Obama's theologian: Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist

There’s much chat these days about the late Reinhold Niebuhr being the theologian whose thinking most influences President Barack Obama’s ideas, a suggestion with which the president concurs (hear Krista Tippett’s discussion with journalists David Brooks and E. J. Dionne on the NPR program, “Speaking of Faith”).  In that light, I’ve resurrected a column I wrote 13 years ago.

Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist

By Allan R. Andrews

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First published June 23, 1996, in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan.  At that time, Andrews was managing editor of the newspaper and a weekly columnist.

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Although he started a magazine and wrote for several others, few remember Reinhold Niebuhr as a journalist.

Niebuhr certainly rates as one of the most renowned American theologians of the 20th century.

Because of his German heritage, and probably because of his close association with German thinkers such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr is often erroneously thought to have come out of the German theological academy.

He didn't. He was born June 21, 1892, in Wright City, Mo., and attended the graduate school at Yale University, though he never finished because of boredom and the press of family needs.

(Writer's note:  It has been called to my attention that Niebuhr did indeed complete BD and M.Div degrees at Yale but left before completing his doctoral program).

Nevertheless, more than any other philosopher or theologian writing in the first three quarters of the 20th century, Niebuhr is a politician's--and a journalist's--thinker.

One recent commentator claims Niebuhr is ``one of the very few theologians to whom secular and humanist thinkers pay attention.''

Niebuhr, who died in 1971, never thought of himself as a theologian and lacked the usual credentials associated with the ivory tower. He thought of himself as a pastor, and much of his thinking came from his 13-year tenure as minister at Detroit's Bethel Evangelical Church.

His incisive mind, however, put him on the faculty of New York's Union Theological Seminary, where he lectured and wrote for 32 years.

As a thinker, Niebuhr stated his goal was ``to establish the relevance of the Christian faith to contemporary problems.''

The magazine that Niebuhr founded to that end, Christianity and Crisis, folded in 1994. It was never a big seller, but it served as a philosophical editorial page, provoking many movers and shakers who read it.

Many think its collapse signaled a failure of liberal theology, but Niebuhr was admired and listened to by conservative thinkers as well. One of the most appreciative studies of Niebuhr was written by the late conservative evangelical philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary, Edward J. Carnell.

Niebuhr's major writings included two massive studies, one entitled The Nature and Destiny of Man, which is credited with dispelling the notion of the perfectibility of society, an idea that had persisted in liberal American thought through two world wars and continues to exert an influence on American social policy.

The other of his great works, Moral Man and Immoral Society, propounded Niebuhr's conviction that one gets a clearer picture of what drives a human being not by studying the individual but by studying the groups in which that individual behaves. Groups--including those of organized religion--he thought often were influences of egoism and evil.

I can't do justice to his thinking here, but several American politicians--knowingly or not-- have built their philosophy of society and humanity out of exposure to Niebuhr's thinking.

My appreciation of Niebuhr is more pedestrian and takes some extrapolation.

Just a year after Niebuhr left the church in Detroit, he published a little book of journal entries from his years in Michigan. The book was released in 1929 under the title Leaves From the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.

Journalists frequently are accused of cynicism. Rather than deny such a label, I find comfort in Niebuhr's notion of a ``tamed cynic.''

In this book, Niebuhr addressed the church, but as I reread it last year it struck me he could just as easily have been talking to journalism.

Was Niebuhr thinking of columnists when he wrote of his preaching task, ``I don't know whether I can ever accustom myself to the task of bringing light and inspiration in regular weekly installments''?

Aren't journalists as well as preachers taken to task with these words: ``all these momentary simplifications of the complexities of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life''?

If Niebuhr didn't intend it when he wrote, I certainly thought of Washington, D.C., and other centers of power when I read: ``I have to work in the twilight zone where superstition is inextricably mixed up with something that is--well, not superstition.''

``America worships success,'' he wrote. ``And the only kind of success the average man can understand is obvious success.''

We journalists major in reporting obvious success; it's the not-so-obvious ones we miss.

