Fractured Recovery Divides the Region

By JAMES BARRON, SAM DOLNICKand MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ NY TIMES

The patchy recovery from Hurricane Sandy exposed a fractured region on Saturday. The lights flickered on in Manhattan neighborhoods that had been dark for days, and New York’s subways rumbled and screeched through East River tunnels again.

But in shorefront stretches of Staten Island and Queens that were all but demolished, and in broad sections of New Jersey and Long Island, gasoline was still almost impossible to come by, electricity was still lacking, temperatures were dropping and worried homeowners wondered when help would finally arrive.

Drivers in New Jersey faced 1970s-style gasoline rationing imposed by Gov. Chris Christie, while in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that the Defense Department would distribute free fuel from five mobile stations. But that effort backfired when too many people showed up.

It was a weekend of contrasts. Crowds streamed into city parks that reopened on a blindingly bright Saturday morning, while people who had been displaced by the storm said help was not coming fast enough and the desperation was growing.

David O’Connor, 44, had begun to use his living room chairs as firewood in Long Beach, N.Y., where the storm sent water surging down streets. A neighbor, Gina Braddish, a 27-year-old newlywed, was planning to siphon gas from a boat that washed into her front yard. Older people on darkened streets have been shouting for help from second-floor windows, at eye level with the buoys still trapped in trees.

“I’m looking around seeing people really down,” said Joann Bush, a social worker who lives in Coney Island. “They don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring.”

There were other contrasts: The grandstands were still in place for the New York City Marathon, even though Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had canceled the race on Friday for the first time in its 42-year history. But instead of promoting a race, Mr. Bloomberg visited the devastated neighborhoods in the Rockaway section of Queens, where he voiced concern about chilly temperatures and hypothermia. “It’s cold, and it really is critical that people stay warm, especially the elderly,” he said at a City Hall briefing, urging people to go to shelters if they did not have heat. He added, “We are committed to making sure that everybody can have a roof over their head and food in their stomachs and deal with the cold safely.”

In many places that the storm pounded in its relentless push into the Northeast, there was a profound sense of isolation, with whole towns on Long Island still cut off from basic information, supplies and electricity. People in washed-out neighborhoods said they felt increasingly desperate. “Everything involving our lives is a matter of exhaustion,” said Nancy Reardon, 45, who waited for gas for five hours on Saturday in Massapequa.

Vikki Quinn, standing amid ruined belongings in front of her flooded house in Long Beach, said she felt lost. “I just keep waiting for someone with a megaphone and a car to just tell us what to do,” she said.

Hank Arkin, 60, a photographer in Merrick, wondered how much of the damage could have been avoided. “I am screaming mad because this is an inhumane way to live in the highest property-taxed area of the entire state,” he said. “They had days of notice before the storm and nothing was done.”

Officials said they were trying to get help where it was needed. “One of the problems is that when you have lots of different agencies, it takes a while for them to get coordinated,” Mr. Bloomberg said at his briefing, adding that he understood how high the tensions were in the Rockaways. “Somebody this morning screamed at me that they could not get coffee,” he said. “Someone else screamed at me that there is nothing there, but one block away, there was a service.”

Hundreds of thousands of homes on Long Island were still without power Saturday, and frustration with the utilities, particularly Long Island Power Authority, continued to rise. “LIPA, get your act together,” Edward P. Mangano, the Nassau County executive, wrote on his Facebook page Saturday. “This response and lack of communication with customers is shameful.”

Mr. Bloomberg, too, attacked the power authority, which provides electricity to the Rockaways. “LIPA in our view has not acted aggressively enough,” the mayor said. He said the power authority had “no clear timetable” for restoring the power and that it had indicated that some homes and businesses might have to wait two weeks before the lights went back on.

“That is certainly not acceptable,” he said. “When it comes to prioritizing resources,” he said, the Rockaways “should be first in line” because the storm did so much damage there. But so far, he said, “that does not appear to be the case.” Mr. Cuomo also criticized the power authority on Saturday, as he has almost daily since the storm hit.

Mr. Cuomo said there were signs of progress. He said four subway lines that tie Manhattan to Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens — the Nos. 4, 5, 6 and 7 lines — returned to life completely on Saturday morning, with four others — the D, F, J and M lines — set to begin running between Manhattan and Brooklyn by nightfall. The Q train was also expected back by the end of the day on Saturday, and the Nos. 2 and 3 trains on Sunday. But the L line remained flooded on Saturday — “wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling,” the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Joseph J. Lhota, said.

Mr. Bloomberg said most public schools would reopen on Monday, only to close again on Tuesday for Election Day. He said some 65 schools would not open on Monday, some because they were being used as shelters, some because they had sustained damage in the storm. He said officials hoped that most of those schools could open Wednesday.

He said that building inspectors still had to check some 55,000 buildings in the low-lying areas that he ordered evacuated before the storm struck. He said that 8,500 buildings have been inspected and that more than 7,200 were “safe to inhabit.”

Utility crews from across the country struggled with a power network that had been battered. As they went from town to town and block to block, they trimmed trees and freed cables that had toppled in winds that approached 80 miles an hour.

Despite nonstop work, the numbers were daunting. In New Jersey, Public Service Electric and Gas still had more than 600,000 customers without power on Saturday. Hoboken remained the biggest challenge because of water damage, officials said.

Mr. Cuomo said that in New York, 60 percent of those who lost power in the storm had had it restored, but that 900,000 were still in the dark. On Long Island, where 1.2 million people lost power, about 550,000 had their power back by Saturday morning.

Mr. Cuomo also said 8 million gallons of gas had been unloaded from commercial tankers and an additional 28 million gallons would go to distribution terminals over the weekend.

In Midtown Manhattan, riggers went to work high above West 57th Street, near Carnegie Hall, where the storm broke the boom on a construction crane and left it dangling 74 stories up. They hand-cranked the boom closer to the partially completed building and planned to strap the boom to the structure. Once that was done, the surrounding streets, which had been closed since the boom snapped, could reopen — perhaps by Sunday, the mayor said.

