Lincoln Mullen | Writings Feed

Modeling Historical Events and Lives in YAML

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:16:00 +0000

For my dissertation, I am researching the lives of converts from the nineteenth century. Some people who converted left behind an enormous source base. Orestes Brownson converted from Congregationalism to Presbyterianism to Universalism to Unitarianism to Transcendentalism to Catholicism, publishing voluminously all along the way. For other converts, I can find the barest of mentions in a newspaper or collection of papers. The dissertation needs to get both at the experience of well-known, articulate converts like Brownson, and lesser- or unknown converts. To retrieve that second kind of experience, I want to try analyzing all the conversions as data.

As I compile my research, I want to use it for two purposes. First, I need regular research notes to use when writing the dissertation. Second, I’d like to use the research as data, which I’ll analyze from some unknown tool (maybe Ruby). I have an idea of some of the questions that I’ll ask: How many people converted from X to Y? How likely were converts who were clergy in one religion likely to become clergy in another? How were conversions distributed over time? over space? But I won’t know which questions can be investigated programmatically or what the data to answer them will look like until I’ve done substantially more research.

The idea: use YAML to model lives and events

With that research problem in mind, I’ve drawn up a list of specifications for what my data model should look like.

The data must be human-readable and -writable as research notes.
The data model must be able to grow organically as I do the research.
The data model must be able to hold large amounts of undigested text as notes.
The data must be portable to other formats, possible JSON or XML/TEI.

My idea is to use YAML as the format for the data. YAML is a “human friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages.” YAML’s two top priorities are “YAML is easily readable by humans” and “YAML data is portable between programming languages,” which match my own priorities. I’m familiar with YAML from using Jekyll for this blog and another web project. YAML also fits well into the principles I learned from Linux and the Unix Philosophy, especially “store data in flat text files.”

Example YAML model and Ruby script

I’ve created a working example with two YAML files and a Ruby script to output some of the data. I’ve shared the example as a Gist on GitHub.

The YAML file for Orestes Brownson is below, and there is another sample file for Charles Wharton in the Gist. You’ll notice that at the outermost level of indentation, there are keys and values for basic biographical information, such as born: 1803-09-16. The most important part of the model is the list of conversions, which is a YAML array as signaled by the - character and indentation. The markup for the notes field (notes: >) lets that field contain as many paragraphs as necessary. Finally, the source array has one value (@carey_orestes_2004) which is the key to an entry in my BibTeX database, which I’ve added with Vim’s autocomplete function.

# A model of a convert's life --- name-last : Brownson name-first : Orestes Augustus born : 1803-09-16 died : 1876-04-17 birth-religion : Congregationalism conversions : - origin-religion : Congregationalism destination-religion : Presbyterianism date : 1822 ritual : church membership citation : ANB notes : > Brownson's change to congregationalism was more denominational switching than a change in conscience. - origin-religion : Presbyterianism destination-religion : Universalism date : 1826 ritual : ordination location : "Jaffrey, New Hampshire" citation : ANB notes : > "He would later refer to his years in this fold as 'the most anti-Christian period of my life'" (ANB). Brownson was editor of _The Gospel Advocate and Impartial Investigator_, a Universalist publication. - origin-religion : Universalism destination-religion : Unitarianism ritual : further research location : "Walpole, New Hampshire" citation : ANB notes : > Brownson spent some time at Brook Farm, which prepared him for Transcendentalism - origin-religion : Unitarianism and Transcendentalism destination-religion : Catholicism date : 1844-10-19 ritual : baptism citation : ANB notes : > Brownson studied after his conversion with a Sulpician priest. source : - Carey, Orestes Brownson - American National Biography comments : > This is a minimal example of what a model of a convert might look like. The historical data is hastily gathered, so only the model is of interest here. N.B. I would like to replace the citations with BibTeX keys. ...

I had to prove to myself that I could get at the data programmatically, so I wrote the Ruby script below. It’s just a proof-of-concept, and it’s the first Ruby script I’ve written, so there are ugly parts. The script creates a class Converts, which loads an array of YAML files into a hash. The class has a few methods to display the names of the converts and a list of all the conversions. Doubtless there are more interesting things that can be done.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby # A proof-of-concept script that outputs some simple data from YAML # files modeling conversions # # Author:: Lincoln Mullen (lincoln@lincolnmullen.com) require 'yaml' # This class loads data from YAML files, and outputs some values class Converts attr_accessor :files, :data def initialize (files = nil, data = nil) @files = files @data = Hash.new if @files.nil? puts "You didn't pass me any files." elsif @files.respond_to?("each") # walk through the array of files, creating a hash with the # file name as the key and the file data as the value @files.each do |file| @data[file] = YAML.load_file( file ) end end end # output the hash we can see what we're working with def display_raw puts "\nThis is the raw data we have loaded:" p( @data ) end # walk through the hash, outputting the names of each person def display_names puts "\nThese people converted:" @data.each_key do |key| puts " - #{@data[key]["name-first"]} #{@data[key]["name-last"]}" end end # walk through the hash, outputting the names and conversions of # each person def display_conversions puts "\nWe know about these conversions:" @data.each_key do |key| puts " - #{@data[key]["name-first"]} #{@data[key]["name-last"]}:" # each person has an array of conversions (even if there is # only one conversion) @data[key]["conversions"].each { |conversion| puts " + From #{conversion["origin-religion"]} to #{conversion["destination-religion"]} by #{conversion["ritual"]} in #{conversion["date"]}." } end end end # get sample data by loading every YAML file in the directory puts "Let's load all the YAML files in this directory:" puts Dir.glob( '*.yml').join(', ') c = Converts.new(Dir.glob('*.yml')) # call the methods to display the names and conversions c.display_names c.display_conversions

If you run the script on the sample YAML files, you get the output below. (Yes—the script does output in Markdown. I only know one trick.)

Let's load all the YAML files in this directory: brownson-orestes.yml, wharton-charles.yml These people converted: - Charles Wharton - Orestes Augustus Brownson We know about these conversions: - Charles Wharton: + From Catholicism to Church of England by conformity in . - Orestes Augustus Brownson: + From Congregationalism to Presbyterianism by church membership in 1822. + From Presbyterianism to Universalism by ordination in 1826. + From Universalism to Unitarianism by further research in . + From Unitarianism and Transcendentalism to Catholicism by baptism in 1844-10-19.

What’s next?

If this model works for modeling conversions, it should also work for modeling other kinds of historical events. For example, suppose a labor historian is researching strikes and kept a YAML file for each strike …

id:  Pullman strike
location: Pullman, Illinois
date: 1894-05-11
corporations:
- Pullman Palace Car Company
unions:
- American Railway Union
accounts:

- name: John A. Doe
  source: Chicago Tribune
  description: >
  "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris
  malesuada, purus vel posuere aliquam, enim orci tempor quam, ac
  rutrum arcu arcu nec leo."

- name: Jane B. Doe
  source: New York Times
  description: >
  "Maecenas in velit nulla, pretium vestibulum lacus. Morbi dui purus,
  imperdiet ac aliquam sodales, gravida ut diam. Vestibulum nec erat a
  ligula tincidunt dignissim in et diam. Quisque tincidunt
  pellentesque lorem, a scelerisque quam lacinia vitae."

and another for each union …

union: American Railway Union
leaders:  
  -   name: Eugene V. Debs
      start: 1893-06-20
      end: ~
founded:
  date: 1893-06-20
  place: Chicago, Illinois

I asked about this idea at Digital Humanities Questions & Answers and on Twitter. Chad Black, Ben Brumfield, Ethan Gruber, Caleb McDaniel, and Conal Tuohy offered valuable advice about how to think about this problem and what tools might be helpful later in the project. The TEI markup for an event and person (recommended by Conal) seems promising because it can accommodate types of data that I know I’ll need, such as uncertain dates and name changes.

For now, though, I’m going to work with YAML, since I can get started on it right away and since I’m completely sure it will work as research notes and reasonably sure it can be munged into another format later.

I’ll be glad for any advice about how to improve the data model or script and about what considerations I should think about to make sure the data is useful. If you have any ideas about what to do with the data once I’ve gathered it, I’ll be glad for those too.

Reading ‘History as a Literary Art’

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:00:08 +0000

When I was an undergraduate taking a class on writing history, and again when I was a graduate student, a professor assigned me to read Samuel Eliot Morison’s essay “History As a Literary Art.” Morison, more than most, was a credible source of writing advice. When he wrote the essay in 1946 he had already won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. By the end of his life, he would pick up another Pulitzer and two Bancroft Prizes. Morison was a professional historian, but he wrote squarely in the tradition of amateur, literary historians like Francis Parkman—perhaps unsurprisingly, since both were Boston blue bloods.

Morison was glad for the gains of academic history, but deplored the writing of only “dull, solid, valuable monographs,” leaving “journalists, novelists, and freelance writers” to ”extract the gold.” The question of…

Save Articles to Read Later with Pocket

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:00:37 +0000

There are any number of web services and apps that let you save something online to read later. Several ProfHacker authors use these services. Brian introduced us to the concept with his post back in 2009 on “Asynchronous Reading.” Amy, Natalie, and Jason have mentioned Instapaper; Erin wrote about Zite (a related application); Brian and I have written about Read It Later; and George mentioned Readability.

Read It Later recently rebranded itself as Pocket and released a substantial update. Pocket lets you save items like articles and videos to their web service. You can then read or watch the things you’ve saved on their website, or on apps for iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and the Kindle Fire. You can get a fuller overview on Pocket’s website.

Screen shot of Pocket's web app

The upgrade has…

VirtualBox Makes It Easy to Use Other Operating Systems

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:00:45 +0000

One of the current ideas about computing is that the operating system is becoming less important. With many software applications and even your data in the cloud, most of the work that you do can be done in a browser, or so the idea goes. That’s not true for me. While I do use my e-mail and calendar in Google Apps, sync my most important files to the cloud with ProfHacker favorite Dropbox, and use any number of other web applications, I still spend most of my computing time in my operating system using applications that can’t be run on a web service. For security and privacy reasons, which we’ve covered, you might not want much of your important in the cloud anyway.

