Can We Make the World a Better Place?
by Peter J Leithart, First Things:
Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty by Ephraim Radner:
Midway through Mortal Goods, Ephraim Radner briefly recounts his time as a young Anglican priest in Burundi during the early 1980s, shortly after the Tutsi genocide of Hutus had subsided. Filled with zeal to fix things, he was appalled that the Africans just got on with life, farming, trading, marrying and being given in marriage. Radner wrote an essay for the Christian Century condemning the African “will to silence” and challenging Church leaders who “support or acquiesce to the myth of peaceful order that is used as a cover for injustice and spiritual illness.” He was deported for his troubles. “I was raised to ‘make a difference,’” Radner reflects, “the prospect of change for the better, with the self in the center of its confecting, was also exhilarating and was bred in my bones.” Radner wrote Mortal Goods to provide background for a letter to his children, but the book is also a mature epistle to his idealistic younger self.
When I read the passage about Burundi, I was reminded of Ecclesiastes. Solomon devotes himself to grand construction projects, but knows they’re all “vapor,” dispersed by the gentlest breeze. He has no guarantees for the future, because he feels the shadow of death and cannot control what will happen when he’s gone. Trying to manage creation is trying to “shepherd the wind” or sculpt castles out of mist. Mortal Goods is an Ecclesiastes-esque meditation on Christian politics.
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