughly does Sisman set the stage for it.) He gives this story the drama and interest of a novel, partly by moving back and forth between the two poets, especially during the seven years before the friendship actually begins. This technique creates an inevitability about the two coming together at just the right time—when their powers had matured—in the annus mirabilis, 1797-98.

In the years leading up to their meeting, Coleridge was active in many ventures, such as his ill-fated journal The Watchman, and had completed two collections of poetry. His brilliance was apparent to all, and his spell-binding conversation attracted the likes of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincy. On the other hand, Wordsworth from 1790 to 1797 had no occupation but his poetry, and he and his sister seemed to live largely by the assistance of relatives and friends. Both poets were initially enthusiastic about the French Revolution: “Bliss was it that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven.” Wordsworth actually spent time in France, where he met Annette Vallon and had a child with her before war separated them for ten years. While in Paris he observed part of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.

The poets’ disillusionment with the Revolution, following the Terror and ascent of Napoleon, partly explains their desire to retire from the world, finding in poetry and nature something other than politics to redeem humankind. (Interestingly, both young radicals became conservative in their middle years—especially Wordsworth—much to the distress of a younger generation of Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.)

The two seemed fated to join forces by their similar backgrounds and the circles they moved in. They had exchanged letters earlier, but the friendship really began one June morning when Coleridge leaped over the fence at Racedown Lodge and ran across a field to greet William and Dorothy in the garden. Within a day the two poets were reciting their poems to one another. Coleridge, who’d planned to stay only a couple of days, extended his visit to three weeks.

In a chapter titled “Communion,” Sisman focuses on how extraordinarily close Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge grew, especially in the first few years before Coleridge left for Malta. They claimed during this time to be “three people, but one soul.” Often they wrote at the same table. They read their work to each other and exchanged criticism and advice. Several of the poems later claimed by one of them contained lines or even whole stanzas written by the other. Regular scrutiny quickened their resolve. Words raced across the paper. They jokingly referred to themselves as “the Concern,” a “commercial or manufacturing establishment” for the production of verse.

A single anecdote exemplifies the kind of cooperation that must surely have happened in other, unrecorded cases. Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” was largely composed while he was walking “in the grove” at Alfoxden, and many years later he gave an account of how it was completed:

When it was all but finished, I came in and recited it to Mr. Coleridge and my Sister, and said, “A prefatory stanza must be added, and I should sit down to our little tea-meal with greater pleasure if my task was finished.” I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed, and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza.

Dorothy was the ideal companion for both poets. “Years later,” Sisman writes,

Thomas De Quincy would describe Dorothy—her gipsy tan, her wild and startling eyes, the glancing quickness of her motion, the powerful feelings that would sometime cause her to stammer … and remark on the “exceeding sympathy, always ready and always profound, by which she made all that one could tell her, all that one could describe, … reverberate to one’s own feelings.”

And the friends complemented each other to an extraordinary degree:

Their conversations turned frequently on the nature of poetry, as they sought new forms with which to express ideas and impressions. In Coleridge, Wordsworth encountered a mind of apparently limitless capabilities, interested in every aspect of human enquiry: a mind moreover nourished by encyclopaedic reading. Wordsworth too possessed a powerful mind, one less analytical than Coleridge’s but nonetheless perpetually probing the sublime, a disciplined mind that fed on a rich hinterland of experience.

For his part, Coleridge admired qualities in Wordsworth that he lacked in himself—control of his feelings, steady habits, and self-discipline. Wordsworth’s firm self-regard, not always appreciated by others, was later memorably characterized by Keats, for whom Wordsworth’s poetry was marked by “the egotistical sublime.” Though Coleridge was far better known and had published much more than Wordsworth when they met, he almost immediately claimed that Wordsworth’s genius was one that overshadowed his own. His admiration was based in part upon Wordsworth’s handful of published poems at that time—”Descriptive Sketches,” “An Evening Walk,” and “The Ruined Cottage,” none of which had been well received by the critics—but also upon the sheer force of his new friend’s personality. Within a day or two of meeting Wordsworth, Coleridge wrote, “I speak with heart-felt sincerity & (I think) unblinded judgement, when I tell you, that I feel myself a little man by his side; & yet do not think myself the less man, than I formerly thought myself.”

Others saw this putting down of himself in Wordsworth’s favor as unjustified and regularly warned him of its dangers. The symbiotic aspect of their work persisted, even though Coleridge, after the first five years, wrote less and less poetry. He encouraged his friend to write the great poem on “Nature, Man, and Society” that Wordsworth contemplated. Both men considered The Prelude (1805) an introduction to the envisioned larger work. Sisman points out that this encyclopedic poem would have much more suited Coleridge’s mind and capacities than Wordsworth’s. (I would add that even if he didn’t complete the projected Recluse, Wordsworth nevertheless wrote the greatest long poem in the language since Paradise Lost. Nor has any written after it rivaled its stature.)

In 1804, Coleridge, weakened by his opium addiction, left for Malta for two years to seek healing in a warm climate. Laudanum was opium in a form taken as an analgesic, as commonly prescribed as aspirin today. Coleridge probably grew addicted to it while ill for several months as an undergraduate. (His addiction was finally brought under control years later, when in his forties he moved to London and lived in the home of a generous physician, Dr. James Gillman.) His early abandoning of poetry may have been due to a number of causes: the ravages of opium, his unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker, and frustrated love for Sara Hutchinson. Perhaps even more destructive of his powers, Sisman stresses, was an overweening regard for Wordsworth’s talent and genius, to the neglect of his own.

Coleridge confided to his notebooks his own fear that this was the case. He returned very ill after the years in Malta, to be cared for by the Wordsworths and living with them until the quarrel in 1810. Unfortunate remarks of Wordsworth about Coleridge’s addiction and behavior, passed on by a third party, caused a serious rift in their friendship that after a year or so was mended. But Coleridge deeply felt betrayed, and the wound did not heal completely.

Sisman describes Wordsworth’s comparatively serene life in the Lakes as perhaps too comfortable in the adoring company of his wife, her sister, and his beloved Dorothy, but he was hardly immune to the vicissitudes of life. Like Coleridge, he always seemed short of cash until given a sinecure in the postal system at the age of forty-two. (As he himself acknowledged, he had no head for business.) He did receive assistance from various friends, relatives, and legacies, and his own habits were decidedly frugal. Early on he suffered the loss of two his children and his beloved brother John. And he was treated with brutal malice and contempt by the critics for many years. (Even as late as 1815, Francis Jeffrey could write in The Edinburgh Review of “The White Doe of Rylstone”: “This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume.”) Still, he lived to see his poetry finally accepted and celebrated.

Living away from Wordsworth in London, Coleridge became “the sage of Highgate,” writing some of the best criticism we have of Wordsworth’s poetry in the Biographia Literaria. Although he shows Wordsworth’s limitations, he also reveals his greatness. Coleridge had long supported his friend with his confidence in his work through all the years that it suffered attacks from the established reviews.

A younger generation accepted and celebrated both poets’ work. They sought out Coleridge in London, while tourists streamed to the Lakes to appreciate the scenery Wordsworth described and to visit him at Rydal Mount (in such numbers that he sometimes charged strangers for their tea). And Wordsworth was finally honored with the laureateship.

Sisman skips lightly over these later years. I feel it is helpful to add that once Coleridge’s opium addiction was controlled, under Dr. Gillman’s care, he became remarkably productive, though not of poetry. I also believe Wordsworth might be excused for writing some of his less inspired verse in these years, given that he was revising and perfecting The Prelude, first published in 1850. Though some critics have preferred the early version for its apparent pantheism, the later one, as J. Robert Barth argues in Romanticism and Transcendence and elsewhere, not only reflects the trinitarian Christianity to which Wordsworth and Coleridge both came, but is stylistically much improved and philosophically more coherent.

Interestingly, one subject Coleridge claimed the poets never discussed, at least in the early years, was religion: “We found our data dissimilar and never renewed the subject.” But Coleridge was always devout, even in his Unitarian days, and Wordsworth was from the beginning inclined to mystical experience in nature. In later years Coleridge wrote important theological and philosophical works, including The Statesman Manual and Aids to Reflection, the latter of which Emerson called his “golden book.” Although he never wrote his philosophical magnum opus, except in fragmentary form, his ideas were some of the most seminal in all British philosophy, as Bentham claimed. He was a polymath, interested in all subjects. The 19th-century physicist Michael Faraday credited Coleridge’s Essay on Life, which concludes that all matter is alive, with giving him insights which—decades later, in the 20th century—led to the splitting of the atom.

By focusing on this marvelous friendship, its background and its intense high point, Sisman has created a work at once scholarly and of great general interest. He avoids the trap of trying to psychoanalyze subjects who are no longer living and lets the poets’ letters and other documents speak for themselves, while re-creating the drama of their lives together. Certainly all lovers of poetry should find his book immensely informative and enjoyable, and as thought-provoking as these two “Prophets of Nature” themselves.

Robert Siegel’s most recent books of poetry are A Pentecost of Finches: New & Selected Poems (Paraclete) and The Waters Under the Earth (Canon Press). He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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

I rarely go on a trip without packing binoculars. The chance to visit a new locale means the opportunity to discover a bird I haven’t seen before. My biggest travel dilemma often boils down to this: Which field guide do I take? With a shelf full of bird books, it’s no easy decision.

I’m not alone. With an estimated 46 million birders in America today—and birding one of the fastest-growing outdoor hobbies—there should be a ready audience for Scott Weidensaul’s Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding and Jonathan Rosen’s The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature.

Although both are about birding, these are very different books. Weidensaul’s mostly chronological history of birding is chock-full of bizarre characters and historical and personal anecdotes. He comes across as the likeable guy next door: telling stories of watching The Beverly Hillbillies as a child (and hating Miss Jane Hathaway for making birders look like nerds); spinning folksy tales of expeditions where liquor-preserved specimens were lost when the alcohol was siphoned off by thirsty men; and confessing to the shelf-staggering loads of field guides that threaten to take over his house. Although his writing here is not as lyrical as in his superlative Living on the Wind, his grasp of birding and joy in birds comes across on every page. Weidensaul’s proverbial glass is full to brimming.

Rosen, on the other hand, is the brooding intellectual for whom birding is a path to self-understanding and a means of moving toward the mystery of something greater than himself. In birding, he writes, “you are eventually forced to recognize that the way to the universal is through the particular.” Birds, for Rosen, are symbols of loss and the hunt for something—he doesn’t know exactly what, but he yearns for it, nevertheless. His glass is half empty, but he doesn’t want it to stay that way.

The history of birding is a vast, sprawling subject, and it’s not surprising that Weidensaul struggles to get it going for the first fifty pages or so. Then he hits his stride, and the rewards for the reader are rich. He begins with the Native Americans and white Roanoke settler Governor John White. Rosen starts with the rapscallion genius John James Audubon and a macabre tale about the death of Audubon’s favorite parrot at the hands of a pet monkey (Rosen uses this story to frame much of his narrative). Both authors are fascinated by Audubon—”what a damnably awkward challenge Audubon still poses, almost two centuries after his pinnacle,” writes Weidensaul—and like countless others, they can’t help but be drawn in by his charismatic persona.

