Integrite Spring 2025

VOLUME 24 NUMBER 1

INTÉGRITÉ SPRING 2025

PUBLISHED SEMIANNUALLY BY

MISSOURI BAPTIST UNIVERSITY Saint Louis, Missouri 63141-8698

mobap.edu/about-mbu/publications/integrite/

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Editor

John J. Han, Missouri Baptist University

Editorial Review Board

Matthew Bardowell, Missouri Baptist University Todd C. Ream, Taylor University C. Clark Triplett, Missouri Baptist University

Advisory Board

Bob Agee, Oklahoma Baptist University & Union University Jane Beal, University of La Verne Eric Shane Bryan, Missouri University of Science and Technology Andy Chambers, Missouri Baptist University Arlen Dykstra, Missouri Baptist University Matthew Easter, Missouri Baptist University Lorie Watkins Massey, William Carey University Darren J. N. Middleton, Baylor University John Zheng, Mississippi Valley State University

Editorial Assistants Dylan Chastain

Terrie Jacks

Webmasters

Jenna Gulick

Lauryn Pyatt

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal (ISSN 1547-0474 and 1547-0873) is published in spring and fall by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University. Published both online at https://www.mobap.edu/aboutmbu/publications/integrite/ and in print copy, the journal examines historical, philosophical, theological, cultural, and pedagogical issues related to the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. All submissions are critically reviewed for content and substance by the editor and the editorial review board; in some cases, scholars in specific fields are invited to evaluate manuscripts. The opinions expressed by individual writers in this journal are not necessarily endorsed by the editor, editorial board, or Missouri Baptist University.

SUBMISSIONS: Submissions of scholarly articles, short essays, book reviews, and poems are welcome. Send your work and your 100-125-word author bio as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. We accept submissions all year round. For detailed submission guidelines, see the last two pages of this journal.

SUBSCRIPTIONS & BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Intégrité subscriptions, renewals, address changes, and books for review should be mailed to John J. Han, Editor of Intégrité, Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missouri 63141. Phone: (314) 392-2311/Fax: (314) 434-7596. Subscription rates: Individuals $10 per year; institutions $20 per year.

INDEXING: Intégrité is listed in the Southern Baptist Periodical Index and the Christian Periodical Index.

Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 2025 © 2025 Missouri Baptist University. All rights reserved.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Volume 24

Number 1

Spring 2025

CONTENTS Papers presented at the Seventh Annual Faith and Research Conference, Missouri Baptist University, April 3-4, 2025 Theme: After Humanism?: Defining the Human for the Modern Age 3

Ecclesial Personhood: A Theological-Interpretative Conversation between Genesis 2:18 and 1 Corinthians 12:12 Aaron S. Halstead

12

Striving after Wind: Human Need in Ecclesiastes and the Monk and Robot Series Julie Steinbeck

19

Transhumanism, Christianity, and the Inherent Good of Human Limitations Christopher Talbot

28

A Biblical Theology of Labor and Vocation for the 21st Century Matthew Steven Bracey

36

Maps and Exclusivity: The Selective Storytelling of the Map Michelle Ryan

40

“To Krakoa, My X-Men”: The Creation of Mutant Culture Within the Krakoa Era of X-Men and the Importance of Autonomy for Marginalized Groups Elsa Linson

BOOK REVIEWS 47

Thomas P. Hillman, Pity Power and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many (Kent UP, 2023) Matthew Bardowell

51

John Hendrix, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. & J. R. R. Tolkien (Abrams Fanfare, 2024) Matthew Bardowell

54

Jeffrey Bilbro, Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope (Baylor UP, 2024) Julie Ooms

58

Jennifer L. Holberg, Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2023) Julie Ooms

CREATIVE WORKS 61

Photo Art and Creative Writing Michael Shoemaker

67

Two Poems Gideon T. Braley

69

“Sunflowers Painted on a Water Glass” and Other Poems Jane Beal

74

Two Poems Heather Hallberg Yanda

78

“At the Church in Your Home” and Other Poems Todd Sukany

81

Roaming with Flannery O’Connor’s Characters: A Photo Essay from Rural Georgia John J. Han

97

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

101

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Aaron S. Halstead 3 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 3-11

ARTICLES Ecclesial Personhood: A Theological-Interpretative Conversation between Genesis 2:18 and 1 Corinthians 12:12 Aaron S. Halstead Doctrinal issues related to personhood and theological anthropology proliferate in the contemporary setting. Theologian Malcom B. Yarnell has commented that he believes the next great theological locus churches in the West must develop is not bibliology, pneumatology, or ecclesiology, but anthropology—what the Christian faith confesses about humanity.1 In my own experience, cultural, contextual, and candidly personal factors have contributed to my interest in this topic. Culturally, even a casual observer of the current cultural climate can see that questions related to personhood and related anthropological concerns dominate. Recent academic and popular-level books on theological anthropology demonstrate the (at least) perceived need for Christian thinking in this area.2 Cultural and ethical conversations regarding sexual orientation and identity, abuse, abortion, fertility treatments, social and racial justice, euthanasia, and artificial intelligence are all rooted in anthropological concerns. How should the church confess, think, and respond to such questions?

Contextually, my “day job” is Lead Pastor of Mid-Cities Church in Maplewood, a progressive-presenting neighborhood in the South City/Mid County region of St. Louis. Each month, I attend a Community Connections meeting—a gathering of representatives from Maplewood’s governmental, educational, religious, social service, human advocacy, and private spheres. The goal of this group is to work for the common good of our community, and social and community concerns such as immigration, homelessness, food scarcity, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and senior citizen care and enrichment have all become topics of conversation. Two values have been repeatedly emphasized in this discussion: (1) that the parties represented in these discussions are not abstract entities but human personalities and (2) the benefit of the diverse voices at work in solving these issues, including, to my surprise, the evangelical pastors in the room.

Candidly, when I began to pastor this church almost four years ago, we had 74 members and 32 regular attenders, or 106 people in total. In these almost four years, we’ve dropped down to 43 members and 37

4 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal regular attendees, or 80 people total. Some of that has been to death, moving, and cleaning up membership rolls. But some of it has been to people leaving, and it leads me to ask the questions, “What are people giving up when they leave? Why does it hurt the church so much to see people leave the congregation?”

My allotted presentation time and the attention span of my audience—and hopefully an ounce of humility—prevent me from seeking to tackle each of these concerns. Rather, my goal is to justify the position that it is indeed the church’s prerogative to speak to such issues, or, to put it colloquially, it’s good and right for the church to have a seat at the table.

The church’s vocal seat at the cultural-anthropological table is justified because of her unique position as not the authoritative source on what constitutes personhood, but rather as personhood’s good and proper end.3 My claim is this: personhood is fully expressed in ecclesia, in the church.

To demonstrate this claim, I intend to give a brief theological interpretation of Genesis 2:18 and 1 Corinthians 12:12 and then to bring the subsequent insights gleaned from these two scriptural texts into cohesion. My understanding is that by letting the theology of these two texts “talk to one another,” an anthropological vision emerges that grants the church confidence to move forward in her dialogue with her cultural detractors.

Definitions First, any theological project must define its terms sufficiently. In the present proposal, three concepts must be clearly defined so that we know what we’re talking about. The first is “theological interpretation,” since it provides the methodology moving forward. Though the two remaining concepts, “personhood” and “the church,” should be largely derived from the text of scripture, some definition is needed to know what theological presuppositions I bring to this inquiry.

By “theological interpretation,” I mean a particular interpretive method characterized by a distinctive goal. In defining theological interpretation, we need to understand it in contrast with the grammaticalhistorical interpretive method. The grammatical-historical method seeks to place the text in question in relationship to its literary, historical, and cultural context to assess the text’s meaning to the original audience, and, in some cases, application for a contemporary audience. Theological interpretation is not opposed to such an approach, but rather, builds upon it and has a different goal. The difference in goal, according to Kevin Vanhoozer, is that theological interpretation “is characterized by a governing interest in God, the word and works of God, and by a governing intention to engage in what we might call ‘theological criticism.’” Because of this focus, theological interpretation concerns itself with “enabl[ing] the church better to hear what God is saying to the church and world today.”4 Therefore, theological interpretation focuses on the text itself, and the

Aaron S. Halstead 5 theological impetus of the text, rather than a supposed “world” behind or in front of the text.5 In defining “personhood,” I am driven largely by the confessional heritage of Southern Baptists, who confess, “Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation.”6 Personhood, then, means that quality possessed by an individual through participation in the imago Dei (Gen 1:26–27; Acts 17:26–28; 1 Cor 15:21–22). Certainly, the imago Dei as a doctrine includes more than simply establishing a working definition for “personhood,” but such a role is sufficient for my purposes here.

Once more, Southern Baptist confessionalism sets my parameters in defining “the church” as that “autonomous local congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel.” It should be noted that though “the New Testament speaks also of the church as the Body of Christ which includes all of the redeemed of all ages, believers from every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation,”7 this redeemed people can only be expressed in a local, covenantal context. The early church used the term ἐκκλησία with intentionality: the church is the people who have gathered together and covenant to follow Christ and proclaim the good news (Acts 19:32, 39, 41; 2 Cor 6:16). 8 With these definitions in place, we turn to the first of our textual conversation partners.

Genesis 2:18 Genesis 2:18 is found in the pericope Genesis 2:4–24, which constitutes a parallel creation account to the one found in Genesis 1:1– 2:3.9 Having created the man Adam, placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it, and given him instructions on how to live in this garden, “then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make a helper fit for him’” (Gen 2:18).10 The word used to describe Adam’s condition before the creation of the woman Eve is ‫( לְ בַ דֹּ ו‬lĕ’baddô). The construct is comprised of the lamedh preposition “specifying a particular referent” (i.e., Adam),11 the adjective ‫( בַ ד‬băḏ), and the third-person masculine singular pronoun suffix. Thus, ‫( בַ ד‬băḏ) describes his condition at that time. According to Harris, Archer, and Waltke, “the core concept [of the adjective] is ‘to be separate and isolated’” and “may have a positive, a negative, or neutral connotation.”12 The adjective’s connotation as it concerns Adam’s condition in this verse is to be determined by its relationship to God’s declaration. How does God characterize Adam’s isolation?

God declares that Adam’s isolation is ‫ֹּא־טֹוב‬ ֛ ‫( ל‬lô’ṭôḇ), a construct comprised of the negative particle and the adjective ‫( טֹוב‬ṭôḇ). To characterize something as ṭôḇ is to characterize it as “having the qualities that make something useful and desirable.”13 This is the same descriptor given to God’s creative acts in the previous chapter in Genesis. At this

6 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal point in the biblical narrative, evil as a moral quality has not appeared as a category. Although ṭôḇ can carry a moral or ethical connotation.14 It is unclear whether this connotation is in view in Genesis 2:18—especially considering the theological implications this creates for calling God’s prefall creation “not good.” More likely, or at least principally, is the idea that without community, he remains “incomplete,”15 or it is not desirable for Adam to be in isolation.

As it concerns the contemporary context, Genesis 2:18 provides important data in describing an individual’s personhood. Adam’s personhood was not ontologically affected in his băḏ-state. In other words, though in isolation, he still retained the imago Dei. That said, his isolation was not ṭôḇ; it was not desirable. The definitive text related to the imago Dei (Gen 1:26–27) is applied to a corporate collection of individuals, though each individual is said to participate in the imago Dei. In Genesis 2:18, however, we see that this personhood reaches a climax, or a more beautiful expression, in covenant community.16 Therefore, contemporary individuals participate in a similar ontological reality as Edenic humanity.

An isolated existence does not destroy the imago Dei, but there is a more desirable and more beautiful form of existence available.

1 Corinthians 12:12 1 Corinthians 12:12 continues an argument the Apostle Paul makes to the Corinthian church, beginning back 11:2 and continuing to 14:40.

The predominant theme in this larger section is the demonstration of the church’s disunity in her corporate worship gatherings. 12:1–11 introduces the concept of spiritual gifts into this larger conversation concerning corporate worship, but Paul grounds the exercising of these gifts in a particular view of the church’s unity.17 We can summarize that view of church unity using 1 Corinthians 12:12, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

The Καθάπερ…οὕτως (kathaper-houtōs, “just as..so”) construction draws an obvious comparison between the human body and Christ’s body, the church. Paul’s point in this verse, as demonstrated in his repeated use of the noun μέλος (melos, “member”) is that the church, as is the human body, is composed of parts and yet participates in a larger unified whole.18 Paul spends vv. 14–26 illustrating this unified composition in the church, and then in v.27 expands on his comments in v.12. Paul says in v.27, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Ὑμεῖς (plural) δέ (logical transition conjunction) ἐστε (plural) σῶμα Χριστοῦ (both singular) καὶ (coordinating conjunction) μέλη (the nominative singular neuter of μέλος, demonstrating that participation in a larger whole is in view) ἐκ μέρους. The ESV translates ἐκ μέρους (ek merous) with “individually,” but that phrase is used elsewhere in the New Testament to

Aaron S. Halstead 7 designate a “sharing” in a common reality or to refer to a piece of a larger unit.19 Analyzing 1 Corinthians 12:12 in view of the larger section related to the church’s public worship gatherings, a larger context of participation is in view. Whatever our interpretation—or lack thereof—of Paul’s teaching on head coverings in 11:2–16, the repeated comparison between man, woman, and God using εἰκών (eikon, “image”) and δόξα (doxa, “glory”) in v.7 imply some form of participation in a common personhood between the three parties. Further, vv. 8–9 refer back to the Genesis creation narrative. Conversations regarding the Lord’s Supper in 10:16–17 teach that the liturgical act of celebrating the eucharist is a κοινωνία (koinonia, “participation”) in Christ. In reference to eating of the bread, Paul says that it bears some relationship to the reality that “we who are many are one body” (v.17), the same language as can be found in 12:12.

For Paul, the church is a social reality where individual persons participate in a common identity. Although how this relates to personhood in general will be explored just a little later, the ecclesial 20 context and theme of participation in 1 Corinthians 12:12 demonstrate that, at least for the saints who are in Christ, the church constitutes a corporate collection of individuals who participate in a larger liturgical, Christological, and ecclesial reality. We turn now to how these two texts cohere into a common theological vision related to personhood.

Theological Cohesion In our exploration of Genesis 2:18, I concluded by saying that the text’s connection to the imago Dei doctrine points to a common ontological expression of personhood in each individual, and yet it holds out a more desirable expression of that personhood in community. In our exploration of 1 Corinthians 12:12, I concluded that the larger context of the text points to how individual members of the local church share in a common expression of identity. Each person in humanity participates in a common ontological personhood. That said, it is a ṭôḇ-ier way to live to move beyond one’s băḏ-state. In other words, the more desirable expression of personhood necessitates an “other” to complement the individual’s aloneness and end his or her isolation. Surely a state of redemption, which necessitates an inclusion into the church as well, is a more beautiful, more desirable, a ṭôḇ-ier existence than lostness and perdition.

Once included as a member of the church, an individual finds a similar reality at play: each believer is made a melos of the church, specifically, a melos ek merous. Thus, each member of the church participates in a common ecclesial identity; each member shares in larger covenantal reality beyond themselves.21 However, as the Baptist Faith and Message reminds us, that broader ecclesial reality can only be expressed in a local context. In the same way that one’s personhood is not destroyed by

8 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal being in the băḏ-state, one’s individuality is not destroyed in a local ecclesial context. However, that individuality is still “held” within a larger corporate identity that is also explained in organic terms of personhood (i.e., a body).22 An individual not connected to the church, or any community in general, is not less a person than an individual who is connected to the church. However, life in the faith community is a more desirable life. It is good and right. It is more beautiful than a life of isolation or of separation from the body. Disconnection from the church is lô’ṭôḇ. It cries out for an “other” to complement the isolation. It longs for a body to become melos ek merous. We have been given the answer to that cry and longing, for our personhood to find its full expression in ecclesia.

Conclusion We now end where we began, with cultural, contextual, and candidly personal concerns seeking answers from our theological anthropology. The church can speak to these larger cultural questions related to anthropology because she is the ṭôḇ community.23 As she dialogs with others in her context, she speaks as witness to that community,24 extending the invitation for others to become a fellow melos. When members leave, the pain is real because a melos ek merous is now pulled asunder from the body. This is not as it should be. So, the church continues her call for others, even those who left, to end their băḏ-state and join a local expression of the larger ecclesial community.

Notes 1 Yarnell made this statement on at least two occasions to a group of PhD

students at Southwestern Seminary in systematic theology reading seminars during the Fall of 2019 and the Spring of 2020.

2 For example, see Joshua R. Harris, Introduction to Theological

Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020); Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020); the popular-level rewrite of the previous work, Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2022); Preston M. Sprinkle, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2021); Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022); Katie J. McCoy, To Be a

Aaron S. Halstead 9 Woman: The Confusion Over Female Identity and How Christians Can Respond (Nashville: B&H, 2023).

3 God himself is the authoritative source on what constitutes personhood,

as he is the authoritative source for any theological subject. His voice is heard in scripture, and so scripture is theology’s normative agent in theological formulation. The church, as a “creature of the Word,” listens to scripture and communicates what she hears in a contextually appropriate idiom. But she is not herself the source for theological formulation.

4 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Introduction: What Is Theological Interpretation of

the Bible?” in The Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, eds. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Craig G. Bartholomew, Daniel J. Treier, and N. T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 22.

5 Gregory K. Hollifield, “Pericope-by-Pericope: Transforming Disciples

into Christ’s Likeness through the Theological Interpretation of Scripture,” Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry 15, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 48–49.

As such, theological interpretation is not unconcerned with the historical accuracy of the biblical text nor with practical application. It simply wishes to take the text itself on its own merits and keeps historicity and modern application from acting as the driving force of the interpretive enterprise.

This does not mean the authorial intent of the text is inconsequential; no, the theological interpretation of a text will always be compatible with and born out of the meaning for the original audience. See Hollifield, “Pericope-by-Pericope,” 50.

6 “Article III. Man,” The Baptist Faith and Message (2000), 2023, accessed

March 18, 2025, https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/.

7 “Article VI. The Church,” The Baptist Faith and Message (2000).

8 Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville: B&H,

1994), 605–06. See also Brian Haymes, Ruth Gouldbourne, and Anthony R. Cross, On Being the Church: Revisioning Baptist Identity, Studies in Baptist History and Though 21 (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2008), 29–30.

9 Allen P. Ross, Creation & Blessing: A Guide to the Study and Exposition

of Genesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 117–18.

10 All scripture references are in the English Standard Version.

10 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal 11 James Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic

Domains: Hebrew (Old Testament) (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, 1997), s.v. 4200 I. ‫( לְ ־‬l). See also R Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody, 1999), 463.

12 Harris, et al, TWOT, 90.

13 Aaron C. Fenlason, “Beauty,” in Lexham Theological Wordbook, ed.

Douglas Magnum, Lexham Bible Reference Series (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), s.v. ‫( טֹוב‬ṭôb).

