Patrick Allitt's study of British and American Protestants who converted to Roman Catholicism during the period1800 to 1960 demands attention for three reasons. First, it contains sprightly vignettes of some of the most interesting Christian thinkers of the recent past, including (in rough chronological order), the Anglican vicar who became a Catholic cardinal, John Henry Newman, the American editor Orestes Brownson, the irrepressible G. K. Chesterton, the Bible-translator and detective-writer Ronald Knox, the Columbia University historian of European diplomacy Carlton Hays, the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, the socially radical but theologically conservative Dorothy Day, and the cultural historian Christopher Dawson. That all of these luminaries were converts to Catholicism, that most of them shared at least some common experiences (for example, preconversion contact with Catholicism as much through reading as through involvement with functioning Catholic communities), that each exploited the resources of the Catholic church in making their intellectual contributions, and that they all experienced almost as much difficulty from their new Catholic coreligionists as from their erstwhile Protestant connections—all these are illuminating conclusions from the kind of synthetic study of this subject that has been needed for some time.

Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome

By Patrick Allitt

Cornell University Press

343 pp.; $35

Orestes A. Brownson: A Bibliography, 1826-1876

Compiled and annotated by Patrick W.Carey

Marquette University Press

212 pp.; $20

Second, the book is also helpful for its perspective on recent Catholic history in Britain and America. Allitt argues that these converts provided most of the intellectual firepower in a church dominated by the Irish (in Britain) and (in America) by immigrant communities from several European regions. The tension between "Catholic thought" aimed at making a difference in the Protestant- or secular-dominated world the converts had left and "Catholic thought" as the conservative, neoscholastic Thomism of the papal hierarchy has, in fact, been a key element in the recent history of the Catholic church.

Third, this history is a primer for Protestants who would also like to make a difference intellectually. How convert intellectuals negotiated relations with populist Catholic officials, chipped away at the hegemony of secular intellectual fashion, and carried on in the face of pious disdain from their fellow Catholics and academic disdain from their fellow intellectuals offers much to ponder for Christians from other denominations who also hope to discipline the mind for Christ.

A most useful complement to Allitt's general history is the bibliography of Orestes Brownson prepared by Marquette historian Patrick Carey. Brownson was the most articulate nineteenth-century American convert to the Catholic church. Carey's 143 tightly packed pages of annotations (nestled between a useful introduction and an indispensable index) provide an excellent bird's-eye view of the occasionally quirky, but always passionate, convictions of one of America's most important, but also most neglected, intellectuals of the nineteenth century.

—Mark Noll

The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649

Abridged edition, edited by Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle

Belknap Press/Harvard University Press

354 pp.; $39.95, hardcover; $19.95, paper

For most Americans, knowledge of the first one hundred years of the English conquest and colonization of New England is limited to hazy images of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and lazy stereotypes about Puritan oppression. The lack of a deeper, more nuanced understanding is regrettable, because the literature of early New England is one of the best treasures we have, not only for an understanding of the American past but also for the interpretation of the American present. While struggling to make their way in the wilds of the New World, the Puritans produced an incredibly diverse body of literary texts of lasting value—from William Bradford's stark history of the Plymouth Plantation to Cotton Mather's brilliantly bizarre readings of providence and the New England story, from the harrowing account Mary Rowlandson gave of her Indian captivity to the eloquent poems of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. These and other works from the period document the flawed genius of the Puritan experiment and evidence the brilliant abilities of many who had thrown themselves into the enterprise.

Of all the literature produced in the first century of New England, no work has had a more lasting influence than the journal of John Winthrop, who served as the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for most of the years (1630-49) that he spent in the New World. Within years of Winthrop's death, Puritan apologists and historians began to make use of the journal for telling the New England story, and it remains to this day a unique private record of early New England's most public man. Richard Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle have done a superb job of deciphering Winthrop's almost indecipherable script, and taken in their entirety, their copious annotations tell a fascinating history of the first two decades of colonial life in Massachusetts.

