Page 1264 – Christianity Today (2024)

There are three great reasons to watch Bears, the latest documentary in a series of theatrical releases from Disneynature.

Reason No. 1: The Title Characters

Who doesn't love bears?

This is a beautifully shot film about Alaska's brown bears, particularly focusing on a family of three—a momma bear named Sky and her cubs, Scout and Amber. They're just arbitrary names that the filmmakers assigned to the creatures for the sake of telling a kid-friendly story. The movie follows our ursine friends on a nearly year-long adventure, starting with some how-did-they-do-that footage of the cubs' birth while still in their den.

We see their ridiculously cute first wobbly steps as they emerge from the den at the verge of spring. We see them trying to keep up with Sky as she leads them down the mountain slopes—dodging an avalanche along the way!—to a verdant meadow, where they feed on grass with other bear families. We meet the massive Magnus, a half-ton alpha male who strikes fear into all the other bears, and his rival Chinook, an outcast who apparently won't hesitate to gobble up one of the cubs. (He doesn't, but these films always include perils—some quite real, some concocted—to keep the story moving along. Our protagonists need to face some sense of danger, right?)

We learn that Scout is a rambunctious, fearless rascal who sometimes wanders away and gets himself into trouble. We learn that Amber is more of a momma's girl, staying close to Sky while taking it all in. And we learn that Sky is a mostly competent mom willing to do anything for her children—including fight off intruders who regard them as a potential meal. It's a joy to watch her lead the cubs from the appetizer (the sweet grasses and berries of the meadow) to the main course (the protein-rich salmon that are spawning upstream).

And we learn some fascinating bear facts along the way:

• To prepare for hibernation, adult bears must eat 90 pounds of food per day to store up enough fuel for the winter.
• A bear's sense of smell is seven times more sensitive than a bloodhound's.
• When salmon are unavailable, bears still find protein by streams and riverbeds—by digging up clams from the mud and cracking then open.
• Bear cubs stay with their mothers for three years before venturing out on their own as young adults.

For the most part, the story in Bears feels "real," organic to what's unfolding on the screen. Some storylines in previous Disneynature films, especially 2012's Chimpanzee, felt a bit forced, edited almost to excess to fit the footage. But as a chronological story, Bears follows a natural plotline that feels just right.

We meet other animals along the way. Wolves. Foxes. Bald eagles. Squirrels.

Reason No. 2: The Narrator

The narrators for previous Disneynature films have been hit-or-miss. Patrick Stewart and James Earl Jones were two of the four narrators on 2009's Earth, the debut from the Disney spinoff studio—and they were marvelous. Pierce Brosnan did 2010's Oceans, and while the film was terrific, the narration was just okay. Samuel L. Jackson was a pretty good storyteller for 2011's African Cats, and then Tim Allen zonked in Chimpanzee. (To be fair, the golden-voiced Allen—sensational in the "Pure Michigan" radio and TV spots—had a lame script to work with.)

But who would've thought that John C. Reilly might be the best of the bunch? (Not me.) Reilly hardly has the finest speaking voice, compared to his predecessors. (I'd listen to Stewart and/or Jones read the phone book.) Reilly can be nasally and whiny, and he's certainly not going to win any Shakespearean soliloquy throw-downs.

But he's absolutely brilliant as the narrator of Bears­. If a voice can be as cute, cuddly, and fun-loving as the frolicking cubs we're watching, well, Reilly pulls it off. Unsurprisingly, his background as a comedian comes in handy during the film's lighter moments, especially as he "speaks" for the bears, his timing impeccable. But there's also just enough gravitas in his delivery for the film's more serious moments. It's endearing throughout, and almost worth the price of admission in itself.

Reason No. 3: The Scenery

I've traveled to numerous places around the world, but I've never seen a place more beautiful, more breathtaking—and I mean that literally—than Alaska. Denali National Park rendered me almost speechless. The Alaska Range is not just the most amazing thing I've ever seen; it's also one of the most terrifying. You feel like you could soar, and you feel like you could die—or at least get hurt really, really bad.

It's one of those parts of Creation where you see and feel God's glory—and his awesome, awful (in the archaic sense of the word) power. You want to embrace, and you want to run away, all at once. It was, for me, something akin to a Burning Bush moment.

Though Bears isn't filmed in Denali, it showcases enough of Alaska's vast wilderness that you'll get much of the same sensation in watching this film. Some of the scenery is jaw-droppingly spectacular. Much of the movie was shot in Katmai National Park and Preserve, right where the Alaskan peninsula joins the mainland. And it's stunning. A dozen or more scenes in this movie will take your breath away.

"We wanted to take audiences to one of the most beautiful places in the world—an area people hope to visit, but never do," said director Alastair Fothergill. "Now they can see Alaska through the eyes of a mother bear and her cubs."

It's a journey well worth a trip to your local movieplex.

Be sure to hang around for the closing credits, where they include clips of Fothergill and his team filming the action. You'll be astonished at how close they get to their subjects!

Caveat Spectator

Bears is rated G and is very family friendly, appropriate for ages 4-up. There are moments of mild peril, but no animals die in the film. The only blood is when the bears catch salmon and rip them apart with their claws and teeth. But hey, think of it as sushi.

Mark Moring, a former film and music editor at CT, is a writer at Grizzard Communications in Atlanta.

As my husband and I trucked up Broadway toward our subway stop after our screening of Transcendence, he said, "The problem is he did what she wanted, but he didn't ask her about it first."

"So this is a movie about communicating better with your wife?" I asked.

"I guess?" he said.

"Did we really need IMAX for that?" I asked him. He shrugged.

That, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with Transcendence, though it doesn't touch what's right about it. (And no, it wasn't a spoiler.)

It's not a bad movie, by a long shot. In fact, it has all the trappings of a good movie: great talent (Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Morgan Freeman, Kate Mara), carefully framed scenes—Wally Pfister, the director, is best known for being Christopher Nolan's cinematographer—and an interesting plot that hits at the core of things we're interested in right now.

After all, this is the second movie in six months in major release that features a human in a close, even intimate relationship with artificial intelligences (the other was Spike Jonze's Her, winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay this year).

It's also got something very strange and interesting going on beneath the surface. More on that anon.

The Thing About Sci-Fi

The thing about science fiction, good science fiction, is that you've got basically two directions in which it can go. One is to go heavy on plot, playing the story as a cautionary tale about the danger of some kind of human activity taken too far (genetic modification, technology, take your pick). Think Ender's Game. Or Metropolis. Or most classic sci-fi literature.

The other is to treat the new setting primarily as a character study, using the unfamiliar futuristic environment as a backdrop for exploring human nature or stories with enduring appeal. Star Wars primarily fits this mold, and many of Steven Spielberg's movies, and many others. Her was one of the finest examples of this: the technological advances were presented with neither comment nor alarm.

Some stories successfully straddle the divide (Star Trek is a good example, and the newer Battlestar Galactica) or reinvent it. But part of the problem with Transcendence is it tries to do both, and falls short of both marks. It's not like last year's Oblivion, which was all flash and positively no substance and, after a year and another viewing, still counts as a truly "epic" fail in my book.

Transcendence nearly gets to its target several times, but it thunks to the ground by the end. Which is sad, because Jack Paglen, the screenwriter, is a hot commodity in Hollywood right now. Last summer, there were reports that he'd be writing the Prometheus sequel; he was replaced on that project, but lately he's been attached to the (in my view, entirely unnecessary) Battlestar Galactica reboot. But the faults of this film stand out in bold relief next to Jonze's Her screenplay.

Singularity, or Transcendence?

Transcendence (and Her, too) is a movie about what some tech theorists call "the singularity"—the moment in the future when artificial intelligences will become so advanced that they will outpace human intelligence. Scientists disagree on when the singularity will occur, but many think it's coming fast, with dates ranging from 2017 to 2040.

In this film, Will Caster (Depp) and his brilliant wife Evelyn (Hall) are partners in both science and life, devoted to the development of an artificial intelligence they've named P.I.N.N. (Physically Independent Neural Network). The Casters are a study in the contrast between pure science and its commercial application. While Will loves elegant, theoretical science, Evelyn is more interested in the practical applications of their work: at a conference called "EVOLVE the FUTURE," she tells the crowd that this work has an altruistic purpose. Some day, she says, it will help clean the earth, solve health problems, eliminate poverty.

When Will gets up to speak about his vision for A.I.—some people call it the singularity, he says, but "I call it transcendence"—he's interrupted by a young man who asks him, "So you want to create a god, your own god?"

"Isn't that what man has always done?" Will asks him.

Well, that is the question. Just after Will exits the conference, chaos breaks out. He's shot by a young man who then shoots himself; simultaneously, five A.I. labs across the country are attacked. A radical Luddite terrorist group with grave concerns about how such an A.I. may destroy humanity has taken action.

Though it first seems as if Will is going to recover, he soon becomes sick, and it turns out that the bullet that just grazed him was poisonous, loaded with radiation that will kill him within a month. Evelyn, along with their friend and fellow scientist Max (Bettany), is distraught, but resigned. And yet, as Will's health declines, Evelyn starts to form a plan. What if they could upload Will's consciousness into P.I.N.N.?

They manage to do so, just before Will dies. And it works. Will's consciousness—with Will's memories, speech patterns, and proclivities—comes online and begins working and communicating with Evelyn (in a scene reminiscent of Samantha's camera-as-eye in Her, Will can't see Evelyn till she positions the camera properly). He reorders his consciousness a bit to make it cleaner, creates a visual representation of himself, connects to the Internet, and begins to expand. He asks Evelyn to build a vast data center so he can grow more powerful. He figures out how to heal humans from serious illnesses, and how to network them. And over the course of years, he grows more vast, with Evelyn's help.

But Max has been worried from the start that this is not Will at all, but something more sinister, something that will take over the world. He's not the only one.

Like Her, Transcendence's core is a love story that gets complicated when one of the partners becomes vastly intelligent, a mind that transcends space and time.

But here's what Her did well: it gave us scenes between the two partners that showed us the development and depth of this love—didn't just show us, but made us feel it. Transcendence, though a character piece, is also preoccupied with its singularity plot, trying to explore the negative and positive potential of this sort of development.

As a result, it moves far too fast, skimping on both character and plot. It tells us that Evelyn and Will have a vital connection, but doesn't really make us feel it. It tells us to be worried about the singularity, and tells us there might be benefits, but without giving us enough time to catch our breath and sink into the feeling. And by the end, when it effectively pulls the rug out, it leaves us scratching our heads about what we were supposed to be feeling in the first place. Sure, it's great when characters are complicated and multi-dimensional, but all those colorful sparkles a prism flings around a room get blurry and flat when you whirl it around too fast.

Another, more surprising problem, given Pfister's bona fides as a cinematographer, was the use of IMAX. If I'm seated in front of an enormous screen, you've got my attention, and I am expecting something visually stunning. Transcendence delivered, but only occasionally. In fact, I thought at least once that I might like this movie better if I was watching it on a smaller screen—something I've never thought before. It's visually excellent, but it doesn't merit the majesty of IMAX, and it seems dangerous to raise an audience's expectations (and ticket prices) without delivering. (It may do well on DVD.)

All that to say that among the field of directorial debuts, Transcendence is better than the average. But it doesn't really give you much to think about with respect to human love or to the dangers of technology.

An (Inadvertent?) Parable

But, but. I couldn't shake the feeling there was something else going on. I don't know a blessed thing about Jack Paglen or Wally Pfister's religious beliefs, and I'm definitely not the kind of critic who sees a Christ figure around every corner.

But if Paglen and Pfister weren't intentionally layering in a narrative structure ripped straight from the Bible, they certainly did so unconsciously.

(There might be some spoilers ahead, so if you plan to see the film, you may want to stop now or jump down to the Caveat Spectator, and then come back later.)

We begin with a couple who are busy about the work of creation driven by both the pure joy of creating and by a desire to heal the world's ills and cause human flourishing. But violence is done to one of them because of this, and he dies. He becomes—as the man in the audience says to Will—a sort of god, a transcendent being who can heal humans and bring about harmony, who becomes part of creation, all because of his love for his wife, an embodied being who is working with him.

Yet that transcendent being is persecuted and despised by those it wants to save—even those who purportedly loved it at one time. Eventually, even the person closes to him comes to distrust him ("why did you lose faith in me? Why didn't you believe in me?"). The only way to save her, and save the world, is to return to earth, to become embodied once more. But then, he must sacrifice himself. And he leaves behind a still-broken world, though one with the potential for regeneration.

And then there's the last bit of the movie, in which we return to a garden where things still bloom, where life still exists. That garden, we're told, was created "for the same reason he did everything—so that they could be together."

Obviously, this isn't a theologically perfect analogy in any way. But even if it's mixing the lines between creation and created, Trinity and man, death and rebirth, it's certainly following some familiar plot lines that Christians can recognize. Where it fails as plot and character sketch, Transcendence becomes weirdly successful as a sort of co*ckeyed analogy for the gospel and the painful, tragic, violent beauty of the Incarnation and Christ's crucifixion.

Perhaps it makes sense this is being released on Good Friday.

