In this interview with Matthew Steem, Ron grandly explicates the following points:
*This interview will appear in Radix Magazine in the Spring Issue of 2025
Names mentioned in this interview:
C. S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, Evelyn Underhill, Bede Griffiths, George Grant, Stephen Leacock, Erasmus, Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Beats, Timothy Leary, Noam Chomsky, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jim Forrest, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Seneca, Cicero, Plato, Walt Disney, Julie Andrews, German Pietism, Augustine of Hippo, Homer, Hesiod, Jacob Burckhardt, T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, Oswald Spengler.
Books mentioned:
A Preface to Paradise Lost (C. S. Lewis)
The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis)
The Great Divorce (C. S. Lewis)
The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Hermann Hesse: Phoenix Arising (Ron Dart)
Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)
Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse)
The Glass Bead Game (Hermann Hesse)
Peter Camenzind (Hermann Hesse)
Journey to the East (Hermann Hesse)
Under the Wheel (Hermann Hesse)
Demian (Hermann Hesse)
If The War Goes On (Hermann Hesse)
I and Thou (Martin Buber)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
Confessions (St. Augustine)
The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Shadia Drury, Chauvinism of the West: The Case of American Exceptionalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
Each year a few fine and must-read books are published (others not worth more than a passing glance), but there can be little doubt that Shadia Drury’s Chauvinism of the West is a ten-bell book. There is much packed into this historic read of the West and its impact on the notion and ideology of American exceptionalism—the origins, history and contemporary reality of American politics, foreign policy and global politics are parsed and exposed well and wisely.
Chauvinism of the West is divided into 6 compact, probing and arrow hitting bull’s eye well chapters: 1) The Roots of American Exceptionalism, 2) Manifest Destiny Goes Global, 3) What’s Wrong with Spreading Democracy, 4) Neoconservative Realism, 5) Fascist Elements in Neoconservative Realism and 6) The Political Theology of the West. Each of the paced well and tightly argued chapters are divided into smaller sections that hold the reader as Shadia’s argument unfolds and develops. The almost 50 pages of the “Annotated Bibliography” convert the at odds book with the orthodox way of viewing America into a spacious library that highlights further reading for those interested in following the pathway and trail that Shadia organized and constructed.
The cover of Chauvinism of the West speaks its own evocative and convincing message, metaphor of Statue of Liberty falling into the sea, foaming waves soon to bury and drown it, city in the distance soon to suffer the same fate.
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T.S. Eliot began the 6th of his Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Ariel poems “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” in an apt and poignant manner.
There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open to midnight),
And the childish—which is not that of the child
The birth of the child, of course, was none of the above, so accurately depicted by Eliot. The actual birth was about the uncertain Joseph-Mary having to leave their home in Nazareth, being ignored in their hour of birthing need in Bethlehem, larger political powers seemingly driving them to places of loneliness---they must have wondered as did the Magi in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” that indeed it was a cold coming, a hard coming and was it all folly? And where was God in all this, God actually with them in the form of a vulnerable child (never easy to see when much seems to contradict and oppose such a read of a lived historic moment).
It would have been a matter of months (perhaps under 2 years) that Herod sent his death squads to slaughter many innocent children, Joseph-Mary and Jesus refugees, flight to Egypt and the Jewish community there a temporary home for a few years. Such is, in brief, the tale of the Jewish Jesus born from the Jewish context, the Biblical Jewish tale central to the Western Tradition and ethos, a chosen people, a people offered land, a people near and dear to a significant segment of the Christian Tradition. But, where in this tale are the Muslim and Christian Palestinians?
We have witnessed a barbaric and aggressive Jewish assault on the Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The extreme right-of-centre Israeli state has brutally, even though judged as engaging in genocide and violating international law, ignored basic human rights and savaged the Palestinians in Gaza (the West Bank has also felt the impact of this). The right-of-centre Jewish Orthodox Zealots and Christian Zionists have cheered on such a war against a people, and Western leaders have done little to halt the carnage. And, there was the 1st Christmas--yes, the slaughter of the innocents (many more done by the Jewish state than ever done by the Roman military) and Mary-Joseph-Jesus refugees (rather minor when compared to the multitude of Palestinian refugees).
