Page 1440 – Christianity Today (2024)

Generations of news media have branded the academic discipline of economics "the dismal science" for its gloomy forecasts.

But Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, calls himself "an optimistic economist" and has reported compelling evidence that the global economic glass is at least half-full. His contrarian 2011 book, Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve the World Even More (Basic Books), takes an evidence-based approach to the study of global poverty.

Each year, billions of dollars in aid are spent to achieve the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. Three of the eight goals directly connect to the welfare of children: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, and reducing child-mortality rates by two-thirds.

UN member states adopted the goals in 2000 and set a deadline of 2015, now 18 months away. Kenny said that while not all those goals will be achieved by then, the progress has been significant. He recently spoke with Christianity Today senior editor of global journalism Timothy C. Morgan about his findings.

Your book describes a historic decline in global poverty. But hasn't the worldwide economic recession bumped poverty rates back up?

If I were writing the book today, I would be more positive. What has become clear is that the African continent, sub-Saharan Africa in particular, is having one of its best decades ever. Some of the fastest-growing countries in the world have been in Africa, and these countries over the past decade have doubled their gross domestic product. It's really an impressive performance.

We have seen quite dramatic poverty reduction as a result. If you look at Africa in the 1990s, the proportion of Africans living on $1.25 a day went up. But since 2000, it's been tumbling back down the other way. There's good news about income pretty much everywhere over the past decade.

You would have expected in 2008–2009 to see a dramatic reversal in progress in poverty and income. There was a slowdown. They didn't drop as far as the West has, and they bounced back faster. Not even the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression reversed the progress.

If you look at child mortality, Africa has had a spectacular decade. In a four- or five-year period, for example, Senegal reduced child mortality by two-fifths. It's a big drop.

The past ten years have seen dramatically faster progress on reducing child mortality. We've halved the number of African children who are going to die before their fifth birthday. The progress has been historically unprecedented. Africa is leading the charge over the past decade in reducing child mortality. It's a wonderful story.

Some experts still look at the glass as half empty. For example, Somalia and Burundi don't seem to be getting better at all. What's your response?

There is immense unnecessary suffering worldwide. I don't want to say the glass is full. It's a long way from full.

There is misery of every form in places like the Congo [DRC]. I don't want to sound ridiculously positive in the face of such misery. Yet even in the Congo, from the survey evidence, child mortality is dropping. It's dropping from hideous highs, but it is dropping. There are small signs of progress—green shoots if you will.

The people in the Congo and in other war-torn regions are changing behaviors that are improving lives, especially of their kids. Even in the Congo, vaccination rates are up, and more parents are telling their kids to wash their hands after they go to the bathroom.

That is reducing avoidable mortality. Even in extremely miserable places, there are green shoots.

So new research confirms a critical role for parents?

One study looked at simple community-level interventions. The idea that newborn kids are unclean was prevalent in one community. Newborns weren't cleaned for the first 24 hours, which increased neonatal mortality dramatically.

Parents were encouraged to use safer birthing practices, and they were able to quite dramatically reduce rates of child mortality.

We should be worried about paternalism. In this particular case, I think we shouldn't be as concerned. These techniques are clearly working to save kids, and that's something that everybody wants. There are approaches that involve nudges—encouragement to behave in the right way, not making people behave in a different way.

A nice example is vaccines. Setting up a vaccine camp is quite complicated. If you get only a third of parents turning up to get their kids vaccinated, it's not as effective. So the MIT Poverty Action Lab gave parents a bag of lentils if they got their kids vaccinated. Now lentils are not that expensive, but that little incentive dramatically increased the number of parents who turned up.

Who should get the lion's share of the credit for reducing poverty?

People. At the bottom of all this are parents making different decisions. It's all very well building a school, but if parents don't want their kids to go to that school, it's really hard to make them.

What is driving up enrollment rates? Parents making the active decision to send their kids to school. What is driving up increased vaccination rates? Parents making the decision to get their kids vaccinated.

I don't want to sound ridiculously positive in the face of such misery. Yet even in the Congo, child mortality is dropping. There are small signs of progress—green shoots if you will.

After people, there's a lot of credit to go around. I'm happy to give quite a lot to NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and civil society, to governments, and to the United Nations. The halving of child mortality rates over 25 years is a big enough story that there is a lot of credit to go around.

Is the faith sector being particularly effective in improving the lives of children?

There's a bunch of basic child-health interventions in particular, but also education interventions, where what you want is universal coverage. You want every kid getting access.

The best way to do it long term certainly involves the government, but not necessarily the government doing all of it. Universal delivery of a service has to involve the government.

Having said that, if you look at some of the most exciting advances in how we provide services sustainably and more efficiently, they're coming out of faith-based organizations and other NGOs. Once you set up a government program, government is wedded to it. They have political capital attached to it.

If you want innovation and change, you want outsiders. Many kids in India spend seven years in school and learn nothing. But Acer India [an educational assessment nonprofit] is running some of the most exciting experiments on how we improve test scores. Can you bring in contract teachers? Can you reduce class sizes? Can you use computers? They're throwing changes at the problem and very carefully measuring what happens.

Outside groups are not wedded to the current system for all sorts of reasons. We see it all the time in child health. Who is it that comes up with the way to increase the number of people to turn up to vaccine camps? Faith-based organizations, NGOs.

We talked about the importance of parents acting differently. I would probably put child sponsorship in this category. I'm glad to hear it makes a difference, [but] on an individual basis in a cost-effectiveness measure, it's probably quite expensive for the changes you're making.

And you're making an 8-to-10 year commitment when you sponsor a child.

It's a lot of money, compared with how much is being spent on that kid locally. There could be spillover effects, if other parents who have one kid being sponsored see the impact on that kid, and then look into finding the money to do it for their other kids.

Faith-based organizations and NGOs have a reputation for not being in it for themselves. They're more likely to change norms than are the government or local agencies.

A norm change in a village would be believing that girls can go to school.

Right. Or that it's okay to have skin contact with your kid in the first 24 hours after birth. It is quite likely that NGOs and faith-based organizations coming in working on those things will have greater credibility than would a contractor or the local government. If faith-based organizations can find places where they can leverage the impact of their money, where by spending money on a few people, they can create change over time that spreads to the rest—that's a powerful role.

Do you have any concerns about the basic child-sponsorship model?

Some of these programs don't work as well as others. That has to do with careful monitoring and making sure that the kids get the benefits rather than somebody else, and that applies to any development program.

The individual connection, especially if the kid is writing to you, means you might have some independent way of verifying whether your money is actually doing good.

I'm also concerned about the cost effectiveness. But along with that concern comes a kind of reality check, which is that these people might not be giving money at all if they did not have an individual connection with somebody.

If my choice is between a terribly effective program with no funding and a slightly less effective program with funding, I'll take the second.

We have to be realistic. It's a painful debate. We have to do the painful moral calculus, when we can, of cost effectiveness in health. We also have to be cognizant of the fact that the pot of money changes depending on how much people want there to be a pot of money in the first place.

I'm quite willing to believe that there are more effective programs to improve outcomes for kids in the developing world than even the more effective child-sponsorship programs. But I'd still rather have the less effective program with money, thank you very much.

You stress the essential need for individual initiative. Are you laying down the gauntlet for individuals to take responsibility?

Yes, one problem I have with the current dominant marketing strategy for many NGOs and even some faith-based organizations is that they say, "It's all miserable in Africa."

That gives people a moral out. If it's all miserable in Africa, and it's always been all miserable in Africa despite all of what we've done today to try and help, that means your money will be wasted if you spend it there. So you don't.

You may have a theoretical moral duty to help those who are in considerably worse straits than yourself. But if you cannot actually help them, you can spend the money on a new iPad.

I think the world is getting better. Partially it is connected with the support of NGOs, faith-based groups, governments, taxpayer dollars at work—all of that. It means that actually—yeah, sorry—we have a moral responsibility.

At New York University for the past year, human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, a leading opponent of China’s brutal enforcement of its one-child policy, had found a safe haven from the Chinese government, which held him under house arrest for years.

But late Sunday evening, Chen confirmed a New York Post report that China pressured the university to end its relationship with the activist, blind from birth.

In a statement, Chen, who arrived in New York in May 2012 with his wife and two children, said, “It is true that New York University has asked us to leave before the end of June. In fact, as early as last August and September, the Chinese Communists had already begun to apply great, unrelenting pressure on New York University, so much so that after we had been in the United States just three to four months, NYU was already starting to discuss our departure with us.

“The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back. Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.

“China’s Communist rulers hope to use these means to disturb our normal life, and even want to make me so busy trying to earn a living that I don’t have time for human rights advocacy, but this is not going to happen. Whether it was the dangers I faced in China or the current momentary difficulties we face, I will never bow my head to evil or to lies. I will always do everything I can for my compatriots back in China who still are not free and who are now being oppressed.”

The New York Post last week reported that the university severed its ties to Chen, who exposed forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi City, Shandong Province, in 2005 because the school is about to open its own campus in Shanghai.

New York University law professor Jerome Cohen, who helped Chen escape house arrest and travel to New York, disputed the Post Report. He told the Washington Post, “No political refugee, even Albert Einstein, has received better treatment by an American academic institution than that received by Chen from NYU.”

An NYU spokesperson John Beckman, “We are very discouraged to learn of Mr. Chen’s statement, which contains a number of speculations about the role of the Chinese government in NYU’s decision-making that are both false and contradicted by the well-established facts.”

In the Christian community, Bob Fu, founder of China Aid, an advocacy and assistance organization for China’s Christians, spoke out publicly last year to bring Chen’s case to the attention of Congress and the public.

Today, Fu said on the China Aid website, “American universities are out chasing the China dollar and are very reluctant to work with dissidents who have a strong voice in China. It does not always have to be direct pressure from Beijing, there is also self- censorship, particularly if a college president believes their China campus or the future enrollment of Chinese students will be sabotaged.

“This is unfortunate because U.S. institutions that welcome dissidents are seen as havens of religious freedom and free speech and will be more attractive to Chinese young people who can’t experience these freedoms at home.”

A prolife Republican and leading critic of China, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, told the New York Post that he had “no doubt” that China’s government pressured New York University to keep close tabs on Chen, limit his contact with outsiders, and end the relationship after one year.

