Inherit the Land

2009-07-14T11:20:00.000-04:00

History in the Making
Three things have come up recently that I thought would be worth posting on the blog – not that the intervening months have been empty, but that these opportunities come with a special relationship to the spirit, even the letter, of Inherit the Land.

First, I recently took a bus trip with some high school students and others following part of the Underground Railroad route in southern Michigan. (The story is online at http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090628/News01/906280425/1011/News.) Learning about the local connections that I didn’t know was amazing, but even more amazing was the response of thoughtful, passionate young people. They were especially eager to get friends of other cultures to come with them on the trip – as the story says, reflecting their view: African-American history is American history. At the same time, I got to meet a man whose ancestors made it to Indiana because they were freed by a Quaker plantation owner in North Carolina in 1829. I am in the process of investigating the possibility of finding funding sources and writing a book on that story, a perfect prewar complement to Inherit the Land. If that happens, I know of another story in Eastern North Carolina that would complete the set – it’s about a black family that still lives on the land their former master gave them when they were freed by the war.

Second, I recently signed a contract to write the 60-year history of Logan Center, the agency for developmentally disabled people in South Bend whose story tracks the national evolution of such centers. (My Uncle Ed was involved in creating similar programs in Gastonia in the 1950s.) The book will point out the parallels between this movement an the African-American Civil Rights Movement – an impulse for freedom and dignity coming out of World War II, grassroots organizations, key Supreme Court and legislative decisions, increasing inclusion of a once-neglected group in the mainstream of society, significant advance with much more work to be done. It’s an exciting project with terrific people. I hope to finish early next year.

Finally, I have become the principal writer of a new national quarterly magazine, Racing Toward Diversity, produced in South Bend but widely distributed on Wall Street and elsewhere. This is an amazing opportunity to see what progress has been made, and what remains to be made, in both internal corporate communications and external marketing in the field of inclusion. It’s put me in touch with a fascinating array of people who in their various fields share a passion for a more just and equitable society. Each issue includes general articles and an industry focus (the inaugural focus, Spring 2009, was on Motorports). I wrote stories on Robert Marchman of the New York Stock Exchange, businessman Andre Thornton, racing pioneer Charles Wiggins, Rick Clark Motorsports, the Urban Youth Racing School, the Music City Motor Sports Institute and the Boy Scouts of America, in addition to editing some contributed articles. For the second edition, I’m writing about financial literacy, the SEC, pioneer African-American women in communications and PR, and diversity programs in golf, so far. If you’re interested in seeing the magazine, it’s online at www.southbendtribune.com/RacingTowardDiversity. If you’d like to buy a copy or subscription, visit https://www2.southbendtribune.com/services/order-form.php?c=diversity. (You can type my name in the Promotional Code box at the bottom.)

It’s great to participate in these kinds of projects at this point in our society. Yes, there is much to be done. But many people know it, and history is on our side.

2009-03-02T15:25:00.000-05:00

Ashes to Ashes
Something is wrong with Lent.
Some of my friends have given up chocolate, liquor, lobster and instant-messaging for 40 days. I, as usual, have given up watermelon. But something seems simply wrong with this picture. I think the problem with Lent is that we don’t understand Easter.
It seems to me that the prevalent understand of the resurrection of Jesus has become something like “Jesus died and rose from the dead so we could go to heaven when we die and live with God forever.” Nothing could be further from the biblical story.
The doctrine of resurrection from the dead in general, so far from being about “heaven,” is the strongest possible affirmation of the physical world, and the Christian claims about the resurrection of Jesus – that it took place in history, with history continuing – is the strongest possible affirmation of the role of history in that world.
In other words, the doctrine of resurrection is the most legitimate option available when one starts with the biblical doctrine of creation: the Earth is our home, because it’s what we’re made out of.
The Hebrews for most of their history before Jesus chose to believe “dust you are and to dust you shall return” (the text, of course, for Ash Wednesday) rather than to accept the otherworldly religions that empowered some people (priests, Pharaohs) to create a present world that others just have to live in.
During the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Hebrews came to believe that God’s covenant with his people would not allow the oppressor to have the last word. Daniel 12 and 2 Maccabees 7 show their confidence that the faithful People of God would get to live again in this world. The writer of Wisdom’s reflection on this, however much he is attempting to communicate it to a Greek mindset, will not give up on its fundamentally physical and historical meaning.
Neither will the New Testament writers. The descriptions of the resurrection of Jesus go out of their way to deny that something simply “spiritual” has happened here – he is not a ghost, he can eat what they’re eating, he can be touched. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 explains the surprising fact that Daniel 12 was fulfilled first by one person, but he insists that the Hebrews’ hope is still the hope for all of us. Death will be conquered, and as he says in Romans 8, when our bodies are redeemed, the whole Earth will share in that glorious liberty. It will not burn. It was not made for destruction. Our life is here.
The mistake, I think, comes from a misreading of the Ascension story through Greek eyes that assume the ether as our goal. I think the story, in both Paul and Luke, is a claim that Daniel 7 has been fulfilled, i.e., the Son of Man has gone to the Ancient of Days. This was not geographic in Daniel – narratively, it is in the exact position of the stone’s filling the whole Earth in Daniel 2, which clearly refers to the vindication of the People of God – and it is not geographic in the New Testament. Paul, in fact, makes clear that Jesus has not left – rather, he fills all things (Ephesians 2 and 4).
Easter is about a new creation, about a resurrection revealed as light breaks through the darkness (Luke 24) – about as clear an allusion to Genesis 1 as one could find. A new creation that is this world, and this history, liberated from the death brought by sin.
How, then, could the shunning of food, drink and friendly conversation be an appropriate preparation for such a celebration? I do not mean to pass judgment on a particular case here – there may be very good reasons for a person to adopt such practices. (Although I personally don’t believe in the pendulum theory, the best explanation I’ve heard, that the cure for excess is defect. Temperance – the real virtue, not the American perversion called the “temperance movement” – is an avoiding of both errors all the time.) But any practice that stems from a Gnostic spiritual/material division calls for a Christian correction.
Getting Easter right could make Lent really fruitful. We are still in the outworking of the story (as I think we always will be), and the climax – Jesus’ resurrection – must be brought to bear on all the ways our world is broken. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are great opportunities to participate in that – fasting, that is, in the Isaiah 58 sense rather than the Pharisaical not-like-other-men sense. We could make ourselves ready, by considering the tasks at hand, to celebrate the solution and go forth into ordinary time revived.

2008-11-23T10:36:00.001-05:00

Why Ask Why?

Now that the most gripping political campaign since I was 14 is finished, I’m hoping to get back here more often. I was reluctant to make my strong opinions a point of division on the blog, and anyway, plenty of other people had that job covered. Now that it’s over, and without attempting to add anything to the celebrations and post-mortems about politics, I’d like to start by saying something about the much-maligned press and its role in the process.

As usual, the “liberal, elite media” was a frequent target, and too often the media responded with hand-wringing and a misguided swing at “balance.” Somebody accurately named this approach “the symmetry of sin,” meaning that if you say something bad about somebody (e.g., he started an elective war that has killed more than 4,000 people so far), you have to find something bad to say about his opponent (e.g., he ate the whole main course with the salad fork) that leaves the reader with a satisfying sense of equivalence. One blogger, confronted with the statistic that 80 percent of journalists vote Democrats, responded with the only correct answer: So what? He was assailed as part of the problem. (This, of course, in a political season when it was counted as “correction” to say “oh, no, he’s a good family man” when someone was accused of being an Arab.)

But on the fundamental issue of whether we look at the world as a static place or a dynamic place, the parties will never have parity within journalism. I don’t think it’s primarily because journalists come from upper-middle-class homes or take more humanities courses in college or tend to be more idealistic than average, although all of that may be true and it’s often cited as the reason for the disparity. I think it’s because the journalist’s job is to ask questions – and not just Who? What? When? and Where? but Why? and How?

Once upon a time in journalism, reporters were little more than stenographers for the system. They accepted the authorities in place – government, religion, public schools, large corporations and institutions – and dutifully transmitted what those authorities said. Printing a press release pretty much satisfied the first four questions. Then came Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon and Watergate, and the last two questions came into play. For the first time, the media was attempting to tell the whole story – to answer all the questions.

It seems to me that the simple act of asking those questions puts the media on one side of the great divide. To ask the question is to presuppose that the answers are not self-evident, which by itself is a challenge to the cherished conservative belief in the fixed reality of the establishment. The answer, at bottom, to “why are things the way they are?” is “because this is the way they are.” In our day, for example, it’s flags should not be burned, gay couples should not marry and rich people should not pay more taxes (beware the liberal notion that top tax rates should revert to their 2000 levels!). Why? Because that’s the way it is. In an earlier day, it was blacks should know their place, interracial couples should not marry and rich people should not pay more taxes.

A conservative may grant that things are not the way they should be, but the answer to that unfortunate circumstance is to restore things to the fixed way they should be – and the conservative knows what that is (pregnant teenagers should get married, for example). The overwhelming share of media types on the left turns out to be balanced by the overwhelming share of fundamentalist types on the right. There are journalists who consider themselves conservative, but I expect it’s because they understand the answers to the questions to line up with conservative views. If it’s because they don’t understand the importance of the questions, they are not journalists worthy of the name.

2008-07-19T16:55:00.001-04:00

Living History

A story this weekend in the New York Times reports the disclosure of a stone column with Hebrew writing, dating from shortly before the time of Jesus, that seems to refer to a messiah who would rise from the dead in three days. (The whole story is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/middleeast/06stone.html?hp.) The headline, of course, says the discovery “ignites debate.” I would like to think that it could settle a debate. Just as science has shown that natural events can be explained naturally, I hope this pushes us closer to understanding that historical events can be understood historically. The old divide between static “natural” and “supernatural” categories, the common ground of medieval philosophers and modern fundamentalists that has preoccupied us for so long, could then go away and we, like Israel, would be free to work with God in history.

The stone’s message supposedly calls into question the supposed uniqueness of Christianity. (Uniqueness is a dubious quality in my view, anyway, for a religion that is supposed to be for all the nations – especially if the uniqueness requires divorce from its Jewish roots.) In the gospels, Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples that he would die and rise again. If there was an alive tradition of a messiah rising in three days in the late first century B.C.E. and early first century C.E., as the stone suggests, he did not say that because he could see the future (the fundamentalist view), and we are not required to believe that the gospel writers retrojected such sayings into the text (the liberal view). History trumps both wrongheaded approaches.

As usual, the historical approach bears fruit in lots of other areas. Here’s one that the story doesn’t mention. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:4 that Jesus was raised on the third day “in accordance with the scriptures,” a line that made its way into the creeds. The remark is offhand, as if to say “just as we always expected” – the messiah’s rising on the third day is not a surprise or a novelty in the story to Paul. But if one asks “what scriptures?” the candidates are extremely thin. The only explicit one I know of is Hosea 6:2, which in context is about Israel’s return to YHWH: “After two days he will revive us, on the third day he will raise us up and we shall live in his presence.” Either Paul is reaching for a proof-text here, without citing it, or Paul knows a developed tradition, perhaps rooted in the Hosea text, that is attested by the stone. The second seems to me much more likely.

Nothing stands or falls on the case of the stone, just as nothing stands or falls in evolution on a particular fossil discovery. Doubtless the discovery will be attacked by the ahistorical fundamentalists (of the right and the left), just as fossil discoveries are attacked by the ascientific fundamentalists. But the world is changing.

Alasdair MacIntyre opens his After Virtue with “A Disquieting Suggestion,” imagining a catastrophe in the natural sciences that leaves us with fragments of the past later gathered up and recast as “science.” “But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appear very surprising to us,” MacIntyre says. He is, of course, describing what he considers the Enlightenment’s devastation of the classical, specifically Aristotelean, tradition. But I would suggest that the exercise works at least as well for the Greek devastation of the Hebrew tradition, the imposition of static categories, otherworldly goals, suspicion (at least) of physicality and, worst of all, the unfreedom of a world where some people get to tell others how they have to live. That world is collapsing under its own incoherence. YHWH our God is the one who brought us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Jesus is alive, risen after three days, in the history that we share.

2008-07-19T16:54:00.000-04:00

No Senator No

I am sure Jesse Helms was proud on July 4, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. He understood his role in terms of saving the Republic, which included saving the Republican Party in the South. But his understanding of the Republic, while it may have had something in common with Adams’ attacks on freedom in the Alien and Sedition Acts, bears little resemblance with Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.” That’s a pity, because a little historical awareness could have brought about a different world.

I have long contended that Sen. Helms was at the Ross will trial in his mother’s womb. The evidence is, of course, circumstantial – the trial was in April, Helms was born in October. Still, his father was one of three police officers in town, and one of the others was a juror at the sensational trial. At any rate, he was certainly born into a world where that verdict had been given, but the result was quickly suppressed. I knew Sen. Helms because I was a reporter in his hometown. I was not a political reporter covering his campaigns, but I met him frequently at events in Monroe. I asked him in detail if he had ever heard of the Ross will trial, and he assured me that he had not. I believed him. Growing up in Monroe decades later, I didn’t hear of it either.

Until I met the Ross family, I thought that a Southerner’s a stand for equal rights required repudiating the past. There is much to repudiate, not least the behavior of Sen. Helms and his sort. His protests that he was not “racist” depend on defining racism in violent lynching terms, and his brand, in the tradition of Walter Bickett and John J. Parker, is far more insidious for its paternalistic “separate but equal” inequality. But there is a past, with people like Maggie and Sallie and Bob and Mittie, that can be recovered and treasured as we tell our story moving forward. What a different world if that had been Jesse Helms’ story.

2008-06-13T10:33:00.001-04:00

Sex and the City Room

The handwringing about sexism in the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is predictable, but ultimately wasted. The beauty of individualism (yes, there are beauties and well as uglies) is that different people can be treated differently even when they belong to the same group. It is just too great a leap to believe that any other woman (think Elizabeth Dole, Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi) would get the same kind of coverage as this particular former First Lady with the kinds of baggage she brought and the kinds of rhetoric she piled on. If anything, the media treated her with kid gloves, failing to analyze her failure to get health care 15 years ago, turning her Pat Schroeder-like tears into a turnaround in New Hampshire. What other campaign, male or female, could have survived a public appeal to “hard-working white people,” more brazen than anything George Wallace tried 40 years ago?

The worst thing the media did was the equal-opportunity drive to keep the ratings-boosting horse race alive, pounding on “bittergate” and Obama’s preacher when needed, looping her lie about sniper fire and her hint of assassination when needed. Imagine the coverage of any other candidate who kept the race alive by injecting $5 million of her own money before Feb. 5 and millions more to keep from bowing out. As she went around claiming 18 million votes, who checked to see how many of those from California were still with her four months later, and who subtracted the territorial voters who can’t participate in the general election? A few sources hinted at the polls that shifted strongly in California, and some did late, thorough analysis of the math, but most just tagged “the Obama campaign disputes” when reporting that she said she had more popular votes. Already, only 19 percent of her voters are still saying they will vote for McCain, fewer than the number in Kentucky and West Virginia who voted for her because the other candidate is black.

