Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Notes: Francine Witte, “Cold June”


The men and women who populate Cold June, Francine Witte’s new flash fiction chapbook, don’t have much time. They do desperate, magical, outrageous things to bridge the all-too-ordinary distances between them, the indifference of lovers and the clumsiness of communication. The rare happy marriage can almost survive the world’s end, it seems, whereas for many others, even a trip to outer space won’t rekindle the fire. This chapbook won the 2010 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award from RopeWalk Press.

Visit Francine’s website to find out about her other poetry and fiction collections. She kindly shares two stories from Cold June below.

Arm

Eunice felt worthless, and so she put her arm up for auction on EBay. That way, she could find out her compartmental value, at least. She imagined there must be someone who would need an arm or want or an arm or anyway, not mind an arm. But to be safe, she would keep the arm attached until she had a bidder.

She asked her friend, Hank, to take the picture.

“The arm is still on you,” he said, a bit stupidly. Hank was balloony and humid and was always popping the buttons off his shirts. This really annoyed Eunice, and she kept meaning to end their friendship, but that would leave her with no one.

“Well,” Eunice said, “take the picture anyway, and we can always crop out the non-arm part of me.” Then, she dressed up the arm in tinkly bracelets and painted on a fake tattoo. She turned on the lamp, knelt at the foot of the bed, and sprawled the arm across a glittery, puffed-up pillow. That’s when she looked at Hank’s face, the drool on his mouth corners, the need in his eyes. “I’ve never seen anything more lovely,” he stammered. “It’s like a Cleopatra snake or something.”

“Would you like to place a bid?” Eunice cooed, undulating the arm in the small moon of light from the bedroom lamp.

“I’ll do even better,” Hank said. “I’d like to marry that arm.”

Eunice thought for a moment, imagining the two of them at the altar, Hank in a tux, wobbly man-penguin, and the arm next to him on the floor in bridal white.

“Of course, I’d need the rest of you to keep the arm from leaving me in the middle of the night.”

Eunice looked at Hank, who was looking at her arm in a way he had never looked at any other part of her. But still, it was something. And when Hank leaned over to kiss the arm, and popped every single one of his buttons, somehow it didn’t bother Eunice all that much anymore.

****

The Way the Vase Got Broken

Was the cat. First, he did his little purr thing, followed by his sinewy arch thing. This was all topped off by his jump thing and then that, was just that.

My wife is one of those women who could live without a vase, but not without a cat, so she didn’t yell in his guilty, Cheshire face.

Sometimes, I’m sure she likes the cat more than she likes me. I know I could never get away with breaking her vase just like that. And I’m also pretty sure that if somehow, this cat were a human cat and not a cat cat, she would divorce me and marry him.

But, in the end, we get along fine, with the cat, but no vase. Though on Valentine’s Day, when I bring her roses, she accuses me of trying to make the cat look bad.

“Swallow” Gets Downright Eucharistic on Logic’s Ass


Martha Rzadkowolsky-Raoli has written a fantastic review of my chapbook Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) for the Ampersand Books website. She’s reverse-engineered these rather difficult and prickly poems to make clear the theology behind them. The miracle of writing: when our readers mirror back to us more than we consciously realized we had said. I wrote Swallow by mad intuition, but an astute reader finds “method in it” after all. Some highlights:

Jendi Reiter created a tidy poetry book in which swallow means everything you can expect swallow to mean. She exhausts the word; its mashed remains a mix of cow meat, desire, intestines, bird. If you read the book, and you should, you’ll experience the beating of the word. Swallow. How else to learn something new ?(about the parameters of language) — – something only poetry can do, and these poems do it….

****

…By suggesting disparate contexts, these aphorisms maintain a collaged-world view. I like Reiter’s objection to a poetics bound by singular points of view. I like when word-artists comply with the rules of our new universe (a mess of sources coming at you from everywhere: billboards, email, the doorman). This kind of work feels real….

****

…Reiter’s rhetorical tricks can remind me of the riddle-ish catechism I was taught. The relationship between premises in these poems get downright eucharistic on logic’s ass. Mysterious pronouncements sound as zany as any church stories of body-magic: The body jesus lived in, the jesus body that is the eucharist, and the jesus body that you put into your body….


Read the whole review here.

You know you want it now:


Charles W. Pratt: “Evening Meditation in a Cathedral Town”


Charles W. Pratt’s From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New & Selected Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2010) is the most delightful poetry collection I’ve read this year, and I read many. The comparison that first springs to mind is Richard Wilbur, as both poets have more than ordinary gifts for writing formal verse that is light-footed, elegant, and full of surprises. Think of a Fred Astaire dance routine, or a Bach minuet: the underlying order is there, but never belabored on the surface. There’s no egotism or careerism in Pratt’s displays of skill. Not that I have anything against “confessional” poetry, but it’s also refreshing to read an author who echoes an earlier age, when poems could be reticent about personal details yet full of emotion.

