Culture Watch: February, March, April 2013

CultureWatch

Inside CultureWatch 42 Crossing the Belief Divide Julie Polter reviews ReFocus and Faitheist

Books art music film

43 Sleeper, Awake!

Will O’Brien reviews Unto Us the Sun

in the margins of a little notebook that he had with a pencil in the tiniest lettering he could, and he tried to keep track of his thoughts and his observations in order to keep himself from going insane,” Magee said.

Magee did the same thing in the film and used Pi’s journal entries, jotted in the margins of his survival manual, to delve into the character’s inner dialogue. Through the written word and the slow dissolving of his one pencil, the days and nights pass as Pi becomes ever more weary.

But the solitude of his journey is part of its beauty. Because the viewer is seeing things

Anyone who has read Life of Pi can understand how near impossible it seems to adapt the larger-than-life story into a film.

Suraj Sharma plays Pi.

By Sandi Villarreal

tigers by the Tale

For Life of Pi screenwriter David Magee, stories help light the way through chaos and despair.

IT’S A STORY that promises to make you believe in God. A boy, shipwrecked on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, repeatedly cheats death and eventually discovers his own self. It’s a typical coming-of-age tale, really—except for the whole tiger part.

Life of Pi centers on Pi Patel, the son of a zookeeper, who grows up grasping to understand God. His open heart and willingness to learn lead him from Hinduism to Christianity to Islam. While stranded at sea along with a few escaped zoo animals as company, he continues to explore the meaning of God as he’s thrust into dramatic—and at times inconceivable—situations.

Anyone who has read Yann Martel’s best-selling book can understand how near

38 sojourners february 2013

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impossible it seems to adapt the larger-thanlife story into a film—none more so than the person who did just that, screenwriter David Magee. The largest chunk of Pi’s journey is a solitary one, save the aforementioned Bengal tiger (named Richard Parker).

In an interview with Sojourners, Magee said he wrote the scenes without any lines for Pi at all, only inserting them where necessary after the fact.

“We didn’t want to have some strange conversations with the tiger that he would never have,” Magee said.

To work out other ways to move along the story, the filmmakers met with Steven Callahan, an actual survivor of a shipwreck who spent 76 days at sea.

“While he was on his journey, [he] wrote

through the mind of this creative and open young boy, magnificent pictures emerge.

The sky becomes an impossible confluence of colors. The ocean glows green with sea life beneath the makeshift raft Pi builds to stay a safe distance from the tiger in the boat. And a life-threatening, carnivorous tiger becomes Pi’s salvation.

As is often the case in real life, the film pivots on the protagonist reaching his breaking point. When Pi has nothing left to give, almost no strength, and absolutely no understanding of why these horrible things have happened to him, he gives everything over to God. “The zoo is gone, his family is gone ... the only thing he has left confronting him is a voracious tiger who is ready to kill him the moment he lets his guard down,” Magee said. “Of course he reaches a point on his journey when he says, essentially, ‘God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”

But Pi then realizes that Richard Parker is the one thing that keeps him sane. The constant threat of death is what ultimately saves his life.

In that desperate nadir of anger and questioning, Pi also reaches another biblically reminiscent juncture—the “your will be done” moment. Pi remains faithful to this

44 Getting to Green Tobias Winright on Sacred Acts

New & Noteworthy Fresh Vintage Cody ChesnuTT’s Landing on a Hundred is a classic soul album, from the infectious grooves and vocals to recurrent themes of personal and social redemption (comparisons include Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield). Vibration Vineyard Reclaimed Voices A team of actors, playwrights, and activists help Ugandan teens, many of them survivors of abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army, courageously share their stories with their community—and, through the documentary After Kony: Staging Hope, with the world. First Run Feature

Exile and Welcome In Kind of Kin, by Rilla Askew, a rural Oklahoma family finds itself torn from within and without when its patriarch is arrested for harboring undocumented immigrants in his barn.

Sometimes heart-rending, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, this novel deftly explores issues of faith, family, immigration, and economic hardship in the heartland. Ecco Defiant Prayer The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation, by Stephen R. Haynes, tells an inspiring, lesser-known story of the civil rights era: the 196465 campaign by groups of white and black students to challenge segregation in local churches. Oxford

Continued on Page 41 february 2013 sojourners 39

EYES & EARS

by Danny duncan Collum

People Get Ready

Bruce Springsteen performs for President Obama at an election campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio.

represents the sacred American musical tradition that has grown from the work songs, ring shouts, and spirituals of the slaves.

Over time, that tradition has mingled with the folk and country of Southern poor whites and cross-pollinated with other sounds that came up from Mexico and the Caribbean and over from Europe. Today, most of this tradition is onstage at an E Street Band show. The core rock band is now joined by horns and a choir. Those rock and soul staples are occasionally supplemented by accordion, Stevie Van Zandt’s Italian mandolin, and an extra percussionist who sometimes breaks out an Irish marching drum.

And speaking of rock and soul staples, “lovemaking [and] bootyshaking,” as Springsteen puts it, are still high on the E Street Band’s agenda, but the band’s sense of purpose has also broadened and deepened with time. In the early years, the band’s signature song was “Born to Run,” a young man’s dream of love and freedom. In the middle period, “Born in the U.S.A.” put the band firmly on the side of those exploited, abused, and ignored by

The “hope and dreams” in Springsteen’s song are those of the immigrant, the refugee, and the runaway slave. the poem in which Allen Ginsberg asked America, “When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?”

Paraphrasing Ginsberg, I ask today, “America, when will you be worthy of your E Street Band?”

To me, going to see the E Street Band has become something like going to see a natural wonder, like Yellowstone or Mammoth Cave or, more to the point, the California redwood forests: Like the redwoods, it’s growing older. The bark gets rougher by the decade, and some branches break off and fall to the earth. But Springsteen’s great tree of American music is still growing in stature and substance. The band has become a cultural institution that spans races, genders, and generations and fittingly

40 sojourners february 2013

America’s economic powers-thatbe. In 1999, after most of a decade apart, Springsteen reunited with his band, and the signature song for the E Street Band in this century is “Land of Hope and Dreams.” That song, which incorporates snatches of Curtis Mayfield’s pop-gospel classic “People Get Ready,” does the trick that Martin Luther King Jr.’s best speeches did, of conflating the gospel promise—here symbolized by the train that carries “saints and sinners ... losers and winners”—with the American dream.

The “hope and dreams” in Springsteen’s song are those of the immigrant, the refugee, and the runaway slave for a place where all are welcomed and none are left behind. And for three hours on a Saturday night, I came to believe that America could be that land again. Three days later, my fellow citizens went to the polls and rejected plutocracy. So maybe I can still hope, against all hope, that at least my children may one day live in a country that is worthy of its E Street Band. n Danny Duncan Collum teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.

He is the author of the novel White Boy. www.sojo.net

OnFilm

Books art music film

Continued from Page 39

Jason Reed/Reuters

It was the first week of November 2012, and Bruce Springsteen was busy helping nail down a few swing states for President Obama. In the process, he expressed more enthusiasm than I could ever muster for the man who put Tim “The Fox” Geithner in charge of our financial hen house. But political quibbles aside, I remain convinced that what Springsteen actually does for a living is more important to the life of our country than the work of any living politician, and I saw living proof that very same week.

On the Saturday night before Election Day, Springsteen and his E Street Band dropped into Louisville, Ky. Of course, my wife, Polly, and I had to go, and we had to take our 12-year-old son, Joseph, who has become the fourth Springsteenobsessed member of our family. It was my fifth time to see the show, and ever since I’ve been thinking of

CultureWatch God he’s constructed from various world religions and fully accepts the will of the divine in the middle of his suffering.

Magee said there are clear parallels in Pi’s story to those in the Bible.

“There’s the obvious beginning of the journey, when he considers himself on ‘Pi’s ark,’ the only one who escapes, and takes the animals with him on this journey ... gradually it turns into Job’s story,” Magee said.

But both the book and the film pull themes from across the religious spectrum.

As a boy, Pi is influenced by the world around him, which leads him to various interpretations of God. Instead of seeing those ideas as conflicting beliefs, Pi embraces them all.

It’s in the Hindu faith of his mother that Pi says he first meets God. But then he

From The Pirates!

Band of Misfits.

Top 10 of 2012 THE BEST experiences I had at the cinema last year were nostalgic—re-releases of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Lawrence of Arabia were uncanny reflections on the cost of war to soldiers and some roots of contemporary Middle East strife. Here’s my list of the best films released in 2012: 10. A tie: The Pirates! Band of Misfits, a gloriously rich, smart comedy for all ages, full of life and self-deprecating humor, and Life of Pi, which envelopes its audience with visual wonders and spiritual questions.

A life-threatening, carnivorous tiger becomes Pi’s salvation. encounters Christianity and, while wary at first, meets God a second time in the incarnation of Christ revealed to him through an Orthodox priest. Then he learns about Islam, stretching his nonreligious father’s patience ever more when he tells him, “I would like to be baptized and I would like a prayer rug.”

“There’s even a nod to atheism in here.

Atheists have a worldview, a point of view; they rely on a story, a narrative to get them through,” Magee said.

It’s the undercurrent of religion and faith within each story that Magee said the film tries to expose. It doesn’t preach, and it doesn’t show preference. It just illustrates that each life is a narrative.

“We don’t want to say that you should believe in all things and nothing all at once.

All of these narratives, all of these stories that we rely on are groping for answers to the same

by Gareth Higgins

9. Wes Anderson’s delightful treatment of childhood first love amid dysfunctional adults, and a film not afraid of the shadow side of growing up, Moonrise Kingdom.

