New Books

In preparation for my final exhibit coming at the end of April, I've been picking up a few books to help guide some of my thoughts on the project. I've been thinking a lot about the photographic object itself...its history, lost images, how they are used etc. Too often we tend to look "through" the photograph to the referent, subject or what is imaged. And yet, the object nature of the photograph cannot be separated from its subject.

The Art of the American Snapshot is a fabulous collection and history of vernacular photography. This is one of the first books I bought in this direction and it is definitely my favorite because of its diversity of photo techniques and essays, and sheer volume of images.

Another similar, and much smaller text is In the Vernacular. This book also functions like a very select group of images from an exhibition. They also break the images into various categories of archive, proof, surrogate, and yardstick. The images and their functions are explored through these categories.

I've also picked up a few texts on the photo album and its histories and functions. Suspended Conversations is the most recent text that I have purchased. More essays than photos, it looks to be a helpful guide. Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album runs the other way with photographs of and interpretations of various antique photographs. The book itself invites touch with its green embossed felt cover.

More Thoughts on Hauerwas' The Peaceable Kingdom

Sometimes I imagine conversations with important folk. Its not an escapist exercise, but rather an exercise of critical thinking. How would this person respond to my questions. As I have been re-reading Hauerwas, I have several questions I would like to ask. One of the little things I would like to ask Dr Hauerwas is why he chooses to say that we appropriate the story rather than are appropriated into it.... it just seems highly susceptible to our individualistic tendencies. I have this image of a river picking up rocks and tumbling them down stream in the current. As they go, they are shaped and rounded by the water and other rocks. This is what I imagine happening as we are taken into the story. When we take story into our own hands we tend to spill it and remove pieces from the whole and the power of the current is lost in our handful of water.

Hauerwas is helpful in taking a realistic account of communities “attempts” (his words) at faithfully living the story. Understanding our sinfulness is a key aspect of understanding the story and God. A fundamental piece of the story is recognition of our sinfulness and that we are in process, thus our communities are in process as we try and often fail to live the story in a helpful manner.

Hauerwas makes a beautiful statement about the role of tradition, “to gratefully inherit a tradition is but to recognize and honor the chain of actual benefactors who have sustained the skills and stories that provide us with the means to know and live our lives as God’s creatures” (27). This cloud of witnesses that have gone before us struggled as we struggle now to become proficient in telling the story. We must recognize that we are part of a tradition, multiple traditions, that impact (and at times infect) our interpretations. Without recognizing our benefactors we are much more prone to be derailed in our attempts to understand and share the story. Perhaps the individualism our heritage fostered is why we have so many splinter heterodox groups in American history.

Carrying on in the role of tradition (his connection to McIntyre is quite obvious at these points) if the ethic is removed from the contextual story, we as its participants become “alienated from ourselves, we lose the ability to locate the history of which we are a part.” This is a wonderful and challenging statement. Our culture is one of purposeful amnesia. By forgetting we owe nothing to no one and we presume that we really can be autonomous individuals making up our life and ethic as we go along. We are our stories. We cannot leave our past behind with another move, another church, another spouse. It is who we are. When we have cast off our stories that give a grounding in a community or context we are lost. We may not like our storied past, but we cannot escape it.

Book Recommendations

I've been working my way through several books lately preparing for my conference papers. A few of which are certainly notable. The first, Ecotopia The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video looks at photography and ecology. The text includes a nice roundtable discussion and works from 35+ artists. This is essentially the catalog from the show.








The second, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, looks at just that...suburban landscapes. Published by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, this is a collection of work and essays dealing with social life in the burbs. If you are interested in ideas of sprawl, consumption, bix box stores and what happens in the wake of commercialism under the veneer this is an excellent text.

Thoughts On Hauerwas' The Peaceable Kingdom

I’ve been rereading Stanley Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom and continue to find things I could write on for the entire semester from just the first chapter. I’ve been interested in reading Hauerwas for some time. I have an existing conceptually rough outline of his perspective, but it has already been confirmed by the first chapter.

