Page 1608 – Christianity Today (2024)

The loneliness and isolation that mark modern Western life are amplified in a place like Phoenix.

By far the largest city in the second-fastest-growing state, with 4.2 million, Phoenix has wittingly or unwittingly taken on a spirit of more, bigger and—possibly most significantly—farther. It's the opposite of a place like New York City, where tight quarters lead to creative use of compact areas.

The vast horizons in the Valley of the Sun are breathtaking. But the sheer possibility offered by all of the land can lead to fragmented lives, long car rides, and moving farther and farther out.

Enter Jade Meskill, a Phoenix entrepreneur who's built his company around fighting such isolation with a vengeance. His strategy is simple: he values human beings. And his values have driven him to make ample space—literally—for community and collaboration.

This wasn't always the case. In his first job as Chief Technology Officer for a distribution company in Chandler, just outside Phoenix, Meskill rose to the top fast and was ready to do things his way.

"I wanted to build a great environment where people loved to work," Meskill says. "I gave my employees really flexible schedules, a totally open work environment, and good pay," Meskill says. He even threw in video games. "I wanted people to like working for me," Meskill says.

"But they hated it, and they hated me."

Meskill says he went through a couple cycles of employees who responded to his management style with the same distaste. He had to dig deeper to figure out what was going on.

"I couldn't just blame my employees," Meskill says. "I had to ask how I was responsible for what happened." As a follower of Jesus, Meskill knew that people had gifts and talents given by God. He also knew he was not a perfect boss. What he had yet to do was make his management approach line up with what he confessed on Sunday morning.

A New Way

Meskill's journey toward "prioritizing human relationships," he says, took an even more dramatic turn when he co-founded a software development company with friend and colleague Derek Neighbors. While software development can conjure up images of a lone programmer working in a dark room writing code, Meskill says in truth, "it's a highly social endeavor." If people who use the software are ignored, no programming code is good enough to make the system work. Once again, Meskill was face to face with living out the values of human collaboration.

Inspired by Jesus (as well as agile software development methods), Meskill and his company, Integrum, began building around a different set of values, of collaboration, transparency, and honesty. They went so far as to make "love" a core value. Simply put, they were becoming experts at working together. They began teaching themselves and their clients how to move away from a top-down, control-oriented process and trust each other.

As Meskill became more convinced of the power of collaboration and human potential, he and his colleagues started looking at their "tribe": the greater software and design community. "We saw that in Phoenix we were very disconnected; we are so spread out," he says. "We were all trying to make a difference, but we weren't working together for the greater good."

A self-admitted risk taker, Meskill and his colleagues had some extra office space and knew a small graphic-design group that was losing its workspace. They decided to invite them in. The new tenants paid no rent. They were there to work alongside and, in Meskill's words, "see what happened."

Both companies benefited from sharing the space. They began meeting regularly to collaborate and discover possibilities they wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Then the circle widened. Others who were linked to the design firm would stop by and discover their shared office space. Meskill says, "Before we knew it, we had a bunch of people just showing up." They all were working on their respective business opportunities, but all the while sharing expertise and innovating.

Jade says it was like stepping onto a ship of possibility—the possibility that comes through human collaboration—and setting sail. They were not disappointed.

Today, that small sailing ship has turned into a full-fledged, sea-faring vessel. And it is appropriately named Gangplank, the walkway between land and sea.

Building a Gangplank

Picture this: You are going to meet Meskill at his office. You arrive at the correct address and open the front doors. You see about 50 people working at long tables in a big room with exposed wood rafters overhead and cement floors below. You proceed to the back of the room. All along you assume these are Meskill's colleagues hard at work, and in a way they are. It turns out, they don't work for him or Integrum.

Meskill and Neighbors designed Gangplank as a place for people to just show up. The website says, "Gangplank offers FREE collaborative workspace M-F. If you are in the area, drop on by and get your work on." The Gangplank community spans from 20 to 50 years old, and represent at least 10 different companies involved in real estate, education, graphic design, software development, marketing, and business development consulting.

They show up because they believe they have something to offer and something to receive. That's it. They don't pay rent. They have few rules. The only requirement, if a person becomes a regular, is that he or she gives back to the surrounding city in some way in return for all they are receiving through Gangplank. Often this takes place through a monthly Gangplank Open Forum, where people teach from their areas of expertise. Other times giving back means an impromptu problem-solving session for another person's business opportunity. Sometimes giving back doesn't take place within the walls of Gangplank at all. Tutoring children, volunteering for nonprofits, serving in a local church are all part of Gangplank's vision of giving.

As Gangplank regular Greg Taylor, a digital marketing specialist, told the local East Valley Tribune, "The biggest benefit is a sense of community . . . I can see innovation happen first-hand. If I have a challenge with a client on a technical standpoint, there's someone who can help me."

The City of Chandler has climbed on board to Gangplank's vision. A grant from Chandler pays for the space, located on the city's historic main street. The Chamber of Commerce is convinced that Gangplank is fostering good things for the people involved and the community at large. And they want Gangplank to prosper, knowing that will directly affect the local economy.

Faith and Action

In spoken and unspoken ways, Meskill's faith is intertwined through all of his endeavors. From his view of humanity to his willingness to admit shortcomings, he is rooted in Jesus' gospel. And he is applying the freedom of the gospel to create a counterculture of work and creativity.

As summed up in the Gangplank Manifesto, Meskill seeks to value:

• collaboration over competition,
• community over agendas,
• participation over observation,
• doing over saying,
• friendship over formality,
• boldness over assurance,
• learning over expertise,
• people over personalities.

Meskill's pastor, Bill Weaver, celebrates the perspective that Jade brings. "It would be very easy for Jade to get rich on whitewashed fences, but that's just not his style," says Weaver, pastor at San Tan Christian Center. "Jade wants to help destroy the fence in order to see it built up again the right way in business, church, and life."

Integrum now does little to no software development, instead spending most of its time teaching all kinds of teams within corporations how to work together. They call themselves "culture hackers," as they analyze and break through current business practices and help teams discover new ways to work together.

When asked if people know that he seeks to follow Christ in all he his doing, Meskill says, "People know me pretty well," Meskill says. "They know what I stand for and what I believe. I hope all that I am doing starts to open people's minds about what . . . Christians [are] like."

The Gangplank vision is catching. Already two more Gangplank locations have opened, in Tucson, Ariz., and Avondale, Ariz. A third is starting in Richmond, Virginia. In each location, government and business leaders have approached the planners, recognizing that a nonprofit mission like Gangplank can incubate small businesses and serve the common good.

Entrepreneur magazine named Gangplank as one of the 100 Brilliant Companies in 2011.

Farther out or Further in?

While the Phoenix metro area is pushed to the limits of expansion in terms of real estate and infrastructure, there is something in the human spirit that inherently knows "farther out" has its limits. Fortunately, for this city and others, Meskill has taken risks to hack the culture of individualism and build a business culture around the truth that, no matter how competitive the businessman, we all are wired for community.

Eileen O'Gorman lives in Phoenix, where she works in communication for Food for the Hungry, an international relief and development organization. Since moving to Phoenix, she's grown to love the big sky, cool nights, cactus blooms and the people. She is a member of Christ Church Anglican and holds a Master of Divinity from Covenant Theological Seminary, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Photo courtesy of Esther Martinez.

According to CBS News and a number of other outlets, last night Republican candidate for an Indiana U.S. Senate seat Richard Mourdock suggested that pregnancies resulting from rape are "something that God intended to happen." He was in the midst of a debate with two opponents, explaining how he believes that "life begins at conception," and how he would only allow for abortions in circ*mstances in which the mother's life is in danger.

"I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God," Mourdock said. "And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

As expected, Democrats jumped on the statement: "The God I believe in and the God I know most Hoosiers believe in, does not intend for rape to happen—ever," said his Democratic foe, Joe Donnelly said. "What Mr. Mourdock said is shocking, and it is stunning that he would be so disrespectful to survivors of rape."

Many media outlets are expressing shock, unable to concieve of a God or a world in which God might actually make something good from something horrid, that the child of rape or incest could be considered a divine gift. Note the tone and disgust of the Atlantic Wire summary of the story.

It's hard to believe that anyone would really believe what Mourdock seemed to say, that rape itself is intended by God. And in fact, even he doesn't believe it. He later clarified: "What I said was, in answering the question form my position of faith, I said I believe that God creates life. I believe that as wholly and as fully as I can believe it. That God creates life. Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think that God pre-ordained rape? No, I don't think that. That's sick. Twisted. That's not even close to what I said. What I said is that God creates life."

Though a prime example of gotcha-politics, this incident raises other issues, issues weighted with glory even. It almost goes without saying that for Christians, while rape is a terrible thing, in the providence of God, this too can be redeemed, a tragic event from which love can emerge. And yet we live in a society in which many find this view intolerable, outside the bounds—anathema. This is a delicate conversation we're a part of in America, one that requires us to eschew the cheap advice or platitudes of Job's counselors, to be sure. Then again, it may be even more "disrespectful to the survivors of rape" to fail to tell them about the wondrous redeeming power of God, even in the most horrible circ*mstances.

It's an ancient story that still plays out today, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where, in 2010, 20.9 million widows struggled for survival, according to new research from the UK-based Loomba Foundation.

Western Christians seeking to help the poor in Africa give enormous attention to AIDS and the plight of orphans. But mission and aid workers are discovering that one of the biggest problems is land rights for widows.

When Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, sent church members around the world in 2004 to ask native populations what their biggest needs were, they consistently heard the same complaint, especially in Rwanda: widows were losing their land.

In interviewing judges—including those on the Supreme Court—and lawyers, pastors, and denominational heads, land grabbing, along with physical and sexual violence toward women, always topped the list of urgent concerns.

"We looked at the laws relating to land and women and found that one of the laws had just been brought into the 21st century," said Saddleback attorney Vance Simonds. Rwanda adopted a new constitution in 2003, and for the first time, women were allowed to inherit property. "Women and children had been considered chattel," he said. "Their rights were now set down in the laws. Women could inherit property."

When 26-year-old Constance Kyalimpa's husband Paul died of AIDS, his family immediately asked her to leave her five children with them and go away, explaining that because she didn't belong to their tribe, she had no right to her husband's land or possessions.

The trouble is that the laws aren't being enforced, and not just in Rwanda. In Uganda, "[There] is a set of laws from the constitution on down that do require equal access to land and allow women to own, inherit, buy, and sell land," said Jesse Rudy, International Justice Mission (IJM) field director in Kampala, Uganda. "In practice, that doesn't happen."