What we need next time is more than one woman running for president. When one of them wins and the other loses, we will have reached real equality – and the Monday morning quarterbacks won’t be able to blame the loss on sexism.

Paradigm Shifted
David Brooks’ column on Obama in today’s New York Times (6/13/08) illustrates the problem with his kind of either/or thinking. He is trying to pigeonhole the candidate in one of the two possible approaches to education that Brooks sets up, and he suggests that the failure to fit nicely is a sign of vacillation or maybe even deceit.

What Brooks misses is that the failure to fit nicely, so far from the failure of post-partisanship that he wants to claim, is precisely the different way of understanding the world that Obama offers. Rather than the clashing either/or of the past, the model that makes sense of this phenomenon is Hegel’s description of progress – thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The opposing views are not, as they have been in American politics for so long, doomed to fight each other to the death or a red-blue standoff. Something new can emerge. And the something new doesn’t have to be a dissatisfying compromise chiseled out so gains and losses are balanced – that isn’t really anything new. The synthesis can be something that neither side alone thought of before, but something that makes real progress possible.

Here’s an example. For a long time, societies thought that capital punishment was a positive good. They understood it in terms of retributive justice, deterrence, etc. Then arose those who thought capital punishment was a positive evil. They understood it in terms of vengeance, state-sanctioned murder, etc. For a long time, the fight was across intractable lines, no matter how many studies demonstrated that it was or was not a deterrent or how many appeals were made to Genesis 4 and Genesis 9. Then Pope John Paul II reframed this issue: The question is about justice, he said, but about justice for this person. No longer did the fights about deterrence matter – not because one or the other side had won, but because a new thing had become central. The society’s right to defend itself goes unhampered, but the responsibility to defend itself in every other way possible before carrying out capital punishment comes clear. This is not a compromise. It is synthetic, a new thing arising out of the old debate.

That kind of change, I think, is what Obama is offering. I also think that’s why Hillary Clinton and John McCain seem so oddly similar in contrast to him. She’s not really a Republican in the policy sense, but they are both exponents of this older way of seeing the world. The failure of Brooks and those like him even to notice the categories tells us much more about them than it does about Obama.

2008-04-18T18:24:00.001-04:00

Part of the reason I haven’t posted for a while is that most of my thinking has been about the Democratic primary, and I didn’t want to tip my hand for those of you who don’t already know. But the media frenzy about Senator Obama’s “bitter” remarks demands a response.

I think the underlying question is "Why do people resist hope and change, settling for security and familiarity?" Why do they hold on to what they have so tightly (yes, “cling”) instead of reaching out for something even better? And I think the answer is that their immediate basic needs are so great, so overwhelming, that all of their attention has to be focused there. Leisure is the basis of culture, and the worker who lives from paycheck to paycheck has no time for creativity, for free imagination or for action to alter the circumstances around her that she, on reflection, would recognize as oppressive and unjust. The Republicans did not, as they promised, starve the government. They starved the middle class, kept them so strained economically that they were easy prey for cynical campaigns against flag-burning and gay marriage. Analogous to what, perhaps accurately, they accused the Democrats of doing with the welfare generations, they created a world where people have time, after meeting their subsistence requirements, to do only what they are told.

The status quo that the Republicans, and perhaps the Clintons, represent does not want change. Those who win by dividing and taking 50 percent plus one do not want unity. They want to make a world that other people have to live in. Those people will not challenge that world if they live in uncertainty of where their next meal is coming from, how their kids will get educated or what will happen to them if they suffer a catastrophic illness. Obama challenges that world and wants to lift all Americans to a place where we can participate in fashioning a more equal,more just society. His comments show that he understands why that message is difficult for some to hear. Those who twist his words are the real elitists.

2008-02-10T21:32:00.000-05:00

Hip-deep in a presidential election that will last for most of the year, we might do well to stop and consider what we mean by “president.” Like “love” or “change” or “experience,” it’s one of those words that might just be a place-holder for one’s private thoughts, and we may be talking past each other without recognizing it when we don’t mean the same thing. I’d like to start the conversation by suggesting two things that “president” does not mean, at least not in the Constitution, that many people seem to take it to mean in our day.
To begin with, the president is not the “decider.” The current president’s appropriation of that term is just the latest in a long history of presidents’ grasping for more than executive power. But it is simply not present in the Constitution. The Framers understood that there are three powers – the same powers that every person has: to choose, to act on the choice, and to evaluate the choice and the action. Those are what we call the legislative, executive and judicial powers when it comes to government, and the Framers were insistent that no two of them, much less all three, could be invested in one department, much less in one person. That way, they knew, leads to tyranny. Congress alone is the “decider.” Congress chooses what the laws will be. The president has power to execute, not what he wants, but what Congress has told him to execute. This limit is so clear constitutionally that the Supreme Court has ruled the line-item veto unconstitutional (the Decider’s use of “signing statements” raises other questions). The president has the power to veto the laws Congress passes, but if Congress wants something badly enough, it can override the veto. (Early presidents seemed to think the veto should have something to do with constitutionality, not personal preference, but the power is there nonetheless.) So, when we are electing a president, we might do well not to think that we are electing a “decider.” That’s what representatives and senators are for. The role of “decider” has, historically, been more readily invoked and accepted in times of crisis, such as Lincoln during the Civil War or FDR during the Depression, but that doesn’t make it constitutional – and it certainly should not become a permanent feature of the office, even if a misnamed “war on terror” goes on for 100 years.
The president also is not a CEO. This business metaphor, however attractive in a corporate culture, may be even more dangerous than “decider,” because it includes all of those problems and leaves no room for Congress at all. The CEO of a corporation is hired by a board of directors. In the metaphor, that’s the voters. The incoherence of this view becomes clear when one objects that the voters are actually the shareholders. But then who is the board? Congress does not hire the president (although, in principle, they can fire him). The CEO keeps his job by making the kinds of profits that make the shareholders and the board happy. Again, will and force, choice and action, are united in him. The Constitution does not envision that we are electing a CEO.
Then what are we electing? It turns out that, whatever else, we are electing someone to a dual role rare in most nations. We are electing both the head of state – the one who will receive other heads of state or their representatives, negotiate treaties, etc. – and the head of government – the one who is charged with executing the laws passed by the Congress. For whatever reason – perhaps aversion to monarchy, perhaps a differently-conceived view of the federal government and the state governments – the Framers did not divide the roles as they are in systems with a president (or monarch) and a prime minister. In most of those systems, the danger that the prime minister will not want to execute the decisions of the parliament is mitigated by the fact that he is part of the majority party. He puts the decisions into action, and someone else holds the more ceremonial, visible-principle-of-unity role in the society. Our president must do both, even when he (or she) is not of the same party as the deciding Congress.
If we do not consider the dual role, we run the risk of electing someone who has the skills only to be the head of state or only be the head of government. The disparaging of a candidate because he is inspirational and unifying but not a policy wonk, or because she is a policy wonk and not inspirational and unifying (if such were to happen) could be understood in terms of the fitness for the dual role. Michael Dukakis tried to run for head of government only (“This election is about competence, not ideology”) against a vice president who knew how to invoke the national symbols (e.g., pledge of allegiance) and overarching themes (“kinder, gentler”) like a head of state (however he actually governed once he got there). Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy seemed to emphasize the role of head of state, renewing and invigorating the country. Given the limited executive role – which must be restored, and Congress resume its responsibility – I would tend on balance toward the more promising head of state when I had to choose.

2008-02-03T15:16:00.001-05:00

Money is time.
Sorry not to have posted in so long…I’m ramping up a full-time freelance writing business that has been somewhat consuming. I don’t know how regular I’ll be for a while, but I wanted to say something that I’ve learned in the process.
One of the dangers of working for yourself, as I had seen from the outside but now know firsthand, is the temptation to work all the time, putting aside other pursuits (like blogging) because I could be using the same time to make money. Right now, I could be typing a set of notes, writing a press release for a customer or finishing an article. The decision not to do that, to maintain a more balanced approach to life, became easier when I realized that the old saying “Time is money” is false – in fact, it is backwards.
Time is not money. You might as well say time is relationships or time is travel or time is play – you might as well predicate anything a person uses time to do. Time is what we have to do all the things we do. Years ago, I read a study by a Notre Dame professor who pointed out the damage done when society comes to understand life in terms of “billable hours.” This reductionism – an hour is an hour is an hour – makes no distinction between the hour spent at worship, the hour at a birthday party and the hour on the job. In a Scarlett O’Hara society – “I’ve found out that money’s the most important thing in the world, and I don’t ever intend to be without it again” – that spawns the temptation to spend more time at work.
Because, in fact, money is time. The choice to make money is actually a choice about how to allocate my time. Recognizing that allows me to put money where it belongs, competing with the other good things that make demands on my time rather than giving it a presumptive place of favor. Money will get its due time, but it will not be the definition of time. Time is more – life is more. The unfreedom of work with no rest, the circumstance of the Hebrews in Egypt, led them to establish the weekly Sabbath for everyone including the cows and the sabbatical year for the ground itself. That unfreedom can come from a taskmaster, and the taskmaster can be myself. No one should have to live under such bondage.

2007-12-27T23:29:00.001-05:00

Breaking the Cycle
For the Babylonians, the New Year was the time for the re-enactment of Marduk’s defeat of the water goddess and creation of the world – not as a recollection of a historical event but as a mythic understanding of the cyclical nature of the universe. Reading the usual stories about the winter solstice, New Year’s Day, and other annual events that cluster around this page of the calendar, and celebrating once again the Incarnation of Jesus at Christmas, I began to wonder whether we aren’t susceptible to the same view. It would, I think, be worth resisting.
Many worldviews, reasonably enough, organize themselves on the cycles they observe in nature. The sun rises, the sun sets; the moon waxes, the moon wanes; the days lengthen, the days shorten; the oak trees appear dead, the oak trees return to life. The problem with the cycles is that they close and repeat. Life inside of them – inside of a universe so understood – is not free, or at most is free only for some who know the secrets of the cycles, whatever that priestly class might be called, and who get to organize a world that everyone else just has to live in. There is the illusion of progress, but the repetition of enough cycles destroys the illusion, as Jim Burden so pessimistically concluded in My Antonia that the trembling verdant life of summer is the lie and the gray cold of winter is the truth. The universe is like a car engine with no transmission – in motion, yes, but merely going around and around and not going forward (or, for that matter, backward). “There is nothing new under the sun,” Ecclesiastes’ famous line, is not a revelation about the real world but the complaint of a person who had paid close attention to nature’s cycles of sun, wind and water.
The Hebrews, of course, were all about breaking out of such systems, whether Ur, Egypt or the Canaanite cities. They located the work of God fundamentally not in nature but in history – creation was for the sake of humanity, the central reality for them was that God had brought them out of the house of bondage, and the engagement of God in the world militated against the notion of a finished “creation.” Those in power, as usual, preferred to read Genesis differently, excluding the possibility of change, and enshrining their belief in a certain celebration of the Sabbath that excluded healing because it distracted from their closed-in understanding of the universe. Jesus took sides against them and for a rival reading of the creation story that includes history: “My Father goes on working, and so do I.”
The cyclical understanding of the universe runs deep. I think even a certain emphasis on self-improvement, whether secular or spiritual, can turn out to be a slight variant: Human freedom can be understood as my choice to fit in (or not) to the cycle, rhythm, plan, whatever, and I can do better by getting myself more in tune with nature, God, the universe, etc. “Change” amounts to “adjustment” to a fixed external system. The story, of course, comes with a closed end – the “end of the world” and maybe a survival outside time and space for those who fit in (or not) to the pattern. I don’t think that’s the biblical understanding. Rather, human freedom is a real agent in the future of a universe that is evolving, progressing, not going round and round but opening out into possibility. (Resurrection from the dead is not the end of that possibility but the denial that it ends.) We are not the only agents – we are, or can be, in a relationship of love with God who gave us this creative freedom – but we are real agents, having something to do with whether Sodom is saved, whether the story of Israel starts over with Moses, whether states go on executing criminals, whether children of the working poor get health care, etc.
So the celebration of Christmas, like the celebration of Passover, stands in contrast to the nature religions’ cycles. It does not begin anything anew. Rather, it is a claim about what God did in history to set us free, a decisive act for us to recall so that we will understand our own story of the universe, who we are, and so move even more confidently into a New Year full of possibility.

2007-12-10T22:31:00.000-05:00

The Appeal of Repeal

Dec. 5 was Repeal Day, a historic event whose date I had not noticed in the past despite teaching American history. On Dec. 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment – Prohibition. Friends and I joked about whether they deliberately restored the fifth on the Fifth, but the event is even more important for its serious meaning.
Prohibition was the only amendment to the Constitution that limited the rights of the people. Some other amendments dealt with other issues (preventing ties in the Electoral College, limiting the terms of presidents or the pay raises of Congress), but most increased the rights of the people – establishing the bill of rights, freeing slaves, providing for direct election of Senators, extending the right to vote to African-Americans, women, those unable to pay poll tax and 18-year-olds. (I voted in the N.C. primary at 17 because the state qualified anyone who would be eligible to vote in the general election.)
Only Prohibition took away rights. The effect of that Amendment was, among other things, the rise of the Mafia in the Roaring Twenties. It was an idea whose time had gone. Congress proposed the Amendment in February, and Utah’s – Utah’s! – approval on Dec. 5 ratified it.

Those who favor constitutional amendments that would limit rights in our time should take a lesson from the history. In the past 20 years or so, there have been drives to ban abortion, prohibit flag-burning and outlaw gay marriage by constitutional amendment. Their failure demonstrates the wisdom of the Founders in making amendment so difficult – two-thirds of both House and Senate, three-fourths of states. The high threshold also sank the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, but it is unclear to me that the change in the Constitution would have given women more rights than they have now. And this is not a comment on whether we should have abortion, gay marriage or flag-burning – it’s a comment on the role of the Constitution in our life.

Amendments to the Constitution define who we are as a society. Limiting rights of people is a way of excluding them from the society. With Prohibition, the effect was that a vast number of people, previously upstanding citizens, became outlaws, and they learned to behave like outlaws. The behavior of drinking should not have been criminalized. The state is quite able to legislate against behaviors that result from drinking that are harmful to society, such as drunk driving, and prosecute those who so endanger others. But no right of the teetotaler is violated by his neighbor’s mixing a cocktail, no right of the married couple is violated by their same-sex neighbors’ property arrangement, and no right of the citizen is violated by another citizen’s burning of the flag. (Abortion is an entirely different matter – the right of the aborted baby to life is being violated – but it still doesn’t seem to me that the Constitution is the right place to solve this: What penalty is to be imposed on the mother?)

We are in perilous enough shape these days when it comes to dividing ourselves up and otherizing those who are not like us. One candidate for president says the Constitution established a “Christian nation” (any high school freshman knows better), and another argued that a “religion” thin enough to identify his with everyone else’s should have a favored place in the public square (I could hardly add anything to David Brooks’ column on Romney’s speech in the New York Times, or the paper’s editorial). So far from defining ourselves constitutionally in such exclusive ways, we should move into the other direction. I don’t think the E Pluribus Unum motto means that everybody becomes alike. I think it means we become different parts of a healthy body.

