Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930 By Bruce Kuklick Princeton University Press 253 pp.; $29.95
Bruce Kuklick, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, is a scholar of unusual breadth. He has published substantial books on twentieth-century philosophy and nineteenth-century theology, but also on the modern presidency and on baseball in Philadelphia. Most of these earlier books are marked by skeptical, but also respectful, treatment of traditional faith. So it is as well with Puritans in Babylon, a revealing study of the motley crew of businessmen, ne’er-do-wells, academics, and adventurers who got formal study of the ancient Near East off the ground.
Kuklick is not overly concerned about details of archaeological practice; it is archaeology of head and heart that concerns him. The book does deal expertly with the pioneering American expedition to Nippur (south of Baghdad) and the emergence of formal academic disciplines to study the Middle East. But its central concern is how the historical mindset spurred by archaeological study undercut traditional Jewish and Christian belief in the historicity of Scripture. Kuklick’s careful treatment of this complex subject includes sympathetic discussion of William Foxwell Albright, a leader in modern archaeology who yet retained a traditional faith. But Kuklick himself sides with those who saw modern archaeology assisting higher criticism of Scripture in a “reordering of the worldview of the twentieth-century thinker” that rendered traditional belief impossible. What makes this book so effective–but also so challenging–to those who would combine traditional faith and rigorous scholarship is Kuklick’s own stance. He exhibits keen self-awareness, for example, that “many learned conclusions [rebutting traditional belief] were not compelled by the evidence but instead were produced by the culturally grounded inventiveness of scholars.” But along with that critical self-awareness goes a firm conviction that no serious alternative exists to the “enormous conceptual shift” that came about as both presupposition and conclusion of modern scholarship. This book, and the personal corpus of which it is a part, set a formidable agenda for those who think otherwise.
-Mark Noll
History of Vatican II, Vol. I: Announcing and Preparing Vatican Council II, Toward a New Era in Catholicism Edited by Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak Orbis 527 pp.; $80
Historians make bad prophets, but even a historian would not be irresponsible to think that the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) will long be regarded as one of the most significant Christian events in the twentieth century. Along with the shifting in the center of Christian gravity from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, the miraculous Christian endurance under state-Marxism, the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism, Christian reactions to war and holocaust, and (perhaps) the theology of Karl Barth, the effects of the Second Vatican Council seem especially destined as shaping forces in the twenty-first century and beyond. Roman Catholicism, after the council, would never be the same. In its wake, some parts of the Catholic church have become more evangelical, some have rushed toward modernism, and others have tried to regain a conservative Catholic path.
This hefty book, the first of five projected volumes, provides a nuts-and-bolts view of how the council came about. It takes the story from Pope John XXIII’s call on January 25, 1959, less than three months after he succeeded Pope Pius XII, to October 1962 and the arrival in Rome of about 2,300 cardinals, archbishops, and bishops. The book’s five authors (from Italy, France, Brazil, Germany, and the United States) fill in what happened between these two dates with exquisite attention to detail. They do not try to hide the fact that powerful factions were competing strenuously for advantage. For Protestants, there are full sections on reactions from outside Catholicism, as well as extensive discussion of the large role of Scripture in preconciliar deliberations. Carefully noted details supplement expert accounts of grand strategy. For what lies ahead in the next four volumes, one of the most intriguing of those details is the record that Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, archbishop of Gnesen and Warsaw, reached Rome’s main train station “at 8:55 a.m., on October 7, 1962; he was accompanied by fourteen Polish bishops, among them Karol Wojtyla of Krakow.”
-MN
Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir By Bill Bradley Alfred A. Knopf, 428 pp.; $26 Vintage, $13, paper
Bill Bradley has lurked at the edges of our national stage since the early sixties: first as an All American basketball star and Rhodes Scholar who led Princeton to national prominence in the NCAA tournament, then as a slow-footed, sure-shooting guard on two champion New York Knicks teams in the seventies, and for 17 years as a New Jersey senator. In this memoir, Bradley attains the worthy end of telling his version of the last two decades in American politics without laboring to set himself up as the hero of his own story.