Rudy likens these laws to a building full of antiretroviral drugs, made useless without any syringes. "They aren't getting the laws to the people who need them the most. The implementation level is not an effective enforcement of the law. People don't know or understand the law."

Tim Hanstad, CEO of Landesa—an organization that partners with governments and local churches and charities to secure land rights for poor families worldwide—says this problem has been around since the Old Testament period. Hanstad cites the Book of Ruth: "It's a story of Naomi—Ruth's mother-in-law—who is a poor widow. She no longer owns her husband's land. She is unable to redeem it herself and goes elsewhere."

A Familiar Story

The struggle for a widow to hang on to her land follows a somewhat predictable pattern after a husband's death. His family will tell her, sometimes at the funeral, to leave. Rudy said, "Everything she has relied on to support her is gone and has actually turned on her."

Being evicted from the land is a terrifying, desperate experience, but women don't give up their husband's home or land without a fight. Rudy said, "Clients know what the consequences of leaving are. Starvation and death are on the other side of leaving their house." More than half of African widows—55 percent according to one research report—face pressure to leave their land after their husband dies.

A widow cannot easily go back to her home village. Hanstad said, "Women in these situations are often forced into desperation, which often leads to risky behavior."

When 26-year-old Constance Kyalimpa's husband Paul died of AIDS in Uganda, his family immediately asked her to leave her five children with them and go away, explaining that because she didn't belong to their tribe, she had no right to her husband's land or possessions.

Then his family began to take things from her, such as Paul's cows. They threatened to take Paul's motorcycle, but one of his brothers offered to pay Kyalimpa in exchange for using it. The plan worked until her stepson disappeared with the motorcycle, leaving her with no source of income.

Meanwhile, Paul's uncle was trying to sell the land to foreign investors, who wanted to build a factory. The uncle claimed the land belonged to him and to Paul, and since Paul was dead, the land reverted to him.

Kyalimpa sold her goat to get enough money to travel into the city, where she reported what was happening to the administrator general. (When someone dies without a will, this national office ensures that no one takes or gives away property of the deceased without legal authority.) The office wrote letters to the business developer, who promised to wait for Kyalimpa's consent before purchasing, and to Paul's family, who paid no attention.

If the widow hangs on—and she generally does—the measures may turn violent. Rudy recalled clients who "have had their homes pushed in on them when they were asleep" or "whom perpetrators have tried to bludgeon to death with a brick." Crops are slashed or burned at night. The family is beaten until they agree to leave or they are threatened with a machete.

When Kyalimpa's stepson discovered she was challenging the sale, he threatened to cut her, and he began carrying around a machete.

"I used to get in the house early and go to bed very early," she said. "I was scared."

Then the counselor from Kyalimpa's AIDS support organization told her that a respected leader would come to teach widows how to keep their land. "That night I did not sleep," she said. IJM put her in touch with the proper authorities, called everyone involved, and brought in surveyors to establish boundaries around Kyalimpa's six acres. Eventually, she acquired a deed to the property.

IJM helped Kyalimpa put her children back in school and loaned her money to rear pigs. She also began to earn money making beads through the Bead for Life organization. She is building tenant houses on her land, which she will be able to rent out. Kyalimpa came from a Catholic background, but her encounter with other Christians through IJM introduced her to Jesus, she said. She now attends Zion Lutheran Church.

"IJM resurrected me," she said. "They got my bones and covered them with flesh."

Why the Land?

Land insecurity has larger implications for the poor. "We in the West often underestimate the close relationship between . . . right to land and poverty," Hanstad said. "It is often not understood that three-quarters of the world's poorest people live in rural areas. Landlessness is the best predictor of poverty in many places."

Land insecurity is also telling in agricultural productivity and yield gaps, which refer to how nearly farmers reach the physical potential of the land they're working. "Africa as a whole is using well under half, more commonly about 25 percent, of the potential of that land," said Hanstad. "One of the reasons for that is because the people who are actually farming the land don't have the long-term security, and incentives that go with that, to make long-term productive investments in the land. That's a land tenure issue."

It's a serious problem. The women, who have the most tenuous grip on the land, are producing 60 to 80 percent of the food in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

The underproductivity of the land is also a major reason behind the so-called "land grab" of recent years. Global demand for food and bio-fuels is causing global investors to search for unused or underused land. In all of Africa, nearly 148 million acres—an area the size of France—was purchased or leased by foreign companies or governments in 2009 alone. Seventy percent of that land was in sub-Saharan Africa.

The squeeze on the land has pinched women the hardest, since fewer of them own titles to land and many are left out of land inheritance. "Women are certainly being disproportionately affected," Hanstad said. "Even when some compensation is given, it's the male head of household who receives that compensation and controls it."

Forcing out widows and weaker owners is made possible by Africa's struggle to document land ownership—something that has been going on since colonization, said Sandra Joireman, international relations professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. Joireman specializes in property rights and legal development in previously colonized countries.

She explains that in much of Africa, there were usually two systems of land rights, something that was carried over even when the countries began to claim independence. "We get this dual system of property rights that continued, except it is no longer the subject and the colonizer. It becomes the wealthy people in cities who have formal rights, and the rural, less-educated people who have customary rights."

The biggest difference is that formalized land can be bought, sold, or inherited, while customary land reverts back to the community (the family or the chief) after the landowner dies, she said.

"It means you can't decide to sell your land and move to the city," Joireman said. "You also can't mortgage your house to start a business. No bank will ever give you a loan." More than 90 percent of land in Africa is still outside the formal legal system, according to the FAO.

A 2012 study released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development revealed that children who live in countries where women lack the ability to own land are on average 60 percent more malnourished than children in countries where women have some or equal access to land.

"If [widows] have more security in the land, they're more likely to steward it better, more likely to make long-term investments, more likely to access credit," Hanstad said. This leads to a more productive agriculture, which leads to a more productive economy. In countries where women have equal access to land, agriculture yields go up by 20 to 30 percent, according to the FAO.

First Line of Justice: Clergy, Elders

Progress is being made to document ownership, through projects like Rwanda's land tenure regularization program. The primary goal is to issue titles to every landholder in the country. A World Bank research group found that two and a half years after implementation, the program had improved access to land for married women.

In Uganda, IJM pressed officials to enforce existing laws, enabling 529 victims to regain their property. The office handles between 80 and 100 cases at any given time, so in response to the demand, IJM will open a second office this fall in northern Uganda's Gulu region.

In Rwanda and Kenya, Landesa is working on structural changes, to define and clarify the rights that exist for women, and creating a property rights regime to back them up. "Part of that structural solution is changing formal laws—where it's needed—to give not only women equal rights to land, but to better clarify the rights that exist," Hanstad said. After understanding the local customs, Landesa works to change the laws in ways that can formalize and legally protect women's rights to land, he said.

But changing the law, while necessary, often isn't sufficient, he said. The first line of justice isn't the courts—it's the clergy, elders, and tribal leaders. They are the ones to help women, who are poor and unable to access courts, explains Landesa spokesperson Rena Singer.

"Traditional elders determine everything from inheritance disputes to whether a girl goes to school and domestic violence."

Educating those elders about the law turns them into advocates for women, Singer said. "The elders tell the men, 'You'd better put your wife's name on your title, for your kids,' " she said. "It's effective."

Educating clergy can have the same effect, Saddleback attorney Simonds said. Pastors are present and influential at critical times in a woman's life—the wedding, her children's births, the death of her husband. Saddleback has been working informally with IJM to understand the laws and pass that knowledge on to pastors, he said.

"Whether talking about HIV or clean water or literacy or land grabbing, it's always about letting the pastor be the center," he said. "You can go to little villages all over the world and you might not see a fire department or a city hall or even a grocery store, but you'll see a church."

Two hundred of Saddleback's network of 2,200 pastors in Rwanda have been trained through an education curriculum to protect widows from land grabs. (A video is under development in order to speed up the training and to reach more pastors.)

Pastors are taught about the principles of the law, how to make very basic wills, and how to preach a funeral sermon that exhorts the family to care for the widow and fatherless. They also learn about official marriage licenses, birth certificates, and wills, all of which can stand between a widow and the loss of her land.

"We teach the pastors the critical importance of getting married in the church and being recognized by government authorities," Simonds said. If there aren't verification papers, a government might recognize the brother's rights over the widow's claim.

Documenting a child's birth is also crucial, so that the rights of the woman and her children will be established before the husband dies, Simonds said. "Throughout the Bible there are implications that we should care for the widows and fatherless," Simonds said. "One of the things we try to do for pastors is make the bridge."

It's hard to imagine that people who should be the guardians of widows and orphans are the very ones preying on them, he said. "It's a meaningful quest we're on," Simonds said. "Christ himself said in Luke 20, 'Beware of the teachers of the law …. They devour widows' houses and … will be punished most severely.' What else could that mean other than land grabbing in the sense that we're talking about right now?"

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra is a freelance writer based in Chicago. With additional reporting by Esther Nakkazi in Kampala, Uganda.

David Boyd, a pastor from the suburbs of Sydney, sat on the floor of a smoke-filled room in rural Nepal, and spoke to the village elders through his interpreter and friend Gam. Peppered with questions about the "Jesus way," he marveled at the opportunity to share the gospel with this unreached people group, a privilege denied to previous missionaries. How was this unlikely door opened? It wasn't through a short-term missions trip or a Western missionary, but through Gam, a Nepalese migrant who became a Christian at Boyd's church in Sydney.

J. D. Payne, professor of evangelism at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wants to show the West that God is orchestrating the movements of migrants like Gam to help fulfill the Great Commission. Whereas other recent books about immigration have focused on political or ethical debates, Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration, and Mission (InterVarsity Press) instead seeks to educate Westerners about the tidal wave of migrants coming to the West, and so challenge them to reach one of the world's most important (and overlooked) mission fields.

The statistics of migration alone are enough to give pause for reflection. In 2010, the United States was home to 43 million international migrants, 20 percent of the world total and 30 million more than the next largest migrant host. Nearly 41 percent of the world's migrants live in the West, among them more than one million international students and another million refugees. Moreover, the Southern Baptist Convention–affiliated International Mission Board estimates there are 361 unreached people groups (defined by most as less than 2 percent evangelical) living in the United States, ranking the United States behind only India and China for the highest number of unevangelized people groups within its borders.

The world is on the move—and through migration, many "distant mission fields" are now in American neighborhoods, sitting at the same stoplights and waiting in the same grocery lines.