Chen, a self-taught lawyer, reportedly has two offers from other academic institutions, including one from Fordham University Law School. He has not yet announced which one he might accept.

In 2006, China convicted him for “damaging property and organizing a mob.” He was sentenced to four years in prison. Authorities released Chen in 2010, but then security police placed Chen under house arrest almost immediately up until April 2012 when he escaped from his home, fled to Beijing, and then traveled to New York with the help of US diplomats.

This year, opponents of China’s one-child policy have kept the issue before the public as well as the presidents of China and the US. Both presidents met in early June. At that time, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an advocacy group, released a statement that 200,000 people from 70 nations had signed petitions for China to end its one-child policy and the practice of forced abortion.

The group reported (warning: graphic photo) that in March this year a Chinese woman, who twice underwent “forced sterlization procedure,” took her own life by hanging herself in family planning office in Henan Province.

When Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich was asked about the most revolutionary way to change society, he answered:

Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into our future so that we can take the next step … If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.

——

In 2011 I moved with my wife and three sons to Silicon Valley. The day we moved, I had just three people committed to my dream and just three thousand dollars in the church bank account. I'd never felt so scared, or so excited. We were pursuing a dream—to start a church that would engage our city with the gospel in a new way. It was a move of faith. I had no guarantees. But it all felt so right, like the next chapter in the story that God was writing for my life.

I assume that all of you who are reading this share my dream—that you care about seeing deep change in the people around you. As I seek to love and touch people in my city, I focus my energy on two main things:

1. listening to their personal story
2. telling them the Big Story.

Two big tasks. Listening and telling.

Bigger Stories

I've always sensed that my life is part of a bigger story. Whether I've been navigating a season of excitement or suffering, it's always been my grip on the "Big Story" (or the Big Story's grip on me), that has made sense of life's ups and downs. It's the times when I've forgotten this bigger story that I've felt the most lost in life.

When my wife and I moved into our new home in Silicon Valley we began getting to know our neighbors and praying for them. But we could never seem to make contact with the people who live directly across the street from us—they left for work and returned from work by pulling quickly in and out of their garage. They never came outside. But, I eventually noticed that I had a fifteen-second window each week where I could get to know my neighbor: when he would take his trash out to the street each Sunday night.

So on Sunday nights, the second I heard my neighbor wheel his trash cans out to our street, I would dash outside, "just happening" to wheel out our trash before the garbage man arrived in the morning. Each time I did this I would say hi to my neighbor and try to make a little conversation. I learned that his name was Kaywan and that he was Persian. I thought he hated me. His name and his ethnicity were all I could learn. He was a man of few words, who quickly went back inside.

The Sunday night ritual continued. Slowly, Kaywan began to open up to me. After several months our fifteen-second interactions turned into two-minute interactions, and eventually five-minute conversations. With a lot of listening I began to piece together Kaywan's story. He was a restless man in search of truth and open to talking about God.

After months of listening, my wife and I invited Kaywan and his wife to visit the community group that gathers in our home every Wednesday night. To our surprise, they actually came! And, even more surprising, they kept coming! Then they started coming to our Sunday worship service. I kept listening and telling the story that I believe, explaining to Kaywan and his wife how only Jesus offered the rest, peace, and purpose they were searching for. I invited him into the only story that is big enough to make sense out of all the beauty and all the brokenness that has been part of his story. Then, the moment came. God used me to lead my neighbors to place their faith in Jesus, to baptize them, and to begin a process of further discipling them. Today I can't imagine life on our street or life in our church without them.

All it required was patient listening and patient telling of a better story than the ones Kaywan had heard.

During the last two years, God has been using me more than ever before to lead people to place their faith in Jesus and experience new life in Him. It's thrilling. My only "secret" is that I believe God can save anyone's life, and I work hard at listening to people's stories and telling them a good story of my own.

I think we put too much pressure on ourselves. To see people accept Christ we assume we have to be master apologists, or magnetic evangelists, or powerful speakers. But stories are a whole lot simpler. They work. In Silicon Valley, I'm discovering that Illich was right.

"If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story."

Justin Buzzard is pastor of Garden City Church in Silicon Valley and author of The Big Story (Crossway, 2013).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Some of you are in a season of life where ministry is rewarding, fruitful, and fun. The staff is gelling, the difficult decisions you made last year were the right ones, and you have a renewed sense of passion and focus. Your spouse even likes your sermons lately. Life is good.

If that's you, I'm thrilled for you. Ride that wave. I hope it lasts a very long time.

But this piece is not for you.

This is for those of you who want to run for your life.

This is for those of you who woke up Monday morning to an email that ruined the rest of your day, and it has a good shot of ruining the rest of your week.

It's for those of you who are dealing with a thorny staff issue, which is turning out to be an energy-sucking sinkhole, and it isn't getting better.

It's for those of you who sit at Starbucks and pray that your appointment won't show up, so you can have an hour (or seven) to yourself.

It's for those of you who feel defective after slogging through another book highlighting the importance of vision, because you are utterly blind these days, and you're wondering how long it will be before others notice.

It's for those of you who can't stop that thing you know you need to stop, and can't start that thing you know you need to start.

It's for those of you who feel hyper-criticized, under-appreciated, over-worked, and inefficient.

It's for those of you who feel dangerously close to doing something stupid.

It's for those of you who have already done something stupid.

If you are in a season of ministry where you want to run for your life, you are not a terrible pastor, or person. In fact, you just might be at the threshold of transformation.

One of the most helpful books I've read lately is Invitation to Solitude and Silence, by Ruth Haley Barton. In it, she chronicles the dangerous and liberating story of Elijah, who not only wanted to run for his life, but actually did.

It started with a victory.

You know the story. Up against 450 prophets of Baal and a f*ckless king on Mount Carmel, Elijah calls on God, and God comes through. Stones and wood and sacrifice are all consumed in an apocalyptic fireball, and all the people saw it. And then, rain finally fell on the parched ground, signaling a victory for God and for Elijah that would be talked about for the next several thousand years.

This is the pastor's daydream, which never happens: your enemies are vanquished, you are vindicated, and everybody sees it.

It was a very good day for Elijah.

But it was followed by one of his worst days.

Jezebel, the manipulative power behind King Ahab, sends a message to Elijah, promising to kill him before the day is over. Apparently, Jezebel has a history of making good on these kinds of promises, because in an instant, Elijah is gone.

I've gotten some nasty emails. I've received some letters that elicit fear and self-loathing. But I have not yet received an email from someone who promises to kill me before sundown.

When you get an email that knocks you down and threatens you, what rises up in you?

I wish I could say I had a thick skin and that those kinds of emails "just roll off my back." But they don't, and my guess is that they don't for you, either. But we pretend they do, even as the poisonous toxicity seeps into our veins and slowly kills us.

Elijah doesn't confront Jezebel. He doesn't stand firm. He doesn't go to his friends for advice. He doesn't trust God.

He runs.

He runs all the way into the wilderness, and ends up alone, under a sparse broom bush. And he brings to God what actually is. No platitudes. No clichés. No thundering, faith-filled prayer. In the wilderness, Elijah lays the barren truth out there, naked and unvarnished.

"I have had enough, Lord," he said. "Take my life; I'm no better than my ancestors." Then he lay down under that spectacularly ordinary broom bush, and fell asleep.

For those of us that want to run, this is our prayer.

When you want to quit, the most courageous thing you can do is to stop pretending you don't want to quit. When we run to the wilderness, we find the truth; about ourselves, and about God.

Fortunately, all throughout the Scriptures, the wilderness is the place where God speaks.

It's where Moses turned aside.

It's where Hagar was finally noticed.

It's where Jacob wrestled.

Elijah is woken from his sleep to an invitation: "Get up and eat." An angel has prepared bread and water for him, and it's sitting right by his head, so he doesn't even have to get up. I find it fascinating that when we are at our most depleted, God shows up with basic stuff. When I'm desperate, I'm always asking for a WORD FROM GOD, and maybe all God wants me to do is take a nap, and have a snack. So Elijah simply eats and drinks what is laid before him, and goes back to sleep.

When he is woken a second time, he is given an invitation to a journey: "Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you."

This time, there is no mention of a jug of water and a loaf of bread. And yet we read that Elijah eats and drinks, and is strengthened by "that food."

What is "that food" that he ate? Was it leftovers from his earlier meal? Was it a different meal? Or was it something else entirely?

What is it that strengthens someone who previously wanted to die?

Whatever it was, "that food" strengthened Elijah for the arduous forty-day journey to Mount Horeb, where he would meet with God and receive instructions for the rest of his ministry life.

The Rabbis say that whenever the number forty is mentioned in the Old Testament, it signals that something old is dying, and something new is about to be born.

So maybe you need to run. For your life. To the wilderness.

Where you can finally be honest.

Where God might speak.

Where you might be invited on a journey.

Where God might finally give you "that food."

Where something might die, and something might be born.

Maybe it's time to run.

Steve Wiens is the Associate Senior Pastor at Church of the Open Door in Maple Grove, MN, where he lives with his wife and three sons. You can follow him at his daily blog SteveWiens.com and on twitter.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Editor’s note: Eric Metaxas and I first met almost 20 years ago, and we’ve been friends ever since. This conversation was conducted via email. When I got in touch with Eric to suggest that we talk about his new book, he was in Germany. By the time the conversation actually started, he was 30,000 feet in the air, en route to Texas. (“I’m on the plane to Austin now …,” he emailed me. “I’ll land in ten minutes and have dinner with a new friend and then go to bed and tomorrow I’m speaking at the National Conference of Holocaust Organizations about Bonhoeffer. Then I fly to Dallas so that the next morning I can fly to Ottawa where I’m speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast of Canada. No kidding. Happy to continue this as I am able.”) And he did continue. By the time our conversation concluded, he’d been to Redding, in Northern California, then to San Francisco, and was about to fly home to New York. If some of his answers seem a bit incoherent, please consider the circ*mstances and cut him some slack.

Why a book called 7 Men? Sounds like The Seven Samurai. Are you working the shtick perfected by John Eldredge, Mark Driscoll, et al.? Why not 3 Men & 3 Women?

