Christianity In the Public Square: Literatures of Politics, Protest and Social Justice

By Anthony R. Grasso, CSC, Editor

Proceedings of the Conference on Christianity & Literature

Northeast Regional Meeting , Nov. 2-3, 2012
King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, PA

Rev. Anthony R. Grasso, CSC, Ph. D., Editor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: May 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483410883

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Copyright © 2014 Anthony Grasso.

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Contents

Acknowledgment

American Christianity Between Power And Persecution: An Introduction

Thomas Nagel’s Rejection Of Theism: A Review*

Against A Discourse Of Division: Marilynne Robinson’s Politics Of Grace

The Good Society: Why Bother With The Humanities In A Time Of Crisis?

Piers Plowman And The Christian Impulse To Social Reform

A Dream Deferred: The Poetry Of Politics, Protest, And Social Justice

In Defense Of Weakness: Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology Of The Cross In Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

The Creative Necessity Of Doubt: Encountering The Other In Art

Imago Dei: Nussbaum’s Politics Of Disgust, Christianity And Leroux’s Phantom

The Political Realm After Christ: Langland’s Search For A Just Order In Piers Plowman

Some Sort Of Explanation, Better Than None: Christian Leftist Poetry And Self-Representation In The Public Sphere

Prophesy And Mysticism In Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast Of The Goat

Teaching Postcolonial Texts: Faith, Theory And Praxis

I’ve Always Been Haunted By The Boxcars: Flannery O’connor, Martin Buber, And Post-Holocaust Revelation

Christian Principles And Social Critique In Lois Lowry’s Giver Series

The Radical Example Of Dorothy Day As A Living Response To Matthew’s Rich Young Man

The Divine In American Politics: Robert Frost, John F. Kennedy And Early 1960S America

G. B. Shaw: Christ’s Kingdom In Imperial Britain**

He Was Always There: Competing Ethical Standards In Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall-Street

Does Idealized Justice Have A Vendetta Against Ugly People?: Punishment And Christian Forgiveness In Richardson’s Pamela And Its Sequels

Dismantling The Myth: The Playboy Riots, 1907

Christian Personae: Attentiveness And Reader Response

Selected Poems From His Reading, Friday, November 2Nd

Endnotes

Acknowledgment

When asked in March if I could host the 2012 Northeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature at King’s College, because no one was free to host in the New York Metro area, who could have had any idea of what was in store with Hurricane Sandy? The first matter at hand, having agreed to host, was finding a suitable theme. Given that the phenomenon of the Occupy Movement had filled downtowns and raised public consciousness about growing dissatisfaction with the impasse in government, and expressed concern about the plight of workers and citizens during the period following the financial downturn in 2008-2009, there seemed to be only one direction in which to look. In addition to all of that activity, national elections were on the horizon. Thus emerged the theme, "Christianity in the Public Square: Literatures of Politics, Protest & Social Justice."

Available dates, the 2nd and 3rd of November, were chosen. All was arranged when the unexpected occurred. Hurricane Sandy, having merged with another major weather system, became one of the largest and most powerful storms ever to strike the region. Arriving on October 28th-29th, Sandy came at the time of an unusually high tide and its effects have lingered. In retrospect, it was fortuitous—even providential—that the conference wasn’t able to be held in the New York City area because it would undoubtedly have been cancelled.

My first thought was that we’d have to cancel, but I was reluctant to do so. Having checked with several people during two very tense days, we determined that moving the date wasn’t feasible because schedules fill so much in advance. Cancelling was not an ideal option, so we decided to carry on. We missed several people from the New York and New Jersey areas who weren’t able to attend, and some from California, whose flights in and out of the New York were not being guaranteed. We managed to receive papers electronically from a few, which were read at their sessions. We heard from some who could not attend; still others, we had no contact with at all which was worrisome.