Weidensaul’s apt to go off on tangents, such as folk names for birds or tracking a vulture or scenes from his own birding life, but the reader will probably enjoy going along for the ride, choppy as it sometimes gets. He admirably covers a lot of ground: the evolution of field guides, the rise of recreational birding, bird conservation, and the bitter divide between amateurs and professionals.

These birders are a motley crew, and their stories make lively reading. Weidensaul includes such ornithological pioneers as Mark Catesby, Alexander Wilson, and Elliott Coues, as well as contemporary birders Roger Tory Peterson and Kenn Kaufman. For amateur birders like myself, learning about these men (and the few women) who jumpstarted ornithology lends understanding to some common bird names in my field guides (think “Bell’s vireo”) as well as their Latin monikers (Pica nuttalli, named in honor of naturalist Thomas Nuttall). Weidensaul explains that Eastern birds are often named for a location (“Cape May warbler”) and Western birds for a person. I also learned that birders consider it bad manners if you discover a new rarity and name it for yourself. You are supposed to wait until an ornithological friend discovers a bird and names it for you.

In an era when birdfeeders are as common in backyards as barbeque grills, it’s difficult to remember that in the 19th century, the idea of looking at birds for the sake of observation was revolutionary. As Weidensaul writes, “To the general public, birds were usually seen through a strictly utilitarian lens—either as valuable for sport, food, or pest control, or viewed as vermin to be stamped out when their behavior conflicted with human interests.” Indeed, birds such as robins and red-winged blackbirds showed up regularly on hotel dinner menus. Birds were important for their economic influence (eating weed seeds), stuffed for private natural history collections in homes, and prized for their feathers as millenary decoration. The modern Audubon societies, shaped by late 19th-century women’s club movements, would change all of this. By the turn of the century, as birds became moral symbols rather than just scientific specimens, birding was shifting decisively from shotgun to field-glass ornithology.

Weidensaul also connects the rise of popular birding to the growth of the automotive culture and the evolution of the field guide. Although field guides had been around for a long time, Roger Tory Peterson’s landmark work of 1934 was distinctively accessible to the non-scientist, as well as being portable and affordable. Peterson, whose name became a brand, opened many eyes to the natural world for the first time, Weidensaul argues: “Field guides make the natural world knowable.” Indeed, this evolution in field guides, he says, helped to provide the impetus for the modern environmental movement.

It is here that the contrast in tone between the two books is most salient, even as their fundamental concerns intertwine. For Rosen, birding is a way to find his place in a diminished landscape—birds represent the “shards of a broken world.” Of the two authors, Rosen thinks more deeply about the paradoxical relationship between man and birds: “We need to subdue the natural world in order to thrive in its midst, but subduing it too fully will ultimately destroy us.”

Birds such as the elusive (and possibly extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker, Rosen writes, can help us see who we really are: “wild children of American fantasy … but equally biblical, stewards of the earth.” Rosen, who is Jewish, says this stewardship comes about because of a divine spark in us which calls us to become caretakers of the earth: “I’m not saying you can’t be a conservationist without this feeling—it’s just harder for me to understand what we owe the ivory-billed woodpecker without it.” He points to the Kabbalistic tradition in which each person has a sacred task to repair the earth. “Perhaps birdwatching is a living metaphor for this mystical process.”

Rosen’s bent for the symbolic, while intriguing, can become overwrought, as when he writes about the much-vilified introduction of the house sparrow around 1850, and the reaction of ornithologists: “I sometimes think that in some unconscious way they were acknowledging, through their hatred of this bird, a certain dark awareness of what European settlers had done to the native human population of America.” Sometimes, a house sparrow is just a house sparrow.

Both Weidensaul and Rosen are laudably passionate about conservation, although of the two, Rosen is more conflicted and predictably melancholy: “Never have I better understood the meaning of Hegel’s observation [“the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”], which essentially means that insight arrives when the end is near, or that cultures peak when they are about to die, than when I started birding.” Later, he writes poignantly, “If we don’t shore up the earth, the skies will be empty.” Birding has changed him for the better: “Dawn and dusk matter differently to me now, and the seasons, tied to the arrival of birds and the departure of birds, bind me to the earth in subtle and important ways.” Beautifully said.

And Weidensaul would heartily agree. He decries changes in birding that have made it more superficial, “another outlet for frenzied hyperactivity.” This sort of birding—where compulsive life-listers are apathetic to the birds and their habitats, driven only by the desire to rack up more bird sightings than the other guy—prompts him to call for “a path in which the thrill of the sport is tempered by a celebration of the creature that makes it all possible—the small, contained miracle that is a bird.”

Weidensaul is right. Next time you see an iridescent hummingbird probing a flower for nectar, a scarlet cardinal cracking sunflower seeds at the backyard feeder, or a heron wading along the shoreline, take time to look. Not only the skies, but also our lives, would be emptier for their absence.

Cindy Crosby is the author of three books, including By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer (Paraclete), and editor/compiler of The Ancient Christian Devotional (InterVarsity Press).

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

Only in the last ten to fifteen years has the serious study of the Civil War’s religious dimension become commonplace. Thanks to scholars such as Mitchell Snay, Steven Woodworth, James McPherson, Richard Carwardine, Eugene Genovese, and Harry Stout, we now know much more than ever before concerning the role of religious bodies and religious beliefs in the unfolding of the sectional crisis.

On the crest of this historiographical wave comes The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, the latest work from the nation’s premier historian of Christian thought. In the opening pages, Mark Noll explains that his goal is not primarily to shed light on the causes or course of the war but rather “to show how and why the cultural conflict that led to such a crisis for the nation also constituted a crisis for theology.” That crisis centered on two questions: what the Bible had to say about slavery, and what the conflict seemed to suggest about God’s providential design for the country. Although “both read the same Bible,” as Lincoln famously observed in his second inaugural, Protestants North and South discovered that “the Bible they had relied on for building up America’s republican civilization was not nearly … as inherently unifying for an overwhelmingly Christian people as they once had thought.” In the end it was the force of arms, not the Word of God, that would resolve the sectional dispute.

Noll situates the theological crisis brought on by the war in the context of popular “habits of mind” that had flourished in the United States since the early years of the republic. Marrying Christian faith with republican political ideals and Enlightenment epistemology, American Protestants were typically suspicious of religious authority and skeptical of intellectual élites, and they thought of the Bible as a “plain book” readily comprehensible to “anyone who simply opened the cover and read.” Many viewed God’s ongoing work in the affairs of men as just as easily apprehended; rare was the Christian leader who shared Lincoln’s humbling insight that “the Almighty has his own purposes.” Instead, as the war approached, “confidence in the human ability to fathom God’s providential actions rose to new heights.” Although the integration of “biblical faith and Enlightenment certainty” gave antebellum American Christianity much of its popular appeal and expansive vitality, Noll argues that the combination left evangelicals ill equipped to resolve the sectional crisis—or even to think very deeply about its implications. Indeed, one of the distinctive traits of the American Civil War, Noll contends, is the almost utter lack of “theological profundity” that it evoked among the Christians torn apart by it.

Of the two major questions that he highlights, Noll devotes considerably more attention to the controversial relationship between the Bible and slavery. Proslavery southerners read the Bible literally and found no explicit indictment of the institution. Significantly, when antislavery northerners read the Bible literally they frequently reached the same conclusion, a realization that drove a tiny minority to repudiate biblical authority entirely, while prompting a far larger group down the slippery slope of appeals to the general “spirit” of Scripture, which their common sense (as opposed to careful exegesis) convinced them was incompatible with human bondage. The latter often invoked “self-evident truths” that were central to national ideology, but “the stronger their arguments based on general humanitarian principles became, the weaker the Bible looked in any traditional sense.” Small wonder that so many proslavery Christians came to equate the antislavery crusade with an assault on orthodoxy.

There was a third alternative for antislavery Christians, Noll notes, one that would have preserved biblical authority by conceding that Scripture did not prohibit slavery per se but contending that it did in fact condemn the racial slavery actually practiced in the United States. A few lone voices tried to marshal such arguments, but they failed badly. For one thing, their “nuanced biblical argument was doomed” by a democratic culture that exalted “common sense” approaches and was reflexively suspicious of sophisticated biblical interpretation. As important, Noll argues strenuously, was the pervasive racism—in the North as well as the South—that led whites to take for granted that references to slavery in the Bible “could only mean black slavery.” To be successful, he asserts, “the argument that a racially discriminatory slavery was a different thing from slavery per se would have required the kind of commitment to racial antiprejudice that the nation only accepted … late in the twentieth century—if in fact it has accepted it now.”

Some of the most interesting insights in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis come from Noll’s brief survey of the views of European Christians regarding the American conflict. Although European Christians were just as likely to discern God’s intentions in the struggle, almost none linked the defense of American slavery with the defense of scriptural authority. Noll attributes the difference to the greater weight that “history, tradition, and respect for formal learning” carried in Europe, as opposed to the United States, where the “interpretive will of the people” reigned without challenge. European observers also saw clearly much that was invisible to American believers, in particular the degree to which material interests, republican assumptions, and racial attitudes were shaping the Christians, North and South. Above all, they were willing to question whether the combination of individualism and a lack of centralized religious authority—the democratic and voluntary features of American Christianity that had contributed so much to its dynamic growth—might also be primarily responsible for the civil strife that had divided the country. “It was a point to ponder,” Noll remarks.

This slim book raises momentous questions for the history of American Christianity while offering, in the process, intriguing insights into an understudied aspect of our nation’s greatest civil ordeal. As such it deserves a wide audience, not only among scholars but, more important, among Christians outside the academy. It will be more accessible to the former. Published by a university press, derived from lectures originally delivered to an academic audience, this is a book that will communicate best with specialists. Church historians will be interested in Noll’s characterization of the Civil War as a turning point in American theology, while Civil War historians will be enlightened by his explication of the conflict’s understudied theological dimension. The latter may question whether he has really demonstrated the centrality of theological debate to the sectional crisis, given that Noll focuses primarily on a small number of prominent theologians and religious leaders, and both groups of specialists may wish that the author had offered more evidence of how élite theology translated into popular religious attitudes.

Of greater significance to the lay reader should be the implications of Noll’s analysis for contemporary Christianity. Although Noll never overtly moralizes, there is a sense in which his entire book is a cautionary tale. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis reminds us of how easily cultural conventions can shape definitions of “orthodoxy.” It warns us that an aversion to complexity is not the same thing as a commitment to scriptural authority. And it demonstrates, powerfully and all too pertinently to the present moment, the consequences that follow when Christians in a society given to the “voluntary and democratic appropriation of Scripture” come to disagree passionately about what Scripture actually teaches.

Robert Tracy McKenzie is Logan Family Professor of American History at the University of Washington. He is the author most recently of Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (Oxford Univ. Press).

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

We know something of the grand scale of the Civil War—the battles, the generals, the various factors that led to the conflict—but we know much less about how it affected the people who actually lived through it and fought in it. The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell thus provides us with an invaluable resource, weaving the mundane and extraordinary events of the war into a seamless narrative that allows us to view the war as it really was, at least through the eyes of one rather remarkable man. His attention to detail, human sympathies, and religious sensibilities make him a trusty observer of a conflict that forever changed the course of American history. Moreover, his convictions hearken back to a time in American history when evangelical faith, moral reform, and social justice were allies rather than enemies.

