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Being Radically Religious in Public Life
Dorothy Day and Osama bin Laden are hardly two of a kind. But a recent Woodstock forum aired the provocative thought that the pacifist Catholic Worker founder and the patron terrorist offer examples of uncompromisingly public religious lives, and are manifestations of religious militancy. Could the originating motivations of both religious killers and religious peace-builders be construed in some way as "authentically religious," in R. Scott Appleby's phrasing? Are all claims to possess full certainty of God's revelation "religiously idolatrous," as Father Leon Hooper, S.J., suggests? And what does the postmodern attack on Christian truth - Gil Bailie's concern - have to do with it? The March 14 forum featured presentations by Appleby, Bailie, and Father Hooper, and was moderated by Sue Morris, a Catholic social-action leader and spiritual director. Following is an edited transcript of the discussion.
INTRODUCTION
Sue Morris currently ministers at the Oblates King's House Retreat and Renewal Center in Belleville, Illinois. She has worked for over 25 years in religious education, social ministry, and directed retreats specializing in spirituality and peace and justice.
Tonight's forum, "Being Radically Religious in Public Life," grows out of September 11th concerns. We live as a people who believe in the Second Vatican Council's universal call to holiness and its embrace of the many different ways of life. At the same time, awareness of God in our world of business, finance, and politics can be difficult. We find ourselves admiring people who live with such total dedication.
At the same time, we can be troubled by the clarity and the certainty of some "true believers." But we might be repulsed by the fact that both pure pacifists, such as Dorothy Day, and terrorists such as Mohamed Atta, do claim the sense of being closely involved with God in their life and attuned to God's intention for the world. Tonight's discussion will examine two forms of radical religion in public life: the uncompromisingly non-violent, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Dorothy Day, and the unflinchingly violent, as represented by Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. By way of contrast, we shall also discuss how God may be found along more moderate paths we find ourselves in, amid the ambiguity and the compromise of public life today.
RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE AND RELIGIOUS PEACE BUILDING
R. Scott Appleby is director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. With Martin E. Marty, Scott served as co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an extensive study of public religion conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which has produced five volumes to date. Appleby is author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation and Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism.
My assignment is to talk about religious violence and religious peace-building and see to what extent we can understand the two as related, and in fact as coming from, in some sense, the same religious dynamic while making distinctions between those who do religious violence and religious peace-building. How can we say that both deadly violence and self-sacrificial healing and compassion are both "authentically religious?"
Two mistakes are often made. One is to say that the young Palestinian suicide bomber or the Jewish settler, or the Christian abortion clinic bomber, because they do violence, because they murder and kill, and maim and torture and commit acts of terrorism, of course cannot be religious. They are either manipulated by secular, Marxist, or other ideological agents. They are in no way motivated by authentic or genuine religion. This just can't be true. That's a mistake. We have to separate, make a distinction between normative judgments about these great religious traditions and what counts for appropriate reading of those traditions, on the one hand, and the vast array of people who read them in different ways but who are living according to the patterns, dynamics, and motivations of the sacred. So fellow
Muslims might say, about that young Muslim suicide bomber, fellow Jews about the Jewish settlers, fellow Christians about the abortion clinic bombers - "that's not Islam, that's not Judaism, that's not Christianity." And everyone has the right and the authority within these traditions to say that. But that doesn't help us understand why that person believes it to be Islam. Or why devotion to self-sacrifice in the cause of killing others is construed as Islamic in a way that is different from other kinds of motivations or acts of violence.
The other mistake about religion in international affairs and in deadly conflict is the notion that all religion is inherently intolerant, violent, extremist, and deadly. I can give many examples of this. But when the American Academy of Arts and Sciences won a huge grant to study religious fundamentalism, I sat on the committee as a young 30-year-old because Martin Marty couldn't be there. And the other committee members were incensed that we gave any money to religion at all. Some of these are Nobel Laureates, people who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and they said: "Young man, if we're giving one damn penny to religion, you better eradicate it." Not fundamentalism, religion. It's all irrational, barbarian. It is superstitious. It lends itself to intolerance and prejudice. I found myself babbling about St. Thomas Aquinas, reason and revelation. But there are many examples of this kind of secular prejudice.