So, cheers to Repeal Day! However you choose – wine or water, martini or milk, Scotch or soda. And may there never need to be another.

2007-12-07T19:14:00.000-05:00

Ancient Termites and Modern Law

I often use this brief poem to help students understand the idea of remote causation, and the flaw of attributing too much to such a purported cause:

Some ancient termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good.
And that is why your Auntie May
Fell through the parlor floor today.

The rather whimsical attribution of today’s accident to the “ancient termite” points out the fallacy of stringing together non-necessary events as if they were explanatory. Inexperienced students sometimes will write something like “Achilleus’ anger caused him to give up his anger” without noticing the absurdity of thus relating the subject and predicate. His anger may have led him to despair and his despair led him to give up his anger, but those are not necessary moves, and the proper subject would be the despair. Likewise, “The death of Patroklos caused Achilleus to give up his anger,” another frequent attempt, directly contradicts the story, because the death of Patroklos triggered the violent anger that made Achilleus so mistreat the body of Hektor. Only when that anger was exhausted – certainly not the result of Patroklos’ death – is Achilleus able to give up his anger.

I thought about this when reading a story about a man jailed for murder in Florida because he loaned his car to a friend who wound up committing a murder in the process of a burglary. The law, apparently a remnant of medieval English common law, considers every participant in the crime guilty of the crime, even though in this case the one who loaned the car was more than a mile away and probably asleep after a late night of partying. Continental Europe never had such a law, and it seems from the article that every other former English colony has repealed the practice. The prosecutor in Florida, however, insisted “no car, no crime,” and got the car owner convicted of murder. That looks like an “ancient termite” to me – a nonnecessary effect of the loaning. It’s especially odd in a country that places so much stock in personal responsibility – the murderer, not the car owner, is responsible for the crime. Perhaps we should join the rest of the civilized world on this question.

2007-11-30T22:59:00.000-05:00

Contract or Body?

A bunch of freshman boys this week drew my attention to two very different ways of looking at the world in, of all things, Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Early in the story, the American boy Jim Burden meets a Bohemian family out on the Nebraska prairie. The clash of cultures is sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant as the Americans turn up their noses at sourdough bread and the Bohemians plead for the Americans to teach their children English. But the most persistent difference, as the students noticed, is the Bohemians’ reckless generosity and the Americans’ reluctance to accept their gifts. Antonia gives Jim a silver ring at their first meeting, and not much later, her father promises him a valuable rifle. Jim is uncomfortable in the situation, bewildered at the custom and blaming it for why the foreigners never “get on” in the world.
The students at first wanted to suggest that the Bohemians give in order to get, and they could give some evidence of such motive in Antonia’s mother, a woman so desperate to keep her family fed and warm in the new country that she complains loudly about her deprivation and demands a cooking pot the first time she sees the Americans’ well-stocked kitchen. Jim thought it weak-minded of his grandmother to give her the pot. On the other hand, Antonia’s mother shares the only thing she has – dried mushrooms carefully carried from Bohemia – with Jim’s grandmother, who has been complaining of how little she has to enhance cooking out on the frontier. Although Antonia and her brother testify to the wonders of the seasoning, the Americans toss the chips into the fire because they don’t understand and don’t trust the gift.

As we discussed the two ways of looking at the world, the students remembered an earlier conversation about two metaphors for society – the “contract” of Locke and Rousseau and the “body” of Aristotle. It seemed that the Bohemians were operating under a “body” understanding – giving to somebody else strengthens the whole community that I’m part of, and so it is a benefit to me. (I had recently been reading Pericles’ speech where he asserts that individual prosperity when the body is suffering is doomed while individual suffering while the body is healthy will be healed.) The Americans seemed to be operating under a “contract” model – what I give is a subtraction from me, and I have to be sure I’m getting back at least as much. Antonia makes the point clear to Jim -- his rich family would be better off if they would help the neighbors in their time of need – and Jim can do no better than to complain that her family is greedy.

What’s the model for us? At some level, surely, any society worthy of the name ought to recognize its responsibility to all its members. A column in the New York Times today describes a corporation’s resistance to adding a single penny to tomato pickers’ piece pay: “Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year.” If that inequity is not iniquity, what is? No society can survive or thrive while denying basic dignity to every human being.

But the “body” metaphor in history has been the basis for terrible oppression, injustice and inhumanity against anyone who was “other” than the acceptable body. The burning of heretics was justified as the removal of a “cancer” from the body politic. The “head” of the body in some systems was a king, understood to rule by divine right, and the members were unfree – they had to live in a world that somebody else made without their participation. Against such a system, Jefferson rose up to revolt against tyranny and to celebrate an America that had “banished from our shores that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered.”

I’d say we have the chance for the best of both worlds here. America leaves us free to form our own communities. The “nation” was never intended to be the locus of our whole life – if anything, the states were that in the beginning, and our voluntary associations can be that now. We have not put in common what nations historically have put in common – language, religion, ethnicity, etc. – but rather dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. That doesn’t mean we should live without associations with, say, religion in common, but it means the state will neither dictate to us what that will be nor interfere with our forming such an association.

For the Christian community, biblically, the question is settled: We are a body (Romans 12, Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12, etc.). But we are not the state, and the state is not us. We are a chosen race, a holy nation, a people set apart, and we can govern ourselves in significant ways, but we are not meant to govern anyone else – they, like we, must be free. We can form our own culture – a body where we recognize that giving enhances rather than diminishes us – while supporting every other’s right to human dignity and respecting their freedom to choose in what body they will participate.

2007-11-25T18:13:00.000-05:00

Like the Other Nations?

I doubt many people get to spend their days, as I have recently, reading the fight over the Alien and Sedition Acts in the morning and in the afternoon the debate in Athens over whether to fight Sparta. The juxtaposition of those pieces of our tradition, along with the current situation that we can read about in the paper every day, brings some things into sharp relief.

Pericles makes the case in The Peloponnesian War that Athens’ greatest advantage is its freedom. People who live this free life as full participants in their society are bound to be better at defending it, he says, than people like the Spartans whose whole life is about discipline and obedience. In is First Inaugural, Jeffers says participatory government is “the strongest government on earth. I believe it is other only one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.” Jefferson and Madison make a similar argument in the Kentucky Resolutions against John Adams’ clearly unconstitutional Sedition Act: “confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy [for our rights] and not in confidence [in leaders].” Consider that in the light of an administration official’s suggestion that we change the meaning of “privacy” from “anonymity” to “the government knows everything about us but safeguards the information.”

The debate, as usual, has to do with whether everyone participates in the shaping of the world (Pericles, Jefferson) or whether some people (the Spartan oligarchy, the Federalists, etc.) get to shape a world that other people have to live in. Applying that question to biblical history provides some interesting insights very different from certain governments that Christians have erected, in the churches and in the society, across the centuries. It seems to me that obedience to the Torah was a great equalizer in ancient Israel. There is no suggestion that a few people knew the Torah and dispensed their wisdom, Gnostic-style, to the rest of the community. The heart of the Law, the Ten Commandments, is given to the community directly in Exodus 20; the entire Five Books is read to the whole community upon the return from Babylon. The attempt to establish a monarchy, always resisted and finally a failure, always meant only that both the king and the people had to obey YHWH. The prophet was there to call the king back to the covenant – the law that precisely defended the whole people from being tyrannized, that guaranteed the freedom YHWH had brought them “out of the house of bondage” to experience.
In non-self-governing Israel, so-called experts in the law, such as the Pharisees, tried to fill the power vacuum and build a world other people had to live in. Consider their despising of “sinners,” their refusal to join the feasts, their condemnation of Jesus when he supposedly violated Torah or failed to stop a “sinner” from touching him. Jesus made clear that this was a misuse of Torah, just as their exclusivist identification was a misuse of the Temple. He told his disciples that his community would be different – not “like the other nations,” as the pro-monarchy crowd had desired in 1 Samuel, where some people lord it over others and gain the name “benefactor.” His is a community of equality based on love – and love that does not violate equality. Any call to obedience of community or civil leaders in the rest of the New Testament must be read in the light of this understanding – as a way of sharing life, not oppressing or suffering oppression.

One of the greatest benefits of Miss Maggie’s will was the ability of a once-excluded class of people to participate in their society. This should be the measure of any progress, and the reason for refusing limits on any human’s rights.

2007-11-18T22:20:00.000-05:00

Miss Maggie’s Will at 100

Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2007, is the 100th anniversary of the signing of Miss Maggie and Miss Sallie’s will. I will celebrate with fried chicken, biscuits, gravy and pound cake, my best guess, based on my own experience in Union County, at what a celebratory feast would have been for them. I will replicate what I know they served one guest – a glass of wine and a platter of tea cakes. The celebration will include a toast to what their will accomplished in Marvin, and a prayer for what it could accomplish everywhere. An article by Henry Louis Gates in today’s New York Times confirms yet again what this story could mean in our time.

Gates is writing about the growing gap between poor blacks and middle-class blacks, a gap so wide that many blacks no longer consider themselves a single “race” (in response to a confusing poll question that should have asked about “interest group”), but his diagnosis applies to the race gap in general. Equality must include economic equality. He laments the failure to apply “40 acres and a mule” as the root of both black poverty and oppressive white supremacy, as I have for about a year, and he has the interesting statistic that fewer than 25 percent of blacks owned land in 1920 – the year Miss Maggie’s will was revealed. Because of the will, as Part IV of Inherit the Land describes, black land ownership became normal in Marvin and contributed significantly to the unbroken racial harmony in the community.

Maggie and Sallie signed their will at a time when whites in other parts of the South were lynching blacks to steal their land. I grew up knowing that side of the story, often from people who approved it, and came late to know that the real past was far more complicated. When I say I am proud to be a Southerner, which I am, it is with their courage in mind. These women, and the family that inherited, and the lawyers that defended, and the jury that upheld are the bravest people I have known personally. I will raise a glass to them, and say a prayer for us, on Tuesday. If you’ll join me, it would be nice to know – send an email so we can celebrate together.

2007-11-15T17:07:00.000-05:00

Resurrection, Not “Afterlife”

It came to my attention recently that the word “afterlife,” like the word “hell,” is not a biblical word. The first occasion was a discussion of the Sadducees’ question to Jesus about the resurrection of the dead – their mocking case involving the law that required a man’s brother to father a descendant with the man’s wife if the man dies childless. Later, I heard a priest, preaching on the same text, make the same mistake in an otherwise excellent sermon. The law’s purpose, of course, was to keep a man’s name alive in the community, especially on his land. Many Jews, beginning in the time of the Maccabean war, had come to believe in resurrection from the dead – a revolutionary doctrine because it proposes that individual human life outlasts oppressive regimes. The notion of change implicit in the idea was one reason the Sadducees, very happy with conditions as they were since they were in charge, would not believe it.

During the discussion, several people consistently substituted the word “afterlife” for the text’s “resurrection” (the priest did exactly the same thing). I proposed that we limit our vocabulary to the word in the text, and they wanted to know why. The answer was, and is, that the concepts are not equivalent. Resurrection has to do with a mode of life, whereas afterlife has to do with life at different times. In fact, afterlife requires death, but resurrection does not: Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 (an idea already present in 1 Thessalonians) that “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” The deeply-embedded equivalence between “afterlife” and “resurrection” is, once again, a disastrous subversion of the story of the People of God by the Greek philosophers, who laughed Paul off Mars Hill for his assertion of resurrection (Acts 17).

The stakes could hardly be higher. “Afterlife” suggests a discontinuity between the present life and the future state. As the priest said, earthly things like marriage fade away in the “vision of God.” Resurrection, by contrast, insists on a continuity between the present life and the future state. The young men in 2 Maccabees 7 gave up their bodies, their hands, their tongues because they expected to get them back. Their mother gave them up because she expected to get them back. The Daniel 12 hope of resurrection is a hope that we will return to this life. Romans 8 looks forward to the “redemption of our bodies,” i.e., our resurrection, as part of the restoration, and certainly not the destruction, of the physical universe. Jesus returns from the dead not as a ghost, as the disciples first feared, but as one who could be touched, one who could eat, one who could cook breakfast. (His ascension, so that he could fill all things as Ephesians 4 explains, is a separate event and unique to him.) The biblical story looks for the restoration of our lives here, in this created universe of which we are made (Genesis 2).

Resurrection is our hope. That means the world we’re building is the world we’ll live in – free from sin, not least because of our building, our work to defeat the enemies. So what we do not is not important as a condition of our getting from this to some other place. It is important because of what it has to do with the future when we get there.

As a Presbyterian preacher’s son I appreciated what JPB had to say about predestination and the Reformed tradition after the last post. No one is interested in maintaining ecumenical respect than I am (having belonged to practically every tradition). However, it seems to me that some of the various attempts of Christians in history to give specific accounts stand in the same position as various attempts in the Jewish tradition to give specific accounts. The debates within the community between Ezra and 3 Isaiah/Jonah/Ruth, pro-monarchy and anti-monarchy in Samuel, the Deuteronomist and the author of Job, are real debates. Biblical Christianity winds up taking sides among them, such as when the Council of Jerusalem decides against requiring circumcision or Jesus refers to the “sign of Jonah” against the Ezra-minded Pharisees. Where Christian theologians in history failed to see that, and failed to see which moved forward with approval in history because they considered scripture flatly as a revelation of forms, we should reconsider. If a theologian, for example, supports quietism based on Romans 13, aiding and a betting a Hitler, we would suggest another reading. If a theologian takes the position of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, identifying some “sin” that accounts for Job’s suffering (as did most of the preachers of my youth), I would suggest another reading. We do not have to shore up the divisive systems of the past. Once again, thank God for evolution.

2007-11-03T09:44:00.000-04:00

Freedom and Predestination

Note: People who come to this blog because of their interest in the issues raised in Inherit the Land may find the following discussion of biblical theology puzzling. For me, the issues are inseparable. The questions have to do with human freedom and God’s work in the world, as the inscription to the book reads: “Justice, justice shall you pursue, so that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” I consider this kind of discussion fair game and expect to continue it.

The questions of predestination that have occupied Christianity for so much of its history, and the biblical texts invoked on their behalf, take on an entirely different color when understood in the context of the Hebrew story. However one may want to use those passages in our time, claims to their meaning when they were written should have to take into account what was available to the writer when the texts were composed. This is an intentional denial, of course, of any view of biblical inspiration that depends on the platonic understanding of forms that might have been seen and described, but not understood, by the biblical writers. The premise here is simply that what the writers wrote – the meaning it had when they wrote it – was intelligible to them and their readers in the first instance.

I think that at least two ideas key to the predestination ideas from Augustine forward are missing from biblical understandings for the vast majority of biblical history, and I find the strength of these ideas in the New Testament still highly debatable. The ideas are 1. “original sin” and 2. “afterlife.”

