INTÉGRITÉ Spring 2023

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Volume 22

Number 1

CONTENTS

Spring 2023

ARTICLES

Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Faith and Research Conference (MissouriBaptistUniversity, 13-14 April 2023), Volume 4, 2023, pages 32-106. https://www.mobap.edu/aboutmbu/publications/symposium-proceedings/.

3 Imago Dei: Made in God’s Image to be Lords, Stewards, or Servants of Creation?

CordellP. Schulten

13 Perfect Timing: The Historical Case for the Coming of Christ in “The Fullness of Time”

Matthew C. Heckel

31 Being in the Room: Ritual, Affect, and Pedagogy in the Christian College Classroom

Brian Howell

39 The Ozarks as a Bastion of Christian Faith: An Insider’s View

John J. Han

47 A Survey of Old Testament Survey Books for Use in Undergraduate Courses

Nathan Maroney

55 Doing Away with Beautiful Things in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth

Matthew Bardowell

Undergraduate Papers:

62 Problems in Healthcare Communication: What is Happening? What Could Change?

SydneyKardasz

68 Added Symbols in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”

Emma Winkler

BOOK REVIEWS

74 Jason Byassee and Andria Irwin. Following: Embodied Discipleship in a Digital Age (Baker Academic, 2021)

Julie Ooms

78 Andy Crouch. The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (Convergent, 2022)

Julie Ooms

POEMS

81 When Winter Turns to Spring: Haiku

Jane Beal

82 “Balance” and Other Poems

Mark Tappmeyer

PHOTO ESSAY

92 Harold Bell Wright’s Ozarks: A Photo Essay

John J. Han

105 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

108 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 3-12

Imago Dei: Made in God’s Image to be Lords, Stewards, or Servants of Creation?

Cordell P. Schulten

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

Genesis 1:26 (NRSV)

The Genesis chapter one account of God’s active creation of all things culminates in verse twenty-six with two clauses: “Let us make man in our image” and “Let them have dominion.” The first has become “the centerpiece of reflection concerning the Christian understanding of the human person” (Stephenson 6). The second is the subject of volumes addressing the question of the human role in, relationship to, and responsibility for the whole of creation. Amid the centuries of dialogue engaging these two inquiries, a variety of perspectives have emerged upon the explication of the imago Dei. More recently, a similar divergence of opinion has developed on the nature of the dominion granted by God to humans over creation. The three most prominent views of imago Dei are characterized as: substantialist, functionalist, and relationalist. The two contrasting perspectives on dominion may be denominated “lordship” on the one hand, and “stewardship” on the other.

It is the initial thesis of this brief paper that the differing views of imago Dei bear directly upon these distinct perspectives of dominion. To put it succinctly, the substantialist and functionalist views give rise to and support “dominion as lordship,” and the relationalist view begets “dominion as stewardship.” Neither of these approaches, however, apprehends the fullness of the imago Dei nor the fulfillment of dominion according to the purpose of God in the person of Christ as revealed in Scripture. Thus, as an alternative, this paper will advance a communalist view of imago Dei and further suggest that this perspective will envision humans’ fulfilling their vocation of dominion over creation, not as lords nor as stewards, butrather, as servants.

The Substantialist/Functionalist View Dominion as Lordship

Although the phrase “image of God” appears no more than three times in the Hebrew Bible, the scope of literature addressing the imago Dei, as Gunton observes, “is immense, and like other immensities of discussion, comes to no agreed conclusion” (193). While his observation is true, there does emerge out of this voluminous midst at least three prominent perspectives on the meaning of imago Dei. The first of these views focuses upon the distinctiveness of human beings from non-human creation by way of human’s similarity to the divine being. The image of God is understood as referring to something that is inherent in Homo sapiens (Hall 89), because it is seen as consisting of certain characteristics and qualities that inhere in the human creaturely substance. As such, this first view is a substantialistic concept of the imago Dei. Ramsey aptly defines this perspective as centering upon “something within the substantial form of human, some faculty or capacity man possesses” which distinguishes “man from nature and from other animals” (quoted in Hall 89).

A large majority of theologians throughout the history of the church have espoused ideas about the imago Dei that fall within the substantialist view. Many of these teachers of the church associated the characteristics that distinguish humans from non-humans with “internal and ultimately static qualities of the human mind, namely a disembodied rationality” (Stephenson 6). A few theologians of antiquity, however, such as Irenaeus and later, Augustine, understood the image of God to consist of more than man’s rational soul. For Irenaeus, “the Father created man as a bodily being and modeled man after his Son, [thus] the whole man is the icon of the Son” (Weinandy 21, emphasis added). For Augustine, what was distinctive in the human creature was not his rational capacities, but rather his freedom to choose: “to affirm created being in spite of its limitations; to actualize its potential righteousness; to refrain from sin” (Hall 97). At the fall, man lost this freedom, according to Augustine, and only in Christ is man’s bound will liberated and transformed. Hence, both Irenaeus and, to a larger extent, Augustine located the imago Dei within the human capacityfor free decision and action (Hall97).

The substantialist view thus conceived of both human’s intellectual and volitional powers as constituents of man’s likeness to God. Taking the analysis one step further, a closely related view developed that looks at humans not only for what they are, but also for what they do, hence, the functionalist perspective. Chief among human’s functions, in this regard, is the concomitant phrase in Genesis 1:26, “Let them have dominion.” With its expanded focus, the functionalist view of imago Dei sees human likeness to God as consisting principally in mankind’s role as rule r over creation. In this respect, the image is seen as mediation of power over the non-human world (Middleton 28). While some traces of this view may be found as early as in the writings of the ante-Nicene fathers, Middleton contends that a fully developed articulation of the “royal-functional

interpretation” of imago Dei did not find expression until the beginning of the twentieth century in the work of H. Holzinger and Johannes Hehn (29).

Whenever one would plot its origin, the functionalist view is, in any case, essentially an outgrowth from the foundation laid by the more broadly adopted substantialist perspective of imago Dei. Both views posit humans as placed by God in a superior position over the non-human creation; one by virtue of distinguishing godlike qualities humans possess in the substance of their being, and the other by virtue of the function only humans can fulfill as beings endowed with power and ability to rule over the remainder of creation. Charles Hodge aptly described the implications of these two related views when he wrote: “[Man] is the image of God, and bears and reflects the divine likeness among the inhabitants of the earth, because he is a spirit, an intelligent, voluntary agent; and as such he is rightfully invested which universal dominion” (quoted in Hall 96). Thus, man’s investiture with the “dominion mandate” in Genesis 1:26 places him as lord of creation, and in keeping with the words of Psalm 8, “crowns” him “with glory and honor.”

Calvin Beisner of the Acton Institute presents a succinct explanation of the fundamental basis for founding the interpretation of “dominion as lordship” upon the substantialist and functionalist conceptions of imago Dei even though he uses terminology such as “cultural mandate” and “stewardship vocation.” In his work, Where Garden Meets Wilderness, he states:

[A]s God ruled over all creation, so man, as God’s image, is to subdue and rule the earth and all living things in it . . . . The force of the Hebrew words translated subdue and rule here (quoting Genesis 1:26-28) both conveying strong, forceful subjugation must not be ignored. Although we should not read into them a harsh, careless oppression which would be unlike God’s rule over creation we cannot escape the fact that they indicate subduing and ruling something whose spontaneous tendency is to resist dominion. (103-104)

Beisner’s statement, however, belies two detrimental implications of viewing humans as lords over creation. The first is an anthropocentric attitude engendering the abuses that arise from human’s subduing and ruling of creation. These are the very abuses that formed the heart of Lynn White’s landmark critique of this view as the principal cause of environmental degradations perpetrated by humans. In an attempt to counter this critique, Beisner cautions that man’s lordship should not be characterized by “a harsh, careless oppression,” yet he still pits dominant humans against the subservient non-human creation. The second detrimental implication follows from Beisner’s depiction of original creation, before the fall, as already possessed of a “spontaneous tendency .

. . to resist dominion.” While Beisner’s exegesis of the Hebrew text in Genesis 1 may be arguably consistent with similar uses of “rule” and “subjugation” in other ancient oriental texts, his placing of humans against the non-human creation based upon Genesis 1:26-28 alone, is inconsistent with the fuller biblical narrative of original creation and the consequences that flowed to the whole of creation upon mankind’s subsequent rebellion againsthis creator.

The substantialist/functionalist view of imago Dei together with its resulting notion of human dominion as lordship over creation paints a picture of the world as essentially a kingdom. Within this kingdom, God has placed human beings in the role of lord of the realm. All aspects of the non-human creation are subjects under this lord’s power and authority. They may be used for the lord’s benefit and enjoyment. While the lord does exercise beneficent care over his subjects, he does so in light of their loyalty and utility to their sovereign. All subjects are in service to the crown. Elevated to the position of lord of creation, humans are imbued with authority to act, first and foremost, in their own interest. Being both above and against a resistant creation, man’s lordship readily descends from beneficent use to self-preserving abuse. In order to avoid and overcome this detrimental tendency, a better way of conceiving the human dominion role must be found by pursuing the quest for a different location of imago Dei.

The Relationalist View—Dominion as Stewardship

Having recognized a deficiency in the traditional understanding of imago Dei within its essentially individualistic conception, many contemporary theologians have sought to reinterpret the image, not as an individually held static quality of the mind, butas a relational achievement which is constituted between others-in-relation” (Stephenson 7). In particular, this relational reinterpretation of imago Dei is based upon an analogy to the relationality of God’s dynamic and triune being. Trinitarian theologian Colin Gunton articulates the relational view through four aspects:

To be a created person is, first, to be in inescapable relation to God the Father through his two hands, the Son and the Spirit, who will not, this side of eternity, cease to hold and direct those created in hope; and it is to be in such a relation as, second, a project, according to which it is the purpose of God to perfect to his glory those he created out of free love to live as a people to his praise, to offer themselves their souls and bodies as living sacrifice of thanksgiving. Third, the project is a personal one in the further sense that human beings are created to be with and for God in Jesus Christ and so for one another, in likeness to the triune communion, as

male and female and in responsibility under God for the good ordering of the creation. . . . Finally, being in the image of God implies, therefore, an ethic, according to which human life is ordered appropriately to both the personal and the non-personal creation. All are called to relations of lovein-freedom with others so imaged; all are called to represent God to the creation. (Gunton 210)

Unlike the dualistic distinction of soul and body in the substantialist view, the relational perspective sees humans as whole persons body, soul, and mind in the image of God and in relation with God, other humans and the non-human creation. Thus, the imago Dei is not something that makes humans separate and distinct from the remainder of creation. Rather, being in God’s image places human beings in a unique position of relatedness with both the Creator and all of his creation. As Joseph Sittler has succinctly observed, “The fundamental term imago Dei is not a term that points to a substance, an attribute or a specifiable quality, but one which specifies a relation (Sittler 79).

Gunton further notes that the relationalist view has significant ethical implications which address both the deficiencies and the detrimental attitudes engendered by the earlier substantialist/ functionalist perspective. He states: “In place of the damaging dualism of much of our intellectual inheritance, the doctrine of the image . . . places us in a layered network of relationships, first to God the creator, then to one another, and then to the world in its diversity. Our continuity with the rest of the world maintains a due measure of our finite and limited state, but our difference from it [is] a witness to our high calling under God to exercise a rightdominion over the restof the created world (Gunton 211).

What then is that “right dominion” to which humans are called? Not one of lordship urged by the substantialist/functionalist concept of imago Dei; but rather, the relational view promotes and supports the notion of dominion as stewardship. In his 1986 work entitled, Imaging God, Douglas John Hall presents one of the most well-developed contemporary treatments of “dominion as stewardship” the subtitle of his book. Hall expressly ties the relationalist view of imago Dei to the exercise of the human dominion vocation as a stewardship. This conception of dominion, Hall notes, is not fraught with the superiority complex fostered bythe substantialistview, when he states:

According to [the relational] understanding of human beings, anthropos does have a particular vocation within the creaturely sphere; and while this vocation is bound up with its being a creature capable of multiple and mediatorial relations, there is not in this theology of the imago Dei the same propensity that one finds within substantialist interpretations to present essential humanity in a way that makes itnecessaryto denigrate other creatures. (Hall108)

In contrast to expressing dominion as lordship, stewardship posits humans as “the representation of God within the sphere of creation . . . The human creature is required to emulate God’s own character and manner of rule; it is to image God within the creational realm” (Hessel 145, quoting Hall, Professing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, 349-350). While Hall sets forth a convincing case for conceiving the human vocation to dominion over creation as something different from the traditional lordship model, he also acknowledges that in suggesting the stewardship alternative he prompts more inquiry than he answers the query as to what “dominion as stewardship” would or should look like (Hall 194). The stewardship model generally views the world, not as a kingdom, but instead, as a household. In particular, the created realm is conceived of as God’s household over which he has placed humans as his stewards. Their charge is to care for and manage the household to which they themselves also belong. As stewards, humans are accountable for their management of the household’s diverse facilities and members. Responsibility for the well-being and preservation of household orderliness lies on the steward. But, just like the rule of even a beneficent lord may devolve into tyranny, so too the management of a household may deteriorate into mayhem should the steward fall prey to thinking that the master of the house has delayed his return and deferred the day of calling his steward into account. Both models are insufficient because they are based upon viewing the human role in relation to creation on an individualistic basis. What thus appears to be lacking in the lordship and stewardship approaches alike is an awareness of imago Dei that operates, not as an individual representation of God, but rather, as a present expression of God in Christ’s personal, ongoing work of redemption and restoration in concertwith the whole of creation.

The Communalist View Dominion as Servanthood

The work of John D. Zizioulas, a Greek Orthodox theologian, has led the way in not only moving beyond the limitations of the substantialist/functionalist view, but also in refining the relational perspective on imago Dei by demonstrating that the image of God in man finds its ultimate expression in “the communal being of persons gathered in the body of Christ.” (Stephenson 7). Zizioulas begins with the same relational understanding of the image founded upon the triune nature of God that both Gunton and Hall articulate. In so doing, he rejects the substantialist static and rigid conception of imago Dei that consists in an autonomous rational individual, and instead, he builds upon “the model of trinitarian persons that places persons and communion prior to substance” (Russell172). Thus, Zizioulas observes:

Both in the case of God and of man the identity of a person is recognized and posited clearly and unequivocally, but this is only so in and through a relationship, and not through an objective ontology in which this identity would be isolated, pointed at and described in itself. Personal identity is totally lost if isolated, for its ontological condition is relationship.

(Schwöbel46; emphasis in the original)

The pure relational view, though, still addresses humans in their individual relationships as the expression of imago Dei. This is where Zizioulas advances his contribution to a fuller understanding of the image for he moves beyond the individual to the community, and not to just any human community, but a particular community – the Church. In his work, Being as Communion, he contends:

The Church is not simply an institution. She is a “mode of existence,” a way of being. Ecclesial being is bound to the very being of God, and it is only as a member of the Church that a human being becomes the “image of God” and takes on God’s “way of being” – a way of relationship with the world, with other people and with God. This relationship is an event of communion which can only be realized as an ecclesial fact rather than as the achievement of an individual.

(Russell 175, quoting Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985, 15, emphasis in the original).

Having thus shifted the focus off the individual and to the community of persons in Christ, Zizioulas now points us in the direction of a New Testament (i.e., Pauline) understanding of “the connection between the new humanity and the imago Dei – namely, it corporate character” (Grenz 250). This connection is demonstrated in 2 Corinthians 3:18 where the Apostle Paul writes: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (NRSV). The particular image into which believers are being transformed, as Grenz further observes, is “Christ, who is the image of God” (250, quoting 2 Corinthians 4:6). In the communalist view, then, imago Dei is an on-going expression of God’s present redemptive and transformative work in and through the corporate body of Christ on earth – the Church.

One of Zizioulas’ critics, however, warns of a danger in his communalist view of the image of God. Indeed, Edward Russell argues that Zizioulas “dissolves the individual person into corporate existence in the body of Christ” (182). He queries, “How can different persons be constituted by the same relation between the Son and the Father that is

common to all persons?” (183). As a response to this danger, Russell himself suggests that the weakness in the communalist perspective may be overcome by recognizing that the uniqueness of individual persons is still “maintained by the Holy Spirit, and in particular the gifts of the Spirit” (183). Russell’s suggested refinement upon Zizioulas’ communalist view actually reveals the balance that demonstrates how this approach to imago Dei more fully informs a proper understanding of the human vocation to dominion over creation. In the communalist view, dominion is not lordship, nor is it stewardship, but, more consistent with the image of God in the incarnate Christ, it is understood as servanthood. For it is Christ who did not come into the world to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45); it is Christ who did not regard equality with God as something to cling to or exploit, but instead poured himself into the form of a servant (cf. Philippians 2:6,7). He is the one who instructed his disciples by saying, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is notso among you, but whoever wishes to become greatamongyou mustbe your servant” (Mark 10:42,43).

As servants, then, those who are being transformed in community into the imago Dei, join together with the Father in his continuing care, provision, and preservation of the whole of creation. In this regard, the Anglican scholar John R. W. Stott has noted:

God’s continuing ownership and caring supervision of the earth . . . is asserted many times in Scripture. . . . The assertion of Psalm 24:1 that “the earth is the Lord’s” . . . includes all living things which inhabit the earth: “every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine” (Psalm 50:10-11). In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus extended the divine dominion further from the largest to the smallest of creatures. On the one hand, God makes “his sun” to rise (it belongs to him), and on the other he feeds the birds, and he clothes the lilies and the grass of the field . . . He thus sustains the whole of his creation; in committing it to us, he has not renounced responsibility for it (136).

As Christ is the archetypal servant accomplishing God’s redemptive work of not only mankind but also the whole of creation (Romans 8:19-23; Colossians 1:17-20), so humans as members of his body the Church are being transformed into his image to reflect his glory as they together serve in the on-going, caring supervision of and provision for creation. Centuries before Zizioulas expounded the communalist view with its corresponding idea of dominion as servanthood, Francis of Assisi was captivated by the servant image of Christ in his self-emptying incarnation and humble birth in Bethlehem. Commenting upon the implications of

Francis’ life lived in response to his apprehension of Christ’s kenosis, Paul Santmire writes:

Identification with the kenotic Christ restores one, in an otherwise sinful world, to perfect communion the overflowing goodness of God in the whole creation. Identification with the kenotic Christ, then, is not the occasion for dying to this world in order to ascend above to a world-transcending union with God. Identification with the kenotic Christ is the occasion for living in this world, imitating that Christ, yes, but at the same time imitating the Father of the same Christ, who is constantly descending to care for and to bless all of his creatures. . . . In this sense, Francis was not a romantic. He did not go directly to nature, at least at first. At first he went directly to Christ. This meant that the only way to see nature as it truly is, as universally blessed and cared for by the Creator, was the way of humility (112-13).

In conclusion, we may thus observe that dominion as servanthood paints a picture of the world, not as a kingdom nor as a household, but as an orchestra performing together a great symphony to the praise of the Creator. Each musician and instrument has his part to play. Christ, himself, is the conductor orchestrating the whole. Humans take their cue as musicians playing instruments the Holy Spirit has given them the gifts and empowerment to perform. All creation birds of the air, fish of the sea, and animals upon the land, as well as mountains and streams, rocks and trees, together joins in this symphony through the responsible efforts of humans in service to the Creator and his creation, and so resounds in praise to the glory of God in Christ.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; Break forth into joyous song and sing praises. Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with lyre and the sound of melody. With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord. Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who live in it. Let the floods clap their hands; Let the hills sing together for joy at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming to judge the earth. Psalm 98:4-9

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Works Cited

Beisner, E. Calvin. Where Garden Meets Wilderness. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Grenz, StanleyJ. The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Gunton, Colin E. The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.

Hall, Douglas John. Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986.

Hessel, Dieter T., and RosemaryRadford Ruether, eds. Christianity and Ecology. Cambridge: HarvardUP, 2000.

Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005.

Russell, Edward. “Reconsidering RelationalAnthropology: A Critical Assessmentof John Zizioulas’s TheologicalAnthropology.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 5.2 (2003): 168-186.

Santmire, H. Paul. The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1985.

Schwöbel, Christoph & Colin E. Gunton. Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991.

Sittler, Joseph. Evocations of Grace: Writings on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics, ed. by Steve Bouma-Prediger & Peter Bakken, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

Stephenson, Bret. “Nature, Technologyand the Imago Dei: Mediating the Nonhuman through the Practice of Science.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 57.1(2005): 6-12.