Joseph Hopkins Twichell (1838-1918), the son of a tanner, was born and raised in New England. After graduating from Yale, Twichell enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York to prepare for the ministry. But his abolitionist sympathies drove him to volunteer as a chaplain in the Excelsior Brigade of Lower Manhattan, a unit mostly made up of Irish Catholics. From 1861 to 1864 Twichell served as chaplain of the brigade, which saw action in several major Civil War battles, including Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. After his tour of duty Twichell returned to New England, married Julia Harmony Cushman, with whom he had nine children, and completed his ministerial training at Andover Seminary.

Twichell then served as pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational Church for 47 years. The church grew steadily under his leadership and started many outreach programs to Hartford’s needy. But Twichell’s interests were not confined to church ministry alone. He enjoyed a deep friendship with the élite of New England, including the writer Mark Twain and the composer Charles Ives, who married his daughter Harmony. He became involved in the Chinese Educational Mission, the Hartford Evening Club, Nook Farm, the Republican Party, and the Yale Alumni Association.

Alas, Twichell has been largely lost to our historical memory. This publication might help change that. He wrote hundreds of letters during the war, mostly to his father but also, especially after his father’s death in 1863, to his mother, siblings, and a few friends. The book includes about a third of his letters, a short biography of Twichell, occasional commentary, notes to identify obscure references, maps, photos, drawings, and bibliography. The editors provide necessary information without becoming obtrusive; they let the letters speak for themselves.

Early on, Twichell’s primary duty was to organize religious services for “his boys,” as he liked to call them. But as the war progressed he found it nearly impossible to perform traditional religious duties and thus had to find other ways to make himself useful. He assisted medics in performing amputations and other surgeries, comforted soldiers who were about to die, wrote letters to their families back home, secured couriers to get their meager pay to the bank, and helped to bury the dead.

His letters provide an unvarnished account of the war as soldiers and civilians experienced it. For example, he frequently comments about the impact of weather and other natural phenomena, which so often affected the movement of troops and the outcome of battles. (He likens bad weather—rain and mud, cold and wind, drought and dust—to the plagues of Egypt.) His attention to detail makes his account of historic battles ghastly and wrenching. He describes the suffering of individual soldiers, the stench of death, the cries of the wounded, all the while adding the human element that every person fighting in the Civil War felt—the longing for home. “I have been up to my elbows in blood all day, and it is a relief now just at night to turn for a few minutes homeward, where there is peace and happiness.” He comments after coming upon Confederates who had died in battle, “They lay in heaps almost—a half dozen together. Wounds of every description were open to view, some horribly disfiguring … . I saw one handsome fellow, with a beardless face and a hand small and delicate as a girl’s. I took hold of it and even in death it felt smooth and soft.”

Twichell took his job as chaplain seriously. He expresses moral indignation about the abuse of alcohol (he was a teetotaler), use of profanity, discord among the troops, the execution of deserters, and tension between Protestants and Catholics. He tried his best to find common ground with Catholics, hoping that his example would impress them spiritually. Though never fully approving of Catholics, he did develop a fast friendship with a Catholic chaplain, Father O’Hagan, and grew to appreciate some elements of Catholic faith. His familiarity with Catholics mitigated the natural suspicion and hostility he had inherited from his background—and set him apart from most of his fellow Protestants, especially after the war.

He is no distant, cold observer. He admits to depression and loneliness and homesickness. He expresses affection for his faithful horse, deep concern for family back home, and frustration when he does not receive letters. His father’s sudden death in 1863 dealt him a severe blow. “O, my Father! My Father, where are thou? Is it I, or is it he that is lost? … Now with unutterable yearning I grope round the shadowed world after him, and find nothing but fresh grave … . I shall never write ‘Dear Father’ again—never.” Is the style grandiloquent, grating on 21st-century sensibilities? Yes, but the emotion is real, the sense of loss universal.

Twichell believed that the Union cause was right. The North’s commitment to preserve the union and abolish slavery was noble, even redemptive. He condemns the South, vilifies Copperheads (northern Democrats who opposed the war and advocated withdrawal), and extols the “magnificence” of the Union army. Yet there is a Lincolnesque quality to his writing, too. He speaks of an “Eternal Plan” that no one could ultimately fathom. On occasion he admits doubt:. “I pray continually that God in pitying mercy will end these dreadful times. I often am inclined to think that, after all, liberty [may] cost too much. If you could see what I have seen you would be thus tempted also.” At such times only faith sustains him. “If I had no faith in God, and did not feel that the plan, the plan, is unfolding in ways of His appointment, I should go crazy. I thought yesterday that I should not much care if I had done with earth, so full of violence.”

Both a revivalist and a social reformer, Twichell would find it hard to understand why anyone might imagine that those commitments were antithetical. He believed that the war presented a rare opportunity to preach Christ: “I do not know that I shall ever again be placed where I can preach the Gospel with such an advantage as here and certainly I shall never be placed where it is more needed.” He endorsed the cause of temperance, favored strict Sabbath observance, and, above all, opposed slavery, which was an evil that had to be stamped out, no matter what the price:

So far as slavery is concerned, nothing could deepen my hatred of it. All that I have personally seen and heard has only confirmed what had before been told. My abhorrence of the system goes beyond my commiseration of its negro victims. I think sincerely that it were better that the present generation of slaves be exterminated than that the Curse of another generation of Slavery rest upon the shoulders of the nation … . Something must perish utterly, not in its relations but in itself.

This is a strange and troubling notion—”it were better that the present generation of slaves be exterminated than that the Curse of another generation of Slavery rest upon the shoulders of the nation”—which suggests that, despite his genuine sympathy for the slaves, they were finally less real to Twichell than the moral drama of a nation facing divine judgment, as Israel did in the Old Testament.

Twichell’s letters capture the trauma of the war as no standard history could, tracing the loss of innocence, easy optimism, and confidence in America as a Christian nation. He matured as the war progressed. His enthusiasm was tempered, his indignation softened, his convictions sharpened, his easy answers moderated. He was still the same man who held to the same convictions. But there was greater depth in him, too. The war grew him up without making him disillusioned and cynical.

This rare book reminds us that history does not consist only of great events splashed on a huge landscape but also must be faithful to the lives of ordinary people who believed, however rightly or wrongly, in a cause for which they were willing to die. And it testifies that it is possible to endure catastrophic suffering and come out the other side the better for it.

Gerald L. Sittser is professor of theology at Whitworth College. He is the author most recently of Water from a Deep Well: Christian Spirituality from Early Martyrs to Modern Missionaries (InterVarsity).

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

When I returned to Virginia after my sophom*ore year of college, I went back to my high school to pose a question to my beloved U.S. history teacher: how, I wanted to know, had I grown up thinking that the Civil War was fought over the tariff? It took exactly one week in a college history class—a week in which I read the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, which makes clear that it was not the tariff but rather the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” that led to the creation of the Confederacy—to realize I had been led astray about the cause of the most important event in American history.

Apparently, I was not alone. At the outset of her terrific first book, Georgetown historian Chandra Manning recounts a conversation she recently had at a wedding. Sitting next to her was a history buff, and soon the conversation turned to the Civil War. The buff held forth, “insisting … that slavery had nothing to do with the conflict.”

The straightforward argument of What This Cruel War Was Over is that soldiers themselves—far from being ignorant patriots or naïve dupes—knew that the war was about slavery. Confederate soldiers understood this from the first. In the wake of Fort Sumter, for example, a group of Louisiana men who were studying at the University of North Carolina gathered to declare their commitment to defending “that Institution at once our pride and the source of all our wealth and prosperity.” Most Union soldiers recognized the centrality of slavery to the conflict only slightly later, somewhat before much of the northern public accepted emancipation as a war aim. Indeed, it was often Union soldiers’ contact with white Confederates and black slaves that got them thinking about slavery. They heard from white civilians that the Confederacy had gone to war because Lincoln’s election had threatened slavery, and their interactions with slaves persuaded previously indifferent Billy Yanks, many of whom had never met a black person before the war, of the necessity of emancipation. One soldier from Iowa witnessed a slaveowner trying to sell off a slave who was also his daughter, and declared, “By G-d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on.” Of course, this didn’t mean that Union soldiers ceased to be racists. Like their president, many a man in blue was able to hold together a strong commitment to ending slavery with a strong distaste for the idea of black equality.

Manning’s book ought to silence anyone who still wants to talk about the tariff, but beyond that, Manning makes important smaller claims. She reminds us that many southern unionists opposed secession not because they were any less invested in slavery, but because they believed that their leaving the Union would more seriously imperil slavery than their staying. In particular, secession would guarantee that white Southerners would have no role in determining how northern states treated fugitive slaves. As Georgian Benjamin Hill put it in November 1860, “the only real ground of difference now is: some of us think we can get redress in the Union, and others think we cannot.”

Manning suggests that her discussion of soldiers may help solve the logjam over “who ended slavery.” One answer to that question is the slaves themselves: in escaping to freedom behind Union lines, slaves forced the U.S. government to decide whether it would return these slaves to their owners or recognize their freedom; thus the slaves pushed the question of emancipation onto the war agenda, even as Lincoln was writing (in 1862), “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” The other answer is that Lincoln freed the slaves: he may have dragged his feet, but he did eventually sign the Emancipation Proclamation (and, of course, it was Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery that prompted secession in the first place). Manning intriguingly argues that this debate has overlooked “the crucial link between slaves and policy makers”—yes, slaves forced emancipation onto the political agenda, but one way they did so was by “converting enlisted Union soldiers … into emancipation advocates who expected their views to influence the prosecution of the war.”

As significant as these two points are, Manning’s greatest contribution is her insistence on connecting military, political, and social history. Those connections are something historians often talk about but rarely attend to. We frankly don’t need another history of the Battle of Bull Run that focuses solely on the minutiae of military maneuvering, and, great storyteller though he was, we don’t need another Shelby Foote. We need more Chandra Mannings, historians who understand that the best military history—whether the subject be the Civil War or “Operation Iraqi Freedom”—is always the history of ideology, too.

Despite Manning’s exhaustive research—she seems to have read, and made good use of, nearly every primary and secondary source plausibly connected to her topic—she neglects to grapple with, or even cite, Stephen Hahn’s seminal 1983 study The Roots of Southern Populism. There, Hahn shows that yeomen fought a war for slavery because, even though they didn’t own slaves themselves, the system of slavery safeguarded yeomen’s “communal, prebourgeois” society, and in general protected yeomen from the hardships of capitalist social relations. Hahn’s is a much more precise and persuasive argument than Manning’s more generalized assertions that white Southern yeomen were drawn into the war because slavery “undergirded white Southerners’ convictions of their own superior moral orthodoxy,” helped yeomen feel manly, and was tied in with their “unobstructed pursuit of material prosperity.” Still, such nitpicking aside, What This Cruel War Was Over establishes Manning as one of the most significant Civil War historians of the next generation.

The Civil War changed virtually every aspect of American society, from religion to gender roles. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, has devoted her new book to exploring how the war changed American death. In the Civil War, over 2 percent of the nation’s population died—which, as Faust points out, was roughly equivalent to the entire state of Maine being killed, or twice the population of Vermont. The Victorian choreography of “the good death” was inadequate for dealing with the mind-boggling numbers, the stench, the mangled corpses of men too young to die. Americans had to overhaul their notions of what death could and should look like, and even what kind of God could be said to be present—or absent—during such death.

