The New Religious Humanists: A Reader.

Early in this century, in an already post-Christian culture, the case for the reasonableness of Christianity was effectively made by G. K. Chesterton. After World War II, C. S. Lewis had a similar influence among serious readers; and T. S. Eliot remained a powerfully "prophetic" presence. Jacques Maritain, in works like True Humanism (1938), sought to preserve "Christian civilization" while upholding the dignity of workers in an enlightened capitalism. All four of these writers are cited in this collection, which is in effect a residual version of that much older project, but now in far less propitious circumstances.

Somewhat unsettlingly, the reader has to dig into the footnotes to see that the work of key contributors is most likely to appear in or cite "right" journals like Commentary, Crisis, First Things, and The National Review. This collection is, in effect, a serious statement from the still informal coalition of conservative Catholics and moderate Evangelicals and some other Protestants.

Editor Gregory Wolfe, sounding a hopeful note, seeks a middle ground between current extremes: on the one hand, the anti-intellectual Evangelicals, as well as the juggernaut of late twentieth-century "industrial capitalism"; and on the other, "secular" liberals, who have a parasitic relationship to traditional religion. His own special interest is with the Christian imagination as conveyed by reflective and "literary" writers. But unlike the more established figures he names, most of the younger writers he recommends will be scarcely known to readers. Wolfe is correct that the taboo against "religion" in the secular media has been relaxed in recent years. Still, even he admits, there is simply no "prophetic" voice now like Eliot (or Solzhenitsyn), and no "philosophical artist" comparable to Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy.

Two thoughtful essays deserve close attention. Glenn Tinder asks whether a responsible pluralism, still based on the "dignity and equality" of persons, could survive "if Christianity declines during the coming decades." Tinder voices a deep suspicion of "Enlightenment rationalism" - but he ignores that even thoughtful Christians will, inevitably, live in problematic interaction with modernity and all its post/post/post phases. More gratifyingly, Tinder argues for "responsible hope," over against the callousness and greed of "capitalist and bureaucratic institutions."

Os Guinness's principle of "covenantalism" - of citizens pursuing their interests but acting responsibly as members of a "commonwealth" - may seem abstract. But he rightly notes that the most fractious disputes pitting "social unity" against "religious liberty and diversity" occur in public school debates, ranging from school prayer to "textbook tampering." Guinness pleads for a "commitment to universal rights"; his weakness is a disdain for the bulk of the recalcitrant "issues" plaguing this society.

Here and there come flashes of scorn for expected topics like identity and gender politics, and multicultural curricula. But there are some pressing topics addressed in a few essays. Andrew Kimbrell invokes "a sacramental vision," calling for a total halt to "desacralizing technology," especially as applied to the human body - by fighting in the courts and legislatures. Frederica Mathewes-Green proposes the shared idea of "a world without abortion"; her shrewd strategy is to attack the extreme rhetoric of her fellow prolifers. Her recommendation of "simple friendship and support" for women with unwanted pregnancies may seem feeble in this fiercest of debates, but it may refocus the discussion. Vigen Guroian outlines "a contemporary ethic of death and dying" for the "postbiblical" near-future.

Of the nineteen essays, two pieces, finally, capture particularly well where "we" are, at the millennium. In his autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1982), Richard Rodriguez - by now perhaps one of the most influential Catholic commentators in this country - speaks, bleakly and movingly, of the liturgy as "a community of those who share with each other only the experience of standing .alone before God." And antitechnology utopianism reaches its apex in an essay by Wendell Berry, who defends a biblical environmentalism and attacks both "the industrialist's contempt or hatred for nature" and modern "organized Christianity's" lack of any "serious interest" in ecology. Berry's backward-looking turn to the green world aligns him with earlier machinery-hating social "prophets," from John Ruskin to William Morris to Eric Gill.

The book's bland facade slips in an essay by Leon Kass, whose brilliant (and tendentious) reading of the Babel story swerves into a dark polarization between moderns who are given up to "total self-creation" and those who live in "obedient dependence." Kass calls for a politics that hears "the voice of what is eternal, true, and good," never indicating, of course, who (besides himself) already knows these absolutes in the contingent world of politics.

The questions raised in this somewhat mysterious project are indeed central ones for the seriously religious: how to live a truly spiritual life; and whether one can do so while participating in so "broken" a world. Like the move to the "desert" in late-classical civilization, the impulse to live (as a poet once put it) "unspotted by the world," fuels current calls for a return to sexual purity and "traditional" roles for men and women in perfectionist movements. Most challenging is the volume's postecclesiastical mood, and the indictment of mainstream Christianity for its "infection" by late-modern individualism and narcissism.

The "hopeful signs" the editor claims to discern, and the "profound spirit of openness to the world" he attractively proposes, do not, then, capture the larger drift of the bulk of these essays. The presiding tactic is to so overstate the contamination of the "modern" as to justify a retreat into privacy, and turning one's back on mere people and the intractable and "messy" problems (including one's own "divisions") of the fragmented present.

The book as a whole strongly affirms the vertical thrust of the Christian ethic, stressing dogma and submission. What I find lacking is the horizontal thrust - the loving concern for others. Still, Wolfe's project compels a searching look at one's own spiritual integrity. I think finally of Maritain, who, having defined the elements of an "integral" Christian humanism, at the end turned away from the all-too-modern world, and from the "new" church, gone astray in a welter of relativism and Teilhardian pantheism. (See, The Peasant of the Garonne, 1968.) A similar loneliness and permanent alienation from this culture, and the occasional descent into anger, mark some of the best of these writers. This almost Tolstoyan rejection of virtually all positions is one principled, though most will think too simple, option. Others - a "remnant" - seem condemned to remain, uneasy and less "pure," inside the degraded Secular City.

David J. DeLaura is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and former chair of the English Department.