RICHARD BRAUTIGAN READ READER'S DIGEST

I just read Ianthe Brautigan's memoir of her father You Can't Catch Death (St. Martin's 2000). It's an excellent book and in many ways preferable to her father's books because it offers a wider framework in which Brautigan himself as well as his books are caught within her understanding of the family dynamics, and literary dynamics, and generational dynamics, that launched his work briefly into the international limelight. At the end of the book she even takes a road trip to visit Richard's mother -- who as it turns out is not white trash as Brautigan claimed but middle-income, possessed of a hard work ethic, and is as quick and bright as Richard, and from whom the legendary wit derived his own perspective. "He had always told me we were white trash. He was wrong. The little house I had been sitting in for seven hours showed evidence of people who worked hard to make what they had better" (201). Richard Bautigan's mother at age 85 lived in a comfortable middle-class ranch-style home with white vinyl siding (there is a photo in the book). Richard Brautigan too had a powerful work ethic. Even after his success and during his worst bouts of drunkeness he continued to produce excellent writing. I quit reading Brautigan in about 1977 for no particular reason. I suppose in fact it was the novel In Watermelon Sugar which I felt was too Luddite for my taste in that machinery is equated with the evils of society. Recently I started to read the later novels. I was impressed by the Hawkline Monster and am about to read Sombrero Fallout. Ianthe Brautigan's memoir provided a larger understanding of Brautigan's life than Keith Abbott's Downsteam from Trout Fishing in America. She discusses his drinking, his binges, and the personal effect it had on her high school career, and on her own feeling of happiness into her twenties and thirties. A powerful, emotional book.

But the thing I was stunned by was the mention of Reader's Digest when she's interviewing Richard's mother in Eugene:

"She broke the mood. 'Richard was real smart, read all the time. Always had a paperback in his pocket.'
'What did he read?'
'You know, those Reader's Digests. And he was always helping the other boys with their schoolwork. He had the nicest friends. Good boys.'" (198).

In rural areas everyone read Reader's Digest in the 1950s 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps they still do. I still do. The writing is lively and informative, there is the vocabulary builder, it is inexpensive enough so that most lower middle-class homes can afford it. My family had/has a subscription. I remember talking once with the poet Mike Topp and he said that his family had it, too, although now he no longer subscribes. I suppose that those who do are rural, poor. The one connection to literacy throughout my childhood was the Reader's Digest. For me it was a lifeline at a certain time. It is no longer that but I continue to see it as an affordable and reader-friendly journal and I continue to do the vocabulary builder every month and I am delighted by the humor.

OPPOSITES ATTRACT

What's serious implies its opposite which is the ludicrous. In the same way the Lutheran sensibility implies the Surrealist sensibility. Lutheranism and Surrealism are meant for one another and have now expressed an intention of lifelong devotion.

I had always been interested in God. I remember walking around in my Philadelphia suburb (Warminster) in 1964 and noticing that God was everywhere in sparkles around the trees. I was raised as a Lutheran in one of the local churches. Didn't know much about theology and loved the word amen which meant that I could go home. I also loved the way it was said as there was so much peace in the word.

There was a ferocious assault on Christianity that I first noticed when the Beatles' John Lennon bragged that his group was bigger than Jesus. Then over the next few days he scrambled as the media lit into him and he said it was just something that he noticed not that it was true. But was that the first time I noticed the Culture War? I wanted to have long hair and was glad whenever my parents didn't notice that my hair was getting longer. I remember in the barber shop a barber joking with my mother that his spinning barber pole was "psychadelic." My mother laughed. I didn't know what the word meant.

Allen Ginsberg was a close friend of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and many other bards of thunder in the 1960s and 1970s. He said that one could find God in LSD on a nationally syndicated show. I got interested. I tried it and thought he was probably wrong. I then went to Naropa Institute to study in the summer of 1977. I was 20. I studied with Ginsberg and tried the Buddhist ways of meditation. I tried to write poetry. I had some poems published in the Partisan Review, and many other small press journals. I couldn't understand quite what I was doing and it all seemed like I was starting off on the wrong foot.