8. The Cabin in the Woods, a gruesome horror comedy that not only enacts and portrays, but understands the lie of redemptive violence.

7. The sprawling, operatic imagining of love-transcending-all that is Cloud Atlas, which made me feel the way Star Wars might—if it were written for adults.

6. The Dark Knight Rises, the conclusion to a truly epic film series that imagined heroism as self-giving rather than merely slaughtering every bad guy in sight.

5. A disturbing, unpleasant, and utterly compelling vision of religious searching and abuse, relational longing and exploitation, holistic change and psychic torture, The Master.

4. Looper, the most fully realized and coherent future sci-fi world since Blade

Runner, and over-the-top entertainment invoking both The Wizard of Oz and just war theory.

3. For sheer enjoyability, life-affirming magic, political questioning, and prophetic insights, look no further than the work of mad genius called Holy Motors, in which a man engages with what it is to be human, critiques our culture’s addiction to relating through screens and bytes, and wonders aloud about violence as a way of life.

2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the most truthful high school film I’ve seen, with totally believable performances, honest facing of adolescent pain, and the best way of turning an old, cliched piece of music back into something totally fresh.

1. For me the freshest film of 2012 is Seven Psychopaths, a self-referencing, Tarantino-trouncing, imagination-expanding story about storytelling itself. Seven Psychopaths manages to reach back into imperial history and imagine a credible alternative to fight-or-flight myths that is both inspirational and full of moral strength. It understands the power of telling stories, and how, this year and next, it is storytellers who will command the attention, fund the public imagination, and change the world for the better or worse. n Gareth Higgins is a Sojourners contributing editor and executive director of the Wild Goose Festival. Originally from Northern Ireland, he lives in Asheville, North Carolina. february 2013 sojourners 41

CultureWatch Books art music film

question. And there are more in common in these stories than you might at first realize on the surface,” Magee said. “They’re all trying to put some sort of order on the chaos and the despair that we confront in our lives, and if you listen to those stories, you can hear the common theme along the journey.”

So, is Pi’s a story that will make you believe in God? You’ll have to see for yourself (in 3-D).

But there’s a larger piece here. Are you looking for a story to make you believe in God? Maybe you should look at your own.

Each of us has a story to tell.

It’s in the journey—with its little miracles and little tragedies, the faces of the people who join our stories along the way, fleeting bits of joy, moments of utter despair that bring us to our knees, and realizations of love—where we glimpse God. And that’s where we believe. n Sandi Villarreal is web editor at Sojourners.

You can follow her on Twitter @Sandi.

Reviewed by Julie Polter

crossing the Belief divide ReFocus: Living a Life that Reflects God’s Heart, by Jim Daly. Zondervan.

Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, by Chris Stedman. Beacon.

It was as if the poison of the rancorous 2012 campaign had seeped into our social groundwater, tainting family gatherings, Facebook feeds, church coffee hours, and workplace lunch rooms. In my lowest moments I pictured an election-result map rendered with myriad fractures, like windshield glass—a nation of particles and fragments, held together, barely, by begrudging surface tension.

How do those of good will find productive and respectful ways to talk about important civic and moral issues when a significant number of people view their fellow citizens as enemies?

Two recent books, by radically different authors, explore how to stay committed to

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your principles while reaching out and even finding common cause with those who live and believe differently.

ReFocus: Living a Life that Reflects God’s Heart, is by Jim Daly, president since 2005 of Focus on the Family. Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious is by Chris Stedman, the assistant Humanist chaplain at Harvard University and an activist in atheist-interfaith engagement. Daly leads a conservative evangelical institution that has been a major player on the Right in the culture wars of the past three decades (including around what Focus would term the “homosexual lifestyle”).

Stedman is a young gay atheist who was once attacked by thugs who shouted Bible verses as they tried to shove him and a friend in front of an oncoming train. And yet both men argue, from both pragmatic and ethical grounds, for actively and respectfully engaging those who hold different beliefs.

The difference between Daly and his predecessor, Focus founder and culture gladiator James Dobson, is hinted at in this chapter title: “We’re Not Entitled to Run the World.” As Daly writes early on in ReFocus: “you should know that this isn’t a book about what’s going badly in the culture, but rather one about how Christians should respond to it. ... Are we more concerned with shaping the debate than we are with shaping and refining our own attitudes toward the world?” Daly argues that conservative evangelicals are called first to love, compassion, and humility.

Focus has not, of course, radically shifted its positions on things like marriage equality or abortion. Daly believes that both “God’s design” and “social science research ... affirms the wisdom of the traditional oneman/one-woman marriage.” But, noting the dramatic increase in societal acceptance of same-sex marriage, he asks, “If our current methods are failing to stem the tide of public acceptance, shouldn’t we consider the possibility that the Lord is calling us to engage in a different way?” Likewise, Focus www.sojo.net

remains committed to overturning Roe vs.

Wade, but Daly also argues for a two-track approach, maintaining the legal battle while reaching out to those on the pro-choice side to seek ways to reduce the abortion rate, such as promoting adoption.

Some Focus supporters have sharply criticized Daly for even these fairly modest steps away from “warrior mode,” or others, such as signing on to the “Evangelical Statement of Principles for Immigration Reform” last summer. Liberal critics might chalk up some of his shifts in tone to strategic pragmatism in the face of changing demographics. But with its emphasis on scripture and personal humility, ReFocus communicates, from within the boundaries of a conservative Christian worldview, the sincere desire of a true believer to challenge himself and others to follow “a still more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31).

CHRIS STEDMAN’S book, Faitheist, a spiritual autobiography with a nontheistic ending, traces Stedman’s journey from his evangelical conversion as an adolescent, then into Lutheranism when conservative teachings and his sexual orientation became irreconcilable. He entered Augsburg College expecting it “to be a time of spiritual growth that would set my call to ministry.” Instead, gradually, Stedman discovered that he simply didn’t believe in God anymore; he describes himself as “insufferable” for a time in his derision toward others’ beliefs.

But as his commitment to atheism deepened, so did his interest in understanding religious people, their stories, and their beliefs. He realized his attitude had been “defined by caricature and critique instead of humility, honesty, and open-mindedness.” Stedman decided to concretely “bridge the vast divide between religious communities and the nonreligious.” In an unusual move for an atheist, he entered seminary and also began working with Interfaith Youth Core.

Some atheists’ aggressive hostility toward religion frustrates Stedman (although he notes that as a small minority in the U.S., atheists also receive some hostility). For Stedman, secular humanism intrinsically involves care for people and service to society—goals that

are incompatible with bigotry of any kind.

And so his book is a hand of friendship offered to people of faith and no faith. Not just to make nice, but to make ways for people with very different motivations to serve others and build justice together.

The message of combining passionate, principled belief with humility, love, and

respect toward others is not new. But in this contentious age, for two people as far apart on the religious and political spectrum as Daly and Stedman to choose to deliver it is notable, and perhaps a sign of hope. n Julie Polter is an associate editor of Sojourners.

Reviewed by Will O’Brien

sleeper Awake!

Unto Us the Sun, by Aimee Wilson. Self-released.

IN THE TITLE song of Aimee Wilson’s new album, Unto Us the Sun, the music begins soft and gentle, like a slight shaft of light breaking over the morning horizon. Gradually the song intensifies, both instrumentally and vocally, until it reaches an almost ecstatic crescendo—a musical embodiment of the process she lyrically portrays of the subtleties of nature opening up its unspeakable beauty, a grand chorus of creation praising its Creator. It is also hardly incidental that the song evokes biblical language of resurrection, while both the title and images such as “tender as the shoot” subtly hint at the presence of Christ—not a heavy-handed doctrinal Christ, but the saving incarnation of a loving God. Wilson is part of a remarkable network of young, spiritually rooted musicians (such as the Psalters) who are fashioning a very new and dynamic musical language of radical faith—a faith that is searching, exploring the edges of experience, probing human hurts and joys as well as divine mysteries and manifestations. Wilson’s personal journey has taken her from the hills of her native Tennessee to inner-city Philadelphia. Her songs cover a range of moods, many reflecting her mystical apprehension of God’s presence in creation. Other songs, drawing on her experience working with women who have struggled with homelessness and mental illness, convey the power of grace amid human brokenness.

Her music, which she has called “a dialogue with God,” is deeply personal yet evokes universal and ancient chords. In crafting her art, she draws upon a variety of traditions,

from American Sacred Harp choral music to Hindu devotional chants to Middle Eastern rhythms. The album features remarkable layering of instrumental textures, Singer including the Indian sitar, the Aimee Chinese erhu, the harp, and the Wilson hurdy gurdy. The songs move from gentle solo guitar lines to elaborate and intricate percussion. And her amazing voice, tremulous yet strong, stamps an unmistakable character on all the pieces—one that is passionate, searching, and authentic.

In the song “Suri” (a Persian word for “red rock”) Wilson makes her most remarkable statement of the gospel: “Up from Jesse’s shoot stands a root that breaks the ground / we lay until we taste the wine that bled, / and you broke the bread into our depths: Yeshua, ... Touch and taste the wounds of grace that fill our cups and call us to say: ... Yeshua.”

But while we live with the “wounds of grace,” that gospel is also embedded in the ineffable rapture of the world around us, a rapture to which we must be attentive. In the closing number, “The Wheel,” Wilson returns again to the image of a sunrise, singing this invocation: “Hear the call of the rising sun / Ablaze in all that breathes for more / And in the winds I hear you singing / Along the edge of a new beginning / Awake my soul.” The song and the album then conclude with a gorgeous Sacred Harp choir chanting, “Awake my soul.”

