Dear Miroslav, I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m fifty-six years old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.
So begins the first letter in Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian (HarperOne, 2026), a book collecting emails exchanged over the course of 2023 and 2024 between poet Christian Wiman and theologian Miroslav Volf, who are colleagues at Yale Divinity School. The exchange evinces a close friendship, founded on candor and commitment to the mutual avowal, in language accessible to ordinary readers but shaped in its rhythms and references by the authors’ literary and scholarly professions, of the difficulties of “faith.” Or rather of “what faith means.” The faith at stake for Wiman and Volf has something to do with faith in Christ, or Christianity, or religion. It often seems to have more to do, as these opening lines suggest, with something called “meaning,” a feeling or force of significance that charges—or evacuates—words and lives.
Wiman begins his correspondence with Volf by declaring that he is afraid of “those big words—faith, grace, sin, redemption, love—which make us so sad.” These “big words” might make us sad because they have a long, bloody history. Both men are (albeit Wiman more than Volf) uncomfortable with Christianity’s implication in centuries of patriarchy, colonialism, and genocide. Their discomfort, however, is not so much with the sad record of these “big words,” and the burdens they place on those who inherit them, as with what Wiman calls these words’ tendency to “seethe and shift and slip free from meaning.” The main terms of the vocabulary of Christian faith are “not stable enough,” he argues, for our “whole-souled attention.” Volf agrees, finding that the word “God” in particular, “the biggest of the big words,” is a “very unstable linguistic space.” Even in the midst of prayer directed God’s way, meaning suddenly “empties itself,” leaving Volf adrift until meaning just as unexpectedly returns.
In their conversational back-and-forth, Wiman and Volf parallel the swinging between meaning and futility, between experiences of semantic-cum-existential plenitude and emptiness, that they find organizes spiritual life. Their exchange is offered to readers as a model for how that life can be shared, and how problems of meaning can be addressed—rather than answered—in intellectual, emotional, and spiritual fellowship. As the authors admit in their co-written preface, “We don’t solve any of the old conundrums, but then that’s not really the point.” The point is “to nourish a friendship,” sustained through dialogue punctuated by episodes of poignant self-disclosure and empathetic response. Theirs is a distinctly male friendship, Wiman and Volf announce, and male friendships, according to “sociologists,” work best when men work together on a common project, giving each other “peripheral attention.”
Readers from evangelical traditions may be reminded of conversations between “accountability partners.” These semi-ritualized relationships between two people of the same sex are meant to help them along what evangelicals call their “walk” with God, especially in dealing with temptation. Wiman and Volf regularly confess to each other their feelings about faith, and give each other supportive advice, including gentle disagreement, as they discuss “some issue of theology, philosophy or literature one of us is wrestling with.” There the similarity with “accountability” culture may end, however, for the book’s authors are remarkably free of evangelicals’ concern with sin; it is hard to imagine accountability partners who would describe their conversations about religious matters as essentially directed toward nourishing their own friendship instead of helping them get closer to God.
Particularly for readers who lack, in their own lives, examples of how faith can be lived amid doubt, and how spirituality might be companionate rather than either solitary or oppressively collective, Glimmerings may be helpful. This is a book for people culturally connected to certain forms of Christianity, who feel ambivalent about, if not agonized by, that connection. Such people might benefit from seeing how two intelligent friends can reimagine such a connection, bypassing traditional Christian formulas through a vocabulary that combines the intimate terms of self-disclosure with intellectual issues of the largest scale—private traumas and problems of “meaning.” Wiman and Volf translate for non-evangelical audiences something of the special affective flavor of evangelicalism’s passionately first-personal (“I” and “we”) form of belief—while softening away its elements potentially offensive to the sort of people who read The Atlantic.
Even in the midst of prayer directed God’s way, meaning suddenly “empties itself,” leaving Volf adrift until meaning just as unexpectedly returns.
