Page 1067 – Christianity Today (2024)

Robert Schuller's early life was stamped by a natural disaster. One summer when he was home from college, he and his father spotted the tail of a tornado slithering down from the sky as they were working on the family pig farm in northwest Iowa. They raced away from the twister in their family car, and when they returned after the storm had cleared, they found absolute destruction. The house, barn, and outbuildings had been completely leveled. The pigs were dead, and the corn was flattened. Even the trees had been uprooted.

Schuller's father was a taciturn Dutchman. He said little about the loss and simply offered an early iteration of Possibility Thinking: "Never look at what you have lost. Always look at what you have left."

The next morning he found a dilapidated house in a nearby town, bought a section of it for $50, and proceeded, with his son's help, to take it apart. Every shingle and every nail were saved. Even the concrete blocks of the foundation were pulled apart and repurposed. A new house was built on the old site. Fields were replanted using a borrowed horse and a homemade plow. In a few years, they were prosperous again. And Schuller never forgot his father's refusal to accept defeat.

As a boy, Schuller was known for dreams. His wife, Arvella, saw it in high school. "He was so exciting . . . so sure of himself. He loved the spotlight. . . . He had bigger dreams than anyone I had ever met in my life."

Those dreams were tied to Christian ministry. The youngest of five children, Schuller went off to the Reformed Church's Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and then to neighboring Western Theological Seminary. Graduating in 1950, he promptly married Arvella and moved to a Chicago suburb to take up a small, flagging church. In four years, the church grew from 40 members to 400. Schuller relentlessly walked the streets to build the congregation, calling door to door.

He could've stayed and prospered, but he was drawn to wider horizons. In 1955, the Schuller family—now four in number—moved to Garden Grove, California, to start a church. Garden Grove was mainly farms and fields, but construction for Disneyland was being finished only two miles down the road.

Always in a hurry, Schuller scoured the area for a place to meet, but he couldn't find one. So he settled on a drive-in theater, which he rented for $10 a week. Thus began a strange experiment in church life.

Today, the emerging church has familiarized us with services in coffee shops and bars. But nobody in 1955 saw the future of holding a service in a drive-in theater. Schuller pulled the family organ on-site every Sunday morning in a trailer, and Arvella would play hymns while Schuller preached from the top of the snack bar. An A-frame ladder enclosing a wooden cross was propped up behind him, thus church-ifying the space. "Worship as you are in the family car," fliers suggested. Forty-six cars came the first Sunday.

What began as expediency soon became a philosophy. Grandson Bobby Schuller said, "Everything begins with the drive-in movie theater. People could come to church without really coming to church. He reached out to wounded, broken people who were afraid of the church experience. It was the beginning of the seeker-sensitive movement."

More conventionally, Schuller bought property and quickly built a 300-seat chapel. But people kept attending the drive-in. Schuller settled on two services: He preached at the chapel and then raced to the Orange Drive-In to preach again. Eventually, the church split over his vision of combining the two. He won a 52-48 vote to build a "walk-in, drive-in church." Much of the losing half left the church.

Schuller managed to hire internationally-known architect Richard Neutra. In 1961, they dedicated a 1,700-seat auditorium with room for 2,000 cars to duplicate the drive-in theater experience. A huge glass door allowed Schuller to walk outside to address people in their cars.

Seven years later, the church purchased an adjacent walnut grove, with plans for the spectacular Crystal Cathedral. It too featured huge doors that opened onto a parking lot. The drive-in aspect of Schuller's church gradually withered away. Television replaced it, offering an even more convenient way to participate in church.

The Hour of Power and the Crystal Cathedral

When Billy Graham came to the Anaheim Stadium in 1969, Schuller was particularly impressed by Graham's mobile television facilities. Six months later, with Graham's encouragement, he began broadcasting throughout the Los Angeles area. Soon The Hour of Power was buying air time all over the country. Robert Schuller, with his twinkling eyes and mischievous grin, his flamboyant and optimistic spirit conveyed in slogans and sweeping gestures, became a household presence.

He was likeable. He was encouraging. He eliminated the sharp edges of religion. Schuller's target audience was the same group that had come to his drive-in church. He hoped to reach people who wouldn't go to church because they didn't want to deal with the people. You could do church in your pajamas, with a hangover.

The Crystal Cathedral, which opened ten years and $20 million later, was a set for the TV show. Designed by world-famous architect Philip Johnson, it suggested a dream church, with an open view to the sky. To be sure, Schuller's Garden Grove Community Church inhabited the building as a vital, active local congregation. But the television church became Schuller's reference point, the tail that wagged the dog, and—eventually—a hungry monster that ate the dog.

'New Thought' Idealist or Gospel Preacher?

During his seminary years, Schuller studied John Calvin's Institutes with unusual seriousness and developed a detailed index of the entire work. He always insisted that he was a Calvinist, but he also insisted that he was a missionary who had to communicate the gospel to people who no longer lived in Calvin's God-centered universe.

Schuller's grandson Bobby said that "a lot of people who walked into church in the '80s walked in because they were warmed up by Dr. Schuller." That was his objective. In Orange County, he encountered people who didn't know the Old Testament from the New and didn't care. If he was going to build a big church—and Schuller always thought big—he had to talk in a language that appealed to these indifferent people.

Schuller understood that Southern California residents wanted a life liberated from the narrowness of small-town traditions, including church. With remarkable entrepreneurial energy and great communication skills, Schuller offered a new, clean, beautiful, and uplifting form of Christianity. He did for church what Disneyland did for amusem*nt parks. Schuller pitched perfectly to the same upper-middle-class white audiences who would fall in love with the affable Ronald Reagan. "He offered a more inclusive, generous kind of American religion. In that sense he was a unifying voice, shunning doctrinal debates," said Darren Dochuk, history professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

When Schuller was a young pastor in Illinois, he was heavily influenced by Norman Vincent Peale, a fellow Reformed Church pastor who published The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. Peale actually preached for Schuller in the drive-in theater church, drawing throngs, and he preached at the first services of the drive-in, walk-in church in 1961.

Schuller acquired Peale's fascination with psychology, along with his optimistic belief in the possibility of changing your destiny by changing your thoughts. Schuller found that psychologists gave him more insight into the human condition than theologians did. He encouraged people to believe in themselves, to have faith in God, and to love. It was self-help optimism in the name of Jesus.