This is indeed music to awaken our souls. n Will O’Brien is coordinator of The Alternative Seminary (www.alternativeseminary.net) in Philadelphia. Aimee Wilson’s music is at aimee. thefactorye.com. february 2013 sojourners 43

CultureWatch Books art music film

Reviewed by Tobias Winright

getting to Green Sacred Acts: How Churches Are Working to Protect Earth’s Climate, edited by Mallory McDuff. New Society.

IN THE FOREWORD to Sacred Acts: How Churches Are Working to Protect Earth’s Climate, prolific scholar-activist Bill McKibben recalls a time not long ago when many people of faith regarded environmentalism suspiciously—conservatives saw it as a cover for possible paganism, while liberals considered it less of a priority than problems such as war and poverty. Now, however, theologians and religious leaders discuss the environment almost as much as ecologists and Nobel prize-winning scientists do. As this book shows, moreover, the environmental movement now includes religious organizations such as Earth Ministry, Interfaith Power & Light, and GreenFaith, which are working at the grassroots level in congregations and communities.

Edited by Mallory McDuff, a lay Episcopalian who teaches environmental education at Warren Wilson College near Ashville, N.C., Sacred Acts boldly focuses on climate change. McDuff believes that momentum is building among Christian communities worldwide as they call for just climate solutions—much like a modern Pentecost moment. The book addresses both skeptics and those who know climate change is real but feel overwhelmed by the problem’s magnitude and despair of finding and implementing solutions.

The contributors to Sacred Acts include clergy, teachers, activists, directors of nonprofit organizations, and a farmer. Its 12 chapters are divided into four sections on the themes and strategies of stewardship,

spirituality, advocacy, and justice.

Each contributor concentrates on “opportunities for empowering action”— just earthkeeping practices, I would call them. Instead of offering analysis of the theological whys, the chapters deal with the practical hows of the “need to share and replicate the range of actions that congregations can take to convert communities to a low-carbon future.” Concrete examples, anecdotes, illustrations, diagrams, and graphs abound to equip individuals and local congregations to put environmental theology into practice.

For example, writer and farmer Ragan Sutterfield proposes a catechesis to encourage appreciation of fresh rather than processed, canned, and packaged fruits and vegetables. To illustrate, he highlights Cedar Ridge Community Church near Washington, D.C., where members took up farming to grow and provide meals for the poor and needy—which revived and promoted neighborliness and harvesting celebrations in the community.

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The Common Ground Church Community with its Goodness Grows mission in North Lima, Ohio, builds community gardens, teaches job skills to youth, and operates agricultural businesses such as a subscription-based vegetable program.

McDuff explores more sustainable burial practices that conserve energy and minimize waste, while also involving family and friends, who do things like shoveling dirt into the grave. She introduces the Trappist monks of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Ga., who operate a green cemetery. Burying the dead is truly a corporal work of mercy there, with the option of pine caskets and avoidance of toxic embalming chemicals.

Episcopal Rev. Brian Cole, sub-dean of the Cathedral of All Souls in Asheville, N.C., suggests ways that clergy can “allow the natural world to come ‘inside,’ to figure prominently in prayers and litanies and hymns and sermons”; LeeAnne Beres and Jessie Dye highlight Earth Ministry, a national leader in training people of faith in advocacy skills and helping them to be heard in public policy decision-making; Michele McGeoy’s chapter deals with training green-collar workers, as exemplified by Solar Richmond, a grassroots organization in Richmond, Calif., that trains underemployed and unemployed people to work in the solar industry. Meanwhile St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, Calif., reduced its carbon footprint while creating a full-time job for a Solar Richmond graduate.

Sacred Acts is ideal for adult education classes in parishes and congregations seeking renewed inspiration and practical insights into caring for the environment.

The chapters included in each of the book’s four sections sometimes seem arbitrary; for instance, the chapters by Sutterfield and Norman Wirzba, which are in different sections, could just as easily have been placed together. Otherwise, McDuff and the contributors have done us a tremendous service that I hope many will put to good use. n Tobias Winright is associate professor of theological ethics at Saint Louis University and editor of Green Discipleship: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Environment.

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CultureWatch

Inside CultureWatch 40 Air Wars Danny Duncan Collum on the dangers of too much Murdoch

Books art music film

42 To Protect and to Heal Aimee Kang reviews The Cry of Tamar

treason, and people would listen. Given a room and a crowd, the born preachers cannot tame the urge to climb atop the pulpit.

This political instinct to prophesy and govern is noted but subdued in the opening song of Old Ideas, called “Going Home,” the cry of an old man liberated from burdens of desire for love and for mission: “He will speak these words of wisdom / like a sage, a man of vision / though he knows he’s really nothing / but the brief elaboration of a tube ... a lazy bastard living in a suit.”

Although he is no preacher, to say that the poems of Leonard Cohen have a litur-

Cohen’s arrangements are set in the mode of Hebrew Minor, conspiring to create a vivid world that does not exist except in paradox.

By Shefa Siegel

Can You Hear My Song?

IF YOU ARE not overly familiar with the repertoire of a Leonard Cohen concert, it’s hard to tell the new songs from the old. Songs from a different age sound neither anachronistic nor nostalgic, while the new echo as though they have been around forever. It’s the same show night after night, with songs from the latest album, Old Ideas (released in 2012), woven into the familiar canon. Cohen tells audiences that his revivalist tour might end in two years, so that he can start smoking again by the time he turns 80.

It is a joke you know Cohen has cracked a hundred times, the kind that makes my brother call him the Jewish Dean Martin. The humor is one part of a precise choreography, whose arrangements shift from blues to waltzes to New Orleans jazz, Celtic, gospel, country, and disco, all set in the mode of Hebrew Minor and

38 sojourners march 2013

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MJ Kim

Leonard Cohen as irreverent master of prayer.

conspiring to create a vivid world that does not exist, except in paradox. Honey is the texture that comes to mind. Viscous and turbid, neither solid nor liquid. Sensual relief from the coarse, metallic world. And sweet. Sweet in the meaning of the verse from the Persian song “Navaee”—“High sweet melody, and sadness of love, dwelling in the bottom of the heart, where nobody sees”—the mixing of sorrow and transcendence into sublime paradox.

He is and has been many things to his devotees: poet, singer, writer, band leader, lover, satirist, artist, and novelist. But one thing Leonard Cohen is not is a preacher.

Prostrating and posing on bended knee, eyes knit tight, hat pulled low—he could say anything he pleases, from treatises to

gical quality is no stretch. He has played with Jewish canonical formulas for decades.

“Who by Fire” revises one of the central liturgical themes of the autumnal atonement festivals (Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur).

“If It Be Your Will” uses a call-and-response technique through which priests and prayerleaders communicate with congregants during worship.

But more than any mimicry of liturgical methods, there is a theological consistency in the language that evokes an essential tension guiding the approach Hebrew liturgy uses to converse with God. I like to watch the faces and postures of people at a Leonard Cohen concert: This one has her hands folded beneath her chin, that one his eyes closed in reverie, others are rocking their shoulders back and forth—shucklers, petitioners, prostrators, mumblers, and practitioners crooning in naked prayer.

Few words are more degraded and deadening than “prayer.” There is something uniquely uncool about it. No New York publishing house would be excited by an author submitting a book of prayers.

The word and the actions it represents seem static and boring. Hebrew liturgy, however, has no single term for prayer: The varieties of

Continued on Page 41

46 Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines Amy Sullivan on Jay Bakker’s latest

New & Noteworthy The Whole Gospel Ken Wytsma’s Pursuing Justice: The Call to Live & Die for Bigger Things is a passionate evangelical argument for making justice central to a gospel-rooted life. For those who already embrace social justice in their faith, it is a spiritual refresher and resource for engaging with more wary Christians.

Thomas Nelson Their Future, Our Future Girl Rising, a feature film on the power of education in the lives of nine girls from the developing world, releases March 7. It is at the center of a social action campaign for girls’ education called 10x10, launched by former ABC News journalists.

Learn more, advocate, or organize a screening. 10x10act.org A Lifelong Quest In Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African, Lamin Sanneh, a professor of world Christianity at Yale, tells of his journey from a Muslim childhood in Gambia to becoming a Christian academic in the West. An engaging personal story filled with professional insights on the global church, Christian-Muslim relations, and much more. Eerdmans Distilled wisdom The booklet Old Monk gathers brief poems and short commentaries written by Benedictine sister Mary Lou Kownacki in response to Cold Mountain, a classic book by 9th century Chinese poet Han-shan. An unorthodox little devotional with wisdom for seekers and church pillars, artists and activists, monks and heretics. Benetvision march 2013 sojourners 39

EYES & EARS

by Danny duncan Collum

Air Wars

The best evidence against Murdoch is the existence of Fox News. same time that an FCC report on minority media ownership arrived showing the share of outlets owned by people of color to be only 2.2 percent for commercial full-power television and 6.2 percent for commercial AM radio. This, needless to say, raises questions about the wisdom of further media consolidation.

Over the decades, this column has spilled a lot of ink on the subjects of the FCC, media policy, and, especially, media ownership. I haven’t obsessed over these issues because of any love for the details of broadband allocation and other regulatory minutiae. In fact, I struggle to understand some of those matters

40 sojourners march 2013

OnFilm

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by Gareth Higgins

Continued from Page 39

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AS THIS IS written, the Federal Communications Commission is, again, preparing to rule on a revision of its media ownership rules that could, again, allow the few remaining mass media conglomerates to own even more of what are currently competing local news outlets.

For one thing, the proposed revision would allow Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to have its Los Angeles and Chicago TV stations and eat the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune, too.