From time to time, I need to run a different operating system than my OS of choice. If I’m finishing up an important web project, I like to test the website on Windows and Linux as well as on my Mac. You might want to use …

How to Fork a Syllabus on GitHub

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:00:04 +0000

A few weeks ago Brian wrote a great post on “Forking Your Syllabus.” Borrowing from discussions with Kathy Harris and Trevor Owen, Brian advanced the idea that

syllabi could learn a trick or two from GitHub. GitHub is a repository for open source code that supports version control . . . . What this means in plain terms is that developers can share code using GitHub and then other developers can add on to that code, with the repository tracking all the changes. If a developer wants to take a piece of code down a different line of development, he or she “forks” the code. The fork shows the provenance of the code while still allowing you to adapt it to your own needs. Finding a platform to “fork your syllabus” would not only allow you to give acknowledgments to those whose work you drew on, but it would invite others to make use of your syllabus for their own…

Chapter 4 Drafted, and Thoughts on Gift Economies

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:20:00 +0000

After I returned from the AHA/ASCH annual meeting this January, I broke ground on my dissertation. My goal is to turn out a rough draft of a chapter every three months. For this first chapter to be drafted, I was helped in meeting the deadline by the fact that I’ve been scheduled to present the draft at a history department faculty/grad workshop in April. I sent draft to my committee on Monday, and I’ll send it to the history department later this week.

The first chapter that I’ve written will be the fourth chapter of the dissertation. It is a history of Cherokee conversions to Christianity in the first four decades of the nineteenth century.

A challenge for this chapter—as I expect it will be for every chapter—was telling a complete story in a very small frame. There is a good reason why very few histories of American religion outside surveys try to deal with multiple religious traditions at once. I tried to solve this problem by focusing on a few converts and then describing Cherokee conversions more generally. This technique was also necessary to give a narrative line to the chapter.

In thinking about what conversion meant for Cherokee Christians, I was especially helped by an essay written by Leigh Eric Schmidt: “Practices of Exchange: From Market Culture to Gift Economy in the Interpretation of American Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 69–91. I haven’t seen this essay cited or used elsewhere in American religious history, but Schmidt’s ideas in this essay have much interpretative power.

Briefly, Schmidt argues that historians have mostly seen American religion as a competitive marketplace, but religion is replete with the ideas about gifts. Religion functions as a gift economy—even if it also functions as or within a market economy.

In reading the records of the Moravian mission at Springplace in Georgia, and the ABCFM mission at Brainerd in Tennessee, I was struck by the observation that missionaries and Cherokee alike experienced the gift economy as a material reality. (Maybe I’ve been reading too much Marx recently, but I keep looking for economic, material realities at the root of things.) The missions and the nearby inhabitants often did not have enough, let alone a surplus for market transactions. The missions had an obligation to be hospitable. And of course, the missions were able to function because they were recipients of gifts from churches and benevolent associations. It makes sense to me, then, to look at Cherokee conversions within the context of both a market and a gift economy.

Install Applications Easily with a Package Manager

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:00:29 +0000

When the Apple App Store came out, one of the features it touted was a central place to buy and install applications. You could download all your applications from one place, and when they were out of date, you could upgrade them from one place. Indeed, this is a useful feature (leaving aside discussions of the economics of such stores).

Indeed, this is a feature that users of the command line had for a long time. For command line terminals, these app stores are usually called package managers. They’re not called app stores, because the applications are free.

A package manager is a convenient way to install and update new software. Often the software you can get from a package manager runs on the command line, but you can also install some GUI applications as well.

If you’re on a computer running Linux, you already have a package manager built in. For example, if you’re on…

Academic Article Class for XeLaTeX

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 04:00:00 +0000

I’ve created an XeLaTeX class that creates a nice-looking academic article with nicer fonts and headings. You can get the code at GitHub.

Make Your Own E-Books with Pandoc

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:00:01 +0000

As devices for reading e-books proliferate, it increasingly makes sense to make publications available in an e-book. There are a number of cases in which you might do this:

If you have a blog and want to make the best posts into an e-book. For example, sociologist Kieran Healy created an e-book of posts from his blog.
If you have content in one format that you want to read as an e-book instead. For example, our own Mark Sample took the open-access book Hacking the Academy and turned it into several versions of an e-book for Nooks, iPads, and Kindles.
If you want to give your readers the option to read your content as an e-book. For example, I’m the web editor for The Journal of Southern Religion. As a supplement to the articles on the website, I intend to make an e-book of each issue with the articles “bound” together.

Making an e-book can be easy—almost trivially…

Writing Power Tools: Text Editors

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:00:10 +0000

One of the recent themes on ProfHacker has been the virtues of using plain text to do your work, especially your writing. For me there is one big advantage: I write in plain text so that I can use a text editor to do my writing.

By text editor, I mean a program that is meant to edit code—the type of tool that programmers use. My text editor of choice is Vim, but there are many similar programs: BBEdit, Emacs, Notepad++, TextMate, TextWrangler, and SciTE are just a few of the options. These all share features that are intended to help you write code. They are not primarily software for word processing, like Microsoft Word or Libre Office.

So why would someone want to write using software that is meant for writing code rather than writing words? I’ve found that thinking about my words as if they were code has improved my process of writing. There are the…

Pandoc Converts All Your (Text) Documents

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:00:07 +0000

For the past few months we ProfHackers have been running an occasional series about using the command line. I got us started with a couple posts explaining why you might want to use the command line and how to get started using it. Konrad followed with a posts about the uniq command and the sort command for working with text and data files. Amy added a post about how the command line let her hack the NOOK Color, and I wrote about using pdftk to manipulate PDFs.

Taking up the command line is easier if you have a specific problem you’re trying to solve. For me, the problem was that I wanted to do all of my writing in a plain text format, like Markdown or LaTeX. But I need to be able to share my writing in a variety of formats: HTML for the web, PDF for printed documents or academic writing, and occasionally RTF or Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.

The best way I’ve found to move between …

Take Better Notes by Paraphrasing

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:00:32 +0000

I’ve recently started doing the research for dissertation, which means I have a minor obsession with note taking. (As do many ProfHackers.) I’m not a good note taker. I must have taken notes well enough to muddle along this far, but there is a fundamental shift in the kind of research I’m doing. The notes I’m taking now need to be usable for a book-length project spanning years, rather than a semester. Indeed, I hope some of the notes I’m taking now will prove the foundation for work beyond the dissertation.

Some of the best advice I’ve read about how to take notes is from the dusty volumes on library research that were recommended to me as an undergrad. Of course some of that advice is basic: identify your source, take one note per card, etc.

The best advice about note taking that I’ve learned I got from Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff’s The Modern Researcher: paraphrase your…

What Does Practice Look Like for You?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:00:37 +0000

One of the most helpful blogs I’ve read about productivity is Cal Newport’s Study Hacks, which we’ve referenced a few times before. Newport is a computer scientist and professor at Georgetown University. Besides the blog on studying, he has also written several books for undergrads on how to succeed at college.

At the heart of Newport’s writing is the simple idea that success doesn’t require courage, it requires working hard in the right way. There are a number of ideas that follow from that: for example, you have to “become so good that they can’t ignore you” and becoming that good requires “hard focus.” The idea I’ve found most helpful is that to become good you have to practice deliberately.

My work in history doesn’t have an obvious divide between practice and performance, unlike, say, musicians’ work. But there are kinds of work that I do that are like practice, in that they a…

Review of A Theology of Religious Change

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Zehnder, David J. A Theology of Religious Change: What the Social Science of Conversion Means for the Gospel. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2011. xxii + 179 pages. ISBN: 978-1-61097-359-5.

Religious conversion is a topic of interest to many domains of knowledge. Historians, social scientists, philosophers, and theologians of every creed have studied and attempted to explain conversion. David Zehnder is the rare theologian—or scholar of any discipline—who has done the difficult work of crossing disciplinary boundaries to bring back the fruits of disciplines not his own. The title of his book, A Theology of Religious Change: What the Social Science of the Conversion Means for the Gospel indicates that Zehnder is a net importer of ideas, and contributing back to the social sciences is not on his agenda. He is interested in the pastoral, apologetic uses to which social scientific findings can be put. But his primary task is to mine the psychological and sociological literature on conversion in an attempt to resolve one of theology’s most longstanding questions: “the problem of why one person believes the gospel and another does not” (141).

This “theologian’s cross” is the question of how to reconcile the human and the divine role in salvation. Zehnder’s study of divinity has given him a firm position on the question of God’s role in salvation. He subscribes to a theology of monergism—the belief that God is the only active agent in salvation—that initially drew him to the theological question of predestination, and which shapes the opening and concluding chapters on theology as well many of the observations about the social science of conversion in the middle five chapters.

But Zehnder is also willing to study the human side of conversion, and has set upon the social sciences, especially sociology and psychology, as the best way to approach questions. Reconciling the social sciences and theology requires a theory of how those domains of knowledge relate to one another. This book takes a “correlational” approach that “holds theological and scientific claims in tension as different explanatory means that cannot directly contradict one another” (xv). This theory has its merits, but Zehnder is unable to consistently follow it because he does occasionally find that social science contradicts his theology.

Chapters two through six, which present the findings of social science on various topics, all follow the same pattern. A brief theological or pastoral introduction is followed by an extensive review of social scientific literature, after which Zehnder reflects on the use of the social science for pastoral concerns and its implications for theology. The book summarizes social scientific research on religious change, transformations of individuals, parental influences, ideology, and social ties as they relate to conversion. These summaries of social science read like so many literature reviews, though the book is at least more readable than many of the studies it summarizes. More problematic is the tendency to treat most research as equally valid, which flattens out the debates and disagreements within social science. But it is in his pastoral reflections on social science that Zehnder offers his most useful contribution.

