Articles – Page 175 – Religion Online

Sola Gratia in Lake Wobegon

Garrison Keillor, whose news from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon will come to an end on June 13 after more than a dozen years on Public Radio, frequently can be as funny as any humorist you could name. But I suggest that he has been something more. There are times -- as in his treating shy people with a kind of gossamer poetry, or his evoking the tenderness of a father watching his son learn to swim, or his telling about an immigrant Norwegian who, sharing no common language with his new German bride, does the dishes to show how happy he is that she has arrived -- when you say to yourself, hey, wait a minute, is this humor, or what? Sometimes it is the "what," or humor mixed with the what so that it becomes a kind of superwhat.

But Keillor has not neglected the humorist’s first responsibility. Whether his work brings you to a state of total collapse depends, of course, on your susceptibilities -- on the mysterious transaction between the humorist and the humoree. You might, for example, be reading Keillor’s book Lake Wobegon Days (Viking Penguin, 1985) to your wife in the car, and suddenly find that you can’t get a passage’s funniest phrases out of your mouth. You make several runs at it, backing off to the beginning of the paragraph, gathering yourself, then approaching the most uproarious sentences with a running momentum like a roller coaster trying to crest a hill. You fail again, and finally your wife, who is driving the car and is not yet in on the joke’s denouement, pulls over to the EMERGENCY PARKING ONLY strip along the Interstate, stops the car, takes the book, reads the passage, looks inscrutably at you over her glasses, and starts driving again. Listening to "The Prairie Home Companion" on the car radio can be dangerous for Saturday night driving. Among the passages that produced in one hearer-reader distinct effects of this kind is the author’s discussion of the semaphore work of Lake Wobegon’s Boy Scout troop ("UNGENT/SEND HEAP/I’M BADLY CURT")

Nonetheless, producing convulsed hilarity is not Keillor’s only distinction, or even his chief one. In my opinion his main achievement is that he has decisively taken over from Woody Allen (or, if you prefer, from Peter De Vries) the title of the nation’s leading humorist-as-theologian. In fact, he may have retired the cup.

Keillor’s religious understanding functions in his material in three ways. First, he reports much more -- and much more sympathetically and with much more knowledge -- about the hinterland’s religious people, institutions and beliefs than does any other American humorist. That’s an obvious point. Second, he fairly often makes an explicitly religious affirmation. That point, I think, is fairly obvious, too. Third, and perhaps not so obvious, his outlook throughout his work -- not just when he is dealing with religious subjects -- is suffused with what we may discern to be a religious understanding.

Particularly apt is his treatment of the fissiparousness and perfectionism of his own little sect, the Sanctified Brethren: "Once having tasted the pleasure of being Correct and defending True Doctrine, they kept right on and broke up at every opportunity." The Cox Brethren were distinguished from the Bird Brethren, "who tended to be lax about such things as listening to the radio on Sunday and who went in for hot baths to an extent the Beales considered sensual." Although by the time Keillor came along, the Beale (or Cold Water) Brethren listened to the radio on Sunday and ran the bath hot, they never patched things up with the Bird Brethren. "Patching up was not a Brethren talent," he observes laconically. Some nights when Brother Louie and Brother Mel would argue at length about interpretations of the Bible, he could see that Lake Wobegon’s Cox Brethren "might soon divide into the Louies and the Mels."

Keillor describes the small-group sectarian worship service itself -- held in a private home -- with a mixture of humor and tender empathy:

Either the Spirit was moving someone to speak who was taking his sweet time or else the Spirit was playing a wonderful joke on us and letting us sit, or perhaps silence was the point of it. . . . This living room so hushed, the Brethren in their customary places on folding chairs (the comfortable ones were put away on Sunday morning) around the end-table draped with a white cloth and the glass of wine and loaf of bread (unsliced) was as familiar to me as my mother and father, the founders of my life.

When the sect’s meetings were shifted to the second floor of the St. Cloud bus station, "the long silences were often broken by the roar of bus engines and the rumble of bus announcements downstairs. Waiting for the Spirit to guide us to a hymn, a prayer, a passage from Scripture, we heard, ‘Now boarding at Gate One."’

Keillor has also dealt with the mainline church -- if anything in Lake Wobegon can be called mainline. He tells how David Ingqvist, pastor of the Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church~ lost out on a trip with his wife to the five-day Rural Lutheran Clergy Conference in Orlando, Florida, owing to the intervention of his most troublesome deacon ("When I see those pictures of starving babies I just think we ought to go through the budget and cut out the nonessentials -- travel, and that sort of thing")

Pastor Ingqvist, Keillor also notes, was alarmed that Dear Abby so often recommended that her readers seek the advice of ministers. "Talk to your minister," she’d say to a 14-year-old girl in love with a 51-year-old married auto mechanic who is in prison for rape. Why did Abby assume that a minister could deal with this situation? The poor old guy is in his study, paging through Revelation, when the door flies open and a teen-aged girl in a tank top bursts in sobbing passionately for a married felon three times her age -- what is the good reverend to do? Try to interest her in two weeks of handicrafts at Camp Tonawanda?

And so on. The thread of the town’s religious life runs constantly through the news from Lake Wobegon. Especially effective, however, is the way that Keillor, without ceasing to be a humorist, gets inside the mind of a worshiper, exaggerating, tossing off choice phrases, exposing the wandering mind and the human frailty, but still not mocking, not observing from outside, not repudiating. Take, for example, his affecting description of a revival service in the concluding chapter of Lake Wobegon Days. Could any other American humorist have written such an account? Ring Lardner? Sinclair Lewis? Robert Benchley? James Thurber? H. L. Mencken? Even Mark Twain himself? The question answers itself -- answers not just No, but No in thunder. Keillor stands this entire humorous tradition on its head.

Again, in a piece on the subject of where babies come from, he speaks movingly of the eagerness of the Tolleruds, standing on tiptoe and pressing forward to greet their adopted Korean baby at the Minneapolis airport. In listening to such episodes you may wonder when it is going to be funny; you may chuckle once or twice, but then you may find that it elicits tears instead of laughter. One could almost substitute these sketches for a sermon in a worship service (and in some instances that would no doubt be an improvement).

As to the third point, which conceivably some might find not entirely obvious: religion figures in Keillor’s work not just as subject matter but also as point of view. In addition to certain characteristic material -- what he or she makes jokes about -- a humorist also has an angle of vision and an implicit philosophy. Keillor has an implicit, and sometimes explicit, point of view that differs from the main American tradition of high humor -- even though he is a significant new member of that tradition.

That tradition of the artist’s humor descends from Mark Twain and the 19th-century raconteurs. But it took a new turn, as did so much of our history, after World War I, with Ring Lardner, the Algonquin wits and the early New Yorker, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, E. B. White, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman and their various companions, imitators and successors. They were shaped by the printed page, before the world was overcome by furniture that talks. As a part of that tradition, Keillor writes for the New Yorker, as did many of its number, and like them he shapes his work with discriminating intelligence, with imagination, and with a distinctive perspective. His work is not that of a joke-maker, a mere gag writer who feeds the laugh machine.

It is fortunate that Keillor continues this heritage that regards humor as a demanding creative art (even though both the general public and the elite have difficulty understanding that there can be such a thing) because without those exacting standards his writing would topple over into sentimentality. Even now it constantly trembles on the brink. It will not be good news when there are imitation Keillors all over the lot, peddling warm nostalgic memories of innumerable small towns.

It is also fortunate that it fell to Keillor to combine the standards set by the New Yorker with the wider possibilities, in audience, style and subject matter, of radio -- but public radio, not commercial, and radio, not the terrible new furniture that not only talks but gives off hideous flickering images. As we try to hold on to the tattered remnants of culture against the waves of mindless images, radio has this advantage: it can still give prominence to words. One of those is indeed worth a thousand pictures.

But while Keillor is among the best of the current representatives of the American tradition of literate humor, he also represents an important alteration or correction of it -- and perhaps even a repudiation of its prevailing points of view. It is not only that tradition’s treatment of religion that he has stood on its head; the same is true of his treatment of everything else. His work gives the tradition’s customary subjects and attitudes a 720-degree turnaround -- that is, insofar as the tradition may contain the smug, fast-talking humor of dismissal and exclusion, or the self-occupied humor of urban neuroses. And in that turnaround one can detect religious significance.

And at times the tables can be turned on the would-be satirist, as in the case of Johnny Tollefson. Much embarrassed by his folks and much distressed by the limitations of his surroundings, Johnny is going to be -- of course -- a writer ("He made a list of experiences he thought he should have in order to become a better writer. He left No. 1 blank, for fear his mother might see it"). On one occasion Johnny visits the local bar for ideas and atmosphere. After a few beers he emerges, trips and falls, gets up too soon and falls sideways against the hood of a brown pickup -- just as his uncle and aunt are passing by on their way to Wednesday night prayer meeting. It is a classic scene out of American humor. This time, however, it is not the presumably earnest Bible-carrying pair who are subjected to a sprinkling of mockery, but the young writer. After an exchange with his aunt and uncle, Johnny begins thinking how he might make a story of the scene and improve upon the details. He concludes that "the story would go on to reveal their essential hypocrisy and that of the entire town." Thus the proto-satirist is himself the recipient of a gentle satiric touch.

Often after reading the depressing formal literature devoted to analysis of jokes, humor and laughter, one senses a notable discrepancy between its theories and something that one has actually experienced in one’s own life -- the healing power of laughter.

The critics’ dubious efforts at analyzing humor tell us a good deal about its "banana peel" aspect, which is external and cruel and which involves taking pleasure in someone else’s discomfiture; about its superior aspect, in which we reinforce our exalted sense of ourselves by mocking and putting down others; about its satirical aspect, in which we seek to undermine the evils and puncture the foibles of this world by subjecting them to derision; about its cynical aspect, which meets the alleged meaninglessness of life with a defiant, bitter laugh; and about its irresponsible aspect, which shrugs and wisecracks to turn aside the requirements and obligations of our life here on earth. But Keillor’s humor is the opposite of all of these.

There is indeed an aspect of humor that divides -- that makes someone the butt of a joke while the rest of us laugh at him or her. But is there not, at a more profound level, an aspect of high humor that unites, that brings a shock of recognition of our common humanity? Often there is a sudden rush not only of recognition -- Yes, that’s the way it is, exaggerated now so we can see it clearly -- but also of fellow-feeling, even of surprise identification: Yes, it must be that way with them, and it would be so with us, in that condition; yes, we share those human responses.

Is all this intended to poke fun at impractical, absent-minded folk who are somehow different from the rest of us? Or at cigarette smokers? Or people who smoke Pall Malls instead of Marlboros? No. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve ever driven in a blizzard, or where you rank (or think you rank) on the scale of absent-mindedness of this kind: You understand. You identify: Yes, that’s true to something in us. Keillor manages to convey an accepting inclusiveness that is also a larger affirmation.

Sometimes this larger affirmation -- of Providence, of the grace of God, even of the dangerous notion of Special Providence (i.e., Providence for me) -- appears in Keillor’s work almost in an explicit way. For example, he writes in a New Yorker story:

When I dropped the window off that falling ladder back in 1971, I didn’t know that my son had come around the corner of the house and was standing at the foot of the ladder watching me. The window hit the ground and burst, the ladder hit the ground and bounded, and his father landed face first in the chrysanthemums: all three missed him by a few feet. Quite a spectacle for a little boy to see up close, and he laughed our loud and clapped his hands. I moved my arms to make sure they weren’t broken into little pieces, and I clapped too. Hurray for God! So many fiction writers nowadays would have sent the window down on the boy’s head as if it were on a pulley and the rope were around his neck, but God let three heavy objects fall at his feet and not so much as scratch him.

Any minor-league skeptic could of course make short shrift of that claim without working up a sweat: What about all the two-year-olds who are hit by a falling window? What is God doing about them? And so on. American humorists, have mostly been on the side of the skeptic, but Keillor is not. It would really require a more thorough analysis to establish the point, but take it from those of us who have read and heard a lot of him: Something like Amazing Grace is humming along through Keillor’ s stuff.

One of his most striking themes is what one might call a positive or benign irony: getting more than, other than, better than, you deserve. "But what a lucky man [the fellow whose car is snowbound in the ditch]. Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you have wanted had you known. . . . He starts out on the short walk to the house where people love him and will be happy to see his face." Sometimes there is a lot of grace around -- as in Garrison Keillor’s coming along when we needed him.

