Page 1159 – Christianity Today (2024)

All Christians affirm design because the entire universe is the creative work of God. However, believers differ over how to discern design, as well as the appropriate characterization of that design, whether primarily engineering or artistic. Intelligent design (ID) advocates adopt an engineering picture of design, a perspective playing a crucial role in their argument that design is empirically detectable in specific biological phenomena.

In his recent books, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (SC), and Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (DD), Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute of Seattle, articulates the case for design in its mature form. Although SC focuses on the origin of life and DD on the Cambrian explosion, Meyer's argument for ID takes the same form in both books and largely focuses on the intricacies of cells and DNA. Therefore, our attention largely will be on SC.[1] Of course the origin of life is an area of scientific research that presents a tremendous challenge to science. Meyer's response is to offer intelligent design as providing the best explanation for the extraordinary complexity and functionality embedded in DNA.

Meyer presents what he describes as "a rigorous case for intelligent design as an inference to the best explanation." He insists that an appeal to intelligent agency provides a better explanation for the exceedingly complex, albeit functionally specific structure of DNA and the nucleus of the cell. He has long championed this more modest, somewhat chastened line of reasoning, favoring ID for its explanatory excellence. Meyer compellingly articulates the probabilistic case for intelligent design: although material processes could explain these biological phenomena, and we may yet come up with just such an account, at present, the better account is provided by appeal to an intelligent agent. One strength of this claim, then, lies in its relatively modest ambitions.

Articulating the case as an inference to the best explanation serves well to highlight that Meyer's argument turns on both the case against the causal adequacy of fully natural processes as well as on the positive case favoring intelligent agency. ID has long suffered under the misconception that it engages in crude god-of-the-gaps reasoning or presents a simplistic argument from ignorance. Meyer deftly dispatches these common lines of objection. He does so by explicitly comparing the leading materialist origins-of-life accounts with the explanatory power of intelligent agency, an analysis which focuses readers' attention on the central decision point: At present, reason reveals of intelligent design to be a better explanation for the complexity of the functionally specific structure at the very heart of the biological world compared to explanations citing natural processes alone. This sets up "Premise One" of a two-premise, summary argument: "Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information."

"Premise Two" focuses on the competing hypothesis: "Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information." What, precisely, does Meyer mean by "intelligence" in premise two? "By intelligent design I mean 'the deliberate choice of a conscious, intelligent agent or person to effect a particular outcome, end, or objective.' Clearly, intelligent agents, by their powers of choice, can make a causal difference in the outcome of events." The upshot is that reasonable assessment of the comparative strengths of each side of the ledger shows that the explanation appealing to intelligent agency trumps the promise of any currently conceivable natural process. Meyer concludes that "[i]ntelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell."

In a head-to-head competition, Meyer contends, appeal to intelligent agency wins out primarily based on Charles Lyell's "Uniformitarian principle" which insists that the laws and principles at work in the universe in the past are the very laws and principles at work at present (this same principle figures prominently in Charles Darwin's work on evolution). We have no assurance that strictly natural processes have ever produced the kind of complex, functionally specific phenomena evident in the nucleus of the cell. Yet we do know that intelligent agency, in the person of human agents, does even now produce such functionally specific phenomena. Hence, Lyell's principle gives the nod to the latter hypothesis.

This comparative line of reasoning, the crucial move in the argument, does rest, however, on some underlying assumptions. First, as we have mentioned, the argument presupposes an engineering picture of design. This is particularly evident in Meyer's treating the nucleus of the cell as an information-processing system (i.e., DNA stores programming instructions like a hard drive; RNA reads these instructions; protein factories process DNA instructions). The inference that intelligent agency is the cause of DNA is largely based on our experience of human-designed information processing systems like computers and cell phones. Meyer draws liberally upon this metaphor (likewise in DD).

Nevertheless, talk of "genetic codes" and "information processing" with respect to the origin of life or the nucleus can be very limiting if not misleading. Taken literally, such descriptions suggest something like stored codes that are read and implemented by processors, like computers, which are rigidly deterministic processing systems. But, a deterministic information processing system is less effective or reliable in comparison with a teleological or goal-directed system. There is a clear difference between a nucleus functioning deterministically and one that functions reliably. The more steps there are to a deterministic program the more opportunities for unanticipated obstacles to render it unreliable (roughly, the human DNA "code" would be the length of tens of thousands of Meyer's books). Given the length of time over which developmental processes stretch, or the length of time over which self-replicating molecules must have formed in a pre-biotic environment, the abstracted notions of programs and processing seem inadequate to capture the exquisite precision and reliability of these processes. For example, teleology is more effective and reliable as a picture of how the nucleus' processes work so well over such extended periods of time in the face of myriad contingencies. The nucleus as a goal-oriented system appears to be able to flexibly function to produce its protein products under a wide variety of circ*mstances that a deterministic set of instructions wouldn't be able to accomplish with the same degree of reliability. Similarly, the more basic self-replicating molecular processes sought by origins of life researchers would also be goal-oriented. So in comparison with the limitations of the information processing metaphor, there is a powerful motivation for why so many biologists have continued using teleological vocabulary and explanations in genetics.

Shifting to a teleological view should be a welcome move for Meyer as it seems to lead naturally to his strongest point—that DNA performs a very specific function—but it comes at a cost. The information-processing picture gives us a number of intuitions that make it natural to pick out the highly specific functions that Meyer favors. In fact, Meyer appeals to the more muted teleological language of function, rather than that of goal or purpose, allowing him to cast the argument in the objective language of science. Biologists agree: The structure of DNA, however contingent, serves well to produce a functional outcome. There is nothing subjective in this. In spite of the complexity inherent in the coding regions of DNA, the specific arrangement "hits a functional target." That is, from among the vast array of possibilities, a DNA sequence that renders possible or enhances the life of an organism betokens the intentional activity of intelligent agency. Within the information processing picture, Meyer identifies precise functional targets for DNA, but there is a great deal of room for human interpretation, here, rather than an objective appeal to data. Within the context of the "life sciences," the function seems obvious: these phenomena exist for the production and promotion of life. This is what these biological phenomena do. But, can one assign a function, an intended role, to a natural phenomenon without first supposing that the broader context has a specific function? To speak of the function of particular phenomena is already to have provided an answer to this global question in favor of design.

It is indisputable that DNA works—it produces life. It is equally indisputable that the specific sequences are exceedingly improbable and that only a very small subset advances the interests of an organism. Therefore, echoing St. Thomas, ID insists: "Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer." But, even though the archer hits this bulls-eye, why suppose that, and not some other, must have been the intended target? Thus while purporting to offer objective, scientific grounds for design detection, Meyer's ID argument retains this objectionable feature of classical teleological arguments. Inherent in the notion of a functional outcome is the presumption that life constitutes a distinguished outcome. An objective observer will realize that, if life is the goal, then that arrangement, however improbable, functions magnificently. If some other outcome were the goal, however—say the more modest goal of replication—then that outcome would have no particular value. Even though selfish gene theories have faded, a strong case still can be made on biological grounds that living organisms are a byproduct of replication in particular environments rather than the goal. Since life has value—to us—we naturally insist that any means conducive to life has distinctive value. But that's an interpretation we supply. Functional sequences do not, as Meyer maintains, "constitute an independent pattern or target"; rather, they constitute a productive means to an outcome in which we are all personally invested. ID's "functional finesse" fails to avoid the inherent interpretive nature of this underlying assumption.

Second, Meyer's comparative analysis assumes that natural processes and intelligent agency are mutually exclusive explanatory rivals. This assumption reflects an all too common dichotomy in both Christian and materialist circles that has its roots in the deistic-mechanistic picture of the world fashionable from the early 18th century forward: events in creation are brought about either by God's direct, unmediated intervention, or arise as the result of natural processes with no divine influence whatsoever. Evolutionary creationists, in contrast, argue that mechanisms such as mutation and natural selection are not, in fact, "wholly blind and undirected," so there is an alternative to the strict dichotomy. Meyer doesn't so much object to the manner by which "theistic evolution" accounts for the development and diversity of life as to its undetectability. ID is all about the signature, supposedly empirically evident in the cell, which demonstratively establishes the activity of agency. On the evolutionary creationist account, the work is signed using invisible ink.

A third assumption of Meyer's comparative argument is evident in the second prong, namely that intelligent agency has special causal powers. "A vast amount of human experience shows that intelligent agents have unique causal powers that purely material processes lack," he writes. Specifically, an agent cause possesses "self-conscious mind in possession of thoughts, will and intentions," the central components that do the explanatory work vis-à-vis those complex, functionally specific biological phenomena in question. If material processes lack such causal powers, then intelligent agency cannot be material. The analysis assumes that this present, adequate cause—mind—is fundamentally immaterial.

Two salient observations about this assumption: First, Meyer offers very little substantive support for mind having unique causal properties inasmuch as it is immaterial. Any way you look at it, what support might be available must certainly be regarded as philosophical rather than scientific. At least on this side of the ledger, ID looks more like philosophy than science.

Second, when Meyer claims that "[o]nly persons have such minds and only minds of this kind can create complex specified information," he appears guilty of begging the very question at hand. Biologists discover that, "[i]n virtue of their specific arrangements, the bases in coding regions of DNA and RNA and the amino acids in proteins enable these molecules to perform biological functions" and wonder how this might have happened. Mind, Meyer points out "now stands as the only cause known to be capable of producing" such phenomena. From this it follows that "there is only one known cause." But this phrase, "only one known cause," is crucially ambiguous. It might mean that, among all the possible causes, there is only one that we have good reason to believe is capable of producing specified complexity. This point, however, poses (could there be others?) rather than answers the question.