The book’s contributions to theology are more troublesome. The assumption of monergism forces Zehnder to depart from his “correlational” model whenever the findings of social science contradict that central tenet. In chapter three, he correctly concludes that most social scientific research concludes that conversion is “activist”—that is, that people who convert tend to be “active seekers.” This poses a problem for both Zehnder’s method and his theology: “The active conversion is probably sociology’s most direct challenge to monergistic theology which holds that conversion is not . . . ‘a personal accomplishment’” (52–53). For Zehnder, this raises the question “whether active seekers could think that they have chosen the gospel out of a pure act of will and still have the gospel at all” (53). To his credit, Zehnder tries to take a middle road on this question, but still calls the church to action: “the church cannot view active conversion as a normative viewpoint … and must continually offer its corrective” (54).

This conclusion is unsurprising and unobjectionable, if one accepts the premise of monergism. But for any Christian tradition for which monergism and election are not the central preoccupations, the question is not a live one and an opportunity has been missed. A more rigorous application of Zehnder’s own correlational model would have found much more use in social science’s findings about active conversion.

In sum, readers who are not concerned with the theological problems implied by monergism, or who are inclined to see salvation as a human choice as well as a divine choice, are not likely to find the theological issues discussed in this book to be live questions. Readers who are inclined to agree with Zehnder that theology is a divine choice will find Zehnder’s theological reasonings informed by social science to be intriguing. I hope they will also find them salutary, for Zehnder’s willingness to approach both sides of the question should be applauded. And all readers can find his desire to turn “theology’s attention away from unsolvable mysteries and toward the question of how the church can communicate to people’s needs” (141), as well as his helpful suggestions to that end, to be profitable.

Review of American Scriptures

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F., ed. American Scriptures: An Anthology of Sacred Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. 406 pages. ISBN: 0143106198.

In his chapter on “Reading” in Walden, Henry David Thoreau complained, “As for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture.” Thoreau is likely as correct about our day as he was about his own. But teachers of the history of American religion and religious studies can correct the error for American sacred writings at least, thanks to Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s new collection, American Scriptures: An Anthology of Sacred Writings.

In this affordable paperback, published by Penguin Classics, Maffly-Kipp collects sacred texts written and published in the United States. These texts capture some of the religious diversity and creativity of American religion. The book contains a bewildering array of religious traditions: rational religion, the Latter-Day Saints, Shakers, Spiritualists, black Methodists, Christian Scientists, Seventh-day Adventists, Theosophists, feminists, traditions influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. Some of the books were unpublished or virtually unknown in their own day; others were massive bestsellers. The collection contains some well-known texts, helpfully extracted, such as Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It also contains texts very difficult to find elsewhere.

But for all the diversity, there are several important similarities across the text. All but one text is from the nineteenth century, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1819–20) and ending with Levi H. Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1907)—a century or so of religious creativity expressed in sacred texts. But more important, almost all of these texts are an interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth. This collection of texts would work well paired with Richard Wightman Fox’s Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession or Stephen R. Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, to allow students to compare the cultural history of Jesus across religious traditions and over time.

The one limitation of the text is that it is a collection of scriptures written in America, not scriptures used in America. So the most religiously and culturally significant scriptures in America, such as the King James Bible, the Tanakh and Talmud, the Qu’ran, and the Vedas and Upanishads, are unrepresented. This is hardly a fault, since those texts are readily available elsewhere, but in designing a course one would have to take it into account. Then too, the collection can give little sense of the material culture of these texts. There are some intriguing hints: Thomas Jefferson cutting and pasting his revision of the Gospels; John Ballou Newbrough writting OAHSPE on “a novel device called a typewriter” as the angels guided his hands. Again, it would be unreasonable to expect this volume to tackle the material aspect of the texts. But an enterprising scholar, taking a cue from this collection and from Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, could do intriguing work on the material culture of sacred texts in the United States.

Full disclosure: At the AHA, Penguin gave me a free book-bag for buying more books than were in my budget, but no compensation for this blog post.

Review of All Can Be Saved

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Schwartz, Stuart B. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-300-15854-0.

The early modern Atlantic world, in Iberia as well as in Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World, was home to an enormous religious diversity. A simple catalog of the religions that Stuart Schwartz mentions in his book All Can Be Saved gives some idea of how diverse the Atlantic world was: Catholic Christianity, in both its pre- and post-Tridentine formulations; Judaism; Islam; Protestant Christianity, especially Dutch Reformed, French Huguenot, and German Lutheran Protestants; African animist religions; Native American animist religions; European traditions of magic and the occult; and skepticism and unbelief. Of course religious belief as actually held seldom fell into such systematic categories, and Schwartz discusses many kinds of forced and voluntary religious intermingling, among which were Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity, Old Christians who layered Catholicism on top of folk religions or skepticism, Native Americans and Africans who mixed Christianity with their traditional religions, and Christians who were influenced by Native American and African religions or converted to Islam or Judaism. The question that motivates Schwartz’s study is this: Out of that religious milieu, how did many Iberian Christians come to hold the proposition that “each person can be saved in his or her own religion” (epigraph)? Put another way, how did toleration develop out of religious conflict?

Scholars studying the history of toleration or the confessionalization of Europe have given several answers to that question. Some have traced the rise of toleration to the Atlantic and particularly Iberian religious milieu itself. The argument is that Catholics, Jews, and Muslims had for some time learned to peacefully coexist, and that the Spanish Reconquista and the Catholic Inquisition, with the forced conversion of Jews and Muslims to Catholicism, was an aberration, albeit a long one. Others have argued that the Inquisition encouraged skepticism and disbelief, by forcing Conversos and Moriscos and even Old Christians to lie about their true religious beliefs, making religion a more interior and less public matter. Still others have argued that toleration came about through the philosophies of Enlightenment elites and through the pragmatic attempts of monarchs to rule over diverse populations. Though not rejecting these arguments out of hand, Schwartz regards them as insufficient, for they do not adequately connect skepticism to relativism or toleration, nor do they fit all the facts.

Schwartz offers a refined interpretation based on his reading of Inquisition documents from Spain, Portugal, and the New World. In those documents he has found a great many common people who expressed ideas contrary to Catholic dogma. Two categories of dissenting ideas are particular important to the analysis: ideas about religious relativism, and ideas about sex. Many people, including Old Christians and foreigners and not just New Christians, expressed a belief that people could be saved outside of the Catholic Church, expressly contradicting the dogma of Cyprian and Augustine that extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation). This idea was commonly couched in Schwartz’s epigraph quoted above and also in the phrase “better a good Moor than a bad Christian” (191) and in the concept of three equally valid laws, “that of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that of Mohammed, and that of Señor Moses” (51). People who held such ideas were frequently denounced, yet they continued to articulate them before Inquisitorial questioning and even torture. Those ideas were frequently coupled with ideas about sex. Contrary to church teaching, many in Iberia refused to regard sex outside of marriage as a sin, so long as it was not adulterous. In the New World, that concept was extended to a popular sanction of sex with Indians or Africans, so long as they were not baptized. Schwartz examines the two sets of ideas in tandem because ideas about sex, unlike ideas about religion, have measurable demographic effects.

Whence came these unorthodox ideas? Schwartz argues that ideas of tolerance came from common people themselves. They crafted them from their own experience with other faiths and from their own sense of justice, as can be seen in arguments that Jews and Muslims had done them no personal harm and that the Inquisition was wrong to seize their property. They also formed these ideas from their own understanding of Christianity, by giving more weight to God’s benevolence and the duty to love one’s neighbor than to claims of universality. Despite the post-Tridentine insistence that they must not, people interpreted Catholic teaching and the Bible for themselves, and Iberian Christians frequently criticized a newly invasive, papal form of the church. Schwartz’s point is that toleration—or official state permission for different faiths—sprang not simply from philosophy or statecraft, but from the ideas of common people who were literate, who traveled, who interacted with other faiths, and who above all judged right and wrong for themselves. To quote his conclusion, toleration came “also from common people, who, drawing on their own experiences, their own understanding of the tenets of their faith, and their own sense of justice, created a soil of tolerance” (255).

This book is persuasive in its argument, not least because it is sophisticated in its ideas of theology, vernacular ideas, interiority, and layered religious identity. Still, I wish to offer two critiques, or rather extensions, of Schwartz’s argument, one concerning theology and another concerning lived religion.

First, theology. The argument of this book takes place in the context of an Atlantic world in which the three monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths all shared a central concern with salvation. This Schwartz takes for granted. What happens if that assumption is questioned? For those three faiths account for just part of the religious world that Schwartz is describing, but Native American and African religions, European folk magic, and Enlightenment skepticism do not share the search for salvation. Tolerance based on relativism and the shared significance of soteriology is one thing, while toleration based on skepticism or the idea that religion is not about salvation is quite another. Schwartz’s analysis would have been more cogent had he distinguished more carefully between these two distinct theological ideas.

Second, lived religion. Schwartz spends much of the book exploring the conditions that made tolerance possible in the context of an expanding Catholic church. But Schwartz seems to have missed a crucial element: as paradoxical as it might seem, Catholicism itself was a necessary precondition for tolerance. I do not mean Christian ideas of loving one’s neighbor or the universal love of God, which Schwartz is careful to exposit. Rather, I mean that Catholic practice as experienced by laypeople seems to have encouraged toleration. There are two hints to this in Schwartz’s book. The first is the concept of the “three laws.” Schwartz explores tolerance in the concept of the plurality of religions, but not in their shared practice of law. While the concept of law is not the same in Judaism, Islam, and Catholic Christianity, each religion regards law as essential to the pursuit of salvation. The second hint is the language laypeople used to express their idea about how one receives salvation. To quote Oliveira e Sousa, “Our Lord God was very merciful that he had to save those who lived good lives … ”; and to quote Inocencio de Aldama, “Any person can save themselves in the law that they may profess so long as they keep it, be they Moor, infidel, or heretic” (89–90, emphasis mine). The emphasis is on earning salvation through obedience to law, which in each religion is a set of practices. It is very difficult to see a similar idea of tolerance developing among, say, Genevan Reformed Protestants, for whom grace as opposed to law and God’s election as opposed to free will were the determinants of people’s salvation. But this is not so much a question of theology as lived religion. The “rustic Pelagians” of Iberia and the New World were intent on earning their salvation through Catholic reforms instituted at Trent, most notably annual participation in the Eucharist, annual auricular confession, and the use of devotional techniques such as the rosary or Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Might Catholics have noticed similarities between their own practices and the rituals of Jews and Muslims, and concluded not only that they were all seeking salvation, but that they were all seeking salvation in the same way?

