Example 1:

Silverstein was very nearly correct in his assessment that the headquarters at Famous Poets Society must be modest, only “two rooms.” The fact is, they are headquartered in a one-room office with many volunteers doing their part to make sure no poet with a dream is left behind.

Pamela Schuknecht
San Diego

Example 2:

Martin Amis’s complaint about the feeblemindedness of religion has, in these times when we are terrorized by religion’s literalism, much to recommend it, even to a scholar of religious studies. Unfortunately, Amis significantly oversimplifies: religious belief has a strange and consequential history.

Until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then only in the West, the “believing” that Amis excoriates did not involve literalistic claims about matters of fact but instead emphasized cherishing, trust and loyalty. The word’s etymology is cognate with the German belieben, “to hold dear,” and, perhaps surprisingly, the Latin libindo, “desire.” As the late historian of comparative religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith has shown, the Reformation and early modern science effectively colluded in a momentous redefinition of this key term. Thus have we been led to a distorted theory of religion (religions as “belief systems”), as well as to a practice impelled, despite accommodations and mitigations, toward the toxic pseudo-certainties of fundamentalism.

Not unreason, then, as such but an excess of misplaced rationalism in the modern period has produced what Amis laments as feeblemindedness. And although neither Arnold nor Leavis, let alone political correctness, has given us a viable alternative to religion-as-belief, clearly aesthetic modes are more fitting ones for a healthy religion than are the scientific criteria that religion has futilely sought to satisfy for half a millennium.

Given this history, Marx got it wrong and Martin Amis may want to reconsider: the criticism not of religion but of literal belief is the beginning of all criticism.

Daniel Noel
Pacifica Graduate Institute
Carpinteria California

Example 3:

Ted Fishman states, in his essay vilifying global capitalism, that “ethnic and religious divisions, grievances over political participation and class, matter little in today’s private wars.” He then attributes these conflicts to goods, such as diamonds, gold, and oil, that attract anonymous global capital.

I must take issue with Fishman’s thinking. In Africa it is impossible to separate ethnicity from economic specialization as the genesis of political conflict. Governments in that part of the world are divided along ethnic lines, and the most important resources are controlled, overwhelmingly by the ruling class. These individuals, with the illimitable appetite of kleptocrats, assign the control of “national assets” to their cohorts and sycophants, whose role is to empower members of their own ethnicity and exclude everyone else.

Fishman’s argument would have been more compelling had he acknowledged the strong, unbreakable link that exists between ethnic conflict and economic specialization.

John L. Kiggundu
Charlotttesville, Va.

Example 4:

In his discussion of Martin Luther King’s legacy, Anthony Walton cynically chooses to ignore a great deal of substantive progress made by African Americans. By failing even to mention the work of so-called revisionist writers such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, Walton creates the impression that there is a consensus on the race issue, agreement that black victims are repressed by institutional white racism. In fact, today there is no such monolithic view.

(not sure of author).