In the West's urban centers, the line between foreign and local missions is now a blur. Take, for example, Linda from Toronto. One day she walked into a salon and was greeted by a Somali hairdresser. Knowing most Somalis are Muslim, she began to share her faith. But the Somali woman promptly declared, "Don't worry. I believe in Jesus too. That lady," she said, pointing to her Chinese co-worker, "introduced me to the Savior." In the global diaspora, migrants are some of the best missionaries, both to their own people and cross-culturally. And in cities like Toronto, where visible minority groups are expected to make up over half the population by 2017, mission is now, in the words of Samuel Escobar, "from everywhere to everyone."

With its case studies and practical guidelines for reaching migrants, pastors and lay leaders will find Strangers Next Door to be a clear and useful resource in building a global missions strategy. Although the book is perhaps overly optimistic that many job-seeking migrants will eventually return home, Payne does readers a service by bracketing the U.S. immigration debate and refocusing attention on the unique opportunity migrants present for world mission.

During his travels, the apostle Paul once declared to the Athenians that God determined the times and exact places where people would live, so "that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him" (Acts 17: 27, ESV). If God still intervenes to move people across the globe today so that they might hear the gospel, then perhaps it's time for Western Christians to venture across the street and meet the strangers next door.

Jeff Haanen is a freelance writer living in Denver.

Interracial marriage is on the rise. A Pew Research Center poll released in February 2012 found that in 2010, 15 percent of all new marriages in the U.S. were between spouses of different races or ethnicities. That's compared to 6.7 percent in 1980.

In general, interracial marriage is no longer taboo—although some still find it objectionable. While 43 percent of Americans believe it is good for society, 11 percent believe the growth in interracial marriage is a change for the worse. Just last year, a church in Kentucky barred an interracial couple from worshipping together (that ban was eventually overturned due to widespread outrage). And with a quick search on the Web, I discovered many sites and articles arguing the viewpoint that interracial marriage is unbiblical.

Though this viewpoint exists, Evangelicals are not against interracial marriage. In fact, pastors have spoken out in favor of it. For example, John Piper not only advocates interracial marriage in his book Bloodlines; he has taken the time to preach about the topic.

That said, here's the truth: a decision to marry outside one's race or ethnicity should not be entered into lightly. Interracial couples must face struggles that others may not encounter. But the solutions are the same for everyone: humility, love, and the gospel.

Discovering Differences

My husband and I are different from each other in almost every way, including racially. We knew going into our marriage that we were different, but as most married couples know, you really don't know someone until you're married and living with them. We were in love, and that love led us to make a vow to be together, for better or for worse, until death. But at the beginning of our marriage we quickly discovered that we were strangers. We had work to do to get to know each other, and many of our confusions were rooted in the fact that we were so culturally different.

My husband and I joke that we are the reasons for the black and white stereotypes out there. He likes meat and potatoes and beer on occasion; listens to alternative rock and people like Nick Drake; and likes camping and hiking. I, on the other hand, can throw down on fried chicken, greens, and mashed potatoes; prefer gospel, jazz, hip-hop, or anything I can dance to; and would much rather workout indoors or run than be in the wilderness. Even our personalities are at two different extremes. He is reserved, speaking when necessary, and calm. I am charismatic, expressive, and enthusiastic. As we learned more about just how different we were, our differences began to put a strain on our marriage.

Tim and Kathy Keller explain the phenomenon in their book The Meaning of Marriage: "If your purpose in marriage was to acquire a 'soul mate'—a person who would not change you and would supportively help you reach your life goals—then this particular reality of marriage will be deeply disorienting. You wake up to the realization that your marriage will take a huge investment of time just to make it work. Just as distressing will be the discovery that your spouse finds you a stranger and has begun to confront you with a list of your serious shortcomings."

Our differences in culture caused some conflicts at the beginning of our marriage. We knew we were the same in Christ, but culturally we were so different. It became increasingly difficult to relate. Like many newlyweds, we had much to work through, with the added fear that as I became one with my husband I would lose a major part of who I was as a black female. The solution was simple. We needed to become more gospel-centered.

Breaking Barriers

The gospel breaks down barriers because in salvation there is no distinction between people of different races, backgrounds, and ethnicities (Romans 10:12). God created my husband and me equally and God saved us by the same grace (Ephesians 2:8-9). Our first order of business was to see each other not in light of what we needed from each other, but rather as God viewed us—as redeemed children. As we began to see each other as covered with Christ's righteousness and beloved, the cultural differences became less important. What was important was whether we were glorifying God in our marriage through our relating to one another.

By the grace of God, our marriage did not remain in an uncertain state. We found the secret to marriage—the gospel. As the Kellers explain, "The gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another … When God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind … The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once." Knowing this made it more exciting to begin to learn about each other and put into practice agape (service) love.

Different, Yet the Same

No, we have not assimilated into each other. I am no more white than he is black. Instead, we appreciate aspects about each other that are different. We do not necessarily enjoy everything together. He won't be making up dance routines to music, and I'm never really going to be able to make Yorkshire pudding like his mum. But what we've learned to do is enjoy God's creativity in making us unique by learning about each other's cultures and embracing our differences.

One very practical way we celebrate our diversity together is through worship and music. We like to have dance parties in our home. We play various styles of worship music and sing and worship together. Or we put on different listening music and dance around. We have a blast enjoying our various styles of worship and listening and at the same time exposing our children to both.

We've also discovered that we are quite the same. What I mean is, because of the gospel, our differences don't separate us. Rather, they bring us together. We are a unified front in declaring the gospel to our children. We are united in service to our church. We are united in being each other's best friend. And of course we enjoy activities together, united in love and united in Christ—such as long drives, building traditions in our home, visits to our city square, praying and sharing our hearts' desires. We enjoy each other to the fullest extent that marriage intends.

As much as we may be different from married couples who are not interracial, we are truly the same. We are learning to lay down our lives, die to ourselves, love each other, learn from each other, and build each other up. We celebrate the joys of deep intimacy. We are learning to overcome sin and bear with one another. Our relationship may look different from the outside, but on the inside God's Spirit dwells within us; therefore, we are very much the same.

Trillia Newbell is a freelance journalist and writer. She writes on faith and family for The Knoxville News-Sentinel, and serves as the managing editor for Women of God Magazine. Her love and primary role is that of wife and mother. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, Thern, and their two children.

How lovely it might be to attend a dinner party hosted by John Lithgow.

As I read Drama: An Actor’s Education, Lithgow’s autobiography, I could easily discern his distinctive cadences and puckish personality (if, indeed, it is possible to describe a 6’4” individual as “puckish”). As a breezy account of an extraordinary career in theater, film, and television, the book is top-notch.

“Theatrical” may be the best way to describe it. I had a genuine “Aha!” moment when, in reading the acknowledgements, I discovered that its writing was actually antecedent to a one-man show Lithgow developed and performed, first at various venues around the country, and finally at Lincoln Center in 2008.

Knowing that much of the book was meant to work as a script, one better understands its structure. The rising action of each chapter often pays off with lines reminiscent of one of the well-crafted sitcoms for which Lithgow is known by most who watch television. This style works best when he is dishing a theater story. (“A moment of history? Of course! It was the last time Meryl Streep would have to audition for anything.”) The technique is less effective when he is punctuating the account of a difficult-to-capture event or era. (“We are capable of anything. A caustic three-word phrase barked out in an empty ice-house on the campus of The Stockbridge School was my first and most startling demonstration of that truth.”) And it is perhaps least successful when he is working to create a through-line for the book by summarizing its central relationship, that between the author and his father, theatrical producer and director Arthur Lithgow. (“Was it Oedipal pigheadedness? Did I have too high an opinion of my own abilities? Too low an opinion of my father’s? Whatever the reason, I never worked for him again.”) Lights fade.

This is not to say that the stories of the actor’s dad, generously leavening the book, are not occasionally illuminating and consistently entertaining. (Who wouldn’t be fascinated to learn about a man who once appeared before a paying audience playing two Shakespearian characters simultaneously in the same scene?) It just seems too complex a relationship to be accommodated by this highly stylized memoir—not least because there is much of the father in the son.

The elder Lithgow, whose career was spent perched mostly on the middle rungs of the theatrical ladder, is described as an entrepreneurial figure, brimming with moxie, who spent the author’s childhood moving the family precipitously between theatrical enterprises of one kind or another. And while the author claims never to have seriously considered acting as a career until he was a student at Harvard, it seems to this reader that he was a goner from early childhood, by fact of both nature and nurture. From the incidents recounted of his childhood and adolescence (in third grade, for instance, he complained bitterly about attempts to scale down the size of his hat for a turn as the Chief Cook of Sleeping Beauty’s castle), the son seems to have been destined to follow the father into the theater.

Arthur Lithgow’s jobs varied in quality and duration; with the exception of one academic appointment at a small midwestern college, they were never long. The family’s barn-storming lifestyle provides a wealth of rich coming-of-age material, which the author shares with relish in the early part of the book.

But it is this theatrical zest that is sometimes an issue in the writing. Did the actor actually, upon hearing that his father was moving the family once again, storm tearfully into the night to stand in a moonlit field in the Berkshire mountains (note: nicely set, beautifully lit), and cry out at the top of his lungs, “WHY ME? WHY AKRON?” Perhaps. But episodes like this lead us to question the veracity of events detailed elsewhere in the book, and we wonder how exactly we are meant to receive Lithgow’s memories.

This takes me back to the dinner party of my imagining. The stories told here are spun wonderfully well—in exactly the way one might love to hear them around a dinner table with friends. Lithgow is a gifted raconteur. But in that setting (as in a theater—or a pub!), we would grant the teller a certain license, whereas in the book—especially given some deeper notes the author is trying to sound—we’re not sure quite how far to extend that license.

There are times in the book when this trouble with tone is more pronounced than others. I was put off by the coy use of a pseudonym for an actor Lithgow worked with on a film early in his career. Referring to the actor as “Rock Masters” in a chapter entitled “Mr. Pleasant,” Lithgow savages his outdated technique and puffed ego, seems to feel generally superior to him in numerous ways, and then tries to soften the effect with a line that says, “But I took no pleasure in his decline. I actually liked the man.” Well, perhaps. But if there was no pleasure taken in the experience of witnessing an actor in decline, there does seem to be significant pleasure taken in recounting it, and the winking attempt to veil identities in a career as well documented as Lithgow’s—and in the age of Google—seems both disingenuous and uncharacteristically lacking in generosity.

Similarly, his evasion of the Vietnam draft by lying in an interview takes on the tone of a tale, and I was left feeling that the shame he confesses experiencing (in the last line of the chapter) rings a little hollow. And when he writes off his serial marital infidelities as a young actor—he had never experienced adolescence, he tells us, and he found himself in a world where there is simply a great deal of temptation—it seems like an inadequate reckoning.

