Articles – Page 103 – Religion Online

The Complex Face of Orthodoxy

When he became president of Russia last year, Vladimir Putin disclosed that "when I was serving in the KGB in Germany, I always wore a cross under my shirt" Whether or not one believes this astonishing claim, there is no doubt that Putin embraces the Russian Orthodox Church as a partner in his blueprint for a strong new Russia. On his first Easter Sunday in office he declared, "The widespread celebration of Easter is visible proof of the rebirth of the spiritual foundations of our society. I believe that together with the church we will achieve the spiritual revival of a strong, prospering Russia in the 21st century."

A democratic mandate brought Putin into office, though there were accusations of vote-rigging. He rode a wave of popular support for his "solution" to the problem of Chechnya’s attempted secession, a solution that might well have earned him the title -- not in current usage -- of the "butcher of Grozny." In that conflict, the Moscow Patriarchate stressed the duty of all young Russian males to serve in the army -- thus not falling far short of implicitly condoning genocide.

The Orthodox Church’s long history of validating state policy goes back to the Czarist period. Though the church consistently backed the state under communism, it clearly did so under duress and the threat of increased persecution. The accession of Mikhail Gorbachev 16 years ago freed the church from coercion. Its current alliance with Putin is voluntary.

This chorus of church and state now has new words. The Czarist national anthem proclaimed, "Powerful and sovereign, reign for glory, reign for terror to enemies, Orthodox Czar, God save the Czar!" The new Russian national anthem (to the old Soviet tune) goes, "You are unique in the world, inimitable, native land protected by God!" The author of the new words is the same Sergei Mikhalkov, now 87, who 60 years ago to the same tune wrote the words glorifying Stalin, words later adapted again as, "O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people, to communism’s triumph lead us on!"

How did the new harmony between church and state come about? No one could have predicted this development when believers first threw off their shackles during Gorbachev’s perestroika. In April 1988 Gorbachev summoned the senior bishops of the Orthodox Church to the Kremlin to discuss their role in his reconstruction policy. As an inducement, he offered them the opportunity more fully to celebrate the millennium of the 988 baptism of Prince Vladimir.

The ensuing June days were intoxicating. The news media vied with each other to laud the achievements of Russian Christianity. But church leaders were unprepared for these new opportunities. There were neither books, buildings nor teachers to take advantage of the situation.

Gorbachev’s second promise to the church leadership was to prepare a new law on religion. Experts outside as well as inside the Soviet Union were consulted. The new law, passed in September 1990, represented a total reversal of fortunes not only for the Russian Orthodox Church but for all other religious creeds. It gave believers virtually complete religious liberty. Stalin’s nefarious 1929 law, which had completely subjugated the churches, was abolished, along with the dreaded Council for Religious Affairs, the arm of the KGB which had "supervised" the lives of believers. The U.S. had provided Russia with the model for a true separation of church and state, such as Russia had never known. And the Orthodox Church was given all the freedom it needed to rebuild its shattered institutions.

But it was not long before sentiments and policies changed. The Soviet Union was inundated with foreign evangelists and missionaries commanding technological resources unimaginable to a church just emerging from captivity. People began to blame the liberality of the 1990 law for the onslaught of foreign missionaries. The Moscow patriarch lobbied behind the scenes for the reintroduction of controls. During the ensuing debate, the old communists sensed an opportunity to reverse Gorbachev’s policy and regain lost jobs in the offices which monitored religious activities. President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II both intervened with President Boris Yeltsin in 1997 when they saw drafts of a new law which threatened to negate the freedoms of the non-Orthodox and move toward reestablishing Orthodoxy as the state religion.

Eventually Yeltsin signed a new law which, while maintaining a theoretical separation of church and state, protected the Russian Orthodox Church and, surprisingly, the other "traditional" religions of Russia -- Islam, Judaism and Buddhism -- from the supposedly foreign incursions of the Protestant and Catholic churches. The fact that there have been Protestants in Russia since the 17th century and Catholics for even longer made for confusion and the probability of bureaucratic intrusion. The law did not provide grounds for banning the incursion of foreign missionaries, though that had obviously been one of its key intentions. The hated provision of mandatory registration was reestablished, with advantage conferred on those bodies which had legally existed during the Brezhnev period. This discriminates not only against such groups as the Salvation Army and the Jehovah’s Witnesses but even against the Catholics, whose only official presence at that time had been one church in Moscow. While all this was going on, Yeltsin was appearing in church at major festival times and inviting Patriarch Alexsy II to bless the great occasions of state.

Putin has no interest in revising this law. A move to repeal it will arise only if enforcement becomes brutal. Until then, we can expect messy and confused local wrangles about registration, about the return of former church property and about the presence of foreign missionaries.

The Orthodox Church’s willingness to enlist the state on its behalf, and in turn to offer sacral endorsement of the state’s policies, has deep psychological and historical roots. It is impossible for the outsider to understand the depth of the humiliation endured by the church during the 70 years of its captivity under communism. After exerting influence on state affairs under Czarist rule, the church found itself overnight banished from public life, its property confiscated, its worship repressed, and its role in the educational system ended. Most of its hierarchy, as well as thousands of parish clergy, monks and nuns lost their liberty, and many lost their lives. Only those willing to submit to the state survived.

The KGB archives, opened fleetingly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, proved what many Russians had known but few in the West had believed: that the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church were often forced to carry out the specific instructions of the more nefarious organs of state. Only those who toed the line were appointed to positions of authority. Many of the best priests could not even secure places in the three theological seminaries. "Spiritual formation," therefore, included being malleable enough to become, if not a KGB agent, someone ready to do the state’s bidding. When the reversal of fortune came in 1997, the urge to recapture the privileges of an established church was overwhelming.

Putin needs the church to legitimate his policies. Yeltsin had struggled at personal cost to free himself from his communist past, and he fought on the front line of democracy. Putin has no such record. Therefore his embrace of the church in general and of its hierarchy in particular is part of a self-protective policy to accord himself added legitimacy.

The character of the present patriarch of Moscow, Alexsy II, reflects this convoluted church history. He was born in free Estonia in 1929, the son of a Russian mother and an aristocratic Estonian father. He saw his country suffer successively under the Red Army, the Germans and then the Soviets again. After the war the only way he could enter a theological seminary was by suppressing his nationality and any anticommunist tendencies which his experiences might have bred. When he was in his 30s the authorities recognized that his political compliance made him an ideal candidate for bishop in an area where nationalism could (and one day would) cause unrest. His reward for helping to pacify Estonia was the license to travel extensively abroad to further ecumenical contacts (Soviet style), and his elevation to metropolitan of Leningrad and eventually patriarch in 1990, the next-to-last year of Soviet power.

KGB material in the Estonian archives leaves no doubt about the patriarch’s connections with the KGB. It even gives a specific date for his recruitment: February 28, 1958. He received the code name "Drozdov." The Estonian document, signed by a Colonel I. P. Karpov, head of the KGB in the republic, states: "During the period of collaboration with the organs of the KGB ‘Drozdov’ positively recommended himself. During secret rendezvous he was punctilious, energetic and convivial. He is well-orientated in theoretical questions of theology and the international situation. He has a willing attitude to the fulfillment of our tasks and has already provided materials deserving attention."

Other aspects of the Orthodox hierarchy are also a cause for concern. The church has always been extremely reluctant to accord any legitimacy to the views of its most forward-looking theologian, Alexander Men, known as the "apostle of church perestroika." Men was murdered in 1990, before his books were widely available in Russia. After his death the bishop in Yekaterinburg ordered the burning of his books, along with those of the American theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff. (A hopeful sign that the church is changing, however, is that a group of clergy petitioned successfully for the bishop’s removal, and the new bishop welcomes contact with the West.)

The late Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg was an ultranationalist whose writings were explicitly antiSemitic. Alexsy never censured him beyond saying that he did not share his views. In Moscow, Father Georgi Kochetkov was removed from his parish for attempting to introduce a translation of the Slavonic liturgy into modern Russian. Another Moscow priest lost his parish for making it a center for the city’s most disadvantaged people.

Yet the Moscow Patriarchate is not the whole of the church, nor is it even typical. I was reminded of this last year when I visited Smolensk, one of the most ancient Russian cities. Smolensk embraced Christianity in the 11th century, while Moscow was still a village. As a guardian of Russia’s western flank, the city has witnessed the passage of many armies. Napoleon was defeated here in 1812, and Germany ravaged it in 1941. In its indomitable spirit it encapsulates the essence of Russia, and it is now being extensively restored and rebuilt.

Not one of the city’s ancient churches was left unscathed by the long years of official atheism. Nothing that one would recognize as normal religious life remained. In the huge area covered by the Smolensk diocese, only 25 churches maintained some semblance of a regular pattern of worship.

But now almost all of Smolensk’s churches are being restored. More than 100 have reopened, including some in Kaliningrad, in the section of the Smolensk diocese lying beyond Belarus and Lithuania -- a region cut off from the rest of Russia. In the Soviet period, Kaliningrad’s communists prided themselves on having established a model atheist city. Now it is full of new churches -- Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran.

The rebuilding visible everywhere in Smolensk is typical of Russia’s provincial cities. Despite economic deprivation, civic pride is driving reconstruction, and the Russian Orthodox Church is playing a large part in the rebuilding. Smolensk is untypical of the provinces only insofar as it provides the most direct link between them and the Moscow Patriarchate. Its bishop, Metropolitan Kirill, is the second most influential figure in the church hierarchy. He divides his time between Smolensk and Moscow, and his responsibility as head of the Department of Foreign Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate frequently takes him abroad. Though ecumenical relations have suffered a severe blow under his leadership, he is superbly successful as a diocesan bishop.

Starting in the Gorbachev period, Kirill established close relations with the Smolensk civic authorities, which gave him a head start in his rebuilding program. He was the first bishop to receive back a substantial swathe of ecclesiastical buildings, including the episcopal palace and administrative buildings adjacent to the cathedral.

Kirill has also established a theological seminary for catechists, nurses and choir trainers in part of the administrative complex. All except one or two students are female, and they are all developing extraordinary talents under the energetic guidance of a nun, Mother Ioanna, from whom goodness and efficiency flow in equally generous measure. This is happening in a church which is not exactly known for the contribution it has made to the feminist cause -- and under the watchful eye of a bishop whose conservatism has caused much disappointment on the international front.

A mile away, visible on top of a hill, is the seminary for training priests. Some 100 young men live in cramped conditions while their building is gradually being restored. Their library may be among the best of any Russian seminary -- though it would pale beside its equivalent in, say, a deprived African country.

Metropolitan Kirill invited the BBC to do a broadcast from Smolensk on the Sunday before Christmas 1999, and I was asked to take part. Though there was, of course, a measure of self-promotion in Kirill’s invitation, the reception we received was not only warm but professional and cooperative. No one asked to see our script or to listen to any of the taped material before transmission. The radio broadcast, a worship service, demonstrated the authenticity and energy of the religious life in the provincial diocese most closely under the protection of the central authorities. One has to encounter the religious energies in Smolensk as well as the political concerns in Moscow to begin to grasp today’s Russian Orthodox Church.

Given the links that the church’s current leaders had with the KGB, one can understand why the patriarchate’s policymakers are finding it difficult to come to terms with the church’s activities during the Soviet period. The worst injustice has been the church’s inability to recognize the sacrifice of the martyrs under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and even Brezhnev. Many of these martyrs had opposed the patriarchate’s policy of accommodation with the Soviet regime. Thousands gave their lives for their stand.

The most notable center of opposition was the Solovki monastery-prison on an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean which had become virtually a death camp for the clergy and intellectuals of Czarist Russia. It prompted Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s title, The Gulag Archipelago, for his history of the Soviet prison-camp system, which was dispersed around the U.S.S.R. like a land-bound archipelago. The most significant opposition to the church’s compromise with the state in the Stalin years were the letters signed in 1927 by 17 bishops incarcerated in the Solovki prison. These letters called on the government to renounce its systematic persecution of believers, and denounced the collaborationists who claimed that the state’s goals and interests were identical with those of the church.

To this day the Moscow Patriarchate (which did not exist at the time of the declaration) has never acknowledged the text or even printed it for study. Lawrence Uzzell, the director of Oxford’s Keston Institute, which specializes in the study of religion in Russia, recently called on the Orthodox Church to undertake a study of the document. The possibility that his words may be heeded was suggested by the church’s decision in 2000 to canonize six men who had signed the letters.

The church building is probably more essential in the Orthodox than in any other Christian tradition. This fact makes the extensive rebuilding of churches and the opening of new theological seminaries in the Russian provinces especially notable. Two thirds of the 68 dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church, many themselves newly created or reestablished after a gap of 80 years, now have their own theological schools, and in every region churches devastated in the Soviet period are being rebuilt.

At one end of the spectrum is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, criticized by many for its grandiosity and expense; visible from inside the Kremlin, it replaces its predecessor, destroyed by Stalin in the 1930s. At the other end is a church in the village of Gridino, about 90 miles southeast of Moscow. Here a 70-year-old woman saw a vision of "three angels, as pretty as princesses, shining in their white raiment and lighting up my kitchen. They told me to build a church." As she trekked through the offices of administrative officialdom, Olga Fedorovna was often called mad. But she persisted, finally received permission to build the church, and then had another vision in which the angels told her where to build it. She collected donations for the bricks and mortar, but the breakthrough came when "three newly rich businessmen donated the bricks that had been destined to build their second homes in the country." The church now stands in modest splendor.

In 1995 I had an unforgettable vision of the new life of the Orthodox Church. I was in the Russian Arctic, sailing across the White Sea through a dense fog. When the fog cleared, a magnificent sight appeared on the skyline: the Solovki Monastery seemed to rise from the depths of the waters, like the Invisible City of Kitezh of Russian legend, sunk by God to escape destruction by the Tatars. According to the legend, it arises to the surface once a year, its packed churches offering songs of praise to the savior.

The vision dispelled when we arrived at the quayside. Many of the horrors of the former prison were still visible, though the reconstruction of the monastery had begun. This ruin housing the bare and fractured bones of once magnificent churches could never again become the place of pilgrimage, inspiration and learning it once had been, I thought. But the restoration has steadily progressed and may yet return it to its former glory.

