Friday Reflections on Mormonism and the Cross

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent. A version of this post previously appeared at Times and Seasons]

This past Sunday, which was Palm Sunday (though so far as I know, no one in our ward made mention of that fact), my second daughter, Caitlyn, was taught in her Primary class that the Atonement which we Mormons accept Jesus Christ to have performed for us--the Atonement which we, along with the rest of the Christian world, particularly honor with our commemoration of His resurrection every Easter--was performed in the Garden of Gethsemane, not (or at least not primarily) upon the Cross. Her teacher's comments, at least as she relayed them to me, might be subject to some quibbling, but in my experience at least, they reflect an easily substantiated reality: in our scripture study, in our worship services, in our rhetoric and in our art, Mormons--at least the American Mormons I know best--do tend to emphasize what we understand to be Jesus's active obedience to the Father, His conscious, brave, loving (and presumably free) choice to take upon Himself an awesome burden of sin while praying in the Garden, rather than His passive submission to the deprivation, humiliation, and death upon the Cross which followed. Our focus, in other words, is upon this...


...rather than the Cross.

This Good Friday, I would like to express my dissent from my daughter's Primary teacher's lesson. Not that I would disagree with the basic accuracy of his description of what the majority of Mormons probably believe, if they were of a mind to pin-down the specifics of their understanding of the Atonement. No, I would, instead, just like to personally dissent from the substance of the claim itself. I'm a Mormon, and for me, the Atonement which I reflect upon at Eastertime is all about the Cross.

It really begins with the Sermon on the Mount, which, in the history of popular Christianity, frequently gets turned into a series of ethical edicts--important edicts to be sure, but still, "merely" ethical, somewhat separate from the heavy theological transformations associated with Jesus's atoning work. But my reading of the Sermon has usually run differently. It is the radical powerlessness of the message that strikes me most strongly. Here is the Savior, telling his disciples not to turn to the courts, not to attempt to turn conflicts to their own advantage, not to expect or seek praise, not to limit one’s charity or forgiveness or love to those who are decent and kind, but to extend it to every person, friend or enemy. At almost every point throughout the whole Sermon, Jesus is telling us to submit to authority, to refrain from judgment, to embrace every burden and confess every sin. The overwhelming message is one of humility--or indeed, passivity. That is, Christ is calling upon those who follow Him to allow the world to act upon them, rather than to arrogate to themselves the authority and power to act upon the world.

Now of course, as alluded to above, the Sermon on the Mount is not the totality of Jesus’s teachings. But the notion that He preached passivity is not some completely incongruous doctrine that somehow sneaked into the tradition through the back door. "Passivity" and "passion" are, at their roots, talking about the same thing--allowing oneself to be used, to be filled, to be moved by and subject to others and their needs. Hence the traditional description of Christ’s suffering and death as His "Passion": He made himself powerless and weak before the mobs, the Romans, the Sanhedrin, the devil, the sins of all human history, He let it all act upon Him, and in that passivity, He transcended the logic of death and hell itself, and thus triumphed. From the ultimate weakness, from submission, comes the power to remake the world.

Accepting--even, perhaps, embracing--one's powerlessness, one's dependency upon God and one's disengagement from the world, is not an easy perspective to maintain, especially in 21st-century America, the land of instant gratification and self-righteous complaint. And that is where, I think, I find remembering the Cross becomes most crucial to appreciating the whole work of the Atonement. I sometimes describe myself as a "closet Lutheran": not because I necessarily embrace many elements of Luther's theology (though I do embrace more than a few), but primarily because of Luther’s fundamental description of humankind--simul justus et peccator, simultaneously sinner and saved--and how that line comes closer to capturing my own intuitions about my own condition than any other work of Christian commentary I have ever read. At the heart of the Sermon on the Mount there is Jesus's uncompromising call for us to "be perfect." But that call is not one, as natural men, we can ever fully, completely, respond to. To whatever degree we do succeed in responding to it, it is a function of our becoming...well, passive (or, as the scripture says, "submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father). Which is what we find Jesus exemplifying most thoroughly, most absolutely, upon the Cross.

If the call to perfection, Jesus's ethical call for us to serve and bless and love all of those around us, is bound up with the notion of being able to express that love not only despite but indeed through abasement, powerlessness, weakness, and acceptance, then--I think, at least--the image of a willfully chosen, struggled-with-and-triumphantly-accomplished Atonement can never truly capture what our Savior accomplished for us. We need, much more than Gethsemane, to focus on where Jesus was defeated; where God Himself was beaten, wounded, and murdered, for all humankind. No other could descend so low; consequently, no other could ever provide such grace, such service, to all the rest of us who still, as fallen mortals, pray selfishly and stand defiantly and insist on maintaining our (ridiculously pathetic) power and pride. So taking up the cross--symbolically and otherwise--becomes a way to make oneself beholden to one’s indebtedness, to acknowledge the weak and humiliating end which made and sill makes a new beginning for us all.

Douglas Davies, an Anglican priest, wrote a book some years ago with thoughtfully explored, among other things, Mormon approaches to the idea of Atonement, and its concomitant idea of God's grace, that which enables us all to stand in the shadow of the cross and continually strive to be perfect in God's eyes, however often we (inevitably) fail. At one point in the book he observes: "In Gethsemane...in the LDS [that is, Latter-day Saint, or Mormon] preexistence, Christ is the clear and decisive voice, accepting his heavenly father's will for the benefit of others. He is the proactive Christ....[while on] Calvary, by contrast, Christ becomes more passive, led, mocked, crucified and killed. The logic of LDS discourse on atonement is grounded in this self-commitment to affliction, and not in an abject passivity as a sacrifice upon whom death is wrought" (pg. 49). David Paulsen and Cory Walker thoughtfully reviewed Davies's book for FARMS, and acknowledged the force of many of his insights, but also took issue with the case that he built for Mormon thought on the Atonement as something overwhelmingly concerned with choice and affirmation, rather than sacrifice and submission. They argue, among other things, that the common Mormon reluctance to use the Cross as a symbol has no theological grounding in Mormon revelations and official statements whatsoever, but is really just a historical accident of where and when Mormon religious culture began to flourish. More importantly, they insist that while the Cross is not mentioned in our sacrament prayers, a fuller consideration of our full sacramental liturgy "should [make it] clear that [these prayers are] a reference to Christ's body which he laid down in death, as a sacrifice." The sacrament, then, is our connection to the Cross, to His brokenness and death, His ultimate passive giving over of Himself to the sin of world, as a sacrifice, for our sakes. They conclude that while the language of the Cross, like the language of grace, may remain mostly "implicit" in Mormon teachings, it is there all the same. Gethsemane and Golgotha, choice and grace, prayer and Cross, together in one act of Atonement. As one great modern-day servant of God has described it, "as pertaining to this perfect atonement, wrought by the shedding of the blood of God--I testify that it took place in Gethsemane and at Golgotha, and as pertaining to Jesus Christ, I testify that he is the Son of the Living God and was crucified for the sins of the world."

