Page 2643 – Christianity Today (2024)

An Egyptian Coptic Christian woman has been sentenced to three years in prison for failing to uphold her Islamic identity—an identity she did not know she had for more than four decades.

Bahia Nagy El-Sisi was arrested and tried this September for claiming Christianity as her official religious identity on her marriage certificate. Her sister, Shadia, received an identical sentence in November 2007 for doing the same. Unknown to the sisters, their religious identity had officially changed 46 years ago due to their father’s temporary conversion to Islam.

Their father, Nagy El-Sisi, converted to Islam in 1962 during a brief marital dispute in order to obtain a divorce and potentially gain custody of his daughters, the sisters’ lawyer Peter Ramses said. Egyptian law is influenced by Islamic jurisprudence (Shari’ah), which automatically awards child custody to whichever parent has the “superior” religion, and dictates “no jurisdiction of a non-Muslim over a Muslim.”

A few years after his conversion, Nagy El-Sisi returned to his family and Christianity. He sought the help of a Muslim employee in the Civil Registration Office, who agreed to forge his Christian identification documents. Reversion to Christianity for converts to Islam has been nearly impossible in Egyptian courts.

The case is being appealed before Egypt’s Supreme Court. If Bahia Nagy El-Sisi’s identity as a Muslim stands, her religious status could potentially create a domino effect that would require her husband to convert to Islam or to nullify their marriage. Her children would also be registered as Muslims. Both sisters are married to Christians.

“All of their children and grandchildren would be registered as Muslims,” Ramses said. “[The ruling] would affect many people.”

Other sources said it is too soon to determine the fate of the sisters’ marriages and families, as neither of the cases has been finalized. Legal experts believe that when Bahia Nagy El-Sisi’s case comes before the Supreme Court, her sentence will be retracted like that of her sister, who was released from prison in January.

Egypt’s constitution guarantees freedom of belief and practice for the country’s Christian minority, who composes 10 percent of the population.

The case is also an example of the social pressure put on Egyptian non-Muslims to convert when a parent embraces Islam, despite the constitutional guarantee of equality, said Youssef Sidhom, editor in chief of the national weekly Watani, the only Christian newspaper in Egypt.

“This is a sick environment that we struggle to change,” Sidhom said. “According to what is taking place here, freedom is protected and provided for Christians to convert to Islam, while the opposite is not provided.”

Ramses is appealing the case to Egypt’s Supreme Court. He said he worries the case could further erode the precarious situation of religious minorities in the Muslim-majority country of 79 million.

“How can the government say to [someone] who has lived 50 years in a Christian way that they must become a Muslim and their children must be Muslims and their whole family must all be Muslims?” he said. “This is very important for the freedom of religion.”

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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Christianity Today has special sections on Islam and Egypt.

Dalia Mogahed spoke at July’s Common Word Conference at Yale University, where hundreds of moderate Muslims and evangelical Christian scholars met seeking better understanding. As senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, Mogahed travels widely, engaging audiences on what Muslims think. Her analysis has appeared in The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Mogahed, a Muslim, lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons. Also attending the conference was Warren Larson, director of the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies at Columbia International University and author of Islamic Ideology and Fundamentalism in Pakistan: Climate for Conversion to Christianity?

Here, Larson interviews Mogahed about the book she coauthored with John Esposito, Who Speaks For Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (Gallup Press, 2008). The idea for the book was born shortly after 9/11, when Donald Rumsfeld was asked how Muslims felt about the attacks on the U.S. He replied, “I don’t know; it’s not like you can take a Gallup poll.” The survey covered 90 percent of the global Muslim population on, among other things, Muslims’ views of democracy, extremism, jihad, and women’s rights, and Americans’ views of Islam.

What surprised you most in your findings?

It was how much Americans and residents of majority-Muslim countries have in common. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that paints a picture of an inherently conflict-ridden relationship. Americans are as likely, for example, as Iranians to say religious leaders should have no part in crafting a constitution. We found that 57 percent of Americans think the Bible should have at least some role in legislation. (Nine percent think it should be the sole source.) This is similar to many majority-Muslim countries where people don’t want theocracy and don’t favor religious leaders being in control, but they do want legislation informed by religious values.

What do Muslim women say about Shari’ah [Islamic law]?

Muslim women and men, surprisingly, hold similar views about Shari’ah. In Jordan, most Muslim women and men say it should play a role in legislation. Muslim women want and think they deserve equal rights: the right to vote without interference from their families, the right to work at any job they are qualified for, and even the right to serve in senior levels of government. In short, Muslim women don’t regard Shari’ah as impeding their rights; they may in fact see it as a road to progress.

Didn’t Ontario’s government recently disallow Islamic law because Muslim women opposed it?

In the absence of representative survey research, we cannot make that assessment. The government was actually led to believe Muslim women didn’t want it, but we can’t be sure. Often a vocal, well-organized minority speaks for everyone and claims that it’s the opinion of the majority. For example, a Washington Post article claimed Iraqi women were outraged and against Islamic law. Our research in Iraq shows 83 percent of Iraqi women say they do not want a division between state and religion, and most want religious leaders to take a part in family law.

What stereotypes does your book challenge?

[One is that] Muslims allegedly reject democratic values, when in fact they admire them and wish they had more of those values implemented in their own governments. A second popular stereotype is that the conflict between the Muslim world and the West is about a clash of values, a rejection of modernity. What Americans admire about themselves—democracy, technology, ingenuity—is what Muslims admire most about America.

Your book says that 7 percent, or 91 million, of 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide think the 9/11 attacks were “completely” justified, leaving 93 percent as moderates. Ninety-one million is a big number, but other studies put Islamic extremism at an even higher level.

We must define extremism. If it’s the number of people actually involved in violence, the number is much less than 7 percent. Analysts estimate thousands, not millions. If it’s about people who sympathize with extremists, we must define what it means to sympathize. But our goal was not to quantify percentages of so-called extremists, but to understand the fringe element and how they differ from mainstream Muslims.

Do you question a Sunday Telegraph report in 2006, for example, that claimed the percentage of UK Muslims who were “radical” jumped from 15 percent in 2001 to 43 percent in 2006?

If we use the same measuring stick on the American public, we find that a whopping 31 percent are extremists. The University of Maryland surveyed [Americans on] the justifiability of attacks on civilians, and nearly one-third said “sometimes.” That kind of definition might be good for newspaper headlines, but it does not give the information needed to understand the fringe element.

What do most Muslims think about apostates?

Apostates are not very popular in any religion, so [Muslims] definitely view leaving Islam as a terrible idea. On the other hand, in any faith community, it’s not something people think should be handled violently. Our study shows it is dangerous to call other Muslims apostates. An important declaration several years ago by a group of prominent scholars, the Amman Message, defined what it means to call someone else an apostate and how theologically incorrect it is to use such terms against fellow Muslims.

Don’t all four schools of Sunni Islamic law suggest that a Muslim who leaves Islam and embraces Christianity, for example, should be executed?

We have to look at modern interpretations, because Islamic law is a vibrant, ever-changing set of interpretations. Fiqh, or human interpretation of Shari’ah, maps changes with time and place. Look, for example, at Sheikh Ali Jumu’a, grand mufti of Egypt, whose interpretation of apostasy laws is not to take drastic measures. In the past, apostasy was seen as treason because citizenship in one group was defined by faith, and when people left one faith, they had to work against their community. One’s faith today is no longer seen in the same context, because the nation-state has been completely transformed.

How do you respond to conventional wisdom that says the Qur’an espouses violence?

First, [violent] verses have a historical context and must be understood and interpreted in a specific way. Second, if the Qur’an espouses violence, then we should have a greater percentage of Muslims involved in violence. Violence is usually politically, not religiously, motivated. Third, terrorist sympathizers or the “cheering section”—the 7 percent who are politically radicalized—are no more religious than mainstream Muslims who abhor violence and say it is morally unjustified. Muslims are as likely as Americans to denounce attacks on civilians. Finally, people defending their position on 9/11—the 7 percent who think it’s completely justified—do so because of political and geopolitical perceptions, not theology. Not one referred to the Qur’an. Their responses could have come from an atheist. They see the U.S. as an imperialist power trying to control the world. Those who condemned 9/11 quoted Qur’anic verses that forbid killing innocent people. So moral objection to terrorism is competing with political rage, and people can go either way.

In Who Speaks for Islam? you suggest that the domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. Why?

I refer to his writings. Another example is the Ku Klux Klan. When people hold a certain ideology, whether rooted in religion or some political thought, they [can] become radicalized, and that radicalization takes on symbolic language. When environmentalists become radicalized, they become environmental terrorists. When animal-rights activists become radicalized, they become animal-rights terrorists. Similarly, Muslim rhetoric takes on the symbols of the dominant social medium they are in. Timothy McVeigh’s radical ideas, reflected in his writings, carry symbols of Christianity. Throughout history the KKK claimed to be sincere Christians. The religious ideology they hold is not the root of their radicalization, but it will necessarily be the context in which their ideas manifest.

How should evangelicals respond to what seems to be the spread of extremist Islam globally?

