Articles – Page 178 – Religion Online

The Century in Transition: 1916-1922

From the time it was established in 1884 in Des Moines. Iowa, The Christian Century had been published by and for members of the Disciples of Christ denomination. One day in 1916, as Editor Charles Clayton Morrison, an ordained Disciples minister, was making his rounds through the magazine’s southside Chicago office, he stopped at the desk of the employee in charge of subscriptions. He later recorded the experience in his unpublished memoirs:

Glancing at the open mail before her, my eye caught the letterhead of Oberlin College. Picking up the letter I found that Henry Churchill King, president of Oberlin [a prominent Congregationalist], was renewing his subscription. This interested me. I took up the little sheaf of letters and looked at the signatures. To my surprise, I found that Lynn Harold Hough [a Methodist], then president of Northwestern University. was also renewing his subscription. What does this mean? I reflected. I asked the young lady to run off on the tape the entire subscription list (not a big job!) and give it to me. My eye went through the whole list to see if there were other non-Disciple readers of such prominence that I could recognize them. I found perhaps 20. If I can recognize 20, there must be many others whom I do not recognize by name.

This revelation set Morrison on a train of thought that was to have far-reaching consequences. Long an adherent of unity among the denominations, he was receptive to any developments that might seem to promote that goal. He decided to try an experiment: in 1917 the magazine began to carry the subtitle “An Undenominational journal of Religion.” No announcement of the change was made; Morrison simply waited to see what the response would be.

Later he observed, “I knew that this subtitle was ambiguous. It would be interpreted by non-Disciples as we intended them to take it, and it could be interpreted by Disciples as implying the traditional claim that they were not a denomination. So the experiment was noncommittal.”

Morrison needn’t have worried about the reactions of his Disciples readers and financial backers -- whose opinion concerned him profoundly since the journal still operated tenuously, almost from issue to issue. They were uniformly pleased with the change, which they seem to have understood immediately in the real sense which Morrison intended -- i.e.. interdenominational.

Morrison and his colleagues Herbert L. Willett and Thomas Curtis Clark (until 1924 the only full-time editor besides Morrison) began, as they put it, “unobtrusively” to expand the Century’s news department to cover events in other denominations. In several years. this resulted in the popular “News of the Christian World” department, for which the editors began to line up correspondents across the nation -- and around the globe

The new product met with success, and the subscription rolls began to increase. The editorial style and point of view were gradually oriented to a larger and more diverse public. As a result of the change, the editors felt that “the amenities which a denominational organ naturally observes toward other denominations were now less binding. We became almost as frank and open in expressing editorial opinion on the doings of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and others as we had always been on those of the Disciples.”

In a few years -- and after an advertising campaign in other publications -- the journal had acquired roughly as many Congregational, as many Presbyterian, nearly as many Baptist, and twice as many Methodist subscribers as the subscription list of Disciples at the campaign’s beginning. Smaller denominations were represented in proportion to their membership.

In a relatively short time, non-Disciple writers and editors began to appear with great frequency. For example, in the teens Morrison signed on two columnists who both wrote nearly every week and who became immensely successful with readers. The first was Congregational minister William E. Barton from Oak Park, Illinois (who in 1911 had begun writing articles on the arts for the Century), whose pen name was Safed the Sage. Written in a formal, “antique’’ style, each of his short pieces contained a moral point, often expressed in sharp-edged wit. In 1919. Lynn Harold Hough, whose renewal form had so influenced Morrison, began his column, “The Lion in his Den,” Cast in a much more straightforward style than Barton’s, yet often containing a veiled and ambiguous meaning, Hough’s column provoked many letters to the editor. In addition to his column, he began to contribute regular articles on a wide variety of topics. (After leaving Northwestern, Hough had become pastor of a distinguished Methodist church in Detroit.) Also added to the staff was British Congregational minister Edward Shillito, who wrote a regular “British Table Talk” feature.

Several article series appearing in the magazine at the time indicate just how far Morrison was now able to reach for writers, both from other denominations and from the secular world. A 1921 series titled “Do the Teachings of Jesus Fit Our Times?” included authors Jane Addams, Joseph Ernest McAfee, Herbert Croly, Vida Scudder, Lloyd C. Douglas and Hough. Another series that year, “Some Living Masters of the Pulpit,” profiled noted preachers of various denominations. For a 1922 series, “The Future of the Denominations.” Morrison invited experts from a number of church bodies to comment on the situation of and prospects for their own groups. Frequent writers during the period included well-known adherents of various denominations: Harry Emerson Fosdick, Sherwood Eddy, Joseph Fort Newton, Joseph Ernest McAfee and John Haynes Holmes.

In their pursuit of church unity, the editors supported such cooperative ventures as the Interchurch World Movement, whose postwar object was “the careful survey of the fields and forces involved in the problems of world evangelization . . . . and the avoidance of any duplication by various denominations.” While recognizing that this was not “a fixed, and final form of Christian unity,” the editors applauded such cooperation.

As the Century expanded its denominational horizons, it also increased its coverage of all types of religious movements. For example, while the editors had often lamented the growth of fundamentalism, in the late teens their attacks became more vociferous. They wrote pieces with titles like “No Time to Revive the Old Revivalism,” in which they argued: “A wholesome evangelistic spirit is of the very essence of Christian experience and passion. But the very name evangelism has suffered through the perversions to which the fine art of soul saving has been subjected.” Or, on another occasion: “The only trouble with the fundamentalists is that they have missed finding the fundamentals.”

From 1916 into the ‘20s, the Century’s main preoccupation, not surprisingly, was World War I and then its aftermath. While the editors were never enthusiastic about the possibility of U.S. participation in the conflict, when it became an inevitability they wasted no time in expressing their support for President Woodrow Wilson’s decision. “War brings men duties,” they wrote in April 1917, just after U.S. entry:

America has not wanted war. We have deliberated while those who have become our allies have been fighting our battles. At last the most peace-loving president of America’s history has been driven to declare for war. He is a Christian man. He has believed, as most of us believe, that though war is a mighty evil, there are some evils even worse.

While the editors supported participation, they did so in the spirit of Wilson’s pronouncement that this was a “war to end all wars.”

It is our duty to hold to our hope of universal peace, even in the midst of war. . . . we may even now be taking the first step in the program of a League to Enforce Peace.

Even in the expression of such patriotic sentiments, one may discern hints of Morrison’s later repudiation of armed conflict and his firsthand involvement in the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 -- a treaty designed to outlaw war. But at the beginning of America’s entry into the Great War, the Century betrayed no signs of a pacifist impulse. In October of 1917 the editors wrote the following:

The pacifist who still thinks that his abstract “peace” is of more value than civilization itself is now a sorry figure. Horrible as Europe now is, more horrible would be the moral degradation and spiritual deadness of a world which would fall to the level of the present Prussian government.

As the war ended and the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the editors felt betrayed by a president whom they had formerly supported totally. The treaty, they believed, was harsh and unfair. It “looked to the past and sought punishment, when it should have looked to the future and sought reconciliation.” They called the peace terms “unjust and vicious.” Their feelings about the treaty strongly influenced their view of the proposed League of Nations. While they called the latter “the one saving feature of the Treaty,” they expressed ambivalence about the concept because it was linked inextricably with that treaty.

Because of their increasing disillusionment with Wilson’s leadership, the editors were not crushed by the results of the 1920 election. While acknowledging that it could be “a moment of great peril to the fine fabric of social idealism which has painfully been woven in the consciousness of modern Christianity,” they chose to offer cautious support to the new Republican president, suggesting that they believed his promises to create some substitute for the League. “It is too easy to become cynical,” they argued, predicting that the nation would soon emerge from its “emotional slump.” They strove consciously always to maintain an open and optimistic attitude.

However, it took very little tune for the Century writers to become thoroughly disillusioned with Harding, whom they saw to have quickly abandoned his promise not to let America resume an isolationist stance. In 1922 they were writing that “at the close of the war we left our international task half completed” -- and the present administration had done nothing to achieve that completion. Further, the editors felt that the administration’s handling of the war’s domestic aftermath was deplorable. For example, even though they had supported the war and had chastised the pacifists, they had never condemned anyone’s right to express any opinion whatsoever on the topic. So they were outraged by the treatment of objectors. In January of 1922 a blistering editorial, “Political Prisoners and the Christian Conscience,” summed up their views.

The record of our attitude toward those who “for conscience’ sake” refused to support the war is a matter which Christian intelligence can no longer decline to contemplate. We passed laws depriving such men of what they had supposed were their constitutional rights of freedom of speech and press. We enforced those laws with a degree of passion in excess of that obtaining in any other country, not excepting even Germany itself.

And now the administration was still keeping many protesters locked up -- while the few it released were expected to pay their own deportation costs. This the Century editors regarded as intolerable. They were now writing frequent editorials with titles like “The Nation’s Declining Moral Credit.”

The editors’ views on the postwar situation shared attention with two other frequent themes: the need to rehabilitate the social gospel -- badly battered by the war -- and the necessity to impose prohibition and then to maintain its enforcement.

The editors never wavered in their fierce advocacy of the social gospel movement and felt its weakening to be one of the war’s great losses. They continued their pervasive coverage of its developments and wrote frequent theoretical treatises on its merits. Contributing editor Alva W. Taylor, an expert on the topic, wrote major articles as well as a regular column on the practice of social Christianity. During this period he paid special attention to the rampant labor problems that the nation was experiencing.

While the Century editors were generally prolabor, they were not blindly so. For example, in 1917 they wrote editorials condemning labor unions for discriminating against blacks. In 1919 they wrote of the labor movement: “Gone . . . for the moment is its responsiveness to moral obligation. The way in which organized labor tears up its solemn contracts without scruple is one of the most ominous aspects of the present situation.” They also wrote other pieces expressing a balanced view of the cooperation needed between labor and the capitalists. “It is no time for revenge,” they asserted in 1921 after a number of crippling strikes. “It is a time for understanding.”

On other social issues of the day the editors were equally forthright. For example, they were very vocal in their disapproval of capital punishment. “There is no evidence to show that capital punishment is at all superior as a means of handling . . . criminals. It is cheaper, but it breaks down the very thing that the community wants to build up, the sense of sanctity of human life.”

The editors were similarly outspoken in condemning the racism that seemed to have become more virulent with the wartime influx of blacks into northern industrial cities. While frequently adopting a paternalistic attitude, the editors were sincere in their antiracist ideals. As ready to criticize such discrimination in the churches as elsewhere, they wrote in 1917, “Even in the Church of God there are still the remnants of this ugly and unreasoning hatred. . . . Men called bishops in the church of God [have] voted against having any fellowship in the church with black men.” The editors also endorsed the woman’s suffrage movement, writing, “There is no occasion for delaying further the ratification of the suffrage amendment. . . .” By its ratification, “an ancient wrong will be righted.” They extended their demands for women’s rights to the church as well, arguing in 1919. “It is inconceivable that there should be a world movement for a full franchise for women in politics without there being at the same time a movement for full opportunity for women in organized religion. The recent meeting in St. Louis of women preachers who propose to ‘encourage capable and consecrated young women to take up the work of the ministry’ is a significant sign of the times.” This concern with prejudice against blacks or women was not pervasive among social gospel adherents, many of whom championed labor, for example, but had little to say about sexism or racism.

However, on the biggest social issue of the day -- prohibition -- almost all branches of the social gospel movement were in complete agreement, and the Century editors were among the most vocal, calling liquor the land’s “worst menace.” Having campaigned for prohibition since he assumed ownership of the Century in 1908, Morrison heated up his efforts as passage of the Volstead Act neared. There was no relenting after its passage, however, because of the widespread flouting of the act’s provisions. Indeed, until long after repeal of the act in 1933, prohibition was one of the magazines major preoccupations. The Century editors viewed the liquor industry as a corrupt, powerful cabal that exploited the worker mercilessly; they felt that the only way to solve the problem was to destroy the industry. (Interestingly, the labor unions of the day did not generally support the dry position.)

But the editors also maintained what today seems like a naïve psychological perspective, portraying liquor as the cause of degradation rather than emphasizing that poverty or oppression might lead to drinking. They were also naïve in believing that once all the saloons were closed, former drinkers would suddenly display miraculously improved character.

Morrison and his colleagues were unprepared for the widespread lack of cooperation with the Volstead Act, but they marshaled their forces anew, arguing that with stricter enforcement it was possible to solve the nation’s problems with “immoral personal behavior” -- caused in large part, they thought, by liquor.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this issue for the Century. Woodrow Wilson’s occasional seeming friendliness toward the liquor industry was one reason the editors began to suspect him. Similarly, after their mildly positive response to Harding’s election, they subsequently perceived him as too soft on the Wet forces. Such was the strength of their conviction on this issue that it strongly influenced their political allegiances.

By 1922 Morrison and his staff found themselves in the midst of several shifting tides. Their attitude toward the nation’s moral rectitude was becoming more exhortatory, their attitude toward war more chastened. Late in the year they wrote of the recent conflict in Europe, “We may not be ready yet to say that we did the wrong thing in going in on the side of what we thought was democracy, decency and the rights of men. But . . . we now know that there is something monstrously wrong about that method of arriving at just ends.”

Two points on which the editors did not waver were the centrality of social Christianity, and the need for unity among the denominations. These were their most cherished goals. Toward both of these pursuits the editors maintained the relentlessly optimistic demeanor that characterized their liberal faith and their progressive view of life. They condemned pessimism at every turn. In the last issue of 1922 they were proclaiming a pox on “negation.” ‘Building” is what they called for: “Our age awaits the era of the architect.”

In the later 1920s and the ‘30s Morrison and his colleagues were to prove themselves significant architects in a variety of liberal religious undertakings -- not all of them solely journalistic.

Charles Clayton Morrison: Shaping a Journal’s Identity

The year 1984 is a very special one for The Christian Century: it marks the original founding of the magazine (then called the Christian Oracle) in 1884. Although the July 4-11 issue will be our official centennial number, celebration of the event began with our January 4-11 issue and will continue throughout the year. One feature of the observance will be a series of staff-written articles tracing the history of the journal to the present. The opening piece in the series appears below. It is the first half of Managing Editor Linda-Marie Delloff’s two-part treatment of the magazine’s earliest years under Charles Clayton Morrison, the editor who changed the journal from a Disciples of Christ publication to a broad-based nondenominational magazine.

Morrison is the most influential figure in the Century’s history; his story is the magazine’s story -- even today. An introduction to the magazine’s development must necessarily be an introduction to the man. In examining Morrison’s personal spiritual and intellectual journey, it is possible to see many of the currents shaping turn-of-the-century Protestantism -- currents which determined the identity of the journal as it assumed a prominent role in the progress of liberal American Protestantism. The magazine still retains essentially the character formed during those early years, and it is safe to say that the tradition established by Morrison will continue to influence the Century’s future. It is difficult to overestimate the tremendous strength with which this young, rural Disciples of Christ minister shaped an ongoing legacy.

As writers on religion in 19th century America have emphasized, that era in our nation’s history was one of undisputed Protestant hegemony. The country not only worshiped in Protestant churches, but embodied Protestant morals and mores in its social, cultural and political activities as well. Protestant clergy looked forward to the 20th century with confidence, expecting to continue to assume positions of community leadership. The predominant mood of Protestantism at the turn of the century was positive, optimistic and liberal -- and its leaders welcomed the modernism heralded by the new age: the spirit of rationality and scientific inquiry, the growth of social awareness, and the sense of an expanding world. Protestant liberals were bent on proving that genuine Christian faith could live in mutual harmony with the modern developments in science, technology, immigration, communication and culture that were already under way.