What will be the long-term ripple effect for politics in the Middle East and Palestinian children who have seen families killed, homes destroyed, hospitals, and educational structures obliterated? How will Muslim states (pro-contra West) view the virtual apathy of Israel in this war? And there was the 1st Christmas, many faithfully and religiously remember these days, some as Eliot noted, missing the deeper meaning. But what is the relationship between what the Palestinians are living through (much more gruesome and sustained, Jewish death squads creating hovels, slaughtering many innocents) and the 1st Christmas? To isolate the latter from the reality of the former is to misread the meaning of the contemporary reality in Israel today and its war, genocide, and refugee-making machine on the Muslim and Christian Palestinians on this Christmas season. It might be of some worth to read Eliot’s “The Triumphal March,” the 5th in the Ariel poems, to get a sense of how such a drama plays itself out in the affluent and insulated West to get a sense of the tragedy the West and Israel are facilitating and inflicting on the Palestinians and the unwary implications of it
Fiat Lux
Ron Dart
John W. Martens and Paul V. Niskanen (eds.), The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word: A Critical Synthesis of Antioch and Alexandria (Saint Paul Seminary Press, 2024).
There has been, in the history of Christian exegesis, at one level, a consistent yet unhelpful tension, simplification and polarization between the literal, grammatical, historic and linguistic approach to exegesis that Antioch (both as a place and metaphor for a type of exegesis) embodies and the more allegorical, tropological, anagogical and mystical exegetical approach of Alexandria (both as a site and icon) of an alternate approach to exegesis. Needless to say, such an either-or attitude should not dominate—in short, there is plenty of Alexandria in Antioch and Antioch in Alexandria.
I should note, before I comment on this fine book, that it was dedicated to Ben D. Meyer (1926-1995). When I was doing my PHD at McMaster University in the mid-1980s, I was Ben’s TA for a semester. I shall never forget the way he assigned, for a lower level class, Bernard Lonergan’s (1904-1984) Insight: A Study in Human Understanding---we who were his TAs had to interpret Lonergan to students who had not the slightest idea of what Lonergan was saying, doing and why, his opposition to “field specialization-subject specialization”, most young students not mature enough to comprehend. But, Ben’s thinking had been deeply impacted by Lonergan and Lonergan-Meyer were grappling, in a significant and nuanced way, with the challenges of the Enlightenment’s historic, empirical and rationalist approach (that was used by many in their approach to the Bible) and a more classical layered method (that was true to modern methods but also acutely alert to how such approaches both revealed and concealed the motherlode and mystery of the text).
The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word brings together essays from a conference in June 2022, highlighting eight packed and challenging chapters that engage, in an updated way, layered ways of defining both Antioch and Alexandria and a lively and healthy dialogue between them. Specific texts are chosen from limited passages in the Bible that reflect both Antioch and Alexandria and massage the nature of both “letter” and “Spirit”. The varied approaches of Patristic exegesis and how Psalms can be interpreted and applied are wisely covered just as New Testament texts that reflect on the baptism of Jesus and “the Johannine Farewell Discourse”. Each of these chapters, when read slowly and thoughtfully, reread and sat with for days, walks the attentive reader into a way of reading the Bible in a way that asks of the reader a thoughtful and receptive mind and imagination. A rather dated and, perhaps, irrelevant notion of Antioch versus Alexandria or Alexandria versus Antioch vanishes in such a judicious approach and multiple probes. I have no doubt that Ben Meyer would be amply pleased with those who have been given the torch he once carried and carried it yet further.
The front cover of the book has splendid painting of St. Jerome as a portal of sorts into the sanctuary of insights. It might have been valuable, given the Antioch-Alexandria dialogue to have Origen gracing the cover also.
Ben Meyer was at McMaster at the same time as the much respected Canadian political philosopher George Grant. Both Grant and Meyer would have agreed with Lonergan’s questioning of “field specialization-subject specialization”--all three would have been committed to multiple methods to approach the more comprehensive whole and mystery of the journey. The underlying vision of The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word very much reflects such a notion of the deeper concerns and reasons for uniting, in an updated way, Antioch and Alexandria.
The Bibliography in The Transcendent Mystery of God’s Word is an inviting library in itself and many of the books listed point in directions for those interested that bring to the fore the fuller landscape of the Antioch-Alexandria merging. If understood aright, these approaches can be friends on the journey rather than opponents. John Martens and Paul Niskanen should be offered many a kudo for this 10 bell book that one and all should read and inwardly digest for a mature understanding of Antioch-Alexandria and the transcendent mystery of God’s Word.
Amor Vincit Omnia
Ron Dart
Goldilocks and the Three Bears: An Allegorical Read – Bradley Jersak
Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a much loved and much read tale that can be read at a simple literal level (or with varied moral reads) but it can also be read at a more complex and layered allegorical level. First, though, there is a short history of the story to be told. The tale was initially published by Robert Southey (High Tory Anglican Poet Laureate of England from 1813 until his death in 1843) in 1837 as The Three Bears. It was not a young girl who entered the bears home but an old woman. Then, in 1850, Joseph Cundall turned the old woman into a young child called Silver-hair. And, as the story developed, Goldilocks replaced Silver-hair, hence Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And, now we turn to the read and layered interpretation of the evocative tale.
