Fors Clavigera

"Radical Orthodoxy and Political Theology": Grad Course @ Trinity College

2012-01-20T08:04:00.003-05:00

It is an absolute honor and delight for me to have been recently appointed as Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College, University of Toronto (and not just because Trinity is the fabled inspiration for The College of St. John & the Holy Ghost in Robertson Davies' novel, Rebel Angels!).

My first experience teaching there last summer was delightful: engaging faculty, a wonderful dean (David Neelands), and students from across the Toronto School of Theology--all while nestled in a historic college at the heart of the University of Toronto. The whole experience was a refreshing change from the environs of west Michigan and an opportunity to teach material I cant' tackle with undergraduates. So I'm very grateful to now have an ongoing relationship.

This will likely mean that I'll teach a graduate seminar each summer. For 2012, I'll be offering a course sort of "by request": "Radical Orthodoxy and Political Theology" (a description and initial syllabus are available via that link). Jeffrey Stout meets Graham Ward meets Saint Augustine. Should be great fun.

This will also be an opportunity to turn to the work I'll be doing for the third and final volume of my "Cultural Liturgies" trilogy, which will focus on political theology. Spring 2013 is a sabbatical term for me, and I'm just now finalizing plans for where we'll spend that. Given that it's currently 4 degrees in Grand Rapids, MI, someplace warm gets a certain priority in planning. Stay tuned.

Constrained to be Free: On "Freedom" Software

2012-01-12T08:17:00.004-05:00

Is this what it's come to? Smart, creative adults needs to pay for software to save themselves from distraction by the internet? Apparently.

Pico Iyer's essay, "The Joy of Quiet," in last Sunday's Times mentioned software called "Freedom." The website bills the software thus:

Freedom is a simple productivity application that locks you away from the internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom frees you from distractions, allowing you time to write, analyze, code, or create. At the end of your offline period, Freedom allows you back on the internet. You can download Freedom immediately for 10 dollars, and a free trial is available.

It then goes on to list the writers who have positively praised Freedom software in various interviews, including Nora Ephron, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby, Miranda July, and many others.

I'm sure others have already commented on the almost Pascalian irony here. Let me just note the obvious: The development of such software is, technically speaking (I'm not here to judge), the confirmation of the absence of virtue--that is, the absence of adequate internal dispositions to pursue the good and resist temptations away from that. In short, again technically speaking, such software is a corrective for the vice of sloth--but a wholly external corrective. Aquinas notes that law and virtue are sort of in inverse proportional relation to each other: the more virtuous I am (having good habits), the less the external constraint of law is necessary. Conversely, the more vicious I am, the more the force of law is necessary.

In this particular case, what has happened is that we have unwittingly imbibed habits of distraction: the material rhythms of an "online" life have inculcated in us patterns of behavior--and hence internal dispositions--to seek distraction. It's not that we lack habits; it's that we have acquired habits of distraction.

And so software that constricts me is called "Freedom."

Don't get me wrong: something about this thrills my Augustinian heart. As I've argued elsewhere, Augustine is one of the first to articulate the Christian understanding of freedom that is almost incomprehensible in our libertarian age: to be "free" is actually to be rightly constrained, to be empowered to choose the good. I am free just to the extent that I am a slave of Christ, and I am free just to the extent that the Spirit of God has so habituated me that I become "disposed" toward the good. "Sanctification" is sort of the extension of regeneration over time such that my habits are renewed. So it's ultimately not just submitting to an external law (though that's a start) but ultimately absorbing an internal reorientation.

So in some ways, to call this software "Freedom" is a kind of functional, unwitting Augustinianism. But I doubt its creators--or many of its users--are interested in signing up to be consistent Augustinians (cue young enthusiasm for Ron Paul here). But their willingness to submit to constraint in order to be free might be a backhanded clue to what it takes to be human.

Adele as Allegory

2012-01-11T08:50:00.004-05:00

Because of her commercial success, some indie music snobs might miss the fact that Adele is one of the great female crooners of a generation. We bought my daughter a copy of her live performance at Royal Albert Hall for Christmas, but I think it's been in the CD player in my car since December 25. It is a masterful, captivating performance (despite the fact that she was suffering from a throat condition and would undergo surgery shortly after).

Just today it hit me how one of her classics of forlornness, "Someone Like You," can be heard allegorically--not only as a ballad of love lost, but as a wider meditation on loss and rejection. (David Foster Wallace, in his conversations with David Lipsky, said country music takes on a whole new meaning if you listen to it allegorically--even if the "you" in all those sad songs is heard as the "You" of the universe.) In the live performance she invites the audience to sing along, and given the sad, broken world that we live in, it's a song that everyone knows by heart.

This is not the Royal Albert Hall performance (there are a number of amateur recordings of that available), but a slightly different performance. Worth a listen. Or two.

@C3Nashville Conference, March 1-3, 2012

2012-01-10T07:44:00.002-05:00

I'll be joining a great line up folks for the upcoming C3 (Christ, Church, Culture) Conference hosted by the St. George's Institute in Nashville, TN on March 1-3, 2012. This conference has quickly built a strong reputation for bringing together people at the intersection of theology, ministry, the arts, and cultural engagement. I'll be joining other plenary speakers such as Kenda Creasy Dean, Makoto Fujimura, Andy Crouch, and George Carey. There are also a number of breakout workshops (I'll lead one). And it all kicks off with a tapas reception--what's not to love?

Favorite Reads 2011: Novels

2012-01-09T07:54:00.002-05:00

Of the novels I read in 2011, here are the five that stand out in terms of their quality as well as their continued, lingering presence in my imagination:

5. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom.

I began 2011 by reading this novel in January. Much-discussed, people seem to either love it or hate it. I'm in the camp of the former, though I continue to think that Franzen holds an aloof, judgmental distance from his characters that makes it hard for readers to sympathize. (In fact, when I read his essay collection, The Discomfort Zone, later in the year, I thought Franzen's critique of Mann's "ironic condescension" could just as easily be leveled against Franzen). Nonetheless, Franzen remains a master of the contemporary family epic and an astute observer of our present.

4. Richard Price, Kate Vaiden.

I'll admit I'm inclined to lump North Carolina authors into my "Thomas Wolfe" basket. That's perhaps not always fair, but I think in this case it is entirely right to see Kate Vaiden as Reynold Price's female analogue to Wolfe's Eugene Gant. Price's novel is a Bildungsroman with young Kate Vaiden at its center, tracking her afflicted sojourns in North Carolina and Virginia. Kate is surely one of the strongest female characters in 20th-century American fiction, despite all she suffers.

3. James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy.

In the tradition of hyper-realism, this entire novel is narrated by a young Scottish boy of 11 or 12, growing up in working class Glasgow in what seems to be the late 60s or early 70s. It is written in dialect and only avails itself of the lexicon such a lad might have at his disposal. (Though I don't think Kelman ever plausibly comes up with a trope as to why a young working class boy is putting all of this down on paper, and is able to sustain the exercise over enough time to generate a book of over 400 pages--especially since Kieron is no prodigy. While the distractions of a digital age make something like this unbelievable, by setting it in an age of pre-digital simplicity, Kelman perhaps asks us to suspend a little less disbelief.)

When I first started it, the reproduction of the dialect in print was throwing me for a loop (shades of The Sound and the Fury). So I went online looking for YouTube videos that would help me hear the lilt of the Glaswegian accent. I then went back to the book and read out loud for a few pages to help me then internalize the voice I needed to hear in my head as I read silently.

The story is both poignant and charming, while also facing up to the realities of urban life probably just a hair above poverty. You can't help falling in love with Kieron--who, while not averse to being a trouble-maker, is also sweet enough to use little asterisks to help cover up the "dirty words" he and his friends use. Indeed, Kelman probably opens himself to the charge of romanticism since this young lad is just so loveable with such a rich interior

ity. (Here again: I worry that the great loss of our Facebooked age is that 12-year-olds have less occasion to cultivate such interiority.)

Kieron's honesty and forthrightness are endearing. Consider this wonderful passage where he's beginning to notice his world in new ways (and try to hear this in a Glaswegian brogue):

Oh but Lyndsey Farel, she was Sandra's pal. People wanted to f**l off her too but she did not let them. I was down at the shops and saw her. She was looking at me. I thought she was. Another boy was there and we were smoking a fag. She had black hair coming down both sides of her eyes, and her skirt and her legs just like the way she walked and then how she turned round and just how her skirt stuck out, and just swinging. Some lasses' skirts just done that and it looked good just how it went, I thought it was good.

Kieron, with his Irish sounding name, also struggles with the religious tensions of

Glasgow, between Protestants and Catholics ("Papes"). Kieron feels like that line runs right through him: that despite being a Protestant, he might actually be a Pape, since he feels drawn to the material expressions of faith that the "RC's" seem to follow. This suspicion sneaks up on him when he finds himself alone at Sunday School, which again shows Kelman's masterful ability to get at the interiority of a boy in ways Proust could never do:

A bench was there and I sat on it. It was funny how it was just me and I was at the Sunday School and nobody else was. Out of everybody that was all my age only it was me. How come? It was just a thing and I was thinking about it. Then all other stuff. And a secret wee thing how really if I was a Pape. That was a wee thing I used to think. If I was one and did not know it so I was not going to Chapel but just to Church. I should have been going to Chapel but was not. Because I did not know. Because nobody told me. If I did not know. So I could not do it.

The novel left me with a longing to see Kieron continue to grow, hoping I could bump into him today.

2. Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding.

One of this year's "it" novels, but very deserving of the attention and praise. (And the backstory of its long road to publication is scintillating in itself. In fact, Keith Gessen's Vanity Fair article was so engrossing they turned it into an e-book.)

Like Franzen, Harbach is at once literary and eminently readable--indeed, this was something of a page-turner read for me. Like Franzen, Harbach deftly crafts characters with depth who live and move and have their own being; unlike Franzen, you get the sense that the author might actually have some charity toward them. While it's a campus novel, revolving around baseball, with a college president who is a Melville scholar and who has just embarked on his very first gay relationship (with a student, no less!), none of these themes dominate the story. That, in itself, shows remarkable maturity: in the hands of some recent MFA graduate, any one of those could have become a gimmicky spine for the story. Instead, I read the novel as a long meditation on the vexing self-consciousness that plagues late modern culture. And in that respect, I see Harbach very much in the tradition of David Foster Wallace.

1. Shusako Endo, Silence.

Wittgenstein famously concluded his Tractatus with an injunction: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." My relationship to Endo's Silence is of that order: I'm hesitant to even try to speak about how this story affected me. It was my Lenten reading for 2011, and I'm seriously considering making it an annual discipline.

The story of a Jesuit missionary sent to Japan in the 17th century, some have suggested certain parallels to Graham Green's The Power and the Glory. Endo's theme is something like the depth and extent of Christ's identification with sinful humanity--that the incarnation was not just an assumption of humanity but of suffering. At the center of the story are layered considerations of solidarity. Might Christ even be willing to suffer the rejection of his followers? And what if his followers, out of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, could undo their oppression by rejecting Christ? Then could imaging Christ actually look like rejecting him? Is this a temptation, or a way for which we lack the courage? Is martyrdom something we can impose on others? These are only a few of the tortured questions the novel evokes.

But please don't mistake this for a "religious" novel. It is human, all too human in its evocation of these themes.

Favorite Reads 2011: Nonfiction

2012-01-07T09:51:00.004-05:00

5. Val Ross, Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic.

[From my GoodReads review] Since reading Fifth Business, Davies has stood, for me, as the quintessential Canadian man of letters (I realize I'm just catching up with the 1970s in this respect). His emergence from a village in southwestern Ontario resonates with me, of course--though his emergence was to the rarefied world of Upper Canada College, Queen's University, Oxford, and ultimately Massey College at the University of Toronto. But there is something about the Protestant Canadian village that one can never leave behind. As I've often said, "You can take the boy out of Embro, but you can't take Embro out of the boy." The entire Deptford trilogy might be about exactly that point.

Val Ross' quasi-biography employs the same method as Nelson Aldrich's potrait of George Plimpton in George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by More Than 300 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals--and a Few Unappreciative ...--which I reviewed a few years ago (seehttp://jameskasmith.blogspot.com/2009/02... ). The strategy is to compile snippets of conversations and testimonies from a wide array of family, friends, and acquaintances, organized into a chronological survey of a life. It is perhaps the ideal way for a journalist to write a sort of biography, and Ross undertook herculean labor in tracking down sources. (Sadly, Ross died of cancer before this book was published.)

The result is a deceptively easy read that breezes through Davies life, yet with a rich cumulative effect. I'm now picking up The Manticore.

4. Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe.

Edited by his former agent, Elizabeth Nowell, these letters are charged with the same frenetic energy as his fiction. And given the range from his youth until just a couple of days before his untimely death, they also function as an ersatz autobiography.

Wolfe's candor and sincerity go a long ways toward making up for his narcissism and insecurity. His account of critics and reviewers will surely resonate with anyone who has taken the risk of putting their thoughts in print (noting "that one of the pleasantest occupations of a great many people in this world is to shoot down a whole regiment of wooden soldiers, and then return triumphant from the wars, saying, 'we have met the enemy and they are ours'").

But most interesting are the glimpses into the creative process, the sheer labor of writing, the manic highs and deep lows that attend the process. Wolfe's work ethic was impeccable--none of this "waiting for the muse" mythology, sitting around waiting for inspiration. Wolfe was a workhouse of a writer, a lunchbox creator who punched the clock of discipline.

For more, see my earlier blogs on this book here and here.

3. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Everything I had expected and hoped it would be. See my comments from July for a more detailed reaction.

2. The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford and Elizabeth Kolbert.

I have long been fascinated by the poles, particularly the South Pole because of its proximity to Cape Horn, which also holds a strange enchantment for me. Hitting upon this book in a bargain bin was a wonderful surprise for me. The book is really two-in-one, inverted to one another, with different covers front and back--so each cover is actually the "front" of the other book. More importantly, Kolbert and Spufford have done a marvelous job selecting and editing pieces from the history of exploration in both poles. To be able to read the waves of attempts to reach the pole in quick succession is a peculiar but affecting experience. I also think this book is a treasure trove for those thinking about leadership (as Nancy Koehn showed in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago).

My bias is towards the Antarctic: here you'll find selections from Cook, Wilson, Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott, along with the classic tale of Scott's catastrophic return to Antarctica as told by Cherry-Garrard. In recounting the "Winter Journey," a sort of scientific side-exploration before "the Polar Journey" to the pole itself, Cherry-Garrard is poignant in his understatement as he recalls his companions, Birdie and Bill:

In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South. These two men went through the Winter Journey and lived: later they went through the Polar Journey and died. They were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was.

Through all these days, and those which were to follow, the worst I suppose in their dark severity that men have ever come through alive, no single hasty or angry word passed their lips. When, later, we were sure, so far as we can be sure of anything, that we must die, they were cheerful, and so far as I can judge their songs and cheery words were quite unforced. Nor were they ever flurried, though always as quick as the conditions would allow in moments of emergency. It is hard that often such men must go first when others far less worthy remain. [...]

I am not going to pretend that this was anything but a ghastly journey, made bearable and even pleasant to look back upon by the qualities of my two companions who have gone.