Who’s Great

Billy Graham and John Paul II are indisputably great men. However much of what they accomplished should be attributed to their own actions and however much is due to other factors, these two must be considered significant actors in 20th-century history. For Billy Graham in 1957 to invite participation at his New York City evangelistic campaign from representatives of all willing churches – thereby, opening up a wide array of ecumenical possibilities for former fundamentalists, new-style evangelicals and many mainline Protestants -- was indisputably an important action. But even that significant action will probably receive less attention in the history books than John Paul II’s trip to Poland in June 1979, when millions of his compatriots ignored official disapproval to attend masses and other Catholic services -- and so accelerated, or maybe sparked, the shaking that eventually brought down state-communism in Eastern Europe.

But what can responsibly be said about such "great" persons? Can concentration upon the lives of the "great" stand up against the current heightened concern for the previously marginalized, or -- in Christian terms -- for "the least of these," whom the scriptures repeatedly describe as central to the purposes of God? Should one talk at all about great men among Christian groups, in that most of the time and in most places churches have been chiefly populated -- and chiefly kept functioning -- by women?

These questions have had sharpened implications for historians. The once-regnant ideal of history -- that it features elite males as the main actors in political and military narratives -- is now in tatters. One discerning study of modern uncertainties about historical practice, by Joyce Appleby, Margaret Jacob and Lynn Hunt, even began by pointing out that their own participation in the historical profession, as women from nonelite social backgrounds, could not have happened without the intermingled social and intellectual changes of recent decades (Telling the Truth About History).

To these authors it is a good thing that what once counted as "absolutisms" have faded away. Such absolutisms included a heroic myth about U.S. history interpreted as the rise of "the successful male white Protestant, whose features were turned into ideals for the entire human race." Another was a mythic reverence for the intellectual purity of science in which, once again, individual great men were responsible for what was truly significant.

Against these absolutisms have arisen various ways of writing history that concentrate on once marginalized populations (women, African-Americans, workers, immigrants) as themselves important historical actors. The history writing that results from these new perspectives is anything but placid, since competition among champions of the various groups can be severe. But the new perspectives are responsible for an almost entirely new attitude toward what constitutes historical importance.

And yet, if simplistic assumptions about great men and history have been abandoned, interest remains high in what significant individuals have done. While historians have welcomed Appleby’s nuanced study of how the War for Independence altered the lives of ordinary Americans (Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans), an even broader and more appreciative audience has made David McCullough’s biography of John Adams a run away best seller. Expert books by a number of scholars on the shock troops of the civil rights movement have revealed how many different kinds of people from many walks of life in many different contributed to the struggle. But books featuring Martin Luther King Jr., such as the two splendid volumes by Taylor Branch, still remain the most read, most influential and most memorable.

Complicating even the academic terrain are a number of initiatives reasserting the importance of individual actions, even when undertaken by elite Caucasian males. Christian Smith, for instance, introduces an important new collection of essays on The Secular Revolution with a bold statement about the importance of personal agency: "The central claim of this book is that the historical secularization of the institutions of American public life was not a natural, inevitable, and abstract by-product of modernization; rather it was the outcome of a struggle between contending groups." The essays in Smith’s persuasive book mostly concern how one collection of influential males (the new academic secularists) successfully wrested control of the institutions of national culture from another collection of influential males (the old Protestant leaders).

James McPherson’s riveting account of the battle of Antietam, Crossroads of Freedom, is one of the first volumes in a new series called Pivotal Moments in American History. The premise of the series, as explained by editors McPherson and David Hackett Fischer, is its focus on "contingency" or the awareness that important historical developments do not take place inevitably. In their view, books stressing contingency "offer a way forward, beyond the ‘old political history’ and the new ‘social and cultural history’ by a reunion of process and event," In other words, what Individual people did -- perhaps especially people who filled leading public posts -- may be as genuinely significant as the ordinary forces acting upon ordinary people.

In Christian perspective, it can be affirmed that the created realm reflects the being of its creator, and so is immeasurably more complex than any single human, or any single school of historical analysis, can fathom. Similarly, however, and again because of God’s gracious bestowments upon his creatures, most individuals and most schools of historical analysis can see some things clearly about the past. Bringing together into a coherent whole the valid insights of different individuals and schools of analysis is the hard part.

A Christian vision of history need not, in principle, be opposed to the idea of "great person" history -- for much the same reason that it need not, in principle, be opposed to history focused on the marginalized. The reason, though offered as much by faith as by sight, is that in Jesus Christ, as the apostle put it to the Colossians, "all things hold together," even the well-publicized actions of well-known figures and the day-to-day activities of ordinary people carried on with never a thought about the scrutiny of history.

Battle for the Bible

In October 1845, two able theologians debated the Bible’s view of slavery in a public event in Cincinnati that went on for eight hours a day through four long days. Jonathan Blanchard spoke for the abolitionist position, Nathan L. Rice for the position that while the Bible pointed toward the eventual, voluntary elimination of slavery, it nowhere called slavery evil as such.

While Rice methodically tied Blanchard in knots over how to interpret the proslavery implications of specific texts, Blanchard returned repeatedly to "the broad principle of common equity and common sense" that he found in scripture, to "the general principles of the Bible" and "the whole scope of the Bible," where to him it was obvious that "the principles of the Bible are justice and righteousness." Early on in the debate, Blanchard’s exasperation with Rice’s attention to particular passages led him to utter a particularly revealing statement of his own reasoning: "Abolitionists take their stand upon the New Testament doctrine of the natural equity of man. The one-bloodism of human kind [from Acts 17:26]: -- and upon those great principles of human rights, drawn from the New Testament, and announced in the American Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men have natural and inalienable rights to person, property and the pursuit of happiness."

Blanchard’s linkage between themes from scripture and tropes from American republicanism was repeated regularly by abolitionists. But this use of the Bible almost never found support in the South and only rarely among northern moderates and conservatives. In general, it was a use that suffered particular difficulties when, as in the ground rules laid down for Blanchard and Rice in their Cincinnati debate, disputants pledged themselves in good Protestant fashion to base what they said on the Bible as their only authoritative source.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lightning-rod novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, provided one of the era’s most powerful examples of the abolitionist appeal to the general spirit of the Bible. Stowe, herself a dedicated if romantic partisan for the Bible, nonetheless subtly questioned widespread American notions about the self-interpreting power of scripture. For example, she had one of her slave-owning characters, Augustine St. Clare, suggest that scriptural interpretation was driven more by interest than intellect:

"Suppose that something should bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don’t you think we should have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What a flood of light would pour into the church, all at once, and how immediately it would be discovered that everything in the Bible and reason went the other way!"

Stowe also intimated the cynical conclusion, which would become more common among secularists after the Civil War, that the Bible was easily manipulated to prove anything that readers might desire with regard to a problem like slavery. At one place in the novel, Stowe had passengers on a steamboat, which was carrying slaves down the Ohio River, exchange biblical texts with each other like bird shot. On the one side: "‘It’s undoubtedly the intention of Providence that the African race should be servants -- kept in a low condition,’ said a grave-looking gentleman in black, a clergyman, seated by the cabin door. "‘Cursed be Canaan: a servant of servants shall he be," the scripture says.

On the other side: "A tall, slender young man, with a face expressive of great feeling and intelligence, here broke in, and repeated the words, "‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." I suppose,’ he added, ‘that is scripture, as much as "Cursed be Canaan.""’

In each case, Stowe’s own sentiments obviously lay with the antislavery use of the Bible, but her portrayal of a divided usage could not have reassured those who paused to reflect on how this novel might awaken uncertainty about the supposedly perspicuous authority of the Bible.

Stowe’s most extensive incident featuring an appeal to scripture conveyed a less ambiguous message. After the slave Eliza escapes over the ice-clogged Ohio River with her young son, she comes, exhausted, to the home of Senator and Mrs. Bird just as they have finished discussing the senator’s support for Ohio’s version of the Fugitive Slave Law. When Mary Bird surprises her husband by attacking all such laws as "shameful, wicked, [and] abominable," John Bird replies with arguments paralleling the biblical defense: "But, Mary, just listen to me. Your feelings are all quite right, dear, and interesting, and I love you for them; but, then, dear, we mustn’t suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment."

In response to arguments in favor of fugitive slave laws, which regularly included a proslavery use of the Bible, Mary Bird blows away the equivalent of chapter-and-verse argumentation with a larger gestalt of scriptural sentiment:

"Now, John, I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow."

"But in cases where your doing so would involve a great public evil -- "

"Obeying God never brings on public evils. I know it can’t. It’s always safest, all round, to do as He bids us."

"Now, listen to me, Mary, and I can state to you a very clear argument to show -- "

"O, nonsense, John! You can talk all night, but you wouldn’t do it, I put it to you, John -- would you now turn away a poor, shivering, hungry creature from your door, because he was a runaway? Would you now?"

At that very point the fugitive slave Eliza arrives at their door, and the senator proves his mettle by setting aside his arguments and moving Eliza in the dead of night away from danger.

The significance of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the biblical debate over slavery lay in the novel’s emotive power. Stowe exemplified -- rather than just announced -- the persuasive force of what she regarded as the Bible’s overarching general message.

The fact that a novelist brought off this task more effectively than the exegetes did not stop abolitionist scholars and preachers from continuing the battle in their chosen media. On the eve of conflict, George Cheever, a Congregationalist minister from upstate New York, published one of the era’s most elaborate biblical attacks on slavery. Cheever labored diligently, if not too convincingly, to show that Old Testament "bondmen" and New Testament "servants" were not slaves at all. He certainly scored points in using biblical prohibitions against "manstealing" when he excoriated the internal trade in slaves and, by implication, all slaveholding. Yet over and over again he appealed to the inconsistency between slavery and "the benevolence commanded in the Scriptures." At the end he brought his book to a climax by moving from the biblical "letter" to a much broader basis: "The moral argument from Scripture on the subject appeals to the common conscience of all mankind, and at every step enlists the common sense of humanity in its behalf."

So also did Henry Ward Beecher reason in his climactic public statement on the eve of conflict. Maybe, he conceded, a defense of slavery could be teased out of obscure, individual texts of scripture, but surely the defining message of the Bible was something else entirely. In his fast day sermon of January 4, 1861, Beecher strenuously appealed to the general meaning of the Bible as opposed to the pedantic literalism that undergirded the proslavery view: "‘I came to open the prison-doors,’ said Christ; and that is the text on which men justify shutting them and locking them. ‘I came to loose those that are bound’; and that is the text out of which men spin cords to bind men, women, and children. ‘I came to carry light to them that are in darkness and deliverance to the oppressed’; and that is the Book from out of which they argue, with amazing ingenuity, all the infernal meshes and snares by which to keep men in bondage. It is pitiful."

Such use of the Bible doubtless carries more weight today than it did in 1860, when the way that Beecher reasoned disturbed broad reaches of American religious opinion. At the time, however, the conviction that he could easily separate the Bible’s antislavery "spirit" from its proslavery "letter" was not only a minority position; it was also widely perceived as a theologically dangerous position.

A devastating theological weakness of this position made many who were otherwise sympathetic shy away. As early as 1846, the Connecticut Congregationalist Leonard Bacon, who very much wanted to oppose slavery as a sin, nonetheless hung back. His analysis of the spirit-over-the-letter argument caught the dilemma exactly: "The evidence that there were both slaves and masters of slaves in the churches founded and directed by the apostles, cannot begot rid of without resorting to methods of interpretation which will get rid of everything." In Bacon’s view, the well-intentioned souls who "torture the Scriptures into saying that which the anti-slavery theory requires them to say" did great damage to the scriptures themselves.

To Bacon and many others who were tempted to make a move from the Bible’s letter of sanction for slavery to its spirit of universal liberation, the facts of American experience may have been the great stumbling block. Precisely by following the Bible strictly, by tending to its letter when heretics of various kinds were running after its spirit, the churches had prospered, and the balm of the gospel had reached unprecedented numbers of spiritually needy men and women.

