"A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving

The warm thanks to Frederick Buechner in the Acknowledgments of John Irving's 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany first caught my eye. Then, not far into the book, I noticed Irving's carefully expressed theological and liturgically accurate descriptions of Episcopal (and Anglican) worship and piety in the childhood and adult life of the novel's narrator, John Wheelwright. Over the course of the novel, Irving unironically treats themes of divine providence, a seer’s prophetic dream, and active participation in the sacrificial death of Christ. Irving also deploys Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come explicitly but with just enough ambiguity to keep A Prayer for Owen Meany from becoming allegory. All the while telling an engaging story of two friends becoming adults as the seeds of the war in Vietnam ultimately bloom.

Of course, symbol, foreshadowing, plausible character development, and religiously serious characters (much less theologizing) simply may  not  be  done in modern literary fiction. Tediously detailed descriptions of settings are in; coherent accounts of profound internal lives are out.

All of which were mere personal observations until I read "Yesterday's Men: the death of the mythical method" by Alan Jacobs in the July 2024 issue of Harper's Magazine. Literary critic Northrop Frye is Jacobs's archetypal example of a "yesterday's man" but others include George Frazier (The Golden Bough), T.S. Elliot (The Wasteland), Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return), and Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces). In brief, these writers were shaped "by a fascination with the distinctive forms taken by various societies, as well as a syncretic interest of myths." The myth of a sacramental rather than a mechanical universe was the myth that provided coherence in a chaotic world.

But by the 1980’s, mere discursivity came to replace coherence. No longer should critics (and hence the primary objects of criticism, novelists) “conceive of [of their task to identify] myth, archetype, and symbol [ultimately forming] a cathedral-like structure.” Texts now came to be seen only as means to generate other texts. Providing a coherent account for meaning had been, it turns out, a disguised power play.

During World War II and while the credibility of Aryan exceptionality remained in play, the US government had commissioned a "myth" aimed at fostering belief in human equality among American soldiers. The Races of Mankind even made passing reference to humanity’s common ancestry in Adam and Eve as the ground for human unity and equality. But not until the 1950's did Northop Frye turn the mythopoeic vision of humanity's repeated accounts for its own sensed meaning into an exceptionally recondite but endlessly fecund framework for literary criticism. Quoting Jacobs,

Frye provided a theoretical scaffolding for these scattered insights into the great Romantic and post-Romantic artists. He would make literary criticism a “science”... built on a quasi-Jungian study of myth as intrinsic to the deep structures of human consciousness, where archetypes dwell.

Nonsense, wrote Terry Eagleton in 1983. Quoting Jacobs quoting Eagleton, “Frye’s work ‘is marked by a deep fear of the actual world, a distaste for history itself,’ and is primarily an exercise in nostalgia.” For Eagleton the 1960’s—the central decade of A Prayer for Owen Meany—had removed the cataracts from our eyes so that deployment of myth “came to be seen as an evasion of political realities.” Whatever one might say of A Prayer for Owen Meany, it does not evade political realities. Instead, it frames political (and personal) realities in a larger—dare I say—archetypal reality.

John Irving certainly knew of the critical theories that followed the passing of yesterday’s men. But such theories were ignored in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving’s novel is chock full of the mythopoeic.

The structure of Irving’s novel stands as a rebuke to the anti-mythologists. But Irving’s extensive deployment of Thomas Hardy in the high school English classes of narrator John Wheelwright undercuts confidence that such myths necessary be true. If Irving is channeling Hardy, then whatever their veracity, myths are simply the best ways of addressing questions of human meaning. If Buechner, then Irving intimates the fundamental veracity of the Christian myths at work in his novel. I have an opinion but will leave it to other readers of A Prayer for Owen Meany to form their own.

And other readers there should be. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a fine novel with gripping characters, serious themes, and several laugh-out-loud accounts. Take up and read.

 

Podcasting a Timeless Theme: Puritanism and Contract Law

Go to your preferred podcast provider (Apple podcasts here; Spotify here) to listen to an hour of a scintillating conversion between Timon Cline (host of the Hale Institute podcast) and me about the development of the common law of contracts in sixteenth/seventeenth England. And, oh yeah, the influence of those disciplined Puritans.