From the Box… was the first volume in Hobblebush Books’ Granite State Poetry Series, which publishes authors with a connection to New Hampshire. Many of Pratt’s poems concern his work as an apple-grower, describing the farming life with humor, wistfulness, and reverence. There are also poems of family life, European travel, meditations on aging and and the mystery that lies beyond.

The poem below is reprinted by permission. This one stood out for me because of the mood, delicately balanced between modern empiricism and timeless wonder, and the intricate pattern of the rhymes. Note the deft double meaning of the closing line.

EVENING MEDITATION IN A CATHEDRAL TOWN

Transparent on transparency,
A lacewing on the windowpane.
Pale green traceries of vein
In the lancets of its wings sustain
A membrane too fine for the eye.
As tranquil on the mystery
Of glass as if taught by its wings
How to put faith in invisible things,
In slow sweeps back and forth it swings
Its frail antennae thoughtfully,
Like compasses that leave no mark:
Geometers imagining the arc.

In the cathedral treasury
I’ve gazed, unmoved, at the Virgin’s shift,
Draped like dead insect wings—enough,
The histories repeat, to lift
That heap of masonry so high.
Others believed in it; now I
Where the great stained windows raise
Their winged parabolas of praise
Day after day can bring to graze,
Sheepish, my agnostic eye.
Such precious straining of the light
Surprises stone and souls of stone to flight.

Small concentration of the evening air,
Lacewing, I look through you and glass to where
Beyond the fields the late sun condescends
To denseness, and its true brightness bends
And bursts to beauty where the transparent ends.

Two Poems by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal


Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s poetry chapbook Facing Home has just been released by Finishing Line Press. As the title suggests, these frank and emotionally charged poems are about facing memories of the home we grew up in, as well as the homes that we as adults have made, broken, and re-formed. Rosenthal’s accessible writing style balances humor, anger, and compassion. She employs enough specific details from her own life to make the memories feel real, while staying focused on universal themes that will resonate with many readers. Some of her strongest work is about the complex feelings involved in caring for elderly parents who were emotionally unavailable to her as a child.

I chose the poems below for reprinting, with her permission. The extended metaphor of the porcupine is clever in its own right, but gains additional significance in the context of the more straightforwardly autobiographical poems–a sign of a well-constructed collection. As for “Zinnias”, I loved how she made the colors and textures of the scene come to life. My grandmother also slipcovered the good furniture in her Lower East Side apartment, and she also had a canary who died prematurely from the heat of the kitchen, though it wasn’t for lack of love–I’m told she let the little fellow fly all around the house, pooping where he wished!

Contemplating Caring for a Porcupine

A roof over its head, easily done.
Nurturing, quite another story.

Bathing — only with a long hose.
As for mealtime — the prickly thing

jumping up and down, impatient —
what protection would repel prick of quill?

What if the rascal was inclined to make
sport of that, then hide the mischief?

Get angry and chance an antsy porcupine
turning combative? Pay dearly for that;

or, if the critter contrite, savor the moment?
Or, having fed the robust rodent,

if it yelps for more but is on a diet,
what would distract? A game

of Hide and Seek might, though if
the quill ball should turn up missing,

how to know it would fare well, and
what angst to bear if the poor thing

was found to have been the dinner
of some known predator — when

all the poor porcupine wanted was more gruel,
and all I ever wanted was to care for it?

****

I Remember the Zinnias,

autumnal hues with bee-magnet centers.
In the planting, pearls of satisfaction
beaded Mother’s cheeks, made her glow
head to toe. Each summer, till first frost,
zinnias fringed the pathway to
the side door by our kitchen.

Mother loved her zinnias, their color rich
contrast to the dusty-rose brocade sofa,
aqua cut-velvet of Father’s chair —
both bound in clear-plastic slipcovers
that, in summer, made the backs
of our thighs stick to our seats.

When her new dining set arrived, keen
to keep it pristine, Mother moved Lucky,
my beloved canary, to the kitchen, to roost
inches from pot roasts simmering, the window
nearby rarely open — and, child I was,
I didn’t protest on my bird’s behalf.

Weeks later, just back from school,
I learned that Lucky had died
and Mother had given his cage away.
She claimed to have buried him
in her tomato patch, just feet
from her prized zinnias.

Book Notes: Carol Smallwood, “Lily’s Odyssey”


In Carol Smallwood’s novel Lily’s Odyssey (All Things That Matter Press, 2010), a retired scholar in a working-class Midwestern town struggles to process her memories of childhood incest and unravel its effects on her psyche.

This book’s strengths are its sharp characterization of people and cultural settings, and the connections it draws between domestic abuse and sexist institutions that conspire to keep it secret. On her long journey to claim her truth, the narrator must rethink not only her family’s official storyline of virtue and vice, but the messages from religious authorities and psychologists who dismiss a woman’s perspective. Metaphors from her scientific research give her a creative way to resist. This book shows how trauma can give birth to an artist’s intellect that notices and questions human behavior.

While I understand that the nonchronological structure is meant to show how traumatic memories bleed into the present, I personally wished Smallwood had thrown in a few more clues to indicate where we are on the timeline when a new scene begins. By the time I finished the book, I had figured out all the essential information, but orienting myself was sometimes distracting. On the other hand, perhaps that’s the effect she was going for. Being inside Lily’s head is the experience of an incisive mind condemned to spend most of its energy flailing around in a fog.

