Bellah responds to his critics

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FIRST THINGS June/July 2013

A REPLY T O MY C R IT IC SRobert N. Bellah responds to Thomas Joseph White,

Francesca Aran Murphy, and Paul Griffiths.

erhaps it was inevitable ina symposium organized

by F I R S T T H I N G S that all

three com m entators fault my b ook for not tak ing the life, death, and Res-

urrection of Jesus Christ as the center of my story, when the fact of the

matter is that my book didn't reach chronologically to the life of Jesus.

That's because Religion in Hum an Evolution, large as it is, is a fragm ent.I had originally intended to bring the boo k u p to the present, but when in

201 0 the m anu script h ad becom e so tall that it could alm ost tip over I real-

ized tha t it m ust go to the publisher w ith the hope for an other (inevitably

smaller) book to com plete wh at I had originally hop ed to d o. I rationalized

this decision on the grounds that it did achieve, I hoped, one major point

Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.



A RE P L Y TO M Y CR I T I CS

that wascentral to my argument: By looking at wherereligion came from rather than where it was going,I could avoid what I thought w ere the major defectsof most previous efforts to account for the evolutionof religion—namely, determinism and reductionism.

It was precisely in an attem pt to defeat efforts to

reduce religion to deterministic and reductionist bio-logical causes that I undertook at my advanced agea fairly serious education in biology so that I couldshow that those accounts could not be substantiatedin biological terms. I was then also concerned toavoid sociological or economic determinism by show-ing instead that religion, from the earliest forms tothe great transformations of the Axial Age, had itsown inner dynamic and creativity, which made it im-possible to treat it as a "variable" determined by itssocial environment, however much it interacted w ithand responded to that environment.

So I wish my critics had focused more on what Idid do than on what I didn't do. But under the cir-cumstances, that was understandable. Theologianswill be theologians , I suppose.

Francesca Aran Murphy, in her emphasis onfreedom, comes closest to getting at what Iwas most trying to do in this book, and hercriticisms are off the mark only by a little.She and I share a great admiration for Johan

Huizinga's Homo Ludens, which has been central in

both of our lives. However, she sees Huizinga fol-lowing Plato when he, in the Laws, wrote that "manis made God's plaything, and tha t is the best part ofhim," but she does not see me doing so. Why does sheimagine that I don't affirm Plato as Huizinga does?Nothing in what follows the Plato quote in Religionin Human E volution indicates any disavowal on mypart. And the fairly long and largely ecstatic treat-ment of Plato in the chapter on Greece in the AxialAge would certainly suggest to most readers that Iam a Platonist.

She comes to her conclusion in part because else-

where in the book I quote Kant with approval andso must believe, as she thinks Kant does, that free-dom is purely negative, "freedom from," rather than"freedom for the fulfillment of our na tures ." But ofcourse , Kant specifically thinks of the freedom at thebasis of the categorical imperative as positive—thatis, the freedom to treat oneself and all others as endsin themselves, thus producing a "kingdom of ends,"which is the ideal society. Plato and Kant arrive attheir conclusions in very different ways, but both seefreedom as for something.

After largely agreeing with my argum ent. M urphy

writes, "It is quite impossible for an orthodox

Christian theologian to buy into Bellah's narrativetaken as a whole." That raises the question of what"Bellah's narrative as a whole" really is, somethingthat bedevils all the contributions to the sympo-sium (and preoccupied much of the discussion at theseminar last December as well). But for now, let's

leave aside "my narrative" and take up the issue ofwhat is and isn't possible for orthodox Christians.Murphy is attentive to my references to Huizingaand then to Plato, yet she ignores my reference toBlaise Pascal, who m akes a rather surprising appear-ance in a chapter on my very lukewarm account of"religious naturalism." There I quote him affirmingnot the God of the philosophers but God incarnatein Jesus Christ. Perhaps Pascal appears where hedoes to make a point not entirely incompatible with"orthodox Christian theology."

While I am honored by ThomasJoseph White's assertion thatReligion in Human Evolution is"the greatest work of liberal Prot-estant theology ever," I nonethe-

less would like to decline the honor. I wrote my bookas an example of one possible kind of contemporarysocial science, interdisciplinary even to the point ofincluding natural science along with social sciencesand the humanities. Still, I believe that all our cat-egories overlap, and so my book does not require

excluding revelation and metaphysics but is, on thecontrary, open to them in a variety of ways. A bookcan address topics of theological import without be-ing a book of theology.

