Page 2115 – Christianity Today (2024)

It’s surprising that there hasn’t yet been a biopic of Ronald Reagan, one of the most-loved Presidents in U.S. history. But that’s about to change, thanks in much part to a pair of Christian producers in Hollywood.

Ralph Winter (X-Men and Fantastic Four movies) and Mark Joseph are co-producing the film, simply titled Reagan. An actor has not yet been chose to play the part, but speculation has already begun here.

Joseph, who worked on Ray, Holes, and The Passion of The Christ, says that much of the tone and script will be based on two Reagan biographies by historian Paul Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Triumph Over Communism.

Joseph tells CT that “it’d be impossible not to” focus on Reagan’s spirituality, given the source material of those two books. “You can’t understand Reagan if you don’t understand where he came from. . . . Kengor went to the church Reagen grew up in and asked to see the sermons he would have heard as a child. They were in the basem*nt, and previous Reagan biographers hadn’t exactly kicked down the door to read them.

“Those sermons, a book he read as a child called That Printer of Udell’s, and the influence of his mother Nelle set him on a course for, as he might have said, a rendezvous with destiny. It would be impossible to understand Reagan without understanding his spiritual roots.

“At the same time, we balance that with Kengor’s other book, The Crusader, which is about foreign policy intrigue and the nuts and bolts of how Reagan accomplished what he did. Taken together, the two books address both the spiritual and the temporal.”

Jonas McCord wrote the script despite not being a gung-ho Reagan fan. “I was of the opinion that at best he was a bad actor and at worst a clown,” McCord told The Hollywood Reporter. But after doing his research, McCord saw the possibilities.

Joseph defended his choice of writers: “Jonas wasn’t a rah-rah Republican. But over time he came to understand what a consequential man and president Ronald Reagan was. He came to the material open minded. And when I sent him to Reagan’s old haunts in Dixon, Illinois, and Eureka College he discovered a deeper appreciation for the man. But I’m not afraid to have people involved who may not be dyed-in-the-wool fans but nonetheless appreciate the man and his contributions. But ultimately it’s my job to make sure the film stays true to who he was and lives up to the expectations filmgoers will have.”

McCord told The Hollywood Reporter that Reagan’s childhood was like “a surreal Norman Rockwell painting with his alcoholic Catholic father, devout Christian mother, Catholic brother and ever-changing boarders the family took in.”

Joseph says he was drawn to the project because Reagan “lived a fascinating life and he looms large over the American landscape in ways that we don’t even think about. He was also an enigmatic person. His official biographer called him ‘inscrutable.’ All of which makes for a great movie. There are very few stories that have near 100 percent name recognition and this is one of those special American stories.

“He was much more than a President to a lot of people like me. He was one of the only public figures who didn’t let my generation down. I came from a generation of the anti-hero: Nixon had Watergate, Carter had malaise. Religious leaders like Swaggart and Bakker couldn’t live up to what they professed. But Reagan never wavered.”

The only thing close to a Reagan biopic so far was a 2003 TV miniseries, The Reagans. That less-than-reverent project, starring James Brolin as the President (pictured at left), was supposed to air on CBS, but a controversy over alleged left-wing bias erupted, and it was shifted to Showtime instead, and seen by only 1.2 million people, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Only in Hollywood could you make an insulting, condescending movie about a much-loved historical figure,” Joseph told The Hollywood Reporter. “Hire an actor who loathed the man. Watch it flop and then somehow conclude that Americans don’t want to see a movie about him. I watched Americans line up and wait for 10 hours for the simple privilege of passing by his closed casket. They loved this man.”

Brolin disagreed with Joseph’s assessment of the miniseries, and says he admired Reagan: “He’s literally our best icon in recent years. He represented America quite well. There were some clandestine things going down, but for the most part I think he was a good president.”

Fans of Bella and Juno will be glad to welcome Expecting Mary, another film showing how an unexpected pregnancy can lead to a happy ending. This time around the mom-to-be is Mary (Olesya Rulin), a 16-year-old runaway; she is headed for California and her dad who, she thinks, will be more understanding and “cool” than her uptight mom.

“I’m only having it because they [her mom and stepdad] don’t want me to,” she tells another character. Is that because of financial pressures, and too many mouths to feed? No, Mary replies, her parents are rich, and “could afford to feed twenty more mouths.” Mary has spent her life in fancy boarding schools while her parents traveled the world. The pregnancy is unacceptable to them because it is an embarrassment, considering their social circle. “They said, ‘Come home, have an abortion, we’ll say it was appendicitis.'” Instead, she ran away.