In contrast, Meyer stealthily uses this phrase to suggest that, among all the causes, we know that only one is capable of producing specified complexity, shifting an argument based on the epistemic limits of our knowledge to one based on the ontological limits of reality. "Logically," Meyer rightly insists, "one can infer the past existence of a cause from its effect, when the cause is known to be necessary to produce the effect in question." This would constitute a deductive proof of that account. But Meyer overreaches when he goes on to say, "If there are no other known causes—if there is only one known cause—of a given effect, then the presence of the effect points unambiguously back to the (uniquely adequate) cause." For this deductive line of reasoning to go through, "only one known cause" must be read as a gloss on "no other known causes." But this can only mean that, in fact, we have positive knowledge that no other causes are adequate. Only then would it follow that the single cause would be necessary to produce that effect. This exclusivity claim has the effect of rendering an argument of otherwise modest pretensions into exactly the sort of eliminative deduction that Dembski formulated in terms of his explanatory filter. In the end, it turns out that the mature ID argument remains true to its roots.

As a final thought, reflect on the difference between the designing of a director of an artistic performance and that of a hands-on engineer manufacturing a product. A good director guides and works through the independent personalities, talents, and skills of actors to achieve the goals of the performance. For someone familiar with the director watching the play, the "fingerprints" of the director are clearly visible. To someone unfamiliar with the director, unwilling to make unwarranted assumptions as to her desires, beliefs, goals, or values, the director's "signature" will not be evident. Creation as an artistic performance would have this same ambiguity for those who are acquainted with God and those who are not so acquainted. This is a biblical ambiguity familiar to Christians. With its preference for an engineering picture of design, this is an ambiguity that ID cannot abide.

Both SC and DD are worthwhile reads. By recounting Meyer's own journey, these books should lay to rest much of the ad hominem reaction to ID. Also, by explicitly presenting the argument as an inference to the best explanation, these books serve well to focus attention on the philosophical, as well as the scientific, side of the ledger. Their strengths are in rendering transparent the extent to which ID's argument depends on the plausibility of this alternative proposal. As is evident in Meyer's formulation, at its core, the theory of design offers a theory of mind, a not unexpected outcome from a philosopher.

1. Ralph Stearly, "Review Essay: The Cambrian Explosion: How Much Bang for the Buck?" Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith vol. 65, no. 4 (2013), pp. 245-257 contains good discussion of Myer's treatment of the Cambrian explosion. See also biologos.org/blog/the-grand-synthesis-reviewing-darwins-doubt-robert-bishop-part-1.

Robert Bishop is John and Madeleine McIntyre Endowed Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Wheaton College. Robert O'Connor is associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, historian Mark Noll laments that "far too many of us" evangelical Christians "still make the intellectually suicidal mistake of promoting 'creation science' as the best way to resist naturalistic philosophies of science."[1] Bradley J. Gundlach's study of the leading scientists, theologians, and philosophers in the Princeton Seminary and Princeton College community of the 19th and early 20th century suggests that they would have likely endorsed Noll's complaint. To be sure, as Gundlach convincingly demonstrates in Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929, the orthodox Protestants of Princeton categorically rejected Darwinism because of its atheism. But they did not embrace antievolutionism. Instead, Gundlach's study reveals that the Princetonians affirmed developmentalism as quite compatible with their Reformed theology.

Rather than anachronistically recasting the history of science and theology at Princeton during this period into neat evolutionist and creationist parties, Gundlach explores how Princetonians themselves actually saw the evolution question. By giving them voice, he offers a fresh perspective on the major questions involved in evolutionary thinking during this critical period. In the first three chapters, Gundlach examines their assessment of evolutionary thinking starting with their response to Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the immediate forerunner of Charles Darwin's work. While rejecting Chambers' proposal on both metaphysical and epistemological grounds, everyone on both the college and seminary faculty who addressed these questions, Gundlach proves, rejected materialistic evolutionism but embraced some form of non-Darwinian developmentalism of the natural world. Gundlach also explains the Princetonians' Battle Plan, as he labels it, for defending the faith. This plan rested upon two closely related convictions: the unity of truth and the division of labor. As the theologian Charles Hodge put it, "It is the weakness of our faith in the infallibility of the Scriptures, which makes us afraid of science, or unwilling that scientific men should pursue their investigations according to their own methods. If we firmly believe that the Bible cannot err, we should be satisfied that the well authenticated facts of science can never contradict its teachings." Instead of retreating behind the Bible and demeaning science, they sought to storm the enemy arsenal, seize and master its weapons, and turn them to their proper use in fortifying the citadel of faith.

In the next three chapters, Gundlach investigates the Princetonians' encounter with the evolution question in the far more forceful form which Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Huxley gave to it. Gundlach's careful analysis of the points of agreement and disagreement within the Princeton community is especially insightful. He corrects the misleading impression perpetuated by some historians who have pitted Princeton College president James McCosh over against the seminary's Charles Hodge. According to this caricature, McCosh embraced evolution while Hodge rejected it as atheism. According to Gundlach's more nuanced study, McCosh selectively embraced natural selection as an example of secondary causation carrying out the will of God, the great First Cause. Darwin's theory of the mechanism of evolution threatened religion no more than Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation did. Although it might have removed some of the mystery of the cosmos, it also revealed to humanity the beautiful intricacies of the natural world whose order, beneficence, and purposefulness glorified God. Darwin, of course, rejected this providentialist interpretation of his theory. On this point, McCosh agreed with Hodge's assessment: Darwinism's interpretation of natural selection as random inevitably led to atheism because it precluded, as both McCosh and Hodge insisted, divine intervention, most notably in the creation of the human soul.

Even though they affirmed inerrancy and the historicity of Adam, A. A. Hodge, Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen could not teach at some conservative seminaries today.

Gundlach devotes the subsequent two chapters to surveying the relationship between progressionism in evolutionary biology and progressionism in orthodox Calvinist theology among the generation of Princeton scholars who succeeded McCosh and Hodge. Gundlach's examination of the views of the theologian B. B. Warfield might surprise contemporary readers who assume that Warfield's commitment to biblical inerrancy inevitably led him to reject evolution. Well-known for co-authoring an 1881 article with A. A. Hodge that articulated the Princetonian understanding of inerrancy, Warfield, like numerous Princetonians before him, criticized atheistic naturalism. Yet Warfield, who embraced evolution even more than McCosh, went so far as to consider the possibility that an immaterial aspect of animal life served as a precursor to the human soul, constituting a second and essentially separate evolution alongside the physical one.

In the final chapter, Gundlach analyzes the demise of the consensus about theology and evolution at Princeton. After World War I, the origins debate entered a new phase when William Jennings Bryan led a national antievolution crusade that culminated in the 1925 Scopes trial. The discussion over evolution, Gundlach observes, shifted from persuasion to coercion, from a contest between debating "experts" (scientists and ministers) to an attempt to employ the coercive power of the state to enforce certain views about religion and science in the public schools. This newly politicized landscape produced a division between McCosh's heirs at the university and seminary. Princeton University biologist Edward Grant Conklin and director of the American Museum of Natural History Henry Fairfield Osborne, for instance, led the opposition to Bryan's antievolution crusade. Meanwhile at the seminary, some refused to be drawn into the debate over creation. New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, for example, declined Bryan's invitation to serve as a prosecution witness at the Scopes trial. Others, however, backed away from Princeton's longstanding selective embrace of evolution. For instance, Old Testament professor Oswald T. Allis, editor of the Princeton Theological Review, invited the Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price to submit an article on "flood geology." As Gundlach explains, Allis could not find a scientist who was willing to write a piece on evolution for the journal, so at the urging of a friend, he asked Price. Price penned articles that questioned fossils as age-markers in geology and challenged transmutationism on the basis of botany. Price's "flood geology" later played a highly influential role in the emergence of "scientific creationism." Thus McCosh's heirs at the seminary turned to a man with little formal scientific training who once taught geology at an obscure college in Nebraska—a man who advocated views that contradicted nearly every Princetonian since the 1840s.

Gundlach's study is a model of careful historical analysis. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources, including personal papers and published material, this lucid account provides a fascinating window into one of the leading citadels of theology and science in American higher education. By explaining the arguments of Princeton's philosophers, scientists, and theologians regarding evolution in their historical context, Gundlach's study helps to set the historical record straight.

Gundlach's study also offers several startling insights. Besides demonstrating the Princetonians' eagerness to embrace selectively some modified forms of evolution, Gundlach explains the critical impact that the fundamentalist antievolution crusade had upon the Princeton Battle Plan. Likewise, Gundlach describes the Princetonians' remarkably robust commitment to the Reformed doctrine of divine providence. The Reformed tradition's vision of God's sovereignty over creation and the reality and efficiency of creaturely activity, from universal laws like gravity to the minutest choices of individual people, Gundlach explains, was "a distinctive teaching of Calvinist orthodoxy that enabled the Princetonians to embrace evolutionary thinking (carefully construed) not only as compatible with their theology, but even as an expression of it."

