by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
The Wilbur Award: Excellent Journalism, Seen Several Ways
It has been said on good authority that you can’t serve two masters. But the Wilbur Awards, presented in New York the other night, suggest otherwise – at least when it comes to the coverage of Pope Francis and his United States visit.
The Wilbur Awards are presented annually by the Religious Communicators Council (founded 1929) to recognize “excellence in communicating religious issues, values and themes in the public media.” This year the Awards recognized work in twenty-one categories, ranging from an Associated Press story on the Chinese government’s crackdown on the public display of crosses to the OWN network’s Belief series to a Slate story about a evangelical creationist’s change of mind about evolution.
Three of the awards recognized coverage of Pope Francis: a group of NPR reports about his visit to the U.S. and Cuba; a Religion Dispatches series of posts about Francis’s efforts on ecology and climate – and my profile of Francis for Vanity Fair.
That’s what put the “two masters” insight in mind. My professional training, such as it is, was in long-form journalism, and from the beginning it was my wish (and then my aim, and then my strategy) to write articles dealing with religion that would deliver all the satisfactions of the long-form magazine journalism I grew up reading, and would do so in ways that represented religious perspectives credibly, in all their complexity and depth.
I worked at this for The New Republic, and Lingua Franca, and the Times Magazine, and the Atlantic. Lately I’ve had the opportunity to do such work for Vanity Fair; and when it came time to undertake a profile of Pope Francis, the two (master) editors I work with there – David Friend, who assigned and edited the piece, and also Cullen Murphy – let me follow a direction I found promising and write a piece in which I would see Pope Francis from multiple perspectives: face to face; from the point of view of a pilgrim; through his friends and associates; in history and in the Jesuit milieu; in his role as pastor to the people of Rome, and as a spiritual leader initiating a Year of Mercy.
That the piece received a Wilbur Award suggests that it worked for people who know religious perspectives as well as for Vanity Fair and its diverse readers.
It was an honor to be present at the banquet the other night and receive the award – and to meet some of the several dozen other journalists who have managed to serve two masters in their own ways.
The photograph shows an image from Pope Francis’s new Instagram account.
From “Father” to “My God”
Thanks be for short, tightly written books – books
that can be read in a day or two, in a couple of sittings, as the
occasion demands.
James Martin’s Seven Last Words is such a book. It emerged out of a set of reflections on the “seven last words of Christ” that Fr. Martin – the well-known Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of America – delivered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York during Holy Week a couple of years ago. The “seven last words” devotion emphasizes the extraordinary concision of the Gospel texts, and Fr. Martin responds with a like concision, drawing out of those last words seven insights into aspects of human experience that Jesus understood – understands – because he went through them himself.
I was struck especially by a passage, rooted in the work of the great scripture scholar Raymond Brown, S.S., where Fr. Martin focuses on a single pair of words, and on the way Jesus’s turning away from the one word and toward the other suggests the profound abandonment he felt on the cross:
“When Jesus speaks to the Father in the garden, he says, `Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me …’ Abba is a familiar way of speaking, something like saying, `Dad.’ (Both times I have visited Jerusalem on pilgrimage, I have seen, in the crowded city streets, young children running up to catch up with their fathers shouting, `Abba! Abba!’
“But on the cross, when Jesus says, `My God, my God,’ he uses the Aramaic word Eloi (or the Hebrew Eli, depending on the Gospel). That’s a more formal way of speaking to God. The shift from the familiar Abba in the garden to the more formal Eloi on the cross is heartbreaking. Jesus’s feeling of distance, then, reveals itself not only in the scream and not only in the line of the psalm that he utters, but also in the word Eloi.”
It really is heartbreaking. “Abandonment” is the word Fr. Martin and many others use to characterize what Jesus must have feel on the cross just then. But the shift from one name to the other suggests a more precise emotion. Just then, Jesus feels “estranged” from his father – feels like a stranger to him.
The illustration is “The Black Crucifixion” (1963), by Fritz Eichenberg.
In Chicago: The American Pilgrimage Project
A freshly retired pastor who works with the survivors of people killed in gang violence; two men exploring the confluence of Catholic spirituality and the spirituality of the men’s movement; the founder of an innovative network of Jesuit high schools for students of severely limited financial means; a Christian theologian and the Muslim chaplain at DePaul, the nation’s largest Catholic university; a woman, once homeless, who underwent an Ignatian-style retreat with a woman who has become a retreat master . . .
