On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered while celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. In 1988, this chronologically arranged selection—drawn principally from Romero’s homilies—was published by Harper & Row. We owe a debt a gratitude to Plough for its reissue.
During his tenure as archbishop (he was appointed in 1977), Romero spoke out frequently against the greed of El Salvador’s ruling elite and the brutality of its military, whose death squads (many of them led by U.S.-trained officers) killed and raped with impunity. He spoke on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, and he defended the “right of just insurrection” as recognized in Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio. For such courageous stands Romero was murdered.
The Violence of Love
by Oscar Romero
Compiled and translated
by James R. Brockman
Foreword by Henri Nouwen Plough
216 pp.; $14, paper
To that extent, the received account—the “myth of Archbishop Romero”—is accurate. But Romero was not, as he is often portrayed by tendentious commentators, a convert to liberation theology.
“It’s amusing,” he said in a homily on June 3, 1979: “This week I received accusations from both extremes—from the extreme right, that I am a communist; from the extreme left, that I am joining the right. I am not with the right or the left. I am trying to be faithful to the word that the Lord bids me preach, to the message that cannot change, which tells both sides the good they do and the injustices they commit.” On September 2 of that same year, he observed: “Those who do not understand transcendence cannot understand us. When we speak of injustice here below and denounce it, they think we are playing politics. It is in the name of God’s just reign that we denounce the injustices of the earth.”
Passionate, unpretentious, and deeply moving, The Violence of Love is a manual for the Christian life, calling us—whether in San Salvador or Chicago, Sarajevo, or New York—to reveal the presence of Christ.—JW
The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the SouthBy Eli N. Evans Free Press 391 pp.; $16, paper
My father has often remarked that reading The Provincials is like reading his own autobiography. It is, I suspect, praise that Eli Evans hears often. When The Provincials, which grew out of a series of articles for Harper‘s magazine, was originally published in 1973, Evans became the spokesman for southern Jews. (His eloquence has since been rivaled only by Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo.)
For the new edition, released on the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Evans has written five additional chapters, which disappoint: Evans’s tales of burying his parents and of attending the Atlanta Olympics, where the Olympic committee acknowledged the Munich 11 for the first time, lack the pathos, and the flair, that mark the rest of the book. The first 21 chapters, however, remain, after two and a half decades, insightful and illuminating. There, Evans knits together personal memoir with a broader history of southern Jews. Interwoven with discussions of Jewish confederates and Leo Frank’s lynching and the 1958 bombing of the Temple in Atlanta are Evans’s recollections of his father’s (successful) 1951 bid for mayor, of his black maid’s unmatchable matzo balls, and of the Jewish singles scene at the University of North Carolina.
Evans’s struggles as a Jewish child in a deeply Protestant environment are both funny and gut-wrenching. When asked by his schoolmates why he didn’t believe in Jesus, young Eli would reply, “I believe Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived,” or, “Well, he sure was a great prophet, just like Isaiah, Moses, and Paul.” (Evans dropped this later answer after an interlocutor asked him if he therefore accepted Moses as his personal savior.) When Christmas carols and hymns were sung in school assemblies, Evans would chime in loudly with his classmates, singing all the words except Christian, and substituting Moses whenever Jesus appeared in the lyrics. Thus, at his sixth-grade graduation, we find an 11-year-old Eli belting, “Onward hum-hum soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Moses, standing at the fore.”
And Evans writes of his fears that on Christmas Eve, “when we Jews were out of line with the planets,” Santa would neglect to come to his house, “a sinister reminder that the bad Jews down there didn’t deserve a visit.” Or, worse, Saint Nick might forget that the Evanses were Jewish, swoop through their chimney into the living room, “get furious when he didn’t see any stockings, and leave coal all around and maybe tear up the couch in anger.”
These vignettes would resonate with Jews all over the South. But most striking for me is when Evans recalls summoning the nerve to tell his father that he planned to go to law school rather than take over the family store: “[T]he story of Jews in the South,” writes Evans, “is the story of fathers who built businesses to give to their sons who didn’t want them.” That explains why you can’t find Evans’s United Department Store in Durham any longer, and also why all that’s left of Winner’s Department Store in downtown Asheville is the beauty parlor, which long since passed into another family’s hands. My father went to law school, too.