This anticipatory mood is captured in one participant’s narrative describing the renaming of a religious journal, the Christian Oracle, published beginning in 1884 by the Disciples of Christ denomination:

As the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth, the whole Christian world was in a mood of expectant optimism. The press was full of discussion and prediction of the wonders that would take place in the new era which the new century was ushering in. Dr. George A. Campbell, a Chicago pastor, was at that time editor of The Oracle. None of us liked that name. Campbell suggested that this new century must be made a Christian century. He accordingly proposed that The Oracle be re-Christened with that name. His friends . . . heartily agreed. And so in 1900 it was done. No name could have better symbolized the optimistic outlook of that period.

The writer of those words was a young Disciples minister, Charles Clayton Morrison, who in 1908 was to take over what was by then a publication floundering in financial distress, and eventually to turn it into the most influential Protestant magazine of its time.

When young Morrison completed high school in Jefferson, Iowa, in 1892, no one could have guessed that he would become a leader of his denomination and of liberal Protestantism in general. Indeed, he was a somewhat desultory student and had to do remedial work (especially in the classics) to qualify as a freshman. at Disciples-related Drake University in Des Moines. It was not until several years later that he became a keen student with wide-ranging scholarly interests. However, he was already deeply involved in his faith and supported himself at Drake by preaching at a Disciples church in nearby Perry. He had no other immediate plans than to continue in this semirural pastorate near his family’s home, but an unexpected call from the Monroe Street Christian Church in Chicago turned his course toward far broader horizons.

Morrison accepted the position at the small (less than half the size of the Perry congregation) west-side church in the city and became active in the Disciples community of the Hyde Park area located near the University of Chicago. There he continued his friendships with such distinguished Disciples leaders as Herbert L. Willett and Edward Scribner Ames, whom he had met when they came to Drake as guest lecturers. Willett, who taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School and who was later to become a controversial figure in the battle over the new “higher biblical criticism,” was already an editor at The Christian Century. Morrison also became friendly with the group of men who had supported the journal since its move from Iowa to Chicago in 1891, and who were responsible for the 1900 name change. These included the most prominent Disciples in the city, though even collectively they had never been able to guide the magazine into solvency.

After serving at the Monroe Street Church for several years, Morrison fulfilled a dream he had begun to develop when his intellectual sights had broadened during his last years at college: to embark on graduate study at the University of Chicago. However, as he recorded in his unpublished memoirs, “I chose the department of philosophy, rather than the Divinity School.” The reason for this decision, he wrote, was that “I had a theory that the problems of theology originated in philosophy, and I wanted to get to the bottom of things.” He continued in his description of those very important years of study.

However dubious this theory may have been, I found myself confronting the ultimate issues of the nature of the world and the nature of man in a more naked form than I was likely to face them in theology. Besides, philosophy seemed to be the most exciting field in the academic world at that time. The head of the department was John Dewey, who . . . had gathered a faculty of his own disciples around him. Together they were elaborating a philosophical position which boldly challenged traditional modes of thinking and came to be called “The Chicago School” of philosophy. In addition to my courses with Dewey I studied with James Hayden Tufts in the history of philosophy, James R. Angell (later to become president of Yale) in psychology and George Herbert Mead in what might be called constructive philosophy.

It is probably fortunate that Morrison chose to study philosophy rather than theology at that time. His work at Chicago forced his naturally good mind to confront challenges and explore areas he might have avoided at the divinity school. It also made him permanently aware that religion must coexist with other aspects of human life and that its study must coexist with other disciplines. It is evident that this period influenced Morrison’s permanent interest in exploring the relationships between religion and its surrounding culture, with the result that a unique feature of the Century came to be its openness to articles on topics -- political and literary, for instance -- that did not commonly appear in religious publications. The full realization of these tendencies came later. At the time he left graduate school Morrison was, by his own admission, thoroughly steeped in Dewey’s empiricism. Over the years he began to use that system as a foil for his increasing interest in theology.

After departing from the university, Morrison returned to the Monroe Street Church, where he ministered somewhat restlessly while the congregation and neighborhood changed with the large influx of immigrants. Since many of the newcomers to the neighborhood were not Protestants, his church was not growing and did not seem to have a strong sense of itself. When an opportunity for a new type of ministry presented itself, Morrison was quite willing to take a substantial risk.

There was a small but reputable paper published in Chicago called The Christian Century. Though avowedly representing the Disciples of Christ, it had never gained a general circulation in the denomination, despite the high respect in which its succession of editors -- four or five within the past decade -- was held. I learned that it was about to suspend publication unless a mortgage of $1,500 was paid off. The holder of this mortgage saw that his only hope of getting his money was to find another editor naïve enough to imagine that he could make a go of it where a succession of editors had failed. This man was employed in the shop where the paper was printed. Evidently to try me out, he asked me to edit the paper temporarily. This I did for several weeks in that summer of 1908. By September, I had become fully intrigued, and when the sheriffs deputy arrived to sell the “property” on the block I bid $1,500 and became the owner.

At this time the magazine had 600 subscribers at $2.00 each. It was to be many years, and to require the help of many generous donors, before the Century finally achieved some financial stability.

At the time of the purchase, wrote Morrison later, “I had no other thought nor ambition than to keep the Century within the Disciples denomination, both as to its editorial outlook and its constituency. . . . For eight years or so the subjects we discussed and our news page were oriented by our interest in Disciples’ affairs and problems.”

By no means did this focus lead to smooth sailing during Morrison’s first years in his new job; indeed, he was forced by the situation within his own denomination to alter his editorial philosophy -- a development that eventually shaped the magazine’s identity as a meeting ground and debating platform for controversial and opposing viewpoints.

Wrote the editor later in his memoirs:

At the beginning, in my journalistic innocence of what lay ahead, I had planned an editorial policy that would minimize but not avoid controversial subjects. It was my intention to devote the major portion of my writing to themes in the general area of the “Christian life.” . . . It was my desire that the Christian Century should transcend the controversial patterns that had long characterized Disciple journalism.

Times were difficult for the Disciples, who were split over several issues. At the beginning of Morrison’s tenure, their most burning controversy involved the new higher criticism of the Bible, and much of the debate focused on Morrison’s coeditor, Herbert L. Willett, an acknowledged champion of the new academic discipline. Because of Willett’s controversial position, wrote Morrison, “another editor might have regarded him as a liability.” But Morrison was devoted to both Willett and his views. The new magazine owner filled the Century’s pages with editorials supporting his colleague and attacking Willett’s main detractor, the conservative Christian Standard (published in Cincinnati), the strongest and most widely circulated newspaper of the denomination at that time.

The controversy focused on whether Willett should be allowed to deliver a speech at the Disciples centennial gathering in 1909 in Pittsburgh. The Christian Standard argued No, calling Willett an “infidel” and a “betrayer of the Bible.” The Century argued Yes and began to attack the Standard in strong language. Willett was eventually upheld, without any damage to his reputation; the controversy may even have enhanced it. As Morrison noted, “Willett’s address was heard by the largest audience of the convention.”

The higher criticism continued to be an important object of attention during the next several years, and the Century consistently supported its practitioners, publishing their articles and reviewing their books.

Another controversy had exploded at the 1909 convention and began to occupy much space in the magazine: the issue of “open membership.” This debate concerned whether to accept as members of the denomination individuals who had not been baptized by immersion, the Disciples’ practice. Over a period of more than four -years, Morrison engaged in what he termed “a lover’s quarrel with my denomination” over this issue. His editorials consistently supported accepting into membership such individuals without requiring them to be rebaptized by immersion, while many denominational leaders argued that this was a totally unacceptable practice. The seriousness of this concern to the Disciples permeates the relevant portions of Morrison’s memoirs:

It should be made clear to the reader of these pages that the Disciples had no ecclesiastical structure above the local church by which this or any other issue could be settled by authority. They represented on a national scale the concept of a town-meeting democracy. In such a body, the denominational newspapers exercised a far greater influence than in other denominations. They provided a kind of parliament for the discussion of questions of interest to the denomination. It was strictly in harmony with the Disciples tradition for the Christian Century to direct the denomination’s attention to a serious inconsistency in its practice and to an egregious error at a vital point in its traditional ideology. (1) The inconsistency was stated thus: The Disciples churches by requiring the rebaptism of members of other churches who apply for membership in a local church of Disciples deny their fundamental commitment to the cause of Christian unity. (2) The error in their thinking which had seemed to justify this sectarian practice was an egregious misconception of the meaning of baptism.’

We could not have touched a more sensitive nerve. The Disciples had spent more argumentative ingenuity in convincing others (and, as I believe, convincing themselves) that the New Testament meaning of baptism was immersion in water, than upon any other subject. Their firm conviction on this subject amounted to hardly less than a fixation or a stereotype.

The Century launched a series of 20 long editorials under the title “The Meaning of Baptism.” In these Morrison challenged church father Alexander Campbell’s rendering of the Greek word baptizo and his argument that made immersion identical with baptism. This controversy led inevitably to a debate over whether other churches are “true churches of Christ and whether the members of these churches are baptized members of the Church of Christ.” To the Century, a negative answer to this question was theologically incorrect and came into conflict with the Disciples’ highest ideal: Christian unity. Morrison had long supported the attainment of such unity, and he recognized the baptisms performed by all other Protestant denominations. He had also been the first Disciples of Christ minister to practice open membership.

This issue again brought the Century into conflict with the denomination’s most influential papers -- the Christian Standard and the newly conservative Christian Evangelist, formerly the publication of well-known liberal editor J. H. Garrison. However, the Century also received much support from its readers, and throughout the period Morrison printed many favorable letters on the topic. Eventually open membership became the accepted denominational stance.

Thus for the first five years of Morrison’s tenure, the Century was a focus of controversy. Yet as a result of this period of strife, the editor and his journal both emerged stronger and more certainly headed toward the magazine s eventual transformation into a nondenominational publication.

During the years leading up to World War I the Century did address issues that reached beyond denominational boundaries. Many of these can be grouped under the general rubric of the social gospel, that movement having thoroughly captured the interest, of editors Morrison and Willett. In addition to major articles by and about such figures as Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch and Jane Addams, the editors printed many pieces with titles like “The Social Gospel and its Relation to Home Mission Expansion” and “Humane Missionary Work at Ellis Island.” They also ran a column titled “Social Survey,” usually written by Contributing Editor Alva W. Taylor, which noted and discussed developments in important areas: for example, child labor, the growth of slums, and the obligations of churches for community outreach. Titles of some notices in the column include the following: “Eight Hour Day Movement in Britain,” “Sanitary Dwellings in Austria,” “Retirement Pensions,” “Summer Vacation Schools,” “Will the Theater be Redeemed?” Basically, the column writer reported on as many developments of (or impediments to) the social-gospel movement as he could identify.

Another column, “The World is Growing Better,” had a similar purpose but reflected even more of the magazine’s optimistic liberal view of human and religious progress. In this space the editors carried items like “National Conference on Race Betterment,” “Vocational Schools for Chicago,” “Movie Censors Begin Work” and “British Fight Race Track Gambling.”

During these years the magazine adopted the subtitle “A Constructive Weekly.” The editors viewed their job as a committed ministry and believed that they were working toward building a positive society by calling attention to social evils and praising worthwhile social developments. One of the journal’s more interesting features during this pre- World War I period was a column called “Modern Womanhood” written by the Century’s first female editor, Ida Withers Harrison. Her concerns included women’s suffrage and the elements of making a decision on whether or not to work outside the home. In her innovative contributions she often profiled interesting women from various fields of endeavor, as in “A Tribute to Clara Barton” and “Women as Inventors.” She also ran excerpts from the work of female writers -- Zona Gale being frequently represented. Mrs. Harrison was a keen reviewer of books and plays which she identified as containing important social themes, especially those dealing with women.

From the first years of Morrison’s term as editor, all of the staff members revealed a strong interest in the arts and their relation to religion. The magazine published fiction containing social gospel themes and ran a regular poetry column titled “Poems of the Social Awakening,” carrying works by poets Edwin Markham, Vachel Lindsay (a Disciple from downstate Illinois -- a particular favorite) and the Century’s own Thomas Curtis Clark. (It also published a great deal of poetry on other topics.) The journal ran articles on “the religious significance of poetry,” and others with titles like “Shall Pastors Know Something About Art?” It published pieces by officials of Chicago’s Art Institute, as well as by and on local sculptor Lorado Taft, in whose work Morrison saw portrayed “lofty ideas” and “the supremacy of the ethical.”

Many of the books reviewed in the regular “Book World” column dealt with social issues, but the editors also included notices of academic theological monographs and of books on subjects not traditional for religious publications: literary criticism, philosophy and psychology. For example, books reviewed in the first months of 1910 included Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life; Education in the Far East, by Charles F. Thwing; a philosophical study titled Religion and the Modern Mind, by Frank Carleton Doan; Jane Addams’s The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets; The Immigrant Tide, by Edward Steiner; Medical Inspectors of Schools (a Russel Sage Foundation study); A. Modern City (a scientific study of that phenomenon), by William Kirk; The Leading Facts of American History, by D. H. Montgomery; and Jack London’s collection of short stories, Lost Face.

One important aspect of the editors’ social concern was their- concentration on a topic that would preoccupy them for many years: prohibition and the evils of liquor. Articles in this area carried such stirring titles as “Goliath Rum on the Run:” The Century editors argued repeatedly that the use of liquor destroys social units -- especially the family -- and keeps people from realizing their natural potential.

In these prewar years the Century gradually turned its focus away from the Midwest and even began to include. international coverage. Until 1914 the magazine’s main global focus was. on foreign missions and related topics. But in that year the editors began to write frequently about the war in Europe, publishing a series of editorials with the titles “God and War,” “Prayer and the War,” “The President and the War” and “Human Progress and the War.” Though the position of the editors at this time was generally antiwar, it did not incorporate the pacifistic elements that were to characterize their post -- World War I attitudes. Indeed, Morrison wrote in an editorial:

There are some things better than life. There are some things gloriously worth dying for. There are some things gloriously worth giving your son for, and your husband and your father, and suffering for yourself in poverty and heart-break all the rest of your days. Truth and honor and the well being of others and the ideal of a better social order for future generations -- these are all worth while for a man to lay down his life and for a woman to give up her husband or a mother to give up her son. To help establish these supreme moral goods is the great business of living, and if it takes life to establish them our humanity has always been heroically willing to give, life without stint and without whining.

It is not soft sentimentality, therefore, that moves us to deplore this present war. Our hearts revolt at it because there is no worthwhile moral issue at stake. It is a mad war, an irrational war, a hysterical and frenzied slaughter. And the thing wherein humanity suffers most is not in the mere shedding of blood, but the halting and inevitable turning back of those movements which during the long period of peace have been making for a new humanity, a new social order.

In other words, Morrison did allow that some wars could be worth fighting -- but not this one. He deplored what he saw as useless bloodshed with no “supreme moral good” at stake. On the eve of developments that would lead to America’s entry into the war, Morrison was speaking for a large segment of American Protestantism in his view that one of the greatest of this war’s tragedies would be the destruction of social progress -- a near-fatal blow to the social gospel. He was, of course, correct.

The years after the war were to see Morrison launch renewed efforts to reinvigorate the weakened movement. In the meanwhile he supported Woodrow Wilson’s conduct in foreign affairs and broadened the magazine’s perspective on the areas in which those affairs were taking place.