Hauerwas starts off by saying, “All ethical reflection occurs relative to a particular time and place.” Ethics, he claims, is determined by the particularities and peculiarities of a community and history. It is contextual. But Hauerwas says that this runs counter to much of ethical reflection in Modernity that sought a universal and objective ethic with unchangeable principles. I think this is a hard pill for many to swallow at least initially. Though my hunch is that is their inability to find such a universal that drives them onward. Because things are so ambiguous at times, I can see why many want to create a universal set of principles on which society must reside. Hauerwas notes the irony that our dogmatism hides our profound doubt. I was just chatting about this with a friend the other day about how our family and social upbringing impacted our view of God and the theological system we find ourselves most comfortable with. She had remarked that sought out her Catholic aunt who was a nun when her family and home life was falling apart because she wanted a solid theological framework around her to give her life stability. I have seen this in others as well. As her life became more stable over the years, her theology grew from the fundamentalist answers she held on to so tightly at the beginning of her faith journey to and embracing of the question and mystery of God now.

Hauerwas is also keen on deflating the modern individual and how the lone person tries to conceive, in isolated freedom, a personal ethic without impingement upon his or her neighbors. Ethics, for Hauerwas, is not a matter of ones own shaping rather something that shapes us. He states, “We do not create moral values, principles, virtues; rather they constitute a life for us to appropriate.” While I agree with the thrust of this thought, I would want to make one small change to suggest that we are appropriated into the tradition. To say that we appropriate this life still suggests the priority of the individual rather than the story.

Hauerwas presents a similar story to that of Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart. Where there is no shared standard value system, individuals all exist on equal ground where tolerance becomes the virtue of plurality. As a private matter, one cannot impose upon another’s chosen values. In such a world, conflicts are resolved by “honesty and communication” of ones “needs and desires” as matters of “technical problem solving, not moral decision.” Morality then is based on the highly subjective nature of personal preferences. Values are arbitrarily chosen. As a result, successful self-reliance and self-fulfillment become the standards for choosing those preferences and yet, that self-fulfillment is done in radical isolation without means of affecting that same fulfillment for others. The only, and very ironic, fragile unity that such a strident diversity is able to bring about is in the language of individual rights.

One of the other key directions that Hauerwas introduces is the idea of practices. These practices shape both the individual and communities to embody the storied ethic. This was one of the ideas I was wrestling with a few weeks ago in my posting. I was struggling to articulate the insufficiency of an abstract or objective privatized religion. Such a state of affairs has a tendency for a detached critique rather than a love embodied into the world. Practices, like baptism and the Eucharist, ground or embody our ethics in the lives of the community, rather in the abstraction of the radical individual. Thus our participation in the life of the community is formative shaping us in those right commitments to be acted in the world. Since we are all sinful we need to be trained and well practiced to desire rightly. Something that cannot be done on our own because since we are sinful, we cannot rightly conceive of what is good. What we begin to see is an incarnational ethic. We do not simply conceive of a set of principles from our theology, rather our theology is our ethic. They are not separate matters.

The last thing I wanted to touch on is his non-violence methodology. This is something new that I will be looking at. I have thought about the violence in terms of our actions, but not really considered the violence done by our methodology. Like a computers operating system that determines the actions outcomes one can take, our methodology would seem to suggest the same thing. It is not just the resultant actions that are violent but also the methods behind them. Hauerwas suggests, “For the attempts to secure peace though founding morality on rationality itself, or some other inherent human characteristic, ironically underwrites coercion. If others refuse to accept my account of rationality, it seems within my bounds to force them to be true to their true selves.” He further states that “peace is not something to be achieved by our power.” Central to that direction is a peaceful acceptance of diversity within the Body, rather than forcing everyone to an objective morality. This is a challenging statement for the ecclesia of God.

Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, ( ), 1.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid.
Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 16.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 16.
Hauerwas, 12.
Ibid.

Catholicity and the New Topographics II

(Water Towers, 1980 - Bernd and Hilla Becher)
















Sheldrake’s first chapter wrestles with complexity and diversity of place which makes it very difficult to pin down in theory and perhaps in practice as well.

Essentially, place “refers not simply to geographical location but to a dialectical relationship between environment and human narrative. Place is space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious.”[1] Sheldrake is already weeding through common misconceptions of place as simple location as is used in common language today. Secondly, Sheldrake accurately points out the dialectic between the environment and humanity and its reciprocity. Humanity shapes and cultivates its environment which simultaneously impacts its local residents. Sheldrake also leans heavily upon narrative structured remembering and history accounts through Paul Ricouer. A third component of Sheldrake’s theology of place is rooted, to use a metaphor of place, in the evoking of what is precious. What is precious and how does this work? Memory and imagination, formed in the liturgy by the Eucharist will likely play a prominent role in answering these questions.

