Straitened and Narrowed

I found Doug Frank's ["Straitened & Narrowed," November/December 1997] clarification of the constituents of authentic Christian faith interesting. If I understood him aright, his principles were that

• the proper wellspring of our creativity lies deep within the mess that is the center of our being, a center which is, as a first principle, broken, painful, and dark;
• we thus should embrace the anxiety, betrayal, hurt, and anger at our very core, and allow them to define us—this is the lived truth of human subjectivity;
• it is best to let loose of all doctrinal certainties and other sources of cheap equanimity, for in doing so we can find our authentic humanness;
• it is not "Truth" outside ourselves that will allow us to see the world better, but "ourselves" themselves;
• in contrast to the deception of thinking that we can know truth in any meaningful way and thus be "right," the best state of the mind is unending openness and fluidity;
• God's commands are really divine permissions which spontaneously generate a full flowering of being (and thus it turns out that God is not really that demanding or absolutistic after all);
• forget the arid abstractions and distillations of Paul and the early church fathers—the real Jesus was the rustic flesh-and-blood itinerant the "historical Jesus" scholars found decades ago; and
• this real Jesus drives us toward nothingness and beckons us to follow him off into the dark.

There's just one thing I don't understand. Why was it again that we call ourselves evangelical Christians?

Stanton L. Jones
Wheaton College
Wheaton, Ill

Myth of the White Male Promise Keeper

The secular media often portray the Promise Keeper movement as disproportionately composed of white males. I was surprised to see this myth perpetuated in Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen's article ["Weeping Warriors," November/December 1997]. She makes the following statement:

The insecurity and uncertainty such changes bring are hard on all men in a society that has identified masculinity with breadwinning, but middle-aged, middle-class white men are particularly vulnerable since they have been led for many decades to expect a steadily rising standard of living. So perhaps we should not be surprised that 84 percent of attendees at Promise Keepers rallies are white, and that their median age is 38.

The October 1997 U.S. Census Bureau's population estimate shows that 83 percent of the U.S. male population is white. The same source shows that the median age of white males from 16 to 80 is 40. These data are very close to the 84 percent white and median age of 38 given by Van Leeuwen. Her contention that these data point to "insecurity and uncertainty" in middle-age white males is not supported by the facts. What the figures do show is that the attendees of pk events reflect the population of the United States.

William R. Womack
Wheaton, Ill.

Soulless

Allen Guelzo, in his review of several books on consciousness [January/February] raises some questions in favor of Cartesian mind-body dualism in order, as I understand him, that we not "forfeit" our souls to a purely materialistic view of ourselves. As a Christian (fairly fundamental on central theological beliefs) and a physicist (Ph.D., experimental), I would like to raise a few observations that for me suggest a different approach to the conundrums in this area.

Assume for the moment, as I do, that mind, consciousness, and (perhaps, during life) soul are fully resident on the brain. What does this reduce them to? To the limited extent that I understand materialistic philosophy, matter is defined to be a straightforward summation of local, self-existent bits and pieces that have, in and of themselves, whatever (simple) properties may be applicable. From this point of view, notions such as mind and soul are reduced to meaninglessness. But such a definition of matter begs the questions and, furthermore, isn't valid modern science.