Why "Chapter 11" on the cover? Is this intended as a subtle reminder that, like virtually all publications of its kind, Books & Culture—if not exactly ready to file for bankruptcy—is in urgent need of your financial support? No, though if you renew your subscription for another three years and send in a handful of gift subs while you're at it, you will be contributing mightily to the health of the magazine. "Chapter 11" is on the cover because with this issue, we are embarking on our 11th year. Our first issue, September/October 1995, featured (among others) Mark Noll on Abraham Lincoln, Philip Yancey on Annie Dillard, and Frederica Mathewes-Green on icons. All three appear in this celebratory 10th anniversary issue, along with many other regulars and some newer voices as well.

Too many people have contributed in manifold ways to the first ten years of the magazine to single out a few of them here (may they receive this issue as a collective thank-you note), but the support of several institutions must be acknowledged. Without the significant help provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts from 1994 to 2000, Books & Culture would not exist. A grant from the Lilly Foundation in 1998 provided a strategic boost. Beginning three years ago and concluding this summer—a period during which the magazine industry reeled from the economic downturn—Baylor University offered crucial assistance. Finally, Christianity Today International has invested enormous resources to publish a magazine in which you can read Amy Laura Hall on "Holy Housekeeping," George Marsden on fundamentalism, Harry Stout reviewing Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's magnum opus, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, Alan Jacobs on Harry Potter, Philip Jenkins on religion and the media, and Lauren Winner on Jan Karon's Mitford saga, to name a few of the pieces coming in our November/December issue. Thanks to these institutions, to the advertisers (with deep gratitude to those faithful ones who have been with us from the start), and, especially, to all our readers.

Two of the pieces in this issue make mention of the Butterfly Effect, identified by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s. Lorenz was simulating weather patterns on his computer (a clumsy ancestor of our fleet pcs, but a marvel in its own time) when he discovered—by accident—that miniscule differences between two starting-points produced huge divergences in the patterns that resulted. "He might as well have chosen two random weathers out of a hat," as James Gleick puts it in his account of Lorenz's discovery in Chaos: Making a New Science. What emerged from Lorenz's work was a new appreciation for "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," not only in the weather but in the world more generally, best known as the Butterfly Effect: "the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York."

A lot of foolishness has been spun out of notions of "chaos" and "complexity," as Eugene McCarraher observed in his dissection of Mark C. Taylor's Nietzschean boosterism ["The Confidence Man," July/August], and some of it has been wrapped around the Butterfly Effect. But there's an eminently practical lesson from Lorenz's findings. Our everyday world—the world in which we make countless choices, large and small, in the course of a week, a year, a lifetime—is marked by sensitive dependence on initial conditions. We need to keep two salient truths in mind. What we do (or don't do) will make a difference, far exceeding what we could imagine. (Somewhere in Brazil, a butterfly is fluttering near the table where a young woman sits in the sun, drinking coffee and turning the pages of this issue of Books & Culture.) Yet often the ramifying consequences of our actions, their place in the infinitely intricate unfolding of "cause" and "effect," will not be readily apparent to us—or to anyone else, except God. The result, a nice balance between awe and absurdity, is the nature of our condition this side of glory.

As I'm writing, the news is full of reports from London following the (unsuccessful) second wave of terrorist bombings (on July 21) and the fatal shooting of a man wrongly suspected of involvement. The response in many quarters has been appalling. You may recall Don Yerxa's interview with the military historian Max Hastings ["The Moral Complexity of War," March/April], whose book Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 was one of my favorites from 2004. Here is what Hastings wrote, after the first round of bombings, in the Daily Mail (as quoted in the New York Times):

The price for being America's ally, for joining President Bush's Iraq adventure, was always likely to be paid in innocent blood. We must acknowledge that by supporting President Bush's extravagances in his ill-named war on terror and ill-justified invasion of Iraq, Blair has ensured that we are in the front line beside the U.S., whether we like it or not.

Whatever one's views of the invasion of Iraq, it's clear, I think, that if a man with Hastings' knowledge of 20th-century history is capable of expressing such sentiments—widely repeated by others in the wake of the attacks—the rot has penetrated very deeply indeed. When the first issue of Books & Culture was published ten years ago, the war in which these bombings are the latest offensive had already been well launched by radical Islam, though only a few in the West were aware of its scope. Like the war against the Nazis—a very different kind of war against an equally formidable but very different kind of enemy—it will be a war to the death. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain: all are on the front lines. Whenever the Europeans show weakness, the Islamists will merely be emboldened. Already they believe that self-doubt and internal divisions render the West defeatable.

A cluster of articles and op-ed pieces have been pointing to the discrepancy between the experience of U.S. troops in Iraq and people back home, where little in the way of sacrifice or commitment is being demanded. "All Quiet on the Home Front, and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why," as Thom Shanker put it in a New York Times report (July 24, 2005). Shanker quotes Maj. General Robert H. Scales, Jr., retired, who formerly commanded the Army War College: "Despite the enormous impact of Sept. 11, it hasn't really translated into a national movement towards fighting the war on terrorism. It's almost as if the politicians want to be able to declare war and, at the same time, maintain a sense of normalcy."

How true. But wait a while. Alas, 9/11 won't be the last major attack on American soil. And ultimately our government will be forced to acknowledge in a more forthright manner the ideological nature of the conflict. It won't be enough to say over and over that the terrorists "hate our freedom." For this war, like the Cold War with the Soviet Union—yet again, a very different kind of war against a very different kind of enemy, but with powerful analogies nonetheless—is fundamentally an ideological conflict, and it won't be possible to sustain the well-meaning fiction that it isn't a conflict with Islam.

Of course it is a conflict with one version of Islam, not with Islam across the board. That distinction is absolutely vital—and it will be most persuasively enforced by believing Muslims who reject the radical Islamist agenda. But is it too much to hope that even now there are figures close to the White House who realize that it's past time to speak frankly to the American people about this ill-defined war we find ourselves in?

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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