14 Fenlason, “Beauty,” s.v. ‫( טֹוב‬ṭôb); Harris, et al, TWOT, 345.

15 Ross, Creation & Blessing, 125–26.

16 Brueggemann sees Genesis 2:18 as fulfilled in v.24, which establishes the

human need for covenant unity in community. See Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 47.

17 The verse begins with “Καθάπερ γὰρ,” which is an adverbial comparative

conjunction Καθάπερ paired with an explanatory γὰρ. The construction allows the reader to understand Paul’s argument in this pericope (extending to v.31) as an expansion of previous data in the larger section but still a sustained new thought.

18 Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains:

Greek (New Testament) (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, 1997), s.v.

3517 μέλος (melos); Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey William Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 577.; Rick Brannan, ed., Lexham Research Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, Lexham Research Lexicons (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020), s.v. μέλος -ους, τό; (melos).

19 Kittel, et al, TDNTA, 585.

20 The use of “ecclesial” as opposed to “ecclesiastical” is intentional.

“Ecclesiastical,” though it still includes a relationship to the church, connotes the structures and systems of the church; it has a more

Aaron S. Halstead 11 “institutional feel” to it. “Ecclesial,” on the other hand, still includes a relationship to the church but does not connote institution per se. As a term, it “fits” better with the more organic language used in 1 Corinthians.

21 The household codes of Ephesians 4–6, Colossians 3:18–4:1, Titus 2:1–

10, and 1 Peter 2:13–17 demonstrate “a covenantal framework of the church that should regulate the relationships between its members is built into the fabric of the New Testament.” See Gregg R. Allison, Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church, Foundations of Evangelical Theology, ed. John S. Feinberg (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 125. The texts 2 Corinthians 6:16–18 and Hebrews 8:10 also point to a pattern in which God covenants with the church, which is then paralleled in disciples constituting a church together. See Paul S. Fiddes, “Covenant and Communion,” in Baptists and the Communion of Saints: A Theology of Covenanted Disciples, eds. Paul S. Fiddes, Brian Haymes, and Richard Kidd (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 32. Further, as the church exists in covenant relationship with God, it then participates in the divine life of the Trinity. See Curtis W. Freeman, Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 246– 47; Haymes, et al, On Being the Church, 5–6.

22 This is a vastly simplified form of the argument put forth in Dietrich

Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 1, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).

23 In her unity, holiness, catholicity, apostolicity, right preaching of the

gospel, and right administration of the sacraments, the church signifies to the rest of the world that she is, indeed, the new covenant community. See Curtis W. Freeman, “Wholly Church, But Not the Whole Church,” American Baptist Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 9.

24 Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 614–26.

12 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 12-18

Striving after Wind: Human Need in Ecclesiastes and the Monk and Robot Series Julie Steinbeck Most education majors can confirm that one of the first things that they will learn in their basic education courses is the concept of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Originating from Abraham Maslow’s “A Theory of Human Motivation,” the general idea is that unless lower “deficiency” needs such as physical safety, nourishment, and rest are fulfilled, a person is unable to fulfill the higher “growth” needs—friendship, belonging, selfactualization, and learning (Wichita State). As a teacher, this theory anecdotally proves true: students will not do their best work in class if they are sick, injured, hungry, or stressed beyond their normal circumstances.

But when one’s “deficiency” needs are filled, how can we tell that our “growth” needs are being addressed and that we have reached our full potential?

Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books address these themes of human need and desire in A Psalm for the Wild-Built and how these questions are resolved in A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Sibling Dex begins their adventure in Wild-Built in the main city on the human-inhabited moon Panga, growing restless and bored with their surroundings. They abruptly decide to leave the safety and relative comfort of the monastery where they have lived for several years in favor of doing tea service in the surrounding villages. As they ponder the overall meaninglessness of their work, Dex encounters Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot. While robots have not been seen by humans for several centuries, their civilization sends a representative to check up on the humans by asking them, “What do people need?” And so begins Dex and Mosscap’s journey to answer that question. Despite searching for satisfaction from a variety of sources, throughout Wild-Built we see Dex struggling with this notion of never having enough in some way: But so what, right? Dex was the best tea monk in Panga, if the chatter was to be believed. […] That should have been enough. That should have been more than enough. And yet, if they were completely honest, the thing they had come to look forward to most was not the smiles nor the gifts nor the sense of work done well […] Why wasn’t it enough? (WildBuilt 38-39)

Julie Steinbeck 13 Despite the faithful work being done in the service of Dex’s chosen god and of those needing it, they are not fulfilled. Dex’s deficiency and growth needs are technically met but end up not being soul-satisfying, even after all the work and searching done in both Wild-Built and Crown-Shy. Such a line of thinking is reminiscent of the Preacher from Ecclesiastes. We are introduced to the Preacher as he reflects on his journey to find what exactly the purpose of mankind is and what will truly make one happy; he desires “an approach to life that would avoid the consequences of greed on the one hand and the dissipation of folly on the other” (Bullock 214). He begins his writing by musing that “It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with” and that “all is vanity and a striving after wind” (The Holy Bible Ecc. 1.13-14). In other words, very little that a person does is likely to have much of an impact—that “Death makes all human work and wisdom and wealth and pleasure ‘vain’” (O’Donnell 10). As Dex is in their work, Bullock notes that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes is a religious man, striving for a life of balance, wisdom, and enjoying the present moment (210-11). As such, Dex and the Preacher share much of their backgrounds and attitudes toward a life well lived; however, they are left melancholy while they continue their respective searches. Both characters examine what humans need and how to live a satisfying life, but despite the similarities in their approaches, only one finds humanity’s true need.

One of the most fundamental growth needs that we find in the Monk and Robot books is that of crafting one’s own identity. This notion of unconditional self-acceptance, as Chamberlain and Haaga describe, “should correlate negatively with anxiety […] and correlate positively with happiness and general well-being,” and soften the blow when negative events occur (165). In other words, having crafted a secure identity, Dex should remain secure in their overall mood, with fewer times of negative emotional reactions.

Both of Chambers’ novels imply how much work has gone into Dex’s self-identification. For instance, notice how thus far Dex has been referred to with gender-neutral title and pronouns; this emphasis on Dex’s non-binary gender shows the importance of being able to craft one’s own identity, particularly in the book’s context (the reader is never told how large the non-binary population of Panga is, but Dex is not the only nonbinary individual described). Dex also takes on the title of “Sibling” in their monastic life rather than the more common “Brother” or “Sister,” both of which are still found in referring to other characters. Notably, the reader is also never told Dex’s biological sex—an implicit statement that identity is whatever one wants it to be and that one should be secure in whichever choices are made in that respect. Dex is so adamant about the ability to construct their own identity that Mosscap’s explanation of robots’ preference for the impersonal “it” makes Dex deeply uncomfortable. They find “it” unsuitable for beings that are supposed to be equal to humans (Wild-Built 69). But even with the supposed personal security stemming

14 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal from the complete freedom of identity and self-acceptance, Dex is still aimless, seeking further understanding of what they need to be fulfilled.

The Preacher, by contrast, places less emphasis on the need to seek or construct an identity. Instead, the Preacher is deliberately vague about who he is, saying only that he is the son of David, king in Jerusalem (Ecc. 1.1 and 12). This is where the authorship of Ecclesiastes is up for some debate. While King Solomon is usually assumed to be the author, the Preacher does not explicitly say so, unlike other material Solomon authors, and Bullock points out that linguistic analysis tentatively says that Ecclesiastes’ words belong to someone else, though the evidence is shaky either way (219-20). Regardless of the specific authorship, most agree that the Preacher was “a Jew who was a wisdom teacher (12:9-10) of ample wealth and opportunity” (220). But with that in mind, the Preacher heavily implies that how he identifies is of less importance than what he says.

Though personal identity is one of the highest-order needs that Maslow describes, it does not serve here as what is truly needed for satisfaction and fulfillment.

As one would expect of a monk, Dex spends their time early on in Wild-Built in intellectual work, and they are certainly educated, especially in the myths and history of Panga. Dex resides in Meadow Den, the monastery in Panga’s only city, tending their order’s garden and taking advantage of the City’s various cultural offerings (Wild-Built 5 and CrownShy 131). The city is full of anything that the human mind could want to explore: movies, museums, art shows, and parks—all meant to fulfill one’s intellectual curiosity (Wild-Built 5). During travel, Dex’s smartphone-like device downloads books and other sources of information—knowledge on the go! But even with the resources at their disposal, Dex still bemoans their lack of enthusiasm for what they can learn: “I read books and monastic texts and everything I could find” and they “still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog” (120). Despite the acquisition of knowledge and the access to resources others might not have, and even though intellectual growth is a large step towards Maslow’s description of self-actualization, Dex is unable to work well with their knowledge.

The Preacher has plenty of reason for confidence in his intellect: “I said in my heart, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge’” (Ecc. 1.16). His intellectual prowess dwarfs any mind around him. All the same, the Preacher laments his lack of purpose and direction: Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? (Ecc. 1.2-3) Later, he says that “I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind”

Julie Steinbeck 15 (Ecc 1.17). All of the reasoning in the world, the Preacher realizes, “cannot undo the curse of a sovereign God on Adam’s offspring” (O’Donnell 38).

Even with everything that he has going for him, the Preacher is at a loss of how to treat his immense knowledge and wisdom because the entire operation seems pointless—for the wise and fool both meet the same end (Ecc. 2.14-15). He can be confident in his immense knowledge and his ability to apply it, but he is still left wondering why wisdom and knowledge do not satisfy him, saying that he hates the life he lives “because what is done under the sun is grievous to [him]” (Ecc. 2.17). After all this contemplation and study, the Preacher’s conclusion remains the same as his starting premise (Bullock 230). He investigates and weighs everything, but the same depression and futility remain.

The next attempts to reach contentment in each text center not around intellectual development but physical indulgence. Of course, no one expects a monk to indulge much in the earthlier desires, but Dex follows Allalae, the god of small comforts. As such, Dex is encouraged to take part in things that are comforting to them. All comforts, great and small, are open to them and encouraged. Even Dex’s everyday dress features a bear-shaped pendant representative of Allalae, used to remind themself to “Welcome comfort […] Without it, you cannot stay strong” (Crown-Shy 30). They spend their time gardening and, when doing tea service, giving others advice and comfort for each individual’s circumstances. Dex attends parties, drinks alcohol, cooks elaborate meals, and relaxes in public baths. Dex is also not forbidden from engaging in sexual relationships, as they mention in Wild-Built (120); in Crown-Shy the reader sees Dex spending at least one night with Leroy, a craftsman who helps Mosscap with a repair (76-77). But, obviously, the central question for Dex is how many different types of comfort are needed to stay satisfied, because every self-indulgence does not bring contentment for very long.

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes engages in much the same things as Dex, though as a wildly rich king, there are more resources to put towards his own physical satisfaction. We are told that the Preacher uses all measures of pleasurable things to see if they can satisfy, experimenting carefully with wine, architectural wonders, vast amounts of wealth and livestock, ease of living through slaves, and even carnal desires (Ecc. 2.38). O’Donnell notes that the Preacher’s study of madness and folly is not merely exploration of the less-than-rational: it is the “pursuit of pleasures, immoral ones (in 9:3, ‘madness’ [holelot] is equated with ‘evil’)” (O’Donnell 39). He withholds nothing from himself, and his accomplishments outmatch any of his peers (Ecc 2.9-10). He even acknowledges that a ruler committed to the benefit of his people is a good thing, that wealth can be a boon to future generations—but he finds that no one can remain truly satisfied with just the acquisition of riches and status (Ecc. 5.10). He notes that wealth, contrary to what many would believe, creates inequality, oppression, and trouble even for those who

16 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal own it (Ecc. 5.8, 13). The Preacher has tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and found it only increases sorrow (O’Donnell 40).

The final common element we see Sibling Dex and Ecclesiastes’ Preacher taking on in their quests for satisfaction is work, mostly in the service of others. The reader is introduced to Dex as someone that wants to get out of town, meaning an abrupt change in vocation in their monastical life. As Dex later describes the situation to Mosscap, “And yet every […] day in the City, I woke up hollow, and… and just… tired, y’know?

So I did something else” (Wild-Built 118). Their order sets them up with the necessary equipment and sends them off into the Pangan wilderness.

As a tea monk, Dex’s job is to travel around, set up shop, create custom brews of tea suited to comfort those who approach them, and offer advice befitting the person’s situation. As previously mentioned, once Dex grows accustomed to the work, they rapidly become popular, drawing large crowds whenever they are scheduled to be in town. Dex knows this and has an earnest desire to do good for others, but still grows disillusioned: “I thought, if I can just do that, if I can do it well, I’ll feel okay. And guess what? I do do it well. I’m good at what I do. I make people happy. I make people feel better. And yet I still wake up tired, like… like something’s missing” (118). Dex has done everything that is supposed to lead to happiness, even self-sacrificing so that others can benefit, but in the end they are still at a loss and wondering why their work seems aimless.

Much of the Preacher’s efforts as king in Jerusalem have their benefits for others, and he is not a man that celebrates indolence. While the Preacher is shown to have accomplished much—gardens, orchards, parks, and other great works—he throws up his hands in despair, saying that “I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be a master of all for which I toiled” (Ecc. 2.18-19a). In other words, the Preacher is frustrated by the fact that everything he does will eventually be left to those after him, who would likely squander all of his efforts and gathering of wealth. In fact, he calls it “a great evil” that someone who did not labor will be the one to enjoy the efforts of the one who did (Ecc. 2.21). The Preacher also speaks to the preoccupation that many feel about their work, that one’s thoughts can dwell on their job at any hour of the day, disallowing the rest that usually comes at the end of a workday (Ecc. 2.23).

At this point, the Preacher seems to reach another revelation. His first attempts at reaching for contentment he treated as a human experience, independent of God and more fleeting than a wisp of smoke in the air (O’Donnell 64). However, the next passage presents a complete about-face, where the Preacher praises the ability to work, for “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God” (Ecc. 2.24).

The Preacher also emphasizes the role of God in finding satisfaction and not just the giving: “for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and

Julie Steinbeck 17 knowledge and joy” (Ecc. 2.25-26a). When finally, rightly, placed in the context of what God has given to man, the Preacher emphasizes however reluctantly that a good life and balanced living are divine gifts, despite our temporary ability to enjoy them. While not necessarily cheerful, the Preacher is resigned to the enjoyment of the moments and pleasures that God gives as the one viable option for human need fulfillment (Bullock 230). The Preacher afterward examines the nature of time, injustice, religious matters, and other themes that would lend to his conclusion that the chief purpose of man is to enjoy what he is given while remaining anchored in God’s commandments (Ecc. 12.13). Thus, he finally seems satisfied with his pondering.

These two texts, separated by thousands of years, content, and style, show just how ubiquitous the search for the fulfillment of needs is and the avenues we take to reach it. Sadly, also universal is the lack of satisfaction humans feel when even Maslow’s highest-level needs are fulfilled. This is no surprise: Maslow himself wrote in his original paper that once any need is fulfilled, we simply move on to another one and use that as our motivation, explaining that “gratified needs are not active motivators.

Thus man is a perpetually wanting animal” (395). Ecclesiastes’ Preacher, Maslow, and Dex all agree: meeting needs in and of themselves is fruitless, even if everything is done “right” according to the standard of our world.

The fulfillment of physical and intellectual pleasures, honest work in service of self and others, and the ability to self-actualize as one sees fit: these are supposed to be the keys to happiness and the good life.

But this is where the paths diverge. While Dex makes a strong attempt at finding an ideal lifestyle for them, they lament a lack of purpose—until they are finally told by Mosscap that “You are an animal, Sibling Dex. And animals have no purpose” (Wild-Built 138). At the end of their adventure, Dex and Mosscap temporarily give up on their quest. They admit defeat, take a detour from their travels, and decide to go where the wind takes them, starting with a frolic in the sea (Crown-Shy 148). They are gleeful in the moment, but the implication remains that Dex will return to their work, their routine, and, most likely, their despondency. There is little for them to return to when their negative thoughts catch up with them. Dex never finds an anchor for their soul, leaving Chambers’ readers without respite. One need is fulfilled, and others spring up in a neverending cycle.

The Preacher, on the other hand, in his wisdom and his folly, still reminds his readers that there is one more thing to fall back on: the purpose given by fearing God and keeping his commandments, “for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecc. 12.13). He effectively depresses us into dependence on God for purpose and fulfillment, as “the ultimate remedy to meaninglessness and the depression caused by a godless life” (O’Donnell 221). Thus, we enjoy the small comforts, we take pleasure in our work and in balanced living, and we recall that “Our labor is not in vain” despite its resemblance to folly (I Cor. 15.58). Humans are offered choice in the meeting of our needs: do we pursue pleasure and knowledge

18 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal and wisdom for their own sake, or do we accept the good as gifts of God, knowing that lean and difficult times will test our endurance? We must then approach our search diligently, weighing our options and taking the lessons from the Preacher and the monk.

Works Cited Bullock, C. Hassell. An Introduction to the Old Testament: Poetic Books.

Chicago, Moody Publishers. 1988.

Chamberlain, John M., and David A.F. Haaga. “Unconditional SelfAcceptance and Psychological Health.” Journal of RationalEmotive and Cognitive-Behavior Therapy 19.3. 2001. Pp. 163-176.

Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. New York, Tom Doherty Associates. 2021. _______. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. New York, Tom Doherty Associates. 2022.

The Holy Bible. English Standard Version, Crossway, 2001.

Maslow, Abraham H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50. 1943. pp. 370-396.

“Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” University of Wichita, 2024. https://www.wichita.edu/services/mrc/OIR/Pedagogy/Theories/m aslow.php. Accessed 22 October 2024.

O’Donnell, Douglas Sean. Ecclesiastes. Phillipsburg, P&R Publishers.

2014.

Christopher Talbot 19 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 19-27

Transhumanism, Christianity, and the Inherent Good of Human Limitations Christopher Talbot Technological progress, especially as it relates to human beings, has captured our cultural imagination. For millennia, humanity has been fixated on casting off restraints and pressing onward to a greater and larger picture of what it might mean to be human. On one hand, modern ideologies like the transhumanist vision argue that man currently is but a point on the line of evolutionary progress, previously less than human, eventually moving towards a state of post-humanity. On the other hand, Christianity argues that man, because he is inherently and uniquely a creature, has limitations in his ability to “upgrade.” Therefore, I will argue in this paper that human beings, because they are created persons, contain inherently good limitations that are at odds with transhumanist views.

Offered here is a Christian apologetic, seeking to explain why there is a discontinuity between the historic Christian perspective on the nature of man and the consensus vision among transhumanists. The apologetic offered here is focused on the nature of man, primarily grounded within a Christian philosophical perspective. Crucial to this apologetic of man’s nature is a theological-philosophical definition of what it means to be human.

