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Religious Studies | Intellectual History

FAITHFUL

CURRY AND
WELLS
“A dazzling display of the power of a Christian mind; top-notch authors at the top of their game.

IMAGINATION IN
This book shows how fearless and honest Christians should engage the contemporary world.”
—C. Stephen Evans, Baylor University

“Faithful Imagination in the Academy takes the faith and learning discussion beyond the emphasis
on argument to clear vision; beyond combative metaphors to dialogue; and beyond an apologetic
tone to invitation. The book provokes intrigue and puzzlement through concrete examples of
what scholars have actually tried to do, rather than speculating on what might be possible.”
—Shirley A. Mullen, Houghton College
THE ACADEMY
“First-order scholarship by Christian believers is no longer a rarity. Yet, because of the multiplied
complexities of existence, there is an ongoing need for learning that moves from general Christian
perspectives to specific intellectual challenges. The chapters of this book show how convincingly
that scholarship can be carried out. The book’s breadth combines with the depth of its individual

FAITHFUL IMAGINATION IN THE ACADEMY

chapters to make a compelling statement.” —Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame

In the past thirty years there has been a sea change in North American intellectual life regarding the
role of religious commitments in academic endeavors. Driven partly by postmodernism and the
fragmentation of knowledge and partly by the democratization of the academy in which different
voices are celebrated, the appropriate role that religion should play is contested. Some academics
insist that religion cannot and must not have a place at the academic table; others insist that reli-
gious values should drive the argument.

Faithful Imagination in the Academy takes an approach based on dialogue with various viewpoints,
claiming neither too much nor too little. All the authors are seasoned academics with many signif-
icant publications to their credit. While they all know how the academy operates and how to make
worthwhile contributions in their respective disciplines, they are also Christians whose religious
commitments are reflected in their intellectual work.

Contributors
Janel M. Curry, Mark Fackler, Susan M. Felch, John Hare, Del Ratzsch, Kurt C. Schaefer, Helen M.
Sterk, David A. Van Baak, Ronald A. Wells

JANEL M. CURRY is professor of geography and dean for research and scholarship at Calvin
College.

RONALD A. WELLS is director of the Maryville Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at
Maryville College.

Explorations in Religious
Belief and Scholarship
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Faithful Imagination
in the Academy
Faithful Imagination
in the Academy
Explorations in Religious
Belief and Scholarship

Edited by Janel M. Curry and

Ronald A. Wells

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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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Faithful imagination in the academy : explorations in religious belief and
scholarship / edited by Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2547-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2547-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3035-3 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-3035-8 (electronic)
1. Theology—Congresses. I. Curry, Janel M., 1956– II. Wells, Ronald, 1941–
BR41.F35 2008
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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1
Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

Part I: Probing Linguistic and Moral Coherence

1 Words and Things: The Hope of Perspectival Realism 13
Susan M. Felch
2 Can We Be Good without God? 31
John Hare

Part II: Questioning Assumptions Underlying Science

3 Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? 45
David A. Van Baak
4 Design in Nature: What Is Science Properly Permitted to Think? 57
Del Ratzsch

Part III: Truth Telling and Truth Searching

5 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West:
Josiah Royce and American Memory 81
Ronald A. Wells
6 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place 99
Mark Fackler

v
vi Contents

Part IV: Imagining a World

7 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 115
Helen M. Sterk
8 American Poverty Policy: Concerns about the Nature of
Persons in a Good Society 131
Kurt C. Schaefer
9 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure:
A Case Study of Great Barrier Island, New Zealand 151
Janel M. Curry

Index 165
About the Contributors 173
Preface and Acknowledgments

The authors whose chapters appear in this book did not start out believ-
ing their work would end up in a common volume. This book came about
because the two editors and the Provost of Calvin College, Dr. Claudia
Beversluis, believed that it might, or should, be so. We all—editors, authors,
and provost alike—believe deeply both in scholarship rooted in a liberal
arts consciousness, formed in a faith-related context, and in its dissemina-
tion both to general readers and to teacher-scholars in institutions of higher
learning.
The chapters in this book are by no means thought to be anything like
the last word on the chosen subject for the various disciplines. We have
a more modest goal. These essays are contributions to the ongoing and
widespread revisionist project that asks the question: What can it mean
for scholars to integrate their faith with their academic work? As much for
scholars in so-called secular universities as for colleagues in church-related
liberal arts colleges, we offer this work as an example of what faith-based
discourse might possibly amount to.
In the past thirty years, there has been a sea change in North American
intellectual life regarding the role of religious commitments in academic
endeavors. That change has been driven partly by postmodernism and the
concomitant fragmentation of knowledge and partly by the democratiza-
tion of the academy in which different voices are celebrated. However,
the appropriate role that religion should play in all this is contested: some
academics still insist that religion cannot and must not have a place at the
academic table or it will not be academics at all; others insist that religious
values should drive the argument.

vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgments

This book takes a determinedly moderate approach, claiming neither

too much nor too little. All the authors are seasoned, veteran academics
with many significant publications to their credit. We all know how the
academy operates and how to make worthwhile contributions in our re-
spective disciplines. At the same time, we are people of faith who want to
demonstrate how religious commitments are reflected in our intellectual
work. In this respect, we respond in advance to two possible objections: to
those who think that religion does not and cannot have a place in academic
discourse, we ask that they give these essays an honest and open reading; to
those scholars of faith who think that one’s academic conclusions should
be substantially—some would say antithetically—different from secular
people, we ask that they, too, give us an honest and open reading before
they express their possible disappointment at our cautious approach.
These essays were first delivered as lectures when we were “The Calvin
Worldview Lecturer.” That program was conceived of, and administered by,
Calvin College and Chaplaincy Ministry of the Christian Reformed Church.
In brief, the program releases a Calvin faculty member from teaching each
academic year so that the person might travel to lecture at universities that
invite us. We were meant, as far as possible, to work with university chap-
lains, who were to negotiate invitations for us at departmental lectures, col-
loquia, and seminars. We lecturers were meant to go to secular universities,
not theological seminaries or church-related liberal arts colleges.
The editors of this volume asked each Calvin Lecturer from the inception
of the program in 1998 to 2006 to give us the lecture that best represents
the dynamic that went on in universities from British Columbia and On-
tario to California, Massachusetts, and New Mexico and from Switzerland
and Britain to New Zealand, Kenya, and Korea. The various authors have
worked with the editors to bring their spoken presentations into the literary
essays found in this book.
We should say that there is one essay in the group that was not given by
a Calvin Lecturer, as such. Janel Curry, as dean for research at Calvin, has
the oversight role for the lectureship, so she was closely associated with the
program. Her coeditor in this book noted the relative lack of essays in the
social sciences; thus it was decided that she contribute an essay that was in
the spirit of the lectureship. We think her work demonstrates and illustrates
the intent of the book in a discipline and a geographic area that had not
otherwise been touched.
We could not have done this book without the human encouragements
and financial assistance of two successive provosts at Calvin College, Joel
Carpenter and Claudia Beversluis, and three successive deans for research,
Stephen Evans, Shirley Roels, and the present coeditor Janel Curry. We
thank them heartily. Special thanks are due the Rev. William van Gronin-
gen, the head of CRC chaplains when the program was conceived, and to
 Preface and Acknowledgments ix

the Rev. Peter Schuurman, whose leadership from 2004 onward gave fresh
energy and resolve. We also thank the various chaplains whose hard work
on our behalf facilitated many good venues. While all chaplains did good
work for us, we risk singling out one for his outstanding leadership and
assistance, the Rev. Dr. Michael Fallon, at McMaster University in Ontario.
We thank Dawn Crook for providing the administrative support for the
lectureship program and for her help with this project. Finally, we thank
James Bratt, Donna Romanowski, and Dale Williams at the Calvin Center
for Christian Scholarship, whose human and financial help at a key stage
was critical and much appreciated. Last, we thank our publisher, Jon Sisk at
Rowman & Littlefield, who always seems open to new ideas.
We hope and trust that these essays will find their way into the hands of
comrades in the cause of liberal arts faith-based scholarship, and into those
of people who might want to know, perhaps for the first time, what all this
discourse regarding faith-based scholarship is all about.
Introduction
Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

Many Christian academics feel themselves to be “outsiders in the sacred

grove” when it comes to their faith and their scholarly life. Mark Schwehn
depicts this well in his book, Exiles from Eden.1 We feel on the outside
whether it is over against enlightenment secular rationalism or postmod-
ern relativism, but as Schwehn points out, higher learning needs religion
in order to flourish. This book illustrates this need. It reflects an attempt to
focus disciplinary knowledge toward deeper understanding that would not
be possible without a religious perspective. Thus, this book models both
the need of the faith community to honor intellectual life and the need of
the academy to reach deeper for intellectual life that also seeks religious
understanding.
The intellectual work presented in this book can be seen as the out-
growth of two intellectual streams, often portrayed at odds with each
other. The first stream is postmodernism. Postmodernism has undermined
the Enlightenment models of scientific detachment, showing that they
do not provide the objectivity once believed. While perhaps at times ad-
vocating a position of our being unable to ascertain any truth at all, the
postmodern intellectual tradition has unknowingly opened up new venues
for the development and advocacy of a particular faith perspective in aca-
demic disciplines. The irony of this opening for intellectual work informed
by faith commitments is that such work often questions the very assump-
tions of postmodernism. This volume is no different. Postmodernism has
been portrayed as the search for community that ends up being one person
at each table alone. The chapters in this volume, the result of the opening
created by postmodernism, however, ask us to confront a different reality
that leads us to a different end point—being made in the image of God

1
2 Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

means that we are inherently relational. Understanding comes through

knowing who we are, and part of that personhood is a call to be a member
of a community.
The postmodern era has created an environment in which religiously
informed scholarly thought has deepened and matured, undermining the
relativism of postmodernism itself. As faithful scholarship has matured,
the audience of this scholarship has moved from being largely a Christian
audience, to being able to gain a place at the table with other intellectual
sparring partners within the secular university. This book also represents
some of the best of this growing dialogue at the table across many disci-
plines, from philosophy to physics to economics. All of these chapters were
developed for presentation at secular universities, to primarily disciplinary
audiences, but with an explicit or implicit faith perspective.
As is evidenced in this volume, such scholarly engagement has come a
great distance from some of its earlier stages. It has grown from more gen-
eralist statements on the Christian mind such as those expressed in Harry
Blamires’s The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?2 and the works
of Francis Schaeffer, who addressed an educated popular audience, to more
disciplinary works with expanded audiences.3 Key works that have both
argued for this direction of scholarship are Mark Noll and George Marsden.
Noll, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, spoke to a Christian
audience, stating, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not
much of an evangelical mind.”4 He argued against the anti-intellectualism
of American evangelicalism and for more responsible intellectual work
from this community. Marsden spoke to a largely secular, academic audi-
ence, arguing for the inclusion of faith commitments in the public academic
sphere alongside such perspectives such as race and gender. This argument
is possible because of the openings created by postmodernism. He argues
that this adds to the richness of intellectual life. He states, “Religious com-
mitments, after all, are basic to the identities and social location of many
if not most human beings, and academics routinely recognize such factors
as having intellectual significance . . . Nonetheless it is not unusual for oth-
erwise judicious scholars to dismiss the idea of the relevance of religious
perspectives to respectable scholarship as absurd.”5
On the heels of Noll and Marsden, Calvin College convened a confer-
ence in the fall of 2001, in honor of its 125th anniversary celebration. The
conference’s focus was on how religious perspectives might play a signifi-
cant role in American academic life. At this conference, Richard J. Mouw
gave an assessment of Christian scholarship, a “state of the state” of Chris-
tian scholarship.6 He echoed both Marsden and Noll. He reminded secular
academicians that all intellectual life is infused with faith and thus could
not be excluded from discussions in the academy. All intellectual activity is
guided by presuppositions and faith commitments, and such thought at its
 Introduction 3

best is self-consciously explicit about its intellectual starting points, model-

ing transparency in the academy. Mouw also reminded the Christian com-
munity that the call to cultivate a disciplined mind that struggled with deep
intellectual challenges was a divine summons and should not be devalued
by the Christian community.7
Mouw identified several trends that appear in the chapters in this book.
The first such trend, evident in all the works that follow, is that the faith-
directed voice is now part of the mainstream. Rather than battling over
against the larger intellectual culture, lodging critiques from the margins,
we have begun to form networks within the mainstream academy. Ideas
are no longer used as weapons but rather provide currency that facilitates
dialogue and work with people with whom we might disagree on major
issues.8 The chapters in this book all speak as part of dialogues already un-
derway within disciplines or subject areas.
Mouw claims that Christians in the past have either abandoned the pub-
lic square, or tried to take it over. He calls this the triumphalism of past
Christian scholarship.9 All the works in this book represent a move away
from triumphalism and toward dialogue with the academic mainstream.
While more modest in its hopes for success, Mouw claims that it produces
scholarship with more depth.10 The depth of this type of scholarship is il-
lustrated in these chapters. Each was developed in the context of presenta-
tions at major secular universities, with the goal of inviting dialogue rather
than either abandoning the public square or trying to take it over. Thus,
each chapter requires that the scholar write across boundaries—bridging
disciplinary communities with the church-related academic community,
or larger Christian community, as well as explaining religious perspectives
to secular disciplinary audiences. This is the reason each of the scholars
writing here writes within both the context of a discipline and its form of
argumentation and evidence and speaks to the issues being addressed by
that discipline. This book is unique in its desire to bridge these divides, and
in its being “field tested.”
While bridging disciplinary discussions with the faith community in gen-
eral, the chapters also clearly draw on the breadth of specifically Christian
traditions, yet one more characteristic of contemporary Christian scholar-
ship identified by Mouw.11 These traditions are not limited to the West
either. Faith-informed scholarship, reflecting larger intellectual trends, has
increasingly recognized social and cultural context, drawing our attention
to different ways in which the Christian message is expressed in a variety
of cultural contexts.12 Fackler’s chapter represents an explicit attempt to ac-
knowledge and draw upon religious perspectives that come from one area
of the developing world as well as from Western cultural sources. Others,
such as Van Baak’s, lay the groundwork for questioning the hegemonic
worldview of the West.
4 Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

PROBING LINGUISTIC AND

MORAL COHERENCE

Susan Felch, a professor of English, illustrates in her chapter the need to

hold on to both the reality of perspective and also the hope of understand-
ing through language. She draws on the work of Russian thinker Mikhail
Mikhailovich Bakhtin and counters the reductionistic tendencies of lin-
guistics in its attempt to understand language. Rather than language being
made of structure that can be objectively described as it “really” is, Felch
argues for a view of language that it ultimately relational and meaning-
ful. Language speaks about the world but also speaks to others, and, it is
a messy affair. Drawing on Bakhtin, Felch states, “Words are necessarily
tethered to the world, to other people, and to God . . . to understand words
well; we must have an explanation of language that takes into account all
three of these tethers.” Abstract analysis takes too much of the world and
our relationships out of its understanding. Language ultimately involves
an irreducible community of two that cannot be understood apart from
that reality. Felch argues for perspectival realism, arguing for the reality of
the world—there is a world; we can know the world; there are rights and
wrongs—but our understandings are always local and particular. Through
the medium of language, Felch touches on many of the themes that follow
in subsequent chapters, the humility required from the recognition of our
limited perspective, the search for understanding that recognizes the reality
of a world created by God, and the recognition that we are creatures created
for community.
Philosopher John Hare illustrates yet another theme that arises out of
these chapters. In his chapter, he uses the tools of his discipline to show
the inherent instability of morality without God. This illustrates a maturing
of Christian scholarship, where it is placed in dialogue with the tradition
of a discipline, arguing for a position within the methods and rules of that
particular academic tradition.

NATURAL SCIENCE—QUESTIONING
ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING SCIENCE

David Van Baak, a physicist, compares a mechanical picture of the universe

with a competing nonmechanical view of the universe. He shows how
neither view is within the power of physical science to establish, which is
a truer depiction of the deep nature of the world. Either can fully and ac-
curately describe basic behavior of matter. Speaking out of his discipline, he
points out that the goal of theory if more than prediction of experimental
 Introduction 5

results—we expect more from theory. In fact, the history and philosophy of
science would support the deeper or more fundamental theory as the one to
be more fruitful. He then delves into explanations on why Western science
has privileged mechanical views of the universe in spite of its understand-
ing of theory. Yet, reflecting the humility of present-day Christian scholar-
ship, he does not conclude that we must accept the nonmechanical view of
the universe and that this proves the existence of God. Rather, his argument
is more nuanced—that scientific knowledge is not a prerequisite for war-
ranted belief in the existence of God. Furthermore, the fact that two such
theories can coexist defeats the claim that a scientific worldview requires
the adoption of a mechanistic worldview, and, further, scientific theorizing
is entirely open to purpose and factors outside itself in order to answer the
question of the deep character of the world.
Philosopher Del Ratzsch likewise argues clearly from within the bounds
of philosophy of science in his chapter. He purposefully leaves aside the
question of whether there is empirical data at present to support design
theories and instead addresses the question of whether it is even legitimate
to appeal to the concept of intelligent design in the context of natural sci-
ence. He works through the question by unmasking many of the assump-
tions underlying those that reject the question as falling within science. This
is done through a deep understanding, historically and philosophically,
of the arguments surrounding what defines science. Some of the issues
addressed include (1) the justification for taking methodological natural-
ism as characterizing science, and (2) questioning a normative definition
of science. Instead of placing it in the context of historical changes and its
being a human construction, the concept of strict falsifiability as a basis
of scientific legitimacy. He then turns the argument toward arguing that
methodological naturalistic constraints actually have downsides: “the basic
problem with prestipulated conceptual-theoretical boundaries is that if re-
ality itself happens to fall outside those boundaries, theorizing within the
confines of those boundaries will inevitably generate either incompleteness
or error.” Thus, he shows how science cannot restrict itself to the natural
while assuming it can get to all truth. When methodological naturalism
does so, it becomes something akin to philosophical naturalism, and such
assumptions stop the exploration of where evidence may lead, keeping
explanatory headway from being made. Ratzsch concludes that there might
be no plausible evidence for intelligent design and deliberate agency, but
that there is nothing inherently unscientific about the idea or about its
being empirically investigated. To stop the exploration is a detriment to
science and our understanding of the empirical world around us. Science is
thus missing something significant when it excludes purpose and intention
from being explored empirically.
6 Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

TRUTH TELLING AND TRUTH SEARCHING

Van Baak and Ratzsch represent a tradition of religious scholarship that

unmasks assumptions underlying the practice, in this case, of science. His-
torian Ronald Wells illustrates one of the trends identified by Mouw—the
move away from triumphalism in Christian scholarship. Conflicts between
and among peoples involve both the telling of stories and the keeping
of memories. Wells asks questions about the use of memory, reflected in
interpretations of history, to support the status quo, those in power, or
nationalistic ideologies. He uses the insights and debates surrounding the
early California historian Josiah Royce as a model of truth telling to allow
us to explore how and when nations or peoples might make confession of,
and ask forgiveness for, past wrongs and injustices. The story of California
and its history also continues to remind us of the need to allow space for all
stories or perspectives to be told, not just the stories of the victors. It is only
in this honesty and asking for forgiveness that shalom can arise.
Mark Fackler, professor of communication, goes a step further in his
chapter and argues that we need the voices of Africa in order to build a
more responsible media in the West. He argues that “a vision for humanity
held deeply in the traditions of Africa may be pivotal to a renewal of vision
for public media in America.” The freedom of expression in the West comes
from the Enlightenment doctrine of the individual as moral center. The lib-
eral view of the press arose out of this Enlightenment worldview. The dis-
covery of this open marketplace of ideas in Africa has been used to increase
government accountability and foster indigenous development. Yet, Fackler
argues, the classical liberal theory of the press has come up short in that in
the West its lack of boundaries is causing it to buckle under its own weight
from everything from sexually provocative speech to commercial messag-
ing. We need community norms, or speech dissolves social trust. The liberal
model has little to teach us here. Fackler argues, though, that African views
of humanity, and what it means to be made in the image of God, can con-
tribute to the theoretical work that allows us to move beyond our Western
conundrum. African theology emphasizes the Trinity where community life
is central, with connectedness, communitarian caregiving, and mutual ac-
countability at its heart. Such a view of the moral life would have us adjust
the aims of media toward the bonds that hold people together, reflecting
the true nature of what it means to be “created in God’s image.”

IMAGINING A WORLD

Another scholar of communication, Helen Sterk, explores further the concept

of personhood, imagining a world where gender partnership is possible and
 Introduction 7

care for all people is prevalent. She argues that the dominant cultural world-
view that continues to frame women and men as opposites keeps inequalities
in place. Furthermore, this worldview portrays men and women as unable to
understand each other. In contrast, Sterk argues for a recognition of gendered
qualities of life that honors the fluidity of the meaning of gender, resulting
in partnership. Echoing some of the other authors’ calls for dialogue over
domination, she argues for the inclusion of faith and life traditions in the
public intellectual space, rejecting both Christian triumphalism as well as
secular triumphalism. This invitational rhetoric assumes that we can find a
cooperative way of living together in the world. Sterk develops this vision of
cooperation in the context of gender relations. She unmasks the assumption
that there is something inherent in biology that determines how humans act
in masculine or feminine ways. Such a view limits our understanding of the
person. She believes that God made us as embodied individuals, but these
bodies are embedded in social and cultural systems. A rigid ideology based
on biology subordinates being human to being male (masculine) or female
(feminine), limiting our visions or possibilities for change in society or our
imagination on what is possible. Her vision of partnership is informed by a
trinitarian theology and an ethic of care. Both perspectives argue that humans
are inherently relational and that their dependency is a part of being human.
Such a perspective on what it means to be human is an image of not the soli-
tary self but the connective self—for both men and women. The connective
self holds rights and responsibilities as flexible, as in creative tension, much
as Jesus’s admonition to “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The
focus moves from polarized gender relations to operating under an ethic of
care where individuals are not essentialized or compartmentalized but rather
find themselves flexing in relation to the needs of others, in the context of
particular contexts, and over a lifetime of change and growth.
Economist Kurt Schaefer struggles with how care becomes embedded
in social policy in a way that people of faith can engage in it with a clear
conscience. In this chapter, he uses the tools of economics to analyze the
effects of welfare policy over the past forty years, while asking us to hold
on to the dual goals of building right relationships in society and support-
ing virtuous behavior. In this social-science version of truth telling, he asks
us to set aside our preconceptions and attempt to honestly look at which
institutional frameworks are closest to achieving those dual goals and, thus,
represent the most effective way to care for the poor. In doing so, Schaefer
points to the particular as well as to the tension between structures and
individual virtue. Such an approach shows that persons are not merely
individuals but part of many different communities, imaging the Trinity.
Schaefer develops a perspective on societal structures for caring for the vul-
nerable around the Scriptural vision of true humanity as one of “virtuous
persons living in right community.”
8 Janel M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells

This volume is rounded out by the chapter written by geographer Janel

Curry. In a way, the sensibilities and insights developed in it illustrate a
conclusion toward which the book had been tending. Here is a scholar
using empirical work in her discipline to ask questions that transcend her
discipline. The work is a case study of the connection between the worlds
of nature and of humanly constructed society.
Curry begins by showing the clash of worldviews among government
bureaucrats, business people, and the indigenous people on the question
of how to sustain life and livelihood on New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island.
The government’s faith in the international market economy cannot result
in good policy for all. This is so because neoliberal economics does not, be-
cause it cannot, take into account the knowledge of local people in a given
ecosystem and how that ecosystem can be preserved while giving people a
livelihood in the market economy.
For Curry, this can be resolved by ontology, a theology and a social sci-
ence methodology that suggests the relationality of all things. She utilized
the path-breaking work of Douglas Hall and Colin Gunton to root her anal-
ysis of the interconnectedness of human and human-made institutions.
All the scholars whose work is represented in this volume are driven by a
deep love for reality and for God’s world. They have felt the calling to love
this reality through delving deeply into its secrets in all honesty, integrity,
and intellectual ability. As such, they also find that, along with Richard
Mouw, “To love reality in its depths means that we cannot help but grieve
over the brokenness and woundedness of God’s world in its present condi-
tion.”13

NOTES

1. Mark R. Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2. Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think (Ann Arbor,
Mich.: Servant Books, 1963).
3. For examples, see Richard Hughes, The Vocation of a Christian Scholar: How
Christian Life Can Sustain the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
2005); Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1991); Henk Aay and Sander Griffioen, eds., Geography and
Worldview: A Christian Reconnaissance (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America,
1998); Arthur Holmes, The Idea of the Christian College (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-
mans, 1987); Arthur Holmes, The Making of a Christian Mind: A Christian Worldview
and the Academic Enterprise (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1984); Howard
J. Van Till, The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens Are Telling Us about Cre-
ation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986); Ronald A. Wells, ed., History and the
Christian Historian (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998); Janel M. Curry and
 Introduction 9

Steven McGuire, Community on Land: Community, Ecology, and the Public Interest
(Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
4. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-
mans, 1994), 3.
5. George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
6. Richard J. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship: Where We’ve Been and
Where We’re Going,” in Christian Scholarship . . . for What? ed. Susan M. Felch
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Calvin College, 2003), 7–21.
7. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 9.
8. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 11.
9. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 11–12.
10. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 12.
11. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 14.
12. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 16–17.
13. Mouw, “Assessing Christian Scholarship,” 20.
I
PROBING LINGUISTIC AND
MORAL COHERENCE
1
Words and Things:
The Hope of Perspectival Realism
Susan M. Felch

“There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-
birthday presents,” said Humpty Dumpty, “and only one for birthday
presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I
tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice ob-
jected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so
many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s
all.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chapter 6

Words, things, birthdays, arguments, un-birthday presents, and glory—

along with mad hatters, mock turtles, and tipsy tea parties—it is just these
wild juxtapositions and absurdities that delight us as we hustle along the
winding paths of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. If we were to stop for a mo-
ment to catch our breath and think about this particular argument between
an arrogant egg and a determined little girl, we might find it not so wild
or absurd after all. In fact, we might find ourselves asking some similar
questions: How does language actually work? Can you make a word mean
whatever you “choose it to mean”? Given the miscues that are rife in this
passage, how is it that Alice and Humpty Dumpty even manage to carry on

13
14 Susan M. Felch

a conversation? Is it not the case, even in our ordinary day-to-day conversa-

tions, that words do indeed “mean so many different things”?
Such questions about language are not new. In nearly every one of
Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, he creates scenes that revolve around
the slipperiness of speech and writing: clever puns trip up the brightest
characters, lovers are deceived into jealous anger by the merest whisper,
and ambiguous letters go astray. Nevertheless, questions about language
have taken on a new urgency in the last hundred years. “Language is the
house of being,” wrote Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism,1 setting off
a scramble among philosophers who careened into its rooms and began
to rearrange the furniture, inaugurating in the process what is often called
the “linguistic turn” in modern thought. Literary scholars, who had always
loved language and explored its intricate curves, now began to focus their
attention on its more angular formal elements. Even the hard sciences were
affected. Thomas Kuhn announced that normal science operates by way of
paradigms, which are linguistic descriptions of reality, not reality itself. He
controversially claimed that such paradigms are overturned or replaced not
so much by the discovery of new data as by the creation of new descriptions
that better fit the existing data.2 Michael Polanyi, taking a somewhat differ-
ent tack, pressed the notion that personal knowledge, mediated through
language, accounted for scientific discourse as much as did physical facts.3
This linguistic turn in all its guises avoided, to borrow a phrase from the
literary critic Jonathan Culler, “the unseemly rush from word to world”4
by focusing attention on words themselves rather than on the things they
might point to.
Among literary people, no one was more influential in stopping this
unseemly rush from word to world than a Swiss linguist named Ferdinand
de Saussure (1857–1913), whose classroom lecture notes were published
posthumously in 1916 as Cours de linguistique générale (The Course in Gen-
eral Linguistics). This slender volume set the direction of language studies
for the remainder of the twentieth century. Saussure’s predecessors had
been German-trained philologists—”lovers of words”—who were keenly
interested in the historical development of languages and the classification
of language groups. These were the men (and a few women) who discov-
ered that Sanskrit was related to Latin, who posited an Indo-European
family of languages, and who compiled the massive twenty-volume Oxford
English Dictionary, which sorted out historical definitions and source lan-
guages for thousands of English words. Saussure, however, was impatient
with the collecting impulses of the late Victorians. He insisted that modern
linguistics be modeled after the hypothesis-driven agendas of the hard
sciences and thus be enabled to carve out for itself a place in the modern
research university. To do so, linguistics must abandon philology, with its
emphasis on historical development and language classification, and study
 Words and Things 15

a particular language at a particular time; it must, in his terms, abandon

diachrony for synchrony.
At the heart of Saussure’s new theory of language were two key hypoth-
eses. The first concerned the nature of words. Words, he said, are signs
composed of two parts: the signifier (sounds or written marks) and the
signified (the concept that is attached to the signifier). To put it another
way, the signifier and the signified together make up the sign, which is
itself like a coin with two inseparable sides—heads and tails. The relation-
ship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary but not individual.
That is, I do not attach signifiers to signifieds (unless I am composing an
idiosyncratic language), but rather I am inculcated into the system of signs
that we call English as I learn my mother tongue. That system consists of
signs whose signifiers and signifieds are conjoined in stable, but arbitrary,
relationships. For instance, there is no necessary, inner relationship be-
tween the signifier tree and the concept of a large, woody, perennial plant,
but once such a connection is made, says Saussure, the sign is “fixed, not
free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it.”5 When an
English speaker says tree, other English speakers think of a large, woody
plant. The relationship of the sign (signifier + signified) to any object in
the outside world (the referent or the real tree) is also arbitrary, but Sau-
ssure considered this notion of reference to be of relatively little interest to
the linguist. Furthermore, because these signs do not have any essential or
inherent meaning in and of themselves, they accrue meaning only within
the system of language: Each sign differs from other signs. We thus think
large woody plant when we hear tree, but small stinging insect when we
hear bee or a payment when we hear fee. It is the difference among the signs
within a system, not any inherent essence in each individual word, that
gives meaning to tree, bee, and fee.
The second hypothesis had to do with the nature of language. Saussure
posited that language could be divided into an abstract system of rules
(langue) and the actual concrete sentences that people speak (parole). For
Saussure, only langue was the proper subject matter for the linguist—the
system of language and not actual speech, which was too messy for care-
ful analysis. Because Saussure wanted to construct linguistics as a scien-
tific discipline, he was interested neither in the referent (the object in the
outside world) nor in parole (the actual sentences we use in everyday life).
He wanted rather to focus on signs and on langue, the system of signs that
undergirds any particular instance of parole. In fact, he thought that no sys-
tematic study could be undertaken of parole because it consisted of millions
of idiosyncratic and individual choices made on the basis of a common
langue. He felt pretty confident that by bracketing the referent and ignoring
parole you could map out with a fair degree of certainty the structure of lan-
guage and so describe what language really is. You could, in other words,
16 Susan M. Felch

resolve the argument between Humpty Dumpty and Alice as to what words
mean and how they come to have those meanings.
The linguists who followed Saussure eagerly embraced his hypothesis
of words as signs composed of signifier and signified and his insistence
on the study of langue. In North America, the linguist Noam Chomsky
modulated langue into the psychological notion of linguistic competency
and parole into linguistic performance. The “Chomskyan revolution,” as it
is often called, decreed that all grammatical sentences in ordinary language
(parole) could be generated or transformed from a set of rules descriptive
of its deep structure (langue)—hence, the term transformational grammar.
On the Continent, Saussurean linguistics was influential in the developing
science of semiotics, the study of sign systems as diverse as traffic signals
and high fashion, and in the anthropological paradigms of such scholars as
Claude Levi-Strauss. It was also picked up in the 1960s by the young French
philosopher Jacques Derrida.
There were, however, those who questioned Saussure’s turn away from
philology to linguistics and none more important than the Russian thinker
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. He was born in 1895 in Russia to moder-
ately affluent parents who provided him with a cosmopolitan education.
Bakhtin may have learned German from his nanny; he studied Danish on
his own when he was a teenager so that he could read Kierkegaard in his na-
tive tongue; he pursued classical studies at Petrograd University, and, in his
late twenties and thirties, took up with a group of musicians, scholars, and
teachers to form what is now known as the Nevel circle. In 1929, he was
arrested by the Stalinist government for alleged activity in the underground
Russian Orthodox Church and was sentenced to internal exile. After years
of obscurity, he was rediscovered in 1961 by a group of graduate students
who promoted the publication of his work, both before and after his death
in 1975.
Although, after 1929, Bakhtin was cut off from the larger academic world,
he did know the work of Saussure, and it worried him. “To study the word
as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless
as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life to-
ward which it was directed and by which it is determined,” he declared, see-
ing in Saussure that growing tendency evident in other academic disciplines
to overvalue abstraction.6 In fact, Bakhtin’s worry about the encroaching
role of theory and its deleterious effect on literature, the arts, and ethics was
such that he devoted one of his early works, Toward a Philosophy of the Act,
to considering the relationship between theory and experience.
The world in which we live, says Bakhtin, is full, rich, and open-ended,
and our experiences in this world are so layered and complex that any at-
tempt to explain them is doomed to failure. Yet, we want and need to talk
about our lives. Thus, we construct explanations, we form theories, we
 Words and Things 17

tell stories, and all these verbal acts serve a very useful function in help-
ing us organize and understand who we are and the world in which we
live. Nevertheless, such finite intellectual endeavors—whether they are
constructed formally as academic disciplines or informally as we talk with
family and friends about our everyday lives—inevitably, and in principle,
fail to comprehend the complex context of life, the real world in which
we live. Theories, therefore, can never be more than partial descriptions,
perspectival approximations “of the actual . . . experiencing of the world.”7
The problem with theories, however, is that they tend toward imperialism.
Forgetting that they provide merely a perspective on the world, they begin
instead to claim that they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth—even when, as will happen later in the century, the very
notion of truth is held suspect. Theory, says Bakhtin, “seeks to pass itself
off as the whole world” rather than, more appropriately, and humbly, to
acknowledge that it is merely a tool, a heuristic device, one way of partially
understanding the world in which we live.8
In particular, a theory that cuts off signs from their referents and relegates
language to a system not only thins out language—by taking from words
their three-dimensional referentiality—but it also robs language of its per-
sonal dimension. Not only are we no longer speaking about the world, but
we are no longer speaking to or with other people. Here, in contrast, is how
Bakhtin understands the relationship of language to things and to people:

Any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed
already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with
value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the
“light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled,
shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and
accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated
and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents,
weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils
from others, intersects with yet a third group. . . . The word, breaking through
to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien
words and variously evaluating accents, harmonizing with some of the ele-
ments in this environment and striking a dissonance with others, is able, in
this dialogized process, to shape its own stylistic profile and tone.9

Even if we do not immediately grasp the significance of this quote, and

the language is dense, there is a distinct difference in tone between Bakhtin
and Saussure. Bakhtin does not divide language into langue and parole, nor
does he privilege langue. Rather than categorizing language as system, he
begins with concrete discourse or utterance, that is, with real words that are
actually spoken by real people. Language—in all the ways that really mat-
ter, even in a theoretical account—is not an abstract system but is already
18 Susan M. Felch

embroiled in communicating with real people. Furthermore, language is

necessarily attached to referents—to objects in the real world. There can be
no bracketing of the referent as merely incidental because language is em-
bedded in prepositions. We speak about things to other people.
In other words, whenever we begin to talk about something—that object
to which words are directed—we find that someone else has been there
before us. Their words form an obscuring mist or, perhaps better, a sort
of gloaming light. Our own words enter into “this dialogically agitated
and tension-filled environment” that is already filled with the words and
perspectives of other people. Our words harmonize with some, strike a dis-
sonance with others, but eventually begin to find their “own stylistic profile
and tone.” As Bakhtin understands language, we do not simply exchange
signs, we use words that come to us richly textured with past uses and many
voices. We do not mechanically generate sentences from a system of langue,
we use concrete utterances to actually communicate and, alas, to miscom-
municate, with other people. For Bakhtin, there is always a “Tower-of-Babel
mixing of languages that goes on around any object,”10 a naming that can
never exhaust the world, which remains more than a sum of its definitions.
There is, consequently, nothing neat about language; it is a messy affair.
And Bakhtin worries that if we try to tidy up our theories about language,
we will be tempted to substitute our tidy system for the real thing, for the
weightiness of language as it takes its place in the world. Additionally, as
we shall see later, he also worries that if you bracket out things in the world
(the referents) and other living people in order to concentrate on signs and
langue, you will be tempted to bracket out God as well.
Bakhtin agrees with Saussure that words are not identical to, or isomor-
phic with, referents, real things in the world—he is not, to use a technical
term, a naïve realist. But he disagrees with Saussure that referents are not
important to the study of language. Words are necessarily tethered to the
world, to other people, and to God.11 And he claims that to understand
words well, we must have an explanation of language that takes into ac-
count all three of these tethers.
Bakhtin was very much aware that in speaking about utterances and
objects and dialogical environments and even world, he, too, was theo-
rizing. It is not that theory or abstraction or intellectual analysis are bad;
merely that we need, on the one hand, to keep them tethered to material
reality and, on the other, to remember that they are merely tools. Abstract
analysis can only offer a glimpse, although a very useful glimpse, of the
real world. Abstract analysis, however, that brackets out too much material
reality, whether things or persons or both, risks the possibility of skewing
its interpretations (by using too little data) and thus deforming the world
into conformity with its own expectations. Such deformity really matters
 Words and Things 19

because how you think about the world and about the language that de-
scribes that world will have an effect on how you live in the world. We can
perhaps better understand Bakhtin’s worries and his alternative approach
to words and things by looking at the development of Saussure’s linguistic
theory in the work of one of his disciples, Jacques Derrida.
It is Derrida himself who claims descent from Saussure. “Now Saussure
first of all,” he says, “is the thinker who put the arbitrary character of the sign
and the differential character of the sign at the very foundation of general
semiology, particularly linguistics. . . . [We retain] at least the framework, if
not the content, of this requirement formulated by Saussure.”12 Derrida in-
deed retains a great deal of Saussurean linguistics, including (1) Saussure’s
distinction between langue and parole, (2) his focus upon langue, and (3)
the bracketing of referents. He also retains Saussure’s claims that signs,
which gain their meaning by differing from one another, and the system
of language, are what constitute a proper understanding of language. Der-
rida, however, does make a substantial revision to Saussurean linguistics by
dividing the sign, which Saussure had considered indissoluble, and separat-
ing the signifier from the signified. In other words, Derrida splits Saussure’s
coin: He divides the sign, heads from tails.
One can understand the significance of this move by playing a simple
game. If you look up the signifier enthusiasm in Webster’s Ninth New Col-
legiate Dictionary, you will find this definition: “belief in special revelations
of the Holy Spirit.” Aha, you say, the signifier enthusiasm is defined by a
signified, the concept of “revelations.” No, says Derrida, revelation is itself
just a signifier, a set of sounds, and if you look up its definition, you get not
a signified—a concept—but just another signifier, or set of words. In this
case, the signifier is “an act of revealing or communicating divine truth,”
which in turn points you to another signifier divine and so on ad infinitum.
The system of language, or langue, says Derrida, does not consist of signi-
fiers and signifieds, of sounds and concepts, joined together in a stable, if
arbitrary, sign. Rather, it consists of endlessly deferring signifiers that carry
meaning only as they differ from one another within langue, the system of
language. Différance, the word Derrida coined to designate this understand-
ing of langue, brings together the dual concepts of deferring and differing.
Thus, in the 1968 essay entitled “Différance,” Derrida suggests that
[o]ne could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is
constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition
erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the
différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of
the same (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible dif-
ferent and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring
intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring).13
20 Susan M. Felch

This is a classic Derridean quotation: it takes binary oppositions (two

words that appear to be diametrically opposed to one another, in this case
intelligible/sensible; concept/intuition; culture/nature) and asserts that rather than
being opposites, the two terms necessary complement or supplement one
another. They differ from each other, but they are also linked together in
the system of philosophic language (“in the economy of the same”). Rather
than being opposites in the traditional sense, each term is necessary to define
the other. We understand what these terms mean not in isolation from each
other, as independent concepts, but only when we see how each of them
“must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred
in the economy of the same.” Whatever meaning they have cannot be de-
termined from looking carefully at the terms themselves or at any referent
to which they might point but must be generated from their never-ending,
deferred, oscillating relationship. In this quotation, Derrida also treats us to
a characteristic virtuoso display of oscillating grammar as the words seesaw
back and forth, never landing at a stable resting place, let alone on a defini-
tion, referent, or thing. Derrida also signals an ever-present concern that
becomes even more dominant in his later writings, namely that how we talk
about language in the world determines to a considerable extent how we live
in that world. Derrida is not interested in how pairs of opposites such as “red
and blue” or “dogs and cats” might appear “as the différance of the other,” but
rather in oppositions that carry a great deal of linguistic and ethical weight.
Although he might take an interest in Humpty Dumpty’s signifier glory, he
would likely be unmoved by birthday and un-birthday presents.
Although by splitting the signifier from the signified and discarding
the latter, Derrida’s revision may seem quite radical, it actually is a logical
extension of Saussurean linguistics insofar as it recognizes that there is no
necessary reason to posit a signified, other than as a nod to tradition. Be-
cause language, in all the ways that really count, is an abstract system, you
may as well eliminate not just the referent but also the signified, which is
simply a halfway house between referents and signifiers.
For Bakhtin, however, language, in all the ways that really count, is not
an abstract system but a living, breathing entity that is tethered to the ma-
terial reality of things and bodies. It is embedded in prepositions: we talk
about the world to other people. Words, or utterances to use Bakhtin’s term,
are always directed toward things, toward objects (material or immaterial)
in the world. Or as Annie Dillard puts it, “Words refer, and fiction’s ele-
ments must always be bits of world . . . Language is weighted with referents
. . . [T]he writer, unlike the painter, sculptor, or composer, cannot form
his idea of order directly in his materials; for as soon as he writes the least
noun, the whole world starts pouring onto his page.”14
It is not only the whole world that pours out through language but also
the words of other people. The importance of considering people—real
 Words and Things 21

people—when we look at language is summarized in one of Bakhtin’s

more provocative, often-cited comments that “in the everyday speech of
any person living in society, no less than half (on the average) of all the
words uttered by him will be someone else’s words.”15 By words Bakhtin
does not mean just vocabulary but concepts and ideas that are expressed
through words. Even so, this is a somewhat startling statement but one that
is crucial to Bakhtin’s thought. Words do not belong to us, nor are they part
of a neutral system of language. They are out in the world, circulating on
the borderlines between ourselves and others. Words are formed in social
interaction; they belong to others before they belong to us. After all, he says,
“the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not out
of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather [language] exists
in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s
intentions.”16 That is why when Bakhtin talks about language, he does not
use terms such as signifier and signified or referent and system. Nor does he
think about a single language in isolation from all other languages that
exist either now or in the past. Instead, he talks about heteroglossia, which
literally means “many tongues.” Bakhtin uses the term to refer to the many
languages, dialects, and inflections we hear in our everyday lives—not just
American English, Canadian English, and French, for instance, but also the
language of our parents, the slang of our friends, academic terminology
from various disciplines, the contractual language of our apartment lease,
and so forth. We not only hear these languages, but they are the stuff out
of which our words, ideas, and concepts—indeed, out of which meaning
itself—is formed.
Because language is inextricably tethered to other people, we cannot seri-
ously consider any notion of meaning without taking them into account.
Thus, it is simply the case that language arises out of an irreducible commu-
nity of two. In his early works, Bakhtin explores this irreducible community
of two through a series of images. First, he tries out the image of sight. Mean-
ing is created, he suggests, when two people who remain irrevocably outside
one another exchange “an excess of vision.” When I look at you, I see you
as a three-dimensional person, situated within a rich environment. You see
me in the same way. Nonetheless, I cannot see myself as a whole being or
even the total environment in which I stand. I look out at a horizon, and I
see only bits of myself—my arms and legs, perhaps a blurry nose and parts
of my torso. I see less of myself than you see, but I see more of you than you
can see of yourself. In this way, I offer you a perspective you cannot have
of yourself, and you offer me a perspective I cannot have of myself. Because
we are outside one another, because we are irreducibly different from one
another, we experience an excess of seeing that creates meaning as we offer
this perspective to one another, as a gift.17 Language demands such an ex-
change, a three-dimensional environment or roundness that comes closer to
22 Susan M. Felch

the thick richness of lived experience than does the thin linearity of abstract
system. What I offer to you and what you offer to me, in our complementary
visions, is that environment that we cannot create for ourselves.
Bakhtin, however, is not wedded to images of sight. He also uses the
sense of touch: “It is only the other who can be embraced,” he says. “It is
only the other’s boundaries that can all be touched and felt lovingly. . . .
Only the other’s lips can be touched with our own.”18 He augments the be-
neficent gaze and the loving embrace with the image of a singer in a chorus:
“I embody myself in the voice of the other who sings of me. . . . The voice
can sing only in a warm atmosphere, only in the atmosphere of possible
choral support, where solitariness of sound is in principle excluded.”19 To
these three images, Bakhtin adds those of rhythm and dance: “Rhythm is an
embrace and kiss bestowed upon the . . . ‘bodied’ time of another’s mortal
life; . . . In dancing I become ‘bodied’ in being to the highest degree; I come
to participate in the being of others.”20
In his middle essays, when Bakhtin turns his focus from the self and oth-
ers to issues of language and literature, he still retains this emphasis on the
irreducible community of two:

