I’m reading Hermann Hesse’s Demian for class right now. It was a sensation when published, right after WWI; it’s a spiritual coming of age story for a young man who looks an awful lot like the author himself.

Hesse was born to returned missionary parents, who had served in India but ran a missionary printing house near Stuttgart in southwestern Germany. Hesse’s was a rebellious adolescence. Nothing terribly remarkable there; that’s the tragedy of human life period: broken family, lost love, generational contempt.

But Hesse actively didn’t like the Christianity of his upbringing, a robust version of Pietism, any of several spiritual movements in German-speaking countries, movements with some analogies to fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the Anglo world.

Although he professed some interest in Catholic praxis, especially the smells-and-bells parts, which seemed so different from the bare-bones Pietism he was fleeing, Hesse never returned to his roots. He experimented all over the place, and his seeking resulted in part in his Asian-spirituality novel Siddhartha and his psychedelic novel Steppenwolf, both of which were big in the English-speaking world among the sixties countercultures.

But—here’s the point—Hesse’s story is deeply moving to me, because, as a missionary-kid myself, I understand him in a deep way, even as I disagree with him and regret his decisions.

Missionary kids, turned adults, are a different breed, marked for life with the field of tensions intrinsic to missions: on the one hand, the embrace of the world, and on the other hand, and quite often as a result of that worldliness, an impossibility of living a quietly rooted life. Many MKs marry people with deep roots; many become cosmopolitans. Very few grow up to be “normal”.

More importantly, very few Missionary Kids grow up to be nominal Christians. They’re either deeply committed (as am I; as is Urbana director Jim Tebbe), or they’re actively, even urgently NOT-Christian. Hesse certainly belongs to that camp.

Why? There are probably dozens of answers, but parenting is a big one: some MKs resent their parents’ ministry. They’ve been robbed of normalcy. Missionary kids may be children of the world, but natives of nowhere. And some people hate the feeling, and can never build a whole soul.

For myself, I remember taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator once, during an InterVarsity training camp. I tested kind of funny, and the instructor suggested, rather indelicately, that I was either double-masking, or worse—or: was I by any chance a missionary kid? That explained everything.

I love what God allowed me to experience. I feel like a happy, whole, and continually growing believer. But I know many others who’ve walked away from faith altogether. Nominal faith, crowded with busyness, is simply not an option for them. They’ve seen Christianity in its heart—meaning its frontiers, where our intentionally global and cross-cultural faith is most acute—and they either love or hate what they’ve seen.

I read a great book on modern France a few weeks ago, as good background material. I was fairly familiar with the French Revolution, and then … big white spots on the mental map up to, say, where my own memory kicks in in the 1980s.

As it works out, Charles Sowerwine has just written a second edition of his textbook France since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic, available for a cool $100. Which means look for it at the library.

Sowerwine manages to cover politics, literature, film, economics, and immigration and make it look easy, although his interests clearly lean toward labor relations. His coverage of French women’s issues is strong, and his coverage of religion weak.

Very weak for my tastes, as religion only appears in a few contexts: the politics of separation of church and state, and the conservative Catholic embrace of the German occupation during World War 2. At the very end of the book Islam makes an appearance, but only as a cultural-political problem regarding Muslim immigrants.

So religion is clearly tangential to the course of French history in the twentieth century, or at least, the less religion, the better.

That’s well and good, because to the best of my reading, Sowerwine is roughly approximating the opinions of the French leadership-journalism-intelligentsia nexus. It's a bigger problem than one book. This is clearly a textbook, and is really valuable as such.

I’ve been a fan of Amazon.com for far longer than they deserve; that’s how fanship works, I guess. And I’ll continue to shop there.

On this blog, I’ve usually linked books I’m discussing to the respective Amazon pages, in part because they usually have sizeable page previews. Others, most notably Google Books, have those same previews, but I’ve stuck with Amazon.

My recent work (grad-school in history) has had me open several books unavailable on Amazon, though. Some are foreign-language, but mostly it’s that they’re too old, or at least too old to have page previews (i.e. more than, say, ten years).

Most of those books are scanned and available in limited preview at google books, and suitable for citation in a blog. So I was already considering the move.

But a recent event around the Kindle has pushed me: the remote-controlled deletion from Kindle owners’ hard-drives of several books that had been mistakenly posted on the Kindle store without the publisher’s permission.

