New Year's Reflections & Resolutions

First and foremost for a publishing house, of course, are the books: in the reflection bank, the books we published in 2007; in the resolutions file, those we look forward to publishing in 2008. For any of you unfortunate enough to have missed reading Beacon books this past year, here's hoping 2008 brings relief in large doses. We're really looking forward to publishing books which tackle some urgent issues in this election year.

As you know if you're reading this page, one of our new ventures in 2007 was this blog. When we launched it in Banned Books Week back in September, it was our hope to offer some interesting and provocative posts that might lead readers back to books. But after only three months, I've come to feel that the blog in and of itself is an achievement and well worth reading even if it doesn't lead you back to the printed word (though I won't deny that we all still fervently hope that it will).

So I want to take a minute to thank all of the Beacon Press authors who have contributed to the blog in 2007, and especially to thank the authors who are not (or not yet) published by Beacon for their posts.  And to thank you for dropping by to sample their contributions. Keep coming back; we're resolved to make it well worth the trip.

May your New Year be full of good reading, no matter where you find it.

Helene Atwan

Helene Atwan began her career in publishing at Random House in 1976; she worked at A.A.Knopf, Viking Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Simon and Schuster, before being named director of Beacon Press in 1995.  She served for eight years on the board of PEN-New England and is the Administrator of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1808

by Thomas N. DeWolf

Americans love to celebrate. We commemorate historic events (Thanksgiving, Independence Day) and people (Presidents Day, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day). But few are aware of the significance of January 1, 2008: the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States. We tend to remember the end of the institution of slavery as one result of the Civil War. African Americans have commemorated Juneteenth, a celebration of the day, on June 19, 1865, when slaves in Texas were finally told about the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years after it was implemented. But America has all but ignored the date that marks the end of the slave trade.

This past year, Great Britain spent the equivalent of $40 million to remember their 200-year old abolition law from 1807. They educated students, invested in museums and commemorative services, and considered the legacy of slavery and the impact it still has today. They taught anew the heroic actions of historic figures like Wilberforce, Newton, Equiano, and Clarkson, who led England’s fight to end their evil commerce in human flesh.

Here in the United States we are doing precious little to mark the occasion of our equivalent historical watershed event. To my knowledge, the only official action toward commemorating the date, a bill to establish a commission to “ensure a suitable national observance of the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade” (H.R. 3432), was introduced in August 2007, passed in the House (October) and the Senate (December 19 ), but with all funding eliminated. It remains to be seen whether this remains an ineffectual symbolic gesture or if funding will be forthcoming in 2008, obviously after the January 1 anniversary. Beyond that, the only government-sponsored event planned, of which I'm aware, is a public symposium hosted by the National Archives on January 10.

One can reasonably argue that the law to end the slave trade was less than effective. Enforcement efforts were often half-hearted; those who continued trading illegally did so with vigor, particularly prior to 1820 when the penalty for conviction of slave trading became death. (Even this change to the law was largely toothless, as the penalty was only applied once, during the Civil War). Yet the 1808 law was a turning point. It helped energize the abolition movement and provided government affirmation that slave trading was not only immoral but criminal.

Sundays in America: Christmas Eve in Bethlehem

by Suzanne Strempek Shea

This time last year, I was headed to Bethlehem

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, that is. As part of a year I spent worshipping at a different Protestant church each Sunday to research my book, Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, Bethlehem seemed the perfect choice for a service on the Sunday that was Christmas Eve, 2006.

Growing up Catholic, I was warned time and again never to enter a Protestant church. I would be headed straight to hell, I was told, right after the roof caved in on me. I’m thrilled to say I lived to tell the tale of my year of visits, and that Sundays in America will be published by Beacon Press in March of 2008. I’m now looking back on what was a fascinating year of travel and services from coast to coast, and out to Hawaii.