There are no “neutral” words and forms—words and forms that can belong to
“no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with inten-
tions and accents . . . Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and
easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—
overpopulated—with the intentions of others.21

All these images—sight, touch, song, rhythm, dance, and words—gesture

toward one conclusion: the self without others is not only lonely but bereft,
silent, without language. No less than half of my words are the words of
someone else, whether I recognize that to be the case or not.
However, how do I engage these words that are so richly textured and
tethered to both things and other people? Through a process that Bakhtin
calls dialogism. The root of this word, of course, is dialogue, but Bakhtin
means something more than simply two people talking to each other. He
refers to a complex interrelationship of words, people, things, and analysis.
Bakhtin uses such concepts as the irreducible community of two and dia-
logism to deny that language can be understood as a linear system or that
it can be understood apart from other people, but he also recognizes the
flexibility of language and its power for individual, creative expression. It is,
in fact, this flexibility and creativity of language that allows us to think new
thoughts, to understand and explain new situations, to translate from one
language to another—indeed to live as image bearers of God. If we think for
a moment about the first three chapters of Genesis, we can see that it is the
flexibility of language that enables humans to name the animals, to write
 Words and Things 23

love poems—“Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”—and to engage the

serpent in the conversation that inaugurates the Fall.
Bakhtin suggests that we find our way in the world and in words through
our interactions with two kinds of language: he calls them authoritative
discourse and internally persuasive discourse. Authoritative discourse, says
Bakhtin, is a binding word that “demands our unconditional allegiance.”22
He identifies it as the word of fathers, adults, and teachers. It comes to us
as a single, undigested lump; we can either swallow it whole or spit it out,
but we cannot assimilate it piecemeal. We might say, then, that authorita-
tive discourse is composed of words that come at us. In contrast, internally
persuasive discourse consists of words that come to us. As with authoritative
discourse, it is composed of alien words that are at first strange and perhaps
even frightening. As we take these words into our own mouths, however, as
we frame them, speak them, and modify them, we affirm them through as-
similation and tightly interweave them with our own words. The words that
once belonged to someone else awaken new words and new thoughts in us
and create the capacity for further ideas that remain full of possibility.23
Authoritative discourse, to put it another way, is composed of words
that we recite from memory, words, that, if written, would be enclosed in
quotation marks. They are words that remain external to us. But internally
persuasive discourse is composed of language we “retell in our own words.”
In that retelling, we do not invent language, but we do make it our own
in the way we frame, modify, and reflect it. For instance, when Humpty
Dumpty recites from memory “In winter, when the fields are white/I sing
this song for your delight” he is engaged in authoritative discourse.24 When
he dismisses all the connotations and denotations of glory and arrogantly
announces that it means “a nice knock-down argument,” just because that
is what he chooses it to mean, he is also engaging in authoritative discourse.
In the first instance, he simply accepts and recites a poem without engaging
or modifying it. In the second instance, he simply rejects all that tethers
glory to things or to other people. He spits the word out.
When Alice engages Humpty Dumpty in conversation about the word
glory, when she takes his definition into her mouth, reworks it, questions
it, and reframes it, when she asks “whether you can make words mean so
many different things,” she participates in internally persuasive discourse,
the kind of language that helps her see more of the world around her, even
if it appears in upside-down ways. Internally persuasive discourse is a kind
of testimony to the dynamic and dialogic power of language. The word tes-
timony links us to a voice Bakhtin incorporates into his own writings, that
of the fourth-century African thinker Augustine of Hippo.
Augustine makes a distinction between reciting and testifying that paral-
lels Bakhtin’s notion of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse.
24 Susan M. Felch

To recite, for Augustine, is merely to rehearse with your tongue something

you have heard and perhaps understood superficially. It is to repeat an
authoritative discourse. To testify, or to speak an internally persuasive
discourse, however, is, in Augustine’s words, “to speak out what the heart
holds true. If the tongue and the heart are at odds, you are reciting, not testi-
fying.”25 Testifying requires that you take another’s words into your mouth,
chew them, digest them, and make them your own so that what the tongue
says and the heart conceives are one and the same.
With the notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, recit-
ing, and testifying, we are a long way from language conceived as an abstract
system composed of signifiers and signifieds or endlessly deferring and dif-
fering signifiers. We might better think of words as rotating in a centrifuge:
they come to us from other people; they come laden with meaning, attached
to things; but they also come with the potential to create new meanings.
They come already spinning with centrifugal force. Yet, at the same time, we
deeply and intuitively know that language communicates—that it tethers us
not only to the world but also to other people. Language is not, after all, an
abstract system of disembodied words but the response of one person to an-
other: Alice to Humpty Dumpty; Bakhtin to Saussure; I to you in this chapter;
it is not words that communicate, but we who communicate in interactions
that require, as a minimum, the irreducible community of two.
The minimum, however, for Bakhtin is not enough. The call/response of
meaningful language characterizes not only our relationships to other per-
sons, but also our relationship to the infinite person, to God. In response to
a colleague who argued that the “God hypothesis” short-circuited rigorous
thinking, Bakhtin put it this way:

Revelation characterizes the world just as much as natural laws do . . . [and

is characterized] by the Person who wants to reveal Himself. . . . [A] personal
relationship to a personal God—that is the distinguishing feature of religion,
but that is also what constitutes the special difficulty of religion, owing to
which there may arise a distinctive fear of religion and of Revelation, a fear of
the personal orientation. . . . This is not a refusal to accept Revelation but a
typical fear of Revelation. Cf. the people who are afraid of accepting a favor,
afraid of becoming obligated; what we are dealing with here is precisely the
fear of receiving a gift, and thereby obligating oneself too much.26

Bakhtin’s perception that people in general, and academics in particular,

reject the notion of revelation not because it is untrue but because, if true,
it puts them under obligation to a personal God, is shrewdly perceptive
and may help to explain the steady recourse to abstract systems through-
out the modernist period. If the world is structured not as an impersonal
system, but through a personal call, through revelation, then the appropri-
ate response is—well, a response. Communication, call/response, dialogic
 Words and Things 25

interchange, is inscribed into the very structure of the world. To return to

the visual image, God is the one who looks on me, who sees me in a three-
dimensional environment, who offers me the gift of meaning. Bakhtin puts
it this way, “What I must be for the other, God is for me.”27 That is, what
I should be for others—one who helps to create meaning by offering my
excess of vision to another—God already is for me, whether or not I recog-
nize this to be the case.
It is not simply that God’s beneficent, and therefore productive, gaze
provides a model for the meaningful encounters I should seek to create, al-
though Bakhtin does speak in this way. It is also that God’s creation of, and
revelation in, the world guarantees the possibility of meaning. The personal
noun is important here, for, in speaking of God, Bakhtin rejects abstract
language. God is not a concept, an absolute principle, an inert authorita-
tive dogma. God is a person—the infinite person, the person who in his
wholeness can guarantee a complex, thick, three-dimensional environment
that will sustain a plenitude of meanings for an entire world. Because he is
a person, the divine person, he also initiates the call/response of meaning-
ful language.
It is Bakhtin’s thick view of language—tethered to the world, to other
people, and to God, yet full of centrifugal energy—that points us in the
direction of perspectival realism, a conjunction of terms that may suggest
an oxymoron at best if not a flat-out contradiction.28 Realism advances the
claim that there is a definite “something” that lies outside our own per-
ception. Perspectival, on the other hand, turns our attention to our own
particularities and the roles played by our biases, traditions, genders, and
the like. Giving full weight to the term realism means recognizing a world
that exists outside our own constructions and impinges upon us and sets
limits to our ways of seeing, being, and acting in the world. Such realism
is metaphysical (there is a real world), epistemological (we can know the
world, not just the representations of our own minds), and ethical (there
are rights and wrongs as well as moral consequences). Our understand-
ings of the world—metaphysically, epistemologically, and ethically—are,
however, always necessarily local and particular. We are each of us limited
by what we can see and by our own horizons. We cannot, in principle,
know or describe the world either universally or exhaustively—we cannot
have a view from nowhere—and so we are, inevitably, perspectivalists both
spatially and temporally. Spatially, how we see the world is determined in
part from the place where we stand. For instance, I look at my house from
the curb or floating above it in a balloon, as its owner or as its prospective
seller. Temporally, the world itself seems in flux and in need of a continuing
interpretive discourse: a Ptolemaic description of the universe may seem in-
adequate next to a quantum mechanical one. Yet, each perspective is whole
in and of itself: it is not a pixel that can be added to other pixels in order to
26 Susan M. Felch

produce a complete picture. Rather, each perspective is complete in itself,

although it remains inevitably a partial picture. Combining the perspectives
results in a kaleidoscopic plenitude, not a larger singular viewpoint.
If I were a philosopher rather than an English professor, I might start talk-
ing here about the two key concepts in modernist theories of knowing: the
notion of representational epistemology and the correspondence view of
truth.29 In representational epistemology, the objects of our awareness are
appearances and concepts, not the world itself. If we link representational
epistemology to a correspondence theory of truth, then we believe that in
some way these appearances and concepts resemble the world, which we
know (tautologically) only as it is reflected in appearances and concepts.
Representational epistemology and a correspondence view of truth lead to
a modernist view of realism—that we do, or at least potentially can, know
what the world is really like.
The problem, of course, is that we have no way to check on the validity of
the resemblance between the appearances and concepts and the world itself,
and so no way to know whether or not we actually are perceiving the world as
it really is. Most postmodern thinkers, consequently, question the whole con-
cept of a correspondence view of truth, although they retain the structure of
representational epistemology. That is, they deny that ideas or language are
tethered to the world, to other people, or to God; ideas and language are only
linked to appearances and can only be accessed within systems. Because we
cannot know the world apart from our perceptions and concepts, they say, all
we can know is the content of our own minds, our perspectives, our system
of language—not the world as it really is. Because we do not have access to
the world or to other people or to God, nor do we have any way to validate
the contents of our minds, we cannot claim to have true knowledge about
anything. Not only should we be skeptical about whether our concepts actu-
ally match up with the world, we cannot in any meaningful way talk about
concepts themselves: signifieds have themselves been dissolved into signifiers
that defer and differ within an abstract system of language.
What perspectival realism does is to reconfigure this whole interrelated
set of questions. It retains a correspondence view of truth—that the world is
a certain way regardless of our thinking about it—but it substitutes a realist
epistemology (that the world is the object of our awareness) for a repre-
sentational epistemology (that appearances and concepts are the objects of
our awareness). It also gives up the modernist goal of exhaustive knowledge
(that to have truth we must be able to map out the isomorphic relation-
ship of our perceptions to reality) for the promise of genuine knowledge
(that our various perceptions do give us access to a real world). In a realist
epistemology, appearances and concepts are not the objects of our aware-
ness but the means by which we become aware of the world. Appearances
 Words and Things 27

and concepts do not need to resemble the world in some sort of transpar-
ent relationship. Rather, they are tools or means by which we respond to
a world that presents itself to us as a set of thick, multilayered experiences.
Language, then, is seen not as an end in itself but as one of the media, or
means, by which we respond to and act in the world.
For Bakthin, the word always reaches out beyond itself. What do I hear
when another speaks? How do I take his words into my mouth? How do
I cite and frame her speech to make it both mine and hers? How do these
words swirl about the objects to which they are directed? The messy, am-
biguous, inaccurate, penetrating chaos of real words as they circulate in the
world, not an abstract system of langue, constitutes the very stuff of lan-
guage, and language includes not just words but gestures, intonation, eye
contact, the pitch and timbre of my voice. Language is perspectival because
our words are embedded—embodied—in particular persons, particular
traditions, particular dialects, and particular times. This embodiedness is
not accidental but essential to the nature of language. Yet, language, which
is inherently perspectival, is also a means of describing reality because it
emerges out of and returns to a common world we share: as soon as we
write the least noun, the whole world pours onto the page. A perspectival
realist view of language takes the world as its object, not just its own signi-
fiers and signifieds.
Bakhtin’s emphasis on the referential or realist, yet perspectival, nature
of language removes an impossible burden of proof from both epistemol-
ogy and language. We are not confined to the representations of our own
minds nor do we claim that our perspectives isomorphically map out a
completely accurate picture of the world. A single description, a universal
meaning, a view-from-nowhere, is precisely what language can never afford
us because language itself is dialogic, embedded in the material world and
in particular people, in the irreducible community of two. Nevertheless, we
do encounter bits of the world as it really is, through our words and ideas.
As philosopher Lee Hardy puts it,

I see a rectangular book, even though all of its shape appearances, save the one
given along a line orthogonal to its surface, are variations on the trapezoid. As
a skilled and competent perceiver, I move through the multiplicity of its shape
appearances to perceive its shape, the one I take it to enjoy independently of
its appearances to perceivers such as me—the one, in fact, that in large part
accounts for why it appears to me the way it does. The appearances by which
I perceive the book are clearly relative to my perception (even if they are not
wholly relative to it). The precise dimensions and angles of the apparent figure
are strictly dependent upon the book’s relation to the standpoint from which I
perceive it. But the spatial properties of the book I perceive are not dependent
upon its relation to my perception of them. The book itself is rectangular.30
28 Susan M. Felch

That we can talk in true ways about books and the world, about each
other and God, and that we can talk to each other and to God is important
not just for theories of language but also for actual living. While it may not
matter in Wonderland whether glory means “a knock-down argument” or
not, it does matter when we want to communicate in this real world, and
how we talk with each other affects the way we live with each other.
For Bakhtin, a truly ethical act, like a genuine word, is not an element
within an abstract system. It is an act of faithfulness that recognizes its teth-
ers to the material world, to others, and to God, a particular act for which
I take responsibility and to which I sign my name. Derrida, too, conceives
of ethics as a particular act that requires a signature. For Derrida, however,
the ethical act takes place in a moment of madness, when among the oscil-
lating binary oppositions, the deferring and differing signifiers, I make a
strategic wager, take a risk, invent a decision.31 It is too much to hope that
I will act wisely and well; I can only try to “betray as little as possible.”32
The primary ethical action for Bakhtin, however, is not snatching a position
from oscillating binary oppositions but faithfulness to or being-true-to a
person, “the way,” says Bakhtin, faithfulness “is used in reference to love
and marriage.”33 In other words, I do this act, say this word, not in a “mo-
ment of madness,” but because I choose to be faithful—to God, to others,
to myself. Additionally, I know the content of that faithful action (what I
ought to do) insofar as I have come to know and be known by the words
and the person of the divine and the human other.
In ethics, then, as in language and epistemology, Bakhtin’s perspectival
realism reminds us that we are responsible to shape our actions, our words,
and our knowing, but we do so within the thick bonds created by our teth-
ers to the world, to others, and to God. All of these constantly intrude upon
us, disallowing arrogantly solipsistic or radically skeptical theories of mean-
ing. It is comforting to know that glory does not mean “a nice knock-down
argument,” but understanding this is only to begin the task of discovering
what even a single word does and can mean. As one of my students once
remarked, “Language is simple until you start to think about it. Then it
becomes an inexplicable mystery. Each time something we say clicks with
someone else, we should be overwhelmed with the wonder the miraculous
deserves.” Indeed we should.

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193.
2. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962).
 Words and Things 29

3. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy, cor-

rected ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
4. Jonathan Culler, “Literary Competence,” in The Critical Tradition, ed. David
H. Richter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 928.
5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and
Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 71.
6. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), 292; author’s emphasis.
7. M. M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed.
Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993),
56–62.
8. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 8.
9. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 276–77.
10. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 278.
11. The word tether is my simplified image for Bakhtin’s complex and nuanced
account of the relationship of words to things, other people, and God.
12. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 10, 12; emphasis in the original.
13. Derrida, “Différance,” 17.
14. Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 50.
15. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 339.
16. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 293–94.
17. M. M. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answer-
ability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim
Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 24–25.
18. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 41.
19. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 170, author’s emphasis.
20. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 120, 137.
21. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 293–94.
22. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 343.
23. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 346.
24. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll
(New York: Modern Library, 1939), 217.
25. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 26.2, trans. Garry Wills, in Saint
Augustine’s Childhood: Confessions Book One (New York: Viking, 2001), 14.
26. “M. M. Bakhtin’s Lectures and Comments of 1924–1925,” in Bakhtin and
Religion: A Feeling for Faith, ed. Susan M. Felch and Paul J. Contino (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 2001), 219–20; author’s emphasis.
27. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 56.
28. The translators of Bakhtin do not use the term perspectival realism, but
throughout his writings, Bakhtin points us to world and word as “something given”
(realism) and “something-to-be-achieved” (perspectivalism); see Bakhtin, Toward a
Philosophy of the Act, 30.
29. This discussion of epistemology is indebted to conversations with my col-
league Lee Hardy.
30 Susan M. Felch

30. Lee Hardy, “Postmodernism as a Kind of Modernism: Nietzsche’s Critique of

Knowledge,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 35.
31. Jacques Derrida, “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch over Thinking” in Points . . .
Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1995), 361.
32. Derrida, “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch over Thinking,” 360.
33. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 37.
2
Can We Be Good without God?
John Hare

If our title is taken to mean, can we be good without believing in God, the
answer is yes. In fact, there are people who do not believe in God whose
lives put the lives of many believers to shame, but that is not really all there
is to say. Here is the thesis of this chapter: morality, as we are familiar with
it in our culture, originally made sense against the background of a set of
beliefs and practices in traditional theism. In elite Western culture, these
beliefs and practices have now been widely abandoned. The result is that
morality no longer makes sense within that culture the way it once did. I
will mention Immanuel Kant, though this chapter is not about Kant, as
such, because I think he is the most important philosopher of the mod-
ern age. He put the point this way, that morality without belief in God is
possible but is rationally unstable.1 That is the position I want to discuss.
There are two problem areas in particular that I will stress. The first is the
gap between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to meet
it. This gap produces the question, Can we be morally good? The second
problem area is the source of the authority of morality. This produces the
question, Why should we be morally good? One traditional answer to these
questions has been that God enables us to live in the way we should, and
that we should live that way because God tells us to live that way. I will be
looking at various kinds of incoherence that arise if this traditional answer
is no longer available.
What I call “the moral gap” is the gap between the moral demand on us
and our natural capacities to live by it.2 One central feature of the moral
demand is the requirement of impartial benevolence—wanting good for
everybody. This is not the whole of morality, but it will be the focus here.
I will give two formulations of this requirement taken from Kant. When a

31
32 John Hare

person proposes an action to herself, she does it with some account to her-
self of the reason why she should do it. The first formulation of the moral
demand gives her a test: if her action is going to be morally permissible, she
has to be willing to propose that anyone in her kind of situation should do
that kind of action for that kind of reason. That would turn her proposal
into a universal law for what should be done in such circumstances.3 An
example might make this clearer. Suppose she is a college professor and she
has a huge stack of student papers to grade. Suppose she hates grading pa-
pers, and she hates the winter, and the thought occurs to her that she could
leave the papers and fly to the Bahamas for a few days and soak in the sun.
Then when she gets home, she could take the whole pile of papers up to
the top of the stairs and throw them down, and any paper that gets on the
bottom step would get an A, and on the next step an A- and on the next step
a B+, and so on. She could save herself hours and hours of time and have a
lovely weekend. Now the question is whether this action together with this
motivation is morally permissible.
The moral answer is no because she will find that she cannot will that
anyone in such a situation should act like that. Suppose she is not the
professor, but one of the students, perhaps one of the students whose ad-
mission to medical school is in the balance, depending on his cumulative
average, and who has just put hours and hours into this paper as a result.
Can she will for this situation that the professor grade the papers in this
haphazard way? She cannot. This test has the result that any reference to
any particular person, including herself, is eliminated. If she is willing the
action for anyone in a certain kind of situation, she cannot preserve refer-
ence to herself or any other individual. She has to will that the same action
should be done if the particular people in her particular situation were to
reverse their roles, if she were to become the student and the student were
to become the professor. The principle is thus a version of the golden rule,
which we should do to others only what we wish they should do to us,4 the
principle that we should love the neighbor as the self.5
So this is the first formulation of the moral demand. The second formula-
tion is that we should treat humanity, whether in ourselves or anyone else,
as an end and never merely as a means.6 To treat another person as an end
in herself is to share her goals and purposes as far as the moral law allows.7
This does not mean that I am forbidden to use another person for my pur-
poses as a reader of this chapter is using me for enlightenment or entertain-
ment. Morality says that I am forbidden to use another person merely for
my purposes. For example, you are at a restaurant and the waitress brings
you your food. Do you think of her merely as a conveyer belt on legs to get
the food from the kitchen to your table? Do you consider that she, too, is a
person with goals and purposes of her own? Perhaps you are tired and have
had a long day, but you consider that she, too, may be tired and she may
 Can We Be Good without God? 33

have had a long day facing grouchy people like you. To treat her as an end
is to share her purposes, that is, to make her purposes your purposes as far
as the moral law allows. She wants a friendly face, though not too friendly.
Is there something morally wrong about this? No. You should want to
give it to her. Note that you have to treat humanity this way also in your
own person. Morality does not say that you treat yourself as a doormat, a
mere means to supply other people’s preferences. You also have to respect
yourself as having the same worth (but morally no greater worth) than any
other human being.
To show why these two formulations of the supreme principle of moral-
ity are so demanding, I will describe two cases. First, you are considering
going to a movie for nine dollars, and it occurs to you that nine dollars
could keep someone alive for a week in, say, Zambia.8 One may doubt this,
but there are actually a billion people in the world who live on less than
a dollar a day. I lived and worked as a teacher in India for about a year,
and my salary was the equivalent of about a dollar a day. My daughter
Catherine worked in Zambia, where the per capita income is $380 a year.
Moreover, the rate of adult HIV infection is very high and that country is
full of orphans whose extended family cannot feed their own children, let
alone others. Now is the purpose of staying alive for a week morally per-
missible? Yes. You should share that person’s purpose. Then, which is more
important, the movie or the life? If you did not know which role you were
going to play in this situation, the starving child or the filmgoer, which
would you choose? In Christian terms, we could put it this way: Christ says
about feeding the hungry, “in as far as you do it to the least of these my
brethren, you do it unto me.”9 Thus, which is more important to Christ, the
movie or the life?
The second case is that morality, in the shape I have described it, requires
that we love our enemies. Every human whom we affect by our actions
counts as worth the same and we have to make their ends our ends as far
as we can. We do not have to share their immoral ends, if for example, their
purpose is to do us harm. Their purposes to continue living themselves,
to have their dignity respected, to have flourishing communities and per-
sonal relations, to have worthwhile achievements and lives full of beauty
and truth, all count morally just as much as our own. Now, how natural
is this kind of love? When I think back over the years since 9/11, people
in America have experienced a more vivid sense of who their enemies are.
I have seen in many people what started from a sense of justice outraged
but slipped almost immediately into hatred or revenge. This is natural. The
common sense on this matter is what Socrates first encountered in Athens
when he asked, “What is Justice?” in the Republic. The answer was justice
is doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.10 This is natural,
given our fallen nature, but it is not what love requires.
34 John Hare

The moral demand is the first part of the structure of the moral gap. The
second part is our natural capacities, those we were born with, and those
capacities are not adequate to the demand. What I am presenting here is a
version of the traditional doctrine of original sin, which is still to be found
in Kant. His version goes back into the history of the pietist Lutheranism
in which he grew up. It comes to Luther through Ockham and Scotus and
behind Scotus, Anselm, and behind Anselm, Augustine.11 The way Duns
Scotus puts it is that there are two basic affections of the will if you like two
pulls. There is the pull toward one’s own advantage and the pull toward
what is good in itself, independently of our happiness.12 We humans are
born with, and will always experience both affections, even in heaven. The
key moral question, though, is which we put first. For example, as I gave
the lecture that became this chapter, I could have been thinking first of
the material and my audience. I could be thinking first of myself and my
anxieties or satisfactions. I am in fact thinking of both, and there is noth-
ing wrong with this; but the key question is the ranking. When I am doing
public presentations, my prayer beforehand is always that I focus less on
myself and more on my subject matter and my audience. Do we put the
good in itself first and do what will make us happy only if it is consistent
with this? Conversely, do we put happiness first and do what is good in it-
self only to the extent that it will make us happy? To think this second way
is to be under the evil principle that subordinates duty to happiness. We
are all born this way. Here, I think that Plato and Aristotle were right. What
is natural to us is to pursue our own happiness. This means we cannot be
impartially benevolent, for we put ourselves first. This also means that we
cannot make ourselves impartial, for the evil principle is our root principle,
and, if the root is corrupt it cannot mend itself.
My experience in talking about this view to people is that some of them
think it is too pessimistic. They think, for example, that we are born basi-
cally good, and we do such horrible things to each other mostly because
we do not understand what we are doing. People, however, can know per-
fectly well how much they are hurting each other, and do it anyway. My
wife used to volunteer at recess in an elementary school. She noticed that
these children, who had been together for several years, had established
a pecking order, like chickens in a coop; and those at the bottom of this
hierarchy were bullied into a state of misery that, she thought, might leave
serious psychological damage. My point is that the kids doing this damage
knew precisely how to torment those beneath them. Consider, for example,
a dysfunctional marriage in which the two partners have refined to an art
form the techniques of wounding each other. In a perverse way, it is their
ability to torment each other that keeps them together.
Even if we discount what one might think are extreme cases, let us think
again about the movie. There are some initial responses to this dilemma.13
 Can We Be Good without God? 35

Movies are an art form, and art has its own deep value. Suppose, however,
that it is Terminator 5? I need some relaxation, I might say, otherwise I will
grow weary with well-doing, and burn out, but am I really on the verge of
burnout when I go? Alternatively, what about a walk in the woods? I need
to spend time with my family, I may say, and indeed I think I can justify
spending more resources on my own children, but is the movie really the
best way to spend time with them? I think that after we have given all these
sorts of reasons, we will realize that there is something unjust about the
way we are spending our money. This applies not just to the movie but to
the CD player, the new couch, and the down jacket. Impartial benevolence
turns out to make a demand on us that we limit our standard of living. I
happen to think the demand is too high for us by our natural capacities.
I find myself switching off when the pictures of starving children come
on because I just cannot face it. Moreover our culture is full of devices to
weaken any inclination we originally had. The retailers in the mall and the
advertisers do not want us to think about justice while we are shopping. In
West Michigan, where I used to teach, the largest mall decided not to allow
the Salvation Army to collect in their traditional way at Christmastime.
These two features of the gap picture, namely the demand and our defec-
tive capacities, are present in Kant and have been repeated by most of the
theorists of morality who followed Kant. A remarkable fact is that they have
also repeated a third feature. They construct the picture of a person who
is without our limitations of information and good will, and who tells us
how to live. This imaginary being is given many different names and de-
scriptions: an ideal observer, an archangel, and ourselves behind the veil of
ignorance.14 What is typical of all these imaginary beings, however, is that
they are without the usual human limitations. This pattern needs explana-
tion. Why should morality be presented as having this shape rather than
what we might otherwise have expected—a purely human institution—tied
to our human conditions of limitation? I think the overwhelmingly plau-
sible answer is that these imaginary beings are a remnant, a relic. They are
the remains of a traditional view, according to which human beings are
subordinate to a divine being who is without our limitations and whose
prescriptions about our lives we are supposed to obey.
I do not want to limit the picture of the moral gap to Christianity, or
even to the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. There is already in Aristotle the description of a gap-shaped moral-
ity. The best life, he tells us, would be superior to the human level, but we
ought not to follow the proverb writers, and “think human, since (we) are
human, or think mortal, since (we) are mortal.”15 Rather, as far as we can,
we ought to be immortal, that is, like the immortal gods. The gap picture
goes beyond Western culture. When I was teaching very briefly in China, I
went to visit the monastery where Chu Hsi, a neo-Confucian of the twelfth
36 John Hare

century, lived and taught. He held that for most of us our good nature is
like a pearl lying in muddy water, which means that we cannot see through
to the right principles whose source is heaven.
The description of life in this moral gap, without anything added to it, is
incoherent because of another feature of morality that can be expressed suc-
cinctly as the view that ought implies can. The best way to put this is that the
question whether you ought to do something does not arise unless you can
do it. To see the appeal of this principle, consider this example. When I was
working for the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, I took
my infant daughter with me to visit the congressman who was head of the
committee. She was too young to control her bladder, and had an accident
that left a mark on the congressman’s blue carpet. Now, if I blamed her for
this, it would not merely be stupid, it would go against the whole point of
blaming. It is a cardinal principle of childrearing that you should only hold
children accountable to standards that they are able to reach. Another way
to put that is to say that ought implies can. Then if our capacities are really
inadequate to the moral demand, is it not the case that we ought to live by
it? It is incoherent to put us under a demand we cannot reach. Yet, surely
we are under the moral demand. How are we to explain this paradox?
Christianity has a particular reading of the gap picture of morality to
help with this difficulty. The gap picture has three components; first, the
demand; second, our capacities; and third, the person without our limita-
tions. What Christianity adds is that the third part of this picture (the per-
son without our limitations, namely God) intervenes in human affairs so
as to change the second part of this picture (namely our capacities) so that
they become adequate to the first part of the picture (namely the moral
demand). Just how God is supposed to do this is another topic. My point
here is not to describe God’s assistance but to show the place for it in moral-
ity. This feature of Christianity about God’s assistance has dropped out of
the professional literature in moral theory. This means that contemporary
moral philosophy is faced with the threat of the incoherence I have just
described, namely the incoherence of holding us accountable to a standard
we are unable to meet. Contemporary moral philosophers have responded
to this threat in essentially three ways.
First, there are philosophers who exaggerate our initial capacity so that
it becomes adequate to the demand, which is held constant as impartial
benevolence.16 Some theorists hold that if we were only vividly aware of the
effects of our actions on other people, we would tend to do what morality
requires. It is thus ignorance that holds us back, they say, not any radical
evil of the will. Then, how is it that people who know perfectly well how
much they are harming others nevertheless persist in the most horrifying
contempt and cruelty? It is interesting to compare the beginning of the
twenty-first century with the beginning of the twentieth. Around the last
 Can We Be Good without God? 37

turn of the century, there was enormous confidence that the new century
was going to be one of moral progress through education and technological
advance. I have noticed some of the same rhetoric around the turn of the
new century. In between has come the bloodiest and most brutal century in
human history. The Germans who killed the Jews and others in the camps
of the Second World War had their victims perform Bach’s sacred music for
them before putting them in the gas chambers. Education and technology
made evil worse. The humanist manifesto published just before the Second
World War said, “Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible
for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself
the power for its achievement.”17 The question I am asking is whether this
is true and whether it is supported by our experience of the world run by
the people who believed it.
The second strategy for dealing with the moral gap without God is to
hold our natural capacities constant as biased toward the self and then ad-
just the demand downward in order to meet them.18 Some moral theorists
diminish the moral demand by saying that we are not, after all, required to
be impartially benevolent, and our moral obligations are just to particular
people who are embedded within the special relations we have to them
as friends and family and members of our community. We do not, for ex-
ample, have moral obligations to starving children in Africa because they
are not related to us in the right way. We do not even know their names.
This makes the moral demand much closer to our natural tendency to re-
strict our care to those close to us. One example is the kind of evolutionary
ethics that decides what humans generally desire by looking at their evolu-
tionary history, most of which was hunting and gathering. If contemporary
hunter-gatherer societies do not show signs of impartial benevolence or of
loving the enemy, this kind of evolutionary ethics dismisses these sorts of
demands as utopian. We are not, so to speak, programmed for such a life.
On this strategy, what is good is what fits our natural capacities, and our
natural capacities are given us by evolution for the reproductive advantage
of our genes.
The third strategy is to hold both the demand and our capacities con-
stant, and then to try to find some substitute for divine assistance in bridg-
ing the resultant gap. Perhaps, as for Rousseau, love of the country will
change our capacities. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it is the withering away
of the state and ownership by the working class of the means of production
as Marx thought. To discuss this strategy carefully requires going through
these alternatives one by one and examining whether they work. I am not
optimistic that they do.
We need to go on to the second problem area distinguished at the begin-
ning. The first was the picture of the moral gap. The second is the source of
the authority of morality. We can ask the question, Why should I be moral?
38 John Hare

This is not the question, What do I get out of being moral? but the ques-
tion, Why should I accept the moral demand as a demand upon me that is
independent of my happiness? Why should I not go down to the Bahamas
and neglect the grading? Why should I do my duty? I will call this question
“the normative question.”19 To put it another way, Why is morality trumps?
I am going to look at various answers that contemporary moral philosophy
has given to this question, none of which say that morality is binding on
us because God has commanded it or called us to it. My sense is that none
of these alternative answers is satisfactory, and I am going to mention a
difficulty or two with each of them. This, however, is just the beginning
of what would be a long discussion of each one. What follows if none of
these nontheist answers works? We should expect to find that if there is no
generally accepted answer to the question, Why should I be moral? the per-
ceived authority of morality in the culture will start to weaken. This is what
Nietzsche already foresaw at the end of the nineteenth century. He foresaw
what he called the death of God, and he foresaw and looked forward to the
death of guilt along with the death of God.20 Guilt, considered subjectively,
is what we feel when we violate the moral law. If we lose the sense of the
authority of the moral law, then we will lose this kind of feeling of subjec-
tive guilt along with it.
Contemporary moral philosophy has tried various answers to the norma-
tive question without bringing God into it. One is that reason demands that
I be moral. We might try tying the nature of reason to willing universal law,
which is the first formulation of the moral demand I gave you from Kant.
The problem is that there are universal laws that eliminate reference to any
individual but that would be immoral to will. Consider the principle that
all Jewish people should be killed. There is a true story about a fanatical
Nazi who discovered that he had a Jewish grandmother, which was the
degree of connection the regime had established as sufficient for deporta-
tion to the death camps. True to his principles, the Nazi handed himself
in. He did not make any special exemption for himself, but surely this is
not enough to make his principle morally permissible. Suppose a terrorist
thinks that it is good to free the world of as many infidels as possible. He
may be able to eliminate reference to any individuals in this principle and
thus pass the logical test of universality. This does not make his principle
morally permissible, however. There are problems with making reason the
source of the authority of morality.21
Another answer we might propose is that the source of the moral obliga-
tion is the community we belong to. We might say that we have grown up
in communities that respect the moral law, and our identities are at least
in part formed by those communities. Socrates says that Athens is like a
parent; it has made him the person he is.22 Perhaps to be true to our social
identity, therefore, we have to acknowledge the authority of the moral de-
 Can We Be Good without God? 39

mand that our community instilled into us. I grew up in a community that
was socially stratified by class. My nanny told me that gentlemen polished
the backs of their shoes; ordinary people polish the fronts, but only gentle-
men the backs. I remember at boarding school being beaten with a shoe by
a prefect in the dormitory for having come down to breakfast with my hair
unbrushed. He was trying to mold me into a gentleman. There were some
good features of the code of being a gentleman, but they were tied up with
inherited privilege in a way that I now think is wrong. It does not follow
from the fact that I grew up a certain way that I am obliged to continue that
way. The community does not have that sort of authority. If it did, then
everyone would be obliged to the standards they grew up with, and that
would be normative relativism. In addition, if we make community the
source of the authority of morality, we will get exclusivity. We will start to
think of our obligations as limited to those we have special relations with.
We will stop seeing or caring about the effects of our choices of lifestyle and
public policy on the rest of the world. The contemporary world displays a
curious mixture of increased globalization on the one hand and increas-
ingly aggressive tribal loyalty on the other. We need a sense of moral obli-
gation that transcends the community, a sense of the dignity of a human
being as such, even of an enemy.
A third possibility is that nature grounds the authority of morality. Some
theorists think that you can deduce normative conclusions about how
we ought to live from factual premises about what kind of people we are
and what we are naturally inclined toward.23 Here, we need to go back to
the point I made earlier about our natural capacities. I suggested that the
philosophers Plato and Aristotle had it right—we naturally pursue our
own happiness. As Duns Scotus put it, we rank the affection for advantage
above the affection for justice. We could construct a more cheerful picture,
by which our nature is fundamentally good and then deduce morality
from this nature. Then, however, we will have built the conclusion into the
premises. I have spent some time writing about evolutionary ethics, which
is the attempt to find a basis for ethics in the nature we share with other
animals.24 I have found kin selection, by which insects in some species
refrain from reproduction because their genes get a better chance of replica-
tion in the next generation if they perform a more specialized function. I
have found what is misleadingly called reciprocal altruism, which is a kind
of tit for tat. I have found various forms of social control where discipline
is exercises on some members of a group for the sake of the group. I have
not found the Good Samaritan, the love of the enemy. This still needs to
be explained. Nature in the sense of what we share with other animals does
not give us a basis for this kind of morality.
Finally, we might say that it is simply self-evident that morality is authori-
tative, and so this authority does not need a ground at all, either in God or
40 John Hare

in anything else.25 Morality might be like sense perception in this way. It is

self-evident, when I see a goldfinch outside my window in good light, that
I am justified in believing that there is a goldfinch there. This is not to say
my perception is infallible. I might be the victim of a practical joke by a
neighbor who knows that I am a philosopher who argues for the basic reli-
ability of sense perception and who has constructed a holograph projecting
a picture of a goldfinch onto the tree outside my window. Nevertheless, in
the absence of some such special condition, I should believe that my senses
are giving me the truth. Perceptual beliefs such as this are properly basic.
If everything had to be justified, then it would turn out that nothing could
be. We do have to start somewhere, and perception seems to be one good
place. The problem is that the authority of moral sense seems different from
the authority of sense perception. Our moral sensors have been distorted
more than our sense perception because the moral sensors are closer to the
will that is where the self-preference and so the distortion resides. Addition-
ally, I do not have the experience of waking up in the morning and just not
trusting my senses. I can imagine having such an experience; suppose I am a
habitual user of hallucinogens for example, or I am waking up after a general
anesthetic. In the absence of such special conditions, I just go ahead and
trust. I do, however, have the experience of moral apathy or listlessness, of
simply not feeling the authority of the moral demand. I know my duty, but
I turn over and go back to sleep. This is no doubt a sign of a weak character,
but it is not abnormal in the way it is abnormal to distrust the authority of
the senses. The authority of moral perception is self-evident only when our
wills are correctly ordered, but, in fact, they are regularly disordered.
I have described the four main alternative secular answers to the nor-
mative question, Why should I be moral? All of them need a supplement
to tell us which demands of reason, which community, and which nature,
which moral perceptions we should trust. Christianity has an answer to the
normative question that is different from any of the above. It says that I
should be moral because God tells me to be so. For example, John Calvin
says, “God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness, that whatever
he wills, by the very fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous.”26
Morality has authority because it is the route that God has chosen for us
toward our ultimate end, which is some form of union with God.
I will now summarize what I hope to have accomplished here. I have
focused on two questions, which an account of morality needs to answer.
The first question is, Can we be good? and if the answer to this is yes, we can
go on to the second question, which is, Why should we be good? My claim
has been that morality does not make sense without answers to these ques-
tions and that the main contemporary nontheist answers fail. I gave three
types of nontheist answers to the first question, and four to the second. If
I am right about these failures, this does not prove that the theist answers
 Can We Be Good without God? 41

are correct, and it does not show that only theists can be morally good.
There are many forms of life that people can practice without being able to
make sense of them. However, having answers to these two questions is an
advantage, and without answers I think the authority of morality will tend
to decline. Those who want to hold onto morality, but without God, will
have to find a substitute to do the same work, and it is not going to be easy
to find such a substitute. If they do not, their morality will remain, as Kant
put it, rationally unstable.

NOTES

1. Volckmann’s Notes to Kant’s Lectures on Natural Theology, NT, 1151. See

also, Kant, Critique of Judgment, KU, 5:452.
2. John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assis-
tance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
3. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:402.
4. Matthew 7:12.
5. Mark 12:31.
6. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429.
7. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:430.
8. There are premises for this argument that I have not stated; for example, we
are to be held accountable for omissions as well as commissions. Also, the particu-
lar figures given in the example were written at the time of the composition of the
lecture and may not be accurate any longer.
9. Matthew 25:40.
10. Plato, Republic, 332b.
11. This history is given in somewhat more detail in John E. Hare, God and Moral-
ity: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
12. Ordinatio 2, dist. 6, q. 2.
13. I have described the responses more fully in Ethics and International Affairs
(London: Macmillan, 1982), 163–83.
14. Richard Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1959);
R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); John Rawls, A Theory
of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10.7.1177b32–33.
16. This is typical of utilitarianism, for example, John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism,
ed. George Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979).
17. “A Humanist Manifesto,” The New Humanist 6, no. 3 (1933).
18. Examples would be Nel Noddings, Caring (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984) and Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1998).
19. The name is from Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7.
20. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage
Books, 1967), 90–91.
42 John Hare

21. Kant does not himself make the argument this way. One of the problems is
in formulating an account of reason where moral commitment is neither built into
its definition nor invalidly inferred from it.
22. Plato, Crito, 50d.
23. Deductivist natural law theories are of this type. It is controversial whether
Thomas Aquinas was himself a deductivist, but some neo-Thomists have been, for
example, Henry Veatch, Swimming against the Current in Contemporary Philosophy
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990).
24. John E. Hare, “Is There an Evolutionary Foundation for Human Morality?”
in Evolution and Ethics, ed. Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 2004), 187–203.
25. For example, see G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903; repr. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993).
26. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans.
Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.22.2.
II
QUESTIONING ASSUMPTIONS
UNDERLYING SCIENCE
3
Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the
Nature of the World?
David A. Van Baak

It is perfectly natural to all of us born in the twentieth century to draw con-

clusions about the character of the natural world from the picture we have
formed of it through the methods of science. In our time, the tools of myth,
history, poetry, philosophy, and theology, which formerly bore the role of
providing portraits of the material world, have been largely supplanted by
science in this respect. From this, what conclusions do we typically draw
from the sciences, about the character of the physical universe? Here are
the two conclusions perhaps most familiar to us: first, that the universe is
almost unimaginably large and old; second, that the matter in the universe
behaves mechanically, in the same sense (and for the same reasons) as do
the parts of a machine.
This essay does not address the size or age of the universe but instead
takes up the second of these points. I will try, from my standpoint as a
teaching physicist, to show what I mean by a mechanical picture of the
universe. I will give a glimpse of a competing nonmechanical view of the
universe and the process by which it was supplanted. That part of the story
might be familiar, but I intend to show that there remains, even today,
another viewpoint, wholly within mainstream physics, that is by contrast
decidedly nonmechanical in character. I conclude by showing why it does
not lie with the power of physical science to establish which of these two
competing pictures gives a truer depiction of the deep nature of the world.
To show the character of the now-prevalent view of the world as a mecha-
nism, I want to introduce an early expression of an alternative viewpoint. It
is a view about the natural world’s behavior that we would now call presci-
entific, and one that is certainly nonmechanistic. This expression of it comes
from the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, the state-of-the-art compendium of

45
46 David A. Van Baak

philosophical theology of the thirteenth century, and it serves there as the

fifth of St. Thomas’s famous proofs for the existence of God. He writes,

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things
that lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident
from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain
the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they
achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an
end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intel-
ligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by an archer. Therefore some intelligent
being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being
we call God.1

Here we see that even in the prescientific era, thinking persons con-
templated the “governance of the world,” and deduced something about
the nature of the world from the behavior of inanimate objects within it.
The noteworthy features of the behavior were clear: consistent or law-like
behavior, that is, “acting always or nearly always,” “not fortuitously”; and,
intentional or volitional behavior—“so as to obtain the best result” or “de-
signedly do they achieve their end.” This consistent intentional behavior of
objects, St. Thomas claimed, could not be ascribed to the bodies themselves
because they lacked intelligence, so it was ascribed instead to “some being
endowed with knowledge and intelligence,” which being we, or at least
Aquinas, called God.
Nearly every feature of this argument, or proof, has been rendered anach-
ronistic or quaint to most moderns by the intellectual revolution we call
Newtonianism. Even such a sympathetic an author as Paul Davies, who
entitled one of his recent books, The Mind of God, agrees that Aquinas’s
view of the world as consistently intentional has been overthrown by an
alternative collection of explanations typically expressed as natural law and
typically pictured as a clockwork universe.