First of all, how about a hello? A smile don’t cost nothing, friend. Anyways. Well, the reason the title of my book is 7 Men is that it is actually about seven men. Perhaps that strikes you as overly literal, but I can be that way sometimes. For example, when Jesus said “I am the door,” I believe he meant that literally. But that’s another story. Also, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not a Kurosawa fan and barely got the Seven Samurai reference. I much prefer Hal Roach as a director. Or Jerry Lewis. As for the shtick I’m working to perfect, it is my own shtick entirely. In fact, I suspect Eldredge and Driscoll et al. are drafting off of my shtick, to use a bicycling term. Not “shtick,” but “drafting off of.” I believe “shtick” comes to us from the world of taxidermy. Finally, three and three make six, not seven. I’m flabbergasted that you didn’t know that. I strongly suggest an abacus before we go any further.

The Rifleman, yes. Doesn’t the intro to every episode feature him cranking shots from his custom-made rifle, sort of like a 19th-c. version of an assault weapon? This is what we need today “to communicate what it means to be a real man, a good man, a heroic and brave man”?

Dude, you’re harsh! By the way, I think you have to clue the folks who are reading this into the idea that I mention The Rifleman in my introductory chapter. I don’t wanna tell you how to do your job or nothing … but yes, of course, The Rifleman opened with Chuck Connors blasting away. It was awesome! It was a show mainly geared toward boys, of course, and the reason I mention it in my intro is it always showed that a man should use his strength nobly, to protect the weak, and should to stand up to bullies—not you specifically!—and that there was evil in the world and that real men stood against it with courage. Every episode seemed to have a theme along those lines. There was real nobility and heroism in it, much as you and your over-educated hash-smokin’ friends might like to sneer at it! I take that back; you’re not over-educated. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much coffee.

You know, my brother has worked for decades with what they call “at-risk” kids. And a lot of those kids have been at risk because their fathers are absent (sometimes in prison), or dead, or failing to live up to the minimum daily requirements of fatherhood. Let’s bracket out the question of whether watching The Riflemen would help them to do better, and take a look at the seven men you highlight, starting with George Washington. What might a man in 2013—an ordinary man, insofar as any human being is “ordinary”—learn from Washington’s example?

The main reason for putting Washington in the book—and really it’s at the heart of why I put all of these men in the book—is that at one or more points in his life he made an extraordinary sacrifice. I’m thinking most specifically of when in 1783 he turned down an offer of virtually unlimited power. It’s staggering that he did that, but true.

The officers around him were all angry that Congress wasn’t paying them. They’d sacrificed enormously over the years of the war and now weren’t even being paid and might never be paid. As far as they were concerned, their leader, Washington should simply lead a military coup and take charge of the fledgling country. He’d practically created it with his bare hands and he deserved it. And he would be a noble leader, not a tyrant. He could style himself King George of America and everyone would be happy. They certainly had the ability to pull off a coup at that time. They had the sheer military strength, and most Americans would probably have applauded them. And we have to keep in mind that the globe was covered with monarchs. The thought of a democratically elected president didn’t even exist. But with all of this, Washington flatly refused the offer. In fact, he was deeply offended at it, saying that the principles for which he had fought the war must not be compromised. The nobility of what he did at this juncture is truly historic and stunning. It deserves our notice and our celebration and undying gratitude. But most school kids today hear nothing of this. Of course they should know about this, that a man who had great power voluntarily gave it up and that despite tremendous temptation, he did the right thing.

That’s the case with almost all of the men in this book, and it’s vital that we let young men especially know that these men existed and did these things. It works against the cynical idea that all leaders are venal and self-serving; instead it can inspire others to do the right thing when the chips are down. I think the denigration of the heroic is a large part of why young men, especially, are confused about life and not sure what they were created for. They were created for greatness and for things like what Washington and these other great men did, but they need to know about these great men and what they did.

Sorry to go on, but that’s the main thing I think instructive about Washington and why he’s in the book. Now can we talk about The Rifleman some more? And if ye kin spare the time, I’m hankerin’ to chew the fat with ye over Gunsmoke and Johnny Yuma and some of them other shows what featured plenty o’ gunplay and brawlin’ and didn’t have a lotta bookish types in ’em neither! Why, in them shows, th’ only feller who wuz called “Perfesser” was the fella what played piano in the cathouse! Or is a-mentionin’ that too rough for yer gentrified readers?

Help me apply Washington’s example to choices that are made by men who will never be in the position Washington was. Because the point—right?—is not to emphasize how great Washington was (even as we honor him) but rather to say you can act as Washington did, in the circ*mstances of your own life.

First let me say that a number of the men in 7 Men made similar sacrifices and “did the right thing” when everything was pushing against that. Jackie Robinson gave up the right to fight back against what were the most despicable insults, and sometimes actual physical attacks. But he did this because as a Christian he believed in Jesus’ command to “turn the other cheek,” and also because he knew that the success of integrating baseball depended on his being completely above the fray. Chuck Colson gave up a plea bargain that would have kept him from going to jail, because he was unwilling to lie and say he’d done something he hadn’t done. And he went to jail. Eric Liddell gave up a guaranteed gold medal in the Olympics because it would have required him to run on a Sunday, something that he simply couldn’t do, since his Scottish Presbyterian tradition said that he couldn’t. In each of these cases the temptation is different and the circ*mstances are different, but you see strength and courage and nobility. Everyone has moments in his life when he will be tempted to cut a corner or to do something he really shouldn’t. These stories are meant to show us that there are men who did the right thing, and that’s an encouragement to us in our own lives, whatever the circ*mstances.

Yes. And there’s a nice twist in the chapter on Eric Liddell, about running on Sunday, which doesn’t at all undermine his uncompromising stand in that famous instance but which shows another quality worthy of emulation.

You must mean where he says “Dude, rules are made to be broken!” Sorry, I couldn’t resist. But seriously, folks, that moment to which you are referring is so touching. I don’t want to spoil it for the reader, but you do see his heart in that. He was obviously not some overserious legalist. He was a truly wonderful man. I’ve actually met someone who knew him, who was at that time a boy in the Chinese prison camp when Eric Liddell was during World War II. The kids loved him, and of course I talk about that in my chapter about him as well.

Yes, and your account of Liddell’s time in the prison camp is very moving. In fact, there are powerful stories in every chapter. But I wonder: Why do we hear almost nothing about the flaws of these men?

Because most of them were so genuinely wonderful that it would be a disservice and a distortion of the truth, especially in a short chapter. If someone asked me about you and even though I think tremendously well of you I felt the need to think of one negative thing to say, just to be “fair,” that would in fact be deeply unfair and wrong. For example, shall I tell everyone who asks me about you that you stole from those dear elderly people you were visiting? Besides, you needed that jewelry, didn’t you? Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it’s nobody’s business.

Okay, but seriously, let me wonder right back atcha: Why is our generation obsessed with the flaws of famous men? At some point in the last 40 or 50 years we’ve swung from never revealing the flaws of famous men to focusing exclusively on those flaws. I talk about this at length in the introductory chapter of the book. It’s become genuinely pathological. We’ve gone from hiding the glaring flaws of seriously troubled men like JFK—who everyone feared might be “too Catholic,” but who in reality regularly brought prostitutes into the White House, which is not all that Catholic, now that we think about it, eh?—to tearing down genuinely great men, like George Washington, who did so much for this nation that we are all profoundly in his debt, but who now must always be gravely scolded for having owned slaves at a time when not one single Virginia landowner did not own slaves. Of course there was a time when we may have overpraised even the great George Washington, but for the love of Mike, let’s not all leap from being Parson Weems to being Bill Maher or Chelsea Handler. Can’t we strike a balance?

We’ve got to regain our common sense and be able to tell the difference between heroes and villains—and yes, those categories still exist—without endlessly feeling the hand-wringing obligation to say that some hero wasn’t perfect. Of course every one of the men in 7 Men is a sinner and flawed, but since none of them is Jesus, shouldn’t that go without saying? We owe it to ourselves—and to young people especially—to be able to make the distinction between Joseph Stalin and Christopher Columbus. And we have got to snap out of the adolescent habit of saying that unless we report on the one bad thing someone did, we’re not telling the “whole” story. Our constantly tearing down leaders and over-focusing on their flaws has had a tremendously baleful effect on the culture at large. It’s made us all cynical and world-weary. There really are times when it’s okay to be innocent and hopeful, but like some eye-rolling Goth 15-year-old, we’ve decided that that’s just like so naïve. To which I must needs reply: whatever.

It’s fascinating how differently we see this question. “Can’t we strike a balance?” But what you mean by “balance” is hagiography. I think we have WAY too much of that already (especially in Christian circles), just as we have too much sneering cynicism.

I believe your perspective is atypical, to put it mildly. In your position in the CT universe, you’ve for decades been wading at the base of the thundering CBA waterfall, being pummeled by their often saccharine offerings. So I suspect you are inclined to think most Americans see the banal hagiographies to which you refer more than they actually do. And as an antidote to what you’ve experienced, you’ve also spent a lot of time reading especially exquisite books and watching art-house movies. So what you have missed—and good that you have—is the mainstream culture in which most Americans (who aren’t editors of Books & Culture, and that is probably the majority of us) exist. Yes, there is lots of sneering cynicism, but I would say that more than that, there is a simple absence of books that focus on the good and redemptive. Mainstream culture was once awash in hagiography, which is not good, but now it’s utterly devoid of anything leaning in that direction.

There is a place for positive and redemptive stories. They’re important, or do you think Plutarch’s Lives merely hagiographic? Bonhoeffer in his last days was reading Plutarch’s Lives, and we know he had superb taste in literature. He was very fond of Adalbert Stifter and of Georges Bernanos, for example. But yes, young men especially need to know that there is such a thing as greatness, to know that there are real heroes, that there are men who did the noble and right thing when others didn’t. We need to go back and tell the good stories again. The seven men in my book led lives that—on balance—were remarkably good and true and beautiful and I’m thrilled to be able to share them.

Hmm. I thought we were talking about biography. Instead you give me something like a free therapy session. Turns out I’m a pointy-headed intellectual—a nice guy, to be sure, but a bit out of touch. Ah, well. You do get back to the subject eventually. “There is a place for positive and redemptive stories.” I agree, as I have already made clear, but the impact of such stories isn’t negated by acknowledging, in the telling, that our heroes are flawed, imperfect, as all human beings are. On the contrary: this makes their stories more compelling. Or so I think.