Cline's interest in my co-authored piece goes to show that even old articles (like The Puritan Revolution and the Law of Contracts; download here or here) can have a long afterlife.

I also got to talk about my review of Dairmaid MacCulloch's definitive biography of Thomas (of Wolf Hall fame) Cromwell (here). And even some hints about my upcoming piece (Person-Centered Pluralism About Contract Theory).

A great time all around.

Envying Isabelle Butker

I've waited until the kerfuffle about Harrison Butker's commencement speech has almost--but not quite--faded into the trash bin of the 24-hour news cycle to make an observation. Not about the whole address but some responses to the following remarks:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.

Fairly anodyne for a commencement speech at a small Catholic college in the heartland. But apparently warranting febrile sputtering in the negative world of contemporary American secularism. From my Facebook feed:

You know who we HAVEN'T heard from? His wife. Shouldn't SHE be explaining to us how much SHE loves her trad-wife situation? Crickets? Silence says everything. [Apparently she's not an idiot.] 

Unfortunately, many white women feel protected by and comfortable in the patriarchy, so they go right along with it. Case in point: their support of Trump. [White women?]

I was wondering what her response is but honestly she's not really going to say anything against him or her privileged life. Even if she regrets not having a career. If they were thrust into poverty and she was forced into the workplace, their outlook would be different. [And you know this ... how?]

Apart from the borderline IQ typically displayed on social media, is there anything wrong about these comments? More specifically, is one of the seven capital vices on display? Oh, I don't know, perhaps envy? Drawing on the book by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins (2009), let's consider what exactly is envy.

Envy beginis when we perceive ourselves as an individual person. Envy then proceeds to consider oneself relative to another and culminates with a negative comparison. Negative, that is, of oneself. Envy targets the goods of another person that contribute to his (or her) worth, honor, standing, or status. While the envious may also desire an external object, it is primarily because that object represents the other's high standing.

For the envious, the bottom line is how they compare to others because that is how the envious measure their self-worth--relatively. The envious feel sorrow over another's success because it surpasses their own, highlighting not only one's deficiency in a particular area but also his self-perceived lack of worth. Envy is as much about envier's felt inferiority, revealed by comparison, as it is about any specific good the envious may lack.

Envy involves a sense of inferiority and is often first expereinced through feelings of offense at another's talents, successes, or good fortune. It is expressed in ill will, by attributing false motives to the actions of others, by fostering antagonism, and in scorn for another's success.

If the envious fail to undermine a rival, bitterness deepens, and the envious come even more to resent the other's success. Unchecked, envy can escalate into full-scale hatred. The envier comes to hate the other and her goods because of perceived damage to her own self-worth.

Envy sees the world as fundamentally antagonistic. Life unfolds in a me-versus-you framework where only one can have the good of high standing. In this zero-sum game, where the envious lack what they desire, a common reaction is to try to undermine their rival's success. And, if destroying the rival is not feasible, in the age of social media the envier can at least commiserate with others who share the same object of envy. In short, as Frederick Buechner observed, the envious desire that "everyone else [be] as unsuccessful as [they] are."

Of course, envy is not limited to the online world; it is deadly and unwell in all communities. Nor is envy a vice especially associated with women. Behind the scenes passive-aggressive behavior is found on both sides of the gender dichotomy. But to conclude, while we can see the vice of envy in the quoted comments, we must be on guard against envy in our own hearts.

Fifth Monarchists. Or, One Way Not To Be a Christian Nation

Some observations by Austin Woolrych in his fine book "Commonwealth to Protectorate" (Clarendon Press 1982). While Woolrych's book focuses on the events of 1653, when the New Model Army deposed the remnants of the Long Parliament (the so-called Rump Parliament) and England's republican Commonwealth in favor of a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, he backs up to address the problems that had been simmering below the surface for almost a decade.