Schuller always wore a clerical robe, his church's music was organ and hymnody (though the hymns were never about repentance or the church), his church buildings had gardens and splashing fountains before shopping malls adopted them, and he stayed out of politics and controversy. Messages left no room for gloomy reflections; those were to be overcome with faith, hope, and love.

As an opening for missionary opportunities, that was defensible. But Schuller saw it as something more: an entirely new expression of orthodoxy. In 1982, he published Self-Esteem: The New Reformation. Sensitive and anxious for approval, Schuller compared his insights to those of Martin Luther, proposing that the church would not survive unless it superseded the guilt-ridden, sin-obsessed religion of the Reformers. "God's ultimate objective is to turn you and me into self-confident persons," he wrote. "Dare to be a possibility thinker! . . . God's almost impossible task is to keep us believing every hour of every day how great we are as his sons and daughters on planet earth." Reviewers were not kind.

In 1984, CT sent theologians Kenneth Kantzer and David Wells for an extensive interview with Schuller. Schuller gave them a detailed explanation of his views on sin and repentance, which he had thought through in a thorough if non-scholarly way. Schuller failed to satisfy them that his ideas were fully biblical, but they did come away convinced that he was no New Thought idealist posing as a servant of Jesus. His ambition was to claim as many people as possible for the God of the Bible.

Calvin College communications professor Quentin Schultze, who often watched Schuller's TV show, says that Schuller regularly went beyond self-help to present the gospel. He never lost his evangelical convictions, and his Garden Grove congregation was solidly gospel-centered. How much his TV audience benefited is not so certain.

Times A-Changing

The problem with trying to meet a cultural moment is that you may be buried in it. America changed again, becoming more polarized and doctrinaire. Culture wars made it harder to find middle ground in sunny optimism.

"TV's insatiable appetite for more led to a wide range of problems," says Schultze. "Ministries that wanted to continue growing required more and more money from a diminishing supply. Constant financial difficulties [meant they] had to create special promotions." Some televangelists used emotional appeals based on moral or political concerns. Schuller's audience would not have liked that. "What Schuller tried to do with fundraising was books and jewelry. He was a religious jewelry salesman. He offered some new dove earring almost every week."

TV also requires nimble and crystal-clear leadership. The slow processes of ecclesiastical democracy would never have moved fast enough. Schuller's church was overshadowed by its TV ministry, which was run by members of Schuller's family. All five children and their spouses worked with Schuller.

In 2006, he named his son Robert as his heir. In 2008, citing differences in vision, he reneged on that plan and announced that his daughter Sheila had become head pastor. In 2010, bankruptcy was announced. In 2011, Schuller was removed from the Hour of Power board. And in 2012, the church buildings were sold to the Catholic Church. The congregation was forced to move. (In 1980, when the Crystal Cathedral opened, it was "debt free." But the television ministry certainly was not, and it owned the building.) All in all, it was a sad ending to a dazzling ministry.

Why Schuller Matters

To focus on the demise of the Crystal Cathedral is to miss the bigger story of Robert Schuller. He was driven by a missionary calling to reach people who had distanced themselves from traditional church-going. Brilliant at understanding and adapting to his time, he reached millions. He built one of the earliest megachurches, with a strong and deeply orthodox ministry. He passed along his vision to other pastors, becoming a significant force in the development of the seeker-sensitive movement. Rick Warren, among many others, profited from Schuller's teaching. A pioneer in Christian television, Schuller was never caught in a scandal—personal or financial. Even those who know his faults intimately speak of him with great love and loyalty.

We need Schuller's missional creativity today—more than ever. Americans are increasingly resistant to the church. Many don't want to worship "as you are, in the family car," or in any other way. The church needs new leaders with creative approaches to emerge. And these new leaders will face the same challenges that Schuller did: How do you tell the gospel creatively and attractively, using modern terminology and technology, without straying from orthodoxy? How do you build an institutional support structure that is nimble yet strong? Can a local church be combined with a global media empire? What do you do when times change and your most creative approaches become outdated?

When you have a well-known reputation, when you have a large budget, when you must produce an hour-long show each week for a loyal audience on whom you're financially dependent, it's difficult, and perhaps impossible, to adapt yet again. Times change, and big organizations find it hard to change with them. That explains Schuller's predicament in the end.

We can learn from Schuller's failures, but we need a continuing renewal of his audacious, optimistic spirit. He loved God and gave his life to the church. Moreover, he loved those who were far from the church and he was driven to find ways to reach them. He really was a Possibility Thinker; it was not just a slogan. That is his legacy.

Tim Stafford, CT editor at large, is the author of The Adam Quest: Eleven Scientists Who Held on to a Strong Faith While Wrestling with the Mystery of Human Origins (Thomas Nelson).

See also CT's August 10, 1984, issue, which included a lengthy interview with Schuller, his view of sin, and Kenneth Kantzer's assessment of Schuller's theology.

This edition, we trust, will help deepen your devotion during Holy Week.

We begin with the glorious end of this week: The resurrection of our Lord. Ted Olsen helps us address a disturbing fact: Jesus isn’t the only person to have come back from the dead. What’s the difference between Jesus’ resurrection and these other stories, some of which are in Scripture? The difference, as a reader of this digizine might suspect, leads us into another experience of wonder.

The article on seeds (“Seeds—Small and Mighty”) is our science piece for the issue, a fascinating look at the crucial ubiquity of these little things. It subtly harkens Jesus’ own allusion to his death: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24).

An article on how God stoops to our level when he communicates with us—which helps us make sense of the scientific “inaccuracies” of some parables—and a moving poem about Good Friday round out this issue (with our regular exclamation point of Wonder on the Web at the end).

—Mark Galli, co-editor

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” (Gen. 1:29)

In Ruth Krauss’s classic book The Carrot Seed, a silent little boy disregards all naysayers, patiently watering and weeding around his plant until at last a great carrot sprouts up, “just as the little boy had known it would.”

Though famous for how its simple drawings transformed the genre of pictures books, Krauss’s story also tells us something profound about our relationship with nature. Even children know that the tiniest pip contains what George Bernard Shaw called “fierce energy”—the spark and all the instructions needed to build a carrot, an oak tree, wheat, mustard, sequoias, or any one of the estimated 352,000 other kinds of plants that use seeds to reproduce. The faith we place in that ability gives seeds a unique position in the history of the human endeavor. Without the act and anticipation of planting and harvest, there could be no agriculture as we know it, and our species would still be wandering in small bands of hunters, gatherers, and herdsmen. Indeed, some experts believe that hom*o sapiens might never have evolved at all in a world that lacked seeds. More than perhaps any other natural objects, these small botanical marvels paved the way for modern civilization, their fascinating evolution and natural history shaping and reshaping our own.