Aquinas’ argument collapsed in the seventeenth century with the development

of the science of mechanics. Newton’s laws explain the motion of material
bodies perfectly adequately in terms of inertia and forces without the need for
divine supervision. Nor did this purely mechanistic account of the world have
any place for teleology (final or goal-directed causes). The explanation for the
behavior of objects is to be sought in proximate physical causes—i.e., forces
impressed upon them locally by other bodies.2

This is a world in which the behavior of objects is indeed consistent, in fact

perfectly law-abiding but in which the character of the laws is not inten-
tional but mechanical, giving a picture of matter in motion, motion due to
force, forces that (as we say) enforce obedient but blind consequences.
 Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? 47

An early, and still very impressive, example of Newtonian mechanical

explanations was the account given of the motion of the bodies in our so-
lar system as described by Newton’s famous Three Laws of Motion and the
further Law of Universal Gravitation that he formulated. These combined
to give a system of the world that made no reference to ends, goals, or in-
tentions (in fact gave no description of why, or even how, gravity actually
worked) but nevertheless provided a mathematically complete, physically
unified, and observationally precise description of a vast host of celestial
phenomena. In fact, the apparent completeness and omnicompetence of
a Newtonian description of the motion of the planets is well illustrated
by the anecdote of an exchange alleged to have occurred when the French
mathematical physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace presented formally his
magnum opus (a thick book on celestial mechanics) to Emperor Napoleon.
Napoleon, noting (or having been briefed on) the character of the world
it portrayed, supposedly said to Laplace, “I see that in your book you have
made no mention of God,” to which Laplace replied, “Sire, I had no need
of that hypothesis.”3
The degree to which Laplace believed in the predictability of a mechani-
cal system and the determinism to which it led him is vividly captured in
his famous quotation:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and
the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all
forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature
is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to
analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the great-
est bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect
nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present
before its eyes.4

The clockwork universe was certainly understood by some to portray a

work whose operation, if not its very origin, could be understood wholly in
terms of mechanism: the operation of material causes without goal, end, or
intention, without choice or alternative, consistent yet purposeless, and (in
contradiction to Thomas Aquinas) serving as a proof, if for anything, then
for the irrelevance of divine purpose in the working of the world. It was a
natural, perhaps unreflective, outworking of this frame of mind that led
the physics department of the California Institute of Technology to choose
a title for the elaborate video version they filmed of a full year’s introduc-
tory course in college physics; they called this expensive production “The
Mechanical Universe.”5
The continuing intellectual power of such a Newtonian description, even
to religious believers, might best be made clear by a sort of conundrum:
48 David A. Van Baak

among those of us who would think it appropriate to address to the De-

ity a humble prayer for the healing of disease, or the sending of necessary
rain, how many would have the faith or daring to pray for the occurrence
of an eclipse of the sun, other than one of those predicted by Newtonian
means?
Fish in the sea, we are told, find it so natural to be surrounded by water
as to be wholly unaware of its existence; so we, too, live in a context in
which we find it natural to seek and to be contented with mechanical and
impersonal (rather than intentional or volitional) explanations for what
we see happening around us, particularly so in the behavior of inanimate
matter. In fact, so ingrained are these expectations that it takes a real effort
of imagination to contemplate an alternative world in which phenomena
are or could be any different. But as a tool to stimulate the imagination,
in the spirit of allegorical literature, let me now try to tell a “Tale of Two
Cities,” that I propose to be located in parallel but distinct universes and
that I will name, for the purposes of contrast, the cities of Mechanicsville
and Teleopolis. Let me convey some features of the account of their natural
worlds that the dwellers in these two cities give. We are going to see, in
various areas of experience, their accounts of common phenomena making
use of quite different modes of explanation. I have to proceed by selective
example here, and will avoid the full mathematical elaboration that think-
ers from these two cities give to their descriptions. I can, though, give at
least a literary expression to some of the theories adopted in the two cities;
my purpose in each example is to try to show how a nonmechanistic theory
differs from a mechanistic one.
For a first example, light shines on our two cities; in both places, scientists
use a model invoking light rays for describing its behavior. In both places,
it is long been noted that a ray of light, falling obliquely onto a flat surface
like that of water, does not continue straight, but is deflected, or refracted,
where it enters the water.
In Mechanicsville, the law of refraction for this process is well known; it
describes in mathematical form the relation between the angle of incidence
or ray angle in the air, and the angle of refraction or ray angle in the water.
On earth, we call this Snel’s Law.
In Teleopolis, the refraction of light that occurs there, too, is described
by a wholly different theory. There it is noted that light moves more slowly
in water than in air, and light, leaving a source in the air and getting to a
destination in the water, in fact follows a path bent so as to lengthen its
path in the air, and shorten its path in the water, in just such a way, along
just such a path, as to minimize the time it takes to get from its source to its
destination. Thus, “a principle of least time” governs light in Teleopolis.
Unlike Snel’s Law, which applies only to refraction, the teleopolitan prin-
ciple of least time has the advantage of also serving to explain ordinary
 Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? 49

straight-line propagation of light and the behavior of light upon reflection

from a mirror.
Let us consider a second example of a physical phenomenon that can be
explained in two distinct ways. They have “electricity” in Mechanicsville,
and thinkers there model it as being due to the motion of charged particles,
mobile in materials called conductors, moving in response to forces. The
picture of electric charge is that it is indestructible, so that a flow of electric-
ity in a conductor, upon reaching a junction, might divide in some propor-
tions, with a portion of the current flowing into each of several alternative
conductors. There is a law in Mechanicsville, called the Loop Theorem, that
describes the mechanism that enforces at junctions in a conductive network
the division of electrical current into these proportions.
Now Teleopolis is electrified too, and oddly enough, thinkers there also
have noticed that electrical phenomena can be explained in terms of the
motion of indestructible electric charges though matter. They, too, have
formulated a theory that describes how electric currents divide in flowing
through a network, but it is a very different sort of explanation. In Tele-
opolis, out of all the divisions and distributions that current could take in
flowing through a network, scientists have noted that the one that actually
occurs is that unique pattern of flow of electric charge that minimizes the
total rate of generation of heat by the passage of the electricity through the
conductive network. A principle of minimum heat governs electricity in
Teleopolis.
There are many more examples of similarities in the behavior of the
physical world that are different in theoretical description in our two
imagined cities. Let me add just one more example. In both Mechanicsville
and Teleopolis, the character of matter itself is modeled as the motion of
microscopic particles through empty space.
In Mechanicsville, the scientific picture of the motion of material par-
ticles is a description of their positions and velocities at any given moment
and a knowledge of the forces that act on these particles due to interactions
between them. Therefore, laws of motion can be used to predict, from pres-
ent values of position and velocity and present values of the forces between
the particles, the new values of position and velocity that must obtain in
each next new instant of time. By calculating these forces, the motion of
particles can be predicted into the future in Mechanicsville. The execution
of this intellectual program gives just the sort of mechanical determinism
that was envisioned by Laplace in our world.
In the world of Teleopolis, there are no forces; or at least, theorists there
have no need of that hypothesis. The description of the motion of particles
is instead conducted in terms of energy alone. Any particle is viewed as
possessing two kinds of energy: kinetic energy (energy due to its motion),
and potential energy (energy due to its position relative to other particles).
50 David A. Van Baak

The deep discovery in Teleopolis is that the motion of any particle, from its
starting point and time to its final place and time, is governed by a selection
principle. It says that of all the paths through space and time that the par-
ticle might have taken from start to finish, in Teleopolis the path actually
taken is always the one that minimizes the average value of the difference
between kinetic and potential energy. By the Teleopolitan scientists who
have discovered it, this is called the principle of least action.
In these three examples, we can now see that there is a systematic differ-
ence between the pictures of the nature of the world in our two imagined
cities of Mechanicsville and Teleopolis. In Mechanicsville, there is a law for
everything: for every particle, process, and instant, there is only one thing
that can and must happen; determinism reigns, alternatives are not to be
thought of, and the present determines the future ineluctably. In Teleopo-
lis, by contrast, there is a principle of minimization for everything: for every
combination of starting and ending states of the world, there is always the
intellectual requirement of contemplating all the different ways by which
the initial state might have become the final state, and there is always a
principle that selects, out of all these imaginable ways, the unique way that
is actually realized in the physical world. It is always the way that is opti-
mal, in the sense of least time, least heat, least action, and so forth; the one
way that surpasses any alternative in this minimization of some quantity.
We can easily imagine some features of the picture of the natural world
that are likely to be painted by thinkers in these two cities. In Mechanics-
ville, the operation of the world can be fully explained in terms of obedi-
ence to laws that apply locally at each place and time; there is no appeal to
foresight, plan, intention, or goal. In Teleopolis, physical explanations are
all global or holistic; they apply to a system in its entirety; and they have
a very different flavor, making it seem as if matter had foresight, as if all
alternatives were considered, as if matter were mindful, volitional, or pur-
poseful, and even as if there were a mind, will, or purpose to account for
the principles that govern the behavior of the world.
Those who recall the fourfold theory of causation developed by the
Greeks will recognize that scientists in our two cities are offering explana-
tions invoking the same material causes of behavior, in that both treat light
as rays, electricity as motion of charges, matter as made of particles. It is
in a separate aspect of causation that thinkers in these two cities differ: in
Mechanicsville, efficient causes are all that are required or expected of scien-
tific laws; they express the mechanism by which the present turns into the
future. In Teleopolis, on the other hand, final causes are at the heart and
core of all the principles that select, from among all candidate alternatives,
those actual occurrences that best achieve (as it were) some goal, end, or
telos by the minimization of some quantity.
 Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? 51

These two quite distinct modes of explanation are labeled mechanistic

and variational in the mathematical trade used to express them; and I have
tried to communicate how different in character are the mechanistic de-
scriptions used in Mechanicsville, compared to the variational ones used in
Teleopolis, to describe the different physical universes we imagined to ap-
ply as if on two distinct planets. The biggest surprise, however, is to disclose
that our world, the actual world we live in, is literally both Mechanicsville
and Teleopolis. To put it another way, however different might be the char-
acter of the theories used by thinking residents in these two mythical cities
to account for the behavior of matter, a visitor to them could not tell just by
looking at the behavior of matter in these two cities at which of them one
had arrived. In fact, the behavior of light, or electricity, or particles in mo-
tion on our earth, in all the cities of our world, can be fully and accurately
described both by mechanistic and by variational theories. What, then, are
we to make of having two distinct forms of theoretical description of the
one physical universe we live in?
First, I need to assert that there is no way, now or in future, to validate
or confirm one of these two formulations and to disprove or refute the
other by having one succeed and the other fail to describe some experi-
mental result. Every area of physics we know that has both mechanistic
and variational descriptions also offers a mathematical proof that the two
formulations will make the same predictions as to the results of each pos-
sible experimental test. The two outlooks, so different in character and
viewpoint, are mathematically equivalent when it comes to experimentally
testable predictions. Either of the two formulations, mechanistic or varia-
tional, could be adopted as a starting point and then entail the other as a
consequence.
This surprising fact—the uselessness of appeal to experiment to settle
a theoretical competition—is a fine example of a problem known to phi-
losophers of science as the “underdetermination of theory by experiment.”
It is an illustration of the awkward fact that any set of experimental data,
however large or broad, can still be described by two (or more) theories,
not just trivially or triflingly different but possibly of a wholly different
character or affect.
Second, if experiment cannot resolve the dispute, could not we just prag-
matically deny any real difference between mechanistic and variational
approaches? Could not we just say they are two distinct but equivalent
mathematical formulations of the same physical theory? This might indeed
suffice if we focused only on the goal of the prediction of experimental re-
sults. In practice, however, we expect more from a theory, and, in existential
fact, we extract from such theories whole portraits of the character of the
physical world. So, while mechanistic and variational theories might agree
52 David A. Van Baak

as to experimental predictions, they differ so radically in their depictions of

the character of the world that I find it impossible to deny the distinction
between them.
Richard Feynman similarly noted in another context that two theories
can be physically equivalent and still be psychologically inequivalent,6 and
to my view, mechanistic and variational descriptions of reality are psycho-
logically inequivalent because they appeal to wholly distinct explanatory
mechanisms. They seem to attribute to the natural world wholly antitheti-
cal themes: blind obedience versus apparent foresight; fixed single outcome
versus host of alternatives; law versus principle; apparently mindless versus
apparently volitional; as-if purposeless versus as-if intentional.
A third alternative would recognize these viewpoints as distinct but
would seek to make one of them foundational and the other derivative.
The problem is, Which of them should be assigned the deeper, more fun-
damental status? Here is the difficulty: (1) there is no experimental guid-
ance to be had, as experimental tests cannot privilege one viewpoint over
the other; (2) there is no mathematical guidance to be had, as mathematics
can only prove the viewpoints are equivalent (a symmetrical relationship);
and (3) yet there might be grounds outside of the strictly experimental or
mathematical to guide us.
In cases such as these, the history and philosophy of science suggest that
the deeper or more fundamental theory is likely to be the one possessing
greater elegance and beauty, or greater generality and fruitfulness. If these
criteria are to be used, it is fair to say that variational principles are of the
greatest generality and fruitfulness of any yet found in physics. Speaking of
variational methods, Max Planck, the German scientist who was the first
quantum physicist, wrote,

But there is another, far broader law, which has the property of giving a spe-
cific, unequivocal answer to each and every sensible question concerning the
course of a natural process; as far as we can see, this law—like the law of con-
servation of energy—possesses an exact validity even in the most modern parts
of physics. But what we must regard as the greatest wonder of all is the fact
that the most adequate formulation of this law creates the impression in every
unbiased mind that nature is ruled by a rational, purposive will.7

Now given all these considerations—the equivalence (on scientific

grounds) of the mechanistic and variational expressions of theory, and
the legitimate (if extra-scientific) preference perhaps to be accorded to
variational expressions on philosophy-of-science grounds—one is entitled
to ask, Why have I not heard of variational outlooks? Why have they not
captured the imagination of thinkers and lent weight to nonmechanistic
views of the nature of the world?
 Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? 53

Let me say first that it is not that variational expressions have only re-
cently been discovered; all the examples I gave for light, electricity, and mo-
tion, and also other cases, have been known for over a century. The original
principle of least action was known to Leibniz in the eighteenth century
and may in fact have been partly responsible for the philosophical outlook
captured by the phrase “the best of all possible worlds.” Thus, if novelty is
not the explanation, what is? I can think of three explanations, two of them
innocent, and one suspect.
The first is priority in time. In each case I know, the mechanistic explana-
tion came first, and the variational one came later by a generation or more.
Therefore mechanistic explanations have had chronological priority, which
has helped to make variational expressions seem a mere luxury as latecom-
ers to the intellectual fray.
The second innocent reason is that of difficulty; mechanistic descriptions
of the motion of matter lead rather naturally to differential calculus, a sub-
ject of adequate difficulty in itself; but variational descriptions require the
further mathematical development called the “calculus of variations,” to
which most students of physics attain but that (I suspect) few philosophi-
cal thinkers reach. The mathematical vocabulary and techniques necessary
have perhaps combined to make variational methods less well known.
A third and less innocent reason for the preference typically accorded to
mechanistic description might be due to the metaphysical presuppositions
of those who—for the first time in the eighteenth century—had to express
a preference between the two views. The choice exercised in the tradition of
the French Encyclopedists tilted emphatically and self-consciously toward
mechanistic, and against variational, descriptions of reality. I think it would
repay historians of science to find the reasons behind those preferences.
Meanwhile, one is surely allowed to suspect that the philosophical predis-
positions of the Encyclopedists had something to do with their preference
for mechanistic and impersonal Newtonian explanations, as opposed to
variational explanations with their decided odor of teleology.
Apart from these various possible reasons for the general tilt, in the
worldview typical of our culture, in favor of mechanistic descriptions (as
opposed to variational theories) in science, what can we conclude from the
mere existence of a full set of nonmechanistic variational descriptions?
First, we have to conclude that science as science has to be seen as unable
to tell us which to prefer. If there is to be a preference, it must be attributable
to extra-scientific considerations. This in turn provides us with an example
of the failure of what I might call “scientism,” the belief that science, and
only science, can answer any and all questions worth posing. Rather, we see
here emerging naturally out of mathematical physics a very deep and inter-
esting question, the answer to which cannot be found inside of science.
54 David A. Van Baak

Second, we can take a lesson from physics that may be applicable else-
where in the sciences. In fact, the more reductionist one’s sympathies, the
more broadly it might be applicable elsewhere. Imagine situating ourselves
chronologically between Newton and his mechanism, and Lagrange and his
variational methods, when the mechanistic description of planetary mo-
tion was well developed but the variational outlook was still uninvented.
As we can now see in retrospect, the existence and experimental success of a
complete and accurate mechanistic description did not then (and does not
now) preclude the possibility of a future discovery of an equally complete
and accurate description of the same phenomena but now in variational,
even teleological, terms. This lesson can be learned from the past in physics;
it may yet have relevance in the future of other sciences, such as geology
and biology.
What else can we make of the mere existence of variational alternatives
to mechanistic theories of the behavior of matter in our physical universe?
How seriously can we take their apparent appeal to foresight or volition?
Can they rehabilitate the teleological argument of Aquinas for the existence
of God? It has been a considerable temptation to generations of physicists
with a predisposition to doubt materialism and determinism to appeal to
purpose allegedly exhibited in the physical world and to design and voli-
tion expressed in its formation. The questions here stray outside of science,
or even the history or philosophy of science, right into apologetics. Would
the arguments of Aquinas about natural bodies acting “for an end,” “so as
to obtain the best result” sound more persuasive to Teleopolitan scientists?
Would the apparent purposefulness exhibited by inanimate matter there
incline thinkers’ views toward a belief in God?
Perhaps it would in Teleopolis; perhaps the discovery of Lagrangian or
variational mechanics made a huge impression on Aquinas-trained Catho-
lic eighteenth-century physicists in our world—that would be a worthwhile
research topic in the history of science. However, I am skeptical of using a
technical argument from physics to infer character traits about God, which
is what we would be doing here. Let me explain why I am skeptical, first
with an anecdote and then with a more serious reason.
The story goes that a devout cleric once asked a scientist, “What can you
conclude about the nature of God from your study of the world?” He is
supposed to have replied, “God seems to have an inordinate fondness for
beetles.”8 Now maybe the preponderance of numbers of species of beetles,
among all insects, really does tell us something about God’s preferences but
you can see what a narrow range of God’s character traits, if any at all, we
can discover from such an observation.
Similarly with a physical-teleology argument, if we ask for the principle
of least action to be our guide to the character of a purposive God, we might
risk inferring a God of decidedly Scottish character, as if stingy enough with
 Can Scientific Laws Teach Us the Nature of the World? 55

a limited supply of cosmic action as only to dole it out in some minimizing,

cheeseparing fashion. If we were to be successful in influencing the agnostic
to contemplate such a God of least action, I am certain that some doubter
or skeptic would be tempted to entertain the extrapolation to the limiting
case of a God of no action at all.
If these are my anecdotal reasons for doubting the effectiveness of a
variational route to belief in God, let me now close with my own outlook
as a physicist and a theist on what can be concluded from the curious co-
existence of separate variational and mechanistic expressions of physical
law. I do not subscribe to the outlook, prominent in Anglo-American evan-
gelicalism, that natural science has either the outcome, or the obligation,
of necessarily creating belief in a benevolent God. I have lots of reasons,
philosophical and theological, for preferring the view that scientific knowl-
edge is not and ought not to be expected to be a prerequisite for warranted
belief in the existence of God.
As a practicing physicist, I nevertheless do know of the existence, within
mainstream, universally accepted physics, of equivalent mechanistic and
variational expressions of fundamental theories. What I make of this co-
existence is a sort of negative conclusion, but nevertheless a conclusion
welcome to any theist. In the existence of variational methods, I have a
strong defeater for the claim that acceptance of a scientific outlook neces-
sarily requires the adoption of a mechanistic worldview. In the existence
of variational methods, I have a striking indication that the universe can
be accurately and scientifically described in terms that make use of appar-
ent purpose or goal. Finally, I have quite distinct evidence that on the very
important question of the character of the natural world, science as science
speaks, at best, equivocally, telling the disinterested observer that mecha-
nistic and variational outlooks provide scientific descriptions of equal ad-
equacy. This in turn points directly to the inadequacy of science to provide
an answer to the perfectly legitimate and existentially captivating question
of whether the universe is “friendly to purpose.” Far from denying purpose,
scientific theorizing is entirely open to purpose, and science points outside
itself for anyone who wants an answer to the question of the deep character
of the natural world.

NOTES

1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, ques. 2, art. 3; the quotation may
conveniently be found in Peter Kreeft, A Shorter Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1993), 63.
2. Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 200.
56 David A. Van Baak

3. The genesis of this oft-repeated anecdote is traced by Brandon Watson in his

online site Houyhnhnm Land, at branemrys.org/archives/2004/08/i-have-no-need-
of-that-hypothesis/ (accessed December 17, 2007).
4. The intelligence that Laplace imagines in this paragraph has come to be called
“Laplace’s Demon”; see Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
(1902; repr, New York: Dover, 1995), 4.
5. The telecourse, The Magnificent Universe . . . and Beyond is now a resource avail-
able on DVD, to be found at www.learner.org/resources/series42.html (accessed
December 17, 2007).
6. Richard P. Feynman, “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum
Electrodynamics,” in Nobel Lectures Physics 1963–1970 (Elsevier, 1972), 177.
7. This quotation may be found in the 1937 lecture “Religion and Natural Sci-
ence,” in Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, ed. Max Planck (London: Wil-
liams and Norgate, 1950), 177.
8. The expression is attributed to J. B. S. Haldane, and has become the title of
a book. Arthur V. Evans and Charles L. Bellamy, An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
4
Design in Nature:
What Is Science Properly
Permitted to Think?1
Del Ratzsch

In writings of scientists from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries,

one frequently encounters the idea that there are empirically observable
features of both cosmic and biological nature that can be best—or perhaps
only—explained by reference to deliberate, intelligent design. Virtually with-
out exception, the major figures of that lengthy period—Kepler, Newton,
Boyle, Faraday, Herschel, Whewell, and Maxwell—held such views. In fact,
the early nineteenth century saw publication of the Bridgewater Treatises—a
series of eight volumes, each authored by a (or the) top practitioner in some
scientific area, laying out the scientific discoveries in that area that could be
construed as evidences of a designing hand in nature.
However, for a variety of reasons, design thinking in broadly scientific
contexts subsequently fell onto hard times.2 Recent decades, though, have
seen something of a resurgence of design thinking. That resurgence began in
the 1970s with exploration of cosmic fine-tuning and discussion of various
“cosmological anthropic principles.” Then, in the 1990s, design discussions
began seeping into a few biological discussions as a small group of biolo-
gists and biochemists came to suspect (like their predecessors) that there
were in some biological phenomena empirically determinable evidences of
design, that is phenomena that could only adequately be understood and
explained at least in part in intentional terms. Such suspicions constituted
one impetus for what is now known as the Intelligent Design Movement
(IDM), committed to the ideas (1) that there are (or can be) evidences of
deliberate design in nature, (2) that such design can be in principle empiri-
cally identified and investigated, (3) that such investigation can in principle
be genuinely and legitimately scientific, and (4) that such positions merit
a fair scientific hearing.

57
58 Del Ratzsch

The majority (not all) of the IDM constituency also rejects (especially
Darwinian) evolutionary theory as being incapable of adequately explain-
ing the phenomena they take to be indicative of design, and the majority
(not all) of the movement takes the designer to be God of the Bible.
Such suggestions have elicited an ongoing firestorm of opposition and
criticism. That opposition is nowhere more vociferously expressed than
in the work of Richard Dawkins who has described attempts to explain
biological complexity by appeal to a designer (which Dawkins takes to be
a question-begging appeal to complexity) as “cowardly and dishonest.”3
Advocacy of design theories, as Dawkins sees it, is not just a scientific fail-
ing but is thus also a moral failing, that is, it is wicked to think such things
in science.
What underlies this type of outrage? In some cases, philosophical com-
mitments and even antireligious bias fuel the fury. The emotionalism of
various academics aside, however, there are two significant questions in
the general neighborhood. The first is a philosophy of science issue: is it
even in principle legitimate to appeal to the concept of (especially super-
natural) intelligent design in the context of natural science? The second is
an empirical issue: were we to answer the above question in the affirma-
tive, do the empirical data we have at present actually support design views
or theories?
I will not address that latter question (that falls outside philosophical
territory) except merely to note that I do not find the purely empirical cases
produced specifically by the intelligent design movement to be persuasive.4
In what follows, I will focus on the former question, which is a variant form
of the question of whether or not scientists qua scientists can properly and
legitimately be forbidden to think about (supernatural) intelligent design
within scientific contexts.

METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM: BASIC LANDSCAPE

The idea of (supernatural) intelligent design as an authentic scientific ex-

planatory or descriptive conceptual resource strikes many people as a prima
facie nonstarter—as virtually a category mistake. Many, perhaps most,
would agree with Eugenie Scott that “to be dealt with scientifically, ‘intel-
ligence’ must also be natural, because all science is natural . . . Any theory
with a supernatural foundation is not scientific.”5
What is the justification for that universal stipulation? The standard an-
swer involves appeal to some version of naturalism. Naturalism comes in
a variety of flavors. Metaphysical (or philosophical) naturalism is the view
that the natural realm is the totality of reality that there simply is no su-
pernatural realm. Although there are some who explicitly and implausibly
 Design in Nature 59

claim that genuine science presupposes philosophical naturalism,6 most

are a bit more circumspect, holding that science employs and requires only
methodological naturalism. The standard concept of methodological natu-
ralism can be characterized informally as follows:

Philosophical naturalism may or may not be correct (science itself simply

takes no position), but since science cannot deal with the supernatural, it is an
essential methodological principle of science that science must proceed as if
philosophical naturalism is correct.7

Thus again Eugenie Scott:

Science has made a little deal with itself; because you can’t put God in a test
tube (or keep it [sic] out of one) science acts as if the supernatural did not exist.
This methodological materialism [methodological naturalism] is the corner-
stone of modern science.8

STANDARD CASES FOR

METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM

If methodological naturalism is in fact normative for genuine science, then

standard design theories are evidently in some difficulty.9 What exactly is
the justification for taking methodological naturalism as characterizing sci-
ence? There are several standard (not all mutually consistent) answers to
that question, which might be categorized as conceptual, empirical, and
pragmatic. None, I think, are entirely compelling, for reasons I will briefly
sketch.

Conceptual
According to some, the methodological naturalistic prohibition on refer-
ence to anything beyond the natural realm is part of the very character of
science itself. Thus, for instance, Michael Ruse:

[Q]ua science, that is qua an enterprise formed through the practice of methodologi-
cal naturalism, science has no place for talk of God . . . [I]nasmuch as one is
going to the scientist for science, theology can and must be ruled out as irrel-
evant. [my emphasis]10

and again:

[T]he methodological naturalist insists that, inasmuch as one is doing science,

one avoid all theological or other religious reference. In particular, one denies
God a role in creation. [my emphasis]11
60 Del Ratzsch

Nancey Murphy is even more specific:

[What] we might call methodological atheism . . . is by definition common to

all natural science [my emphasis]12

and again Scott:

By definition, science cannot consider supernatural explanations. . . . So by

definition, if an individual is attempting to explain some aspect of the natural
world using science he or she must act as if there were no supernatural forces
operating on it. [my emphasis] 13

It seems to me that neither sort of attempt can withstand much scrutiny.

As to definitional cases for methodological naturalism, it is worth keeping
in mind that such attempts must be at least prima facie tentative for the
simple reason that no one actually has a completely workable definition of
science (indeed, not even necessary and sufficient conditions).14 Even if we
thought we did, such definitions (even those employed by scientists them-
selves) have been historically unstable. In fact, the definitions employed by
scientists themselves changed substantively at least four times during the
past century. Furthermore, attempts to control the shape of science by way
of appeal to authoritative definitions seem more in keeping with Medieval
philosophy (or theology) than with contemporary intellectual—let alone
scientific—procedures. After all, definitions are human constructions. They
are not found in the bottom of test tubes, carved on some stratum within
the earth’s crust, outlined in the constellations, or found in authoritative
dictionaries that fall from the skies. Exactly why human definitions should
be inviolably normative for attempts to understand the natural cosmos
around us is unclear.

Empirical
According to one popular basis for methodological naturalism, there is a
scientifically fatal disconnect between the empirical and the supernatural,
including supernatural design.

Scientific Emptiness
References beyond nature in science are widely seen as being scientifi-
cally bankrupt. That bankruptcy was, the claim continues, not yet clear to
such historical figures as Kepler, Newton, and others who quite happily
incorporated theological principles and implications into their (alleged)
science. However, the scientific emptiness of appeal to supernatural agency,
 Design in Nature 61

design, and the like became increasingly evident as science progressed and
is now starkly clear.
Such claims are only slightly less shaky than definitional stipulations.
(And, of course, history, even if accurately construed, would not establish
the scientific normativity of prohibitions on things toward the nonnatural
end of the spectrum.) The historical allegations are problematic in any case.
According to historian of science Timothy Lenoir, “in early nineteenth-
century Germany a very coherent body of theory based on a teleological ap-
proach was worked out, and it did provide a constant fertile source for the
advance of biological science on a number of different research fronts.”15
More global (and more striking) is a claim of physicist Max Planck:

Amid the more or less general laws which mark the achievements of physical
science during the course of the last centuries, the principle of least action is
perhaps that which . . . may claim to come nearest to [the] ideal final aim of
theoretical research [i.e., to “condense all natural phenomena which have been
observed and are still to be observed into one simple principle”].16

Indeed, some historians of science have argued that the early modern
Western European Christian intellectual context provided conceptual re-
sources utterly essential to the very existence and rise of science. That fact
not only casts some doubt upon the present claim that nonnatural consid-
erations were historically scientifically empty (or even detrimental to sci-
ence), but that also might explain why no culture lacking such conceptual
resources ever produced anything such as modern theoretical science.
That the (at least implicit) relevance of not merely teleological but even
theological conceptual structures is not mere historical curiosity is sug-
gested by physicist Paul Davies; he believes that “Science began as an out-
growth of theology, and all scientists, whether atheists or theists . . . accept
an essentially theological worldview.”17
It is frequently asked, Where is any payoff for design ideas in science? If
Davies is correct—and I think that he is—then it may be that the success of
science itself is such a payoff, just as for some Quinean mathematical natu-
ralists the success of science is an empirical confirmation of mathematics.
Most scientists do not seem to take the success of science as either design
payoff or design confirmation; that may be because the situation has taken
on the mask of the familiar.18 Iris Murdoch once remarked, “People from
a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole
time to have the things about us.”19
Perhaps we should be, but we are not: we have grown jadedly out of that.
Similarly, consider the often-remarked unreasonable—even “spooky”20—
scientific effectiveness of mathematics. The stark fact is that the best under-
standing of natural reality we can generate is so shaped according to the
62 Del Ratzsch

most mind-redolent structures we know (mathematics) that some people

refuse to consider something as proper science unless it is mathematiz-
able.
One might think a priori that the citizens of such a mathematized,
mind-redolent world would find the evidence for deliberate design to be
overpowering. Perhaps sometimes we do (as even Darwin testified).21 In
any case, it may be that we do not so much need prediction of something
new and otherwise unexpected (as often demanded of design advocates) as
merely to recognize the objective unexpectedness of what is so familiarly
under our noses. Again, it is not necessarily irrelevant that historically it
was not until nature was looked at as a product of design that science itself
really got off the ground.

Unfalsifiability
It is widely claimed that any sort of design hypothesis (concerning na-
ture) is unfalsifiable and consequently scientifically illegitimate. This objec-
tion generally rests on the perception that design attempts are reconcilable
with absolutely everything, thus impossible to pin down to any specifiable
empirical content. Even were strict falsifiability impossible (which, sur-
prisingly enough, is in fact the case for nearly every legitimate scientific
theory),22 there could be evidence against design adequate for any legiti-
mate scientific purpose. If we had good empirical reason to believe that the
history of human evolution, for instance, really was a totally random mat-
ter, then although the absence of deliberate design would not be strictly
entailed,23 claims that our history exhibited a lack of design (in that specific
instance) could well be scientifically defensible or scientifically supported.
Given the character of science, that is not only adequate but perhaps as
good as one can demand.
In any case, even strict unfalsifiability does not imply absence of rele-
vance or of substantive impact. Science itself contains principles such as the
uniformity of nature which are strictly unfalsifiable, but which are scientifi-
cally legitimate, relevant, and even beyond that, absolutely indispensable.

Nonpredictiveness
Closely intertwined with the unfalsifiability issue is a charge that in-
telligent design generates no predictions. Here again the issue is not so
straightforward as often thought. First, it is widely recognized that even the
most upright scientific theory makes no predictions in isolation but only in
conjunction with a variety of other inferential resources—boundary condi-
tions, auxiliary hypotheses, instrumentation theories, and so forth. Second,
different scientifically essential principles operate at different levels in a
 Design in Nature 63

conceptual hierarchy within science, at different degrees of removal from

the empirical trenches. What precise connection a conceptual component
of science should have with empirical predictions is in part a function of
the role that component plays in science and the level at which it operates.
Of course, even overarching high-level (or deep underlying) principles
must generate some payoff in the broader scientific picture, but that payoff
does not reduce to anything so simple as particular identifiable empirical
predictions. Design theories might find their legitimacy at some particular
point within the structure of science for which demands for unique and
specifiable empirical predictions are misplaced.
The further up the hierarchy in which design concepts operate, the less
rigid will be any connection between such concepts and empirical data and
the less stringent the empirical demands that can meaningfully be placed
upon such concepts. On the other hand, the further up the hierarchy in
which design operates, the less will empirical scientific cases substantiate
design principles. Thus, what a design theory might gain in immunity, it
might lose in immediate empirical substance. In general, however, what
characteristic it is or is not appropriate to demand of some component
of the scientific conceptual hierarchy depends on where in the hierarchy
that component operates. Thus, what does or does not count as a fatal dif-
ficulty for design theories will depend upon the exact nature and level of
such theories. Specific proposals might be quite properly rejected for failing
legitimate requirements at specific levels, but blanket illegitimacy cases are
more difficult to defend.
Suppose, however, that specific predictive demands were appropriate.
It certainly does not seem to be true that design theories are inherently
nonpredictive. If we know or believe that some subsystem of some object
is designed for some purpose or function, we can often predict some things
concerning not only that subsystem itself but even concerning the existence
and characteristics of correlated entities or other subsystems. It might turn
out that the specific design theories associated with contemporary design
advocates make no requisite predictions, but if that is a failure it may be
simply a failure of local theory, not a principial problem.

Pragmatic
It is widely suggested that a science unprotected by methodologically
natural strictures is at deep risk, that is, allowing nonnatural concepts to
roam unchecked within science poses serious potential for destruction. This
worry is not just a recent invention. Indeed, one can find it expressed by
such prominent and devout scientists as Robert Boyle: “[A] naturalist who
would Deserve the Name, must not let the Search for Knowledge of First
Causes, make him Neglect the Industrious Indagation of Efficients.”24
64 Del Ratzsch

In 1623, Francis Bacon thought that actual harm to science was already
evident: “The handling of final causes mixed with the rest in physical
inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent enquiry of all real and
physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory
and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further inquiry.”25
Similar warnings continue to be issued regularly. For instance, Robert Pen-
nock: “Once such supernatural explanations are permitted they could be
used in chemistry and physics as easily as Creationists have used them in
biology and geology. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely
descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for
everything.”26
The precise risk, then, is that if it were permissible to appeal to design,
supernatural agency, and the like in science, then scientists, being as human
as any other group, would succumb to the always present temptation to
take that easy way out when confronting seemingly intractable theoretical
problems, such as choosing to appeal to design, nonnatural agency, and
other such ready-made answers rather than to persevere in the grinding,
slogging, seemingly doomed search for natural answers. In Bacon’s terms,
scientists would give up, quit (arrest inquiry) too soon to the ultimate det-
riment of science itself, given that continued search just might ultimately
uncover the natural solution.
That is indeed a legitimate worry, and I think that methodological natu-
ralism as a first approximation pragmatic (but defeasible) strategy may well
be defensible. The ultimate upshot of that worry, though, is perhaps less
transparent than often thought, for two reasons. First, there is a correspond-
ing worry on the opposite end of the same stick—the risk of refusing to
recognize when it is time to quit. Science historically has abandoned quite
a number of previously pursued projects, for example, perpetual motion
machines. Such projects have typically been abandoned for very good rea-
son, which does not change the fact that recognition of when it was time to
drop pursuit was to the ultimate benefit of science, and that science could
have continued only “to the great arrest and prejudice” of further produc-
tive inquiry. (A related issue will be addressed a bit later.)
Second, it is not at all evident that either science or scientists are quite so
susceptible to the temptations of intellectual sloth as apparently presumed.
Indeed, the history of science itself would suggest that the risks are not
all that great on precisely this point. Historically, no disaster such as that
darkly hinted above by Pennock occurred. In fact, if the history of science
told by critics of teleology, creationism, intelligent design, and the like is
accurate, during the nineteenth century, previously robust and entrenched
supernatural design explanations (such as Paley, the Bridgewater Treatises,
and so forth) lost the scientific battle to mere fledgling naturalistic expla-
nations—hardly what one would expect if merely allowing currently dis-
 Design in Nature 65

enfranchised supernatural design explanations into the conversation were

likely to destroy current mature and robust natural science. Thomas Huxley
once remarked that, “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every
new science as the strangled snakes beside [the cradle] of Hercules.”27 If
the infant Hercules could strangle the serpents that surrounded his cradle,
it is not terribly likely that the adult Hercules would be done in by rogue
nightcrawlers.

MORE (POTENTIAL) RISKS?

Although the hazards of pursuing degenerating (or degenerate) research

programs beyond any fruitful point might, perhaps, be less detrimental to
science than giving up too soon, the existence of even those lesser hazards
at least suggest that methodological naturalistic constraints could have their
down sides. In fact, I think that there are potentially several such. I shall
very briefly discuss some general considerations and then look at two pos-
sible specific examples in a bit more detail.
Let us begin with a story. Suppose that during the final prelaunch crew
briefing for NASA’s first manned mission to Mars, the head of NASA warns
the crew of the dangers of starting public panics and instructs them to make
no mention in any of their reports of aliens regardless of what they happen
to find on Mars. The restriction does make some sense, but suppose that the
first thing the crew sees upon exiting their lander is an utterly undeniable
bulldozer. The question instantly arises, of course: where did that come
from? The crew has a problem answering that question. Given the prohibi-
tion barring any reference to aliens, the crew really has only two options:
(1) they can simply refrain from addressing the question, or (2) they can
try to construct a (nonalien) theory of the natural chemical evolution of
Martian bulldozers. That means that their science of Mars will be either (1)
woefully incomplete (leaving out perhaps the single most fascinating aspect
of the mission) or (2) outrageously mistaken.
The basic problem with prestipulated conceptual and/or theoretical
boundaries is that if reality itself happens to fall outside those boundaries,
theorizing within the confines of those boundaries will inevitably generate
either incompleteness or error. Methodological naturalism is a stipulated
prohibition on anything outside the boundaries of the “natural” playing
any conceptual role in our scientific attempts to understand the cosmos
around us. If it were to turn out that reality itself chose not to abide by our
restrictions (and why should it not?), if scientifically relevant reality falls
outside methodological naturalist boundaries, then scientific thinking and
theorizing that is forbidden to cross those boundaries will inevitably be
either incomplete or mistaken.
66 Del Ratzsch

Of course, it might be claimed that incompleteness in science is not par-

ticularly surprising, that science does not claim to be complete, and that
science cheerfully admits to realms of reality that it does not pretend to ad-
dress; although that might depend upon exactly who is doing the talking.28
If science is not considered to be (in principle) competent to all reality, how-
ever, then the freedom to recognize when to quit pursuing specific programs
becomes even more imperative. Blindly and doggedly trying to push into
areas of noncompetence will produce mainly fruitless wheel spinning.
On the other hand, methodological naturalism conjoined with aspira-
tions for completeness has substantive implications. First, if one restricts
science to the natural (even just methodologically) but then assumes that
science can in principle get to all truth, then one has in effect implicitly
presupposed philosophical naturalism because on that view all truth will
be natural. Even if one stipulates methodological naturalism as essential
to science, then assumes merely that science is competent for all physical
matters or that what science does (properly) generate concerning the physi-
cal realm will, in principle, be truth, then if the truth of the specific matter
in question is nonnatural, even the most excruciatingly proper naturalistic
scientific deliverances on that matter may be wide of the mark, typically in
exactly the way a science built on philosophical naturalism would be. For
practical purposes, that comes close to importing an assumption of philo-
sophical naturalism into the inner structure of science.
Beyond that, a strict methodological naturalism tells us at every level of
explanation that the next more fundamental level of explanation (if any)
must also be sought within the explanatory resources of the natural. That
would mean that one must either abandon the project of further scientific
understanding at some level of brute natural fact or seek a scientific expla-
nation that could hold were philosophical naturalism true. Thus, if one
conceptually links methodological naturalistic science to truth in certain
ways, something paralleling both a conceptual and a practical commit-
ment to philosophical naturalism comes out of the mix. Therefore, whether
methodological naturalism in science has substantive philosophical impli-
cations (contrary to the common denial) or is philosophically neutral de-
pends on what it operates in tandem with. At the very least, methodologi-
cal naturalism makes the de facto assumption that there is an identifiable
realm of reality that is functionally self-contained and that is functionally
decoupled from the supernatural. That assumption is neither obvious, nor,
since it is equivalent to an empirical universal negative, provable.
Two further implications fall directly out of the above sorts of consider-
ations. First, if there are relevant but nonnatural truths within the cosmos,
a science forbidden the requisite conceptual resources will be unable to rec-
ognize or accommodate those truths. In that case, genuine understanding
of the cosmos will be truncated. Second, given that possibility, the widely
 Design in Nature 67

accepted “self-corrective” ability of science will be limited. If some relevant

truth is nonnatural, then the eventual failure of a proposed naturalistic
theory will lead not to subsequent acceptance of the correct (nonnatural-
istic) theory but at most only to replacement of the defective naturalistic
theory by another (ex hypothesi) defective naturalistic theory. Here again, if
self-correction is linked even indirectly to truth, this comes very near to an
implicit practical assumption of philosophical naturalism.

ACTUAL TROUBLE SPOTS?

The foregoing catalog of worries might seem to involve primarily specula-

tive, only potential, risks that methodological naturalism might pose for
science. As interesting as such “in principle” risks might be, are there any
traces of any serious, real life actual detrimental effects of employing even
the most unbending methodological naturalism in science? I think that
there are at least some hints of such cases, of which I shall discuss two.

