On Warren Farha, Cultural Renewal, and the (Too Few) Bookish Places Where It Happens

Last week Warren Farha—a devout Orthodox Christian, a soft-spoken descendent of Lebanese immigrants and merchants, a lifelong Wichitan, and most relevantly, the founder of the marvelous Eighth Day Books—passed away after a sudden illness. News of his death ricocheted throughout numerous churches, groups, and communities—religious, literary, cultural, ethnic, and more—both locally and far-distant. In retrospect, that kind of interconnectedness is a manifestation of his whole ecumenical and intellectual vocation, a manifestation that was made real yesterday evening.

Starting at 6pm, people started to gather at Eighth Day Books, at the corner of Douglas and Erie east of Wichita’s downtown. Who was there? Well, among the dozens I talked with, there were Orthodox priests, elementary school teachers, devout young entrepreneurs, Catholic nuns, burned-out hippies hawking exercise and acupuncture manuals, published poets, families with young children running around, former and current musicians, self-described socialist Jews, older folks sharing memories of their days with Warren in the Jesus Movement in the 1970s, before he returned to the Orthodox faith of his family heritage, and many more. It was simultaneously three things: a deeply pious religious honoring of Warren’s legacy and faith (complete with a public reading of the Paschal Sermon of St. John Chrysostom, a favorites of Warren’s); an ecumenical gathering of people who shared a common history with and belief in the power of God as something which can be experienced through the written word; a social celebration of a man and the friendships that emerged in the literary space he had built over nearly 40 years.

It was through the last one that I knew Warren best. Not that I knew him especially well at all—I didn’t have the church connections so many had with him, and since my wife has worked at Wichita’s Watermark Books, Wichita’s premier general independent bookstore, for nearly 15 years, the connections I have to Wichita’s many overlapping literary and educational groups and associations have gone through that store, rather than Warren’s. But that doesn’t mean I was a stranger to Eighth Day Books. It was there that my education in the Church Fathers and Mothers began, and whenever I was in the mood of searching through idiosyncratic classics of theology, mythology, history, or more, the crammed stacks of Eighth Day Books always invited me, and the advice of Warren or whomever was behind the counter was always valued. More importantly, Eighth Day Books, and the Institute which it inspired, has produced some of the most valuable gatherings I’ve ever been part of here in Wichita, whether they were large conferences (some of which I’ve presented at) or small reading groups.

Who attended, and still attends, these gatherings? Admittedly, it’s mostly people from religious traditions that have, at the very least, profoundly ambivalent feelings about my own Mormon Christian faith, as well as mostly people whose politics, especially when it comes to various “culture war” topics, are profoundly different from mine. In our present moment, with Christian nationalist ideas and Trumpian devotion having poisoned far too many sources of what ought to be voices of peace and inclusion and justice, I can understand how some might look upon the Eighth Day Institute, an organization of lay believers who take “cultural renewal” as their central conviction, and see it as a problem for the life of the mind, if not an actual threat.

“Renewal,” though, doesn’t have to mean anything reactionary, though obviously it can include such things. In my view, “renewal” when it comes to matters of culture is best understood as a continual recommit to, and a continual re-appropriation of, that which one has already been given. Such an interpretation doesn’t exhaust cultural renewal of all ideological content: nihilistic libertarians and individualists who insist they are entirely self-taught and self-made are pretty much outside the bounds of any kind of renewal sensibility. But anyone who recognizes that we are constituted by, and that our lives are an ongoing negotiation and evaluation of, all the inputs that we have known—spiritual, parental, educational, cultural, and more—can, I think, be moved to action by this conviction, and want to share in it.

In the space that Warren created, and in the connections those associated with him built both within and out from that space, those inputs were primarily presented in terms of God’s gifts, and the Christian writings and traditions which articulated them, and for people who struggle with conservative elements of such writings and traditions, there’s bound to be tension. But Warren himself once defined “ecumenism” as “a turning toward one another, looking one another in the eyes, recognizing each other as human beings made in the image of God, loving one another, and discussing our differences with respect and love”; once, when I was talking to him about the challenges of keeping Eighth Day going during the pandemic, he commented—and pointedly emphasized to me that his words had more than just an economic meaning—that when it comes to creating spaces for ideas as well as commerce, “the door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something larger than themselves.” In this way of thinking, I cannot imagine a better metaphor for, and a better invitation to, the forming and renewing of cultural connections and communities, than bookish places—libraries and, of course, bookstores.

I’ve always loved bookstores, both new and used. I love being able to go into well-curated spaces for readers, thinkers, and people who wish to share what they’ve learned from and experienced through all that they’ve read and thought about. When I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University in the 1990s, people like Don Fossum and Linda Brummett ran a bookstore that sold not only the textbooks which professors assigned us students, but maintained an active—if subtle—presence in the intellectual life of the university, hosting talks and issuing newsletters and keeping books that challenged the university’s religious mission available behind the Information Desk for those who knew who to ask. By the early 2000s, tragically, university bookstores were going the way of the dodo, as cost-cutting and internet delusions convinced most colleges and universities to use their bookstores primarily as a way to sell merchandise to visiting alumni and prospective students, and to move most of the actual business of placing books in the hands of those who need them online. The bookstore here at Friends University was never large, but Michael Sullivan oversaw it successfully for years with a wry and knowing attitude (knowing, in particular, what to say and what not to say, and when); when Friends finally closed it—turning the space into an exercise room for students—in 2022, Michael recognized the move as inevitable, but still tragic all the same.

The tragedy of a bookstore closing, and the reason why various trends suggesting that the brick-and-mortar bookstore may have weathered the worst that the online world can throw at them are a cause for celebration, is assured not because bookstores are the only place one can find collections of writings on whatever particular topic interests you. Rather, it is because bookstores have often been—and in hands loving readers like Warren, absolute were—places where one can find collections of people: people reading, yes, but also seeking, learning, sharing. Warren assuredly understood such connectivity as an instantiation of ecumenical Christian grace—the spirit moving through and among us all, building chains between living people and thoughtful observers of the human experience and God’s work long dead. But if that’s not your sort of acculturation, if that’s not how you experience renewal, it takes nothing away from the simple necessity of spaces where people, and books, can find one another, and that which is out in God’s creation—in all its scientific, poetic, historical, literary, and cultural glory—can be taken up by a reader once again…and, of course, recommended to any of the readers sharing that common space together. That, in the end, was, to my mind anyway, the true secret of Warren’s Eighth Day Books, and of any great library or bookstore: it’s a space where everyone, even the oddest and most oppositional of persons, can find someone to recommend to them a book to read and be renewed by. Warren did that better than most, and for that I, like thousands of others, am grateful.