Many of the concrete changes in American dying that Faust documents involve the government’s role in military death; indeed, it was the Civil War that created governmental responsibilities that we now take for granted, such as next-of-kin notification, which neither the Union nor the Confederacy viewed as their job in 1861. At the outset of the war, the Union had no organized method for burying, or even identifying, dead soldiers. That began to change with the 1862 passage of a law giving the president power to purchase land for a national cemetery for soldiers; cemeteries were established at Chattanooga, Stones River, Knoxville, Antietam, and, of course, Gettysburg.

In the years during and after the war, the government developed a more aggressive system for counting the war dead (the figures of Union soldiers killed were constantly revised until the 1880s, when the War Department settled on 360,222) and paying pensions and survivor’s benefits. The erstwhile Confederacy didn’t have a government anymore, and certainly didn’t expect the Union to give money to Confederate war widows, so states stepped in. (I recall the day in 1986 when the North Carolina legislature, having made its final payment to the widow of a Confederate soldier, repealed the statute that provided Confederate widow pensions. The widow in question was Harriet Victoria Stallings, who had married Cyrus H. Stallings, of Company A, 70th Regiment North Carolina troops, in 1898. She lived to the ripe old age of 102. If only North Carolina had been as concerned for the welfare of the freed slaves and their descendants.)

These changes were tied to a larger change the Civil War wrought: the creation of a centralized and powerful nation-state out of what had been a more loosely connected confederation: “as the very term implies,” writes Faust, “statistics emerged in close alliance with notions of an expanding state, with the assessment of its resources, strength, and responsibilities.” So just as Manning’s book is not merely an account of soldiering, This Republic of Suffering is not just a history of American death but, subtly, a history of American politics as well. In case anyone was in doubt, Harvard has an insightful and incisive scholar at her helm.

Lauren F. Winner holds a Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University, and is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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

The exploding growth of Protestantism in Latin America has been old news for some time. But even for those who have stayed in touch with recent developments, the news item in the June 22 Miami Herald was a stunner. Although traffic jams are a daily staple in and around Guatemala City, this one in the community of Mixco was special. The cars, backed up for miles, were headed for the inaugural sermon at Mega Frater, Central America’s biggest church building. The new worship center of the Neo-Pentecostal Fraternidad Cristiana “includes an auditorium that seats 12,500, a seven-story parking tower topped with a helipad and a day-care center for 3,000 kids.” It is surely of no small significance that the heads of all three branches of government, as well as the mayors of Guatemala City and Mixco, found it propitious to grace the occasion with their presence. [1]

With the shift in global Christianity—away from the North Atlantic quadrant to the new center of gravity in the South and East—the news item might just as well have been about Seoul or Nairobi or Rio de Janiero. But it’s not just Christianity on the upswing. Other religions are experiencing phenomenal growth as well. “What is important in history,” wrote British historian Paul Johnson in 1983, “is not only the events that occur but the events that obstinately do not occur. The outstanding non-event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear.” [2]

Responsibility for predicting the demise of religion has inevitably become part of sociologist Max Weber’s legacy. It was he who in 1918 used a particular locution that has come reverberating down through the years. “The fate of our times,” Weber said, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world” (emphasis added).

Given that turn of phrase for the anticipated hegemony of secularization, acknowledgment of religion’s continued effectual presence in the human family has often jettisoned the word disenchantment and substituted reenchantment. Some recent examples range from New Age guru Thomas Moore through an array of scholars from various disciplines and countries including Peter Berger, Alister McGrath, Marcel Gauchet, and Avihu Zakai. Add to the list Roger Lundin’s latest book, reviewed recently in these pages, which draws on the reenchantment theme to explicate Emerson. [3] Perhaps most revealing is the April 2007 meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, in Phoenix, Arizona. Under the theme “The Reenchantment of the World?”, anthropologists spent two days exploring the contours of contemporary religious landscapes around the globe.

Davidson College anthropologist C. Mathews Samson, one of the participants in that conference, uses the disenchantment/reenchantment theme to shed light on the experience of Maya Protestants in the Guatemalan highlands. He has impressive qualifications to tackle the subject. When scholars who have no personal background in religion are faced with the necessity of processing religious data in the subject under examination, readers can pretty easily detect a hesitancy—or worse, a heavy-footed dismissive tone—especially when dealing with experiences and ideas with evangelical or Pentecostal overtones. Not so with the author of this work. An anthropologist with a Ph.D. earned at the University at Albany under Professor Robert Carmack, along with years of field work in Guatemala, Samson is also an ordained Presbyterian clergyman who clearly has a more than professional interest in the matters he discusses. By focusing on a Central American nation, he adds significantly to the literature on Christianity’s continuing vitality. Philip Jenkins’ recent book, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, confines its attention to Africa and Asia. [4] While it would be a stretch to call Guatemala typical of all Latin America, the encounter of the Gospel with the customs and beliefs of traditional Maya religion foregrounds a number of fundamental questions.

The question that comes most immediately to mind is this: If a meaningful response to Weber’s disenchantment is the reenchantment supplied by the religious impulse, how should we understand “reenchanting the world” in Guatemala, a country that has been saturated with religions for centuries on all levels of society? As the abstract for one of the panels at the anthropologists’ Phoenix conference pointed out, “It should come as no surprise that religious reenchantment is on the rise. In many parts of the world it never went away.” On an even more basic level, in this realm of discourse what is reenchantment anyway? Samson does not evade these questions. But they are not simple ones, and it takes the entire book to examine the layers of complexity and bring everything into focus.

ÂA working definition doesn’t sort out all the subtleties, but it’s a necessary start. Disenchantment, as Samson treats it, “connotes the sense of a loss of mystery as human life becomes more rationalized through the application of a scientific worldview and technological innovation.” Reenchantment, then, refers to the recovery of that sense of mystery in one’s relationship to the world. As will become apparent, in the Guatemalan indigenous context it will involve revindication (revindicacion) of the Maya worldview.

It is necessary as well to give readers a modicum of information about Guatemala’s culture and history. Samson meets that demand with several introductory chapters in which he lays out an admirably clear and concise background not only for the focused subject of the book but for a better understanding of the violent warp and woof of Guatemalan life.

ÂThe burden of national history is at the root of the problem: a European invasion that forcefully imposed Christianity on the native population and declared the practice of their traditional religion illegal; centuries in which that Maya religion survived either through clandestine ceremonies deep inside mountain caves or in a syncretistic melding with Christian ritual winked at by the Church; the official welcoming of Protestant missionaries late in the 19th century as a counterbalance to Catholic power; the inevitable overlap of Christianity, civilization, and commercialization; systematic oppression of the Maya population whose cheap labor was essential but whose numerical majority created a perpetual fear of revolt; vacillation of dominant Catholicism between support for the oligarchy and protest on behalf of the poor in the name of liberation theology; a 36-year civil war in which one’s religious allegiance was often a life or death matter; and a postwar decade in which the hope for a “multiethnic, pluricultural, and multilingual” country is still only a distant dream.

Add to that the fragmentation of both Protestantism and Catholicism. Samson sees four kinds of Catholicism in Guatemala—indigenous, orthodox, charismatic, and activist—with the possible addition of a “folk Catholic category for those places where the indigenous component is not as strong.” On the Protestant side, it is said that there are more than 300 evangelical groups in the country, leading Presbyterian mission co-worker Dennis Smith to postulate an “Amoeba School of Church Growth.” Smith adds that “where there is one Evangelical congregation, within six months there will probably be three.” [5] Protestant groups, Samson says, can be loosely categorized as “evangelical (Bible-believing non-Pentecostal), Pentecostal (focused on experiences of the Holy Spirit in the person’s life, including through divine healing), and neo-Pentecostal (usually based in the elite sectors of society and proclaiming some version of dominion or health-and-wealth theology that justifies their place in the upper crust of society).” The huge Mega Frater church, whose opening was covered in the Miami Herald, would be in this last category. And when you include in the mix the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other groups usually identified as sects, plus a revitalized traditional Maya spirituality with its own special appeal, one is tempted to say that no place on earth is more deserving of the ubiquitous postmodern label, “religious marketplace.”

To sort out the cultural and theological diversity, Samson uses a comparative method, looking ethnographically at two Maya presbyteries that are part of the National Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Guatemala. The very existence of these separate presbyteries is part of an involved history. Early Presbyterian missionary efforts were not directed primarily toward the indigenous. According to Virginia Garrard-Burnett, denominational mission strategy was to focus first on the urban population, even among the very poor, “in anticipation of expanding their work into the middle and upper classes from this established base.” [6] As part of that strategy, Presbyterians built hospitals and started schools, but with the western highlands and its indigenous population beckoning, the more adventurous missionaries soon broke out of the geographical confines and began also the formidable task of translating the Bible into the multiple native languages. The separate Maya presbyteries emerged in mid-century as part of a continuing process of adjusting power relations in the denomination and achieving a more equitable distribution of resources.

Samson succinctly summarizes the difference between the two presbyteries in this way:

If the Mam Presbytery represents a Maya evangelical identity rooted in the symbolics of a historical Protestant theological tradition, and even a sometimes tenuous union of those symbolics with Mam cultural identity and cosmology, then the Kaqchikel Presbytery represents an activist evangelical identity. This activism is a direct challenge to notions of evangelicals as apolitical and inattentive to social issues. Simultaneously, it cultivates a challenge to state power and the political, social, and economic structure of Guatemalan society from a stance shaped by direct political and social involvement.

But even a cursory reading of Samson’s account makes it clear that the contrast is subtle rather than stark. We should not be surprised, in other words, to discover that the Mam approach has political dimensions as well, or that the politically volatile Kaqchikel world has concerns arising from the juxtaposition of Protestant theology and Maya cosmology.

Protestants in the Mam group define themselves as being separate from two inescapable and forceful presences: one is Roman Catholicism, so completely identified with Latin American culture for centures; the other is costumbre, the system of native customs that is tainted with “paganism” and “idolatry” and whose public rituals are associated with excessive use of alcohol. While a stress on personal and communal behavior effectively demonstrates a separation from costumbre, the symbolism of sacred space, both exterior and interior, of Mam templos (places of worship) sets them apart from Catholicism. For one thing, unlike the imposing Catholic cathedrals in cities and town squares, the simple, small, and colorful Protestant churches are everywhere. In place of Catholic iconography and in accord with the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, decorations concentrate on Bible verses and occasional visualizations of biblical scenes. On the platform, the pulpit (i.e., the sermon) is central, rather than the altar (the Eucharist). Normally the chairs are arranged in rows, as in a lecture hall.

The Kaqchikel are different in their worship practices in almost every way. For one thing, they place a low priority on the place where worship occurs: “Actual templos or church buildings do not typically serve as gathering places, and the discourse maintained by the presbytery is of work done in communities instead of in congregations as such.” Several years ago, on one of my trips to Guatemala, having attended a relatively conventional worship service in a Mam templo, I was caught up short by the differences when I attended a Sunday morning service at a Kaqchikel Presbyterian congregation in an urban neighborhood in the city of Chimaltenango. Inside the nondescript meeting room, entered off a dirt path, the chairs were arranged in a circle instead of in rows. We joined the few people who were already there and waited quietly as others came in, one woman carrying a chicken in a cage. Clearly there was no hard and fast starting time and no set order of service. I don’t offer these recollections as a criticism; we sang some hymns, read the Scriptures, and then listened respectfully to thoughtful comments that could have been used as illustrations in Philip Jenkins’ book on reading the Bible in the global South. It reminded me of a Christian base community gathering I had attended in Nicaragua.