Methodological Naturalism and Biology

With respect to the origin and diversity of biological life on earth, few
can imagine any serious naturalistic candidates beyond unguided evolu-
tion. Because methodological naturalism says that naturalistic candidates
constitute the entire catalog of legitimate, acceptable theories, and because
unguided evolution is the only theory listed in that specific catalogue, un-
guided evolutionary theory becomes the only scientific game in town and
thus the empirical default position. That is emphatically not to say that the
empirical evidence does not in fact strongly support an evolutionary theory.
I am not addressing that issue at all. It does mean that the relation between
theory and empirical data becomes somewhat anomalous. Evidence of that
peculiarity can be seen in statements such as the following from Richard
Dawkins: “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the
only theory we know that is in principle capable of explaining the existence
of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would
still be the best theory available” (his emphasis).29 Equally starkly contra-
empirical claims come from Matthew Brauer and Daniel Brumbaugh: “Of
course, such studies may not show the evolution of a new ‘kind’ . . . as
demanded by some neo-creationists. To scientists, however, such a concern
is simply irrelevant since evolution necessarily generates higher-level pat-
terns from lower-level processes.”30 Thus, when critics of evolution ask for
evidence that, say, microevolution can result in macroevolution, the appar-
ent response is that such questions of evidence are just irrelevant because
evolution just has to work as advertised.
68 Del Ratzsch

Of course, unless one takes the (seriously implausible) view that philo-
sophical naturalism is necessarily true, it will remain at least possible that
unguided evolution (or indeed, any other naturalistic theory) is in fact
wrong and that some nonnatural explanation is correct. That possibility
in conjunction with a strict methodological naturalism generates a curious
potential split between science and truth. That split surfaces in comments
from several critics of Creationism, for instance, Douglas Futuyma: “It isn’t
necessarily wrong. It just is not amenable to scientific investigation”;31 and
Michael Ruse: “It is not necessarily wrong, but it is not science”;32 and Niles
Eldredge: “It could even be true, but it cannot be construed as science.”33
This split reaches its most bizarre in Pennock’s resurrection of something
like the old Medieval theological “two truth” position. That emerges in the
following passage:

To be sure, this [referring to a statement about a particular Darwinian mecha-

nism] is an approximate and tentative scientific truth, not an ontological
(metaphysical) truth in the sense that it cannot rule out the possibility that
a supernatural Creator is involved in the process . . . Surely we may accept
that statement [referring to a statement concerning a different evolutionary,
genetic explanation] as true, even though, as a merely naturalistic scientific
truth, it does not rule out the possibility of an intelligent supernatural cause
. . . so it cannot be said to be absolutely true in the ontological (metaphysical)
sense. Similarly, the Creationists’ supernatural story may be a metaphysical
truth—God may have created the world 6,000 years ago but made it look older
as “Appearance of Age” creationists hold—but it is not a scientific truth.34

Pennock here distinguishes between “merely naturalistic scientific truth”

(presumably what a proper science defined by methodological naturalism
generates) and “ontological (metaphysical) truth” (what most of us would
call real truth). If we do make that distinction, then although mere natu-
ralistic scientific truth may often or even usually correspond to real truth, if
we mistakenly equate real truth with mere naturalistic scientific truth even
on such purely material matters as the age of the earth, we will (again) be
implicitly doing something akin to assuming philosophical naturalism.
When specific theories are cited as superior regardless of the data, or
when demands for supporting evidence are declared to be irrelevant, one
suspects that some deeper factor than mere empirical data and objectivity
may be doing some of the driving. In some specific cases, one can find clues
as to what the relevant factor is. The factor in the present case for Harvard
biologist Richard Lewontin is fairly evident:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is
the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the super-
natural. We take the side of science . . . because we have a prior commitment,
a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of
 Design in Nature 69

science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenom-

enal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence
to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no mat-
ter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute,
for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.35

Methodological Naturalism and Cosmology

Cosmology offers a number of intriguing examples of methodological
(and philosophical) naturalism, generating both resistance to some design-
tropic ideas and overly tenacious allegiance to other design-phobic ideas,
that is, both conformity to prohibitions and resistance to timely quitting.
Some of the well-known initial resistance to Big Bang cosmology (due to
its resemblance to creation-ex-nihilo theologies) might be classified as the
former, while the associated refusal of Fred Hoyle and others to abandon
steady-state cosmologies (pursuing them even to the point where they im-
plied that the majority of the known universe was anomalous) might fit
under the latter heading.
But of more present interest is the recent (and continuing) debate in-
volving fine-tuning, cosmological anthropic principles, and many-universe
cosmologies. Very briefly, it was for many centuries believed that life (and
species) as we know it was a result of deliberate and direct design. Darwin,
after years of seeking and developing a natural and mechanical explanation,
eventually proposed an evolutionary mechanism that was (it was argued)
capable of generating (or mimicking) apparent exquisite biological design by
blind natural means, that is, random variation sieved by natural selection (in
conjunction with some auxiliary processes). It was noted, however (even by
Darwin36) that evolution itself depended upon conditions and laws specific
enough to themselves suggest design. Subsequent scientific developments
began some decades ago to reveal just how specific the relevant conditions
had to be, for instance, just how very special, unlikely, and improbable a
place the earth was. Of course, the primary traditional means of overcoming
unfavorable odds is to multiply tries. The increasingly apparent vastness of
the cosmos, with its presumed numerous and varied planets (perhaps 107 in
our galaxy alone, by some estimates) seemed to offer ample opportunities
for the cosmos to produce suitable planets purely by chance. However, it also
began looking increasingly as if the laws, constants, and boundary conditions
necessary just to produce planets within a Big Bang cosmology were subject
to wildly tight constraints. Indeed by at least one estimate, the odds of all the
relevant factors being properly “tuned” for the bare production of planets (let
alone life) were one in 10229.37 Such apparent “fine tuning” impressed even
those unsympathetic to nonnatural explanations.38
70 Del Ratzsch

There was, of course, a readily available—indeed, nearly insistent—

nonnatural explanation: that the reason the basic nomic structures and
boundary conditions of the cosmos looked like they were deliberately de-
signed was because they were deliberately designed. The laws, conditions,
the parameters even of the Big Bang itself had been delicately adjusted
for subsequent life. Naturalists, however, seemed to be stuck with a brute
“aren’t-we-lucky-that-things-turned-out-in-this-hugely-improbable-way” as
their final answer. Both inside and outside science, rational explanation
typically trumps brute fact nonexplanations, so the ready availability of a
nonnatural explanation for the empirically determinable, basic character of
the cosmos created some conceptual unease for philosophical naturalists.
Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that it created an explanatory im-
perative. That may have been in part what Hoyle was feeling when despite
initially arguing that that apparent fine-tuning really was just coincidence,
he later said, “Such properties seem to run through the fabric of the natural
world like a thread of happy coincidences. But there are so many odd coin-
cidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account
for them.”39 In fact, since methodological naturalism is independent of any
procedure for determining when it is time to quit, running into this cos-
mological brute wall produced a practical explanatory imperative for many
methodological naturalists as well.
The subsequent response is well known. Because the standard procedure
for overcoming unfavorable odds is to multiply tries, the only available
naturalistic recourse was to multiply randomly varying universes—indeed,
to proliferate them to the degree required to swamp odds on the order of
123
one in 1010 . 40 Some simply postulated infinitely many worlds.
What exactly is the scientific situation with respect to such theories? One
presumably needs a mechanism for generating those worlds. Otherwise,
their postulation is just bald philosophical speculating—not science. There
have been a number of proposed mechanisms for producing the requisite
worlds. All are, of course, seriously speculative. On most tellings, the alter-
native universes are mutually inaccessible, meaning that from our world
their empirical status is tenuous at best.41 Confirming claims of their actual
existence would seem to be problematic. Falsifying claims of their actual
existence would seem to be problematic.
Furthermore, it appears that stepping back one level does not solve
any of the fundamental problems. The production of multiple worlds
intuitively would seem to require a structure of mechanisms, conditions
and capabilities at least as demanding—or fine-tuned—as the worlds being
produced. John Leslie, for instance, remarks, “Even when a Grand Unified
Theory is selected cunningly to achieve the desired results—which . . . can
look suspiciously like the ‘fine tuning’ which the inflationary hypothesis
is so often praised for rendering unnecessary—you may still be forced to
 Design in Nature 71

postulate a gigantic space containing rare regions in which inflation of the

right type occurs.”42 Others have made similar points (in this and related
contexts): Richard Swinburne says, “[T]he shape of the problem has in no
way changed by postulating more universes”;43 and Ernan McMullin states,
“[I]t is curious how the same challenge arises over and over.”44
As mentioned earlier, Richard Dawkins has (ill-temperedly) remarked that
design theories attempting to explain complexity in terms of a designer of
even greater complexity are “cowardly and dishonest.” Why that same moral
opprobrium should not attach to those trying to explain the fine-tuning of
our cosmos in terms of a comparably fine-tuned world-ensemble and a com-
parably fine-tuned world-ensemble generator is not clear.
The payoff for all these universes is supposed to be an explanation not
requiring a designer. Why that should be regarded as a payoff needs further
exploration. In the earlier case of the Martian bulldozer, a proposed explana-
tion that made no reference to design and intent would not be considered
to be a payoff so much as a blatant denial of the obvious. It is only within
the constraints of naturalism—philosophical or methodological—that a
design-free explanation of something that looks designed and intended could
automatically be considered a payoff. In any case, multiple-universe theories
add another level of complexity having some serious attendant problems
while reaping no obvious empirical gains.
Let me briefly mention two additional considerations. The first is this.
Throughout most scientific history, simplicity, elegance, and other allied
considerations played substantive roles in theory construction and evalu-
ation. One standard element in such considerations was various versions
of Occam’s Razor. Yet, the impulse to avoid design concepts at the cost
of countenancing huge rafts of alternative universes constitutes in effect
an abandonment of that principle. For example, Paul Davies writes, “In-
voking an infinite number of other universes just to explain the apparent
contrivances of the one we see is pretty drastic, and in stark conflict with
Occam’s razor.”45 Edward Harrison adds, “Take your choice: blind chance
that requires multitudes of universes, or design that requires only one.”46
In the case of infinitely many universes, Occam would be well advised to
bring along something more than a mere razor, perhaps something more
like a chainsaw.
In fact, one might suspect that there is no qualitative explanatory gain
from multiplying freestanding universes without end. Robert Boyle harbored
a related worry concerning one specific sort of atomism in his own day:

For he, that shall attentively consider, what the atomists themselves may be
compelled to allow, concerning the eternity of matter, the origin of local
motion . . . the infinity or boundlessness of space, the divisibleness or non-
divisibility of each corporeal substance into infinite material parts, may clearly
72 Del Ratzsch

perceive, that the atomist, by denying that there is a God, cannot free his
understanding from such puzzling difficulties, as he pretends to be the reason
of his denial; for instead of one God, he must confess an infinite number of
atoms to be eternal, self-existent, immortal, self-moving.47

The point for the present issue is that in adding infinitely many universes,
one may not be getting any ultimate explanatory traction and may be im-
porting more, and worse, puzzles than those with which one began.48 Of
course, similar things could be alleged concerning design theories as well.
They add not only an additional level of complexity (a designer) but one
that perhaps imports even more puzzles than does an ensemble of other
universes. There is, I think, one intriguing difference.
The rough history, recall, is almost cyclic. Something appears to be a likely
product of deliberate design. Often for philosophical reasons a natural,
mechanistic, nondesign explanation is nonetheless sought. Once found,
that explanation in its turn requires factors and conditions that in their
turn, seem to be likely candidates for a design explanation. However, some
deeper-level natural, mechanistic, nondesign explanation is again sought,
and, when found, it, too, exhibits characteristics that seem to invite a de-
sign explanation. It was this pattern that McMullin was referring to in his
earlier-quoted remark about the curiousness of the same challenge arising
repeatedly.
It is somewhat tempting to suggest that because we never get rid of the
initial appearance of the need for design explanations at each level and
that that need constitutes an explanatory requirement “all the way down,”
indicating that the only sort of explanations that can stop the regress is a
design explanation. The instant response, of course, is that whatever the
explanatory temptation at each level, natural and mechanical explanations
have ultimately proven explanatorily adequate at each of those successive
levels and that if such iterations cut any ontological ice at all, any such case
for design is paralleled by an exactly equally powerful case for naturalism.
I do not think that counter can be casually dismissed. But the fact that the
same explanation (design) suggests itself at each successive iteration may
constitute a hint that no qualitative explanatory headway is being made
by naturalistic proposals, and that the real explanatory promissory note is
simply being passed on unpaid. Consider this analogy. Were an alien oscil-
loscope found on Mars, we would suspect that a design explanation would
be demanded. Subsequent discovery of an automated Martian oscilloscope-
producing machine would change the location of the ultimate design input
but would not in the slightest erode the ultimate design demand because
that machine, in its turn, would be equally demanding of a design explana-
tion. (This, incidentally, was a point Paley, Whewell, and others were al-
ready on to two centuries ago.) Similarly, in the current cosmic case, that the
successive layers of proposed mechanical explanations differ at each level,
 Design in Nature 73

but never discharge the mystery of the recurring fine-tuning, may constitute
a regress, while the same possible design explanation might suggest that the
parallel design track exhibits a recursion, whose stable character really does
indicate an ultimate, ineradicable fact of design. I am not strongly push-
ing that idea, but it does seem to me that there is a potentially significant
difference here that might indicate a foundational priority for design over
ultimate brute mechanical naturalism.
If that is the case, then unless deliberately halted at some level, doctrinaire
conformity to methodological naturalism will guarantee that cosmology is
driven ultimately into sterility. (Recall that methodological naturalism has
no inherent stopping procedure.) Contrary to Lewontin’s earlier “no matter
how counterintuitive,” it may be that at some height of counterintuitivity
it really does matter.49

ONE MORE, SLIGHTLY QUIRKY, CONSIDERATION

I include this section with some trepidation. Whenever even in-principle

references to aliens arise in this context, the almost invariable temptation
is to dismiss such references out of hand as the proper province only of
loonies, such as UFO cranks and crop-circle devotees. It should be kept in
mind, however, that whether or not there is any serious present evidence
for aliens and alien activity, and what might be our proper rational stance
toward various issues (including design) were there any such evidence, are
two very different issues. The first may indeed at this point be the province
of loonies. The second is not. It simply is not a principle of reason that sci-
ence could not even in principle recognize any possible evidence of such
beings or such activity no matter what that evidence was, for example, an
alien craft landing on the Capitol lawn and proceeding to blow away the
Washington Monument.
A number of prominent scientists (Hoyle, Francis Crick, and others)
have argued that life could not have arisen by natural processes under the
prevailing early conditions and time constraints on earth, and that life
consequently had to have been brought here, deliberately or otherwise,
from elsewhere. It is at least possible in that case that life was specifically
engineered for earth conditions; in short, that life as we know it is an arti-
fact of intelligent design and deliberate agency. There may be no plausible
evidence whatever for such a view, but there is nothing inherently unscien-
tific in the idea that life as we know it on earth is a designed artifact, and
that it is at least in principle possible for us to discover that fact through
empirical investigation.
In fact, this line can be extended even further. It has been suggested by
various physicists (e.g., Andrei Linde and Edward Harrison) that sufficiently
74 Del Ratzsch

technologically advanced cultures (e.g., aliens) might have the capability

of generating artificial bubble universes. It seems in principle possible that
suitably advanced technology might even allow the specification of some of
the “natural” physical parameters inside such bubble universes, permitting
generation of what would appear to anyone inside such a universe to be
“cosmic fine-tuning.” Or things might go beyond even that. According to
Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde,

If I create an inflationary universe with a small density, I can prepare the uni-
verse in a particular state. . . . [I]f I am preparing a universe in some peculiar
state, I can send [a] message encoded in the laws of physics. . . . Let us imagine
that someone made our universe as a message. . . . To send a long message,
you must make a weird universe with complicated laws of physics. . . . The
only people who can read this message are physicists. Since we see around us
a rather weird universe, does it imply that our universe was created not by God,
but by a physicist-hacker? I don’t entirely think of this possibility as a joke.50

There seems to be no a priori reason for thinking that creatures devel-

oped within such a bubble universe (perhaps as an intended result of speci-
fication of various of the bubble’s physical parameters) would of necessity
simply be unable to determine the artifactual status of their universe. In-
deed, the higher the capabilities of those generating the bubble, the greater
the possibility of those developing inside the bubble having the capabilities
necessary to empirically determine the artifactuality and the designedness
of their “cosmos.”
Thus, so long as the potential cosmic artisans are technologically ad-
vanced but natural (in some broad sense), the position that our nature
is deliberately, intelligently designed and that empirical investigation can
perhaps reveal or establish that fact, is in principle scientifically legitimate.
That means that the ideas both of design as such and of design’s empirical
investigability as such are scientifically perfectly legitimate, and need have
no immediate religious overtones at all, either when applied to significant
portions of what we are accustomed to thinking of as the “natural” realm
or even to our entire universe. Thus, attempts to prohibit application of the
concept of design either to phenomena within nature or to nature itself, are
simply mistaken. There might, of course, be all sorts of nasty problems in
pursuing such investigation (e.g., problems with recognizing such design as
design), but those are not necessarily principle problems.
It is not at all clear what difference the identity of the artisan(s) should
make. Whether something is designed, who/what the designer(s) might be,
and whether or not the designer is supernatural are quite distinct issues. It
cannot be seriously maintained that one cannot legitimately admit within
science that something is designed unless one either knows or assumes that
the designer is not supernatural. One cannot seriously maintain that one
 Design in Nature 75

could not identify a Martian bulldozer as a product of deliberate design

unless one knew enough about the designer to know that he or she or it or
they or whatever was natural. It is perfectly obvious that a supernatural be-
ing, if there are any, could plunk a directly, miraculously created bulldozer
down on the surface of Mars. No human Mars landing team stumbling
across it would have to pretend not to be able to tell that that bulldozer
was a designed entity until and unless that supernatural possibility had
been eliminated. Therefore, even if it does turn out to be illegitimate to ex-
plicitly consider the supernatural within science, empirically determinably
designed phenomena could still be scientifically legitimately recognized
as designed even if their designer was in fact supernatural.51 Or alien. Or a
tipsy British crop-circle prankster.
Methodological naturalism or some other design prohibition may be a
good provisional, pragmatic strategy, as even Bacon and Boyle would agree,
but to try to wield it as a design conversation-stopper within science seems
to leap well beyond any justification it can muster, any track record it can
cite, and any future promise it can seriously make. Indeed, a doctrinaire
employment of methodological naturalistic prohibitions on what one is
permitted qua scientist to think, may ultimately work to the detriment not
only of free exploration within science but also of genuine understanding
even of the empirical realm around us.
The current popularity of such prohibition attempts makes a remark of
cosmologist Andrei Linde in a different context especially worth pondering:

A healthy scientific conservatism usually forces us to disregard all metaphysi-

cal subjects that seem unrelated to our search. However, in order to make sure
that this conservatism is really healthy, from time to time one should take a
risk to abandon some of the standard assumptions. This may allow us either
to reaffirm our previous position, or to find some possible limitation of our
earlier point of view.52

Taking that risk demands some courage, especially in the contemporary

herdlike secular academic cultural climate. But real commitment to genu-
inely understanding reality has never been for the timid.

NOTES

1. Part of this chapter also appeared in “Saturation, World Ensembles, and De-
sign,” Special issue, Faith and Philosophy, no. 5 (2005); “Proceedings of the Russian-
Anglo American Conference on Cosmology and Theology, Notre Dame,” 667–86.
I have also discussed some of the issues and points addressed in this chapter in
a number of other places, including “Design: What Scientific Difference Could It
Make?” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 56, no. 1 (March 2004): 14–25.
76 Del Ratzsch

“Intelligent Design: What Does the History of Science Really Tell Us?” in Scientific
Explanation and Religious Belief, ed. Michael G. Parker and Thomas M. Schmidt,
(Tubingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 126–49; “How Not to Critique Intelligent
Design Theory,” Ars Disputandi (2005), at www.arsdisputandi.org/; “Design and Its
Critics: Monologues Passing in the Night,” review of Intelligent Design Creationism
and Its Critics by Robert Pennock in Ars Disputandi (2002); and most particularly
“Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism, and ‘Turtles All the Way Down,’”
Faith and Philosophy 21, no. 4 (October 2004): 436–55; and other writings men-
tioned below.
2. The story here is significantly more complicated than usually portrayed—it
was not a simple case of design being blindsided by Darwin. See my “Intelligent
Design: What Does the History of Science Really Tell Us?” in Scientific Explanation
and Religious Belief, ed. Michael G. Parker and Thomas M. Schmidt (Tubingen, Ger.:
Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 126–49.
3. Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the Rainbow,” (lecture, Grand Valley State
University, Allendale, Mich., October 11, 1999).
4. I do find fine-tuning cases to be pretty powerful, but those cases have been
produced almost exclusively outside the IDM. There may also be biological cases
that are compelling, but not, I think, in the way IDM advocates think. See my “Per-
ceiving Design” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed.
Neil Manson (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 124–44.
5. Review of Of Pandas and People by Eugenie Scott, National Center for Science
Education (NCSE) Reports (Jan/Feb,1990): 18.
6. For instance, Norman F. and Lucia K. B. Hall, “Is the War between Science
and Religion Over?” The Humanist (May/June 1986): 26–27.
7. As my colleague Stephen Wykstra has pointed out in a personal communica-
tion, some historical thinkers (e.g., Robert Boyle) argued that nature itself might
have different characteristics in a theistic rather than a nontheistic universe, and
thus limiting science to the natural would not necessarily be equivalent to science
proceeding as if philosophical naturalism were correct. That distinction is usually
missed in discussions of methodological naturalism.
8. Eugenie Scott, “Darwin Prosecuted,” Creation/Evolution, no. 2 (Winter 1993):
42–47.
9. The difficulties may be significantly less than meets the eye for reasons I
have developed elsewhere. See my Nature, Design, and Science (Albany: SUNY Press,
2001).
10. Ruse, “Methodological Naturalism Under Attack,” in Intelligent Design Creation-
ism and Its Critics, ed. Robert Pennock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), 365–66.
11. Ruse, “Methodological Naturalism,” 365.
12. Murphy, “Philip Johnson on Trial: A Critique of His Critique of Darwin,” in
Intelligent Design Creationism, 451–69. Originally in Perspectives on Science and Chris-
tian Faith 45, no. 1 (1993): 26–36.
13. Scott, “Creationism, Ideology, and Science,” Annals of the NY Academy of Sci-
ence 775 (June 24, 1996): 518.
14. This is linked to the widely accepted failure of proposed demarcation criteria.
15. Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life (Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1982), 2.
 Design in Nature 77

16. Max Planck, “Religion and Natural Science,” in Scientific Autobiography and
Other Papers (London: Norgate, 1950), 177. In this connection, see the contribution
to this volume by David Van Baak.
17. Paul Davies, Are We Alone? (New York: Basic, 1995), 138.
18. Einstein is quoted as asking, “What does a fish know about the water in
which he swims all his life?” in The Quarks and Captain Ahab, ed. Sir Denys Haigh
Wilkinson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8.
19. Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honorable Defeat (New York: Penguin, 2001), 170.
20. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992),
131.
21. See George Douglas Campbell, “What Is Science?” in Good Words (April
1885): 244.
22. For brief discussion, see my Science and Its Limits (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-
Varsity Press, 2000), 77.
23. For more on this topic, see my “Design, Chance, and Theistic Evolution,”
in Mere Creation, ed. W. Dembski (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998),
289–312.
24. Robert Boyle, A disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural things; wherein it
is inquir’d Whether, And (if at all) with what Cautions, a naturalist should admit them?
(London: Printed by H. C. for John Taylor, at the Ship in St. Paul’s Churchyard,
1688), 237.
25. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 2d
bk., 7, para. 7, 119.
26. Robert Pennock, “Naturalism, Evidence, and Creationism: The Case of Philip
Johnson,” in Intelligent Design Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), 90.
27. Thomas Huxley, “The Origin of Species,” Collected Essays, vol. 2, Darwiniana
(New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), 52. This is a reprint of a review of Origin of
Species, Westminster Review 17 (April 1860): 541–70.
28. A fair number of vocal scientists reject the idea of there being any area of real-
ity for which science is not competent. As one example, see Peter Atkins, “Awesome
versus Adipose,” Free Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Spring 1998), at www.secularhumanism
.org/index.php?section=library&page=atkins_18_2 (accessed December 17, 2008).
29. Richard Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1987), 317.
30. Matthew Brauer and Daniel Brumbaugh, “Biology Remystified: The Scientific
Claims of the New Creationists,” in Intelligent Design Creationism, 297.
31. Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1988), 301.
32. Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 1995), 169.
33. Niles Eldredge, The Monkey Business (New York: Washington Square, 1982),
134.
34. Robert Pennock, “Reply: Johnson’s Reason in the Balance,” in Intelligent Design
Creationism, 104.
35. Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Times Book
Review 44, no. 1 (January 9, 1997): 31.
36. See Darwin’s 1860 letter to Asa Gray, in Autobiography of Charles Darwin and
Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), 249.
37. Lee Smolin, Life in the Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 45.
78 Del Ratzsch

38. Think of Freeman Dyson’s famous observation that it is as though in some

sense the universe knew that we were coming (Dyson, Infinite in All Directions [New
York: Harper & Row, 1988], 298) or Fred Hoyle’s comment about the possibility of
a superintellect “monkeying” with the physics (Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Pres-
ent Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20 [1982]: 16).
39. Quoted in Walter Bradley, “The ‘Just So’ Universe,” Touchstone (July/Aug
1990): 75.
40. Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 343–44.
41. Some—for example, Martin Reese, Lee Smolin, David Deutsch—have held
that empirical evidence of other universes is possible. In this connection, John Leslie
says, “Strong evidence for something . . . is whatever causes a puzzlement which the
existence of that something would reduce or remove” in Leslie, Universes (New York:
Routledge, 1989), 194. In that sense, the existence of other worlds might “explain”
the fine-tuning of this one. By that same principle the fine-tuning of our world
would constitute empirical evidence for supernatural design as well.
42. Leslie, Universes, 30.
43. Richard Swinburne, “Prior Probabilities in the Argument from Fine-tuning,”
special issue, Faith and Philosophy 22, no. 5 (2005): 651.
44. Ernam McMullin, “Indifference Principle and Anthropic Principle in Cos-
mology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24, no. 3 (1993): 359.
45. Paul Davies, Are We Alone? 121.
46. Edward Harrison, Masks of the Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 252.
47. Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natu-
ral Philosophy, in The Works of Robert Boyle, 3, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B.
Davis, (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 273.
48. For additional discussion of difficulties, see my “Saturation, World Ensem-
bles, and Design,” in “Proceedings of the Russian-Anglo American Conference on
Cosmology and Theology, Notre Dame,” special issue, Faith and Philosophy 22, no.
5 (2005): 667–86.
49. For additional discussion, see my “Natural Theology, Methodological Natu-
ralism, and ‘Turtles All the Way Down’” Faith and Philosophy 21, no. 4 (October
2004): 436–55.
50. Andrei Linde, Wired, 3.07, July 1995. Linde has made the same suggestion
other places as well. See, for example, John Horgan, The End of Science (New York:
Broadway, 1996), 101.
51. I have discussed this issue in more detail in “Design: What Scientific Differ-
ence Could It Make?” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 56, no. 1 (March
2004): 14–25.
52. “Inflation, Quantum Cosmology, and the Anthropic Principle,” in Science and
Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity, ed. J. D. Barrow, P. C. W.
Davies, and C. L. Harper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 449.
III
TRUTH TELLING AND
TRUTH SEARCHING
5
Reckoning with the Conquest of
California and the West: Josiah
Royce and American Memory1
Ronald A. Wells

WHY ARE WE INTERESTED IN THIS SUBJECT?

WHAT IS AT STAKE?

No one ever studied history. We study the past. The past is what happened,
but it is the world we have lost. History is our telling of the past. We can
neither know nor tell all of the past so we select aspects of it that we be-
lieve are the key aspects. History, then, is our construction of other people’s
lives, and we do that from where we stand, from our time. Doing history
is always a dialogue between the present and the past. Sometimes we ask
our questions of the past, while other times we invite the past to speak to
our time and place.
Over the past fifteen or twenty years, I have been interested in certain
questions. They coalesce around a central question that is expressed best
by the title of a recent book to which I contributed a chapter: The Politics
of Past Evil.2 In that anthology, a group of scholars asked how societies and
peoples that had experienced violence and civil discord were able to work
through the conflicts of the past—and differing memories of them—to ask
for forgiveness and to move forward to peace. Part of the answer lies in the
ability of one or both communities in the historic conflict to be able to ask
for forgiveness from the other. This must be preceded by a willingness to
make confession for past wrongs.
In this chapter, I look again at the conquest of the American West. We
are helped to focus our reevaluation by using the seminal work of the
historian and moral philosopher Josiah Royce. His classic—but largely ig-
nored—work was published in 1886. It gives us an insight into the way in
which conflicted histories can be negotiated and “the politics of past evil”

81
82 Ronald A. Wells

can be addressed. Royce confronts directly one of the main heroes in the
winning of the West. John C. Frémont, sometimes called the pathfinder,
was instrumental in gaining California and much of the southwest for
the United States. He was the first candidate for president offered by the
newly formed Republican Party in 1856. Royce’s work also is vital because
it anticipates and essentially confronts the work of the most important and
influential historian of the American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner.
Turner’s famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American
History,” to be discussed below, laid down an approving line of argument
about the frontier that informed much of American thinking about “movin’
West.” In short, Royce’s moral history of the conquest offers us today a kind
of case study in examining how history has been used to create a national
mythology that justifies the creation of the American empire. It also shows
us, by contrast, how history can also be redeemed if we put multiple stories,
confession, and justice as the central concerns.

THE IMPORTANCE OF JOSIAH ROYCE’S

CALIFORNIA FOR OUR TIME

In the mid-1980s, two books appeared that were important in reorienting

public discourse about the past and the future of American life: Robert
Bellah’s Habits of the Heart3 and Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of
Conquest.4 Later, two groups of scholars evaluated these books, and the au-
thors were given an opportunity for response. In both cases the celebrated
authors wrote of their own surprise in acknowledging that they had had a
nineteenth-century scholar in the back of their minds when writing their
books but had not said so. They both stated their previously unacknowl-
edged debt to Josiah Royce.
In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues reached back to
that incomparable observer of America—Alexis de Tocqueville—to discuss
what the core American belief in individualism had done to American val-
ues and beliefs. When a noted group of Catholic scholars critiqued Habits,
and one of them suggested the salience of Josiah Royce to the discussion
about individualism and community,5 Bellah responded,

I was embarrassed to discover that our own memory had lapsed in that the
authors of Habits did not credit Royce with the terms “community of memory”
and “community of hope” which play a central role in our argument. Royce
was in the background of several of us but we did not return to him in the
period when we were writing Habits.6

In Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Nelson Limerick accomplished a signal

success in collapsing the intellectual world given us by Frederick Jackson
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 83

Turner who had seen a discontinuity between the culture-shaping time of

the frontier and our own time. Rather, Limerick insisted, there were and
are fundamental continuities between that time and ours in terms of race,
ethnicity, gender, and economics. When Limerick reflected on her work two
years after the book’s publication7—in the context of an evaluation of Legacy
by a blue-ribbon group of scholars—she admitted some “failings” in Legacy:
“Perhaps most embarrassing [was] the unacknowledged, uncited status of
Josiah Royce. In a number of ways, Legacy is an argument for awarding
Royce his deserved status as the father of western history.”8 The purpose
here is not to fault Bellah and Limerick, but one observes that when two
prominent intellectuals write important books, and later both are embar-
rassed not to have acknowledged their debts to Josiah Royce, we know we
are on to something worthwhile about the importance of Royce’s work for
our own time. Moreover, as we focus on Royce’s seminal work on California
history, we join with others in seeking the wisdom he might offer by looking
again at Royce’s challenge to his own time. As we seek, with Kevin Starr and
others, to sort out the various meanings for us of the California founding
time, we do well to listen again to a writer who combined criticism of, and
admiration for, what was to become the California dream in the American
mind.9 Our rereading of a classic text like Royce’s can help us in the project
of deconstructing—and reconstructing—American memory.

JOSIAH ROYCE’S CALIFORNIA:

A STUDY OF AMERICAN CHARACTER

Josiah Royce, a young instructor at Harvard University, published a book in

1886 that was among the first serious histories of California. It has influ-
enced the imaginations of those who would interpret the meaning of the
American phase of western and California history. It is the kind of history
one might expect from a moral philosopher. Moreover, it presages by a cen-
tury our concerns with the whole genre of studies on history and memory,
which is what makes it so fascinating. It has a long nineteenth-century title
that no scholar would use today: California, From the Conquest in 1846 to the
Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character
(hereafter we will simply call it California).
Royce had not intended to be a historian of California. He was chosen
because the intended author for the California volume in The American
Commonwealth series died suddenly. The editor at Houghton Mifflin,
Horace Scudder, moved to fill the gap quickly, by talking with friends in
academic and business communities of Cambridge and Boston. He soon
came upon Royce, who had come to Harvard as a one-year replacement for
William James.
84 Ronald A. Wells

James said in a letter to a friend that he was enjoying the company of

Royce “who is just thirty years old and [a] perfect little Socrates for wisdom
and humor.”10 This little Socrates was chosen for the series not because he
was an academically trained historian of California but because he was
available through Harvard connections and because he was a native Cali-
fornian. He was to make a major name for himself as a moral philosopher,
teaching at Harvard for thirty years and writing more than a score of books
and many articles in philosophy. While it is his role as historian that inter-
ests us here, we cannot take Royce’s historical work out of the context of his
larger efforts in philosophy.11
Though not trained in history, Royce did his research and writing with
the concerns of a scholar, with meticulous attention to detail and docu-
mentation. In fact, he later told a friend that writing history was much more
difficult than writing philosophy because in history one had to stick to em-
pirical reality.12 Not only did he think and write like a scholar, he had the
good fortune of having had nearly unlimited access to the library of Hubert
Howe Bancroft. That library was to be the foundation for the Bancroft Li-
brary at the University of California. Bancroft is credited for having written,
along with his assistants, the monumental achievement of a multivolume
history of California, matched only in our time by the work of Kevin Starr.
Royce finished his more limited book before Bancroft, and Royce gave
Bancroft full credit in California. In sum, Royce was not only good as a
scholar, he was lucky as a researcher to have Bancroft’s help. Moreover, he
was unique in being the first scholar, lucky or otherwise, to write on the
state who was himself a native Californian. He brought an intuitive feel to
the subject and a passion born out of his desire to see the moral signifi-
cance of the new land of his birth. He was also unique in another respect:
in researching California, Royce asked his mother to write her memoirs of
being a forty-niner, which she probably would not have written without her
son’s request. Because of it, Royce wrote a better book, and we have one of
the best accounts of pioneer life from a woman’s perspective. A generation
later, Yale historian Ralph Henry Gabriel edited and introduced what Sarah
Bayliss Royce had called her “Pilgrimage Journey.”13
Royce’s sense for early California life was born out of a deep curiosity
about his native town, Grass Valley, which was itself only about a half-
dozen years older than Royce. His early experiences in the Sierra Nevada
were to fill him with wonder about the nature of society itself:

My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders

meant when they said this was a new community. I frequently looked at the
vestiges left by the former diggings of miners, saw that many pine logs were
rotten, and that a miner’s grave was to be found in a lonely place not far from
my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. . . . The logs and
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 85

graves looked old. The sunsets were beautiful. The wide prospects when one
looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive and had long interested
the people of whose love for my country I heard much. What was there then
in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered,
and gradually came to feel that part of my life’s business was to find out what
all this wonder meant.14

It was from an early age, he later recalled, that his ideas about the nature of
persons and society in community were formed:

I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the
Idea of the Community, although this idea has only gradually come into my
consciousness. This was what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sis-
ters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley, and wondered about the great
world beyond our mountains.15

The great world would, of course, be very large indeed under the scrutiny of
this mind of colossal energy, but, he always tried to balance the particular
and the universal, or, as he was later to say, the provincial and the great
community.
Royce’s personal interest in the history of California was lifelong. Al-
though he did not write professionally about California after 1891, the
whole of his philosophical work was part his working out the failure of,
and the need for community in his native California. For Royce the philos-
opher, abstract ideas came to life only in the realities of life as lived. As he
developed philosophical positions on loyalty, provincialism, and the great
community, California was never far from Royce’s mind. If there was one
single point to be distilled from Royce’s California and from his other work,
it is that humans cannot escape social duties. As Patricia Nelson Limerick
was later to write in Legacy of Conquest, “The cruel but common lesson of
western history: postponements and evasions catch up with people.”16
In the strictest professional sense, Royce stayed with California history
from 1884 to 1891. One recent historian, reviewing the historiography
of the Gold Rush, considerably overstates his case in a way that dismisses
Royce and disrespects the moral discourse for which Royce stood. About
Royce’s California, this scholar patronizes Royce as follows: “He lectured
the young state of California about its moral shortcomings in the tone of
an understanding but disappointed father. The lecture over, Royce returned
once more to the study of philosophy.”17 In fact, Royce began research in
Bancroft’s library in 1884 and stopped writing directly about California
history in 1891 only when his several publishers—Robert Underwood
Johnson, Millicent Shinn, and Horace Scudder—told him that the read-
ing public had had enough of his meticulous work, especially on John C.
Frémont.
86 Ronald A. Wells

I have read all of Royce’s writings on California. I have also read his per-
sonal letters in manuscript form in the archives at Harvard University and
the University of California at Berkeley, some of which were later collected
and published by John Clendenning. His writings and his letters, taken
together, reveal a man who may have begun his work on California in a
relatively light-hearted spirit, possibly unaware of the enormity of the task
ahead, but they also reveal a person who matured as a scholar and a moral
observer of society in the process. In the story of California, he saw the
triumph that others had seen but saw tragedy too; he saw the heroism that
other writers saw but treachery too; he joined with others in celebrating the
best in American character as shown in early California, but he also saw the
worst and was unafraid to say so. Because he could get past simple polari-
ties about the moral aspects of early California life, Royce received much
criticism, and he engaged in a fairly bitter battle for historical truth concern-
ing the years 1846–1856, and he would have continued it if necessary.
What strikes one in reading Royce’s California and his many journalistic
pieces in the battle of words that followed the book’s publication, is his
responsible, careful, and nuanced writing, as compared to what his letters
indicate of how he really felt about it. His letters reveal a person who is
shocked, even appalled at times, both by the story of early California his-
tory itself, but even more so by the attempted cover-up of odious aspects by
the participants and their descendants. In reviewing the documentary evi-
dence in Bancroft’s personal library, Royce began to give intellectual order
to a pattern of social arrogance and carelessness he saw emerging. There was
also the problem of the historical record being willfully distorted or muted,
either by the historical actors themselves or more typically by relatives and
friends who wished to portray a decent, even heroic, past when dispute and
dishonor also needed to be admitted.
Some scholars of this subject trace to Royce’s own unhappy childhood
and school days his disinclination to allow a heroic, manifest destiny type
of narrative to stand. It is alleged that, somewhere down deep in Royce’s
soul, he thoroughly disliked those who caused social exclusion or who bul-
lied weaker people.18 One does not know what to make of psychological
explanations for Royce’s work, other than that they seem plausible; whether
or not persuasive is another matter. In any event, Royce was a moral social
analyst who decried injustice. Moreover, he became downright angry with
those who lied about and tried to cover up the injustices they had perpe-
trated.
Many subsequent scholars, even those sympathetic to Royce, believe he
overdid it, both in terms of his verbosity and of his seemingly relentless
(some would say obsessive) pursuit of the legend of John C. Frémont. As to
the first point, any modern reader would question Royce on his verbiage.
Where one word would do, he used two. Several of his editors at the time
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 87

asked him to delete parts of his works. It seems he was the same way in
person. If one asked Royce a question, all the available space was filled by
the answer, leaving many questioners sorry they had asked.19 Royce was
nothing if not thorough, but he seems not to have mastered the difference
between thoroughness and verbosity. Thus, we are not alone in seeking
Royce’s wisdom in a leaner form. The other charge, that Royce went way
over the top in his pursuit of Frémont, for example, is not so easy to con-
cede. In the end, I think we must sympathize with Royce; even if he wrote
too much on the Frémont legend, that legend, as Royce lamented, would
not go down, despite the facts of the case. This chapter, then, risks join-
ing Royce in possible overemphasis on the Frémont affair, but since it is
crucial—both to later interpreters of California and to Royce’s credibility
in our eyes—we must follow the letter trail on this matter.
We will detail below some of the pertinent facts relating to the Frémont
controversy, but for now a few words will suffice. Captain John C. Fré-
mont, a well-known explorer, was in California in 1845–1846. When the
hostilities of the Mexican War began to impinge on California, Frémont
associated himself with a group of Americans along the Sacramento River
who were restive under Mexican control, and the Bear Flag revolt began.
The question, in 1846 and when Royce wrote forty years later, was this:
on what orders did Frémont act? Because the policy of the United States
was to welcome the Californios (Royce calls them native Californians),
not antagonize them, the conquest set in place an unfortunate pattern of
racial-ethnic relations in California that was difficult to overcome. Royce,
as a moral philosopher, deplored that pattern. The Frémont legend was,
and is, vital to California history: if Frémont was right, that he acted on
orders, then Californians must rightly regard him as their hero; if he had
no orders, and his actions poisoned ethnic relations, then he is the vil-
lain in the piece. Frémont was, after all, the first Republican candidate
for president, and he had a considerable reputation based on his early
California career.
When Josiah Royce began his research for California in the summer of
1884, he had access to Bancroft’s unique library of documents, memoirs,
and newspapers. It soon became obvious to Royce that things did not look
good for Frémont. Cautious and scholarly as he was, Royce wondered if
there was an alternative interpretation than what seemed to be developing
in his mind. As it turned out, a friend of his from Berkeley undergradu-
ate days—William Carey Jones, later to be a founder of legal studies at
Berkeley—was also a nephew of Frémont on his mother’s side. Jones
agreed to set up an interview between Royce and Frémont, and Royce sent
Jones the sorts of questions he wanted to ask (by then, General) Frémont.
Royce was deferential, saying that he need not even bother the aged hero
if documentary evidence could point to that which would satisfy Royce’s
88 Ronald A. Wells

questions.20 The Frémonts preferred an interview, which occurred in early

December 1884 at the Frémont home in New York.
Royce spoke with General Frémont and his wife, Jessie, the daughter of
Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who had been a prominent figure in ante-
bellum politics. Because of Royce’s access to Bancroft’s documents, he had
obtained a copy of an 1846 dispatch from Secretary of State Buchanan to
Thomas Larkin, the American consul at Monterey in the 1840s. The docu-
ment was vitally important because it disclosed both the American policy
in California and who was in charge of it. The policy of the Polk Adminis-
tration was clearly designed to bring California into the Union, but Larkin
was to ensure the harmony of that desire with the good feelings of the
Californios. Larkin, then, was the government’s secret agent in California,
not Frémont, and the policy was peaceful persuasion toward the Mexican
population.
During the interview, Royce kept quiet about the Larkin dispatch in his
pocket. The Frémonts insisted that no such dispatch existed and that Larkin
could never have been trusted by Polk for such a delicate assignment. They
insisted that Frémont was the government’s man in California.21 A recent
biographer of Frémont will not directly admit that Royce had the goods
on Frémont; rather he chose to attack Royce. Regarding the infamous “Lar-
kin dispatch,” the biographer writes, “Royce perversely did not reveal that
[he] had copied such a telltale document.”22 While there is little doubt in
Royce’s written account of the interview that he thoroughly enjoyed catch-
ing the great pathfinder lying, keeping silent does not necessarily reveal
perversity but caution. Royce realized two things: that for a young scholar
to deconstruct the Frémont legend would occasion stiff opposition, so he
had to be careful, and, part of that care was to verify his documents. The
one he had in his pocket was a copy of one of Bancroft’s copies. He believed
he needed to see the original before going public with it.
In the early spring of 1885, Royce made a quick research trip to Wash-
ington, D.C. He went to the State Department, and after some negotiations
over what today we would call national security issues, Royce was able
to see the original Larkin dispatch. By mid-April 1885, Royce knew what
he had to do. On April 14, he wrote his publisher, Horace Scudder, and
a key assistant in the Bancroft enterprise, Henry Oak, to tell the news.23
The originals in Washington finally and fully confirmed what they all had
thought, that is, that the documents in Bancroft’s possession were not only
true and accurate, but all that there was on the subject. Frémont was now
doubly damned: not only was Larkin surely the only agent and the policy
of peace toward the Californios the government’s only policy, there were no
instructions to Frémont at all. Royce now believed, as he told Oak, that he
could apply “the thumb-screw” to the Frémonts in a way he could not have
done when he had seen only Bancroft’s copy. Even so, Royce was a cautious
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 89

scholar and wanted to give the Frémonts another chance to exonerate them-
selves. On the same day, April 14, 1885, he wrote Jessie Benton Frémont,
disclosing what he had found in Washington, saying that the documentary
evidence did not seem to support the General’s view of events on the Sac-
ramento River in 1846. Royce repeated that he wanted to do justice to the
Frémonts, and he urgently requested them to reveal their secrets just as the
government in Washington had done.24
In the summer of 1885, Royce made another visit to the Frémonts. He
later reported to Henry Oak in Berkeley what had transpired. Royce pleaded
with the Frémonts for something new from them that would shed a differ-
ent light on the Bear Flag Affair now that the government’s secrets were out.
The conversation was cordial, Royce wrote, with the General “dignified and
charming,” and Mrs. Frémont “calm, sunny and benevolent.” In the face of
the facts, Royce told Oak, Frémont “lied, lied unmistakably, unmitigatedly,
hopelessly. And that was his only defence [sic].”25 Even so, Royce tried yet
again to find a way of escape for the Frémonts. Already to Oak, Royce had
given some wiggle space, suggesting that the problem was not so much
with events as with the General’s memory of them (“that his memory and
not his design is now the deceiver”).26 Royce wrote once again to Jessie Fré-
mont, suggesting, though not in so many words, an honorable way for the
General to be let off the hook. With his book nearly finished now, Royce
asked Mrs. Frémont, “How shall I explain these facts consistently with Gen-
eral Frémont’s present memory?”27 Significantly for our story, Jessie Benton
Frémont never replied to Royce’s letter.
Royce’s California was published in 1886, causing quite a stir among
those interested and involved in the early history of California and in the
reputations made in those years. Royce was surprised by the virulence of
the attacks on him and his book and the friendships it would cost him; he
was equally surprised at the lengths he would have to go to defend what
he had written.
We now take a few pages to summarize the actual contents of the book,
it is enough for now to say that Josiah Royce’s venture into the waters of
California history was far stormier that he had imagined it would be. It is
not so much that he was naive, as one historian has recently charged28 but
that the issues he raised were—and are—troublesome to those who care
about California history. Royce’s book, in the end, allows us to begin to see
an alternative narrative for the early history of California.