Half a century ago, another English emigrant to the New World, the poet W. H. Auden, contrasted the ancient European ideal of romanitas, the belief that virtue is prior to liberty, with the "antagonistic presupposition" for which America has come to stand, "that liberty is prior to virtue, i.e., liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning." More than any other figure in early New England history, John Winthrop understood how difficult it would be to champion virtue over liberty in the New World.

From the beginning of the Puritan settlement, the centrifugal forces of life in the wilderness proved stronger than those that would have kept the settlers centered on their original mission. Winthrop's journal documents an amazing array of events that pushed the boundaries of liberty in the Puritan world. Winthrop tells of how entire communities sought to separate themselves from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and move further into the wilderness for settlement; he records the demands of individual congregations and towns to be free of communal restraints; and his journal contains a surprising number of accounts of sexual liberties and deviancies, including everything from adultery and the sexual abuse of children to acts of sodomy and bestiality.

Through it all, Winthrop does his fallen best to maintain a balance between the desire for liberty that had driven the Puritans to the New World in the first place and the need for order and discipline that both the Calvinist view of human nature and the Reformed view of the covenant demanded. Hindsight shows us that though Winthrop won many of the skirmishes—Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished, while sodomites and adulterers lost their liberties and, in some cases, their lives—he lost the war. While later American culture gladly appropriated the millennial vision of the New World as a "city upon a hill," it happily dispensed with his crimped view of human freedom. Were he to come back today, John Winthrop might be alarmed by the libertine excesses of our wired world of electronic images, but he would also recognize how much we continue to grapple with the issues of freedom and authority that he struggled with in his life and that he recorded so compellingly in this extraordinary journal.

—Roger Lundin

Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate

By Steven Johnson

HarperSanFrancisco

172 pp.; $24

As editor of the heralded webzine Feed and one of Newsweek's "Fifty People Who Matter Most on the Internet," 27-year-old Steven Johnson is certainly ready to talk about computer interface (the meeting place between computers and their users). But the territory he has staked out might be too vast for any writer to cover in fewer than 200 pages:

This book has been conceived as a kind of secular response to the twin religions of techno-boosterism and techno-phobia … . I have tried to think about the elements of modern interface design as though they were the cultural equivalents of a Dickens novel, a Welles film, a Rem Koolhaas building.

Johnson wants to be a good modern historian, to contextualize and normalize our understanding of computer interface. But he also wants to show us how little difference there is between a young Picasso and a young interface designer. Therefore, it would seem that his most pressing concerns would be to establish the qualities of the triumphs of past culture, define the quality of "interface," and then build a substantial connection between the two. But the author, preferring allusion and anecdote to sustained argument, manages only a weak stab at his original thesis.

Johnson is at his best as a historian of the digital revolution. The first chapter plunges in with the story of Doug Englebart's 1968 demonstration of his invention "bitmapping"--a way of revealing information on a screen that is not constrained by predefined alphanumeric symbols but allows for pixel-by-pixel graphical representation. Ten years later, Englebart's "mouse" gave computer users the ability to point-and-click their way through digital information. Obviously, both of these inventions have transformed the way man uses computers.

Johnson's claims, however, are far more ambitious: he wants us to believe that modern interface, by interpreting an unseen world, rivals the great works of literature: "The Victorians had novelists like Dickens to ease them through the technological revolutions of the industrial age, writers who built novelistic maps of the threatening new territory and the social relations it produced." But are the social forces Dickens helped "map" comparable to the digital information that computer interface interprets?

In the second chapter, "The Desktop," Johnson discusses Gothic architecture with the same logic: "Where the flying buttresses of Chartres rendered the kingdom of heaven in stone, the information space on the monitor embodies … the otherwise invisible cotillion of zeros and ones whirling through our microchips." We must agree that the interface designer's task bears similarity to the Gothic architect's. Both labor to create a set of symbols that "users," parishioners, will recognize. Both are artisans of a sort. But there is also a significant difference, and that is the quality of that which is being symbolized. Computer interfaces would seem to be more accurately compared to car dashboards than to cathedrals.

