Page 3113 – Christianity Today (2024)

“Would that Episcopal leaders showed the same zeal for their faith that they do for their property.”John Yates, rector of the Falls Church, and Os Guinness, a church member. The Falls Church and 14 other Virginia congregations broke ties with the Episcopal Church in January and now face a court fight over property ownership.

“At a fundamental level, they just want candidates to give God his due, more than they care about specific issues.”Political consultant Eric Sapp, on evangelical pastors. Sapp is senior partner at Common Good Strategies, which helps Democrats “connect with America’s diverse religious communities.”

“He does things the right way. No profanity, no intimidation, just helping his guys the best he can—and that’s the way I try to do it. I think it’s great that we’re able to show the world not only that African American coaches can do it, but that Christian coaches can do it in a way that we can still win.”Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy, on his former protégé, Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith. The two men faced off in Super Bowl XLI.

“I believe in the culture war. And you know what? If I have to take a side in the culture war, I’ll take [the conservative Christian] side. Because if you give me the choice of Paris Hilton or Jesus, I’ll take Jesus.”Alexandra Pelosi, creator of the new HBO documentary Friends of God and daughter of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Sources: The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The New York Times

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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Sources: The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The New York Times

Lifelong friends run into mid-life crises ranging from low-level malaise to marital breakdown. They decide to embark on an adventure together, taking themselves out of their comfort zones in an effort to reclaim their youth or at least rediscover their spirit. Hilarity ensues, buddies bond, and the men emerge walking funny but with the realization they have a lot to live for.

If you’re old enough to relate to this premise, it will likely remind you of City Slickers. The bad news: Wild Hogs is no City Slickers. The good news: While utterly lacking in subtlety, surprise, or nuance, Wild Hogs has some genuinely funny scenes, and a decent enough cast (particularly the reliable William H. Macy) to mostly distract its audience from its mediocre script.

Doug (Tim Allen) is a dentist with a spacious home and a loving, supportive wife (a woefully under-used Jill Hennessy). His only real problem: His tween-aged son doesn’t think he’s cool. Doug begins to examine his life (and spreading waistline) and wonders if he might need a little more adventure.

Bobby (Martin Lawrence) is a plumber whose yearlong writing sabbatical has just been brought to a forceful close by his overbearing wife (a woefully stereotyped Tachina Arnold). The complete lack of respect for him in his household, coupled with a catastrophic toilet-incident his first day back on the job, get him looking for a chance to reassert his manhood (or maybe just get out of town).

Dudley (William H. Macy) is a geeky computer programmer whose inability to talk to women has kept him a pining bachelor. He’s ready to do something drastic—like get a tattoo of the Apple Computer logo on his right bicep, or maybe even get his shiny Harley dirty on the back roads of America.

Woody (John Travolta) is the friend who has it all together, except for the fact that his supermodel wife has left him and he’s free falling over the edge of bankruptcy. Woody isn’t ready to tell his friends about the left-turns his life is making, but he is ready to goad them into a motorcycle trip from their Cincinnati homes to the Pacific Ocean. Given that all four men live for their Saturday rides on their Harleys, Woody doesn’t have a hard time convincing them that a road trip is just what they need.

Screenwriter Brad Copeland has until now been primarily a sitcom writer (My Name Is Earl, Arrested Development) which may explain the episodic feel of Wild Hogs. Once the guys hit the road, they ride from mishap to mishap with lulls not unlike commercial breaks in between. They throw away their cell phones. A gay cop (Scrubs’ John C. McGinley) misunderstands the nature of their male bonding. They run out of gas and wish they still had their cell phones. They argue with each other over the correct disposal of human waste in the woods. And so on. Some of these episodes are laugh-out-loud funny, others are groan-out-loud lame. Either way, they just keep coming.

The second half of Wild Hogs centers on the heroes’ run-in with the Del Fuegos, an easily angered New Mexico biker gang led by Cro-Magnum-esque Jack (an over-the-top Ray Liotta). The film finally hits on all cylinders during its final act, when a supremely well-choreographed conflict between the guys and the gang works by making the most of physical comedy and the least of dialogue. Add in a perfect cameo by a biker movie icon and a hilarious epilogue while the end credits roll, and you’ve got a strong to finish to an otherwise middling trip.

Wild Hogs is directed by Walt Becker, whose resume is dominated by the Van Wilder films, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that this movie is sporadically characterized by a National Lampoon-like vulgarity. The problem lies in the fact that Wild Hogs also tries, rather clumsily and with only the sketchiest character development in place, to operate at some deeper and more mature levels. Macy and Marisa Tomei make the most they can of their sweet but flimsy love story. But when Becker and Copeland want to explore any given character’s angst, they bring the silliness to a screeching halt to have one actor say to another, “You look a little down.” While the experience level of the cast saves the movie from disaster, it also hints at what could have been had the filmmakers developed a more even tone and a less lazy script. Wild Hogs ultimately can’t live up to the promise of its premise and its participants.

Still, the movie is almost certainly guaranteed to make you laugh. In fact, at the screening I attended, there was more audible laughter in the theatre than I’ve heard in a long time. If you’re patient, and you can overlook some sophom*oric misfires in a movie that clearly should know better, the final 20 minutes of Wild Hogs will reward your endurance. It’s a wildly uneven ride, but it finishes well.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Early in the movie, Doug is disappointed to realize that his son would rather play basketball with a friend’s dad than with him. Is separation between a teen and his or her father natural? Should parents “pursue” their children, or give them space?
2. Christian writer John Elridge has written extensively about a universal male need to be challenged and have adventure. Do you believe this to be true? If so, and if you are male, do you have healthy outlets for this need in your life? If you are the spouse of a male, do you perceive this as a priority for your husband?
3. In the biblical story of David and Jonathan, two friends vow their friendship to one another for life (see 1 Samuel 18). Wild Hogs, for all its vulgarity, operates on the rather refreshing assumption that men can form strong life-long friendships. Have you made committed friendships a priority in your life? Is there a friend you have formally or informally made a covenant with?
4. Bobby’s wife expects him to return to work after a year of book writing has not yielded tangible results. How does a responsible adult determine how long to pursue a dream? How long should a spouse support a dream without results?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Wild Hogs is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, and some violence. While the violence is mostly cartoonish slapstick, there is frequent vulgar and profane language and strong sexual innuendo, often of a hom*osexual (and even oddly hom*ophobic) nature.

Photos © Copyright Buena Vista Pictures

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What other Christian critics are saying:

• Plugged In
• Crosswalk
• Catholic News Service
• Past the Popcorn

Jaws introduced us to the shark-cam. From the shark’s perspective, we saw the vulnerable legs of that oblivious swimmer just before the deadly strike. Then, blood stained the water.

David Fincher’s new film Zodiac, based on a murder mystery that began in 1969 and continues today, opens with “the incoming mail cam.” We’re drawn into the offices of The San Francisco Chronicle, moving along with a letter penned by a murderer who calls himself “the Zodiac.” And when the letter is discovered, fear stains the air … and spreads.

Okay, so the shot isn’t as immediately terrifying as that moment in Jaws. But gradually, the Zodiac’s letters—which often include puzzling cryptograms, and claim responsibility for brutal murders—inspire a citywide terror. As the cops, investigators, and journalists discuss strategies for catching this shark, they seem every bit as frantic and flustered as the men who hunted the sea monster in Spielberg’s famous thriller.