Religious Violence and Peace-Building. How do we understand these two expressions of religion within a range that is authentically religious? We could go back to a book written in 1924 by a historian of religion named Rudolph Otto. The book was called The Idea of the Holy. And I will use the words "holy" and the "sacred" interchangeably. Otto made the claim that I think is still valid, that religion is rooted in experience, a distinctive kind of experience, the experience of the holy, of the sacred. And it's an experience across cultures that leads one to community - "religare" means "to bind together," to live in community. This experience does something to bring people together, somewhat like say, the experience of ecstasy, falling in love. You communicate it. You want it to be known. You want to bind yourself together to others. Well, for this experience of the sacred, which is community forming, he used the memorable phrase, "mysterium tremendum, et fascinans."
Mysterium means this is an experience of something radically other than myself or my community. It's not a tingle in my toes. It's not a kind of intuition. It is something that is not me. So it's radically other. It is mysterious. Profoundly other. And yet, it's also tremendum, i.e., tremendous in the sense of soul-shaking. In the presence of the sacred, in the presence of the holy, we recognize ourselves radically to be creatures, to be finite, to be contingent, to be unable to exist on our own. But there's also "et fascinans." It's also fascinating, intriguing, compelling, and in a sense, seductive. It draws us to it.
The important insight here, however, in this phenomenology of religion is that the experience of the holy, of the sacred, is pre-moral. It does not come with its own program, where you tell the players apart, and know what is good and bad, what is the right thing to do, how to interpret it. So religion itself is an interpretive exercise. And it's an interpretation not just of anything, but of this awesome, tremendous, mysterious, soul-shaking reality, that in fact evokes in us our spiritual reality. Paul Tillich said we have a passion for the infinite. We are finite creatures who are drawn beyond ourselves. And so we are capable of giving ourselves, not only our own lives and livelihoods, but even our children, our loved ones' lives to a cause we decide or we consider to be sacred or holy.
The Varieties of Religious Militancy. Therefore, militance [sic] is a religious norm. I use the word "militant" to refer to the religious dynamic that binds together those who move into modes of violence and those who move into modes of compassion and healing. One could use the word "extremism" or some other word, but the word I use is "militance." Gandhi said: "I am a militant." One of the representatives of St. Egidio, the lay Catholic community in Rome that does peace-building around the world, pounded his fists on the table a few years ago and said: "I am a militant for peace!" By militance, I mean a dynamic within religion that calls forth or evokes self-sacrifice, a willingness to give oneself entirely to a cause unto flying a plane in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or whatever other kind of extreme and outrageous acts but also unto leading a non-violent movement to liberate India from the British. You can go across the spectrum and see that this kind of militance is part of a devotion to the sacred.
Then there are extremists - those religious militants who are dedicated to violence. They believe violence to be a religious obligation. It's not an option for them. It's not something they can choose or reject. There are two kinds of extremists to talk about. One would be the ethno-religious type of extremist. And here we have examples of weak religion. These are often ethno-religious conflicts where the conflict is not primarily to defend or protect or expand or enlarge religion. Instead the conflict is an ethnic, territorial, nationalist conflict that recruits religion to sacrilize the killing, that brings this devotion to absolutism, and to self-sacrifice to the service of nationalist claims. In the conflict in Northern Ireland, the IRA is not fighting for Catholics to attend Mass more regularly or to be better Catholics. In Bosnia, when Serbian soldiers were raping and torturing Muslim women, they were singing Christian hymns. But they were not fighting to increase Serbian orthodoxy as such. In their folk religion, orthodoxy and Serbian identity are intertwined. The internal pluralism of orthodoxy, the resistance to nationalism, is underdeveloped. And so, you could ask those Serbian soldiers who were singing hymns while they were doing atrocities a few basic theological questions that are likely to fail. Because the religion is weak but it's powerful in the sense of being fused with ethnicity.
The second kind of extremist religion is "radical fundamentalism." Here we are talking about religious extremists who are fighting primarily, although never exclusively, for religion. They believe that the reason the grievances are there, the injustice is there, is precisely because they believe that religion has been displaced. And here we find a variety of Islamic movements. The problem for the Osama bin Ladens is that the people they're recruiting have a knowledge and a literacy of their religious tradition and understand that the mainstream tradition does not teach brutal violence. So they have to say: under certain conditions, we're threatened with death, the tradition is about to be annihilated. And in fact, you can find in the New Testament, if you want to, in the Torah, in the Koran, emergency clauses. In case of this assault, pick up the sword.