But thanks for making the time for this conversation. It’s always good to talk with you, even via email in bits and pieces. To wrap it up, when you were all done with 7 Men, what surprised you most about the lives in which you had been immersed while writing the book?

A free therapy session? Er, that wasn’t my intention. I was hoping you’d write me a check. And I didn’t mean “pointy-headed” literally. Or did I just think that word and you somehow intuited it?

But really, all I’m trying to say is that you are blessed not to hang out in the toxic world of mainstream American culture. It was meant as a compliment. But yes, like the movie expert/reviewer who has seen so many movies and who goes to ten movies a week, he comes at movies from another angle than the average moviegoer. Is it so odd to suggest that that changes one’s perspective?

So your sense that there’s too much hagiography out there simply seems wrong to me. And of course I absolutely do mention the flaws of some of the men in my book. I talk about Washington’s slaveholding and his involvement in the murder of a group of French soldiers early in his military career. I talk about Jackie Robinson’s struggles with his temper, and I talk about Chuck Colson’s flaws in tremendous detail. Did you miss the part where he blows his marriage and participates in the Watergate scandal and then goes to jail? So I confess I’m just not sure what you’re looking for, nor that you should be looking for it.

As for what surprised me, I’m not sure that anything especially surprised me. I knew the gist of these stories before I really got into writing this book and so I didn’t find anything I hadn’t really seen before. Except for the fact that John Paul II was a jogger. That’s not a joke, as you will know from my chapter on him. It happened. But the idea of a pope jogging just kills me! Of course it was the ’70s, and everyone was jogging. Still, I can’t help thinking of him wearing long tube socks, Nike Waffle Trainers, red-white-and-blue wristbands with a matching headband, and a Starsky & Hutch tee-shirt as he sprints past surprised tourists near the Spanish Steps. Not that that actually happened. But it might have. Who would know? Huggy Bear, that’s who.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

Copyright © 2013 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

A couple of years ago, one set of happy circ*mstances and a popular collection of New Yorker articles came together to nudge me in a way that wasn’t, as usual, unimportant and forgettable; rather, a lot of other promptings seemed to fit the same pattern.

When I got married, I was grateful to my husband, Tom, for giving me a home. I accepted the dog who came with it, a noisy and officious Shetland Sheepdog named Bradley, and I found another home for the cat I was hiding in my divinity school apartment after rescuing her, filthy and starving, from the local park. I’d been a cat lover my whole adult life, but this cat enjoyed nothing as much as sitting on Tom’s head and showed no aptitude for getting along with any other animal, let alone one who would always picture her plummeting, like a dim-witted ewe from a mountain scarp, from the high perches where she spends her days.

During the first two years of our marriage, we had the good luck to live fifty yards from a meadow and a few doors from the Clerk of the local Quaker Meeting, a woman with a semi-professional interest in dogs that had devolved into a mere humorous enjoyment of living with them. During one of the first walks I took in the meadow with her and her freely ricocheting German Shepherd, she looked down at Bradley, wretched on his leash, and asked, “Does he need that?”

He didn’t, and since then he’s worn a leash only where it’s illegal not to. A creature who worries that I will get my head stuck between barbed-wire strands of a fence isn’t going to head off on his own. With his atavistic respect for an authoritative voice—I lower mine to sound like a Scotsman—I can recall him from even the most pressing research into security matters in the underbrush.

My greater open-mindedness about dogs has affirmed for me the results of certain animal-behavior research. Unlike other species of pets, Bradley goes where I point, in or out of a room, in spite of where his own judgment tells him he belongs. He stands patiently (though shivering a little) in a bathtub for any length of time if I explain that he needs a thorough shampoo and rinse to soothe his eczema. I’ve realized he never begs impolitely or damages anything, and when Tom and I had to pill him by force, he tried to resist without his teeth being in the way—it was touching, if hopeless. The relationship between the dog and me isn’t a problem but a gift, a blessing mediated by nature, tradition, and community. The sight of him in itself reminds me of my heavy debts and painful failings, and it’s an organic, unsurprising surmise that he will have a voice to plead for me (or not) before the throne of God.

This is one reason Malcolm Gladwell’s writing began to bother me. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, which has featured innumerable articles of his, and his four collections of favorite pieces—The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); and What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures (2009)—are so widely celebrated and so seldom read critically that the term Zeitgeist seems in order. The spirit of 21st-century social science has its shrine in Gladwell’s writing. I realized that if I wanted to understand how I had been trained, from the heights of the American media, to think about human purpose, I couldn’t do much better than to re-examine this prose.

The article that lends its title to What the Dog Saw has a quite typical Gladwell structure: as the topic, a complex problem or mysterious phenomenon; a charismatic expert to offer solutions; further, contextualizing or dimension-adding expertise; and an unsympathetic dismissal or a mere elision of whatever common ideas and practices suggest that any of the expertise is superfluous—traditional moral judgment is noted only to be discounted. Not all of these elements appear in every essay, but there is a pretty tight similarity across Gladwell’s four existing books, and his forthcoming one, David and Goliath (about the science of the weak defeating the strong), will probably not diverge.

This marketing of science—that’s in fact what it is: Gladwell studied and aspired to advertising and adheres to advertising techniques such as the penetrating image, the personal endorsem*nt, and the product comparison—has become ho-hum in the commercial media, so at first it was almost an unconscious realization that his writing came across as quite different from nonfiction of the past, especially nonfiction with a natural relationship to public policy.

Aristotle’s treatise On Rhetoric has a great deal in common with his more famous work on tragedy in setting out the solid bases for appeal to an audience. A public speaker, like a tragic poet, needs to move his listeners morally (through the depiction of ethos, or character, his own or his subjects’), emotionally (through the pathos, or experience, described, which the audience should feel it shares), and logically (through logos—yes, the same term John 1:1-5 uses to state that the Word, or sublimely coherent thought, created and sustains the universe).

But Aristotle must have failed (as usual) to give his own audience any shocking news: these are elemental, interpenetrating parts of persuasion, present not only in every effective political and forensic speech, but also in my husband’s case for keeping Bradley: He’s a good dog; and imagine what he would go through, adjusting to a complete new house-hold at his age; and it makes sense to keep him, as his monitoring of everything shows his value as a guard dog, his frequent demands for walks will help us lose weight, etc.

But rhetoric landed more squarely in science writing than anywhere else, because it landed upside down. With the rules of evidence instead of moral and emotional appeals as the foundation, these other two stood on top, with more stability than ever before. It’s therefore, in a sense, built in that scientists and their adherents write in moral, moving terms when they address the public. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s attack on theories of human intelligence emphasizing genetic determinism was, in scientific terms, an attack on the misuse of statistics and other quantitative data; but his motives transparently included his anger at his opponents’ use of “science” to justify racism. When I was a student in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, the Science Writing program boasted recent biochemistry PhDs who saw no difference between championing the public interest and elucidating facts.

That Malcolm Gladwell, as the leading popular science writer of this generation, stands outside this mutually counter-balancing Aristotelian structure is disquieting. First of all, he deals only in passing with the hard sciences, which have tougher evidentiary roots, and he does not seem alert to the squishy, multi-variable character of most problems in his soft home ground. But such alertness wouldn’t even be germane. Many of his “minor geniuses” are entrepreneurs, social engineers, or both, and their ties to academic research are suspiciously loose in some cases (given the claims they make to objectivity and authority), suspiciously tight in others (given that the academy is funded mostly by taxes and charity). Their explanation of their means and goals to an old-fashioned probing journalist would not be sympathetic, but their attempts to prove what they say about their skills and achievements would not be convincing.

Ethos, therefore, does not have a leg to stand on. Gladwell himself is not just allergic to traditional ethical discourse; the threat of it sends him into a sort of intellectual anaphylactic shock: in What the Dog Saw alone, he writes the blame out of the Enron scandal, the missed warnings about 9/11, and the Challenger disaster. Gladwell’s essay about this last tragedy has, in fact, a decisive counterweight in the popular media: Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist alive at the time, summarized the accountability by dropping O-rings into ice water at a press conference. This showed that, contrary to their manufacturer’s claim, they could become inflexible in predictable atmospheric conditions, allowing a fuel leak from the joints they were supposed to be sealing. The Space Shuttle’s design and operation weren’t a hopelessly complex system to Feynman (hopeless complexity being Gladwell’s standard plea, even though he acknowledges that complexity can be artificial and a blind)—nor to the public, when a truly expert, objective scientific communicator stepped forward.

These dismissals leave Gladwell a big empty space to fill with pathos, and as a dazzling writer and a supernice guy (active in dog rescue!), he would do that job proud in a fictional genre. With his sympathy for ambition and inventiveness, his delight in eccentricity, and his open-mindedness coupled with suspicion of cant, he brings readers very close to his subjects—or to his own sense of them.

This wouldn’t matter, if science writing could properly be about either. But the drama of science is about the future of the planet, so I’m queasy when I think how many readers have been caught up instead, for example, in the story of Chris Langan, the author of the unpublished “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe.” By-the-book treatment prevented him from completing a BA at Reed College or Montana State University thirty years before Gladwell wrote about him. According to Gladwell, Langan should have been cut some slack: look at what the privileged Robert Oppenheimer got away with at Cambridge, and here is research that shows dooming differences in the ways poor children—Langan was very poor—interact with authority.

But, I have to add, there’s no word about public-policy measures to help keep all poor students in school; a routinely assigned mentor might have made sure that Langan’s financial-need paperwork was submitted at the juncture where, as things did happen, the major trouble started. That line of thinking would be way off Gladwell’s point, which is that Langan should be an academic researcher in the social sciences, a full member of the “genius” pantheon. When Langan voices contempt for the academy and contentment with his life as it turned out (he is married, lives on a horse ranch, and studies on his own), Gladwell doesn’t seem to listen. Within the scope of science writing, there is no point.

Certainly in nonfiction rhetoric pathos shouldn’t be about fantasy, about a temporal world that can be made perfect by and for special people. That’s doubly the case in science writing, as hard evidence tends to point toward how good the world is already, demanding not the intervention of magical experts to “solve” its “problems,” but unglamorous, no-brainer shared responsibility toward Creation and fellow creatures.