Stott, John R. W. Human Rights & Human Wrongs: Major Moral Issues for a New Century. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999.

Weinandy, Thomas G. “St. Ireaneusand the Imago Dei: The Importance of Being Human.” Logos 6.4 (2003): 15-34.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 13-30

Perfect Timing: The Historical Case for the Coming of Christ in “The Fullness of Time”

Matthew C. Heckel

Christians believe that God is telling a story through the world he created. Itmay be cliché, but it is worth noting thathistory has been called “his-story.” The Christian metanarrative of good creation, fall into sin, redemption in Christ, and restoration at the end of time has guided the Christian interpretation of history since Genesis 3:15 spoke of the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head. The Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 4:4-5: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”1 The apostle holds Christ to be the hinge of history. There was a point when the times had reached their fullness, when God the Father introduced his Christ into the world. Paul argued that the period of Old Testament law gave way to Christ who came to redeem those under the law from the curse of breaking it, so that adoption would take place under the new covenant. As a historian, I have wondered if there are more ways that this “fullness” of time can be discerned historically. I will argue that this is indeed the case. The fullness of time can be seen in the Jewish Diaspora of the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities of the 722 BC and 586 BC respectively, the conquests of Alexander the Great, the pax Romana and the development of the Roman infrastructure seen in road building, and the convergence of myth, history, and philosophy in Christwho fulfilled the longings of each.

The Jewish Diaspora

The Jews were placed at the crossroads of ancient civilizations to serve as a headquarters for evangelizing the world for Israel’s God. God told Abraham that he would make him and his offspring into a great nation and said in Genesis 12:3, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” This is the great commission of the Old Testament. But instead of spreading the good news of the promised Messiah to the nations who passed through their land, the Jews generally used their covenant status as the people of God to look down on these peoples and jealously guarded their exclusive covenant identity against everyone else. Despite this, there were Gentile converts to the Jewish people usually called proselytes in the Old and New Testaments.2

In judgment for Israel’s covenant unfaithfulness, God sent the Assyrians and Babylonians against them. They were taken into captivity and dispersed throughout much of the rest of the world, with the result that their religion permeated the nations to prepare them for the coming of Christ. The Jews contributed at least the following four things to the cultures of the world to which they became attached: monotheism, the law, the messianic expectation, and linear time.

The Jews were unique in the ancient world as monotheists. Monotheism is the belief in one transcendent, self-existent God as opposed to polytheism seen in such civilizations as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Greco-Romans. Monotheism is based in Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Sociologist and historian Rodney Stark writes of this uniqueness:

Only One True God can provide an adequate basis for the moral order. Divine essences such as the Tao do not command us to love one another. The ‘first mover’ does not forbid us to covet another’s spouse… As for the little ‘beings’ who populate pagan pantheons, they seem to concern themselves only with their own welfare and to ignore what people do to and for one another. Onlymonotheism serves as a basis for morality, for compelling and significant ‘thou shalts’ and ‘thou shalt nots.’ This certainly is not to suggest

that pagan societies lack morality, but to acknowledge that their moral orders are not justified on religious grounds. The link between monotheism and morality has been well demonstrated by research based on modern societies as well as by anthropological reports on premodern groups. … Monotheism prevails because it offers a God worth dying for indeed, a God who promises everlasting life.3

Thus, Israel’s one God reveals his righteous nature to humans in the Jewish law, epitomized in the Ten Commandments, that has served as the basis of the Western moral order. It was this law that Jesus Christ claimed Matthew 5:17 to fulfill.

Paulwrote in Galatians 3:18 – 25:

For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made. … Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order thatwe mightbe justified by faith.

According to the apostle, the law made humans aware of their transgressions of God’s will, which pointed out that they were sinners in need of a savior. This savior would justify or make them righteous before God by faith. This savior was the Christ, and so there was a messianic expectation.

Old Testament prophecies about the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15) created the messianic expectation of a coming descendent of Abraham’s promised son Isaac through whom the nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3), and a King descended from David who would sit on David’s throne forever (2 Samuel 7:16; Jeremiah 33:14-18). Probably the clearest messianic prophecy comes from Isaiah 53:1-12, which speaks of the Messiah’s substitutionary atonement for the people of God and perhaps even hints at the resurrection:

Surelyhe has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yetwe esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. Buthe was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisementthatbroughtus peace, and with his wounds we are healed. … and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all. … when his soulmakes an offering for guilt, he shallsee his offspring; he shallprolong his days; Out of the anguish of his soulhe shallsee and be satisfied; by his knowledge shallthe righteous one, myservant, make manyto be accounted righteous, and he shallbear their iniquities. … and makes intercession for the transgressors.4

This messianic expectation can be seen in Luke’s account of Simeon in Luke 2:26, where he is awaiting the appearance of the “Lord’s Christ,” and Anna in verse 32 who, on seeing Jesus, “began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.”5 Lastly, the Jews were unique in believing in linear time. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, time is not cyclical as with the Greeks and most other ancient civilizations but is going forward toward a telos or goal. Aristotle knew there had to be an Unmoved Mover who was behind the world’s existence, but this god was an impersonal essence who did not intervene in the affairs of mankind, much less leading them to a consummation. According to Aristotle, the world did not progress to an end goal for which it was made but went through cycles of lows and highs. According to Stark, Aristotle asserted that everything has “been invented several times over in the course of ages, or rather times without number.” Stark points out that

since he was living in a Golden Age, the levels of technology of his time were at the maximum attainable, precluding further progress. As for inventions, so too for individuals the same persons would be born again and again as the blind cycles of the universe rolled along…. Plato … too firmly believed in cycles, and that eternal laws caused each Golden Age to be followed by chaos and collapse.6

Thus, the Jews of the Diaspora prepared the nations to which they were scattered for recognizing the coming Christ. They did this by taking their belief in one God whose law created moral standards and awareness of sin to the ancient world. This was accompanied by their messianic expectation of a figure who would save them from sin through faith. This would all happen in the fullness of linear time. Paul and other missionaries tended to plant churches in Diasporan communities because God had providentially prepared these groups to receive the gospel. Stark observes:

All of the cities [of the Roman Empire] with Diasporan communities had a church by the end of the first century, while only 18 percent of the cities without such a community had a church that early…. The emphasis on the Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora as providing the basis of early

Christianity is fully justified…. Looking at the data, we see that Paul’s missionizing had no significant, independent effect on Christianization, while the importance of Diasporan communities was quite significant. These results strongly suggest that Paul’s impact on the spread of Christianity was incidental to the general receptivity of the Diasporan communities to Christian missionizing.7

Conquests of Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great, though he had no significant contact with Israel’s God, played, I believe, a role in preparing for the “fullness of time.” Everywhere that Alexander conquered he spread the Greek language, culture, and philosophical thought forms. This meant that most everyone throughout Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant (Syro-Palestine), Egypt, and ancient Persia would learn to speak koine Greek no matter their native language. Greek became the lingua franca of much of the ancient world. The New Testament would be written in Greek, so that it could overcome the language barrier and broadcast its message quickly and easily throughout the East and West. The language barriers created at Babel would be overcome for the sake of trade, education, but especially, from the Christian point-of-view, the propagating of the gospel. Everett Ferguson points out:

Another important background contribution to Christianity was the spread of the Greek language. Greek was a sufficiently universal language in the Roman empire that it provided a means of communication nearly everywhere. A common language provided more than direct intelligibility, with it went certain common ideas and ways of thinking, a certain level of education, and a manner of perception that is, Greek philosophy, literature, and religion. This common frame of reference assisted vastly the task of preaching the gospelof Jesus.8

Biblical evidence of Greek literary sources employed by Paul can be seen in Acts 17:26-28, where the apostle Paul was speaking to the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens:

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being;” as even some

of your own poets have said, “For we are indeed his offspring.”

Paul’s speech hits on the “fullness of time” motif when he said to the Athenian philosophers: “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,that they should seek God.” God is engineering history to bring people to himself. This includes using the Greek thought world of Alexander’s empire. This is exemplified in Paul’s quoting of Greek classical authors to the Athenians who would have been familiar with them and accepted their authority. Paul’s first quote is from the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who he also quotes in Titus 1:12, and the second from the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus (Phaenomena 2-5) butalso occurs in Cleanthes (Fragment 537, “Hymn to Zeus”).9

The Pharisee Gamaliel taught Paul (Acts 22:3), then Saul, and according to Pauline scholar F. F. Bruce, “It is quite possible that Paul acquired rudiments of Greek learning in Gamaliel’s school.”10 This would ultimately be because of the conquests of Alexander. Craig Keener even suggests that Luke was depicting Paul as a new Socrates, since Socrates too had been brought before the Areopagus, approximately 450 years earlier, on similar charges of atheism toward the Greek gods. Keener says

that this would heighten suspense, since Socrates had been executed. Paul’s atheism consisted in challenging the Greek gods’ status by introducing a foreign God who, according to Paul, was the maker of heaven and earth.11 Paul by his own assertion knew how “to be all things to all men” (1 Corinthians 9:19-23), and in the Athenian context Paul employed the Hellenistic inheritance of Alexander’s empire for the extension of the gospelto Greek philosophers.

The Pax Romana and Roman Roads

The 56,000 miles of paved Roman roads, many still in existence, made travel throughout the Roman world much easier. Paul and other missionaries would use these to carry the gospel throughout the Roman world. The pax romana was the cessation of Roman civil wars under the new golden age of Rome from Caesar Augustus to Marcus Aurelius (27 BCAD 180), where Roman soldiers stationed along roads would police them from highwaymen and bandits. This would also provide for the flow of the gospel as Christians dispersed throughout the empire because of persecution and the callof missionarywork. RodneyStark observes:

Perhaps his [Paul’s] personal role as a missionary has been overplayed, partly because of his towering theological importance and partly because we know about it in such detail. It should be remembered that Paul was only one of many traveling professional missionaries, to say nothing of all the rank-and-file missionaries who circulated from city to city. Indeed, Paul may have been far more important as a trainer, organizer, and motivator of missionaries than as an actualfounder of congregations.12

This circulation was made possible by the arterial system of roads built by the great road builders of the ancient world, and the Roman legions that made itsafe for travel. EverettFerguson comments:

The Roman empire brought unified rule to the Mediterranean world and with it an end to the almost constant warfare there since the death of Alexander the Great. Even on the frontiers of the empire there were extended periods of peace. The blessings of a single, stable government were an important external factor in the growth and spread of Christianity. Not least of these blessings was the resultant ease of travel. Along with maintaining external peace Rome attempted to suppress piracy and brigandage; this too contributed to the safety of travel routes. Further, Rome’s practice of building and maintaining roads greatly facilitated land travel. The Roman peace encouraged

commerce; and travelers as well as merchants, missionaries as wellas governmentofficials benefited.13

Myth, History, and Philosophy

The mythmakers of the ancient world Hesiod, Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Ovid, Vergil expressed what John Calvin called the sensus divinitatis (perception of the divine).14 Their stories ground their civil origin or some aspect of their life in the existence of supernatural beings called “gods.” These narratives reflect and form what the civilization believes about itself and values as true. Myths are often considered pre-scientific as they usually seek to explain by divine means what is now regarded as natural phenomena. This does not mean that myth is necessarily false, in the sense that it can portray truth in figurative form. For instance, there are ancient myths of dying and rising gods that precede the gospel narratives, such as Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Osiris in Egypt, and Persephone in Greek. These are vegetation gods associated with fertility, which experience cycles of death and rebirth with the seasons. The goddess Cybele, whose mythology probably began in eighth century B. C. Phrygia but developed in Greece before being imported by the Romans, killed her lover Attis but resurrected him. Her cult sacrificed a bull to commemorate Attis, and “It was believed that the blood washed away each initiate’s past, giving each a new life.”15 Some hero demi-gods like Odysseus and Aeneas undergo a figurative death and resurrection as

they journey to the place of the dead the underworld and return still alive. They are both inspired with a new mission to establish their respective civilizations of Greece and Rome through a kingly deliverance from threatening forces. The parallels have been noted since the publication of The Golden Bough by James Frazer in 1890.16 Ronald Nash in The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? has shown that no one ancient god or hero completely prefigured the full picture of the Christ of the Bible as God’s son incarnate, who worked miracles, died as a substitutionary sacrifice for mankind suffering their punishment for sin, and then raised bodily from the dead.17 Certain parallels are present however including that of sacrifice. The purveyors of these parallels, like James Frazer, have charged the New Testament gospel writers with the equivalent of plagiarism. These charges have not been ignored by Christian apologists including C. S. Lewis who wrote:

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming factit does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. … To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessarythan the other.18

Lewis thus asserted that Christ is like the other myths of dying and rising gods with this difference: the Christians claimed that it happened in time and space. In other words, Christ is the “true myth,” that is, his story is more than a story. It is history too. Paul insisted on the historicity of the Jesus story when he wrote, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. … eat and drink for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:17 … 32). According to Paul, the Christian faith depends on a bodily resurrection of the historical Jesus. Thus, the myth is wedded to reality. This joining of myth and history is distinctive about Christianity. Lewis again:

Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded … that what became fact was a myth, that it carries with it into the world of factall the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the

mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic and is not the sky itself a myth shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and PerfectFact.19

To the critics, who follow James Frazer, and claim that Christianity copied the pagan myths of Cybele and Attis, Osiris, and others, because they speak of death and resurrection and even virginal conception, Rodney Stark replies:

Of course, from the beginning Christian theologians have been fully aware of similarities between the Christ story and pagan mythology. And it did not disturb them to admit that elements of God’s final revelation had seeped into human awareness to help prepare the way. … If the Christ story seems steeped in pagan conventions, this does not necessarily show these elements to be false. … These were ‘proofs’ of Christ’s divinity that pagans could most easily recognize.20

Stark provocatively adds, “… even though there were six million Jews in the empire, what counted mostas the Christian numbers mounted was not cultural continuity with Judaism, but cultural continuity with paganism!”21 Even the pagans conceived of divine substitutionary atonement as witnessed in Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound.” There Hermes says to Prometheus: “And don’t expect an end to this agony until some god appears to take upon himself your suffering and volunteers to descend into the dark realm of Death in the depths of Tartarus.”22 Thus a dying God may suffer vicariously and rise to bring relief and new life for others.

Christ not only fulfilled the longings of the mythmakers for a dying and rising God, who suffers for humans and renews them, and the yearnings of the historians for this world reality, but he also revealed himself as the true Logos of the philosophers. The Logos was a concept in Greek philosophy introduced by Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) and especially developed in Stoicism and Neo-Platonism.23 Heraclitus referred to the Logos as God who brought balance to creation. In Stoicism it referred to the rational, ordering principle of the cosmos and was considered divine, though impersonal. It was the Logos spermatikos that generated the universe in its rational, orderly form. The Logos is the logic of creation that makes the world intelligible. The world is understandable by human minds because it was created on the pattern of the divine mind of the Logos. John wrote in chapter 1:1-4, “In the beginning was the Word

(Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”24 St. Augustine wrote in the fifth century that he found the same idea of the Logos in the Greek Platonists. But he said what he could not find there was John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”25 The Neo-Platonists believed in a rational creator, but they found it inconceivable that he would become a man of flesh and blood, because, following Plato, they regarded the physical world as the lowest form of reality that corrupts the spiritual. In this conception, the body is a prison house of the soul. But John says that the Logos in fact became enfleshed in Jesus Christ, and now we can know the Logos personally as savior. Thus, Christ fulfilled the philosopher’s longing to know the Logos, though not personally, and improves upon it by showing him to be the personal Savior. This affirms the goodness of the material world since Christ is the eternal Logos who unites to himself a human nature. In this way, John recognizes a concept integral to Greek philosophy as fulfilled in Christ and newly represented in Christian theology.26 Christianity was able to supplant Greek philosophy because it incorporated it where it was already consistent with Christianity and superseded it with superior promises of a blessed afterlife in Christ the creator and redeemer.27 Historian of philosophy Étienne Gilson has remarked:

On all the points covered in common by philosophy and by revelation, rationality stood on the side of revelation much more than on that of philosophy: a single God, creator of heaven and earth, ruler of the world and its providence, a God who made man in his own image, and revealed to him along with his last end the way to attain it. Where in the splendid achievements of Greek Philosophy could one find a view of the world as clear and as perfectly satisfactory to the mind as the one revealed to man byHoly Scripture.28

The Shaker of Nations

While fulfilling the Longings of the mythmakers, historians, and philosophers of the ancient world, the Johannine Logos also turned its notions of power upside down. If the incarnate Logos was a problem for the ancient mind the crucified Son was a scandal. Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World writes:

Divinity … was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, … or to blind them and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been

crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. The ultimate offensiveness, though, was to one particular people: Jesus’ own. The Jews, unlike their rulers, did not believe that a man might become a god; they believed that there was only the one almighty, eternal deity. Creator of the heavens and the earth, he was worshipped by them as the Most High God, the Lord of Hosts, the Master of all the Earth. Empires were to his order; mountains to melt like wax. That such a god, of all gods, might have had a son, and that this son, suffering the fate of a slave, might have been tortured to death on a cross, were claims as stupefying as they were, to most Jews, repellent. No more shocking a reversal of their most devoutly held assumptions could possibly have been imagined. Not merely blasphemy, it was madness.29

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:22-23: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” Thus, the Christ-story is just too counterproductive to be a legend. In other words, if you were making up a religion to win converts among Jews and Greeks in the first century Roman world you couldn't have imagined a worse marketing strategy than a Godman who dies the shameful death of the lowest of the low criminals. The Jews couldn't stand the idea of Jesus's claim to be the Great IAM of Exodus, and Greeks couldn't abide their divine Logos identifying with stinking flesh. Add to this death by crucifixion and you've got a recipe for disaster. So how did Christianity establish itself? The authorities couldn't disprove the resurrection or get the disciples to admit to something they didn't do steal the body. The resurrection was literally a divine spark that ignited the transformation of the disciples, who would begin the redemption of the earth. The growth of the church in such a hostile environment required intense energy. The kind of energy needed to overcome the worldview resistance inherent in the Jewish and Greek mindsets must have been utterly powerful. Christianity is here and all over the world because it had behind it resurrection power.

The Uniqueness of Christianity

While it is historically evident that there was much continuity between Christ and the ancient world, there was also discontinuity. Everett Ferguson writes:

The idea of a suffering and dying son of God was not foreign to pagan thought, but a crucifixion by official authority was hardly the sort of teaching to find an immediately favorable

response. Although paganism had its stories of divine births, particularly of a deity fathering a hero through a human mother … it had no genuine doctrine of an incarnation. In fact such was repugnant, contrary to all notions about the divine. The doctrine of a bodily resurrection ran counter to hopes about the afterlife. … The body was commonly thought of as a hindrance from whose weaknesses the soul must escape. To define hope in terms of a return to “bodily” existence was not what the educated pagan would have wanted.30

The Greeks, especially the Platonists and the Stoics, envisioned salvation not in terms of bodily resurrection but as release from the body.31 The Jews divided into the camps of the Pharisees who believed in bodily resurrection and Sadducees who did not. So, what did it for so many Jews and pagans that they found conversion to this theology irresistible? It was historical. Ferguson points outthatChristianity’s

founder was a historical personage with a real life story. It offered a sure triumph over death and a happy afterlife. It made exclusive claims and demanded an exclusive loyalty. It combined high moral standards with religious faith. It developed a worldview with a philosophical explanation and defense of its teachings. It had a social cohesiveness that provided material security and psychological support. It promised deliverance from the power of demons, fate, and magic as well as redemption from sin and guilt. It offered salvation to all classes and conditions of persons. It released a powerful zeal and determination to propagate and conquer.32

Christianity was also unique because it was based on a unique person and truth claims about that person, which required faith to connect to him.

Ferguson again:

That which is truly unique to Christianity is Jesus Christ. He was what was essential to its beginning and remains central to what it is. This is so in a historicalsense. However much of his life and teachings might be paralleled from one part of the ancient world or another, Jesus his person and work are what was unique in an absolute sense, with no possible historical rival, would be for Jesus to be what is claimed for him the one and only Son of God, God who has come in the flesh; and to have done what is affirmed for him to have brought a salvation and relationship with God that no one else than the Son of God could have brought. There we pass from history to faith.33

Diaspora Revisited

Diaspora Jews and proselytes from all over the Roman Empire were in Jerusalem at Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2:1-13. They beheld a miracle of language as they testified, “We hear them [the apostles] telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:11). God had prepared the world for his familiar but unique Christ, and people from all over the Roman world were there at Jerusalem to hear the message of the divine, crucified, and risen Messiah, who had united the longings of the mythmakers, historians, and philosophers in himself. Many diaspora Jews would return to their homelands traveling by safe Roman roads. They would surely speak perhaps in Greek to their fellow inhabitants at diverse outposts of the Roman Empire. They must have declared what they had seen and heard in “the fullness of time.” The historical case for this has shown that God’s timing was indeed perfect. Every petty human, geographical location, commercial crossroad, language development, mythical story, rational philosophy, and authoritarian government led up to one goal the conversion of people from “every tribe and nation,” who would be able to resonate with his word and would continue telling God’s story as they spread it to the furthest reaches of the earth down to our own time in history.

