A small but intriguing book just arrived in the mail: Rodney Clapp’s Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation. Known for such legendary songs as “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line,” Cash, particularily in his final years of life, brilliantly expressed the Christian mystery of suffering and redemption through his work. The fall of Cash’s death, Peter M. Candler Jr. wrote on “Johnny of the Cross” for our pages. Here’s a taste:

Cash’s voice . . . had a weakness stronger than others’ strengths. Nowhere is this more clear than on the music video for “Hurt,” directed by Mark Romanek. As with most of the songs on American IV, the vocals for “Hurt” were recorded dry—without the use of reverb, delay, or other effects. That in itself is remarkable, because recording a voice that way reveals all the idiosyncrasies and flaws that a digital effect might otherwise cover up. Nowadays almost no one records vocals this way. The unadorned character of the voice is echoed visually in the film by Cash’s refusal to conceal, with the use of makeup and other gimmickry, the fact that he is dying. No attempt is made to shoot his face from the most flattering angle, no effort to shun the ravaged face of a once indomitable figure now consumed by disease.

Towards the end of the video, the song crescendos to an intense height, accentuated by the repetition of a single note on the piano. Superimposed on all of this is a rapid montage of footage from Cash’s prime, when his hair was still black and his jaw still square. Juxtaposed beside flashes of his successes are images of the Cash museum in a state of disrepair, broken shards of those successes whose significance is now altogether subverted by the figure of Cash himself, sitting at the head of the festal table. And in between visions of the spry young superstar and the remnants of fame is the recurring image of the crucifixion. The climax of the film comes when Cash, with a crystal goblet full of red wine lifted and trembling in his enfeebled right hand, turns the cup over and empties its contents over the table, baptizing the sumptuous banquet laid out before him.

For Cash there was no empty cross but a crucifix, which neither concealed the horrors of suffering nor prematurely removed the bleeding Christ to a higher plane. In the end, it seems all his life’s vices—and even his virtues—were consumed by the blood of Christ. The truth of Cash’s music, and of his life, lies in the image of the crucified Jesus—who dies alone and forsaken, simultaneously consummating the whole creation and crippled by its weight. For Cash, redemption was not won without a fight: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrew 9:22).

Candler concludes: “In his living, playing, loving, and singing, [Cash] sounded out the timbre of the Christian faith and showed how it ought to be lived: stammeringly, tunefully, with no overdubs and no effects. But most of all, with soul.”

First Things readers interested in music and, more broadly, American culture will want to take a look at Candler’s full essay, and Rodney’s Clapp’s insightful new volume.

The Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs mentioned in its February newsletter an online dialogue it hosted this summer between its president, Joel Rosenthal, and Mathew Taylor, chief executive of RSA in London, on the best reasons for supporting the crusade against global warming, supposedly caused by human activity.

What’s RSA? The online exchange gives no clue, nor do the links to RSA itself. It seems mysterious. But some internet sleuthing gives the answer: it’s the Royal Society of Arts, whose motto is “Working to remove the barriers to social progress.” Its reach is pretty wide. Its website even advertises that its facilities in central London are available for fancy weddings, not only the party, but the ceremony, too, including “civil partnership” or “civil commitment ceremony.” Apparently that’s an example of removing barriers to social progress.

In any case, since anything that helps “social progress” (as they define it) is eligible for their concern, I guess they can talk about global warming, too. The little dialogue raises some points worth considering, not about the science, though Taylor can’t resist the usual demeaning smear of dissenting scientists as “the small vociferous minority.” Apparently both he and Rosenthal believe the demonstrably false mantra of the alarmists that “the science is settled.” So they talk instead about climate and human rights, justice for the poor, and stewardship of the earth, all, obviously, laudable goals. But the way they apply these worthy ends to “climate change” (formerly known as “global warming”) is perverse.

