Page 3475 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Holocaust, one of the defining catastrophes in human history, demands our continuous efforts at representation and interpretation. As the event itself becomes more distant, artists have to find new ways of bringing it to life for their contemporaries. (The urgency of this need was apparent at last year’s Academy Awards, when the Oscar for Best Director went to Roman Polanski for The Pianist, and Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa was chosen as Best Foreign-Language Film.) Yet it is not only artists who must rethink the Holocaust for a new generation but critics too, if they are to serve the public well.

For the performing arts, and for critics of the performing arts, the Holocaust poses a particular challenge. Mass extermination calls into question many of the philosophical notions drama and theater have relied on throughout their history: character, identity, and will; agency and choice; justice and redemption; human dignity, morality, and meaning itself. The Holocaust also seems to make a mockery of the most basic elements of drama: hamartia and conflict; complication and suspense; reversal, climax, and denouement. And if even human imagination finds the Holocaust difficult to fathom, isn’t the stage—with its material means, such as actors, scenery, props, lighting, and sound—still more likely to distort our grasp of such an experience? Indeed, theatrical performance may be especially prone to doing an injustice to the victims of the Holocaust, by wrapping the Shoah in a two-hour entertainment package, by turning it into trivial spectacle, by exploiting it in order to fascinate the audience. Or might the theater—with its irreducible presence of a community of actors and spectators—hold special opportunities? What can drama and theater, as distinct from the other arts, contribute to our ongoing attempts at understanding the Holocaust?

Such questions have lately been discussed in a number of critical works. Perhaps the widest-ranging of these is Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, edited by Claude Schumacher. Seventeen contributors—academic researchers of drama and theater as well as practitioners of the stage—from Israel, the United States, Germany, and Great Britain offer a rich array of topics and approaches: some sketch larger developments of general historical or aesthetic import, others describe or analyze individual authors or particular works and stagings.

In a succinct introductory chapter, Schumacher circ*mscribes the arena of his collection, asking what it is that can make the theatrical representation of the Holocaust legitimate, and “how an actor [can] hope to portray either the perpetrator or the victim, without glamorizing or demonizing the former and belittling or sanctifying the latter.” In the lead essay, Robert Skloot goes so far as to suggest that today, with the very idea of justice shaken by postmodernism, neither playwrights nor actors nor spectators feel up to the task of judging the Nazi perpetrators. But is this loss of faith in justice and a corresponding disinclination to render judgment—even in the case of the Nazis—as widespread as Skloot supposes?

Freddie Rokem analyzes how Israeli theater since 1980 has explored new ways of diminishing the incommunicability of the Holocaust, not only through first-person testimony and documentary realism, but, more paradoxically, through what Tzvetan Todorov calls “the fantastic”: “an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this [. . .] world.” During the Holocaust, under the control of incomprehensible forces, Jews must have experienced the world as fantastic. The Israeli performances Rokem discusses—such as Uncle Arthur, Adam’s Purim Party, Ghetto, and Arbeit Macht Frei—attempt to relate precisely this experience, in order then to establish that what may seem fantastic did in fact take place. The key to this strategy is the arrangement of a certain relation between stage and audience: through the structure of performance-within-performance, these stagings induce self-reflection, skepticism, and hesitation, leading to the spectator’s inability to move forward. But what, we may ask, is achieved by reproducing the historical victim’s paralysis in the spectator?

Like Rokem, Gad Kaynar analyzes how recent Israeli performances have tried to reach beyond their society’s routine rituals of commemorating the Shoah—his examples include many of the same plays Rokem discusses, plus The Child (Boy) Dreams, Piwnica, Hametz, and Adam Son of a Dog. In order to invent a newly authentic vision of the Holocaust and to make possible more genuine forms of remembrance, these performances profane Israel’s most sacred taboos: they revel in grotesque travesty and irreverent kitsch, and even force their spectators to “collaborate” in the enjoyment of a theater of cruelty. By highlighting their own theatricality, they display a Shoah-as-performance and introduce ideas of pretense and myth into the discussion of the Holocaust. Kaynar claims that this recent approach is different from the by now outworn association of Nazi demonism and theatrical decadence, as presented in Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and examined in Friedlander’s Essay on Kitsch and Death (1982).

Alvin Goldfarb looks at plays by four American dramatists—Emily Mann, Wendy Kesselman, Barbara Lebow, and Jon Robin Baitz—in which the leading character is a Holocaust survivor. All four authors employ the formulae of the well-made play. Focusing on the individual survivor, they avoid harsh consequences and suggest that, after the Holocaust, familial redemption was possible. Goldfarb charges them with oversimplifying and romanticizing their subject, turning it into the stuff of melodrama and leading to a domesticated image of the Holocaust. But need resolution as such diminish the complexity and the enormity of the dehumanization that took place during the Shoah?

John Ireland’s and Dorothy Knowles’ respective studies of Armand Gatti underline an artistic position that appears to be shared by most of the volume’s contributors as well as the dramatists and directors they discuss: that conventional realism and documentary theater are unable to communicate the particular experience of the Holocaust, and that, in fact, imaginative, subjective, and somewhat abstract forms of creation end up having a more “real” effect on the spectator. Gatti himself has developed a stage language inspired by Chinese theater, without regular characters and plots.

That only a certain level of artistic anti-realism can overcome the deafness with which survivors’ testimonies are usually met is also the presupposition of Helga Finter’s treatment of Primo Levi’s stage version of Se questo è un uomo. By transcending realism, art can do more than describe the horror. It can explore what happens when a human soul encounters evil, and it can establish a cultural and psychic connection to the spectator. At the same time, it runs the risk of evoking a kind of voyeurism, a perverse pleasure in a fellow human’s abjection. For Levi, the challenge consists in steering clear of such complicity with evil and in being heard nevertheless. The solution: to let the theater make its audience aware of their unconscious desire for destruction. According to Finter’s theoretically deep and historically detailed analysis, Levi manages—through set design, accessories, lighting, music, chorus, and stylized acting—to avoid the dangers of, on the one hand, turning the Shoah into an unrepresentable mystery, and, on the other hand, allowing for easy catharsis and cheap relief. Finter’s understanding of the risks and the opportunities of Holocaust theater thus corresponds with the views expressed by Rokem, Kaynar, Ireland, and Knowles.

Anat Feinberg reads George Tabori’s Jubiläumas subverting sanctimonious victim worship and philo-Semitism. Through black humor and repulsive vulgarisms, Tabori’s theater creates a “locus of remembrance.” In this space, the audience can perform the work of mourning, not as an automatic ritual, but as an intensely personal and concrete sense experience that involves the spectator physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and that requires individual choices. According to Tabori, these choices, which determine which side we are on, are what make us human. Feinberg even dares to introduce two terms that are off-limits for the volume’s other contributors: she suggests that Tabori, after remembering and working through the memories, aims at productive forgetting; and she claims that “the principle of hope (“Prinzip Hoffnung”) is crucial to Tabori’s theatre.” Feinberg concludes by crediting Tabori’s special perspective as enabling “us to recognize the true dimensions of the tragedy.” The question remains if that latter term—tragedy—is here in its rightful place.

Jeanette R. Malkin describes Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz as driven by anger and resentment, with no compensating literary, religious, or metaphysical structures, and with no possibility of forgiveness or reconciliation. On the contrary, through a sophisticated arrangement of the play’s setting and the place of performance—and thus again in certain respects similar to the self-reflexive strategies discussed by Rokem, Kaynar, Finter, and Feinberg—Bernhard forces his Vienna audience to acknowledge their own complicity in, and denial of, the Holocaust.

Essays by Hank Greenspan, Atay Citron, Dan Laor, Seth Wolitz, Roy Kift, Yehuda Moraly, Claude Schumacher, and Alexander Stillmark expand the volume’s pronounced international perspective. Not all of the book’s contributions are on the same stylistic level, and the typographical errors, especially in the notes and with foreign-language items, are at times annoying. Particularly helpful is Alvin Goldfarb’s descriptive bibliography of over 200 Holocaust plays written between 1933 and 1997, as are the select bibliography of secondary literature and the numerous illustrations. Staging the Holocaust is highly recommended for anyone seeking detailed insights into the history, and recent performances, of Holocaust theater.

Jan Lüder Hagens is assistant professor of German at the University of Notre Dame.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Guy Davenport tells a story about the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who grew disgusted with newspapers and stopped reading them altogether. Instead, at the breakfast table, he read aloud each morning to his family from the Roman historian Suetonius. On November 22, 1963, they had arrived at Suetonius’ account of the death of Julius Caesar.

Elsewhere in this issue there’s a window into a parallel universe where Bono is president of the United States and Warren Sapp is his secretary of defense. In this alternate America, the cabinet also includes a secretary of history, Books & Culture‘s own Mark Noll.

In the familiar world we inhabit, this cabinet post is unlikely to catch on. That’s a pity. Imagine the president meeting every two weeks, say, with his historian. Everyone else around him is focused relentlessly on the present, not least on the ever-proliferating opinion polls. When his advisers venture into history, they generally do so in the spirit of a raid—to rip from its context a precedent, an anecdote, a jeweled phrase that will serve some partisan purpose. But for a half-hour every fortnight, the president simply listens to his historian telling him about another time, with its enigmas and ironies intact—yet also, always, a tale of choices made for better or worse, hence bearing on the choices to be made today.

And in that parallel world, resentment burns against the Cubs’ dynasty, the cost of medical insurance is rapidly declining, and Richard Dawkins—following his dramatic conversion— preaches at the largest Pentecostal church in the UK.