These are some of the people who told their stories in conversation as the American Pilgrimage Project went to Chicago for two days last week. They are Susan Johnson; Joe Durepos and Tom McGrath; Fr. John P. Foley; Scott Alexander and Abdul-Malik Ryan; Amanda Asque and Renate Reichs …
And that was just day one, held in the StoryCorps booth in the Chicago Cultural Center – a grand building, once the city’s public library, at the corner of Michigan and Washington.
The American Pilgrimage Project is a Georgetown partnership with StoryCorps – the acclaimed Brooklyn-based documentary outfit – devoted to gathering, archiving, and sharing everyday Americans’ stories of the ways their religious beliefs have shaped their lives at crucial moments. The Project will go to Charleston, West Virginia, and to Baltimore before returning to Chicago in May.
For day two in Chicago, we were hosted by the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in its gorgeous building on Michigan Avenue. The “fit” between the American Pilgrimage Project and Spertus is such that Spertus’s Mark Akgulian and I found ourselves discussing the prospect of holding another day of conversations at the Institute during the May visit.
I spent all day Friday there, and it was really something to sit in one of the Institute’s media centers and see the people come in to tell their stories:
Peter Bensinger, a Spertus trustee, and CEO Hal Lewis; Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persch, Sisters of Charity – and friends for sixty years – who lead a weekly vigil for immigrants without documents who are facing deportation; Mark Vargas and Jazmin Fermin, graduates of Cristo Rey – that Jesuit high school network; Bill Creed and Marty Kelliher – partners an Ignatian retreat designed for people struggling with homelessness or addiction; Olga Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, and Arielle Weininger, a curator at Spertus; Rev. Neichelle Guidry, a prominent young African-American pastor, and Sarah Thompson, director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who does strategic non-violent intervention in areas of lethal conflict and structural violence.
A first principle of the StoryCorps approach is that the conversation “booth” is protected space, with only a StoryCorps facilitator present alongside the conversation partners. So I had the strange experience of meeting all those amazing people and learning more about them without actually getting to hear the stories they told at the microphones.
I’ll hear those stories digitally in the coming days – and then share them through StoryCorps, the Berkley Center website, and other media.
Waiting, and Asking Why
I haven’t posted a piece of writing to this site in a while, in a little more than three weeks to be precise, and I have been asking myself why.
Asking why because I didn’t make any decision to stop writing and posting – just found that I wasn’t doing it.
Asking why because the site, in my view, has been a focal point for my writing these past three years. Sure, there are questions about who is reading it and how, and about whether the ubiquity of Twitter as the conduit to everything else means you might as well tweet your thoughts instead of essaying them. (The news that Twitter is questioning its own effectiveness suggests that these questions go with the digital territory.)
Asking why because, without fail, I’ve enjoyed writing and posting pieces to the site, and because by now the mental act is habitual, so that short essays take shape in my mind without any effort on my part. This morning, for example, obituaries on successive days for George Martin and Robert Palladino – one the Beatles’ producer, the other a Trappist calligrapher whose love of beautiful typography was passed on to his student Steve Jobs – prompted a mental mini-essay on the unlikelihood of these two men becoming major figures in the confluence of the arts and technology, an essay that (had I written it) would also have taken into account Google’s home page today, which is dedicated to the theramin, one of the first and most original electric musical instruments.
Asking why because all signs have been that the site fits aptly into the community of thought and feeling that is Georgetown.
So: why? I didn’t have an answer until I looked at the date of my post recent – now not so recent – post, about a Faith & Culture conversation with David Gregory.
It was Tuesday, February 9. It was Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.
In the religion-and-culture field, where I till the soil from time to time, it’s an article of faith that the liturgical calendar is something like a substratum to the ordinary calendar, and that the movement from Annunciation to Christmas and Epiphany to Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday and Easter to Pentecost and on into ordinary time is a pattern natural to human experience.
I am generally suspicious of such a view. It’s too easy, too smug; it takes as givens the patterns that must be reinstilled, and then renewed and reinterpreted – reinvented – from one generation to the next.
And yet there it is: as the season of self-emptying and purgation began, I instinctive set aside one of my self-preoccupations without understanding why.
Following Lutheran custom, during Lent J.S. Bach led no “figured music” in the churches where he worked. One year, he seized the opportunity – seven weeks without a need to compose fresh music for each Sunday – to compose the St. John Passion, truly an amazing Lenten feat.
I wish I could say I have been painting my masterpiece. I haven’t, quite. But I have been taking a step in that direction – so I hope, anyway.