Last summer I visited the Tolga Convent, on the Volga near Yaroslavl in Central Russia. Here the rebuilding of another former prison (a boys’ reformatory) is proceeding at an amazing pace. Every vista is magnificent, every encounter with the nuns a torrent of warm words explaining how the convent is revitalizing the whole countryside -- not only providing work, but also spreading Christian enlightenment and education. I remembered that the great Danilov Monastery in Moscow, formerly also a juvenile prison, was restored just in time to host the Millennium of the Baptism of Russia in June 1988.

Before the end of the Gorbachev years, many bishops began to make plans for the daunting task of rebuilding seminary life. The strides they have made over the past ten years have been impressive. A useful benchmark is the remarkable ecumenical venture by the Roman Catholic agency, Aid to the Church in Need. In 1992 its founder, the Dutch Norbertine monk Werenfried van Straaten, already 79 years old, had a vision which challenged him to support the Russian Orthodox Church. His advisers settled on helping Russian Orthodox theological education as the most effective focus for this new outreach. Of the 46 theological academies, seminaries and schools in Russia, Aid to the Church in Need is now helping 26 financially.

In the Crimean city of Yalta I visited an Orthodox junior school taking pupils up to the age of ten. Here they receive a grounding in the faith from dedicated teachers. The parents want their children’s Christian education prolonged through the equivalent of their high school years, which at present is financially impossible. Similar initiatives exist in Russia.

Clergy introducing innovative programs have been heavily scrutinized by the patriarchate, especially in Moscow. But even here some clergy who are daring to be more innovative are retaining their posts. Last July, in the central Moscow church of St. Cosmas and Damian, I helped organize a unique event: a tour of Russia by an English Episcopal cathedral choir. Georgi Chistyakov, one of the remarkable clergy associated with this church, invited the Exeter Cathedral Choir (boys and men, clad in scarlet cassocks) to sing a concert. The occasion was informal but also deeply spiritual. Benches to seat the audience appeared (no Orthodox churches in Russia have seats). Georgi gave a short theological reflection about the words of each selection the choir sang. A Russian radio broadcast of the concert described the choir as made up of "small English gentlemen or cardinals."

Some -- perhaps most -- of the graduates from the new theological seminaries are as conservative as the bishops or rectors who selected them for training, but theirs is not the only mind-set in the provincial dioceses. In 2000 I had only two opportunities for protracted conversations with young clergy, in places far distant and different from each other. Both of the men wished to see urgent reforms in the life of the church, one in its theology, the other in its order, which lays down an unbridgeable divide between married (parochial) and celibate (monastic) clergy. Individuals must decide this issue for all time before ordination; it can never be reconsidered (except in cases where the wife dies).

The far north of European Russia is showing strong signs of a religious revival in which the laity are playing a leading role, according to two researchers at Keston Institute, Sergei Filatoy and Roman Lunkin. The regions they name are Karehia (formerly part of Finland), Arkhangelsk (on the White Sea, the southern extremity of the Arctic Ocean), the Komi Republic (the next area to the east) and Novgorod (further south, adjacent to St. Petersburg). This is especially remarkable because church life here was even more devastated by communism than it was in central Russia. When I toured Petrozavodsk (capital of Karehia) in the company of Father Nikolai Ozohin a few years ago, he told me that in that whole vast region only four of the formerly 400 churches, mostly wooden, had survived for worship by the beginning of the Gorbachev period.

Generalizing about the region, Filatoy and Lunkin write of a rare phenomenon in the Orthodox Church: its "cooperation with the intelligentsia, university teachers, writers, artists and museum staff and widespread involvement of teachers in the work of Sunday schools. The atmosphere in these regions, where culture and education have always enjoyed pride of place, and also the attitude of the diocesan leadership help to reduce the barrier between the intelligentsia and the church."

A building firm run by a believer, Yevgeni Kuzkin, supports a religious and educational center in Petrozavodsk, where he participates in the selection of teaching staff. The courses themselves are run by the church, with significant participation by the diocesan bishop. Would-be catechists can study for three years, during which time they can explore their vocation for the priesthood. There is a lively interchange with secular institutes of higher education.

Ozolin, who was born and studied in Paris, brings his knowledge of the rest of Europe to Russia’s far north. He has set up an educational project in conjunction with the directors of the Kizhi museum, a remarkable collection of ancient wooden churches on an island accessible from Petrozavodsk. He also works with Aid to the Church in Need, advising the charity on the distribution of its aid over this huge and deprived region. Ozohin and others also receive help from neighboring Finland, where the Lutherans (as well as the small Orthodox community) care intensely about Karehia. It may be the most ecumenical region in the whole of Russia.

In Arkhangelsk a businessman, Dmitri Zenchenko, supports the church-sponsored Children’s Aid Foundation and the Medicines for Children program. A mathematician in Syktyvkar (capital of the Komi Republic), Yuri Yekishev, has revived the Boy Scout movement with the help of the church.

The rebirth of monastic life is of special significance throughout these northern regions. A new generation of monks is involving itself widely in educational and social projects, as well as spiritual counseling for the many visiting pilgrims, just as monks did in medieval Russia. As monastic communities pushed further north, partly to avoid the press of the crowds they attracted, they opened up the economy of new regions. People flocked to follow them, creating new work in field and forest to support both themselves and the monastic communities.

Despite the problems confronting the Russian Orthodox Church today, and the issues that cloud its past, many positive things are happening. Perhaps, through them, it will find the confidence to embark on a new era, in which it engages with society at all levels and cooperates with its friends around the world.

Everyday Fortitude

Book Review: The Mystery of Courage

By William Ian Miller Harvard University Press, 346 pp.

We will never forget the terror of September 11, but neither will we forget the heroic efforts of the police and firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center to help people escape. Some of them paid for their courage with their lives. The catastrophes of that day led to extraordinary testimonies of sympathy, generosity and dedication. Yet a disquieting question begins to stir: Does it take a disaster to rouse us to virtuous action? Is our ordinary common life hostile or indifferent to moral excellence?

Courage is a fine probe for this difficult problem, and William Miller’s book is a helpful guide to the enigma. Miller, who teaches law at the University of Michigan, has himself shown courage -- and panache -- in facing up to his task. He has not shied away from vigorous research, nor from the slings and arrows of postmodern know-it-all superiority, nor from the paradoxes of psychology and ethics. Miller is a fine writer, combining stylistic virtuosity with lawyerly precision and philosophical thoughtfulness.

A consideration of this greatest of human virtues begins with the puzzles of psychology, for it seems that courage is inexplicably distributed. Some people have it and some don’t. But if courage is simply a matter of course for the truly courageous, should we -- turning now to ethics -- give them moral credit? Are not the fears and terrors we feel in the face of danger the crucial obstacles courage must overcome in order to be courage? If those terrors simply paralyze us, should we not be held blameless? But if we are blameless, what is the meaning of cowardice? Is cowardice the deliberate refusal to confront danger? Yet it has been said that in war most men overcome cowardice because they are not courageous enough to say no to war. And where does courage shade over into fanaticism?

It is a strength of Miller’s book that it confronts such questions by bringing up the particulars of courage and cowardice in reports and testimonies from the ancient Greeks to the Vietnam War. Miller is suspicious of the philosophers who unduly extol the element of courage closest to their trade -- the deliberate assessment of the dangers to be faced. At the same time, it is Aristotle’s treatment of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics that provides the framework for Miller’s book. Miller also adopts Aristotle’s view as to the foremost setting of courage -- mortal danger in war.

Such glorification offends our sense of justice and peace. Students of ethics, at least since Immanuel Kant, have insisted that moral norms and accomplishments must be open to all, not just to warriors and soldiers and certainly not only to those soldiers who have "the good fortune" of serving in a war. Christians share Kant’s inclusiveness. More important, they have been told that the meek, not the courageous, shall inherit the earth. To remember this today and to say it aloud requires its own kind of courage.

Courage is part of the ethics of virtue rather than the ethics of principle that has dominated modernity. According to virtue ethics, the cultivation and formation of character through virtues such as temperance and fortitude is the essential aspect of the moral life. According to principle ethics, most important is the knowledge of ethical principles -- act from duty, not from desire; maximize pleasure and minimize pain -- which will guide individuals and communities in choosing the good. Adhering to Kant and the utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, modern ethics aspires to principles of universal scope and cogent force. Principle ethics was intended to rule anywhere at anytime. Virtues, in contrast, are in a crucial sense always circumstantial. They are in large part moral skills, and a skill that is illuminating in one setting can be irrelevant in another. For example, the skill of reading tracks is valuable in the Rockies, but not in Chicago’s Loop.

The Gospels in places read like an explicit rejection of principle ethics. When Jesus is asked for a definition, he tells a story. When in a parable the problem of the impartial administration of justice arises, the particular takes precedence over the universal, and the claims of justice are overruled by the grace of charity.

Virtue ethics has recently had a scholarly renaissance. But virtue ethicists have spent most of their energy on showing that the explanatory power of their brand of ethics can equal or surpass what its rivals -- Kantian ethics and utilitarianism -- have to offer. They argue that virtue ethics gives a more holistic view of the moral life than principle ethics does; it not only insists that we try to be blameless but promotes moral excellence; and it recognizes that the vitality of the good life is not codifiable in a set of principles.

Through William Bennett’s best-selling Book of Virtues, virtue ethics appears to have enjoyed some popular success, but my guess is that the book was more often bought and given as a present than lovingly read to children. What makes recent virtue ethics (Bennett’s included) so ineffectively pious is that it does not admit that the moral force of a virtue such as courage depends greatly on its circumstances. Recent virtue ethics has allowed itself to be coopted on this point by its rivals, and as a consequence its teachings seem old-fashioned and without purchase on our predicaments.

Miller shows that what is courage in hand-to-hand combat is foolishness in meeting a hail of bullets and plain stupidity in standing up to mortar shells. He recounts testimony to the effect that one can revel in courage when one engages in a perilous foray, but that courage inevitably seeps away, except among psychopaths, in the grind and squalor of trench warfare. In fact, Aristotle found it very hard to discuss courage because in his day its setting had shifted from the heroic to the civic.

Courage was the defining virtue of the Homeric hero, and Aristotle evidently loved heroic courage above all. When in the Nicomachean Ethics he says of the virtuous man that "he would prefer an hour of rapture to a long period of mild enjoyment, a year of beautiful life to many years of ordinary existence, one great and glorious exploit to many small successes," he surely had in mind Achilles, who lived and died by this precept. Aristotle ranks courage according to the dangers the hero meets, mortal danger being the severest test. He asks, "What form of death then is a test of courage?" and answers, "Presumably that which is the most beautiful. Now the most beautiful form of death is death in battle, for it is encountered in the midst of the greatest and most beautiful of dangers."

Aristotle must have been thinking of the grace and athleticism of heroic, warrior-to-warrior combat. Translators invariably mute Aristotle’s aesthetic delight in war by translating "beautiful" as "noble," "fine," "admirable" and the like. In any case, warriors in Aristotle’s time no longer fought for glory and spoils but to protect the city, the women and the children. And there was little beauty, if some nobility, in the famously effective Greek phalanx. The main concern was to keep those heavy shields locked to make an impenetrable wall and to advance steadily. Though Aristotle makes no explicit distinction between heroic and civic courage, his sympathies are evident. He wistfully concludes that civic courage belongs among the lesser kinds of courage, although it is first among them "since it most closely resembles true courage."

Like Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas looked back to a heroic age, an age when courage was a defining and unequivocally glorious Christian virtue. In the Roman Empire persecution was the ultimate test of faith, hope and charity, and to suffer martyrdom was to pass the test triumphantly. But Aquinas was just about as far from the time of martyrs as Aristotle was from the time of heroes -- about a thousand years. By the 13th century, the church was secure and flourishing. To lead a faithful life no longer required a confrontation with torture and death but, rather, the struggle with the hardships and distractions of everyday life.

To agree with Aristotle, whom Aquinas simply calls "the Philosopher," was nearly as important to Aquinas as being faithful to Christian doctrine. Hence he did not want to deny that war is the preeminent setting of courage. But he widened the meaning of war to include particular attacks on one’s life or well-being. Moreover, he divided courage into the aggressive and the enduring and, appealing to a throw-away line of Aristotle’s, he elevated endurance over acts of daring -- a point Miller is loath to accept. Miller wants to call this attitude "fortitude" and make it a separate virtue.

English is blessed with numerous pairs of near-synonyms that allow one to mark subtle differences in meaning. Fortitude refers more to the mental and patient side of encountering dangers well, while courage has a greater affinity to the physical and daring side of confronting perils. Aquinas’s Latin, however, had just one word for it (fortitudo), as did Aristotle’s Greek (andreia, whose original meaning was manliness). Aquinas’s thinking is likely to be more helpful to our present state than Aristotle’s.

Thomas did not conceal his admiration for the glory of martyrdom. As Miller tells us, however, David Hume and Adam Smith, who experienced the modern refinement of manners and the promise of technological comfort, began to worry about the fate of courage. The dangers and hardships that made courage prosper were receding, but the need for the moral vigor of courage continued.

For more than 300 years now, modern technology has been dissolving traditional structures and indulging our weaknesses. Every generation fears for what structures and virtues have been spared so far. Already in 1848 Marx and Engels noted: "All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned . . ." Nietzsche, and in our day Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch and a host of others, have all continued that lament.

As for courage, Smith’s and Hume’s apprehensions were followed in 1896 by William James’s call for "The Moral Equivalent of War" -- a setting where in peaceful times the "military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people." The details of the process, as James imagined them, strike us today as strange, not to say bizarre, and are worth quoting because they show how intractable the predicament of courage had become.

"To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and more sober ideas. They would have paid their bloodtax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation."

These words might as well have been written 300 years ago for all the distance in situation and sentiment that separates us from them. Mining is a declining industry, freight trains have been surpassed by trucks and planes, steel furnaces have all but disappeared. Most important, we would not think of restricting moral toughening to young men, nor would we confess, much less give praise to, "the immemorial human warfare against nature. We have crossed a cultural divide from the modern to the post-modern era.

Or have we? The conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton two years ago was appalled by the lack of courage the Allies showed in the Kosovo conflict. Risk was for him the wellspring of moral vigor, and so he thought it was wrong for governments to promote "moral obesity by reducing risk in activities, consumer products, and employment." Such a proposal would lead us from the bizarreness of James’s proposals to the bizarreness of wanton risk, maiming and death. Imagine a world without lifeguards, seat belts and safety goggles.