About a dozen presenters and attendees from storm ravaged areas were unable to be with us, but we managed to have an intimate group of thirty-eight people in attendance, whose spirit and patience was wonderful. The depth of the exchanges after the papers and in between sessions was amazing, and was something which many commented upon. Throughout the weekend we thought about and prayed for our colleagues so adversely affected by this massive storm, and that spirit of those who could not be among us seemed to intensify everyone’s level of participation. I decided to produce a Proceedings volume which would for those who could not present their work or share in the convivial exchange, provide an opportunity for their ideas to be read.

What follows includes many of the papers given, as well as essays from colleagues at institutions in and around the New York City Metro Region whose work didn’t make it to the session, but is printed here for all the participants and presenters to read and contemplate. In addition, I’ve included an Introductory Essay by Dr. Jonathan Malesic, Associate Professor of Theology at King’s, whom I’d hoped could present some ideas on the subject at the conference. However, owing to his sabbatical, Jon was away and unable to attend. Jonathan has done some extensive research in the area of public faith, which were published in his book, Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), a controversial approach to the topic. I hope you find it a valuable read and that it provokes continued thought on the subject.

We were also fortunate to have with us well-known poet and writer, Jim Daniels, author of several anthologies of poetry, books and screenplays, and a highly respected member of the faculty in the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Jim’s work often touches on the stuff of a changing American urban and social landscape, and he mesmerized the group with a passionate reading from some of his poems on Friday evening. He graciously consented, along with his publisher, to allow us to reprint a few of those poems in this volume. We are very grateful for his kindness, since it enables us to re-create some of the flavor of his work and how the wonderful imagery of his poetry fleshed out the conference theme.

There are some people whom I wish to offer special thanks for their generous assistance and support both throughout the planning process and during the Conference, especially the Paper Selection Committee, Dr. Jennifer McClinton-Temple, Assoc. Prof. of English, and Dr. Janice Thompson, Assoc. Prof. of Theology, both of King’s College, for their able assistance, and for chairing sessions as well, along with Dr. Megan Lloyd, Professor of English. I would also like to acknowledge the following:

• Dr. Mary Anne Vetterling, host of the 2011 NE CCL at Regis College, Boston, for her assistance with lists and her good advice about the planning process.

• Ms. Jordan Hardman, Managing Editor of the Christianity & Literature Journal at Pepperdine University, Drs. Susan Felch, VP, and Scott Lamascus, Treasurer of CCL, for their assistance during the planning stages.

• Drs. Nicholas Holodick and Joseph Evan, Office of Academic Affairs, for their support of the conference.

• Ms. Suzanne McCabe, then-director of the Conference and Events Office at King’s, along with Ms. Vicki Weaver, executive assistant, for their advice, suggestions and hard work during every stage of the planning process and throughout the conference weekend.

• Mary Wood and the Food Service Team from Sodexo at the King’s College Dining Service.

• The Safety & Security Office for arranging parking and directing guests to the sessions and events.

• Andy Bowen & Jared Holodick, Print Shop, for programs and name tags created at amazing speed.

• Anthony Scaccia, Mathematics Major, and Sarah Scinto, English Major, then-seniors at King’s, who as members of the College’s Delta Epsilon Sigma Honor Society ably assisted me with Registration and other tasks required to respond to everyone’s needs as they arose.

• Members of the Facilities Division who readied rooms, and had things where they needed to be.

• Sam Falbo, from Media Services, for his dedication, & the College’s IITS Division for providing portable technology in rooms where it wasn’t usually available.

• Dr. Neal Bukeavich, English Department Chairperson, for his presence and support throughout the conference and the readying of these Proceedings.

• Members of the English and Theology Departments who attended conference sessions and offered assistance.

• Special thanks to Dr. Dave Baggett, Liberty University. Attending with his wife, Marybeth, a presenter at the conference, Dave offered to present his review of a work, pertinent to the conference topic, when he heard some presenters weren’t able to be there. His generosity saved a session and made for lively exchange along with another presenter. We thank him, and the Harvard Theological Review which published the revised review, for going above and beyond. Kudos!