A 1994 book listed 25 stories that journalism underplayed in the past decade. It includes the issues of labor law violations and environmental pollution and several political issues that were never tracked during presidential campaigns.

The Center for Diseases Control consistently argues that journalists should stop playing up bizarre medical stories such as cannibalistic bacteria and devote more time and energy to the less sensational, more boring but more important stories of medical research related to cancer or AIDS. Had he been a journalist, Niebuhr would have followed and investigated those kinds of stories.

Also in 1994, in an article entitled ``Reinhold Niebuhr and the Evening News,'' a Wisconsin Presbyterian minister, Randall K. Bush, wrote: ``Given the changing complexities of the world, a voice like Niebuhr's would be most welcome today--one able to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us.''

What could be a better goal for journalists and commentators than this: to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us?

Bush is convinced that Niebuhr's relevance is related to his understanding of ``the religious dimension inherent in all history.''

Far from being a cynic, Niebuhr is a pragmatic idealist. He wrote: ``Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair.''

Amid any despair related to economic stagnation, racial or ethnic hatred and random violence in the streets, America would do well to attend still to this ``tamed cynic'' whose birth anniversary passed last week 

(ed. note:  Niebuhr was born June 21, 1892, and died on June 1, 1971).

Wales tourism hurt by epidemic

A.R. Special Report:
TOURISM TO BEAUTIFUL WALES HURT BY FMD EPIDEMIC 
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent
Annapolis, Md.

May 25, 2001

FISHGUARD, Pembrokeshire, Wales -- Foot-and-mouth disease, which has made eating beef in Britain a rare event, is subtly devastating the tourist trade in this paradise of nature and Celtic history.

"We have a large youth hostel up the road," a tea shop proprietor in the tiny coastal village of Trevine told us during a recent visit. "But no one is staying in it." Sales of a small collection of artwork are helping the woman keep her shop open.

A neighboring tea shop exposed a small sign: "Sorry, we are closed." This was no short-term closure. Another sign in a nearby window indicated that all furnishings and equipment of the cottage business were being sold as well.

Friends traveling with us visited a farm cottage near St. David's in which they had spent delightful past summers along this strip of Atlantic Coast that the government has designated as the only coastal national park in the United Kingdom. They learned from the landlord that the cottage had been sold because the family's herd was destroyed. The threat of foot-and-mouth disease has the government buying up herds of cows to destroy them and thus curtail the spread of the disease. The woman and her husband were moving into the coastal ferry port of Fishguard to refocus on entertaining tourists rather than raising cattle and augmenting their income with summer cottage rentals.

These villages along the Pembrokeshire Coast Trail, nearly 200 miles of hiking paths that rise and fall and meander above the carved cliffs of Southwestern Wales, are facing a summer of ghost town existence. The people who typically fill Trevine's hostel, its neighboring cottages, pubs and teashops are walkers, visitors who rent summer rooms in the area and spend their vacations trekking the public footpaths that wind along the gorgeous coast.

A resident of nearby Abercastle, a 16-family haven for lobster boats tucked between two high headlands, confirmed the scarcity of tourists.

"Usually, the paths at this time of the year are a steady stream of walkers," the man said. "This year, no one comes." The man stopped on the street to talk about the downturn in tourism with my wife and me and the American couple traveling with us.

"I take good note of what's going on," the man said. "The disease is more than a hundred miles from us. I thought they were going to open the paths this weekend, but they didn't."

"They" is the local and national governments who have posted closings on massive sections of the coastal hiking paths that skirt the perimeters of farming and grazing land.

Gates and stiles that provide entry to the footways are posted and often strapped closed with yellow tapes, much like a crime investigation scene. Trespassers are warned they can be fined up to 5,000 pounds (about$7,500), the equivalent to about 15 round-trip airfares between New York and London, for an hour or so on Wales' picturesque coast.

Rumors are rife in the area: There are reports of government carelessness and delay. There are reports of farmers--already eking out a living in a gorgeous land whose mining, farming and industrial livelihoods are largely history--committing suicide after their herds were destroyed.

There are reports of unethical exploiters offering to infect farmers' animals so the government will come in and buy out theherds.