I dropped out of poetry for several decades and studied philosophy. I needed to understand all the different philosophies that were coming at me. After years of study I managed to finally understand what it was that I was thinking. I was a Lutheran. No one had encouraged me to be a Lutheran for decades but I still felt that the Lutheran system had gotten everything exactly right. So fundamentally and in my innermost heart, I hadn't changed a whit from the kid who had gone to the suburban Lutheran church in Warminster 20 miles north of Philadelphia. There were blasts of self-recognition that came when my daughter was baptized in a Lutheran church in rural Finland and other blasts along the way as I read Luther's biographies and started to read his own texts. I made my way to a Lutheran church when I got my job in Delhi, New York. I began to read very difficult Lutheran theological texts with the help of a retired pastor. I finally read the Bible as an adult. I met regularly and corresponded with Lutheran pastors one of whom had even been my college professor without my awareness that he was a Lutheran some thirty years ago at East Stroudsburg State College (now University).

All of those men I worked with are now seventy and I am almost 50 (come next September).

The Culture Wars had made it almost impossible for me to find my way back to my Philadelphia suburb, to my family, and to my God. Now that I have gotten back I have had to reinvent poetry for myself too. The initial result will be published in a chapbook sometime this month or next by PR Primeau's Persistencia Press. I think the title is to be Waiting for the Rapture.

The technique is odd -- part Reznikoff as filtered through Ginsberg's technique -- but the feeling isn't like anything else I've encountered in contemporary poetry. It's three decades of Culture War rubble lifted off my cave so that I could once more walk down the street as I did as a child in Warminster looking at "things" as a Lutheran, or actually as I always have, but was too afraid to confess even to myself. I hope my book will help other poets come out of the Christian "closet."

There is no reason to be embarrassed to be a Christian poet, and we should have the same rights of freedom/speech under the First Amendment as everyone else. Finally I feel that I can publish a book of poems and they will make sense, and between the covers of such a book I can find myself at home.

If Hegel's philosophy of time could be configured as a progressive spiral, how would Kierkegaard's theory of time be configured?

THE ROMANIAN REVOLUTION REVISITED

In my book on Codrescu I worked on the notion of whether postmodernism had overthrown the communist tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu. As I researched the question and looked into the Dada underground in Romania I came across what to my surprise was that the revolution was actually a Christian uprising at least at its inception.

There was a Lutheran Bishop named Tokes in the city of Timisoara who had been fired for preaching faithfully. A handful of Baptists and Lutherans surrounded his house in silent vigil. The Romanian army came. More Christians appeared. Hundreds of children knelt in the snow with candles and prayed. The Romanian communists shot them to death.

It was finally too much even for the hardened gargoyles that made up Ceausescu's security forces and the government collapsed like a house of cards for want of a supportable conceptual framework.

An enormous crowd gathered in Timisoara and sang a Christian anthem by the poet Constantin Ioanid titled, "God Exists!"

Faced with this the army could no longer shoot and many of them switched sides. Confusion reigned. The poem made its way all over Romania and was featured in one peaceful manifestation after another. Even the state church priests began to sing the anthem. There was a new king. It was all over but the shooting. The communist tyrant and his monstrous wife fell and liberty was restored.

It is probably rare that a poem plays such a central role in a revolution. However, I have been unable to find a copy of the text to Constantin Ioanid's poem, "God Exists!" I had wanted to present it on its anniversary on my RealPoetik site. There seem to be many details about that messy baptism in blood that are still missing. Even Andrei Codrescu himself was unable to tell me anything else about the poem in question, and he didn't know the poet. Is there anyone out there who knows the poem orhas more information on the poet?

If Lutheran Surrealism were to be transformed into an ideal institution what would it look like physically. What would be the names of the departments? Who would teach there? What kinds of students would pay to attend? What would other colleges and universities think of ours? How many of our students would get jobs or to go on and make a name for themselves in the arts? Would the ministry be a possibility?