That said, it is probably "liberal Protestant" thatgives me more trouble than "theology." I consider PaulTillich one of my three great teachers. I know he isoften categorized as a liberal Protestant, but he doesn'tfit. He was a critic no t only of liberal Protestantism (forjust the reason White cites: It had liquidated itself in tosecular humanism) but also of Protestantism itself. Hisbook The Protestant Era was first proposed as The

End of the Protestant Era?, but his publisher didn'twant a question mark in the title; he then titled it TheEnd of the Protestant Era, but Protestant friends feltthat seemed to suggest he was becoming Catholic, sohe ended up with the title we know.

Tillich's criticism of Protestantism itself, which wasvery deep and led to his feeling tha t he lived at the endof "the Protes tant era," was based on his understand-ing of Ch ristianity . He consistently affirmed "theProtestant principle," which is in essence prophetic re-ligion that calls everything on this ea rth into questionrelative to a transcendent conception of God. How-

ever, the Protestant principle also requires what he



EIRST THINGS June/July 2013

called "Catholic subs tance," in the absence of whichthe Protestant principle turns into sheer criticism,which finally turns on itself and becomes nihilistic.Eor Tillich, the essence of Catholic substance is sacra-mentalism, and it isexactly tha t which P rotestantismabandoned. Eirst, orthodox Protestantism proclaimed

the Word and the Sacrament; then it became the Sac-rament through the Word; and then it became just theWord. Eor example, when Karl Barth said the Wordof God did not contain the sentence "Th ou shalt lightcandles," he m ade Tillich's point. Even more crushingwas T illich's claim that Protestant theology had aban-doned love as the central theological virtue in place ofthe all-consuming emphasis on faith.

For me, accepting Tillich's criticism of liberalProtestantism, and of Protestantism itself(though not the Protestant principle), meantthat I could only be a small-p protestant.Through my decades of involvement in the

Berkeley Graduate Theological Union, where I wasan adjunct professor from the time I first came toBerkeley in 1967, and especially owing to my closecollaboration with faculty and graduate studentsat the Jesuit School of the GTU, I lived in a heav-ily Ca tholic atmosphere even in so secular a place asBerkeley. Though I had been raised as a PresbyterianI ended up an Episcopalian, where liturgy and the Eu-charist in particular m et my need for a sacramental

religious prac tice. So I ended up a small-c catholic (orAnglo-Catholic) as well as a small-p protestant. Forall these reasons, I don't want to be called a liberalProtestant theologian, however great.

To the extent that I'll accept the honor of beingcalled a theologian, it's along the lines of what Til-lich himself described in a talk to the Harvard Over-seers of 1959. He said that all academic study in thehum anities, and especially in religion, must combinedetachment or distance with participation: "All de-tached knowledge remains hypothesis. It is prelimi-nary; but participation brings the subject matter into

us or us into it. Such participation produces the erosand the passion which inspire the teaching withoutdestroying the scientific soberness." In the empiricalcases I treat in my book, revelation and metaphysicsare not parked at the door.

On the con trary, several have significant existen-tial meaning to me. "Nothing is ever lost" becamemy mantra. In the case studies of my book I soughtthe passion of participation that Tillich rightly rec-ognized must complement detached analysis. Mytreatment of the biblical Hebrew prophets in mychapter on ancient Israel takes me back to my high

school church experience, when I first read them and

where they indelibly formed in me a social Christi-anity th at I have never abando ned. I especially iden-tify with Jeremiah, with his terrible burden of beingcalled by God, though he dearly wished God hadchosen someone else. Through much of my adult lifeI have been reading Plato and Aristotle, Aristotle

long before I read After Virtue, but with increasingunderstanding after that. I first read Confucius andMencius in classical Chinese in my first year in gradu-ate school, where I was combining a degree in sociol-ogy with East Asian languages. They have never leftme. In my research on ancient India, where I wascompletely a novice, I met the Buddha of the PaliCanon for the firs t time , despite my long fam iliaritywith Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia, where the"historical Buddha" is completely overshadowed bythe B odhisattvas. I was entranced with what I found:such wonderful, wise, and often amusing dialogues.