There are continuing reports of disease discoveries, each one seemingly inching closer to the idyllic coast that traditionally draws thousands of= tourists from England, the European Continent and from North America.

What largely is unreported is that tourists are not coming.

Those walking paths that are open--perhaps 40 percent of the total Coast Path--are being trod by few hikers.

It's still early in the tourist season, and many more miles of paths may yet open, but as new reports of disease threaten the central highlands of Wales, it is likely the summer of 2001 will be a tourist disaster for Pembrokeshire.

Perhaps the only good side of the threat to the tourists was expressed by the Abercastle man: "I've noticed," he said, "that the wild flowers are blooming like never before, and some of the shore birds seem to be abundant." He theorizes the lack of humans walking the paths has given the flora and fauna an unprecedented chance to reproduce and thrive without being disturbed.

Ironically, that flora and fauna, together with the ocean and the Irish Sea, are what lure the tourists, and nature is thriving because the tourists are not arriving.

A similar thriving cannot describe the Welsh people who live and work here.

They've come to depend on tourist money, and when walkers stay home so= do their wallets.

Allan R. Andrews, a former editor of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Japan, is a freelance consulting editor in Annapolis, Md. Write him at aroyandrews@gmail.com

Copyright 2008 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

Jesus and Meat

JESUS AND MEAT

By Allan Roy Andrews

American Reporter Columnist

Published on the news site of The American Reporter.

First posted, May 21, 2000

 

WASHINGTON -- A new word came to me last week for which I am always grateful because despite its signaling an area of ignorance it also indicates that an old dog can learn new vocabulary.

The word came out of an unlikely place. Unlikely for two reasons: first, I found it in an editorial from a newspaper I had never read before--the Norman (Okla.) Transcript; second, because it was in a newspaper.

Newspapers tend to shy away from new vocabulary. They stick pretty much to the known--unless, of course, it's a term taught to reporters by lawyers or law enforcement people. We journalists have somehow let ourselves be kowtowed by the legalists in the public sector. But I digress.

My new word is PAREVE.

I also learned, of course, that anyone familiar with the language of vegetarianism or of kosher meal preparations probably knows this word well.

The exact context of the Transcript's use of this word had to do with billboards that are appearing around the nation sponsored, in part, by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

In its attempt to be clever, PETA has supported billboards that exclaim, "Jesus was a vegetarian."

According to the Transcript's editorial, this billboard "gets Christian carnivores riled in just about every city it hits." PETA's intention, ostensibly, is to raise the moral consciousness of every meat-producer and meat-consumer.

The Transcript editorial, apparently written by a "Christian carnivore" or at least a carnivore sympathizer, takes a preacherly approach in exegeting a passage from the Bible; in particular, the 24th chapter of the gospel of Luke, verses 41-43.

"The Bible is mostly silent on what Jesus ate, preferring to focus on what he taught, but it's not entirely silent," the essayist writes.

Quoting the Biblical passage where the risen Jesus meets his disciples and asks, "Have ye here any meat?", the Transcript notes that Jesus is given broiled fish. The writer then concludes: "Pareve he might have been but not vegetarian, unless you consider fish a vegetable."

Pareve, by the way, is derived from the Yiddish word parev, and it has to do with food prepared without dairy or milk products. It's a very important term for Jews in the preparation of kosher meals.

I'm not certain we can draw conclusions on whether or not Jesus was a carnivore, even from a passage such as the Transcript uses as a proof text.

I put the question to a friend of mine who is studying to become an Episcopal priest, and she said, "Well, in those days hardly anyone ever ate meat, and when they did it was probably what had been offered as a sacrifice to God."

What strikes me as more problematic about this little controversy, if it can be called that, is that Jesus' cultural behavior is deemed normative for ours. It's a kind of scholarly version of "What would Jesus Do? (WWJD) that might be termed, "What did Jesus do?" (WDJD).

This could be troublesome: Suppose it is determined that Jesus was left-handed. Are we then to suppose that left-handedness is sacred and not, as the Latin-speaking Romans believed, that it was a sign of sinister character? Based on what we can tell from the Scriptures, Jesus girded his loins with linen garments and robes. Are we then to suppose that forms of modern cloth are inappropriate as garments? (Fantasy headline:  Jesus shunned polyester!)