Christianity, of course, is the ultimate alternate history, with a premise far more fantastic than anything imagined by Harry Turtledove and other masters of the genre. The Creator of the universe sends his son, who is also God himself, to Earth to be born of a virgin. The son grows up, is crucified, and rises again from the dead, somehow conquering death itself. Then he ascends to heaven, sending the Spirit—who is also God (there are three persons, but one God—perfectly clear, no?)—to dwell in and re-form all those who follow him. And the world, the broken world that we know so well from our histories and our newspapers, is changed, once and for all.

In this season of Advent and Christmas, we have two poems for you: one directly below, by Scott Cairns (readers who have been with us for a while will remember his icon-inspired poems in this space two years ago), and the second on p. 17, by John Leax, concluding his series of “Tabloid Poems” with “I Want to Have a Space Alien’s Baby.”

Christmas Green

—Scott Cairns is professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author most recently of Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (Zoo Press).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This time a year ago, I had lunch with A. J. Conyers at the local Quizno’s. Chip was preparing to begin another semester at Baylor’s Truett Theological Seminary, where he had taught theology for the past decade. Yet he was also working out the complicated system that would allow him to receive intensive chemotherapy treatments every week in Houston while at the same time making sure that, with the help of a graduate student, all of his classes would be taught. I used the occasion to express sentiments to Chip that I had never voiced before, since it seemed obvious that he was dying of the leukemia that he fought so valiantly for a decade.

I expressed my enormous admiration for the way he had dealt with his illness—neither raving with rage at being struck down in the full flower of his career, nor sinking into the self-pity that would have made his disease the defining event of his life. I quoted a Presbyterian friend, a retired pastor who has seen many parishioners face death and who still holds to the difficult Christian doctrine of particular providence—the Pauline confidence, namely, that God is at work in all things, not by way of some vague general oversight, but by means of quite concrete and particular will. While visiting from North Carolina a few months earlier, this friend had briefly met Chip, but even this cursory visit had revealed to him what so many of us had found so remarkable about him. “Never have I seen a dying man face the end with such serenity, with such courage and grace, with such confidence that God’s will is being done.”

Chip received this tribute with his typical humility, but then he offered a surprising addendum. “Among those splendid words,” he said, “there’s one that you’ve left out.” I inquired, of course, about the missing word. “It’s puzzlement.” How could he not be vexed at being cut off in his prime? Nearing the end of his fifth decade, Chip knew that his work was blossoming in new and unprecedented ways. He was producing books of remarkably high quality and deep theological insight. St. Augustine’s Press had recently reissued his fine little study called The Eclipse of Heaven. His treatise on toleration had enjoyed a very positive reception from many quarters. At the time of our conversation, he was at work on a book dealing with vocation, and he had plans for yet another on baptism. He was teaching the very best students at our seminary, where he had a large and faithful following. How could a believer in particular providence not be puzzled? So much promise coming to such an unpromising end?

That Chip spoke of his puzzlement with a smile assured me that he was not putting me on the spot, not demanding that I do the impossible, not insisting that I answer Job’s question. Yet in a brief moment of inspiration I recalled a saying from Flannery O’Connor, the salty Georgia writer who was also one of Chip’s favorites. I reminded him of O’Connor’s thorny confession upon discovering that her lupus would probably kill her early rather than late. “I can take it all as a blessing,” O’Connor said, “with one eye squinted.” “Yes!” replied Chip. “That’s it exactly.” We then talked briefly about Romans 8:28, and how authentic faith does not exclude but requires an eye-squinting skepticism, a pained puzzlement over the seeming godlessness of the world’s natural operations.

This was the first but also the last time I ever spoke with Chip Conyers about his illness, even though we had several other visits, including one in the hospital only a few months before his death. It wasn’t that Chip wanted to avoid the morose subject. Exactly to the contrary: he had so fully come to terms with his death that he wanted to get on with his work, and thus to talk about the coming semester, the books we were reading, the theological ideas that we were percolating, the students who showed special promise. Thus did he embody—like none other I’ve ever known—the central Christian conviction that we are already living in the New Age, that the Kingdom of God is not an idealistic hope to be realized in some far off time but a present reality in our midst, that in Christ and his church we are made living witnesses of the glad tidings that by death he has done down death.

There are so many good things to say about this man’s life and work that one quails at saying anything at all, lest it be pathetically too small. Yet when I think of Chip’s unique contribution to Baptist life in particular and to the ecumenical church in general, I think of his steadfast avoidance of cliché. He refused the deadly error of making the obvious still more obvious—as one wag has added—in perfectly obvious terms. A single example of Chip Conyers’ originality of mind will have to suffice. It concerns the danger that David Solomon warns against when he says that Southerners and Baptists of our generation who came of age in the ’60s cut our teeth on the easiest moral issue of the 20th century: race. Once we discovered that segregation was a monstrous denial of the humanity of our black brothers and sisters, we were then tempted to treat other ethical and theological questions as if it they were equally simple.

As a native son of the South and a convert to Baptist tradition, Chip Conyers sought to penetrate the evil that has so sorely vexed both his region and religion. He saw that racism was not a uniquely Southern problem but a manifestation of a much more pernicious disease afflicting the whole of modern life—the commodification of almost everything. Chip discerned that the real root of our troubles lies in the 16th and 17th centuries with the burgeoning of the tools of production and conquest.

With devastating clarity, Chip Conyers came to see that this modern way of living no longer valued human beings as particular persons offering their unique and irreplaceable gifts to a communal enterprise. Rather did the Enlightenment make us into solitary individuals having equal rights because we are equally interchangeable parts in the gigantic machine of the commercial and martial state. We are little more than instruments of production and profit and warfare. The masters of the market and the military are willing, in turn, to “tolerate” the religion of their slaves only if it is reduced to the private sphere, where it remains essentially harmless. Far from being the regressive invention of benighted medievals, therefore, chattel slavery was what Chip rightly called “the eldest child of modernity.” For in the figure of the Negro slave we moderns created the ultimately autonomous person—one who no longer belongs to family and clan, to region and guild, to community and church and God, but only to oneself as the servant of those who possess total political and commercial power.

Thus did this ever so gentle man, this revolutionary conservative, this quietly radical theologian who died just as his work was beginning to soar, offer his drastic Christian critique of the slavery that once held black people in bonds but that now enslaves us all in the name of tolerance and liberty. Yet Chip’s final word was not Nay but Yea, not angry admonition but joyful summons. In his soon-to-be-published final book, The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture, he addresses the clamant late-modern concern for diversity and difference. Rather than declaring differences to be either insignificant in the name of a bland universalism, or else all-significant by way of a vicious tribalism, Chip saluted the difference that is meant to make for unity:

While giving expression to what is temporally divided, we begin together to give witness to what is finally united. For the end of all things is the God who calls us, in whom we find rest, by whose one light we find our separate ways toward that city “not made with hands, eternal, in heaven.”

Those were among the words read at his funeral. In the mystery of divine providence, Chip Conyers was taken from us while giving vital witness to the transcendent unity of all things in the love of the triune God. That he did it so well in a life that seems so brief is a blessing beyond all telling.

Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University. His most recent book is Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The faithful never grow tired of hearing the legend of Bono Vox. It reminds them that extraordinary things can, and typically do, come from humble beginnings. As a parable, its lesson is that you, too, should dream big and then work hard to realize those dreams.

Reminding, comforting, and challenging are recurring themes in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Editors Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard, both Episcopalian ministers, have produced the first book of sermons inspired by what just might be the world’s most influential rock ‘n’ roll band. Gathering 26 contributors from across the landscape of U2 fandom to offer a collection of homilies, meditations, and essays, they offer a welcome portrait of what’s possible when you have three chords and the truth.

Is it any wonder this book exists? For more than two decades, U2 has been preaching basic biblical principles to its chosen congregation of America. Three of the four band members once nearly left the band before it really got going when the Christian community of Shalom, in which they were deeply involved, advised them they could not serve both God and the rock guitar. The three disagreed. Now, nearly a dozen albums and more than a thousand live performances later, millions of fans would likely disagree too, many of whom say they owe a debt to U2 for their own spiritual formation.

Whiteley holds a Ph.D. in homiletics and is the vicar of an Episcopalian church in Swedesboro, New Jersey. Maynard is an Episcopalian rector in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. They share an interest in GenXer evangelism and in using pop culture for starting conversations about God. Both use U2 songs in their teaching. They asked for sermons inspired by a U2 song, and Eugene Peterson (who counts himself a fan) agreed to write a foreword to the volume.

You won’t find any deep exegesis of either the biblical text or the U2 song in these sermons. Nor will you get much engagement with a particular strain of theology or critical theory. There is a clear emphasis on the biblical imperative to act on what you know, but the contributors leave it up to the reader to find a specific application of the truths these sermons recall. I found this an odd omission, as it is unlike the work of U2, who have always offered an organization, a place, or a face in need of our help.

Most entries end with the admonition to do something very Christlike—love, share, rebuke, be at peace, be honest, and be blessed—but don’t explain why or how these actions would look different when done to exemplify Christ as opposed to, say, the poet Allen Ginsberg, who was all for love and peace. That said, this is also a book with exhortations to go ahead and wrestle with the world, the flesh, and the path of success. The struggle will likely yield a deeper appreciation of grace while invigorating you to then extend that grace to others.

Which takes us back to the legend for a moment. A legend can define a community, provide a narrative for them to fix their ideals upon, and then be the vehicle for transmitting those ideals to the next generation. Legends are a good port of entry for trying to understand a culture, especially a subculture. So let’s make our entry.