Thus, despite his self-proclaimed role as a "secularist," Johnson falls prey to the mystification that mars so much current writing about the realm of digital information. We need more level-headed reporting from this new world and less high-flying speculation—more John McPhee and less Gurdjieff.

—Aaron Belz

On Evil: Disputed Questions

By Saint Thomas Aquinas

Translated by John A. Oesterle and

Jean T. Oesterle

Notre Dame University Press

547 pp.; $49.95

All arguments against the existence of God fall into one of two categories, according to Thomas Aquinas. Philosophers with a congenital distaste for all nonempirical explanations believe they can adequately account for everything that exists without the "God hypothesis." The response of Thomists has always been: No, you can't. Without a conceptually First Cause--"what everyone understands to be God"--there is no adequate account for the existence of rabbits (i.e., contingent beings), the possibility of doing science (i.e., knowing the per se causes of things and events), and humans' ability to use language (i.e., the existence of intentionality). Aquinas himself nowhere spends much effort refuting the "No God hypothesis," largely because he thought it fairly obvious that the best pagan philosopher and scientist—Aristotle--had already done so. On the other hand, in On Evil Aquinas devotes more than 500 closely argued pages to the second argument against God: How can there be an all-powerful and loving God when there is so much evil?

Evangelical responses to evil typically focus on human freedom, arguing that a creation in which humans possess free will—and hence, the possibility of misusing that freedom—is better than a creation in which humans had no freedom. Though Aquinas himself develops this response (in fact, the discussion of free will here is one of his most thorough), he believes that more must be said. Following Augustine's lead, Aquinas argues that while evil is real, it has no independent status or existence. That is, evil is not "something" that exists apart from the good things God has created. In this respect, good and evil are related like light and darkness. While darkness is quite real, it exists only as the absence of light. Flashlights do not eliminate darkness by replacing one thing with something else, but by creating something—light--where once there was nothing.

So why is it important to begin like this? One of the problems with the "free will response" when it stands by itself is that it is not self-evidently impossible for God to have created a universe populated with humans who both have a free will and always or usually freely choose to do the right things. If all people can sometimes freely do what is right, it seems possible that some people might always freely do what is right. Why can't God elect to create only people who he knows in advance will always do what is right of their own free will? Of course, it would be impossible for even the best of human biologists to predict in advance which unions of sperm and egg will develop into morally flawless people and which won't. But this wouldn't be difficult for an omnipotent God. If the believer responds, "While some people often freely choose to do the right thing, in fact no one always freely does the right thing," skeptical philosophers reply that an all-powerful and good God isn't limited by such de facto possibilities.

Aquinas's argument circumvents such objections. If evil is not a "thing" but instead a privation, that is, a hole or gap or diminution in the intensity of existence, then God cannot be blamed for creating evil since not even God can create "nothingness." The skeptic will retort, Why didn't God create a universe without holes or gaps or diminution? Aquinas answers: a universe with no holes or gaps or diminution would be infinite, and it is logically impossible for God to create another infinite being for the same reason that it is impossible that Lincoln and Reagan both be America's best president.

The above virtually caricatures the intricacies of Aquinas's profoundly metaphysical treatment of evil. Those who have the required time and tenacity will be richly rewarded by his treatment of a perennial problem in the first half of On Evil. And those who persevere to the end will also learn much about demons, their connection to original sin, and the seven capital vices to which sin gives birth. But be forewarned—Aquinas's arguments are as detailed and complex as medieval architecture.