It was a few old books by George Orwell. People bought them on Amazon for their Kindles. The copyright holder notified Amazon of a violation, and Amazon withdrew the product to respect the copyright.

So far so good. It’s what they did next that concerns me: they remotely deleted it from customer’s computers. That they had this power shouldn’t surprise me; that they exercised it is very disturbing, even if the books were illegal.

It was as if a store gave away a product—a book, say—and subsequently discovered the store copy had been a stolen copy, and, rather than making amends with the publisher, secretly entered customers’ houses and took the books back.

The New York Times notes the great irony here: the books in question were 1984 and Animal Farm, about oppressive governments and fascism:

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

But a more piercing critique comes from David Ulin at the LA Times:

Meanwhile, we embrace Amazon and the Kindle with little real consideration for what it all means, as we move increasingly toward an electronic model for intellectual and literary life. Much of the talk about the digital future has to do with its inevitability, but though that may be true, it overlooks more subtle questions of engagement and control.

For Amazon, books are a business, and the more hegemony it exerts over the market, the better off it is. For the culture, though, books and information serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than mere commerce that shouldn't be merely bought and sold.

A brilliant lecture I heard recently by Brian Stanley of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for the Study of World Christianity detailed evolving missionary thought from the Victorian period to the Modernist period: during this time a shift in emphasis emerged from Christian universalism, with its attendant focus on the “brotherhood of man” to a multi-ethnic focus on cultural diversity.

In the first case, the motive of mission was to embrace those outside the faith with the blessings of Christian community, which was usually and unfortunately understood as coterminous with contemporary European culture, including modes of dress and etiquette.

In the second case, a Christian was assigned a “cultural mandate” to diversify. Theorists started putting a lot of weight on verses such as those of Revelation 21:24-26 where, speaking of the New Jerusalem, it reads:

24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

Both emphases are faithful to the bible and point to an inherent tension in the Christian faith—that of a scattering localism on the one hand, and of a center-focused universalism on the other. While it’s hard to live without either force, because extremism rapidly emerges—whether fascism and racism on the one hand, or insistent conformity on the other—the two forces are in constant tension in our minds. It’s a fact of life.

Stanley’s point was this: that at first glance the Victorian civilizing missionary is greatly embarrassing to today's sensitivities, and yet: we today need to listen to them, because they had thought long and hard about creating a global family. We needn’t follow them to the conclusion of conformity to Western cultural standards, but neither should we reject their universalism out of hand.

Today’s insistent multi-culturalism, Stanley concludes, uses nearly the same compassionate language as the civilizing mission of the 1880s, and needs to be brought back into the tension of local vs. global. If local is the only acceptable incarnation of faith, correction from the global community becomes less likely, and locally-birthed bad ideas and practices can blossom unchecked.

As one example, we need only consider the religious justifications for slavery in antebellum America (south and north alike). As Mark Noll demonstrates in God and Race in American Politics,  so important a book that I’ll need to write about it separately, the sheer volume of pro-slavery sermons can only point to a widespread fear that slavery was somehow unchristian.

In the end, Noll suggests, the white church of the American south convinced itself that faithfulness to scripture demanded a political separation from the north; the civil war can thus be partially conceived as the last great Western religious war.

hich leads to the question Brian Stanley was asking: what if local faith is wrong? What if, in the interest of creating a grass-roots Christianity we also make a Christianity deaf to correction from the outside?

This is a really disturbing question to me, who have dedicated a lot of thought to the multi-ethnic aspects of my faith.

I’ve always loved poring over maps. It’s better recreation for me than watching a movie—it’s pure escapism. So when I was reading Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada recently, I was delighted and astonished by this statement by author John Hudson:

Regional geography begins with the premise that it is possible to gain the sense of a place by reading about it.

 Surely that is true! But if so, that would mean that it’s possible to imagine life in those places, and further: to empathize with people one might find there.

Hudson is certainly not suggesting reading as a replacement for immersion, but I believe he’s on to something profound about the human condition: we are simultaneously anchored in space and have the capacity to reach beyond this space, with our minds and hearts, at least.

Among the growing body of evangelical eco-literature, Matthew Sleeth’s Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action is one of the best. But that’s a pretty tough qualification: most Evangelical contributions are less than great.

Sleeth, it is clear, is a true leader and deep thinker constrained by the genre. He has studied broadly, and has original thoughts on everything ranging from consumer society to pollution to global warming.