—Lauren F. Winner
Great Souls: Six Who Changed the CenturyBy David Aikman Word Publishing 388 pp.; $22.99
Who says there are no heroes today? Actually, many say so. Journalists sometimes seem at their most assiduous when digging for dirt on persons of renown, and historians who gleefully ransack the records in search of feet of clay say there never were any heroes, either. The giants who bestrode school texts a generation ago have now been brought down to size.
David Aikman, former senior correspondent for Time magazine, stands athwart the leveling imperatives of our antiheroic age. He doesn’t ask if we need heroes. He simply says heroes are still among us, whether or not we think we need them, and he profiles six of them. He chooses them not for their public exploits and certainly not for mere celebrity status but for their greatness of soul.
In each character sketch, Aikman focuses on a single overriding quality, preoccupation, or virtue: Billy Graham, salvation; Nelson Mandela, forgiveness; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, truth; Mother Teresa, compassion; Pope John Paul II, human dignity; Elie Wiesel, remembrance. All six lived into the late 1990s, had impact far beyond their places of origin and have been widely recognized as outstanding human beings by persons who do not share their views. Five of them, be it noted, grew up under state systems widely agreed to have been tyrannical. Their differences are also noteworthy—someone for everyone. They are Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish; happily married, unhappily married, celibate; from three continents and six countries.
Aikman is no hagiographer; he does not gloss over personal failings. But he does show that these six carry treasure in their earthen vessels. Readers with sharp dislikes for any of these six might be surprised to find themselves wavering after the author makes his case. They might even test the breadth of their human sympathy by trying to embrace both Mandela and Solzhenitsyn, both Graham and Wiesel.
Did these individuals change the century? Readers might try a little thought experiment of “the presence of the absence” and imagine the difference without these lives. (Another thought experiment is to come up with a list of six contemporaneous atheists who have had a similar beneficent influence.) One need not resolve the argument about whether history is moved by great individuals or impersonal forces to grant that ordinary persons can do extraordinary things or that uncommonness can be explained in terms other than that of neurosis. As a teacher, I thought of the young who are already cynical and wondered how they would respond to this book if they received it as a gift.
—Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to MillsBy Christopher Shannon Johns Hopkins University Press 211 pp.; $38
Rarely does an author deserve to be called brave, a word usually reserved for infantrymen, wide receivers, and others who regularly put life and limb at risk. Yet Christopher Shannon’s Conspicuous Criticism takes on such enormous shibboleths of the academy, with such uncommon grace and intelligence, that one can only call it courage—especially coming from a young, untenured historian seeking to speak from within academe.
Shannon purposes to cast light on the process by which a society ruled by the autonomous individual has supplanted premodern forms of community. Through an arduous exegesis of select works in the canon of American social thought, he argues that the theoretical premises of intellectuals such as John Dewey and C. Wright Mills militated, ironically, against the realization of the very communitarian ideals that sparked their social visions.
The implicit but undeniable aim of modern social thinkers has been to unchain individuals from the constraints of tradition, elevating relationships “based on choice and consent” as the bedrock of the new order, and making the social-scientific concept of “culture” the theoretical locus of a new form of social solidarity. The reality, Shannon contends, is that this overarching vision of autonomous individuals-in-community has actually given birth to a society in which “morality has revealed itself to be nihilism”; apart from a shared belief in a divinely sustained order in which the individual, society, and nature are united, modern hopes for “community” are mere chimera. As he cogently puts it in his concluding line, “The bourgeois attempt to construct a rational alternative to tradition has failed.”
Shannon sees far beyond the realm of ideas in his explication of individualism’s triumph: capitalism, on his view, is the political-economic counterpart of this intellectual tradition of “critical objectification,” since both capitalism and modern social thought have as their fulcrum the liberated individual, free to consume or construct as he or she desires. The market’s triumph has thus been total: its logic now rules not only economics but all dimensions of society.
