I love reading about about the humanities across multiple disciplines. Sometimes, that means reading about the humanities outside of humanities disciplines.
Outside of humanities disciplines, but not outside the humanities; because the humanities address potentially everything. If it’s produced by humans—whether it’s math or science or engineering, or anything else—it’s in the province of the humanities. And if we’re reading it, even if we’re using “read” as a metaphor for interpreting natural phenomena, it’s humans doing the reading. The humanities are uniquely capacious; nothing about our human experience escapes them.
Still, in the narrow way we divide up knowledge in universities, you can technically leave the humanities for other fields. But even then, you often find the humanities there, or the humanities find you. So it has been for me in recent months as I have been perusing work by prominent theologians across the Christian tradition.
I love reading theology and am often struck by the profound insights of people in other faiths and the impact their insights have on my own. During this difficult pandemic year, I have read theology with particular interest. One text of special relevance, perhaps because it was written with our present circumstances in mind, is God and the Pandemic by the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright, a text brought to my attention by my friend and English Department colleague Miranda Wilcox. Wright reflects compellingly on prayerful Christian responses to the pandemic. These responses include openly lamenting human misfortune, acknowledging the dreadful reality that has befallen so many, and laboring to improve the lives of those who suffer. “[W] hen the world is going through great convulsions, the followers of Jesus are called to be people of prayer at the place where the world is in pain.”1
Perseverance, the theme of this issue of Humanities magazine, also turns out to be one of the important themes of Wright’s short but powerful book. If we are to be, in Wright’s words, “people of prayer at the place where the world is in pain,” then we must be people who are willing to work and to wait: to work for a better world even as we wait to understand fully all of what “better” may mean. After all, is “better” defined solely by a return to “normal”? Was “normal life” in, say, mid-
February 2020 something to be desperately desired? Can we do no better? Can we not draw on our experience of the pandemic to become more understanding, more equitable, more caring, a little less selfish, less frenetic, less driven by things that matter least? And are we sure we know how to create that better world? Are we ready for the world we desire?
Wright is doubtful. Indeed, he believes all Christians should feel some helpful, faithful doubt. And it is in doubt—and in persevering through that incomprehension while waiting for further light and knowledge—that we may be most spiritually (and perhaps socially) transformed. To give expression to this complex sentiment—to a feeling of hope that we may come to understand how we do not yet know for what we should hope—Wright turns to the humanities. Specifically, he turns to poetry, to these lines from T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker”:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting. 2
Here, Eliot appeals to apophatic mysticism, that is, to the idea that in being too eager to define God and His will, we project our own needs and limited understanding onto God’s eternal nature and purposes. And Wright appeals to Eliot because he recognizes our natural desire not to “have to face the darkness. So that we don’t have to ‘watch and pray’ with Jesus in Gethsemane.”3 But our moment, right now, requires more deeply Christian behavior. And so, Wright continues, this “is a time for restraint, for fasting, for a sense of exile,” or at least of social distancing, a time “of not-belonging. . . . A time for not rushing to judgments.”4
Ours is a time, in short, for waiting. During the pandemic, such waiting has been made a little more bearable for me by books like Wright’s. And his book is made a little more poignant by poems like Eliot’s.
—Matthew Wickman,
Founding Director of the Humanities Center
1. N.T. Wright. God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (London: Zondervan, 2020), 42, emphases delete
2. Ibid, 54.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