It's generally assumed that Jesus was a carpenter. Does this cast a sacred aura around that profession and suggest that alternative professions such as ironworker, fisherman or candlestick maker ought to be abandoned or at least deemed less normative for human labor?

We could mount our own campaign to match PETA's with a billboard that rightly exclaims, "Jesus walked everywhere he traveled" (except when traveling on the back of an animal, which raises a whole new set of questions about the ethical treatment of animals). What would that do to the automobile industry?

My own sense is that both vegetarians and carnivores--and even pareve--err when they attempt to enlist Jesus on their side.

As a Christian carnivore, I really don't think it matters to my eating behavior whether Jesus was a vegetarian or not. He clearly attacked gluttony, whether it be carnivorous gluttony or vegetarian gluttony.

The New Testament's ultimate challenge is that Jesus was God, or as a young theologian I once heard put it: He is God incarnate; that is, God in the meat!

 

Dan Quisenberry: The pitcher turned poet

The American Reporter, October 1, 1998

also posted on NandO Times/News, October 2, 1998

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Dan Quisenberry, the poet

By Allan R. Andrews 
American Reporter Correspondent

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WASHINGTON - Dan Quisenberry and I met on the Internet. I initiated our e-mail exchange because I wanted to interview him as a poet not as a pitcher.

The former all-star pitcher for the Kansas City Royals died yesterday at age 45. He had been battling a brain tumor since it was diagnosed last December.

In late 1996, I came across a poem called "The Bomb" in the somewhat obscure academic journal called Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, written by Dan Quisenberry. A contributors' note cited Quisenberry's 16-year baseball career and added, "He now plays with two teenagers, words, dogs, mountains, and golf clubs."

With the help of a local poetry society in Kansas City, I tracked down Quisenberry's e-mail address. It was August when he agreed to be interviewed by e-mail after I asked him some introductory questions about his life and career. A second exchange brought his answers to a baker's dozen of my questions about poetry and writing.

It was my intention to follow up with more questions, but the press of life and work got in the way. I went back to my notes every spring when baseball season began hoping I could find a news peg that would allow me to finish my interview and get Quisenberry the poet in front of readers.

In January of 1998 I read of his medical problem and put my project on the back burner, sending him one last message bidding him prayerful peace. It's time to share his answers to my questions.

Because I was working for a military audience, I asked him if he'd ever been in the military.

"No," he wrote. "Just wanted to play ball. Vietnam looked too scary, scarier than throwing Dave Winfield fastballs outside."

After retiring from baseball, Quisenberry toyed with the idea of buying a business, but said he "discovered I like writing more." He took courses and played at writing fiction but found himself attracted to poetry. Then he told me to "fire away" with my questions about poetry and writing.

That was how we met via e-mail. Here's what he told me about himself as a poet.  Quisenberry remembered only scribbling "jests" while in college, though he said his wife "has received poems from me almost since we met."

He did not write poems while he was playing with the Royals, "But now that I have written some," he reflected, "I think I thought poems then, just didn't know it at the time. But I loved words, did, do, and what they mean and don't mean."

I asked him to expand on his attraction to poetry. "Loving words," he said. "Word lovers write, talk a lot or at least read a lot. Me, I read a lot, then talked a lot, now attempting to write (but not a lot yet).

"I write poetry because it seems to say what I cannot in other ways. I try to get too funny in person. I can't stay on course in a story or essay. A poem gets to the core. Usually happens fast. A quick swim in cold water, a few strokes, a peek to see what's down there and then lurking out the other side.

"The attraction is voice, soul, something that stops the mind to focus on what is said. It helps me to hear it out loud; it's hard to slow down enough to listen, as well as write. My rpms run too fast most of the time to hear a poem inside. It takes slowing to look, listen, quiet enough to gather and understand these words that carry power. Almost mystical."

Quisenberry called himself a scanner of poetry more than a reader. He said his favorite poets included William Stafford; Rumi, an Islamic mystic; Robert Bly; Lucille Clifton; Carolyn Forche; Adrienne Rich; Gary Snyder; Pablo Neruda.

