Literature and Secularization: At MLA and in Print

by Everett Hamner

For any of you blog readers who might be at MLA (program is linked here) rather than AHA in a few days(gasp!), there's a session you won't want to miss. Several of the mostprovocative, insightful scholars at the intersection of religion and literaturewill be participating on a panel entitled "Literature andSecularization" (Friday, 3:30-4:45, WSCC 617). Facilitated by SusannahBrietz Monta (Notre Dame, and editor of Religionand Literature), this roundtable will feature Lori Branch (Iowa, author of Rituals of Spontaneity); John Cox (HopeCollege, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeareand Skeptical Faith); Tracy Fessenden (Arizona State, Culture and Redemption); William Franke (Vanderbilt, Poetry and Apocalypse); Colin Lovell Jager(Rutgers, New Brunswick, The Book of God);and Michael W. Kaufmann (Temple, coordinator of recent Religion and Literature forum, "Locating thePostsecular").

While I'm in advertising mode, many of you--religious studies and history typesincluded--might well enjoy Amy Hungerford's PostmodernBelief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, 2010). Ireviewed this for Religion and Literaturerecently (43.1, Spring 2011), and here's the opening paragraph:

Atfirst glance, Amy Hungerford’s second book might seem literary criticism’sanswer to Robert Wuthnow’s After Heaven:Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, which shows how Americans havedrifted away from institutional religious commitments and toward more informal,syncretistic spiritualities. However, Hungerford reveals not just a looseningand recombination of doctrines and practices, but the return of a “belief inmeaninglessness” (xiii) rooted in transcendentalism and Romanticism. Postmodern Belief is an examination offaith without content, trust in the nonsemantic, belief as itself a form ofritual, all as discerned primarily through the work of writers rarelyidentified as religious themselves, but who still “live in oblique relation tothe structures and discourses of institutional religion” (xvi). Rather thanconcerning herself with these authors’ theologies, Hungerford investigatestheir convictions about literature. In fact, “their literary beliefs areultimately best understood as a species of religious thought, and theirliterary practice as a species of religious practice” (xvi).

Fear Itself: Literary Reflections on 9/11

Paul Harvey

Editorial note: Over the past few days and continuing through this weekend, reflections, essays, and artistic responses pour in on the 10th anniversary of September 11th. I have written my own consideration historicizing our national response to the event for Religion Dispatches, and Kevin Levin has developed much further and more insightfully the comparison I draw between Civil War commemorations and 9/11 remembrances.

Just this evening I have been reflecting on Judith Weisenfeld's look at "The Ephemera of Commemoration," about "grassroots modes of mourning" which sprung up in impromptu 9/11 memorials to those murdered that morning; on Hussein Rashid's consideration of works of art since/about 9/11; on Randy Balmer's history lesson on why Ground Zero and lower Manhattan were sacred spaces for America's best pluralist ideals long before 9/11; and on Mark Silk's reminder of why memorializing the epochal events for an entire community work best as collective secular rituals that bring the community together, and not (as has happened already) as food fights over whose religious leader was or wasn't there.

One voice that will stick with me this weekend whom I had not heard before is that of Fekkak Mamdouh, the Morocco-born waiter at Windows on the World restaurant on the top floor of the Twin Towers, who spoke about the loss of dozens of his friends and co-workers that day and his life since 9/11 for the radio program The World today.

Mamdouh might have appeared as a character in Amy Waldman's powerful novel The Submission; as I blogged about a few days ago, don't miss Haroon Moghul's interview with Waldman. In trying to think about some of the major artistic literary responses to 9/11, I recently read Waldman's The Submission alongside Netherland, Joseph O'Neill's much-noted novel from a few years back. I read some other short stories and novels as well, including Don Dellilo's Falling Man, and listened to a variety of music that reflected on the day and its aftermath, but ultimately these two works stick with me the most.

The definitive artistic work may come in a future generation, but in the meantime, below is a consideration of O'Neill's and Waldman's moving novels on this anniversary weekend, along with some thoughts putting them with my favorite piece of popular music which beautifully reflects on our era of fear, Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. If nothing else, I hope the following short essay provides some food for thought on your own reflections and responses to that day and all that has come since.