All that aside, Transcendence is yet another movie that shows how important our bodies are to our full humanity, and as our computers and phones and watches and glasses get smarter, and as we get more and more removed from one another, that seems to be something we care about. (Brett McCracken wrote about this beautifully when he reviewed Her for us.) Lower your expectations if they're raised by the IMAX screen, don't expect an epic warning plot or a careful humanist character sketch, and you'll be just fine.

Caveat Spectator

Transcendence is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action and violence, some bloody images, brief strong language and sensuality, but it's one of the "cleanest" PG-13 films I've seen in a long time, suitable for most teenagers and adults. The only "strong language" I caught was a solitary euphemism for human excrement. There is certainly violence—mostly people getting shot—but nothing gratuitous. There are some very brief scenes that imply sex between married people in which we see nothing. And there are intimations of vast impending doom that could be scary, but nothing that should evoke nightmares.

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today's chief film critic. She is assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City and editor at QIdeas. She tweets @alissamarie.

For years and for complicated reasons, my friend of solitary temperament suffered privately with cancer and its harsh remediations. Pride, pain, denial, fatigue—all contributed to her debilitation—and fear, toward the end, once the medical professionals assaulted her denial and spoke only of comfort.

She said she wasn't afraid of death but of dying, not of meeting her Maker but of traversing the valley, crossing the bar. She had come to the end of her human resources and knew she had to throw herself toward the mercy of God, or maybe it was a more passive letting herself fall into the abyss of grace.

In an attempt to alleviate her fear, I left home somewhat impulsively at 7:30 in the morning to visit her, newly embedded in a residential hospice. She was heavily medicated, not speaking or eating, and hardly drinking, receiving no tubal hydration. I expected to return home within the hour, but when I found her alone, I stayed until early afternoon, when her family arrived.

I sang hymns and gospel songs that I had memorized as a child, sometimes improvising new lines. Though it was Lent, I sang the off-season Gloria and the all-season Sanctus: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord." In an alcove, I found coffee refills. I hadn't thought to eat breakfast, and by 10:30 a.m., I was hungry. In silences between songs, I carried on a conversation with myself.

Just go out and find a snack.

No. Remember Jesus' Gethsemane line: "Can you not watch with me for one hour?" Or with a dying friend for one morning?

I held off, claiming the consciously chosen hunger as a form of discipline, though I wasn't sure why my discomfort held any meaning beyond my body's chemistry.

I've fasted only a few times in my life, never more than a day—and that time only because a friend suggested fasting as a sort of spiritual bargaining tool: God, give me what I want. Please. I'm serious here. Don't you see?

But that's not what this was about. I wasn't begging God for anything, not even for my friend's life. Nor was I girding myself against temptation, as the Gospel writer says Peter in Gethsemane should have.

I sat with her for long, early-hour stretches in the final week of her life, though each day after the first I grabbed a breakfast muffin before I left home. Perhaps fasting the first day prepared me for this short-term service, just like Jesus' 40-day endurance set the pace for his ministry.

In those morning watches, my friend never spoke, though she nodded recognition. When I replaced my pathetic voice with a John Rutter choral recording, she turned her head toward the heavenly strains: "O God Our Help . . ."

Tonight, after a Holy Thursday evening service—just three weeks after my friend's death—my fellow parishioners will take part in an all-night prayer vigil. For one-hour segments, a faithful few will sit in or pace around the sanctuary, in sight of the Communion elements representing Jesus' presence. The tradition holds. The sign-up roster is full. We're acting out the Gethsemane scene as disciples who intend to stay awake. We're watching with the fearful dying, waiting for the dawn.

Evelyn Bence is author of Room at My Table: Preparing Heart and Home for Christian Hospitality, forthcoming from Upper Room Books.

Here's Part 2 of a unique story. Today, Aidyn talks about tension and our common, difficult path of discipleship. (Be sure to read Part 1 if you haven't yet. It's necessary context.) EDIT: Don't miss this follow-up response from Aidyn's wife Joy. -Paul

I've never had to prove my gay-ness to anyone in the gay community, but I frequently have to reassert my Christian-ness in the Christian community.

I experience tremendous tension when I'm at church. Most pastors hear my story and describe me as un-cemented in my faith. Perhaps duplicitous, divisive, subversive, selfish, preoccupied with my sexuality, or "unrepentant." When the men I'm supposed to respect describe me that way, which is not my understanding at all, I lose some motivation to pursue relationship with them.

I experience painful tension when I want to be more active in my church but encounter invisible walls—and am prevented from doing anything more than setting up chairs. I wonder if these are because the leadership sees me as a dangerous sinner, inferior Christian, or just unfit for holy things. In the past, I've been asked to leave a youth ministry and was quietly dropped from a worship team.

I experience the tension of being emotionally and spiritually exhausted and just wanting to give up. Sometimes I think I'd settle for just being touched. Maybe holding hands or an arm around a shoulder that doesn't pull away. But even that would make most Christian men uncomfortable.

This is perhaps the greatest tension a gay person can experience at church—the wondering.

There's a tension I feel anytime I see a same-sex couple interact. There's the tension of wanting to be more connected to the gay community, but having to go to "their" places to do so, and having so little support from my church family to do this. I don't think my church really trusts me. And this creates perhaps the greatest tension a gay person can experience at church—the wondering.

People may smile, and be nice, and pastors may invite you into their home, but you wonder if the whole time they are convinced you're going to hell. Sometimes, there's even the wondering if God actually hates you. I'm lucky—my church knew me first as a Christian, then as a gay Christian. I'm pretty sure they think I'm going to heaven, but I still wonder if behind all their smiles they think I'm committing some sort of grievous travesty just by being honest about myself.

I'm not trying to be subversive; I'm just trying to figure out the best way to live. My sexuality is one of the factors affecting how I understand Jesus. Should I not be able to speak of such things in the company of Christians?

The funny thing about tension is that it doesn't go away. As long as I stay where I am, I will have tension. There's the tension of the internal struggle in me that goes on every day. This is common to all Christians. St. Paul talks about it in Romans 7. It's not comfortable.

What does discipleship look like?

I believe barriers create opportunities. I have an opportunity to persist, to press brazenly into Christ. I know I'm one of those people that many of his followers don't like, but I know I like Christ and want to be with Him. So I press in. I find that God is welcoming. He creates a safe space for all of who I am, for my faith process, for all my questions.

These tensions have created opportunity for honest, daring conversations with God. For all my grief, anger, frustration, and confusion, his response is to make sure there are always people in my life who show me grace and patience. He has helped me develop greater compassion for minority peoples.

So what does discipleship look like for me? I'm learning.

Discipleship for me means not giving up on my faith or my marriage, but holding on and choosing to look for reasons God is good, instead of reasons He is not. It's sacrificially caring for others and trusting that God will put people in my life to care for me. It means experiencing God's sufficiency one day's supply at a time. It means still recognizing Christ as the supreme thing.

Discipleship is leaning into Christ to be my sufficiency as I surrender what I want to Him and trust Him to be better.

Discipleship has meant developing a balanced view of my sexuality in the context of my whole self. My sexual orientation is a foundational aspect of who I am … but so are my faith and relationships. It has meant becoming aware of how my life impacts the lives around me—my wife, my son, the younger men I have mentored. Discipleship means living in the foundational tension between wanting what I want so very badly, but recognizing that God might want something different. Discipleship is learning to trust that what God wants is better.

I've come to discover that the central question of discipleship is, "Who gets what they want?" Discipleship is leaning into Christ to be my sufficiency as I surrender what I want to Him and trust Him to be better.

It's seeking Jesus and seeking how to most make Him real to the most people.

Sound familiar?

The walk between worlds

The limb out on which I stand is to believe that the gospel is for the gay community as much as for anyone, and that they will need a safe place to be received and discipled. I am not convinced that the church is that safe place … yet.

One more thing—discipleship means not abandoning my communities. I live in the tension of being completely welcomed by the gay community or being cautiously accepted at best (blacklisted at worst) by the Christian community. Christian community is less comfortable, yet we Christians are supposed to be the ones with the words of life.

The limb out on which I stand is to believe that the gospel is for the gay community as much as for anyone, and that they will need a safe place to be received and discipled. I am not convinced that the church is that safe place … yet.

For now, I've been given the unique gift to walk between two worlds that seem very much at odds with each other. I feel alienated and misunderstood in both, but they both are part of me. To say I am no longer Christian would be dishonoring to God. To deny that I am gay would be a lie.

This path—the one between worlds—is the one God has given me to walk.

A.J. Sevilla attends a church with his family in the Pacific Northwest. He works as a counselor.

Last week, I observed two examples of loving service at the dinner table. At one end, my sister-in-law smooshed peas in a plastic bowl for Beatrix, the newest member of the family. At the other, my grandmother sliced steak into pieces for my grandfather, who can no longer manage both knife and fork. Both women performed the same task, but for different reasons and with vastly dissimilar expectations.

My sister-in-law will experience joy as she watches my niece master new skills and learn new words by the chubby handful. But for my grandmother, the outcome isn't so promising, as her husband will continue to lose abilities with each passing year. She is one of 15 million people in the United States caring for someone with Alzheimer's or another form of dementia.

According to a recent report by the Alzheimer's Association, more than 5.2 million Americans are affected by this disease, and the number is expected to climb to 13.8 million by 2050.

Women bear the brunt of this illness in more ways than one. Not only are we more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, but we also shoulder t he burden of being primary caregivers. (Between 60 to 70 percent of people nursing a loved one with this condition are female.)

Sadly, despite the fact that this disease is now the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., Alzheimer's research receives a fraction of the funding apportioned to cancer, AIDS, and diabetes, Newsweek reported. This disparity led Seth Rogan (a self-proclaimed "lazy, self-involved, generally self-medicated man-child") both to create Hilarity for Charity, a foundation to help raise awareness about the disease, and to testify before a Senate subcommittee about the need for increased funding. "Americans whisper the word Alzheimer's," he said, but "it needs to be yelled and screamed to the point that it finally gets the attention…it needs."

Much has been said concerning the patients—of their right to live with dignity and value though they can no longer contribute to society in the ways they once did. However, what of those who are asked to surrender their lives to serve them?

When it became apparent that my grandfather was vanishing, collapsing in on himself, my sympathies were wholly his. In fact, though I am embarrassed to say it now, I was frustrated by my grandmother's initial impatience and frustration—what I believed was an unwillingness to "face facts" and "suck it up." This is what we sign on for, I'd tell myself. This is the "for worse" part we know will come. Why can't she understand that?

2 Corinthians 9:11 says that Christians are "enriched in every way to be generous in every way" (NKJV), but I lost sight of that in the confusion of shifting family dynamics. My grandfather struggled to pray at family gatherings, so my uncle assumed the task. Another person absorbed his duties around the house. Others became the handyman, bookkeeper, and financial planner.

Though I did whatever I could to help my grandfather, I rarely spared a thought for my grandmother. I didn't fully understand how this disease has eaten away at her life and sense of self. I came to see that she, too, was mourning—both for herself and the man she's loved for 58 years, the one she's losing to a pitiless disease that scours memories from the gray grooves of his brain.

I've watched her grapple with the fact that she is neither fully widow nor fully wife while also caring for my grandfather, and I can say without hesitation that her task is a sacred one. She has looked upon human frailty in all its nakedness and come away filled not with loathing, but love. And even though Alzheimer's has severed every cord that once moored her to "normal life," grace and mercy remain.

Rather than weaken, they become stronger each time he forgets how to dress himself or, in his agitation, speaks to her in anger. After he walks away from her in a crowded mall. As he styles his hair yet again with a paste-covered toothbrush. When he forgets her name. Her days are filled with a hundred such moments, piled on one side of a scale that he can never balance. But in spite of it all, she forgives and soothes his frayed nerves. She forgives each debt and is further sanctified for having done so.

In Judaism, there is a cleansing ceremony known as tahara that prepares the dead for burial. Done without an expectation of gain, it is considered to be a chesed shel emet—"a good deed of truth." Rabbi Mayer Waxman, Assistant National Director of Yachad, the National Jewish Council for Disabilities, even goes so far as to refer to the tahara as "the ultimate kindness."

And that is how I think of my grandmother's life as it stands today. Unlike my sister-in-law, who is preparing a little one for her first steps into life, my grandmother is caring for someone in his last days. Each meal she prepares is an act of continued communion, though it must seem painfully one-sided at times. Every re-buttoned shirt and unknotted shoelace is a battle fought to maintain his dignity.

While we won't find joy (at least not in the sense of the word as most understand it), there is a rightness that comes from being obedient and willing to serve. Every moment of her life is the embodiment of Christ's words to his disciples: "If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me" (Luke 9:23). In her, I have seen the true heart of God. The sight has broken me wide open, hollowed out the hard places, and made me more empathetic.

Perhaps that is the purpose of such a merciless condition. It allows the strongest and best souls to serve as a truth writ large. Because of my grandmother, many people have learned the full weight and measure of the statement, "Love suffers long and is kind. Love never fails" (1 Cor. 13:4, 8). She is the teacher of a divine truth—that no matter how much we suffer in this life, Christ suffered far greater still for our sake.

