Revelation and its correlative, faith, were at the heart of Karl Rahner's life and work. As a priest and theologian, his major concern was ultimately a pastoral one, that of helping people to come to faith, to deepen their faith, to make it a life-enhancing, life-directing force in their lives. His focus was on both the content of faith and the existential appropriation of that content in the lived response of believers to it, on fides quae and fides qua.

When Rahner began his theological career issues of revelation and faith tended to be addressed primarily within the context of fundamental theology and its preoccupation with apologetics. Although new and creative developments were beginning to be made in this area, the neo-scholastic approach remained dominant. Described as a form of extrinsicism, its concern was to establish the possibility and credibility of a historical revelation by God in the history of Israel and especially in the person of Jesus. Particular emphasis was given to miracles and the fulfillment of prophecy as divine endorsement of the claims of Jesus. A further task of this kind of apologetics was to show that Jesus instituted the Church and entrusted to its teaching authority the content of revelation. The method of argumentation remained on what might be called the formal level in that it was intent on establishing the fact of revelation and the formal structures by which that revelation is handed on in the Church. No consideration was given to the content of revelation or to the actual situation of those to whom the gospel was to be preached.

If the title of this essay is taken at face value, by all rights it should be very short. While Rahner's life spanned the twentieth century, with the rapid and irreversible change that century has brought to our understanding of “female, ” Rahner's observations about the changing status of women do not refer to the movement of feminist theology, a movement that was well underway by the time of his death in 1984. At the outset, then, we must state clearly that Karl Rahner was not a feminist (indeed, not even an “anonymous” one). Nevertheless, Rahner's twin expositions of the hearer of the word and the mystery of God, his searching method, and, perhaps most importantly, his insistence that these ground a dynamic re-framing of the Christian, and particularly the Roman Catholic, tradition, have proven to be a rich resource for Catholic feminists.

Following the vision of Vatican II, and responding to the needs of a church faced with rising numbers and declining vocations, an unprecedented wave of lay women and men began graduate-level study in theology in the 1970s, readying themselves for a variety of positions in parish ministry and education. Many of those studying were women, women who were experiencing simultaneous social and ecclesial revolutions. For many of these, Rahner’s voice shaped their theological study, providing a theological framework for questions about doctrinal change, masculine symbolism, and the status of the human person before God, as well as a pastoral voice that took seriously their experience of profound change, with its shock of freedom and decision.

One thing to keep in mind when reading and thinking about Willa Cather is that she was, in both literal and figurative terms, an American pioneer. Her family migrated to Nebraska in the 1880s, a time when people lived in dug-outs and sod-houses (although when young Willa arrived, she had family contacts there to make her settlement relatively easier) and old-timers shared memories of Indian encounters. As an adult, with memories of one uprooting embedded in her consciousness, Cather moved to the Northeast with enthusiasm, finding opportunities for ambitious and intelligent women not in the small towns of Nebraska and the Midwest but in urban centers, amid “the steel and concrete and electric waves” of large cities such as Pittsburgh and New York. There, the figurative pioneer, Cather rose to the top of her field in journalism (in the first decade of the new century she was the editor of McClure's Magazine, one of the most famous and widely read magazines in American history) and then abandoned that career to become a novelist. In her fiction she did what is understood to be impossible: she wrote novels embraced as art by critics and read with passion and devotion by the popular reading public.

Willa Cather and the criticism of politics

In 1996, Elizabeth Ammons confidently asserted that “the new canon in American literature - the one . . . that it is imperative to think about Willa Cather within - is multiculturalism.” Undoubtedly, multiculturalism - including feminist, queer, and ethnic studies - has brought an enormous vitality to Cather criticism. Yet the composite of Cather constructed by such approaches - queer opera diva, rugged cowgirl, and Greenwich Village cosmopolitan - has barely dented the image of Cather that persists in the public imagination. When Laura Bush recently proclaimed, after hosting a literary salon celebrating the writing of Cather, Edna Ferber, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, that “there is nothing political about American literature,” it was clear that the Cather she had invited to the White House was safely apolitical, the author of slightly more grown-up, highbrow versions of Little House on the Prairie. The First Lady's appropriation of a bland, antiseptic Cather follows close on the heels of Joan Acocella's reactionary crusade to cleanse Cather criticism of ideology - recuperating Cather from an academic trend towards what Acocella terms “spun-from-nothing hypotheses” about race, sex, and politics.

