Home Waters: A Blog

When I was in college, I had the privilege of listening to a reading by the great writer Wallace Stegner. He came to a student dorm and did a reading from his novel, Wolf Willow. In my family he was a revered name. He wrote some of the American West’s greatest novels, he understood Western history and the need for a stronger environmental ethic, and he wrote compassionately about Mormon history as someone who had spent part of his youth in Salt Lake City where he attended activities with a local Mormon Boy Scout troop. I am more disappointed every year to discover that LDS students do not even know who he was. At the time, I was writing a review of his novel, Crossing to Safety, and I was eager to talk to him about it, so after everyone cleared out, Amy and I found ourselves in a private interview with him. While I had his attention, I couldn’t help asking the question that was most on my mind: “Do you think Mormons will ever write great literature?” [Read more…] about The Quest for Great Mormon Literature

The great artist Andy Goldsworthy in the documentary about his work, Rivers and Tides, is seen gathering roots and twigs at the base of a tree in his home in Scotland. He stitches these small pieces of fibrous matter together to form a beautiful man-made web that hangs precariously from the branch of a tree. What this signifies to me is the power of the imagination to make order out of chaos, to bring objects, discrete “things” into relationship in order to convey a sense of wholeness and meaning.

We recently sponsored the visit of Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim to Brigham Young University. They are both directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale and are executive producers of the new fantastic film, Journey of the Universe.  Check out their websites for an immense treasure of information on religion, science, and the environment. Their visit provoked a lot of good discussion, especially on the topic of finding ways to make religious sense of the scientific story of the origin of the earth and of life on earth. The importance of building these bridges between science and religion should be obvious. We are more advanced than ever before in the history of the world in our understanding of the workings of this universe and yet we seem to be sliding backwards in terms of scientific literacy. Religion remains a vital source of moral motivation and it provides the most profound feelings of belonging and meaning in our universe. But it is also true that data alone are not going to change behavior. What motivates and changes behavior is when information is placed within a meaningful framework and when we can then see its importance to our relationships—with others, with the earth, and with God. Otherwise information is like so many twigs lying about on the ground with no reference to any thing else; data are seen as mere isolated objects.

So science needs the world-making forces of not only religion but of art as well. It needs the power of narrative, the beauty of visual representation and music, and the aura and moral authority of religion’s cosmological reach. We should not fail to notice when science moves us. It is usually when it is presented in a compelling way, when it is described with poetic and philosophical artistry and when it becomes clear what it means to us in our particular circumstances. I am profoundly grateful for such people as Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim and the many other brilliant minds in our country who seek to make science morally and spiritually valuable to us. Despite the noise and attention given to such atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and despite the nonsensical reactions of religious people who are anti-science, many great writers and thinkers in the sciences, in theology, and in the humanities have advanced an understanding of the world that does not argue for mutually exclusive choices between religion and science. I only wish that our education system would pay more attention to these developments. I am thinking, for a few examples, of such writers as Marilynne Robinson, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, John Haught, Cormac McCarthy, and others.

It was clear to me in watching the film and in the fascinating Q&A afterwards with Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim that we make strides in our own theological understandings to the degree that we are willing to think through the implications and meaning of the universe as we currently understand it, rather than overly worrying ourselves about perceptions of difference between faith and reason, between religion and science. It sounds odd to put it this way, but I felt a profound increase of love for God, for the world, and for truth. I have never spent much time worrying myself about how to reconcile science and religion. I know others feel the same but do so because of apathy. I believe it is an expression of my faith to be open to science, to trust that truth is all that I am required to believe in and to understand that my understanding of things is much too inadequate to use as a basis for arriving at any final conclusions about reality. That is not to say, however, that I am indifferent to science or that I can easily dismiss it because it is a form of knowledge still in formation. It is the nature of life that we are always confronted with the need to make decisions, as Wendell Berry has aptly noted, when we nevertheless possess perpetually inadequate information. We need to learn to act with only partial understandings. But act we must and err we will. But the risks, it seems, are far greater in willfully ignoring what we do know or willfully delaying the need to make decisions. I am thinking most specifically about such matters as air pollution and its effects on public health, about climate change and its impacts on the poor, and our shocking rates of biodiversity loss. Such willful dismissals are not attitudes of faith but of fear. They are not based in faith or in reason but in radical and irrational certainty. In that sense, denialism of science is profoundly irreligious.

