Urbana.org All Things New Blog - books

The Tragedy of MKs

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:39:00 -0600

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.

France from 1870

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:28:00 -0600

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'm switching to Google

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:23:00 -0600

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.

What if Local Christians are Wrong?

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:26:00 -0600

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.

Imagining the World

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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.

Serve God Save the Planet

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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.

Who is a Cosmopolitan?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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.

The Poverty Hitler Hated, continued

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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.

1000 Pieces of Paradise

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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.

David Crowder is no Fascist

Mon, 18 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

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.

Is Evangelicalism an offshoot of Romanticism?

Thu, 07 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’m reading this terribly great book right now, The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin was a renaissance man of culture; this book, released posthumously, collects lectures he gave in Washington, DC, some 40 years ago.

Accordingly, this is a work of rhetoric, not research, but builds upon an unbelievable amount of research. What he’s trying to do is twofold:

Establish the Romanticist movement as the most decisive intellectual revolution in western history (and knocking the Enlightenment off its pedestal); and
Figure out where this revolution came from.

He succeeds marvelously at the first task, if Christianity’s impact on pagan Europe is excluded. He seems to hardly concern himself with the cross-cultural translation of an initially Jewish sect into Greek/Roman society in the first centuries of the Common Era—he takes the Christian West for granted. That’s a problem, but hey: these are lectures, and I can grant him that point, if it helps his case.

His first major problem is defining romanticism, which is as slippery as soap. After explaining, with characteristic dry wit, that (regarding the hopeless task of supplying a definition) “I do not propose to fall into that particular trap,” he ultimately settles on calling Romanticism a (particularly German) critique of the (particularly French) Enlightenment, the latter with its voracious appetite for imposing quantifiable human categories on everything, from miracles to natural laws to ethnography.

Again, he’s on thin ice, but:

"Unless we do use some generalizations it is impossible to trace the course of human history. Therefore, difficult as it may be, it is important to find out what it was that caused this enormous revolution in human consciousness."

Where it gets really interesting is when he, moving from definitions, actually starts this revolution. And what he finds starts with pietism, that German (Lutheran) spiritual movement roughly analogous to Anglo-Saxon evangelicalism. Pietists took faith from an external point of connection to church and community, and made it individual and experiential.

The personal experience of faith opens all kind of new capacities inside one’s brain, as one can now conceive, for instance, of one’s fellow believers on the other side of the world as closer kin than one’s next-door neighbor unbelievers. This kind of intellectual leap is taken for granted today, but was incredibly destabilizing to the societies it landed in.

Berlin himself found pietism fairly pathetic, an internalization of spiritual energies because of the political weakness of Germany at that time. Never mind that: he’s uncovering something important: Inasmuch as we who concern ourselves with world Christianity believe in experience outweighing life station, we are all romantics.

When Lions Attack, Landmines Maim, Slavers Pillage, and Deserts Devour

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Just in case you’re ever tempted to think you’ve got it hard (as I do when, for example, a child won’t go to sleep at night, or when I miss the bus): these kids have an incredible story to tell.

I just finished reading They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan

It’s a first-hand account of refugees from the civil wars in Sudan, and it pulls no punches, points no fingers, and does not take sides. It merely gives a voice to three young men who walked thousands of miles, from parched deserts to deadly jungles, through lion-infested savannahs and crocodile-infested swamps, dodging AK-47-wielding enemies and more.

I was looking for something else, as I was working on something related to boy soldiers. After a few pages it became clear that this wasn’t my book. These kids are only refugees, after all.

But even with my very limited time, I kept reading. I was never sure just how much I could trust their accounts, but in the end, I had to. They were, after all, in many cases the only survivors.

Now: I do have a gripe here: the editors’ unbending choice to cut our editorializing. I realize that these three boys are not experts. They experienced the hellish conditions, but they didn’t necessarily understand the context of the war. Still, I wish at times I’d heard opinions, rather than merely stories about why they had to flee, why they were driven from camp to camp, etc.

But, on the other hand, sometimes it’s nice—if a little stomach-turning—to hear first-person testimonies. And this book is certainly that.

Unintentional Evils

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:58:00 -0600

I had a grand time yesterday in a high-octane graduate seminar in history I visited at a local university. The students were discussing Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, an audacious global history by Matthew Connelly, a prof at Columbia.

Connelly looks at a wide range of unrelated birth-control, eugenics, and population control movements, and combines them all in a discussion of the cold war and the emergence of the third world. His two main points:

Well-intentioned people can launch projects that are nothing short of evil (Connelly would not use that word)—like forced sterilization camps in India.
How does this happen? When these well-intentioned people are unaccountable to democratic checks and balances.

Who is unaccountable? Among others, Non-Governmental Organizations, he argues. Despite oftentimes large government contracts, most NGOs are accountable only to their donors. If you’re already not giving to a suspicious group, you have very limited options for expressing your opposition to them.