None of this takes away from the book’s main achievement, which is to provide us with an opportunity to consider the rare career of an actor who has enjoyed remarkable success across three genres. Lithgow has a gift for characters who are outsized or, because of their strangeness or their darkness, difficult to consider. In the hands of a less gifted actor, these stories might not be told; Lithgow has handled them consistently and gracefully over his long career. I sometimes wished, in reading this book, that he had been able to treat his own life with as much honesty, precision, and care.

Mark Lewis is associate professor of communication and co-director of Arena Theater at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Michael Plekon has a penchant for the also-rans of Christian sanctity. Books by his favorites among his fellow Eastern Orthodox—Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff, and Alexander Men—were burned by a Russian hierarch as recently as 1998. Dorothy Day has made it into the canonization process but amidst fierce resistance on account of her abortion, many lovers, and leftwing politics; Thomas Merton, prolific and beloved monastic writer though he was, probably engaged too much with other religions to get even that far. Etty Hillesum and Simone Weil were not baptized. Andrew Krivak left the Jesuits. Sara Miles, Darcey Steinke, and Barbara Brown Taylor openly confess their doubts, flaws, and transgressions—and have the slight impediment of still being alive. Even among the safely canonized, Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Thérèse of Liseux earn more praise from Plekon for the pain of their unvarnished journals than for the bright and shiny image they’ve acquired in popular religiosity.

This is not plain old contrarianism on Plekon’s part. He joins the ranks of other theologians who, starting in the early 20th century, have called into question the official procedures of canonization and argued for a reconceived notion of holiness. A host of problems attend the traditional approach, from such a fixation on miracles that the saints become inaccessibly other from their fellow Christians to a “cult of celebrity” looking for sensations over fidelity. Along with writers like George Fedotov, Nadia Gorodetsky, Jim Forest, Michael Mott, Gillian Crow, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Olga Lossky, and Thomas Craughwell, Plekon has charted the waters of a “new hagiography” much needed in the unprecedented world situation where we find ourselves today.

Plekon’s quest to join in with other new hagiographers started at the margins of his own ecclesial community. Westerners are often little aware of the battles for theological direction taking place in the East, not least because one of the most intense battles is to what extent the East should even be in conversation with the West. A not inconsiderable number of Orthodox consign the whole lot to a state of unredeemed heresy and regard the faintest ecumenical impulse as treachery. To this attitude Plekon counterpoises—in Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church—the example of ten Eastern Christians, chosen for “their openness to the world, their creative yet ordinary ways of living out the gospel.” Deeply rooted in and formed by the particular cultures of Orthodoxy, they nevertheless recognized that the Christian faith transcends every place, which in turn led them to a fearless openness toward the culture and faith of the West.

This makes Plekon’s Living Icons of equal interest to religiously Western and Eastern readers. Most of the figures here understood themselves as living bridges between the divided halves of the church, whose calling was to enact Christian unity in their own lives and bodies. Fr. Lev Gillet, for example, a French Catholic who started his ministry as a Benedictine monk, joined himself to the Eastern church through the simple concelebration of the Eucharist with an Orthodox priest: no rebaptism, no renunciation, no rite of reception—nor would he ever say that he had left Catholicism behind. Lay theologian Paul Evdokimov earned himself the (not entirely complimentary) nickname “Orthodoxy’s Protestant” for his commitment to evangelical freedom, engagement with social questions, and passion for the “interiorized monasticism” that is the calling of every Christian, the married included. Nicholas Afanasiev is the source of the now international, interconfessional “communion ecclesiology” and was the only Orthodox mentioned in the working sessions and drafts of the Second Vatican Council.

Plekon regales the reader with the lives and thought of these and other remarkable figures from the boundary line of East and West. There is Sergius Bulgakov, of whom it is said that “no theologian in the Eastern Church had produced a body of thought comparable [to his] since the fall of Byzantium,” yet he remains virtually unknown and unstudied even among the Orthodox. Mother Maria Skobtsova (who did manage to make it to canonization on the strength of her death in a Nazi concentration camp) severely criticized the insularity of the religious orders of her day and sought in her own life to embody a new diaconally oriented monasticism. Gregory Krug, despite his lifelong struggles with depression, became a unique practitioner of “theology in color” as an iconographer. Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff strove for a truly indigenized Orthodoxy in the United States, free from the disastrous ecclesiology that would regard it as merely “diaspora.” Alexander Men, a Russian priest, renewed the preaching of the gospel in his homeland but in so doing made enemies and was cruelly murdered; he is probably more widely admired now outside Russia than within it.

The subtler plot of Living Icons is Plekon’s own critique of Orthodoxy, hidden within the telling of the stories of these great lights, along with his love song to it. The theological question at stake in the critique and the love alike is the question of holiness. Is it a matter of retreat, purity, preservation? Or is it a matter of risk, marginality, experimentation? Plekon evidently favors the latter view, but there is an inherent catch in choosing that option through the stories of the well-known, even if of mixed reception. At the end of Living Icons, Plekon mentions in passing that “it would require another entire book to tell the stories of the hidden saints in our communities.” He was right; that book is the second in this series, aptly titled Hidden Holiness.

Here Plekon sets out “to explore the shapes of a universal and more ordinary, and thus less noticeable or hidden holiness, one founded on the baptismal calling of all to be prophets and priests, witnesses to the Gospel.” Eschewing the heroic, Plekon presents faithful servants of Christ, the contours of whose lives will never a motion picture make. Unlike the vast majority of the canonized who are bishops, priests, monks, nuns, ascetics, and martyrs—the not-so-subtle implication being that you can’t be a saint with a job, a mortgage, a spouse, or kids—Plekon goes looking for those whose words and lives show the enormous range of fidelity in our time, for “there is really no limit to the ways in which holiness can be lived.”

At the very least, this means that holiness cannot be viewed principally as inherent virtue and the total absence of “sin and human qualities, eccentricities, phobias, sufferings—the substance of ordinary human life. Holiness is a struggle with the baggage of human existence, all the elements that make us who we are.” For “holiness is supremely personal, even idiosyncratic.” In this vein, we are treated to accounts of little-known but loveable persons who lived in Christ: Olga Arsamquq Michael, a Native Alaskan priest’s wife and quiet healer of victims of sexual abuse; the artist Joanna Reitlinger; the pioneering theologian Elisabeth Behr-Sigel; the YMCA staffer and ecumenist Paul Anderson; and many others. Plekon’s method here does not duplicate that of Living Icons with a chapter for each figure. Rather he follows a more intuitive approach, threading his way through these human stories, groping toward an image of holiness in our time. He echoes the thoughts of Simone Weil, who wrote: “Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.”

If anything drives Plekon’s illustration of holiness here, it is its universality of scope. Despite the ancient understanding of the holy as something “set apart,” Plekon and his fellow travelers insist that in Christ this can never mean a distinction between different domains of life, different geographical locations, different tasks. Holiness demands to be everywhere: “If the Gospel does not become woven into everything human, it is not real, not made incarnate.” Divine holiness is not too good to keep unsavory company—and this was, after all, a major scandal of Jesus’ own ministry.

A reader may well begin to wonder at this point if Plekon’s approach to holiness doesn’t render the whole sense of the word “saint” meaningless. If holiness is for everyone, if God offers it everywhere, on what grounds do we call anyone a saint as if it suggested a distinction from others? Even if the figures presented in Hidden Holiness are less famous than those in Living Icons, they’re obviously still recognized enough to get a write-up. Plekon himself admits, “The wave of interest in saints seems to lead to an impasse for the argument I have tried to raise here …. The saints who appear to really make a difference are the ones who light up the sky with their courageous teaching or witness, with the force of their extraordinary, heroic actions as well as their words.” Can the gap be closed even further, from the saint-that-inspires-me to the saint-that-I-am-called-to-be? Plekon’s own approach seems to demand it: “‘Hidden holiness,’ in the end, is neither magical nor theoretical, but personal and interpersonal—an invitation to follow Christ where we are.”

And that brings us to the third and final book, Saints As They Really Are: Voices of Holiness in Our Time. “We will always lift up extraordinary, exemplary people in our traditions,” Plekon realizes. “At the same time we must recognize that there are innumerable others, a huge cloud of witnesses, whose efforts to search for God and live out the gospel will never be widely known. But there remains a third category—saints in the making.” These are the subject of this last installment, people (mostly) still alive and unlikely ever to be venerated, but they fit Plekon’s definition of sainthood: “fallible humanity” in whom “Christ remained at the center.” Working mostly through the medium of contemporary memoirs, Plekon examines the efforts of ordinary Christians to live with Christ at their center, however much their margins might fall away. This includes an explicit confrontation of toxic, destructive, and pathological eruptions in the church, matched with a critique of inappropriate valorization of suffering when housecleaning would be a much better option.

But the most remarkable aspect of this third book is how Plekon himself finally comes out of hiding. He has shown his loves and convictions through his choice of saints to present, but throughout the reader has suspected that an interesting account of his own hidden holiness has been held back. Now at last we hear the story: how as a young person Plekon attended minor seminary under the care of the Carmelites, professed friar vows, and set himself on course for a life of service in the priesthood—a trajectory that broke down in his early twenties when he left to pursue his life “in the world.” Most of his story took place before the reforms of Vatican II were implemented, so Plekon grew up in a world where there was a strict divorce between holiness and worldliness. Perhaps the saddest part of all was the practice, then, of discouraging seminarians from emotional intimacy of any kind with anyone at all; holiness was treated as a matter of keeping oneself to oneself and God alone: “Emotional reserve, the distancing of oneself from others and from one’s own feelings, having little to say about one’s own thoughts, less even about one’s personality—all of this was to some extent acquired in the formation I experienced in the Carmelites.” It is no surprise that he and so many others couldn’t stick it in the end, but one would expect to find the same problem in any Christian community that drives a hard line between individual and community, between the holy life and the ordinary life.

Through this meandering journey, Plekon ultimately paints a rich portrait of what holiness is and could be for all the body of Christ in the 21st century. As he writes, “Sanctity is not a moral achievement but more like a seal, a stamp, being marked and set apart as God’s own.” The stamp stays on us whether we are laity or clergy, young or old, married or single, working or homemaking, resting or fighting, succeeding or failing. But being set apart does not mean being set alone. Plekon does well to remind us of Tertullian’s old adage: “Solus christianus, nullus christianus: There is no such thing as a solitary Christian.”