__________________________________________________________

We were trying to understand . . whether we were in an apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely pre-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow. (Joseph O’Neill, Netherland)

The fear is there, Paul. The fear is real . . People need someone to blame at a time like this. They’re not consoled by abstract notions of process. (Amy Waldman, The Submission)

I can taste the fear
Gonna lift me up and take me out of here (Arcade Fire, “Intervention,” from Neon Bible)

In his inaugural address in March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “this is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” He warned against “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” During the war, when reasons for fear were all too numerous, he proposed “freedom from fear” as one major plank of his “four freedoms.”

Since then, we’ve learned to fear fear itself. During the Cold War, fear became the basis of “security,” as well as the subject of a huge volume of artistic production which tried to understand how fear would shape democracy – what Ira Chernus has called the “national insecurity state.”

And again, in the last decade, we’ve learned to fear fear itself, in part because America’s civil religion of security and religious impulse towards boundaries of belief have embraced fear. Those fundamentally religious impulses – with all the complicated forces forming them, and the opposite if not quite equal reactions against them – have informed artistic productions reflecting on the events of September 11 and their years of aftermath. From Don DeLillo and Philip Roth forward now to novels and music emanating from post 9/11 America, artists have been drawn to fear as a theme which has color-coded our anxieties, shaped our politics, produced our wars, and deepened our divisions.

In our version of the day that will live in infamy, fear expressed through social conflicts and allegories of wonderful but unachievable neat resolutions drive the plots of two of the most engaging novelistic works addressing post-9/11 America: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (published 2008) and Amy Waldman’s new novel The Submission.

And the same notions drive many of the songs of the single best exploration of nameless fear in popular music of the last decade, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. On that recording, the fear is omnipresent and real, but unexplained and without a specific referent except that the tide is high, and it’s rising still/And I don’t want to see it at my windowsill.

“I’ve heard it said that the indiscriminate nature of the attack transformed all of us on that island into victims of attempted murder, but I’m not at all sure that geographic proximity to the catastrophe confers this status on me or anybody else,” Hans van den Broek, the narrator of Netherland, notes of the fact that on the morning of 9/11 in midtown Manhattan he watched televised images of the attack just as he would have done if he were in Madagascar. It’s the same observation about the mediated sensations of mass tragedy and mourning that Don DeLillo, our best novelist of “nameless fear,” would have made.

One’s interpretation here all depends on what the meaning of it is. It’s a nameless it that drives the lyrical prose of Netherland, as well, and that it compels the actions of many of the characters who step out of real life and from the green rooms of cable talk shows and into the pages of The Submission

From different ends of the 9/1l literary shelf, Joseph O’Neill’s and Amy Waldman’s novels explore the taste of fear and foreboding after 9/11, combined with a sense that the sheer everydayness of life and the foibles of human nature survive the most devastating of attacks.

And in both novels, reflecting a generalized American experience of the last decade, actual wars reside elsewhere. They are there to be commented upon, observed, argued about, and watched on the television screen. Of the invasion of Iraq, the oddly passive protagonist in Netherland simply comments “The war started. The baseball season came into view.” Hans, a Dutch oil futures analyst, tries to piece together a life taken apart by the events of 9/11, on the one hand, but more by his own passivity and inability to seize meaning in human relationships, on the other. “Hot” wars abroad scarcely matter.

America’s wars play little direct role in The Submission, either, but provide the indispensable backdrop for a plot exploring America’s conflicted relationship with religious diversity and media hype. The story follows the fortunes of Mohammed Khan (an architect and secular son of a Muslim immigrant from India who goes by the name “Mo” and prefers Chinese takeout food for his meals), the designer of “the submission” which has won the competition for a Ground Zero memorial. When the name of the winner is revealed to the competition committee, all hell breaks loose. From there, the novel follows a cast of recognizable character types, in a manner reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.

In writing The Submission, by her own account, Amy Waldman struggled to make her novel not seem quite so ripped from the headlines, but life kept overtaking her art. When the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy sprang up (a sequence which parallels the response to the revelation of Mohammed Khan’s winning the prize for the Memorial in the novel), she rewrote portions of the plot so that it would not seem quite so plagiarized from real life. She could not do that for Alyssa Spier, the tabloid reporter for a New York Post style paper in the novel. Despite the author’s best effort at satirizing the tabloid press, Spier comes across as a whiter shade of Rupert Murdoch’s pale, unable to match the cellphone-hacking shenanigans of the News of the World crowd.