Gundlach's work also contains some implications that might give participants in today's debates about theology and evolution reasons to rethink their approaches. By pitting purely naturalistic evolution over against an allegedly literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2, both militant secular atheists and "creation scientists" usually employ reductionistic binary reasoning when it comes to issues of science and theology. Gundlach's study, however, suggests other historic alternatives are available to Christian scholars. He shows that theologians and philosophers at Princeton had a thorough knowledge of contemporary science and that many scientists were well-informed about theology. The same cannot always be said of those who engage in the debate over origins today. Moreover, Gundlach demonstrates that "creation science" is actually a modern movement with shallow roots in Christian orthodoxy. Many conservative Protestants today continue the Princeton tradition's critique of modern evolutionary theories because of the metaphysical assumptions and antisupernatural bias in purely naturalistic explanations of the origins of the universe. Ironically, however, other conservative Protestants, especially some with an affinity for Princeton's Calvinist theological tradition, categorically reject Warfield's efforts to reconcile Christian theism with non-Darwinian evolutionary views. They favor an interpretation of Genesis 1-2 that actually stands closer to Price and his intellectual heirs. The distinguished Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, for example, resigned his position at Reformed Theological Seminary in 2010 because of his advocacy of theistic evolution and, more important, his criticisms of "scientific creationists" for denigrating modern science. Gundlach also demonstrates why, since the Scopes trial, such views have not often been welcomed in conservative circles. Even though they affirmed inerrancy and the historicity of Adam, A. A. Hodge, Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen could not teach at some conservative seminaries today because they held that Genesis could be harmonized with a non-Darwinian view of evolution. Perhaps Gundlach's study will help conservative Christians rethink some of the missteps made in the early 20th century.

1. Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 153.

P. C. Kemeny is professor of religion and humanities and assistant dean at Grove City College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The language and thought of art historian Katie Kresser are by turns painterly and poetic, then sharply penetrating in their logic and analytic edge. Unlike the rather dry rhetoric one sometimes encounters in scholarly art historical studies, The Art and Thought of John LaFarge is brimful of surprising turns, metaphysical reaching, and fresh insight into an American artist and a time that are both neglected nowadays —thought passé or irrelevant to our contemporary moment. Kresser creates a striking portrait of LaFarge (1835-1910) and his era, the so-called Gilded Age, and clears the way for a robust reassessment of a very rich period in American art history—one that may have new relevance to our changing international art scene, which—in some quarters, at least—is seeking relief from a century of ceaseless experimentation and transgressive aesthetic shock tactics.

The late 19th century in the United States is known for its economic growth, tumultuous industrial change, and social unrest—and in artistic circles for a paradoxical mixture of uncertainty and academicism; for beauty and high decorative form in painting, architecture, and applied arts but also for stylistic wandering and lack of focus. LaFarge was one of a small number of prominent artists whose work was publicly celebrated and who enjoyed many major commissions for murals and stained glass: for churches, state house buildings, libraries, universities and the like.[1] But the artist also sought in his theoretical and personal work to investigate perception itself, as a kind of early artist-phenomenologist. In her study of the artist, Kresser is able to conjure the atmosphere of the Gilded Age in compelling prose that evokes the polarizing effect of rapid change and growingly sophisticated global awareness—revealing that LaFarge was far from the stereotype often applied to him in modern art circles (where he is sometimes seen as a mere church decorator).

On the contrary, under the eye and pen of Katie Kresser, LaFarge is revealed to be ahead of his time on many fronts—in his late theoretical writings, his sometimes daringly compressed pictorial space, and in his insistence on a certain epistemic humility before his painterly subjects. Kresser suggests that LaFarge, himself a believing Roman Catholic, anticipated the thought of Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, both of whom worked at a high view of artistic making as a fundamental mode of being on par with the human capacity to know or to communicate. Kresser discusses LaFarge's stubborn decision to forego certainty or stylistic brand in favor of steadfastly beholding the mystery of being, as uniquely manifest in the fragile humanly wrought thing. In LaFarge's view, the artist participates in the wildness and unpredictability of the Creation itself by becoming a servant of the work of art—itself now become a further extension of Being.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner discusses at length the concept of intellectual hospitality and the need for the reader to freshly submit to the "presence" communicated in a given text or work of art—to achieve an unguarded gaze and receptivity that allows the work to do its work. Steiner goes on to say, "It takes uncanny strength and abstention from re-cognition, from implicit reference, to read the world and not the text of the world as it has been previously encoded for us"—in other words, to submit to the thing seen, not to its culturally conditioned simulacrum. The LaFarge that Kresser paints for us is just such a receptive soul who persistently attempts to achieve that unguarded gaze.

LaFarge's expansive intellect would not let him seek a facile stylistic brand. His paintings are exploratory even as they participate in traditional idioms—and therefore occasionally seem weak or unfinished. It is as though the artist says, "I am a servant of the form, of the tradition, and of this passing moment of looking. I cannot simply invent myself whole cloth; neither can I default to a ready-made style or finish." Kresser writes, for example:

In LaFarge's work, to borrow a phrase from W. B. Yeats that foreshadows the thought of Jacques Derrida, "the center cannot hold." But this relinquished harmony, this absent center, is a product of purposeful self-abnegation. The work, renouncing a rhetoric of self-completeness that might imply a separate world of "ideals" (or more darkly, counterfeits), became an effect of the Real—vexed, complex, part willed and part accidental, pushed, shoved and pummeled by something external to the structures of human thought.

And Kresser goes on to stress LaFarge's innate Thomist bent—i.e., his insistent attempt to achieve what Steiner calls "uncanny strength and abstention" and to get past the conceptual grid that we painstakingly construct as we name and categorize and cage the world around us.[2] Yet as she points out later in the book, LaFarge was aware of the impossibility of literally attaining anything like innocence of perception, free from the trammels of "previously encoded" concepts of the world:

What LaFarge sought, but what he knew was impossible, was the primitive rune—the perfect, economical symbol that carried the reality of its object within itself, and that therefore became an object in turn—a rich and dense evocation of thingness whose only allegiance was to the thing it evoked—not to a frame, or to institutional expectations.

Kresser presents a LaFarge who, like Martin Buber in I and Thou, confronts us with an elemental choice in his art: encounter the world as being, as real presence—or objectify and reduce it to your selfish ends, where every tree is only and always potential lumber. The author goes on in succeeding chapters to discuss LaFarge's distinction from contemporaries who sought to "brand" American art with a kind of consensus aesthetic, enforced by an academic credentialing system. She contrasts painters like Kenyon Cox with LaFarge by showing their reliance on a supposed "common sense" appeal rather than the authenticity of the unguarded gaze.

LaFarge therefore, per Kresser, moved away from the mainstream, becoming a man at the margins—a "figure," as his friend Henry James described him. And in fact, like his French contemporary Paul Gauguin, LaFarge did travel to Tahiti and Japan and Asia more generally in an attempt to investigate further his theory of immediate, pre-conceptual perception in art. Yet LaFarge rejected Gauguin's primitivism as "wild and stupid." There was no going back, no innocent or noble savage. There was only the forward gaze of ceaseless presence, submitting to the Muse of Painting. And the figure of Painting, personified in LaFarge's work by that same title, sits eyes closed and palette empty before the Subject—the Real world—practicing the heroic abstention that Steiner alludes to.

Kresser seems to want us, her readers, to encounter her own work in much the same way as she presents the artist LaFarge—she wants us to become witnesses to the impossible act in which the author foregoes a strictly academic rendering and offers a felt and sensed portrait as opposed to the conceit of objectified biography. The frank admission of the impossibility of accomplishing objectivity frees the writer and the reader to enter into honest encounter (as opposed to preconceived evaluation and categorization) with an artist who emptied himself in the same way. LaFarge, in Katie Kresser's account, is an artist who knows his limitations and understands that these are of the essence, not simply a sign of his own failure, but rather the baseline humility required of the honest inquiry which alone can yield hope for culture.

It is this sense of quixotic hope that seems hover over The Art and Thought of John LaFarge in a poignant and telling way. As a reader, I not only felt the presence of the nominal subject of the book but also "heard" the author in genuine conversation with the dead artist and with the living reader. This is a refreshingly honest and vulnerable stance—and reveals the author's posture, namely that all art historical writing, like painting itself, is a gaze into the irreducible mystery of the Real and will always be provisional, contingent—a gesture toward authentic encounter.

1. There are 56 public buildings across the United States that sport LaFarge stained glass and many restored public murals that are treasured by local communities.

2. Thomas Aquinas (as quoted in LaFarge): "We cannot understand things … unless they are united to our intellect in such a way that the knower and the known become one."

Bruce Herman, a painter whose work has been widely exhibited, is Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in the Fine Arts at Gordon College. He collaborated with G. Walter Hansen in Through Your Eyes: Dialogues on the Painting of Bruce Herman (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If you're a member of group that gets club oufits, it's typical to personalize the shirts or jackets with a nickname or in-joke. My students often use versions of their names (e.g., "Jules" for Julie), but the names can be more cryptic: a swimmer I knew in high school used "Plecostomus."[1] When I was on the student council, I chose "E=MC2" for the back of my sweatshirt, sure that this was the clearest way to show my identification as a future scientist.

To my chagrin, my choice came off as more puzzling than anything else. It's one thing to be nerdy, but for your nerdiness to not even be intelligible … that's the worst. I got so many questions that, finally, I just stopped wearing it. I had naively figured that most of my contemporaries would have at least seen Einstein's mass-energy equivalence; what about the Cold War, hadn't they heard of nuclear bombs? But this most famous equation was a mystery even to otherwise well-read friends.