Five years ago, the Bush administration’s FCC commissioners tried this move, but it was routed in a decision by a federal appeals court. But, just in time to quash any illusions that a second Obama administration might be less friendly to corporate power, Julius Genachowski, the Obama-appointed FCC chair, tried, at the end of 2012, to quietly slip in this new set of Murdoch-friendly ownership rules. The only reason it may not have happened already is because he raised the issue at the

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Media magnate Rupert Murdoch wants to have greater influence over the flow of information in the U.S.

just well enough to try and explain why they are important. But they are important, mostly because deregulated and monopolistic mass media impinge upon our ability to effectively exercise our God-given free will and participate rationally in the process of self-government.

To me, the case keeps coming back to two words: Rupert Murdoch. I know that Murdoch isn’t the whole issue here. And I know that even Murdoch is capable of goodness as well as evil—in 1989, his Fox TV network bankrolled the development of The Simpsons and has kept the show on the air ever since. But that will make for a slim portfolio when the 81-year-old tycoon someday pleads his case before the pearly gates.

And on that day there will be plenty of evidence for the prosecution. When Murdoch branched out from his native Australia into England, one of his first innovations was to place pictures of bare-breasted women on page three of a general circulation daily paper.

It’s been all downhill from there. We now know that staff at his British newspapers listened in on the telephone calls of private citizens. We also know that those same newspapers

regularly paid bribes to the police.

That, by the way, would seem to put Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corp in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials. The Justice Department is looking into it, and may do something in a couple of years or so.

But the best evidence against allowing Murdoch to exercise more influence over the flow of information in America is the existence of Fox News. Those of us who enjoy the mixed blessing of living among ordinary people out in the middle of the country know how thoroughly Fox’s 24/7 propaganda onslaught has crippled public discourse. A significant portion of our fellow citizens now believe fervently and, I fear, unshakably in things (such as the “war on Christmas” and Iraq’s supposed connection to 9/11) that are simply not true.

Strict regulation of media ownership has to be reinstated, if only to limit the power of the Murdoch machine. n Danny Duncan Collum teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. He is the author of the novel White Boy. For details on how to take action, check out freepress.net. www.sojo.net

prayer are countless and constantly evolving because any utterance performed with the right approach can become prayer, if one is a “master of prayer.”

The master of prayer (baal tefillah in Hebrew) is nothing like the rabbinic preacher. Rabbis are controversial. They antagonize congregants, who find every which way to criticize the rabbi. The role of the master of prayer is to hold the community together. Since the objective of prayer is unitive, the master of prayer cannot be divisive. Individual prayer unites the soul and its seeker: communal prayer unites factions by annulling abstractions. The rabbi is a professional: equal parts lecturer, bureaucrat, adjudicator, and administrator; to every ruling there is opposition, every decision offends somebody. The master of prayer is an amateur. A populist.

People want the rabbi to be above and better: more pious, reverent, disciplined, and wise. The master of prayer must be irreverent like everyone else, because if the master of prayer has the right to atone—and we know he’s a sinner!—then I must also possess the right.

In the Rosh Hashana liturgy, this right is exercised by speaking truth, singing, trumpeting, bargaining, reminiscing, and even threatening to get angry with God— “Remember that time you made a covenant with Abraham / Don’t you forget this deal / Or that it applies to me, no less than Abraham,” the liturgy implores.

The most common misinterpretation of this liturgy is that we are petitioners, and God our absolute king and judge. But the approach is precisely the opposite: Dualism seems so real, but it is illusion. God is majestic and I am nothing, and yet God Majestic is crowned only at the pleasure of my participation. Since everything is God’s creation, sin and suffering are neither separation nor exile: God forgives because in the end there is nothing to forgive. The game is rigged, but in my favor.

“We find ourselves / on different sides / of a line nobody drew,” Cohen writes in a new song called “Different Sides.” “Though it all may be one in the higher eye / Down here where we live it is two.” And elsewhere on the album, the prayer “Come Healing” goes: “O, troubled dust concealing / An undivided

Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty.

Oscars and the Big Picture WE SHOULDN’T really expect the Oscars to grasp the point of history, though this year the films nominated for Best Picture are a fascinating snapshot of what ails— and could heal—us.

Zero Dark Thirty takes a clinical view of the search for Bin Laden and has been criticized for its portrayal of torture as effective. To my mind this debate may miss the wider question: Torture is bad enough, but a central assumption about the efficacy and validity of killing for peace—that shooting an old man in his bedroom would solve anything—is worthy of enhanced interrogation.

The point is missed also in the brouhaha about Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s thrilling satirical Western.

People are up in arms about the comic book violence and use of the N-word— but this is perhaps the most powerful, even indelible, portrayal of the violence of slavery ever made for a mainstream audience. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and the revenge arc in this film should be questioned, but Tarantino has done a moral service in not sanitizing his fictionalization of historical memory.

Lincoln is the perfect companion piece— I highly recommend you see both. Django Unchained uses B-movie tropes to vastly entertain while confronting the real horrors Abraham Lincoln was fighting to end. Lincoln is a theatrical history lesson that delicately handles the moral authority competitions, language games, and political complexity behind the 13th Amendment.

Lincoln’s struggle could be seen as one

between grace and law, the central theme of Les Misérables, which moves too fast, but does at least move; and even more so in Silver Linings Playbook, a lovely fusion of two elements—serious (and distressing) drama about family brokenness, and just as serious about love (the same theme explored with a very different tone in Amour). My favorite of the nominated films is probably Life of Pi, another genre fusion, with marvelous color and a compelling hero’s journey narrative; my least favorite is Argo, which squanders the chance to tell a two-sided story about U.S. involvement in Iran in exchange for a classy but derivative escape-from-thescary-foreigners flick.

In Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis’ gentlevoiced president is at pains to remind the audience that “things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” Lincoln should present the Oscars. I mean, how can one say that Beasts of the Southern Wild (multiply nominated, highly acclaimed, honest about social marginalization with a touch of magic realism) is better than The Perks of Being a Wallflower (not nominated at all, highly acclaimed, honest about social marginalization with a touch of realistic magic)?

The Oscars don’t really matter. But thankfully some of these films do. n Gareth Higgins is a Sojourners contributing editor and executive director of the Wild Goose Festival. Originally from Northern Ireland, he lives in Asheville, North Carolina. march 2013 sojourners 41

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love / The heart beneath is teaching / To the broken heart above.”

Still, the master of prayer, despite knowing he possesses the right, approaches the throne of God humbly, just “a lazy bastard living in a suit,” as Cohen puts it. “Here I am,” is the opening line introducing the atonement ceremonies of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. “I am here even though I am not worthy of offering this prayer.”

This posture of the humble supplicant— “the brief elaboration of a tube”—is rooted in the ecclesiastical concept of vanity (in Hebrew hevel), which refers not to meaninglessness, as it often translated, but transience.

“What are we? What are our lives ... When really there is no difference between a human being and an animal, because everything is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 3:19).

Ecclesiastical humility is the foundation of Hebrew canonical prayer, yet it is set directly alongside the boldest of spiritual concepts. “What gives me authority to stand here and ask for compassion?” the “Here I am” prayer asks in its conclusion. “Nothing, except that masters of prayer are angels, carrying prayers to the throne of God.” The paradoxical merging of these two postures—ecclesiastical and angelic—creates the experience of majesty, of holiness, by entangling the worminess of inhabiting the body with the audacity to offer the highest prayer.

Among the varieties of prayer, this paradoxical prayer is the most demanding to perform. It stretches the imagination farthest, pushes the voice hardest. One must be absolutely sincere, or the whole effort disintegrates, and instead of honey the product is sap. When executed exquisitely, however, it makes angels and unrepentant sinners of everybody present. “You’d sing too,” Cohen writes in his 2006 collection of poems, Book of Longing. “You wouldn’t worry about / whether you were as good / as Ray Charles or Edith Piaf / You’d sing / You’d sing / not for yourself / but to make a self.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Leonard Cohen ought to be viewed only as a Jewish liturgist. How artificial and trivial this sounds! Anyway, you never know for certain when he is singing to the women of his life and when he is singing to God. Yet it’s hard not to recognize the humble qualities of a master of prayer, who, when attempting to summon the nerve to sing, can do no more than close his eyes, grab hold of something firm, and hope to hell his voice doesn’t crack. n Shefa Siegel, from Vancouver, British Columbia, writes about environment, ethics, and religion. His essays appear in Haaretz, Ethics & International Affairs, Americas Quarterly, and Yale Environment 360.

Reviewed by Aimee Kang

To protect and to heal The Cry of Tamar: Violence Against Women and the Church’s Response,

by Pamela Cooper-White. Fortress Press.

OVER DINNER my friends and I reflected recently on the headlines that surprised us last year. A few were especially painful: former Rep. Todd Akin’s comment that “legitimate” rapes do not lead to pregnancies; failed Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s comment that a pregnancy from rape is “something that God intended to happen”; and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), in effect since 1994, ending as the 112th Congress closed without reauthorizing it. All reminded me why the second edition of The Cry of Tamar: Violence against Women and the Church’s Response, by Pamela Cooper-White, is still needed almost 20

42 sojourners march 2013

years since its first edition.

The Cry of Tamar reads as a graduate textbook on providing pastoral support for the victims of violence against women.

It weaves pastoral counseling methods and social and psychological theories in dialogue with biblical exegesis and constructive theology to give clergy, pastoral caregivers, and religious leaders tools to help victims of violence and the larger Christ-community.

The story of Tamar, a girl raped 3,000 years ago in Jerusalem, frames and guides the book’s goal of providing healing to the girls and women who are victims of violence today. www.sojo.net

Advocacy, prevention, and intervention to stop violence against women have advanced since the 1995 first edition.