It appears clear to me that doctrines of predestination and original sin are inextricably linked from at least Augustine forward. It seems less clear that the link predates Augustine. The logic of the link is something like an inverse proportion between one’s view of the damage done by original sin and one’s view of predestination. Well down one end of the spectrum is the Anabaptist view that original sin distanced human beings from God but did not do great damage to their nature. That comes with the view that human beings are free to choose in their relationship with God, with little or no reference to predestination ("Free Will Baptists," for example). It was, in fact, the ascription of such a view to Pelagius that seems to have driven Augustine to the kinds of statements he makes about both predestination and original sin. We will deal later with Augustine’s and others' use of certain biblical texts in that debate. Well down the other end of the spectrum is a certain Reformed view that human beings are totally depraved because of original sin. That comes with the view that humans have no freedom in their relationship with God, and reference to predestination is complete, not only for those who are “saved” but also for those who are “damned.”

A personal aside: My father was present at the examination of a candidate for the ministry by officials of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, a Calvin-Knox tradition, in upper South Carolina in the 1950s. The elders asked the candidate whether he would be willing to be “damned for the glory of God.” His answer: “Sir, I would be willing for this whole committee to be damned for the glory of God.” He was ordained. Possibly at the same meeting, my father thought that he would not be able to be ordained because he would not admit that he believed in predestination to this degree: He would not say it was God’s will when a 4-year-old child was hit by a car and killed. At lunchtime, he asked my uncle, a prominent Methodist, to try to arrange a Methodist appointment for him. After lunch, he returned to the session and asked what the elders meant by “predestination.” They argued among themselves until 5 p.m., when they decided they should not withhold ordination if they couldn’t define the term of their question.

It also appears clear to me that leading ideas of predestination have to do with “afterlife,” an unbiblical word and likely an unbiblical concept as commonly understood. “Predestination,” as in the ARP elder’s question, is usually “to” some eternal state, “heaven” or “hell,” a word as completely absent from the biblical text as “afterlife.” In fact, the Hebrews vigorously denied the possibility of an afterlife – no big surprise, considering how they were treated in Egypt where the concept was perhaps at its most extravagant in history. Better, they thought, to accept “dust you are and to dust you shall return” than to legitimate an oppressive priestly-political class with control over the fate of individuals. The view of resurrection that they came to around 164 B.C., by way of their theologies of creation and the justice of God, is radically different from the static "beatific vision" supposedly enjoyed by a disembodied soul.

The biblical texts, both in the Old Testament story and in the New Testament writers’ use of those stories, especially Paul in Romans, seem to me to be describing the relationship of free beings – God on the one hand and humans, individually and collectively, on the other. His exchanges with Abraham over Sodom, with Moses over Israel after the calf incident, with David over the Temple, with Amos over sinful Israel, etc., are not exceptions to be explained away but representative of the whole relationship. (Notice that nothing resembling the notion of “original sin” as an explanation of the actions shows up in these texts.) Where post-Augustinian doctrines of predestination seem to calculate relative degrees of freedom between the parties in a zero-sum way, the biblical stories seem to assume that each is free precisely within the limit of the other’s freedom. God does not force human beings, and human beings do not force God, but they are in dialogue with each other. The outstanding exception to the second rule turns out to be Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, Job’s friends who thought they could make demands on God and explain mechanically the reason why good things and bad things happen. God says they were lying about him. Robert Frost noticed in his poetic drama about the story that Job set God free from human demands.

The post-biblical doctrines of predestination obscure the fact that the biblical story is about God’s freely making promises and keeping them. God’s central identity to Israel is as the one who “brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Unlike all the people around them, Israel eschewed prediction (cf. Deuteronomy 18) because, I think, they realized that the notion that the future is fixed is antithetical to freedom. Some read the texts as merely distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate ways of predicting the fixed future. That makes no sense to me, like the readings of the promise at the end of Flood story that suggest God will still destroy the world, only not with water. This is not a matter of excluding certain arbitrary details. It is a wholly different way of looking at the world.

Much predestinarian theology makes extensive use of Romans, especially 9-11. There are other ways to read those texts more consonant with the biblical narrative. Take the notion of God’s “hardening hearts.” A careful reading of the Plagues story in Exodus shows that Pharaoh hardened his own heart at least as often as God hardened his heart, and the passive voice “heart was hardened” avoids identifying the acting subject even more often. The phrase “God hardened his heart” may have much less to do with God’s arbitrary or coercive action than with the irrevocability of Pharaoh’s choice that he made freely.

Even more interesting is the discussion of God’s choice of Jacob over Esau. This is typically read as if Jacob is predestined to heaven and Esau to hell, as if Jacob is part of God’s people and Esau is not. But in context, this is an impossible reading. God’s promise to Abraham, which is the question under discussion, included the blessing of all the nations, not the exclusion of Edom. The question is not who is in the people of God but how God is going to establish a people for the sake of all the nations. The question is not whether the Edomites are among the nations God intends to bless but whether the group that will become the nation for the sake of all the others is Jacob’s descendants or Esau’s descendants. (The notion that it can’t be both seems non-controversial in any Christian theological system – God could no more have two People than he could have two Sons.) The story is about God’s keeping his promise to Abraham. Keeping his promises is the righteousness of God. God’s keeping his promises is also the meaning of predestination in the biblical story. Post-biblical predestination theologies don’t get the wrong answers – they just ask the wrong questions.

2007-10-25T22:18:00.001-04:00

Reading, Writing and Rowling

It doesn’t matter to me whether Dumbledore is gay or not. I have no objections to the Harry Potter books; I have not read them, although many of my children have read and enjoyed them. I do, however, find it odd that the author would “reveal” something about a character at this late date, after the entire series is published. I do object to what her announcement suggests about writers and readers.

If J.K. Rowling wanted us to know that Dumbledore was gay, she should have written the books in such a way as to make it visible. Once the books are published, once she and her editor have had plenty of time to make sure that the words in them are the words they meant to be in them, then they are released into the world for us to read. The world of the story is there for us to investigate – there for her to investigate too, if she like – but she has no right to be looking over our shoulder and telling us what she “meant” if the meaning isn’t there in the text. That’s the difference between writing and conversation: in a conversation, I can clear up your misunderstandings by responding to them, but in writing, the words on the page are all you can expect to get from me, and all I can expect to give to you. They will be there when I’m dead.

I once had this discussion with a colleague about an Emily Dickinson poem that I think can be read as describing a train or describing a river. The colleague looked it up on the Internet and found that Emily Dickinson said it was a train. I said, “I respect her opinion, but it’s just her opinion. Not one word precludes it from being a river or limits it to being a train.” If she meant to, she should have chosen different words.

This has to do with the integrity of the text and the freedom of the reader. I would have been glad to hear Rowling say she considers Dumbledore gay – a remark about her own reading of the text. I would have said, “Really? Where to you see that in the story?” But an assertion about the character, so clearly unnecessary from a reasonable reading of the text that it makes an audience of fans gasp, is an after-the-fact tyranny of an expert rather than another member of a shared world. It may show social compassion, smart politics or shrewd marketing, but if she meant to communicate that characteristic of Dumbledore’s in the book, she’s admitting to poor writing.

2007-09-28T22:08:00.000-04:00

A friend drove me to consider what it means to “apply the Bible to our times” recently when we were discussing the story of the widow’s gift to the Temple in Luke 21. The conversation started with the fairly common reading that Jesus commends her “faith,” meaning she would give up her last money not knowing where her next meal was coming from (as if she were Elijah to be fed by ravens), and with the considerable likelihood that she went home and starved.

I proposed that she had more assurance than abstract faith of God’s provision – that she in fact knew where her next meal was coming from because she lived in a community that would support her. We looked at Acts 4, about the community where no one is in need, and 1 Timothy 5, about how the community looks after widows, and I suggested that Luke the historian is writing in the context of such communities, looking back at events in the life of Jesus that make sense of both his actions and their life.

He was interested in such a reading, but explained that he was just trying to make the Bible applicable to our own time. I proposed that maybe there’s more than one way to make the Bible applicable to our time. One way would be to accept the conditions of our time – in this case, isolation, poverty, starvation, homelessness – then take a passage like this, lift it out of its historical context, set it beside the modern circumstance and think about how they relate. In such a case, you could decide that the modern people who die in those circumstances, if they have been faithful and done their religious duty like the widow, will get a reward, a commendation from the Lord. (In a recent sermon, a priest told the story, without flinching, about a homeless man in his mother’s parish who died of exposure and who is surely now in heaven and will welcome the priest in. I thought he should have considered the story of the rich man and Lazarus instead.) Another way to apply the Bible would be to understand its history and meaning at its writing – in this case, a community where no one is in need and even poor widows are free to participate fully in society; set that next to the conditions of our time – isolation, poverty, starvation, homelessness; and go on to create a community where no one is in need. We had looked at 1 Corinthians 15, so it seemed possible, even likely, that that kind of application has something to do with the Son of Man, with his people, putting those enemies under his feet.

2007-09-21T15:27:00.000-04:00

Obituaries for Alex, the African Grey parrot who died recently, have not as far as I can tell mentioned the reference to expriements with the bird that Walker Percy mentions in his Semiotics chapter in Lost in the Cosmos. It seems clear that it's the same bird, and certainly the same kinds of experiments. Percy, of course, gives an account of the bird's conditioning that denies anything like human speech going on. It's an interesting moment to consider his larger argument in that chapter.

Percy's semiotics argues for a triadic communication among human beings: the sign-giver and the sign-receiver have agreed to a referent, such as "apple," that they mean when they pronounce and hear a word. Percy says this opens the door for misunderstanding as well as understanding, lying as well as truth-telling. One important insight for me is that the referent has to do with what the sign-giver and the sign-receiver come to agree on. A corollary to this, in my mind, is that no word is univocal. That premise is crucial, not least because it destroys the platonic notion that there is a "right" definition for each word, I guess what the philosopher-king comes back and tells us. It's more like the Hebrew poetry, whose parallelism indicates that there's more than one way to say the same thing. The converse is also true.

Words have meaning, but the meaning comes from the context -- the story in which they appear, the community that uses them. We read the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification with freshmen at Trinity. Part of the document describes the different uses of the word "concupiscence" between Catholics and Protestants. This was a big deal in the 16th century: the Catholic Council of Trent said "If anyone say concupiscence is sin, let him be anathama." But it turned out, in the dialogue, that Lutherans mean by "sin" anything that is contrary to God's will -- which concupiscence surely is -- while for Catholics actual "sin" involves the engagement of a person's reason and freedom, which concupiscence doesn''t. On those grounds, the mutual excommunicatios of he 16th century became moot.

Language creates the world we live in (distinct, as Percy says, from the physical environment, the cosmos). Like Percy, I doubt that Alex ever had a world. But more importantly, I think we humans have more than an environment. We can shape the world we live in, for better or worse, with the story we tell.

2007-09-13T17:33:00.000-04:00

American Exceptionalism and its Exceptions

David Brooks in a recent New York Times column answered the question I wondered about a while back about how we wound up with an employer-based health care benefits system. Turns out that with wage controls during World War II, companies added such benefits to attract workers, providing more than competitors even though they couldn’t give higher wages. Eventually, courts decided that the benefits were not taxable.

Even Brooks admits that we have to find some other place to locate health care these days. As I wrote before, the fluidity of the workplace and the non-portability of the benefits are just too big a problem. The curious thing is that Brooks dismisses out of hand any possibility of establishing a single-payer system like almost every other industrialized nation. Americans, he asserts, are too “individualistic” and “pluralistic” to accept such a program.

Brooks is in a long line of observers whose premise is American exceptionalism, all the way back to the Puritan colonists who thought they were building the city on the hill. But on his own account, our “pluralism” means there is more to us than “individualism,” and we might, in fact, decide that the government that has responsibility for us all is the most appropriate place to locate the authority for such care.

We have certainly decided to give the central government that kind of authority in other arenas, from delivering mail to building interstates to, for better or worse, waging war. I don’t think many of us want the Ku Klux Klan or the Michigan Militia responsible for our defense. By the same token, we may be better off with a single payer, rather than Kaiser Permanente and Humana and the like, responsible for our health.

The question is even bigger than health care. It has to do with what kind of people, in both the collective and the individual senses, we are going to be. I think it’s a big mistake to start with an assertion of what kind of people we already are. We can look back at our history and see both Walter Bickett and E.T. Cansler, racist lynchers and Maggie Ross. We can see the individualism of a Carnegie and a Hoover and the communitarianism of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. We get to choose what moves forward.

2007-09-10T22:07:00.000-04:00

Your Tax Dollars at Play

A recent story in the New York Times detailed how taxpayers wind up subsidizing about one-third of “philanthropic” gifts because of tax policy that allows charitable deductions for a stunning range of exempt organizations – all the way to a group that helps sadomasochists replace the tools they lost to Hurricane Katrina. The story reminded me of the regular debate freshmen have over Andrew Carnegie’s theories about philanthropy articulated in his 1889 essay “Wealth.”

Of course, the modern situation is, in one sense, much worse than the late-19th-century one. Income tax began only in the early 20th century, with a constitutional amendment, so at least Carnegie wasn’t getting tax support for his spending choices. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that he was building monuments to himself – libraries and concert halls with his name on them – with money that belonged to other people. In “Wealth,” he frankly admits that the owners of the means of production deliberately pay their workers the lowest possible wage in order to maximize profits.
As Upton Sinclair vividly portrays in The Jungle – titled to skewer Carnegie’s survival-of-the-fittest, law-of-the-jungle assertions – those wages were far below survival rates for individuals, much less their families. In one telling passage, he also describes how those driven to work long hours for six days a week had no chance on their one day off of enjoying the “public” parks and other amusements so well endowed for upper-middle-class families.
The origin and use of Carnegie’s wealth raises a moral question: How should he distribute money harvested by such dehumanizing treatment of workers? One answer might be that he take less profit and pay his workers a living wage. Another, very common among admirers of the “captains of industry,” is that he could do whatever he wanted to with it, and the government had no right to tell him how he should spend it. Setting aside a great deal of understanding about solidarity, justice and the preferential option for the poor, maybe so. But the present situation raises another, to me less moral, question: Should the tax system subsidize such “philanthropic” giving for middle-class enjoyments, or worse? In effect, wealthy philanthropists’ write-offs increase the tax burden on the rest of us (or, from another view, increase the deficit that our grandchildren will have to pay). They are not simply exercising their right to choose how to distribute “their” money, ill-gotten or otherwise. They are enjoying a subsidy that affects my money.

2007-08-29T22:18:00.000-04:00

Now that school has started back, I’m hoping to have lots more to post – the content and level of the conversation with students and fellow teachers is a rich mine of ideas and a strong stimulus to reflect and write on them. Here’s just one example, from orientation day.

I was talking with some students who had pretty much run out of anything to say, before the allotted time had run out, about what they were expecting in the new school year. I said, “Somebody same something – anything. Anything at all.” One of them, never really at a loss for words, said “You’re supposed to plant split peas on the land before you plant wheat on it?” Little did he know that I had been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an incredible study of food by Michael Pollan. I’m still in the first section, on corn’s evolution and role in the modern industrial food diet, but I knew enough to talk to the student.

