Category: Journal Issues

Dundas offers a personal narrative of how writing a feature on evangelicals took him, as a writer for an alternative newspaper, out of his own comfort zone and into an important insight. The narrative becomes emblematic of the social challenges we face in America: we exist in a diverse society full of segmented pods of special interest, with a perpetual invitation to cocoon ourselves with others who share our values, interests, and tastes. This, Dundas remarks, is okay—as long as we remember there are other worlds out there, just as valid and rich as our own. Every one of us should make periodic efforts to learn a little bit about people who are not like us. Dundas winsomely reveals how researching the story helped him recognize the limits of his own preconceptions through an experience of diversity.

The culture wars did not begin in 2004. In many respects, the warfare can be traced back to the hostilities between liberal and conservative Christianity culminating in the Scopes Trial in 1925, which pitted the traditional understanding of the Bible against Darwinism. Historian George Marsden has claimed that one can hardly overestimate the significance of the Scopes Trial for understanding the emerging Fundamentalist psyche. Harper seeks to show how the trial’s legacy continues to shape Fundamentalist and Evangelical sub-cultures, impacting their engagement of the broader culture to this day. The essay also explores ways in which both Left and Right might move beyond isolationist and polarizing practices and attitudes, working together to find common ground to pursue shared values and build “beloved community.”

As we look at the culture wars of our own time with their ranks of implacable antagonists, Zinn urges us to pursue beloved community, not through avoiding conflict, but through a better, more discerning practice of conflict. Conflict is not the problem. The problem stems from styles of conflict which lack charity, and from tactics of conflict which neglect “the tools of liberal study,” among other things. Through reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Abraham Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address,” Zinn illustrates the potential of tools of liberal study, including “critical thinking, historical understanding,” and “an appreciation for the variety of ideas.”

As condensed statements of belief, bumper stickers serve as regular reminders that some people share our ideas and other people don’t. Baxter offers a brief discussion of bumper stickers as a metaphor for contemporary reflexes we often bring to understanding and engaging belief-conflicts: our range of responses to bumper stickers illustrates how sound-bite attitudes and expectations shape our perceptions of others and hinder our practices in public dialogue. This “sound-bite stupor” can be seen in the ways that familiar metaphors like “culture war” coach attitudes and practices counterproductive for collective life. Drawing upon the insights of social and linguistic theorist Kenneth Burke, psychologist Michael Nicoles, and religious historian John Woodbridge, Baxter suggests ways to awaken from the sound-bite stupor by attending to patterns of reactivity, cultivating more complex and patient listening habits, and practicing more accessible and civic-building discourse.

Reflecting on the complexity of her own religious experience and the complex nature of Jesus, who “turns everything upside down—all our normal expectations,” and who is so unlike us in so many ways, Marilyn Sewell contends that we are all too comfortable with limited responses to the Jesus we profess to follow. We fund soup kitchens, but rarely ask uncomfortable questions about structures that sustain poverty. As a “Christian” nation, we are all too comfortable with war. While religious in many ways, we fail too often to recognize the uncomfortable truth that Jesus often associated with the unreligious: with prostitutes and the tax-collector traitors of the nation. As the essay reiterates, what is ultimately lost is the point that Jesus’ radical message focused on others, not on ourselves.