A kindly truck driver, Horace (Elliott Gould), gives her a lift, and wants to know if he can ask a “personal question.” With a sigh, she rattles off the basics—16, unwed, eight months pregnant. Horace says no, what he was going to ask was, “Do you like polka music?” He pops in an 8-track tape to introduce her to what he calls “the happiest music on earth.” Mary has met the first in a long line of charmingly kooky folks who are going to impact her life in various ways all the way through the child’s birth.

In New Mexico, Horace suggests that they stop to eat at the casino where his where girlfriend is a showgirl. It turns out to be a small and shopworn place, run by “the last of the Kaiyute Indians,” Lillian Littlefeather (Lainie Kazan), a plump old dame who sprinkles her conversation with Yiddish. Horace’s girl is Darnella (Linda Gray), who, with fellow troupers Shar D’onnay and Crystal Lite, make up the “Kaiyute Kai-yuties.” Horace tells Mary that Darnella was once the girlfriend of Frank Sinatra, and that it was Frank who gave her that nifty green Thunderbird. The Kai-yuties stroll across the stage wearing (fairly modest) red outfits, and bulky Christmas-tree headdresses dotted with blinking lights.

It will come as no surprise that Mary is going to hit some detours, and meet some interesting characters, before getting to her dad’s door. She lingers in the little town, sleeping on the sofa at Darnella’s place and getting to know the other residents of the trailer park. There’s a batty old gal, Annie (Cloris Leachman), who is all about pigs—pig clothing, pig shoes, a pink piggy paint job for her trailer—and who raises pigs in the small enclosure around her trailer. When local kids yell and try to frighten the critters, she fires rock salt at them from a shotgun. There’s also the very grumpy owner of the trailer park, Doris (Della Reese), who takes every opportunity to shoot down Darnella’s optimism. Darnella has an agent, a loopy guy portrayed by Fred Willard, and he’s as watchable and funny here as he is in similar roles in Christopher Guest movies.

Eventually we do get to meet Mary’s dad (played by Gene Simmons of KISS), and her ice-queen mom (Cybill Shepherd, being a very good sport as the butt of some hearty slapstick in a later scene). Plenty of colorful chaos ensues before it all comes together for a thoughtful and moving conclusion.

If this sounds like the kind of movie you like, you won’t be disappointed. Personally, I went into it with some skepticism. The setup sounded too artificial to me—all the pointedly quirky characters and deliberately oddball touches. It sounded too calculated. As I watched, I felt like it just wasn’t coming together. The parade of kooky details didn’t seem like authentic, organic elements of the characters’ personalities. Nor did the characters link convincingly to each other. The action felt centerless. This is a large ensemble cast, with eight main roles besides that of Mary; the venerable actors filling those roles each get their turn in the spotlight, and each gives a fine performance. But they don’t seem to really be part of each other’s lives.

Perhaps the weakness of the center has something to do with the character of Darnella, who is the link for everyone else. She’s presented as a figure of sweet simplicity, but something more dynamic could have forged a stronger link—a character less wistful and good, more boisterous and fallible, perhaps. As it is, some of Darnella’s comments, intended to signal childlike simplicity, come across as just inane. When Mary notes that her trailer is already decorated for Christmas (it’s Thanksgiving), Darnella says she never takes the lights down because “The Christmas spirit is just so nice. It’s a shame to save it for Christmas.” I try to imagine how Bette Midler might have said such a line.

The generation-gap casting is curious, too: apart from young Olesya Rulin (who is great as Mary), the eight other main characters are portrayed by actors ranging in age from 60 to 84. When I first looked over the notes for the movie, I wondered if it was a vehicle designed to give Baby Boomers an opportunity to play colorful and (hopefully) memorable characters. But, actually, all but two of this crowd are too old to qualify as Boomers. Cloris Leachman is 84; Della Reese is 79; Linda Gray, who portrays Darnella, is 70. She looks great for her age, but there is something about a 70-year-old showgirl that is unsettling, even in theory.

Surely some of the names attached to this movie would flinch at hearing it described as “pro-life,” but a film that depicts, in literally glowing fashion, the transcendent goodness of giving life, can’t be described another way. The bottom line is, audiences like it when pregnant characters give birth. A movie about a character in Mary’s shoes, who had an abortion instead, would be a downer. We seem to be pre-set to cheer for babies to make it out of the womb alive. As movies like Juno, Bella, and now Expecting Mary show, it’s becoming increasingly possible to present such pro-birth stories on screen. May there be many more.

Talk About It

1. Darnella says, “I don’t believe in death. I think we just take off our spacesuits.” What do you think she means by that? Do you agree?
2. Mary’s birth takes place in an unusual setting, one which, at one time, might have been thought disrespectful. Why does it seem more acceptable today? Are there other examples in this movie of things we now are free to laugh about, but were once considered off-limits?
3. Darnella tells Mary that we must love someone “with an open hand.” This recalls a quote from Khalil Gibran, “If you love somebody, let them go.” Does this seem true, to you? Are there situations in which it is right to take the opposite, and fight to preserve a relationship? Do we find references to either kind of love in the Scriptures?