I like this conclusion, though I suspect in some ways it is too pat. It is one thing to say that submissive weakness and responsible affirmation go hand-in-hand in salvation; it is another thing entirely to understand how to live that way. Which, perhaps, is itself simply another way of pointing out that only Jesus Christ knew how to act perfectly, while yet being acted upon. For the rest of us...well, as we make our way through the world, in the shadow of Jesus’s saving work, I suppose we have to just self-correct as necessary--and if the thought and image of the Cross provides a guide to such correction, then that is a strong enough reason, for me at least, to buck whatever opposing traditions and teachings I may encounter, and turn my eyes, and the eyes of my children, to act great act of acceptance which we all, as prideful, natural men and women, must ever be in need of learning from.

Richard John Neuhaus, the brilliant and controversial Catholic leader and writer, wrote a book before he died called Death on a Friday Afternoon, portions of which I've praised before, as I've pondered Neuhaus's legacy and the meaning of the Christian (and my own Mormon Christian) faith. Some of his words return to me now; they may not be particularly Mormon words, but they appropriate words for today, all the same:

Atonement. At-one-ment. What was separated by an abyss of wrong has been reconciled by the deed of perfect love. What the first Adam destroyed the second Adam as restored. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." We knew not what we did when we reached for the right to name good and evil. We knew not what we did when we grabbed what we could and went off to a distant country. We knew not what we did when, in the madness of excusing ourselves, we declared God guilty. But today we have come to our senses. Today, here at the cross, our eyes are fixed on the dying derelict who is the Lord of life. We look at the one who is everything that we are and everything we are not, the one who is true man and true God. In him we, God and man, are perfectly one. At-one-ment. Here, through the cross, we have come home. Home to the truth about ourselves. Home to the truth about what God has done about what we have done. And now we know, or begin to know, why this awful, awe-filled Friday is called good.

Friday Morning Videos: "Running in the Family"

These guys definitely deserved to be bigger than they were in their heyday; they're one of my favorite bands. And just to prove how completely they missed the brass ring (despite a couple of top 40 tunes in the U.S.), I confess that I have no memory whatsoever of Level 42's 80s music while I was growing up (though I'm sure I must have heard some of it). It was hearing one of my fellow missionaries in South Korea singing their praises that led me to dig up their music once I came home, and giving it serious attention. To say the least, I was rewarded. Simply peerless, smooth, hip, funky, perfect pop sound. So many great cuts to choose from; picking this video was more a matter of arbitrary taste than anything else.

Christian Democratic Communities and Teleological States: A Response to God's Economy

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Lew Daly's book, God's Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, is something of an odd masterpiece, a brilliant revisionist study of the idea of church-state partnerships in the struggle for social justice and collective goods. I say "revisionist" thinking primarily in terms of my own--and Daly's--American context; in societies where the legacy of established churches remain, the available language for talking about the various means of providing for the poor (whether that language be legalistic, political, or simply economic) is much broader than is the case in the United States, where the separation of church and state--as well as a fairly individualistic mainline and evangelical Protestantism--have long been (and to a degree, still are) the dominant paradigms. So Daly's arguments about the long evolution of different arguments about how churches can and should supplement the state (or vice versa!) in providing welfare and protection to the needy will likely not seem quite so "revisionist" to those schooled in, or experience with, Catholic social teachings, Dutch Calvinist social pluralism, and the like. But to this reader, at least, they were fantastically eye-opening.

In a book so broad, it is difficult to pick out and summarize any one of its many fascinating claims--but, since book reviews oblige one to do so, I'll try (guided significantly by his precis, here). Among other things, Daly argues that the "compassionate conservative" vision of "faith-based initiatives," the effort by the Bush administration to extend the provisioning of essential welfare resources through the agency of various disparate religious organizations, was hardly an original idea, but was in fact yet another development in an ongoing argument which extends back to, and took its original form in the wake of, the French Revolution. In the (most people would say admirable) efforts of the leaders of the revolution to end the numerous and often horrific abuses which the ancien régime had visited upon the French people--abuses which were often harshly tied up in the land and industries which the church and hereditary aristocrats controlled and employed to their own undemocratic ends--the French radicals went too far; they insisted upon, in contrast to the multiple modes of life and association which characterized traditional France, the existence of only one, uniform "corporation": the French nation itself. There could be no other communal property, no other citizen attachments, nothing. The aim was egalitarian. The result, however, was not; the advantages enjoyed by the wealthy did not disappear (as they almost never do), but the ability of all others to build for themselves communities that could help them sustain mutually enriching lives was seriously compromised. This was a radical individualism, which in particular left the poor (or those who worked in less-than prestigious professions, or who lived in less-than powerful parts of the country) unable to organize and effectively support and defend their ways of life. As these same individualistic ideas spread throughout Europe and America along with the Industrial Revolution, there appeared in response strong critics of French revolutionary fervor. Daly focuses in particular upon Catholic social and Dutch anti-revolutionary thinkers, both of whom, in different ways, emphasized the crucial role that the Christian religion must play in bringing security to those who, in the modern era, lacked such. The argument, from that point on, was and has been a continuing legal, political, and economic tug-of-war, with one side--the side taken by both advocates of a secularist state and supporters of an untrammeled capitalist market--seeing politically organized charitable and church groups as their common enemy, while the other side strives to advance the argument for the social pluralism and libertas ecclesiae, the freedom for church's to do God's work amongst the poor.

The book is powerful, provocative, and filled with eminently-arguable theses. (For example, in the foreword to the book, E.J. Dionne, while strongly praising Daly's work, take serious issue with him over his rather extensive claims regarding the influence Catholic and social democratic thought had on the New Deal.) So let me pick out one of the book's many strands of thought: leaving aside the question of just how one determines in the first place the extent and nature of the egalitarian support which social justice demands the poor receive to enable them to be full-fledged members of the community, what does Daly have to say about the role (and the inter-relationship) which church's, local communities, and the central state have in providing such justice?