Bradley begins with a bit of self-deflation, acknowledging the defects of his boring 1992 Democratic Convention speech in Madison Square Garden: “My ability as a public speaker was comparable to the rhetorical skills of an inmate of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.” Having decentered himself as a celebrity, he reveals that he is just the precocious and disciplined son of a Crystal City, Missouri, housewife and her banker husband, who writes about what he loves and what kept him going during three senate terms: his family; the land and people of all 50 states; the ideal of universal racial integration; and the hope of doing good work with a clear conscience.
The book is a series of tales about major national and international issues, interwoven with stories about people Bradley has met and can’t forget. Whether he is describing legislative hearings to adjudicate water rights in the West or the racial mixture of New Jersey’s cities, at the core of his book runs a narrative stream that comes from a man who must listen much better than he speaks. The book seems to blossom from this conviction: “It’s through the stories of people’s lives that I am moved and that I gain a hesitancy about universal solutions. . . . I can’t understand how politicians can connect with people, or begin to represent them, if they do not listen to their stories.”
By the end, we feel connected to Bradley’s own story. We know what made him tick as a public servant–in Bradley’s case the term seems simply accurate–and we understand why he will not run for political office again. And finally, we know that he is a believer. He does not profane the seriousness of his faith by dissecting it or denominating it; instead, he offers the narrative of his growth from childhood mainline Protestantism, through a heady period of adolescent Me-and-Jesus-on-the-court chest thumping, to a mature adult faith characterized by a sober hope in the face of death and sorrow.
-Sam Alvord
From People’s War to People’s Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam By Timothy J. Lomperis University of North Carolina Press 456 pp.; $55, hardcover; $19.95, paper
In the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, President Bush proclaimed victory, not only over the forces of Saddam Hussein, but also over the lingering national nightmare of Vietnam. “By God,” said Bush, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”
Six years later, it is clear that our nation’s tortured memory of Vietnam will not be put to rest so easily. Indeed, the specter of Vietnam continues to be resurrected every time we engage in a national conversation about the appropriateness of American military intervention. It doesn’t matter whether the debate is about Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia. In each case, “the lessons of Vietnam” are seized upon by the proponents and opponents of American intervention to support their point of view.
But what are the lessons of Vietnam? It is this question that Timothy Lomperis, a political science professor at West Point, examines in From People’s War to People’s Rule. Lomperis makes a good argument that Americans have been sloppy in identifying the putative lessons of Vietnam. The reason for this, says Lomperis, is that “Vietnam is a better ghost than a lesson.” In other words, Vietnam is a powerful metaphor and memory that “can be summoned for any lesson a conjurer wants”–either as a “noble crusade” (Ronald Reagan) or a heinous “crime” (Daniel Ellsberg). In this book, Lomperis attempts to provide the rigor and the contextual understanding needed to transform Vietnam from ghost to lesson, a truly serviceable guide to future U.S. policy-makers.
Lomperis divides post-World War II history into two periods. The first–what he calls the “Era of People’s Wars”–lasted from 1945 until the fall of Saigon in 1975, and gave way to a second period, the “Era of People’s Rule.” The central theme of the first period–the major focus of this book–was the revolutionary struggle of former Third World colonies to become independent and modern states. Lomperis contends that the war in Vietnam can best be understood as a conflict between competing claims to national political legitimacy.
At the same time, Lomperis emphasizes that any lessons of Vietnam are only likely to emerge when Vietnam is “passed through the analytic prism of companion cases.” Therefore, a substantial part of his book is devoted to examining revolutionary insurgencies, in places such as Greece, China, and Malaya, that also attracted Western intervention. The conclusion the author offers is that the success or failure of revolutionary movements is a function of the political legitimacy achieved by one side or the other, and outside intervention–such as America’s in Vietnam–is most likely to succeed when allied with the side that can make the best claim to legitimacy.
This is an interesting thesis. Unfortunately, this exhaustive book is also exhausting to read. The disparate topics that the author addresses lack a clear, unifying focus. The result is an argument that is difficult to follow. A more coherent focus and a style void of abstruse social-science jargon would have made this promising book a more valuable contribution to our ongoing quest to understand the tragedy of Vietnam.