Zodiac’s screenplay is as labyrinthine as Oliver Stone’s JFK, but Fincher never lets things become a preachy or ponderous commentary. Screenwriter James Vanderbilt took the wealth of information compiled by Robert Graysmith and wove facts, testimonies, and terrifying events into a screenplay that snaps, crackles, and pops. Fincher focuses on recreating these events with meticulous visual detail. He recreates the period with such precision that Zodiac looks like it might have been made at the same time as All the President’s Men and The Conversation, films that clearly influenced Fincher’s work. It’s hard to believe such a studious work would come from the man who crafted such sensual thrillers as Se7en and Fight Club.

But when the killer strikes, Fincher fans will feel the same paralyzing fear that the director brought to Panic Room. And this time, he doesn’t turn away from the bloodshed. This isn’t Se7en. We don’t arrive on the crime scene after the fact. No, this time he brings the camera in so close to the victims as the killing blows are struck that many will turn away in horror.

Moviegoers should consider ahead of time whether or not they want to witness these depictions of senseless brutality. But it’s easy to see why Fincher includes them. He wants us to get angry. He wants us to share the maddening obsession of those who try to track this sad*stic monster. He wants us to feel their frustration when the clues lead nowhere, theories fall apart, and trails go cold.

Hannibal Lecter, Keyser Söze, and Se7en’s John Doe scared us with intelligence. But the Zodiac’s messages are far from eloquent—he’s not a genius, he’s just a bloodthirsty egomaniac. Like Jack the Ripper, his obsession with becoming a criminal celebrity should make him an easy catch. What makes him scary is his ghostlike ability to remain untouchable and enigmatic.

His homemade PR campaign seems like a boilerplate for today’s viral marketing efforts. He has an insignia as catchy as Nike or Target; his messages are interactive, challenging us with puzzles—and his messages pop up when you least expect them. And, as in advertising, the more he claims about himself, the more his audience begins to doubt him. Did the Zodiac actually commit all of the murders he claimed? Or did he only carry out a few, but convince us of the rest through his power of persuasion?

The killer becomes such a powerful presence that the film’s main characters seem pale by comparison, drained by the vampire. The Chronicle‘s crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) give us a good sense of how the Zodiac disrupted everyday procedure. The editors’ debate about whether to indulge the killer’s exhibitionist ambitions and publish his letters for the public, or to refuse and test his temper, is the film’s most compelling ethical dilemma.

Homicide inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and his wingman William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) acquaint us with the corridors of the San Francisco Police Department. We feel their pain as the laws fail to empower them to make an arrest. And eventually, they begin to succumb to despair as they revisit cold crime scenes, like the intersection of Washington and Cherry where a murder happened in front of witnesses, wondering if they’ll ever find that clue … the one that will solve it all. Before long, they’re aggravated by movies about the very crime they cannot solve.

The actors do an impressive job of developing convincing characters without distracting us from the mystery. Gyllenhaal’s performance is a more adult version of his haunted Donnie Darko character. His is face drawn and sad, his large eyes staring half at the details and half into nightmare, he wanders into a downward spiral, longing to find that missing piece so that he can rest.

Ruffalo is equally engaging in his most demanding role since You Can Count on Me. He makes Toschi a thoughtful cop who internalizes his rage, where other actors would have wanted to dramatize this character’s desperation and disintegration.

Downey Jr., on the other hand, can’t help but ham it up as he always does. And he gives the film some much-needed humor, even if he is a bit out of step with a rather sullen supporting cast, which includes Donal Logue and Elias Koteas as weatherbeaten cops. Chloe Sevigny does what she can with the thankless role of Graysmith’s increasingly frustrated wife. But the film is almost stolen by John Carroll Lynch (better known as Norm Gunderson of Fargo), who plays a creepy child molester.

If the film has a weakness, it’s the predictable story of Graysmith’s family troubles. The more the movie zeroes in on his solitary quest to catch a killer, the more it steps into the territory of conventional thrillers.

Eventually, when Graysmith emerges as the closest thing to a central character, we see that families are being destroyed by the Zodiac’s tactics as well.

Nevertheless, Zodiac remains riveting for its entire 154 minutes. We’re led in a mad dash through a maze of forks in the road, dead-ends, and strange new paths that lead us right back to where we started, until we’re dizzy. Clues are strewn like candy all along the way, and they prove to be just as empty, just as useless.

Zodiac is sure to cause complaints that it’s just a parade of information that leads to nothing at all. But dig deeper, and you’ll find a story about the elusive nature of evil in a world that thinks information, knowledge, and technology will eventually solve our problems.

Dig even deeper, and you’ll feel the vibrations of 9/11. While Toschi and Graysmith panic and plot, applying all their powers of reason, technology, and information to try and eliminate the threat, it’s hard to miss the implications. The Zodiac slips through every net, just like that present-day criminal mastermind who taunts America with video appearances instead of writing letters. After all of the post-9/11 investigations, manhunts, arrests, theories, and invasions, the threat is still out there. Our government, law enforcement agencies, and media have failed to find a solution. We’ve witnessed an epidemic of fear and the escalation of a worldwide conflict.

Reason and information are certainly helpful in bringing criminals to justice, but humankind will never muster enough resources to solve the problem of evil. That kind of help can only come from heaven. But no one looks up in this town.

Still, Fincher does give us a few glimpses of the city from above. Whatever he intended, it’s just enough to make us wonder what God sees as he watches us scurry about in our futile efforts to solve problems on our own, as he waits for us to remember how much we need him.

But even if we believe that God will someday right all wrongs and heal all wounds, Zodiac still leaves us with chilling questions. If he is benevolent and all-powerful, why does he allow such acts of cruelty? It’s the kind of conundrum that can challenge a person’s faith. The answer lies buried in a history of sin, in the glaciers of an ice age. We can only hope, as the earth groans, that all will come clear someday in the light and heat of a just and merciful God.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Do you find anything worthwhile in a film about an unsolved murder case? Did the movie just frighten and disturb you, or did it leave you with anything worthwhile to consider?
2. If you were the editor of The Chronicle, would you have published the Zodiac’s letters? Why, or why not?
3. What is the film’s perspective on the conflict of good and evil? Does it leave you feeling hopeful or depressed?
4. Do you admire any of the characters? Consider the differing responses of Toschi, Avery, and Graysmith. Whose method of dealing with the challenge is most admirable?
5. As Graysmith’s family suffers from his obsession with solving the Zodiac mystery, who has your sympathy? Graysmith? His wife? Whose priorities are in the right place?
6. None of these men exhibit a personal faith in God. Would Christian faith be of any comfort for them? If so, how? How do you reconcile events like these with a belief in a benevolent, all-powerful, just God?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Zodiac is rated R for some strong killings, language, drug material, and brief sexual images. The film includes scenes of extreme violence (including two especially horrifying murders), and shows us characters who use foul language and abuse drugs. It is far too frightening and troubling for children, and if parents allow older teens to see the film, it would be wise for them to discuss the movie afterward.

Photos © Copyright Paramount Pictures

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What other Christian critics are saying:

• Plugged In
• Crosswalk
• Catholic News Service
• Past the Popcorn

The horizon—the color of ashes—promises a storm. The muddled snow, which had been melting, is arrested by the returning cold.

Lent, a somber season, seems the practice even of my leafless gray and brown northern landscape. Not a hint of indulgence, celebration, or color can be seen.

“What are you giving up for Lent?” can be heard in even casual conversations, between people who normally give religion wide topical berth, as if picking up again last month’s chatter about New Year’s resolutions. We give up things we really never needed anyway, but like those resolutions, our Lenten disciplines may fall aside before Good Friday arrives.

As leaders, we often pray for those we lead. But do we ever fast for them? Do we consider fasting (giving up something for a spiritual purpose) to be similar to a New Year’s resolution, or could it be something more?

