Sneak Peek!

Prairie Sky: A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude by W. Scott Olsen will be available in three to four weeks.  Pre-order it today! 

 

Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology.  W. Scott Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground.  While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.

Excerpt: 

Thin Places and Thick Time

A Duet for Two Worlds

“Ready to go flying?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

“Think I know how to do this?”

Roy Hammerling, a religion professor at the college, sits in the right seat as the Skyhawk enters the runway.

“I’m counting on it,” he says.

The throttle goes forward, and the airplane begins to run down the centerline. It’s a beautiful day for flying. Clear sky and bright sun. A gentle breeze from the north. Huge distances between the very small clouds. The type of day where chasing an idea with an airplane seems perfectly logical and sane. At 60 knots I ease back on the yoke, the nose lifts, and then the rest of the airplane follows. We begin a gentle climbing turn to the west.

“I love that initial feeling,” Roy says. “It’s like you’re tethered to the ground, and then all of a sudden you break free.”

Roy and I are on an expedition this morning, a mission, a voyage of discovery. We are looking for the place where everything changes, the place where the very behavior of the physical earth changes direction. There are signs on the ground that point to the spot, but when you are standing there, the shift is too subtle to see. We are looking for a line reaching back to Pleistocene catastrophe and forward into ecology and myth. We are looking for the Laurentian Divide. And we are looking for something else as well.

Below us the land is green where crops have sprouted, brown where the plants are still emerging. We’ve had three days of hard rain, and overland water moves toward the Maple and Sheyenne and Red Rivers, streams today in depressions you can measure but never see.

“I am always amazed by the takeoff,” he says. “When I was a little kid, I used to imagine it was like there were ropes around the airplane, and you had to break away. And there is this sense of—I don’t know—elation when you break free.”

There is such a thing as accidental genius, I think. Hunting for geology, the normal thing would be to invite a geologist. But the Laurentian Divide in North Dakota is nothing like the Great Divide running the length of the Rocky Mountains. There is no leap and swooning of summit and valley here. Subtle at best, invisible at worst, the Laurentian Divide is more idea than rock, but the evidence of its presence is overwhelming. I mentioned this in a hallway once, and Roy got interested.

If you are looking for the invisible, I think, invite a theologian. I level the wings just fifteen hundred feet over the ground. Traffic on the interstate is light. An egret flies southbound below us.

“I always felt there was a bit of a metaphor for spiritual life in that,” Roy continues. “In the sense that what people always want is a sense of joy or happiness. But there’s always these things tethering you down to the ground. You can’t get away from it. I have a friend who’s a pilot, and I’ve gone up with him a few times. I always have this sense of freedom in flying.”

We’ve begun this conversation a thousand times. In my office, in his office, in hallways and lunch lines, we get to talking about flying and about the small insistent sense that something else is happening beyond the shape of air moving over wings. But then we’ve always paused.

“In the airplane,” I’ve said. “I want to hear what you think while we’re actually flying.”

When I told him I was going to try to find the divide, something huge and historic and mostly invisible unless you’re looking for it, and even then damn near impossible to fix precisely, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. We’ve delayed this conversation so long, it nearly erupts.

“Do you know what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?”

“Transformation,” I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to relax—the physics and the math work pretty well.”

“Some people never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears; they build up regulations and walls and rules. They do things that keep them from flying. And it seems to me that the spiritual life is about letting go, is about being free and trusting. There is a sense of mystery about it. There is always a sense of mystery. Like right now, I look over, and you don’t even have your hands on the controls.”

I smile and point at the autopilot in the panel.

“Oh,” he says, laughing. “See? Mystery explained by a higher power.”

I remember a map I have at home that shows the rock underneath the Dakota soils. Like nearly every map, it’s an aerial perspective. Archean basement rock, billions of years old, from the time when continents first formed and life, nonnucleated single-celled hopes called prokaryotes, first appeared, hides under Fargo. Heading west, however, the rock quickly becomes Cretaceous. The rock of Tyrannosaurus rex. The rock of Giganotosaurus and Triceratops. The rock of Pangaea’s breakup. The rock of the Western Interior Seaway, an ocean in the middle of the continent. The rock of a meteor falling on the Yucatán and killing nearly everything. Keep going west and the rock keeps getting younger. But none of it is visible now. The planet cooled. The glaciers came, scraped every hilltop, and filled every valley with gravel and sand. An ice sheet named Laurentide pushed the Missouri River valley into shape. And when the glaciers moved back, the meltwater Lake Agassiz, the largest inland sea in North American history, deposited sediment and clay. There are marks in the North Dakota soil that reveal where icebergs trapped in retreating pack ice scraped the lake-bottom sediment. You cannot see them from the ground.