He confessed to not having read Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. He said he intended to read James Merrill because he'd heard that Merrill "is supposed to be very good." He said he liked to hear local Kansas City poets rather than read them.

Taking writing courses and poetry workshops led him to reading his poems in libraries, churches and coffeehouses around Kansas City. He talked about the places he'd published poems and said he considered any thought of self-publishing as a kind of "cheating, throwing spitters, telling all that I am a poet."

About his work, he concluded, "I'm just trying to get better and hope whoever reads it likes it; knows, feels something."

With clear assessment, he admitted his being a baseball player got him attention as a poet, but "a poetry journal won't take me a second time just for the novelty of it."

I asked him if there was any relationship or metaphor in his poetry to match his side-arm style of pitching.

"To try to mix pitching and poetry is a stretch for me. In pitching, I was trying to win, beat the guy with the bat, do the team run-for-the-pennant thing. So much of that was physical; drive, win, beat, go. In poetry, I don't feel the competition; it isn't competition. It's mining, sifting, creative contemplation, more like swimming underwater and looking at stuff one doesn't see on the surface."

Concerning active athletes as writers, Quisenberry turned analytic. "In sports, it's difficult for the player-athlete to open up to what's going on inside; it means to say sometimes 'I'm scared, doubting, lost.' We were coached, taught, pushed to go on no matter what. That means to avoid, deny, push away all that gets in the way of the performance. To focus on being, doing well, one has to block what the fans are yelling, what the opposing dugout is doing, the moth over the bill of the cap, the heat, cold, the general manager. The creative writing on sports is written by the observer, rarely the active participant."

He noted that most sports books are written "as told to." His only guess as to why sports generate so much literature was, "it triggers this little kid in us that says we can do anything, play anything, I guess."

If he had it to do over again, Quisenberry said, he would have pitched armed with a journal, writing stuff "as it happened" recording "knowledge from the belly of the whale."

Comparing writing to athletics, Quisenberry said, "Both take practice, lots of practice." The very best players he knew, he said, were good at practicing.

"In practicing," he wrote, "new stuff seems to happen. Maybe not great poems or novels, but sometimes just a fun sentence or an insight I didn't know I knew."

I told him I'd observed that poets often tend to be reflective, even religious, persons with some kind of commitment to searching for spiritual truth. To that he responded, "A poem can tell about the unexplainable. It is spiritual, not in a Nirvana sense, but in a following sense. One feels inspired by poems, or a thought that leads to a poem.

"I like God poetry, even if it questions the church, the pope, or scripture. The questions lead home eventually. Searching for the truth does too. Faith is at the heart of this stuff, or the search for truth is. The presence in the poem is."

Quisenberry was just embarking on a poetry career when a brain tumor curtailed it. His poems can be found in several literary journals and in a chapbook called "Down and In," published by Helicon Nine Editions in Kansas City.

The last lines from "Down and In," part of a poem called "Baseball Cards," summarize much of what needs to be said about Quisenberry the poet:

I look back 
At who I thought I was 
Or used to be 
Now, trying to be funny 
I tell folks 
I used to be famous 
I used to be good 
They say 
We thought you were bigger 
I say 
I was 

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The Kansas City Star has posted a memorial site to Quisenberry, devoted mostly to his baseball career but with key links to his writings and to interviews with him. I'm not certain how long they'll keep it posted, but it's worth a visit.

 

 

Poets and Scam-artists

This column is one of my most frequently copied, posted, and linked-to writings.  It's a bit dated now, but its message is valid and refers to online poetry entries as well as print versions.

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Would-be poets and scam artists

BY Allan Roy Andrews,

Former Editor, Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan

First published December 21, 1997

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Scams generally fall into two categories: those that appeal to our desire to make money--usually fast--and those that appeal to our vanity.

The Internet is chock full of the first type. All those complaints we're hearing about ``junk mail'' [aka "spam"] on the Internet, especially on popular service providers such as America Online, are largely directed against fast-buck operators attempting to lure us into a get-rich-quick scheme.