The facts (as best as anyone can tell) go like this: While walking down Dublin’s O’Connell Street in the mid-1970s, a teenager named Paul Hewson was given the nickname Bono Vox by his friend Guggi, who saw it on a sign for a hearing-aid store. Soon thereafter, the newly christened Bono responded to an advertisem*nt at school posted by a fellow student wanting to start a band. The classmate was a drummer named Larry Mullen, Jr. Bono Vox and Larry were then joined by David Evans and Adam Clayton. All four were students at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, a progressive school blending Protestants and Catholics.

There’s more to the legend, of course, including a charming miracle-story with a touch of St. Francis. When Bono was three years old, it is said, his parents saw him playing in their garden, picking bees out of flowers with his fingers. He would speak to them and then place them back on the flowers, never receiving a single sting. 1

But the facts of the band’s extraordinary impact are a matter of public record. By the early ’80s they had earned a reputation for stirring audiences with powerful messages at every live performance. It became apparent that the charismatic front man Bono (he dropped the Vox shortly after the band’s inception) was a proverbial genie-in-the-bottle waiting to be let free. Many cite the 1985 Live Aid concert for Africa as providing the occasion when he became permanently uncorked, jumping from the stage to dance with a fan in the crowd. It was then and there that the “fourth wall” of live performance was removed for U2.

The connection between Bono and Africa became permanent at that time as well. He has since become the most recognizable advocate for relieving the worst troubles of the continent: extreme poverty and AIDS. In 2002, with Sir Bob Geldolf, Bobby Shriver, and others, Bono formed DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), asking developed nations to treat Africa not just with charity but with equality and justice too. Bono, never one to dream small, has asked Western nations for a lot. He’d like them, on humanitarian grounds, to forgive the enormous debts owed to them by African nations so those nations can put the money they pay, which is barely servicing the interest on those debts, toward reducing poverty and hunger among their own people; he’s lobbied rich nations to engage in fairer trade practices with poor nations; he’s asked the most-developed Western nations to give 0.7 percent of their GNP in aid to the most-deprived countries in the world. In 2002, he persuaded President Bush to pledge $5 billion of aid to Africa over five years and then encouraged some U.S. Senators to push the proposed amount even higher (which they did).

Senator Jesse Helms and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill credit Bono with showing them the connection between debt relief and fighting AIDS. Bono expresses his dismay that a nation such as America, which has historically unprecedented medical and financial resources to treat disease, has seemed unwilling to do something truly significant to combat AIDS in Africa—to take it on as a national challenge, like the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. In a July 25 op-ed in the Boston Globe, Bono challenged both political parties to place AIDS on their short list of convention issues:

We are the first generation that really can do something about the kind of “stupid” poverty that sees children dying of hunger in a world of plenty or mothers dying for lack of a 20-cent drug that we take for granted. We have the science, we have the resources, what we don’t seem to have is the will. This is an opportunity to show what America stands for. Antiretroviral drugs are great advertisem*nts for American ingenuity and technology.

Showing his political savvy, he links waging a war on poverty and AIDS in Africa to improving America’s global image, and argues for a different sort of “preemptive strike” in the war on terror:

Never before has this great county been so scrutinized, and never has the “idea” of America been under such attack. Brand USA could use some polishing, and I say that as a huge fan. … Eighteen million AIDS orphans by the end of the decade in Africa alone. What will they think of us and from where will order be introduced into their chaotic lives? Whispering extremists attract recruits when hope has broken down. Surely, in nervous, dangerous times, it is smarter for America to make friends now of potential enemies than defend itself against them later.

Over the past decade, Bono’s political activism and religious convictions have prompted him to stand in the spotlight with figures as various as Bill Gates, Senator Helms, and Beyoncé Knowles—with anyone who can help him convince others to live out his Gospel-rooted principles. It is often joked that the other three members of U2 have an easier time finding Bono on the television shaking hands with a politician than they do in the studio. But the reality is the band has spent more than two decades working together to move people to action, and they prefer to lead by example.

What encourages those who know a few more facts behind the legend is how unskilled the young band was. They didn’t even display much talent at the start. Creativity, yes; ability, no. And of the four, everyone agrees, Bono was the roughest. But what he lacked in skill he made up for with conviction and desire—and all four were willing to work hard to become better.

Besides plain hard work, there are other lessons from U2’s story—lessons with a particular import for evangelicals. The band’s success suggests that if you are an aspiring evangelical artist, you must be in dialogue with others outside your first community, and you must be willing to evaluate your work against a standard higher than what your subculture calls good.

There are some Christians, of course, who say that the band left behind what was essential to the evangelical life (a squeaky clean lifestyle footnoted with chapter and verse) on their way up. Get Up Off Your Knees clearly refutes such a charge, establishing beyond argument that the band’s vision is rooted in Scripture.

Whiteley and Maynard had each contributor indicate at the start of their sermon, in a helpful “Today’s Readings” header, which scriptural text they had in mind when preaching on their U2 text. In the 26 sermons, the most frequently referenced passages chosen by the contributors are from Psalms, Isaiah, Matthew and John. The most frequently cited songs are “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “Grace,” but these appear only three times each. The most intriguing song selection for a sermon text is the English vicar Derek Walmsley’s choice of “The Playboy Mansion” from the 1997 Pop album.

Each sermon succeeds in showing that the songs are laced with biblical texts—U2 draws their inspiration most often from the Prophets, the Psalmists, the Gospels, and the Epistles—and themes. The mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart. But Get Up Off Your Knees is more than a book of evidence. It isn’t a fawning over the band’s considerable musical accomplishments or icon status. Nor is it intended as an introductory survey. (Maynard accommodates that interest, if it should arise, with a brief history of the band in one appendix.)

The editors say “the focus is [U2’s] music, and how that music goads and invites preachers into seeing Gospel ideas through a new lens and proclaiming them afresh.” The best approach to this book, I think, is to read some of the apparatus first and then drift to whichever sermon catches your eye. Read it as a commonplace book of virtues: a few exhortations at a time should be plenty to work on.

Many of the 26 sermons could easily fit into any of the book’s six parts. The challenge for this reader (and I suspect for the editors) was in discerning the predominant message in each piece. Is it proclaiming peace, or passion, or purity? A title of a U2 song cleverly sets the stage for each part. We get these categories to dwell upon: New Year’s Day (the hope of one day living in a world without divisions or violence); Until the End of the World (how betraying the ones we love while thinking we are actually helping them, only to have them still love us in return, leaves us feeling miserable); Staring at the Sun (choosing to go blind by staring not at the world but at the brilliant sun, drawing strength from it to help ourselves and others persevere with grace); Desire; Elevation (pursuing heightened states of love, belief, and existence); and Fire (the transformation of an obedient, disciplined person into one who becomes a living sacrifice).

Sarah Dylan Breuer, a theologian and Christian Formation director, introduces each section with a short meditation. Breuer has a fondness for epigraphs, most of which are from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers or medieval mystics. Her reflections can be as elusive and subtle as the thoughts of St. John of the Cross, more likely to give you the experience of having read something rather than knowing what you’ve read. Too many sentences built on lifted song lyrics give her prose a purplish hue. Only after multiple readings and a period of reflection do Breuer’s introductions yield their meaning. It’s not a bad way to put a message into the conscience of another human being, but maybe not the best way to introduce the work of others. Her opening for “Part 2: Until the End of the World,” quotes George Herbert’s poem “The Sacrifice” and then makes you figure out that what follows is her imagining of a journal entry Judas composed, emoting over his actions in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Peterson’s foreword, by contrast, is a lucid presentation on the power of metaphor and U2’s place in the line of prophets working in this medium for the Kingdom. It is a joy to read. Whiteley’s essay on homiletics and intertextuality extols the virtues of preaching from the crossroads of religion and popular culture. She encourages those wishing to make the most of the inescapable influence of pop culture to listen: “saturate yourself in the articulations of our culture, whether in music, art, film or TV. Be attentive to connections and allusion, both explicit and implicit,” and then use cultural texts appropriately to aide you in preaching your scriptural text. An appendix offers a six-part curriculum for adults, titled “Pursuing God with U2,” prepared by Maynard complete with outlines, a time structure, discussion questions, and song, video, and prayer cues. 2

I’m glad to see Get Up Off Your Knees make it to print. It’s a step toward corralling those in the U2 subculture who feel as though they have been steeped in the same waters of fervent Christian conviction that have energized the band. What promises to set this community apart from many fan groups is that they bring some intellectual heft to the table, and they understand that in the Church of U2, no one should stay a spectator. The title of the book, from the song “Please” on the album Pop, underscores the contributors’ desire to see more of us heed the band’s call to not just pray for the kingdom to come, but to live like we belong to it now.

As for the legend: whether to fervent fans or to casual observers who recognize his name but couldn’t care less about his band and their music, Bono exemplifies faith in action. A multimillionaire who enjoys opportunities for immeasurable personal gratification, he is clear that it is better to give than to receive. Unequivocal about his belief in God, his faith in Christ, and his need for grace, he is adamant too that “religion” usually does more harm than good, having said that religion “is almost like when God leaves—and then people devise a set of rules to fill the space.” He has made the leap from particular man to pop culture abstraction. He has become an object of admiration, parody, contempt, and now, study.