Both Wiman and Volf were raised evangelical. Wiman grew up Baptist, Volf in a small Pentecostal church led by his father in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Through adolescent crises and professional tracks that took them far from their provincial backgrounds, they each became leading figures in their respective vocations, with prestigious institutional résumés and the support of wealthy donors. Before coming to Yale, Wiman was the editor of Poetry magazine. Volf has taught for years at Yale, where he directs the very well-funded Yale Center for Faith & Culture; he is an academic superstar and in-demand lecturer, at schools and churches across the world, not to mention elite summits like the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Deploying their backgrounds in ways that make them legible, and charismatic, to the secular, upper-middle-class, educated professionals whose ranks they have joined has been fundamental to Wiman’s and Volf’s success. Yet the poet and theologian often claim that secular modernity, with what they take to be its paradigmatic lifestyles of striving and self-serving, is a wasteland from which belief may, or may not, deliver us. Volf has said that the “viable candidates for the meaning of life are all religiously based,” while Wiman laments that modernity has annihilated “the possibility of belief.” Somehow, such claims do not seem to offend anyone in the prestigious, non-religious institutions through which Wiman and Volf move. The other inhabitants of these institutions—universities, let’s say—are surely familiar with colleagues who, from other ideological vantages, also sweepingly bemoan modernity (along with, for example, capitalism and whiteness) while remaining upwardly mobile within it. The contemporary pluralist university welcomes a variety of perspectives critical (indeed calling for the abolition) of its own intellectual, social, and political foundations. Much of the politesse of academia consists in pretending, or rather quietly understanding, that these critics, and critiques, pose no threat.
Wiman and Volf’s disagreements with each other are likewise safely amicable. They have, over their similar trajectories, acquired different expressions of Christianity, matching their respective personae as a poet and a theologian. Wiman is emotive, effusive, and apparently spontaneous. Volf is reasoned, cautious, and conciliatory, comfortable with diverse theoretical idioms acquired in an education that exposed him, in travels across Europe and North America, to many forms of Christian expression. Wiman styles himself through Glimmerings—and across his whole body of work (poems, essays, and interviews)—as a desperate spiritual seeker, full of “restless and appetitive drive” for God, or meaning, that is continually disappointed. Indeed for Wiman, “good hunger,” the right way of seeking spiritual things, “has no expectation of permanent fulfillment.”
Volf, by contrast, is a member of the Episcopal Church, and asks why Wiman cannot be content with that progressive mainline denomination (Wiman responds that it is “white” and makes him “bored”—wait till he hears what people think of the Ivy League, and poetry!). He sometimes chides Wiman, lovingly, by suggesting that the Bible is full of promises of fulfillment, not injunctions to dissatisfaction, and that Wiman’s supposedly restless faith, refusing easy comforts, is in fact a narrow, settled, self-determined pose. After all, Wiman ends Glimmerings by urging a skeptical Volf to credit Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Eire is their Yale colleague; Glimmerings’s horizon is ecumenical but geographically bound to New Haven), a history of saintly miracles in early modern Europe, arguing for their possibility. But against Wiman’s urging to take seriously reported miracles like a seventeenth-century Italian case of levitation, Volf might well ask Wiman to take seriously the possibility that God could make life reasonably satisfying. That the God of miracles might cure Wiman’s chronic cancer—a wish for healing that would be obvious and automatic in an evangelical context—seems as off-the-table as the authors confronting each other’s sins.
Hardly anything written about Wiman avoids mention of his years-long battle with cancer; the experiences of Volf and his family under communism are likewise an inescapable theme of his work (cancer and communism appear, respectively, on pages 1 and 3 of Glimmerings). Intensely personal experiences—of trauma, ecstasy, despair, and boredom—fill their correspondence, and in each case God and meaning seem at first absent but reappear to move life onward. This will look to some readers like fearless honesty, and to others like a routine if utterly sincere performance of the evangelical persona, learned and rehearsed in formative years. That persona undergoes periodic crises in which the world seems empty of significance. These crises lead the Christian, again and again, back to God, who appears less as a metaphysical first principle, law-giving king, or guide through life than as the intermittently convincing guarantee that life is worth living because it is filled with significance.