The Family Corner

Expecting Mary is rated PG for thematic elements involving teen pregnancy, and some language. The language is mild, and the scene in the casino is fairly tame, and the only evident gambling is a slot machine.

Photos © WonderStar Productions.

Copyright © 2010 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The pampered lives of modern baseball players, evinced by octuple-digit salaries, private jet travel, and clubhouses seemingly designed by Sardanapalus, appear otherworldly to us mortal fans today—how much more so the hard-scrabble players and rough-tongued fans of 125 years ago! Indeed, the portrait that Edward Achorn offers in Fifty-Nine in ’84 depicts not only the realm of professional baseball but also the sociological vistas of the urbanizing East and Middle West of America in the “Gilded Age” as places of grim, deterministic, and cruel forces at work.

Providence, Rhode Island, the hometown of the 1884 NL pennant-winning Grays and their yeoman pitcher and protagonist Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn, features here as Deadwood on the Atlantic—criminals, prostitutes, corruption, desecration of land and water in the pursuit of wealth. The players themselves are a variety of ill-educated, hard-drinking, womanizing warriors, out for blood both on and off the field, with the occasional oddly placed Ivy Leaguer toiling for tuition money. (One of the best incidentals in the book is the story of Lee Richmond, who—in 1881, pitching for the Worcester NL club—sandwiched his Friday afternoon commencement from Brown University with a four-hit shutout of Cleveland on Thursday and the first perfect game in major league history on Saturday!)

But the best part about this travelogue of the 1884 Grays is that Radbourn himself doesn’t fit the easy categories of either his time or his profession. It’s not that he was a gentleman (though his parents had recently arrived from Bath, England, where his father had worked as a gardener at a manor) or educated (near the book’s end, Achorn points out that Radbourn’s contract dealings were hampered insofar as he was “a poor reader at best” and “could not write”), nor was he particularly scrupulous (he seems to have put his own interests ahead of the team’s when disgruntled over the rivalry with the Gray’s 1884 rookie pitching phenom Charlie Sweeney). But he was downright progressive in financial and labor matters against overwhelming management oppression, so much so that a reporter called him “sort of an anarchist” (think Curt Flood). Unlike the typically spendthrift players of the day, he invested his money back in his off-season hometown of Bloomington, Illinois, and actually married his boardinghouse-keeper companion, Carrie Stanhope, near the end of his short life to assure her of financial security (he appears to have died at age 42 from syphilis contracted from Carrie, whose scratch-and-claw story is related as a somewhat forced subplot of Achorn’s narrative). In an 1880s America living explicitly by Darwin’s dictates, not only in baseball (where the Chicago Whitestockings’ notorious cheater Mike Kelly pointed out that “self-preservation is the law of the land”) but also in politics and business, Radbourn cut an off-kilter figure, his self-interests strangely shading toward altruism.

And the outlandish 1884 season! Old Hoss wasn’t even the Grays’ best pitcher for the first half of the season: that was Charlie Sweeney, already an alcoholic at the tender age of 21 (and later to be imprisoned for murdering his mob employer in his hometown, San Francisco). Sweeney betrayed the team at mid-season to jump to the outlaw Union Association for more money—he was one of many National Leaguers to do so, despite the NL’s policy of lifelong banishment. (My own hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan, makes a dubious entry in the narrative as the site, during an exhibition game in August of ’84, where three Cleveland players openly defected to the Union Association Cincinnati squad, then had the gumption to force their revenue-minded Cleveland manager to pay them an extra $10 each to play their final game!) Radbourn himself had been suspected of already cutting a deal with the Union Association (he was one of the few superstar pitchers of the NL, having won a then-record 48 games in 1883), but after Sweeney’s defection, Old Hoss agreed to an improbable bargain: he would get Sweeney’s salary alongside his own, and receive his free-agency at the end of the season, IF he would pitch virtually every day until the Grays clinched their first pennant.

The heart of the narrative is that aching, relentless, money-and-pride-and-grit- driven task. Certainly the rules were different (the pitcher could take a couple of steps forward before releasing the ball, and he was throwing from a box only 50 feet from home plate), but the circ*mstances were in some ways more demanding for the hurler. (The virtually barehanded status of both catcher and fielders—catchers wore a thin, close-fitting glove that covered the palm only, catching the ball with their unprotected fingers—made passed balls and errors the bane of good pitchers, especially the hardest throwers.) Radbourn threw sidearm, shunning the new rule of 1884 allowing for overhand tosses, which Sweeney and other young guns had mastered—to the detriment of their arm health—and the descriptions of his “skillful strategic pitching,” with multiple delivery angles, an arsenal of junk pitches, and a willingness to let his fielders handle chances (he has the lowest career strikeout total of any pitcher with more than 300 wins), make Radbourne sound like an ancestral Greg Maddux or Spaceman Bill Lee (though with a demeanor closer to Steve Carlton or maybe Oil Can Boyd).