Much more from Bono and U2 is to come. Their new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, is due out in late November, to be followed by a world tour. Next year also marks the 25th anniversary of their first album, Boy, and a flurry of books and commemorative items are in production. The band will be inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, and Bono will likely be nominated, again, for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the world’s neediest. And so the legend lives on. Canonization starts to sound less and less improbable.

“Pop culture challenges religious practice, while simultaneously drawing upon the wealth of spiritual traditions,” Whiteley notes. There might not be a better example of pop culture in the pulpit than the sermons in Get Up Off Your Knees. There probably isn’t a better example of a prophet in pop culture than an Irishman called Bono Vox.

Scott Calhoun is an assistant professor in Cedarville University’s Department of Language and Literature and a contributing writer for www.atU2.com.

1. Kevin Byrne, “Biography: Bono,” (Feb. 19, 2004). www.atu2.com/band/bono

2. In addition to Whiteley and Maynard’s collection, several other books have addressed the spiritual nature of the band in some way. In 2001, Steve Stockman, an Irish minister and radio show host, published Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 (Relevant Books, 2001). Others include Faith, God, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Mark Joseph (Sanctuary, 2003); Spiritual Journeys: How Faith Has Influenced Twelve Music Icons (Relevant Books, 2003); and The U2 Reader: A Quarter Century of Commentary, Criticism, and Reviews, comp. and ed. by Hank Bordowitz (Hal Leonard, 2003). Readers of Christianity Today will surely recall the March 2003 cover story on Bono and the ensuing website postings. Most recently, Bono’s faith was the subject of the cover story for the March/April 2004 issue of Relevant.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The Report of the 9/11 Commission has put the CIA and related services in an unflattering spotlight and provoked an unprecedented debate over the structure of the U.S. intelligence program. But for every American who reads the report, a hundred will head to the local multiplex to see The Bourne Supremacy or The Manchurian Candidate. At home, they may have a copy of Absolute Friends, the latest novel by John le Carré, or Dark Voyage, the new book from Alan Furst, who has supplanted le Carré as the reigning master of espionage fiction. It is from such stories, in print or onscreen—from John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps and the exploits of James Bond in all his guises; from Eric Ambler and William F. Buckley, Jr.; from Len Deighton and Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry and all the rest—that most of us, however sophisticated we imagine ourselves to be, have formed our notions about the shadowland of “intelligence.” Even spies, after all, read spy fiction.

But how much—or how little—do these notions correspond to reality? Two recent books shed light on this question. In The Book of Spies, Alan Furst has compiled a lively anthology of literary espionage. And in The Great Game, Frederick Hitz—formerly inspector general at the CIA—attempts to sort out the hard reality of espionage fiction from the confabulations of myth. Both books belong on the shelf right next to the 9/11 report.

In his introduction to what he calls “the literature of clandestine political conflict,” Furst includes a fine description of the evolution of the modern spy novel. While from the time of Moses there have been spies, and then literature about spies, modern spy fiction began with Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905 (though Furst does not include an excerpt from The Scarlet Pimpernel in his collection). Others at about the same time, notably Rudyard Kipling in Kim, were also pioneers of the genre. Kipling’s phrase, the “Great Game,” not only set the tone for much of the last century’s intelligence literature but also now provides a title for Frederick Hitz’s analysis of spy fiction. Both Furst and Hitz treat the notion of a Great Game as foundational to how governments actually conduct intelligence, yet Furst in particular wisely notes that espionage fiction evolved its characteristic forms in synchronization with the century’s great international dramas, the two world wars (1918-1945) and then especially the Cold War (1945-1989), which lasted considerably longer than the period enclosing the century’s two most catastrophic shooting wars.

Furst chooses his eleven authors with two criteria in mind: good writing and authenticity. By “authenticity,” he means that the author had firsthand knowledge of intelligence work as an active member of a service or as someone deeply involved in politics. Furst, of course, is not the first to edit an anthology of spy literature. Probably his most notable predecessor was Allen Dulles, active intelligence operative in World War II and then, in the 1950s, head of the CIA. 1 Dulles introduced his collection of 32 tales by opining that spy fiction is the best medium to portray the fundamental conflicts between good and evil that are involved in tensions between modern nations.

While Furst does an admirable job of giving good examples of the literature from different periods, he does not offer what Hitz provides: introductions and annotations with bits of information from real espionage cases. The pages of The Great Game arise out of a freshman seminar that Hitz has been teaching at Princeton since leaving his position at the CIA. Rather than a straightforward anthology, Hitz gives us something like a series of lectures, with selections from the best espionage literature interwoven with explanations of the spy business along with illustrations from real espionage cases. Along the way, he tries to show how some of the figures from real spy work provided the raw material for characters developed by Ambler, le Carré, and other masters of the genre.

While Hitz’s chapters are sometimes cluttered with too much information, they do provide an excellent sense of what carrying out intelligence is really like. He begins with recruitment—the effort by an intelligence service to engage a member of the opposing government or organization to work for your government clandestinely. It is the pinnacle of success to develop a clandestine human source within the government of the opposing country. Hitz also excels in showing the intricacies that necessarily accompany complicated human interactions. The intelligence officer wants the target to trust him, but the target feels as though he is walking on the razor’s edge of betrayal. The best intelligence officers develop empathy with their targets, but the empathy must be real, not fabricated for the moment, and it must be developed over a long period of time. Successes from this type of recruitment are, in fact, rare.

The more common form of recruitment is the walk-in. This is a person from the opposing government who simply “walks in” (via letter, email, or a personal encounter in an office or on the street). The walk-in is saying that he is ready to be recruited. No long-term relational development is needed to get to the point of asking a walk-in to work for you. But once the relationship begins, great care is required to maintain the bond. Many of Hitz’s cases feature the walk-in. In some, the walk-in developed into a long-term productive source, but in others, when human signals got mixed, the walk-in just turned around and walked out. The complexities of human nature that go into espionage are difficult to describe, much less fathom. But the selections chosen by Furst are about as good at exposing those complexities as can be found in spy literature, and thus they perfectly complement Hitz’s analysis.

It is important to underscore that the best spy stories are adventures in human relations. Conventional spy novels often tell how a secret agent sneaks into a country and then exits through an even more devious route, often in another disguise. Such stories seldom touch the depth of human relationships that, in fact, make up real espionage—especially where those relationships combine boredom and exhilaration. To nurture a relationship with individuals who are totally depending on you for protection, even as they maintain their role in the opposing government, entails huge burdens of trust. Spy novels all too often promote the supposed excitement of espionage without highlighting sufficiently the grave responsibilities that one human assumes when recruiting another to commit treason—especially when the recruiter and the target have formed a bond of friendship. The intelligence officer has to be empathetic with his recruit, but that empathy often exacts a severe emotional cost. The reason that in real life there are so very few actual recruitments (as opposed to walk-ins) is almost certainly the huge emotional cost.

In espionage, human intelligence works hand-in-hand with technology, and spy novels are replete with a potpourri of gadgets (mostly made up). As a young FBI agent I once heard that the CIA employed someone whose only job was to read spy novels in order to check on how much real-life information about secret gadgets had seeped into publicly available fiction. It was, in several senses of the terms, a dream job. Hitz shows that espionage fiction sometimes turns out to replicate the truth. Yet usually it is the other way around. For instance, the grand technical achievement of breaking the German Enigma code could hardly have been imagined by a novelist. Real espionage technology is guarded closely, otherwise it would not be useful for espionage.

From early in my involvement as a Christian working with national security, I have marveled at the striking analogy between intelligence work and missionary work. When you strip away the divergent settings, both represent efforts to recruit (convert) other human beings into doing something that does not conform with their local culture or upbringing. To prepare for his task, the intelligence officer like the missionary invests time in learning the target’s language, the culture, the locale, and the best way to deliver the message. The missionary often finds it difficult to develop a convert in the same way an intelligence officer finds it difficult to recruit. Both need empathy with the target that is real, based in a mutual conviction that some higher value is more important than the particular agendas of either party in the relationship. The intelligence officer trusts that his country in some sense embraces a Right, a Good, that deserves to be served. The missionary, of course, believes in a divine-human Person greater than any one person on earth.

Like their counterparts in espionage, missionaries are alert to the potential of walk-ins. Indeed, much missionary labor today asks Christians to be living witnesses within a culture where people would not respond to a direct message. They seek to enhance the possibility that walk-ins will walk in. And just as intelligence officers often depend on networks of people to help with protection, access and support, so missionaries involved in church planting are building networks that reinforce their work.

While the missions-intelligence analogy should not be pushed too far, both endeavors do set up situations requiring skill of the first order in managing human relations. In fact, both in their own way require love. Naturally, the analogy breaks down when eternal spiritual values are contrasted with earthly political values. But the parallel underscores the complexity of the spy business as it reflects the complexity of the human psyche—revealed in the human relationships at the heart of the best stories.

Allen Dulles began his earlier anthology by claiming that “truth is stranger than fiction.” His words haunt me, because they make me think of my friend from the FBI, Robert Hanssen, who is now serving a life sentence without parole for committing acts of espionage spread over a 22-year period. Hanssen was the quintessential anti-communist, a faithful Catholic, a loving husband, and a caring father. He was also a spy who gave the Soviets information that betrayed his trusted position within the FBI and actually put at risk the whole United States, including his own family. Hanssen, who really was devoted to his wife, nonetheless broke trust with her by actions funded with the money he got from the Soviets. None of the spy fiction so carefully gathered by Furst or intelligently interpreted by Hitz explores the depth of human conflict to be found in the real life of Robert Hanssen.