Sharing this perspective, Wiman and Volf have taken up contrasting styles of personal piety and religious belonging. Volf is an Episcopalian content with the Book of Common Prayer, Wiman a restless, hungry seeker. But both men hold their positions in a paradoxical fashion. Volf ends their correspondence by sending Wiman a personal credo (“I believe that love is God’s very being,” it begins) quite different from the Apostle’s or Nicene Creeds found in the Episcopal prayer book and liturgy. Wiman occasionally attends Mass at his wife’s church, a Roman Catholic parish where “the priest makes clear that communion is open to everyone, thus ignoring this especially odious point of Catholic doctrine.” Between the member of a church who rewrites its creedal forms, and the ex-evangelical seeker who flirts with Roman Catholicism while refusing to accept its most basic beliefs and practices, the two men embody American Christianity’s trans-denominational cafeteria style.
Volf’s “own existential credo” speaks to his fundamental concern with meaning and fear of meaninglessness. God, his credo holds, wants to save us “from futility and the power of evil” and loves the world even though (for unexplained reasons) it is “marked by futility and colonized by evil.” There is neither human sin nor divine wrath in Volf’s credo. Rather, by pairing (twice) “futility” with “evil” (it is not clear whose), Volf, in fact, presents as the central problem of human life, for which God’s love is the solution, our feeling that everything might be pointless. This is, of course, one of the problems that people in the Bible—most notably Solomon in Ecclesiastes—call on God to address, but only one, alongside injustice, suffering, sin, and death.
Wiman, in response, hails the “beautiful” vision of Volf’s credo. He says that it recalls a moment in their friendship when Wiman had been in “despair” over an “essay [he] was writing” that made him realize how little he had accomplished as a writer. Volf “admitted to sometimes feeling the same thing,” and in that moment “two bare, forked creatures acknowledging their bare, forked creatureliness enabled Christ to come among them, in them, and between them.” For Wiman, this moment, like Volf’s credo, is an expression of the essence of Christianity:
I am a Christian because of moments like that one. I am a Christian because, when I live toward God, when I allow myself (or am allowed) to inhabit a reality whose very realness depends upon God, I feel … right. I feel like my life and mind align with the stars and the trees, and I am both utterly myself and freed from that. It’s the oldest lesson in Christianity, no?
If one chooses to answer that question “no,” then one might describe what happened in that moment differently. The specter of futility was hanging over the career of a white-collar creative professional. Manipulating symbols to create satisfying emotions is his stock-in-trade, but at times—perhaps precisely because he does it for a living—it seems to him like a pointless activity. Sharing this feeling of emptiness with a friend, however, allows that very feeling, expressed in language, to become a source of comfort and even pleasure. The whole episode can now be turned into a story, a unit of Wiman’s professional activity, a page in his book, for which he will be remunerated. Moments of meaninglessness are rescued and reintegrated into the pattern of a successful professional life. That’s not necessarily a better story, but it’s no less plausible.
As Wiman and Volf discuss problems of faith and meaning over the course of the book, they enact their respective roles as “poet” and “theologian,” and as representatives of different forms of contemporary American Christianity. Neither poetry nor theology are flourishing parts of our public life, beyond academia and charitable institutions, which seem to consider them decorous, vaguely uplifting rhetorical practices. It is hardly possible—at least in Christian lands—to recognize either poetry or theology as forms of speech that once stirred the most dangerous passions, inspiring and commemorating conflicts among irreconcilable, absolute commitments. One of the tasks that the authors of Glimmerings seem to have set for themselves is the demonstration to a wider public that poets and theologians still have it within them to fulfill their traditional functions of speaking compellingly about our shared concerns, while remaining within the moderate, peaceable ambit of dialogue.
