To say that Adam and Eve were created in the image of God ought to answer a host of questions, but the historian of exegesis finds that it raises more questions than it answers, since any given interpretation of the image of God reveals as much about the interpreter as it does about the image itself. It would be a bit melodramatic to describe Gen 1:26 as an exegetical Rorschach test, a literary “ink blot” which means only what the interpreter thinks it means. But Gen 1:26 does, in fact, serve usefully as a “weathervane.’ An interpreter's explanation of the imago dei often points to his or her larger theological agenda.

Following the failure of national prohibition, the temperance movement came to be regarded as an alien blight that had afflicted the American landscape. Richard Hofstadter spoke for many historians when he suggested that the story of prohibition seems “like a historical detour, a meaningless nuisance, an extraneous imposition upon the main course of history.” Rather than being viewed as somehow integral to and indicative of developments in American society and culture, the temperance movement has more commonly been exploited as a quarry for providing colorful instances of human folly and fanaticism. The tendency is natural for, unlike other leading reform movements such as antislavery and women's suffrage, which have legacies most historians are eager to affirm, the crusade against drink seems odd and misplaced to contemporary minds. But this approach has overlooked important features of the movement, failing to show why it did not strike its many advocates as a pseudo-concern or do justice to its widespread support and distinction as the longest continuous reform movement in American history.

The figure of William L. Sullivan, the Paulist missionary and teacher who renounced Roman Catholicism in 1910 and migrated eventually to Unitarianism, poses a continuing challenge for historians of American religion. How is one to interpret his spiritual pilgrimage? Is Sullivan best understood as a reformer whose abhorrence of the perduring Vaticanism and Romanism in Catholic ecclesiology impelled him towards liberal Protestantism? Was he primarily, as he put it in his unfinished autobiography, “a moral personality under orders,” ultimately restless with every institutional expression of the “religion of the Infinite Spirit”? Or does the key to his life and thought lie in an excessive patriotism and nationalism reflected, in part, by his allegiance to the “cause” of the Americanists? Was he a Modernist? Most provocative, perhaps, is the thesis linking these two heresies: does Sullivan's career stand as the embodiment of the continuity between Americanism and Modernism?

In speaking about his objective in translating the tales of Nahman of Bratslav in July of 1906 Martin Buber said, “In general it is not my goal to gather new facts, but rather solely to give a new interpretation of their coherence, a new synthetic presentation of Jewish mystics and their creations.” Before his death, in responding to harsh criticism of his translations of the Hasidic tales, Buber referred to his work as an attempt “to convey to our own time the force of a former life of faith.” His task, as Gershom Scholem once pointed out in derision, was not primarily historical; it was not a process of fact gathering, but it was hermeneutical. He aimed to present a new interpretation of the Hasidic tales of the past which would render them relevant to the crisis of the contemporary reader.

I feel very deeply both the honor and the responsibility attendant upon Professor Carman's kind invitation to speak to you this evening. The attempt to make some sense of the history and context of this Center on the occasion of its silver anniversary is a challenge made poignant by the tragic and repeated experiences of loss we have so recently suffered. This even more than chronological milestones makes such a celebration of memory and community all the more necessary and meaningful. I am very privileged to have been entrusted with this role.