With regard to how the Mam deal with weightier matters of theological belief, Samson cites illustrations that tend in opposite directions. The more or less official position is that conversion should be a break with the past—meaning particularly the traditions of the ancestors. But the break is not always a clean one. His summary of a series of interviews with a Mam Presbyterian minister poignantly underscores the problem. Representing “a strongly biblical and Calvinistic approach to evangelicalism,” the interviewee was usually reluctant to discuss Maya spirituality and its relation to his theology. When he did finally agree to talk about the subject, his deeply personal response, which Samson reproduces at length, clearly revealed the ambivalence at the heart of the matter. The issue hinged on the eternal destiny of a great-great-grandmother whose influence, though she was not a Christian, had played an important part in his life. It was an emotionally wrenching question: Was she in heaven or hell? Raising the possibility of a faith in God “like that in the time of Abraham,” the minister eventually found a resolution in which he could take comfort: “I came to believe that, yes, she also died, but she was not lost.”

To stress these matters as of primary importance to the Protestant faith of the Mam is not to say that they are apolitical in the practical outworking of their Christian commitment: “Mam leadership has promoted a teologica integral (integral theology) that emphasizes holistic approaches to development concerns such as agriculture and health care within the larger community.” On my first trip to Guatemala in the summer of 1987, our Presbyterian delegation had a briefing with Don Jose Romero, the superintendent of the Mam Center in San Juan Ostuncalco. He told us of a recent official visit by a colonel from the nearby military base. The officer wanted a full report on what was going on there. Romero did a rundown of the center’s many activities: agriculture, water projects, health clinic, weaving classes, worship services. That was permissible, said the colonel grudgingly, “But if I ever hear that there’s any of that liberation theology going on, we’ll burn your place down and kill everyone.” Obviously, liberation theology and what was “going on” at the Mam Center shared a good deal of common ground, but given the level of theological sophistication in the Guatemalan military, that visit passed without repercussions.

Political involvement among the Kaqchikel, on the other hand, has consistently gone far beyond “teologica integral.” Their leaders were not only deeply and directly involved, at considerable personal risk, in efforts to bring about an end to the 36-year civil war; one of their number ran (unsuccessfully) as a vice-presidential candidate in a postwar national election. Even something as basic as location within the country played a part in the differing approach of these two groups. The Mam area is farther away from the capital, beyond Quetzaltenango, the country’s second-largest city, and closer to the border with Mexico. Today the distance between those two major cities can be traversed with relative ease—though no one will mistake the Pan-American Highway for I-80 across Nebraska. But in earlier years the greater distance from the center of power meant a degree of isolation. The Kaqchikel people clustered around Chimaltenango, which even in the days of more primitive travel was within the aura of governmental influence. More to the point, during the civil war they were located in a geographic axis that tied together the different fronts of the war, connecting them to the strategic Guatemala City region. Their greater political involvement has a religious counterpart in a much greater experience of and commitment to ecumenicity than the Mam have, not only within Guatemala but in important transnational liaisons that have played a supportive role in the struggle for human rights.

In the book’s penultimate chapter, Samson takes a different tack: an analysis of a single act of violence and the response it triggered in the Kaqchikel Presbytery. In June 1995, Manuel Saquic, a minister on his way home from his work at the human rights office in Chimaltenango, was brutally stabbed to death, his body thrown into a cornfield. Hardly an unusual event for Guatemala. But a year later, through a series of events set in motion by the presbytery leaders—a memorial service and skillfully orchestrated protest marches and demonstrations—the assassination took on a transcendent significance. Saquic was declared a “triple martyr”: “a martyr for human rights, a Christian martyr, and a Maya martyr.” With this proclamation, says Samson, “a new coyuntura (historical moment) came into being in the nexus of evangelical identity, the struggle against impunity in the area of human and civil rights, and the struggle for ethnic renewal by the Maya in Guatemala.”

If I read Samson correctly, the reenchanting process among Maya Protestants in the Guatemalan highlands—understood as revitalization, the restoration of a sense of mystery at the heart of existence—is proceeding on two tracks, in the same direction but not exactly parallel. Both the Mam and Kaqchikel presbyteries “represent the most rational wing of Protestantism—ascetic Calvinists with connections to a long missionary history in Guatemala.” As such, both are vulnerable to “the reworking of religious meaning” taking place on many levels: “this can be seen not only in the Protestant presence but also in the midst of the revindicacion of Maya culture and Maya spirituality that challenges at every turn the tenets of both Roman Catholic and Protestant manifestations of Christianity.”

It is easy to detect the warning bells in those sentences. This “reworking of religious meaning” is taking place in a country trying to become “multiethnic, pluricultural, multilingual.” Pluralism may seem innocuous at first, a sort of democratic breadth of tolerance. But Samson quotes Diana Eck, director of Harvard’s Pluralism Project, to the effect that pluralism is “the language not just of difference but of engagement, involvement, and participation. It is the language of traffic, dialogue and debate.” While such problems are hardly new in the history of the church, they have taken on a new magnitude with reenchantment in the saddle. And they are not open to simplistic resolution.

The ambiguities are many. But I will take leave of the subject by using an epigraph that Samson puts at the head of his first chapter. It’s a pithy saying by Vitalino Similox, a Presbyterian Kaqchikel minister: “God was here before Columbus came.”

Rudy Nelson, associate professor of English, emeritus, University at Albany, is co-producer/director (with Shirley Nelson) of the documentary film Precarious Peace: God and Guatemala.

1. MiamiHerald.com, June 22, 2007

2. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (Harper & Row, 1983), p. 698.

3. Thomas Moore, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life (Harper Collins, 1996); Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Eerdmans, 1999); Alister McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis (Doubleday, 2002); Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997); Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton Univ. Press, 2003); Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

4. Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).

5. Dennis Smith, “Coming of Age: A Reflection on Pentecostal, Politics and Popular Religion in Guatemala,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Vol.13, No. 2 (Fall 1991), p. 131.

6. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Univ. of Texas Press, 1998), p. 40.

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

Years of skilful interviewing by David Smilde of the men in two churches in dangerous parts of Caracas, Venezuela, conducted during the period just before Chavez, confirm what investigations have shown from Kingston, Jamaica, to Accra, Ghana, and points east. Evangelical, charismatic, and in particular Pentecostal Christianity offers visions and revisions of lives changed for good, spiritually, morally and (so far as may be, given the changes and chances of life) materially. Of course, some fall by the way, because things don’t to work out as hoped, or else they are pulled back into old ways by boon companions. Most encounter experiences which try them “as gold in the fire,” and getting right with God may turn out easier than getting right with a wife or partner. All the same, there is enough evidence of some betterment affecting all the interlinked dimensions of life to vindicate Providence in the eyes of believers rather than the influence of fortuna and fate. Even when sorely tried, Pentecostals turn to ancient, indeed biblical, ways of searching out the ways of God: for example, that he is teaching his children through adversity, that his ways are not as their ways, that their way of life has somehow been displeasing in his sight, and that the goods of this world corrupt our treasure in heaven.

Smilde describes his work as ethnography, which I find rather problematic, given the absence of the “surrounds” needed to set off the specific character of the group (or groups) under scrutiny. Certainly we are offered lively accounts of the workings of the two churches selected for study, Emmanuel and Raise Your Voice to the Lord, and of the way Pentecostal evangelicals confront the trials of everyday life. These may involve the mockery of friends and the pull of old associates, or pressure from close members of the family, or confrontations with violent and murderous men in a macho culture of honor and feud. Smilde shows, once again, how Pentecostal strategies of survival both entail social costs and offer an understood way out of the spirals of reciprocal violence. He gives us moving examples of Pentecostal eloquence in (for example) open-air sermons, and, by acute questioning, he elicits remarkably thoughtful responses about how first getting right with God enables men to realize their “better selves” through (on balance) betterment all round.

Smilde also provides an account of the economic and social crises that hit Venezuela, above all in the “popular sectors,” in the last two decades of the 20th century, after decades of rising prosperity based on oil revenues. A period of rising expectations, disfigured by a clientelist mode of distribution, was followed by a decline, characterized by degrees of corruption that made an objectively bad situation even worse. This was the period of the evangelical (mostly Pentecostal) takeoff, later than elsewhere in Latin America (except Argentina), so that evangelicals now make up about 5 percent of a population of over twenty million. It was also a period of mobilization undertaken by various groups, including evangelical Pentecostals, such as El Clamor por Venezuela, analyzed in an earlier work by Smilde but omitted here, even in the bibliography. What Smilde does offer is a tale of several cities thrown up by the socio-economic developments he graphically sets out. These comprise the long faded remnants of a disorganized colonial society and fractured Church, the monuments of a triumphant liberal anti-clericalism, the rapidly fading “modern” city of the oil boom, the gleaming postmodern city of global capital, and the vast “informal city” of the marginalized and impoverished, dotted with outposts of evangelical Pentecostalism.

But what is not covered of the “surrounds” is really rather astonishing. Smilde notes that Venezuela was regarded as one of the more “secular” among the Latin American countries, though not as militantly so as Uruguay. That secularity overlay an inspirited religious landscape of syncretic folk Catholicism. Yet this landscape only emerges sideways through evangelical accounts of it. Smilde notes that the sense of the holy attached to the Bible and the Divine offers a slipway for movements of evangelical conversion, so that what evangelicalism provides is a near-optimum relation between similarity and difference. That apart, the Catholic Church remains undiscussed. Other work on Venezuelan evangelicalism is ignored, and even the Neo-Pentecostalism of the middle classes only appears marginally by way of contrast.

Given that Smilde’s investigation approximates ethnography rather than any other genre, his range of comparative ethnographic reference with regard to a vast literature directly relevant to his concerns, is minute. The same is true of work on Pentecostal women, though it is obviously relevant for his specific analysis of Pentecostal men. I also find it surprising that he passes up the opportunity for comparative comment on the specific Venezuelan case, for example the parallel late emergence of interdenominational charismatic Christianity in Argentina. Of course, ethnography does not have to be comparative, except that Smilde makes selective raids on the comparative literature to make theoretical, and indeed injurious, polemical points that tell us as much about academic culture and the exigencies of survival in academia as they tell us about the culture of Pentecostalism. My hunch is that this literature has mostly been left unread, given the alternative explanations are worse: misunderstanding (which is unlikely, since Smilde is clearly highly intelligent) or misrepresentation at others’ expense in order to clear a space for his own interpretations.

Smilde describes himself, a little oddly, at least in British academic terms, as a “trained” philosopher, and this training is deployed on issues in the area of “theory,” especially rational choice. Theory provides the axes of the book and far too much of the bibliography. Much fascinating material is shredded through the kind of discourse that keeps professional journals in business: this is our most obvious déformation professionelle. Too many sociologists and social psychologists produce sharply angled theoretical takes on life as lived, especially religious life, based on reified alternatives. In Smilde’s analysis these alternatives include instrumental action and non-instrumental action, contemplative and calculating, self-interest and mutuality, culture and structure, moral order and empowerment, agency and non-agency. He also exerts himself on the reified and mistaken dichotomy that contrasts the symbolic, figurative and generalized orientations held to be characteristic of religion, with the practical and concrete approaches of the mundane.