In what I thought to be a particular insightful section of the book, Daly reflects upon the mid-1900s rediscovery of "social capital" as a term of analysis when thinking about community. About this, he writes:

John DiIulio and other social scientists have made significant efforts to [consider the role of religious providers in terms of social capital]. [Robert] Putnam himself...[has] argued that "nearly half of America's stock of social capital," as measured by membership, philanthropy, and volunteerism, "is religious or religiously affiliated." Or, as John DiIulio terms it, roughly half of our social capital is really "spiritual capital." Yet when Putnam specifies that "houses of worship" spend $15-20 billion annually on social services, it should also be clear that the scale of spiritual capital (at least by this one measure of involvement) barely touches the magnitude of social needs: $15-20 billion equals approximately $350 annually for every person near or below the poverty line as of 2007. In gross comparative terms, the total spiritual capital of the nation amounts to less that 20 percent of the total "poverty gap" in the United States--the amount by which impoverished people fall below the poverty line, which totaled $107 billion in 2001. This is to say nothing of the tens of millions of people who live near the poverty line on low-wage pay or go through their days only one medical crisis or one corporate merger away from plunging downward to the bottom rungs of the income ladder....

[E]ven if the "faith factor" is definitively proven [to be effective in responding to the needs of poor individuals and families] with further comprehensive research (perhaps leading politicians to prioritize faith-based services beyond current efforts to "level the playing field"), this does nothing to rectify what is obviously a more fundamental problem: the deficient scale of faith-based welfare (indeed of all welfare combined) in a country with growing poverty and increasing downward wage pressures affecting tens of millions of households above the poverty line....What social assistance should accomplish and by what means, and how the cost should be borne, assuming that more should be done, is...a larger question, not just of welfare policy, but of "public purpose," or what [Abraham] Kuyper and his scattered American followers call "public justice" (pp. 190-191).

Public justice calls for more and better aid to be given to the suffering among us, but it cannot (and, speaking both realistically and politically, will not) be given along convention welfare state lines. I would argue that the long and not-yet (perhaps never-to-be) concluded debate over paying for and providing health care in the United States is a fine example of such: despite many serious attempts to introduce more localism or more communitarianism (or both) into the reforms proposed, in the end the result was perhaps predictable from the beginning: a merging of state and corporate power to accomplish much needed, but still philosophically regrettable, ends. What will have to happen to truly expand upon the vision of faith-based initiatives--the vision of Christian aid being sufficient to satisfying both the human and the communal needs of all needy people in any given polity--is a "re-engineering of the [whole] social safety net along pluralist lines....from the perspective of families and communities, and from a religious perspective, restricting the state while ignoring what is happening in society is not genuine pluralism but simply a faith-based alliance with liberal anti-statism" (pp. 192-193). Seeking to cut back on welfare, and encouraging--whether legally or monetarily or both--churches to take up the slack, while not seeking at the same time to seriously repair a socio-economic order which continues to prize an ultimately unforgiving and rapacious individualism above all, is no way to be true to principles which God calls the believer. A more comprehensive approach to welfare--what Daly calls, in reference to many policies which exist in Western European states, "Christian Democratic welfare policy"--is what is needed: a welfare policy that orients the whole of society, in its many different (and much in need of defense!) parts, around a common restorative goal. To quote Daly again:

Put simply, the faith-based initiative embodies a pluralist vision of societal restoration, based on legal recognition of the real personality of social groups--most importantly families and their churches and communities--coupled with requisite public provisioning for their security and special needs if this autonomy is infringed or reduced by other centers of power, whether public or private. In its fullness this vision encompasses a mandate of stopping or mitigating the impact of all institutions or organized powers that threaten the "tie-beams and anchors of the social structure," or "God-willed community," as Kuyper put it (pg 193).

Daly's conclusion is, ultimately, a hopeful one--that the introduction of a constitutional and procedural language in American politics for seeing welfare delivered and supplemented by locally grounded faith-based organizations is a step towards the kind of pluralistic re-imagining which is necessary for social or public justice to be achieved. Christians are called to help the poor; the best way to help them is to enable them to find and defend dignified ways of family and communal life; the scale of the need in regards to such is massive, and cannot at present be provided by churches alone--but to leave churches out of the matter entirely is to fail to acknowledge the critique, authority, and dignity which local religious bodies can provide; hence, the development of church-state partnerships is a crucial step forward in the filling of a gap in our thinking about the needs of the poor which extends back to the original, violent separating of the individual from the communities of faith and security which they once knew.

I wish I could share in Daly's optimism, but I do not. Not because I do not find his analysis of this--as well as many other--strands of the argument persuasive; on the contrary, I do, and like Adam Webb says in his consideration of the book, I am fully supportive of Daly's proposals. But Adam also touches on what I think to be the crucial issue. He observes that "plural sovereignty is grounded on a telos," and that if we want to make into subsidiarity something more than Michael Walzer's (admirable from the communitarian point of view, but limited insofar as the Christian one goes) "spheres of justice," then we must have a "more rigorous--and universal--underlying view of human purpose, human dignity, and the practices that secure them." We must, in other worlds, be able to collectively conceive of an end for welfare, or else doing justice for the poor will be indistinguishable from endlessly providing them with one or another different egalitarian program. Let me be clear: I think that most of those egalitarian programs are valuable, and usually are much better--when it comes to keeping families and neighborhoods intact--than nothing. But on their own they will only incidentally provide space for the development of truly democratic communities, of communities of capable, responsible, active, compassionate citizens and human beings...and sometimes, tragically, will become, as Daly notes in his critique of the welfare state, an active obstacle to such. What is needed is for the state to become, as Daly's title puts it, a "Caring State"....and for the state to care, it must believe in something. It needs a civil religion--and certainly a more robust one that the United States has at present.