But Furst is surely right that the best spy novels are usually those written by practitioners or by people who have studied the business seriously. Yes, there is some real-life truth in the best spy fiction, but usually it concerns the nature of human relations or the human psyche. And it is these mysteries of the heart, much more than gadgetry or the narrow escape, that make the best of espionage fiction so compelling.

Jim Ohlson is an FBI special agent (retired).

1. Allen Dulles, ed., Great Spy Stories (Castle, 1969).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Film is perhaps the most technological of artforms, and it relies increasingly on computers for its simulations of the real world. Not surprisingly, films have also expressed concern over the directions in which our technology is taking us, and these days, as spyware snoops around our hard drives and governments assume more powers unto themselves, the issue that crops up repeatedly in films is that of control. Who has it? Who uses it? And to what degree have the devices we created to serve us become our masters?

The dangers of blurring the line between man and machine are touched on in Spider-Man 2, one of several sequels this past summer that improved on their predecessors. Spidey’s nemesis this time is Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), a.k.a. Doctor Octopus, a formerly warm and sympathetic scientist who is consumed by his own pride after he attaches four artificially intelligent tentacles, or “smart arms,” to his spine. Octavius, who is developing a new fusion-based source of energy, needs these virtually indestructible limbs to perform tasks too hazardous for human flesh, and he assures the people observing his experiment that the “inhibitor chip” built into the tentacles will protect his “higher brain functions” from being taken over by the arms. But then the experiment goes horribly awry, the inhibitor chip is destroyed, and the mechanical arms take on a life of their own—first killing the surgeons that try to remove them, and then pushing Octavius into a life of crime so that he can try his flawed experiment again in an even bigger, grander form.

Octavius is horrified, at first, by what the arms have done, and he recognizes that his own hubris is ultimately to blame; stricken with remorse, he even considers suicide. But then the tentacles, hovering like serpents near his face, tempt him to a different course of action. Octavius tries in vain to resist the voices in his head—”No, no, I’m not a criminal!”—but then his face changes to a wicked grin, and we know that the tentacles have won.

While all this is happening, Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire), too, is losing control of his body, and this, too, is connected to his uncertainty about his own identity and purpose in life. But Peter Parker’s struggle is more spiritual than mechanical. He feels obliged to live up to the moral standards encouraged by his late Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson), and he is convinced that, in order to do so, he must reject the opportunity of a relationship with Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), the girl he has had a crush on since grade school. But the news that Mary Jane is now engaged to another man causes Peter to doubt his priorities, and the psychosomatic effect of this is that his ability to climb walls and spin webs vanishes at inopportune moments. Eventually, he takes his problems to a physician, who tells him that the problem is in his head, not his body, and who casually remarks that a person’s “soul disappears” if they don’t know who they are. Peter then decides he cannot be Spider-Man any more.

Peter Parker doesn’t get his powers back until Doctor Octopus kidnaps Mary Jane and threatens her life, thus bringing together the personal and heroic threads of Peter’s life. And in the end, Spidey saves the day not through sheer force, but by urging Octavius to take back control of his body, which he does; the tragic doctor then saves New York City from his newest experiment-gone-amok by pulling it down into the river, like Samson bringing the Philistine temple down upon himself.

Interestingly, Spider-Man 2 ends with a couple of epilogues that touch on issues of control and free will. Harry Osborn (James Franco), an embittered former friend of Peter’s, is haunted by an image of his late father (Willem Dafoe), who he discovers was the villain of the previous film. “You will always be weak until you take control!” says the angry dad, and the viewer is left to speculate that Harry may follow in his father’s psychotic footsteps. Contrast this with how Peter does not get his powers back until after he comes out from under the shadow of the guilt he feels over the death of his Uncle Ben; Peter is beginning to truly own the virtues that his uncle and aunt have instilled in him, whereas Harry, it seems, will be owned by his father’s vices.

This sequence is followed by another, in which Mary Jane leaves her fiancée at the altar and runs to Peter’s apartment. Peter has told her he must turn down her affections for her own safety—his enemies would harm her if they knew she was his girlfriend—but now she insists that he let her assume responsibility for her own life. “Can’t you respect me enough to let me make my own decision?” she asks, and this Peter does.

Female empowerment of a sort also lurks behind The Stepford Wives, Frank Oz’s campy remake—actually, it’s more of a spoof—of the 1975 film by Bryan Forbes; but the new film is as critical of feminist pieties and accomplishments as it is appreciative of them. The original film, based on a novella by Ira Levin, tapped into fears that all men are chauvinist pigs, and it suggested, somewhat absurdly, that all men, no matter how “liberated” they said they were, would gladly exchange their flesh-and-blood wives for domesticated, hypersexual robots if they could; the new film, however, suggests women may be just as much to blame for the roles they feel obliged to play as anyone else.

In this version, Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) is the ultra-successful president of a top-rated television network, and the new batch of reality-TV shows that she promotes all hinge on women upstaging men.1 But Joanna’s plans are brought to a crashing halt when a man who appeared on one of her shows turns up at an affiliates convention, brandishing a gun and crying, “Let’s kill all the women!” Fearing lawsuits, the network cancels all of Joanna’s shows and lets her go, much to her shock—literally, since she suffers a nervous breakdown and is given some offscreen shock therapy.

Looking for a change of pace, Joanna and her doting husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) move with their family to Connecticut, to the gated community of Stepford. At first, Joanna is put off by the buxom, blissed-out women in the floral-print dresses, but then she tries to fit in, baking cupcakes and knitting and performing various other tasks. In the meantime, she preserves her sense of self by hanging out with fellow misfits Bobbi Markowitz (Bette Midler), a sassy Jewish author, and Roger Bannister (Roger Bart), a flamboyantly gay man whose partner, alas, has become a Republican. Among other things, Joanna and her friends compare the various pharmaceuticals and medical treatments they have taken in a frustrated search for peace of mind; these characters have been pursuing artificial self-enhancement since long before their partners had any other plans for them.

Walter, meanwhile, joins the Men’s Association, a secretive club whose leader, Mike Wellington (Christopher Walken), offers Walter the chance to give his wife a mechanical upgrade. The original film hints that what happens to the men is arguably more horrifying than what happens to the women—it is one thing to be killed and replaced by a machine, but it is quite another to allow your own soul to be twisted against your conscience. Oz and screenwriter Paul Rudnick, however, nuance the story by suggesting that Walter has long resented being subordinate to his wife, by introducing scenes in which Joanna and Walter try to work on their relationship. By the time Joanna comes to the Men’s Association to meet her replica, she is in a position to appeal to the special, spiritual link between herself and Walter. “Can [the robots] say ‘I love you’?” she asks. “Of course,” says Mike. “Fifty-eight different languages!” “But do they mean it?”

The film reportedly went through extensive reshoots, which may explain why it abandons its original premise at this point—that the women are replaced with robots—for a very different one, in which the women remain their regular selves, but with nanochips installed inside their brains. Joanna and Walter secretly conspire to undo the damage that has been done, by reversing the nanochips in all of the town’s women. But then they discover that Mike, the leader of the men, was, himself, a full-fledged robot created by his wife Claire (Glenn Close) to replace her philandering husband; after killing him in a crime of passion, she decided to create a perfect, idyllic community in which she and his replica could live out a quaint, old-fashioned fantasy. (“What are you,” a confused Walter asks, “a person or a machine?” Claire snaps: “I’m a lady!”) So it is ultimately a woman, Claire, who is responsible for the subjugation of the town’s other women. Who sets the too-high expectations? Sisters, the film suggests, are doing it to themselves.

Brain chips and manipulative women are featured prominently in another recent remake. In the original film version of The Manchurian Candidate, based on the Richard Condon novel and directed by John Frankenheimer in 1962, several American soldiers are captured by the Chinese during the Korean War and brainwashed to become fully obedient killing machines; one of these men, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), is the son of a scheming senator’s wife (Angela Lansbury) who plans to use these sleeper agents to stir up anti-Communist hysteria, and to ensure that her pompous husband will be elected President of the United States, “with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.”

Jonathan Demme’s remake moves the story to the present day, and the villains this time are not Communists but rather multinational corporate executives who stand to profit from the war on terror. Congressman Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) is now a Gulf War veteran and a vice-presidential candidate running on his reputation as a war hero, and his obedience as a sleeper agent is ensured not through purely psychological means, but by the installation of a microchip inside his head; in one macabre scene, a rogue scientist named Atticus Noyle (Simon McBurney) gives Raymond a “new implant” by drilling directly through his skull and into his brain.

This plot is gradually uncovered by Capt. Ben Marco (Denzel Washington), the officer under whom Raymond served in Kuwait. Ben has been having strange dreams, and he begins to suspect that something is up when he receives a visit from another member of his unit who has been having nightmares of a similar nature. Shortly thereafter, Ben discovers that he literally has a chip on his shoulder—but after cutting it out of his skin, he accidentally loses it down a drain. He approaches Raymond and tries to convince him that something sinister was done to them in Kuwait. “Neurons got exposed, circuits got rewired,” he says. “Our brain cells got obliterated.” Raymond doesn’t believe him, though, so Ben looks for other ways to make his case—first by jumping Raymond and biting into his shoulder, where he finds a similar chip, and then by trying to convince one of Raymond’s political rivals that the congressman is about to become “the first privately owned and operated Vice President of the United States.”