Defining the Nature of Humanity From a biblical-theological perspective, Anthony Hoekema posits, “[T]he human being is both a creature and a person; he or she is a created person… To be a creature… means absolute dependence on God; to be a person means relative independence…To be creatures means that God is the potter and we are the clay (Rom. 9:21); to be persons means that we are the ones who fashion our lives by our own decisions.”1 This definition emphasizes man’s reliance upon his Creator while also offering balance regarding man’s own autonomous personhood.2 From a Christian philosophical perspective, J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae argue for a Thomistic-like substance dualism regarding the nature of man. They understand man’s identity to be found in the soul, but to be causally connected to the body. They write, “[T]he soul contains capacities for biological as well as mental functioning… the soul is related to the body more intimately and fully than by way of an external causal connection.”3 Thus, this Creator has created man in His image and created

20 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal man constitutionally including both a body and a soul, thus defining the whole human person who bears responsibility to the one who created him.4 Offering a theological-philosophical synthesis of the abovementioned views, John Cooper notes, “Biblical anthropology is demonstrably both holistic and dualist. It is holist in teaching that God created, redeems, and will glorify humans as whole embodied persons. It is dualist in teaching that God created humans of two ingredients and that he sustains persons (souls, spirits) apart from their bodies between death and resurrection.”5 James Hughes and others see this belief of an ensouled person to be a major obstacle of agreement with the transhumanist community.6 Transhumanism offers a considerably different perspective on the nature of humanity.7 To be clear, transhumanism can be a difficult ideology to define, specifically regarding the nature of man, largely due to the lack of consensus among its subscribers. However, certain tenets are seemingly consistent across various perspectives. Transhumanism is often understood as an outgrowth of both secular humanism and the Enlightenment.8 In finding its tributaries in Enlightenment ideology, transhumanism has largely rejected the idea of man having an essential nature or telos. One author noted that transhumanism seeks “the radical removal of the constraints of our bodies and brains and the recognition of human existence according to technological opportunities.”9 Likewise, Max More, a prominent transhumanist, argues, “True transhumanism does seek to enable each of us to alter and improve (by our own standards) the human body and champions morphological freedom. Rather than denying the body, transhumanists typically want to choose its form and be able to inhabit different bodies, including virtual bodies.”10 More does not want to jettison the importance of an embodied experience for the human person, however, he is unable to ground an individual’s personhood in their own particular body.11 Transhumanism, then, makes a marked shift in how one understands humanity. Nick Bostrom states, “Transhumanism is more than just an abstract belief that we are about to transcend our biological limitations by means of technology; it is also an attempt to re-evaluate the entire human predicament as traditionally conceived.”12 As Matthew Eppinette articulated, “Inasmuch as humanity and its potential are the ultimate concern of transhumanism, humanity has replaced God; their theology is their anthropology.”13 Limited Creaturely Capacities Building from a theological-philosophical definition of human nature, it is now worth turning our attention to a Christian perspective that grounds human capacities and powers in human nature. Being human would seem to require certain capacities, and these capacities explain the

Christopher Talbot 21 kind of things human beings are. As Moreland and Rae note, “A substance’s capacities culminate in a set of its ultimate capacities that are possessed by it solely in virtue of the substance belonging to its natural kind…”14 These capacities are rooted in the soul and are an ordered set, and therefore belong to natural groupings and hierarchies. Taking this all together, it is clear that Christians, from a substance dualist approach, argue for a universal human nature.

Regarding these capacities, there is a difference between limitations and defects. Limitations are not defects, and limitations are not a lack of in-hand capacities. It is important, here, to note the distinction between lower and higher order capacities as it relates to man’s nature and transhumanism.15 The absence of a lower-order capacity does not claim the absence of a higher-order capacity. As stated earlier, it is a thing’s ultimate capacities that constitute its essence or nature, “which is possessed by it solely in virtue of being a member of its natural kind.” 16 Moreland and Rae clarify that a defect of a lower order capacity does not affect or make up its nature. A defect is the absence of a lower-order capacity that blocks the ability to perform a higher-order capacity.17 This difference, then, between defects and limitations is critical. From a substance dualist perspective, man does not naturally contain defects, but he does contain certain limitations. Therefore, the substance dualist would appropriately seek to rectify defects, even with technologies, but would work within the boundaries of his natural limitations.

The nagging question here for the apologist is what limited creaturely capacities may include. Before offering a list of these capacities, it is important to note the qualifiers that are included. These capacities are both limited and creaturely because they relate to the nature of humanity as a created person. That is, man is necessarily bounded by the capacities that he has and cannot exceed them. His inner nature of ultimate capacities is what makes him human. However, it is also important to note the relation between man and God. Because man is the product of God’s creation, there may be certain capacities that are otherwise limited that can only be obtained through relation and participation with God. For example, one may ask whether or not man has the capacity to eternal life. Christianity says yes. However, Christianity can only answer in the affirmative if this eternal life can be procured by way of participation with the Creator. Without participation with God, man is limited and naturally mortal, bound to die and not experience eternal life in communion with God. Christianity accordingly seeks to argue that being a human in the fullest sense requires participation with the divine because man does not have this ultimate capacity for immortality (not to mention other ultimate capacities) by his nature alone.

Along with the possibility of immortality, one is pressed to offer other limited capacities that man contains that are consistent with his creaturely nature. These capacities may include a variety, but one list could contain limited knowledge, limited presence, and limited power to act, to name a few. It would seem that even in his resurrection state,

22 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal mankind still lives within these limits. Man, according to his own nature, cannot know everything, be everywhere, and operate with universal power.

These stand opposite, but in relation to God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.

These limited capacities challenge the transhumanist vision, primarily because of the difference in metaphysical commitments.

Transhumanism is not trafficking in the use of ultimate capacities; instead, this worldview is largely defining man by his lower and higher order capacities and pushing against any notion of ultimate capacities.

Transhumanism seeks to move beyond whatever capacities we may think are unique to humankind and move towards something else, something arguably better. However, the transhumanist vision is a rather reductionistic and dangerous view of man.18 Metaphysical Commitments of Transhumanism Paradoxically, even as transhumanists may treat man (or at least his body) in a somewhat utilitarian fashion, they simultaneously treat man’s potentiality with almost theological language. Jeffrey Bishop argues that as man reaches towards post-humanity, he increasingly is conceptualized more as a god. At a basic level, transhumanism market traffics in notions of telos and progress. However, plenty of transhumanist writers articulate post-humanity in the terms of a hyper-theosis, or man becoming gods.19 The problem, of course, is that it is only the posthuman that has god-like value, not the universal man. Value is placed on what man can become, not necessarily on what he is now.

Another area of metaphysical disagreement between Christianity and Transhumanism is the nature of human telos. Bishop writes, “The transhumanist metaphysical belief is that we human beings are on an evolutionary journey, from human to posthuman; those wise and smart enough to see and understand the transitory nature of human beings are thus transitional humans. The philosophy of transhumanism seeks to order evolutionary becoming.”20 Transhumanism argues human beings should make use of technology to surpass the limitations of both their body and their brain.21 With the use of biotechnologies man is to become something different than our modern understanding of humanity. Of course, one is faced with questions as to when one ceases to be human and may become post-human. What qualities, properties, or capacities must one maintain to be considered human? Moreover, what freedom does man have to change?

Christopher Talbot 23 Mereological or Morphological Freedom Christianity and transhumanism stand at odds specifically on the issue of mereological and morphological freedom. Morphological freedom is “the ability to take advantage of whatever technology a person wants to in order to change their body in any way they desire.”22 This includes aims towards post-humanity, but also includes more immediate practices like biohacking and uses of nanotechnology. Man is not only to overcome disease and death, but also will have greater physical, mental, and psychological capabilities, with the further ability to choose the form and capacities one maintains.23 A question that needs answering is, how much “enhancement” or “upgrading” is too much? In other words, how much upgrading can one do and still maintain their human nature? Can the human person take medicine, receive surgeries, etc., to push their limitations? These challenging questions can be answered from at least two fronts. First, one could deal with these issues by placing various practices in two helpful but distinct categories within a larger taxonomy. The first category would include anything that corrects an already existing infirmity. This may include, but is not limited to, medicine to regulate or restore a physical process, or prosthetic limbs that help accomplish what a natural limb would. The second category would include anything that would move beyond our existing human nature and capacities. The former is relatively uncontroversial and is largely restorative and is aimed at removing defects to a person’s capacities. The latter, on the other hand, is rather controversial—hence the focus of this paper—because it seeks to sidestep the human framework.24 The first approach helps man sustain his inherent limitations, whereas the other seeks to disregard those limitations entirely.

Second, and in conjunction with the first, it seems these “upgrades” can be dealt with in relation to ultimate capacities. One can inquire as to whether the action fulfills an ultimate capacity or whether it seems to challenge or move beyond the ultimate capacity. For example, it may be that one trains rigorously and eats a certain way to run faster than most human beings. They can do what most people cannot, and yet, this person is still operating within the ultimate capacities of their particular kind.

However, if this same person decided to surgically replace their arms and legs and install cybernetic wings, they would be dismissing these ultimate capacities. Man does not naturally operate this way. Though an absurd example, this demonstrates that these new capacities that move beyond natural human limits do not constitute what it means to be human. They make man into something else. Thus, whether this integration is partial (cyborgs) or whole (uploading of consciousness), there is a new kind of thing that is produced.25

24 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal The Goodness of Inherent Limitations Saturated in a culture of progress and innovation, one might question why any kind of limitation, particularly those that may be inherent, would be good. Transhumanism makes a major misstep in human dignity and worth by ascribing goodness to man’s functions, future or otherwise. It treats the individual’s potential as a property, rather than recognizing any inherent worth in the very essence of being human.

While transhumanism seeks to articulate its own good(s), this particular Christian apologetic argues that limited creaturely capacities are good for at least three reasons. First, Christianity argues that these limitations inherent within mankind’s nature are a positive good, precisely because it is a feature and demonstration of one’s good dependence upon his Creator. According to Christianity, both man’s nature and his telos are grounded in his Creator’s design. Therefore, Christianity teaches that as long as humans pursue God-ordained ends that are according to their designed human nature and capacities, things will ultimately work out well.

Second, these limited capacities are good according to man’s very nature, and without these limitations, man would no longer maintain his “mannishness.” Man is naturally dependent as a creature (rather than Creator) and thus has limitations in relation to his Creator. Therefore, these capacities are good because they are definitive in making a man.

Third, these limited capacities are good according to man’s inherent telos. Discussion of telos not only engages with man’s purpose but extends to our future state as human beings. Christianity articulates a resurrection, incorruptible self that is free from all defective capacities: a new creation.

At the end, limited capacities are a good because the value is placed within the thing itself, rather than a different object or state. This Christian view of man argues that man contains inherent worth because of his very essence. Transhumanism, conversely, places the value on the thing to which man is merging or what he might become. While Christianity and transhumanism may both share in an optimistic teleology and eschatology—seeing the future as greater than today—the views presented here are irreconcilable in their anthropology.

Conclusion In this paper, I have sought to offer an apologetic for a Christian perspective on the nature of man in light of the worldview implications of transhumanism. Max More, Nick Bostrom, and others within the transhumanist movement have sought to offer a metaphysical picture of post-humanity that demonstrates an optimistic future and telos. The main aim of this paper was to defend the limited creaturely capacities that are inherent in the nature of man as a positive good.

Christopher Talbot 25 Certainly, the transhumanist vision offers an intriguing and compelling vision of what man can accomplish and become. The desire to overcome disease, age, and death is a tempting invitation, and not an altogether futile one. Yet, Christianity uniquely offers a profound paradox in which man cannot move beyond himself to become another thing.

Instead, Christianity claims that man can become more fully himself through divine participation. Then, and only then, can man overcome these obstacles to our fullest state of being.

Notes 1 Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1994), 6.

2 Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, 6.

3 J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body & Soul: Human Nature the Crisis

in Ethics, 3rd ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2000), 21.

4 While Hoekema does not use the term substance dualism, he does

acknowledge that man contains two substances, only one of which can continue during the intermediate state. Akin to John Cooper’s conception, Hoekema refers to his understanding of man’s constitution as a “psychosomatic unity.” Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, 222.

5 Cooper, “Biblical Anthropology is Holistic and Dualistic,” 424.

6 James Hughes, “The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist

Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future,” Global Spiral 8 (2007): 7.

7 For the Transhumanist Declaration, see World Transhumanist

Association, http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanistdeclaration/, and Max More and Natasha Vita-More, eds., The Transhumanist Reader, 54-55.

8 Nick Bostrom, “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity,” Bioethics 19.3 (2005):

202.

9 Fabrice Jotterand, “At the Roots of Transhumanism: From the

Enlightenment to a Post-Human Future,” Journal of Medicine & Philosophy 35.6 (2010): 617.

10 Max More, “The Philosophy of Transhumanism,” in Max More and

Natasha Vita-More, eds., The Transhumanist Reader, 15.

26 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal 11 As noted earlier, transhumanism is at particular odds with a Thomistic-

like substance dualism view. Hughes, as well as others, have sought to argue that there are various metaphysics a Christian can hold to that are congruent with transhumanism. Hughes lists a few, including, “Emergent dualists see the soul as a supernatural thing that emerges from the brain.

Non-reductive physicalists see the soul as a property of the mind, which cannot be reduced to the functioning of neurons, hormones and genes, but which is not supernatural. Christian theological materialists see the soul as synonymous with the workings of the body and brain, and the death of the body as the end of the soul. “ Hughes, “The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future,” 7.

12 Bostrom, “What Is Transhumanism?”

13 Matthew Eppinette, “Humans 2.0: Transhumanism as a Cultural

Trend,” in Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, eds. Charles A. Anderson, Michael J. Sleasman, and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic, 2007), 203.

14 Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, 73.

15 In seeking to define and illustrate the difference between higher and

lower-order capacities, Moreland writes, “Higher order capacities are realized by the development of lower order capacities under them. An acorn has the ultimate capacity to draw nourishment from the soil, but this can be actualized and unfolded only by developing the lower capacity to have a root system, then developing the still lower capacities a/the root system, and so on. When a substance has a defect (e.g., a child is color blind), it does not lose its ultimate capacities. Rather, it lacks some lower order capacity it needs for the ultimate capacity to be developed.”

Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, 72-73.

16 Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, 226.

17 Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, 226.

18 Consistently in the second part of their book, Moreland and Rae

challenge the functional view of man as it relates to abortion, fetal research, reproductive and genetic technologies, human closing, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide. See Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, 231-342.

Christopher Talbot 27 19 A rather straightforward case of this is Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus:

A Brief History of Tomorrow, Illustrated edition. (New York, NY: Harper, 2017); See further discussions in Cole-Turner, ed., Transhumanism and Transcendence; Bishop, “Transhumanism, Metaphysics, and the Posthuman God.” 20 Bishop, “Transhumanism, Metaphysics, and the Posthuman God,” 707.

12 Hughes, “The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of

Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future,” 2.

22 Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God, 56.

23 Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God, 42.

24 Travis Dumsday, “Transhumanism, Theological Anthropology, and

Modern Biological Taxonomy,” Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 52.3 (2017): 602.

25 Dumsday, “Transhumanism, Theological Anthropology, and Modern

Biological Taxonomy,” 610.

28 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 28-35

A Biblical Theology of Labor and Vocation for the 21st Century Matthew Steven Bracey Firstly, I wanted to express my appreciation for the opportunity to be at this conference. My presentation represents an abbreviated version of a chapter that first appeared in Christians in Culture, edited by Dr. Chris Talbot and me. My work in this paper reflects a synthesis of a Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Wesleyan, and evangelical theology of vocation.

Rightly understood, work is a vocation from a good God. In fact, the word vocation, from the Latin vocatio, means “calling.” God has called Christians to a host of vocations. Sadly, college students and working adults alike sometimes fail to view secular jobs as sufficiently spiritual when compared to church-specific jobs. Such wrongheaded thinking can lead to apathy or even despair about those jobs. However, all Christians are co-laborers in God’s kingdom, whether behind the pulpit or on the mission field, behind the tractor or on the football field.

To establish this truth, I will first examine some theological foundations of work.1 Next, I will reflect on a wider view of vocation.

Finally, I will consider some practical considerations for labor and vocation.

Theological Foundations Creation Work has not resulted from the Fall. It has resulted from God’s ordering of the world that humans subdue the earth and exercise dominion over its creatures (Genesis 1:28).

The way work manifests itself in individuals’ lives differs according to their God-given propensities and strengths, which God has given them, and which impact our choices for jobs and careers. Carl F. H. Henry masterfully links these themes: “Through his work, man shares the creation purpose of God in subduing nature, whether he is a miner with dirty hands, a mechanic with a greasy face, or a stenographer with stencil smudged fingers.”2 Contemporary cultures sometimes demean blue-collar work in favor of white-collar work. However, neither biblical Christianity

Matthew Steven Bracey 29 nor the mainstream of the Christian tradition affirms any such vocational hierarchy.

Fall However, work is not fully what God intended for it to be because of man’s sin. Work is at the center of the Fall because man mismanaged the serpent and the fruit, each of which, significantly, were the objects of man’s work.

By listening to the serpent, Adam and Eve transgressed God’s regal command to exercise dominion over the beasts (3:1), and by eating from the forbidden tree, they did not subdue the earth as God intended. Now, the pursuit of work lacks the unmitigated blessing for which God intended it.

Restoration God, being rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4), seeks to restore what is lost (Matthew 18:11), including His intended ends for work. Adam and Eve sought to cover their shame by working, namely, by “sew[ing] fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Genesis 3:7b). But their hard work could not save them. Ultimately, God, not we, gives our work its significance.

The Church Significantly, God does not sanctify our work in solitary existence. Rather, He restores our work within the community of the church. The church is composed of distinct members (e.g., eyes, ears, toes), each with its own strengths and functions. Although Paul’s analogy of the body is applied directly to spiritual gifts, its underlying principle applies more broadly to our vocational gifts. Gene Edward Veith, Jr. thus refers to the church’s composition as a “divine division of labor.”3 So we gather, we are strengthened, and then we scatter into all the world.

A Wider View of Vocation However, a robust doctrine of vocation is not only about our careers. It is about all our “callings.”

God Our calling before God is the foundational calling giving structure and shape to every other vocation we receive. Hence, Jesus states, “Love the LORD your God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” By loving God with our whole beings, we can better love our neighbors in whatever vocational context (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18).

30 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Family Man’s second vocation is that of his or her biological and/or adoptive families. God calls us to honor our parents, keep our siblings, and care for our children (Exodus 20:12; Genesis 4:9; Deuteronomy 6:7). A central ethic for properly stewarding our vocations is that of neighbor-love, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). The neighbor is not some abstract other; he or she is mom and dad, brother and sister, son and daughter, and so forth. Precisely how neighbor-love applies within each familial context will depend on the relationship. Admittedly, unique complications can result from circumstances of abuse or divorce; we must therefore pursue this vocation with prudence. But, generally, our family members, whether Christian or not, are our neighbors whom God has called us to love.