Even in the chapter on tribal religion, I noted howmuch the Australian Aborigines, especially as de-scribed by the Australian anthropologist W. E. H.Stanner, and the Navajo, as described by my own un-dergraduate teachers at H arvard , have meant to me.

S

o I don't entirely deny that there is theologyin my book—indeed, what would it be ifthere weren't? And perhaps White will in-sist that I'm being too ingenious in my use ofTillich to parry the liberal Protestant label.

I'm willing to concede that it's the theologian's pre-rogative to define theological categories. But I'd liketo challenge White's sociological assumptions abouttheological traditions .

He notes the irony of my remarkable achieve-ment of a liberal Protestant theology just at the mo-ment when liberal Protestantism is in eclipse. I thinkthat is more of an open question tha n he does. The"eclipse" may be due to the triumph of liberal Prot-estantism. By so invading secular humanist culturethat it lost its own distinction, it won, after all, bytransforming secular humanist culture itself. There

is more th an a little evidence that most Am ericans,for example, would assent to unmarked liberal Prot-estant beliefs more often than to unmarked ortho-dox alternatives, and that this would be true notonly for most mainline Protestants but also for mostCatholics and even most Evangelicals.

I joked in our seminar that liberal Protestantismhad died and been reborn ; it is called "religious stu-dies." Religious studies is not a homogeneous field,but I think there is more than a little truth in whatI said, and that the replacement of theology depart-ments with religious studies departments in most

American universities (and now in Europe and Asia



A RE P L Y TO M Y CR I T I CS

too) is a sign that liberal Protestantism as White en-

visagss it is alive and well, being taught to tens of

thousands of students every year.

There are other signs of triumph . Ma ny have not-

ed the process of "Protestantization" of the "world

religions" (the very term is a liberal Pro testan t inven-

tion). Reform movements in Hinduism, Buddhism,Confucianism, even Islam, with Reform Judaism be-

ing a vivid example, all exhibit this process. Some

have seen Vatican II in this light. It may seem that

radical fundame ntalism has won the day, but in sheer

num bers the fundamen talists are probably eclipsed in

most traditions by liberal reformist alternatives, who

are quieter but more numerous. The emergence of a

vigorous human rights agenda in global civil society

is another partial offshoot of liberal Protestantism.

And what the growing number of religious "nones"

in America believe is far less likely to be atheism

than some res idual form of unorganized l ibera l

Protestantism. One can find liberal Protestantism in-

adequate, though not withou t redeeming qualities, as

I do, witho ut presum ing it is near death.

Paul Griffiths has some nice things to say

about Religion in Human Evolution, bu the soon begins the process of demolishing

my book by questioning its entire substance

on two grounds. First, he believes there is

not enough evidence for such a story. At moments, it

seems Griffiths is so skeptical abou t the adeq uacy ofour kn owledg e of the things I try to cover in my b ook

that he thinks no one could ever write a coherent ac-

cou nt. Second, he claims I use wha t evidence there is

willfully to suit myself. He argues that I am arbitrary,

tha t I am telling "a story I like the sound of."

Here, all I can say in my defense against the

first criticism is that I did the best I could. Like any

scholarly book, certainly any history book, it will

be quickly outmoded in its details because of new

scholarsh ip. But in the thirteen y ears I work ed o n my

bo ok, I sought the m ost reliable accounts I could find.

M y boo k is deeply collaborative. I consulted not on lybasic texts where they w ere available (relying m ainly

on translations, though with key texts in more than

one translation), but also on the classic secondary

literature, as well as on the state-of-the-art second ary

literature at the time of writing.

In many cases I consulted specialists , some of

wh om are at Berkeley but most of wh om are scattered

all over the world. (I have my doubts about modern

inform ation technology, but I have to say I could n ot

have written this book without e-mail.) I sought and

largely obtained readings that told me where I was

wrong and helped me to get things right, or at least

defensible, in area after are a where I was not a special-

ist or, in the case of India, had no b ackgro und at all.

If Griffiths wants to believe there is no objective

basis for the stories I tell, he can of course do so.

But I'm less of a skeptic. Scholars som etimes have to

venture synthetic judgments, especially if we want

to have something informed to say about large-scalequestions of the sort I try to answer, however tenta-

tively, however fallibly, in my book.

