What happened to Robert Ingersoll?

Susan Jacoby wonders why the 19th century's "Great Agnostic" Robert G. Ingersoll was more or less forgotten to history. One theory she suggests: it was liberals' smug confidence in their victory over fundamentalism after the Scopes trial. 

Jacoby writes:

Ingersoll's collected works were published within a few years of his death [in 1899] by his brother-in-law C. P. Farrell, who owned the Dresden Publishing Company (named for Ingersoll’s birthplace in upstate New York). The Great Agnostic remained a well-known, frequently cited figure into the 1920s, not only because many of his friends and enemies remained alive but also because his writings were still thought to be capable of corrupting American youth. 

The memory of Ingersoll faded swiftly, however, after the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which pitted the leading spokesman for religious fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, against Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous criminal lawyer and an equally famous agnostic, who had been strongly influenced by hearing Ingersoll’s speeches in the 1870s and 1880s.

Jacoby has a biography of Ingersoll coming out in 2013.

I'm slightly suspicious of the question, here. There's an assumption that it's odd or abnormal for Ingersoll's presence to have faded or have been forgotten, an assumption that goes to support Jacoby's thesis about Ingersoll's significance without making an argument for his importance.

There is an interesting question here, though. To what extent did the "victory" in the Tennessee court house, as understood by those who were critical of religion, as represented by them to themselves, change the shape of skeptical arguments and the development of the atheistic cause?

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Thinking about religious books as commodities

Matt Hedstrom, American Studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the recently released The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, talking about his book on Virginia public radio.

Hedstrom starts with a brief, of sorts, for the book markets and book cultures, and why that study is important in the study of religion:

"Religions also always take on the characteristics of their moment, of their surrounding culture. When you think about the United States in the 20th century, and still in the 21st century, I think the most powerful cultural forces we've got are media and the consumer marketplace. We shape our identities so much through what we consume and how we choose to consume all kinds of commodities, and how we consume media in particular. And, for a lot of Americans, over the course of the the 20th century, the most culturally significant commodity that they bought were books."

Thinking about books as commodities and about how faith as currently, culturally understood, is constructed in the context of such market interactions between consumers and commodities has been one of the major developments of my thinking in my dissertation work. Hearing Hedstrom talk at the Religion and the Marketplace conference in Heidelberg, in Oct. 2011, spurred me on in this.

His book, I think, will be a good addition to the growing body of work on religious book cultures.

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Christian book covers

The Evangelical Christian Publisher's association has announced the finalists for the 2012 cover design awards. Most seem to me ... underwhelming. Some are very bad. There's certainly a clear preference for visual puns and over-literal interpretations.

I'm not an expert at these things. Perhaps the above, for example, does what it's supposed to do in a bookstore, catches attention and communicates a basic idea very succinctly. I can't help but feel, though, that such covers communicate also a deep disrespect for the intended audience.

The very worst of the nominated covers:

Presumably such dreck actually helps sales, though.

Update: A summary of the marketing research behind these designs can be found here.

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Daniel Dennet discovers Erasmus

Daniel Dennett is notoriously horrible at history. It turns out, though, if you give him an award and €150,000, he is willing to do a little.

Here, in an interview with a Dutch journalist about how he won the Erasums award, he discovers Erasmus, and finds he has, at least in one specific sense he'll admit to, been preceeded.

Dennett: "It's a little bit eerie to discover that you're echoing a debate which is hundreds of years old. And some very similar points being made."

Indeed, Dr. Dennet. Indeed.

For an offhand -- and, I'd argue, deeplyunserious -- dismissal of phenomenology and Thomas Nagel's famous paper What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", keep watching to the 11:07 mark.

via 3 Quarks Daily.

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Rob Bell's internal contradiction

Rob Bell's been gone from the Michigan megachurch he founded for more than a year now. When he remembers the church, he often in a sense misremembers it, according to Kelefa Sunnah's piece in the New Yorker.

Not misremembers, exactly, but rather remembers the beginning and not the end, what was overcome instead of what was created. He talks about the energy of the potential, not the extent to which an institution is an institution is an institution. The difference between what's emphasized and what's not is the contradiction inherently internal to the megachurch project, and also to Bell himself.

Sennah writes:

"Because [Bell] vividly remembers the early days, he still sometimes talks about Mars Hill as a gritty, scrappy place: a church with no sign, no steeple, no cross, and hardly any decoration. This is all true, but Mars Hill is also a comfortable, well-run facility, with plenty of parking and age-specific child care. It was just after eight o’clock on a seasonably cold morning, and worshippers were trickling in and stamping the snow off their boots."

Both of these aspects were critical to Mars Hill's success, and also to the problems that eventually became serious. Sennah locates the tension in the two very different things a church like Mars Hill needs: a sense of creativity and ongoing discovery, but also structure, order and stability.

Another way to say this would be: the things that Bell did tended to have two opposite and yet simultaneous results. His sermon style, to take one example, brought people together who wouldn't have otherwise been brought together, and it also created new polarities, and pushed people apart.

The same is also probably true for other major evangelical leaders and their megachurches.

The question is always, it seems, of how the internal opposite forces are balanced.

Bell, on the one hand, couldn't not push. But also -- and this is missed by most of his critics and more than a few of his fans -- he couldn't allow himself or be happy with himself as a bomb-thrower and controversialist.

The contradiction, at some point, became unsustainable for Mars Hills. Or, arguably, not for Mars Hill but for Bell, who himself was internally conflicted in exactly this same way the church he created was conflicted, on the one hand wanting to be a radical and on the other unwilling to take strong stands, wanting to be a mediator and someone who builds consensus.

In Sennah's telling, the inherent contradiction within Rob Bell was expressed as a kind of crafted ambiguity ("a careful ambiguity, allowing worshipers to think that he was however evangelical" -- or however liberal -- "they wanted him to be. He wanted to make a wide range of worshipers feel comfortable.") that ultimately broke down. Either Bell himself couldn't bear the cost of keeping it up, or the balancing act of that ambiguity just became impossible, and any move would have meant a tumble.

In this postmortem, at least, the controversy over hell that marked the end, at least for now, of Bell's pastoral ministry was rather incidental to there being an end. It if wasn't that, it would have been something else. What he had, what Bell was, was unsustainable.

The internal contradiction that couldn't be kept up indefinitely.

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Woman and fire

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