Evangelicals should respond the way everyone should respond. Understanding the cause of the problem is important. The data clearly show it is driven not by religious extremism but by extreme political ideology. Second, as a human family, look at the extremists as an outside group, rather than as an outgrowth of religion. This builds bridges between people of different faiths all fighting a common enemy. Let’s not forget that Muslims are the primary victims of violent extremism. People in majority-Muslim countries, unlike Americans, say their greatest fear is terrorism. Third, evangelicals should help empower those trying to make positive change peacefully. At the end of the day, this battle is not for the soul of Islam. It’s the road to reform.

The grievances terrorists champion are strategically chosen and ones the vast majority agree with. Others try to address these same issues peacefully. To the extent these people are effective, terrorists are seen as ineffective and their methods as barbaric. Finally, evangelicals should vocally and unequivocally denounce anti-Muslim hate speech. When prominent Christian leaders make degrading statements about Islam, it feeds [Osama] bin Laden’s claim of an American “crusade” against Islam and Muslims. Hateful statements against what Muslims hold most dear are a gift to bin Laden and a slap to mainstream Muslims who fear and reject his methods and therefore should be seen as allies, not enemies, in the fight against violent extremism.

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Related Elsewhere:

Christianity Today wrote about the Common Word Conference at Yale University and has a special section on Islam.

California fires ripped through Westmont College last night, destroying several buildings at the Christian liberal arts college.

The flames destroyed several buildings that house the physics and psychology departments, a dormitory and at least one faculty home, college spokesman Scott Craig told the Associated Press.

An automated message on the college’s switchboard says, “Westmont College has suffered major damage due to a wild man fire, but all students and employees are safe. All major campus buildings are unscathed, but we did lose 8 smaller buildings and 14 faculty homes in the adjacent development.” Classes are canceled today, but the college hopes to resume on Monday.

The fire burned around 1,500 acres and destroyed at least 80 homes in the surrounding neighborhood, according to the Los Angeles Times. The fire is not yet extinguished, but authorities believe they have contained it.

The AP reports:

Hundreds of students fled to a gym, where they spent the night sleeping on the floor. Some stood in groups praying, others sobbed openly and comforted each other.

Beth Lazor, 18, said she was in her dorm when the alarm went off. She said she only had time to grab her laptop, phone, a teddy bear and a debit card before fleeing the burning building.

The college’s website and student newspaper website are currently down, but Ray Ford has photos of the fire on his site.

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that last night, the website listed structures partially or completed destroyed as including “the Physics Building, the old math building, Bauder Hall, and the Quonset huts.”

The college lost electricity after a natural-gas line broke, interrupting the fuel supply for the college’s generators. The Red Cross brought cots and blankets to the gym for people who wanted to remain there, but students and others who wanted to leave the campus were being allowed to depart.

Update: Westmont’s student newspaper, The Horizon, is up and running, and Robert Gutierrez is liveblogging.

It is fortunate that Florence Nightingale had a clear and unwavering conviction that Almighty God had called her to be a nurse, because she was an awful preacher. Although she never delivered a sermon, “The Lady with the Lamp” wrote her first one at the age of nine, and apparently had recourse to this practice throughout much of her adult life. Only a few of her sermons have survived, but these are enough to confirm that she did not have the gift. One of the most eminent liberal clergymen of the 19th century, Benjamin Jowett, solicited her homiletic manuscripts and intimated that he would preach them himself, perhaps even in Westminster Abbey. One can hope he was only being polite.

Perhaps if the Church of England in Nightingale’s day would have allowed women to occupy the pulpit, she might have grown into the role. As it was, her preaching was, well, too preachy. She continually berates her imagined congregation for not knowing what she knows and thinking like she thinks—a classic amateur’s mistake. Her wince-worthy catch phrase is “no one,” meaning no one but her, as in “no one” (but me) is bothering to study “the character of God.”

Nightingale was raised in a wealthy, well-connected Victorian family, and she chafed against the expectations for what her life should be in such a milieu. Not for her the endless idle talk with fashionable ladies in the drawing room of her father’s grand house. She viewed marriage equally unfavorably as a permanent perpetuation of this tedious existence. For the rest of her life she marked the anniversary of February 7, 1837, the day when God had called her—a 16-year old girl—to an active life of service for him.

She soon discerned that nursing was the concrete form of this call, but she had many years of family opposition ahead. Not even her only sister or her favorite aunt approved of her chosen vocation, let alone her parents. Nightingale found encouragement in her Bible, however: “Christ’s whole life was a war against the family. From a child, he said he must be about his Father’s business.” Nursing at that time was largely the province of poor, unfortunate souls—deserted wives, “fallen” women, and drunkards. It was generally agreed to be an occupation unfit for a lady—and Nightingale was indisputably a lady. Nevertheless, her parents finally consented to let her pursue nursing. She began her chosen life in 1853 at the age of 33.

Now Nightingale’s birthright of élite social connections proved itself capable of dramatically speeding her down her God-given path. After only a year of nursing, the secretary at war asked her to form a unit of nurses to go out to help the men fighting in the Crimea. There were a lot of soldiers who needed medical attention, and Nightingale became a heroic ministering angel. The war effort was hampered by poor planning, red tape, rank incompetence, and sheer foolishness, and Nightingale stepped into the gap as a whirlwind of organization and an influential voice for commonsense reforms.

After the war, she was a central force, not only in founding modern nursing and reorganizing the army medical service, but in a range of other reforming tasks that only government could tackle adequately. At the height of her influence, no newly appointed viceroy for India would dare to begin without first consulting Nightingale, who would duly barrage him with detailed irrigation and sanitation schemes for improving health on the subcontinent. Along the way, her example also helped to inspire the founding of the Red Cross and the drafting of the Geneva Convention. Finding favor with both God and man, Florence Nightingale was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit, and her commemoration in the Church of England calendar (on August 13), makes her as close as a Protestant can get to being officially recognized as a saint.

Historians are vile creatures. They weasel their way into the houses of the dead and rifle through their pockets and furniture. The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale faithfully records the founder of modern nursing’s loathing of such behavior: “the publishing of private letters not only is a treachery and a theft but a treachery and a theft which recoils upon the head of the very memory, so sacred, which they are meant to exalt … . If I thought that letters in my possession were to be given up after my death I would destroy every letter I have at once, and I would never write another.” In fairness to my profession, we scholars can share the blame with others. These volumes include numerous letters that are headed “private burn.” Nightingale could not trust her closest relatives to obey these instructions—nor even an Anglican Sister or a Catholic Reverend Mother.

As for the spiritual leader of English Catholics, Archbishop Manning, he replied to her missive written specifically to plead with him to destroy her letters as she had a “well-founded horror” that they might be published after her death with this unequivocal promise: “be sure that the knowledge of your wish will prevent my giving them into any hand, and at my death every letter, paper and journal of mine will be burnt unopened. This charge will be religiously executed by the fathers of our congregation.” If you are wondering if there was anything in those old letters to Manning that might have been particularly embarrassing for Nightingale, feel free to decide for yourself: they have been carefully preserved and are now printed in Volume 3.

Indeed, a staggering amount of Nightingale material has survived. The projected 16 weighty volumes of the printed Collected Works will constitute only a selection of it. Volume 1 is sprinkled with disclaimers such as this one for a section devoted to Nightingale’s domestic employees: “Only a small fraction are published here.” The editor, Lynn McDonald, promises that all the material will be available in the electronic version of the project. It will take either an extremely thorough scholar or an obsessively curious person to want more than the print version, which reaches down to record even the sentences in books that Nightingale underlined and recipes she gave to her kitchen staff. (If you have ever wondered how long she thought stewed roll of veal should be cooked, the answer is now readily accessible.) There is even an entire section on “Cat Care”—complete with feline menus. McDonald’s introduction begins solemnly: “Nightingale, although a bird lover, was a devoted cat owner.”

In a highly satisfactory new biography of Nightingale, Mark Bostridge candidly admits that he has found himself “occasionally wishing that the odd bonfire had actually taken place,” and slyly confesses that he has cared enough for the preservation of his own mental health to have not set for himself the task of reading everything Nightingale wrote. On the other hand, Bostridge also demonstrates that even a pet cat can eerily wander toward the heart of the story: “In 1869 Tib strayed into the house of Florence’s neighbour, Lord Lucan, ignominious leader of the Charge of the Light Brigade, from where he was hastily retrieved.”

Indeed, if ineffectual sermons were the kind of thing Nightingale hoped would be thrown into the fire, and most readers might have been glad to have been spared conventional advice on how to roast a chicken, there is nevertheless much in these manuscripts to interest. Although Nightingale would have thought her playful remarks to friends and relations are none of our business, they do keep her from becoming a plastic saint. She was fascinated by the lives of Jesus and Paul, medieval saints and contemporary nuns, and she saw celibacy as a necessary part of fulfilling her own calling. Here is a delightful postscript in which she charmingly indicates that her fantasies are aligned to her God-given mission:

Behold the miraculous effects of bride cake! As some of Mrs Fred Verney’s had been kindly sent me, for the orthodox purpose as I supposed. I placed a crumb under my pillow and dreamt. And I dreamt that I was under secretary for India with a balance of 10 millions on the right side of my sheet and that I was irrigating Orissa and draining the deltas of Hooply and Brahmapootra and famine was vanishing away and cholera almost extinct. Tell Mrs. F. Verney.

