Tag: biography (page 1 of 1)

June 14, 2025

Buckley

I’ve just finished Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley, which is magisterial. I have many, many thoughts, only a few of which I’ll share here.

Buckley’s greatest virtue and greatest vice was loyalty. Again and again we see him behaving with exceptional generosity to friends and family, even when that generosity was costly to him in dollars, in reputation, or in both. Once he came to think of someone as belonging in some way, in any way, to “us,” then it was almost impossible to dislodge his loyalty to them — even when they had, by any serious measure, betrayed that loyalty. Having settled on anything — a spouse, a friend, a house, a belief, a political stance — he couldn’t face abandoning him or her or it.

Buckley begins his book In Search of Anti-Semitism by frankly acknowledging that his own father was an antisemite, though he doesn’t go into any detail. (Tanenhaus does, though, and it’s not pretty.) But immediately after acknowledging his father’s views, he goes on to say that “the bias never engaged the enthusiastic attention of any of my father’s ten children…, except in the attenuated sense that we felt instinctive loyalty to any of Father’s opinions, whether about Jews or about tariffs or about Pancho Villa.” Okay … but what is that “attenuated sense”? The passage goes on without a break, as though to explain:

Seven or eight children in Sharon, Connecticut, among them four of my brothers and sisters, thought it would be a great lark one night in 1937 to burn a cross outside a Jewish resort nearby. That story has been told, and my biographer (John Judis) points out that I was not among that wretched little band. He fails to point out that I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young. Suffice it to say that children as old as 15 or 16 who wouldn’t intentionally threaten anyone could, in 1937, do that kind of thing lightheartedly. Thoughtless, yes, but motivated only by the desire to have the fun of scaring adults! It was the kind of thing we didn’t distinguish from a Halloween prank. None of us gave any thought to Kristallnacht, even when it happened (November 9, 1938 — I was 12, in a boarding school in England), and certainly not to its implications. But then this is a legitimate grievance of the Jew: Kristallnacht was not held up in the critical media as an international event of the first magnitude, comparable to the initial (1948) laws heralding the formal beginning of apartheid or the triggering episodes of the religious wars of the seventeenth century.

The is strangely evasive, except in one respect: Buckley bluntly refuses to distinguish himself from his siblings simply because they burned the cross and he didn’t. Loyalty! If they are to be condemned, then he will share in their condemnation!

But should they be condemned? Should they have known that this was something rather more serious than “a Halloween prank”? Does he expect us to believe that the cross-burning just happened to have been done on a site belonging to Jews and that any other place favored by “adults” would have done just as well? (If not, why does he bring in the “scaring adults” line at all? And why does he include it in a paragraph about the relationship between his father’s antisemitism and the beliefs of his children?)

Does he now, at the time of writing, think it something that should have been seen as a serious offense? Or, rather, that no one could have been expected to take it seriously in 1937 but should have done so after Kristallnacht? Or even that it wouldn’t have been seen as serious in 1938 but on that point Jews have a “legitimate grievance”?

Who can say?

But note that every possibility listed reminds us that Buckley is only seeing this from the perspective of the people who had their “lark,” not the Jews who looked out their hotel window to find a cross burning on the lawn. For them he does not spare a thought. (Something similar occurs in his discussion of Joseph Sobran, a blatant Jew-hater whom Buckley allowed for a long time to write for National Review and dismissed only under significant pressure: when Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, protested Sobran’s writings Buckley replied that “you are strangely insensitive to the point that his essay is much more damaging to me than it is to you.” I’m the real victim here!)

Similarly: he knew what Joe McCarthy was, knew what terrible sins and crimes he committed, and he was too honest to deny those sins and crimes; but out of loyalty he minimized them and said — well, what he always said from the beginning of his career to the end: The other side is worse and therefore hypocritical. “They” are worse than “we.” The people unjustly smeared by McCarthy simply don’t show up on Buckley’s radar at all.