Most of those who take the idea of civil religion at all seriously in our hyper-pluralistic and individualistic age probably agree that America's civil religion, to the extent that it has one, has been tainted by a Christianity Lite, or "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism," as some prefer to call it. I'm on record as believing that, to whatever extent such a self-regarding, non-judgmental, atheological civil religion has captivated the country, that...well, there could be worse fates. A civil religion which is tolerant, pragmatic, open-minded, decent, and merciful, is to be much preferred over one that is none of those things. But that is a civil religion too well-suited to our meritocratic age; it has no real notion of suffering or sacrifice, and hence has no need of grace. If your religion--or at least your concept of the moral norms of the civil order--lacks a notion of grace, it therefore also lacks a notion of gifts; all it can say is that some people are lucky, not that some people are blessed. And with that slips away the notion of a blessed--or, as Martin Luther King preferred, a "beloved"--community, one in which the members' feeling for and service towards one another reflects something larger, adds up to something larger. The simple principles of social justice and welfare, without the teleological notions of adding up and gifting and blessing which the concepts of subsidiarity and "sphere sovereignty" (Catholic and Kuyperian terms, respectively) introduce, can never fulfill their own--often unstated, and these days perhaps mostly forgotten--aspirations. It also makes them an easy target for libertarian-minded Christians, who wish to reject the aims of welfare entirely, or who prefer to piously speak of freeing the churches to handle social welfare, without giving any thought to the pluralistic reality which--at least insofar as Daly thinks and hopes--faith-based initiatives hint at. But with America's current civil religion, such hints will not be enough.

Rod Dreher touches on this point, tangentially, in his thoughts about Phillip Blond's recent visit to the U.S., and the connection which "Red Toryism" might have to subsidiarian and localist reforms of the welfare state. While he was cheered by Blond's diagnosis of our present condition, and applauded his solutions, he doubted their applicability: "[F]or [Red Toryism] to be true, people have to not only be virtuous, but to agree on what virtue is....What the poor need is not a politician, but a preacher....We are stuck being governed by a procedural liberalism because we cannot agree on what constitutes 'the good life.' Moreover, in our liberal/libertarian political settlement, we no longer even consider that a concept of the good life can be arrived at through political discussion. In a heterogeneous, culturally pluralistic society like ours, it's not enough to point to the Christian tradition....[T]he radical transformation of our political and social life that Blond envisions will not take place through politics, but requires religious conversion." I can't disagree with Rod's concerns. Indeed, I would extend them to Blond's proposals themselves--if they are to be taken serious, if they are to be understood as contributing, in their own way, to same kind of Christian democratic project that Daly thinks may be enabled through faith-based initiatives, then they must remain teleological; they must maintain their religious point. Which means that the most important component of Red Toryism, like the most important component of Bush's original faith-based idea, is the religious worldview behind them, and the ability to elaborate such. For Bush, that worldview was essentially unexamined, as DiIulio's own experience with the Bush administration proved. For Blond, that worldview is hopefully closer to the surface. The "Radical Orthodoxy" of John Milbank and others may seem, at first glace, an odd addition to the ongoing argument which Daly has traced, what were their talk of "traditionalist socialism" or "socialism by grace". But a worldview that can provide an telos for the caring state like this one--"an associationist communitarianism, which combines left egalitarianism with conservatism about cultural and ethical values"--is something to be taken seriously.

Who knows? Perhaps, after Obama in America, after (perhaps) Cameron in Great Britain, Daly may have enough material to write an additional chapter to his impressive book. But in the meantime, he has given us plenty to debate about, all the same.

Influential (Actually Published, Actually Read Cover-to-Cover Before I Became A Trained Intellectual) Books, Part 2

The wonderful discussion threads which were prompted by this meme (I'm thinking in particular of those found at Crooked Timber and Rod Dreher's and E.D. Kain's blogs) have left me feeling as though I haven't been truthful--that I've only told half the story, at best. And so, just because it's going to keep bugging me if I don't, I present a second contribution to the "Influential Books" meme--only this time, I'm staying away from the stuff I read as part of my undergraduate and graduate education, and looking at books that I read when young or for fun, completely aside from what I was doing to make me into a officially credentialed member of the academic intelligentsia.

One caveat remains the same, though--these are actual books I really did read cover-to-cover...which means, once more, lots of essays or articles of different sorts (all those chapters from Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization!) which challenged me or got me thinking are left aside. Oh, and I'm also going to fifteen again, just because. In alphabetic order:

Richard Adams, Watership Down--I first read this aloud, to my older brother Daniel, when we were both in about 5th or 6th grade. I picked it up at a book sale, knowing nothing about it, and was subsequently swallowed up by the adventure and characters which Adams gave his readers. I never thought of it--and still don't--as a "fantasy" novel, but rather as a grand moral epic, one which gave me the idea that every type of person (Hazel, the wise and wounded leader; Strawberry, the repentant cosmopolitan; Blackavar, the haunted survivalist) can be part of a grand and shared destiny. It was a book which, even more than Tolkien, bonded Daniel's (who was Bigwig, the big tough fighter) and my (who was Fiver, the introspective mystic) imaginary worlds together.

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays--Of the many collections of Berry's which I have since read, this first one, read when I was still only beginning to theorize about the appeal which localism and Luddism had for me, remains the best. Perhaps surprisingly, my favorite essay in it is "The Problem of Tobacco," wherein Berry speaks sympathetically, sadly, and wisely about the tobacco farmers he has known, and by so doing expresses well the difficult balancing act which any attempt to live by principles while also living amongst one's fellow beings invariably entails.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol--I have no idea when I first read this story, and I have no idea if the first version I read was a complete one, or one of the hundreds of adaptations out there. All I know is that this story made me passionately devoted to Christmas, and to the liberal lessons it cannot, I think, help but teach.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes--I read through every single one of these short stories, and all four novels, when I was around 13 years old. I knew, even while reading them, that I couldn't be a Sherlock Holmes; I felt no identification with Holmes's deductive, logical brilliance. But they did make me want to be brilliant, and gave me some no-doubt unwarranted pride in the small amount of brilliance I did have.

James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man--The first real work of historical scholarship I ever read. I think I might have been inspired to pick it up by a trip our family took to Revolutionary and Civil War historical sights around the east coast when I was 14. It ignited two passions in me: for America's political history, and for books (I searched for years in those pre-internet years for the four-volume biography this one volume was based upon, finally discovering them in a bookstore in Williamsburg, VA, during a summer internship in DC in 1993).