Religious communities and congregations have become more informed about how to care and respond to both victims and perpetrators. But the need for increased awareness and education is ongoing. This second edition is an effort to update the conversation and keep it on the table.

The first of the book’s three parts provides a theologically grounded framework for analyzing the forms of violence against women and the church’s response. To understand human violence, Cooper-White begins with Martin Buber’s study of interpersonal relationality—what he calls the “I-Thou”

Violence and exploitation occur when the other is objectified and becomes an It rather than a Thou. and “I-It” relationship. We all have an innate yearning for genuine connection. Violence and exploitation occur when the other is objectified and becomes an It rather than a Thou—power and control over the other replaces relationality.

I appreciate that Cooper-White adds another dimension to the I-Thou/I-It scope by introducing the I-Thou-We paradigm, adding the communal aspect of accountability.

“We”—community—is the third dimension that holds the I-Thou accountable. It’s a reminder that true communities are built on subjects (Thou) and not objects (It).

In part two, Cooper-White analyzes forms of violence against women: sexual harassment, rape, sexual assault and battering, sexual abuse by clergy, and sexual abuse of children. The chapters include narratives of each type of violence and describe the myths surrounding it, followed by a pastoral response or a theological and biblical resource to help clergy.

The last section of the book focuses on the church’s response. First, Cooper-White reminds clergy of their own wounds, the dangers of burnout and triangulation, and the importance of keeping boundaries, doing self-care, and finding a supportive march 2013 sojourners 43

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community. She encourages them to be attentive witnesses, guided by the Spirit.

Second, the book offers a practical guide to providing pastoral counseling to a perpetrator while holding him firmly responsible for his actions and the need to unlearn violence.

Lastly, Cooper-White discusses pastoral care and counseling for the victim. The role of a pastoral counselor is to walk alongside a victim during the long recovery process and create a safe space for discerning God’s call toward an abundant life—to help her know she is not an It but should be received and treated as a Thou.

As reflected in the I-Thou-We paradigm, Cooper-White concludes by bringing the We element to the victim-perpetrator

Aimee Kang, office manager at Sojourners, has master’s degrees in divinity and theology from Emory University, and is being ordained as a United Methodist deacon.

Reviewed by Julienne Gage

A tropical quest Restless Fires: Young John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867-68,

by James B. Hunt. Mercer University Press.

A FEW YEARS before American naturalist John Muir heeded the call of the California mountains, the boggy swamps and towering palm trees of a much flatter territory beckoned him south to the Gulf Coast states.

As for many young travelers before and since, a journey into exotic lands was a path toward vocational and spiritual enlightenment for Muir.

In Restless Fires: Young John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867-68, Whitworth University emeritus professor James B. Hunt explores how that trip forever changed Muir’s perspectives on humans’ relationship to the natural environment.

Digging deep into Muir’s childhood, Hunt details how Muir’s theological transformation shaped his environmental stewardship.

It’s a wonder Muir maintained any divine belief system. Muir’s Scottish father, a strict practitioner of Campbellite Christianity, nearly beat faith out of him, combining forced Bible memorization with harsh physical punishment. Hunt contends an unfortunate twist of fate may have opened the door to Muir’s escape from suffocating under zealous religion and monotonous factory life. He lost an eye while working as a

44 sojourners march 2013

relationship. It is the responsibility of the congregation, not just the pastor, to assure a victim of God’s love. A congregation can be taught to be a support and shelter for authentic healing, not pushing for cheap forgiveness and grace but seeking justice as the only path to potential reconciliation and restoration of the whole community.

The statistics are loud and clear: Violence against women is rampant. Addressing it must be part of the mission of the church.

This book is a good place to start. n

machinist, which caused temporary sympathetic blindness in his other eye. As soon as Muir was able to see again, he left the Midwest in a southward walk toward what he imagined was North America’s Eden.

Hunt’s appreciation for Muir is reflected in his writing style which, much like his subject’s own journal entries, is academic but poetic, philosophical but purposeful: “The walk gave him the time and experience to define life in his own terms rather than to subscribe to the ones prescribed by society. In so doing, he helped the American public and his readership to see nature as he did, with new eyes,” writes Hunt.

Muir’s journey south came at a critical time in American history—the post-Civil War era. Hunt is careful to place Muir in the appropriate historical context, warning that Muir’s writing about issues of race and class is quite naïve. The young traveler had avoided participation in the Civil War by going to work in Canada, and he largely steered clear of political discussions with Southerners for fear it would create problems for his botanical investigations. Muir did, however, acknowledge that he experienced hospitality and compassion from www.sojo.net

Southerners of all backgrounds.

His journey was also enriched by correspondence with friends and mentors, some of whom offered important moral support for a young man on an unconventional career path, not to mention a solitary walk.

Muir’s letters and journal entries attest to the thrill of discovering foreign plant and animal life as well as to loneliness, hunger, and sickness.

These delights and challenges held the makings of new worldviews. Brushes with large reptiles and tropical diseases forced Muir to contemplate notions of human dominion over the earth.

Muir also expresses great jubilation over finding flora and fauna he’d only known of in biblical passages. It turns out Northerners were made giddy by subtropical aesthetics long before the air conditioning that made Florida a manageable tourist destination.

Among sketches Hunt includes from Muir’s journals is a self-portrait of the young botanist posing below a palm tree. To him, those Palm Sunday branches waved in the breeze in an eternal state of worship.

It’s also quite possible that another twist of fate—a near-death experience with a tropical disease—was a blessing for millions of Americans who visit this nation’s national parks. Muir had originally planned to travel all through Central and South America, but he picked up malaria while in Florida. During a long recovery in Cuba, he decided the cooler, more arid mountains of California would be a little safer. The rest, including Muir’s key role in the creation of our natural parks, is better known American history.

Hunt tells Muir’s coming of age experience as only an avid traveler, hiker, and college professor could. Historical characters such as Muir inspired Hunt to lead many students on study trips to exotic lands in hopes of broadening their worldviews. His exploration of Muir’s early years is a reminder that such journeys are more than just frivolous vacations. They can profoundly carve paths toward greater spiritual enlightenment and, hence, deep care for creation. n Julienne Gage is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a former student of author James Hunt, who led the first of many investigative trips she’s taken abroad.

Excerpt by Karen Houppert

‘But WHY?’ TODAY, Greg Bright, 56, sits on the cement porch of his yellow clapboard house in New Orleans’ 7th Ward and rests his hand on the head of his yellow dog, Q. It is 2012, and he often finds himself musing over the notion of time—time past, time lost, time wasted. “It feels like a minute since I been out here,” he says.

It took some time to adjust to life on the outside, he admits, and once, on a dark rainy morning as he found himself biking seven miles in the rain to his miserable job working the line in a chicken plant in Mississippi, he felt real despair—just recognizing that he was 47 years old and had never owned a car. He tried hard to dismiss the sobering thought that, arrested at age 20 and doing 27 years of time, he’d been “seven more years in prison than I was on the streets.” Sometimes, he says, “it’s little things like that” that really threaten to drag him down into sorrow.

So he chose to do something that both keeps those wasted years fresh in his memory yet also mitigates the sense of powerlessness he sometimes feels. He helps to educate others in the hopes that his story will spur reforms. He is not an educated man—his formal schooling stopped in sixth grade—but he is one of dozens and dozens of ex-cons who form a vital link in the post-Katrina criminal justice reform efforts through various organizations such as Resurrection After Exoneration, a holistic reentry program for ex-offenders, and Innocence Project New Orleans. Greg tells his story to students, activists, politicians, church groups, friends, strangers—anybody with time to spare and an inclination to listen—doggedly putting a face on an abstract idea, injustice.

On this particular afternoon in May 2012, he tells his story to me. For a fourth time. He is deeply preoccupied with the judge who repeatedly denied his requests

over the years (the same one who was on the team prosecuting his murder case in 1976). The very month that Greg was released in 2003, the judge died. Greg goes into his house to retrieve the judge’s yellow and tattered obituary that he has kept these nine years. He reads it—as he has done hundreds of times. The obituary, like all obituaries, says nice things.

“The judge may have been a good man,” Greg muses. “He might have been a good husband, a good father, a good friend to many people—and I’m sure he was. But people might be saying the same thing about me.” Q, the dog, who lies panting at Greg’s feet, lifts his head for a moment to look around, as if considering the matter.

Then he lowers his head to rest his muzzle on Greg’s shoe. “But because I’m not a lawyer, but because I’m the little guy, man, you step on my head and crush me.

I don’t have money or influence or even God on my side.” ... [The Supreme Court case Gideon vs. Wainwright] guaranteed him an attorney, but a flawed indigent defense system and a lackluster lawyer rendered that almost meaningless.

“But why?” he says. “You know, why?

Sometimes I think about it.” He wonders what the solutions are to the troubled criminal justice system here, to the high incarceration rates in the black community, to the racism and power imbalance.

He talks on and on, indignant, furious, rambling—but right.

Like a dog licking a wound, keeping it open and raw, Greg Bright revisits his past, alternately trying to decide whether he— and the city of New Orleans—get to have a happy ending or whether their shared story is a tragedy. n Copyright © 2013 by Karen Houppert. This excerpt originally appeared in Chasing Gideon, published by The New Press.

Reprinted here with permission. march 2013 sojourners 45

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Uncertainty’s Graces Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve Crossed: Walking with the Unknown God,

by Jay Bakker with Andy Meisenheimer. Jericho Books.