Fasting during this 40-day season was originally practiced to help us remember the suffering and temptations of Christ. It is a time to deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow Jesus. But often, the temptation is not to indulge in what we have given up, but to become legalistic on one hand—or flippant and trite on the other.

When Jesus taught on fasting, he seemed to assume that it was a part of his audience’s regular spiritual practice, not just something to attempt for a few weeks of the year.

“When you fast…” he said. Not, if you fast. When.

“When you fast,” he said, “don’t call attention to yourself.” In other words, engage in the discipline of secrecy, of not bragging about our spiritual efforts or accomplishments.

What if we were, this month, to combine the disciplines of fasting and secrecy, as Jesus recommends? To let go of something that holds us in its grip, but not tell anyone?

In her book Soul Feast, Marjorie Thompson writes, “In the early church, Lent was viewed as a spiritual spring, a time of light and joy in the renewal of the soul’s life.”

A sort of spring-cleaning for the soul, which sounds lovely. But how can we embrace this intimidating practice, or even dabble in it? Fasting brings us face-to-face with our fears. At the root of it, we are afraid that if we don’t continually consume, if we don’t grab all we need and then some, we will probably die.

It is not just food that we consume. What do we feel that we “must” have or do regularly? What if we could fast from say, television? Or gossip?

What if you were to fast from electronics? Here’s a fast to try: no electronics after 5 p.m. Turn off the computer, television, iPod, cell phone. Don’t turn any of it on again until the next morning. Do this from now until Easter and see if you don’t suddenly find yourself with time to read, pray, or even have conversations with friends, family, even strangers.

And then, as Jesus said, when you fast, don’t call attention to it. What if, when facing the overwhelming needs of ministry, we were to fast and pray? For the children we lead, for their schools, their families, their friends?

What should we fast from? Well, what holds you in its grip? What regular unhealthy habits are currently a part of your routine—this could be anything from too much soda pop to excess negativity.

What if you were to fast from merely saying the words, “hurry up”? When you’re stuck in traffic, don’t say those words (or even think those words) to the driver in front of you. When you are getting ready to go somewhere with your children, don’t tell them to hurry. When you are listening to the kids you minister to, actually listen, rather than finishing their sentences or interrupting (both ways we tell people, without saying it directly, to hurry). How many times a day do you say “hurry up”? What is that doing to your soul?

Fasting during Lent provides an opportunity to let go of the things my hands are full of, to get rid of some of the clutter in my soul. Let the spring-cleaning begin.

For further reflection:Ruth Haley Barton has written a great article about Lent, “Crossing the Threshold into Lent“.

Lynne Baab’s excellent book, Fasting, offers wonderful insights on the freedom that this discipline brings us.

Keri Wyatt Kent’s For Your Soul column appears in this space once a month. Keri is a Promiseland volunteer, author, and speaker. This column is original and not excerpted from any of her books. Learn more about her ministry at www.keriwyattkent.com.

Copyright © 2007 Promiseland.

In 2000, Phil Vischer was running the largest animation studio between the coasts, had revolutionized Christian family entertainment by selling thirty million Veggie Tales videos, and was named one of the top ten people to watch in worldwide religion. Vischer’s vegetable empire, better known as Big Idea Productions, seemed poised to become a Christian Disney.

But by 2003 the dream was over. After a heartbreaking court decision, later overturned on appeal, Big Idea declared bankruptcy and Vischer had to sell the company’s assets, including his computer animated characters Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. We spoke with him recently about his life after Big Idea, and how God has transformed his understanding of ministry.

In the book you talk about growing up in evangelicalism. How did that shape your sense of mission when you started Big Idea?

In college I heard a sermon in chapel about knowing God’s will. It was given by a former mathematician. He said that if God’s will is not clear we should use the test of spiritual expediency. Which of the two choices in front of me will impact more lives? That one is God’s will. My evangelical upbringing said more impact is better. It’s better to be Bill Bright than Mother Teresa. Better to impact millions at once than one at a time. God has given us limited time and resources and we have to help as many people as possible – not just two or three. Mother Teresa should have franchised a system for feeding the poor on a massive scale. She needed an MBA.

When did that perspective begin to change?

Near the end we were selling a gazillion [Veggie Tales] videos and I was getting four hundred fan letters a day, but one day I was reading my Bible and I came across the verse that lists the fruit of the Spirit. It occurred to me that none of those things were present in my life. It didn’t say the fruit of the Spirit is impact, large numbers, or selling lots of videos. I realized something was not right.

I began asking, how am I supposed to live? I thought I had that figured out, but evidently I was completely wrong. So over three months I went through all of Paul’s letters and wrote down every directive or instructive statement he made. And when I read all of those statements it became clear that the gospel I had was a sham. It was more the gospel of Benjamin Franklin than the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was more about self-improvement, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and going out and changing the world. It was American cultural values masquerading as the words of Christ.

What is your understanding of success now?

Now I understand God has a unique journey for each of us with unique measures of success. Now I ask myself, have I done what God has asked me to do? Am I walking with him daily? Success has very little to do with where I end up. I don’t know exactly why, but we seem wired to look for numerical results for affirmation. But success in ministry cannot be about measurable impact.

What advice do you have for church leaders? How can we keep our souls healthy?

I think we all have to start with a good self-assessment. That is what I did when I was sitting in the wreckage of my world-changing ministry reading the fruit of the Spirit and not finding it in my life. We should have peace. We should have joy. And that doesn’t mean we should force ourselves to have it, because we can’t. It will come from us when we’ve let go of our life, when we’ve let go of our ministry, when we’ve let go of any aspiration for having an impact. When it’s just us and God we’ll find the joy and the peace. Then, we can get back to work and help other people follow that path.

You can read more of the interview with Phil Vischer in the spring issue of Leadership.

If you think you are standing strong, be careful, for you, too, may fall into the same sin. 1 Corinthians 10:12

I fought back tears as my ten-year-old daughter leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Dad, you’ll never do that to us, will you?” We were listening to a young woman in a Christian college choir share her story. The loving home environment in which she grew up was suddenly shattered when her dad unexpectedly walked out on the family. It was an all-too-familiar story: another woman captured his heart, and so he abandoned his wife of almost twenty years.

In response to my daughter’s question, I whispered back, “I promise that I won’t.” Later, as I reflected on this exchange, I realized that I had answered honestly. Making that promise was appropriate. But I could not, with integrity, say, “I will never do anything like that.”

Some Christians—including some Christian leaders—see an admission of vulnerability as a sign of spiritual immaturity. The apostle Paul, however, considered it a sign of spiritual maturity. He confessed, “I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:27). Then, as if anticipating a self-righteous response from his readers, he pointed them to the nation of Israel. No nation had ever had the spiritual privileges Israel posessed—from the parting of the Red Sea to the presence of Christ (10:1-4). But they still blew it. They caved in to complaining, idolatry, and sexual immorality. Paul cites the people of Israel as “Exhibit A” of what can happen even to people who seem to be closest to God. Then he issues his classic warning against falling.

I don’t know any Christian leaders who intend to pursue extramarital affairs. I don’t know any Christian leaders who began their ministries with the aim of embezzling or misusing funds. I don’t know any Christian leaders who planned on becoming bitter or walking away from their faith. But it happens. Just as eating a high-fat diet increases the risk of heart disease, assuming that “it will never happen to me” increases the risk of moral failure.

Leaders of integrity promise to walk in integrity. But they maintain their integrity by admitting vulnerability.