Spufford's own introduction is a gem in its own right. He is an excellent writer and doesn't shrink from the solemn, almost sermonic tone that we find in the journals themselves. For example, he confronts the reader and asks:

Which are you? Are you a Captain Scott, tense, anxious, man-hauling your way through the snow by main force yet describing it brilliantly afterwards, relying for your authority on military rank and charm? Are you a Shackleton, with exactly the same prejudice against dog-sledging as Scott, having learned it with him on the same disastrous journey in 1902, but allied to a wonderfully supple gift for managing people, maternally kind when you could be, unhesitatingly ruthless when you had to be? Are you Amundsen, driven, impeccably self-educated in polar technique, yet far more of a polar performance artist than a word man, and so best appreciated ever after by skiers, mountaineers, ice athletes who can dance through the same moves he made, on his way to the Pole in 1912? Are you, far more obscurely, a Shirase, scarcely noticed by the main contenders for the Pole when he turned up in the Ross Sea in 1912, yet determined to be there, to make a start?

1. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

Those close to me are sick of hearing about this book. And indeed, what hasn't already been said about it, surely the most-reviewed book of 2011? I can only say that I was--and continue to be--deeply affected by this book. It was discomforting and inspiring. While Isaacson's prose is pedestrian, the story--and Jobs as the protagonist--moves on its own. Here is a conflicted character no novelist could have dreamed up. I also think some of my fascination stemmed from the fact that the history of Apple, and the history of personal computing, is pretty much parallel with my own history. I also deeply resonated with Jobs' aesthetic sensibilities--his vision for holistic production, concurrent engineering, and a beautiful simplicity.

Perhaps above all I came away astounded by an energy for innovation and creativity that makes the academy look dowdy and conservative. We scholars like to fancy ourselves radicals, on the front lines, on the cutting edge--but the truth be told we are inherently conservative animals who don't want anyone to mess with the status quo of tenure and staid rhythms of the university as we know it. At points I was almost sheepish as I looked at my own boring, plodding preference for comfort in contrast to the bold innovation that sustained this generation of college dropouts. The book has stayed with me, not always in ways that I like.

Epiphanies: Favorite Poems and Poets, 2011

2012-01-06T07:58:00.002-05:00

Today, Ephiphany, is a fitting day to briefly highlight the poets I spent some time with in 2011, since I'll begin with a poem on just that.

5. My subscription to Poetry is a primary source for new poetry in the house (along with their fantastic mobile app while I'm on the road). A favorite from this past year was Joanne Mackowski, including this one:

Epiphany

A momentary rupture to the vision:
the wavering limbs of a birch fashion

the fluttering hem of the deity’s garment,
the cooling cup of coffee the ocean the deity

waltzes across. This is enough—but sometimes
the deity’s heady ta-da coaxes the cherries

in our mental slot machine to line up, and
our brains summon flickering silver like

salmon spawning a river; the jury decides
in our favor, and we’re free to see, for now.

A flaw swells from the facets of a day, increasing
the day’s value; a freakish postage stamp mails

our envelope outside time; hairy, claw-like
magnolia buds bloom from bare branches;

and the deity pops up again like a girl from
a giant cake. O deity: you transfixing transgressor,

translating back and forth on the border
without a passport. Fleeing revolutions

of same-old simultaneous boredom and
boredom, we hoard epiphanies under the bed,

stuff them in jars and bury them in the backyard;
we cram our closet with sunrise; prop up our feet

and drink gallons of wow!; we visit the doctor
because all this is raising the blood’s levels of

c₆H₃(OH)₂CHOHCH₂NHCH₃, the heart caught
in the deity’s hem and haw, the oh unfurling

from our chest like a bee from our cup of coffee,
an autochthonous greeting: there. Who saw it?

4. Simon Armitage is a longtime favorite, so of course I gobbled up Seeing Stars, which did not disappoint--though I do need to spend some more time with it.

3. One of those "where-have-you-been?" discoveries that are really a self-indictment (where-have-I-been?): the Canadian poet P.K. Page, particularly her collection Cosmologies: Poems Selected and New. The book is published by David R. Godine, a wonderful publisher of poetry whose devotion to the craft is reflected in the attention to material detail in all of their books. Page seems influenced by Neruda, perhaps. But in another sense, she feels like Wordsworth crossed with a hint of Baudelaire--a nature poetry of modernity. Consider just this sample:

2. If Page is Wordsworth meets Baudelaire, then Sarah Lindsay might be Keats crossed with Charles Darwin. A poet of nature who is more specifically a poet of the animal--the poet as zoologist. Both of her collections, Primate Behavior and Twigs & Knucklebones, are delightful and pensive, attentive to the world in all of its beauty and brokenness.

1. The poetry collection that has stuck with me the most from 2011 is Ted Hughes reframing of Shakespeare in Essential Shakespeare--I roundly praised just recently on this blog.

Next up (as soon as I can get to it): Nonfiction, then Novels.

The Kids Are Not All Right (cross-posting)

2012-01-04T09:26:00.003-05:00

[I'm here cross-posting from The Twelve about a unique research opportunity on youth spirituality and worship. "Favorite Reads: 2011 Edition" will resume soon.]

Do me a favor: Promise me you'll read this post with The National's "Conversation 16" video playing in the background. Don't try to exegete the lyrics, just let it rattle and hum a couple of times through. If you're looking for a more adventuresome video version, try this (advanced warning: zombie ahead!).

The kids are not all right. That is the evidence-based, data-driven picture that is emerging from sociologist Christian Smith's National Study of Youth and Religion. His account of the paucity of moral reasoning among twentysomethings can't be chalked up as mere grumpy-old-man harumphing about "those damn kids" or a reactionary conservative harangue about godless "secular" America. Smith's longitudinal study provides a deeply worrisome snapshot of the state of spiritual maturity and moral reflection among millenials. Indded, I found the first chapter of his latest book, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, to be positively harrowing in its account of how these young people are "morally adrift." But as Smith is at pains to emphasize: the point isn't to demonize twentysomethings; the point is for the rest of us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we produced this generation.

Earlier volumes (Soul Searching and Souls in Transition) did the same with respect to religious understanding and spiritual maturity. While the study considers young people from various religions and those without any, the implications for Christian ministry were especially challenging (explored with verve and wisdom by Kenda Creasy Dean in Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teens is Telling the Church). The "faith" that young Christians were learning (often from age-segmented youth ministries) was not trinitarian Christian faith but rather "moralistic therapuetic deism": a strange deity who embraces antimonies and paradox, who is both a legalist and a great big bubble gum machine in the sky--the perfect god for American civil religion, who judges premarital sex but is enough of a big teddy bear to also let it slide, because really, he just wants you to be happy. The god of moralistic therapeutic deism is a lot like Oprah, it turns out.

And if that's the god that our young people worship, we need to ask ourselves: What have we done? As Dean puts it, this is an indictment of the church, not teenagers.

This is why I think Bert Polman's upcoming seminar (June 18-22, 2012), "Singing What We Believe: Theology & Hymn Texts," is such an excellent, timely opportunity for a blend of scholars and practitioners to spend some time together thinking about these issues. For maybe it's at least partly the case that young people have been sung into the moralistic therapeutic deistic faith. Here's a description of the seminar:

Congregational songs have often been called the lay persons’ “handbook of theology” as “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” have a unique mix of doxa (worship) and logia (teaching) which shape and express the life of Christians. This seminar will explore initially the theology of hymn texts, based on an analysis of some 250 classic hymn lyrics and a similar number of contemporary Praise-Worship texts. Then the seminar participants will discuss the relationship between the theological themes of such texts and the prevalence of what sociologists of religion (Christian Smith, et al) have termed “moralistic therapeutic deism.” In other words, this interdisciplinary seminar will focus not only on doxa and logia but also onpraxis, and is expected to raise issues about current religious convictions and practices of Christians.

Do consider applying (by February 1)!

Favorite Reads 2011: Short Stories

2012-01-02T07:34:00.001-05:00

Twas the year of New Yorker stories for me, I guess. While I dabbled in some other collections (Hemmingway, Alice Munro), here are the five stories that made a dent on my imagination this past year (all published in the New Yorker):

5. Lauren Groff, "Above and Below." A rather minimalist tale of a Florida runaway. Excellent writing. I'm hoping this is a first taste of what will be a novel.

4. Ron Rash, "The Trusty." A Thomas Wolfe-ish tale of a break from a chain gang in North Carolina. A constant sense of foreboding takes a surprising turn at the very end.

3. George Saunders, "Home." I've blogged about this one already.

2. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, "Gilgul." It's funny: when I first started reading this, I hadn't paid attention to the author and sort of assumed it was a story by Amos Oz. It is an Israeli story in which a man encounters a gypsy fortune teller after the death of his father. Early in the story he powerfully recounts the sensation upon his father's death:

The shock of it. He, Ravitch, who had always thought his mind inviolable, had naively conceived of depression as merely a state of being very sad. The trembling of his hands and the motor roaring in the back of his skull had enlightened him. Clinical depression, a succession of doctors had explained gravely, patiently, defining his suffering. Not uncommon under the circumstances. Not severe enough for hospitalization. A cocktail of various pills, taken over three months, had rid him of the worst symptoms. Time and new habits would undoubtedly assuage his nocturnal agitation. What was left was simply the feeling of being scooped out, hollow. No other words for it. But what did it portend?

1. George Saunders, "Tenth of December." This is an incredible story. Deeply affecting. An excellent example of free indirect speech across two different protagonists whose stories eventually intertwine: a pudgy, dorky, but imaginative young boy, marginalized by his difference, and an older man suffering from an illness that drives him to the brink. Saunders, who is a gifted comic writer, here masters a deep sense of hope without bathos.

Favorite Reads 2011: Theology for Christian Scholars

2012-01-01T07:46:00.005-05:00

I don't usually highlight my "professional" reading in these annual retrospectives, but this year I read three theology books that stood out in a unique way. These are books that I would be enthused to give to friends and colleagues. In particular, it struck me that these three books could be very profitably read by Christian scholars from across the disciplines, and each of them would be an excellent candidate for a kind of "One Book, One Campus" program at Christian colleges & universities. Each of them would be sources of renewal for Christian colleges and universities. They would help us recognize wrong turns we've made and unveil problematic assumptions we've unwittingly taken on board. Each of the books also provides a constructive way forward through tensions and challenges that affect the very foundations of contemporary Christian higher education.

So without further ado, I commend to you three important books:

J. Todd Billings, The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Eerdmans, 2010).

For a couple of months after reading this, I was like the Ancient Mariner, button-holing anybody who would listen and pressing upon them the virtues of this outstanding book. Billings points out the paucity of both "conservative" and "progressive" approaches to reading Scripture insofar as they fail to be rooted in the historical Christian practice of theological interpretation. Billings' prose is clear and accessible for wide audiences, and his argument is irenic without pulling any punches. This book deserves to be read, not just by scholars in biblical studies and theology, but by thoughtful Christians in general--and especially by Christian scholars across the disciplines.

Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Eerdmans, 2011).

This could be read as a kind of popular, abridged version of Boersma's magisterial book, Nouvelle Theologie and Sacramental Ontology (Oxford). But it is much more than that: Boersma offers a trenchant diagnosis of all the ways that evangelicalism has bought into the flattened, univocal ontology of modernity--and how that finds expression is a new-found affirmation of creation that borders on a forgetfulness of "heaven." His real quarry is the articulation of a sacramental ontology as the only appropriate metaphysic for a Christian understanding of the world. He then explores the implications of this for different spheres of Christian practice (the interpretation of Scripture, worship, and the practice of theology). In effect he articulates a rich, robust Christian "worldview" that could transform how we think about the mission and task of the Christian university (though the latter implication is not his direct concern, but an implication to be worked out).

N.T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (HarperOne, 2011).

Certainly the most accessible of these three books, Wright's volume is nonetheless paradigm-shifting for how many people might approach the authority of Scripture. With one eye on debates in the Anglican communion, but also familiar with North American evangelicalism, Wright deftly reorients the conversation around the authority of God and then situates Scripture in the economy of God's relationship to his covenant people. Case studies help picture how this works itself out.

Favorite Reads: 2011 Edition

2011-12-31T10:13:00.004-05:00

Looking back, 2011 was a difficult year for our family. But any year in which one can still read can't be all bad. So as per my tradition (see, for example, 2009 and 2010), and as a way to cultivate gratitude, I'll spend the next few posts reflecting on a year of reading.

I'll highlight reads from several categories: Theology for Christian Scholars (a new category this year), Nonfiction, Poetry, Short Stories, and Novels. Stay tuned.

The Fall of Interpretation, 2nd edition

2011-12-22T10:30:00.003-05:00

I've put to bed the proofs and index for a second, revised edition of my first book, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, forthcoming from Baker Academic. (My son, Coleson, helped with the index this time around--breeding a family of child laborers is finally paying off! ;-)

The book is slated for release in April 2012, but that sometimes means you'll see copies in March. I'm eager to see it in print.

The endorsements have also started to come in. Here are a few:

"With the absence of an 'interpretive police,' in the first edition ofThe Fall of Interpretation, James K. A. Smith worried how to keep at bay the charge of relativism. This revised edition unambiguously affirms the particularity of the Nicene tradition as the locale for genuine interpretation of Scripture. Smith cogently argues that we need the church's authoritative theological interpretation of Scripture to live with the varying degrees of the author's 'real presence' in the text."--Hans Boersma, J. I. Packer Professor of Theology, Regent College

"The first edition of James K. A. Smith's Fall of Interpretation cast a clear, sharp light on the important topic of difference in interpretation, and the contribution he made to the theological understanding of hermeneutics has still not been fully appreciated. This second edition, with a new introduction and an added chapter that draws on Smith's further years of philosophical, theological exploration, makes an even more powerful claim for the attention of anyone concerned about the prospects for hermeneutics."--A. K. M. Adam, lecturer in New Testament, University of Glasgow
"In the hands of the unskilled or unwise, hermeneutics can be dangerous, fueling a blaze of apocalyptic fire where interpretation dissolves creaturely goodness into a relativistic morass. Nonetheless, as Smith persuasively argues, interpretation is inevitable. To reject it for 'immediacy' is to close one's eyes to the obvious. Smith shows how hermeneutics emerges not from our sinfulness but from our creaturely goodness. This second edition guides the reader along Smith's own path, resisting the 'emergent' temptation in favor of 'catholic' substance."--D. Stephen Long, professor of systematic theology, Marquette University

More Lessons from Bellow: Our Schilder?

2011-12-21T09:28:00.003-05:00

Today I conclude my little series on Saul Bellow at The Twelve blog: "The Temptations of Assimilation: Schilder our Bellow?" Here's where I end up:

"Being Reformed" is too regularly the banner under which we enthusiastically assimilate to the age. "Being Reformed" is the warrant and rationale for our cultural engagement to the point that it becomes a license to have our cake and eat it, too. "Being Reformed" is the badge of our refusal to be fundamentalists or evangelicals or conservatives or "concordists" or what have you, which only gives us permission to happily assimilate to the spirit of the age (there are both "left" and "right" versions of this available).
If we learn anything from Saul Bellow, we might look for continuing education from Klaas Schilder.

Kahneman :: Brooks :: McGilchrist

2011-12-20T08:47:00.002-05:00

As I'm working through Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, I can't help but compare it to two other important books I've read in the last year or so: David Brooks' much-discussed The Social Animal and Iain McGilchrist's underappreciated The Master and his Emmisary. Of course they are quite different projects, working with different lexicons, and with different goals in mind. But I think one could line up a simple analogy that brings their overlap into focus.