Miller’s lament about postmodern courage exhibits a similar concern, though it does so much more thoughtfully and with engaging ruefulness:

A recent spate of books and movies look with great nostalgia on World War II. They have been written or directed by those who did not fight and who are now middle-aged, when it is safe for them to indulge in this kind of wistfulness about having missed out on war. Most of my social class in the U.S. (myself included) bought substitutes for the only war in which we were eligible to fight and would no doubt do so again. So when in middle age I come at last to believe that a nation builds up a moral treasury of merit by the sacrifices of its people in war and I begin to worry, like the ancient moralists did, that we grow fat, lazy and contemptible amidst our plenty, I don’t have a leg to stand on. My father does, because he did fight in a war, but he is too wise to make such an argument.

Is moral courage the virtue that remains, now that physical danger and hardship have receded from our lives? Not in the way Miller defines it. Moral courage is the willingness to suffer discomfort or disgrace in the defense of what is right and good. The need for such courage has not entirely evaporated, nor is physical courage obviated across the board. But in a decent society there is no need for the regular exercise of moral courage. The more we succeed in securing justice and fairness through laws and regulations, the less call there is for moral courage. If courage is to be a virtue, however, it must be a habit, a moral skill that is regularly tested and exercised.

A skill is context-specific, and perhaps the real question is not how we can hope to situate a traditional virtue in contemporary circumstances but what circumstances today are most hostile to a Christian life and what moral skills does countering them require. The relevant circumstances can’t be the safety and well-being brought about by public health measures, medical care and insurance companies, wholesome food and clean water, etc. Surely God does not want us to court and suffer preventable harms.

Our circumstances are the opposite of those that made for martyrs. Where the martyrs’ challenges were overt, ours are concealed; where theirs were mortal to their bodies, ours are lethal to our souls; and where theirs tore them out of their normal life, ours channel our lives between the unquestioned banks of the technological culture. Here is an example: We come home from work, frazzled and spent. We walk into our kitchens and are not surprised that our children and spouses are not at home. We take what we like most out of our refrigerators, put it in the microwave and stare at the paper on the kitchen table; it’s Wednesday, our favorite TV show is on, followed by a game of the home team. Our pulses quicken a little. The show is good, our spouse comes home, we exchange a few words, we find the game boring, so we move to the den to do an overdue memo on the computer. But first we check our e-mail and the latest news, play a computer game and say good-night to our spouse. Then we too go to bed.

Is this an unchristian evening? We have not coveted our neighbor’s spouse, stolen anything or ordered anyone around. What we have done seems unexceptional. We enjoyed moments of a pleasant sort of freedom, eating what we liked when we liked while watching the program we like. There were moments of mild excitement as we anticipated the baseball game or started to play the video game. We may have felt vaguely sullen by the time we went to bed, but we had not depended on anyone or inconvenienced anyone.

This sort of retreat to a cocoon of autonomy has been spreading enormously in the last generation, as Robert Putnam has shown so impressively and depressingly. And a life without grace and gratitude is unchristian, not in this failing or that but from the ground up. It denies our capacity for redemption. The rising specter of irredeemability is stalking us. It is more hidden when we are engaged in activity, when we go shopping, finish the basement or go after a promotion. Yet all of our activity is in the service of consumption, of increasing it and of deepening its hold on us.

Amazingly, we are still surrounded by the possibility of engagement. Here on the shelf is the poetry we could read to one another, there in the corner are the flute and the guitar we could play together. Right next to the kitchen is the dining room table around which we could gather. And not far from our home are the playing fields where we could teach our sons and daughters tennis or join a softball league with our beloved. Within easy reach is the museum where local painters are showing their work and the concert hall where the citizens’ symphony plays.

These are the places where patience is tried and generosity rewarded, where disappointments can’t be escaped and grace descends in what Virginia Woolf calls moments of being. Such places and activities the precincts of faith where redemption comes into view again as the perfection the world cries out for.

To social critics the devotion to family and to communal celebration seem bland and retrograde goals better perhaps than consumption and shopping but not exactly the stuff of bold designs and revolutionary politics. Nor would the conservative champions of courage get excited about these goals. Where an the hardships? Where the risks? All people would have to do to be "courageous" is cross the threshold from the TV room to the dining room or from the home to the community.

The physical thresholds are in fact low and smooth, but they coincide with moral thresholds that are so high and hard that few of us cross them. Those are the thresholds of unencumbered self-determination -- of seductive promises, of self-indulgence and of lack of accountability. A residual tradition or the needs of a loved one occasionally get us on the other side of comfort, and we feel surprised and grateful. But the blandishments of technology will not disappear. The decision to cross the thresholds must be made daily. Steadiness in crossing them can come only from an arduously acquired and faithfully maintained habit -- a virtue, as Aristotle and Aquinas would call it. Courage is not quite the right name for it, but fortitude is. Fortitude needs to become the defining virtue of the postmodern era.

Diagnose This!

At the pastors’ conference, church diagnostician has been telling me and other glassy-eyed pastors that we have to start seeing things differently. Regional churches, more commonly known as megachurches, are the wave of the future. The statistics show "clearly" that megachurches will continue to draw more and more members because of their ability to provide expanded ministries to specific groups of people. These churches will have bigger choirs and more of them: choirs for adults, men, women, children, toddlers, infants -- maybe even choirs for babes still in the womb. How can another church compete?

They will also have small-group Bible studies, interactive Sunday school groups, and hymnals that you don’t need to hold. I’m ready to run home and tell our members to close up shop.

In my snazzy hotel room, I lie awake with a feeling of foreboding. I am pastor of two rural congregations in the middle of Wisconsin. We average 60 at worship, but if there is a family reunion on Sunday, the number can dip to 30. Diagnose that!

The next morning another diagnostician tells us that his area of expertise is "the integration of people and church." He spends the day going through every inch of a church layout, "walking" us from the parking lot to the toilets, from the sanctuary to the back closets. He tells us how to make all these things more inviting. Do our closets have to be inviting too?

My depression deepens and hope oozes out of me while the doctor of diagnosis smiles on and on.

During the final break, when everyone else is eating bran muffins and drinking some kind of French decaffeinated coffee, I sit alone beside the pop machine, hoping no one sees me huddled there with my Mountain Dew and Snickers bar. Then, in that quiet hallway, the Lord appears to me. Or is it the sugar kicking in? The vision is clear. I see a whole valley of rural congregations, and we are glowing. The brightness is dazzling. Onlookers can’t see that our bathrooms are undecorated, and that there is less than half a roll of toilet paper left in the dispenser. They can’t see that we don’t have parking lot greeters with personalized name tags. But I tell you they can see how we shine!

The revelation is soon over, but I’m inspired. That evening when the pastors get together around the pool, I decide to test my revelation. I want to put our rural congregations up against the megachurch.

Granted, I may need to add a bit of a flourish to God’s revelation, embellishing things here and there -- but nothing to send down the lightning of God’s anger.

One pastor in our group apparently serves a church that could be a poster child for the diagnosticians, and he’s eager to tell us about it.

Pastor Goliath brags that he has a 60-member choir. I put down my pop and matter-of-factly tell him both of our churches have 60-member choirs. I nod with all the persuasiveness I can muster, hoping my eyes don’t give me away.

I’m not lying, really. I just don’t add that our choir anthems are also called congregational hymns.

He tells us about the great small-group Bible studies at his church -- 12 groups of ten each, to be exact. He is taken aback when I inform him that we have small-group Bible studies going at our church too. I don’t explain that every Bible study at our church is a small group.

His voice moves up an octave as he talks about the parenting classes he is offering to the church -- classes, as he says, where parents are learning to share their faith with their kids. I echo him rather smugly with the news that parents meet each week at our churches to do the same thing. As I see it, each time the family gathers for worship, it is "doing" active parenting and sharing the faith within the family. I add that our classes are intergenerational. (After all, I’ve heard grandparents tell their grandkids to "sit down and shut up!")

"We have rest and relaxation classes," Goliath says, "to help people deal with the stress of their busy lives."

"We do too," I counter. What else should I call those who fall asleep in church -- and so what if they need a nap after a busy week?

"Our Sunday school is thriving!" Goliath says. I cut him off ruthlessly.

"Thriving?" I mock, "We’re thriving so much we lose track of kids sometimes." This is nothing to brag about, but it seems to fit the conversation.

Goliath moves on to church structure. He tells about the high visibility his church has: newspaper ads, billboards, TV and radio commercials, cable access. I acknowledge the importance of visibility. "We’re tops in that area too." Yes, that’s right. Both churches are built on top of hills. Of course, the wind can be a terrible nuisance, and in the winter we sometimes have to cancel church because we can’t get up the hill -- but Goliath doesn’t ask about the weather.

Instead he talks about the trained parking lot greeters who make a visitor’s first encounter with the church a pleasant one. I grin. If he knew anything about rural churches he would never have mentioned the parking lot. Everyone knows that in rural churches more is accomplished in the parking lot than in the church itself. In fact, most council decisions are made out there.

Goliath then breathes out the sacred words, "Handicapped parking facilities." I’m on cruise control now. I tell him we already know where Olive parks her car. And if anybody dares to park in her spot, it’s like an alarm bell that reverberates throughout the sanctuary with the message: "Visitor! Visitor!"

"Adequate parking?" he shoots back, his jaw clenched.

I wipe a bead of sweat off my forehead. I stall. In rural America, parishioners park anywhere they please, even on the church lawn. I can imagine how Goliath’s parishioners would react if someone late for church pulled up onto the church’s lush green lawn in a 1985 Ford 4x4 covered with cow manure.

Goliath eyes me carefully. He knows he’s running out of ammunition. Can I withstand the final push?

"Four houses," he spits out finally, his eyes a menacing squint. "We just bought four houses around our church so we can expand."

I pause, then breath a deep sigh of relief. "We’ve expanded too." It’s true. We just bought two more acres to add to our cemetery. We figure that should be enough room for the saints of the next 100 years.

We conclude by discussing issues of hospitality and welcoming, discipline and integration. Through it all, God’s revelation holds strong. God had shown me a great truth. What many of these megachurches are trying to simulate or produce through strategized ministries, we already have in our little podunk church.

The next Sunday, I arrive early at church. I sweep aside the raccoon droppings and unlock the church door. I walk through the church turning on lights and checking to see that there is toilet paper. (I did learn something!) Soon people begin to arrive.

When Hazel walks in, I am a bit surprised. She’s not a member, but her husband was, and his funeral was held at the church two weeks before. I make my way to the back of the church to welcome her. She tells me it is hard. I nod in sympathy and tell her that I’m glad she is here. When she finds a seat in an empty pew near the back of the church, I grimace. I was hoping she wouldn’t sit alone.

Then I see Lenora, also a widow. She stands up, leaves her pew and goes to sit by Hazel. Dorothe, another widow, slides over. For the next 15 minutes, I see Hazel laugh and cry and Lenora put her arm around her and give here a gigantic hug.

We’ll be all right. Goliath has size, but David has a good heart.

My biggest worry is that Pastor Goliath will show up to check out my story. I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do.

The Practice of Pilgrimage

Book Review:

American Pilgrimage: Eleven Sacred Journeys and Spiritual Destinations. By Mark Ogilbee and Jana Riess. Paraclete, 176 pp., $16.95 paperback.

Sacred Travels: Recovering the Ancient Practice of Pilgrimage. By Christian George. InterVarsity Press, , 179 pp., $13.00 paperback.

In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands. By Daniel Taylor. Bog Walk Press, 182 pp., $14.95 paperback.

Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino. By Joyce Rupp. Orbis, 256 pp., $15.00 paperback.

School of the Pilgrim: An Alternative Path to Christian Growth. By Brett Webb-Mitchell. Westminster John Knox, 166 pp., $24.95 paperback.

When I first heard about the Camino de Santiago, my response was unequivocally disbelieving: "Why would anyone want to do that?" I was doing research in Europe and fancied that my journey--by air, rented car and first-class train, no less--was a pilgrimage, so I began reading the history of Christian pilgrimage. I kept encountering information about the Camino, a Spanish pilgrim path that was one of the three most prominent pilgrimage destinations in medieval times (competing with Rome and the Holy Land). The Camino is experiencing renewal once more, with tens of thousands annually electing to go hundreds of miles on it, often by foot. I could fathom neither the arduousness of the travel nor the pilgrims’ fascination with St. James, the route’s patron. Yet within five years; I had walked 500 miles of the classic path. I was a caught—off-guard convert to pilgrimage. And I was not the only one.

For a long while, pilgrimage was metaphorical. When it was nearly universally rejected by Protestant Reformers, the concept became inward: think of the allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress. It is true, after all, that we are all on a journey of some sort. But now the original sense of pilgrimage as a concretely physical spiritual practice is being recovered by broad sections of the Christian community and by people beyond the church’s walls as well. This is one area in which Christendom’s traditional dividing lines are breaking down and ecumenical connections are being strengthened.

Some scholars argue that involvement in pilgrimage increases as churchgoing diminishes. Six thousand shrines and sites in Western Europe now draw as many as 100 million pilgrims annually. Colleagues at foundations that fund pastor sabbaticals comment with bemusement on the popularity of Iona and Taizé as project destinations. But in God’s Continent, Philip Jenkins observes that the "continuing popularity of pilgrimages … refutes simple claims that European Christianity is dead," and he suggests that pilgrimage may reinvent and reinvigorate European Christianity.

This interest is part of a wider movement of reclaiming practices that cultivate the habits of heart, mind and body that form faithful Christians, build Christian character and enrich church life. Concretely physical, the ancient practice of pilgrimage pushes beyond the usual crop of spiritual disciplines that are only for the introverted, contemplative or intuitive.

Critics of pilgrimage rightly observe that one need not travel far to seek or find God. Indeed, all of life can be--and ought to be--pilgrimage. Every time we venture to church, we make a small pilgrimage. Each day’s activities and all our encounters can lead us in searching for God and keeping company with God.

It is true that we should go about our weekly worship and daily life in a pilgrim spirit. Nevertheless, there is merit in deliberately engaging in more demanding journeys from time to time, just as there are good reasons to set aside times for prayer, worship, fasting and retreat.