This review by Jan Siebold shares some more of the book’s highlights. Jan Siebold, a school library media specialist in East Aurora, New York since 1977, received her MLS from the University of Buffalo. Jan has served as NYLA Secretary, and received the NYLA/SLMS Cultural Media Award in 1992. She is the author of Rope Burn (Albert Whitman, 1998), Doing Time Online (Albert Whitman, 2002) and My Nights at the Improv (Albert Whitman, 2005), three middle grade novels on numerous award lists.

Some authors use the word “odyssey” to simply represent a journey or a passage of time. In Lily’s Odyssey author Carol Smallwood takes a more literal approach. Just as Odysseus spends years making his way home after the Trojan War, Lily struggles to find her true home in the world.

She has encountered her share of cannibals, lotus-eaters, sirens and monsters along the way, but it is her abusive Uncle Walt and his Cyclopic wife Hester (who turned her one good eye away from the incestuous situation years ago) that have haunted Lily’s thoughts and dreams since childhood.

Smallwood’s Homer-like use of a nonlinear plot is well-suited to the story since Lily’s journey is rather like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle. With intelligence and humor Lily navigates the passages of her life which include marriage, motherhood, psychotherapy and education. She even spends time in Ithaca while working on a Master’s Degree in Geology. In fact, geological references are abundant as Lily explores her lifelong fascination with the formation of the earth and her place on it. Readers can feel Lily’s sense of frustration at the ever-shifting underground plates that prevent her from finding solid footing.

Orphaned at an early age and sent to live with her aunt and uncle, Lily later explores her obsession about abandoned animals and plants, and eventually discovers its root in her childhood. What may seem obvious to the reader is not as easily seen by Lily,
whose vision of the past has been obscured by the trauma of abuse, insensitivity and denial.

The book begins with the death of Uncle Walt and Lily’s return to the house where she had spent her childhood. It is there that Lily begins to think about reinventing herself without the existence of Uncle Walt in her life.

The author’s use of imagery is at times stunning. “I heard the train whistle. I saw myself as a bird following the train as it wound its way through the landscape, leaving only smoke as evidence that it had passed.” Referring to her aunt, Lily thinks about “Tulips closed as tightly as Aunt Hester’s lips.”

Smallwood’s many cultural, historical, scientific and religious references are a nod to her readers’ awareness, intelligence and curiosity. They elevate the story and allow us to discover more about Lily’s world and our own.

On a basic level the reader can relate to Lily’s awkward attempts at relationships, and to her wickedly funny observations about people. We cheer for Lily as she leaves behind her dismissive husband Cal, the lecherous Dr. Schackmann and other toxic people whom she encounters. We understand as she questions the tenets that were instilled during her strict Catholic upbringing, including “the duties and sufferings of women as wives.” We yearn for Lily to find the illumination and peace of mind that she seeks.

In a particularly vulnerable moment Lily pens a letter to God. In the letter she writes, “Women need new paths. To find our way out of the old labyrinths requires more than one lifetime.”

Through Lily’s Odyssey, Carol Smallwood gives us hope that one lifetime might be enough for Lily and others to find their way.


Find out more about Carol Smallwood’s other writing and editing projects here. She is the editor of numerous anthologies about librarians, library science, and women’s writing careers.

Sad Comics for Grownups


The acquisitions staff at our local library shares my passion for graphic novels. The term is a bit of a misnomer because many books in this genre aren’t “novels” at all–they’re nonfiction or collections of short pieces–but it sounds better than “comic books your kids wouldn’t understand”. Below, a brief roundup of some of my latest reading.

R. Sikoryak’s inventive and darkly funny Masterpiece Comics mashes up the plots of literary classics with the visual style of well-known comic strips. This could easily have been a one-joke wonder, but Sikorsky’s thoughtful pairings give this slim volume an unexpected depth. Reading it, you realize that Charlie Brown actually does have a lot in common with Kafka’s Gregor Samsa; ditto for Beavis and Butthead and the protagonists of Waiting for Godot. You come away appreciating the existential sadness under comics’ forced jollity and limited range of expression, as well as the slam-bang action and excitement buried inside these books we treat so reverently. Maybe high school boys would crack open Wuthering Heights if they read Sikorsky’s “Tales from the Crypt” version first.