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning coffee and bagel to the cotton in our clothes and the cup of cocoa we might drink before bed, seeds surround us all day long. They give us food and fuels, intoxicants and poisons, oils, dyes, fibers, and spices. Without seeds there would be no bread, no rice, no beans, corn, or nuts. They are quite literally the staff of life, the basis of diets, economies, and lifestyles around the globe. They anchor life in the wild, too: seed plants now make up more than 90 percent of our flora. They are so commonplace, it’s hard to imagine that for over 100 million years other types of plant life dominated the earth.

Roll back the clock and we find seeds evolving as trivial players in a flora ruled by spores, where tree-like club mosses, horsetails, and ferns formed vast forests that remain with us in the form of coal. From this humble beginning, the seed plants steadily gained advantage—first with conifers, cycads, and ginkgoes, and then in a great diversification of flowering species—until now it is the spore bearers and algae that watch from the sidelines.

This dramatic triumph of seeds poses an obvious question: Why are they so successful? What traits and habits have allowed seeds, and the plants that bear them, to so thoroughly transform our planet? The answers reveal not only why seeds thrive in nature, but why they are so vital to people.

Seeds Nourish. Seeds come pre-equipped with a baby plant’s first meal, everything needed to send forth incipient root, shoot, and leaf. Anyone who has ever put sprouts on a sandwich takes this fact for granted, but it was a critical step in the history of plants. Concentrating that energy into a compact, portable package opened up a huge range of evolutionary possibilities and helped seed plants spread across the planet. For people, unlocking the energy contained in seeds paved the way for modern civilization. To this day, the foundation of the human diet lies in co-opting seed food, stealing the nourishment designed for baby plants.

Seeds Unite. Before seeds, plant sex was pretty dull stuff. When they did it at all, plants made sure the act was quick, out of sight, and usually with themselves. Cloning and other asexual means were common, and whatever sex happened rarely mixed genes in a predictable or thorough way. With the advent of seeds, plants suddenly began breeding in the open air, dispersing pollen to egg in increasingly creative ways. It was a profound innovation: unite the genes from two parents on the mother plant and package them into portable, ready-to-sprout offspring. Where spore plants interbred only occasionally, seed plants mixed and remixed their genes constantly. The evolutionary potential was enormous, and it’s no coincidence that Gregor Mendel [Augustinian monk and “father of modern genetics”] solved the mystery of inheritance by a close examination of pea seeds. Science might still be waiting to understand genetics if that famed pea experiment had instead been “Mendel’s Spores.”

Seeds Endure. As any gardener knows, seeds stored through the winter months can be planted the following spring. In fact, many seeds require a cold spell, a fire, or even passage through an animal gut to trigger their germination. Some species persist in the soil for decades, sprouting only when the right combination of light, water, and nutrients makes conditions right for plant growth. This habit of dormancy sets seed plants apart from nearly all other life forms, allowing great specialization and diversification. For people, mastering the storage and manipulation of dormant seeds paved the way for agriculture and continues to determine the fate of nations.

Seeds Defend. Almost any organism will fight to protect its young, but plants equip their seeds with an astonishing and sometimes deadly assortment of defenses. From impenetrable husks and jagged spikes to the compounds that give us hot peppers, nutmeg, and allspice, not to mention poisons like arsenic and strychnine, seed defenses include some surprising (and surprisingly useful) adaptations. Exploring the topic illuminates a major evolutionary force in nature and shows how people have co-opted seed defense for their own ends, from the heat in Tabasco sauce to pharmaceuticals to the most beloved seed producers of all, coffee and chocolate.

Seeds Travel. Whether tossed up by storm waves, spun on the wind, or packaged in the flesh of a fruit, seeds have found countless ways to get around. Their adaptations for travel have given them access to habitats spanning the globe, spurred diversity, and led people to some of the most essential and valuable products in history, from cotton and kapok to Velcro and apple pie.

Thor Hanson is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Switzer Environmental Fellow, and an award-winning author and biologist. His most recent book is The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered Nature and Shaped Human History. Copyright @ 2015 by Thor Hanson. Published by Basic Books. Used with permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Scripture epigraph added by the editors.

Imagine a conversation between a child and her father:

“Well, Rosie,” says Dad, “I’m going on a trip. Would you like me to bring you something?”

“I would like a star, Daddy,” Rosie answers. “One like that.” She points to Betelgeuse, the red giant in the constellation Orion.

“There are a few problems with that, Rosie. First, there is the question of how long it might take me to get there and back. Even with a ship that could travel at light speed and was big enough to carry a star, it would take me 642 years to get there.”

“Can’t you go faster?”

“Well, no. The speed of light is a constant, and anything that actually reaches light speed converts into energy—into light itself. But if I got to near light speed, I might be able to survive the entire journey because of relativity. Time would slow down for me, but people on earth would still die before I got back . . .”

As good as this father’s intentions are, a better response might be something like, “It may be too big, but I’ll see what I can do.”

This example came to mind as I was preparing a lecture in which I was trying to answer the question, “How do we incorporate the findings of science into our readings of the Bible? How do we read as scientists, or at least scientifically minded people?”

Consider Luke 11:34–36. Jesus had just performed an exorcism, yet some around him are asking for a sign. The crowds are growing in size. Jesus tells those around him that the only sign they will receive is the sign of Jonah. Then he says something particularly puzzling:

Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.

Many folks read this passage and walk away confused. What do eyes and lamps and inner light have to do with anything? Jesus doesn’t seem to make sense here.

If we do some digging, though, we find out that the ancient world had two competing theories for how the eyeball functioned in human physiology. One theory, advocated by Plato and the ancient physician Galen, suggested that the eye functioned as a sort of projector. It casts light onto the physical world, illuminating it in much the same way sonar works by projecting and receiving sound waves. Thus a bad lamp inside the body meant the projector didn’t work properly and one could not see.

The other theory of how the eye functioned was advocated by Plato’s student Aristotle. He suggested that the eye was a receiver and processor of externally generated light. Though the minority view, Aristotle’s was eventually vindicated by modern science.