While these novels take philosophically different approaches, from the most elegant/restrained to the most ripped-from-the-headlines full of action, one truth unites the two: outsiders, immigrants, and the marginalized ultimately understand America and represent it best. In Netherland, the rogue-hero is Chuck Ramkissoon, the cricket-playing and illegal lottery-organizing charming shyster who befriends the drifting upper-class Dutch immigrant banker. Hans van den Breuck believes he can take care of Chuck and his world of dark-skinned West Indian cricket players, who come out of their taxis and their bodegas to engage in cricket matches, but realizes later that “they’d already been looking after me.” Chuck’s dream, presented with gracious humor in the novel, is that the United States cannot fulfill its destiny as a carrier of civilization until it has embraced cricket. Chuck recognizes and wants to mass commercialize (in the form of huge sports stadiums) a renewed British Empire, only with America at the helm, even as he recognizes that cricket in America is underwritten by “the same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played anywhere—longings concerned with horizons and potentials signed or hallucinated and in any event lost long ago.” Cricket is their attempt to impose a religious order – one of clearly defined rules, rituals, and grace – on a turbulent America whose moves and motivations cannot be grasped or controlled.

Chuck is also the immigrant on the make, combining inspiring dreams with the gritty reality of running a shady lottery in his community on the side, the side job which leads to his being killed and body dumped in the river. By that point, the endpoint of the story which begins the novel, Hans has rejoined his wife in London, and in trying to explain Chuck to her unfolds the story which frames the novel. In replaying his relationship with his family, with America before and after 9/11, and with the cricket crew gathered around the central character of Chuck, he realizes that “we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.”

Both Netherland and The Submission give voice, in their stylistically contrasting ways, to the uglier underside of the entire decade since 9/11—the vast machinery of war blithely unleashed, the maddening car-alarm sirening of cable news, the hypocrisies both big and small of individual daily lives, the sensation-hungry press. O’Neill’s more lyrical, poetic prose expresses this best: “The rinsed taxis, hissing over flesh slush, shone like grapefruits; bit if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.”

The way that fears from contending places in the social fabric feed on each other, indeed need each other, is chronicled in journalistically skillful sociological detail in The Submission

The novelist takes satiric swipes at the recognizable character-types who depend on fear to maximize their own media exposure, but ultimately takes seriously the socially destructive role of nameless fears.Waldman chronicles the doings of everyone from obnoxious “headscarf pullers” harassing Muslim women, to high-society philanthropists who just want us all to get along, to organizers of media-ready groups such as Save America from Islam, to equally media-ready spokesmen of groups such as the Muslim American Coordinating Council, which uses the Memorial competition in the novel to promote its own interests. In the midst of the media hubbub, the original point of everything – the geometrically patterned garden that was to memorialize the victims of that day – is lost in a swirl of accusations that the design is a “martyr’s paradise” meant as a dog-whistle to jihadis across the world. Again, while the novel is meant to be parody, its painful humor in depicting what happens to Mo’s design seems more true to life than the real-life parody of the “9/11 Mosque” fiasco. In both cases, though, FDR’s warning against “nameless, unreasoning fear” seems swamped by the manipulations of fear by our media culture, and the ways those fears overtake even those who seek to poo-poo their power.

As the novel progresses, the real heroine emerges, the parallel (in part) in The Submission to Chuck in Netherland. In The Submission, it is Asma, a Bangladeshi woman and New York undocumented immigrant whose janitor husband had been crushed in the collapse of the Towers, and who later, after barely receiving acknowledgement and compensation for her husband’s death, realizes quietly that “there was no one to speak for her husband, for the army of workers who cleaned and cooked and bowed and scraped and when the day came died as if it were just another way to please . . . she couldn’t shake the sense . . . that history had only narrowly made room for him.” Asma’s encounter with her personal tragedy, losing her husband when the towers fell, and with being among the “uncounted” among the victims afterwards, shook her: “Faith for her had always been something like an indestructible building. Now she had spotted a loose brick whose removal could topple the whole structure, and her hand hovered near it, tempted, afraid.”

And yet, her entire experience makes her not fearful (even though she has every reason to be the most fearful of all, as the hand of the state investigates the details of her life and status), but the most bold in defense of Mohammed Khan’s submission for the Memorial of a geometrically patterned garden, with tufts of steel sticking up as tree branches in the center. At a media-made event in which “the families” can praise, vent rage at, or otherwise comment on the submission, Asma states her truths most simply and directly, chastising those who would fear fear itself: “The gardens of paradise are for men like my husband, who never hurt anyone. . . I think a garden is right . . . because that is what America is—all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together. How can you pretend we and our traditions are not part of this place.”