This consideration did not deter abolitionists like Cheever and the Beechers. Yet the stronger their arguments based on general humanitarian principles became, the weaker the Bible looked in any traditional sense. By contrast, rebuttal of such arguments from biblical principle increasingly came to look like a defense of scripture itself.

Bacon and those who, like him, wanted both to preserve traditional biblical authority and to oppose slavery still had one more argument to advance. They could concede that the Bible never did in fact condemn slavery per se, but they could also contend that, when properly interpreted, scripture did condemn the kind of slavery practiced in the American South. With a substantial history behind it, this was an argument of some subtlety, and one that Bacon himself, along with a sizable number of other earnest Bible believers, tried to make in the years before war broke out.

In 1808 one of the first and best biblical arguments against the southern system of slavery was published by David Barrow. His Involuntary, Unmerited, Perpetual, Absolute, Hereditary Slavery, Examined; on the Principles of Nature, Reason, Justice, Policy and Scripture featured arguments denying that the descendants of Canaan were Africans. More generally, he held that the precedents for slavery found by paying close attention to Abraham’s life and Mosaic law were, for American experience, irrelevant. If all cotton growers and owners of rice plantations were Hebrews, if they could locate Canaanites for slaves, and if they would then transport their operations to the Middle East, then Barrow would concede a biblical warrant for slavery.

Francis Wayland went over Barrow’s argument, only with more erudition and with more detail from the Hebrew language and Old Testament history. To Wayland, in an argument that also loomed large in African-American biblical exegesis, the fact that Abraham circumcised his slaves (Gen. 17:12), and so included them in all the blessings God promised to "his people," set up a very different situation than prevailed in the South. So it was as well with the Mosaic legislation that provided for manumission if a master harmed a slave in any way (such as knocking out a tooth; Exod. 21:27) or if a slave escaped to a Hebrew town (Deut. 23:15-16).

Wayland did not believe that Old Testament slavery provided a legitimate rationale for slavery in other times and places. But even if it did, he held that to follow the Bible meant that Americans would have to abandon the slave system that then existed in their land: "Suppose ... that whatever was sanctioned to the Hebrews is sanctioned to all men at all times,. . . I do not see in what manner it could justify slavery in the United States. It is, I presume, conceded that a permission of this kind is to be understood according to the utmost strictness of application. If slavery be justified by the law of Moses, it is, of course, only justified in the manner and with the restrictions under which it was placed by that law."

A few years later a Baptist preacher with far less of a reputation made Wayland’s points even more sharply, and he did so in Kentucky, where such opinions could be dangerous. James M. Pendleton was a hard-nosed defender of the Bible’s inerrancy as well as of Baptist distinctives, but that cast of mind did not prevent him from mounting a strong case against slavery as practiced in Kentucky at a time when legislation concerning slavery was being considered by a state constitutional convention. Pendleton turned to the standard passages about Abraham and his slaves and observed "that there are points of material dissimilarity between that system and our system of slavery." Unlike owners in the southern states, where it was usually illegal for slaves to be armed, Abraham gave weapons to his slaves, and Abraham was prepared, before his son Isaac was born, to make a slave his heir. The only conclusion that Pendleton could draw was that "it does not follow necessarily that Abraham’s servants were slaves in the American acceptation of the word."

Bible scholar Tayler Lewis made an even more extensive case in response to proslavery use of the Bible. He began by arguing that "the Patriarchal Servitude" in ancient times was very different from the slavery found in the American South. And he asserted that, regardless of the social system in place, scripture never speaks of servants as mere property.

Lewis then expounded at length on what he held to be a key feature of Old Testament teaching -- yes, there was divine approval for buying non-Jews as slaves, but never for selling them. More important, since this provision for servitude depended on the distinction in ancient Israel between the people of God and "the heathen," it was imperative to recognize the great change inaugurated by the coming of Jesus Christ. If, as Christians believe, Jesus opened the doorway of salvation to all people everywhere, who then were the heathen of modem times? In Lewis’s words, "We still speak of heathen, using the term geographically, and, to some extent, ethnologically; but theologically, ecclesiastically, Christianly, there are no heathen." Rather, because the work of Christ accentuated what Lewis called "the blood unity of the race," it was necessary to recognize that there were no longer any heathen whom it was acceptable for the people of God to enslave.

To drive his point home, he asked why, if proslavery advocates were so faithful in believing the Bible, slaves who became Christians (who, that is, stopped being heathen even in the illegitimate sense in which the term was still being used) were not manumitted immediately. Finally, Lewis returned at the end of his long argument to repeat that the slave system practiced in the U.S. could not by any means be considered the same as anything practiced in the ancient world, In his view, even the brutal Roman system was not as degenerate by biblical standards as the American: ‘No Roman court ever made a decision so casting a man out of the state, and out of the pale of humanity, as the Dred Scott [case]." In sum, Lewis argued that the Bible nowhere legitimated racially defined slavery and everywhere condemned social systems beset with the evils that in fact attended the practice of slavery in the U.S.

Promising as the arguments made by Lewis might now seem, they failed in late 1860 to make much headway in American public debate. Three reasons explain why this nuanced biblical attack on American slavery was so relatively ineffective. The first was that biblical defenders of slavery found it easy to lump Lewis’s kind of nuanced biblicism with the arguments of radical abolitionists who claimed that the Bible condemned slavery per se as a sin. Since these radical arguments seemed so obviously to lead to the overthrow of the Bible, the more nuanced position probably did too.

The other two reasons for the failure of a nuanced biblical antislavery concerned the weighty issues of race and common sense. As indicated in Lewis’s arguments, an inability to countenance "the blood unity of the race" provided strong support for biblical defenses of slavery.

On the other front, nuanced biblical attacks on American slavery faced rough going precisely because they were nuanced. This position could not simply be read out of any one biblical text; it could not be lifted directly from the page. Rather, it needed patient reflection on the entirety of the scriptures; it required expert knowledge of the historical circumstances of ancient Near Eastern and Roman slave systems as well as of the actually existing conditions in the slave states; and it demanded that sophisticated interpretative practice replace a commonsensically literal approach to the sacred text. In short, this was an argument of elites requiring that the populace defer to its intellectual betters. As such, it contradicted democratic and republican intellectual instincts. In the culture of the U.S., as that culture had been constructed by three generations of evangelical Bible believers, the nuanced biblical argument was doomed.

The question of scripture and slavery constituted a great problem in 1860 because a biblically inspired people had done so much to construct the country they were now pulling apart. The interpretative practices that had grown up with the great antebellum denominations favored democratic, republican, antitraditional and commonsensical exegesis. Against this historical background, the biblical proslavery argument seemed very strong, the biblical antislavery argument seemed religiously dangerous, and the nuanced biblical argument against slavery in its American form did not comport well with democratic practice and republican theory. Yet many in the North who because of their commonsensical interpretation of the Bible opposed any use of scripture to attack slavery were nonetheless uneasy with the system. They were joined by at least a few from the South. Though conservative in their attachment to traditional views of the Bible, they continued to struggle against the all-out proslavery biblicism of the South’s great champions.

On the eve of the Civil War, interpretations of the Bible that made the most sense to the broadest public were those that incorporated the defining experiences of America into the hermeneutics used for interpreting what the infallible text actually meant. In this effort, those who, like James Henley Thornwell, defended the legitimacy of slavery in the Bible had the easiest task. The procedure, which by 1860 had been repeated countless times, was uncomplicated. First, open the scriptures and read -- at, say, Leviticus 25:45, or, even better, at 1 Corinthians 7:20-21. Second, decide for yourself what these passages mean. Don’t wait for a bishop or a king or a president or a meddling Yankee to tell you what the passage means, but decide for yourself. Third, if anyone tries to convince you that you are not interpreting such passages in the commonsensical, ordinary meaning of the words, look hard at what such a one believes with respect to other biblical doctrines. If you find in what he or she says about such doctrines the least hint of unorthodoxy, as inevitably you will, then you may rest assured that you are being asked to give up not only the plain meaning of scripture, but also the entire trust in the Bible that made the country into such a great Christian civilization.

With debate over the Bible and slavery at such a pass, and especially with the success of the proslavery biblical argument manifestly (if also uncomfortably) convincing to most southerners and many in the North, difficulties abounded. The country had a problem because its most trusted religious authority, the Bible, was sounding an uncertain note. The evangelical Protestant churches had a problem because the mere fact of trusting implicitly in the Bible was not solving disagreements about what the Bible taught concerning slavery. The country and the churches were both in trouble because the remedy that finally solved the question of how to interpret the Bible was recourse to arms. The supreme crisis over the Bible was that there existed no apparent biblical resolution to the crisis. It was left to those consummate theologians, the reverend doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant.

Reasons and Arguments in the Constitution

Book Review: The Founders’ Constitution edited by Philip B. Kurkland and Ralph Lerner (University of Chicago Press), $300. 3,250 pp.

The bicentennial celebration of the United States Constitution has naturally produced a flurry of books on the subject. Among the reissues of old standards and a largish crop of filio-pietistic potboilers are a number of works of enduring substance. The past two years have seen the appearance of an informative Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (4 vols., edited by Leonard W. Levy [Macmillan]) , several outstanding studies on its intellectual background (including Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seculorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution [University Press of Kansas] and Morton White’s Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution [Oxford University Press], at least one pathbreaking effort to trace the document’s role through the years (Michael Kammen’s A Machine That Would Go of Itself The Constitution in American Culture [Knopf]) and a gaggle of good books on its religious themes (see Martin Marty’s review in The Century ["James Madison Revisited," April 9. 1986])

In this season of good books, however, the most significant is surely The Founders’ Constitution a five-volume work edited by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, widely recognized experts in constitutional law and constitutional politics respectively, who teach at the University of Chicago. The Founders’ Constitution (University of Chicago Press, $250 until June 30; $300 thereafter) is not the last word on that venerable document, but the comprehensiveness and compelling organization of its 3,250 pages and nearly 40 million words make it, beyond cavil, the place to begin discussions. Even at its hefty price, it is a bargain.

The Founders’ Constitution is, in the editors’ words, "an anthology of reasons and of the political arguments that thoughtful men and women drew from, and used to support those reasons" (I: xi) The "reasons" and "arguments" are those of the founding generation and of the works that the’ founders read. The editors have organized "reasons" and "arguments" according to the structure of the Constitution itself. Volume I first reproduces nine "Fundamental Documents" marking the stages of constitutional development from the beginnings of independence (i.e., the Continental Congress’s "Declaration and Resolves" of October 1774) through the struggle for nationhood (e.g., the Virginia Declaration of Rights of June 1776, the Dec1aration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation of 1781) to the Constitution itself. The remainder of Volume I gathers documents relating to general principles of constitutionalism, organized according to the phrases of the Preamble. Volumes II-V follow the same pattern, with historical documents arranged so as to illuminate each clause of the Constitution and its first 12 amendments.

Most of the documents originated during the years between Lexington and Concord (1775) and the passage of the Bill of Rights (1791) , a period during which patriots established not only two different national governments but also the governments of the 13 states. A healthy number of selections are drawn from earlier sources (John Calvin, Roger Williams and William Penn, for instance, along with more obviously political influences) The editors also include many documents from the period after the Constitution’s passage to the mid 1830s, when the last of the major founding fathers died (John Marshall in 1835, James Madison in 1836) By so doing they show how the new nation’s courts, its congresses and the veterans of the Convention interpreted the Constitution over its first half-century. A splendid series of indexes (included with each volume) makes it easier to get at the material.

A sense of the volume’s organization can be gleaned from Volume I, where the editors expound three themes under the heading "We the People of the United States": ‘Popular Basis of Political Authority," "Right of Revolution" and "Republican Government." The latter includes 34 documents; first, on the theme of republicanism, are excerpts from Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws , David Hume’ s Of Commerce and Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Following in chronological sequence are selections from the published and private writings of John Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Gouverneur Morris and other founders, and selections from official proceedings of state and national governments.