1 English Standard Version (ESV)(Crossway, 2001). ESV Online. https://esv.literalword.com/. Seealso 1Timothy2:6, “who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimonygiven atthe proper time,” and Mark 1:14-15, “Jesus cameinto Galilee, proclaiming the gospelof God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is athand; repent and believe in the gospel’.” All biblical citations are ESV.

2 The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, used the term for the stranger or alien in the land of Israelwho covenantedwith the God of Israeland becamea Jew. The Mosaic law laid down requirements for foreigners who wanted to convertto the people of God, which meant males submitting to circumcision and allto Passover and Sabbath observance (SeeExodus12:48; 20:10; 23:12; 12:19, 48; Deuteronomy5:14; 16:11, 14). 2 Chronicles 2:17 records: “Then Solomon counted allthe residentaliens who were in the land of Israel, after the censusof them that David his father had taken, and there werefound 153,600” (ESV). In New Testamenttimesthe proselytes or “God fearers” attached themselvesto synagogues thatspread throughoutthe ancientworld due to the Jewish Diasporas. In 722 BC the Assyrians conquered andexiledthe northern ten tribes of Israel, who took their religion with them. In 586 BC King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed much of Jerusalem andexiledthe southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin to Babylon, where theyremained until some returned under the decree of King Cyrus of Persia (For the timing issues see https://seminary.bju.edu/theology-in-3d/so-was-it-70years-or-not/). The rebuiltJerusalemtemple was again destroyedin AD 70by the Romans, scattering the Jewsyetagain. The presence of proselytes and the Jewish attitude towards Gentilescan be seen in the apostle Peter’s visitto the house of Cornelius in Acts 10:22 and 28 respectively: “And theysaid, ‘Cornelius, a centurion, an uprightand Godfearing man, who is well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation, was directed bya holy angelto send for you to come to his house and to hear whatyou have to say.’… And he [Peter] said to them, “You yourselves know how unlawfulit is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me thatI should notcallanyperson common or unclean.”

3 RodenyStark, Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (Harper One, 2006) 116.

4 Isaiah 53:4-12(ESV).

5 For a fuller exposition of the messianic expectation and Jesus’s awareness of itsee https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/themessianic-hope/.

6 RodneyStark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005) 19.

7 Stark, Cities, 134.

8 EverettFerguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Second Ed. (Eerdmans:1993) 579-580.

9 See Mark Allan Powell, Introducing the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2018).

http://cdn.bakerpublishinggroup.com/processed/esourceassets/files/1835/original/10.26.Acts_17.2728__Paul_Quotes_the_Pagans.pdf?1524575512 . Notice thatin reference to the second quote Paulrefers to poets. He evidentlyknew the sentiment appeared in multiple Greek authors.

10 F. F. Bruce, Paul Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Eerdmans1977) 126.

11 Craig Keener, Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Intervarsity, 1992) 373. Keener states thatthe Epimenidesreference “appears in Jewish anthologies of proof texts usefulfor showing pagans the truth about God, and Paulmayhave learneditfrom such a text” (374).

12 Stark, Cities, 134.

13 Ferguson, 579.

14 Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.3.1, 3.

15 Stark, Cities, 91.

16 Frazer’s thesis has been repeatedand expounded upon bythe likes of CarlJung, Joseph Campbell, Camile Paglia, and mostrecentlyin Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity? (Allen & Unwin, 2010).

17 Ronald Nash, The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? (Presbyterian and ReformedPublishing, 2nd ed. 2003).

18 C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, 1970)66-67.

19 Ibid. 67.

20 Stark, Cities, 106-107.

21 Ibid. 112.

22 Aeschylus, “Prometheus Bound,” trans. GeorgeTheodoridis (2006) 1020.

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Prometheus.php

23 Ferguson, 336.

24 Luc Ferryin his A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (Harper: 2011) 59-66, explains how the Christian view of the Logos as expressedin John divergedfrom the Stoic view. I would argue thatFerry creates a false dichotomywhenhe writes, “To the horror of the Greeks, the new believers maintained thatthe Logos in other words the divine principle was in no sense identicalwith the harmonious order of the word, butwas incarnated in one outstanding individual, namelyChrist” (59). The Greeks werehorrified for sure butfor the Christians the Logos was both the creator of the harmonious order of physical reality, as the Greeks maintained, andthe personalsavior who became the man Jesus Christ. Ferrythinks thatthe Christians transitioned the Logos from the essenseof reason to the objectof faith, and thus replaced reason with religion. But, according to the Christian mind, there is no problem with both being true. Christwas rationalcreator and incarnate savior according to John.

There is also a debate over whether the Logos of John owes more to the Greeks or the Jewish conception in Philo of Alexandria, which is riffs off Plato’s Forms by making Logos the ideas in the mind of God, or some contend thatit is almostentirelyreimagined as the incarnateChrist(see Ferguson 336). I see John as improving on the Greek and Hellenistic Jewish ideas bysaying letme tellyou who the real Logos is the rational, Creator-Son, madeflesh in Jesus Christ. Louis Markos in From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics comments, “John’s discussion of the Logos in his prologue, regardless of whether it was inspired by Greek or Hebrew thought, is a representation of God, Christand the universe thatwould speak stronglyto a Platonistwho was seeking after God” (IntervarsityPress, 2007, 19).

25 Confessions 7.9.13-14, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: 1991). The Platonists were Plotinus (d. A. D. 270) and his studentPorphyry (d. 305).

26 Ferguson writes, “No ancientreligion other than Christianitycreated its own philosophy outof the materials furnished byGreek thought. Noteven Judaism did this to the extentof Christianity, in spite of the promising beginning by Philo, to whom the philosophical theologyowed so much. Nor did anyHellenistic philosophical schoolfully achieve the motivation and devotion of a religious faith. … Popular religion was unable to hold the conviction of the educated, and philosophywas unable to reach the masses. Christianitysuccessfullyintegrateda religious faith with a worldview and pattern of life thatwere philosophically defensible, if not ‘philosophical’ in the strict sense” (574).

27 See Ferrychapter 4 “The Victory of Christianity over Greek Philosophy,” in A Brief History, 55-92.

28 Étienne Gilson, A Gilson Reader: Selected Writings, ed. Anton Charles Pegis (Image Books, 1957), 178.

29 Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2021), 6.

30 Ferguson, 571-572.

31 Calvin J. Roetzelwrites in The World that Shaped the New Testament: “Paul’s adamantinsistenceon ‘the resurrection of the body’would have been disgusting to Stoics, for salvation to the Stoics meantliberation from the body” (Revised ed., Westminster John Knox Press, 68).

32 Ferguson, 581.

33 Ibid. 583.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 31-38

Being in the Room: Ritual, Affect, and Pedagogy in the Christian College Classroom

Brian Howell

Anyone who has been teaching since 2010 or earlier can tell you there’s been a change. I hate to be one of those “back in my day” sorts of old people, but in this, I have research on my side.1 My classroom reflects the documented trend that students are, increasingly, struggling. Rates of anxietyand depression are rising. Students are finding it harder to manage multiple tasks, and to accomplish them without greater guidance. This isn’t a slam on “kids these days” as much as it’s an observation about U.S. (or what some have called WEIRD) society generally.2 Many of us, for a variety of reasons, aren’t doing all that well. This was noticed prior to the global pandemic, although the pandemic, as they say, turned these phenomena upto 11.

What I want to present today is not a panacea, but does, I argue, provide resources that are often overlooked in pedagogical conversations. This comes from research conducted largely in 2018-19, but, like anthropological research tends to do, began with personal experiences and has continued past the “formal fieldwork” phase of my work. The paper here is bringing together several themes from this research specifically around the conferencetheme of Wellbeing of Mind, Body, Spirit.

I start briefly introducing the context of my research, which is the theater group at Wheaton College known as Workout. This is a group of about 40 students who meet twice weekly for an hour or so to engage in exercises, rituals, and other embodied work that is meant to form them as actors, but also as human beings. From there, I want to focus on the practice of ritual as a key component of the pedagogical strategy of the teaching of theater and acting in this evangelical college context. Finally, I offer some ways that I, myself, have brought this into my own teaching and how we mightextend this for the sake of our students.

The Context of Teaching Theater at Wheaton College

Wheaton College has been fortunate (and increasingly unusual) to have a relatively robust theater program for the past 50 years. One of its notable features has been a group known as Workout (the name coming from the book of Philippians in which believers are called to “work out [their] salvation in fear and trembling”). But the work of Workout is not what many of us might think of as theater training. The current director of

Workout, Mark Lewis, took up the group in 1995 and retained much of its legacy, while adapting it to create a space where the members of the group engage in a process of holistic formation as actors, humans, and followers of Christ.

I started at Wheaton in 2001 and learned of Workout immediately. I had many students whose lives overlapped anthropology and theater, and I enjoyed attending the productions the theater would mount each season. But I did not have much direct experience of the Workout program until 2017 when Mark led what we call an “Advanced Faith and Learning Seminar.” Mark offered 10 of us a year of going through the same exercises and experiences as his students, culminating in a kind of performance in the spring. It was a powerful experience for me both personally and professionally.

Personally, it was deeply refreshing to spend time, once per week, doing what Mark generally called “silly games.” These were often what you would imagine for a theater space: standing in a circle and stepping forward one at a time to “make a sound,” walking back and forth in the room silently and purposefully “with breath,” or pretending to brew tea or carry a heavy net or some other imaginative activity. While some of these exercises definitely pushed us to embrace silliness and be a bit vulnerable in the group, many of them were straightforward mindfulness exercises, giving us space away from email and intellectual conversation to become more aware of our bodies, emotions, and one another.

Professionally, I found this work profoundly engaging as I became aware of the ways the repetitions of these practices the ritualization of this space created ways of considering and experiencing aspects of personhood thatwere rare, if not unavailable, in other settings.

The work I’m presenting here is part of a larger project that I hope will be forthcoming soon, but for the purposes of this conference I want to select a few key elements I hope will spark conversation and engagement for our common pursuitof Christian education and wellness.

Mattering: Engaging Rituals of Social Presence

One of the most important aspects of Workout is the radical commitment to freedom. Students are free to say no to any activity for any reason. There is a pillow pile in the room where students are able to simply nap through the entire session if they choose. In the several dozen Workout sessions I have attended, there are always a few students in the pillow pile, although rarely more than three, and different students. But even those who are actively participating can, for a moment, say no and step away from an activity. What Mark makes clear, however, is that while any person may choose to say “no” for any reason, no one is an observer. “Your presence matters,” Mark will often say. “The fact that you are here matters.”

This value becomes ritualized in the practices of the theater in several ways. One is through a common practice of Mark’s in which he will pause any activity, at any point, and invite the members of Workout to “see the room you’re in.” This entails nothing more than stopping one’s movement or activity, and looking around the room, making eye contact with people nearby and those across the large room where Workoutalways takes place. This may only last 10-12 seconds (or may go on for several minutes), but it has the effect of re-orienting us away from the activity back to the ensemble, the people of the room. This ritual is most consistently engaged in the final circle thatcloses every Workout session. As the time draws to a close, Mark will invite all the members of the group to “grab three walls” (or some other specified number) and gather in a circle. The “grab three walls” causes each of us to scurry around the room to touch three of the four walls before finding our way to a spot on the floor. It is during this time that the Workoutmembers buried in the pillow pile will be lovingly raised from their comfy repose and brought, groggily, into the circle. As we sit together, or in the final moments when we’ve come to our feet about to leave, Mark will virtually always invite us to, again, “see the room.” We look around at the collected faces, exchanging smiles, or simply seeing one another, before concluding the day.

These are not rituals in the sense that the term is often used in anthropology or religious studies. In those contexts, the term ritual has often meant a kind of representative practice in which objects and actions are meant to symbolize specific ideas, values, history, or cosmic truths. And there are, of course, many rituals which do exactly this: the Communion table where wine (or, for deprived Protestants, grape juice) is a symbol of Jesus’ blood, and an unleavened wafer (or, increasingly, a gluten-free rice cracker) represents Jesus’ broken body. These are eaten, symbolically taking Jesus into ourselves. According to classic anthropological accounts, rituals such as these produce social cohesion by orienting the values and beliefs of the community to common understandings, or, as Clifford Geertz argued, taking the common understandings of the world and making them tangible and persuasive.3 But the rituals of Workout, and, arguably, the rituals of everyday life in which we regularly participate, do not require common belief, nor consent, nor even understanding of their purpose or meaning. These are not rituals meant to solidify commitments to dogma, nor do they represent a cosmic reality to which the community desires assent. Instead, I would argue these are best understood as “rituals of the subjunctive.” That is, these rituals serveas the “creation of an order as if it were trulythe case.”4

By inviting us to stop and “see the room,” Mark is constructing a ritual moment in which we are brought back to the people in the room, to recognize that the activities the “silly games” of Workout are not the only, nor perhaps the most important, focus. Rather, what matters are the people in the room, including the person seeing the room.

Many of us would recognize that this is not the condition of many rooms in which we find ourselves. Classrooms, offices, conference rooms, and even many churches, are organized in such a way as to diminish the importance of the individuals in the room. Chairs are arranged so that people look in one direction, lights in the room may focus on one speaker or presentation. Symbols of power be they robes, microphones, uneven floors metaphorically or literally elevate one person or event over all the others in the room. In a time of zoom meetings, where people might turn off their cameras and “attend” a meeting as a black box, the people “in the room” mayeven become a literalvoid. But these small rituals of presence in which each person is invited to acknowledge every other person changes the dynamic of the room. Like a family gathered around a dinner table, where each is given a short time to share what happened during her day, rituals of presence like these foreground the personhood of the members, not in a way that produces conformity or necessarily creates “cohesion, ” but it constitutes an “as if” moment in which the members of Workoutexperience the world as if each one of us mattered, is important, and is equally valued for the work of the whole to succeed.

Belonging: Rituals of Physical Connection

Alongside rituals of presence occur rituals of connection. These, too, are rituals of the subjunctive, rather than rituals of representation, but these rituals have a piece that is specifically physical, tactile, and material. Along with Mark’s concern that each person in the room would have a sense of mattering, Mark often refers to Workout as a place where he hopes people can have a “cold head and hot body.” This is the inverse, he argues, of how we normally go through our day. What he means is that we are often “in our heads,” driving our thoughts, causing our heads to be “hot,” while our bodies are still, immobile, “cold.” Mark wants to reverse that, at least sometimes, so that we spend time aware of and connected to the body, while the mind is allowed to rest, or at least take a secondary role, in responding to the world.

There are many exercises that promote this hot body/cold head experience, none probably more so than what is called “Moving Statues.” In this exercise, Mark calls a number (usually 3-7) and that number of students will gather on one end of the long room. While the rest of the ensemble watches, one member of the group will strike a statue pose, immediately another member of the group will run in front to make a different, but complementary, pose, with some small bit of contact (fingertips, feet adjacent, hand to elbow). The moment the second student gets her pose, the third will go. Once the last person has adopted a pose, the first person leaves his spot and runs to the front of the line. This continues the length of the room. The progress of the group is very rapid, with barely enough time to see what one person has done, before the next

person must choose her own pose. For the participants, the effect is that you find your body moving faster than your brain. One student called Moving Statues her favorite game, saying, “I like watching it and seeing what other people don’t see. And when I’m doing it, I like knowing that what I’m a part of is bigger than what I think it is at the moment. I love how cold head, warm bodyit is. It’s veryinstinctual.”

What this student reports are two levels of connection. One is with the members of the exercise, both inside and outside the actual activity. At the same time, she experiences a connection with herself, her body, that she calls “instinctual.”

My own experience of this experience came most strongly through an exercise called Corner to Corner, in which one member of the ensemble would walk from one corner of the room to the other, a distance of approximately 15 meters. This person would be given an identity a queen, or a magician, or a storm cloud. As this person walked, doing nothing more than walking, it was the job of the other ensemble members to create the context for this character. One of the students was “royalty.” As she walked, the 30ish of us in the room ran ahead, alongside, and behind, calling out things like “hail to the King” and “your majesty!” or carrying her imaginary robe. It was cacophonous and dynamic, and a bit crazy. That day I also took a turn, and I was a ship plowing the seas. As I walked the students swirled around me, making ocean sounds, leaping like dolphins, blowing like the wind. It was a profound experience of “becoming,” feeling very much like I was, in fact, acting out this role of the ship, but it was the ensemble thatdid allthe work.

Like the rituals of presence, these rituals of connection worked in a subjunctive key, making the world as if we are part of the larger whole, as if we can see the world in its entirety. It also brought a physicality to the subjunctive world thatacknowledged the importance of affect.

Affect is a term that philosophers and anthropologists have invoked for some decades to refer to the sensations and responses of humans that are pre-emotional and pre-cognitive. It is a term meant to capture the very concrete and human experience of gut-feeling/intuition that shapes our daily experience of the world and society. There is a deep and rich literature on affect that intersects with multiple aspects of ritual in all its guises, butfor now, I want to only focus on the connectivity of affect. In his seminal essay “The Autonomy of Affect,” philosopher Brian Massumi wrote that affect “vaguely but insistently connects what is normally indexed as separate.”5 That is, if we consider the Corner to Corner game, while the specific emotions that any one person may have in the context of this ritualized game can vary widely, there is feeling, and this feeling-ness serves as a connection between those things that are normally “indexed as separate.” (The individual persons, the mind and body, the “main character” from the ensemble.)

The presence of affect sensation in stimulating such connections is normal in everyday life, but suppressed in many settings, particularly, I would argue, Christian academic institutions. Thus, in these settings there

is a danger of those things indexed as separate will remain separate in our feeling-thinking selves. We find ourselves fragmented, isolated, and even broken by the separateness of these elements of ourselves. Wellness requires an integration, a healing, of these separations.

Mattering and Belonging in the Christian College Classroom

You may be saying at this point, “That sounds lovely, but I don’t teach theater,” or “I’m a student and I don’t have electives to burn.” Or you may be thinking, “Playing theater games in front of others sounds like about as much fun as poking rusty cocktail forks in my eyes. No thank you.”

First, I would say, this is not something that is only helpful for extroverts and divas. This need not involve high-risk exhibitions of talent or imagination. Second, I would say thatthis is not only relevant to theater at all. Rather this is something that can apply to all of us in Christian higher education and the church.

Part of the reason such physical, movement-based pedagogies seem out of place in most non-theater settings is due to the “brains on a stick” model of the human personhood. This is the idea that human action always starts with ideas and beliefs. We learn, this model says, through words and concepts first. Only after those become part of our cognitive repertoire do they become partof our behavior.

This model has been widely criticized in recent years by Augustinian theologians, philosophers, and the occasional anthropologist.6 Humans are, biblically and empirically, more than just our minds, our thoughts, and our beliefs. We are our feelings, our desires, and our bodies who operate in the physical, mental, and affective realms simultaneously. We are all aware that there are many things we believe and want to desire, yet we do, as Paul says, the opposite. We may say that if we “really believed” X then we would always do Y. But I won’t belabor the point to saythatjust isn’t true.

These Western Enlightenment models of personhood have privileged the rational and cognitive aspects of the person (cogito ergo sum) for centuries. Thus, in the Protestant Christianity contextualized to this cultural context, the sermon, in which brains listen in quiet stillness, are the center point of Christian life. Rather than centering the Eucharist or rituals of worship, or developing a recursive sermon such as is found in the African American traditions, the mind and immaterial language are the height of our spiritual lives, and bodies just distract from that. In the academic context, where lectures and the primacy of the text are the dominant modes of learning, it is easy to see how these separations become heightened.

I have found, in these rituals of theater, a way of understanding both how and why to address the pathologies of separateness thatafflict so many of my students, and me. As I stated above, this is not a panacea, but

it is, I have found, a productive way to address the problems. Specifically, how?