He took the same approach to Southern racists who thought of themselves are preserving Southern traditions — people like his parents, to whom of course he was loyal. (His father was a Texan and his mother from New Orleans, and they split their time between a home in Connecticut and one in South Carolina. Buckley grew up in both worlds.) In 1959 he wrote a column for National Review that astounds me:

In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white — as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status. It is unpleasant to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural advantage of white over Negro; but the statistics are there, and are not easily challenged by those who associate together and call for the Advancement of Colored People. There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities. The problem is not biological, but cultural and educational. The question the white community faces, then, is whether the claims of civilization (and of culture, community, regime) supersede universal suffrage.

He answers Yes: indeed, “the claims of civilization” justify denying black people the vote. That’s not the astonishing part, though: what strikes me is Buckley’s quite explicit denial of the central claim of the Southern segregationists, which is that blacks are intrinsically and necessarily inferior to whites. Nonsense, Buckley says: “There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities.” White culture is superior to black culture because of the “preternatural advantages” granted by “tradition, training, and economic status.” But because it is superior, it should be allowed to rule. Which is no different than saying that a man who steals all my money should be allowed to keep it because he’s richer than I am. The plain old racists have at least the merit of consistency.

Now, in his famous Cambridge debate with James Baldwin in 1965, when a man in the audience shouted that black people in Mississippi should be allowed to vote, Buckley said, “I couldn’t agree with you more.” But then he went on to say “I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough Negroes are voting but that too many white people are voting.” He then went on to suggest an elevation of the standards of voting — presumably by refusing the vote to those unable to pass a civics test — that would dramatically reduce the number of white people allowed to vote but at the same time, given the racial inequities in the Mississippi education system, would certainly reduce by an even greater degree the number of black voters.

In 2004 Buckley told an interviewer: “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” A pundit admitting error is a remarkable thing, seen but a few times a century. That is admirable. But I do wonder how he could ever have believed, even in 1959, that people whose entire lives were built on the conviction of white supremacy would somehow “evolve” into something different? I doubt that he ever did believe it, though he may have wished for it. Primarily what he was doing in that column was being loyal to his parents and to their social world.

All that duly noted, I came away from this biography admiring Buckley for some things, and maybe most of all for his commitment to debate, especially on his TV show Firing Line. The very first episode of that show featured the socialist Michael Harrington, and at the end of it Buckley commended Harrington for making the most eloquent defense of President Johnson’s anti-poverty programs that he had ever heard.

And as Tanenhaus notes, Firing Line became the place to go if you wanted to hear what the radical black activists of the Sixties and Seventies — Huey Newton! Eldridge Cleaver! Roy Innis! — actually thought:

Buckley interviewed these activists, and opened his microphones to them, at a time when their exposure on mainstream television was limited to footage of violent demonstrations. “Amazingly,” writes the media historian Heather Hendershot, “a PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to conservatism [broadcast] some of the most comprehensive representations of Black Power from [its] era outside of the underground press and other alternative sources.”

(Link added.) That’s pretty cool.

I have a great deal to think through after reading this remarkable book. There may be more thoughts later — I feel that I ought to say more about what Buckley got right, because there were a few things. But for now I’m out of time.

March 10, 2023

of bad book reviewers and writerly cults

A book can go wrong in a nearly infinite number of ways, but a book review has a narrower range of ways to fail. In what follows I’ll be writing about book reviews that are published in professional venues, not what people write on their blogs and on social media. (Those reviews tend to be more honest.)

The chief modes of book-review failure are as follows:

Reviewer A didn’t read the book at all. This happens more often than most people think, especially now that information about a book can be searched for online. I’d say maybe 10% of book reviews are written by people who haven’t read the book they’re reviewing.

Reviewer B read the book only in part or cursorily, and is aware of his or her limited knowledge and consequently is careful and measured in criticism. This kind of reviewer thinks you may have failed to mention something X, but realizes that you may well have done so, somewhere in your too-long-to-read book, and so says something like “More attention to X would have been welcome.”

Reviewer C read the book only in part or cursorily but is unaware of or indifferent to his or her carelessness. This is the kind of reviewer who asserts with breezy confidence that the author failed to acknowledge X, when in fact the author at five different points in the book – all of which are findable in the index – acknowledged X. This is the kind of reviewer who gathers some vague sense that the author probably believes Z and then flatly asserts that the author said Z. (And if the author replies “I never said Z!” this kind of reviewer says “Well, you implied it.”)