Goldilocks was a restless child at home, at odds with her parents and eager to see a bigger world. Such is a legitimate and necessary part of the journey—weaning from parents, individuating, tradition of upbringing not speaking to soul or life direction. The journey of Goldilocks is a perennial one. It is one thing to be “free from” something but another thing to be “free for” the next phase of the pilgrimage through time. We must always be alert that we are not just changing one cage for another—such is at the centre of so much religious and political culture wars, past and present.
Goldilocks lacked discernment in the “freedom for” and so she unwittingly entered the home of 3 bears, the bears absent and the home inviting—such is often innocent entering the world of competing experiences. It was just a matter of time before innocence met experience but Goldilocks was unaware of the threats to her existence, bears and humans often at odds, the underlying myth of the story unfolding and to be read as such.
Goldilocks does, though, enter the home of the bears and she finds 3 bowels of porridge—one too hot, one too cold and one just right. Needless to say, in the path of life there are those who too emotional, too charismatic, too intense, too irrational, Dionysius the god—avoid such! But, there are also those who are too cold, too rational, too aloof, Apollo the god, political ideologies and religions veering in both directions. But, the porridge that is just right blends the best of the thoughtful and the imaginative, emotions and reflection---and yet, and yet--there is more!
Goldilocks then turns to the three chairs---one is too high, another moderate but still not right, the smaller chair just perfect and yet, once sat on, Goldilocks breaks it—the insight not to be missed---be wary of being too sophisticated, too high culturally, too aesthetic but also too middle, too bourgeois, too addicted to the middle way—Nietzsche once said, “Blessed are the balanced for they will be bland—Blessed are the moderate for they will be mediocre”. Aristotle beware! Goldilocks found the smallest chair to her liking and yet, once sat on, she broke it. A danger on the journey is finding the place we seem at peace in and yet there is more and such means we need either consciously or unconsciously to break it to grow deeper and walk further on the trail of life. Or, as Eliot aptly suggested “Old Men ought to be explorers….”
And finally, it was to the 3 beds—the one too hard, the other too soft and again the bed that was just right. There are those in life that can be too hard, too critical, too convinced of their worldviews and ways, often judgmental of others---and others can be too soft, too uncritical, grounded and rooted in nothing, Dante’s upper level of the Inferno—such are so open they invite and welcome demons unaware. Goldilocks finds the bed that is just right and falls asleep in it—such is yet another danger. We think we have found a thoughtful and meaningful explanation for our journey and we drift off into sleep and cease to ask deeper and further questions about ourselves, friendships, community and the larger political and public world we live in.
It is often the tragedies and suffering of life, painful experiences, like the bears that Goldilocks encounters, that wake us from our slumber and sleep. It is as we engage the bears (of various shapes and sizes, some smaller and less threatening, others challenging and more difficult and the larger bears that are almost too difficult to face into yet necessary to do so).
Goldilocks does flee from the wake-up experience of being in the bears den, learned much about the deeper and more complex journey and returns to her parents (to a larger Tradition) a sadder but a wiser person—she understands her parents (Tradition) in a more sophisticated and mature manner. So, what seems to be the sad romp of the innocent girl becomes the process of education and transformation, the metaphors of porridges, chairs and beds each lessons to be internalized, none to be absolutized—la lotta continua!
I suspect Southey might be pleased with such a read, literal and moral level giving way to a deeper ontological one of being becoming being.
amor vincit omnia
Ron Dart
Diane Kalen-Sukra, Save Your City: How toxic culture kills community & what to do about it (5th Anniversary Edition: 2024).
Review by Ron Dart
Cultural, religious, educational, and political wars are not new to our all-too-human journey. Sadly, with the rise of instant media, “cancel culture,” “wokeism,” and simplistic ideological posturing, a rather crude notion of polarization has come to define trendy progressivism and reactionary conservatism. In the process, healthy civic virtues and civility in the midst of the fray have been mostly banished.
The evocative and compelling beauty of the 5th edition of Save Your City is the way Diane Kalen-Sukra, drawing from the best and wisest of political thought and activism, overcomes the toxic culture that kills community and shows us what can be done about it. In short, this bounty of a missive reflects on our contemporary crises and what, practically, can be done to bring health and healing to local communities again. Needless to say, such insights can also be applied to higher levels of cultural and political life.