The numbers, as so often in baseball history, tell their own poetic story. In 39 games from late July to late September, the pennant-stretch then as now, Radbourne pitched all but three games (22 straight from August 21 on), and his record during that two-month span was 30-4, with one save (a recent emendation of the Sabremetricians) and one game ending in a darkness-induced tie (which led the New York crowd to rush the umpire, a Providence reserve player, in a mob assault!). Radbourn pitched and won every game for a month, which Achorn well asserts is “perhaps the greatest feat in baseball history.” No physical freak, Radbourn could barely lift his arm on the morning of the pennant-clinching game at Chicago’s Lake Front Park: a late September day, whipped by chilling winds (the cold, blustery weather all summer, caused by the ash cloud aftermath of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, is another quirky subplot). Fortified by a few shots of proto-Cortisone whiskey, and working in the (almost literal) shadow of the high canvas right field fence only 196 feet (!) down the right-field line, Hoss junk-balled the intimidating Whitestockings and won his fifty-fifth game of the year, securing the pennant for Providence. Achorn offers this culmination in a gripping inning-by-inning account, and any Chicagoan reading along might be stunned by déjà vu when seeing the quote from the Tribune the next morning: “‘The Chicago ball team is made up largely of cripples, bums and bigheads.”

Radbourn had achieved all his aims, financial and professional and otherwise, the moment the pennant was clinched. Yet Achorn again shows the quirkiness of the man behind the fierce mustache: Radbourn went on to take his turn in the rotation time and again, winning four more games to finish the season at 59-12, then pitching and dominating in the first World Series, when Providence crushed the New York club of the rival American Association. The New York Times offered this consummate judgment: “Radbourne was an insurmountable obstacle for the Metropolitans.”

And then the grim finale, in which Achorn’s two protagonists meet for a last reckoning: Radbourn the stoic, worn down by rough-and-tumble forces of the burgeoning republic. His body aged and ravaged by the demands of his harsh trade, the syphilis so rife in urban settings destroying his sight and mind, and the startling financial reverses of the 1890s economic downturn (well, some things don’t change, perhaps) all conspired to take the proud man from the height of fame and craftsmanship to his grave in little more than a decade. And though America has smoothed over many rough edges in the century and a quarter since, with the American pastime following suit, the sense of struggle and desperation endure, and grit still captures the imagination, if not always the pennant. Edward Achorn has opened a chapter of the past that reveals an almost accidental hopefulness in a vastly fallen world. Take and read, but beware: shooting pains in your pitching shoulder may result!

Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Copyright © 2010 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Yesterday Leadership Network hosted their very popular online conference “The Nines.” 6 minute videos ran all day featuring church leaders discussing “game changing” insights. Skye Jethani, senior editor of Leadership Journal and Out of Ur, used his 6 minutes to highlight a turning point in his ministry when he realized much of what we do “inoculates” people to the gospel because we emphasize living FOR God rather than living WITH him.

Baylor University alum David Crowder loves his Bears – so much that he wrote something of a fight song, “Rise Up,” for his alma mater’s football team, which will take the field to the playing of the song at every home game this season.

Crowder had seen some of the team’s commercials over the summer, which had the theme of “rise up.” He went to sleep one night, and woke up the next day with the song in his head.

“I don’t want to talk about Manifest Destiny,” he told Baylor, “but I woke up the next morning and I’m sort of in a dream state with this song in its entirety. Later in the day I remember I had a song in my head when I woke up, and I started talking to a guy I work with. I said I feel like I had a dream, something about Baylor football, and I started reciting lyrics to it. About halfway through, I go, ‘This is a good song. I gotta go, I gotta record it quick before it disappears.’ So that day I recorded it and sent it to some folks in the athletic department, and they got pretty excited. I was already excited, so we went ahead and polished it up.”

At last Saturday’s opener, the 42,821 fans in attendance heard the song, and the Bears rose up and whipped Sam Houston State, 34-3.

The song is now available for listening and downloading.

Freedove, born in New Orleans and now living in New York, recently released a single, “The One,” with proceeds to benefit Gulf relief efforts after the summer oil spill.

“It’s a message of hope for the world,” she told CT in an e-mail. “All proceeds from sales will go to Gulf relief efforts. I am hoping that more people will learn about the song and help the cause. It truly is a labor of love for my hometown.”

The single can be heard on her MySpace page.