In 1653 the army, back from its victorious campaigns in Ireland and Scotland, was frustrated that little (really, almost nothing) had been effected to created the godly commonwealth for which they had been fighting. Significantly influenced by a group that believed that the execution of Charles I in 1649 would usher in Christ's millennial kingdom (the Fifth Monarchists), more than a few "believed not only that the reign of Christ on earth was imminent, but that it was their mission and duty to bring it about ..."

Of course,

There was an inherent contradiction between their goal--government by the saints for the saints--and those of believers in civil liberties (including Cromwell) who held that the promised kingdom was a spiritual one, that the spheres of nature and of grace should be distinguished, and that therefore mere natural men should not be debarred from their right in the choosing of their temporal legislators.

Already in 1649 a group of Fifth Monarchists had addressed Oliver Cromwell with a question: 

"How can the kingdom be saints ... when the ungodly are electors and elected to govern?" Parliaments must be put down as well as kings, they declared, before the one true kingdom, that of Christ, could be established.

Matters were reaching a head in 1653, but what was to be done? As it turns out, the Fifth Monarchists did not get their way. True, Cromwell forcibly dissolved the Rump Parliament but he replaced it with a new parliament dedicated to reforming England, not a revolution. Of course, the new "Barebones" Parliament ultimately failed, too, in part because of the presence of a minority committed to the Fifth Monarchist agenda of what nowadays would be called "immanentizing the eschatological."

In short, if history is any guide, any program of radically reducing the remit of the American liberal political order in favor of "the rule of the saints" is most unlikely to succeed.

"The Great Escape"

Written by Saket Soni and subtitled "A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America", The Great Escape is the first-person account of an Indian-born community organizer who, over the course of three years (2007- 2010), fought relentlessly for the freedom of 300 Indian workers brought to America by fraud and kept here as unfree laborers.

Over the past two decades, the reality of human trafficking has reached the consciousness of more Americans. Many Americans now know that young girls, both native-born and brought from elsewhere, are are trafficked as commodities and compelled to trade sexual services for the financial gain of their pimps.

But Soni's book shows a different face of human trafficking, one in which skilled laborers beg and borrow to scrape together tens of thousands of dollars to pay a "broker" to come to work in the United States (without a work visa) on the promise of green cards. Once here, the laborers in The Great Escape found themselves kept under guard in housing worse than they had experienced in India or the Middle East. After seeing "rent" deducted from their paychecks, the workers eventually came to realize that the promise of green cards was a fraud. Only modest remittances could be returned to their immediate families in India, which, in turn, left them deep in debt to their extended families or money lenders.

Soni, originally from India but having lived abroad and in the United States for many years, dedicated himself to protecting undocumented aliens from the oppression and violence they suffered as a result of their illegal status. He had worked to free many individuals from sex trafficking and oppressive (and illegal) working conditions. He had never, however, worked to rescue 300 men working for a single employer.

Soni's account of the nighttime breakout, hiding in a post-Katrina New Orleans, marching to Washington, hunger strikes, political negotiations, and raising money to feed his shrinking band is a gripping tale. The narrative of his long-standing efforts, conflicts from without (with ICE, the FBI, and the US Department of Justice) and within his group of escapees until final success is gratifying.

The story of Soni's ultimate breakthrough with John Cotton Richmond, an attorney with the Department of Justice who had worked in India for several years with International Justice Mission, is greatly encouraging. His years-later meeting with Alvin Ladner, his arch-nemesis from ICE, then suffering from dementia, adds a coda of forgiveness. 

The Great Escape is an excellent book and I encourage folks to read it for themselves. Deep gratitude to daughter Rachel for giving it to me for Christmas.

The Virtue of Moderation. Or, An Update on Compromise

Over a a decade ago I published A Theology of Compromise?  A year later I posted a brief follow-up here. As I observed in my initial piece,

[Clay] Cooke [to whom I was responding] at best provides a "negative" theological argument in favor of compromise. He combines the theological categories of human finitude and human sinfulness. We don't know everything, especially the follow-along of choices, and most especially legislative choices. This counsels wariness when pressing a law-making advantage to the hilt or voting against the good because it's not perfect. Be careful of what you wish for, as the saying goes. (Prohibition, anyone?) Combine our lack of knowledge, particularly about the future, with our sinfulness--our propensity to take advantage of opportunities to gain at another's loss--and an attitude opposed to compromise can lead to bad results.