As I considered the “dialectical” component of Sheldrake’s work, I began to think about Genesis and the creation stories. God offers Adam dominion over creation and not domination. But in our technological age, have we lost the understanding of the “give and take” relationship we have with the environment? Has the earth become another means toward personal and global fulfillment? Another entity that those in power enact said power upon? Do we only recognize the reciprocity in the midst of tragedies such as the tsunami, hurricanes, tornados, and draughts?

So as I am reading Sheldrake’s work again I am continuing to direct my thoughts toward the New Topographics. In the introduction to my paper I’ve written,

“In 1975, William Jenkins, the Assistant Curator of 20th Century Photography at the George Eastman House gallery convened a landmark exhibit titled, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” The ten invited photographers,[2] each with a distinctive approach, shared a common aesthetic through which they worked. By shifting their lenses from the pristine and Edenic West found in the work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, they focused a documentary-like objective gaze upon the emerging banality of place under the shifting weight of industry and consumptive patterns. In turn, they ushered in a profound alteration in landscape photography. Despite the absence of humanity from the images, their work speaks prominently of anthropology and the human imprint upon the landscape.”

The subtitle caught my attention today after reading Sheldrake…”Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” If you have not seen any of their work, a common feature is the lack of actual humanity. I cannot recall any images of humanity even being in the show. But the human foot/fingerprint is readily present. Here, most prominently is one half of the dialectic; human imprints upon the world. Only, in a few of Robert Adams photographs, are we subtly aware of nature’s push back into human endeavors.

[1] Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, p.1.
[2] Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr.

Catholicity and the New Topographics

(Holden St. North Adams, Massachusetts, 1974 by Stephen Shore)

Well now that Christmas day has passed and all the preparations that went into it, I feel as if I can finally turn my attention to research and writing the paper for CTS at the end of May. The paper is titled, Re-Viewing Place: Catholicity and the New Topographics which is an attempt to reconcile my studies in art, theology and place into a cohesive proposal. I am thankful that I have made good headway into researching the New Topographics this last semester in my 20th & 21st C. Art History Class. One of the struggles in this project is the relatively little engagement this group has received until a more recent resurgence in interest in the group.

My paper will examine Philip Sheldrake's Spaces for the Sacred as a potential hermeneutical lens, not only for place, but the landscapes of the New Topographics. Sheldrake's lens is one of catholicity formed by the Eucharist. My hope is to explore the implications of his proposal for mission, and to some extent ethics and ecology.

My hope is to fill postings here with my progress and musings over the next few months as I interact with these ideas. I am beginning with a re-reading of Sheldrake's text which I read in 2006 as part of a larger inquiry into sacred space/place.

Pith of the Apocalypse

My New Testament Professor from seminary, Paul Rainbow, has recently published a new commentary on Revelations entitled The Pith of the Apocalypse: Essential Message and Principles For Interpretation.


From the Sioux Falls Seminary Website...
Focusing on the prophetic summons to the church in the book of Revelation, Pith was written to help interpreters see more clearly the text's message to serve God and Christ faithfully in the midst of a pagan society that exalts power, wealth, and pleasure and to revisit the text with enhanced confidence and understanding.

According to Rainbow, his aspirations for The Pith of the Apocalypse were "to open up the book to the bewildered by explaining some generally accepted principles of interpretation that any thoughtful person can use to penetrate its message. The present study is intended for practicing clergy and theological students; for questing lay leaders who want an approach informed by recent scholarship; even, in places, for scholars prying into unsolved problems."

Can These Bones Live?: A Catholic Baptist Engagement with Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory by Barry Harvey

I am so excited to get a look at Barry Harvey's recent text. I have had the privilege of meeting Barry at the joint national meetings of the College Theology Society and National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion (see links below). Harvey’s previous work, Another City explores the nature of the church as an altera civitas in a post-Christian environment. My hunch is that his new text will offer a more in depth, and decidedly more catholic perspective.

Product Description (from Amazon.com)
In this book, Barry Harvey offers a doctrine of the church that combines Baptist distinctives and origins with an unbending commitment to the visible church as the social body of Christ. Writing from a postliberal, post-Constantinian perspective, Harvey outlines how the church, in its current Western setting, needs to recover and reinvigorate core ecclesial practices in order to "remember the scattered followers of Jesus into the earthy-historical form of the crucified and risen Christ." These core practices include the theological interpretation of Scripture, the development of sound doctrine, the centrality of baptism and the Eucharist, the exercises of spiritual discipline, and the cultivation of the church as a distinctive social body. This book will serve as a useful text for students of ecclesiology, systematic theology, missiology, and ethics.