Reviewer D has an axe to grind and either isn’t sufficiently self-aware to know it or deliberately obscures it – and the “or” there indicates that I’m putting into this one category attitudes and approaches that perhaps could be separated into different categories. Axe-grinding could be seen as a single flaw, but there are many and various axes. Maybe the reviewer has a personal hostility to the author that has nothing to do with the book, but the book provides a convenient outlet for that hostility. Maybe the reviewer thinks that he should have been asked to write the book, or is angry that his own book on a similar subject didn’t get widely reviewed. Maybe the reviewer has turf to protect.

Reviewer E just wants to show off. Auden: “Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.” And if you want to show off, then you will contrive to say a book is bad even when it’s not.

•

I have these thoughts in mind because I just read my old friend Charles Marsh’s brief book Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand, in which he responds to some critics of his powerful biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory. Now, this immediately raises the question: Should a writer respond to negative reviews at all? Many writers say no, but opinions vary. My own feeling is that when the reviewer says something that is just factually wrong, and can be shown to be factually wrong, then it’s fine for the writer to say so – in some cases it’s necessary to say so. But you can’t effectively contest someone’s judgments about your work.

The matter gets complicated, though, when a critic combines factual errors with implausible judgments. That’s the case with Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, who seems recently to have made a career of criticizing Marsh’s biography, largely on the Bulverist logic that since Americans can’t really understand Bonhoeffer and Charles Marsh is an American, Marsh’s biography must be wrong – it remains only to discover how it is wrong. Schlingensiepen takes his task seriously enough that when he discovers that Marsh has misnamed a Berlin department store, he cries that such an error is “grotesque.” Can you really answer someone who thinks that way? I doubt it.

But Marsh’s attempt to do so leads into some really interesting reflections on – here’s where the book’s title comes in – how a certain kind of author can become the object of a branding exercise, in a way that blurs the boundaries between a brand and a cult.

I’ve written before about the pleasure of working with Auden’s literary executor Edward Mendelson, who has consistently aided and abetted Auden scholars, extending the same courtesy to those whose views of Auden he strongly disagrees with as to those whose views resemble his own. That is to say, Mendelson has refused to be the custodian of a cult. This attitude is rarer than it should be. For instance, it’s clear that there is a strong network of Bonhoeffer scholars, centered in Germany but not confined there, for whom Bonhoeffer’s dear friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge is the one authoritative Keeper of the Bonhoeffer Flame, whose judgments must be acknowledged correct and thus made the grounding of all future scholarship on Bonhoeffer. Marsh knew and greatly admires Bethge but does not take quite that view. (How American of him!) And even mild dissent from the Authorized View – Strange Glory is certainly no “revisionist” biography of Bonhoeffer, though it has many new insights – must be policed by (see Reviewer D above) the protectors of turf. Thus: turf protection as brand management; and book reviews as an instrument of brand management.

ALl this interests me because precisely the same kind of behavior can be seen in the world of C.S. Lewis scholarship. Here Walter Hooper plays the role that Bethge plays for Bonhoeffer: the officially designated custodian of the Cult. The majority of Lewis scholars, I think, see themselves as continuing and extending the work of Hooper, and are typically not happy with work that dissents from Hooper’s understanding of Lewis. (Everyone who reads deeply in Lewis is indebted to Hooper for his energetic editorial labors, but his interpretations of Lewis are another matter.) Thus A. N. Wilson’s biography of Lewis – which is to some degree a revisionist one – was generally excoriated by the Lewisites, though it is in fact a mixed bag, deeply insightful in some ways and grossly mistaken in others. My own biography of Lewis has been largely ignored by the disciples of Hooper, I think because I am neither fish nor fowl: by no means a revisionist or skeptic, but also not following in Hooper’s interpretative footsteps. I am outside the Cult, but the way in which I am outside the Cult is not legible to them.

