On Saturday I drove with Clark and Amanda and Jay, a friend of theirs, out to the Mondavi Center in Davis to see a performance by a friend of my three companions, Rinde Eckhart. It was a piece called Horizon, something in between performance art and a play. We made the trip in my 1991 Mazda Navajo, a dear old tank of a car that is enormously fun to drive and whose gas mileage, even though it exceeded my expectations, is something of a sin, if venial, to indulge. The transmission was slipping something awful a few months ago, but when I had the oil changed I was somewhat disappointed to find that the addition of a quart of transmission fluid repaired it completely, putting off my purchase of a turbo diesel Jetta by who knows how long.

I remarked later, when we were dissecting the play later at Clark and Amanda’s place, over a glass of wine, that it is probably the only piece I know of that is centered around the life and musings of a theologian, although now that I think of it there was that rather hagiographic film about Martin Luther a year or so back. The theology is borrowed extensively from the work of H. Reinhold Niebuhr, who would undoubtedly have been a heretic if he weren’t already a schismatic. Niebuhr is of course one of the founding fathers of neo-orthodoxy, which in turn was a reaction to the theological liberalism of the nineteenth century that forever divided the Protestant world into the evangelical and mainline camps. Liberalism in turn resulted from the skepticism of the Enlightenment; it denies the existence of miracles, including of course the Ressurection, and is not surprisingly somewhat ambivalent about the existence of God. What remains is something of a social gospel, founded on what are essentially little more than nice sentiments about how people ought to behave to one another, all of which have their place