Benjamin D . Crace
After completing a triple major in English, Religion, and Philosophy at Georgetown College in Kentucky, I was a Fulbright Fellow for a year in Qatar. Upon returning to the US, I completed my first MA in English and then went back overseas. In time, I went on to complete another MA in Evangelical and Charismatic Studies through the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies at the University of Birmingham. Subsequently, I finished my PhD at UofB with Prof. Allan H. Anderson and Dr. Michael Wilkinson. My thesis focused on the lived spirituality and context of the Coptic diaspora in Kuwait. My research is interdisciplinary, covering sociology, cultural anthropology, literature (T.S. Eliot specifically), and theology (mainly in the Christian tradition).
Supervisors: Professor Allan Heaton Anderson and Dr. Michael Wilkinson
Supervisors: Professor Allan Heaton Anderson and Dr. Michael Wilkinson
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Book Reviews by Benjamin D . Crace
Religious responses to this shift to the immanent frame (Taylor 2007) within the Christian tradition have ranged from increased political involvement, to attention to social justice issues, to ecological awareness to a newfound appreciation for emotional and mental health and an embracing of alternative medicine: the body, the body politic, here and now has upstaged the by and by.
Both this shift and “aptness by perversion” of the zombie zeitgeist are negotiated in the character arc of Gabriel, a black Episcopal priest, in the television series The Walking Dead. As a symbol of bygone transcendence, Gabriel’s struggle with his faith forms a central narrative thread in the series, and he remains a key character from Season 5 to the final season. In a broad sense, he is the sole representative of Southern Christianity in a post-apocalyptic world.
And yet a central premise of this proposal is that The Walking Dead is less about a dystopic future and more about the present-day loss of meaning and metanarrative. From this, I explore the ways in which Gabriel deconstructs the priest trope by foregrounding a kind of immanent and humanistic theodicy with a subjective spirituality that reflects a post-Christian moral and metaphysical universe.
Three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Thomas Merton entered the Trappist Monastery. Having converted to Catholicism in 1938 while teaching English at St. Bonaventure University, it was a decision long in the making for the author who would go on to write one of the most influential Catholic autobiographies in Christian history, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). But before Merton was a monk, he was a Modernist, through and through, and attempted to channel that movement’s creative energy into the quasi-autobiographical novel. According to his life-long editor and friend, Naomi Burton, a young Merton had come to her in early 1940 with two complete novels for publication: The Labyrinth and The Man in the Sycamore Tree. She could not get either through to publication. A year later, Merton brought her another novel, then called Journal of My Escape from the Nazis (later called My Argument with the Gestapo). She recalls, “I liked it and again tried to sell it, but this was even tougher. It was 1941. How could one interest anyone in a book about an imaginary visit to England and France.” Imaginary, yes, but, at its heart, was still Thomas Merton, who had left Europe in 1935, and, in 1968, remembered encountering Nazis in France while hiking in the Rhine Valley in 1932. Its autobiographical elements certainly include Merton’s new-found commitment to Catholicism; Mary Gordon observes, “And woven lightly in, a pastel thread through the saturated primary colors of the cloth, is Merton the convert, making his way through the world with a new anointing.” And yet “Merton is under the sway of Joyce, the Joyce of Ulysses and perhaps most especially of Finnegans Wake.” In short, My Argument is a Modernist novel by a Catholic convert reflecting on the 1930s and the early days of the 1940s. It, perhaps, then belongs more to the 30s than the 40s; Merton himself notes, “[The novel] is about the crisis of civilization in general, and the Germany it deals with is still largely that of Bismarck and the Kaiser. It is the Germany that accepted Nazism.” And, it is shot through with Merton trying to, “attempt to define its [the world] predicament and my own place in it” to “gain access. . . to my own myth.” Merton’s spiritual response to Modernity, presaged in the novel, was ascetic renunciation in the hills of Kentucky.