Here, Jesus is saying that unrighteousness and evil—our sin nature—corrupt us until we cannot see the evident signs of God’s Messiah performed before our very face. We can ask for a miraculous sign all we want, but if our eyes are bad—if our projector lamp is evil and dark—everything we see and subsequently do will be evil and dark. We will neither see nor follow God when he shows up in our lives.

Here’s the problem: it appears that Jesus, God-made-flesh, taught using a mistaken understanding of physiology. This passage from Luke makes perfect sense if we assume Plato and Galen’s ideas, but what does this say about biblical authority and revelation? We now know how eyes operate, and there is no dispute about it. Did Jesus get it wrong?

Or did Jesus meet his listeners where they were?

This is brings us back to the dad tasked with delivering Betelgeuse. Correcting his child’s understanding of the science of the universe is not the important thing; conveying love to her is. Jesus, as the omniscient God-man, could have spent years and years correcting our understandings, explaining to us heliocentricity and relativity and biological physics. But he didn’t, because that was not the crucial task at hand. There were bigger things at stake than getting our physiology right.

Jesus met humanity where we were in cognitive development and scientific understanding. Just as he condescended to become a baby born in an animal feeding trough among the poorest of the poor, God humbled himself to use naïve and (what moderns would call) un-scientific theories of the world to convey his love to us. He did not validate those understandings, but he worked through them and in spite of them for our sake. God met us where we were, even if it meant humbling his glory, his majesty, his transcendence, his intellect.

The God who wrote the codes of gravity, formed the voids of space, and dictated the functions of biology put aside the intimate understanding of creation—the knowledge that only the Creator himself had—to make the revelations now mediated in Scripture. From the Higgs boson to galaxy clusters, God knows and knew all that can be known. And yet he would debase himself with frail and primitive understandings of the world in order to convey his love to us.

We ask for Betelgeuse, and our Father in heaven hears us, wants the best for us, and is willing to bend down and reveal part of his amazing plan for the cosmos and humanity. Instead of scoffing at the “antiquated” science that God speaks through, I am humbled at what he was willing to do for the sake of those he loves—and yet still encouraged to delve ever deeper into the world he created and the word he spoke.

Reed Metcalf is media relations and communications specialist at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the editor of the Fuller Blog on Patheos and co-founder of the Fuller Faith and Science Student Group.

Am I a stone and not a sheep

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,

To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon—

I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.

Christina Rossetti was a 19th-century Anglo-Catholic poet best known for penning the words to the Christmas hymn “In the Bleak Midwinter.” This poem is in the public domain.

Imaginations on Parade

We’d all do well to read more children’s stories. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is one of those that seems perennially to capture imaginations and inspire new artistic renderings. For the classic’s 150th birthday (several months ago), Maria Popova at Brain Pickings compiled some of the best illustrations used in various editions of the book through the decades, a parade of both individual creativity and generational style.

Look Up

You never know what you might see if you just look up. A few lucky folks doing so around 4:45 A.M. on February 17 witnessed a rare, 500-pound meteor barreling over Pittsburg. Lucky for you, three of NASA’s cameras also caught the fireball, and you can see it here.

About That Poem. . .

Given that this issue released during Holy Week, we were happy to feature Christina Rossetti’s poem Good Friday. For a wonderful reflection on it, here’s a sermon from renowned preacher Fleming Rutledge. She not only provides poetic commentary, but also devotional thoughts on Ezekiel and the hardness of our hearts.

The Grace of Naps

Benjamin Franklin wrote that wine is “proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” We’d say the same is true for naps. Here is a two-minute video presenting “nap hacks you need in your life.” Bite-sized science, applicable to your life. Our favorite trick: the coffee nap.

(P.S. Though that Ben Franklin saying is often misquoted—many times connected with beer—he actually did write it. And it’s found in his study of the miracle at Cana, within a letter where he “beg[s] to edify you by some Christian, moral, and philosophical reflections” on drinking.)

“Her skin had already started hardening, her hands and toes were curling up, they were already drawn,” Tim Thomas told the Charleston Daily Mail in 2009. "There was no life there."

Val Thomas, 59, had collapsed earlier at home. She then had three cardiac arrests within 24 hours. Tim said doctors told him his mom now had “no pulse, no blood pressure, no brain frequency.” In fact, she’d shown no brain activity for the last 17 hours.

"We just prayed and prayed and prayed,” he told the paper. "And I came to the conclusion she wasn't going to make it. I was given confirmation from God to take her off [the ventilator]. My pastor said the same thing. I felt a sense of peace that I made the right decision. I knew where my mom was going.”

Val was taken off life support. And as the nurses removed the tubes, she moved her arm. Then her foot. Then she coughed. Then she started talking. And asking for her son.

“My whole family gives God all the glory,” Tim told the local reporter. “I hope and pray that over this there will be many souls touched."

Tony Yahle doesn’t remember dying and coming back to life in August 2013. “I went to bed [and] woke up five days later in the hospital,” he told reporters. But his son remembers it.

Even after the 37-year-old mechanic’s heart stopped, doctors worked for 45 minutes to revive him. Finally, they pronounced him dead and a doctor went to inform the family.

When the doctor came into the room, Tony’s 17-year-old son, Lawrence, was praying. After doctors told him his father was dead, he slammed his fist into the wall. Then he straightened himself up, went to his father’s room, pointed at the corpse and shouted, “Dad, you're not going to die today!”

Tony’s heart restarted.

“It’s kind of funny,” he later told Decision magazine. “We’re usually very quiet people [who] sit in the back row in church. . . . [But we’re the] ones God chose to make the most noise.”

It’s actually kind of easy to believe in resurrection, at least in someone coming back to life, isn’t it? In saints’ hagiographies, raising the dead is a big deal. But it’s also pretty common. Try to find a hagiography without a resurrection. It’s awfully hard. Read a dictionary of saints and you’ll start with St. Anastasius, who was a heathen when St. Julian raised him from the dead. Anastasius “told such a mournful tale about the way to Hell as never came to man before nor after since.” He converted to Christianity, the story goes, and was martyred with Julian around A.D. 311.

A few pages later you’ll read about St. Archelides, who came to life for the span of one sentence, settling a dispute between his fellows over whether his mother could be buried next to him even though she was a woman. (She could, for the record.)

Hundreds of resurrection stories later, as you near the final pages, you’ll encounter St. Winifred, beheaded around 650 by the son of a prince for spurning him. She was reportedly raised to life by the prayers of her uncle, St. Beuno.