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF CALIFORNIA

Royce’s California revealed his independent mind. Of himself he said, “Be-

cause I am a Californian [I am] little bound to follow mere tradition.”29 In
90 Ronald A. Wells

fact, his rendition of early California history flew in the face of a traditional
American, that is, manifest destiny, viewpoint. Royce wanted his history to
be more than merely a factual recounting of early days; he was interested
in the events of history for themselves but even more so for “their value as
illustrating American life and character.”30 That paradoxical character was
displayed, as Royce saw it, on the one hand as careless, hasty, and blind
to social duties; on the other hand as “cheerful, energetic, courageous and
teachable”(2).
Royce does not really doubt a certain inevitability about the eventual
American conquest, nor, in his view, did the Californios. What the latter
feared was the coming of bad Americans. The good American, to Mexi-
cans and to Royce, is represented by Thomas Larkin, who was “the only
American official who can receive nearly unmixed praise” for his work in
California (38). The bad American is represented by John C. Frémont. For
Royce, history was not to be a happy patriotic story. Rather, he wrote the
book “to serve the true patriot’s interest in a clear self-knowledge and in the
formation of sensible ideals of national greatness” (49). California, there-
fore, is the true parent of Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest, for in it Royce sees
that conquest is indeed the right word, and that the attitudes of conquest
continued after 1846. Those attitudes, Royce insisted, which the American
“national character made us assume towards the Californians at the mo-
ment of our appearance among them as conquerors, we have ever since
kept, with disaster to them, and not without disgrace and degradation to
ourselves” (49).
The author then proceeds to the lengthy and detailed analysis of John C.
Frémont’s various escapades. Royce is particularly hard on the leaders of
the Bear Flag uprising, especially Robert Semple and William B. Ide. Royce
mounts the evidence against Frémont and finds his actions wanting in moral
character; at one point saying they amounted to “atrocity” (135). Neverthe-
less, Royce ends the Frémont section with a magnanimity and grace beyond
the judgementalism that some historians think Royce evidences. He says he
cannot fully fathom “what inner motives” drove Frémont, yet Royce knows
that Frémont’s actions were disastrous for the nation because they put an
enmity between the American and the Californian.
The very basis of the state reveals this uneasy conscience about the con-
quest, Royce insists. The lines most quoted by scholars and journalists from
California are these: “The American as conqueror is unwilling to appear in
public as a pure aggressor . . . The American wants to persuade not only the
world, but himself, that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even
when he violently takes what he has determined to get” (151). While Royce
would have no part in such hypocrisy, he would not judge all Californians.
He rather preferred noting the irony that while the Mexican War had come
to be regarded with “shame and contempt,” the acquisition of California
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 91

continued to be regarded as “a God-fearing act . . . [and part of] our devo-

tion to the cause of freedom” (156). In this respect, Royce hoped his book
would be a reminder and a guide for the future:

So that when our nation is another time about to serve the devil, it will do so
with more frankness, and will deceive itself less by half-conscious cant. For
the rest, our mission in the cause of liberty is to be accomplished through a
steadfast devotion to the cultivation of our own inner life, and not by going
abroad as missionaries, as conquerors, or as marauders among weaker peoples.
(156)

The singular injustice perpetrated by Frémont and Commander Sloat was

the second conquest of the Californios in 1847, thereby sealing an ineradica-
ble division between Anglo and Mexican Californians. When the Californios
resented, sometimes resisted, all this, they came to be seen by Americans
as rebels and traitors, which, Royce thought, forged “one more link in the
fatal chain of injustice” (194).
The Gold Rush is portrayed within Royce’s overall thesis of order and dis-
order. With thousands of new settlers arriving in 1849–1850, the new state
was subjected to further scenes of racism and antiforeign feeling. Drawing
from his own family’s difficult trek to California in 1849, Royce noted the
religious aura often associated with arrival in California and the consequent
attitude of high expectations among the new settlers. They hoped for, even
expected, a great deal, so that when foreigners got in their way there was
often violent reaction. Royce regards such actions as a disgrace to American
ideals of liberty and fairness. So-called miner’s justice was more than dis-
graceful; it retarded social maturity in the Anglo-American community by
instilling a kind of thinking that quick, unambiguous justice could be had
cheaply. Royce’s passion shows clearly when he described the easy opera-
tion of lynching juries in convicting a “greaser” on little evidence: “One
could see his guilt, so plainly, we know, in his ugly, swarthy face, before
the trial began . . . And if he was a native Californian, a born ‘greaser,’ then
so much the worse for him” (363–64). Yet, despite the passion, or perhaps
because of it, Royce marvels at the way in which mining communities could
learn from this “inner social disease” and begin the process of renewal
within a generation. They were, in the end, able to found real communities,
that is, in his terms, to move “from social foolishness to social steadfast-
ness” (375).
In Royce’s discussion of San Francisco’s first ten years, we find “dramatic
incidents that belong to the painful side of the struggle for order” (378).
He contradicts thoroughly an early version of pioneer mythology that
reveled in the “wicked” history of the city. To the contrary, the legend of
gambling men and easy women were “but the froth on the turbid current”
(398). The transient quality of early San Francisco life did indeed leave the
92 Ronald A. Wells

stain of individuality that forsook social duty, but that was overcome by
institutions of a conservative character, especially churches and families
that showed people their social duty. The committees of vigilance were,
of course, of great concern to the early history of San Francisco, and once
again Royce goes right to the heart of the matter. There was a great deal of
crime and corruption in the early 1850s. Royce does not so much blame
the obviously guilty malefactors (e.g., the fraud, Henry Meiggs) as the
complacency of society for not making social responsibility a top priority.
In the famous case of the murder of the reform-minded editor, James King
of William by James Casey, Royce was the first scholar to see the signifi-
cance of the social composition of the vigilance committee. It seems that
“the best men” of San Francisco thwarted mob rule by asserting its own
social and economic power. It was, as Royce noted, “[a] businessman’s
revolution” (440).
Royce’s final subject is the emotionally charged dispute over land titles.
He wanted respect for the guarantees given the Californios at the time of the
conquest. Most of the guaranteed land titles were not honored because of
what Royce called “the rapacity” of “predatory disregard” by the Americans
(467). The Land Act of 1851, according to Royce, only slightly dignified the
wholesale movement of land from Californian to American hands. Worse
yet, for Royce, was that the land manipulated away from the Californios did
not end up in the hands of ordinary Americans but in the greedy hands
of speculators and lawyers. This was, he says, to cause lasting injury to the
whole state of California.
In conclusion, Royce restates that California history is more than a local
or regional concern. In his view, California in the 1850s was an immature
society characterized by social irresponsibility; by people who “love mere
fullness of life and lack reverence for the relations of life” (500). Finally,
the community did find a kind of social salvation, but only because it
learned the lessons it had heretofore “despised and forgotten.” For Royce,
it was only by Californians’ confessing that past to each other that the way
forward could be found.

ROYCE’S CALIFORNIA AND

“THE NEW WESTERN HISTORY”

There has been a sea change in the way we think about American history. It
has happened in the past generation, and its consequences are still shaking
American academic life. We should look into the new way of doing history
to see how Royce’s insights have continuing salience.
Among the vast literature about historical study there is one recent book
that is singularly useful in demonstrating the ways in which history has
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 93

changed. It is Telling the Truth about History, by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt,
and Margaret Jacob.31 By “telling the truth” Appleby and her colleagues
do not mean to imply that other, prior historians were telling lies. Rather,
they mean that there was once a single narrative about American history
that most Americans (African Americans and Native Americans excepted)
accepted as part of their heritage. It was a story of achievement, of how a
nation of immigrants made the first liberal democracy, and how that na-
tion became the economic success story of modern world history. Appleby
and her colleagues suggest that there is an increasing emphasis on diversity.
When historians extend the range of American history beyond dominant
groups, the historical picture changes. Moreover, there is a new emphasis on
the standpoint of the historian her- or himself. Just as acknowledging the so-
cial location of historical subjects is important in getting a more fully orbed
picture of reality, so is the intellectual location of the historian important in
terms of the questions asked and the answers sought. As the Appleby team
(importantly, three women), writes, “We routinely, even angrily, ask: whose
history? Whose science? Whose interests are being served by these ideas and
stories? The challenge is out to all claims of universality.”32
This idea—what we call “the social construction of knowledge”—has
transformed how we think about the history of the American West. Ameri-
can history, in its academic, professional setting, grew up with the history
of the West. In a path-breaking essay in 1893, “The Significance of the Fron-
tier in American History,”33 Frederick Jackson Turner articulated a vision
for American history that has been hard to shake. While many important
points can be adduced from Turner, two are vital: that American interaction
with the frontier provided an essential way of understanding the develop-
ment of democracy in America, and that the frontier closed about 1890,
thus ending forever the most American phase of American history.
Several generations of historians have reacted to Turner in a variety of
ways. Most importantly for our purposes, the newer versions of western
history ask different questions than did Turner and his followers. Today,
we want to know the experience of women, natives, and other “outsiders”
because we want to know a total history of the West, not just “how the West
was won.” Moreover, the practitioners of this newer mode of historical
discourse question the whole notion of conquest in moral terms. Instead
of how the West was won, we look at the historic treatment of natives, non-
whites, women, and even the land itself, and we might ask how the West
was abused, oppressed, and, some might even say, raped. This, in short, is
a discussion of a different order.
Larry McMurtry, the novelist, is mistaken to say that these new kinds of
questions and histories amount to the “failure studies” of American Western
history.34 The intense work of Patricia Limerick, Donald Worster, Clyde Mil-
ner, William Cronon, Richard White, Linda Schlissel, and others do indeed
94 Ronald A. Wells

ask searching, even searing, questions about the triumphalist viewpoint that
was taught in most American history texts until fairly recently. McMurtry
may be right to remind us that some of the uncomfortable truths coming out
in the new Western history have long been known, but, he vitiates his own
point, and unintentionally vindicates Limerick and others in noting that
Americans typically have not wanted “to receive bad news from out West.”35
In the end, McMurtry is doleful, asking, “Are our myths safe for a few more
years, or must we westerners face up to living with nothing more stirring
than our suburbs now that John Wayne is dead?”36 What is lost in the new
story is not the real American West; that was always, as Woody Guthrie ob-
served, “hard, ain’t it hard” for the people and the land. For McMurtry and
others, what is lost is the West of the imagination. He reports having once
noted sadness in his aged father’s eyes, a sadness begotten of having known
the newness of the West and now to know that his children would never see
it. While one does not belittle McMurtry’s wounded memory, the historians
of the newer mode also see sadness in aged eyes, but they are those of the
native people on marginal reservations and of the migrant workers picking
fruits and vegetables in the Imperial Valley. The conquest was about them
and their ancestors, and Patricia Nelson Limerick is surely right to call our
attention to the unbroken links between the past and the present.
The new western historians, especially Limerick, have been criticized from
another direction, that they, especially she, have made too much of their
own discovery of the tragic elements in western history. Especially forceful
is the work of Forrest Robinson37 who often astonishes the careful reader in
questioning the motives and integrity of Limerick. We have already noted
that Limerick admitted to being embarrassed in acknowledging she had
omitted explicit discussion of Royce’s California in her Legacy of Conquest. I
prefer to take Limerick at her word, that she apologized for the oversight,
and, if there would be a new edition of Legacy she would discuss Royce.
Robinson, however, is not so sanguine. He notes that Limerick’s hope for a
historian of the American West who could bring in the tragic element—as
C. Vann Woodward had done for the South—and suggests that she ignored
Royce in order to promote her own originality in that regard.38 How, one
asks, does Robinson know this? While it is possible to concede that some
of Limerick’s and Donald Worster’s early work was dismissive of prior his-
torians, I do not recall them attacking another scholar the way Robinson
does Limerick. Even Royce’s sustained attack on John C. Frémont was more
generous that Robinson’s on Limerick.
The concerns of McMurtry and Robinson, to be fair, are important to
scholars and students who would look anew at the history of California. As
McMurtry himself writes, it is the West in our heads that we cannot let go
of, “the very explorers who began the destruction of the Garden could not
bear to admit that the Garden had been destroyed.”39 Robinson celebrates
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 95

Royce for going against the temper of his own time and for displaying the
courage to confront triumphalist ideologies. The issue for this historian is
not faulting Limerick and others for forgetting Royce but being glad that
they remember him and his insights now; we can face the future more real-
istically because we have acknowledged the past more courageously. To di-
rectly speak to McMurtry’s lament, we need not give up all the stories of the
past even as we acknowledge the more recently discovered stories of other
actors in the California drama. We need not give up the stories of hardship,
bravery, courage, and generosity now that we also know that there were, at
least, equal measures of cowardice, treachery, greed, and ill-gotten luxury.
Historian Richard Etulain has described with care and sensitivity the sorts
of morally nuanced, socially complex and self-reflective stories that are
needed for the new history to unite past and future generations.40 It was not
Royce’s goal, nor should it be ours, to subvert one major narrative about
the West in order to raise up another but to disclose the multiple nature of
realities in the West and especially California.
Kevin Starr, whose multivolume history of California has been previously
mentioned, distinguishes himself once again in a recent article, as Califor-
nia’s preeminent historian. Even as he congratulates the recent historians
for their new viewpoints, he asks that we not lose sight of what he calls
“the founding time” of (American) California. In the context of the Gold
Rush he concedes that it was not worth the cost of one Indian’s child’s life.
He writes with both insight and deep feeling, “Would it be better that the
Gold Rush never happened? Is that what we are saying? Is that what we are
saying when we contemplate the tragic dimensions of experience? Would
it be better that there were no California? That we not be here? Which is to
say that America not be here?”41 Starr approvingly quotes Patricia Limerick,
in her opening of the Gold Rush exhibit in Oakland, that human beings
regularly do bad things. Starr, a practicing Catholic, invokes the Judeo-
Christian tradition by calling these bad things sins, which, when taken
together, “constitute a grave burden on the present because these sins are
now a part of our living history.”42 Starr still wants to affirm the good and
socially useful aspects of early California history, but, for him, that affirma-
tion must always be in tandem with an acknowledgement of “the sins of
the fathers,” and a determination “that these sins are not being recommit-
ted in our own time.” This is seen as California’s “experiencing a prophetic
probe, for better or for worse, of the larger American experience.”43 At the
end of the article in which these words are written, one finds a reproduction
of a cartoon drawing of Josiah Royce reading from a very large text!
As Robert Hine has suggested, Royce saw the history of the American West
“as metaphysics,” in which society moves from the willfulness of individual-
ism to the social cohesion of genuine community.44 The glue that holds the
community together, and at the same time prevents collectivist statism, is
96 Ronald A. Wells

what Royce called loyalty, a word probably better redefined in our time as
“solidarity.” Some Roycean interpreters think this to be an essentially “reli-
gious” insight that has much to say about American values. Whether or not
readers of California will agree with Royce’s religious insistence will, of course,
depend upon how that person constructs the moral life. Kevin Starr, the re-
doubtable critic who is conscious of sin in California’s past presses us further:
“And yet the moment we mention sin, we must also mention repentance,
atonement, healing and forgiveness . . . But for all the tangled burden of the
past . . . [California] is struggling toward redemption and the light.”45
Yet, despite Starr’s impressive litany of religious actions, there is one
missing: confession. It is precisely here that Royce’s California is so com-
pelling. Royce thought the early history of California to be of “divinely
moral significance.” He wrote his history for “any fellow Californian who
may perchance note the faults of which I make confession.”46 He shows a
way of social salvation, of solidarity within a community; for Royce that
was the only saving grace. Whether or not Kevin Starr is right—that with
redemption the “Pacific City on the Hill” can still flourish47—is for future
generations of Californians to determine. Royce neither condemns nor con-
dones all actions in early California history. He, too, seeks the balance that
McMurtry, Starr, and others are looking for: of not now emphasizing too
much what Starr calls the dark side of California history and losing what
McMurtry wants to retain—the West of the imagination.
Royce’s California—a study of American character as the subtitle pro-
claims—is the type of book that can help us develop that fully orbed his-
torical consciousness that any healthy and virtuous society needs.

NOTES

1. Parts of this chapter have appeared elsewhere: in an introduction to a new edi-

tion of Royce’s California (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2002) and in a heuristic
article in Fides et Historia in 2003. “History and memory” is a bright, new field in
the discipline of history, having its own journal of that name, published at Indiana
University’s Center for the Study of History and Memory. This chapter originated as
a lecture for the Calvin College Worldview Lectureship, but as a scholarly matter, it
takes its cue from the large literature on history and memory, too voluminous to be
listed here. Some of that literature can be accessed by visiting the website of the Cen-
ter at Indiana University noted above. A celebrated scholar on the subject, whose
work has illumined the possibilities of this new subfield, is David Blight of Yale
University. His award-winning book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American
Memory, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002) is already a classic.
2. Daniel Philpott, ed., The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation and the
Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
2006).
 Reckoning with the Conquest of California and the West 97

3. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in

American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
4. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the
American West (New York: Norton, 1987).
5. Frank M. Oppenheim, “A Roycean Response to the Challenge of Individu-
alism,” in Beyond Individualism: Toward A Retrieval of Moral Discourse in America,
ed. Donald L. Gelpi (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989),
87–119.
6. Gelpi, Beyond Individualism, 222.
7. Donald Worster et al., “The Legacy of Conquest by Patricia Nelson Limerick: A
Panel of Appraisal,” Western Historical Quarterly 20 (1989): 303–22.
8. Worster et al., “Legacy of Conquest,” 317.
9. Kevin Starr, America and the California Dream (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973).
10. William James, The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (London: Long-
mans, Green, 1920), 1:249.
11. For biographies of Royce, see especially John Clendenning, The Life and
Thought of Josiah Royce, rev. ed. (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999);
Robert V. Hine, Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1992).
12. John Clendenning, ed., The Letters of Josiah Royce (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1970), 178.
13. Ralph Henry Gabriel, ed., A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and
Early California (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932).
14. Josiah Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan,
1916), 5.
15. Royce, Hope.
16. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 95.
17. Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American
Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 298.
18. Clendenning, Life and Thought, 32–38; Josiah Royce, California (New York:
Alfred Knopf, 1948), xiii.
19. Clendenning, Life and Thought, 330–31.
20. Josiah Royce to William Carey Jones, September 23, 1884. Jones Papers,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Hereinafter, letters will be noted by collection and
“Berkeley.”
21. Clendenning, Letters, 141–45.
22. Andrew Rolle, John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 260.
23. Josiah Royce to Horace Scudder, April 14, 1885. Scudder Papers, Berkeley.
Josiah Royce to Henry Oak, April 14, 1885. Oak Papers, Berkeley.
24. Josiah Royce to Jessie Frémont, April 14, 1885. Copy in Oak Papers, Berkeley.
25. Josiah Royce to Henry Oak, August 8, 1885. Oak Papers, Berkeley.
26. Josiah Royce to Henry Oak, August 8, 1885.
27. Josiah Royce to Jessie Frémont, August 20, 1885. Copy in Oak Papers,
Berkeley.
28. Rolle, Frémont, 260.
98 Ronald A. Wells

29. Josiah Royce, Fugitive Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1920), 7.
30. Josiah Royce, California (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), vii (hereinaf-
ter all references to the book will appear parenthetically in the text, with the pages
listed referring to the original 1886 edition).
31. Jocye Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1997).
32. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth, 9.
33. This famous essay is most conveniently found as the first chapter in Frederick
Turner The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920).
34. Larry McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” The New Republic (Octo-
ber 22, 1999): 32–38.
35. McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” 33.
36. McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” 32.
37. Forrest G. Robinson, The New Western History (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1997).
38. Robinson, New Western History, 80.
39. McMurtry, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” 38.
40. Richard Etulain, “Western Stories for the Next Generation,” Western Historical
Quarterly 31 (2002): 5–23.
41. Kevin Starr, “The Gold Rush and the California Dream,” California History 77
(Spring 1998): 58.
42. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 61.
43. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 66.
44. Hine, Josiah Royce, 166–85.
45. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 67.
46. Royce, California, 501.
47. Starr, “The Gold Rush,” 67.
6
Better Media with Wisdom
from a Distant Place
Mark Fackler

The Ghanian scholar George Ayittey titled his recent book on Africa, Con-
tinent in Chaos. He writes that Africa is a rich continent: natural resources,
oil, diamonds, and manganese. It is a productive continent: cocoa, coffee,
tea, and palm oil. Its beauty is fabulous: pristine ecology and unrivaled
wildlife, but “paradoxically, a continent with such abundance and potential
is inexorably mired in steaming squalor, misery, deprivation, and chaos. It
is in the throes of a seemingly incurable crisis.”1
That observation deserves our attention. From lack of food security to
political corruption to AIDS, from cost-prohibitive education to tribal
conflict to decrepit health care delivery—at every level—this appears to be
a lost continent. Supporting Ayittey, Peter Schwab called his book Africa, A
Continent Self-Destructs. He writes,

By the late 1970s and into the 80s and 90s, much of the continent had de-
volved into chaos. Little was left of the optimism that had permeated African
leaders and Western academics in the first decades of independence, the 60s
and 70s. Although many intellectuals including myself attempted to hold
onto some enthusiasm, it really did seem apparent that Africa south of the
Sahara had matriculated into a period in which pandemonium, war, predatory
governments, disease, poverty, famine, and Western neglect were strikingly in
ascendance. As the world entered the new millennium, sub-Sahara Africa had
all but collapsed into anarchy and viciousness.2

The dimensions of this African problem are far-reaching and complex

and provide many challenges for the world. Africa faces enormous eco-
nomic challenges, presenting problems that I strongly suspect that world
economic networks could afford to ignore. Africa provides challenges for

99
100 Mark Fackler

the world in its political problems, not because of any obvious strategic
importance, but because the porous borders of even pro-Western African
nations are more and more open to gun traffic and malefactors.
I prefer, however, to focus on another human problem to which this con-
tinent of chaos offers us wisdom, that is, the task of communicating with
each other: telling stories, sorting out values, negotiating differences, solv-
ing problems, celebrating, connecting, improving, prospering, and grow-
ing. Our focus on communication leads us first to look at the fascinating
development underway in sub-Sahara Africa, lest we miss an opportunity
for our own development. In the West, we trust tools of technology to carry
us along, often naively believing that technology is good as an end in itself;
in the Southern Hemisphere generally, tools still serve the lively engage-
ment of a first-order oral culture where the sound of the voice, as Walter
Ong cogently described it, is still the sign of life.3
The central themes of African history are the achievement of human
coexistence with nature and the building up of enduring societies. Hu-
mankind traces its earliest movement to the spread of peoples across the
continent of Africa. John Iliffe notes that these “frontiersmen colonized
an especially hostile region of the world on behalf of the entire human
race.”4 The prehistory of these early societies includes the emergence of
food-producing and gathering communities that tilled poor soils through
unpredictable rainfall, insects, and disease. Agricultural and food-sharing
cooperatives—early expressions of communitarian social behavior—first
appeared in sub-Sahara Africa. Long before the atomistic individual of
the Western Enlightenment was invented, people of conscience and self-
reflection learned that survival required strategies of interdependence and
mutual aid. In contrast, communitarian practice in North America is pri-
marily associated with the marginalized enclave or utopian sect, and its
theorizing has only recently generated a literature. Communitarian practice
has been evident in Africa from the beginning. Neither empire nor indi-
vidualism, writ large across Western history, has distracted Africans from
the sense of mutuality and social interdependence that have been integral
from the earliest expressions of their cultural development.

COMMUNICATION THEORY

Technologies of mass media came to Africa with the missionaries and

colonists. Empire, church, and commerce needed efficient means of mes-
sage delivery. Africa’s first newspaper was established by the late 1920s.
Broadcasting began for an African audience in the 1940s.5 The indepen-
dence movements of the mid-1900s changed the way mass media were
deployed—focusing on the complex social task of nation building. Kenya,
 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place 101

for instance, found media an essential key to self-governance. Jomo Ken-

yatta came out of a British jail to lead the newly independent republic in
1963. He and other Kenyan leaders faced the daunting task of uniting tribal
and language groups, some of whose territory extended across the 1885
boundaries established by European mapmakers. Kenya emerged from its
independence struggle with an elected parliament dominated by the Ki-
kuyu tribal group, with the best land still held by British farmers and nearly
all businesses owned and operated by Asian merchants. More than fifty
languages were heard within its tightly knit rural communities. Outside its
two cities, people had little sense of national identity. In this context, mass
media, especially radio, became the vehicle by which political constituen-
cies were developed. Newspapers were more difficult to circulate and car-
ried the literacy barrier but nonetheless were the effective mouthpiece of
political elites.6
Elsewhere on the continent, mass media likewise played a strong and
contentious role in national development.7 In Ghana, the first of Africa’s in-
dependent states, Kwame Nkrumah started the first national news agency,
developed national radio broadcasting, and began a television service be-
fore his ouster in 1966. Nigerian political debate flourished immediately
after independence, and media provided the venue for voices protesting
oppression and appealing for support and foreign aid. However, the first
wave of democratic politics, which involved competing parties no longer
under colonial control, failed to move that country’s three major ethnic
groups toward consensus. Through the various independence movements,
media was employed to turn subjects into citizens.8
Kenyan media, established by the British and appropriated by Kenyan
nationalists to use for the goal of winning independence, has not meant
publishing freedom.9 Kenyan journalists are still subject to legal action for
criminal libel, a sure sign of the fragile relationship between Western con-
cepts of free speech and the African realities of political power.

A WESTERN VERSION

In the West, the right to express the beliefs of conscience emanates from a
doctrine of the individual as moral center. Responsibility and freedom are
grounded in the individual. The Enlightenment taught us that dominion
by decree, tyranny imposed from above, violates human value and dignity.
The classical liberal theory of the press emerged in seventeenth-century
Britain as John Milton wrote the famous Areopagitica, his defense of the
right to freely express one’s conscience in an open marketplace of ideas.
“Let truth and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a
free and open encounter?”10 The “classical liberal theory of the press” arises
102 Mark Fackler

out of Milton’s thought, but Milton did not give us that name. It comes
from a small book written by three scholars at the University of Illinois in
the mid-1950s. They titled their book Four Theories of the Press. This little
book, which drew worldwide appeal, draws four paradigms representing
the relationship of political power to public expression of conscience and
thought.11 These scholars describe how Britain, where the modern press first
appeared, went from an authoritarian model12 to a classical liberal theory
articulated by Milton, John Lilburne, and the Puritan dissidents. One of the
hallmarks of Western emancipation from feudalism and intellectual slavery
was this brave democratic movement that held conscience higher than em-
pire, and publication by voice, gesture, or technology a natural right. Most
people in North America have lived happy and successful lives without ever
hearing of this 1950s book. However, nearly every African student of com-
munications and journalism has read or been lectured to from this little
book. The freedom to speak one’s mind is something quite exciting, daring,
and visionary in their context.
In the West, stories of people who came to believe that the freedom to
speak and publish are treated as history. This first-order right to freedom of
expression, popular from the Medieval era to the Enlightenment, has been
displaced by the perspective of postmodern theorizing. Grounding free
speech in an appeal to human rationality would be considered quite old-
fashioned today. In young democracies in Africa, however, the idea of free
expression without punishment or fear of retribution is refreshingly new. In
most African universities, writers and editors who have run for their lives or
served prison terms for daring to speak up, to criticize, and to suggest reform
walk into class. This is contemporary history. For example, in 2002, a reform
coalition won national elections in Kenya, opening up press freedom to a
point previously unknown. Yet, when I first taught there less than ten years
earlier, I was told to be cautious. Some of the writers I was interviewing were
the kind who would prompt police to knock on your door and escort you di-
rectly to the airport. Free speech is fragile. Even in the United States with our
long tradition of First Amendment law, speech is tempered and suppressed
and adjudicated constantly. Imagine the climate for free speech if a nation’s
laws are not codified, if final decisions lay with a judiciary that serves at the
will of the executive, and where tradition dictates that dissenters are pre-
sumptively criminals. Stephen Carter has argued that the way a nation treats
dissenters is a barometer of its political and social well-being.13
This discovery of the open marketplace of ideas, largely rhetorical though
it be, is quite exciting and now well known in African media studies. One
can see creative and competent uses made of it to increase government
accountability and to foster and promote indigenous development. In se-
lected classrooms and even in newsrooms, one can feel the pulse of a young
African mind discovering the power of creative thinking and writing, media
 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place 103

making, and symbolic discourse. In broadcast studios, native language

speakers are addressing national issues in a mother tongue. In Op-Ed pages,
citizens urge their bureaucratic institutions toward reform.

DAZZLING TURNABOUTS

In the West, technological prowess walks hand in hand with epistemologi-

cal confusion. For example, we now face the colossal confusion surround-
ing acceptable restrictions on content based on notions of good and true.
We lack an agreed-upon place to stand. This right of conscience to speak
freely—to challenge tradition, to say what is on your mind, to build a me-
dia empire by whatever means you have, to advertise and sell with every
persuasive skill you can muster, to entertain by appealing to a freely chosen
appetite—the vision of a free individual speaking freely has run its course.
The classical liberal theory of the press has come up short.
In the West, we have learned that freedom to speak is not the final demo-
cratic truth but that freedom, too, needs boundaries if people, communi-
ties, and nations are to prosper and thrive. We now concede that sexually
provocative speech has its limits, that speech advocating racial violence has
limits, that unregulated commercial messages make victims out of buyers,
and those politicians who lie can do irreparable harm to the community.
We have now come to recognize that the open marketplace needs bound-
aries in the form of community norms or social values, or else speech be-
comes the contest of sophists and social trust dissolves.14
How do we make sense of this theoretically? We have been emancipated
from the authoritarian model of the press and cannot go back, yet the
liberal model has left us without capacity to draw boundary lines. Even
as the ink on Four Theories of the Press was drying in the 1950s, the smoke
from classical liberalism’s demise was filling the nostrils of intellectuals and
media practitioners. The fourth and last of the four theories presented by
the Illinois authors was the social responsibility theory. This theory called
for a return to the notion that persons live in community and that com-
munity norms are important. The authors of Four Theories did not develop
this communitarian notion nor perhaps even sense its power. However,
the dozen people who fashioned this fourth theory, all members of Rob-
ert Hutchins’ Commission on Freedom of the Press, included the likes of
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and philosopher William Ernest Hocking.
Their wider writings began to fill in the theoretical framework lacking in
the earlier work.15 Others, too, sensing a real-world discovery that needed
to be explored, have built on such concepts as care, the speech act bounded,
and the reality of power—the need for all voices, not just those capable of
owning a press or a transmitter.
104 Mark Fackler

Without returning to the monarchial authoritarian theory or advocating

the discredited communist-socialist theory, these movements in the last
half century have struggled to define and defend a communitarian theory of
the press, not a compromise between state power and personal freedom but
a theory built on the recognition that freedom comes bounded by norms,
and relationships precede individualized personhood.
Theorizing about communications—its freedoms and responsibilities—
needs a new start. We may find that start where technology is still young,
and where humanity still talks. The African continent may experience sheer
chaos, hurt by AIDS and violence, raped by corruption, and drained of
brain power, yet this fragile, dusty continent, fertile for malaria and dysen-
tery, may be the most fruitful place to look for intellectual foundations for
deepening a communitarian theory of the press.

COMMUNICATION THEORY AND MEDIA FREEDOM

Mining for intellectual foundations may take you to Athens, Paris, London,
New York-Boston-Cambridge—but Addis Ababa? Kampala? Bujumbura?
This journey sounds like it involves the wrong flight. In the West, the right
to freely speak one’s conscience arose from the insight that humankind,
created in God’s image, is morally conscious, self-aware, and holds in the
soul the capacity to connect with others, to empathize, and to seek the di-
vine. This grant underscored the inherent value of every person. Obviously,
these ideas are contested today. Pluralism long ago called into question
the legitimacy of any one set of theological convictions presumed to be
the only authentic set. Humanism, pragmatism, postmodernity, and even
sociobiology proposed alternate readings of the human person. Empiricism
challenged any theory that could not be verified by repeatable observation
or measurement. Therein lies the tale. Does the global community today
have any commonly accepted notion of who we are? Today a person’s
moral claim to worth rides on a continuum between economic capacity
and a generic, free-floating appeal to dignity.
African theological reflection offers a possible way out of this dilemma.
It fixes human worth at a different point than the West and interprets the
image as a grant of essential human relatedness. The Nigerian scholar Og-
bonnaya argues that divine essence is communal, and thus being made in
God’s image means humankind is made for community akin to that of the
Godhead—fundamentally related and ontologically equal while distinct in
person and function. Ogbonnaya grounds human intersubjectivity in the
belief that prior to creation, the Godhead was dialectical yet undivided. He
portrays classic Trinitarian theology as a coming-to-be in time of persons in
dynamic relation but now in history fulfilling a mutual essence that is once
 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place 105

ineffable and visible.16 Alexander Lucie-Smith, a long-time member of the

East African theological fraternity, concludes that morality “begins with the
Trinity at its heart. It is a morality that puts personal communion and com-
munity life as central . . . a Trinitarian faith will stress the communal nature
of human existence as opposed to seeing humans as solitary animals.”17
Shrouded in mystery as it is, this communal movement grounded in the
Trinity illuminates for these scholars something of the reason why human
culture seeks connectedness. Laurent Magesa, one of central Africa’s promi-
nent theologians, affirms that “in the African worldview, belonging is a
central principle of being human.”18 Apart from relationships, a person has
no identity. This sense of the unity of the cosmos predated the arrival of
Christianity in Africa, claims Ambrose Moyo, as “African eyes see the world
made up of supernatural, invisible realities. People must live in solidarity
with the rest of creation.”19
Not all African scholars support this theological mood. The Ghanaian
philosopher Kwasi Wiredu insists that African communitarianism requires
no theological grounding at all. The intellectual orientation of the Akan
people of Ghana, he contends, is fundamentally empirical. For Africans,
the divine does not exist outside the known universe. To link ethical uni-
versals to a supernatural other is to think gibberish and to speak nonsense.
For the Akan, morality is what promotes social well-being by harmonizing
interests. Had the ancient Akan written a classic ethic, mutual aid would
have been the keynote, not rationalist appeals to duty or injunction re-
vealed by special circumstance.20 Wiredu insists that centuries of human
interdependence and mutual aid have established a worldview inherently
part of the practical necessity of daily survival. One sees this played out at
every level. Poorer Africans own one shirt; seconds go to relatives otherwise
shirtless. Rich Africans accumulate and keep wealth only by careful sharing
with wide circles of relational claimants; the contentedness of even distant
relations assures the safety of centralized family assets.
From Southern Africa comes another indigenous strain of African reflec-
tion on culture and ethics, closely akin to Wiredu’s communalism. Called
Ubuntu, it was recently introduced to the West’s press theory colloquium
by Clifford Christians.21 Ubuntu, a Zulu/Xhosa word, is commonly trans-
lated “humanity toward others.” It is a normative concept that triggers
related concepts such as generosity, patience, kindness, and mutual respect.
A person who understands Ubuntu must be a person who recognizes his
or her place in the social order, even creational order, and that place has
significance. One’s humanity is developed in this notion of mutuality from
childhood on. One’s accomplishments, obligations, possessions, intellect,
and commitments are all shared and open to public review. To be a person
in this kind of cultural milieu, one must talk or perform. Nonparticipation
is a contradiction. Seeking advantage at the expense of another is irrational.
106 Mark Fackler

Arguments obviously occur, to be resolved by the wisdom of the collective.

Dilemmas arise: in a draught, who gets water, children or cattle? All living
things bear a relationship to all others.
Ubuntu’s kinship to communitarianism is evident, as both celebrate
the priority of relationships over individual autonomy. The nature of the
person is social and interdependent; moral norms begin with care; moral
blame reaches its nadir in betrayal and treachery. Ubuntu has not been
worked out in voluminous literature but lived out in the hardscrabble cor-
ners of a continent known for poverty, political corruption, disease, and
chaos.22 Ubuntu describes the life of survivors whose experience manifestly
teaches the need for human connectedness at every level: economic, spiri-
tual, communicational. Ubuntu is not only the summary of African moral
and social wisdom but also its hope. Deeply social yet akin finally to the
point and purpose of human work and speech, Ubuntu represents a matrix
of ideas and behaviors that undergird claims that a nation’s press owes
moral obligation to its people, its neighbors, as sisters, and its brothers.
Ubuntu holds promise for women of Africa as well; those who traditionally
are child-bearers and laborers, not leaders and hardly citizens, but that is
changing rapidly.23
If communitarianism in the West is a reaction to Enlightenment indi-
vidualism, in sub-Sahara Africa communitarianism is the way the world
is constituted, whether cast in terms of theological interrelatedness, as
Ogbonnaya argues, or in humanist common faith and survival, as Wiredu
prefers. From all sides, the African would appear to regard community as
nothing less than the way things are, a precondition of knowledge, even
of language. To speak sensibly is to address social reality in communitar-
ian terms. The Kenyan secretary general of the World Council of Churches
writes that Africans live in a “social tapestry of relationships which sustain
the life of each and all.” The individual is defined “only in relation to
others.”24
What if this communitarian impulse is brought face to face with global-
ization? What if profit-hungry media empires, for instance, meet the Afri-
can communitarian who has never contemplated his or her neighbor as a
market? Can money-driven media practice typical of the West coexist with
communitarianism, where relationships are not primarily instrumental
and obligations not determined so much by contract as tradition and care?
This meeting of two worldviews is already happening. As a result, state-run
media systems across sub-Sahara languish. The entertainment they offer is
political propaganda, and few listeners or viewers pay serious attention. At
the same time, successful commercial channels are foreign owned. These
channels offer programming produced in Europe, America, and India. The
advertising content for which this programming exists appeals to the top
one percent of the economic strata. Who else can afford to buy the adver-
 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place 107

tised products? We watch and wait for the social fallout, the restructuring.
Yet, there are hopeful signs.
The communitarian approach I have described supports what we call in
the West, accessible media channels. Media should not become the voice of
the elite, says Kenyan press critic Philip Ochieng: “There can be no freedom
of the press where only a handful of people exist who can efficiently and
quickly collect, process, and sell ideas. No country can enjoy freedom of
expression in a situation of underdevelopment.”25 Wiredu of Ghana knows
that as villages become cities, the technologies of speaking and writing
must be available to representative political publics. Media systems aimed
at profit or political monoculture cannot enhance dialogue, and without
dialogue community withers.
Stepping back, we ask if this is the core issue on the continent in chaos?
What about child soldiers losing their consciences in nearly every war zone;
or starvation, unemployment, illiteracy, the fumes that wreck air quality in
the cities and the potholes in every road system? What about orphans and
refugees? Let us talk about national armies pillaging their own people, or
countless young girls kidnapped for pleasure. Against these African realities,
to argue for accessible media channels may seem superfluous. Clean water
and sewage treatment are arguable priorities, but communitarian theory
insists that all of these social realities are issues about which interested
publics must be speaking, in order to coordinate and achieve real solutions.
Media literacy and many voices in the public circle are not elixirs, but they
are components of public well-being. Accessible media is the modern invi-
tation to join the village palaver.
That palaver, described by the Congolese Jesuit Benezet Bujo, is about the
moral life and the development of character.26 In African communitarian-
ism, no human life is a prop to another’s happiness. Life is sacred. Every
democratic statement on human rights supports free expression and the
duty of each person to speak truthfully in context. African communitari-
anism understands these human needs and responsibilities. Much of the
chaos in Africa is due to the loss of these precolonial commitments. The
continent needs a recovery of confidence in the rightness of peaceful, ani-
mated, cooperative political progress; of dialogue with oppositional voices;
and of human sympathy across ethnic and tribal lines. The present conflicts
in Africa and Africa’s seven million refugees all scoff at the notion of com-
munitarian revival, but what are the alternatives?
Community based media reinforcing communal values have been effec-
tive examples of popular participation and ownership. In Kenya, when the
Rainbow Coalition defeated KANU in national elections, the electoral vic-
tory was secured by people, politically active, using media to report precinct
results before the expected ballot-box corruption could be engineered. This
significant event and its implications should be noted and explored.27
108 Mark Fackler

In the last five years in Africa, the Internet has been the primary media
for breaking old silences and retrieving open dialogue. Marshall McLuhan
in The Mechanical Bride describes the impact of media technology on the
human person.28 Are we capable of making strategic adjustments, he asks,
or will the maelstrom of technology dash our culture, our humanness, on
the rocks of fragmentation, individualism, and greed. The maelstrom—
technology and technicized efficiency, in Jacque Ellul’s terms29—is our
problem as well. Will future public discourse in the West show integrity and
genuine other-centeredness? Will technology—our use of it, our response
to it and our incorporation of its power—make sophists, objectivists, or he-
donists of us all? The bedrock communitarianism of Africa is that peoples’
contribution to a partnership we need.
Those characteristics of African communitarianism so needed by the
West include life-affirming dialogue. Even the tenacious, though irrational,
beliefs associated with ethnic hatred are amenable to change if dialogue is
steady and caring. Africans who write about their own communitarian cli-
mate suggest that, in contrast to the West, public talk there is not bound by
commercial or class constraints.30 African communitarianism is expansive.
For example, the dialogue concerning human rights is a vigorous conversa-
tion with calls for greater government guarantees for the press, for the rule
of law, for the special needs of children and women, for literacy and the
preservation of minority languages, and for basic education for all.
Tokundoh Adeyemo describes the core belief of nearly all African reli-
gious groups: “God is, hence we are.”31 In African traditions, this core works
itself out in elaborate interconnections of spirit and nature, animistic and
fetishistic. However, Christian faith recalibrates those relationships around
a beneficent creator-redeemer, a rescuer whose self-sacrifice is humanity’s
ultimate hope. The public envisioned in the Bible’s story of redemption are
culturally diverse collaborators working it out, enlarging, embracing, enno-
bling, and rehearsing their identities, values, meanings, and telos.