This brings me back to dogs. Gladwell’s essay “What the Dog Saw” is about Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” and his skill in making dogs behave. To give Millan credit, he has a great deal of experience with the species and is more honest than his promoters. On video, he often says that a distressed owner is struggling with the wrong breed—a large, active dog in a small house, for example, or a working dog in a sedentary family.

But as the leader of a small industry, he does not of course say that the puppy mills pullulating in California, where he operates, and the American Kennel Club’s refusal to enforce any health standards for purebred registration, and in general the treatment of pets as consumer goods rather than members of families, are his biggest sources of profit. Inbred, sick, unsocialized puppies, sometimes with congenital behavior problems like “Springer Rage” (I’m not kidding—maybe there’s also “Poodle Pandemonium”), urgently produced and f*cklessly bought during the few months that a breed is fashionable because of its appearance in a movie or a commercial, make for miserable, misery-spreading dogs. (Gladwell, in fact, mentions that one of Millan’s cases he observed was a puppy-mill dog fraudulently sold as show-quality.)

In other words, dogs are not the issue. In fact, they were the first animal domesticated, and they adapted to get along with us better than we get along with each other. Instead of dog transformation, there are political, social, and philosophical challenges that people have to address together in order to lead better (in both senses) individual lives. It’s the opposite of the need for expertise; if the traditions of democracy were merely valued again, as much of a solution as is possible would lie within reach.

Instead, the media induce the attitude—which, clinically, is sociopathy—that nothing exists out there but opportunities to exploit. My young neighbor stalks the dog-walking path with dog-training business cards and, when Bradley barks at him (as at everybody), lectures me about the dangers of “aggression” (though Bradley would die rather than bite). One of this entrepreneur’s victims, a beautiful Border Collie rescued from an abusive home, suffers windpipe-closing yanks at his leash and loud, angry scolding when he crouches down and backwards, in the instinctively correct way (but never growls or bites), at the approach of a person or another dog. “He’s not supposed to do that! He’s had training, he needs more training!” recites his new owner when urged to see things from his point of view. Citizenship and work are turning into efforts to trick or bully each other into buying “solutions” for cause and effect—and then, naturally, “solutions” for previous “solutions.”

Gladwell rhapsodizes over Millan’s physical movements or “phrasing” around dogs, and purported experts concur. But Millan didn’t develop his movements scientifically (he simply spent a lot of time with dogs), and they aren’t essential for communicating with canines—if they were, it would leave us tapping our teeth over companion and service dogs for the disabled, some of whom cannot stand straight, with their shoulders back, because they cannot stand, or cannot execute fluid arm movements because they are paralyzed.

One enthusiastic viewer of a Millan video, a “dance-movement therapist” named Suzi Tortora, has worked “for a number of years” with “an autistic boy with severe language and communications problems.” But in a video of the two of them together, the child is only three and a half and is throwing a normal-sounding tantrum (running back and forth, throwing himself on the floor, flailing, sitting up again, twisting, squirming, crying) with a normal-looking denouement (calming down and saying “OK” to an offer to dance).

What is abnormal is the reward: the woman’s gentle but stimulating touch, her massaging then playful movements, her engaging gaze: clear messages to the child that his behavior needs another person—a special, irreplaceable one—to bring it under control, and that the process is pleasant and inviting. For me, shaking off the effects of Gladwell’s storytelling is like the end of a hallucinogenic drug trip: the whole exhaustively reported, culturally dominant world of social science doesn’t seem real any more. How much of its “evidence” has been manufactured? And when will those most contemptuous of the religious point of view accept as much of compelling reality as that view mandates?

Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Wesleyan University, where she has been translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf in 2014.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Victoria Sweet spent more than 20 years as a physician at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital, tending to some of the city’s sickest, poorest residents. The first thing to know about God’s Hotel, her elegant account of her “journey to the heart of medicine” over those years, is her affection for her patients. She introduces each with a tender character sketch—we meet Mr. Essem through his “round young face, his round ears, and his round, attentive brown eyes” and Mr. Tom through his shy, childlike smile “with eyes crinkling down at the corners.”

But there’s another character Sweet is even more interested in understanding: the old hospital itself, a 19th-century estate planted on a hillside overlooking the Pacific. With its Romanesque turrets, arches, and open windows, Laguna Honda recalled the origins of the Western hospital—the medieval nuns and monks who cared for the sick poor as part of their religious duty. With vegetable gardens, occasional chickens wandering the wards, and the ability to take long-term patients discharged from the city’s emergency care centers, the hospital also served as the last of the almshouses that once housed America’s sick poor, often located on farms at the edges of towns.

Sweet follows these echoes back through time, tracking the development of Western medicine and uncovering surprisingly holistic origins. By braiding these historical searches with her time at Laguna Honda, she arrives at a compelling critique of modernized health care and a vision for transforming it.

We meet Sweet as she conducts her first autopsy after medical school, sorting through tissue and organs and finding she has no language for the something she feels should lie at the center of the body, “like what you find at the center of a baseball when you unroll it.” She realizes she has landed in a profession from which “words like spiritus and animus had been banished.”

That discovery leads her toward a doctorate in the history of medicine, studying Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century German mystic and theologian who was also an influential medical practitioner. Hildegard listened to and sat with patients before moving to treatment, which was typically focused on diet and herbs. Sweet delves into Hildegard’s medical texts, brewing her medicinal beers and discovering that Hildegard’s vision of health rests on the concept of viriditas, Latin for the green life-giving sap of plants:

I began to understand that the premodern system was based on the gardener’s understanding of the world, and that Hildegard took a gardener’s approach to the body, not a mechanic’s or a computer programmer’s. She did not focus down to the cellular level of the body; instead, she stood back from her patient and looked around.

A gardener, Sweet realizes, proceeds by attending to both plants and their environment, observing, tweaking, and waiting for results to unfold.

Alongside her studies, Sweet works in the admitting ward at Laguna Honda, treating patients picked up from the streets or discharged from the city’s acute-care facilities. She helps patients unravel complex tangles of diagnoses, misdiagnoses, prescription drugs, bad habits, and sheer fatigue from their journeys. She reflects that Laguna Honda’s most valuable offering is plentiful time—for long-term patients to recover, for doctors and nurses to build relationships with them, for drugs (illegal or misprescribed) to leave the body.

She tells the story of Klara Muller, a 78-year-old with a lilting Austrian accent struggling to recover from a routine hip replacement surgery. Mrs. Muller became delirious after the operation; diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, she was sent home for recovery. After some months, she arrived at Laguna Honda on antipsychotic medications, confused and unable to walk. Sweet puzzled over the situation, ordered an X-ray, and went upstairs to read it herself. Her patient, she found, had a dislocated hip—and not diabetes or Alzheimer’s.

How did the problem go undiscovered for six months? Mrs. Muller received home visits from an aide, a physical therapist, a social worker, and a nurse. Each performed a narrow role, says Sweet, but it “wasn’t anyone’s responsibility to put it all together.”

Recalling Hildegard’s patience, Sweet responds to efficiency-minded health care with the concept of “slow medicine.” Just as the slow food movement arose from a sense that nourishment is not a commodity that can be isolated from the process of a meal, slow medicine suggests that healing is a fundamentally relational endeavor. To heal is to become whole (both words come from the Old English hál), restoring connection between body and mind, between oneself and one’s place in the family of things.

Sweet marvels at the old doctors who seemed to do little more than enter a patient’s room, say hello, and watch her face and body as she spoke. They understood there was something mysterious and holy (another word derived from hál) in the mutual trust that arose between patient and healer.

Sweet’s journey alone would provide a worthwhile memoir. What gives God’s Hotel a dramatic arc, however, is the relentless determination of city-appointed efficiency consultants to turn Laguna Honda into a modernized hospital. They file report after report on the public hospital, forcing administrators to add layers of managers and thrusting more and more forms and training sessions at doctors and nurses, whose numbers are eventually cut. Sweet observes all this with candid skepticism.

The book’s trickiest task lies in dramatizing a series of consultant reports. The administrative tedium threatens to come off as … administrative tedium. The cast of successive hospital leaders can be difficult to keep straight. But Sweet holds our attention by tying this narrative to her patient’s stories and taking the economic arguments head on.

She notes that health economists seek to conserve precious doctor time while allowing abundant lab tests and drug prescriptions. They also trim the hospital’s food budget down to a minimum, ignoring the central role diet plays in wellness. Sweet says they have things exactly wrong: It’s the tests and drugs that are exorbitantly expensive—well-used doctor time is cheap by comparison. She tells the story of a patient who waited three months to be discharged because his Medicaid-covered shoes hadn’t arrived. A fellow doctor met the patient, considered his medical duties, and drove to Wal-Mart to buy the man shoes, bucking bureaucratic protocol. “He must have saved the health-care system many thousands of dollars by buying those shoes, and yet [the consultants] would not have thought his action efficient,” says Sweet.

She offers the paradox of “the efficiency of inefficiency” to explain why decades of medical cost-control efforts in the U.S. have failed. She tells of a head nurse who spends much of her time at work knitting blankets for each patient on her long-term recovery ward. A trained, well-paid professional knitting might seem like the height of waste, but Sweet argues those blankets send important cues. They signal that every other task on the floor has been completed, that details are important, and that comfort matters. Even when some of the patients aren’t alert enough to notice, the blankets send a message to aides, doctors, ambulance workers, and family members visiting the ward.

“The secret in the care of the patient is in caring for the patient,” says Sweet.

At the book’s end, in 2010, the city closes the old Laguna Honda and moves patients to a new glass-and-steel facility next door, replete with cost-control technology. In response, Sweet designed an experiment that would compare the cost and effectiveness of a typical care unit with a “slow medicine” unit that would offer patients ample staff time, organic food, and plenty of sunlight. (She is seeking funding for the project.)

Sweet’s key insight is that by defining efficiency too narrowly, health care’s funders (i.e., all of us) end up paying much more. The question isn’t whether to be frugal. The question is whether discharging patients too quickly is more “efficient” than giving them time for rest and healthy eating under attentive care. The same risk holds true with overly narrow view of the “cost” of public education, public infrastructure, public social aid, and so on. She doesn’t belabor the point. Instead, she returns to the tension inherent in the limited resources that doctors and nurses face as they try to be agents of healing—the same tension that Hildegard and her fellow monastics understood.