Society and State A third vocation is that of society and state. Society, and all it involves, is a vocation from God, not to ignore but to steward. In the words of Jeremiah, God calls us to “seek the welfare of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7).4 The precise way in which we engage this calling will differ according to our circumstances because all societies are distinct in terms of their histories, cultures, and politics. But whatever our engagement looks like, it should occur under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

In this vocation, our neighbors are those with whom we practice community—the clerk at the store, the runner on the greenway, and the teacher at school. Even seemingly ordinary acts, properly understood, are acts of love of neighbor. Something as simple as obeying road rules demonstrates neighbor-love because, by so doing, we help to maintain order rather than to create chaos, thereby decreasing the likelihood of accident, harm, and even fatality to the societal neighbor.

Church A final vocation is our spiritual family, the church. God calls us to the church—again, not in the abstract but to an imperfect local body of believers. Our church neighbors include our fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters in the faith: pastors, deacons, teachers, music leaders, laypersons, and so on. We practice neighbor-love toward them by obeying the “one another” passages throughout the Scriptures: rejoicing with them, weeping with them, and so forth.

Matthew Steven Bracey 31 Practical Considerations for Labor and Vocation 1. Bridge the sacred-secular divide.

Christians sometimes dichotomize sacred (church) and secular (nonchurch) jobs, seeing church jobs as superior to non-church jobs, which causes some Christians in non-pastoral vocations to underestimate the significance of God’s call on their lives. The sacred-secular division has resulted in two errors. First, people sometimes think that secular jobs are non-religious or even anti-religious. This mistake occurs because people conflate secular and secularism. However, secularism refers to the absence of religion, whereas secular refers to the world but not necessarily to the non-religious. The second error correlates church vocations with the sacred and non-church vocations with the secular. However, this mistake treats the secular vocation as if it cannot also be sacred. Sacred means “holy” or dedicated to God. In the words of Dorothy Sayers, “It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred.”5 2. Expand your view of ministry.

People also associate church vocations, but not secular vocations, with “the ministry.” However, ministry extends beyond church offices and church walls and includes non-church jobs. The word ministry means “service,” which can occur anywhere. Pastor Eugene Peterson contended, “[I]f Christian ministry is reduced to the work of pastors and the people who help them [. . .] there is not much integrity in praying, ‘Thy Kingdom Come.’”6 Rather than distinguishing sacred and secular jobs, or designating church jobs alone as vocational ministry, perhaps we should speak simply terms of church work and secular work, recognizing that all jobs within God’s sovereign economy are vocational, sacred, and ministerial.

3. Honor church work and secular work alike.

We should honor church work and secular work alike insofar as they represent God’s calling on our lives, which vary according to His designs.

Consider Jesus’ interactions with tax collectors. To Matthew, He said, “Follow Me,” and “he rose and followed him” (Matthew 9:9). Yet, when other tax collectors asked, “Teacher, what shall we do?” He replied, “Collect no more than you are authorized to do” (Luke 3:12–13).

Sometimes God calls us to change direction in our lives from fishing nets and tax booths to mission work or preaching ministry. Other times, He calls us to stay the vocational course, not to drop our swords or leave our administrative posts but to tell our friends what we have seen and heard.

Sometimes students are tempted to think that their student vocations do not bear equal significance to workplace vocations, or people

32 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal engaged in secular work are tempted to believe that their vocations are not as important as church vocations. However, a biblical theology of vocation dispels these notions. Hence, the Puritan William Perkins argued that “washing dishes” and “wiping shoes” may please God just as much as “preaching the Word of God.” Hence, whether blue-collar or white-collar, we should properly honor all God-given vocations.

4. Find an appropriate church-work balance.

People whose vocational ministry does not occur within the local church often find the church-work balance difficult. Pastors want God’s people to spend more time in the church and at church functions. However, people with secular vocations are often exhausted from following God’s will for them in the world and, at some point, must rest in obedience to the command of the Sabbath (Exodus 20:8–11; Deuteronomy 5:12–15). How can we best navigate the tension that can arise between pastors and congregants because of these challenges?

Pastors may rightly challenge their congregants about their church commitment but should avoid creating a false sense of guilt within their congregants who cannot participate in everything the church offers.

Similarly, congregants may rightly pursue their jobs in the world as their service (ministry) before God but should also not forsake assembling with believers (Hebrews 10:25) and serving the church (Galatians 6:10). A good faith effort may not make it to every function, but it is a good faith effort.

5. Recognize that God sanctifies you in Christ by the Holy Spirit within vocation.

Church and secular vocations have meaning because God has called us to them for specific purposes. The remainder of these “practical considerations” will review these purposes. One is that God’s sanctification of His children takes place in the hustle and bustle of ordinary life, including work. Hence, Paul urged the Ephesians to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (4:1), which he then applied within the context of one’s work. Charles Kingsley memorably commented: “Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in your temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.”7 Kingsley is right. Oftentimes, doing that which we do not want forms in us vital spiritual fruit.

6. Pursue excellence in your work.

Another purpose of work is excellence. Fundamentally, we serve God through our work and, therefore, should pursue excellence in it.

Matthew Steven Bracey 33 Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ. […]

(Ephesians 6:5).

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. […] Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. […] You are serving the Lord Christ (Colossians 3:17, 23–24).

One of the ways we do excellent work is by engaging it with what F. Leroy Forlines called our “total personality.” Good work will engross our minds, hearts, and actions.8 Sayers described the concept of excellence by the phrase “serving the work,” which means giving it our best, which means excellence before God. Sayers rightly criticized the church that fails to emphasize workplace excellence. The “very first demand” of the “intelligent carpenter” is that “he should make good tables.” She imagines the carpentry that would have come from Jesus’ shop: “No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth.”9 If Jesus was perfect, and the Father expects excellence, then He would have pursued His vocations with excellence. So should we.

7. Do not settle for mediocrity.

Sayers observes that Christians often settle for mediocrity in the name of piety, giving examples from the church and from secular work. However, good intentions do not excuse shoddy work. If any institution should lead the way in excellence, it is the church of God. Piety minus excellence equals “a living lie” precisely because God desires our excellence. That God can accomplish His work through mediocre or poor work speaks only to God’s sovereignty, not to any irrelevance or relativity of excellence, which has its foundation in Him. 8. Make money.

Of course, serving the work does not exclude making money; another purpose of work is money. While the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10), money itself is not evil. John Wesley suggested three rules for money: gain all you can (industry), save all you can (frugality), and give all you can (charity).10 We cannot give except we save, and we cannot save except we gain, and we cannot gain except we work.

Money allows us to provide for our families, give tithes and offerings, practice charity, and enjoy God’s good gifts.

34 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal 9. See the “masks of God” in your vocations.

The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther described secular vocations as the “masks of God” by which God teaches us to depend on Him and cares for the world at large. While God does not need our work, He graciously uses it in the hopes that we will learn dependence on Him. Also, through our work, God cares for the world—feeding, clothing, sheltering, and supporting them—through the vocation of ordinary, human labor.11 For example, we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11), and God answers that prayer not only by providing seeds and soil and sun and rain and crops but also by gifting farmers and factory workers and truck drivers and retail clerks to get that food from the ground in South Dakota to our tables in Missouri or Tennessee or wherever.

10. Find opportunities to witness and contribute to human flourishing.

Finally, our work is a means by which the sovereign God invites people to Himself and brings about human flourishing. It provides an opportunity for evangelical witness because by it we let our “light shine before others, so that they may see [our] good works and give glory to [our] Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). And it provides an opportunity to contribute to human flourishing because presumably, hopefully, the culture and society around us improved because of our witness.

Conclusion A rich and robust theology undergirds vocation. Vocation includes career, but it is more than our career. Finally, it is eminently practical.

Whatever God’s calling on your life, learn to see it through the lens of faith and recognize your vocational significance within God’s economy.

Notes 1 Timothy Keller also organizes his discussion of vocation by the creation-

fall-redemption rubric. Similarly, James Hamilton bases his volume on work on the themes of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. See Timothy Keller with Katherine Leary Alsdorf, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (New York: Penguin, 2012); and James M. Hamilton, Jr., Work and our Labor in the Lord, Biblical Studies in Biblical Theology, ed. Dane C. Ortlund and Miles V. Van Pelt (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2017).

2 Carl F. H. Henry, quoted in John A. Bernbaum and Simon A. Steer, Why

Work? Careers and Employment in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids,

Matthew Steven Bracey 35 Mich.: Baker, 1986), 6–7. See also Andrew T. Walker, Introduction to The Gospel and Work, The Gospel for Life Series, ed. Russell Moore and Andrew T. Walker (Nashville: B&H, 2017), 2.

3 Gene Edward Veith, Jr., God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of

Life, Focal Point Series (2002; repr., Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 40.

4 Nelson discusses implications for work from Jeremiah 31, explaining that

we can convey God’s “common grace” by being “good neighbors” and promoting “workplace justice” among our societal neighbors. See Tom Nelson, Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 131, 133, 137.

5 Dorothy L. Sayers, Why Work? (April 3, 1942), in Letters to a

Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 131.

6 Eugene Peterson, The Wisdom of Each Other: A Conversation Between

Spiritual Friends (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998), 77.

7 Charles Kingsley, in The Christian Advocate, January 16, 1913, 80.

8 F. Leroy Forlines, The Quest for Truth: Answering Life’s Inescapable

Questions (Nashville: Randall House, 2001), 55, 139.

9 Sayers, Why Work? 132.

10 John Wesley, “The Use of Money,” in John Wesley, ed. Albert C. Outler

(1964; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 241, 245, 247.

10 Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 20–21.

36 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 36-39

Maps and Exclusivity: The Selective Storytelling of the Map Michelle Ryan In their efforts to understand their world, humans are label makers.

The boundaries and borders people build, and the exclusivity they create, shape people’s sense of identity and view of others. A product of this want to understand is mapmaking, and this technology, from its advent, became ingrained in culture. It not only dictates where one goes, but it also describes where one has been and defines where one will go. Maps, especially geographic maps, wield an authority that is overt at times and imperceptible at others. Much of what maps are made up of is not the physical but the circumstantial. They communicate where neighborhoods begin and end, how much property taxes are, and what public schools are available, among other things. Maps can be a mix of the readily observable (like land topography) and the things more abstract (like the border between Iowa and Minnesota). In Borders: A Very Short Introduction, Diener and Hagen observe, “[Borders] symbolically perpetuate meaning and physically shape the mobilities of human beings” (Diener and Hagen 59). This illustrates the power maps have over culture, a power that has grown with the advancement of mapping systems to include satellite imagery. Despite the authority maps wield, they are seldom questioned or read with a critical eye. Monmonier points out in How to Lie with Maps that often no one stops to consider the mapmakers, the fallible humans who are in charge of putting the world on paper (Monmonier 1).

Often, maps get the most attention when a border or its label is in dispute. Mapmakers and those who read their maps can disagree— sometimes publicly, as U.S. President Trump and Mexican President Sheinbaum did over the name of the Gulf of Mexico—slash—Gulf of America. The names groups or places are given and the way they are depicted, whether it is on Apple Maps or a world atlas, can shape how they are considered, which is why it is important to ask questions about the boundary lines that “[… physically shape the mobilities of human beings” (Diener and Hagen 59). Diener and Hagen consider, “For whom are borders constructed? By whom? And to what ends?” (Diener and Hagen 18). Considering the sway maps have over one’s daily life, it is beneficial to be critical of what information maps disseminate and to be aware that they do not hold all the facts—they cannot. Every map grapples with “[…] what is known instead of what is merely seen, what is understood rather than what is no more than sensed (Wood 7),” says Wood in The Power of Maps.

Michelle Ryan 37 For all the information presented, information has also been excluded and so the presence of a map should be a reminder of the presence of mystery.

As one seeks to understand maps and their creators, it is important to remember that maps, at their core, are exclusive, and maps serve the interests of their makers. This is the paradox of the map: “To present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies” (Monmonier 1). A map with all the information would be overwhelming and impossible to use. It would also reveal just how contradictory the world can be and how few things can be fully encapsulated by text and an ink border. Maps must simplify the world so it can be navigable, but they must not be seen as the world. Questioning the way geographic information is presented isn’t just a reminder of the complexity of Creation, it also looks at the hearts of humanity and the lengths people go to understand the world and to mold it. At their worst, maps become the catalyst of falsification or a twisting of reality if left unexamined.

In Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, the comical character Mein Herr brags about his home country’s skills in cartography.

In an attempt to make the most accurate map, a map in the ratio of one mile to one mile is commissioned. “It has never been spread out yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well” (Carroll 49). Lewis Carroll’s fantastical map reveals a few things about real-world mapmaking, beginning with map-territory relation, which is the relationship between a map and what it is depicting. There is an understanding that the map could never fully encompass what it is trying to merely represent. “Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a video screen, a map must distort reality” (Monmonier 1), says Monmonier. Carroll’s map also illustrates Bonini’s paradox, the idea that as a model of something becomes more complex and truer to life, the less desirable it becomes to users. An example of this paradox in action is public transit maps, which often simplify whole cities to stops along colorful lines so that riders can quickly ascertain where they need to go (Monmonier 35).

Therefore, it should be understood that “The map’s effectiveness is a consequence of the selectivity with which it brings the past to bear on the present,” says Wood (1). A part of the human experience is understanding that sometimes, mystery has to be lived with, and no finite human can function with all of the information—there must be curation. Humans aren’t omnipresent, nor should they be. Often, there is an attempt to diminish mystery as much as possible through sensemaking. Maps reveal the human need to know, but also the inability to know everything and make sense of it.

While maps must be inherently selective, their exclusivity should be to enhance their usefulness, not to serve some other agenda. Wood argues that within maps, there is a “double coding” happening, which is “put to

38 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal the service of myth,” with the myth being that the map depicts things as they truly are (Wood 2). Mapmakers can use the authority easily given to the map by its users to sow geographic disinformation. Sometimes that disinformation can be achieved simply through omission, what Monmonier calls “cartographic silences” (Monmonier 87).

In his article, Duggan states, “Maps and what we do with them cannot be defined universally. Ideals and ideas about maps frequently clash with the reality of how and why maps are used” (Duggan). This reveals the need to read maps critically, as maps will always serve interests (Wood 1). Maps don’t just present the world objectively observed; they can present the world as it is idealized. A map can be a tool to encourage action or attitudes toward “us” and “them.” The most obvious example of this is the use of the map to solidify national identity, especially in times of political upheaval (Monmonier 89). “Nowhere is the map more a national symbol and an intellectual weapon than in disputes over territory,” says Monmonier (90). The use of maps as a symbol of national identity became the norm by the end of the nineteenth century, as the nation-state became the sought-after ideal, “[…] where the political borders of the state would coincide with the cultural boundaries of the nation” (Diener and Hagen 43). Monarchs no longer represented their nation’s sovereignty; it was the nation itself—its very outline became its brand.

Fast-forward to the 21st Century, the map remains the favorite tool of the political propagandist. No better example is the discrepancy between maps produced by Ukraine and those produced by Russia, depicting the same land area. On Ukrainian maps, the peninsula of Crimea is often included as part of the country, despite its annexation by Russia in 2014. On Russian maps, Crimea is included as part of the nation along with other disputed territories. Krimnash (“Crimea is ours”) was a popular slogan among patriotic Russians before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and now the sentiment has grown, along with the idea that Russia should extend its borders to “adopt” land where any enclaves of ethnic Russians are present. It would not be far off to suggest that the personal identities of the almost 2 million people who live in Crimea cannot be neatly defined by the many maps that attempt to claim it.

The maps that have come out of the war in Ukraine reveal the opposing narratives both countries communicate, with Russia claiming to occupy huge swaths of Ukraine while Ukrainian maps are much stingier on what it considers “under Russian control” (NZZ).

A more local example of the politics and subsequent damage of maps is the history of redlining in St. Louis. In the 1930s, the Home Owners Land Corporation mapped multiple cities, assessing their “residential security” neighborhood by neighborhood (Mapping Inequality). St. Louis was divided up into squares of red, yellow, green, and blue, with red considered to be the location of the most “hazardous” neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked as “hazardous” by the HOLC were overwhelmingly African American. Those who lived in these ‘red neighborhoods’ struggled to obtain mortgages as their areas were

Michelle Ryan 39 deemed ‘risky’ by banks, regardless of whether their neighborhood was truly dilapidated.

Maps are not neutral or objective, despite the prevailing notion, says Duggan. Maps might masquerade as infallible, but they can change over time and vary from place to place. Maps must be exclusive, but sometimes that exclusivity is wielded to exclude the identities and histories of others. According to Diener and Hagen, states are not “rigid containers that neatly partition global space into nation-state territories corresponding to distinct societies” (Diener and Hagen 14), and this is true at the local level as well. Maps remind their users of what is known, but they should also be a reminder of what is unknown, complex, or even ephemeral. They reveal the diversity of humanity in its thought, culture, and identity—none of which can be fully put to paper. Maps should not be passively consumed but studied and questioned. Who is included and excluded by these boundaries? How have those boundaries fluctuated?

What information is ignored? Of course, these are weighty questions to be asking a phone GPS when simply attempting to avoid traffic congestion, but perhaps it is worth considering how the maps one is exposed to write a story that isn’t entirely objective, from the international level down to public school zoning.

Works Cited Carroll, Lewis. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. 1893. PDF File.

Diener, Alexander C., and Joshua Hagen. Borders: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Duggan, Mike. “Maps Shape Our Lives—Showing Us Not Just Where We Are, but Who We Are.” Phys.org, 28 Feb. 2024, https://phys.org/news/2024-02-maps-shape-our-livesshowing.html#google_vignette. Accessed 2 Apr. 2025.

“Mapping Inequality.” Dsl.richmond.edu, 2023, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Visuals, N.Z.Z. “Mapping the Battle Lines in Ukraine.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10 June 2022, www.nzz.ch/english/ukraine-warinteractive-map-of-the-current-front-line-ld.1688087. Accessed 2 Apr. 2025.

Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. Guilford Publications, 1992.

40 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 40-46

“To Krakoa, My X-Men”: The Creation of Mutant Culture Within the Krakoa Era of X-Men and the Importance of Autonomy for Marginalized Groups Elsa Linson The X-Men comics canon has been expanding for over 60 years, and in that time the series has gone through countless changes as different writers and artists take over, characters come and go, and the times themselves change. However, one aspect of the X-Men that is nearly always there is the so-called “mutant metaphor”—the comparison between mutants and real-world marginalized groups. Over time, there have been many different iterations of the mutant metaphor, from the parallel between the original 60s team and the Civil Rights Movement, to the relation of mutants to the queer community in the early 2000s movie trilogy, which led to the now infamous scene in X2 where Iceman “comes out” as a mutant to his family. While the metaphor has evolved with the comics themselves, the use of the X-Men to explore how minorities are treated by a hostile majority has always been an important theme. In the recent “Krakoa era” of the comics, though, mutants for the first time can entirely escape the human majority and create their own nation—Krakoa— and way of life, which drastically shifts the reality of mutant life for the better and provides an entirely new take on the mutant metaphor.