Want only the resurrection stories? Track down Albert J. Hebert’s extremely credulous Saints Who Raised the Dead: True Stories of 400 Resurrection Miracles, in which even the most unreliable hagiographic accounts of resurrections by Patrick, Joan of Arc, Francis of Paola, Stanislaus of Krakow, and other saints are treated authentically.

I’m skeptical of most of these stories, as I am of several of the more dramatic resurrection claims I’ve been sent while overseeing Christianity Today’s news functions. But I’m not dismissive of the phenomenon in total. It’s hard to say something never happens when my Bible says it did.

The Bible is full of stories about the dead coming back to life. Elijah prays to God to bring a boy back from the dead, and God does it. Elisha does the same thing: prays to God to bring a boy back from the dead, and God does it. Even Elisha’s bones bring someone back from the dead. Peter brings Dorcas back from the dead. Paul brings Eutychus back from the dead. Jesus brings the daughter of Jairus back from the dead. And then of course there’s Lazarus and the “many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep” that were raised at Jesus’ crucifixion (Matt. 27:52–53).

Jesus’ resurrection isn’t just one important resurrection story among several in the Bible. He’s the first of a new kind of resurrection. Which may be why everyone seems to be so confused when they meet the resurrected Christ. Remember: Jesus’ disciples had seen people come back from the dead before. They had seen Jesus raise Jairus’s daughter. They knew Lazarus personally. But Jesus coming back? That was different. His resurrection was not like the others. Examine, for example, the attention John’s gospel gives to the difference between Lazarus coming out of the tomb bound in his burial clothes and Jesus leaving the tomb with his “linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth . . . folded up in a place by itself.”

Jesus reveals the key difference outside Lazarus’s tomb. “Your brother will rise again,” he told Martha.

Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

She replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world” (John 11:23–27). Martha’s declaration of Jesus’ identity is dramatic. But at the same time, it seems she doesn’t believe that Jesus is going to raise her brother from the dead right then and there.

What’s important isn’t that Jesus really did raise Lazarus right then and there. It’s that Jesus suddenly changed resurrection from a what-and-when question to a who question. He changed it from a passive verb—someone was raised from the dead—to an active and personal noun. I AM the Resurrection.

We’re still waiting for the resurrection on the last day; that’s our future hope. But he is that resurrection. Right now. Acting. Saving. Redeeming. Setting things right. Remaking creation into something better than ever. In starting a new, spirit-powered creation made from the dust of this first, fallen creation—like a stalk of wheat made from a cracked kernel—Jesus’ body is where it starts. He is the firstborn of all creation, and the firstfruits of the new creation, the firstborn from the dead.

And even if, like the disciples, we’ve seen people rise from the dead, we haven’t seen anything like his resurrection, which carries all to glory.

Ted Olsen is co-editor of The Behemoth. Parts of this article earlier appeared at the Christian History blog.

Christians defend certain days of the Holy Weekend. For instance, we’ll defend the idea that on Friday Jesus actually died on a cross to save the world from its sin. Then we’ll turn around and defend Easter Sunday as the day that Jesus actually rose from the grave, defeating the powers of evil running loose in the world.

But nobody defends Saturday. Nobody writes apologetics defending the belief that Jesus actually lay dead for one long, endless day two thousand years ago. What’s the defense for that? If you’ve got the power to rise from the grave, why would you wait one whole long day to do it? Why not just rise from the grave, like, just a little later Friday night?

Even if it seems puzzling, something profound happened in the lives of Jesus’ followers on Saturday.

Martin Luther said himself that Saturday was the day that God himself lay cold in the grave. Friday was death, Sunday was hope, but Saturday was that seemingly ignored middle day between them when God occupied a dirty grave in a little garden outside Jerusalem. Saturday is about waiting, about uncertainty, about not knowing what’ll happen. Saturday is ambiguity. It’s about, as one theologian put it, “muddling through” when the future isn’t clear.

When Understanding and Reason Lay Dead

So much of Christian faith is Saturday faith.

I call it “awkward Saturday”: that holy day to sit, wait, hope—unsure of what’s to come tomorrow. Saturday is the day that Jesus, and all understanding, lay dead.

A medieval theologian, Anselm, once described the kind of faith that comes with Saturday—fides quaerens intellectum: “faith seeking understanding.” By that, he meant that faith isn’t something that arises after moments of understanding. Rather, faith is something that you cling to when understanding and reason lay dead. We don’t believe once we understand it—we believe in order to understand it. Saturday’s like that: offering a day of waiting, a day of ambiguity, a day when God is sovereign even if our ideas and theologies and expectations about him are not. It is the day that our ignorance is our witness and our proclamation. Truth is, our intellect will always be one step behind in our love of God. We don’t love God once we understand him; we love God in order to understand him.

When we look honestly at the bigger picture in the Bible, we find, over and over, that people who had real, fleshy, in-your-face experiences with the living God periodically exhibited a pattern in their lives. Most of these people in the Bible at some point became depressed. Some even became suicidal.

For instance, I reflect on the life of Elijah. God sent him to the people with a message about needing to return to God. He went and did his job and then ran away to save his life. Sitting under a broom bush, he asked God to kill him. Elijah prayed, “I have had enough, Lord. …Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then, after praying, he took a nap, hoping God wouldn’t let him wake up.

Or what about Jonah? God came to Jonah and told him to go to the nation of Assyria, his sworn enemy, and tell them that God loved them and had grace for them. He went. The first three chapters of Jonah talk about this miracle. The whole city of Nineveh believed in God and turned from their wickedness. Somebody told me the Hebrew says that even the cows in the city repented. Talk about a successful mission trip.

Then there’s chapter 4. Nobody preaches chapter 4. It’s like it doesn’t exist. After his mission trip was complete and the whole city of Nineveh had believed in Yahweh, Jonah went and sat under a tree. Under the tree, Jonah said to God, “Now, Lord, take away my life, for it’s better for me to die than to live.”

Consider, as well, Job. Satan went and had coffee with God and worked out a deal: Satan could ruin everything in Job’s life, but, God said, Satan could not kill Job. Satan went and destroyed everything around Job. Job lost his children, his sheep, his house, his health, his hope. Everything. But not himself. Like we all would, Job went and sat in the dust. Sitting there in the dust, Job cut himself with broken pottery. While not celebrating hurting one’s body, the Bible acknowledges a cutter in his pain.