I'm thinking of the parallels between dualities that they each offer: McGilchrist's right/left brain, Brooks' first/second education, and Kahneman's System 1/System 2. Of course each of these calls for a million qualifications, but I think you can line them up as follows:

McGilchrist :: Brooks :: Kahneman

Left brain :: Formal ('first') education :: System 2 = reflexive, "rational"

Right brain :: "Second" (sentimental) education :: System 1 = primary, most influential

Nothing earth-shattering in noticing these parallels, but noting them might open up some new synergies.

Q Gathering 2012: Washington, DC

2011-12-19T14:11:00.002-05:00

One of the highlights of 2011 for me was making the acquaintance of Gabe Lyons and all the good folks associated with Q: Ideas for the Common Good. The conversation has connected me with a wide network of leaders and innovators from various arenas of cultural production (politics, media, the arts, finance and commerce, education, science & technology, etc.). You can get a glimpse of what this is all about in Gabe's latest book, The Next Christians: The Good News About the End of Christian America. In some ways, I read it as kind of an accessible, concrete rendition of James Davison Hunter's landmark book, To Change the World. (I'm not sure how either James or Gabe would feel about that comparison, but that's how the two books reverberate in the echo chamber of my mind.)

So I'm honored and excited to be one of the speakers for the 2012 Q Gathering that will take place in Washington, DC on April 10-12. Indeed, I'm downright geeked to be part of this--in part because I'll be glad to reconnect with some new friends, but also because I know Deanna and I will come away energized and refreshed by lively conversation with innovative people of faith and hope. You might consider joining the conversation.

In Memory of Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T07:45:00.006-05:00

Right here above my desk at home is a section of books by Christopher Hitchens, close at hand since they often repay revisiting. The titles will seem eclectic, but in fact there is a tight logic that threads them together: books on Thomas Paine and Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger and Thomas Jefferson, the Clintons and George Orwell, alongside collections on literature and politics. Perhaps these are all tied together in Letters to a Young Contrarian.

Let us not do Hitchens the injustice of wishing him eternal peace. Let's be honest and honor his memory by recognizing he didn't want it. Granted, I would certainly be grateful if the witness of Francis Collins and the prayers of many were effective; it would certainly make for interesting conversation in the new heavens and earth. (In which case, let's hope sardonic wit is not a sin--and that there are still certain latitudes of grace in the kingdom. It's hard for me to imagine a sober Hitchens being much fun.) But I don't want to impose my fantasies on Hitchens.

So I won't retroactively baptize Christopher Hitchens as I mourn his passing today. Better to honor his brash defiance. And no better way to do that than to listen again to his closing envoi to young contrarians:

I have no peroration or clarion note on which to close. Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the "transcendent" and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Dont' be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

I shall leave you with a few words from George Konrad, the Hungarian dissident who retained his integrity through some crepuscular times, and who survived his persecutors by writing Antipolitics and The Loser, and many other lapidary essays and fictions. (When, after the emancipation of his country and society, they came to him and offered him the presidency, he said, "No, thanks.") He wrote this in 1987, when the dawn seemed a good way off:

Have a lived life instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses. ... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days.

May it be so with you, and may you keep your powder dry for the battles ahead, and know when and how to recognise them.

Condensing Taylor's "A Secular Age"

2011-12-10T16:23:00.004-05:00

Ruth Abbey's review of a new little book by Charles Taylor and Jocelyn Maclure (Secularism and Freedom of Conscience) opens with an interesting observation:

Readers hoping for a condensed version of Taylor's 2007 tome, A Secular Age, will not find it here.

I find that intriguing precisely because I think I'm writing that hoped-for book! I've contracted with Eerdmans to write a crisp little book (of about 50,000 words) that will function as a "guide for the perplexed" as they approach Taylor's daunting tome. The goal is to write a book that at once condenses Taylor's argument while also giving it some room to breathe, with more cultural hooks and analysis that will make his account come alive. Ideally my little book will function as a portal and invitation to A Secular Age--a book that I feel contains an argument with real existential import; but one that has, to date, been underappreciated because of the density of Taylor's prose and the sprawling nature of the book's analysis.

My goal is to finish the book by the end of January 2012, hoping for a quick turnaround from my good friends at Eerdmans. Abbey's lead gives me hope that there might be an audience waiting for it.

Local Bookstore Event, Friday, December 9, 7:30pm

2011-12-08T07:00:00.001-05:00

For those in the West Michigan area, just FYI:

Learning to be Reformed from a Jewish Novelist

2011-12-07T08:52:00.003-05:00

Today I continue my "Lessons from Saul Bellow" over at The Twelve blog. Here's the opening couple of paragraphs:

As you'll note from my recent Perspectives article, "A Peculiar People," I've been thinking a lot about the dynamics of immigration and how that intersects with my own experience of being an immigrant--and being Reformed. That's not just because my Reformed community finds its heritage in an immigrant population; rather, there is something inherent to this expression of the Reformed faith that is poised to appreciate the precarious place of the immigrant and the exile. This is because the people of God inhabit that equally precarious place between common grace andantithesis--between the persistent affirmation that the whole earth is the Lord's (Psalm 24:1) and the heartbreaking recognition that the whole world lies under the sway of the evil one (1 John 5:19). We serve the risen, coming King of creation but are constantly aware of the governorship of the enemy in this meanwhile. And so we are like citizens who return to our homeland only to find it under foreign rule. We are not so different from Israel, who returned from exile only to find themselves exiles in their homeland now run by the Roman empire.
At the heart of what I've imbibed from Kuyper and Dooyeweerd and Runner and Seerveld is the sense that the covenant people of God will (and should) never quite be "at home" anywhere; the people of God hold citizenship in a far country which should make us uncomfortable but constructive inhabitants of any culture. We are called to seek the welfare of the city in which we are exiled (Jeremiah 29:4-7) while also learning to sing the Lord's song in a strange land (Psalm 137:4). We shouldn't lock ourselves up in ex-pat enclaves, as it were--forming holy huddles and circling the wagons to protect ourselves from "the world." But neither should we gleefully assimmilate to majority cultures characterized by disordered love. Reformed Christians, for example, should never easily be described as "good Americans," it seems to me. We should instead by characterized by a kind of immigrant distance, which can also manifest itself as cautious gratitude.

Read the rest of "Learning to be Reformed from a Jewish Novelist."

A Conversation about Church Planting

2011-12-04T20:34:00.003-05:00

Earlier this year I mentioned my rejuvenating time with the Society of Vineyard Scholars. One of the movers and shakers behind SVS is Caleb Maskell, a bright, passionate, all-around-great guy studying the history of American religion at Princeton University and deeply involved in Vineyard urban missions and church planting.

A few months ago, Caleb and I sat down for a Skype conversation about church planting in light of themes I address in Desiring the Kingdom and Thinking in Tongues. It was a ranging conversation which has now been published in Cutting Edge, the Vineyard magazine for church planters. You can download the interview, "Desiring the Kingdom in a Postmodern World" [pdf] or click on the Scribd link below.

Cutting Edge Interview: A Conversation with Caleb Maskell on Church Planting

More Light, Less Heat in the Faith & Science Conversation

2011-11-30T11:40:00.003-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I noted the launch of The Colossian Forum website. On the front page is a short film introducing TCF; we've also created a longer (8 1/2 minute) film that delves into some of the themes in more depth. You might find this a helpful conversation starter in different contexts.

More Light, Less Heat from The Colossian Forum on Vimeo.

Taking Leave of Religion? On Secular Religion

2011-11-22T11:08:00.005-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an excerpt from Phil Zuckerman's new book, Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion. In "Taking Leave of Religion," Zuckerman notes the increase in "apostasy" in the United States, citing the growing numbers of Americans who identify with no religion. This is not just a factor of secularists reproducing, he suggests (nonreligious people have fewer children than believers), but rather an outcome of people leaving faith. He's also happy to repeat the tired canard that, basically, smart people "get over" religious belief.

I won't contest Zuckerman's argument (yet). While he claims to have generated new qualitative data, I think the bar of explanation has been raised by Taylor's A Secular Age. Rehashing the secularization thesis is just uninteresting. Even if Zuckerman correctly predicts a growing departure from institutional religion in the United States, all that means is that the USA is less of an exception. The conclusions one draws from this are what's at issue.

For now, I'm interested in homing in on Zuckerman's claims about "religion" (and the lack thereof). Consider a first conclusion he draws:

Religion is not universal or necessary. Many people live without religion—in fact, prefer it that way. That bald fact strongly counters the notion that people—as people—are intrinsically religious or that religion is inextricable from the human condition. That might seem obvious, yet some scholars continue to write about religion as an inevitable force. Paul Froese, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor University, calls religion an "essential aspect of the human condition." Beliefs about God, he continues, "lie at the core of human understanding," and religion is universal and essentially unalterable. Reginald W. Bibby, a sociologist at the University of Lethbridge, describes religion as one of the "essential needs" of humanity, like food. The existence and recent increase in apostasy renders such notions highly suspect.

This gets at something I've contested in various places over the last several years: the identification of "religion" with particular sets of beliefs, and specifically beliefs about God. (I've crystallized this argument in a chapter I've written, "Secular Liturgies and the Prospect for a 'Post-Secular' Sociology of Religion," which will appear in The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, forthcoming from NYU Press. I'll try to get permission to excerpt here in the future.)

Interestingly, I don't think a Christian account of "religion" requires that we identify religion with belief in God. Whether one considers Paul or Augustine or Calvin, it seems to me that "religion" is associated more fundamentally with an impulse to worship. To say that human beings are ineradicably "religious" is not to say that they just can't shake belief in God.

(As an aside, I think this is exactly the mistake of so much of the current work on "cognitive science of religion" done by Christians in an apologetic mode--per the "Templeton" project, so to speak.)

To say that humans are essentially "religious" is to claim that they are primed to worship, wired devote themselves to something as ultimate, to ascribe "worthship" to some ultimate end. So while people might be "taking leave" of belief in God or gods, or "apostasizing" from specific communities of religious practice, I don't think that is sufficient to conclude that "religion is not universal or necessary." On my account, secular devotion is not just "analogously" religious: it is religious. It is an expression and product of "secular liturgies."

Reconfiguring our definition of religion--away from a belief-centric model to a "liturgical" definition--gives us new radar for cultural analysis and reframes the sorts of data Zuckerman cites. It also gives us a new take on the everyday. To take just one example ready to hand: Here on my desk is the latest issue of the New York Review of Books in which Michael Greenberg offers further reflections on "Occupy Wall Street." Talking with some of the activists in Zuccotti Park, Greenberg comments:

Talking with him, as with Katie, I was reminded of the so-called Tercer Mundista priests I met in Mexico in the early 1970s, who broke with the Vatican and actively supported revolutionary movements in Central America. Both Alec and Katie possessed that calm sense of devotion to a higher calling—not a certainty of belief so much as a certainty of purpose. They both spoke of the movement in unabashedly spiritual terms. And while neither talked explicitly of religion, they seemed to have faith that they were progressing toward the kind of social system that would provide participants a measure of peace and “mental fulfillment.”

Zuckerman's tired categories will not enable him to see the religious nature of secular devotion.

My Rock Star Colleagues

2011-11-21T08:29:00.003-05:00

I am blessed to work with pretty incredible people. Calvin College is the place I've planted myself, in no small part because the intellectual energy of this institution keeps me on my toes: I am constantly learning from my colleagues across the disciplines. We're big enough to have an amazing array of scholars at work in a number of fields, but also just small enough to actually get to know each other and collaborate on different projects.

Indeed, some of my colleagues are just downright "rock stars" who allow the rest of us to bask in reflected glory. As a sample, let me highlight just two who've gotten attention over the past couple of weeks, both members of our legendary English department:

First, Gary Schmidt, who teaches creative writing here at Calvin, is a much-lauded author of fiction for young people--and a regular hit in the Smith house. His earlier books Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and The Wednesday Wars were both Newberry Honor books. And then this year, his new novel, Okay for Now, was nominated for a National Book Award! Yeah, he's kind of a big deal. And he gladly and masterfully teaches eager undergraduates at Calvin College.

Second, Lew Klatt is a colleague of Gary's in our English Department where Lew specializes in poetry. His first collection, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize and his most recent collection, Cloud of Ink, was awarded the prestigious Iowa Poetry Prize. And the accolades just keep coming. Most recently his poem, "Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91," which first appeared in The Believer, has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry of 2011 AND was made into a fantastic short film.

To see that film, hear the poem, and hear Klatt's reflections on "The Artifice of Eternity: Notes Toward a Christian Poetics," enjoy this video of a recent lecture:

The Artifice of Eternity from Calvin College on Vimeo.

The Colossian Forum: Reframing the Faith & Science Conversation

2011-11-17T08:06:00.006-05:00

For the past year I've been quietly involved with a start-up organization called The Colossian Forum. Rooted in the conviction that "all things hold together in Christ," The Colossian Forum aims to help the church grapple with issues that often cause tension and dissension within the body of Christ. In particular, we're focused on helping the church to be equipped to work through debates and disagreements at the intersection of faith and science.

However, our approach is different than other organizations in this ballpark. We are not a conduit of scientific information, nor do we have a stake in any particular "position" (say, on issues of creation and evolution). Rather, The Colossian Forum is focused on the spade work needed to help the church be able to have such conversations. Our task is not to provide information to settle a debate; instead, we want to foster formation in the requisite virtues of compassion, patience, humility, and charity so that the church can be a people who have such debates well--so that we can grapple with potentially divisive issues in a way that does not compromise the unity of the body of Christ, precisely because out witness is tied to our unity.

In addition, The Colossian Forum aims to reframe the Christian theological heritage as a resource rather than a liability in such conversations. We see the tradition as a gift, not a millstone, when it comes to grappling with such issues--and we believe the theological wisdom of the tradition is uniquely "carried" in the worship and practices of the ecclesia.

I'll say more about The Colossian Forum over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I invite you to explore our new website and watch this short film that introduces the mission and vision of TCF:

Colossian Trailer - Nov 2011 from The Colossian Forum on Vimeo.

A Peculiar People: Sifting "Dutch" and "Reformed"

2011-11-11T09:35:00.005-05:00

There are a number of denominations in the United States and Canada that are bound up with a distinct ethnic heritage and specific immigrant communities. These would include Lutheran denominations which were initially founded by German immigrants, the Swedes who founded the Evangelical Covenant Church, the Presbyterian Church in Canada's Scottish heritage, or more recently, the growth of Latino Pentecostal congregations and Nigerian denominations in the United States. My own denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, has a similar history that intertwines a distinct theological accent with a significant ethnic heritage--in this case, waves of Dutch immigration to the United States and Canada.

Almost a year ago, I published an article in our denominational magazine, The Banner, that obliquely addressed some unique tensions (and confusion) at this intersection of Reformed identity and ethnic heritage. In "Buried Treasures?" I noted it this way:

[S]ome have been rightly concerned that what was often valued as “Reformed” was really just “Dutch.” And they rightly understand that the proclamation of God’s kingdom, and the invitation into the people of God, is not a matter of taking on the particularities of some ethnic heritage. So we have spent a generation sifting the tradition, as it were, in order to separate the dross from the treasures of the Spirit.
That’s a crucial concern. Yet I worry that something else has happened along the way: that we have inadvertently fallen into the trap of thinking that Reformed Christian faith is a kind of “content” or “message” that can be distilled and then dropped into other so-called “relevant” or “contemporary” containers.

