Days Full of Grace: Remembering My Father

Dad as a pastor in the 1960s

Dad holding me in 1971

O day full of grace, which we behold,
Now gently to view ascending,
Thou over the earth thy reign unfold,
Good cheer to all mortals lending,
That children of light of every clime
May prove that the night is ending!

 —N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783-1872), trans. by Carl Døving

This was my first Christmas without my dad, Theodore Johannes (Ted) Thuesen, Jr., who died July 11, 2024, at age 96. As his health worsened last summer, I took a hiatus from blogging and am only now resuming to reflect on his death. I was grateful to be with him when he died, though it was hard to watch him slip away.

Dad became a father later than most. He was 43 when I was born and was on his second career as a sociology professor. As a young man, he had been a parish pastor for seven years, from 1956 to 1963. In those days, American Lutherans of Danish heritage were divided into two groups, stereotypically known as the “Happy Danes” and the “Holy Danes.” The “Holy Danes” tended toward biblical literalism and moral strictness. This definitely was not Dad. He and other “Happy Danes” were followers of the great theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig, who rejected biblical fundamentalism and saw earthly life not as an exile but as something to be enjoyed and celebrated.

That outlook is expressed in Grundtvig’s version of the old Scandinavian folk hymn, “O Day Full of Grace,” which speaks of the good cheer that God brings to mortals. (In 2019, I had the joy of hearing my daughter sing this with the St. Olaf Choir in F. Melius Christiansen’s gorgeous arrangement.)

The notion that life is filled with grace permeated every sermon I ever heard Dad preach. Though I was born after his parish days, I remember accompanying him when he was, as he used to joke, a circuit rider, or supply preacher. He did this even into retirement and would pull old homilies from what he called his “sermon barrel” (actually a file drawer in his clothes closet).

After Dad died, my sister and I went through his sermon barrel and found “Not Far to Fall,” first preached at Bethesda Lutheran Church, Newark, New Jersey, in 1958, and last preached in 1999. The sermon begins with a story, no doubt from Dad’s personal experience growing up in Iowa, of a young boy playing in a grain elevator, which is a dangerous place for a child to play.

The boy swings from a rope suspended over a huge grain bin, but in the darkness, he becomes afraid when he realizes he can’t see the floor. He slowly lowers himself all the way to the end of the rope but his feet still don’t touch bottom. Petrified, he holds on until his arms finally give out. Bracing himself, he drops—only to fall about six inches onto the soft grain below.

For Dad, the boy in the grain elevator was a metaphor for the unknowns of the afterlife—all the questions about what happens when we die. I quote Dad now:

We ask these questions because we all are, to some extent, afraid of death. We all, like the boy in the grain bin, cling to the rope of life desperately, with all of our strength as long as we are able. We cling because life is good and we were meant to love life and to be grateful for the days we are given to live on this good earth. And so we don’t want to let go. We are afraid to let go and fall into the dark unknown. But finally the day comes for all of us when we are forced to let go like the boy clinging to the rope in the grain bin. But we need not be afraid, for everything we read in scripture about death and God’s love for each of us leads us to believe that, like the boy in the dark grain bin, we fall only a little ways; only a little ways onto a cushion—a cushion of love. We fall not into a dark unknown at all, but into the everlasting arms of him who said: “I will raise you up at the last day and you will live forever.” “Let not your hearts be troubled; neither let them be afraid.” “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

I heard Dad deliver this sermon numerous times, so it stuck with me. I can still hear him preaching it. Its message comforts me still, even amid my own persistent religious doubts. That message of comfort became basic to how I think about religion, which I do all the time as a religious studies professor.

Religion is many things, including differences of doctrine that divide Lutherans to this day. But as Grundtvig realized, doctrinal purity avails us little if religion loses its ability to comfort.

My dad appreciated this too. For him, every day on this “good earth,” as he put it, was a day full of grace. I miss him now that he no longer walks this earth, but I am thankful to carry his message with me.

© 2025 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

If This Building Could Talk: Faith and Hope in Chicago

My great-grandmother at 6410 S. Ashland circa 1910s

6410 S. Ashland as a storefront church in 2021

A building can reveal the aspirations and struggles of its inhabitants. Buildings are also barometers of demographic change. That’s what I discovered in researching the history of my great-grandparents’ former hardware store in Chicago.

Peder Ørts Jensen and Anne Kjestine Brandt emigrated from Denmark in 1891 and were married the following year. Four of their six children died young. The eldest surviving child, my grandmother Christine, was a teenager in 1909 when the family bought the dwelling at 6410 South Ashland Avenue in Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood. They expanded the building two years later, opening a hardware store on the street level and living in the apartment above.

A photo, possibly taken during World War I when nativist sentiment ran high, shows my great-grandmother standing in front of the store. The awning advertises an Americanized name, “Peter O. Jensen”; in the upstairs window, two American flags are prominently displayed.

According to a story passed down to my father, bandits once robbed the store after locking my great-grandmother in the cellar. My grandmother Christine was likely not at home because she worked weekdays as a secretary for the Wrigley chewing gum company.

In 1920, the Jensens moved their store to a bigger building a block north at 6341 Ashland Avenue. (That structure was razed to make a parking lot for the Ashland/63rd elevated train station, which opened in 1969.)

Scandinavians like my Jensen forebears were among West Englewood’s earliest immigrant residents. A city almanac from 1926 shows that the neighborhood had a branch of the Walhalla Danish Society. But other immigrant groups, including Italians and Irish, soon vied for space.

An Irish immigrant, Mary Mulryan Dalton, was the owner of 6410 Ashland in 1951 when the building made news because of two backyard bombings that happened just three weeks apart. In the second incident, she was at home in the upstairs apartment when a blast shattered the windows. After a police investigation found that the downstairs tenant, the Consolidated Veterans Club, was a possible front for gambling, she obtained a court order canceling the club’s lease.

But Mrs. Dalton, who was recently widowed, soon regretted the loss of the $200 monthly rental income. When she asked the court’s permission for the club to stay another month, neighbors were incensed. A telephone caller threatened her: “Get those people out of there or you’ll be killed.” She apparently complied because the controversy disappeared from the news.

In searching the history of the Dalton family, I found a connection to my own city of Indianapolis. It was there that Mary Mulryan (a native of County Galway, Ireland) met Michael Dalton at a house party. The two were married at SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1916. After their move to Chicago, Michael served the city as a police officer. He and Mary raised five children, one of whom became a Sister of the Holy Cross, taking the religious name Mary Bonaventure.