A stranger from Helsinki showed up on my blog named Topi Loppilainen.  I asked
him if he knew of any literature in the Scandinavian countries that could be
co-opted by the Lutheran Surrealist label.  Topi is working on a dissertation
about Swedish-language writing in Finland.  I suppose the work that interests
me most in this area is in the children's writer Tove Jansson who created the
Moomin Valley series of books and cartoons.  She is normally known as a children's
writer.  But I find her to be most to my taste of the Finnish or Swedish writers.
Is she at all Lutheran?  Doubtful.  I read my children to sleep with her books
every evening and I can't find any clear signs of Lutheranism.  But she's a
remarkable high class literary writer for children along the lines of Lewis Carroll.
She's very much to my taste. 

So I suppose I am more on the side of surrealism
in taste but am trying to find links.  Dr. Seuss would be along these lines, too
(Geisel was a Lutheran in his upbringing).

I would like to get a similar overview
of the potential of Lutheran Surrealism in the Danish Caribbean and in
Lutheran Africa (especially Namibia) if anyone is interested who knows the turf.
Thanks again to Topi Loppilainen from Helsinki University.  Here's his off-
the-cuff survey:


Lutheran surrealists? Are there any? Who wrote Lutheran
literature? Sure, Zachris Topelius (1818-1898) from
Swedish-speaking Osthrobotnia is a very Lutheran writer (poems, novels, fairy
tales) but nothing to do with surrealism. Still, he's one of the great
writers of 19th Century Finland and Lutheranism in Finland is sometimes
even referred to as Topelian Lutheranism.

Gustaf Fröding (1860-1911) is
however, where I'd start if I were you. Sure he was before surrealism but he
was a big poet in the background for those in Sweden and Finland who would
get into modernist poetry. More stuff on him:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/froding.htm

Fröding was from Sweden and I actually saw his grave in Uppsala
last May (all that time I'd lived in that city and first this year
visiting there did I check out some of the famous graves of Uppsala). Maybe he
was more of a Nietzschean than a Lutheran but I think he'd be valuable to
start with to see the bridge between Lutheranism and Surrealism (maybe
he's half way there without being either of them?) His poems are usually
very funny, including one very nice Lutheran priest poem (Våran prost).

His contemporary Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864-1931, the 1931 Nobel
laureate who was awarded his prize posthumously) was more heavily on the
Lutheran side but might have been less influential on those who would
have loved surrealism? Comparing the two Swedes Karlfeldt and Fröding could
be interesting (not my project) to see where the traditional and
the modernist ways parted.

The generation that started modernism in Swedish-language
literature in Sweden and in Finland (very significant this Swedish literature
in Finland in this regard, most significant of all during the 1920s) would
have been born mostly during the 1890s and 1900s.

Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974), another Nobel laureate would
certainly be of interest to you. Yeah, he's no Lutheran Surrealist but
Christianity and modernism are big issues for him. Who wrote about Christian
themes in Sweden during the 20th Century? Lagerkvist. Who was the first
major modernist poet in Sweden during the 1910s? Lagerkvist. He's just
a very, very serious writer, heavily engaged against totalitarianism
during the 1930s. I don't know his poems well enough to say there's nothing
surrealist in them or nothing funny there (I've laughed some
times when reading him but mostly he's just this serious deep thinker), yet
if a Lutheran existentialist modernist or anything of the sort
interests you, Lagerkvist would be good to know just a little bit about.

The Swedish writers of Sweden tend to be more serious than the
Swedish writers of Finland. At least when it comes to the golden age of
modernism. I think even some of the Swedish modernist writers of Finland
may have taken themselves incredibly seriously but their work can still
be fun to read.