I've just published a new article in Perspectives that now follows up on this issue, emphasizing the importance of "de-ethnicizing" the Reformed tradition without thereby losing the distinctive theological gifts and accents that we inherit from this specific incarnation of the Reformed tradition which we have inherited from thinkers like Kuyper and Bavinck and Dooyeweerd--who were, providentially, gathered as a community in the Netherlands. We should neither identify Reformed distinctives as if they are merely "Dutch" nor should we throw out such Reformed accents just because they have been inherited from a particular community. As I put it at one point in this new article, "A Peculiar People":

Because a lot of CRC folk—including, it seems to me, denominational leaders— have unwittingly bought the historians' ethnic reductionism, they have also implicitly accepted the Reformed = Dutch equation. As a result, the dynamics of immigrant embarrassment wash onto our denomination's theological heritage. Rightly wanting to unhook the CRC from mere "Dutchness," but having confused Reformed practice with Dutch ethnicity, eager "reformers" in the CRC advocate throwing overboard all sorts of Reformed theological distinctives in the name of relevance, reform, and even anti-racism.

We need a different paradigm. We need to refuse the tendency to reduce Reformed identity to mere Dutch heritage. We need to resist accounts that confuse theological distinctives with ethnic habits. I have elsewhere argued that those of us in historically "ethnic" Reformed denominations need to do some work "sifting" our ethnic habits from our theological inheritance. This is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, we can't let merely ethnic preferences masquerade as theological distinctives; that is, we can't allow Dutch traditionalism to parade under a "Reformed" banner. But I don't think this is our biggest problem today. No, we need to appreciate the second edge of this point: while we cannot allow mere Dutchness to mask itself as "Reformed," neither can we jettison the riches of a Reformed theological heritage under the pretense that it is merely an ethnic inheritance. We can't confuse Reformed babies with Dutch bathwater.

Read the rest of the essay.

On Saul Bellow @ The Twelve Blog

2011-11-09T13:59:00.003-05:00

As further evidence of my continued inability to say "No!" to good things, I have agreed to be part of a team of bloggers at The Twelve, a collaborative blog hosted by the good folks at Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought. It's a diverse team of--you guessed it!--12 bloggers with different styles and interests coming from various vocations (pastors, artists, scholars) but all identifying with Reformed traditions. (Which of us is Judas remains to be seen! ;-) I hope you'll consider adding it to your RSS feeds and such.

My first post begins a little series that will look at Saul Bellow's recently published essay, "The Jewish Writer in America"--which raises some interesting parallels for Reformed folk in a North American context (with obvious differences as well).

On a related note: watch for the release of The Best of the Reformed Journal, a compilation of some of the landmark essays that appeared in the predecessor to Perspectives.

The Hidden Meaning of Hand-Raising

2011-11-07T15:19:00.001-05:00

A fun little sidebar in the Education section of Sunday's New York Times was a bang-on semiotic analysis of "The Hidden Meaning of Hand-Raising." Check out the slide show online. Here's a sample:

THE ONE-FINGER DISSENT

Uh, I’m going to have to disagree actually. I know you haven’t finished talking, but I can already tell that I disagree. I’m pretty sure the professor disagrees, too. I mean, psh, I can see that she’s nodding and smiling at you, but she and I have a more subtle understanding. Right, professor? Professor?

Hughes + Shakespeare

2011-11-05T11:13:00.001-04:00

Essential Shakespeare by Ted Hughes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Shakespeare + Hughes = Jackpot.

This book is brilliant in its conception and stunning in its content. Part of the Ecco "Essential Poets" series, Hughes made a brilliant editorial decision: rather than simply anthologizing Shakespeare's poetry (i.e., the sonnets), Hughes decided to de- and recontextualize passages from the plays as poetry. As he notes, speaking of Macbeth's soliloquy, "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow...":

[I]f one specifies that "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" is spoken by MacBeth as he faces the leafy army that will put an end to his spellbound, murderous career (having just heard that his wife, who prompted the course of action that converted him from the king's loyal champion to a regicidal tyrant, has died), it actually limits the use of the passage for the readers. Its relevance is then confined to Macbeth's unique predicament in a sacrosanct, old-fashioned play rather than applied directly to our immediate plight as ephemeral creatures facing the abyss on a spinning ball of self-delusion. Obviously by reading the passage out of context, one is missing the great imaginative experience of the drama--but one is missing that anyway. The speech on its own is something else, read in less than a minute, learned in less than five, still wonderful, and a pure bonus.

This decontextualization works brilliantly. It makes Shakespeare's language and psychology come alive in a new immediacy. All of a sudden one sees how Shakespeare is part of a lineage of English poetry, part of the stream that will give us Yeats and Eliot and Larkin and Hughes.

One has to wonder whether this work--the work of an "anthologist" now immortalized in Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist--isn't part of Hughes lasting testament. Indeed, I found myself hearing Shakespeare anew, almost as if the language had the same broad earthiness of Hughes' Yorkshire dialect. The very context seemed to help me hear Shakespeare anew, as a voice of England, and not just the sort of Oxford snobbery that usually accompanies his aficionados.

In sum, a marvelous little book--one of those delights to which one returns again and again, to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.

View all my reviews

New Books

2011-10-23T16:20:00.005-04:00

I'm pretty excited about a new book I co-edited with my friend and colleague, David Smith: Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning, now available from Eerdmans. The book is a collection of case studies in which professors from a range of disciplines (including economics, physics, kinesiology, psychology, history, literature, and philosophy) extend and incorporate the pedagogical genius of Christian practices into the Christian college classroom. This grew out of a multi-year research group that was funded by the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith; but the book also includes chapters by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung and Paul Griffiths, plenary speakers at our culminating conference.

David & I were thrilled that Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra were willing to write a Foreword for the book. The back cover includes a snippet from that Foreword:

"If you want to see great teaching in action, read this book. If you believe that college classes can be communities of learning where knowledge of self, others, and the world is sought in response to God’s call and the world’s need, read this book. If you yearn for pedagogical wisdom capable of sustaining resistance to consumerist and instrumentalist pressures on teaching and learning, read this book. . . . This excellent book is one of the best we have ever read on the subject of pedagogy. It is also one of the best we know on the subject of Christian practices."
— Craig Dykstra and Dorothy C. Bass

I hope Christian educators across a range of disciplines and institutional contexts will find this book to be a helpful catalyst for new conversations about Christian teaching and learning.

Last week I also received copies of the new Korean translation of Letters to a Young Calvinist, which is now (I think) my 3rd book that has been translated into Korean, with 2 more in progress. I'm grateful that some of my work can serve conversations in South Korea where the Reformed tradition is alive and well. A couple of Korean friends have told me that my "faint praise" for the Westminster confession has generated some vigorous discussion over there.

Beware Bad Metrics: College Graduate Salary Statistics

2011-10-12T10:49:00.003-04:00

One could easily imagine a college recruiting and marketing department latching onto the quantifiable data compiled PayScale's College Salary Report. The data paints a picture of starting and median salaries for graduates of over 1000 institutions across the United States. You can view the data by region as well (e.g., the Midwest). PayScale also offers an analysis of "return on investment," calculating the 30-year return on tuition in terms of salary income over a lifetime. (This latter metric yields some interesting data: for example, while some public universities might be cheaper 'up front,' they also don't offer the same return on their tuition investment as some private colleges with higher tuition.)

However, I would hope that Christian colleges and universities would at least be cautious in employing this data, since it is clearly a way of playing into the hands of economic pragmatism about higher education--one more way to simply treat a degree as a credential for employment rather than as a means for holistic formation of "prime citizens of the kingdom."

More importantly, this analysis of the data (let's just assume all the numbers are trustworthy) is simply reductionistic. It doesn't have room to recognize or absorb the fact that different kinds of institutions envision "success" very differently. To take just an easy example, many Christian and Catholic universities inculcate in their students a deep devotion to service, to the pursuit of justice and shalom. This often translates into social entrepreneurs who devote themselves to NGOs and non-profit agencies concerned with the marginalized and downtrodden. These colleges send into the world graduates who imagine the world otherwise, and who imaginatively launch new organizations, programs, and initiatives that counter hunger, poverty, disease, and illiteracy. These, too, are "successful" graduates, but their work and vocation isn't going to bump up the median salaries of our alumni any time soon. So be it. We're working with a different metric.

The Mall-ification of America

2011-10-10T07:55:00.004-04:00

A friend pointed me to this article on the "Mall-ification of America"--which dovetails with my analysis of the mall's liturgies in Desiring the Kingdom, particularly highlighting the assimilation that happens when we naively adopt what we (wrongly) think are "neutral" forms. Consider these concluding paragraphs:

There is some data to go on, though: According to the 2008 Hartford Institute survey,47% of megachurch income typically goes to employee salariesand benefits, compared to 13% for missions and benevolence. According to Leadership Network, a Christian nonprofit, pastor salaries in megachurches can reachas high as $400,000 a year. The IRS monitors salaries and specifically prohibits shareholder-like pay for ministers and church employees. Still, popular personalities regularly command higher salaries.

Churches maintain that monetary growth is just a means to the end of gaining new converts, not the other way around. On its website, Southland writes: "Some say, 'We don't need more churches. We're only draining the rolls of other churches.' Our hope is that we're draining the rolls of hell. More locations provide more opportunity for evangelism." For churches like Southland, paintball courts and letters to Britney are ultimately good because they help bring more people to God. Malls, similarly, are tools that bring in more members. But at what point does embracing commercial culture change one's religious message? While holding services in a renovated Dillards might not affect how worshipers see Jesus, giving away flat screen TVs and cars to new attendees as prizes on an Easter Sunday "egg hunt" probably does. (The hunt, hosted by Bay Area Fellowship of Corpus Cristi, TX, also served as a casting call for a new season of MTV's reality show "Made.") Even when they become shells of their former selves, malls' pasts never completely disappear, as Summer Grove's recycled mall Christmas decorations suggest.

Whether you fasten on a steeple or add a glass facade, Americans remember malls as childhood fantasy lands, where they could meet Santa Claus and play with any toy. Perhaps it's not a bad bet, then, that as adults, they might come back to meet Jesus.

Imagine the "Jesus" they'll be meeting.

Jobs, Dubya, and Leadership

2011-10-06T12:13:00.003-04:00

From the completely random file: within just a couple of days I read a long essay on George W. Bush and then several obituaries for Steve Jobs and was struck by similarities in their leadership style--and how differently those similarities were evaluated.

The first essay, "Dubya and Me," by Walt Harrington, appeared in the Autumn issue of The American Scholar. I think only the most ideologically blinkered would fail to appreciate this intimate portrait of George W. Bush as someone with deep historical curiosity, particularly eager to find exemplars of leadership. One also sees Bush's swagger, brashness, and aggressiveness, to be sure. But these are recontextualized in this behind-the-curtain portrait. Harrington's account won't win any converts amongst the usual suspects of my "progressive" friends--but for those who are less ideologically constrained by partisan devotion, I commend the article for your edification.

But what's the link to Jobs, who is being virtually canonized in today's press? (I write as a devoted Mac user--penning this from my Macbook Pro, with my iPhone playing in the docking station and an iPad sitting on the coffee table.) What could the forward-thinking guru from the Silicon Valley possibly have in common with the 'g-dropping hunter from west Texas?

Well, I was struck by the way that leadership characteristics seen as faults in Dubya are praised as the necessary genius that Jobs brought to Apple. Consider, for example, Joe Nocera's (reprinted) homage to Jobs in the New York Times, "What Makes Steve Jobs Great," alongside the Times' obituary. Both note that Jobs' management style could border on the draconian: uncollaborative, single-minded, aggressive, and very top-down. He could unleash excoriating criticisms of his employees and was almost maniacally ("insanely"!) concerned with secrecy, flaunting that great liberal ideal of "transparency." And yet Jobs will be (rightly) praised as one of America's greatest innovators and entrepreneurs.

What I find curious is that the same traits that are praised in Jobs are held up as vices and character flaws in Bush (not by Harrington, but by oft-trotted-out caricatures that circulate so widely). I note this not to defend Bush or his policies, but only to observe that our evaluation of leadership styles is not some neutral affair: we bring our biases and presuppositions and ideological agendas to our identification of "best practices" and our evaluation of leaders and leadership style. If we canonize St. Steve, we might have to re-evaluate knee-jerk caricatures of POTUS 43.

Church and Pomo Reboot

2011-10-03T08:16:00.003-04:00

The Church and Postmodern Culture conversation is moving to the hospitable environs of The Other Journal--a move that we hope brings new energy to the conversation. Update your bookmarks, visit the new site, and watch for info about a book giveaway. Most importantly, join the conversation!

Theology, Human Origins, and the Church: A Conversation

2011-09-28T11:02:00.003-04:00

My home institution has been in the news of late: as many probably know, Calvin College is wrestling with issues at the intersection of faith and science--specifically issues at the intersection of Reformed theological commitments and the implications of an evolutionary account of human origins. Indeed, I think it is precisely because we are a Reformed institution that we are pressed to engage such issues: I see this as "coming with the territory," so to speak.

This internal debate has been externally aired in places that include Christianity Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and NPR. For the most part, I think the journalism around this issue has been sloppy (not to mention the blogging)--though the CT coverage was much more nuanced than most. From some of these outlets, you'd think the question was whether or not scholars at Calvin College could affirm evolution. That's simply not the issue. That was settled for the college (and for the denomination) years ago. The question is what sorts of theological implications that entails--and how such entailments and inferences can (and should) be drawn. In this particular instance, the question is whether the affirmation of common descent requires jettisoning the orthodox Christian doctrines of the Fall and original sin.

But before one can address that sort of specific question, it is necessary to attend to fundamental methodological issues (e.g., about the nature and interpretation of Scripture, the role of the confessions [since we are a confessional tradition], the notion of "natural revelation," etc., etc., etc.). While I've been cagily silent about these matters in public, I am currently co-chairing the college's ad hoc committee addressing this issue. I'll continue my silence on the specifics until that report has been made public.

But more recently John Kloosterman, one of the op-ed editors for our student newspaper, the Chimes, sat down with me for an interview about some of these surrounding issues in this conversation. That conversation is now available on the Chimes website (pdf): "Human Origins and the Church: A Discussion with James K.A. Smith."

Google asks: "What do you love?"

2011-09-27T15:10:00.005-04:00

When I give talks based on Desiring the Kingdom, I sometimes try to crystallize the philosophical anthropology at the heart of the book in this way: "If I really want to know who you are, I'm not going to ask what you know. I'm not even going to ask what you believe. If I really want to know what you're about, the question I will ask is: What do you want? What do you love?"

Well it appears that Google is now asking just that question.

[Thanks to Dieter Bouma for the pointer.]

From Coffee Shop to Book Shop

2011-09-19T10:54:00.002-04:00

EerdWord, the Eerdmans blog, has just posted a little piece in which I recount the back story to my newest book, Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning, co-edited with my good friend, David Smith.

"From Book Shop to Coffee Shop" gives a glimpse of how this book on pedagogy began its life on napkins in the local coffee shop, turned into a grant proposal, then morphed into a multi-year research team, and finally became the book that is due to hit the shelves in the next couple of weeks--just in time for David's conference on "Education as Formation: Christian Approaches," October 6-8, 2011 here at Calvin College.

