Articles – Page 54 – Religion Online

Fresh Evidence (Lk. 24:36b-48)

When I was in kindergarten, one of my favorite activities was "What’s in the box?" The teacher cut a hand-sized hole in a box and placed a mystery object inside. You could reach in the box, smell the box, shake the box -- everything but open the box. Each one of us would take a turn with the box and share what we discovered with the class. We tried to guess the right answer. "It’s kind of fuzzy." "Is it a teddy bear?" "It feels like a ball. but it’s pointy on the side." "Is it a football?"

We thought it was just a game, but our teacher was trying to show us how to explore the world, how to ask the right questions, put together clues, hold back wild guesses and be patient, waiting for the right conclusion to emerge.

Jesus uses a similar pedagogy as he leads the disciples into exploring the post-Easter-world. They are somewhat less eager pupils than my kindergarten class. For one thing, they are terrified. For another, they are pretty sure that they already know what they are seeing. After all, there are only two ways to explain why this man who looks like Jesus is standing before them. One is that Jesus hadn’t died after all. But as much as they wanted to believe that, they knew it couldn’t be true. They had seen the cross, the body, the sealed tomb. They had all the evidence they needed, and there was only one other conclusion. This was a ghost, and ghosts are not generally signs of good news.

But Jesus gently coaxes them to a third, unconsidered, incomprehensible conclusion. He doesn’t explain resurrection, but instead encourages them to discover it for themselves. "Look at my hands and feet, where I was nailed to the wood. Yes, that’s right. I did die. A ghost? Are you sure? Touch me. Is that what a ghost feels like? Give me some fish. Do apparitions chew and swallow? It is I. I know you don’t understand it; I know you can’t believe it, but go ahead. Take a guess at what God has done."

Luke tells us that the disciples "in their joy. . . were still disbelieving and still wondering." They wanted to give in to the hope that was jumping around in their bellies; they wanted to raise their hand and say, "Is it Jesus? It is; it’s Jesus!" But they were so very, very afraid of getting this answer wrong. So Jesus gives them some more clues. He begins again to tell the story of God’s plan to restore all of creation, from the covenant with Abraham to the exodus from Egypt, from Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones to Isaiah’s suffering servant. He’s told them all this before, of course, but this time, in the presence of their risen Lord, the doors in the minds of the disciples are unlocked. The rejection, the suffering, the crucifixion -- they weren’t a detour from God’s plan after all, but the final steps of God’s long journey down into the plight of broken humanity. Now they are witnesses to the first steps on the other side. Not a dead man, not a ghost, but the victory of God!

And that is the role that Jesus gives to the disciples and to us in this story -- we are to be witnesses. Not expert witnesses, just witnesses -- people who tell the truth about what they have experienced. Throughout this Easter season, we hear some of the earliest of these testimonies:

"I touched him, and he was not a ghost." "I saw the marks in his hands and feet; he was the crucified one. "We broke bread with him, and he ate." Two thousand years later, we can still give evidence of how the risen Jesus has come into our lives and retold the story of our lives in a way that opened our minds to the truth.

But those first witnesses didn’t just give their testimony in words. Many of the people who saw the resurrected Jesus that day eventually offered evidence that was written in their own blood. The word translated as "witness" is martyr.

Some scholars rush to point out that this meaning was a "later development," that Jesus did not intend that all his witnesses should become martyrs in the technical sense. Fair enough. But the church that grew from the blood of those martyrs knew what it was talking about. To be a Christian witness is not simply to repeat what you have heard. It is to give your whole life as evidence of the truth. Belief in the resurrected Lord can’t be argued or explained into someone. Even Jesus didn’t try that. He knew that the truth had to be seen, had to be touched, had to be experienced in his own flesh and in the living, and if necessary dying, witness of his disciples.

We are witnesses when we can invite someone to look into our homes, our families, our friendships, our work, our checkbook, our daytimer -- and find Jesus there. We are witnesses when we allow ourselves to be touched by folks who are lost and afraid. We are witnesses when we live in a way that defies any explanation other than the presence of the risen Christ within us. Look, touch, see, believe! It isn’t a ghost. It’s the living God.

The City and the Good Life

Western ideas about good cities descend from Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. From Athens we inherit two seminal ideas: that the good life is the life of moral and intellectual excellence, and that the good city is one that makes this good life possible for its citizens. From Jerusalem comes a third idea: that a city’s excellence is also measured by the care it exhibits for its weakest members. And from Rome we inherit the idea that a city’s beauty is warranted by and represents its greatness. This ancient view of cities, though it acknowledged the central role of commerce, was essentially moral and aesthetic.

Today’s common wisdom is different. It views the city as governed by impersonal market forces, and devotes little thought to the good life or to the relation cities might have to the good life.

The city is a central metaphor and theme in Christianity. Christian scripture depicts the end of the human pilgrimage as a heavenly city, the New Jerusalem; and the relationship between this world and the next was articulated paradigmatically for Christians in the fifth century in St. Augustine’s classic The City of God.

Systematic philosophical thinking about urbanism antedates Christianity, going back to Aristotle, who wrote some four centuries before Christ that the best life for human beings is lived in community with others, and most particularly in a polis. This "city-state" was typically small in scale, with flexible but definite physical and geographic characteristics, It happened also to approximate the size of subsequent historic towns and urban neighborhoods -- and for an obvious reason: it is an area that can be comfortably walked. Its size fit the embodied nature of the human person. Of the polis Aristotle wrote that it is a community of communities, "the highest of all, embracing all the rest . . . [aiming] at the highest good: the well-being of all its citizens."

The Christian might say that Aristotle is not quite right on this point. The church is the highest of all communities, for it aims at the truly highest good: people’s eternal wellbeing. Augustine addresses this tension in a way that became definitive for Christians. He contended that in its life on earth, the church is but a single member of and participant in that community of communities which is the earthly city. With respect to its divine vocation, however, the church represents and to some extent embodies the heavenly city. Pace Aristotle, the highest of all communities therefore is indeed a city: it is the City of God, of which the church is its earthly herald, symbol and sacramental anticipation. Christians recognize that on earth we have no lasting city but seek the city that is to come. Christians therefore possess a dual citizenship.

Aristotle argued that human beings are by nature social animals that thrive in cities. Historically, Christians have agreed, but maintain that human sociability reflects the inherent sociability of the one triune God. It is important therefore not to regard Augustine’s use of the term city as mere metaphor. Both Alasdair MacIntyre and Peter Brown (writing about the classical polis and Augustine respectively) have emphasized that in the premodern world human identity was bound up with particular communities and particular places. (This indeed was essential to the appeal of Augustine’s thesis: Christians belong to a city, a heavenly city -- God’s city.)

And it is worth noting that the modern disintegration of the traditional city, which I will shortly describe, coincides with the (now disintegrating) modern notion of the self as disembodied and ahistorical. We might recall that the frequently used metaphor "the church in the public square" derives from the historic presence of real churches on real public squares. The power of this metaphor diminishes as we lose and forget how to make real public squares fronted by real churches.

Urban social life as both reality and ideal became problematic with the rise of the industrial city. As recently as the 18th century Samuel Johnson could say of London: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the urban setting became known as the site of disease, pollution, crime, squalor and ugliness. William Blake wrote of England’s "dark satanic mills," and Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times describes the prototypical industrial city of Coke-town in terms more hellish than heavenly.

Every urban reform movement of the past 200 years -- from England’s Hygiene Acts to America’s City Beautiful Movement to modern zoning laws to modernist architecture to the creation of public housing and the rise of environmentalism and historic preservation -- has been a response to the social and cultural problems created by industrialism.

Several of these reform movements -- such as the 19th-century urban parks movement, without which contemporary big-city life would be almost unlivable -- have made permanent contributions to our experience and understanding of good city life. Others have been more problematic.

Americans have largely succeeded in one area of reform: we have separated the noxious aspects of industrial production from city life, exporting them to regions outside the city or to other countries. But this has not meant that America has been making or promoting good cities. Since World War lithe U.S. has excelled chiefly at creating a pattern of development known as suburban sprawl.

The ubiquity of suburban sprawl has come to constitute a serious physical, intellectual and cultural problem of its own. This problem today is engendered and sustained by virtually every institution responsible for the creation of the built environment: the real estate development industry; the construction industry; federal, state and local regulatory agencies; the rule-of-thumb manuals of transportation engineers; the lending policies of banks; the professions of architecture and planning; the patrons of architecture; and above all the zoning ordinances that regulate where and how buildings get built.

What exactly is the problem with suburban sprawl? The Congress for New Urbanism has identified a set of interconnected problems, all related to the physical characteristics of sprawl. Suburban sprawl fosters disinvestment in historic city centers; excessive separation of people by age, race and income; extreme inequality of educational opportunity; pollution and the loss of agricultural lands and wilderness; record rates of obesity; and sheer ugliness.

New Urbanists are not environmental determinists; they are not arguing that suburban sprawl creates these problems all by itself. They do argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the built environment on the one hand and people’s character and social relations on the other. As the charter of the New Urbanism says: "Physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework."

The very physical structure of suburban sprawl makes it virtually impossible for people of different generations and different incomes to live in close proximity to one another -- and not only live close together but also work, shop, play, learn and worship in the same neighborhood. The automobile-dependent suburb effectively demobilizes and disenfranchises those without cars and those unable to drive, notably children (whose parents must become chauffeurs) and the elderly.

To live in suburbia has become an American ideal; but it is a contradictory ideal, for suburban sprawl voraciously consumes the landscape that is the very substance of its promise. The suburban ideal simply cannot deliver on its promise of convenience, mobility, natural beauty, individual freedom and well-being for all. Its self-contradictory dynamic is evident in the way those who have most recently arrived in suburbia are often the people most vociferously opposed to its extension (the political phenomenon that has come to be known as NIM BY-ism -- "Not In My Back Yard").

The cultural ideal and reality of suburban sprawl are perhaps most insidious in the way they undermine the formal and cultural patterns -- the urban patterns -- by means of which human beings have traditionally sought to achieve the good life. The postwar suburban ideal caters to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided. Christians especially should understand that unpleasantness in life cannot be avoided.

In contrast to suburbia, the traditional city is a complex institution designed to address and transform the unpleasant aspects of human life by means of community, culture and civil society. To live in a civitas is to be civilized. To live in a polis one must learn to be polite, perhaps even to acquire some polish. Urbanites sometimes become urbane.

I am contrasting two formal paradigms of human settlement: the traditional town or traditional urban neighborhood and the post-1945automobile-dependent suburb. My division of history at the year 1945 may seem extravagant or simplistic, but that year effectively represents the temporal demarcation between the routine creation of walkable human settlements and the creation of those that require mechanical transportation to perform the majority of life’s daily tasks,

With other members of the Congress for New Urbanism, I contend that the mixed-use walkable neighborhood is the sine qua non of urban design and that it ought to be a focus of both public policy and urban planning, whether such neighborhoods are considered in isolation or in relation to other neighborhoods. A neighborhood standing alone in the landscape is a village; several neighborhoods in the landscape constitute a town; many contiguous neighborhoods in the landscape together constitute a city or a metropolis. To make traditional villages, towns, neighborhoods and cities today -- like the places we love to visit (villages and towns like Cooperstown and Key West; small cities like Annapolis, Savannah and Santa Barbara; and big cities with distinctive neighborhoods like Boston, New York and Chicago) -- requires a conscious and conscientious rejection of the way we’ve been making human settlements since 1945.

We can identify at least four kinds of order in a good city: an ecological order: an economic order, a moral order and a formal order. A good city clearly is part of an ecological order -- it is a means by which humans live over an extended period in the natural landscape. If the city is made well, both the human animal and the ecological order of which it is part will thrive. If the city is not made well, both humans and the ecological order will eventually suffer.

The economic order of a good city is characterized by marketplace diversity and entrepreneurial freedom. Its purpose is twofold: to create and distribute the material goods and services necessary to the material wellbeing of the populace, and to create the surplus wealth, and hence the leisure, necessary for the various kinds of cultural endeavors -- music, art, scholarship, sport -- that are the hallmarks of civilization.