My trip to Bethlehem last Christmas Eve Day included worship at Central Moravian Church in what’s now known as Christmas City USA. The city of Bethlehem was founded on Christmas Eve, 1741, by Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf of Germany and a group of Moravians who named the hilly spot after the Biblical village in Judea. If 1741 sounds eons ago, consider that the Worldwide Moravian church was founded 449 years ago, in 1457. That’s 60 years before Martin Luther nailed his thesis to a church door and one hundred before the Anglican Church began. From the start, Moravians flocked to missionary work, often finding themselves in forgotten corners of the world. (The contingent that founded Bethlehem was interested in saving the souls of Native Americans and unchurched Colonists.) As a result, more than a quarter of its current 600,000 members worldwide live in Tanzania.

If you want to worship with the ones in Bethlehem, Christmas Eve is an excellent time to do so.  I hope you get to hear the dozen members of the bell choir who chimed in with hymns prior to the service I attended last Christmas Eve Day. In her sermon, Pastor Carol A. Reifinger talked about Christmas in Tanzania, where the preparations take all year and new shoes for Christmas worship are the big thing. In Tanzania, she said, the faithful say, “If we are going to see Jesus, we must look our best.”

Pastor Carol reminded the congregation about the expansiveness of the Christian faith. “You can’t put a fence around Christianity,” she said that morning. “What is the Christmas story but the hovering of peace above a dark and conflicted world?”

Suzanne Strempek Shea,winner of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, is the author of five novels, Selling the Lite of Heaven , Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again , and Becoming Finola, and the memoirs Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, and Shelf Life. Her next book, Sundays in America, from which she adapted this post, will be released by Beacon Press this coming Easter. She lives in Bondsville, Massachusetts, and sells books at Edwards Books in Springfield, Massachusetts.

A Hajj for the Children of Mali

by Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur

As millions of Muslims around the world converge on Saudi Arabia to perform the Hajj, I want to share with you the story of millions of women in Mali, babies in tow, who recently made their own hajj.  Muslims go on Hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to save and purify their souls and to fulfill a major religious right.  These Malian women made a pilgrimage to health centers across Mali to get bed nets to save their childrens' lives.

Eid-ul-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice, marks the Hajj season. It commemorates the time that God, in the ultimate test of faith, asked the Prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice his son, Ismael. Ibrahim wrestled with God’s request of him, but when Ismael heard what had been asked of his father, he demanded that Ibrahim surrender to the God's will; as Ibrahim prepared for the sacrifice, Ismael comforted his father and encouraged him to close his eyes to make it easier. As Ibrahim touched the sword to Ismael’s throat, in an act of God’s infinite mercy, Ismael was transported to safety and a sheep was slaughtered in his place. Millions of Muslim slaughter animals during Eid-ul-Adha to remember Ibrahim and Ismael’s willingness to surrender to God’s will and God’s mercy.

Ismael's mother also figures prominently in the primary text of Islam. Ibrahim was an elderly and childless man by the he time he took Hajar as a junior wife. When Hajar finally gave birth to their son, Ismael, the miraculous birth was received with great joy and happiness, but soon after God asked Ibrahim to leave Hajar and and the infant Ismael in a distant, isolated desert location. Mother and child quickly depleted their small supply of water and a few dates. Realizing that her life and the life of her baby depended on finding sustenance, Hajar called out to God for help. No answer. She ran to a nearby mountain named and called again to her Lord for help. She ran in the valley to the next mountain, , calling on God for sustenance. Seven times, she ran back and forth, praying all the while to God for help. At last, an angel appeared in human form and kicked his heels in the dry desert sand. Up from the spot he furrowed into the desert floor sprang a well of water, which immediately nourished Hajar and her son. The story is a powerful example of how a woman, relying solely on her faith in God, saved her life and the life of her son.

