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Some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been misunderstood or co-opted. We think of him more as a civil-rights icon than as an engaged prophetic Christian trying to figure out non violence. I think he had a much more troubled, interesting, complex message to America than what we have decided it was in our history books and in our one-paragraph summaries of him. I would say that his legacy probably has not been fully understood.

I don't think the full impact of what Schumacher has written about economics has really hit yet, the defense of family business and local community economies. That's starting to have resurgence in the third world with these micro credit organizations. If you start taking Schumacher seriously, then economics is due for a quantum leap, and that hasn't happened yet. We need to rethink the way we do economics, to question the assumption that we're all self-maximizing individuals.

I think Northrop Frye is another one who was understood too quickly, or misunderstood. Literary studies over the past 20 years has been struggling with a lot of competing materialisms. Frye had offered in the early 60s a radical mystic contemplative vision of the literary studies, which doomed him to obsolescence in 1963. But now that practices like lectio divina and those contemplative ways of reading are being rediscovered, you look back at Northrop Frye, and he's the guy who provides the most interesting ideas and paradigms. But I think such a recovery is going to have to be done by religious folk. Because if you try secularizing his categories, they just don't work. It's only through religious eyes that Frye's literary cosmology makes sense, in the same way that Lord of the Rings has a deeper meaning to those who see its Christian themes.

In Frye's letters and journals and also his sermons, because he was a pastor, you get to see the full Christian dimension of his thinking. He discussed how to read prophetically, how to read contemplatively. These were issues that Frye addressed that the last 20- 25-five years of literary criticism just ignored. I think what's going to happen in about 10 years is they're going to rediscover the language in which Frye was writing and learn he was trying to teach us how to read in a way that deepened our inner lives, not just increased our intellectual sophistication.

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from Brazos Press.

Zachry O. Kincaid, director of the Matthew's House Project, reviewed Subversive Orthodoxy.

Dorthy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor (who is not included in Inchausti's book) were all written about in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, by Paul Elie. An interview with Elie and a review of the book are available on our site.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49