Review by New York Times Review
NOTHING about the founders seems as interesting or as timely to us, 200 years and more farther on, as their religious views - who, if Anyone, they worshiped, how they marked the boundaries of church and state. As a Washington biographer, I have been assured, during the Q. and A. periods after talks, that George Washington saw the Virgin Mary at Valley Forge and converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed (why wait, if he had seen the Virgin 21 years earlier?). I was also once asked if he was an "illuminated Freemason"; I sped away from that question as fast as possible. Whether in legal briefs or op-ed articles, we are as passionate about religion as the founders were. Unfortunately, our passions make for a lot of sloppy and willful historical thinking and writing. In "Founding Faith," Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious Web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye. Waldman wants to make two large points, rebuking by turns both sides in the contemporary culture wars. One common myth, he writes, holds that "the founding fathers wanted religious freedom because they were deists." The First Amendment, in this view, is a conjurer's trick designed to hold the rubes' attention while gentlemen professed polite unbelief over their after-dinner port. In fact, Waldman writes, "few" of the founders "were true deists - people who believed that God had created the universe and then receded from action." Many were orthodox Christians - Waldman lists Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Witherspoon (a Presbyterian minister) and Roger Sherman. The founders whose biographies fill our best-seller lists are a more heterodox lot. John Adams, a scrappy Unitarian, scolded Catholics, Anglicans and skeptical French philosophers as each passed under his eye. Benjamin Franklin flirted with polytheism in his youth but ended believing in "one God, creator of the universe," who "governs the world by his providence." Thomas Jefferson railed against the Christian church, past and present, as corrupting the teachings of Jesus, and made his own digest of Gospel sayings he considered accurate. "It was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington," Waldman quotes him, "after getting thro' the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." Yet even these founders, Waldman says, "believed in God and that he shaped their lives and fortunes." According to an equal and opposite myth, America's national origins were Christian. The 13 colonies, Waldman says, were indeed Christian polities, most of them indulging in persecution to uphold their ideals. But the independent United States "was not established as a 'Christian nation.'" When George Washington was Revolutionary commander in chief, he mandated that his soldiers have chaplains and strongly encouraged them to attend divine service, but his own writings typically employed nondenominational language, appealing to providence rather than Christ. The First Amendment, which, along with its siblings second through Tenth, was among the first business of Congress under the new Constitution, rejected a national religious establishment. States were allowed to maintain their own establishments, and some did so for decades, although James Madison had hoped to dismantle even these. Perhaps the strongest supporters of the separation of church and state in the founding era were the communicants of a new, vigorous church, the Baptists. From 1760 to 1778 there were 56 jailings of Baptist preachers in Anglican Virginia. When the Rev. James Ireland continued to preach through the window of his cell, two supporters of the 39 Articles put a bench to the wall, stood on it and urinated in his face. No Barsetshire atmosphere in the New World. At least 14 jailings of Baptists happened in Madison's home county. "Though much scholarship has gone into assessing which Enlightenment philosophers shaped Madison's mind," Waldman says, "what likely influenced him most was not ideas from Europe but persecutions in Virginia." Waldman's conclusion is that "the Founding Faith ... was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty - a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone." There is a certain amount of modern sales pitch in Waldman's revolutionary formula: Religious right! Nouvelle atheists! A pox on both their houses! But he adduces a mass of evidence to support it. One of the pleasures of this book is seeing the important people or points that are sometimes neglected in general histories get their due. There is a short chapter on George Whitefield (1714-70), the charismatic cross-eyed English evangelist who made seven tours of colonial America and who is buried in Newburyport, Mass. Whitefield was as media savvy as any television evangelist, "tapping into a burgeoning network of newspapers that had sprung up in the colonies." Franklin, who knew good copy when he saw it, covered Whitefield extensively in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and published a serialized set of his talks. Whitefield, Waldman says, paved the way for political revolution by assuring his audiences "they had the insight, and right, to connect directly and interpret God's will." Though his "first target was the Miter, the Scepter was not far behind." Waldman also