First, we bring our bodies into the classroom. I engage rituals of physical connection. This does not mean people need to physically touch one another, although that can be, when done with trust and safety, a powerful experience. But it does mean we become connected to the physical and concrete, our bodies, the material world, our own affect and the affect of others. For example, in my own classroom, I will often do this with a short physical activity in which students will toss an imaginary ball back and forth. When gaining eye contact, students will toss several balls of different sizes around the circle. This requires movement and awareness, causing them to consider their own presence in space and the physical presence of others. This also creates opportunities for rituals of presence.

Second, we make everybody matter. One need not be a professor of theater to create rituals of presence for our students. A simple ritual of presence I often use in my classroom is another circle game in which students create a one-word story together. I may give them a title or topic or let them strike out on their own (the first four words are often “Once Upon A time…”), but as the story develops around the circle students are listening to one another, contributing together, and making something thatnecessarilyrequireseveryperson.

These activities, depending on the size of the group, may take 10 minutes. Usually less. In a larger group, if space allows, the group would be broken into subgroups, which is less ideal for including everyone, but can serve some of the same goals. What I have increasingly found is that the time given to these rituals more than pays for itself in engagement, honesty, care, and inclusivity in the learning community. I find we are all better able to attend to one another when we have taken time to make our bodies, and each other, matter.

I am convinced that these approaches begin to move all of us students, staff, faculty towards a wellness that transcends mere absence of affliction. We can bring holistic wellness into our classrooms as students and faculty together experience a greater sense of connection and significance in the room.

Notes

1 See, for example, Shorey, Shefaly, Esperanza DebbyNg, and Celine H. J. Wong. “Global Prevalence of Depression and Elevated Depressive Symptoms among Adolescents:A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” British Journal of Clinical Psychology 61, no. 2 (2022): 287–305. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12333.

2 Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) societies include segments of coutries with widespread poverty, and also do not

include allcommunities within a given countrywhere wealth inequality separate communities. See, Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

3 See, Geertz, Clifford C. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Hutchinson, 1975.

4 Seligman, Adam B., ed. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2008, 20.

5 Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Anniversary, Twentieth AnniversaryEdition with a New Preface bythe Author. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2021, 27.

6 See, for example, Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultral Formation, 2009; also, Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: BelknapPress of Harvard UniversityPress, 2007; Howell, Brian M. “Teaching Bodies: How to Bring the Body into the Christian Liberal Arts.” Christian Scholar’s Review (blog), November 10, 2021. https://christianscholars.com/teaching-bodies-how-to-bring-thebody-into-the-christian-liberal-arts/.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 39-46

The Ozarks as a Bastion of Christian Faith: An Insider’s View

John J. Han

Introduction

Despite their love for the pristine terrain of the Ozarks, some outsiders held an Arcadian view of the region and its people in the early and mid-twentieth century. In Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (1969), Peter J. Schmitt discusses the back-to-nature movement led by middle-class urbanites from around 1900 to shortly after World War I. While the movement leaders viewed nature as a healer and restorer for humanity, they embraced a romanticized conception of nature nature removed from thetoughnessof countryliving.

The pastoral impulse also spawned what Schmitt calls wilderness fiction by authors such as Gene Stratton Porter, Dallas Sharp, and Harold Bell Wright. The heroes of wilderness fiction “were not primitive woodsmen but sophisticated intellectuals who valued nature’s ancient grandeur and a simple life denied to most Americans” (126). This romantic vision of the Ozarks, which still exists among some outsiders, reflects a condescending, urban view of the region, which recalls the colonial bias Edward Said expounds in Orientalism (1978). According to these outsiders, the Ozarks is admirable despite the backwardness of the inhabitants, including the Christians in the region.

For instance, Harold Bell Wright the author of six Ozarks novels, including The Shepherd of the Hills (1907) portrays the inhabitants of the Ozarks as fundamentally ignorant and uncultured. In his autobiography, To My Sons (1934), Wrightalso recalls how he was disturbed by the lack of education he detected in an Ozarks preacher’s sermon:

The services began with a “spell o’ singin’.” There were no books, no instrument. Even to my unmusical ears the high-pitched, wailing discordant noise the preacher called a hymn, was painful.

At least the preacher announced his text. Imagine my consternation when he read from one of the most wonderful lessons Jesus ever gave to men: “Ye are the salt of the earth and the salt hath lost its Saviour.” I was shocked beyond expression.

Those poor spiritually hungry backwoods people had come to that meeting to be fed. The man who had invited them held in his hand the Book which contained the greatest spiritual food the world has ever known. Those people were dependent upon him. They were waiting, with breathless interest, for his message. And the preacher himself was incapable even of so much as reading the words of Jesus. If this one who proposed to present to them the teaching of Jesus could not distinguish between “savor” and “Saviour,” what chance had they of receiving from his lips the truths carried in the Master’s own words?

The preacher began his sermon. “Now, brethren and sisters, yo-all air the salt of this hyer yearth and yo-all has done crucified yo’Saviour.”

For two hours that representative of the Lord spoke with authority which I alone of all his hearers could question. He thundered at them the most horrible conglomeration imaginable of misquotations, with confused, involved, and impossible interpretations of the simple utterances of Jesus. His weird and terrible doctrines of hellfire and damnation, starry crowns and golden streets, blood and sacrifice, were revolting. To me, it was profane. I burned with shame that in a Christian country such things could be; and that, too, in the same of Jesus whose simple eternal truths meant so much to me. (199-200)

Like Wright, Vance Randolph a renowned folklorist who was born in Pittsburg, Kansas, and lived in the Ozarks for more than six decades introduces Ozarks customs and beliefs in a way that often demeans the inhabitants. In Ozark Superstitions (Columbia UP, 1947; republished in 1964 under the title Ozark Magic and Folklore), for instance, he sensationalizes the superstitious nature of Christianity in the Ozarks. According to him, a woman had the habit of opening the Bible at random three times. Whenever she saw the words “it came to pass,” she took it as a sign that her wish would be granted (836). Randolph also met a woman whose husband was a Pentecostal preacher. In a state of trance, the preacher received a divine message, according to which “Jesus Christ was going to visit the United States, run for President on the Democratic ticket, and ‘stumpthe whole State of Arkansas!’” (339)

Wright’s and Randolph’s representations of native-born Christians in the Ozarks are not necessarily false. The problem is that these two authors, who first visited the Ozark Mountains in 1896 and 1898, respectively, focus mainly on the negative tendencies of local Christians. They tend to overgeneralize Ozarks Christians based on their limited experience.

This paper aims to critique an outsider’s view of Christianity in the Ozarks by presenting native viewpoints in three nonfiction books: Douglas Mahnkey’s Bright Glowed My Hills (1968), Chris Meadows’s Short Stories and Poems of the Ozark Hills (1971), and J. Kenneth Eakins’s Less Than a Mile: A Philosophy of Life from the Ozarks…and Beyond (2001). These three writers tend to hold a predominantly positive view of their fellow natives and their values. In the sphere of religion, they show a deep admiration for the way Ozark residents practice their religion.

Douglas Mahnkey’s Bright Glowed My Hills

Douglas Mahnkey (1902-2004) was a well-known lawyer, politician, and folklorist from Taney County, Missouri. (His mother, Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey, was an Ozark storyteller and small-town journalist selected in 1935 by the Crowell Publishing Company in New York as “the best country newspaper correspondent in the United States.”) Douglas

Mahnkey authored two books: Bright Glowed My Hills, a memoir, and Hill and Holler Stories (1975), a book about life in the Ozarks of his time. In Bright Glowed My Hills, the author extols the earlysettlers as follows:

[T]he Ozarks pioneers had a deep religious conviction, a strong will, a strong sense of justice, a willingness to endure hardship, an ability to make the best of any situation, a sense of humor, a ready wit, a quick answer, a bent for fun, a sharp intuition and a love for the hills and streams which they had chosen for home. (“Preface”)

He fondly recalls his happy childhood in the Ozarks. The parents were not rich but raised their children the right way: “In those slow-moving days mothers and fathers had time for their children, teaching them by precept and example to be good Americans and good Christians” (12). When early settlers came to the Ozarks, they built a school, typically a one-room cabin, which was used as a church until a separate church building was constructed. In Mahnkey’s childhood, his mother taught his Sunday School class, and he and his siblings were expected to attend church on Sundays: “Church and Sunday School were held every Sunday at the School House. Mother always taught a class so we children always attended unless there was some mighty good reason” (29). He always held “high respect” for his pastor. When the pastor died, he “left the Mincy Valleycountry a little better place in which to live” (29).

Chris Meadows’s Short Stories and Poems of the Ozark Hills

A contemporary of Douglas Mahnkey, Chris Meadows (1908-97) was also born in Taney County, Missouri. He was an actor who played the

role of Old Matt at the Shepherd of the Hills Theatre in Branson for many years. Like Bright Glowed My Hills, Short Stories and Poems of the Ozark Hills is a memoir of Ozarks life in the early twentieth century. (In 2022, the author’s grandchildren honored him by publishing a compilation of four books by Meadows, including Short Stories and Poems of the Ozark Hills.) In this book, the author recalls how whathe learned in childhood contributed to his happiness and wellbeing in life: love, honor, obedience, law and order, Christian faith, manuallabor, and discipline.

Meadows grew up in an environment where religion was an integral part of life. He wentto church regularly, admiring his pastor:

Going to church was a must. I can still visualize our old Preacher Snow as he drove up the Bull Creek trail in his buggy, with that big stallion pulling it along. He was a wonderful person, truly a man of God. With his long white hair and beard he made an impression on all of us. He was a large man with an equally large booming voice. He came every Sunday to preach his hell, fire and brimstone religion to his flock. (2)

The most unforgettable memory from his Ozarks life is that of an old preacher who prayed alone for his hill people at midnight. In his early teens, Meadows was on his way home from finishing. As he was passing an old house where a preacher and his wife in their eighties were living, he heard a voice. He writes,

I sensed some person talking and as I came up closer in the moonlight, I then saw the old preacher as he knelt beside a big oak tree in prayer. He poured out his soul to God, as I stood there in silence. As he prayed loud and clear to our

God, with no altar and no congregation, I listened, knowing I was in the presence of God. This old preacher never knew that I was there. He had his back to me. When he ended his prayer I walked slowly down the pathway towards home. In all these years, I can still go back to thatnight and remember the feeling that I was in the presence of God with an old, devoted mountain preacher, as he prayed for forgiveness of sin, and for his mountain people. (10)

Later in the chapter on fishing, Meadows declares the Ozarks as “truly God’s country” (56). He senses the presence of God in the natural beauty of the Ozarks, an idea repeated in his poem “Hills of Home.” As he approaches the twilight of life, he is ready to rest from work and observe the beautyof God’s creation in his surroundings:

With mywork and sorrows over, I will gentlystop to rest And see His works of scenic beauty For God has greatlyblest. (77)

J. Kenneth Eakins’s Less Than a Mile: A Philosophy of Life from the Ozarks…and Beyond

Finally, in Less Than a Mile (2002), Joel Kenneth Eakins shares his stories about the Ozarks, where he lived for the firstfifteen years of his life. Born in Ozark, Christian County, Missouri, in 1930, he earned a B.S. degree and an M.D. from the University of Illinois in the 1950s. Afterwards, he earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He worked as a seminary professor, a museum curator, and a pediatrician outside the Ozarks. Less Than a Mile, in which the author fondly reflects on the positive impact of his childhood in southern Missouri, appears to have come out when he was either 70 or 71.

Although he left the Ozarks as a teenager, his “Ozarkian philosophy” characterized by family ties, loyalty, love and encouragement, simplicity, schooling, and life in the church has served as a bedrock for his life. He reminds the reader that all his observations in the book reflect “the influence of [his] beliefs as a Christian” (8). To his recollection, few Ozarkers in his childhood knew the Christian word agape, but“manyof them experiencedits joy” (13).

Unlike Mahnkey and Meadows, who were Christians since early childhood, Eakins become a believer as a teenager. He was surrounded by Christians in his childhood, but religious skepticism made him keep his

distance from the church. It changed when he met a girl in high school named Marian who was a pastor’s daughter:

Whathappened was beautiful. Under the influence of Marian and her family, I began to see more clearly how important and thrilling a personal relationship with God could be. Faith was not a peripheral matter. It was at the very center of all that was meaningful and worthwhile in life. I was called to embrace not a religion, nor a denomination, nor an institution, but Jesus himself, the Head of the Church, of which I was a part. Now I had a secure position from which all of life could be evaluated and seen in true perspective. (48)

Although his home church in the Ozarks was not diverse, which was demographically unavoidable, he learned from the pastor and Sunday School teachers that “God expects Christians to love all kinds of people. All are precious to him” (54). As a well-educated, open-minded Christian, he believes that “Christians should glory in diversity and promote it within our churches” (54).

Conclusion

The three memoirs above suggest that the flaws of the twentiethcentury Ozarks Christians are minimal compared with their sincerity and positive values. Most of them strove to follow the church’s teachings,

working hard, helping the needy, and instilling moral values in their children.

Times have changed, and Ozarks culture is no longer monolithic. In religion, the number of non-Christian religions (such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism) is rising, whereas the number of Christians is decreasing. According to recent data, only half of the residents of Springfield, Missouri called the Queen City of the Ozarks are Christians, and 48% profess no religion. Even among Christians, there is a diversity. In addition to fundamentalists and Pentecostals, the two religious groups Wright and Randolph seem to underappreciate in their works, there are Mennonites, mainline Christians, and unitarian universalists in the region. Regardless of their religious affiliations, however, Ozarkers have tended to uphold honesty, morality, and empathy, which are grounded in Christian teachings. Mahnkey, Meadows, and Eakins highlight the wholesome aspects of Ozarks Christianity and minimize its shortcomings in their respective nonfiction works.

Works Cited

Eakins, J. Kenneth. Less Than a Mile: A Philosophy of Life from The Ozarks...And beyond. No publisher, 2001.

Mahnkey, Douglas. Bright Glowed My Hills. Lookout, MO: Schoolof the Ozarks Press, 1968.

Meadows, Chris. Short Stories and Poems of the Ozark Hills. Cassville, MO: Litho Printers, 1971.

Randolph, Vance. Ozark Magic and Folklore. Dover, 1964.

Schmitt, Peter J. Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America. 1969. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.

Wright, Harold Bell. To Sy Sons. New York: Harper, 1934.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 47-54

A Survey of Old Testament Survey Books for Use in Undergraduate Courses

Nathan Maroney

Introduction

This essay is a survey on available textbooks for use in an Old Testament survey course. The aim is not to be comprehensive, but rather to provide an overview that is useful in thinking through how we can best approach teaching the Old Testament.

While introductory Old Testament textbooks comprise a good portion of the literature published in the field, there is not much interaction between scholars evaluating the works. Obviously due to the nature of an introductory textbook, it makes sense that these works would not be quoting each other or engaging extensively in scholarly conversation. Occasionally a review article of a textbook will appear. However, more reflection from the field on how these works can be improved will be beneficial.

Certainly, there is no shortage of introductory textbooks, but reflection is needed on which of the many textbooks available is most helpful to use. In addition, in other languages there still is a lack of available textbooks, so reflection is important. This reflection can help in determining which should be translated from English to a target language, or how to go aboutwriting a new textbook in a targetlanguage.

Difficulties in Teaching the Old Testament

This question is relevant because it fits into the broader question of teaching the Bible in the modern age. I believe that it is harder than ever to teach the Old Testament today. There are two factors that contribute to this. The first factor is growing biblical illiteracy and church decline. To give a few examples from a 2022 survey, 71% of self-proclaimed Christians deny original sin, 56% believe God accepts Islam and Judaism, 43% deny that Jesus was God.1 No doubt comprehension of the Old Testament is even worse.

Church attendance is similarly in general decline in parts of the U.S. There have always been non-believers in Bible survey courses, but as Christianity declines in some areas, the number of non-believers in survey courses may increase. Even for believers in survey courses an Old Testament survey course could be the last, or even only serious

engagement with the Old Testament they will receive, since biblical illiteracy is increasing within the church. Thus, teaching the Old Testament is more important than ever as it fills an ever-growing gap in knowledge. And yet it is certainly more difficult as there is less and less knowledge going into the course.

The second factor is an opposite force that of growing skepticism and distrust of the Biblical text. Critical approaches to the Bible are nothing new, but they continue to become more mainstream, and more available to the public. In previous generations, critical approaches were mostly confined to academia. Believers could experience a crisis of faith if they went to a more liberal university; but churches and Christian universities could usually remain a safe haven from critical approaches to the Bible, and interaction with those approaches could be leftto academia. Today, however, critical approaches to the Bible are everywhere. A lay person can experience a crisis of faith from the comfort of their own home. To give one example, many Wikipedia pages relating to the Bible accept critical approaches. It is simply assumed that Biblical texts are written by multiple contradicting authors, and that the historical information recorded in the Bible is myth and does not correlate with what we know to be the true history of the Ancient Near East. Again, these are not new ideas, but the ideas are more accessible than ever. I know believers in their 60s and 70s who have lived most of their life without having to really face critical approaches. I highly doubt the next generation will be able to escape this in the same way. Here I give just one example of this broad phenomenon. Daniel McLellan is the author of the recent skillful and thought-provoking work, YHWH's Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. 2 The work uses insights from cognitive science to examine depictions of divinity in the Old Testament. The work promotes the ideas that the Pentateuch was compiled from multiple contradictory sources, and thatmonotheism was a late invention within the evolution of the Old Testament. But these are among the less controversialand novel ideas in the book within the field of Old Testament studies. They are the building blocks for his other conclusions. McLellan, like more and more up and coming scholars, is an independent scholar and is not teaching regularly at a university. But his influence cannot be overstated. He is on TikTok and YouTube, creating content and interacting with other content creators.3 Part of his stated goal in teaching the Bible is to free the text from its misuse by religious people with a theologicalagenda.4

We can thus no longer assume that critical approaches are confined to more liberal universities. Anyone who spends much time online will quickly become aware of some of the challenges to the Bible. Some common evidence I see cited by even non-specialists online includes seeing Pentateuch as made up of various contradictory sources, and the claim that the gospels were written by anonymous authors, generations after Jesus.

With these problems in mind, more intentionality is required in approaching an Old Testament survey course. In response to declining knowledge of the Bible, less can be assumed going into the course. In response to growing distrust in the Bible, more attention to introductory issues is needed. Granted the course cannot turn into an Apologetics course, but it is no longer possible to fail to connect to the broader discussion of distrust in the text. This might differ from approaches to preaching, where lack of engagement with background historical issues may be more appropriate. Intentionality is required when structuring the course. One cannot simply begin in Genesis and get as far as possible in the time allotted. Here we turn toward the use of textbooks and their potential benefitin structuring a course.

Why Use a Textbook?

It is useful to ask why we even use textbooks in courses. In discussions in academia more generally, it is usually said that the purpose of using a textbook is to give a structure and outline to the course. Obviously with courses on the Bible the material is already organized since technically there already is a textbook the Biblical text. Therefore, some opt not to use a textbook. I mention here two such approaches. One approach is to simply use no textbook and only use the Biblical text. This approach has the benefit of reserving more weekly reading for the Biblical text, since there is no reading of a textbook required. Italso has a financial benefit which is not insignificant. Having variety in the different types of readings assigned can also be beneficial. This approach also misses out on the benefits of a textbook that we will see in this paper. Another approach is for a professor to develop their own textbook consisting of notes that match lectures and have blank spaces for students to fill in while listening to the lecture. This has the benefit of increasing engagement in the lecture and guaranteeing effective note taking which will aid in recalling the lectures later. Again, however, one misses out on the other benefits a textbook can provide.

I see several benefits that a textbook can provide. One is the diffusion of sources material taugh. By reading an author other than the professor, whether the two agree or not, there is less of a sense that the professor is giving a perspective that is “clouded” by faith and fails to engage with more “objective” critical views. This is especially the case with textbooks that have multiple authors, and especially the case with textbooks that have extensive footnotes linking other material. Another benefit is the repetition of material in a different medium, sometimes in a one thatis captivating to readers.

General Observations

As we transition to look at the variety of textbooks available, several initial points stand out. Length tends to fall in the 200-300-page range or the 700-800-page range. A recent trend has been the introduction of even shorter works or booklets (under 200 words) on the subject.5 We can generalize that shorter works tend to be more focused on literary and theological issues, while longer works tend to be more focused on historical and archaeological issues. Illustrations tend to be of geographicalor archaeologicaldata and so are usuallyfound in the latter. Textbooks generally have one or two authors or have a different author for each chapter. Almost all textbooks are organized according to the Biblical books. Some divide the books according to historical, wisdom, and prophets, while some divide the books according to Law, Prophets, and Writings, but devoting a chapter to each biblical book is almost universal.