Jamie A. Hughes is the managing editor of In Touch magazine in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her B.A. in English and B.S.Ed. in Secondary Education from Valdosta State University and her M.A. in English from the University of North Florida. She currently blogs about everything from the beatitudes to baseball at tousledapostle.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @tousledapostle.

Comprehensive biographies are always a risk, both to write and to read. So much information, so many details, such a risk to lose the thread. When I came to The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams, I felt some trepidation as I riffled through the almost 800 pages. The Splendid Splinter lived a long, eventful life, having played in four different decades, managed into a fifth, and remained active and controversial up to, and even after, his death in 2002. Yes, this book—by Ben Bradlee, Jr.—is a long haul (the index officially ends at page 855—a Tolstoyan span). But it's also a feast.

The Kid is a tale of two halves (the first bigger than the second, as Yogi Berra might say). Bradlee's treatment of Williams' life up to the end of his playing career has the strong thematic element of baseball to hold the story together and keep it from descending into soap opera. Though we get more time on Ted's dysfunctional marriages and parenting as the book moves forward, the account of his Hall of Fame induction in 1966 and even of his rather quixotic managerial foray with the Senators/Rangers in the late 1960s and early '70s sustains the narrative drive.

Of baseball anecdotes there are many, more than enough to get one through the rockier psychodramatic sequences, which Williams appears to have had with as much frequency as multi-hit games. Bradlee attends at length to Williams' childhood and adolescence, with an absentee father and hyper-pious and also absentee Salvation Army mother leaving Ted and his brother lonely and bitter. (His brother became a petty criminal and died young of cancer.) Intriguing and indicative is the information that Ted's mom was of Mexican lineage on both sides, and further that Williams never spoke publically (and rarely privately) about the fact that he was half-Mexican.

From the start to the finish, Ted retreated into what he was good at, such as fishing and baseball. The trope of playing ball all day long at the park was for Ted a necessity—and he would practice hitting the whole time. Even as a skinny teen, he commanded the respect of the older kids (who would pitch to him) at the park, and the awe of the younger kids (who would shag balls all day long for him). This double theme—of trauma and loss, but also of entitlement and selfishness—is at the heart of Bradlee's book, and he uses it deftly to reveal many of the sharp paradoxes of Williams' life.

"The Kid," as the 20-year-old Williams was christened by the Red Sox equipment manager on the first day of spring training in 1938, would always live dramatically in the public eye, whether openly deriding fans and reporters (sometimes psychotically so), or creating baseball lore with the light bats and lithe arms he sported. Williams' flair for the mythic is the single most powerful theme I took from this account. His screwball antics, much beloved by the press in his one minor-league season in Minneapolis and in his rookie year of 1939, would fade as his ornery side emerged, but the hitting prowess never diminished. I had no idea that Williams' rookie tour was so shockingly good. The guard of American League power was changing that year, as the first putout Williams made as a fielder in his first major league game was off the bat of an already sick Lou Gehrig. And Williams immediately made his presence felt; in his first game at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, "Ted limbered up by lacing the first pitch over the right-field roof, 120 feet high, but just foul. No player had ever hit a ball over the roof at Briggs Stadium." In his next at bat, Ted "worked the count to three and two, then unloaded on a high fastball and drove it on top of the roof in right-center." His third time up, "Williams crushed a rising line drive. The ball screamed out to right field in a heartbeat, flew over the roof, fair by a dozen feet, and landed across adjoining Trumbull Avenue, bouncing against a taxi garage on one hop." This from a 6'4" young man who may have weighed 170 pounds with his flannels and spikes! All in the wrists, indeed!

I'm tempted to continue with the rookie lore (at the next stop after Detroit, the St. Louis Browns knocked him down twice—each time, he got up and hit the next pitch for a home run). He was the talk of the league. Then, at mid-season, a dark mood took him (shades of 1 Samuel?!), and he bristled toward fans and writers. And so the cycle of heroism and villainy began, which Bradlee plumbs at length (as did the Boston sportswriters) but never quite figures out. Along the way over the next few seasons, Williams peaked as a hitter, coupling what he always called his greatest hit, the game-winning home run at the 1941 All-Star Game (with Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, then 48 games into his fabled hitting streak, on first base), with the quest to hit .400, which his great eye, respected by all AL umpires, and his willingness to take a walk in any and all situations (a source of criticism throughout his career) made possible.

On the last day of the season, entering a double header with the Philadelphia A's, his average stood at .39955, enough to round up for the coveted prize—but not legitimately so, in Ted's mind. Connie Mack, the A's legendary owner and manager (and the last man to wear street-clothes in the dugout, a rule that disallowed him from ever entering the field of play to argue!), made things as hard as he could on Ted, starting rookie righthanders, neither of whom Ted had faced, in both games. In the first game, Williams went 4 for 5, and not with slap hits either, hitting three hot shots past the first baseman and a fourth ball "over the right-field wall and onto the street, about 440 feet away, for his thirty-seventh home run of the season." Though he stood at .4039 after the first game—.400 was thus assured no matter if he went 0-4 in the finale—Ted still provided more drama, singling in the second and then, "in the fourth, Williams absolutely crushed Caligiuri's 2-0 pitch, and years later he would call it the hardest hit ball of his career. It was a wicked, rising line drive that reached the top of the right-field wall in a heartbeat before slamming into a loudspeaker mounted on the wall, knocking a hole in it, and dropping back to the playing field for a ground-rule double." (194). For the day, he went 6-8, finishing the year at .4057—as Bradlee epitomizes the feat, "it was a day that would define his playing career and shape his legacy."

That statement cuts both ways, as Bradlee often reminds us: Ted's greatest achievements in baseball were almost all individual in nature, in situations (like flying a fighter plane or high-intensity sport fishing) where he could be in control. But what if the selfishness and the greatness go hand in hand?

That being said, Ted's service in WW II as a flight trainee and later instructor followed the 1942 season in which he won the triple crown but lost the MVP for the second straight year (in '41, DiMaggio won it), this time to Joe Gordon of the Yankees. Ted's .356, 36 HR, 137 RBI season dwarfed Gordon's .322, 18 HR, 103 RBI, but the Yankees were champions, and Ted had been vilified all summer in a draft status controversy (he was listed 3A as sole supporter of his mother). Ironically, Williams volunteered for the Navy at the end of the season, and willingly surrendered the 1943-1945 seasons, as well as all of 1952 and most of 1953, when he was flying combat missions in Korea (note: he resented the call-up from the Marine Reserves to Korea and made his opinion known for the rest of his life, often embarrassingly). Again, the contradictions abound—the man who didn't necessarily want to serve in either war was a faithful and successful pilot, who didn't go in for the coddling of ballplayers at military bases that was part-and-parcel of the 1940s and '50s military establishment, but sought out the Marine Corps and combat (he was in San Francisco on his way to a Pacific Theater assignment on V-J Day). Intriguingly, during his WWII training at the Chapel Hill, NC Flight School, he was joined by a college baseball player, George H.W. Bush, who had attended games at Fenway when he was a student at Phillips Andover Academy. Ted, a virulent Republican, would later stump for Bush, Sr. in New Hampshire (Ted roomed in Korea with fellow fighter pilot and future astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn).

Williams' return from World War II service began the ascent of the Red Sox as true contenders, which lasted from 1946 through 1949. During these years, the team lost the '46 World Series in 7 games (Williams' only World Series, as it turned out), lost the pennant to the Indians in '48 in a playoff game, and then folded to the Yankees on the final day of the '49 season. These failures, in the minds of the Boston sports press and of many fans, would be as defining for Ted's legacy as the tremendous impact of his first four seasons. Ted's return in 1946 was triumphant in many ways, as he hit well over .400 through May, the Sox won fifteen in a row at one point, and "on June 9, he capped the surge with a titanic blow off the Tigers' Fred Hutchinson that landed thirty-seven rows up in the right-field bleachers at Fenway." Bradlee observes in a footnote that the Red Sox management later measured the blow at 502 feet and painted that bleacher seat red. ("Latter-day Sox sluggers such as Mo Vaughan and David Ortiz," Bradlee adds, "have called the distant red seat impossible to reach, even in the steroids era, and dismissed it as a management propaganda designed to enhance the Williams mythos." Classy!) It was in the 1946 All-Star Game that Ted stepped up on Rip Sewell's eephus pitch and uppercut it into the AL bullpen, the only home run that had ever been hit off the blooper. By the middle of 1946, Ted's ascent as a hitter seemed to have no ceiling, and now he was pulling the Red Sox upward with him. Finally, it seemed, he could match his rival Joltin' Joe by wedding individual splendor with championship credentials.

But 1946 also showed some of the cracks in Williams' armor, cracks that would widen and haunt him, difficulties on the field (so rare for him, at least at the plate) directly correlative to his vast abilities. Five days after the All-Star Game, Ted had arguably the greatest performance of his career, abusing Cleveland pitching in the first game of a double-header with a 3 HR, 8 RBI performance. In the second game, Indians' player-manager Lou Boudreau invented the "Ted Williams shift," putting 3 infielders on the right-side, with the second-baseman on the right-field grass. In Boudreau's model, he stayed in place at shortstop, but the third-baseman played behind second base, and the left-fielder came in to the edge of the outfield grass. It was baseball hyperbole, a direct challenge to Williams' pride as a pull-hitter, the concession of automatic singles if The Kid wanted to stroke the ball to left. And interestingly, the psychological element proved confounding; as Bradlee points out, "Ted could never shake a fundamental ambivalence over how to cope with the shift … . [H]e was loath to meddle with the mechanics of his swing, to artificially alter its rhythm and flow. He was, after all, the Natural, and style was important to Williams." By the time they reached the World Series, the Cardinals had added the strategy of junk-balling Williams consistently: "The Cardinals told their pitchers what Williams would be expecting from them in a variety of situations and then ordered them to keep him off balance by throwing something different." Again, the Kid's strengths were used against him—he had only five singles (and five strikeouts) in his only Fall Classic ever, and the Cardinals won on Enos Slaughter's mad dash from first to home in the eighth inning of Game Seven. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that Ted had hit two blasts of more than 400' to the capacious center-field at St. Louis, both of which were tracked down by Cardinal outfielders.

More ironies and contradictions epitomized 1947, as Bradlee fluidly reveals the ugly with the good. It appears that the Yankees and Red Sox contemplated trading Joe DiMaggio straight up for Williams prior to the season, in order to finally match their power strokes to their home parks: DiMag would eat up the Green Monster (and not lose home runs to Yankee Stadium's 430' left-center, and Ted would shower the 295' right-field porch at the Stadium. As it turned out, each stayed home, and Ted won the Triple Crown again, and lost the MVP again, this time to DiMaggio by a single point! Once he retired, Joe D. remained bristly about his rivalry with Williams, and though he publically called Ted a great hitter (sometimes he used the term "greatest"), he privately mocked Ted: "He throws like a broad and runs like a ruptured duck," or the more biting but widely shared question, "Tell him to hold up his hands. Where are the rings?" But Ted, who would bluster and abuse sportswriters and fans on a regular basis, always made a point of taking the high road regarding Joe (perhaps because of Ted's close friendship with younger brother and Red Sox center-fielder Dom DiMaggio). For the rest of their lives, especially as both dealt with the sports memorabilia industry, observers commented equally on Ted's enduring generosity and Joe's enduring stinginess.

This surprising even-handedness also characterized Ted's response to Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby arriving as the first black players in the Major Leagues in the 20th century. Ted and Jackie had both played in the 1936 Los Angeles County baseball tournament (though their teams didn't meet), and Ted wrote a congratulatory letter to Jackie when he made the big club (a gesture that Rachel Robinson noted years later was especially gratifying to Jackie). Doby noted that Williams specifically came over to welcome him when the Red Sox played the Indians: "He just gave me the feeling of being welcome, which was important to me, especially when you had a lot of other people not saying anything." Such sentiments were echoed in Williams' 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech, perhaps the highlight of the second half of his life (and the second half of Bradlee's book), when Ted shocked many listeners (and the stodgy baseball world) by lauding Willie Mays, who had just surpassed his own home run total, and then proclaiming, "'I hope that someday, the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the Negro players that are not here only because they were never given a chance." Largely based on Williams' remarks, the Baseball Hall of Fame decided a few years later to open up at the Veteran's Committee level a process for giving Negro League greats of the past the privilege, not of a special exhibition, but of full induction. This from the oddly generous selfish man, Ted Williams.

Bradlee casts the second half of Williams' playing career, after his return from the Korean War, as a series of unexpected comebacks or repeated "rising from the ashes" of lay-off and injury and plain old age. That the Red Sox were not competitive during the whole decade seems apt, as the story of the team became the story of Ted alone. This was not Ted's fault, but he didn't seem to mind.