Pilgrimage is faith-motivated travel to experience God in ways that can shape and change us; it focuses explicitly on growth in discipleship. Such journeying sometimes involves extraordinary expense and exertion, and it often means going to particular places associated with important events or persons in faith history.

Pilgrimage and tourism have much in common. They both involve movement or travel. They constitute a break from everyday life and realities. They often involve some kind of expense. Taking either kind of journey is a privilege. So what is the difference between pilgrimage and tourism? A recent crop of books help us ponder the distinction.

In American Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys and Spiritual Destinations, Mark Ogilbee and Jana Riess show that pilgrimage need not be only about the distant and exotic. The U.S. has no shrines comparable to Santiago, Taizé, Iona or Lourdes. Nor does it have sacred, well-worn paths similar to Spain’s Camino de Santiago or Britain’s Pilgrim Ways. But the U.S. does have landscapes and places that inspire devotion, including El Santuario de Chimayó in New Mexico (the "Lourdes of America"), the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago, the Community of Jesus in Cape Cod and the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

Ogilbee and Riess provide vivid details about each location, report on conversations with pilgrims, offer reflections on the history and give hints of lessons that might be learned. Appendices provide practical counsel on getting to the sites. Writing in deceptively simple prose, Ogilbee and Riess evoke awe and curiosity as they explore numerous themes common to pilgrimage literature: prayer, healing, sacred landscapes and communion of saints.

The authors observe that while tourism is often about destinations, a pilgrim values the journey itself and is "more like a participant observer, pausing on the path to take stock of where she has been and where she is going." But the tone of the book is dispassionate at times, and one wonders whether the writers are themselves pilgrims. Also, their criteria for choosing locations are unclear. They include chapters on a popular New Age destination--Sedona, Arizona, and its "vortexes"--and on Disney World and Elvis’s Graceland. American is in the book’s title, and Graceland and Disney World are certainly American pilgrimage destinations; I confess to having journeyed to both. Yet while we can meet omnipresent God anywhere, Graceland and Disney World have more to do with consumerism than with God’s reign. Readers might also question why this volume lumps together Billy Graham and Thich Nhat Hanh as "modern ‘saints’" worthy of pilgrims’ attention. The book informs about worthwhile destinations, but is not particularly challenging or inspiring.

Christian George, who writes from a more explicit faith commitment, did not set out to be a pilgrim. As a young evangelical he journeyed to a score of countries and learned that travel can be spiritually significant. Gradually he felt transformed from tourist to pilgrim. He reflects on a dozen locations, including Canterbury, Luther’s Wittenberg, Assisi, Iona, Nagasaki, Rome and Taizé.

There is much to commend in George’s Sacred Travels. He includes sacred places of interest to Catholics, evangelicals, Anabaptists, Lutherans and Baptists. He also displays a passion for social justice (which he explores in reflections on Birmingham, Alabama) and a deep respect for the wide sweep of Christian history and traditions.

George convincingly recommends pilgrimage, saying that it

benefits the believer in many ways, but above all it gives us perspective on God, faith and how we encounter both. … I have found that the process of pilgrimage is more transformative than simply reaching a destination. Each step of the journey involves deeper communion with God, and by the end of it, we discover that we have encountered him thousands of times along the way.

Ultimately, he says, authentic pilgrimage bears fruit when we return home, "spiritually seasoned and refreshed for service in the kingdom of God."

However, George himself spent only a day at Assisi and two hours at Skellig Michael in Ireland--hardly enough time for serious reflection. The brevity of the visits undercuts his charming insight that pilgrimage is a "marinating process" and opens him to charges of been-there-done-that voyeurism.

Annoyingly jumping from one subject to another, he sometimes short-circuits his masterful descriptions by moving too quickly to devotional conclusions that occasionally feel hackneyed or clichéd. Some of George’s facts are simply wrong: he says that 5,000 people visit Taizé annually; that is the average attendance each summer week. Pilgrimage often involves effort and endurance--that is why it has the potential to change the sojourner--but one wonders whether George ever broke a sweat. He apparently had endless funds to travel conveniently without demand or sacrifice. His travels seem more like tourism--comfortable, objective, detached and observational--than pilgrimage.

A SIMILAR BOOK by a more mature hand is Daniel Taylor’s In Search of Sacred Places. Late in life Taylor went on academic sabbatical to Great Britain. Previously he had neither considered making pilgrimages nor paid much attention to emerging interest in Celtic Christianity, but he decided almost on a whim to go on quick visits, usually in a large rented van, to Iona, St. David’s in Wales, Glendalough in Ireland and Lindisfarne in England. Though pilgrimage was a part of neither the Baptist fundamentalism of his early years nor the evangelicalism of his adulthood, Taylor sensed a spiritual challenge as he encountered these sites.

Taylor is the best writer in this bunch; one wonders why his book was not snapped up by a major publisher. I’ve been to most of the locations he discusses and was astonished by his compelling portraits, which enabled me to see the sites clearly again and filled me with longing to return. Taylor weaves reflections together with pertinent historical observations and compelling quotes of Christians who have gone before. His wry humor is winsome and self-deprecating. "I am not a good pilgrim," he writes, and then he sets out to prove why: he cannot sit still, he does not want to change, he is not purposeful in his journeys. Still he gently draws out the challenges he encounters--about simplicity, hospitality, contentment and self-assessment--without ever sounding preachy or self-righteous. Taylor may not be a good pilgrim, but he invites the reader to deeper faithfulness and to a vision of God’s blazing presence and lively activity here on earth.

Like George’s, some of Taylor’s visits are short, one merely 30 minutes. Occasionally a dilettante, Taylor casually mentions how he and companions hastily "check off two holy spots along the way" to Dublin. He displays ambivalence about both the kitschy faddishness of some destinations and his own resistance to conversion. He wants to be a tourist, a "detached observer," but is affected nevertheless: "I am working my way toward seeing all of life as simply different manifestations of worship." In this book he exemplifies what he most admires about the saints he studies--they were "on the lookout for significance, for signs and rumors of transcendence." Pilgrimage is about encountering God, and Taylor certainly does--and we do too through this work.

Joyce Rupp, an American nun, is a popular spiritual and devotional writer. At age 60, Rupp decided to walk 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago with an older friend, a retired priest (though they often ended up taking a bus). Walk in a Relaxed Manner includes her reflections on the journey and numerous resources and practical tips for sojourning on the Camino.

Having walked this classic pilgrimage route myself, I was tempted to take issue with some of Rupp’s claims and to quibble about details. She’s wrong on some basic facts, such as names for various routes and details related to the traditional symbol of the scallop shell. The writing sometimes is wordy. Parts of the book have a New Age edge; Rupp writes of "pilgrim energy," is a little too affirming of Shirley MacLaine’s bizarre Camino book and comments on "entering into union with our Divine Pilgrim." What is most odd is that Rupp offers almost no explicit reflection on Jesus, St. James or the saint’s cathedral at the end of the path. Was this pilgrimage only about onerous travel and lessons learned? If so, she could have walked the Appalachian Trail. This was certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but was it Christian pilgrimage?

Rupp insists that in the spiritual life every journey changes us. As she hints in the title, a primary lesson for her involved examining how she deals with rush and hurry and learning how to let go of the need for control. Often, Rupp notes, we do not see the converting power of the sustained and sacrificial undertaking of pilgrimage until well afterward: "Only then do we recognize how a new attitude, a stronger dedication, and a fuller passion stretched us into the fullness of life."

No one is doing more to get the church to take pilgrimage seriously than Brett Webb-Mitchell. School of the Pilgrim is his second book on the subject. A Presbyterian pastor, he is founding director of a Christian formation organization also called School of the Pilgrim. Webb-Mitchell believes that pilgrimage is the richest paradigm for describing Christian growth: "The length and breadth of the Christian life is a pilgrimage and … it is through the actual practice of pilgrimage that we may best understand the experience of growth and change." He does not confine the meaning of pilgrimage to an internal process, and he writes frequently about sojourns that he’s taken or led for others.

Webb-Mitchell has an agenda. In grad school, he grew suspicious of human development theories that charted growth in distinguishable steps or stages. He also concluded that too much Christian education is programmed: "There are no guarantees that learning happens in intentional moments in preplanned places, like Sunday schools or adult Bible studies. Rather, God educates the Christian in spontaneous, nonsystematic, serendipitous moments." So he began going on pilgrimages.

This author blends accounts of his journeys (to Chimayó, Lindisfarne, St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland and El Cristo Negro in Guatemala) with biblical, historical and theological reflections. The result is a careful, systematic exploration of pilgrimage and its possibilities. He sees pilgrimage not as a single practice but as a collection of practices: community, hospitality, communion, friendship, worship, prayer and encountering strangers. Though a number of location descriptions overlap substantially with Webb-Mitchell’s previously published material--and it is unsettling that a major source he repeatedly cites to explain and define pilgrimage is a popular lightweight inspirational book--his is a voice that needs to be heard. Webb-Mitchell stresses the importance of place in Christian faith, shows that the honoring of place has ecological implications, and points the way to disciplines that integrate mind, body and spirit.

On the research trip to Europe during which I first heard about the Camino, I visited many cathedrals, monastic ruins, stone crosses and church cemeteries. I was on a meaning-seeking journey that was certainly character forming, but I was only fumbling toward pilgrimage. The authors here are not on the sort of idiosyncratic quest that my journey proved to be. Rather, they invite us into deeper and richer pursuits, the promise and potential of pilgrimage.

The Office Of Prayer

Book Reviews:

For Those We Love But See No Longer: Daily Offices for Times of Grief

By Lisa Beicher Hamilton. Paraclete, 188 pp. paperback.

Venite: A Book of Daily Prayer

By Robert Benson. Tarcher/Putnam, 271 pp.,

Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer

By J. Philip Newell. Eerdmans, pp.

The Prymer: The Prayer Book of the Medieval Era Adapted for Contemporary Use

Translated and adapted by Robert E. Webber Paraclete, 172 pp., also in paperback.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime

By Phyllis Tickle. Doubleday, 647 pp.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime

By Phyllis Tickle. Doubleday, 651 pp.

The current interest in spirituality is breaking down traditional dividing lines between Christians. People from various Protestant traditions have been turning to the wisdom found in the pre-Reformation church (East and West), in Franciscan spirituality, in Celtic Christianity and in the writings of various mystics.

Monasticism is also getting increased attention. I’ve even heard that some Baptists have started a Benedictine-style monastery. Consider the best-selling status of Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk and the avalanche of popular literature on Benedictines by Elizabeth Canham, Joan Chittister, Esther de Waal, John McQuiston, Basil Pennington, David Steindl-Rast, Benet Tvedten and Norvene Vest. While monastic vocations decline, the number of monastic lay affiliates, or oblates, grows.

In After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s Robert Wuthnow describes the emergence of a "practice-oriented spirituality," rooted in disciplines, institutions and ethical commitments. In a recent interview, Phyllis Tickle spoke of the highly unusual surge of prayerbooks." She says one publisher described this trend as "rapidly hastening toward the third century." Tickle added: "That’s exactly where the market’s going, taking us back to original Christianity, before the Reformation, back before East and West even began to act as if they were separate."

Given this interest in spiritual practices and things monastic, it is not surprising that more and more people are practicing the daily office (also called "divine office," "office," "liturgy of the hours" or "common prayer"). The office is a pattern of nonsacramental prayer services that are celebrated at regular times of the day or night, primarily lands in the morning and vespers at night. Its history goes back to the earliest centuries of the church. Various offices are found in Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican traditions, with some Protestant variations.

Recent fiction reflects this interest. Gail Godwin’s Evensong presents an Anglican priest’s life and her daily office practice. A popular writer of hard-boiled mysteries, Loren D. Estleman, centers The Hours of the Virgin around a medieval breviary. Mark Salzman’s acclaimed novel about a cloistered Carmelite monastery, Lying Awake, reflects on the office.

Other recent books reinforce the importance and opportunity of the office. John Reeves’s poems about Christ’s life take the form of A Book of Hours. C. W. McPherson’s Grace at This Time: Praying the Daily Office is a theological commentary and practical guide. Suzanne Guthrie’s reflective Praying the Hours ponders the hallowing of time. Chant Made Simple, by Robert M. Fowells, is a beginner’s guide to Gregorian chant. In Shaping of a Life, Phyllis Tickle reflects on how she has been formed and informed by the office.

The Book of Common Prayer has received new attention. In celebration of its 450th anniversary, C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl edited an attractive volume, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer, which includes historical notes and devotional reflections. Eerdmans has published a daily devotional based on the BCP, Daily Book of Common Prayer: Readings and Prayers Through the Year.

Historical interest in missals and psalters is indicated in two recent books by Janet Backhouse, The Sherbourne Missal and Medieval Rural Life in the Luttrell Psalter. Both contain interesting and accessible essays, but are especially delightful for their illuminated manuscript excerpts. Many reproductions are beautifully done in color and all reflect charmingly on the spirituality and nature of their society and culture.

Most impressive, however, are several new offices. Lisa Belcher Hamilton, an Episcopal priest and young widow, offers a great pastoral service with For Those We Love But See No Longer: Daily Offices for Times of Grief. She organizes BCP prayers into a one-week cycle of four daily prayer services. Each service includes short scripture readings, petitions regarding mourning, suggestions for reflection, and room for journaling. Its portable size makes it easy to carry and use anywhere. Hamilton notes that regular prayer can give people a needed structure in the chaos of mourning. It also connects us to the communion of the saints, living and dead.

Furthermore, praying the office with others is important at a time when we are prone to feeling isolated. She notes that Cranmer began work on the BCP after the loss of his wife and child in childbirth. Hamilton stays close to the text of the BCP While I appreciate her respect for tradition, I wonder whether she -- and indeed all the office compilers here reviewed -- could have been more attentive to inclusive language.

Venite: A Book of Daily Prayer is a lovely contribution by Robert Benson. Though raised as an evangelical, Robert Benson was gradually drawn into the power of the office. He discovered that most prayer-books were difficult to use, and so wrote a one-volume daily prayerbook for his own use and was gradually persuaded to share it with others. His book is designed for up to four daily offices (morning, noon, evening and night). The helpful introduction explains how to use the book and how to develop an office discipline. (Benson recommends beginning with only a part of one or two services and building up gradually.) Everything necessary for daily observance is here: church season prayers, saints’ days, canticles, selected psalms, and a 30-day cycle of New Testament readings. The book also includes mealtime prayers, a communion service, a solitary commemoration service and occasional prayers.