Just as important, however, is the moral order. The marks of this order are the existence of various religious, civic and political institutions that shape and restrain individual behavior. Such institutions seek to educate individuals in a variety of moral and intellectual virtues, and to promote regard for the common good. If these institutions are healthy, they promote and sustain a shared sense that the city is not only a marketplace but also a moral community, and that the market exists for the community not the community for the market.

The formal order of the city is what architects typically think about when they think about the city -- the pattern of buildings, squares, streets and sidewalks. Most people intuitively understand the relationship between the formal order of a city and its economic order, because they know it requires economic power to build significant buildings. The relationship between the formal order of a city and its moral order may be less obvious but is no less significant, for every formal order reflects and embodies some moral order (whether it’s admirable or decadent).

The traditional view of the good life in the West is that it is lived in community. In the traditional city, that moral view is embodied in its formal order. A counterpoint to that view is evident in the formal order of the automobile-dependent suburb.

European architect Leon Krier, the most influential traditional urbanist of our time, has compared the traditional urban neighborhood to a slice of pizza. A neighborhood is to the larger city what a slice of the pizza is to the whole pie: the part contains within itself the essential qualifies and elements of the whole.

In the case of a city made of neighborhoods, this means that a neighborhood contains within walkable proximity to one another places to live, work, play, learn and worship. Within the legal boundaries of a postwar suburb, by contrast, the elements of the "pizza" are physically separated and at some distance from one another -- as if the crust is here, the sauce over there, the cheese someplace else and the pepperoni way out yonder. A suburb may have places to live, work, play, learn and worship, but these activities are confined to single-use zones that are typically distant from one another and require access by car through a pedestrian-hostile environment. By analogy, a postwar suburb has all the ingredients (in Aristotelian terms, the material cause) of a pizza, but it is not a pizza precisely because it does not have the form of a pizza. A postwar suburb may contain the ingredients of a city, but it is not a city precisely because it lacks the physical and the social form (the formal cause) of a city.

What are some of the key features of the formal order of traditional towns and cities amid the neighborhoods of which they are constituted? Cities are composed of a private-economic realm and a public-civic realm which are distinguishable but mixed together in close proximity.

City form is made out of blocks of buildings that define a public realm of streets, along with plazas or squares typically fronted by civic buildings or focused on a centralized monument (Figure 3). Plazas are hard-surfaced, while squares are usually green spaces. Plazas are more common in European cities, squares in Anglo-American cities. Neither are common in those parts of America built since 1945.

Virtually all urban streets connect; cul de sacs are rare. Although there is a recognizable hierarchy of streets according to traffic capacity (and hence size), urban streets always accommodate pedestrians. American towns and cities often line their streets with trees; European cities tend to limit trees to boulevards and avenues.

Primary urban streets carry large volumes of car traffic, but unlike suburban arterial streets they have on-street parking, which protects pedestrians, and wide sidewalks, which safely and comfortably accommodate people on foot (Figure 4).

Secondary urban streets are narrow, and usually permit parking on one or both sides (Figure 5). They allow traffic to connect to major streets, but their narrow width requires cars to move slowly, creating an inherently safer pedestrian environment. Lanes or alleys constitute a third kind of street, essentially a service street for garage access, utilities and trash collection.

Private buildings relate to the street in a consistent and disciplined manner (see Figures 4-5), and are used primarily for commerce and for dwelling. Such buildings front and give spatial definition to streets, and often shelter a mix of uses. Buildings used primarily for commerce may also have residences above the ground floor, and buildings primarily intended as residences may also shelter small offices or businesses.

Good towns and city neighborhoods provide a variety of housing types, often (unlike suburbs) on the same block. In addition to various kinds of detached single-family houses, there may be row houses, apartment buildings, coach houses, and apartments located above stores. The consequence of this concentrated mix of housing is that the young and the old, singles and families, the poor and the wealthy, can all find places to live within the neighborhood. Think of the low-rise, high-density character of neighborhoods in Paris, London or Charleston, or any pre-1945American town or city neighborhood, which are characterized above all by a beautiful, walkable, convenient public realm that more than compensates for their small building parcels. Small ancillary buildings are typically permitted and encouraged within the backyard of each lot. This small building maybe used as a rental unit of housing or as a place to work; it may also be properly regarded as an example of private sector affordable housing.

Schools are within walking distance of the homes of students and teachers.

Good cities provide parks of various sizes throughout neighborhoods for both passive and active recreation.

Prominent sites are reserved for civic buildings and community monuments. Buildings for education, religion, culture, sport and government are sited either at the end of important street vistas or fronting squares or plazas.

Civic, commercial, residential and recreational buildings and uses are located within pedestrian proximity of one another -- typically a five-to-ten-minute (one-quarter-to-one-half-mile) walk, This is the historic physical and anthropological measure of good urban culture. This rule does not presume that everyone who lives in the neighborhood necessarily works in the neighborhood. Nor does it mean that people will or should cease to have cars. It does mean that a significant reduction in car travel is possible, and that residents who are too young, too old, too poor or too infirm to drive a car remain able to live independently within the community.

The formal characteristics of traditional towns and urban neighborhoods are easily learned by attending carefully to the most beloved cities and neighborhoods in the world. Nevertheless, making such neighborhoods today is very hard, not only because we have largely lost the requisite cultural and social habits, but also because in most places zoning laws (which mandate segregated uses) and street design regulations (which are crafted exclusively to make streets efficient for cars rather than also safe for pedestrians) make it literally illegal to build such environments.

Can the art of traditional urban design be renewed? And can we learn once again to be happy in traditional towns and cities -- not only as a moral antidote to individualism, inequality and the misuse of environmental resources, and not only as an aesthetic antidote to suburban sprawl, but also for the sake of the genuine goods and pleasures (including both communal belonging and individual freedom) of traditional urban life? These are the questions that have been taken up over the past ten years by the Congress for New Urbanism.

The CNU includes architects, planners, developers, engineers, government officials and ordinary citizens committed to revitalizing and promoting traditional urbanism. As New Urbanists came to realize that existing zoning ordinances, street design manuals and housing industry practices were all impediments to making traditional towns and neighborhoods, they began developing new kinds of zoning ordinances; found sympathetic traffic engineers to help write a different set of street design standards; renewed the practice of creating high-quality pattern books to guide home-builders; and learned how to persuade lending institutions of the economic advantages of financing traditional neighborhoods. The result is that there are now more than 200 New Urbanist mixed-use projects under construction in the U.S. and throughout the world, and hundreds more being planned (though this remains but a fraction of new construction taking place).

New Urbanism has aroused vocal opposition from both the political left and the political right. For the left, New Urbanists are too closely involved with the marketplace and too content with "conventional" aesthetics. New Urbanism is alleged to be just a prettier version of suburban exclusivity ("Disneyesque" is the preferred term of opprobrium), and out of step with the ironic postmodern zeitgeist. For the right, in particular the libertarians, New Urbanists are too closely allied with government regulatory control.

These criticisms are category mistakes. The fact that both opposition to and support for New Urbanism come from across the political spectrum suggests that current political categories may not apply. New Urbanism is arguably nothing so much as a classic Tocquevillian democratic "association" active primarily at local levels of community and government. New Urbanists work both substantively and procedurally to fight precisely those tendencies toward individualism that Tocqueville recognized as the most serious threat to the culture of democracy, for which free associations of citizens were the primary remedy and of which suburban sprawl is arguably our culture’s foremost physical embodiment.

If the New Urbanism has an Achilles’ heel, it is that its projects do not yet measure up to its own professed objectives. New Urbanist "greenfield" projects in particular -- mixed-use developments built on previously undeveloped land -- for the most part have yet to coalesce into genuine towns and neighborhoods (though given their physical infrastructure and the passage of time they probably will do so, unlike their sprawl counterparts). Moreover, because New Urbanist developments remain rare, and because they have undeniable market appeal, they tend to be expensive.

This discrepancy between the ideals and the reality of New Urbanism is due in part to the fact that New Urbanist proposals to date are mostly being pitched to and driven by the housing market. While it is impossible for New Urbanist projects to succeed outside the market, it is clear -- even to New Urbanists -- that the ideal of mixed-use, walkable and above all economically and generationally diverse human settlements will not be realized solely by market forces.

Since good towns and cities manifest and promote a moral order as well as an economic order, churches obviously have an interest in the form of cities and a potentially important role to play in the revival of traditional urbanism. It is worth noting that that New Urbanists derive their ideas about public space and formal order in large part from traditional cities in which churches and their ancillary institutions have been key players. Church communities continue to erect buildings -- for worship, for education, for health care, for dwelling -- that are potentially important components of traditional neighborhoods. Moreover, churches are a kind of community in which at least in principle (unlike in suburbia) membership is not primarily a function of class or age. The church therefore would seem to have much to offer the New Urbanist enterprise out of its own long intellectual and spiritual traditions -- not least a serious and sophisticated view of human nature and human community, a pastoral mandate to serve rich and poor, and a long history of urban and architectural patronage.

At the same time, the lessons about place and character that the New Urbanists are relearning are lessons that churches also need to relearn. All too often churches unthinkingly comply with the cultural presuppositions of suburban sprawl. This compliance is evident in new church buildings located in the midst of large surface parking lots; in the frequent attempts by older neighborhood churches to tear down adjacent buildings to provide parking for a suburban constituency; in well-meaning but misconceived programs that create housing for the elderly or low-income persons as concentrated enclaves rather than components of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods; and in their almost complete indifference to the aesthetics of a shared public realm.

What can churches do both to save and be saved, urban-istically speaking? Churches could assume a more significant role in neighborhood building by rethinking church development procedures in at least two areas. The first has to do with the size of new churches. Many new evangelical megachurches and Roman Catholic parish churches are so big as to be intrinsically anti-urban. A new church building required to seat more than about 700 people will almost inevitably be situated in a parking lot rather then amid a walkable neighborhood -- and that’s a problem for urbanism.

The second, related area has to do with land use. A new suburban church complex typically occupies six to 15 acres on which will be located a church building, perhaps an associated school and a surface parking lot -- and that’s it! In contrast, my own Chicago parish church and elementary school are located on two city blocks that together take up ten acres, but those blocks include -- in addition to the church and school -- over 100 dwelling units in a variety of buildings two-to-three stories tall, more than 15 businesses, and nearly 200 on- and off-street parking spaces for the public. My parish church is a genuine neighborhood center, in contrast to new suburban churches, which function (in terms of formal order) as the center of parking lots.

Of course, new suburban churches don’t have to promote densities at the scale of a Chicago neighborhood in order to promote better human settlements. Figure 6 shows how a 700-seat church and a 400 student elementary school (with a gym) could occupy a ten-acre parcel of land that could also accommodate some small-town-sized single-family building lots, a block of row houses fronting a plaza and a public square, and a short block of mixed-use buildings fronting the square. With accessory buildings (coach houses with garages below and a small living or work space above) permitted on the single-family house lots, this design makes room for 41 private development parcels, allowing up to 70 dwelling units and four ground-floor shops; off-street parking for 82 cars; on-street and plaza public parking for 216 cars; and additional Sunday parking available for up to 90 more cars on the perimeter lanes of the property. The parcel is also laid out to allow street connections to future development adjacent to the property.

A development approach such as this also has the potential to help congregations finance their building projects by forming partnerships with developers to build the non-church portion. (It is also likely to require a change in the local zoning ordinance -- but there are plenty of good New Urbanist designers around to assist congregations and parishes in this endeavor.)

For such a project a congregation need not presume that all members will live in the adjacent homes, or that everyone who lives in the adjacent units will be a member of the church. Nor would such a development in any way constitute a complete neighborhood. But it could be the nucleus of a complete neighborhood, one which has a church community at its enter, and the potential to promote growth in an urban rather than suburban sprawl pattern (much as the most beautiful parts of contemporary London grew in the 17th and 18th centuries around small residential-square developments). This model is only suggestive, of course; there are many legitimate strategies for how church communities might come to promote and reclaim a better physical presence in the earthly city.