Between the member of a church who rewrites its creedal forms, and the ex-evangelical seeker who flirts with Roman Catholicism while refusing to accept its most basic beliefs and practices, the two men embody American Christianity’s trans-denominational cafeteria style.
Wiman and Volf express these ambitions in different ways through their correspondence and their larger bodies of work. Wiman is concerned with craft and the precise use of language, which he sees as having a moral purpose; aesthetics awakens us to morality and spirituality. Being a good poet has to do, at least potentially, with being a good person. Volf sees friendship, similarly, as a pattern for and spur to a better way of living. Inspired by his doctoral advisor Jürgen Moltmann’s rethinking of the Trinity, Volf often posits in his writings a loving relationship of mutual giving as an alternative to the violent, exploitative, or sterile forms of our economic and political arrangements—offering a theological reading of friendship as a cure for the supposed ills of a secularized culture. A book about the meaning of faith in the context of their own friendship allows Wiman and Volf to combine their specific approaches to extending their respective fields of poetry and theology back into public life. Evaluating Glimmerings thus requires a further look into Wiman’s theory and practice of poetry, and Volf’s theory and practice of relation.
Wiman can seem throughout Glimmerings and his other writings as an insensitive, if not maniacal, partisan for the supremacy of literature. He poses to Volf as a model of “aesthetic triumph” the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew murdered at Auschwitz, of whom he says “[w]e wouldn’t care about the life”—not even qualified as her life, but bare “life”—“were her words not so beautifully formed.” The “aesthetic triumph” of her diary “enables the moral one” (it is unclear whose triumph is the “moral one”: Hillesum’s for writing her diary, or Wiman’s for reading it). “Technique,” he concludes, “is the test of sincerity.”
These remarks are chilling in their implications, which seem both un-Christian and inhumane. They also point to a fundamental problem in Wiman’s vision of faith. For someone who thinks that the use of words is so important—with aesthetic triumph making a life worthy of concern, literary technique proving sincerity, and the comings and goings of meaningfulness comprising the pulse of spiritual existence—Wiman is, in his poetry, often careless and inept in their use.
Wiman the poet is widely praised. A representative volume of his mature work, Every Riven Thing (2011), for example, carries enthusiastic blurbs by reviewers from The New York Times, The New Yorker, and First Things—a remarkable coalition of left-liberal and conservative Christian opinion. Readers from a range of perspectives appreciate the way Wiman speaks about personal but relatable experiences of illness and spiritual crisis, in language that is direct and clear but obviously signifies “poetry.” One of that book’s central poems, “Darkcharms,” has been particularly praised. It describes, like so much of Wiman’s poetry and prose, medical scenes in terms of existential torment:
Darkcharms
In the waiting room, alive together, alone together,
bright hives humming inside of us, in spite of us …
*
Radiated, palliated, sheened gray like infected meat,
he takes my hand, gratified, mystified, as if we’d met on the moon.
*
Needle of knowledge, needle of nothingnesss,
grinding through my spine to sip and the marrow of me.
*
To be so touched, so known, so beloved of nothing:
a kind of chewed-tinfoil shiver of the soul.
*
Animate iron, black junk, seared fearless, up crawls
my cockroach hope, lone survivor of the fire I am.
*
In the world the world’s unchanged to all but you:
iodine dawns, abyss of birdsong, a friend’s laughter lashes
invisible whips.
*
How are you? Pity soaks the moment like wet bread.
Do I spit it out, or must I gum this unguent down?
*
Philosophy of treatment regimens, scripture of obituaries:
heretic, lunatic, I touch my tumor like a charm.
*
Prevarications, extenuations, tomorrow’s tease of being:
we are what we are only in our last bastions.
*
And past that?
Now, near me, not me, a girl, shameless, veinless, screams.