JUST A FEW dozen pages into Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve Crossed, evangelical pastor Jay Bakker pens what may be the best explanation for the Christian emphasis on church community that I’ve ever encountered. Noting that doubt can be “hard and scary,” Bakker writes: “That’s why we have one another, why we have community. We can go through those days of doubt together. I wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for the people who have been there with me as I question everything.”

Many writers have grappled with the

often contingent on accepting a certain concept of God, a certain idea of eternity and where people get to spend it, a certain understanding of the Bible. Above all, many communities demand certainty.

As Bakker points out, that certainty makes it possible for bad theology to propagate and for hubris to take hold of believers. One of the benefits of doubt, he writes, is that “[it] keeps me from thinking I’ve got a handle on God. Doubt encourages me to keep learning, to keep myself open to being wrong.” One

Certainty makes it possible for bad theology to propagate and for hubris to take hold of believers. challenge that doubt poses for religious believers. But in this honest, searching, and ultimately uplifting book, Bakker pulls doubt out of the shadows where many believers wrestle with it on their own and instead presents it as a reality that Christian communities can and should address together.

Bakker’s approach to the often-taboo topic of questioning—or, as he puts it, “the sense that faith is crap, life is meaningless, there is no God, the Bible is a fraud, Jesus was just a charismatic man turned mythological figure if he existed at all”—is shaped by his childhood in a Pentecostal environment that left no room for doubt. As Bakker ruefully notes in the book’s introduction, “I will probably be 80 years old and still introduced as Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye.” That unusual background only provides the impetus, however, and not the substance for this book, which reads mostly as the stream-ofconsciousness meditation of a man pushing and pulling at his faith to see if it holds up.

The beliefs that pull Bakker up short, that cause him to question what he’s always been taught about his faith, aren’t that different from what many of us are told in our own religious communities. Our membership is

46 sojourners march 2013

could imagine a little doubt being helpful for those who are so quick to, say, see God’s wrath in a natural disaster or the mass killing of little children.

Although the book is about Bakker’s own struggles with faith, his conclusion is that all individuals should feel safe and welcome to wrestle with questions within a religious community. He pastors just such a congregation in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, called Revolution NYC, which meets on Sunday afternoons at a bar called Pete’s Candy Store.

I wish that a postcard version of Bakker’s message could be beamed to every person who thinks of him- or herself as “spiritual but not religious.” Many of the growing number of Americans who don’t identify with a specific religious tradition have been put off by congregations that forced them to believe or leave. It is so much harder, though, to work through issues of belief and doubt alone, and most exiles simply don’t.

Amy Sullivan is a correspondent for National Journal and the author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap. www.sojo.net

Frank Mugisha Bio: Executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, which works for full legal and social equality in the country, and recipient of the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

Website: www.sexualminoritiesuganda.net

1

What’s your response to the letter U.S. religious leaders signed last year, which condemned the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” before Uganda’s Parliament because it “would forcefully push lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people further into the margins”? Uganda is a very Christian country. About 85 percent of our

2

Before Parliament adjourned without passing the “kill the gays” bill, an official had suggested it would pass as a “Christmas gift.” As a Catholic yourself, what’s your response to that image?

What I’ve always said is that instead of promoting hatred, we should promote love.

And clearly, this law has so much discrimination, the language is full of hatred; this is not appropriate for Jesus’ birthday, because he said love your God and love your neighbor as you love yourself—those are the greatest commandments.

“The Anti-Homosexuality Bill violates our own culture as Africans.” population is Christian—Anglican, Catholic, and Pentecostal. So for religious leaders to speak out against the Ugandan legislation, that is very important for me and for my colleagues in Uganda, because it speaks not only to the politicians and legislators, but also to the minds of the ordinary citizens.

It is very important to have respected religious leaders involved, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, because these are leaders who have spoken out on other human rights issues such as apartheid, women’s rights, and slavery. And for us, for the voice of LGBT rights, to join with these other issues clearly indicates that our movement is fighting for human rights.

3

As an African, how do you see all this?

The bill itself violates our own culture as Africans, because Africans are people who are united to each other, but this bill clearly divides. For example, it includes a clause that says that every person should report any “known homosexual” to authorities, and failure to do that becomes criminal— it calls for a witch hunt that was never seen in African culture. The bill also criminalizes the “promotion of homosexuality,” which would criminalize any kind of dialogue or talk about homosexuality in my country.

4

Would it require clergy to turn in gay members of their flocks? Yes, priests taking confession and any religious leader— whether giving health support, psychosocial counseling, or anything—are required to go and report to the authorities. So this totally violates Christian teaching, including the Catholic faith.

Rafto.no

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5

Does the bill threaten efforts to fight HIV? Even if the death penalty is removed, the legislation itself will drive LGBT people underground—already now, without the bill passing, there’s fear. People are afraid to go to health workers and say that they’re in same-sex relations, so this will happen underground, with no information, and that will greatly increase the spread of HIV/AIDS.

6

What message do you have for Christians in the U.S.? It is important for people to know that there has been a lot of influence from American fundamentalist Christians in promoting this hatred in Uganda; some of them have been very vocal.

We think that Christians in the U.S. should hold these preachers accountable.

—Interview by Elizabeth Palmberg march 2013 sojourners 47

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Inside CultureWatch 40 Guns, Culture, and Sanity Danny Duncan Collum on rural culture and unacceptable risks

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43 An Unhindered Hope Mary Kate MacIsaac on Making Friends Among the Taliban

mirrored faith, blind faith. We were looking at sketches and plans but had no idea who had designed them. Some of the entries contained written statements that were so moving in their optimism for Port-au-Prince and its 3 million inhabitants, their hopes for Haiti and her people, and their longing for the rebuilt cathedral to serve as a symbol of renewal that they nearly brought me to tears.

You see, I grew up in the shadow of that cathedral. I spent the first 12 years of my life in Bel Air, the poor but vibrant neighborhood that in part surrounds the cathedral. When

This cathedral was so central to the city that mariners used a light on the cupola of the church’s north tower to help bring their ships home.

By Edwidge Danticat

House of Prayer and Dreams Haiti’s once and future cathedral is a place of healing and memory.

WE WERE LOOKING at cathedrals while others were mourning and burying their dead.

It was the first day of the international design competition that would help choose a few architectural plans that might be used to rebuild Notre Dame de l’Assomption, Our Lady of the Assumption, Port-au-Prince’s most famous cathedral. This cathedral was so central to the city that, before it was leveled in the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, its turrets could be seen from most places in Port-au-Prince, as well as from the sea, where mariners used a light on the cupola of the church’s north tower to help bring their ships home.

During the 2010 earthquake, the Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, was killed inside an administrative building adjoining the cathedral, along with priests and parishioners. It was the images of their

38 sojourners april 2013

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Associated Press

The ruins of Notre Dame de l’Assomption, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the devastating earthquake in 2010. Below, an artist’s rendering of the reconstructed cathedral.

crushed bodies and their loved ones wailing around the perimeters of the cathedral’s rubble that motivated me, a non-architect and non-Catholic—but a lover of cathedrals—to agree to join a development strategist, a preservationist architect, a structural engineer, a priest and liturgical consultant, the dean and associate dean of two architectural schools, and the editor of a magazine that discusses the dual issues of faith and architecture to help select three out of the 134 moving, elegant, and in some cases totally out-there designs that we had received from architects all over the world. Among the panelists, three of us were Haitian born, and many of the others had either worked in Haiti or in the Catholic Church for years.

The selection exercise itself was one that

I started going to school, I would walk by it every day, along with another Catholic church that was also razed in the earthquake, Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Together, the chimes of these churches’ bells guided the routines of my day.

My entire primary school, which was nearby, was taken to Notre Dame de l’Assomption every Friday for weekly Mass, no matter what religion we individually practiced. And I was always pleasantly surprised that my uncle and guardian, a Protestant minister, never objected to my participation in this Mass. I became so intrigued by crosses, stained glass, and incense that, when I became older, whenever I traveled I always made a stop at a town’s signature cathedral to see if it lived up to the signature one in Port-au-Prince.

Yes, Notre Dame de Paris and Our Lady of Strasbourg are magnificent cathedrals, but they were not surrounded by bustling street markets; they did not function in the midst of such a busy atmosphere that the buzz of people’s voices and cars honking were always part of the distant echoes of the Mass. These cathedrals might have been more pristine, but their saints probably didn’t hear as many urgent prayers as those of Notre Dame de

Continued on Page 41

44 Converted, but Still Wrestling Min-Ah Cho reviews From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart

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by Shayne Moore and Kimberly McOwen Yim, is a guide to how regular people, juggling the everyday demands of family and work, can become activists fighting human trafficking and slavery. IVP Books Leaders of the Faith Different writers pay tribute to the work and witness of Catholic sisters in Thank You, Sisters: Stories of Women Religious and How They Enrich Our Lives, edited by John Feister.

These strong, faithful women are inspiring, no matter your tradition. Franciscan Media We Will Shine In photographs and brief essays, Shadows then Light, by Steve Pavey and Marco Saavedra, focuses on undocumented youth who engage in civil disobedience to protest detentions and deportations—and thus confront society with the deeper spiritual and ethical questions implicit in the immigration debate. shadowsthenlight.com Holy Liberation Raymond Rivera draws on more than 45 years of pastoring inner-city churches in his book Liberty to the Captives: Our Call to Minister in a Captive World.

This is a biblically rooted vision for social action and care and advocacy on behalf of our most vulnerable neighbors. Eerdmans april 2013 sojourners 39

EYES & EARS

by Danny duncan Collum

Guns, Culture, and Sanity

Not everything that’s fun is a constitutionally protected right. don’t understand the rural culture of hunting and shooting and can’t be bothered to expend the moral energy that act of empathy would require. For me, that part of the gun control discussion pushes the same outrage buttons that go off when an economist says people in dying rural communities just need to move, or when someone else suggests eliminating all farm subsidies from the federal budget. Such comments betray the fact that the speakers neither know, nor care, about rural communities and rural culture.