Edith Södergran (1892-1923) was the one who started modernism in
Swedish language literature of Finland around 1916. Maybe the following
poets were funnier than she but in her works Nietzsche and Jesus Christ
play a crucial role, which could be of interest to you. I have
Södergran's Collected Poems in English (published by the Anglo-American
Center) and I'm quoting now from Helmer Lång's foreword:

"If the second phase of Södergran's poetry was written under the
signum of Nietzsche, the third phase is equally clearly stamped by
another, and different Superman: Christ. He is her beloved in "The land that
is not", and He may also appear as Death, the singing Liberator, in
"Arrival in Hades". Both these poems, the poet's last, were found by her
pillow after her death by her mother.  Total humility before the
miracles of God and nature is themost striking feature of the new poems:

The key to all secrets lies in the grass at the raspberry
patch. But she never abandoned her enthusiasm. There is something
passionate, almost erotic, in Edith Södergran's relation to Christ. "Can one
dance with Christ?" she asks provocatively in a letter to her friend
Hagar Olsson, who has showed us the poet's naked face in her book
"Edith's letters". And if we were to look for a single formula which
would encompass the whole of Edith's poetry, it must surely be this,
which includes both love, Nietzsche, and Christ: lyrical ecstasy."

There were five names, I think: Fröding, Karlfeldt and
Lagerkvist, male poets from Sweden, Lagerkvist also a very important novelist,
Topelius (über-Lutheran Romantic from Finland writing in Swedish) and
Södergran (one of the biggest women writers in the Swedish language, from
Finland, but having gone to school in St. Petersburg). By reading these
you might get the picture why Lutheranism and Surrealism do not fit
together or to get the first traces of why that union would indeed exist to
some extent.

Södergran's friend Hagar Olsson was one of the leading
proponents of modernism in Finland: by googling "Hagar Olsson Lutheran" you'll
get as search result a text "The Literature Collection: the woodcarver
and death: Browse text" and you'll get the tidbits that her (Hagar's)
father was a Lutheran priest and many of her characters come from a Lutheran
milieu.

Here I'm again getting to the Lutheran bit and probably not even
close to the Surrealist part of the equation. Still, Södergran and Olsson
(1893-1978) paved the way for the more absurdist writers. Gunnar
Björling ("the prophet of Kaivopuisto", 1887-1960) has written some
pretty absurd poems and his works also often include religious themes. Among
his books of poetry are Korset och löftet (The Cross and the Promise) and
Kiri-ra! Could even one of his poems bear strong traces of both
Lutheranism and Surrealism if you'd check out on them? In his youth Björling was
a socialist but he's usually seen as one of the more apolitical
writers of his generation. He became known as a poet in his thirties, when
politics was no longer the big issue of the day for him.

Still I haven't given you any Danish names... Thomas Kingo might
be an interesting Baroque poet, Ludvig Holberg (who I think was
Norwegian but all Norwegians of his time wrote in Danish) the great comedy
writer of the 18th Century and the biggest Lutheran name is the 19th Century
theologian and psalm-writer Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig. If
Lutheranism in Finland (and in the literature) is Topelian, in Denmark it must
be Grundtvigian. Your novel synopsis sounds like a whole lot of
fun, and I think you might find the most fun in Scandinavian literature in
Danish poets and playwrights (maybe not in theology books though?) and
of course, Kierkegaard is funny (Diary of a Seducer...) More on him:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/

There is a film version of Diary of a Seducer, too (haven't seen
it):

http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/d/diary.html

More on Finnish-language writers later on (Topelius and
Södergran are huge names in the literature of Finland but they wrote in Swedish)...
Modernism came late, mostly in the 1950s, quite dark existentialist poets
like Eeva-Liisa Manner... I think you might find Aaro Hellaakoski (one of his
books of poetry from the 1920s was clearly modernist, not
getting any followers he was silent for many years and came back after the
war as a more traditionalist poet) very interesting (your wife is
Finnish, maybe she knows Jääpeili, "the ice mirror"? That's probably not been
translated but you should ask your wife, Hellaakoski's late 1920s poems can
be really funny even if they aren't exactly surrealist but it's quite
comic modernism).

Best, Topi

Without error, there would be music.