From the Back Cover
"Barry Harvey has written a small Summa for our time, a fine compendium of ecclesial wisdom for making Christian witness to the principalities and powers of our age. With massive learning, both theological and biblical, he offers us a real masterwork, a splendid demonstration of theological thinking at its best, fully mature and fully engaged with church and world alike."--Ralph C. Wood, Baylor University

"Barry Harvey contends that Free churches in North America, and throughout the world, do not merely exist in a state of division. Like the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision, they lie scattered and lifeless. But this book is not merely an exercise in social criticism. It constructively shows how to understand what it might mean for Christ's dismembered body to be re-membered. Harvey's aim is to enable readers to imagine such a future so that they may desire it. If he is successful, there is yet hope for renewal."--Curtis W. Freeman, Duke University Divinity School

"In this masterful account of the contemporary church, Barry Harvey demonstrates the frightening relevance of God's question of Ezekiel to our day. His scholarship is profound, although he displays it gracefully, and his insights penetrating. While accurately describing the political, social, and economic forces that have severed the sinews of Christ's body, this marvelous work also represents a fresh breath of the Spirit, offering a rich account of the ecclesial practices that may yet clothe us with new life."--Elizabeth Newman, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond

"This book serves up impressive scholarly breadth, grounded in many streams of the Christian tradition and argued in ways that remind all branches of the church of their best insights, instincts, and practices. Engaging social theory and politics, economic analysis and the humanities, Harvey offers an exciting and pastorally relevant ecclesiology grounded in scripture, tradition, and critical thinking. This book is valuable for students, scholars, clergy, and lay people interested in how we ended up in our current situation in matters of church, politics, and culture."--Michael L. Budde, DePaul University

About the Author
Barry Harvey (PhD, Duke University) is professor of theology in the Honors College at Baylor University, author of Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer for a Post-Christian World, and coauthor of StormFront: The Good News of God. He lives in Hewitt, Texas.

Democratization of American Christianity - Nathan Hatch

Having summarized several aspects of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart last October, I want to turn briefly to Nathan Hatch’s work in Democratization of American Christianity which should help to create a better vista of how our current doctrines and practice are be compromised by individualism.

Hatch attempts to show how the democratic spirit of early America set the tone for the American church as it took on the spirit of the age. This democratic spirit emerged in three profound ways. First, American’s rejected the traditional separation between clergy and laity where power and virtue was transferred from the educated elite to larger body of individuals.[1] Apart from the well educated elite and tradition, individuals were free to explore their “spiritual impulses” thus defining faith for themselves.[2] Filled with democratic hope, Christianity was to become a liberating force for all people from authoritarian structures.[3] From these beginnings, Hatch says that three tendencies emerged for American Christianity: 1) mingling of diverse and contradictory sources, 2) fragmentation, and finally inversion of authority.[4] American religious experience mirrors what was taking place in the name of equality and freedom both at a national level and within its constituents by the systematic and simultaneous raising of the common individual by casting off oppressive authority and placing that authority into the hands of each person.[5] A largely untrained people became the prime interpreters of scripture, now taken from the oppressive hands of educated clergy revealing a populist common-sense or self-evident hermeneutic.

[1] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9.
[2] Ibid., 10.
[3] Ibid., 11.
[4] Ibid., 35.
[5] Ibid., 10.

Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 4

The lifestyle enclave becomes a means of self-expression where the self has been divided between the working public life and private and intimate sphere of the home. Once the self is separated from family, religion, and work, individuals can express their “unique identity” by joining lifestyle enclaves. Rooted in private leisure and consumption, enclaves gather those who are “socially, economically, or culturally similar” to enjoy like-minded individuals.[1] In contrast to a community which seeks to be inclusive, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life, the lifestyle enclave is exclusive. Marriages and church affiliation reduced to the affinity of lifestyle enclaves.

If we have separated the self from family, religion, work, and tradition, what is left to constitute the self? The simple answer is our preferences. But, what are these choices really based upon? If selves are simply defined by their preferences which are arbitrary, “each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself.”[2] Without any larger objective framework for right and wrong, good and evil, the self and its feelings become the moral guide.[3] The self is constantly in progress but without fixed moral end and is able to adapt behavior to various social roles.[4] Self-awareness and self-knowledge leading to personal happiness become the keys forming ones personal moral convictions.

Finding oneself also means finding the story in which our life seems to make sense. Yet they seek to do this as individuals without reference or perceived shared experience with a “larger generational, historical religious context”[5] Each life stage becomes a crisis of further individuation. Public work and the private lifestyle enclave become the means of orienting or filling ones divergent selves.