Books by Michael Plekon discussed in this essay:

Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

Hidden Holiness (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

Saints As They Really Are: Voices of Holiness in Our Time (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is assistant research professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, and the editor of Lutheran Forum.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Intersex persons are burdened enough by disputes about how discrepancies between their genotype and genitals should be handled. But their psychological makeup is also part of the battlefield on which the nature-nurture dispute is fought. To explain why, Rebecca Jordan-Young, in Brain Storm, cites experiments with animals that traced the effects of deliberate pre- or post-natal hormonal interference on their subsequent social and sexual behavior. Brain Organization Theory (BOT) researchers have used these findings to suggest that every mammalian brain (human included) “is a sort of accessory reproductive organ.” In other words, along with differing gonads and other structures needed for heterosexual mating, “[m]ales and females also need different brains so they are predisposed to complementary sexual desires and behaviors that lead to reproduction.”

As Jordan-Young summarizes:

This theory suggests that regardless of chromosomal sex, having a male-typical hormonal milieu in utero leads to male-looking genitals and “masculine” psychological traits, including erotic orientation toward women, as well as broadly masculine cognitive patterns and interests. Likewise, a female-typical hormonal milieu leads to feminine-appearing genitals and “feminine” psychology, including erotic orientation to men …. Moreover, sexual differentiation is not restricted to those behaviors that are directly involved in reproduction, or even in courting. Instead, brain organization theory is used to explain a very wide range of differences related to gender and sexuality—in humans, including everything from spatial [ability], verbal ability, or math aptitude, to a tendency to display nurturing behavior, to sexual orientation …. [T]he core assumption is that masculinity and femininity are package deals with reproductive sexuality at the core.

How well is the theory substantiated? To answer this, Jordan-Young reviewed over 300 studies, covering the various research designs used to test the hormone-psychology connections summarized above. She also interviewed almost two dozen prominent brain organization scientists. The result is a very detailed assessment, and one that could initially intimidate readers with little training in research design. But Jordan-Young is a clear and careful writer, so her book will repay persistent readers at all levels of methodological literacy. She is no Cartesian dualist: she clearly respects the constraints of embodiment in animals and humans alike. She also defends the freedom of scientists (of whom she is one) to use deterministic models to explain psychological and social processes, not just more obviously physical ones. But she thinks that BOT research is plagued by bad theory and shoddy methodology, often in the service of defending the theory in the face of ambiguous or contrary data. Ironically, despite the much-touted scientific trappings of their work, many BOT researchers routinely violate the central Popperian criterion for being scientific—namely, willingness to revise a theory when it is confronted by consistent empirical failures. Jordan-Young shows that some BOT adherents are also too quick to accuse their critics of blindly following the forces of postmodern political correctness, when in fact many are motivated by legitimate methodological concerns.

What are some of these concerns? Jordan-Young notes that when you can’t do with humans the kind of controlled experiments that can be done with animals, you have to settle for a series of quasi-experiments, in which you look for consistent patterns of correlation across time and place, and across differing samples and research designs. There are rules for doing good quasi-experiments. For instance, we obviously couldn’t establish a causal link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer by randomly assigning some people to smoke real cigarettes and others to smoke fake ones for several decades, then comparing their differential cancer rates. So epidemiologists did the next best thing: longitudinal studies tracking the health of existing smokers and non-smokers. (This is known as a cohort study design.) They also used the opposite approach: finding people who already did or didn’t have lung cancer, then retrospectively assessing their rates of cigarette consumption. (This is known as a case-control design.)

The reason the smoking-cancer link is so well accepted is that, over the years, these quasi-experimental studies shared several important features. First, the “input” and “output” variables, i.e., “smoking” and “lung cancer”—were consistent, both in terms of what they represented and how they were measured over time. Second, the number of people studied was very large. Third, the smoking-cancer correlations showed up in different kinds of research designs (e.g., both cohort and case-control studies). Fourth, most of the correlations between smoking and lung cancer were large and statistically significant. Finally, and critically, there was a consistent “dose-response” relationship across all types of studies: more smoking, more lung cancer risk; less smoking, less lung cancer risk. (There would hardly have been a legal case against the cigarette companies if a significant percentage of studies showed that smoking a pack a day for years made no difference, or worse, even reduced the chances of lung cancer.)

Jordan-Young applies these quasi-experimental research standards to her hefty sample of studies designed to test BOT. She concludes that, far from pointing to likely causal relationships between “brain sex” and sex-typed behavior, both the theory and its research methods are in need of drastic overhaul. Consider, for example, the many studies that have tried to demonstrate more “masculine” personality traits, skills, sexual interests, and the like in females with the intersex condition known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) than in the normal population of females. When these are taken together (and they must be: even the findings of a double-blind trial require at least one replication, and less-controlled quasi-experiments are held to an even higher standard), the evidence is thin. For example, there is no consistent evidence that CAH females have superior spatial skills, of the sort that help you orient yourself geographically or do jigsaw puzzles. In normal populations, there is a modest but statistically significant difference in some spatial skills that favors males. But when assessing CAH females or males most studies show no advantage, or (more embarrassingly) poorer spatial skills in CAH persons than in normal controls of their own genotype. This clearly violates the dose-response rule: just as you would expect increasing rates of smoking to correlate with increasing risks of lung cancer, so (according to BOT) there should be a positive correlation between people’s prenatal and/or postnatal “doses” of testosterone and their scores on sex-related cognitive tasks. At the very least, the correlation shouldn’t be reversed. Nor are CAH girls reliably more aggressive, assertive, competitive, or dominant than their non-CAH peers. Nor are they more likely than girls in general to engage in rough-and-tumble play as children, or to prefer male playmates in childhood, or seek out female sexual partners in adulthood. And all this is despite the fact that, having been born with masculinized genitals, there may be the expectation on the part of parents and others who know of their condition that they will be stereotypically more like boys. Remember, you can’t do a double blind experiment when you’re raising children.

There are two exceptions to these disconfirmations of brain organization theory. One is that CAH girls, compared to matched controls, are more likely to say they prefer so-called boys’ toys, such as building blocks or vehicles, to toys like dolls or cooking sets. But here we run into two problems. The first is that what people say and what they do are often discrepant, and very few studies have looked at what toys CAH girls actually do play with compared to normal controls. A 2003 study that did so (in an individualized playroom setting) found that CAH girls were indeed more likely than others to play with a toy garage, cars, and Lincoln logs than with baby dolls. This was taken as support for a version of BOT that sees people with testosterone-organized brains as more likely to be “systematizers” (interested in how things are put together, both concretely and abstractly) than “empathizers” (interested in understanding other people). However, a closer look at the data shows that even the normal control girls spent three times as much time playing with the garage and cars as with the baby doll, and six times as much with the Lincoln logs. And at the end of the play period, when offered the choice of a doll, a car, or a ball to take home, they chose the doll least often, by a wide margin.

If you’re wondering why, in 2003 (well after girls started playing soccer in droves), BOT researchers were coding “masculine” and “feminine” toys the same way they did in the 1950s, that’s the second problem. It reflects the essentialist presumption that gendered behaviors, along with normal genitals, are parts of a fixed package, and so their measures can remain as unchanging as measures of genital anatomy. It presumes that normal girls with low testosterone can be only minimally influenced by cultural shifts to start preferring Lincoln logs to baby dolls (once an empathizer, always an empathizer), even when data gathered by BOT researchers themselves indicate otherwise.

In the face of such contradictions, Jordan-Young notes that some BOT researchers over the years have quietly changed their definitions of what is “natural.” For example, the BOT view of “natural” female sexuality originally excluded things like masturbation, erotic dreams, and initiating sex, all of which were regarded as quintessentially masculine. These days BOT researchers treat all of them as “natural” for both sexes. But they did not make this shift because they suddenly admitted that cultural forces (for example, the second wave of feminism) might be stronger than they previously thought. Instead, they underplayed the changes they’d made to accommodate those very same cultural forces while continuing to embrace a biologically essentialist paradigm. The result is that current definitions of female sexuality are treated as equivalent to past ones for purposes of supporting the theory, when in fact they’re like apples and oranges. It’s like trying to establish a smoking-cancer link by measuring throat cancer rates for a couple of decades, then deciding to switch to lung cancer without acknowledging the switch or explaining why it was made. This is not the stuff of which successful lawsuits are made.

The second exception is that though CAH women don’t engage in hom*osexual behavior more than other women, they are less likely to marry or express interest in men, and somewhat more likely to have same-sex erotic fantasies. BOT researchers take this to indicate that excessive testosterone has masculinized CAH girls’ brains and hence their sexual preferences. But here we run into a vexing methodological confound. Most CAH girls who have been surgically “corrected” (as most now are) have very stressful medical histories. Surgeries often extend beyond infancy, followed by uncomfortable mechanical therapies to keep the reconstructed vagin* open. Moreover, surgery can lead to reduced sensitivity as a result of cl*toral reduction. If you add to this the fact that CAH girls are often recruited to be in research studies where their vagin*s and genitals are frequently examined (and sometimes photographed) by male researchers, then you hardly need to invoke high testosterone levels to explain their relative lack of interest in men and marriage, or their occasional fantasies that they might be better off with another woman. Unfortunately, BOT researchers have shown little interest in doing well-designed studies to assess and then control for the psychological effects of such experiences.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Enter the Social Psychologists

Jordan-Young’s book is wide-ranging in its criticisms of the BOT paradigm, but the examples I’ve cited should be enough to show that she has done her homework. In the meantime, social psychologist Cordelia Fine (with her book Delusions of Gender) and neuroscientist Lise Eliot (Pink Brain, Blue Brain) have weighed in on the debate. These scholars focus less on BOT research that has been done with sexual minorities—such as intersex persons—and more on the claims made for males and females in general. If boys are more likely to be systematizers and girls to be empathizers, should you send your child to a single-sex school that takes these differences into account? If women’s and men’s brains are wired for complementary skills and interests, should we stop worrying that there aren’t more tenured women scientists at Harvard? If your preschool son is slow to develop language skills, should you chalk it up to his masculine brain and let him wait a year longer than his sister to start kindergarten? If your teenage daughter struggles with algebra, are you doing her feminine brain a favor by letting her drop the class? Brain organization theorists (and many of their popularizers) often say yes to such questions, though sometimes, Fine notes, with a show of pained reluctance to demonstrate how objective they are.

If you’re wondering where the second wave of feminism has disappeared in all this, Fine suggests that a covert anti-feminist backlash is at work. This is partly why she coins the term “neurosexism” as part of her book’s subtitle: a new form of sexism that recasts what used to be enforced “duties” as simply natural (and therefore uncoerced) “preferences.” So if, after decades spent dismantling gender discrimination, few women still choose to be engineers and few men choose to be kindergarten teachers, the fact that each of these jobs is skewed toward one sex (as well as being very unequally compensated) is said to reflect no injustice at all. Fine calls this “Gender Equality 2.0.” It is “a revised version of equality in which men and women are not equal, but equally free to express their essentially different natures.”