Or here she is at the age of seventy putting a young man in his place: “I shan’t send you Burton’s letter, my dear Arthur, if you call him a ‘prig.’ He is a pedant. So am I. But a prig is one who cannot believe in anything above his own level.” She was a woman of action who was impatient with her social peers, who too often assumed that the way to address a challenge facing the nation was to write an essay for a quarterly review: “It used to be said that people gave their blood to their country. Now they give their ink.”

But we must move on to more substantive thought. McDonald deserves the highest praise for recognizing that Nightingale’s faith was central to her life, work, and thought. She is not at all apologetic about this, but just informs readers clearly and repeatedly that it was so. Moreover, she has shaped this whole project in the light of this truth. The first volume provides an introduction to Nightingale’s life and family, and then the series moves straight into a 586-page volume on her “spiritual journey” followed by a 678-page one on her theology.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that McDonald has a good working knowledge of the contents of the Bible herself, and the editing has not been done meticulously. The first two footnotes for the first manuscript presented in the first volume are both citations of biblical texts and both are simply wrong. This false start does not set the standard for what follows, but there are enough mistakes to make one assume that too many footnotes were generated too hastily. For example, when Nightingale quotes the prophet Nathan’s words to King David, “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7), the footnote reads: “An allusion to Peter denying Christ, Luke 22:58.” When Nightingale refers to “Gehazi’s leprosy,” McDonald—having apparently skimmed the first story she hit upon with Gehazi in it—inserts this erroneous and irrelevant note: “Gehazi’s child was raised from the dead by Elisha.”

This cavalier approach extends to the historical context as well. McDonald claims that Nightingale lived “before the emergence of any peace movement,” which must have been an assumption that went straight into the text, as the least investigation of the issue would have soundly refuted it. A note inexplicably asserts that Mark Pattison was “later a bishop” when actually he ripened into an agnostic, the real-life model for the eponymous character in the best-selling loss-of-faith novel, Robert Elsmere. Nightingale’s gesture toward “Luther at Augsburg” is elucidated as referring to the Confession of 1530 rather than the Diet of 1518. I could go on in this way.

The “anxiety of influence,” if my distant recollections of that notion have any validity, exposes a tendency we have to attack the works we most admire in order to make space to achieve something ourselves. Behind my cavils, there is immense admiration for Lynn McDonald. She has taken on a valuable scholarly task that, frankly, I would have found too daunting to pursue myself. The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale is an extremely ambitious project that is a great service to scholarship. Every general academic library should own the complete set. It pulls together material that has been hitherto diffused across more than 150 collections, some of them private ones, in places ranging from Germany to India and Japan, as well as numerous English-speaking countries. McDonald is pouring untold years into this project and, with sincere humility, she repeatedly requests that she be informed of any errors so that they can be corrected for the electronic version.

Bostridge, for his part, has written the one essential biography that anyone who wants to learn about Nightingale should read. It is a cliché for scholars to say that a great subject has been let down by his or her poor biographer. For Nightingale, the problem has been almost the reverse: she is too important a subject to attract only one biographer, yet the official, two-volume Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Sir Edward Cook was such a thorough and judicious piece of work that it has tempted subsequent scholars to champion extreme and untenable interpretations as a way to justify their contribution. Bostridge never overreaches himself, pays generous tribute to Cook, and yet also gives readers information that Cook did not have or could not present at that time (such as that the poet Arthur Hugh Clough’s widow blamed Nightingale for his death). He also includes material that is more interesting now than Cook must have deemed it then: I was enchanted to learn of Nightingale’s energetic campaign to expose “the risk of death by fire to women wearing crinolines.”

Bostridge is not preoccupied with religion, but he ungrudgingly acknowledges that it was at the core of Nightingale’s identity. Moreover, when it does come into his story, he generally handles it in a sure-footed way that shows he has done his homework. Only rarely does a lack of nuance jar a little. For example, he refers flatly to Jowett’s views as heretical. He also claims that Nightingale “saw prayer essentially as misdirection of human energy” and that she did not have “any time for the atonement” when her critiques were of petitionary prayer and substitutionary atonement. It is also curious that, although Bostridge is keen to mention all the major ways in which Nightingale has been honored since her death (from a Hollywood film to a British bank note), he completely overlooks her commemoration in the Anglican calendars of several nations, choosing instead to aver that she has sometimes been presented as a “secular saint.” Still, if you would like to read a biography of “the Bird” (as her enemies used to call her), choose without hesitation Florence Nightingale: The Making of An Icon.

Nightingale’s theology was unflinchingly liberal. Often sounding like a Deist, she believed in a God who was a law-giver. This meant for her that there could never be any such thing as a miracle or a special providence or anything going on other than the orderly course of general laws (“God does not send me a toothache to punish me for telling a lie”). What God would have us do in a time of plague is not to recite inanely “good Lord, deliver us” but rather to get out and fix the drainage system. She did not believe in the orthodox doctrine of the divinity of Christ and did not shrink from identifying ways in which Jesus was in error, even in his understanding of God. His resurrection never happened (“such a poor tale, so evidently put together afterwards”). Eternal punishment was a theological impossibility once one understood the nature of the Almighty.

On the other hand, she was a Broad Church Anglican rather than a freethinker. The latter she dismissed as merely negative—always tearing down and never building up. The important thing was to inspire people with what is true, not to expend the bulk of one’s energy being iconoclastic. Unlike the true religious skeptics, she also tended to level up rather than down: Christ is not the only one who is in some sense divine or a savior; the Bible is not the only place to find inspiration and the mind of God.

Broad Church instincts meant that as a young woman she was bemused by the passion which the high and low church parties put into fights over vestments:

the question whether surplices are to be white, black or Oxford mixture is all our religion … . I do hope, my dear child, that Lizzie has been careful to have particular reference to this question in deciding the colour of her slippers, if unhappily that be not already settled. I tremble to think how materially she may otherwise impair her reputation for orthodoxy … . Think if the colour of the slippers were to undermine some rising man’s religious principles! What would be her self-reproach—these things cannot be too carefully attended to.

The Ritualist Commission of 1867 hardened this response into contempt: “What would you have thought of me, if I, with my nurses, had sat for ‘nineteen sittings’ in the Crimean War to determine how we were to be dressed?”

One virtue of the Church of England, Nightingale believed, was that it kept one’s private devotion private. She was not impressed with the Methodist practice of corporate extemporaneous prayer: “I am sure I do not want any dissenting minister I ever heard to express out of his own head my feelings towards my Creator.” Those feelings ran deep. Saint or no, Florence Nightingale belies any assumption that a theological liberal is just a fundamentally secular person with a religious veneer. She sought the Lord day and night. Her devotional life was faithful and intense. Her self-examination, repentance of sin, dedication to divine service, praise and worship were authentic and unceasing. Her sense of being in an intimate relationship with a personal God was unshakeable and lifelong. She was deeply attached to hymns beloved by evangelicals, citing favorably even a variety of ones that had been written after her invalid status meant that she did not attend public worship. (She steadfastly arranged for a priest to come to her home and administer Communion to her and a few relations, friends, and servants.)

Sitting incongruously with her dismissal of special providences was her conviction: “I believe there is direct communication with God.” Included in these volumes are records of visions that she had, and journal entries bear witness to specific words from the Almighty. Here is one from 1877: “7:00 a.m. The Voice: If I do what you want about the Indian irrigation, would you give up all your name in it? Yes, Lord, I think I would. Answer before 7:30: Yes, Lord, I am sure I would.” These even came in the phraseology of Old Testament prophecy: “This is the word of the Lord unto thee London 7 May 1867: It is thirty years since I called thee unto my service.”

Part of the husk that Nightingale dispensed with—so she saw it—was the virgin birth: “it is probable the Virgin never lived at all … certainly not as she is represented at the beginning of two gospels.” In another sense, however, in her leveling-up sort of way, the great secret of her inner spiritual life was that under her official identity as a nurse she was really the Virgin. Her life verse (if that bit of evangelical jargon may be forgiven) was Luke 1:38: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” She references this text in relationship to her own life and calling in season and out of season from decade to decade. It seems she even greeted her Heavenly Father with this text every morning as a prayer of dedication. In her writings, Nightingale repeatedly explains that she is a “virgin mother,” meaning that she, a celibate, has influenced people as much as a parent does.

So far, Florence, at any rate, every generation has called you blessed.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford Univ. Press), and he is at work on a book about the Bible in the 19th century.

Books discussed in this essay:

Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale is an ongoing project. It is planned as sixteen volumes, the first ten of which are now in print.

Lynn McDonald, ed., Florence Nightingale: An Introduction to Her Life and Family, The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Vol. 1 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001).

Lynn McDonald, ed., Florence Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey: Biblical Annotations, Sermons and Journal Notes, The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Vol. 2 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001).

Lynn McDonald, ed., Florence Nightingale’s Theology: Essays, Letters and Journal Notes, The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Vol. 3 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Near the close of his exceptional intellectual biography of William James, Robert D. Richardson pauses briefly to sing the praises of the great man. The occasion for his encomium happens to be a letter that James wrote, only months before he died, to Henry Adams, the curmudgeonly historian who was the grandson and great-grandson of presidents.