Perhaps the best anecdote of the whole book is the return of Williams from Korea toward the end of the 1953 season. Ted hadn't hit for over a year, and former batboy and now journalist George Sullivan was in the office of Sox owner Tom Yawkey when Ted showed up. They convinced him to head right to the batting cage a few hours before game time, and he stepped in among ushers and concession kids. Sullivan recalled the scene: "Ted hit a couple of line drives. Then he hit one out, next to the bull pen. This is the first time he's hit since coming back from Korea. Schreiber threw another. Ted hit it out. Then a third that went way out. Schreiber was following the flight of the ball. 'Never mind watching,' Ted screams at him. 'Throw the ______ ball!' He must have hit about twelve out. Then I noticed that blood was coming through his clenched fingers. His skin was tender. Finally, after, like, the thirteenth one, he just went back to the dugout. It was the greatest display I ever saw." Such moments of will and concentration, of muscle memory and prodigious ability, seem to have been Ted's gift to the world, amidst slow decline and the constant upheaval in his personal relationships.

The final line for Williams' truncated 1953 season was one of his finest, albeit in miniature: "He hit .407 in 91 at bats, with 13 home runs and 34 RBIs. His on-base percentage was .509, his slugging performance an astonishing .901. Yogi Berra of the Yankees remarked in September that Ted 'don't look like he used to. He looks better.'" Leave it to Yogi to capture the essence—and Yogi's words seemed to have kept echoing forth. In 1954, a rather out-of-shape Williams broke his collarbone in spring training, and then sat out more of the season until his divorce (and the financial implications) got settled. He returned to the lineup for a doubleheader in Detroit (yet again!), and "he put on a show. After getting three singles in four times up in the first game, Ted surprised his teammates by opting to play the second game, too, and he proceeded to go 5-5, with two home runs and a double. That was 8-9 on the day—'the greatest batting show I have ever seen,' said Curt Gowdy." In a July exhibition at the Polo Grounds against the Giants, Williams led a group against Willie Mays's group in a home run contest. No one but Willie hit more than two (Say Hey hit three out). Then, Ted stepped up, "and the air crackled with anticipation … . He smashed the next pitch into the lower deck in right field. Ted pulled Schreiber's next offering down the line just inside the foul pole for home run number two. Then came a shot into the upper deck to tie Mays at three. The crowd rose to its feet, and players in both dugouts moved to the top step as the drama built. In came the pitch, and out flew the ball, deeper into the upper deck this time. That was four swings, four home runs. Could he make it five for five? Williams let one pitch go—too low. Then he turned on the next one and crushed a rising line drive high in the sky. The ball struck off the base of the light towers and bounced down into the stands. The fans and players from both sides gave Ted a five-minute standing ovation. 'Unbelievable!' said Red Sox rookie pitcher Russ Kemmerer. 'I've never seen anything like it and most likely never will.'" Such shocking achievements, but Bradlee points out over and over that none of these moments were for the glory of Red Sox—in the miraculous 8-9 doubleheader in Detroit, Boston lost both games by a run, and of course the exhibition against the Giants was not part of the actual season. That shadow of selfishness always loomed in the corner.

Apparently batting titles in the '50s were based on a certain number of at-bats to qualify (not plate appearances, as has been the case for decades now); hence, bases on balls, a Williams specialty, actually cost him the batting title in 1954 and 1955. When he was healthy, he hit better than anyone in the league, but he didn't have enough at-bats to qualify. In 1957, though, he qualified, not only for the batting title, but also for another rung on the ladder of his baseball immortality, as he again flirted with .400—and this in a season during which he turned 39! (Ask Derek Jeter how tough that must have been.) In the stretch run of the season, Williams was battling a young and peaking Mickey Mantle for the AL home run crown. After a two-week bout with pneumonia (lung ailments dogged him throughout his career), Williams returned to the lineup, and outdid all his former exploits—he didn't make an out for a week. First pinch-hitting and then back in the field, "He had hit four home runs in four official times at bat since returning on the seventeenth, and he had reached base safely his first sixteen times up"—and one of those shots was in the ninth inning off of Whitey Ford! By season's end, he was only five hits away from .400; his .388 average "marked what Williams himself considered the grandest achievement of his career, surpassing his .406 in 1941." Yet, he lost the MVP once again, to Mantle of course (though this was one year the Yankees hadn't won it all). To his credit, Mantle was shocked that Ted didn't get it, a gracious response for a man who hit .365 on the season, and lost the batting title by 23 points!

There is more gold in the final few seasons of Williams' career, and Bradlee gives it ample coverage, especially to the home run in his final at bat at Fenway (and subsequent refusal, as always, to tip his cap to the Boston faithful)—but here Bradlee wisely defers to John Updike, whose story of the event in The New Yorker, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," is rightly acknowledged as perhaps "the best sports essay ever." Bradlee does his best work more than halfway through the book, right at the end of the playing career, in a chapter simply entitled "Kindness." Though he spares no details of Williams' tantrums, abuses, philandering, and at times stunning vulgarity, he always arcs back across the contradictions, to show a more hopeful side to the man. In this particular chapter, Bradlee discusses something Williams rarely talked about publically: his work for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston-based charity established to help the victims of juvenile cancer. As it turns out, "His innate kindness to sick kids and to others who were having a hard time in life was Ted's most redeeming quality—the quiet counter-balance to all those moments when he boiled with rage and became unhinged." I felt in reading this chapter a return of all the affection I have felt in the past for the self-destructive but affable and kind Babe Ruth, who would often travel hours out of his way when the Yankees were on the road in order to visit a sick or disabled child. Troubled kids themselves, neglected and never quite readjusted, both Ruth and Williams found themselves at home with these needy kids, who they could unequivocally please (unlike wives and managers and the press). In May of 1947, Ted visited a young double-amputee, Glenny Brann: "Williams promised the boy a homer in his next game, then hit not one but two—the first balls he hit over the left-field wall at Fenway." But the game exploits weren't the whole story: "Mike Andrews, the former Red Sox second baseman who went on to become the Jimmy Fund chairman, told of a time when a little boy wouldn't let go of Williams's hand, so Ted had someone pull up a cot, and he slept next to the boy." In fact, Bradlee reveals that, "Until Ted died, he would stay in touch with, and be a mentor to, some of the children who had survived." Certainly, Ted's relationship with his own kids was spotty, overbearing, in the end indulgent and, in the case of his son John Henry, myopic; long-term intimacy was always a struggle for him, as Bradlee's long finale reveals, but this spot of light—or rather long, steady ray of light—he exhibited with the Jimmy Fund is one of the most meaningful treasures found in this biography.

What to say about the finale? Well, I've said more than enough already, and the plot thickens in ways that I found hard to slot through, but I'll offer one last moment of comeback for the Splendid Splinter, this time in the early '70s, when he was manager of the Senators become Texas Rangers. Ted had been named AL manager of the year in 1969, but he had subsequently endured player subversion (led by fugitive from Detroit and later fugitive from the law Denny McLain), not to mention his own obvious lack of interest and engagement (he often mocked and abused his own pitchers as "stupid," and gave no advice except on hitting). On August 25, 1972, the Rangers were in Fenway, a few days before Ted turned 54. All proceeds of the game were tabbed for the Jimmy Fund, and several ex-Red Sox stars were going to hit before the game, many of them Ted's old teammates. Williams was not slated to hit at all, but after a visit from his old employer Tom Yawkey, Ted appeared in the Ranger dugout, rifled through most of the bats, and found one he liked, a Louisville Slugger model named for him. After letting the crowd chant, then cheer, he stepped up, rebuking the soft-serve toss of the batting practice coach: "Then Ted began hitting line drives all over right field and center field. They were all ropes. One ball cleared the right-field fence by Pesky's Pole. Another hit the bull-pen wall on a short hop. After ten or twelve swings, Ted flipped his bat in the air dramatically and walked back to his dugout in triumph, as the entire park cheered deliriously. Players from both benches also stood to applaud. Dick Billings, one of the Rangers players, said 'It was the most electrifying experience in my life … . We sat on the bench with our mouths open. He never hit in spring training or during batting practice … . What I saw that day, he still could have hit .300 if he didn't have to run.'" In a few months, he would retire from managing and leave the everyday world of baseball behind. But for a few minutes he pushed back the athlete's nemesis, time, and brought that splendid stroke to life, just because he could. (Bradlee includes a stirring photograph of a portly Williams in a homely Rangers uniform, following through on a beautiful swing.)

Certainly, the last 30 years of his life were not filled with the grace and majesty of that swing, because, though Williams well declared that hitting a round ball with a round bat is the toughest act in sports, it's nevertheless easy compared to living life in the web of relationships and obligations that humans share. From childhood through old age, Williams struggled with the human element, and the legacy of wounds and scars in that sphere is on display throughout Bradlee's narrative. There is a dark cloud over this volume, a cloud of pain suffered and especially of pain caused. But there is also kindness done, for family and friends, for dying children and commonplace people, a kind of penance from one who seemed to know intuitively the adage "Sin boldly." And ultimately, there is the loneliest of stages, the man with a wooden bat standing alone in the box, doing with dogged and recursive excellence something we've all longed to do, but none has ever done as well—see it, turn on it, clear the hips, power through with the arms, and watch it fly!

I want to mention, by contrast, Tim Wendel's slender volume Down to the Last Pitch: How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves Gave Us the Best World Series of All Time. Wendel is an accomplished baseball journalist and a writer who finds the intriguing and quirky angles that the study of baseball history invites. I enjoyed very much reading and reviewing his book High Heat a few years ago, a history of fastball pitchers and the cultural obsession with fireballers (and an illuminating account of the fastest of them all, the ill-starred Steve Dalkowski!). So I received this new book with some eagerness, and within a few pages I was transported in memory back to the worst place I've ever lived in, a "strip motel" set in the rougher edges of Annapolis, Maryland (yes, this splendid colonial city has a couple of tough streets), an apartment where I had only a chair, a desk, and books, and so slept on the floor, which was problematic for both me and the books when I awakened one morning with a splash, as two inches of water washed through from the water-pipe breakage. But my roommate from Texas must have secured an old TV, because I watched at least a portion of each of the seven games, and the stubbly visage of Mark Lemke was emblazoned forever in my mind. I remembered that both teams had gone worst-to-first that year (a fact dimmed by the Braves subsequent near two decades of winning), and I remember the exciting plays at the plate, and of course Kirby Puckett's walk-off homer in Game 6. But Wendel's specialty is contextualizing and nuancing the details of the games, and in pursuing this end, he both heightens and, at times, diverts the intensity of those memories.

Now and then the reader gets a bit lost in the backstory and sidestory, as the web of details and allusions is woven. I'll admit I'm rather drawn to Wendel's desultory and episodic style, and I find most of the forays into biography and lore to be fascinating. But the "unities" are not sustained, as E.M. Forster or Edith Wharton might require. At times, the actual events of the games are tucked in at the end of the chapters, or broken into odd pacings. For a World Series that had "five games determined in the home team's last at-bat … [,] a series that would see four games decided on the last pitch," the style is a tad anti-dramatic.

Nevertheless this is a thoroughly enjoyable book, especially in the later chapters as the Series moves towards its climax. And there are great tidbits all along (e.g., on the Twins blue-collar manager Tom Kelly: "He played in the minors for thirteen seasons, and in 1975 he reached the Twins for forty-nine games, where he batted .181 and hit his only major league home run off the Tigers' Vern Ruhle"). The Metrodome itself is an intriguing, ugly, cacophonous character in the story, with its "ear-splitting noise and that infernal, mesmerizing roof." The events of Games 1 and 2 get a little lost, though the unlikely home run heroics of the Twins light-hitting left side of the infield, with Greg Gagne homering in the first game and Scott Leius in the second, are described with nice detail. (Wendel interviewed the players extensively to help reconstruct the situations.) I especially liked the "ironic twist that baseball often offers," as Leius, who grew up in Yonkers as an early '80s Yankee lover, became part of the Twins third base platoon with his boyhood hero, Mike Pagliarulo.

The account of Game 3 is intriguing but diffuse, as Wendel intersperses a number of disparate elements at work in society in the early '90's, including high-profile born-again conversions, such as Gary Gaetti's, that seemed to rough up the chemistry left over from the 1987 World Champion Twins, as well as the Native American protests against the "tomahawk chop" rally gesture of the Braves fans, led by owner and TV magnate Ted Turner and his wife and erstwhile activist Jane Fonda. The chapters drag a bit, sort of like the Braves blowout of the Twins in Game 5 (the only tension-less game of the Series), but Wendel redeems and revivifies the narrative with his work on the other three games, all decided on the final play.

The account of Game 4, which ends with Twins catcher Brian Harper and Braves underdog second baseman Mark Lemke sprawled at the plate in one of the closest deciding players ever witnessed, is a great mix of human interest and baseball tension (dulled just a bit by a long account of the Pete Rose scandal, still resonating in 1991, and exhausting even then). It was Harper's third attempt to save a run the hard way that game, and Wendel, aware of the rule changes in place for this season to prevent home plate violence, notes nevertheless that "A close play at the plate ranks among baseball's classic moments," and that "Harper had long ago made his pact with the devil. He didn't care about the price of playing behind the plate as long as he could win a place on a major league roster." Invariably, the injuries to catchers Ray Fosse and Buster Posey come up for discussion, but Wendel's tone is elegiac toward the now-diminished status of the home plate collision. As it turns out, in the bottom of the ninth of Game 4, Lemke, a defense utility guy who had his one superior hitting streak during late September and October of '91, chose not to plow through Harper on the tag-up throw from right fielder Shane Mack (one of the great clutch throws ever). Rather, Lemke avoided Harper, veering right, feeling contact as the catcher swung his arm around to try for the tag, and reaching out his left hand to touch home plate on the way by. " 'He's out,' Jack Buck told his television audience, 'safe, safe, safe'"—and so Wendell captures the wonderful confusion, the settling dust of this "game of inches."