The War on Error

Without error, the world would be no longer in need of correction.

Mini-autobiography

There was a time about 15 years ago that I decided that life, music, poetry, were all errors. Interesting errors, but still errors.

Then I started to feel something different about 8 years ago after my daughter's baptism. I started to feel that everything is just as it should be, that life fundamentally is perfect, and that music and poetry and life were all meant to be.

And so I shifted from a sympathy with Gnosticism to a sympathy with Lutheranism.

If I remember correctly it was Stravinsky who said (it was the poet Clark Coolidge who first said this to me summer of 1977 at Naropa) that he wanted to explore the sounds outside of the usual melodies -- all the harshness, the cacophanies that were generally dismissed. In similar ways Lutheran Surrealism wants to explore the politics outside of what's generally accepted as music to the ears of whatever two parties have hogged the podium.

Moms and War

I picked up a book called The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home. It's by Reid Mitchell, a historian at the University of Maryland. Published by Oxford University Press, 1993.

The opening pages argue that it was the moms of the north that threw their sons into battle.

Mercy Ryder didn't want her son to go into battle, but "She had prayed during the night, and learned her duty. ' I knew other mothers' boys must go, and now you have my consent and blessing.' (xii).

It was the Republican side that voted for Lincoln and wanted to prosecute the Civil War. Reid writes, "A Republican mother raised virtuous Republican children. Her boys became the men that the Republic would draw upon for leadership. Kerber explains that, 'The influence women had on children, especially sons, gave them ultimate responsibility for the future of the new nation.' " (xii).

The mothers' character was judged by the conduct of their sons, and the sons' character was judged by the conduct of their mothers. Once enrolled in the army the men fought for their local group. Everybody typically knew one another. Any slackers and the mothers would find out about it via letters back home sent by others. This constant judgment and gossip kept the community together. Soldiers felt that morality called upon them to go to war (32).

When I lived in Finland there was a similar sensibility. All the Finnish students I worked with said they would be honored to serve in their army. There was no sense that the army was evil or that people who served in it were oppressors as has increasingly become the case since Vietnam in this country.

I've always thought of the family as the ultimate crucible of value and the mother as the ultimate determiner of a family's values. This book actually documents it. I'm only 40 pages into it.

But honestly my mother never talked to me about war. I don't even think she talked about it once. Had I been drafted into the war on the Vietnamese communists I would have gone to Sweden, and I think my mom would have only been slightly disgraced. That was an unpopular war. It is the viewpoint of the moms on TV that I watch with great interest in the Iraq war. I have seen moms completely against the war, and moms who are for it. Ultimately it is they who will decide what happens.

"Whereas the exchange of ideas in the republics of Greence and Rome took place largely by the human voice, with the climactic movements in large face-to-face meetings in the Areopagus and the Forum, with Demosthenes and Isocates and Cicero and the like playing the central role with their tradition of oratorical eloquence, the modern republics that James Madison studied (in print) and the new one he helped to come into being (largely by print) had a much different cultural shape, and for one important reason: the means of presenting and arguing and preserving and spreading ideas had undergone a radical change. The great political moments that are most important to the making of America -- the Puritan Revolution and the Glorious Revolution in England and the American Revolution and constitution-making -- were all inundated with furious hailstorms of print" (45).

The Business of May Next: James Madison and the Founding, by William Lee Miller.

And how has the internet speeded things up even more so? Or has it?

On James Madison's Princeton Mentor John Witherspoon

"Witherspoon's reading and conviction and the scars of battle from Scotland made him an opponent of what he called 'sacerdotal tyranny' and he comprehended in one cause civil and religious liberty. His orthodoxy -- his moderate Calvinism, for want of a better term -- in religious matters should not lead a modern reader to the mistaken conclusion that such a man would be conservative in politics; there is an old tradition, important to the Protestant beginnings of America, that combined Reformed Christian belief with republican (which then meant progressive) politics" (51).

The Business of May Next: James Madison & The Founding, by William Lee Miller (Charlottesville: U of V Press, 1992).