James had just finished reading Adams’ “Letter to American Teachers of History,” a 125-page lamentation over the implications for the study of history of Lord Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics. The dyspeptic Adams read the physics of entropy directly into the philosophy of history, and as he peered into the future, he spied not Al Gore’s global warming fires but Lord Kelvin’s “terminal ice.” Adams envisioned “the last tribe” of humankind dying of hunger in the cold, camping at the equator, “on the shores of the last sea in the rays of a pale sun which will henceforward illumine an earth that is only a wandering tomb, turning around a useless light and a barren heat.”

We can only imagine what a typical history teacher might have made of such a letter a century ago, but we know for certain that James didn’t think much of it. Although he was dying of heart disease, he rallied sufficiently, in Richardson’s words, “to rise in protest against the urbane and learned pessimism of his friend Adams’s book-length funk.” The philosopher told the historian he had forgotten a crucial fact about history, which is that all that matters is what men and women do with the powers they have. A dinosaur’s brain may have “as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man’s,” James wrote, but it can do little more than unlock that creature’s muscles, whereas the human brain, “by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral etc. and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise—in short make history.” So it is, that “the ‘second law’ is wholly irrelevant to ‘history.’ “

However irrelevant the “second law” might be to history, it had a special pertinence for William James as he wrote to Adams, for death had planted a viselike grip upon his life, and his vital energy seemed to be leaking away by the day. A year earlier, when he and Sigmund Freud had met at a conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, the aged philosopher could not keep pace on a short walk with the younger psychoanalyst. “James stopped suddenly,” Freud reported, “handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch up” as soon as he had recovered from an attack of angina. Only months later, James was so short of breath that he could barely speak as he introduced a distinguished guest lecturer at Harvard. The situation proved to be so dire that William’s wife wrote a terse summary of his condition and that of his brother Henry: “William cannot walk and Henry cannot smile.”

Nevertheless, here was William James, stymied in speech and walking at a crawl but still able to muster the energy needed to confront the state of entropy head on. “It is impossible, after reading James for any length of time, to refrain from using italics oneself,” Richardson concludes:

But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!

One is tempted to say something similar about Robert Richardson, because for the past two decades he has been writing, with his own matchless incandescence and stylistic brilliance, a fascinating history of the 19th-century origins of contemporary mainstream Protestantism. Where others—George Marsden and Mark Noll among them—have told this story so well from the outside, Richardson has given us the incomparable feel of this history from within, from under the skin. His book on William James is the third of the volumes in which he has told this story, with outstanding intellectual biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau having preceded it.

In turn, the history that Richardson recounts, which runs from 1830 (Emerson’s emergence) to 1910 (James’ death), provides an all but perfect background for the work of Alfred Kazin, the 20th-century critic whose life Richard Cook has ably presented in his recent study. To move from the account of the one life (James) to the other (Kazin) in these books, is to get a surprising sense of unexpected connections. That is because, taken together, Richardson and Cook tell the story of how Emerson, Thoreau, and James developed in the 19th century a post-Christian Protestantism that came to serve as a secular creed for countless 20th-century artists and critics, Alfred Kazin included.

The course that liberal Protestantism ran in the 19th century led from the apologetic reduction of Christianity in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) to the wholesale forsaking of Christian particularity in James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Schleiermacher sought to preserve the essence of Christianity by blunting its distinctives, but no matter how much substance he softened or pared away, he still professed to “believe in the living power of religion and of Christianity.” James, on the other hand, explicitly rejected the idea that “a particular theology, the Christian theology,” offered any definitive clues as to the identity of the “more” with which the human spirit seeks “union.” If we were “to define the ‘more’ as Jehovah, and the ‘union’ as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ,” James explained, “that would be unfair to other religions” and would constitute “an over-belief.”

For James an “over-belief”—a faith in a personal God who has the power to forgive sins and raise the dead—would be, like Papa Bear’s porridge, “too hot,” while the acceptance of icy indifference as the law of life would be “too cold.” For a belief whose feel would be “just right,” James turned to private experience. In a passage that Richardson highlights from Varieties, the philosopher says that ultimately “personal religion will prove itself more fundamental” than theology or the church. Churches and the theological enterprise both “live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power” to “their direct communion with the divine.” Richardson acknowledges that this represents “a radical departure, more radical even than that of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” for it assumes that the Alpha and Omega of all religion is to be found only within the span of an individual life and all its conscious conceptions and activities.

To see how radical this departure was and to sense what it came to entail for the liberal tradition in Protestantism, we might consider an observation Richardson offers about James’ method in Varieties. The biographer observes that to make his major points in this book, more often than not James offers “a collection of stories rather than a logical argument.” Firsthand accounts do almost all the heavy lifting for the Jamesian experiential apologetic, and in fact, Richardson notes, “one has to go back to Fox’s Book of Martyrs to find a comparable example of religious writing that rests its entire enterprise on narrative testimony.”

This analogy is convincing, but only to a point. John Foxe does indeed pack his martyrology with harrowing stories of saintly suffering (by Protestants) and glorious incidents of divine retribution (against Catholics), but there is a profound difference between the foundation on which his narrative rests and the one that supports William James’ enterprise. In an impressive study of martyrdom in early modern Europe, Brad Gregory explains that although Foxe’s book contains some outright errors, the most important question was not whether “factual errors were sometimes made, but rather how the events they recounted were understood.”

Gregory’s point has to do both with the meaning of particular events in the saga of Reformation martyrdom and with the underlying system of belief that placed those events in a meaningful context. Within the view of providence that governed the Protestant view of history, every sudden death of a priest, every fire in a monastery, and every outbreak of the plague in a Catholic region could be interpreted as a sign of God’s judgment. If the Reformation represented the restoration of the pure, unalloyed Gospel, it only made sense to assume that God would punish its corrupt opponents even as he sustained its persecuted supporters. This is the logic that drove the actions of Protestant martyrs and the interpretive practices of Reformation chroniclers such as Foxe. Gregory, himself a Catholic, says that regardless of the correctness of Protestant beliefs, the Reformation “worldview was comprehensive,” and “all events had to fit somewhere, even if their meaning was not always transparent.” [1]

This, then, is the foundational difference between the world of William James and that of John Foxe, and it is there, no matter how much the Book of Martyrs may resemble Varieties in its reliance upon “narrative testimony.” For Foxe, that testimony rests upon and is encompassed by a complex view of God’s sovereignty; and in turn, that view of providence is buttressed by a belief in the authority of Scripture, a conviction about the spiritual significance of natural phenomena, and a trust in the redemptive, covenantal activity of God throughout history. So in a fundamental sense, we can no more say that Foxe’s enterprise rests entirely on narrative testimony than we could claim that the play in a child’s room is grounded upon the second-floor carpet alone or that the deliberations in the corporate boardroom rest solely upon the steel beams that crisscross the 38th floor.

For William James, it does indeed seem to be the case that the foundations hover somewhere in the air. Because nature, Scripture, and history no longer serve as sources of authoritative support for the spiritual life in James’ world, the carpet must somehow fly on the winds of experience alone, and the boardroom’s beams must somehow be levitated by the psychic energies of the corporate cohort. It is in that sense that the Jamesian move to personal experience as the exclusive source of spiritual authority turns Protestantism, or at least this branch of it, into a form of post-Christian therapeutics.

Richardson says the inspiration for James’ embrace of radical experientialism was none other than “Emerson the liberator, Emerson the champion of the single self.” From the Concord essayist more than anyone else, James acquired his deepest conviction, which was “that the innermost nature of things is congenial to the powers that men possess.” “History is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming,” Emerson had written in 1841, and both William James and Alfred Kazin were to take him at his word. “The axis of reality,” James concluded, “runs solely through the egotistic places—they are strung upon it like so many beads,” and God, Kazin surmised, cannot be a person but is instead “a property of the human mind inquiring into the infinity of our relationships.”

On the surface of things, James and Kazin make an incongruous pair. Almost two decades before the start of the Civil War, James was born into a family that was admittedly a bit off-center but remained securely tethered within the circle of the Protestant élites. Richardson describes William’s father’s convictions as “strong, idiosyncratic, and not easily located in the history of thought.” Yet those convictions, and the connections they established for Henry James, the father, were sufficient to pave the way for his sons, William and Henry (the novelist), and his daughter, Alice, to work their way to the heart of American intellectual culture in the late 19th century.

In comparison, Alfred Kazin—who was born in 1915, less than five years after the death of William James—had to scrap and write his way into the mainstream of the American literary establishment. Born to Jewish parents who had only recently emigrated to the United States, Kazin developed at a young age a view of Jewishness primarily as a category of individualism and isolation. “My favorite notion of the Jew in history,” he explained late in life, had always been “the high and low, the first man and the last, the nearest to God (he thinks) and the pariah, the ‘prophet and the bounder’ (Proust), … the most ‘in’ and the most ‘out.’ ” For Kazin, to be a Jew was simply and supremely to be an individual, with all the loneliness and sense of singular purpose that entailed.