In the latter part of the 1930s, Eliot began his masterpiece, Four Quartets. Around the same time as Merton was teaching English, converting to Catholicism, and considering the monastic life, Eliot published “Burnt Norton” and then “East Coker.” In 1933, Eliot had separated from his estranged wife and moved in with Father Cheetham, the Vicar of St. Stephens, a high Anglo-Catholic church. This arrangement allowed Eliot to explore his own monastic tendencies and was the context for the opening poems of FQ. Arguably one of the creators of Modernism, Eliot’s spiritual response was to live out what Joshua Richards has called his “ascetic ideal.” A mixture of mysticism and self-renunciation, this ideal is neatly summarized in Eliot’s own words, “ardor, selflessness, and self-surrender,” developed through “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”
Building on historical and biographical context then close readings, this chapter seeks to interrogate the two Toms’ ascetic responses to Modernism as manifested through Eliot’s early FQ poems and Merton’s posthumously published (1968) and oft-overlooked, pre-monastic novel. In doing so, I demonstrate how Merton and Eliot’s post-conversion ‘readjustment’ and redeployment of the Modernist ethos provides both their contemporaneous audiences and readers today with “equipment for living” as a Christian in a non-Christian world ever on the verge of total war.
. . .[P]entecostals of various stripes also believe in all kinds of intermediary, disincarnate spirit beings. Often these are the spirits of recently dead or long-dead ancestors, separated from their bodies but still capable of interacting with. . . their living descendants; this is particularly prevalent in regions of the global South among pentecostal groups whose indigenous worldviews include the spirits of deceased ancestors possibly interacting with the day-to-day lives of their descendants.
Allan Anderson’s ethnographic work among pentecostals in South Africa layers Yong’s observation above of a spirit-filled pentecostal imagination in practice. In general, Anderson points out that the interaction with deceased ancestors is one of the major features of African popular religiosity. He sees this emphasis on the ancestors as arising from the traditional view of God as inaccessible and remote:
Ancestors are usually seen nearer to God than their [his interviewees] living relatives are. Many. . . said that ancestors were mediators between people and God, God’s helpers who revealed God’s will to people. When people wanted to speak to God they should go through ancestors.
These relationships with the ancestors are on equal footing, not subservience to divine beings. They are “relationally real,” that is, regardless of the ontological status of the spiritual entity in the eyes of scholars, the relationship is real. Anderson draws a parallel between African ancestor interaction with saint cults in Catholicism and Orthodoxy: “[T]heir traditional rituals are not unlike the prayers to the saints in some Christian traditions.” Such similarities might partly explain the most common and widespread response of African Pentecostals: confrontation, “where the presence of the spirit world is acknowledged but is demonized, so that an important part of Christian rituals consists of getting rid of Satan.” He continues:
The weight of evidence points to the fact that for most members of these churches, the commemoration of ancestors is rejected. Ancestors do appear to Christians, but their response as believers is usually to reject any visitation. The ancestors, they believe, are not really ancestors, but demon spirits impersonating them that need to be confronted and exorcised for they only lead to further misery and bondage.
For these respondents, the spirit world is real, but the spirits who contact the living are demons. Thus, a significant portion of ministry in African pentecostalism deals with deliverance and exorcism in opposition to the ancestor rituals and commemoration. Anderson sees this attitude as a result of western missionary influence that often generates tension and conflict with traditional familial respect. But honoring one’s ancestors can be quite burdensome and require significant time and resources—resources that might better be suited to one’s service to God through the church or for one’s living family. The payoff, however, is that the ancestors “protect their living descendants from evil and witchcraft.” Neglecting one’s duties to one’s ancestors, however, can bring about troubling consequence once that protection is removed. Here one can begin to understand why pentecostals see such observances as upstaging the role of God and faith in Him; Holy Spirit empowerment must surely entail freedom from these snares.
Along the spectrum of Christian responses to the spirit-filled world, Anderson also notes accommodation—a position eschewed by most African pentecostal churches. Nevertheless, for some, the ancestors acted as “the mediators of God, who sometimes revealed the will of God to people, and who inspired the prophets.” But Anderson also found a wide variety of practices and beliefs within this category as well, ranging from the observance of ritual killings to mundane protection, healing, and assistance.
Although Anderson’s work is largely descriptive and analytical, it elides well with the development of Yong’s call for a spirit-filled pentecostal imagination. In that mode, then, this article seeks to offer a constructive (and at times, speculative) pneumatic thanatology that lies between complete capitulation to pre-Christian African traditional religiosity and the confrontational stance of western missionary influence. I would like to offer a position of critical and functional accommodation utilizing the Wesleyan quadrilateral for methodological and rhetorical structuring purposes.