The books under review would like to rectify this. The Universe in Zero Words and In Pursuit of the Unknown are books by mathematicians who promise to explain some of the secrets behind the most important equations. The first book, by science writer[2] Dana Mackenzie, leans more toward using equations as a way to tell interesting stories about mathematics, while veteran math popularizer Ian Stewart focuses a lot of time and attention on the background behind, and applications of, these formulas.

Naturally, although each book has around 20 equations as the starting point, the individual chapters range beyond that strictness, with lots of interesting anecdotes about the humanity of those involved as well. Both books have good morsels to offer to the educated "layman"; just who that ideal reader might be, we'll get to in a bit.

In Pursuit of the Unknown has particularly good bites to recommend it. Each chapter is really a self-standing essay, and I believe this is the best way to read this book. Want to learn about math connected to probability, astronomy, and eugenics? Read Chapter 7 on the normal distribution.[3] Want to know how your camera saves and stores its pictures and what this has to do with fingerprints? Read Chapter 9 on the Fourier Transform. On the other hand, if you want a (condensed) explanation of what Fermat's Last Theorem is about, or one of several possible approaches to chaos theory (lushly illustrated), then The Universe in Zero Words has it for you.

Big-name mathematical topics such as calculus and the Pythagorean Theorem get full chapters in both books; the most celebrated physics equations, like those of electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum theory, are also shared, though sometimes from quite different viewpoints. Most readers of this journal will be more comfortable with the level Stewart starts out with, and I recommend this book more when it comes to applications and a broader sense of how each topic fits into a cultural context. He doesn't just tell you that relativity makes your GPS work, he tells you exactly how useless a Newtonian GPS would be![4] Mackenzie does a very nice job explaining a variety of "pure" topics, like the quaternions, the prime number theorem, and the (Chern-)Gauss-Bonnet formula, for those whose background includes more than a semester or two of college mathematics; his "whale geometry" example is a wonderful way for someone of any background to think about why the shortest distance between two points isn't always a straight line. The books aren't perfect in editing—for example, Stewart repeats the long-debunked quote about IBM chair Thomas J. Watson thinking there would be a world demand for five computers, and Mackenzie's book has quite a few just-barely-relevant illustrations. But rather than desiring more such details, the reader at this point is more likely wondering whether he or she is in the target audience.

Indeed! Who is this semi-mythical reader who is neither mathematician nor physicist but still wants to see, as Mackenzie puts it, the masterpieces of figures like Einstein or Newton? This question is important to the authors; Mackenzie speaks of a "vast cultural gap," and Stewart grants an entire page to C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures" essay. And it is a shame that, in some circles, one can profess to not knowing "E=MC2" but not to being ignorant of Shakespeare.[5]

But I don't see these books as contributing to bridging that gap. Even though, particularly in Stewart's book, there is not a huge amount of mathematical background needed, I feel that the intended reader probably is already interested in learning more—perhaps like students I occasionally encounter who always loved math but didn't find room for it in their schedule, or the fellow I see on the train who sometimes asks for a tip for a math history book. In which case, the reader already has a multitude of general math and science books to choose from at his or her favorite (bricks-and-mortar or online) retailer, and ones which have the space to really tell a story in engrossing depth. As another reviewer put it, "I don't think we now have a surfeit of 'great equations' books, but we do have a sufficiency."

One "bridge" that might contribute to bringing readers a little closer to the point where they might want to take up Stewart or Mackenzie is Clifford Pickover's The Math Book. With just one glossy page (and opposing illustration) per fact, person, pretty picture, or formula, some topics are only brushed on; on the other hand, with 250 mathematical milestones, it's easy to pick another one if your first isn't intriguing. With well-chosen pictures[6] that invite discussion, Pickover's volume is a coffee-table book which (so my personal experience attests) people actually want to talk about, but it also offers some real depth.

Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future, by computer scientist John MacCormick, could contribute in a different direction. Readers averse to equations may nonetheless be interested in learning about the step-by-step instructions that have changed our society so radically in the last half-century. (Some commentators would argue that these algorithms are more important than the equations!) Want to know how Google works its magic, or how handwriting-recognition software does its job? It's here, and in a surprisingly accessible treatment—I really liked the color-mixing metaphor for public key exchange, for instance. A few chapters of this could provide a bridge to the bridge, so to speak.

Why should I care about people getting to the place where they might want to explore these or similar books? After all, my fellow mathematicians often deprecate such efforts. (As MIT's Gian-Carlo Rota put it, "Attempts have been made to string together beautiful mathematical results and to present them in books bearing … attractive titles …. Such anthologies are seldom found on a mathematician's bookshelf.")

A big answer is exemplified by one formula both books under review spend quite a bit of time[7] on—one you haven't heard of, but should have. The Black-Scholes(-Merton) equation is a second-order partial differential equation, possibly the most forbidding-looking one in either book—and well it should be. For both authors (correctly, in my view) lay the blame for the recent Great Recession largely on misuse of solutions to this Nobel-winning formula and those derived from it. These formulas give the correct price of financial derivatives … in a perfect market … with a certain statistically defined type of volatility … which doesn't obtain in a panic.

More books about equations can't prevent such abuses by themselves; there was a lot of money to be made, and some will always take the risk. But what if some of the higher echelons of AIG, Bear Stearns, et al. (or those crafting regulations) had asked themselves whether the quants really even knew what their equations were saying? As Stewart says, the financial system "desperately needs more mathematics, not less. But it also needs to learn how to use mathematics intelligently, rather than as a kind of magical talisman." Understanding how mathematics, science, and their equations lead to applications—and when they can go wrong—is something anyone in authority in our technology-saturated culture ought to seek out. These books, and many others like them, can help bring us closer to that point.

Karl-Dieter Crisman is associate professor of mathematics at Gordon College.

1. The generic name for a bottom-dwelling "sucker fish," often used in aquariums to remove algae. I'm not sure what he was trying to convey with that name.

2. Mackenzie's story, available online, of how he ended up in science writing after not receiving tenure is itself interesting (and sobering) reading.

3. To the experts: in what is surely an editorial slip, the distribution is at one point called a probability, which it isn't.

4. For those who can't wait to find out: the error grows by about 10 kilometers a day. See also http://xkcd.com/808/.

5. In many circles it is considered a badge of honor to be ignorant of both, and readers of this journal would do well to continue to productively engage those circles as well, but these books do not address that audience.

6. Often of beautiful fractals or somber mathematicians.

7. And which, in this case, Mackenzie has the more elementary treatment of.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the clear front-runner for the 2016 presidential race. She has yet to announce she is running, and she may opt not to seek the nation's highest office again. But until she makes an official announcement either way, other Democratic hopefuls are in a state of suspended animation, few daring to make any public moves until Clinton has showed her hand.

HRC, a political biography of Clinton's time as secretary of state, offers insights into her style and character, helping explain why so many potential presidential candidates seem paralyzed. She is a formidable—and vindictive—political figure whose presence undoubtedly changes the game.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, journalists who cover domestic politics for Politico and The Hill, describe their book as a "tale of political resurrection for which the final chapters remain unwritten." Focusing their attention on the domestic political ramifications of Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, they highlight her attempts to overcome the 2008 election loss, reshape the direction of American diplomacy, and establish a political legacy distinct from her husband's.

The authors stay too narrowly focused on this task, and, in so doing, miss the opportunity to frame their reporting with constructive context. Readers travel a dizzying pace from 2009 to early 2013, with a few flashbacks to the 2008 campaign trail interspersed. We learn a lot about how Clinton operates, but we're given far too little background to explore why she acts as she does and what makes her tick. Most readers think they know a lot about Hillary and Bill Clinton, which makes it even more essential to highlight relevant background material. Given the vast rumor mills that surround them, the authors should establish facts up front and set the stage for the rest of the book.

Allen and Parnes gained impressive access to Clinton's aides and friends, interviewing more than 200 sources, including several in her inner circle. Given the close-knit networks and strong bonds of loyalty described in the book, it is inconceivable that her confidantes would have participated in the project without her blessing. The authors should have cast a wider net and talked to more of Clinton's critics. Perhaps they inadvertently (or even knowingly) gave in to the fear of retribution that is a recurring theme throughout the book. The authors also get distracted, allowing melodrama, ominous foreshadowing, and gossip-filled anecdotes to detract from the central themes. Do we really need to know how much Clinton's Georgetown home is worth? Or its square footage? The book includes more discussion of Huma Abedin's baby shower than of the administration's response to the civil war in Syria.

Despite these shortcomings, HRC provides useful background for evaluating Clinton as a presidential contender. First, the book offers insights into her character. The Clinton who emerges on these pages is a compassionate woman with a keen intellect and a dedication to social justice. She is loyal to her friends in good times and in bad, unwilling to drop intimates even when it would be politically expedient. She is serious and tough yet good-humored.

Other, less flattering, aspects of Clinton's character also surface. Clinton is a consummate politician who seems to calculate almost every action to maximize future gain. She and her husband Bill (a background player in this narrative, but one who plays pivotal roles) come across as vengeful and unforgiving. Hillary's aides maintain a detailed database of friends and foes. Allen and Parnes recount several stories to show that those who cross the Clintons often pay a steep political price, even years down the road.

Consider one telling example. In 2008, then-candidate Clinton met with Congressman Jason Altmire to seek his support for her as a Democratic convention superdelegate. He refused to commit to Clinton or Obama. Clinton left the meeting, yelling: "such a [bleeping] waste of time." When Altmire faced an in-party primary challenge four years later, Bill Clinton endorsed his opponent, who narrowly beat Altmire.