"Mission Accomplished": O'Reilly Declares Victory in the War on Christmas

by Frederick Lane

Forty or so years ago, a U.S. Senator from Vermont by the name of George Aiken wisely advised both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon that the United States should simply declare victory in Vietnam and bring its troops home. Unfortunately, neither listened to him. His advice, sadly, is still relevant. When President George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 and declared "Mission Accomplished," he only got it half right; he overlooked the bit about bringing the troops home.

And then there's Bill O'Reilly, the bombastic host of Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor," and a cultural warrior who finally seems to have taken Aiken's advice to heart. In the December 13 episode of his show, O'Reilly announced that Fox News had won the so-called "war on Christmas." Well, that is a relief. The only question is whether O'Reilly will follow all of Aiken's advice and call home the Fox troops scouring the countryside for the last signs of the anti-Christmas resistance.

"The far left secular progressive community is furious, furious, I tell you about losing the war on Christmas…. [A]ll over the country, the sights and signs of Christmas are on display. Few department stores are telling employees not to say a 'Merry Christmas.' And the Taliban-like oppression of the holiday has largely ceased, but the SPs are not happy about that."

The Email That Ended a Career: Intelligent Design and Texas Education

by Glenn Branch

I send a lot of e-mail in the course of the average day, and ordinarily nobody is fired as a result. But I’m not always so lucky.

I work at the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Even eighty-two years after the Scopes trial, that’s a job that keeps us busy. In a 2005 survey conducted by the National Science Teachers Association, for example, 30% of the science teachers responding indicated that they experienced pressure to omit or downplay evolution and related topics, while 31% indicated that they experienced pressure to include nonscientific alternatives to evolution, such as “creation science” or “intelligent design,” in their science classrooms.

Sometimes the pressure isn’t so quiet, either. In 2004, after efforts to have a creationist textbook adopted were stymied, a creationist majority on the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, passed a policy misleadingly describing evolution as “a theory ... not a fact” and recommending “intelligent design”—the latest incarnation of creationism—as a scientifically credible alternative, and tried to force the science teachers to read a disclaimer to that effect.

Interrogation or Torture?

by Jennifer Harbury

The issue of water-boarding has become quite the political flashpoint in recent weeks. First there was an uproar when Michael Mukasey, now our Attorney General, stated his uncertainty as to whether or not this “interrogation” technique constituted torture. Shamefully, he is not alone. Many officials in our intelligence community insist that it does not. (Perhaps they should give it a try.) Next, Congressional leaders urged that this and other special CIA methods be banned for good, with predictable protests from the White House. Now we learn that the CIA has destroyed secret videotapes of two high value detainees being subjected to water-boarding. Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who gave the order, is a colleague of Terry Ward, who covered up my husband’s ongoing torture and eventual murder in Guatemala years ago. There are too many historical ironies here.

To begin with, the sanitized and highly deceptive language being used should itself be banned. Duping the American public is hardly the proper solution to international charges of war crimes. Our intelligence leaders tell us that water-boarding consists of placing a cloth over the prisoner’s face, then pouring water over him until he "thinks he is going to drown." This sounds like little more than a scare technique. The description is so benign, in fact, that one wonders how the method could convince any prisoner to talk.

A number of my friends survived water-boarding sessions in Latin America, and they give a rather different description. As my friend "O," a former POW in Guatemala tells me, his army tormentors immersed him in a vat of water. He tried desperately to hold his breath, but finally the water rushed into his head, causing terrible pain. He remembers gagging and choking, and a mounting pressure that made him think his eardrums would burst. He felt himself vomiting and going into convulsions. He awoke on the floor to find his torturers administering CPR. We shared this description with the United Nations Committee Against Torture last year. The Committee members had no difficulty in declaring this technique a form of torture, and banning it outright. Senator John McCain, himself a torture survivor, has long said the same. Water-boarding is a slow and very painful mock execution, in short, "exquisite torture."