Prospects for a Christian Philosophical Anthropology: An Exchange with Christian Smith

2011-09-17T09:12:00.002-04:00

As promised, here is my follow-up exchange with Christian Smith in light of my review of his book, What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up--in which I clarify how much I resonate with, and appreciate, Smith's project, but also note points of continued disagreement.

CSR Exchange With Christian Smith

The Other Journal: Print Edition

2011-09-16T10:08:00.003-04:00

I've long been a friend and fan of the good folks at The Other Journal. For several years now they have been publishing theologically informed cultural commentary, along with art, fiction, and poetry, all with a solid aesthetic sense for design.

However, The Other Journal has always been virtual--until now. In this age of Kindles and iPad apps, The Other Journal gang has taken the ridiculous risk of producing a print edition. And it's fantastic. I heartily commend it to you: holding The Other Journal in your hands is a whole new experience that seems exactly right. They've done a great job with design: sharp, minimalist, with just a hint of a Paris Review feel I think. A Warhol photograph adorns the first cover.

And the content is great, too--though I don't want to harp on that too much lest it look like self-promotion (not that I'm above that! ;-). This first issue includes my interview with James Davison Hunter, as well as my review of Brett McCracken's Hipster Christianity (it was fun, I'll admit, to go back to that). You'll find essays, interviews, criticism, reviews, fiction, and poetry on themes ranging from artist Jeff Koons to pundit Glenn Beck, the Twilight phenomenon and the meaning of freedom. Great stuff throughout.

Do yourself a favor: skip three days at Starbucks and sign up for a subscription today.

Review Essay on Christian Smith and David Kelsey

2011-09-15T09:04:00.002-04:00

Last year, in the Christian Scholar's Review, I published a review essay looking at Christian Smith's What is a Person? alongside David Kelsey's Eccentric Existence. This was commissioned as an opportunity to compare and contrast discussions in the social sciences regarding the nature of the human person with a robust theological anthropology. I've uploaded a pdf of the essay on Scribd and am happy to share it here.

CSR Review Essay on Smith and Kelsey

This generated a response from Christian Smith, to which I replied, in a later issue of Christian Scholar's Review. I'll post that exchange in a couple of days.

The Contradictions of David Brooks

2011-09-13T09:39:00.008-04:00

One doesn't need to read Fors Clavigera very long to notice my (increasingly less grudging) appreciation of David Brooks. And his column today, "If It Feels Right...," pretty much covers my reading list over the last three years: Christian Smith, Charles Taylor, James Davison Hunter, and others.

Today Brooks focuses on the disheartening picture that emerges from Christian Smith's National Study of Youth and Religion, a remarkable longitudinal study of youth spirituality from adolescence, through "adultolescence" and eventually into adulthood. What both Smith and Brooks take to be disheartening is the sophomoric relativism of people in their twenties ("That might be true for you, but..."), their functional individualism about morality ("I personally don't think you should..."), and a general loss of virtue.

But Brooks picks up on a theme in Smith that he shouldn't. Brooks summarizes:

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

This gets to a methodological problem with Smith's work that I pressed when he visited Calvin College a couple of years ago. The entire methodology of the NSYR is a measure of articulation: the instruments and methods can only, at best, measure the ability of young people to, well, think and talk about faith and morality.

But shouldn't Brooks be a bit suspicious of what we could conclude from such measures? Indeed, isn't the argument of The Social Animal precisely that much of our action is not the outcome of rational, deliberative "thinking?" How do we square his tip of the hat to Smith's worry about what young people think about morality with Brooks' own critique of "the rationalist folk theory of morality" (pp. 280ff.)? Brooks' appreciation for the unconscious "drivers" of our action--and the action and behavior of young people--should recognize (as Charles Taylor does) that there can be a gap between how we act and how we think about how we act. That doesn't mean we might not be disappointed on both counts, but it should alert us that measuring what young people say is, at best (at best), only a measure of what they think. And the entire upshot of Brook's Social Animal--the reason why he argues that policy has been misguided and unsuccessful--is that we have overestimated thinking.

More importantly, appreciating this point--that behavior and action (which are surely the most relevant measures if one is talking about "morality") are often driven by unconscious habits and desires--generates a very different response to the problem. Smith, ever-the-evangelical (despite his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism), still tends to think that what these young people need is more teaching--more religious "instruction" in doctrines, beliefs, and moral standards. But Brooks' own argument in The Social Animal should lead us to suspect that this would be an insufficient response. What is really needed is the education of their loves, and that, as Brooks himself knows, takes practice: it takes the ethos of a community with embodied rituals and practices that inscribe virtue--not just the intellectual capacity to parse some moral dilemma, but the wants that pull us toward ends that are good (see The Social Animal, pp. 111-112).

Thus Brooks' column ends right where it should: a communtarian emphasis on virtue formation. This is not going to be pulled off at some "national" level. It will be embedded and embodied in concrete communities of practices that are pursuing a "thick" vision of the good. And such virtue is caught more than it is taught; it is absorbed more than it is deduced; it is less about what we think and more about what we love. That's a lesson I learned from David Brooks.

In Praise of Elites

2011-09-12T08:11:00.003-04:00

Friedman and Mandelbaum's That Used to be Us seems to be a cautionary tale about America's diminished future (sort of like Super Sad True Love Story without the laughs?). But I found the closing of David Frum's New York Times review to be intriguing.

Having already noted a tone of ambivalence in the book--talking about their optimism so much you get the impression they're trying to talk themselves into it--Frum suggests that they might not be putting all their cards on the table.

Friedman and Mandelbaum at one point praise the beauty of solutions that rise from the bottom up as opposed to the top down. This praise is not consciously insincere, but pretty plainly it does not accurately represent their operational plan. Friedman and Mandelbaum are men of the American elite, and they write to salute those members of the American elite who behave public-spiritedly and to scourge those who do not. They are winners, writing to urge other winners to have more of a care for their fellow citizens who are not winners.

And then this final reflection:

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that! Societies inescapably generate elites. Those elites can be public-spirited and responsible or they can be selfish and shortsighted. An elite can have concern and care for the less advantaged or it can callously disregard them. Maybe not surprisingly, the language of anti-elitism has often been a useful tool of the most rapacious and merciless among the elite.
American society has had a big serving of that ugly anti-elitist spirit in the recent past. It could use more of the generous responsible spirit Friedman and Mandelbaum recommend. They say less than might be wished about what a more public-spirited American elite might do. But they have eloquently described what such an elite should want to do.

I find this intriguing, perhaps especially because American evangelicals are so prone to this grassroots-ism (which is probably why they can also be so easily lured by Tea Party activism). In this respect, Frum's unabashed affirmation of elites reminds me a bit of James Davison Hunter's critique of Christian grassroots-ism in To Change the World.

But it also got me thinking of Ruskin's "Tory socialism." Might we ever be allowed to dream of kings? Ruskin's kings are a strange lot: not slovenly aristocrats destined by mere blood, but men "capable" of "kinghood." So Ruskin's monarchical dream is actually sort of democratic, too:

my only hope of prosperity for England, or any other country, in whatever life they lead, is in their discovering and obeying men capable of Kinghood.

Yeats on Blake on the Imagination

2011-09-09T23:33:00.003-04:00

The project outlined in Desiring the Kingdom has a tenuous relationship to romanticism. On the one hand, while I accord a central role to the imagination, I spend time trying to emphasize that this is not the "inventive" imagination of the romantics; instead it is a receptive, constituting imagination--a mode of intentionality on a different register. (William Desmond is quite helpful on this point.)

On the other hand, it is romanticism that articulates a counter-modernity, displacing the rationalism of the Enlightenment strain of modernity and, in some sense, anticipating the hermeneutic phenomenology of the 20th century. This is why Charles Taylor's genealogy of our "secular age" accords a central place for romanticism. One might also consider John Milbank's recent diagnosis of trends in contemporary theology that affirms a "romantic" theology.

So, as you might imagine, I'm a bit of a sucker for Blake, even though part of me knows I shouldn't be. But then this past week I scored a copy of The Yeats Reader and discovered Yeats' remarkable essay, "William Blake and the Imagination"--a marvelous example of the Wildean ideal of the critic as artist. Consider these opening paragraphs an invitation to go read it for yourself:

There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him. He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world about him; and he understood it more perfectly than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things--in the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work, there is a moment when are understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished. In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination but that they 'made their souls' by listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons. In our time we are agreed that we 'make our souls' out of some one of the great poets of ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler's pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things. We write of great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed an unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept for the beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we believe with our lips, we believe with our hearts that beautiful things, as Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have 'lain burningly on the Divine hand,' and that when time has begun to wither, the Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity. When no man believed these things William Blake believed them, and began that preaching against the Philistine, which is as the preaching of the Middle Ages against the Saracen.
He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that imagination was the first emanation of divinity, 'the body of God,' 'the Divine members,' and he drew the deduction, which they did not draw, that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations, and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and righteous alike, which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness of sins commanded by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts. He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live--lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old times. Passions, because most living, are most holy--and this was a scandalous paradox in his time--and man shall enter eternity borne upon their wings.

Jane Kenyon, "Notes from the Other Side"

2011-09-09T09:09:00.002-04:00

Last night I was dabbling in The Graywolf Silver Anthology and hit upon a selection of poems from Jane Kenyon. I was immeasurably moved by "Notes from the Other Side," in no small part because our congregation has been grieving and mourning alongside a family who are, unbelievably, unspeakably, journeying with their 21-year-old daughter through the valley of the shadow of death. And all of my theological 'answers' to evil (the free will defense, the importance of lament, etc., etc.) have been absolutely humbled by their unaccountable faith and grace and hope in the midst of profound sadness.

Notes from the Other Side

I divested myself of despair

and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching

one's own eye in the mirror,

there are no bad books, no plastic,

no insurance premiums, and of course,

no illness. Contrition

does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth. No one howls as the first

clod of earth hits the casket.

The poor we no longer have with us.

Our calm hearts strike only the hour,

and God, as promised, proves

to be mercy clothed in light.

On Being Careful about the Charge of "Pietism"

2011-09-06T09:16:00.003-04:00

Chris Gehrz, associate professor of history at Bethel University, articulates a fair and helpful critique of my use of the word "pietism" in Desiring the Kingdom and related discussions. As I've noted elsewhere (and Gehrz recognizes), "pietism" is a particularly loaded, shorthand term in Reformed conversations. But that narrow use of the term does an injustice to the pietism of Spener, Hamann, the Blumhardts, and others whose project would deeply resonate with what I'm trying to articulate in my "Cultural Liturgies" work.

So I'll try to be more careful in my use of "pietism" as an epithet in the future. But it's going to take practice.

Orwell for Labor Day

2011-09-05T09:24:00.003-04:00

Thank heavens the NFL doesn't play on Labor Day, otherwise we'd have one more holiday marshaled for militarism, with soldiers no doubt extolled as the real laborers, the hero "workers."

Not that we're particularly well poised to celebrate labor in this country: while everyone trumpets on behalf of "the middle class," you'll hear next to nothing today about labor, and certainly not a good word about labor unions (those dastardly interferers with the wisdom and benevolent hand of "the market!"). Even "workers," for the most part, have been hoodwinked into opposing organized labor.

Any day is a good day to read Orwell, but perhaps today is especially appropriate. Consider this little snippet from Road to Wigan Pier:

In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Literary Sup., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comerade X, author of Marxism for Infants–all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

The iPhone-ization of our World(view)

2011-09-02T09:10:00.004-04:00

Every technology is attended by a mode of bodily practice. So even if the computer is primarily an information processor, it can never completely reduce us to just "thinking things" because it requires some mode of bodily interface: whether we're hunched over a desk, glued to a screen; or looking downward at a smartphone, our attention directed away from others at the table, etc.

Apple has long understood the bodily nature of this interface. In this respect, we already take for granted how revolutionary the touch screen is: it is a new, differently-tactile mode of bodily interface. Indeed, working on a MacBook feels distant and disconnected compared to the fingertip intimacy of the iPhone or the iPad. (Do you ever thoughtlessly try to touch your MacBook screen? Then you know what I'm talking about.)

But as Pierre Bourdieu would emphasize, such "micropractices" have macro effects: what might appear to be inconsequential micro habits are, in fact, disciplinary formations that begin to reconfigure our relation to the wider world--indeed, they begin to make that world. As Bourdieu puts it in The Logic of Practice, "The cunning of pedagogic reason lies precisely in the fact that it manages to extort what is essential while seeming to demand the insignificant" (p. 69).

One could suggest that our interface with the iPhone is just this sort of micro-training that subtly and unconsciously trains us to treat the world as "available" to me, and at my disposal--to be selected, scaled, scanned, tapped, and enjoyed. (In fact, one might wonder whether the basic orientation to the world that is "carried" and learned in this micropractice isn't analogous to the "training" one would receive from viewing pornography.)

I was struck by this when I recently saw a rather inane Michelob Ultra commercial that nonetheless signaled just this kind of iPhone-ized relation to the world. Consider it an illustration of this case in point:

(Liberal) Skepticism vs. (Orthodox) Doubt

2011-08-25T06:11:00.003-04:00

There are certain streams of "emerging" Christianity which seem to think that doubt is some revolutionary new stance that has finally had permission to emerge now that we are "new kinds of Christians." Formerly oppressed by fundamentalisms that quashed any hint of uncertainty, such Christians are at pains to point out that we can never be certain. But having still accepted the modern equation of knowledge with certainty, they also end up professing that we can't know. So what we're left with is not doubt, but skepticism.

It seems that those who think permission to doubt is some radically new possibility for Christians are the same people who think that a concern for justice is some "secret message" of Jesus heretofore hidden from Christianity--when, in fact, it just means that it was hidden from them in the pietistic enclaves of their early formation. In a similar way, doubt is as old as faith. As Kierkegaard suggested in one of his journals, "doubt comes into the world through faith." As I've suggested elsewhere, some of our greatest saints have been our greatest doubters, too. Some of our exemplary believers have also been masters of suspicion. The new kind of doubters have nothing on the likes of Graham Greene or Mother Teresa or Bernanos' country priest or Endo's Jesuit missionaries.

But there is also an important difference between emergent skeptics and catholic doubters: The new kind of skeptics want the faith to be cut down to the size of their doubt, to conform to their suspicions. Doubt is taken to be sufficient warrant for jettisoning what occasions our disbelief and discomfort, cutting a scandalizing God down to the size of our believing. For the new doubters, if I can't believe it, it can't be true. If orthodoxy is unbelievable, then let's come up with a rendition we can believe in.

But for catholic doubters, God is not subject to my doubts. Rather, like the movements of a lament psalm, all of the scandalizing, unbelievable aspects of an inscrutable God are the target of my doubts--but the catholic doubter would never dream that this is occasion for revising the faith, cutting it down to the measure of what I can live with. It's not a matter of coming up with a Gospel I can live with; it's a matter of learning to live with all of the scandal of the Gospel--and that can take a lifetime. Graham Greene's "whiskey priest" doesn't for a moment think that the church should revise its doctrine and standards in order to make him feel comfortable about his fornication--even if he might lament what seems to be a denial of some feature of his humannness. All of his doubts and suspicion and resistance are not skeptical gambits that set him off in search of a liberal Christianity he can live with; they are, instead, features of a life of sanctification, or lack thereof. And no one is surprised by that. The prayer of the doubter is not, "Lord I believe, conform to the measure of my unbelief," but rather: "Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief."