Whereas most biographers of Hillary Clinton give serious attention to her faith, HRC makes only passing references—on my count, a mere four mentions in 405 pages—and therefore misses one key element of what motivates her. A lifelong Methodist, even as her husband's church affiliation has waxed and waned, Clinton's faith appears to help direct her political steps. " 'She has something more driving her than just power. She has a very strong moral compass that she leans into,' said one longtime friend. 'So she doesn't wear [religion] on her sleeve, but I think if you had any length of conversation with her as a Methodist, and talked to her about her faith, she would be very insightful.' " It's disappointing that the authors did not heed this advice.

The book also casts light on Clinton's management style and policy priorities. Much ink will be spilled appraising Clinton's time as secretary of state as a harbinger of what she might do if elected president. But such analyses should be set against the constraints of the office. Cabinet secretaries and the immediate layers of people below them serve at the pleasure of the president and implement his policies. To be sure, Hillary Clinton was no ordinary cabinet member. A national figure with a powerful network and sky-high name recognition, she had far greater political resources than other administration officials. As this book documents, Clinton sought ways to make her distinctive political mark throughout her term in office and left a legacy of internal reforms at the State Department. She was often in the room when key foreign policy decisions were made, and her advice appears to have won the day at times. Clinton was a key player, but simply that. Barack Obama set the foreign policy direction that the State Department had to follow, he made the final decisions, and he bears ultimate responsibility for his administration's policy successes or failures.

Most readers know little about the everyday work of foreign policy. HRC is by no means a definitive account of internal State Department strategy, but it does offer a behind-the-scenes look at diplomacy in action and offers insights into Clinton's approach to international relations. Stories discussing fundraising for the USA pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, negotiations on the New START Treaty and Iran sanctions, and on-the-ground meetings and local outreach in Pakistan highlight different elements of Clinton's diplomatic strategy and her affinity for smart power theory.

She is a competent, intelligent manager with great attention to detail and deep concern for employee morale. She is a proactive leader who is willing to take risks. She relies heavily on an inner circle of confidantes, to whom she is steadfastly loyal. She is a careful student who is humble enough to learn from others. As the authors summarize, "Her strengths were in executing the good ideas that came to her and applying lessons learned from one problem to resolving another."

Although not the authors' central purpose, the book also offers insight into some of the political issues that animate Clinton most. On foreign and economic policy, she comes across as an ideological moderate much like her husband. In discussions of possible military action, Clinton is the hawk to Vice President Biden's dove. She works hard to include business interests among those of other stakeholders. While HRC devotes relatively little space to domestic policy, the authors show that Clinton's views on social issues, especially gay and lesbian rights, align more with the progressive wing of her party.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly for those with eyes on the 2016 election, HRC demonstrates the immense political power Hillary and Bill Clinton have amassed. After finishing this book, no one will question why potential rivals run scared. Serious presidential contenders must be prodigious fundraisers. Overall spending for Obama and Romney's presidential bids each topped more than a billion dollars. Donor pools in both parties are large, but ultimately limited. Everyone wants to back the winner, so big dollars flow to those with the most loyal following and those most likely to go the distance.

Clinton has a formidable fundraising advantage over potential rivals. The Clintons have devoted decades to building and cultivating an incredible network of donors—those who will write big checks and will bundle money from their own networks to bring in hundreds of thousands more. They also have deep connections with so-called Super PACs, political groups that can pour almost unlimited dollars into campaigns.

Vignettes scattered throughout HRC demonstrate the depth of the Clinton fundraising machine and the power the couple wields over Democratic politicians and donors. Aspiring politicians and those currently in office want to stay in the Clintons' good graces and fear potential retribution for opposing them or even staying neutral. Bill Clinton's political draw is powerful and likely unrivaled in the Democratic Party. His support can be instrumental to election victory; his opposition, a death knell.

Clinton's time in the State Department expanded her résumé. On top of her time as First Lady, she has more than a decade of legislative and executive experience, culminating in the four years at State that deepened her knowledge of foreign affairs. She is a master power broker with sharp political instincts. Few, if any, potential rivals can bring such rich background and expertise to the contest.

At the same time, a Clinton win is by no means inevitable. She was out-campaigned in 2008 and would need to build a fundamentally different and much more modern operation—spear-headed by campaign professionals instead of inner-circle advisers—to secure the nomination in 2016. Although quite popular during her time as Secretary of State, she remains one of the most polarizing figures in American politics. If she were to re-enter the political fray, opponents within and outside her party would be armed and ready to attack, and her negative ratings would rise.

If Hillary Clinton does indeed seek the presidency a second time, she will do so with a long political record behind her. HRC offers an incomplete picture of its complex subject, but it will give readers some insights into Clinton's character and some of the strengths and weaknesses she would likely bring to the Oval Office.

Amy E. Black is associate professor of political science at Wheaton College and author of Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Faith, and Reason (Moody).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Surveillance of those suspected of wrongdoing, or who threaten some legitimate government, or of military targets is an ancient practice. From biblical times, for instance, one sees spies checking out the "promised land," bodyguards seeing that the king is protected, and watchers keeping guard over a city against illicit or violent activity. It even seems to echo the all-seeing eye of God, although as soon as God is invoked as surveillant, biblical attention is directed to the primary motif of God's care for creation and especially for the vulnerable—God notices the sparrow, and how much more the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger.

In modern times, surveillance has become centrally significant as a feature of organizational life, both within government and policing on the one hand, and in the corporate sector, including workplaces, on the other. Back in the 1960s, Jacques Ellul showed presciently that surveillance subtly seeps beyond bounds, monitoring more and more of us. And as surveillance seems to spill over into inappropriate areas of life, checks have also been placed on it, in our day, by regulatory mechanisms, technical devices, and data protection and privacy laws. Such limits are important for open democracy, for everyday liberties, and for living without fear of unknown eyes.

The revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden laid bare some striking features of surveillance today that had not been so clear to many. The NSA is engaged in widespread surveillance, and for many this ramping-up is seen as a necessary response to the attacks of 9/11. But the ways that data are obtained—whether willingly or not—from telephone and internet companies struck a discordant note. Could we as customers trust those companies to keep our data and, crucially, metadata secure? The NSA disclosures show that the very marketplace of modern life is public in ways we never guessed. The internet, where we conduct our business, meet our friends, converse with colleagues, organize politically, and share our hopes and fears, is now also an uneasy environment in which surveillance is rampant.

What strikes one about 'The NSA Report' is how closely its recommendations follow the Snowden script.

The mention of "metadata" prompts comment. Of course, the NSA and other such agencies have the means to listen in on conversations and tap into messages. But the main activity is trawling through massive amounts of digital data in order to pull together disparate details of the time and place of calls and messages, their duration, and with whom they were conducted. Such metadata can also reveal medical, religious, and other sensitive information, so they are far from innocent or innocuous. There is no doubt that this is dragnet-style mass surveillance that includes domestic populations as well as foreign nationals. The NSA Report, discussed below, says the status of metadata should be studied further but doubts that the distinction between data and metadata makes much sense.

The Snowden revelations continue to make headlines through a kind of drip-feed insistence. Although some evidence is patchy, many aspects of NSA-style surveillance are very clearly demonstrated. The agencies' responses range from scathing dismissal of Snowden to grudging admission that at least some of what he says is correct. To his credit, President Obama commissioned a study by some leading experts: The NSA Report: Liberty and Security in a Changing World. Meanwhile Snowden himself has made a number of electronically enabled public appearances during 2014, and the key journalist with whom he shared the evidence, Glenn Greenwald, came out with his own account: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Both books are clear that the U.S. government should end practices such as bulk phone-data collection, that the internet is a key arena of struggle, that privacy and civil liberties are vital values, and that far greater transparency and accountability is required of surveillance programs. It's worth noting these areas of common ground because they are extensive and important, not to say somewhat surprising. Indeed, the report to the president concludes that "some of the authorities that were expanded or created in the aftermath to September 11 unduly sacrifice fundamental interests in individual liberty, personal privacy, and democratic governance," a judgment which resonates with Glenn Greenwald's more forceful version. Speaking of the exaggerated threat of terrorism, he argues that "[t]he idea that we should dismantle the core protections of our political system to erect a ubiquitous surveillance state for the sake of this risk is the height of irrationality."

Of course, the two books also have very different starting points. The genesis of Greenwald's broadside is that he, along with filmmaker Laura Poitras, was nominated by Snowden to receive and to disseminate as they saw fit the files he had lifted from his employer. No Place to Hide documents what transpired from the weeks of ignoring the messages from an unknown Snowden to the moments of sheer disbelief as Greenwald read the astonishing documents. A program called PRISM allows the NSA to pull in private communications from internet giants including Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, and Skype. An instruction manual for NSA spooks shows how to use phone and email logs to discover details about and listen in to their targets. Ordinary Americans were under state surveillance in ways of which no one outside the NSA had dreamed. The stunningly big story implicated not only the secretive NSA but also the "five eyes" of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA, along with many other countries, too. With the support of their publishers, Greenwald and Poitras met Snowden in Hong Kong and embarked on a concerted plan to release the information in an intentional order.