“You know,” I say, “I have been told that there is not one single description in the Bible of an angel in the act of landing. There is one scene where a couple of them are zipping around a living room, but otherwise they are almost always in the air. And if they are on the ground, they are frequently in disguise, appearing as commonplace humans. So it would be possible to argue that their true appearance, the place where they can reveal their true nature, is airborne. It may be forcing the idea a bit, coming from a pilot, but it does strike me that there is something intuitive there. Something true about the human character.”

“You can think of Ezekiel being taken up in the fiery chariot, of Jesus’s ascending into clouds, and it lends itself to the idea that heaven and the holy are somewhere above.”

“These guys don’t just dissolve,” I say. “They don’t just fade away into some other state of being. They rise. They take off. They fly.”

“Saint Augustine,” Roy says, “in his Confessions has this great line. He says something like ‘Oh, God, are you the God of the heavens? And if so, are the birds more holy because they fly closer to you?’ He knows that God is in some type of heavenly place. But the question is, where is that place?”

“Today,” I say, “it’s fifteen hundred feet over Dakota farmland.”

“Perhaps not,” Roy says. “Augustine concludes that the way people need to fly like birds is to go within.” He looks out the window. “But I will admit, if Augustine had a Cessna, he might have changed his mind.”

Even More New E-Books

We are continuing to make more of our backlist titles newly available as e-books. Here are six more brand-new releases for your reading pleasure.

Robert H. Ferrell, widely regarded as an authority on the thirty-third president, challenges the popular characterization of Harry Truman as a man who rarely sought the offices he received, revealing instead a man who—with modesty, commitment to service, and basic honesty—moved with method and system toward the presidency. Based upon years of research in the Truman Library and the study of many never-before-used primary sources, Harry S. Truman is the authoritative account of this important president.

With single-mindedness of purpose and unwavering devotion to achievement, J. C. Nichols left an indelible imprint on the Kansas City metropolitan area. His projects--including the Country Club Plaza, the first of many regional shopping centers built in anticipation of the increased use of automobiles--influenced the design and development of major residential and commercial areas throughout the United States. In J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, William S. Worley provides a valuable study of the man who was one of the most influential entrepreneurs in American land development.

The tremors that shook southeast Missouri from December 16, 1811, through February 7, 1812, are among the most violent quakes to hit the North American continent in recorded history. Collectively known as the New Madrid earthquakes, these quakes affected more than 1 million square miles. In On Shaky Ground, Norma Hayes Bagnall provides eyewitness accounts from people both on the land and on the river, capturing the fears of the residents through their tales about the smells and dark vapors that filled the air, the cries of the people, the bawling of animals, and the constant roar of the river and its collapsing banks.

 

At the age of twelve, Beth Taylor’s idyllic childhood was shattered by the suicide of her older brother Geoff. Raised in an “intentional community” north of Philadelphia—a mix of farm village, hippie commune, and suburb—she and her siblings were instilled with nonconformist values and respect for the Quaker tradition. With the loss of her beloved brother, Taylor began her complicated journey to understand family, loss, and faith. Written after years of contemplation, The Plain Language of Love and Loss reflects on the meaning of death and loss for three generations of Taylor’s family and their friends.

In this tale of homecoming and forgiveness, death and dying, Margaret Gibson recounts how she overcame her long indifference to a sister she had thought different from herself, recognizing the strengths of the bonds that both hold us and set us free. Interweaving astute social observations on social pressures, race relations, sibling rivalry, adolescent angst, and more, The Prodigal Daughter is a startlingly honest portrayal of one family in one southern city and the story of all too many families across America.

The Civil War in Missouri was a time of great violence and destruction. Much of the fighting was an ugly form of terrorism carried out by loose bands of Missouri guerrillas, by Kansas "Jayhawkers," or by marauding patrols of Union soldiers. This irregular warfare provided a training ground for people like Jesse and Frank James who, after the war, used their newly learned skills to form an outlaw band that gained worldwide fame. In Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri, Robert L. Dyer reveals how the war helped create both the legend and the reality of Jesse James and his gang.