—Steve Mathewson

Reflection

In what areas of my character am I particularly “at risk”? How could I strengthen these areas against sin?

Prayer

Father of Lights, my Rock and my Redeemer, you do not change. In you there are no shifting shadows. But I am weak and prone to wander. Hold me, Lord, and strengthen me. Let me abide always in your unfailing love.

“Whenever a man or a woman fails to walk with God, he or she walks on the edge of an abyss.”

—Haddon Robinson, professor of preaching

Leadership DevotionsCopyright © Tyndale House Publishers.Used by permission.

Words Without Borders is an online magazine which seeks “to promote international communication through translation of the world’s best writing—selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals—and publishing and promoting these works (or excerpts) on the web,” as well acting as “an advocacy organization for literature in translation.” Their cause is a noble one, and seriously underfunded; you should consider sending them a check.

I say that even though the anthology just published with their imprimatur—Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers (Anchor Books)—is a disaster. The trouble begins right off the bat, with the introduction by Andre Dubus III, who recalls how Americans responded to the 1979 embassy takeover in Tehran and again after 9/11 with orgies of violence against immigrants. (You don’t remember it happening quite that way? Maybe this book isn’t for you.) The publicity material for the anthology features a helpful interview comparing censorship in Iran and North Korea with censorship in the United States. (You always wondered why so many people in airports are toting blockbusters by James Patterson and his ilk, and so few are carrying novels from Iran? Now you know.) Over the project there hovers the notion that reading literature in translation is a quasi-political act. You want to strike a blow against American fascism? Read a novel from the Hungarian and accrue virtue, distinguishing yourself from your dreadfully provincial fellow Americans.

The selections themselves—by 27 writers from all around the world—struck me as largely mediocre, despite the luster of their distinguished “recommenders” (a number of whom are writers I admire). I say that not with satisfaction but with disappointment, as a reader with a healthy appetite for a lot of different kinds of writing. (Of course, this judgment is in part no doubt simply a matter of taste, but taste aside, the batting average is below the Mendoza Line.) The mini-introductions to the selections, done by the recommenders, are uneven: some are shrewd or winsome, others take pratfalls.

Consider novelist Heidi Julavits’ intro to a story by a Norwegian writer, Johan Harstad, which Julavits describes as “so stripped down and steely that it almost reads like the work of Philip K. Dick.” PKD, stripped down and steely? She was thinking perhaps of the passage in Clans of the Alphane Moon when the chatty, telepathic Ganymedean slime mold Lord Running Clam makes its first appearance, flowing under the protagonist’s door and gathering itself “into the heap of small globes which comprised its physical being.” No, that won’t do. Either Heidi Julavits has never actually read a page of Philip K. Dick (she saw the movies, maybe), or she wrote this under the influence of Chew-Z.

But never mind. Let a thousand flowers bloom. May wwb flourish, and translations abound at Costco. Nan Talese, I’m glad to see, under her imprint at Doubleday, has inaugurated a series called International Fiction, with six titles debuting between January and April of this year. (Four of the novels are translated; two were written in English but nevertheless fit the rubric.) And there are, as always, some books by established writers on the way: Peter Handke’s Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, which I have been itching to read, is due in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, translated from the German by Krishna Winston. Also coming from fsg, by the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano, is The Savage Detectives, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, a massive book to set next to the stack of Bolano translations over the last several years from New Directions, one of the publishers most consistently dedicated to literature in translation. University of California Press has just published a magnificent volume, The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshelman. And Harvard University Press (in their Harvard East Asian Monographs series) has issued another volume by the preternaturally gifted scholar Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century, a critical study which is chock-full of Owen’s translations from the period. From Transaction, you can get the second volume of John Taylor’s Paths to Contemporary French Literature; Taylor’s short pieces on a huge range of writers are the literary equivalent of a superb travel guide. (Look for more on all of these titles in due course in Books & Culture.)

I could happily prattle on in this vein, but translation is a much bigger subject than these examples suggest. Long before I even possessed a clear concept of “translation,” I was immersed in the stuff, as every child is whose early memories include hearing the Bible read and then beginning to read it. (Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh, among others, have rightly emphasized the translatability of Christianity, which is translated into cultures as it is translated into vernacular languages.)

The Bible was the most important text, but there were so many more: tales from the Brothers Grimm, very different tales from China (where my grandparents were missionaries and my mother lived until she was ten years old), and on and on, books that someone had rendered from German or Chinese or French into English, though even when I became aware that they were “translations” the meaning of that was very much in the background. And of course the English into which they were translated was often not the English you’d be likely to hear as a boy growing up in California in the 1950s.

Many years later, when I read George Steiner’s extraordinary After Babel—Wendy and I drove to the old Pickwick’s in Hollywood to get the book as soon as it was available—I came to these sentences in his first chapter, “Understanding as Translation”:

Any thorough reading of a text out of the past of one’s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpretation. In the great majority of cases, this act is hardly performed or even consciously recognized.

I had learned this same lesson, with different emphases, from C. S. Lewis’ Studies in Words and from reading and studying with Hugh Kenner. Understanding itself, Steiner says, is a kind of translation (sometimes a fruitful mistranslation, Kenner added). When, age 12 or so, I found in the Pomona Public Library an illustrated translation of selections from The Thousand and One Nights, rendered from Arabic into a florid English with a curious period flavor, considerable translation was required, though I didn’t think of it in those terms. There was the method of storytelling—fascinating, but different from what I knew: a welcome challenge. There was the culture whose assumptions were implicit in the tales. There was the appalling cruelty of many of the tales, and the eroticism—sometimes enticing, sometimes off-putting. I soldiered on, ignorant, eager to learn, reading Scheherazade’s bedtime stories alongside Perry Mason’s latest adventures in the Saturday Evening Post and Luther’s Small Catechism, itself translated from the text of the magisterial Reformer whose translation of the Bible into German was a landmark in both the spiritual and the literary history of that people. (As a non-Lutheran student at a Lutheran school, I was exempt from catechism class, but I did the work anyway.)

By the time I got to college, I understood more clearly what “translation” in the narrow sense meant. I also began to grasp, to some extent at least, the huge gulf between my reading of Tolstoy, say, and that of a reader fluent in Russian. Indeed, for the first time I encountered people who sneered at the very notion of “literature in translation.” A contradiction in terms, they said. I’ve never been persuaded or even daunted by their claims, though I deeply admire readers who truly master other tongues, and I have learned a great deal from them when reading texts that I can’t myself absorb in the original language—not least from the commentators who devote their attention to biblical texts. But who could take the arguments of the purists too seriously while sitting in the darkness of the theater with those ravishing “foreign” films, which allowed us to hear French (through the pouty lips of Jeanne Moreau) and Swedish and Japanese and Italian and Russian and Czech and Polish spoken in seductively foreign rhythms while taking in the occasionally risible English subtitles.

Yes, translation was everywhere and is everywhere and will be everywhere until the promise implicit in Peter’s Pentecost sermon is fulfilled, and we all speak one heavenly language.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The final countdown will begin in March of 2012. Around that time a huge comet will strike the earth, causing an explosion that will in turn trigger a variety of horrific plagues, bringing severe physical suffering, many deaths, and widespread anarchy. An account of the exact nature of these coming events is hidden in the Scriptures, and the mysteries contained therein can only be discerned by a prophet who is known to his followers as the Chosen Vessel. Those who accept his teachings will be saved. All others will perish in the terrible days that will soon arrive.

This is the scenario sketched out in great detail in a recently produced book-length manuscript, “March 2012 A.D.: It All Begins As Foretold,” that can be read at www.sevenseals.com, the website of the Branch Davidians. Yes, this group is still around, composed of folks who were not present when their Waco compound was destroyed by fire, along with a handul of the nine survivors of that conflagration.