But social psychologists have ways of showing that gender discrimination is still happening, and that “essential” differences between the sexes can be quite responsive to social influence. Fine reviews this literature with a thoroughness laced with irony. Earlier I noted that we’re not able to manipulate actual sex as an independent variable, or do double-blind experiments with humans to separate the effects of gendered socialization from gendered biology. But social psychologists have developed indirect ways of doing both. Consider, for example, the many experiments showing that the same (fictitious) job application is often treated quite differently depending on whether the applicant is male or female. The names of such “paper people” are kept as identical as possible (Michael vs. Michelle Miller, Edward vs. Emily Williams, etc.), and the applications are randomly distributed to judges, sometimes at real hiring destinations and sometimes in laboratory simulations of workplace settings. In addition, neither the recipients of the applications nor the people who analyze their judgments know what the study is about, so it’s a true double-blind experiment, and one that’s sometimes been done in real-life settings. One recent meta-analysis of several dozen lab versions of the experiment showed that, overall, men were rated more favorably than identical paper women for stereotypically masculine jobs (engineer, truck driver, etc.), and less favorably for stereotypically feminine jobs (secretary, home economics teacher, etc.) Gender prejudice is likely still operating in the workplace.

A second way that social psychologists manage to do true experiments is by the use of a technique known as “priming”—that is, making something like gender or ethnicity more salient for one group than another, then seeing what effects this has on their behavior, attitudes, interests, etc. For example, consider a typical experiment in what is called stereotype threat, defined as a realistic fear of being judged and treated badly in a setting where negative stereotypes of one’s group are present. Women and men with similar college mathematics grades are randomly assigned to one of two groups to do a math test using Graduate Record Exam-type problems. Before they begin, one group is told they are doing the test for unspecified research purposes. But the other group is casually informed that men tend to do better on this test than women. Then we see how well each group—both pre-selected to include students with similar math grades—does on the math test. Neither the students nor the people (or machines) scoring their tests know the purpose of the study, so this is again a true double-blind design. Across many such studies, the only people who underperform as a group are the women who are told that women can be expected to do so. (When the study design focuses on Caucasians and African Americans rather than men and women, and the “threat” is to African Americans’ competence, you get analogous results.) Oppositely, if you preface the test with the announcement that no sex differences in test performance have been previously found, then the women in that group often outperform all the others.

It’s also possible to produce the same effect in white college males, whom you might expect to have more confidence in their innately superior mathematical skills. But when the pre-selected groups are Caucasian and Asian male students, and one of the groups is told that Asians tend to do better on the upcoming math test, it’s the Caucasian men in that group (but not those in the group given the non-threatening introduction) who get significantly lower scores. Related research suggests that it’s the anxiety triggered by the threat to one’s own group’s status that interferes with performance. “Most people facing a difficult and important intellectual challenge are likely to have a few intrusive self-doubts and anxieties,” writes Fine. “But people performing under stereotype threat have more. This places an extra load on working memory, to the detriment of the cognitive feat you are trying to achieve.” To the extent that women must cope with such culturally presumed handicaps more than men (or blacks more than whites), they are vulnerable to performing below their actual capacity. But as the stereotype threat studies demonstrate, the ease with which this effect can be socially inflated, or even reversed, suggests that it has little to do with hormones.

These studies illustrate what Fine calls the “now you see it, now you don’t” quality of supposedly gender-typical behaviors. Other examples could be cited.[1] Cumulatively, they suggest that gender operates like a verb as much as a noun. It’s not just something we have (like hormones); it’s something that we do, with greater or lesser zeal, depending on situational demands. Or, to change the metaphor, gender (along with ethnicity, religion, class, and other aspects of our human identity) is like a rheostat that we turn up or down, depending on how much or little we are “primed” to do so. And gender—perhaps because it is more dichotomous than ethnicity, class, or religion—is a very fundamental and anxiety-provoking part of human identity, so it can often be primed more easily. Thus, if the items on a questionnaire—even an anonymous one—let us know we’re being assessed for empathy, women and men will both tend to skew their responses to line up with expectations for their sex. It’s like a gender placebo effect: We think, therefore we are. But the fact that this difference disappears when people don’t know what they’re being assessed for suggests that empathy is a more generically human trait than BOT popularizers would have us believe.

Of the books considered here, Lise Eliot’s misleadingly titled Pink Brain, Blue Brain is the one most obviously aimed at a popular (but educated) audience. Though the title smacks of BOT orthodoxy, its subtitle—”How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It”—points to a more nuanced agenda. Eliot is a medical school professor of neuroscience who does research on neuroplasticity—that is, on ways that experience changes the brain. Even so, she began writing the book with a bias toward brain organization theory. Thinking that she could explain human behavioral differences by building mostly on animal research, she soon found herself accepting the more social constructionist arguments presented by developmental and social psychologists. Like Fine and Jordan-Young, she lists the flaws in the BOT paradigm, including some that the other authors missed. For example, Simon Baron-Cohen’s version of BOT includes the hypothesis that autistic boys (who often display a compulsion to collect and organize) have brains that have been hyper-masculinized in utero. If so, you’d expect boys who are diagnosed with autism to have had higher prenatal testosterone levels than those who are not. But this turns out not to be the case—nor is there any correlation in girls between prenatal testosterone levels and their later levels of “empathizing” vs. “systematizing” behavior. Another dose-response embarrassment.

Eliot also reminds readers that gendered behavioral differences are far from absolute. A small average difference between the sexes (e.g., in spatial or verbal skills) is usually dwarfed by the amount of variability within each sex—hardly a ringing endorsem*nt of gender essentialism. And even when average differences are found, this indicates nothing about their origins: correlation is not the same as causality.

Nevertheless, Eliot is inclined to give BOT some benefit of the doubt, and grant that small gender differences at birth may reflect the work of prenatal hormones or other biological forces. For example, even in countries with superior medical services, boys are more vulnerable than girls to miscarriage, to be born prematurely, and to die at birth. Those that survive are on average fussier than infant girls—perhaps because of their prior vulnerability. Eliot also lists some reliable but small neonatal differences in olfactory, auditory, and visual sensitivity, as well as in motor performance, and notes that through mid-adolescence girls’ bodies (including their brains) mature earlier than boys’. But she argues that these minor differences are greatly inflated by the different social demands, expectations, and resources placed before girls and boys—rather like a snowball that begins tiny, but gathers size and momentum as it rolls down a hill.

The human brain, Eliot concludes, has much more plasticity than people give it credit for. This blind spot is especially significant in the United States, where people routinely attribute their own and others’ achievements to innate ability rather than to hard work. By contrast, in the rising Asian nations and in many European ones, it is assumed that if children work hard enough and are well taught, they can all be competent in all subjects. Not coincidentally, both boys and girls in these nations routinely become bi- or multilingual, and on international mathematics tests their female students often leave American males (with their “innate” systematizing edge) in the dust. “Gender,” Eliot asserts, “should never be an excuse for a child’s low performance in a given area, whether it is reading or math, science or writing. Expectations are important, so we must hold them consistently high for all children.”

Eliot fleshes out this assertion with practical advice for parents and teachers. For example, children of both sexes obviously need both language and spatial training—but make sure you don’t shortchange boys on the former, or girls on the latter. Look for competent, same-sex role models to build up boys’ empathizing and girls’ systematizing skills. Emphasize coed sports and coed groups for school projects, to get around children’s tendency to form same-sex huddles and thus reinforce gender stereotypes. Never mind whether the stereotypes originate in nature, nurture, or both: remember neuroplasticity, and challenge them. “Every boy and girl,” Eliot writes, “deserves the chance to develop the full range of his or her potential, unhindered by gender, race, or other societal assumptions. If we can pull it off … [b]oys and girls will both lead richer lives, and our society will benefit from their [more] complete development.”

Caveat Emptor: Where Do We Go From Here?

At the end of Brain Storm, Rebecca Jordan-Young recalls an assignment in which she was asked to analyze a sex survey done by a popular magazine. The findings actually challenged the popular stereotype that men are mostly interested in sex, while women mainly crave relational intimacy. But her editor kept steering her away from this data and back to the familiar dichotomy: “When he finally said to me, ‘People don’t buy this magazine to learn something; they like to confirm what they already know,’—I knew it was time to withdraw from the project.” Eliot and Fine join her in documenting a gap between actual BOT findings and the rhetoric of the theory’s enthusiasts. Eliot cites one of these, Leonard Sax, who uses the minuscule auditory threshold differences between boys and girls to warn that teenage girls hear their father’s voices as “ten times louder” than they actually are, and goes on to claim this as a reason for steering boys and girls into single-sex classrooms. Another BOT popularizer, Louann Brizendine, dramatically blames the prenatal “testosterone marination” of men’s brains for their “innate [in]ability to read faces and tone of voice for emotional nuance.”[2]

In the face of such wild generalizations, one might be forgiven for wanting to fire all (or most) of the writers who make money exploiting people’s gender insecurities and their reflex awe of (what they take to be) science. Of course there is nothing new about this, and scientists have regularly held that they are not responsible for popular distortions of their work. But when it comes to bridging the evidence gap between animal and human studies, scientists have a special responsibility to be clear about the methodological ambiguities that surround their work, including all the challenges of doing good quasi-experiments. Research design is not a very sexy subject, but there are good practical reasons for encouraging greater literacy about it. A wise dean at one of America’s top universities recently welcomed a new medical school class by warning them that half of what they were going to be taught would turn out to be false. Unfortunately, he added, we don’t know which half. Buyer beware.

A second lesson—stressed by all the working scientists in this review—is that many BOT researchers (and just as many in the social-constructionist camp) have a too-simplistic view of how nature and nurture work. Many embrace what might be called the layer cake model: they talk as if either nature or nurture is more foundational, then concede that the other factor might add or subtract a bit from its effects. This reflects a common temptation to believe that we can neatly separate the two—as gender studies scholars did back in the 1970s, when they decided that the term “sex” should refer to what was strictly biological, and “gender” to what was strictly cultural. Unfortunately for the layer cake model, gender affects sex, and sex affects gender—which is precisely why I have avoided using this terminological distinction. Think of the anorexic who is so influenced by cultural messages about women’s bodies that she ceases menstruating when her weight gets too low. Think also of the boy in our culture who enters puberty early, and is immediately assumed by older teenagers to be ready for sexual initiation, whether he wants it or not. In another culture he could instead be forbidden even to be alone with any female who was not a close relative.