—Ric Machuga

Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas

By Brian Lamb

Times Books

423 pp.; $25

Brian Lamb is a model citizen. By establishing two privately funded ad-free television networks (so far) devoted to public affairs, this Indiana-born common man has done more to cultivate democracy in America today than anyone else I can think of, certainly more than any elected official. This book is not, however, about the main functions of c-span and c-span2, which are to carry live the proceedings of the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively. It is about one hour-long weekly program on c-span designed to serve book lovers, a group of citizens signally ill served by either commercial or tax-supported television. Booknotes ends my weekends. Readers with the same habit will relive many enjoyable moments; readers who don't watch the program risk developing the habit if they pick up this dandy nonbook. Of the 400 interviews of authors (limited to one appearance apiece) over the program's eight years, 120 get excerpted here. Fitting with c-span's mission (and Lamb's tastes?), the books are limited to history, politics, and public affairs.

As instructive as it is to get some sense of what is in all these good books, the most fascinating parts are those about how the authors do their work—why they chose their topics, when and where they write. Lamb must think so, too, because that is exactly what gets featured in these two- to four-page selections. Anyone who has ever written a book will constantly be making comparisons. It is surprising how many of these authors eschew word processors. Most write in the morning. One writes in the nude.

The authors are placed quirkily into three groups: storytellers, reporters, and public figures, in that order. That is, the further one reads, the more famous but the less interesting the people become. When President Clinton begins, "A good writer is someone who … ," you know you don't want to read any further. Despite the smooth editing of these selections, we junkies miss the taciturn questioning voice of our Brian. With deliciously contrived naïveté, he will ask, "And who is Aristotle?" And we believe with him that general readers still live. Congress has now passed a law benefiting Rupert Murdoch but depriving myriads of us of c-span2. Those of you who still receive this network can spend your Saturday evenings as I used to, watching About Books. Will the voters in Congressman Edward Markey's district in Massachusetts please replace this master of unintended consequences soon?

—Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain

By Catherine McNicol Stock

Cornell University Press

219 pp.; $25

Extremist white rural violence, dramatized in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building of Oklahoma City, is a thoroughly American phenomenon. In Rural Radicals, Catherine McNicol Stock says that Timothy McVeigh and his kind are the product of two separate but related traditions in American history.

One tradition is "rural producer radicalism," which extended from the Regulator movements on the British North American frontier to the populist movement and into the twentieth century among alienated farmers who rejected farm-subsidy liberalism. The other is the "culture of vigilantism"--the violent acting out of vengeance in the name of community self-defense. American rural vigilantes, attacking African Americans, Mormons, Chinese, and others, saw no contradiction between their violent methods and their ideals of freedom and equality.

Stock's contribution is to bring together these two themes in an excellent narrative that takes account of forces of race, class, and, to some extent, religion. She explains how rural producer radicalism failed in the decades after World War II, and how vigilantism has come to "triumph" by the end of the century. The result is an extensive subculture of "militia men, conspiracists, survivalists, Identity Christians, white supremacists, and other 'hate radicals.' "

Rural Radicals presents the case for the agrarian roots of contemporary vigilante violence. It does not address problems of urban violence, nor does it explore the myth of redemptive violence that inspires our "good" national wars as well as our aberrant vigilantes. But it is an important addition to the literature on American extremism.

—James C. Juhnke

Poetry of the American West

Edited by Allison Hawthorne Deming

Columbia University Press

307 pp.; $24.95

About ten years ago, cowboy poetry crawled from the campfires to the podiums and gained an audience that prefers their verse humorous, sentimental, and earthy; meanwhile, the literary poetry of the American West has been available in small bites in sundry quarterlies and collections. The vastness of the West has always been like a far-stretching canvas for painters and writers. It is the land of myth, dreams, heroism, and, more recently, historical revisionism and rampant political correctness.