When Michael died at age 58 in 1951, his funeral mass was held at St. Theodore, the Irish parish (since razed) in West Englewood. Three years later, in another blow to the family, Sister Mary Bonaventure died at St. Patrick’s Convent, Danville, Illinois, at age 37.

The Daltons’ Irish Catholicism and my great-grandparents’ Danish Lutheranism were not the only chapters in 6410 Ashland’s ethnoreligious history. In 1930, West Englewood was 3 percent Black; by 1990, it was 98 percent. The reason was the Great Migration, which brought millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. This transformation gave rise to a new fixture of urban religious life—the storefront church.

I don’t know when 6410 Ashland became a church, but that’s what I found when I visited West Englewood in 2021. The sign painted on the façade advertised “Faith Tabernacle M[issionary] B[aptist] Church” and “Raymond Spaulding, Pastor.”

The attached addition at 6412 Ashland also represented new diversity: it was the office of Chicago alderman Raymond Lopez, a former airline skycap who was the first openly gay Mexican American elected to office in Illinois. Lopez eventually moved his headquarters to a different location.

At my last check of Google Maps, Faith Tabernacle was still in operation. A Bible reference on the church’s sign seemed remarkably apt: “Where we walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). To me, it symbolizes perseverance amid the hardships experienced by the building’s occupants, past and present. All who dwelt in this place had faith they would attain something greater—if not in this life, then in the life to come.

© 2024 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Details gleaned from the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis News, and the Suburbanite Economist (Chicago). On the Walhalla Danish Society in West Englewood, see The Chicago Daily News Almanac and Year-Book (1926), 733. On St. Theodore Parish, see Harrison Fillmore, Chicago Catholic Churches: A Sketchbook (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2022), 69. On the demographics of West Englewood, see the article by Franklin Forts in the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

The Biggest Reason Not to Elect Trump

There are many reasons not to vote for Donald Trump. Until this week, I wouldn’t have known where to begin. Then I read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024). It’s hands down the most terrifying book I’ve ever read, and it reminded me of how high the stakes are in the 2024 election. Though Trump appears only in the endnotes, my inescapable conclusion from reading the book is that we must never again entrust the nuclear codes to a man so erratic and morally anchorless.

In one sense, the story Jacobsen tells is nothing new. We’ve known for a long time about the danger of nuclear holocaust. When I was 12 years old, the nuclear war film The Day After (1983) affected me deeply and led me in high school to write letters to President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pleading for a reduction in nuclear arms. At that time, the two superpowers together possessed about 70,000 nuclear weapons, the all-time high.

Fortunately for the world, Reagan and Gorbachev were sane men. Their diplomacy ultimately led to two treaties, including START I (signed by Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush), which limited each side to 6,000 warheads—still more than enough to destroy the world, but a crucial step toward sanity.

After the arms reduction talks of the 1980s and 1990s, new crises grabbed public attention. The 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War (predicated in part on the false claim that Iraq had nuclear weapons) dominated the headlines. More recently, resurgent culture wars over gay marriage and abortion have preoccupied many Americans.

But the risk of nuclear Armageddon didn’t go away. Today, according to Hans Kristensen and his colleagues at the Federation of American Scientists, nine countries have a total of more than 12,000 nuclear warheads. Particularly worrisome is North Korea, which doesn’t announce its nuclear tests but has launched 100 missiles since 2022.  Meanwhile, relations between the United States and Russia have tanked since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And if that weren’t worrisome enough, now Israel and Iran (a confirmed nuclear state and an emerging one) are trading fire over the conflict in Gaza.

A nuclear attack by North Korea on the United States is the nightmare Jacobsen imagines in her book. Jacobsen is no conspiracy theorist. She’s a respected national security journalist who interviewed dozens of top officials and combed through thousands of declassified and other documents to game out a possible scenario of the failure of nuclear deterrence.

For decades, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) ostensibly kept the peace between the nuclear powers, deterring them from launching a preemptive attack that would draw an overwhelming response. But as Jacobsen notes, MAD only works until it doesn’t—until a crazy leader or computer error or tragic misunderstanding triggers nuclear doomsday. Once an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is launched, it can’t be recalled, which leaves little room for error when a nation thinks it’s under attack. The danger is compounded by the superpowers’ “launch on warning” protocol, which gives the U.S. president sole authority to launch a counterattack when he or she believes an enemy missile is incoming.

In Jacobsen’s scenario, American intelligence correctly identifies two North Korean ICBMs headed toward the United States, prompting a massive U.S. counterattack. But Russian analysts misinterpret the radar signals from the retaliatory barrage as missiles directed at Russia. A general nuclear war ensues. Within just 72 minutes of the initial North Korean attack, 1,000 Russian warheads rain down on America as the United States unleashes a similar firestorm on Russia. Hundreds of millions of people perish. When the fires die down, nuclear winter envelops the globe. Jacobsen quotes Nikita Khrushchev: “The survivors will envy the dead.”

The scariest thing, however, is left unsaid by Jacobsen. In her telling, the American president and his advisors seem properly aware of the gravity of their responsibility and wait to launch a counterattack until the last possible minute. But what if a less levelheaded individual were president? And what if he lacked the benefit of experienced and knowledgeable advisors? Such a situation increases the possibility the president could set off a nuclear war even in the absence of a preemptive strike on the U.S.

As we face the possibility of a second Trump presidency, we must assume that his massive legal entanglements and his involvement in the January 6 insurrection will dissuade any respectable public servants from serving in his administration. If Trump returns to the White House, there will almost certainly be no grown-ups like his former defense secretary Jim Mattis or secretary of state Rex Tillerson, both of whom fell out with their boss. Trump will likely instead be surrounded by sycophants and right-wing zealots, not the sort of people one would want advising him in a crisis.

Jacobsen shows how quickly a so-called limited nuclear exchange could turn into a worldwide conflagration. But to connect the dots to the upcoming election, we should supplement her account with William J. Perry and Tom Z. Collina’s The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (2020). Perry, a former defense secretary, and Collina, former director of policy at the Ploughshares Fund, wrote their book during the Trump administration, when they became alarmed at watching such an unsteady hand on the nuclear arsenal.

Perry and Collina believe that current U.S. nuclear protocol concentrates too much power in the president. They recommend retiring the “football” (the briefcase with launch codes accompanying the president wherever he goes) and enacting other safeguards to prevent a hair-trigger response. As they put it, there “is no justifiable need to give any president the unilateral power to end the world within minutes.” They recommend prohibiting launch on warning, which is so susceptible to false reports (including hacked ones) of a nuclear attack.