But as I also noted, this argument lacks a postive basis for compromise. An argument in favor of the lesser of two evils is fine but shouldn't there be an affirmative moral warrant for something like compromise in public life? 

My follow-up post got a bit closer to a moral warrant where I quoted James K.A. Smith riffing Oliver O'Donovan:

Rooted in our uncompromising [primary] commitment to Christ, we nonetheless have to act, and we act always and only in [particular] situations. ... "It is an old and damaging confusion," O'Donovan points out, "to suppose that compromise in this secondary [situational] sense implies compromise in the primary sense." Thus "every moral decision will be a decision between faithfulness and compromise."

Nonetheless, even drawing from O'Donovan, there seems more pragmatism than virtue. What classical (and Christian) virtues supply a robust warrant for the evident necessity of compromise? Or is necessity all there is?

Enter the virtue of moderation. Given the nature of a virtue, moderation is something more than mere pragmatics. On its own account moderation is a habit that, combined with other virtues, leads to a flourishing life.

But what is the virtue of moderation? Or, to put the question another way: moderation in respect of what? Moderation as the restraint of appetites? Or as the tool to triangulate between two opposing vices? Is moderation another name for the mean, e.g., courage (between foolhardiness and cowardice)? Or is moderation a tool of phronesis, a form of practical wisdom? 

Enter a book recently (re)published by The Davenant Institute, Joseph Hall's A Treatise on Christian Moderation (2024) (with an introduction and scholarly annotation by Andre Gazal). Hall (1575-1656) was a bishop in the Church of England in the run-up to the English Civil War. In his treatise, Hall called for personal and public moderation, a call that was ignored as England plunged into a war that took more lives (per capita) then did WW I. In our own increasingly immoderate age, this work may find a hearing. Perhaps cultural partisans will find warrant to moderate their political wills.

If you wan't to know more before taking the plunge, listen to this podcast where Colin Redemer, Rhys Laverty, and Jonathan McKenzie discuss the Hall's book and work to distinguish the virtue of moderation from the vice of cowardice.

Abraham Kuyper's Doctrine of the Church Part 2: Or, AI Reads My Posts!

Only this past Friday I published a short piece in which I looked at Abraham Kuyper's distinction between the church-as-institute and church-as-organism. A book chapter updated by Ruben Alvaro had occasioned my thoughts. I suspected that Alvarado might be right--Kuyper's doctrinal innovation may have unintentionally accelerated the secularization of Dutch society--but I withheld full concurrence. After all, I mused, there was much more Kuyper to canvass than Alvarado's chapter considered.

The next day the algorithm powering academia.com emailed a suggestion that I should read "The Kuyperian-Schilderian Option: A Synthesis of Abraham Kuyper and Klaas Schilder That is Better than Saint Benedict" by Dennis Greeson (here). Quite a mouthful.

In brief (because I lack sufficient interest to pursue the issue further), Greeson anticipated my hope that someone would take up a fuller oeuvre of Kuyper's work and provide a definitive resolution to the contention Alvarado raised. Only in pages 19-21 does Greeson explicitly address institute vs. organism; his burden focuses on Kuyper parallel innovation of the doctrine of common grace. Still, there's enough in the paper to give me greater confidence that both innovations contained enough ambiguity to permit some of Kuyper's heirs to take them in wrongheaded directions. The evolution of Kuyper's thoughts about common grace and his unsystematic, occasional form of writing opened the door both for active acquiescence in the Nazi regime of 1940-1945 and cooperation in progressive governments (and secularizing the university he founded) thereafter.

Abraham Kuyper's Doctrine of the Church: A Timely Adjustment or a Poison Pill?

Eight years ago my friend Ruben Alvarado published a chapter titled "The Kuyper Option: Kuyper's Concept of the Church in the Context of Strategic Christian Action."* Alvarado updated his chapter in 2021 (here). 