Such individualism appears to come straight out of Emerson, and more than once, Kazin described himself as a Jew who had found his home in the Emersonian tradition. “I love being Jewish,” he told an interviewer at the end of his life, “but I pursue my own way in these things. I’m an Emersonian and always have been.” At the same time, Kazin realized there were serious limits to this approach. Spiritual self-reliance often led to feelings of “intellectual homelessness,” and a fundamental question remained for him: “Can one really worship the Jewish God privately?” Kazin was not sure. “He chose to pray alone,” Cook reports, “often lying awake at night, lonely, frightened, beseeching.” Like Emerson in his adulthood, Kazin shunned formal and corporate worship, for “I just am what I am. I have my own feelings.”

Kazin tried to take solace from his belief that each human life is a story of what Emerson, quoting Plotinus, had called the “flight of the alone to the Alone.” To be fully human is to commune with other great minds whose only companions are their own ideals and abstractions. “With us now everything, anything, is first seen as psychological. An honest believer is always on the couch,” Kazin wrote in his valedictory work, God and the American Writer. From the “embattled lonely beginnings” of this culture to the present, “each church in America” has been “separate from and doctrinally hostile to others.” And the culture’s greatest religious writers have not really believed “in anything—except the unlimited freedom that is the usual American faith.” [2]

Where Robert Richardson gives us the life of William James from the inside out—his is a life of the mind told from the vantage point of a companionate successor—Richard Cook’s account of Alfred Kazin’s life is a narrative told from a considerable distance. Clearly and straightforwardly, he relates the story of a life that began in the tenements of Brooklyn, and then moved with frenetic energy and an insatiable appetite from library to library, campus to campus, and bed to bed for almost half a century, before the last of four marriages, and the dividing of time between rural Connecticut and the Upper West Side, brought a measure peace to a most restless man.

Cook documents all of this carefully and copiously, sometimes quoting at length from Kazin’s journals and published autobiographical writings. He lingers in particular, as Kazin himself did, on the first of the writer’s infidelities, committed five years into his marriage to his first wife. Of making love to his “beautifully lawless and outrageous” partner, Kazin wrote that it was “one of the true privileges of the human condition … . Being with her spread such a circle of peace, easiness, perfection that I acquired a respect for sex that I had never known before.” There is more of this, much more, in the unexpurgated versions given in Cook’s biography, and most of it passes before the reader’s eyes with little or no comment on its meaning for the life of the lonely Alfred Kazin.

No breathless sex is described or hinted at in Richardson’s account of James’ intellectual development, and about the raciest thing the Harvard philosopher appears ever to have done was perhaps to brush his leg, inadvertently, up against a psychic medium at one of the many “sittings” he attended. In going to these sessions—we would now call them séances—James was fueled as much by a desire to prove the possibility of psychic contact as he was by any yearning to hear from dead family members or friends. For all his bravado in taunting the second law of thermodynamics, to the end of his days, James longed to find a way out of the prison house of matter and a hope beyond the destiny of the grave.

One senses with both of these lives—that of the post-Christian Protestant and the non-observant Jew—that the loneliness they simultaneously treasured and lamented was grounded in something deeper and more desperate than personality alone. That loneliness was in fact a microcosm of the cosmic solitude that many had come to feel in the decades after Darwin. At its root, for James and Kazin, this solitude was intertwined with a fear that everything they valued so deeply, from the play of language to the mysteries of intimate personal experience and prolific cultural life, was a curious byproduct, a mental castoff of material life. “Consciousness,” James wrote, may “be nothing but a sort of superadded biological perfection—useless unless it prompted to useful conduct.”

Yet what was the ultimate purpose of human conduct, however “useful” it might be to the process of living? Although neither James nor Kazin pretended to know the answer to that question, they kept asking it to the end, with James doing so openly and intentionally and Kazin pursuing the matter in a more displaced and oblique manner.

Less than a year before he died, James mounted one last attempt to fight his way out of the metaphysical box and find a cure for his cosmic loneliness. He wrote a report titled “The Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher,’ ” which was meant to defend his experiments in parapsychology, to explain his disappointment over the meager yield of those explorations, and to reassert his hope that a word from beyond might still break through someday. Calling himself not a “spiritist” or a “scientist,” James said, “I still remain a psychical researcher waiting for more facts before concluding.”

In the meantime, as we watch and wait, we do so alone. The “Psychical Researcher” essay closes with a heart-rending picture of the human condition as it appeared to an unblinking observer at the dawn of the 20th century. From his experiences with psychic phenomena in particular and the long run of his life in general, James reports that “one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges.” It is “that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest.” If we listen closely, we may hear “the maple and the pine … whisper to each other with their leaves,” just as the lonely towns along the New England coast may “hear each other’s fog-horns.”

For James, the only hope for human life lay in the tangle of unseen connections that he believed must be there, somewhere beneath the seas of our lives: “The trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together” beneath the bottom of the ocean. “Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”

Because both James and Kazin believed neither in a personal God nor in the possibility of eternal life, that plunge of the mind into the mother-sea was to reveal nothing that could be known and yield nothing that could be enjoyed. The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?” and then replies, “That I belong—body and soul, in life and death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” But on the “flight of the alone to the Alone,” there is no Son of God to bring comfort and no Spirit to provide communion. “At the end,” for William James, his wife reported, there had simply been “no pain and no consciousness.” And Alfred Kazin’s wife writes that a year after his death, she and a few others dropped the box of his ashes from the Brooklyn Bridge—”halfway from each shore, Brownsville [in Brooklyn] on the right, ‘Beyond’ [Manhattan] on the left. Then it went down. Just where he wanted to be.”

Roger Lundin is Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College.

1. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 182.

2. Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (Knopf, 1997), p. 259.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Like most American success stories, The Christian Century had a humble beginning. According to the oft-retold official account, the intelligent but chronically insolvent periodical was about to go under in 1908. Impending mortgage foreclosure sent it to the sheriff’s auction block, where Charles Clayton Morrison, a Disciples of Christ minister and editorial neophyte, redeemed it with a scraped-together payment of $1,500.

So began the saga of man and magazine, together rising to prominence over the next four decades. When Morrison stepped down as editor in June 1947, both Newsweek and Time recapped his career at the top of their religion sections. Newsweek called Morrison a “fiery, forceful man” who had increased from 600 to 40,000 the circulation of “the most important organ of Protestant opinion in the world today.” Time lauded the Century as “Protestantism’s most vigorous voice” and “a beacon of level-headedness in a fog of misty thinking.” [1] Historians’ praise for the Century has been just as lavish; Robert Moats Miller, for example, ranks it as “Protestantism’s most influential periodical” and Donald Meyer commends it for “keeping the passion vital in the ranks of the ministry.” Nearly 3,000 libraries keep the Century on hand for research and leisure reading, more than any other religious magazine can boast.

The centennial of the Century’s rebirth marks a fine occasion to revisit its history. Because the Century’s story in so many ways parallels that of the Protestant mainline, the narrative becomes a tale of two establishments, each shaping the other. The Century and the mainline grew up together. They speak the same language. Neither is easy to define, but they shed light on each other, illuminating a sector of American religion that—with some notable exceptions—is oddly ignored by contemporary scholarship.

Martin Marty, a contributor to the Century for more than fifty years, once reflected, “The turn of the century in American religion came not in 1901 but in 1908.” That year saw the formation of the Federal Council of Churches, the adoption of the Methodist Social Creed, the graduation of Roman Catholicism in America from mission to canonical status, and, of course, the re-founding of The Christian Century. In the Century’s case, though, 1908 made less of a difference than one might expect.

For one thing, the magazine already had almost 25 years of history behind it. Founded in Des Moines in 1884 as a Disciples of Christ denominational weekly called the Christian Oracle, it moved to Chicago in 1892 and was re-christened The Christian Century in 1900. Morrison knew much of that history and had participated in it. An Iowa boy, he had come to Chicago in 1898 to serve an urban church and study philosophy under John Dewey at the University of Chicago. He had been among the friends of the Oracle who disdained that moniker and voted for the optimistic new name. Beginning in 1900, he wrote a column for the magazine, “The Christian Life,” and he remained a contributor through his assumption of the editorship.

This back-story helps explain why Morrison retained the Century title in 1908, even though some other members of the magazine’s circle expressed unease about both its grandiose aspirations and the legacy of failure it carried. The Century had run through four or five editors and nearly as many bankruptcies by the time of Morrison’s purchase. Nonetheless, Morrison liked the name and could hardly have been intimidated by its buoyancy. One of his moves as editor was to introduce a column of upbeat news items titled, “The World Is Growing Better.”

Morrison was similarly undisturbed by the magazine’s denominational heritage. As he later wrote in his unpublished autobiography, for nearly his first decade behind the editor’s desk, he “had no other thought or ambition than to keep The Century within the Disciples denomination, both as to outlook and constituency.” In those early days, the magazine—or “paper,” as he called it—published article after article about the Disciples centennial in 1909, controversies at denominational institutions, the proper relation of baptism to church membership, and other insider topics.

When Morrison looked back on his transition from full-time pastor to full-time editor, he called it the pursuit of a new profession but the same vocation. In other words, he left the pastorate, but he never left the pulpit. His editorials could be preachy, and the Century’s articles frequently moved, like sermons, between exposition and exhortation. Morrison derived this conception of his journalistic role from the Disciples tradition, in which it is often said, “We don’t have bishops; we have editors.” Historically averse to bureaucracy, Disciples spread their message and adjudicated their disputes in print, tasks in which Morrison and his early co-laborers engaged eagerly.

