In the summertime of 1916, an Ohio farm boy had an encounter with God. What he skilled one night on a quiet nation street was so highly effective that he would construct his total life and profession on making an attempt to recreate it. And his efforts would affect the best way Individuals perceive religion to today.
The long-neglected however vital story of Eugene Exman is advised within the new e book God the Greatest Vendor: How One Editor Reworked American Faith One E book at a Timeby Stephen Prothero, professor of faith at Boston College. It was fairly by probability – by way of an opportunity assembly with Exman’s daughter – that Prothero found Exman’s library in an outdated home on Cape Cod, crammed with first editions and private letters signed by prestigious authors.
He was like a person who tries repeatedly to recapture the primary ecstasy of falling in love as an alternative of studying the best way to make a wedding work.
He found that Exman had been head of Harper & Row’s spiritual books division for almost forty years, and that his surprising and sudden encounter with God as a young person – Exman described it as being “engulfed” by a drive that lifted him out of his life. his physique had formed all the pieces he did in that place.
Exman grew up as a Baptist however was launched to modernist concepts about Christianity at college. He remained a church-going Protestant, however continued to push the boundaries of what that meant. All through his life, he explored every kind of religions, each Western and Japanese, and labored with authors from these completely different traditions to convey their concepts to the American public. The seek for God, as he noticed it, shouldn’t be based mostly on doctrines, dogmas, or establishments; as an alternative he promoted ‘the faith of expertise’. He wished to have that direct expertise of the divine once more, and he wished others to have it too, in no matter manner attainable.
In tracing his topic’s path over the course of this biography, Prothero does one thing fascinating. What begins as a honest celebration of Exman and his work slowly evolves into a pointy critique – generally refined, however often fairly sharp. He notes the strain Exman continuously felt between his pursuit of a holy life and his embrace of the prosperous company way of life. Much more related, he explores the methods during which Exman’s open-minded liberal Protestantism may generally blind him to vital points of the human expertise.
Exman’s seek for God and his associated profession in publishing learn like a microcosm of twentieth century faith, together with varied concepts and developments of the twenty first century. (In the event you assume cancel tradition is model new, learn Prothero in regards to the rise and fall of medical missionary Albert Schweitzer’s popularity throughout his personal lifetime). Exman labored with preachers from Harry Emerson Fosdick to Martin Luther King Jr. He experimented with group residing in California and traveled to India to fulfill a well known guru. He even tried LSD within the late Fifties, when it was touted as “a quicker and simpler path to God.” Prothero tells us that at one level Exman wished to enroll C.S. Lewis as a Harper creator, however that did not work out—at the very least not throughout Exman or Lewis’s lifetime.
That was simply nearly as good. As ecumenical as Lewis might be Mere Christianity and different works, he and Exman would undoubtedly have clashed over the latter’s constant deemphasis on spiritual doctrine. Prothero’s account of Exman’s work with Catholic activist Dorothy Day, one of the crucial intriguing chapters within the e book, offers us a way of how such a relationship may need unfolded.
Exman revealed Day’s autobiography and agreed to publish her subsequent e book, a biography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. However Exman’s shut good friend and colleague Margueritte Bro, a non secular seeker like himself, recoiled from the venture as if it had been a boa constrictor, calling the manuscript “religiously psychotic” and saying some fairly sturdy issues about Roman Catholics usually. Exman held on for some time, however finally the venture was deserted.
“Bro had Exman’s ear,” Prothero writes, “and whereas he didn’t all the time comply with her recommendation, it’s troublesome to think about that her characterization of Saint Thérèse’s piety as ‘sadistic’ and ‘psychopathic’ had no impact.” Thérèse could have skilled her personal divine encounters, however they had been too intertwined with struggling to have a lot attraction to Harper’s group.
Day, for her half, “rightly resented the best way Exman and his colleagues tried to recast her story within the picture of Protestantism.” Prothero dryly notes: “Regardless of their songs of affection for pluralism, liberal Protestants in the US have not often discovered the best way to do something nicer to Roman Catholics than agreeing to comply with Jesus’ command to ‘love your enemies ‘.”
It’s troublesome to say whether or not Bro, and to some extent Exman, had been extra troubled by Day’s Catholicism, or (and right here the comparability with Lewis comes into play) merely by her strict adherence to the tenets of her church, which their aversion to organized faith. . However each components undoubtedly performed a task.
The incident was very a lot consistent with Exman’s dedication to following a path to God based mostly on private expertise moderately than church doctrine. Prothero convincingly argues that Exman was the forerunner of the ‘non secular however not spiritual’ motion. Exman in all probability would have been positive with that. However he could not have been so happy with Prothero’s closing verdict:
Exmans [publishing] venture succeeded as a result of its native habitat is the ecology of client capitalism. The faith of expertise preaches the behavior of the unending quest. That search doesn’t lead to discovering, however in need. And the thing of that need is step by step moved – from God to the expertise of God to the expertise of no matter you consider as God. Seekers then search for experiences that appear to have nothing in any respect to do with God, faith or spirituality. They set their hearts (and bets) on a lifetime of experiences. Making recollections is their mantra.
As a lot as Exman revered the search itself, he believed it was a quest for one thing – one thing that would and ought to be discovered. He by no means fairly felt that he had achieved his purpose, but when his biographer is true, his chosen mode of pursuit carries inside it the seeds of his personal failure. He was like a person who tries repeatedly to recapture the primary ecstasy of falling in love as an alternative of studying the best way to make a wedding work.
As a spiritual writer, Exman did a lot good by giving religion a voice in literature when a lot of his fellow intellectuals felt it had no proper to be there, and by doing what he may to interrupt down racial and ideological limitations in to destroy his subject of experience. However his obsession with pursuing an “expertise” of God led him—and with him a lot of American tradition—down a path that in the end leads to not God, however to self-gratification.