At the same time -- in 1916 -- he quietly relabeled the Christian Century “undenominational.”

A Seminary’s Artist in Residence: Cathy Kapikian’s Fabric of Faith

The ambivalence of American Protestantism’s relationship to art has always been pronounced. During the early part of the 19th century, church leaders manifested remnants of Puritan negativism toward art, though sporadically there were significant figures speaking out on behalf of religion’s natural association with the creative impulse: for example, Calvinist Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) , Congregational preacher Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) As the century progressed, liberal American churchmen began to travel to Europe, where they encountered great artworks of all genres cast in religious contexts or occupying religious settings. Returning home full of enthusiasm, these "clerical patrons of art" (Neil J. Harris, The Artist in American Society [1966]) began advocating the presence of visual artworks in churches. However, because they were still quite inexperienced and unfamiliar with principles of aesthetics, these enthusiasts easily degenerated into advocates of mere ornament. This movement gave rise to further rejection of art on the part of many churchgoers who longed for the Protestant simplicity they were used to.

During the first decades of the new century, marked by the hegemony of the social gospel, its advocates for the most part were too involved with their movement activities to dwell much on determining their theological views of art’s importance. A small group, spearheaded in fact by Christian Century editor Charles Clayton Morrison, was an exception to this attitude and theorized extensively on the crucial interplay of art and faith. But the best creative work done in the field at that time (mostly in arts of the word) was accomplished by religious conservatives such as T. S. Eliot.

The mainline Protestant church has never sorted out its basic attitude toward art, and interest seems to wax and wane. For example, from 1950 to 1978 the National Council of Churches had a Worship and the Arts department, but it ceased to function due to lack of funding.

It is clear that ambivalence on the topic remains strong today. It is also clear from the paucity of good art (except for music) in most churches, and the general absence of the study of art in seminaries, that even if interest is present, there is little accompanying effort to support the interaction of art and faith on any ongoing basis.

Certainly there are exceptions to this generalization; many individual churches are involved with the arts in a variety of ways: purchasing paintings; sponsoring art fairs; hosting dance or poetry performances, or classes on literary biblical themes. A good example of a church with multiple art ministries is New York’s Riverside. But such efforts are not generally sustained systematically in church-related college or seminary education, and the understanding of art’s relationship to faith is absent from most curricula (though some exceptions exist here, too -- for instance Gustavus Adolphus College, which employs sculptor-in-residence Philip Granlund, or Notre Dame, which also has an arts program).

One exception that particularly stands out in its conscious -- indeed quite passionate -- embrace of the arts is Wesley Theological Seminary (United Methodist) in Washington, D.C. The heart and soul of its Center for the Arts and Religion is founder and director Catherine Kapikian, a practicing visual artist and a 1979 Wesley graduate. Upon completion of her seminary work, which had crystallized her convictions concerning art’s intrinsic importance to faith, Kapikian had proposed the idea for an art studio and an artist-in-residence program to the school’s administration. Though she was at the start willing to organize and work in the program on a voluntary basis, she was turned down, to her considerable disappointment. However, shortly thereafter she received a surprise phone call informing her that the administration had decided to give her the go-ahead after all. That was the beginning of a venture that has generated great enthusiasm among students, faculty and visitors to the seminary (some of whom come to see only the studio, and others of whom have additional business on campus but often come to see the studio first)

Presiding over the bright and airy studio filled with a variety of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, stained glass and other projects -- most of them in process -- Kapikian provides a variety of opportunities for seminarians to delve as deeply into the artistic process as they might wish (or can be encouraged to essay) In addition to teaching courses in these media (or bringing in other artists to do so) , Kapikian also provides instruction in such topics as art history, describing the historical contexts that nurtured artists great and near-great, and that gave rise to specific movements. Students marvel at the masterpieces she shows on slides, many of them never before having seen pictures of the world’s great artworks (let alone the originals)

All Wesley students are required to take at least one course in. the arts, with a number of others being available as electives; all of the courses are organized around a theological focus. Students from other nearby colleges and seminaries may also enroll in the courses, and are doing so in increasing numbers. Often students are given the choice of writing a paper or actually producing a work of art as their course requirement; Kapikian encourages the latter, and though they may start out hesitantly, many seminarians develop or display skills of which they had been totally unaware. For example, Alex Roqué, OMI, a student at Roman Catholic Oblate College on the other side of Washington, chose to produce an art project for his course requirement in "Christian Themes Expressed in Washington, D.C. Art." In the course, which Roqué describes as "the most exciting of my four years in seminary, students visited local museums and churches displaying important artworks After learning about the diverse techniques they had seen, individuals created works in mosaic, stained glass, acrylic paint or other media. Roqué found work on his project to be "a very gratifying faith experience," and he will use his new knowledge in his missions ministry in Puerto Rico or an impoverished area of the U.S.

In addition to actual classroom instruction, Kapikian’s very presence and example are equally crucial as an educational device, she says, because of "the daily functioning of art in the studio. The centrality of the image, the potency of the image is forever present to the community. It reminds the community that theology must include more than just the language and structure of philosophical discourse."

Though Kapikian accords respect to academics interested in the relations between art and religion (generally these are theologians, although several schools have "religion and art" departments for the scholarly, theoretical study of the two) , she argues that the scholars have tended to dominate discussion of the relationship, virtually excluding working artists from any sort of dialogue.

Approaching the arts from a theoretical vantage point, says Kapikian,

has its own validity. But I don’t think it’s the place to start. I think the place to start is to have artists like myself -- who understand the language of art, who can teach theory but at the same time are able to involve art in a formative way -- work with students, helping them to understand the nonverbal vocabulary of the arts. This must include involving them in the doing and the making. Until one knows this language, one cannot talk theoretically about the arts and hope to impart an understanding.

The problem, says Kapikian further, is that the academic community, by and large, will not recognize the artist as being on an equal footing. "What is required is the understanding that art is an autonomous activity capable of discerning and communicating the truth from its own point of view." While Kapikian is careful not to indict scholarship per se, she is adamant in her view that its advocates assume inappropriate roles, in particular usurping that more naturally played by a trained, experienced artist. She is equally assertive about the necessity to abolish scholarship’s condescension toward practice, citing as one positive example the Wesley administration’s practice of including her completed art-works when listing faculty publications or honors.

Comments Bruce Birch, Wesley professor of Old Testament: "Having Cathy in our midst has made all of the faculty more sensitive to the artistic dimensions of the subjects we teach." For example, Birch now offers a course on the Old Testament and the arts, and in his other courses is more aware that "the biblical message has come down to us not only through an analytical/exegetical tradition, but also through an artistic tradition." Kapikian’s influence extends beyond new awareness of the visual arts, says Birch. For example, he is now more inclined to have his students read literature that reflects religious concepts.

Kapikian also notes that there is much informal mingling of students and faculty in the studio, with conversation often revolving around the works that are on the walls and occupying every corner of the room. These might be by students, by Kapikian herself, or by some of the artists in residence whom she invites to work at the seminary for a year (all of whom do so without remuneration).

Not all of the guest artists Kapikian has invited work in the visual field. For example, she has asked a poet to talk to students, and has helped to sponsor dance activity at the seminary, including a recent program expressing themes in Armenian Apostolic worship (this is the church she currently attends with her husband, who is of Armenian descent) She ardently endorses the idea of various types of artists working together on projects, a goal she has pursued in her own independent work. Though she was trained as a painter, Kapikian’s favorite medium is fabric. She has discovered that she is most comfortable and most creative "when I have a pair of scissors in my hand." Her fabric constructions hang in a variety of churches (and, soon, a synagogue) on the East Coast. Generally they are large works that display intricate variety in texture and color, and even those that are nonrepresentational are designed to convey various religious feelings or concepts. In some cases she has treated a particular biblical theme (the last supper; the Song of Songs; the Easter story) , while in others the religious theme is more generally evocative ("We and Thou’’; ‘‘Make a Joyful Noise’’; ‘‘Celebration’’)

During a visit I asked Kapikian her views on why only the art of music has truly endured in the church. (While many churches are proud of the stained glass windows they have inherited, little new creative work is appearing in that field today. See the M.E.M.O column, p. 295.) In addition to the influence of various traditions proscribing visual images, there is the inescapable fact that music does a certain amount of work for the listener in defining its own beginning, climax and conclusion, and in carrying the auditor along instead of forcing her to choose how much time to spend in contemplation. Music is also "multidimensional" in that it surrounds the listener. In contrast, a work of visual an -- whether painting, tapestry, statue or other -- placed in a particular location, does not involve the observer in the same ways. He or she must define the time and dimensions of involvement, and must make the first effort to engage the work; it does not move out to embrace the observer. (Kapikian advises her students that one does not walk up to a painting and say, "What does it mean?" but, rather, "How are you?") In these ways the visual arts may be intimidating to many, especially if the particular work at hand is abstract or otherwise not " realistic." (For example, Kapikian received some criticism for a work in which Christ and the apostles are depicted in vivid hues of blue, green and other strong colors.)

Further, congregations might have no idea how to in-corporate visual art into worship, which of course is a natural setting for music. I asked Kapikian what she thought about devoting a specific devotional time to contemplating artworks displayed from a slide projector, and she agreed that it would be as appropriate as meditation during organ music.

Indeed, another reason for the popularity of music over visual art, especially for worship purposes, is that many of us fear total silence; we fear what thoughts may come to us during a sustained period of real quiet. Hence we want our worship and meditation to be filled with sound (even if soft music). Few individuals ever choose to sit in true silence for very long. In this way music is a great rescuer, in or out of church (consider the numbers of people who wear radio earphones when taking a walk, or those who cannot sit quietly during a movie or even a concert).

However, what must happen, according to Kapikian, in any effort by churches to incorporate more art, and more varieties of it, into their corporate life is that education precede acquisition. She is adamant that individuals learn as much as possible about art and its parallels with religion before seeking to engage it directly. She advises that for seminarians such education be at least available if not mandatory; pastors may then carry this knowledge with them into their various ministries. She also advocates ongoing education, such as lectures by artists, roundtable discussions, panels of artists and scholars, or whatever other program may provide an opportunity for learning. This includes practical studio courses being offered to the community as well as to a student body. Only after appropriate preparation, asserts Kapikian, should one expect to be able to probe deeply into the meaning or significance of specific artworks.

Kapikian follows her own advice not only in the institutional seminary setting but also with the many private commissions she receives to create works for individual churches. For example, after she and a church committee have exchanged enough ideas to agree that she is the artist they wish to engage, she talks with that group, or other representatives of the congregation several times.

On these occasions she discusses the ways in which art uses the same kind of symbolic language that religion uses to convey its message, as well as how art can communicate religious ideas and feelings. She explains her plans to the group, indicating how she will be working, what they might expect the finished product to look like, and how they might prepare to receive it. She also makes it a point to study the space into which the work will fit, and to discuss that choice and its significance with the representatives. She talks, too, with members about their church building as a whole -- its architectural significance and its opportunities for the creative use of space. Such educational occasions, she finds, immensely enrich the parishioners’ experience of acquiring and growing with art. How, without this type of preparation, she questions, can the untrained person be expected to enjoy or appreciate at any great depth the new experience of contemplating religious ideas or emotions portrayed in art, especially if it is not traditionally realistic?

Another result of insufficient education, Kapikian argues, is the tendency for congregations to adorn their spaces with mediocre art. Indeed, she pronounces, "bad art is bad religion." Uneducated pastors and parishioners "don’t understand that fact because they don’t know how to look at art; they don’t know how to value it." In fact, it may be more difficult to deter a group from this inclination than to provide it with its first exposure to art. Some interest is present; it is judgment that is lacking. And of course it is next to impossible to inform a congregation that its choices are second-rate. The problem of mediocre art in churches would occur less often, Kapikian observes, if the educational process were to begin early. When many students arrive at seminary, she says, they are "basically culturally impoverished," and, while it would be ideal for them to have been taught by the family or in school, they now have another opportunity to learn before assuming their professional roles.

Other objections have been raised to the presumed difficulty of setting up a studio. But Kapikian scoffs at this; artists, she says, are skilled at the use of space, and they all know how to put together a studio even in the meanest of circumstances. Basically, she thinks that such objections actually mask a hesitation that grows out of school administrators’ own lack of familiarity with the arts, especially their importance to faith, or out of the traditional bias of scholarship against practical experience.

Kapikian actually fears that "the health of the church is at stake" if it does not soon recognize the intrinsic closeness of the artistic and the religious impulses. And it is up to the churches to challenge ignorance in their seminaries. "I believe there has to be a trend" toward establishing programs like Wesley’s, Kapikian emphasizes fervently. "And I believe I’m an agent in that trend. For one person actually can make a difference. Fundamentally that is what gives me my conviction to do my work: I am building a prototype. I am doing my share." Kapikian’s enthusiasm is infectious, and it is clear that her commitment to her goal is total and evangelistic. But it is in no way didactic or hierarchical. What she wants is for all Christians to share the joy of realizing how an understanding of art can heighten religious perceptions and vice versa.

Kapikian is convinced that in addition to seminaries’ establishing artist-in-residence programs, churches should also institute such arrangements. She observes that there are always heated rooms, often in an administration building, that stand empty during the week. Why not turn one of those into a studio, she suggests. Presumably, individual churches will be even more concerned about costs than are larger institutions. However, she maintains that many artists are willing to work without fee for the privilege of having an official association with a church.

Nor need the acquisition of art be expensive, according to Kapikian. In addition to the fact that many good artists’ works are within the range of church budgets, she says, other artists will sometimes lower their prices for a church. Then there is the possibility of a congregation’s contributing directly to the creation of an artwork to be placed in the church. For example, she is currently directing work on a 25’ x 10’ dossal cloth that she designed for the Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist church in Washington. She has created a needlepoint design which will be executed by 50 volunteers from the church -- both women and men.

Such cooperative ventures between an artist and a congregation are precisely what Kapikian would like to encourage. In all of her assignments, as well as her creations for others, she stresses the value of art as process over that of art as object; and there is no more meaningful process than for parishioners to share in the creation of their own product.

Another aspect of such cooperative involvement between artist and patrons, or artist and students, is the opportunity for important interactions to develop out of the shared experience. "I can tell you that that’s one of the great joys of my work -- these wonderful relationships," says the artist, finding such partnerships to be extremely energizing to her own professional and personal development.

As is clear from many of her remarks, Kapikian emphasizes that the value of the program she recommends accrues as much to the artist as to the community with whom he or she is working. "It’s empowering to the creative act to be nurtured, to be loved, to be respected and to be in a community where the issues that are germane to the church are forever on everyone’s lips. Being in this kind of community has a direct relationship to the work produced" by the artist.

In a cooperative arrangement such as an artist-in-residence program, there is benefit not only to the students and faculty individually, and to the artist, but also to the institution as such. Says Douglas Lewis, president of Wesley, in commenting on the many contributions of the studio, "It has made the seminary unique in defining a different approach to the arts from that existing elsewhere. The active dimension is unique," he notes, and the presence of a studio is "a visible reminder" of that distinctive approach. Because of the strong enthusiasm emanating from Wesley for this active engagement with the arts, the school has become a catalyst on the Washington scene for the formation of various arts groups seeking guidance from Wesley’s experience. Indeed, the school has been credited with stimulating considerable new local artistic activity.