Save Your City is both a short yet large book, short in length but a library of information packed into it. The missive is divided into three parts with an “Appendix” worth sitting with for many a lingering moment:
Part 1: “Welcome to Bullyville,” rightly so, walks the curious and attentive reader through the “City Gates” and “Surviving Uncivil Society.”
Part 2: “Journey to Sustainable” points the way out of the malaise in a positive direction to “Sanctuary,” “Join the Renaissance,” and “One Ship, One Destiny.”
Part III: Sustainable Culture” ups the challenge to yet higher and more significant levels, “Global Call for Values Education” and “Love is the Greatest Civic Virtue.”
The timely and timeless Appendix holds the reader and offers a mature path to a “Roadmap To Renewing Civic Culture.”
Is Save Your City a naively optimist manifesto, as some hard realists and cynics might argue (the position of such skeptics leading to impotence and paralysis), or does this book provide a pathway and opening forward to engage the tough issues in a demanding yet thoughtful manner? Diane has been in the thick of the fray for many a decade; hence, Save Your City is acutely aware of the low culture that often dominates much public discourse—she is realistic enough to know if such toxicity continues, communities, in time, will be no more.
So, such a book is realism at its most focused and engaged. Save Your City, for those with a background in Classical education, draws from the lessons learned from such a heritage and the lessons learned both for good and ill of the wisest women and men of the past. History, in short, is replete with many tragic and sad tales, for those who ignore both Cassandra and Tiresias, and Diane knows of what she speaks because of where she sees from. We do well to heed her seeing and speaking, vision, and committed activism.
I would not hesitate, for a moment, to warmly and highly encourage one and all to purchase, inwardly digest, and be shaped and massaged in mind and imagination, soul and body by Save Your City—the future of meaningful civic virtues and public civility hinges on understanding what needs to be understood at a deeper level to overcome toxic culture at many insidious and acrid levels.
Ron Dart
Professor Emeritus
Department of Political Science
University of the Fraser Valley
Abbotsford BC
The Slaughter of the Innocents: Then and Now – Ron Dart
We reflect at this season of the liturgical year on both the birth of Jesus but also the immediate political implications of it: the slaughter of innocent children under two years of age by the Roman military. How many children were killed, and what type of soldier would do such a thing? Obviously, most Roman soldiers would not kill innocent children to appease Herod’s insecure ambitions – mercenaries or killers with no conscience. But, many were the innocent children killed in such a slaughter, and many a family lamenting the carnage.
The slaughter of the innocents has been well depicted and graphically illustrated in the history of art – anyone with a minimal conscience cannot but be appalled by the savagery of it. But, many are the innocents being killed in Gaza and the West Bank these days – much, much more than the Roman killing of innocent Jewish children. Now, it is the Jewish state-military killing multiple Palestinian children – a few facts, and there are many more I could highlight:
There are, at the present time, a combination of 28,000 deaths/missing Palestinian persons.
I could go on, in detail, describing the destruction of hospitals and health units, malnutrition increasing, familial ties shattered, and American military and diplomatic support ever pro-Israeli. The irony is this: the goal is to destroy Hamas, but the very barbaric and savage atrocities by Israel will midwife an even more committed Hamas and Muslim world in its animosity toward the Judeo-Christian West.
We should, rightly so, meditate on the slaughter of the innocents at the birth of Christ. But, we are living through a much greater and more brutal slaughter of the innocents at the present time – such crude and vindictive brutality makes the Roman killing of innocent children pale in comparison – then was tragic, now raises the meaning of barbarism to a new level.
What would a Jewish prophet speak to the Jewish people at such a time as this? Who are the Jewish and Christian prophets speaking such words of moral truth? What are the short and long-term implications of ignoring such words of pure truth, justice, and shalom?
La Lotta Continua
[continuous struggle]
Ron Dart
Ron Dart taught in the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the University of Fraser Valley (British Columbia) for 33 years. He has published and edited more than forty books, including Scrutinizing Scruton: Canadian High Toryism and Scrutonia; Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective; Christianity and Pluralism (co-authored with J.I Packer); Thomas Merton and the Beats of the North Cascades; and The North American High Tory Tradition. He is also an avid mountaineer.
In this interview, Ron talks about the complex negotiation that needs to take place between truth and unity. This includes the need to question certainty (which requires humility), establishing dialogue (Dart includes a good bit of Martin Buber), and, in general, holding a hermeneutic of generosity.
To listen to the audio interview from Matthew Steem at Radix Magazine, CLICK HERE.
Torbjorn Ekelund, The Boy and the Mountain: A Father, His Son, and a Journey of Discovery (Greystone Books, 2023).