For just this reason orthodox, catholic faith has always been able to absorb doubt as a feature of discipleship: indeed, the church is full of doubters. It is the grace of our scandalous God that welcomes them.

On Misunderstanding David Brooks Redux

2011-08-17T20:11:00.002-04:00

Misreading Brooks' The Social Animal seems to be all the rage. To H. Allen Orr's skewed interpretation, we can now add this aside from one of my favorites, James Wood:

These days, one is continually running up against a crass evolutionary neuroscientific pragmatism that is loved by popular evolutionary psychologists and newspaper columnists (of the kind who argue that we are happiest living in suburbs and voting Republican because neuroscience has “proved” that a certain bit of our brain lights up upon seeing Chevy Chase or Greenwich; or that we all like novels because stories must have taught us, millennia ago, how to negotiate our confusing hunter-gatherer society—I exaggerate only a little).

Now first let me admit: that's pretty damn good. Classic Wood: a tightly compressed insight laced with acerbic wit. I'll give him that.

But Wood is guilty of missing the same point as Orr: Brooks is decidedly not out to argue that we are biologically wired to be Bobos in a moderate Republican paradise. His point is that the "new sciences of human nature" account for how we are formed and habituated by the ethos in which our dispositions are incubated, and that our account of--and orientation toward--a vision of "the good life" is acquired, inscribed in us by the rituals and practices of a culture that then prime us (dispose us) toward certain ends.

We don't think our way through the world. And contrary to the functional libertarianisms of both left and right, we are not fundamentally choosers: our action in--and comportment to--the world is the product of unconscious dispositions and habit which are NOT (repeat: NOT) biologically hardwired but rather acquired on the platform of our biological makeup. We are not conservative animals; but we are habitual animals. That's why our policies and educations need to broach the question of formation. But wherever there is a project of formation, there is also the specification of a telos--and it is precisely that "imposition" on the myth of autonomy that is refused by the ideologies of left and right.

Brooks isn't offering some new-fangled version of B.F. Skinner; he's exploring how contemporary cognitive science confirms the insights of Aristotle. The Social Animal isn't trying to offer "scientific proof" for conservatism; it's trying to show that science confirms a Burkean (and Ruskinian?) conservativism long-forgotten--a concern for virtue formation.

On Misunderstanding David Brooks

2011-08-16T23:36:00.002-04:00

The review of David Brooks' The Social Animal in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books was a disappointment. Since there's pretty much zero chance that the letter I sent will ever see the light of day, I reproduce it here as a small effort to counter this common sort of misreading (or under-reading) of Brooks' argument.

To the Editors:

H. Allen Orr seems to have missed the central concern of David Brooks' engagement with the new sciences of human nature. Orr reads the appeal to "science" as if Brooks were trying to reduce us to our hard-wiring--which is why Orr homes in on those passages that are concerned with pheromones and the genetic information absorbed when couples are swapping saliva.

But Brooks is not engaged in the sort of reductionism that Orr seems to think characterizes a "scientific" account. More specifically, Brooks doesn't give us a biologized story of some kind of "hard-wired" human nature. Instead, Brooks sees the new sciences of human nature offering an account of how we absorb our second nature--what Aristotle called "character." The core argument of The Social Animal--and the one that impinges on how we make policy and organize social institutions like schools--is that we are creatures of habit and we absorb fundmental, orienting habits through embodied but unconcious routines and rituals. Orr seems to have missed this argument entirely.

It is just this attention to formation, habituation and virtue which makes Brooks a classic conservative in the spirit of Burke--a voice much needed amidst the so-called "conservative" ideologies of liberatarian self-invention that will assail us over the next season of Republican presidential campaigning.

Sincerely,

James K.A. Smith

Warren Buffett: Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

2011-08-15T21:34:00.003-04:00

It is surely telling that Warren Buffett's important editorial, "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich," did not appear in the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, I find myself wondering whether it was floated there, then rejected. Wouldn't that have been most conspicuous place for Buffett's offing?

In any case, one wonders how the Tea Party ideologues in the Republican party--all those busy little e-traders with copies of Rich Dad, Poor Dad under their pillows at night--could possibly counter the logic of Buffett the investment guru. For here is the poster boy of a "job maker" debunking the myth that taxation frustrates investing. As Buffett succinctly puts it,

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Buffett's entire editorial repays reading (and sharing). In it he documents the ridiculous exemptions from tax burden enjoyed by the super-rich--people who, as he puts it, "make money with money."

But you'll have to go to the New York Times to find it: not a word has been breathed about it at WSJ. Correction/update: Dieter Bouma pointed out to me that the WSJ blog is home to some discussion of this editorial.

The Medium is the Message

2011-08-09T10:26:00.004-04:00

In giving talks around the country about Desiring the Kingdom, one of the themes I regularly press is the refusal of any form/content distinction when it comes to Christian worship. This is central to my argument: when I claim that Christian worship forms and orients our loves, it's not just any old version of Christian worship that does this. Indeed, much of what evangelicals think of when they think of "worship" (=music) does not have the potential to be formative in this way. What we need is Christian worship that embodies the unique logic of the Gospel, practicing and enacting the specificity of the Christian narrative. This is why, over time, the church, led by the Spirit, has communally discerned a certain given "shape" for core elements of Christian worship (which can then be "indigenized" in different ways in different contexts at different times).

The Gospel is not a "content" that can be distilled and just dropped into any old "form" that seems hip or relevant or attractive. You can't distill Jesus from Christian worship and then just drop him into the mall or the coffee shop or the concert: while you might think you're "Jesu-fying" this medium, in fact you just end up commodifying Jesus.

As I try to unpack this argument in various contexts, I sometimes allude to Marshall McLuhan's famous claim that "the medium is the message." The intuition is the same: there is no neat and tidy form/content distinction because we can't sort out the message from its medium: the medium is the message. That's not a bad shorthand for the point I'm trying to make--it's just that I think catholic Christianity discerned this long before McLuhan.

Turns out, however, that McLuhan's intuitions owe something to Catholic Christianity. When I was staying in Toronto earlier this summer, this was confirmed for me on two separate occasions. First, while visiting my brother and joining his family on a trip to the local library, I sat down with a recent issue of The Walrus, sort of Canada's version of Harper's or The New Yorker. Lo and behold, the issue contained an article by Jeet Heer, "Divine Inspiration," in which Heer unpacks the significance of McLuhan's conversion to Catholicism as the "background" of his theorizing. Fascinating stuff.

Then just a couple of days later, in a basement bookshop on Bloor Street, I hit upon another little gem (this is why I believe in bibliographical providence): The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion which is a collection of McLuhan's essays and interviews on religion, particularly Roman Catholicism, with some illuminating reflections on liturgy in particular.

There's work to be done here.

On X-Games and Nostalgia

2011-07-30T14:46:00.005-04:00

It's that time of year again, when my kids groan and roll their eyes as I, Uncle-Rico-like, relive the glory days of the 1980s, regaling them with tales of my freestyle BMX exploits. That's right: it's X Games 2011.

My favorite event is BMX Freestyle Park--though what they're doing today bears only an analogical resemblance to what we were doing in the 80s. Indeed, as someone who has some familiarity with the difficult of what they make look easy, the level of riding today is simply mind-boggling.

But my nostalgia meter went through the roof last night while watching BMX Freestyle Vert. After watching Jamie Bestwick drop in and tear up the ramp, I thought I had misheard the announcer as he said that "Dennis McCoy" was up next. I thought, "Huh, that's funny: when I was a teenager there was another Dennis McCoy who was a flatland BMX dynamo." But it didn't take long for the reality to sink in: this was the same Dennis McCoy, now 44-years-old (4 years older than I am!). His "old school" lines could be recognized from a million miles away, and it was a beautiful thing.

There was, however, a less than welcome outcome: After my kids saw this old man bustin' huge air, they turned to me and asked: "What's your problem, Uncle Rico?"

On Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

2011-07-21T08:30:00.004-04:00

Cross-posting from GoodReads:

I have sort of read Joan Didion backwards, beginning with her masterful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and now working my way back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem--one of those books that casts a long shadow over contemporary nonfiction. I picked up this book as a companion for a recent trip back to Los Angeles, both because Didion is one of those rare creatures who is a "native" of California, but also because California figures prominently in these essays. But I became so absorbed in the book I didn't sleep on my redeye flight and finished it while taxiing at LAX.

As I understand it, Didion was sometimes mistaken for a reactionary conservative because of her unflinching depiction of the Haight-Ashbury district in the summer of '67 (the title essay in this volume). This is clearly to misread her. Indeed, Didion cringes at her own inability to capture the essence of the summer of love in that essay, but she also laments misreading:

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.

This is part of the allure of this volume: it is both a collection of stellar nonfiction writing as well as reflexive commentary on the vocation and task of writing. Hence the more confessional, autobiographical moments of the book (on keeping a notebook, on going home, on leaving New York). Even these are packed with suggestive nuance. (For example, in commenting on the faith a young communist in Watts who seems driven by dread, Didion confesses: "I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroine or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.")

In these pieces from the 60s, Didion is both a powerful stylist and a crisp observer. Her writing couples bravura and insight as few can. In fact, in this sense she often reminded me of Norman Mailer (imagine Norman Mailer with a vagina!). There are paragraphs in here (especially in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream") that left me almost breathless from their energy--a virtuoso performance that captures both a zeitgest and a geography in 3 pages of fire. But there are crystallized one-liners that nail reality to the wall (of Joan Baez she says, "until she found Carmel, she did not really come from anywhere").

California is a quarry for Didion precisely because California is where Americanism goes to die--though it goes there thinking it will achieve eternal life. Didion often frames this in terms of the "dream": the American dream, the dream of the Gold Rush, the buttoned-down dreamers in the Valley or the turned-on dreamers in the Haight. So the spiral of a disaffected marriage in southern California becomes "the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live"--and kill and die. Or in a remarkable piece on John Wayne, a younger Didion confesses: "when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams." Or she sees Howard Hughes as a projection of our dreams:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake [...], but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. [...] He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

I suppose the line on Didion as a reactionary or a 'conservative' of sorts stems from a kind of memory or quasi-nostalgia that sometimes comes to the surface in this collection. For example, she recalls the scene of John Wayne's "discovery" by director John Ford: "There, a meeting with John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost." The same sense of loss and errancy gets a kind of imprimatur on her reflections on the history of Sacramento, her home town--a town founded on a curious mixture of hope and history, that things started downhill pretty much just after the "Eureka" moment of discovery:

Such a view of history casts a certain melancholia over those who participate in it; my own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried by ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

The lament/memory/nostalgia is most famously expressed in the opening of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" where Didion observes "children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together." This opening gambit is completed by the end of the essay when she concludes:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing it ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

[It is a straight line, I think, from this observation to the stinging satire of Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.]

So Didion regularly looks back, laments something lost, wonders whether we've taken some wrong turns. For those who think any glance back amounts to some kind of ideology (this assumption itself being ideological), this is enough for Didion to qualify as a reactionary. But is all memory nostalgia? And could our memory sometimes be right? Certainly Didion is no Whig; and only whiggish ideals of progress consider historical laments as false de jure. But some of us just refuse such simplicities. Perhaps Didion is a Burkean we need now more than ever.

The Pedagogy of Sermons

2011-07-20T12:11:00.005-04:00

Josef Bengston passed along this interesting little snippet from Alain de Botton, an old favorite of mine. This is lifted from a TED talk in which he looks to religious sources for secular practices (kind of, in a backhanded way, confirming some of the analyses in Desiring the Kingdom):

A sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. I think we need to go back to that tradition of sermon in education.

This, of course, only works as an exhortation if the sermon itself hasn't just devolved to a didactic lecture.

On the State of Contemporary Theology

2011-07-14T09:00:00.001-04:00

A friend who is a grad student in theology recently expressed some frustration with the proliferation of narrow "camps" in contemporary theology--and hence the lack of space for emerging theologians to engage in conversations which aren't just predetermined at the outset. What s/he has found is that most theological claims/discussions are judged beforehand by a kind of guilt-by-association: "Oh, you're working out of Camp X and are sympathetic to Theologian Y. I've already got a line/take/pigeonhole for that 'school,' and so I already know what you're going to say. Ergo, there's really no need for the conversation."

Not exactly productive conditions for common pursuit of truth.

So, my friend asked, is there some place where young theologians can engage in honest, forthright dialogue without all the posturing? Here's what I suggested, off-the-cuff (and slightly redacted):

It's a good question, but I'm afraid I don't have a very good answer. I must confess I despair about the state of "professional" theology today. It just seems to me that we have increasing "balkanization," with everyone carving themselves up into smaller and smaller tribish enclaves, and then proceeding to both rail against straw men and preach to their own little choirs. In some ways, I think this is an effect of the loss of confessional and denominational identity. Instead of training to be Reformed theologians or Roman Catholic theologians or Lutheran theologians we have a generation who are training to become "ecclesiocentric" theologians or "apocalyptic" theologians or "radically orthodox" theologians, etc. Everybody's gotta have an "angle," a project, an agenda, a manifesto, a list of "Theses" that discloses the hitherto hidden truth of the world on the basis of their own ingenuity. Hence the most important words in our theological lexicons become "alone" and "only," as in: "Only [insert theological ideology here] can properly account for [insert favorite political and social issue here]."

All of this does weird things to theological identity and community, which then breeds a narcissism of minor differences. In some ways, this is a strange by-product of "ecumenical" theological education. (I think the blogosphere exacerbates this in important ways, but I would need more data to substantiate such a claim.)

I also think this state of the field is a by-product of the fact that many up-and-coming theologians right now are not what we used to call "churchmen" in any strong sense ("churchwomen" included): they are not tied to denominational identities, they are not participants in the specifics of ecclesiastical governance/teaching, they are not subject to ecclesial magisteria of any sort, they are not aspiring to chairs in their denominational seminaries, etc. From where I sit, freelancing does not seem very conducive to healthy theologizing.

In a lot of ways, this is why I have planted myself in a very particular, "thick" confessional location--not because it is the one, true perspective; or the temple that holds all the secrets; but because it is a good location (and a "good enough" location) which is both catholic and particular, and one to which I feel--if this doesn't sound too quaint--called. So I'm a Reformed thinker, and even more specifically, a Christian Reformed thinker. Far from being a recipe for sectarianism, I think that centering frees me up to engage selectively, critically, and generously (I hope). In a sense, thick confessional/denominational identity eliminates a certain insecurity that I think explains alot of the current fragmentation. So my theological and professional identity is not bound up with any 'school of thought' or sensibility. (Based on my books, people seem to think that I have some investment in being "postmodern" or "RO" or "Hauerwasian" or whathaveyou: but I don't own stock in any of these little cottage industries, though I have interest in all of them. My central investment is in this obscure little denomination where I'm planted.)

So in some sense, I just don't know if the sort of space you're looking for exists, sadly. Then again, maybe it's always been this way!

FWIW,

Jamie

The Excremental and Sacramental: More Gems from Wolfe's Letters

2011-07-12T09:07:00.002-04:00

I'm continuing to enjoy Thomas Wolfe's Letters. They hearken back to an epistolary age that is lost, when the letter had all the potential to be an essay, a short story, a travelogue, a memoir. Our emails will never be the same.