As a consequence of its enthusiasm for the studio and for Kapikian’s programs, Wesley is making plans to open an art gallery on its premises. Some works will hang in the gallery permanently (as well as in other locations throughout the buildings) , and others will be displayed in specific shows. Lewis hopes that no visitor to the seminary will be able to leave without having encountered and being influenced by the gallery.

Certainly Kapikian’s works will be among those on view. Interestingly, she has kept only one piece of the many she has created in recent years. Titled "Black Christ," it grew out of her encounter with another art form: black poetry. In notes on the work she recalls, "The imagery in this poetry devastated me. I lost sleep. So I had to create this." Around the image of the Christ is black and white cloth: "The white stitch . . . inundates the black man. The pulled threads and frayed edges are indicative of this very strife in the fabric of our existence."

Kapikian allows the work to be exhibited, and it has been shown six times. However, she will not sell it; it has been too important to her creative development. "How," she asks in her notes,

can I expect you to understand the import of this work in my life as an artist? It was liberating. The potency of the imagery demanded a new way of working; and this constitutes a breakthrough. What else could I do but shred the cloth and pick away? Are not all innocent, tortured, suffering victims mutilated in like fashion? Therein lies its significance: I realized an idea authentically.

Cathy Kapikian is as interested in attempting different forms of communication as she wishes for others to be with regard to art. Though she consistently says that she is "not a word person," on Friday March 6 she preached her first sermon. For an artist who would keep in her possession only one of her works -- one that expresses the deepest pain of the human condition -- it is most appropriate that her initial step to the pulpit was during the Lenten season.

Distorted Images: The Elderly and the Media

Virtually all experts agree that this rapid increase will most certainly outdistance most societies’ abilities to cope with it, and they anticipate a proliferation of problems, especially in the poorer countries. At the same time, gerontology as a discipline is itself experiencing growth pangs. Relatively new as a specific field of study, it has developed especially quickly during the past 20 years. However, it still tends to be structured on national bases, and so far there are only the beginnings of an organized international movement. (This is also true in the social service field dealing with aging, though somewhat less so.) Both types of advocates came together on a truly international basis for the first time at the 1982 United Nations World Assembly on Aging, held in Vienna -- the debut of a UN-sponsored event in this field. The assembly produced a plan of action recommending substantial policy developments to its member nations. It also served admirably as an opportunity for government-employed specialists in aging to meet one another, as well as those nongovernmental participants present. However, it frequently became bogged down in the same type of political wrangles that characterize many UN-related events, and valuable planning time was thus lost. Clearly, there is a need for other forums in which international exchanges take place in a less-heated atmosphere.

Such a gathering took place late this past fall in Madrid, the European headquarters of cosponsor Opera Pia International for Active Aging (OPIAA) , a Catholic group long involved in innovative work with the elderly in a number of nations. Also sponsoring the event was Rome-headquartered Interpress, a nonprofit news service that focuses on the Third World. Held with the cooperation of the UN Fund for Population Activities, the meeting convened around a particular focus: the image of the elderly in the media. Coming from all parts of the globe, participants included professional gerontologists, social service providers -- both religious and secular -- and specialists from both broadcast and print media: writers, editors, directors, producers, administrators and others. While the conclave was not designed to embrace a specifically religious perspective, it was noteworthy that even many of the representatives of secular organizations attributed their interest in aging at least partially to their own churches’ influence and traditional support for the elderly.

Though the conference theme was primarily addressed to images of aging in the media, dialogue flowed in a variety of related directions as well, with the most important subtopic emerging as the relationship of the elderly to various media forms.

Of the few elders who do appear on TV in one or another capacity, noted Heisel, almost all are male: only one in ten characters judged to be 65 or older is a woman. Thus, she said, if we assume that what has meaning and status for society finds, its way onto television screens, the message conveyed seems to be that the elderly are not very important, and that among that population group, only men have significance. In referring to research of other gerontologists, Heisel also observed that when older persons do appear on screen, they tend to be "more comical, stubborn, eccentric, and foolish than other characters." She also cited a 1977 Annenberg School of Communication survey of more than 9,000 television characters, which determined that only 3.7 of them were elderly; moreover, compared to other groups, these individuals were portrayed as ineffective, unattractive and unhappy.

Though very little of this type of information is available for non-Western nations, there is enough to be alarming. For example, several projects have recently examined media images of the elderly in Japan, a nation traditionally cited for its reverence toward its elders. However, as Japan has surpassed even the U.S. in its industrial, technological and consumerist ethos, the historic respect accorded the elderly has been disappearing quite dramatically from its cultural and social attitudes. Heisel reported a study comparing Japanese and American children’s TV programs, whose results revealed that there were even few older characters on the Japanese shows: 4 per cent of all speaking roles, as compared to 9 per cent for the U.S. The Japanese characters also remained on screen for only one-third the time that the American characters did. And only 2 per cent of the Japanese figures were women.

This is a disconcerting shift in emphasis in a nation once regarded as a model for care and veneration of its elders. The most rapidly aging nation in the world, and the one with the highest life expectancy, Japan by the year 2,000, according to government statistics, will have a population with 21 per cent of its members 65 or older -- and the nation generally considers old age to begin at 55, when mandatory retirement usually occurs. In an August 7, 1986, Chicago Tribune article, Ronald E. Yates quotes Tsuneo Iida, a professor at Nagoya University: "While much of the world still thinks Japan is a society where the children look after their elderly parents, that simply is no longer the case." Yates writes that according to a recent survey conducted by the Japan Institute of Life Insurance, only one in four Japanese between 55 and 64 felt that children should be financially responsible for aging parents. These respondents have accepted an attitude that apparently originates with the nation’s young adults. It was expressed poignantly by a 76-year-old former gardener whom Yates interviewed in his tiny Tokyo apartment, shared with another elderly man: "I don’t like this new Japan -- it is a lonely, cold place. . . . Everything is electronic, nothing is human. Even my two daughters are more concerned with their kitchen appliances than with their father."

In the past five years, in a reversal of previous practices, the number of elderly Japanese citizens living by themselves has increased by a startling 30 per cent. And in this wealthy, sophisticated nation, hundreds of older men and women now spend their nights in Tokyo’s railroad stations or street corridors, curled up in cardboard boxes -- just as they do in New York or cities in other nations. The elderly are simply disappearing from the Japanese national consciousness -- just as they are essentially absent from its media. This is a distressing development externally as well as internally, especially for those other countries that have looked to Japan for attitudinal models.

The situation is not as bad with print media as it is with television. This state of affairs can be only partially encouraging, however, for the increasing worldwide popularity of TV has been accompanied by a steady decrease in reading (and in nations where the literacy rate is low, television can have an instant impact on people who have never read a newspaper or magazine) At any rate, recent research has concluded that of all media, newspapers do the best job of presenting a satisfactory image of aging. For example, M. Bucholz and J. E. Bynum (Gerontologist, vol. 22, 1982) studied 2,000 feature stories in both a major influential paper, the New York Times, and a small state paper, the Oklahoman. In both cases, there were few negative or inaccurate stories, with both papers, especially the Times, portraying the elderly mostly in active roles. (What these authors did find lacking was information of benefit specifically to the elderly, on such topics as health care, retirement and crime. But recently, both public television and special-interest magazines have been attempting to remedy this situation.)

Magazines, too, have done a better job of dealing with aging than has TV. In addition to a steady increase, internationally, in special-interest publications written for the elderly, their image in other types of publications is both more present and more positive than that on television. For example, in recent years Newsweek has published four excellent and comprehensive feature sections dealing with aging both in the U.S. and elsewhere. For the most part, the way in which the articles’ subjects have been described has been quite positive. In fact, however, this situation introduces another problem, to which those concerned have given less thought than they have to negative images of the elderly. That is, how often do older people really want to see themselves represented by the exceptions -- those elders who "look younger" or who are "exceptionally active for their age" or who have just won a marathon or a swim meet?

On the one hand, elderly people, like those of other ages, enjoy the stimulation that a role model can provide, especially if that model has overcome some impediment or accomplished some particularly ambitious goal. But the appearance of only such individuals can become oppressive for the target group. For example, the omnipresence of extremely thin fashion models in American magazine ads gave rise to a demand for "large size" models: frankly heavy women for whom there are now special lines of designer fashions (though it is worth noting that this trend has not extended to men’s clothing ads -- nor has it shown up on television). Similarly, the "average" elderly person sometimes wants to be represented in the media by just another average person.

A U.S. study by the National Commission on Working Women has concluded that in the case of a few programs at least, TV has recently been just as guilty in portraying an artificially positive image of aging as it has always been in the other direction. In referring to characters from such programs as "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest," the study’s authors agree that "if painting a rosy picture is a crime, TV is guilty when it comes to older women. Never has life been so good for females over 50. They are healthy, attractive, affluent and available for romance." Indeed, "prime-time women are unrealistically upscale": 26 per cent are millionaires, 68 per cent are middle class and only 5 per cent are working class. In reality, only 0.2 per cent of all American women over 50 have annual incomes above $75,000; almost 40 per cent survive on less than $5,000 per year. The study also suggested that, while men appear more often as TV characters, their depiction is equally unrealistic (Clarence Petersen, Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1986, sect. 2, p. 1). (One partial exception to the commission’s study results may be the popular program "Golden Girls," in which the major characters are all women -- who are generally portrayed with less egregious exaggeration than some other shows’ characters.)

But even when intentions are good, results may sometimes be unexpectedly off the mark. For example, in its November 1982 feature on "Living Longer, Living Better, Newsweek notes that "the wisdom of the elders is more often honored than consulted, and the patronizing compliments they are paid can betray a subtle bias. ‘I used to say "Thank you" when people said I had a young mind,"’ recalls interviewee Daisy Grunau in the Newsweek article. "Later, I realized what an insult that is. Do my 50 years of experience mean nothing? That sort of ageist slur is rooted in the pejoratives of everyday language, where the old are also ‘spry,’ ‘crusty,’ ‘well preserved."’ And yet, on the magazine’s cover, illustrating this same feature article, the thin, lithe and extremely attractive woman shown exercising in a leotard is scarcely typical, and is the sort likely to be complimented as exceedingly "spry." Indeed, the subhead next to the photograph reads: "Growing Old Without Thinking Old’ ‘ -- exactly what Daisy Grunau complained of in pointing to standards of youth as those by which we measure all behavior and appearance. Surely an unplanned blunder on Newsweek’s part, but a blunder nonetheless (perhaps worse in the long run exactly because it was unconscious and indicates not deliberate discrimination but a naive lack of sensitivity) A balance of exceptional model elders with equal numbers of average everyday folk would provide a more accurate picture of the aging as they really are, with their very human combinations of merits and faults.

It is highly ironic that most media are not more sensitive to the images of aging that they portray, for the elderly are among the greatest users of all media forms. According to Heisel, from middle age on, media consumption increases with age. For example, newspaper reading actually reaches a peak at age 65 (then drops quickly, presumably due to problems with eyesight) ; the same is true of magazine reading. Listening to the radio is also popular with the elderly, especially for news and weather, though its use, too, declines later, due to hearing difficulties. Where television is available, it is the preferred medium, partly because it can be both heard and seen, thus allowing the viewer to compensate for some impairments. Television viewing, reports Heisel, increases consistently from around 40 years of age until well into the 80s. In the U.S., people over 60 view more television than do members of any other age group, including children; older people, various researchers have shown, list television viewing as their favorite leisuretime activity. One study in a retirement community, where the median age was 72, indicated that residents watched television an average of six hours a day; this statistic compared with two hours of radio listening, 45 minutes of newspaper reading, one-half hour of magazine reading and a few minutes of book reading.

As Heisel points out, the media, especially television, provide companionship to the elderly, particularly those living alone or simply feeling lonely as a result of old age’s inevitable losses. Such individuals, along with those physically unable to leave their residences, depend on the media as their lifeline to the world. In the best of circumstances, TV, radio and reading material can even provide a focus for social -activity; it is not uncommon to see a group of nursing-home residents watching a TV program together and then discussing it. One elderly woman living in an institution where there was no communal TV set reported feeling highly pleased that she had one in her private room and could invite friends in to watch a program. Though print media serve fewer such functions, they, too, may be used in a variety of ways that do not necessarily isolate an individual. For quite some time I taught a public-affairs course in a nursing home; its subject matter was the daily or Sunday newspaper. Because many of the residents had lost part or all of their eyesight, I read articles or features to them, which the group then analyzed.

What with all the media interest the elderly demonstrate, it is doubly cruel that the images they see of themselves therein are so frequently distorted. This fact itself can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, for people often act in the ways they are expected to. Their own self-images tend to conform to the images they see portrayed, thus setting up a vicious circle that seems well-nigh impenetrable.

Of course, the problems the elderly face with regard to their media portrayal are part and parcel of an entire fabric of societal attitudes, preferences, wishes and fears. Birth, aging and death are the only experiences shared by all human beings. And in some ways it is easier to dramatize some rare, grim disease in a TV story than it is to depict the relative banalities of old age. The story of the unusual illness will be watched with fascination and a sense of relief by those who do not have it -- and with a certain fascination and sense of exclusive identity by those who do. The more common an experience, the less interesting it is likely to be to the media. Add to this the fact that society, particularly in the West, fears aging and death -- and the conditions weighing against their realistic portrayal become overwhelming.

In addition to the many constructive roles the church plays vis-à-vis the elderly, it could help very specifically in this context, and yet it often does not -- for many of the same reasons that block others from doing so. In the words of theologian Joseph Sittler, whose recent work has focused on aging:

. . . what might be the role of religious institutions in this era of extended life? How are the churches to address the many problems that accompany that extension? Many people could tell you the obvious things: the provision of special care, the preparation of the church building for access, the sensitization of the pastor to the increasing numbers of the aging. All of these efforts are obvious and good. The less obvious but very important issue is our need to start talking about death earlier in life. It seems to me that the church has been simply supine before the mores of Western culture, according to which it is indecent to talk about death in polite society P ‘Theological Perspectives on Aging," Human Values Institute Conference, May 12-14, 1986; published in Second Opinion: A Journal of Health, Faith, and Ethics, November 1986].

Sittler argues that the church is not as active as it should be in addressing the nonmaterial needs of the elderly, in this case the losses of age and the inevitability of death -- the same issues from which the media also shy away.

The problems that contribute to unrealistic images of aging must be addressed at both the personal and the systemic levels; healthy old age and its proper representation in society are a matter of public policy as well as of individual behavior. In the U.S. and Western Europe, both levels have been targeted for attention, though most large-scale efforts until rather recently were directed toward the practical concerns of adequate food, housing and health care. In the past 15 years or so, more energy has been channeled toward the "quality of life" issues that contribute substantially to image and to other needs that are less physical than they are mental, emotional or spiritual. But though a great deal of effort has been poured into such attempts they continue to face a variety of obstacles.

For example, the American Association of Retired Persons is the U.S.’s largest support group on behalf of the elderly; it currently has a membership of some 24 million. And yet AARP has its own image problem. To many, it is basically a middle-class organization catering to those who want to take advantage of its insurance policies or its vacation discounts; they do not know of its legal and lobbying work on behalf of legislation to benefit the elderly of all economic levels. Nor are large numbers (including many of its own members) fully aware of the organization’s innovative activities that address image and other nontangibles as part of their focus. One such project is a "worker equity" program that attempts, as one of its goals, to eradicate from employers’ minds the common negative stereotypes of older employees (they are stubborn, lazy, have less energy, do not adapt to new technologies) Another unit of the organizations the Interreligious Liaison Office, is also involved with the non-material aspects of aging. One current example is the unit’s minority training program, in which 13 minority persons have received preparation to represent the interests of their particular minority group within their religious denomination. A second such project is the promotion of opportunities for ministries by older persons within various denominations.