At the other end are the people who are committed to non-violence and just peace-building. They are, of course, woefully under-recorded, often under-organized, not staffed, and not funded. There's a fellow named David Steele, a United Church of Christ minister, who works on reconciliation workshops in the former Yugoslavia, does wonderful work, painstaking, long-term work with the religious communities there, bringing them together. First, he had to spend years letting them talk about their suffering before they could even talk about reconciliation. Furthermore, his budget is on such a shoestring that you couldn't even paint one of our warheads with the amount of money he has. So it's a great inequity. The resources of these people who are working in non-violence, justice, and peace-building are tremendous because they are local. These are people working in and of the communities. They have great integrity, also in some cases, like Catholicism, have a transnational presence they can draw upon in conflict mediation. And they have a record, as I say, of integrity, which is parenthetically one of the really painful things we're all undergoing in the Catholic community with the scandals in Boston, because what's being eroded is one of the great advantages of local peace-building and justice, which is trust, integrity. People who are turning to religious peace-builders are willing to risk themselves in battle for reconciliation.
Saturation Peacemaking. To conclude, there are three different models of religious peace-building. One is what I call the saturation model in which religious peace-builders have worked over a long term at the elite level, at middle management in the societies, and in the grass roots to foster reconciliation. It's difficult to prove how important these people are because it's difficult to prove a negative. In Northern Ireland, there are more peace-builders per capita than anywhere else in the world. The cynic will say, "Well you still had over 3,000 deaths since 1970." And the correct answer is: "You should see what it would have been like if we hadn't had thousands of people dedicated to peace- building." Saturation is one model, and then I should mention the conflict mediation model of St. Egidio and other religious movements. They recognize that the religious actors devoted to peace-building can't do this on their own. And so they work with governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, with the U.S. Catholic Conference or Catholic Relief Services, or the CIA (if they have to). But my point is, the religious peace-builders, the non-violent, are no less devoted, and I think no less potentially effective, than the extremists.
SECULAR FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE TRUTH QUESTION
Gil Bailie is president of The Florilegia Institute of Sonoma, California. For many years he taught a wide variety of courses at the Institute, including courses on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and a great number of other Biblical themes and topics. Bailie's book, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, received the 1996 Pax Christi USA book award. He spends his time traveling the country and the world giving talks on issues of justice and violence.
I want to talk about ideologies, which were invented in the post-Christian world, beginning in the 18th century, and in ways too complicated to try to explore right now. Each of them was designed to in some way neutralize and marginalize the Gospel tradition. They have all failed. We were in desperate need of a post-ideological ideology and wouldn't you know it? We found one. It might be called secular fundamentalism. It's sometimes called post-modernism. And, by the way, like so many of these other things, post-modernism is like a broken clock. It's right twice a day. So I'm not here to completely dismantle it or attack it, but I do want to tell a parable.
I could turn, as Henri de Lubac and others have, to Nietzsche. Nietzsche is naturally a madman, and he's sown incredible poison, but he understood Christianity better than most Christians. He wanted to get rid of it, but he understood it at least. Or at least he understood its cultural and historical impact, and he wanted to eliminate it. If de Lubac can turn to Nietzsche, I want to turn to Virginia Woolf. She has a prophetic anticipation of the spiritual plight of modern intellectual life in the West in her novel, The Waves. Bernard, a character in the novel, is a "wannabe" writer and poet. In fact, he is a scribe, a man completely preoccupied with textuality.
Early in the novel, Bernard says: "I have made up thousands of stories. I have filled up innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer, but I have never yet found that story." Like his later post-modern descendants, Bernard is a man without a meta-narrative. Unlike them, he still at least claims to be looking for one, in the absence of which, he tries to breathe life into the eviscerated text with which his study is now strewn, his own life story in a perfectly comfortable state of amorphous incoherence. As Virginia Woolf makes unmistakably clear, the question that haunts these pages is the question of truth, the post-modern question. Bernard is awash in narratives and in the verbal and grammatical spare parts out of which they are constructed, but from none of this literary abundance can he fashion a reliable story. The untruth which infects his stories is explicitly related to the fact that he is unable to situate them in "the" story, the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer. It is the absence of this one overarching unifying story that has rendered the stories that might have been its constituent parts untrue.