Even though David Koresh and 79 of his followers died in the destruction that occurred in April 1993, the continuing Branch Davidians do not see that as a defeat. Like the death of Samson, Koresh’s demise was for them an important victory, an essential part of the divine plan. To be sure, the victory did not conform exactly to Koresh’s own predictions, but this too makes perfect sense, as the Branch Davidians now explain it on their website: just as Samson had to become “literally blind” in order to destroy the temple of the Philistines, so too it was necessary for David Koresh to be made “spiritually blind to the part he fulfilled” in the unfolding events of the end-time.

What all of this shows is that the Branch Davidians are engaged in an ongoing theological project. And to recognize that is important for understanding the character of the movement, and especially for correcting some common misperceptions of what they were about prior to the events of 1993. In the popular imagination, for example, the Branch Davidians are regularly lumped together with Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, two other collective tragedies in which cultic groups followed charismatic leaders to the bitter end. But these other groups have no continuing legacy. No one has taken up the cause of keeping their teachings alive. In contrast, the Branch Davidians are not only an enduring presence, they are hard at work with their theological project—including a detailed theological explanation of what happened in Waco in 1993.

Kenneth Newport’s The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect is a lengthy apologia for the Branch Davidians as possessing a highly nuanced and coherent theological system. Not that Newport, who holds ordination in the Church of England, means to defend the Davidians’ perspective. But he does treat the movement’s theology with great care—even with a kind of loving respect. David Koresh, he insists, cannot be dismissed merely as “a sex-crazed maniac who duped his followers into accepting his twisted views on life, death, and the world that is to come.” For one thing, Koresh’s followers were too smart for that kind of blind following: one of them was a graduate of Harvard Law School, another a wealthy businessman, yet another a former pastor with a graduate degree in theology. There is every indication, Newport argues, that most of his followers were convinced by Koresh’s theology, and were willing to stick by their convictions no matter what.

To be sure, Newport is not the first scholar to insist that we must take the theological views of David Koresh and his followers with utmost seriousness if we are to understand what happened during those fateful days that led to the great fire of April 19, 1993. James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher, whose book on Waco I reviewed in the very first issue of Books & Culture,1 argued at length that the Waco tragedy was largely the fault of federal agents who systematically misunderstood Koresh’s beliefs, and therefore his intentions, in the lengthy negotiations that led to their decision to raid the compound. But Newport is not willing to lay the blame squarely on the government negotiators. This interpretation too, he is convinced, is based on a failure to grasp the full significance of the theological system that was—and is—at work among the Branch Davidians.

It is hard to imagine a more thorough exposition of Koresh’s teachings than what Newport provides. Indeed, he offers 170-plus pages of theological background before getting around to the specifics of Koresh’s thought. Newport manages to provide a fairly clear structure to a theological story that includes many esoteric interpretations of myriad passages in the biblical books of Daniel, Isaiah, Zechariah, Revelation and the like—esoteric, I might add, even for those of us who were once schooled in the detailed notes of the Scofield Bible! And woven into this complex theological narrative are many plots and subplots about power struggles among various leaders.

But the overall pattern of doctrinal development is made clear. For Newport’s purposes, the basic story begins with early Seventh-day Adventist teachings, particularly Ellen White’s scheme for interpreting Bible prophecy. Victor Houteff, who saw himself as refining White’s interpretations, established a splinter group in the 1920s that originally called themselves the “Shepherd’s Rod” movement, but eventually adopted the label “Davidian,” to signal the central importance in their thinking of the biblical motif of the Kingdom of David. When Houteff died, his wife, Florence, took over the leadership, but her authority suffered a fatal blow when she predicted that major end-time events would occur “on or about” April 22, 1959. Clearly disillusioned when her prophecy failed, she and her leadership team not only acknowledged that they had been wrong on the specifics but went much further: they had come to see that there were serious flaws both in their own movement’s approach to biblical interpretation and in the larger Adventist system from which they had derived their basics. In March 1962, Florence Houteff and her trustees simply disbanded the community headquartered in the Texas compound that was later to become the home of the Koresh movement.

There was a group, however, who remained loyal to Victor Houteff’s pre-Florence teachings. They set up shop in Riverside, California, and their movement still operates, maintaining, for example, a web archive of Houteff’s writings.2 Much more significant for Newport’s story, however, is the group headed by Ben Roden, who soon laid claim to the Mt. Carmel property near Waco, Texas. Roden adopted the name “Branch Davidian” for his offshoot, a reference to the prophecy in Zechariah 6:12 (KJV): “Behold the man whose name is THE BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD.”

The Davidian movement’s use of biblical references of this sort has to be understood in the context of general theology of types and antitypes in the Scriptures. The ancient Kingdom of David, for example, was a temporal-physical phenomenon that pointed beyond itself to a future end-time Kingdom of Christ, the Son of David. But in the last days God would raise up an antitype of the ancient David, who would assume a kingly role: Victor Houteff claimed this role for himself, as did David Koresh. Both also saw themselves as present-day antitypes of the likes of Elijah and John the Baptist—and of “THE BRANCH” of Zechariah’s prophecy.

Newport’s detailed exposition of these matters—much too detailed to spell out here—is itself worth the reading of his book for anyone who cares about the varieties of Bible prophecy schools of thought, as well as about apocalyptic religious movements in general. But his analysis takes on added significance for a very down-to-earth hypothesis that he sets forth regarding the setting of the Waco fire that destroyed the Davidians’ Mt. Carmel compound.

Unlike Tabor and Gallagher, who argued in their book that the destruction might have been avoided if the federal negotiators were more conversant with Branch Davidian theology, Newport suggests that the fire was in fact unavoidable—because Koresh and his followers actually wanted it. Their expectation of a conflagration, he theorizes, “was very much part of the overall eschatological scheme that the Branch Davidians believed themselves to be acting out during these last days,” a scheme that had long focused on texts such as Isaiah 66:15-16: “For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh: and the slain of the Lord shall be many.”

Newport spells out the significance of the biblical “fire” texts at great length, providing a context that makes his concrete hypothesis less shocking—and far more persuasive—than it would be without such patient exposition: Koresh and his followers actually started the fire themselves, he proposes; and they did it because they saw the fire as a necessary cleansing force for preparing their community for entrance into the coming Kingdom.

Newport knows that this hypothesis is underdetermined by the available evidence, but he rightly makes much of the fact that the present-day Branch Davidians themselves see the Waco fire as constituting a victory of sorts. Nor is this a case of a significant “when-prophecy-fails” adjustment in their prophetic scheme. Newport demonstrates that the movement had long taught that a smaller-scale cleansing fire (some leaders connected it to the “baptism by fire” motif) would take place as a necessary prelude to a more universal fire of judgment that God would visit upon the unbelieving majority of the human race. Thus the Waco fire serves today as a firm basis for the eschatological expectations of the continuing Branch Davidian movement.

In his concluding observations, Newport acknowledges that many readers will think that he has gone into far too much detail in telling the story that led up to the tragedy at Waco. I am not one of those readers. The matters that he chronicles in this important book are well worth the effort required to understand them. The Waco tragedy is a case study of a group of people who took the details of “Bible prophecy” with utmost seriousness—to the point of being willing to die for their interpretations. Even if Newport is wrong in his concrete hypothesis regarding the self-immolation of the folks who died in the Mt. Carmel compound (although I don’t think he is wrong), he demonstrates convincingly that this was a community of intelligent people for whom theological ideas were a matter of life and death—no small finding in an intellectual climate where religion is often dismissed as a disguised version of something else.

