Two new publications

Time, Place

My essay, “Dag Hammarskjöld and Markings: A Reconsideration,” has just been published in a US journal, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality (11:1, spring 2011). The journal is unlikely to be on newsstands; it may be available in single copies through the website of Johns Hopkins University Press. But here is an offer: readers of this site who would care to have an offprint can let me know privately at lipseyr@gmail.com, with your mailing address. If you aren’t too numerous, I’ll respond.

Marie-Noëlle Little's new book, The Knight and the Troubadour: Dag Hammarskjöld and Ezra Pound, has just been published on line by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation; a download is available at the Foundation's site. This is a good topic; it's a book to be welcomed.

Below is a brief excerpt from the Spiritus essay.

In the later 1950s, Hammarskjöld embodied the United Nations and articulated its ideals and challenges for a global audience. The media loved his mix of wit and gravity; press conferences were often good-natured duels between the typically reticent but friendly secretary-general and UN reporters who were expected to report something. In 1954 he had remarked, with the summarizing force so characteristic of him, that “the Governments of the United Nations expect the Secretary-General to take the independent responsibility, irrespective of their attitude, to represent the detached element in the international life of the peoples.” He had become that object—the “detached element”—and people worldwide, no less than governments, respected him for it. At a 1958 meeting in Rome, Pope Pius told him, “Vous êtes mon homologue laïque”—you are my lay counterpart—and Hammarskjöld once lightly said to W.H. Auden that to be secretary-general of the United Nations was much like being a secular pope. At a staff gathering in 1958, to mark the beginning of his second term in office, Hammarskjöld responded to their warm praise in part with these words: “We are no Vatican, we are no republic, we are not outside the world—we are very much in the world. But, even within the world, there can be this…sense of belonging, this deeper sense of unity. I hope that we are on our road to that sense….” Although his listeners could not have known it, his statement all but erases the boundary between the religious perspective of Markings and the searching realism typical of Hammarskjöld’s public discourse.

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