John Irving, The Cider House Rules--Recommended to me by an English teacher while at BYU as an undergraduate, Irving made me really think about the power of non-mythic, non-epic story-telling for perhaps the first time. I became, for some years, an Irving obsessive, eventually reading all his novels from The World According to Garp to A Widow for One Year. My favorite--and, I think, the best of all those I've read--is A Prayer for Owen Meany, but this book, coming into my life when I was a confused, questioning, horny young man, forcing me to think again about what I truly believed about sex and truth-telling and abortion and rules and growing up, had the greater impact.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce--I found an old paperback copy of this book in my first missionary apartment in Seoul, South Korea, in the late summer of 1988. I'd never read any Lewis before, though I was familiar with The Screwtape Letters from church leaders who would quote from them (as much as practically any other body of conservative American Christians, Mormons like being able to cite Lewis as he was one of our own). Now, having read much more Lewis, The Great Divorce, a story of a group of damned souls taking a bus tour to heaven, still resonates with me--it is, I think, his finest, wisest, most sharply observed and deeply imagined apologetic work. All of it was good, and parts of it (like the encounter between the angel and the soul struggling with the sin of lust) were shatteringly powerful.

J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground--This tale of the conflict over busing in Boston is a monumental bit of creative non-fiction. No other book or article or essay I've ever read has ever so achingly conveyed the vain ambitions and tragic underside of modern liberalism: the good intentions, the high principles, the inability to relate to the actual human beings caught up in its projects, and the way it so often and so frustratingly (though perhaps also necessarily) sails over deep fissures of class and culture.

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns--Of the big graphic novels that came out in the mid-1980s and were considered game-changers in the comic book world, Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's The Watchmen is the one which gets the most critical attention, and deservedly so. I can't pretend that it isn't the superior work; it truly is a masterpiece of comic story-telling. But my heart is with the one I read first: Miller's viciously funny, heavy-handed, emotionally rough tale of Batman's return after 10 years of retirement to a collapsing world. Its politics were frankly fascist; its mythologizing of Batman was crude. But still, panel after panel hit me with Kubrickian force. It's the ugly get-it-done! side of my liberal interventionism which I shouldn't ever let myself forget.

The New Testament--Wait, you say, you're Mormon; shouldn't you be all about the Book of Mormon? Well, I do take our religion's additional testament of Jesus Christ quite seriously. But if I'm looking for a text that has shaped the fine grain of my Christian thinking, it is simply this. I was on my Mormon proselytizing mission before I ever read the Bible all the way through; I failed with the Old Testament (got about as far as Lamentations), but couldn't get enough of the New. Paul's epistles, in particular, framed fundamental questions and hopes about God and Christ which the stories of the Book of Mormon, I think, at best only expand upon, rather than express so succinctly, or with such poignancy.

Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion--Here, then, is where my Mormonism comes in. For a religious tradition less than 200 years old, it is perhaps to be expected that Mormonism hasn't yet produced a great many profound thinkers (as opposed to inspired and wise leaders, of which we've had more than a few). Nibley, however, was one such: a scholar of the ancient world who, with a deeply and entirely orthodox Mormon sensibility, used his learning to kindly yet relentless tear apart every compromise the Mormon community (particularly the politically conservative, thoroughly capitalist, environmentally unfriendly, intensely patriotic, western American Mormon culture he knew best) had made with 20th-century life. Long before I'd been able to truly situate myself in regards to all the postmodern philosophy and radical politics I was absorbing, Nibley's essays (in particular his magnum opus, "Work We Must, But the Lunch is Free") taught me--admittedly, perhaps inaccurately--that my faith was egalitarian, communitarian, anti-modern, anti-authoritarian, and delightfully fun. I still agree with him (or at least want to) today.

Orwell, Down and Out In Paris and London--Orwell's 1984 was the best novel I read in high school, and trying to unlock Orwell's argument with and about modern democratic life in the mid-20th century was one of the first real interpretive puzzles I ever consciously took on. In time, I came to love--and wanted to emulate--his essays and reportage even more than his fiction. Despite that, I didn't read this book until I'd graduated from BYU. I was, perhaps not coincidentally, working as a dishwasher at a restaurant at the time, giving me the chance to verify that, however artificially constructed Orwell's persona may have been, his observations about human life and work at the bottom of the food-chain were dead-on accurate.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings--Like tens of millions of others worldwide over the past half-century, Tolkien was my gateway drug to fantasy. The consciousness that history, geography, language, religion, genealogy, all of it, was and, in fact, should be properly understood as the constituent elements of myth-making and world-creation permanently altered not just how I read stories, but the way I valued stories as well. To tell a story that made use of all the adventures and archetypes echoing around our heads well was to do something more than just to have created a fun Dungeons and Dragons campaign; it was to have done something that was, in some profound sense, moral. And who doesn't want to be part of that?

George F. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft--I read so much George F. Will when I was in high school; I bought big collections of his columns, and I thought his regular mini-essays on the back page of Newsweek magazine were the height of intelligent journalism. I've long since changed my mind about him. But when I bought this book of his (which, dork that I am, I actually was holding in my senior high school photograph), a set of essays he gave at Harvard long before he became a complete partisan, I realized a couple of things. First, I realized I agreed with him at least insofar in that I could never be a libertarian; I like respond to tradition and community too instinctively. Second, I realized he was doing what I wanted to be able to do: to marshal history--Burke! Tocqueville! Marx!--to defend an explanation of government and society. (It took me a few years to realize that was called "political theory"...and then, away I went.)

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men--A great novel, reflecting a great moment in American literature, yes. But for me, more simply, it is the finest evocation of the feeling of belonging and place that I have ever read. The fact that Warren could so effectively, so lovingly, do this for unlovely people living in the squalid, corrupt political culture of the poverty-stricken Jim Crow south makes it all the more remarkable to me. I have no illusions that I could ever write anything as good as this book. But I do continue to tend to the illusion that, once I found a place for us to be, I could live as fully, as rootedly, as the characters Warren described did. That one, of course, is a work in progress, and probably always will be.

Friday Morning Videos: "Kiss and Tell"

Well, if I gave Roxy Music the video treatment last week, I've got to given Bryan Ferry's solo work a nod this week, of course.



I swear, there are a couple of shots in this video where he looks exactly like a younger, Miller's Crossing-era Gabriel Byrne.

Classic Bugs Bunny Rules Us All

Doug Merrill's new Facebook profile has inspired me:



Man, I haven't seen the unexpurgated original in years.

On Health Care, Parliamentary Democracy, and the Tyranny of the Majority

Lots of excellent "Day After" thoughts out there, as the final hurdle in the way of establishing some kind of (still too minimal, still private-insurer-based, still poorly funded...yet still, I think, very much worth passing!) national health coverage system retreats into history. I am intrigued by Jacob's idea here (will the positive freedom enabled by the greater security provided by health care reform weaken other forces which similarly push for security against the free market?), Matt's observation here (by standing on their principles and refusing to compromise whatsoever, are the Republicans the unsung heroes of pushing the Democrats towards comprehensive reform?), and Ross's question here (will health care reform will turn out to be the last peak liberal egalitarianism will be able to climb before an era of global retrenching forces a long, slow, climb-down?). All are worth reading. But let me focus on something which comes up on Megan McArdle's and Laura McKenna's blogs.