The Boy and the Mountain was originally published in Norwegian in 2017 and translated into English in 2023. Ekelund has, thus far, published two fine books that weave, thoughtfully and delicately together, the layered relationship between humans and nature: In Praise of Paths and A Year in the Woods. There is a meditative approach that shapes and defines Ekelund’s writing style, and such a tendency is front and center in The Boy and the Mountain.
There are a variety of suggestive layers at work in The Boy and the Mountain and the interweaving of such layers makes this missive inviting and evocative. There is the story of a young child (six years of age) who wandered from his mother in a backcountry and mountainous in southern Norway (near Kongsberg) in the Skrim area, lost his way, and was found dead---such was the fate of Hans Torske when he disappeared July 8 1894 and was found July 29 1895. It is this mysterious death of Hans that is constantly, like a stream, running through the mind of Ekeland as he takes to the same area with his son (August) for a father and son trek to, in principle, the summit of Styggemann mountain. But, what is the significance of mother and son taking to the backcountry, father in the city, Hans innocently leaving mother, then disappearing, lost in the woods, disoriented, many in the area searching for him, when found a year later dead? This is certainly a tale of poorly prepared trips and treks into nature, a child acting in a spontaneous and creative manner, nature quite indifferent to such a choice, no sense of how to orient or find his way back to his mother, then being lost and nature taking its inevitable toll—certainly no nature romanticism, those unprepared and unaware often victims of nature’s ways and means. So, the tale of Hans is the warning and backdrop to the hike of father and son.
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Jan Zwicky, Once upon a Time in the West: Essays on the Politics of Thought and Imagination (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).
I lived for a couple of years in the young 1970s in northern Norway and Switzerland. I spent time in Norway with the mountain Sami—this was a period when Arne Naess (Norwegian mountaineer, Spinoza scholar and founder of deep ecology with Delores LaChapelle) worked closely with the Sami to oppose the large dam projects. Naess lived in Austria from 1933-1935 and was involved, when there, with the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein. When I was in Switzerland, I took in the Swiss mountaineering tradition and soaked myself in the writings of Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt (complicated history with Nietzsche), Hesse and Heidegger. I have been fortunate to spent time at Heidegger’s Hut in southern Germany (Todtnauberg) and Nietzsche’s home in Sils Maria. I mention this the simple reason that each of these thinkers were focused and preoccupied with the dilemma of the West and its seeming deterioration and decline, its lemming-like stampede to a cliff’s edge, its hyper and unanalyzed addiction to the vita activa and its opposition to the vita contemplativa—such are the legitimate and focused concerns of Jan Zwicky’s recent probes and beauty of a book, Once upon a Time in the West, “Once”, “Time” and West” the target, the suggestive and classical fairy tale sequence not to miss.
Once upon a Time in the West is divided into 14 reflective and meditative chapters, the personal and philosophical woven together on a finely textured tapestry of thought and insight. The initial chapter, “Auden as Philosopher: How Poets Think” is the golden key that walks the attentive reader into this bounty of a book, two ways of seeing and the consequences for the West of taking one path or the other: “Auden’s Poetic Epistemology” versus “The Epistemology of Baconian Science.” Bacon was somewhat more sophisticated than his detractors make him out to be but the ‘novum organum,” when pushed too far, conceals much what Zwicky’s read of Auden-Coleridge unconceals—this is a chapter worthy of multiple slow reads.
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Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, Wheaton: 2020).
Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, Wheaton: 2022).
Sic et Non (Yes and No)
Carl Trueman has emerged, in the last few years, as a rather popular thinker and commentator on our late modern and postmodern versions of the ideology of liberalism. A couple of his early books (The Creedal Imperative & Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom) kept him safely confined in a more insulated religious ethos, but with the publishing of the more demanding The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) and the more readable version of the larger tome, Strange New World (2022), Trueman has positioned himself well as an interpreter of our contemporary ills and the roots and genealogy of such a cultural disease. How should Trueman’s read of our present malaise be engaged, and how should his read of its origins be accepted or questioned?
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is divided into 5 Parts: 1) Architecture of the Revolution, 2) Foundations of the Revolution, 3) Sexualization of the Revolution, 4) Triumphs of the Revolution, and 5) Concluding Unscientific Prologue. Rod Dreher wrote the “Foreword,” and each Part has a handy “Epilogue”. There can be no doubt that the notion of the “self” (and its protean-like meanings and interpretations) has been a focus in the West for the past 500 years (not as Trueman seems to think since Rousseau and tribe forward). Trueman does draw from Taylor’s comprehensive Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) in his approach to the topic, but Trueman lacks the comprehensive breadth and depth of Taylor. There is no doubting the fact, though, that there is, from a certain perspective, a definite and decided inward turn to the subject and inner self within the West as a part of the quest for meaning and the search for a meaningful identity—such is the journey of identity politics. Taylor recognizes in such a turn, there can be an indulgent and narcissistic view of the self, but there are, in such a turn, possibilities for a more authentic self to emerge—how is the difference to be discerned?