Overall, Morrison’s acquisition of the magazine in 1908 produced more continuity than change. The Century’s roster of contributors repeated familiar names. It continued the course set by previous editors, namely the promotion of new biblical scholarship, ecumenism, and the Social Gospel within the Disciples movement. Its financial troubles also continued. Morrison worked so hard to keep it afloat that he was hospitalized for exhaustion in 1915. As the enterprise could not stay on this trajectory forever, larger changes eventually came, but these never included a repudiation of either the Disciples heritage or the editor-bishop aspect of its ethos.

The Century’s editorial positions clearly identified it with the liberal side of the fundamentalist-liberal split, the side that evolved into the mainline. Morrison’s sense of his editorial mission as pastoral and prophetic, as well as his envisioning of his readership as a congregation, also fit what historian Peter J. Theusen has called the “logic of mainline churchliness.” [2]

Within the constellation of ideas encompassed by this phrase, Theusen highlighted three: “a reasonable tolerance of ethical differences, a thoroughgoing commitment to ecumenical cooperation, and an all-embracing conception of the church’s public role.” Morrison, who always thought of himself as a churchman and of his magazine as an instrument of the church press (though he never thought of the church he served as “mainline”), would have been delighted to be identified as tolerant, ecumenical, and public-minded.

Over time, Morrison’s vision of his congregation expanded along with his ambitions. The next key date for the Century was 1917, when the magazine changed its tagline, “Published Weekly by the Disciples of Christ in the Interest of the Kingdom of God,” to “An Undenominational Journal of Religion.” Surprisingly little fanfare accompanied this alteration. The last issue of November bore the old motto, and the first issue of December bore the new, with no editorial explanation.

Morrison offered an explanation much later, in an anniversary reflection published in 1928. According to his story, around 1917, Morrison happened to be strolling by the business manager’s desk when his eye chanced upon a list of subscribers. Much to his surprise, he noticed the names of “several well-known churchmen who were not Disciples.” Ostensibly without intention or even awareness on the part of the staff, the Century had outgrown its denominational borders.

The magazine had not expanded in all directions equally. By the end of the decade, it counted among its subscribers considerable numbers of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Episcopalians, almost all from the Northern branches of these churches. By Morrison’s 20th anniversary as editor, Methodists constituted the largest group of subscribers, even though the Century had for a while avoided marketing to them, on the assumption that Methodist periodicals already effectively served that audience.

Morrison’s account of the magazine’s growth told volumes. “The question [of expansion] is difficult to answer,” he wrote, “because it really came about by the gradual acceptance of the paper by progressive opinion in all denominations as an organ of their own ideals. We did not try to make it such. There was no editorial genius who projected The Christian Century in its present church-wide and world-wide scope. Like Topsy, it ‘just growed.'”

Several varieties of soft imperialism peeked through these statements. By progressive, Morrison meant what historians label Progressive, the array of ideas and reforms promulgated by a cadre of mostly white, Protestant, middle- to upper-class, well-educated activists between the 1890s and the 1920s. Muckraking journalists belonged to this camp, as did presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, urban crusaders such as Jane Addams, and, of course, one of the movement’s intellectual architects, John Dewey.

At their best, Progressives battled corruption, promoted women’s rights, improved living and working conditions for laborers, cleaned up the nation’s food supply, and sought to make the world safe for democracy. At their worst, they marched around with supposedly scientific agendas and told everyone else to get with the program or get out of the way. The frenzied patriotism surrounding World War I, a general inattention to racial injustice, the failed experiment of Prohibition, and the insidious legacy of eugenics are among the stains on the Progressive record.

As far as Morrison was concerned, however, Progressivism indeed promised progress, and only the uninformed or recalcitrant would resist it. Granted, Morrison wrote of “progressive opinion” in 1928, before the mixed fruits of these efforts had fully ripened, but 80 years later, Progressivism and mainline Protestantism remain entwined. The logic identified by Theusen includes a penchant for bureaucratic, top-down reform that strengthened through the civil rights era and continues today.

The phrase all denominations, amplified by church-wide and world-wide, conveyed a different set of imperialistic assumptions. Morrison had in mind the denominations he had just listed as those whose members read the Century: Disciples, Congregationalists (today’s United Church of Christ), Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Methodists. He might also have counted Reform Judaism, because one of its leading rabbis, Stephen Samuel Wise, was among the group of Morrison’s friends who organized a letter-writing campaign in honor of his editorial anniversary.

Morrison emphatically did not mean Roman Catholics, toward whom he harbored a lifelong animosity, or fundamentalists, who for him stood as the paragons of uninformed, recalcitrant opposition to progress. As for Pentecostals, holiness churches, the Orthodox, or members of the Southern branches of the Century’s constituent denominations, they did not enter his line of vision as he looked out on the church from his Dearborn Street office window.

Pointing out the limitations of the Century’s audience is not merely an exercise in retroactive judgment, but a necessary clarification of terms. When Morrison wrote of “the church” or (as he frequently did) of the ideals or “mind” of the church, he simply did not mean all Christians of his era, or all Christians in whom a student of American religion might be interested.

Put differently, the “undenominational” in the magazine’s tagline was not synonymous with universal, and in some respects it meant nearly the opposite of nondenominational. The logic of mainline churchliness incorporated “church” in both the familiar sense, designating a world in which pastors, congregations, and theology dominated the landscape, and in the sociological sense, designating religious organizations with aspirations of universality and cultural authority. Denominations, as units of community and loci of social action, mattered immensely, and some—principally the rich, white, Northern ones—mattered far more than others.

Despite these biases, it would be unfair to judge Morrison too harshly for the Topsy reference in his anniversary reflection. The Century’s track record on race is strong. The magazine dared to criticize its usual allies in labor unions and liberal churches when these institutions denied blacks equal rights, and it was one of very few journalistic outlets that loudly decried the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In June 1963, the Century became the first national site of publication for the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” penned by one of its contributing editors, Martin Luther King, Jr. A quotation from this article hangs in the magazine’s foyer today as a reminder of one of its greatest editorial achievements.

The second quotation hanging on the wall of the Century foyer was penned by its other most famous contributing editor, Reinhold Niebuhr. His association with the magazine constituted a high-water mark, when the magazine achieved its founding goal to be a place of free and far-ranging debate. It also caused a crisis from which the Century never entirely recovered.

Morrison discovered Niebuhr around 1922, through his “Christian America” column in the Evangelical Herald and through a letter published in The New Republic espousing pacifism. Morrison did not print the first Niebuhr piece he received, an article titled “The Church versus the Gospel,” but he strongly encouraged the young pastor to try again.

Niebuhr next submitted a piece with the working title “Romanticism and Realism in the Pulpit.” Morrison liked it so much that he ran it as an unsigned editorial, making Niebuhr’s the official voice of the Century. Owing to personal differences, Niebuhr never joined the Century staff, but Morrison begged him to contribute as many articles as he could write.

As early as 1928, Niebuhr began to sound notes that clashed with the chorus of other Century contributors. In a column titled “The Confession of a Tired Radical,” he indicted liberals like Morrison for failing to see that all groups of people pursue their own interests. There is no disinterested benevolence, Niebuhr argued. Genteel discussion will not produce a peaceable kingdom. Niebuhr stressed these points even more forcefully in his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society.

Century book reviewers took Niebuhr to task for this and the other books he produced in the 1930s. One reviewer called him unchristian, another accused him of taking “morbid pleasure” in making religion seem absurd, and a third faulted him for chasing his subject down a “blind alley.” Yet Morrison remained as eager as ever to print Niebuhr’s articles. In 1939 the editor proudly included Niebuhr and liberals’ other theological nemesis, Karl Barth, among contributors to the inaugural round of what would become the magazine’s marquee decennial series, “How My Mind Has Changed.” The Century might never have represented the entire breadth of American Protestantism, but it was hardly a monolith.

Niebuhr did eventually break with the Century, jaggedly, in 1941. His advocacy of America’s entry into World War II, in direct opposition to Morrison’s pacifism, hacked at the ties that bound them, as did Niebuhr’s simmering resentment over the bad book reviews. Morrison’s long personal relationship with Niebuhr, however, made him loath to let go. He declared in a private letter, “I still treasure the memory of our friendship and am deeply pained that you seem willing to allow it to be shattered.” Niebuhr responded coldly, “I say a friendship has ended.”

Beyond this loss of relationship, Niebuhr’s departure had serious ramifications for the magazine. A few months before the angry exchange of letters, Niebuhr had founded Christianity and Crisis, “A Bi-Weekly Journal of Christian Opinion” that claimed to dispense with pieties and get down to the sometimes dirty business of theologically informed political engagement. The journal looked a lot like The Christian Century, targeted the same audience, and, according to religion scholar Mark Hulsether, adopted as its basic mission “to convert as many Century readers as possible and neutralize the rest.” [3] For the first time since a slew of religious magazines had bowed out in the 1920s, the Century had competition.