THE CULTURAL COVENANT

Is the West ready to receive this gift from Africa? Federico Mayor, former
director-general of UNESCO, articulated the malaise of advanced capitalism:

We cannot fail to observe the increase in soul-sickness at the very heart of the
most prosperous societies and social categories that seem best protected from
misfortune. The heart itself seems prey to a curious void. Indifference and
passivity grow. There is an ethical desert. Passions and emotions are blunted.
People’s eyes are empty and solidarity evaporates. Grey areas expand. Amnesia
wins out. The future seems unreadable. We witness the divorce between fore-
 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place 109

cast and plan. Long-term vision is discredited. Now and then we are truly sick
at heart.32

Mayor recounts the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, symbol of the cel-
ebrated demise of the controlled state and warns that celebrations were
premature: “Today we are witnessing the economic success of a system [cor-
porate capitalism] based on the concept of liberty that has forgotten equality
and solidarity alike. This success is coupled with an ethical vacuum and with
an absolute lack of purpose.”33 Reaching for his point, Mayor urges, “The mo-
ment of truth has arrived—the fate of the human race itself may be at stake,
so weighty will be the combination of dangers jeopardizing our future.”34
These words read like a refrain from the prophet Joel. We live in desper-
ate times. Pointing toward solutions, Mayor proposes four contracts, which
he hopes will become an agenda for action. These contracts are not legal
agreements, but pledges affirmed by communities that direct resources to-
ward beneficent ends. The first contract he calls the social contract, which
addresses all aspects of poverty.35 The second contract, the natural contract,
addresses matters of science, development, and the environment.
He calls the third contract, the one that engages communication and com-
munity, the cultural contract. This one covers languages and media, especially
digital media and the new social architecture that rides on those media.
Our social world is constituted by symbols that carry meaning for us.
Symbols change as needs, goals, and social visions change. Language is an
important part of this symbolic world, but music, color, gesture, sound,
and signage create and sustain meaning too. Mayor’s cultural contract
entails the creation of a media infrastructure that generates more talk, con-
ducted without coercion and leading toward greater freedom and creativity.
If freedom means the absence of coercive restraint, then social institutions
that seek human well-being should eagerly rescind the privileges of power
to let talk follow its course. When freedom needs moral restraint, com-
munities must talk to establish the boundary line between creativity and
degeneration.36
Media professionals are taking note. A wonderful new study titled Good
Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, surveys journalists around North
America and finds disillusionment and cynicism emerging from the im-
mense disparity between mission and reality. One media professional said,
“Screw journalism. It’s all a fraud anyway.”37 Another commented, “I see
the country drifting in this mindless direction and the only people with the
fortitude to stand up to it are going to save us.”38 Canadian editor Kalle Lasn
laid out the problem and the challenge: “The next revolution will be in your
head. It will be a propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative
visions of the future. We must identify the core ideas that guide us toward
a sustainable future.”39
110 Mark Fackler

The world ahead will need reasons to embrace the stranger and to enlarge
community. This capacity must be a corporate treasure that engages our
emotions, minds, and passion for service. Perhaps we need new signage.
This corporate treasure of human community is well described by the
Swahili word heri, meaning “good, right, prosperous, whole, full, happy,
hopeful, and content.” In the New Testament’s Beatitudes, heri equates to
blessed, the sum of all you want to be. Heri and blessed go beyond the trite-
ness of modern idioms and capture a concept that all cultures desire. To
find our way to heri, though, we need help from every part of the world and
the wisdom its traditions offer. For public media, heri promotes stories that
challenge our stereotypes, that give courage under duress, that celebrate
honesty and loyalty, moving us toward the good. For example, when a
decade ago Canadians identified excessive media violence as the trigger to
mounting violence, Canada’s Radio-Television and Telecommunications
Commissions negotiated industry-wide agreements to protect youth from
excessive exposure to violent programming. This kind of effort leads us all
toward creative recovery of human care.40
The Maasai of East Africa have a failsafe method for peacekeeping. It
does not involve a greater force used against a lesser force. The inventory of
Maasai weaponry, however, is quite primitive: spears, knives, clubs. These
tools of forcefulness are also nearly identical in length, weight, sharpness,
and hardness throughout the Great Rift Valley. The failsafe Maasai method
for peace is just this: when a tribal elder raises a stick, hostilities end. Weap-
ons are sheathed as warriors disengage. The injured are given care; clubs
and shafts give way to talk. Of course, you need practice for this method to
work. You must want your community to survive, as well as your adversary’s
community. You must recognize wisdom that transcends local complaints.
You must understand your own connectedness to a larger project that you
together with your neighbor will help create.
In the developed West, we have much to learn from this continent in
chaos. News coverage, advertising appeals, and entertainment program-
ming shape our vision and our values. Those who make it, and we who use
it, must do better at tapping the communal potential of media, adjusting
their aims, directing their symbol-making power toward the bonds that
unite—those qualities of humanness that mark us, that cause us to imagine
what “created in God’s image” is meant to mean.

NOTES

1. George B. N. Ayittey, Africa in Chaos (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 6.
2. Peter Schwab, Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2.
 Better Media with Wisdom from a Distant Place 111

3. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1967), 33. Ong’s seminal research presented the thesis that sound rather than
sight denotes the presence of life.
4. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 1.
5. Louise Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 70, 155.
6. Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa, 103.
7. Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa, 206.
8. Mahmood Mamdani explains this distinction in Citizen and Subject (Princ-
eton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
9. Levi Obonyo Owino, Growing in the Cradle (PhD diss., Temple University,
2005), 86.
10. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644) (New York: Appleton, 1951), 50.
11. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the
Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1956), 7.
12. Frederick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1965), 120–26. The Star Chamber is a reference to the
seventeenth-century English courtroom, painted with stars on the ceiling, where tri-
als of political dissidents, speakers, and publishers were conducted.
13. Stephen Carter, The Dissent of the Governed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 6.
14. Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Harvest, 1996), 302.
15. Robert D. Leigh, ed., A Free and Responsible Press (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1947), passim.
16. A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, On Communitarian Divinity (New York: Paragon,
1994), 69.
17. Alexander Lucie-Smith, Foundations of Moral Theology (Nairobi: Paulines,
2006), 72.
18. Laurent Magesa, Christian Ethics in Africa (Nairobi: Acton, 2002), 6.
19. Ambrose Moyo, “Material Things in African Society: Implications for Chris-
tian Ethics,” in Issues in African Christianity, ed. J. N. K. Mugambi and Anne Na-
simiyu (Nairobi: Acton, 2003), 3:51.
20. Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 21.
21. Clifford Christians, “Ubuntu and Communitarianism in Media Ethics,” Ec-
quid Novi 25, no. 2 (2004): 235–56.
22. Christians, “Ubuntu and Communications,” 241.
23. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitvch, African Women (New York: Westview Press,
1997).
24. Samuel Kobia, The Courage to Hope (Nairobi: Acton, 2003), 43.
25. Philip Ochieng, I Accuse the Press (Nairobi: Acts Press, 1992), 190.
26. Bénézet Bujo, The Ethical Dimension of Community (Nairobi: Paulines, 1998),
35.
27. Personal conversations with leaders of the ballot watchdog movement, July
2005.
112 Mark Fackler

28. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon, 1951), v.

29. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York:
Knopf, 1965), passim.
30. Kobia, Courage to Hope, 107.
31. Tokunboh Adeyemo, “Unapproachable God: The High God of African Tra-
ditional Religion,” in The Global God, ed. Aida Besancon Spence and William David
Spencer (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1998), 138.
32. Frederico Mayor, The World Ahead: Our Future in the Making (New York: Zed,
2001), 5.
33. Mayor, The World Ahead, 18.
34. Mayor, The World Ahead, 14.
35. Mayor, The World Ahead, 17.
36. Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, 302.
37. Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, and William Damon, Good Work:
When Excellence and Ethics Meet (New York: Basic, 2001), 147.
38. Gardner and Damon, Good Work, 126.
39. Gardner and Damon, Good Work, 127.
40. Sissela Bok, Mayhem (Reading, Mass: Addison–Wesley, 1998), 153.
IV
IMAGINING A WORLD
7
Gender Partnership:
A Care Theory Perspective
Helen M. Sterk

Many people seem to think this is a postfeminist era. Amazon.com lists

151 books dealing with the postfeminist era. However, far more people
argue that we live in a “feminized era” as reflected in the 8,410 results in a
similar Amazon key term search. A widespread feeling seems to exist that
the need for feminism is past and that we have reached a cultural moment
when women and men not only share equal rights and opportunities but
women actually have more rights and opportunities than men. After all,
laws prohibit most discrimination on the basis of sex, and the only jobs
not open to women seem to be those of priest and pope. However, even a
cursory examination of several key areas of life shows that discriminatory
treatment based on gender still is alive and well.1 From the moment of birth
and throughout life, gender matters. Consider, for example, several key life
contexts: birth, media representation, sport, the economy, business, and
politics.
In the case of birthing, women’s choices are becoming more, rather than
less constrained. Technologies for testing fetuses and monitoring babies’
conditions during labor have become more and more commonplace. Insur-
ance coverage rarely extends to anything other than doctor-guided, hospital-
based births. Caesarean deliveries are framed as ways to regulate birth and
avoid pain. Added up, these routine birthing practices remove control from
women and their caregivers.2
In the media, male and female celebrities now share the public stage.
Women, however, tend to disappear after age forty, while men such as Jack
Nicholson and Clint Eastwood routinely are featured not only as leading
men but as romantic leads well into their sixties, even seventies. In sport,
women have joined men in taking to the field. Title IX mandated that sport

115
116 Helen M. Sterk

opportunities be made available to all women in schools that receive fed-

eral funding on an equal basis with men. However, ever since its institution
in 1972, Title IX has been contested. For example, in 2003, the George W.
Bush administration created a commission whose mission was to change
regulations to favor male sports over female. After long debate, Title IX
was reaffirmed. Notwithstanding, the percentage of women intercollegiate
athletes involved in competitive sports remains at a low 30 percent, even
though women make up closer to 65 percent of college and university
populations.3
In the economy, the wage gap between women and men has been nar-
rowing. In the 1980s, American women earned 59 cents on average for
every dollar men earned, which has risen to 77 cents currently for white
women.4 Women of color lag even further behind, earning 67 cents on
average in comparison to all men if they are black, and an even lower 54
cents if they are Latina.5
In business, statistics indicate that the higher the position, the greater
the probability that the manager is a man. In 2006, only 16.4 percent of
Fortune 500 corporate officers were women; of those only 9.4 percent held
what the research organization Catalyst calls “clout titles” (vice president
or higher).6 At the current rate of growth, Catalyst projects that forty more
years will be needed in order for women to achieve parity with men in
corporate life.
In medicine and law, women appear to have made great strides. How-
ever, gender hegemony emerges in the fact that as women begin to out-
number men in certain specialties, both the prestige and the pay plummet
in those specialties.7
In politics, women are running for political office, closing in on a run for
the presidency. However, in 2006, only sixteen women served in the Sen-
ate, seventy-one in the House of Representatives (in each case, roughly 16
percent of the legislative bodies), and only nine governors were women. In
fact, the U.S. ranks sixtieth in the world (out of 187 countries) in terms of
women’s representation in national government.8 Today, as it was histori-
cally, the more things seem to change in gender relations, the more they
stay the same.
The paradox leads me to ask, “Why do inequities between women and
men continue? What dynamics maintain those ‘glass walls and ceilings’ that
appeared to be cracking in the late twentieth century?” Why is there still
such currency to the idea that a feminized era is something to be feared?
Inequities remain in place due to a dominant cultural worldview that
frames women and men as opposite. This worldview crosses secular and
religious boundaries. In such a worldview, women and men are seen as un-
able to understand each other at all. At best, they are presented as comple-
mentary to one another in a gender hierarchy, where men remain dominant.
 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 117

I would like to argue for an alternative, one that recognizes the gendered
qualities of life but honors the fluidity of the meaning of gender. Different
circumstances call for different responses. Fluid gendered responses bend
and bow in a relational dance. Instead of opposition, this flexible concept
of gender relations draws upon ideas of partnership. This concept contrasts
with an emphatic, predetermined complementarianism that dictates action
based on a rigid sense of sex roles. Instead, in partnership, gender relations
are set loose from predictable sex roles and allowed to form, reform, and
shift, given the dynamics of the persons and the situations involved.
To move through this argument, first, I will lay out a way to think about
worldviews and their roles in gender relations. Second, I will discuss gen-
der within an oppositional framework and contrast that with a framework
of care, which reflects a worldview of partnership. Finally, I will present
a scenario of gendered life that will illustrate care at work within a policy
context.

WORLDVIEW THINKING

We operate out of a set of life assumptions that guide our choices for action
and communication. This is what a worldview is, both normative and for-
mative. In my case, I operate out of two worldviews, feminist and Christian.
Often, they overlap, sometimes they even coalesce and inform each other.
Naming these worldviews as central to my scholarship threatened (but did
not derail) my tenure case early in my career. One colleague on the college
promotion and tenure committee was of the opinion that all scholarship
should be disinterested and come from a neutral standpoint—that bringing
in one’s own assumptions and background inevitably would pollute the
scholarship. That opinion is not unusual. However, I have come to believe
that this kind of neutrality is impossible.
One of the human gifts of postmodernism is the opening of a public
space for scholarship that comes out of faith and life traditions, a scholar-
ship that allows public recognition of a person’s identity. Jewish scholars,
Muslim scholars, Christian scholars; feminist, socialist, race-based theo-
rists—all claim an intellectual space. This opening refreshes and invigorates
scholarship while unmasking the myth of neutrality. Even taking into con-
sideration the fragmentation of public thought that the demise of modern-
ism has engendered, on balance, much is redemptive in postmodernism’s
broadening of the academic stage.
However, a dark side exists to this more open public intellectual space, a
darkness that can wither worldview-grounded scholarship. Some who take
advantage of the spaces opened up by postmodernity absolutize their own
positions at the expense of others’. Michelle Goldberg, in Kingdom Coming,
118 Helen M. Sterk

on a phenomenon she calls the rise of Christian nationalism, shows how

some conservative, fundamentalist Christians are trying to silence non-
Christian voices in American life. As she portrays it, rather than entering
public space and engaging with others in an authentic exchange of ideas,
some Christians’ goal is to take over the public space with their worldview
dominating and marginalizing others.9 John Danforth, former senator from
Missouri and UN ambassador, makes a similar argument in Faith and Poli-
tics. Self-identifying as Christian, he says there are many ways to be Chris-
tian; thus, no one way should be ceded the public space that is now opened
to faith perspectives. While Christianity affects political thought and work,
he argues that Christians of strong faith may well come down on oppo-
site sides of an issue.10 Both authors show how triumphalism has served
Christianity poorly in public life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. When a Christian worldview is played as a trump card to stop
conversation, it ceases to serve the common good.
In the current political and religious context, where fundamentalist
Christian voices dominate, more moderate Christian voices must enter the
conversation, and people of all faiths need to lay claim to the public square.
Daniel Maguire offers one model. In A Moral Creed for All Christians11 and
The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity,12 Maguire argues that Christianity
should take its place within the range of human faiths, entering into dia-
logue rather than seeking domination, to the end goal of all living together
in harmony.
I endorse this model of public civil engagement—speaking out of a clear
point of view, allowing other points of view to be elaborated, and then
seeking common ground for action in life. As Diane Eck, director of the Plu-
ralism Project at Harvard University explains, pluralism “does not require
us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is
the encounter of commitments.”13 In this form of engagement, people are
aware of, and transparent about, what they think and believe; they define
its foundations, its limits. Pluralist thinkers remain open to respectful con-
versation with other points of view, not necessarily becoming converted to
those views but creatively engaging in dialogue in order to create coopera-
tive ways of living together in the world.
One strategy of civic and civil engagement is “invitational rhetoric” iden-
tified by Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin. Invitational rhetoric entails respect,
honesty, and honor for others.14 In contrast with coercive rhetoric, which
tends to put the speaker in control of topics, issues, and strategies, invita-
tional rhetoric focuses on enhancing conversations between speakers and
audiences through encouraging reciprocal storytelling and sharing of strat-
egies. Worldview thinking, at its best, starts thoughtful conversations that
allow people to know who they are, what they stand for and why—but does
not impose an ending point to which all people should be forced. Through
 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 119

the rhetoric of invitation, people can move together toward common

ground, toward places where their worldviews’ values and goals overlap.
Returning to gender, the question remains: why do inequities between
women and men remain so deeply embedded in our cultural, political,
economic, intellectual, and religious lives? Why does a worldview of gender
opposition rather than gender partnership continue to exercise hegemony?

PARADOXES AND TABOOS

Arguments affecting gender relations tend to operate on the assumption

that either nature or nurture influences humans to act in masculine or
feminine ways. The nature argument continues to be attractive, presenting
women and men as polar opposites, and concluding that it is futile, if not
actually wrong, to work against the grain of nature. Differences among men
and women are believed to be innate; women do not participate in sport,
politics, work, and public life as much as men because their nature does not
encourage them to do so. What women really want, deep down, at some
biological level, the argument goes, is to have children and stay home with
them. Thus, when women choose to act against their nature, everyone in
the family suffers.15 An extension of the same argument, offered by groups
such as Promise Keepers and Concerned Women for America, presumes
that gender differences are due to created differences between the sexes.
God made men to lead and women to be led. Whether the rhetoric calls
on nature, or on creation, both are grounded upon the assumption that
gender differences are essential. Furthermore, these differences must be ac-
cepted for the world to operate as it should, in a complementary balance
of femininity and masculinity. To do otherwise, such rhetoric holds, leads
to chaos.
Given the hold of arguments based on biology or creation, it seems ta-
boo, in some deeply felt way, to argue that cultural institutions may be the
source of gender construction. It seems impolite to argue that differences
remain firmly in place because of the hegemony of patriarchy, a cultural
system within which all that is associated with women is devalued. Yet, as
the examples at the beginning of this chapter suggest, femininity remains in
a one-down relation to masculinity in virtually every life context (feminin-
ity and masculinity because individual women and men are able to escape
the boxes only occasionally—in this case, the exceptions remain just that,
exceptions). Gender relations are weighted with power, the power that
comes from cultural evaluation.
Biology alone does not determine human behavior. In the case of gen-
der relations, this means that one’s given sex has far less to do with how
one acts than does one’s gender assignment, gender identity, and social
120 Helen M. Sterk

and cultural possibilities in relation to gender. Biology certainly influences

our actions; we all need air, water, food, love, and a sense of family in our
lives. As a person of faith, I also believe that God made us—all of us—as
embodied individuals who are embedded in social and cultural situations.
In a very real way, human action is mediated by culture, affected by human
will. We are more than the sum of our biological parts. Routinely, humans
overcome biological obstacles to achieve far more than anyone would pre-
dict. For example, Helen Keller’s brilliance did not remain hidden behind
being deaf and blind. Likewise, Stephen Hawking’s significant physical
disabilities have not stopped his intellectual contributions. Nor did the
gender of Queen Elizabeth I thwart her from governing England. Policies
and systems of meaning that depend upon unexamined worldviews and a
naive acceptance of “natural” gender relations may undermine, but cannot
kill, human initiative and accomplishment. An ideology of gender based
on biology or creation does not encourage full human flourishing because
such an ideology subordinates being human to being male/masculine or fe-
male/feminine. However, when a priori social and cultural rules of gender
duality and hierarchy are lifted, both women and men achieve interesting,
often unpredicted outcomes. Given a gender worldview of partnership, pri-
vate and public life can change, often for the better. People can share jobs.
Women can give birth and men can care for the babies. Policies on leave
and vacation time can shift to reflect concern for family life, and measures
of success in any sphere of life moderate.
What might be the means by which not only individuals but society and
culture break the grip of rules and roles based on an idea of what nature/
creation equips women and men to do?

FEMINIST POWER ANALYSIS

As a response to arguments based on nature/creation, typically feminists

have turned to power analyses to try to open up space for women, relying
on the assumption that nurture affects gender identity and relations more
than nature. In the field of communication, feminism’s first contribution
came in the form of critique of masculine hegemony—the unquestioned
power of defining both people and concepts from the vantage point of
masculinity. In particular, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell charted women’s peril-
ous journeys through the rhetorical paths cut by men who had access to
resources and political power. She argued that women required different
ways of speaking, not because they were biologically different from men
but because their social and cultural positions differed so markedly from
men’s.16 Along with her, many others have documented the ways masculin-
ity structures women’s possibilities in politics, media, and personal life.
 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 121

Feminist rhetorical scholars have recently realized that power analyses

alone cannot motivate positive communication, either publicly or privately.
Three reasons support this realization. First, such analyses lead to reifica-
tion of the status quo rather than change. When the status quo is reified, the
implication is that people cannot escape existing power structures, leading
to the attitude, why try? Because these power structures seem to obliterate
human agency, motivation for action is not ignited through learning what
these structures are and how they operate. Second, these analyses offer an
impoverished view of humanity. Power critiques obscure human variation.
If masculine power is the focus of attention, women’s agency looks mini-
mal and men’s power seems unlimited. That is not true to life as we know
it; individual women and men show much more varied life patterns than
power analyses allow us to see. Third, power analyses limit what can be
considered worthy of study because power critiques limit analyses to what
men do and say about women. These critiques allow too little exploration
of how humans take up rhetoric, how they internalize it, and what they do
with it. Instead of encouraging discovery and advocacy of nonhegemonic
norms, and styles and structures of communication, power critiques limit
us to, hmmm, power critiques.
One of the great ironies of feminist theory based upon analyses of power,
which leave masculine hegemony and feminine powerlessness in place, is
that such theory places women and men in opposition, just as does the
nature/creation theory of gender. Both ask us to see the world as consti-
tuted by two polarized genders in which men oppress women, and where
the only relational option that serves women well is complete separation
from men. We need theorizing that does not imply one gender is more
human than another and encourages partnership. While power analyses
remain necessary in understanding gender relations and human agency’s
possibilities and limits, power analyses work best as starting, but not end-
ing, points.

CARE THEORY17

Care theory, as opposed to power analyses, begins with the premise that
all humans are connected by (sometimes invisible) bands of love, whether
they are related by blood to one another or not. It stands in contrast to a
Darwinian understanding of the world as premised on power, in which the
fittest survive at the cost of the demise of the weakest. Developed largely
by feminist philosophers and theorists, care theory develops ways to help
people understand how their actions and relationships affect other people
and the world, toward the end of increasing empathy, informed decision-
making, and care for the least of these. In that way, care theory resonates
122 Helen M. Sterk

strongly with Christian thought and practice based on the model of Jesus
as presented in the Gospels.
Rather than begin with the theory, let us look at a poem that contrasts
a rhetoric of power with a rhetoric of care. This poem comes in the form
of a short narrative based on real-life experiences in a young boy’s life
in northwestern Iowa. Situated as it is in real communication practice, it
shows how a desire for control withers when care enters the situation. Writ-
ten by Sietze Buning (the pen name of Stanley Wiersma), “First Lesson in
Rhetoric” tells the story of a twelve-year-old Iowa farm boy in an upstairs
bedroom listening in to a conversation between his father, a church elder,
and a fellow elder:

Father’s
Fellow elder
Marius called in—
Frequently. Did his talk
Leave too little or too much
To the imagination of the emerging
Adolescent trying to sleep in the room
Above with an opening register in between?

“Confession of guilt at consistory meeting is not enough.

Better to have them stand up at a service. Better to purge
The unclean thing from among us. There are more and more
Shotgun weddings. Nothing to be afraid of, standing up
In church, not after sinners stand before God and confess.
Besides, it’s a chance for the church to welcome back the
Wayward. A truly Christian couple would prefer it.”

Several such visits—the cases different

But the rhetoric identical—and rhetoric
Not even part of our active vocabularies—
And then a visit from Marius with a new
Rhetoric:

“Our Martha
Loved unwisely.
Our Martha must keep
The baby. Our Martha
So repentant, so sensitive.

Must our Martha stand in church?

Her mother will die—blood
Pressure over two-hundred
Right along. Our
Martha . . .”
 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 123

Did the differences in rhetoric leave

Too little or too much to the imagination
Of the emerging adolescent, ear at
The register? And none
Of us—not Marius,
Not Father, not
I, even aware
Of the word
Rhetoric.18

As long as the form of language, such as public confession, served Mari-

us’s need to control those he defined as sinners, he emphasized the power
function of communication. However, when he found himself enmeshed
in fatherly love with just such a “sinner,” he sought other, more caring,
language forms. He loved his wayward Martha. He loved his heartsick wife.
In the face of this love and care, his desire to exercise the power of public
humiliation over them shriveled. When care colors communication, the
meaning and means both change.
Care theorists argue that humans innately care about and love other
humans—not only blood relatives—and that care is as strong a motivator
for human action as is the drive to power. Philosopher Nel Noddings looks
to her own experience and consciousness of giving and receiving care for
evidence of the radical reality of connection.19 Sara Ruddick sees the atti-
tude of care triggered through caregiving, tracing example after example of
both men and women connecting with others when called to take physi-
cal care of them.20 Joan Tronto finds dependency as a “natural part of the
human experience,” both male and female, one to be accepted rather than
seen as “character destroying.”21 Communication theorist Julia Wood sees
humans giving and receiving care simply by virtue of their humanity.22
Rhetorical theorists Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin have argued that care and
connection come from humans’ essential and shared spirituality.23 With a
more focused reference to the need to recognize how faith shapes care, ge-
ographer Janel Curry draws on social Trinitarian theology when she states,
“In Christian terms, all being is being-with; all existence is co-existence,
because the God who makes and sustains all things is a triune community
of mutually engendering and indwelling love.”24
For each, care is a natural response to the human condition. None of us
wants to be alone in the world, least of all during times of extreme physical
or emotional crisis, such as giving birth, facing illness or death, or dying.
At its most basic level, care means reassurance that we are connected with
other humans, that we matter to other people. When we are treated as if
we are separate from other humans rather than tied by mutual rights and
responsibilities, we are being controlled, not being given care.
124 Helen M. Sterk

In the context of care, self-love and love for others are bound together.
Western culture, points out Catherine Keller in From a Broken Web: Separa-
tion, Sexism, and Self, recognizes three senses of self: separative (which re-
fers to the individual who demands personal rights and is concerned with
autonomy); soluable (which refers to one who loses a sense of self in order
to serve others); and connective (which refers to one who balances a love
for self with a love for others). Culturally, the separative self has been re-
manded to masculinity and the soluable to femininity. The connective self
is currently under cultural negotiation. Because a connective sense of self
is not associated with one gender, it is suited to partnership.25 The connec-
tive sense of self holds rights and responsibilities as flexible, as in creative
tension, much as does Jesus’s admonition to “Love your neighbor as you
love yourself.” This line of thinking resonates with Augustine’s admonition
to love others: in philosopher Ruth Groenhout’s framing of Augustine,
she finds that “when human relationships are in good order, they involve
each human loving the other as the self, each concerned about the good of
each other.”26 In addition, the connective self hearkens to Carol Gilligan’s
generative formulation of women’s morality as balancing the needs of oth-
ers against one’s own needs in In a Different Voice.27 Since Gilligan, many
feminist theorists have come to the recognition that this sense of morality is
not so much essentially female as it is deeply human. Herein lies the genius
of the connective sense of self: it encourages people to see themselves as
having value equal to their neighbor and at the same time requires people
to see others as making legitimate demands upon them.
One of the challenges in working with care theory is to see how it can
move from the interpersonal realm into public life. It seems easy, almost
self-evident, to say that care should govern interpersonal relations. That
point of view makes a cul-de-sac of care theory, limiting its application to
family and friends. In those contexts, too, women are seen as the primary
and appropriate caregivers. It is much harder to apply care theory to a
public situation, to policymaking. In policymaking, power relations and
discourses tend to predominate. What might a real policymaking commu-
nication ethic of care look like? How would it differ from a communication
ethic based on power? At this point, a philosopher might lay out principles
of care and construct a hypothetical case, a historian might tell the story of a
well-documented past situation that has been resolved, a political scientist
might look to an example of government policymaking. As a communica-
tion scholar, I will look at a real, evolving case of policymaking, where
real-life constraints and real people make caring communication a lively,
volatile interaction. As a person of faith, my concern is with loving my
neighbor as I love myself. As a feminist, I will draw on feminist principles
for human interaction.
 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 125

I begin with a reframing of Gerda Lerner’s five characteristics of feminist

consciousness into terms of care, shaping these five into a set of principles
that constitute an ethic of care that bridges interpersonal and public life.
Lerner’s five characteristics are, first, to be aware of living in a symbolically
maintained system of power relations; second, to realize that everyone,
including oneself, has some level of power within the system; third, to see
others as engaged with oneself; fourth, to tell the stories of their own situ-
ations; and fifth, to develop a vision of mutual care and responsibility.28
Taken together, these five do indeed constitute an ethic of care, a set of
guiding principles that integrate self-love with interdependence.
When we examine and analyze a real policy in a real place in the light of
care theory—of caring for, not controlling people—we can see the practical
possibilities of care theorizing. This example, one that I know well from
both experience and observation, draws on a current situation common
to many academic institutions and of vital interest to all faculty members,
particularly those of childbearing age—a private college’s maternity leave
policy. While the example depends for meaning on a national context of
privatized healthcare and a local context of a church-related, four-year, pri-
vate, liberal arts college, it tells a universal story: when decision-making is
done without adequate consideration of the persons involved, the decisions
can harm as much as help. This story can be generalized to policymaking
on almost any level, from family to national to international.
Like many schools, one church-related, private, four-year college in
the Midwest of the United States faces the challenge of an aging faculty.
Roughly 50 percent of the faculty members will be retiring in the next ten
years. Roughly half of those people are married, male, full professors with
wives who have taken full responsibility for housework, care of children,
social networking, health, church life, doctors’ appointments, and the like.
For these professors, having babies meant some caregiving, but mostly it
meant working hard to make the money to support a family. That profile
is shifting dramatically.
Many of the college’s new faculty members are women; some are couples
sharing a position; several are couples where the woman is the primary
wage earner. The college’s maternity policy was written to be generous in
the abstract sense of things. Instead of giving people twelve weeks unpaid
leave, as is mandated in the United States’ Family and Medical Leave Act,
the college policy offers six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid leave.
However, as is true of many such seemingly clean and simple policies
that are made without adequate consideration of persons and circum-
stances, this policy harms more than it helps. While such a policy might
work for staff persons, whose work has a day-to-day rhythm, it is clumsy,
if not useless when applied to a person who teaches, whose work has a
126 Helen M. Sterk

semester-to-semester rhythm. Taking a six to twelve week leave in the

middle of a semester is next to impossible; continuity of teaching can-
not be sustained. Some faculty members discovered that they could make
personal deals with their chairs and deans. Those who knew the behind-
the-scenes possibilities for other ways to structure a leave found ways to
circumvent the policy on an ad hoc basis. As a result of a one-size-fits-all
policy that did not take into account the realities of college teaching as
well as new parenthood, every person who wished to claim more than the
minimal, on-the-books benefit had to negotiate their own unique pack-
age. As a further consequence of the ad hoc nature of individual dealings,
chairs and deans did not always know what had been done before. There-
fore, precedents were unavailable to guide the decisions. The entire process
came to be stressful and humiliating, no matter whether faculty members
took the written policy leave or negotiated something more advantageous,
leaving people vulnerable and resentful at a time when they most needed
care.
A group of faculty and administrators noticed the inequities of the policy
and banded together to create a leave policy that reflects care for all persons
and consideration of the good of the college, helping the college to live up to
its faith values and claims of being a family-friendly institution. This group
is well aware of the first principle of care ethics: they are located within a
symbolically maintained system of power relations. They realize the college
is located within a context of privatized health insurance and American
parental leave policies. Members include a current dean, a past dean, a long-
time advocate of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP),
and a department chair. Consulting members include women who currently
are pregnant and men who either are or could become fathers. All members
of the group value power analyses, understanding that without them, new
policy proposals will not work. This group is crafting a policy that will go to
the personnel and practices committee that is authorized to move such poli-
cies along, as well as to the vice-president for academic affairs, for informa-
tion. Second, the people who are becoming fathers and mothers are starting
to see themselves as having some power in this system, even though they did
not feel so at first. Just recognizing their sheer numbers, now and in the near
future, helps. Third, the potential parents and the ad hoc group know with
whom they need to be engaged—other faculty, appropriate committees, the
faculty deliberative body, and academic administrators. No one alone has
enough information or wisdom to create a good policy. Fourth, people who
are having babies are telling their stories to people who can help form poli-
cies. These stories help to show the fault lines of the current and proposed
policies, leading to more flexible and comprehensive policymaking. Finally,
everyone involved sees themselves as needing to help take care of each other.
Older faculty need younger ones to replace them; babies need people to take
 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 127

care of them; younger faculty need not only support but also to explain the
complexities of their lives. The whole community needs to live out family
values based on the needs of real, not hypothetical, families.
The proposal is this: if a faculty member has a baby coming into the fam-
ily during a semester either through birth or adoption, they are entitled to
take a semester’s leave from teaching. That leave will cost them 15 percent
of their yearly salary if they want to cease all other nonteaching duties that
entire semester. If they make an arrangement either with their chair or
their dean to do research, advising, and some administrative work for the
semester, they may receive 100 percent of their yearly salary. If a person has
a child arrive in the summer, the faculty member may take a one-course
reduction either the semester before or after the baby arrives. The policy
reflects care for all involved—the long-term good of human beings and the
college as well as the short-term needs of new parents.
This analysis shows how an ethic of care might work to help frame and
shape policy decision-making. While the particular situation of the college
in question may be highlighted in this example, the potential applications
of the five characteristics of an ethic of care reach far beyond the school. In
principle, caring requires recognition of human relatedness, of mutual re-
sponsibility for action, and of personal knowledge as a legitimate source of
information for policymaking. When human interdependence is honored,
care takes place.
This chapter began with the argument that gender relations are becom-
ing increasingly polarized, rather than integrated. Estrangement, coercion,
polarization, and opposition mark human gender relations. However, that
does not need to remain the case. Neither nature nor nurture theories of
gender lead to positive, equitable relations. Instead, each furthers division
and a false sense of the bifurcation of humanity. A theory based on human
care brings women and men together as partners in the world.
When people operate within an ethic of care, they will be different. They
will not be able easily to essentialize and compartmentalize other people.
Gender relations cannot help but be transformed from the easy and clichéd
oppositions of John Gray’s “men are from Mars and women from Venus,”29
or the rappers’ ganstas and hos, or Braveheart’s30 throwback mythic roles of
warriors and maidens to women and men sharing the work of the world.
Care theory leads to partnership rather than opposition as the ruling deep
metaphor of human relations. People will not stand upon their own rights
as absolute or their individualism as sacred. Instead, they will find them-
selves flexing, considering people, situations, and what courses of action will
best serve all involved. They will give profound honor both to themselves
and others, thereby loving their neighbors as they love themselves.
The vision of partnership resonates deeply with the Christian theological
tradition. The tradition encourages a sense of human life as in a trajectory
128 Helen M. Sterk

begun with the biblical narrative. In the tradition, the world is a good place,
created by God, given to humans to care for and nurture—to humans as
male and female, not just to males with females as supporters of male
endeavor—made so deeply wrong by human sin, redeemed through the
sacrifice of Jesus, supported by the work of the Holy Spirit in human lives,
and intended for future good. This trajectory means gender partnership is
needed to tie us together in common nurture and care, with each person
contributing fully in line with their gifts and inclinations.
Care for people and the world provides an important common cause that
religious and nonreligious scholars can share. The concept of care opens a
common space that can be shared by people of good will. We may have dif-
ferent basic assumptions on why we share the space of care—for Christians,
the answer comes from faith. Christians care because God cared first. God
calls us to love one another. Christians know why every single human being
matters. We matter because we are made in God’s image and are called to
care for the world. In the eyes of God, no one is marginal. Because of that,
we are free to love ourselves, and we are bound to love each other.
People who do not identify themselves as Christian may base their rea-
sons for caring on another faith tradition, or a basic belief in the goodness
of humanity, or from their family’s values. In care theory, people can come
together, with common humanity trumping any divisions of race or class or
gender. We would do well to nurture all the foundations of care as we listen,
learn, and decide how to live our own lives in community with others.

NOTES

1. While sex and gender are closely related concepts, sex generally refers to being
physically male or female, while gender generally refers to the social and cultural
meanings given to whatever is associated with maleness and femaleness, namely
masculinity and femininity. In this chapter, I use the term gender most often because
my focus is less on physical distinctions than on social and cultural ones.
2. Helen Sterk et al., Who’s Having This Baby: Perspectives on Birthing (Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2002).
3. “Women in Intercollegiate Sport,” Women in Sport (September 9, 2006), at
webpages.charter.net/womeninsport/ (accessed August 15, 2007).
4. “Women’s Earnings as a Percentage of Men’s, 1951–2004,” Infoplease (Sep-
tember 9, 2006), at www.infoplease.com/ipa/AO193820.html (accessed August 15,
2007).
5. Ellen Bravo, “Wage Gap Persists between Men, Women,” Miami Herald, No-
vember 14, 2003, at www.commondreams.org/viewsoc/1114-03.htm (accessed
March 23, 2004).
6. “Rate of Women’s Advancement to Top Corporate Offices Slow, New Catalyst
10th Anniversary Census Shows,” Catalyst, at www.catalyst.org/pressroom/press
 Gender Partnership: A Care Theory Perspective 129

_releases/7_26_06%20%202005%20COTE%20release.pdf (accessed September 9,

2006).
7. Iona Heath, “Women in Medicine,” BMJ 329 (August 21, 2004), at www.bmj
.com/cgi/content/extract/329/7463/412.
8. “Snapshots of Current Political Leadership,” The White House Project (2006),
at www.thewhitehouseproject.org/about/casestatement/documents/FinalCase3-23
.pdf (accessed April 19, 2007).
9. Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
10. John Danforth, Faith and Politics: How the “Moral Values” Debate Divides
America and How to Move Forward (New York: Viking, 2006).
11. Daniel C. Maguire, A Moral Creed for All Christians (Minneapolis: Augsburg
Fortress, 2005).
12. Daniel C. Maguire, The Moral Core of Judaism and Christianity: Reclaiming the
Revolution (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993).
13. Mary E. Hunt, quoting Diane Eck in “Unfinished Business: The Flowering
of Feminist/Womanist Theologies,” in Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect, ed.
Rosemary Radford Reuther (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 88.
14. Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin, “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory:
Toward a Clarification of Boundaries,” Western Journal of Communication 56 (Fall
1992): 330–49.
15. Caitlin Flanagan, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” The Atlan-
tic Monthly (March 2004), at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/03/flanagan.htm
(accessed May 5, 2004).
16. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1989).
17. A short digression: At times in my life, power analyses consumed my life
as a scholar—their influence leaked over into my personal and professional life,
souring me on men. I spent a year working on a coauthored book on Christianity
and gender, living and writing with four other strong feminists. At the time, power
analyses seemed the only way to talk about gender. My marriage suffered and even
my relationship with my infant son suffered because of my deep distrust of men and
masculinity. As a result and in order to reestablish balance, I focused as a scholar
solely on something I thought belonged only to women—birth. However, again it
led to implicating men and masculinity, and not just in getting pregnant! Finally,
in the mid-1990s, I discovered care theory in feminist thought, and it reintegrated
my faith and life with feminism because it offered a way to think positively, yet still
retain an edge of critique about women and men in life relations.
18. Sietze Buning, “First Lesson in Rhetoric,” in Purpaleanie and Other Permuta-
tions (Orange City, Iowa: Middleburg Press, 1978).
19. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
20. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Bal-
lantine Books, 1989).
21. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 163.
130 Helen M. Sterk

22. Julia Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1993).
23. Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin, “A Feminist Perspective on Rhetorical Theory,”
330–49.
24. Janel Curry, “Globalization and the Problem of the Nature/Culture Bound-
ary,” in Secularity and Globalization: What Comes After Modernity? ed. James K. A.
Smith (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, forthcoming), 19.
25. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1986).
26. Ruth Groenhout, Connected Lives: Human Nature and an Ethics of Care (Lan-
ham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 66.
27. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1982).
28. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to
Eighteen-seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
29. John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for
Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships (New
York: HarperCollins, 1992).
30. Braveheart, Paramount Pictures (1995).
8
American Poverty Policy:
Concerns about the Nature of
Persons in a Good Society1
Kurt C. Schaefer

By 1990, the century’s big economic question had changed. Is capitalism

preferable to planned socialism? had been replaced by, What sort of capi-
talism do we want to have? By 1990, the United States was wealthy. The
country was flexible and efficient and technologically advanced, but was it
fair? Were the vulnerable being treated justly?
By mid-decade America was setting out on an experiment to explore
these questions. The 1990s was the decade of welfare reform, with dramatic
changes in support for poor families. This chapter is an account of those
experiments and their effects. Recent American experience with poverty
policy supplies a rich narrative concerning which approaches seem to work,
and which others are attractive but counterproductive. We have learned a
great deal—much of it surprising and counterintuitive—about how policies
affect the vulnerable.
This analysis should engage us for a number of reasons. First, we can
learn practical things about how best to care for each other, which is often
far from obvious. The careful study of actual events can save us from ad-
vocating approaches that seem reasonable but do not work. Second, this is
an area in which basic values and views of human nature loom large, both
in framing policies and in evaluating them. Although sometimes technical,
the discussion is meant to probe normative questions about the nature of
persons and a good society.
Both of these motives, the practical and values, are related to the Scrip-
tures and their rich picture of life as whole persons in a rightly ordered
world. The Scriptures take a high view of the dignity of the person.2 Each
person is given responsibility to pursue virtue and sacrificial love, to make
responsible choices, and to anticipate bad personal consequences after bad

131
132 Kurt C. Schaefer

choices. All of creation is normed by God, and human persons are the pri-
mary stewards of that creation, responsible to disclose creation according
to the norms it was meant to follow.
Yet, the Scriptures teach that persons are not merely individuals.3 God is
a Trinity of persons living in perfect community and love. The eternal life
of the Godhead, to which humans are called, is a communal life of love,
deference, communication, and joy in creating the space in which others
can prosper and find their full meaning. A share of this eternal, communal
life is what God mediates out to humans in the creative work of God’s Son.
To be created in God’s image is to be irreducibly a part of a larger com-
munity of human persons. A single person is not meant to fully bear God’s
image: “Let us make them in our image . . . It is not good for the man to be
alone.” To be fully human is to be part of a community, with obligations
running in both directions—from individual to group and from group to
individual.
Thus, the Scriptures’ vision of true humanity is one of virtuous persons liv-
ing in right community. The Fall—the rebellion against the God-given norms
that establish meaning and joy—has affected humans in the fullest sense,
both individual persons and the communities and institutions by which we
seek to disclose God’s creation. By God’s grace, however, the Trinity is at work
redeeming and restoring this entire full humanity—individual persons, the
communities and institutions that they inhabit, and the creation that they
together are disclosing.
The Hebrew prophets drive this emphasis home. Their vision for God’s
intentions in the world includes worship and piety but also encompasses
the practical ways that communities work, especially their care for the
poor. Lest anyone think that this message is limited to communities of the
faithful, or meant to be spiritualized, the prophets teach that God holds
all nations accountable for the ways in which they disclose the creation,
especially for the treatment of the most marginalized.