Review of Sister Wendy Beckett and Robert Ellsberg, Dearest Sister Wendy: A Surprising Story of Faith and Friendship (Orbis Books, 2022). Review by Ron Dart.
I have, sitting on my desk before me, Sister Wendy Beckett’s classic visual and textual beauty and must-read of a tome, Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces (1999). Sister Wendy certainly established herself as one of the most significant art historians (both on BBC and in publishing) in the latter half of the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century. Robert Ellsberg and Orbis Books have established a unique and needful place in the publishing world in the genre of prophetic theology. It is rare that a much-respected nun and art historian and writer engaged in the rigorous field of public theology would dialogue in a meaningful and intimate correspondence, but such is the evocative and compelling mother lode of Dearest Sister Wendy.
Sister Wendy Beckett was in the late autumn season of her all too earthy journey when the intensive and extensive correspondence began with Robert Ellsberg, the most compact phase from 2016-2018, Sister Wendy crossed the river on December 26, 2018. There is a tender and sensitive combination of letters between Robert Ellsberg and Sister Wendy that, insightfully so, is divided into three historic sections: “The Art of Seeing,” “The Art of Loving” and “The Art of Letting Go”.
The general momentum of the letters has a certain direction, Sister Wendy encourages (she being a contemplative) Robert to slow down and ease up on all his frantic busyness, Robert kindly encourages Sister Wendy to be more honest, transparent, and confessional about herself and her life journey.
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Bradley Jersak, Out of the Embers: Faith After The Great Deconstruction (Whitaker House, 2022)
Out of the Embers, like the perennial wise and far-seeing Phoenix, knows the meaning of going to places of death and disappointment, suffering and sadness, and yet, from such places, the resurrection and tears of the Phoenix, brings healing to all whose tears touch the skin of their souls. In short, from the embers and ashes of the great deconstruction, a wise, mature and resurrected life is born and offers tears and discerning insights to others.
Out of the Embers is divided into 3 sections, each section an invitation to journey into the next, deconstruction birthing reconstruction and renovation in the larger culture wars: Part I: Memoirs: Trauma, Purgation, and Liberation, Part II: Memos: Seven Sleepers of Deconstruction and Part III: Provocations: Out of the Embers –Faith after Freefall.
Part I, as the title suggests, has a personal and confessional bent to it, Brad relating and telling his journey, his journey having much overlap with many who were birthed in varied forms of a conservative evangelical ethos but finding such a family soul suffocating and tomb-like. Needless to say, Brad’s journey does mirror and reflect the initial faith journey of many but such a beginning does need to be grown beyond if minimal depth and thoughtfulness are to be part of the next steps of the pilgrimage through time—in short, such beginnings do need to be critically deconstructed. But, who might be heard, trusted, and consulted in such a needful deconstruction?
Part II, in a creative and engaged manner, draws from an ancient myth of the seven sleepers, such sleepers awakening to bring light and life to dark and troubling times. Brad has called forth seven significant philosophers of the past to aid in the deconstruction process: Moses (and his apophatic line and linage as a means of deconstructing ways of thinking and being that are too certain types of interpretive idolatry), Plato, Voltaire, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Weil-Camus. There are two sections dedicated to Nietzsche and three sections heeding the challenging insights of Dostoevsky. Each of these thinkers-activists are rigorous and no-nonsense master of deconstruction: they have little time or patience for religious silliness or thinness. I was fortunate, when doing my Ph.D., to do translations of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and trekked many of the trails Nietzsche did from his home in Sils Maria in the Engadine Valley in Switzerland (there is a scholars in residence program at Nietzsche’s home in Sils). I have also, at the University I have taught for almost 35 years, hosted day-long symposiums on Russian writers, including Dostoevsky—Brad has chosen wisely and well from his seven sleepers. Part II is the longest section of the book and is worthy of many a meditative read—deconstruction and reconstruction ever the challenging and lived tension.
Part III reflects on various and needful approaches of provocation, the emergence, phoenix-like, out of the embers, faith after a painful and for many years erratic and confusing freefalls. Each of the sections in provocations is worth lingering at as pointers to the deeper, fuller and resurrected journey---such is “revenants”. The future way forward is more than hinted at in this final section of Out of the Embers—do read and inwardly digest.