I have been arguing that good cities are an essential component of the good life for human beings, who are made in the image of God, and that urbanism -- for good reason -- is a privileged symbol in the Christian imagination. Post-World War II suburban sprawl is the antithesis of good urbanism. To the extent that we Christians simply accept the premises of suburban culture, we compromise both the substance of our faith and the effectiveness of our evangelical efforts. Churches will better contribute both to the good of the City of Man and to our witness to the City of God by promoting the formal order of traditional urbanism.

Facing Up To Inequalities

Book Review: Inequality and Christian Ethics. By Douglas Hicks. Cambridge University Press, 287 pp.; also in paperback.

The Common Good and Christian Ethics. By David Hollenbach, S.J. Cambridge University Press, 269pp.; also in paperback.

What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality. By Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons. University of Chicago Press, 409 pp.; also in paperback.

The New World of Welfare. Edited by Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins. Brookings Institution Press, 514pp.; also in paperback.

Pineapple, an eight-year-old growing up in the Mott Haven district of the South Bronx, wanted to become a pediatrician, she told Jonathan Kozol. She was among the Hispanic and African-American children Kozol came to know through the after-school program at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church when he was preparing to write Ordinary Resurrections in the late ‘90s. Pineapple’s aspirations and potential far exceeded her opportunities to fulfill them. Unemployment in the South Bronx was at 45 percent; of the 1,900 to 2,000 children enrolled at Morris High School, only about 65 graduated each year; and, many of the children were afflicted with asthma, something Kozol associated with the neighborhood’s incinerators for discarded medical supplies. These circumstances prompted indignant protest from Mother Martha, the priest at St. Ann’s. Mother Martha, Kozol reported, "doesn’t simply say. . . that rich people ‘have advantages.’ She says, ‘They take advantages."’

Kozol’s account of the human toll of poverty and inequality reflects an all-too-common reality in the U.S. and in the developing world. More than one in every ten Americans (11.7 percent) and an even higher number of children (16.3 percent) lived in poverty in 2001. The poverty line that year was $18,104 for a household of four. Many people estimate that the actual threshold for poverty is far higher than this income line used by the Census Bureau, and poverty is on the rise in the present recessionary economy. Poverty measurements that include illiteracy and premature death in addition to income make the prospect for Americans like Pineapple even grimmer. According to the poverty index of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.S. ranks last (17th) among all the developed nations for which measurements are available. Canada ranks 12th.

People just above the poverty line fare little better and are becoming increasingly worse off. Two of the books considered here cite data showing that the quintile of U.S. citizens with the highest income receives nearly 50 percent of all income, while the lowest quintile receives less than 4 percent. Income inequality has significantly increased since the early 1970s, and the changes are even more dramatic over the past three decades among the very highest income levels.

Paul Krugman, Princeton University economist and a columnist for the New York Times, says that the 13,000 U.S. taxpayers with the highest reported income received 3 percent of all income in 1998, 300 times that of average families. In 1970 a similar segment of taxpayers received 0.7 percent of all income, "only" 70 times the average family income. (According to Krugman, changing social norms, not economic productivity, explain these obscenely large incomes.)

Provisions for health care are just as unequal. In a nation that devotes nearly 14 percent of its GNP to health care, more than 40 million citizens (one-sixth of the population, most of whom are not officially impoverished) lack private or public health care insurance. No other industrial nation contributes more than 9 percent of its GNP to national health care, yet all have a universal and far more equal system of health care delivery.

The data on global poverty and inequality chill hope that economic growth alone will diminish poverty and benefit everyone. In its millennial report on poverty, the World Bank reveals that 24 percent of the population in developing nations live -- or struggle to live -- in absolute poverty, on less than one dollar a day. From one perspective, this is good news. The percentage of the world’s population in absolute poverty has diminished significantly during the past half century. Nevertheless, hopes that democracy, free markets and economic growth would substantially reduce poverty, as measured by income, have been frustrated by uneven progress. Nor do measurements of cognitive development and physical and mental health give reason for satisfaction. The UNDP calculates that 113 million of 680 million primary-school-age children were not enrolled in school in 1998. In 2000 1.1 billion people lacked access to safe water and 2.4 billion to sanitation services.

The data on global inequality are even bleaker. The 2002 report of the UNDP indicates that the 5 percent of the world’s population with the highest income receives 114 times the amount received by the 5 percent with the lowest. The inequality of income between countries for which we have data has increased since 1950. The adult literacy rate in Niger is 16 percent compared to over 90 percent in many Latin American nations.

Americans are only vaguely aware of these depressing statistics. We do not contemplate their significance for the well-being and fundamental dignity of millions of people. We are not embarrassed and indignant enough to scrutinize and alter policies responsible for such levels of poverty and inequality.

Fortunately, two books by Christian ethicists address the circumstances underlying these data. David Hollenbach, S.J., teaches at Boston College and was a principal contributor to the widely read -- and even more widely publicized -- 1986 U.S. Catholic bishops’ letter on economic justice. Douglas Hicks, a Presbyterian clergyman, teaches at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. Both books are part of a Cambridge University Press series in Christian ethics.

Hicks and Hollenbach offer painstaking accounts of poverty and inequality as issues of justice. They cannot be reduced to problems of individual and subcultural behavior and should not be viewed merely as potential threats to political and economic stability. Hicks and Hollenbach also demonstrate Christian theology’s distinctive contribution to moral and social-scientific discourse on poverty and inequality. Christians can agree with others about justice and the common good without compromising the integrity of their faith or their individual religious freedom. Moreover, Christian contributions to a public consensus about just policies are needed in order to meet the challenge of poverty and inequality.

In his notes for a 1916 lecture, Walter Rauschenbusch wrote that wherever significant economic inequalities exist, unearned (and unjust) gain may be assumed to exist. Rauschenbusch’s case against inequality was more than a moral assertion. It rested on empirical studies of the economic markets that uncovered special privileges for the rich. Hicks expands on Rauschenbusch’s method, offering highly sophisticated data gathered by economists to expose two aspects of inequality that indicate injustice even when there is equal opportunity in the labor market. Pineapple, for example, may be deprived of the capability for cognitive and physical development and of the identity needed to become a pediatrician even if no immediate barriers of racial or class prejudice impede her education. Hicks helps us recognize the significance of the unequal capabilities and of the gross inequalities that undermine identity.

Informed by the economics and moral philosophy of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Hicks demonstrates that inequalities of capability (in reading and writing, for example) may exist independently of income inequalities. His analyses focus on education and health. He shows that a nation may offer adequate provisions for education or health and yet distribute these resources unequally.

Even if there were no unfair barriers to opportunity for individuals or groups in the labor market, unequal capability could impede what Sen sometimes calls "effective freedom" or "real opportunities." Sen and Hicks measure whether people are equally able to make choices about how they will function cognitively or physically To make the point that grossly unequal capabilities are not always reflected by income inequalities, Sen observes that black males in Harlem, who receive many times the income of their counterparts in Bangladesh, are less likely to attain the age of 65 than are the men of Bangladesh.

Hicks employs theological, philosophical and empirical resources to show that gross inequalities, whether in income or capability, rob people of their identity, their self-hood, and consequently their dignity before God. He draws on H. Richard Niebuhr and Gustavo Gutiérrez to show how gross socioeconomic inequalities undermine the moral equality of people whom Christians affirm are all created in the image of God.

People are severely hindered in their development when inequalities marginalize their participation in social and cultural life. Pineapple and her classmates are likely to become literate, but they have little prospect of developing the skills to participate fully in American society. Moral equality and human dignity are context-dependent, Hicks argues. They depend on the relative equality of social goods in a particular society.

Hicks’s careful empirical and normative analyses help us to understand why equal opportunity in economic markets is not enough to ensure equal human dignity. A just society must have a relative equality of capability, not just of income. Hicks omits criteria for making normative judgments about what levels of inequality are just -- normative criteria that Christian ethicists of an earlier generation called "middle axioms" between broad theological and moral principles and policy judgments. Inequalities of income or capability may not subvert human dignity as easily as Hicks supposes. But these quibbles do not detract from the importance of Hicks’s contribution. He shows why Christians should be indignant about increasing domestic and global inequalities, and his arguments are both distinctively Christian and accessible to non-Christians.

As his title suggests, Hollenbach argues that we need a new commitment to a reconstructed conception of the idea of the common good once prominent in Catholic moral theology. Liberal tolerance is not enough to overcome the isolation that perpetuates poverty. Hollenbach’s argument, like Hicks’s, rests on empirical and descriptive claims as well as on theological and philosophical ones. He relies on surveys and interviews that reveal the extent to which middle-class Americans deny the increasing interdependence between middle-class suburbanites and the urban poor, and between our nation and disadvantaged people in other parts of the world.

Neither the common good nor its place among the virtues is an eternal verity. The post-Reformation religious wars in Europe created circumstances in which respect for individual freedom needed to be accentuated. Today, empirical studies show that while Americans are more tolerant of religious and racial differences, they also believe that those being tolerated control their own well-being. Hence, many believe it their right to live in isolation from the problems of urban poverty.

But even our respect for individual freedom depends on mutual respect and a common commitment to institutions that preserve tolerance. Other spheres of our economic, cultural and political lives are also interdependent. Children like Pineapple depend on educational, public health and environmental policies developed by metropolitan and state governments. Inner-city poverty thrives on the isolation of suburban dwellers, an isolation that belies and ignores the extent to which the conditions for poverty result from policies developed in the suburbs. (Hollenbach’s arguments could also be applied to the poor scattered outside these inner-city neighborhoods. In It Takes a Nation, Rebecca Blank notes that only 12 percent of the U.S. poor live in inner-city neighborhoods with concentrated poverty.) Similarly, our respect for national sovereignty causes us to neglect the increasing global interdependence in the distribution of resources for human well-being.

Our changing domestic and global circumstances require solidarity, a commitment to institutions and policies that advance the common good of equal dignity and freedom for all, Hollenbach argues. Mere tolerance of the poor will not alleviate poverty. Justice demands solidarity, both in our political discourse and in our practical solutions. Our choice is not between freedom and suffocating community but between a "society based on reciprocal respect and solidarity and a society that leaves many people behind."

Benjamin Page and James Simmons, who teach political science at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, respectively, are not adverse to moral argument. Indeed, they trot out just about any moral argument that might persuade someone to embrace the policies they advocate. However, their book is most valuable for its extensive evaluation of U.S. government policies related to poverty and inequality.

They advocate government policies to augment the cognitive and health development of the poor as well as their political power. Unlike Hollenbach, they do not extend the effort to alleviate poverty beyond government to civic institutions. (Hollenbach and Hicks offer good reasons to be dubious of an approach limited to government policies unsupported by systematic moral arguments and changes in civic institutions,)

Page and Simmons helpfully explicate how all aspects of government, even the necessary laws of commerce countenanced by libertarians, shape economic markets in ways that benefit or burden the poorest citizens. Their most refined discussion is of policies consciously designed to correct defects in the market distribution of income, wealth and human capital. Their informative chapters on social insurance, tax policy, education, efforts to improve jobs and wages for less-skilled workers, and in-kind and cash assistance make clear why current policies are often regressive. (They cover health care in both the chapter on social insurance and the chapter on public assistance.) Page and Simmons advocate redistributive reforms in all of these areas. They note, for example, that tax credits for homeowners totaled $93 billion in 2000, while subsidies for those with inadequate housing reached only $29 billion and were insufficient to meet needs. They propose universal social insurance entitling all families to adequate housing. The full set of reforms Page and Simmons propose go well beyond income redistribution because income alone "will not inevitably maximize the well-being of all poor people." In their remedies for inequality they heed Hicks’s insight that persons may suffer injustice in the distribution of capability as well as income.

Their proposals are expensive, an issue Page and Simmons address by considering economic productivity and the political obstacles to enacting their policies. They contend that many policies that advance equality will also enhance economic efficiency, and that we can afford to sacrifice some efficiency for the sake of equality. They also advocate extensive reforms to politically empower the poor and near-poor. Page and Simmons’s policies are largely compatible with Hicks’s and Hollenbach’s call for solidarity. However, the former two may be naïve to believe that political and economic reforms are feasible without changes in what Hollenbach, following political philosopher John Bawls, calls the "background culture" of political discourse and practice.

Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins’s volume sets an even narrower agenda. Its 19 articles evaluate various aspects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. The editors are social scientists with experience in Washington. Blank served on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and is dean of the Gerald B. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Haskins, a developmental psychologist, was the principal staff consultant for the House Republicans on welfare reform and is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. The editors set out to demonstrate the value of social science in evaluating the successes and failures of PRWORA and to recommend revisions during reauthorization. This book does not invite cover-to-cover reading, but selected articles reveal a great deal about the interaction between the social sciences and ethics on antipoverty policy.

Despite their moral and political differences, the essayists agree that PRWORA policies must be judged on empirical evaluations of their success. Many of the authors have altered their policy judgments based on such evaluations. However, they disagree sharply on the outcomes by which public assistance programs should be evaluated. Haskins is unapologetic about his goal for PRWORA. Conservatives, he says, would have considered reform a success had it changed the source of income for the poor from government assistance to labor-market earnings, even with no accompanying increase in income.

The other essays exhibit an astounding, often incompatible array of outcomes by which the success or failure of PRWORA should be measured. These outcomes include reducing the welfare caseload; employing former welfare recipients; increasing incomes for the poor and near poor; improving the cognitive, physical and social development of children; reducing out-of-wedlock births; improving health care for low-income residents; and bolstering job stability and advancement.

The social sciences play a principal role in determining what variables promote specific outcomes; they cannot, by themselves, justify outcomes. They do not, for example. show us why reducing the welfare caseload without decreasing poverty and inequality is unjust. The unresolved questions about outcomes reveal the necessity for theological and ethical arguments.

The social scientists do, however, reveal a dimension of the moral problem of poverty that the other three books neglect. Liberal and conservative alike, they demonstrate why and how Americans with low-incomes and deficient capabilities can benefit from being held accountable for behavior that fits with receiving wider opportunities to participate in an interdependent society. Page and Simmons implicitly reject incorporating recipient accountability into antipoverty policy. A few left-of-center philosophers such as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (in Democracy and Disagreement) offer a moral defense of accountability for work in the labor market under specified conditions.

Some critics of this view understandably object to holding politically powerless people accountable for their behavior while the very rich are not subject to structures of accountability. However, if the vulgar incomes of the richest Americans result from relaxed social norms rather than from productive forces inherent in the market economy, as Krugman surmises, then social and political changes, such as those advocated by Hollenbach and Hicks, can extend the structure of accountability to these upper echelons of the income scale.

Taken together, these four books offer theological, ethical and empirical reasons to be indignant about persistent domestic and global poverty and inequality. Their empirical and policy analyses lead to morally prudent political and civic efforts to diminish these attacks on human dignity. Poverty and inequality are, as Hicks argues and Page and Simmons assume, interrelated. Moreover, the inequalities occur in multiple spheres; education, health and political participation as well as income. To address these dimensions of poverty, we need a solidarity in which all persons are accountable for a common good that advances the equal dignity and freedom of all citizens.

Paul Almighty (2 Cor. 12:2-10, Mk. 6:1-13)

In this summer’s blockbuster movie Bruce Almighty, a television newsman is given a set of divine powers, including the capacity to perform such miracles as the parting of a bowl of tomato soup, à la Moses’ parting of the Red Sea. When God wants to communicate with Bruce, God displays a telephone number on Bruce’s pager. In the weeks after the movie’s release, anyone who shared God’s seven-digit number was besieged with calls from cranks, practical jokers and a lot of people desperate to connect with God.

I remember a friend telling me about her sister-in-law who had found such a connection in a weekly prayer group, then became insufferable to the other members of the family "We just can’t be spiritual enough for Evelyn," my friend sighed. My friend stopped worrying about spiritual inadequacy, however, when she heard that the prayer group had prayed for a set of color-coordinated kitchen appliances for one of its members, Yes, the appliances arrived at the member’s home. But they still needed to be paid for by means of an easy-payment plan.

Long ago, a group of Jewish-Christian missionaries came to Corinth, Greece, and claimed to have a special connection, or "easy line," to God. They criticized the apostle Paul and claimed to have more spiritual power than he had ever dreamed of.

Paul had one of the more extraordinary spiritual experiences a person could imagine, being "caught up in the third heaven," but he never considered praying for such a thing, and after it happened he kept it to himself. He could have impressed people if he had told them about his spectacular trip to paradise, where he was given a revelation of "things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat." Heavenly journeys were all the rage in Paul’s day, but his lips remained sealed for 14 years. When he finally felt compelled to speak of his experience to his erstwhile friends in Corinth, he used the third person, as if he were speaking of someone else.

Remembering Paul today, one wonders what in the world has happened to the perfectly respectable Christian value of humility. Indeed, much more than virtue is involved. The very nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake when those who claim to follow Jesus spend their energies boasting about how good they are, as opposed to the rest of us; how accessible the Almighty is to them, as opposed to the rest of us; how efficacious their prayer life is, as opposed to ours,

After Paul’s unexpected ecstatic experience, something else happened that he had not expected or prayed for. A thorn in his flesh was given him by "a messenger of Satan." Why? Twice in one verse, Paul offers what is, to him, the obvious explanation: "To keep me from being too elated," If you get too carried away about yourself -- if you impress yourself and want to impress others with your spiritual high-water marks -- you are likely to get confused about who really has the power to save and how that power is released in the world. According to the original story, it was not so much in glorious spectacle but in suffering death, Foolishness in the eyes of the world.

So what was that dratted thorn? Oceans of ink have flowed with speculation about it. Was it a physical disability? A mental illness? A spiritual torment or a chronic temptation that Paul constantly had to wrestle to the ground but could never finally defeat? Presumably the Corinthians knew what it was, so he had no need to name it for them, Presumably every Corinthian had his or her own thorn to deal with, So do we. What does the old Joe South song say? "I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden." But thorns we get. They are chronic, They cause pain.

For Paul, who wasn’t one to complain much, the problem with the thorn and the reason he had asked the Lord to remove it three times was that he was worried that it might interfere with his purpose in life, which was to share the good news of Christ. No wonder he thought a messenger of Satan had delivered it to him!

Yet even with Paul’s wish to serve, even with his good motives, the Lord did not answer his prayer as he had asked or expected. This instead was the answer: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." Good-bye, Paul Almighty. Hello, servant, through whom the power of Christ can shine. Good-bye any wish for perfection. Hello, hope for every long-suffering, imperfect, demon-fighting, disability-challenged, stage-frightened, anxiety-ridden, on-the-verge-of-a-pity-party servant of the gospel who ever lived. Don’t worry about what you bring to the table. If you are called, God’s grace will be sufficient for you.

Surely the sufficiency of grace was what lay behind Jesus’ sending out his first 12 apostles without anything but a staff: "no bread, no bag, no money in their belts" (Mark 6:8). When those disciples hit the road, they had nothing to show for themselves but the power of Christ. As another friend of mine has put it, isn’t it his power, finally, that gets the job done?

During the Civil War, a hastily written prayer was found in the pocket of a fatally wounded soldier. "I received nothing that I asked for, but all I had hoped," it read. "My prayers were answered." Our prayers will also be answered, in God’s own time and God’s own way, and when they are, I hope we won’t brag about it, but rather be humbly grateful and give the glory to God Almighty.

A Terrible Text (Mk. 7:14-29)

If preachers are ever inclined to take a break from the rigors of the lectionary, it is in the middle of the summer, when the blackberries are ripe for picking and the pews are thinly populated. I have a special place in my heart for those who bravely shape and roll out a summer set of sermons based on "Terrible Texts" or "Passages I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know Were in the Bible." By the time the fireflies have gone, the congregation and the preacher have struggled through the account of poor Uzzah’s being struck dead for reaching out his hand to steady the ark when it wobbled on its way to Jerusalem (2 Samuel), or the heartbreaking saga in Judges about Jephthah’s daughter, who lost her life because of her father’s foolish promise. These will surely make the summer hit parade.

Because the lectionary usually spares us such grim episodes, it is noteworthy that Mark’s account of the beheading of John the Baptist is an assigned Gospel lesson in the month of July. I confess that I have never heard nor preached a sermon on the passage, and for good reason. You can put your ear to the ground and listen as hard as you can, but you will not detect a single note of authentic joy or hope anywhere in the vicinity. What you will hear is a sordid tale of anger and revenge, resentment and death. Jesus is never even mentioned. Instead, the plot revolves around two men -- John the Baptist and Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, and two women --Herodias, Herod’s wife, formerly married to Herod’s brother Philip, and Herod’s niece/stepdaughter, also named Herodias. (Jewish historian Josephus identified her as "Salome," which helps with the confusion.)

John had gone to Herod and had told him that his marriage was a moral outrage. (Herod had broken up his brother’s marriage in order to take Herodias as his wife.) Herod did not like John’s words, but the blushing bride was so infuriated that she wanted to kill him. Herod, who spent most of his time trying to please people, decided to lock John the Baptist in prison.

Things came to a head, if you will pardon the expression, when Herod threw a birthday banquet for himself. The entertainment for the evening was provided by the family lotus blossom, Salome, who danced up such a storm that Herod told her that she could have anything she wanted.

When Salome asked her mother what she should ask for, Herodias shot back, "Ask for the head of John the baptizer!" Salome returned to the party and made the demand, adding her own personal touch by requesting that John’s head he served on a platter as the last course at the banquet. Herod did not really want to grant the request, but he couldn’t afford to lose face in front of Salome or his VIP guests, who had heard him make his foolish promise. After the grotesque scene ended, what was left of John was claimed by his disciples and laid in a tomb.

Though Jesus is never mentioned, the key to understanding why this sorry saga shows up where it does in Mark’s Gospel is its relation both to the growing fame of Jesus and the success of his disciples. On their very first missionary journey, the disciples had "cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them" (Mark 6:13). Just as in the opening verses of Mark the beginning of Jesus’ ministry is linked to the work of John the Baptist, so here, John’s death foreshadows Jesus’ death. Just as John’s willingness to speak the truth to power leads to his being taken prisoner and suffering a terrible death, so it will be with Jesus. Herod will become Pilate. The means of execution will be a cross rather than a sword, but the end will be the same. And so it will be for many of the early followers of Jesus, readers of Mark, who will be imprisoned and die for the sake of the gospel.

Those who follow Jesus in any age must never become carried away with the naïve notion that faithfulness to God will ever be easy. The road is rocky. Resistance is real, as is the fecklessness of many who are entrusted with political power and who are threatened by any authority other than their own. It is not that they are all bad or all good. It is that when things get tight, expediency and people-pleasing usually carry the day

And, of course, there is the capacity for evil that can flourish in any human heart, regardless of outward beauty or grace. There is also the ferocity of wounded pride and the wish for revenge. These are too real.

Over the desk in my study is a small framed photograph taken in the early 1930s. My grandmother Anna, a preacher’s wife who died before I was born, sits in a wicker rocker, a shawl around her ample shoulders and a Bible open in her hands on her lap. Whatever is the opposite of Herodias and Salome was my grandmother. I wonder what she thought about the beheading of John the Baptist. I am sure she knew the story. And I think she also knew that it would take more than a decapitation to stop the truth of God, more than a crucifixion to stop the Son of God, more than persecution to stop the mission of God.

All the important guests at Herod’s birthday party would never know what my grandmother knew -- that after Herod was sealed in his grave, you and I would be thinking about John the Baptist and rejoicing that gospel power was still on the prowl.

Political Activism, Mainline Style

Book Review:

The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism.

Edited by Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans, University of California Press, 430 pp.

Despite the size and historic importance of mainline churches, say sociologists Robert Wuthnow and John Evans, "their activities and the ways in which they seek to influence public policy are poorly understood." Compared to the noisy political activity of conservatives and evangelicals, that of quieter mainline Protestants can indeed be overlooked. Wuthnow and Evans have assembled a group of scholars with the aim of giving attention to mainline Christians’ ways of doing politics.

One reason mainline churches are neglected is because of the widespread perception that their ranks are rapidly depleting. Are they? Wuthnow and Evans are skeptical. Though membership in mainline denominations is not increasing, neither is it decreasing, they contend. And the members of mainline churches do not suffer from an inferiority complex, since most of them believe that their churches are growing.