On the other hand, fear of outsiders is also a part of rural culture.

Groups like the NRA, and gun

40 sojourners april 2013

manufacturers themselves, have done a pretty good job of exploiting that flaw, to the point that some of my neighbors are convinced that they need assault weapons to defend themselves against some vague, unnamable “them.” And my experience of rural life, which has all been in the South, confirms that this can apply doubly or triply to “outsiders” with a different skin color.

Still, I’m also sure that some people around here own assault weapons simply because it’s fun to shoot them at a target, or at some hapless animal.

At a Boy Scout meeting last week, I heard a 14-year-old confess that he had been taken deer “hunting” using an assault rifle with a 30-round clip.

For the record, the scoutmaster, himself an NRA member and avid hunter, condemned this practice as reckless and unsportsmanlike. But I imagine it is a thrill to let that kind of firepower rip. It’s also a lot of fun to drive a car down the highway at 100 miles per hour. But not everything that’s fun is a constitutionally protected right, and when gun lovers get all lofty and libertarian about their right to keep military weapons in their homes, they invite

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Continued from Page 39

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I DON’T OWN any guns, and I’ve only fired them at inanimate objects, but I live in the country, so guns are a part of my life.

During deer season, the woods around our place sometimes sound like Baghdad circa 2006. We used to have a close neighbor who regularly fired a gun in his backyard, usually on Sunday afternoons—at what, we’re not entirely sure. Our family has a three-legged dog that lost his right rear appendage to a gunshot wound. Our kids in Boy Scouts get gun safety training and rifle and shotgun shooting lessons in a program certified by the National Rifle Association.

So when the gun control debate heats up, as it has since the Sandy Hook School massacre, I come down with a serious case of mixed feelings. I think rural gun lovers are at least partly right when they say that urban gun control advocates look down on them as ignorant primitives. Many city people, and I’d dare say most urban liberals,

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the misunderstanding and contempt that comes their way.

Of course, the other subject that gets close to home when we talk about gun violence is violent video games. There’s dueling research on that subject, but what I’ve seen of my children’s peers, and of some gameaddicted college students, leads me to side with the theory that violent games do promote real-world aggression. But it’s also worth noting that the most recent adolescent mass murderer, 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego of New Mexico, accused of killing five family members, was a homeschooled evangelical Christian pastor’s kid whose parents tried to tightly regulate his access to TV and video games. But they also kept an assault rifle in an unlocked closet, and now they and three of their children are dead.

There’s no justification—constitutional, cultural, or otherwise—for forcing that level of risk onto our communities. It’s just plain crazy. n Danny Duncan Collum teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. He is the author of the novel White Boy. www.sojo.net

l’Assomption, where worship began loudly outside, in the sun, at the foot of the cross, where novenas were shouted rather than whispered, and votive candles flickered wildly as hot paraffin dripped down the supplicants’ arms.

While it is true that, in places like Haiti, many who have come to conquer and kill since the time of Christopher Columbus have carried a Bible and a cross and have used God’s name to justify evil deeds, it is also true that many of us have found ways to make this conflicted legacy a part of our own.

“My childhood memories of the cathedral are quite joyful,” recalls Haitian-American filmmaker Guetty Felin in Broken Stones, her 2012 documentary film about the cathedral and the people who have always found solace in its promise and now refuse to abandon its ruins. “Notre Dame was one of the only public buildings that I was not afraid of in these bittersweet years, sweet because we children were experts in creating places of refuge in our imaginations, even when the world around us seemed to be falling apart.”

A CHURCH CAN be out of its place and time. It can be a museum or a mausoleum, or it can be an active, living, healing, gathering place, one of the design competition panelists said. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dead.

In addition to the 200,000 people who had died in the earthquake more than three years ago, I was also thinking about the 26—20 of them children—who had been killed in the massacre in Newtown, Conn., three days before we came together. Two of the children, children my oldest daughter’s age, were being buried that same day.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about others who were dying and being mourned, even at that very moment, in Haiti and elsewhere, from hunger, from disease, from underreported wars, some without even the dignity of a simple burial, no national mourning, not even a piece of wood or a stone to mark their final resting place.

“We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in Flight to Arras (1942). “We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.”

A scene from the video game Saints Row.

Time to start Talking THE CEO OF one of the world’s most popular video-game manufacturers recently denied any relationship between his products (some of which have their users re-enact mass slaughter) and real killing. The substance of such denial appeared to some to be no more complex than “because I said so, and some other people agree with me.” Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the Aurora movie theater shootings last year, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein called for a summit of directors to discuss their imaginary guns. He later acknowledged that “I don’t have the answers to these questions. ... They’re so complicated; you need people with better facts and intelligence. In this situation I have to be a follower, not a leader.” Refreshing humility from someone better known for bluster and self-assurance, now opening a door to a conversation on which lives may depend.

Film critics, too, have a responsibility to contribute to this conversation, so let me propose some ideas: 1. Portrayal and advocacy are not the same thing. The violence of Reservoir Dogs and Looper may be visceral, but it tells the truth about the suffering that guns and knives can inflict and may help people think twice about enacting real violence. The violence of Home Alone and Transformers may be cartoonish, but it lies to the audience and may fuel appetites for further destruction.

2. The shape of the narrative arc may be more influential than any particular acts of violence. Our culture seems to be addicted to the idea that order can

be brought out of chaos by ultimate force, that violence can literally “cleanse the world.” This myth—this religion—shows up everywhere, not just in the movies.

Indeed, it is a keystone of our politics. The best thing movies can do about it is to tell a different story.

3. Art is always political. Talking about gun control in the aftermath of a mass shooting is not politicizing a tragedy; attempting to silence those voices is.

4. Using cinematic guns almost always constitutes cheap drama. If we paid greater attention to the imagination (and to spiritual practices), we’d make better movies.

5. Guns may not actually be the problem.

Research suggests that the factor that seems to have the closest implied causal relationship with increased gun homicide rates is not increased gun ownership, but rather social inequality and the lack of community bonds. The problem might therefore require a fusion of conservative and liberal solutions: Building up local communities and challenging economic inequality may have far greater impact on reducing gun violence than blaming Hollywood.

There is an overwhelming need for publicly compelling conversation about violence, guns, and the role of entertainment media. That conversation is often ill-informed. So if you have something good to say, please say it. n Gareth Higgins is a Sojourners contributing editor and executive director of the Wild Goose Festival. Originally from Northern Ireland, he lives in Asheville, North Carolina. april 2013 sojourners 41

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Looking at cathedral after potential cathedral, I thought of how many of us go in and out of worship places only at the beginning or at the end of our lives. Some of us never enter churches or other places of worship at all unless a tragedy has occurred and we are looking for comfort for ourselves and others. For so many of us, entering a church is a prelude to burying our dead.

A city, if it wishes it, deserves places with indestructible narratives, and churches contain within their walls plenty of stories of births and deaths, renewals and rebirths. A city, if it wishes it, deserves places of healing and memory, beacons and lighthouses, and churches are often called on to serve that purpose—indiscriminately, we hope, for both paupers and kings. A city, if it wishes it, deserves places where people can come out of the sun and wind and rain—believers and nonbelievers alike—and just sit down and cry. And churches can offer that too.

Notre Dame de l’Assomption was designed and built collaboratively by both Haitian and foreign architects and engineers, and it took 45 years until the cathedral was completed and formally consecrated in 1928.

It took 35 seconds on Jan. 12, 2010, for it to be reduced to a pile of stones.

Finally, looking at the first-place design, a mix of the old cathedral and a futuristic new one, potentially seismic-resistant and green, a blend of the present, the future, and the past, I remembered a reading I had heard at one of the Masses I had attended as a child.

This is how my child’s ear had heard this marvelous tale: A prophet, Ezekiel, found himself in a valley filled with bones. Then a loud voice asked him from the heavens, “Ezekiel, can these bones live?”

The bones then rose out of the ground and came to life.

“Our nation is finished,” the bone people said.

But the nation was not finished. The stones would speak. The bones would live. n Edwidge Danticat is an author living in Miami. Her next book of fiction, Claire of the Sea Light, will be published by Knopf in August 2013. You can see past and present photos of Notre Dame de l’Assomption and the winning design for the future cathedral at ndapap.org.

42 sojourners april 2013

Reviewed by Andrew Wilkes

The Church’s Alternative Currency The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World,

by Daniel M. Bell Jr. Baker Academic.

DANIEL BELL’S The Economy of Desire juxtaposes Christianity and capitalism, situating both in the context of postmodernity. The main argument of the book is that performing works of mercy—both corporal and spiritual—constitutes an alternative economy that can resist capitalism. Capitalism, in Bell’s construal, is an economic system founded on voluntary contracts, private property, and an ideological regime where the rule of the market transcends the rule of law and disregards the reign of God in Christ.

The author draws on the work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to set up a philosophical framework for talking about power and desire. His treatment of Foucaultian insights on the ubiquity of power is meant to decenter the state as the primary engine of social change. Deleuze’s

society. The scope of the author’s analysis is also impressive. Bell substantively engages the arguments of diverse figures from Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich von Hayek to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. Moreover, Bell’s contention that proponents of capitalism effectively deny the possibility of social holiness is worth the price of the book.