Relief agencies poured into beleaguered neighborhoods, but so did hundreds of volunteers on their own. The narrow lanes of Midland Beach on Staten Island, which the storm slammed with particular fury, were busy. Groups of volunteers carrying brooms, rakes and shovels went from door to door, offering to pitch in with the cleanup. Others circled the blocks in pickup trucks full of food, blankets, clothes and cleaning supplies. Impromptu distribution centers piled high with food and secondhand clothes sprang up on every other corner.

“Anybody need anything?” a man shouted from a truck to a group cleaning out a house on Olympia Boulevard. A few minutes later, two women pulling rolling suitcases paused in front of the house and asked the same question. There appeared to be more volunteers offering help than residents in need.The storm’s toll in the city rose to 41, according to the police, when a 90-year-old man was found dead in his basement in Rockaway Park. He was identified as George Stathis. The police said his body was found when a cousin went to check on him.

Two patients remained in the evacuated Bellevue Hospital Center on the East Side of Manhattan on Saturday because they were too sick to be carried down the stairs, according to several people familiar with the situation. One of the patients was a 500- to 600-pound woman, and the other a man who was scheduled to have heart surgery powered by an emergency generator after the hospital lost power in the storm, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Bellevue employees had received an e-mail threatening them with dismissal if they spoke to reporters.

Ian Michaels, a spokesman for Bellevue, said power had been restored on Saturday. He said officials hoped to transfer out the last two patients as soon as the elevators were back in service.

The authorities estimated that as many as 100,000 homes and businesses on Long Island had been destroyed or badly damaged in the storm. Sand dunes were flattened and rows of beach houses crushed. The storm’s furious flood tide created new inlets that could become permanent parts of the topography.

Redrawing the maps will take time. The cleanup is immediate, and grim. In a grocery on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, men tried to slop out foul-smelling muck as thousands of dollars worth of food and produce lay rotting on the floor.

“Everything is damaged, everything is garbage,” said Boris Yakubov, who said he was the store owner’s brother. He was pushing a mop, trying to help clear out the mess.

Down the street, the pharmacy in the back of a store was open, but the customers had to wade through a tide of mud that remained in the front. Irina Vovnoby got her white tennis shoes dirty and wet dropping off a prescription for her mother-in-law.

“I never saw a situation like this,” she said. “This is a disaster.”

Reporting was contributed by Taylor Adams, Charles V. Bagli, Ruth Bashinsky, Matt Flegenheimer, Elizabeth A. Harris, Anemona Hartocollis, Angela Macropoulos, Colin Moynihan, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Marc Santora, Nate Schweber, Stacey Stowe and Bernard Vaughan.

And God Spoke to Abraham (Lincoln)

By EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY NY TIMES

 

 

In early October 1862, Abraham Lincoln received a letter from God.

"I am your Heavenly Father and the God of all Nations," it began. God had particular explanations and instructions for the president, whose entire term of office had been defined by war. "I am the cause for the disruption between the North and the South," he continued, and the point was to destroy the "horrible state of affairs" that man's "selfish nature" had brought. "I am not partial and have no respect of persons." Coming just weeks after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the letter made it clear that God wanted to destroy slavery. For further instructions, God told Lincoln to gather six of his best men and meet in person "my instrument the Messenger of Peace the Christ of this day."

Conveniently, the "Christ of this day" was not only staying in Washington, but lived just a few miles from the White House, at 476 Pennsylvania Avenue. At the meeting and through the medium, God would explain "what to do that will speedily terminate this Devilish war."

Lincoln did not believe the letter was from God, of course; as he suspected, it came from a local religious devotee named Lydia Smith, who believed herself to be God's medium. For Lincoln, this kind of supernatural penetration was lunacy, not prophecy. He didn't believe that God walked the earth, inserting himself into the affairs of men. He told one group of ministers who had earlier pressed him for emancipation that these were not "the days of miracles," and that "I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation."

Yet for as much as Lincoln disclaimed the possibilities of "direct revelation," writers to him thought otherwise. This was, after all, the mid-19th century, when religious fervor ran deep in the country's psyche, not to mention the middle of the Civil War. The possibility of overturning slavery had so fired spiritual sentiments across the North that self-proclaimed mediums and prophets believed that God was on the move in the nation. Throughout the war, and especially when it came to emancipation, people sent the president missives on what God was doing, where Jesus was and how the sacred could win the war for the Union.

Perhaps the most interesting spiritual letter Lincoln received was from a man named George F. Kelly. A month after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, Kelly warned the president that he was "surrounded by Spies and men of evil intentions." Perhaps, he wrote, Lincoln wondered now "if God has forsaken us." But, Kelly insisted, this was not the case. Instead, God had further demands for the president.

Kelly, claiming to be channeling God, called on the president to "adopt the plans called, Radical," which would emancipate the slaves and bring full racial equality to the nation. "I have Seen in visions," Kelly went on. The son of God, he reported, had returned and was ready to lead Lincoln's military to overthrow the South. "Have not the honest hearted been longing for the Second 'Jesus' to Save this nation and the world," Kelly asked, and then answered, "Have ye not heard that in one of the New England States 'God has raised him up in humble life'?" Did he not, Kelly asked, "do even So with His former Servant; who toiled with the people more than thirty years?" Kelly's prophetic vision concluded that in two weeks, Jesus would reveal himself and win the war for the Union.

Although Lincoln considered Kelly a "Crazy Man," as the president wrote on one envelope from him, the letter was telling. In the midst of a war where white men were killing white men in epic numbers over, in part, the institution of slavery, Kelly now envisioned Jesus to be a New Englander who would fight to free the black captives. In Kelly's eyes, Jesus looked and sounded awfully similar to John Brown. The man who had been executed for treason only a few years earlier, but who had fired spiritual sentiments himself with comparisons to Christ, seemed to be reincarnated and ready to fight.