Schwartz is to be applauded for his exposition of vernacular ideas, and his work might be strengthened by future investigations into the relationship between vernacular ideas, theology, religious practice, and lived religion.

Comments

It is always encouraging to see well done reviews done with care, clarity, and an appreciation and understanding of the topic. Your points are well-taken and I appreciate the thought you have put into the critique. My response is that I feel on the first critique you are a bit too hard, after all there is considerable discussion of Africans and syncretism in the chapter on Brazil and some mention of them elsewhere. Also, converso ideas of “salvation” seem to have their origin more in Christian theology rather in that of Judaism.

On the second, there may be something there in that the emphasis on good works presents a catholic position to some extent, but the problem is, as I implied in the last chapter,that such ideas of tolerance could also be found elsewhere in Europe in Protestant communities–a position, by the way that B. Kaplan’s Divided by Faith also argues.

In any case, thanks for the thoughtful review.

Stuart Schwartz — 1 December 2010

What Is Secularization?

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, Paul introduced us to secularization theory, and in particular to Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age. (Taylor’s other book, Sources of the Self, was the subject of an earlier post.) Taylor’s book is notable for going against the grain: at a time when most scholars are again recognizing the importance of religion, Taylor has undertaken to explain the old question of why societies become more secular. Why?

The phenomenon in need of explaining is this: religion can expand and secularization can occur at the same time in the same society. As Leigh Eric Schmidt observes in a review of Taylor’s book, “We must pair our narratives of modern secularization with narratives of modern sanctification.” Religion and secularization are “America’s uncanny twins.” (Do read at least the last paragraph of Schmidt’s review.)

Whatever the faults of Taylor’s history of secularization, Taylor offers a definition of secularization that is powerful enough to account for simultaneous religion and secularization. Taylor first offers two unsatisfactory definitions of secularization:

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do… .

But it’s not so clear in what this secularity consists. There are two big candidates for its characterization… . The first concentrates on the common institutions and practices—most obviously, but not only, the state. The difference would then consist in this, that whereas the political organizations of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection. Churches are now separate from political structures… .

[Taylor observes that some societies, notably the U.S., have a strong separation of church and state, yet are vigorously religious.]

In this second meaning, secularity consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church. In this sense, the countries of western Europe have mainly become secular–even those who retain the vestigial public reference to God in public space. (1–2)

These definitions are useful as far as they go. Both are advantageous in that they can be turned into empirical questions. Both describe actual conditions, and can account for differences between, say, Europe and the United States. But Taylor offers a better, because more useful, definition of secularization:

Now I believe that an examination of this age as secular is worth taking up in a third sense, closely related to the second, and not without connection to the first. This would focus on the conditions of belief. The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace. In this meaning, as against sense 2, at least many milieux in the United States are secularized, and I would argue that the United States as a whole is. Clear contrast cases today would be the majority of Muslim societies, or the milieux in which the vast majority of Indians live. It wouldn’t matter if one showed that the statistics for church/synagogue attendance in the U.S., or some regions of it, approached those for Friday mosque attendance in, say, Pakistan or Jordan (or this, plus daily prayer). That would be evidence towards classing these societies as the same in sense 2. Nevertheless it seems to me evident that there are big differences between these societies in what it is to believe, stemming in part from the fact that belief is an option, and in some sense an embattled option in the Christian (or “post-Christian”) society, and not (or not yet) in the Muslim ones. (2–3)

This is an elegant definition, even if the prose is not. The change that matters is that Christianity is no longer the only possible option in Western society. One might be a Christian, one might become a Buddhist, one might become an atheist, or might remain uncommitted. But everyone must choose, and that choice will be contested. As William James put it in“The Will to Believe,” the choice is genuine because it is “forced, living, and momentous.”

Taylor’s definition is elegant in that it can account historically for how secularization changes even fervent religious belief. There is, for example, an extraordinarily long continuity in Christian belief as expressed in creeds such as the Nicene Creed. If one grants that the words of the creed and the content of the belief are the same across time, yet one must observe that the meaning of that belief is different in fourth-century Constantinople, twelfth-century Rome, and twenty-first-century America, because the other options in which the believer might believe have changed.

To sum up: Taylor’s definition of secularization as having to do with “the conditions of belief” is useful because it can be historicized. This definition, which you can see in the above excerpts from Taylor’s first three pages, can be used apart from any particular historical narrative of secularization. But if you want to see how Taylor puts his definition to work, you’ll have to read the other 800 pages for yourself.

What's So Wrong with Myths?

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0000

In this week’s issue of The Economist, the Lexington columnist wrote an article titled “The Perils of Constitution-Worship,” with the summary, “One of the guiding principles of the tea-party movement is based on a myth.” After I recommended the article, a colleague at Brandeis asked, what’s so wrong with myths anyway? This is a question well-worth asking, and answering.

Myths are probably inescapable. We all believe myths, in the sense that we all use stories about the past that are more believed than proved as a means of explaining and arguing about the present. Society could scarcely function if there were not some myths held in common.

Though myths may be inescapable, it does not follow that all myths are equally true, nor that they are all equally useful. Some myths more closely align with what can be known about the past and present than others. To that extent, the more truthful a myth is, the more useful it is. For myths are useful because they make prominent certain features of the past, but in so doing they blur other features. In short, myths are vices that must confronted, not virtues to be lauded. The task of the historian is to reshape myths to conform as near as possible to the truth—to be a translator speaking for the past.

To take the case of the Tea Party, since that is the particular issue at hand, it seems clear to me that the myths the Tea Party tells are particularly pernicious, because they are particularly (and demonstrably) false. One might spend a great deal of time expositing exactly why they are false in the light of several generations of historical research, but I think theEconomistarticle, among others, does a good job of explaining this succinctly.

But there is another problem with myths, beyond their deviance from truth. The problem is that the past can never speak entirely for the present. The past can, and should, be made to speak to the issues of the present. But each generation must confront new situations. As Leonard Levy (formerly a professor at Brandeis University) observed, the framers of the Constitution spoke plainly to the issues they anticipated, but were silent on issues that they could not, including the most troubling issues of today. Or, as a statesmen but not a Founding Father pronounced in a time far worse than our own:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Sacred Book, Sacred Space: My Attempt to Buy a Qur’an

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Yesterday afternoon, I tried to buy a Qur’an. I used to own two copies of the Qur’an (or, to be precise, a translation of the meaning of the Qur’an). One I bought as a textbook, and read, and one was mailed to me by Muslims trying to proselytize, but a search of my bookcases and attic revealed that neither copy had survived recent relocations. And so, I walked to the center of town to buy another copy.

I’m not the only person in the market for a Qur’an this week. According to Amazon, the Oxford World’s Classics edition is currently at 72 and climbing in their bestsellers list, meaning that Amazon is selling a lot of Qur’ans. Demand is being spurred by two related events: plans to build an Islamic community center in New York City, and plans to burn Qur’ans in Gainesville, Florida.

The two controversies are mirror images of each other—not exactly so, but near enough. In the one, Muslims plan to build a community center that an overwhelming majority of evangelical Christians oppose. Many defend Muslims’ First Amendment right to the free exercise of their religion and fair use of their private property, while questioning the wisdom of trying to build near Ground Zero. In the other, evangelical Christians plan to burn the Qur’ans on September 11 (also the last day of Ramadan), an action opposed by all Muslims and, one hopes, a majority of Americans. It’s pretty clear that the Qur’an burning is protected speech under the First Amendment, and in any case it cannot be prevented in advance, but many have decried the insult to Muslims and the potential danger to U.S. troops overseas. Both cases are linked by the problem of the sacred and the problem of pluralism.

The sacred is enlisted in both controversies. The chief argument advanced against building the Islamic community center is that Ground Zero is a sacred, a claim some 56% of Americans believe. Ground Zero’s alleged sacredness is not the sacredness of a church, but something between the sacredness of a roadside shrine for a car accident and that of a battlefield. Like the shrine, Ground Zero is sacred to the cult of the victims, and it has an out-and-about, everyday kind of sacredness. But the more apt comparison is to a battlefield. Officially, according to Presidents Bush and Obama, the war is the American people against terrorism. It would be naive, though, to miss that many Americans are fighting or wish to fight a different war: one that pits a bastard mix of Christianity and American civil religion against global Islam.

Terry Jones, pastor of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, is just one of those Americans. Had he not been the one to receive the media’s attention, doubtless someone else would have gotten it. Calling his threat to burn the Qur’an on September 11 a publicity stunt misses the point, though. Jones is doubtless after publicity, but his beliefs and his hate are sincere; the media amplifies them, but it did not create them. Jones’s plan is to desecrate the Qur’an by burning it, a double insult to Islam, on the one hand, and to rational secularists who regard books as sacred. (Librarians and intellectuals regularly protest book burning.) Yet the act of burning a Qur’an is, in a way, an inadvertent acknowledgment that it is sacred. Before an object can be desecrated, it must first be sacred. It is the boundary that gives meaning to the transgression, and the transgression is the most visible acknowledgement that a boundary exists.

These controversies over a sacred space and a sacred book raise the question: How does an open society like the United States deal with the problem of multiple religions?