Asma’s plea makes her a media celebrity, which exacts a heavy price. But hers is the voice that stays with the reader after the nonstop cultural chatter parodied in the novel finally fades to black.

The characters portrayed by Waldman ultimately build walls rather than gardens. They suggest the viscerally religious response towards exclusion and suspicion, a powerful force in American religious and political history. But Asma’s dignity through her tragedy suggests that America’s diverse religious and cultural fabric is too interwoven ever to be pull apart by the cultural tug-of-war fueled in part by the well-funded Islamaphobic kulturkampf of the nativist right. That’s a message of hope coming from a novel which deploys satiric characterizations of nameless fear to devastating effect.

Postscript: And it's a hope enacted by the myriad interfaith groups, conversations, meetings, and public forums which have happened over the last decade. Amy Sullivan has noted the importance of understanding religion in a post 9/11 world. Given the subject of this blog that is probably preaching to the converted, but after thinking through Amy Waldman's novel of ideas, that work seems more important than ever.

Fear and Loathing in Post 9/11 America: Amy Waldman's The Submission

Paul Harvey

Amy Waldman's new novel The Submission has hit the bookstore and amazon shelves at our moment of national reflection on the 9/11 anniversary. The book has been reviewed many places, too many to list here, and Maureen Corrigan glowingly reviewed the work today on Fresh Air, calling it a good candidate for America's 9/11 novel (beating out, in her mind, some other serious contenders by the likes of Don Delillo and Jonathan Foer).

I have written a piece about the novel, which will appear soon either here or elsewhere (will link to it or post it shortly). In the meantime, Haroon Moghul has conducted an insightful interview with the author and posted it over at Religion Dispatches.

The novel, in case you haven't seen or heard about it yet, follows the story of a competition for submissions to design the 9/11 memorial, two years after the day. When the winner's name is revealed -- Mohammed Khan -- all hell breaks loose, and the rest of the novel follows the story of all the contending passions, both real and media-made, which we've witnessed over the last several years. The novel certainly functions as social satire, as it intends to do, but as the book progresses there are many powerful passages which transcend the genre and give voice to powerful emotions in both the characters and the reader. The work asks difficult questions and doesn't provide any easy answers.

Here's a brief excerpt from the interview, and then follow the rest at the break. My own thoughts on the book (as well as on another very different take on post 9/11 New York, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland) will be posted soon.

The novel seems to intertwine tragedy and how we remember tragedy. It’s a very American story, obviously—but the aftermath of September 11 has affected the whole world. Do you think audiences outside America can connect with your story?

I do. As you say, what happened to America has affected so much of the rest of the world—both because of America’s response, and because of the debates about and within Islam that September 11 prompted. America, and the ideals it’s meant to represent, obviously cast a disproportionate shadow globally, and even though the novel is a fictional portrait of the aftermath of 9/11, I think it will resonate with all of the non-Americans who have followed the real-life version.

And many of the novel’s questions are universal: how do you decide what you believe, and how do you act on that? How do you balance loyalty to the dead and the living, to family and country, and to yourself? How do private histories or personal insecurities shape public dramas—and thus the course of history? The Submission is about all of that.

Continue reading here . . .

Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010: Your Top 10 List

Welcome back to our contributor to Everett Hamner, who's been goofing around doing research and teaching at Western Illinois instead of spending time on the all-important business of blogging. Below are his thoughts on ten recent pieces of American literature, of all genres, which show the vitality of religion in American literary culture. Feel free to add your own suggestions for a top ten list in the comments section.

Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010
by Everett Hamner

As one of the literary types haunting this blog, and in small recompense for all I learned about American religious history from my just-graduated Young Scholars in American Religion cohort, I thought some of you might appreciate these recommendations of 21^st-century novels and graphic narratives to teach, reference, or just enjoy. Beyond their individual quality, my only criteria for inclusion was that they significantly engage religious questions and that they had not been discussed before at Religion in American History. The resulting list is neither exhaustive nor even my own “top ten.” But it is relevant and eclectic, featuring postmodern doorstoppers and plot-driven page-turners, science fiction and realism, with main characters ranging from African American Protestants to a Catholic-Islamic-Hindu syncretist. I hope many of you discover something intriguing.