With an almost breathtaking literary economy, Virginia Woolf shows us the real nature of the post-modern spirit. The Waves is a novel written in 1930. She shows how utterly ad hoc is Bernard's objection to the truth claim, precisely the Christian truth claim, for that is what she is no doubt here exploring. And those like Bernard, imbued with that passive-aggressive resentful post-modern spirit, will instantly glance around for something, anything, to which they can plausibly point as an exception, something to which the claim does not apply, for it is precisely the universality of the claim that arouses resentment.
What Woolf shows, however, is how ludicrously arbitrary are the objections thrown up against the truth claims of Christianity. Does Bernard offer philosophical objections or counter-arguments based on comparative religion, or science, or the unedifying history of the Church? No. Virginia Woolf has engaged in such polemics and she knows herself well enough and is honest enough to tell us the truth about them. What she shows us here is what underlies all these seemingly rational objections is an irrational one. Pure resentment at the fact that a universal truth claim is still being made. No self-respecting person would lower himself to countering truth claims with allusions to something as utterly arbitrary and accidental as a cat which one has just happens to have seen stealing a piece of fish. No. One would counter such claims with philosophically or politically or scientifically respectable arguments.
What Virginia Woolf knows from firsthand experience, however, is that these more respectable arguments camouflage often even from those who advance them, the real source of the antipathy. The greater the intellectual respectability of the counter claim, the less apparent it will be that it is driven by pure resentment. That is why we need the Dostoyevskys and Virginia Woolfs and Nietzsches of the world to reveal the truth about such things to us. Virginia Woolf has substituted a philosophically absurd counter-argument in place of an intellectually respectable one, in order to reveal a motive that infects even the intellectually respectable one, namely resentment felt towards any and all truth claims, but felt with especial vehemence towards the truth claims of Christianity.
The heart and soul of post-modernism's attitude toward truth here stands exposed. The most important thing to recognize, however, is what Virginia Woolf reveals with such skill, that Bernard's stories are also untrue because, as Bernard himself tells us, they were written for the very purpose of obscuring truth, precisely the Christian truth, the truth represented by the crucifix. Bernard tells us that he made up thousands of stories in order to obliterate the angels of the crucifix, eliminating thereby the story which Christianity proclaims to be the one true story, the story in which Christians find both the truth about God and the truth about humanity. The narrative Rosetta Stone for all substantive theological and anthropological thought, the story of Golgotha.
The Peace Stake in Christian Truth. The Gospel's deconstruction of the myths of sacred violence happens implacably. The cross shows us the innocence of the victim, the madness of the mob, it begins to deconstruct all the myths that require us to believe in the guilt of the victim and the sanctity and rightness of the mob.
Yet, even while it deconstructs those myths, it can also unleash the violence that those sacrificial regimes existed to minimize. So, it's in an incredibly paradoxical world, but the Gospel does two things. It destroys the old sacred system, and it does this other thing. It teaches us how to live without it. If it just destroys the old sacred system, we will eventually, like a lot of people who have turned to fundamentalism, try to get it back. Unless we learn how to live without it. Learning how to live without the old sacred system is what the Gospel is teaching us to do. And so the Gospel is destroying the old sacred system and the myths that justify it faster than we're learning how to live without it. And that's why people say to me: What are we gonna do? I say: evangelization. And when I say evangelization, it means the christianizing - if you want to use a small "c," fine - of our world, to bring it precisely into a dialogue, to connect us with others and to exhibit the God who is the God of everybody.
RELIGIOUS IDOLATRIES AND ABSOLUTIST CLAIMS
Leon Hooper, S.J., is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center. He has written extensively on the public theology of John Courtney Murray, edited two volumes of primary Murray texts, and co-directed a Lilly Endowment study of Murray and the American church, resulting in the volume of secondary essays, John Courtney Murray and the Growth of Tradition. He is currently working on a comparative study of Dorothy Day and Murray, anchored in recent studies of the rhetorical analyses of the way mystics talk about God.