Shannon’s book cannot simply be dismissed as the next in a long and hallowed line of Protestant-American jeremiads, for in fact it is a critique of them. In his story, the tradition of “conspicuous criticism” finds its seed in the Reformation and its (alleged) bastard child, the Enlightenment. Shannon, a Roman Catholic, holds out hope for escape only to those who “embrace the great surviving traditions of the premodern West: orthodox Judaism, Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox churches, and Islam.” Although his account of modern individualism’s genesis is reductive and his counterproposal opaque, Shannon’s acuity of vision unveils salutary interpretive vistas, as well as the kind of intellectual buttress yearned for by those sympathetic to his concerns.
—Eric J. Miller
The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of InventionBy David F. Noble Alfred E. Knopf 274 pp.; $26
Technological power enthralls our society. We invest billions of private and public dollars to magnify and extend those powers throughout the universe, from the gene to the stars. Why? What drives a people to invest so much money and hope in the latest technological advances?
David Noble, the well-known social historian of technology, answers that the West’s exaltation of its technological prowess is deeply rooted in its religious heritage. In the first third of his book, Noble sketches a broad historical overview of how an amalgam of differing religious traditions, shaped primarily by Christianity, developed a spiritual justification for exploiting technological power. The dreams of human perfectibility that motivate the genetic engineers at the Human Genome Project are linked across a millennium with the ninth-century Benedictine monks who first infused the mechanical arts with transcendent significance.
The growing theme throughout this history has been that the mechanical arts would deliver Man (not woman) from his post-Fall ignorance and imperfections. Knowledge was technological power. Man could best demonstrate his dominion over the creation through the mechanical arts. Success in their use became the sign and seal of God’s blessing and approval. Through them Man could transform and renew the imperfections of himself and the creation; heaven could be brought to earth.
Noble devotes the remaining chapters of his book to detailing modern religious incantations praising technology: the “ascent of the saints” in space flight, the “immortal mind” of artificial intelligence, the “powers of perfection” in genetic engineering. We hear Robert Oppenheimer glorying in the potential redemptive power of the atom; Werner von Braun expressing his millenarian hopes for space exploration; and the engineers at the Human Genome Project acting on God’s behalf to restore and even perfect our flawed humanity with their esoteric genetic knowledge.
In each case, Noble finds, technological elites exploit religion to advance their own quest for power. But, he warns, they have purchased their success at the heavy social cost of ignoring the profound burdens that most people and the earth still endure. We can no longer allow technology, allegedly the most rational of enterprises, to escape critical scrutiny while hiding behind the skirts of divine sanction. Our society is now at the point, Noble concludes, where it must defy “the divine pretensions of the few in the interest of securing the moral necessities of the many … and embrace anew our one and only earthly existence.”
Noble’s story has important lessons for the church. The “religion” that he has found entwined with the development of modern technology has warped and inverted the Christian message in profound ways. It partakes of the heresy of Gnosticism, against which the church has struggled from its earliest days. Gnosticism, as nearly all pagan and neopagan religions do, confused our fallenness with our creatureliness. The Gnostics sought to achieve a godlike knowledge, leaving mere humanity behind.
How can orthodox Christians adopt this line of thought? Where do we find Noble’s Christian engineers meditating on the subtle and insidious ways in which we incarnate and magnify our brokenness in our nuclear power, computers, genetic engineering, space exploration, and countless other technologies? Where are the penetrating analyses of the burden humans now carry of knowing good and evil in their technological dreams? How can we distinguish between building the Tower of Babel and the New Jerusalem?
These are some of the questions Noble’s book raises for the orthodox community. We will need more than technological expertise and fuzzy religious sloganeering to address them. After you read Noble’s sobering book turn to C. S. Lewis’s provocative classic, The Abolition of Man, especially the third chapter on the meaning of “Man’s conquest of Nature,” and allow his thinking to refresh your Christian mind.
—Kenn Hermann
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College. Kenn Hermann is associate professor at history at Dordt College. Eric J. Miller is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at the University of Delaware.
Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