The Adopting God

Thank you, Christianity Today and Russell Moore, for shedding light on the responsibility—and opportunity—of adoption [“Abba Changes Everything,” July]. When God chose adoption as the means by which he would save us, he knew fully what it would cost him: incarnation and crucifixion. Having made us his children, he left us in a world of orphans, exhorting us to imitate him (Eph. 5:1). What more obvious, explicit way could we do so than by rescuing forsaken children?

Ron OgdenWinona Lake, Indiana

As the parent of two adopted children and the director of a poverty relief agency, I would tweak Moore’s mandate that “every Christian is called to care for orphans.” Every Christian is called to help the poor, of which orphans are but one subset. Depending on gifts and resources, all members of the body need to engage with the least of these: the hungry, the fatherless, and the imprisoned. To do so will push us past the “carnal sameness” that Moore rails against and let the church model unity in diversity.

Marianne Haver HillPacoima, California

As the parent of eight kids between ages 10 and 15—five of whom were once orphans in another country—adoption is of course heavy on our hearts. It is so hard to explain to others why we do what we do. Many say that we are either saintly or crazy. Yet how could we not? Jesus loved us enough to bring us into his family. We are only following his commands.

When people ask if we are done adopting, our response is generally “no” or “we shall see,” even though we have no idea how we would afford another adoption. But God provides, and this is his journey. We are just grateful to be on it.

Christy OswaldLuxemburg, Wisconsin

Original Jew for Jesus

My wife and I spent ten rather fruitless years in Bangladesh. In 1972, as a furloughing missionary at Trinity Seminary, I was looking for an innovative methodology to help our team bring Muslims to Christ. Our textbooks, authored by Fuller professors, provided a theoretical basis for hope. But we lacked concrete examples where contextualization actually worked in reaching Muslims.

Enter Moishe Rosen [“An Evangelist with Chutzpah” (Online version),” July], who provided our team with the boldness to strike out into uncharted territory. Yes, Rosen had huge feet of clay. But I salute him as one whose footprints lie heavily on the worldwide harvesting of Muslims into the kingdom.

Phil Parshall, SIM Missionary at Large Charlotte, North Carolina

I knew Moishe Rosen for 50 years. As a new Gentile believer in Christ, I was drawn to him because he was a Hebrew Christian. He encouraged me to leave my secular career to become a missionary in East Africa for 32 years. I simply cannot imagine my life apart from the influence of this remarkable man.

“An Evangelist with Chutzpah” includes the blanket statement that Moishe said “friendship evangelism is no evangelism at all.” I recall Moisheɳaying that friendship evangelism didn’t work for him, because most Jews reject friendship with Jewish Christian believers who always want to talk about Jesus as Messiah. He believed that Jews more readily accept Gentile Christian friendships and conversations.

Darwin DunhamMinneola, Florida

Lying for Christ?

CT’s July editorial [“Bearing True Witness“] was excellent. Embellishing conversion stories dismisses God’s actual activity in our lives as inadequate and misrepresents him terribly. And many of the embellished stories similar to Ergun Caner’s only play to our culture’s anti-Muslim bias. An embellishing Western Christian knows he will have a sympathetic audience because so many listeners already believe the worst about non-Christians.

Dave DaubertChicago, Illinois

CT’s editorial reminded me of a woman at a recent writers’ workshop who wanted help turning a phrase into an exciting conversion narrative to submit in a writing contest. The phrase? After a near-accident, her husband muttered, “Thank God we weren’t hurt.” Surely a wordsmith could make the incident sound spectacular, indeed, prize-worthy.

Stories of miracle healings and escapes from abuse and addiction get the book contracts and movie scripts. Stories of God helping someone care for a long-term invalid, turn the other cheek when maligned, or continue to trust him when accidents happen don’t make the front page. We no longer see God at work in the ordinary, looking only for the spectacular to assure ourselves that he is with us.

Katie Funk WiebeWichita, Kansas

Real Conversion

I was surprised to see CT print a favorable review of Sara Miles’s books [“Real Presence,” July]. However, I wanted to learn more about her conversion, so I read Take This Bread and Jesus Freak. I came away with a great admiration for her as a person and a writer. Though John Wilson noted that an acknowledgment of sin was missing from Miles’s conversion story, he negleced to add the weightier issue of repentance. Miles likes to focus on Scripture that suits her and disregard the rest. Of course, she is free to proclaim her message. But I can’t understand why a Christian magazine would draw attention to such an unorthodox view. In the future, I’d like to see more editorial discernment.

Annie ReynoldsNorth Kingstown, Rhode Island

Yes, Miles’s conversion story leaves something to be desired. But I rebel against the idea that we can never learn anything from a person or book because it is imperfect. Is our faith so immature that we dare not expose ourselves to those who come down differently on certain issues? I’m no Greek philosopher, but I have learned much from Socrates. All truth is God’s truth. Take what is good, leave the rest.

