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It's not easy to place thinkers as diverse as Walker Percy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Northrop Frye into the same category. But Robert Inchausti, English professor at California State Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, says they were all avant-garde orthodox Christians. No matter their different political, denominational, or literary positions, they all sought to be faithful to Jesus while engaging the world. In Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, Inchausi discusses Christian thinkers, writers, and activists who challenged secular worldviews on their own turf, yet remained thoroughly Christian.

Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?

These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various secular disciplines. They're interesting people because they're both subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the church or subversive of the faith.

They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn't just protest against it or isolate from it.

If you look at some of the major Christian artists and thinkers and social critics over the last hundred years, you find a variety of political, artistic, and intellectual schools within which they operate. Yet, they still share Christ as their major inspiration. You have somebody like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who from an American political perspective would be very conservative. He single-handedly did away with Marxism as an attractive philosophy for Paris intellectuals. And at the same time you have somebody like Dorothy Day, whose entire witness to the poor in the United States was to defend small families and small farms and collectives and indigenous poor against a social Darwinism that she thought was running away with American culture during the Cold War years.

Few people know these believers were Christians. E.F. Schumacher, the Small Is Beautiful fellow, is often recognized as the guy who wrote about Buddhist economics, because of a chapter in his book Small Is Beautiful. But he was a Christian, and he said he put in Buddhism because he didn't want it to seem like special pleading. He just wanted to make it clear that the economic systems had religious under pinning. In order to demonstrate that in a way that he could get a hearing, he used the example of Buddhism. But he himself was a Christian thinker.

Not only was their Christianity misunderstood, but often their message was misunderstood. You include Jack Kerouac, who dismissed his hippie followers who got into Buddhism, but Kerouac was a conservative and a Catholic.

Kerouac was really only a Buddhist for three years of his life. He was a very traditional Catholic growing up, and then he toyed with Buddhism for about three years. He came back to his faith and wrote a lot of stuff about Jesus and refused to give up his love of Jesus for the Buddha. Later, when he was having a hard time kicking his alcoholism, he started getting attacked by the New York critics for a pretty accurate description of his work, in which they said, This is a form of Christian primitivism.

Kerouac captures a spiritual search in a way that many novelists don't. You make the point that the novel has the ability to probe the soul in a way that Enlightenment attempts to discover truth can't.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49