Here are just a couple of snippets Wolfe wrote from Europe in 1928. Consider, for example, this prescient observation about the coming dynamics of globalization:

"The things you and I have liked best in Europe--the grand pictures, the buildings, and so on--belong mostly to an order of things that has gone: the world--the world that has to eat and drink and labor--is probably being 'Americanized.' At least, they groan about it, and deprecate it, but I think they earnestly want it for themselves. To be 'Americanized' is simply to be industrialized in the most complete and serviceable fashion."

Or this culmination of his description of a church service in rural Hungary, sort of oozing with a weird blend of the sacramental and excremental which, oddly, makes sense:

"Nowhere have I ever seen the simple animal nature of men so plainly as in this church--I kep thinking of this as they all stood there with their smell of the stable, hearing of their kinship to God."

Woody Allen on Nostalgia: On "Midnight in Paris"

2011-07-08T22:32:00.005-04:00

Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" could be co-opted as an interesting little parable for Christian theology and certain sensibilities within contemporary Christianity.

The story centers around Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson): a writer who's sold his soul to Hollywood screenwriting but is now trying to realize his dream of being a "real" writer, that is, a novelist. The story of his novel is centered on the owner of a "nostalgia store," a shop of memorabilia for those who live in the past--much like the writer, Gil, who idolizes the Paris of the 20s, and more particularly the jazz ages writers who transplanted themselves there: Hemmingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others. In short, just as the protagonist of his novel longs for a past that would allow him to escape his dismal present, so Gil romanticizes a Parisian past that would deliver him from the doldrums of his stalled book and shallow fiance.

Lo and behold, Gil gets his wish. At midnight, a magical car (just go with it...) transports him back to the Paris of the 20s where he dances with Scott and Zelda, listens to Hemmingway's minimalist rhapsodies about "courage" and "honesty," shares his manuscript with Gertrude Stein, woos a lover away from Picasso, and has a delightful encounter with Salvador Dali (played fantastically by Adrien Brody).

He returns each morning to his present--which begins to look even flatter and more banal. But he also returns with new creative energy, an expanded imagination, jolted out of his noncreative stupor. This is what Gil finally realizes: he does come back to his present. He's never quite tempted to settle into this past Paris of his dreams. The film, at this point, gets a tad didactic and just a bit preachy, but still does a nice job of registering an important critique of nostalgia as a disordered relation to the past. But the rejection of nostalgia does not entail some equally problematic utopianism of future progress, or even some trite "celebration" of the present. No, the rejection of nostalgia can nonetheless recognize creative debts to the past, even the importance of an inventive retrieval for the sake of an imagined future--the imagination of which is dependent upon our forebears.

I'll resist the temptation Allen falls prey to, viz., telling rather than showing. Suffice it to say that one could profitably read this as a parable that might point up the nostalgic leanings of some theological trajectories, but without reducing all contemporary projects of retrieval as nostalgic. Ressourcement is not nostalgia, but it can be a bit of a gateway drug to such wistful escapism.

Unconscious Writing

2011-06-30T21:23:00.004-04:00

My summer-evening, front-porch reading for the past few days has been the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by his former agent, Elizabeth Nowell. They are charged with the same frenetic energy as his fiction. And given the range from his youth until just a couple of days before his untimely death, they also function as an ersatz autobiography.

"And although my conscious mind was busy with all the things and places I was seeing and the people I was meeting, I think my unconscious mind must have been busy at my book, because now that I am back, the whole plan, from first to last, has become clear to me, and I think I know exactly what I want to do."

The Fall of Interpretation, 2nd edition

2011-06-27T21:26:00.003-04:00

On Pentecost Sunday, from my temporary rooms at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, I dispatched the manuscript for a second, revised edition of my first book, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, which will be published by Baker Academic. As I note in the new Preface to the book, that temporal and spatial nexus was a little treat of providence for me, since The Fall of Interpretation was first conceived as my master's thesis at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, and the book advanced a "creational-pneumatic hermeneutic" that owed a Pentecostal debt.

I'm grateful for the opportunity this new edition provides to reframe and recontextualize my argument, to address some criticisms, and to indicate how the argument of Fall connects with (and is expanded) in the trajectory of my later work. In addition to beefing up and updating the footnotes, the new edition includes an entirely new Introduction ("Reconsiderations") and adds a final chapter ("Limited Inc/arnation: From Creation to Ecclesia") that, I believe, clarifies what was a fundamental ambiguity in the first edition.

A release date of spring 2012 is projected for this project.

The Downside of "Professional Competence": Adam Gopnik

2011-06-26T22:37:00.003-04:00

While it's a throwaway comment within his new essay, "Life Studies: What I Learned When I Learned to Draw," I paused for a while over this observation from Adam Gopnik:

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never any good at doing in the first place--relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table (p. 58).

Yes. That sounds right. To achieve "success" is often just the privilege of being able to insulate oneself from failure. The reward for competence becomes monotony and one becomes enslaved to one's expertise. We become more and more failure-averse and instead carve out worlds without surprises, without tests, without risk. We polish all our shiny new trophies, but they're all from the same sport, so to speak.

It's particularly bothersome that this phenomenon seems to be inching its way back from the life stage of adult, professional success and creeping back into adolescence, even childhood. Something is afoot that has young people absorbing this failure-averse stance early on, shrinking from the possibility of being stretched in order to settle on a space for the early display of mastery. (This could be seen as a feature of what Charles Taylor calls the dynamics of "mutual self-display" in our age of authenticity.)

What's lost in this "security" is precisely the virtue of failure--the strange thrill of trying and not succeeding (the first time, the third time, the 27th time). Indeed, I think even many of those who have achieved the "professional competence" that Gopnik describes have secret, buried desires to fail, to have the courage and opportunity to venture beyond the bounds of competence. To remember once again that peculiar high that comes from the attempt, the adrenaline rush triggered by working without a net--not to mention the cliched virtue of "try, try again."

That, of course, is why Calvinists invented golf.

Later Wittgenstein on Philosophy

2011-06-22T07:53:00.004-04:00

Dipping into Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations yet again, I was reminded of this little barb about philosophy. It's a typical Wittgensteinian aphorism, koan-like, that has to sink in a bit, particularly since the analogy is an inversion of precisely the sorts of philosophical assumptions Wittgenstein is calling into question:

"When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it" (§194).

Saunders, "Home"

2011-06-21T08:21:00.002-04:00

I'm always glad to see a new short story from George Saunders. This month's New Yorker features his story, "Home," as part of their summer fiction issue. The story of a vet trying to re-enter his life after service in Afghanistan or Iraq (we're never sure which), it is vintage Saunders: uproariously funny in parts, then sliding into probing psychological insight, with a hint of horror hanging over the entire story.

Consider just this snippet of brilliance, from a scene where the narrator loses himself in a kind of revelry of violence and threat with his mother and her boyfriend:

They were both so scared they weren’t talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you’re not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.

Word Guild Awards 2011

2011-06-19T21:51:00.003-04:00

I was honored (sorry: "honoured") to learn that my book, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy, has received the 2011 Word Guild Award in the Academic category. (The Word Guild hosts the annual Canadian Christian Writing Awards.)

I was quite surprised since the other finalists in this category--Deborah C. Bowen's Stories of the Middle Space: Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms and James R. Payton's Getting the Reformation Wrong--are both books I've noted and are well-deserving of recognition, thus I was very much expecting them to spread the wealth, so to speak. So I'm particularly grateful for the honour [sic] and continue to be encouraged by the community of Christian writers in my home and native land--though I don't expect to be overtaking Janette Oke anytime soon!

A Liturgical Turn in Cultural Theory

2011-06-18T09:43:00.004-04:00

Just one more prompt from the CICW Summer Seminars: I've put up a first post describing the focus of my seminar, "From Worldview to Worship: The Liturgical Turn in Cultural Theory," which includes a description and link to the syllabus. Those interested in this conversation will be able to hear from several seminar participants who'll be blogging throughout the seminar--and able to join the conversation through the comments. Watch http://worshipweblog.com/ for updates.

Blogging from the Calvin Summer Seminars

2011-06-17T17:56:00.002-04:00

One of the hats I wear is "Research Fellow and Academic Programs Coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship" (catchy, eh?). In that role, one of the initiatives I've launched this summer is a team of bloggers who will be posting from our three seminars that will be happening over the next month. Over at http://worshipweblog.com/ you'll be able to listen in on conversations about liturgy, culture, pedagogy, and cultural change through posts from scholars, pastors, teachers, and others practitioners.

As I noted in a first post, this year's seminars include:

“Reflective Pedagogy and Christian Practices,” directed by David Smith (Calvin College)
“Congregations and Social Change: Adaptations and Innovation among Religious Communities,” directed by Gerardo Marti (Davidson College)
“From Worship to Worldview: The Liturgical Turn in Cultural Theory,” directed by James K.A. Smith (Calvin College)

So add http://worshipweblog.com/ to your RSS feed and follow the conversations as they unfold over the next month.

3-D Icons: A Short Film on Mannequins

2011-06-07T22:32:00.004-04:00

In Desiring the Kingdom I offer an opening phenomenology of the mall as a temple--a religious, liturgical space whose labyrinthine corridors are lined by tiny chapels devoted to various saints. And those saints, I suggest, are "pictured" not in the flat renditions of stained-glass but in the 3-D icons of mannequins draped in the au courant vision of "the good life."

Well, in that vein, my former student Bryan Kibbe recently pointed me to an almost incredible short film that documents the work and vision of a mannequin factory. Titled "34 x 25 x 36" (you can guess why), the documentary unveils the unapologetic industry of female "perfection," eliciting from the owners and designers a shameless articulation of their goals. This is a must-see for those working in gender studies.

But halfway through the film (at about the 3:30 mark), one of the owner/designers begins to rhapsodize about their work as a deliberate extension of religious devotion to the saints--embodying the now secular, materialist ideal for women to emulate, yea, "worship."

Bookish Fate and Bibliographical Providence

2011-06-04T10:28:00.003-04:00

In Letter XXII of my Letters to a Young Calvinist, I playfully but seriously testify to a conviction regarding bibliographical providence: that some books that I just "happen" to bump into, or have passed on to me, were divine appointments of a sort. There are volumes that have fallen into my lap, and captured my attention, which one couldn't have plotted from a previous bibliographical trajectory. And looking back on their role in my formation, I can't help but see them as instances of illumination along a path--a journey in which I was being led rather than charting my own course.

So it was with some interest that I read Michael Chabon's introduction to a new edition of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, recently excerpted in the New York Review of Books. While Chabon can't avail himself of a notion of providence, and is pressed into the language of gifts without a giver, one can nonetheless hear an analogous conviction:

The book appeared in my life as mysteriously as the titular tollbooth itself, brought to our house one night as a gift for me by some old friend of my father’s whom I had never met before, and never saw again. Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo’s tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious—the most phantasmal—is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.

This is Your Brain on Marketing

2011-06-03T11:23:00.002-04:00

Friends and readers now regularly float me tidbits that sort of serve as confirmations and illustrations--or at least case studies--of some of the kinds of claims I made in Desiring the Kingdom regarding cultural formation (like the recent study on the cult-status of Apple for devotees). So I'm going to crowd-source here and feature them in an occasional series of "DTK Case Studies," with thanks for the tips and suggestions.

Mark Roeda (who's provided tips before) pointed me to Jonah Lehrer's recent observations about the formation of memory by marketers, and the brain science that underlies this. (Lehrer makes regular cameos in David Brooks' new book, The Social Animal.)

Here's the tease:

How could a stupid commercial trick me into believing that I loved a product I’d never actually tasted? Or that I drank Coke out of glass bottles?

And here's the upshot:

This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. The recall is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what we actually remember and more about what we’d like to remember. It’s the difference between a “Save” and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life. We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

Now go read the whole article.

On the Temptations of Christian Higher Education

2011-05-25T18:45:00.005-04:00

I'm not usually inclined to agree with Allen Guelzo--but given his contrarian tendencies, agreement would almost constitute failure for him. However, his recent reflections on Christian higher education in Touchstone magazine are worth noting (HT: FT's Evangel blog).

Many will fixate on his critique of quality in these institutions (or lack thereof), as well his worry about the rise of "Rolodex presidents"--"presidents who may or may not have much understanding of the life of liberal arts education and who may or may not have much personal investment in the Evangelical identity of the college, but who have been picked out of a corporate Rolodex of “successful leaders,” either by boards of trustees or executive search firms." (I don't think this situation is quite as dire as Guelzo suggests, but we might be on the way. And I think Guelzo has a bit of an idealistic picture of colleges as "learning institutions," as if historians and philosophers would be the most natural leaders for such institutions. But the contemporary college or university is obviously a much more complex beast, and I can imagine all kinds of "scholars" who could sink a college in no time despite all their scholarly acumen and prestige.)

However, that's not my interest. Instead, I'm sympathetic to Guelzo's identification of another dynamic that compromises certain institutions of higher education: de facto allegiance to the guild rather than the institution. As Guelzo rightly notes:

Faculty want to be left alone because, for the most part, their primary allegiance is to their professional guild, “a largely closed community of practitioners,” says Louis Menand, “who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields” (e.g., history, chemistry, physics, sociology, and so on). Allegiance to the college fades far back in the wake of the academic career. Faculty think of themselves as historians, chemists, physicists and sociologists first, rather than as members of a certain college faculty, because that’s where the mobility is.
This means that, even for Christian colleges, there is only modest incentive for a faculty member to buy into a Christian college’s worldview paradigm. Given the atmosphere of financial fragility, the resources to reward the development of such a worldview are simply not there, and the professional cultures in which faculty are trained are actively hostile to it.
The yardsticks by which I have been measuring the decline and fall of many Christian colleges have been, I admit, secular ones: endowment, admittance rates, and so forth. All of these I could cheerfully agree to dismiss if they were the price being paid by a college for its commitment to a forthrightly Christian identity. But they are not. In pursuit of Rolodex presidents and guild-minded faculty, too many Christian colleges are actually begging to be judged by secular standards. They are, in effect, trying to serve two masters. I am simply taking them at their word.

The notion that Christian colleges and universities are in danger of becoming too academic and scholarly will sound almost laughable. And in many cases it is: there are all kinds of small Christian colleges which are still working to emerge from their "Bible school" heritages, and in those places there's hardly a danger of being too committed to the wider academy. To the contrary.

However, Guelzo is right that there is another tier of Christian colleges for whom I think this is a very real temptation. In the name of "rigorous" scholarship, the scholars at these institutions commit themselves to the regnant paradigms in their guilds, find their primary identity and allegiance in such guilds, and are thus puzzled and exasperated as to why the Christian institution in which they teach doesn't just simply mirror their guild or the research university down the road. As I've argued elsewhere, such a stance is usually also accompanied by the schtick that education is a hands-off endeavor of providing skills for "critical thinking" and professors who have absorbed this trope will be completely allergic to the illiberal notion that education is about formation.

In short, once a critical mass of faculty at such Christian colleges have decided that their primary allegiance is to the guild, in some sense the "core business" and raison d'etre of the Christian college has been abandoned. Or as Guelzo puts it, the college will have swapped the formative task of education--handing on a tradition--for the instrumental job of conferring credentials:

Christian higher education, if it has anyraison d’etreat all, is in the business of handing on a tradition, not of piling up research or conferring credentials—in other words, its real “core business” is education. If Christianity is a revealed religion, then the content of that revelation is both fixed and authoritative; it does not bend, wilt, or evolve gradually into something else. It will not be improved by research into religious phenomena. Thus, the Christian college may recover, re-emphasize, and reform, but it will not re-design.