Alvarado identifies two innovations in Kuyper's doctrine that warrant scrutiny: his doctrine of common grace and his distinction between the church as an institute from the church as an organism. Alvarado concludes that, whatever were Kuyper's intentions, both innovations led to deprecation of the preeminence of the Church in the Netherlands and thus acceleration of the secularization of that society. Alvarado focuses on the institute vs. organism distinction and I will limit my remarks to it.

Kuyper retained the traditional Protestant distinction between the visible and the invisible Church. Not all persons baptized into the church are in fact ultimately joined to Christ, the head of the Church. Baptized hypocrites and apostates have always existed. Kuyper's additional institute/organism distinction makes a different point: (i) the life of Christians as Christians extends beyond the institutional boundaries of the church-as-institute, (ii) extra-institutional living necessarily assumes associational forms (business entities, labor unions, universities, political parties, social clubs, etc.), and (iii) the expression "church-as-organism" identifies and reifies this latter state of affairs.

As Alvarado observes, few Christians deny propositions (i) or (ii). Alvarado, however, following a later Dutch theologian Klass Schilder, identifies the associational life of Christians simply as service while living in a society and at the same time as a member of the church-as-institute: "The two aspects of institute and organism cannot be separated from each other in the way that Kuyper does. They are correlative and concurrent, two sides of the same coin."

Well. Okay. Of what significance might be such theological hairsplitting?

Alvarado identifies two problems downstream of Kuyper's originality. First is the "freedom" of the church-as-organism from the doctrines and discipline of the church-as-institute. The members of the amorphous church-as-organism can come together across confessional lines to form associations that take positions that are inconsistent with the doctrines of the church-as-institute. For example, a Kuyperian Christian political party formed by persons who identify as members of the church-as-organism will be drawn inexorably to thin its distinctive claims in favor of increasing its numbers to accomplish what all political parties want: political power.

Second is the practical result that the place of the church-as-institute is depreciated in favor of Christian associations cobbled together by the church-as-organism. Big, powerful, and socially influential associations will attract more attention than the traditional and confessionally-circumscribed church-as-institute. But only the latter has the keys to eternal life. Kuyper's innovation may thus have had the unexpected effect of turning traditional two kingdoms theology on its head.

In Kuyper's defense, the increasingly pluralistic religious and political landscape called for some reconfiguration of the increasingly complex forms of social life. The complicated relationship among the national church, more powerful forms of business (and labor) associations, and an increasingly democratically-minded citizenry defied the old forms of resolution. The forces of modernity were dissolving traditional forms of Dutch life

In any event, Alvarado's concerns are well taken if the foregoing is an accurate account of Kuyper's distinction between between church-as-institute and church-as-organism. And it may well be. It certainly strikes me as plausible given what happened with Kuyper's denomination, university, and political party in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century. But I'm not ready to commit.

While writing this short chapter, Alvarado did not have access to the complete corpus of Kuyper's political and theological writing in English. Thanks to the Acton Institute and Lexham Press that corpus (all twelve volumes of it!) are now available in English in both print and digital editions. I suspect that there's a dissertation waiting to be written that examines Alvarado's argument in light of all that Kuyper wrote.

* Bradford Littlejohn, ed., For Law and for Liberty: Essays on the Transatlantic Legacy of Protestant Political Thought (Davenant Press 2016).

Half a Million and Counting

Sometime this past week the number of pageviews for my blog crossed the half-million mark. "Pageviews" doesn't mean a great deal in the world of SEO's but it's something. And  it's free. A Moving Trueman is my number one post if anyone cares to know.

Today I want to link to the YouTube lecture by Oliver O'Donovan titled "Love, Values, and Rights." (O'Donovan's lecture begins at the 9:00 mark.) As some readers may already know, I count O'Donovan as the greatest living Protestant moral theologian. I have posted about his work more times than I care to count or link. This lecture, the bulk of which is devoted to an account of love, is causing me to rethink what I concluded in "What's Wrong With Rights? Part 4".