H is second criticism turns on what I can

only describe as a monomaniacal ap-

proach to metanarratives. He believes

a metanarrative is "a narrative that, in

the eyes of its users, frames and explains

all other narratives and can be framed and explained

by none." When I take up the discussion of metanar-

ratives in my second chapter (I have to wonder if he

even read that chapter) I outline an entirely different

view. I am concerned with many metanarratives and

indicate that none of them can subsume all the oth-

ers. For example, I say that "there is one story about

origins that, at least among educated people, has a

kind of priority today, and that is the story as told

by science: in terms of the universe, scientific cosmol-

ogy; in terms of life, evolution." I go on to say that,

although this is a story I can't avoid, "that does not

mea n it is the only story. In the course of writing this

boo k, which is a history of histories, and story of sto-

ries, I have become involved with man y of the storiesI recou nt to the poin t of at least part ial conversion."

In other w ord s, althou gh I tak e the scientific story

as a necessary framework, I reject it as an adequate

religious myth, though some people have proposed

to do so. For example, the astute reader will note

that Teilhard de Chardin, a favorite of those who

want to fuse science with religion, is not mentioned

once in my bo ok . I engage in critical exegesis of such

efforts and show w hat is wron g with their app roach.

Thus, if Griffiths had read carefully, he would know

that the scientific story is to me only a convenience

for exposition and not my myth. I call the religiousinterpretation of the scientific story of cosmology

and biological evolution a "myth" not in a pejorative

sense but to indicate th at using th at story for religious

purposes has moved out of the realm of science.

I attempt to reclaim the use of the term myth tha t

allows for pluralism, rather than the monism Griffiths

presupposes, when I write: "Myth can be true, but

it is a different kind of truth from the truth of sci-

ence and mu st be judged by different criteria. . . . I

would argue that the myths told by the ancient Is-

raelite prophets, by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle ,

by Confucius and Mencius, and by the Buddha, just



FIRST THINGS June/July 2013

to stay within the purview of this book, are all truemyths. They overlap with each other and with [thescientific myth], but even in their conflicts, which aresometimes serious, they are all worthy of belief, and Ifind it possible to believe in all of them in rather deepbut not exclusive ways."

I know that this opens me to the charge of relativ-ism from Griffiths (with which I will deal later),but it shows decisively that I have no mono-myth designed to replace all others. I criticizeand disavow the use of the modern cosmologi-

cal and evolutionary myth as an adequate religiousstory, and I certainly do not use it as "my story."To the extent that Griffiths thinks that I do, andMurphy and W hite seem to indicate that they agree,they have all failed to read carefully enough. So

when Murphy writes that as "an orthodox Ghristiantheologian" she "cannot buy into Beliah's narrativetaken as a whole," I wonder what narrative she istalking about. It is not my conscious intent to offersuch a narrative.

When I move beyond biology to the realm ofculture, I am leaving behind the scientific narrativethat "all educated people accept." I am developinginsights from Merlin Donald, Jerome Bruner, andothers to try to understand aspects of cultural evolu-tion. Here I move into contested territory, since somescholars think that the idea of evolution applies only

to biology and not to cu lture, and others believe thatcultural evolution is defensible but have a differentview from the one I adopted. I'm fully aware of thelack of scientific consensus on these issues. Still fur-ther, I am not so foolish as to imagine that the tw o is-sues I raise at the end of my conclusion—namely, thedanger of ecological catastrophe and the necessity ofsympathetic understanding of all human traditions—command anything like universal agreement. Here Iam doing exactly what Griffiths thinks I should bedoing: agreeing that "the metanarrative one has isone candidate among many." I am not offering one

more triumphalist m etanarrative.I find the charge bizarre. Triumphalist narratives

usually offer a final stage tha t is a "fulfillment" of allprevious stages. Yet the few hints I give about wherethe story I tell seems to be headed lead to exactly theopposite conclusion. I have profound doubts about themodern project itself, which has significant achieve-ments but seems headed toward self-destruction. Iargue that the theoretic, which modern culture tendsto exalt, is not the final culminating stage that candispense with everything before it. Yes, it is power-ful in some ways compared with its predecessors, the

mimetic and the mythic, but it is also vulnerable to

great dangers precisely when it becomes disembeddedfrom bodily practice and narrative.