1) E. L. Doctorow, City of God (2000). The back cover promises “a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a Lower East Side church only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue.” That just scratches the surface. This postmodern collage of literary forms, including emails, jazz lyrics, free verse, and prayers, is definitely about something missing, but not so much the cross as the God presumed to have hung upon it. Yet this is not merely another expression of Dover Beachian despair. Featuring dark matter and quantum physics, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, Tillichian theology and “Evolutionary Judaism,” and early Christianity and modern filmmaking, the novel is worthy of its namesake. As an early passage has it, “That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated … is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.” A.

2. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001). Martel’s novel is one of only a couple on this list that is neither by an American writer nor about American religion. Instead its settings are India, Mexico, Canada, and most of all, the Pacific Ocean. At one level, this is a fairly simple adolescent adventure story, a tale of shipwreck and survival. The twist is that the ship in question was carrying a zoo, so Pi’s lifeboat companions include an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger. Too fantastic, you say? Then let me assure you that this half-comedic narrative is framed so as to render the entire novel a study in epistemology and an inquiry into the nature of fiction, allegory, and metaphor. Oh, and because the main character believes that “religion is about our dignity, not our depravity,” he assumes that a loving God won’t mind if a growing boy is simultaneously a pious Catholic, Muslim, and Hindu … even if he doesn’t tell his priest, imam, or pandit. Pluralism, anyone? A-.

3) Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, and José Marzán, Jr. Y: The Last Man (2002-08).

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative is thriving in the new millennium, and I don’t just mean Left Behind. Now collected in book form, this widely-acclaimed comic series will turn off some with its graphic violence and sexuality, but those who tackle it will be rewarded with much more to ponder than the average superhero tale. Utilizing a premise going back to Mary Shelley, this globetrotting narrative interrogates potential mutations of feminism, homophobia, racism, genetic engineering, US nationalism, global terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. True to the genre, there is plenty of hyperbole, special effects, and tongue-in-cheek humor, but these lush panels are as consistently evocative as the plot is relevant. Surgeon General Warning: strangely addictive. B+.

4) Joe Sacco, Palestine (2002). And now for something intensely historical, just to counterbalance the colorful future of that last entry. Joe Sacco does in-depth reporting through immersing himself in the world’s least stable environs. Rather than a feature in The New York Times Magazine, however, the result is graphic narrative. This account of two months in the Occupied Territories in 1991-92 is an effort to uncover the personal dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. There are certainly references to larger-scale political maneuvering, but the core of this work is its on-the-ground tales, which come from both sides of the fences. The wounds of rock-flinging juvenile operatives, the devastation of a neighborhood’s olive trees (and thus some residents’ primary sources of income), the torture of political prisoners, women’s feelings about the hijab, and the obliviousness of Western tourists … material religion, indeed. B+.

5) Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2003). Richard Powers is best known for his mastery of scientific detail and his insights about human responses to new technologies. Like his stellar National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2005), this novel foregrounds evolution,but here the transformations are primarily of music, race, and religion. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the civil rights movement and its legacy, this is not only a 600+ page meditation on jazz, opera, and classical music, but a compelling argument about America’s need to embrace racial hybridity, confront class divisions, and search deeper than religious labels. With a Jewish immigrant father and an African American mother, the brothers who are the novel’s main characters face the same sort of dilemmas observed by their father decades earlier. Among them: “If I want to get ahead, I must become a Christian. But if I use Christianity to get ahead, I lose my soul!” A-.

6) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). “Faulkner without the pretension,” I thought upon reading Gilead’s last sentence. The Pulitzer selection committee must have felt similarly, and among these recommendations, Robinson’s interwoven novels are the most certain to appear on future American literature syllabi. But greatness is only one element of their appeal. If you need antidotes to megachurch spectacles or clergy sex scandals, these quiet works consider far more mundane matters. Very little occurs plot-wise, and even some of the major events take place offstage. What we do get is immense theological depth, attention to ordinary beauties and graces easily overlooked. We find main characters who are largely admirable andindeed wise rural Iowan pastors. Seriously, this is possible. Need more? Well, race plays a major role. And in covering the same events from the two old men’s perspectives, the novels become a single, very successful narrative experiment. They are also full of understated humor, as in this description of a home health care book: “It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus.” Taken as a whole, what Gilead’s narrator says of a verse in the gospels may be what even the most informed readers feel about American Protestantism after finishing these masterpieces: “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completelyignorant of it.” A+.

7) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2007). I debated listing this novel, as I’m not sure it says anything explicit about religion, at least not if defined narrowly. But a single scene from its sparing journey through a barely recognizable, post-apocalyptic American wilderness should be enough to convey the work’s significance. Having walked for days with little to eat, a father and his small son find an underground emergency bunker in the yard of an abandoned home. If the reader has not already accompanied this pair through the bleakness of the preceding hundred pages, the sensory impact of the moment is impossible to fully convey, but suffice it to say that I will never look at a tin of canned fruit the same way. “He turned and looked at the boy crouched above him blinking in the smoke rising up from the lamp and then he descended to the lower steps and sat and held the lamp out. Oh my God, he whispered. Oh my God. What is it Papa? Come down. Oh my God. Come down. Crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. […] He held his forehead in his hand. Oh my God, he said. He looked back at the boy. It’s all right, he said. Come down. Papa? Come down. Come down and see.” A-.

8) Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2010). Speaking of food, here is one of the best science fiction novels of the decade, and the problem here is calories. Imagining a twenty-third century in which international oil obsessions have given way to scarcities of food production, the setting and artificial beings involved are remindful of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, but the setting is Thailand. As in Life of Pi, the religion here is syncretistic, but the strange combinations in play—Buddhists overlapping with Grahamites, with stories about “Noah Bodhisattva, who saved all the animals and trees and flowers on his great bamboo raft and helped them cross the waters”—are taken for granted. This is a compelling contribution to the cyberpunk tradition that invites readers to extrapolate from current religious, ethnic, and global economic tensions and then to reinvest in that future’s history. B+.

9) Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting … (2010). Ralph Ellison worked for more than forty years on his follow-up to Invisible Man, but never could bring himself to finish. The reasons were legion, and have recently been thoroughly explored in Adam Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress and Arnold Rampersad’s biography. Scholars of race and American literature are well aware of this struggle, but as I will likely argue in a future essay, those who study American religion should be, too. This 1100-page volume contains a wealth of archival material painstakingly organized and introduced by Bradley and John F. Callahan, including the most coherent 300+ pages of the second novel (which were originally published in 1999 as Juneteenth). Such an unfinished monstrosity may prove too massive for some to engage, but be not afraid: it includes many bite-sized excerpts that deal powerfully with civil religion, African American Protestantism, and the increasingly hybrid religious realities evident at the turn of the millennium. See especially the eight excerpts published by Ellison during his lifetime that appear at the volume’s conclusion. A-.

10) Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010). I’m cheating with this one, as I just discovered it myself and am only a hundred pages in. Given the praise garnered elsewhere, though, that’s enough to recommend it. With the 36 chapters receiving such titles as “The Argument from the Improbable Self” and “The Argument from the Irrepressible Past,” philosophers and theoretically-oriented historians of religion and science may be most immediately attracted, but this is compelling reading for anyone in the humanities whose afternoons are commonly devoted to faculty meetings and university lectures. Although several main characters are unapologetically brilliant, Goldstein holds nothing back in critiquing the posturing and petty divisions that characterize too much of academic life. Meanwhile, the novel’s equally serious and humorous reflections on the relationship of faith and knowledge and on modern dynamics of religion and secularism suggest an ear very close to the ground. A-, so far.

"The change is not in itself, but in them"

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Look out at that ocean, that sky, the fish, the birds, wild and wicked out in the chaos. Is there a god that can deliver us from the chaos of nature?”

--Reverend Carlton in the film Glory at Sea

This is an appropriate question to ask on a day when the Army Corps of Engineers opens a floodway that will displace at least 2,500 people, devastate thousands of acres of farmland, and destroy hundreds of homes and businesses in order to avoid the same tragedy in more populated areas like Baton Rouge (my home) and New Orleans.

Morganza Floodway (under normal conditions)

Morganza Floodway (1973)

Glory at Sea, according to its creators, is a 30-minute film about "a group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades [who] build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea."

Glory At Sea! from Court 13 on Vimeo.