Yet not everyone agrees with Wuthnow and Evans’s assessment, including other contributors to this volume. University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox calls the drop-off in membership between 1965 and 1990 "dramatic" and points out that some denominations have lost fully one-third of their adherents.

This debate matters. If one concludes that mainline churches are not losing their appeal, there is no reason seriously to question whether they ought to change the ways they have been carrying out their mission. But if one believes that they face a serious membership crisis, one is more likely to ask whether they need to engage in critical self-reflection. Among those aspects of mainline Protestantism that then would be especially subject to analysis is the way its churches involve themselves in politics. There is a strong sense among both social scientists and the general public that the leadership of mainline Protestantism has become far more liberal than the membership.

Because it focuses specifically on the political activities of mainline Protestants, The Quiet Hand of God makes an important contribution to this debate, albeit in often unintended ways. A number of the contributors believe that mainline churches are obliged to pursue a certain political agenda no matter how unpopular that agenda may be or how uncomfortable it may make mainline worshipers.

Bradford Verter, a visiting professor of religion and culture at Williams College, provides the clearest example of such unabashed political advocacy. In his view, mainline commitments to abolishing racism are suspect because they are half-hearted and more rhetorical than substantive. As evidence, he cites the fate of Project Equality, which he describes as "an interfaith advocacy group that has for more than 25 years served as the mainline’s most important agent for the promotion of affirmative action."

Project Equality certifies vendors who commit themselves to equal-opportunity hiring practices, and it is a major sponsor of diversity training. It was also involved in one of the most publicized efforts to promote racial justice: Jesse Jackson’s campaign to encourage Texaco to reform racist practices that had been brought to light when internal conversations were made public. Project Equality has fallen on hard times in recent years, which Verter takes as a sign of the mainline’s less than full commitment to the cause of racial justice.

Yet there is little mystery about why the activities of Project Equality have slowed. As a result of the general membership decline among mainline denominations, fewer funds are available for such efforts. Verter never asks whether some members might have left because they oppose the political activism associated with Project Equality, yet there is reason to believe that some have. As Verter himself points out, the individualism that lies at the heart of Protestant theology may be incompatible with the group-based claims of affirmative action. As many as 75 percent of mainline Presbyterians oppose preferential hiring, and this may be as much due to ideas inherited from Martin Luther, John Calvin or John Locke as to members’ alleged racism.

Efforts like Jackson’s are seen by many Americans as thinly disguised forms of extortion, in which Jackson obtains symbolic payments from companies in return for his promise to leave them alone. (Jackson has also faced enough questions about his financial and sexual ethics to make one wonder whether he deserves church support.) "African-Americans are tired of apologies and promises of reconciliation," Verter writes, as if the only obligation of mainline believers is to give activists for racial equality everything for which they ask. Given the complexities of racial politics in America, denominations that attempt to do so will decline even further.

Verter is not the only contributor who takes left-wing political activism as a given for mainline churches. Michael Moody, who teaches sociology at Boston University, writes that he comes not to celebrate mainline environmental activism but to "chronicle" it. Yet celebrate it he does, despite the fact that Christianity has deep roots in anthropocentric thought. (It does not seem unreasonable to believe, as many Christians throughout history have, that God has a special relationship with human beings because of all God’s creatures they are the only ones who use their minds to honor him.) There are many reasons for churches to work on behalf of the environment, but Moody’s chapter does little to challenge the view of skeptics who believe that environmental activism came first and that religious justifications for it were found afterwards, rather than the other way around.

America is a democratic society proclaiming its faith in its people. Churches in America are under no obligation to be democratic, but if they stray too far from public opinion they undermine their numerical strength and thereby undercut the very political influence they seek. Like other Baptists, Derek Davis, who directs the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, advocates a strong wall of separation between church and state. Such positions are not all that popular in America, however. Davis points out that many Protestant clergy are "backing off positions concerning school prayer, school vouchers, and others," even in denominations with strong historic commitments to the principle of church-state separation. For him, this is evidence of the failure of Protestants to remain tine to their principles. Yet Davis does not consider the huge cost of the alternative -- of Protestant clergy holding fast to positions their congregants no longer support.

There are, furthermore, strong moral reasons why clergy might question a too strict church -- state separation. Consider the case of school vouchers, which, on church-state grounds, Davis opposes. The strongest supporters of school vouchers are inner-city parents desperate for a better education for their children. Should Protestant clergy stand on principle and tell them that they cannot expect this help because the Constitution prohibits it? Or should they support any reasonable responses to heartfelt appeals for help? There is no easy answer. We ought to reject the view that commitment to abstract principles always takes priority over the real-world dilemmas faced by ordinary people.

No other issue has divided mainline believers more than has homosexuality. In contrast to the agenda-driven chapters by Verter, Moody and Davis, Wendy Cadge’s exploration of the controversies over gay rights is a model of balance and clarity. Nowhere does Cadge take the position that homosexuality represents sinful conduct that has no place in mainline religion. But neither does she argue that mainline churches must accord homosexuals full membership rights and full access to ordination. As she reviews the history of this issue, Cadge is more impressed by the way the debate has taken place than by how it has been resolved. (As she points out, it indeed has not yet been resolved.) In a society that provides few venues for debate over emotionally charged issues -- or at least venues in which sound -- bites and verbal attacks can be avoided -- churches have provided an important public service in making themselves available as arenas for disagreement. Cadge encourages mainline denominations to recognize that even divisive issues provide opportunities for enlightenment and reconciliation.

Because he acknowledges the serious membership declines among mainline Protestants, Bradford Wilcox also delves more deeply into the consequences of political activism than do most of the others assembled in this book. Wilcox’s subject is the family, which like homosexuality is a contentious issue for many mainline congregations and denominations. Should churches, in the name of social justice, support movements of personal liberation, even if such movements result in rising divorce rates or more children being raised in single-parent households? Or should churches, in the name of morality, encourage strong family values, even if the defense of family values is often associated with conservatives and the Religious Right?

Wilcox presents fascinating material demonstrating that these need not be either-or questions. While the leaders of many mainline churches proclaim what Wilcox calls an "expressive liberalism’ committed to individual fulfillment, their church practices reinforce what he calls ‘progressive familism," or efforts to support and strengthen ordinary nuclear families along egalitarian lines. Like Wendy Cadge, Wilcox provides a hopeful reading of the mainline Protestant condition; despite all the publicity given to extreme left-wing views among mainliners, their actual practices are centrist and sensible.

The important question raised by all these chapters is, "What are the most appropriate and effective forms for political engagement among mainline Protestants?" Vector has no doubt about how that question should be answered; he calls on churches to reject "reactive roles" in favor of "prophetic" ones. Churches, he believes, have to do what is right, and since racial justice is good and racism is bad their course is clear, even if following it makes churches take increasingly unpopular positions.

But there is another answer to that question, an answer that grows out of some of the important shifts that mainline Protestantism has undergone in the past half century. Sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks show that mainliners, who once could be identified by the label "liberal Republican," now divide their votes between the political parties roughly as other Americans do. Whatever the views of denominational leaders and clergy, mainline Protestants cluster toward the center and therefore become an important swing vote in the increasingly partisan and tendentious conflict between liberals and conservatives that dominates American politics.

If Manza and Brooks are correct, as I believe they are, prophecy is the wrong direction to take. Instead, mainline churches ought to play the role in American politics that debates over homosexuality have played within mainline Protestantism. Occupying the middle of the spectrum, mainline believers can bridge the gap between secular liberals on the one side, who share their politics but not their faith, and caring but conservative religious believers on the other, who share their faith but not their politics. "Mainline churches have learned, at least thus far, how to disagree without dividing," Wendy Cadge writes of the internal debates over homosexuality. If they can help the entire country to learn this, they will perform an invaluable service.

The New National Security Strategy

The Bush administration’s grand design for foreign policy, spelled out last September in a document titled "The National Security Strategy," declares that the U.S. will exercise the responsibilities of the dominant power in international politics in order to resist terrorism and rogue states and to shape a global ethos of human dignity and prosperity. The authors of the document believe that history has thrust the U.S. into this role and has established a coincidence between its national interests and the larger interests of the world. "The great struggle of the 20th century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom -- and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise." It is the responsibility of the U.S. to preserve, protect and extend -- that is, to universalize -- this model.

What are we to make of this political-moral declaration? Is it a rational recognition of the fact that dominance imposes leadership responsibilities on the U.S. in every corner of the world? Or does it express the arrogance of power more than the responsibilities of power, with an implicit sense of providential election? The answer is not entirely clear, though the historical antecedents of this document give us reason to fear that arrogance is indeed at work.

The ancestors of the September document are the Defense Policy Guidance paper of 1992, prepared in the Department of Defense under then Secretary Richard Cheney, and "Rebuilding America’s Defenses; Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century," issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century. These earlier documents were explicit in their frank commitment to seizing and exploiting the opportunity for American global hegemony on a permanent basis. Toward this end, "Rebuilding America’s Defenses" called for U.S. control of outer space and cyberspace, the development of smaller nuclear weapons to dig out embedded weapons of hostile states, regime change where necessary, the expansion of regular military forces, substantial increases in defense budgets, and the relocation and extension of American military forces around the world, including the establishing of bases in Southeast Asia.

By contrast, the National Security Strategy paper speaks not of permanent superiority but of leadership, calls for a secure presence in space but not control of it (or cyberspace), implies the possibility of regime changes without stating it explicitly, and does not mention developing smaller nuclear weapons. However, it agrees on the need to upgrade and transform U.S. military capabilities and to relocate military positions so as to cope with distant crises. Both documents advocate the development and deployment of missile defenses, and both call for proactive leadership to counter the dangers of terrorism and rogue states. Which of the two visions prevails in this administration may depend on which individuals prevail in the struggle for dominance within the Bush foreign-policy team.

Although there are problems with the National Security document, it is important to acknowledge that most of its premises are defensible. The U.S. is in fact the dominant power in world politics. It is the only state able to exercise its power with global reach. Other states acknowledge this leadership, however grudgingly, and at times they demand it. Inevitably, the U.S. is criticized for its interventions, and just as inevitably criticized when it does not intervene where its dominant power seems needed.

And there is nothing controversial in the documents commitment to freedom and democracy throughout the world, to peaceful cooperation in international relations, and to "the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity; the rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property." These commitments express the liberal internationalism of every Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson. The pertinent passages in this Republican document easily could have been written by Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. In any event, the list itself is commendable, and it serves as a benchmark both for shaping an international future and for examining the domestic practices and policies.

Nor is there anything controversial in the claim that the Constitution requires the U.S. government to protect and defend its people and territory against all enemies foreign and domestic. Disagreements will arise over the seriousness of particular threats, whether "just cause" and "last resort" are present for the use of military force, the utility of nonviolent and persuasive methods, whether a missile defense system (required by the strategy paper) is itself defensible practically and morally, and whether the U.S. should make interventionary decisions unilaterally or with international consent and support. Further disagreements arise over whether the Bush administration has sufficiently justified a war against Iraq, and over the uses and limits of militant rhetoric and military power in dealing with North Korea. But few people would contend that the U.S. government has no business concerning itself with terrorism, with Saddam Hussein or with North Korea.

Finally, the document is right in arguing that defense against terrorism and rogue states must be proactive and not merely reactive.

On other points, however, the National Security Strategy document is seriously deficient.

1) The document ignores the strategic significance of oil. It contains no discussion of oil reserves, their location, their transmission, and their relationship to other policy proposals and military projections. The section on economic growth and free trade contains a short paragraph devoted to enhancing energy security, pledging "to expand the sources and types of global energy supplied, especially in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and the Caspian region." But it does not mention the Middle East or the obvious relationship of oil politics to geopolitics. The document fails as a declaration of national security strategy at least on this essential point.

2) It offers no sustained, self-critical inquiry into whether the nation’s use of its power always is responsible, no inquiry into why American power and presence are resented so deeply around the world, no attempt to examine when international interests might be subordinated to American interests and human rights to political and economic objectives.