NGOs aren’t the bad guys, he point out repeatedly. Rather, bad things can happen there, and through unaccountable government agencies, in these cases:

When Groupthink replaces critical thought, which usually happens at moments of crisis or threat, and
When technocrats and experts become too segregated from the people they are supposedly serving.

The former occurs all the time. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out a generation ago, scientific revolutions occur when groupthink has come to be an inflexible paradigm, for which paradigm shifts are both necessary and painful.

Jeremi Suri, the professor leading yesterday’s seminar, asked a comparative question: replacing the 1960s word “population bomb” with today’s “climate change”, what groupthink is in process today? More importantly, how should the climate change technocracy temper crisis thought for the purpose of avoiding the same evils?

This is not to deny climate change. That’s not the point. The point is to ask: at what points in the well-intentioned efforts to stave off global ecological crisis are we in danger of repeating the same mistakes as a few short decades ago?

Any thoughts?

Unser Kampf

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:09:00 -0600

News Flash: we follow in our parents’ footsteps, often even in the way we reject our parents.

I really want to read this book: Unser Kampf: 1968—Ein Irritierter Blick Zurück, by German historian Götz Aly, but I can’t access it, because I don’t want to fork over € 40 to buy it from Europe. But it seems to be a particularly juicy book of recent history, one that has triggered quite the brouhaha in Germany (link in German-sorry).

Unser Kampf means “our struggle” and refers to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf (“my struggle”). The title alone is the first punch: it’s hard for North Americans to understand the feelings such a title can arouse. Germany is a modern liberal democracy, yet one which has made exceptions to freedom of speech in matters of the Nazi past: Mein Kampf is banned; holocaust denial is illegal; the Neo-Nazi party is illegal, and so on.

A major public debate in recent decades has focused on situating the Nazi moment in German History. Put crudely, the question is: was Hitler the exception or the rule? With “our struggle”, (again, which I haven’t yet read), Aly seems to be pushing those buttons and more.

The book is about the “68 Generation,” or those young people involved in revolutionary (leftist) movements of 1968. Aly, as a young man, was a leading participant at the time. Forty years later, as a scholar of the Nazi period, he looks back to his own youth and concludes: we too had totalitarian tendencies.

As the 1968 protests were part political rebellion and part generational struggle between those born before and after World War 2, it is particularly belligerent of Aly to highlight the similarities between the camps. As one reviewer has put it, Aly is far from disinterested here; with many of his fellow 68ers, he’s writing through a bullhorn.

And, writing forty years later, this bullhorn says: the seduction of belonging to mass movements; the thrill of believing that the solution to most of the world’s problems may be at hand; the intoxicating feeling of being on the correct side of progress—all these are shared by both the 68er youth and their Nazi youth parents.

What does all this mean for North America? 1968 here was more fragmented. After Martin Luther King’s murder that spring, all hope for a revolutionary coalition between black and white youth withered away; plus the anti-Vietnam element here drew attention away from a leftist social transformation as envisioned by the Port Huron crowd.

But generational battles are always new, and full of mutual incriminations. It’s tempting to Monday-morning quarterback the mistakes of one’s parents’ youth. It’s a lot harder to admit we were wrong.

Many readers of this blog, I assume, are of student age. We too will one day have to swallow withering critique from our children. Some of it will be ignorant; some of it deserved. How will we face that moment? More importantly, how will we handle the bullhorn of our own youth, as we speak to our own parents?

The Danger of Grief without Hope

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:29:00 -0600

Too often as action-minded young Christians, who see a problem and want to immediately solve it, we fail to acknowledge Christ's presence. We rush to shut out the cries.

Wise evangelical leaders, including one of my heroes, Scott Bessenecker (who once again has beat me to the point here), have pointed out the profound spiritual power in solidarity, in grieving with those who are in grief.

“This is not how things are supposed to be” is a refrain I’ve heard from students learning to grieve with the grieving, rather than simply taking the reins and getting busy.

There is truth there: things are indeed not the way God wants the world to be. And furthermore, just as Jesus lingered at his friend’s tomb, weeping even as he knew he was about to raise him from the dead—lingering in grief for this dying world is good.

But, as I’ve just been reminded by Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice in their new book Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing, grief without hope is only part of the Christian story: Things can and must get better. Or, as Katongole and Rice put it, “things are not the way they have to be.”

Not the way they should be … Not the way they have to be. Two slightly different ways of expressing discontent with the world, but two very different solutions. The first expresses grief alone; the second expresses grief informed by hope in God’s restoration.

We ought to welcome the growing evangelical willingness to once again enter the dark corners of the world. But let’s be clear: Grief without hope is easily perverted into catharsis, navel-gazing, and withdrawal.