THE PROGRAMS WE LOVE TO HATE

Many discussions of welfare get off on the wrong foot because of basic
misunderstandings about the programs and our historical experiences with
them. Thus, I start with a review of the main American antipoverty pro-
grams. In brief, two main income-transfer programs have been aimed at the
poor (Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] and Supplemental
Security Income [SSI]), and their summed budgets are relatively small—
about $50 billion per year, for an average benefit in each of about $400 per
month. Another $50 billion each year goes to housing and food subsidies,
and $200 billion subsidizes medical insurance through Medicaid. These
 American Poverty Policy 133

budgets are dwarfed by the income redistribution that takes place through
Social Security and Medicare.4
Social Security was established in 1935 as a social insurance program,
providing old-age, survivor, and disability benefits. Since 1965, the pro-
gram has provided medical insurance to the elderly and disabled through
Medicare. About 90 percent of Americans participate in one of these pro-
grams. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, with maximum and mini-
mum benefits that contain a significant implicit redistribution of income.
Most retirees are covered by Medicare regardless of income, subsidizing
their medical expenses while offering an optional supplementary medical
expense program. The expense of the program is growing rapidly.
Other programs include a range of approaches and target populations.
Medicaid offers medical-care coverage similar to Medicare, but is directed
to low-income persons. The number of participants is roughly equal to
the number not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, yet not receiving health
insurance through their employment—America’s uninsured. The Supple-
mental Security Income (SSI) program was created in 1974 to support the
incomes of very low-income elderly and disabled persons who otherwise
would have little Social Security coverage. Aid to Families with Dependent
Children, the main traditional income-assistance program, officially ended
in 1996. AFDC was funded by the states, with matching funding from the
federal government. Monthly benefit levels varied widely across the states
(with highs over $1,000 per month and lows under $300). Eligibility re-
quired very low income, essentially no assets, and (almost always) single
parenthood. Unemployment compensation programs support those seek-
ing work who are unemployed involuntarily. Programs vary by state, aver-
aging about twenty months of support at about one-third of one’s normal
wages. Recipients are paid regardless of their income or assets. In addition,
many separate programs offer housing support, including public hous-
ing (in which rent is generally limited to less than 30 percent of income)
and “Section 8” subsidies to cover landlord rents for low-income inhabit-
ants. The Food Stamp (FS) Program adds additional support and provides
stamps or debit cards for food purchases at a discount. The amount of
discount depends on income and family size.
The tax system provides benefits as well. The Earned Income Tax Credit
(EITC) is a refundable federal tax credit that subsidizes low-wage incomes
in working families. The EITC tries to support the poor while rewarding
work. In this program, one’s tax liability falls by about $0.35–$0.40 for
each dollar of income earned up to a basic level of income (influenced by
the size of the family). After this limit, the per-dollar-earned benefit de-
clines until, at high enough levels of earned income, one ceases to qualify
for the program. Some states supplement the federal EITC with additional,
more generous funding.
134 Kurt C. Schaefer

POVERTY PROGRAMS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

These welfare spending programs, described above, have not been static.
They have been repeatedly reformed during the last forty years, each reform
about a decade long. What follows is an overview of these eras.
President Johnson’s administration launched its Great Society program
in the mid-1960s, emphasizing economic and social rights. Closely fol-
lowing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many welfare and health programs were
created or significantly expanded in 1965. These programs included an
expansion of AFDC, public housing, urban renewal, public education,
public health insurance (with creation of Medicaid and Supplemental Se-
curity Income programs) and food assistance (by creating the Food Stamp
Program). In principle, recipients of AFDC were required to register for
work or job training, but in practice, welfare payments were guaranteed for
female-headed households. President Nixon embraced and expanded these
programs, adding worker health and safety regulation, consumer product
safety, environmental regulation, and regulation of the rights of those ac-
cused of crimes.
Taken together, these changes constituted a revolution in the role of
government, in the interest of promoting rights and freedom of opportu-
nity. Christians and other observers are of course divided on the usefulness
of this approach in caring for marginalized citizens, and the discipline of
economics may have something to contribute in helping to resolve that
difference of opinion, because the next thirty years were a testing ground
from which we can gather some preliminary conclusions about the practi-
cal effects of this approach.
The next era of welfare policy, between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s,
brought about some individual program funding expansion, but was typi-
fied by its overall steady decline in after-inflation AFDC benefits. The major
AFDC reform legislation of the period—the 1981 Omnibus Budget Recon-
ciliation Act—removed many working families from eligibility for AFDC.
These restrictions in eligibility were roughly offset by steady growth in the
number of single-parent low-income families, leaving total after-inflation
AFDC spending about constant.
Several stereotypes do not hold during this period. Little evidence exists
that the expansion of programs caused a general loss of stigma associated
with public assistance, at least after the mid-1960s. Said differently, data do
not show that the work ethic of low-income Americans declined due to the
expansion of AFDC and similar programs. At any time, roughly 40 percent
of those eligible for assistance did not participate, and recent immigrants
generally had lower participation rates than long-term residents.
Stereotypes about family structure and welfare are rather complicated
to evaluate. Average AFDC family size shrank, from 4.0 in 1969 to 2.9
 American Poverty Policy 135

in 1993, but the structure of those families changed significantly. In the

Johnson-Nixon era, the most common reason for participation in AFDC
remained divorce or separation (about 45 percent), and the primary reason
for leaving AFDC was marriage (about 35 percent). Only about 30 percent
enrolled because an unmarried woman gave birth. However, women enter-
ing due to divorce tended to have shorter spells of participation, so that
the welfare rolls did come to be dominated by families who had never
experienced a marriage. Hence, the unexpected phenomenon that most of
the families helped by AFDC received short-term postdivorce assistance,
but most of the families receiving AFDC at any one time were headed by
never-married single mothers.
Poverty rates among those fatherless households have not changed
much, but the number of such families has increased dramatically in the
last thirty years. The majority of women receiving AFDC in the 1950s were
widows. By the 1970s, the majority were divorced. In the 1980s the major-
ity became never-married single mothers.
Another group of stereotypes about individual recipients must also be
resisted, and, because economists are in the habit of studying these indi-
vidual attributes, the profession may be of some help in keeping the debate
honest at this point: the educational attainment of welfare participants in-
creased over time. In the 1960s most had high school or less, but by 1991,
12 percent had completed some college. Although welfare recipients are
disproportionately black, they were at least as likely to be white as black,
and the percentage of recipients who are black steadily declined from the
1960s to the 1990s (from 45 percent to 36 percent). The growth in never-
married welfare mothers was not primarily due to an increase in enrollment
by teenage mothers; women 20 or older accounted for most of the increase.
Never-married women on welfare over 25 grew from 48 percent of the total
(1976) to 62 percent (1992).
Even after correcting these overly negative stereotypes, by the late 1980s
abundant reason for concern existed about the effect of welfare policy on the
poor, and as a result, political support for traditional income support pro-
grams had significantly eroded. Between 1965 and 1985, AFDC caseloads
had increased 270 percent despite general increases in standards of living in
the nation at large. The Food Stamp Program went from a small commodity
distribution program to a transfer program with two times as many recipi-
ents as AFDC. Medicaid (introduced in 1965) had a caseload larger than the
Food Stamp Program. Total real spending on means-tested programs had
increased by about 230 percent, to about 3.5 percent of GDP.
Participants in AFDC seemed increasingly unattached to the labor market
and to prosperity in the nation at large. The percentage of recipients work-
ing fell from 14.5 percent in 1969 to 6.4 percent by 1993, while average
earned income of recipients fell by about one-third from 1976 to 1992.
136 Kurt C. Schaefer

Concerns about the effects of welfare programs on family structure were

also growing. For example, more than half of female-headed households
received AFDC, food stamps, or Medicaid, and 25 percent received all three.
By contrast, fewer than 20 percent of two-parent families received any as-
sistance, with over half of those receiving unemployment assistance only.
The proportion of single women on welfare who had never been married
quadrupled in 16 years, to over 1.5 million by 1992.
Of course, welfare programs cannot be evaluated simply on the basis
of numbers of participants, work effort, and family structure. The goal of
the policies is the reduction of poverty, not reduction of caseloads. Thus,
if welfare programs had effectively reduced poverty, that benefit should be
weighed against the other, negative outcomes associated with welfare pro-
grams. Unfortunately, once economists try to separate the effects of welfare
programs from other influences, the balance of evidence indicates that
traditional welfare programs did little to reduce poverty.
A significant reduction in poverty rates occurred during the 1960s, but
much of that reduction—about half—came in the economic boom before
the 1965 introduction of the Great Society programs. This boom continued
past the end of the decade and may well be responsible for most of the fur-
ther reductions in poverty during the 1960s. Poverty rates in the succeeding
twenty years had a very weak and inconsistent relationship to the generos-
ity of antipoverty programs. Poverty rates fell from 22.2 percent to 12.6
percent between 1960 and 1970, but thereafter wandered between 12.3
and 15 percent until the late 1990s, despite changes in poverty programs.
African American poverty rates fell to 33.5 percent by 1970, but stayed in
the low-to-mid-30s range until the mid-1990s. Perhaps more troubling,
after 1970 the relationship between poverty and the general health of the
American economy seemed to have been severed. In the past, prosperity
had generally raised all ships, and economic decline had been shared to
some extent by a broad spectrum of Americans. After around 1970, pros-
perity and recession came and went, but poverty measures showed a stub-
born resistance to change. A large group of Americans had been removed
from participation in the fortunes of the general economy. If the goal of
welfare programs was to reduce poverty among female-headed families,
then the great growth in the number of these families, and the enduring
poverty among American children, indicates that the policies had not met
their goal.
An evaluation of the specific approach to poverty that the United States
pursued in the past is not a general indictment of governmental attempts to
fight poverty. As we have just seen, poverty is not randomly distributed, but
falls disproportionately on females and nonwhites. Poverty cannot be viewed
as the natural and fair outcome of free interactions in a well-functioning dy-
namic market. In a fair market, race and gender are irrelevant characteristics.
 American Poverty Policy 137

They are not irrelevant in America. As we endorse group action to end other
forms of unfair practice to improve our markets—prosecuting organized
crime, regulating bankers, arresting counterfeiters—so, taking group action to
end the unfair impedance of human potential is a promarket, pro-freedom-
of-enterprise policy. Just as we do not expect prosecution of criminals or con-
trol of the currency to be a spontaneous, voluntary activity, no reason exists
to insist that care of the poor should be a matter of private charity only. Thus,
conservatives should like the idea of generous welfare programs if they can
be made effective. Effectiveness should be the relevant measure for people of
all political leanings, and, as of the mid-1980s, it appeared that we still had
much to learn about making welfare programs effective.
The first round of modern welfare reform came with the George H. W.
Bush and early Clinton administrations. These reforms were grounded in
the hope that a different mix of policies might have fewer negative effects
while having a greater positive effect on poverty. Many believed that the
stinginess of welfare benefits, combined with rules for participation that
discouraged industry among recipients, were part of the problem. Four
major policy changes in just five years increased spending nearly as much
as in the 1960s and early 1970s.
All of the program changes of this era were aimed at combining more
generosity with improved incentives. Because traditional AFDC tended to
exclude the working poor and thus create a disincentive to work, the EITC
was dramatically expanded, tripling its funding. In addition, eligibility for
Medicaid expanded, mainly to single mothers and their children leaving
AFDC, in order to reduce the incentive to remain on AFDC just to gain
health insurance. Spending on Medicaid grew by 88 percent. The Food
Stamp Program budget grew by 42 percent. Significant expansions took
place in the caseload of the SSI program (targeted at the elderly and dis-
abled), mainly due to increased numbers of disabled adults and children.
The Family Support Act of 1988 mandated work, education, and training
for AFDC recipients and funded new spending on work-related programs.
These changes were expected to reduce participation in AFDC by replac-
ing some AFDC spending with other forms of support that encouraged
work.5 Many people of faith believed that these changes would calibrate
the American welfare system to more nearly reflect biblical norms for right
social relationships, while also encouraging virtue among recipients.
To the great surprise and dismay of many, the number of recipients of
AFDC increased suddenly, by about 40 percent between 1989 and 1993.
Some increase might have been expected because of the 1991–1992 reces-
sion, but the increase was far out of proportion to the increases during
prior, deeper recessions.6 Disaffection for welfare was now widely shared
throughout the American class structure. A majority of welfare recipients
reported that the system was doing more harm than good. A surprising
138 Kurt C. Schaefer

broad-based agreement about the general directions that reform should

take developed. The large majority, including the majority of recipients,
favored a major reform that would include work requirements and public
subsidies to help recipients’ transitions into work. Polls indicated that most
Americans were not motivated by appeals to their wallets. The main con-
cern was not for fraud or expense but the tendency of welfare to encourage
irresponsible lifestyles and values.
This groundswell of intuitive opinion was, by an unusual turn of good
fortune, accompanied by an opportunity for economists to cast fresh light
on the most effective ways to answer the public call for change. At about
the same time that President G. H. W. Bush began expanding spending
on means-tested programs, the Federal government also expanded the
program of “state waivers.” States were allowed to apply for permission to
experiment with the structure and administration of their welfare programs.
Pressure for this freedom to experiment often came from state governors
(including then-governor Bill Clinton), as expanding AFDC populations
put pressure on state budgets. Over half of the states received waivers from
the traditional federal AFDC formulas.
These waiver experiments were crucial to the future direction of welfare
reform because the states that received waivers were required to fund a
serious evaluation of their new programs. These were usually random-
assignment evaluations, which are as close to true controlled experiments
as we get in social science. These waivers and evaluations yielded detailed
information about the apparent effect of specific policy changes. They of-
fer an unusually rich source of information for people who know that care
of the needy is essential but still wonder about the most effective way to
exercise that care.
State waiver experiments gave particular attention to two policy options.
Mandatory employment programs (welfare-to-work, work first, and work-
fare programs) required participants to take part in placement services, brief
job training, or actual work in order to qualify for benefits, rather than
emphasizing long-term education and training. Earnings disregards and
other financial-incentive programs imitated some features of the EITC by
disregarding some income earned by participants when determining their
eligibility for support, or by otherwise providing a wage subsidy to increase
the attractiveness of work.
Most waivers from the mid-1980s onward included the first option—
mandatory work for all people deemed to be work eligible. Nearly all
of these experiments produced significant increases in employment and
reductions in AFDC participation and payments. This was not surprising.
However, other outcomes in these experiments were unexpected. Many
had expected that this approach would be hardest on the most marginal-
ized citizens. Surprisingly, the most disadvantaged participants experienced
 American Poverty Policy 139

about the same employment and earnings gains as less-disadvantaged

participants. Employment outcomes (such as wages and hours hired)
were neither significantly worse among the less-skilled participants, nor
among those with clear barriers to work, such as child-care problems.7
Another surprise was that programs pushing recipients quickly into jobs,
with little training or education, increased earnings and decreased welfare
dependence more quickly than the more expensive programs that empha-
sized training and education. Many women who participated in welfare
programs experienced bigger gains from work experience than from formal
education or training.8
The bad news was that these mandatory work programs showed little
evidence of increased income and reduced poverty. Earnings in simple
work-first programs were generally offset, dollar-for-dollar, by reductions in
public support, with no net effect on poverty. Other states, however, (and
two Canadian provinces) had combined mandatory work with earnings-
disregards and other earnings subsidies. The Minnesota (1994) and Cana-
dian (1992) programs created enough control groups to explicitly compare
the combined and separate effects of work requirements and earnings dis-
regards. These experiments yielded a strong conclusion: Work requirements
combined with earnings disregards had the net effect of increasing work
while also reducing poverty. These programs generally did not reduce the
cost to the state budget. They also did not cut the incidence of welfare usage
because more people continued to be eligible for benefits as their incomes
rose, but these programs did shift benefits from nonworkers to workers,
and they did decrease poverty.
Many worry that reforms requiring work will negatively affect poor chil-
dren who may now receive less attention from their working parent. When
child outcomes were measured along with earnings, employment, and pov-
erty, the earnings-supplement programs were associated with significant
improvements in school achievement and child behaviors for elementary
school children, especially among long-term welfare recipient families.9
The mandatory-work-only programs did not show these positive results.
Though these programs did not reduce the state’s welfare budget, they did
make state spending much more effective. The ratio of reduction-in-poverty
per dollar-spent is vastly superior to the less expensive work-requirement
programs.10
These programs that combined work requirements with earnings dis-
regards are not panaceas. For example, they are only effective when work
is available; many Canadians did not take up participation when offered,
unable to find the requisite thirty hours per week of work. Additionally,
though the average outcomes are encouraging, a fairly wide variance of
results came about, indicating that programs are best targeted at subpopula-
tions for which they work best.
140 Kurt C. Schaefer

The fourth era in our historical survey, from the mid-1990s to the pres-
ent, brought program changes in five areas. AFDC was dramatically re-
structured and renamed TANF (Temporary Assistance to Need Families).
The program received less overall funding, though per-family benefits
were expected to increase because of the program’s other fundamental
changes. Medicaid was restructured and became more generous. The EITC
was restructured and became more generous, with expenditures larger than
AFDC. SSI became more generous without being significantly restructured.
Finally, charitable choice legislation affected the way in which social ser-
vices are delivered.
Several important things happened in the background during this period,
complementing welfare reform. The minimum wage rose by 10.8 percent
from 1989 to 1997, even after adjusting for inflation. The general economy
was exceptionally strong in the late 1990s, shrinking welfare caseloads. Un-
employment rates remained under 5 percent, and wages among less-skilled
workers began rising in 1995 for the first time since the late 1970s.11 In ad-
dition, access to public health insurance was increasingly decoupled from
income assistance, so that by the end of the 1990s all children in families
with incomes below the poverty line were eligible for Medicaid.12
The first welfare-reform volley of this period was a major expansion
of the EITC by Congress in 1993.13 Together with increased minimum
wages, this raised the after-inflation minimum-wage full-time earnings of a
woman with one child by 19.7 percent during the 1990s, from $10,568 in
1998 to $12,653 in 2000. Women with two or more children experienced
a 34.3 percent increase. The strong economy also meant that more women
experienced these improvements. Although increases in the minimum
wage have the potential to cause layoffs, it appears that this happened
mainly for low-skilled teenaged workers. Thus, these changes substantially
increased work incentives for low-income women with children, and their
labor-force participation rates rose markedly.14
These indirect welfare reform measures were followed by welfare reform
legislation: the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconcilia-
tion Act (PRWORA) of 1996. It made several changes. Federal welfare rules
were devolved to the states, institutionalizing the idea of designing poverty
programs at the state level within Federal guidelines. Many states diverted
some eligible citizens from cash assistance. Ten states imposed work-search
requirements for eligibility. Twelve states set up temporary short-term cash
payments that did not count toward time limits. Nine states adopted both
approaches. States shifted support toward noncash services such as child
care. (Between 1993 and 2000, for example, child-care subsidies nearly
doubled, from $9.5 billion to $18 billion. Transportation and job-search
expenses were also often expanded.) Yet, in most places, cash benefit levels
for the nonworking changed very little.
 American Poverty Policy 141

The nature of Federal funding changed. Under AFDC, Federal funding

moved up and down with state funding. Under TANF, states receive a fixed
grant each year based on the previous level of AFDC funding. To avoid a
“race to the bottom,” states were required to spend at least 75 percent of
their AFDC budget on TANF programs to receive full funding. States could
use some TANF funds for child care rather than income subsidies. The
Child Care Tax Credit was expanded for lower-middle income families. Al-
though the size of the block grants was slightly smaller than AFDC funding,
these grants were fixed over time. The strategy correctly anticipated that, as
the number of participants shrank under the new policies, the funding per
participant would rise. Fears that block grants would reduce state spending
did not materialize.
PRWORA established work requirements. By 2002, at least 50 percent of
a state’s 1997 caseload were expected to be working, in work-preparation
programs, or no longer receiving support. General education or training did
not count toward this requirement,15 so the emphasis remained on work-
first rather than long-term training.
The new system incorporated time limits on recipients. The first word
in the new program’s name is temporary, which signals a major shift in
philosophy. Even though AFDC was often temporary in practice, TANF
is temporary by design. Federal income assistance comes with a lifetime
limit of five years. States are free to set shorter time limits, or to continue
funding any family for longer than sixty months out of their own state
revenues, or to set limits on the length of each individual spell of participa-
tion. States may also exempt up to 20 percent of their 1997 caseload from
these federal time limits as not yet work-ready. The best guess (still quite
soft) is that perhaps 10 percent of the caseload decline post-1996 is due
to time limits.16
Some elements of welfare reform addressed family structure. Much of
the legislation’s language was directed to this issue (i.e., to reducing out-
of-wedlock births and encouraging marriage). Actual program changes to
this end were more limited. PRWORA allows for family caps on benefits
(no benefits for children born to families receiving support) and require-
ments that teen mothers stay in school and live in a supervised setting.
States that experienced falling illegitimacy rates without rising abortion
rates received special funding bonuses. Several changes also encouraged
establishment of paternity at birth, and improved collection of child sup-
port from absent parents. New restrictions were instituted that related to
place of birth. Legal immigrants arriving after August 1996 were generally
denied access to TANF, Food Stamps, and SSI, usually for a period of
about ten years.
Finally, charitable choice provisions were instituted. This legislation aims
to affect the provision of services by allowing faith-based and community
142 Kurt C. Schaefer

organizations to compete on an equal footing with other providers for some

government-issued social-service contracts (such as employment searches,
job training, marriage or budget counseling, community services, and drug-
treatment programs). Recipients of programs from faith-based organizations
must be served without religious or other discrimination, may not be forced
to participate in inherently religious activities, and must be offered a secular
alternative if they object to a faith-based provider. All government funds
must be used to fulfill the specific public social-service goals, and may not
be used for inherently religious activities.

EVALUATING WELFARE REFORM

Economists can offer some guidance on separating welfare reform effects

from the general economy’s influence. A great deal of research has also in-
vestigated the effects of PRWORA on caseloads, employment, poverty, and
family structure. These categories give us a partial window into questions of
virtuous behavior in a rightly ordered culture. The effect of any particular
PRWORA change is difficult to separate from the other changes because so
many things were altered simultaneously in 1996. Some effects, however,
have become clearer as time has passed, and economists also have employed
some modeling and statistical tools to tease out individual program effects.
The emerging consensus is that the reforms have had a significant ef-
fect on behavior beyond that of the strong economy. For example, after
1996, the decline in the nationwide unemployment rate slowed, but the
decline in participation in TANF accelerated. In comparison, during the
era of strong economic growth between 1983 and 1989, AFDC caseloads
changed little. The best estimates seem to be that somewhere between 10
percent and 30 percent of the reductions in TANF caseloads after 1996 are
attributable to the economy rather than the welfare-policy changes, though
it is likely that the two reinforced each other.
Given that welfare reform had a significant independent effect on the
poor, we can try to measure that effect. No one of any political persua-
sion would have predicted—or even believed possible—the magnitude of
change that occurred in the behavior of low-income single-parent families
during the 1990s. Participation in TANF (caseloads) declined, beginning in
the early 1990s and accelerating after welfare reform, falling to late-1960s
levels. Between 1994 and 2000, caseloads fell by 56.5 percent, and the
declines occurred in every state. But, by itself, this tells us little. The point
of having poverty programs is not to make them inaccessible, but rather to
maintain incentives for work and other responsible behaviors while reduc-
ing poverty.
 American Poverty Policy 143

First, consider work choices. Employment rates of single mothers have

soared. Single mothers showed little change in labor-force participation
rates from 1980 through the early-1990s, despite significant variations in
the health of the general economy. The recent welfare reforms significantly
altered the nature of federal poverty support: Between 1988 and 1999, the
federal money that supports working poor families17 increased from $11
billion to $66.7 billion (in inflation-adjusted, 2002 dollars). Compare this
to cash support to nonelderly, nondisabled, largely nonworking adults: $24
billion in 1988, $27 billion in 1992, $13 billion in 1999. These changes
altered work incentives. Work effort by single mothers rose significantly,
including work among women who remained on welfare. The share with
earnings rose from 6.7 percent in 1990 to 28.1 percent in 1999.18 Even with
over one million less-skilled women entering the labor force by way of wel-
fare reform, wages among less-skilled women rose throughout the 1990s to
their highest point in several decades, while female unemployment rates
fell to their lowest levels in several decades. This trend in wages continued
even through the recession of 2001–2002.
Of course, increases in work might not reduce poverty, and might actu-
ally increase poverty if earnings do not replace lost welfare benefits. We
must consider changes in total incomes and poverty since welfare reform.19
The national poverty rate improved, falling below the historic low of 8.8
percent in 1974. The decline was more rapid among single-mother families
than in the population at large, and it dropped to new record lows for all
ethnic groupings. After decades of little change, the poverty rate among
single-female-headed households fell by 30 percent between 1992 and
2000. The rate among African American single-female-headed households
fell by 31 percent, with exactly the same decline among Hispanic single-
female-headed households.
Though fewer people are below the poverty threshold, their increase in
income has often been moderate, and there remain serious problems. Pov-
erty rates are still disturbingly high among ethnic minorities. Poverty rates
also fell less quickly than participation fell; combined with the increase in
work effort, this yields the ironic result that the share of working poor in
the U.S. population increased. Some families left TANF but still remained
poor.
How have the general improvements in incomes been spread throughout
the poverty population? One way of approaching this topic is to consider
the poverty gaps, the distance between the poverty line and the average
income of families that are still poor. The change in welfare policies in the
1990s apparently led to a slight rise in the poverty gap (based on after-tax
incomes), from $1,447 to $1,524.20 Fewer people were in poverty, but for
those who were, poverty on average seems to have slightly worsened.21 At
least half of those leaving TANF have incomes below the poverty line when
144 Kurt C. Schaefer

they leave, and roughly 40 percent still have incomes below the poverty
level five years after leaving. Among legal immigrants, who were made
ineligible for virtually all federal public assistance in 1996, there was likely
a substantial loss of well-being, though this area is remarkably understud-
ied.22
On the other hand, the data on poverty gaps and deep poverty consider
only reported income, not actual consumption (ability to spend) among
the poor. We do have evidence of multiple sources of (at least temporary)
income for poor families, and by triangulating from consumption surveys
and employer pay records we know that some income is not fully reported.
Toward the bottom of the income distribution, the discrepancy appears
to be on the order of 50–100 percent underreporting. Data on consumer
expenditures in fact show increasing consumption spending through the
1990s, even among very low-income families with children.23
Regarding family structure, even under the old AFDC program research
found a surprisingly small effect of the program on out-of-wedlock births.
The long-term changes in family structure seem to be driven by other things
(such as increases in female job opportunities and the relative decline in
unskilled male wages). Thus, we might expect small effects of welfare re-
form here, especially because few changes were directly aimed at family
structure.24 Indeed, only muted evidence exists that welfare reform per se
has had any effect on family structure. Marriage and divorce rates seem to
be drifting along their long-term trends. Birth rates to unmarried women
did start to change around 1990, beginning a slow decline among both
African Americans and whites, and among both older and younger women,
but these trends seem to have begun well before welfare reform. Generally,
though birth rates to unmarried women have been falling, the share of
families headed by never-married mothers has increased steadily, from 3
percent in 1976 to over 10 percent now.25 The share of children living with
single mothers (especially in African American families) did decline signifi-
cantly in the late 1990s. Family caps, the main reform that might affect fam-
ily structure, appear to have had very little if any effect on out-of-wedlock
birth rates. This might have been expected, because the forgone benefits lost
under family caps are relatively small—on the order of $60 per month.26
On the other hand, the Minnesota waiver program found that single
mothers in the program married at a significantly higher rate than in the
control study, and that two-parent families in the program stayed married
at a higher rate. Careful studies of these family-structure changes are few
and far between, and they are complicated by the fact that a time lag exists
between policy changes and birth-rate responses. In sum, we have limited
evidence on welfare reform’s effect on family structure, and no clear evi-
dence about which policies most influence marriage and fertility.
 American Poverty Policy 145

The jury is still out regarding charitable choice. Many state and local
governments have been slow to implement the law, and President Clinton
further slowed implementation by issuing executive orders that contracts
could not go to “pervasively sectarian” service providers. President Bush has
reversed this executive interpretation of the law, but Charitable Choice still
governs only a few federal programs. Limited evaluations have focused on
the relative effectiveness of faith-based providers (finding that they are gen-
erally at least as effective as their secular peers), and the providers’ experi-
ences in navigating government contracts (finding relatively few problems,
despite complaints about dealing with bureaucracy, timing of payments,
and excessive paperwork requirements).

WHERE SHALL WE GO FROM HERE?

Reforms have tried to expand the possibilities for and incentives toward
responsible choices, and their effects are largely positive (though in some
cases disappointingly small) in the effort to build a rightly-ordered culture
that values and promotes personal virtue. One might conclude that the next
step should be to further improve incentives and expand possibilities for
choice. I think this may be the right instinct, but we must be precise about
just what is required in order to expand families’ range of choices. At their
best Christian social reformers have balanced the role of the individual and
the role of social structures.
The early nineteenth century saw the emergence of several such reform
movements, to a great extent grounded in the principles of the Second Great
Awakening. The temperance movement, the first and most widespread of
the reform movements, emphasized self-discipline and self-control. Be-
yond personal pledges of self-discipline, the movement worked to see
social alternatives increased: alcohol-free hotels and transportation, limits
on the promotion and availability of alcohol, sobriety pledges at work-
places. By 1840, alcohol consumption fell to less than half the 1830 level.
However, reform did not end with calls to personal virtue. Movements to
reform education and prisons, to abolish slavery, and to establish women’s
rights sprang from the same seeds. Change in these areas came more slowly
than in the temperance movement, but over time American society began
to fundamentally change.
The welfare reforms considered here should be merely the opening act
in exploring how to construct modern parallels of these five other reform
movements. We are probably farthest along in the movement to reform
public education. In this area, we are surrounded by active experiments and
reforms, and we have some cause to be hopeful.
146 Kurt C. Schaefer

A modern temperance movement would not only build support against

the abuse of drugs and alcohol, but would also address the stunning
changes in sexual ethics, pornography, and standards for greediness during
the last generation.
A modern prison reform movement would reconsider the fairness of the
American justice system. When year after year one-sixth of marriage-aged
black men are incarcerated, we should not be that surprised at the pressures
that are created against stable family life. It is increasingly hard to believe
that this disproportionate African American imprisonment rate is the result
of a fair application of the law. Consider the disproportionate number of
black men on death rows, and the considerable proportion of them who
are being cleared by DNA evidence.
The modern equivalents of the abolitionist and women’s rights move-
ments would focus on basic restructuring of society in areas where some are
systematically put at a disadvantage.27 In many cases overt discrimination
still limits possibilities. Zoning laws, lending practices, and school fund-
ing formulas still tend to concentrate poverty and affluence into separated,
self-perpetuating spheres. There have been real gains in the last generation,
but there is much yet to do if we adopt a theologically informed standpoint
concerning virtuous persons in a well-ordered society.

NOTES

1. I am in debt to two excellent reviews of the research literature by the two lead-
ing economists on the topic of welfare reform: Robert Moffitt, “Incentive Effects of
the U.S. Welfare System: A Review,” Journal of Economic Literature 30 (1992): 1–61,
and Rebecca Blank, Evaluating Welfare Reform in the United States, Working Paper
8983 (Boston: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002). For survey results and
an understanding of the political process leading to welfare reform, I am indebted
to Gary Bryner, Politics and Public Morality (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). All data
are drawn from Moffit and Blank, or from calculations by the author using data
from the U.S. Census Bureau, The Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2002, 121st
ed. (Washington, D.C., 2001).
2. For a detailed introduction to the themes of this paragraph, see Albert M.
Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rap-
ids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985).
3. Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning,
and Living (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), presents an introduction to the
themes of this and the next paragraph.
4. Direct income-support accounts for about 9 percent of total Federal spending;
the implicit income redistribution through Social Security and Medicare comprises
another 27 percent of total spending.
5. AFDC had been the largest means-tested program in the 1960s, but by the
mid-1990s was a distant fifth behind Medicaid, SSI, EITC, and Food Stamps.
 American Poverty Policy 147

6. Compare increases of under 10 percent in the mid-1970s, around 10 percent

in the early 1980s. Gary Bryner, Politics and Public Morality (New York: W.W. Norton,
1998), 6.
7. There is an exception: those at a high risk of depression experienced signifi-
cant difficulties in maintaining employment.
8. Some evidence exists that subgroups of women do benefit more from im-
mediate training than work-first, and that many benefit from training after several
years of work-first, but no programs of this kind have been evaluated with random-
ized experiments.
9. Older children show smaller and less positive results.
10. Canada and Minnesota generated $2–$2.50 in income for long-term recipi-
ents per $1 spent in the program on earnings disregards; by contrast, simple work-
requirement programs have a ratio in the range of $0.50 to –$0.50.
11. Wages among less-skilled women continued to rise, amazingly, through the
1991–1992 recession, increasing by 5 percent during 1992.
12. About half the states set higher income levels for cutoff from the program;
pregnant women and children under five have access federally through 133 percent
of the poverty line.
13. The EITC is very popular in both parties because it raises wages while encour-
aging people to participate in work, yet without forcing employers to pay higher
wages—which might reduce the number of jobs available. It is not a panacea. The
EITC involves a marriage penalty at some earnings levels, though the research sug-
gests little effect on actual marriage patterns. It creates a fairly high marginal tax rate
for those who work enough to receive the maximum subsidy (77 precent of the total
eligible pool), which likely encourages some people to remain in low-wage or part-
time jobs rather than move up the wage ladder. (Research suggests at least a slight
negative effect on work of married women for this reason and of both women and
men in two-earner households.) In order to maintain reasonable marginal tax rates,
the subsidy continues to two-child-family incomes over $30,000, which is well up
the income distribution. It is also believed that there are frequent overpayments (of
around 25 percent of tax expenditures) in the program, mostly due to inaccurate
claims for qualifying children. (Compare 17 percent of taxes not paid overall to
the IRS, and over 25 percent nonpayment for some capital-income and informal-
sector income.) The subsidy also reaches only those who properly file for it; among
eligible single mothers, this is around 42–54 percent of the total eligible pool, but
many of the same effects exist, and are larger, with the other more traditional ap-
proaches to income assistance.
14. In principle, it seemed clear that a woman off welfare, receiving full-time earn-
ings, the EITC, Food Stamps (FS), child care assistance, and child support would be
substantially better off than under the old AFDC program. In fact, the aim of policy
was that any family with one adult working forty-hour weeks at minimum wage
would, by combining earnings, EITC and Food Stamps, and Medicaid, be lifted above
the poverty level. In practice, this has not quite happened universally, partly because
steady full-time work was not always possible to maintain, and partly because of
difficulties in accessing programs, especially Food Stamps. AFDC participation was
traditionally the gateway to other forms of in-kind support such as Food Stamps. As
support has shifted from AFDC to work-related support, access to FS has not success-
148 Kurt C. Schaefer

fully shifted with it. Offices are often only open during daytime work hours; FS ben-
efits change monthly as earnings change, and this creates complexity for caseworkers
that they would often prefer to avoid by getting workers off the FS rolls; asset rules
for eligibility (like car resale value) reduce eligibility. Participation by eligible families
with a working adult head was only 43 percent in 1999 (from 71 percent in 1998),
while 70 percent of eligible nonearners participated. Even among the very poor who
leave TANF (income below 50 percent of poverty line), only about half continue
to receive FS, though all are still eligible. There is some hopeful sign in that rates of
decline in FS use were similar to those in TANF for 1994–1998, but FS use fell much
less steeply after 1998. Programs are in place to reduce this nonparticipation in FS
(and in Medicaid as well).
15. This does not apply to mothers under age eighteen without a high school
degree.
16. Blank, Evaluating Welfare Reform, 48.
17. EITC, child-care assistance, Medicaid, CHIP, but not including job training/
placement or cash benefits.
18. Between half and two-thirds of those leaving income support appear to be
working within three months. Mothers with multiple barriers—such as substance
abuse, health problems, depression, low work skills, or domestic violence—work
less frequently than others; about 20 percent of leavers appear to not have worked
in the four year period after participation. Thus, most leavers find jobs, though
jobholding is sometimes not continuous; most have no more than two unemploy-
ment spells within four years of leaving, and employers are found to rate welfare
recipients as performing as well or better than other employees (Blank, Evaluating
Welfare Reform, 52).
19. Our measures are unfortunately less precise than we might wish. We would
like a comprehensive measure of total well being, including levels of health insur-
ance access, housing, food, crime, mental health, education for children, and chil-
dren’s schooling and behavior outcomes. Reliable consistent data on such things are
difficult to find and aggregate. So economists usually consider several alternatives.
20. Blank, “Evaluating Welfare Reform,” table 4 gives poverty gaps between 1993
and 1999.
21. Said differently, the incomes of the vast majority of single mothers—certainly
over 80 percent of them—rose after 1996; but deep poverty—those with incomes at
under half the poverty level—appears to have also risen somewhat in the late 1990s.
Average annual income in this deep-poverty group has declined by perhaps $600.
22. We do know that use of public assistance has fallen suddenly among im-
migrants (the share receiving fell almost in half, 1994–1998), and that FS receipt
among eligible citizen children living with immigrant parents fell from 80 percent
in 1994 to 46 percent in 1999.
23. Total consumption among single mothers increased in the mid-1990s, abso-
lutely, relative to women without children, and relative to married mothers. Food-related
problems declined between 1995 and 1999 for single mothers, and declined as
rapidly as they did among other poor groups.
24. On the other hand, the AFDC-related studies compared changes in benefit
levels across states to changes in birth rates. PRWORA did not take its effect primarily
through changes in benefit levels; it changed a great number of behavioral incen-
 American Poverty Policy 149

tives, so that the indirect effect on birth rates might have conceivably been larger
than the effect of changing AFDC benefit levels. In the end, it appears not.
25. Among those with lower incomes or less education, the rate of increase
slowed somewhat in the late 1990s.
26. These benefit-cap studies are reinforced by research on the Teen Parent Dem-
onstration Project in Ohio, which required teen welfare mothers to participate in a
set of education and work support programs. The project appears to have had no
effect on second pregnancies; Blank, Evaluating Welfare Reform, 81.
27. One reasonable area for action would be a concerted effort at finding creative
ways to make work pay. Raising the wages of the lowest-paid workers, assuring them
of basic health insurance as they seek employment, and creating job security so they
do not bear the brunt of economic downturns would all be natural and important
extensions of the lessons learned from welfare reform. Yet, it seems obvious that
something more creative than “living wage” laws will be necessary. Simply legislat-
ing that wages must double or triple is very likely counter-productive for those most
in need.
9
Understanding God, Nature, and
Social Structure: A Case Study of
Great Barrier Island, New Zealand1
Janel M. Curry

How can our understanding of ourselves and our moral understanding be

deepened to account for our membership in societies that are embedded
in particular places, which are, in turn, embedded within ecosystems? This
question reflects the challenge within academia and faith communities of
understanding humans as placed simultaneously within societal structures
and within nature in a way that neither negates the uniqueness of humans,
created in the image of God, nor denigrates the value of God’s creation.
The challenge is the full integration of humans, society, and nature into the
vision of shalom that God intends—an integration that is crucial for our
decisions on how to structure our lives in relation to the earth.
Theological thinking on the environment has come a long way from the
time of Lynn White’s classic article, “The Historical Roots of Our Environ-
mental Crisis.”2 Writings on the theological and philosophical understand-
ing of our relationship with the earth have grown. In addition, our scientific
understanding of the impact of humans and the workings of nature has
increased. The challenge for all—whether faith communities, scientific
communities, secular environmental communities, or combinations of the
previous—is the full conceptual and practical integration of society and
nature.
Views on the nature of reality, particularly views on the relationship be-
tween nature and humans, or what is often called the nature-culture bound-
ary, have concrete expression in policies that shape both this regulation and
commodification of nature. For example, a legal system that emphasizes
individual property rights results in a society that also emphasizes the
boundary among individuals over against a more communal sense of prop-
erty and personhood. Natural resource management policy has to involve

151
152 Janel M. Curry

drawing exactly these sorts of boundaries among different groups of people

and between the social and the natural. Such choices are not timeless, pre-
determined absolutes but choices reflecting and shaping societal beliefs and
worldviews.

CASE STUDY

This study in natural resource management, focused on oceans manage-

ment on Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, starts with the assumption
of the nonreducibility of morality, social structures, and the earth and
has the goal of extending our understanding of this wholeness. The study
incorporated both policy analysis and data from fieldwork conducted in
the marine-resource-dependent community of northern Great Barrier Is-
land, New Zealand. The policy analysis derives from documents obtained
while in residence at Victoria University in Wellington, the capital of New
Zealand. In addition, government officials and representatives of several
ocean-related interest groups participated in interviews. These people
included several representatives of the fisheries industry, including the
lobbyist for the Rock Lobster Association. Several people who work with
Forest and Bird, one of the most effective and powerful environmental
groups in New Zealand, also participated in interviews as well as govern-
ment officials from the Ministry for Environment and Department of
Conservation (DOC). The local case study involved four weeks of field-
work on Great Barrier Island (Aotea). The research conducted on northern
Great Barrier Island involved forty local participants who represented a
range of interest groups. While the number of individuals involved in this
study was not large, it did represent a significant proportion of the adult
population from the island’s northern section. Key informants identified
participants who represented a variety of interests, including the DOC,
commercial lobster fishing, mussel farming, tourism, agriculture, health
care workers, teachers, and individuals who represented a range within
the Maori community. Great Barrier Island is approximately sixty miles
off the coast from Auckland, New Zealand. The island is approximately
25 miles (40 kilometers) by 15 miles (22 kilometers) in size and has a
population of less than 1,000 people.3 Highly dependent on marine re-
sources for its economy, life on the island has been transformed through
the development of a market and property-rights based marine-resource
policy regime driven by globalization.4
Policy regimes both reflect and transform relationships among people
and between nature and culture. Beginning in the 1980s, fisheries policy
across the world moved toward closed access to fisheries through the de-
velopment of new forms of property rights, an approach called rights-based
 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure 153

management. These changes have been made in the context of a global

emphasis on market-based approaches to resource.
New Zealand’s rights-based system of management is its Quota Manage-
ment System (QMS). It has two key structural pillars: Total Allowable Catch
(TAC) and Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ). Individual Transferable
Quota (ITQ) are transferable property rights allocated to fishers in the
form of a “right of harvest” up to a particular tonnage of a species from a
defined region. In addition, a permit is necessary to commercially harvest
fish controlled by the QMS. To be eligible for a permit, commercial fishers
must hold minimum quota amounts such as three tons for rock lobster and
shellfish per quota management area or region (QMA).5
The QMS, as it has been implemented in New Zealand, illustrates how
the bounding of property—reflecting a particular set of assumptions re-
garding the relationship between society and nature—has an impact on
relationships among people and the natural world. The QMS divides na-
ture into pieces—pieces that are legally bounded. Ownership of pieces is
individualized. For the purpose of establishing these property rights, nature
is divided into single species catch by ton. Noncommercial species are set
outside these boundaries. Minimum species quota for a license also has
constructed human interests by individual species and amount.
The Individualized Quota tonnage is also regionalized under the QMS.
This regionalized ownership has further reordered who fishers are in rela-
tionship with; putting together regions as joint exploiters. These regions
may bear no relationship to prior social relations. Great Barrier Island’s
quota management area covers the entire northeast portion of the North
Island. In the past, the small boats out of Great Barrier Island were limited
to a relatively small area by their size, yet the quota system has opened
up Great Barrier Island fishing grounds to those from off the island. Fur-
thermore, after a decade or more under the quota system, the option of
returning to a locally controlled system is no longer viable because of the
individualistic decision-making that resulted from the QMS. A local resi-
dent talked about how giving power to the local fisherman to manage the
island fisheries at this point would not work because locals did not have
the informal management system—the relationships—in place that was
there fifty years ago.
Finally, and significantly, the QMS has changed the relationship between
local catch and commercial sales of catch. The QMS requires that the catch
around Great Barrier Island be recorded in Auckland. This means, among
other things, that local restaurants cannot buy from local fishers. This has
increased the social distance among locals on Great Barrier Island as well as
increased the distance between nature and humans. No longer can locally
caught fish be sold directly into the local economy. The relationships have
to be funneled through Auckland.
154 Janel M. Curry

The impact of New Zealand’s QMS on social boundaries is particularly

significant on those at the margins of society who often live along coastal
margins. For example, the QMS undermined the survival strategy of life
of Great Barrier Island that involved part-time, multiple jobs. Individuals
in places such as Great Barrier Island have had a strategy for survival that
involves crossing the land-ocean boundary as well as crossing standard
employment boundaries through part-time employment and multiple
jobs. This strategy sustained communities and has been particularly true
of the indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori.6 Great Barrier Island
is a microcosm of the larger changes brought by the QMS. In the early
1990s, Great Barrier Island had twenty-five locally owned fishing boats and
another fifteen from the mainland that unloaded catch on the island. By
2002, only two full-time resident fishermen remained. Commercial fishers
were either forced out of fishing because they could not establish their right
to quota, or they were given amounts of quota that were under the limit to
obtain a permit to fish, partially the result of employment strategies.7
The Quota Management System policy offers a clear example of a policy
that views nature and society as divisible and boundable. Nature is not seen
as tied to the local human community. In fact, the interests of the local com-
munity are seen as biased. The market, enhanced by the QMS distribution
of property rights to individuals, is thought to serve as the morally neutral
arbitrator of the distribution of goods. Thus, in order for policy to be ratio-
nal and disinterested, decision-making must be protected from the interests
of the local community, thus protecting policy from any relational notion of
personhood, whether with other people or a local ecological system.