I appreciate Benson’s reminder that these prayers are not meant to be said alone and indeed are very difficult to say alone: "One of the keys to the discipline of the prayer of the office is the realization that . . . we are joining our voices with a great multitude unknown to us who are marking the same office at the same time each day." As one does need to jump around in the book -- from office to season collects, canticles, Psalter and New Testament readings -- ribbons to mark one’s place would have been helpful. And limiting oneself to abridged psalms and short New Testament texts is too skimpy; better to follow a lectionary, I think. Benson’s rewriting of various psalms also raised questions for me, and I would prefer a little more variety in the daily services.

J. Phillip Newell is a Scottish writer, formerly affiliated with the Iona Community. His Celtic Benediction is the most appealing but least substantial of the offices under review. Newell presents a seven-day cycle of morning and evening prayers written in the "Celtic tradition," which emphasizes the goodness of creation. Though the image of God in us is distorted by sin, it has not been erased by sin. "Redemption in this tradition is about being reconnected to the presence of this glory deep within us and among us in creation." Thus this office is shaped by the seven days of creation. It is beautifully illustrated with colorful Celtic knotwork from the Lindisfarne Gospels. Each office includes short Bible verses for silent pondering, lovely opening prayers (connected to nature themes), thanksgiving prayers and a closing prayer. The book’s weakness is that it is not clearly enough connected to office traditions.

Robert Webber created two previous office books, The Book of Daily Prayer and The Book of Family Prayer. He has now translated a 15th-century prayerbook or Prymer from Latin into contemporary English. Prymers were a popular form of individual devotion for medieval layfolk. Webber’s book is a compilation of the "Hours of the Blessed Virgin," which reflect on Jesus’ last hours through his mother’s eyes. As well as daily offices, Webber includes "Prayers and Readings for a Time of Grief." Such an office of the dead or "dirge" was timely in the Middle Ages when so many people died young. Webber includes helpful comments on the meaning of ancient Latin terms and is a gold mine of introductory information on the office. He argues that the Prymer is a particularly appropriate form for this postmodern time when "we are undergoing a . . . shift from the emphasis on objective truth to a desire for a more subjective experience of truth."

The book lays out all the material for praying the services and includes 63 psalms. Webber wants us to "ruminate" on scripture by praying the texts slowly and digesting them thoroughly. He leaves wide margins for notes. One can either pray through this material as a one-day retreat or as a weekly or even a monthly cycle. The book is biblically and liturgically substantial and worthwhile. As ecumenical as I fancy myself, however, I am still ambivalent about all the prayers to Mary.

After praying the office for 30 years, Phyllis Tickle decided to help others do so. Last winter her first volume quickly became an Amazon.com best-selling book on prayer; within months the first 10,000 sold out. Tickle’s Divine Hours series (two of the three have been published) are the most impressive of all the recent volumes. They provide psalms, prayers and readings for four services every day. Tickle incorporates prayers and readings from a host of good sources. She also includes excellent hymn suggestions for vespers. Everything is beautifully laid out on good quality paper. Versions in paperback, CD and electronic format are in the works. The latter will be a publishing first. The books are easy to use. Everything needed for each service is in one place. They include an introduction to the history of the office, helpful instructions on how to pray the office, and even guidance on how to chant the psalms. I quickly began using these manuals as additional resources for some of my prayers.

But I would have liked more help with the intercessions and also more readings from the Old Testament. Also, the size and weight of these volumes makes them difficult to carry around. More seriously, such efforts written for individuals, with no specific communities in mind, reinforce a sensibility of individual edification rather than common prayer. On the other hand, these prayers and services are brief enough for almost anyone to work into their lives.

It is unfortunate that the third volume, Prayers for Springtime, will not be available until fall. That means people who have used the manuals from June 2000 until January 2001 are without a prayer book for Lent, Easter and springtime. Tickle told me that various "non-liturgically reared" church folk have told her that these books are "the missing piece" in their lives. She says that among the gifts of the office one looms especially large: "If you do it, it forces you to drop out for a few minutes. People who haven’t done it would be amazed at how much perspective you suddenly get from thinking, ‘I just stopped to talk to God, and what a pile of foolishness the rest of this looks like.’ If you do it with any thought at all, the world you come back to four minutes later is vastly different from the hysteria you left."

The current interest in the office is a healthy development at a time when all manner of phenomena go under the guise of spiritual renewal. Disciplined use of the office helps us pray regularly and -- by hallowing our time -- even unceasingly. Furthermore, it helps us to pray objectively. Rather than focusing on our personal priorities we are formed by praise, confession and listening to God’s word, and enabled to pray whether we feel like it or not. The office’s daily nature, its joys and challenges (even its monotony) help us to pay attention to God in all of life’s joys and challenges. The office is also ecumenical. It is the only Roman Catholic liturgy in which all Christians may fully participate. As places like Taizé demonstrate, common prayer can bring people together in ways that no other ecumenical ventures have achieved.

Even so, the rash of new offices raises some concerns. I certainly hope we do not start seeing "specialty offices" like all those "specialty Bibles" (for men, women, teens, codependents, whomever). The danger is that we will become subjective and individualistic in our prayer, when one of the most important advantages of the office is that we pray it in common with others, whether or not we are in their physical presence at the time.

A College Recovers Its Christian Identity

For much of this century, the waning influence of religion in American colleges and universities was viewed as a natural concomitant of modernization, and it was generally seen as a necessary or even a good thing. In recent years, Christian scholars such as George Marsden and James Burtchaell have offered a new interpretation of that history, arguing that the marginalization of religion in higher education has been lamentable and assigning the blame to institutional leaders, not to the inexorable forces of modernization.

Of course, not all Christian colleges have been secularized. Notre Dame, Baylor, Valparaiso, St. Olaf, Wheaton and Calvin are among the schools that have maintained a robust relation to their sponsoring religious heritages.

More typical, however, are the church-related colleges and universities that have experienced significant secularization and that have maintained only a thin connection with their religious heritage. Some of these schools maintain this connection simply as a social ornament -- a gentle hypocrisy. Others have made new efforts to reengage their heritage. Roanoke College in Virginia is one such school.

Roanoke is a liberal arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It is the second oldest Lutheran college in the U.S. Its clergyman founder, David Bittle, was from the beginning committed to a broad, nonconfessional approach to higher education. He regarded Lutheran ethnic or religious isolation as something to be avoided. Many sorts of Christians and non-Christians were invited into the enterprise, though it was clear that Lutherans were responsible for directing it.

Through most of its years the college was recognizably Christian -- its intellectual, moral and social life guided by Christian principles. Immersed deeply in enlightened evangelicalism, it was never troubled by serious conflicts over evolution or biblical interpretation. Its Christian humanism was borne by the informal consensus of southern Lutheran gentlemen, led by impressive and learned clergy presidents. Its Christian character was reinforced by the religious culture of southwestern Virginia, whence many of its students came. Relations with supporting Lutheran bodies were unsteady, however, since the synods were unable or unwilling to provide the financial support the college needed.

In the late 1950s and ‘60s, the college was led by lay presidents who did not tend to the earlier Christian consensus, partly because that consensus was more tacit than articulated. During the expansion of the school in the 1960s and the cultural upheavals of that era, administrators, professors and board members were recruited without regard to their religious convictions.

A familiar story unfolded. The statement of purpose no longer claimed that the college was Christian or that intellectual and moral development there took place in a "Christian atmosphere." Rather, it vaguely stated that the college "honors its Christian heritage and founding by Lutherans." The two required religion courses were made electives. Chapel attendance was no longer required. Christian moral standards were no longer publicly claimed as guides for conduct; the honor system was abandoned. In the ‘70s Roanoke was listed in Playboy’s catalog of top party schools.

New faculty were influenced heavily by the Enlightenment bias that religion has no reliable intellectual content. The increasingly large secularist wing of the faculty mounted at least one attempt to disengage the college from the church. Religious practice was marginalized and religious organizations declined. The chaplain focused on crisis intervention among the many students caught up in alcohol and drug abuse. Any sense of common life nearly vanished, and the faculty adopted a kind of social libertarianism -- it kept the common educational core as minimal as possible. And the church became increasingly suspicious of the college.

By the early ‘80s, the religious factor seemed to be ignored in all facets of the college’s life. The number of Lutherans in the administration and on the faculty was so low that the few who were left appealed to the president for some Lutheran affirmative action. Religion was no longer considered publicly relevant. As a powerful member of the board put it in the midst of a debate about whether the president should be required to be Lutheran, "It is a matter of indifference to the board what the president does on his weekends."

As the college stood poised on the brink of total disengagement from the church, the president, a midwestern Lutheran used to more robust connections, and the dean, a Presbyterian, quietly but deliberately began to take steps to reverse the process. They raised Lutheran money for an endowed chair in religion and for a center for church and society. I was recruited for that chair, then the only endowed professorship at the college, and to be director of the center. I was asked to find ways to strengthen the Christian character of the college. Several new board members of strong Lutheran conviction were appointed. A young and vigorous new bishop of the Virginia Synod came onto the executive committee of the board. The college provided space for the Virginia Synod headquarters, and the bishop and his staff became a familiar presence on campus. A director of church relations was hired who opened the college to many church functions-youth events, synod assembly, continuing education events and synod council meetings. So successful has she been in recruiting Lutheran donors for the specifically religious activities of the college that the chaplaincy and its staff recently became completely endowed.

Through a combination of providence and design, a significant number of Christian faculty who are willing to be public about their convictions and to integrate their faith with their teaching have been gathered. A second endowed professorship -- this time in English -- was filled by a Christian intellectual committed to church-related education.

Near the beginning of this process, a majority of the faculty would not have supported the college’s reengagement with its Christian heritage. If the issue had been brought to a public vote, the Christian partisans would certainly have been trounced.

Crucially important to winning support for these reforms has been a grass-roots group on "faith and learning" which meets regularly to reflect on the college’s religious character and to support efforts to strengthen it. The president and most of his cabinet participate regularly. Now with nearly 40 members, the "faith and learning" organization has given the administration stimulation and support. It has broadened faculty support by making a persuasive case for the viability of the Christian intellectual tradition.

The college has joined both the Lilly Network of Church-related Colleges and Universities and the Rhodes Consultation, and participates vigorously in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s summer conferences on the calling of the Lutheran college and in its Lutheran Academy for younger scholars.

Roanoke’s current president came from a midwestern Lutheran college with a robust connection to its Lutheran heritage. He is a theologically reflective Lutheran layman who has through the years strengthened his support for our Christian heritage. His public rhetoric has become more boldly Christian. His cabinet of six includes four Lutherans. He has been committed to raising endowments for the particularly religious elements of the college’s identity and mission. Working with development personnel and faculty, he is raising endowments for chairs in Lutheran studies, evangelical studies and Christian ethics, as well as for the Center for Religion and Society (the name was changed so as to include the Jewish studies program for which the college received a major ongoing grant).

A high-quality religion department is essential to a church-related college. In the present buyer’s market in religion and philosophy, we have been able to recruit some of the best graduates from top graduate schools. Their exemplary record in both teaching and scholarship is one of the school’s most potent signals that we are serious about religion. Most of them speak not only about but for the Christian tradition. The number of religion majors has increased from one in 1983 to 40 in 2000. We are again supplying a steady stream of students (four to six per year) to a wide range of seminaries.

Guided by a Lutheran chaplain who is bold in his proclamation of the Word, religious life on campus has grown. The meetings of many study groups, Inter-Varsity, Lutheran Student Movement, Baptist Student Union and a Catholic Campus Ministry fill the college calendar. Weekly morning chapel has returned as an option, while several other worship services are held in the evenings. The last decade has also brought the development of one of the marks of Lutheran college education -- a vigorous choral music program. The college has also adopted a required co-curricular program that emphasizes service to the community. These service opportunities are organized by the chaplain’s office.

Despite determined efforts to recruit Lutheran students, the Lutheran composition of the student body remains low -- about 8 or 9 percent -- mainly because our region is sparsely populated with Lutherans (but Lutheran students seem to make an impact beyond their numbers). Evangelical students drawn from the region provide the strongest religious presence in the student body. Our effort to endow a professorship in evangelical studies is intended both to nourish and recruit more of these students, as well as to study a major American religious movement.

The presence of the Center for Religion and Society means that major campus public lectures and conferences include the religious perspective among others. The center provides our weekly convocation with a number of Christian speakers each term. It encourages interdisciplinary conversations and courses; and last year a symposium on religion and psychology was held by the two departments. The center is now embarking on a series of hour-long programs on religion and society issues for our local public television station. And, after a 20-year absence from the curriculum, the college has again instituted a required religion and philosophy course, called "Values and the Responsible Life."

The introduction of this course in the early ‘90s prompted the first public showdown between those supporting reengagement and those resisting it. The faculty narrowly voted to allow a "values course" to be developed by the religion and philosophy department. When faculty realized that this course would include the Judeo-Christian tradition as a source of religious and moral values along with other perspectives, many grew suspicious. The course was monitored more closely than any other in the core curriculum. When evaluation of the core curriculum took place in the mid-’90s, a number of faculty protested anonymously that the course was "Sunday school proselytizing" with weak intellectual content.

In response, the college held a summer workshop to prepare faculty outside the religion and philosophy department to teach the class. The word spread that indeed there was intellectual challenge in the course and that the department wasn’t coercing the students to faith, if indeed that were possible. Since that workshop there has been little further carping, and the college touts the importance of the course far and wide.

The momentum toward reconnection led last year to important revisions in the college’s statement of purpose. One of those revisions brought about a second showdown. The new statement not only puts a greater emphasis on spiritual growth and participation in religious and service activities, but spells out what it means to "honor our Christian heritage." The new version states that the college "honors its Christian heritage and its partnership with the Lutheran church by nurturing a dialogue between faith and reason."

Anticipating a lively debate on the new wording, the "faith and learning" group arranged for articulate spokespersons from the group to defend the amendment against possible objections. Curiously, the skeptics did not argue against it. The ensuing vote resulted in a tie, which the faculty moderator, a devout Catholic, broke by voting for the proposal. When a later attempt was made to reconsider the change, the faculty defeated it by a comfortable margin.