• Ms. Ashley Panko, Senior English Major, for invaluable assistance in preparing the Word Document of this manuscript. Many thanks!

Lastly, it was a pleasure to work with the conference presenters themselves, who were in turn patient and responsive when they needed to be, especially during the time of the storm. Your support and bravado in travelling at a difficult time, from New York to California, Canada and many places in between, bolstered my spirits during those days after the storm. I hope the volume reflects some of what you experienced and allows all who made the conference so worthwhile by their thoughtful work, to re-live the energy of those papers and discussions well into the future.

Sincerely,

Tony Grasso, CSC, Ph. D.

Department of English

King’s College

Wilkes-Barre, PA 18711

American Christianity between Power and Persecution: An Introduction

Jonathan Malesic, Ph. D.                                           King’s College

Christianity has long had a troubled—and troubling—relationship with political power. Followers of the Way were persecuted virtually from the start. Persecution continued off and on for several centuries afterward under Roman rule.¹ But as Rome became Christian, bishops grew in power and eventually began to persecute non-Christians.² After the Reformation, Christians stood on both sides of the oppressor–oppressed divide. Religious dissenters became enemies of the state, and the rivers of northern Europe ran red with the blood of martyrs—or heretics.

Given that power and persecution are the two extreme possibilities for Christians to approach public life, the question becomes how to negotiate the vast space between them. Christians in America are having trouble doing so right now. Part of the problem is that these poles are magnetic. The lust for power is universal in human beings (or so Augustine thought). The lust for authenticity is strong in Christians, too, and thus persecution and martyrdom have held their appeal.

For more than a year now, prominent American Christians have been arguing that religious freedom is threatened on many fronts, most notably through the Department of Health and Human Services’ mandate that contraceptives and sterilization procedures be covered by health insurance plans offered by all employers, including ones whose religious identity entails a prohibition on contraception and sterilization. Among other institutions, a few dozen Catholic universities, including the University of Notre Dame and the Catholic University of America, are currently challenging the mandate in court, alleging that the mandate forces the institutions to do something—fund contraception and sterilization—that violates the institutions’ Catholic conscience.

Alongside this legitimate legal challenge is some worrisome language that compares the mandate to the tactics of murderous regimes hell-bent on destroying inconvenient religions. For example, John Garvey, President of the Catholic University of America wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that struggling to find a conscientious way to deal with the mandate reminded him of the wonderful story of Eleazar, a Jewish scribe who was executed by the occupying Greeks for refusing to eat pork (2 Macc 6:18-31).³

No one in the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to kill John Garvey, who is, like Eleazar, a legal scholar. So why does Mr. Garvey resort to such extreme rhetoric? Why do other Christian leaders invoke the specter of Soviet totalitarianism when describing the alleged threat the Obama agenda poses to religious freedom?

I wish I knew. But then, I also wish I knew why so many American Christians so eagerly embraced the past decade’s two foreign wars as holy struggles. And in fact, it is some of the same people—in political life, figures like Rick Santorum, and in intellectual life, publications like First Things—who have tried to have it both ways. To them, America is a Christian power, and yet Christianity in America is under constant threat from internal enemies. Among Christians, it has been the politically conservative ones who have most readily exhibited this victim/victor complex, but liberal and other ideologues do so, too. Indeed, it may be that all ideologues think this way. If only we had fewer of them and more pragmatic ironists in the political and chattering classes.

As the scholar of early Christianity Candida Moss has argued, the ready equation of present-day American Christians with early Christian martyrs ultimately leaves American Christians (who are under no threat of bodily harm) without a meaningful vocabulary for talking about real oppression of Christians in Nigeria, Egypt, or China.⁴

Neither the triumphalist embrace of power nor the stance of persecution gets the political or theological facts right. Neither extreme offers a viable way for American Christians to engage with America’s pluralistic public sphere.