Historians tell us that some of our Christian heroes went through similar dark experiences. William Wilberforce (1759–1833), a devoted Christian, helped end the slave trade in Britain. At night, he would walk down to the ships to look at the horrid conditions the slaves had to endure to make it from Africa to England. Wilberforce changed the world. But the task he believed God had assigned him took such a toll on his soul that by the time he died Wilberforce could only get out of bed in the morning with the help of opiates and barbiturates. He got that depressed from his fight against slavery.

Fits with the rest of the story of faith, doesn’t it? I wonder if maybe, during the course of poring over its pages, we’ve neglected to recognize something that the Bible has been shouting for some time. We’ve just refused to hear it—out of fear or whatever.

A legitimate stage of holiness is hopelessness.

Close but Far Away

So much of faith is living in the awkward Saturday, living in the dark mesh of twilight between the moments of hopelessness and utter blinding hope.

At times, we are all like the two disciples on their way to Emmaus who were really close to Jesus but didn’t always know it. In Luke 24, two disciples walked away from Jerusalem, where they’d just seen their Lord and Master die on the cross. Leaving, dejected, upset, hopeless, and broken, to find the next stage in their lives and careers. Unbeknownst to them, Jesus had been resurrected and was actually walking alongside them on their way to Emmaus. The hope of Sunday hadn’t dawned on them yet. The Gospels tell us that, on their way to Emmaus, the disciples were “downcast.”

That experience is the kind of experience Saturday is all about.

English author and mystic Evelyn Underhill hit it on the head: the eternal God of the universe is mysteriously a “nearness yet otherness.”

On Saturday, God is close but so far away. The traditional recipe for Christians is that we look at Friday and Saturday through the lens of Sunday. By that, I mean we look at Friday and Saturday in light of the resurrection in the same way we watch a scary movie we’ve seen a million times. It’s scary the first time we see it because we don’t know what will happen. But when we’ve seen it, we don’t experience it the way we did when we first saw it. Consequently, we don’t experience Saturday as the first disciples did.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Tuchman wrote a book in which she talked about “flash-forwards” in history. When we read the stories of our history, it’s tempting to be calmed by knowing the outcome. But, Tuchman tells us, we must understand that those in the events themselves would not, could not, know what we know: the outcome. There are no “flash-forwards” in history.

Most of our Holy Week Saturdays are filled with family, food, and movies. But the original Saturday would have been torturous. Jesus had died and there was no way in the world to know if he would return. We call Friday “good” because we can see things from our angle. Tell that to the first people who lost Jesus. They’d have called it “hell” Friday.

So when we think about Saturday, we must do so rejecting our knowledge that Jesus will rise. Those in the first Saturday didn’t know that. They were unaware. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar brings a penetrating point to the table on this. He says that we prematurely move from Friday to Saturday and from Saturday to Sunday. We shouldn’t. He writes, “We must … guard against that theological busyness and religious impatience which insist on anticipating the moment of fruiting the eternal redemption through the temporal passion—on dragging forward that moment from Easter to Holy Saturday.”

When we experience Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Balthasar is saying, we shouldn’t be too quick to move to Sunday. We must sit in Saturday, not too “theologically busy” and “religiously impatient” to squat in the tomb for a day. Of course, to a certain degree that is true; the only problem with such a statement is that those original disciples—disappointed after watching from the front row their best friend hang helplessly on the cross of a criminal—didn’t know what Sunday would bring. Their Saturday didn’t know Sunday was coming. Their Saturday was final.

And even when we get to Sunday, we must remember that this isn’t the end of the journey. Saturday will come again. It always does.

Carrying the Body

The Gospels speak very little of the disciples’ immediate response to Jesus’ death on Saturday. But before the sunset on Friday, a man named Joseph of Arimathea came to Pontius Pilate to request Jesus’ cold, dead body, that it might be properly buried. The text reads, “Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus.… He came and took the body away.”

It’s a subtle verse you could easily move past, but acres of meaning await within it. According to John—after the crowds fled and the slowly muffled screams of the executed ceased—Joseph made the sorrowful journey to receive Jesus’ body as Friday drew to a close. Slowly, carefully, Joseph lowered the cross, pulled the large Roman nails from Jesus’ fragile hands and feet, and carried him in his arms.

Allow your imagination to paint the devastation of pulling those nails and along with them uprooting your greatest dreams and hopes. Imagine how awkward it would have been then and there. The darkness was never thicker. Hopes and dreams were dashed. Years earlier, most likely, Joseph had left behind his life of predictability and safety to follow an unknown Savior, only to have his vision crushed the night before. Now Joseph held his dead dream in his arms. He hadn’t signed up for this. This wasn’t in the fine print. What a failure. What a waste.

But Joseph still showed up.

Joseph asked for Jesus’ body. It wasn’t forced upon him. He experienced the burden of it by his own choice. Part of being a Christian is carrying the body of your God to its place of rest. It’s heavy. Very harsh. Beyond awkward. But you have to be open to it. It won’t be forced upon you. Who would ask for the heaviness of Christ? Who desires the corpse of Jesus? Who asks for this kind of stuff?

A Christ-follower does.

Holy Moments of Waiting

At the Christian store, there’s a painting illustrating a poem called “Footprints.” Down the middle, one set of footprints walks along the sandy seashore. The poem is a narrative. Walking down the beach, someone talks to God as he (or she) remembers moments from his life. The man’s life journey through these moments is represented by footprints in the sand. Usually there are two sets of prints: one belonging to him and one belonging to God. He notices that during the anguishing periods, though, only one set of footprints is evident in the sand. The man asks God where he was. And God says that during those hard parts, God was carrying him.

The poem is beautiful. Yet, for me it misses something crucial about Christian faith. God does carry us. I believe that. But sometimes faith is so hard that it feels like we are carrying Jesus. That we’re carrying the weight of his very heavy body. Beholding his glory can be so heavy, so weighty. (It is perhaps instructive that the Hebrew word kabod means two things: “glory” and “weighty.”)

There’s another footprints painting that nobody paints or even wants to see, and they’ll never put it up at the mall. That one is about how everyone who’s seeking to follow after Jesus will inevitably end up carrying Jesus to the tomb.