The answer, in a word, is pluralism. Pluralism is not the vague notion that all religions are the same. That idea, propounded by both the religious and the irreligious, is an insult to all religions, for it ignores the actual meaning of their beliefs and practices and reduces them to a set of platitudes. Pluralism, rather, acknowledges that religions are different and irreconciliable, that their practitioners will frequently be at odds, and that they have every right to attempt to proselytize the other. Yet pluralism makes room within society for multiple religions. Making room is, in one sense, dependent on law. The state provides ordered liberty–the protection of rights and the maintenance of order. It is for this reason that the Apostle Paul wrote that rulers are “the ministers of God” who are “not a terror to good conduct, but to bad” and commanded Christians to pray for rulers “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” But making room is, in another sense, dependent not on legal restrictions but on voluntarily restrictions. It may be legal to burn a Qur’an, but it is wrong by the code of an open society and by the imperatives of the gospel. There’s a saying that your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins. If that’s the case, then it’s also true that my right to profane ends where your sense of the sacred begins.

Pluralism of this type works when allegiance to the state does not conflict with allegiance to religion. In other words, it works when I can be both Christian and American, and you can be a Muslim and an American, without violating our religious conscience to maintain our political loyalty. The problem in both cases is that religious loyalties and political loyalty are confused because of American civil religion, a syncretistic, quasi-Judeo-Christian political religion intended to promote loyalty to the state. Protestant-Catholic-Jew, to borrow Will Herberg’s phrase, may have equal right to claim Americanness, but Muslims have not yet been welcomed into the cult of civil religion . In both the case of the community center and the Qur’an-burning, the conflict is not primarily between Islam and Christianity, but between Islam and American civil religion. This is apparent from the choice of Ground Zero and September 11 as holy space and holy day, respectively, and in the patterns of opposition to the community center as desecration, strongest among Christians but claiming a broader following. A genuine pluralism cannot exist where a civil religion superimposes itself on religious and political loyalty.

That is why I tried to buy a Qur’an yesterday. Reading about other religions is hardly a panacea, but it’s a better step than burning them. I had to resort to Amazon, though, because my attempt to buy a Qur’an at a bookstore failed. The religion section of one used bookstore held a dozen Bibles and even a Tanakh, but no Qur’an. The other bookstore was closed, ironically enough, for Rosh Hashanah.

Charles Taylor and the Sources of the Self

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0000

What is identity? What is a self? How has selfhood changed over time?

Those are the questions that Charles Taylor), a philosopher with a historical method, sets out to answer in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity(Harvard University Press, 1989). His book is an investigation of how the modern sense of what it means to be a person came into being through the influences of philosophers and popular thought. To that end, he first lays a philosophical foundation, then offers a history of selfhood that is somewhere between straightfoward intellectual history and a history of mentalités.

Taylor’s basic argument is that the concept of the self in linked to morality. Morality means not simply a set of claims about what one ought to do or not do to be moral; rather, it means what one ought to be or not be. Morality is related to the self by what Taylor calls a framework. How one thinks about oneself depends (1) on what one considers to be the Good and (2) how one relates to that Good. If this all sounds very philosophical, it is. But the insight is rather simple, though profound: you can only think of yourself as you think of yourself in relation to what is most important.

Taylor’s insight that selfhood is dependent on the Good and on one’s relation to it permits him to ask how those conceptions of self have changed over time, as people held to different goods and related to them differently. The bulk of the book is spent on a sweeping exposition of the changes in the self, running from Plato to Augustine to Descartes to Locke to Montaigne to Protestant Christianity to the Victorians to the present. In brief, the transition the Taylor describes is from an external sense of the self to an interior sense of the self. It is also a transition from finding meaning in extraordinary deeds to one that finds meaning in everyday actions.

I am fairly averse to using theory in the practice of history, but I find Taylor’s work to be extraordinarily useful. At the minimum, it provides a set of questions of interest to the historian of religion. How did people conceive of who they were, and how did their religion influence their conceptions? His work also provides a way of thinking about the question of religion and the self. Taylor argues that the self is undefinable apart from the Good, so it follows that religion, which defines the Good and how to relate to it for many people, is a powerful key to understanding people’s sense of self. This is a way to use religion as a lens to another topic, yet without treating religion as something merely epiphenomenal. Then too, Taylor provides a fairly compelling narrative of the differences in the self over time. I suppose that for myself, it is also appealing that Charles Taylor is himself a Catholic, and so is working to some degree within the Christian philosophical tradition.

I hope in time to make all this philosophizing here a bit more concrete in my own work on conversion. Conversion, after all, is a fundamental change in the self, usually taking the form of new relationship to God, the world, and the community. To take just two examples, what is the difference between a seventeenth-century Puritan in New England undergoing the anguish of conversion and a twentieth-century Cuban Catholic in Miami venerating Our Lady of Charity? The difference is one of ritual and creed and community, to be sure, but also of conceptions of the self.

Religious Liberty and the Islamic Community Center

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0000

For some time the news has been filled with debates over a proposed Islamic community center (not a mosque) to be built near Ground Zero in New York City. On the one hand, the usual suspects in the Republican Party and, more surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League, have opposed the center as an insult to the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks. On the other hand, American Muslims have defended the center as a perfectly legitimate outreach into the community, as the Islamic equivalent of the YMCA.

The debate, however, has taken a far nastier turn. Opponents of the community center have attempted to use the power of the state to prevent its construction. One attempt has tried to declare the existing building on the site a landmark, to prevent the property from being developed. Another, only slightly less invidious attempt, has offered state funding if the center would be built further from Ground Zero. (It is worth noting in passing the hypocrisy of politicians and voters who rail against state interference in the economy and society yet have no qualms about using state power to interfere in this case.)

The question at issue is not whether one would wish for an Islamic community center to be built at the proposed location. The question is this: Should the state have the power to prevent the free use of private property for a religious purpose?

The answer is no. If that answer is not obvious, then I recommend Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s August 3 speech and Melissa Rogers’s essay for the Washington Post. That answer is required by the basic principles of our republic and, I believe, by the implications of the gospel. To their shame, it is an answer too few Christians, and in particular too few evangelicals, have been willing to give.

Review of The Lives of David Brainerd

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Grigg, John A. The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 276 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-537237-3.

As John Grigg observes, David Brainerd is second only to Jonathan Edwards in evangelicals’ memory of the Great Awakening. His often-republished diary has been a staple of evangelical devotional literature since Edwards published his Life of Brainerdin 1749. Academic historians take note of Brainerd too, both for his role in the controversies surrounding the Awakening and for his missionary efforts among the Delaware Indians. Grigg’s The Lives of David Brainerd is a history of both Brainerds. The book’s first section contains a careful reconstruction of Brainerd’s life, while the second section examines the memory of Brainerd since his death.

To write his life of Brainerd, Grigg has recovered fragments and leaves of Brainerd’s writings, very little of which is extant. He fills in the details with accounts of Brainerd’s hometown, of Yale, and of other missionary efforts to the Indians. Grigg’s argument is that Brainerd stood uneasily on the boundary between the radical and the moderate supporters of the Great Awakening. Brainerd’s expulsion from Yale was not precipitated solely by his intemperate outbursts against Yale leaders, but was a consequence of Brainerd’s attempt to minister to New Haven’s separatist congregation while trying to receive the imprimatur of a Yale degree. Nor was Brainerd forced into a mission to the Indians because he could not get a ministerial position. Rather, Brainerd turned down two offers of a position to continue his mission. Brainerd intentionally based his missions work on a mix of the radical and moderate Awakening. By the time of his death, Brainerd had mostly learned to shed the racist assumptions of his day and to think of people in terms of religion and not race, identifying himself with “godly Indians” rather than “white heathens.”

Grigg’s history of the memory of Brainerd runs from his death to the late twentieth century. He demonstrates that Jonathan Edwards used his Life of Brainerd as an argument in several debates, presenting Brainerd as an opponent of the enthusiastic excesses of the Awakening, as a denouncer of Arminianism, and as a model of life after conversion for his congregants. John Wesley, on the other hand, did his own editing of Brainerd’s journals to provide a model to itinerant Methodists of a minister who was unmarried, ascetic, a proper steward of money, and inured to hardship. Early nineteenth-century evangelicals, notably William Carey in Britain and Adoniram Judson in the United States, also claimed Brainerd, adding a mythical bethrothal between Brainerd and Jerusha Edwards in support of their belief that missionaries should be married. The student missionary movement at the turn of the twentieth century, led by men such as E. M. Bounds and A. J. Gordon, held up Brainerd as a model of prayer. In the second half of the twentieth century, Brainerd inspired missionaries like Jim Eliot, and also stood as a prototype of the campus radical and the civil rights leaders. Grigg thus uses Brainerd’s to reveal significant changes in American evangelicalism and missions.

This book is a revised dissertation, and readers unaccustomed to the genre will be jarred by the historiographical debates, not all of which have been excised from the main text. Because Grigg is obligated by the scarcity of Brainerd’s writings to turn to other sources, the text occasionally wanders from its topic, as in the needlessly long summary of Edwards’s writings. One wishes that the author had not been so generous with people who made up the versions of Brainerd out of whole cloth as to insist that there runs a “thread of truth beneath the surface” (190) of their fabrications.

Quibbles aside, Grigg’s book is precisely the critical study of Brainerd that has been needed by both historians and evangelicals. As such, it is likely to become the standard work on Brainerd.

The Cultural History of American Fundamentalism: A Review Essay

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Watt, David Harrington. A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

In 1980 George Marsden published Fundamentalism and American Culture, a history of the first decades of American fundamentalism. The book quickly rose to prominence in the historical profession, provoking new studies of American fundamentalism and contributing to a renewal of interest in American religious history. The book’s timing was fortunate, for it was published as a resurgent fundamentalism was becoming active in politics and society. The rise of the Christian right provoked the question: where did the movement come from?^1

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

The historical interpretation of fundamentalism that was then current could not provide an adequate answer. In the standard narrative, fundamentalism was a reaction by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evangelical Christians against modernizations in American society, such as industrialization, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and changes in popular mores. Fundamentalists resented modernization because it clashed with their out-of-date worldview and literal faith in the Bible and Christian doctrine. Within the American denominations, fundamentalists fought modernists in losing battles over doctrines such as the inspiration of the Bible, the creation of the world, and the virgin birth of Jesus, but fundamentalists were eventually driven from their denominations in defeat. Fundamentalists also mounted a bid to retain control of American society, most notably through laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. Their attempt was soundly defeated and ridiculed at the 1925 Scopes trial. After the trial, fundamentalists were demoralized and in retreat, sufficiently marginalized that they could never again make a serious effort to control the nation. By defining fundamentalism as a reaction against modernism, the standard narrative implicitly predicted that fundamentalism would disappear as the United States completed modernizing.