The early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman is often quoted as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Seeking an alternative to my feminist friends’ grim suspiciousness of popular culture and fashion, I picked up Sharon Rudahl’s cartoon biography of Goldman, A Dangerous Woman. The book definitely made me want to learn more about Goldman, a feisty and life-affirming woman who put herself at risk to improve the lives of prisoners, prostitutes, and other marginalized people. However, I was a bit disappointed by the presentation. The visual elements didn’t interact dynamically with the text, feeling more like illustrated summaries than true scenes. Since Rudahl relies mainly on Goldman’s own account of her life, the book always casts her actions in a positive light, glossing over difficult moral questions like the anarchists’ use of violence against civilians. A Dangerous Woman is an intriguing introduction to the subject, but I wouldn’t rely on it as the definitive word on this complicated historical figure.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a witty sapphic soap opera whose humor often arises from the contrast between the characters’ self-righteous political views and their messy personal lives. I binged on 10 volumes of the strip from 1989 to 2005. The left-wing rants sometimes became tiresome, so my favorite characters were the ones who didn’t take themselves so seriously: the gleefully careerist Sydney, a literature professor with a Martha Stewart fetish; Lois, the part-time drag king and full-time sexual dynamo; and Mo’s two Siamese cats, who survey their human companions’ anxious lives with amused detachment.

My highest praise, though, is reserved for Bechdel’s cartoon memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which is both beautifully drawn and elegantly crafted as a narrative. Fun Home intertwines the author’s coming of age as a lesbian with her memories of her brilliant, enigmatic, repressed father, a closeted homosexual who died in an accident that she suspects was suicide. Drawing parallels to sources as diverse as Joyce, Colette, Proust, classical mythology, and The Wind in the Willows, she shows how their shared love of literature substituted for the intimacy they could never express in more personal terms. Some online reviewers felt Bechdel strained too hard to fit their family story into literary templates, but for me, that was what gave the book its special poignancy: ultimately, Bechdel concludes that there are no neat explanations that will give her closure, and we return to the simple image that opened the story, a little girl in her father’s arms.

Book Notes: Sara Miles, “Jesus Freak”


Who is Jesus? For liberals, a political role model; for conservatives, the heavenly gatekeeper. But for Sara Miles, author of the new book Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), he’s “the Boyfriend”, a tangible and loving presence who empowers her–and potentially all of us–to embody God’s love through fellowship and service to one another.

Formerly a secular political journalist and restaurant worker, Miles underwent an unexpected conversion at the age of 46, when she took communion at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco and suddenly experienced a mystical awareness that the wafer was really and truly the bread of life, the body of God. She went on to become Director of Ministry at St. Gregory’s and start a food pantry that now serves up to 800 people each week. This story is told in her previous book, Take This Bread. (I would have liked a little more background in Jesus Freak for readers like myself who haven’t read her first book.)

Jesus Freak begins with the radical claim that Jesus empowers us to be Jesus. We have the authority to bring meaning, healing, nourishment and forgiveness to God’s people. The rest of the book shares anecdotes from her ministry: funny, poignant, madcap, heartbreaking stories about what it looks like “to live as if you–and everyone else around you–were Jesus, and filled with his power”.

In Miles’ telling, the Jesus-inspired community looks unconditionally inclusive and egalitarian. People of widely varying beliefs, abilities, and social classes find themselves bound together not merely by mutual tolerance, but by love and cooperation.

In her chapter on “Feeding”, for instance, she questions the divide between churches’ worship space and their community service programs. Why do the soup kitchen and the worship service take place in different locations, at different times, and serve non-overlapping groups of people? I’ve often wondered the same thing. Unlike me, Miles actually did something about it. The weekly food giveaway at St. Gregory’s takes place at the altar and becomes a ritual of sharing that harks back to the communal meals of the first-century church.

When Miles talks about “Healing” and “Raising the Dead”, she isn’t promising medical miracles, though she won’t rule those out, either. We may not always be able to cure physical ills, but we can offer something even more important. We can surround suffering people with an environment that gives their lives dignity, meaning and love.

For instance, toward the end of the book, Miles tells the story of Laura, a middle-aged woman who sought her counsel when dying of lung cancer. Over the last months of her life, Miles helped Laura’s family begin the process of grieving and taking care of one another. In a scene reminiscent of Jesus’ words from the cross in John 19:26-27, Laura arranged for her female companion to become her teenage son’s new mother. Miles was on hand not only to assist with the paperwork but, more crucially, to provide a spiritually meaningful context for the event, so that a sad occasion became in some way a celebration.

Finally, when Laura died, Miles had to help the paramedics hoist her stiffening, obese body onto the gurney from the floor where she’d fallen out of bed. Many another writer might approach this scene with disgust, despair, or pathos. Miles handles Laura’s body, in life and on the page, with tenderness and joy at being able to perform a last service for her. And if there’s a touch of humor, it seems like a joke that the dead woman shares. What is grace, after all, if not the erasing of shame, right here in the flesh from which we’ve been alienated since Adam and Eve first put on their legendary fig leaves?

I found this book to be a balm for the headache that theology often leaves me with nowadays. When doctrinal arguments become political weapons, the social gospel begins to look attractively simple. Visit the prisoners, give a cup of water to the thirsty–surely this is more straightforward, and better for my character, than reviewing yet another book on the “real” meaning of Romans 1:26-27. There’s something about theologizing, one could even say, that is intertwined with class privilege. It can be a diversion of energy away from the more urgent needs of people who don’t have a voice in the conversation.