They also urge the resurrection of arms control, including saving the New START treaty (signed by President Obama), which further limited the number of American and Russian warheads. In February 2023, Vladimir Putin announced he was suspending Russia’s participation and would no longer allow NATO inspections of the country’s nuclear facilities.

Trump’s professed admiration for Putin—and his recent comment that Russia can “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t pay their fair share of the alliance’s costs—doesn’t bode well for holding Russia to account. Nor does his on-again, off-again relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Though Perry and Collina supported Trump’s effort to engage with Kim diplomatically, they decried Trump’s lack of a viable negotiating strategy and his repeated sabotage of his own efforts. Case in point was Trump’s insane taunt of Kim on Twitter in January 2018 in which he boasted that “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

The bottom line is that Trump is unfit to possess the nuclear button. The volatility of his personality and his lack of sound judgment have only become clearer since he left office. It’s incomprehensible folly that one of the major political parties is on the verge of nominating him again.

© 2024 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

The Day the Mass Became American: Remembering Cardinal Cushing’s Rites for JFK, 60 Years Later

Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, leading the flag-draped casket of President John F. Kennedy into St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington on November 25, 1963.

When I was a kid, I used to play my parents’ LP album “I Can Hear It Now / The Sixties,” a compilation of 1960s news events narrated by Walter Cronkite. Though John F. Kennedy was assassinated before I was born, I felt the drama of his death and burial in listening to the sounds of those fateful four days.

For some reason, one audio excerpt always stuck with me: the South Boston twang of Richard Cardinal Cushing, praying at the president’s graveside:

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Let us pray. O God, through whose mercy the souls of the faithful find rest, be pleased to bless this grave . . . that of our beloved Jack Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, that his soul may rejoice in Thee, with all the saints, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sixty years after JFK’s death, I’m writing a book about Cushing. As a subject, he’s something of a departure for me, given my past focus on intellectual history. Cushing wasn’t a scholar, though he appreciated academic expertise. Nor was he the smoothest public speaker, though he always left a memorable impression.

But more than any other American Catholic prelate of his day, he was an ecumenist and a pluralist. Throughout his career as archbishop of Boston, 1944 to 1970, he cultivated relationships with non-Catholics, speaking in Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, and secular bastions like Harvard. His Catholicism was traditional and even zealous, but he preached it without the militancy that has come to characterize so much religion since. (His militant anti-communism is another story, revealing his complex entanglement in the politics of his time.)

To Cushing, Catholicism was one faith among many. While I’m sure he regarded it as the one true faith, he insisted it must be respectful of the nation’s pluralistic reality. It was fitting, then, that this pluralist prince of the church, the son of Irish immigrants, should preside at the first state funeral for a U.S. president that was also a Catholic Mass.

Cushing was an obvious choice to officiate. The Kennedy family had longstanding ties to New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, a Massachusetts native and the most prominent member of the American Catholic hierarchy. But during the 1960 presidential campaign, when Kennedy came out against federal aid for Catholic parochial schools, Spellman had supported Nixon. Cushing defended Kennedy. Moreover, Cushing had married JFK and Jacqueline and had officiated at the funeral of the couple’s infant son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died a few months before his father.

The ceremony for Patrick had been private, held in Cardinal Cushing’s own chapel. But the rites for JFK would be a state occasion, which meant balancing the elements of civil religion with the church’s canonical requirements. To many Protestant Americans, the Catholic Mass was slightly sinister, the mysterious ritual of a foreign faith. Kennedy’s Catholicism had been a campaign issue. A 1959 Gallup poll revealed that almost a quarter of Americans (24 percent) would not vote for a Catholic for president. In 1960, Kennedy won the popular vote by a razor-thin margin of fewer than 113,000.

The competing demands of a state funeral seemed to call for a simplified ritual. Jacqueline Kennedy insisted on a spoken Low Mass, not the more elaborate solemnities of a sung High Mass. And Cushing rebuffed Egidio Vagnozzi, the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, who said that a head of state was entitled to five ritual absolutions at the end of the liturgy. “If there are going to be five absolutions, you’ll have to say them yourself,” Cushing reportedly told him. “I won’t do it because they’ll last twice as long as the Mass itself.”

But a key aspect of the ancient ceremony would remain: the Latin language. Though the new vernacular Mass in English was due to be implemented by the Second Vatican Council the following year, the Latin Mass was still how Catholics married and buried. A president’s funeral was no exception.

The day of the funeral, November 25, 1963, Cushing, wearing a tall white miter, met the president’s casket on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. For millions of Americans watching on television, it was the first time they had seen a Catholic Mass. Cushing’s rapid-fire reading of the Latin liturgy did little to disabuse some Protestants of the notion that the Mass was a meaningless incantation. But the planners had anticipated this public relations challenge and, in a brilliant stroke, had enlisted the mellifluous Monsignor Leonard Hurley to provide voice-over commentary during the service.

Hurley’s poignant narration, reprinted in transcript in the New York Times, was like a primer on Catholic theology: “The Holy Eucharist is the daily bread that Christians everywhere devoutly pray for. For the Catholic, the sacramental Body of Christ received in the Eucharist is the Christ whom those who die in the Lord will meet in heaven.”

But in the end, Cushing stole the show in his typical improvisatory fashion. At the conclusion of the Mass, as he circled the casket, blessing Kennedy’s body with incense and holy water, he recited the prescribed words, including Requiescat in pace (“May he rest in peace”). But then he broke into English:

May the angels, dear Jack, lead you into Paradise. May the martyrs receive you at your coming. May the spirit of God embrace you, and mayest thou, with all those who made the supreme sacrifice of dying for others, receive eternal rest and peace. Amen.

By that point, both Cushing and Jacqueline were in tears. As he processed out, Cushing saw five-year-old Caroline Kennedy consoling her mother. He bent over and embraced the child. Jacqueline whispered to the Cardinal, “I’ll never forget you calling him ‘dear Jack.’”

Cushing’s down-to-earth performance at the funeral and the graveside won wide approval. Though purists today still grumble about his sloppy Latin pronunciation, ordinary laypeople at the time thanked him for his human touch. A man in Florida wrote to him on “how wonderful and consoling you were.” A woman in California wrote that if, as a Protestant, she found the Mass so comforting, “I am sure that those of your faith must have found it doubly so.”