Has the long and often ugly struggle over health care reform in essence made our national government (or at least Congress, or at least the Democratic party) more parliamentary? Megan thinks so:

Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all....I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent--I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them. We're not a parliamentary democracy, and we don't have the mechanisms, like votes of no confidence, that parliamentary democracies use to provide a check on their politicians. The check that we have is that politicians care what the voters think. If that slips away, America's already quite toxic politics will become poisonous.

This is, to be blunt, stupid. Laura knows it:

Not everything that gets passed in Congress needs to be bipartisan. This vote represents a major failure of the Republican party to come up with a better idea for how to deal with rising health care costs and how to deal with the millions of uninsured Americans waiting in line in emergency rooms across the country. With the lack of policy imagination, all they had left was a "no" vote and that's what they did. It was the cowardly way out of this problem.

That's all that really needs to be said...but I like to talk, so let's pick apart Megan a little bit more. First "lie to the voters, and then ignore them"? The first part is simply false; while obviously the sausage-making process which is legislation has contorted the promises and specifics which many people, both Democratic and Republican, debated regarding health care reform over the past year, President Obama's basic intentions were laid out from the very beginning of his campaign. No one doubted that this was going to be a priority of his (and of Pelosi's and Reid's) from Day One. As for the second part...ignore which percentage of voters, at what point, regarding which issue? The best measurements suggest that the opinion of the American people in regards to the specific bill voted on last night breaks down at about 50% opposed, 42% in favor. A significant difference, but not a huge one--and moreover, a difference moderated by the fact that increasing awareness of the bill's specific provisions increases its popularity across the board.

Second, Megan seems to do be making use of a strange double-standard here. On the one hand, we clearly do not have a direct, plebiscitarian democracy in the U.S.; we have an indirect, representative one. Political representatives obviously should be expected to attune themselves to the will of their constituents, but--as Megan herself notes--we do not have the structural mechanics in place for voter approval or disapproval to be directly (or, at least, more directly) rendered via popular party actions like votes of no confidence. All we have are, well, elections--the most recent one of which gave the Democratic party enough votes (though just barely) in both houses of Congress to push through their agenda. But, on the other hand, Megan seems to consider this "tyrannical," and attacks the Democratic party's rule by majority as failing to "care what the voters think." Does she actually want our system of government to be a direct and plebiscitarian one? Because, if she does, the types of reforms that would make it so are...parliamentarian, with the pursuant lessening of the power of the Senate and its filibuster, the very thing which most slowed health care reform down (and forced strange compromises in it) in the first place. I could, perhaps, get on board with that.

In a recent discussion on Front Porch Republic, talking again about the possibility of "Red Tory" ideas here in the U.S. in connection with Phillip Blond's visit, one commenter observed that those who really want to see a more subsidiarian and communitarian politics emerge in America ought to note that "Front Porch or Red Tory principles are more congruent with parliamentary rather than presidential democracy, with coalitions rather than majority rule, and with variable decentralisation based on subsidiarity rather than rigid federalism." I agreed, commenting that parliamentary democracy is one way of bringing to life certain populist democratic principles: namely, that "that people can form coalitions, that coalitions can create majorities on appropriate levels of government, and that said majorities ought to be able to rule...Parliamentary democracy arguably strikes a better balance between the needs to respect individual rights and to empower majority coalitions than does our own separation of powers system." Now, to be sure, the great bulk of those (at least in American history) who have styled themselves as "populists" have not spoken a parliamentary language. But the overlap is, I would argue, undeniable: the populist demand for local empowerment against distant entities invariably involves an expectation of democratic accountability and responsiveness--that a majority of people can rightly control their government, express their views, and defend their places through collective action....such as a coalition of those being rendered insuranceless because of pre-existing conditions and their sympathizers demanding access to insurance markets, perhaps? Some people, of course, might call that "tyranny of the majority"; I wonder if it would have been the sort of tyranny (a tyranny much more responsive to "what people think," such as what they thought when they elected the health-care-reform-supporting Barack Obama over John McCain by 53% to 45%--which, interestingly, is about the same percentage spread over health care approval today--in the first place) that Megan would have been more approving of.

The United States of America, with its size, its consolidated and corporate media, and its atrophied party system, is arguably not particularly well suited to parliamentary rule; very likely any such reforms would, in our present socio-economic and geo-political context, simply result in a change in the structure and nature of political representation, not make our representatives markedly more democratic. But still, it would be more direct; it would be more responsive, and more accountable, to "what voters think." If Megan thinks the lack of direct plebiscitarianism in our democracy, and the ability for an elected majority to pass laws in the face of an up-to 8% point range in relative popular disapproval--if, that is, she thinks the lack of a parliamentarian democratic attitude amongst our representatives--is a serious problem, there is a easy way to fix that: embrace parliamentarian reforms! But somehow, if the matter involves legislation she doesn't like, I suspect Megan would find "tyranny" in that as well.

[Update, 3/23/10, 3:57pm CST: Nate Silver runs down 14 different arguments which people like Megan make to argue that there was something "tyrannical" about the passage of the health care bill; I don't agree with all of this comments, but his last one, #14, is dead-on accurate, not to mention specifically germane to this post here:

[W]ere the Congress closer to a direct democracy--such as by having proportional representation of Senators, non-gerrymandered congressional districts, and a norm for majority-rules procedures in the Senate [in other words, needless to say, if it were more...parliamentarian!]--health care reform would have been signed into law months ago and would likely be substantially more liberal and sweeping than the reforms that have in fact been enacted.]

Looks Like They Made It (Final Reflections on Health Care Reform, Maybe)

(Update, 9:45pm, CST, 3/21/10: With a 219-212 vote in the House, and with Reid's Democrats in the Senate ready to mop-up the remaining details, and with Obama clearly ready to sign the damn thing, I'd say that it's only a slightly hyperbolic to announce that, love it or hate it, national health insurance reform is that the law of the land.)