FISHERIES, BOUNDARIES, AND MARINE RESERVES

Scholars have noted that for each move toward economic liberalism, such
as seen in the QMS, there is a countermovement toward social protection.8
This idea can also be applied to nature-culture relationships. In the case
of the commodification of nature as seen in the QMS in New Zealand,
this countermove is toward environmental preservation. An emphasis on
freedom through the QMS system has led to a countermove of restrictions
on freedom through the establishment of marine reserves as no-take zones.
The development of marine reserves on the surface appears to be the op-
posite of the division and portioning of nature via the QMS. However, both
assume very rigid nature-culture boundaries in which humans are not seen
to be integrated with nature but rather separate. Great Barrier Island has
also been subject to this policy of preservation.
New Zealand passed a Marine Reserves law whose purpose was to estab-
lish a series of marine reserves in response to worries about overfishing and
 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure 155

decreasing marine biodiversity. The New Zealand government is committed

to putting 10 percent of New Zealand’s marine environment in reserves as
a way to preserve biodiversity. To date, only 0.1 percent of the coastline is
protected within fifteen marine reserves.9
The most isolated part of Great Barrier Island is the northeastern tip,
with more populated ports and sheltered areas on the western shore. The
isolation of this area, combined with the Department of Conservation’s
ownership of much of the land in this area, has led to a proposal to make
a portion of the area a marine reserve. The creation of this reserve has
been controversial, and the debate surrounding its possible establishment
illustrates, again, differing views on nature-culture relationships. The De-
partment of Conservation and the marine reserve legislation emphasize
no-take marine protected areas, separating the human community from
nature. This separation is based on a view of nature-culture that concludes
that humans must be removed from nature to ensure the protection of
biodiversity. This implies that humans exploit nature through their action,
leaving it in a degraded state. Thus, in order to save nature, we must set a
“boundary between pristine wilderness and modified, humanized stretches
of land.”10 This preservation is based on scientific justifications.11
In interviews with locals on Great Barrier Island, it was clear that they
did not perceive such a strict separation between nature and the human
community but view reality as the integration of nature and the human
community with community health and the well-being of the surrounding
environment intertwined. They would often speak of how the management
of the environment around them was directly related to the health of the
community and economy. In this view of reality, science does not stand
apart from the political but includes deeply held values, values based on
assumptions that all parties need to discuss.12 Thus, their exclusion from
meaningful participation in decisions related to the management of the
environmental was a constant area of frustration.
Debates over the establishment of a marine reserve on Great Barrier
Island illustrate the same largely modernist, nature-culture dichotomy
seen in fisheries management. The proposal assumes a spatial dichotomy
between the protection of the inside from the threat by those outside and a
clear distinction between nature and culture.13

MUSSEL FARMS

The picture of nature inherent in, and established by, the QMS has
changed social relations on Great Barrier Island. The QMS splits nature
into pieces of a bundle of property rights. These property rights have been
distributed in such a way as to transform social relations between people
156 Janel M. Curry

and the nonhuman world and relations among people. The countermove
has been to create more protected areas. Science has been a part of this
process of division, tending to fragment both biological and human sys-
tems into parts in the application of management policies. This leaves sci-
ence and policy grasping for means for reconnecting the pieces of nature
into a whole and reconnecting this whole with human society.14
What, then, integrates these pieces back into some kind of whole? Neo-
liberalism, the dominant ideology of government in New Zealand since the
1980s, sees the free market as the integrator.15 The market is expected to be-
have as the mediator of boundaries, and the individual thus contributes to
the community via market competitiveness. Yet, rationalistic and market-
oriented policy structures allow for no local consideration to be taken into
account in terms of who gets the benefits of policy. Such considerations are
thought to be biased.
The proposed expansion of aquaculture for mussel farms around Great
Barrier Island shows these tensions within this structuring of policy. Mussel
farming is one of the major commercial fishing industries on Great Barrier
Island, with tremendous pressures for expansion due to high prices and the
high quality that can be produced on the island. Green lipped mussels are
grown on lines suspended from floats on the surface of the water and such
mussel farms on Great Barrier Island produce fifteen hundred tons annu-
ally.16 The Auckland Regional Council (ARC), the local planning entity,
grants permits for the establishment of such aquacultural farms. However,
ARC is not allowed to take into account the residency of the applicant into
its decision-making. If a local person gets such a license, they are allowed
to turn around and sell it to a nonlocal person at a huge profit. Policy
structures allow for no local consideration to be taken into account in terms
of who can get permits. A person who owns a Great Barrier Island mussel
farm but is from Auckland is equal to a mussel farmer who lives on Great
Barrier Island itself. 17
This policy has created great internal conflict among locals. Some locals
would have been willing to support an increase in mussel farm permits if
these could be maintained by locals. Policy, however, does not allow for
such local accountability or recognition of interest. The same applies to
tourism-related concession contracts with the Department of Conservation.
No guaranteed benefits to the local community are ensured.

BREAKING CONCEPTUAL BOUNDARIES

If social-local-economic-ecological boundaries are in reality intertwined

and exhibit multiple connections rather than being clearly separable, what
is left out by building policies that act otherwise? If an aspect of nature or
 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure 157

society is not known or recognized by way of policy, its existence is not

recognized. Bounding individualized commercial interests leaves out eco-
systems as a whole, including noncommercial aspects of nature, as well as
the relational aspect of society. Because of the way nature and society has
been divided in policy in New Zealand, the only answer to the problem of
the nature-culture relationship problem is strict bounding through preser-
vation. This is the only way to keep nature as a whole. Yet, by doing so,
humans and “the local” are once again left out of nature.
In order to overcome the conceptual and policy boundaries built under
policy regimes such as those of New Zealand, knowledge creation must
include the processes of objective science placed in dialogue with local
knowledge. Our objective science demands the universality of distance and
objectivity, but we also need local knowledge—contextualization—to form
effective policy that is built on a more nuanced view of the integration of
society and nature.18
The conservation community is largely made up of professionals trained
in such a way as to give priority to scientific explanations and strategies for
protecting biodiversity. However, science arises out of a particular intellec-
tual and philosophical tradition and often discredits other ways of know-
ing, creating a barrier to dialogue with local communities and the possibil-
ity for finding a common language and goals. For example, on Great Barrier
Island, local people continually said of the DOC and their scientific studies:
“They never ask us! I’ve sat here every day for forty years observing the estu-
ary and the brown teal ducks and ecologists come in and do a one month
study, demand I change some type of activity, without ever asking me what
I’ve observed, and then leave.”
So why is this local knowledge needed alongside the more distance ob-
jective knowledge? Contextualized science and policy are part of the bridge
between nature and society that allows deeper levels of existence and caring
to develop. Care theorist, Nel Noddings, calls for the movement between
the abstract and the concrete. She says that one of the greatest dangers may
be premature switching to a rational-objective mode. If rational-objective
thinking is to be put in the service of caring for nature and the human
community, we must at the right moments turn it away from the abstract
toward which it tends and back to the concrete. The rational-objective
mode must continually be reestablished and redirected from a fresh base
of the concrete. Otherwise, we become deeply enmeshed in procedures that
somehow serve only themselves; our thoughts are separated, completely
detached, from the original context.19 To move back and forth allows the
practice of living our lives within society and nature to become craft over
against abstract reasoning alone.20
Great Barrier Island is an example of a case where local knowledge and
involvement might provide the link between the theory of protecting nature
158 Janel M. Curry

and its practice. As with the proposed marine reserve, consensus at the local
level is the only means of policing the reserve. No other way exists of pro-
tecting an area extending out eighteen kilometers (twelve miles) from the
coastline from poaching at night. A constant criticism of the Great Barrier
Island marine reserve proposal is the problem of policing the reserve. The
Department of Conservation wants to establish the reserve only on its sci-
entific merits, as delineated in the original legislation without presenting as
part of the package the contextual plan on policing and ensuring benefits to
the local community. This lack of contextualization remains the largest bar-
rier to locals. The reality of integration of society and nature means that the
protection of biodiversity can only take place through the vehicle of human
institutions such as laws, organizations, or cultural practices.21 Our objective
science demands the universality of distance and objectivity. In reality, we
can benefit from seeing nature, human nature, and our understanding of
knowledge intertwined.22

RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

If we view nature as intertwined with human society in a thickly nuanced,

intricately interactive reality, we move to a relational, rather than an indi-
vidualistic understanding of ethical agency, and ground our ethical systems
in an embodied form.23 In this relational ontology, humans are viewed “not
as an individually held static quality of mind but as a relational achieve-
ment that is constituted between others-in-relation.”24 Several theoretical
movements are simultaneously arguing for this very thing. Care theorists,
arising out of feminist ethics, work out of a relational framework.25 Like-
wise, Sarah Whatmore uses the concept of hybridity to describe this reality
as a “mode of worldly inhabitation that precedes the urge to separate out
the social from the natural” and a “gesture toward their reconciliation.”26
What it is to be human cannot be conceived apart from these relationships.
The same can be said of nature.
Theologian Douglas Hall argues that while traditional theological reflec-
tion has centered on traits possessed by humans that image God, a minority
tradition has identified the image of God not as a quality of being but as a
quality of relationship. Hall proposes a biblical ontology of communion,
community, and ecology similar to that of Joseph Sittler.27 Hall states, “we
are created for relationship. Relatedness—and specifically the modality of
relatedness designated by the biblical word ‘love’—is the essence of our
humanity as the Creator-Redeemer of this tradition intends it.”28 In this
relatedness, nature is not a neutral backdrop, but rather God, humanity,
and nature are inextricably bound up with one another.29 To start from the
 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure 159

assumption that humans are interdependent means that the terms for our
moral discussions must shift. Local community health and wholeness is
one measure of the fulfillment of that relational aspect of human nature as
well as in the relationship between humans and land.30
Hall is part of a group of so-called social Trinitarians, namely, those that
argue that God is who God is only by virtue of the relationships among
the persons of the godhead—God is a community of Love, a family of in-
terpenetrating perichoretic Love. Thus, a relational ontology arising out of
secular streams of thought is backed by a relational theology. Colin Gunton
goes so far as to say that whereas Descartes and his successors destroyed the
understanding of the symbiosis of social and universal order, “we shall not
understand our place in the world unless we face up to the way in which
we are internally related to the rest of the world.”31 Not only is it wrong to
abstract humans from their social context, Gunton argues that abstracting
the environment from its inhabitants leads to a world that is emptied of its
personal meaning.32
Can there be a rebuilding on the new theological foundation suggested
by the Trinitarians?33 The key to Gunton is an appreciation for the role of
the spirit in which the spirit is to do the crossing of boundaries while main-
taining and even strengthening particularity. “It is not a spirit of merging
or assimilation—of homogenization—but of relation in otherness, relation
which does not subvert but established the other in its true reality.”34 In
contrast, the modern notion of particularity loses that particular when it is
deprived of its concrete subsistence and meaning.35
Growing Trinitarian dialogue promises to reshape the way we see our re-
lations to God, to the earth, and to each other. It also reveals a deep human
desire to be connected to each other and to the earth.36 All entities are what
they are only by virtue of their relationships to other entities, having their
source in the God who is a community of Love, a family of interpenetrating
perichoretic Love. In Christian terms, all being is being-with; all existence is
coexistence, because the God who makes and sustains all things is a triune
community of mutually engendering and indwelling love.37 The challenge
is to build natural resource policies that invite this communion, extending
it to the rest of creation.38
Therefore, what does theology have to teach about fisheries manage-
ment? A relational ontology and theology make it possible to develop a
view of boundaries among people, among societal groups, and among hu-
mans and nature as places for relationship building rather than as tools to
demarcate differences. A relational ontology suggests that rather than look-
ing at boundaries as something that divide, they should be seen as oppor-
tunities for dialogue and relationship building that deepens understanding
of ourselves, our place in the world, and our relationship to nature.39 Then
160 Janel M. Curry

it follows that “knowing” also is only possible through understanding

relationships, whether it is the relationship among entities, or between
creations and the Creator.
New Zealand’s marine management strategies favor a universalized
policy regime with equitable treatment of each individual, individuals
who are assumed to have no basis for continuing relationships with each
other.40 The alternative, relational model must be built on more flexibility
and assume ongoing relationships within the human community as well as
between the human community and environment. The reality of ecologi-
cal systems is that their long-term stability requires models that integrate
nonlinearity, complexity, flexibility, quick feedback, and change.41 In the
former, the public becomes an abstract concept, one more element to add
to a technical question, allowing the expert to remain above the fray.42 The
relational model requires natural resource agencies to make clearer distinc-
tions, acknowledging its on-the-ground reality.43
Community management strategies of a variety of types have been initi-
ated in the management of fisheries.44 Environment Canada has replaced its
basic management model with a more flexible approach in its development
of its Atlantic Coastal Action Program (ACAP). The program stresses com-
munity involvement in dealing with coastal problems.45 Community in-
volvement goes beyond participation to what are referred to as community-
based initiatives.46 The role of Environment Canada has changed to allow
for local ownership of decision-making and actions. In the case of the ACAP,
environmental monitoring activities are often done by unpaid volunteers
because government funding is not sufficient.47 Yet, government agencies
still need to empower the local community, support their initiatives, and
provide some funding.48 The relationships across scales are important.
Common characteristics underlie the success of these initiatives. Local
stakeholders and the government must mutually recognize the existence of
the resource problems, and this mutual recognition serves to initiate a joint
management arrangement. Local interests and knowledge must be recog-
nized. Local institutional capacity must exist or be built. User rights must
be clearly defined, and enforcement must be effective through the provision
of legal and policy support. The objects of the management scheme must
be clear and agreed upon by both local and government interests with tan-
gible mutually agreed upon results. In the end, the combination of these
characteristics leads to positive attitudes toward rules and toward collective
action rather than their being undermined.49
A relational ontology, undergirded by a relational theology lead to a
fundamental need for building trust as a fundamental building block
for any management scheme. Trust is achieved through verification, and
verification is achieved through monitoring, not just of biodiversity but of
 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure 161

ecological, biological, social, and economic conditions. Such monitoring is

embedded in local community initiatives because it is essential for building
trust, for discussion, and for knowing if actions have led to desired objec-
tives.50 Trust building is a process, not an outcome, just as monitoring is a
continuous process.51

NATURE-SOCIETY REENVISIONED

The picture of nature inherent in, and established by, the QMS has changed
social relations on Great Barrier Island. The Individual Quota System has
split nature into pieces of a bundle of property rights. These property rights
have been distributed in such a way as to transform social relations be-
tween people and the nonhuman world and relations among people. The
countermove has been to create more protected areas. Science has been a
part of this process of division, tending to fragment both biological and
human systems into parts in the application of management policies and
then left science, policy, and the market as the means for reconnecting the
pieces of nature into a whole and reconnecting this whole with human
society.52
We are in need of a Trinitarian imagination and a relational ontology in
constructing our future on this earth. Nature and culture are not separate,
objective entities. Neither are they social constructions. “They are socio-
material fabrication in which the histories and geographies” are made
flesh.53 We need to continue to develop a more integrative understanding
of the relationships among God, humans and societal structure, and the
earth, one that is more complete and nuanced than we presently have. Such
a model must move beyond traditional concepts of human stewardship
of creation to embeddedness in social structure and the earth and beyond
the human-nature dualism that dominates present natural resource policy.
Such an understanding must be built on the reality of the profoundly
relational nature of not just human relations but also in the relationship
between humans and the earth. This relational understanding must draw
as well on the insights of modern ecology in contrast to various forms
of scientific reductionism. This relational understanding of science goes
beyond the traditional model of rationality that assumes that more infor-
mation on a phenomenon automatically leads to answers on what actions
to take in the management of the creation, free of the formative influence
of the human community and thus failing to include sufficient legitimacy
to communities and social structure. The universalizing nature of science
has abstracted nature, humans, and their interrelationships from our more
thickly nuanced, intricately interactive reality.
162 Janel M. Curry

A faith-informed ontology is not built on a dualistic and oppositional

structure of culture and nature. Rather culture and nature are viewed as in-
herently relational and representing a whole that in turn has its origins in,
and is sustained by, God. The challenge is to build policies that recognize
this reality.

NOTES

1. For more extensive treatments of this topic, see Janel Curry, “Globalization
and the Problem of the Nature/Culture Boundary,” in Secularity and Globalization:
What Comes After Modernity? ed. James K. A. Smith (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University
Press, forthcoming); Janel M. Curry, “The Nature-Culture Boundary and Oceans’
Policy: Great Barrier Island, New Zealand,” The Geographical Review 97 (2007):
46–66.
2. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155,
no. 376 (1967): 1203–7.
3. R. Clough, “Introduction,” in Great Barrier Island, ed. D. Armitage (Christ-
church, N.Z.: Canterbury University Press, 2001), 10–20, 19.
4. Janel M. Curry, “Contested Ocean Spaces: Great Barrier Island, New Zea-
land,” Focus 48 (2006): 25–30.
5. B. M. H. Sharp, “From Regulated Access to Transferable Harvesting Rights:
Policy Insights from New Zealand,” Marine Policy 21, no. 6 (1997): 501–17; C. J.
Batstone and B. M. H. Sharp, “New Zealand’s Quota Management System: The First
Ten Years,” Marine Policy 23, no. 2 (1999): 177–90.
6. P. A. Memon and R. Cullen, “Fisheries Policies and Their Impact on the New
Zealand Maori,” Marine Resource Economics 7 (1992): 158.
7. Auckland City, Great Barrier Island (GBI) Overview and Strategy, Report to
Directors (February 24, 2003), 5; L. Howie and A. Robertson, “Great Barrier Island
Community Profile,” (unpublished manuscript, 2002), 12.
8. B. Mansfield, “Rules of Privatization: Contradictions in Neoliberal Regula-
tion of North Pacific Fisheries,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94
(2004): 565–84, 570.
9. Department of Conservation, A Marine Reserve for Great Barrier Island? Your
Chance to Have a Say (January, 2003), 4.
10. J. Fall, “Divide and Rule: Constructing Human Boundaries in ‘Boundless
Nature,’” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 243–51.
11. Fall, “Divide and Rule,” 246.
12. C. A. Capitini, B. N. Tissot, M. S. Carroll, W. J. Walsh, and S. Peck, “Compet-
ing Perspectives in Resource Protection: The Case of Marine Protected Areas in West
Hawaii,” Society and Natural Resources 17 (2004): 776.
13. Fall, “Divide and Rule,” 248.
14. G. A. Bradshaw and M. Bekoff, “Integrating Humans and Nature,” Trends in
Ecology & Evolution 15, no. 8 (2000): 309.
15. Mansfield, “Rules of Privatization,” 566.
16. Clough, “Introduction,” 19.
 Understanding God, Nature, and Social Structure 163

17. P. Simons, “Going Beyond Technicism and Neo-liberal Economism: What Is

Involved in a Sustainable Long-term Care of Land and Sea?” (Paper presented at Hui
on “Caring for Land and Sea,” Tamihana Foundation, June 12, 2004), 1.
18. Bradshaw and Bekoff, “Integrating Humans,” 309.
19. N. Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 26.
20. S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Sage
Press, 2002), 3.
21. S. R. Brechin, P. R. Wilshusen, C. L. Fortwangler, and P. C. West, “Beyond the
Square Wheel: Toward a More Comprehensive Understanding of Biodiversity Conser-
vation as Social and Political Process,” Society and Natural Resources 15 (2002): 46.
22. J. M. Curry-Roper, “Embeddedness in Place: Its Role in the Sustainability of a
Rural Farm Community in Iowa,” Space and Culture 4, no. 5 (2000): 204–22.
23. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 146.
24. B. Stephenson, “Nature, Technology and the Imago Dei: Mediating the Non-
human through the Practice of Science,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
57 (2005): 7.
25. R. E. Groenhout, Theological Echoes in an Ethic of Care, Erasmus Institute Oc-
casional Papers 2003–2 (South Bend, Ind.: Erasmus Institute, University of Notre
Dame, 2003).
26. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 98.
27. D. J. Hall, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-
mans, 1986), 124; J. Sittler, Evocations of Grace: Writings on Ecology, Theology, and
Ethics, ed. Steven Bouma-Prediger and Peter Bakken (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-
mans, 2000).
28. Hall, Imaging God, 113.
29. Hall, Imaging God, 129.
30. D. J. Hall, “The Spirituality of the Covenant: Imaging God, Stewarding
Earth,” Perspectives (December 1988): 11–14.
31. C. E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture
of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15.
32. Gunton, The One, 16.
33. Gunton, The One, 155.
34. Gunton, The One, 181, 182.
35. Gunton, The One, 193.
36. J. Wood, J. Curry, M. Bjelland, S. Bouma-Prediger, and S. Bratton, “Christian
Environmentalism: Cosmos, Community, and Place,” Perspectives on Science and
Christian Faith 57, no. 1 (2005): 2.
37. Wood et al., “Christian Environmentalism,” 5.
38. Wood et al., “Christian Environmentalism,” 5.
39. J. M. Curry and S. McGuire, Community on Land: Community, Ecology, and the
Public Interest (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 209–34.
40. J. F. Handler, Law and the Search for Community (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 40.
41. James W. Crossley, “Managing Ecosystems for Integrity: Theoretical Consid-
erations for Resource and Environmental Managers,” Society and Natural Resources
9 (1996): 465.
164 Janel M. Curry

42. B. J. McCay and S. Jentoft, “From the Bottom Up: Participatory Issues in Fish-
eries Management,” Society and Natural Resources 9 (1996): 243.
43. Nancy J. Manring, “Alternative Dispute Resolution and Organizational Incen-
tives in the U.S. Forest Service,” Society and Natural Resources 11 (1998): 67–80, 75.
44. Anthony Davis and Conner Bailey, “Common in Custom, Uncommon in
Advantage: Common Property, Local Elites, and Alternative Approaches to Fisheries
Management,” Society and Natural Resources 9 (1996): 255.
45. G. M. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental
Management in Atlantic Canada” (Paper presented at the International Rural Geog-
raphy Symposium, St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1999), 1.
46. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental Man-
agement,” 3.
47. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental Man-
agement,” 3.
48. Robinson, “Theory and Practice in Community-Based Environmental Man-
agement,” 5.
49. B. Katon, R. S. Pomeroy, L. R. Garces, and A. M. Salamanca, “Fisheries Man-
agement of San Salvador Island, Philippines: A Shared Responsibility,” Society and
Natural Resources 12 (1999): 777–95, 792–93.
50. G. Gray and J. Kusel, “Changing the Rules,” American Forests 103, no. 4
(1998): 27–30, 29–30.
51. Michael P. Dombeck, Christopher A. Wood, and Jack E. Williams, “Focus:
Restoring Watersheds, Rebuilding Communities,” American Forests 103, no. 4
(1998): 26.
52. Bradshaw and Bekoff, “Integrating Humans,” 309.
53. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 98.
Index
ACAP. See Atlantic Coastal Action
Program
Adeyemo, Tokundoh, 108
AFDC. See Aid to Families with
Dependent Children
Africa, 6, 37, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105,
106, 107, 108, 110; Africa, A
Continent Self-Destructs (Schwab),
99; Continent in Chaos (Ayittey),
99; sub-Sahara Africa, 99, 100,
106
Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC), 132, 133, 134,
135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142,
144
aliens, 65, 73, 74
Anselm. See Saint Anselm of
Canterbury
Appleby, Joyce, 93
Aquinas, Thomas, 42, 45, 46, 47, 54
ARC. See Auckland Regional Council
Areopagitica, 101
Aristotle, 34, 35, 39
Atlantic Coastal Action Program
(ACAP), 160
Auckland Regional Council (ARC), 156
Augustine, 23, 24, 34, 124
Ayittey, George, 99
165
Bacon, Francis, 64, 75
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 4, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
27, 28
Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 84, 85, 86, 87,
88
Bear Flag revolt, 87, 89, 90
beliefs: American values and, 82;
associated with ethnic hatred, 108;
perceptual, 40; shaping societal and
worldview, 152
Bellah, Robert, 82, 83
Benton, Senator Thomas Hart, 88
biodiversity, 155, 157, 158, 161
birthing, 115; Who’s Having This Baby?
Perspectives on Birthing (Buzzanell,
Turner), 128
boundaries, 3, 5, 22, 65, 101, 103,
152, 153, 156, 159; breaking
conceptual boundaries, 156;
conceptual and policy, 157;
fisheries, marine reserves, and, 154;
lack of, 6; methodological naturalist,
65; nature-culture, 151, 154;
prestipulated conceptual-theoretical,
5, 65; religious, 116; social, 154;
social-local-economic-ecological,
156; standard employment, 154
166
Boyle, Robert, 57, 63, 71, 75
bracketing the referent(s), 15, 18, 19
Brauer, Matthew, 67
Bridgewater Treatises, 57, 64; From a
Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and
Self (Keller), 124
Brumbaugh, Daniel, 67
bubble universe, 74
Buchanan, James, 88
Bujo, Benezet, 107
Buning, Sietze. See Wiersma, Stanley
California, 6, 47, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86,
87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96,
97; University of, 84
California, From the Conquest in 1846
to the Second Vigilance Committee in
San Francisco: A Study of American
Character (Royce), 83, 84, 85, 86,
87, 89, 90, 94, 96
Californians: Anglo and Mexican, 91;
native, 87, 90, 92, 96
Californios, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92
Calvin, John, 40
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 120
capitalism, 108, 109, 131
carelessness, 86
care theory, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128,
129
Carroll, Lewis, 13
Carter, Stephen, 102, 111
Casey, James, 92
charitable choice legislation, 140
Child Care Tax Credit, 141
Chomsky, Noam, 16
Christian, 2, 33, 118, 122, 123, 128,
159; academics, 1; community,
3; faith, 108; feminist and
Christian worldview, 117; Judeo-
Christian tradition, 95; message,
3; nationalism, 118; scholarship,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 117; social reformers,
145; theological tradition, 127;
traditions, 3; triumphalism, 7;
voices, 118; Western European
intellectual context, 61; worldview,
118
Index
Christianity, 35, 36, 40, 118; in Africa,
105; The Moral Core of Judaism and
Christianity (Maguire), 118
The Christian Mind: How Should a
Christian Think? (Blamires), 2
Christians, 3, 118, 128; freedom
of opportunity for, 134;
fundamentalist voices, 118
Christians, Clifford, 105
circulating words, 21
Civil Rights Act of 1964, 134
Clendenning, John, 86
clockwork universe, 46, 47
Commission on Freedom of the Press
(Hutchins), 103
communicating, 18, 19, 100
communication, 100, 102, 120,
122, 124, 132; action and, 117;
community and, 109; ethic based
on power, 124; policymaking
communication ethic of care, 124;
positive, 121; power function of,
123; styles and structures of, 121;
theory, 100, 104; theory and media
freedom, 104
communist-socialist theory, 104
communitarian social behavior, 100
communitarian theory, 104, 107
community, 7, 37, 40, 84, 92, 95, 96,
106, 107, 109, 110, 123, 127, 128,
132, 141, 142, 152, 154, 155, 156,
157, 158, 159, 160, 161; academic,
3; Anglo-American, 91; California
and the, 85; called to be a member of
a, 2; communication and, 105; faith,
1, 3; global, 104; individualism and,
82; irreducible community of two,
4, 21, 24, 27; linguistic, 15; memory
and hope of, 82; moral obligation
to, 38; nature of persons and society
in, 85; norms, 6; norms or social
values, 103; as source of authority of
morality, 39
Concerned Women for America, 119
confession, 6, 81, 82, 96, 122, 123
Congo, 107
connectedness, 6, 110; human, 8, 105
 Index
connective, 7, 124
Continent in Chaos. See Africa: Continent
in Chaos (Ayittey)
correspondence view of truth, 26
cosmological anthropic principles, 57,
69
Cours de linguistique générale (The Course
in General Linguistics) (de Saussure),
14
creationism, 64, 68
Crick, Francis, 73
Cronon, William, 93
Culler, Jonathan Culler, 14
cultural contract, 109
cultural institutions, 119
Curry, Janel M., 1, 8, 123, 151
Danforth, John, 118
Darwin, 62, 69
Darwinian evolutionary theory, 58
Davies, Paul, 46, 61, 71
Dawkins, Richard, 58, 67, 71
de Laplace, Pierre Simon, 47
Derrida, Jacques, 16, 19, 20, 28
de Saussure, Ferdinand, 14
Descartes, 159
design. See intelligent design
design-phobic ideas, 69
design-tropic ideas, 69; in nature, 57;
standard theories, 59; supernatural,
60, 64; theories, 63, 71
determinism, 47, 49, 50, 54
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 82
dialogic, 23, 24, 27
dialogism, 22
différance, 19; In a Different Voice
(Gilligan), 124
Dillard, Annie, 20
discourse, 17, 19; authoritative, 23, 24;
faith and learning, 166; historical,
93; interpretive, 25; moral, 85;
persuasive, 23, 24; public, 82, 108;
scientific, 14; symbolic, 103
dissenters, 102
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 133
Eck, Diane, 118
167
economic liberalism, 154
ecosystems, 151, 157
EITC. See Earned Income Tax Credit
Eldredge, Niles, 68
Ellul, Jacque, 108
embedded in prepositions, 20
empirical, 8, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66,
70, 71, 74, 75, 84, 105; data, 5, 58,
63, 67, 68; default position, 67;
disconnect between the supernatural
and the, 60; evidence, 67;
investigation, 73, 74; investigations
of social policy issues, 166;
predictions, 63
Environment Canada, 160
epistemological confusion, 25, 103;
earnings-disregards, 138
Etulain, Richard, 95
Fackler, Mark, 3, 6, 99
Faith and Politics (Danforth), 118
Family Support Act of 1988, 137
Faraday, Michael, 57
Felch, Susan M., 4, 13
Feminist Power Analysis, 120
Feynman, Richard, 52
fluid gendered responses, 117
Food Stamp (FS) Program, 133, 134,
135, 141
food stamps, 136
forty-niner, 84
Foss, Sonja, 118, 123
fourfold theory of causation, 50
Four Theories of the Press, 102, 103
free speech, 101, 102
French Encyclopedists, 53
FS. See Food Stamp Program
full integration of humans, society, and
nature, 151
Futuyma, Douglas, 68
Gabriel, Ralph Henry, 84
gap picture, 35, 36
gender construction, 119
gender partnership, 6, 128
Ghana, 101, 105, 107
Gilligan, Carol, 124
168 Index

Goldberg, Michelle, 117 individual property rights, 151

golden rule, 32 Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ),
Gold Rush, 85, 91, 95 153
good Samaritan, 39 intelligent design, 5, 57, 58, 64, 73
Good Work When Excellence and Ethics Intelligent Design Movement (IDM),
Meet, 109 57, 58
Gray, John, 127 interchange, 25
Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, 8, invitational rhetoric, 7, 118
152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, irreducible community of two, 22
161 ITQ. See Individual Transferable Quota
Great Society program, 134, 136
Griffin, Cindy, 118, 123 Jacob, Margaret, 93
Groenhout, Ruth, 124 James, William, 83, 84
guilt, 38, 91, 122 James King of William (Casey), 92
Gunton, Colin, 8, 159 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 85
Guthrie, Woody, 94 Jones, William Carey, 87

Habits of the Heart (Bellah), 82 Kant, Immanuel, 31, 34, 35, 38, 41
Hall, Douglas, 8, 158 KANU, 107
Hardy, Lee, 27 Kenya, 100, 101, 102, 107
Hare, John, 4, 31 Kenyatta, Jomo, 101
Harrison, Edward, 71, 73 Kepler, Johannes, 57, 60
Heidegger, Martin, 14 Kikuyu, 101
Herschel, John, 57 kinetic, 49, 50
heteroglossia, 21 Kingdom Coming (Goldberg), 117
Hine, Robert V., 95 Kuhn, Thomas S., 14
The Historical Roots of Our Environmental
Crisis (White), 151 Lagrange, 54
Hocking, William Ernest, 103 Land Act of 1851, 92
Hoyle, Fred, 69, 70, 73 language, 4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
human connectedness. See 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,
connectedness: human 28, 101, 103, 106, 123, 141, 157;
humanist manifesto, 37 flexibility of, 22; to God, 4, 18,
humanity, impoverished view of, 121 24, 25, 26, 28; linear system, 22;
humanly constructed society, 8 literature and, 22; nature of, 15, 27;
Hunt, Lynn, 93 structure of, 15; two kinds of, 23;
Hutchins, Robert. See Commission on view of, 4, 25, 27
Freedom of the Press langue, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 27
Huxley, Thomas, 65 Larkin, Thomas, 88, 90
hybridity, 158 Lasn, Kalle, 109
law, 32, 33, 38, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55,
Ide, William B., 90 102, 108, 116, 145, 146
IDM. See Intelligent Design Movement Law of Universal Gravitation, 47
Iliffe, John, 100 Legacy of Conquest (Limerick), 82, 83,
image of God, 1, 6, 151, 158 85, 90, 94
income-transfer programs, 132 Lenoir, Timothy, 61
Individualized Quota, 153 Lerner, Gerda, 125
 Index
Letter on Humanism (Heidegger), 14
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 16
Lewontin, Richard, 68, 73
Lilburne, John, 102
Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 82, 83, 85,
90, 93, 94, 95
Linde, Andrei, 73, 74, 75
linguistics, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20;
community, 15; competency
of, 16; moral coherence and, 4;
reductionistic tendencies of, 4;
Saussurean, 16, 20. See also Cours de
linguistique générale
Loop Theorem, 49
lost continent, 99
loyalty, 39, 85, 96, 110
Lucie-Smith, Alexander, 105
macroevolution, 67
Magesa, Laurent, 105
Maguire, Daniel, 118
mandatory employment programs, 138
manifest destiny, 86, 90
Maori, 152, 154
Marine Reserves law, 154
Marsden, George M., 2
Marx, Karl, 37
mass media, 100, 101
Maxwell, James, 57
McLuhan, Marshall, 108
McMullin, Ernan, 71, 72
McMurtry, Larry, 93, 94, 95, 96
The Mechanical Bride (Marshall), 108
mechanical picture of the universe, 4
mechanical views, 5
mechanistic, 53, 72
Medicaid, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136,
137, 140
Medicare, 133
medicine, 116
metaphysical, 25, 53, 68, 75
Mexican War, 87, 90
microevolution, 67
Milner, Clyde, 93
Milton, John, 101, 102
The Mind of God (Davies), 46
minimum wage, 140
169
Minnesota MFIP program, 144
modes of explanation, 48; mechanistic,
51, 52, 53, 54, 55; variational, 51,
52, 53, 54, 55
monarchial authoritarian theory, 104
The Moral Core of Judaism and
Christianity (Maguire), 118
A Moral Creed for All Christians
(Maguire), 118
moral demand, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38,
40
moral gap, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37
morality, 4, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40,
41, 105, 124, 152; authority of, 31,
37, 38, 39, 40, 41
Mouw, Richard J., 2, 3, 6, 8
Moyo, Ambrose, 105
Murdoch, Iris, 61
Murphy, Nancey, 60
Napoleon, 47
nation building, 100
natural capacities, 31, 34, 35, 37, 39
natural contract, 109
naturalism, 5, 58, 66, 68, 72, 73;
biology and, 67; human nature,
131, 158, 159, 161; metaphysical,
58; methodological, 5, 58, 59, 60,
64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73,
75; methodological naturalism and
cosmology, 69; nature, 39, 57, 154,
155; philosophical, 59, 67, 69, 71.
See also boundaries
natural law, 42
natural resource management, 151, 152
nature-culture, 151, 154, 155, 157, 161,
162; of God, 54; nonmechanistic
views, 52; nurture or, 119, 127;
society and, 153, 154; uniformity
of, 62
neoliberal: economics, 8
neoliberalism, 156
Nevel circle, 16
Newton, Sir Isaac, 46, 47, 54, 57, 60
Newtonian, 47, 48, 53
Newtonianism, 46; Three Laws of
Motion, 47
170 Index

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 103 Politics of Past Evil Religion,

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38 Reconciliation and the Dilemmas of
Nigerian, 101, 104 Transitional Justice (Philpott), 81
Nkrumah, Kwame, 101 Polk Administration, 88
Noddings, Nel, 123, 157 postmodernity, 104, 117
Noll, Mark, 2 potential energy, 49, 50
nonmechanical view, 4, 5, 45 poverty programs, 136, 140, 142
nonnatural truths, 66 poverty rates, 135, 136; among ethnic
nonpredictiveness, 62 minorities, 143
normative relativism, 39 pragmatic, 59, 64, 75
nurture, 120, 128; nature or, 119, 127 prescientific, 45, 46
principle of least action, 50, 53, 61
Oak, Henry, 88, 89 principle of least time, 48
Occam’s Razor, 71 Promise Keepers, 119
Ochieng, Philip, 107 PRWORA. See Personal Responsibility
Ogbonnaya, 104, 106 and Work Opportunity
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, Reconciliation Act
134 public intellectual space, 7, 117
Ong, Walter, 100 Puritan dissidents, 102
opposition, 19, 58, 88, 117, 127;
binary, 20; gender, 119, 121, 127 QMS. See Quota Management System
oppositions: binary, 28 Quota Management System (QMS),
oral culture, 100 153, 154
original sin, 34
racial-ethnic relations, 87
Paley, William, 64, 72. See also Rainbow Coalition, 107
Bridgewater Treatises Ratzsch, Del, 5, 6, 57
parole, 15, 16, 17, 19 reciting, 23, 24
particularity, 159 relational ontology, 158, 159, 160,
patriarchy, 119 161
Pennock, Robert, 64, 68 relational theology, 159, 160
Personal Responsibility and Work representational epistemology, 26
Opportunity Reconciliation Act Republic (Socrates), 33
(PRWORA), 140, 141, 142 Republican Party in 1856, 82
perspectivalists, 25 rights-based management, 153
perspectival realism, 4, 25, 26 Robinson, Forrest G., 94
philosophy of science, 5, 52, 54, 58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37
Planck, Max, 52, 61 Royce, Josiah, 6, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86,
planned socialism, 131 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96
Plato, 34, 39 Royce, Sarah Bayliss, 84
pluralism, 104, 118 Ruddick, Sara, 123
pluralist thinkers, 118 Ruse, Michael, 59, 68
Polanyi, Michael, 14
policy regimes, 157 Saint Anselm of Canterbury, 34
political dissidents, 111 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
politics, 81, 88, 101, 115, 116, 119, (Noll), 2
120 Schaefer, Kurt C., 7, 131, 146
 Index
Schlissel, Linda, 93
Schwab, Peter. See Africa
Schwehn, Mark, 1
scientific emptiness, 60
scientism, 53
Scott, Eugenie, 58, 59, 60
Scotus, John Duns, 34, 39
Scudder, Horrace, 83, 85, 88
Second Great Awakening, 145
Section 8, 133
secular triumphalism, 7
self-correction, 67
Semple, Robert, 90
senses of self, 124
separative, 124
shalom, 6, 151
Shinn, Millicent, 85
The Significance of the Frontier in
American History (Turner), 82, 93
signifieds, 15, 19, 24, 27
signifiers, 15, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 28
sin, 95, 96, 128
Sittler, Joseph, 158
Sloat, John, 91
Snel’s Law, 48
social arrogance, 86
social contract, 109
social protection, 154
social responsibility theory, 103
social salvation, 92, 96
Social Security, 133
social Trinitarians, 159
Socrates, 33, 38, 84
soluable, 124
SSI. See Supplemental Security Income
Starr, Kevin, 83, 84, 95, 96
status quo, reification of the, 121
Sterk, Helen M., 3, 6, 7, 115
Summa of Thomas Aquinas, 45
Supplemental Security Income (SSI),
132, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141
Swinburne, Richard, 71
TAC. See Total Allowable Catch
TANF. See Temporary Assistance for
Needy Families
technological prowess, 103
171
Telling the Truth about History
(Appleby), 93
Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF), 140, 141, 142, 143
testifying, 23, 24
Theories of the Press. See Four Theories of
the Press
Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 13
Title IX, 115, 116
Total Allowable Catch (TAC), 153
Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Bakhtin),
16
traditional theism, 31
transformational grammar, 16
Trinitarians. See social Trinitarians
Trinity, 6, 7, 105, 132
triumphalism, 3, 6, 7, 118; Christian,
7; secular, 7
Tronto, Joan, 123
trust-building, 161
truth, correspondence view of, 26
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 82, 83, 93
“two truth” position, 68
Ubuntu, 105, 106
underdetermination of theory by
experiment, 51
UNESCO, 108
unfalsifiability, 62
universalized policy regime, 160
Van Baak, David A., 3, 4, 6, 45
variational methods, 52, 54
wage gap, 116
waiver experiments, 138
welfare policy, 7, 134, 135
welfare reform, 131, 137, 140, 141,
142, 143, 144
Wells, Ronald A., 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 81, 82,
84, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96
Whatmore, Sarah, 158
Whewell, William, 57, 72
White, Lynn, 151
White, Richard, 93
Wiersma, Stanley (pseud. Sietze
Buning), 122
172 Index

Wiredu, Kwasi, 105, 106, 107 West, 3; mechanistic, 5; scientific, 5;

Wood, Julia, 123
Woodward, C. Vann, 94
worldview thinking, 118; African, 105;
gender, 117, 120; gender opposition,
119; hegemonic worldview of the
societal beliefs and, 152; theological,
61; values and goals, 119
Worster, Donald, 93, 94
worthy of study: limit what can be
considered, 121
About the Contributors

Janel M. Curry is dean for research and scholarship and professor of geog-
raphy at Calvin College. Her published work, which has appeared in major
disciplinary journals, has centered on worldview and natural resource man-
agement. Her most recent book is Community on Land: Community, Ecology,
and the Public Interest (with Steven McGuire).

Mark Fackler, professor of communication arts and sciences at Calvin Col-

lege, has published widely in professional ethics. His works include Media
Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, Good News: Social Ethics and the Press, and
Ethics and Evil in the Public Sphere. He has lectured in Mongolia, Guatemala,
and Norway, but most frequently in East Africa, where he also does devel-
opment work in cooperation with students from both continents.

Susan M. Felch is professor of English at Calvin College and past direc-

tor of the Seminars in Christian Scholarship. Her research interests are in
sixteenth-century British literature as well as in theoretical approaches to
religion and literature. Her publications include a series of volumes on the
spiritual biographies of the seasons (coedited with Gary Schmidt), Bakhtin
and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (coedited with Paul J. Contino), The Col-
lected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, and the forthcoming Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s
Morning and Evening Prayers.

John Hare is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale

University. Before going to Yale in 2003 he taught at Calvin College for
fourteen years. His recent books include God and Morality: A Philosophical
History, Why Bother Being Good, and God’s Call.

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174 About the Contributors

Del Ratzsch is chair and professor of philosophy at Calvin College. He spe-

cializes in philosophy of science, with particular focus on science/religion
integration questions. His published work deals with a variety of issues in
that broad area and includes Science and Its Limits, The Battle of Beginnings,
and Nature, Design, and Science.

Kurt C. Schaefer, professor of economics at Calvin College, has also directed

the college’s Center for Social Research. He is managing editor of Faith and
Economics, and secretary/treasurer of the Association of Christian Econo-
mists. Much of his published work consists of empirical investigations of
social policy issues, including workplace discrimination, income support’s
relationship to unmarried parenting, and international trade issues.

Helen Sterk is chair and professor of communication arts and sciences at

Calvin College. She held the William Spoelhof Teacher Scholar Chair at
Calvin from 1997–1999. Her research interests focus on rhetoric by and
about women, including analyses of popular culture, religion, and health
discourses. Publications include Gender and Applied Communication (coed-
ited with Patrice Buzzanell and Lynn Turner) and Who’s Having This Baby?
Perspectives on Birthing, as well as Differences That Make a Difference (edited
with Lynn Turner) and Constructing and Reconstructing Gender (edited with
Linda A. M. Perry and Lynn Turner). Sterk has served as editor of the Journal
of Communication and Religion and serves on three other editorial boards.

David A. Van Baak, professor of physics at Calvin College, has taught

there since 1980. He has spent sabbaticals at Notre Dame and the National
Institute for Standards and Technology, and a year as Fulbright Lecturer at
University College Cork, Ireland. Since 2004 he has also been a collabo-
rating physicist at TeachSpin, Inc., a developer of apparatus for advanced
laboratory instruction in physics.

Ronald A. Wells is professor of history emeritus at Calvin College. He is

now retired in Tennessee, where he is director of the Maryville Symposium
on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College. His research interests are
in historical aspects of peace and justice issues, and in bringing “faith and
learning” discourse into professional historical scholarship. He is author of
History through the Eyes of Faith and History and the Christian Historian. He
was editor of Fides et Historia for fourteen years.