You can buy any of these e-books from Amazon, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Chegg, Ebrary, EBSCO, Google, Kobo, OverDrive, Sony, and the Press’s own web page, where you will also find many more e-books available.

If there are any other University of Missouri Press books that you would like to be able to purchase as e-books, let us know in the comments.

Author Spotlight: Eugene Webb

Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development by Eugene Webb

Worldview and Mind covers a wide range of thinkers and movements to explore the relation between religion and modernity in all its complexity. Eugene Webb invokes a number of topical issues, including religious terrorism, as he unfolds the phenomenon of religion in all its complications, from the difference between faith and belief to the diversities among—and within—religions.

What drew you to write about this complex topic?

One of the writers I talk about, Robert Kegan, has described our modern world as one in which many of us find ourselves “in over our heads,” overwhelmed both by competing visions of life in our pluralistic world and by the demands of mental development these make on us.  I conceived my book as a kind of guide for the perplexed that would help people deal with these challenges by showing the reciprocal relation between the worldviews we hold and the minds we develop and hold them with.  It is a book not about what to think but about how to think--that is, about what is involved in the process of thinking carefully and critically about issues of ultimate meaning and value.

What is the difference between faith and belief?

Since the rise of modern science in about the seventeenth century, the word belief has taken on the rather narrow meaning of holding opinions, usually with insufficient evidence.  In its root meaning, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed, believe is cognate to the German belieben, meaning to cherish or hold dear.  The root in Latin is similar: credo (I believe) is formed from cor (heart) + do (I give).  It is in modern usage, therefore, that the two words diverge.  In their original meanings they were quite close, with faith referring to loving trust and loyalty under conditions of uncertainty.  In the book I discuss St. Thomas Aquinas’s conception of living faith (fides formata) as animated by love, as compared with dead faith (fides informis), which lacks animation by love.  The word belief, in modern usage, tends to be understood as referring to the latter.

What are the basic steps we can take to be more tolerant of others’ beliefs?

One key element, I think, it to recognize that all worldviews are developed by interpretation and that careful thinking in any domain requires a willingness to consider different possibilities of interpretation.  Another is to recognize that religions tend to address questions that have no simple and straightforward answer, so that alternative symbolisms may be helpful in further illuminating the areas of mystery and spiritual experience religions are concerned with.

Why do you think religion has had such a huge impact on society since as far back as religion dates? What is it about us that makes religion such a big part of our lives?

I think human beings have a basic thirst for meaning that is all-encompassing in its reach.  Religions are not the only way people can try to satisfy this thirst, but religions, at least at their best, tend to be the most open to living in the face of mystery.

In your introduction you say, “Almost every person alive today is aware that there are people who hold visions of life different from his or her own, and almost everyone suffers at least some degree of anxiety about the lack of certainty this implies.” Do you ever find yourself guilty of having this anxiety?

I don’t think anxiety is something anyone should have reason to feel guilty about.  I agree with Kierkegaard that anxiety is a great teacher and that if one listens to it, it can lead toward greater intellectual and spiritual openness.  Anxiety comes as an indication that one may be resisting new possibilities of interpretation that might be more adequate to experience.  If one attends to the voice of anxiety, it can make one aware of areas of resistance.  Anxiety becomes chronic, and therefore problematic, however, when one resists it by trying to cling to impossible claims to certainty that would exclude further questions and further possibilities of experience and interpretation.

Do you think that it is likely in our lifetime that “the world’s religions might manage to develop a way of living together with mutual appreciation and respect”?

Certainly not in our lifetime, but even so, each individual can try, by living in intellectual and spiritual openness as a reasonable, responsible person, to contribute to the development of a world in which such mutual appreciation and respect can take root.

What can you tell us about your next book?

In Chapter 7, on “The Dynamic Diversity of Religious Worldview,” I said that the vitality of a religion depends on its openness to differences of interpretation and that just as there is diversity among different religions, there is also diversity within any given stream of religion.  In this book I used the diverse forms among Islamic traditions as the main example, but I also mentioned that there was similar diversity within the Christian tradition and that the differences between Eastern and Western Christianity would be worth exploring.  That is what my next book, In Search of the Triune God: The Christian Paths of East and West (University of Missouri Press) will be about.