The ultimate strength of God’s Hotel lies in that paradoxical dual motion—inward toward the holy mystery of the healer-patient relationship, and outward toward a people’s duty to care for those the Gospel of Matthew calls “the least of these.”

Jonathan Hiskes writes about health at Bastyr University near Seattle. His reporting has appeared online at The Guardian, Mother Jones, Grist, Sustainable Industries, and elsewhere.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I began to study philosophy in earnest when, as a recent college graduate, I became interested in Christian apologetics. In retrospect, I now realize that this was only my formal introduction to the study of philosophy. In fact, I came to think philosophically in a number of other contexts. When I was twelve I picked up a copy of the Penguin edition of The Last Days of Socrates at a garage sale because it had the names "Plato" and "Socrates" on the cover, and they sounded important. I read it and enjoyed it even though I—much like the young men that Socrates so influenced in his time—was drawn to Socrates not because of what he said but because of the beauty of the way he thought. The attraction was seductive rather than simply rational. Or perhaps the very rationality of Socrates was the thing I found so alluring.

Something similar hit me in my middle school geometry class when I realized that I wasn't just doing math but learning how to reason. A few years later in college, Professor Pardon Tillinghast gave me my first taste of history that didn't boil down to memorization of names and dates. Tillinghast was a hagiographer, a historiographer, and a philosopher of history. As we read multiple versions of the same historical events, I slowly came to realize that history was not a neutral practice but one charged with purposes, and that the idea of history itself can be studied in its historical development. These courses weren't just training, they were inductions into communities of thought.

Looking back on it, I realize now that I came to philosophy through love, and through the practices of communities. It's helpful for me to remember this as I attempt to teach philosophy to my students. It would be a shame to transform the discipline I love and turn it into just a set of propositions and arguments to be memorized for an exam. My hope is that the study of philosophy will inform my students' whole lives, enriching their thinking and giving them tools for solving problems they have not yet even imagined.

Which brings me to Howard Wettstein's enticing and brilliant new book, The Significance of Religious Experience. Wettstein is a philosopher who hopes to reform philosophy of religion by teaching it to hear the language of the Bible anew. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say by teaching it to hear the language of the Bible in a very old, pre-philosophical way, and by inviting philosophers of religion to consider religion and religious practices in their native environment and not merely as dessicated lab specimens.

I began by thinking that Wettstein and I would have a lot to disagree about, since we belong to such different communities. He is an analytic philosopher, and I am trained in the traditions of European phenomenology and American pragmatism. He's a Wittgenstein scholar with a deep concern with the philosophy of language; I'm a Peirce scholar and really more of a historian of ideas. He's Jewish; I'm Christian. He is a naturalist; I find it hard to dismiss the supernatural. And so on. And yet, as I read this book I kept finding myself nodding my head in deep agreement. My reading notes go beyond my usual summaries of the arguments and are full of bold yeses, questions I'd like to ask Wettstein, lists of books I'd like to discuss with him. Despite our obvious differences, I have the sense that Wettstein and I are working toward the same goal. How could this be?

I think the best way to answer that question is to turn not to Wettstein's first chapter, but to his last. The book ends in a way that I'll call confessional, though I should be careful to point out that I don't mean that it gives a profession of faith. I mean it more like Augustine means it: Wettstein ends by reflecting on what he believes, and on what he thinks he can reliably say about that.

In this last chapter, Wettstein recounts his own journey and what it has been like telling his friends about his religious views. Early in life he was religious. Later he left religion, and in the most recent stage of life he has returned to religion. He doesn't call himself a believer in God, but he is committed to the religious life of his tradition.

Some of his friends who have outgrown their religion are envious of his return to religion and its comforts, but they can't imagine affirming religion because it looks to them like religion is simply false. Others suspect he has bought his return to religion too cheaply: Wettstein gets to pray and attend religious services without having to make a commitment to religious metaphysics. But the most interesting conversation he recounts is one he has with an Orthodox Jewish friend. Wettstein admits to this friend that even though he does not believe in God he still prays. "To my surprise, he was not so sure how far apart we were even on questions of basic theology. The reason was, he said, that he is not at all sure what he is speaking of when he speaks of God, and not at all sure to whom he is speaking when he speaks to God."

This kind of talk makes many Christians leery, and makes philosophers of religion shake their heads, but it's also very Augustinian, and in that sense akin to both Christian faith and to philosophy. For Augustine, "confession" means not only confession of faith but confession of ignorance. Augustine famously asks, "What do I love when I love my God?" Augustine is far more aware of the lived experience of his own love than he is of the one to whom his love is directed. Of course, Augustine, who was once "in love with love itself," knows that love can be a dangerous master. And yet it can also be a marvelous guide, and the best thing we do. Jesus frames the greatest commandments—all three of them—in terms of love, after all.

The idea of religion as love informs much of Wettstein's book. The texts of the Bible are like love letters; the prayers of religious communities aren't doctrines disguised as prayer, but the love-language of a people and their God, one that may seem silly to those who aren't in love; religious life is not about settled knowledge but about love, gratitude and awe. Wettstein begins his last chapter like this:

During my first sojourn in religious life, I dreamed that religion and I would part ways and I would be bereft. It brought to mind a line from our evening prayers in which we implore God not to remove his love from us …. At some point afterward, I left religious life, but certainly did not feel bereft. Now that I am back, I feel profoundly enriched. I have the sense that my religious life puts me in contact with deep truths and equally deep perplexities.

Wettstein didn't return to religion by believing but by coming to stand in awe of God. How important is it to know what God is like when you love God? Is it possible to stand in awe of God without believing in God? Wettstein believes that it is: "In prayer … I have the sense of the presence of the divine, of making contact. But ask me about the party on the other end of the line and one of two things will happen: either I will beg to be excused for not having much to say, or else we will have a very long talk about how difficult a matter it is that is in question."

Over the course of the book it is plain that while Wettstein does not want to say much about God, he has a lot to say about this difficult matter of religion. And not being willing to say much about God is not the same as saying nothing about God. If anything, Wettstein's reluctance to make positive claims about God helpfully refocuses our attention, diverting it from metaphysical proofs to the practices of awe and worship. Wettstein's thinking is reminiscent of the spirit of historians and classicists who are haunted by the thought that we have not yet plumbed all the depths of the ancient world.

The book is a collection of lectures and essays, each of which stands alone, and most of which have been published elsewhere. Its chief fault is that some of the essays cover very similar ground. This complaint is nonetheless greatly mitigated by the inviting smoothness of Wettstein's prose. Even his footnotes are interesting and well-written.

So instead of a chapter-by-chapter account, let me highlight a few of the points that emerge repeatedly throughout the book. Wettstein asks philosophers not to reduce religion to religious beliefs, but to concern ourselves with the actual practices of religion. Wettstein says that a pre-philosophical, biblical religious life does not depend upon settled metaphysical doctrines about God. Wettstein's orientation to religion is naturalistic, but his naturalism doesn't try to do away with God-talk. Liturgy and prayer are essential to religious life. They free us from dependence on feelings of awe, and allow us to enact the values that arise from awe even when we don't feel it. When belief becomes an obligation, we become epistemological legalists. The Bible is not a list of God's qualities we must believe; it is a collection of narratives about God's roles that helps us to live in awe of God. Liturgies are not a telescope by which our gaze can escape the world and see only heaven. Rather, the prayers and stories of the Bible are the means of standing in awe of God, fostering love for neighbors, and practicing gratitude.

In biblical communities, awe (Wettstein prefers "awe" as a translation of the Hebrew yirah rather than "fear") is more important than belief, because belief is concerned with cognition, while awe is a matter of one's whole life. Wettstein reminds us several times throughout the book that it is quite possible to engage in real and fruitful practices without firm knowledge of the metaphysical fundamentals, as we do in mathematics.

The late physicist Richard Feynman once said that he lived in and among numbers. Wettstein quips, "If one were to ask Feynman about the reality of numbers, I imagine him unhesitating in his affirmation. If one were to ask, in a philosophical vein, about their existence as abstract entities, I imagine him scratching his head in wonder about what exactly was in question." It is one thing to be able to use mathematics competently, and quite another to have knowledge of the metaphysics of numbers. Do numbers exist? Are there Platonic forms of numbers? We have theories about the metaphysics, but we don't know for certain. And most of us don't need to know. Wettstein suggests that it is much the same in religion: "I have known people with a genuinely deep grasp of religion 'from within'; only some of them have any taste or feel for philosophy." Thankfully, Wettstein is blessed with both a grasp of religious practice and a "feel for philosophy."

What is surprising is that someone as passionately in favor of religion and religious experience as Wettstein should fall so solidly in the naturalist camp. "Naturalism" is a broad term, but it entails a refusal to make the supernatural a definitive element of the world. This has often meant reductionism—that is, the reduction of all supernatural terms to natural terms, like trying to explain religion entirely in terms of neurology, cultural norms, or evolutionary psychology—or eliminativism, the attempt to simply eliminate supernatural talk altogether. Wettstein argues that naturalism simply makes sense to us, living in this age. It is hard not to think like a naturalist in a time when the natural sciences are ascendant and lab coats have all but replaced albs and chasubles, but naturalistic reductionism and eliminativism miss the heart of religion.

One of Wettstein's intriguing suggestions is that philosophers of religion might have missed it, too. Philosophers have come to treat God as a concept to be cognized, abstracting God from biblical religion and from the literary and liturgical life of the communities to whom God most matters. In giving this abstract God-concept so much of our attention, philosophy has neglected the practices of religion almost altogether. As Wettstein puts it, "Concern with what seems fundamental—the existence of God—often has been all-absorbing, and I would argue, distracting." That is, distracting from the real work and life of the religious community. The danger is that we turn God into a thing we find in the world, a resource at our disposal. Religious epistemology takes center stage, focusing on legal notions like warrant, justification, duty, and obligation. Arguably, much of the scientism that informs one version of modern atheism is the offspring of this legal-epistemological approach to philosophy of religion, where religion is evil because religious belief is irresponsible, unscientific, or indefensible.