Perhaps it is naïve to expect the administration to explore critically the relation of American oil interests to Middle East politics, or whether its initial neglect of the Israel-Palestine conflict followed by partiality toward Israel exacerbates that problem, or whether its campaign for world democracy is congruent with alliances with autocratic regimes, or whether its stated commitment to energy conservation is its actual policy. However, asking questions of this sort is the essence of realism. To ignore them in the consideration of strategy is to compromise both international responsibility and national interest. At minimum, it shows a lack of moral seriousness.

3) Though the strategy document calls for investing "time and resources into building international relationships and institutions that can help manage local crises when they emerge," this seems more like a policy of convenience subordinated to the unilateralist approach often taken by this administration, The concept of "coalitions of the willing" advanced in the document appears to describe a coalition of states willing to follow the leadership of the U.S. when international institutions prove reluctant and resistant. A "balance of power that favors freedom" appears to be fundamental in the proposed strategy, but the nature of this balance is unexplained.

Historically, the purpose of a balance of power is to prevent any state from becoming dominant in a system of interstate relationships. What the U.S. seems to be proposing here, by contrast, is a "balance" created and controlled by the dominant power. In the meantime, what other states are doing -- especially with regard to a possible war with Iraq -- is to use international institutions to limit and restrain (or "balance") the power of the U.S. Helping international institutions to develop the strength and authority to manage local crises is a responsible use of dominant power. That work implies arranging for one’s own power to be balanced, and thereby building into the practice procedures for the diminishing of dominance.

4) The document never addresses the high costs of implementing this strategy. "Rearming America’s Defenses" boldly proposed budget increases, which it assumed would be covered by the (now disappeared) budget surplus. It also recommended major increases in military personnel, not only to staff expanded military obligations but also to diminish the use of reserves and the National Guard. If these proposals were to be adopted, they would increase greatly the tax bill for the American people. More important, they also most certainly would require the reinstitution of the draft. President Bush’s National Security Strategy document entails similar cost implications. The administration should have the courage and the wisdom to confront the American people with these costs.

5) The strategy document seeks to justify preemptive war, but then extends the argument to preventive war by collapsing the distinction between the two. Preemptive war is a matter of negating an imminent attack on one’s own forces, territory or allies. Preventive war is a matter of eliminating the possibility of future threats by attacking and destroying latent or emergent capabilities. The document claims that "legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat -- most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack." Then it continues, "We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries." The purpose is to "interdict enabling technologies and materials" -- by implication, to wage war on Iraq for seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction even in the absence of an actual and imminent threat against the U.S.

Technological development being what it is, one should not dismiss the possible justification of preventive war, but neither should one equate it with preemptive war. The process of moral justification in the case of preventive war is more stringent. A nation’s potential to create terrible weapons may turn into a catastrophic actuality, but that potential may have more than one use it may never be developed fully, or it may never find its way into an actively threatening situation. Given the immediacy of a threat, preemptive war may of necessity be a unilateral decision. However, in the absence of an immediate threat, justification for preventive war should require international consensus -- unless, of course, the U.S. means to universalize this moral permission and allow it to every state.

One positive observation: The document appears to move away from the language of evil used at times by President Bush, but it does not address the issue directly. The preamble to Chapter III quotes the president as saying that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." The document then avoids any further reference to "ridding the world of evil" and proceeds generally in somewhat less emotive and more pragmatic (but nevertheless grandiose) terms to discuss and project foreign-policy objectives. Also, it never refers to an "axis of evil." These omissions suggest important differences between Bush and other members of his foreign-policy team in conceptualizing international politics.

Finally, the document presents two conflicting goals. On the one hand, it aims to maximize national power to eliminate all real and suspected threats and to impose the nation’s moral vision on the world in the name of justice and peace. On the other hand, it seeks to encourage international organizations and other states to manage threats in a cooperative manner. Some might say the first option is an expression of realism, the second of idealism. On the contrary, the first option may be too optimistic and therefore too idealistic in assuming that security can be established and perpetuated by military domination without provoking uncontrollable resentment or bankrupting the dominating state.

In fact, the second approach may be more realistic in recognizing that a participatory and cooperative order -- with power widely shared -- is more stable than one that is hegemonic if not imperial. If the second course is the course of realism, then the overriding responsibility of the dominant power is to enable the conditions for reducing and perhaps ending its own dominance.

Tomorrow’s Catholics

Book Review:

Toward a New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform.

By James Carroll. Mariner Books, 130 pp.

The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church.

By George Weigel. Basic Books, 246 pp.

Why I Am a Catholic.

By Garry Wills. Houghton Mifflin, 390 pp.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Though William Faulkner did not have the Catholic sexual-abuse crisis in mind when he wrote these words, they do throw light on the conflicting responses to the scandals of the past year. While most commentators agree that there really are two scandals -- clerical sexual abuse itself and the subsequent episcopal dereliction -- they differ on their diagnoses of both the causes and the appropriate remedies. Some attribute the crisis in part to a centuries-old repressive sexual ethic, while others indict the church’s ambiguous and permissive moral teaching of recent decades. Some hold that numerous bishops have failed because of their complicity in corrupt ecclesial structures, while others believe that these leaders lacked the courage to teach unpopular truths and to govern their own dioceses.

Such divergent responses to the crisis are unintelligible unless one sees them as part of the deeper issue of what might be called American Catholicism’s "culture wars." Over the past 40 years, since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the Catholic Church in the U.S. has become increasingly divided over liturgy, theology, catechesis, ministry, sexuality and a host of other issues. If, as priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley argues, such polarization has little affect on the average Catholic, it does profoundly afflict ministerial, theological and cultural elites within the church. It has become impossible not to pigeonhole leaders and thinkers: Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles is a "progressive"; Cardinal Francis George of Chicago a "traditionalist"; Notre Dame theologian Richard McBrien a "liberal"; First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus a "conservative."

The polarization is so deep that when, in 1996, the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin founded the Catholic Common Ground Initiative as a means of addressing division in the church, he was criticized by some liberal Catholics who thought that the project was not radical enough and by some of his brother cardinals who believed that it jeopardized the essential truths of the faith.

James Carroll, George Weigel and Garry Wills all agree that the sexual-abuse crisis is symptomatic of a deeper cultural war in Catholicism, but they differ -- often diametrically -- on what is at stake. Carroll, a novelist and former priest who won a National Book Award for his memoir An American Requiem, offers the slimmest tome of the three. A lightly edited version of the concluding section of his 2001 book Constantine’s Sword, it calls for a Vatican III which will bring about "full democratic reform." This reform will enable Catholicism to reject anti-Semitism, triumphalist and exclusivist conceptions of Christ and the church, and puritanical notions of sexuality.

Garry Wills, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Lincoln at Gettysburg and the author of Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, focuses on the charism of the Petrine ministry of church unity and the papacy’s frequent self-aggrandizement throughout the centuries. George Weigel, best known for Witness to Hope, his massive and massively successful biography of Pope John Paul II, is the only one of the three whose book specifically responds to the sexual-abuse crisis. He argues that Catholicism needs a renewal of holiness, and that only the saints formed by such a renewal can reform the priesthood, the episcopate and the entire church through their courageous embrace of the fullness of Catholic truth and tradition.

For each writer, the past is very much present in American Catholicism in the form of three decisive years: the 1965 conclusion of Vatican II; the 1968 release of Humanae Vitae ("Of Human Life"), Pope Paul VI’s encyclical which banned artificial contraception; and the 1978 election of Pope John Paul II.

Vatican II is the decisive event of modern Catholicism. Convoked by Pope John XXIII, the council engaged in a twofold movement of ressourcement (a return to the often-neglected sources of the Christian tradition) and aggiornamento (an updating of the church’s life and doctrine in response to the times). In both its 16 documents and its overall experience of communion and collegiality, the council effected the first comprehensive reform of Catholicism since the 16th-century Council of Trent. Nearly 40 years after the close of Vatican II, significant differences remain in how the achievements of the council are interpreted and in its reception in the life of the church. How one views the council is therefore a Rorschach test for one’s understanding of the church and its reform.

Devoting several chapters to Vatican II and its aftermath, Wills locates the council’s fundamental achievement in its conception of the church as the "people of God" in which the laity and hierarchy are equal in their baptismal dignity. The council also led to a renewal of the liturgy, an affirmation of religious freedom and the primacy of conscience, a rejection of church-state unions, an openness to the truth of other religions (especially Judaism) and a renewed sense that the church’s teaching authority resides in all of the faithful, not exclusively in the hierarchy.

More broadly, Wills sees the "spirit" of Vatican II in the church’s rejection of the "mystique of changelessness" and in its consequent "opening of the windows" to the world; Catholicism must look outward, not inward. The church, according to Pope John’s opening address to the council, ought to serve the world with the "medicine of mercy," rather than condemn it with the "medicine of severity."

Carroll largely agrees with Wills on the concrete achievements of the council -- especially its affirmation of the equal dignity of the entire people of God and its view of Judaism -- but goes still further in interpreting its "spirit." Above all, the council addressed the gaps in life and thought that had developed between a largely medieval, defensive Catholicism and the modern world. It ended the church’s self-destructive revolt against modernity and declared a truce not simply with the world, but also within itself. Second, the council rejected the "imperial autocracy" that had reached its doctrinal apex in Vatican I’s 1870 definition of papal infallibility and its organizational apex in the "bureaucratized misanthropy" of modern Catholicism. Because Vatican II’s work was incomplete, a Vatican III is needed. But Vatican II nonetheless opened the door for a future affirmation of the radical equality of all people in the church and in the world.

If Carroll sees Vatican II as a move toward the "holiness of democracy," Weigel sees it as proclaiming the "democracy of holiness." Whereas Carroll and Wills focus on the ecclesial aspects of the council’s labors, Weigel emphasizes its evangelical and anthropological dimensions. Vatican II, in his view, inaugurated a two-way dialogue in which Catholicism not only listened to the world’s hopes and anxieties but also proposed to the world a Christian humanism: the "passionate love of God for all humanity, made visible in . . . Jesus Christ, crucified and risen," that same Christ who fully and uniquely reveals to humanity its incomparable dignity and high calling. Accordingly, while the council made decisive advances in such areas as liturgy and religious freedom, its primary achievement was renewing the church’s mission to proclaim to all humanity the good news that Christ is the source of tine freedom and life. Too many Catholics, mostly liberals but also some conservatives, have failed to grasp this evangelical core, Weigel argues, and so have remained fixated on internal church reform.

If all three writers agree on the decisive importance -- if not the meaning -- of Vatican II, so too with the events of 1968, a revolutionary, traumatic year for the church and the world. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as well as the student demonstrations in Europe and the escalation of the Vietnam War, seemed to mark the disintegration of Western society. And the sexual revolution went into overdrive, leading to further upheaval in North America and Western Europe.

That year also signaled the end of the Vatican II honeymoon in Catholicism. The theological and ecclesial fault lines that had begun to surface within the conciliar majority (as opposed to a more conservative and Roman minority) toward the end of the council now appeared in full view. Several of the council’s most influential and progressive theologians -- most prominently Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger -- challenged appeals to the "spirit" of Vatican II that seemed far removed from the documents and the intentions of the council. Much of what passed as conciliar-inspired church reform, they argued, was an accommodation to the world and a betrayal of the church’s identity.

More visibly, the release of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae rocked the American church, leading to unprecedented public dissent. In upholding the prohibition against artificial methods of birth control, the encyclical dashed the hopes of many believers for a change in church teaching -- hopes that had been raised when the National Catholic Reporter leaked the news that the lay and clerical members of the hand-picked papal commission studying the matter had voted decisively to support the limited use of artificial contraception within the context of marriage.

Disappointment was inevitable, but its magnitude was astonishing. Hundreds of Catholic theologians (including ethicist Charles Curran, whose permission to teach as a Catholic theologian Rome would later rescind) signed a public statement that questioned the teaching. Financial contributions and church attendance dropped precipitously. Wounded by the outcry, Pope Paul never wrote another encyclical. The American church entered into an acrimony that still lingers.

