“Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism Of Karl Barth”

Chicoan and substitute teacher Max Feiler graduated from Duke Divinity School in 2019, where he struck up a friendship with one of his professors, Stanley Hauerwas, born in 1940. 

A theologian and author of dozens of books, Hauerwas’ vision of the Christian life is perhaps most accessible in “Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony,” co-authored with Will Willimon, a retired United Methodist bishop who, Feiler writes me, “told me recently that I reminded him of a ‘young Hauerwas’” in his constant awareness of human sinfulness and possession of a rather wicked sense of humor.

The abiding question for Hauerwas is the place of the Christian church in light of Easter’s resurrection reality, when the temptation is to succumb to narcissistic impulses or to take over the reins of secular power.

Now, in a series of lectures and occasional pieces entitled “Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism Of Karl Barth” ($29.50 in paperback from University of Virginia Press), Hauerwas reflects on key themes from a controversial career, influenced by many, but especially Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). For Barth, as for Hauerwas, the “humanism” of liberal theology, which focuses on the human response to God, must be rejected.

In its place is the humanism revealed in Jesus Christ who in taking on our humanity revealed what it means to be fully alive, fully human. It is “apocalyptic” since Barth lived  “through an apocalyptic time but also because he saw the world as forever changed by a Galilean peasant.”

Though the book isn’t the place to start with Hauerwas, it is full of trenchant observations: The capitalist system “destroys human attachment to, and affections for, relationships and institutions by embedding them in impersonal exchanges.” More sarcastically, he writes that the American story is one called “freedom”: “That story produces people who think they have been wounded by being born.”

Hauerwas considers how the Kingdom of God made manifest in Jesus Christ ought to display a new kind of politics, showing an alternative to narcissism and power that can befriend “the least of these.” His is a provocative view, but, as he observes, “Few sins are more deadly than making God boring.”

“Mimetic Theory & Middle-Earth: Untangling Desire In Tolkien’s Legendarium”

“I’m of the mind,” writes Chico author Matthew Distefano, “that we can never not desire; and we will never be not mimetic. The question, then, becomes ‘to whom will we look to as our models?’” The word “mimetic” or “mimic” means “imitation.” So we learn what’s valuable by seeing what others desire and imitate that desire. If it’s the same thing or person, “mimetic” spells “trouble.”

And so it has been throughout history, people desiring what other people have; often it’s not so much the object itself (like money or political position) that evokes desire as the power the object delivers. Distefano draws on French theorist René Girard to look behind the scenes at human motivation and though for the most part the picture is not pretty, it’s, well, human.

And mostly unconscious. Girard deals with our propensity to scapegoat—create a “fall guy,” Distefano writes, whom we brand as evil and who takes “the blame for something they aren’t responsible for.” We learn in “The Lord of the Rings” the Hobbit Sméagol (Gollum) kills his friend to take the Ring; later, his tricks rile folks and he’s made the scapegoat for all the community’s woes and banished to lonely wandering.

Yet Distefano finds in Tolkien not just negative examples of desire but a different kind of mimesis. It is friendship (think of the Hobbits Frodo and Sam) “discovered, not through unconscious mimesis of a model, but rather through conscious imitation of the love and affection each have for the other.”

This vision of a better community is lovingly unwrapped in “Mimetic Theory & Middle-Earth: Untangling Desire In Tolkien’s Legendarium” ($19.99 in paperback from Chico-based Quoir, quoir.com; also for Amazon Kindle), crafted for a general audience. “It is no surprise,” Distefano writes, “I am enamored with the Shire.” It’s not perfect, but a model of friendship.

Toward the end, the author writes of his friendship with Michael Machuga in Paradise, where Hobbit-like they tend a garden at Michael’s house and afterward “put our (not so) furry feet up while pairing our pipe-weed with a glass of some of the ‘harder stuff.’”

Friendship, it turns out, is Hobbit forming.