In short, drawing on nineteenth-century German jurist Friedrich Stahl, I found in the notion of the fear of God a means by which to resolve the conflicting accounts of the foundation of an orderly social life of O'Donovan and American philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. O'Donovan argues that a right-order has priority over rights while Wolterstorff contends for the reverse.

But what if, I am now wondering, the higher order principle by which the accounts of these two heavyweights can be harmonized is not in the fear of the Lord but instead is in love? The fear of the Lord certainly entails love of God but does not, standing alone, require love of one's neighbor. Following O'Donovan's lecture it begins to seem that the virtue of love--of God and my neighbor--can bring together without remainder an account of a rightly ordered society together with subjective rights of its individual members.

I hope to follow up as I continue to work out this matter. Until then, keep those pageviews coming!

"Why Do Protestants Convert?"

Why Do Protestants Convert? is a short (100 pp.) popular-level book published in 2023 and co-authored by Brad Littlejohn of the Davenant Institute and pastor-theologian Chris Castaldo. While nodding to Protestant conversions to Orthodox churches, Why Do Protestants Convert? focuses on conversions to the Roman Catholic Church. And even here, the authors opine that more folks baptized into the communion headed by the Bishop of Rome eventually affiliate with a Protestant church than vice versa. Indeed, this book is not fortified by empirical or qualitative research. Why Do Protestants Convert? is the authors's account of the reasons they believe that, over recent decades, a non-trivial number academic and otherwise intellectually-oriented Protestants have converted to Rome. From my limited vantage point, the reasons Littlejohn and Castaldo describe strike me as entirely plausible.

The core of Why Do Protestants Convert? is its three middle chapters: The Psychology of Conversion, The Theology of Conversion, and The Sociology of Conversion. Each of these chapters in turn is divided into three parallel subchapters followed by a clear summary conclusion. The book's final chapter is "Why Protestant's Should Not Convert."

For example, the first section of the chapter The Sociology of Conversion, "Tired of Division" invokes a concern among many (most? all?) Christians that the current divisions of the Church dishonors Jesus' prayer for the unity of his followers recorded in John 17:20-21. Addressing this legitimate concern, the authors contrast the Protestant understanding of the Spiritual unity of the Church (in terms of reconciliation through the work of Christ, the priesthood  of believers united to Christ, and the marks of preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments) with the "sacerdotal vision of ecclesial unity upheld by Rome." The multifarious forms that the Church now takes "may appear deficient" from the perspective of a church whose clergy claim to exert apostolic authority, "but they are simply the outworking of an ecclesiology that defines catholicity by adherence to the kerygma." In short Protestants emphasize the Spirituality of the Church over against claims of hierarchy and apostolic succession.

The authors acknowledge much of the substance of the second rationale of conversion to Rome ("Tired of Shallowness") but observe that the Evangelical decline into worship characterized by therapy and smoke machines developed long after the Reformation. Still, even if entertainment-as-worship would have left Protestants aghast until the latter half of the twentieth century, it remains a reason for dissatisfaction for many with worship in some Evangelical churches today. Of course, shallowness characterizes contemporary versions of the Mass in most Catholic churches. And many Protestant churches have maintained a serious liturgy of God-directed worship.

A desire to be counted among the "in" crowd also pulls some Protestants toward Rome. No one can deny that Protestants in America have largely failed to build institutions that carry heft in public life. This failure is not endemic to Protestantism. After all, for generations following the Reformation, Protestants founded many great institutions. But this is no longer the case today, which calls for a program of institutional reconstruction. (On a related note, folks interested in an accounting of the failure of American conservatives generally to build sustainable institutions of higher education should read this post by James M. Patterson.)

There's much more of value in this short book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding why many of American Evangelicalism's best and brightest are not staying the course.

"African Founders"

It took me nearly a year to read David Hackett Fischer's 749-page (plus 131 pages of endnotes) African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (Simon & Schuster 2022). (I must be getting old because it took me only five months to read Fischer's earlier masterwork, Albion's Seed.) 

While African Founders could have used some tighter editing, it is an excellent work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in a detailed account of who came from Africa, by whom and where they were enslaved, and what and how they ultimately contributed to the culture of America.