Thus, when it comes to religion understood as"a conception of a general order of existence," asClifford Geer tz puts it, I prefer Plato's to tha t ofmodern science used as a religious myth. In fact, Ithink all the Axial myths are preferable to that lat-ter alternative. I believe in multiple metanarratives,in many histories arid many stories, and therefore Icanno t accurately be accused of asserting a single tri -umphalist story, and especially not the one modernscience has on offer. "M etanarratives don't brook ri-vals," Griffiths writes . His might not, but I find hatclaim a theoretical abstraction. As I show, duringthe Axial Age, world history did offer rivals—andit still does. One of the major points of my book isthat we should avoid using a triumphalist scientific

metanarrative by subsuming or resolving or domes-ticating this rivalry.

Griffiths takes up two positions that Ifind profoundly shocking. One is hiscasual acceptance of a future of massextinction for humans and probablymost multicellular life. He writes that

"major ex tinction events are a regular feature of ourplanet's life, with or without human involvement."Here he is simply wrong. All previous extinctionevents have been caused by physical occurrences such

as collisions with comets or meteorites or massivevolcanic eruptions. Only this one is caused by hu-mans, and only this one can humans do somethingabout. I though t Catholics were especially concernedabout life. How can Griffiths be so complacent aboutpassively accepting the death of millions, or billions,or very possibly all human lives?

I have recently reread Gaudium et Spes and notedthat, while it warns us against the illusion that flaw edhuman beings can bring about the Kingdom of Godon earth, we are not to use that as an excuse not todo all we can to bring our present world as close as

possible to that end. Human weakness is rejected asan excuse for inaction in the face of worldly evils.I am certain that humans can still do a lot to miti-gate the environmental disasters already beginning(how often in history has lower Manhattan beenunderwater?) but am not optimistic that we will acteffectively in time. In this case, Kant's "can" surelymeans "should," and I can't imagine Griffiths' com-placency in so serious a m atter.

The other thing that shocked me was Griffiths'horror at the idea of a world civil society, which hebelieves "would mean the end of the Church and, I

think, of most other religious traditions." Why on



A REPLY TO MY G RITIC S

earth w ould he think that a global civil society wouldmean the end of the Church? History suggests oth-erw isî. Freedom of religion is the very first commit-ment of civil society, going back to its origins in theeighteenth century. All the other freedoms that civilsociety requires, such as freedom of speech, of the

press, of association, and so forth, are extrapolationsfrom that one central freedom, the freedom of reli-gion. For a long time the Catholic Church supportedthe idiea of an established church and was doubtfulabout religious freedom, but several of the centraldocuments of Vatican II indicate a strong affirmationof religious freedom. A world civil society of the sort Ihope (as does a major s trand of modern Catholicism)will flour ish is therefore more likely to mean an endto religious persecution th an the end of religion.

Jürgen Habermas and others also support the ideaof a global civil society. We have a global economythat transcends and intimidates all nations, but wehave nothing above the nation-state to mitigate thedangers of the unconstrained use of national power,even for genocide. Further, nationalism is one ofthegreatest dangers in our w orld today, especially sincethe two most powerful nations in the world, theUnited States and C hina, are its two most national-ist. The idea of a war between China and the UnitedStates is not inconceivable as things are going at themom ent, but that would be disastrous and could leadto the same consequences as environmental disaster.

I n any event, a global civil society open to plu-ralism is already beginning to show its head. Iwas in China twice in 2011 and saw the hopeyoung intellectuals there had that such a devel-opment could mitigate the authoritarianism of

their own country and lead to a genuine engagementof China with the other leading nations of the earth.These young Chinese wanted a civil society with nostate ideology—not Marxism, not Confucianism—but rather the open discussion of all the alternatives,in which a chastened Confucianism would have a

voice, though only in dialogue with the traditionalreligions of Buddhism and Daoism, as well as withChristianity, a growing religion in China and thefaith, as these young intellectuals well knew, of manyChinese dissidents.