Romney on Faith in America: Encouraging and Disappointing

by C. Welton Gaddy

Mitt Romney’s speech on Faith in America was both encouraging and disappointing. I appreciate the tone of his speech and the fact that he seriously addressed the issue of religious liberty. I commend him for clearly stating that religious tolerance is not reserved only for faiths with which we agree and for warning against imposing a religious test on any candidate for public office.

At the same time, I’m concerned with how much of the speech was designed as red-meat for conservative Christian voters. He equated the right to life movement with the struggle for civil rights and abolition. He warned of the secularist boogeyman who would take religion out of the public square. And he completely ignored the values, rights, and contributions of millions of non-religious Americans.

By saying, “freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom,” Mr. Romney showed a clear misunderstanding of American history, our Constitution, and the nature of religion. Fortunately, those who founded this nation and wrote the Constitution understood that freedom would endure and religion would thrive only if the institutions of religion and government were kept separate. Too many of our elected officials today believe in their religious freedom but not yours; they want to use government to impose their narrow religious values on the rest of us.

Et tu, Democrats?! Abstinence-Only Sex Education and The Politics of the Budget

by Carole Joffe

After nearly seven years of the George W. Bush presidency and its regressive sexual and reproductive politics, it is no surprise that this administration continues to staunchly support "abstinence-only sex  education."  The fact that study after study—including one commissioned by Congress itself has shown these programs to be ineffective does not trouble this president, who, in the face of inconvenient findings, has consistently allowed  ideology  to trump science.  Whether the issue is global warming or weapons of mass destruction or condom effectiveness, this administration is infamous for, as a Bush administration official—famously and unapologetically—put it, "creating its own reality." (New York Times magazine, October 17, 2004).

And it is no surprise that the Republican candidates for president support abstinence-only programs. This issue remains of great symbolic importance to the Religious Right base of the Republican Party. Though some observers say this movement is in decline, evangelicals remain very influential in the nominating process (witness Mike Huckabee’s recent meteoric rise), and candidates cannot afford to offend them on this issue. (And to be sure, abstinence-only is more than just symbolically important to many on the right; as The Nation so ably detailed, in "The Abstinence Gluttons," those  who receive  contracts to deliver these programs are raking in millions).

But Democrats supporting "abstinence-only," especially after the November 2006 election, when they regained control of the House and Senate?!  A powerful Democratic committee chair proposing to give even more to these programs than the Bush administration has asked for?!  No, this is not a Saturday Night Live or Jon Stewart parody. This is Washington politics. In a move that stunned advocates for "comprehensive" sex education—that is, programs that include discussion of both abstinence and birth control options—Congressman Dave Obey of Wisconsin, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, proposed increasing by $28 million the current abstinence-only allocation of $113 million. Obey made this move in order to lure Republican votes for Congress’s main domestic spending bill.    (In fairness, an equal increase was suggested for Title X, a federal family planning program that has been consistently under-funded during the Bush years.)

Romney: "Ich bin ein Kennedy"

by Frederick Lane

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney traveled to College Station, Texas, to deliver a major address on faith to an audience at the George H.W. Bush presidential library. Given the fact that the speech was so clearly an attempt to emulate President John F. Kennedy's famous speech on faith forty-seven years ago, it's a little surprising that Romney didn't deliver the speech at the Kennedy Library in Boston instead. But context is everything, and the backdrop of the Boston skyline would not have been reassuring to Romney's true audience—Christian evangelical voters who have grave reservations about electing a Mormon (and former Massachusetts governor)—as president.

It is not likely, however, that Romney's speech will resonate as deeply into history as Kennedy's has. That's not entirely Romney's fault, of course: Kennedy was a particularly charismatic speaker, and no candidate since, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, has had such eloquent speechwriters. But Romney and his campaign are certainly responsible for his speech's two main failings: its timing, and its content.