Reducing religion to belief can also make it seem that biblical authors were really frustrated philosophers. The Hebrew Bible isn't an anthology of poorly written propositions about God. Its chapters are the stories and poems and prayers of communities of people who stand in awe of God, people enveloped in a religious life. If the alleged propositions about God found in the Bible seem at times to contradict one another it is because they were never intended to be a scientific, coherent, and complete description of God. To stand in awe of God, Wettstein says, is not a matter of knowing awesome things about God so much as it is to feel privileged, to be overwhelmed, to feel humility without being diminished. The biblical texts attempt to express this, not by cataloguing God's properties but through narratives about God's roles. Wettstein puts it like this:

We often speak of the biblical narrative, and narrative is another aspect of the Bible's literary character. The Bible's characteristic mode of "theology" is story telling, the stories overlaid with poetic language. Never does one find the sort of conceptually refined doctrinal propositions characteristic of a doctrinal approach. When the divine protagonist comes into view, we are not told much about his properties. Think about the divine perfections, the highly abstract omni-properties (omnipotence, omniscience, and the like), so dominant in medieval and post-medieval theology. One has to work very hard—too hard—to find even hints of these in the Biblical text. Instead of properties, perfection and the like the Bible speaks of God's roles—father, king, friend, lover, judge, creator, and the like. Roles, as opposed to properties; this should give one pause.

Obviously, Wettstein's title is a nod to William James. Wettstein confesses an admiration for James, Dewey, and Santayana, all of whom "took religion seriously as a central human concern." They lacked philosophical rigor, perhaps, but they had "vision." This book attempts to combine that vision with rigor by renewing our concern for the practices that matter most to religious communities.

Those practices and experiences are significant, Wettstein insists. They aren't just wallpaper on the metaphysical living room wall; they are the living room itself, the place where the community lives and moves and has its being. Religion doesn't depend on proofs; it depends on Haggadah, on narrative. Perhaps it's this sense of the deep significance of narrative that makes Wettstein such a good writer; in almost every chapter he shifts easily from narrating his own experience to discussing Wittgenstein, Aristotle, or Spinoza, and then to a broader narrative about religious life in general.

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's well-written and well thought out, but more than that, it's promising and genuinely helpful. It promises a renewal of the vision of the classical American pragmatists who saw that the lived experience of religion—as it is lived, breathed, sung, and prayed in communities of awe—matters at least as much as settling metaphysical doctrines. This is not to say that theology is unimportant, but that it is helpful to remember that affirming systems of propositions is no substitute for learning to live in awe of God.

David L. O'Hara is associate professor of philosophy and classics at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In the village of Wreay in Cumbria, five miles from the city of Carlisle, stands the curious and beautiful St. Mary's Church, which since its construction in the mid-19th century has aroused much commentary and a good deal of wonderment. The pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it "a church in the Byzantine style, full of beauty and imaginative detail, though extremely severe and simple" and by any measure "much more original than the things done by the young architects now." But he could not find words to describe the church well and wished for others to see this "most beautiful thing." A century later the great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had his own descriptive struggles: he dubbed the building's style "Byzantino-Naturalistic," and said it was "a crazy building without any doubt."

Yet when Pevsner put the question "What is best in church architecture during the years of Queen Victoria?" he insisted that "the first building to call out" had to be the church at Wreay. Similarly, Simon Jenkins, in his lovely book England's Thousand Best Churches, calls St. Mary's "one of the most eccentric small churches in England" but thinks it a masterpiece with no clear antecedents, no pattern from which it derives. Its architect was "a single original mind, … an individual genius." That genius was not a professional architect—indeed, lacked any formal architectural training—and was merely the chief landowner in the vicinity of Wreay. Her name was Sarah Losh, and in The Pinecone Jenny Uglow tells her story.

The story, obviously, takes the form of a puzzle: Where did the idea for such a building come from? How could Sarah Losh have come up with it? Perhaps even more inexplicable is the question of how she, and the people she hired to build it, pulled off the design so successfully. Few writers could be better suited to pursue these questions than Uglow, who in her previous books—especially her finest, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730-1810 (2002)—has demonstrated a great interest in how networks of like-minded people have the power to generate rich ideas and powerful inventions. The Lunar Men reveals how ambitious thinkers like the inventor James Watt, the physician and naturalist Erasmus Darwin, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, the potter Josiah Wedgewood, and the scientist, theologian, and radical politician Joseph Priestley fed one another's minds in the years that they all lived in or around the city of Birmingham. In that account the lines of influence and mutual encouragement are clear—but how to account for Sarah Losh's solitary masterwork? That seems a far greater puzzle.

And indeed, Uglow does not manage to solve it. There is just not enough information to go on. Uglow surrounds the core story of the building of St. Mary's Church with dozens of digressive mini-essays about—well, about almost everything pertaining to the place and time: the geology of Cumbria as it was discovered and explored in the Romantic era, the history of its churches and religious monuments, the rise and development of the city of Carlisle, the financial connections of the Losh family with the industrial city of Newcastle, Sarah Losh's father's friendship with William Wordsworth, the rise of Anglo-Catholicism and its influence on ecclesiastical architecture, the history of the village of Wreay after Sarah Losh's death. All of these excurses are interesting and well-written, but as I read The Pinecone I struggled to discern clear patterns. Uglow's description of the building of the church commences about two-thirds of the way into the book, and the reader who started with Chapter 15 would be about as well-equipped to understand Sarah Losh's achievement as the reader who had read every previous page with care.

Stripped of Uglow's ample and learned contextualizing, the story goes like this. Sarah—as Uglow calls her throughout; I will follow that lead—was born into a Cumbrian landowning family near the beginning of 1786. She and her sister Katharine were given the sporadic and piecemeal education that was about the best that girls of their time could hope for, though Sarah's evident brilliance led to her pursuing ancient languages further than would have been common at the time. The sisters were by all accounts quite attractive, but neither ever showed any inclination to marry, and after the early deaths of their parents they became the socially and economically leading figures in their small world. They were both especially beloved as benefactors of the poor, but few elements of their local life escaped their attention and care. Katharine was the more outgoing, Sarah the more introspective and intellectual, but both were deemed charming. Above all they were inseparable companions, both at home and on their occasional travels to the Continent.

And then, when Sarah was around fifty, Katharine died. Sarah was devastated by the loss, and never fully emerged from mourning in the 18 years of life remaining to her: on her death in 1853, she was buried with her sister, and their tombstone bears the inscription In vita divisae, in morte conjunctae—in life divided, in death conjoined—followed by a plea from the ancient hymn Te Deum laudamus: "Lord Let thy Mercy lighten upon us." But Katharine's death seems also to have driven Sarah into a period of astonishing imaginative creativity. The tiny local chapel of Wreay had fallen into disrepair, and Sarah convinced the local authorities to allow her to restore it; and then, on the discovery that it was too derelict for restoration, to do something more. In her own words, she agreed "to furnish a new site for the chapel and to defray all the expenses of its reerection," but only—and here we catch the glint of a steely will—"on condition that I should be left unrestricted as to the mode of building it." The offer, with its blunt condition, was accepted, and Sarah set to work.

The ultimate result was unlike any church in England, and in some respects unlike any church anywhere. Sarah knew perfectly well that the whole impetus of ecclesiastical architecture in England was toward the high Gothic style: indeed, many of the leading figures in the emergent Anglo-Catholic movement forcefully insisted that no other style was fully Christian. Sarah ignored them and built a church in a far simpler style that she herself called "early Saxon or modified Lombard": Romanesque, we might say, with rounded arches and small windows, but featuring certain structures, especially a rounded apse behind the altar, that recall churches built in Lombardy in northern Italy during its period of Byzantine power and influence. (Sarah might have seen some of these on her Continental travels.)

Only a very few of the oldest, and generally ruined, churches in northern England resembled it in the least, and Sarah may have had their basic structure in mind, which could account for her reference to "early Saxon." But the decorations both inside and outside the church—which she designed and even helped to create, carving some of the stone herself—have no real precedent anywhere. Uglow describes Sarah's insistent deployment of naturalistic forms, almost to the exclusion of any familiar Christian symbolism:

Around the central window a chrysalis rested on an oak leaf at each side, with six butterflies above, separated by poppy-heads, ripe with seeds, reaching up to lilies curving around two butterflies—their wings outspread and their antennae touching a band of ripe wheat. All these, including the butterflies, symbols of the soul, from their Greek name psyche, spoke of the earth. By contrast the carvings on the left-hand window conjured ancient oceans, with ammonites and nautilus fossils and staghorn coral. On the right, they took to the air. Fir branches met at the top and between the cones perched a raven, a scarab with open wings, a bee and a small, wise owl.

Sarah designed all of these images herself and, in a workshop she had built in her house, molded them in clay so local stonemasons could see in three dimensions just what she wanted. The forms are naturalized and yet stylized in a way that anticipates the Arts and Crafts movement and the kind of work that artists like Eric Gill would be doing some 75 years later.

The church abounds in curiosities. From the outer walls project a series of what Sarah called "emblematical monsters": a crocodile, a winged turtle, a snake, and (most charming of all) an open-mouthed dragon who serves to vent steam from a boiler. These are delightful, but some of the obscurest decorations tend rather to disturb, especially the iron arrows that stick into walls. No one has ever explained these, but local villagers believed that they were made in honor of William Thain, a soldier who was a close friend of the Losh family and who was killed in India as the church was under construction.

On a couple of occasions Uglow quotes the verdict of one Canon Hall—who, as vicar of Wreay for almost half a century, had more opportunity than anyone to see and reflect on the strange furnishings of the church—that Sarah's whole design is thoroughly Christian, every detail vibrating with theologically orthodox significance. Uglow is, I think, rightly doubtful about the good canon's interpretations, but her own tentative suggestion that Sarah was a Deist seems to me even less likely. The elaborate natural imagery of the church suggests rather something older, more pagan: an animistic world, pantheist or panentheist in tone. Sarah may have been no more sympathetic to the Deism common in the intellectual circles of her time than she was to the rise of the Gothic in architecture.