Inclusion of study questions is relatively rare but does appear in some works. The introduction of House actually entails a companion volume madeupentirelyof studyquestions.6

Survey of Works

A good example of an older standard work is The Heart of Hebrew History: A Study of the Old Testament by H. I. Hester.7 The work has a good deal of introductory information before examining individual Old Testament books. It also features historical background information throughout. At the same time, the work does not ignore the actual message of the Old Testament and pays attention to how various narratives make statements about themes such as leadership and mercy. Another older work is that of Peter Craigie is an older work with almost exclusivelyhistoricalinformation.8

Dillard and Longman’s work An Introduction to the Old Testament later became a standard work.9 The work is a good example of providing a high amount of information in various areas in a concise manner. Each chapter is devoted to a biblical book and includes historical background, summaries and critiques of critical approaches, literary analysis, and theological analysis. Connections to the New Testament are sometimes made, and there areextensivebibliographies for further research.

A similar work is that of Hill and Walton, A Survey of the Old Testament, which includes a good deal of historical information.10 The work of Richard Hess is newer and strikes a good balance of information regarding history of interpretation, historical information, and literary information.11

A significant trend is the rise of textbooks which lack interaction with historical issues, or critical approaches, and instead focus on literary readings and attending to the overarching narrativeof the Old Testament.

The work edited by Jason Derouchie, What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About is a good example of an attempt at a modern updating of an approach similar to that of Dillard and Longman.12 This work has a different author for each chapter and provides literary and theological analysis. Historical analysis is not totally absent but appears significantly less often than in the work of Dillard and Longman. It also lacks the extensive bibliography found in Dillard and Longman. While the bibliography in Dillard and Longman is probably longer than necessary, it seems better to have too much than too little. A positive of Derouchie’s work is that it has more illustrations than thatof Dillard and Longman. Other books do not deal at all with background info like historical or archaeological information. This seems to be a newer trend compared to older textbooks. Examples are Peter Leitharts A House for my Name: A Survey of the Old Testament, 13 and A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the Old Testament: The Gospel Promised. 14 Another example is Stephen Dempster’s Dominion and Dynasty, which I will focus on in more detail.15 While notdesigned as a textbook for an introductory course, it has widely been used as such. Dempster’s approach is to give an account of the theology of the story of the Old Testament, with the main goal of “not missing the forest for the trees” as he puts it. He assumes the Old Testament has a unified discernible message and he seeks to expound it. The book makes many great insights and is easy to read. Dempster writes well, and is engaging and witty, often using devices like alliteration which make points memorable. With all due credit to this great work, I do not think it is the best option as a sole textbook for an introductory course. It is highly idiosyncratic in that it gives the interpretation of a single author. Much of what he says is noncontroversial, but he also makes some interpretive leaps that would not be accepted by even conservative scholarship widely.16 It is also not a great text for an audience that is non-sympathetic. Fewer and fewer students today will agree with his approach of finding unity in the message of the Old Testament. Because of its lack of interaction with background issues in the field, I do not see this work as a sufficient textbook on its own. To his credit, Dempster’s goal is not to write an introductory textbook, but to attend to the overarching narrative of the Old Testament. In fact, he does a great job of this, and the work is beneficial in addressing one of the aforementioned problems in current Old Testament teaching that of biblical illiteracy. This fits a general trend of works on the Bible trying to get at the bigger picture of the biblical story. If such a work is used in a course, however, it is probably best supplemented with a work thatattends to the other problem in current Old Testament teaching - that of suspicion of historicalaccuracy.

Other Approaches

Here we mention a few novel approaches. One is that of the book Voice, Word, and Spirit: A Pentecostal Old Testament Survey. 17 This work’s explicit goal is to give a survey of the Old Testament with an emphasis on the Old Testament depiction of the Holy Spirit, a central elementof Pentecostalfaith.

Another novel approach is that of incorporating film in courses. A professor and friend of mine, Paul Jackson has incorporated movies into Old Testament study through a textbook by Barsotti and Johnston.18 These are not movies about the Bible, but popular movies which surprisingly illustrated a concept illustrated by a biblical author. Such concepts could include among others the effects of abusive sin, suffering, forgiveness, and loyalty. The methodology was obviously controversial but had some basis in pedagogy research and seemed to generate interest in the subject matter.19 Generally speaking, students wanting to pursue continued education in Biblical studies did not enjoy this method. But students broadly, and especially students who otherwise would not have cared aboutstudying the Bible, responded positively to the method. In my opinion, this is what is more important for a survey course. Seeing how the Old Testament addresses concepts which are still being portrayed in films about modern life encourages a sympathetic reading of the Old Testament.

Conclusion

We have seen several different approaches to introducing the Old Testament by looking at various approaches of available textbooks. A main element was a trend from the historical to the literary and theological. This trend seems to be an intentional response to critical views. We have seen how works attending to the Bible’s overarching narrative are helpful for addressing the problem of biblical illiteracy but should probably be supplemented with works that address the problem of suspicion of the Bible’s historicity.

Notes

1 https://thestateoftheology.com. Accessed April19, 2023.

2 DanielO McClellan, Yhwh's Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. Ancientnear East Monographs, Number 29, Societyof BiblicalLiterature (Atlanta, GA: 2022).

3 An aspectof his work online that is to be commended, for example, is his refutation of certain recent, more exotic, interpretations of the book of Revelation.

4 McClellan, Yhwh’s Divine Images.

5 See, for example, MichaelDavid Coogan, The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction. VeryShortIntroductions, 181, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). This is a fitting title, since his other, “short” introduction is over 400pages.

6 Eric Mitchell and Archie England, Old Testament Survey: A Student’s Guide, (Nashville: B&HBooks, 2007). Companion work for Paul R House and Eric Mitchell, Old Testament Survey. 2nd ed. (Nashville: B & H Academic: 2007).

7 H. I. Hester, The Heart of Hebrew History: A Study of the Old Testament, [Revisededition], (Liberty: QualityPress: 1962).

8 Peter C. Craigie, The Old Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content, (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1986).

9 Tremper Longman and Raymond B Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2nd ed., (Grand Rapids: Zondervan: 2006).

10 Andrew E Hill and John HWalton. A Survey of the Old Testament, 3rd ed., (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Pub. House, 2009).

11 Richard S. Hess, The Old Testament: A Historical, Theological, and Critical Introduction, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016).

12 Jason Shane DeRouchie, ed. What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About: A Survey of Jesus' Bible, (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2013).

13 Peter J. Leithart, A House for My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament, (Moscow: Canon Press, 2000).

14 Miles V Van Pelt, ed. A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the Old Testament: The Gospel Promised, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016).

15 Dempster, Stephen G. Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible, New Studies in Biblical Theology, 15.

16 For example, the suggestion thatthe laws concerning a disobedientson in Deuteronomy21:18-21 are linked with the laws for hanging in

Deuteronomy21:2-23, and thattogether theypoint to Christ who takes on the punishmentof Israel, God’s disobedientson, Dempster, Dominion.

17 Rick Dale Moore, and Brian Neil Peterson. Voice, Word, and Spirit: A Pentecostal Old Testament Survey, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2017).

18 Catherine M, Barsottiand RobertKJohnston, eds. God in the Movies: A Guide for Exploring Four Decades of Film, (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2017).

19 PaulJackson, “Beyond Narrative, Structure, and Linguistics:The Power of Film” paper presented atthe 71stAnnualMeeting of the Evangelical TheologicalSociety, 2019.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 55-61

Doing Away with Beautiful Things in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth

Matthew Bardowell

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is a place filled with both danger and beauty, and critics of his work observe that these two qualities are often linked. Christine Chism has written on the corrupting influence of beautiful things within Tolkien’s Legendarium, showing that not only can objects of beauty have corrupting influence but beautiful stories can as well (63). This essay will build on previous studies that address the peril of beautiful things to articulate the root of Tolkien’s anxiety about them. Beauty in Middle-earth is often used to gain a foothold on well-meaning characters. Itcan, and often does, lead to corruption. This essay argues for an underappreciated aspect of this corruption: the fear of losing beautiful things, which leads to a desire to preserve them. Beauty abounds in Middle-earth, and this beauty is just as likely to be of nature as it is of the objects rational beings make. The Shire has a kind of bucolic splendor in its rolling hills and neatly framed fields. Lothlórien has an austere beauty, even though its beauty is fading when we arrive there in The Fellowship of the Ring. Beyond these beautiful locations, we also have beautiful artifacts made by the inhabitants of Middle-earth. Elves make precious gems and rings. Men, as well as Elves, make weaponry that is not only deadly but beautiful to behold. These objects often have special significance and can become heirlooms or given names. Similarly, Dwarves fashion beautiful objects from stone and metal, and these artifacts hold an important place in Dwarf culture. In this essay, when I refer to beautiful things I refer, almost exclusively, to artifacts. Beautiful things, in this sense, are rings, not rainbows, and swords, not sunsets.

What is Tolkien’s attitude toward artistic creation in his fictional world? The answer is related to his attitudes about artistic creation in general, particularly his own. The answer is also related to his treatment of beauty. How does Tolkien depict the beauty inherent in these artistic creations? How do Tolkien’s attitudes about these two things hint at his feelings about his own artistic creation? I argue that these beautiful objects can have a mixed sort of moral coding. Often, beautiful things are coded as good within the moral framework of Middle-earth, but in some notable cases, theseobjects presenta danger to those who behold them.

The typical moral coding we see in Middle-earth is that beauty and goodness are linked. Consider Tolkien’s description of Goblin culture in The Hobbit: “Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well” (Tolkien, H 59). Goblins are wicked, and here Tolkien offers as evidence of that wickedness that they have no place for beauty in their culture.

By contrast, Men, Elves, and Dwarves each make in their own ways and after the fashion of their respective cultures. In the recently published The Fall of Númenor (2022), Tolkien explains a little about the way men in this world create. Tolkien tells us that the Edain, the word in Sindarin for “men,” had a number of “skills and crafts” (FN 36). Many of these crafts were learned from the Eldar and preserved in their culture. When these men settled in Númenor, they brought with them precious gems and metals, which could not be found in Númenor. Tolkien remarks that the Edain “loved [these things] for their beauty, and it was this love that first aroused in them cupidity, in later days when they fell under the Shadow and became proud and unjust in their dealings with lesser folk of Middleearth” (Tolkien, FN 36). The word “cupidity” (cupiditas) commonly means ‘avarice’ or ‘greed,’ but it is a word that has undergone a fair bit of linguistic broadening. William S. Babcock, writing on Augustine’s use of the term, shows that it is a type of love distinguishable by its object. Cupiditas is “love of things that can be lost” (Canning 591).1 This sense of cupiditas can be distinguished from caritas, the love which knows and enjoys the eternal God, who alone cannot be taken away” (Canning 591). Raymond Canning, who reviews Babcock’s essay, observes another notable distinction between these two loves. According to Canning, we can distinguish these loves not only based on their objects but also on the basis of the “social order to which each of them gives rise” (591). Cupiditas “sets person against person,” but caritas “unites persons in the common bond of love shared without threat or envy” (591). This distinction serves nicely to help us understand what goes wrong when the people of Middle-earth settheir hearts on earthlythings evenwhen thosethings are beautiful. We see this cupidity in the Elves as well, and here I present two examples as evidence of the general case: Fëanor’s attachment to the Silmarils in The Silmarillion, and Galadriel’s attachment to Lothlórien in The Fellowship of the Ring. Observe what happens to Fëanor after creating the Silmarils. These are objects of great beauty. They are gems, but these gems contain the light of the two Trees of Valinor: Laurelin and Telperion. In The Silmarillion, when Melkor brings Ungoliant to devour the light of these two trees, they are fatally wounded in the attack. Their light will be extinguished unless Fëanor relinquishes the Silmarils so that they can be unlocked and the light within them revive the dying trees. Fëanor considers the request, but replies, “For the less even as for the

greater there is some deed that he may accomplish but once only; and in that deed his heart shall rest. It may be that I can unlock my jewels, but never again shall I make their like; and if I must break them, I shall break my heart, and I shall be slain” (Tolkien, S 78). Notice the language of mortality in what Fëanor says. He views his act of sub-creation as a oncein-a-lifetime feat, which it very well might be. Yet viewing his work in that way causes him to fear losing what he has made. The Silmarils are of earthly material, and, as such, temporary as the world is temporary. Observe the depth of Fëanor’s identification with his own little creation. He, as an Elf, is immortal, and yet the love of the mortal things he has made ties him, too, to the mortal realm. To unlock them, would be to break them, and to break them would be to break him. Fëanor refuses to give up the gems, because, he says, that if he were to see them destroyed it would mean nothing less than his own death. Fëanor has poured so much of himself into these artistic creations and become so attached to them, that he cannot bear to see them harmed, and he refuses to give them over, even if it means the Trees of Valinor will perish. His decision to cling to the Silmarils is one of the most disastrous choices anyone of any race in Middle-earth makes in the entirety of Tolkien’s Legendarium. It leads to greatsuffering for his people, the Noldor. Fëanor’s case exhibits the love of beautiful things, yes, but the love of those beautiful things is directly tied to his own cupidity his attachment to the physical, to that which can be lost.

We see a similar motive in the temptation Galadriel experiences when Frodo brings the Ruling Ring to Lothlórien. The Elves have a deep love of the natural world, and it is for this reason that their demeanor in The Lord of the Rings is so often sorrowful. After Frodo looks into her mirror, Galadriel explains why the fellowship’s coming is unwelcome to the inhabitants of Lothlórien: “Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom?For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We mustdepart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten” (Tolkien, FR 356). Galadriel feels the love of this world and of her small place within it so sharply, and the threat that Lothlórien almost induces her to claim the Ring for herself. In the end, she resists the Power to preserve the transient things thatshe loves, but this victory comes at the expense of her own diminishment. Some critics have argued that cupidity, or as it is more commonly framed, greed, may not always be dangerous. As Elisa Bursten puts it, within the moral landscape of Tolkien’s Middle-earth “greed in and of itself is notportrayed as an inherently dangerous thing” (68). Bursten cites as evidence for this claim some Old Norse sources that do not depict greedy characters as wicked. According to Bursten, characters who exhibit greed as a natural trait are, such as Tolkien’s Dwarves, are modeled on these Old Norse sources. The problem with such a claim is that it is both unparsimonious and partial in its explanatory power. It is unparsimonious

because Bursten must introduce a new element into the kinds of greed we see in Tolkien’s characters to account for the bad sort of greed. When speaking of the Dwarves, for instance, Bursten makes a distinction between innate greed, which is neutral, and “social” greed, which is harmful. In this view, it is only when greed impinges on others that it damages relationships. This distinction between types of greed is needlessly complicated, especially in view of the notion of greed as cupiditas, which already has social implications. A love of that which can be lost is, by its very nature, alienating. Bursten’s argument about greed also fails to account for the kind of fallenness that may be innate to a person and yetstill wicked. Consider Galadriel’s words to Gimli the Dwarf as she bestows the gift of the three strands of her golden hair upon him. She tells him that “these words shall go with the gift . . . I say to you Gimli, son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion” (Tolkien, FR 367). Here, Galadriel acknowledges the reputation that Dwarves have for innate greed and offers the blessing in the hopes thatGimliwill be freed from this trait.

Tolkien’s characterization of beautiful things is not univocally positive. Beautiful artifacts can be perilous because of their potential to arouse the cupidity in those who behold them. This love of the physical leads to a kind of anxiety about losing that which can be lost and so leads to the desire to preserve and control such artifacts. Tolkien links the desire to preserve the physical to the power of the Ruling Ring. While Tolkien rejects allegorical interpretations of his work, he acknowledges that any good story will feel as though it is allegorical in its applicability. Isn’t it true that we see the really good stories everywhere? Of that applicability, in his well-known letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien lets us in on the three major themes he sees in his own fairy stories that might lend his work to applicability outside the world of Middle-earth. Because of the passage’s significance, I quote ithere in full:

all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Morality, and the Machine . . . . with Mortality especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, which, in our own world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as “its own,” the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the creator especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective and so to the Machine (or Magic). (Tolkien, Letters 145-146)

Here in his own words Tolkien is saying that his work is mainly concerned with addressing the creative artistic impulse. This is what he means by the phrase “sub-creative desire.” He observes that the desire to make beautiful things arises from a “passionate love” of this world, in all its beauty and all its transience. Because all art derives from the primary, transient world, its maker is keenly aware of the risk of losing that which they have made. Tolkien then goes on to describe what goes wrong when we cultivate a love of that which can be lost: we become possessive, desiring to rise to the status of God over the diminutive and derivative work of our hands. This applies to the Silmarils of Fëanor. It applies to the gold of the Dwarves. It applies to the precious stones of men. It applies to rings, and swords, and the work of the authors who imagine these things into existence. The danger of loving beautiful things extends past Middle-earth to Tolkien’s own self-consciousness about his own status as sub-creator of that world. Tolkien’s admission that his work is primarily concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine, specifically with respect to the subcreative desire is striking, and he explores the anxiety of the sub-creator in other places as well, perhaps most notably in “On Fairy-Stories,” his fullest treatment of the sub-creative impulse. At the end of that essay, Tolkien reflects on the consolation of fairy stories, which is their “happy ending” (Tolkien, “OFS” 156). At this point, the essay takes a sudden personal turn, at least as I read it. Tolkien reflects on Gospel as the true fairy-tale from which all others derive, and he seems to suggest that not only may we, as sinful mortals, be redeemed by the Good News of Christ, but, perhaps one day, our works will also be redeemed. Hereis whathe writes:

In God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian still has work to do, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know. (“OFS” 156-157).

If you are like me, you can almost feel the mixture of hope and humility with which Tolkien pens these lines. The hope Tolkien speaks of here is too great to utter above a whisper. What if God, one day, will redeem not just ourselves, but the work of our souls the beautiful things we make in imitation of our Father, who is Himself a Creator.

There is one passage that seems to me to attain to this notion that an artifact could be redeemed within the moral landscape of Middle-earth. To see it, we must turn to Aulë’s creation of the Dwarves. The tale is told in The Silmarillion, and in it, Aulë, one of the quasi-angelic beings who serves the God of Middle-earth, Ilúvatar, oversteps his bounds. He creates the race of Dwarves before the proper time, and Ilúvatar confronts him about this. The Dwarves are Aulë’s sub-creation. He makes them because he, himself, is made in the image of the Maker. But Aulë cannot fathom the responsibility that comes with being a Maker of a race of beings. He does not realize that he cannot bestow life in the way that Ilúvatar can. Ilúvatar tells him: “Thou hast from me as a gift thy own being only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle” (Tolkien, S 43). Aulë is unprepared for this kind of lordship. He repents from his impetuousness and seeks to reconcile with Ilúvatar, and he says, “As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made. Do with them what thou wilt. But should I rather not destroy the work of my presumption?” (43). Aulë, the great Smith, raises his hammer to destroy the Dwarves, but the text then tells us that “Ilúvatar had compassion upon Aulë and his desire because of his humility” (43-4). Ilúvatar grants the Dwarves life and allows them to inhabit Middle-earth after the Firstborn, the Elves, “awaken upon the Earth” (44).

I am well aware of the danger of reading an author’s work autobiographically, but I cannot help but see Tolkien himself in this passage. Delighting to create his own sub-created world after the fashion of his own Maker. Aulë’s remark “I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made” is particularly poignant. Tolkien has already acknowledged in his letter to Waldman that the sub-creative desire seems antithetical to the practical concerns and demands of the real world. Whatever anxiety Tolkien may have felt in devoting so much time to his fictional world seems to seep through in this passage. Is it presumptuous of me to sub-create? Does it bind me to the physical, perishable world in a way that could lead to cupidity? These are some concerns that Tolkien’s work raises, and, because of the great power of that work, we come to see thatthese concerns are justified.

We know, as Jesus tells us, that if we love our lives, we run the risk of losing them but that if we lay them down, we will receive eternal life. What if it is the same with the beautiful things we make? We must not clutch at them hold them in a closed fist but, instead, hold them with an open hand, knowing that at any point we might lose them. Only when we do this, when we are willing to do away with the beauty we have made, can we hope thatthe Creator will redeem them.

Note

1 qtd. in Canning 591. Original source is Babcock, “Cupiditas and Caritas: The Early Augustine on Love and Fulfillment.” In Augustine Today, edited by Richard John Neuhaus. Encounter Series16, Grand Rapids: MI: Eerdmans, 1993.