In Oxford American, Win Bassett (a former student at Yale Divinity School), hailed the poem, saying its “speaker wrestles with the crust of cancer” (one does not typically “wrestle” with a “crust,” although as we will see there are some confusing issues of baked goods in the poem). The Austin American-Statesman loved its opening line describing cancer patients as “alive together, alone together”—a phrase that certainly, in its obvious pairing of “alive” and “alone” (a thought that has occurred, notably, to The Chemical Brothers, as well as Mickey Thomas of Jefferson Starship), supports Triquarterly Review’s claim that the poem exemplifies Wiman’s “stunningly open” style.
“Darkcharms” is accessible. Its apparent ease of comprehension seems to invite immediate identification with the speaker of the poem rather than closer attention to the language of the text. But with a second look at any of its lines, “Darkcharms” becomes less clear, and less satisfying. Take a line that Bassett appreciated so much that he began an essay in (Wiman’s former employer) Poetry by quoting it: “How are you? Pity soaks the moment like wet bread. / Do I spit it out, or must I gum this unguent down?” This is undeniably poetry. There is meter. There is assonance, in the repeated “uh” noises of “must I gum this unguent down” (which, read aloud, sounds something like a cow performing an ill-remembered monologue from Shakespeare). And there is simile, even if it’s not obvious what “[p]ity soaks the moment like wet bread” means.
For someone who thinks that use of words is so important … Wiman is, in his poetry, often careless and inept in their use.
Consider the comparison in detail. “Soak” is an odd verb that can mean either to absorb (a sponge “soaks up”) or to drench (the rain “soaks through”). Is pity soaking through the moment or soaking it up into itself? If the former, the “wet bread” is the pity; if the latter, it’s the moment. This ambiguity may be deliberate, but rather than punningly opening up a double meaning, it prepares the way for further confusion. Bread often soaks up liquids in our meals, but “wet bread,” being or having already soaked, cannot do any more soaking (one suspects that the bread here is “wet” only for the sake of the meter). Wet or dry, soaking or soaked, bread is not applied to “unguent[s],” which are topical salves, thick creams placed on the surface of the body rather than ingested.
Here again, this may be an intentionally alienating move on Wiman’s part, offering an image of an absorbent food covered in an inedible substance. But taken in context it seems more like unconcern with the words composing his image. Somehow from one line to the other bread covered in the medical ointment of pity has found its way into the speaker’s mouth (has the questioner who pitied him shoved it in?), forcing him to either “spit” or “gum” it. Why the speaker of the poem does not have teeth and must “gum” rather than chew this unguent-soaked bread is unknown. Wiman uses a number of poetic techniques in these two lines. He offers a strong image (the bread of a pity-laden moment filling his mouth) that evokes, in novel terms, a universal human situation (being the recipient of concern that makes us uncomfortable). He meets what might be called the poetic minimum. But on examination, the poem’s accessibility—its “stunningly open” quality—collapses into a series of technical maneuvers hackneyed or vague.
If he were not the widely-praised former editor of one of the country’s most prestigious poetry journals, nor a strenuous advocate of the preeminent importance of literary technique, these bad lines would be no more alarming than the ones that clang out in the work of many imperfect poets who, because they deal in accessible language with major themes like cancer, love, or politics, are appreciated beyond their strictly literary merits. But Wiman is a champion of poetry, which he at times identifies—like at the conclusion of Glimmerings—with religion:
Faith, for me, is an instinct above all else. Poetry is raveled up with this. When I allow myself to inhabit a reality whose very realness depends upon certain inevitable, immutable arrangements of language; when I believe in poetry, whether it’s writing or reading it, then all the worldly noise that attends art goes quiet, and in the cage of mortality I am completely free.