First, as usual, I asked if he knew why. He didn’t – he knew only the bare fact. Someone else knew that it had something to do with nutrients, but he didn’t even know it had to do with nitrogen. That was it. I explained what I had learned about nitrogen-fixing. Then we talked about how human beings have figured out how to make nitrogen available to plants without depending on nature (but by depending on a great deal of petroleum-based energy). I asked how long in human history had we not been dependent on natural forces (bacteria, lightening) to take nitrogen out of the atmosphere. The answer is 87 years – the process was invented by a Nobel prize winner in 1920 – and we’ve actually used the technology for only 60 years, since a World War II munitions plant in Alabama switched to making fertilizer.

The boys were as amazed as I am by the power of human beings to shape our world. The Omnivore’s Dilemma points out the complex issues that arise from that power – the overproduction of corn is responsible for both poverty and obesity. The slogan of Massive Change comes to mind: Now that we can do whatever we want, what will we do?

A little update on the book. Apparently, Amazon.com sent around an email to people who bought Barak Obama’s Audacity of Hope and told them that they might also be interested in Inherit the Land, which comes out in paperback next month. When I checked Amazon’s Website, the paperback, which had been unranked, was at 6,777 (that’s a very high number; the hardback recently was at 754,000). The book even shows up in the top 100 on special-interest lists such as Southern history, African-American history and Discrimination and Racism sociology.

2007-08-21T21:40:00.001-04:00

Unless you live near Charlotte, you might not have heard of the recent death of former Mayor John M. Belk at age 87. Mr. Belk was mayor from 1969 to 1977, and long involved in civic, religious, business and educational affairs before and after. The press eulogies of his career (see www.charlotte.com) both praised his impact on the community and noted that he was the last of his kind of mayor. He took office at the end of a long line of white male business leaders who used their role to bring improvement to the city’s infrastructure, especially its roads and airport. He also earned credit for keeping Charlotte’s race relations relatively peaceful in a difficult time. Among other things, the city was the national Supreme Court case for busing to achieve racial integration in the early 1970s.
Readers of Inherit the Land might recognize the Belk name, and the connection is close. Mr. Belk’s father founded the Belk department stores in Union County in the late 1880s, and the Rosses often shopped at the store in Waxhaw. John J. Parker got his first job at the store in Monroe, recognized as the first in the chain. Mr. Belk was CEO of the company, the nation’s largest private department store, for 50 years.
Mr. Belk served his time well, but memories of his time show how much society has evolved since then. Charlotte has had both a black mayor and a woman mayor in the intervening years. Downtown business leaders have learned to share power with neighborhood leaders. Sadly, the schools, which had successfully desegregated by the mid-1980s, are largely resegregated. We change, for better and worse. As the Alec Baldwin character in “Ghosts of Mississippi” told his wife at their parting: “People change.” “Are you saying I’ve changed?” she asked, and he replied: “I’m saying you haven’t.”
As links in the chain of human extension across time, we can hope to fill our roles as well as Mr. Belk did his. But we can also hope that our lives will lead to even better change in the future.

2007-08-20T16:24:00.001-04:00

Pet Doctors and Pet Programs
I got a chance, in the course of a newspaper interview today, to talk to a very reflective, thoughtful, self-identified “conservative” business president with 3,500 employees about health care. I have long wanted to ask such a person why he accepts government mandates that make him responsible for providing insurance. He had an interesting understanding of the history, namely that health care got caught up in a web of more directly business-related issues such as workplace safety, environmental oversight and protections for Americans with disabilities.
He also had an interesting idea for the solution: Human health care should adopt the model of veterinary care, with reasonable pricing, direct relationships with providers and no threat of lawsuits when things unavoidably go wrong. He also had suggested to his insurance agent that the company could retain its own physician or group, pay a salary, contract for services, promise not to sue and buy a catastrophic insurance policy at far less cost than they now incur. This stuck me as similar to a recent suggestion in the New York Times that such a system – put doctors on salary and pay them bonuses for getting people well, rather than for ordering endless tests – would be good for the whole country. Maybe it’s good to start with experiments with individual companies. My source said his agent said some companies have put such an idea into practice.
The hour and a half I spent with him – probably a record for a newspaper story, and it was followup to an earlier hour interview – also showed me the poverty of labels. He called himself a conservative (I did not bother to label myself), but his care for his employees, his acknowledgement of the present system’s flaws and his eagerness to evolve meant that we could dialogue fruitfully. We’re reading the same book – The Omnivore’s Dilemma (more on that later) – and I expect we’ll find ways to continue the conversation as persons, not as reporter and source.

2007-08-13T16:01:00.000-04:00

Shrinking Life and Greatest Generation

A few years ago when I was doing research for Inherit the Land, I was struck by the apparent trajectory of the family stories that I was following. Among the valuable sources were interviews with families, biographical sketches published years ago about Monroe civic leaders and Union County doctors, and especially the Historical Society’s The Heritage of Union County, a thick collection of family histories gathered and published in connection with the county’s sesquicentennial. I read dozens of the stories and began to detect a pattern that I called The Incredible Shrinking Life.

The more remote the subjects were, the more impressive seemed their accomplishments, and as the narratives reached the present, they became more and more mundane. Thus the ancestors carved a civilization out of the wilderness, established far-flung plantations, rebuilt the state after the collapse of the Confederacy, founded hospitals and churches, made fortunes with brave business initiatives and never forgot to look after widows and orphans. Their descendants writing the stories mention that they enjoy their work as, say, department store clerks or middle management in giant corporations, and they’re proud that their children have graduated from high school and are going to college.

At the time, I found this sobering, if not depressing. Are we the epigones of history? Have all the civilizations been established, all the mighty works accomplished? I remember as a little kid riding around and thinking how glad I was that I had not lived in the generation that had to pave all these roads (although it turns out my children might have to be the generation that rebuilds all the bridges). But as I read these stories, I felt like Alexander, who sat down and wept because he feared that his father would leave him no more worlds to conquer. Yes, like the people who write the stories, I had six great children, liked my job and went to church regularly, but I couldn’t compare to my own great-great-grandfathers who had fought for independence or a more remote relative who helped start the textile industry in the South after the Civil War or even my father who suffered for his stance for civil rights. I’m not part of the Greatest Generation – maybe the best my agemates can hope for is the Not-So-Bad Generation.

Or so I thought. Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe Tom Brokaw did us a disservice when he so labeled our parents and grandparents, giving us an excuse for not changing the world like they did, stoking nostalgia and not action. I am much more sure now than I was 10 years ago that the world is a place of possibility, not necessity, and we are responsible for the future we create – whether it’s a future of oppression or freedom. I am also much more sure that the world is far too complicated to fit under a label like “Greatest.” Many people of the same generation that got us through the Depression and defeated Hitler aimed water cannons at Civil Rights protestors or stood on the sidelines while people suffered. The idyllic ‘50s were idyllic for a relative few – so were the ‘80s and ‘90s – and justice can never be content with such inequity.

Now I think the chances are that some of the writers were too modest, downplaying their own achievements in deference to their ancestors, like some evangelistic testimonies overstate sin to give God a boost. At the same time, I think that the story we tell about ourselves has a great deal to do with who we are, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I think we should expect that the children and grandchildren of the “Greatest Generation” would be even greater – destroying even more evil in the world, bringing about even greater freedom and justice – and we should expect that our children and grandchildren will be even greater. We are not the clay feet of some image whose head was gold. The best is yet to be.

2007-08-07T21:47:00.000-04:00

Democracy and Majority

August raises some interesting points. Let’s keep the conversation going.

It’s widely understood that “democracy,” meaning “rule by the people,” is equivalent to “rule by the majority.” Maybe that’s how it’s been practiced in many so-called democracies, but it’s not a necessary definition. I think it’s interesting that an approach to democracy that respects the rights of all the people has a great deal of common ground not only with the Founders of the American democratic republic (I have read and taught the Federalist Papers many times) but also with certain versions of socialism, not least Upton Sinclair in The Jungle and Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. All agree that no one should be excluded from participation in the shaping of the world because they are members of a minority, whether a minority political faction (Federalists) or some other minority (race, gender, national origin, religion, economic class, etc.). Their voice must be heard, and their dignity must be preserved.

Remember, the starting point for this site is the counter-cultural relationship of black and white families in the Jim Crow era, and its motto is: “Justice, justice shall you pursue so that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” It seems to me that denying any person the right to participate appropriately in the shaping of the world is a grave injustice. On this ground, I can oppose both abortion and a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage (not that I support gay marriage – I wish the government were out of the “marriage” business altogether – but I think it matters that the only constitutional amendment limiting rights, Prohibition, is also the only amendment repealed). How can the right of some of the people to rule the rest of the people, making a world they have to live in without their participation, pass for democracy?

Which brings me to the point about subsidiarity. I totally agree with August that if the so-called “extended” family is capable of looking after a couple’s children when the couple can’t, they should. I find it sad that “family” is taken in our time to mean “nuclear family,” and one must add the adjective “extended” to mean more. When I was growing up, it was the other way around: “family” meant grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and it took “nuclear” to limit the group. And I’m perfectly willing for any existing intervening levels that are capable of looking after a situation to look after it before it reaches the governmental level. I was “jumping” to ultimates.

Because I think that, ultimately, only the government that represents all of us can take responsibility for all of us, and from that its authority derives – an authority that can be exercised only when it must assume the responsibility because no lower level can handle it. I totally agree that the unnecessary annexation of responsibility, and therefore authority, is a big problem. The “church” is, historically, in an odd position here. I can remember, from my childhood, heated arguments between my father, a Presbyterian minister, and my uncle, a small-town civic leader, about whether the church should be the lead welfare organization. I now think my father was wrong, but I think I understand why. Calvinists, like Catholics, have in their history periods when they were responsible for the whole society and therefore had authority over the whole society. The authority is gone – we are no longer a religious state – and the responsibility is gone with it. That goes unnoticed in a lot of places. I think the confusion results from the identification of the Pilgrims, with their church-based government, as the root of America. The church can take care of some of us, but not all of us – and all of us have to be cared for.

On another point, August says that the “superhero” story is a knockoff of the “Messiah” story: That raises a chicken-or-egg question for me. Is the biblical “messiah” story about someone who came with power from the outside, or about someone who gained power by taking responsibility? Personally, I suspect that many, if not most, modern versions of the Messiah story (including Gibson’s “The Passion”) are knockoffs of the superhero story and miss the power of the biblical narrative. Maybe we can talk about that another time.

2007-08-06T23:09:00.000-04:00

Power and Responsibility

In movies, comic books and some governmental systems, the motto is: "With great power comes great responsibility." Spiderman has great power in himself, and it is entirely up to him how to use it. His decision to use it for good is as arbitrary as it is benevolent, as the bad guys point out. Democracy claims that the opposite is true: Responsibility is the cause, not the consequence, of authority. As the Declaration of Independence makes clear, governments are established in order to secure rights -- among them, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- and they derive their just power from the consent of the governed. Use of power for the good of the whole is not the choice of the one in power, but the necessary condition for his (or her) having the power.

The differences in the approaches often seem to be overlooked, although they lead to significantly different worlds. The movie "Pollyanna" gives a great example of the contrast. Aunt Polly lives by the code "There is an obligation that comes with wealth," and the result is a life of unfreedom -- for her and for every other person in Harrington Town. Only when the citizens decide to act together, without dependence on or deference to her control-granting largesse, can they (or, significantly, she) really be happy. Yet the reigning motif in much of literature and history, not to mention politics and philosophy (e.g., Plato's philosopher-king), has to do with the person (cowboy, detective, Zorro, etc.) who comes from the outside, already endued with power, and rights the wrongs of the otherwise hapless society. Recognizably authentic American literature typically pits the powerless person against the power structures of society (Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird) and thereby shows why the powerful ought to need the consent of the governed (juries would rule justly if they had Jem Finch's perspective).

The relationship between responsibility and authority is a key to understanding subsidiarity. The government's authority over my children ends where my responsibility begins -- as long as I fulfill my responsibility. The government doesn't feed my children; I do -- unless I cannot afford to, and then the government makes sure they don't starve (food stamps, etc.). But in a democracy, the government's power stops where its responsibility stops. It's interesting to consider how the Founders, at a time when state governments had much greater responsibility and authority, gave the federal goverment specific responsibilities (enumerated powers) to limit its authority. We can have lots of interesting dialogue over how much responsiblity the government should have. But unlike a superhero or cowboy riding in to save us, the government (including its executive) has power only to the extent of that responsibility. I think this is something like what Jesus was talking about when, specifically addressing the question of government, he said that the greatest must be the servant of all, i.e., only the one who accepts the greatest responsibility can have the greatest power.

2007-08-05T11:51:00.001-04:00

The Test of Ideas

The test of ideas, not to mention ideologies, is their effect on the human person. One label that I have so far found no reason to reject is "personalist." This is, of course, an arguable starting point, because as far as I can tell no starting point can be externally verified, but we have to start somewhere. We could start out with the good of some group (the white, the rich, the minority, the poor, the religious, etc.), but starting here implies belief in a real common good, not a competition among humans for incommensurable goods, so this is where I start. The dialogue with a person who starts here looks very different from a dialogue that starts anywhere else.To be clear: this is a million miles, nay in a different universe, from utilitarianism. The "greatest good for the greatest number," with the "greatest number" less than the whole, is as opposed to this as "the greatest good for my race" or "the greatest good for my party." Each person is of infinite worth, and no accumulation of infinities is greater than infinity.

It's worth noting that the Civil Rights movement succeeded on this ground. Once black people were recognized as human persons, "men" under the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" (a status denied them, at least publicly, by Thomas Jefferson), objections to their equal treatment withered. Brown vs. Board of Education affirmed their citizenship under the 14th amendment, and the rationale for denying them equal access to water fountains, restrooms, schools and snack bars crumbled. (I have often wished that we could replay the pro-life movement on the personhood of the child rather than some religious proscription. I worry that the "God hates abortion" stance has a great deal to do with the hostility we experience in the public square as cause, not effect.)

For years, many of us who opposed abortion supported capital punishment. It was part of life: when I was in seventh grade, North Carolina's law included capital punishment for arson, burgulary and rape as well as murder. I could go on and on about the difference between the taking of "innocent" life (where was my belief in original sin?) and the retributive justice of capital punishment. I could bring up the deterrence argument, although I was unconvinced personally. I don't think I ever used the economic argument that society shouldn't have to pay to keep this guy alive for the rest of his life (demonstrably false, since the cost of completing the steps to execution is higher, except maybe in Texas).

Everything changed when the question became not "what is justice (in the abstract)?" but "what is justice for this person"? Capital punishment showed its true colors as revenge. Justice for the person can never be about last time -- it has to be about next time. The biblical injunction in Genesis 9 that seemed to insist on capital punishment became a text about the value of every human life, especially read in the light of Geneis 4 when God himself, as the story goes, protected the first murderer from capital punishment. Societies do not lose their right to defend themselves, but few societies need killing as defense.

What if that question became a controlling question on other issues? What if the question about health care became a question about justice for 44.8 million uninsured (emergency rooms aside)? What if the labels of "socialist," "capitalist," "government" and "private" left the dialogue until we could consider the health, and therefore the life, of each of those persons?