More of faith than we’d like to admit consists of sitting in the tomb, a side of faith many of us probably didn’t sign up for. Joseph probably didn’t. And while maybe we didn’t anticipate those dark moments of waiting, they are nonetheless holy moments. Faith isn’t just Good Friday and Easter Sunday; faith is awkward Saturday too. So much is sitting in that tomb with the soon-to-be resurrected Lord. It’s so dark. So damp. So scary. The silence is deafening. But there is hope in there. Even the ants that normally crawled the contours of the rocks rejoiced. The air praised God. The rock, which would later be rolled away, yearned to jump for joy. The full tomb knew that resurrection was under it all. Because in that kind of dark, there’s a kind of beautiful light. Not a normal light. Not the light of the sun, or the light of a lamp, or the light of a flashlight. A different light that few can see. The light in the full tomb goes much deeper than physical light.

And in that kind of darkness, there’s a glory.

In the tomb, the darkness is thick. But that’s where God is.

A. J. Swoboda is a pastor and professor in Portland, Oregon. This article is adapted from his book, A Glorious Dark: Finding Hope in the Tension between Belief and Experience (Baker).

Used by permission of Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, Copyright © 2015.

This Easter debuts the follow-up to Mark Burnett and Roma Downey’s record-breaking History Channel series The Bible. Chronicling Jesus’ resurrection and the early church in Acts, A.D. The Bible Continues offers powerful lessons for today’s church, the Christian husband-wife producing team told CT in an interview.

More than 13 million viewers watched The Bible in 2013, and the movie adaptation of the series, Son of God, grossed nearly $60 million, corresponding with a wave of Bible epics at the box office.

Why did you feel like now was the right time to adapt this story?

Downey: What we hope to do with A.D. The Bible Continues is to take a deeper dive into the book of Acts so we can really explore the stories and really dig deeper into the characters. You’ve got to remember they didn’t know they were characters in the Bible, but rather were people like you and me struggling with the things that we struggle with.

…We cast an amazing international group of actors who bring racial diversity and emotional intensity so that we can present this story in a gritty and realistic way that feels authentic. We in no way wanted this to feel corny, or that you were seeing something from Sunday school, but rather that you were tuning into the emotional and exciting hour of drama. We worked with scholars and theologians to make sure that when we get Scripture into this that we do so accurately.

This first season of A.D. will take us through chapters of 1 through 10 from the book of Acts but we also draw from history and the writings of Josephus at the time, because it’s important to set a political context for the story so the audience can understand what was going on in Judea at that time.

Acts, in many ways, is the story of a persecuted church. Where did you see parallels between persecution today and that of the first century?

Downey: I think the parallels are obvious, and it’s with heartbreak that we watch the news coming out overseas . We are surprised at how little news there is really in this country about what is happening over there. You can see that 2,000 years have passed and many things have changed but tragically some things have not changed. I think it’s up to us, the American Christians, to speak up and speak out and speak loudly, that this cannot happen.

Our story takes us on the journey of those dark days after the death of Jesus, when fear and confusion reigned for the disciples and danger lurked down every alleyway. We know the Roman occupation was cruel and severe, led by Pontius Pilate. We see the also the political maneuvering of the temple authorities and that struggle for power led by Caiaphas. We show you the struggle for freedom by taking up arms as expressed by the zealots and then, of course, at the center of it at all, we have the disciples and the early believers navigating through the dangerous days and waiting for the Holy Spirit to come.

What do we learn from the characters?

Burnett: God never gives up on us. People make mistakes over and over but it’s the people who make the biggest mistakes or who take the wrong path, who end up becoming so important to all of us. In A.D., Peter denies Jesus three times. Saul was the biggest persecutor. One let down his best friend and his Lord and still got the same charge and one was the biggest persecutor and ended up writing more of the New Testament and traveling further spreading the word.

Downey: Also, you see in the first episode, Mary Magdalene going up through the tomb, and you’re reminded that it was a woman to whom Jesus first appeared when he resurrects. That scene never ceases to move me when we see her confused and fearful at first, thinking they have stolen Jesus’ body and then there he is and what an honor for her to have been the very first person and for it to be a woman.

The early church struggled throughout with balancing diversity and unity. What are some lessons you learned about those two themes from the book of Acts?

Downey: Certainly we have reached out across the Christian community, across denominations, and found that there is a beautiful opportunity for bridge building, particularly when we gather around issues like what is happening to our brothers and sisters overseas. We are many in number.

If you look at A.D., the church started with 11 remaining disciples and a handful of early believers and it grew and it grew. We are more than two billion people today and when we stand together with the strength of our numbers and our shared belief that Jesus is the son of God, I think that we can do anything and with concerns to these larger issues happening in the world, we must stand together.

Do you worry that there may be fatigue from so many Bible-based films and shows?

Burnett: Nope. In the same way I don’t think there is any new fatigue as far as planting new churches. It’s a supernatural thing, and it’s part of the plan. I can’t imagine any Christian being fatigued by hearing his Word.

In February, a wide range of spiritual and literary types—writers, readers, editors, and thinkers largely consisting of Roman Catholics but not entirely—gathered at USC's Caruso Catholic Center and Doheny Memorial Library for readings, workshops, lectures, roundtables, and panel sessions, all devoted to and exploring a particular future, that of the Catholic literary imagination. It's a pleasure when, having taken the trouble to reach a conference, you arrive, have your mind and spirit stirred for a few days, and are reminded freshly why you love the thing you do, and feel admiration and affection for the people you have known, or have just met, who enjoy doing this same sort of thing, too. And when a conference is really good, as this one was, it stays with you—memories and highlights of those few days leave a vivid imprint upon you, weeks and months later, and maybe longer.

Dana Gioia, the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at USC, and Gary Adler, Director of Research at USC's Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, both deserve great praise for making this conference happen. They tirelessly searched for money to make the event a reality, so much so that there were no registration costs for participants. Blessed are the plan-makers, risk-takers, and fund-raisers, for they will merit much applause. What's more, Dana and Gary were seemingly omnipresent hosts, giving visitors directions to upcoming sessions, participating in multiple sessions themselves, and making helpful announcements when those sessions ended.