This approach succeeds admirably in bringing to life the distant words of the Constitution. A reader who wishes to know, for instance, why Article 1, section 9, clause 1 prohibited Congress from making any alteration until 1808 in "the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit" can turn to Volume III and find 28 contemporary documents on slavery and the slave trade. These include minutes from the Constitutional Convention’s debates on the clause, records of discussions in the state ratifying conventions bearing on the continuation of slavery, excerpts from public tracts on the subject and several selections from the private correspondence of the Constitution’s authors. Among these, an exchange between two aging figures, John Jay of New York and Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, is especially poignant. Both men played prominent roles in securing the Constitution’s passage, and in addition they shared an active Christian faith that led them to promote a wide variety of mission and reform activities. In 1819 Boudinot sent Jay a brochure describing the work of a New Jersey antislave society. Jay responded by ruminating on this clause in the Constitution and confessing sadly that "the word slaves was avoided, probably on account of the existing toleration of slavery, and of its discordancy with the principles of the Revolution; and from a consciousness of its being repugnant to. . . the Declaration of Independence" (111:298) The number of such revealing glimpses into the thinking of the founders is almost without number. A similar treasure lies in store for those more interested in judicial cases or published arguments than in personal correspondence.

On this question we also hear Ben Franklin: ‘When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself. . so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one" (IV:634) But we also hear of Luther Martin, Maryland’s first lawyer and a leading antifederalist. who saw no problems with a general religious test. He reported sarcastically that "there’ were some members [at the Constitutional Convention] so unfashionable as to think that a belief of the existence of a Deity, and of a state of future rewards and punishments would be some security for the good conduct of our rulers, and that in a Christian country it would be at least decent to hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism" (IV:642) This chapter also includes excerpts from state constitutions that imposed religious tests on government officers (Delaware, for example. required belief in the Trinity and in the inspiration of the Christian Bible) and several statements from leaders who agreed. with Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth (by chance a member of Luther Martin’s 1766 graduating class from Princeton College) that

if we mean to have those appointed to public offices, who are sincere friends to religion, we, the people who appoint them, must take care to choose such characters; and not rely upon such cobweb barriers as test-laws are" (IV:640)

With such documentary riches, the extraordinary historical value of The Founders’ Constitution is beyond question. But we must also ask: Is it relevant? Setting forth so painstakingly the context of the Constitution’s words, does it guide us in using that venerable instrument of government today? Would it, for example. be useful for adjudicating the recent dispute between Attorney General Edwin Meese and Justice William Brennan over whether the court is following the founders’ "intention"?

The editors clearly hope so, but they express that hope with a sober realism: "To the extent that the Constitution still matters -- as a framework, as a statement of broad purposes, as a point of recurring reference, as a legitimation of further developments, as a restraint on the overbearing and the righteous -- to that extent it is worthwhile to try to enter into that world of discourse" (I:xii) As always, however, where the historical scholarship is very good, the contemporary application must be very cautious. No chapter in The Founders’ Constitution shows the need for such caution more clearly than its wonderful section on the religion phrases of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof") Like several other chapters (including those on Art. I, sec. 2, clause 3 regarding apportionment, on Art. 3, Sec. 2, clause 1 concerning the powers of the judiciary, and on the Fifth and Sixth Amendments concerning criminal process) , the treatment of this clause amounts to a substantial monograph. The 69 documents and the references to 99 other pertinent sources put us as close to this ‘text" and its "original intent" as all but the most diligent scholars are ever going to get on their own.

On one level, the "meaning" of this clause is quite clear. One after another the state constitutions had declared that, as North Carolina’s put it, "all men have a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences" (V :71) The state constitutions indicated that the right of "free exercise" was meant to be absolute, at least to the point of not "disturb[ing] the public peace or obstruct[ing] others in their religious worship" (Massachusetts, 1780, V:77) Equally straightforward was the opposition to "an establishment of religion."

During the debate in the first Congress of August 1789 that led to the First Amendment, the fear was expressed that this amendment might be used "to abolish religion altogether." Madison hastened to silence this objection, saying that he "apprehended the meaning of the words to be, that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience" (V:93) "No establishment" meant that there would never be a Church of America as there had been a Church of England, and that the United States government would never coerce any of its citizens to support any church in the land.

But exactly what did the prohibition of an established church and a guarantee of the free exercise of religion "mean" to the founders themselves? At this point, The Founders’ Constitution is no less helpful, though it shows that this is not a simple question. What Jefferson thought the First Amendment meant is well known. As he put it to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, there was to be "a wail of separation between Church and State" (V:96). He also felt that debate over the famous Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1785 formed the essential background to the First Amendment, and that the Virginia Statute was consciously written to guarantee full participation in public life on equal terms by "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination" (V:85)

Other founders interpreted the words differently. In 1812 Joseph Story became the youngest judge ever to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and over the course of his lengthy tenure (1812-1845) he was Chief Justice John Marshall’s right-hand man in defining the role of the court itself, and its jurisdiction over state an4 national laws.. While serving as a justice, Story transformed the Harvard Law School into the nation’s premier school for lawyers and also wrote the most influential commentaries on the nation’s laws to appear before the Civil War.

Story’s 1833 commentary on the First Amendment showed how he read the founders’ intent. Hebegan by asserting that "the promulgation of the great doctrines of religion . . . . [can] never be a matter of indifference to any well ordered community," "A republic" in particular required "the Christian religion, as the great basis, on which it must rest for, its support and permanence." The First Amendment therefore allowed "Christianity . . . to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship." Moreover, "the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the state governments," but to the end that "the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel, may sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship" (V:108-l10)

James Madison, the individual closest to the document, offered an interpretation more like Jefferson’s. On the basis of the First Amendment, as well as the general principles of the Constitution, he opposed public payment for chaplains in Congress and the military, spoke out against national proclamations of days of prayer (though as president he did "recommend" them) and while president vetoed congressional efforts to incorporate churches in the District of Columbia (fullest statement, V: 103-105) At the same time, Madison frequently opined that it was appropriate for private citizens to support chaplains and various kinds of semiorganized public religion through voluntary contributions (V: 104,105)

Jefferson, Story and Madison were all "founders" -- Madison through direct participation at the Convention, Jefferson and Story through their influential application of the Constitution in its early years. Whose intention defines the real meaning of the First Amendment? The Founders’ Constitution does not leave us totally in the dark on such issues. None of the founders, for instance, interpreted the First Amendment as prohibiting religiously grounded arguments for general public policies. Nor did they seem to worry about incidental benefits accruing to religious institutions from government measures designed for the benefit of all citizens. On the other hand, none felt it was an easy matter for the government to support "religion" in general without edging toward the legal establishment of something like a "church." How such general interpretations apply to situations unknown to the founders (like mass public education or the contention that secular ideologies may function like religions) remains unclear. It is among the many great virtues of this work that The Founders’ Constitution both provides the historical resources for debating such issues and illustrates the pressing need for ongoing political negotiation to resolve them.

More than a few pundits have recently bemoaned the absence of breakthroughs or excitement in the observations of the Constitution’s bicentennial. The Founders’ Constitution is capable of shutting those mouths by itself. Those who take the time to peruse it carefully will find two things far more significant than transitory euphoria: they will understand why the constitutional period was the most compelling episode of political reasoning in our history; and they will realize how clearly a discussion of "first principles" is necessary for rescuing American politics from its parlous state today.

Combating Modern-day Feudalism: Land as God’s Gift

Calling for "a modern equivalent of Jubilee," signers of a proposal fundamentally to revise the property tax structure petitioned the endorsement of the 1984 General Conference of the United Methodist Church. The proposal, which the conference did endorse, sought to shift taxes from labor to land values. Combining good biblical theology with public policy insight, the plan offers a simple but critical tax change as a way of dealing with "poverty, joblessness, slums, urban decay, farmland destruction, the erosion of public services and facilities and social justice."

The current property tax combines land and building taxes; recently, it has become a tax mostly on buildings. As a result, owner-made building improvements are overtaxed, while land is under-taxed. And undertaxing land encourages its disuse. The Methodist petitioners’ simple proposal was to tax land, not buildings. The possibilities are great for achieving social justice through this easily implemented change in the property tax.

These Methodists were echoing early Americans who had the Liberty Bell inscribed to read: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," quoting Leviticus 25:10 which proclaims the Jubilee year. Every 50th year -- the Jubilee year -- the Jewish people were to return the land to the original owners’ heirs.

Biblical justice in this instance, as Walter Brueggemann asserts, "is to sort out what belongs to whom, and return it to them." That is the focus of the Old Testament’s Jubilee proclamation, a policy designed to reduce the excesses of greed and to avoid splitting society into landed and landless factions. The Methodists’ proposal is an example of the type of plan needed to address the inequities that characterize use and ownership of the land.

The generally held belief that ours is a nation of small landholders is a myth. According to Gene Wunderlich, quoted in a 1979 Harper’s article, "about 3 percent of the population owns 55 percent of all American land." And that same 3 per cent holds "95 percent of the private land." Furthermore, while 64 per cent of families own or are in the process of buying their residences, the residential sector occupies only 2 per cent of the 1.3 billion acres of privately held land.

Feudalism, it seems, is still with us; its new face is the landlordism that lets a few benefit from what belongs to society. This lopsided arrangement denies the Bible’s insistence that an equitable share of the Lord’s resources is the birthright of all humans. While the U.S. is infinitely better off than the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa, our situation is worsening. Consider these facts:

• Poor people pay inordinate rents. While in 1970, 25 per cent of income generally went for rent, today, according to National Low-Income Housing Coalition reports, that percentage for many renters, especially the poor, has doubled.

Early in the century, poor immigrants in New York City could buy or lease a shop with a fair chance of prospering. Now many minorities face site costs that almost doom new businesses from the start. A front foot costs more than the whole lot would have 70 years ago, a startling change even when considering inflation.

•Large firms are deserting the cities for cheaper suburban sites, taking with them employment and badly needed tax revenues.

•Large agribusinesses represent only 13 per cent of U.S. farms but take in 72 per cent of agricultural sales, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. At the other end of the scale, 50 per cent of the farms account for only 3 per cent of sales.

• Land-holding is gaining ascendancy over land-using. Land speculation -- holding land for its future worth rather than putting it into current production -- has become standard practice for the affluent.

What gives value to land. Any real estate textbook will explain that the three factors for determining land value are "location, location and location." And any property owner will affirm this truth. But what generates locational value? Three phenomena: God, people and public activities.

God the creator, Genesis tells us, "looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good." We recognize this goodness in the fertility of the soil, natural harbors, scenic beauty, the availability of water, and the subsurface riches of coal, oil, gold, iron and other substances. The land has a God-given goodness and is one of the gifts through which God sustains us.

People create land values simply because they are social beings, consumers and producers. The more people concentrated on a piece of land, the higher its value. The press of population intensifies the demand for homes, jobs and services; this is what makes Manhattan far more valuable than downtown Richmond, Virginia, and Richmond more valuable than Anderson, Indiana, and Anderson more valuable than an uninhabited Utah crossroad.

Finally, the public or government generates land values by providing streets, schools, police protection and other infrastructures. Opening a subway system for the District of Columbia in 1976 gave Washington’s blighted downtown a new lease on life. The subway and its riders are stimulating the economy along all of its corridors. According to a 1981 congressional study, "a minimum of $2 billion in land values has already been added to the existing land value base." However, it concluded that "only a trickle" of these new values finds its way back to local government through the property tax. The biggest share goes to people "lucky enough to own land within easy access of Metro stations."

Private vs. common property. We utterly misunderstand the land issue unless we acknowledge the distinction between the value of the land itself and the value of labor on the land. The institution of private property has a sound foundation -- the proposition that people have a right to the fruits of their labor; that is, to the output of their mental and physical efforts. We are not questioning the legitimacy of earnings that landholders or others derive from buildings or production on the land. People who build homes, factories or offices, or who produce various types of goods and services, have a solid ethical claim to what they have created. However, the land itself, as our biblical forbears realized, does not meet this criterion. "The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof" (Ps. 24:1).

God’s gift of the land does not confer absolute ownership. We are free to use it, enjoy it and benefit from it, but God retains ownership. We serve as God’s caretakers, or tenants, on the land. Jefferson recognized this gift, saying that land belonged in usufruct -- in trust -- to the living. Sir William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on English law, wrote in his Commentaries: "The earth and all things therein are the general property of all mankind, from the gift of the creator."

This idea of the land belonging to all humanity, to the community as a whole, is not entirely inoperative today. National parks, school grounds, public building sites, many wilderness areas, lakes and ocean fronts are recognized as the common property of all.