2007-08-04T18:41:00.000-04:00

The test of ideas, not to mention ideologies, is their effect on the human person. One label that I have so far found no reason to reject is "personalist." This is, of course, an arguable starting point, because as far as I can tell no starting point can be externally verified, but we have to start somewhere. We could start out with the good of some group (the white, the rich, the minority, the poor, the religious, etc.), but starting here implies belief in a real common good, not a competition among humans for incommensurable goods, so this is where I start. The dialogue with a person who starts here looks very different from a dialogue that starts anywhere else.To be clear: this is a million miles, nay in a different universe, from utilitarianism. The "greatest good for the greatest number," with the "greatest number" less than the whole, is as opposed to this as "the greatest good for my race" or "the greatest good for my party." Each person is of infinite worth, and no accumulation of infinities is greater than infinity.

It's worth noting that the Civil Rights movement succeeded on this ground. Once black people were recognized as human persons, "men" under the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" (a status denied them, at least publicly, by Thomas Jefferson), objections to their equal treatment withered. Brown vs. Board of Education affirmed their citizenship under the 14th amendment, and the rationale for denying them equal access to water fountains, restrooms, schools and snack bars crumbled. (I have often wished that we could replay the pro-life movement on the personhood of the child rather than some religious proscription. I worry that the "God hates abortion" stance has a great deal to do with the hostility we experience in the public square as cause, not effect.)

For years, many of us who opposed abortion supported capital punishment. It was part of life: when I was in seventh grade, North Carolina's law included capital punishment for arson, burgulary and rape as well as murder. I could go on and on about the difference between the taking of "innocent" life (where was my belief in original sin?) and the retributive justice of capital punishment. I could bring up the deterrence argument, although I was unconvinced personally. I don't think I ever used the economic argument that society shouldn't have to pay to keep this guy alive for the rest of his life (demonstrably false, since the cost of completing the steps to execution is higher, except maybe in Texas).

Everything changed when the question became not "what is justice (in the abstract)?" but "what is justice for this person"? Capital punishment showed its true colors as revenge. Justice for the person can never be about last time -- it has to be about next time. The biblical injunction in Genesis 9 that seemed to insist on capital punishment became a text about the value of every human life, especially read in the light of Geneis 4 when God himself, as the story goes, protected the first murderer from capital punishment. Societies do not lose their right to defend themselves, but few societies need killing as defense.

What if that question became a controlling question on other issues? What if the question about health care became a question about justice for 44.8 million uninsured (emergency rooms aside)? What if the labels of "socialist," "capitalist," "government" and "private" left the dialogue until we could consider the health, and therefore the life, of each of those persons?

2007-08-02T10:23:00.000-04:00

Subsidiarity

Part of the problem with much of the conversation in the country today, including the health care issue, has to do with each side’s framing the debate in either-or terms – what logicians call the black-and-white fallacy. Liberal-conservative, Socialist-capitalist, totalitarian-individualist, red-blue – we talk as if every person, not to mention every position, has to be shoehorned into one or the other of mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world.

It ain’t necessarily so. In fact, there’s hardly any chance that such a simplistic dualism is the best way to look at the world. Probably the first thing we have to admit, all of us, is that the answer will be as complicated as the question, as fraught with facets and paradoxes and “on the one hand-on the other hand” complexities that are the stuff of real life. Heck, I remember when there were only two kingdoms, plant and animal. Now there are five or six and, as I understand it, more than 200 taxonomies for the exact same set of living organisms.

A concept that has helped me understand the complexity of the world without giving up the idea of its unity is “subsidiarity.” I heard the word for the first time when I was in my 30s, but apparently it’s been around even longer. It means something like this: The smallest unit that can handle a task should handle it. Raising kids? That’s the family’s job – unless the family demonstrably, for whatever reason, can’t handle the job, and then we go to a larger unit, maybe the county’s foster care system. Delivering public education? That’s the county’s job – unless the county can’t do it (this has happened in some places, including Michigan and New Jersey), and the state steps in. Providing disaster relief? That’s the city’s job – depending on the disaster. If it’s a snowstorm, South Bend sends out its crews and clears the street. If it’s Hurricane Katrina, the county, the state, and, yes, the whole country are called on to help meet the need.

Notice how the concept can shift the discussion. The public-private, person-society line can’t be a barrier, a wall. The family isn’t insulated from the government, for example, when the child is being neglected, nor vice versa. The state can’t say to the family “it’s not my problem” when the problem is too big for the family, and the person can’t stay to the state “it’s not your problem” when the family isn’t handling the problem. It requires a conversation about what constitutes a problem that’s too big, of course, but that’s a very different conversation than an ideological position that would keep the public and private isolated.

The government, in fact, does all sorts of things that can be understood under this heading, in addition to obvious roles such as military defense, police protection, building interstate highways, food inspection, mail delivery, etc. If a person can’t pay her debts, the state provides protection from creditors, called bankruptcy laws. Home mortgage deductions and child tax credits, which renters or childless people properly could label “socialist,” are ways that the state helps support family life, easing financial burdens in a way that surely heads off many situations that could wind up in bankruptcy.

The concept applies to many issues, but let’s take health care as an example. Suppose the smallest unit, the individual or the family, is responsible for health care. How soon would they run out of the ability to meet that need? So who should take it over? Well, as the President said, there’s always the emergency room, which ultimately means the government. Otherwise, strangely – almost bizarrely from this point of view – we have made the employer of some member of the family responsible for providing insurance. How did the workplace become a unit of society, like the government, the family or the church, responsible for this particular task? Even if one could understand the insuring of the worker as in the interest of the company so that it doesn’t lose an employee, it’s quite a stretch to understand why the company is also responsible for all the worker’s dependents. I don’t know the complete history, but surely this got in place in the days of gold watches and pension plans, when workers had single, long-term careers with the same company. In those bygone days, the workplace really did look like a unit of society. (I remember the mills in small Southern towns, and I’ve heard of Studebaker here in South Bend, where generations of families knew they had reliable jobs and benefits.) Today, when you can take your phone number from company to company, you can’t take your insurance from employer to employer. Why does any capitalist think putting this financial burden on a business owner is a good thing?

So, what unit of society should be responsible for the health of the society? For me, the health of the whole society is the responsibility of the whole society, and the only agent of the whole society is the government. I mean that as I would mean it about education – people should have a right to spend more and get private access to more services, but the baseline has to be backstopped by the whole. Doing that with emergency rooms seems bizarre and inefficient. Doing it together isn’t socialism. It’s subsidiarity. Let’s overcome all of our black-and-white fallacies.

2007-07-28T20:28:00.000-04:00

A Culture of Health

If my fellow Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y want to change the world as significantly as our parents’ civil rights movement has, I suggest that the issue of our time is the gap between rich and poor. As numerous people have pointed out since the Supreme Court decision on racial integration in schools, this is a good way forward for the civil rights movement, whose unfinished business shows up significantly in disproportionate economic disparities. And I would suggest that any kind of movement for economic justice should start with the American health care system (with its postsecondary educational system a close second).

Yes, I saw “Sicko.” You should, too. Forget everything you know about Michael Moore. This movie is 180 degrees from his earlier work. There are no harangues, either of the fat cats in the industry or of the audience. Instead, the approach, uninterrupted, is gentle, even pleading: “Who are we?” What kind of people do we want to be? “More ‘we’ and less ‘me.’” Much of the evidence, of course, is anecdotal. It’s a film, not an essay, and the juxtaposition of child who died in America with a child who lived in France, a man who had to choose which finger to save in America with a man who had all five fingers reattached free in France, tells a powerful story.

Who among us doesn’t have our own anecdote? Two months ago, I was pleading with my daughter who graduated from college to get accepted into a grad school so she could at least stay on my insurance through the summer. We had already hurried up the necessary extraction of her wisdom teeth to get the procedure done under our plan, and we’re still trying to calculate whether my wife’s plan can help. (My daughter wound up quickly getting a job with only 30 days’ delay in getting on insurance. Now we can exhale.) All of my grown children’s decisions about school and work have “health insurance” as the determining factor. Some years ago when I went to work for a self-insured organization, I ran into the plan administrator whose first words were: “Aren’t your children ever well?” I think the story of a broken system is true. It is a source of stunning unfreedom for me and my children, and we’re not among the 47 million with no coverage.

It also happens to be a true story when the statistics are added – from the declining height of Americans (a measure of health care for children) to the conclusion of Jane Bryant Quinn (no Michael Moore) in a recent Newsweek that we could cover everyone right now with the same amount of money we’re spending on health care. For those who think the private sector can do a better job, Moore gently reminds us of the fact that we think some basic needs – education, mail delivery, national defense – are widely accepted as public-sector roles (with the choice of, say, private education and package delivery for those who want to pay more). I can think of more examples – rural electrification comes to mind – where the motive isn’t just profit. Doesn’t health care rank among those basic elements of life?

I hope that among the “pro-life” movement this issue goes the way of capital punishment. For many of us (including Pope John Paul II), the cognitive dissonance between opposing abortion and supporting capital punishment became too much. Supporting a for-profit health system that hastens death for many people in order to increase the bottom line, according to its own practitioners in congressional testimony, has the same cognitive dissonance. Do we care for unborn children, and for that matter frozen embryos scheduled for discarding, and not for the little girl with a life-threatening fever in the emergency room who is refused treatment because the hospital is not in her HMO? This issue has everything to do with justice, freedom, love and life. What kind of “culture of life” can we possibly have without a culture of health? Does anyone think that’s what we have now?

2007-07-23T11:21:00.000-04:00

Person and Community: The Integrated Society

The question of what an integrated society would look like brings up the question of the relationship between the individual and the whole. It seems to me that this is at the heart of most political theory, and most of the theory makes the mistake of setting the individual and the whole in opposition. The extreme examples in our time are the regimes, including the radical Islamists, that consider the individual expendable for the sake of the group (e.g., suicide bombers) and the radical individualism present in the West. The extremes seem to feed each other. Individualism grows in reaction to totalitarian regimes (any suggestion of limits is called “fascist”), and totalitarianism grows in reaction to what it perceives as the disorder in individualistic societies.
David Brooks had an interesting column in the New York Times recently where he pointed out the importance of relationship in developing personal identity. It’s seemed to me for a long time that being is being-in-relationship, not sealed-off autonomy. But even Brooks finally lacks a language for describing this. At one point, he refers to totalitarianism as putting the needs of the community above the needs of the individual. That’s a common definition, but it undermines another possible meaning for “community,” and the notion of “common good”: what’s really good for the individual is really good for the community, and vice versa.
One of the formative moments in my own thought was when my art history professor at Carolina, who claimed not to be a Christian, said the Christians were missing a great opportunity by not focusing on their unique contribution, the doctrine of the Trinity -- one does not have to choose between complete personhood and total unity. Every year, I ask my doctrine students: what do you really want? Usually, the discussion comes down to: I want to be my own person and I want to have good relationships. Most people thing that’s multiple choice. I think you can have both. It finally comes down to love: love that is love of a real person, the neighbor, not the love of love or some other abstraction. It’s what Christians call the love of the Father and the Son, and it is completely identity producing: the Father is the Father because he has a Son, and the Son is the Son because he has a Father. This is not some mathematical mystery to be taken “on faith,” but the foundation of an entirely new kind of world, a community of persons where the good of the individual and the good of the whole are in no way in opposition.
That community is the kind of integrated society that we should expect. No one loses their personal identity, we are not reduced to some least common denominator, and we do not have to look alike. Our unity has nothing to do with uniformity, but with love.

2007-07-18T11:02:00.000-04:00

History and Possibility

The hint about history in Stanley Fish’s recent column – that the current decision isn’t necessarily final, and principles are chosen in history – reminds me of a pivotal moment in my life 35 years ago. One reason the moment is fresh on my mind is that I was telling my nephew about it just the other day. It involves his father.

When I was 18 years old, just out of high school, my brother was getting his doctorate in English at the University of South Carolina. He noticed my increased interest in Christianity and worried that I was being drawn into an anti-intellectualism, so he posed a challenge: “Did God create the best of all possible worlds?” I know now that it’s a standard question, in some ways a trick question like the reporter’s famous “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Both “Yes” and “No” are unsatisfactory. If yes, God created the best of all possible worlds, then either this is it or he was unable to sustain it. If no, God did not create the best of all possible worlds, then why not? I told my brother I’d get back to him.

After a few days of pretty hard thinking, I came back with an answer that I’d still give today: “Yes – because he made history a feature of it.” The apparent dilemma in the question presupposes a static view, I think. But if the world is a world of possibility, a world of freedom, a world where history really matters, then the present situation in the world is neither necessary (hence not necessarily God’s fault) nor necessarily permanent. I can change. We can change. The world can change.

I’ve thought about these questions a bit more in the last three and a half decades, of course, and the issues of possibility, freedom and history are even more important than they were. It’s not clear to me, though, that my children’s generation understands them in the same way. My conversation with my brother was in 1972, when we were seeing the world change before our eyes. My whole life has been in the world of Brown v. Board of Education, which was handed down two days before I was born. I had lived in a segregated society – my father had suffered for his stand against it – and that world had changed dramatically. We were also on the verge of ending the war in Vietnam. Men had walked on the moon. Change was everywhere, and possibility was clear. For my children, that’s all history. There is no clear example in their experience of the world’s changing, except maybe for the widening of the gap between rich and poor, which is the wrong kind of change. It is doubtful to me that the changes of the civil rights movement are complete, or even safe. The goal of racial equality needs to move forward. What else needs to change? We need to hold up those kinds of goals for ourselves and our children. The world can change. It is a world of possibility and freedom. Thank God for evolution.

2007-07-16T09:30:00.001-04:00

Human Bodies and History

The Body Worlds (www.bodyworlds.com ) exhibit on tour around the country is an amazing display of science and art – tasteful, informative, challenging and strikingly beautiful. I saw it with my mother at Discovery Place in Charlotte. The biological, technical and aesthetic qualities of the exhibit are pretty widely known. I was not prepared for its historical dimension. It seems clear to me that Gunther von Hagens, who developed the technology and created the exhibits, understands himself to be restoring an attitude toward death, the human body and the encounter between the living and the dead that he thinks was common until the last 200 to 300 years. Little of this shows up in the audio tour, but it is a major theme of the hanging banners and other printed material at the display. One points out that the average life expectancy was 35 until relatively recent times, and death was an ordinary part of life. Several describe the practice of public dissections, including a large, detailed, carefully interpreted image from the front of an anatomy book.

Although I didn’t notice explicit connections in the written material, it was also clear that von Hagens is deliberately echoing some of the work of earlier anatomists. His giant equestrian work stands near a large, full-color picture of a similar work from centuries ago. His own example of a pregnant woman with her unborn child is near a detailed description of an earlier case where a pregnant woman drowned herself and the experts preserved mother and child intact. This is not, nor should it be, a disinterested display of technology. It is the product of a human being with a certain understanding of the world, of what is possible, and of what he considers desirable for human beings on this subject. He is explicit about his interest in health – he deliberately juxtaposes healthy and smoking-tarred lungs, healthy and cirrhosis-damaged livers, healthy and cholesterol-clogged arteries. His cross section of an overweight body next to a corresponding healthy body makes it a lot easer to choose fruit instead of French fries. But I think his message goes beyond that, proposing a return to a world that sees the body as more than the frail carrier of the soul, a world that is willing to face mortality frankly and with faith. His use of history to that end was powerful.