“Sometimes The Soul Needs Chocolate: Pandemic Odes”

“Sometimes the soul needs chocolate,” the poet writes, “when we’re flung towards chaos, and plagues./ Bigots, wildfires, and powerful fools/ leap our way. Cacao lifts us up,/ unbinds our tongues, helps us stand/ on the speeding ground. Food of the gods,/ keep us wild!”

The poet is Chicoan Paul Belz. Remembering 2020-2021, his poems acknowledge pandemic and political chaos but also the importance of simple pleasures and especially connection with the natural world.

“Sometimes The Soul Needs Chocolate: Pandemic Odes” ($7.99 in paperback from Vanguard Press; also for Amazon Kindle and available locally at Made In Chico) presents two dozen free verse poems beginning with “Ode To A Pencil”:

“Do you tremble when these sparks/ gather at your paper-scratching tip,/ tingle as we fill notebooks with song,/ wear yourself out with this frenzied work,/ then shout through my arm to my heart and skull,/ beg for more images, off-rhymes, beats/ you can place in a new-born poem?”

Belz is the author of “Bidwell Park,” also available locally, and it’s clear the author-poet is transfixed by nature’s expansiveness. In “Ode To Big Chico Creek” the poet imagines where the water rushing past has been:

“Other molecules streamed skyward through oaks’ roots,/ then waited for the sun to yank them up/ to chilled air, where they gathered as clouds./ They tumbled onto roses, mallards, pines./ Rain landed on people. Did some drench Darwin,/ who strolled on the Beagle’s deck and watched spiders/ cling to bits of webs and ride the wind/ over the sea, onto his nose?”

At the poem’s end, almost as an implied rebuke to the enclosed isolation wrought by Covid, the poet exclaims: “I watch you slide by,/ while heat takes water from my skin./ I’m parched. If I drink from you,/ I’ll take in multitudes.”

While “Hospitals turn the dying away,” the poet finds some measure of relief in camping. As so many suffer, there comes an almost guilty question: “Can I briefly claim the right to be sane?” 

In that regard, the “Election 2020 Ode” expresses a wish perhaps even more relevant today: “Maybe we’ll learn to think again,/ wrangle and argue without curses,/ semi-automatics or flames….”

"Love Bath"

“It was 1986,” writes Oroville resident “Caroling Atomz” (Carolyn Adams), “and I’d been in a sick relationship since ’83. I was addicted to the man and the drug. The man was the drug. I pretended everything was wonderful. The intense orgasms and nanoseconds of love conspired to make me believe I was happy.”

Later, in 1988, she found herself on staff at Wilbur Hot Springs in Williams where she discovered a love of writing. What happened in between is told in a quirky and mostly upbeat memoir, “Love Bath” ($27 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), which also features photographs and Adams’ artwork.

In her teenage years she had turned to drugs and booze, was sent to a boarding school at thirteen after her mother remarried, and realized her dad, abused by his father, had taken up gambling “and the ‘easy’ life” to make up for a harsh upbringing.

Things began to change in 1987 when Adams and her mom attended a new age conference at Asilomar called “The Emerging Goddess.” “I loved being in silence and in communion with one particular tree. In taking time to ‘be’ with the tree, to touch it, and to give part of myself to it, I felt rooted in deep connection with the Earth….” Adams searches for more of this rootedness in creative expression that didn’t require a man to guide her.

But more lessons first. When her new boyfriend, “Albert,” came into her life, the math professor shared the drug Ecstasy with her. “I loved feeling the essence of God in any way, shape or form. Psychedelic drugs helped me see the true Oneness of all things: how we are all One with God.”

Things didn’t turn out as expected; during a healing stay in Bali, she learned Al had fallen for another. “I was beginning to grasp … that I could move more slowly and freely, at my own pace—and that I did not need this man, or any man, to feel safe and complete.” In a therapy session at Wilbur, she finds her “heart is broken open and there is more love than ever, rivers flowing out into the sands of time.”