So also, it is the significance of those "inches" that Wendel concentrates upon in his finest chapter, the account of Game 6 and, more broadly, of the tragicomedy of Kirby Puckett. Anyone who saw that game remembers Kirby's fist-pumping celebration rounding second in the 11th inning, having put a Charlie Liebrandt change-up just over the plexiglass wall in center field where he'd earlier leapt—all 5'8" of him—to rob Ron Gant of a home run (and the likely deciding run of the Series) by inches. The fireplug centerfielder, the loose and laughing heart of the Twins team, was exemplary of those sports heroes who possess a "common touch that transcends the every day and can reach out to so many"—and then, there are the flaws, that humanize and humiliate our heroes, which Ted Williams wore on his sleeve, and which Kirby hid away until the end of his life.

Puckett's end was doubly tragic—first the untimely baseball end, the brutal beaning and broken jaw at the end of the 1995 season, then the quixotic comeback in the spring of '96 ended, forever, by the sudden onset of glaucoma. He retired that year at 36, the same age as DiMaggio when he hung up the spikes, and both are in the Hall of Fame. But Puckett's second tragedy—the drift from his teammates and from the Twin Cities after retirement, the revelations and charges of domestic and sexual abuse, the dark secrets behind the beaming smile and all-or-nothing swing—provides the dark cloud over Wendel's whole story and makes it stronger, a morality tale of the fleeting nature of fame and moments of glory, but also a lesson in how bright things, bright moments, endure even such disappointments. Hence, Wendel's account of Puckett's funeral—lonely and estranged, he died of a stroke in 2006, at age 45—deepens our sense of this magical Series: "The White Sox's Ozzie Guillen watched the ceremony on television and wept. 'I think Dave Winfield said the right thing,' Guillen said. '[Puckett] was the only player in the history of baseball everybody loved.'" And like the Splendid Splinter who died a few years before him, Puck will be remembered as great, and as flawed, inseparably pieces of human puzzles.

As with Carlton Fisk leaping and waving in another Game 6 in extra innings, watching his shot clear the Green Monster in the midnight hours, the image of Puckett's fist-pump belies the fact that there was still a Game 7 to play. It's hard to call an extra-innings Game 7 a denouement, but the reality was a pitcher's duel, with the bristly veteran Jack Morris facing the young, emerging John Smoltz, who as a teen in Lansing, Michigan had idolized Morris, then the Tigers ace. Master and apprentice. The splitter and the cutter. Steel will (Morris refused to come out of the game, and, over 120 pitches in, and in his late thirties, he so persuaded manager Tom Kelly that TK was prepared to send him in for the eleventh) against positive visualization (Smoltz had seen a sports psychologist after a horrible crisis of confidence early in the season). And as it turned out, Morris had two other things going for him, in the crucial eighth inning: the Metrodome roof and a cast of "mimes" in the field. Lonnie Smith's fatal pause near second base on Terry Pendleton's drive to the gap is presented craftily by Wendel as a mix of likelihood and lore. Smith claimed he lost the ball, which was all too easy against the white roof, low lights, and sea of white "homer hankies"—and yet, the fake double-play gestures of Greg Gagne and Chuck Knoblauch, a spontaneous outgrowth of practice field shenanigans, along with Dan Gladden's decoy gesture of catching a ball well out of his reach, may have, possibly, maybe subconsciously, cost Smith a step. All to say, he only got to third, albeit with no outs, and then Morris shut the Braves down, no runs scored, a goat was crowned, and the door was opened for one more hero. He couldn't run because of tendinitis in the knee. And he was an Ivy Leaguer, the challenger to all Lou Gehrig's baseball records at Columbia University. And he was so nervous that he could barely make it to the plate to hit. And so Gene Larkin's drive over a pulled-in outfield in the bottom of the tenth in the Metrodome. I'm out of breath and exhilarated just writing this, and Wendel offers Jack Morris' summation as an apt homage: " 'Somebody had to go home a loser,' Morris said years later, 'but nobody was a loser in my mind.'" That, from a bulldog competitor who never gave an inch, speaks volumes about the psychological impact of such stirring competition in this, the Series for the ages, the "Series of inches." Bravo Tim Wendel, for an occasionally distracted but finally riveting piece of work.

Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Copyright © 2014 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

In 1973, Morton Smith announced a spectacular discovery that promised to reshape the understanding of the New Testament. The authenticity of that alleged find is still hotly debated, and I belong to the school that believes it to be fiction. Actually, I would go further. I think his find was from the first inspired by fiction, by novels. One of those fictional sources is now well known, but I believe that I am the first to draw attention to another.

Smith’s book was Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, and it was taken sufficiently seriously to be published by Harvard University Press. Smith claimed that in 1958, he had made an astonishing find at the monastery of Mar Saba, in Palestine. In a previously unknown letter from c. 200, Clement of Alexandria wrote to one “Theodore,” discussing the various versions of Mark’s gospel circulating in his era. There was the canonical gospel that we know, but he also knows another secret version. He quotes a portion of this text, which concerns a young man whom Jesus instructed by night. But in yet a third edition, condemned by Clement, the Carpocratian sect had elaborated that passage by adding overt sexual content—”naked man with naked man.” While Clement’s church condemned that deviant book, it approved the “mainstream” clandestine text. Moreover, the alternative passage quoted by Clement was part of a whole expanded gospel, most of which is now lost. This has come to be known as the Secret Gospel of Mark.

Apart from its implications for the canonical text of the New Testament, Clement’s letter suggested that much early Christian doctrine was transmitted through esoteric or mystical teaching, much of which was subsequently lost. This was explosive stuff. But did Secret Mark ever exist? Put another way, is Clement’s supposed letter authentic? If not, when was it composed? Might it be an early forgery—perhaps 3rd-century—or did Smith forge it himself? Although some scholars had doubts from the beginning, fears of libel suits made them nervous about speaking openly before Smith’s death in 1991. Also, many highly qualified and reputable scholars accepted the discovery at face value, claiming that it shed invaluable light on the process by which the gospels were composed. Secret Mark, for instance, still appears as genuine in the current fourth edition of Complete Gospels, a collection of canonical and alternative ancient texts edited by Robert J. Miller. This volume was a central project of the ultracritical Jesus Seminar.

Recently, Tony Burke has edited an impressive collection of scholarly essays under the title Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate (Cascade Books, 2013). Whichever side you take in the controversy, this book is eminently worth reading as a model of how first-class critical scholars go about forming their conclusions and debating disputed points. In these pages, admirably, their fundamental disagreements remain firmly within the boundaries of civility and mutual respect.

Arguments against the reality of Secret Mark abound, and the case against Smith himself gains strength the deeper we dig into his background. By any standard, this was an epochal discovery, and it strains belief that it should have been made by a scholar who had previously been writing on precisely the passages elaborated in Clement’s letter. From the late 1940s, too, a decade before his alleged discovery, he had been working on Clement, and planning a book on Mark’s Gospel.

Moreover, Smith himself had a deep personal interest in occult and antinomian traditions, and for many years he corresponded with Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish messianism and mysticism. (The correspondence has been edited by Guy G. Stroumsa, as Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem: Correspondence 1945-1982 (Brill 2008).) Smith’s 1978 book, Jesus the Magician, depicted Jesus himself as a wandering sorcerer. From this perspective, the alleged letter of Clement, with its exposé of the ancient church as a base for secret mystical instruction, was precisely what he might have hoped to find to confirm everything he ever believed. It’s far too good to be true.

In 2001, I pointed out an odd fact about the location of Smith’s alleged find, in the monastery of Mar Saba. In 1940, Canadian evangelical James H. Hunter published a novel called The Mystery of Mar Saba, which depicted a plot to undermine the morale of the Christian West. To accomplish this, Nazi agents planted a forged gospel text called the Shred of Nicodemus, with the goal of disproving the Resurrection, and they did this at Mar Saba itself. This proto-Indiana Jones thriller was popular, running into multiple editions. As I have noted elsewhere, the fact that Smith’s alleged find occurred at Mar Saba is either strong proof of the text’s authenticity, in that nobody would have dared invent such a thing, or else it is a tribute to the unabashed chutzpah of a forger. If you are going to fake a fossil discovery, you would have to be very brave to do it at Piltdown.

If in fact Secret Mark was a hoax, then Smith was almost advertising the fact, presumably to show his contempt for the gullibility of academe. Not only would they miss the obvious clues hinting at forgery—the Mar Saba connection—but they would even accept the outrageous idea of placing Jesus in a hom*oerotic context. Even in 1973, this notion was far more shocking than any suggestion that the church had once tolerated multiple editions of the gospel text.

But Mystery of Mar Saba was not the only novel to portray such a deliberate deception, and another book may actually be more relevant to the present discussion. I stress that I have no direct evidence that Smith read this other work, any more than he did Mystery, but the parallels to the Secret Mark affair are striking.

In 1956, English author Angus Wilson’s novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was published. Wilson was then at the height of his powers, and the book was widely reviewed and read, in North America as well as Britain. (WARNING: Many spoilers follow.) This brilliant and very funny satire tells the story of an academic fraud at an archaeological site.

Understanding the book’s origins requires a little background in contemporary British archaeology, at a time when fraud and “planted” materials were much in the news. The legendary case was of course that of Piltdown Man, involving ancient human fossils supposedly discovered in Sussex in 1912. These materials were finally, and sensationally, exposed as fraudulent in 1953. (Remarkably, responsibility for the fraud has still not been definitely established.) Also famous—if not yet as scandalous—was the widely reported discovery of a Neolithic statue believed to represent the Great Goddess, found in 1939 at the flintmining site of Grimes Graves. Although not definitively exposed as a fake until the 1980s, this “find” had been from the outset a source of gossip in the archaeological community. Also in 1939—and this time, the find was entirely genuine—archaeologists investigated the magnificent Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk.

Wilson’s novel synthesizes these three episodes. He describes the 1912 excavation at the Anglo-Saxon site of Melpham, which features the grave of a celebrated 7th- century missionary bishop named Eorpwald. (The date recalls Piltdown, the setting suggests Sutton Hoo.) To the astonishment of the chief excavator, Lionel Stokesay, Eorpwald’s grave includes a phallic fertility idol. The only explanation the archaeologists can suggest is that, in these dark early centuries, even the leaders of the venerated Anglo-Saxon church practiced a clandestine syncretism, a dual faith. The heroic Eorpwald was an apostate.

By the time of the novel’s main action in the 1950s, that shocking theory has achieved a grudging consensus status among British historians. It is particularly welcomed by “Rose Lorimer,” a thinly disguised version of the eccentric real-life scholar Margaret Murray, the inventor of many modern theories about the history of witchcraft and neo-paganism. (Eccentric is the most charitable word I can offer.) Wilson offers a beautifully realized portrait of the English academic world of his day, with many real scholars portrayed under thin disguise: it is a roman à clef. He knew many of these figures first hand through his employment at the British Museum. He depicted with comic precision exactly how academics walk and talk, think and argue.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a novel about the dilemmas of professional ethics and personal loyalties. The central character, Gerald Middleton, suspects from the beginning that the idol was in fact planted, and by his old friend Gilbert, the rebellious son of Lionel Stokesay. For multiple reasons, though, not for forty years can he bring himself to investigate the case properly and expose the outrageous fraud. Ultimately, he succeeds in proving what Gilbert Stokesay had done, and his motives for doing so. Gilbert undertook the hoax in order to discredit and disgrace his father. More generally, he was targeting everything his father stood for, the whole generation that would shortly lead the country into war. Gilbert sought to disgrace and embarrass the historical establishment, which he saw as boring, pretentious—and grossly stupid enough to believe an obvious hoax. However much these alleged scholars prided themselves on their critical acumen, a daring novice could deceive them easily.

Also under threat were the sexual orthodoxies of his day. Wilson himself was openly gay, courageously so given the repressive atmosphere of his time, and much of the book depicts English gay subculture. This theme also shapes the Eorpwald hoax. By faking the discovery, Gilbert was subverting the heroic image that the modern-day church has of its founders, to make them confront the possibility that those early predecessors themselves were open to unrestrained “pagan” sexuality. To a large degree, he succeeded, as scholars so uniformly accepted these bizarre claims and integrated them into their understanding of medieval faith.

When Morton Smith was working in 1958, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes had recently been making news as a best-seller. The book had a particular appeal for readers interested in scholarship or in accurate accounts of the scholarly world. With some hesitation, I also raise the controversial subject of Smith’s sexuality. He is commonly described as gay, although some commentators report him having relationships with women as well. If in fact he was gay or bisexual, he would have had a particular interest in a novel that was noted as a ground-breaking gay classic.

Leaving aside any biographical material, though, I turn again to the text of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and point out the obvious parallels to Secret Mark. Wilson’s book describes a forgery planted in an early Christian site. In fact, it was in the possession of a famous bishop, who is identified as a disciple of the great English Archbishop Theodore. We recall that Clement’s supposed letter was addressed to an otherwise unknown and inexplicable “Theodore.”