Here, when craft is well-executed in “certain … arrangements of language,” it melts into undoubting “instinct,” no longer aware of itself as “art,” sliding deliciously from self-consciousness into silent strong belief in … well, one is not sure belief in what. “Ravel,” like “soak,” has opposite meanings (tangle and untangle), and seems to mean here that faith and poetry are wound together in Wiman’s feelings that ping between artistic anxiety and satisfaction with his work. The stakes that Wiman puts on these feelings could not be higher. But to compare what he says about literature—let alone to compare what he says about Etty Hillesum—with his own poems seems cruel. For Wiman’s sake, one must hope that it does not take “beautifully formed words” to make us care about a life or set a person “free.”
An idealized form of relating is for Volf what literary craft is for Wiman: a path to personal, spiritual liberation, and a means of securing reassurance that life is meaningful. Volf began his theological career with a critique of traditional Protestant theologies of vocation, written under the supervision of the eminent German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. In that early scholarship, Volf called for a fusion of work and faith. Extending that call, over subsequent writings, to bring faith into politics, he argues that Christianity has a message for “all spheres of life,” as he put it in his 2011 book A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. In the workplace, “God is, in a sense, our employer,” and in the political sphere, although it should never be “coercive,” faith should be “active.” An active, public faith should look like a scaled-up version of friendship based on dialogue. Volf posits that individuals and groups of different faiths should “argue productively as friends rather than destructively as enemies.”
There are at least two problems here, one having to do with the nature of politics, the other with the nature of friendship. First, politics is coercive. We expect those invested with political authority to pacify society such that disagreements among citizens do not reach a pitch of enmity but remain at the level of civil conversation. It is possible for people of different faiths to safely disagree, whether or not they are friends, and to pursue different ways of living, only insofar as politics coerces us in a variety of ways, from punishing the violent to educating the young in ideals of tolerance.
Volf’s confusion about the nature of politics, and his wish to replace political coercion with friendly conversation, can lead to statements that seem either astonishingly naïve or cynically indifferent to reality. For example, in a 2010 essay, “Body Counts,” he argues that the correct response of Western Christians to the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Turks in 1453 would have been to “engage in dialogue” with the Islamic world. “The threat of expanding Islam” should not have been met with violence—such as the wars that halted Ottoman expansion. In fact, Volf argues, it was not victories like Lepanto and the two sieges of Vienna, or the military, political, and economic might (“the power of guns”) behind them, that account for “Western ascendancy … but the power of ideas forged in vigorous debate.” Volf acknowledges that the world is a scene of violence, but does not draw the conclusion that states must acquire “the power of guns” to protect their citizens, or recognize that the possibility of peaceful dialogue depends on those who reject such dialogue having been forcibly pacified.
Peaceful, perhaps “productive” dialogue among Christians and Muslims, or people of other religions, whether at the scale of personal relationships, within a single country, or throughout the globe, is possible when political coercion (that is, politics) creates conditions for peace. Centuries of wars between Christians and Muslims—and between different forms of Christianity—within Europe were not overcome through anyone’s deepened commitment to ecumenical dialogue, but were arrested through the construction of modern states powerful enough to constrain and tame their restive populations’ religious hatreds. Dialogue is not possible—and exhortations to dialogue are pathetically ineffectual—when political authorities either fail in this duty or commit wanton violence themselves.
Volf’s confusion about the nature of politics, and his wish to replace political coercion with friendly conversation, can lead to statements that seem either astonishingly naïve or cynically indifferent to reality.
We might expect Volf, who has co-taught a course at Yale with Tony Blair, an architect of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq (which Volf, rightly, condemned as an “indefensible war”), to appreciate that the “power of guns” is not going to disappear. Spiritual people may well renounce involvement with politics as incompatible with morality, or might appreciate that politics, when conducted rightly, creates the conditions within which the pursuit of spiritual things—including friendly conversation about them—is possible. But whether they choose to withdraw from it or to steer it in appropriate directions, theologians are responsible for recognizing that politics, founded on coercion, is different from potentially non-coercive spheres of life, such as friendship and religion.