I am vividly reminded of the academic industry of New Testament criticism. Sociologists compulsively revisit the sites of older excavations to reconfigure them according to the most recent illuminations. What Smilde aims to reconfigure is a contrast between an interpretive schema stressing the rationality of conversion as a life-strategy and one stressing its “imaginative” character, in the pejorative sense: invented, unreal entities like the Devil or God. This affords him opportunity to produce the mediating concept of “imaginative rationality,” based on a pragmatic understanding of truth as what works in practice. Though obvious, this happens to make good sense of evangelical Pentecostals as “agents” envisaging a better life through the prism of divine agency. It takes a sociologist triumphantly to arrive back at the obvious. It also takes a sociologist, or perhaps a literary theorist, solemnly to explain that a narrative of conversion involves temporality, that is, one thing following another in time. Again, though Smilde makes good use of network analysis, any lay person who has an addict in the family knows about the role of significant others in constraining an addict to continue or enabling him or her to discontinue. And there really is no problem about combining network analysis with a search for meaning.

Finally, Smilde makes what he regards as three original points. One is that students of religion should “provincialize” Europe with its “sacred canopies,” as well as the United States, and “incorporate need satisfaction through religious practice.” Yes indeed. He adds that marginalized sectors and displaced social élites frequently mobilize themselves through cultural identities, and that populations moving around the globe make distinctions like center and periphery, industrialized and developing, “largely” irrelevant. This kind of long-delayed and overstated wisdom is yet more evidence that vast stretches of research in several continents over decades have completely eluded his attention.

As for his emphasis on consciously desired and comprehensive betterment when it comes to “deciding to believe,” of course evangelical appeals offer release from vicios while distinguishing, as he shows, between business gain and moral reorientation. Certainly evangelicals sharply repudiate the cruder versions of the prosperity gospel, and the spin it gives to words like “rich” and “fruitful.” The problem lies in his phrase “deciding to believe,” when the heart of the matter only marginally involves shifts of belief, if by belief we mean a grammar of assent. Belief is a notoriously multivalent notion. The beliefs in question are inspirited orientations largely shared with the wider society, except for the rejection of “idols” and the (unmentioned) mutations from Mary to Sophia, and from the suffering of the Passion to celebration. Rather, we are dealing with fiducia, trusting faith. Alike in the canonic narratives of the Bible and of the paradigmatic histories of Pentecostals, the climactic shift, sometimes immediate, sometimes more prolonged, is in the passive-active mood: “I yet not I.” It is a standard paradox of the phenomenology of conversion that those suffering from “the bondage of the will” outsource renewed moral “agency” to the Holy Spirit. Narcotics Anonymous works in a parallel way with regard to a “higher power” and the need to accept one’s own helplessness as a precondition of agency. Smilde calls the accounts of conversion he cites “loose,” when in truth they are subtly presented in terms of tight, classical paradoxes: “I yet not I,” in the Pauline sense, and the shift from dis-ease to abundant (or “eternal”) life, in the Johannine sense, here and now.

Smilde also contrasts Marxist emphases on structural constraint with a supposed “neo-conservative” emphases on unlimited voluntarism, meaning an ability to choose your culture at will. This latter view he initially attributes to Brigitte Berger (wrongly spelt) in a quoted sentence retaining crucial provisos (p. 12). However, he rapidly drops the provisos. By page 280 he is correcting a “glib” neo-conservative voluntarism, which he then loads onto me and Peter Berger.

In the past I have lamented the careless, ethnocentric projection of categories derived from America’s culture wars onto the analysis of global Pentecostalism. In this instance, Smilde projects “neo-conservative” onto someone in a culture where political alignments are quite differently articulated, and where there are all kinds of selective conservatism with a small “c” outside his cultural range. As for the charge that I believe people can adopt any culture at any time, it is outrageous. When I and, for example, the Bergers and Larry Harrison, claim that culture makes a difference, it is, or ought to be, a truism. Culture obviously matters, as any visitor to the former East Germany knows, and as the achievements of the Chinese or the Jews in diaspora clearly indicate. At the same time, the cultural revisions achieved by Pentecostals derive from structural openings. They are constrained and they vary over time and cultural space. To suggest I or the Bergers think otherwise passes belief. Is this deliberate misrepresentation? Surely, surely not. Let it be put down to what the Catholic Church in its charity calls “invincible ignorance”—with perhaps an additional reflection that we who choose to live in a menagerie should not be so surprised when we get scratched. Else “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?”

Jane Soothill’s sophisticated and path-breaking study, Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power, focuses on women in nondenominational charismatic churches in Accra, Ghana. Even more than in Venezuela, life and politics are saturated in the world of the Spirit. Moreover, the historical sequences are strikingly similar, for example, the effects of International Monetary Fund interventions and the emergence of groups mobilizing as part of an incipient civil society. However, Ghana’s oil was cocoa. What specially characterizes Ghana is a semi-mythical evocation of precolonial gender equality, a tendency on the part of the colonial government to work with male local leaders, the political co-option of women’s movements after independence, and the re-emergence of “Queen Mothers” as powerful “First Ladies.”

Soothill addresses established themes in global research, particularly in Africa. These include orality and the extraordinary power of the media, the freedom of the Spirit and participation in a context of authoritarianism, the role of networks and aspiration in geographical and social mobility, American influence and rapid indigenization, and individuation in the context of the emergent nuclear family. The names of the churches she studied show how much they emphasize victorious living rather than patient suffering. Indeed, Action Chapel International, Alive Chapel International, and Solid Rock Chapel International resemble their American counterparts in promoting self-realization and “holding up your head” for both sexes, rather than the more patriarchal emphases still present in fundamentalist Christianity. Self-esteem and sexual harmony replace abstinence in a thoroughly modern manner. Soothill identifies gender as an area of potent ambiguity and paradox where three main theses have been put forward: that the Pentecostal emphasis on domesticity reinforces patriarchy; that Pentecostalism transforms the patriarchal family by feminizing the man; and that the priority accorded to feeling good, whether one is male or female, more than counteracts recourse to gendered hierarchies.

In her chapters on “Womanhood” and “Big Women, Small Girls,” Soothill first argues that born-again discourses emphasize an individuality that creates a tension between women’s social roles and their personal trajectories. She then suggests that genuine opportunities for participation and self-expression are tempered somewhat by narratives of mistrust among participants, and the dominance of the leadership. In the cases of leaders such as the Reverend Francisca Duncan-Williams and the Reverend Christie Doe Tetteh—when they are not in international orbit—we have “Big Women” in the clientelist style of “First Lady” while lesser participants take up the role of “Small Girls.” What the new churches successfully provide is access to spiritual power on the part of prophetic individuals, a power that is then deployed more widely as women try to use it in mediating their gendered relationships.

In her key chapters on “Men, Marriage and Modernity” and “Christianity, Gender and Cultural Authenticity,” Soothill widens her scope to include Mensa Otabil of the International Central Gospel Chapel and David Oyedepo of Winners Chapel. Though Ghanaians remain more embedded in wider kin relations than was anticipated, charismatic Christianity is at the forefront of shifts to the nuclear family and shifts to mutual solicitude, respect, and commitment. It was Adam who originally courted trouble and let in the snake by his absenteeism—”Adam, where art thou?”—not Eve, and his headship has been redefined as humble self-giving. Charismatic Christians are told to replace African traditions with this more Christian attitude. Charismatic sermons on male misconduct and the proper conduct of lovemaking might raise an eyebrow even in the more liberal sectors of ECUSA: “You just had fun for five minutes, and she carried the burden for nine months … . O, God! If I had a cane, we would lash all the man on their backs, on the bare behind.” Success in spiritual warfare against satanic and demonic influence comes with fulfilled responsibility, and when men fail, as they do, women are their salvation through their appropriation of spiritual power. Ancient and modern are here combined.

Soothill poses awkward questions about the negative judgments made by Western theologians on this kind of Christianity, and about African theological intellectuals dubious about its African authenticity. For charismatic Christians, Africa is the problem, not the solution, and yet their own solution is clearly framed within the African religious imagination and its enspirited universe. Female pastors adopting the role of “Big Women,” Soothill suggests, are “post-colonial hybrids” disjoined and yet connected to Africa’s precolonial and colonial past. As for “authenticity,” who decides? As David Lehmann argues in the context of Latin America, populist Pentecostalism is markedly indifferent to the sponsorship of intellectual élites.

On a wider historical horizon one cannot help reflecting on the way Christian genealogies mutate over time. Calvin was a progenitor of Joseph Priestley, and now it seems German Pietists, with their focus on the Passion, were the progenitors of Archbishop Idahosa, with his focus on Jesus the Winner Man.

David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ashgate). He was recently elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

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

In the two millennia after Democritus first proposed that matter could be divided only until one reached a smallest defined particle, natural philosophers debated what the smallest unit of matter could be. With the flowering of the Scientific Revolution, the concept that atoms are the basic unit of matter was gradually established beyond dispute. And in the latter half of the century just past, several leading historians of science thought they had pinned down more or less exactly who knew what about atoms and when.

Schoolchildren in the 1950s and ’60s were taught that each atom was a miniature solar system of sorts: a tiny, dense lump of protons and neutrons (the sun) ringed by a cloud of electrons orbiting in rapid circles (the planets). The number of negatively charged electrons exactly balanced the positive charge of the protons in the nucleus. We knew these electrons were in fixed orbits in a complex ladder based on each electron’s energy level and the number of electrons orbiting the atom. And this knowledge was given currency on magazine covers and billboards and even television, depicting both good in the form of nuclear energy and evil in the form of bombs and fallout. These images reminded us that although atoms are unimaginably small, splitting an atom’s nucleus released energy that made nuclear weapons not merely the most powerful bombs in history but something more, something difficult to grasp: real doomsday weapons.

While schoolchildren practiced hiding under their desks in “Duck and Cover” drills, historians of science were codifying a view of how and when atoms came to be seen as the basic unit of matter. Briefly, the idea that atoms are the smallest unit of any element was a minority opinion in Western science from its beginnings with Democritus all the way up through the late 1600s. Then—so the story went—the Scientific Revolution occurred. Reason reigned, superstition was superseded.

Readers who follow developments in physics and chemistry know that the scientific view of atoms today is much more complex than the mini-solar-system view popularized in the mid-20th century. It turns out that no one can determine both the position and the momentum of tiny subatomic particles, so the current view of electrons around the nucleus of an atom describes only a cloud of probable positions. The nucleus is far more complex than the spherical lump of positively charged and neutral particles pictured in textbooks just a few decades ago. Each proton and neutron is composed of smaller particles called quarks that exist for eons or fractions of seconds and have fractional charges and “colors” and spins and charm and other characteristics far more challenging to visualize and grasp than the old model.

So too, the popular image of the Scientific Revolution, representative of the mid-century scholarly consensus even if greatly simplified, has given way to messier narratives that reflect new understandings of the history of science. And nowhere is this change more apparent than in the revised estimate of alchemy among a growing number of contemporary scholars.

Alchemists, of course, figured in the familiar Enlightenment story as the last crazy magicians of the Middle Ages, charlatans scamming credulous creatures of the pre-modern world. In the 17th century, they were vanquished by the Scientific Revolution, their mummery discredited once and for all. But in Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, William R. Newman tells a very different tale. Newman’s intent with this book is to “give cause for reconsideration of the traditional ‘grand narrative’ of the Scientific Revolution. It is time to consider this topic anew rather than adding further lucubrations to the surveys and textbooks of our forebears.” Aiming to rescue the beginnings of modern science from accumulated errors and misreadings, Newman clearly demonstrates that alchemists developed and refined laboratory practices that formed part of the foundation of what has become known as the Scientific Revolution. Far from springing up unbidden after a long and dreary epoch of rank superstition, the Scientific Revolution took root in the good soil of centuries of experimentation, much of it done by the alchemists.