Speaking of history, the recent Stanley Fish column in the New York Times, Fish’s reflections on the Supreme Court desegregation decision, makes an intriguing case about interpreting the Constitution based on “principle” versus “history.” Four of the five in the decision’s majority seemed to be looking only to a “timeless” principle that the law must treat individuals as individuals and not as members of groups, while the dissenters (and Kennedy, although he went along with the four) were willing to look at the actual effects in history of decisions such as Brown. At the end, Fish also points out that history finally wins – that even principles are chosen in history, and this decision is not likely the end. It’s worth a read. We should talk about it some more.

2007-07-11T23:47:00.000-04:00

Thoughts from the road...

Searching the radio dial in the late hours of Sunday night, as I drove to Myrtle Beach from the Ardrey Family Reunion at the Rosses' magnificently restored house, I came across a Public Radio rebroadcast of some of Tavis Smiley's symposium on the 400th anniversary of Jamestown. It was an eye-opening, invigorating conversation about competing American narratives. I have long been annoyed that the New England story, enshrined in song and Thanksgiving celebrations, has become the nation's master narrative. Two years ago, I asked 22 freshmen on the first day of American History class to name the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Of the ones who thought they knew, two said Jamestown and eight said Plymouth. A good friend thinks the change came after the Civil War, but I'm not sure.

The scholars on the radio made clear how much this narrative matters. They had different things to say -- you can Google and listen to the symposium -- but all of them want the "competing narratives" of the nation's founding "folded in" to the master narrative. My own thoughts as I reflected on the stimulating discussion ran along these lines (not that they were anyone's thesis from the panel, much less a consensus):

1. The beginnings of America were as a business venture, not a society (one speaker described this in detail). The Virginia Company of London, a capitalist enterprise, was after profit. From this point of view, "greed" (he said), particularly corporate greed, has been a driving force in America. As the conversation continued and the origins of institutionalized slavery unfolded, it seemed to me that the establishment of such "peculiar labor" traces back to this greed. Before cotton, of course, there was a tobacco culture, beginning (they said) in 1614.

2. Slavery was not practiced at Jamestown in any way like the image of slavery we have from the mid-19th century. From what I could tell (and I'd like to hear from others as well as research this myself), the 19 black people who were offloaded from the Dutch ship in 1619 were at worst in about the position of white indentured servants in the colony. Some became free and wealthy landowners with servants of their own, so Jamestown was very much a multiracial society (obviously including contacts with the natives). Speakers said that laws institutionalizing slavery, including the slave status of a slave child, were not passed until 1661, after the Cavaliers from England combined with the whites already in the colony and went about setting up a class system.

3. New England was able to replace Jamestown in the "master narrative" of America becaue of the situation at Jamestown. I think this can be taken two ways. Maybe the people composing the master narrative believed in freedom and equality, and the slavery that developed at Jamestown made that story unworthy. Or maybe it was the multiracial and essentially secular character of the original colony that made them think it was not worthy of becoming the American ensign. Certainly the success of the Puritans' successors is at the heart of American exceptionalism -- the city on the hill; the nation with the "manifest destiny" to replace natives, Hispanics and anybody else in the way from sea to shining sea; the WASP. Look at the Thanksgiving symbol, setting aside the role of the natives: all-white hosts who arrived later than the Africans (Angolans, as one speaker pointed out; the language issues of such invented categories as "African" and "European" were part of the session's fascination). Ask Roger Williams about the "tolerance" of the archetypal colony, and you might understand some Americans' reaction to Catholics in the 1840s and Muslims today.

A new future requires a new past. Maybe this year, the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, will give us some time to consider our multiracial origins, what could have happened, what went so terribly wrong, what we can do to more forward toward a more integrated (by which I do not mean homogeneous) future.

Check out my book about racial justice in the 1920s South and my blog, Inherit the Land, at http://www.genestowe.com.

Ready for the edge of your seat? Check out tonight's top picks on Yahoo! TV.

2007-07-09T15:24:00.000-04:00

New start for blog!

I'm traveling again, on my way to the family reunion of the Ardrey family, the descendants of the doctor who built the mansion in Marvin where Maggie and Sallie raised Mittie Bell. The reunion is at their house, and the organizer is going to let me talk about the role of the house in the story and in the community. Should be fun.

But I'm writing again not because I'm traveling but because I've had a lot of time to think (well, a lot of it was on the 8-hour drive) about what's going on in the world these days and how people who appreciate the story of Inherit the Land might think about them. I started this blog about a year ago as the quickest possible way to get information out about the book when it was newly released -- a Web address on a business card. I hope it can become more. I will be posting more often and reflecting more than reporting, and I hope we can get some conversations going to help us all sort out some issues.

The outstanding event, as you might suspect, was the Supreme Court's recent decision about school integration. I expect that John J. Parker, whose ruling in the Clarendon County, S.C., case was overturned by Brown, might find something satisfying in the effort to stop using race as a factor in school assignments. After all, later in his career when he was supposed to be implementing Brown, he argued that the decision meant that school could not segregate -- it did not mean that they had to integrate.

Several commentators after the recent decision have raised some interesting questions about how to move forward. Some expect that school districts will find other ways to keep schools diverse -- economic levels or ZIP Codes rather than race. That could be a very good thing. A great number of school districts, including Charlotte's, have resegregated already, and maybe they will start thinking about the desirability of diversity in other ways.

David Brook in the New York Times raised the question of what kind of integrated society we should expect to have, given people's resistance, perhaps even evolution-based, to efforts to have them share life in a certain way.

I have always thought of Maggie and Sallie's farm as an integrated community -- black and white tenants working together, going to the store, Bob's collecting rents, Maggie paying Will Body's debts to keep his belongings from being confiscated. They certainly had a life together. But it also, certainly, wasn't that they did everything together, much less that they did everything the same. Their religious cultures, for example, were certainly different, as Lavinia Kell pointed out to a black friend. And it seems clear to me that each would have been diminished if they had been required to attend the other's church, or a church cobbled from compromises between the two cultures.

I would propose a different meaning for "integration." I start by imagining the opposite. What was segregation? Black children were not free to attend white schools. Why does the opposite of that (integration) mean that black children are not free not to attend white schools? Why can't it just be that black children are free to attend white schools? I realize that sounds like the recent supreme court decision, but I mean that the black families really do have to be free to send their children to white schools (and, of course, vice versa). Individuals mst be free to move where they choose, and they must all have access to the public square. That was (and may still be) the benefit of Brown. In the field of public education, we had to break down the official "otherness" (and later the de facto "otherness") so that we could have a place to recognize each other's humanity (think of Jim and Huck on the raft in Huckleberry Finn). We would all be poorer if we forced, say, churches to integrate -- some valid religious expressions on both sides would be lost in the mix. And God forbid that we have a uniform cuisine. But we would also be poorer if we simply lived parallel lives in isolate, hostile communities as biological evolution may (or may not) have suggested. I'm not sure Brooks has the science nailed down, and even if he does, humans are able to choose a new way (Maggie and Sallie and Bob and Mittie certainly did). We are not, in fact, different species. We don't have to be colorblind -- that would be an impoverished way of looking at the world -- but we can acknowledge, even celebrate, the differences and learn how to enjoy them rather than making them reasons for separation.

My understanding of northern cities is one of ethnic neighborhoods (this did not happen in the south for historical immigration reasons). No probably with that in itself. The problem comes with restrictions of freedom to move between the groups. Compare "West Side Story" to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." It's the fundamental question of identity -- is my identity what I am or what I'm not? The "other" person is a threat only if I find my identity in negating him. I don't have to. The New Heaven/New Earth is a place where people of all nations, races and tongues are together, not where everybody has become the same nation, race or tongue (the problem of the Tower of Babel is undone, but not by reverting to the pre-problem state).

So, what do you think? There are a lot more things I hope we talk about here, and I'd like to hear what others would like to talk about. "Justice, justice shall you pursue, in order that that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God is giving you."

2007-03-05T13:54:00.000-05:00

On the road again...

There's something about traveling for the book that makes me want to blog -- maybe it's the hours of driving that give me time to think, maybe it's the audiences that give me something to think about. This time, two libraries in western North Carolina asked me to speak about the connections between Inherit the Land and To Kill a Mockingbird, the novel the mountain counties are reading in a coordinated library program this year. Here's what I came up with:

Every writer -- novelist, historian, journalist, whatever -- writes for her own time. Harper Lee, writing in a fairly early stage of the Civil Rights Movement showed what could have been and should have been in a 1930s small Southern town, surely in the hopes that her readers would see what could be and should be in the 1960s. When I read To Kill a Mockingbird in the late 1960s, I wished it could have been and thought it should have been, too. It still wasn't.

Inherit the Land isn't about what could have been or should have been. It is about what really was. I think Harper Lee would be pleased to know that Southern women really wrote a will leaving 800 acres to a black family 100 years ago, at the same time when other Southern whites were lynching black farmers to steal their land. I think she would be pleased that a small Southern community really learned to live with the arrangement, "odd but good," where Bob Ross was respected enough to collect rents, buy like a landowner in the store and direct the location of a road through the farm. I think she would be pleased that Southern leaders -- lawyers, mayors, a judge, a jury and a Governor -- really established justice for a black family in court.

The story, even the language, of what really happens bears some striking similarities to the fiction. Compare Atticus Finch's plea to the jury that in the United States, all men are created equal in court, which is how Harper Lee thought it should be, with Judge Ray's charge to the jury, written by the propounders, that they could not consider the effect of their verdict on the community and they could not let any prejudice sway them based on the beneficiaries' color. John C. Sikes made the same point when he urged them to show the world that a Negro could get justice in court, even when "the opposing counsel shouts 'nigger!'" Compare Atticus Finch's shocking statement that any white man who mistreats a black man is "trash" with Gov. Walter Bickett's speech in Virginia, the night before the verdict, where he said that a white man despises no one more than another white man who would defraud a black man. These things really happened, long before they didn't happen in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The message seemed to resonate with the adults at libraries and with the students in the schools. I spoke to four groups at Statesville Middle School on Tuesday, two groups at Parkwood High School in Union County Wednesday morning and the entire eighth grade (about 450 students) at Porter Ridge Middle School in Union County Wednesday afternoon. A number of teachers wanted to buy books, and traffic on the Website seems to have increased.

But this trip hasn't bee mostly about selling books. It's about getting the word out -- and it's about staying involved in the story. After the presentations in Union County, I went by the site of the house that Maggie and Sallie built for Mittie and Tom in 1908. It so happened that the developer who bought the land, and is building mangificient home on it including one for his parents, was there overseeing some construction, and we got to meet. He had heard bits of the story from Joe Hudson's daughter, a descendant of R.A. Hudson, but he was interested in hearing more of the history. As I looked at the huge mansions he's building in the six-lot cul-de-sac off Crane Road, I remembered a family member's reference to "baby hotels" in the original interview in 1993 (mentioned in the book).

The best was yet to come. I went by the Ross graves across from Banks Presbyterian Church, as I always do, and noticed some cars in the church parking lot. I went to see if Rev. Hillborn, a good man who appreciates the story, happened to be there. He was, and we had a nice visit, but a lady who was there for the prayer meeting recognized me and said she had something to show me. She went home to get it -- an old studio photograph of Maggie and Sallie! It was taken in Monroe in the women's younger days, a remarkably hansome photograph of them. The lady had found it in her aunt's belongings three weeks earlier. It may have been evidence in the trial. I have to study some more and try to find out when the studio, stamped on the back, was operating. But it's magnificent to have such a clear picture of the women, far more illuminating than the tiny images of them in the large picture.

I realized on this trip that this year is the 100th anniversary of the signing of the will. I'm going to ask Rev. Hillborn if he'd consider hosting some kind of celebration on the property, perhaps even during the time that the ASALH convention is in Charlotte in October. Amazing to thing that a full century has passed since these women made this remarkable decision.

2006-09-25T13:01:00.000-04:00

September 25, 2006: The Urban League Black & White Gala

The Urban League Black & White Gala turned out to be a perfect home for Inherit the Land, as Rev. Michael Patton, the president of the League, had expected. More than 300 people, black and white, attended the gala, and it was in some ways reminiscent of the Fall Festival at Marvin where I first saw the effects of the Ross history. People were together, eating at the same tables, carrying on conversations, sharing their hopes for the future. But as Dr. Roland Chamblee, an 83-year-old civil rights pioneer, pointed out in his address as chair of the event, they need to do this more than once a year to develop the kinds of relationships that would really change things. It was a great opportunity to point out how ordinary people such as Maggie, Bob and Mittie had been able to change their community.

2006-09-07T12:10:00.000-04:00

September 7, 2006
After a hiatus from blogging, we are back! A schedule of exciting upcoming events will be posted soon.

Cheers,
Gene

2006-07-16T22:58:00.000-04:00

Talk Given at Recent Book Signing

Here's a version of the talk that I gave at the book signing at
Barnes & Noble in South Bend last week.

Cheers,
Gene

Chances are, you’ve heard the outline of this story or read about it in the Tribune, that a white woman willed her 800-acre homeplace to a black family and a white jury in Monroe, N.C., upheld the will, over the objection of more than 100 cousins, in 1921. Some of you may be wondering why you should care about a Southern history, even if the author happened to move to Indiana 13 years ago. I can think of two reasons.

One is so that you can come to understand the South, that is, so that you might recognize that there’s more than the one-dimensional story you might have grown up on. Overcoming stereotypes is worth doing any time you can do it. That’s a big reason I wrote the book. In fact, if I hadn’t moved here and seen the shocked reactions of so many Northerners to this story, I might have given up on it long ago. When one person after another told me that they had never heard of, or even imagined, that Southern whites could treat black people with equality in the early years of the 20th century, I became more and more determined to document this story. This is not, by the way, to excuse or cover up the evil that so dominated race relations in the South during the period. In fact, it demonstrates that the evil was unnecessary – the notion that these people were “product of their times” cannot stand as a defense of wrongdoing when others who were products of the same times could, as The Charlotte Observer put it, “establish justice…and write a triumph for the law.” But it does show that race relations were more complicated than the segregationist politicians wanted us to believe, and more complicated than my Northern friends once believed.

The other reason I hope you care about this story is so that you might come to understand yourself. That’s what happened to me in the 13 years I was writing it. I lived with these women, these families, these jurors, who were the reason for the island of racial harmony called Marvin in the midst of a very troubled region. I wondered for years how they accomplished this – what was the key that caused this community to escape what so many other cities, North and South, suffered across the 20th century. Then one night I met a 91-year-old woman, Lavinia Kell, whose relatives had testified for Miss Maggie’s will. “My mother told me about them Ross women,” she said. “People talked.” “I’m sure they did, Mrs. Kell,” I said. “What did they say?” She leaned back, stared at me through those thick glasses and explained: “Them women was odd. But they was good.” In that moment, I saw what changed the world – what changed Marvin, and what could stand up to any other evil. In the heart of this community lived the most odd possible family – white people who called black people their “darling granddaughter,” their “son-in-law.” But the neighbors accepted it, and came to respect the black people themselves, because the women were so good. They didn’t impose, they didn’t preach, they didn’t attempt to convert. They just lived their lives the way they knew was right, and earned so much respect from their neighbors that the whole community was transformed.