The immorality of landlordism. An increasingly small elite is taking possession of the nation’s land, enabling them to squeeze more and more from the landless. This is runaway landlordism, and current public policy fuels its progress.

On the federal level, while the wages of ordinary workers find no shelter from the Internal Revenue Service, exemptions and special preferences for landowners whittle down their taxes or turn real estate losses into profits. The 1986 Tax Reform Act aims to reduce these privileges, but landowners’ past ingenuity in avoiding taxation warrants continued vigilance over tax structures. At the local level, the property tax rises for owners who build or improve their homes, rental apartments or commercial buildings, while it is reduced for those who let their land go fallow. Compare the following situation of the Joneses, the Smiths and the Greens.

The Joneses have a well-maintained home. The local tax office, seeing that they have has added air conditioning, a recreation room and a new roof, raises their assessment. Never mind that the Joneses improved their neighborhood and generated jobs and business. The result will be higher taxes not only this year, but as long as they keep the house in good condition.

The Smiths’ home of the same size and age is an eyesore. The yard is full of junk, gutters are rusted, screens are torn, paint is peeling. The tax office says it is worth less than last year. The Smiths’ taxes are reduced, a "reward" for blighting the community.

The Greens do not use their lot at all. They offer no production or housing on it. For wasting the site’s potential, they enjoy the lowest tax bill of the three.

Overtaxing good land use while under-taxing blight and empty lots invites slumlords and encourages land speculators. This type of landlordism -- or modern feudalism -- is an injustice. It allows individual landowners to siphon off the lion’s share of land values.

The ethical foundations of land value taxation. The biblical Jubilee prescription -- redividing the land every half century -- may have been feasible for a people practicing crude agriculture. However, a modern civilization cannot reshuffle the land without confiscating unmovable property or discouraging economic progress. The land value plan suggested here -- increasing land taxes, while decreasing taxes on labor, production and buildings -- achieves the same Jubilee goal without negative effects. It lets everyone share the economic value of the land rather than the land itself, just as a corporation, instead of carving up physical portions of itself each year, lets shareholders enjoy portions of the profit.

The proposed change in the property tax would enable the community to recapture community-created land values. Those who hold land retain undisturbed possession of it so long as they pay back their fair share of land tax to the community each year. Those with prized sites pay most; holders of poor locations pay least.

Society suffers a loss when speculators hold highly productive sites out of use. A land value tax usually persuades owners to use land or to sell it to others who wish to do so. If not, the higher tax compensates society for the land privileges it grants. This approach permits the elimination or major reduction of other taxes that weigh too heavily on wages, while it contributes to increases in local productivity.

Seven Pennsylvania cities have independently increased tax rates on land while imposing much lower tax rates on buildings. Scranton, with a population of 87,000, has had a modest two-rate tax for 70 years. When federal funding was cut in 1980, it raised the tax rate on land to four times that on buildings. In the next two years, the value of private construction in Scranton rose 22 per cent. In contrast, Wilkes-Barre, 18 miles away, kept its old tax system, and construction dropped 44 per cent during the same period.

Strapped for funds in 1974, Harrisburg twice dropped tax rates on buildings and twice increased rates on land. Almost every homeowner got a tax break. McKeesport adopted the two-rate tax in 1980, raising revenues 50 per cent and getting the town out of debt. More remarkably, building investment rose 36 per cent, while falling 14 per cent in neighboring Duquesne and more than twice that in nearby Clairton. Since then, Duquesne, along with New Castle and Washington, has adopted a two-rate tax.

The largest American city using the two-rate tax is Pittsburgh. After the city raised its land-tax rate to four times its building-tax rate in 1979, new construction rose a healthy 14 per cent. In 1980, the land-tax rate rose to five times the building rate, and the value of construction shot up 212 per cent. When in 1982 the city widened the gap to six times the building rate, the value of new building permits rose 600 per cent.

In all these cities, despite a national recession and a severe steel crisis in their region, changes in the property tax structure produced results that were nothing short of startling. As detailed in a Fortune article ("Higher Taxes That Promote Development," August 8, 1983) , housing and downtown buildings increased in numbers and dollar value. Homeowners enjoyed tax reductions, and housing costs were kept low. New construction jobs eased losses in the industrial sector.

Poverty, joblessness and homelessness have been central concerns of religious social-action groups. There is a growing awareness that neither private nor public charity is sufficient in dealing with these problems. Shifting property taxes offers an effective way to encourage public policy to be responsive to blighted cities, farm dislocation, declining industries, chronic unemployment and growing poverty. The need to infuse biblical principles into solutions for these problems seems imperative. Acknowledgment of this necessity is already evident in the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy and parallel works by the Presbyterians, United Methodists and the United Church of Christ. The need to address poverty’s basic causes, including the unhealthy concentration of America’s land and resources in the hands of so few owners -- who have tended to misappropriate land values -- ought to be high on our religious and public policy agendas.

Teaching the Eco-Justice Ethic: The Parable of the Billerica Dam

On the last day of August 1839, Henry David Thoreau, then 22 years old, and his brother, John, 24, set out in their homemade dory on Massachusetts’s Concord River for a week’s camping trip. Thoreau later wrote about the trip in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

After passing through Concord and traveling past the first battleground of the Revolution, where in 1775 "once the embattled farmers stood! And fired the shot heard round the world," they drifted leisurely downstream for most of the afternoon, winding their way through the lush meadows that lay on either side of the river, arriving near sundown at the outskirts of the town of Billerica. Here, on a spit of land jutting into the river, they camped for the night -- the first night in his life Thoreau spent out of doors.

As they rowed along that afternoon, Thoreau observed with delight the rich diversity of fishes and plants that inhabited the river and its banks, and the occasional solitary fisherman who lingered by its shores. But when the two brothers neared Billerica a sudden shift in perception occurred. Three species of fish -- salmon, shad and alewives -- Thoreau writes, "were formerly abundant here, and taken in weirs by the Indians, who taught this method to the whites, by whom they were used as food and as manure." Now, however, fish were missing from the river because "the dam, and afterward the canal at Billerica. . . put an end to their migrations hitherward." There was a time, he recalls, still within memory of the eldest citizens, when the river overflowed with ‘‘miraculous draughts of fishes."

Thoreau’s interest was especially attracted to the plight of the shad, which migrated each year up the river only to be met "by the Corporation with its dam":

Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter. . . . Armed with no sword, . . . but mere shad, armed only with innocence and a just cause. . . I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam?

Yet the shad were not alone in being oppressed by the dam. Thoreau goes on: "At length it would seem that the interests, not of the fishes only, but of the men of Wayland, of Sudbury, of Concord, demand the levelling of that dam." For the dam had not only stopped the harvesting of fish for food and manure, but had also flooded the meadows for many miles upstream. And in the heavily wooded Massachusetts countryside of 1839, natural meadows were a precious resource, essential to farmers for hay to feed their livestock. The farmers now stood idly "with scythes whet," vainly "waiting the subsiding of the waters." "So many sources of wealth inaccessible," Thoreau exclaims.

If we are going to teach the ethic of eco-justice in ways that will empower the public to act on its own behalf, we will need to tell stories about reality.

Jesus began the revolution that is Christianity by teaching parables of the Kingdom. For generations, black Americans have maintained their struggle for political freedom by telling stories of spiritual liberation. According to John Adams, the real American Revolution took place in the hearts and minds of the people long before it happened on the battlefield. British loyalists failed because they had no story to match the sacred story of human rights.

People learn and act through stories. We know how true this is for us as individuals and as members of congregations: our private lives are governed largely by the personal stories we understand ourselves to be living out. Our religious communities live or die on the basis of the redemptive reality of the stories they tell. This is no less true of the civic communities in which we participate -- and the stories that we live out as citizens. Our collective destiny is shaped by the public stories that we believe provide trustworthy clues to the meaning of our common world and direction for the future.

If we are going to teach a public ethic of eco-justice, we need public stories of eco-justice -- public parables that have the capacity to communicate the meaning of our love for the earth and for people as citizens: the reality of the struggle for eco-justice in the ongoing history of our civic communities.

Such public parables must undergird all of the policies, programs, pronouncements, speeches, resolutions, action plans, studies and reports that we make on the limits of natural resources and the unjust distribution of economic costs and benefits. Without those parables, everything else is futile. They alone will empower us to take the two most basic actions in this regard: first, to identify ourselves as members of civic communities -- inclusive of the natural communities with which we share common ground; and second, to organize ourselves as civic communities by regaining control of our social, political and economic institutions and reinhabiting the land that sustains us.

It is evident that in today’s world such public stories are by definition revolutionary. It is also evident that they will be, in one way or another, parables of democratic faith, carrying forward the prophetic convictions of our biblical and religious heritage through the story of our shared secular struggle toward "liberty and justice for all." Substantial resources for parables of eco-justice are to be found in the literature of progressive democratic traditions of the United States (and of other world cultures) Thoreau’s story of Billerica Dam is one.

The story begins in the world of ordinary experience. Thoreau and his brother, cruising down the Concord River, admiring the scenery, come upon Billerica Dam. It is an ordinary enough sight -- faint purple clouds reflected in the water, cowbells along the banks. Then Thoreau abruptly begins to address not the reader but the fish of the river. He suddenly shifts the point of view, and we find ourselves looking at the scene through the eyes of lowly shad seeking a way up the river to spawn; through the eyes of elderly citizens who remember their own childhood when the fish swam free; through the eyes of farmers with their oxen, barred from cutting hay. Then our eyes are opened, and we see that at the core of the ordinary world there is a world struggling to be free, that this is the world that is worthy of our love:

Who hears the fishes when they cry? It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries. Thou shalt ere long have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if I am not mistaken. Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized. If it were not so, but thou were to be overlooked at first and at last, then would not I take their heaven. . . . Keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayest meet.

This is the world-affirming truth about the scene. The story of shad and farmers and oxen is the true story. The "Corporation and its dam" -- so apparently the stuff of the ordinary course of events, like the priest and the Levite passing on the other side -- is a story that is world-denying.

What analogy does Thoreau use that enables this sudden and radical shift in our perception? Is it not the analogy between the human struggle for liberation and nature’s struggle to be free? And that between the oppression of people and the oppression of the earth? Again like the parables of Jesus, Thoreau’s tale is built upon a new and radical metaphor which serves well as the basic metaphor for all stories that teach the ethic of eco-justice.

Not by accident does Thoreau begin his account in passing the Concord battlefield. This is the assumed metaphorical reference for everything that follows. The shad, like the Concord farmers, have, as he says, a "just cause," and when he asks what might avail a crowbar against the Billerica Dam, he is pointing, by means of a parable, to a radically new understanding of the story of human existence. The whole point of Thoreau’s parable -- indeed, of all his writings, including Walden, Civil Disobedience and his famous Plea for Captain John Brown -- is to declare that the revolution of 1776 is not yet over; the people and the land we love still struggle for liberation.

It is by virtue of this analogy that the parable gains its moral power. It bids us ask: How can this be? Why should a corporation be able to oppress the people and other living creatures who depend on the Concord River’s running free?

The most powerful tools available to us for teaching the ethic of eco-justice are these stories built upon the analogy between human oppression and nature’s oppression, between the human struggle for liberation and nature’s struggle for fulfillment. All that we hope to say about the interdependence of people and the earth, economic justice and ecological responsibility, is ultimately based in this metaphor and its message that the struggle of humanity and the earth are one.

This is not a new metaphor in human history. It lies latent, occasionally becoming explicit, in the biblical texts. "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream," declares Amos. "The land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air; and even the fish of the sea are taken away," laments Hosea. "For I reckon that the sufferings we now endure bear no comparison with the splendour, as yet unrevealed, which is in store for us," writes Paul in his letter to the Romans. "Up to the present, we know, the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of childbirth."

Such images, deeply engraved on our cultural memory, lie behind Thoreau’s parable on Billerica Dam. But the moral import of these images has become clear only in the modern era. Indeed, their full existential implications may be clear for the first time to our generation.

The critical turning point was the 18th century: the age of human rights and the first democratic revolutions. The English reformer William Wilberforce, after successfully leading the struggle to abolish slavery from the British empire, sponsored Parliament’s first bill to protect animals -- at the same time that movements for human rights began. Thomas Paine declared that, if it had not been for tyrants, "the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race." The Declaration of Independence audaciously grounded the inalienable rights of persons in the laws of nature and nature’s God.

