For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today

Christian Century, Nov 17, 1999 by Gary Dorrien

I've attended those meetings, and so has Loeb, but he found a vocation in the question. He has read a great many self-help books and he quotes them extensively. The cover of his book promises an evocative style "reminiscent of Thomas Moore and M. Scott Peck." Marianne Williamson is apparently another of his literary models. These writers are exactly the pop-spirituality mavens panned by Purdy--though in fairness to Peck, I feel compelled to note that at least he writes chapters that develop a single point or anecdote for several pages at a time. Loeb's book is considerably dumbed-down from that standard, it seems more fitting to describe him as the book's compiler or assembler than its author. His average page is sprinkled with two or three quotes ripped out of context that serve as introductions to bite-sized anecdotes. No story is analyzed or developed, the anecdotes keep coming, and the effect of reading the book is like eating a six-course meal of cotton candy.

Perhaps Loeb doesn't expect people to read his book straight through; maybe he assumes that readers will cruise the text for evocative anecdotes. In any case, I believe that he is wrong to pitch his case for a progressive spiritual politics at such a low level. He denounces the commodifying spirit of capitalism and assumes a pose of left-wing superiority over business interests, but his story-per-page formula reeks of commercial calculation. The book ends with an advertisement for his lecture and workshop bureau.

Loeb's assumptions about his audience's lack of taste for argument and stylish expression are undoubtedly market-tested, but I think he is wrong to sell leftist activism in the same way that Williamson sells New Age spirituality. He could make the same case in a way that discards the formulaic baby-talk he has adopted and that respects the intelligence of his readers. Put differently, he could try to write more like Wendell Berry or Jedediah Purdy.

Loeb persistently treats political questions from a pop-psychology premise. In his telling, the left has lost its critical mass not because it was often wrong, but because its partisans have lost heart or lost their way or given in to the cynicism of the dominant culture. He shares with Purdy the commendable desire to lift his readers from self-absorbed indifference, but the genre of self-help is not well suited to effect this outcome. It reinforces the very habits of self-preoccupation it claims to transcend. Some ironies are saving, but not this one.

Reviewed by Gary Dorrien, author of The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (1998) and The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology Without Weapons (1999). He teaches at Kalamazoo College.