Christianity and Crisis posed more of a symbolic than a financial challenge. Its budget was tiny, it carried no advertisem*nts in the early years, and its subscriber base numbered just 8,000 at the end of the war, around one-fifth the circulation of the Century. But as long as C&C shared coffee tables and library shelves with its older brother, the Century could not plausibly claim “church-wide and world-wide scope.” The Century’s banner did not stretch far enough to cover all of America’s northern, liberal, Protestant élite, let alone any Christians who did not share those characteristics.

Other competitors for the title of America’s leading Protestant periodical appeared soon afterward. Appealing more to the pews than the pulpit, Norman Vincent Peale’s Guideposts rolled out in 1945 and quickly became the most widely circulated religious periodical in the country. Its 2008 circulation of 3.3 million made it one of the top 20 magazines in any genre. Other than in circulation, though, Guideposts never challenged the Century.

Christianity Today was a different story. In 1956, Billy Graham legendarily awakened in the middle of the night with a vision for an evangelical answer to the Century. He especially wanted to speak to and for conservative clergy in liberal-trending denominations. Graham was not so combative as to aim at converting or neutralizing the other magazine’s readers, but Christianity Today’s first editor, Carl F. H. Henry, acknowledged that his periodical sought to give the Century “a run for its biases.” Like Guideposts, though on a less meteoric trajectory, Christianity Today immediately eclipsed the Century’s circulation.

It is not reasonable to draw a straight line from Christianity and Crisis to Christianity Today, as if the latter could not have risen up to challenge the Century without the example of the former. These two magazines, as well as Guideposts, originated at different points on the landscape of American Protestantism, promulgated different messages, and responded to different needs among their readers. Nonetheless, each stood as a repudiation of the Century’s dreams of universality.

Competition—for cultural authority as well as for circulation—necessitated language to distinguish the various parties. C&C represented the Christian realists, Guideposts the positive thinkers, and Christianity Today the evangelicals. As of the late 1950s, though, the Century’s bloc did not have an agreed-upon label. Representing an imagined center compared with which all other positions were peripheral, the Century had never really needed to label its own constituency. At various times it had adopted words like liberal, modern, social, and ecumenical, but these functioned more as descriptors than as labels. For several years after the launch of Christianity Today, the Century fought for custody of evangelical, forwarding the word’s European heritage, but eventually it yielded to common usage. Finally, around 1960, the outside world settled on the term with which the Century has since been interlocked, mainline.

For such a familiar and seemingly clear term, mainline had a very murky provenance. It originated in the railroad world, where, as two words (main line), it described the most direct or most traveled stretch of track in any rail system. Colloquially, in another form (Main Line), it referred to the wealthy northwestern suburbs of Philadelphia, which were served by the main line of that city’s transit system. By the 1950s, according to sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, another form of the word—Mainliner—had come to mean “upper crust,” “old family,” or “socialite.” [4]

Exactly how and when the word mainline jumped from discussions of suburbs and socialites to discussions of certain upper-crust churches remains a mystery. An early instance of this usage appeared in a 1960 New York Times article headlined, “Extremists Try to Curb Clergy; Moves to ban social issues causing Protestant rift.” In this piece, the “extremists” were wealthy, conservative Southern and Midwestern laymen who asked clergy in their churches (Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal) to quit making liberal pronouncements on social issues and instead “stick to the Gospel.” The reporter described the denominations served by the beleaguered clergy as “mainline,” “moderate,” “liberal,” and “old-line.”

Without actually defining the mainline, the reporter communicated a lot about it. The term designated entire denominations or churches, not individuals. (Think of how seldom one hears of “mainliners,” compared to how frequently one hears of evangelicals, fundamentalists, Pentecostals, or Catholics.) The mainline was old, moderate to liberal, and socially progressive. Its churches were “major.” Its clergy were “leaders.” Its challengers hailed from the heartland and the Sunbelt. It was identified strongly with the National Council of Churches. Moreover, it commanded the respect of The New York Times, and, like the Times, it influenced national agendas.

Scholars who seek to get beyond such an impressionistic portrait of the mainline typically name denominations. The standard list—those churches the late historian William Hutchison called the “Seven Sisters”—includes the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the American Baptist church, the Congregationalist (UCC) Church, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the Disciples of Christ. [5] Some studies of the contemporary mainline drop the Disciples, which have now shrunk to under 1 million members. Occasionally the Lutherans are excluded, with the explanation that they either joined the club late or followed a trajectory different enough from the others that they should not be lumped together. A recent book by Glenn Utter, Mainline Christians and U.S. Public Policy, adds to the standard seven the Reformed Church in America and the Roman Catholic Church. [6] Even this most basic attempt to define the mainline encounters ambiguity.

Institutional definitions have not always been sufficient to describe the Century’s mainline constituency. Other attempts to define it center on theological positions, ecclesial politics, worship styles, or cultural markers. Depending on the conversation in which distinctions are drawn, the mainline churches might be those that accept hom*osexual members, ordain women, support abortion, protest war, have governance structures above the individual congregation, follow liturgies, or ring America’s courthouse squares with tall steeples.

Religion scholar Peter W. Williams, in his textbook America’s Religions, has given the fullest description of the mainline. [7] He admitted that mainline is not a technical term but found it a useful name for religious expressions consonant with most or all of twenty characteristics including membership in the Seven Sisters denominations, middle to upper social class, northwestern European ancestry, use of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, low tension with American culture, and patronage, particularly by clergy, of The Christian Century or Christianity and Crisis.

The rest of Williams’ chapter on mainline Protestants mainly covered bureaucratic structures and theological and social conflicts. The contrast between this chapter and the next one, on conservative Protestants, which brimmed with famous names, scandals, pop culture references, and single-issue political efforts, was striking.

Mainline and conservative Protestants do not just have divergent views on common topics. The categories in which people think of them scarcely overlap. Mainline is church; evangelical is lay or parachurch. Mainline councils speak; evangelical celebrities speak. Of course, evangelicals have churches and the mainline has laypeople. Likewise, evangelicals have meetings (if not exactly councils) and the mainline has celebrities, but it is a matter of what comes to mind first, what scholars and journalists think to go looking for. The logics differ.

No handy pocket definition of the mainline, analogous to David Bebbington’s four-point definition of evangelicalism, exists (a point that is significant in and of itself), but Theusen’s logic of mainline churchliness might come closest to meeting this lexical need. In varying ways, The Christian Century has embodied all of his key characteristics—ethical tolerance, ecumenical commitment, and an embrace of the church’s public role—for the past 100 years.

The sticking points for the Century, and the mainline more broadly, came when these core principles seemed to be in conflict. Ethical differences that were allowed, even welcomed, during discussions sometimes got swept under the rug when the time came to make public pronouncements. Continuing the cycle, public pronouncements that better represented the views of some religious bodies than of others could impede ecumenical endeavors. Most vexing, what common ground could committed ecumenists find with Christians whose ethics or conception of the church’s public role caused them to eschew World Council of Churches-style ecumenism?

One of the few watercooler stories that still circulates about Morrison highlights these difficulties. In the early 1960s, editorializing on developments in the WCC, Martin Marty and another young Century editor urged Protestant leaders to take Orthodox concerns about that institution more seriously. Morrison, whose old age and blindness generally kept him away from the office, stormed in to register his complaint about the editorial. The young bucks threw his own definition of the church at him, arguing that, if the church exists wherever the character of Christ is formed, then the Orthodox are part of the church, and pains should be taken to keep them at the ecumenical table. Morrison fumed, “But if we wait for the Orthodox, I won’t live to see Christian unity!”

Morrison’s magazine has not lived to see Christian unity or a truly Christian century. Its antagonism (lessening all the time) toward some branches of American Christianity might even have impeded these goals, but it presses on. It has recently returned to its roots as a publication for ministers, adding columns on preaching the lectionary and increasing coverage of pastoral matters. The imperialism associated with pretended universality has abated. The Century serves churches, rather than an imagined single church, as the voice of a creative minority. It is mainline, not broadly mainstream. And yet, like the Protestant mainline, it has far too rich a heritage simply to fade away. As it moves into a new century, it still merits our respect.

Elesha Coffman is assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. She has just completed a dissertation at Duke University on Charles Clayton Morrison’s years at The Christian Century.

1. “Voice of the Century,” Newsweek, June 23, 1947, p. 72; “Man of the Century,” Time, June 23, 1947, pp. 75-76.

2. Peter J. Theusen, “The Logic of Mainline Churchliness,” in Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans, eds., The Quiet Hand of God (Univ. of California Press, 2002), pp. 27-53.

3. Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1999), p. 26.

4. E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Free Press, 1958), p. 201.

5. William R. Hutchison, “Protestantism as Establishment,” in Hutchison, ed., Between the Times (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 6.

6. Glenn Utter, Mainline Christians and U.S. Public Policy (ABC-CLIO, 2007).

7. Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 355-357.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The 2006 smash hit Casino Royale was James Bond’s Batman Begins, a darkly masterful, psychologically layered origin story that threw to the winds the tongue-in-cheek camp stylings of earlier franchise installments and completely rethought its iconic but flawed hero and his world from the ground up, taking seriously the rough edges that had previously been papered over with a wink.