The intrusive item promises to rewrite church history, by proving that Christian orthodoxy co-existed with controversial clandestine practices. There was the faith on the surface, and the secret undercurrent—quite literally underground. Eorpwald himself was accused of being a sorcerer as well as a Christian, much like Jesus the Magician, as imagined by Morton Smith. As the demented Rose Lorimer proclaims, “the division between these two worlds—the pagan and the Christian—is really rather artificial. Was there so much that finally separated them?” A “dual religion stares at us from Eorpwald’s tomb.” Moreover, that shadow religion had a strong sexual content.

Now, in order to make his point, Morton Smith could do nothing so crude as plant a bogus idol in an archaeological dig. That was not his area of expertise. He was a manuscript scholar. In order to grant the truth of Morton Smith’s alleged discovery of the Mar Saba letter, at the particular time and place, we must accept an outrageous series of coincidences, to which we must now add explicit echoes of two separate contemporary novels. At some point, surely, Occam’s Razor requires us to seek the simplest explanation for the whole Mar Saba affair.

There’s no mystery here. The Mystery of Mar Saba + Anglo-Saxon Attitudes = Secret Mark.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. His book The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade is just out from HarperOne.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The good news in Young Catholic America is that, for all the talk about the Church's decline, today's American Catholics between ages 18 and 25 are not so different from their predecessors of the 1970s and 80s. That's also the bad news. As in decades past, only a minority of Catholic young adults attend Mass most or all Sundays (34 percent in the 1970s, 20 percent in the 2000s), pray daily (36 percent in the 80s, 45 percent now), and rate their religious affiliation as strong (26 percent in both the 1970s and the 2000s).

Disagreement with the Church's most controversial moral teachings is also common: 33 percent of young Catholics consider abortion OK for any reason, 43 percent consider hom*osexual sex not wrong at all (one of few numbers that has changed markedly), and more than 90 percent reject the Church's ban on premarital sex. As the authors conclude, "whatever religious decline that may have happened must have taken place before the 1970s," most likely during the upheaval following the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 release of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical reiterating the Church's longstanding ban on artificial birth control.

Since that time, Catholics' religious practices and moral views have hardly differed from those of their non-Catholic peers. In other life outcomes, from mental health and family relationships to educational attainment and volunteer activities, the same story broadly applies. Today, even young adults who were raised unequivocally Catholic—as teens they had Catholic parents, attended Mass regularly, and self-identified as Catholic—say that you don't need the Church to be religious (74 percent) and that it's OK to pick and choose your beliefs (64 percent). They do not accept the Church as an authoritative teacher of Christian doctrine and do not consider the Church necessary to their spiritual lives at all: by baptism they are Catholic but by belief, they are effectively Protestant.

As the above figures suggest, Young Catholic America contains a raft of data. The numbers can be overwhelming, but they're a crucial counterweight to the anecdotes that usually dominate generational profiles and religious journalism. I've contributed anecdotes to these genres myself; in addition, I'm a member of the generation of Catholics under examination here, and I was paid to copyedit this volume. My reflections are not those of a detached, objective reviewer (if such a creature exists).

In writing the book, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his coauthors draw primarily on findings from the National Study of Youth and Religion, a three-wave survey running from 2002 to 2008 that followed some 3,000 young people from their teenage years into young adulthood. This is the fourth book to result from the study: earlier ones by Smith and various coauthors include Soul Searching, on teens' religious lives; Souls in Transition, on the same group's religious practice in young adulthood; and Lost in Transition, on teens' transition to young adulthood more generally.

Adding color to the abstract statistics are the ways that young Catholics and former Catholics discuss their faith with interviewers. "Jae"—a pseudonym, like all names here—says "there are several reasons" he's not interested in church right now, but overall "it's just easier not to follow a religion." Steve was raised Catholic and briefly became an evangelical, but after studying history and philosophy in college, he is now an agnostic and thinks that religious belief is driven by emotion. Rob says he's Catholic but admits all he means by that is "I believe in God and basically I celebrate Christmas." Maria attends Mass pretty regularly but considers the syncretistic spirit religion of Santeria compatible with Catholicism and believes all religions are basically the same. She's among just twelve interviewees, out of forty-one total who were Catholics as teens, who remained actively connected to the Church as the nsyr ended. To say that such examples highlight the Church's failures in evangelization and catechesis would be an understatement. If future generations of Catholics are anything like this one, the Church in America will experience a decline in this century worse than its decline over the past half-century.

Moreover, assuming recent precedent holds, most of these young Catholics will not change their ways later in adulthood. Unlike Protestants, who tend to increase their church attendance as they age, Catholics usually maintain similar rates of attendance across their lifetime. The ongoing multi-decade decline in Mass attendance in the U.S. is mainly the result not of all Catholics changing their practices, but of older Catholics dying and being replaced by successive generations becoming ever less likely to attend Mass often.

The book's greatest strength is not in providing a snapshot of young Catholics, which is also available from other sources, but in illustrating how their faith evolves through the teenage years to young adulthood. At all life stages, Catholics are less likely than non-Catholics to fall in the most religiously observant group (as measured by frequency of religious service attendance, frequency of personal prayer, and self-reported importance of religious faith). Though the average level of observance declines across all groups as they enter adulthood, highly religious Catholic teens are even more likely to decrease their observance than highly religious non-Catholic teens. About half of all Catholics maintain similar levels of religious practice from late adolescence to early adulthood; however, a large majority (three-quarters) of the changing half becomes less observant.

The factors from the teenage years that predict Catholics' high religiosity later are largely what one would expect: considering faith important, having highly religious Catholic parents and knowing other supportive religious adults, praying alone frequently, reporting personal religious experiences, attending Mass, having religious friends, etc.

One last factor has to do with another facet of parents' religiosity: whether parents identify themselves as traditional, moderate, or liberal Catholics. The young adult children of traditional and moderate Catholics are about three times as likely as children of liberal Catholics to attend Mass weekly, and only half as likely to never attend. I would attribute this to traditional Catholics' greater emphasis on obeying Church teachings (which require going to Mass weekly) and, more speculatively, to their greater efforts to teach their sons and daughters that what the Church proclaims is actually true. Liberal Catholics generally prioritize social justice over points of doctrine, so their children could inherit their moral concerns without inheriting their devotion to God and the Church.

If Young Catholic America has one major shortcoming, it's the lack of direct comparisons between Catholics and other religious groups. Catholics are repeatedly compared either to the U.S. population as a whole or to non-Catholics, an umbrella category that includes evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, "Nones," atheists, and others. I'd prefer comparisons between Catholics, evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and (to see how Christians differ from more secular Americans) Nones. All these groups are large enough for statistics to be meaningful, and Catholics could learn much more from the experiences of evangelicals, in particular, than from the amorphous group "non-Catholics."

Smith and his coauthors set out to analyze, not to advise, the Church, but Catholic priests, educators, and parents who care about young people's faith can draw many lessons from their findings. First, parents and other older adults with strong ties to teens and emerging adults have enormous influence over their faith—probably more than they realize—and should act accordingly. Without close relationships to practicing Catholic adults, typically their parents, Catholic teens are extremely unlikely to remain or become devoted Catholics as young adults. In addition, having just one Catholic parent (typically the mother) is not enough. Having "a committed Catholic father seems to be a necessary [but not sufficient] condition" for young Catholics to remain actively Catholic as adults. Growing up with a devout mom and a skeptical dad may contribute to some young men's belief that faith is something "feminine, and thus to be kept at a distance."

Second, for young people to maintain their faith into adulthood, they must find their faith important in daily life and internalize Catholic doctrines—processes that are guided, again, by parents, other relatives, and role models. Youth group leaders and Catholic school teachers could also contribute to this formation. Third, religious practices such as attending Mass, reading the Bible, and praying regularly exert a strong influence on teens' future religiosity. Once more, parents and other adults can model these practices themselves and urge young people to do the same.

Fourth, Catholic high schools and colleges do not appear to be transmitting the faith to their students very effectively. After the researchers controlled for students' family background, Catholic high schools had "little to no independent influence five years later on those who attended them." The schools did seem to make Catholic students, regardless of background, less likely to totally abandon the faith as young adults, but that's not saying much. The book has less data on Catholic colleges, but the researchers' interviews with several students at Catholic colleges suggest that they make little if any difference in the religious lives of students. Assuming such schools still wish to contribute to their students' religious and spiritual development, they must address this problem along with the grave financial difficulties many are facing.

For practicing Catholics, and many other Christians, Young Catholic America will be a sobering read. Yet there are more signs of hope, it seems to me, than the book's figures would suggest. Let me share a few. Seminary enrollment is at its highest level in the past 20 years, and several traditional religious orders are attracting dozens of aspiring new members a year. Every spring, hundreds of Catholic college graduates sign up for a year or more of serving in relative poverty as volunteers, missionaries, and teachers at needy Catholic schools. Other young Catholics are actively sharing and defending their faith on the web—or on the street, literally, with the recently founded and rapidly expanding group St. Paul Street Evangelization. These Catholics are too atypical to show up in national surveys, but they're apt to have a disproportionate impact on the U.S. Church's future. They are ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them—and in a world of despair, that could go a long way.

Anna Sutherland is the editor of Family-Studies.org, a former junior fellow at First Things, and a freelance writer.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The decline of religion in sometime Protestant Britain is a matter of serious historical interest not because Britain is still a world power, but because it was the first country to enter modernity through the furnaces of the first industrial revolution and now lies with sometime Protestant Holland close to the epicenter of northwest European secularity. Interestingly the British pattern is reflected in Australasia, above all in New Zealand, which is England and Scotland geographically “upside down.” The other two closely affiliated societies, the U.S. and Canada, are sufficiently different in their religious patterns to continue to intrigue historians and sociologists working on comparative trajectories of secularization.

Nearly half a century has passed since I first raised questions about secularization as a universal trend and almost as long since I proposed a delimited theory of secularization pointing to sharply varied historical patterns even in its Western European epicenter. Since then the debate has shifted back and forth, with contributions in Britain by scholars like Grace Davie stressing mutation and the exceptional character of “secular Europe,” or Steve Bruce (like Simon Green in his new book, following Bryan Wilson) stressing irreversible and potentially universal decline and religious privatization, or analyses of contemporary spirituality by scholars like Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas. Something depends on how broadly you define religion, and much depends on how wide you cast your net back in time and across cultures globally. However you look at it, Britain offers a major instance, either of the universal fate awaiting religion as a significant social force everywhere, or else of peculiar features shared with much of northwestern Europe. The debate could hardly be more fundamental.

Simon Green is a historian writing about the institutional death of Protestantism, particularly in its Puritan form as the most characteristic expression of English religion during the period between 1920 and 1960. The death of Protestantism more broadly understood, as distinct from the Puritan variants that made such an impact in the mid-17th and mid-19th century, refers to a creed mostly dominant from the 1570s on, and defining Britain as a nation, above all in its wars with France. Both Protestantism and Puritanism in Wales and Scotland eventually followed the English trajectory, but these countries only play supporting roles in the text.

Green is not writing about the death of Protestantism as such in England, let alone the death of religion or God. There is still much active religion in England, more Catholic and more diverse than before, with a mixture of superstition and magic that has once more come to the surface rather than remaining a subterranean presence. His argument could profitably be supplemented by an important book by Christie Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (2004), and by George Dangerfield’s classic account of The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935). Dangerfield’s Liberal England died around 1920, at the beginning of Green’s chosen period, and Christie Davies’ Moral Britain (referring to a demanding and disciplined moral regime) was moribund by the 1960s.

For Green all these changes are connected, and the best place to begin is the mutation in British politics that occurred after World War I, because that was the moment when religious divides ceased closely to correspond to political divides and therefore lost the capacity seriously to affect political strategies. The Liberal Party, acting as the vehicle of the Nonconformist conscience and of what had once been Nonconformist grievances, gave way to a multidenominational Labour party and a multidenominational Conservative party, and the cancer of Irish Catholic nationalism in the Westminster Parliament was removed by the formation of the Irish Free State. The Labour Party harbored little of the anti-clerical sentiment found in Europe, partly because its program could be seen as Christianity in action, for example in the persons of politicians like the Methodist Arthur Henderson, but also because some of the historical roots of Labour lay in Scots and Welsh Protestantism and because in some key industrial areas Labour had to be sensitive towards a (largely Irish) Catholic vote.

Green concludes that by the end of World War II, membership in a church, and/or moral prudence, ceased to matter all that much for a career in politics, though some famous “gangsters” like Lloyd George and Churchill had always survived the “Puritan spirit” articulated by Baldwin. In Green’s view the motivation, organization, and even the language of politics became de-Christianized. Secular politics took over until by 2000, politics had gone the way of religion. Both sets of institutions were failing to inspire long-term commitment and experiencing the effects of privatization, even though churches were increasingly active in social comment and critique. All this may suggest that the difficulties experienced by religion in Britain were not unique but shared with other institutions requiring long-term commitment. Perhaps there was a crisis for all kinds of belief, not unconnected with what Pope Benedict criticized as a pervasive relativism. Of course, some developments that came to fruition in and after the Sixties lie outside Green’s time period, such as the influence of secular elites in an expanding and reorganized education system and a centralized media, and the romantic assumptions undergirding pop music and youth culture.

