Radical orthodoxy

Here’s an interview with the author of Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise (via A Conservative Blog for Peace).

Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?
These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various secular disciplines. They’re interesting people because they’re both subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the church or subversive of the faith.

They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn’t just protest against it or isolate from it.

[…]

It’s ironic that while [Thomas] Merton had left the world for the monastery, through his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians have a different take on political action.

If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who have laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an alternative vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive Christian perspective that doesn’t argue about things so much as reveal things.

Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these people don’t want to change the world. Changing the world is not their number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve the world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that you have to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the way the mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will mean that you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and you will listen. You don’t come in with this top down agenda and take everybody’s life apart so that you can put it back together again.

[Kentucky writer and farmer] Wendell Berry’s method is to ask how this reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with the people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The guy I think who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he was sent to the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human beings. He came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and healing one’s suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political ideology and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has to be regained between people before you can talk about politics. And that’s why ideological posturing, even if you’re right, is counterproductive.

Sounds like an interesting book. Other figures discussed include Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jacques Ellul, Jack Kerouac, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and E.F. Schumacher.