Works Cited

Bursten, Elisa. “‘The Love of BeautifulThings’: Norse Mythologyand Greed in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. “Curious if True”: The Fantastic in Literature, edited byAmyBright, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, 66-90.

Canning, Raymond. Review of Augustine Today edited byRichard John Neuhaus. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 1996, p. 590-592.

Chism, Christine. “Middle-earth, the Middle Ages, and the Aryan Nation: Myth and History in World War II.” Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, Routledge, 2003, 63-92.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fall of Númenor, edited by Brian Sibley. William Morrow, 2022.

_______. The Fellowship of the Ring. 1954. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994.

_______. The Hobbit. 1937. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

_______. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited byHumphreyCarpenter. Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

_______. “On Fairy-Stories.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited byChristopher Tolkien. Harper Collins, 1997. 109161.

_______. The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien. 2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 62-67

Problems in Healthcare Communication: What is Happening? What Could Change?

Sydney

Kardasz

Patient fulfillment has always been an important task when providing care, but every person is different with experiences, culture, and ideas of the world. While the American Healthcare system has been streamlined to be a helpful tool, it is a cookie-cutter fix to always-changing problems. Although the healthcare system is a fantastic help to some patients, and changes to fit the needs of some scenarios, it oftentimes leaves others struggling to find confidence in being heard and have their needs fully met. Strong communication is one of the biggest expectations of patients and providers when visiting a doctor or care provider. Although communication may seem like such a small, easily fixable need, there are many who claim communication in healthcare is lacking and requires a change in mindset for ALL providers and patients. While often requiring many years of school, healthcare professionals can sometimes seem “too specialized” or “overqualified” to care for patients. With their specialized vocabulary and scientific terminology, patients might feel dehumanized or unfulfilled. When visiting a doctor, whether something is wrong or just for a simple checkup, many patients are continuously looking for reassurance or comfort; more than they want answers or a scientific diagnosis. Questions such as, “Are Doctors overspecialized?” and “How does communication in healthcare change diagnoses?” show how there is a disconnect between patients and healthcare workers because of the lack of compassion, understanding, and trustin the relationships.

Danielle Ofri, a practicing doctor, and author of What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear, wrote of her own unfulfillment in her office, and discovered how not only were patients missing the ideas doctors were trying to convey, but doctors were completely neglecting what patients were sharing. In Dr. Ofri’s experience, she had a man coming to her quite often, without making appointments, budging his way through the system, interrupting her lunch breaks, and causing her office to fall behind with scheduled patients. This man had a heart problem and struggled to feel as though he was taken care of by other facilities. Always stressing about his next heart attack, Dr. Ofri tried her best to help, but her annoyance eventually got the best of her, and she found herself resenting this man. One day, he burst into Dr. Ofri’s office, sharing how he trusts only her to help, but as Dr. Ofri was turning him away, telling him to go to the formed a bond with her because of her kindness to always help before. He felt that

with no other doctors, but she let him down. The man could have lost his life that day, but moving forward, Dr. Ofri concluded that in order Emergency Department if it truly is an issue, the man collapsed. After that moment, Dr. Ofri realized that this man had for health care to change, doctors need to have more sympathy, overexplain every diagnosis and treatment, and truly listen to what their patients are telling them, regardless of if itmeans squeezing in a patientwithoutan appointment.

From Dr. Ofri’s experiences, doctors among all healthcare workers, need to understand how to be a patient, before serving patients. Healthcare employees can often forget that they are serving other human beings, rather than simply just doing a job. So, while being annoyed or overwhelmed can sometimes come with healthcare positions, it is important to remember that patients are still as important as anyone else, but often visiting in a more difficult or unknown situation (Ofri, 2018). Dr. Ofri also brings to light the issues with multitasking and not being fully present with a patient (Ofri, 2018). Over time, the loss of face-to-face contact has allowed for an uncertainty to enter patients’ minds, creating a sense of feeling unheard and unfulfilled. All people, especially in a hard unknown time, need sympathy, trust, and compassion. As much as they want to feel better, they also want to feel cared for, reassured, and listened to. In order to fix this healthcare disconnect, Dr. Ofri suggests for doctors to fully put themselves in the patients’ position and think about what they may be looking for when calling or showing up complaining, unannounced and insert themselves in an already busy schedule (Ofri, 2018). While yes, it can be annoying and difficult to fully meet their needs in a busy time, it

is important for healthcare employees to understand that part of the care these patients need is being listened to and fully understood. Not only are providers problem-solving, but they are giving compassion, patience, and reassurance; serving patients just as Jesus served with humility and love. Putting an iPad with patient notes down, sitting face to face and asking important questions, or even asking a patient what they would like in a best-case scenario, are some easy ways to comfort a patient and show them that as a healthcare worker, you are fully present and working on their case together (Ofri, 2018).

While sharing how doctors might send the wrong message or overcomplicate simple prescription ideas, Dr. Ofri also invested time in understanding whatsome of her patients were truly looking for when they came for unexpected or unneeded visits. While she developed her own ways to fix the provider side of healthcare, she also shed light on how a patient might feel with such a disconnect (Ofri, 2018). Dr. Ofri found that patients feel a healthcare worker might use too scientific terminology, or assumes a patient understands everything they are sharing when, in reality, a patient during a medical visit typically has a one-track mind. They want to feel better and go home (Ofri, 2018). Dr. Ofri shares thatat a time of need, as a healthcare professional, you are there to give patients comfort, not make them feel worse for needing high-quality care (Ofri, 2018). After her incident of almost losing a patient in her office because she was unable to hear his concerns and he was unable to properly voice the concerns, she began listening to patients more. Another study called Are interprofessional healthcare teams meeting patient expectations? really focused on the patient side of the problem. This study showed how healthcare has changed to be more “efficient,” but not as “effective” in meeting patientcare. The study shares how, “in recent years, there has been a significant shift in patient care designed to facilitate shorter hospital stays and caring more for patients in the community” (Cutler, 2019, p. 66). Within the healthcare team, it was found that patient involvement decreased when in person meetings were limited and teams relied more on video chats or online discussions (Cutler, 2019, p. 67). Although patient involvement decreased patient expectations of being helped and comforted remained the same. The biggest concern with decreased involvement was how patients were originally able to increase professionals’ knowledge of how their treatment plans will be effective in daily life, or how they might be causing severe problems for patients. However, having shorter visits cut off a patient’s chance of voicing their own concerns and staying involved with their own cases. When studying, they found that patients were feeling left out, uncared for, and unwelcomed by healthcare workers because of the high level of medical terminology and difficulty to schedule adequate meeting times. The biggest reason for the lack of involvement is based more on the patient's “lack of knowledge, their illness, and mental state” (Cutler, 2019, p. 67).

Silvie Cooper and Fiona Stevenson also explore the roles of communication in a United Kingdom Emergency Department over six

months. Researching ten cases, they compare the demand to deliver safe and effective care with the patient's expected outcomes. Cooper and Stevenson concluded that while Doctors were attempting to meet and guide patient tests and outcomes, they were struggling to comfort family and friends who spoke for patients. While the patients also felt misunderstood, the doctors proceeded to get more annoyed by those speaking for the patient with zero medical experience. In Case 1, the patient’s friend had a medical problem previously and recommended all the tests they should have done on her, to be done on the patient, instead of allowing the doctor to do an analysis and conclude what tests might truly be needed (Cooper, 2022, p. 1768). Among clinical care settings, patient safety and overall results are often most considered when delivering care, but it is more common for healthcare workers to not develop a connection with the patient and family. In healthcare, families always remember how they were treated by their staff; if treated extremely well and given the chance to fully understand all that was going on, families remember the patience and kindness they were shown, as well as being able to easilyrecallthe lack of compassion. Some top problems that patients might have, regarding communication, include notunderstanding terminology, feeling like a task on a worker’s to-do list, and struggling to find time to have checkups with a healthcare worker, the biggest concern is how the healthcare mindset can change. While there are many healthcare employees who do a great job and genuinely care about their patients, it is becoming a more uncommon thing in healthcare visits. Patients cannot simply fix the ways others make them feel, or how they do not understand. Healthcare employees are being pushed more by insurance companies, healthcare providers, and higher management to make more money for the company by shortening time spent with the actual patients and seeing more throughout the day, but it is costing patient fulfillment and communication.

The article, Education for Health: Change in Learning & Practice, discusses recent technological advances and the difficulties healthcare employees face trying to stay up to date on all the new technologyand new uses for how to solve problems efficiently (McGrath, 2004). Although technology is always changing and expanding frequently, healthcare employees’ vocabulary and terminologies are always changing as well, making it difficult for patients to keep up unless an employee takes the time and commits to communicating those meanings with patients. While employees might feel disheartened to learn new technology, McGrath argues that patients feel just as worried to learn a misunderstood diagnosis or treatment plan (McGrath, 2004, p. 377). Stilos (2007), author of Building Comfort with Ambiguity in Nursing Practice, shares that bringing comfort into the healthcare field, where patients are coming and going with doubt and concern is a difficult yet needed task, especially when experiencing feeling unsure of what might be the right path. When tasked with caring for others, it becomes a need to set aside your own

doubts, practice what you know, trust your instinct, and comfort a patient (Stilos, 2007, p. 263). Bringing open communication, honesty, and trust into healthcare allows for patients to feel as though they are being cared for by another regular human being with emotion, understanding, and comfort (Stilos, 2007, p. 263). Two approaches McGrath (2004) suggests include implementing “(1) a basic communication model, and (2) the six elements of logical rationale, journalism and technical writing,” (p. 377). Healthcare Executive also states how to be careful of communication problems. It lists watching body posture, not using “lazy talk” or filler words instead of proper grammar, not engaging with a topic, not offering opinions as informative facts, not attempting to charm everyone, saying a proper goodbye, accepting compliments humbly, being truly present in the conversation, and attempting to fully acknowledge helpful criticism (Healthcare Executive, 2013, p. 44).

Communication in healthcare is currently lacking. It fails to provide patients with what they need, creates internal conflict between companies and facilities, and starts a continuous cycle of broken trust and lack of effectiveness. Healthcare employees, while often working difficult jobs, need reminding that their patients are human too. Patients have emotions, can read the room, and know when a healthcare worker truly cares about them or not. To continue providing effective care and creating overall wellbeing for all patients, America needs a reminder of how to be patient, kind, and give compassion. While healthcare could change tremendously from these simple mindsets, I think all people sometimes need that simple reminder that everyone makes mistakes and misunderstands, and while it can be annoying, we’re here to serve others, whether that be in healthcare, or anywhere else. Healthcare communication needs compassion, understanding, and patience for all patients, regardless of the situation or the day.

References

Cooper, S., & Stevenson, F. (2022). Communicating decisions about care with patients and companions in emergencydepartment consultations. Health Expectations, 25(4), 1766–1775. https://0doi-org.bridges.searchmobius.org/10.1111/hex.13519

Cutler, S., Morecroft, C., Carey, P., & Kennedy, T. (2019). Are interprofessionalhealthcare teamsmeeting patientexpectations?

An exploration of the perceptions of patients and informal caregivers. Journalof InterprofessionalCare, 33(1), 66–75.

https://0-doi-

org.bridges.searchmobius.org/10.1080/13561820.2018.1514373

Healthcare Executive, AdaptedbyBrown, M. (2013). Communication: 10 communication mistakes employees makeand how to fix them. (2013). Healthcare Executive, 28(5), 42.

McGrath, J., Lawrence, V., & Richardson, W. S. (2004). Making Medical Research ClinicallyFriendly: A Communication-Based Conceptual Framework. Education for Health: Change in Learning & Practice, 17(3), 374–384. https://0-doiorg.bridges.searchmobius.org/10.1080/13576280400002791

Ofri, D. (2018). What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear. Beacon Press. Stilos, K., Moura, S. L., & Flint, F. (2007). Building ComfortWith Ambiguity in Nursing Practice. Clinical Journal of Oncology

Nursing, 11(2), 259–263. https://0-doiorg.bridges.searchmobius.org/10.1188/07.CJON.259-263

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 68-73

Added Symbols in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”

Emma Winkler

Since Robert Fitzgerald’s 1962 essay “The Countryside and the True Country,” scholars have continued to analyze and praise 20th-century author Flannery O’Connor’s longest short story “The Displaced Person” (Male 451). The story begins with the arrival of a Polish refugee worker from post-World War II Europe named Mr. Guizac to a Southern farm run by orderly Mrs. McIntyre. The first half of the story is seen from the perspective of the farmhand Mrs. Shortley whose hatred for the foreign Guizac and her own bloated self-importance lead to her untasteful death. The next two sections are seen from the perspective of the owner Mrs. McIntyre, who is thrilled with hardworking Guizac until learning of his plan to bring his orphaned cousin to America to marry one of Mrs. McIntyre’s African American farmhands. This outrageous proposition in Mrs. McIntyre’s segregated south begins to shift her perspective of Guizac from one of appreciation to one of disgust similar to that of Mrs. Shortley’s. Mrs. McIntyre herself becomes conflicted and consumed, specifically by whether she should fire a man who does good work but disrupts her principles. Eventually, several other farmhands and Mrs. McIntyre watch and willingly fail to warn Guizac as a tractor rolls down a hill, over his body, crushing and killing him. This eventsends the farm into disarray as the farmhands leave, and Mrs. McIntyre suffers a nervous breakdown and has no choice but to sell the farm and live the rest of her life bedridden.

Taking the lead from Fitzgerald’s essay, many critics throughout the 1960s and 70s examined the themes of religious displacement and the divine symbolism of Mr. Guizac and the farm peacock who is present throughout the story.1 More recently, however, critics’ focus has shifted from the more religious view of human displacement to the literal displacement of Mr. Guizac from a post-Holocaust Europe, as the story is the only one of O’Connor’s to consider the world outside the South in great detail.2 I want to return to look at the earlier themes, specifically in relation to the two versions of the story. The firstversion of “The Displaced Person” was published in 1954 in the Sewanee Review. The following year, a revised version of the story appeared at the end of O’Connor’s first collection of short stories entitled A Good Man is Hard to Find. This second version is the one critics have examined throughout the years with only a few referencing the original version. The only essay I could find that

was primarily devoted to comparing the two versions was a 1970 essay published by Roy R. Male entitled “The Two Versions of ‘The Displaced Person,’” which discussed how O’Connor improved the story with the edits she made but failed to fully consider the enhanced religious aspects with the addition of the peacock, the death of Mr. Guizac, and the displacement of all characters. More importantly, Male did not examine why O’Connor doubled the length of the story. Beyond examining the story itself, one must look at the context that each version was published in. The first version was published independently in a journal, and the second was published as the final short story of ten in a collection. In my paper, I will examine the two symbols that are added to the final version of the story and argue that the change in context was the main reason O’Connor altered “The Displaced Person” so significantly as the added elements align with common themes of stories in the collection and thus ties all the stories together.

Themes of vision, blindness, and sight are rampant in O’Connor’s fiction, so much so that in 2004, a statistical study was done examining the context of each use of the word “eyes” in O’Connor’s stories and noting the physical and spiritual importance of “eyes” in her work (Hardy 410, 412). The same can be said for “The Displaced Person” as eyes and what the characters see and do not see are constantly mentioned, especially around the character of Mrs. Shortley in the first half. Mrs. Shortley’s pride echoes that of other characters in A Good Man is Hard to Find, such as the grandmother in the eponymous story and Hulga in “Good Country People.” These characters believe they see and understand all but are blinded by their own pride and, as a result, suffer dire consequences. The original story makes the pride and blindness clear with Mrs. Shortley’s delusional visions and ironic death in the posture similar to that of the foreigners in the newsreels she despised (Mayer 12) where, in death and suffering, like O’Connor’s other prideful characters, her eyes are finally “turned around, looking inside her” (O’Connor, A Good Man 234). However, it is the addition of the farm peacock in the final version of the story thatmakes Mrs. Shortley’s and every other character’s spiritual state more clear. From the opening sentence, the peacock and Mrs. Shortley are connected, as the peacock follows her as she observes the arrival of the displaced person, yet the peacock sees “something no one else can see” (O’Connor, A Good Man 208). Despite the peacock’s constant presence with her in the first few pages, Mrs. Shortley takes no notice of it instead, when the peacock is right in front of her, she has a vision of herself as an angel. Both details emphasize Mrs. Shortley’s spiritual blindness (Joselyn) in a way that was not done in the original. In fact, the spiritual state of all characters can be seen in their attitude toward the peacock. The priest who brings Guizac to the farm and continues to visit in what Mrs. McIntyre sees as attempts to “convert” her, constantly marvels at the peacock’s beauty, and the African American farm worker Astor, whose physical eyes are ironically “blurred with age” (O’Connor, A Good Man 237), often talks

to the peacock while working (Martin). Notedly, both characters do not play a role in the death of Mr. Guizac. As it can be assumed, critics agree that the peacock holds a divine and spiritual symbolism. Specifically, several critics have argued that the peacock represents the divine Christ (Joselyn; Muller 110; Hyman). The peacock itself was an ancient symbol of divinity and was connected with Christ’s divine character (Joselyn). O’Connor wrote in a letter a few months after the final version was published that “you can’t have a peacock anywhere [in a story] without having a map of the universe” (O’Connor, The Habit 118), and Christ is the creator and sustainer of the universe itself the one who made and can explain all. The connection between Jesus’s divinity and the peacock is most clearly illustrated in the priest’s associating the peacock spreading his tail with the Transfiguration of Christ (O’Connor, A Good Man 252), a biblical event where the human Christ showed his divinity. In the record of the Transfiguration, Christ’s “face [shines] like the sun” (Christian Standard Bible, Matthew 17:2), and in O’Connor’s story the peacock is often described in connection with the sun as the priest marvels at his “tail full of suns” (O’Connor, A Good Man 213).

It is also within the moment where the priestassociates the peacock with the Transfiguration that the other connected symbol–that of Christ’s human nature is made clear. As the priest is again entranced by the peacock during one of his visits, he drowns outMrs. McIntyre’s complaints of the displaced person. Mrs. McIntyre huffs that “[Mr. Guizac] didn’t have to come anyway,” and the priest replies, “He came to redeem us” (O’Connor 252). Here the twin symbols of the priest and Mr. Guizac merge (Muller 110) as it becomes clearer that the peacock symbolizes the divine nature of Christ, while Mr. Guizac symbolizes his human nature (Hyman). And just as with the peacock, the spiritual state of the characters is revealed in their attitude toward Mr. Guizac (Joselyn). At first, Mrs. McIntyre views Mr. Guizac as her “salvation” (O’Connor, A Good Man 220) because of the work he can do for her. Like those in Jerusalem who worship Jesus as he rides in on Palm Sunday but turn on him days later when they realize he is not going to be their salvation from Rome, Mrs. McIntyre rejects Guizac when he challenges social norms in his intention to bring his cousin overseas to marry one of Mrs. McIntyre’s African American workers.

In the original text, Guizac is the object of Mrs. Shortley’s hatred and the reason she is displaced. In the second version, he takes on a sacrificial, Christ-like role that thematically wraps up the entirety of the short story collection (Brittain and Driskell 59). O’Connor’s concern for thematic unity in her collection is reflected in a letter to her editor in which she tells him to choose one of two stories but points out that she believes one of them fits more thematically with the rest of the stories overall (O’Connor, The Habit 73). And although, in another letter, she writes that it is up to the editor to choose which version of “The Displaced Person” to publish (72), the additions fit wonderfully into the themes of

other stories in the collection. O’Connor is known for writing unlikable, prideful characters that are faced with “a moment of grace” (Shearn) in their stories, and the stories in the collection follow this rule. The only characters who could maybe be considered “good” are the innocent the six-year-old boy in “The River” and the mentally handicap daughter in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” O’Connor’s stories affirm the biblical idea that “there is no one righteous, no not one” (Christian Standard Bible, Romans 3:10). However, Guizac, the displaced person, is a man who has seen the cruelty of the world in World War II concentration camps and is still a “good person.” But in the original story, that is all he was a good person who angered the xenophobic, prideful Mrs. Shortley. In the final version, he is a good person who displaces the social norms of the day and is eventually killed by those whose world he displaces because of it. A good person is found and killed, just as the only truly good person who ever lived was also killed. And just as Guizac’s arrival and death displaces the entire farm (Drake), Jesus’s death (and resurrection) displaces the world, making salvation possible for all. Mrs. McIntyre’s rejection of Guizac is a rejection of Christ with her assertion that “Christ was just another D.P.” (O’Connor, A Good Man 256).