A high school dropout, Snowden found in intelligence agencies some senior colleagues who valued his tech skills and offered the opportunity to rise quickly; he held senior positions while still in his twenties. But he became profoundly disturbed by what he saw: that the sprawling U.S. agencies were highly invasive, operating without the knowledge of the government, let alone ordinary citizens. He sensed the enormity of his situation but until pushed by Greenwald, said little about his motives. Until, that is, he commented that a person's worth is seen not in their beliefs but in what they do to defend them. His willingness to make huge sacrifices for beliefs developed over years of reading, playing video games, and watching the CIA and the NSA at work impressed Greenwald and further persuaded him of Snowden's authenticity.

The Guardian published Greenwald's story about the telephone giant Verizon's handing over metadata from millions of Americans under order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on June 6, 2013. It created a media uproar and huge political embarrassment, and was followed the very next day with the equally devastating disclosures about PRISM. Its obviously global scope—concerning the internet, not a national phone company—amplified the fallout. The rest, of course, is well known. Snowden's steady revelations through the journalists' conduits continue to astonish, disturb, and shake the NSA, governments, and ordinary citizens around the world. Greenwald himself warns not only of the imperiled internet but also of the democratic danger of media co-option. His book uncompromisingly demands honesty and courage in each related area as well as real responses from government.

One such response came quickly. What strikes one about The NSA Report is how closely its recommendations follow the Snowden script. It is clear that the authors, all seasoned experts in their fields, had the Snowden "backdrop" in mind, but their concern is longer term, to "create sturdy foundations for the future, safeguarding … liberty and security in a rapidly changing world." In a measured and well-informed way, their 46 recommendations tackle key areas from the limits of surveillance-reach to the security of personal data flowing through the systems.

Right from the start, the report recognizes that "security" may be thought of in many ways, and that the dominant definition as "national security" only rings bells in the vaguest way with majority populations. There is also a (Fourth Amendment) right of people to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" that requires vigilant care, and an expectation that when "security" is spoken it refers to personal safety as well as the protection of government institutions and borders. In line with this, the Report also connects "privacy" with "civil liberties," thus accepting immediately that the problem is not merely one of individual violations—important though they are—but a collective one of justice. In a strong sense, then, the Report leans towards developing a surveillance of care rather than a more abstract control.

The NSA Report cautions about the risk that "high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking." "Americans," they urge, "must never make the mistake of 'wholly trusting' our public officials." The agitated activist in Greenwald agrees, in more passionate prose. Thus has a crucially important debate been launched, one that demands the attention of all who care about an open internet and a fearless press, about personal freedoms and the common good, including those, one might say, who hear those echoes from long ago and far away of a "God who notices me" (Hagar in Genesis 16) and who cares about who is seen, or not, and why and how.

David Lyon directs the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he is professor of sociology, holds a Queen's Research Chair, and is cross-appointed as a professor in the Faculty of Law.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If the people who run The Onion ever decide to launch an academic publishing arm, I have a manuscript to recommend. The only problem is that they would first have to buy the rights to The Bigot, from Yale University Press. The book, an exercise in conspiracy theories and amateur psychology, reads like a series of tweets from someone on a cruise sponsored by The Nation. Hashtag #hitlerhom*ophobeteapartynormanpodhoretzkukluxklan.

This is the kind of book that makes you wonder whether peer review should be anonymous. Because really, when you're done with The Bigot you will want to go to the homes of the people who gave this book their stamp of academic approval and ask in all seriousness: "What were you smoking?"

Stephen Eric Bronner, a "Distinguished Professor of Political Science" at Rutgers, says he didn't write this book "with the naïve idea of converting bigots." Rather it is "to help educate the bigot's enemies." And there's not much point in trying to "compartmentalize" the kinds of bigotry either. Because "prejudices such as anti-Semitism, hom*ophobia, racism, sexism and religious intolerance … intersect in their ideological and political expressions." Spoiler alert: They intersect in the Republican Party, which is basically run by the Tea Party. And neoconservatives. Who have a lot in common with neo-Nazis. I digress, but then so does Stephen Eric Bronner.

Bronner sees bigotry as no less a problem today than it was a hundred years ago. The bigots are just better at hiding their true feelings. But Bronner's got them figured out. And his assumptions allow him to cite a study from the 1920s to justify his pronouncements about bigotry today. So, for instance, "The bigot is most often found in nonurban settings and parochial communities among the lower middle class, low-level bureaucrats, small business owners, individual contractors and farmers—though industrial workers, particularly white men, are among others who can also prove racist and authoritarian."

Bigots are mostly white male hicks, Bronner concludes. And bigots "have always felt at home in the United States," he explains, citing the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and the Moral Majority. Have bigots been more at home in the U.S. than in other countries? Which ones have historically been more tolerant? He doesn't mention.

He just continues with the forward march inside the bigot's head: "Myths have always held a particular attraction for the bigot," he pronounces. "They offer an intricate network of symbols and meanings for making sense of life even today." Never mind that myths have always held a particular attraction for … all of humanity. But what does Bronner mean by "myth" anyway?

He offers the example of someone in Mali who helped to amputate the left foot and right arm of four thieves. (Someone in the government? Someone acting on his own? We're not told.) The man said, "It is not us who ordered this. It is God." Bronner explains this incident by writing, "myths are easily adaptable to the self serving outlook of the bigot. They are nonfalsifiable by definition, they contest modernity and they rest on traditional beliefs—and that is why they appeal to him." Ahh yes, the problem of traditional beliefs.

It is here that Bronner begins his long slide down the slippery slope. People cut off each other's limbs in the name of "traditional beliefs." Whether those traditional beliefs are that hom*osexual behavior is sinful or that thieves should only have two limbs or that evolution didn't happen or that "women always want 'it' and blacks are cattle" (another attitude Bronner detects but doesn't actually attribute to anyone in particular), they are all offensive and all within the purview of the bigot.

The way Bronner manages to elide all of these beliefs is positively dizzying:

The bigot tends to emerge from an authoritarian family structure, sacrosanct traditions and an insular community …. The authoritarian family not only enforces sexual repression, which suits most religious and traditional institutions well, but also serves as the "factory" in which the ideology of an authoritarian community is molded. It is well known, for example, that children who have been beaten by their parents tend to find violence acceptable in dealing with the problems of marriage and social life. Breaking the circle of authoritarian influence is a complex and multifaceted endeavor for which there are no quick solutions.

Did you catch that? The bigot tends to be a traditionally religious person who beats his children, and those children grow up to beat their wives—with the support of their churches, of course. In fact, Bronner goes so far as to explain that "Hitler knew what he was talking about when he insisted that he was only finishing what the Church began."

All of these religious folks—umm, bigots—want the state to impose their religious beliefs on others. They oppose pluralism because "pluralism reduces religion to just another claim. Opposing it thus becomes a matter of institutional preservation for Islamic Salafis, or Catholic believers like Opus Dei." No footnote there, or any explanation of how Opus Dei demonstrates its opposition to religious pluralism. In fact, that was the only mention of the group in the book.

Bronner never quite manages to reconcile his views about how the bigots with their traditional beliefs come from the white lower classes with the fact that the groups most likely to practice religion are blacks, Hispanics, and white members of the middle and upper classes. In his haste to dismiss Charles Murray as a bigot, Bronner must have missed his most recent book addressing this question.

But why let facts get in the way? Let's proceed with the psychobabble. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi are okay with Bronner because they were tolerant of others. (I guess he excuses their belief in "myth," or maybe he thinks that they didn't really believe in any.) But the bigot just can't deal with these men:

They were secure in their faith but the bigot playing the role of true believer is not. He fears the Other because his own faith is weak—it is simply a shield to insulate him from criticism and justify his definition of public life. Genuine people of faith are those whom the true believer does not want to know. Their strength he sees as weakness, and their religious tolerance he sees as betrayal.

Still no footnote. But where would Bronner find one? After all, who knows whether the faith of the bigot is real? God, perhaps?

If it is beginning to seem as though Bronner is arguing in circles and simply labeling anyone he doesn't like a bigot, that's exactly the sense one gets from the book. Bigots, he writes, can be discovered through their belief in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, their opposition to campaign finance reform, and their support of a flat tax. I'm not kidding. "Everyone knows that people of color would disproportionately suffer from a flat tax as well as other regressive attempts to shrink the tax base and, subsequently, bankrupt the welfare state." So obviously the people who support it are racists. And since "everyone knows" this, again, there's no need for a citation.

Like many on the academic left, Bronner is not satisfied with merely suggesting that those who disagree are wrong. They also are evil. And their ideas do not even merit a hearing. He goes after those tricky bigots who "believe that the content of speech is always secondary to the right to speak." (You know, like the authors of the Constitution.) "This logic," warns Bronner, "permits intolerance, places stupidity on the same level as intelligence, and attempts to bind future generations to the ignorant prejudices of those that preceded them. 'Repressive tolerance' is willing to accept hate speech, flat out racism, the denial of global warming, or the rejection of evolution as mere matters of opinion." Well there's a good reason to throw out the First Amendment tomorrow. You know, like they regularly do on college campuses.If you've ever wondered just how impenetrable the bubble of higher education can be, this book is the answer. "The bigot," as Bronner writes, "is always primarily concerned with proving what he already thinks he knows." Sounds like someone else I know.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author most recently of Got Religion? How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back (Templeton Press).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

On July 22, 2011, Alf Walgermo was away from his desk, where he works as the arts and culture editor for Vårt Land—a Christian daily headquartered in Oslo, Norway—when a car bomb detonated 100 meters away. The explosion killed 8 people and injured 209. Walgermo returned later to find his office in disarray, shards of glass impaled in books. "It was a surreal scene," he says. "If I had been there, I would have been lucky to escape with scratches."