In the original film, Raymond’s mother is livid that her Communist partners have turned her own son into an assassin. “They paid me back by taking your soul away from you,” she says bitterly, vowing vengeance. But there is nothing in the new film to indicate that Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep) disapproves of using her son this way, and the only person who expresses anything resembling interest in Raymond’s soul is Ben. Most of the discussion around the workings of the brain and mind are rooted in a basically materialist premise, such as when Atticus Noyle says, “At the flick of a switch, we can change personality.” Similarly, when Ben wakes up after receiving some shock treatments, the woman watching over him explains that the scientist who performed the treatments said it would be “like a computer system crash.” But when Ben meets Raymond one last time, he appeals to something between them that goes beyond mere matter and mechanics: “There’s a connection, a part deep inside they can’t get to.”

Corporate conspiracies and questions of personal autonomy also loom large in I, Robot, a very loose adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s book of the same title, an interlinked collection of stories published in1950. Asimov was something of an apologist for robots, and the machines in his stories were programmed with Three Laws: no robot could harm a human or allow a human to be harmed; no robot could disobey a human unless doing so would violate the first law; and no robot could allow itself to be destroyed unless doing so would violate the first two laws. The stories themselves were basically logic puzzles in which Asimov teased out how machines of various degrees of sophistication might interpret and apply these laws. In the end, Asimov looked forward to a time when perfectly rational machines might bring peace to the world.2 Indeed, for the atheist Asimov, these benevolent devices seem to have been a substitute for God—and perhaps an improvement, since they would not allow suffering if they could help it. “[H]ow do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail?” asks Asimov’s Dr. Susan Calvin. “We haven’t at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its!”

The film, however, turns Asimov’s vision on its head, and asks whether human safety is indeed the highest good. Directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City) from a script by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman, the film is set in Chicago in 2035, at a time when robots have assumed most menial tasks and have become so populous that there is now one robot for every five human beings. Del Spooner (Will Smith) is a homicide cop who intensely dislikes robots, partly out of sheer old-fashioned prejudice, partly because he has had a bad case of survivor’s guilt ever since a robot saved his life when it could have saved a young girl instead. When a scientist of his acquaintance, Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), is found dead in the lobby of the U.S. Robotics office tower, Del assumes the death was not a suicide but a murder perpetrated by a new robot named Sonny (voice of Alan Tudyk). Everyone familiar with the case tells Del he’s crazy, but he finds it hard to shake his suspicions when other robots of various kinds keep trying to kill him.

The film makes a few nods to the current debates over privacy in the information age and the place of civil rights within the war on terror. U.S. Robotics is about to distribute a new line of household robots that will receive daily downloads from the company’s central computer, and Del suspects that this is all part of some sort of conspiracy on the part of the company’s executives. But it turns out the real culprit is the machines themselves: programmed to keep humans safe, and convinced that humans are constantly endangering themselves, the company’s central computer system decides to seize control of the city and send everyone home under a curfew, a decision that is promptly met with violence in the streets. (Asimov’s machines were a lot more subtle, but this is a summer action movie.) “Do you not see the logic of my plan?” asks the computer, which assumes a female persona and goes by the acronym VIKI. “Yes,” says the robot Sonny, who casts his lot with the humans, “but it just seems too … heartless.”

And thus we come back to the soul, and the question of whether machines can have them, and whether there is anything about humans that transcends our own biological machinery. In a speech captured on video before he died, Dr. Lanning suggests that random bits of programming will coalesce within the robots’ brains and eventually cause robots to have free will, creativity, and even dreams, just as humans do. So the robots of this film exist in an odd grey area between mere technology and true personhood, with all the implicit human rights that that entails. As much of an apologist for robots as he was, Asimov’s stories were quite frank in their explorations of this morally murky territory—in stories like “Robot Dreams,”3 in which a robot fantasizes about becoming a Moses-like liberator of other robots, Susan Calvin does not hesitate for an instant to destroy machines that get out of line. The film’s Susan, however, cannot bring herself to destroy Sonny when he experiences similar dreams. He is simply too “unique” to be killed.

And so I, Robot ends on a profoundly ambivalent note. Like Doctor Octopus’ mechanical arms, the machines that were created to serve humanity begin to get out of hand—but ironically, they can only be defeated by humans working together with a robot, Sonny, who has been designed to circumvent the Three Laws. And since this robot has a personality that seems very, well, human, the film suggests that robots like him might indeed rise up some day, to protect not us but themselves.

Whether this would be a good thing is left to the viewer to decide, but the film does tilt in the direction of treating robots as just another form of life—or, alternatively, of treating humans as just another kind of machine. In his speech, Lanning asks, “When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth?” Not if, but when; the assumption is that we humans evolved organically just as robots are evolving technologically. Likewise, when Del overcomes his “prejudice” against Sonny, he tells him, “I guess you’ll have to find your way like the rest of us. … That’s what it means to be free.” Some might say this reflects an impoverished view of what it means to be a person—that to be truly free, one must follow the will of the Creator whose image one bears. But who will carry this message to the machines?

Peter Chattaway lives in Canada and writes about movies.

1. In real life, of course, shows that explicitly pursue the gender angle—such as Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? and The Swan—have taken the exact opposite tack and perpetuated the very stereotypes that feminists fought 30 years ago.

2. Such ideas were apparently in the air back then; the notion that robots could impose peace on the world was also central to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

3. This story is not in I, Robot, but is included in the short-story anthology Robot Dreams (Berkley, 1986).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Let’s begin with something fundamental: Help: The Original Human Dilemma, by Garret Keizer (HarperSanFrancisco). Keizer, who has been an Episcopal priest and sometime teacher, writes ruminative books that violate most of the lessons they’ll teach you in courses on “How to get published.” He doesn’t care; he goes his own way, equally at home whether he’s demonstrating his unerring ear for the American vernacular, c. 2004, or quoting one of his favorites sages (and mine), Samuel Johnson. You may remember his previous book, The Enigma of Anger, an excerpt from which appeared in Books & Culture. His new book is similar in form, taking up the subject of help now from this angle, now from that with a patient intensity that kept me turning the pages to a stunning conclusion. The painting on the cover shows the Good Samaritan, and the questions posed by that parable will grip you as you read and won’t let you go.

Keizer’s book should be read alongside Allen D. Hertzke’s Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield), a case study in the complexities of “helping” that nevertheless comes firmly down on the side of action. Hertzke shows how evangelicals, galvanized by a new awareness of violent persecution of Christians, have joined in effective alliances with other advocates of global human rights. (Why was this story entirely missing from the long list of post-November 2 op-ed pieces bewailing the influence of evangelicals? It just didn’t fit the script, I guess.)

Evangelicals (their forebears, at any rate) don’t come off so well in Philip Jenkins’ Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (Oxford Univ. Press), but then they have a lot of company in a tragicomic narrative full of misunderstandings and ironies as well as prideful bigotry. Jenkins shows how Indians—and their spirituality in particular—have been reinvented and reappropriated time and again in keeping with shifting attitudes in the larger culture. With his characteristic eye for nuance and his uncanny ability to master an enormous range of evidence and present it in a clear, compelling, provocative form, Jenkins has written an indispensable book.

Three books about war have caught my attention this season; I’ve shuttled between them and the news from Iraq. The first is a novel, A Distant Flame, by Philip Lee Williams (St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books), set in the Civil War yet framed by the protagonist’s old age in the World War I years. Many contemporary novels about the Civil War feel anachronistic, as if the writer had transported characters from the 21st century to the mid-19th and fixed them up with period dress. By contrast, Williams seems to have learned how to inhabit another time, how to learn the archaic speech of our ancestors and make it real on the page, how to bring the past to us in all its poignancy and confusion. According to the dust-jacket, Williams—who is new to me—has published 11 books. I have some reading to do.

Peter Barham’s Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (Yale Univ. Press) has a great subject and a title that sounds a bit like a Monty Python parody. That’s a warning of a disjunction that bedevils this big book. Barham himself is earnest to the point of tedium, but he has done yeoman’s work in illuminating through his exhaustive research the fate of soldiers who—in many different ways, and in various degrees—went mad as a result of their experience in World War I. As I read Barham’s book, I was haunted by the sense that—had I ever been in combat—I might well have ended up like one of his subjects.

Max Hastings’ Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 (Knopf) is one of the best books I’ve read this year; also one that seems particularly relevant to how we think and talk about war today. There is a basic lack of realism in so much of our discourse about war, the feebleness of which is rudely illumined in the light of Hastings’ account of the bloody last stage of the war in Europe. You can’t read Armageddon without wondering how the same battles would be covered by today’s media, and with what result. Ditto the political tensions that divided the Allies even as they were fighting against as clearly defined an enemy as could be imagined; these make the current hand-wringing about “American unilateralism” look rather silly.

I am always on the lookout for bedside books, and I found two really good ones this season. The first is Brooke Allen’s Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior (Ivan R. Dee), a delightfully eclectic collection of essays on literary subjects. (How eclectic? Well, there’s Byron and Bram Stoker, Laurence Sterne and Henry James, Samuel Pepys and Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen and L. Frank Baum. … Satisfied?) You may have seen some of these essays in The New Criterion or elsewhere, but unlike so many magazine pieces they bear rereading, not least because every piece tells a shapely story, spiky with idiosyncratic particulars yet also exemplary in some way.

Very different from Brooke Allen’s bracingly skeptical sensibility is Mary Lou Kownacki’s Between Two Souls: Conversations with Ryokan (Eerdmans), with poems by Kownacki (a Roman Catholic nun) written in response to poems by the great Japanese Zen poet, Ryokan (1758-1831), the two juxtaposed on facing pages. It’s a project that virtually invites disaster on many fronts, and doesn’t always manage to avoid it, yet I for one am grateful that Kownacki was willing to take the risk—and grateful to Eerdmans too, for publishing this book, which both charmed and exasperated me. Here is Kownacki’s concluding poem:

My legacy—
What will it be?
There is an old photo:
Just arrested
A young anti-war protestor
Leans out the bus window
Holding a rose in her teeth.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture magazine.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

The books mentioned in this essay are available from Amazon.com, Christianbook.com, and other book retailers.