Cushing continued to console Jacqueline Kennedy, serving as her de facto pastor until his own death in 1970. In 1968, he took considerable flak for defending her marriage to a divorced man, Aristotle Onassis, in violation of church rules. (Onassis’s Greek Orthodox marriage to his first wife had never been annulled.) Amid the controversy, Cushing proposed to retire early, but Pope Paul VI declined the offer.

Cushing’s legacy is extensive and includes the building of schools and hospitals, the founding of a foreign mission society, and the establishment of a seminary to train second-career clergy. His principled ecumenism—and his interfaith overtures to Jews in particular—influenced the documents coming out of Vatican II.

But these accomplishments are overshadowed by the day Cushing brought the requiem Mass to American living rooms. Thanks to the digitally preserved broadcast, Cushing will continue to be remembered as the raspy voiced Everyman who consoled the nation in its grief.

© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Poll numbers from “Can a Catholic Win?” Time, May 18, 1959. On the planning for JFK’s funeral and the ceremony itself, see William Manchester, The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967): 644-45, 681-82. On its cultural significance, see D. G. Hart, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith during the Cold War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020), 61-62. “The Texts of Eulogy at the Funeral Service and Prayer by the Side of Grave,” and “Transcript of Commentary at Requiem Mass for Kennedy in Washington,” New York Times, November 26, 1963. Bart Barnes, “Leonard Hurley, Catholic Priest Who Grew a Maryland Congregation, Dies,” Washington Post, May 1, 2015. Correspondence from laypeople: Bill Boyle to Cardinal Cushing, 17 December 1963; Grace Weston to Cardinal Cushing, 17 December 1963; Richard James Cushing Papers, Archdiocese of Boston. Edward B. Fiske, “The Church and Jacqueline Onassis,” New York Times, October 27, 1968. For support of my archival research on Cardinal Cushing, I gratefully acknowledge a Hibernian Research Grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.

Illustration credit: Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

The Fallacy of All-or-Nothing Religion

At left: Newspaper clipping announcing a 1962 lecture by Father Nogar at Purdue University. At right: Dominican friars at prayer in the priory at the Dominican House of Studies, River Forest, Illinois.

As a historian of American religion, I love introducing undergraduates to the denominational traditions that have made a mark on U.S. history. But many of my students are interested in more than history. They want to know: Which of the religions is right? For them, my class becomes an opportunity for spiritual exploration.

I don’t fight this. Though I teach at a state university, where the First Amendment obliges me to remain neutral on religious truth claims, I can’t control how the students use the background they learn in class.

I do, however, take a stand on at least one matter of theology. Religion, I insist, is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Many people wrongly assume that the “right” religion is just waiting to be found. You’ll know you’ve found it—they think—when, after careful study, you’re able to agree 100 percent with its claims. Short of that, you can’t commit.

The Catholic theologian Raymond Nogar, O.P., had a name for this fallacy. He called it the “the folly of the package deal.” A package deal, as he put it, is “the insistence that if you buy a part, you must buy the whole.” The world is far too complex, he maintained, for one system of thought or religious tradition to account for all the complexity. Even atheism may offer a useful corrective to certain inherited assumptions. “Neither Aquinas nor Sartre suffices,” he said, for explaining the world and the human predicament.

Father Nogar wasn’t arguing that we should assemble our own private religions from the cafeteria of beliefs and practices. He was, after all, a Dominican friar who spent his whole career teaching Catholic philosophy. His point was rather that religious commitment is rarely free of doubt. No religion can explain everything, and sometimes one’s own religion is wrong—even about big things.

I was an undergraduate once, so I remember the desire to find the perfect religious system. In the summer after my sophomore year, I had an internship in Chicago at The Lutheran magazine. I rented a room at Dominican University in River Forest, where I spent part of my “leisure” time reading Paul Tillich’s three-volume Systematic Theology. I never got through the whole thing, and it left me with more questions than answers.

I should have supplemented Tillich with Father Nogar, whose work I didn’t discover until many years later. Little did I know at the time, I was walking in Father Nogar’s old haunts in River Forest, where he taught for more than two decades at the Dominican House of Studies.

Father Nogar is not widely remembered today, though in 1998, the University of Notre Dame Press reissued his little gem of a book, The Lord of the Absurd (1966), which includes his lecture, “The Folly of the Package Deal,” originally delivered to students at Stanford.

On November 17, 1967, Father Nogar was found dead in a stairwell at the Dominican House of Studies. He had suffered a heart attack. He was 51 years old. We can only speculate about what additional contributions he would have made in his specialty, science and religion. But his essays in The Lord of the Absurd, all of them talks given on college campuses, still speak powerfully to the challenge of religious faith in the face of modern skepticism.

In the book’s title essay, “The Lord of the Absurd,” he drew on his knowledge of chaos theory and quantum mechanics to argue that the world is not a tidy system but is full of uncertainty and unpredictability. We are “whistling ourselves a tune,” he said, when we embrace the fiction that the universe is an orderly cosmos.

For Father Nogar, the absurd claim of Christ as crucified God best spoke to the chaos and suffering we encounter in the world. That Christ himself participates in the disorder of creation makes him the Lord of the Absurd, the God who takes on the “mysterious misery” of our existence.

In my secular classroom, I can’t prescribe Father Nogar’s defense of Christianity to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. Non-Christian traditions have their own ways of assimilating suffering that may, in their own cultural contexts, resonate just as deeply as the story of Christ.

But whatever one’s views, Father Nogar’s work teaches us that the point of religion is not to resolve all contradictions or provide an airtight system that can drive away all doubt.

© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

I thank John Wilson, former editor of Books and Culture, for introducing me to Father Nogar’s work. The quotations above appear in Raymond J. Nogar, O.P., The Lord of the Absurd (1966, reprint: Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 56, 60-61, 145. Also helpful is Father Nogar’s article, “The God of Disorder,” Continuum 4, no. 1 (1966): 102-113. For commentary on his work, see Patrick Marrin, “A Spirituality Rooted in Absurdity,” National Catholic Reporter, December 4, 1998; and John Wilson, “Lord of the Absurd: The Tangled Web of Science and Religion,” Christianity Today, April 26, 1999.

Illustration credits: Journal and Courier (Lafayette, Ind.), November 30, 1962, via Newspapers.com. Undated photograph of the Dominican Priory in River Forest, Illinois, Dominican Province of St. Joseph, via Flickr.com.