Many more were not lucky. Two hours after the explosion, Anders Breivik, the lone wolf who planted the bomb, donned a police uniform and opened fire at a nearby youth camp, killing another 69 and injuring 110. The violence shocked the small country most reliably in the spotlight in connection with the Nobel Peace Prize. One study found that 1 in 4 Norwegians knew someone affected by the massacre.

Two years after the attacks—almost to the day—Alf and I sat at a café just inside the main gate to Vigeland Park, Oslo's analogue to Central Park. Cyclists and joggers power through flocks of meandering tourists. Walgermo points out the occasional thirtysomething man in skinny jeans pushing a stroller, a relatively new species of Scandinavian urban male dubbed "latte dads." We sip our own coffees and consume chocolate croissants while talking about the publishing phenomenon that is Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle and the local arts scene.

Along with his work for Vårt Land, Walgermo has served as president of the Norwegian Critics' Association, the country's 350-member strong alliance of art, music, theater, and literary critics. But contra the stereotypes about those who labor at criticism, Alf is no frustrated artist. His own creative output includes several books, not to mention music with his band Minor Yours. He recently wrapped up a stint as a Statens kunstnerstipend fellow that allowed him to take a sabbatical from the newspaper and work on his new novel. During that time he also penned a comedic musical for children about a brother and sister elephant running away from trouble. "I guess it will be almost impossible to translate because all the puns about pachyderms and their noses are in Norwegian," he concedes.

On the day we met in the park, terrorism seemed to be the last thing on anyone's mind. What is increasingly on the country's mind is God, a growing public religious consciousness that predates, but was nonetheless intensified by, Breivik's rampage. "Fifteen years ago no one would deal with religious themes because it was a little bit taboo," Walgermo says. "But now it's a really open environment. Jon Fosse, one of our most famous writers, says that to write is like prayer for him. Even Per Petterson [of Out Stealing Horses fame] is writing more and more about religion. And when the new Norwegian translation of the Bible was published in 2011, it was the talk of the town."

The Norwegian Bible Society (NBS) started revising its previous (1978) edition of the Bible in 1999, but the organization decided that a bolder approach was called for, both because Norwegian is rapidly changing and to take account of the latest biblical scholarship. The NBS employed not only Greek and Hebrew scholars and theologians for the project but also accomplished writers. In 2011, the society released new translations into both Norwegian (bokmål) and New Norwegian (nynorsk), to great fanfare. "It has been remarkable to see nationally famed authors and poets appear in media as Bible translators, strongly recommending the new translation and talking with enthusiasm about their own participation," said NBS general secretary Stein Mydske. The Associated Press reported that the new translated Bible was Norway's bestselling book in 2012.

A popular six-hour play titled Bibelen (Bible), which imagined Jesus committed to a mental hospital and eventually executed via lethal injection instead of dying on a cross, is one of a number of artistic conversations with the new version of the text. And the translation inspired Walgermo's most recent project, Bibeldikt (Bible Poems), a volume he's coedited with Jan Ove Ulstein for which prominent Norwegian poets have written new work in dialogue with Scripture.

"Jan came to me with the idea and I thought it was too exciting to say no," says Alf. "How many times do you see the best writers of a nation writing pieces inspired by the Bible and gathered together in one book?"

While he struggles to picks favorites, Walgermo points to three poems that suggest the variety and depth of the collection: Gro Dahle with a piece on caring for animals—a goose with a broken wing, an abandoned and bitter cat, a sad-eyed dog—that appeals to children and adults alike; Aasne Linnestå's poem about the Syrian conflict combined with reflections on fasting; and Jon Fosse's perspective on the wind that takes us and the light that never dies.

Walgermo speculates that immigration, especially of Muslims, has done a lot to make spiritual life an acceptable topic in broader society. But he notes that the conversational climate has also shifted among Christians. "Active Christians probably make up less than 10 percent of the population and are becoming more and more ecumenical," he says. "Not so many years ago Catholics and evangelicals didn't speak to each other at all. Before it was like: We know what's right and we won't have anything to do with any other church. Now it seems that active Christians in different branches of the faith are finding more reasons and opportunities to collaborate. Of course there are debates and different positions on issues like gay marriage even within Christianity. But it seems like Christian people are finding common cause. Perhaps this is the result of the massacre in 2011. After this horrible attack people came streaming to the church, both active and cultural Christians. Even people from other religions, too. Everyone came together as a people."

Alf was raised in an evangelical family in a small Norwegian town—his mother still works in the office at the church the family attended while he was growing up—and was aware of being part of a suspect minority that was deliberate about its Christian faith. Roughly 85 percent of the Norwegian population identifies as Christian, a legacy of the historic comingling of church and state, but secularism has been the de facto religion in Norway for many decades now. So Walgermo has observed the growing openness to religion with keen personal and professional interest.

"Faith is something natural to me, something I can't escape, despite having tried," he says. "And insofar as my work reflects something of myself, it often involves elements of faith. As a writer, my goal is to write a good book. I don't feel obliged to force faith into my work in some overt way, but I do feel free to involve my faith in my work."

In 2006, Walgermo published Mestermøter (Teacher Meetings), a short story collection that imagines lives for the 100 people the Bible records personally interacting with Jesus during his earthly ministry. Mestermøter was published by a Christian house, and the reception was impressive enough that Norway's largest publisher, Cappelen Damm, agreed to look at his next manuscripts. He got even more positive attention with the children's book Mor og far i himmelen (Mom and Dad in Heaven). The book is a young girl's prayer to God in the wake of the death of both of her parents. Intended to help parents talk to their children about death, its accessible treatment of the problem of evil engaged a wide readership.

Did anyone at Cappelen Damm balk at the overt Christian message in Mom and Dad in Heaven? "Christian content in children's and young adult books from the major publishers is unusual, but I'm told people working in the office were sitting there crying when they read the manuscript. So I would definitely say they're open to it. You just have to write a book that connects with people." The book also connected with Oyvind Torseter, one of Europe's most beloved book illustrators, who agreed to illustrate it after reading the manuscript.

Walgermo's most successful book thus far is a young adult novel called Mitt bankande hjarte (My Beating Heart) about a 14-year-old girl awaiting a heart transplant. "I wanted to avoid the usual clichés about the heart and write about it as a physical organ," he explains. "It's still a love story, though." My Beating Heart won the Bokhandelens barnebokstipend in 2012 and was selected to be one of five titles given to students in the sixth and seventh grades across Norway to encourage reading. It's been translated into seven languages, including French and German but, alas, still not English.

Recently married, Walgermo has spent a lot of time creating work intended for children despite not having any children of his own. I point out his knack for talking to kids about their concerns while thumbing through a copy of the gorgeous Mor og far i himmelen that he's kindly brought to the park for me. Why kids? "Well, children are people," he says with a straight face, before softening into a grin. Touché. "And I've always felt that children need to be taken seriously, both in real life and when it comes to literature. We shouldn't sweep difficult topics under the carpet. You can talk to a 10-year-old about a death in the family, as much as you can talk to a 10-year-old about a loving God."

My Beating Heart has sold well in Europe, and the German edition of Mom and Dad in Heaven has garnered both good reviews and a Catholic literary prize. Bible Poems was just published, in September, and he hopes to finish a new novel before Christmas. Some months after our day at Vigeland, Walgermo wrote with news of his next creative collaboration: "My wife is pregnant!"

Lisa Ann co*ckrel is an editor for Brazos Press and Baker Academic and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She recently fell in love with the Hardangerfjord on Norway's western coast.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I would like to commend myself for not beginning this review with "Aaron Belz is da bomb." And I think you, reader, should commend yourself for reading this review that doesn't begin that way, and me for writing it, because the probability that you will purchase Aaron Belz's new book is now much higher than it would have been if you had continued in your ignorance of Aaron Belz and his new book, assuming that you were in fact ignorant of him and it before you started reading this review, which it is perhaps presumptuous of me to assume, in which case I apologize. But my larger thesis remains, and it is that Aaron Belz is da bomb, notwithstanding my reluctance to begin this review by saying so.

Belz makes me want to be a little silly, as you might have noticed. This is a poet who will write, in a poem entitled "Trois Poésies Antique," "Watch out for the wack kings, / clanking their armor, / riding their dope horsies over the hill." Sound advice, perhaps, but a bit lacking in the Eliotic touch. Belz has that sweet silliness with which late Ashbery, James Tate, and their wise-guy epigones have saturated the marketplace:

When I say
"I dig graves"
what I mean is
I enjoy and/or
understand them.

That's "Hippie Slang," in its entirety. The poem-as-corny-joke is a particular forte of Belz's: "I scream, you scream, we all scream / when we get stabbed in the heart."

But if Belz's aesthetic is familiar, he works it with the new-minted sheen of a sexting mallrat in bubblegum lip gloss. He rarely settles for cutesy or zanier-than-thou contortions (although I want the ten seconds I spent reading "On the Loss of a Finger" back). "Violets, Time and Motherhood" improbably begins, "One night I lay musing, among violets." The tone, after dozens of goofball pages, is impossible to mistake, and the succeeding lines grow purpler until they're practically winking at the reader. And yet the poem achieves a poignant dissonance: "One night I lay awake in a music of voices. / It all came to me suddenly, and so I ran / far from the madness, and into a field."