Volf argues, no less troublingly, that conversation among people of different faiths can be, like arguments among friends, “productive,” and often suggests that inter-faith dialogue may be an engine of positive social change. The various religions of the world, through the communication of their adherents, can be, as he put it in Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (2015), “agents of reconciliation and promoters of just peace.” What the productivity of such conversations would consist in is poorly specified. From one perspective, it could be hoped that believers of different religions—some of which claim to be the sole truth, and even encourage conflict with non-believers—will gradually abandon the violent, polemical, exclusionary dimensions of their faith while retaining and amplifying those we might, from a vantage which is not (yet) that of the believers themselves, consider to be consistent with “flourishing” in a “globalized world.” If people of different views get used to enjoying each other’s company, they will probably find it harder and harder to believe that their friends are, for example, going to Hell, should be denied civil rights, pose a civilizational threat, and so on.
But from another perspective, the point of dialogue is to arrive at truth. Believers of different religions—and even believers who hold to different understandings of the same religion, as Wiman and Volf do—make opposing claims. We might wish for them to take these claims less seriously, and we might promote inter-faith dialogue as a subtle tool toward this end. Or conversely, wishing that they take these claims as seriously as possible, we might see such dialogue as a means for participants to arrive at a greater degree of truth, which would presuppose their willingness to change their beliefs in light of these conversations. These are very different ideals—and much optimistic talk about inter-faith dialogue consists of muddling them, and of concealing from view the fact that, however conceived, such dialogue is possible only to the extent that the coercive force of politics maintains civic order at home and peace abroad.
It is disorienting, moreover, to find Volf imagining that dialogue can be productive of positive social change, given that Glimmerings is, from the outset, premised on it being in the nature of this sort of conversation, the kind that nourishes friendship, to feed on itself without leading to any conclusions or changing anyone’s mind. Indeed, Volf does not change Wiman’s mind about anything, nor change his own, although the two men do perhaps draw closer together through their disagreements about God. Is this what friendship as a political instrument looks like? Or are the forms of dialogue that will lead to a more religious and peaceful world of a different order? Are they the same ones that led to “Western ascendancy”? Being able to disagree without violence is a noble goal—but it is at the very least confusing to find it, in Volf’s work, responsible for everything from satisfying comradeship to the rise of Western hegemony to that hegemony’s possible passage into a more just global order.
Nor is it clear that friendship, or other idealized forms of relating, really can do their work, even in Volf’s own life, without calling on political coercion and its un-Christian logics. Much of Glimmerings finds Volf on the road—sometimes too busy to write back to Wiman, who wonders if they should suspend their correspondence. We catch him vacationing with his second wife and young daughter on the beach, and finishing a book chapter that interprets Milton’s Paradise Lost as a critique of high achievers. That chapter, published last year in The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes us Worse, focuses on Satan and Eve as characters who, unhappy with their inferior positions, make life worse for themselves and everyone else by trying to improve their lot. Volf condemns ambition as often as he praises dialogue. In Flourishing, for example he warned against the nihilism of “ruthless high achievers” who “work hard, they compete hard, and they walk over the bodies of the vanquished with smug indifference, and when they aren’t busy bending the world to align with their needs, they party hard as well.”
From the perspective of the Superior Court of Connecticut, however, Volf himself is such a person. In 2017, it ruled in his favor, and against his ex-wife (a fellow theologian at Yale) who had requested an increase in alimony. The court’s ruling described Volf in what, from the perspective of the judge, must have seemed glowing terms:
[T]he defendant has gone to great lengths to expand his role at Yale as a full-time professor of theology at Yale Divinity School and Founding Director of Yale Center for Faith and Culture. His responsibilities and time commitments at Yale Divinity School have substantially increased since the divorce. This hard work has resulted in a substantial increase in his gross and net spendable income since the divorce…. The defendant is hustling to create positions for himself by taking on significant administrative work in addition to his teaching responsibilities. She simply cannot sit back and expect to benefit from his hard work when she is no longer a contributing factor.