A Pope, a Cardinal, and a New Book Project

Boston Globe, June 3, 1963

John XXIII with Cardinal Cushing

Historians love archives and anniversaries. My recent archival trip to the Archdiocese of Boston got me to thinking about a pope’s death sixty years ago this month.

On June 3, 1963, the 81-year-old Pope John XXIII lay dying in his Vatican apartment as 20,000 faithful kept vigil in Saint Peter’s Square. Elected pope less than five years earlier, this son of Italian peasants had been typecast as a benign caretaker until he surprised the world by convening the Second Vatican Council, which ushered Catholicism into the modern age.

Stricken with stomach cancer, Pope John was surrounded by family and friends as the sounds of the Mass being said for him rose from the square below. At 7:49 p.m., soon after the chanting of the last words, Ite, missa est (“Go, the Mass is ended”), he stopped breathing.

Four thousand miles away, in Boston, Monsignor Francis Lally informed the archbishop, Richard Cardinal Cushing, that the pope had died. One of John XXIII’s first acts as pope had been to elevate Cushing and 22 others to the cardinalate. Like the pope, Cushing came from humble circumstances. The son of Irish immigrants from South Boston, he never lost his working-class persona, which endeared him to Bostonians after he became archbishop in 1944.

Besides their similar backgrounds, Cushing and Pope John were famously affable and shared a predilection for offhand remarks. A reporter’s observation about the pope could well have described Cushing: for “all his easy-going manner and joviality,” he “had a reputation for speaking plainly when he thought the situation warranted.”

Most important was the ideological affinity between the two men. Cushing was an outspoken champion of the pope’s reforming agenda, particularly the improvement of the church’s relations with non-Catholics.

In a statement to the press after the pope’s death, Cushing said John XXIII “was the best human reproduction of Christ that I have ever met” and announced that he would initiate a campaign for the pope’s canonization.

Three days later, Cushing celebrated a requiem Mass for the man he called “Good Pope John” at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Never one to miss an opportunity to make a statement, Cushing welcomed interfaith representatives to the liturgy. He even embraced several of them—an Episcopal bishop, a Greek Orthodox bishop, and a Lutheran synod president—with the “kiss of peace,” a gesture normally reserved for fellow Catholic prelates.

Speaking to the packed cathedral as an overflow crowd watched on closed-circuit television, Cushing said that John XXIII exemplified the title Pontiff, derived from a Latin root meaning “bridge builder.”

“He built a bridge between Catholic Christians and Protestant Christians, another between Christians of the West and those of the East, and a third between Christians and non-Christians,” the cardinal said. “It was a bridge built on respect for the conscientious religious convictions of all peoples, on mutual esteem and love among all the children of God.”

Cushing was also a bridge builder who frequently accepted invitations to speak in non-Catholic houses of worship and who cultivated interfaith alliances. One example was his friendship with Alexander Brin, publisher of Boston’s Jewish Advocate newspaper, who shared Cushing’s grief at the death of Pope John.

In an editorial three days after John XXIII’s death, Brin lauded the pope’s efforts to improve Jewish-Christian relations, including the removal of an old reference to “the perfidious Jews” in the Good Friday liturgy. “Religious figures of all faiths achieve greatness when they reach from without of their own denominational preference into the wide world of human suffering and treat mankind as their flock,” Brin wrote. The pope, he added, “has shown that a readiness to subject hallowed doctrines and practices to the most searching examination is fully compatible with faith.”

When Cardinal Cushing died of cancer seven years later, Brin praised his longtime friend in similar terms. In a front-page tribute in the Jewish Advocate, Brin called Cushing “one of the good men of this earth, a powerful voice and steady hand.”  “No single American churchman,” Brin continued, “had a greater impact on our generation.”

Cushing’s ecumenical zeal first caught my attention years ago when I was researching the making of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, a Protestant translation he later endorsed for Catholic use. But his ecumenism is but one facet of this complex and sometimes contradictory man, who is best known as the spiritual confidant of the Kennedy family. Cushing presided at the funerals of John F. and Robert Kennedy, and he later defended Jacqueline Kennedy when she married a divorced man, Aristotle Onassis, in violation of church rules.

Cushing is a neglected figure in scholarship, a gap I hope to fill with the biography I am writing. Many of the themes of his career, especially the problem of how to reconcile absolute doctrinal claims with religious pluralism, are still contentious today. The legacies of John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council are similarly debated. When Pope Francis was elected in 2013, one of his earliest acts was to canonize Pope John, bypassing the usual requirement of a second miracle attributable to his intercession. That shows how symbolically potent the Vatican II era remains.

Cushing is the American embodiment of that era’s optimism but also its upheaval. His life deserves reappraisal not only for its own sake but for the lessons it may hold for our own time.

© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

On the death of John XXIII, see Thomas Cahill, Pope John XXIII (New York: Viking, 2002), 214. On Monsignor Lally, see John H. Fenton, Salt of the Earth: An Informal Portrait of Richard Cardinal Cushing (Garden City, N.Y.: Echo Books, Doubleday, 1965), 146. John T. McGreevy notes John XXIII’s “penchant for offhand remarks” in Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022), 291. The description of John XXIII’s “easy-going manner and joviality” is from “John XXIII . . . Pope of Unity,” Associated Press, Boston Globe, June 4, 1963. William R. Callahan, “Movement On for Sainthood,” Boston Globe, June 4, 1963. “‘The Whole Human Family Is Desolate’ —Card. Cushing,” Boston Globe, June 4, 1963. Edward G. McGrath, “Tears, Prayers, as Cardinal Embraces Protestant Leaders,” Boston Globe, June 7, 1963. “Cardinal Cushing’s Eulogy of Pope John: ‘He Built a Bridge on Mutual Esteem, Love,’” Boston Globe, June 7, 1963. “Pope John XXIII” (unsigned editorial), Jewish Advocate, June 6, 1963. Alexander Brin, “Prelate Passes: A Tribute,” Jewish Advocate, November 5, 1970.

For support of my archival travel related to Cardinal Cushing, I gratefully acknowledge a Hibernian Research Grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.

Illustration credits: Boston Globe via Newspapers.com; John XXIII with Cardinal Cushing, courtesy of the Archive of the Archdiocese of Boston

George Lindbeck at 100: A Tribute

Blog post published concurrently by Yale Divinity School.
* * *

This month would have been the 100th birthday of the Yale theologian George Lindbeck (1923-2018), whose work was formative for how I think about religion. His 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine was a revelation to me when I read it as a rising college senior. At that time, I never imagined I would get to know him personally.