At the same time, good works become a dry duty, another kind of works-righteousness, without a live connection to God’s love. I’ve bounced back and forth between Episcopal and evangelical churches in search of that encounter with the mysterium tremendum. Philosopher of religion and progressive God-blogger Eric Reitan recently noted that the common liberal dichotomy between Christian belief (bad, fundamentalist, divisive) and Christ-like action (good, crunchy, progressive) doesn’t hold up:

…I suspect that most Christians will agree that “having faith in Jesus” is much more than just believing in a set of propositions. It’s a way of leading one’s life. (Agreement among Christians is likely to break down as soon as we ask what way of life is implied by faith in Jesus.)

But even if faith in Jesus is much more than belief in a set of propositions, the way of life implied by such faith will certainly presuppose a set of beliefs. To have faith is, in part, to live one’s life as if certain things are true. In the broadest terms, having faith in Jesus means living as if Jesus’ life and ministry express the ultimate reality, the divine, in some unique and profound way. And having faith in Jesus as savior means living as if Jesus has secured the redemption of the world; as if the evils that shatter human lives and infect human hearts are never the final word; as if somehow, because of Christ, even the most devastating horrors and malignancies have been stripped of the power to deprive our lives of meaning and value….

Jesus is so real and immediate for Miles that she makes an end-run around theological debates. Perhaps because she wasn’t raised Christian, she doesn’t seem to carry around the baggage of guilt and fear, the need to defend her interpretive authority, or to tear down other interpretations of the Bible. She just goes out and feeds the hungry, and gives the glory to God.
 

Book Notes: The God That Failed


The God That Failed, a 1949 anthology edited by Richard Crossman, features essays by six great European and American writers on why they first believed in, then rejected, Communism. The contributors include British poet and critic Stephen Spender; African-American novelist Richard Wright; French symbolist writer and anticolonialist activist Andre Gide, a Nobel laureate; Louis Fischer, a foreign correspondent for the New York Post; Ignazio Silone, a novelist who fought in the anti-Fascist resistance in the 1930s and returned to his Christian roots after leaving Communism; and the well-known Hungarian-born journalist and science writer Arthur Koestler.

I picked up this little paperback at a used book stall as research for one of my novel characters, who’s a young left-wing activist. (With some difficulty, he’s going to teach my protagonist to care about something more than clothes and the boys who wear them.) But I soon realized that this book’s relevance went far beyond its specific political context.

Militarism, political and racial inequality, and the spiritual deadness of complacent bourgeois culture led all six of these men to seek a nobler way of living. Communism looked like Christianity without the baggage of the church–its complicity in the feudal structures of old, its distracting focus on otherworldly goals. The worldwide triumph of the classless society promised to overcome the nationalistic passions that had torn the West apart in World War I. The Communists envisioned a society where the poor would be fed, ethnic distinctions leveled, and swords beat into ploughshares.

The reality, of course, was quite different. The concentration of power in the Soviet bureaucracy led not to equality but to a new form of elitism coupled with hypocrisy. The same old political abuses were repeated in the name of revolution.

Ultimately, these six writers each discovered that artistic freedom and ideological purity don’t mix. Moreover, artistic freedom is not merely a personal luxury: the artist’s focus on the individual has a moral dimension, keeping us from dehumanizing groups of people who stand in the way of our utopian schemes. This, I think, is the book’s greatest lesson, applicable to religious as well as political ideologies.

I’ve had some frustrating conversations with fundamentalists who have decided a priori that human suffering is not a data point to be considered in evaluating their beliefs. They remind me of the Communists whom these six writers challenged regarding the Soviets’ human rights abuses. Either they denied that the torture and silencing of dissidents actually happened, or they argued that repression (always of other people!) in the present was necessary to bring about a future society where everyone would live better. This isn’t too different from the medieval Grand Inquisitors who burned heretics to save their souls–or today’s Christians who believe that shaming and disenfranchising homosexuals will turn them from a “lifestyle” that endangers their salvation. The end justifies the means…but somehow the end is hard to see.

In the end, these six authors found, the qualities needed for great art and a moral society are the same: truth-telling, humility, concern for each person’s unique experience, and a willingness to admit that human behavior is complex and mysterious.

For myself, I’d also add “shared control”: when I write my novel as a collaboration with my characters, it contains more life and truth than when I move them around like Stalin directing his troops. (Even God, in the Bible or the real world, seems to allow His protagonists a lot more leeway than do many authors of “Christian fiction”!)

Spender’s essay, the last in the collection, to my mind expresses these insights most eloquently. This passage follows his lament that under the Soviets, second-rate artists were put in charge of censoring all others, because the criterion for approval was political conformity rather than the quality of the work. Substitute “Biblical” or “religious” for “political” in this essay and you will understand the struggle of the contemporary Christian novelist. Boldface emphasis mine; page numbers refer to the 1949 paperback from Bantam Books:

I listened with disgust to the dogmatic crowing of inferior talents. There was something degrading about the assumption that a political theory of society could place him who held it in a position where he could reject the insights of genius, unless these proved to be, after all, applications of a political theory to aesthetic material.