For judge James G. Kenefick Jr., the theologian’s diverse professional activities at Yale and elsewhere are essentially about making more “income” to which his ex-wife is not entitled. They are admirable feats of “hustling.” Volf, surely, would not describe his work in those terms. Indeed, his career began with a critique of seeing work primarily as a means of making money, and has been punctuated by condemnations of strivers and hustlers who move easily from country to country and relationship to relationship. He has, likewise, praised marriage, along with friendship, as a relationship of mutual giving that transcends the contractual and conflictual thinking that he finds sadly ubiquitous in contemporary society.
In a 2002 essay, “Married Love,” Volf, still married to his first wife, advised readers how to experience the “miracle of a loving and fulfilled marriage.” Of course, if such a marriage is a “miracle,” it can hardly be the result of human effort. Besides being a miracle, however, marriage is also a “covenant,” like the one God made with the people of Israel, and therefore “unconditional.” Volf is not concerned with the contradictions involved in seeing marriage as a “miracle” or “covenant”—that is, in terms of the acts by which God broke into human history. He is concerned rather to leverage these terms against the idea of marriage as a mere contract between two consenting parties, each seeking to get something desired and protecting his or her own “equal rights.” Volf urged instead: “commit yourself to the adventure of a love that seeks to give more than it wants to receive.”
This may seem to some as a beautiful, compelling image, even if its conceptual foundations are confused, and its implications for marriage as a legal institution unclear. Much as Volf seems ready to sweep away difficult political realities in a warm effusion of sentiment about productive dialogue, the hard-won status of modern marriage as a contract among equal parties rather than as the submission of women to a state of chattel vanishes in a cloud of miracle, covenant, and adventure. It is as though for Volf at both the largest scale of politics, where states and peoples survive or perish by the “power of guns,” and in the smallest, where two individuals negotiate the reciprocal duties of common life, Christianity—which seemed for so many centuries to so many theologians to have so much, in such great detail, to say—now provides what might be called merely anti-political exhortation. He suggests that if we commit, with sufficient earnestness, to dialogue and love, we can overcome the otherwise inevitable conflicts generated by living together in a world of scarce resources and conflicting goals. Yet, even in the small domain of his own life, Volf, like all of us, must call on the state to coerce, must insist on his rights, on the terms of a contract (the divorce settlement), must eschew Paul’s poignant words to the Christians of Corinth: “The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means that you are thoroughly defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?”
The Bible, the Christian tradition, and the voice of conscience—all these expressions of faith seem to have much to say to Wiman and Volf about “meaning” but little, except unworkable ideals, to offer for dealing with the real challenges of life. The latter, as the two correspondents encounter them, are not uncommon. There is nothing more normal than for a successful professor to get divorced and marry a younger wife. In my own neighborhood by the University of Chicago, the couples, and families, thus formed are unremarkable—one even encounters the gender-swapped variant. Likewise there is nothing more normal than for a writer, facing death or not, to have episodes of what Wiman calls “despair” over how he has “fallen short” of his ambitions.
Religion, for many of us, has a role in helping us act responsibly on our desires—from sexual desire to professional advancement—and consoling us for the ways, as Paul also reminds us, “all have sinned and fall short.” Life is often disappointing. We are often disappointing, failing to keep our promises to those we love or, as we had hoped, to redeem our lives from futility with a glorious and enduring “aesthetic triumph.” Faith—and theology and poetry and friendship—may guide us to fail less crushingly. As they are displayed and enacted in Glimmerings, all these potential helps seem strangely impotent, even as Wiman and Volf extol them, drained of “meaning” precisely because the poet and theologian put at the center of their conversations’ concerns about what faith means rather than what it does or to whom it is directed.