Additional U.S. organizations have also focused on image and other nonphysical needs. For instance, the primary goal of the National Interfaith Coalition on Aging is the promotion of spiritual well-being for the elderly. Composed of organizational and individual members of the Catholic. Protestant, Jewish and Orthodox communions, NICA is involved in a variety of projects that influence society’s image of aging. A case in point is its GIST (Gerontology In Seminary Training) program, which provides teaching resources for seminarians who will one day be pastors to the elderly in their congregations, and who must understand their special needs and circumstances.

Despite these and other labors, there remains a significant gap in the knowledge which most professionals, including clergy, have about the aging process, particularly its emotional components. Even many physicians are relatively uninformed; and, surprisingly, psychiatrists and other mental health specialists seem particularly limited where the elderly are concerned, despite the fact that large numbers of older people experience depression and other emotional stresses. The development of geriatric psychiatry is very recent, and though there are now several highly respected training centers for its dissemination, the number of practitioners in the field is still extremely small (and may remain so, according to one expert, because most therapists find it more challenging and exciting to work with younger clients and because they themselves may fear the aging process).

It is certain that OPIAA, whose focus has always been international, will persist in its commitment to improve all aspects of the aging process in the countries where it operates. One of the most active participants at the 1982 UN Assembly on Aging, OPIAA has dealt seriously with the set of goals and guidelines produced by that first-of-its-kind event. The recent meeting in Madrid was one example of the Catholic group’s continuing creative efforts; one hopes that the number of such internationally focused events will increase. The world is moving rapidly toward the new century and its dramatic growth in the population of elderly people. Their -- our -- quality of life will depend on actions and attitudes formulated now.

Social Consciousness and World Maps

From its initial announcement, the Peters Projection has been surrounded by controversy: in over 40 articles on the subject, cartographers have vigorously denounced a number of Peters’s claims for the map, while he and his supporters have argued that his is the only world map that meets the concerns of people interested in social issues. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) , the National Council of Churches, and Lutheran and Methodist groups are among the organizations supporting Peters’s map.

Peters’s principal claim is that his projection shows all parts of the world in proportion to their true areas, while the Mercator Projection greatly distorts relative areas so that Europe, the Soviet Union, Canada and Greenland are shown as far larger relative to South America and Africa than they really are. The latter regions include important parts of the Third World that are populated primarily by dark-skinned peoples, and the former regions are populated mostly by light-skinned, industrialized peoples. Peters concluded that the Mercator Projection draws its popularity in large part from exaggerating the sizes of white-dominated regions and thus reflects a racist attitude -- a serious charge, if actually true.

There is no question about it: small Europe does show up more prominently on the Mercator Projection than it does on others that maintain correct area relationships (and there are scores of these besides Peters’s). If this unfortunate bias deserves to be corrected, why do cartographers object so strenuously to the claims Peters makes for his projection?

Their objections fall into two general categories: first, the simplistic proposal that the Peters Projection should be used exclusively (except possibly for navigation) , and second, the number of incorrect statements made about the projection, and therefore (by implication) about other projections.

Promoting the projection as a cure-all for mapping woes is indeed highly simplistic. No one flat projection, especially for world maps, can be ideal. Whereas a globe may be the most accurate world map, it is awkward to handle and to measure on, and of course we can look at only part of it at a time. And besides the many world map projections that show all areas in true proportion, some others are better for measuring certain distances, some for showing routes, some for showing shapes of landmasses and some for shapes of oceans. Other projections are better for mapping small regions such as continents and countries. The promotion of the Peters Projection thus seems to have taken on some of the same single-mindedness as claims for an "only true faith" or a panacea patent medicine. In the process of trying to raise social consciousness with his map, Peters has cast aside objectivity and important facts. And the financial aspect cannot be ignored: According to a 1987 handbook, A New View of the World: A Handbook to the World Map: Peters Projection, written by Ward L. Kaiser (the leading American proponent of the Peters Projection) and published by the Friendship Press of the National Council of Churches, the "Peters Projection map has reached a worldwide distribution of more than 16 million copies in six languages." The promotion of Peters’s projection clearly takes advantage of general unawareness that many other projections do show all countries in true proportion to their areas.

This article. "Peters Projection -- To Each Country Its Due on the World Map," (clearly credited to the Bulletin, the West German government publication in which it originally appeared in 1977) , was reprinted later that year by the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) , a professional association with some 11,000 members, in the November issue of its publication, also (incidentally) called the Bulletin. A decade later, the Friendship Press handbook quoted from the ACSM article and twice treated it as the ACSM’s endorsement of the Peters Projection. The ACSM’s 16-member board was so incensed by this false inference that it unanimously passed a resolution asking that this misuse of its name be retracted, since the ACSM has taken no official position on the projection.

The same 1977 article and several others say that Peters "created" this ‘new" map projection. Actually, Peters’s 1973 projection is the same as one rendered in 1855 by James Gall of Scotland, who published his developments of the Gall Orthographic Projection, as he wished it to be called, in an 1885 article titled "Use of Cylindrical Projections for Geographical, Astronomical and Scientific Purposes" (Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4) , which is available in many American and European technical libraries. (Gall actually preferred one of his two other proposed projection systems.) The existence of this earlier work has led one committee of American cartographers to refer to the Peters Projection as the "Gall-Peters Projection." Gall in turn was just making a relatively simple modification of the Lambert Cylindrical Equal-Area Projection, published by Johann Lambert of Alsace in 1772 and well known to modern cartographers. Other equal-area projections include the oval-shaped Hammer Equal-Area Projection (1892) and an Eckert Equal-Area Projection (1906)

Sixteenth-century Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator himself often used equal-area projections when he made maps for geographical purposes. He designed the Mercator Projection in 1569 strictly to help navigators; his is the only projection that shows rhumbs as straight lines: a navigator could connect two ports with a straight line on Mercator’s map and then proceed along a constant course based on the direction of this line. The Mercator Projection became so well known that people began to misuse it for geographical purposes -- against Mercator’s intent.

It is ironic that while the socially conscious recommend the Gall-Peters Projection for portraying the Third World with proper area scale, that map in fact represents the industrialized nations halfway between the equator and the North Pole with very little distortion of shape, while vertically elongating the Third World countries near the equator by a ratio of two to one. This has led Arthur H. Robinson, professor emeritus of cartography at the University of Wisconsin and author of the most widely used textbook on cartography, Elements of Cartography (John Wiley, 1984) , to describe the Gall-Peters land-masses as "somewhat reminiscent of wet, ragged, long winter-underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle" ("Arno Peters and His New Cartography," The American Cartographer, October 1985)

On the February 3, 1984, broadcast of National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered," interviewer David Malpus challenged Kaiser, noting that the Peters Projection does not show Africa in its normal shape. Kaiser replied, "Well, one needs to ask what is the normal shape of Africa? Without having seen Africa from outer space, I’m really not in a very good position, nor perhaps [is] any of us, to say how it actually looks." But because we have navigators’ and surveyors’ mapping work applied to our globes, as well as the new evidence of photographs by astronauts, we know very well how Africa looks from space! Any flat projection will distort shapes, but Malpus’s point was that Peters’s distortion of Africa seemed excessive.

Actually, Lambert’s 1772 equal-area projection might serve better for Peters’s purpose, since it eliminates shape distortion at the equator, and applies it instead to other regions of the map, including the industrialized areas. There are other, more technical, problems with the claims for the Peters Projection; for example, he makes the computations for the projection seem very complicated while they are actually relatively simple.

Nevertheless, Peters and Kaiser appear to have successfully accomplished a feat that most cartographers only dream of achieving. Professional mapmakers have been wringing their hands for decades about the misuse of the Mercator Projection, but, as Peters stresses, the Mercator is still widely misused by school teachers, television news broadcasters and others. At least Peters’s supporters are rightly communicating the fact that the Mercator should not be used for geographical purposes, and numerous cartographers agree. The Gall-Peters Projection does show many people that there is another way of depicting the world.

If professional cartographers believe that the Gall-Peters is not a good alternative, at least it is challenging them to offer better ones. If they do not take advantage of the platform provided by this controversy, then they are assenting to the Gall-Peters in much the same way that the nonvoter assents to those holding political office.

The ACSM in 1985, through its member organization the American Cartographers Association, formed a Committee on Map Projections, which has prepared two booklets discussing in lay terms what should be involved in choosing a world map projection, and presents ten alternative projections, including the Mercator and the Gall-Peters. Choosing from several is not as easy as simply using one repeatedly, but the process is much more informative. A simplistic approach to the problems of map projection can result in misleading solutions.

Can You Get There from Here? Problems in Bible Translation

The most recent report from the United Bible Societies states that at least one biblical book has now been translated into 1,884 languages, the New Testament into 670 languages, and the complete Bible into 303 languages. All translators of the Bible must confront certain exegetical problems. There are, for example, textual problems. In I Samuel 10:1 is the longer text of the Septuagint to be followed (as in the Revised Standard Version and Today’s English Version) or the shorter Massoretic text as in the New International Version? Did Paul write the words "Not beyond what is written" in I Corinthians 4:6 (as nearly all translations have it) , or was this originally a scribal note in the margin which later was incorrectly incorporated into the text itself (as some commentators and the French Traduction Oecuménique de la Bible contend) ?

There are also lexical problems to examine. Does the Hebrew verb sanah in Judges 1:14 mean that Acsah. daughter of Caleb, got off her donkey (as in the NIV, RSV and TEV) or that she ‘broke wind" (as in the New English Bible first edition; the second edition says, "she made a noise") ?

And translators face grammatical problems. In the noun ges (the earth) in Ephesians 4:9 a genitive in apposition to "lower parts" (as in the NIV -- ’ ‘the lower, earthly regions") or a partitive genitive (RSV -- "into the lowest parts of the earth") ? Is the second half of Genesis 4:23 an example of synonymous parallelism (TEV -- ’ ‘I have killed a young man because he struck me") or does it refer to two men (New Jerusalem Bible -- "I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me") ?

These translation problems arise because of difficulties in the original text (Hebrew. Aramaic or Greek) , not in the receptor language (the language into which the translation is being made) In my work as a consultant for the United Bible Societies in West Africa and South America, helping to organize and supervise translation projects in such places as Ouagadougou, Bobo Dioulasso, Timbuktu and Tamale, and checking translations in such languages as Bobo, Bwamu, Gourma, Pila-Pila and Kabiyd, I have discovered another kind of difficulty: obligatory categories in the receptor languages which do not exist in the biblical languages. When faced with such categories, translators often wonder if it is possible to translate certain texts correctly. They are not sure that they can get "there" (an accurate translation into the new language) from "here" (Whatever language serves as their source-text language).

For example, the Guarani language of Paraguay, spoken more widely there than is Spanish, distinguishes between the "we" that includes the listeners or readers and the "we" that excludes them. To understand the difficulties this poses for the Guarani translator of the New Testament, read II Corinthians 5-7 and try to determine when "we," "us" and "our" refers to the Corinthian Christians (inclusive) and when it refers only to Paul and Timothy (exclusive) In II Corinthians 5:20. "we" and ‘us" are exclusive, but in verse 21 "our" and "we" appear to be inclusive. In 7:1 "we" and "us" are inclusive, but in 7:2 they are exclusive.

The Greek does not have two different forms of the first person plural pronoun. Guaraní does: ñande is inclusive "we" and ore is exclusive "we." When the context is ambiguous and interpreters do not agree on the nature of the reference as in II Peter 1:3 ("his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence") , the Guaraní translator must make a decision which the English translator does not have to make. Indeed, for many readers of English (or Greek, for that matter) the question does not even arise.

For some interpreters of II Peter 1:3, the first "us" refers to Christians in general (inclusive of the readers) , whereas the second "us" refers to the apostles of the historical Jesus (exclusive of the readers) Other interpreters argue that both pronouns include Christians generally. The Guaraní translators chose the inclusive form of the pronoun in both occurrences in this verse, so that the Guaraní reader will not even suspect that the second "us" might refer to some group exclusive of the original recipients of this letter.

Especially difficult is John 8:39. The Jewish opponents of Jesus declare, "Abraham is our father." The Guaraní New Testament uses ore (exclusive) , suggesting to the reader that the Jewish leaders were denying that Jesus was a Jew. Yet to translate "our" with ñande would probably associate Jesus too closely with the opponents.

A similar complication arises with the use of the definite article in the Chulupí language of Paraguay. In Chulupí the definite article must carry information about the relation of the speaker to the person or thing being named. In fact, Chulupí has 16 definite articles, as the following chart demonstrates:

Present Absent but known Absent and not known Dead

Masculine na ja pa ca

Feminine tha lhja lhpa lhca

Plural napi japi papi capi

Things & animals nava java pava cava

Paul wrote in II Corinthians 11:32,

"At Damascus the governor under King Aretus guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me."

Had Paul met the governor or seen him or did he know him’? If so, the translator would use Jo. But if Paul only knew about him, then pa is the correct definite article. The Chulupí translators used the article pa with "the governor," indicating that the governor was absent from Paul as he wrote and also unknown to Paul. Strangely, they used the article ja with King Aretus, though the text gives no indication that Paul knew the king. None of the standard commentaries in German or English even addresses this question since speakers of German and English do not have to know that information to translate what Paul wrote, and nothing in the context of the verse provides any clue.

Another problematic aspect of translation concerns terms of kinship. Many languages of West Africa do not have as all-encompassing word for "brother." Instead, they have one word foi "younger brother" and a different one for "older brother." Some languages indicate whether it is a brother of the same mother or a brother of a different mother (polygamy is reflected in the lexicon of the language) What does one do, then, with James and John in Mark 1:19? Probably they had the same mother, but which one is older? Since James is mentioned first, most translators assume that he is older, but the Greek text simply does not say. The Greek word adeiphus is not precise or specific here in the way that West African languages are.

Among most Mande languages of West Africa, some nouns -- mostly kinship terms -- can occur only in a possessive phrase. "Father," for example, can occur only in phrases such as "my father," "his father," "Kwame’s Father," etc. Such kinship terms do not occur in the abstract as they may in Greek or Hebrew. This raises an interesting problem in translating the prologue of John. Most scholars acknowledge that there is a marked difference between John and the Synoptic Gospels in that "your Father" occurs in John only at 20:17, at the point when Jesus now makes his Father the Father of his "brothers." Are the references to "the Father" in 1:14 and 1:18 written from the perspective in which God is "Father" to Jesus only or from the perspective that the readers share in Jesus’ relationship to the Father ("our" Father) ? English translators can leave the word "Father" in the abstract in these verses; many African translators cannot, and therefore choose to translate "the Father" as "our Father" in 1:14 and 1:18.

A final example involves pronoun gender. English and Greek distinguish between masculine and feminine pronouns in the third person singular (he/she) , but neither distinguishes the gender of the second person singular or plural (you) The Amharic language of Ethiopia uses anta for the second person masculine singular pronoun, and anci for feminine singular. When Paul wrote in Philippians 4:3, "And I ask you also true yokefellow, help these women, ‘he used the pronoun se (you), which could be either masculine or feminine singular. Similarly, syzyge (yokefellow) may be masculine or feminine. Indeed, syzyge is used for "wife" in ancient Greek literature, and Clement of Alexandria believed Paul was addressing his wife. But the Amharic translator must decide whether Paul is addressing a man or a woman in Philippians 4:3 before translating this verse.