Lewis Hyde in The Gift characterizes the life of an artist in terms of two impulses, or modes, which succeed each other, going in and out of phase: the receptive mode, in which the artist waits to receive the gift of inspiration, and the making mode, in which the artist makes art as “the gift that is given back.”
Usually we think of Advent as the time of waiting, of preparation for the reception of a gift. But of course the notion of receptive preparation for a gift fits the Lenten season aptly, too – and helps to clarify the purposes of silence and renunciation and reflection that we associate with Lent.
I hope I am in receptive mode, and not just saying so. In any case, to see the season in this way, to feel it in this way, has been a gift in itself.
The photograph shows the Moon over Lazio: my home page these past few weeks.
Another Side of David Gregory
Today David Gregory is in New Hampshire, naturally: as NBC’s chief White House correspondent during George W. Bush’s administration, and then as host of Meet the Press, he gained an up-close knowledge of the presidency such as few people (even people in Washington) possess, and he is putting it to use in election-year commentary for Fox and CNN.
The other day Gregory was in Riggs Library at Georgetown, taking part in our Faith & Culture conversation series. He’s the author, this past year, of How’s Your Faith? – a book that is as candid an account of a public figure’s religious journey as any I’ve read lately, and a book that gives insight into the whys and wherefores of his deepening Jewish faith.
He told us about his study group of brilliant Jewish journalists (Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks, and Franklin Foer, among others); the creative form of Sabbath observance in his household (youth sports schedules are consulted; a martini is involved); the role of Psalm 27 in his spiritual journey – and especially about his experience of the presence of God, an experience that seldom figures into discussions of Jewish identity and affinity and is rarely described with the term “faith.”
He was so steadily on point that, there on stage in conversation with him, I forgot for a moment that he’s not an accredited expert in this stuff – that his world-class achievements are in political journalism.
And that was the appeal of the conversation. His presence wasn’t inevitable, or professionally apt: he was opening up an aspect of his adult life that many of us wouldn’t have known about otherwise.
Introducing Gregory, I noted that he was the series’ first Jewish guest, our first journalist, and our first author to take his book title from a remark made to him by the president of the United States. But he was a first in this way, too: our first guest whose religious commitment isn’t front and center in his public life – but is what Flannery O'Connor called a “dimension added.”
Now the door is open for other such guests to tell us about the added dimension.
The Lesson of “Silence”: No Humility Without Humiliation
Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence is one of the great contemporary novels about religious faith, and one that seems more complex and profound – at the level of Dostoevsky – each time I reread it. The novel tells the story of three Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan, and of the ways they are encouraged, through torture and other forms of violence, to apostasize – to renounce their faith by defacing an image of Christ prepared for the express purpose of inducing apostasy.
I’ve taught the novel the past three years at Georgetown, each time in anticipation of Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation, which has been in the pipeline for years. Well, this year the movie is imminent: it is due to have its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The three Jesuits are played by Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, and Adam Driver. From Taken and Spider-Man and Star Wars to Silence: here they are action heroes of a very different kind.
This year – by coincidence – I taught the book during Georgetown’s Jesuit Heritage Week, whereby the university affirms its Jesuit identity and expresses it through a dozen events, ranging from lectures to evening prayer to a sportive Jesuit Trivia contest in the Bulldog Tavern. There could be no better context for the novel, for it represents the Jesuit sensibility past and present: the sensibility of the missionaries in the novel, and the sensibility of Shusaku Endo – given an honorary degree by Georgetown in 1987 – who tells their story with maximum attention to its paradoxes: God’s seeming silence in response to human violence, and the anguish felt by the apostate, who is urged to humiliate Christ but who feels the act as a personal humiliation.
As it happened, the aptest context for the novel this week came from a certain Jesuit in Rome. Pope Francis, speaking on the story of King David in a morning homily at the Casa Santa Marta, explained that David’s early humiliation was a precondition of his leadership of the people of Israel. His remark could be a gloss on Silence:
Humility … can only get into the heart via humiliation. There is no humility without humiliation, and if you are not able to put up with some humiliations in your life, you are not humble.
The only way to humility is through humiliation. David’s destiny, which is holiness, comes through humiliation. The destiny of that holiness which God gives to his children, gives to the Church, comes through the humiliation of his Son, who allows himself to be insulted, who allows himself to be placed on the cross - unjustly … And this Son of God who humbles himself, this is the way of holiness. And David, through his behavior, prophesizes this humiliation of Jesus.
“Humility cannot be achieved without humiliation.” It’s “mathematical,” Francis says. I suppose it is, right down to the root the two words share. And yet the point strikes me as profoundly countercultural – and it opens a whole other area of insight into Shusaku Endo’s extraordinary novel.