Inspired by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s masterful talk on mental illness, I have been reflecting on the great hope that is in Christ’s suffering on our behalf. I don’t want to repeat myself, but as someone who has been touched in the most personal and painful way by the effects of mental illness on a brother who took his life many years ago, I simply want to reiterate the truthfulness of his words. [Read more…] about Mental Illness and the Atonement

In honor of Seamus Heaney’s life so well lived, I revisited one of my favorite essays of his, “The Redress of Poetry.” What Heaney addresses in this essay is the age old question of the role of art in the polis and the role of imagining alternative worlds within the context of lived experience. To what extent does art offer a frivolous and perhaps meaningless alternative reality to the concerns that press hard upon us each day? When, on the other hand, does it offer an alternative world we can imagine as a real possibility and toward which we are thus enabled to strive? Another way of asking this question is: When is poetry political? When should it be? An even deeper question is: Is the highest moral commitment a political one? Or is it some other kind of commitment that would displace political concerns as less significant? [Read more…] about On Poetry and Politics, or Why We Can’t Seem to Stop Fighting

Last night I had the unusual opportunity to hear James Taylor sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I have seen JT in concert many times. If I remember correctly, that was my fifth. And I have seen the choir perform many times too, of course. I love choral music, especially sacred music, but I also love the gritty voice of a balladeer, someone who sings from the rooted individual experiences of loss, error, political and social disappointment, and personal redemption. My love for both kinds of music was cultivated simultaneously as I was growing up. I sang in my High School choir and in an acappella group and I went to every concert I could get to of the likes of JT, CSN, Neil Young, Billy Joel, and others. [Read more…] about On Music and Community

A course devoted to reading the Book of Mormon as literature made headlines recently. As happy as I am to see such a course, I don’t really see why this should be news. I guess maybe it is news because it implies, for some people, that the book has somehow been demoted from its sacred status. I don’t see why or how this is the case. In my mind, to read something “as literature” can only mean reading it with careful attention to what it seems to be saying by paying attention to how it says what it says. I taught portions of it as literature when I was in graduate school in Berkeley many years ago. It was great fun. As far as its literary merit is concerned, I don’t find the Book of Mormon particularly beautiful. It doesn’t compare, for example, very favorably to much of the beauty we find in Psalms, Isaiah, Job, Proverbs, or Ecclesiastes. And its human stories are not quite as perplexing and enigmatic and grittily human as they are in the stories of Joseph, Abraham, Job, or David, to name a few. Women, too, are hard to find in its pages. Its literary merit lies, for me, in its epic sweep of interracial conflict, its amalgamation of texts that leads to its own self-conscious metatextuality, and the implications of this metatextuality for the idea of continual revelation. Of course, it is a superb book of doctrine and theology, as well. Nowhere have I found the meaning of the atonement so well articulated.

I am more interested, however, in a different kind of question. In my most recent research, I have been amazed to discover how deeply invested poets and novelists are in arguing over theology through their literature. It is true that some writers seem to want to make strictly secular claims, but even in so doing they can’t escape making at least implicit arguments about the deepest questions of human existence and providing an expansive view of their idea of the cosmos. Other writers seem to rather purposely confuse any distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In this case, literature seems more invested in a kind of exercise in midrash, a taking up the themes and concerns of sacred literature and developing them further by extending the narratives of the Bible, imagining and fleshing out scenarios that are only implicit in original biblical accounts, or simply exploring a theological principle in its practical application in the lives of particular individuals in particular contexts. In sum, I wish to read literature as theology.