Fischer provides a detailed account of the locations, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of the places of origin of those who were enslaved. All Africans were not alike. In this respect African Founders parallels Albion's Seed that recounted in detail the places of origin and folkways of the four British people groups who settled America in its colonial days. But unlike the Britishers who voluntarily settled in America, many Africans were "imported" because of their specific qualities. Thus, the ancestors of the Gullah/Geechee settlements in coastal South Carolina and north Georgia were purchased from the eastern side of Africa because they knew how to grow rice. The Dutch of New Amsterdam sought their slaves from among the "wheeler-dealer" Africans of what today is Zaire and Angola. Some of these people in turn were able to cut deals with their Dutch owners and achieve a unique level of "half-free." This practice continued until the English turned New Netherland into New York.

African Founders doesn't shy away from the brutalities experienced by slaves. Fischer describes them in detail. One account that struck me was the observation that Paul Revere on his famous ride passed under the desiccated remains of a slave who had been hung as an accomplice to murder twenty years earlier and "whose body was ordered to be displayed in an iron cage" as a reminder to all of the heightened retribution wrought on Black criminals, whether slave or free (p. 75). I was also surprised to learn that many Africans were Christians before their enslavement. Portuguese and Spanish missionaries had been at work in Africa since the late 15th century. 

But African Founders is not about the degradations of life as a slave. As Fischer described his work: "this is a history that flowed from the acts and choices of individual people in the midst of others. ... In every American region, Africans both slave and free played a vital role in these processes." (p. 26) And here his work shines as an implicit rebuke to many contemporary social theorists who, in their fixation on the singular dialectic of oppressor/oppressed, ignore realities that can be discovered through careful historical examination. Since this is not a review of African Founders, I won't take the time to describe the hundreds of examples that that Fischer documents and develops. The careful work of Fischer and the multiple empirical research projects on which he draws repeatedly disclose the agency of the enslaved. To be sure, that agency was often suppressed but it was nonetheless real and had and still has tangible and lasting effects on American society. 

The tradition of liberty that the English emigrants described in Albion's Seed brought to the American continent could not help but be caught by the slaves who were imported. For slaves too, America became a land of hope. We see this in Fischer's conclusion drawing from W.E.B. Du Bois extended to the present:

In the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois noted this "double-consciousness" in the thinking of African Americans: "One ever feels his twoness--an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn apart." ... At the same time Du Bois also observed that "few men worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries."

Through the full span of American history, that deep faith in American freedom was strong in the thought and experience of African slaves and their posterity. In the face of tyranny and oppression, the growing strength of that abiding faith in living free has been one of the greatest African contributions to America and the world.

Take up and read.

75 Years Ago This Month

Although I am late by a few days, it's worth recalling that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was ratified on December 10, 1948, 75 years ago. Many folks that I know are suspicious of the United Nations if not the contemporary concept of human rights. No matter the rabbit trails that the UN has pursued in the decades subsequent, the UNDHR was and remains one of its best efforts. You can go here to read about the distinctly Christian influences on the UNDHR and here for a fine explanation of the Chrisian foundation--left behind in human rights discourse--of the notion of rights in the Western, Christian tradition.

As the preceeding sentence suggests, however, "human rights talk" has expanded far beyond what can be justified from within the Christian tradition. The number of human "rights" have grown like kudzu and there is risk that the entire ediface will collapse on account of its internal contradictions. I made this argument at some length over ten years ago in Looking for Bedrock: Accounting for Human Rights in Classical Liberalism, Modern Secularism, and the Christian Tradition (download here or here).

Even so, not everything arising from the explosion of human rights is bad. For the goods of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (here and here), go to my blog posts here and here. In short, the CRPD helped save the life of the unborn child of a young, disabled gal in India. Americans, who enjoy a regime of unbridled rights, are generally dismissive of the realm of international conventions on the subject of human rights. Perhaps viewing life through the lens of those for whom the benefit of legally enforceable rights is a pipe dream would lead to humility and gratitude.