Throughout The Economy of Desire, the author foreshadows his final argument that the works of mercy—physical acts of kindness such as feeding the hungry, as well as spiritual works such as comforting the afflicted—represent an economy of grace and love that resists the transactional status quo of capitalism. Bell argues that the works of mercy, in an Augustinian sense, heal our capacity to love from the dis-

The works of mercy represent an economy of grace and love that resists the transactional status quo of capitalism. work builds on Foucault’s argument by conceptualizing people—and society at large—as flows of desire. Taken together, the claim is potentially but not necessarily democratic: Social structures organize desire in particular ways and are malleable due to the fact that power resides not only in the state or market but in the relational networks of everyday people. Under this account, for instance, the typical presidential election is not simply about securing votes, but about directing the aspirations and actions of the electorate toward a collective passion for growing the economy, expanding the middle class, and so on. Capitalism, for Bell, secures our loyalty because it shapes what we do as well as what we desire.

A few strengths of the book stand out.

It contains a lucid discussion of the difference between commutative (fair contracts) and distributive (fair proportion of wealth, power, and other goods) justice within

tortions and disfigurations of capitalism.

Moreover, this compendium of compassionate deeds, which are fully expounded in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, highlight philanthropy’s evasion of justice and envision a sanctification of the individual in ecclesial community that reorders our respective households within the global capitalist system. Fair enough.

The problem, however, is that Bell’s account overestimates the extent to which ecclesial works of mercy alone can reorder our individual desires. To implement the alternate economy of desire highlighted in the text requires an active civil sector and a government that can serve as a countervailing force to the market, in addition to the sanctified work of families and faith communities.

Bell’s argument could also be strengthened by integrating an account of race and class into its treatment of desire. How, for instance, do the racialized cultural www.sojo.net

productions and consumer goods of capitalism shape our sense of who we are and who we could be? How do undocumented workers barraged by Fox News stereotypes and young black youth flooded with images of misogynist males in rap videos and so on heal desire? Incorporating these threads into the argumentative quilt of the book would heighten its persuasiveness.

I recommend The Economy of Desire to readers who are looking for an accessible and thoughtful treatment of the church’s relationship to capitalism. Despite the insufficiency of Bell’s constructive suggestions about the works of mercy, it is nevertheless a creative and robust proposal of a distinctly Christian vision of economics in the midst of the global capitalist economy. n Andrew Wilkes (@andrewjwilkes) is the faith and community relations associate for Habitat for Humanity-New York City and an affiliate minister at the Greater Allen AME Cathedral of New York.

Reviewed by Mary Kate MacIsaac

An Unhindered Hope Making Friends Among the Taliban: A Peacemaker’s Journey in Afghanistan,

by Jonathan P. Larson. Herald Press.

IN EARLY AUGUST 2010, 10 aid workers were murdered, execution-style, in the province of Badakhshan, in northeastern Afghanistan. Among them were six Americans, two Afghans, a Briton, and a German, all part of a medical mission. It was the deadliest attack on aid workers the country had seen.

D an Te r r y, 6 3 , an American humanitarian who, with his family, had called Afghanistan home for more than 30 years, was among the dead.

What compels a person to risk his or her life in a foreign land so riddled with conflict?

For Terry it was simple—he was called to a life of peacemaking and service.

A friend of Terry’s since childhood, writer Jonathan Larson draws us into

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Terry’s passionate character and the vision he shared with friends in Afghanistan: reconciliation and dialogue. “In the end, we’re all knotted into the same carpet,” Terry was fond of saying. From a swath of interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, both Western and Afghan, Larson has assembled “oral narratives,” sharing with us the exhilarating life of a generous and gentle man, heroic but humble.

The best advice I received as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan was from a leader cut from the same cloth as Terry: “Make no assumptions” and “listen first.” We too often accept media caricatures of the other, labels that shut down discourse and clamp off possibility and hope. Challenging this, Terry insisted on the unwavering potential of each person he met. “Categorical ‘enemies’ have rescued me ... again and again,” he once wrote to friends.

This approach, while considered naïve by some and cavalier by others, helped Terry form unlikely but effective partnerships,

unconventional practices. The creative ways of those rooted in prophetic values and driven by community needs have value, but systems that assure accountability and transparency to the donor and those we serve are also necessary. How to marry these without losing one or the other remains the challenge for many aid agencies, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In discussing Terry’s community-led approach to development, Larson includes significant criticism of military strategies that focus on “winning hearts and minds,” consequently blurring humanitarian aid with intelligence gathering. These often involve short-term, quick-fix projects with little, if any, community participation, which can encourage dependency while increasing the danger for actual aid workers.

Terry’s approach to peacebuilding was at great odds with the “war on terror” that continues to be waged in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and most recently, northern Africa. In light of ongoing fighting and increasing drone warfare, can we ask ourselves and our leaders if we have done enough to seek a peaceful solution in Afghanistan? As international forces depart, have we engaged the context appropriately and encouraged a dialogue that seeks a shared understanding—some common ground, but also compromise—that could potentially save lives?

If Terry was still with us, he would have some suggestions. Thankfully, the stories that Larson has assembled provide guideposts from a man driven by an unhindered hope in our potential and nurtured by a stalwart faith in a God who loves.

Perhaps Terry’s most powerful testimony, applicable to all people, at home and abroad, is captured in the carved words of an unpolished granite tombstone in a Kabul cemetery.

It reads, “Above all, clothe yourselves in love.”

Dan Terry is buried here, but the impact of his life and the message he shared continues. n

Terry would work with individual Talibs who cared for the well-being of their communities. such as with members of the Taliban, whose code had wrought so much suffering on the Afghan people. He would work with individual Talibs who cared for the well-being of their communities and wanted to help improve lives. In his dealings with Taliban administrators or village leaders, gunmen at checkpoints or subsistence farmers, Terry found the common ground, at times securing the release of hostages or bringing enemies together around a common cause. He believed there was no barricade that could not be crossed, no problem that could not be negotiated.

But not everyone appreciated this.

Colleagues criticized him for his alliances with the Taliban, while his superiors grew frustrated by his lack of adherence to proper process and procedure. Here, Larson is nuanced in acknowledging the isolation, even brokenness, Terry felt as the organization he had worked with for years began to distance itself from his

44 sojourners april 2013

Mary Kate MacIsaac is a humanitarian communicator seeking solidarity for marginalized communities in places of conflict and disaster, including Afghanistan (where she worked for three years with an international aid organization), Iraq, Palestine, and Haiti.

Reviewed by Min-Ah Cho

Converted, But Still Wrestling From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart: Rekindling My Love for Catholicism,

by Chris Haw. Ave Maria Press.

SOME BOOKS MAKE you want to sit down with the author on a sunny afternoon for a nice cup of tea. You would be excited to talk about how the book resonated with your own journey. For me, From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart: Rekindling My Love for Catholicism, by Chris Haw, is such a book.

Haw, a young, passionate, and deeply self-reflective theologian, shares his spiritual memoir. Part one recounts Haw’s faith journey from a childhood as a lukewarm Catholic to teenage years at the evangelical megachurch Willow Creek, to college—including brief but powerful months in Belize, as well as days of protest against the Iraq war—and eventually to his present life in the apocalyptic landscape of Camden, N.J., where he returned to the Catholic Church.

Part two presents Haw’s theological reflections on a variety of questions he has raised along his journey. He also focuses on common objections against the Catholic Church, such as the nature of the Mass as a sacrifice, the church’s reliance on human tradition over the Bible, its hierarchical system, alleged ritualism, embellished architecture and ornaments, devastating scandals—including child molestation—and so on. Haw explores such challenging issues thoughtfully and courageously, while humbly accepting that he still struggles with them. Despite it all, Haw longs to see beauty and hope furthered through the Catholic Church.

I am a Catholic convert. I was raised in a Methodist family and trained in Protestant seminaries. By the time I decided to convert to Catholicism, I was starting my first year in the doctoral program of theological studies at Emory University. Feminist theology played a central role in both my theological education and spiritual formation, and it continues to today. www.sojo.net

Shocked and confused by my decision, many of my colleagues asked, “Why do you want to submit yourself to an archaic, patriarchal, misogynistic institution that never fails to perpetuate scandals and controversies?” Although I fully understood my colleagues’ concerns, I saw in Catholicism, as Haw did, things that were too precious and too valuable to be ignored or abandoned. To name a few: the sacraments, which palpably enflesh our desire toward the divine; the mystical tradition, particularly of women mystics, which compellingly connects feminist theology to the voices of women in the past; and Catholic social teaching, which tirelessly strives to build a just and holy society. Those things continue to brilliantly shine out of the tainted, broken, and flawed human institution of the church.

Haw’s contemplation on his return journey to Catholicism rekindled my fondness for its beauty, but also reminded me of our responsibility—how intensely we Catholics need to work in order for the beautiful elements to remain alive, and how urgently, therefore, we ought to challenge the current state of the church hierarchy, which seems to have lost its capacity to engage intellectual conversation with critical voices within and outside of the church.

As Haw explains, Catholics live in an age of irony because, as expressed by G.K. Chesterton, “There is no enduring way forward except with a sort of ‘fanatical pessimism and fanatical optimism’ combined.”

I was a bit surprised that Haw makes little or no mention of some of the burning issues that Catholics struggle with today, including the growing need for the ordination of women, the Vatican’s investigation and reprimand of U.S. nuns, its denouncement of some theologians’ books, and its stance on sexuality and same-sex marriage.

Just as this book is “about the journey not the destination,” I trust that Haw’s theological reflection is an invitation, not a conclusion. I look forward to reading Haw’s next books and learning further from the contemplative action and active contemplation in his ongoing faith journey. n Min-Ah Cho is an assistant professor of theology at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn.

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