The source text must be interpreted: Where do commas and periods go? Where do direct quotations end? What is the author’s own formulation and what is a quotation which he cites from someone else’s letter? When is a sentence interrogative and when is it declarative? Where do new paragraphs begin? What do words mean in a given context? What is the nature of a given grammatical construction? Which words should be capitalized? Which passages should be printed as poetry, creedal formulations or traditional material?

Likewise, certain obligatory categories in the receptor language require translators to make exegetical decisions. Translators cannot refuse to make a choice or say, "Well, if I had to choose . . ." They must choose. And readers of these translations will interpret the Bible in accordance with how it has been translated. Many of them cannot read the Bible in another language, or refer to another version in their own language, in order to clarify their understanding. Nor do commentaries and study aids exist for many language groups.

Translations will always be imperfect, for a variety of reasons. No doubt bad translations have been printed, and no doubt interesting theologies and church practices have been based on inadequate translations. Translating the Bible remains one of the most important tasks of the church. Evangelism, mission, the development of Christian literature and the development of Christian faith -- these all demand a reliable and intelligible translation of the Bible in the language of the people, whether it be English, Spanish, Guaraní, Chulupí, Ewe or one of the several thousand languages still waiting to receive an entire New Testament or a complete Bible.

The Marrying, Burying World of J. F. Powers

The figure of the priest is nearly irresistible to some fiction writers. As a living exemplar of Christ on Earth, he is already halfway to being a symbol. Thus novelists have portrayed censorious, unforgiving priests to demonstrate the gap between the church and genuine Christianity; repressed, neurotic priests to demonstrate the unhealthiness of the celibate life; and gentle, saintly priests to demonstrate the unworldliness of the true Christian. Some writers force priests into ridiculous situations for laughs, suspenseful situations for thrills, or political situations to champion a cause. At a literary pinnacle we have the tormented, existential priests of Graham Greene, and at a literary nadir the sexually compromised priests of much popular fiction. Everything, it seems, except the priest as a man doing a difficult, maybe impossible job.

That is J. F. Powers country.

A published writer for more than 40 years, Powers’s literary career is unusual compared to that of other "important" American writers. While his reputation is high among the discerning -- particularly among other writers -- his limited output has kept him unknown among most of the reading public. His first two published works were short-story collections, The Prince of Darkness (1947) and The Presence of Grace (1956) , whose contents could be divided evenly between the merely excellent and the truly extraordinary. His first novel, Morte D’Urban (1962) , won the National Book Award, as did a third short-story collection, Look How the Fish Live (1973) Although more uneven than the first two collections, this book still contained the requisite number of outstanding pieces. This year Knopf published his second novel, Wheat That Springeth Green.

Style and substance also set Powers apart from most of his contemporaries. Neither a lyricist nor a minimalist, Powers settles for a clean, supple prose, concise without ever being merely functional. While he’s not exactly invisible in his work, he eschews rhetorical flourish. He provides no "big scenes" or anything one might normally think of as dramatic. Sex and violence -- indeed, all forms of violent passion -- are notably absent from his fiction. Powers knows that more clergy are lost to the golf course or a second round of drinks than are tempted by a parishioner’s bed. If, as Alfred Hitchcock has said, "Drama is life with the boring parts left out," Powers likes to leave the boring parts in -- or rather, to reveal the latent drama behind the boring parts. Powers is the bard of prosaic parish life at a time when hot political novels and tricky metafiction prevail. In an age of writers swinging for the fences, Powers hits for average instead.

Though Powers is routinely referred to as a satirist, specifically of the Roman Catholic Church, that term tends to misconstrue his attitude. Satire implies the anger of a Swift or the snobbishness of a Waugh. While Powers’s vision is undoubtedly a comic one, his great strength is balance and proportion. He is not inclined to judge his clergy’s lives, for he understands that any priest must compromise between the spiritual and the secular. In fact, all of Powers’s ecclesiastical fiction, the novels in particular, can be seen as an exploration of this compromise. Intertwined with this theme is Powers’s effort to define the qualities that make a successful parish priest. What constitutes the business of the church, and what is merely church business? Or, as Father Urban Roche, hero of Powers’s first novel, puts it, "There was too much emphasis on dying for the faith. How about living for the faith?" All of Powers’s priests eventually face that question: How does one live for the faith?

Morte D’Urban reads as fresh today as it did when first published. Father Urban Roche is a talented, motivated worldbeater in a declining "teaching and preaching" order, the fictitious Clementines. In a little more than a year’s time he turns the order’s latest white elephant, an estate in rural Minnesota that the order hopes to convert into a retreat, into a going concern. Father Urban is the ecclesiastical version of the ‘50s corporate man, and while his secular talents allow him to accomplish his external goals, they are achieved at the expense of his spiritual life and his vocation as a fisher of men.

Throughout the novel, Father Urban’s spiritual and secular successes are contrasted with those of other priests. Father Urban’s ecclesiastical alter ego (and the closest thing he has to a friend in the order) is Father Jack, who is humble, devoted and sweet-tempered -- everything Urban is not. Significantly, Urban and Jack perform the same service within the order. They travel around the Midwest as guest lecturers, something at which Urban is extremely skillful and Jack is not. Also weighed against Urban is Father Wilfred, his superior at the retreat. Wilfred is a poor administrator and has none of Urban’s social graces. Thus, while Urban’s spiritual failings may be obvious, his skills make it difficult to judge him adversely. Jack is a poor speaker, Wilfred’s decisions are usually bad, and much of the order seems mired in a complacency that may cause it to fold -- the success of the retreat clearly is due almost exclusively to Urban.

The central comic motif in Morte D ‘Urban is the retreat center, which is financed by revenues earned at an adjoining golf course bought by the order for just that purpose -- Urban’s idea, of course. This situation and the logistics of it are very funny, but it also makes explicit the church’s dilemma in the secular world. The golf course is intended to attract the "right kind of people" -- that is, those who can leave an honorarium -- to the retreat. While this should hardly be the order’s chief concern, without financial support the retreat would have to fold. Powers doesn’t make a case for either side of this argument; he merely presents the situation as an example of the compromise the church may have to make.

Father Urban’s principal failure as a priest is his inability to see success for the order in any but worldly terms. This is made explicit in Urban’s dealings with Mrs. Thwaite, a rich Catholic widow whom Urban cultivates in the hope that she will bequeath the Clementines something in her will. When he catches her cheating the maid out of her earnings, he cannot convince her to return the money: his fear of alienating her makes him pussyfoot. As a spiritual adviser, he fails. He also fails with the wealthy, petty and childish Billy Cosgrove. After having charmed Billy into supporting the order, Father Urban is made to realize that the time when he could have taken Billy under his spiritual care and shaped him has passed. Like Billy’s chauffeur, Father Urban is just another bought man. A dunking in the lake at Billy’s hands sets Urban on a road to physical decline just as his spiritual life begins to take off. That this shift in attitude occurs at the pinnacle of Urban’s worldly success is the final irony.

This novel is built on two halves moving in opposite directions. The first chronicles Joe’s spiritual awakening and his education at life’s less than gentle hands. The second half follows his spiritual rebirth.

A privileged only child and former high school track star (and for a short time a sexual athlete as well) , Joe hits the seminary running, his energies turned toward a type of spiritual athleticism. Inspired by a spirituality retreat, Joe becomes the unofficial leader of a small band of contemplatives. In a quest for holiness ("Holiness.

was the only ambition worthy of the priest") they haunt the chapel and give up their vices (for Joe this is "smokes, sweets, snacks, snooker and handball")

Again, Powers uses secondary characters to refine his portrayal of his protagonist’s spiritual state. In Joe’s ascetic phase, two important contrasts to him are provided in Hrdlika, a fellow seminarian, and Father Van Slaag, Joe’s first pastor. Hrdlika is "a simple soul" to whom the rewards of contemplation come easily -- he’s a natural. Given a hair shirt by the seminary rector to test his resolve to join the Trappists, Hrdlika passes with flying colors. At Joe’s request, Hrdlika bequeaths him the hair shirt (there’ll be "God’s plenty of such where Hrdlika was going," Joe reasons) Unfortunately, the bequest comes at a train station and Hrdlika is still wearing the shirt. They manage to make the exchange in the men’s room, but flawed ascetic that he is, Joe can’t bring himself to put it on straight off of Hrdlika’s body.

Joe’s relationship with Van Slaag, the parish’s only pastor/contemplative, is more complex. Joe admires and tries to emulate him, even as he attempts to fulfill the practical demands of the job that Van Slaag ignores. One night, tired of fending off the housekeeper’s vicious dog and putting up with her blaring television, he stumbles into the pastor’s bedroom to complain.

. . . he’d seen through the old, almost buttonless cassock. . . the horny grey growth on the knees, the dogtooth wounds on the ankles. . . . Father Van Slaag did nothing about Mrs. Cox’s dog and TV. He was using them, these crosses, as a means to sanctification and salvation.

Seeing in Van Slaag a sanctity he knows he can never approach, Joe gives himself over to the mundane matters of parish life. He no longer distinguishes "as he had before. . . between the religious and the social demands of parishioners. . . . Joe’s hope had to be that he was, without knowing it, a sleeper."

Yet a priest who is so holy he will not -- or cannot -- heel a nipping dog or ask that a television be quieted is ridiculous. Van Slaag may be a saint, as Joe considers him, but he is also an inadequate parish priest. Earlier, Joe uses the story of Mary and Martha to defend Van Slaag from his critics. Most priests are Martha, he says, who complain about needing help preparing the meal; Van Slaag, like Mary, "hath chosen the best part." But the church needs its Marthas as much as it does its Marys, and Van Slaag’s detachment is an abnegation of his responsibilities as pastor. When at a poker game Joe criticizes Van Slang ("Just one thing wrong with Van not doing his job") , the latter sees it as a betrayal, but he also realizes it’s "only the truth." Leaving Van Slaag to his savaged ankles and calloused knees, the only cross that Father Joe needs is the daily rigors of parish life. He is learning to "live for the faith."

Joe’s complacency comes under attack with the arrival of a new curate. Unlike Joe, Father Bill does not leave the seminary on fire with the idea of becoming a saint. For him, a child of Vatican II, the church provides a chance to do good works, perhaps change the world. He makes it clear he wanted a slum parish, not Joe’s suburban congregation. The conflict between Bill’s idealism and Joe’s realism eventually changes them both.

The scenes involving Joe and his curate have a domestic charm unusual in Powers. When Joe hears he’s to get a curate, he goes through an elaborate and very funny series of preparations to make the new man at home. Later, as pastor and curate become embroiled in a fund-raising crisis, their mutual resistance begins to melt in camaraderie, the daily humiliations of the job creating a closeness that their cross-generational discussions never could. These scenes of priestly fellowship -- Joe and Bill sharing a drink or playing catch -- are perhaps Powers’s warmest and most touching. Joe and the realities of parish work succeed in refocusing Bill’s sights on more realistic goals, but Bill’s innocence in turn affects Joe. The forced introspection and recognition of his self-justification help Joe see how jaded he has become. As the book ends, he reaffirms his sense of vocation, and perhaps takes a small step toward that saintliness he had sought in seminary. It is he, not Bill, who ends up with the slum parish.

To underscore Joe’s progress as a priest, Powers creates an elegant structural device that brings the novel full circle. At Joe’s first mass, Father Stock, his old parish pastor and a money-grubber, takes advantage of having two newly ordained celebrants in his parish to take up a special collection. Joe balks at this, even to the point of trying to pay off Father Stock. His solution -- heartfelt but hilarious -- is to feign nausea, run down the aisle as the collection begins, and hide in the bathroom. Joe is right to condemn Father Stock for this insult to the parishioners and the priesthood. But that doesn’t absolve Joe of either self-righteousness or a lack of spiritual discipline in his refusing to obey his pastor.

Later, as a pastor himself, Joe balks at the taking of a tasteless publicity photo of his rectory, insisted on by his bishop. When he fails to dissuade the bishop, he swallows his pride and -- with a longing look toward the bathroom -- humbly submits. This is not lost on the bishop, who tells him, "There’s something in what you said last night, but a lot more in what you did this morning." "That’s what I’m afraid of," is all Joe can respond. The usual Powers ambiguity is there, but this time Joe submits to the ordeal with a humility that even Van Slaag could envy.

A recent review in the National Catholic Reporter criticized Powers for not acknowledging the ferment in the church resulting from Vatican II; it accused him essentially of writing in a time capsule. This is a misreading. Father Bill and his friends are fairly obvious examples of post-Vatican II clergy. Joe’s response to them is explicit, and it seems to be Powers’s too:

"Sure it was a time of crisis, upheaval, . . . but a man could still do his job. The greatest job in the world, divinely instituted . . . a marrying, burying, sacrificing job, plus whatever good could be done on the side. It was not a crusade. Turn it into one . . . and you ask too much of it, of yourself and of ordinary people, invited nervous breakdowns all around."

Powers doesn’t view life as a crusade either, or as a "barricades operation." "I don’t do the headline stories. I’m not running a newspaper," he has stated. For Powers, the enemy is boredom, careerism or despair. The real challenge is keeping the faith strong while battling the everyday monotonies, rationalizations and concessions.

But this makes Powers sound much too serious, and underplays his humor. His ear for colloquial speech and comic dialogue is unerring, and the one-liners he assigns Father Joe could sustain a borscht-belt comedian. Scenes of Joe fighting with contractors or negotiating rectory politics are pure comedy of manners, while scenes that take place at "the Great Badger, the Discount House with a heart," veer more toward social satire. Best of all are Powers’s interior monologues, comic amalgams of fantasy, faith and sports clichés that somehow approach the lyrical. As a humorist, Powers hits to all fields.

But his greatest comic triumph is Joe Hackett. It would have been easy to requisition a jaded-cleric type from central casting, perhaps give him a few eccentricities, and then knock off for the day. Powers does something much more difficult. While he uses Father Joe to express opinions Powers himself obviously holds, the character is bigger than that, and irreducible in a way Father Urban isn’t. In Father Joe, Powers has achieved that rare accomplishment of creating a fully rounded character like no other in modern fiction.

Catholic Nuns and the Need for Responsible Dissent

In a letter dated July 13, 1988, Sisters Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey resigned from their religious congregation, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (SND) , after a protracted struggle with the Roman Catholic Church involving their public pro-choice stand on abortion.

Since 1984, the two had been frequent speakers at pro-choice demonstrations. In the absence of any uniform policy regarding dissent, their congregation’s representatives had asked that they enter a discernment process with their provincial leaders before making public statements on abortion. The sisters refused.

Two official warnings of possible dismissal were issued by the SND administration in the first two months of 1988. But on June 1 the leaders informed the sisters that they would not be dismissed, saying dismissal would not be in the best interests of the Roman Catholic Church or the congregation. Six weeks later the sisters resigned.

The conflict had been in the news for several years, with pro-choice groups, antiabortion organizations, religious communities, feminist groups and the Vatican all closely following each new development. The decision not to dismiss the sisters was commended by the National Assembly of Religious Women and criticized by the acting director of the Office of Pro-Life Activities for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. A national conservative Catholic newspaper hailed the sisters’ resignation with thanks that a "bad soap opera" was over, while the General Government Group of the Sisters of Notre Dame stated that Sisters Pat and Barbara have done what the situation and their own integrity demanded. They know that the prayers of the Sisters of Notre Dame will follow them into the future."