There were other letters Lincoln received from other spiritual guides, and there were other claims about Christ's power in America at the time. Some demanded money, as was the case where one writer requested half a billion dollars to "Reveale, Christ, Jesus."

At first glance, such letters, and the millenarian spirituality they articulated, sound like vestiges of the culture modern men and women left behind. We would expect talk of revelations and prophecies from colonial Puritans, who executed one another with threats of witchcraft. But the mid-19th century was hardly the modern secular society we sometimes imagine it to be. Firsthand encounters with the sacred were commonplace claims by even respected, "modern" Americans.

Lincoln may have considered George Kelly and the others "crazy" for their visions, but their experiences were little different from those of the abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth, who met with Lincoln in October 1864 and bonded with him over one of his favorite Bibles. Years earlier, Truth believed that God spoke to her. According to one of Truth's friends, she said that "God revealed himself to her, with all the suddenness of flash of lightning."

Experiences like this one led Truth to join the growing Millerite movement of the 1830s, which followed the biblical calculus of William Miller toward the conclusion that Jesus was going to return in the early 1840s. When the Second Coming failed to materialize in 1844, the "Great Disappointment" left many confused. But Truth continued to believe that God and Christ could and would intervene in this world; when her fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke despairingly about the chances for justice, she interrupted him with a rebuke in the form of a question, "Frederick, is God dead?"

There was no disappointment for Joseph Smith, for whom Jesus and God were very much alive. He met with them in upstate New York around the same time Sojourner Truth was earning her freedom, and Smith's "first vision" became a central element of Mormon theology and belief. Indeed, the notion that God still intervened in this world was critical to the emergence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and during the Civil War, many Mormons believed that the carnage was evidence of Smith's prophetic powers. In 1832, he had prophesied that "war will be poured out." It would begin with South Carolina and envelop the entire nation. "For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States." Nat Turner's spirit would take over, and "after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war." At the time of Lincoln's election, one Mormon diarist wrote excitedly, "The south is angry; the North is no better and from what I can see they are both hastening to fulfill the Prophecy of Joseph Smith Jr."

If we broaden our scope even further, we see that during the Civil War, more and more Northerners were searching for God's voice amid the chaos and carnage. Almost as quickly as the war began, some Northerners were pushing for the phrase "In God We Trust" to be placed on coinage. In 1864, a group of Protestant clergy formed the National Reform Association to petition Lincoln and Congress to amend the Constitution to acknowledge "Almighty God" and "the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among nations."

Perhaps most famously, Julia Ward Howe imagined the spirit of Christ (who was "born across the sea") inspiring soldiers in this country. "As he died to make men holy," the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" versed, "let us die to make men free." In the decades after the war and into the 20th century, the song became a staple of American religious culture. Its most famous vocalists, in fact, have been the members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

And of course, by the war's end it was Abraham Lincoln himself who was ruminating on the spiritual meaning of the war and slavery, almost as much as the prophets and mediums who had previously written to him. During his now famous Second Inaugural on March 4, 1865, Lincoln made public his private wonders about what God was doing. He asked his audience, what caused the war? What were God's purposes for the future? Lincoln was uncertain on much of it, but he knew this: slavery was somehow the cause of the war; God hates injustice; and the nation must now bring "charity" and "right" to heal the land. Beyond that, he concluded, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

When Lincoln invoked the Almighty during his Second Inaugural, he tapped into the widespread sense in the North that something spiritual was happening during the war. For as much as he differed from people like George Kelly and Lydia Smith, he shared with them the focus on trying to discern what God had in store for the land. Some believed that the events of the war were so momentous that they were themselves evidence of the work of Jesus and God on earth. Others hoped that by invoking the sacred - either through song or in the Constitution - they could gain the Almighty's favor or empower men to continue to fight.

The songs, the letters, the prophecies, the experiences spoke to another layer of how deeply the Civil War and emancipation touched hearts, minds, and spirits of Americans in the North. Deluged in blood, but hopeful for a peaceful nation shorn of enslavement, these mystics, mediums, prophets, politicians, writers and clergy believed that the events of 150 years ago had ushered in God's intervention. They demonstrate most clearly how war changes people not only in body, but in soul, too.

 

Edward J. Blum, a historian at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, are the co-authors of "The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America."

As Surface Goes on Sale Today, Microsoft Seeks to Reinvent the Tablet

• By Mat Honan Wired GadgetLab

 

Microsoft Windows president Steven Sinofsky and Surface general manager Panos Panay make their pitch. Photo: Mat Honan/Wired

At 9:00 this morning, Pacific time, Microsoft’s future goes on sale. The first Surface tablet, Microsoft’s dramatic foray into the hardware business, is available for pre-order starting today. It will be available for purchase in stores starting Oct. 26. With its release, Microsoft instantly becomes the third major player in the tablet market, a market where it is taking a fundamentally different approach than its rivals, Apple and Google.

At a small event at its Redmond headquarters on Monday, Microsoft at last announced pricing and availability for the highly anticipated Surface for Windows RT tablet — the 32GB base model will cost $499, or $599 with a Touch Cover. But, more interestingly, Microsoft offered a look into its thought process. It took reporters behind the scenes, into the top-secret facility where the Surface was imagined and developed. The company showed off the CNC mills and 3-D printers where it fast-prototyped builds, and handed around early reference designs made from plastic and even cardboard. It described how the Surface was inspired by the Moleskine notebook, and why it decided to opt out of the high-density-display arms race.