Through Long-Game Journalism, a Change Comes
One December evening close to twenty years ago, Lenora and I were en route to the Harper’s Christmas party, at the Housing Works bookstore on Crosby Street, and Jennifer Gonnerman came with us. One reason was that Jen, who was reporting on prisons for the Village Voice, had glimpsed an opportunity to write about Rikers Island, the offshore New York holding facility for accused men awaiting trial – a place proverbially off limits to journalists – and she hoped to turn the access into a prominent story, say, for Harper’s, about the abuses of human rights at the Rikers Island penal colony.
That story didn’t run in Harper’s (it ran in the Voice), and Gonnerman stayed with the story afterward. Over the next twelve years, as she reported and wrote a series of stories about New York’s onerous sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenders; and wrote Life on the Outside, a National Book Award-nominated book about Elaine Barrett, a woman so sentenced; and wrote a series of stylistically groundbreaking stories about “lives out the outside” of financial-boomtown New York – all through this, she kept her eye on the story of Rikers Island.
She told a Rikers story last year in The New Yorker, where she is now a staff writer. It was the story of Kalief Browder, a teenager accused of stealing a backpack and then forced to endure a frankly unendurable series of trial delays, physical abuses, and stints in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, all because he refused to plead guilty to a minor crime he maintained he didn’t do.
The story came out, to extraordinary effect. The abuses at Rikers Island, now in the bright light of The New Yorker, were condemned by New York’s mayor and other politicians.
Then Browder – finally out of Rikers and at home in the Bronx – committed suicide. Even free and back with his family, he was damaged and haunted by the torture (there is no other word for it) of his periods of solitary confinement.
There is no happy ending to such a story. There cannot be. But out of such a story change can come; and change came this week when the Justice Department banned the practice of solitary confinement of juveniles in the federal prison system. President Obama himself explained the ban in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, and he began by telling the story of Kalief Browder – which he doubtless read in The New Yorker.
The president who likes to play the long game did so on solitary confinement, prompted by Jennifer Gonnerman, the journalist who plays the long game better than any other I know. For her part, she wrote a piece attributing the power of the story to the training she got from James Ridgeway and others in an older generation of reporters on abuse in government.
“What it’s all about,” a friend etched above the link to Obama’s opinion piece when he sent it along. Truly, this is what long-form journalism of a certain kind ought to be all about: changing people’s lives and society for the better by telling stories of justice and its violation.
It’s a challenge to the rest of us – I feel it as a challenge, at any rate – to do more, and do better, with our own writing.
Will Mike Bloomberg Walk Through the Door Bernie Sanders Opened?
Over the weekend Michael Bloomberg’s people floated a trial balloon in the form of a long New York Times piece setting out the efforts he is making to explore an independent candidacy for president.
If the piece’s opaque sourcing and strategically placed quotes from Ed Rendell – a longtime Clinton supporter who favors a Bloomberg candidacy – didn’t mark it as a Bloomberg-prompted effort, something else did. The piece passed without a mention over the idea (invariably mentioned in connection with the prospect of a Bloomberg run in 2008) that Bloomberg’s identity as a self-described divorced Jewish New Yorker is an obstacle to him in national politics.
It’s as if with Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish and speaks in a distinct Brooklyn accent, polling strongly in Iowa and New Hampshire, somebody in Bloomberg’s office said: Hey, maybe Sanders has shown that at long last it’s a non-issue.
In the scenario set out in the Times, Bloomberg would be prompted to enter the race if Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
Were that to happen, and were Bloomberg to enter the presidential campaign, it would unfold in a way out of a Michel Houllebecq novel. You’d have not one but two Jewish candidates (the Democrat Sanders and the independent Bloomberg) running against a Latino evangelical (Ted Cruz) and a nominal Christian (Donald Trump) who has proposed a ban on Muslim immigrants to the United States. You’d have a New York billionaire real estate titan running against a New York billionaire media titan who is (as Seth Lipsky points out in Ha'aretz) ten times as rich. You’d have a Democratic-minded Jewish independent who champions the money culture running against an independent-minded Jewish Democrat who excoriates the money culture.
Which would be more historic: the first female president, or the first Jewish president? It’s hard to say. But it can be said that the prospect of the two Jewish presidential candidates stepping up to oppose the frank anti-Muslim, anti-minority rhetoric of Trump’s campaign is very, very appealing.