When fundamentalism reappeared in the 1970s, the flaws in that interpretation were revealed. In its place, a new body of historical work, including Marsden’s book, redefined fundamentalism not as evangelicalism reacting against modernism, but as evangelicalism adopting modernism. The first historian to make this argument was Ernest R. Sandeen in The Roots of Fundamentalism. Sandeen saw fundamentalism as a movement descended from American and British evangelicalism with the additions of dispensationalist eschatology and an explicit definition of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. George Marsden expanded on Sandeen’s definition by unpacking the significance of those additions. Dispensationalism divided history and biblical prophecy into a series of eras, or dispensations—a type of scientific classification. By defining biblical inspiration as extending to the very words of Scripture, fundamentalists created a new hermeneutic which treated the Bible as a source of data to be mined and scientifically analyzed. Marsden further observed that fundamentalism added borrowings from the Holiness movement and from Scottish commonsense realism.^2

Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 16-18, 43-71, 80-100, 102-22. Marsden’s helpful definitions of the terms fundamentalism and evangelicalism and their varying usage over time are on pages 234-35. Fundamentalists themselves have put much effort into defining their movement, for example, David O. Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850* (Greenville, SC: Unusual Publications, 1986), 3-12. These definitions tend to be normative rather than descriptive.

The implications of Marsden’s redefinition were radical. He revealed that fundamentalism was not rural, Southern, and pre-modernist, but rather urban, often Northern, and aggressively modern. Its relationship to modernism led to a paradox in fundamentalists’ identity. On the one hand, fundamentalists identified as heirs to the Protestant establishment of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, they saw themselves as displaced from power by a new modernism, though partaking of what they found desirable in it. Marsden’s explication of this paradox had great power to explain fundamentalism’s struggle to control the United States at the same time that they felt alienated from it. Even though Marsden ended his book in the 1930s, his thesis could explain how fundamentalism, moribund after the Scopes trial, could rise again in the 1970s.^3

6-8.

Joel Carpenter extended the history of fundamentalism beyond the 1930s in his book Revive Us Again. Carpenter agreed with Marsden that fundamentalism was not merely a reaction against modernism. Carpenter’s insight was that fundamentalists’ defeat at the Scopes trial did not necessarily mean that fundamentalism retreated after the 1930s. Rather, Carpenter looked at how fundamentalists created their own network of extra-denominational institutions, most notably Bible colleges that turned out thousands of pastors, evangelists, and missionaries. Also important in linking fundamentalists together were publishing houses, radio shows, and Bible and prophecy conferences. In one sense the creation of these networks was a retreat, because fundamentalists increasingly withdrew from “the world” and from liberal denominations, thus forming their own subculture. Still, because most fundamentalists tended to form para-church institutions rather than denominations, one could identify as a fundamentalist and contribute to fundamentalist organizations even while remaining in mainline denominations. Fundamentalists’ withdrawal was driven far more by their theology of separation from the world than by any marginalization at the Scopes trial.^4

American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13-32, 57-75, 124-40. For a study of fundamentalists’ appropriation of modern mass culture, see Douglas Carl Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940* (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).

Even in the period that Carpenter studies, fundamentalists refused to give up their claim to cultural dominance and instead planned for a revival. What was surprising about 1970s fundamentalism, then, was not its strength or its claims to cultural primacy, but the decision of leaders like Falwell to give up withdrawal in favor of political activism. Even political activism, though, was a part of fundamentalists’ heritage. They were heirs to the evangelical reform movements in the nineteenth century, such as temperance, abolition, and benevolence. Fundamentalism was also a way to be modern while critiquing the reformers of the Progressive era. Anti-evolution crusades were, for example, an attempt to defend the doctrine of creation, but they were also critiques of efforts to reform society scientifically, such as eugenics.^5

Legal historian Edward J. Larson took up the study of fundamentalism and anti-evolution in his Pulitzer prize–winning book Summer for the Gods. The book is a history of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, covering both the trial and its aftermath. Larson pointed out that Dayton was not particularly fundamentalist, but that boosters drummed up the trial as a publicity stunt to put their town on the map. The trial might not have turned into a religious showdown until Clarence Darrow, a famous trial attorney who was a public agnostic, and William Jennings Bryan, a politician and leader of the anti-evolution movement, took the case as lead counsel for the defense and the prosecution, respectively. Darrow and Bryan, along with reporters like H. L. Mencken, turned the trial into a cause célèbrethat tested the validity of fundamentalist Christianity, climaxing in Darrow’s questioning of Bryan on the witness stand as an expert on the Bible.^6

Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion* (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 92-93, 101-5, 116-21, 198.

Larson proves that the Scopes trial was not the defeat for fundamentalists that historians have portrayed it as. Indeed, fundamentalists won the trial and took it as encouragement in their crusade. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court used a technicality to avoid fining John Scopes but also to avoid striking down the anti-evolution law, which remained on the books for decades. The rewriting of the history of the Scopes trial into a victory for modernism did not occur for decades, most notably in the writings of Charles Beard and in the Broadway play and film Inherit the Wind, produced in the 1950s as a fictionalized critique of McCarthyism.^7

Larson’s book makes it possible to write a history of fundamentalism that could escape the undue influence of the Scopes trial. For too long, historians have relied on the trial as a milestone marking the periodization of religious history. Because it was extraordinary, the trial is a useful lens for studying American religion, but because it is extraordinary, the trial cannot be taken as typifying the course of fundamentalism. What is needed is a history of fundamentalism that takes the trial into account, yet which refuses to periodize the history of fundamentalism around the mistaken notion that it was a turning point. By doing so, historians can move beyond the narratives of declension and revival into which religious history too often falls.^8

work which purports to displace the Scopes trial as “antievolution’s defining moment” is Michael Lienesch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), which nevertheless spends only two chapters tracing the history of anti-evolution movements after Scopes.

Marsden and Carpenter’s cultural histories provide one way of situating fundamentalism, whether in decline or revival, within American culture. In A Transforming Faith, David Harrington Watt provides a complementary approach. Where Marsden and Carpenter explicate fundamentalists’ distinctive subculture, Watt examines how American culture shapes and controls the culture of fundamentalism. His approach depends on the same definition of fundamentalism as modern, yet it recasts the inquiry in a profitable new way.^9

Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Most histories of fundamentalism, like those of Marsden and Carpenter, have tried to explicate fundamentalism’s subculture. Another fine work in this mode is Randall Herbert Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). A recent book that, like Watt, is more concerned to show how American culture has influenced religious subcultures is Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America* (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Watt examines how a subculture can maintain its identity within a dominant culture, a hegemonic relationship he terms “asymmetrical power.” Watt argues that American fundamentalists since the 1950s, for all their withdrawal from and critiques of American culture, bought into the major characteristics of the dominant culture. Watt begins with an essay on Bill Bright’s evangelistic tract “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” pointing out how the text markets Christianity as a commodity. He extends similar analysis to other parts of evangelism. Evangelical teaching on marriage and the family were often indebted to feminism, while evangelical counseling owed as much to psychology as to the Bible. Evangelical politics bought uncritically into conservative, free market ideas. Watt’s title points to evangelicalism not as a faith that transforms culture, but as a faith that was transforming under culture’s influence.^10

49-154.))

Marsden’s, Carpenter’s, and Watts’s books are cultural histories that attempt to examine fundamentalism as a whole, to come to grips with its essential characteristics while remaining within the particulars of history. A local history that points in a promising direction for new research is Margaret Bendroth’s Fundamentalists in the City. Bendroth’s book is a fine-grained study of fundamentalist congregations, leaders, and events in Boston from the 1880s to the 1950s. Her chapters on Tremont Temple and Park Street Church in particular make good use of demographic data and show a fine sensitivity to the local motivations and methods peculiar to each congregation. Defining fundamentalism as “oppositional” evangelicalism, Bendroth finds that fundamentalists in Boston did not fight primarily against theological liberals, many of whom called Boston and Cambridge home, but rather against Catholics. Fundamentalists’ battles were inextricably linked to local politics, which in Boston were defined by a statehouse controlled by Protestants and a city hall controlled by Catholics. This kind of insight which could not be deduced from a national history is precisely the promise of local histories of fundamentalism. Bendroth’s study also does valuable work in confirming the conclusions of broader studies, for example, by illustrating how Gordon College was a crucial nexus for Boston fundamentalists, and by showing how fundamentalism flourished even in Boston in the periods when it was supposed to have been in decline.^11

Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950* (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3-9, 99, 101-24, 155-76.