Each of us, probably, has 5-10 books on our shelf as keepers if told we could only take so many to a deserted Island. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse is in my top 5. The Glass Bead Game is about a community of intellectuals (Castalians) who live in the midst of cultural chaos and fragmentation, shallow journalism, war, multiple amusements and diversions and such Castalians attempt to raise the level of cultural and civilizational thought to a higher and fuller level. The low culture, pop culture, deconstructionist and mediocre culture of the time had led to nihilism, cynicism and tribalism. The battle of ideas and identity waged vigorously at many levels. The head of the order, Magister Ludi, understood the need for grappling with ideas at the highest level, but he realized that those who separated the struggle for the best that had been thought and said from engagement with the public and political realm were themselves in an enclosed matrix of sorts. I have taught in the area of political philosophy most of my teaching vocation and I have often been somewhat concerned about how the glass bead game of ideas, theology, exegesis, liturgy etc is often disengaged from political thought, substantive political theology, political parties, political activism and policy. When this occurs, a subtler form of gnosticism emerges, ideas versus history, theology-philosophy versus politics etc. In short, in this superb book by Brad, I would have liked to see some serious thinking on how “faith after the great deconstruction” faces into the head winds of political philosophy, political theology, political parties, activism and party policies—cynicism and skepticism in these areas is short-sighted and counterproductive. Some of the seven sleepers Brad draws from certainly did rigorous political probes—more attention to these probes might have enriched the book yet further.
In sum, Out of the Embers is a beauty and bounty of tome—more pondering on how the glass bead game of ideas connects with the challenges of public and political life would yet have made for a fuller way of embodying a form of political faith after the serious limitations of the great deconstruction.
Amor Vincit Omnia
Ron Dart
Bill Morgan, Thomas Merton & Lawrence Ferlinghetti: and the Protection of All Beings (Beatdom Books, 2022)
As to the U.S. Beats I am more in sympathy with them
but in most cases I do not respond to them fully.
Thomas Merton letter to Stefan Baciu (1965): p.77
I have sitting before me a splendid hard copy edition of Bill Morgan’s The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (2010). I have read the evocative beauty a few times and there can be no doubt Morgan has covered, in readable detail, the varied lives of the Beats in an honest and transparent way. Most of the significant Beats such as Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, Snyder and Ferlinghetti are covered in a candid way (their opponents are also noted). There can be no doubt Morgan is one of the finest chroniclers of the Beats (as a complex tribe) and individual Beat activists and poets in a thoughtful way and manner. There is, though, more digging that needs to be done on the Beats and the Roman Catholic Beat tradition—such is the initial approach in Thomas Merton & Lawrence Ferlinghetti: And the Protection of All Beings.
I have, in a suggestive way, attempted to reflect on the Beat-Roman Catholic Beats in two books: Thomas Merton and Beats of the North Cascades (2005 & 2008) and Thomas Merton and the Counter Culture: A Golden String (2016). I have also touched on the Beats in the North Cascades (a mountainous area where I live) in “The Beat Generation in the Mountains” Appalachia (Winter/Spring 2012). But it is Morgan’s fine primer on Merton and Ferlinghetti that needs to be heeded and read attentively.
The subtitle of the missive sums up the main focus of the book. Merton was emerging as a political writer in the late 1950s-early 1960s (most unusual for a Roman Catholic monk mostly known for his writings on the contemplative life). Ferlinghetti was committed to calling forth poets to think and write in a more political (albeit anarchist) manner. The idea was to birth, in 1961, a magazine, The Journal For The Protection Of All Beings. Ferlinghetti sent out many an invitation for contributors but few were those willing to submit an article, poem or other means of facing the dire political issues of the time. Merton and Ferlinghetti both shared a Roman Catholic background, both had political leanings, both were poets and both shared a French European cultural ethos. Morgan covers these similarities in a nuanced way. Merton had written Original Child Bomb: Points For Meditation To Be Scratched On The Walls Of A Cave (a chilling 41-point description of the research, planning and final dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Ferlinghetti thought this anti-poem of sorts would fit perfectly into the Journal. The concern was would the Roman Catholic censors allow such a poem to be published by a monk? A significant part of this timely missive by Morgan covers the correspondence in the late Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter of 1961 regarding Merton’s contribution to the Journal. There was, though, another poem-anti-poem by Merton that held Ferlinghetti: Chant to Be Used in Processions Around A Site With Furnaces (the theme, of course, the docile attitude of those who mindlessly obeyed orders, Arendt calling this the “banality of evil”—Merton I might add had a significant respect for Arendt). Morgan included both of these creative anti-poems in the book and the confusion about their publishing.