Throughout X-Men comics, mutants have often been used as a metaphor for minority groups, and the development of a unique mutant culture in the Krakoa era of X-Men, as well as the paradise this culture creates, reflects how minority groups living under oppressive majorities must be allowed the autonomy to define themselves to truly thrive.

Examining the creation of mutant culture and its relationship to real-world marginalized communities interacts with the relatively recent and incredibly wide-spanning field of cultural studies, which came about because of the massive cultural shifts that occurred in the 1960s. Because it is so broad, there is no one single goal or method to cultural studies, but it tends to focus on “social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and isolation” (Guerin et al. 305). Cultural studies scholars are interested both in how culture is constructed and applied within texts and how texts connect with real-world cultures, and they often pair this focus with other theories interested in cultural forces, such as feminism, postcolonialism, or Marxism. Another major factor in the philosophy of cultural studies is that it “denies the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art” (Guerin et al. 306). Instead, since all texts contribute to and

Elsa Linson 41 are influenced by culture in some way, all texts, including comics, are worth studying as a “phenomenon of culture” (Guerin et al. 306).

Within the vast span of cultural studies, the area most applicable to the subject at hand is ethnic studies, a field that looks at “evolving identities of racial and ethnic groups” (Guerin et al. 309). However, XMen’s incredibly fluid and ever-evolving mutant metaphor takes the notion of “culture” beyond a purely ethnic definition, instead expanding mutants’ symbolic significance to any group with their own shared experiences and history, including those such as the queer or disabled communities. The very definition of what a culture is and how one is developed are often subjects for ethnic studies work, and they are also central to X-Men’s Krakoa era, as is the question of whether it is “good to celebrate ‘the Other’ and bring others into the mainstream” or to instead prioritize “the preservation of difference rather than continued marginalization,” which correlates to the contrast between mutants living within human society and them living in their own society on Krakoa (Guerin et al. 309). Ethnic studies is the branch of cultural studies that examines cultural development, definition, and evolution, making it the perfect lens through which to analyze the story of mutants shaping their own unique cultural identity and its real-world implications.

Since their introduction in 1963, mutants have always been set apart from the rest of their superhero peers and singled out as “different.”

As soon as mutants are discussed in the very first issue of X-Men, Professor X shares that when he “was young, normal people feared [him], distrusted [him]”, so he “realized the human race is not yet ready to accept those with extra power”, leading him to build a special school where mutants could train and express their powers safely (Lee 16). Immediately, the idea of mutation and hatred from humans goes hand in hand. Because a mutation can manifest as nearly anything—from simply giving someone psychic abilities, to transforming one into a transparent creature made of a gelatinous substance—and over sixty years, the X-Men comics have become similarly varied, oppression from humans has always been one of the only commonalities of the mutant—and by extension X-Men— experience. There is no shortage of X-Men villains whose primary motivation is to either control or totally eradicate mutants: Bolivar Trask, whose mutant hunting Sentinels are one of the X-Men’s most common recurring foes; Reverend Stryker, who distorts religion as a twisted justification for his bigotry; and Senator Kelly, who always seeks to create anti-mutant legislation in Congress, to name a few. People who would otherwise be considered ordinary civilians are elevated to the status of comic book villain by their hatred, and this inability of the human majority to accept the mutant minority has always defined the mutant experience.

As a result of living in a majority human society, most mutants are forced to either conform to the standards of that society or leave it altogether—as the sewer-dwelling Morlocks choose to. While those mutants who can easily pass for human—those with no physical mutations—can simply avoid using their powers in public, those who

42 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal cannot are forced to actively alter parts of themselves to fit human standards– an act which is almost universally stifling and demoralizing.

On the original X-Men team, the mutant Angel is forced to strap down his wings under his civilian clothes, which he compares to “wearing a straightjacket,” and he “feel[s] like [himself] again” when he can display his wings openly and fly as a superhero (Lee 23). Similarly, when Nightcrawler– the first X-Man with an entirely inhuman appearance– joins the team, the Professor has him wear an “image inducer” that alters his demon-like appearance to look human. Eventually, Kurt Wagner rejects this device, declaring that “God—or fate—or dumb luck—made me what I am, and I won’t hide anymore, not even for the X-Men” (Claremont 34). Mutations–both powers and physical ones– are an intrinsic part of mutants’ identities, down to their genes, and as a result, hiding them means continually rejecting a vital aspect of themselves. Angel’s wing harness is literally physically restrictive, and Kurt’s image inducer likewise stifles a part of himself. Mutants are the perpetual “other.” Human society will never accept them when they express their mutations because they do not fit human standards, so living in such a society requires a constant suppression and twisting of one’s innate identity. True expression and acceptance are impossible when one is forced to operate in a system not built for them.

Despite this long-established status quo of mutants living as an oppressed minority under a human majority, the recent “Krakoa era” in XMen comics turns this standard on its head. Now, the mutants are all living in their own country of their own design. A mutant society designed by and for mutants to fit mutant standards. This new paradigm radically shifts how mutants can express themselves and fit into the world in which they live—not just as costumed superheroes but as civilians, too—complete people. While Nightcrawler was always forced to either hide his genuine appearance or risk rejection because of his true, blue form when living among humans, there is no such need for hiding on Krakoa. The inherent diversity of form mutation takes means that there is no “standard” appearance for mutants– physical differences are expected and accepted.

It is not just that Kurt is no longer living in a society that does not fit his identity, though. Because Krakoa is a sentient mutant itself, all of the dwellings on the island are grown by a mutant and designed for different mutations. While mutants are still establishing and exploring their new home in the Reign of X storyline, they discover a structure that is “hollow”, but no one can go inside because there are no doors, and even if one tries to cut their way in, “it just immediately seal[s] back up” (Hickman, no. 7 of Reign of X). Nightcrawler is the only one who can enter because of his ability to teleport, and inside he finds that “if [he] were designing a place to live that was everything [he] wanted—that would have been it. [He] would have called it home” (Hickman, no 7 of Reign of X). It is a “perfect” place that “the island made […] just for [him]” (Hickman, no.

7 of Reign of X). Kurt’s home is a perfect example of how Krakoa is shaped around mutants and their abilities. Krakoa is not just designed to make

Elsa Linson 43 mutant powers a net neutral, but to support and celebrate them.

Nightcrawler is now in a culture built with him in mind, not just passively accepting but actively supporting his uniqueness, allowing him to fully express himself and his abilities. As Magneto observes, Krakoa is all about the “breaking of human norms”; it fits a mutant framework instead (Hickman, no. 4 of Reign of X).

This same attention to and centering of mutant abilities and experiences can be seen throughout the development of mutant culture.

Before Krakoa, because mutants were so spread out and forced to merely work within a human system actively suppressing their mutant identities, there was never a unified “mutant culture”. Instead, humans “decide[d] what’s right for all of [the mutants]. How to talk, how to think, what to believe…” (Hickman, no. 7 of Reign of X). On Krakoa, though, the mutants declare “no more” and work to shape their own narrative and identity as a unified nation, taking back control and creating a culture defined by what sets mutants apart.

This can clearly be seen in the development of a unique mutant language. Since mutants are randomly born into different nations around the world, they typically speak the language of their birth country, and there is no singular shared language for mutants. However, as the Kenyan post-colonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains, “language as communication and as culture are […] products of each other,” so “language is thus inseparable from…a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world” (Thiong’o 1134). Language is a central aspect of culture and identity, and these concepts can only be expressed to their fullest extent by a language developed for and by a specific culture.

When Professor X was first starting to develop the idea of Krakoa, he had to communicate his plans with the mutant island, but since Krakoa has their own unique language that no one else speaks, they had to communicate through empathic telepathy. They were “talking, but not at a complex, nuanced level” (Hickman, no. 8 of House of X/Powers of X). To be able to understand the “complicated, deeper” meaning of Krakoa’s speech—and through it the island’s history—he needs the abilities of Cypher, a mutant whose power is “understanding and deciphering the nuances of any language” (Hickman, no. 8 of House of X/Powers of X).

Language is the essential vessel for the true communication of one’s identity, and in the case of Krakoa, that connection is made possible using mutant abilities. Language carries history and identity and uniquely binds it to the culture that originates it. To supply this need for a unique, connecting language to found this new mutant country on, Cypher uses his powers to design a “Krakoan” language and alphabet, which is then telepathically taught to each mutant when they enter Krakoa. Thus, mutants finally have their own language to set them apart as a culture, and this language is developed along the lines of the unique experiences and attributes of the people it belongs to and the environment they live in, mirroring the way languages and cultures form in reality.

44 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal The Krakoa era developed a new original setting and culture for mutants, and this allowed mutants to thrive and achieve things they had never been able to before. One of the most immediately obvious indicators of this prosperity is the radical inclusiveness of Krakoa. Krakoa is the mutant nation, and therefore, all mutants are welcome, even those who were historically enemies of the X-Men. Ever since the first issue of XMen, Professor X and Magneto have been set up as diametrically opposed foes who represent the two primary approaches mutants have to responding to humans: Professor X seeks to compromise with humans, while Magneto views humans as an inherent enemy. However, in the Krakoa era, Magneto and Professor X worked together to help found the mutant country and then serve as two of the most influential members of Krakoa’s governing body, the Quiet Council.

When Xavier was first considering the idea of establishing Krakoa, he went to his “old friend” and current enemy and pitched that they should put aside their ideological differences because they were “both wrong” and “both [their] dreams are fleeting and too small for the coming days” (Hickman, no. 3 of House of X/Powers of X). Previously, Xavier and Erik’s differences had always boiled down to how they believed mutants should interact with humans, so therefore, removing humans from the equation finally allowed them to move past their differences to try and build something instead of seeking each other’s destruction. The existence of a minority under a hostile majority tends to lead to division within the minority itself because members of that group are forced to focus on their tension with the majority instead of their shared bond with each other.

The introduction of autonomy and self-defined culture shift that focus back to the unique identity members of the minority have in common, leading to the growth of a stronger community that prioritizes helping its own as opposed to competing with an outside threat. Professor X’s key realization is that the very notion of them as hero and villain is the “wrong” focus because both sides—whether they seek to befriend or battle humans—are allowing the group that hates them to define their dreams and lives instead of defining themselves internally as their own community, a community both share. “Apart,” they “always lose” to the narrativedefining power of humanity, and “only together” can “all [their] people survive” (Hickman, no. 3 of House of X/Powers of X). Krakoa not only creates a more united mutant community than ever before, but it is sustained by that united community.

Because of the larger mutant community that the culture of Krakoa brings together, mutants in this era can achieve things that were previously impossible and, in doing so, heal some of the wounds inflicted on them by humanity. Shortly after Krakoa’s creation, Professor X sends several of the most iconic members of the X-Men—including Jean Grey, Cyclops, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler—on a vital mission to attempt to destroy a new Mother Mold, a human creation that would be able to manufacture unprecedented numbers of mutant-hunting Sentinel robots.

However, in a brutal twist, every single participant in this mission is killed.

Elsa Linson 45 In a spread constructed as a montage of the team’s deaths interspersed with news headlines and data from past human massacres of mutants, Professor X is overwhelmed with the horrific losses mutants have suffered at humans’ hands, finally declaring that this sort of tragedy will happen “no more” (Hickman, no. 7 of House of X/Powers of X). What would have ordinarily served as merely an impassioned exclamation, though, is transformed into something far more tangible with the newfound collective power of a mutant nation.

After the team’s deaths, the scene shifts to a contrastingly lush and beautiful garden, where a group of five seemingly random mutants is gathered. However, by utilizing their unique powers in tandem, this group– the Five– can bring back each of the mutants who died, introducing the concept of mutant resurrection, which becomes a defining aspect of Krakoan culture. Magneto explains to his daughter Polaris that “separate, yes, [The Five] are great mutants—but only significant, not transcendent. Together, however, […] together these five mutants have made [mutantkind] whole” (Hickman, no. 8 of House of X/Powers of X).

Never before have mutants had the power to simply resurrect any dead mutant as a fact of their society, and this revolutionary ability is only possible because of the distinct conditions on Krakoa.

An autonomous mutant culture can gather people who would have otherwise never had the opportunity to work together, and this allows for the distinct combination of powers that facilitate resurrection. No single mutant has the gift to revive the entirety of the mutant race, but working together, mutant powers allow a group that has endured countless horrors to finally heal. Directly contrasting the thousands of mutant deaths brought up in the last issue, the Five can give back the lives taken by humans, beginning the process of repairing the damage done to mutants and making their community truly “whole.” In the end, the ultimate achievement of Krakoa—the ability to resurrect mutants—fully encapsulates what autonomy offers mutants. Resurrection is the purest representation of mutants taking control of their lives. It is only possible with a group of mutants working in a community, and this new experience—exclusive to mutants—helps mold the shape of mutant culture. Professor X declaring “no more” to humanity’s cruelty is not merely a plea but a declaration that from then on, “mutants will be judged by mutant law, not man’s” (Hickman, no. 10 of House of X/Powers of X).

The Krakoa era of X-Men marks a massive paradigm shift for mutants, as they finally move from being defined by the dominant human culture to creating their own unique culture shaped by their distinct experiences. The unprecedented ways this allows mutants to thrive reveal the power that self-definition holds for minority communities. The mutant metaphor has remained trapped in the scenario of majority domination for decades, but this era finally dares to explore what would be possible if a minority were able to live in a society designed for them instead. The result is a radical creation of culture, community, and catharsis. When discussing his new life on Krakoa, the mutant Cyclops declares, “I’m done

46 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal focusing on the things that want me dead—and I’m choosing to spend my days focused on the things that make me want to live”; the ultimate gift of Krakoa is a place to do just that (Hickman, no. 1 of Reign of X).

Works Cited Claremont, Chris. X-Men Milestones: Dark Phoenix Saga. Marvel, 2019.

Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2011.

Hickman, Jonathan. House of X/Powers of X. Marvel, 2020. _______. Reign of X. vol. 1, Marvel, 2024.

Lee, Stan. Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men. vol. 1, Marvel, 2021.

Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. “Decolonizing the Mind.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd ed., Blackwell, 2004, pp. 1126–1150.

Matthew Bardowell 47 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 47-60

BOOK REVIEWS Hillman, Thomas P. Pity Power and Tolkien’s Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many. Kent State UP, 2023. 320 pages, $40.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Matthew Bardowell

I had the good fortune to read Thomas P. Hillman’s book in a semester during which I was teaching an undergraduate class on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. I did not know when I started reading just how much Hillman’s ideas would inform my approach to teaching The Lord of the Rings in that semester. After discussing the first book of The Fellowship of the Ring, my students had many questions about the ring itself. What precisely is it? What is the nature of its power over those who encounter it? When teaching students who grew up with Harry Potter, professors must inevitably reckon with the question: Is it like a horcrux? These are questions that Hillman’s analysis of the ring addresses with striking clarity and insight. Coupled with Hillman’s argument about the ring is an equally

48 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal insightful argument about the nature of pity in Tolkien’s work. Readers will be familiar with Gandalf’s words to Frodo upon telling him that his uncle Bilbo let Gollum live in chapter five of The Hobbit, “Riddles in the Dark.” Frodo, repulsed by Gollum’s wickedness, wishes that Bilbo had slain him, to which Gandalf responds in reproof: “the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least” (Tolkien, FR 58). While it is common for scholars to observe how Gandalf’s statement shows prescience concerning the plot, Hillman’s analysis of pity delves more deeply into this notion, showing its centrality not merely as a foreshadowing of the novel’s climax but as animating principle in character development of both Frodo, Gollum, and others. Hillman shows how pity and power work to fashion a compelling moral arc that can so often be lost in the high romance of Tolkien’s world.

Central to Hillman’s argument about pity is the role of the divine in the narrative. It is a truth universally acknowledged that The Lord of the Rings is a profoundly Catholic work, but it seems to me that this can be true in two ways. First, and perhaps most prevalent in Tolkien scholarship, is to note that Tolkien himself was a man of great personal faith and, because of this commitment, his writings are infused with Christian truths even if they were not explicitly articulated in his fiction. The second and, I would argue, less prevalent way in which Tolkien’s work can be classified as religious is to observe the activity of the divine beings with Tolkien’s own mythology and see how their influence finds its way into the narrative. Hillman examines this second manner of religious influence in a way that is both refreshing and compelling.

We can see Hillman consider the role of divinity in the novel in his distinction between the two types of pity that Tolkien develops. There is the lower-case “pity” and then there is the capitalized “Pity,” both of which denote “a deep, benevolent compassion such as one person might feel for the suffering of another, whether that suffering seems deserved or not” (6). But Hillman’s distinction between the two forms of pity has to do with its source. Lower-case “pity” is only found on a “mundane or earthly level” while upper-case “Pity” emanates from “the level of the supernatural or divine or somehow attains that level if only for a moment” (6). With this distinction, Hillman makes the role of the divine within the novel more prominent than is often observed, and this idea is developed further by examining some of the more cryptic comments of the novel’s wiser characters. In chapter 1, “Bilbo’s Lie and the Ring,” Hillman offers an intertextual analysis of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to show that in resolving a plotting issue in the way Bilbo receives the ring only emphasizes the role of what Hillman terms “Providence [. . .] (whether the Valar or the One)” (17).

As a professor who teaches Tolkien’s novel regularly, Hillman’s book is an incredibly helpful resource for creating a golden thread that can guide students through all three volumes. This thread also enables readers not just to steer clear of some of the common interpretive pitfalls of the story but to mark the traps and understand why they may be so alluring.

Matthew Bardowell 49 One such trap is to read the novel as one last great heroic stand against the forces of darkness in which bravery and a willingness to join the battle succeed in overpowering evil. This reading may be one of the most alluring errors for undergraduate readers. Hillman offers a clear-eyed vision of the power of Sauron’s ring and a nuanced reading of its nature. Hillman focuses on the temptation that arises within characters when they contemplate the ring’s usefulness. It is tempting to assign the ring agency, as if it has a will of its own or is perhaps so imbued with the will of Sauron that it is a kind of remote emissary. Indeed, the characters in the book seem to speak this way about the ring at times, but are we, the readers, meant to take those characterizations at face value? Hillman presents a compelling argument for reconsidering readings like these by reflecting on the nature of temptation. In the instance in which characters contemplate taking the ring, Hillman urges the reader to reflect on the corrupting power of the ring and how it appeals to “both our virtues and vices by seeming to offer the power to do good or evil” (32). The temptation of the ring is the allure of power, even the power to effect positive change.