Can the Christian community gain any insights from this ordeal which brought heartache, frustration and turmoil to countless numbers of people?

One popular interpretation of this event centers on the right of public dissent from noninfallible teaching in the Roman Catholic Church. Although Roman Catholic Church law acknowledges that the faithful have the right to make their views known (Canon 212, #3) , it appears that this right dramatically decreases as the views increase in dissent from official teaching and as they become more public. While there has been substantial dissent among Roman Catholics from the bishops’ pastoral letters, "The Challenge of Peace" and ‘‘Economic Justice for All," dissent on sexual matters such as abortion, homosexuality, priestly ordination of women and even birth control has become increasingly less tolerable to church authorities.

An equally important interpretation of the SND struggle is that the congregational leaders had a right to dismiss a member who failed to comply with legitimate demands. Many SND members objected to the public statements by the two sisters. Antiabortion groups complained to the Vatican about the scandal of nuns publicly assuming positions contrary to official Catholic teaching. They urged the Vatican to exercise its right to dismiss the two sisters. The Vatican, in turn, hoped this dismissal would be carried out by the SND leadership.

The exceedingly complex Notre Dame conflict cannot adequately be analyzed in terms of either the right to public dissent or the right of a religious congregation to dismiss an unsuitable member. A more fundamental analysis is needed to examine the extent to which dissent is responsible dissent. Carol Gilligan, a Harvard University developmental psychologist, illustrates responsible dissent in her examination of male and female moral problem-solving. Females most often analyze moral problems in terms of responsibility in relationships. How are people connected to one another? Males are more likely to be interested in justice, individual rights and fair outcomes. Gilligan claims that men generally adopt a morality of justice and rights, while women approach morality as responsibility and caring in relationships. For example, in her immensely popular book In a Different Voice, Gilligan describes a moral dilemma posed to Jake and Amy, two equally intelligent sixth graders. The moral problem involves Heintz, whose sick wife needs a drug in order to live. If Heintz has no money to buy the drug, should he steal it from the druggist?

Jake sees the problem as a conflict of rights. He acknowledges that the druggist has the right of ownership of the drug, but also that Heintz’s wife has a right to live. Reasoning that the right to live is of higher value than the right to property, Jake states that Heintz should steal the drug.

In contrast, Amy says that there may be alternative ways to obtain the money and suggests that Heintz borrow it. Amy elaborates on the effects of Heintz’s stealing the drug: "He might have to go to jail, and then his wife might get sicker again and he couldn’t get more of the drug." Amy then suggests that Heintz should explain the consequences to the druggist, who might then give him the drug and allow him to pay later.

Amy perceives the dilemma not as a conflict between the druggist’s and the wife’s rights but as a tension in a web of relationships that entail responsibilities on the part of all the actors. In Amy’s world of responsibility and interdependence, personal communication and dialogue are the means for mediating problems. Jake’s world of impersonal law and logic appeals to a hierarchical ordering of rights to resolve problems.

This discussion of rights and responsibilities does not mean that all males or all females conceive of moral problems in the manner described, but that a male’s approach to problematic situations generally focuses on rights, while a woman’s construction of reality usually identifies responsibilities.

Gilligan’s distinction might be useful in examining the ways in which Ferraro and Hussey may have taken a typically male, "rights" approach to dissent. More important, however, is the perspective Gilligan’s research lends to the Notre Dame case as a whole. Most interpretations of the case have simply contrasted the right to dissent and the right to dismiss -- a generally male perspective. Gilligan offers us the alternative of a female analysis which would not so much question the right to express a diverse view, or the right to determine membership in a group, but would examine the issue of responsibility. The real benefit of the Notre Dame case to the Christian community lies in its prompting a serious reflection on the nature of responsibility in regard to dissent.

In 1968, in the storm of public rejection of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on birth control, the U.S. Catholic bishops proposed three norms for theological dissent in their pastoral letter "Human Life in Our Day." The bishops stated, "The expression of theological dissent from the magisterium is in order only if the reasons are serious and well-founded, if the manner of dissent does not question or impugn the teaching authority of the church, and is such as not to give scandal."

These norms re-entered the debate on public dissent in the case of Father Charles Curran, the Catholic University theologian who in August 1987 was deemed by the Vatican neither suitable nor eligible to teach as a Catholic theologian because of his dissenting views on various moral issues. The archbishop of Washington, D.C., James Hickey, pronounced the bishops’ norms "unworkable" because of the extreme latitude for dissent they afforded Curran.

While it is worth re-examining these guidelines as a starting point in the quest for public dissent, we also need a further interpretation of dissent which incorporates Gilligan’s theories of responsible problem-solving. I am assuming here that public discussion of moral topics is the responsibility not only of theologians but of all church members if a healthy development of doctrine is to occur in an ecclesial body. In her article "Moral Discourse in the Public Arena" in Vatican Authority and American Catholic Dissent, Margaret Farley makes an excellent case for public discourse in which each member of the church participates and shares insights, experiences and reflections. Without the investment of the entire Christian community, the search for truth and meaning would be inadequate and incomplete. Furthermore, Farley argues, public discussion of morality is necessary in order to preclude the unjust damage which is inflicted on church members when their lived experience is ignored in the development of moral doctrine. In the Roman Catholic community, the letters-to-the-editor section of diocesan newspapers is one elementary forum for such public exchange of opinion.

Consider the first of the three norms proposed by the U.S. bishops: "The reasons [must be] serious and well-founded." If public dissent is to be taken seriously, there must be compelling reasons for the dissent. What are sufficiently serious reasons? In a church tradition which has long failed to take sufficient account of empirical knowledge, a dissent based on experience, I believe, constitutes sufficient reason. For example, widespread unrest among committed Roman Catholics about present teachings on sexual issues is reasonably based on appeals to experience.

Second, the bishops stated that the manner of dissent must not question or impugn the teaching authority of the church. A teaching authority is needed for moral guidance and support in a faith community. The community can arrive at truth only by reflecting on the collective wisdom articulated by ecclesial representatives. An individual’s moral decisions are aided by theological reflection within the faith community context. But acknowledgment, recognition and respect for a teaching authority do not preclude a questioning of the manner in which the teaching authority is exercised, nor of the content of the teaching itself. Such questioning is not a threat to the moral power of church authorities.

Third, the bishops stated that dissent must not give scandal. Although such a norm is necessary, I doubt that it would often be violated. Furthermore, it must be asked what constitutes scandal and who decides how scandal is given or received. In a 1987 address Curran rightly noted that, because of greater educational levels among all Roman Catholics and because of the discussion of controversial issues in popular public forums today, scandal no longer consists in causing "confusion" in the minds of the faithful. The majority of Catholic laity are no longer the "ignorant multitude," as Pope Leo XIII called them.

In this day and age it is scandalous to curtail public conversations on controversial topics. Confusion is unavoidable on confusing issues, and it may be a necessary step in the inquiry into truth. A paternalism which seeks to shelter the minds of individuals and to protect them from making possible mistakes fails to respect these persons as adult moral agents. Attempts to silence dissent can cause scandal by eroding credibility in church authority.

Beyond the three norms cited by the bishops’ letter, three further criteria reflected in Gilligan’s research into women’s responsible moral problem-solving can address the issues of communication in the SND case and all public dissent.

In the Notre Dame affair, the sisters did not enter into a clarification process proposed by their leadership; they rejected a suggested egalitarian method of discernment and refused to engage in dialogue privately with their general leadership unless that leadership made a public apology for some remarks of the previous year. The two sisters firmly believed that the leaders were attempting to silence their public actions and were unable to accept the leaders’ word that they were not under pressure from the Vatican. In internal correspondence, the SND General Government Group stated that they had never asked the two sisters to remain silent on the issue of abortion. Satisfied that their basic stance was not a pro-abortion position, the General Government Group requested that the sisters "refrain from making further public statements which did not fully convey their position." The leadership stated to the congregation that the sisters’ methods of public action became offensive to the great majority of the congregation’s membership because their statements contained language which was abusive and disrespectful of persons and because their statements were interpreted as being pro-abortion.

This event further illustrates a fifth norm: the dissent must be articulated as clearly as possible, with close attention to proper nuancing in order to minimize the possibility of misinterpretation. Since confusion is possible in complex issues, the dissenting view should invite dialogue and questioning. Criticism should be sought and welcomed. To promote the search for truth in love, public dissent must not become intractable. Responsible dissent always invites the Christian community to deeper reflection and continued dialogue.

Finally, the Notre Dame case, together with Gilligan’s relational model of moral problem-solving, indicates a sixth norm for responsible dissent: as far as possible, the dissenter should communicate and dialogue with those who will be most seriously and immediately affected by the dissent. Like 11-year-old Amy who saw that Heintz was involved in a web of relationships which summoned him to responsibility, Christians are entwined in multiple relationships as parts of many different communities and voluntary organizations. In public dissent, individual actions impinge upon the larger group. While formal association with others imposes restrictions on one’s degree of autonomy, an individual benefits from the moral persuasion exerted by organizational identification. In other words, there are trade-offs to group membership. Most often, those directly affected by the dissent are the institution’s representatives who have the responsibility of maintaining some sense of unity and cohesiveness, although never at the expense of legitimate diversity and plurality. A member’s refusal to discuss areas of tension prevents the individual from understanding and empathizing with leaders’ accountability to the entire group.

A member of an organization with a distinct body of religious beliefs can, I believe, publicly dissent from a major tenet of that group if the dissent is responsible. Without responsible dissent, how can any institution grow; change, or renew itself? In the process of public dissent the individual may discover that the bonds of affiliation and feelings of identification with the organization have become irreparably ruptured. In order to preserve his or her own fidelity to basic principles and beliefs, the individual may responsibly decide to withdraw from the group.

If the dissent is not responsible, should the member be expelled from the religious institution? If the member can responsibly resign, can the group responsibly exclude? If one goal of religious communities is to model a church which sustains harmonious, albeit not tension-free, relationships and which seeks to reconcile members holding conflicting views, dismissal or rejection serves only to compound the degree of alienation. If church members have distanced themselves by their public or private actions, the members will probably withdraw voluntarily. Threatening members with dismissal because of an unwillingness to negotiate differences does not foster communication. If all known means to propitiate parties have been exhausted, the community members and representatives would do well to pray and wait for God’s grace of reconciliation. Even Vatican authorities did not initiate excommunication proceedings against the ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for his adamant refusal to adhere to the reforms of Vatican II; instead they made magnanimous concessions to keep the archbishop within the church.

Susan Maloney identified a key issue in the Notre Dame case by questioning the degree of individual autonomy that is possible in a religious order ("Religious Orders and Sisters in Dissent," The Christian Century, March 9, 1988) While it is dubious whether any person can or should be a totally autonomous actor, women religious must achieve some sense of independence in their own affairs. The responsibilities of Roman Catholic women bonded to one another spiritually and bound canonically to the Roman Catholic Church are still in the process of being worked out. In a reflection paper prepared by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for the Fifth Inter-American Conference on Religious Life in 1985, the religious leaders stated, "We work for patterns of mutual accountability with structures for responsible dissent."

As the church continues to grapple with resolving conflicts, the role of nuns is pivotal, especially given their increasing dissatisfaction with arbitrary Vatican control and given the fact that they are becoming more vocal in their disagreement with many church policies. In a post-Vatican II church, women religious like Ferraro and Hussey are living in the tension of trying to maintain an individual and corporate integrity while remaining connected to traditional ecclesial structures. How nuns identify their responsibilities can provide a model for how each individual can cope with the demands of conflicting relationships in her or his own life. The way U.S. nuns handle responsible public dissent may provide a better understanding of how we all should treat each other in the Christian community.

The Politics of Loss

Book Review:

Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class, by Katherine Newman. Free Press, 320 pp., $22.95.

A debate has been raging over whether the U.S. is in the midst of military, economic and social decline -- whether it is and will remain Number One.

Yale historian Paul Kennedy kicked off the debate with The Rise and Fail of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. Unlike most serious works of history, it became a best seller. After examining the factors that led to the decline of imperial Spain in the 1600s and the British Empire around 1900, Kennedy turns to the U.S. What he calls the "imperial over-stretch" of American military and political commitments worldwide, coupled with our increasing inability or unwillingness to meet our socioeconomic needs at home, leads him to forecast the imminent decline of U.S. power and prestige. In line with his sobering conclusions, Kennedy offers U.S. policymakers a difficult prescription, on which many have gagged. "The task facing American statesmen over the next decades," he counsels, is to "‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States position takes place slowly and smoothly."

More than a few American statesmen, along with political commentators and scholars, have chosen instead to bash Kennedy and his thesis. The anti-declinists argue that the U.S. is, can and must remain Number One, and any suggestion that we accept something less is isolationist, defeatist and probably un-American.

Whether or not we are heading for decline, it is fair to say that Americans have passed over a line in our political psyche. Problems no longer appear as issues that call for management and solution, but as questions about us as a people: who we are, what we are capable of, where we are going. Americans are experiencing their problems not simply as problems but as losses -- events that take from us something we fear cannot be regained or replaced.

We have yet to recognize the central role that loss now plays in national thinking. Nor have we addressed its effects on our collective identity in such a way that we do not fall into depression, numb ourselves into mindless complacency ("Don’t worry, be happy") , or resort to grandiose self-delusion ("Still Number One!") We need to shape political discourse so that we find in the realistic discussion of what we have and haven’t lost -- including illusions about ourselves -- opportunities to think about the grief we are going through, and what recovery may look like.

Beyond overcoming the denial so common to grief, we face the more general problem of the American prejudice against dealing with loss. We equate loss with losing, with failure, with being washed up. We Americans don’t like to lose, and we attach a certain stigma to people who do. The limits of our compassion for the poor, for example, derive in part from the conviction that, if they would only try harder, they could be winners instead of losers.

"Hundreds of thousands of middle-class families plunge down America’s social ladder every year," Newman notes in her preface.

They lose their jobs, their income drops drastically, and they confront prolonged economic hardship, often for the first time. In the face of this downward mobility, people long accustomed to feeling secure and in control find themselves suddenly powerless and unable to direct their lives.

While other citizens worry about economic and social decline, these Americans are experiencing a "falling from grace" -- which is distinct from being poor -- in a particularly virulent form.

Newman looks at how "downward mobility" affects members of four different groups with distinctly different subcultures in America’s middle class (mid-level professionals, union members, etc.) She shows that people’s success in not only retaining pride and dignity in the face of the loss but in finding the meaning and purpose necessary to recover an effective life depends on how they and those around them interpret what the loss means. If solving our problems now depends on the ability of our political culture to motivate and support us in confronting loss, the implications of Newman’s study are striking.

Newman begins by examining middle managers who have lost their jobs as firms "downsized," merged, or were victims of hostile takeovers (part of what leads Americans to talk about decline) For these executives, their families and friends -- immersed in a culture of upward mobility -- financial success means everything. These people find that many of their children, accustomed to sheltered lives, turn on them when they experience loss. Sons and daughters of a "culture of meritocracy," these children were "taught that worthy people are successful . . . that success is indicative of merit," that the wealth the family once had meant they were "intrinsically smarter or more diligent than their [less successful] counterparts." People who do not make it, this aspect of our culture seems to be saying, are not only shameful but defective -- a view that makes it very hard to accept loss as a part of life. "When the successful fall from grace," the ideology of "meritocratic individualism . . . boomerangs . . . [f]or if individuals are responsible for their own destinies [i.e., success], there is no one else to blame in case of failure." The corporate managers Newman interviewed were often unable to accept what had happened to them and begin new lives. They became mired in depression, self-recrimination, shame and isolation as family support dwindled, friends drifted away, and their former employers referred to them, in the past tense, as "dead wood."