From my perspective, Glory at Sea is a film about religion. It is about living in a broken world, seeking order in chaos, and finding meaning in suffering. It is about a people in exile, a people lost at sea, a people without a home. Recently, students in my “Religion in Louisiana” course watched the film and wrote an essay relating its themes to several other books about life in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta, including Brenda Marie Osbey's collection of poems All Saints, Tennessee Williams’ play Vieux Carré, and William Alexander Percy’s autobiography Lanterns on the Levee. They hated me for it. But they also got it.

What we’re watching along the Mississippi River is indeed about the chaos of nature, but it’s the kind that comes when we engineer nature in order to delivery us from chaos. William Alexander Percy knew a little something about the Mississippi River when he wrote, “The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey. As a thing used by men it has changed: the change is not in itself, but in them.”

Ferocious Morality and the Infinite Jest of Solitude: Two Etudes on David Foster Wallace

Paul Harvey

By chance a couple of fine pieces about David Foster Wallace passed my way over the past few days; and more than just about Wallace (and appropriate for the wide-ranging and philosophical/quasi-religious writer), they suggested to me an awful lot to reflect on about the nature of love, companionship, solitude, and the “endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.”

First is David Masciotra’s “The Ferocious Morality of David Foster Wallace,” at popmatters.com (HT Scott Poole). The first part of this essay focuses on Wallace’s short non-fiction essays, where I have connected with him most, the fiction being just a little too bewildering for me to take in:

Wallace examines how the entertainment ethic is corrosive and destructive to an important, and perhaps sacred, part of the human experience. He did it with subtlety, humor, and complex insight. He wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone preacher, but it’s impossible to read [his essays] . . . without mourning the damage inflicted on sexuality, animal rights, and politics by the popular belief that nothing is intrinsically important, that nothing is sacred, and that everything is fair game for measurement according to the market-driven calculation of the lowest common denominator in the entertainment for entertainment’s sake world of decision-making.

Wallace’s application and assignment of dignity was the polar opposite of big business, big government, and big media. The bathroom attendant’s life [in a short story collection] was boring, inglorious, and at times, humiliating, but it might benefit us to consider how his life may be more respectable that that of a brilliant millionaire. It’s a very Christ-like worldview that places someone that everyone walks by in a room built to hold and deposit human waste at the moral center and a contemporary superstar at the periphery.

But an essay that struck me with tremendous force is the piece by Jonathan Franzen in last week’s New Yorker, “Farther Away: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude" (the link is just a short summary and a few nice quotes; you'll need to get the mag. to read the whole).

I’m not particularly a Franzen fan or follower, so I expected to skim this particular piece, be a bit amused and annoyed as I often am by his shorter pieces, and then move on, little affected one way or another.

Instead, I was moved, nearly to tears, by Franzen’s tale of secluding himself on the island far off the coast of Chile which inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. What appears at first to be a light New Yorker comic adventure tale (novelist meets wilderness, pratfalls ensue, wilderness wins, novelist learns that wilderness not all cracked up to be) soon leads to some fascinating explorations of the origins of the novel, and the novel’s connections to both psychological solitude and group entertainment – “the self had become an island, and now, it seemed the island was becoming the world.” These reflections then take Franzen to grappling with his unresolved feelings and anger over how and why his novelist-friend Wallace “killed himself in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most.” Somehow, the three tales of physical, historical, and psychological solitude come together into a powerful whole.

Franzen makes sense of Wallace’s final act in part through thinking about the role of the devil in The Screwtape Letters (which, according to Franzen, was one of Wallace’s favorite works, a surprise to me), and also “The Grand Inquisitor” of Dostoevsky. Only the kinds of internal dialogues carried on by the part of Wallace that Franzen “distrusted” could have taken “the person away from us and made him into a very public legend”; and only “in the act of making that legend Wallace could satisfy his own self-loathing “hunger for career advantage”; and yet, “because it would represent a capitulation to the side of himself that his embattled better side perceived as evil,” the act further confirmed “the justice of his death sentence.” The terrible irony was that “to the extent that each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island . . . we gratefully seized on each new dispatch from that farthest-away island that was David,” even despite the “near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love,” replaced instead by “characters scheming to appear loving.”