Less than a day from now, President Obama's health care reform plan--The Health Care and Education Affordability Act--will be law, or at least very nearly so. Obviously, at the time of my writing this, the votes haven't been taken, and there are still ways in which Pelosi's carefully finagled vote-counting and timing process in the House of Representatives could collapse. And despite numerous assurances, it's still possible for Reid and the Democrats in the Senate to renege on their promises, or otherwise fumble the ball, and not put the negotiated reconciliation fixes over the finish line. But things are looking good for the Democrats--tight, but good.

Things are looking good for America too, I believe. This final version of the numerous plans hammered out in committees and through difficult votes in both the House and the Senate does some of the essential things most advocates of health insurance reform have always wanted to see done: puts firm regulations on insurance providers, so as to minimize their ability to exclude certain high-risk populations; provides the means (and the subsidies) for over 30 million uninsured Americans to purchase coverage; establishes individual mandates so to bring far more Americans into the same insurance market, thereby undercutting the affect which the aforementioned pooling had on the basic guarantees which characterized the various plans offered. And on top of that, it seems likely to exercise at least some control over medical costs, and introduce further controls as the years go by. All of which, policy-wise, are positive things.

But what do I know--I'm not a policy wonk, am I? Of course not; I can figure a few things out for myself, and there are a few numbers that I can add up in my own head, but when it comes to something as complex as this--the single largest expansion of America's welfare state in close to a half-century--there's just people I trust, because I can figure ways to see their statements and actions align with my own beliefs and preferences, and people I don't.

For example, I trust Dennis Kucinich. I'm not crazy about him by any means, at least partly because he occasionally seems borderline crazy himself. Also, I liked him better when he was willing to speak out against abortion. But as far as someone trying his best to push social democratic aims in a political environment that provides no real partisan location for advocates of social democracy, his record is second to few, if not none. So if he's comes to accept that the passage of this flawed-but-still-important bit of legislation has become crucial to the government's ability to further other social democratic and progressive causes, I take that as a heartening sign.

I mentioned abortion above; what about that? His relatively uncomplicated support for abortion rights was the one thing which really, truly bothered me about supporting Obama in 2008; does this legislation confirm all my fears? No, it does not. The argument about whether this bill would enable or increase federal funding for abortion was, I think anyway, always an artificial discussion, just a way of playing out ideological animosities and frustrations in the midst of a red-hot policy debate. The Stupak amendment in the original House bill included anti-abortion restrictions beyond the long-invoked Hyde Amendment to prevent the federal government from directly or indirectly funding abortion; Senate Democrats couldn't go along with that, and cut it back to the status quo. It's possible that conservative, anti-abortion House Democrats may get some specific executive language guaranteeing that status quo, but even if they don't get it, then all we have is what...well, what we already have. If that's good enough for an increasing majority of Catholic hospitals, health-workers, and activists, that's good enough for me.

What about my deep, theoretical concerns with it all? That it is, in the end, another entitlement, however well-meant, and not true reform: not anything that moves us towards greater solidarity, greater community empowerment, greater appreciation of the common good?

Well, those concerns are still there--indeed, reading the text of President Obama's final pep-talk to the House Democrats, just deepens those concerns, with the President insisting "this piece of historic legislation is built on the private insurance system that we have now and runs straight down the center of American political thought." Great--making our "private insurance system" central to a program designed to create a common foundation amongst all the members of our polity, not being subject to the divisions and competition which that same private insurance industry contributes to! It's frustrating, to be sure. It's frustrating because I'm convinced those same corporate entities are primarily responsible (most indirectly, but sometimes directly) in so isolating us and individualizing us, as consumers and citizens, as to make it almost inconceivable that real democratic government, real populist action, real community sovereignty and sufficiencv, is ever to be recovered. But with all that, I take solace from something Matt Stannard (a much more hard-core doomsayer than myself) recently observed:

Engaging institutions, even dying ones (perhaps especially dying ones), is unavoidable for virtually everyone in society. Our material positions put us there....On the other hand, we have to understand how the system is collapsing...to understand both the limits of reformism and the necessity to engage it precisely because it is crossing various economic and historical thresholds....Having listened to Democrats who actually favor the current legislation, to Democrats and other progressives who say it's better than nothing, to socialists who say it will make things worse...I agree with everyone. It isn't enough. It's a start. It's a distraction. It's a payoff. It will help some people. It will inspire some people. It will make some people complacent. It's a step forward and a step backward.

I wouldn't use all the language he uses, but I like his conclusion, because it fits, I suspect, pretty much any "reform" action taken in our present socio-economic context. The Health Care and Education Affordability Act is just that: something that will help many, make many more complacent ("That goodness that tiresome debate is finally over!" they will say), open up many new opportunities for greater social concern, as well as mollify us into thinking that we didn't need radical change after all. All at once.

Jonathan Cohn, who has followed this long legislative debate as well as anyone, thinks we have come to the "Closing Arguments," and he's hopeful; to his mind, the passage of health care reform in the House twelve or twenty hours from now could signal a crucial shift away from "conservative ideas about responsibility and vulnerability [which] have dominated political discussion for most of the last four decades," and back towards the animating principles of Social Security and Medicare: "We all give, in the form of financial contributions; and we all get, in the form of financial security...we are stronger [together] than when we are apart." I admire his communitarian sentiment, and I like the elements of it I see in America's welfare state, though I'm doubtful that someone who celebrates the end-result and downplays some of the corporate-friendly principles that were embraced at the beginning of the process fully appreciates what the communitarian point truly involves. James Poulos, though, has the opposite problem; he looks at health care reform as sees nothing but an overriding, self-righteous, legislation-by-fiat vision, a vision that posits "something is better than nothing" as a moral principle, which he rejects entirely: "unless you think this is true because insuring uninsured Americans is so important as to be worth doing even through a bill as wretched, misbegotten, and irresponsible as this, it is not true." But Poulos's ridiculous, Tea-Partier rhetoric about a bill that has been sent back and forth through the legislative wringer more times over the past year that the great majority of bills ever experience (how does ten months of constant debate and scrutiny add up to governing by "fiat"?) simply reveals him, beneath his philosophy, to be Mansfieldian at heart: someone so disbelieving that any kind of collective action or positive reforms can contribute to political liberty as to lead him to assume that anything which smacks of "reform" is by definition the undemocratic work of a Lawgiver, and therefore sees the "process" behind such as invalidating any and all claims that might be made on behalf of, for instance, insuring people, and regulating insurers, and maybe even lowering costs. I'm more sympathetic to Cohn than Poulos, obviously, but both of them miss this dialectical reality here: the end results don't justify or forgive every flawed principle behind the process, but the process itself is too much a part of the many admirable results to be reduced to a single, misbegotten mistake. Ends do not justify means, but neither are all ends subject to approval solely on the basis of one, absolute means-test. Reform isn't that bad a word...not yet, anyway.