In a pointed exception, gay corporate managers, according to Newman, were generally less depressed, more optimistic, and better able to move on with their lives. Part of the reason, she notes, is that they did not have to support a "nuclear family" (or lose that family’s support). She attributes much of their recovery to "very extensive friendship networks" that did not desert them after they lost their jobs, precisely because financial success was not the key to shared identity. One might also argue that, as gays, these men had already learned a great deal about the loss and recovery of identity and the difficulties but also the potential for growth in that experience.

The once well-paid professionals that Newman interviewed now held down such jobs as groundskeepers and janitors. Yet she found spirits high, self-recrimination absent, belief in the future intact. Somehow these men had taken "from this cataclysmic event a sense of purpose and meaning that has sustained them in the years thereafter." The air-traffic controllers have found a way to interpret their losses not as humiliating defeat, nor reason for self-blame, but as a reason to keep going. Appropriating the "peculiarly American ideal of misunderstood crusader," as Newman puts it, they have dedicated themselves to convincing the public and Congress of the rightness of their grievances (emphasizing air-traffic safety, not money) and the injustice of what was done to them. The air controllers’ hero, Newman was told, was no longer Reagan but Martin Luther King.

What makes the air-traffic controllers’ response to loss particularly instructive is how they found unity and purpose not in parochial complaints but in "identifying and elaborating existing readings of the wider culture" that allowed them to see their struggle in a self-respectful, self-affirming way. Surely there is a lesson here for our politics. In such rereadings of our national experience, we could find self-enhancing ways to translate our losses into new meanings, motivate ourselves, and indeed forge a new sense of identity through confrontation with, rather than flight from, our problems.

Newman’s study of factory workers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, might also constitute a basis for public discourse and deliberation about loss. Left without jobs when the Singer Sewing Machine Company shut its flagship plant there, workers told Newman a story of how their employers had abandoned them after years of ignoring the plant and ignoring workers’ suggestions on modernizing and on how to save their jobs. But it was how they told their story that gripped Newman. They consistently interpreted what had happened to them as a betrayal of traditional American values, such as craftsmanship and loyalty to workers.

Their reaction illuminates a way of seeing the current American political focus on traditional values not only as Americans’ way of talking about the suppressed subject of loss but even as a basis for a critique of current property relations, in which owners have no continuing responsibility to those they once employed, or of a country whose human resources are plundered and abandoned.

After describing the downward mobility of divorced women with children, Newman ends her book with a plea for attention to those highly skilled human beings who are "dumped on society’s junkheap" in a "monumental waste of intelligence, motivation and aspiration." She eloquently summarizes how brutal it is to be "evicted from the American dream," and how the cynicism with which losses are currently being inflicted on even the middle class is eating away at our commitments to each other and to our work.

As our losses accumulate, the entire nation will eventually have to confront them and decide what they represent. Decline? Defectiveness? Our failure as a people? Why not simply answer reality? -- a reality we can adjust to.

When our losses can no longer be avoided or denied, we will either grow more and more disappointed in ourselves as losers in life’s (and world) competition, or we will find a new way of seeing ourselves that allows us to be more compassionate with ourselves and more understanding of others. This is the challenge American politics now faces: to help Americans face loss and, in the process of recovering meaning and purpose for our collective lives, forge an identity more secure, more cooperative, more productive than the old one -- better even than being Number One.

Making It Safe to Grieve

"I’m so ashamed," the young widow told me over the phone, weeping softly. She had called about a self-help support group I lead for the young newly widowed. Her husband had died of cancer at 38, after only three years of marriage.

Her tears were occasioned not by the pain of her horrible loss, sharpened by the shortness of the marriage, nor even the ubiquitous fears for the future that stalk the newly bereaved. The shame, embarrassment and humiliation she and others speak of, the "feeling that there’s something wrong with me," arose from her inability to stop grieving, no matter how much those around her told her she should.

Her parents and friends, she said, had grown impatient with her crying and her incessant talking about (and often to) her dead husband. She wanted to accommodate them, but the tears kept flowing, the "obsessing" continued and she saw no hope of it ending soon.

Given her mother’s and father’s exasperation, I wondered how long it had been since her husband died. Painfully she admitted it had been "over three months." Three months. "There is nothing wrong with you," I gently kidded her, "but I’d check out your parents."

The intolerance of family and friends for those grieving a deceased spouse -- even for those who have lost their spouse in the first years of marriage -- is more the rule than the exception. Parents, friends, relatives, clergy and counselors who offer support to the bereaved in the first weeks or months after the death soon begin finding "subtle but effective ways," as Douglas Manning puts it, "to take grief away" (Don’t Take My Grief Away [Harper & Row, 1979], pp. 64-65). A mother asks a grieving offspring if the crying "really helps." Friends suggest that it’s time to move on. "Neighbors take the new widow aside -- sometimes only minutes after the funeral -- and counsel her to "be strong," as though to grieve were weak.

William Sloane Coffin has talked of the reactions he encountered from some fellow ministers during his first months of grief over the drowning death of his teenage son. Many offered "comforting words of Scripture" to suggest he find God’s will or some blessing in the midst of tragedy. But "the reality of grief is the absence of God," he noted, and we must guard against words offered "for self-protection, to pretty up a situation whose bleakness [we] simply [cannot] face . . ." ("My Son Beat Me to the Grave," A.D., June 1983, p. 26). Such attempts to soften grief show no regard for the magnitude of the loss the bereaved are feeling, at a time when they are sensitive to any suggestion that their grief may be exaggerated.

While efforts to reduce someone s grieving may seem justified as acts of love, and motivated only by a wish to minimize another’s pain (and thus are difficult, especially for the bereaved, to challenge), they fail the first test of love: they do not show respect. To assert that we know better than the griever, particularly one who is in a situation we cannot possibly comprehend, how she should feel, think, or behave is fundamentally disrespectful. Normally we would not so presume or condescend, knowing it to be wrong and fearing the other’s reaction.

Many people, however, consider the bereaved’s situation pathetic, her tears signs of helplessness, and her distress evidence of weakness and confusion. Such an attitude leads normally loving people to violate the griever’s self-respect and dignity. While their actions may leave the griever "wondering if [she is] weak or even crazy," Manning notes, they are sure they know better than the griever what is right for her, for they aren’t in as much pain.

The notion that people experiencing intense emotional pain don’t quite know what they are doing (or they wouldn’t be doing it) is the root problem leading to disrespect for grief and the griever. It is based on a belief, as firmly held as it is wrongheaded, that expressing so much pain is neither necessary nor constructive. Once you believe that the pain of grief is needless, it is hard to appreciate a process that is putting your loved one through such pain. And if one assumes that the pain is unnecessary, it is hard to appreciate your loved ones for putting you through it.

While Manning ascribes such hostility to general ignorance about griefs stages (shock, tears, anger) , it rests rather on prejudices toward the pain that are capable of withstanding considerable education about the grief cycle. Once the extraordinary intensity and longevity of grief’s pain is actually witnessed, many people (including not a few grievers) simply refuse to believe that an emotional response of this magnitude could possibly be healthy, or be what grieving books, counselors, etc., are referring to ("They told me you’d cry, but not this much!") It is also hard to imagine a purpose great enough to justify something so terrible to bear -- or to watch.

Those who hope to help the bereaved must respect her pain and accept the fact that it is necessary and vital. While suppressing tears, ruminations and painful feelings may expedite the bereaved’s effort to "function normally," it hinders the process of working through the loss. Acknowledging and expressing the pain helps the griever recover her sense of self and renew her sense of meaning and purpose so that she can again truly and joyously embrace life, though the love of one’s life is gone.

When a loved one dies, the blow to one’s sense of self and motivation to live is potentially mortal. This is no overstatement. In the first week of bereavement -- according to one study -- husbands whose wives died by accident or violence are 66 times more likely to kill themselves. Women who die of heart disease are six times more likely than other women to have been bereaved in the past six months -- and heart disease among widowers under 45 has been found to be ten times the rate among married men the same age. "In a sense," notes the Harvard Mental Health Letter (March 1987), "people do die of a broken heart." The well-known Holmes-Rahe scale classifies spouse loss as by far the most stressful of all events in adult life.

Pain’s first task is to demonstrate to the griever the seriousness of the situation, so that she will pay attention to it. Thus, whenever we encourage the griever to deny the pain ("crying won’t help") we are in fact inviting her to ignore herself. If she is wise, she will ignore us instead.

It is not easy for grievers to resist flight from the pain of grief, and it is a slander to suggest that those who refuse so stop grieving openly when most do so -- after the first few weeks or months – are somehow "weak." Anyone can walk away from pain, if she has hardened herself to love or become careless enough not to listen to a desperate plea for help from within herself. To risk feeling the pain is a sign of immense strength of character, not weakness. And it is an act of courage, for it means facing not only pain and a lot of work, but also fear.

Death’s most frightening message is found in the griever’s lament, "All is lost." All that was once important and meaningful, all that made life valuable, is gone -- hopelessly entwined with a love now past, and unrecoverable.

Grief is a challenge, and though confronting it is slow and painstaking, doing so is among the most creative of human activities. May Sarton puts it well:

The only way through pain, and I am thinking of mental anguish of which I have had rather too much this past year, is through it, to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth, isn’t it? . . Even the most terrible shock has somehow to be built into the fabric of the personality [Recovering: A Journal (Norton, 1980) p. 13].

In reconstructing a new life the meanings, purposes and love once thought lost in the death are retrieved through arduous "grief work." The griever’s senses of meaning and purpose are translated into new and different forms, making them available for incorporation into the survivor’s present and future life. Unless processed through grief, pain will eventually find a way out in illness or depression, or will lead the griever to avoid all the deep feelings with which it is associated, preventing her from ever again feeling love or enjoying herself as deeply as before.

The self-healing process of reinterpreting and reintegrating the meaning of one’s life and love cannot be rushed, but it can easily be waylaid. The griever will experience a variety of feelings, and needs to hear from loving supporters: "Feel whatever you are feeling; I am listening and learning; I admire your courage." This encouragement affirms the grief process at a time when the slightest criticism can send it under cover, and offers certainty in the midst of doubt: this is the way to recovery. Those who speak impatiently to the griever are subtle collaborators in death’s message, and it is important for them to realize it. Their refusal to concede any meaning or purpose to the griever’s thoughts and feelings confirms that all that she once cherished is lost, irretrievably; what love now leads her to do will lead nowhere. Leave it alone, many say; time heals all wounds. But a shattered life is never fully recovered without work.

Pain will naturally dissipate as meaning is rediscovered. This takes a great deal of time. Progress may be hard to see, but is visible to loving and patient supporters. Bereavement scholars Colin Parkes and Robert Weiss have eloquently described why, when done right, the grief process moves almost imperceptibly slowly:

Emotional acceptance [of the death] can [only] be said to have taken place when the widow or widower no longer feels the need to avoid reminders of loss for fear of being flooded by grief, pain and remorse. For this state to be reached, there must be repeated confrontation with every element of the loss until the intensity of distress is diminished to the point where it becomes tolerable and the pleasure of recollection begins to outweigh the pain. The process is difficult, time consuming, and painful. It seems that emotional acceptance can be achieved only as a consequence of fme-grained, almost filigree work with memory what appears to an observer to be a kind of obsessive review . . . [But] if the process is going well . . . [there] are not quite the same thoughts and memories; there is movement [Recovery from Bereavement (Basic Books, 1983) , p. 157].

Their study of the younger widowed showed that recovery could usually be detected by the end of the first year, but the full formation of a new identity, the end point of the process, took at least two to three years.

Robert Veninga studied characteristics common to those who not only survive life crises but successfully recover full, rich, meaningful lives. In all cases, he found that these people first fully recognized and embraced the magnitude of the loss. To recover, he counsels the bereaved,

. . . you need to enter fully into your tragedy. You need to feel in the depth of your being what it is that you have lost. You should talk about your losses over and over again with a sympathetic friend. And you need to let the tears flow when your world is spinning out of control. In short, you need to acknowledge the enormity of that which has happened [A Gift of Hope (Little, Brown, 1985) , p. 66].

How we talk to ourselves, what psychologists are coming to call our "explanatory style," can be learned and changed, and whenever grievers indicate they are thinking self-denigrating thoughts ("I’m so weak I’m ashamed; I know I’m being foolish," etc.) the loving supporter should interrupt them. They are heeding internalized suggestions that addressing emotional loss is purposeless, inconsiderate and socially embarrassing. Until grievers learn to reject such attitudes, they will turn their anger inward, stifling that part of them still expressing love for their spouse, which they now blame for causing all their troubles.

The suppression of anger is also a serious potential stumbling block to full recovery. As the pain of grief signals the self’s violation, anger urges it to find redress. Griefs anger may first appear as only a means of placing blame -- on the doctor for a misdiagnosis, on the minister for not saying enough at the funeral, on parents and friends for failing to understand. But after the fury subsides -- after the reckless driver has been sued -- the bereaved is confronted with the fact that the person she loved is dead, and this unredressable fact is where the fundamental anger lies.

In seeking full recovery, the griever will use some of her anger to deter further violations of her life -- for example, by defending her grief process. A very serious difficulty is that so many people perceive anger as an ugly emotion they never learn to express it. And unless encouraged to learn how to do so when grieving, they deny themselves the stimulus necessary for the more assertive work of self-defense and self-caring required for full recovery. The griever who comes to see her grief as courageous and its violation a threat to the recovery of her life is more likely to see her anger as justified and right and to act on it.

When the pain and anger of grief are allowed to take their course, they will eventually join with the gamut of other feelings of grief, including joy and hope as well as sorrow, to focus on the true enemy, death, and the true goal, life. Recovery, after all, can be seen as life’s bold act, affirming itself in angry defiance against death. The pain that leads to anger at the violation inflicted on one’s meaning and purpose becomes the will to find a new meaning. Where death declared, "All is lost," grievers finally reply, "Not by a long shot," and go on to recover the very different, positive and constructive meaning that lies waiting for each of us, whenever we choose life.

Before meeting Pauline, I had survived a life of considerable loss ,first at the hands of parents who viciously abused all three of their children and then in a fight with cancer while in law school. After much confusion, suffering and a great deal of work, I had learned how to make it safe for myself to grieve. Then Pauline died.

A tenet of all major faiths is that suffering can redeem, and that if we take its lessons to heart, we will better understand not only the meaning of our own lives and the precious gift that is life, but how to bring the gift of meaning, life and love to others who suffer. Nine months after Pauline died, I began a self-help group for young widowed people like myself. The nearly 40 people with whom I have worked thus far have renewed their sense of efficacy as they worked through their grief and turned with excitement to the challenges of recovery and the future. This fall, one of our members, eager to share what she has learned, began a group for the widowed in midlife (ages 45-59) using our model. And so the chain of life and love continues.

The pain of Pauline’s death has not entirely faded, and I don’t expect it ever will. But with almost every passing day more of my emptiness and despair is translated into hope. Life is different and much more difficult than it would have been had Pauline lived, but I am infinitely enriched by her life having touched mine, and lam determined to find all the love, excitement and joy my wife would wish me. Even now, as I write, I hear her applauding.