In the summer of 1992 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was preparing to write a senior honors thesis on conflict in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Though the denomination was barely four years old, conservatives and liberals were already at each other throats over issues like homosexuality and ecumenical relations with non-Lutherans. Conservatives, convinced that the ELCA had abandoned fidelity to confessional and biblical truth, would eventually form breakaway denominations, reversing decades of progress toward Lutheran unity.

I found the strife in the ELCA disillusioning. Having grown up in Lutheranism’s liberal wing, I took for granted that church unity was a higher goal than doctrinal purity, and I wanted nothing to do with biblical literalism on sexuality. At the same time, I understood the conservatives’ fear of losing a distinctive Lutheran identity. Was it possible, I wondered, to remain a “traditional” Lutheran without succumbing to biblical or theological fundamentalism?

Then I read Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine. Like Lindbeck himself, the book was erudite and unflashy. Its signal contribution was to push beyond the prevailing options toward a different way of thinking about religion. On the one hand, Lindbeck rejected the liberal tradition, associated with Schleiermacher, that made individual experience the starting point of theology. On the other hand, Lindbeck repudiated the “cognitive-propositional” view, commonly associated with conservatism, that religion is about objective truths that can be stated with certainty.

Lindbeck argued instead for a “cultural-linguistic” alternative: religions are like languages, and their doctrines like grammatical rules. One becomes conversant in a religious tradition the same way one learns to speak a language—through gradual socialization and practice. To Lindbeck, this view made sense of the way the world really works, first by tempering the liberal confidence in the priority of pure experience. As he wrote, “it is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied, and differentiated can be our experiences.” At the same time, Lindbeck corrected the conservative error that absolute truth is fully knowable in this life. Our manner of speaking about God may or may not correspond to the way God is. To use a Christian example, the Trinity is a manner of speaking about God in the same way that idioms function in everyday speech. But other religions have different idioms, and no language has complete access to unmediated truth.

Lindbeck had grown up encountering other idioms. The son of Swedish-American Lutheran missionaries, he was born on March 10, 1923, in Luoyang, China, where he lived until age 17. Historian David Hollinger cites Lindbeck as an example of “missionary cosmopolitans”: Americans reared in a missionary context who brought a broad-minded, global outlook back to the States. Indeed, Lindbeck would dedicate his entire career to ecumenism. After earning his Ph.D. at Yale and joining the faculty of the Divinity School there, he was named a delegated observer from the Lutheran World Federation to the Second Vatican Council. The influence of this experience is evident in The Nature of Doctrine, where he proposes that non-Catholics need not entirely dissent from papal infallibility if understood as the claim that the church does not violate the grammar of its own faith.

Lindbeck’s critics were quick to pounce on his grammatical view of doctrine as relativistic. His fellow Lutheran Carl Braaten charged that the “neopragmatism” of Lindbeck and his Yale colleague Hans Frei sacrificed truth for fidelity. And the Lutheran-turned-Catholic Richard John Neuhaus wrote that average believers who affirm religious doctrines do not think they are engaging in a grammatical exercise: “Paul, Luther, and Mrs. May at St. Paul’s Lutheran think they are asserting the way reality really is.”

The criticisms belied Lindbeck’s own traditional piety. I had the good fortune to learn to know him in my first year of graduate school at Princeton University during his visiting appointment as the Virginia and Richard Stewart Lecturer. Perhaps because he took pity on a fellow Lutheran, he agreed to supervise a directed readings course for me. We often met for lunch at Forbes College, the undergraduate residential community where he had an apartment. I remember seeing in his living room a well-worn Lutheran breviary, evidence of his daily devotional regimen. He even invited me to be his guest to hear the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg deliver the 1994 Erasmus Lecture in New York City. At dinner at the Waldorf Astoria after the lecture, we sat at the head table with the event’s host, Richard John Neuhaus.

That Lindbeck moved effortlessly between the conservative constituency of Neuhaus’s magazine First Things and the secular liberals at universities like Princeton was a testament not only to his unassuming personality but also to the power of his cultural-linguistic view of religion for preserving traditionalism even while allowing for agnosticism.

I doubt Lindbeck was agnostic in his heart of hearts. In the section on truth in The Nature of Doctrine, he uses the term only once. But for me, his methodological agnosticism was liberating. It freed me from the notions that truth must be absolutely knowable and that there is only one legitimate doctrinal language for describing it. Though I’ve come to think that Lindbeck shortchanged experience—I’m enough of a mystic to believe that something like an unmediated experience of the divine is possible—I’ve remained a Lindbeckian in my understanding of religious truth.

This Lindbeckian commitment has opened new religious worlds to me. After marrying an Episcopalian, I left the ELCA and joined the Episcopal Church, a small step to outsiders but a big deal to one so thoroughly Lutheran. The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer is a prime example of the expressive richness that Lindbeck wrote about. On the professional front, a bigger leap was my embrace of the Latter-day Saints as an area of teaching and research. Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic theory of religion has helped me appreciate the wisdom of Mormon theology as a religious idiom. Most recently, my research has turned to Catholicism, Lindbeck’s great ecumenical interest. I’m now writing a biography of Richard Cardinal Cushing (1895-1970), who embodied the Vatican II ideal that Lindbeck so championed. (Cushing is said to have complained, with typical tongue in cheek, that the delegated observers to the council, Lindbeck among them, were treated better in Rome than he was.)

To its critics, Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic theory is better suited to religious studies than to Christian theology, which makes hard truth claims. Undoubtedly that’s one reason Lindbeck’s theory is so amenable to my work as a historian of American religion in a secular department of religious studies. But Lindbeck also speaks to me as a person of faith. In the three decades since I read The Nature of Doctrine, I’ve become ever more convinced that for all we lose in propositional truth, we gain in imaginative richness.

© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), quotation about experience, 37; on papal infallibility, 98-99; on the “agnostic” view of truth, 67. The Nature of Doctrine is also available in a 25th anniversary edition (Westminster, 2009) that includes a bibliography of works by and about Lindbeck. David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World But Changed America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), 108. Carl E. Braaten, No Other Gospel! Christianity among the World’s Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 19. Richard John Neuhaus, “Is There Theological Life After Liberalism? The Lindbeck Proposal,” Dialog 24 (1985): 69. Cushing’s quip recounted in George A. Lindbeck, “Reminiscences of Vatican II,” in The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. James J. Buckley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 11-12.

Illustration credits: George Lindbeck, courtesy of Yale Divinity School; the first edition of The Nature of Doctrine, photo by Peter J. Thuesen.