Three years ago I was one of 25 participants, from a dozen different faith traditions, gathered at the Aspen Institute's Wye River Center. Our topic was: why we heterodox believers talk with each other, given our obvious disagreements. The response that both a Muslim Imam and I gave to the question evoked strong disagreement from each of our co-religionists. Surprisingly we found ourselves reduced to encouraging but wan smiles, and even a surreptitious wink, across the embattled conference room. The proposition we both subscribed to, which was rigorously denied by others, ran as follows:
God's revelation to us all - of who we are and who God is - is not closed. In this post-Cold War and post-modern age, God is trying to teach us something new. None of our pasts contain all that God is yet to reveal.
Murray and Day as Models. Here I will suggest - and suggest is all I can do here - that any claims to exclusive moral and religious truth are empirically false, socially deadly, and religiously idolatrous. My models for this claim are John Courtney Murray and Dorothy Day, and the moves they made as they faced their mid-twentieth century.
By most estimates, Murray was a moderate, a Rockefeller Republican who hung around with Henry and Clare Booth Luce. Day, the radical, associated with, even lived with, the poorest of our poor in Catholic Worker houses. In the early 1940s, Day nearly buried the Worker movement with her insistence that Christianity demanded non-violence in the face of Hitler's atrocities, while Murray was arguing, from papal sources, that no Catholic could be a pacifist. Both characterized the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, in Murray's terms, as "atrocities," as "savage ... paroxysms of violence." In the early 1950s, though, Day was jailed for actively demonstrating against nuclear bomb shelter drills, while Murray was arguing that we should use strategic nuclear weapons along the Chinese/Korean border. And in the mid-1950s, in his defense of a moral core at the heart of America, Murray argued from the premise that, in principle, we had solved the problem of poverty. With the Catholic Worker, Day was letting us know what our economy was doing to the poor, to blacks, and to farm-workers.
We, of course, think of Day as the more religiously radical. We judge that by what her living with the desperate and uneducated cost her, and would cost us. She claimed with all the realism she could muster that the poor "are the Christ," and she added, "When we meet people who deny Christ in his poor, we feel, 'Here are atheists indeed'."
And yet, I suggest, this is not Day at her most radical. She was her most radical when she would not allow her moral and religious values to exclude anyone from God's redeeming presence. Day accepted church teaching, including what the church said about atheists, communists, and non-Catholics. Yet she herself insisted that she learned of God's love for the poor from a communist college friend. Similarly, God as Creator became known to her through the loving of the man who fathered her child, an adamant atheist who adored nature. Amid the excluding demands of her faith, Day found a way to think of those outsiders, those aliens, as redeemed. She prayed that they, in the last second of their lives, would realize God's love for them.
For Day, acknowledging Christ in the poor was relatively a piece of cake. Much more difficult was acknowledging the Christ among totalitarian dictators or capitalist managers. In this she became truly challenging. While she bluntly condemned brutality and praised kindness wherever she found them, she refused to squeeze God into the narrow confines of even her best moral categories. God was and is fully present to all God's creation.
Now, to Murray. While he is tamer than Day, Murray did appear to us as at least mildly heroic. He insisted, against our adamant secularists, that religious voices needed to be heard. And against his own church he insisted that the voice of freedom coming from those secularists was indeed the voice of God, to whom we ought to pay attention. Even though, early in his life, Murray had entertained the notion that the Anglo-West was the "quintessence of all that is evil," he really did think that our Anglo-American freedoms were worth defending, and were God-given.
Murray's Mutual Conversation. Not very radical, by the standards of Day's life style. Yet Murray had to - and did - overcome his nearly lifelong, utter disbelief that we Catholics might learn anything about our God from non-Catholics, non-Christians, from atheists. Early in his life he argued that the Reformation break shattered the possibility of interfaith God-talk. And he acted accordingly, until the Second Vatican Council. Then, during and especially after the Council he confessed that, in the future, what we learn of our God will be learned only in mutual conversation, that theology must begin in ecumenical dialogue, if we are to know the truth of our God. And for Murray, talking with atheists, especially about God, was even more difficult. Until the Council he could give no principled grounds for not suppressing atheistic voices. After the Council, hesitantly and even grudgingly, he did so talk with them - although a picture from one such meeting reveals a Murray with the glazed look of a deer caught in headlights.