So “sex” and “gender” form a feedback loop with each other. The brain and the rest of the body constrain experience, but experience is at the same time constantly changing both. It can even alter the expression of genes that are passed on to children and grandchildren, as the emerging field of epigenetics has begun to notice. Yet as recently as a decade ago, the idea that acquired traits could be biologically passed on to future generations was treated as a Lamarckian myth decisively laid to rest by the advances of modern genetics. We need to think less in terms of essences, and more in terms of developmental potentials. We need to pay due attention to brain plasticity.

Along the way, Jordan-Young suggests a couple of other ways of thinking outside the box. First, we need to rethink how we talk about the so-called “sex hormones.” Not only are they not specific to males or females; their effects aren’t even limited to reproductive processes. They have also been found (thus far) to influence liver and bone growth, nitrogen and carbohydrate metabolism, and diurnal body rhythms. The “sex hormone” framework, she concludes, “demonstrably blocks recognition of complex and accurate information … [and] what good is a science that doesn’t tell us anything new?” Second, while it’s clear that personality traits and interests are not the same in everyone (even in infancy), “they are also not well captured by the binary system of gender—even in spite of pervasive [cultural forces] that exert pressures toward this pattern. We aren’t blank slates, but we also aren’t pink and blue notepads.” Identity emerges from a host of influences, including class, ethnicity, politics, religion, and many others.

All of this strongly suggests that Christians should not be allowing the BOT tail to wag the ecclesiastical dog, in terms of church policy regarding so-called hom*osexuals or any other gender-related issue. This is certainly—but not only—because the gap between BOT rhetoric and its actual scientific rigor is often weak. Just as certainly, Christians should be cautious about jumping on the social-constructionist bandwagon, despite its much-needed challenge to BOT’s biological determinism. Both camps have important lessons to teach us about embodiment and identity formation—and hence about pastoral responsibility to sexual minorities of whatever kind. But getting stuck in this debate can tempt onlookers to lurch between reductionism and self-deification: between the notion that Christian tradition should yield either to biological necessity (so called) on the one hand, or to shifting individual identity choices (so called) on the other.

The late Reformed theologian Lewis Smedes once pointed out that biblical anthropology does not envisage us as Cartesian angels driving around in automobiles that yield to our disembodied wills. Nor does it conclude that we are merely brains in vats, subject entirely to natural (and/or social) forces beyond our control. Instead, he wrote, we are bodies who come alive—or do not—to God. This means that whatever impulses we have, regardless of where they originate or how socially respectable they are, we can all expect to face major renovation plans. The church has not always done a good job of deciding what this implies for sexual ethics on the one hand and pastoral responsibilities to sexual minorities on the other. But it’s simply false to assume that it has never really had to grapple with such issues till now: both the biblical record and the church’s early attempts to deal compassionately with eunuchs indicate otherwise.

On the other hand, it bears pointing out that even the churches who are most conservative on the issue of hom*osexual practice have long since stopped being biblical literalists on the issue of divorce—so much so that the rate of divorce among the self-identified “born again” is no different from that of the U.S. population at large. Those who believe that heterosexual monogamy and celibate singleness are the patterns to which God has called us cannot blame gays and lesbians (however those terms are defined) for their own failure to keep their marital promises. And here is another irony: members of the very demographic group (upper-middle class) who led the no-fault divorce stampede in America forty years ago are now the least likely to divorce. They are more often staying together, raising their children together, getting their kids into better schools (students in élite colleges are considerably less likely to come from divorced families than the student population at large)—and, to the shock of Enlightenment secularists, starting to go back to church.

Neither divorce nor one’s choice of sexual partner may be strictly confessional issues—but they are both surely prudential issues, and forty years after the divorce revolution began, people are beginning to recognize that, absent things like chronic abuse or irresponsibility, marital commitment trumps serial monogamy as a route to human flourishing for adults and children alike. Similarly, forty years after the sexual revolution was launched, both the heterosexual majority and the so-called sexual minorities are beginning to acknowledge its exploitative downside. So rather than rushing to rubber stamp cultural trends that are already in the process of changing, perhaps the church—while surely being attentive to pastoral and practical needs of the marginalized—needs to remind all of its members that their identity in Christ is foundational to all other identities, and that this will let no one off the hook in terms of what it will require. Perhaps we should think of this as heart plasticity.

—This essay is part 2 of a two-part article.

1. An excellent review of the meta-analytic literature on this topic can be found in Janet Shibley Hyde’s “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist, Vol. 60, No. 4 (2005), pp. 581-92.

2. Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (Broadway, 2006), p. 166.

Books discussed in this essay:

Lise Eliot, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It (Houghton MifflinHarcourt, 2009).

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, andNeurosexism Create Difference (W. W. Norton, 2010).

Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard Univ. Press, 2010).

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Through many years writing about books, there have been a good number that I have found so dreadful that I can hardly bear to discuss them. In only one instance, though, have I held off from writing about a book because I was seriously afraid of the consequences of making it better known—actually, my self-restraint lasted for a decade. The work in question is The Sheep Look Up, a novel by British science-fiction writer John Brunner, which first appeared in 1972, and which offers a detailed blueprint for the destruction of the United States by means well within the reach of contemporary terrorists. But despite its alarming quality, it also demands attention as one of the greatest modern examples of apocalyptic literature. The Sheep Look Up is the centerpiece of a sequence of Brunner novels that appeared in the decade after 1966 and which, taken together, represent a deeply impressive literary achievement at least on a par with that of Philip K. Dick. Far more than much of the mainstream literary output of the 1960s and ’70s, Brunner’s genre writing cries out to be recalled from oblivion.

John Brunner (1934-95) was a prolific author of what might easily be dismissed as pulp fiction, author of such titles as Secret Agent of Terra. At the same time, he was profoundly aware of the real and immediate dangers threatening human civilization, perils that could only be discussed by extrapolating them into apocalyptic visions. He wrote the anthem for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, “Can You Hear the H-Bomb’s Thunder?,” but he also picked up the early warning alarms from other looming global dangers. In 1968, his hugely praised Stand on Zanzibar depicted a world in the process of Malthusian crisis and environmental ruin.

The basic idea of ecological crisis is familiar enough today, but Stand on Zanzibar still amazes by Brunner’s dazzling literary techniques. He uses imagined ephemera to reveal a whole future society in all its various dimensions—through its advertisem*nts and commercial jingles, through its slang, through snippets of overheard conversation, through extracts from imagined magazines, books, and television talk shows, covering a vast array of subjects. Brunner had an astonishing gift of pastiche, to present other styles of writing and speech with total plausibility. Ultimately borrowed from Dos Passos, the immersion technique places the reader mind and soul in an imagined future, with its different technologies, attitudes, and assumptions—and, of course, its pressing problems. Through such means, Brunner created and populated worlds.

Stand began Brunner’s most creative period, and was followed shortly by other novels that built whole worlds in order to explore present and future social crises. The Jagged Orbit (1969) focused on racial divisions, while Shockwave Rider (1975) still stuns by its remarkably early visions of a computer-dominated world. Nine years before William Gibson’s legendary novel Neuromancer, Shockwave Rider was the real manifesto for cyberpunk. The book—published before the founding of Apple and the marketing of the first PC—is a story of heroic computer hackers marauding through what would soon be christened “cyberspace.” The book even coined the word “worm” in its strictly modern electronic context.

But beyond the technological vision, already in 1975 Brunner was thinking through the social and political implications of the incipient revolution. He was confronting such themes as data privacy and information overload, and the social atomization caused by widespread access to electronic technologies, not to mention the consequences of extreme social inequality. Although Shockwave Rider must be counted among the most daring and visionary American novels of the 1960s and ’70s, don’t try looking for Brunner’s oeuvre in any modern history of U.S. culture or thought in that era. As all worthwhile cultural historians think they know, concerns about this kind of technology and cyberculture were just getting started at the turn of the 21st century, and only today are we beginning to grasp the issues involved.

Even as I make the case for these other novels, I have no hesitation in ranking The Sheep Look Up as Brunner’s finest, in terms of its breadth of vision and its ability to invoke a whole imaginary society. That needs stressing because the book was always, so to speak, a black sheep. Although each of Brunner’s major novels from this era won its share of sparkling reviews and literary prizes, Sheep was always viewed askance, as an embarrassingly ambiguous treasure. It has through the years floated in and out of print, and only recently has there appeared a handsome standard edition, introduced by Kim Stanley Robinson. This relative neglect stems not from the book’s dire messages—it is less uniformly depressing than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—but from the very specific targeting of Brunner’s prophetic zeal, as the book explicitly and uncomfortably calls down apocalyptic judgment on the United States.

I have spoken of apocalyptic, a term that goes far beyond its conventional usage of imminent doom and destruction, not necessarily in a religious context. In its Jewish and Christian origins, though, apocalyptic was very much a literature of hope, above all for the poor and powerless. It was strictly focused on an act of divine judgment, a sweeping condemnation of the evils of the present world, a world that needed to be told frankly and urgently that its end was approaching. As a rhetorical style, apocalyptic overlaps closely with prophetic literature. The prophets likewise painted very dark pictures of approaching menace, but always with the implication that hearers could avert ruin by utterly changing their lives and turning to God.

The Sheep Look Up is as much prophecy as apocalypse, in that it describes the near-future world in hideous terms in order to demand thoroughgoing reform and reconstruction. Brunner’s imagined America is a hellish place, but its ills are entirely self-inflicted. Atmospheric pollution is so appalling that drivers jam the roads on (false) rumors that the sun might have broken through briefly. Of course, you wear a filter-mask before venturing outside, because “throats didn’t last long in the raw air.” No sane person drinks tap-water or even allows it near their skin without the necessary antiseptics. Generations of pumping antibiotics into livestock have forced bacteria to evolve into drug-resistant superstrains, so that human beings can no longer protect themselves against simple infections. Food is utterly tainted, unless you seek out the health-food products marketed by the giant Puritan corporation—which is in reality a Mob front selling regular food under vastly overpriced labels. Birth defects run riot. Waste-dumping deep into the earth has made earthquakes commonplace, and these in turn release long-buried chemical and biological weapons stores. The Great Lakes are quite dead, and the Gulf of Mexico is a “fetid puddle.” Overseas, American defoliants have turned much of Southeast Asia into desert; the Europeans have killed the Mediterranean and the Baltic is on the verge of death. Worse, pollutants are causing global climate change.