I’d love to see him unbridled; if freed from the constraints of evangelical anti-liberal paranoia, he might be today’s best shot at bringing new life and unity to the many fragmented threads of the environmental movement, Christian and otherwise.

As long as editors force evangelical environmentalists to continually assert their conservative credentials, Evangelicals will not have much of a role to play in solving the complex problems of today.

Our current political climate is toxic for evangelical reformers. And yet, if we’re really honest, which few corporations or politicians is showing themselves to be at this time, the environmental crisis will only be solved by sacrifice—the sacrifice of the unsustainable American Dream.

We will not solve global warming by changing light bulbs. We will not solve smog by driving hybrids. The only real solution is the hard, slow, unsexy work of downsizing our lifestyles, as they’re currently articulated.

That’s where Matthew Sleeth comes in. His story itself—of a wealthy surgeon who, with his family, stepped off the career ladder for a slower-paced, less remunerative but fuller life—is a role model for the kind of sacrifice we’re talking about. And more: he’s emerged on the other side intact enough to enjoy the fruit. His teenagers, liberated from slavery to media, have learned to love each other and their parents and neighbors. It’s real. I’ve seen others like the Sleeths, but so far from everyday experience as to be prophetic and a little incredible.

If evangelicals are going to make a world-changing impact on the environment, it will be through the unique gifts they bring:

1.    Faith in the apparently impossible; and the associated
2.    Willingness to embark on the impossible;
3.    Belief in right and wrong, especially the s-word, sin;

And perhaps most importantly,

4.  The mental skill of holding the global and the local in tension.

Moving easily from topic to topic, Sleeth demonstrates mastery of all these. Discussing cancer deriving from exposure to dioxins, for example, he notes what dioxins have in common with sin: there’s no safe dose. Statements like this are not hokey bones to the believers: they are expressions of a deep engagement with the morality of poison. They may ruffle the feathers of the eco-establishment, but the same are usually won over with right actions. So if sin-believing evangelicals can be mobilized to get carcinogens out of our homes and food, that’s worth the embarrassment of tolerating Christians.

Sleeth’s strongest appeals come when he discusses affluence, particularly his screed against Santa Claus. The reckless pursuit of stuff, he argues, harms more than the environment: it harms our moral centers, and stunts the emotional growth of our families and communities.

I’d love to see more here. It’s a shame that evangelicals are still in need of hand-holding. Sleeth is capable of leading a trek, but has to continually slow down to tend to doubters and babies. But this is a success story of a book.

I’ve been looking at B. Venkat Mani’s book Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. It’s a critical exploration of the emergence of literature from among the Turkish “guest workers” in Germany.

This story is significant, because Turks in Germany are a large community who, after decades of presence, remain very foreign. One of Mani’s key points is an emerging Turkish literary assertion of belonging in Germany, irrespective of the official German centers of culture. But they are resisting categories thrust upon them by frustrated opinion-makers: they are no longer guests in Germany; they use the German language, but are not necessarily striving toward German-ness as traditionally understood. Rather, they are creating new centers bolstered by cosmopolitan claims.

And this cosmopolitanism is doubly subversive: is subverts the centers of official Germany, and subverts the cultural norms of the global jet-set—those typically granted the title of cosmopolitan, because these Turks are anything but elites. They are meat-and-potatoes workers.

Cosmopolitanism by itself, Mani told me in an office visit, is innocent of the standard charge of being a hobby for the privileged few (although he said this more eloquently and sharply). It’s a way of doing life that untold numbers of quiet transnational migrants and working-class immigrants have discovered in recent decades, of being at once citizens of the world and of their respective places.

Terribly fascinating stuff; and a real joy. I hope I can take Mani’s class this fall, if my first-semester grad calendar allows me to.

Hitler hated Jews, rich and poor alike. He also hated German poverty. And even in war, he managed to do something about it. That is the astonishing story here.

Götz Ali is a German historian whose research on the Third Reich and Second World War has made him a bit of a rock-star in the German-speaking world, to the degree that detractors have been known to protest his book signings. I doubt such a fate would await any American historian, in part because Americans are heirs to a centuries-old attempt to bury the past. To be a historian, in certain respects, is an un-American vocation.

But Germans and their neighbors live with the consequences of WWII, and as Ali points out in Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, there remain many untold stories of what happened and what remains for us, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the perpetrators.