Both Day and Murray taught us much about our twentieth century and God's hopes for it. In this, our post-superpower world with its World Trade Centers, its terrorized Jewish and Palestinian children, soaring hopes and seething resentments and massive indifference - how can they help us tribalists discern God's present revelation to us, to us Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sihks, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, all of us? Here I mention three points.
1. We are learning that any faith that traps the God of love, God compassionate and merciful, within our moral and doctrinal commitments, is a form of idolatry. That which we affirm as good is often enough truly good. But to confine God within the limits of those goods is to take a creature and turn it into a God. In an age of less communication (therefore an age less pluralistic) and an age of less firepower, such idolatries could be tolerated, even encouraged. Now we can no longer afford them. We simply now know too much and can kill too easily.
2. Any claims to possess in one's small mitts the fullness or fullest revelation of God's will and graciousness (my divine whole against your at best fragmentary, if not diabolic, part), must now be recognized for what they have always been: inadequate expressions of God's graciousness that too easily, one might even say diabolically, lend themselves to building one's own sense of election on the battered bodies and souls and cultures and religions of the alien. We need to clean up our own traditions, recognizing our own tribalism for what it has been - much as Day and Murray challenged their own tradition for ignorantly abetting political, economic, and religious violations of human dignity.
3. We are now in a position to appreciate a bit more fully that being creatures means living within contradictory drives that allow no resolution. Here the unresolvable contradiction is a permanent tension between the particulars we know and the comprehensive that has been revealed to us - a problem between the many and the one. As people such as Julian of Norwich, and Day and Murray demonstrate, we need to simultaneously do the hard work of discriminating between the real world goods and evils that surround us, on the one hand, and living out God's all-encompassing love, on the other. We know the good. We just can't limit the good when we think of God.
An example might help.
When we look at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or the West Bank, we see people brutally murdered. But we Christians also have been trained to see, in those who appear most abandoned by God, people who are taken up into God's eternal life. After all, we have heard the Son of God cry out, "My God, why have you forsaken me." As Day could see the Christ in those most abandoned, so we recognize the Christ embracing all who are cast out beyond the margins of civility.
Mohamed Atta's Distance from God. However, if we are to be true to the Jesus who invited tax collectors, prostitutes, priests, and the learned to sit at the same table, prior to reforming their lives (much like Day's hopes for Worker dining rooms and farms), then we must ask ourselves: who at the World Trade Center seems to us the most distant from God? And the answer surely is Mohamed Atta, the pilot who directed one of the planes into the towers. Such brutality, to our eyes and hearts, puts him outside any grace that we can recognize. But is he beyond the grace that saves? Can we, living in the Spirit of Christ, leave him twisting in the outer darkness, even when he himself consigns us to hell? Do we return the favor?
In the fifteenth century, Julian of Norwich looked at her world, decimated by both the black plague and lawless banditry, and the church's promise that evil persons would burn in hell, on the one hand. And she encountered God's love so intensely, on the other, that she could not resolve the demands of justice with the experience of a God "in whom there is no wrath." She struggled with her age's best demands for justice and with her God, and finally threw up her hands and claimed that, when Christ comes again, "All will be well." She could claim no more - and no less - if she was to be true to the limited goods she encountered and the unlimited Good who grasped her. To claim only the full realization of justice, or only the full realization of mercy, is always an attempt to play God, and thus to deny the God who continues to create and reveal.
Julian was a mystic. Murray certainly wasn't. Day possibly so. But the moves of all three conform to a suggestion of Karl Rahner's: that the religion that will survive and be worthy of our God and of our best hopes, will be a religion that is mystical. Our times are revealing to us that our current brutalities emerge not only from the evils we recognize, but more savagely from our drive to idolatrize even our best moral categories. The corrective to this idolatry is not abandonment of our hard fought moral discriminations, but lies in a willingness to live with them while simultaneously we acknowledge that God's embracing love reaches beyond them. Even Atta is grasped. Without that grasp, God is not God, or at least not a God worthy of adoration.