Audacious Prophet: Joseph Smith and the Revision of Scripture

Joseph Smith's headstone in Nauvoo, Illinois

In my “Mormonism and American Culture” class this semester, one of the Latter-day Saint students (there are only two in a group of 36) shared a striking detail about why her grandfather converted to Mormonism. What sealed his decision was 3 Nephi 12:3 in the Book of Mormon: “Blessed are the poor in spirit who come unto me, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.”

Anyone familiar with the New Testament will recognize the similarity of that passage to the first of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3). But 3 Nephi adds the phrase “who come unto me.” As my student explained, this was a revelation to her grandfather, who drew from it that the poor in spirit don’t automatically go to heaven but must seek and follow Christ. The Book of Mormon, in other words, emphasizes human initiative in the process of salvation.

The Prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint tradition, made a similar change to Matthew 5:3 in the text known as the Joseph Smith Translation (JST), which technically is not a translation but a series of inspired revisions to the Bible. There, the addition sounds more archaic (“which cometh unto me”), echoing the diction of the King James Bible.

Matthew 5:3 is not the only passage that Smith modified to stress human agency. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (6:44). To the Calvinist preachers Smith encountered during his youth, this was a favorite proof text of predestination because it suggests that a person will have faith in Christ only if God wills it. But in the JST, Smith shifted the priority to the human will: “No man can come unto me, except he doeth the will of my Father who hath sent me.” Likewise, he modified 1 Corinthians 1:24 (“But unto them which are called”) to read, “But unto them who believe,” replacing a predestinarian implication with a voluntaristic one.

By what authority did Smith dictate these changes? To his detractors then and now, his revisions were the height of hubris. Evangelical Protestants—those believers most wedded to a “Bible alone” version of Christianity—accused Smith of violating scripture’s own warning not to add or subtract from its words (Revelation 22:18-19). Never mind that this curse formula, a standard posture among ancient scribes, applies only to the Book of Revelation. For Smith’s opponents, it negates not only the JST but the entire Book of Mormon.

But Joseph Smith wasn’t troubled by Revelation 22:18-19 (which he left intact in the JST) or by his own lack of academic credentials. As he once said, “I [am] a rough stone. . . . I desire the learning and wisdom of heaven alone.” He believed that God had revealed to him all the scriptural emendations as well as the other writings in the Latter-day Saint canon. As the Lord says in the Book of Mormon in logic that is difficult to confute, “Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written” (2 Nephi 29:10).

Philip Barlow, a Latter-day Saint historian at Brigham Young University, explains in his book Mormons and the Bible that Joseph Smith had a “strong sense of prophetic license”: “His dominating concern . . . was not with textual precision but with enlightening the world through revealed truth. He thus did not feel bound by what he took to be the original writings in the Bible, and yet he continued to revere the Bible.”

That sense of prophetic license is what makes Joseph Smith one of the most fascinating figures in American religious history. It puts him in the company of a handful of other American prophets, including the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy.

In her own enlargement of the biblical canon, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), Eddy reworded the Lord’s Prayer to convey what she felt was its proper spiritual sense. Instead of “Our Father in heaven,” she addressed the deity as “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious.” And she changed “Thy kingdom come” to “Thy kingdom is come” to express her belief that God’s power of healing is already present to those who understand it rightly.

To Eddy’s critics, such revisions bespoke arrogance or delusion. But as the late Stephen Gottschalk, a leading scholar of Christian Science, observed, Eddy’s “sense of speaking in the prophetic voice remains a basic fact of her biography and is essential to an understanding of what she wrote.”

What’s the historian to make of prophets like Smith and Eddy? For a long time, their ideas weren’t taken seriously, at least in the subfield of intellectual history, which tended to focus on more conventionally credentialed thinkers. The situation has improved in recent years, thanks in part to the work of believing scholars—for example, Gottschalk among Christian Scientists and Terryl Givens among Latter-day Saints—who have set their traditions within a wider intellectual context.

Outsider scholars also have a role to play, which is one reason I began teaching “Mormonism and American Culture” more than a decade ago. As the title of the course suggests, part of the goal is to understand the Latter-day Saint tradition as a product of its environment. But I also take seriously Joseph Smith’s prophetic vocation and his contribution to the world of religious ideas.

When I see the one-word epitaph on Joseph Smith’s tombstone—“Prophet”—I’m filled not with suspicion but with amazement. What wisdom did this audacious prophet impart, and how did he transcend his own parochial location? If we read between the lines of Joseph Smith’s prophecies, including his revisions to the Bible, we enter doctrinal conversations as old as Christianity itself.

© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Thomas A. Wayment, ed., The Complete Joseph Smith Translation of the New Testament: A Side-by-Side Comparison with the King James Version (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 11, 240, 267. On the anti-Calvinism of Joseph Smith’s revisions, see Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 126-29. Joseph Smith’s self-description is quoted in Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), vii. Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67. Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 415. For Terryl Givens’s account of Latter-day Saint doctrine, see Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Terryl L. Givens, Feeding the Flock: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Church and Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Illustration credit: Photo of Joseph Smith’s grave by Quinn Dombrowski (via Flickr).

Assessing the Value of Religious Studies

Sitting in the Indianapolis airport recently, I watched a lighted billboard repeatedly flash advertisements for health science and technology programs at my university.

I’m a professor of religious studies, so on my pessimistic days, such marketing reminds me of the uphill battle that humanities programs face in today’s educational environment. Though many employers know the value of a humanities degree for educating well-rounded, adaptable employees, it’s harder to convince students that there are real career possibilities outside of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).

Universities have made matters worse with their constant emphasis on assessment. Every degree and every course must have measurable outcomes. Pedagogy worth its salt should integrate high-impact practices, the current educational buzzword for internships, practica, projects, or other products that can be showcased on a student’s résumé.

I don’t dispute the value of these practices. I’m a parent, so I too have felt my college-age children’s legitimate need to graduate with marketable skills.

But alongside more career-oriented courses, the curriculum should include—and even require—courses that push beyond what is conventionally knowable.

That’s where religious studies comes in.

In today’s STEM-saturated environment, which stresses rational mastery of the world, it’s precisely the illogic of religion that makes it so needful as a subject of study. In all of its cultural expressions, religion reminds us that not everything in life conforms to human expectations. Not everything is quantifiable or even comprehensible by human calculus. Some mysteries will always elude our grasp.