-Dean C. Curry
Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke By Daniel E. Ritchie Eerdmans 302 pp.; $27, paper
This is a book of good sense, by a Christian, and in lucid prose. Therefore, it will be neglected by the literary Establishment. Three strikes and you’re out. Nor will it altogether please those Christian “beyondists” who imagine themselves above the culture wars, a futile pose shared, oddly, even by some ideologues. In contrast to those who describe Christianity as one competing ideology among many, Daniel Ritchie shows how fundamental are the differences between Christian literary criticism and ideological criticism. Although both insist on keeping literature related to life (the half-truth of the ideologists), a nuanced Christian criticism allows a limited autonomy to literature, thus locating itself among the “truly pluralistic readings, where people of diverse ultimate commitments can join together to advance knowledge.” Ideological criticism, in contrast, is totalist; its appeal “depends upon a prior acceptance of the perspective.” When one singlemindedly assumes that every old text participates in the hegemony of an oppressive system, “it is impossible . . . to be wrong about anything.” Ritchie argues that, among the various bases for resistance to ideology’s own would-be hegemony, “biblical faith provides the most thorough response.” One can argue with him, as one cannot with ideologues, and a secular critic can appropriate insights from him without sharing his faith. For he engages in a conversation, and ideologues do not. His productive, though not inevitable, method deploys biblical poetics, which “begins by inquiring how the Bible itself uses language, then asks about the significance of that inquiry for literature.”
This somewhat elusive concept undergirds Ritchie’s discussion of five major authors, with each of whom he juxtaposes a current ideological position. In a neat turning of the intertextual tables, he has traditional texts interrogating current critics, not the ideologists’ other way around. The first and broadest chapter extends Jonathan Swift’s “culture wars” treatment of “ancients” and “moderns” to contrasting approaches toward prior texts by a biblical author (Matthew) and by current ideologues. The ensuing alignments engage issues of literary canonicity through Samuel Johnson, of ideological feminism through John Milton, of multiculturalism through Edmund Burke, and of deconstruction through Alexander Pope. So, for example, Burke, the moving spirit behind modern conservatism, is every bit as hard on Britain’s oppression of India as an “oppression studies” practitioner could be, but without jettisoning a common culture. Concerning multiculturalism, “to paraphrase Carlyle, close thy Gramsci, open thy Burke.” Similarly, “we can learn more about gender from Milton than from current feminist critiques of Milton.”
Through wide reading, sophisticated arguments, and sharp challenges to received opinion, this book succeeds in helping us “enjoy the literary tradition again.” Place it next to Roger Lundin’s The Culture of Interpretation on your bookshelf.
-Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
Sam Alvord oversees the writing program of the Oregon Extension. His essay on David James Duncan is forthcoming in B&C. Dean Curry is professor of political science at Messiah College. Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College. Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.
High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace Edited by Peter Ludlow MIT Press 536 pp.; $30, paper
Moths to the Flame: The Seduction of Computer Technology By Gregory J. E. Rawlins MIT Press 184 pp.; $22.50
City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn By William J. Mitchell MIT Press 225 pp.; $20, hardcover; $10, paper
You’ve just been to Target for lightbulbs or disposable diapers. Now you’re reclining, cozy under a quilt, cup of tea at hand, with what promises to be an interesting book. Your author and guide, William J. Mitchell (wjm@mit.edu), is knowledgeable about an extraordinary range of subjects, but his chief role here is the ancient one of seer. “Increasingly . . . , merchants will find that they can dispense with sales floors and sales staff altogether.” The disappearance of sales staff: that has been going on for some time. But how would one get the lightbulbs? Maybe the same way you would shop for groceries, pointing and clicking along the shelves of a virtual market: “The order is then delivered at a prearranged time.”
This very book you are holding is a dinosaur, though not targeted for complete extinction: “Those addicted to the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow (and prepared to pay for it) would not have to kick the habit; elegant physical volumes could automatically be generated on demand.” (You may notice a pattern here: a recurring utopian strain. There is a lot of huffing and puffing, too: “cyberspace has the potential to change political institutions and mechanisms fundamentally.” Be sure to let us know when that happens.)
Curl up with Mitchell, Peter Ludlow (ludlow@well.com), and Gregory Rawlins (rawlins@cs.indiana.edu) and prepare for a gentle bombardment of visions and conundrums (how, for instance, can or should intellectual property be protected on the Net?). The effect is at once stimulating and unsettling; the room in which you’re reading begins to seem a little less tangibly there.
-JW
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