Bendroth’s history might well be taken as a model by future historians of fundamentalism, who must fill up the deficit of local histories of fundamentalism. To be sure, there have been many highly particular books on recent fundamentalism. Some of these are exposes, whether as journalism or as memoir. Of more scholarly use are David Watt’s brief ethnographic studies of three Philadelphia congregations in the 1990s, and James M. Ault’s sociological study of a Baptist congregation in 1980s Worcester, Massachusetts. These studies are all recent, though, and they are not histories. What is needed are local studies of fundamentalist congregations or institutions, researched in the tradition of ethnographic history and focusing on the congregants rather than the leaders. If the sources are extant, numerous congregations present themselves as options: J. Frank Norris’s First Baptist Church in Fort Worth; William Bell Riley’s First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, John R. Rice’s Sword of the Lord conferences; A. C. Dixon’s Moody Church in Chicago or Metropolitan Tabernacle in London; and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s Westminster Chapel in London.^12

see Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009). For expose as memoir, see Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007). Schaeffer’s book is notable only for being the most shameless of the ex-fundamentalist memoirs. For a far more sensitive and sympathetic memoir, used as a means of introduction to the history of fundamentalism, see Brett Grainger, In the World But Not of It: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America (New York: Walker, 2008). David Harrington Watt, Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); James M. Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

If the history of fundamentalism could benefit from going local, it could also benefit from going transatlantic. Some of the British connection of fundamentalism are well known, such as the tours in Britain by evangelists from D. L. Moody to Billy Graham. Other known connections include how American fundamentalism imported dispensationalism and the literal interpretation of biblical prophecy from John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, and later imported apologetics and fiction from C. S. Lewis. Some pastors, such as A. C. Dixon, held pulpits in both Britain and United States. Less well known, though, is how British and American Christians interacted on a regular basis, and how fundamentalism in America and conservative evangelicalism in Britain functioned in their different political and cultural circumstances. Some excellent work has been done in tracing evangelicalism in the Anglophone world, most notably the series A History of Evangelicalism, edited by Mark Noll and David Bebbington. A transatlantic study along those lines could free the study of American fundamentalists from what may be invalid assumptions about its peculiar Americanness. Such a transatlantic history would be a return to Ernest Sandeen’s insight that dispensationalist theology could be understood only by linking British and American history.^13

Evangelicalism: The Age of John R. Mott, J. Gresham Machen and Aimee Semple McPherson, to be written by Geoff Treloar, and The Gobal Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott*, to be written by Brian Stanley, will cover the period of American fundamentalism.

Historians of fundamentalism have made many advances since the 1980s. They have dispelled mistaken interpretations of fundamentalism and contributed a great deal of knowledge about the movement’s culture. These gains might be consolidated in a history told finally without dependence on the Scopes trial. And they might be advanced by pursuing further studies fundamentalism in both its local and its transatlantic contexts.

Review of To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Wed, 05 May 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton looks at a series of big questions using the world’s biggest corporation as a lens. Her book is a cultural, not a business, history of Wal-Mart. Rather than chart Wal-Mart’s rise through its innovations in technology, logistics, and business practices, Moreton explains how Wal-Mart adopted and modified the culture in which it was founded. This approach permits analysis of a range of subjects, including gender in the workplace, the rise of a service economy, Christianity and free enterprise, business training in colleges and universities, and business promotion of free enterprise in the United States and abroad. This broad inquiry is motivated by two central questions: How did a discount retailer from the Ozarks become the world’s largest corporation, and what motivates the workers employed by Wal-Mart?

The answer to these questions, according to Moreton, lies in the distinctive culture of the Ozarks. Both Wal-Mart’s customers and its employees went from a subsistence-based agrarian economy to a consumer-oriented service economy while skipping a production-oriented industrial economy. Wal-Mart thus incorporated elements of an agrarian economy into its business and labor practices. The retailer had to convince customers who had long valued frugality to become consumers. Wal-Mart reconciled the competing ideas of consumption and thrift by selling consumer goods at the lowest prices in sparsely decorated stores that let the customers serve themselves, in contrast to the ornateness of full-service city department stores. Wal-Mart also overcame the prejudice of its Ozarks constituents, not many generations removed from the Populists, against corporations. It did so by adopting the corporate structure, which the Populists had themselves adopted, while avoiding the taint of “foreign” capital by raising funds from the Walton family then from other Ozark businessmen.

Like its customers, Wal-Mart’s employees carried over patterns from the agrarian economy. They regarded employment as a way to subsistence, rather than a way to wealth. Many employees, especially women, took jobs at Wal-Mart as a means of supporting a family farm, or of supplementing the family income. Women’s labor at Wal-Mart was undertaken as a “second job” in conjunction with their labor as homemakers and childcare providers. The types of jobs that appealed to women were therefore part-time service position, rather than managerial careers. Work at Wal-Mart was thus highly gendered: women worked as clerks, while men worked as managers. Wal-Mart consciously maintained these distinctions by requiring that managers frequently relocate, and it took advantage of the general undervaluing of women’s labor in order to pay them subsistence wages.

These labor practices, however, were not resented by employees. Rather, they appealed to workers because they reproduced familiar patterns of labor from families. They also appealed to Christian concepts of “servant leadership.” This idea was that through service to others, one became a leader and fulfilled his or her duty to God. The idea was in the first instance applied to personal and church relationships, but was also explicitly applied by Christians to business. Through service to customers and co-workers became a way of turning work for Wal-Mart into work for God.

Moreton’s cultural reading of Wal-Mart is perceptive and nuanced. Nevertheless, it suffers from several problems of interpretation and evidence. First, separating the business history of Wal-Mart from its cultural history leaves the reader unable to evaluate the relative weight to be assigned to cultural and economic causes. Put bluntly, did Wal-Mart really prosper because of its cultural adaptation, or because its goods were plentiful and its prices cheap? A simple test is the observation that Wal-Mart has spread far beyond its rural, Christian roots in the Ozarks; it cannot have profited solely from the customer base described in this book. It might also be pointed out that Wal-Mart, while in part a service industry, is also a mover of industrial goods, and so does not fit so neatly in the category to which Moreton assigns it. Then too, Moreton has a powerful explanation for the appeal of Wal-Mart to workers, but one suspects that economic necessity is at least as powerful a motivation.

Second, the book lacks chronological and geographical specificity. This is not to suggest that this topically arranged book ought to have been cast in a narrative, chronological structure. Rather, within each chapter Moreton cites evidence from many years, without explaining how the highly anecdotal evidence is or is not typical. There is little sense of how Wal-Mart developed over time. At the same time, Moreton cites evidence from stores without placing them in their culture outside of the Ozarks. The effect of this lack of specificity is that the book often casts Wal-Mart as the actor, rather than making it plain who the human actors were behind the corporation.

Third, it is not always plain what the connection is between Wal-Mart and the other institutions whose histories Moreton sketches. These institutions are intended to provide an illuminate the culture around Wal-Mart. A case in point is the sketch of the Fellowship Bible Church in Arkansas. The corporatist, entertainment-centered ministries of the church supposedly demonstrate the connection between Wal-Mart and evangelicalism. But the connection is so loosely drawn (some Wal-Mart executives have attended the church) that any other mega-church might have been substituted. For example, Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago and Saddleback Church in California (pastored by Rick Warren, whose Purpose-Driven Life is sold in Wal-Marts) have much in common with Fellowship Bible Church, yet are in no way typical of the Ozarks. Other than the concept of servant leadership, the connections between Wal-Mart and evangelicalism are not well drawn.

Any book dealing with the combination of conservative Southerners, Wal-Mart shoppers, and evangelical Christians is ripe for scholarly disdain. Moreton has successfully avoided that potential pitfall, instead analyzing her subjects with insight and sympathy. Still, by knitting the three groups together so loosely, Moreton may have unintentionally perpetuated these stereotypical connections without adequate evidence.

Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We’re All Digital Humanists Now

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Digital humanities is a spectrum. To put it another way, all humanities scholars use digital practices and concepts to one degree or another, even those who do not identify as digital humanists. Working as a digital humanist is not one side of a binary, the other side of which is working as a traditional scholar.

Consider a few examples: one historian keeps notes and transcribed documents in MS Word documents so that they can be searched. A literary scholar uses a print-on-demand machine to get a physical copy of a book or newspaper scanned by Google. A medievalist uses a library or archive website to read a document that would otherwise require a trip to Europe. A professor making assignments for a class posts readings to Blackboard. A graduate student in a hurry uses Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature to verify a footnote. A history department circulates papers for a workshop via e-mail.

These examples are all done by scholars every day. The examples are unremarkable: using these methods does not imply that the scholar works in the digital humanities. They are unremarkable, though, because they are ubiquitous.

Moving from these practices to the digital humanities is a difference of degree, not of kind. It’s only one step from searching Word documents to using Zotero, and from there it is only a few more steps to text mining. A scholar who uses online digital collections is that much closer to curating an online collection, perhaps using Omeka.net. A professor who can post readings to Blackboard can create a course website using WordPress. Circulating papers for comment via e-mail might be a second cousin to posting your manuscript online for comment, but the two types of review are related.

My argument that all scholars now use digital practices to some degree is not to miss how the digital humanities fundamentally transform scholarship. I’m simply arguing that we’re already being transformed—all of us.

Defining digital humanities as a spectrum might help resolve one of the contradictions I see in discussion of the digital humanities. On the one hand, these discussions often lament the barriers between digital scholars and traditional scholars, with worries about how new scholarship can be recognized as valid and how digital humanists can be tenured. I do not want to minimize these concerns at all; they are some of the pressing problems of the digital humanities. But the solution to these problems is not a rhetoric of binary. I think the answer will come from what is, on the other hand, digital humanities’ ethos of inclusion. It’s the ethos that says, I’m a coder and you’re not, so let me teach you, or let me build the tools you need. It’s the ethos that says texts and tools should be available for all and that publicly funded research and instruction should be publicly accessible.

This concept of a spectrum can turn the ethos of inclusion into a tool of persuasion. Does someone question whether digital humanities work counts as scholarship? Demonstrate how the work advances or refines techniques implicit in more traditional scholarship. Does a scholar doubt the value of identifying as a digital humanist? Point out how that scholar is already using digital methods and concepts.

In other words: we’re all digital humanists now. Persuading other scholars of that is a way to spread what is best in the ethos of digital humanities.

What Would Jesus Do? A Parable About Copyright

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Have you heard the saying “What would Jesus do?” Who hasn’t? In the 1990s the phrase became a fad among evangelical Christians, who printed the abbreviation WWJD? on bracelets, t-shirts, and posters, spawning in turn a host of mocking pop culture imitations. WWJD can provide a useful lens for looking at evangelical consumer culture of the late twentieth century. But the phrase can also serve as a parable about contemporary copyright law.