discusses 18th-century American Freemasonry - a topic that is almost always consigned to Masonic boasting or anti-Masonic raving, when it is noticed at all. Part fad, part aspirational fraternity, Masonry clothed Enlightenment ideals of the brotherhood of man in pomp and circumstance. The most famous Mason in founding America was George Washington, who laid the cornerstone of the Capitol in 1793 in a Masonic ceremony. Waldman acknowledges that "there is no direct evidence that Masonry influenced Washington's approach to tolerance - perhaps Washington developed the sensibility on his own and was attracted to the Masons because they shared his views - but at a minimum it reinforced Washington's desire for nonsectarianism." "Founding Faith" has a few shortcomings. Waldman gives the most ink, as do we all, to the founding all-stars - Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison. Why not spend a little more time, in a book on founding religion, on the most pious and most radical of the founders, Samuel Adams? As a young man, Adams heard Whitefield preach; as an old one, he criticized the anti-Christian polemics of his friend Thomas Paine. Waldman's favorite among the Big Five is Madison, a wise choice if constitutional interpretation is the core of the story (certainly courts are the venue where church/state issues are hashed out these days). But this is not an unassailable choice. The laws tell us what we may do. Leaders must decide what they themselves should do. If leadership is the focus, then pride of place must go to Washington, who, unlike Madison, ran a successful war and a successful presidency, attributing his success to providence all the while. Waldman ends by encouraging us to be like the founders. We should understand their principles, learn from their experience, then have at it ourselves. "We must pick up the argument that they began and do as they instructed - use our reason to determine our views." A good place to start is this entertaining, provocative book. 'The Founding Faith ... was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty.' Richard Brookhiser is the author of "What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Best known for picture books such as How Much Is a Million? (1985) and Millions to Measure (2003), Schwartz teams up with Schy to create a science book about animal camouflage. Each double-page spread begins with a poem on the left-hand page about an unidentified, camouflaged animal. Facing it is a gatefold page with a photo of one or more animals camouflaged in their habitat and often difficult to discern in the picture. Readers opening out that page will find the same scene, mysteriously changed: the animal's surroundings have faded to create a pale, misty background, and the creature now stands out clearly. A few paragraphs of text comment on the animal and how it can hide so well in plain view. The well-crafted, short poems, varying in form from rhymed couplets to haiku to concrete verse, offer clues to the hidden animals' identities. Beautifully photographed and designed with great attention to detail, this book will intrigue and challenge children, whether they find it individually or in a classroom setting.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-4-Ten very different animals introduce the concept of camouflage in this handsome guessing game. "In the warm summer months, my coat is dark brown./Then as winter arrives, I don a white gown." A short-tailed weasel, or ermine, is described in the poetic lines and peers through snowy grasses in the facing picture. Visible only because of its bright eyes, the furry predator could truly "hide in full view." The combination of poetry, beautiful photography, and clear factual explanation is executed in all of its parts with economy and skill. Patient viewing usually reveals the hidden animal, though some are pretty hard to spot. Each vivid picture folds out to a new view where the background is muted with tissue and the featured creature highlighted. Here there is a short, clear commentary on the animal's life and use of camouflage. Adults will marvel at the ability of the photographer to locate these hidden denizens of day and night, forests, meadows, and ocean beds. Children will be intrigued with the familiar and lesser-known animals. Teachers will find many different uses for science and even visual-literacy units.-Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Not only do science and poetry blend nicely in this introduction to camouflage, but even sharp-eyed viewers will have trouble picking out the single small animals perched on similarly patterned backgrounds in Kuhn's nature photographs. The ten short poems that face each full-page illustration offer hints--" . . . nesting / outspread / wings of white / blend with birch bark / by day's light"--but for the impatient or less acute each spread includes a gatefold that, when opened, reveals a washed-out version of the same picture with the hiding animal highlighted, plus a leaf of illustrated commentary. Aimed at slightly more advanced readers than Noelle Oliver's Twilight Hunt (August 2007), this also features a wider range of creatures, from fawns and a coyote to a flounder and a crab spider. (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-9) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
