Letter from the Editor

I’m writing on a night early in December. Never has the hope we share as Christians seemed more preposterous—or more welcome—than it does right now. But when hasn’t it been so?

Have you seen The City, the fine journal from Houston Baptist University, edited by Ben Domenech? The Fall 2013 issue arrived a couple of days ago, leading off with a section titled “The Nation in Crisis.” That started me wondering when the nation hasn’t been in crisis. Was that during World War II? The Great Depression? Or was it in some earlier halcyon days?

Talk of “crisis” reminds me of Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, reviewed in this issue by John Schmalzbauer. A crisis of authority, huh? Can a crisis be continuous over a period of roughly 400 years? Maybe another word is needed. In The American Spectator of yore, there was a regular section called “The Continuing Crisis,” the title of which allowed readers to savor the irony even as they tracked the latest evidence of folly, perfidy, and decline.

Then there’s David Hollinger, whose After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History is reviewed in this issue by George Marsden. It was Hollinger who not long ago issued a stirring call to his fellow secular Americans to make common cause with “ecumenical” Protestants against the evangelical menace. Readers of Hollinger’s book may be struck by a certain double-mindedness, since he takes pleasure in describing liberal Protestantism as a halfway house on the way to unbelief, adding that no one but “Christian survivalists” could be disturbed by that. (Thereby he casually writes out of existence the many liberal Protestants whose faith unites them with Catholic and Orthodox and Pentecostal and even … yes, evangelical Christians around the world, however much they may disagree on this, that, or the other point of contention.)

Crisis can galvanize people to acts of solidarity, generosity, and self-sacrifice. The issue of Books & Culture you are holding in your hands would not have existed—the magazine would have ceased publication—without the generous response by our readers to our call for help in September. But the sense of urgency created by crisis can also be misused. In this issue, Makoto Fujimura commends Gennifer Weisenfeld’s Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923. He was thinking about 9/11 and 3/11 (the Fukushima disaster) as he read Weisenfeld’s book, not to mention the rebuilding of Japan after the fires of war. And he was struck by parallels between the recovery after the 1923 earthquake (driven by “a modernistic pragmatism in which budget and utility always outweighed the interests of beauty”) and the postwar recovery (“[o]ne could even argue, looking at this book, that postwar construction was even more short-sighted and gray than the first rebuilding efforts after the earthquake”). He sees in this repeated pattern a betrayal of something precious in Japan’s national heritage.

Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge—the subject of the lead essay in this issue, in which Alan Jacobs looks at that novel and its companion volume, Inherent Vice—also has 9/11 at its center, but the catastrophe that preoccupies Pynchon here, as in all his books, is perennial, going back to the Garden of Eden. Alan zeroes in on a passage describing a tiny island of untouched marshland, just outside the city:

This little island reminds her of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it.

It is our hope that this “unexpected refuge” is a reminder of what is still to come, however improbable it may seem, as promised in Acts 3:21: “the restoration of all things.”