Well, there you go: some (probably) final thoughts, as national health care reform enters what will very likely be it's very final act. Now watch everything go to hell ten hours from now, and this whole post gets rendered moot.

Friday Morning Videos: "More Than This"

Someone e-mailed me, and rebuked me: you've been doing this for more than a year, and still nothing from Roxy Music? Shame, shame, shame! To which I could only reply: you're right. How could they have slipped my mind? I don't know. Well, I can make up for that right here.



I hearby announce that the coming weeks will feature videos from the big-but-not-mainstream stars of the 80s video era. Should be fun.

Influential (Actually Published, Actually Read Cover-to-Cover During College or Graduate School) Books

Matthew Yglesias has put up a list of ten books that have been important influences in how he thinks about things. I can do that, too. Except, one problem: when it comes to my thinking--particularly stuff relevant to the political, philosophical, or otherwise intellectual thinking that I went to school for eleven years for--the reading that has influenced me most has usually come in the form of a journal or magazine article (or lately, a blog post). I'm not particularly proud of that, but that's the truth (and I suspect it's true for most academics as well).

So herewith, an attempt to be rigorous, and focus only on the books (though more than a few of them are collections of essays or articles). That means I'm leaving out some essays that profoundly influenced me, but you've got to put your boundaries somewhere. Also, I'm sticking with stuff that I read and which influenced me while I was forming my intellectual academic foundation, meaning the years from 1987 to 2001, with a two-year break in there while I was gallivanting around South Korea. (That means Tolkien is out!) And also, I'm going to have to go to fifteen, because I'm just verbose that way. In alphabetical order:

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Essays like "What is Freedom?" and "What is Authority?" gave me an entirely different way of thinking about democracy and liberty--or, at least, gave me a language for expressing what I had already been thinking about for a while.

F.M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism. The first--and, as yet, the only--complete and published study of Herder's political ideas that I ever read, and, as much as I in time came to disagree with some elements of Barnard's interpretations of his subject, his account Herder's romantic contribution to a historicized but still morally truthful account of culture and language still draws me in--much more than Herder's own actual writings do.

Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought. Came at a time in my education when my studies of Herder had convinced me that the struggle between the Aufklärer and the advocates of Counter-Enlightenment told the only philosophical story really worth knowing. I grew out of that obsession eventually, but this book and others like it gave me a historical context for understanding my own nascent romantic and/or hermeneutic approaches to political life, cultural identity, and religious truth.

Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. A slim book, but packed with provocative ideas. By treating Confucian ritual teachings as religious and "magical," Fingarette helped my anthropological and ideological interest in East Asian philosophy become a moral one as well.

David C. Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking Through Confucius. The first in a series of books which Hall and Ames wrote together, exploring--sometimes in a phenomenological, sometimes in a Deweyesque manner--the application of Confucius's Analects to essential philosophical questions from the Western tradition: the nature of truth, the purpose of society, the cultivation of the self. Helped give me a basic orientation as to how I wanted to make use of all these notions I'd brought back with me from East Asia.

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. Like much of Heidegger's writings (yes, I did try to read Being and Time; I got about a third of the way through) some of the essays are opaque and overwrought. But some of them--"The Letter on Humanism," "The Question Concerning Technology," "The Way to Language," for example--had a transformative impact on how I understood our way as human beings of perceiving and constructing both reality and society.

Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View. I think I must have underlined every sentence in this book. It was the first book I'd read that made me think both critically and practically about all the stuff I'd been reading about "republicanism" for years.

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Nowadays, I would probably put Marx's "On the Jewish Question" as the most important bit of Marxist thought in my own thinking. But at the time, actually reading, carefully and thoughtfully, through the Manifesto was a bit of a revelation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau's Political Writings. I don't use this edition in my own work or my teaching any more, but it's the collection that kicked-started my own engagement with communitarian thought, though I didn't call it that at the time. Much of what I still believe about equality and modernity can be traced back to The Second Discourse, the first work of political philosophy I ever took seriously.

Nicholas H. Smith, Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity. Helped me put Gadamer, Ricoeur, Taylor, and many others together and draw out the fundamentals of their insights; and by so doing, it helped focus my interest in developing a kind of "conservative" approach to culture and identity which did not fall into a literalist or natural law trap.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. The single heaviest, sustained philosophical argument I have ever taken myself through, and far and away the most influential in how I think about the relationship between truth claims and the historical and cultural narratives they are invariably embedded in.

Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation. A book about political theory, but it had a huge impact on how I, as a religious believer, took the hermeneutical arguments I'd come to accept and constructed them as part of the moral engagement I wanted to have with the world.

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. Presented a way of thinking about "liberalism" and "conservatism" in the American context that I don't think anyone has yet been able to refute. More than that, it's also a tour de force, linking the history of America, the nature of rhetoric, and the meaning of democracy and constitutionalism together into a single, succinct argument.

Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Like a deeply planted time bomb, this book's various observations and arguments (mostly about Tocqueville and the Federalists and Anti-Federalists) kept coming to me, suddenly making sense, while thinking about community or politics or government or religion or philosophy or just about anything else, years and years after my advisor first recommended it to me.

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Helped me see why republican ideas and language mattered, why those ideas gave rise modern democracy, and why the rise of democracy would mean means republicanism's inevitable fall. I don't fully agree, but it's an argument I can't shake, and which I make use of in my classes to this day.

On a different day, I'd probably come up with a slightly different list, but I think this hits all the big, influential books in my intellectual genealogy. Obviously, it reveals my graduate school interests: communitarianism, pluralism, comparative and American and the history of political thought. Nothing much there hinting at my later interests in socialism, populism, or localism. Even on it's own terms, I'm not terribly proud of the list: not enough original sources, and too much commentary on what others have said. Also, for someone who got a PhD in political philosophy in the 1990s, it's kind of sad to admit that big books by Rawls, Sandel, Young, Kymlicka, Rorty, Walzer, Okin, Rosenblum, Cohen, etc., just didn't move me as much as the (mostly more specialized) books above did, or as much as the smaller articles and secondary literature these thinkers produced did. But that's the way in happened, for better or worse.

Your turn, if you're so inclined.