That’s not just a Southern story. That’s a story that matters wherever human dignity and human equality are at stake, wherever discrimination based on differences threatens to bring about the bitterness and violence that always come from oppression. That’s why I hope you care about this story, too.

2006-07-11T13:18:00.000-04:00

From the Charlotte Observer

Miss Maggie Bequeathed Kinship

Gene Stowe was visiting a fall festival in 1992 at Marvin AME Zion Church in what then was a rural corner of southeastern Mecklenburg County.

Continue reading [...]

The full article will be available on the Web for a limited time:

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/
news/local/states/north_carolina/counties/
mecklenburg/14998534.htm.

2006-07-04T15:12:00.000-04:00

Mark your calendar!
Gene Stowe will sign copies of Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will from 4 to 6 p.m. July 8 at Barnes and Noble Bookstore on Grape Road in Mishawaka. Carl Sergio will sign prints of his illustrations.

Click
here for directions:

http://storelocator.barnesandnoble.com/storedetail.do;jsessionid=
0DDC44E4F4CCFC768988525E54E3E9B8?store=2659"

2006-06-30T15:41:00.000-04:00

Gene in the South Bend Tribune

Click here to access Gene's most recent article in the South Bend Tribune. In it, he reflects on his experience as a Southern "expatriate author," journalist, and educator living in South Bend while researching and writing Inherit the Land. Hurry and read it, the link will expire in 5 days!

For a downloadable version of the article click:
http://www.genestowe.com/SBTstowe6-28.pdf.
Adobe Acrobat: 65kbs

This link will not expire.

2006-06-30T15:27:00.000-04:00

Q & A with Gene and the University Press of Mississippi

Recently, I gave an brief interview with the publishers of my book Inherit the Land. Here's the link.

Or click: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/tips/06-15-2006/porch.html.

2006-06-23T19:00:00.000-04:00

From the road... Louisburg, NC

Here I am in the hometown of Walter Bickett, Maggie and Sallie's cousin who moved from Monroe to practice law here around the turn of the century. He wound up being elected attorney general and governor from here. Seems like he went by Thomas here, Walter in Monroe where a school is still named for him (his name was Thomas Walter). Mostly, this gives me a chance to catch up on the trip so far.

Working backwards: Last night, I was able to attend the championship game of the Stanley Cup! A friend here had an extra ticket. It was unbelievable to be in that building The city went nuts, of course, although not Detroit nuts (no cars or buildings were burned).

The game likely cut down on the attendance at the Quail Ridge bookstore event, but a nice group of people turned out, and my Aunt Dot drove three hours to be there with my cousin Karen. Dot Jackson, a former colleague at The Charlotte Observer who has recently published a novel, also showed up. One person mentioned that she had heard my radio interview last Friday on WUNC. A teacher said she wants to get the book for her high school history class.

I spent eight hours Sunday at Marvin AME Zion Church -- two services with signings after each. The second service especially was much like being in the Raleigh arena for the Stanley Cup -- lots of joyful noise -- and the preacher even made the point that people should be so willing to express themselves in such. At the early service, the readings were about how Barnabus helped the apostles accept Paul when they were worried that he wasn't one of them and about the woman at the well who reminded Jesus "Jews have no dealings with Samaritans." It was especially meaningful because Frank Crane's grandchildren came to the service, and I saw the same kind of relating I had seen at Banks Presbyterian in 1992. All-around inspring.

Saturday, we sold out all the books that Park Road Books had ordered, they bought five from my trunk and sold those, and they bought five more to stock. Then I met Mom at Central Steele Creek Presbyterian Church for an anniversary party with a couple who were celebrating 70 years. Saw lots of old friends (and sold a half-dozen books).

For the Friday three-hour trip with Burleson descendants, check the BFRG link on the blog.

Cheers,

Gene

2006-06-22T15:36:00.000-04:00

From the road... Chapel Hill, NC

I'm in Chapel Hill now, reliving my youth! So cool to walk by the bell tower, on my way to the Old Well.

Cheers,
Gene

2006-06-22T13:50:00.000-04:00

THE PROJECT FOR A NEW PAST:

The most unexpected response to Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie’s Will has been the number of people who have come up after talks and told me stories about situations in their own family histories that mirror the Ross relationship of racial equality. This broadens my own conviction that the story of the 1921 verdict could have created a different world and avoided, among other things, the 1961 riot in Monroe. It is not that what the Ross women did was unique. It is that such alternative stories have been suppressed by a world that wanted power for one group over another.

Historian Eric Foner has written: “A new future requires a new past.” The attempt to create a new future in the South, and for that matter in America, has been more weak and halting than it should because it has been assumed to require abandoning our past. This is not a human thing to do. Any attempt to force it will backfire in superficial, legal, impersonal arrangements that may keep one group from oppressing another but will fail to unite us. We do not have to reject our history wholesale. It was never as monolithic as the segregationists would have had us believe or as many Northerners now believe about the South. Rather, we need to discover and tell the stories of racial equality from our past, stories like Inherit the Land.

Some will object that these stories are “exceptions,” even “exceptions that prove the rule.” But such an objection misses the evolutionary nature of history. In biology, the “exceptions” are called “mutations.” They are what cause the species to adapt to the changing environment and move forward. History, involving the element of human choice, can use these exceptions more creatively, even after the fact. It is a matter of selection, not natural selection. History, like all writing, is revision. I am not suggesting that these exceptions concerning racial equality brought about an evolutionary change in society. Rather, I am suggesting that society failed to evolve, and to some degree still fails to evolve as it could, because these exceptions were suppressed. And I am suggesting that recovery of these exceptions can contribute to the evolution of a richer, fuller society.

Therefore, I am launching, on this blog, The Project for a New Past. I want to collect as many stories as I can about acts of racial equality in the Jim Crow era. The historical period is roughly 1877 to 1954, the end of Reconstruction to Brown v. Board, but don’t hesitate to send any story from earlier or later. I am not talking about stories where whites were kind to blacks while maintaining a relationship of superiority to inferiority. That kind of racism, so fully elaborated by Walter Bickett, is more insidious than violence and more successful at dividing in the long run. I am looking for stories, like Inherit the Land, where the act clearly demonstrates an understanding of equal dignity and worth. Write as much or as little of the story as you like, but include contact information so I can get in touch with you for getting more detail and documentation. I don’t know where this will go, but at least we will have the benefit of knowing these stories.

In the fall of 1992 at Banks Presbyterian Church, I saw black people and white people relating to each other in ways I had never seen before. They weren’t just at the same event – they really were together, not at separate tables in the same dining room, so to speak, but all at the same table. Their connections were natural, free, easy and familial. I wrote a story about it for The Charlotte Observer and decided to find out more about the history of the black community at Marvin. The result is Inherit the Land. To this day, I have never seen such relating among blacks and whites. In the most accepting and tolerant of circumstances, it seems to me that the level of comfort of blacks with whites and whites with blacks does not approach the level of comfort blacks have among themselves and whites have among themselves, as it did on that day at Banks. But it could, with the kind of history that those people had.

2006-06-21T17:37:00.000-04:00

With the BFRG at Banks Presbyterian Church in Marvin, NC...

On Friday June 16th I met with the Burleson Family Research Group met with at Banks Presbyterian Church in Marvin, NC for a tour of the areas related to Inherit the Land.

Click here to download the minutes (it has great pictures) of the June 16th BFRG meeting with me.

Click on the following link:
http://www.genestowe.com/BFRG-GeneStowe.pdf
(Adobe Acrobat; 1.34 MB)

2006-06-19T16:02:00.000-04:00

From the road... Union County, NC

Below is the text of a speech that I delivered at the Union County Courthouse, a place of central importance in my book Inherit the Land:

Twenty years ago, when this Courthouse was restored for its centennial, I wrote a story for The Union Observer that was published as a self-guided tour of the building. Some of the people in this book, it turns out, are mentioned in that story because they had offices downstairs. And, of course, I was able to write it, like I was able to write the book, because of the interest and support of the people who care about the history of this County.

I moved to Indiana primarily so that my children could get a certain kind of education. But in so happened that in 13 years of teaching history and literature and writing, I learned some things that made it possible to write this book. I'd like to share one of them: History is of the past, by the present, for the future. Let me take the history of this Courthouse as a case in point.

In July 1910, Attorney General Walter Bickett, Miss Maggie's cousin who became governor, dedicated the Confederate monument outside. I have a copy of his speech. He gave a spirited defense of secession, though not of slavery, and thanked the veterans for settling the issue in their generation instead of handing it off to his. "Some things must be fought out," he said.

In August 1961, a demonstration by the Freedom Riders outside led to such confusion and violenced that Robert Williams of the local NAACP fled the country. This bit of history, like all history, was both a result and a cause. It was the result of a certain understanding of relationships between black people and white people, the cause of further division and, unfortunately, the source of what much of the world today knows about Monroe. A Google search this morning for "Monroe," North Carolina" and "racism" turned up this sentence on the first page of about 239,000 entries: "Even in historically recent times, the racism of this place was among the worst in the South." Why? Because for too long, we were missing an important piece of our history.

In April 1921, in this room, 12 white men took 45 minutes to uphold the will of Miss Maggie Ross and award 800 acres of prime farmland in Marvin to a black family. It was an act of racial justice with few parallels. The Charlotte Observer noticed in an editorial (p. 261): "Perhaps no greater temptation has ever been placed on a jury to break a will, but it made bold to establish justice for negroes and write a triumph for the law."

That story got lost. Imagine what might have happened, or not happened, here 40 years later if the triumph of Miss Maggie's will over Jim Crow had been told to the children and grandchildren between. Yet what happened in here is as much a part of Union County's history, of North Carolina's history, of the South's history, of American history as what happened out there. That's why I wrote this book, even though it took 13 years. What this jury did, what these families did that moved that jury to "write a triumph for the law," is a piece of our past that belongs to our present and our future. As Gov. Bickett said out there, we can finish the job, we can hand on to our children peace instead of violence. We can learn what it takes to "establish justice" for everyone.

2006-06-19T10:33:00.000-04:00

BFRG: The Burleson Family Research Group

The Burleson Family Research Group (BFRG) is a gathering of members of the family through whom Maggie Ross received the 800-acre homeplace. Her grandfather was Jonathan Burleyson, descended from Isaac Burleson Sr. Maggie also inherited $3,600 in gold coin from Jonathan, helping make her the richest woman in Union County in 1920.

Please visit BFRG's website here.

2006-06-15T10:43:00.000-04:00

From the road... Gastonia, NC

Below is the copy of talk given in Gastonia, North Carolina in honor of my mother Beverly and her influence on the writing of the book:

Decades before Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream, little white boys and little black boys were playing together on the streets of Gastonia. My father told me about it. He was one of the little white boys. In a way, that’s how this book got started. He grew up to stand up for equality – for encouraging an old janitor to learn to read, for letting a black high school student sing in a white church choir – and to show me a better way to think than many of the people around me when I was in high school in Monroe. When I found out 13 years ago, as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, that a white jury in the Union County Courthouse had awarded an 800-acre estate to a black family in Marvin, I knew I had to write it. Come to think of it, Dad had also told me a lot about inheritance – he said we were Gastonia Stowes, not Belmont Stowes, related but not close enough to get on the will.
It’s great to introduce this book for the first time in my ancestral homeland. I grew up hearing the stories of Gastonia, visiting my grandparents when I was little and my Uncle Ed and Aunt Joyce for all my life. When Mom and Dad bought the farm and moved back to Gaston County, the year I got married, I was glad to have even more connection. Their five-acre okra patch provided the material for my first farm column for The Charlotte Observer, and the big house with its hammock and magnolia tree was our vacation destination for the first decade of our life in Indiana. It was also the base for my research trips over the years, as you can read in the Acknowledgements.
They say that a person should write what he knows. In the years I was writing this book, I kept running across things I knew – a guy who graduated from Erskine, people from Steele Creek, Barium Springs Orphanage, Livingstone College, the Loray Mill trial that involved E.T. Cansler after he won this case, a wedding between a Methodist and a Presbyterian, the building of a Presbyterian church, more Presbyterian preachers than you can shake a stick at, and doing what they do best: visiting folks in their homes and raising money for the Lord. [could read founding of Banks, p. 11, or Robertson, p. 133]
But at its heart, this story is about great Southern ladies who did what all Southern ladies do – they just did it with unexpected people for the time. They practiced hospitality and generosity, they fulfilled their responsibilities, and they lived their faith. Lucky for me, I grew up with exactly that kind of Southern lady, so I could know what I wrote, and write what I know. I’d like to read two examples for you.
P. 12 [about the woman who lived next to the church]: “The yield of the rich garden, the fruit trees, the fields, the barnyard, and the beehives flowed into [her] kitchen. Her art filled the house with the fragrance of fried chicken and fried ham, fluffy buttermilk biscuits and crisp cracklin’ cornbread, blackberry cobbler and pound cake, green beans shimmering in bacon-laced pot likker and dill pickles steeping in pottery crocks of vinegar. Folks who came to spend the day pitched in to help with peeling potatoes and plucking hens, shucking corn and shelling peas, and they shared in the celebratory supper at the long table in the dining room.”
P. 15 [about Sallie Ross]: “She rose early each day; she addressed herself with energy to her daily tasks; she was temperate in all things – in dress, in food and drink, in rest and labor. No advantage was ever taken of the poor, the needy or the distressed, whether white or colored. But whilst she gave her attention to the business of this world, she was not unmindful of the claims of the world to come. She publicly avowed her faith in Jesus Christ as her personal Savior…. Her religion was not of the demonstrative kind which proclaims itself publicly and on special occasions where it can be “seen of men.” Hers was of the kind that prefers to reveal itself quietly all the year round in the payment of honest debts, in dealing kindly and mercifully with those dependent upon her, and in keeping her promises to the letter whether made to rich or poor, white or black.”
You know what I mean. I could write about these people because I lived with Beverly Stowe. And it’s great to meet all of you who live with her now.

2006-06-08T12:42:00.000-04:00

Welcome!

Writing Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will has changed my life in lots of ways, not least that I now have a Blog! This from a guy who resisted answering machines and voicemail until 1998. Anything to get the word out about this remarkable story about Southern white women who treated black people with real equality, even leaving them their 800-acre estate and loving them so much that an all-white jury believed they were family. Those of you who know me know how much I love talking about this story. Those of you who don't are welcome to find out. But you'll also find out that I like to talk about lots of things -- especially words, stories, ideas and issues of human equality and freedom. I've been known to say: "I'd rather talk about this than eat when I'm hungry." It's true.

Right now, I'm on tour for the book, so that's a lot of what I'll be talking about. But I'd love to hear from you -- opinions, ideas, responses, whatever you feel like saying. Ain't technology wonderful?

Cheers,
Gene