What both extremes have in common is that they take for granted that Christians should visibly and vocally tout their Christian identities when they take on matters of public concern. The presumption is that because Christians are to be witnesses, the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Mt 5:13-14), they need to make known at every possible moment that they are Christians, in order to get the message out and to sanctify every aspect of life. And yet Jesus followed the instruction to be salt and light with an admonition to downplay one’s religious identity in public, lest one confuse political victory with salvation or political defeat with righteous martyrdom (Mt 6:5-6).

The confusion of worldly gain with spiritual gain is the fruit of making faith too public. Ironically, when Christians vigorously assert their distinctive religious identity in a hyperactive, media-saturated public square, that identity becomes no more than one political marker among many others. The Catholic vote becomes not much different in kind from the Hispanic vote, the union vote, or the rural vote. The church becomes a demographic, a constituency, not a sacramental reality.

So if the extremes of triumphalism and false victimhood are both bad, and if both extremes entail vocally promoting one’s Christian identity to the world, then what quieter alternatives are there?

American Christians today might take a lesson from an earlier era in which religion and public life were converging. In the middle of the fourth century, when Diocletian’s persecutions were slipping out of living memory and the Roman Empire was rapidly Christianizing, Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, recognized that public religious talk was cheap. He saw many people seeking nominal membership in the church because doing so might please a Christian employer or win greater political rights.

Cyril, a pastoral and political mastermind, responded by concealing the sacraments, the distinctive activities of full members of the church, from those seeking to join the church. If they were curious about the sacraments, they would have to go all-in. Nominal Christianity would not be enough. Cyril also enjoined the already-baptized not to tell the seekers about sacramental doctrine or practice.⁵ This practice went against the general trend at the time toward public, stational liturgy: the literal parading of the sacraments throughout the streets that performed the union between Christianity and public life.⁶

Cyril hoped that by withholding what the opportunists sought, he could both frustrate their drive to exploit Christian identity and reform their desires, getting them to see baptism and the eucharist as profound spiritual goods in their own right. By taking the faith out of public circulation, Cyril reasserted its properly transcendent value. Whether Christianity was favored by the state or not (and, had the reign of Julian the Apostate not ended prematurely, the church’s power would likely have receded), a focus on its spiritual treasures would serve its members best.

The incessant drive in our century to merge faith and public life has left so much Christian discourse empty, cheap, and too closely aligned with narrow political interests. Pausing before speaking is nearly always a good policy; American Christians would do well to adopt it. The evangelical theologian Charles Marsh has similarly called for a season of silence for an American church that exhibited tremendous hubris in vocally supporting the dubious agenda of President George W. Bush. This silence is not meant as an admission of the church’s irrelevance to politics or culture. It is instead the silence of thoughtful renewal: it is the depth and the silence of God out of which our words must arise ever anew.⁷ Thus Christians should not drop out of public life altogether. Marsh and I are calling for quiet, not quietism. The polis is a site for engagement; you might even say that it is a site for Christians to practice the love of neighbor that will characterize the heavenly Jerusalem.⁸

What would it mean today to follow the model of Cyril, using secrecy as a weapon against Constantinianism? How should Christians act, if they want their faith to matter in public life but they don’t want it to get lost amid the cacophony of identity politics?

Pope Francis has recently offered good guidance. As I write this, the immediate threat of a U.S. bombing campaign in Syria, which President Obama had proposed as a just response to the Assad regime’s alleged chemical weapons attack against civilians, has receded, as Russian leaders have promised to remove chemical weapons from Syria. Shortly after President Obama stated that he would ask Congress for the authority to strike Syria, Francis made his own appeal to Catholics and all people of good will. In addition to calling for a total end to war, the pope asked Catholics to fast and pray for peace.⁹

These actions, fasting and prayer, are meant to be done in secret, as Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount. Only the hypocrites make a great noise about their pious actions; they receive their reward in public acclaim. But that is not to say that fasting and prayer lack public significance. Søren Kierkegaard expresses the dialectic between secret prayer and public works of love when he writes, "Shut your door and pray to God…. [W]hen you open the door that you shut in order to pray to God and go out the very first person you meet is the neighbor, whom you shall love."¹⁰ Loving the neighbor, the ultimate Christian public act, need not require words at all.