They argue that justice for the poor is best served if everyone in the developed nations reduces his “carbon footprint” and thus his consumption of energy, which is mostly created from fossil fuels. In fact the drastic cuts in energy called for by the alarmists would impoverish civilization across the globe and doom the poor to perpetual poverty. Only a vibrant economy will permit us all to adapt to climate changes that nature brings and about which we can do very little, since solar variations, ocean currents, and volcanic eruptions are quite beyond our control. The poverty of our ancestors left them at the mercy of climate changes, and the results were awful. We can do better, but not if we decimate our economies by chasing the illusion that we can affect the climate.

Their argument about stewardship of the earth is similarly misplaced. They think our obligation to be sparing in our use of resources and to avoid making the environment unhealthy, for the sake of future generations, requires us to combat global warming. But they are conflating quite different issues. There are good reasons to take care of our environment, but stopping global warming is not one of them. There are public policies, mostly sensible, addressing environmental health, but the policies meant to control warming are different and would be disastrous.
Taylor also claims that human-induced warming has caused rising sea levels and desertification, hence “climate change refugees” which is an issue of human rights. This is simply wrong. Sea level has been rising slowly and inexorably since the end of the last ice age, and the rate has not accelerated in a warming climate. More CO2 in the atmosphere should increase plant growth, and there is evidence that this is happening.

He also invokes the famous “precautionary principle,” that even if we don’t know for certain that global warming will produce epic disaster, we had better do all we can think of to stop it “just in case.” The risk may be slight, he says, but the potential danger is so great there are no limits to what we must do. But there are. Insurance premiums are always adjusted for the risk. We are being asked to reverse economic growth and all the benefits it has brought us in better health and longevity and cessation from grinding toil, all in the name of a possibility so remote that it may never happen.

And behind the debate is the stubborn fact that climate swings are natural and cannot be stopped. Flailing away at natural forces will get us nothing but wasted money and inattention to real human need.

A press release just arrived from the American Bible Society. I don’t see it on their website, so I thought I’d pass along the news, just in case you missed it.

“Easter is a moveable feast, so to speak, because it is not fixed in relation to the civil calendar and every year when the winter thaw begins, there is uncertainty as to its exact date,” the press release reports, and it’s true: Many of us just weren’t sure when we were going to celebrate Easter this year—on any other year, for that matter. But now, “The American Bible Society is pleased to dispel any confusion and begin a new annual custom: To announce each year when the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection occurs.”

Am I the only one who finds this phrasing funny? The headline—AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY ANNOUNCES EARLY EASTER—really says it all. But there’s this, too: “Most Christians celebrate Easter with families and friends sharing traditions that often go back several generations—attending special religious services and sharing bountiful meals.” Several generations, huh? And special religious services, too!

The New York Sun runs a little piece today by Eric Ormsby on W.H Auden, a notice of the publication of Auden’s Collected Prose, Volume III: 1949–1955.

It is a nice summary of the book, as one would expect from Ormsby, but along the way it quotes the last poem Auden wrote, the 1973 “Archaeology.” And I was reminded just how frustrating Auden’s quietism can be. The quoted lines run:

From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all

being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.

OK, so it’s nice, and Audenesque, and though he would have changed such filler phrases as “to wit,” it represents much in his thought. But much of that much is just wrong. Auden’s retreat to what he called “the Great Good Place” can give him an admirable clarity:

The Hidden Law does not deny
Our laws of probability,
But takes the atom and the star
And human beings as they are,
And answers nothing when we lie.

And it can give him a despicable muddiness. After reading such famous lines in Auden’s “Spain, 1937” as it as History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon and Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death; / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder, George Orwell cried that they manage only to combine “the gangster and the pansy.” “Mr. Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled,” Orwell later added. “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

And there both the clarity and the muddiness are in “Archaeology.” History . . . / being made, as it is, / by the criminal in us—well, yes, you know what he means. And goodness is timeless—yes, there, too, you know what he means. But put them together and what do you have? A world where grace and virtue and right action are impossible, where they dwell altogether elsewhere than this messy human world.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss
Silently and very fast.