Hillman uses Boromir as an example, which makes good sense, but it is Hillman’s analysis of how Frodo considers the ring useful that is less common and more insightful. As Hillman says, even wishing he could put it on to evade the Sackville-Bagginses is a kind of use, though seemingly humorous and small in scale, that foreshadows his ultimate failure to cast off the ring (32). These moments of temptation reveal that, in the end, pity cannot be completely protective or efficacious in withstanding the power of the ring. Bilbo, who first received the ring with pity, may thrive for a while, but his life is still being spread thin as butter over too much bread.

The ring is mastering and would finally have mastered him, too, despite his pity, and Frodo is no different.

These are the ideas that animate Hillman’s argument, and the structure of his book traces the intertwining of the ring’s power and the role of pity in The Lord of the Rings. Occasionally, detours are made, as when Hillman examines Bilbo’s relatively brief stewardship of the ring.

Those who are interested in a clear and succinct encapsulation of the change in Bilbo’s story from the 1937 edition of The Hobbit to the 1951 edition will find it in chapter 3. In all, the first three chapters offer an excellent theoretical grounding for Hillman’s argument with strong textual analysis of way Tolkien’s themes crystallize with revision. Following these opening three chapters, Hillman’s structure follows the movement of the ring from Bag End to Mordor and past its unmaking.

In his final chapter, Hillman reflects on what Tolkien achieves in the great pantheon of heroic tales, particularly as it contrasts with a poem that was tremendously influential for Tolkien: the Old English poem Beowulf. Scholars often engage in source identification between Tolkien’s world and the literature he knew and loved, but that is not what Hillman offers here, and the book is much the better for it. Often, the appeal of source studies can be complex and inconclusive concerning their significance to the larger picture, but what Hillman does is to consider

50 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Tolkien’s narrative innovations as they contrast with the literature that certainly informed his work. Observing Tolkien’s departure from these influential texts is often both more interesting and more revealing.

Beowulf, as Hillman remarks, is a poem about the heights and limitations of human action. In the end, Beowulf is no demigod but merely a man whose death inevitably arrives at its appointed time (233). That poem begins and ends with an elegy (236). The Lord of the Rings, Hillman observes, begins and ends with a different ceremony: a celebration followed by a departure (236). Where Beowulf is limited by its pagan characters and setting, The Lord of the Rings leaves room for what Tolkien termed ‘eucatastrophe,’ the sudden good turn, poignant as its inverse, catastrophe, the sudden bad turn. As Hillman concludes, he references a few of Tolkien’s letters to show how he, Tolkien, applied his own story to life and history. Yes, at times, it seems that we are amid Mordor, as Tolkien mentions regarding the invention of the atomic bomb (265).

Hillman is right; power is central to Tolkien’s novel as it is to the story of human history. But pity is also central. Central to the character’s best actions in the novel, and probably central to our best actions as we grapple with the events of our time. We, like Bilbo and Frodo, do not have the benefit of knowing how all these events may turn out, but we may have the opportunity to act in pity, even when it seems hopeless. Such pity, Hillman suggests, extends the window of possibilities that we do not always perceive. As Hillman phrases it, pity “opens a door that strength and courage, reinforced by grace, can keep open for a time” (234).

Work Cited Tolkien. J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring. 1954. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Matthew Bardowell 51

Hendrix, John. The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. & J. R. R. Tolkien. Abrams Fanfare, 2024. 224 pages, $24.99 (hardback).

Reviewed by Matthew Bardowell

When I first sat down to read John Hendrix’s new graphic novel Mythmakers, I was sitting next to my 8-year-old son. He was reading his own graphic novel. As I turned page after page of lush illustrations, delightful characters (Mr. Lion and Wizard being the first I met), and mysterious symbols, my son’s eyes slowly drifted from his book to mine.

“What is that?” he asked me. “Oh, nothing,” I replied. Readers with children may know that when a child inquires about something in which you desperately want them to take an interest, it’s best to play it cool. He kept on looking, and one illustration piqued his curiosity such that he asked to trade books with me. It was a close-up image of a wooden door with an ornate handle covered in strange, unfamiliar runes. Above the handle, there was a keyhole, and from the keyhole drifted a whisp of smoke (6). I thought this little story was appropriate to relate here because it encapsulates the wide appeal of Hendrix’s new book. A 43-year-old who has spent decades reading and writing about C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien can be edified by it, and so can an 8-year-old just beginning his journey with these writers. Indeed, this is an explicit feature of the book’s structure. Readers open the cover but are then encouraged to take different doors through its pages.

52 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal While the target age range for this novel is wide, readers should be aware that some of the content is not for the faint of heart. Hendrix does a remarkable job of presenting the moments of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s early lives, which involve a fair amount of loss. It is not without reason that Tom Shippey classes these writers among the traumatized authors of the twentieth century (Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century viii).

Hendrix’s affable and comforting illustrations drive that poignancy home for the reader in ways that a solely textual biography simply doesn’t.

Hendrix’s medium also allows for thematic connections to emerge in surprising ways. Two instances of this come to mind. First, the section titled “Dead Marshes” takes readers through Tolkien’s experience in the trenches of World War I. Overlayed upon the images of the casualties of war caught in barbed wire and submerged in shallow puddles are glimpses of what Tolkien would later describe as Frodo. Sam and Gollum traverse the marshes of Middle Earth. Hendrix makes many such observations to suggest the interesting and complex relationship between life and art. We see this again in the case of Lewis during the war. Hendrix offers what I would argue is one of the most stirring depictions of Lewis’s involvement in the Battle of Arras. Amid the pain and loss, Hendrix illustrates a panel that quotes a devastating line from Lewis’s book of poetry Spirits in Bondage, in a way Lewis’s own harrowing cry of dereliction (55). It is not easy to depict such beloved figures as Tolkien and Lewis without falling back on hagiography, but Hendrix manages to avoid this. Rarely have twodimensional characters (those lovingly drawn on each page) felt so rounded and fully developed. These moments in Hendrix’s novel show just how powerful this medium can be to explore the heights and the depths of a human life.

Readers who come to this book not yet knowing the details of these men’s lives will find a sensitive and remarkably full account of their friendship. Those who are familiar with their lives will be rewarded for the surprising richness with which Hendrix frames various moments. The appeal for me was like anticipating the film adaptation of a favorite book. I couldn’t wait to see how Hendrix would render moments like Lewis’s famous stroll down Addison’s Walk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

Hendrix’s drawings here are particularly evocative, calling to mind moments in deep conversation where time seems to stand still, moments that, despite our rationalism, seem to be imbued with eternal consequence. I read Hendrix’s depictions of Inklings meetings with equal relish.

One of the saddest turns in the story of Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship is how they slowly drifted apart in their later years. This is perhaps the most challenging bit to narrate, mostly because the causes for this seemed so subtle and the effect so pronounced. Mr. Lion and Wizard are powerful facilitators in this section of the book. By the time they walk the reader (and each other) through the twists and turns of this part of the friendship, they have developed their own ethos, their own voice, which we have learned to trust and depend on to guide us. It was only upon

Matthew Bardowell 53 rereading that I realized the power of this scene. Mr. Lion and Wizard turn out to be narrative extensions of Lewis and Tolkien themselves, and Hendrix does some remarkable character development here. In one notable instance, he allows Mr. Lion to explain the reasoning for Tolkien’s cool reception of Lewis’s first Narnia book. Mr. Lion, a representation of Lewis, offers Tolkien’s own reasoning with great sympathy and charity. It is quite a remarkable feat to have the wounded party explain, in charitable terms, the reasoning of the friend who wounded them.

Of the many affecting moments in Hendrix’s retelling, the most affecting moment comes at the end, when Hendrix imagines what a reunion between these two friends might look like. I can remember when, as a young graduate student, I had just finished Humphrey Carpenter’s wonderful biography The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. It came as a shock to me that, in their later years, the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien seemed to cool. Their disagreements, which seemed so small to me in my naivete, loomed large for them. They seemed to become distant, and this filled me with sadness.

In response to this, Hendrix offers a scene that I’m sure so many of those who know and love these writers wished for: a scene of reunion and reconciliation. We may call it Hendrix’s own imaginative supposal, but I’m sure it is a supposal many readers have had in their own imaginations. The two men find themselves atop a tower from which they can look out upon the sea, an image that summons Tolkien’s famous analogy in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” They exchange words they never had the chance to say in life. They recognize the gift of friendship just before they themselves pass into the west (176-183). This scene is filled with meaningful references to their writings, and yet it writes an entirely new chapter of their friendship, this time taking place in a far country that those on this side of eternity have only ever glimpsed.

This book is a must-own for those who have befriended these men through their writings. It is also a wonderful introduction for newcomers.

Hendrix’s structure and approach are capable of great pathos and also great depth, as we see from the detours we can take into the history of myth, the historical accounts of the Great War, and accessible explanations of important philosophical ideas like the “myth of progress.”

It leaves the reader reflecting on their own friendships, with companions both present and gone, whether we shared time and space on this earth or whether we had only ever met in the realms of imagination and story.

Works Cited Shippey, T. A. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Harper Collins, 2000.

54 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Bilbro, Jeffrey. Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope. Baylor University Press, 2024. 300 pages, $47.99.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

What assumptions underlie our optimism and pessimism about the potential of textual technologies? Or, in other words, what do we imagine our age’s textual technologies will lead us to become, for better or for worse? These questions are at the core of Jeffrey Bilbro’s Words for Conviviality, and they are vital ones in our age of seemingly limitless information access, AI text generators, and the ability to instantly spread any information (or disinformation) to friends and strangers alike. But, Bilbro argues, such questions aren’t unique to our moment and its technologies. The book opens with a description of a culture being transformed by “radical innovations in communications technology,” “fierce partisan and geographic divides,” and “doctrinal disputes,” but the culture Bilbro describes is that of 1850s America, not the early 21 st century, and the communications technology he mentions is the steampowered printing press, not digital technologies (1). Bilbro’s point here is that we can, and should, look to the past to help us understand our current moment: “Understanding how a previous era was shaped—and in some ways warped—by the assumptions that industrial print technology engendered may enable us to recognize more clearly how our own verbal

Julie Ooms 55 habits and practices are formed and deformed by our enmeshment in digital technologies” (5). In other words, we can and should consider how nineteenth-century thinkers, facing a similar technology-driven upheaval in how we read and communicate, wrestled with the implications of those technologies so that we may respond more faithfully to the upheaval in our own age.

Bilbro develops this argument not as a historian but as a literary scholar with a keen understanding of history, and I think this stance is appropriate, given that his focus is on the metaphors various nineteenthcentury writers used to imagine (and encouraged, implicitly or explicitly, their readers to imagine) textual technologies’ promise and pitfalls. The book’s chapters are organized into three categories of metaphors: “utopia,” “dystopia,” and “hope.” “Utopia” explores what industrial print technologies “tempt optimistic readers to imagine themselves as” (29); “dystopia” explores what those technologies “lead its victims to fear they will become” (105); and “hope” offers “alternative metaphors [that] might orient more convivial reading” (163). In each chapter, Bilbro presents a different metaphor and discusses one American literary figure whose work and life illustrate that metaphor. In chapter 1, for example, entitled “Transparent Eyeballs,” Bilbro’s subject is Emerson, who wrote in Nature in 1836 that, on an evening walk, he became a “transparent eyeball” when he felt he’d been “caught up into the Universal Being” (31). This passage in Nature is widely quoted and one I’ve read (and taught) many times, and obviously Emerson’s metaphor is part of a much larger and more complex Transcendentalist philosophy, not necessarily related to print culture, which Bilbro acknowledges. However, the interpretation Bilbro offers is both astute and helpful for our understanding of both Emerson and our current age. “Emerson’s sensation of being a transparent eyeball stems from his immersion in a particular kind of print culture, one that privileges the visual to the detriment of the body and its other senses, elevates the present at the expense of memory and tradition, and promises direct, unmediated access to truth” Bilbro summarizes (32). He then connects Emerson’s 19th-century metaphor with his readers’ 21st-century context. This feeling of being able to transcend all contextualization (even our own bodies) and imagine ourselves able to attain some kind of “godlike vantage,” he argues, resonates with the promise algorithms make “to strip away all the noise in order to reveal the signal that lies hidden beneath the irrelevant particulars” (33). In this chapter, as in others, recognizing the possible pitfalls of contemporary digital technologies becomes easier because we can see something similar happening in an earlier age. The other chapters in the “Utopia” section—“Men of Adamant,” “Encyclopedists and Map-Plotters,” “Celebrities,” and “Benevolent Bosses”—provide other examples of authors and characters who, with menacing optimism, imagined themselves as wielders of neargodlike control of land, of others’ affection, of even their own souls.

Bilbro’s overview of these 19th-century utopic visions reminds readers, often explicitly (see, for example his discussion of Walt Whitman and

56 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal influencer culture in chapter 4), of the similar utopian visions cast by much contemporary textual technologies.

Section two, “dystopia,” explores the dark sides of these utopian visions, introducing a new group of metaphors for what those harmed by new textual technologies imagine they will become: “loose fish,” “macadamized minds,” “commodities,” and “slaves.” Through his analyses of Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass, Bilbro invites his readers to consider seriously how media technologies past and present warp how people imagine themselves and their neighbors. The chapter that stood out to me most in this section was chapter 8, “Commodities,” which analyzed Dickinson. Owing to my own lack of in-depth research on Dickinson, I had long assumed that the reason so few of Dickinson’s poems were published before her death was her reclusiveness. Bilbro argues, however, with overwhelming support from Dickinson’s biography and writing, that Dickinson did not publish her poetry because she did not want to be turned into a commodity and therefore dehumanized. “Shaping our thoughts into a product that can be marketed and sold defiles their divine origin,” Bilbro states, analyzing one of Dickinson’s poems that begins with the lines “Publication—is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—” (134, 133). Expounding on Dickinson’s worries, Bilbro argues that thanks to contemporary media technologies like “marketing algorithms and social media, we are all invited to imagine ourselves as the sum of a narrow set of factors or choices,” rendering ourselves and viewing others “as legible and profitable trails of data” rather than human beings (134-5). Though the connections Bilbro makes between these 19th-century writers’ metaphors and the current digital age are all astute, it’s this one that struck me most. I think this dehumanization is one all of us can recognize from our experiences getting personalized ads on social media or trying to sell ourselves on a dating app or trying to cultivate a “personal brand,” whatever that is. That it is dehumanizing is sometimes more difficult to articulate, and Bilbro’s discussion of Dickinson helps fully illuminate the darkest corners of commodification.

It’s likely already quite clear to my readers that I find Bilbro’s book to be astute and helpful in fully articulating just why the effects of our current media technologies are so disquieting and dehumanizing. Perhaps I am too easily persuaded because I am pessimistic about digital technologies’ effects on our ability to read and live well with each other. I do know that when I have raised concerns similar to Bilbro’s—or Dickinson’s, or Douglass’s, or Melville’s—with friends and colleagues, the most common response is something like: “Well, even if you’re right, what can be done about it? This is the world we live in.” And in a way, they’re right. 19th-century America did not destroy its steam-powered printing presses and revert to more humanizing modes of communication (in fact, many, much bloodier things happened instead). 21st-century America will no longer resign its investment in AI or social media. These technologies are too widely used to be renounced completely, barring widespread

Julie Ooms 57 societal upheaval akin to a science fiction plot (I think, for example, of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven). What Bilbro offers in the last section of his book might therefore seem comparatively small and even pointless: imagining ourselves and practicing being walkers, conversationalists, friends, and cross-bearers. But I would contend (as Bilbro does) that to think these practices are useless is to subscribe to a belief that the only meaningful action is a grand, heroic one—to, returning to the first chapter on Emerson, imagine that we can be “transparent eyeballs,” overseeing everything around us without regard for our smallness, our attachments, and our dependence on our neighbors. Words for Conviviality, finally, offers readers both a careful analysis of 19 thcentury American responses to textual technologies and a guide for ways in which, as others have before us, we can live faithfully and hopefully amidst the technological upheavals of our own age.

58 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Holberg, Jennifer L. Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith. InterVarsity Press, 2023. 230 pages, $26.99.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

In a recent class meeting, my HONR 203 students and I contemplated the presence (and absence) of empathy in the novel we were working through, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. Almost all of the characters are graveyard ghosts, and almost all of them seem wholly uninterested in listening to each other, intent instead on repeating their own grievances to any newcomer they hope might listen. As we discussed scene after scene of characters trying to get a word in, trying to get someone to listen to them, I asked students, “Does our ability to empathize with each other have anything to do with listening to each other’s stories?”

It was, I admitted to them, a very English-professor kind of question. It’s a question that Jennifer L. Holberg, herself an English professor, asks throughout Nourishing Narratives (and her answer, like mine, is a resounding “yes”). “Through stories we come to understand the expectations and norms of others around us—our family, community, church, and larger culture. Indeed, stories define those expectations and norms—and signal to us whether our lives are successful or not (at least according to those doing the telling,” she writes early in the first chapter (4). We live in, and understand our and others’ lives through, stories.

Julie Ooms 59 Further, stories are the most fundamental way we understand not only the world around us but God as well. And if this is all true, Holberg argues, then learning to read stories well is incredibly important.

Though we might want to simplify our own stories or the stories of others and God, especially if they make us uncomfortable or seem too complex, doing so is to misread and distort our understanding of others and God. Thus, Holberg argues (citing Flannery O’Connor), “we can only gain a truer picture of reality by being committed to learning how to read in a more nuanced way” (17) that rejects “pious cliché” and instead recognizes all the mysteries, complexities, and contradictions inherent in our lives and others’. Reading literature, and learning how to read it well, can help us do this, she writes as she closes her first chapter: Literature must help us look to the margins to see the overlooked and the perishing. And not just to see but to turn our face unhesitatingly toward the ‘disaster’ and embrace it as our very own ‘important failure,’ worthy not just of our attention, but of our most valiant efforts to rectify it. (26) Throughout the book, Holberg traces various kinds of stories that we tell ourselves and how those stories do or don’t help us become more virtuous readers and better storytellers. For example, in the second chapter, “Enough,” she asks readers to consider “how rare it is to think that anything is, in fact, enough” (29). She calls insufficiency—never having enough—the “operational hermeneutic of our lives in so many ways” (29) and traces that hermeneutic all the way back to the biblical story of the Israelites who, after finally being delivered from Egypt by the very presence of God in visible pillars of fire and smoke, still find reasons to grumble and worry about not having enough to eat or drink. Their discontent is linked to the way they are reading the story of their circumstances, focusing on what they lack rather than on the abundant provision of God. Instead, Holberg argues, they and we should seek to replace this hermeneutic of insufficiency with virtuous recognition that God will provide for each of us our daily bread. We should focus not on “our finitude” and its attending worries but on “God’s infinity” (42). Such a reorientation will help us live a different story, one where we are able to wonder at “God’s plenitude” and also have “the chance to respond appropriately…[in] worship and gratitude” (43).