In the “Hired Girls” section of My Ántonia, just after her move to town, Ántonia tells the following story of country life. It is threshing time, and a tramp emerges from the intense heat, thirsty and looking for beer. Trading places with one of the men, he gets on the threshing machine, and begins to work: “He cut bands all right for a few minutes, and then, Mrs. Harling, he waved his hand to me and jumped head-first right into the threshing machine after the wheat. I begun to scream, and the men run to stop the horses, but the belt had sucked him down, and by the time they got her stopped, he was all beat and cut to pieces. He was wedged in so tight it was a hard job to get him out, and the machine ain't never worked right since.” In the dead tramp's pocket they find an old penknife, “the wish-bone of a chicken wrapped up in a piece of paper, and some poetry” - “The Old Oaken Bucket,” cut out of a newspaper. One glimpses in this arresting moment some of the distinctive interests and attitudes of Cather's fiction: its emphasis on the making of meaning, on the gestures, like the tramp's wave, that produce significance in a world cut loose from overmastering explanatory narratives; its careful attention to ordinary life and work as the field in which such meanings emerge; its tolerance for the inconclusive, suggested by the resonant inconsequence of the contents of the tramp's pockets.

Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter once wrote that she liked Willa Cather's short fiction better than any of her novels. More than fifty years later, Porter's opinion runs counter to critical consensus, as Cather is mainly known for her twelve novels published between 1912 and 1940. Her long fiction, which she intended to be her enduring literary legacy, should not, however, obscure her achievement as a short-story writer. Her fiction-writing career began with a short story in 1892 and ended with one over fifty years later. In all, she published sixty-two stories, some of which rank among her most accomplished fiction of any length.

My interest in the comic Cather began with a question at a plenary session of an international seminar. “Does Willa Cather have any sense of humor at all?” After a long silence, someone gamely replied that she must have, though at the moment he couldn't think of an example. The question remained with me, initially alerting me to the one-liners in Cather's writing and eventually taking me to the most basic questions about her art and its relation to life. Art begins in feeling seeking form, Cather believed, anticipating the philosopher Susanne Langer's argument that feelings arise from premises about life that are so fundamental that they are structural. Does one celebrate the uniqueness of an individual asserting himself, or herself, against the world? If so, tragedy provides the form. Or does one celebrate life's continuities, blurring distinctions between the self and the not-self in order to do so? Such a feeling finds an outlet in comedy.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), Willa Cather's last novel, is the first to be set in her birthplace, the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia. In 1936, just before she began work on this new book, Cather wrote an enthusiastic and reflective essay in response to two of Thomas Mann's biblical novels, based on Old Testament narratives. She praised Mann's skill in “making a new story out of an old one which is a very part of the readers' consciousness,” and concluded, “What we most love is not bizarre invention, but to have the old story brought home to us closer than ever before, enriched by all that the right man could draw from it and, by sympathetic insight, put into it.” This essay appeared in Not Under Forty, a collection that Cather proclaimed was intended for “the backward,” readers “over forty” whose gaze was turned toward the past. Cather herself was now in her early sixties, entering the last decade of a career that had been marked by invention. Each of her eleven novels had posed a fresh set of challenges. As Cather turned to the writing of Sapphira, she confronted at last her own quintessential “old story”: the Virginia of her family history and early childhood.

Willa Cather had little use for critics, preferring to have ordinary readers find and encounter her books without the mediating lens of the professional interpreter. Critics have, from time to time, returned the favor, consigning her to near-oblivion in the 1930s when they judged her to be out of touch with the painful social and economic realities of Depression-era America. Today, fortunately, her reputation with both lay and professional readers is secure, for she is widely read (the prestigious Library of America has two Cather volumes in its series, and My Ántonia has been reprinted in the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century series), regularly taught (in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, women's literature, and lesbian/gay/queer studies), and the subject of intense critical scrutiny and controversy. Those controversies have in recent years landed Cather on the cover of such influential middle-brow publications as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where tabloid-style headlines demand to know “What have the academics done to Willa Cather?” or proclaim “Justice for Willa Cather,” as if the long-dead writer has been a hostage or a political prisoner who has finally gained her freedom.