Charles BogleE-mail

What got the most comments in July’s CT

27%Real Presence Review of Sara Miles by John Wilson

20%Abba Changes Everything by Russell Moore

13% An Evangelist with Chutzpah (Online version) by Ruth A. Tucker

Readers’ response to “Real Presence”

12% Yay

88% Nay

Worth Repeating

“We tend to fixate on ‘getting it right’ instead of risking, trusting, and making decisions that require faith in God’s reckless goodness.”Jeff Stull, on the negative impact of the church’s dating advice to singles.Speaking Out: “The Good Christian Girl: A Fable,” by Gina Dalfonzo

“We are not to be conformed to this world (or our first or adopted culture), but rather to be transformed into kingdom people. That is our destiny, when saints from ‘every tribe, language, people, and nation’ shall reign on earth.”Scott Herr, disagreeing with the author about the value of monocultural ministries.Speaking Out: “Needed: More Monocultural Ministries,” by Tom Steers

“If people saw the worst of me on the news 24/7, I would have a lot fewer friends. Shouldn’t we as Christians just be praying for him?”Amy, on whether Christians should boycott Mel Gibson’s films in light of his offensive rants.Women’s Blog: “Why I Can’t Boycott Mel Gibson,” by Anna Broadway

“Christians who support current immigration laws are not trying to be unloving. Encouraging people to break the law is not showing love; it is justifying disobedience to God.”J. D., on the misperception some Christians have of those on the other side of the immigration reform debate.Speaking Out: “Immigration Reform, Another Christian View,” by Alan F.H. Wisdom

Copyright © 2010 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

The July issue is available on our website.

Letters to the editor must include the writer’s name and address if intended for publication. They may be edited for space or clarity.

E-mail: cteditor@christianitytoday.com

Fax: 630.260.8428

For 40 years, Stanley Hauerwas has challenged Christians to live like Christians. He does not fit neatly into the conservative vs. liberal categories that have dominated discussions of American Christianity since the early fundamentalist vs. modernist controversies. Some call him a “post-liberal” because he urges all Christians to return to historical Christianity and to sharpen their thinking.

In 1970, Hauerwas joined the faculty of Notre Dame University, in 1983, he moved to Duke Divinity School, and earlier this year, he published his memoir, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Eerdmans, April 2010). In some ways, he is a professor of professors—widely read by academics for his creative, forceful, and provocative application of Christian thought to a wide range of issues. But he also appeals to blue-collar readers who sense that this son of a bricklayer is one of them—willing to say that many smart-sounding professors are philosophically incoherent.

Andy Rowell, a doctoral student in theology at Duke Divinity School, spoke with Hauerwas about his life, his work, and his hopes and concerns for his evangelical students.

For 40 years you have been reflecting theologically on the habits, virtues, and vices of Americans. Now you have put yourself under the microscope. Why did you write this memoir? Or is it an autobiography?

An autobiography indicates something closer to a chronology, and I didn’t want to be limited to that. A memoir is usually meant to expose one’s subjectivity. For me that creates some difficulty as I do not want to privilege the objective-subjective distinction. I wrote this book because people had asked me to do it. I had resisted doing it, partly because it’s such an invitation to narcissism. But it turned out I’m just narcissistic enough to do it [Laughs]. When I began to think about it, I thought I saw how to do it. It became an obsession that I had to do. I’m glad I did it. It is a different genre from my other writing. People write me and tell me that different aspects of it have struck them.

You say at the end of your memoir Hannah’s Child that the process of writing helped you realize that you are in fact a Christian. Did the process of reflecting on the events of your life give you perspective on the whole?

I don’t want to be silly and think that I didn’t know I was a Christian prior to writing the book, but what the book hopefully makes candid is how a recognition of one’s identity as a Christian has everything to do with how your friends acknowledge what you are. I try to help us see how friendship is constitutive of our ability to claim who we are.

You write about the pressure you felt to go forward at revival services at your childhood United Methodist Church in Texas. You did not feel right about responding insincerely to emotional appeals.

I didn’t think one should fake it.

Did books save you? Did the journey of the intellectual life through college, Yale, Notre Dame and Duke keep you a Christian?

I really have lived in books. Books are friends. They are some of the friends that make you who you are. Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.

Because your first wife Anne was struggling with mental illness, how did you and your son Adam cope?

We did it by having extraordinary friendship with one another. We did it by activity: by throwing Frisbee, by riding our bicycles. We did it by going to church a lot. We did it by having friends that were supportive. I also took up running as a way to deal with the stress of the situation. When Paula and I were getting married, I picked Adam up from college from the airport, he said, “I’m not doing very well.” He said, “It’s this marriage. You and I were the married couple and we just took care of Mom. This is the divorce.” We had to go on and we knew it couldn’t be the same, but it is very gratifying to have a son who is as lovely as he is.