By 1839, at least one American, Henry David Thoreau, grasped the metaphor’s new moral implications and made the crucial connection with the public story of democracy told by his compatriots. In the years since, as the means of human destruction have grown ever greater, and the extent of humanity’s willingness to deny the world has become ever more apparent, the profound truth of the analogy has also become increasingly evident, and its connection with democratic aspirations even stronger.

Or talk to Roy Brown of Puerto Rico, whose band, Aires Bucaneros, plays songs that seek to make a statement about present-day society and are associated with the Puerto Rican movement for independence. Ask him about the group’s song called "Arboles" ("Trees") He will tell you that it relates the importance of trees to Puerto Rico’s future; the purity of trees, how straight they are, how honest they are in their beauty -- how human beings should be like that, should take the side of the least powerful, should, like trees, give shade. And he will also tell you about how the commercial radio stations in Puerto Rico refuse to play his songs because they are considered politically dangerous.

Or talk to the people in the village of Reni in northern India. One day in 1970, so the story goes, the women of the village spontaneously began to hug the local trees, their precious source of firewood, stopping New Delhi corporations from logging the forests for foreign export. Thus the Andolan Chipko movement was born. For weeks a sizable procession marched to the music of drums, bells and cymbals as similar symbolic actions spread rapidly throughout the region. Eventually a 12,000-square-kilometer watershed was saved and an ambitious community-based development program begun -- all because these few women had hugged the life-giving, water-saving trees.

One afternoon I found myself wondering what happened to Billerica Dam. To my surprise, I discovered that the Unitarian Universalist Association, with which I am affiliated, has a member church in Billerica -- in fact, the First Parish of Billerica. A call to the minister, Phil Larson, yielded the information that what looked like "Biller-ica" was pronounced "Bill-rica," and the suggestion that I call church historian Charles Stearns.

From Stearns I learned that the dam Thoreau saw was built in 1835 by a Boston business concern in order to supply water to the Middlesex canal and divert trade from Newburyport to Boston. Other dams had preceded this one; m fact, in the 18th century local farmers filed a series of legal suits against the various corporations that built dams on the river. In 1725 one of these suits was actually won, and a dam was temporarily torn down. Stearns told me that while the dam and canal are now preserved as a national historic landmark, the Concord River is so polluted by manufacturing plants upstream at Sudbury that his children would never think of fishing, swimming or boating in it. He suggested that I call Wayne Klug about the conservation battle going on in Billerica.

Klug, a local college teacher, was eager to talk. It seems that recently an old farm that abutted the river was privately sold to a developer who plans to turn it into a housing development for Boston commuters. The land includes the site on which Thoreau and his brother camped in 1839; it is also crucial to the preservation of the river wetlands. Wayne said that his group had come straight up against the local power structure, which considers private property to be sacrosanct. He also said that the battle had taught him the need to "revolutionize our priorities." But this was not the only environmental battle that had been fought in Billerica. "Call Helen Knight," he said.

Knight, a retired English teacher, led an "infamous group of five" in a successful battle to clean up the Billerica dump. She said that she had never engaged in this kind of activity before, but she was outraged when, seven years ago, her first complaints were brushed aside by the local board of health. The group discovered that the dump contained toxic materials that were contaminating the groundwater of Billerica and the Concord River, as well as creating other threats to human health. The group fought hard to get the attorney general of Massachusetts involved; now the site is on the federal superfund list. In addition to corruption, the basic problem, she said, was the local power structure’s conviction that the dump owner could do anything he wished with his "private property. I have become a very radical old lady," Helen Knight commented.

Billerica is not unique. Grace George, a longtime resident of Patterson, New Jersey, tells stories of the magnificent rainbows that appear in the Passaic River’s Great Falls at Patterson, the very falls that began the industrial revolution in the United States. Today the Passaic is heavily polluted and the city of Patterson is in economic depression. Yet Grace George says that the rainbow -- the symbol of the original promise of the covenant of creation -- is still present, a symbol of the new covenant of free citizens to restore the region’s environmental and social health.

In the final analysis, the churches’ ability to teach the ethic of eco-justice to the public depends on the assessment we make of the religious and ethical significance of our public traditions -- in particular, the civic tradition of participatory democracy. If we are unable to affirm important enough meanings in the stories of our civic communities to be shared and celebrated in our churches, we will always stand in a secondary rather than a primary relationship to the struggle for eco-justice. If, on the other hand, we find such stories illuminating of the prophetic convictions of our biblical and religious heritage -- in some cases, expanding those meanings in new and revealing ways -- we will find the inspiration to speak new words of judgment and hope.

From Songs of Protest to Hymns of Praise

The year is 1968. The place is suburban Chicago. The room is crowded with long-haired young people clad in faded blue jeans, hand-strung beads, Indian headbands, moccasin boots and long calico dresses. Here and there, a clandestine marijuana joint is shared.

On stage is a folk-rock band whose dress and demeanor resemble those of the audience. The songs, from the hit album Hangman, are mostly concerned with civil rights and the Vietnam war.

This particular concert is a fund-raiser for Jerry Rubin, one of the "Chicago Seven," arrested for protesting the war and racial inequities. The group is Mason Proffitt, whose members include brothers John and Terry Talbot.

Almost two decades later another concert takes place in Dallas, or Chicago, or Minneapolis. A mammoth crowd has gathered. Gone are the garments and atmosphere of the ‘60s. The audience hushes as the lights go down, and a Franciscan brother -- clothed in the order’s traditional brown robe -- walks quietly onto the stage, sits down and begins to play an acoustic guitar.

There is no attempt to entertain. Indeed, the evening is more like a mass than a concert. The Franciscan whose soft, sincere sound of praise and worship mesmerizes the audience is John Michael Talbot.

To reach the Little Portion, a Franciscan hermitage founded by Talbot, one must have a tremendous desire to get there. The only approach to the secluded spot in the Arkansas Ozarks is up a steep, unfriendly gravel road that winds for 30 minutes after leaving the paved highway near Eureka Springs, but I am determined to make my visit.

At last I spot the gate and drive slowly onto the hermitage grounds. I am struck first by the silence, and then by the surrounding mountains. The air is clear, the ground is fresh and moist from a recent rain. A small lake sits serenely on one side of the area. Several buildings are scattered around the hermitage, each one divided into two compartments, and each, with its chimney and solar panels, speaking eloquently of careful conservation.

Near the lake on one side is a tiny chapel equipped only with a circle of pillows and a simple altar. A larger building in the middle is used for meals and housekeeping tasks.

John Michael and his older brother, Terry, began singing gospel music for various church groups when they were eight and nine years old. Their love of music accompanied them into their young adult years when their convictions found expression in the songs of Mason Proffitt.

"We were a social comment band," Talbot recalls. "Our hearts were in the right place. We were asking the right questions, but coming up with the wrong answers in many cases. There were some really good people back then, people who were genuinely seeking a better way. We were searching for something universal -- some absolute point of reference. But we couldn’t find it. . . . All of that searching was real. It was genuine. But much of it ended in despair, because many of us found no lasting answer."

Mason Proffitt hit the peak of popularity around 1968, and by 1969 John Talbot was looking elsewhere for fulfillment. "Music had become my god," he says, "and I knew that something was terribly wrong." Within the next few years Talbot had found his absolute truth -- his point of reference -- by searching through Scriptures and reading the Patristics.

Talbot is surprised when I tell him that people see his life and music now as a drastic change from those days. "The Franciscans," he says, "are similar in many ways to the activists of the ‘60s. . . As a Franciscan, I am still working for justice, but in a redeemed and completed kind of way."

However, Talbot did not move directly from his social-activist band to the Franciscans in one step. Indeed, at the time of his conversion to Christianity and for several years afterward, Talbot associated with the "Jesus Movement" and was blatantly anti-Catholic.

During those years the band dissolved, and in 1973 John and Terry, as "the Talbot Brothers," made an album, Reborn. Then in 1976 they collaborated on Firewind, a musical about the events in the early portion of Acts. Talbot also cut two solo albums with the same record label: The New Earth and John Michael Talbot. On the cover of the latter, he is pictured in a white suit with almost waist-length hair and beard, clutching the ubiquitous guitar. The music on the albums was not unlike the folk-rock songs of Mason Proffitt.

Many of Talbot’s phrases and mannerisms are still reminiscent of the Jesus people, with whom he associated for some time. When I point them out, he laughs. "I did identify with the Jesus people," he replies, "although my conversion was independent of any group. I was a freak who came to love Jesus so I guess that makes me a Jesus freak."

During the following years Talbot was divorced, leaving him deeply depressed. "I had lost my wife. I had lost my child. Apparently my Christianity wasn’t so hot -- my wife wasn’t impressed with it," he reflects bitterly. No longer was he finding the answers he needed in the places he had looked before. "I was totally broken."

Then he began reading about St. Francis of Assisi. "I cried and cried," he remembers. "There was this man, living the gospel so humbly and effecting far more than anything I was involved with -- any denomination, any peace and social-action group, any charismatic renewal or Jesus movement. . . . I wanted to know how Francis did it. I wanted to know more about the Franciscans."

Despite his anti-Catholic convictions, Talbot began finding more and more comfort and healing in the writings of Catholic mystics. "Somehow all of the books that were helping me turned out to be Roman Catholic," he says. He decided to visit Alverna, a Franciscan retreat center in Indiana. There, he recalls, the friars "did not try to make me Catholic or Franciscan." But he found such healing among them that he soon became both.

While studying the life of St. Francis, Talbot discovered that much of the saint’s life had been spent in seclusion, and that he had founded more than 25 hermitages. I realized that, in order to be effective in ministry, you’ve got to have an effective contemplative life, or your ministry will burn you out."

So Talbot, now a Third Order Franciscan, obtained permission to build a hermitage at Alverna. There he started the Little Portion House of Prayer and a group called People for Peace. "People started coming -- lots of them," he says. "They thought there was a holy man in the woods. But it was just me."

Soon the hermitage had attracted so many people that it could not maintain its contemplative purpose. "It was too accessible. We needed more seclusion," he recalls. By that time Talbot had sold everything and given the money to the poor -- everything except an isolated plot in the Ozarks that simply wouldn’t sell. "I was going around saying, ‘Where can I go to establish a new hermitage -- a secluded place? Where?"’ Talbot remembers. "And one of the brothers said to me, ‘John, you are so stupid. Look at this property you can’t sell.’ And he was right, of course. It was perfect. And here we are."

The Lord’s Supper (1978) , a quiet and rich musical adaptation of the Catholic Eucharist, was the first recording that Talbot made after becoming a monk. "It was going to be my last," he says. "I thought I would just do that one last album and then go on to other things. It turned out to be the most successful recording I had ever done."

In 1980, he and his brother released another album together -- an intricately arranged feast of music (recorded with the London Chamber Orchestra) titled The Painter. In 1981 Talbot composed Troubadour of the Great King, a double album commemorating St. Francis’s 800^th birthday that captures the spirit of the medieval saint in a joyous way. Included are prayers and sayings of St. Francis set to music in a variety of styles, as well as songs about the saint and the things he loved.

During those years, Talbot also recorded Come to the Quiet, an instrumental album with acoustic guitar and a small woodwind and string ensemble. As the title suggests, the music is intended for contemplation, and is widely used by religious groups in periods of corporate silence.

In 1982 Talbot released a marvelous celebration of the incarnation called Light Eternal with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Light Eternal has been presented by some church choirs (extremely talented ones; it is a difficult piece) in the place of more traditional Christmas cantatas. Songs for Worship (I and II) , released at about the same time as Light Eternal, are the kind of songs that belong around a campfire or beside a lake.

More recently Talbot has recorded The Quiet, which, unlike its companion album, Come to the Quiet, is primarily an instrumental collection. The instruments used are mostly acoustic guitar and woodwinds. He has also produced a collection of his own songs and those of friends (including brothers and sisters from the Little Portion) called Be Exalted, which captures more of the charismatic nature of the Little Portion and Talbot’s Franciscanism.

A new instrumental album, Empty Canvas, can be found in the New Age section of most record stores. Heart of the Shepherd is the singer’s newest album, released earlier this year. Coming out this summer will be Few Be the Lovers, which suggests the bride-of Christ theme that is central to Talbot’s thinking.