One need not believe in God to appreciate these truths. But one must give up some of the instrumentalist view of education that focuses chiefly on the acquisition of practical skills. While religious studies can teach practical skills too (historical or social-scientific methods, for example), its value for general education is ultimately much broader.

Religious studies pushes back against today’s digital culture in which there’s an instant answer (“There’s an app for that”) to every question.

Because the object of religions can be so elusive (God, transcendence, enlightenment), religious studies is qualitatively different from other fields. As a subject in the general education curriculum, it invites students to think beyond everyday assumptions and solutions.

Religious studies revels in contradiction and ambiguity. Religious studies immerses students in the intricacies of unfamiliar doctrines and devotions.

In the secular university curriculum, the study of religious traditions means learning to appreciate the strangeness and wonder of life itself.

This appreciation is difficult to assess. As any assessment czar will tell you, “appreciate” is too vague a verb for a measurable course outcome. Yet if my students leave my classroom with a deeper appreciation for the world’s ambiguities, I’ll have done my job.

And I’ll bet that prospective employers—the good ones, at least—will appreciate such graduates. The ability to deal with complexity is a pearl of great price, a skill whose value can’t be measured.

© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Illustration credit: Billboard at Indianapolis International Airport advertising health science programs; photo by Peter J. Thuesen

Wind

Remarks delivered as part of a panel discussion, “Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire: A Roundtable on Religion and the Anthropocene in North America,” at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Denver, November 21, 2022.

In the beginning was the wind. The Book of Genesis opens with the Ruach Elohim—the mighty Wind of God—sweeping over the waters. Later in scripture, the wind is a metaphor for the power of Israel’s God, whose voice “causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare” (Psalm 29:9). The wind is mysterious because it’s unseen, save for the dust it sucks into its vortex. As Wittgenstein remarked, “How can the wind move a tree, since it is after all just wind? Well, it does move it; & don’t forget it.” Known only by its effects, the wind is unaccountable and unstoppable. Says the prophet Nahum: “The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.”

Americans have typically seen the wind through this biblical lens. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most people assumed that God was behind the wind, even if his purposes weren’t always clear. By the late nineteenth century, as the economic scope of natural disasters increased in proportion to urbanization, religious debates grew accordingly. In 1896, a half-mile-wide tornado, henceforth known as the Great Cyclone, gouged a seven-mile path through St. Louis, killing at least 255, injuring 1,000, and destroying or damaging some 7,500 buildings. In the aftermath, religious liberals and conservatives argued over whether the storm was sent by God or simply a product of natural forces. Missouri Synod Lutherans, who lost their mother church, Trinity German, to the tornado, pointed out the coincidence, which they did not regard as coincidental, that the lectionary for the following Sunday included a line from the Gospel of John testifying to God’s unpredictable power: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.”

Divine inscrutability reemerged as a theme seven years later when Ellen Burnett Jefferson, a 22-year-old domestic laborer, prophesied that the Lord would send a tornado to destroy Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on May 29, 1903. Even as headlines in the local newspaper exuded racist scorn (“Awful Calamity to Befall Pine Bluff Says a Crazy Negro Woman,” read one), a mass exodus of citizens ensued. When the predicted doomsday brought a storm but no tornado, the press heaped further ridicule. But for her own part, Jefferson knew the Lord’s judgments are unsearchable and his ways past finding out. Why God had spared Pine Bluff was “the Lord’s business,” she told a reporter. “I didn’t want to make this prophecy. I tried to get out of it, but the Lord wouldn’t let me.” Jefferson was a cross between the biblical Jonah (the reluctant harbinger of God’s message of doom), and Job (who was left abased and silenced by God’s mystery in the whirlwind).

It wasn’t just frustrated prophets like Jefferson who found the whirlwind inscrutable. By the late nineteenth century, scientists were realizing that something in the wind eluded their grasp. In 1876, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz wrote that of all the phenomena of nature, the winds “are the most capriciously variable ones, the most fugitive, the most impossible to grasp; they escape every attempt of ours to catch them in the enclosure of law.” Helmholtz’s words proved prescient, for a century later, wind inspired the chaos theory of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Thanks to his work, scientists now recognize tornadoes and other storm winds as deterministic systems that nevertheless defy precise prediction because of their nonlinearity and their sensitivity to small changes in variables. As Lorenz’s protégé Howard Bluestein explained to me in an interview for my book Tornado God, even with the most powerful computers, scientists will never obtain measurements fine enough to predict the path of a tornado with perfect accuracy. That’s the upshot Lorenz’s famous 1972 essay, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

Chaos theory in a way vindicates the ancient biblical wisdom of the wind’s inscrutability. Because chaos shrouds tremendous unknowns, it seems to leave room for God in those underlying mysteries. But recent science has also taught us that human beings are variables in that chaos. If the flap of the proverbial butterfly’s wings can set off a tornado in Texas, how much more can the emissions from millions of human-made automobiles alter the macro system of climate. Thus we come to the Anthropocene. We humans do have agency—too much for our own good. However random the winds and weather may appear, their chaos is deterministic, and we’re part of the equation. At the macro level, the calculation is not difficult at all: more CO2 = a warmer planet. Though it’s difficult to know how much any individual storm can be attributed to climate change, we now know, for example, that more intense hurricanes and destructive flooding are the new normal in warming world. Witness Hurricane Ian, with its catastrophic storm surge and winds just shy of Category 5. And while we still refer to such storms as natural disasters, we recognize today that there’s really no such thing—no disaster without at least some human causes, whether anthropogenic global warming, or unregulated coastal development, or racist neglect of minority communities. While these mundane human factors are a far cry from the biblical notion of an inscrutable God sending the winds, the Bible foreshadows the human theme too. As the prophet Hosea declares: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

What, then, are the lessons of the wind for the study of American religion? We need to leave room for the unaccountable—the chaotic, the mysterious, the things that elude our grasp. But we also need to factor in that which can be accounted for: the all-too-predictable human elements in every eruption of religion. As a mystic at heart, I gravitate toward religion’s unaccountable side. But in this age of environmental peril and Trumpist delusion, it’s hard not to fixate on religion as a toxic enabler of human folly. I can only hope that Americans (and all humans) will recognize the whirlwinds they can’t control and avoid reaping the ones they can.

© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

The Ludwig Wittgenstein quotation is from Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, trans. Peter Winch (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 41e. All other quotations are cited in Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Illustration credit: Tornado near Benkelman, Nebraska, May 26, 2021; photo by Jason Frederick, via the National Weather Service.