Readers of Willa Cather's fiction are well aware that many of her most interesting and memorable characters are performing artists. Probably Thea Kronborg, of The Song of the Lark, comes most immediately to mind, but there are many others, some familiar and some not. Even well-informed readers of Cather's novels and stories may not realize, however, the extent of her own familiarity with the performing arts and how much her development of these performing-artist characters rests on direct experience. Cather was in fact intensely devoted to music and theatre throughout her life, and wrote numerous theatre reviews and critical columns about the performing arts during her twenty or more years as a journalist. After she became associated with the successful and influential magazine McClure's, she also wrote informative articles about performing artists, thereby adding to her expertise. The knowledge she accumulated, as well as her personal passion for the theatre and music, contributed importantly to the development of her artistic principles and goals, her conception of herself as an artist, and even her conception of gender - as well as to the success of her stories and novels that involve performers and performances.

Cather was a writer who emerged at a transitional moment in the evolution of American culture, and the complexity of her work results from her responses to this shifting historical matrix. Born in 1873, she was an American of the late-Victorian period, and she lived her early life in the relatively provincial backwater of rural Nebraska. But it would be a patronizing mistake to see this historical and geographical context as inevitably quiet or conservative or politically insignificant. This was a time of considerable political ferment, a ferment that was formative in shaping her fiction's social and political dimensions. After the settlement of the prairies and their initial cultivation by American and European pioneers, the later years of the nineteenth century were lean. The 1890s, when Cather was a student in Lincoln and then a fledgling journalist, were a decade of agricultural crisis. Crop failures, drought, and depopulation (as the prairie schooners continued to move westwards, beyond such states as Kansas and Nebraska) heralded a crisis. Then the Panic of 1893, when a London financial firm abruptly crashed, saw British investors pull their money out of the United States, precipitating a three-year depression (and, as we shall see, directly affecting Nebraskans whom Cather knew). The rise in unemployment and strikes was eerily premonitory of the 1930s, and the crisis touched Cather's state too. In 1895 the power company in her hometown of Red Cloud failed; “the town had no electricity for ten years.” The decade taught Nebraskans tough lessons about a globalizing economy, about failure as well as success.

The study of the significance of Cather's sexuality for her writing was decisively launched by Sharon O'Brien in a 1984 essay; subsequent work in this area takes O'Brien's 1987 biography of Cather as a benchmark, a necessary point of departure. In “'The Thing Not Named': Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer,” O'Brien linked the topics I address here - the question of Cather's artistic practices; the question of her sexuality - in the phrase she highlights from Cather's programmatic 1922 essay, “The Novel Démeublé.” “The thing not named” names the love that dare not speak its name, the crime not to be named among Christians. For O'Brien, Cather's self-recognition as a lesbian was inscribed under this prohibition (O'Brien found evidence for this self-understanding in an 1892 letter of Cather's to Louise Pound). “Cather did not fully or uncritically internalize the emotionally crippling definition of lesbianism as 'sick' or 'perverse' and challenged the social construction of female friendship as unnatural. And yet simultaneously she could not help accepting it” (p. 81). Out of this ambivalence, O'Brien argued, Cather fashioned gender-ambivalent characters (as she had early named herself William Cather, MD; she signed the letter to Pound “William”), displaced same-sex desire into luscious descriptions of feminized landscapes, and eventually molded strong women characters who, however, never were coupled with other women.

Although writers choose from a variety of settings and circumstances for their novels, few writers venture into religious arenas in which they have little direct experience. Cather, whose family had been Baptists in Virginia, was no Catholic, although she joined the Episcopal Church on December 27, 1922, the same year when, she famously wrote in Not Under Forty, “the world broke in two.” When she began writing Death Comes for the Archbishop, she wanted to create a novel that reflected both her profound visual appreciation for the Southwest, which she had visited many times in her lifetime, and her respect for the contributions of the Catholic Church in that region and throughout America. That she admired the rich cultural and artistic traditions of the Church, as well as the devotion of its nineteenth-century missionary clergy, is evident in her novel. The work was inspired by a little known biography Cather discovered in 1925 while she was visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, written by Father William Howlett and published in 1908, provided the writer with her novel's heroes: Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant are closely based on the real-life Archbishop Lamy and his vicar-general Machebeuf.

Two years ago, while spending a sabbatical in California, I decided to reread Willa Cather's letters to Zoë Akins, collected at the Huntington Library. As Cather scholars have long known, doing biographical research on Cather is a challenging task: her letters are scattered in collections all over the country, and no Collected Letters of Willa Cather exists because of the provision in her will banning publication. Now we have the invaluable A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather (2002) edited by Janis Stout, but this useful summary and chronology of Cather's correspondence is no substitute for reading the original documents. Some libraries interpret her will liberally and will either allow you to make Xerox copies or will send you copies. The Huntington policy, however, is to adhere strictly to the terms of the will. No photocopies.