Did the prayer and fasting of Christians and others alter the prospects for peace in Syria? We cannot say. We’re in the realm of secondary causes and, ultimately, divine mystery. But even if peace itself is not directly the result of hidden prayer and fasting, surely the desire for peace can be. And by properly ordering their desires through spiritual exercises, Christians form themselves into citizens of the heavenly city, which can be seen from time to time in this life but which Christians cannot expect to see fully manifest here and now.¹¹

In another recent address, the pope offered further insight into Christian activity in public life, claiming very directly:

Politics, according to the Social Doctrine of the Church, is one of the highest forms of charity, because it serves the common good. I cannot wash my hands, eh? We all have to give something! … A good Catholic meddles in politics, offering the best of himself, so that those who govern can govern.

Is this a call for the resurgence of Catholic political parties? Not quite, as the pope reveals: But what is the best that we can offer to those who govern? Prayer! That’s what Paul says: ‘Pray for all people, and for the king and for all in authority.’¹² To pray—to perform a Christian religious act, even in silence and solitude—is to meddle in politics.

I do not presume to know anything about the prayer life of those who bring Christian identity publicly to bear on matters of broad concern. I have no reason to suppose that they speak openly instead of praying. But I do know that American culture often rewards public Christians with political power and economic revenue (even if there are a few counterexamples, such as a brief 2012 boycott of the expressly Christian fast-food chain Chick-Fil-A over the company’s refusal to grant domestic partner benefits to same-sex employees). It is at least possible that some highly vocal Christians are hypocritical. The real risk of hypocrisy should give pause to leaders and the general public alike: there may be another, more thoughtful and less noisy way to be a Christian in America. Perhaps there can be a public life characterized by love formed through hidden prayer and liturgy.

***************************

Jonathan Malesic is associate professor of theology at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He is the author of Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument of the Concealment of Christian Identity (Brazos), which won ForeWord Reviews’ 2009 Book of the Year Award for the religion category.

Thomas Nagel’s Rejection of Theism: A Review*

David Baggett, Ph.D.                                           Liberty University

In his most recent book—Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False—and in numerous places in his previous work, Thomas Nagel wishes to suggest several reasons that theism is not a live option for him (to use a phrase made famous by William James). He does not seem to intend many of his criticisms to be more than suggestive, much less decisive; nonetheless, in light of the strength of his conviction that theism is somehow inherently too outrageous an option to believe, I would like to spend a bit of time identifying and assessing the criticisms he mentions.

Nagel does not seem averse to characterizing his resistance to theism as something of a bias. He is rather transparent about theism simply not being a reasonable alternative for him personally. He seems to leave open the possibility that others may find it to be reasonable, but he himself, he says, has not been blessed with the sensus divinitatis (sense of divinity). Alvin Plantinga’s work in epistemology employs this term, borrowing from the writings of John Calvin, to refer to the idea that God has made God’s reality known to people in a direct fashion apart from discursive inference.¹ Nagel, though, claims to have no such sense, however inchoate. The thesis of theism strikes him rather as a dead option—perhaps akin (this is my example, not his) to the difficulty if not impossibility for an evangelical Christian of endorsing doctrines of reincarnation or karma.

Important to emphasize is the irenic way in which Nagel conveys this impression. There is nothing overtly tendentious or dismissive about his view toward theists in general, despite his own rejection of theism and incredulity at some of its tenets. In fact, he goes out of his way to express gratitude for the work of certain theistically motivated advocates of intelligent design—lauding them as iconoclasts—for raising important