One matter that impressed me particularly as an evangelical reading Newport is his insistence that the tragic errors in David Koresh’s understanding of the Bible do in fact have a history, a history that can in turn be traced to a perspective that was birthed by Ellen White, whose denomination has by now rightly earned considerable respect in evangelical circles and beyond. When the Waco tragedy was unfolding, the Seventh-day Adventist community engaged in a major public relations campaign to distance themselves from the Branch Davidians. I find no fault in that effort—having done my own share of public denying that this or that person who once studied at the seminary that I lead does in fact represent our theological position! The distancing was especially important in the Waco case, since that situation was a highly visible example of theology gone awry, and it was necessary for the general public to be advised that the Branch Davidians had long departed from the mainstream of Adventist thought.

But the flames at Waco no longer burn, and the smoke has cleared. Now is a good time for Adventist theologians to acknowledge at least some responsibility on the part of their tradition for the developments chronicled by Newport, since those developments do in fact draw on important elements in early Adventism. Many of us in the Dutch Reformed communities expended considerable energy insisting during apartheid days that South African racism was not a necessary consequence of our theological convictions. But some of us also did a good deal of soul-searching during that time, checking out the ways in which those racist themes did make connections—legitimately or illegitimately—to motifs that are indigenous to Reformed theology. That theological self-examination was a healthy exercise, and I recommend a similar project to my Adventist friends.

It is a fact, for example, as Newport points out, that the Davidians share with the early Adventists an expectation that some sort of violent cleansing in the end-time is a necessary preface to the coming Kingdom. And this scenario was often connected, in early Adventism, to the notion that in the last days America would function as the second beast of Revelation 13, a deceptively “lamb-like” collective entity that would foster false worship and persecute the faithful remnant of Sabbath-keepers.

This prophecy-based anti-Americanism looms large in Davidian thought, but it does not seem to be a prominent emphasis these days among the Seventh-day Adventists. While we can be grateful for that de-emphasis on purely theological grounds, the question of the theological status of the American nation in God’s plan for the world is no minor theme in certain parts of the Christian world today. It is not uncommon to hear contemporary theological voices—including not a few evangelical ones—describing the United States in the present world as a beastly “imperial” force that has aligned itself with much that is destructive on the global scene. Since these thoughts often lack the serious attention to biblical specifics that the Davidians, in all of their confusions, have exhibited, this might be a good time for Adventist thinkers to lead the way in helping all of us get clearer about how we can think sensible—and appropriately biblically informed—thoughts about such important matters.

Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author most recently of Praying at Burger King, coming soon from Eerdmans.

1. James D. Taylor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Univ. of California Press, 1995); my review appeared in the September/October 1995 issue.

2. www.shepherds-rod-message.org/answerers

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 2005, Jane Smiley published a reader’s and writer’s guide, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. The title seems particularly apt, since there are at least 13 ways of looking at Smiley’s own fiction. Few people love every last one of her novels, but it is in part her delightfully unpredictable range that makes her one of our finest contemporary writers. She has written academic satire (Moo); sprawling novels of manners (Good Faith); historical fiction (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Liddie Newton), not to mention a massive saga (The Greenlanders); a dark, sophisticated murder mystery (Duplicate Keys); and finely grained domestic studies (most famously the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ten Thousand Acres, but also Paradise Gate, Barn Blind, and—possibly my very favorite piece of 20th-century American fiction—the novella The Age of Grief). In her latest novel, Ten Days in the Hills, Smiley melds interpersonal drama with political commentary, and the result is dazzling.

Just as Ten Thousand Acres is—among other things—a feminist reinterpretation of KingLear, Ten Days in the Hills is a riff on Boccaccio’s Decameron. Written in the 1350s, Boccaccio’s classic centers on ten Italians sequestered together outside Florence in an attempt to escape both boredom and the bubonic plague. They pass the time telling one another morally instructive, bawdy, salacious, entertaining, tantalizing stories, with time off for holy days.

Unsurprisingly, Smiley’s crew doesn’t observe the church calendar. Max and Elena are middle-aged lovers who found each other in Hollwood. He’s a movie director who’s not worked in a while; she writes self-help manuals. Both are parents of 20-something kids. Both are lefties. Both are passionate, and both have learned a thing or two about themselves and the world. Around Max and Elena assembles a quirky group of friends and family, who show up, more or less uninvited, for what evolves into a long house-party. There’s Zoe, a famous actress who happens to be Max’s ex-wife; her weird, New Agey boyfriend; Elena’s son; Max and Zoe’s daughter, Isabel; Zoe’s aged mother, Delphine; Delphine’s dearest friend; Max’s old buddy Charlie, recently divorced, myopically right-wing, utterly lacking self-knowledge, and generally irritating; and Max’s agent, Stoney, who at first appears to be a minor figure but becomes one of the more complex characters in the novel. Seemingly adrift in early middle age, he’s not a great agent, but he inherited the business from his dad, whose shadow he can’t escape and whose memory possesses him.

Boccaccio isn’t Smiley’s only template. She likes to juggle genres, and here she is both parodying and paying homage to the Hollywood Novel as well. Elena’s son is neglecting college in order to work as an extra in a p*rn flick (he says it’s an art film, poking fun at the conventions of soft p*rn). Max has a cinematic bee in his bonnet. He wants to make a movie about making love with Elena. The whole movie would be just one long session in bed, sex and nuzzling interspersed with a conversation. Stoney is convinced this would be a disaster, but Max insists it will be the next My Dinner With André.

All sorts of attractions and entanglements propel the story. Is Max still in love with his ex-wife? Is she attracted to Elena’s son? Will Elena’s son and Max’s daughter turn out to be a perfectly matched, if faintly incestuous, couple? Will Charlie, clearly besotted with Zoe, get her into bed? And so on. (Smiley’s sex scenes can be lyrical or matter-of-fact, quietly erotic or bawdy, and she can also bring a wickedly satirical edge to the subject.)

But how does this free-style house-party (which shifts location for a while to another mansion, the domain of eccentric Russian émigrés) in any way recall Boccaccio’s set-up? Well, the novel is set in 2003 (the action begins a day after the Academy Awards), and for Elena, America’s invasion of Iraq is so overwhelming and upsetting, she is beside herself with anger and grief. This is the disaster that she is fleeing, the equivalent of the plague; at the same time, it is all she can think about and all she wants to talk about, and she is alternately prophetic and annoying. (But what prophet is likable all the time?)

Caveat lector: This is a decidedly political book, and if political differences interfered with your appreciation of Anne Lamott’s Plan B or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, say, chances are you won’t get very far with Ten Days in The Hills. Indeed, you may be rolling your eyes this very minute and thinking “Oh, please. Escaping the plague is one thing. Hiding out because you’re upset about the war? That’s just ridiculous.”

In Smiley’s defense, I will admit that I had trouble leaving the house or even getting out of bed for about a week following the 2004 election. Smiley herself has said that Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel (which includes a discussion of the Decameron) was born in part because, after 9/11, she found herself unable to write fiction, so she turned instead to reading and writing about fiction (she worked her way through 100 novels, just as Boccaccio’s characters tell 100 tales).

And exposing the differences and similarities between the situation of Boccaccio’s Florentinians during the plague and Americans during the Iraq War is, indeed, part of the point. For the characters in Smiley’s novel, the war is both literally and imaginatively removed, far off and abstract in a way that the plague was not for 14th-century Italians. It is that sense of being removed from the war that creates Elena’s (and Smiley’s) burden – to persuade the others that the war really is as awful, as destructive, as horrific as she believes, and as harshly diagnostic of the state of the nation. Elena wants to awaken her companions to a danger that can feel deceptively distant.