If the unconventional title Quantum of Solace, more redolent of “Star Trek” cerebralism than the id-driven 007 world, held out any hope that the much-anticipated follow-up would be in any way analogous to The Dark Knight—that is, an even more ambitious crucible for the newly minted hero, a soul-searching exploration of chaos and order in a world of escalation, failure and incalculable exigencies—well, no such luck.

Where Casino Royale was the longest Bond movie ever, Quantum of Solace is the shortest ever—and the title track by Jack White and Alicia Keyes bearing the distinctly Bondesque title “Another Way to Die,” is one of the most abrasive and unpleasant ever. (Also, as noted by CT Movies critic and inveterate list-maker Peter Chattaway, Casino director Martin Campbell was the oldest director ever of a Bond film, while Quantum director Marc Forster is the youngest.)

The result may not be the least consequential Bond flick ever, but it has no pretensions of topping or even rivaling Casino‘s landmark contribution to the Bond mythos. Compared to Casino, Quantum is unquestionably a disappointment, a coda to its formidable predecessor. Compared to Bond films for the last twenty years or so, Quantum is … a decent post-Bourne action thriller, I guess. Ferocious car chases, rooftop pursuits, brutal combat sequences, elegantly choreographed stunts, a parade of exotic locations … Quantum does all this, with credible panache. Just don’t expect to care like you did in Casino.

Quantum does extend Casino‘s cold, cynical tone as Bond finds himself adrift in a trust-no-one world of military intelligence blind spots, ignorance and conflicts of interest. There is some attempt to develop a post-9/11 context for Bond’s adventures in the sinister secret organization Quantum, whose absolute secrecy and seemingly all-powerful reach are all the more implausible precisely because of the realism of MI-6’s fallibility.

Daniel Craig is still the quintessential James Bond, cold, ruthless and somehow lacking in complete humanity. “A blunt instrument,” M (Judi Dench) called him in Casino, and villainous Mr. Greene (Mathieu Amalric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) of Quantum, ostensibly an environmentalist–philanthropist, contemptuously describes both Bond and the heroine du jour as “damaged goods.”

The latter is Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a reckless, fragile femme fatale among equally fatales hommes, a woman who, like Quantum‘s Bond, is driven by revenge. In one significant way, Camille might be among the most interesting Bond Girls, precisely because she might be, in a sense, the only Bond Girl who isn’t.

To be sure, in Casino Bond had little time for women, and in Quantum he has almost none. But there would ordinarily be little doubt that Bond could have pretty much any woman he wants. When Mr. Greene confides to Bond, with mixed resentment, envy and contempt, that Camille “won’t sleep with you unless you give her something,” the natural thought is that he doesn’t know Bond. But, by the same token, we don’t know Camille.

Alas, whatever plus Camille might represent is undermined by the inclusion of a token bedroom scene (“token” is definitely the word) involving an insultingly gratuitous plaything of a Bond Girl, a dewy, strawberry-tressed MI-6 agent named Fields (21-year-old Gemma Arterton)—and only in the end credits does the film admit that, yes, her name is Strawberry Fields.

Fields confronts Bond in Bolivia wrapped in a knee-length trenchcoat and no other visible clothing, looking remarkably like a centerfold in some Playboy feature on International Women of Mystery. Isn’t that just the agent you would assign if you were MI-6 to take Bond in hand, under arrest if necessary? (Answer: Pierce Brosnan Bond, yes; Daniel Craig Bond, no.)

Fields is easily the least credible approximation of a professional woman in a Bond film since then-28 Denise Richards tried to pass for a nuclear physicist in The World Is Not Enough. Not that Fields doesn’t seem smart or self-aware, but Bond can’t be bothered even to make a show of flirtation or romancing her, and she obligingly follows him into the bedroom to help him, um, look for stationery (what a line) … and then finds herself naked and smilingly self-remonstrating with her back to Bond as he kisses her from behind?

The scene is just as problematic on Bond’s end. Consider: Fields is the first woman he’s been with since Casino—and the first woman with whom we see this Bond get physical in whom he has neither ulterior nor emotional interest. (The direct chronological dovetailing of the two films leaves no room for hypothetical other women in the interim.)

In Casino Bond began ravishing one woman because (as she knew very well) he wanted something from her, but when circ*mstances changed he left her on the floor with a bottle of champagne. Then came his beloved/hated Vesper Lynd, for whom he fell body and soul, who saved him and betrayed him and left him a hollower shell of a man than he had been before.

Given that history, meaningless, perfunctory sex with Fields may not be implausible on Bond’s part—but at least it represents some sort of turning point. It should mean something to the screenwriters, if not to Bond. But it doesn’t. It’s like a relic of the pre-Casino franchise, tossed in because you can’t have a 007 movie with no sex.

Just as bad is a nasty postscript that echoes the discovery of the villain’s wife in the hammock in Casino, among other such scenes in Bond history, except that here it’s pointless and unconnected to Bond’s callousness toward women. Quantum even has M making some disparaging remark to Bond (something like “See what your charm has done”), which is stupid, because this time Bond’s charm had nothing to do with it.

M’s role is bigger this time out, but her relationship with Bond is less prickly and more cartoony than in Casino. Quantum also brings back Casino‘s Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), who, in a key scene that would have been even more important in a better film, urges Bond to “forgive” Vesper and himself.

Quantum also takes a turn toward the political: It turns out that the U.S. willingly colludes with military coups in foreign countries if they think there’s oil in it for them, and the British will do whatever the U.S. wants them to. Curiously, Quantum’s evil plot oddly resonates with a key plot point in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa: In both films a third-world community living in desert terrain is threatened by a hidden group with controlling access to the earth’s most precious resource—a substance beside which even diamonds and gold or oil are seen to be of little worth.

Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) directs his first action feature in a style clearly modeled on the Bourne and Batman films, all tight closeups and fast edits. For some reason he intercuts action scenes with other images: an underground chase sequence in Siena is punctuated by that city’s Palio horse race; a melee at an opera house is counterpointed by scenes from the opera; and Bond’s climactic duel in a burning desert fortress is intercut with the heroine’s own battle to the death.

Quantum isn’t a complete waste. Craig’s charisma holds up even when the screenplay lets him down. And while there’s nothing here to compare to Casino‘s opening parkour pursuit sequence, the chases and fight scenes are entertaining and sometimes strikingly well staged. Three years ago, Quantum of Solace would have been a pretty good Bond flick. Two pair isn’t a bad hand. It’s just anticlimactic after a royal flush.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. How is revenge different from justice? How easy or difficult is it to tell them apart in practice?
2. Matthis urges Bond to “forgive” Vesper and himself. Is this good advice?
3. What is forgiveness? How is it different from understanding or excusing? What would it mean to “forgive” oneself? What do people often mean when they say this?
4. Camilla tells Bond she wishes she could help free him. Why is Bond not free? What would freedom mean for him? Why can’t Camilla help him?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Quantum of Solace is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and some sexual content. There’s a lot of brutal, sometimes deadly hand-to-hand combat and gunplay as well as vehicular chase/combat sequences involving cars and aircraft. Sexual content includes a brief post-coital bedroom scene (no explicit nudity) and a sequence involving attempted sexual assault and references to rape in the back story. Objectionable language includes misuse of God’s name as well as some obscene and crass references.

Photos © Copyright Columbia

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What other Christian critics are saying:

1. Plugged In
2. Crosswalk
3. Catholic News Service
4. Past the Popcorn

by Skye Jethani

Amazing. How else can you describe what happened last week when Barack Obama became the first African American elected President of the United States? However you voted, whatever your politics, the election reveals something about the progress of our society. As George W. Bush said the morning after the election, it “showed a watching world the vitality of America’s democracy and the strides we have made toward a more perfect union.”

Amid the reflections there have been numerous references to Martin Luther King Jr.’s pioneering civil rights movement and his “dream.” One Chicago news commentator on election night said the day King delivered his famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial he could not have known that a two year old boy in Hawaii would become the fulfillment of his dream. That got me wondering – is Barack Obama really the fulfillment of King’s dream?

To read the rest of this article you’ll need to subscribe to the free Out of Ur Newsletter which delivers exclusive editorial, news, and commentary to your inbox each week.

Protests over Proposition 8 continue, and gay-marriage advocates are attempting to collect signatures for a ballot initiative to reverse the ban in California, the Associated Press reports.

The AP reports that Connecticut issued 58 marriage licenses to same-sex couples yesterday, the first day that gays and lesbians could get married in the state.

Twenty-six states have amended their constitutions to ban gay marriage, and the always-excellent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has released a helpful graphic that which states banned gay marriage when, starting with Alaska in 1998.

USA Today has a nice story today on Stephen Curry, who wowed the nation in March by taking tiny Davidson College to the Elite Eight of the NCAA basketball tournament.

The piece, titled “Just a regular man on campus,” not only recounts Curry’s amazing run in the NCAAs, when he averaged 32 points per game, but also notes that “success hasn’t spoiled him” and that “he’s an unassuming 20-year-old in oversized sweathshirts and jeans known for getting involved in campus activities.”

All well and good, but what the story fails to mention is that Curry comes from a strong Christian home, attended a Christian high school, and has a vibrant faith himself – the likely reason he’s such a humble young man who is always finding ways to help out his fellow collegians.

Read more about Curry’s faith in this recent story from Sports Illustrated.