I felt scarcely less revulsion for that extensive Marxist literary criticism which interprets literature as myths consciously or unconsciously invented by writers to serve the interests of some historically ascendant class. To my mind, although poets such as Dante and Shakespeare are certainly in a sense both men of their time and political thinkers, there is a transcendent aspect of their experience which takes them beyond human social interests altogether. Society may follow them into luminous revelations about the universal nature of life which are quite outside and beyond the preoccupations of any particular historical epoch, and in that sense society may be elevated by them; but their illuminations are not just the projected wishful thinkings of their society.

To me the beliefs of poets are sacred revelations, illustrations of a reality about the nature of life, which I may not share, but which I cannot and do not wish to explain away as “social phenomena.” If art teaches us anything, it is that man is not entirely imprisoned within his society. From art, society may even learn to some extent to escape from its own prison. (pp.243-44)

****

…Now the artist is simply the most highly developed individual consciousness within a society. He does not have an official generalized view of human needs and activities, but he does have a profound insight into the feelings and experiences, the state of happiness and unhappiness of individuals. To say that the artist is an individualist is not to say that he creates only out of himself only for himself. It is to say that he creates out of a level of his own experiences, which has profound connections with the experiences of many people on a level where they are not just expressions of social needs.

Literature and art are therefore a temoignage, a witnessing of the human condition within the particular circumstances of time and place. To make individual experience submit to the generalization of official information and observation, is to cut humanity off from a main means of becoming conscious of itself as a community of individuals existing together within many separate personal lives. It is difficult to believe that a central authority of the State which denies writers and artists the freedom to express their intuitions if these are contrary to the politics of the State has the vitality and moral force to give people happy lives. All it has is a machinery and an organization to take the place of living. To destroy the freedom of art is really a kind of madness, like destroying the freedom of the individual to have ears to hear sounds to which his mind is sensitive, and to replace them with microphones which are only tuned in to hear what the State directives wish him to hear, which are the sounds relayed by the State amplifiers. Yet the destruction of this freedom is justified by a slogan: that freedom is the recognition of necessity. The political freedom of necessity is the necessity of the State version of the needs of generalized, collectivized man. The freedom of art speaks for the individuality of each human being. Although art is not the same as politics, art is political in that it is forever widening our conception of human freedom, and this widening process alters our conception of life from generation to generation, and ultimately has an effect on the political aims of society. (pp.246-47)

Christian Books Roundup: “The Nonviolent Atonement” and Others


It’s a bit early for a best-of-the-year roundup, but nearly getting beaned by a falling tree last week has convinced me that there’s no time like the present. So enjoy these capsule summaries of the best Christian nonfiction I’ve read this year, and be sure to prune your pear trees before they get top-heavy. (Although some would argue that God was angry at my perennials bed for supporting gay marriage.)

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J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001) argues, to my mind persuasively, that traditional “satisfaction” theories of atonement are inconsistent with the nonviolent character of Jesus, and have also done harm by permitting Christians to romanticize abuse and oppression. The satisfaction model portrays Christ’s death as the saving act that was required to reconcile God and humanity. Weaver, coming from the Anabaptist “peace church” tradition, prefers a model he calls “narrative Christus Victor”, in which Christ’s death is a by-product of the collision between good and evil. The salvific event is Christ’s resurrection, which has both objective and subjective effects: on the cosmic level, it assures the eventual defeat of the powers of evil, and on the human level, it invites us to begin creating an alternative power structure that will be fully realized only at the eschaton–one in which self-giving love triumphs over domination. This is not something we must do to earn salvation; it is salvation itself, defined as participation in the reign of God and restoration of God’s image in us.

Theologians throughout the ages have come up with different metaphors for how the satisfaction-atonement worked, each (as Weaver observes) reflecting their own contingent cultural viewpoint. The 11th-century scholar Anselm conceived of God as a feudal lord whose honor required blood repayment, while the Puritans employed the language of their harsh penal system. Contort the metaphors as they will, Weaver argues, all of these narratives ultimately make God the author of Jesus’ death. Narrative Christus Victor actually puts the blame where it belongs–on us!–and defuses charges of “divine child abuse”.

Weaver frequently accuses the mainstream atonement tradition of severing the links between ethics and Christology, or ethics and salvation. The actual values that Jesus embodied in his earthly ministry become irrelevant, or even contradictory, when we picture God as restoring cosmic order through vengeance. Protestants have become so skittish about works-righteousness that we’ve reduced salvation to a transaction that occurs in some apolitical, supernatural realm–which conveniently allows us to dodge self-scrutiny about the church’s collusion with oppressive social structures. I do feel that Weaver is too quick to dismiss the Nicene-Chalcedonian creedal formulas as examples of this post-Constantinian turn toward empty philosophizing, but to be fair, the progressive political implications of the Trinity don’t get nearly as much press as they deserve.

In the second half of the book, Weaver surveys developments in black, feminist, and womanist Christian theology, offering a respectful summary and critique of several authors who have argued that satisfaction atonement reinforces abusive power dynamics by mischaracterizing the giving and receiving of punishment as expressions of love. I appreciate Weaver’s willingness to buck the anti-supernatural trend among liberal Christians by insisting that Jesus as moral example is important but insufficient; we also need the cosmic dimension of Christ’s victory over sin, effectuated by the resurrection.