Here (via Ha'aretz) is Bloomberg speaking on a New York City subway platform in 2008:
“To those who are wailing against immigration, to those politicians who, all of a sudden, have embraced xenophobia, I say: open your eyes,” the mayor said. “Take a look behind me. This is what makes America great. This is New York City. This is freedom. This is compassion, and democracy, and opportunity.”
The photograph shows Michael Bloomberg leaving the White House after meeting President Obama about gun control in 2013.
Lawrence Joseph, Surging
In a recent piece on Commonweal’s website, Anthony Domestico proposed that the work of the New York poet Lawrence Joseph “bridges the gap between two very different conceptions of modern poetry: the meditative, self-interrogating poetry of Stevens and the fractured, history-interrogating poetry of Pound.”
The piece is apt and instructive; in 1500 words, a third of them words from Joseph’s own poetry and prose, Domestico sketches the running conflict between Team Stevens and Team Pound – a key divide in contemporary poetry – and plausibly presents Joseph as a poet who belongs prominently to both.
It’s a measure of the strength of Joseph’s poetry that it can bear the weight of such an analysis; and it’s a further measure that the poetry can suggest to me a wholly different pair of terms and seems to reconcile those as well – the poetry of modern cities, pulsing with the yearnings and ill-gotten gains of their large populations, and the poetry of inwardness we associate with religious devotion, the poet as a person intentionally set apart from the crowd.
Joseph’s poem “A Fable,” in the current New Yorker, passes movingly from one to the other. The first part of the poem is a streetscape, data and capital surging through the crooked streets of old New York. The second part, announcing the whole as a fable, is (like many New Yorker poems) a work of art about art – but it calls out the artistry of the first part, the streets gathering “the light in majestic degrees.”
For several years now Joseph has been constructing an extraordinary new book poem by poem – poems published in Granta, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Commonweal right now is as well stocked with writers attuned to literature as at any time in its history: Domestico, Matthew Sitman, and Matthew Boudway, joining Celia Wren and Rand Richards Cooper.
It suggests that the hoped-for state of things is actual just now – that great poetry and great criticism are calling one another forth.
Martin Luther King, Trending Downward?
This year Google searches for “black lives matter” surpassed searches for “civil rights movement.”
That factoid, posted on screen during Sunday’s debate among the Democratic primary candidates, isn’t surprising – but it strikes me as apt and telling.
Martin Luther King seems far away this year, even as concern about race relations and everyday circumstances for African-Americans seems near at hand.
On the face of it, Dr. King is still right in the center of things. Selma is a new release on Netflix and as an Amazon download. In his address to Congress, Pope Francis cited Dr. King as one of four “representative Americans,” along with Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton. The year just past was a year distinguished by nonviolent protest more than any year since Dr. King’s death: in Baltimore, in St. Louis, in Chicago, and especially in Charleston, where the families of the people who died in the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church openly forgave the man who killed them. And the first black president – who has distinguished himself in all sorts of ways – did so especially with his remarks on the Charleston shooting and its aftermath.
My own feeling for Dr. King is undiminished: he is, if not the greatest American, then the American whose greatness appeals to me most powerfully. And if Georgetown’s slate of events surrounding Martin Luther King Day is any indication, he is undiminished culturally, too. There will be a dozen events across ten days, from a concert at the Kennedy Center to a teach-in on nonviolence to a ceremony that joins remembrace of Dr. King to the church’s Year of Mercy and to a reflection on Georgetown’s participation in the practices of slavery and racial discrimination in decades past.
Dr. King’s book title Why We Can’t Wait is now a hashtag to reckon with. And yet Dr. King himself seems to be at a distance this year. Why is that? It may be that, after half a century, and the natural deaths of many in the civil rights movement, the link between his legacy and one’s personal association with him has been broken, and now Martin Luther King belongs to all of us, free at last. It may be that with Black Lives Matter, the movement for equal rights for African Americans has a fresh outlook – a fresh set of arguments and imagery – for the first time in a generation.
In those respects, the diminishing of Martin Luther King’s legacy – if it is true – may be a good thing, a chance for other people to lead, challenge, and inspire. And yet I worry that much of what he represented is easily lost and not so easily regained. His rock-solid identification of racial justice with religious faith; his conviction that nonviolence is not a tactic but a way of life; his affirmation of patience as a virtue and a strategy, not as a form of weakness or a failure of nerve: his recognition that even collective and egalitaritarian mass movements need individual leaders who are willing to stick out from the group: as Black Lives Matter takes the movement for racial justice forward, there’s a risk that these things will be underestimated.
Lest we forget, #MLKMatters.