Like Ashbery, Belz makes comedy out of "what Wyatt and Surrey left around, / Took up and put down again / Like so much gorgeous raw material," mixing registers not (or not only) in order to mock or ironize, but with something like wistfulness:

Like, I might be driving along, and the
iPod might shuffle to that one Coldplay song:
why now? Here, where the road
gracefully descends to Steak 'n Shake,
where the trail ends

The second sentence begins with a traditional lyric deictic placement: think of Keats—"Here, where men sit and hear each other groan"; of Ammons—"here / where we can watch / the closing up of day." It descends into the vulgar poetry of consumerism, then resumes its contemplative register, confident in its accommodation of the jingly present.

This is a common enough tactic in contemporary smart-ass lyric poetry, but Belz is better at it than most wack kings. A poem that's mostly concerned to joke around about "the other stuff I'm picking / well enough on my own, such as my nose," suddenly digresses to observe a racehorse who "faltered in the muddy stretch, coat full of foam." As in Ashbery's work, the high style of that line is part of the joke, which doesn't mean it's not admirable writing. To an extent, the point is to question such distinctions.

Which brings us to Belz's "My Last duch*ess":

That's my last duch*ess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. She's not.
She was too flirtatious, so I had her killed.
Now I want to marry your master's daughter.

As a joke—literalizing what in Browning's original is all indirection—it's not much (a poet friend of mine thinks it banal for this reason). But I read it as a weary commentary on the teaching of literature, Belz's sometime profession and my own. Inevitably, Browning's poem, like Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," gets reduced to an object lesson in subtext, as if literary works were riddles for students to puzzle out. Browning's superb rhetorical control and social satire go missing. Belz's flat lines reveal how little the "message" of a poem matters.

It's perhaps ironic to discover such subtextual contraband in Belz's parody, but he's sneaky that way. To say he isn't "merely" a comic poet implies that there's something wrong with being a comic poet. I don't believe that, and Belz is one of the best comic poets we have. But even his silliest poems can break—with panache—into anxiety, heartbreak, longing, loss. "There's no I in team," he writes, "but there's one in bitterness / and one in failure." Glitter Bomb glitters with inanity, but keep an eye out for unattended baggage. Watch out for the wack kings.

Michael Robbins is the author of two collections of poetry: Alien vs. Predator (Penguin) and The Second Sex (just published by Penguin). He teaches creative writing at Montclair State University.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

David Mitchell's brilliant new novel, The Bone Clocks, spans roughly sixty years, half of them spent (1984 to the present), half not (the present to 2043). Sure, its characters—many of them the heirs or exploiters or prey of a secret loophole in mortality—strain that timeline. And, thanks to their incredibly long memories, centuries lapse in the course of their flashbacks. Then again, The Bone Clocks's chronological glitches are nothing compared to its prodigal geography. Its characters hurtle unimpeded between the known continents. As well as past them.

They visit, specifically, secret principalities—realms that exist alongside the world as we know it and in which two clans of "atemporals" (beings able to put off death) are at war, most pointedly over the worth of "temporal" lives. The nobler clan, Horology, has been granted their approximate immortality unbidden (by what deity or accident they don't know). The Anchorites, conversely, wrest deathlessness to themselves. When the tribes clash, though, their ferocity impinges upon and smudges ordinary mortals' ongoing stories.

So the atemporals do work together to do one thing. They conspire to smuggle the paranormal into an otherwise realistic fiction. Standing behind them, of course, is Mitchell, who, as his fans already know, has an uncanny knack for at once perfecting and flouting the rules of genre. This knack shows up even in the tiniest details of The Bone Clocks. Take the pastoral lyricism that Mitchell infuses with technological jargon, describing "brand-new leaves ooz[ing] unbundling from swollen buds and a wood …. Bluetoothed with birdsong." On a larger scale, meanwhile, one section of this novel begins by standing exquisitely in line with a shelf's worth of other Oxbridge bildungsromans only so that Mitchell can marry it to fantasy.

Its diverting snags and postmodern play notwithstanding, The Bone Clocks begins and ends with one character, Holly Sykes, and her story holds this narrative together. Indeed, the novel opens with her chronicling "A Hot Spell" in her adolescence: a rash entanglement with a used car salesman and its unthinkable aftermath. It closes with her septuagenarian voice: practical, wry, and unflappable except when her loved ones suffer.

Granted, five books lie between the first and last sections of The Bone Clocks—and each is narrated by a character other than Holly. Mitchell, moreover, swivels so boldly in the gaps between these books that Holly, who runs away from home in the book's first pages, goes missing habitually in this narrative. In book three, for instance, she's papered over by a war reporter's story; in book four, by the bitter discourse of a novelist whose popularity is on the wane. She disappears for pages at a time. But always reappears—silhouetted against the snow or holding a crowd in thrall or alone in a churchyard—making this cubist panorama of a fiction compelling for the simplest reason: we look for her, we pull for her.

The Bone Clocks, then, seems to nudge its reader in two directions. On the one hand, it passes down to its readers what a beggar in its second book demands of posh, pretty Hugo Lamb. "Think larger," the panhandler tells him. "Re-draw what is possible." Hugo, for his part, finds the directive hard to resist or to obey, hard to sound, hard to silence. Read this novel, and you will, too.

On the other hand, for all its cerebral virtuosity—for, that is, every time a character from one of Mitchell's previous novels puts in a winking cameo, for every arcane history the writer crams into an aside, for every wry allusion it deploys—this is first and last a book about conscience. It is a book about cunning and compassion. It is a book about the mortal Holly Sykes, who has both.

In short, Mitchell does not exact quite as much from his readers as intrepid beggars do from his characters. Like his debut fiction, Ghostwritten, and the film-adapted Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks commands its audience, primarily, not to "think larger" but to imagine passionately along with its own fiction's largess. And if you read this novel with a pencil in hand, your task will not be to "re-draw what is possible." Mitchell has beat you to that. Rather, your task will be to rough out his plot's incredible genealogy on the book's back matter. Your task will be to decorate his story's margins with whatever idiosyncratic shorthand you use to signal perplexity and epiphany, to flag outlandish allusions and inside jokes, to single out the author's own drawing at its best.

None of that is bad. Indeed, I don't read David Mitchell's novels because I need him to enjoin me to "think larger" than he thinks (I can't) or to scrap the half-possible worlds he conjures and start sketching (I oughtn't). Rather, I read Mitchell's novels because their cunning isn't tiring and their charity isn't condescending, and we do need more books like that.

Why? Because, too often, smart writing is also hard enough going that the only readers whom it rewards with truths about conscience and compassion are those who belong to a literary élite, and this is a problem for two reasons. 1. Literary élites tend to congratulate themselves for their expertise as they read, which makes it easy to miss the real prize: truth, artfully dressed. 2. Lay-readers tend to be put off when what they thought would be a story is instead the transcript of the literati whispering shibboleths back and forth.

Let me be clear. I'm not saying that writers should gag their wit or that readers attuned to writers' witticisms should deny themselves glee. That would be hypocritical of me, as I smilingly dog-eared a page of The Bone Clocks for no other reason than that it contained a droll, willfully cumbersome riff on William Blake (viz., "What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks and more bricks than there are stars?"). What I'm saying is that smart writers sometimes permit the élite wit they can call up to supplant, at worst, or, at best, to limit the circulation of whatever truths they would champion.

David Mitchell doesn't number among them. He doesn't allow his virtuosity to trump the case he makes for virtue. Which is why it's the readers who scrutinize his fiction only for its wit (or evidence of their own)—not the readers who fail to notice his erudite showmanship—who will miss out on what The Bone Clocks offers.

Put otherwise: the accusation that a 22-year-old Holly levels at one of this book's cleverest characters trumps what an enigmatic vagrant commands him on the order of "thinking larger." For when Holly accuses Hugo Lamb of "sifting what [people] say for clues instead of listening," she's also remonstrating with those who sift through books for clues instead of reading, and the novel Mitchell's put her in backs her. You could come to The Bone Clocks with very little literary cunning and still find its story compelling and its morality legible.

The stunning thing about David Mitchell, however, is that you could also come to this novel impatient with simplistic moralizing or sentimental drivel or donnish condescension and not find it wanting. Admittedly, parts of The Bone Clocks—especially its rendering of the future—flirt with portentousness, in both senses of that word, but nowhere does Mitchell dole out moral pablum. On the contrary, even his axioms are frowzy (e.g., "Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it's real, it dies"). And it's possible that, given time, this novel's last hundred pages or so will smack more of prescience than portentousness.

Whether 2043 bears any likeness to the last book of The Bone Clocks, however, is trivia next to Mitchell's deeper thesis. Here it is: as the years elapse, we need to tug cunning and compassion and conscience along with us, and an unlikely story makes a good rucksack for those things.

Furthermore, apart from cunning and compassion and conscience, the world will only produce likely stories, stories that proceed according to the flat templates of genre. So that to reduce another person's sadness into cliché will prove easy, as in "cue crying scene: a scene as old as hominids and tear glands. It's happening all over Planet Earth, right now, in all the languages there are." And evil regimes will issue edicts using the same old mad-lib in which "treason, under Clause Whatever of the Stability Law Act of Whenever, would be dealt with by a bullet through the head."

"The world's default mode is basic indifference," says The Bone Clocks's third narrator. Then he insists that what "is written about [reality] at least makes a tiny dent in the world's memory," and that such dents vex indifference, even if they cannot derail it. By the same token, true fictions at least make a tiny dent in the world's imagination. Fair enough—but in my imagination, Mitchell's novels have left craters and foxholes, and I cannot tell the two apart.

Jane Zwart teaches writing and literature at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.