The interesting question for me is this: Is there a specific kind of thinker who generates a cult, a cult that then creates and manages a brand? There are certainly thinkers who intend to build a cult around themselves – Ayn Rand comes first to mind – but that’s not something that Bonhoeffer or Lewis would ever have done. Yet readers’ devotion to them is so intense that cults happen, as it were. By contrast, though Auden is just as celebrated as Bonhoeffer and Lewis, it is impossible to imagine a cult growing up around him. Perhaps this is because he saw one starting to grow when he was a young writers and took measures to prevent it from happening.

In any event, Marsh’s little book is a really interesting one – and I haven’t even mentioned the thing that mosts interests me, which is its meditations on the relationship between theology and biography. I’ll come to that another day, another way.

July 6, 2022

Caro’s LBJ

After all these years, I am finally getting around to reading Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and you know what? It is just as great as everyone says it is, maybe even greater. I’ve never read a better biography. What astonishes me is the skill with which Caro paces his story, considering its length, and considering how many digressions are necessarily embedded in it.

Caro is fabulously skilled at those digressions; he knows just how long they need to be in order to give the information that readers need if they are to grasp what LBJ was doing and why it mattered. In the first volume, his portrait of Sam Rayburn is a masterful mini-biography that tells us everything we need to know about that remarkable man in a dozen pages; it faithfully guides us when we see Rayburn’s actions later in the story. There are many such character sketches in this book, and each of them is a little marvel of lucidity, compression, and the art of the well-chosen detail. Thus we hear that W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, the supposedly populist governor, when told that some people thought that his policies were betraying his supporters, plaintively replied, “How can they say I’m against the working man when I buried my daddy in overalls?”

But of these digressions, the best one in the first volume, surely, accompanies the account of how LBJ brought electricity to the farms and ranches of the Texas Hill Country. Caro gives us a brief but brilliant history of the daily lives of people of that region in the years before electricity: how they got their water; how they cooked and cleaned; how they milked their cows in the dark, not daring to bring a kerosene lantern into the barn for fear of fire. (Also: precisely how much light kerosene lanterns of the time provided.) He tells us why many of them were afraid of the coming of electricity, and afraid that the government would cheat them, as it had so often cheated them in the past. And then he tells us just how the electrical lines were built:

The poles that would carry the electrical lines had to be sunk in rock. Brown & Root’s mechanical hole-digger broke on the hard Hill Country rock. Every hole had to be dug mostly by hand. Eight or ten-man crews would pile into flatbed trucks – which also carried their lunch and water – in the morning and head out into the hills. Some trucks carried axemen, to hack paths through the cedar; others contained the hole-diggers. “The hole-diggers were the strongest men,” Babe Smith says. Every 300 or 400 feet, two would drop off and begin digging a hole by pounding the end of a crowbar into the limestone. After the hole reached a depth of six inches, half a stick of dynamite was exploded in it, to loosen the rock below, but that, too, had to be dug out by hand. “Swinging crowbars up and down – that’s hard labor,” Babe Smith says. “That’s back-breaking labor.” But the hole-diggers had incentive. For after the hole-digging teams came the pole-setters and “pikemen,” who, in teams of three, set the poles – thirty-five-foot pine poles from East Texas – into the rock, and then the “framers” who attached the insulators, and then the “stringers” who strung the wires, and at the end of the day the hole-diggers could see the result of their work stretching out behind them – poles towering above the cedars, silvery lines against the sapphire sky. And the homes the wires were heading toward were their own homes. “These workers – they were the men of the cooperative,” Smith says. Gratitude was a spur also. Often the crews didn’t have to eat the cold lunch they had brought. A woman would see men toiling toward her home to “bring the lights.” And when they arrived, they would find that a table had been set for them – with the best plates, and the very best food that the family could afford. Three hundred men – axemen, polemen, pikers, hole-diggers, framers – were out in the Edwards Plateau, linking it to the rest of America, linking it to the twentieth century, in fact, at the rate of about twelve miles per day.

All of this comes not from reading books – there’s much here that no book has told – but from interviewing people who were present when the electrification of the Hill Country happened. (In the late Seventies Caro and his wife, though lifelong and happy New Yorkers, moved for a couple of years to the Hill Country, because it took that long to acquire the older folks’ trust.)

