Rodney Clapp. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000. 224 pp. $16.99 US. ISBN: 1587430037.

[1] Rodney Clapp writes from a distinct cognitive position, a representative of a slim but stimulating group of post-modern evangelical Christians (including Brian McLaren, Robert Webber, and Stanley Hauerwas). Clapp works as an editor for Brazos Press, and so has been central to making these perspectives accessible and visible. Clapp's Border Crossings collects essays written for a variety of (largely religious) venues, on a dizzying array of topics from Colin Campbell to Winnie-the-Pooh.

[2] A book like Border Crossings deserves to be engaged. As a Lesbian-Feminist, Marxist-Humanist, musician, philosophical immanentalist, and apostate Christian, I am both the perfect and unintended reader for this collection. So while this journal's readers will be interested in the specifics of how Clapp reads the X-Files and Hank Williams, his interpretations unfold best when his philosophic assumptions are understood.

[3] Clapp's melange of philosophical and theological arguments challenge his own community and secularists alike. Dispensing with foundationalism, liberalism, and individualism via standard post-modern arguments, he reaches the conclusion that the old critique of Christianity - focused on the "scandal of particularity" - no longer prevails (12). Instead, all theology consists of "storied truths" (32, 33f extends this argument in the context of Tom T. Hall and country music's narrative impulse). Following John Howard Yoder, he asserts that credibility is connected to refusability and vulnerability of the message and messengers; admitting "that our argument is contestable" allows evangelicals to speak unapologetically (31-32). Furthermore, this particularity has a divine source: "the God Christians worship is a God who does not shun history and contingency" (38).

[4] Clapp embraces embodiment and human community as central to Christian theology, resulting in an ecclesiocentric emphasis. The chapter "Tacit Holiness" (63-74), drawing on Hauerwas and Polyani, turns toward habitual involvement in worship, functioning as an apologetic for ritual. His critical analysis of religious freedom in the United States, which he sees as an edifice of liberalism, begins from an assumption of communal practice which (perhaps antithetically, perhaps not) could be adopted by others (like Native Americans) frustrated by the cosmological blockheadedness of the courts: "Liberal religious freedom is freedom of the alleged autonomous individual (not the church); it is freedom of the individual to hold religious convictions as private opinions" (46).

[5] One of the most entertaining chapters in the book recounts Clapp's experience of the 1988 American Academy of Religion national meeting. His keen eye uncovers the incongruities of the meeting: "the snack bars bustle with men who now eat hot dogs, squeezing mustard into their beards, and in half an hour will argue about Whitehead's epistemology" (56). Describing a feminist session in which Naomi Goldenberg spoke, he appreciates her intellectual ability "to strew gleaming insights indiscriminately, like a gardener sowing cheap seed." But he is then disappointed with her rejection of the transcendent God (60).

[6] Thus we reach the philosophic problem at the nub of Clapp's exuberant reflections. His embrace of particularity, his pride in Christianity's narrative specificity, has not mitigated the universalist impulse inherent in its eschatological claims. This merely hides beneath a velvet glove of affability. While hoping evangelicals might "move from ... absolute certainty to humble confidence" (32), the humility does not include his deity. Essentially, he maintains a telos while arguing against foundationalism, holds to universalism while lauding particularity.

[7] Far be it from a Marxist to fault someone for retaining telos ... but don't claim to have achieved post-modernity! It is not surprising that this contradiction bites Clapp in the heels when he takes up the question of sexuality. While he refrains from any explicit pro- or anti-gay statements, he endorses marital monogamy in the chapter "From Family Values to Family Virtues" (110-125). Using MacIntyre, he intelligently critiques his co-religionists for the ahistoricity of "family values" rhetoric. With a flourish echoing 1970s feminist rhetoric, he savages the bourgeois pretensions of romantic love as a false naturalism (118-120). He champions the particularity of Christian married monogamy as an alternative, which would be fine if it was one option among many, but this is clearly not the case. In a classic Christian move, which, despite his claims for embodiment, displaces sexuality once again, he writes "Christians do not get married because monogamy is an aphrodisiac; they get married because this is the key way they participate as sexual beings in an adventure far surpassing the potentials of any aphrodisiac, the adventure of witnessing to and building up God's kingdom on earth" (124). Sexuality implicitly threatens totalizing worldviews, because it basks in the immediacy of the moment. Thus, universalizing cosmologies assert that sexuality carries no value in and of itself - it must be always pointing elsewhere, away from the intimate into some ever-receding ultimate. (I am reminded of a lukewarm apologetic from a Maoist group for their murderous homophobia, when they said that sex after the revolution would not bear any relation to sex as we know it).

[8] Still, Clapp is a smart writer and broad reader, gleefully in tune with the pulse and contradictions of popular culture. He takes on the culture of holidays (75-82), shopping malls (164-168), and in what may be the most complex chapter, launches a strong critique of, and alternatives to, consumerism (126-156). While he condemns contemporary capitalism as "the idealization and constant encouragement of insatiability - the deification of dissatisfaction" (143) - he acknowledges that evangelical revivalism has been complicit in establishing this ethos (pace R. Laurence Moore and Jackson Lears). The chapter on John Coltrane demonstrates the true breadth of Clapp's soul, since he acknowledges that prayer, faith, and a genuine spiritual life can exist outside of Christian exclusivism (177-184).

[9] Clapp encourages readers to approach Border Crossings in a non-linear manner; thus, individual essays, written in a popular, approachable style, could be useful in teaching. For instance, consider his analogy that the "not-religious-but-spiritual" individualism of American religion is like someone claiming to be a great football player but eschewing team play in favor of punting in his own backyard (97). Contestable? Of course. But, like much of this volume, its provocative yet playful qualities render it worthy of engagement.

[10] Any book without an index is an abomination in my sight, but, as with other sins of commission and ontology, I'm willing to look the other way for Border Crossings. If the ultimate good review consists in sharing a book, suffice to say I have recommended it to a number of colleagues, with the caveat that there is something quite delightful in a book so clever, so fun (and so funny), and yet so faulty (and so honest about that possibility).

Jennifer Rycenga, San José State University
(jrycenga@earthlink.net)