As a consequence of the disappearance of the Irish Catholics, of the decline of English Nonconformity, and of social and legal changes that made the Church more autonomous, the Anglican Church between the wars emerged as more capable of representing England than for centuries. At least part of the Church was in tune with the shift toward the politics of welfare, beginning on the Conservative side with Neville Chamberlain. That shift was articulated in the copec Conference of 1924, in the attempt of Archbishop Davidson to broker industrial peace in 1926, in the “religion of the Incarnation” as promoted by people like Charles Gore, and in the work of Tawney and Temple. The Church objectified the coming moral consensus today represented by the National Health Service. Those who felt the Church was slavishly following an unfortunate trend, like the mordant Dean Inge, could not claim to be representative, though in an extended chapter on Inge, Green offers a sympathetic portrait of him as a churchman who understood the sapping of a specifically institutional religion, and as a public intellectual and journalist who embraced what were then progressive causes, like eugenics.

The limits of Anglican influence were later revealed after World War II once it tried to differ from that consensus, for example when Archbishop Fisher attacked Premium Bonds. Arguably Fisher’s successful attempt to discourage the marriage of the Queen’s sister to a divorced person, reinforced as it was by political reasons, was a pyrrhic victory, because it focused a general realization that a specifically ecclesiastical morality could not and should not be mandatory for the royal family, let alone the whole society. It also focused on a symbiosis between monarchy and Church that could become problematic if the royal family lost its iconic status, as it did in the Eighties.

The churches also became more ecumenical, perhaps seeing the need to hang together or hang separately, or perhaps because of interdenominational contacts through the work of the scm, and Green shows in a further chapter how one of the fruits of ecumenism matured in the passing of the 1944 Butler Education Act, effectively bringing to an end the most protracted ecclesiastical dispute of Edwardian and late Victorian England.

Curiously the point where the Church of England took on this representative role roughly coincided with a moment when the modest religious stability that had continued during and after World War I entered another period of decline, if we take the figures for electoral rolls between 1924 and 1960, and it was a decline paralleled by the membership figures for the main Free Church bodies. These trends were not really broken even by the supposed postwar “revival” identified by Callum Brown, including the much-publicized Billy Graham campaigns. The Roman Catholic Church of mid-century Britain was a different matter: growing, younger, and peaking at around 15 percent, until it too stagnated in the last third of the century, first in Britain and then in its Irish stronghold. Roy Foster has described the undermining of Catholic political and cultural dominance in Ireland, above all in Dublin, as the “Protestantization” of Ireland.

When the bumpy decline of the institutions of a Protestant England began has been endlessly debated. Though the high point of affiliation was reached in 1905, the decline in the fortunes of Protestant churches goes back to the 1880s. The data for 1920 to 1960 are clear, and so perhaps are the proximate historical causes, but the large-scale and long-term causes identified by sociologists remain disputable. Perhaps the most telling statistics relate to the declining ratio of Anglican clergy to people, which signaled a crisis for the parish, and the dropping of Sunday school enrollments by more than half between 1930 and 1960, which meant the sources of future adult members were much diminished. Of course, it was always the case that most Sunday school students failed to become active adult Christians, but the Sunday school was the most important single source of a diffuse biblical Protestantism. If one had to identify other sources, they would include female primary school teachers, ancillary organizations like the Scouts, and other youth organizations, like the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs.

But these are only the statistical signs. For the cumulative and multi-form historical influences, Green turns to the doleful data of in-depth surveys by people like Gorer, and above all Rowntree’s pathbreaking (and initially much criticized) English Life and Leisure of 1951. Rowntree concluded that by 1950, the visible decline of the churches had been accompanied by an “instinctive” de-Christianization that had reduced those holding recognizably New Testament beliefs to a smallish minority, though the kind of poll data available in the Sixties suggested majority agreement with the absolute basics, supposing those data were to be trusted. The issues Green passes under review in the wake of these surveys include the declining educational difference between clergy and laity, a declining clerical status, a dislike of “paid religion pushers,” and the importance of alternative ways of spending leisure time, especially on the weekend, as well as passive participation by radio.

There was another more imponderable issue lurking here: affluence, with free time to be spent in increasingly varied ways, including crime. When it comes to crime, it is perhaps worth recollecting that the criminologist Christie Davies breaks ranks with established opinion to suppose there is a negative link between religious vitality and crime, just as some others dare to discern a positive link between religion and altruism. The impact of affluence on Protestantism can be put down to a shift from a moral economy of scarcity, for which personal indulgence (gambling, alcoholism) was morally outrageous, to a moral economy of modest abundance, for which it was merely stupid. But then one wonders why Protestantism flourishes in the outrageous abundance of Dallas. A factor has one consequence in one cultural context and quite another where circ*mstances are different.

Similar complex judgments are in play when assessing a shift from self-discipline or self-denial to self expression, with all that might involve for marriage ties in an era when death dallied for longer than previously and contraception loosened inhibitions. Just how moral was moral England in the past when conditions were vastly different, say in 1820? How Christian was the language of politicians in the time of Fox, Pitt, Melbourne, and Palmerston? All this is to ignore the impact of New Testament criticism, of Darwinism, and of the much-touted implication of religion in violence. The average sensual person might conclude in a confused way that the Bible was not “Gospel Truth,” and as often deployed to bolster war and intolerance as peace on earth and goodwill.

These varied historical influences were cumulative, and might provide most of what we need to know. However, sociology not only refers to the fine grain of history but also cites generalized trends or grand processes with a different intellectual genealogy, like bureaucratic rationalization, privatization, the breakdown of community, social differentiation (the increasing autonomy of social spheres like education and welfare from religious aegis), and individualization. It then sets them in the comparative perspective, first of all in Northern Europe, where similar trends are apparent, and the U.S., where similar conditions obtain, except for a church-state establishment and geopolitical decline, and yet religion flourishes at a much higher level of vitality in spite of some downturns since the 1990s. As Grace Davie has argued, Establishment may well have the effect of turning the Church into a service station, and involving it in the slow collapse of older social formations. In Britain those unable to identify themselves religiously belonged to emerging groups unable to place themselves in the old system socially, apart from members of an older working class, especially the men, for whom the culture of the Church was simply alien. (Green shows that the skew of the faithful toward women, and the single, widowed, or divorced, may well go back a century and a half.)

Of the sociological grand processes, the importance once assigned to “rationalizing bureaucracy” and “rationalization” is in doubt, but there is some consensus about the consequences of individualization and of social differentiation. Most observers agree about the effect an accent on individual autonomy and subjective judgment has on religious authority, and indeed on authority of all kinds, including political and (in some contexts) academic and scientific. The task of sociologist and historian alike is to integrate processes like social differentiation with such cumulative historical changes as social and geographical mobility, new media, alternative sources of leisure and welfare, a vague sense that science provides our only salvation, and so on. There are also middle-range conclusions emerging from cross cultural comparisons, for example between England and Holland. In both countries the decline in Catholicism came later than the Protestant decline, and Protestantism experienced something of an evangelical upsurge. But a danger point was reached for all religious minorities, like the English Free Churches and the Catholics in Holland and England, when they succeeded in gaining parity and had no further grievances to galvanize them. Another conclusion from cross-cultural comparison would be that in polities with centralized media and communications, the resistant peripheries gradually conform to the center, whether Brittany to Paris or North Wales to London.

Green points to wider historical problems that confront any sociologist anxious to take long-term and contemporary global history seriously. Historians disagree and change their minds about religion in the 20th century, for example, Callum Brown’s assertions about a postwar revival up to 1956, as well as about religion in the past, for example, arguments about whether England was all that “Christian” between 1680 and 1830, and whether 19th-century industrialization ushered in the first breakdown of religiously based communal bonds or a “second confessional phase” when competing churches mobilized themselves as successful associations. Yet maybe different degrees of industrialization make a distinctive impact: Finland, for example, has a much smaller sector of the completely unattached than Britain.

By way of an epilogue, I want lightly to sketch in some of the elements that would need to be covered in taking the story on a half century from the Sixties to the present day. One element could be covered from the data summarized in Steve Bruce’s recent book Secularization. This is a trenchant restatement of the standard argument focusing on the British case and the decline of the religion that once defined the nation. He shows that the numerical trends regarding Christian belief and practice identified by Green have continued up to the present, less through defection than failure to recruit. About these trends there is no argument. The churches remain a definable subsector of British society, but much diminished in size and heavily tilted toward the older age groups. For Bruce, Britons simply lost interest in Christianity, a conclusion that parallels suggestions that the Dutch did not so much reject Christianity as drift away out of boredom. Parents did not care enough to encourage the continuing involvement of their children. Football practice on Sunday morning or war games on the internet won.

The influences that have brought this situation about from the Sixties on are much like those identified for the earlier period by Green. I have myself argued that attitudes visible among the British elites right back in the 1880s shifted down the social scale with increasing affluence and alternative sources of leisure, to take off first in the interwar period and then again in the Sixties, with the emergence of a vast youth culture. Bruce restates the standard observation that mobility and social mixing of various kinds, especially “marrying out,” undermine the religious subcultures that held up quite well in the mid-19th century. One aspect of that mixing was highlighted in wartime as women were deployed to do the work of men, and this trend has continued. Women’s roles, and the opportunities open to them as to how they spend their time, have been greatly altered and expanded, and the patriarchal attitudes in churches have not increased the enthusiasm of women for active involvement.

Meanwhile, as suggested earlier, the restructuring of education and the media have meant that the resources for reproducing a Protestant verbal culture have been depleted, and those younger people who have gone into the dominant contemporary visual media have been disproportionately “secular” in the Sixties style. One consequence has been the triumph of image-making over both the extended political speech and the sermon, and even perhaps over the lecture. Paradoxically, the very rapid expansion of British universities has meant that the decline in the authority of religion and of politics has been matched by a crisis in the humanities. Just as the Church offers a comprehensive coverage, and just as politics is centralized, so the universities are now an integrated state-controlled system, and all three spheres are unprotected by the teeming variety and pluralism found in the U.S.

There is some debate about what weight to assign to data showing that over two-thirds of British people today still identify themselves as Christian. About religion as such, people are ambivalent. On the one hand, they welcome the voluntary work undertaken by religious bodies and regard churches as “social capital.” Indeed, governments want “faith groups” to play an even greater role as “social capital” in the voluntary sector just when their resources and personnel have been depleted. On the other hand, global events have led to an increasing perception of serious faith as leading to serious trouble, and this is fed by aggressive secularist propaganda, some of it going so far as to argue that parents should not be allowed to pass on faith to their children, and that “divisive” faith schools should not be accepted as part of the education system.

Politically, the Anglican Church played an important role in the critique of Margaret Thatcher, especially in the mid-Eighties when the opposition parties were in disarray. Oddly enough, Thatcher was one of the few major postwar politicians to care what Protestantism was about, though her favorite spokesman on social and moral issues was the chief rabbi, given the hostile political orientation of the churches. For their part, the organs of the churches (less so perhaps, the ordinary lay members) maintained an alliance with welfare as understood on the liberal Left and also produced muchdiscussed critical reports on (for example) “Faith and the City,” ecological stability, financial greed, the just war, and nuclear war. None of the churches favored the Iraq war. Moreover, the established Church provided an umbrella for religious minorities, something that many Muslims appreciated, though on more than one occasion it meant that then-Archbishop Rowan Williams was lampooned in the popular press and advised to “get his head out of the Qu’ran.” To that extent the religious voice in Britain, usually ecumenical, is heard and very far from being privatized.

However, to be heard is not necessarily to be heeded, and though in the more intimate spheres of life governments might in a rather utilitarian way stress the importance of stable family life, in practice social mores go their own way. A church racked by arguments about sexuality and the role of women in the sacred ministry is exposed to ridicule: hence the difficulties dogging Williams’ leadership in the Anglican Church. Certainly female ordination has made a major contribution to maintaining the parish system and to the quality of ordinands. To the extent that churches are identified with the restrictive regulation of personal behavior, legal or otherwise, they are ignored (at best) or strongly condemned.

David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ash-gate); his most recent book is The Education of David Martin: The Making of an Unlikely Sociologist (SPCK/Regent College). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Only a person possessed of extraordinary humility, hard-won and now lightly worn, with a self-deprecating twinkle in his eye, would even think to begin a memoir with a cascade of failure, desultoriness, and anxiety:

In my eightieth year, 2009, I was working with my friend Otto Kallscheuer for the European Commission, and he asked me how I became a sociologist. I explained that in 1947 I had been refused university entrance to study English Literature and failed a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. I had spent 1952 to 1959 as a primary school teacher in West London and Somerset. I stumbled on sociology by accident when a colleague in the Somerset school showed me his correspondence course for an external London University degree. From 1956, when my first marriage broke up, to 1959, I followed that course in my spare time. To my astonishment I won the annual university scholarship in sociology and entered university as a postgraduate. Between 1959 and 1971, as I moved from primary school teaching in SW14 to an LSE chair, I was besieged by neurasthenia and a chronic fear I was an interloper with no right of entry. The aftershocks never fully dissipated. Otto thought the story worth telling, though he can have had no idea of the travail of telling it or the re-examination of self it might require.