The focus of your work is the extraordinary importance of the church but in some ways the churches that you have been apart of look from the outside to be quite ordinary. How did they get it right?

By God’s help. I don’t think the churches that have made my life so much more than it otherwise could have been have been extraordinary because I don’t think the church is extraordinary. Part of what my work has always been about is to show that the apocalyptic character of the gospel makes the everyday possible. It gives us the time that lets us care for one another as we are ill, helps us care for one another as we experience broken relationships, and helps us take the time to worship God in a world of such violence. The church is called to do that as an alternative in a world that doesn’t know there is an alternative. The ordinary churches that I’ve belonged to seemed to have embodied the kind of life that the world so desperately needs.

You started out in a United Methodist Church that was as you say functionally Baptist because it was in Texas. Then you taught at a Lutheran school Augustana, a Roman Catholic institution Notre Dame, and then back to a United Methodist school Duke Divinity. At each stop, you found yourself worshipping with people of that tradition and learning from them appreciatively. Now you worship at an Episcopal church. How do you explain your eclectism or is it ecumenicalism?

I call myself an ecclesial whor*. I don’t know why God made some of us ecclesially homeless. I would like to think it has some ecumenical promise. Let me be clear: I am a Methodist. By that, I mean I think John Wesley was a recovery of Catholic Christianity through disciplined congregational life. Therefore, now that I am a communicant in the Church of the Holy Family [Episcopal Church], I understand myself still to be Methodist because I think the Episcopal Church is the embodiment of much that Wesley cared about. I think that’s true in much of Roman Catholicism. I don’t think any of us should look to Christian unity by thinking we can heal divisions of the past by some kind of artificial agreement. But by going forward, trying to live faithful to the charisms [gifts] within our ecclesial identifications, God hopefully will bring us into unity.

When you just said, “The Episcopal church is the embodiment of much that Wesley cared about,” I think you are referring to a particular congregation and not the denomination as a whole.

I say, “We’re all congregationalists now.” I don’t particularly like it, but we are. How to ensure given that reality that Eucharistic assemblies are not separate from each other is one of the great challenges before us. The role of the bishop is very important to make sure that Eucharistic assemblies are not isolated from one another. There are also other ways to do it. Certainly sending people from one congregation to another helps. But how we recover Christian unity in the world in which we find ourselves is a deep challenge. By “unity,” I don’t mean just agreement about ecclesial organization; I mean the refusal of Christians to kill one other. I think that the division of the church that has let nationalism define Christian identity is one of the great judgments against the Reformation in particular.

Some people assume that theologians like to pray in public and preach but these were acquired tastes for you in your 50s and 60s. What happened?

Being married to Paula made a lot of difference given her ministerial vocation. [Paula Gilbert is assisting pastor for Parish Life at Church of the Holy Family, Episcopal and an ordained United Methodist clergywoman.] She told me to pray in class before I started to lecture so I started doing that. Being in the Divinity school at Duke put me in an ecclesial context in which I was increasingly asked to preach and I discovered that the thing I most nearly like to do is preach. I find the engagement with Scripture to be the heart of what theological reflection has to be about. It is the most energizing thing I do.

How have you tried to steel the theological spine of students going into pastoral ministry?

I try to give them a sense of what a wonderful thing it is that they are doing by going into the ministry. What an extraordinary privilege to every week be asked by people to preach. Our lives hang on it. I try to give a sense of the marvelous adventure it is to be brought within God’s providential care of the world through the every day acts of preaching and Eucharistic celebration.

Your critics say that you want Christians to retreat from the world and just practice the Eucharist. How do you respond?

If I’m asking people to retreat, why are so many people mad at me? [Laughs]. I wouldn’t mind retreating, but we’re surrounded so there’s no place to retreat to. So Christians have to engage the world in which we find ourselves. We’re in love with the world because God is in love with the world. Therefore, we want the world to know what God has given us. Of course, I’ve never asked Christians to refrain from being politically engaged. I just want them to be there as Christians. What it means to be there as Christians is to be shaped by the body and blood of Christ, which has been done for the world. The closing prayer after our Eucharist celebration includes: Send us now into the world in peace and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart through Christ our Lord, Amen. How could that be a retreat? I can’t imagine how the Eucharist can be self-containing if you’re sent out from it.

You have had a number of your doctoral students become professors at evangelical institutions. What do you hope they bring?

I hope they bring a sense of the corporate character of the church to evangelical life. I admire evangelicals’ energy; I admire their love of Jesus. I think often times their energy and love of Jesus is understood in a far too individualistic way that makes the church accidental to their relationship with God. I always want to know who it is you are making your life vulnerable to by reading Scripture. It should be read in context with other people who are Christians. I sometimes worry that evangelicals have a kind of privacy about how they understand their relationship with God that is destructive of the church. So I hope my students help evangelicals recover the ecclesial context that makes Christian convictions intelligible.

