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That's why Solzhenitsyn was so wise to novelize his history of the gulag. When he transformed the sufferings of millions of people into stories we could feel, it became real. Pasternack, in Doctor Zhivago, made the spiritual sufferings of the lost intelligentsia of the revolution real in a way that we could feel. Kerouac does the same thing with a spiritual longing that was useful in the 50s and 60s to say there's more going on then just the Cold War. We should be telling our stories to one another about our inner lives.

Thomas Merton was another Catholic writing spiritual literature during the Cold War years.

The Seven Storey Mountain was a great conversion story. It provided a criticism of materialism, modernism, the Bohemian art theme, and left-wing politics, all these things that tempted him, that he turned away from 20 years before anybody else in the country had discovered them.

Then after he died, all his journals and letters came out, and it turns out that all those years that he was in the monastery, he was having these deep conversations with people from all different backgrounds and was thinking through his faith and bringing it into dialogue with all kinds of things, which made him a different writer. Now, we even read The Seven Storey Mountain differently.

It's ironic that while Merton had left the world for the monastery, through his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians have a different take on political action.

If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who have laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an alternative vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive Christian perspective that doesn't argue about things so much as reveal things.

Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these people don't want to change the world. Changing the world is not their number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve the world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that you have to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the way the mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will mean that you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and you will listen. You don't come in with this top down agenda and take everybody's life apart so that you can put it back together again.

[Kentucky writer and farmer] Wendell Berry's method is to ask how this reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with the people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The guy I think who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he was sent to the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human beings. He came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and healing one's suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political ideology and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has to be regained between people before you can talk about politics. And that's why ideological posturing, even if you're right, is counterproductive.

What kind of impact have these thinkers had, or should have?

In the 20th century, the contemplative side of Christianity was made much more accessible by Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Solzhenitsyn also had a great world impact.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49