Talbot’s albums offer clean, intricate acoustic guitar and a rich tenor voice. Background vocals are blended in an almost mystical harmony. Superb symphonic arrangements in some (such as Troubadour of the Great King and Light Eternal) capture a festive praise. Some are more quiet and contemplative (The Quiet, Come to the Quiet, Empty Canvas) and some are rich liturgical offerings (such as the luxuriant cello prelude to The Lord’s Supper) In every case, though, the music constitutes worship.

Talbot sees his role as a musician as a way to bring people into an authentic relationship with Christ. "I don’t do the challenging myself," he explains. "I just present Jesus to them as real, and Jesus challenges the socks off them. The music just prepares the way for that to happen."

The Little Portion constantly receives letters from people who have been strongly affected by the albums or by the many concerts that Talbot performs with Sister Donna of Little Portion. The overwhelming response is: "It’s more than a concert; it’s profound worship. It’s mystical." Many say that the concerts or albums have changed their lives drastically. Talbot’s response to the feedback is that he would rather not hear the praise. "In one way it would be encouraging, but when I think about it, it scares me to death."

Almost all of the proceeds from Talbot’s albums, books (he has written three) and concerts go to the Franciscan Mercy Corps, which Talbot founded last year to deal with such concerns as a consciously chosen lifestyle of poverty; funds for Third World relief and development; and itinerant ministry – "being a joyful presence in the midst of this materialistic society, to alleviate some of the atrocities of our own country, like the scourge of homeless people now on the streets." Talbot says that he wants to build "an army of friars to remind the people of this country that you can be poor and happy at the same time." He has also founded a national ecumenical order of lay Franciscans, called the Little Portion Associates, made up of people who are not ready (or not meant) for the monastic life; but who respond to the challenge of Franciscan ideals of simplicity, compassion and the living of the Sermon on the Mount.

Talbot describes all of these initiatives as "the gentle revolution." He and others at the Little Portion spend half of their time in retreat and half of their time in ministry. In dealing with such issues as global poverty, social injustice, nuclear war and abortion, Talbot and his associates are living out the 800-year-old Franciscan spirituality. That spirituality is being expressed profoundly in Talbot’s music.

I see that he is getting tired, and I realize that I have taken far more time than I requested. So I ask one more question: What do you want your music to convey? He smiles, and his answer is one word only. "Jesus," he says.

Maundy Thursday: Thomas’s Testimony (Luke 22:15)

"How I have longed to eat this Passover with you before my death" [Luke 22:15].

Yes, they always said I questioned everything –

too much for my own good, was the way they used to put it.

Although, since that evening in the Upper Room

when he offered me his hands and side, the nail prints,

spear wound to touch and know, I’ve never doubted him again.

And yet, I still have questions.

For instance, what he meant when he told us

how he’d wished to eat that supper with us just

before he died. "How I have longed . . ." he said;

as if that was a moment he had lived for all his days.

"How I have longed to eat this pesach with you all

before I die." It gave us quite a shock, I can tell you,

him talking again like that about his death.

But it was the longing that puzzled me at the time –

still catches, tugs the tangled cords of memory

after all these many years. "How I have longed. . ."

What could the Lord have meant by that

expression of deep yearning?

Might it have been because he knew the goal

was now within his reach, that after three hard years

of testing, trial, stress and many disappointments,

giving, always giving, pouring out his mind, his heart,

his very soul, spilling forth so readily the vibrant life

that was within him in acts of healing, feeding, loving,

might it have been with some relief he caught sight

of the end of his long journey, glimpsed the goal which,

fearful though it was to us, to him would mean fulfillment

of his task, the long-expected climax and conclusion

of his pilgrimage? Was that, perhaps, why Jesus said

he longed to share the feast with us, because

it meant that all was nearly over?

Another thought. Could he have seen this supper

as a fond farewell; one final feast with all of us before

he faced the end alone? We certainly had shared enough,

had plenty to remember and be thankful for that night.

So much had happened since he called us from the boats,

the sheds and shops, the hillsides of sweet Galilee,

so many miles of journeying, so many mouths fed,

miseries relieved. Everywhere we went, especially at first,

there were crowds, crowds wanting something, food,

freedom, a future maybe, something they could hope for,

live for, shape their battered lives around

and start to dream again. Mostly they came, I think,

because, he loved them and could tell them so, yes,

even those vast, milling throngs; there was a touch,

a sense, a spirit moving in, across, among those mobs

of eager people, told them here at last they had a man

who was concerned not for himself, who was not out to get

himself elected, but who cared for every single one of them,

and tottering old dames, lepers, whores, soldiers,

robbers; I’ve seen them all transformed by seeing him.

So anyway, perhaps it was the thought of all we’d shared,

the memories, relationships we had built up, he wanted,

then, to celebrate, to gather all together in one last

and glorious evening of true fellowship before he said

"Farewell" to us, the twelve who had walked with him all the way.

And yet I think that there was even more

than this within that longing. He said it

with such passion, I have never, even yet, been able

to forget those words and just the way they sounded.

"How I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I die."

Could it have been that he too was unsure,

that although he knew the basic fundamental fact

that he must die, he did not understand precisely how

and why this had to be fulfilled? It seemed to me as if,

in all he did that evening at the table, he too was finding

meaning and enlightenment, as if, in breaking bread

and pouring wine, our Lord himself was being led –

as we were through him -- into a new and richer comprehension,

into a full and final revelation that this, of course,

was why it must be so -- that only as a grain of wheat falls

to the ground and dies can it arise again and bring forth

ripe new grain to form the loaf that feeds a hungry world.

Yes, I believe it dawned on him -- as he was dong it –

that bread, in being broken, is available, and being shared

becomes a part of many bodies, many lives; multiplies

itself in twelve or twenty, twenty thousand ways and soon

is irresistible, a mighty and united host of servants

for the kingdom. And with the cup,

so clear a symbol of his blood in that red wine,

he saw, as we did, that his life, poured forth, would seal

a new commitment, would form upon the altar of God’s grace

a whole new covenant that would replace the ancient,

worn-out slaughter of the animals with one complete

and final act, the sacrifice of God’s own son

to show the world, to show us all the height

and depth and majesty, the eternal glory of God’s love,

which gives itself forever, or until we come,

at last, and offer up our own lives in return.

So, as the meal progressed, we saw the Father

and the Son converse together in his actions and his words.

We watched the faith take shape, the kingdom-yet-to-be

assume its royal form, its sacramental lineaments.

We all were witnesses at the birth of a new era, new creation.

What followed afterwards, of course is history.

It shattered me -- the whole thing was too much.

And at the cross I had completely lost already all

I had seen and heard and tasted in the Upper Room

the night before. I lost it all.

And if it were not for his love, his grace

that sought me out behind locked doors, called me

to touch and then believe, I would not be here

at your humble table ready now with you, to break

the bread and pour the wine as he did years ago.

Yet I am here; here to tell you what I know,

what I remember of that night and even more,

what I believe will happen here and now as you and I

take bread and wine together in his name.

For it is with great longing that I too have longed

to eat this Passover with you.

Now in his name, and in his risen presence,

let the feast begin. Amen.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: From Superstar to Requiem

From his first success with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1967 at the age of 19, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s works have given a prominent role to religious themes. Recently, in a surprising move prompted by the 1982 death of his father, William Southcombe Lloyd Webber, organist at All Saints Church near Westminster Abbey, the composer departed in style and set to music the same Latin text of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead that fascinated composers from Mozart to Verdi. The result, Requiem, which premiered in New York in 1985, was immediately subject to both controversy and criticism. As one critic wrote, "Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem? Why not give us Sylvester Stallone as King Lear while we’re at it?"

Yet the 38-year-old British composer of such blockbuster musicals as Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and Cats, who has written such enormously popular melodies as "I Don’t Know How to Love Him," "Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina" and "Memories," demonstrated in the Requiem that he can also write beautiful serious music in the English choral tradition -- while still holding on to his more rock-inspired identity. (The "Hosanna" of the Requiem is scored with drum kit, synthesizer, saxophone and piano added to the tenor solo, orchestra and chorus.)

Both musically and theologically the Requiem is far removed from Lloyd Webber’s earlier works. Its colorful collage of musical images coheres largely because of the work’s persistent overall theme of death. This theme is treated from a variety of perspectives -- confusion and resistance, anger and bitterness, mourning and sadness, and a simple but profound proclamation -- "perpetua." We mourn the dead, but we, too, will soon be among them. The distance between the living and the dead is far too narrow to make the radical separation that we, the living, usually put between them. Lloyd Webber seems to have come a long way from the days of Jesus Christ Superstar, with its flippant caricature of Jesus and its use of 1 960s-style English slang (such as in What’s the Buzz, Tell Me What’s Happening?")

When Lloyd Webber visited this country for the world premiere (in Chicago) of the American Ballet Theatre’s staging of the Requiem as a ballet, I had the opportunity to ask him about this apparent change. That opening led into a discussion of the Requiem and his extraordinary career since Jesus Christ Superstar.

Your earlier work, Jesus Christ Superstar, and the more recent Requiem seem to exhibit very different theological points of view. Does this represent a personal change over the years?

Well, I haven’t suddenly become a "born-again Christian" or something, although I could see where the tremendous differences in the points of view of both works could lead people to assume that.

Superstar had a contemporary text by Tim Rice, and was never really intended to be anything more than a piece examining the story of Jesus from the point of view of Judas Iscariot. In that sense it is a dramatic work, and not specifically a religious work at all. I can now recognize that there is a dramatic level of me as a composer present in both works that took them both into the theater, even though that was not anticipated or planned. So hindsight tells me that both scores have a theatricality in common.

With Superstar it was very clear where my own feelings as a composer lay, and the most successful music there in "pop" terms was the music sung by Judas. That was a long time ago, and of course I would write such a piece differently now. The thing that I hope does come through theologically even now is the great climax of the whole first act, the song "Gethsemane," which is very much Jesus’ moment.

As far as the Requiem goes, it was basically intended to be primarily a contemplation for myself, to deal with some things that I was feeling after the death of my father (and then later, the subsequent death of a journalist in the Northern Ireland conflict who had just interviewed me, and that obscure piece in the New York Times about the Cambodian boy who had the option of killing his mutilated sister or being killed himself). But as for any composer, so many things come into one’s mind that I wouldn’t want to call even the Requiem specifically a "religious" piece either, although there are things in it that I hope are quite moving.

But Jesus Christ Superstar was really not an irreligious piece, as has been so often suggested. In its own way and in its own time it was simply a work attempting to ask a couple of questions, the chief of which was stated by Bob Dylan some years ago: "Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?" That was the question that intrigued Tim Rice and me, and that was Tim’s starting point for the text. I mean, clearly Iscariot was not an unintelligent man, and how much was the whole thing in the end an accident of what was necessary given the politics of the day? That’s really what we were asking in Superstar.

What about the work’s ambiguity concerning the resurrection?

Superstar never set out or intended to discuss anything at all like the resurrection. All it ever did was to declare itself to be a version of the last seven days of Jesus Christ. It never even remotely said it was going to move into that area, and to do so would have removed its dramatic purpose. Not to sound irreligious, but quite apart from its religious value, it is a wonderful story, and we wanted to deal primarily with the story’s dramatic rather than its theological side.

It always seemed to me that Superstar was more of the oratorio or passion genre than that of the musical or even "rock opera."

That is well put. In fact, the work has never had a staging which really brings out its full dramatic value, especially in America.

Back in the days when Broadway picked up Superstar, I was someone who had a whole lot of ideas, but no real influence in the theater. So we got locked into what we ended up with. I tried, believe me, to change things as much as I could without simply coming out and being openly disloyal, but the Broadway production ended up being, at least in my view, simply appalling. Broadway’s vulgarization and cheapening of the piece was one of the reasons that I myself took such a stand about it that the Broadway production never went on tour or moved anywhere else -- it was never done again. The productions elsewhere in America, such as Los Angeles, were entirely different, though largely because of the time, there were no real attempts to stage or film the work with a primarily dramatic intention in mind.

I have seen one version of Superstar -- in, surprisingly enough, Japan -- that gets much closer to the kinds of things I originally envisioned for the work than any other version I’ve seen.