Much of this was carefully crafted — even as it was shockingly unscripted for a press event from a major company. Microsoft certainly attempted to drive home a message: Everything about the Surface is considered, and represents refinement after refinement. Just as Apple always punches home the message that its devices are “great” or even “insanely great,” Microsoft again and again hammered home the point that the Surface is a “perfect” product. (Note to Microsoft: Nothing is perfect. )

But it also gave much away, sometimes inadvertently, that hints at how Microsoft views the market. Notably, Android was almost an afterthought. When Microsoft Windows president Steven Sinofsky first began describing the space, he talked about Andriod tablets. And then? In the hours that followed, almost nothing. When the company talked tablets, aside from two or possibly three mentions of the Kindle Fire, the only product from a competitor mentioned was the iPad. And the iPad came up again and again and again.

In short: The iPad is in Microsoft’s head. Which is interesting, because when it came time to develop its own tablet, Microsoft went with a fundamentally different strategy than its competitors have.

Google and Apple are pursuing a strategy where the tablet and the phone are essentially variations of each other, running the same operating system, while the desktop is a different system that uses another. (Oh, you forgot about Google’s Chrome OS? That’s OK. Google’s real operating system is the web.)

Microsoft’a approach flips this. Microsoft’s tablet and desktop share a common operating system, while it is the phone that runs a different OS — although even Windows Phone 8 is based on the same architecture as Windows 8. Microsoft seems to have decided that the tablet is the gateway between mobile and desktop. And Surface RT is the ultimate manifestation of this.

The tablet runs a stripped-down version of Windows 8, Microsoft’s next-generation operating system, without the desktop. But it is the same operating system, and although it lacks that traditional desktop experience, this is clearly Windows, and many of the apps that are core to that experience — Mail, Internet Explorer, People, the Windows Store — run natively. It is given to gestures and sports a remarkably touch-friendly screen. But it also has a USB port and a cover that doubles as a keyboard; it works with a wide range of other devices, like printers and external hard drives; and it will even charge up your phone. It other words, is not just a bigger phone. It is truly in between. Sinofsky drove this point home with a particularly effective point.

“I’ve used a lot of tablets, and this is not a tablet, but it’s the best tablet I’ve ever used,” he said. “I’ve used a lot of notebooks and laptops, and this is not a notebook or a laptop. But it’s also the very best laptop I’ve ever used.”

And then there is the logic of developing its own tablet. Microsoft says that it wanted the hardware to be the ultimate expression of its software. You could think of this Surface for Windows RT tablet as reference design for other manufacturers to follow, but it’s more than that. It really is fundamentally different. It is the expression of not just software but ambition.

The very edge of the Surface is perhaps the best example of this. Microsoft showed off all sorts of iterations it went through on the way to a final design — a design which changed even in between the June 18 Surface announcement and today. Following the public debut, Microsoft redesigned the chamfer, or edge bezel, to add a 3mm offset to make it easier to grip. You can spend hours analyzing the Touch Cover or the molded magnesium body or the battery, but that 3mm chamfer, that final little tweak to the hardware, seemed key to understanding the entire thought process behind the device.

A big question about Surface has been its cover / keyboard, the Touch Cover. At no point during any of the previous demos has Microsoft let journalists actually try out a working Touch Cover. But at the event on Monday, it finally let outsiders try its keyboard, deep in the heart of the Surface lab. And it works. It was responsive and impressive and, well, weird. Keys fired well, but other aspects, like the track pad or pressing keyboard combinations, felt odd. It was neither purely touch nor purely mechanical. It was something else entirely, like Surface itself.

The base model, a 32GB device, will cost $499 and does not include a Touch Cover. You can get one with a Touch Cover for $599. Microsoft is also offering a 64GB Surface, with Touch Cover, for $699. Touch Covers are available separately in five colors (black, white, magenta, cyan and red) for $120 each. Microsoft is also offering a Type Cover, a slightly thicker version with movable physical keys, for $130. All are available for preorder today and will be available from Microsoft’s online and retail stores on Oct. 26.

Both Surface RT devices have NVIDIA T30 processors with 2GB of RAM, both front and back-side 720p HD cameras, a microSDXC card slot, USB port, two Wi-Fi antennas, and a 31.5 W-h battery. It has a 10.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display, and weighs 1.5 pounds.

This is Microsoft’s vision of the future. It is also the most ambitious new tablet to hit the market since the iPad. It is a fundamental re-think of what the tablet should be. You can order it today. Or not. And that’s what really matters. Because while Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, can show us what they think the future will look like, it is we who decide how it will actually play out. Now, it’s decision time.

Judi Dench: 'I never want to stop working'
Tim Adams The Guardian (UK)

With her seventh Bond film about to hit the big screen, Judi Dench shows no sign, even at 77, of curbing her enormous drive. She talks about painting landscapes, playing M and why she hates to be alone on stage

At one point sitting opposite Dame Judi Dench over a pot of tea at a hotel in Covent Garden, I find myself asking her if she has that recurrent dream, the one in which you are on a stage and the curtain is about to go up but can't remember any of your lines or the part you are supposed to play. It seems, as I'm saying it, a bit ridiculous to ask that question of Dench, who not long ago was by a margin voted "the greatest actor of all time" in an exhaustive poll of the readers of The Stage magazine. She is a woman who has hardly put a foot wrong, or missed a beat, since she first performed for an audience 60 years ago. I'd imagine any deep-seated anxiety about being caught out melted away long since. But no, she admits, suddenly slightly grim-faced, that she has the dream all the time. "I'm standing there, all dressed up, and whispering: 'What do I say now?'" she says. "It's awful, really, but it's the big fear. The one that never goes away."

Is this anxiety true? I guess so. Though talking to Dench you do have the occasional nagging reminder of what she is so profoundly good at having you forget: that if she puts her mind to it, she can probably make you believe in anything. In the previous few days I have watched her and re-watched her as Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I, as Iris Murdoch losing her mind, as J Edgar Hoover's mother, as a widow discovering India in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and have been immediately in thrall each time. Now here she is, oddly, in front of me, profoundly familiar, conspiratorial, engaged, gossipy, a good listener, seamlessly inhabiting the role of eager interviewee even at the age of 77, and delivering polished versions of stories that she has honed for just such an audience. The one about how her mother and father came to see her in Romeo and Juliet early in her career, and her dad was so engrossed in her performance that at the line "Where are my mother and father?" he responded: "Here we are, darling, in row H." The ones about being giggly and starstruck on Oscar night.