Love poses different dangers in the two books as well. As many critics have noted (none more trenchantly than Jessica Levenstein), in the Decameron, Boccaccio couples love and death, eros and thanatos, reading them as twin forces that both disrupt and rip open ordinary life. The plague interrupts the ordinary life of the characters, who are unable to halt the disease’s march; eros undoes its victims. Just as no one can stave off death, so too, in the Decameron’s tales, those who try to stop the course of erotic ardor—parents and siblings who try to shield daughters and sisters from the destruction of passion—prove helpless before love’s course. Desire is itself a relentless force.

In Ten Days in the Hills, desire is ubiquitous, but it is not especially disruptive. How could it be, given a culture in which acting out erotic dramas is anything but transgressive? This is not to say that Smiley’s characters are unable to be surprised by love. Rather, it is a different kind of love that takes people by surprise in Ten Days in the Hills—not passionate carnal desire, but a tender love that promises to be more sustaining. The sweet emotional center of the novel is the love affair between Isabel and Stoney. The affair, which began when Isabel was a teenager and has continued on and off, at first seems unpromising—indeed, downright creepy, though banal in its creepiness. As the novel opens, Isabel wants to break things off with Stoney, toss away the affair with other artifacts from her adolescence, and early on this affair seems to be just another indicator that Stoney is a total loser.

But gradually, as the characters unfold, one comes to see Stoney and Isabel differently, and readers may find themselves wondering not when Stoney will grow up and get a life, but whether or not Isabel is mature enough to see what is right before her eyes: someone who knows and loves her; someone who wants to marry her and be faithful to her; someone who, though perhaps a flop by the skewed, superficial standards of Hollywood, is, in fact, a prince.

Lauren F. Winner is a visiting lecturer at Duke Divinity School. Ten Days in the Hills

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

On a short runway in northern California, William Langewiesche is in the pilot’s seat of his Husky A-1B bush plane. He’s saying, “It’s 38 degrees on oil. I won’t take off with less than 100 degrees.” We wait.

“L-M-N-O-P”—”They’re putting in navigation points”—”Oscar 5”

“You hear that guy? Radios here are really busy. You hear a lot of chatter, which is really annoying.”

We’re still waiting for 100 degrees on oil. He’s saying, “I just put on a new propeller. It’s the best propeller out there, better climb performance, better drag performance. It’s the sexiest thing around if you’re into propellers. I was just in Russia doing all this stuff on nuclear proliferation and all I could think about was my new propeller.”

From the sky over Northern California, flying at 2,000 feet with William Langewiesche, you see farmland in quadrants, the alluvial plain of the Sacramento Valley, coastal mountains and low clouds to the east. Then he flies low where the Husky is happiest. You see treetops, “red-neck trailers” on isolated hilltops, and cows. He says, “Okay, you’re going to feel some disorientation now.” At 1,901 you see only the red-lighted numbers 1-9-0-1 on the instrument panel because you’re feeling g-load—negative 2 gs—and focusing on the instrument panel keeps you from throwing up. Soon he’s saying, “When you’re upside down it’s all positive gs. You don’t feel upside down. You’re upside down now.”

During Langewiesche’s fifteen years at The Atlantic Monthly he wrote about disasters such as the crash of ValuJet 592 in the Florida everglades; the spiraling dive of EgyptAir 990 into the waters off Nantucket; the unbuilding of the World Trade Center Towers; the disintegration of the Columbia space shuttle. How? The organizing principle of the sky. His spatial orientation enables him to render otherwise untellable stories of crash sites, war zones, diving co*ckpits, and devastated people with dispassion and understatement that is fleet and spare, almost poetic.

His best pieces, he says, are stories that are metaphors conveying “the power of a tangible narrative that has a deeper meaning.” His Atlantic cover story “The Crash of EgyptAir 990,” which appeared in the aftermath of 9/11 (November 2001), was a metaphor for war. It was also The Atlantic’s intentional response to the attacks of September 11. His piece titled “Eden: A Gated Community” (June 1999), about entrepreneur-turned-ecologist Robert Tompkins (champion of saving Chile’s rain forest by buying up land and imposing his conservation experiment on the indigenous citizens), Langewiesche describes as “a classic missionary story.” His piece “The Shipbreakers” (August 2000), about dismantling ship carcasses in Alang, India, wasametaphor for “imperialism dolled up as a left-wing cause.” I asked what the ValuJet crash story represented. He said, “A paradox about how the pursuit of safety for safety’s sake will kill you. ‘Thou shalt not turn to government for all solutions and regulations.'”

He grew up “in the co*ckpit” in Princeton, New Jersey, son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, a celebrated pilot and an essayist in his own right. The father wrote the definitive primer for pilots, Stick and Rudder, which the son has never read. (You can buy online a “Wolfgang Langewiesche Is My Hero” bumper sticker.) Langewiesche’s mother belonged to the “Nantucket Coleman family,” which means on his mother’s side he is remotely related to Benjamin Franklin. Langewiesche’s first solo flight was in a glider at age fourteen.

He smokes Cuban cigars, a habit he picked up in Iraq, to the dismay of his beguiling 13-year-old daughter Anna. He possesses a dry wit—we laughed a lot—though it can sometimes be hidden by his otherwise taciturn bearing. He says he is not a religious man.

He won the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting for “The Crash of EgyptAir 990.” Two years later “Columbia’s Last Flight” took the same prize.

Five of his books have been published (they all include maps) and a new one—The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor—is forthcoming this spring from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. American Ground appeared as three sequential stories in TheAtlantic, and “transform[ed] the reputation of the magazine,” notes publisher David Bradley. It also elicited visceral hostility from the New York firefighters and their supporters because of Langewiesche’s reportage of firefighters’looting and clannishness on the pile. In May 2006, Langewiesche exchanged his slot on The Atlantic masthead as national correspondent for a spoton Vanity Fair’s.

I flew with Langewiesche in his bush plane, lingered with him at the hangar, and sat with him in his home office in California where we probed the unsettled places of human experience in his work. But first, I had to ask:

Should we honestly believe that if we’re in a plane going down that our seat cushions can be used as flotation devices?

There are plenty of cases of airplanes going into the water and people surviving. What to do in that case is not difficult to remember. Get the hell of out the plane and don’t wear your high heels down the inflatable exit ramp.

You wrote in your book Inside the Sky that flying, like writing, “teaches the need for discerning patterns in a disorderly world.” Is this how you approach journalism?

It’s all about looking at the ground. All the patterns of life on earth are very exposed to the view from above. When you’re in an airplane and you’re looking down on the ground from above, it’s very difficult for anybody to bullsh*t you. People build their front porches or plantations trying to impress the neighbors. Nobody is trying to impress pilots flying by. There is very little pretentiousness directed toward the sky. So you see things which are grand and glorious and wonderful, and things that are despicable. And you see them in their real relationship to one another.

Are you a pilot who writes or a writer who flies?

I’m a writer. Even when I was a pilot I was a writer. I read an enormous amount of material on what I’m working on but I never take notes on what I read. I don’t even underline anymore. I just read and allow myself to forget what is naturally forgotten and remember what I remember. I feel no obligation to cite anything. I like my prose unburdened with apparatus. I take relatively few notes. I listen carefully. I like to use a recorder because it adds the ability to revisit things in a way taking notes doesn’t. It’s not a crutch, though it’s a pain in the ass. I also prefer to do my own research. It makes my work less encyclopedic.