This relatively slender book, in company with other recent scholarship that reconsiders what “everybody knows” about the history of science, promises to revolutionize the received understanding of the Scientific Revolution and the mechanical philosophy and experimentalism that characterized it. Newman is well aware that “alchemy” was an umbrella for a wide range of practices and pursuits, not all of which are pertinent to his argument. His dispute is with historians past and present who have denigrated alchemy tout court and who have failed to acknowledge its role in the development of modern science. They have told the story of the adoption of the mechanical philosophy as the recovery in the Latin West—supposedly in the 16th and 17th centuries—of the ancient views of atoms propounded by Democritus and Lucretius. In this account, these classical ideas were usefully modified by thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes, whom these historians have regarded as proto-physicists. To be sure, Robert Boyle is in their pantheon, but he has been characterized as bringing physical thinking to chemistry, or as having a split personality divided between a modern chemistry self and an alchemical self.

To refute this received opinion, Newman conducts a guided tour through the matter theories of half a dozen thinkers, showing in specific detail bloodlines from alchemy to modern chemistry. While Boyle and Thomas Aquinas will be familiar to most readers, the others—Geber, Thomas Erastus, Andreas Libavius, Julius Caesar Scaliger, and Daniel Sennert—will be new to readers not familiar with science in the middle of the past millennium. They are for the most part thinkers who were once important, but who have been left out of historical accounts because they simply don’t fit the reigning narrative.

This tour demands of the reader a genuine curiosity about matter theories and the mental agility to imagine a time when chemical operations were not necessarily assumed to reveal something about the nature of matter. It requires understanding the meaning of scientific words in use today in rather different ways (much as C. S. Lewis illumined in Studies in Words). In an intriguing “Note on Terminology,” Newman explains, for example, that “atom” did not necessarily mean absolute indivisibility as in classical theories; nor does “atom” imply indivisibility today. But early modern thinkers used a variety of related terms such as “corpuscle” and “molecule”—not surprisingly, without universally agreed upon definitions. Newman also points out that “mixture” and “compound” once meant almost the opposite of their meanings today.

Another potential surprise for the reader may be that there were, so to speak, at least two Aristotles. There was the familiar one of substance, forms, the four elements, and the four qualities. But there was also the less familiar one of minima, the smallest particles that exhibit the characteristics of a particular material. And in his Meteorologia, Aristotle presented mechanical sorts of explanations in which earth’s exhalations condensed to form all the meteorological effects, or, if trapped in the earth, all the metals.

This tradition entered alchemical research at an early date—most prominently in the writings of Geber, the Arabic pseudonym for a 13th-century author called Paul of Taranto. Geber moreover brought experimental evidence taken from the metallurgical-alchemical tradition to bear on matter theory. In the fullness of time, this experimentalism became the gift of alchemy to the emergence of modern science.

Geber used a series of chemical reactions to argue against the Aristotelian theory of matter as explicated by Thomas Aquinas and in support of the sulfur-mercury theory of the composition of metals. In Aquinas’ view, the generation of a new material presupposed the total corruption of the previous material, form and all, that is, resolution to the first simple elements (earth, air, fire, and water) or to prime matter itself. But Geber (who did not have mineral acids at his disposal) argued that metals could not be calcined (oxidized), their calces dissolved, sublimed, and finally reduced by fire if the metals had been corrupted all the way down to the four elements. If so, they might have come back, not as metals, but as almost anything! According to Geber, there must be some intermediate surviving principles that account for the metals; for him, these principles were sulfur and mercury.

Variants of this course of experiments, which Newman dubs “resolution to the prime state,” appear in the alchemical literature right down through Robert Boyle. As if to emphasize that these reactions were really performed in laboratories and not simply in thought experiments, Newman provides color-photo reproductions of such a series as carried out in the laboratory of Cathrine Reck of the Indiana University Chemistry Department. And these are the only illustrations in the whole book: no curious alchemical symbols or quaint alchemical apparatus. The experiment pictured on the plates shows that solid metal could be dissolved in acid. The liquid acid could pass through filter paper, then the original metal could be restored. To pass through filter paper, the silver must have been resolved to very small particles indeed.

Newman and Lawrence Principe have identified Boyle’s immediate predecessor in the use of this general course of experiments as Daniel Sennert, an early 17th-century German academic. Boyle did not acknowledge Sennert in this regard, perhaps because what Sennert tried to demonstrate through this chemistry was quite different from Boyle’s use of it. As the reader will no doubt notice, there’s a black box here: something persists through change, but what? According to Sennert that something was not any combination of the four elements but rather the invisible semina, which safely carried immaterial forms through change. For Boyle, the same reactions showed the semi-permanence of molecule-like corpuscles, which he at one point calls “primary clusters.” These were not informed by forms but rather vice versa. Forms and qualities attributed to bodies really originated in the micro-texture of their particles, which Boyle aimed at demonstrating through other experiments. Newman likens the Sennert-Boyle difference of interpretation of experimental results to the debate between Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier over the dephlogisticated air/oxygen experiments. Priestley clung to the theory of phlogiston until his death. Lavoisier correctly deduced that the element he named oxygen was the key to combustion.

Newman doesn’t mince words. Of one author’s view of alchemy in the 17th century, Newman says, “he is badly mistaken … . [His] method consists largely of adding sociological explanations to the preexisting history of ideas.” Newman chides the same author for missing things one would find with “closer reading” of source material. Of recent work on the Scientific Revolution Newman says: “In reality, the primary representatives of the most recent historiography have done little but proffer a new gloss on an old and outdated story.” But Newman builds his case so carefully and persuasively that these combative words seem fully justified. By the final chapter the fine detail reveals a lovely picture of how the work of the alchemists, especially the mineral acid experiments pictured on the color plates in the center of the book, formed the foundation for modern atomism. Newman is especially vivid in re-creating the brilliant insights of Boyle, demonstrating that particles unimaginably small might be shown to exist without any of the modern instruments and apparatus we take for granted. This is a superb book with far-reaching implications.

Mary Ellen Bowden is senior research fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in Philadelphia.

Neil Gussman is communications manager at CHF.

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

Stephen Dunn was born in New York in 1939. He earned his B.A. in History from Hofstra University, where he also played varsity basketball, and later received his M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 1970. In 2001, Dunn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Different Hours.

Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but currently spends most of his time in Frostburg, Maryland with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd. His most recent collection of poems is Everything Else in the World (Norton). Please visit him on the web at www.stephendunnpoet.com.

This conversation was conducted by phone.

In discussing your poetry my friend Douglas Jones pointed out that parts of it read very much like the book of Ecclesiastes.

Because you had mentioned this before, I was rereading Ecclesiastes this morning, and was reminded what great poetry it is.

I have been rereading your poetry, and there is a sense in which it has the quality of poetic wisdom literature.

I know you mean that as a compliment, but it is risky stuff, such thinking. I have written an essay on the difficulty of writing anything like wisdom poetry. Though, because of the difficulty, sometimes one might wish to try and get away with it. If you sound like you are coming from on high, it won’t feel trustworthy. If the “wisdom” feels like a discovery for the poet, well, there’s a chance. It helps, of course, if you have a genuine sense of being complicit in the ills of the world, which I do. Wisdom that sounds superior, or as received truth, makes me suspicious of it. It is a matter of trusting the voice. Poetry responds to the way things are. If my poetry affirms at all, which it sometimes does, the only affirmations that I tend to trust are ones that acknowledge the condition of the world. Without an acknowledgment of darkness, affirmation is rather vapid.

At the very end of your poem “At the Restaurant,” you say, “inexcusable the slaughter in this world, insufficient the merely decent man.” Here you sound very much like the psalmist David, who is complaining to God, and I mean complaining in a good way. How would you respond to someone recognizing you as part of the tradition of the Psalmist?

I do not think of myself that way at all. Those last two lines were the poem’s discovery that arose out of the material, a kind of self-indictment, actually. Given the horror that is in the world, it might be insufficient just to be a decent person and not to be, say, someone who is more of an activist.

Do you view your poetry as an accurate extension of reality?

More like a correction of reality [laughs]. Most of the language used in a day, I would say, maybe about 75 percent of it, is designed to deceive you. So between government speak, official speak, advertising—any of the oversimplifications you regularly are confronted with—if you’re me, you find yourself listening to or being given a world that does not resemble yours. I think one thing that poetry does is bring us a little closer to the real by the precision of its language. To get the world right is a hard-won thing. It’s not easily done. Wallace Stevens says that one of the jobs of the poet is “to put people in agreement with reality,” which I like a lot.

How is poetry not just an escape from reality?

Bad poetry is [laughs]. Oh, there are all kinds of poems. There are some that please us with their music, or the quality of their inventiveness. But the poems that most matter to me are the ones that put me a little closer to the real. And I think the real is elusive. I don’t know if you know the French mid-century poet Paul Éluard. He has a statement which I have always loved, a credo for my poems. He said “there is another world and it is in this one.”

How does your faith make your poetry beautiful?

I usually find out what I believe by writing. I write myself into beliefs. And I think of beliefs as provisional. They’re not things that constitute anything fixed. It’s very easy for me to entertain lots of possibilities, to wear a lot of beliefs, to test them out, to plumb them. I tend to be a skeptic about firmly held beliefs. I think the world confounds them constantly. So each poem is really a little enterprise in which I’m finding out what I think and what I believe as I go.

G. K. Chesterton once said, “The moment you have a fixed heart you have a free hand.” He thought that freedom and surprise were most healthy, most robust when they have a fixed point. If everything is surprise, then nothing is.

That’s one of those comments that’s very interesting, but I’m somebody who immediately entertains the opposite of what I hear, and I know the opposite of that statement is true also. The unfixed heart gives you a free hand: both things are true.

A little earlier you said that you tend to be a skeptic about firmly held beliefs. Do you ever entertain the opposite of that? Are you ever skeptical of the firmly held belief in skepticism?

I would substitute “cynicism” for “skepticism.” The skeptic is in search of language or truths that pass hard tests. The cynic, as Wilde says, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I’m skeptical of the cynic.

Imagine for a moment that you live in a Christian universe. I know that you are not there personally, but your poetry, I think, invites these questions. What sort of poetic style do animals express? And let me just give you a concrete example of what I am asking about. A line that I really love in your poem “Nature” talks about how you like the “preposterous mad god creations,” the rhinoceri and things like that. How do animals reveal a wild God?

I don’t know what you mean about poetic style in relation to animals. But all the things in the world, collectively, attest to some kind of grandeur. And Christians would like to call that God. I have no problem with that. I think of God as a metaphor. God is a metaphor for the origins and mysteries of the world. I don’t want to quarrel with people who believe in their version of that great mystery. My quarrel is with those who hold that their religion has the answer. If we examine things cross-culturally, we see that there are many gods. As a species, we are god-creators. Every culture seems to need its god. And so I tend to think anthropologically about such things.

In that line about the “preposterous mad god creations,” how is it that they are somehow revealing a wildness in God?