The "faith and learning" group is now organizing a series of programs about what a dialogue between faith and reason entails. The group’s most recent venture featured a lecture by a distinguished historian of Christian thought on the Christian intellectual tradition. The group’s hope is that more faculty will accept the notion that Christian higher education means an intellectual encounter between the Christian account of life and reality and other perspectives implicit in other fields of learning.

Roanoke College is still a long way from being a robust Christian college. Perhaps a third of the faculty -- including many Christians -- remains indifferent to the changes that have been made. A smaller group is disturbed by and suspicious of recent developments. Half the department heads still believe that religious considerations ought to be irrelevant in faculty recruitment and hire accordingly. Too many of our students do not participate in religious life. Chapel attendance is low. The college is still bashful about articulating explicitly Christian standards of moral conduct. As on most campuses, parties continue to be one of the main attractions of student life, and only a fraction of the students are awake on Sunday mornings. Piety is not exactly the campus rage.

Even so, the past 15 years have seen a significant reengagement of the college with its Lutheran and Christian heritage. If Roanoke’s story can be duplicated -- as I believe it can -- colleges that have come close to losing their connection can reverse that process and make important headway in the opposite direction. A determined but patient group of leaders who believe that the Christian account of the world is publicly relevant to all facets of the college’s life and mission can move such a college toward a new relation to its religious heritage. And that new relation may be more intentional, meaningful and fruitful than its earlier one.

Designing the City

In the spring of 1976, I took my New Hampshire youth group to Philadelphia for the bicentennial celebrations. Not wanting to break the bank on hotels, we slept in a church hall in a suburb north of the city. There, for the first time in my life, I encountered row after row, block after block, street after street of identical beige cinderblock houses. Even the church we stayed in was beige cinderblock. I was appalled and remember telling myself, "If anyone suffers from an identity crisis, it must be these people." I could easily imagine one of them walking into someone else’s home and thinking it was his or her own.

Today this phenomenon is described as urban sprawl and demonstrates that urban society includes both the central city and the surrounding suburbs. The Bureau of Census uses the term Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area to refer to a central city of 50,000 or more and its contiguous counties or towns. Thus, when the word urban is used it describes not only the central city but also an entire metropolitan area. Cities and suburbs are symbiotic; they rise and fall together.

Urban sprawl is a familiar concern in cities across the country, and it was an early item in Al Gore’s presidential campaign. While the suburbs have long been the target of social satire for their nondescript strip malls and cookie-cutter housing, only recently have city planners begun to look seriously at alternatives. A new breed of architects, planners and developers -- known collectively as the New Urbanists -- are questioning old orthodoxies. To understand why, we first need to understand the conditions that created sprawl.

After World War II, the mortgage policies of the Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans Administration focused almost entirely on the creation of 11 million new single-family homes. Most of these homes were built in suburbs, in part because the FHA did not make capital available to renovate existing structures or to construct row houses, mixed-use buildings or other types of urban housing. Furthermore, this was the era of the automobile. Under the interstate highway program of the 1950s, 41,000 miles of new roads were created. Government subsidies were available for road improvement, while public transit was neglected. General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone conspired to buy up many local urban transit systems, then shut them down to eliminate competition. The new highway system gave unprecedented mobility to the middle class, enabling workers to live in subdivisions on the edge of town and commute to jobs downtown.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, new construction became highly segmented. Following the design model of those years, shopping centers were put in one location, housing pods in another, and office parks in yet another. A matrix of collector roads connected these developments. Ironically, adjacency didn’t necessarily mean accessibility. For instance, a homeowner living 50 yards from a shopping center might still have to get into a car, drive a mile to exit the subdivision, drive another half a mile on the collector road to the shopping center, park and walk to the store. What might have been a pleasant five-minute walk down a tree-lined street became a trek that used gasoline, required a roadway and took up space for parking.

Current critics of this kind of sprawl blame the engineers and the bureaucrats who codified everything -- curb size, street widths and setbacks -- and who zealously developed zoning laws that enforced segmented development. While it makes sense to separate heavy industry from housing, it doesn’t make sense to outlaw mother-in-law apartments and corner stores in residential areas. Yet lending requirements and mortgage tax credits limited the flow of dollars to one type of housing "product."

Thus, people used housing subdivisions strictly for residential purposes, shopping centers only for commercial uses, and office parks only for work. Instead of placing civic institutions where they would serve as magnets of social and communal activity, planners would put them on the margins. (Consider the vast regional high schools built on the edges of town, the office complexes located away from downtown, and the churches built next to freeway exits.)

The result was, and is, an inefficient use of land, segmented development that depended on an unsustainable infrastructure, and traffic congestion on the roadways needed to connect these "pods" of activity. Sprawl further exacerbated social isolation by excluding those who don’t or can’t drive, and created economic segregation by building housing developments according to exclusive income levels.

Taking pot shots at the burbs is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. They are widely assumed to be, as in the movie American Beauty, dysfunctional, congested and socially isolating places. Urban activists blame the decay of our inner cities on "white flight," which leaves once vital neighborhoods abandoned and siphons off tax dollars needed to solve the problems suburbanites leave behind. Environmentalists are equally critical of sprawl for gobbling up the landscape and endangering wildlife.

Just about everyone is a loser to sprawl. Children lose the opportunity to walk to the corner store, converse with the shopkeeper, make a purchase and count their change. Parents become part-time taxi drivers, and children can have difficulty developing independence. Teenagers lose opportunities to mature by interacting with diverse people and engaging new situations. Instead, they spend more time at the mall or in the car. (Traffic accidents continue to be the leading cause of death among teenagers.)

Another hidden cost of sprawl is that municipalities are often forced to underfund schools because money is diverted to maintain the infrastructure of roadways, extensive sewage and storm-drain systems, and substations. Commuters lose about 500 hours a year sitting in traffic on their way to work, school, home or the store. The poor lose too if they are car-less or there is inadequate public transportation to jobs at the perimeter of cities.

An awakened consciousness of the devastating affect the automobile has on the environment, the sheer ugliness of much of suburbia, the inefficiency of suburbs, and a growing discontent with civil coarseness and social isolation -- these have combined to create a set of principles called the "New Urbanism." The New Urbanists are not so much interested in slamming the suburbs and the suburbanites as they are in building better places to live. The enemy is not the bourgeois middle class that wishes to live outside the urban core, but a generation of shortsighted designers who discarded centuries of precedence on how to build livable, pedestrian-friendly and vibrant communities that exist in healthy relationship to the outlying countryside.

"The history of professional planning is a litany of failure, says Andres Duany, one of the godfathers of the movement. "Since the 1950s, the planning profession has contrived to destroy our cities and consume our countryside."

New Urbanists favor building neighborhoods (not housing developments) that contain mixed construction (residential and commercial), mixed-income housing, town centers and shared green spaces. Their principles are guided by six general rules. First, each neighborhood must have a center, a locus of activity and community identity -- a gathering place where residents can rub shoulders on their daily round of activities, be it a common, a school building or a square with a drug store, market and hardware store.

A sensibly laid-out town or city would, in fact, have all of the necessities and pleasures of daily existence within a five-minute walk from one’s home. You might have to use a bus or subway to go to the symphony, but you should not need to use a car to get a quart of milk, or to become a chauffeur for your children. In such a neighborhood, an automobile would be a convenience, but not a necessity. The elderly could stay in their lifelong neighborhoods by finding an apartment or smaller house once they’ve outgrown their single-family home. They could still have access to grocery and drug stores even when driving is no longer possible.

New Urbanists want streets to be places to walk, chat with neighbors, ride bikes and drive cars. Streets should be narrow and versatile, serving to slow down cars, not speed them up. The traditional grid pattern of most urban neighborhoods is the best way to achieve these goals. A network of straight streets at right angles gives drivers choices if the road they are on is clogged, as there are multiple paths between destinations. This is in stark contrast to the serpentine roads and cul de sacs of the typical suburban housing development, where drivers have only one route out of the development to a collector road. This same road also serves many other developments before funneling all traffic onto a main artery or highway. This kind of design limits the number of routes available and creates traffic congestion even though there is more road surface.

New Urbanists want buildings to be organized according to type and scale, not use. Thus, a coffee shop with apartments above it, a corner drug store, hardware store and grocery store can all be part of a neighborhood. Affordable, middle-income and high-income housing should be built in the same neighborhood and share a common vocabulary of building forms and materials.

New Urbanists also want special sites for special buildings. They argue that churches, libraries, town halls and schools should be the visual and actual center of public life. By having a prominent place in the neighborhood -- at a terminating vista, or at the end of a block -- these buildings signal that communal space takes priority over commercial or residential places.

The New Urbanists are not without their critics. The libertarian Cato Institute has accused them of social engineering and of overregulating private property and new development. The first high-profile New Urbanist project (and also the setting for the movie The Truman Show) was Seaside, Florida, an 80-acre parcel designed by a Florida developer who wanted to re-create the fond memories of boyhood summers spent in quaint wooden cottages by the shore. When it opened, Seaside drew fire from liberals who viewed it as precious and contrived -- another version of suburbia for the rich. They contended that the restrictions on design limited variety and encouraged the blandness they were trying to get away from. Wasn’t this just a reworking of a Norman Rockwell fantasy of small-town America and an uncritical return to turn-of-the-century architectural forms?

If new Urbanism is such a good idea, ask other critics, why are so many older neighborhoods that follow its design principles in decline? And is there really a market for these kinds of mixed-use neighborhoods? Isn’t the growth of segmented suburbia proof that people like suburbia?

Peter Calthorpe, a pioneer in the development of transit-oriented and "village" planning, agrees that earlier forms of the New Urbanism were largely new versions of sprawl rather than alternatives to it. They were often developed on suburban greenfields at relatively low densities and ended up being quite expensive, thus offering nothing more than another escape for the well-to-do.

But the New Urbanist movement has matured and distinguished itself, says Calthorpe, in accenting economic diversity and regionalism. Economic diversity calls for a continuum of housing styles and prices: affordable and pricey, small and spacious, rented and owned, studios and family housing. This means mixing all income groups and races by distributing affordable housing throughout all communities in a given region. In effect, wealthy suburbs would include affordable housing, and urban neighborhoods would house middle-class families. This tenet implies no more warehousing of the poor in the inner city and no more public housing projects in low-income neighborhoods. It calls instead for inclusionary zoning in the suburbs and scattered-site development of affordable housing throughout a region.

The notion of regional design has been out of fashion since Daniel Burnham’s Chicago plan of the 1930s, but it is beginning to make a comeback in light of 21st-century exigencies of smog, sprawl and suburban ennui. The "Charter of the New Urbanism" describes the metropolitan region as "multiple centers that are cities, towns and villages, each with its own identifiable center and edges." A metropolis is a finite area with geographic boundaries defined by topography, watersheds, coastlines, farmlands, regional parks and river basins, otherwise seen as a connected corridor of human and natural habitation. Calthorpe argues that without attention to regional shaping tools such as urban growth boundaries, transit systems and designated urban centers, even well-designed development can flop. Without the constraints of housing diversity within neighborhoods and a regional design that navigates new investments, "the question of where new development should happen and who can afford it remains unanswered."

The notion that there is an ideal scale and shape of human community conducive to human flourishing invites theological reflection. It is linked to the biblical vision that the human community should be a likeness, however dim, of the City of God. At the root of Hebrew and Christian definitions of community is the idea of covenant. In this covenant, human beings bind themselves to God and one another, promising to make and keep obligations for the greater good of the community, not just for themselves. For this community to succeed requires self-restraint and the ability to say no to oneself for the sake of the common good. It also requires a reference point beyond the self -- God, a higher good, an ideal -- something that motivates self-denial and makes it worthwhile.

At the same time individual liberty cannot be so subordinated that all uniqueness is diminished. The success of communities requires balancing the human need for communal belonging and the need for individual freedom. It also requires a realistic assessment of human nature. The Christian vision reminds us that we should not become too sanguine about efforts to create the good society, nor should we be so skeptical as to never make the attempt.

That being said, one wonders at times if the New Urbanists romanticize "the old neighborhood." For every Pleasantville there is also a Hell’s Kitchen and a Watts, places that do more to segregate and isolate immigrants and the underclass than they do to create community. Neighborhoods have also been places to draw sharp lines of turf to be protected.

One such example was reported in the pages of this journal a year ago. In Portland, Oregon, Sunnyside United Methodist Church, a poster child of the New Urbanist movement, held a Wednesday night dinner for the community, which included the homeless population. The purpose was to try to ease class tensions by bringing people of different income groups together for a meal. On Friday evenings the church hosted a coffeehouse for the homeless and recovering alcoholics. Programs included evangelism, anger management, Bible study and live music. Coffeehouse directors barred those who were visibly drunk or causing a public disturbance.

Apparently many residents in Sunnyside resented the presence of this population and the mess they left behind. They filed a complaint with the city, and an official stepped in, shut down the church’s meal program and limited any public gathering, including worship services, to a maximum of 90 persons.

"A number of the concerns were very legitimate " said Tim Lewis, then pastor of Sunnyside. "Complaints about loitering and public disturbances had to be addressed." This was done during a large hearing before the city council, which eventually declared the city official’s actions unconstitutional.

"Many of these young professionals are genuinely committed to re-urbanization until they encounter drugs and homelessness," said Lewis. "Urban reality challenges romantic notions about moving back into the city. As a culture they are very tolerant, but there was also an anti-Christian bias that would show itself at these meetings." At the end of the day, Lewis said, he was impressed by the outcome and the agreements reached between the church, the city and residents.

The vision of building mixed-income and mixed-race neighborhoods is appealing and profoundly biblical, but extremely difficult to pull off without a simultaneous educational or "consciousness-raising" project. Perhaps this project could become a place of cooperation between local churches and developers.

The New Urbanism suggests that if builders and planners proceed according to proper principles, sprawl and its attendant deformations of life would be severely diminished. On this point, the New Urbanists are perhaps a bit naïve about human nature. New Urbanism can also easily devolve into another niche for yuppies rather than becoming a new paradigm for fostering a civil society. The corrosive nature of human sin and unintended consequences always haunts such human projects.