David Martin, along with Oxford's Bryan Wilson one of the twin pillars of British sociology of religion in our day, has at last released a slim volume of memoirs. The book is not, it should be made clear at the outset, simply an autobiography. Martin avers that he has "little to say about the most important things in my life: my second marriage, the travails and triumphs of children, holidays, my sister, the death of parents, intellectual interlocutors, professional co-operations and friendships." Instead, the book recounts a pilgrim's progress toward the celestial city of reconciliation: reconciliation of faith and modernity, of piety and intellect, of religion and reason, of revival and secularization, of tradition and innovation, of periphery and center—and of father and son.

As Europeans negotiated the changing landscape of modernity, questions of faith inevitably overlapped with family dynamics. Fathers (and sometimes mothers) were synecdoches for the heritage under scrutiny, and the outcomes of such analysis were various indeed. Here was the bitter repudiation of an Edmund Gosse, who denounced his patrimony as he denounced his parent in Father and Son. There was the radical reformulation of a Friedrich Schleiermacher, who wrote home from seminary to his anguished Pietist father to declare that he could no longer believe in the Trinity—and then spent decades trying to be a Pietist still, "but of a higher order." The life of David Martin, who describes himself as having had "a Victorian childhood some three decades after the death of Victoria in 1901," describes a different arc still.

Indeed, there are at least five arcs evident in the book—family, class, faith, the academy, and the discipline of sociology—that together form a braid of reconciliation under the linear providence of God, a God who seems to have fitted the man to the work remarkably well.

Readers of this journal, however, might find it most natural to reverse the order of the arcs and begin with sociology, since it is there where Martin has made his scholarly mark. Originally attracted to music (Martin was almost a concert-level pianist, but never attempted the examinations again, finding later a happy musical outlet in accompanying congregations, choirs, and soloists), and prevented from studying literature by his lack of the Latin necessary for university entrance to that subject (oh, the days of yore), he ended up studying sociology. He did so, as he studied most things, strictly to understand the rapidly changing world he was living in and, indeed, to understand his volatile self. Throughout his career, in fact, self-discovery both prompted and was advanced by his social scientific investigation of whole cities, regions, nations, and continents.

As is still the case today, in the 1960s the study of religion was a poor relation in the family of sociological fields. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and even more since 9/11, however, religion at least appears on the map of Important Things to Notice in the world. In Martin's day, studying religion was like studying the last flock of passenger pigeons: perhaps of some historical interest as being once a factor in human life, but doomed to irrelevance because doomed to extinction. David Martin complicated that simple downward plane of the universally held secularization narrative in two respects. Only two, but two intellectual revolutions are perhaps enough to justify a career.

The first revolution was in two parts. In 1965, Martin first challenged the very idea of secularization as too general and too teleological to serve as an adequate description of the evolving relationships between religions and societies. A little more than a decade later—as his secretary came across an accumulation of notes and suggested she might type them up into a book—Martin then produced A General Theory of Secularization (1978) that stands to this day as the single most influential mapping of the variety of salient factors that influence the variety of forms of secularization evident in Europe and America (the conventional scope of the analysis even as recently as four decades ago) and the variety of paths it has taken. Secularization as a simple trope of religious decline in the face of technology, innovation, science, and, above all, reason was definitively critiqued and then replaced by a better paradigm in which communities at different scales negotiate their challenges with recourse to religion depending on a variety of observable and, to some extent (which is the mode in which Martin thinks sociology can only ever operate) predictable, factors. The way religion fares is always "path-dependent," in one of Martin's favorite geographical metaphors (the sociology guild was more resistant to his preferred term, "historically inflected"), and his theory—modified since then in various articles and books—helps us pay attention to those paths and thus to the various careers of religion in the modern world.

The one career, however, that religion was not supposed to enjoy in the modern world was resurgence. Yet David Martin, cartographer of secularization, emerged as one of the earliest and most influential students of the revival and spread of Old-Time Religion in the Global South, particularly in Latin America and in the particular form of Pentecostalism. Typically, he records his foray into this field in which he has stood as a giant as the result of a happy accident credited largely to someone else:

I went to a lecture by Peter Berger in London on a Saturday, something I was normally quite unlikely to do. Appropriately enough the venue was on the site of Aldersgate Street where John Wesley in May 1738 had the experience of a "heart strangely warmed" which gave major impetus to the English and American awakenings preceding Pentecostalism. Peter asked if I had noticed the spread of Pentecostalism in Latin America and parts of the southern states of the USA. Would I be interested in studying it?

I had seen Spanish-speaking Pentecostal churches in California, Arizona and New Mexico, but the presuppositions of sociology led me to suppose Pentecostalism in Latin America would remain a backstreet affair. I expected mass movements to be political not religious, in spite of my critical approach to secularization theory … .

Religion was once again playing a serious role in modernization, more so than the emphasis on the Enlightenment preferred in the academy. Many scholars were dubious about the modernizing potential of Pentecostalism, but I was willing to ask how far it could be a major modernizing agent. I would be challenging the elite ideology of the Enlightenment in the field of modernization as I had earlier challenged it in the field of secularization.

Martin's subsequent researches in the 1980s and '90s introduced his colleagues around the globe to new paths of modernization indeed: not just a revision of the secularization myth, but its reversal. The explosion of Pentecostalism in Latin America, as one of his books put it, meant the explosion also of the secularization orthodoxy once for all, the reverberations of which haven't yet reached the ears of the New Atheists, perhaps, but have echoed down the halls of all serious study of contemporary religion.

To revolutionize one's field, and to do so twice, requires a rare combination of qualities: independence of outlook, a sort of "outsider" mentality that is free to question the conventional wisdom, and influence of office, a position in the hierarchy that compels others to give at least prima facie respect to one's work. The second arc of David Martin's life is the move from being the chauffeur's son to being department chair at the London School of Economics, the move from the primary school teacher's lounge to the halls of the British Academy.

One of the delights of this memoir is Martin's self-portrait as earnest bumbler who ends up all right, and better than all right, after all: a seeker-after-truth who neglected his grammar school studies for the books he preferred to read (and so failed to enter university); who after a stint in the Army went to teachers' college as a pale shadow of the academic life he wanted (and so later happened to notice a teaching colleague taking sociology by correspondence); who happened to be reading Karl Popper on the train (as one does) and found himself emancipated from having to think bien-pensant thoughts; and whose shock at the ungrateful and insolent student uprisings at the LSE in the so-called Sixties prompted strenuous campaigns on behalf of traditional university education, the King James Version, and the Book of Common Prayer in a polemical and controversialist mode he had never sought as, at heart, a "dreamy and unworldly romantic."

The professional arc of David Martin's life will give encouragement to any graduate student wondering if God can use the vicissitudes of one's life toward good results. (It does help, of course, to be natively brilliant, as Martin obviously is. But his memoirs humbly make clear that intelligence and drive are not enough.) Indeed, Martin's modest upbringing by parents who were both "in service" and Nonconformists kept him perpetually on the mental boundaries even as his academic stock rose and his influence spread. Delighted by the university life he had once thought forever denied him, he never took it for granted and wrestled endlessly with his place in it even as the honors piled up:

When I joined the LSE as a lecturer I felt under sufferance as a peripheral attachment. Once when I gave a lecture in a minor institution of the university, somebody commented in amazement, "You still think you're an outsider!" When I was made a Fellow of the British Academy, my son-in-law felt it was time to tell me, "Listen, David, this is the inside."

His background, however, was not simply something from which he felt he needed to escape. Quite the contrary: It furnished him with both the ballast and the outlook needed to think new thoughts:

My sociological colleagues might explain my outsider status in terms of family origins "in-service," but that was not how my parents saw things. They calibrated the world in moral categories. Once I started wandering from home, intellectually and morally, I was never entirely at home again, anywhere. At the same time my home in SW14 [a modest residential area] had given me an inner confidence wherever I went, except that mine was derivative and I could not pass it on to our children. My father was supported by a doctrine of "blessed assurance" and I borrowed my inward security from that unquestioned faith in the unruffled stability of my childhood. The curious confidence bore me forward even in the LSE … . I was besieged by fear because jettisoned into an alien environment far from home, but still sustained by a precarious "blessed assurance." For an outsider and a dreamer I was remarkably sure-footed.

So much in my background was unquestioned but I was ready to question and challenge where others watched to see which way the wind blew, or kept their own counsel. Unthinking security led me to act in a way that often paid off, but was much more dangerous than I realized. I possessed incidental courage.

That "blessed assurance" was, indeed, only partly appropriated. The same train-reading that freed him to think for himself also untethered him, at least for a time, from the authority of the Bible. Reading a wide range of New Testament criticism in the context of only a simple Methodism left him vulnerable to deep doubts, and for years he wandered in various borderlands of Christianity. All the while, strangely, he was a lay preacher in Methodist chapels, and later in Anglican churches. The Bible never lost its hold on him aesthetically, morally, or spiritually, even as he was troubled about its politics and dubious about its historical claims.

Pascal was perhaps chief among a number of writers who helped Martin find his way back to a recognizably orthodox Christianity. Writers such as Gerald Manley Hopkins and the earlier Metaphysical poets, as well as the great heritage of English and German sacred music, fed his soul and inspired his spirit. (Martin seems to be extraordinarily conversant across all the arts.) But it was Reinhold Niebuhr who converted him particularly to Christian realism and helped Martin tackle one of the main problems of his intellectual life: the nexus of the simple and the complex, the naïve and the sophisticated, the sincere and the practical. Martin did not revolutionize the discourse in this zone—although his Does Christianity Cause War? (1997) deserves much more attention—so much as resolve the anguish in his own heart between what he had seen, and admired, about his father's way in the world and what he had learned in sociology about the way of the world.

That anguish between the paternal ideal and the pragmatically real would come to a head in a remote Chilean village in 1991. Martin devotes a chapter to a single day that climaxed in his, once again, finding himself in an unexpected and awkward situation: "My purpose in coming to Rengo as a sociologist was not understood and I found myself having to play the part of a charismatic evangelist if the research were not to collapse."

Martin then proceeded to preach in the traditional style of evangelistic testimony. In doing so, he connected with his father in a profound way. But God, and David Martin, have a sense of humor and the sermon began with him being introduced as coming from Oxford University, not the LSE. "Gloria a Dios! Amen! It is a very great privilege to speak to you tonight because I feel there is more real life here among you than in the whole University of Oxford."

As the sermon progressed, Martin talked about how evangelical people each have a story to tell of what God has done for them. He spoke of his grandmother and grandfather, and then of his father. His father was converted by hearing "a famous evangelist on the radio … Gypsy Smith." Then, "after many years of hard work, the dream of his life came true. He bought his own taxi. He used his taxi to spread the gospel and would often stop for an hour in Hyde Park, which is just like the center of Santiago, and preach."

Martin then opened up his own story:

But what about me? The Word speaks to us all one way or another. One night I was returning to the Army after a weekend spent at home. As the train went hour after hour into the night, I opened the Bible and read the New Testament. The words that specially spoke to me were "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son" and "I am persuaded that neither height nor depth, nor death nor life, nor any other creature, can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord." This is my story.

The sermon concluded with Martin quoting John Wesley three times—recall that Martin was raised a Methodist: "Is your heart as my heart? Then give me your hand." "I am a man of one book and that book is the Bible." "The best of all is, God is with us." And with two amens, he concluded. The service went on for another hour or more.

Afterward, Martin recalls, he was laid low with both strain and relief:

As I lay on the bed recovering, [my wife] Bernice said the occasion had brought a closure in my relationship with my father. The tiny Chilean chapel was not the Albert Hall of his imagination, and maybe he had never heard of Chile, but Bernice was right. In the course of the long "education of David Martin" many mistakes and mishaps remain beyond correction, and many follies beyond expiation, but on 22 November 1991, my father might have seen the travail of his soul and been satisfied.

There is here no "second naïveté." As Martin puts it, "Between one generation and another there are mutations and transpositions rather than repetitions." There is instead a grateful, graceful reconciliation with his father's faith as, of all things, a sociological participant-observer. For "the education of David Martin" was not, as "right-thinking" people would have it, a secularized salvation story of flight from foolish faith into refined reason. Yet education truly played a major part in his journey, with sociological study itself and a career in the higher reaches of the British academy both playing their parts, sometimes straightforwardly and sometimes ironically, in his extended, difficult, and ultimately fruitful appropriation of the gospel.

And here is the final evidence that David Martin has not ended far from his evangelical roots. For his story does not climax with his receiving holy orders in the Church of England, nor in his election to the British Academy, but with him stepping in to preach extemporaneously in a missionary church in a faraway land, giving his heartfelt testimony in simple terms and nicely in line with his father's, with a Bible finally held high over his head with a simple exclamation of Wesleyan praise.

This evangelical friend of David Martin's can only reply, Gloria a Dios indeed.

John Stackhouse is the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College, Vancouver. His latest book is Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology, published this year by Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.