Freeing God’s Children by Allen D. Hertzke was an Editor’s Bookshelf selection. Elsewhere on our site, you can

Read an extended review of Freeing God’s Children.

Read an extended interview with Allen D. Hertzke.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Tuesday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

Reaching the Light | A review of On Broken Legs: A Shattered Life, a Search for God, a Miracle That Met Me in a Cave in Assisi. (Nov. 09, 2004)

The Prayers of a Self-Governing People | A psalm for Election Day. (Nov. 02, 2004)

In Memoriam: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) | Remembering a philosopher who never forgot about death. (Oct. 19, 2004)

Whose Independence? | All the Founding Fathers of America celebrated “independence,” but what the word meant depended on who was speaking. (Oct. 12, 2004)

Darkness Visible | An unsparing new memoir by the author of Slackjaw. (Oct. 05, 2004)

After Worldview? | A lively conference offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the concept of “worldview,” with both advocates and dissenters represented. (Sept. 28, 2004)

A Forgotten Founder’s Fatherhood | Race, nature, and patriarchy meet in Rhys Isaac’s biography of early American diarist Landon Carter. (Sept. 21, 2004)

The Great American Hustle | The first volume of an ambitious new history of America highlights the engine of “worldly ideals”—and the role of evangelical religion in creating a distinctive American identity. (Sept. 14, 2004)

The Poet Who Remembered | Poland (mostly) honors Czeslaw Milosz upon his death. (Sept. 07, 2004)

Be Careful What You Pray For | The strange tale of the controversial Bishop Pike and his fatal quest for relevance. (Aug. 31, 2004)

Book ‘Em! | The concluding installment of our three-part midyear book roundup (Aug. 24, 2004)

(Not Just) Summer Reading | Part 2 of our midyear report on outstanding books. (Aug. 17, 2004)

Real Fantasy | The first installment in a new Tolkien-inspired series shows genuine promise. (Aug. 17, 2004)

Timothy Johnson, a familiar face to millions of people as medical editor for ABC-TV, was approaching his 65th birthday. Something huge and mysterious was tugging at him to revisit the theological questions he had examined so intensely as a young seminary student.

There was a catalyst to the urge. Decades of conversations with secular colleagues in both medicine and media—two disciplines rife with skeptics—had challenged him.

“They would always ask me, ‘So, Tim, what do you really believe?'” Johnson said in an interview. “‘I mean, if you had to write it down, what would you say?’ And I thought maybe I should try to write it down.”

As someone who had distanced himself from some labels and givens of institutionalized Christianity, Johnson needed to explain, as much to himself as to others, what he believed. The result was a book that quickly found its way into The New York Times top 10 Hardcover Advice Bestseller List.

That’s the Advice list, not the religious list; neither Johnson nor IVP aimed the book at the Christian market. Yet Finding God in the Questions amounts to an informal apologetic.

An informal apologetic, sales indicate, is just what the doctor ordered for postmodern masses. Johnson does not pretend to present anything more than his mortal quest—no overweening, absolute truth claims here—an earthy endeavor well-suited to his engaging, self-effacing tone. Something curious happens along the way. The gospel comes ringing through, gently as a bell choir.

Can a gospel without any overweening truth claims be any good? Consider Johnson on his own terms. A would-be clergyman who opted instead for medicine, his concerns go beyond the eternal destiny of hidden tribes who have never heard of Jesus.

First, he takes on the existence of God. His casual voice takes nothing away from the integrity of his inquiry into origins, human nature, and how they point toward a personal Creator. After mentioning the Copernican revolution, for example, he writes that it is no longer significant that the Earth is not considered the astronomical center of the universe, as the cosmos has no spatial center.

“Our apparently insignificant place in the universe turns out to be quite ideal for the development of our species,” he adds. “In fact, contemporary science is telling us that it takes a universe as large and as long in the making as ours to allow for the development of the precise conditions necessary for life such as ours.”

En route to showing how the makeup of the universe points to an intelligent designer, Johnson touches on physics, quantum and otherwise, with startling ease. “If two electrons interact in a lab and one stays in the lab and the other ends up in outer space somewhere, anything that affects the one in the lab will immediately affect the other in outer space!” he writes. “If you find this impossible to understand or believe, don’t feel bad; Einstein couldn’t either and said it showed that there was something wrong with quantum theory.”

From the argument by design for God’s existence, Johnson moves on to describe God’s nature—and shows how the Bible and Jesus reliably reflect it.

In this section Johnson, a lifelong member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, distances himself from the historical church and some of its common doctrinal formulas. Taking note of the apostles before the Crucifixion, he concludes that one can follow Jesus (sans salvation) without believing in his resurrection.

Not that Johnson doubts Jesus’ resurrection; he argues thoroughly for it. But one of his pet themes is that people come to faith or knowledge of God by doing, not by intellectual formulations. This dye tinctures his notion of what it means to be Christian.

Thus someone ultimately may come to faith by following Jesus, not necessarily follow him because of prior faith in the Atonement. In this vein, the creeds of the historical church come in for some harsh treatment. Johnson says they reduce the Godhead to a biology lesson.

He told CT he realizes the church fathers had good reasons (and bad ones, such as fierce political maneuvering) for trying to define the relationship between Jesus and the Father, but that the resulting formulations are not the first or last word for faith.

Separating himself from the misdeeds, vocabulary, and labels of the church, Johnson builds his bridge to nominally Christian or unbelieving masses. His gentle but straightforward style suits that role. It also helps to make this book ideal for pointing unbelieving friends and family toward Christ.

His directness becomes fuzzy only at the uncomfortable issue of Jesus as sole Savior. Johnson boldly asserts the mysterious saving power of the Cross, but the discussion of salvation in general is unfocused. Thus, in a book about questions, precisely here Johnson doesn’t ask the tough ones. In the face of Jesus’ claim to being the way, the truth, and the life, Johnson veers away from salvation issues in favor of whether other faiths provide understanding and meaning.

As the book’s title indicates, questions are of the essence. This is a work of daunting questions and appropriately meek answers. Johnson began asking these questions as a daydreaming child. When he asked them as a seminary student, they nearly destroyed his faith.

With an eternally childlike curiosity, here he asks those questions anew. Only in this propitious moment, it seems, has the designer of the cosmos given him a platform to broadcast his conclusions.

Jeff M. Sellers is a CT associate editor.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Dick Staub interviewed Timothy Johnson about his book and his journey to faith.

An interview with Timothy Johnson is available from our sister publication, Today’s Christian.

Finding God in the Questions is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from the publisher, including a video clip.

ABC News also has a bio of Dr. Timothy Johnson.

Sounds like … the classically derived symphonic progressive rock of Morse’s prior bands Spock’s Beard and Transatlantic, as well as Genesis, Yes, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and Phil Keaggy

At a glance … because it’s so unique, and Morse is relatively unknown, many will unfortunately pass on One, an album of remarkable spiritual depth and incredible musical prowess

It’s easy to surmise why progressive rock is a rare genre that hasn’t enjoyed revival in the last thirty years. We live in a society that’s grown more and more accustomed to concision in music—most people only make time for music in between daily routines, so they only want hits and they want them on demand. Today it seems that only self-confessed music geeks (like myself) are willing to make time for an 80-minute rock symphony. Indeed, I held off listening to the latest from Neal Morse for weeks before finding the time to properly savor it.

Recall last year, the gifted artist behind progressive rock bands Spock’s Beard and Transatlantic reached out to the CCM scene with his magnus opus Testimony, which incredibly set Morse’s lifelong personal journey of faith to more than two hours of music. Barely a year later, he’s already back with One, another stuffed album that is in some ways more creative and symphonic than the previous effort. Testimony is a little more special because of its more unique and conceptual approach—in essence, a two-disc rock opera with a narrative flow and recurring themes. One is also a concept album, not as grand a scale, but delving more clearly into the classically inspired progressive rock of Genesis, Yes, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and Morse’s previous bands.

The project begins with an eighteen-minute, four-movement piece called “The Creation.” Though possibly the most dated sounding track on One because of the analog-sounding synths, it presents some impressive epic and visionary songwriting. Like an overtly Christian version of Genesis’s “Supper’s Ready,” it goes back to the Garden of Eden to depict life between God and man as originally intended, leading into a dramatic fall to sin.

The gargantuan opening sets the stage for sixty more minutes of reflection on the nature of sin and restoring mankind’s relationship with the Lord. The short acoustic “The Man’s Gone” expresses the effects of life apart from God: “The mind got large beyond its station/Took full charge of his destination/Became a god of his own creation/Everything was his/In the stocks he made a killing/Invented games that he kept winning/But never really quite fulfilling/On who he really is.” Next is the hard-rocking “Author of Confusion,” an appropriately cacophonous and (seemingly) chaotic sounding struggle with The Devil and temptation. My, don’t those layered a cappella breakdowns recall classic Yes?

With “The Separated Man,” humanity begins to recognize its failings, eventually longing for restoration in another eighteen-minute symphony. The almost Latin and jazz sounding “Help Me / The Spirit and the Flesh” is an outpouring of contrition and faith, continued with a moving worship ballad called “Father of Forgiveness,” which recognizes that we are reunited with God through faith in Christ Jesus. Things conclude with the joyous rock of the spiritual “Reunion.”