In the fifth chapter, “A Witness Ready to Serve,” Holberg similarly encourages her readers to “be attentive to the constructs and conventions of narrative” by focusing on how the stories we tell (and how we read various biblical narratives) affect how we think about vocation (103). She opens with a question: “What if we have gotten the story of Martha of Bethany all wrong?” and proposes a different reading of that story (102).

Many readings of Martha’s story hold her up “as being exactly the wrong kind of person—well, let’s be honest, the wrong kind of woman,” someone who has “let her job as hostess frazzle her away from the holy” (102).

60 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Holberg argues that these are poor readings that don’t recognize the genre of Martha’s story. Instead, she proposes that we read “Martha’s account in Luke 10 not as a dismissal of her work, but instead as a story of vocation: that hers is in the same genre as that of Peter being called away from his fishing” (103). Read this way, we are able to interpret Jesus’s words to Martha not as a dismissal of her work; instead, Holberg argues, we can see that “[Jesus] is making a radical claim that it isn’t her inherent job as a woman or her highest job as a person” to fulfill a culturally defined role as a hostess (103); rather, Jesus is there to “reassure her where her most important work and identity lies”: in his call on her life and her “primary work as a disciple” (104-5). I chose this chapter to discuss in more detail here because I, too, have heard these misreadings of Martha’s story many times, but never before have I considered a reading that connected her story to vocation. I think Holberg is right about how we should read Martha’s story, and she is also right about how that reading can give “us another way of thinking about narratives of vocation” (105). I, like Holberg, am using to conversations about vocation, and especially to narratives about vocation that link it to jobs. Holberg’s chapter argues, however, that many of our narratives about vocation “seem to default to a vision of calling than is less robust than we would hope” (105). She encourages her readers to seek and tell different, better stories about vocation: “vocation…might be better thought of not so much as a call to individual career but as the voice of God calling us to join the long line of laborers [like Martha] who did not grow ‘weary in well doing’” (112). The narratives of vocation we are used to telling are often limited and focused on self-promotion and temporal success, even cloaked in religious language. Recognizing that how we think about vocation is not founded on fact but rather connected to narratives about who we are and what it means to be called can help us seek out better, truer stories in which we might live out our callings.

I am, for better or worse, smack dab in the middle of Holberg’s idea audience. As a college English professor, I’m already inclined to believe that we live our lives based not on the factual knowledge we’ve assembled to assist in decision making but based on what stories we’re telling— consciously and unconsciously—about how we should understand ourselves, others, the world, and God. And so, it is perhaps not surprising that I would favorably review a book that sees the pursuit of “nourishing narratives” as a primary way we move “toward more Christlike ways of viewing the world” (152). But Holberg’s book is not aimed at an audience of English professors, let alone academics in general; instead, her intended audience is made up of average Christians who know, even if not consciously, that their faith is built on the narratives given to them in scripture. Like George Saunders’s characters in Lincoln in the Bardo, who eventually learn to listen to each other and develop a fuller, more empathetic understanding of their world, Holberg invites her readers to reconsider distorted stories and live into better ones. There are, I think, few better purposes for any text, fiction or nonfiction, to pursue.

Michael Shoemaker 61 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 61-96

CREATIVE WORKS Photo Art and Creative Writing Michael Shoemaker

Steeple at Sunrise

62 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Door of Reverence

Michael Shoemaker 63

Sunday Morning Glory

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Cody’s Answer (Short story) Chaparral was a town people chose to forget, like the sagebrush that sticks on the underside of your car when speeding down the highway in a windstorm, then releases and rolls away into some corner of eternity. It was a town full of antiques of junk, with plenty of colored glass that needed dusting, but not one antique store. To the casual observer, it may have started as Chaparral but grew into its destiny as a Desolate Anonymity.

The locals didn’t mind. It was where a car theft for joyriding in Phoenix was not just reduced to a misdemeanor but was commuted to silent oblivion. It seems that most liked it that way, and curiously, most citizens (or not citizens) of Chaparral found it easier to be law-abiding in this easygoing setting where it was not shoved up your snout every thirty minutes.

Cody was a resolved young man. He was an artist who needed money badly. How bad, it was hard to tell. He hadn’t seen real money for a very long time. At least, his landlord, girlfriend, and probation officer (in that order) thought he needed money soon. Cody, on a personal basis, lived from cloud to darkened summer thundercloud that stacked superheated across the desert horizon.

He needed an idea. Even if he could get $325, he could pay off the restitution fine and get his driver’s license back (a token of freedom) and give him back a bit of dignity.

Cody's pattern of staying financially afloat was to ask everyone he knew, even a few strangers, what to do, and then he did it. This is maybe why the scene of his life looked like a communal stew with carrot ends still on and stalks of celery wilting over the side. No matter. As long as he still had his paint brushes and an easel, Cody still held his parking space on cloud nine.

This time, Cody decided to mix it up. His pattern did not hold. In his furnished rent room, he donned a crisp cotton long-sleeved white shirt, his best black jeans, and a bolo tie with a fake opal. He didn't think God would mind bolo ties.

He slipped away to the chapel around the corner. After all, the sign on the door said that visitors were always welcome. Cody knelt against the back pew as he judged not to be on terms with God enough to make a front approach. He opened his parched lips, and these were the words that fell out.

“Dear God, we haven't spoken much since Mom died last year. I need an idea. If you bring me one, I will try to do the rest. Thanks.”

Later at dusk, Cody rode in the back of his friend Lewis’s pickup truck to a neighboring town. He enjoyed feeling the stiff, cool wind on his face. He wasn't thinking about anything in general. Another truck going

Michael Shoemaker 65 much faster than the speed limit passed them. As the driver swerved back out of the passing lane, a box fell out of the back.

It broke open, and plastic cylinders bounced, then rolled along the asphalt in all directions. Lewis looked in the distance where stars began to twinkle, but the other truck had disappeared beyond a rise. He bent over, looked down, and blurted out, laughing, “Tennis balls. A crazy case of tennis balls.” They picked them up and agreed, as the owner was long gone, that Cody could take them home.

The next morning, after a cold cereal breakfast, Cody stared at his fuzzy oval-shaped yellow prospects. He got up, popped a lid with a whoosh, lifted a ball, and tossed it in the air. Cody decided he needed to know more about these odd toys for all ages.

He went to the park the next Saturday. There were two tennis courts caged in chain link with two half-mast nets billowing in the wind.

Still, four players were on each court. Cody didn't know the rules of the game. He didn't have to. Cody watched these players as they acted out their emotional dramas in the motions of starting, stopping, stretching, and swinging. In a way, it was a beautiful orchestration in time and space.

One player laughed, another cried, and another stomped with rage. Then, Cody had an idea better than he could come up with on his own.

Cody ran home so fast, afraid that somehow his idea would fall through his fingers like water in a sink. At his little kitchen table, he took a tennis ball, his paints, and a brush and painted a laughing face on one, then picked up another and painted a sad face, and finally a third face filled with anger.

The next Saturday, when Lewis drove to the only supermarket within 50 miles in a bigger town, Cody rode along and asked to be dropped at the tennis courts at the park. When a group of four players took a water break, Cody handed one of his painted balls to a guy and asked him what he thought of his tennis balls.

The man laughed and called over. “Hey, Marilyn, isn’t this exactly how I looked 5 minutes ago?"

Marilyn came over, took one look, and doubled over in sheer glee.

“It sure does, sweetheart, and so you don't forget I am going to buy it for you." She swung around and asked Cody how much the ball cost.

Cody stood stunned.

“Well, I only have a twenty on me, will that work?”

It sure did. Emotions on the Ball, LLC. was born. Their millionth tennis ball sold yesterday, and balls go out to 127 countries. 15% of all sales go to natural disaster relief. Cody married his girlfriend, got his driver's license back, and sometimes you'll see him sitting in the last pew on Sunday mornings.

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Sabbath Day (Sijo) The tree You hung on, lives Sabbath day anew to birth and growth; its fruits’ blossoms spring up bright and true, waking up to everlasting life and salvation’s song.

Dear Savior, forgive me now my trespassed sins, rescue my royal birthright as a Beloved Son of God.

Gideon T. Braley 67

Two Poems Gideon T. Braley The Creator Who made the stars and the moon?

Who molded the land like clay?

Who brought the world in tune?

Like a beloved instrument ready to play?

It was the Creator, the Creator that’s who.

Who poured out the seas so vast?

Who caused the plants to grow?

Who shaped the Earth to last?

Who made the rivers flow?

It was the Creator, the Creator that’s who.

Who first breathed life into man?

Who created woman after this?

Who incorporated both into his plan?

Who saw the very first kiss?

It was the Creator, the Creator that’s who.

68 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal The End Times I stand here and look out at the world, The land so withered and worn.

I stand here and look out at the world, At people who now look tattered and torn.

Above me, the moon is shining red, The stars having fallen from the sky.

Above me, the moon is shining red, Causing me to sadly sigh.

The seals, the trumpets, the bowls, All have been loosed upon this earth.

The seals, the trumpets, the bowls Have caused many to curse their birth.

There are a few who realize what this means, It has echoed through all their minds.

There are a few who realize what this means, It is the long-expected end times.

Despite this world now full of evil, There are still those who firmly believe.

Despite this world now full of evil, They wait for Armageddon and relief.

Jane Beal 69

“Sunflowers Painted on a Water Glass” and Other Poems Jane Beal Sunflowers Painted on a Water Glass I have a lovely water glass with sunflowers painted in a circle around its translucent curve.

It stands beside me on a table and the sunlight shines on it through my window.

As the sun shines, the flowers turn and grow, glowing as if they know that they will soon stretch beyond the glass into another world.

70 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Elegy for the Sleeping Heart There is a hillside that looks out over the sea.

The trees hold the ground with roots like lovers’ hands.

Somewhere under that soil your heart is sleeping.

Who is holding you now?

Who is holding you?

Your sleep is so deep, how can you hear my love song?

How can you hear my lullaby?

However long I call you, you never come as you were, in the body, but only as images in dreams that vanish when I awake, still wishing you were here.

Why can you not come back to me?

Why is your voice still silent while mine sings on and on and on, never into your living ears, but only into eternity where sound waves and light waves go on forever without ever reaching you?

Memories of flowers come back to me, given to me by Wisdom, and I try to find comfort in their colors, their meanings, their scents but Wisdom, even born from your body, is not your body: she is not you, and I cannot hold her, like I held you.

My heart longs to hold you like a child and save you from death, death who stole you like Hades when he raped Persephone.

But all longing is unfulfilled.

My tears fall in an endless winter like grains of wheat down Demeter’s desolate face.

Jane Beal 71 We do not have a pomegranate.

I cannot come before God with six seeds to bargain for your life, for six months a year, for just half the time I had with you before, when I could still hear your voice, when I could still hold your face in my hands and kiss you.

But I can’t accept this terrible separation yet.

It is too hard for me.

Your death cuts me off from myself, and my soul twists like a rope hung from a desiccated tree on the edge of the desert.

The wind sings of nothing.

There is nothing but a cord of three strands unwinding, unbinding life from life, life from love, love from time, time from earth, earth from body, body from soul, soul from soul.

You are so far away now that I will never touch you again.

But if I sing for you, will you hear me?

Will your soul grow still and remember a table where I held your hands as we cursed the darkness out of a house full of light?

Will you sing to me so that my Sorrow, ashamed of herself, Will crawl out of my body, far away from my soul, and finally leave me in peace?

What would that peace be like?

Is there a new life that you can give me?

If only you were alive again, I know you would know what to sing to comfort me and make my restless heart be still.

72 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal After Another Dream dream In my dream, I walk into a church with white walls and no icons.

I wait for you to notice me.

I listen as you talk to someone else.

When you do not turn your face to me, I walk down the aisle on the right side of the sanctuary to be with my mother.

When I wake up, I call her. call I tell her my dream. I leave out the part about you and focus on being with her.

She asks me to describe the inside of the church. I do.

She tells me that she went to an old church in California yesterday.

“That’s why you had that dream,” she says.

“I felt you with me in spirit when I was there.” prayer She says Father Junipero Serra built the church and dedicated it to St. Teresa of Avila.

She says she saw a picture of Mary holding the Lamb of God in her arms.

She says she will pray for me now, and my soul is comforted from the sadness of white walls and years of waiting to hear the sound of your voice in my ears.

Jane Beal 73 Haiku from my backyard tiny red leaf from a Japanese maple giant pine little waterfall spilling into a dark pond yellow leaves on the ground sweeping up the fall

Heather Hallberg Yanda 74

Two Poems Heather Hallberg Yanda A Knowing Silence —Thomas the apostle Maybe Thomas was hesitant at first: the man who stood before him was so broken, he questioned if it was really Jesus.

Again, the injured man gestured to the vicious wound on his side. I imagine Thomas did what the others wanted to do: he reached for the fresh sore, wanting to doubt his doubts.

A knowing silence surrounded the men. When their eyes met, Thomas stopped—as if afraid he might hurt him. Maybe Thomas saw then how vulnerable it is to love and be loved, how vulnerable to be human. Maybe this moment is not about doubt at all, but about friendship and the certainty in faith, faith in certainty.

As if for the first time, Thomas saw his own creased palm, rugged fingers, proof of his own life. He thought of the lessons Jesus taught,

Heather Hallberg Yanda 75 every confided word, every meal they shared. I’d like to think this is when he realized some things are meant to remain beyond our own understanding, a mystery as rich as its realization: faith was its own perfection— and he drew his hand away.

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By Jacob’s Well —The Samaritan Woman With pail in hand, she arrived, found the thirsty stranger by Jacob’s well, just as the noon sun burned down.

Maybe she was frightened when she saw the haggard man; maybe he was frightened by his need to need her. On the well’s opposite sides, they stood silently, as if stones and water were there to protect their separate truths. She, who knew nothing about him except her society’s judgments, lowered the pail in the well, aware he was watching as she worked. How vulnerable she must have felt then, and vulnerable again, when he recounted her story— even those details she did not like to admit to herself. So gratefully, he took the water from her: she watched as he drank cold goodness, such satisfied swallows, until the cup was empty. How pure this moment is: where sharp lines once existed—between woman and man, prejudice and friendship, Samaritan and Jew—they became blurred. As Jesus revealed his own story, she realized something new: the wealth in his approval, not the great sting of her poverty.

Maybe they both realized the trust it takes to tell their stories—an

Heather Hallberg Yanda 77 equal exchange—to one who knows how fragile the mysteries that exist within us are, who understands the enormity in the telling, and certainly, the privilege in the listening.

78 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

“At the Church in Your Home” and Other Poems Todd Sukany At the Church in Your Home After a lengthy experience of adoration, solo guitar lowering its volume, you speak from the middle cushion of the couch.

Descriptions of a mystical vision— The Lord Himself, walking beside still waters, a creek banked with vivid grasses.

Colors, so brilliant they defy description.

Voices of encouragement. Love palpable.

Fields of peace stretching to the horizon.

Would this adventure repeat itself on the seventy-fifth floor of Central Park Tower?

Rest on the Day after the Sabbath “The heavens declare the glory of God….” – Psalm 19:1 I lean hard into the oak, wider around than my pants.

I look up and re-preach Sunday to the branches stretching into the heavens. I vent frustration and fatigue.

The tree seems to listen as the mountain airs a deep rumble.

Todd Sukany 79 Too Long Behind the Curtain “And the people waited…and marveled that he tarried so long in the temple.” —Luke 1:21 The anxiety is tangible.

Zacharias, our seasoned veteran of the priesthood.

Decades of in-and-out of the Presence. So familiar with prayer.

So familiar with angels.

So familiar with sacrifice.

He’s made a habit of prompt.

In then out. All in relaxed time. He seldom dawdles. He seldom describes what happens behind closed curtains. He seldom speaks without good reason.

What is taking so long?

Incensed, we’re starting to burn.

Word on the Street “And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman….” — John 8:3 Jilted one sabbath before bar mitzvah, I have watched you, Mari, day after day, from the shadows, leering each new lover. Days passed into a decade; and today, today is the snap, the lurch, the capture, the stanchion before the Nazarene, the rabbi, the blasphemer. We toss you to the center of the crowd, waiting, waiting as he draws a nail-pointed hand through years of dirt.

80 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal After Supper “And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me drink….”

– 2 Sam. 23:15 Roasted lamb and skewers of leeks reduced to a plate of bones and leaves.

A full-bellied sigh, before the plates of apricot cakes, sounds like steam and broccoli. None but three of the mighty acted--their love like rivulets in the sand of the valley of giants.

From One Angle “All a man’s ways seem right to him” — Prov. 21:2 HB, your heart says, “All is well…superb, in fact.” You heard a “You’re free” from your father. A decade of lawlessness and sin pardoned.

The largest broom swept it away.

Any remaining dust will be gathered in a pan and tossed aside like promises to peasants.

All traces and trails erased. Sleepless nights, medicated stupors, incriminating videos–all removed like tiny, burned-out bulbs lining the hallways. Close your bloodshot eyes and enjoy this never-ending darkness.

John J. Han 81

Roaming with Flannery O’Connor’s Characters: A Photo Essay from Rural Georgia John J. Han Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), a Georgia-born novelist and short story writer, lived a brief but remarkable life. Born in Savannah and raised in a devout Irish Catholic family in the small city of Milledgeville, she majored in English and sociology at Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University). She then entered graduate school at the University of Iowa, intending to major in journalism, but soon switched to creative writing, earning her MFA in 1947.

Her promising literary career was dramatically altered in 1952 when she was diagnosed with lupus, the same illness that had claimed her father’s life at 45. Aware of the disease’s inevitability, O’Connor left the literary circles of New York and Connecticut and returned to Georgia. She settled at Andalusia, her widowed mother’s dairy farm five miles north of downtown Milledgeville, where she spent the remaining twelve years of her life. Despite her illness, these years were marked by impressive productivity: she wrote two novels, 32 short stories, numerous book reviews, and a vast number of letters. She also gave public lectures, raised peacocks, and attended daily Mass.

Although her literary output was modest in volume, O’Connor has become a towering figure in American literature, especially as a Christian and Southern writer. Her uncompromising Catholic faith earned her devoted readers and scholars from both Catholic and evangelical traditions. Her fiction—marked by violence, the grotesque, and dark humor—leaves a lasting impression on readers. Yet her legacy remains complex, particularly regarding race. Since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, scrutiny of her racial views has intensified. Some readers venerate her as “a saint” in the Catholic tradition, while others regard her as a racist. Indeed, scholarly opinion remains divided: some argue that she was anti-racist, while others take the opposite view, and compelling arguments exist on both sides. The truth likely lies somewhere in between. O’Connor was a product of her time and region, but she was also a deeply sincere Christian, aware of her mortality from her midtwenties. She died at just 39, and one cannot help but wonder how her social and moral views might have evolved had she lived longer.