But the clearest connection between Guizac as the “good person” and Christ can be seen in the criminal Misfit’s rant about Jesus in the eponymous story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and his insistence that by dying and rising again Jesus had “thrown everything off balance” (21) he displaced the world, making it so if his resurrection was true, people had no choice but to “throw away everything and follow Him” (21). Near the conclusion of “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. McIntyre becomes more and more consumed with her decision to fire Guizac and dreams she is talking to the priest and argues that Guizac has “upset the balance around here” (258). As was the case before with the confusion between Guizac and Christ when talking with the priest, her assertion that "he upset the balance" technically refers to the last person that the priest mentioned before her statement, which is "Christ Our Lord" (258). By extending the story, O’Connor finally reveals a “good man” who is killed for his differences and disregard for social norms. As a result, everything changes, all characters are displaced from what they know as Christ himself was “The Great Displacer” of the self-righteous (Drake). The accomplices in Mr. Guizac’s death leave the farm, and Mrs. McIntyre, whose displacement is immediately felt as she watches people bend over the body, feeling like she is in “some foreign country, ” breaks down with a “nervous affliction” (O’Connor, A Good Man 264) and must sell much of her farm. She becomes bedridden and her eyesight fades (265) perhaps giving her character some hope for grace as she might be able to see the truth with the loss of her eyesight. Therefore, through Guizac’s “vicarious atonement” (Driskell and Brittain 75) and the displacement it brings as Christ’s death does to the world, the entire collection A Good Man is Hard to Find, as noted by Leon Driskell and Joan Brittain, “achieves thematic unity of the sort usuallyonly accomplished in the novel” (59).

However, as Guizac is human, there is no resurrection, which is why the presence of the peacock is necessary to paint a full picture of Christ. Without the peacock’s symbolism intertwined with Guizac, Guizac is simply a man who is killed because of his different beliefs (Joselyn). But the peacock lives, just as Christ’s divine nature lives, even in his death, because “by him all things hold together” (Christian Standard Bible, Colossians 1:17) if Christ’s divine nature died in his human death, the entire world would have collapsed. So, while everyone else is displaced, the peacock stays the same, present in both the first and the last sentence of the story which is also the last sentence of the collection, as he continues to live on the farm, reflecting the unchanging nature of a loving God, who became human to displace our pridefullyblind hearts.

Notes

1 See David R Mayer’s “FlanneryO’Connor and the Peacock”(1976), RobertDrake’s Flannery O’Connor: A Critical Essay (1966), and Sister M. Joselyn’s “Thematic Centers in ‘The Displaced Person’” (1964).

2 See Lucas F.W. Wilson’s “Of Gossipand Gaze: The Shiftfrom Symbolic to SocialExclusion ‘Seen’through a Post-HolocaustAesthetic in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person’” (2018).

Works Cited

CSB Study Bible: Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017.

Drake, Robert. Flannery O’Connor: A Critical Essay. Eerdmans, 1966.

Driskell, Leon V., and Joan T. Brittain. The Eternal Crossroads. University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Fitzgerald, Robert. “The Countryside and the True Country.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 70, no. 3, 1962, pp. 380-94. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27540792.

Hardy, Donald E. “Collocational Analysis as a Stylistic Discovery Procedure: The Caseof FlanneryO’Connor’s Eyes.” Style, vol. 38, no. 4, 2004, pp. 410, 412. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.38.4.410.

Hyman, StanleyEdgar. Flannery O’Connor. Uof Minnesota Press, 1966.

Joselyn, M. “Thematic Centers in ‘The Displaced Person. ’” Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 196, Gale, 2014. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420117520/LitRC?u=st42458&sid=ebsc o&xid=0856a67b. Originallypublished in Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 1, no. 1, 1963, pp. 85-92.

Male, RoyR. “The Two Versions of ‘The Displaced Person.’” Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 196, Gale, 2014. Gale Literature Resource Center,

link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420117522/LitRC?u=st42458&sid=ebsc o&xid=4c2504af. Originallypublished in Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 7, no. 3, 1970, pp. 450-457.

Martin, Carter W. The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. VanderbiltUniversity Press, 1968.

Mayer, David R. “FlanneryO’Connor and the Peacock.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 1976, pp. 12. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1177710.

Muller, Gilbert H. Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Grotesque. University of Georgia Press, 1972.

O’Connor, Flannery. “The Displaced Person.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 62, no. 4, 1954, pp. 634–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27538394.

. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. 1955. HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1976.

. The Habit of Being. 1979. Edited by SallyFitzgerald, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.

Shearn, Amy. “FlanneryO’Connor’s Moments of Grace.” JSTOR Daily, 25 Mar. 2017, daily.jstor.org/flannery-oconnors-moments-ofgrace/#:~:text=Kinney%2C%20writes%2C%20%E2%80%9CFlann ery%20O.

Wilson, Lucas F. W. “Of Gossip and Gaze: The Shiftfrom Symbolic to SocialExclusion ‘Seen’through a Post-HolocaustAesthetic in FlanneryO’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person’: Winner of the 2018 Sarah Gordon Award.” Flannery O’Connor Review, vol. 17, 2019, pp. 165–80. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26785651.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 74-80

Book Reviews

Byassee, Jason, and Andria Irwin. Following: Embodied Discipleship in a Digital Age.Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,2021. 185 pages, $24.00.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

“Yet we know that the opposite is also true,” write Byasse and Irwin in chapter five of Following (91). In context, they are speaking of the profound spiritual truth of sin and redemption: “We are a fallen people. Yet the opposite is also true. We only know we are fallen if God is making redemption possible” (90-1). They are, of course, very much correct on this point. But the authors build an argument about the relationship between technology and discipleship along the same lines: that two seemingly irreconcilable options when held in tension will reveal deeper truth. And though I understand why they argue along these lines (and, frankly, am unsure what else they could do), what results is less a profound paradox and more a careful journey through Scylla and Charybdis that still, unfortunately, risks tearing the metaphoricalshipapart.

“How can we talk about technology hopefully?” the authors ask in the introduction (1) before stating their book’s purpose: Following is a book “about how the church can use technology, with hope, rather than being used by it” (2). The authors’ premise that Christians, particularly those engaged in ministry, must develop a framework for how to employ technology that isn’t to simply reject it is not necessarily new (see, for just one example, the other book I’ve reviewed for this issue of Integrite, Andy Crouch’s The Life We’re Looking For). It is certainly an argument that needs making, particularly (and the authors are very much aware of this) in the early 2020s, fresh out of a global pandemic that some might say necessitated much wider spread use of contemporary communication technologies to hold (or at least simulate) communal worship services. I am glad these authors tackled this topic as much as I am uncertain the framework they propose is solid enough to hold up because, as the phrase I opened this review with suggests, it is very difficult to try to argue two sides atonce. Noteverysetof contradictoryprinciples is paradoxical.

For example, take one of the first paradoxes, initially promising and eventually strained, that the authors explore: that between modern versions of the ancient heresies of Gnosticism and Manicheism. In the introduction, the authors describe the problems inherent in our

technologies and our equally problematic tendencies to put our hope in them and see them as salvific. “Technology always claims to bring eschatological significance: greater prosperity, ease, and happiness,” they write (3). But despite its promises, “Technology often just makes more of us. And we human beings are sinners especially when we think we are not” (3). The seeming omnipotence granted us by the internet, for example, grants human beings power and reach that they are too fallen and too finite to manage without falling into grave error. We thus, the authors argue, can hope only to use technology “to remind us of our creatureliness” (5). And here is where the tap-dance through opposites begins. The authors argue that one approach to technology that it might “rescue us from the space-time world of bodies, creation, and bread and wine and water” is the contemporary equivalent of Gnosticism (5). Technology is not our deliverer, and in particular it cannot be because the salvation it promises is disembodied. On the other hand, an approach to technology that rejects it outright as evil, they argue, is a “revival of the ancient Christian heresy of Manicheism,” which argued that some things in the world are essentially bad a heretical idea, because “there is no essential evil in Christian thought,” only things that are fallen and in need of redemption (7). “The goal of this book,” the authors state near the end of their introduction, “is a middle way between the heresies of Gnosticism and Manicheism. A practical, hope-filled approach to our online tools that keeps them squarely in their place as tools rather than as our masters” (9).

This goal is a noble one, and quite frankly, I am uncertain whether a different kind of argument can be both made and practically implemented. Further, the way in which the authors pursue their purpose is laudable and fully aware of the very tension I am trying to express here. The two coauthors, who self-describe as a “digital immigrant [Byassee] and a digital native [Irwin],” write in conversation with each other in order to highlight areas of disagreement. Byassee is the more hesitant of the two, which he attributes to their difference in age (and when, and to what degree, the technology the authors write about had shaped his life); Irwin is much less hesitant, viewing communication technology and the digital spaces they create as mission fields of their own, repeating the refrain “into this place the church can speak” (25). One particular area of disagreement is about whether or not Christians can celebrate the sacraments essentially embodied practices online. But despite their differences, over and over, the authors refer to technology (particularly smartphones) as a tool when properly viewed: something that is neither essentially good nor essentially evil but that can play a role in doing either across a range of different activities and relationships (friendships, pastoring, holding worship services, evangelism, etc.). Their tensions, honestly presented and explored, eventually lead to some level of consensus. And the consensus is this: in the conclusion, they argue that media is not some new thing that the ancient faith of Christianity must be updated to fit, but that “Christianity is an inherently mediated faith,” and

that we “can only approach this God mediated through material means” (161).

It is with this idea that, I think, readers should be most uncomfortable. I’ll include a few other ways they phrase this idea, just to paint the full picture: “Ours is an embodied faith, and so grace always comes through material, mediated means. No media no grace,” they write later (164); still later, “The God of the Bible loves mediation. This God only appears through, never solo only with, never unaccompanied” (165). Their examples of such mediation include biblical narratives such as the burning bush; they also, tellingly, include the sacraments (the Lord’s Supper and baptism, though they also explore the additional sacraments practiced by Catholics). I do not have the theological knowledge to argue the finer points of their definition of “mediation.” But the mention of sacraments as mediation, and the comparison of the mediation of sacraments to the mediation that happens via smartphones and Zoom windows, gave me pause, to putit lightly.

Another reviewer will have to elucidate the finer points of the theology at work here. But the equation of the mediation of sacraments to the mediation of social media et. al. reminded me immediately of the orders of simulacra outlined by the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose work I teach to literary theory students. For those unfamiliar, Baudrillard argued that electronic mass media has made it increasingly difficult for us to distinguish between reality and representations of reality, and he defined four phases of signs as they become more and more distant from reality. The first phase is the order of the sacrament, where the sign reflects a profound reality. Regardless of our particular theological ideas about what, exactly, is happening during a baptism or the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, I hope all Christians would agree that each reflects a profound reality: our being washed clean of sin and dying to our old selves; the body of Christ broken and his blood shed for our salvation. This mediation is deeplytied to the realityit represents.

I do not think, however, that the mediation the signs generated and disseminated by our technology belong to this order. I believe they belong to the fourth phase, where signs do not reference reality but have become constructs for our consumption, keeping us cycling through their own unreal universe and separate from the very profound realities that sacraments connect us to. This is the nature of our contemporary technologies: they do not mediate our reality but fashion a new one to replace it, and they make it increasingly more difficult for us to recognize what is real and what is simulation. Thus, equating the mediation of the sacraments or even the mediation involved in the composition of the apostles’ letters to the early Church with the mediation of contemporary communication technology is, at best, short-sighted and, at worst, further divorcing us from the profound reality into which God invites us through Christ.

I said above that the authors have set themselves a difficult task, and that they tackle it as well as can be hoped. I hesitate to be too critical

of a book attempting to accomplish something I still cannot reconcile in my own mind. What I would like is for this book to have more readers, because it is the very kinds of conversations modeled by this book charitable ones between people who often disagree, who are clear-eyed about the very real dangers of our contemporary technologies, who nevertheless know we will not be discarding them anytime soon that are necessary here. I can only hope that as many of these conversations happen in-person, over realfood and drink, as possible.

Crouch, Andy. The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationshipin a Technological World. New York: Convergent, 2022. 226 pages, $25.00.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

This book, like Crouch’s others, is written for a lay rather than a scholarly audience; the reading communities that might reach for it first would likely be book study groups connected to churches or parachurch organizations, not necessarily academic conferences or even undergraduate classrooms. The questions Crouch asks and addresses here, though, are far-reaching and extremely timely ones questions that many of us, along with our students, should regularly be asking, particularly (as I write this in mid-2023) as the temptation of dehumanizing “superpowers” Crouch describes seems more and more attractive every day. Crouch’s argument is that the things, particularly the technologies, that we’ve developed in order to make our lives easier and better, actually dehumanize us and distance us from each other, and that we must recognize how this is happening and do what we can to counteract these distortions and recognize each other as persons. I find this argument both timeless and extremelytimely,

Crouch opens his book by acknowledging the deep loneliness endemic to our society. “Recognition is the first human quest,” he writes (3), describing the seeking eyes and cries of infants and the insistent calls of children to their parents. Then he pivots to seemingly similar kind of recognition: the technological marvel of facial recognition software that most of us use every day to open our smartphones. Crouch argues that, however marvelous (and otherwise advantageous) these technologies are, they are not in fact examples of recognition but “ever more accurate simulations of personalized interaction” that, however useful they are, will not be able to satisfy our longing for real, not simulated, human interaction (7). Though we are arguably more connected, technologically speaking, than ever before, we are also deeply lonely. The reason we are is, Crouch argues, is the “shadow side of the bright promises and genuine achievements of the technological world: It has been based all along on a false understanding of what human beings really are and what we most need” (12-13). Our technologies promise “impersonal power, the kind that doesn’t need persons to be effective,” and has delivered us a “personalized impersonal world” in which we can purchase anything we want, have it delivered, and never encounter another human being (13). “My life is full of convenience,” Crouch writes in the first chapter. “It is full of transaction, at its best a mutually beneficial exchange of value, a kind of arm’s-length benign use of one another for our own ends. But it is not full of contemplation. It is often efficient. But it is lonely” (26). Crouch contrasts this vision with the “ideal human community” that has been, and

can be, modeled by the Church, a community in which “every single member mattered as much as each part of our own bodies matters to us” (18), and in which we see ourselves and each other as persons, which Crouch defines as “Heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for love” (31).

Throughout the rest of the book, Crouch elaborates on this central conflict between the power our technologies promise us and the recognition as persons that we truly need. Without exhaustively exploring each chapter, I want to pull out two of Crouch’s primary supporting ideas and highlight their helpfulness to his thesis. The first, in the third chapter, is his use of the terms superpowers and the superpower zone, which I alluded to above. “In countless domains, technology has equipped human beings to vastly increase the sensation of strength while vastly reducing the sensation of effort,” he writes, describing technologies from forklifts to social media to wearable technology to coding (43). These technologies, he argues, tempt us into believing we can have power without effort, while hiding from us the fact that “power without effort…diminishes us as much as it delights us” because it always requires a trade. For example, human beings’ ability to fly a superpower available to us only as recently as the past century or so vastly extends the physical reach of a species whose travel speed, unaided, is about three miles per hour (41). However, in order to seize this superpower, “you must be willing to put essential parts of yourself on hold” and exist for hours in a cramped sitting position, unable to move much at all, unable to interact with the environment around you, your senses dulled, and your ability to experience awe framed by a small airplane window (45-46). “The fundamental experience offered by airplane flight is the very opposite of strength,” Crouch argues (46). And though many of us are likely willing to make that trade in order to arrive at our destination a destination thatmay even allow us to be heartsoul-mind-strength complexes designed for love the “superpower zone” still extracts a price from us. Crouch argues that our desire to do things more quickly and efficiently ignores the fact that the most meaningful parts of our lives, particularly deep relationships with other human beings, are diminished, not enhanced, by speed and efficiency. A strong friendship or romantic partnership will necessarily be full of friction, inconvenience, and vulnerability; a relationship facilitated entirely by a screen requires little of us and leaves us “invulnerable but alone” (59). Thus, the technologies that promised us infinite connectivity have instead delivered loneliness and alienation from each other and own our personhood. The second of Crouch’s ideas that I want to explore here is the distinction he makes between “devices” and “instruments.” A device, as Crouch defines it, is a “kind of technology that displaces earlier tools and, eventually, replaces the human beings who use them” (135); one good example of a device, and the source of my most recent nightmares and existential crises, is generative AI like ChatGPT. Such a technology promises us power without effort but ends up diminishing us instead. Instruments, on the other hand, are technologies that “better equip the

person…rather than replace or diminish them” (137), such as musical instruments or the discovery of black silicon (136-138). Both devices and instruments promise to help us accomplish something, but they also often demand of us some kind of sacrifice. For example, Crouch describes the instrument of writing systems and brings up Socrates’ critique of them in the Phaedrus, a text that I ask my own students to read. Socrates argues that the gift of writing, while it allows us to write down information without having to remember it ourselves, takes from us the need to remember things and might therefore reduce our capacity to remember it, thus making us dependent on writing things down (141). And indeed, this is exactly what the instrument of writing has done! But unlike devices, which require little from us, the best instruments, Crouch argues, expand our capacities while still demanding much of us; they “expand the capacity of human beings without shrinking other parts of us at the same time” (142). One could argue that writing has done this; a bicycle also does this for travelers, carrying us to our destinations faster while still requiring significant effort on our part. The computer and word processing program I am using to compose this book review are also instruments, making my composition and editing processes easier while still demanding significant thought and attention from me. Our task as users and makers of technologies should be, Crouch argues, to develop and use our technologies as instruments, notdevices.

It is probably clear by now that Crouch’s argument very much resonates with me, particularly as I contemplate the ways in which many contemporary technologies generative AI and the smartphones that constantly distract myself and my students, to name just a few dehumanize and alienate me from my fellow image-bearers. And, from conversations I have had not only with colleagues and friends but with my students, I am quite sure his claims would resonate with them as well. His distinction between devices and instruments is particularly helpful because it provides a framework not for abandoning technologies but for soberly considering them and seeking to use them in ways that affirm our personhood rather than detract from it. I believe as well that the ideas Crouch considers, and the concerns he raises, are extremely pressing ones, and the way he considers them provides a clear, personable, and engaging entre into contemporary conversations about the design of our technology, how we think about its purpose in our lives, and how we use it as a result.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 81

Poems

When Winter Turns to Spring: Haiku

Jane Beal

California scrub jay sunbathing in the tree-top

greatwhite egret flying over an orange tree

cedar waxwings whistling in the barelybudding branches of a white maple

northern pintails gliding on the surface of the wetlands

American robins strolling across a green lawn

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 82-91

“Balance” and Other Poems

Mark Tappmeyer

Balance

“Jesus caught[thePharisees] off balance . . . .”

Matthew 22:41, The Message

Some sayHe pivoted so hard, that, as is said in basketball, He broke their ankles. They couldn’t square up, couldn’tturn their shoulders to face Him. And, off balance, theypitched awkwardly, stumbling over their own feet, landing on each other before the crowd.

Last Days

“[In the lastdays] itwill be dog-eat-dog . . . .”

Matthew 24:10, The Message

I can’t explain it, but I’ve gone dark, descended into viciousness. I snarl, not like when I snored on a lap, the newscastdroning. I want to kill, to tear, to eatthe killed, to smear mywhiskers into its entrails. To howl myself across the yard.

My canines flash. Hate boils in me. I dream of the gash I’ll rip into the belly of the Doberman across the street. I paw againstthe wood of the door. I dream of roaming the 'hood, leader of a pack of savage Chihuahuas.

Wordless

“[Jesus] didn’tlet[the demons]saya word.”

Mark 1:34, The Message

The one with the booming voice tried, moved his lips as if to shout You are The . . . but his lips froze, like machinerybroken. The syllables wrenched in his throat.

The mouths of the other fiends craned and snarled and choked with slobber, unable to form the slightestword, the smallestpronoun, a single letter.

The imps, normally mouthy, fellsilentas graves, the flaps of their voice boxes sealed as if with ducttape, the all-season variety, warrantied to hold in all conditions.

Betrayal at Passover

“I have something hard . . . to sayto you: One of you is going to hand me over . . . .”

Jesus, Mark 14:18, The Message

Hard as the iron of nails, the words fell across the Passover table, the Seder plates, onto the bitter herbs, crushing the gefilte fish, the egg, spilling the wine thatsoaked like blood into the tablecloth, cracking the matzah bread before its time, piercing the shank of lamb, shattering the ears of hearers now unable to unhear.

Peter “And Peter gotout of the boat, and walked on the water . . . .”