The first piece is a fine exploration of how, in Wallace's view, "everyone serves something" (his take on Bob Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody."). The second piece chilled and moved me more than anything I've read this year, or just about in any year. Franzen's reflections on the part of his friend that he distrusted made me remember, sadly, these sentences, from a 2008 commencement address of Wallace's which got widely reprinted:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Random Notes from the Religion Merry-Go-Round

Paul Harvey

The merry-go-round, or the tilt-a-whirl, of American religion keeps going. Just a little taste of it, from today's Times:

An entrepreneur follows in the model of JDate, the Jewish speed dating service, with his version of Muslim Speed-Dating:

At intermission, about half of the participants went to a back room to offer their prayers. A 29-year-old woman named Maria, who works as an art director for a major television channel, went to her parents to complain that some of her “dates” did not know what an art director was. “Some of the men are very removed from this culture, even though they live here,” she said. “I need a drink,” said one exhausted bachelor. He did not mean Kool-Aid.

Every college town (in this one it's Gainesville) is heaven for believers in The Gospel of Anarchy:

Taylor’s noble goal in “The Gospel of Anarchy” is to remind those of us long past our own difficult youths of the grace and beauty to be found even in a “bunch of drunkpunks in the armpit of Florida.

In House of Prayer No. 2, the southern writer Mark Richard goes all Apostle on us:

But maybe darkness is what Richard is after, the necessary prologue to the spiritual awakening that occupies the end of his book. Again, he is laconic about the epiphany; we learn simply that while he is walking alone in the Tennessee woods, he gets “the call to ministry.” After a few thwarted attempts to enroll in a seminary, he stumbles on an unexpected outlet for “this thing that has been placed on” his

heart: his Cajun, lapsed-Catholic mother has joined a black Pentecostal church in his hometown, and they need a new building. Richard finds himself deeply involved in making this a reality, holding regular consultations with the pastor, buying bricks and shingles and tools, ordering food for the convicts doing the construction. His story of how the House of Prayer No. 2 gets built — despite financial obstacles and legal setbacks, and with the help of multiple small miracles along the way — becomes his means of testifying, and it’s a powerful one. When the church is close to completion and the pastor’s elderly mother “lays her hand on your shoulder, and you, at last, are slain in the spirit,” I felt a shiver pass through my body, and suddenly the memoir’s reticence, its desultory movement, its use of second person, revealed their purpose to me. To understand the mystery of faith, you cannot be told it; you must experience it yourself.

And finally, there's a girl in New York City who calls herself a human trampoline, and of course there's a church specializing in the BOD4GOD:

New York may lag behind the rest of the country in the language of evangelical self-help, but when it comes to fitness obsession, surely few cities can touch us. Work out more rigorously, work out more gently; be proud of your body, be ashamed of your body. Whatever the message, New Yorkers have peddled it, consumed it, metabolized it and excreted it a thousand times over.

It’s surprising, then, that so few have thought to merge the discourse of God and the discourse of bod. Linking the two has a number of strategic advantages over the standard “look better in a bikini” sales pitch — most notably the chance for followers to outsource their motivation to a higher power.

It’s also an opportunity for the church to prove its value in something concrete — ounces and pounds — rather than the more intangible calculus of spiritual progress.

Ya'll be careful out there.

God-Fearing and Free: Reviews of a Cultural History of the Cold War.

Paul Harvey

A brief note, and a couple of excellent contrasting reviews, of a new book sure to draw a lot of attention: Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War, just out with Harvard U. Press.

This isn't your father's Cold War book, nor a foreign policy/diplomatic history such as Melvyn Leffler's For the Soul of Mankind. Nor it is one of those "all those crazy duck-and-cover drills, my weren't those funny" books -- not that I dislike those books, and students love them, but that territory has been covered. Rather, this is a searching cultural history of American thought and culture during the Cold War, focusing especially on the liberal elite Cold Warriors who provided much of the discourse from that period.

The link above takes you to a description, table of contents, etc. for the book. Here, I wanted to call your attention to two thoughtful reviews; both praise the achievements of the book, but the first provides some critical reflections and dissent.

Molly Worthen, " 'Counter-Modernism' and Cold War America," extensively reviews the volume, finds much to like, but dissents from portions of what she calls a "learned but highly theoretical intellectual history," one she finds too detached from the real world of policymakers.

By contrast, in The New Republic's online book review section The Book, Michael Kimmage finds God-Fearing and Free a "brilliant and original work of scholarship" in the best tradition of American Studies -- in other words, he likes most precisely what Worthen finds most problematic. The book discusses at considerable length the theme of "innocence," one a staple of American studies scholarship and one revived here to great effect.

I can't wait to dig into this text in more detail; in the interim, these two thoughtful reviews provide much food for thought.