By Wendy McDowell

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
—Abraham Lincoln

This past summer, I had the distinct pleasure of reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, a masterpiece of storytelling and political history. Lepore chose the last line of the Lincoln quote above as the epigraph for her book, and I’m not surprised—it is stirring, and it feels remarkably relevant to our fractious climate today.

These lines were delivered on December 1, 1862, as part of Lincoln’s 8,400-word message to Congress—a State of the Union address—less than three months after Antietam, the deadliest one-day battle in US history, and a mere 10 weeks after his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which resulted in his political party suffering an electoral rebuke.

I looked up and read this entire speech, along with some of Lincoln’s other well-known addresses. To read Lincoln is to be struck by the double-edged power of language: how it can be used to rouse our best and highest ideals, and how it can just as easily be employed to spur and sanction unspeakable violence.

On the one hand, the density, complexity, and poetry in Lincoln’s writings drives home how dumbed-down and degraded our political and public language has become. Can you imagine any US politician today using the word “disenthrall”?¹ (As Kaveh Akbar puts it in this issue, we mostly experience “a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn.”) I also appreciated Lincoln’s nuanced view that “the people of the North” were as responsible for, and benefited as much from, slavery as did “the people of the South.”²

At the same time, Lincoln leaves no doubt in his rhetoric about the ongoing resistance by Sioux Indians in Minnesota against white settlers, calling for “the removal of the tribes beyond the limits of the State as a guaranty against future hostilities.” Then there is his advocacy of “colonization”—the deportation of freed slaves to Africa, the Caribbean, and other regions.³ And in his attempt to mollify anti-emancipation northerners, Lincoln proposes a compensation program for slaveowners and argues that “white laborers” will experience “enhanced wages” after emancipation; this is “mathematically certain,” he states.⁴

This two-sided potential of language is a theme taken up by several authors here. In his review of the book Blood Theology, Mark D. Jordan writes: “The ‘power in the blood’ is—like many notions of the divine—both fascinating and dangerous. Languages powerful enough to nurture human lives can also ravage them.” Akbar calls the English language “our most dangerous technology” but also shares ancient spiritual poetry that can “teach us to be comfortable with complexity” and act as an “antidote” to an empire “that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.”

Gary Dorrien describes the crucial work of Katie Cannon and Delores Williams, who created the womanist tradition that has acted as a “bridge” for generations of scholars after them. Cannon’s teaching and the womanist novels from her course led to important conversations between Wendy Sanford and Mary Norman, interviewed here about the book they co-created, These Walls between Us: A Memoir of Friendship across Race and Class. Williams challenged centuries-old language about atonement, and her critique undergirds the abolitionist theology described here by Ashley Y. Lipscomb and Klaus C. Yoder. Both of these womanist scholars exemplified how words constructed out of care for community can be life-giving and life-changing.⁵

The limitations of our language are especially evident whenever we try to address the problem of suffering. “We lack the vocabulary to describe the vast diversity of experiences that might fall under the banner of challenging, difficult, bad, or adverse,” Rachael Petersen suggests. In his antebellum memoir of Auburn Penitentiary, Austin Reed enumerates “cruel innovations” and “rituals of torture,” and Yoder shows how Reed employed “irony and exposé” to resist the tropes and “neat plottings” of the typical prison memoir. Lipscomb reveals how these same carceral logics and Christian genealogy with a “will to punish” fueled the creation of schools. Is it any wonder that “‘traditional’ forms of schooling . . . create conditions that marginalize, other, and push out certain students”?

In the face of loss, suffering, and torture, perhaps the most powerful thing language can do is to point beyond itself. Nancy Yuen-Fang Chu praises the poetry of Fanny Howe, which “radiates with a kind of plus-quality, so that what she says is more than what she is saying,” and how Mark Jordan’s writing “points us to an unknown but anticipated future.” Akbar lifts up the kinds of prayers and poetry that exhibit “an attuned permeability to wonder” and “reject false equivalencies.”