Whether it is an all-consuming "metanarrative" orthe supposed anti-Christian consequences of a worldcivil society, Criffiths consistently suspects that I amoffering some kind of mono-myth that would swal-low up everything else: "If Bellah's metanarra tive istrue, this Christian one must be false—because hisaccount requires Christians exactly not to offer this

narrative as a metanarrative." The non-relativistic

pluralism that I espouse is simply incomprehensibleto him, as it was to many of the symposium par-ticipants. When I recite the Nicene Creed in church Ithink I am asserting a metanarrative not so far fromhis, although he can't imagine that I could seriouslybelieve it. But I do . I wrote Religion in Human Evo-

lution not as a narrow professional undertaking butas a w ork of social science tha t I value existentially,because it tries to bring into clearer focus what rolereligion has in the development and flourishing ofthe human anim al. And I've studied Navajo religion,which evokes in me insights I cherish rather than a de-mand that I reject it as a competing "metanarra tive."

As I read Griffiths' commentary, I have to won-der, has he really read my book? The last thing I amarguing for is "generic sociological and historicalcategories, not theological ones, that [will] inform

the self-understanding of the citizens of the hoped-for world civil society." What I believe is exactly theopposite, as I affirm in the crucial quotation, fromThomas McC arthy, Haberm as' leading American in-terpreter, in the penultimate paragraph of my book:"The conceptual point is this: By their very nature,the universal cannot be actual without the particular ,nor the formal without the substantive, the abstractwithout the concrete, structure without c ontent."

And so it follows that "from our present per-spective, it is clear that the irreducible variety ofhermeneutic standpoints and practical orientations

informing interpretive endeavors, however well in-formed, will typically issue in a 'conflict of interpreta-tions' and thus call for a dialogue across differences."Our religious convictions will make vital contribu-tions to any world civil society that is fit for actualhuman beings.

G

riffiths finally find s my book pointless.Thankfully, the other commentators tosome degree seem to think that I suc-ceeded in fulfilling the two goals I set formyself. First, a serious look at the pres-

ent state of work in evolutionary biology shows that itby no means requires an absolutely determinist and re-ductionist view. M any leading biologists recognize thesentience, creativity, and participation of organisms intheir own evolution as being there from the beginningand believe that genetic mutation is only one part ofthe story, not its absolute foundation. Conserved coreprocesses are able to defend themselves from geneticchanges tha t would destroy them , while encouragingchanges that might enhance them. For these and oth-er related reasons, attempts to use biology to explainculture need not have grim reductionist consequences.

We're spiritual by nature, as it were.



Vi i':F i R S T T H I N G S Juné/July 2013

Second, in my chapters beg inning with trib al reli-gion right up to the Axial Age, I argue that religioninvolves a quest for comprehensive m eaning th at hasits own internal motivation. It occurs within andinteracts with other spheres of society and culture,but what it produces can never be reduced to thoseenvironing spheres. I reject the older, often taken-for-granted economic determinism in the long storyI tell, and I also reject the newer turn to power deter-minism tha t is so popular among the postmod ernists.Thus, in terms of both biological and cultural his-tory, I argue for freedom and creativity rather than

determinism and reductionism. This is surely of somehelp to those students of religion who already intuitthat to be the case, as Murphy suggests most of us do .

' Beyond that, I take every case on its own terms,affirming revelation and metaphysics where I findthem, and also the claim to the truth of their ownmetanarratives, which can never be subsumed into"my metanarrative." I believe there is truth in all ofthem, including the tribal ones. All of them deserveour respect. That does not mean all of them are to bebelieved as equally tru e, w hich I have never affirmed.But it- does mean we can learn from all of them . 13

THE LONG ROOM

Alive in the long, deep room of the s oul,

I feel, at 4 1 , absurdly old,

a burnt-out heap of blackened greenwood

oti the grate. And this despite the steady light

that fills this place and warms the burtiished floors,

the leather chairs, the paintings framed in gilt.

This despite the crystal sparking on the bar,

the shelves of boo ks like soldiers on pa rad e,and bottles of witie racked like mortar shells

against the walls.

And all these guests—good Lord!

They talk and talk, make toasts, and show their teeth.

They straighten steam-pressed pleats and smooth their ties,

ignoritig how the sun sweeps across the room,

each candlestick and champagne flute a gnomon

scything shadows down the hall.

The day goes cold.

Soon, the servants, funereal and neat,

will ghost about the room, closing doorsand shutters against the coming night, against

desire, ambition, and all those vistas

spread across the future's darkened landscape.

I've seen their kn ow ing lo oks, their fox-sly smiles.

They'll turn the locks and pocket all the keys,

and soon, I fear, they'll set the house ablaze.

—Rob Griffith



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Bellah responds to his critics