Does good design create good people? Philip Bess, professor of architecture at Andrews University in Michigan and seminal thinker on these matters, says no and yes. Good design can foster and be an expression of community, but it cannot cause it. In the same way, good design cannot cause human happiness -- but it can provide opportunities for it to flourish. A well-designed town or building creates a place for a community to recognize itself or to find itself. This process requires both time and care. In short, cities are made great because they are loved. If there is nothing particularly lovable about them -- if they are ugly, poorly designed and socially isolating -- then they will not foster community.

Early church leaders lifted up standards regarding the distribution of property and wealth that still have bearing on our subject. Clement of Alexandria in particular spoke of the dual principles of autarkeia and koinonia. Autarkeia is self-sufficiency. Because God is the owner and giver of all things (Ps. 24:1), all people should have the means to make a viable living that sustains them without dependency upon others. A viable living is not just "getting by," but having enough to participate fully in life. Clement contended that property should be used to meet the basic needs of its owners. When those are satisfied, holding excess property while others are in need amounts to greed.

The principle of koinonia asserts that the purpose of property is the promotion of community. Koinonia puts a limit to absolute property rights. The owner’s right to determine the use of his or her property is limited by the needs of landless neighbors or those who live nearby. Without debating the best way to equitably distribute assets, the point remains that deep in the Christian tradition is the understanding that human communities exist to promote the "good life" for all, not just a few. This means allowing people to have access to the resources to create that life, as opposed to just "scraping by" -- creating a community whose members take responsibility for one another.

To aspire to a new vision of the city and human community requires an eschatological hope. A vision means there must be a telos, something toward which we are being ineluctably drawn. The Christian understanding of the natural and cultural orders is that they are real, but unfinished and incomplete. We are restless with today’s cities and towns because they are not what they are supposed to be.

Our cities are filled with art and culture, halls of learning, gracious public gardens, stately buildings and concentrations of commerce. They are also smog-filled, traffic-clogged, racially charged, economically segregated and aesthetically blighted. They have not yet become what they are going to be, but are a work in progress.

In the meantime, what might that city look like? Philip Bess describes the city he would like to live in as one "whose inhabitants understand and respect the cycles of nature; that in its practical pedestrian qualities is scaled to the physiology of the human person; that is economically healthy; that is more rather than less just, and more rather than less inclusive; that promotes individual human freedom, respect for the other, the life of the mind and the life of the spirit; that is beautiful."

In the end, such a city is not the work of human ingenuity alone, but imitation of the Triune God, who is at once togetherness and particularity. We keep in communion with this God through mutual deference and love. Therein we might begin to shape a city that is both loved and lovely.

How International Aid Fails the Poor

In 2006,the United States provided 6 million tons of food aid to agencies such as CARE, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision and Save the Children, which distributed the bags of wheat, rice or corn and containers of vegetable oil. Some of the aid went to places wracked by war or natural disaster, where it directly alleviated human suffering. In other places, children suffering from acute malnutrition were brought back to full health with the help of specially fortified food. Sometimes entire families were able to survive a lean season.

Given these and other positive results, why would any agency reject U.S. food aid?

Yet that’s exactly what CARE did last July, when officials announced that beginning in 2009, CARE will forgo $45 million a year in U.S. food aid. The organization based its decision on disagreement with a practice known as monetization, the process of selling some of the U.S. food abroad in order to raise needed cash for development projects and administrative costs. Although monetization is a common and necessary practice, CARE maintains that the sale of this food in the fragile markets of recipient countries competes with the sale of food produced by local farmers, causing prices to drop and lowering farmers’ income. After careful study, CARE has determined that the benefits of monetization are simply not worth the costs: it will no longer accept those donations of U.S. food aid that are intended for monetization (though it will continue to receive emergency U.S. food aid).

The long journey of food aid begins when the U.S. government purchases basic staples such as corn, rice and wheat (grown in Iowa, Texas and Nebraska), processes and packages the food in plants throughout the country and ships it from ports in the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico and on the West Coast. Originally food aid programs were seen as a way of disposing of large surplus food stocks owned by the federal government--surpluses caused by price control measures that helped sustain U.S. farmers. The plan was to remove surplus food from domestic markets and sell or donate it in foreign countries, thus helping both farmers at home and hungry people overseas.

But those government surplus stocks no longer exist. Today the U.S. government purchases food through regular U.S. commercial channels. The law requires this; it favors agribusiness interests and U.S. shipping companies even though the end result is higher-priced commodities and transportation. If the aid groups were allowed to consider cheaper sources of food and transportation, they would save both money and time.

The law also requires that the vast majority of food aid donations be made into ready-to-eat products or otherwise processed before being shipped. At least 75 percent of food aid must be shipped on U.S. flagships, despite the fact that our domestic shipping fleet is small and normally more costly than its international competitors. The bottom line? More than half of the U.S. food aid budget is consumed by administrative and transportation expenses.

Despite these inefficiencies, various U.S. interests that benefit from the program--agricultural interests, transportation companies and aid agencies--continue to provide strong political support for it. As a result, the United States is the largest donor of food aid worldwide, and since it sends more than half of all its food aid to the World Food Program (WFP), it is the organization’s single most generous supporter. The remaining food aid donations are delivered through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as CARE and Catholic Relief Services.

Though complex, food aid programs do a lot of good. During Niger’s 2006 crop failure and ensuing famine, for example, feeding centers were set up for individuals, particularly children, suffering from acute malnutrition. Thousands of lives were saved. School feeding programs that were made possible through the McGovern-Dole Food for Education program provide hot meals or take-home rations to students. A Bangladesh school feeding program attracted poor children and generated 20-30 percent increases in school enrollment. Food for Work programs--large public works projects in which workers are paid in food instead of cash--have helped to provide jobs and improve local infrastructure. In Sierra Leone, ex-soldiers are finding hope and opportunity through Food for Work, while new roads and irrigation systems help the nation recover from its war-torn past.

But aid in the form of food is seldom enough. Without shelter and sanitation, well-fed disaster-affected communities will continue to suffer; without textbooks and school supplies, kids coming to school will not learn; without tools and technical expertise, the best-designed Food for Work plan will not succeed. And--no matter how generous the food aid--food shortages will continue unless there are investments in farming and agriculture.

Unfortunately, the food aid and development assistance budgets and programs are developed separately, and as a result the U.S. foreign assistance system is not set up to encourage a comprehensive development approach. U.S. food aid programs are managed by the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); each has its own mandate, agenda and rules. Coordination between agencies is the exception rather than the rule. For example, USAID manages Child Survival and Health (CSH) programs intended to reduce illness and death among mothers, infants and young children. But efforts to incorporate food aid into these programs have been hampered by discordant funding and management processes. A CSH program in India that included a food aid component could not function effectively when the food aid budget was cut. In this case, the Indian government promised to step in to fill the gap--but developing-country governments often cannot afford to do this.

When NGOs face obstacles in creating effective nutrition and food security programs with in-kind food aid, they turn to monetization of the food aid as a way of generating funds for transportation and other logistical costs, and for development projects in agriculture, primary education and other key areas.

When it’s done right, monetization can improve food security. In a nonemergency situation in Rwanda, the aid organization ACDI/VOCA is using monetization to equip farmers and traders with the skills needed to supply products to their local markets. The food aid (vitamin-fortified vegetable oil) is sold to local traders. The traders learn to acquire and market a commodity that is scarce locally, while the proceeds from selling the vegetable oil enable ACDI/VOCA to support other initiatives, including improving the environmental sustainability of farmlands and helping farmers build and maintain commercial cooperatives.

But monetization is as much an art as a science, and development NGOs cannot always be sure that food aid sales do no harm. Will food aid directly compete with locally produced food or disrupt existing commercial trade arrangements? Will the sale of food aid discourage farmers from producing a particular crop like corn or wheat? The reality is that monetization does sometimes disrupt local markets.

U.S. law requires NGOs to ensure that nonemergency food aid deliveries do not discourage local production or disrupt established commercial channels, but the studies are not always objective or thorough. In one case, an NGO received donations of soy-oil for a school feeding program in Bangladesh. The soy oil was sold in the local market and the proceeds used to buy fortified biscuits and milk for schoolchildren. But the oil was sold for less than the prevailing market price, and the sale undercut a local business that imported U.S. soy oil on a commercial basis. Both the local business and a thriving commercial market were damaged.

Whenever large quantities of food are sold or donated in fragile markets, local farmers suffer the consequences. A U.S. government study of response to a 2002 southern Africa drought and food crisis found that food aid contributed to a marked drop in the price of corn. The United States had donated corn to feed people in a number of southern African countries, including Malawi, but local traders were already importing corn from other countries and local farmers were harvesting their own corn. When the U.S. food aid arrived, it created a surplus that led to a substantial price decline: from $250 per ton of corn to $100.

CARE believes not only that food aid monetization may harm local producers, but also that it is an extremely inefficient means of raising money. Though groups selling food aid try to recover the full cost of the aid (the food plus packaging, shipping and distribution costs), this is rarely possible. Instead, a dollar’s worth of U.S. food aid, once monetized, usually generates considerably less than a dollar in resources.

In a 2006 Bread for the World Institute review of food aid, it was clear that NGOs administering food aid are doing the best they can with a second-best resource; it was also clear that cash grants rather than food aid would be preferable in almost every case. NGOs should not have to resort to a second-best option when they need cash.

CARE’s decision has generated controversy. Its announcement came at a politically opportune moment, since food aid programs are part of the U.S. farm bill, which is up in Congress for reauthorization. Clayton Yeutter, former secretary of agriculture and critic of the current farm bill, has challenged Congress to imagine what our farm programs might look like if they were designed from scratch. If helping hungry people is the goal, our food aid programs would be markedly different.

President Bush has proposed that Congress allow up to a quarter of U.S. food aid to be procured in local and regional markets. At a recent Bread for the World event, President Bill Clinton praised this proposal--but there is little support for it in the agriculture committees of Congress.

Some NGOs have come out in favor of the shift, but they are worried that reduced support from the U.S. shippers and other interests that benefit from the current system will lead to reduced funding for life-saving food aid. CARE is risking funding in hopes of such reforms.

One positive change is the increase in support of international aid programs from the U.S. public and political leaders of both parties. U.S. funding for poverty-focused development assistance has tripled since 1999. The increase could translate into an increase in political support for food aid, even with the insistence on needed reforms.

Food aid is part of the farm bill, a piece of legislation that historically caters to special interests at the expense of real needs. Bread for the World has been campaigning to reform many aspects of the bill, including its section on food aid. One change would be to reduce commodity payments that go mainly to affluent landowners. The current system, by protecting and subsidizing U.S. farmers, depresses prices and sales opportunities for farmers in Africa and other poor parts of the world. Reducing this obstacle to development for the world’s poorest people would redirect funding for commodity payments to support U.S. farm and rural families of modest means.

Bread for the World, a collective Christian voice against hunger, is working with a coalition of Christian church bodies and other organizations to mobilize people of faith to push for farm bill reform. The cause has attracted a surprising array of allies, ranging from Environmental Defense and Oxfam to the Cato Institute and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

So far, the campaign has been an uphill battle. Both Democrats and Republicans have responded to intense pressure from lobbyists to maintain the status quo. When the House of Representatives passed its version of the farm bill in July, members added funding for rural development, conservation, food stamps and international food aid. But the House did nothing to curtail payments to the various special interests that benefit from the bill.

The Senate voted to protect trade-distorting commodity payments in its version of the farm bill, which passed in December. The president’s proposal to procure some food aid in local markets was stripped out of both the House and Senate versions of the bill.

In the coming weeks the House and Senate have an opportunity to reclaim the moral high ground when they reconcile their respective versions of the farm bill. CARE’s bold stand, and the pressure provided by Bread for the World and other organizations, may yet influence key decision makers and the Bush administration to make the needs of hungry and poor people the driving purpose of food aid--and a higher priority in the farm bill as a whole.

Debunking Myths About Foreign Aid

Fanny Makina, a farmer in Malawi, is tilling her plot of land with a hoe and spade. Next she will plant crops of corn, peanuts, squash, beans and cassava, and mark each row carefully with a stick. In most years, Makina harvests enough food for her family and has food left over to sell. Even in years of limited rainfall, she has income to buy fertilizer and other supplies.

"My children don’t lack for clothes or shoes. I am able to pay their tuition for school," she says proudly. By Malawian standards, Makina is tremendously successful.

Makina’s success is due in part to U.S. foreign aid. She is a member of the National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi (NASFAM), an organization supported in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NASFAM farmers join together to learn about new agricultural methods and to negotiate better prices with truckers and with the merchants who buy their crops. Compared with other farmers, NASFAM members have higher incomes and are less likely to go without food in the annual "hungry time" before harvest.

For Makina and millions of others, aid-supported programs like NASFAM have made the difference. "People think Africa is a lost cause because we are so far away," says Makina. "But if they came and saw what we have achieved with the aid we are receiving, they would think otherwise."

This kind of aid -- aid that supports communities and responsible governments -- could dramatically reduce world hunger over the next decades. At the UN conferences of the 1990s, the nations of the world agreed to cut world hunger in half by 2015. In this period of relative peace and prosperity, we could achieve this goal, but only if U.S. leaders join other leaders in increasing the funding for poverty-focused foreign-aid programs.

Over most of the past 50 years, the U.S. took the lead in advancing foreign aid for developing countries. Foreign-aid priorities were driven by the cold war, and the U.S. saw fighting hunger and poverty as a way to slow communism and woo Third World governments. For example, the biggest recipients of U.S. aid in Africa in the 1980s were dictatorships in Somalia, Sudan and Liberia that contributed to the violence still afflicting these countries today.

Since the end of the cold war, however, funding for aid has dropped. Without a clear statement of purpose for its post-cold-war aid program, Congress has bogged down the work of USAID, the main aid agency within the U.S. government. In the absence of a strong commitment to foreign aid, debilitating myths about such aid have become widespread. Before we sustain a commitment to reducing hunger and poverty around the world, we must debunk these myths.

Myth 1: Foreign aid doesn’t work.

Most foreign aid hasn’t helped poor people because it was never intended to help poor people. Over 20 percent of U.S. foreign assistance goes to Israel and Egypt, although neither country is a low-income nation. Other programs in the "aid" budget help U.S. businesses, or underwrite some senator’s pet organization back home.

But when aid is focused on reducing poverty, it produces results. In the 1980s, a UNICEF-led "child survival revolution" taught low-income parents world-wide how to do simple things to reduce health risks for their children. A sugar and salt solution, for example, can keep diarrhea from dehydrating a child. Now, in 2001, thousands more children live rather than die each day because of this program.