Two years ago Dench published a memoir, dictated to a ghost writer, And Furthermore. It's a breezy, curious book, which treats her life as a never-ending series of wonderful adventures on the stage and in front of the camera. Parents and siblings, her late husband Michael Williams and her daughter Finty get supporting roles from time to time, but anything in the way of revelatory emotion or psychological insight is saved for Cleopatra or Mother Courage. In the past six decades Dench has only twice had any time off from working: when she gave birth to Finty, and when she was nursing her husband, who died of cancer in 2001. She talks about her thespian fears of not being in work, but she has never experienced that state. She likes to recall how Trevor Nunn was a bit sniffy when she mentioned she had been asked to do the sitcom with her husband that became A Fine Romance. Her response was something of a statement of intent: "I think it is our business to do as many things as we can…"

I'm struck, talking to her, that when you ask her about her life, she thinks first of her work. What have been the best of times, I wonder. She immediately thinks of "going to the Vic and all those plays. Stratford days on bikes. Then theatre in Oxford and Nottingham and being in West Africa with the company…"

We are here on the occasion of another of those ongoing adventures: Dench's seventh outing in a Bond movie as M, in Skyfall, a film of which I have been allowed to see three explosive and chaotic minutes. In those minutes she appears to announce the death of 007, an obit that quickly seems greatly exaggerated. There have been rumours that this will be Dench's last outing as M, that in the film she identifies her successor, a shady Ralph Fiennes, before saying a brutal goodbye to Her Majesty's Secret Service. She's too practised a Bond girl to give any of this away before the closely guarded opening night, though.

The role has become a nice punctuation mark in her life in recent years, she suggests, and of course "great fun". Playing with gadgets as M in her first film she recalled how she became "completely drunk with power, because I can't mend anything, or even put the ironing board up properly". She still likes the fact that she gets to be imperiously bossy in it, though is quick to also say that: "I would hate people to think bossy is all I can do." She gets on well with Daniel Craig, but not well enough for him to let her in on the secret of his Olympic parachute jump with the Queen. She's been thrilled this time around to be directed again by Sam Mendes, whom she first worked with on The Cherry Orchard 20 years ago. "You feel great when there is someone you trust there on the bridge, a firm hand."

Dench talks about M with the kind of self-deprecating matter-of-factness with which she discusses all her roles. It's good for her because, she says, unlike Craig, on whose shoulders the whole thing rests, she gets to take it lightly, be a bit irresponsible. It's not her most onerous assignment, even in terms of travel: "This time I got to Pinewood. And I got to Glencoe, which was very beautiful. And I got to Aldershot, which was slightly less so," she says. The character has developed "necessarily, just by the fact I have got older, and she has to work even harder to prove she is up to it..."

Bond was important for Dench in one way, in that it has given her an international audience. Before 1995's GoldenEye she was little known in America. She still gets asked sometimes: "Apart from M, have you done anything else?" and no doubt demurs from mentioning the record seven Olivier awards and indelible roles that included her Juliet for Franco Zeffirelli in 1960; the first London Sally Bowles in Cabaret in 1968; Lady Macbeth in Trevor Nunn's landmark 1976 production; Cleopatra opposite Anthony Hopkins in 1987 and on and on.

One of the more curious aspects of Dench's career is how long it took filmmakers to realise what she might be capable of in front of the camera. At the first screen test she went to, while she was starring at the Old Vic, a man looked at her for a long time and said: "Well, Miss Dench, I have to tell you: you have every single thing wrong with your face." When she walked out, she vowed never to try it again. She didn't properly for a long time.

She still feels like a beginner on screen, she suggests, typically separating her own efforts from those of "really good film actors, proper ones, who will always look at a take after it is done". She can't do that. "I find it too hard to cope with that idea that you can't change it. I love the way in the theatre that you can change it every night."

She tries to avoid seeing herself on screen at all, she says. I mention J. Edgar, in which, directed by Clint Eastwood, she plays Leonardo DiCaprio's domineering mother to scene-stealing effect, and she says brightly: "What's it like? I suppose I should see it."

Has anything she has done on screen pleasantly surprised her, I wonder.

"Never," she says. "I think it is always appalling to see yourself on film. I think John Gielgud used to say that he would love to have had a performance of a play he had been in to put on his mantelpiece so he could live with it and see exactly the ways he could have done it better. Because there are always ways. In the theatre you can change things ever so slightly; it's an organic thing. Whereas in film you only have that chance on the day, and you have no control over it at all."

When I mention J. Edgar she mentions, too, being "completely daunted" by Clint Eastwood. "He rang me up, and I thought at first it was a friend sending me up. So I didn't take it seriously to start with. And then I realised it was really him and that was a tricky conversation. I hadn't met him by the time I got on set, really. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and there was this immensely tall man standing there, a bit terrifying, but brilliant…"

She still likes to think of herself a bit as an interloper in that world; it makes it easier. Who else has she been overawed by, I ask.

"Oh, lots of them. George Clooney – I was bit in awe there. And my daughter was mad about Antonio Banderas, and we were at a party and he came over and asked for a light. I thought she was going to faint. We love going to awards for that reason, to see these huge larger-than-life figures…"

It's quite endearing, this insistent modesty – but it's also, you guess, a way of taking pressure off herself for anything other than acting itself. She has developed other strategies for this. Infamously she has a habit of turning up for a new part without having once read the script. She has always liked to have things read to her rather than reading them herself, and now she has the "perfect excuse" of an eye condition, macular degeneration, inherited from her mother, which makes a lot of reading impossible (though the disease will not, as some reports have had it, lead to loss of vision). "Even before that, though," Dench says, "I have always had a director tell me the story. I want them to put it into words for me. And I am interested in what they choose to put in and leave out. That, after all, is what you are going to do for the audience. I like to have it presented to my mind's eye."