Carroll experienced the conflict both personally and institutionally. Marred by the "ideology of papal absolutism," Humanae Vitae was for him part of Pope Paul’s effort to "turn back the tide" of church reform begun by Vatican II. Ordained to the priesthood only a few months after the encyclical’s release, Carroll could not in good conscience accept the growing disjunction between the church’s official teaching and the lived reality of many Catholics, he states. He resigned the priesthood in 1973 and married soon thereafter.

Wills’s comments on Humanae Vitae lack Carroll’s autobiographical bent but far exceed him in scorn. In Papal Sin, Wills described the encyclical as "the most crippling, puzzling blow to organized Catholicism in our time" and the "most disastrous papal document of this century"; the text and its drafting exemplified Catholicism’s hierarchical subterfuge and intellectual dishonesty. Why I Am a Catholic presents the encyclical as the "great break" between most Catholics and the Vatican, for it opened the way for "qualified and loyal theologians" to dissent from church teaching and emboldened the laity to follow their consciences. No longer would Catholics, "on entering church, have to check our brains at the door" or "suspend our common sense or honesty" when faced with "silly" teaching. If not always able to cite Vatican II’s documents "chapter and verse," these newly empowered faithful nonetheless seek to be faithful to the "spirit of the council" -- that "opening of windows" fundamental to aggiornamento.

Vatican II indeed opened the windows to the world, Weigel agrees, but just at the moment when modernity "barrel[ed] into a dark tunnel full of poisonous fumes." The sexual revolution, a suspicion of institutions and authority, and intellectual nihilism combined in a corrosive mix. When coupled with a postconciliar euphoria in which people forgot that Vatican II intended a two-way dialogue between church and world, the result was ecclesial chaos.

This chaos erupted, according to Weigel, with the publication of Humanae Vitae. Faced with the public dissent of 19 Washington priests, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle disciplined them, even removing some from active ministry. They appealed to Rome, and in 1971 the Vatican allowed them to return to ministry without an explicit rejection of their dissent. Pope Paul VI feared that a crackdown on the priests might lead to schism. While not budging on the truth of the encyclical, he decided to tolerate dissent for the sake of ecclesial unity.

This "Truce of 1968," as Weigel calls it, affected three groups. Theologians and priests learned that their dissent from magisterial teaching would bring few negative consequences. Bishops learned that their efforts to control dissent would receive little support from Rome. Some bishops even felt free themselves to dissent -- however implicitly -- from church teaching. Finally, the laity, observing the conduct of these first two groups, began to think that everything was up for grabs.

Often with an appeal to an amorphous "spirit of Vatican II," priests, bishops and laity alike contributed to a "culture of dissent." The sexual-abuse crisis -- grounded in heterodox sexual morality and unchecked by cowed bishops -- began to develop slowly but surely. What Weigel calls "Catholic Lite" -- a softening of orthodoxy under the guise of reform -- began its ascendancy, and led to the malaise and indecision of the 1970s.

The election of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla to the papacy was a revolution for the church and the world. The first non-Italian pope in 455 years, John Paul II has become a figure of world-historical importance, having played a pivotal role in the fall of communism. Within Catholicism he is universally admired for his personal holiness and his service of the gospel. Among modern popes, he is rivaled only by John XXIII in terms of popular affection and historical significance.

Yet Catholic elites are deeply divided over his still- unfinished legacy. Some see in him courage in the face of a corrupt, brutal modernity; others see intransigence and incomprehension. Some see a crabbed sexual moralist; others see a herald of true sexual fulfillment. Some find authoritative leadership; others find authoritarianism. At the root of these stark differences is a central question: Does John Paul’s pontificate represent renewal or restoration? That is, is it the flowering of Vatican II’s hopeful vision or a return to the defensive triumphalism of the preconciliar era?

Weigel does not hesitate to state that the present pope may someday be known as "John Paul the Great," particularly for his unstinting defense of human dignity in the face of political and cultural barbarisms. He emphasizes that the heart of John Paul’s pontificate is his evangelism and Christian humanism. More a poet and preacher than a bureaucrat, John Paul has, in Weigel’s words, one central theme: in Christ, "you are greater than you imagine, and greater than the late modern world has let you imagine."

Far from trying to repeal Vatican II, as many of his critics hold, John Paul has instead affirmed the council’s key insights into Christ and humanity. Thus he has refused to let the implementation of Vatican II devolve into ecclesial power struggles (e.g., between the pope and the bishops, or between the hierarchy and the laity). When combined with his "theology of the body" -- a celebratory presentation of human embodiment and sexuality -- John Paul’s promotion of Vatican II’s reforms provides crucial resources for responding to the American sexual-abuse crisis -- a crisis, Wills argues, rooted in defective conceptions of the Catholic Church and its sexual teaching.

Carroll and Wills acknowledge John Paul’s intellectual, spiritual and social gifts; "charismatic," he is full of "charm" and "energy." They also note his courageous support for the Solidarity movement in communist Poland, and Carroll makes special mention of his rapprochement with Judaism. But such praise seems grudging, even backhanded, in light of their severe criticism. Calling John Paul a "reactionary," Carroll condemns what he sees as the pope’s program of "medieval restoration" and its attempted repeal of Vatican II.

Wills offers a lengthier indictment. John Paul is apocalyptic, obsessed with martyrdom and with the Virgin Mary, and, worst of all, self-important: "The pope himself seems to think the whole church depends on him -- on his being saved by the Virgin of Fatima, on his living into the new millennium, on his visiting every Marian shrine, on his Stakhanovite canonizing, on his re-definitions of every truth, on his creating a like-minded episcopate. . . . This one-man rescue operation is a staggering assignment," he writes.

If Wills is critical of John Paul, he is contemptuous of Cardinal Ratzinger, John Paul’s chief aide and head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Wills charges Ratzinger with reversing Vatican II’s teachings (and his own earlier writings) on episcopal collegiality, the church as the "people of God," the liturgy, intellectual freedom and ecumenism. Together John Paul and Ratzinger have mounted a "coup" to repeal virtually all of the major advances of the council. This coup has failed, Wills writes, for the Catholic people have rejected it. They have instead shown their love for John Paul by not abandoning him in his errant ways; they support him precisely through their loyal opposition and their faithfulness to Vatican II. Neither "monstrous" nor "misguided," John Paul has been a "well-meaning" failure. "Papal rebirth," Wills concludes, will come from "John [XXIII]’s church, not John Paul’s."

If this is Catholicism’s recent past, then what of its present and future? What is one to make of Carroll’s, Weigel’s and Wills’s calls for church reform? How well do they address problems raised by the clerical sexual-abuse crisis, as well as by the polarization of the Catholic culture wars?

Carroll’s call for Vatican III is thoroughly flawed. The reformed Catholicism he envisions has little connection to the church and to the conception of Christ as they have existed across the centuries. His opening chapter "What Is to Be Done?" -- the only substantively new part of his book -- ranges from religious fundamentalism to Middle Eastern politics to the sexual-abuse crisis, yet it mentions Jesus Christ only once. Here and throughout the book Carroll gives us neither the Christ of scripture and the creeds nor the church that fostered them.

Carroll’s vision of church reform, then, lacks a Christic center. His effort to address the Jewish-Christian division, for instance, reduces the split to a tragic historical misunderstanding and blurs the theological differences between the two faiths. In the same vein, his desire to affirm the value of religious pluralism is based on an agnosticism about divine revelation, and leads to an evisceration of belief in Christ’s unique salvific role, especially in relation to the cross: "It is impossible to reconcile this Christology, these cosmic claims for the accomplishment of Jesus Christ as the one source of salvation, with authentic respect for Judaism and every other ‘spiritual neighbor,"’ he writes.

Carroll’s preference for Jesus as Revealer rather than as Savior turns Jesus into a mere moral exemplar – the same fatal move liberal Protestantism made at the turn of the 20th century. In short, Toward a New Catholic Church is a dying gasp from a branch of liberal Catholicism that has never really left the 1960s and that grows grayer by the year. It is, in Weigel’s phrase, "Catholicism Lite," and the reform it promises leads to dissolution, not to the fruition of Vatican II.

Wills’s work is more intelligent and substantial than Carroll’s, and he writes from a deep faith; he notes, not without pride, that he prays the Rosary daily and recites the Lord’s Prayer in Greek. His chapter on the apostle Peter’s importance for early Christianity is an incisive, eloquent defense of Catholicism’s inclusivity against the exclusivity of Gnosticism and other heresies. He also makes, at the end of his lengthy account of the papacy’s failings, an appealing, if brief, case for reform within -- not apart from -- the church: "I prefer the company of Ignatius of Loyola to that of Luther, or Charles Borromeo to Calvin, Philip Neri to Melanchthon," he writes.

Wills’s argument is nonetheless marred by serious errors of fact and interpretation. Boston College theologian Francis Sullivan, for one, has exposed Wills’s manipulative, dishonest summary of Cardinal Ratzinger’s views on ecumenism and interreligious relations. It is a cruel irony that an author so self-consciously devoted to truth-telling in the church is sometimes himself so free with the truth. Moreover, how can Wills’s unrelenting critique nourish those -- especially the young -- who haven’t yet eaten the solid food of trust and generosity (as he himself fruitfully did in his youth)? His concluding handful of pages on the positive achievements of the papacy may well seem hollow to those who have plowed through hundreds of carping ones on its shortcomings.

In True and False Reform in the Church (a seminal 1950 work disappointingly never mentioned in any of the books under review), the Catholic theologian Yves Cougar argued that the first condition for genuine church reform was charity -- caritas, that selfless, unsentimental love that wills only the good of the other. Wills often makes little effort to understand the legitimate -- even if misguided or wrong-headed -- concerns of his opponents, preferring to ascribe to them the worst of motives. Such utter lack of charity for those with whom he disagrees -- especially Ratzinger -- cannot build up the church he professes to love. Does he really heed Ephesians’ counsel to "speak the truth in love"? Although "structures of deceit" do exist in the church (if not as pervasively as Wills asserts), all efforts to expose them and reform the church will founder if they lack love.

Weigel, for his part, makes a valid -- if unnuanced -- point about the failure of the Catholic "Lite Brigade" to reproduce itself in subsequent generations. Even if younger Catholics are far from unanimous in their support of Weigel’s positions, they nonetheless are not consumed by the theological and ecclesial power-struggles that have afflicted the American church for the past 40 years. I think, for instance, of the "New Wineskins" project at Notre Dame, where advanced graduate students and untenured professors from various institutions gathered this past summer to discuss issues facing Catholic moral theology. The participants represented a variety of educational and intellectual backgrounds, yet were able to avoid the ideological labeling (e.g., "sectarianism" vs. "Constantinianism," "virtue ethics" vs. "casuistry") that often plagues older ethicists. Younger Catholic systematic theologians are likewise moving past the strife between Rahnerians and Balthasarians that has paralyzed many systematicians in their 50s and beyond.

Weigel fails, though, to prove his central thesis: that there is a link between the "Truce of 1968" and the clerical sexual-abuse crisis. One can admit that a "culture of dissent" -- or a "school of resentment," as it has also been described -- does exist, and that the "adventure of orthodoxy" is needed always. However, he refuses even to acknowledge that the widespread rejection of Humanae Vitae’s teaching on artificial contraception -- the supposed origin of the "culture of dissent" -- may have been grounded in something other than systematic dissent or cultural dissolution. By failing to admit that many of those who rejected such teaching did so with integrity, he reduces a complex situation to a simplistic calculus of orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

Furthermore, the two most notorious pedophiles, Boston priests John Geoghan and Paul Shanley, trained at the same pre-Vatican II seminary and began their abuse before 1968, and many of the bishops at the center of the scandals -- Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Edward Egan of New York come to mind -- are not known for doctrinal or disciplinary laxity. Cardinal Law, in fact, first proposed the creation of 1992’s Catechism of the Catholic Church. At the eye of the storm, then, no "culture of dissent" exists, and Weigel’s claims on that score are tendentious at best.