From the perspective of religious belief, this should make perfect sense. Theology, among other things, is the attempt to understand the significance of belief as it is manifested in particular and shifting contexts. There doesn’t seem to be a better opportunity for such learning than that provided by literature. Literature is always stuck in the mud of experience. It bears its very human and earthly stains with intention. It asks us to examine lives one at a time and gives us pause to jump to quick generalizations. And yet it is driven, simultaneously, by an intense urge to locate transcendent meaning in those contexts. Not every religious person would agree with me on the value of secular literature, however. To read literature as theology potentially implies a subordination of the authority of sacred writ. Why do we need literature when we have the Truth? Why read the words of men and women when the word of God is sufficient? Is there not an inherent danger in elevating the secular to such a high status? Do we not miss the mark? These are valid questions, but a strictly intolerant view of secular literature as fallen and as deceptive rejects outright the notion that God’s light of truth might or could be shed anywhere else except on the lives of a few famous biblical figures. Such an attitude ultimately implies that no education, outside of religious education, is necessary. Of course, there are those who take such a position, but in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, which have sponsored the growth of the modern university and the development of the human sciences and which have inspired generations of artists, dramatists, poets, musicians to craft new ways of telling the old stories, this form of belief is an outlier. If Christians believe in general education, if they read at all beyond the Bible, if they claim to like listening even to Bach, then they at least implicitly recognize that the idea of a self-sufficient and closed canon is absurd, that God’s work of revelation is ongoing and that it cannot and will not cease as long as our particular circumstances continue to change and as long as we continue to seek understanding.

From a strictly secularist position, however, to read literature as theology might also seem out of bounds. Many critics prefer the idea that their devotion to language and culture is the secular alternative to the old-time monastic life of the study of the Word. (I myself remember coming to a realization in graduate school that this is what I had become: a modern day monk, poring over texts day and night and straining for every bit of light of understanding I could get. It was also the moment when I committed to taking my study of the scriptures at least as seriously as my study of literature, even if I couldn’t give it the same amount of time.) But many years ago now, Giles Gunn argued that “no serious literature is neutral either to the question of belief or to the question of the relationship between belief and understanding.” He noted that when we write, read and interpret, we are “attempting to assess the actual in light of its full potential for comprehension” and in so doing “we thereby re-enact one of the chief functions of culture, if not religion.” This notion of a kind of religious criticism of literature never really took root among literary critics, however. But this is not because authors are no longer interested in religious questions. How can anyone read Cormac McCarthy and not notice how obsessed the man is with theology? How can we miss the enormous contribution Marilynne Robinson has given to modern Christian thought, just through her novels alone, if not through her essays? Why would we enjoy the poems of Mary Oliver and fail to recognize the new cosmology she seeks us to be reborn into? We don’t see these things because, unfortunately, there are increasing levels of ignorance about religious traditions generally and about the Bible more specifically, increasing specialization whereby religion is studied by religious studies scholars and literature by literary critics, and a growing distrust in and distaste for anything that smacks of metaphysical hope. This is because somewhere along the line in the last forty years, it was unfairly decided that the root of many of our social and environmental problems is the continued importance of notions of faith, metaphysical belief, and religious practice in society. For this reason, I wish I had had the chance to read critics like Alan Jacobs when I was in graduate school.

Religion is a contributor to many of our problems today. I don’t dispute that. All the more reason to get it right. And all the more reason to learn as much as we can about how to test the meaning and value of our lives against the ultimate questions in ways that will get the results we want: a humane, compassionate, and just society where opportunities for human flourishing are universally available both now and for future generations. In this sense the message of the Book of Mormon seems to be most appropriate: God’s word can only make sense to us through a kind of perpetual experimentation, through new acts of translation of truth into varied contexts across the whole globe. To love God and his word, I must learn to love God’s children, their languages, experiences, and cultures. A Christian, among other things, ought to be touched by an insatiable taste for books.