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Related Elsewhere:

Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir is available from ChristianBook.com and other book retailers.

James W. Skillen previously wrote about Stanley Hauerwas for Christianity Today.

Other recent book interviews include:

The World’s Prayer Guide | The latest edition of ‘Operation World’ spotlights a shifting global church. (August 3, 2010)

Focus on the Females | James Dobson explains his ideas for raising daughters, and life after Focus. (July 14, 2010)

The Authentic Bonhoeffer | Eric Metaxas explains how the German theologian lived a life worth examining. (July 1, 2010)

Jaws

1975 | Rated PGdirected by Steven SpielbergAs a teen, I spent many hot days on the beach; after Jaws, we were all scared to go back in the water. Spielberg’s first blockbuster captures not only summer’s heat but also the white-hot terror of what lurks beneath the surface—and reminds us that some of our own fears are well worth heeding.

In the Heat of the Night

1967 | Not rateddirected by Norman JewisonWinning five Oscars, this aptly titled film drips not only with the sweat of a Southern summer, but also with racism, rednecks, and raw tension—and exposes the prejudicial potential that lurks within us all. A brilliant sociological study and murder mystery with Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier at their best.

Rear Window

1954 | Rated PGdirected by Alfred Hitchco*ckThe temperature is a sultry 94 degrees in Greenwich Village as this tense, macabre mystery opens. One resident (Jimmy Stewart)—confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg—sweats it out as he watches his neighbors, particularly one very suspicious man. Hitchco*ck offers keen insights into our tendencies toward voyeurism and hasty conclusions.

To Kill a Mockingbird

1962 | Not rateddirected by Robert MulliganYou know the story: White lawyer defends wrongly accused black man in the Deep South; even “church folk” are ready to see a good lynching. But Atticus Finch—and truth and justice—ultimately triumph with his closing argument: “In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe Tom Robinson.”

12 Angry Men

1957 | Not rateddirected by Sidney LumetShot almost entirely in a 16-by-24-foot room in the oppressive oven of a New York summer, one can almost feel the stifling claustrophobia as 12 jury members debate the fate of a teen boy accused of murder. It provides sizzling dialogue, superb camerawork, and incisive insights into the value of human life.

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G. K. Chesterton, describing an event that exposed the reality of good and evil, wrote, “I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.” Like its eponymous source, the documentary Furious Love (Wanderlust Productions, now on DVD) **** spotlights pockets of the globe where evil reigns and believers fight back in Christ’s name.

Filmmaker Darren Wilson says most Christians in the West are unaware or dismissive of spiritual warfare as a daily reality, though they assent to it as a biblical concept. As J. P. Moreland notes in the film, “We [Western Christians] tend to believe God heals only through medicine, that spirits are multiple personality disorders … [Non-Westerners] have a more biblical worldview when they come to Christ because they already know there’s a supernatural world.” On that note, Furious urges the Western church to turn from doctrinal quibbles and follow the lead of their majority-world spiritual siblings.

With a $300,000 budget and sizable crew, Wilson journeys to Orissa, where India’s Christian minority has long endured attacks by Hindu nationalists, yet is learning the glory of suffering for Christ—and of forgiving persecutors. In Surabaya, Indonesia, the young pastor of a 30,000-member megachurch tells the story of confronting a witch doctor who claims he will resurrect himself—and who later becomes a Christian. In Thailand, a missionary couple helps women shackled in Bangkok’s vast sex trade find dignity in Christ and dignifying employment. “The powers of darkness rage blatantly here. I call it the Disneyland for the spirit world,” says one of the missionaries. “But because of that, the love of Christ rages even more.”

Furious is more ambitious and better produced than Wilson’s first film (2008’s Finger of God) but at times lacks focus. One sequence moves from ministers talking about prostitution in Amsterdam to a first-hand account of Congo’s civil war to a New Age festival in Southern California. Each vignette is compelling, but strung together they have a whirlwind effect. And by focusing on such tangible, shocking stories in exotic locales, Furious all but ignores the subtler battles occurring right under our Western noses. For many, simply choosing lifelong, faithful marriage might be the most radical Christian deed. Including a few less dramatic (but no less powerful) examples like this might have provided a fuller, truly global portrait of God’s kingdom.

But if viewers can follow Furious‘s meandering narrative, they will likely leave deeply moved. “There is one weapon the Devil cannot stand: the weapon of simple, pure love,” says one missionary in the film. By adding love to all the other weapons available in Christ (Eph. 6. ), our brothers and sisters are quietly triumphing. Are we?

Katelyn Beaty is a CT associate editor.

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