Tonight, some friends and I went to hear a lecture by author David McCullough, sometimes called America’s preeminent social historian, given at Belmont University. He talked a bit about his biographies of Harry S. Truman and John Adams, but the main portion of his talk focused on teachers and on reading. “We are shaped by what we read more than we realize,” he said, and, reiterating an idea I’ve heard expressed before, reminded us that “we think with the language of what we read.” I thought of a scene in Steven Soderbergh’s Che, the four-hour Spanish-language film I saw recently at the Belcourt , where Che refuses to promote an illiterate soldier until he learns to read, saying, “A country that cannot read or write is easily deceived.”

Throughout the evening, McCullough repeated the idea that we cannot know who we are until we know our history, where we came from and how we’ve arrived here. I’ve said before that I think it is impossible to be both a Fundamentalist and an historian. For example, taking in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Swedish film The Seventh Seal may provide a much-needed antidote for those caught up in the end-times hysteria promoted by the Left Behind empire, websites like RaptureReady.com, and self-proclaimed “prophecy experts.”
Looking at the past, we see not only some examples to follow and others to avoid at all costs, we see firmly held beliefs – from those we respect, no less – in ideas we now consider profoundly wrong and even unjust, and, if we listen to the whispers of grace, we will come to hold our own ideas with a little looser hand, a greater awareness of our own fallibility and a willingness to extend grace to those who do not find themselves in complete agreement with us.