REINHOLD NIEBUHR ON HUMOR AND FAITH

"Just as laughter is the no-man's land between cynicism and contrition when we deal with the incongruous element of evil in our own soul, so it is also the area between despair and faith when dealing with evil and incongruity in the world about us. Our provisional amusement with the irrational and unpredictable fortunes which invade the order and purpose of our life must move either toward bitterness or faith..." (58).

Nieburh, Reinhold. "Humor and Faith." in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: YUP, 1982): 49-60.

Good Review in Booklist

My novel Temping received a good review in the November 15, 2005 edition of Booklist. Booklist is apparently a major library journal and goes out to most of the libraries in America (how many libraries are there in this country?).

The review is only a paragraph in length but I don't know if I am allowed to reprint the entirety of it and due to copyright restrictions will try to limit myself to only 8 words of the review in which 150 words appear. The review is by Marta Segal Black, and the last sentence reads, "The black comedy is by turns frustrating and enjoyable."

MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCE IN THE CASE OF THE LAW: The Conscientious Objector?

While putting down our thoughts on the marvelous nature of the law we have grown increasingly concerned. What about law in a Nazi state, or in a state such as South Africa, or even in America during the time of Jim Crow. Reading ML King's Letter from Birmingham Jail we find these thoughts on the topic:

"You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there fire two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the Brat to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all"

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression 'of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong."

This is possibly a slippery slope. We have to examine it further. King does go on to stipulate that in breaking an unjust law one must do so out in the open rather than furtively and take the retributive justice in the process. King provides us with prior transgressors of the unjust laws that in turn legitimate his own challenge. He says: This is what Socrates did. This is what Jesus did. This is what Martin Luther did. This is what Lincoln did. This is what Gandhi did. This is what ML King did, therefore.

I haven't checked this with my pastor, but I think it's sound.

What we are principally against is sneaky transgressions. Running a nail across the new paint of an SUV before biology class. If one is willing to steal the mafia's money and go on television and say that this money should have gone to the citizens of Darfur? And to take the punishment of both the mafia and the police?

I'm pretty sure that ML King was on firm ground with the bus boycott and with his insistence on the right to congregate in violation of parade permits. I'm still not sure about the secretary with mob money that she's taking to Darfur to present to the beleaguered folks there. I would like to see a movie based on this, and I would like to see theological debate or commentary.

It's a ticklish issue.

Could one see W.'s intervention into Iraq along these same lines? More importantly, does he see it along these lines? That there is a higher principle at stake?

THE LAW REVISITED

Is it lawful to steal from an unlawful party? For instance if one were working for the Corleone family as a maid and one decided to liberate several million found in a drawer and send this money to help relieve the black Christian Sudanese of the Darfur region who are being slaughtered by Arab militias would this be lawful? The answer is no, because we are not authorized to judge the Corleone family or any other. This is for the government and its legally elected officials. It is lawless to operate outside of the orders established for the regulation of our country. There are no exceptions to this. For anyone to arrogate to themselves a rule of law to which they do not legimitately have title, is simply and purely illegal.

We have seen this kind of vigilante justice dealt out by the likes of Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris and many others who have portrayed heroic individuals who operate outside of the law. Feminists such as Andrea Dworkin have also called for lynch law to operate outside of established channels of justice. Abbie Hoffman urged us to "Steal This Book," and much else, in our fight against corporate greed. Easy Rider asks us to steal money from the population via illegal drug dealing in order to lead an easy life. Many of our TV shows and popular mysteries show us men and women working as "private" eyes to bring down criminals. The criminality of the do-gooder who operates outside the law is as a result very little condemned and widely praised.

Perhaps due to the continual bombardment of the left's message that government isn't working, and the equally continual bombardment of the right's similar message many are willing to turn to lawlessness. Lutheran Surrealism argues that the law is the marvelous, and that it is to it alone that we must constantly return the legitimacy, our prayers, and our fealty.