There are fewer hungry people in the world today than 25 years ago. The proportion of undernourished people in developing countries has dropped from one-third to one-fourth. Since 1960, adult literacy in sub-Saharan Africa has increased by over 280 percent; infant mortality has declined in East Asia by more than 70 percent; the under-five mortality rate has declined by over 75 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean; and life expectancy has risen by 46 percent in South Asia. Development assistance has contributed to these advances.

Myth 2: Most foreign aid gets lost to corrupt bureaucracies in the developing countries.

Yes, corruption is a problem. But since the end of the cold war, USAID and other aid agencies have become tougher on corruption. They are selective about which countries receive aid and what local agencies they fund, and they work with governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to monitor how money is spent. Where corruption is rife, USAID can fund projects through NGOs rather than government agencies.

Even more important, people in many developing countries have fought successfully for democracy, so local citizens are better able to hold governments accountable. People can criticize government officials, and the local press discusses mistakes and abuses.

Myth 3: Foreign aid is a big slice of the federal budget.

A recent poll by the Program for International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland showed that most Americans still imagine that 20 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. In reality, less than 1 percent of the budget is for foreign aid, and only about one-third of that is development assistance.

U.S. development aid has declined steadily over the past 15 years. The U.S. now ranks last among the 22 industrialized countries in percentage of national income given away in development aid: less than 0.1 percent. Tiny Denmark contributes ten times as much of its national income as American taxpayers do. Japan has been the largest provider of official development assistance for ten consecutive years.

Myth 4: Americans want to cut foreign aid.

This is what members of Congress and their staffers like to tell us. But a University of Maryland study reveals that a vast majority of Americans would support an increase in aid focused on reducing poverty. Eighty-three percent of Americans favor U.S. participation in a plan to reduce world hunger by half by 2015, and nearly all these people would be willing to pay more in taxes to make it happen.

Even more intriguing, U.S. strategic and economic interests, long the prime rationales for U.S. foreign aid, rank last in the minds of Americans as reasons to grant aid. Most believe that alleviating hunger and poverty and encouraging economic development in poor countries are the most compelling reasons for aid.

Myth 5: We should take care of problems at home rather than devote resources to helping other countries.

Yes, we should tackle hunger and poverty within our own borders. In the U.S., 31 million people -- including 12 million children -- live in households that don’t always have enough food to eat. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that still puts up with widespread hunger within its borders. But as the richest and most prosperous country in the world, we can afford to -- and should -- both help people here and respond to the needs of people around the world.

In addition, helping people in other countries helps Americans. Rising incomes among people around the world means a more dynamic market for U.S. exports, especially agriculture. U.S. trade with sub-Saharan Africa already exceeds trade with all of the independent states of the former Soviet Union. Development reduces conflict and the costs incurred when the U.S. government responds to crises overseas. Americans also have a self-interest in curtailing communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS and in preserving rain forests and other environmental resources in poor countries.

Myth 6: Charities can do the job of helping poor people around the world.

Americans give generously to charities such as Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief, Oxfam and World Vision, and these agencies do excellent, much-needed work. USAID already directs 38 percent of bilateral foreign aid through these and other agencies. Some in Congress would take that a step further: Senator Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) has proposed replacing USAID with a foundation that would channel money to U.S. charities.

But private charities can’t do the job alone. The U.S. government can mobilize resources on a larger scale, and government-to-government aid can improve public-sector functions that are crucial to making progress against poverty. These include economic policymaking, protection of human rights, and providing public services such as schools and clean water.

Myth 7: Foreign aid isn’t important.

How countries manage their own resources is much more important than foreign aid. But foreign-aid programs influence how local resources are invested and give a boost to countries that are using their resources well. Some critics claim that the only way to reduce poverty is to restrain capitalism. They see aid programs as a Trojan horse for multinational corporations. But many developing countries have found that some reliance on free markets stimulates economic growth.

Critics at the other extreme argue, "If these countries would just open their markets, they wouldn’t need aid." They point out that international trade and investment are much larger financial flows than aid. But trade and investment tend to bypass poor people. They are no substitute for aid.

We need to expand programs that focus on reducing poverty and that involve poor people as active partners. At the top of the list should be aid to agriculture, because 70 percent of the world’s undernourished people live in rural areas. The best agriculture programs listen to local farmers, including women, and involve them directly in agricultural research and extension. We also need to expand programs that fight AIDS. The rapid spread of this disease in Africa is due largely to pervasive poverty, so we must combine the attack on AIDS with a broader attack on poverty.

Programs providing credit to tiny businesses, or micro-enterprises, are another opportunity. Over the last 20 years, pioneering institutions such as the Grameen Bank have been channeling small loans to very poor people. One key has been the focus on reaching the poor. The other has been the involvement of groups of poor people in order to reduce administrative costs and improve repayment rates.

The international debt relief initiative is an example of effective aid. Protestants, Catholics and others in the Jubilee 2000 campaign have pressed the industrialized-country governments to write off some of the unpayable debt of the world’s poorest countries. Churches and Bread for the World’s members mobilized an estimated 250,000 letters to Congress in 1999 and 2000. Thanks to this successful advocacy movement, 22 of the world’s poorest countries have received $34 billion in debt cancellation. Their debt payments for this year have been reduced $1.1. billion.

In addition, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been instructed to focus on reducing poverty in low-income countries by asking those countries to develop poverty-reduction strategies through processes of public consultation.

Debt relief is working better in some countries than others, but reports are generally encouraging. In Uganda, debt relief has more than doubled primary school enrollment. The public consultation process has also led to innovations that reduce corruption in the education sector. Now, when the Ugandan government disburses money for schools, there are announcements on radio and in newspapers. As a result, corruption in the education sector has dropped from more than 50 percent to less than 10 percent.

Sustained progress against hunger and poverty will require a sustained increase in development assistance. We could cut global hunger in half by 2015 for a U.S. contribution of $1 billion more a year in poverty-focused aid. (One billion dollars is less than one penny per day per American.) Bread for the World is pushing to increase annual development assistance to Africa by at least $1 billion in its campaign, "Africa: Hunger to Harvest." We are focusing on Africa because it is the only part of the world where hunger is both pervasive and increasing.

The Bush administration is talking about global poverty issues, but the same administration proposes cutting funding for development and humanitarian assistance by $200 million. The congressional budget resolution proposes to cut another $700 million from foreign-affairs spending.

Meanwhile, U.S. Representatives Jim Leach (R., Iowa) and Don Payne (D., N.J.) have introduced the "Hunger to Harvest" resolution in the House and Senators Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.) and Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) are ready to introduce it in the Senate. Concerned citizens can urge their representatives to cosponsor the resolution. We still have a chance to reduce world hunger by half before 2015.

The New Challenge to Public Health

Book Review: Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

By Laurie Garrett. Hyperion, 754 pp.

I think the young man you just met has plague, the doctor told me. I was visiting one of my students at a community health clinic in Embudo, near Taos; New Mexico. The physician had called the highway patrol to take a blood sample to the state health laboratory. The next morning the diagnosis was confirmed.

I went with the doctor to the young man’s house on his family’s sheep ranch up in the mountains. A beautiful sheep dog lay on the porch. When the physician said that the boy probably had been infected by a flea from the dog, the father gave the animal a quick, dark look. The physician then told him that he must not shoot the dog. He gave the man a can of flea powder and told him to dust the animal and the bedclothes. The dog probably had killed an infected prairie dog or rat. The doctor reassured the father, "There is no shame in la plaga. Your son will be well soon and will return home." And he was.

That incident was 25 years ago. At that time I thought the age of epidemics was behind us. Plague was an anomaly in developed societies. The courses I taught on public health focused on modern hazards like highway accidents and the misuse of tobacco, alcohol and other drugs. Oddly, the coming of HIV/AIDS didn’t dampen our optimism about public health. HIV/AIDS seemed the enormous exception to the rule, and the means of its spread (sex, intravenous drugs) dominated the discussion.

Then in the late ‘80s everything changed. Epidemiologists and virologists began sending up the alarm, noting the connection between AIDS and smaller outbreaks of other diseases. Evidence mounted that epidemics were not only back, they had never left. Books like Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, Richard Rhodes’s Deadly Feasts and Arno Karlen’s Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in Ancient and Modern Times helped draw public attention to the threat of more epidemics.

Garrett’s new book assesses the global preparedness for the fight against a new generation of plagues. In her earlier book, she outlined the principle forces that have returned the threat of epidemics to all parts of the globe instead of keeping it confined to the poorest and remotest places on earth:

• The rapid growth of human populations, especially in urban areas, and the resultant overcrowding, malnutrition and extreme poverty -- conditions that compromise the immune system and amplify epidemics.

• The increased movement of new viruses from plants and animals to humans caused by the penetration of human settlements into previously undisturbed regions like the deep forests of Africa and South America.

• An apparent worldwide warming trend that greatly disturbs ecological niches and further encourages the movement of viruses.

• The unprecedented movement of people and goods around the globe, including a soaring army of refugees.

• The lack of stability and resources among governments stressed by overpopulation and public health calamities.

She describes the bureaucratic bumbling that led to a tragically ineffective response to an outbreak of bubonic plague in India in the early 1990s, the collapse of the public health infrastructure before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the weakening of U.S. public health as a result of an overenthusiastic embrace of the market.

Garrett stresses the fascination of nations with the drama and high technology of medical systems that serve individual patients. Public health measures like vaccines, clean water, nutrition, modest, accessible clinics and a system that makes these protections available to all may seem drab in comparison. Public health focuses on the health of whole communities and populations and stresses prevention, which may mean doing such things as raising the price of tobacco, making automobiles more safe or establishing systems for the removal of waste water.

One of Garrett’s major themes is that public health and politics are joined at the hip and that a nation’s public health is a fair index of its politics. Take, for example, an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Zaire in 1994, only the second time this virus has surfaced. In the early ‘90s the Mobutu government was on its last legs and fighting another of Zaire’s many civil wars. Mobutu and his cronies had spent decades plundering the nation’s resources and treasury. Huge sums of Western aid never reached those it was meant to serve. Mobutu had built a few impressive hospitals and the nation did have trained doctors, but the public health system had collapsed from neglect. So when the epidemic began in the town of Kikwit, located near the rain forest, the hospital had no idea how to respond to this terrifying disease that causes blood to pour from its victims’ bodies.

The epidemic was checked by the arrival of Barbara Kiersteins, a physician with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF -- Doctors Without Borders). She and epidemiologists from the World Health Organization with whom she worked grasped that what the hospital needed was simple public health protections -- clean water, disposable syringes, soap, protective gear and the isolation of Ebola patients, as well as rest and food for frightened health workers.

Most gripping and sad is the story of the collapse of public health in the former Soviet Union, a collapse that probably began decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though the Soviet Union drastically improved the health of its people in the first five decades after the revolution, that progress was reversed. Vast numbers now crowd Russian prisons, where poor sanitation, inferior antibiotics and widespread drug resistance have virtually created a factory for the production of diseases like tuberculosis and HIV. Many of the prisoners have illnesses that are resistant to all but the most sophisticated and costly of antibiotics. Much of this drug resistance is caused by the casual availability of antibiotics in every major Russian city. Russia’s out-of-control HIV and AIDS epidemic is spread mainly by widespread drug abuse among young people, most of whom share used needles.

The U.S’s own failures to safeguard public health stem from a populist embrace of the market. Big government is seen as the enemy of the common people, and the market as the working-man’s best friend. Political movements that tout economic growth as the true friend of the poor and resist government regulation result in underfunded and weakened public health systems.

William Stringfellow and Walter Wink use the New Testament terms "powers and principalities" to describe the institutions and ideologies that undergird society and demand our ultimate loyalty and tribute. The powers have both visible structures and invisible or spiritual dimensions that are the source of their power and sway over people’s ultimate loyalty. Such a worldview often seems to lie behind Garrett’s analysis, though her background as a science reporter keeps her from using frankly spiritual categories.

Garrett’s principal thesis is that the health of every nation depends on the health of every other nation. Places and communities where public health protections are weak become targets of and reservoirs for infections that threaten far-flung communities, now only a plane trip away.

Garrett presents a laundry list of needed responses: reforming a pharmaceutical industry more concerned with profits than people; restraining a profit- and technology-oriented medical system that overshadows the more effective public health infrastructure; slowing the development and settlement of vast areas of rain forest; and persuading rich countries to fund global health campaigns in poor countries.

Behind Garrett’s list stands a deeply spiritual challenge: we need to give our loyalty to the welfare of humankind and all of creation, not to the powers of domination and profit. If suffering people most need disposable syringes and affordable vaccines, then shiny hospitals and huge profits for the pharmaceutical industry cannot be our primary goals.

It was once thought that democracy, with its traditions of individual freedom, property rights and the like, would limit the scope of public health, which typically advances through collective action. Yet over the long run democracies have a far better record of protecting public health than do governments like that of the former Soviet Union. Freedom of speech and discussion are more effective than a powerful state apparatus in reforming health practices, especially such practices as alcohol and other drug use or smoking. We have "talked" smoking rates down and, through democratic discussion and massive publicity, made an impressive start in checking alcohol consumption and decreasing HIV infection in the gay community. Our public and religious moralism, however, has hampered our efforts to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In state socialism, where everything is controlled, private behavior can become an act of defiance or even resistance to the powers of the state. This may partially account for the high rates of drunkenness, drug use and smoking in the former Soviet Union. Such risky behaviors can also be the recourse of those who feel defeated. A friend who visited Poland in the early 1980s noted that most of the country’s public health workers smoked and drank heavily. When he asked why, people told him, "It is our only consolation."

We have tended to see humankind as immune from the laws of creation, as a power apart. While we have sought safety in steel and glass buildings and homes in gated communities, we share our dwelling places with viruses and other pathogens. In the biotic creation we are subjects, not rulers. We must resist intelligently and wisely the invasions of the unseen, for things invisible will always be with us.

There is a danger that the return of the age of plagues may drive us further into the arms of nationalism or of the global market. If we are to learn from the dangers ahead, we must see that we struggle not only for the health of ourselves and our communities, but for our souls. By soul I mean our capacity to transcend ourselves and connect to others -- in biblical terms, to live in resistance to the powers of death.