Eventually, twelve miles a day, the electrification was done, though not without strain of many kinds. Here’s how the chapter concludes:

Brian Smith had persuaded many of his neighbors to sign up, and now, more than a year after they had paid their five dollars, and then more money to have their houses wired, his daughter Evelyn recalls that her neighbors decided they weren’t really going to get it. She recalls that “All their money was tied up in electric wiring” – and their anger was directed at her family. Dropping in to see a friend one day, she was told by the friend’s parents to leave: “You and your city ways. You can go home, and we don’t care to see you again.” They were all but ostracized by their neighbors. Even they themselves were beginning to doubt; it had been so long since the wiring was installed, Evelyn recalls, that they couldn’t remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position.

But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.

“Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!”

But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”

They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

June 30, 2021

writing a Life

Over at the Hog Blog, I’ve written about Herman Hesse — more specifically, about a passage from The Glass Bead Game, his novel about an archipelago of quasi-monastic institutions of learning:

When a member of the Castalian community completes his formal schooling, he (and yes, it’s always “he”) becomes free to pursue any course of study that he desires to pursue. Only one requirement is imposed upon him: Each year he must write a Life.

A what? A Life — an autobiography, and yet not an autobiography. The scholar must write a narrative of his life as it would have been if he had been born in another time and place. Some of the Castalian scholars enter into this task with great verve, deciding, for instance, that a Life of oneself as a medieval Dominican requires a composition in scholastic Latin. Some of the scholars who wrote such lives were led, in the end, to a belief in reincarnation — surely they had indeed lived the Life they had just written. But these were in the minority. For most “it was an exercise, a game for the imaginative faculties.” […]

The question I want to ask is simply this: Is the writing of a Life a game that, in our current moment, can be played? Hesse described each imagined Life as an “entelechy,” that is, the realization of a potential — but perhaps that assumes something like the pre-existence of souls, an Identity that somehow exists before it is embodied in, realized in, a particular culture, a particular gender, a particular ethnicity. In other words, it may be that the very concept of writing a life presupposes a humanism, an idea of the human spirit that precedes any particular embedding. Can we, dare we, think this?

I think belief in the social construction of the self is like denial of free will: these are positions that a skilled disputant can make a strong case for, but they remain outside the scope of lived experience. As Cardinal Newman might say, I may give nominal assent to the claim that my very self is wholly constructed by my social environment or that my every thought and act is determined, but I cannot give real assent to either claim.

But if you try — well, then, you absolve yourself from multiple human responsibilities. If you hold your actions to be predetermined, then you will never repent, and if you never repent you will never amend your life. And if you believe that your identity is wholly socially constructed, then you are unlikely be curious about, much less empathetic towards, those whose lives are constructed otherwise than yours. Their story is not and cannot be your story.

Of course, that selves are wholly social constructed is not a universally held view. As I note in the essay, our society is at the moment very confused about such matters: in general, educated people tend to think that even if race is a social construct the effects of one’s race are fundamental and unchangeable, while sex is (or in theory ought to be) infinitely malleable, but there is disagreement on both points and almost no one knows why they believe what they believe. The writing of a Life would make for a fascinating exercise in testing the limits of a belief in social construction and of a belief in total self-fashioning. I think I might write one myself.

Relatedly, I think, this powerful meditation from my friend MBD:

If people have an unmet desire for recognition, they can call attention to themselves by calling attention to their suffering. The thoughtless words, innocently ignorant slights, and verbal miscues of bystanders are reframed as a pervasive tyranny of micro-aggressions and mini-oppressions fraught with political meaning. This is the external crucible out of which identities are formed.

But as with so much else, I can’t help but see that the existential longing to become what you were meant to be, to somehow turn the sufferings you have endured into a transformative and liberating moment, is fundamentally religious. The experience of becoming what you were meant to be can only be a delusion in a materialist existence. It is the longing to discover Providence at work in one’s life, which is also the desire to discover a purpose that is given to you as a gift, but which has meaning and intelligibility in an objective universe. You find freedom in your predestined purpose precisely because the universe seems to open up to you when you discover it, fresh with new meaning, and deeper joys.

