P for pungent - academic journals - Column

THE SCARLET LETTER, one of America's best novels and

worst movies, taught people what stigma means. The dictionary tells us it is "a mark or token of infamy, disgrace, or reproach." The roots of the word go back to Greek, Latin and Middle English words for "tattoo mark." In The Scarlet Letter the mark was the letter A for adultery. In ages past L might have served to stigmatize leprosy Today, in circles where barbarism waxes and Christian love wanes, stigmatized sufferers might as well be branded with HIV or AIDS.

Those are grand-scale marks. Let's consider little teeny tattoo-scratchings--stigmaettes, as it were. They represent little nuances that tell much about our culture. Let me single out two fresh possibilities, R for reviewing and C for Christian Century or Christianity Today.

Here's the context: Excursus: A Review of Religious Studies (Fall 1995) reprinted some presentations from a University of North Carolina symposium on how the religion faculty relates scholarship to teaching. David Halperin spoke on the strains and stresses that faculty members take on to keep the two connected. David Zercher of the same school responded.

Zercher dealt fairly with the integrity of relevance-be-damned humanistic scholarship, but he pointed to its limits. "A social science study mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement found that, on average, less than four people read any given academic article." For certain journals I'd be surprised if it runs that high. When scanning such journals during my bathtub reading I try to imagine who the article's other three readers might be. Zercher goes on to say that Science in 1990 found that 55 percent of published scientific literature was not cited at all in the five years following publication, and 80 percent was not cited more than once. It, is' worse in the humanities: percent of the articles on American literature are never cited. Zercher wonders whether energies exerted in such means of communication are misplaced. We wonder whether there is a problem with the modes of communication that restrict some scholars. (You can see I am honoring pure scholars with a true-blue I for integrity but stigmatizing them with a scarlet U for unread or unreadable.)

Zercher woke me up with this reference to a colleague, Grant Wacker, who is in the front rank of people in my own field, American religious history: "Some people may think that Professor Wacker is wasting his time and talent by writing pungent reviews for the likes of Christianity Today and Christian Century. In my view, it is some of the most important work that he does."

Give Zercher a B for bravo for that final judgment and give "some people" (unnamed here, but we know their kind) a Z for zilch if they judge Wacker this way.

If "some people" are stigmatizing the hkes of Wacker for writing the likes of his reviews in the likes of our magazine, it is time to come to the defense of the stigmatized. Wacker is in good company. The likes of Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr have pungently written for the Century and similar journals, and they cannot have done it for the pay. They must have believed that scholarship should be tried in the public arena. Maybe "some people" have not learned that many scholars can speak with more than one voice, and can do their teaching and writing for many along with their other writing for three or four of their own kind. May the tribe of such scholars increase.

COPYRIGHT 1996 The Christian Century Foundation
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