The present crisis in American Catholicism, I judge, is less one of dissent or duplicity than of distance. Notre Dame theologian John Cavadini has written that the only way to explain many bishops’ inattention to the victims of sexual abuse and to their families, short of ascribing active malice, is by understanding the distance fostered by clericalism. Such distance, he contends, means the church has "no sense that these are our children," but rather sees them as "your children, those of the laity, whose duty is to listen and submit." Bishops failed, then, not primarily by acquiescing to sexual perversity but by privileging their institutions and reputations over their people. This failure to communicate, to sympathize with another’s plight, to assume the good intentions of their people and treat them as equals, is precisely the problem of polarization.

Thus, while Weigel rightly stresses holiness as the key to ecclesial and episcopal renewal (a point made half a century earlier by Congar), his conception of holiness may exacerbate that polarization. All genuine reform must be grounded in reconversion to Christ, and Weigel’s call to deeper holiness is passionate. and has nothing of the saccharine or the sentimental. He offers a heroic vision of the Christian life that is much needed in a time of despair and mediocrity. This heroic holiness, though, is also largely invulnerable. Although Weigel justly criticizes the abuses committed under the distorted influence of Henri Nouwen’s "wounded healer" model of ministry -- and offers qualified support for the model itself -- he nonetheless leaves little room for the vulnerable leadership needed at this time.

Weigel constructs false dichotomies between the courageous, uncompromising leaders that are now needed and the bureaucratic, "episcopal discussion group moderator[s]" who have allegedly fed the crisis. He contrasts the "harder," "shatterproof" diamond of true Catholicism to the "flaccidity" and "softness" of his opponents. His ideal bishop does much teaching but seemingly less listening. His ideal priest is an icon of Christ who seems to hover above his community. He nods perfunctorily at collaboration and consultation, but makes clear that too much of both has contributed to the present mess of American Catholicism.

A fuller conception of holiness than Weigel’s is needed -- one that integrates heroism and vulnerability in Christian life and ministry. The English Dominican exegete Timothy Radcliffe has written that whereas Old Testament understandings of holiness stress ritual purity and separation. the Epistle to the Hebrews reveals Christ as the high priest and mediator who is holy precisely in embracing fully the brokennness and sinfulness of humanity. He reaches out to those marginalized, dispirited, angry, stigmatized. He reconciles through the blood of his cross and of the Eucharist. In this sense, the Catholic church needs leaders -- clerical and lay -- who have the courage to be not only countercultural but also woundable (the literal meaning of vulnerable).

Cardinal Law, for one, appeared -- publicly, at least -- to be aloof from the complaints and warnings of victim-survivors and their intimates, as well as from the concerns of laity and clergy in his archdiocese. Leadership, in a Christian sense, is decisive and authoritative only to the degree that it hears and bears the pain of the people and refuses to hide behind church and civil law. In a word, it must reflect the holiness of Christ.

Christian holiness bridges the distance that sin creates. It reconciles clergy and laity, liberals and conservatives, the innocent and the guilty. It would be foolish, even dangerous, to imagine that holiness alone will automatically resolve the sexual-abuse crisis or the polarization that divides much of American Catholicism; cultural, intellectual, and structural reforms are all essential and overdue. Without holiness, though, all of these needed reforms will collapse under the weight of history and resentment. With holiness, Faulkner’s "past" might yet become a source of liberation, rather than the imprisonment it now often seems to be.

No Comparison (Is. 49:21-31; Ps. 147:1-11)

Isaiah faced a challenge. How was he to awaken an exiled community from the lethargy of despair? The people’s confidence had been shattered. Their entire world view was drained of its mimetic properties. Former glories lay in ruins. Now the people lived in the land of the dreaded enemy, reciting litanies of lamentation while ghouls goaded them on with "Sing us some of those songs of Zion, miserable losers! Celebrate the memory of what no longer exists." Psalm 137 records the agony of exile and culminates in a cathartic curse.

But in the taunt lurks a solution, a strategy used by untold generations of the conquered: Take the lemon of the oppressor and make lemonade. Using a series of rhetorical questions, the prophet pushes aside the numbness that is our common defense against pain. Who created this? He asks. Who sustains that? Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Why do you keep on chanting that your way is hidden from Yahweh, that your plight is disregarded by God? Don’t you know? ("Of course you know!") Haven’t you heard? ("Of course you have!")

Remember the temple psalms of praise, Isaiah urges. You’ve heard of God’s might because you’ve sung about it! The descriptions of God’s mighty acts of creation in the Oracle are retrieved from hymns of praise, the ones you’re remembering now. Yes, the accompanying rituals are gone, but the power of the worshiping community is awakened in the oracle of comfort. Yahweh (not Marduk) created all this. God (not the king of Babylon) is in control.

One of the prominent themes of these hymns is the incomparability of God, a cultural trope that signifies the highest form of praise. To whom can you compare God? Who is God’s equal? There is no other like the One. This is a common biblical assertion, given expression in the common names Mi-ka-’el and Mi-ka-ya(hu) and Micah "Who is like God/Yahweh?" It is found among the oldest poetry in the Bible, "Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods? Who is like you, awesome in splendor?"

Incomparability is also related to ineffability. We know things only insofar as we can describe their likeness. So the use of this convention also expresses the ultimate mystery of God, and acknowledges that our language and symbols can never adequately grasp the being and will of God. I was taught that pious believers do not pronounce the name of God, not because that name is too holy, but because we believers must avoid assuming that it is possible to grasp God, to fully understand God or to control God.

Incomparability is also related, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to the monotheistic claim that there are no other gods. There are no equals or even standards of measure that might be mustered to quantify God’s greatness. Not the idols -- even the skillfully made ones. Not the gods -- even the beneficent ones. And certainly not the princes and rulers who like to play God -- not even the powerful ones.

Having affirmed this, however, it is just as evident that the Bible is full of such implicit comparisons. While the effects of God’s acts are described by explicit comparisons, or similes, God is always described metaphorically. God is a rock, a fortress, a redeemer/avenger of blood, a shepherd, a doting mother, a bridegroom, a warrior, a consuming fire, a sound of sheer silence. A plethora of penultimate metaphors constitute the divine epithets of the Bible’s prophetic and hymnic literature.

In this oracle of comfort the prophet uses the hymnic traditions of the pre-exilic temple to introduce the theme of Yahweh’s sovereignty over nature and history. It contains a subtle polemic against the astral deities whose worship was at the heart of Babylonian religion. The assertion of God’s sovereignty over the nations is intended to rouse the people from their stupor of lamentation and reestablish their faith. Psalm 147 reflects some of the same themes as Isaiah’s oracle of comfort. God’s mighty works as creator and redeemer are rehearsed here from a postexilic perspective. God is a healer and a reverser of fortunes, a lifter of the downtrodden and a capsizer of the wicked. God takes note and takes care. The metaphors bring us into the vicinity of the great mystery. It is fitting to sing praise and give thanks to this God, for when we do this together, the community is reconstituted and sustained.

Finally, there are the characteristic aspects of God’s delight and desire. This underappreciated and underutilized theological concept reflects a divine aesthetic that is deeply ethical. It belies the typical Christian images of the God of the so-called Old Testament as a wrathful, vengeful, punishing foil to the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Yahweh’s delight is not in the strength of the horse or the speed of the runner, but in those who worship (fear) the One and hope in that loving loyalty.

This brings us back to the essential theme of Isaiah’s comfort oracle. Those that wait and hope for Yahweh will be strengthened and renewed. These verbs do not denote static inactivity but active expectation. Those who wait, then, live in the faith that the God who created and sustains, who is incomparable, who overturns the plans of the most powerful princes of this world -- that this God will do/is doing/has done the restorative and renewing work for child, woman and man.

By worshiping its way to renewal and hope, the community of faith has something to offer a world full of weariness, faintness, powerlessness and despair. Wherever the young are exhausted, wherever the old are clueless, those who know how to hope offer relief from pain and numbness with their songs of praise and joy.

Called to Order (Deut. 18:15-20; Ps. 111; I Cor. 8:1-13

HOLY MOSES! The first surprise in this passage from Deuteronomy is that the biblical lawgiver par excellence is also the prototypical prophet. In 21st-century America, prophets are not so easily disguised as congressmen and senators. What does Washington have to do with Waco? Law, or the codification, enforcement and interpretation of community mores, does not usually appear in the same sentence as prophecy, the impassioned oraculation of the divine word. We tend to think of these two matrices of authority as in tension or opposition to one another. Vox populi on the one hand; Vox dei on the other.

But in the context of Deuteronomy, the biblical passage reflects a revolutionary program of centralized and perhaps domesticated religious authority. All law and prophecy were to be associated with the offices of prophet, priest and king in Jerusalem. Previously acceptable forms of divination and worship were to be focused on "the place where Yahweh shall choose to cause his name to dwell.

The magical practices of the original inhabitants of the land were rejected not only as "Canaanite," but also as illicit soothsaying and divining happening outside the confines of formally sanctioned religion. In place of these practices, a prophet like Moses would be raised up to mediate God’s word. Within the order of the ethos of Torah -- also conceived of as divine word -- the prophet would give voice to the moral imperative.

Within the delimitations of Torah there is accountability for both people and prophet. If the prophet faithfully delivers God’s spoken word to the people, the people are held responsible to follow its dictates. If, however, the prophet presumptuously speaks a word that God did not speak, the prophet is held accountable.

How do listeners know when the word spoken by the prophet in the name of Yahweh is not commanded by Yahweh? The answer: If the word turns out not to be true or the prediction does not come to pass, then it is evident that it was not a true word of Yahweh, but only prophetic hauteur. The people are not to be cowed by such a soothsayer.

It’s been said that the lessons of history are never clear, and when they are they’re usually wrong. Whereas the principle set forth in Deuteronomy may provide some means of measuring the accuracy of the predictions of an astrologer like Jeane Dixon or the lucrative prognostications of a dispensationalist like Hal Lindsey, it is less well suited to discerning the reliability of a call to moral judgment and decisive action. We may still be left with the dilemma of how to tell the true word from the false.

We are not left, however, without resources for this task. Does the call to moral discernment accord with the ethos of Torah? Scripture can provide tools that help us detect the true texture of history and the interwoven inclinations of God’s saving acts. This is something less than blessed assurance. But it does provide an ordered framework within which we can exercise our capacity for moral judgment.

There are, of course, well-known dangers associated with all sanctioned and centralized moral orders. They may become self-legitimizing thickets of power that co-opt the moral prerogative of people and prophet and are no longer open to the living word. But biblical tradition refuses to allow God’s law to become identified with the kings law. Israelite prophecy could embrace the contemplative order of Mosaic law to call the nation toward faithfulness. The inherent tensions between law and prophecy were not resolved, but there was access to the divine word in an ordered cosmos where people could live as free moral agents.

In the poetic structure of the psalm of praise, there is a different kind of order. The acrostic poem adheres to a specific structure in which each line begins with the subsequent letter of the alphabet. Within the discipline of this poetic convention, virtually impossible to reflect in translation, the theme of praise for God’s mighty acts unfolds. The construct compels the poet to paint her picture in a given frame, while the conventions of frame and phraseology help focus the attention of the reciter and facilitate memory as well as meditation. Again, freedom within order.

In Paul’s teaching concerning the issue of food offered to idols, he refers to a certain kind of theological order: there is one God. The gods that the idols are supposed to represent do not exist. Therefore it is lawful to eat food offered to such idols.

But then he weighs this "order of knowledge" against an-other order -- that of Christian love. In this dichotomy, it is acceptable to eat the food offered to idols unless this exercise of one’s freedom threatens the conscience of another believer. Then it is sin. It is better to choose self-restraint than to violate the principle of Christian love.

The order of the law and the prophets is a theological one that rests on a foundation of faith. It is not ultimately upheld by any orthodoxy or orthopraxy, by shrill pieties or by militant fundamentalisms. Nor is it undermined by secular science, by modern alienation or by failed ideologies. Nor can the ache of its absence be felicitously replaced by the comforts of consumerism, or by a pax Americana. It is God’s faithfulness, rather than ours, that grounds our being. Within the ordered constraints of our physicality and mortality, we are free to respond to that faithfulness with every capacity that our miraculously evolved consciousness allows. Free to pit lives of healing and hope against a world of chaos and conflict. Free to live with integrity and die with dignity.