Traveling from home prevented me from attending the conference's opening event, a Thursday-night plenary reading by Julia Alvarez. I did manage to attend Paul Mariani's "Art of Poetry" class early the next morning. Mindful of the thirty or forty Catholic high-school students in the room, assembled in their diverse uniforms from their area schools, Mariani gave a warm and capacious talk about his own growth as a poet and the resources he has found in poetry—as much a series of life lessons as literary lessons. Later in the morning, Villanova scholar James Matthew Wilson led a session on the same topic. It was a tour de force, and I plan to steal many a thing from the eight-page handout he distributed. Wilson discussed, among other things, how poetry is the paradigmatic art form, and how poetry's virtues have differed from age to age—that is, emphasis shifted from ancient tale and stately rhythms to private reading and interior states. In addition to giving a primer on versification, he introduced rhyming and its effects, referring to the "Stabat Mater" and other Latin hymns. He concluded with a consideration of poetry as opposed to mere verse, drawing upon the poet and critic Yvor Winters.

After lunch, Paul Contino eloquently introduced Tobias Wolff, describing Wolff's fiction as not a "pious celebration" but instead "focused on our struggling." Wolff read his story "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs" to a packed chapel, and reflected upon how his reading of The Jesuits of North America informed that story's climactic scene. (He writes about this in an essay in the collection Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints, edited by Paul Elie.) Kevin Starr gave a plenary talk afterward, and a late-afternoon session on the "state of Catholic publishing" featured editors from Ignatius, Loyola, Paraclete, and University of Dayton presses offering insights into today's complex print- and digital-reading landscape. These presses and others also had booths in a tented common area. Browsing, I learned of Orbis Books' Passion: Contemporary Writers on the Story of Calvary and of a conference to be held at the University of Notre Dame in late October, "Transcending Orthodoxies: Academic Freedom in Religiously Affiliated Universities." James Matthew Wilson's The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry was also available, one of several well-designed books by Wiseblood, a relatively new publisher. Friday's activity concluded with the novelist Ron Hansen, who read excerpts from his enduring novel Mariette in Ecstasy, somehow enjoying already its 25th anniversary.

Saturday provided another full, rich day, the last of the conference. Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, Paul Mariani, and James Matthew Wilson participated in a "Poets in the Twenty-First Century" session, with a fine young poet of that vintage, Malachi Black, present in the audience. (A new professor in San Diego, Black benefited from the conference being virtually in his backyard.) O'Donnell spoke powerfully of her Sicilian parents and their Catholic faith and traditions, at one point quoting from Augustine's Confessions: "Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you." Incarnation, she continued, is the soul of poetry, which consists of story, song, and symbol. She spoke of how she writes with her "whole personality," adding that "a writer is never more fully herself than when she is in the act of writing." She also read from her poetry volume Saint Sinatra, after which Dana Gioia announced that there was a Frank Sinatra Museum quite nearby on USC's campus. O'Donnell suggested an immediate pilgrimage!

Paul Mariani, an accomplished biographer as well as poet, described how American poet John Berryman had played the literary pilgrim, visiting sites where Gerard Manley Hopkins had resided. He read from Berryman's Eleven Addresses to the Lord: "Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement. / May I stand until death forever at attention / for any of your least instruction or enlightenment." Even more memorably, Mariani read Hopkins' "The Windhover." Oh, wow, was it something to hear. He read it slowly and sonorously, not unlike some of those early recordings of Yeats, but without any hit of preening. Rather admiringly, savoring it: "AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!"

"The Church has taught me to see the world as it is," remarked James Matthew Wilson during this session. Poetry, he said, does not "retreat from the world to the chapel"; instead, it helps us to know the truth, and abide there.

Fiction took center stage on Saturday afternoon, in a session featuring critics Paul Contino and Mark Eaton, along with novelist and fiction-writer Richard Bausch. Contino began with a view of the critic as a handmaiden to authors, and he illustrated this function broadly, advocating for the Canadian novelist David Adams Richards and American writers Alice McDermott, George Saunders, and Wolff and Bausch, too. Bausch read from his fiction, and then reflected on a writer's higher calling. Writers, he said, at their best transcend the normal limitations of actual living. They strive to write with all of their intelligence, and the compassion of an angel. Eaton, sharing work from a forthcoming project on religion and American fiction since 1950, observed that as religion has become more pliable in modern life, it has also invited more self-reflection on the part of believers. He also helpfully distinguished between belief in propositions and belief as a continuing practice.

I took part in an "Ecumenical Perspectives" session at the end of the day. (I was told last year, upon being invited, that since I was an upstanding professor from Wheaton College, I would be on the 'ecumenical perspectives' panel! I had been looking forward to it since then.) My focus involved the teaching of Renaissance literature from inter-confessional vantage points, even in an evangelical setting. The more predictable Protestant presence in such a class, in such a place, of John Foxe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, and such, ought to be complemented by the lives and writings of figures such as Reginald Pole, Edmund Campion, and Robert Southwell, whose religious poetry in the 1590s made possible the later achievements of John Donne and George Herbert. I argue for this because it reflects better what the field of Renaissance Studies has explored and how its focus has expanded in the past 15 years or so. It also makes the religious complexities and tumult of the Renaissance era more approachable and convincing to students.

Marc Malandra of Biola University was also a part of this session, and he reflected on the place of faith, and his identity in the faith, in his own writing habits. He took a strong position on the freedom that should be felt by writers of faith. Malandra prefers to think of himself as a "Christian who writes, rather than a Christian writer," to avoid the possibly limiting attention or engagement that the qualifying description risks bringing.

Poetry continued to be a strong presence throughout the conference. Saturday afternoon saw a reading by several contributors to the anthology St. Peter's B-List, a collection of contemporary poems on the saints edited by Mary Ann B. Miller, and the conference concluded with a Saturday-night plenary reading involving Dana Gioia, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, and Paul Mariani.

At some point during this conference, I took a few minutes to read a welcoming insert in the conference program, a letter from the Most Reverend Jose H. Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles. Our focus, he announced, was "faith and its relation to literature and culture." For twenty centuries artists have been inspired and sometimes haunted by their search for God, and today artists of faith must speak with force and grace against attempts to "forget and reverse the incarnation." The archbishop continued, "The new evangelization needs new art and new artists. It needs stories and songs, poems and novels and plays, sculptures and architecture, paintings and symphonies"—art that is not satisfied with "temporary consolations and diversions." And if religious art is to be renewed, audiences of faith, for their part, must demand "an art that is truly excellent." To that, all the conference-goers, gathered in the parish of the literary imagination, said Amen.

Brett Foster teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Wheaton College. He is the author of Shakespeare's Life, and has published articles on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Henry VIII, Renaissance Rome, and the sacred and profane in Renaissance literature. He regularly gives talks at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

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