For O’Connor scholars, March 2025 marked a major milestone: the centennial of her birth. Born on March 25, 1925, she was honored with a month-long celebration, organized by the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at her alma mater, Georgia College & State University. As part of the festivities, the Institute awarded travel grants to five O’Connor scholars for a week-long residency in Milledgeville. I was honored to be among those selected, attending from March 24 to 29. In this photo essay, I share selected images from that week, accompanied by brief reflections.

82 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal During my time as a visiting scholar, I attended lectures, toured Andalusia again, and drove to nearby rural locations that resemble the landscapes in O’Connor’s fiction. One of the highlights of the event was the exhibition of O’Connor’s artworks, displayed publicly for the first time.

Many of the pieces were typical of her style: comical. However, one painting caught my special attention: a portrait of a well-dressed Black girl, around six years old. Dressed as if for Sunday, she gazed directly at the artist. She could have been the child of a hired Black family on her mother’s farm, or perhaps someone else O’Connor knew. Given the ongoing debate about O’Connor’s views on race, the painting made me reflect on her intentions. Would someone considered racist devote time and care to portraying this non-white child? In his centennial address titled “O’Connor’s Other Art,” Dr. Robert “Bob” Donahoo of Sam Houston State University—one of the leading O’Connor scholars—remarked that he had wondered the same thing.

This was my fourth visit to Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, yet each visit reveals something new. For me, coming here feels like a pilgrimage. I’m continually struck by how much O’Connor’s literary stature has grown. Georgia College & State University now places her legacy at the heart of its institutional identity. Her influence has helped transform the university into a center for literary scholarship, drawing English majors from beyond Georgia and attracting scholars from across the country and abroad to study her life and work. Given the distance between St. Louis and central Georgia, I’m unsure if I’ll have the chance to return to Milledgeville. It would be wonderful to visit again—and to see its mild-mannered, welcoming residents. But even if I don’t, Milledgeville will remain in my heart just as deeply as the many haiku sites I have visited in Japan.

One of the highlights of Flannery at 100 at GCST in March 2025 was a celebration of the fiction writer as a visual artist.

John J. Han 83

Milledgeville, Georgia’s capital from 1804 to 1868, is located 98 miles southeast of Atlanta and 21 miles south of Eatonton. It was here that Flannery O’Connor earned her undergraduate degree in English and sociology at Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University). Nearby Eatonton is the birthplace of two other notable writers: Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), famed for his Uncle Remus stories, and Alice Walker (b. 1944), best known for her Pulitzer Prizewinning novel The Color Purple (1982). Credit: Google Maps.

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Visitors to Georgia quickly notice the distinctive red color of its soil—a feature often referenced in O’Connor’s fiction. Near the end of her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), for instance, she writes, “Haze got out and glanced at the view. The embankment dropped down for about thirty feet, sheer washed-out red clay, into a partly burnt pasture where there was one scrub cow lying near a puddle. Over in the middle distance there was a one-room shack with a buzzard standing hunch-shouldered on the roof.”

John J. Han 85

This old, weathered structure at Andalusia appears to have once been a sharecropper’s cabin or a tenant farmer’s shack. In O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person,” which is set on a farm strikingly similar to Andalusia, the Shortleys—a white farmhand family—live and work there. The arrival of Mr. Guizac and his family, Polish refugees from post-World War II Europe, disrupts the uneasy balance of the farm. When Mrs. McIntyre, the farm owner, begins to favor the industrious Mr. Guizac, the Shortleys abandon the farm. Mrs. Shortley dies suddenly on the road, and Mr. Shortley later returns and is welcomed back. Ultimately, he causes Mr. Guizac’s death by passively allowing him to be run over by a tractor. One by one, the farmhands leave, and Mrs. McIntyre is left bedridden and alone, visited only by a Catholic priest.

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While driving on GA-49 South, the highway connecting Milledgeville and Macon, I pulled over to take a photo of this spot. The gate, secured with a chain lock to keep people out of the forest, reminded me of Powderhead— the clearing occupied by Mason Tarwater, great-uncle to Francis Marion Tarwater in O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960). A selfproclaimed prophet, Mason lives in isolation, guarding his patch of forest and raising the boy he kidnapped to carry on his religious mission. Rayber, a schoolteacher and Francis’s uncle, tries to rescue the boy from Mason’s anti-modern, backwoods theology but fails. After Mason’s death, Francis ultimately embraces the prophetic destiny his great-uncle prepared him for.

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Located midway between Eatonton and Milledgeville, Sinclair Lake is a man-made reservoir designed for camping, swimming, boating, and other outdoor activities. In The Violent Bear It Away, the schoolteacher’s intellectually challenged son, Bishop, drowns in a boating accident on a lake that might have resembled this one. Remembering Mason’s longstanding command to baptize Bishop, Francis takes the boy out in a boat, performs the baptismal ritual, and ends up killing him. In doing so, Francis fulfills two opposing commands: Mason’s Christian directive to baptize the “dim-witted child” and the Devil’s insistent urge to drown him.

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Part of a cemetery in Dublin, GA. Death—or the looming possibility of it— hovers over much of O’Connor’s fiction. A fatal outcome is often foreshadowed early in her stories, as in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Before the family trip, the grandmother dresses in a way that will ensure she is recognized as a lady if she dies: “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”

Later, during the drive, she and her grandchildren cheerfully discuss a graveyard, unaware that they will soon meet their own deaths. O’Connor’s unsettling blend of comedy and tragedy intensifies the eerie atmosphere as the story nears its violent climax: The children exchanged comic books.

The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children’s mother passed him over the front seat to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island. “Look at the graveyard!” the grandmother said, pointing it out. “That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation.”

“Where’s the plantation?” John Wesley asked.

“Gone With the Wind,” said the grandmother. “Ha. Ha.”

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Trees and woods, so common in Georgia, often signify more than just physical landscapes—they serve as settings for the spiritual drama that unfolds in O’Connor’s stories. In “A Circle in the Fire,” the setting is the farm of Mrs. Cope, one of O’Connor’s many self-righteous Christian characters. One day, she is visited by Powell Boyd—the son of a former farmhand—and two of his teenage friends. Though Powell says he has missed the farm, Mrs. Cope declines their request to stay overnight in her barn. Offended by her cold reception, the boys wreak havoc on the property, ultimately setting her woods on fire. In the story, the boys are compared to Daniel and his two Hebrew companions who survive the fiery furnace in the Book of Daniel.

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An academic building on the campus of Georgia College & State University. O’Connor often mocks higher education for its detachment from real life and its air of intellectual arrogance. In “Good Country People,” for example, she targets the naïveté of academic pride through Hulga, a woman who spitefully changes her name from “Joy” to “Hulga” and holds a PhD in philosophy. Despite her intellectual posturing, Hulga is deceived and humiliated by a seemingly sincere but uneducated “Bible salesman”—a con artist with a disturbing hobby.

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By the Oconee River in Dublin, located 51 miles southeast of Milledgeville, I pose as the evangelist Bevel Summers from O’Connor’s story “The River.”

In the story, he baptizes Harry Ashfield, a neglected 3- or 4-year-old boy, in the river. The next day, driven by his longing to reach the Kingdom of Christ, the boy returns to the river alone and drowns while reenacting his baptism. Below is O’Connor’s portrayal of Bevel Summers: The preacher was standing about ten feet out in the stream where the water came up to his knees. He was a tall youth in khaki trousers that he had rolled up higher than the water. He had on a blue shirt and a red scarf around his neck but no hat and his lightcolored hair was cut in sideburns that curved into the hollows of his cheeks. His face was all bone and red light reflected from the river. He looked as if he might have been nineteen years old. He was singing in a high twangy voice, above the singing on the bank, and he kept his hands behind him and his head tilted back.

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(Top) A warning sign at the entrance to the Oconee River Greenway in Milledgeville recalls the danger young Harry Ashfield fails to perceive in O’Connor’s “The River.” As Harry wades into the water in search of the Kingdom of Christ, Mr. Paradise—the atheistic gas station owner—tries to save him but emerges “empty-handed.” Beneath the surface, however, the boy feels a deep peace and “[knows] he [is] getting somewhere.”

(Bottom) As daylight fades at the Oconee River Greenway, a heron stands motionless, watching for its prey.

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I have arrived in Toomsboro—or should I say Toombsboro, as in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—ready to pursue the Misfit, who kills the smug grandmother, and his two criminal companions, who execute her family. The town is located 23 miles south of Milledgeville. O’Connor’s story mentions this town: They [the family] drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it.

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In northern Toomsboro, I came across a dirt road off Georgia State Route 112 that led to the Duncan Boone Mine—a quiet, secluded place that reminded me of the spot where the grandmother and her family are executed in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In the story, the grandmother’s son, Bailey, turns onto a dirt road in search of an old plantation house she vaguely remembers: “We'll all stay in the car,” his mother [Bailey’s wife] said. They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day’s journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, 6 then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dustcoated trees looking down on them.

John J. Han 95 Jesus is alive and well in rural Georgia.

Toomsboro Baptist Church displays two crosses outside, emphasizing the central role of the cross in evangelical faith.

A giant brick cross sits on the grounds of a cemetery in Dublin, GA—a town that appears in James Joyce’s complex novel Finnegans Wake (1939).

This billboard in Dublin, GA, offers Christian support for those struggling with anxiety: “Anxious? JESUS offers rest.”

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(Top) Chosen Church of God in Eatonton, GA. (Bottom) St. James Church of God in Eatonton, GA. In her fiction, O’Connor often references the Church of God, a denomination with a strong presence in the Deep South. Her short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” includes the following lines: “‘Huh,’ the child said, ‘They wear pants. They’re sixteen and they got a car. Somebody said they were both going to be Church of God preachers because you don’t have to know nothing to be one.’” This passage reflects a common stereotype of fundamentalist and charismatic denominations as antiintellectual. While O’Connor was fascinated by—and often even admired— the zeal of such Protestants, she ultimately regarded them as adherents of flawed theology. For a more detailed discussion, see my article, “A Roman Catholic Response to Nihilism and Protestantism: Wise Blood as an AntiKafkaesque Novel,” in Wise Blood: A Re-Consideration, edited by John J. Han (Amsterdam & New York: Brill, 2011), pp. 181–205.

Notes on Contributors 97

Notes on Contributors Matthew Bardowell <Matthew.Bardowell@mobap.edu>, is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University, where he teaches classes from composition to British Literature. He specializes in Old English and Old Norse poetry and the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He is co-editor of Certainty and Ambiguity: Essays on the Moral Imagination of Mystery Fiction. His recent work appears in From Rus' to Rímur: Norse History, Culture, and Literature East and West published

by Cornell UP. He has a forthcoming chapter on G. K. Chesterton in a volume on literary apologetics that will be published by De Gruyter. Bardowell holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University.

Jane Beal (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) <jbeal@laverne.edu> is Professor of English Literature at the University of La Verne. She is the author or editor of eight academic books and over forty peer-reviewed articles and chapters, primarily on the Pearl-poet, the Polychronicon, and the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien. Her poetry collections include Sanctuary, Rising, and Song of the Selkie, eight haiku microchaps, and three audio recording projects combining poetry and music, “Songs from the Secret Life,” “Love Song,” and, co-created with her brother Andrew Beal, “The Jazz Bird,” available from Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify. To learn more about her and her work, see https://janebeal.wordpress.com.

Matthew Steven Bracey (J.D., Ph.D.) <mbracey@welch.edu> is the Vice Provost for Academic Administration and Assistant Professor of Theology and Culture at Welch College. He is an editor and/or contributor of several books, including Teacher, Scholar, Shepherd; Christians in Culture; Secularism and the American Republic; The Promise of Arminian Theology; and Sexuality, Gender, and the Church. He has also written numerous peer-reviewed and popular articles and is a co-founder and Senior Editor of the Helwys Society Forum (https://www.helwyssocietyforum.com/). Matthew has been married to Sarah for twelve years and is expecting their first child to be born this fall.

Gideon Braley <2390914@mobap.edu> is a junior at Missouri Baptist University, majoring in Liberal Arts. He lives around the small but growing town of Troy, Missouri. He thanks God that he has had a relatively quiet life so far. However, his imagination has always been quite vibrant and active. As a result, he has sought to quench that imagination in the activities of writing. He has always enjoyed reading books and hopes to write his own someday. Until then, he is testing out his skills on creating essays, short stories, and even poetry. As a Christian, one of his goals in life is to show people the power and goodness of God through his writing, even if it is in sometimes subtle ways.

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Aaron S. Halstead <Aaron.Halstead@mobap.edu> is an adjunct professor for the School of Humanities and Theology at Missouri Baptist University. He is also the Lead Pastor of the Teaching and Worship Ministries at Mid-Cities Church in Maplewood, Missouri. He received a Ph.D. in Preaching, minoring in Systematic Theology, from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, writing on the proclamation theology of Heinrich Bullinger and its appropriation into a Baptist theology of preaching. His research interests include homiletics, proclamation and kerygmatic theology, systematic and historical theology, Baptist identity, the Protestant Reformation, and Anabaptists. He is married with two children, ages 6 and 3.

John J. Han <john.han@mobap.edu> is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Theology at Missouri Baptist University. Han is the author, editor, coeditor, or translator of 35 books, including Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction: Essays on the Moral Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). He and C. Clark Triplett are co-editing a forthcoming volume, tentatively titled Cached in the Hills: Critical Essays on Ozarks Literature. The University of Arkansas Press has accepted their proposal.

He earned his M.A. from Kansas State University, his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and his Writing Certificate in English from Missouri Baptist University.

Elsa Linson <2076186@mobap.edu> is a senior at Missouri Baptist University, earning her bachelor’s degree in English with a literature concentration and history minor. She has loved stories her entire life, and it is this love that led her to pursue an English major and shaped her desire to work in a library after graduation. Genre fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and the like—has always been her particular favorite, and one of her goals is to further scholarly study of less traditionally academic media, such as comic books. This is her first conference piece.

Julie Ooms <Julie.Ooms@mobap.edu> is Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in 2014, focusing on twentieth-century war literature. Her current research focuses on Christian practices for teaching reading and the crossroads of religion and secularism in twentieth-century American fiction. She has published articles on the writing of Tim O’Brien, J.D. Salinger, and Sylvia Plath in Renascence, Journal of the Short Story in English, Christian Scholar’s Review, and Plath Profiles. Her book chapter about female friendship in two novels, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, was published in Navigating Women’s Friendships in American Literature and Culture from Palgrave in 2022.

Her book (co-written with Rachel B. Griffis and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts), On Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert Distraction, Hostility,

Notes on Contributors 99 and Consumerism (Baker Academic, 2024), which Christianity Today selected as a 2025 Book Award Finalist in Culture, Poetry and the Arts.

Michelle Ryan <2183310@mobap.edu> is a student at Missouri Baptist University. She will graduate in the spring of 2025 with her BA in Communication Studies with Honors. She currently works for her university and Rossman Elementary School.

Michael Shoemaker <mtshoe@yahoo.com> is a poet, photographer, haikuist, and editor from Magna, Utah, where he lives with his wife and son and enjoys looking out on the Great Salt Lake every day. His poems have appeared in Seashores Haiku Journal, Blue Lake Review, Under the Bashō, and Haiku Commentary. He is the author of three poetry/photography collections and a nominee for the 2025 Haiku Foundation Touchstone Awards, Best of the Net Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize. In October 2025, he will be the Woolf Cottage Writer-inResidence sponsored by the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts in Fairhope, Alabama. https://michaelshoemaker.crevado.com/ Julie Steinbeck <Julie.Steinbeck@mobap.edu> is a St. Louis-area native. After graduating from Truman State University with her Master of Arts in Education, Steinbeck began teaching college English in 2016 and is now the Director of First-Year Composition at Missouri Baptist University.

Most of her teaching work centers on showing freshmen how to write and seniors how to parse sentences and finalize their capstone projects. Her poetry and nonfiction writing appear in Cantos, Fireflies’ Light, Intégrité, and The Right Words. Steinbeck enjoys the English language, dogs, hot beverages, music, and new recipes. She cannot be left unsupervised in bookstores.

Todd Sukany <tasukany@gmail.com>, a two-time Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over forty years. His work has appeared in Ancient Paths, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. Sukany authored Frisco Trail and Tales as well as co-authored four books of poetry under the title, Book of Mirrors, with Raymond Kirk. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing music, loving three children, their spouses, seven grandchildren, caring for two rescued dogs, and four rescued cats.

Christopher Talbot <ctalbot@welch.edu> is the Program Coordinator for Youth and Family Ministry and Campus Pastor at Welch College. He earned his PhD in Apologetics and Culture from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written numerous popular and academic articles on Francis Schaeffer, who is the focus of his dissertation. These publications include First Things, The Gospel Coalition, and the Westminster Theological Journal. He is the Assistant Managing

100Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Editor for the Journal of Youth Ministry. He has written chapters for numerous books and is the co-editor of Christians in Culture: Cultivating A Christian Worldview for All of Life (Welch College Press, 2023).

Heather Hallberg Yanda <yanda@alfred.edu> teaches in the English Department at Alfred University, in the hills of upstate New York. After many years of sending poems out, some getting rejected and others, published in such journals as Barely South Review, Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, and (forthcoming) in The Yale Journal of Medical Humanities; and amid a world-wide pandemic, her first collection of poems, Late Summer’s Origami, was published by Ashland Poetry Press. She is looking for a publisher for her second collection, What the Stones Borrowed.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Submission Guidelines Intégrité (pronounced IN-tay-gri-tay) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal focused on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. Founded in the fall of 2002 with an Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College, the journal is published both online and in print.

Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles (15-25 pages double-spaced), short essays on faith and learning (8-12 pages double-spaced), book reviews (4-8 pages double-spaced), and poetry (5-15 poems single-spaced) for consideration. Along with your work, we need an author bio of 100-125 words written in the third person and complete sentences. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1 for inclusion in the fall issue.

Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith-learning integration. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: • • • • • • • • • •

the current state and/or future of the church-related college history of Christian liberal arts education Christianity and contemporary culture artificial intelligence (AI) and Christian education a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity service learning academic freedom in a Christian context implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines Christian education in the non-Western world global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith-learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic. Articles are expected to be research-based but must focus on the author’s original thought. We also do not consider articles that use more than twenty-five secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especially lengthy ones, should be used sparingly.

Considering that most Intégrité readers are Christian scholars and educators without expertise in multiple disciplines, articles, short essays, and book reviews should be written in a concise, clear, and accessible style.

Writers are encouraged to follow the advice of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write naturally; and avoid fancy words.

For citation style, refer to the current edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Articles and short essays should include intext citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Enter endnotes manually instead of using the “Insert Endnote” function in a wordprocessing program. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after direct quotations.