Identity politics the way we have them are the result of men and women who have been baptized into Christian longings, but who have been given only the intellectual and political tools of Whigs and Marxists for dealing with them. If political tyranny issues forth, it will only be an external reflection of the interior tyranny of lost souls, who are trying to get water to gush forth from a stone, even as they disclaim belief in the miraculous.

March 19, 2021

biographies and brands

This is a fascinating essay by my friend Charles Marsh. For me, there are two major elements of fascination, and I want to take them one at a time.

One: The experience Charles describes – mainly in the central section of his essay – of responses to his book Strange Glory from certain other Bonhoeffer scholars is eerily familiar to me as a biographer of C. S. Lewis. When my biography came out, a number of Lewis scholars wrote reviews, or wrote to me personally, to tell me that I had made terrible factual errors. My skin crawled when I heard those charges; I feared exposure of my inadequacies and subsequent humiliation; but then when with trembling fingers I grabbed my books and checked to see whether I had indeed failed so badly, I discovered that in almost every case I had not. Most of what they called factual errors on my part were simply differences of opinion or interpretation; they were so wedded to their view of Lewis that they could not see disagreement with it as anything but falsehood. In other cases they confidently corrected statements I made, but obviously did so from memory, without checking the relevant sources. From one person I got a twenty-page printout listing errors I had made, which in panic I went over with a fine-toothed comb and discovered that not one accusation of error in the entire twenty pages was accurate. (My book does of course contain errors, some of them embarrassing to me; but oddly enough, my confident critic tended to miss those.)

After a period of receiving these letters and reviews with decreasing panic, I finally came to realize that while the responses claimed to be identiying errors, they really had nothing at all to do with truth or falsehood in scholarship. They were statements by people who perceived themselves to be the faithful custodians of the C. S. Lewis brand — note the title of Charles’s essay — and to them I was an outsider to that custodianship. When they said that Jacobs makes many factual errors, they weren’t even really making a truth claim, they were uttering a spell to ward off the stranger. They were placing me outside their Inner Ring. Once I understood that this was no scholarly endeavor but rather a ritual for maintaining group purity, I stopped worrying about what they said about me.

It seems to me that Charles is in a similar situation, especially with regard to Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, whose criticisms of Strange Glory are inconsistent – he can’t seem to decide whether the flaw of Charles’s book is that it’s too creative or not creative enough – when they aren’t extravagantly petty. From my distance I can’t be sure, of course, but Schlingensiepen certainly looks like a Guardian of the Brand. Charles is outside that Inner Ring. Again and again Charles shows that the accusations of major error are incorrect – of course he made some minor ones, as we all do – but to Guardians of the Brand that will not matter. They have uttered their spell. I think Charles will simply have to content himself with having written an outstanding biography that engages with constant critical sympathy one of the major theological figures of the 20th century, and tells a fascinating story to boot.

Two: The second theme, and one I want to keep thinking about, is Charles’s observation that there are very few good biographies of theologians. This strikes me as being absolutely true, and somewhat worrisome. Too many theological biographies are, as Bethge’s biography of Bonhoeffer was, mere chronicles: useful, informative, but neither illuminating nor inspiring. I can think of a couple of others, which I shall not name here, that aspire to be something more but are dragged down by a turgid prose style. The great theologians need and deserve vivid narratives, but vividness in storytelling is not a virtue that many theologians possess. So perhaps the biographies of theologians will need to be written by non-theologians, except in those rare cases when someone like Charles can be found: learned in his field but also with writerly gifts.

There is another potential issue, related to the matter of Brands: the great theologians tend to be controversial figures — founders of schools and therefore, indirectly, of counter-schools. In relation to the inevitable disputes, the biographer must offer a mere chronicle, as noted above; or take sides (explicitly or implicitly); or find a way to fend off readers who might think that he or she is taking sides. Navigating such obstacles doesn’t often make for a well-told tale, which is why Guardians of the Brand never write good biographies. But: disputes occur in other fields too. There aren’t many philosophers more controversial than Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, and yet Ray Monk’s biographies of them are absolutely masterful. How wonderful it would be if Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar and John Webster and Robert Jenson all found their Ray Monk.

All this makes me want to write a biography of a theologian. Unfortunately I don’t know much about theologians.