She adopts this approach even when choosing parts. Her husband Michael would read scripts for her and give her a line or two and she would immediately have a sense of whether she wanted to do it. Finty, also an actor, does it for her now. "I have always said that phrase: 'What larks, Pip,'" Dench recalls, "and when Finty saw that line in the script of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, she told me I just had to do it. I was having doubts about going to India and so on, but she was right." In all of this she seems to want to hand over responsibility, to restrict her choices to her acting.

In her spare time on set, she often paints landscapes – "So much better than taking photographs, because it really makes you look and remember," she says. I ask her if the process of constructing a character is similar.

"No, a painting is your decision when it comes to it, whereas if you are playing a character it is also everybody else's decision, really, what it should be."

Does she ever paint her characters from her mind's eye, as Antony Sher, for example, always does?

"I don't, although when I am with a script or in rehearsal I might doodle a character's face or something. I nearly always do that. But what I do is listen to what everybody says about you and try to assimilate that."

She is careful about what information she takes on board. Her next role is in a film directed by Stephen Frears, Philomena, the true story of an Irish woman who searched for 50 years for the son, born illegitimately, taken from her by nuns and "sold" to a wealthy American family. Steve Coogan will play the journalist Martin Sixsmith, who helped the woman in her quest, and wrote the original story. "I can go and meet Philomena Lee," Dench says, "though I am not yet sure that I will. I remember playing On Giant's Shoulders about that lovely thalidomide boy Terry Wiles. The first day of filming we were up near Sandy on the A1, and I came face to face with his mother and she just burst into tears and went to pieces. I was shaken by that, and ever since I have been wary of meeting the people whose lives I have been playing. But I think I will meet Philomena Lee. I think it would be good for me to meet her and get the tone of her."

Does she always start with an inkling of tone?

"In some ways," she says. "But anything can be useful. I wanted to be a set designer when I was young. And I still think I am as interested in a set and the costumes as anything else. I remember I was in Stratford once and only doing one play, so in my afternoons I went off and learned how to knot a wig as they would have done back then. That gave me a wonderful insight…"

Her daughter has said she knows her mother inside out, except for one thing. She has no idea what motivates her to work, the continuing compulsive drive. Does she have any idea herself?

"I just feel I have to keep doing it," Dench says. "I never want to stop. I need to learn every day. I don't question the curiosity. It's like I love quizzes and things. Did you know what Nostradamus's first name was? Michel! It's not likely, is it?"

I wonder how often she feels she comes up against the edge of what she is capable of.

"That's always what you hope," she says. "I long to be asked to do, you know, the Afghan woman who learns the tightrope late in life. I remember reading the novel Notes on a Scandal and thinking: I would love to play that woman, to try to find a humanity in that dreadful person. I was thrilled to be asked to do that."

One role that Dench did shy away from playing was that of a widow after she became one herself. She allowed herself to be cast in that role by John Madden for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, however. What made her change her mind?

"Well, to begin with, I didn't want people to make that connection, in a way. And what I found hardest about the Marigold Hotel was that I looked so much like myself. I kept asking John if I could dye my hair or something. I wanted it one step removed. I think a lot of actors are very shy people, and you can only properly express yourself if you are endeavouring to be another person. It is like those moulds for gingerbread men, I sometimes think. You have to inhabit another body in a way, make yourself another shape."

She and Williams were famously devoted; he bought her a red rose each Friday of their married life. Did acting become even more crucial to her after he died?

"Yes, it came to my rescue, really," she says. "I went out to Nova Scotia almost immediately after Michael's funeral and made The Shipping News with Kevin Spacey for four weeks. And then I came back and the day after started Iris and did all of that. And then I immediately went back to Canada to finish The Shipping News. And then I was into Pride & Prejudice. People, friends, kept saying: 'You are not facing up to it; you need to face up to it,' and maybe they were right, but I felt I was – in the acting. Grief supplies you with an enormous amount of energy. I needed to use that up."

Dench by all accounts is the consummate team player, and she seems to have something of a dread of being alone. Her daughter and grandson, now 15, live with her part of the time at her house, Wasp Green, in Surrey, and on her five acres she also has the company of "a dog, four cats, two guinea pigs, a lot of ducks and a lot of coots and 10 water voles, and a huge goldfish that has died twice and I blew into its mouth twice and revived it. Lazarus." She grew up in a noisy household in York with drama-loving parents, her father a doctor, and two older brothers, and 17 cats ("During the war," she says, "nobody had enough food for animals so we took them in.") Part of her impulse to work has always seemed to recreate that, to be a spirited part of something bigger than herself. Before she goes on stage she always has the audience hubbub piped into her dressing room – "I need that sense of life," she says. Her worst fear is "a one-woman show". One gap in her compendious CV I note is any Beckett.

"I was asked to do that play Happy Days once," she says. "But she is on her own on stage with a thing in her left hand and one in her right. I thought: I can't do that. So yes – I was beaten there. I don't want to do anything on my own, not at all. I like that thing of actors coming together and doing that thing that evening for that particular audience. Not any audience, but this one in front of you."

There must have been times, I say, when she hasn't got on with her fellow players in a long theatre run…

She thinks for a moment. "No, I've never been in anything when I have wished it would be over, or when it hasn't come together," she says.

I was, I say, marvelling at her Wikipedia page earlier. Does she ever allow herself the satisfaction of feeling like she has done enough?

She looks a bit shocked, takes a sip of tea. "I hope not," she says with a smile. "It might well feel like enough for someone else. But it always feels like nowhere near enough for me…"

Skyfall is released on 23 October

Where are the Blessed Peacemakers?