You’ve mentioned that you never really intended the Requiem to be a theater piece as such. Given that liturgical use of the piece was not likely or practical, what did you think would happen with it?

Frankly, I really had no idea. I was very aware when I was writing it that the final product would not be considered by critics and audiences to be part of the mainstream of what they consider "contemporary serious music." But it is, to the best of my ability, a serious work with a serious intention.

I was lucky enough to be able to commission the Requiem myself. Having had a tremendous commercial success with the London production of Starlight Express (a musical intended for kids which is great fun, but not exactly a piece that I thought would change the course of Western art music), I thought there was now the possibility of being able to develop an area of my writing that I had been quietly working away on ever since I began composing.

Although I don’t claim to be terribly familiar with the Requiem mass as a genre, the text has always intrigued me. It’s so theatrical. And I very much enjoy writing for the sound of the Latin language, which obviously has something in that it has endured as long as it has. I was also very interested to see whether or not I could make a requiem for an audience of today.

Many critics were puzzled that you would venture off into such a different direction from your more recent theater successes.

It’s always difficult for people to realize that a composer, especially one who has been as lucky and as successful as I have been, can have many sides. My last international success was Cats, and that may have made people forget the bleaker parts of something like Evita, where I was working in a more serious way.

Evita has never been performed anywhere in the world with the orchestration that I actually wrote for it because the conventional commercial theater couldn’t possibly afford it. It was originally scored for full orchestra, quite differently from how it appeared in London and on Broadway. I very much hope that one day it can be done the way I originally wrote it.

Even the cost of the American Ballet Theatre’s staging of the Requiem as a ballet, complete with soloists, chorus and orchestra, is something completely outside the resources of the commercial theater. It wouldn’t be possible to do it without a heavily subsidized group such as ABT picking it up. I have been fairly lucky to have had such top-flight performances of the piece originally, and I realize this can’t be maintained. It is not an easy work to perform, and I realize that it must be performed, and one must let people have a go at performing it because that’s half the point of having written it. But it’s one of those pieces of which quality performances are going to be much rarer as time goes on. It’s a complicated piece.

One of the most distinctive and innovative features of the Requiem is the major emphasis on a child to proclaim a message of death. We tend to think of children as symbolic of life and hope and the future. But that expectation is shattered here.

Yes, that’s all very true. Although it is common in the English choral tradition to feature boy sopranos as soloists, they are not used quite in this way. The crucial thing here is that, ideally, the [female] soprano should also be much younger than one who would normally be used, to keep the suggestion that [the two singers] could be brother and sister. It works less well if you have a bigger, very full soprano voice. It needs the younger interplay between them, particularly in the "Pie Jesu." Yet it’s difficult to find a soprano with the ability to sing a note purely and totally straight; this is not something you often find in a soprano with conventional classical training. Obviously, I’m especially pleased with the way my wife, Sarah [Brightman], sings it.

American Ballet Theatre had something that for the Requiem was a very powerful plus, namely, Alessandra Fern [the ballerina who danced the lead]. There is no question that the way her part was choreographed has a very remarkable resonance with what I intended when I wrote the soprano part.

Did you collaborate with ABT to achieve this effect?

Not really, except to tell Kenneth [MacMillan] what I had told you and everyone else when he asked me about my original intention for the piece. He has choreographed something that is very surprising and very interesting, and certainly something that I would never have thought of myself.

In both Superstar and the Requiem you have not only dusted the cobwebs off two very traditional genres, but you have breathed new life into them. To my mind, the last really significant passion had been Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion, and the last important Requiem mass was probably Britten’s War Requiem. Britten, however, felt the need to supplement the Latin text with some English poetry to convey his message and make the work more accessible. Your Requiem uses the Latin text alone.

The falling away of Latin from the liturgy is another issue altogether, and my exclusive use of the Latin text is one of the reasons that I really despair when critics accuse me of having had a commercial purpose for this piece. That is also one of the reasons why the Requiem is not a piece that can be expected even to approximate the kind of wide pop appeal that Jesus Christ Superstar had, and I never expected it to.

In truth, what pop appeal the Requiem has had has surprised me tremendously. As you may be aware, the "Pie Jesu" was a huge hit in Europe on the pop charts. That was totally bizarre, and nobody could have guessed that would happen, least of all me. If you were to ask, "Do you think that a song with a lyric in Latin sung by a little boy and a girl soprano would be a smash hit?" I would say, "That doesn’t sound like the instant recipe for fame and fortune!"

I was surprised when they asked me if they could release the "Pie Jesu" as a single, and I said, "Fine, if you want to, but I must give my own royalties to a charity," which I did. And for some reason, it’s been the biggest European hit I’ve ever had. It’s all very surprising.

Was it at that point that you decided to make a music video of the "Pie Jesu"?

Yes, I was intrigued with that possibility. It was a reflection of my belief that, regardless of the genre, a composer should use everything within his means to ensure that his music is brought to the broadest number of people.

I’m absolutely convinced that if people were to be making really well-done videos of well-known operatic arias, you’d find that there is a much broader public for opera than people believe. I’m certain of it, in fact.

You have hit on what is simultaneously considered to be your greatest strength and, to many, your greatest weakness -- namely, that you do feel that music should communicate with the broadest number of people.

There isn’t a real point to composing if you don’t give the people the opportunity to decide whether they like your music or not. It would be ludicrous to say that Puccini’s music was terrible just because he attracted and accommodated large crowds with free sweets in the cafes on the opening nights of his operas. Verdi also had a cafe arrangement, and in his own way, so did Wagner.

It had never been part of music history that composers did not try to make their music communicate with broad numbers of people until relatively recently. Composers started to get terribly precious around 1910 or so. It’s all nonsense. Duke Ellington once said, "There are only two types of music -- good music and bad music." In the long term, that’s an accurate assessment.

When we were first rehearsing the Requiem in New York, I had a very nice meeting with a person from the "Entertainment Tonight" television show, who saw the "Pie Jesu" video and asked me, "May I borrow that?" I said, "Fine," figuring that he wanted to show it to some friends or something. When I got back to my hotel that night, I discovered that they had phoned England for clearance and showed the complete video in its entirety on national television that same night. I remember seeing this with huge mixed emotions, thinking, "My God, everyone is going to think that this is the most hyped thing in the world!" What had actually happened was that the editor of the program saw it and was genuinely moved by it, and in fact used it again for Holy Week, and later, after the death of Rock Hudson. There are times like this when people must think that someone like myself, or other people in my position, premeditate such things. But we don’t.

I also recall a review in Los Angeles that was very disparaging about the fact that the Requiem was going to be premiered on PBS, saying, more or less, "This piece will of course do well because it will be reaching people in various cities who would not ordinarily be able to hear this sort of thing." I remember thinking, "Well my God, what do they expect? That a piece shouldn’t be heard? Or that if it is heard, that that automatically ensures its instant popularity?" You may recall that Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach was also shown on PBS’s "Great Performances," but how many copies has that sold at the end of the day? Somebody singing, "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven -- one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... is not going to find any real popularity simply because it’s been exposed to a large audience, and frankly it doesn’t deserve to.

I take it then that the "minimalist" style of composition is not something that appeals to you.

I got myself into terrible trouble back in Britain not long ago when I said, "The problem with me is that I’m a maximalist." But I really do not believe that the future of music is about playing to a very limited audience, the members of which you can increasingly count on one hand. That’s nonsense.

The joy for me personally with my own works is that large numbers of people are actually affected by them. That is exciting. It’s so gratifying when ordinary people come up to you in an airport and say, "We’re really looking forward to the performances -- the Requiem wasn’t a piece that we thought anyone would do today." It’s then when you realize that you’ve achieved something that matters a very great deal more than whether or not you’ve appealed to some critic for some smart publication who thinks that music must now be "minimalist" or whatever else is temporarily in vogue.

Many critics seem frustrated by how difficult it is to categorize your works, and yet that seems to be a large part of your appeal to the general public, much as it was for Gershwin with Porgy and Bess or Bernstein with West Side Story.

That certainly has been a problem, and though I would in no way compare my music to Gershwin’s, he certainly did face the same problem. People couldn’t quite understand why a "commercial composer" would want to write something serious.

When Porgy and Bess came out, some people said, "Well, the tunes are all right, but the operatic bits are terrible." Still others said, "The operatic bits are good, but what a pity he had to spoil them by putting all of those silly commercial tunes in there."

But the issue of genre is an interesting one. I firmly believe that if I or anyone actually sits down and says, "What I am going to do now is write an utterly cynical exercise that I know is going to work for an audience," failure will inevitably be the result. If I sit down and deliberately try to write the ultimate number-one hit single, I can assure you it will sell about two copies.

There is no question that I have been very, very lucky, and I cannot hide the fact that Cats has been the most successful musical of all time. You do not plan for that, I assure you. There is no way that you possibly could.

Tell us about your latest show.

It opened recently in London and is called Phantom of the Opera, a gothic tale which has always intrigued me, and which I felt cried out for scoring. It is an extension of my interest in writing for wider voice ranges. American Hal Prince, who also directed Evita, is directing the show.

Are there plans to mount the show in America yet?

If it works well in London, which it seems to be doing, I think it would be one that would come to America pretty fast. We did want to try it in London first, however -- not only because I live there, but also, I am afraid, because the enormous expense of launching a new show in America is a major factor for avoiding it as an initial testing ground.

I know you see yourself as a theater composer and that you were unhappy with the Hollywood treatment of Jesus Christ Superstar. Has all of this served to turn you away from the film industry completely, or would you consider allowing other works of yours to be filmed? Evita is one that is often talked about.

I am very interested in and very keen on the idea of writing an original musical expressly for the cinema, taking into account the differences between the world of the cinema and that of the theater -- which is rarely done when a theater piece is transformed to the cinema.

Practically speaking, Evita has probably slightly missed its moment anyway, and Cats is still doing so terribly well everywhere that I can’t imagine anyone allowing it to become a movie very quickly. One of the things that people may not realize is that when you enter into an agreement with a theater director or producer such as I have with the Shubert Organization in this country, they actually have the right to block a movie if a show is still selling out as a stage work.

Oddly enough, there was a tremendous interest in trying to detour me from going to the theater with Phantom of the Opera and to make it into a movie instead. But I managed successfully to dodge those telephone calls. I have no intention of abandoning the theater!

Most of your shows actually involve the live audience as part of the action of the play in a major way, and it is difficult to accept the ideas of that vital element disappearing as the audience members become passive spectators of shadows on a screen.

Yes, and besides, I rather enjoy going to the theater at the end of the day. If you go to a show you’ve composed, you have an entire company to talk to afterwards. If you go to see your own movie, who is there to talk to afterwards -- the projectionist? I rather like going around and visiting my companies. I love coming to Chicago and getting to meet Alessandra Fern for the first time and saying, "I’m sorry, Miss Fern, but I’m an enormous fan!" I don’t want to go and just look at celluloid.

How fortunate you are that you are in a position zzzto determine in what way you wish to remain successful. What an unusual problem!

Yes, but believe me, I know how lucky I’ve been. Enormously lucky. After having launched the Phantom I have now composed seven full-length works in seven years’ time, which is simply too many. I think it’s time that I should quietly bow out for awhile. Oh well, I say that every year, don’t I?

I really had thought that with the Requiem, I had finally come up with the one project that I could proudly point to as a commercial failure. As it is, it seems that the clever prophecy that was made by my cynical former partner Tim Rice has actually come to pass. (The assumption, of course, is that we don’t speak to one another anymore, but of course we do tend to -- he’s on the board of my company.) Tim told me, "Of course the problem for you with the Requiem, a piece which you think is so terribly serious and noncommercial and everything, is that it will become tremendously successful commercially and you will have therefore completely failed in what you have set out to do!"

Yet if the Requiem can call large numbers of people, regardless of their religious views, to consider just for a second the human condition and what people have inflicted on one another, then I am truly happy to have "failed."

Note: Since this article was written, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of England and has released a compact disc of music composed by his late father. Sir Andrew has also composed new music for a film version of Evita which, against his better judgment, starred Madonna in

the lead role, and has produced his own version of Jesus Christ Superstar on stage and home video that he feels finally, at long last, captures his true

vision of the piece.

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