Ultimately, suggests Brunner, all these material forms of pollution are outgrowths of inner moral corruption, and like the fulminations of any prophet, his predictions are chiefly intended to indict his contemporaries. We hear his fury expressed most clearly when a younger woman tells a smug old man that his whole evil generation has spoiled the planet: “You liar. You filthy dishonest old man. You put the poison in the world, you and your generation. You crippled my children. You made sure they’d never eat clean food, drink pure water, breathe sweet air.”

Politically too, society is coming apart. America is fighting brushfire wars against much of the Third World, especially against a global Marxist-Maoist network of the dispossessed, the “Tupas,” who take their name from the Tupamaro guerrilla group of the 1970s. Domestically, anti-corporate and anti-pollution activists mobilize in their millions under the symbolic leadership of Christ-like activist Austin Train. These Trainites carry out mass demonstrations, sabotage, and monkey-wrenching under the slogan “Stop! You’re killing me.” (Think of them as a cross between Occupy and the Earth Liberation Front.) Armed black militant groups are also surging, as race war spreads. The U.S. government keeps the lid on the situation by drumming up support for incessant overseas wars and anti-terror campaigns. Anti-pollution activists are denounced as terrorist sympathizers and “chlorophyll addicts” (a wonderful phrase). Anyone who can afford to withdraws into fortified enclaves, elite estates that are not just gated but heavily defended.

Apart from its self-inflicted evils, this future world is also under devastating terrorist assault, and it is this element that makes the book so unnerving to a post-9/11 audience. Few people have ever given so much thought to the practical methods of terrorism as John Brunner did, and that would include Osama bin Laden. Brunner offers a hair-raising catalogue of techniques deployed against America by various groups, including the faceless Tupas. Terrorists use car bombs and Chechen-style apartment bombs; they use ship-launched balloons to carry napalm against land-based civilian targets. This is one of the great fictional treatments—I almost said “manifestos”—of terrorism.

Ultimately, the terrorists seem to deploy a trident of unconventional weapons which does indeed succeed in bringing down the tottering United States—and major spoilers will now follow. Although Brunner eventually undermines the terrorist attribution, the reader believes that the three evils are in fact of external causation. An overseas disease carrier travels widely across the country, airport to airport, spreading a catastrophic plague of enteritis (and in a society where antibiotics no longer function). At the same time, in a lethal act of agricultural terrorism, America’s dwindling food production is crippled by a pesticide-resistant parasite. The nation faces famine. Finally, the Denver metro area is attacked by a deadly psychoactive drug placed in its reservoirs, driving many inhabitants to homicidal insanity and forcing the overstretched armed forces into yet another disaster relief operation. All four horsem*n—famine, plague, war, and death—combine in the final onslaught.

In the popular usage of the word, Brunner’s 1972 description is horribly prophetic. Each of these biological and chemical warfare tactics is plausible, and in fact, each has featured prominently in the darker speculations of the intelligence community since 9/11. Agriterrorism and entomological warfare both attract intense concern, while governments still struggle to devise counter-measures against the possibility of a suicide plague carrier whose deeds are undetectable until victims start dying in their thousands. It was in fact the acutely realistic design of Brunner’s terrorist narrative that led me to abstain from commemorating the 30th anniversary in 2002, and rather to leave it until the 40th. In various ways, I would wholly echo the far-reaching claim made by William Gibson some years ago: “No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel The Sheep Look Up, has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.”

After all this catalogue of horrors, Brunner offers a solution of sorts, but it is thoroughly Swiftian. Yes, we are told, the world is in grim shape, but things are not desperate. As a scientist reports, his computer projections show that “We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on—in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we’ve been doing for the past half century—if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species.” America perishes—with its two hundred million planetary parasites—as the fumes of the final conflagration drift over the Atlantic to Ireland. This section takes its subtitle from Revelation 18, on the fall of Babylon: “The Smoke of That Great Burning.” Brunner’s happy ending is an act of genocide.

For this reason alone, The Sheep Look Up poses real ethical difficulties for the reader—and even more so for any prospective teacher. But I can guarantee that when you have read the book, you will never forget the experience.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author most recently of Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (HarperOne).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This book should never have been written. The author should have died. Instead of taking the subway downtown to his Fidelity Investments job at the World Trade Center Towers, Peter Goodwin Heltzel spent September 11, 2001 writing his dissertation prospectus. When two jets reduced the skyscrapers to an inferno of ash, Heltzel was safe at home. The next day he went to Ground Zero as a volunteer from Riverside Church. He remembers now that as he worked “amid the acrid smoke” and in the “wasteland,” he experienced a call to put theological flesh to the improvised love he witnessed. Ten years later, he encountered another form of that community as part of the Occupy Movement. Discussing his journeys, presenting his theological insights, and calling evangelicals to tap into the prophetic Christianity of African American theological and musical innovations, Heltzel offers a new book that inspires hope amid troubled times.

Heltzel, whose previous book Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics (2009) investigated the role of race in evangelical politics, has several aims for Resurrection City. First, he wants white Christians, particularly evangelicals, to own up to how European and North American theologies and lived religions have benefited from and, at times, sanctified white power. He urges white Christians to recognize their history of violence and to rid themselves of theological tendencies that distance Jesus from his Judaism and, in so doing, whiten the gospel.

Next, Heltzel calls Christians to embrace Jesus through the African American prophetic tradition. This is a tradition that identifies with the covenant people of Israel, that extolls Jesus as a poor Jew from Galilee who was crucified on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and that searches for and builds up resurrection cities that stand against the idols of whiteness, colonization, and patriarchy. Heltzel seeks a mystical-prophetic consensus that builds on the theologies of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr., to link individual experience with communal justice.

Finally, Heltzel asks Christians to approach their faith in a jazz-like, intercultural, improvisational way that can transform cities from citadels of capitalism to theaters of festival, feasting, and faith. He recommends that Christians connect their reading about Jesus Christ with their listening to John Coltrane, the great jazz saxophonist. In jazz, Heltzel finds a musical model for how the church should be. If Christians can decolonize their theology, if they can embrace black prophetic theology, and if they can turn away from the “neoliberal capitalist order” that “is shaped by ego-driven competitive relations,” then the poet-prophets can be heard and an age of “rebel cities” can emerge.

Unlike many liberal commentators who merely spit fire (or satire) against the sins of modern America, Heltzel offers a creative and constructive theology to follow. He does not just bemoan the state of Christian music; he shows how jazz and its communal, call-and-response texture can be emulated by the church. He does not just lament the rise of megachurches and their television-like atmosphere; he looks to Resurrection City (the ill-fated culmination of the Poor People’s Campaign that was run out of Washington, D.C., by the police and the rain in 1968) and the current Occupy Movement as a way churches can put into motion their faith. Reading Resurrection City is a bit like watching Godspell. Just as one cannot help but hum “Day by Day” after the film, I could not help but consider how today I could improvise with love in the places and spaces of my being and moving.

Resurrection City is one of the few books on race and religion in the United States that has a hopeful tenor. Sociologist Michael Emerson’s research keeps showing that evangelicals were, are, and may continue to be as “divided by faith” as they are “divided by race.” New work on the evangelical Left (the so-called “moral minority”) suggests that it fractured during the 1970s and was largely defeated by the so-called moral majority. Heltzel intervenes with his willingness to do what so many scholars of evangelicalism have avoided: he embraces African Americans as main theological influences and views them as primary historical actors. Heltzel takes his theology from Sojourner Truth, not Thomas Jefferson. While he applauds Jefferson’s rhetoric and ideas of freedom, Heltzel demands that we also account theologically for his Monticello architecture that resembled a slave ship and his refusal to free his own slaves. Heltzel follows James Cone more than John Stott. By taking seriously the theopolitical insights from the black prophetic tradition, Heltzel is able to nod in agreement with King that hope can be cut from a stone. Or, as W. E. B. Du Bois once prayed during the high-water mark of lynching and racial segregation, “It is never too late to mend. Nothing is so bad that good may not be put into it and make it better and save it from utter loss.”

Some historians may object to the ways Heltzel occasionally flattens out history. When discussing the christologies of Jefferson and Truth, for instance, he sets them against the theological backdrop of James Cone’s recent work on lynching. Cone, however, was discussing a particular phenomenon of racial violence that shook the American landscape from the 1880s to the 1930s. Jefferson and Truth were working out their theologies one hundred years earlier and in a time of state-sponsored slavery. But Heltzel’s broader point—that American theology must take into consideration the history of violence and how it has severely limited many whites’ vision of freedom in Christ—should be heard.

Similarly, some theologians may object to the ways Heltzel romanticizes African American Christianity and the Occupy Movement. Without doubt, as numerous scholars have discussed, black Christianities have their fair share of exploitative and hierarchical elements. And without doubt, Occupiers have had a tendency to fetishize themselves and their movement. Yet for all the blemishes of African American Christianities and the Occupy Movement, it would not surprise me if a resurrected H. Richard Niebuhr classified both movements as manifestations of the “kingdom of God” in America that he chronicled so eloquently in the late 1930s.

Other theologians may find it frustrating that Heltzel neglects the aspects of the Bible that seem to picture God as a “moral monster.” The destruction of the Canaanites, the death of David’s infant son, and the Pauline words that seem to teach community control rather than individual liberty are all left out. Readers will have to look elsewhere to reckon with the sides of the Bible that seem unjust.

As well, some church organizers may object to Heltzel’s calls for intercultural and improvisational approaches. Church planners often focus on niche marketing and bureaucratic consistency. Whether for legal purposes or to maximize small labor forces, churches often focus more on regulations than on righteousness, more on the system than on the spirit. But Heltzel does not want more churches built. He does not want to see increased numbers. Heltzel wants radically new churches conceived, born, and embodied. He wants the church to enter the street, redeem it through improvised festivals, and bring “shalom justice” (that “communal and ecological well-being” which springs from “the people of God embodying the justice and righteousness of God”) to redeem our cities.

Those who read Heltzel’s book only to quibble academically will miss his point. He is not writing to debate, but to inspire. He is not hoping to conform to any scholarly dialogue, but to transform how Christians move in their worlds. Resurrection City pulsates with both the prophetic rage and redemptive joy that Heltzel finds in the Bible and especially its central figure, the Jewish Jesus “who is leading an intercultural, improvisational movement of love and justice.” To read Resurrection City is to hear the jazzy theological ruminations of a white man resurrected by the black freedom struggle and the Occupy Movement. It is to read of a man who has been reborn over the past ten years. I’m thankful that Heltzel stayed home that tragic September day.

Edward J. Blum is associate professor of history at San Diego State University. His most recent work, co-authored with Paul Harvey, is The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Univ. of North Carolina Press).

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