But we are guessing here. Again and again Uglow comments that Sarah Losh's surviving letters and notes, of which there are many, tell us little or nothing about what she intended or even what she believed. Lacking authoritative guidance, we might do well to remember that the profusion of natural things in her church—or rather, representations in stone and wood of natural things, presented with restrained simplicity and yet lavish—arose in her mind in the aftermath of her deepest loss. The death of her sister is answered by a church dedicated to organic abundance, one that celebrates life, life, and more life.

The two stone railings at the back of the little church's nave are capped, at their inside ends, with stone pinecones: one enters the nave by walking between them. Their prominence is no more explicable than anything else in the building. Uglow notes that "the pinecone is an ancient symbol of regeneration, fertility, and inner enlightenment," as well as embodying in its Fibonacci-sequence structure what natural philosophers of Sarah's time would have called "Sacred Geometry," and she thinks the image important enough to title her book after it; but whatever its public meanings, one has to wonder whether it had for Sarah a private one. It was known in the village that before William Thain died he had sent a pinecone from India to Wreay, intending it to be planted there. The villagers made as much of this as they did of the arrows; the idea of Sarah lamenting a dead lover has an obvious romantic appeal, even though there is no indication that she ever had or sought lovers.

But there is one further point to note. In addition to the church, Sarah had built for Katharine a tiny mausoleum, a strikingly and intentionally crude little building—"Druidical," some called it—made of unmortared and rough-edged stone with no ornamentation and a flat roof. But within it is a smooth white marble sculpture of Katharine. She sits erect, leaning slightly forward, her right hand crossed to her left shoulder. She contemplates an object resting in her lap, held in the folds of her dress by her left hand. It is a pinecone.

Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College and this fall will begin teaching in the Honors College of Baylor University. He is the author most recently of The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, due in October from Princeton University Press.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Home is where you hang your head,” my clever friend George used to say. Many of us know what it’s like to have a vexed relationship with home—particularly if we are bookish types, and grew up among people who didn’t understand that at all.

George fits that familiar pattern, though his story is more extreme than most. He grew up in Ulmer, S.C., which in the 2000 census boasted a population of 102. I met him in college—not any élite college, but just the University of South Carolina, in Columbia. Compared to Ulmer, it might have been Paris. And George was the most intelligent person I’ve ever met. For a paper on a novelist with a paradoxical bent, George wrote 100 pages (on an old-fashioned typewriter); on the 50th page, he began systematically refuting all his previous assertions.

Back home in Ulmer, George sold peaches from a roadside stand. The consensus was, “He’s got school smarts, but that boy’s got no common sense.”

In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher tells a similar story. He grew up in a rural stretch an hour north of Baton Rouge, near St. Francisville, Louisiana. It wasn’t a good fit. His Paw was an avid outdoorsman, but “[t]he last place I wanted to be on a wet, frozen Saturday morning was standing in the woods with a shotgun,” Dreher writes. He’d rather be “in the warmth of the camp kitchen, drinking hot, sweet Community coffee, eating jelly cake, and listening to the crazy talk from Oliver ‘Preacher’ McNabb, the old black cook” who’d spent time in Angola for murder.

Rod’s little sister Ruthie didn’t agree. “She really did love all of it—especially the hunting. As soon as she was big enough to carry a shotgun, she did.” Rod instead drank in the stories from his great-great aunts Hilda and Loisie, who had volunteered as nurses in World War I. He writes, “They caught the train at the bottom of the hill near their family home and didn’t stop their journey until they arrived at the Red Cross canteen at Dijon, France.” Time he spent in their tin-roofed cabin, listening to their stories and looking at old maps, whetted his appetite for the big world beyond the pecan grove. He grew into a teen who loved books and talking about ideas, someone his Paw found hard to understand.

Maybe Ruthie sensed Rod’s advantage in intellectual things; maybe that’s what spurred her to lifelong competition on other fronts. She was the superior athlete, and savored opportunities to prove it. One time Paw goaded Rod into doing some exercises to build up his strength. Dreher writes,

I was … struggling to heave out a pitiful few push-ups. Paw tried to keep Ruthie out of the house when this was going on, because he knew she couldn’t resist trying to outdo me.

“There she came up the hall, saw you on the floor, then flopped down and started pumping them out,” [Paw] recalls. “That was the end of that ring-dang-do. You just quit.”

Bullied at school, falling into frequent arguments with his dad, Rod perked up when he heard of a new residential high school for sciences and the arts. He packed everything into the family pickup and stood at the bow of the car ferry, on his way to a better life.

Many of us don’t feel at home until we leave home, and find out there are others like us. Like Andersen’s Ugly Ducking, my friend George was beautiful to us on campus, but within the nest he looked bewilderingly strange. (Rod writes, “In one of our yelling matches Paw accused me of bringing all this on myself for being so obstinately strange.”) And, as if one more alienating touch were needed, George was gay.

Rod went from the residential high school to Louisiana State University, to the Baton Rouge Advocate, to The Washington Times, where he could look out his apartment window and see the president’s helicopter rising into the air. And his gifts kept him on the move, from Washington to the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, to the New York Post, to the Dallas Morning News, to a major blog at Beliefnet.com, to the Templeton Foundation in Philadelphia.

Ruthie, meanwhile, stayed close to home. She became a teacher in the local public school, and soon stood out as having a way with difficult children. When other teachers would start griping, Ruthie would stand up for the student and find a solution, balancing discipline with encouragement. The results could be remarkable. Before long, a lot of people in St. Francisville knew and loved Mrs. Leming.

With his wife Julie and their (eventual) three kids, Rod returned to the family home a few times a year. He sensed a mostly unspoken contempt for his supposedly wealthy, urban lifestyle. Rod could tell Ruthie thought he was “a snob and a fraud.” She thought it was wrong for him to be paid for writing, because that wasn’t real work. She didn’t like his inclination to ponder great questions; one evening at dinner she said, “Rod, why don’t you say the blessing, since you’re so holier-than-thou?”

He couldn’t figure out how to talk with her and resolve this. Ruthie argued the way her father did; if she felt strongly about something, that meant it was objectively true. His visits home were too short to spend in futile conflict, so he kept postponing that conversation.

In the fall of 2009 Ruthie was in her kitchen, chopping some fresh jalapeno peppers, and she began to cough. “She never really stopped,” Rod writes. By the time she went to see Dr. Tim Lindsay “[s]he could barely complete her sentences without gasping or succumbing to her raspy cough.” The diagnosis was cancer: a large tumor wrapped around a major vein. Ruthie’s friend Abby asked a friend at the hospital how long someone with this cancer would live. He replied, “In cases like this? Three months.”

Rod flew home immediately. He sat on the porch with Ruthie in the last hours before his return flight to Philadelphia. Aware he might never see her again, he tearfully asked her to forgive any bad thing he had ever done to her; he’d inflicted a hundred big-brother taunts and tricks. They hugged and wept, but she waved away any deeper conversation.

When news got around that Ruthie Leming was sick, the response was immediate and strong. One of her husband, Mike’s, fellow firefighters, with tears in his eyes, turned his wallet upside down and shook out every bill. Another friend told Mike he’d never prayed before, but when he heard of Ruthie’s illness, “I prayed twice, dammit.” One of Ruthie’s “most challenging students” stood up during school assembly and told everyone that now they had to “make her proud.”

As Rod listened to the outpouring of love for Ruthie, he began to understand her better. She hadn’t gone to the nation’s capital and written influential columns. But she had done incalculable good, and changed the lives of many people. Rod was reminded of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who did not seek to approach Christ by great deeds or mystical rapture, but only by living in a simple, humble, helpful way—a “little way.” Rod began to see that his sister Ruthie was another saint of the “little way.”

Ruthie lived those three allotted months, and then she kept right on living. She kept leaping over months like a rider on horseback. A year passed, and then continued to turn. But she was weakening. One school morning she was sitting with Mike in her living room when she began coughing violently, coughing blood. “I can’t breathe!” she cried, and fell into her husband’s arms. The ambulance arrived too late.

Rod and his family left immediately for the funeral. Over the course of the next few days, Rod and Julie found they were having the same thought. The warmth and cohesiveness of the St. Francisville community was profoundly attractive. Ruthie’s loss left a big hole in the family. Why not move here and help fill it? They could help raise their nieces and care for Mam and Paw. Circ*mstances fell together providentially, and Rod was given an editorial position at The American Conservative that made it possible to work from home.

And so, in December 2011, the Drehers moved to St. Francisville. It’s a beautiful town, lush and flowering, and in the community there is a quality of steadfast love that is even sweeter. And yet—things haven’t turned out exactly as they’d hoped.

They had trouble connecting with the younger nieces, Claire and Bekah. Some invisible barrier stood between them. One night, Hannah—Ruthie’s eldest—told Rod that he should just give up that project, because it was never going to happen. All their lives their mom had made sharp and mocking comments about Rod. The girls had heard too much of that to like or trust him now. Ruthie had continued saying such things even after the day when Rod had asked her forgiveness and they’d made, he thought, a new start.

Rod and Julie were stunned. The central reason they’d rearranged their lives and moved a thousand miles was to be family to the girls, but Ruthie had apparently made that impossible even before they could begin. How could Ruthie be so kind to everybody she met, yet so unjust to her brother?

Rod still believes that Ruthie was a saint, but even saints aren’t perfect. Perhaps he brought it on himself, with all the pranks and teasing in childhood. Rod knows she loved him, but that doesn’t fix everything. Relationships are complicated.

Of course, given enough time, they can get better. But you don’t always get enough time. George introduced me to my husband, so he was a treasured friend. We planned that at our hippie wedding in the woods he would walk ahead of us in the procession. But a month beforehand he drifted into oncoming traffic, overcorrected, and flipped over into a ditch. He went home to Ulmer suddenly—sightless, voiceless, and still.

Home is where you hang your heart. You hang it out helplessly, whether you want to or not, in full reach of ordinary human beings, not saints. Even when they are saints, you just might be their greatest temptation. And whether we like them or not, whether they understand us or not, we are linked to them forever by the mystery of blood. From the first of life to the last, we are bound to them by unbreakable claims.

When we’re grown we can surround ourselves with whoever we like, but we all must begin life like this, vulnerable, in the midst of people we never chose. God chose them for us. If you have things to say, now is the time to say them. We will all be voiceless one day.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Prayer That Tunes the Heart to God (Paraclete Press).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.