Many of these scams are built on a pyramid structure where the early birds make money, but the suckers at the tail-end come up empty.

Other scams give the illusion of something-for-nothing that in the end winds up costing quite a bit.

The best defense against this type of scam is keeping one's wallet or purse closed. Slap your hand when you reach for the credit card or checkbook to aid and abet the ``small donation'' appeals of ``you-can-make-thousands'' barkers.

If a scam artist can e-mail 100,000 people and get just one percent of them to part with five bucks, that hypemeister is $5,000 richer. And be sure of this: e-mailing 100,000 people on any given morning in today's techno-cyberspace is about as easy as buttering toast.

Then there are scams that appeal to our vanity.Of course, intelligent and savvy persons such as you and I never fall into such appeals, do we?

See how easy it was for me to win your agreement. All I had to do was drop a compliment, or appeal to vanity.

This vanity appeal is rampant in the creative writing subculture. Our world abounds with would-be poets and fiction writers. Every person who has ever put pen or pencil to paper to record some experience in free verse or lines that scan holds a dream of seeing his or her artistic work in print.

These amateur poets are great targets of connivers who gladly take their money in return for an overpriced collection of doggerel and unsophisticated verse.

Jenijoy LaBelle is professor of literature at Caltech and a critic of modern poetry. In order to read Prof. La Belle's gripe about the scam artists I've described, one would have to subscribe to the Chronicle, the newspaper of The Associated Writers Program. I doubt many readers of this column have seen that publication, so I'll summarize the professor's investigation.

I hope this will alert many sincere and devoted amateur poets to hang on to their money and share their writings with trusted friends, mentors and established and reputable publications.

Prof. LaBelle conducted a test stimulated by an ad for a poetry contest. I've seen this ad in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly. ``New Poetry Contest $48,000.00 in Prizes,'' the headline of the ad screams.

The ad explains that ``The National Library of Poetry to award 250 total prizes to amateur poets in coming months.''

Suspicious, Prof. La Belle talked three friends into submitting entries to one of The National Library's contests. Her first friend submitted a patchwork poem comprised of random sayings collected from Chinese fortune cookies. A second friend copied a lyric poem of Emily Dickinson's and entered it in the contest under her own name. The third friend wrote an original piece of irrational doggerel about female breasts.

All three of Prof. LaBelle's friends were notified that they were semi-finalists in the contest and that they should be ``genuinely proud of this accomplishment'' because they were possessed of ``a rare talent.''

By now you see how the bait and the vanity have been hooked. The next step, like one lifted from ``The Sting,'' is to get the ``poet'' to part with his or her money.

``We wish to publish your poem in a forthcoming anthology,'' Prof. LaBelle's friends were informed. To have a copy of this book, entitled, ``Sparkles in the Sand,'' the winners were urged to send in $49.95, plus $4 for postage and handling.

For an additional $20, the publishers would add a short biographical note about the poet. This note was allegedly designed to bring the writers to the attention of the media and the public.

Later, these ersatz poets were offered a chance to have their poems mounted under Lucite on a walnut plaque, an offer costing $38. Furthermore, they could have their poems recorded on a cassette tape for $29.95.

The tape, according to The National Library of Poetry, would feature a well-known narrator and baroque music accompaniment.

LaBelle's friends were offered a chance to join the International Society of Poets, with a membership fee of $125. Each one was notified he or she had been nominated as ``Poet of the Year,'' and could attend an induction ceremony in Washington, D.C., for a convention fee of $495, plus travel and hotel expenses.

``Whoever sends in some lame lines becomes a semi-finalist,'' LaBelle notes. From that point on, the scam is on.

The published anthologies, according to the literature professor, are ``jumbles of trivial or downright bad verse.''

Vanity and gullibility, LaBelle concludes, allow this operation to exploit would-be poets for its own greed and profit.

``Maybe nothing illegal is going on,'' LaBelle writes, ``but something unethical as well as unpoetical certainly is.''

And our vanity, this little test shows, can be costly when plied by a scam artist.

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 + National Society of Newspaper Columnists +

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at aroyandrews@gmail.com