As its title announces, Myths About Suicide also seeks to debunk the myriad ways that suicide is stigmatized by ignorance, disgust, contempt, and callousness.

Is suicide cowardly, as commonly held? No, says Joiner, because overriding the survival instinct requires confronting the fearsome and painful prospect of death. Is it a moral defect? No, because it occurs in a state far removed from measured consideration and balance. Is it a young person’s disorder? No: In the United States, for example, the majority of suicides are men over 50, he says.

“We need to get it in our heads that suicide is not easy, painless, cowardly, selfish, vengeful, self-masterful, nor rash; that it is not caused by breast augmentation, medicines, ‘slow’ methods like smoking or anorexia, or as some psychoanalysts thought, things like masturbation,” Joiner writes. Indeed, he argues that most mental-health professionals are barely less benighted than the general public about suicide, a function of their own fear, ignorance, and a failure of training, amounting to what he sees as a failure in their medical duty to care.

But his own analysis sometimes glosses over painful subjects. While he is careful to acknowledge that characterizing suicide as selfish stems from “trying to reason about the suicidal mind from a nonsuicidal place,” he devotes little attention to a related element: suicide’s intense focus on the self. Is it fatally distorted, or appropriate to the intractable agony of a suicidal person’s life? For some critics, Joiner sometimes sees issues so intently through the lens of his theory that he doesn’t deal with such major concerns.

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The result is her most nuanced and unsentimental novel to date. This is a book that does not depend on big, noisy plot developments, topical issues or deliberately withheld secrets to create suspense. Rather, its power grows from Ms. Miller’s intimate understanding of her characters (for once, the men are as keenly and sympathetically portrayed as the women) and from her Chekhovian understanding of missed connections, lost opportunities, and closely held memories that mutate slowly over time.

The novel caught my eye because of discussions of the possibilities of death being a harm, especially for those who remain. And in this case, for those who are somehow associated or connected with each other.

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The Decline of African American Theology
Pamela Hood, PhD
San Francisco State University

I just read a terrific review of Thabiti Anyabwile’s The Decline of African American Theology. I definitely will get a copy of the book. Sight unseen, three significant things about the topic and Anyabwile’s findings, or at least his thesis stand out.

First, it should be clear by now that even with the presidential election of a constitutional law professor, one worthy of teaching at the University of Chicago, the US is still deep in the grips of anti-intellectualism. I cannot express adequately the heartbreak this causes me. And, no, I’m not being melodramatic. This is not hyperbole.

I started to read several books on the topic of American anti-intellectualism. I had to stop. I was becoming morbidly depressed. The only things that snapped me out of it were my job and my students. Somewhere in America people did care about thinking, if not doing it professionally, at least doing it for large chunks of time throughout the school day and beyond.

As a sign of how desperate I am, I actually exclaimed in my Plato and Aristotle seminar that I longed for William F. Buckley. The one student old enough to know who Buckley was couldn’t help but laugh. You see, I grew up thinking. One of my favorite activities from my pre-teen years onward was to watch Buckley’s Firing Line. I watched it religiously. I watch You Tube clips of it still. For me that show was the equivalent of roller derby (which I also loved watching) and wrestling (which I didn’t enjoy watching). Later, when I was 8 or so and learned how to play chess, I’d imagine Buckley as various chess pieces.

Everything would be going along swimmingly for his opponent and then, WHAM! Black knight stomps on the hapless White Queen. Buckley’s ferocious intellect was not used in service of cheap and tawdry “gotcha” politics and what masquerades as commentary today. Mostly, I disagreed with Buckley’s views. But wow! I loved to see the guy make mincemeat of his opponent. Perhaps my recollections here are too pugilistic. Fine. I heartily enjoyed Buckley pushing and probing his interlocutor. Testing him (and they were nearly all “him’s”), challenging him to go to the end of the interlocutor’s thesis. I never got the sense that Buckley would oppose a view, simply “because”. Show him a good reason, show him the reasoning behind something, show him that the view leads to something consistent with his closely held principles and values, show him something that was in addition to these, good and just. I have no doubt that Buckley would have been a co-signer right then and there.

The problem from the opponents’ perspective (or mine) was that this rarely, if ever, happened on Firing Line. If you want to see perhaps the sole final checkmate against Buckley, check out the magnificent video of his 1965 debate at Cambridge University with James Baldwin. The topic of the debate was “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro”. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Why the preamble about Buckley? I affirm the Nicene Creed. I also affirm the genuine gift of human thought. I also recognize that with this gift comes the responsibility to nurture the gift and to use it for my own good and the good of others. In short, it is because I am a “thinking theist” that I am so disheartened by the paucity of thinking persons in public fora. This includes the Christian church.

One only needs to browse quickly through the holdings at any reputable seminary library or university library to realize that there has been not only a decline in African American theology, there has been a decline in American theology in general. And, to come full circle: there’s simply been a decline in thinking in America.

Name any early Church Father; yes, I’ll even let you include the borderline heretical cases. Any one of them could mop the floor with any televangelist of the past 50 years. Maybe that’s not saying much. But I would also submit that they could obliterate most every pastor — black, red, yellow, pink, cerise, whatever — in America today. (I thought about swapping out “obliterate” for “eviscerate” but decided it was too graphic. You nevertheless can tell where this is going.)