Needless to say, there was more than Ferlinghetti and City Lights interested in Merton’s poems: James Laughlin-New Directions (Merton had published some of his earliest poems with New Directions in the 1940s), Robert Lax- Pax and Dorothy Day-The Catholic Worker were all vying to publish Merton’s prophetic and compact political commentary-Morgan does a superb job of highlighting this reality. The flurry of letters between Merton and Ferlinghetti is well-tracked and traced by Morgan revealing much about both men and the state of publishing at the time.
The inclusion in the book of Ferlinghetti’s “Picturesque Haiti” reflects the obvious gap between the Haiti of the tourist industry and the actual and lived reality of many Haitians in which poverty is their painful lives lived, image and reality not to be confused. Merton approved the lengthy reflection. Merton did face the ire of his censors, but true to form, Ferlinghetti and Laughlin were sensitive to the problem and Laughlin went the extra mile to publish Merton’s yet more political writings, the “Cold War Letters”. Merton’s long letter to Ferlinghetti (December 12, 1961) tells the complex tale (and much else) in substantive depth—this is a letter worth mulling over many times—so much said about many pertinent and timely issues, including Merton’s high praise for the comments by Nez Perce on Chief Joseph’s surrender position, “I will fight no more forever”. Merton did wax hot and cold about some of the contributions to the Journal, though.
Morgan touched on the use Lenny Bruce made of “Chant”, the language of Chant, of course, a perversion of its deeper religious meaning, Merton in the anti-poem making it abundantly clear, that a form of crude statism had become the new religion, a religion Ginsberg aptly portrayed in Howl. The more intense correspondence period between Merton and Ferlinghetti came to an end by late 1961 but this did not mean an end of their friendship (nor Merton’s interaction with the Beats).
The publication of Merton’s Monks Pond in 1968 included contributions by Snyder and Kerouac (Ferlinghetti welcomed to offer a submission) and it was in 1968 Merton reconnected with Ferlinghetti again. Merton was in search of a hermitage far from Gethsemani, his new Abbot approved of such a search so Merton took to Redwoods, New Mexico and Alaska on such a pilgrimage. Merton and Ferlinghetti met for the 1st time in May 1968 and Ferlinghetti offered Merton a room for the night above City Lights. A correspondence emerged again between Merton and Ferlinghetti after their meeting in San Francisco (May 29 1968 and June 5, 1968), Morgan, rightly so, threading together these shorter letters.
There was an ongoing interest at the time in Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Book of the Dead and when Merton travelled to Asia, he met the young Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama (who were at odds with one another)—Merton enthused about both, Rinpoche became a guru of sorts to the Beats, Naropa Institute his educational centre (much controversy in the early years) whereas the Dalai Lama was far from such tensions and clashes. But, to return to Ferlinghetti and Merton.
Morgan brings this timely and well-wrought book to an end by highlighting, in a poem, “A Buddha in the Woodpile” his lament about the tragedy in Waco Texas with the Branch Davidians and pondering if the presence of Merton (or other contemplatives) would have prevented such carnage. And, in 2001, Ferlinghetti in a poem, “Mouth” wonders whether he will yet “join the Trappists”.
Morgan began the book by recounting visits with Ferlinghetti, when both were much younger, and Ferlinghetti’s fond remembrance of Merton and as Ferlinghetti near the end of his all too human journey his support of Morgan’s book on Merton and Ferlinghetti—fine bookends, indeed.
I cannot finish this review without noting both the fine cover and the many black and white photographs in the book, many taken by Merton.
The photographs that introduce us to the book are ones of a young Ferlinghetti with “Prayer Room” in a half shadow behind him and Merton in his Cistercian robe with forest and trees in the background. There are other photos of James Laughlin, cover to Original Child Bomb, typed and written letters, cover to Journal for the Protection of All Beings and photo of Rinpoche and Merton-Dalai Lama.
It is an obvious good to see Bill Morgan extending his work on the Beats in the direction of the Roman Catholic Beats, Merton being but one of them, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti obvious affinities although Ferlinghetti more solid and grounded than Kerouac, Kerouac’s slow descent sad and tragic. Hopefully, in time, much more work will be done on the Christian and Roman Catholic Beats (and those with Beat affinities) and the internal points of concord and discord, Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker, Dan/Phil Berrigan, William Everson-Mary Fabilli, Denise Levertov, Mary Norbert Korte and Jim Forest but doorways into such an expansive and catholic vision.
Thomas Merton & Lawrence Ferlinghetti: and the Protection ff All Beings is worthy of many a curious and ample read and Morgan should be generously rewarded for his fine sleuth work.
Ron Dart