Hitler managed to retain legitimacy in part, Ali argues, because of the material benefits he brought to German daily life. These came in a few forms. First was war-time spending, of which the greatest profits went to major industrial and financial institutions. This is a well-known story, and Ali finds it important to qualify it in the preface:

There is no question that many leading industrialists and financiers were complicit in Hitler’s regime. … And indeed many Germans had a stake in … [shifting] the burden of blame for Nazi barbarism to a handful of individuals.

This book was conceived as an attempt at redressing the balance, at redirecting public attention toward the potential advantages everyday Germans derived from the Nazi regime.

Nazis occupying much of Europe carefully plundered their victims infrastructure, returning untold prosperity to Germany. We’re not talking about crude pirate chests here. Noting old hearsay that the “American care packages that helped Germans survive the early years after the war were dismissed as mere chicken feed. … “

It was only when I began work on this book that the truth behind these stories became clear to me. The women of the Third Reich were accustomed to far better than chicken feed. The packages their husbands had constantly sent back from German-occupied countries between 1941 and 1944 contained staple and gourmet items that supplied well beyond the minimum calories necessary for human survival.

But it was more than a private criminal enterprise: local government was involved. The creepiest picture in the book is a propaganda poster proclaiming that Jüdisches vermögen wird volksgut, or Jewish wealth is becoming the people’s. They were carefully expropriating, for instance private Jewish libraries, and distributing the volumes to local public libraries around Germany.

In this and many other ways, the war didn’t hurt people at home. Chickens landed in people’s pots, and dissent dissipated.

Continuing yesterday's story:

The Kickapoo Valley has always been a highly diverse country. Originally Ho-Chunk country, it was also a crossroads of Sauk and Dakota peoples. It was a battlefield in the Blackhawk War of the 1830s, and a real melting pot of migrants from all over: Cornish, Irish, German, and above all, Norwegian immigrants; Yankee settlers and free blacks.

It was, actually, one of two settlements of black farmers in Wisconsin. There are few blacks there today—but not because of relocation to cities: they melted into the dominant white population. This in itself is a remarkable story. There are precious few stories of racial intermarriage in the rural north of the US.

During the Dust Bowl, Lynne Healy explains in A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley farmers here pioneered the technique of controlling erosion by plowing along the contours of hills, leaving an incredible pattern when viewed from the sky: see the book cover on the left.

Amish farmers started showing up after WW2, relocating from parts of Pennsylvania subject to suburban sprawl; and Hippie farmers began moving in during the sixties. The Amish and the Hippies, not natural allies, found a common interest in what would later be called organic farming.

Everybody, the dairy farmers included, worked so hard to preserve the land that the area became attractive for vacation homes starting in the 80s.

These mixtures of people did not always come effortlessly: a lot of legal fighting took place. The Amish have been accused of tearing up the blacktop roads with studded horseshoes; the dairy farmers have been accused of reckless erosion by grazing their cattle on steep hillsides; the organic farmers have been accused of holier-than-thou attitudes, and so on.

Meanwhile, the Ho-Chunk have returned. Once removed by treaty, they have lived as plain old US citizens back in their homeland for many years. But recent years have seen an enormous infusion of money, thanks to a casino in Wisconsin’s biggest resort area. The Ho-Chunk have acquired large tracts from a cancelled dam project, and have bought other land outright.

The story is not about to resolve, because the area is firmly integrated into American society, with all its contradictory forces. And yet, in a day in which voluntary, de facto segregation is becoming the norm, this quiet—though hardly gentle—story of integration is remarkable.
 

Singalongs can terrify me on occasion. I grew up in cold-war Europe, you see, where the memory of Nazi fascism and the presence of Soviet conformity developed in me and in my friends a bit of paranoia whenever mobs appeared.

Never mind that at raucous hockey games we readily participated in singing down our opponents. Because fascism is thrilling if you’re on the inside.

That being said, I’ve been listening to a live CD by David Crowder, and have been deeply moved by the lusty singing-along on behalf of the crowd: they’re having a great time; they’re really praising God.

And more: I’ve been reading about Why Men Hate Going to Church and have been feeling gloomy about the male presence in the church. Part of it’s the music: a lot of our praise and worship is, well, feminine: we sing about our feelings about Jesus, and how he’s a knight in shining armor.

But listening to Crowder here was a breath of fresh air, with a male-dominated crowd singing their hearts out, including a particularly cheery Hank Williams cover. They were unified, and they didn’t seem at all about to goose-step down to the town square. Good stuff.