Romney enjoyed little of the drama surrounding Kennedy's speech to Greater Houston Ministerial Association (GHMA) on September 12, 1960. The hotly-contested election between Kennedy and the Republican nominee, Vice-President Richard Nixon, was less than two months away. Kennedy was vying to become the nation's first Catholic president, and had endured months of insult, including repeated charges that the Kennedy White House would be subject to the orders of the Pope. Kennedy's stirring affirmation of his independence and America's commitment to religious freedom were a stern reminder to the nation's Protestant majority in general and the GHMA in particular that no one in this country should be the target of religious intolerance. And unlike Romney, who chose a safe venue for his oration, Kennedy strode onto a stage in front of some his most skeptical critics.

Ghosts of Creatures Past

by Lisa Couturier

Being the holiday season, it's a good time to share stories. I'd like to tell the story of my friends who congregate in our city near the Bed, Bath and Beyond. They know a good deal when they see it and will follow one another from Bed, Bath and Beyond to a free doughnut here or some French fries there, which will prompt them to fight and chase and play and scream at one another. Though they prefer to sleep in the city this wintry time of year, they spend the daylight hours out where I live now, in the country, where they work in the cornfields and in the woods. They commute, like many of us. A good chance to visit with them is in the late afternoon, when, on their way home, they stop here and there in and around the city's strip malls, where, though generally it's a good idea to avoid such chaos, I also occasionally stop, and spend time with my friends—these resourceful commuters, the crows.

I have two kids: I do a lot of stopping along the long list of things to do and places to be that my life has become. But stopping can be good. It forces me to attend to what is there. My daughter Madeleine’s ballet school, which was and still is buried behind franchise restaurants, boutiques, and the usual smattering of mega-stores, was also near Starbucks—how convenient—for my fill up of gingerbread latte. And of course the ubiquitous Bed, Bath and Beyond. It was after my scurrying through the autumn rains and winds, from store to store, with my younger daughter Lucienne, first as a baby, then a toddler, then a preschooler, in the carriage, on my hip, or riding piggy back, and it was after stocking up like a mama squirrel on all the treats the city stores offered, that Lucienne and I came to a different sort of stopping. While Madeleine pirouetted into the early evening, Lucienne and I piled our packages into our car parked behind Bed, Bath and Beyond, where we could sit. Where we could sip latte and suck lollipop. Where we could visit with our friends the crows.

Chanukah in Jerusalem

by Ilana Kurshan

On the first night of Chanukah, I was in a coffee shop when the candles were lit; on the second night, I was in Ace hardware, awaiting the movers who would pick up my new bookcases and bring them to my home. I don't know anywhere else in the world in which Chanukah candles are lit publicly at nightfall in coffee shops and hardware stores, but then again, there is no place in the world like Jerusalem.         

I suppose I forgot, when I planned my week, that the custom in Jerusalem is to light candles immediately at nightfall. I forgot that everyone rushes home to light between the afternoon and evening service, "before the last feet have returned home from the market," as the Talmud puts it. And so I was meeting my friend Daniel for our weekly date to read poetry together on Tuesday at 5pm in a coffee shop, when all of a sudden, a group of men burst through the door, placed a menorah on the counter next to the espresso machines, and began reciting the blessings over the candles. Everyone in the shop, from the freelance writers with their laptops to the awkward couples stammering through blind dates, looked up, and many sang along. I confess that I was mostly annoyed—we were in the middle of a Tennyson poem, and the rousing chorus of Maoz Tzur was ruining the rhythm!

Guantanamo Bay: Five Years of Injustice

by Jessica Bennett

For over five years, the United States has held hundreds of people at Guantanamo Bay. The system for legal recourse has been criticized by human rights activists and political leaders around the world. Monday's Boston Globe has an exceptionally moving opinion piece from Sabin Willett, a lawyer representing prisoners in Guantanamo. The prisoner Willett writes about, whom he calls "Joseph," is not guilty of any crime, even by the standards of the military court who tried him: "The military told him in 2002 he was innocent. Again in 2003. Again in 2006."

Unsurprisingly, Joseph has given up hope of ever being released.