Readers interested in exploring the Christus Victor motif may enjoy the writings of N.T. Wright, the Anglican bishop credited (or blamed) for this so-called “new perspective on Paul”. Wright is the featured speaker at the April 2010 Wheaton theology conference, where fans and foes of his writings on justification will be duking it out. I’m hanging up my traveling shoes for awhile, so please send me your impressions of the conference for possible publication in this space.

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British novelist Sara Maitland’s A Big Enough God: A Feminist’s Search for a Joyful Theology (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995) is an amateur theology book in the best sense of the word. In the same spirit as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Maitland loves God’s creations and loves using her literary gifts to share her vision of a God who is wonderfully complex, dynamic, mysterious and risk-taking. (Amazon.com informs me that there’s a sequel from 2002.) Maitland reads a much better story from the book of nature than the rule-bound, abstracted and boxed-in God that religious people want to defend against the perceived onslaught of Galileo, Darwin, and Freud. Her theology is specifically feminist in that it celebrates particularity, difference, and embodiment as evidence of God’s boundless creativity, rather than a threat to the (unattainable) universality of some theological system.

But this is not a fuzzy-minded, sentimental book about Dear Mother Earth. Both the human and non-human elements of creation are marred by violence and decay. Revelation is necessary because nature is not sufficient as a guide to ethics. Maitland firmly believes in the gospel story, which she views as no more or less improbable than the life cycle of the woodlouse. Read her book and you might agree.

Maitland’s solution to the inclusive-language dilemma is a creative one. She warns feminists against setting up a new kind of gender essentialism which merely strokes our egos and denies the dark side of the maternal. Purging liturgical texts of all gendered metaphors won’t do either, because in our incarnational faith, God is known through the particulars. For herself, Maitland concretizes the “both/and nature” of God by calling God “Father” but with female pronouns: “she is Father”. She suggests that men would benefit from using the reverse formula, “he is Mother”, because in both cases, imagining God as the opposite sex acknowledges “that God is ultimately Other, the beloved Other; the transcendent, the enormous, the infinite; everything that I’m not, won’t be come and can’t experience, understand or claim to own.” (p.21)

I’d love to see more exploration of transgenderism as a theological metaphor. Transpersons’ experiences might help us fully celebrate the masculine and feminine energies within God, so that our theological language can avoid both watered-down androgyny and the privileging of one gender over another. (Ex-ex-gay activist Peterson Toscano is doing interesting work in this area.) As Maitland writes:

There seems in all of us to be an enormous resistance to the idea that a thing can simply be different from another thing (usually with myself as the normative thing and divergence from that as abnormal) without becoming better or worse. Yet the scandal of particularity, the fact of the Incarnation, holds up difference, specificity, as desirable. Moreover if difference and diversity are not good in themselves then it is a little difficult to see how this can possibly be the best of all possible worlds–this cosmos in which difference proliferates and the number of insect species is uncounta
ble. The theology I am looking for must affirm the reality of difference; call attention to it; honour and proclaim it as part of the glory. For unless difference is proclaimed the possibility of communicating in love with each other, let alone with God who is manifestly and necessarily different from us, is patently impossible. (pp.8-9)

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While we’re on the topic of harmony within diversity, Thomas Breidenthal’s Sacred Unions: A New Guide to Lifelong Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2006) develops an inspiring and inclusive vision of marriage as a Christian vocation. A Christian marriage points beyond itself to service to God and community. It gives us the most intensive schooling in how to love another person as one’s self, with complete commitment of body and soul. Learning how to honor and cherish the spouse’s otherness also teaches us about intimacy with God, who is the ultimate Other. Meanwhile, the particularity of marriage, our love for a specific and irreplaceable person, reminds us that neighbor-love must be equally reverent toward the dignity of each individual we encounter; it is not merely directed at humanity en masse.

Perhaps I’ve been spending too much time in the gay male alternate universe, but I wished Breidenthal would have spent more time explaining why sexual exclusivity is the only possible definition of sexual fidelity. Certainly it’s always felt that way in my marriage. On the other hand, I know at least one gay male couple who consider themselves married and use their marriage as a home base for the type of ministry and activism that Breidenthal envisions, yet have a wide-open relationship.

If there is still a reason why one-night stands are incompatible with a Christian way of relating to others, maybe it’s the “Ensign Expendable” problem. Each of us naturally thinks of our life as a drama with ourselves as the main character. A few others, such as our primary sexual partner, are also characters who are acknowledged to have feelings and worth. The rest of the people we encounter are props, extras, existing only to advance our storyline. On “Queer as Folk“, the audience isn’t supposed to feel anything for the random hunky guys that Brian is banging each time Justin walks in and wants to talk about their relationship. Their anonymity is part of the sight gag. But from God’s standpoint, Mr. Right Now is just as important as Brian.