Why it’s so hard for Christians to understand the logic of nonviolence in their own traditions

By Elizabeth Drescher

Elizabeth Drescher teaches in the undergraduate program in Religious Studies and the Graduate Program in Pastoral Ministry at Santa Clara University.

Last week’s killings of Americans in Libya has sparked new reflection on the relationship between religion, politics, and violence. Among many thoughtful responses to the attacks that challenge the mind-numbing cravenness of the Romney campaign’s response, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks have perhaps most clearly defined the intimate relationship between religious faith and peacemaking at the heart of both political diplomacy and world religions:

In times like these, it can be easy to despair that some differences are irreconcilable, some mountains too steep to climb; we will therefore never reach the level of understanding and peacefulness that we seek, and which I believe the great religions of the world call us to pursue. But that’s not what I believe, and I don’t think it’s what you believe either here tonight. Part of what makes our country so special is we keep trying. We keep working.

Yet, though violence on the international stage has now captured our attention, our continued efforts toward peace surely being at home, where in the space of just a bit more than a month, from July 20 to August 24, 33 people were killed and another 99 were wounded in a series of mass shootings—a summer of the gun.

On each deadly occasion, there have been passionate, if woefully brief, conversations about the need to reexamine gun regulation in the United States, particularly with regard to the lapsed ban on assault weapons and laws protecting interstate and, by extension, online ammunition sales.

Perhaps Chris Hedges is right: “We have created and live in a world where violence has become the primary form of communication.” Which leaves us where with regard to a national conversation on violence? Dead in the water?

The Armor of God?

Oh, if only there were a place where people could gather on a regular basis to talk about causes, effects, and solutions for escalating public violence, I thought on my way to church recently. It turned out to be a Sunday when most Catholics and Mainline Protestants were reading, in the Apostle Paul’s “Letter from a Roman Jail to the people of Ephesus,” a paradoxical inversion of the rhetoric of violence as pervasive in the first century as the twenty-first:

Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. … Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Ephesians 6:10-17)

Now, of course, other religious traditions have highly developed theologies and philosophies of nonviolence. But, in the West, it is Pauline Christianity which has most deeply shaped both rhetorics of hate and violence and counternarratives of justice and nonviolence. So, understanding what Paul might have been up to and how he has been misread in influential passages such as the one above is particularly important not only for the majority of self-identified Christians who populate the United States, but also for those who must contend with the various Christian ideologies and practices that remain, despite cries of an encroaching anti- or post-Christian secularism, deeply embedded in the culture.

The “armor of God,” too often turned to violent purposes, is comprised of truth, righteousness, and peace. Paul’s “helmet of salvation”—that which protects the center of human thought and reason—and “sword of the Spirit” are not of course acts of aggression, but words. Hence, likewise, the sword of justice wielded in the Revelation of John (Rev. 19:11-15)—the New Testament book most often cited in violent, apocalyptic Christian fantasies—extends from the mouth of the white-robed representation of the risen Christ. He slays the forces of cosmic evil not with physical aggression, but with the same “Word of God” that Paul calls out as the fundamental instrument of Christian faith, righteousness, and peace.

Christians, we seem to forget in all the clucking over the extent to which fried chicken sandwiches do or do not represent ideological preferences, are meant to use words, and to use them in particular for peace. This peace—the “Peace of Christ” in Christian tradition—is the heart of Christian teaching and practice, upon which rests everything from faithful stewardship of creation, to economic justice, to the rejection of violence as a solution for personal, familial, social, or political disagreements.

So why am I not hearing about this much in Sunday sermons?

One reason is that there is a complex theology behind the Gospel message of activist, transformative nonviolence that is easy for a homilist to set aside in favor of God-loves-you! Sunday messages that demand little from believers beyond robust self-esteem and a vague acceptance of God’s expectation that we generally do right by others. Thus, dusted off during Lent and the Easter season, the premodern language of sin, suffering, sacrifice, and salvation, as Marcus Borg has argued and Pew researchers have tracked, are poorly understood by Christians themselves.

A recent New York Times commentary by Colleen Oakley on the religious mullings of disidentified Christian agnostics makes clear that many Christians are hard-pressed to explain what it means to say “Jesus was the son of God,” or “Jesus died for our sins.” Even people who wouldn’t for a minute think of themselves as uninformed biblical literalists interpret these statements with an uncontextualized, theological flatness that would move you right to the top of the class at Liberty University.

This widespread ignorance among Christians—perhaps especially those who think of themselves as more progressive in their beliefs and practices—encourages cooptation by those with an appetite for domination, violence, and exploitation. At the same time, it invites wider misunderstanding and an understandable disdain among non-Christians for what appears as a valorizing of violence in the Christian tradition.

Theology is Complicated

Much of this has had to do with the slow evolution of normative Christian theology, particularly with regard to what is known as atonement theology—the explanation for why Jesus, at once son of God and “true God from true God,” was allowed to die a criminal’s death in a public execution. If Jesus is God, or even if Jesus was merely God’s son, people have asked through the centuries, why would God as Jesus himself or God as the father of Jesus not save himself/him from such a shameful, horrific death? And how, the questioning continues, does Jesus’ death effect the salvation of humankind that Christians claim?

This relationship between Jesus’ death and salvation is at the center of atonement theology and of Christian faith. Perhaps more importantly for those of us wondering how to address violence today, it is at the center of Christian practices of activist nonviolence. Christians are called to nonviolence, that is, not because God asks them to be nice people, but because of why and how the God they worship through Jesus Christ ministered in the world, was executed, and was resurrected.

The “do unto others,” “turn the other cheek,” “love your neighbor as yourself” philosophies that many Christians and non-Christians do identify as among the teachings of Jesus matter only when they are held against the reality of intolerance, injustice, and violence to which Jesus succumbed and over which, in Christian belief, he triumphed as the risen Christ. Absent the social and theological meaning of his violent death, Jesus’ teachings are merely the bumper sticker slogans of a hippy prophet and the resurrection is but the twisted magic trick of a sadomasochistic god.