Yes. I am entertaining that notion, and you are right to call me on it. But to me, it is a comic notion. Those tapirs and rhinoceri are so wonderfully grotesque.

They look otherworldly.

Yes. It attests …

To a creator.

Or to the mysteries of evolution, which probably somebody smarter than I could trace. These moments in my poems are all probings, not beliefs. They’re provisional. And sometimes I’m just having fun. This takes us back to where we started. I try to put people in some agreement with reality, with the real, to discover—without pre-existent impositions—what is out there, what the world is like. It is a constant groping toward. One of the things for me, as an ex-Catholic—and it’s always amazing to my friends—is that I am an ex-Catholic without guilt [laughs].

Well, Martin Luther was too [laughs].

[Really laughs] I was lucky enough, though it confused me at the time, to grow up with my maternal grandparents living in the same house. My father was an Irish Catholic. My mother did not know what she was. And my grandmother was a Scotch Protestant and my grandfather was a German Jew. So there was no orthodoxy quite possible in our house. It was all confusing to me back then. Now, I rather like how it shaped me.

What would you say to someone who thought that in some ways you were a closet Christian?

I would think they are not reading me very well.

[Laughs] I don’t mean that they are peering into the heart of Stephen Dunn and talking about him being regenerate in the theological sense of the word. I am thinking more of the frequent use of Christian categories in the poems, not an explicit confession of Christianity.

Well, what I hope you are talking about is a kind of moral attentiveness.

That is part of what I am talking about. There’s a disagreement I would like to take up with you in your poem “Loves,” which I thought was a great poem. One line says, “in spite of their lack of humor I love Thoreau and Jesus ” As someone who thinks of Christ as the humorist that no one could handle, I would want to quarrel with that claim.

[Laughs] You know, it’s funny, Aaron, most people quarrel with me on that and they pick Thoreau. They think Thoreau is full of humor [both laugh]. You are probably right.

Well I guess the quarrel would come from just watching the way Jesus acts, the way he treats moralists, the way he treats people who do not entertain the opposite, the way he uses parable and poetry and satire all the time—he is dangerously full of humor and poetry.

I would not argue with you on this because I am assuming you are right.

OK. I was wanting you to argue with me [laughs].

The Thoreauvians keep bringing up great moments of humor with Thoreau and I just have to yield.

In regards to your book The Insistence of Beauty, what is this notion that beauty has a demanding, compelling quality to it? Why is beauty that way?

I just think beauty is irresistible. It disarms us. It takes away our arguments. And then if you expand the notion of beauty—that there is beauty in the tawdry, beauty in ugliness—things get complicated. But I think that beauty, which is more related in my mind to the sublime, is what we cannot resist.

In the title poem of your latest book, Everything Else in The World, the speaker has received an education that gives him “a hankering for the sublime.” He’s not content with cubicle life. I get the sense from this poem that you have certain ideas about what a good education should be. Are you a defender of the liberal arts? Is a “hankering for the sublime” characteristic of a good education? I know these are big questions.

They are big questions, deserving of an essay rather than the kind of response I can offer here. I’ll confine myself to saying some things about the poem, which I think of as a dramatization of an early crossroad in the speaker’s life. His education, in a sense, has made him unfit for corporate life. He gets the job, and is good at it, but, yes, he hankers for something like the sublime, and discovers that the virtue of getting such a job is that it fills him with desire for “everything else in the world.” In essence, a comic poem.

In your poem, “The Soul’s Agents,” I enjoy the lines: “In your case we do worry / there may not be enough / quarrel in you, or enough courage / to acknowledge your worst inclinations.” What should people learn to quarrel with in general? Where can we find the courage to acknowledge our worst inclinations?

Well, to pick up on your previous question, maybe a true liberal education should give one the tools to subvert or resist that which in the culture is false, banal, spiritless. Those agents of the soul are looking for someone to pass hard tests, and some of their criteria are a kind of cultural persnicketiness combined with a courage for acute self-examination. That’s what the soul’s agents are looking for, which (in the terms of the poem) they will report to the soul. I don’t know where we can find such courage. I imagine it would differ from person to person, and perhaps anyway it should be a rare occurrence. As we’ve heard, the soul selects its own society.

Throughout this collection of poems there seems to be, if not a theme, a sentiment that there is a way of being principled and efficient that misses the point and leaves one with a desire for everything else in the world. In contrast, there is a beauty and an art in the useless, in the common, daily things. To name several examples, I think of lines from “A Small Part,” “Cut and Break,” and “From the Tower at the Top of the Winding Stairs.” Would you say that everything else in the world refers to the poetry of things?

What a lovely question. Yes, maybe, the poetry of things is always that which is slightly out of reach, and yet approachable through the language that might extend us in its direction. One can learn to love, for example, “the shadows illumination creates,” as I say in “A Small Part.” Or recognize how “stunning” his friend’s “useless art” is. I think most of us, deep down, are seeking what Keats calls “a fine excess,” which, yes, is poetry, and has a chance to enlarge our sense of what it means to be human.

Aaron Rench received his B.A. from New Saint Andrews College, and is currently a graduate student at the University of Oxford in Creative Writing. He and his wife, Gentry, have one daughter, Eve, and make their home in Idaho.

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

It is that time again, when the larder overflows with books on subjects so various, so resistant to any tidy ideological formulation, so exceeding any personal predilection or “demographic,” as to suggest the inexhaustible plentitude of Creation. What’s a poor editor—poor and rich at once—to do?

There’s Cars for Comrades, for instance, by Lewis Siegelbaum, a history of the Soviet automobile industry coming from Cornell University Press. An improbable story worth savoring for the sheer incongruity of it, instructive too. I have already sent the galley to Andy Morriss, an economist who moved recently to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (You may recall his piece “Too Much Choice?” in the July/August 2005 issue of Books & Culture. That wasn’t a problem confronting comrades who were shopping for a car.)

What about Holy Dogs & Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition, by Laura Hobgood-Oster, just published by the University of Illinois Press? The flap-copy begins thus: “Analysis of animals in the history of the Christian tradition has been exclusively symbolic, but Laura Hobgood-Oster utilizes the feminist perspective in her examination of animal presence. In challenging the metaphoric reading of animals that reinforces human superiority and dominance, Holy Dogs & Asses underscores animal agency.” This is rather offputting, beginning with the opening clause, which is manifestly untrue, and the whole paragraph reads a bit like a parody of fashionable academic trends. And yet the subject is compelling (think for instance of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Rational Dependent Animals, a book that is also in conversation with feminist thinkers, and one which is missing from Hobgood-Oster’s bibliography). Might Stephen Webb be interested? Hobgood-Oster spends several pages dismissing Webb’s On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals; with Aquinas, Barth, and Calvin (not bad company to keep!), he’s found guilty of “defining other animals by humanity’s unique relationship to God.”

Mention of MacIntyre and Rational Dependent Animals reminds me of several related books that have recently arrived or are coming soon: for example, Body and Character in Luke and Acts: The Subversion of Physiognomy in Early Christianity, by Mikeal C. Parsons, from BakerAcademic; Theology and Down Syndrome, by Amos Yong, from Baylor University Press; and Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality, by Thomas E. Reynolds, coming in April from Brazos. It would be good to have someone read these books and assess what’s happening.

From Yale University Press comes Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (with six sermons added), edited and annotated by Frank Turner, whose massive biography of Newman was reviewed in these pages several years ago. I’m sending it for review in Books & Culture to Josh Hochschild at Mt. St. Mary’s University. And that reminds me of a stack of Catholic books I have close at hand, which I’d like to see treated in a round-up. No pretense to comprehensiveness, but here are books worth reading, all embodying Catholicity: what do we gain by seeing them together? And I need to ask Jody Bottum at First Things if he can recommend a reviewer for Peter Lawler’s The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, which I have just received from Encounter Books.

Also from Yale is Michael Reid’s Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul. Alongside that we could have a review of John Michael Chasteen’s Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, just out from Oxford (and perhaps that piece could also touch on John Lynch’s biography of Bolivar, now out in paper from Yale). Separately I need to assign Christianity in Latin America, by Ondina Gonzalez and Justo Gonzalez, from Cambridge University Press; I haven’t seen the book yet, but I’m pretty sure we’ll want to cover it. Joel Carpenter at Calvin College is already at work on an essay-review that would complement such a piece.

Did I hear some restless shuffling? Are you feeling a trifle weary of this recitation? I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. There are whole categories of books—each loaded with promising titles—that I haven’t even mentioned yet, many of which I won’t be able to so much as gesture at. (To all authors whose splendid new books are not highlighted here: sorry! That doesn’t mean they are being ignored.) Fiction, for instance. David Maine, who has done three striking novels with Old Testament settings, has a new novel that looks like something different: Monster 1959, arriving this very day from St. Martin’s. I’ve sent galleys of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, due in April from Knopf, to Elissa Elliott, who will review it as a Book of the Week. Coming soon are BoW reviews of Sue Miller’s novel The Senator’s Wife and Anne Rice’s The Road to Cana, the second book in her Christ The Lord sequence (both also from Knopf). Ron Hansen has a new book coming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Exiles, an unconventional historical novel based on the story of the nuns lost in the wreck of the Deutschland, which inspired Hopkins’ great poem. That’s due in May, and—with the galley in hand—I need to find the right reviewer now. (Rudy Nelson mentioned that Paul Mariani is at work on a biography of Hopkins, which will be something to look out for—I need to find out when that’s expected.)

Steve Moshier of Wheaton College has already sent in his review of Ted Nield’s Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet, from Harvard University Press, adding that he’s going to be using the book in class. We are able to contemplate such long views even as we attend to Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri, published by Columbia University Press, informed by a “long view” on a very different historical scale. Marain Marais is playing in the background (look for a review of Bruce Haynes’ The End of Early Music, from Oxford); the sports page says that spring training is about to begin (keep an eye out for Michael Stevens’ annual baseball preview/review on the web near Opening Day). Many little worlds in the great big world.

Books call out to other books. In this issue (p. 46), Lauren Winner reviews Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf). And here comes a galley of a book by Mark Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death, due from Cornell in May, a strangely ahistorical essay in cultural history that I’ll be reviewing in due course. “Asserting that nineteenth-century attitudes toward death were firmly in place before the war began rather than arising from a sense of resignation after the losses became apparent,” the publisher’s account summarizes, “Schantz has written a fascinating and chilling narrative of how a society understood death and reckoned the magnitude of destruction it was willing to tolerate.” Chilling, you understand, because underwritten by the notion that “a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited” the fallen “beyond the grave,” evidence—Schantz says—of “a sensibility with which we have, for the most part, lost touch.”

A word about that sensibility. In 1864, a prison camp for Confederate soldiers was established near Elmira, New York. A total of more than 12,000 prisoners were interned in the camp (“Hellmira,” the Confederates called it), of whom almost 3,000 died in captivity. Woodlawn Cemetery, where they were buried, was designated as a National Cemetery in 1877. According to the website for the city of Elmira, “the sexton for Woodlawn Cemetery, John W. Jones, a former slave who arrived in Elmira via the Underground Railroad, buried each Confederate soldier that died in the Elmira Prison Camp. Of the 2,963 prisoners who Jones buried, only seven are listed as unknown.” Two of the photographs at the top of this page were taken at the cemetery; the figures they show are from a ring of Union graves encircling the Confederate dead.

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