My guess is that it’s hard for gay Christians to discuss these issues openly because they’re still fighting for basic recognition in the churches, which requires assimilation to the heterosexual ideal. Given that many straight Christian couples also break their vows of fidelity, I look forward to the day when we can pool our knowledge about the best ways to achieve a stable, honest and healthy marriage.

 

Book Notes: GLBT Nonfiction in Brief


Back to June pride-blogging with brief reviews of three nonfiction books that offer insightful writing on GLBT themes.

Written from within the evangelical community and addressed to that community, David G. Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni’s What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) makes a welcome contribution to the dialogue about faith and sexuality. Myers is a psychology professor at Michigan’s Hope College, while Scanzoni is a professional journalist and nonfiction author. Her commercial magazine experience is evident in the book’s concise, approachable style.

The book’s argument proceeds in stages: Committed relationships have proven essential to human flourishing. Marriage benefits couples, families, and society as a whole. More and more scientific evidence is showing that homosexuality is a naturally occurring human variation, probably caused by some combination of genetic and prenatal factors, and that sexual orientation is nearly always resistant to change. (The authors document the general failure of “ex-gay therapy” and denounce the suffering it causes.) In addition, the Bible verses most often cited against same-sex intimacy have been taken out of context, when they really refer to specific abuses such as temple prostitution and rape. There is therefore no reason to oppose marriage for committed gay couples on the same terms as straight couples. “Marriage lite” options like domestic partnerships and civil unions actually do more to undermine a culture of marriage, by suggesting that less-committed relationships are equally good for couples and their families.

Readers familiar with gay-affirming theology won’t find a lot that’s new here, but that’s not a bad thing. Seeing the same reinterpretations of Romans 1:26, etc., pop up in many places, one has to conclude that this is no longer a “fringe” viewpoint. It’s a viable alternate view, supported by scholarship, that at the very least deserves to be admitted to the conversation at evangelical colleges, publishing houses, and places of worship. Hopefully, the fact that What God Has Joined Together was written by two straight allies will enhance its credibility in those circles.

I recommend the paperback edition because it includes a dialogue between the authors, discussing reactions to the book and how they themselves came to change their views on homosexuality. Scanzoni observes at one point:

I think when we keep a subject such as homosexuality distant from us, seeing it only in the abstract, it’s easy to believe false information, accept stereotypes, and act accordingly. Homosexual people are then seen as an “out-group,” a category distinctly different from the heterosexual “in-group.” A blind spot makes it hard to see gay people as human beings, as persons who want the same things as straight people do–to love and belong and just go about their lives with dignity, as persons made in God’s image.

But when a heterosexual person learns that what had been only a generalized abstract mental construct is actually embodied in an admired person who reveals his or her sexual orientation, something begins to happen. How can you continue to believe gay relationships don’t last after getting to know Pete and Tom, who have been together 50 years, and have watched Pete tenderly caring for Tom, who now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease? How can you claim that homosexual people are rejecting God when that life-transforming sermon you can’t get out of your mind was preached by a lesbian minister? How can you believe that homosexual people are unfit parents when you see the love and care that Elaine and Laura shower on their baby, or the fun little Joey has as he plays and laughs with his two dads, whom he adores? Meeting gay people replaces an abstract topic with real people and with the universality of human experience.


As Harvey Milk said… “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

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Whereas one might say that Myers and Scanzoni’s work seeks to integrate gay and lesbian couples into the bourgeois mainstream, Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993) celebrates the deconstruction of social norms in the figure of the transvestite. Tracing the theme of cross-dressing through historical anecdotes, legends, high art and popular culture, Garber argues that wherever it occurs, it signals anxiety about the instability of some other social category, not only gender but (at various times) race, class, religion, or colonial power. “[T]ransvestitism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.” (p.17) A little further on, she writes, “there can be no culture without the transvestite because the transvestite marks the entrance into the Symbolic” (p.34) The rest of the book works out this simple thesis at great length.

Garber’s book comes from that mid-1990s postmodernist period when everything looked like a text. She’s a Shakespeare expert, so it makes sense that she’d use the tools of literary criticism to investigate the cross-dressing phenomenon. However, I found myself wondering whether her romance with transgression fits the experience of most trans-people. From what I’ve read on their blogs (and I admit that I’m a beginner here), at least some of them are quite eager to resolve their “third-sex” status into something as close to “male” or “female” as possible. They want to pass for a particular gender, maybe not the one they were born with, but also not some liminal category between.

Bottom line: I wasn’t always satisfied with Garber’s analysis, but I’m still thinking about the book, months after reading it, and that’s enough for me to recommend it.

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Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, edited by Brian Bouldrey (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), is a profound and heartfelt anthology of spiritual memoirs, with contributors including Mark Doty, Andrew Holleran, Kevin Killian, Alfred Corn, Fenton Johnson, and Lev Raphael. The authors touch on such topics as the connection between spiritual and erotic ecstasy, family secrets and reconciliations, and AIDS as a modern crucible of faith. Several Jewish and Christian denominations are represented, as well as Eastern spiritual traditions.