On Peter Mommsen’s “How to love America”: I respect and agree with a lot of what the Bruderhof stands for, but this is one area that I really struggle with. Yes, Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, to give the clothes off our own backs for our brothers. In the Sermon on the Mount he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” However, the Bible also says there is a time for love, and a time to hate, a time for peace and a time for war. Even Jesus became very angry when the people turned his house of God into a marketplace for profit and not for worship. Don’t we have to stand up for what is right and fight against evil? In the Old Testament, God often tells the Israelites to kill all the inhabitants of a nation. Also, when Jesus returns, he is going to make war against evil and many will die. How do you reconcile the two sides of the same coin? My dad was a World War II vet. Did he become disabled in vain? If people did not stand up to Hitler for what was right, he might have conquered the world. Would Hitler have allowed the Bruderhof to exist in his world? I doubt it.

Keith Riddick, Middletown, New York

On David Bentley Hart’s “Running in Circles”: I grew up near Birmingham, Alabama, and when I was in middle school my baseball team played a game at historic Rickwood Field, home of the 1948 Negro League World Series. I missed my chance to play that day and I am still not over it. Last September I visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. The most important thing I learned there was something I saw written in the faces of the men who played the game.

The Negro Leagues were born out of exclusion, yet today the story stands as a testament to resilience and defiance in the face of systemic oppression. Denied access to Major League Baseball, black players forged their own path. Names like Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige, and Willie Mays became synonymous with greatness.

There are parallels to be made between the Negro Leagues and the broader black experience in America. Just as these athletes persevered in the face of adversity, so too have other black communities and institutions. As a black pastor, my view of history is shaped by the legacy of the black church. Its preaching challenged the conscience of America and its activism changed American history. The legacy and impact of the black church on black life and American life writ large can hardly be overstated. And yet the black church has often occupied a place in American religious history similar to that occupied by the Negro Leagues in baseball history, as an appendix rather than an essential chapter.

The Negro Leagues were not a lesser version of Major League Baseball. Phillis Wheatley is not Emily Dickinson’s black analog but a literary genius in her own right. And the black church is not a footnote to American Christianity.

As the conversation about the relevance of baseball seems to be reaching a fever pitch, the game that has long been considered America’s game is calling our attention to one of America’s greatest issues: How do we determine whose stories and achievements are deemed worthy of remembrance?

Rev. Daylan Woodall, Decatur, Alabama

On Plough’s “Who Is America’s Homer?” symposium, in which we asked, “Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?”: If America has a Homer, he’s not a novelist or poet – that ship has sailed. The definitive American art form, for one hundred years now, is the motion picture medium. And any cinematic version, à l’américaine, of the Odyssey or the Iliad would have to be a western or a Civil War or Vietnam War saga. Three films, one in each category, come to mind: The Searchers, Gone with the Wind, and The Deer Hunter. All three are epic in scale, with elements of the feminine, balancing the masculine quotient that dominates most shoot ’em ups and war movies. Thematically, they are also all about going or coming home. In Homeric terms, the best of the three, I believe, is The Searchers, the John Ford epic starring John Wayne, the quintessential western hero, as a vengeful former Confederate soldier who is both a winner and a loser.

Garry Apgar, Bridgeport, Connecticut

It beggars belief that Bob Dylan is not on this list. And the fact of his absence reflects the reason why no one reads poetry. Worse that not one of your respondents offered him up on their own.

Doug Marx, Portland, Oregon

No doubt you have seen this parlor game at Plough. It got some attention because Emily Wilson chose Tracy Chapman. Over at Washington Review of Books, Steve Larkin was a funny old grump about the whole thing. Of course, one cannot disagree with him that “Homer is the Homer of the Americans.” But I cannot see that “framing the question in this way is engaging in almost every American intellectual vice at once,” although he is amusing:

A massive inferiority complex with the Old World revealing itself in hilarious braggadocio (“we have, like, ten Homers over here!”) that poorly conceals justified insecurity (we have, in fact, zero Homers over here). An inability to understand the scope and scale of human history (part of what makes Homer Homer is that people have been reading him for three thousand years). An adjacent belief that everything that happened before America didn’t really count (“we have it in our power to begin the world over again” – immanentizing the eschaton from the beginning). And yet, as a whole, the question flinches before it can go all the way (come on, ask the question you know you want to: “What is the American King James Version?”) It makes you understand James and Eliot.

Of the answers given, Frost, Whitman, and Melville were the ones that seemed closest to answering the case to me, though perhaps “nobody yet” is the true answer. I was surprised not to see Alexis de Tocqueville on the list. Why do we assume America’s Homer would be a poet? I was reminded of Flaubert saying, before he wrote Madame Bovary, that there was, as yet, no Iliad of the novel, and of Carlyle reading the Iliad as part of his preparation to write his French Revolution.

I suggest Hollywood. I would certainly put the great directors ahead of Tracy Chapman on a list of people who “capture the American spirit, the American story, the American identity.” Surely John Ford and John Wayne are one obvious answer? Maybe Gone with the Wind. Frank Capra seems too uneven, but Billy Wilder might not be. What about Chaplin? Or Coppola? I don’t think Hitchcock has the necessary scale, somehow. Perhaps just “Hollywood’s Golden Age” as a whole is the best answer?

Henry Oliver, Arlington, Virginia

On Carolyn Haliburton Carter’s “The Price of a Name”: This was heavy, deep, and real. A deep dive into the lives of those who’ve walked trails of tears and heartache with dignity and hope. Thank you, Carolyn, for this heartfelt journey through the messiness of a truly all-American heritage. All-American includes the tragedy of enslavement, and it must be communicated with names and surnames, whatever the price.

History is always more complex, more accidental, and more sinful than we would want or like. The testimony of scripture, inspired revelation of God, reflects that clearly. None of the heroes of our faith were poster children of perfection. And even the life of our Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, was dramatically shaped by natural, unnatural, and supernatural cause and effect.

Timothy Dale Westergren, Madrid, Spain 

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