Who among the pastors today could possibly match the sheer knowledge of philosophy and theology that Augustine had? Or Origen? Or Clement? The power of the Word they preached was fueled by logos in all its dimensions. The Logos as Lord, but also the logos as thought, argument, account, and reason. The image I frequently offer my Religion classes is that of a character I call “Bible Bob”. This may or may not be his real name. Bible Bob was a guy who came on to the SFSU campus back in the late 80′s and early 90′s (at least) carrying a huge Bible and a plastic milk crate. He’d set up shop in the main quad and he’d let ‘er rip!

I would try to imagine Augustine approaching Bible Bob and attempting to converse with him. I never had the idea that Bible Bob and Augustine would soon begin shouting at each other. My imaginary meeting always ended in one of two ways. Augustine would leave poor Bible Bob stammering as Bob grabbed his milk crate pulpit and ran off campus. The other was a vision of Augustine slowly walking away, shaking his head in disbelief and sorrow. Why? Because one could not intelligently engage Bible Bob. There’s not much hope of having a conversation with someone whose best punch is to scream Scripture, and nothing much more, at you.

I bring Bible Bob up in class to make three points: 1) I’m a thinking theist; I am not Bible Bob. 2) If your essays are filled with nothing but Oprahisms or Scripture verses be prepared to flunk this class. 3) If all you can do is to rant against Oprahisms, trivialize religious belief, or mock religious scriptures, you should also be prepared to flunk the class. It is a philosophy class after all. So while non-theists or non-religious believers in the class needn’t be afraid of engaging critically the phenomena of religious belief for fear of “hurting my feelings”, neither should the religious believers think they’ve got a free pass to blather on about how Jesus helped them find their lost cat or how Jesus saved their mother from breast cancer.

Again and again I say to them: I could care less about what you feel or believe. I only care about what you think.

The point I am making, in an admittedly long-winded way, is quite simple: We are in the grip of a severe case of anti-intellectualism. It is no wonder, then, that there has been a decline in theological thinking.

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The Decline of African American Theology

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When the Gestapo raided the hiding place in the annex to Otto Frank’s business office on Aug. 4, 1944, and arrested its eight occupants, it left behind his daughter Anne’s diary and her writings on loose sheets of papers. The journals recounted life in those rooms behind a movable bookcase and the hopes of a girl on the brink of womanhood. Mrs. Gies gathered up those writings and hid them, unread, hoping that Anne would someday return to claim them.

But when Anne’s father, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam at the end of World War II, having been liberated from Auschwitz, he was the lone survivor of the family. Anne Frank had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months before her 16th birthday. Her sister, Margot, died there at age 19 and their mother, Edith Frank, died at Auschwitz.

Mrs. Gies gave Anne’s writings to Mr. Frank, and they were first published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an abridged version. “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” has since been translated into dozens of languages in several editions, read by millions and adapted for the stage and screen, a voice representing the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

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The parable went like this. “Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees…They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer…insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.”

Gottleib does a smashing job surveying the battleground: we’ve got the “New Atheists”, e.g., Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, on one side and the “New Apologists” (my term, not his), e.g., Karen Armstrong, on the other. Where’s Wittgenstein’s philosopher of religion who relates what he sees but leaves things as they are? Or do we throw our hands up in the air and give up? Maybe Gottlieb takes up the latter as the last sentence below suggests to me anyway.

One trenchant critic of the New Atheists is Terry Eagleton, a leading literary critic (and Catholic), who defines God as “what sustains all things in being by his love, and…is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” Some find it comforting or inspiring to utter such statements. But unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right (which Eagleton never does), this is a self-deluding comfort. A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.

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There is a collective dimension to this: all the early Christians experienced the same thing. Like alien abductees, the first Christians had a shattering experience in common. This brought them together. But this experience was not an institution.” – Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life.

Watch Zahl speak about this book:

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Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

The first two chapters are precious, in the best sense of the word. It recalls a kind of religious devotion and sensibility that is not at all a part of my religious vocabulary. Yet I can appreciate the palpable reality of her childhood faith. What’s interesting to me is that this period of her life was what she called “preliterate”. While I don’t remember not being able to read, Rice has memories of a rich inner and outer life unadulterated by the text.

She admits being a lousy reader in school and through college. (That was a surprising factoid!) But perhaps for the novelist or creative writer the development of one’s own vocabulary used to interface with the world outside and within is a part of what makes great writers. I’m just guessing.

Rice beautifully juxtaposes the menagerie of nature with the riotous panoply of sights, sounds, and smells from the pre-Vatican II liturgies. I’ve yet to attend one but now that Benedict has more or less given a full-voiced imprimatur, more and more parishes are going back to this earlier form of worship. Certainly Rice has made me temper my Protestant rejecting anything as “worship” which the participant can neither pronounce nor understand. Temper, not abandon.

I think part of the difference here is the reliance on “the Book”, the texts, the lyrics of the hymns. That was the main focus of my childhood religious experience. Rice reached the Divine through the phenomena of mostly non-literate sign and symbols of the Divine. Reading Schleiermacher again while picking up this Rice memoir has made me take a step back to realize the spiritual efficacy of this non-literate path. I say “efficacy” only because of the impact these experiences apparently had on Rice. In this Jamesean sense, it certainly “worked” for her. It had an indelible impact on her even though she spent more decades away from the faith that within it. Or perhaps, as Schleiermacher might conjecture, she simply was unaware of the Infinite even as it, or some sense of it, never left her.

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