The individual, while striving for self-reliance still seeks out social interaction in the lifestyle enclave. He is afraid to admit the need to such interaction at the expense of his independence and identity. Rather than an empty, unencumbered, consuming self, what would the interactions of a encumbered self look like? The authors suggest Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue to describe communities of memory. Communities are in many ways constituted by their past and re-telling those stories as its central narrative, and by doing so, “offers examples of men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community.”[6] Traditions are built upon the stories and lives the community and “contain conceptions of character, what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such a character.”[7] These stories tell of health and sickness, success and failure bind the community to the past and turn to the future in hope. We see our part in the story being woven into the greater whole. This takes place at the family level as we pass on stories, heirlooms, and practice family rituals. Communities of memory are also practiced at the national level seen in our holidays and monuments. But powerfully we see the potential for this in the church. Each Sunday and liturgical year, our journey to the church building and worship services re-enact and re-constitute the Christian narrative and community. History and memory become the key to constituting ones future. These communities are enacted in special ways called “practices of commitment.”[8] Memories, hopes, and fears are not only passed on orally but are also practices that define the “patterns of loyalty and obligation that keep the community alive.”[9] Yet, where history is forgotten, community “degenerates into life-style enclaves.”[10]

America has had a varied past of established and disestablished religion. However, once it is disestablished it becomes a private matter to be practiced within the church walls and at home. For many in America, religion is a private and optional matter not to enter the public domain. As a private matter, the autonomous individual, apart from the constraints of any religious system is free to concoct a spirituality as they choose. The authors highlight a woman named Sheila Larson who has named her religion or faith after herself. “Sheilaism” is based on “her little voice” to “love yourself and be gentle with yourself” and “take care of each other.”[11] Since religion is a private matter, diversity or plurality is not only acceptable but encouraged.

[1] Bellah, 72.
[2] Ibid., 76.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 76-77.
[5] Ibid., 82.
[6] Ibid., 153.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 154.
[11] Ibid., 221.

Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 3

Another significant part of Bellah's study that is helpful for many is the articulation of therapeutic tendencies of our culture. Therapy is often related to the expressive individualism we just explored because it focuses on the individual and ones choices about roles, commitments, that one will make. Yet these choices are not based on a larger framework again, but according to “life-effectiveness” as the individual perceives it.[1] Therapy itself suggests a need for cure. But from what? The cure seeks to re-adjust ones social construction between self and the world, private and public meaning. Individuals are able to think in terms of commitments regarding such decisions as marriage, work, and church, as either enhancements or entanglements en route to self creation of ones individuality.[2] In the cultivation of self we see its connection to expressive individualism but its larger root comes from the rub by the incompatibility between the natures of public utilitarian individualism and the private expressive individualism. Only by accepting and asserting ourselves can we enter into “real” relationships.[3]

Several common themes emerge for American individuals: self-reliance, leaving home, leaving church, and work. Self-reliance is a nineteenth-century term popularized by Emerson. Self-reliance in the biblical and republican traditions maintains a collective note expressed in the Puritans who left society to rely upon each other.[4] Yet for the utilitarian and expressive individualists, self-reliance was purely individualistic.[5]

Individuation is a natural part of human development, yet it is a hyper-individuation in America. “Childhood is chiefly preparation for the all-important event of leaving home…in late adolescence” and becomes a recurring theme throughout life.[6] Coming of age means “breaking away from dependency on parents and relying themselves.”[7]

Not unrelated to leaving home, many American’s leave church as well. It is expected that during ones youth, decisions will be made about whether or not to attend church and subsequently which one. Individuals cannot merely assimilate the views of their parents but must make them “particularly and peculiarly one’s own.”[8] This is heightened in Protestantism by “demanding…a unique conversion experience.”[9] The authors point out a fantastic irony by saying, “just where we think we are most free, we are most coerced by the dominant beliefs of our own culture. For it is a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves.”[10]

The demand to “make something of yourself” through work is also a common theme for American individuals.[11] Our sense of work shapes how we view ourselves. For some, jobs are to make a living. For others, the career traces progress through achievement and advancement and is built on success and self-esteem.[12] Whereas calling suggest that ones work and morals are inseparable as an offering of the self into a community for the larger good.


[1] Bellah, 47.
[2] Ibid., 47.
[3] Ibid., 98.
[4] Ibid., 55.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 57.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 63.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 65.
[11] Ibid., 66.
[12] Ibid.

Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 2

For Americans, freedom is likely the most deeply resonant and shared value of American society. Yet this freedom, is conceived in the libertarian sense (as we have commented often this semester) as freedom from others values, ideas, lifestyles in both private and public life. Commonality is shared only in the right of the individual to pursue ones own ideals. Justice, based individual rights, becomes the only means to effect and ensure such equal opportunity. In so far as success, justice, and freedom all are common American themes, they provide little help in talking about anything beyond the individual.

The authors suggest that cultural traditions are conversations or arguments about the meaning of the groups shared destiny.[1] Americans have often used a biblical and/or republican mode of discourse to speak of the country’s shared destiny and meaning. The Puritans become the prime exemplar in their desire to create a community where one could live a truly spiritual life. A libertarian sense of freedom is rejected in favor of a “moral” freedom of what is “good, just, and honest” in the context of the covenant between God and humanity.[2] In contrast, the republican ideal casts Thomas Jefferson as the exemplar of public participation for the larger good of society. Equality is conceived as a universal principle defined in primarily political terms to allow equal citizen participation in a self-governing society.[3]

The authors describe individualism in two particular forms: utilitarian and expressive. Benjamin Franklin is the epitome of the utilitarian expression of individualism where the individual rises to success through hard work and personal initiative. Many believed that if each individual vigorously pursued his or her own interest, the social good would also automatically emerge.[4] Societal participation becomes contractual where individuals enter merely to advance ones self-interests.

Expressive individualism, a form of Romanticism and best exemplified by Walt Whitman, arose in reaction to the materialistic pursuits of utilitarian individualism. Expressive individualism sought to cultivate the self and self-expression where each person has a “unique core of feeling and intuition that must unfold if individuality is to be expressed.”[5] These sentiments are easily identifiable in Whitman’s writings, as well as, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and others. For the expressivists, “the ultimate use of the American’s independence was to cultivate and express the self and explore its vast social and cosmic identities.”[6]


[1] Ibid., 27. See Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 206-207.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 30-31,
[4] Ibid., 33.
[5] Ibid., 333-4.
[6] Ibid., 35.

Habits of the Heart - Robert Bellah pt. 1

“How ought we to live? How do we think about how to live? Who are we, as Americans? What is our character?”[1] So begins Habits of the Heart. Its authors, delving into the life and values of “white, middle-class Americans”[2] explore the pervasiveness of individualism. Their study and title gives homage to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America by returning to his “admiration and anxiety” over the great strength of American individuals, as well as, the potentially isolating tendency of individualism.[3] Tocqueville described these American mores or “habits of the heart” not only as “ideas and opinions but habitual practices with respect to such things as religion, political participation, and economic life.”[4] He described it as the disposition of “each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraws into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself”…where individuals “imagine their whole destiny is in their hands”…finally forgetting their ancestors and descendents.[5]
This sociological study explores the nature of the individual’s participation in both public life through local politics, activism, and voluntary associations and ones private life in terms of love, marriage, and therapy. The first chapter highlights four very distinct individuals which serve to illumine their points through out the text. Even though they betray sharp contrasts in many ways they all share a common individualistic vocabulary in conversations about morality, society, and politics which they call the “first language of American individualism.”[6] Their differences often come in a variety of second languages.
These four individuals give us a broad look at cultural values and the difficulty of reconciling them. The authors claim that our “American cultural traditions define personality, achievement and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation”[7] because ones selected “values and priorities” are merely a personal choice, as long as it does not interfere with the choices of others, and not justified by a “wider framework of purpose or belief.”[8] The good is then defined by one finds rewarding however, as ones preferences change, so does the good.[9]
Where there is no shared standard value system, individuals all exist on equal ground where tolerance becomes the virtue of plurality. As a private matter, one cannot impose upon another’s chosen values. In such a world, conflicts are resolved by “honesty and communication” of ones “needs and desires”[10] as matters of “technical problem solving, not moral decision.”[11] Morality then is based on the highly subjective nature of personal preferences. Values are arbitrarily chosen. As a result, successful self-reliance and self-fulfillment become the standards for choosing those preferences and yet, that self-fulfillment is done in radical isolation without means of affecting that same fulfillment for others.[12] The only, and very ironic, fragile unity that such a strident diversity is able to bring about is in the language of individual rights.

[1] Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), xli.
[2] Ibid., xliii
[3] Ibid., xlii
[4] Ibid., 37.
[5] Ibid., 37.
[6] Ibid., 20.
[7] Ibid., 6.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 16.
[11] Ibid., 7.
[12] Ibid., 16.