No Satisfaction

The bullet-point version, if you will, of classic Christian atonement theories offers up five categories: ransom, satisfaction, substitution, moral influence, and solidarity. The first four go something like this:

• Ransom: Adam and Eve sold their souls to Satan when they ate of the Tree of Knowledge, tainting all of humanity with “original sin.” With Jesus’ death, God reclaimed humanity from the devil, human disobedience having been traded for divine obedience.

• Satisfaction: Jesus’ died on behalf of humankind, whose sinfulness offended the feudal Lord God, creating a debt of honor that humanity could not possibly repay. The death of Jesus is the only thing that could satisfy this debt.

• Substitution: This variation on satisfaction theology has it that humanity was so sinful that God should have wiped out the lot of us, but had made a covenant with Noah after the Great Flood not to do so. Thus, Jesus stands in for sinful humanity, allowing God to avoid violating the covenant while satisfying the debt owed to God.

• Moral Influence: Here, Jesus’ death was not seen primarily as a means to satisfy God, who needs nothing from humanity and whose mind is unchangeable, but to influence moral change in humans through the example of Jesus’ perfect obedience to God, including suffering death at the hands of sinful humans.

From the early church to the Reformation, these theologies of atonement, with various adaptations, made sense to most Christians. The language of “ransom,” “redemption,” “satisfaction” and “obedience” are shot throughout Christian liturgies, regardless of the ideological leanings of particular denominations. You are as likely to hear “Jesus was ransomed for us sinners” from the pulpit of a progressive Lutheran church as you are from that of a conservative evangelical megachurch.

The trouble, however, with all of the classic atonement theories is that they allow that violence is necessary to establish the authority of God and, perhaps more incomprehensibly, God’s love for humanity. Jesus may have been the wrong mark for Roman imperial violence tinged with anti-Semitism, but in these models of atonement, violence itself, injustice, and the abuse of power are presented as not inherently problematic. They’re merely misdirected.

Enlightened Nonviolence

It’s literally taken centuries for most mainstream Christian theologians to move away from what for many Christians and non-Christians alike seem unfathomably cruel, violence-legitimizing interpretations of Jesus’ execution as ransom to Satan, satisfaction or substitution for a debt owed by sinful humanity to God, or as an abusive object lesson in obedience.

The trickle-down from seminary to pulpit may be slow, but the now common theological interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ moves well away from the idea of divinely sanctioned violence, the echoes of which have long been seen in justifications for aggression against non-Christians, non-Westerners, women, children, and so on. Since at least the late 1950s, liberation theologians like Leonardo Boff, Katie Geneva Cannon, Gustavo Gutiérrez, William Stringfellow, and Dorothee Sölle, have emphasized the solidarity with humans who suffer—the poor; ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities; women; the disabled; the sick and dying—as a result of sinful human cultural, economic, political, and religious systems as essential to any meaningful understanding of why God became human, ministered among those at the margins of society, and was executed at the hands of the powerful.

Atonement theologies that highlight God’s solidarity through Jesus with those who suffer eschew the structures and vocabularies of domination and violence that Jesus encountered in his life and that brought about his death. An enlightened, nonviolent version of classic moral influence theories, theologies of radical Christian solidarity argue that God became human as Jesus to make known, as only a divinity choosing to be present in human form could, the tragic vulgarity of the systematized human impulse to domination, exploitation, and violence.

Against this backdrop, Jesus’ teachings about the “Kingdom of God” available “on earth as it is in heaven” and his resurrection are much more than slick marketing brought home with a jaw-dropping divine parlor trick. They are powerful critiques of the social striving, accumulation of material wealth, religious self-righteousness, and the often violent means used to enforce elite status that corrupt human cultures. The lowly birth, bottom-up ministry, criminal execution, and miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ are, likewise, for Christians proclamations that salvation is not a passive, ringside, spectator sport viewed from a mystical kingdom in the sky. Christians are called by faith in the here and now to be “all in” with regard to justice, compassion, and nonviolence—though the response to this call has been rare enough that those who have attempted to make it a way of life came to be called “saints” in a specialized way that St. Paul surely never intended.

Or, as the British Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton famously put it, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

Demographically speaking, Christianity may well be on the wane, but self-identified Christians still make up nearly 80% of the U.S. population and Christian theologies and practices are deeply woven into the fabric of American culture. Given the violence that has shown itself in such a pronounced way over a long, hot summer of discontent across the country, it seems reasonable that Christian believers should be called—by Christians themselves and those of other or no faith tradition—to enact the commitments of their faith in the service of nonviolence and practices of justice and compassion that support it.

It’s been a more than a generation since Christian churches—black churches, for the most part—were seen, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, as centers of nonviolent social engagement. For a remarkable season of dissent and meaningful, if incomplete, social transformation, the Christian gospels and the letters of St. Paul were the very soul of a lived rhetoric of peace and justice. This theology of solidarity and nonviolence did not fail to express its own maddened sense of frustration, disappointment, and outrage, but managed to do this without recourse to the gun-fueled violence, destruction, and death it often faced.

It is this tradition to which Secretary Clinton harkened in her remarks after the Libya attacks:

When Christians are subject to insults to their faith, and that certainly happens, we expect them not to resort to violence. When Hindus or Buddhists are subjected to insults to their faiths, and that also certainly happens, we expect them not to resort to violence. The same goes for all faiths, including Islam.

I can’t speak for other world religions. But, as a Christian and as an American, I can insist that it is time for Christians to begin living actively within this tradition of nonviolent peacemaking again. It is time for Christian churches—all of them—to start speaking and acting out of a zeal for justice and peace more than out of a desire for personal comfort as though that counted for spiritual meaning. It is time, that is, for Christian churches to atone for their own role in the culture of violence within which we all suffer by standing actively against it week upon week upon week in the pulpit and on the street.