Allison Hawthorne Deming, an award-winning poet in her own right, has formed a comprehensive—though hardly definitive—anthology with Poetry of the American West. It would take a volume the size of Texas to include every writer who has penned the West, but she has at least corralled most of the groups of writers. There are ancient and contemporary American Indians (her term), Latinos, Englishmen, a Pole, South Americans, and a wide range of stylists, from the father of modern cowboy poetry, Charles Badger Clark, Jr,. to the grand old headmasters of the newer school, William Stafford and Richard Hugo. The well known are there—William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, Willa Cather, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, and others; as well as notable talents still hitting their stride: James Galvin, Gary Soto, Linda Hogan, and Paul Zarzyski.

Zarzyski is my favorite—he is one of the few, if not the only one, of the "cowboy poets" who is taken seriously as a literary craftsman—but the anthology could have been strengthened by the addition of his compadre, cowboy poet Wally McRae, and others whose involvement in the West is not simply intellectual, political, or vicarious. The working-class authenticity that validates most cowboy poetry would have added to this collection.

Still, this is a rich, stylish book, filled with starkness, beauty, and tragedy and handsomely illustrated with vintage black-and-white photographs. To enjoy this collection you need not be enamored with the American West, but you should have a passion for fine writing. The latter will take care of the former, as this is a table set for the literary diner. Some of the dishes might not be to everyone's taste (I personally would have liked more meat and potatoes and fewer peppers and spices), but the selection is immense and the presentation attractive.

—John L. Moore

The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Edited by Jay Tolson

Doubletake/Norton

310pp.; $27.50

Here is an unbalanced but fascinating account of a 60-year friendship. Unbalanced because Foote, the celebrated historian of the Civil War, did not start keeping Percy's letters until around 1970, by which time Percy had finally (after many detours and false starts) become an established novelist. The first 128 pages of letters are all Foote's, and after that we still hear more from him than from Percy—which is not a disaster, for Percy's letters are typically brief and telegraphic, and he only gets eloquent when depressed. For instance, after completing The Second Coming he tells Foote he is "feeling shaky, seedy, molted, unfit, with no stomach for tackling anything yet mindful of your youthful trick of polishing off a novel in the morning and starting one in the afternoon."

This is unusually sharp. Foote, on the other hand, is a marvelous letter writer and can go on for pages telling Percy what he should read (always Proust), how he should write, and why Shelby Foote is a major author. (Looking over the letters in 1983, Foote "was amazed to observe how didactic I was over the years—I don't see how you managed the grace to put up with it all that time. I'm putting you up for sainthood next time I'm alone with John Paul II.") Much of Foote's braggadocio is just that, a patch for lapses in confidence, and self-consciously comic. In describing his writing of The Civil War, he often speaks as though he were, like a malicious deity, making the war itself: "I killed Lincoln last week—Saturday, at noon … . Then I … had Stanton say, 'Now he belongs to the ages.' "

What is most interesting about the book is the great affection each man always has for the other despite many reversals of external fortune: in high school in Greeneville, Mississippi, Foote idolized Percy, but Foote became a critically if not commercially successful novelist while Percy was floundering. An understandable sense of superiority seems to have encouraged Foote to lecture Percy about the intellectual cowardice of entering the Catholic church, a judgment that Percy's later career made nonsense of (as Foote implicitly acknowledges). But when Percy finally made his name, Foote seemed genuinely thrilled—as did Percy when Foote's trilogy re-established him as a significant American writer. This is a fine tribute to a fine friendship.

—Alan Jacobs

Aaron Belz (aaron@schwa.com) is a freelance writer in Saint Louis, where he is an interface designer for Schwa Digital Design (http://www.schwa.com). Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College. Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. James C. Juhnke is professor of history at Bethel College (Kans.). Roger Lundin is professor of English at Wheaton College. Ric Machuga is professor of philosophy at Butte College. John Moore is a writer in Montana. His book about fathering, Letters to Jess, has been reissued by Thomas Nelson with a new title, Take the Reins. Mark Noll will inaugurate the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professorship of Evangelical Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School in the the spring of 1998.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 45

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