I would like to invite the New Yorker magazine to hold a symposium on Christianity.
I make this proposal after the publication, and the reaction to the publication, of New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza's long profile of Michele Bachmann. Lizza's piece has been getting some criticism for getting a couple facts wrong (Joe Carter at First Things probably got the best shots in). The most egregious was the contention that the late evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer advocated violence against America in order to protest Roe v. Wade. As many Christian commentators have noted, Schaeffer very explicitly renounced violence. He instead called for civil disobedience.
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I met Ryan Lizza this past summer. I teach a summer journalism course for high school students at Georgetown University, and this year I had a panel on the importance of long form print journalism. The panelists were Lizza, Jonah Goldberg from National Review, and Tom Billitteri from CQ Press. Conservatives have been howling for Lizza's head, but having read his writing and met him in person, I can say that Lizza is not an ideologue or a "left-wing hack." He is a thoughtful and honest journalist, as well as a nice person. I was grateful that he stayed long after class to talk to students interested in journalism. In my view he simply made a mistake in his Bachmann piece, and not one that was fueled by animus.
In the same week that Lizza was at Georgetown, we had another speaker, Raymond Arroyo, the news director at the Eternal Word Television Network, a huge Catholic network, and the host of the live weekly news program "The World Over Live." After hearing Arroyo -- who incidentally was a phenomenally popular speaker with the students -- and then meeting Lizza the next day, I was once again reminded of the two different worlds that I, and many other Christians, seem to occupy.
I love the New Yorker magazine. I also love the Harry Potter movies, rock and roll, and the Washington Nationals. Yet I embrace with even more ardor EWTN, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Pope Benedict, and the brilliant mind of the great Catholic writer George Weigel.
Why are these worlds, my Catholicism, and the sphere of popular and mainstream intellectual culture, separate? Liberals would argue that magazine publishing, Hollywood and pop music are simply secular pursuits. That is understandable up to a point, but it is also true that much of the media had simply lost even basic intellectual curiosity about Christianity.
It wasn't that long ago, although it seems like a different epoch, that Reinhold Niebuhr was on the cover of Time magazine. That's why I think the New Yorker should dedicate a special issue on Christianity, to be followed by a symposium on the topic to be held in New York City. My only suggestion is that the effort be fair. Liberals like Hans Kung, the Kennedys and Jim Wallis can be represented, but also the orthodox: David Bentley Hart, whose The Beauty of the Infinite is a work of genius, Dawn Eden -- a former rock journalist who converted to Catholicism -- and George Weigel.
Such a symposium, I believe, could go a long way towards clearing up basic misunderstandings between the secular world and the Christian world. In the same issue of the New Yorker as Lizza's pice about Bachmann, literary critic James Wood has an essay about secularism. In it, Wood claims that "religion cannot be identified with the promise of fullness or enchantment." According to Wood, "both Christianity and Islam harshly challenge the self with an insistence on submission, sacrifice, and kenosis -- and emptying out of the self, and exchange of the wrong kind of fullness for the right kind of humility -- and Buddhism seeks to undermine the very idea of a sovereign, unified self."
To me, this displays a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity. As with Lizza, it doesn't even seem malicious -- just wrong on a fact or two. Anyone who has read Gerald Manley Hopkins, Chesterton or Teresa of Avila knows that to many Christians, especially converts, awakening to Christ makes the world positively pop with enchantment.
We believe that the universe was created by and endlessly creative force of love -- a love that created the grand magnificence of the oceans, the beauty of the animals, and the joy of children. God is love, a love that manifests itself in the world. It is a love, as Dante wrote, that "set the stars in motion." Further, we believe that kenosis, the emptying of oneself that Wood sees as a type of confinement, is actually a form of liberation.
It is often difficult for secular thinkers to grasp Christian paradox. Was John Paul the Great a contemplative Carmelite mystic, a poet, and actor, a nature-loving athlete, or a steely lion who helped topple Communism? The answer, to us Catholics, is, yes. He was all of those things. And his kenosis, his submission to the truth, his God-inspired love, gave him freedom and made him a warrior.
This is exactly the kind of thing that could be addressed at a symposium held about Christianity. The point would not be to convert the unbelieving -- although, sure, that would be a bonus. The point would be to stop the name calling and to build something constructive, and more importantly to build better journalism -- on both sides.
For me, it is usually embarrassing when conservatives and Christians attempt to write about things like rock and roll. Many of them seem as clueless as the left often does about Christianity. For liberals, it would be a chance to cultivate some sources that would make Lizza's unfortunate mistake about Schaeffer less likely. And who knows? We may all become friends.
During my journalism course at Georgetown, I regretted that I hadn't scheduled Lizza and Arroyo on the same panel. I love the New Yorker, with its long articles and lovely art, and I also can't live without "The World Over Live," Arroyo's show, which is live Thursday nights. Here are two first-rate journalist living and working in Washington, D.C., and they had never met. For me it would have been like a great comic book crossover -- Spider-Man meets the Flash. In fact, Arroyo and his remarkable career -- he started as an actor studying under Stella Adler -- would make a good New Yorker profile.
So what do you say New Yorker? Let's do this -- "The New Yorker Presents: Christianity, Past and Future." Such an event would surely be the talk of the town.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
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