The phrase “What would Jesus do?” originated in a novel titled In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, published in 1897 by Charles M. Sheldon. Sheldon was a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas, and a Progressive concerned with Christianity’s relationship to the social politics of his day. His book is a parable about the Reverend Henry Maxwell, a minister to a wealthy middle-class congregation. Maxwell comes into contact with a poor man who owes his plight to industrialization, and is thereby jarred from his complacency about social issues. He challenges his congregation to seriously consider the question “What would Jesus do?” in all their actions. As his congregation takes up the challenge, their views on politics, class, race, charity, and corporations fall in line with the social gospel.

The long reach of Sheldon’s In His Steps was due in large part to its message, which appealed to both mainline and evangelical Christians, and to its simple though not particularly literary prose. But its long reach was also due to a simple mistake by Sheldon’s publisher: the book was never properly copyrighted.

In the 1890s, copyright was opt-in, not opt-out. In order for a book to be copyrighted, the publisher had to register it with the federal government. Chicago Advance, Sheldon’s publisher, incorrectly registered the copyright, and so the book was available in the public domain. Many publishers issued their own editions of In His Steps, which sold widely. About the sales of the book, Paul Boyer writes:

Owing to a defect in the copyright, sixteen different publishers soon had editions of the book in the market, and by the summer of 1897, 100,000 copies had been sold. And this was merely the beginning. While Sheldon’s own later estimate of 30,000,000 sales is overdrawn, Frank L. Mott, tabulator and chronicler of American best-sellers, suggests that a figure of 6,000,000 for total world sales would probably not be far amiss, with perhaps 2,000,000 of these in the United States.

To be sure, In His Steps would not have been a bestseller simply because of a mistake in the copyright registration. Sixteen publishers would not have issued the book unless it appealed to the reading public. Nor can the resurgence of WWJD? in the 1990s be attributed to the book’s being in the public domain—by that time the book would have long been out of copyright no matter what. And it is worth noting that the book was a bestseller: the failure of copyright registration did not mean that the book was available for free, just that Sheldon made hardly any royalties from it. Even today, the book is available for purchase in many editions, though it is available free from several sources.

But would the explosive sales and long-standing popularity of Sheldon’s In His Steps have been possible if the book had been subject to, say, the Copyright Act of 1976, or the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, or, worse, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? If the point of copyright is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing forlimited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” perhaps there is something to be learned from the case of Charles Sheldon and his novel—a fitting parable for a Progressive reformer, indeed.

Review of Prodigal Nation

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Murphy, Andrew R. Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 232 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-532128-9.

Most Americans do not know the word jeremiad, but it is a familiar term to scholars of early American religion. To them the term indicates a type of sermon preached in seventeenth-century New England. These sermons lamented that New England had broken the covenant with God made by its founders. If New England continued its decline, God’s judgment loomed, but if New England repented, then it would receive God’s blessing. But even if most Americans do not know the term jeremiad, they are probably familiar with the genre. In sermons or political speeches, they have heard the idea that America is a Christian nation that has disobeyed God and so faces divine judgment. The old genre of the jeremiad is still very much a part of American discourse.

In his recent book, Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy has done much to advance our understanding of the American jeremiad. In the first part of the book, he gives the history of three jeremiads: the Puritan Jeremiad in the seventeenth-century, the jeremiads before and during the Civil War, and the jeremiads of the Christian Right from the 1970s to the present. Murphy’s book is the first work (to my knowledge) to study the jeremiad over the entire scope of American history. Murphy has not written the whole history of the jeremiad—he leaves out revolutionary America, the early republic and the War of 1812, most of the jeremiads of the South, and the entire century between the Civil War and the 1960s—but by considering the jeremiad over the long term, Murphy has given us a better understanding of the genre than can be gained from examining it in only one period.

In the second part of the book, Murphy analyzes the American jeremiad with the tools of a political scientist. He cogently argues that there are two American jeremiads, which he terms the traditionalist jeremiad, and the progressive jeremiad. The traditionalist jeremiad, which is typically religious, calls for a return to the literal past through repentance and renewed obedience. This type of rhetoric, which could be stereotyped as a sermon preached from 2 Chronicle 7:14 in November or July, most obviously fits the genre of the jeremiad. But Murphy also identifies a progressive jeremiad. That jeremiad, which is typically secular, calls not for a literal return to the past but for a renewal of America’s past ideals. For example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech called for a return to the ideals of racial equality implicit in the Declaration of Independence, the “text” for his sermon.

Identifying a particular jeremiad as traditional or progressive can be difficult, given the constant realignments of conservatism and liberalism in American political history. But by pointing out that two competing rhetorical traditions share the same genre, and thus some of the same basic assumptions, Murphy has provided a key insight into American politics and religion, both present and historical. Perhaps that insight can contribute to refuting the false assumptions of the jeremiad tradition, and to bridging the increasing gap between conservatives and liberals in political discourse.

Review of The Metaphysical Club

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0000

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. 546 pages. ISBN: 0374528497.

Most self-described intellectuals have joined a discussion club at some time or another. Though a few intellectual clubs have left their mark, such as the Holy Club of John and Charles Wesley or the Inklings of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein, most groups disband, leaving behind few records and even less influence. Scarcely any informal gathering of intelligentsia can claim to have promulgated a new philosophy that remade a nation.

But that influence is what Louis Menand claims for the Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872. Started by Chauncey Wright, a brilliant, talkative, but shiftless philosopher of science, the club claimed as members Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce, among others. Their name was a joke, though a bitter one, for the members all hated metaphysics. The record of the club is scanty—it is mentioned only in a letter by James and an unpublished work by Peirce—and its life short, but from that circle of thinkers originated pragmatism. By his title Menand means not just the club proper but all the connections among the pragmatists. For example, the fourth member of the broader club is John Dewey, who was a boy in New Hampshire during the club’s existence but who later showed the influence of pragmatism.

The idea that a club of intellectuals could have such broad influence is thrilling (at least, for intellectuals), but Menand traces their influence back to a more fundamental and pervasive cause: the Civil War. Though the Civil War caused few changes in government compared to, say, the English Civil War, it did give rise to the new philosophy of pragmatism. Menand’s thesis is that in shattering the lives of Americans, the Civil War shattered not just the ideas that provoked the war but the very idea of what ideas are.

Pragmatism’s definition is familiar, and in defining it Menand does not break any new ground. The Civil War proved to pragmatists that ideas can fail, and had. Only ideas that worked, as judged by society, could claim to be true. To put it metaphysically, as the pragmatists would not, ideas have no independent ontological reality; to quote Menand, “Ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves” (xi).

Menand’s genius is his ability to explain pragmatism though biography. Most of the book describes the lives of Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey. Each is the subject of a major section of the book; only the last section deals topically with pragmatism’s implications. Menand describes a host of other thinkers too: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Chauncey Wright, Louis Agassiz, Learned Hand, W. E. B. DuBois, and Franz Boas, to name just a few. He argues implicitly that pragmatism cannot be understood apart from the lives of the pragmatists. Menand’s method fits the pragmatists, for they thought ideas were not higher metaphysical reality but a means of managing life.

Menand’s sketch of Holmes is perhaps his best, and so it is a suitable example of his method. Holmes rejected the anti-abolitionism of his father and broke Harvard College’s regulations so that he could join the Union Army—he volunteered to serve an idea. That idea produced horrific consequences, however, as Holmes experienced war’s suffering. Holmes’s friend Henry Livermore Abbott proved his valor despite being an open Copperhead, and Holmes concluded that one could do his duty divorced from his ideas. Menand brilliantly reconstructs how Holmes reconsidered his philosophy in a hospital after being wounded at Ball’s Bluff; Holmes concluded that he needed no religion and forsook his former beliefs. Holmes was reacting against the war but also against transcendentalism and abolitionism—the ideas that caused it. Menand concludes, “The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence” (61). Holmes famously wrote, “In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire,” and Menand has showed how.

Menand demonstrates how the lives of the other philosophers provoked their philosophies too. He marshals in support such disparate episodes as James’s expedition to Brazil with celebrity scientists Louis Agassiz, Peirce’s testimony about probability in a cause célèbre over a forged will, and Dewey’s struggles with New Hampshire transcendentalism and Hegelianism. Since Holmes was the only one who fought in the Civil War, Menand’s connection between war and the Metaphysical Club is clearest with him, but he extends the connection to his other three main subjects too.

Pragmatism influenced many fields, but Menand seems to cover them all. In discussing Supreme Court justice Holmes, Menand explains the influences of his philosophy on his jurisprudence. Holmes argued that law was not what judges discover but what judges make it. Holmes thus tried to preserve individuals’ right, lest the certitude of any group destroy the nation. He also favored judicial restraint, on the theory that judges could be no more certain of justice than the legislatures. A large part of Menand’s book is given to discussing science and mathematics. He finds mathematical principles of statistics and probability, such as the law of errors, to have been an important influence on Pierce’s pragmatism. Another area that science influenced was racism. Menand’s explanations of the different theories of monogenism and polygenism and how evolution led to racism are among the more enlightening parts of his book. Menand also touches on religion in relation to James’s famous The Varieties of Religious Experience, education in relation to Dewey’s attempts at educational reform, and academic freedom in relation to Dewey’s involvement with the American Association of University Professors.

If any criticism can be made of Menand’s work, it is that his pragmatists are too similar. I do not mean that his biographical sketches are the same—they are all masterful—but that his pragmatists hold essentially similar philosophies. Their similarities, however, did not preclude philosophical differences. Menand points out, for example, that James was willing to give place to religion so long as that idea worked for the individual, but Holmes could make no room for religion. What Menand does not point out is that Dewey had real differences with Holmes, James, and Peirce: first, he never completely shook off his early Hegelianism, and second, he lived so much longer into the twentieth century than the others that he was subjected to a great many different influences.

But to pursue this criticism too far is to mistake Menand’s purpose. Menand never purports to offer a nuanced philosophical discussion of pragmatism (and the reader is doubtless grateful). Rather he seeks to explain historically how the Civil War changed how Americans thought about ideas. At that he has succeeded.