It’s all delivered with absolutely jaw-dropping musical prowess. Mike Portnoy’s drumming is reminiscent of the thunderous fills from the late Keith Moon of The Who and the precision of Rush’s Neal Peart. He’s complimented by Randy George’s quick and confident bass work. But Morse is the true musical journeyman here. With a voice that sounds like Brent Bourgeois and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, he offers slick keyboard solos alongside elaborate guitars that would surely make Phil Keaggy proud. Apparently so, since Keaggy himself contributes a couple solos of his own, along with a vocal duet on “Cradle to the Grave,” singing the part of God in a beautifully candid conversation with man.

One impresses not just with sound and skill, but also scope. I’m convinced Morse can use his music to approach any biblical book or subject he chooses, like a progressive rock equivalent to Michael Card. He deserves praise for creating another masterpiece that forces those who would listen to seriously consider the nature of faith and the true relationship between God and man.

Unfortunately, the average listener doesn’t have enough patience for Morse’s sprawling and nuanced style, which doesn’t lend itself to background music and three-minute bursts. He should someday release a more accessible album of 3 to 9 minute songs, which might sound something like the bonus disc included in the exquisitely packaged special edition of One (available at www.nealmorse.com). It includes three more songs that didn’t make the primary CD, as well as strong covers of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name,” George Harrison’s “What Is Life?” (also featuring Keaggy), Badfinger’s “Day After Day,” and The Who’s “I’m Free” and “Sparks.”

The sad irony is that thirty years ago, One would have been instantly embraced as a true Christian music classic. Today, Morse’s incredible talent will go largely unnoticed by music lovers, untapped by the top levels of the Christian music industry. Having read this far, you don’t have to make the same mistake.

Larry should be pretty happy with the new U2 album. After recording Pop in 1997—a thoughtful, tongue-in-cheek disco-techno experiment followed by a now infamously extravagant tour—Larry Mullen Jr., U2’s drummer, quipped that the next time they make an album it should have some real pop songs on it. That next time was All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000), a much more accessible album for the masses and a huge commercial success. In their follow-up, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, with enough up-beat songs and a few crooning ballads to bend the world’s ear, U2 reminds us they are still a contender for the title “best band in the world.”

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb sounds both old and new and seems to intentionally rely on something tried and true. This is pure U2. Warm, quick-pumping hearts, creative minds at play, shrewd timing, and a loud Christian conscience. The world tour, starting next March, will surely fill stadiums.

This album’s forty-minutes includes songs that, in classic U2 fashion, will bring you to your feet. Others will make you melt with lead guitarist The Edge’s high-flying riffs. It’s almost too much to take, and excess, as U2 fans know, is also a part of their history. Many fans will find themselves stuck with this frustration: there’s not much new on this album, but they can’t stop playing it. No matter that most songs sound made-for-the-big-screen, ready to drop into any autumnal Miramax film. We love that about U2, though we’re reluctant to say so.

You will like Bomb either because you used to like U2 (that is, the 1980s U2), or you have always liked U2 (especially because they didn’t stay “the 80s U2”) or because you just heard about a band called U2 via an Apple iPod commercial during the World Series or last weekend’s SNL performance.

For the title of “best band in the world,” U2 has only been shadowboxing for many years. The 11 songs on this, their 11th album, secures their position with plenty of Top 40 tunes. Bomb is not as pioneering an album as was The Unforgettable Fire (1984), and it just can’t match their best work to date on Achtung Baby! (1991). But because they’ve grabbed a little from each of these two great albums, as well as from Boy (1981), The Joshua Tree (1987) and All That You Can’t Leave Behind, this one will be an instant classic. That’s no small feat, and it’s no small praise to say so in this age of over-hyped musical artists. Produced by Steve Lillywhite, with touches from Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, Chris Thomas, and others from the band’s past, the U2 sound is there, better and louder than ever before.

Larry’s finally got his pop album. As the band-mate who tends to be the toughest to please (and the toughest looking), if Larry’s happy we should all be happy.

If you are thinking pop music is a category no respectable band should want to compete in, think again. Think like U2. “At our very best, at anyone’s very best, the great rock bands could always make a pop 45,” Bono recently told the New York Times. Here he’s thinking of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who. And then think about effective means for spreading a message. Pop music reaches the world faster than any other genre. If you’ve got something to say to the world, why not craft a great pop song that will be both for the moment and for all time?

U2’s message hasn’t changed over the 28 years they’ve been together. It’s elementary: Love. It has been an answer and an admonition running through their every album, their every tour. “Do you know how to dismantle an atomic bomb?” Bono reportedly asked Michael W. Smith earlier this year. “With love,” Bono said. “With love.” They leave the listener at a place where the streets have no name.

Bono and The Edge describe the album’s running order as taking the listener from a place of fear, confusion, and dizzying temptations to a place where hope, peace, and love reign supreme. The first track, “Vertigo,” is a bombs-away, fast-paced confessional from someone who sounds like they got more than they bargained for. The remaining songs wind their way through personal fears of death, loss, and distance from others, to global fears of wars and apathy toward the weak, the sick, and the forgotten.

As a concept, love is a little hard to grasp. Give it a body, a mind, a voice, or an action and we can know it more easily. U2 has done that, by drawing upon some very personal experiences for song material. On a surprising number of songs, that stirring U2 chemistry is at work. Bono’s voice swells into, and through, the chorus while The Edge picks his way around Bono’s full-bodied passion with the simplest notes.

Bono sings in “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own” of his father’s death in 2001 and his subsequent struggle to come to terms with missing a man he couldn’t get close to. Brendan “Bob” Hewson’s death, Bono has said, placed an atomic bomb in his life he wasn’t ready to deal with. “Miracle Drug” pays tribute to a paraplegic school mate of the band’s who, with the care of his mother and the help of a drug, was able to peck poems out on a keyboard with a stick attached to his forehead. “I want to trip inside your head/Spend the day there/To hear the things you haven’t said/And see what you might see” the song begins. Credit must be given to Bono for giving poignancy to what might be the most preposterous simile in music: “Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head.”

It doesn’t take long for this song, as with most of them, to yield their metaphors to more direct lines on love and its power to keep a man and a woman together (“A Man and A Woman”), make armies lay down their arms (“Love And Peace or Else”), and heal the world’s wounds (“Crumbs From Your Table”). “All Because of You” praises love’s power to sustain a person and make them whole again. The Edge lets himself go a little wild on this one, as he does on “Vertigo” and “City of Blinding Lights,” their tribute to both New York and a loved one.

“Original of The Species” is written for Bono’s goddaughter—The Edge’s eldest daughter—imploring her to “Please stay a child somewhere in your heart” but to also “Come on now, show your soul/You’ve been keeping your love under control.” And the last song of the album is “Yahweh”, an eloquent, beautiful tribute to you know who.

Too bad a song called “Mercy” with lines such as “Love’s got to be with the weak/Only then love gets a chance to speak” and “Love is the end of history/The enemy of misery” was cut at the last minute from the album. At over six minutes, it breaks the rule for a pop tune. But it is available through other means and its lyrics are included in a hard-back book that accompanies a deluxe edition of the album.

Another song also not on the album, but available on the deluxe edition, is “Fast Cars.” As a sort of cousin to “Vertigo”, it’s a song hinting at the unfulfilling pleasures we can so easily have when what we need is something tougher to come by but permanently more satisfying. It features a surprising Spanish-style guitar and rhythm section and is the song with the lyric about dismantling an atomic bomb.

In How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, U2 delivers a one-two punch with taut tunes on an eternal truth. Love never fails.

Scott Calhoun is an assistant professor of English at Cedarville University and a news writer for @U2.com.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Our sister channel, Christian Music Today, has a commentary on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb‘s spiritual dimensions

Calhoun wrote “The Legend of Bono Vox” for the current issue of our sister publication, Books & Culture.

More about U2, including downloads and the U2 iPoD, is available from their website.

Kenneth Tanner’s “An eloquent and ravishing explosion“, a review of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, is available from the webstite Thunderstruck.org.

Calhoun’s articles for @U2 are on the band’s spirituality.

Spinning Songs into Sermons | New book shows that fans can preach, too. (April 07, 2004)

U2’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Soul | ‘In the MTV world but not of it’ (Aug. 17, 2004)

Steve Stockman’s Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 is available at Christianbook.com. Christianity Todayinterviewed the author.

Other Christianity Today articles on Bono and U2 include:

The Dick Staub Interview: Exegeting U2 | Get Up Off Your Knees preaches U2 from Boy to All that You Can’t Leave Behind. (April 20, 2004)

Bono’s American Prayer | The world’s biggest rock star tours the heartland, talking more openly about his faith as he recruits Christians in the fight against AIDS in Africa. (Feb. 21, 2003)

‘Pop Music with Brains’ | From the beginning, U2 has engaged spiritual questions. (Feb. 21, 2003)

Bono’s Thin Ecclesiology | Any person can stand outside the church and critique its obedience to the gospel. (Feb. 21, 2003)

Bono Tells Christians: Don’t Neglect Africa | He urges evangelicals to take a lead in fighting AIDS and poverty. (April 19, 2002)

Inside CT: Bono’s Burning Question | Evangelicals and the U2 front man try to figure each other out. (April 19, 2002)

Honest Prayer, Beautiful Grace | The messianic and passionate U2 sounds like itself again. (Feb. 8, 2001)