Matthew 14:29

Three cheers for you, water walker. Your hike was short and in the end you splashed, but whatmatters is you freelystrode on water two steps, ten regardless thenumber baby steps or man strides. Fish observed from below your heelto toe. Heelto toe.

Physics could not pull you under. You walked.

Among the billions who have waded into seas or lakes, only you, a water strider, remained on top and lefta footprint on a wave.

Disclaimer

“I have needto be baptized by You, and do You come to me?”

John the Baptist, Matthew 3:14

Some of this maybe authentic. The Baptizer and the Long Expected One wade into the silt and flow of the Jordan to their ankles, to their knees, into the current deepenough to service the King of Kings. John lowers Him in a dunk unlike anyother, not to wash spots clean.

Jesus rises from underwater, His hair streaming. He whips His head side to side, flinging drops in arcs upon the Baptist, now the baptized, who shines with Kingdom sprinkles in his eyes.

Badgers

“[T]he Pharisees werebadgering [Jesus] . . . .”

Matthew 19:3, The Message

Theycame at Him on instinct bred into them by fathers and fathers of fathers. Badgers on badgers.

The turf was theirs, theybelieved, carved with endless labor into dens by their prodigious claws, marked with their scent, their tenacity.

Theycame atHim on their shortlegs, badgers as badgers bobbing and shifting like weasels, their cousins, their jaws, potent with hate, low riding the ground, snarling menace, knives behind their lips to puncture Him atany chance.

Tea

“Steepyourself in God-reality. . . .”

Jesus, Luke 12:31, The Message

You are notthe teacup of fine china laced with gold leaf, a garden of petals, a collector’s item. Nor are you the water from a clear mountain stream, boiled vigorously, as much as you maythink of yourself as quenching.

Whatyou are is the tea bound in a ball, an imprisonment of shreddedleavesand stems, dried and inert, in appearance indistinctas anygarden weed. You mustlower yourself into the cup and the water, toes to crown.

You muststeepto shed your brittleness into pliability until your essentialoils, your crisp flavors of clouds and mountains, the higher altitudes, release and infusewith the liquid, transforming from clear to amber to a nutty and fruitfultan to which someone says Ahhh.

Flat

“If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end upflaton your face.”

Jesus, Luke 14:11, The Message

The skyridge of your brows mashed down into prairie.

The butte of your chin depressed into a greatplain, like an ego deflated.

Mostly the effectis on your nose the Roman, the snub, the hawk flattened of its distinction.

All the hillocks of your face leveled into lowland, a souldimension into which you stare unrecognizably.

The Grilling

“Jesus, grilled bythe Pharisees . . . .”

Luke 17:20, The Message

Mostwore aprons. One toted a spatula and a potholder. Another a knife.

Theyagreed: briquettes generated the bestheat reliable, long-lasting.

Theywanted slow grilling for releasing savorysmoke into the courtyard to ignite their pleasures.

Three searing minutes on each side to trap the juices. Then a low fire.

Soon he’d be tenderized and readyto surrender the flavors theywould enjoy.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 92-104

Harold Bell Wright’s Ozarks: A Photo Essay

(Excerpts from Harold Bell Wright’s Ozarks: Photos with Notes, Cyberwit, 2023. 102 pages, $17. ISBN 978-93-95224-75-8)

John J. Han

Harold Bell Wright moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to southwestern Missouri in 1896. He lived in or near the Ozarks until 1907, when he and his family moved to Redlands, California. During his stay in the Ozarks, he wrote or conceived six novels set in the region: That Printer of Udell’s: A Story of the Middle West (Chicago: The Book Supply Co., 1903), The Shepherd of the Hills (The Book Supply Co., 1907), The Calling of Dan Matthews (The Book Supply Co., 1909), The Re-Creation of Brian Kent (The Book Supply Co., 1919), God and the Groceryman (New York: Appleton, 1927), and Ma Cinderella (New York: Harpers, 1932).

Although Wright wrote more than ten other novels placed elsewhere, he is known mainly for his bestselling stories of the Ozarks. He died in 1944, but some of his Ozarks novels are still in print, and he continues to have devoted readers, especially Ozarkers and Christians. In his time, Wright was under harsh attack from elitist critics for his sentimentalism, implausible plots, wooden characterization, and didacticism. One critic, Charles C. Baldwin, called him a writer of “tenthrate novels” (quoted in Tagg, Westernlore Press, 1986, p. 22). Another critic asked the question “Is he a writer or a Harold Bell Writer?” whenever there was a new literary find (quoted in Tagg 22). Meanwhile, in Missouri

Bittersweet (1969), MacKinlay Kantor expresses his incredulity at the existence of “Harold Bell Wright addicts” more than two decades after the

passing of the novelist (Doubleday & Co., 1969, p. 301). Regarding the commercialization of the novelistin Branson, he comments,

I first read that lurid and driveling novel [The Shepherd of the Hills] at the age of nine or so, and thought it perfectly marvelous. Next time I read it, I could discern that it was tailored for the nine-year-old mind. However, sixty years after its publication, there is no way to restrain a few people from making a fast buck out of a long-dead novelist who achieved far wider circulation than he merited. (301)

However, “critics” or book reviewers are not the only arbiters of literary taste. Especially in an age of socialmedia, and in an age when hundreds of thousands of new books are published each year, consumers of fiction can afford to choose the novels that they like to read for entertainment, encouragement, and inspiration. Those who still like Wright tend to find more positives than negatives in his fiction, which is why his stories continue to resonate with his followers.

It is unclear exactly when I became interested in Wright’s fiction. Based on my presentations on his fiction at the annual Ozarks Studies Symposium atMissouri State University-WestPlains, he musthave piqued my interest in the early 2010s. Since my first encounter with Wright, I have become his fan and a student of his fiction. There are several reasons why I like him. First, Wright was a man of sincerity and principle. His character was formed by the loving care of his mother, who died when he was onlyeleven; by his aunt in Ohio, who appears as Auntie Sue in The ReCreation of Brian Kent; by Charles M. Sheldon’s 1896 novel In His Steps; and by the teachings of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), with which he was affiliated. I admire those who live by principles. It is difficult to live without bending one’s convictions in this perilous, treacherous world. Based on my reading of his fiction, his autobiography To My Sons (1934), and the various biographical documents, I am confidentthathe pursued or atleaststrove to pursue principled living.

Second, his life exemplifies the value of persistence and hard work. After losing his mother as a young boy, “Hal” and his two siblings were abandoned by their alcoholic father, a Civil War veteran who had always struggled to provide for his family. “Hal” endured many hardships in life alone: hunger, starvation, homelessness, and hard labor that did not suit the frailty of a child. With consolation from the memory of his deceased mother and with kindness from some random strangers, he survived tough times, eventually establishing himself as a painter, preacher, and novelist. Although he received little formal education, his voracious reading habits helped him acquire knowledge, wisdom, and eloquence. As someone who grew up among ill-educated peasants in rural South Korea, I have nothing but admiration for him and can relate to him on a personallevel.

Third, despite some artistic shortcomings of his fiction (mainly a lack of depth and sophistication), his novels are enjoyable, positive, and

heartwarming. They help readers feel good about life and humanity, helping them escape to the fictional world of order and peace. Many twentieth-century American novelists imbued their works with nihilism and despair. The experience of the two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Great Depression, Cambodia’s Killing Fields, and other traumatic events around the globe made people question the goodness of the human heart. Wright’s fiction avoids the complexities of modern life, retreating to the “good old days” when good defeats evil, true masculinity and femininity are upheld, and people do something beneficial for society. His stories unfold predictably, yet they help us regain our faith in the possibility of goodness and beauty.

Fourth and finally, Wright’s fiction is a great resource on the culture and history of Branson and the surrounding areas. Many local sites serve as settings for his stories: the mining town of Pittsburg, Kansas, in That Printer of Udell’s, Mutton Hollow and Dewey Bald (now the Ruth and Paul Henning Conservation Area) in The Shepherd of the Hills, and Lebanon and Bennett Spring State Park in The Calling of Dan Matthews, among many others. I live in St. Louis, Missouri, which Wright often mentions in his fiction, and it takes only two or three hours to reach his Ozarks sites. It has been fascinating to see the locales outdoors, as well as the numerous artifacts related to his life and works displayed in the museums in Branson and Pierce City.

Six Ozarks Novels by Harold Bell Wright

The entrance to the Shepherd’s Adventure Park and the Inspiration Tower. The tower offers a breathtaking view of Branson and the surrounding areas of rolling hills, and adventure seekerscan trythe Vigilante Extreme Ziprider from the top of the tower. The Adventure Park includesOld Matt’s Cabin, Old Matt’s Barn, and other sites thatserve assettings for Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills.

The enclosed observation deck of the Inspiration Tower.

A wall atthe top of the Inspiration Tower explains the connection between Harold BellWrightand the Ozark Mountains. In To My Sons, Wright recalls his firstvisit to the Ozarks as follows:

Following a flood period, the lower Ohio was in such a condition thatfever was almosta certaintyif I continued. I shipped mycanoe back to her home port and continued from Cincinantibyrail. Father was notatSpringfield when I arrived. He was building a house for another uncle, the husband of his sister, who owned a farm farther south in the Ozarks. But Uncle Ben and his family gave me a heartywelcome. Theywere drawn to me, I think, bytheir love for my brother and theymade me feelathome.

It was during this visitto Uncle Ben and his familythatI firstsaw the backwoods of the Ozark Mountains. A farmer neighbor with whom I became acquainted invitedmeto go with him on a camping and fishing trip to the mouth of the James River, which empties into the White. We traveled bymule teamand wagon, stopping beside the road when nightovertook us. As we entered deeper and deeper into the Ozark wilderness, the beautyof the wooded hills, bright little valleys, and clear running streams, entered mysoul. The natives, living in log cabins and farming a few acres of hillside, with their primitive customs and quaintphilosophies, gripped me with intriguing interest. I did notdream then whattheywould, later mean to me. (Harper, 1934, pp. 196-197)

Mutton Hollow seen from the topof the Inspiration Tower. Wright opens chapter 1 of The Shepherd of the Hills with “It was corn-planting time, when the stranger [the title character]followed the Old Trailinto the Mutton Hollow neighborhood” (21). Gradually, the stranger assumesthe role of a spiritual leader for the mountaineers:“In sicknessor in trouble of anykind the people for miles around had long since come to dependupon the shepherd of Mutton Hollow” (167). Near the end of chapter 44, Young Mattand SammyLane’s romance blossoms in Mutton Hollow:

Then the moon looked over the mountain behind themturning Mutton Hollow into a wondrous sea of mistylight outof which the higher hills lifted their heads like fairyislands. The girlspoke, “Come, Matt; we mustgo now. Helpme down.” (1907. Pelican, 2007, p. 187)

A view from the top of the Inspiration Tower. As the plaque reads, one can see from here DeweyBald and the spotwhere “Sammy’s Lookout” used to stand. In The Shepherd of the Hills, Wrightmentions “Sammy’s Lookout” eighttimes. Chapter 14 ends this way: “Awaydown in Mutton Hollow a dog barked, and high upon Old Deweynear Sammy’s Lookout, a spot of light showed for a moment, then vanished” (1907. Pelican, 2007, p. 79).

From the top of the Inspiration Tower, one can view West 76 Country Boulevard and the entranceto the Shepherd of the Hills Adventure Park. The park is in the northwestern partof Branson.

A view of Roark Valley, where Wash Gibbs’s cabin stood. Gibbs is a Baldknobber notorious for both wickedness and cowardice in The Shepherd of the Hills. In chapter 16 of the novel, Wrightdescribes him as follows:

Wash Gibbs was easilydistinguished byhis gigantic form, and with him were ten others [Baldknobbers], riding two and two, severalof whom were known to Young Matt as the mostlawless characters in the country. All were fired by drink and were laughing and talking, with now and then a burstof song, or a vulgar jest. (1907. Pelican, 2007, p. 85)

A view from the Inspiration Tower. One can see partof the barren ridge, Boulder Bald, where the Baldknobber vigilante groupused to meet.

The Ruth and PaulHenning Conservation Area lies between DeweyBald Observation Tower (below) and the Inspiration Tower (top).

A buzzard hovers over Branson. Buzzards appear several timesin The Shepherd of the Hills, including in chapter 1:

The clouds were drifting far away. The western skywas clear with the sun still above the hills. In an old tree thatleaned far outover the valley, a crow shook the wetfrom his plumage and dried himself in the warm light; while far below the mists rolled, and on the surface of thatgraysea, the traveler saw a companyof buzzards, wheeling and circling above some dead thing hidden in its depth. (1907. Pelican, 2007, p. 24)

Here, the traveler is the title character who comes to the Ozarks for the first time. The photo is taken from the top of the DeweyBald Observation Tower.

Notes on Contributors

Matthew Bardowell <Matthew.Bardowell@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University, where he teaches World Literature, British Literature, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. His research centers on Old Norse and Old English literature as well as the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and his recent scholarship engages questions concerning emotion and aesthetics. His work appears in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Mythlore, and The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. He serves as a co-editor (with John J. Han and C. Clark Triplett) of Certainty and Ambiguity: Essays on the Moral Imagination of Mystery Fiction (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming in February 2024). Bardowell holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University.

Jane Beal (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) is Professor of English Literature at the University of La Verne in southern California. Her poetry collections include Sanctuary (2008), Rising (2015), and Song of the Selkie (2020) as well as seven haiku micro-chaps, Journey, Garden, Bliss, Wide Awake and Dreaming, In the Santa Cruz Mountains, Songs of Water, and Wilderness. She is the creator of three audio recording projects combining poetry and music, “Songs from the Secret Life,” “LoveSong,” and with her brother, saxophonist, and composer Andrew Beal, “The Jazz Bird.” Her academic writings, including eight books and forty peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters, focus primarily on a medieval history of the world, the Polychronicon; an exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, dream vision poem, Pearl; and the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien. To learn more about her work, please visit https://janebeal.wordpress.com

John J. Han <john.han@mobap.edu> is Professor of English and Creative Writing and the Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Theology at Missouri Baptist University. Dr. Han is the author, editor, coeditor, or translator of 33 books, including Wise Blood: A ReConsideration (Rodopi, 2011), The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature (Peter Lang, 2015), Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction (McFarland, 2018), Dawn Returns: The Haiku Society of America Members’ Anthology 2022 (HSA, 2022), and Certainty and Ambiguity: Essays on the Moral Imagination of Mystery Fiction (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming in February 2024). He is co-editing, with Dr. Phillip Howerton at Missouri State University-West Plains, a volume titled Cached in the Hills: Critical Essays on Ozarks Literature (forthcoming in 2024). A native of South Korea, he earned his M.A. from Kansas State University and his Ph.D. from the Universityof Nebraska-Lincoln.

Matt Heckel <Matt.Heckel@mobap.edu> teaches history, apologetics, and Latin at Heritage Classical Christian Academy, is an Adjunct Instructor of History at Missouri Baptist University, and a Visiting Instructor in Church History at Covenant Theological Seminary. He has a Ph.D. in Reformation Studies from Concordia Seminary St. Louis and has been published in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Presbyterion, Church History, and contributed to the T & T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology. His forthcoming book is titled His Spear Through My Side into Luther: Calvin’s Relationship to Luther’s Doctrine of the Will. Matt and his wife Tammy have three children and are members at Chesterfield Presbyterian Church.

Brian Howell <brian.howell@wheaton.edu> is Professor of Anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology, Sociology & Urban Studies at Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL). He is the author of two monographs, including Short Term Mission: An Ethnography of Christian Travel Narrative and Experience (IVPAcademic, 2012), as well as a textbook co-authored with Jenell Paris, Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective (Baker Academic, 2019). He earned his BA from Wesleyan University, his MA from Fuller Theological Seminary, and his MA/PhDfrom Washington Universityin St. Louis.

Sydney Kardasz <2077699@mobap.edu> is a nursing student at Missouri Baptist University. Sydney is in Missouri Baptist’s Honors Program and was inducted into Sigma Zeta National Honors of Natural Sciences in 2023. She plans to graduate from Missouri Baptist in 2025 but hopes to continue into a master’s program in nursing following graduation.

Nathan Maroney <nathanmaroney@live.com> is a current student in Old Testament at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. His current research interests include Old Testament anthropomorphism and the breath of God, and intertextuality in Joshua-Judges. Maroney is a Teaching Pastor at a church in Durham, North Carolina. He is author of “Anonymous Author and Divine Author: Preaching the Book of Hebrews,” a chapter in Pastoral Implications of Pseudepigraphy and Anonymity in the New Testament, forthcoming with Wipf & Stock, 2024.

Julie Ooms <Julie.Ooms@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in 2014, focusing on twentieth-century war literature. Her current research focuses on Christian practices for teaching reading and the crossroads of religion and secularism in twentieth-century American fiction. She has published articles on the writing of Tim O’Brien, J.D. Salinger, and Sylvia Plath in Renascence, Journal of the Short Story in English, Christian Scholar’s Review, and Plath Profiles. Her book chapter about female friendship in two novels, The Bell Jar by

Sylvia Plath and Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, was published in Navigating Women’s Friendships in American Literature and Culture from Palgrave in 2022. Her book (co-written with Rachel B. Griffis and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts), On Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert Distraction, Hostility, and Consumerism, received a book contract from Baker Academic in September 2022.

Cordell P. Schulten <Cordell.SchultenJD@mobap.edu> is an Adjunct Professor at Missouri Baptist University. Prior to his return to MBU, he served as a teacher and the Dean of Students and Staff at Valor International Scholars in Anseong, Korea. He has also served as a guest lecturer at L’Abri Fellowship in Korea, a teacher at Heritage Classical Christian Academy and as the English Ministry pastor at the Korean Presbyterian Church in Kirkwood, Missouri. From 2009 through 2014, he taught American Law at Handong Global University in Pohang, Korea. He previously taught at Missouri Baptist University (1995-2005) and Fontbonne University (2005-2009). He has also served in pastoral ministry at several churches in both Korea and the U.S. Before his teaching and ministry days, Cordell practiced law for 10 years. He earned his M.A. in Theological Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in 2004 and his J.D. from Saint Louis University School of Law in 1986. He has also studied Theology and Culture at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He and his wife Sandy have been married for 44 years. They have four grown children and five grandchildren. He is the author of Life Abroad @ Handong and Le Chemin: Wholly Following the Path of Jesus.

Mark Tappmeyer <mtappmeyer@sbuniv.edu> is a retired English professor from Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, where he taught his entire career and served as the department chair for twentyfour years. He observes that while Kansas City Royal George Brett won major league batting titles in three decades, he taught at SBU in five decades, though, it should be noted, without batting titles. While on sabbatical in 2001-2003, he and his English professor wife Linda taught English in Dalian, China. Currently the Tappmeyers live in the Indianapolis area. He has written Wisecracking, a book of poetry published by SBU Press, and has had poems published in Disciple Journal, Intégrité, Cantos, Calliope, St. Anthony Messenger, Penwood Review, Publication of the Missouri Philological Association, and Tipton Poetry Journal.

Emma Winkler <2179927@mobap.edu> is a sophomore and a member of the honors program at Missouri Baptist University studying elementary education in MBU’ s College of Education. Despite her major, she has a great interest in literature and enjoys reading in her free time.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Submission Guidelines

Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. Founded in the fall of 2002 with the Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College, it is published both online and in print copy.

Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles (15-25 pages double spaced), short essays on faith and learning (8-12 pages double spaced), book reviews (4-8 pages double spaced), and poetry (5-15 poems single spaced) for consideration. Along with your work, we need an author bio of 100-125 words written in third person and in complete sentences. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1for inclusion in the fallissue.

Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith-learning integration. Possible topics include, butare not limited to:

• the currentstate and/or future of the church-related college

• history of Christian liberal arts education

• Christianity and contemporaryculture

• a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity

• service learning

• academic freedomin a Christian context

• implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines

• Christian education in the non-Western world

• global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith-learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic. Articles are expected to be research-based but must focus on the author’s original thought. We also do not consider articles thatuse more than twenty-five secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especiallylengthyones, should be used sparingly.

Considering that most Intégrité readers are Christian scholars and educators not necessarily having expertise on multiple disciplines, articles, short essays, and book reviews must be written in concise, precise, and easy-to-understand style. Writers are recommended to follow what William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White suggest in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write in a way that comes naturally; and avoid fancywords.

For citation style, refer to the current edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Articles and short essays should include intext citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Enter endnotes manually instead of using the “Insert Endnote” function in a wordprocessing program. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after directquotations.