The truth is, you don’t have to be smart to be a pilot. The best pilots are people who are dutiful, functional, golfers—hobbyists. They repair antique cars in their garages.

In the same book you talk about “suspended disbelief.” What do you mean?

I said in my book that pilots must learn against all contradictory sensations the discipline of absolute belief in their instruments. Our greatest weakness is that we still lack an instinctive sense of bank. It can induce deadly spirals. Instinct is worse than the useless in the clouds. The first challenge is to suspend disbelief and trust your instruments over instinct.

In the chapter I wrote about the crash of Air India 885, a flight to Bombay in 1978, the pilots were disagreeing about which instrument was failing. I read the transcript of the black box. They had no horizon. It was a black night. Only one instrument was failing. They weren’t all failing. There were other instruments that indicated which was right. The two main pilots were locked on their primary instruments, like tunnel vision, and a third pilot sitting behind them was looking at the instrument that was correct. He was saying, “No, that one!” The other guys should have seen it.

Is that the aptitude you brought to your work on the unbuilding of the World Trade Center?

My job was to write about the deconstruction project. I wasn’t writing the encyclopedia of the site. I wasn’t writing about grief counseling. It was not my mandate to explore the symbolic importance of this event. It was to write about a bunch of junk in the middle of Manhattan and what are they going to do with it. And, by the way, it’s a bunch of junk that is loaded with dead bodies and also loaded with political significance. What are you going to do? How are you going to organize that effort? How are you going to see it through? I called it the “unbuilding of the World Trade Center,” and I meant that specifically. I didn’t say “memorializing” it.

Why did people assert the book was unpatriotic?

The political climate surrounding that topic was one of hysteria and emotionalism. This was especially true of the firemen. Firemen have a culture of their own. These guys live together in the clubhouse a few days a week. They weren’t in a position either individually or as a group to resist the trauma and its associated hype.

The criticism was that I was being unpatriotic because I wasn’t joining lockstep into hero worship. I was so overwhelmed by the material I was dealing with that I was not aware of the larger political context of the United States in the post-9/11 period. I fault myself for not placing the story in that larger context. I should have acknowledged in just a few sentences that yes, this wonderful thing was happening, that it was uniquely American, brave, and healthy—with the exception of the overblown hero worship.

There were individual heroic acts. But largely we don’t know what they were because most of the people who did them died. This categorization of one group of people as being heroes was patently silly and bore no relationship to the experience of war. The firemen were looting. But everyone was looting. I don’t care if the New York firemen loot. Let them loot. Looting is part of war. And this was a war. There was a freeing of social morals inside the wtc operation which was very productive and ingenious. It is also why for 99.9 percent of the people there it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. They were desperate not to leave. I wouldn’t have written about the firemen at all except that because of their clan-ism they had become a corrosive factor on the pile and had a strong effect on the dynamics of the operation.

Does anything stand out in your memory from the pile that you didn’t write about?

I dealt with a lot of grieving widows. The city officials asked me to walk them around the pile, talk to these women, and explain what was going on with the excavation and explain to them how the bodies were being dealt with. I knew the site, and people trusted me to handle these grieving women correctly. I walked with them and they cried. It was terribly hard. It was sad. I wanted to put my arm around these women and say, “Please, I know this is sad. Go ahead and cry.” I didn’t. But I stayed beside them, sometimes for an hour or so. What was odd, and I still don’t understand why, is that it was almost entirely women. You’d very rarely see a man come in there that way. I never wrote about that stuff because it wasn’t my mandate.

Did this assignment traumatize you?

People tell me I am traumatized. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not obvious to me. Over the years, though, a kind of fatigue sets in, a kind of I-don’t-give-a-damnism. There is probably some effect like that, a kind of emotional recklessness, a grimness. But it’s not severe. I don’t know the answer. I do my job. And I know what I do is less dangerous than what a lot of other people do.

Did you do anything to help yourself?

Yeah, I had a beer. I didn’t feel I needed help. I still refuse that. I had a conflict on camera with Charlie Rose about it. I don’t feel anything. It’s just the way it is. People react in different ways. It wasn’t negative. I’m not denying the tragedy. But those people were dead. Nobody died at the site. It was risky. But risk is good. Danger is nice. Danger is liberation. War is liberation. That’s why people like to fight wars.

You said the EgyptAir 990 piece was a metaphor for war and The Atlantic’s response to the 9/11 attacks? In what way?

The buildings were hit. Mike Kelly, who was then the editor, Cullen [Murphy] and I were on the phone together for over an hour, and we decided we had in this story the right metaphor for war. It was about what happens when communication breaks down and you end up walking away. That piece was about the inability of American technocrats to handle the Egyptian government after the plane went down. As a reporter, you reach a point when, in trying to resolve this conflict, people are looking at you and they are lying to you and you know they are lying to you and they know you know they are lying to you. Communication breaks down. You walk away from the table. This leads to war.

[Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq on April 3, 2003.]

You insert a chapter in Inside the Sky called “The Stranger’s Path” examining the odd life of J.B. Jackson, who was not a pilot. Why did you give an entire chapter in a book about flight to someone who did not fly?

It was a literary exercise, an experiment. You can argue whether or not it was successful. For the most part I think it was not successful. Jackson saw things as if he were flying low. I call it the vernacular landscape. Jackson’s vernacular landscape was actually a song of praise for a level of chaos in a society. He was right to distrust romanticism. He was a believer in the healthiness that comes from chaos, the inherent turbulence and mess. I believe that stuff.

J.B. Jackson seemed a lonely man. Did this attract you to him?

He was lonely. But that’s okay. He liked junkyards. He liked trash. He was the bullsh*t patrol. He was attractive to me because of that. From an aesthetic point of view he was a brilliant essayist. He was unattractive in other ways. He had too much money. Also of interest is that his essays in the end left something undone, uncompleted. He never quite delivers in his essays. It was like his life in a way. In the end, he didn’t quite get there.

Do you “get there” in your pieces?

The writing process for me is deeply consuming. I spend a huge amount of time paying attention to sound, rhythm, imagery, tension, and form as opposed strictly to content. At the risk of all else, it is a shift in the mind, maybe something like a meditative state, only it can go on for weeks and weeks. I can’t get up in the morning, write for a few hours, and then go play tennis. I get up in the morning and wake up two months later.

I also see it as highly tactile, like sculpting, forming something, smoothing it with hand strokes. Where before there was nothing, in the end there is a sculpture, an object. Occasionally it doesn’t happen that way, either because of my own inability or because I don’t have the right subject matter. You can get stuck with an overly linear, overly complex, overly generalized text—all kinds of overlys—that can screw up the aesthetic of a piece. At the same time, I hate aesthetics for aesthetics sake. That is a form of masturbation. Rule number one in writing is Don’t Insult the Reader. It’s a great insult to a reader to waste reading time. You have this very precious relationship with each reader, and that reader is probably smarter than I am.

What are your goals as a writer?

One of the great errors of our time is to think the world is getting smaller. My goal as a writer is to take my reader into an expanding world. I don’t want to write the complete story of anything. I want to write a significant story of something.

What demons drive you?

The wolves are at the door all the time lurking as the risk of failure. I don’t think my writing is as good as it should be. I want to be a lot better.

Where do you find peace?

I fly by myself a lot. Sometimes I fly with friends. Last night I went flying with a friend. We cruised around the hills and talked. We flew for about 35 minutes for relaxation, enjoying the view.

Wendy Murray is a writer currently living in Italy, where she is working on a book on Francis of Assisi for Basic Books.

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