While I worry that Guelzo's language conveys a problematic picture of repristination, he's certainly onto something. And as he concludes, if Christian colleges and universities are induced to give up this task of education, it will constitute a real loss in the wider landscape of American higher education:

This will be a great loss because Evangelical higher education really does possess a reason for the “core business” of educating. Evangelicals really do believe that there is a transcendent meaning to learning, that the love of learning is indeed akin to the desire for God. In fact, believing this, the Evangelical college ought to be the one place that really has a foundation from which to hold back the vast outpouring of cultural bilge, from violent video games to proletarian entertainment.
It comes as no shock to discover that secular universities can find no cultural consensus, since they abandoned that a long time ago; and it is not news, since Ex Corde Ecclesia,that Catholic colleges and universities are far from being of one mind on their identity. But it will mean the end of yet another important cultural alternative if Evangelical colleges, one by one, go down—or worse, pull themselves down, because their leaders and their faculties could not make up their minds what core business they were in, and sat in silence.

It might not be too late, but it might be getting late.

I'll feel better about watching "Hangover 2"...

2011-05-25T14:36:00.003-04:00

...because Bradley Cooper just used the word "hermeneutic" on NPR's "Fresh Air"--clearly a reflection of his Villanova/Georgetown education.

This is Your Brain on Apple...

2011-05-24T00:58:00.004-04:00

Given the argument I make about the mall as temple in Desiring the Kingdom, several friends pointed out a recent study which purports to confirm the religious nature of "super brands," lending some MRI support for what The Persuaders showed us already several years ago.

Scanning the brain activity of Apple devotees, the researchers found that the emotional experience associated with Apple stimulated the same regions of the brain that are stimulated by religious experience.

Always nice to have little reductionistic empiricism in the back pocket of my argument!

For Your (Post-Rapture) Listening Pleasure

2011-05-21T06:00:00.000-04:00

If you're reading this...

The Risks of Fatherhood

2011-05-18T09:47:00.002-04:00

I've appreciated the kinds notes in response to my "Letter to Young Parents."

Just FYI, those who found some encouragement in that might also want to listen to a chapel talk I gave at Regent College last summer on "The Risks of Fatherhood" (free audio).

Manhattan this Weekend

2011-05-17T08:00:00.003-04:00

I'm looking forward to being in Manhattan this weekend to present the Gospel & Culture Lecture on Sunday, May 22, at 1:00pm in the Hunter College Auditorium. This is sponsored by Redeemer Presbyterian's Center for Faith & Work who, in 2010-2011, have organized an impressive series of lectures that has also included N.T. Wright, Andy Crouch, Adrienne Chaplin, Robert George and several others. It's an honor to be part of this conversation.

The title of my talk is simply Culture as Liturgy. But my sort of working subtitle is: Taking David Brooks to Church.

Dream Small: A Commencement Address

2011-05-16T10:17:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of delivering the commencement address to the graduating class of King College in Bristol, TN. It's a strange, rather daunting genre. I took brevity to be one of the primary virtues of such a talk. And given that I was in the middle of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King while writing this--and that his own Kenyon College commencement address was rumbling around in my head--I was worried about being entirely derivative (and a bit of a downer). But when I got the invitation last fall, I immediately remembered a note I had scribbled in my moleskin almost two years ago and was able to give them the title immediately: "Dream Small."

Dream Small: King College Commencement Address

A Letter to Young Parents

2011-05-11T13:13:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned before, I recently guest-edited an issue of Comment magazine which we dubbed, "Letters to the Young." There are still some issues available for purchase.

My contribution, beyond the editorial, was a letter to young parents. My wife and I have been married over 20 years and are the proud parents of 4 teenagers. But I can assure you we had no idea what we were getting into. This letter distills some of the wisdom (I hope) I've accumulated thus far--wisdom wrestled from fear and disappointment and heartbreak, and hope birthed by irruptions of grace and goodness.

Dear Grace and Alex,

Congratulations! Thanks be to God for the safe arrival of what sounds like a packed little bundle of hope: my goodness, 10 lbs., 6 oz.! It must be the milk there in Wisconsin.

Well, on behalf of the rest of us exhausted, grateful, and terrified inhabitants, let me welcome you to a strange new world: parenthood. This is going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and it’s worth every bit of the blood, sweat, and tears that are to come. You can’t imagine that now. I understand. Soak up every ounce of joy and elation and starry-eyed wonder at the miracle of baby Liam. I’ll be watching as the terror sets in. It’s usually when you’re headed out the hospital door and it hits you: “They’re actually letting me take this little creature home? But I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!” Yeah, get used to that.

But also remember this: in a few weeks, you’re going to bring Liam forward for baptism. In that sacramental act he is going to be tangibly marked with the sign of God’s promises. That should be a first reminder that you’re not in this alone—that Liam is being claimed by a promise-keeping Father who is even more faithful than you. There will be days and seasons when that will be an unspeakable comfort to you.

In the sacrament of baptism, not only will you claim God’s promises, you’ll be confessing that you alone are not able to raise Liam. The baptismal ceremony is, I think, a wonderful gift to parents who rightly approach their task with fear and trembling. For while you, in response to God’s promise, will make promises to God about how you will raise Liam, the congregation will also make a promise—to come alongside you, to support you and nourish you, to sustain you all within the household of God that is bigger than the three of you. So baptism is a sign that our homes are open, interdependent households, not closed, nuclear units. Baptism signals that all of us—married or single, parent or child—are part of a larger household which is the church of God, and together, that household has pledged to be one big community of godparents. When you run up against the challenges of parenting, don’t be scared to remind the church of the promise it made to you.

I hope and pray that your labour as parents can be buoyed by these promises and this sense that your tiny, growing family will flourish just to the extent that you center yourselves in the “first family,” which is the church. You will need this, believe me. One of the terrible lies of our culture—and even the rhetoric of “family values”—is the crippling myth that our homes are self-sufficient incubators for child-rearing. If you buy into that myth, you’ll isolated by a constant sense of failure. For it won’t take long to realize that you are not able to do this on your own, even though you’re an intertwined team. But if you’ve bought into the myth of the self-sufficient family, you also won’t be willing to admit that you need help. Baptism is the church’s way of signaling right from the get-go that we know you need help! We know you can’t do this on your own. So we’re not going to be surprised or disappointed or judgmental when you lean on us. We’ll be there waiting. Why not get into the habit early?

Finally, while I don’t mean to rain on the parade of your joy, I do feel compelled to share the bad news, too: Liam might break your heart. Actually, Liam is going to break your heart. Somehow. Somewhere. Maybe more than once. To become a parent is to promise you’ll love prodigals. Indeed, some days parenting is exactly how God is going to teach you to love your enemies. Because there’ll be days when a 17-year-old Liam is going to see you as the enemy, and all of a sudden you’ll realize that the Sermon on the Mount is not about war and foreign policy, nor is it just pie-in-the-sky piety: instead, you’ll hear those words anew and realize that in the command to love your enemies, Jesus is calling you to follow him as a parent, and sometimes even that task will look cruciform. It will require absorbing all Liam’s misplaced animosity, all his confused attempts to figure out who (and whose) he is. At those moments, Jesus’ call to lay down your life and take up the cross will have a mundane tangibility you could have never imagined. Some days, loving Liam is going to require you to turn the other cheek and absorb that heartbreak like a slap across the face. And it’s then that you’ll most want to remember the promises of a faithful Father that trickled down his little forehead years ago.

But those painful moments will be overshadowed by a million others. You’re going to think it’s incredible when Liam smiles, or says “Mama,” or rolls over on his tummy, but let me tell you: that won’t even compare to the afternoon when, in what feels like an out-of-body experience, you realize you’re having a conversation with this man—you might be sitting on the front porch talking about Mumford & Sons or Andy Warhol or World War II artillery, and for a moment you can hardly believe that the little bundle you brought home from the hospital has grown into this beautiful, mystifying, wonderful young man. And you realize that, in your son, God has given you one of your best friends in the whole world, and you try to suppress your smile while thinking to yourself, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

It’s all worth it,

Jamie

Public Intellectuals: Across the Channel, Across the Pond

2011-05-09T07:54:00.003-04:00

It turns out Britain and the United States--those two countries long divided by a common language--nonetheless share a common pastime: lamenting the lack of influence of public intellectuals while romanticizing the role of ideas in France. As John Naughton puts it in his Observer essay, "Why don't we love our intellectuals?" (available at the Guardian),

Britain is a country in which the word "intellectual" is often preceded by the sneering adjective "so-called", where smart people are put down because they are "too clever by half" and where a cerebral politician (David Willetts) was for years saddled with the soubriquet "Two Brains". It's a society in which creative engineers are labelled "boffins" and kids with a talent for mathematics or computer programming are "nerds". As far as the Brits are concerned, intellectuals begin at Calais and gravitate to Paris, where the fact that they are lionised in its cafes and salons is seen as proof that the French, despite their cheese- and wine-making skills, are fundamentally unsound. Given this nasty linguistic undercurrent, a Martian anthropologist would be forgiven for thinking that Britain was a nation of knuckle-dragging troglodytes rather than a cockpit of vibrant cultural life and home to some of the world's best universities, most creative artists, liveliest publications and greatest theatres and museums.

As you might guess, Naughton is actually out challenge this picture, enjoining his compatriots to "cast off the inferiority complex towards the cerebral continent and move on to more interesting questions." The question Naughton pursues gets a little less interesting, trying to quantify the influence of public intellectuals (first requiring a definition of a public intellectual)--but it's still worth reading the whole thing.

It would be interesting to try out a similar thesis on this side of the pond (including Canada, a propos of my earlier post on Ignatieff). It's pretty easy to decry the lack of intellectual rigor in American public discourse in a country where someone like Sarah Palin can have any kind of public platform. But that might also be shooting fish in a barrel. Maybe there's also another side to the story. In some deep sense, the United States has always been primarily an idea--indeed, no matter what you might think of the results, the founding of the Republic was a remarkable exercise in theoretical reflection and intellectual imagining. And to some extent, while much of the bluster might just be a cover for selfishness and greed, there is a sense in which debates in this country are still about ideas. I find nothing to commend in Glenn Beck, but it is nonetheless interesting that he could put a book like Hayek's Road to Serfdom on the bestseller list (Fukuyama's review of another Hayek volume in yesterday's NYT is also germane here).

Perhaps what we need is a distinction: often what we might mean when we lament the absence of public intellectuals actually boils down to the lack of influence exerted by academics. But that might betray a problematic equation that is well lost.

Once (and only once) more on the "new universalism"

2011-05-07T18:45:00.004-04:00

[I will no doubt regret this, but a 5-hour layover in Atlanta will make one do all kinds of regrettable things.]

So, I guess there's been a little buzz about my earlier post on the so-called "new universalism." Some people clearly have a lot of time on their hands. Otherwise, why on earth would someone take the time to respond to some blog post that is so clearly malicious, stupid, arrogant, misguided, and irresponsible? Wouldn't the thing to do in such a situation be to just ignore it? Nonetheless, my off-the-cuff remarks have solicited first a 1200 word response; and then, from the master of overkill, a 3200 word response (Dude: don't you have a dissertation to write?); and now a first installment of 1600 words in what promises to be a two-part response. I'm flattered?

A. So, against my better judgment, let me make a few observations:

1. Um, it's a blog post people. I wrote it in 20 minutes one morning after reading another piece of dreck by Lauren Winner. If it's stupid, why comment on it? (There is a huge laughable irony about charges of ressentiment in the ballpark here--you can work that out for yourself.)

2. I really don't have a dog in this fight. "Universalism"--or any sort of crusade against universalism--is simply not on my radar. This ain't my issue. So I'm sure as hell not going to spend much time carrying on some ongoing conversation about it. I made a comment about an essay in the NYT which was itself describing a "zeitgeist" in evangelicalism--and repeated phrases and positions I've heard from real, live people. I made some comments about that zeitgeist. If you think I'm wrong, you're welcome to make that case. I am not obligated to respond to you, and so you're even free to tell yourself that my non-response means that I've been proven wrong. Go crazy. Just note that there are other interpretations of such silence that might be different than what you're telling yourself. I can live with people thinking I'm wrong, so the dynamics of shame that functions in the blogosphere doesn't really bother me. I've got other fish to fry.

3. I must have missed the memo about the requirements for writing a blog post. Apparently, according to the self-appointed police force of the theological blogosphere, one is not allowed to comment on a topic unless one has first completed a dissertation in the field. Who decided only specialists could speak? Is there a reading list everyone's supposed to have mastered before they can comment on an issue? Is it hidden in the catacombs at Multnomah?

4. It was not a blog post on Rob Bell, or universalism in general, or universalism across the spectrum of Christian history. It was a riff on an essay by Lauren Winner from which the phrases "I can't imagine" and "I can hope" are lifted. I do think these are common refrains from folks who extol something like this position but also haven't read all of the books that I'm at fault for not having mastered.

B. So what was I on about in that original post? I'm afraid none of the responses have really given me pause about my concerns. And as I said, I'm not going to engage in some point-by-point refutation. If you think that means I don't have an argument or a defense, go crazy: you're welcome to do that. However, let me make just a couple of clarifications:

1. I'm afraid I still think the motivation question is a legitimate one (though obviously not the only one--do I seriously have to state that? Apparently.). In this regard, I just take myself to be following some of Charles Taylor's methodology in A Secular Age. Indeed, for those who really care about this issue, I think A Secular Age, pp. 650ff. is important reading: there Taylor examines the shift in plausibility conditions that engendered the "decline in Hell." I take my point to be a sort of off-handed cousin of that analysis.

The question would just be something like this: if there is such a "clear" "biblical" logic that impels us toward universalism, why did the majority of Christendom seem to miss this for 1500-1800 years? There are multiple accounts of that. Taylor's account is one of motivations: as he argues, something changes in "modern Christian consciousness" that makes us want something else to be the case, thus priming us to "see" it there all along. That might not be an adequate account, but it is certainly a legitimate aspect of an account. And if you don't think this is really what's at work for all sorts of folks who don't read theology, well...then you haven't read Lauren Winner's essay.

But actually the better parallel from Taylor is found elsewhere in A Secular Age, where Taylor considers "conversions" to unbelief (pp. 362-366). I've summarized this chapter here, but let me reproduce one snippet:

This section is a fascinating little psychoanalysis of a convert—but of one (or a culture) that has converted from belief to unbelief. The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion: if someone tells you that they’ve converted to unbelief because of science, don’t believe them. Because what’s usually captured them is not scientific evidence per se, but the formof science: “Even where the conclusions of science seem to be doing the work of conversion, it is very often not the detailed findings so much as the form” (362). Indeed, “the appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findngs as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality” (365). But you can also understand how, on the retelling, the convert to unbelief will want to give the impression that it was the scientific evidence that was doing the work (365b). Converts to unbelief always tell subtraction stories.
And the belief that they’ve converted from has usually been an immature, Sunday-Schoolish faith that could be easily toppled. So while such converts to unbelief tell themselves stories about “growing up” and “facing reality”—and thus paint belief as essentially immature and childish—what it betrays is the simplistic shape of the faith they’ve abandoned. “[I]f our faith has remained at the stage of the immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible” (365). But in fact their conversion to unbelief was also a conversion to a new faith: “faith in science’s ability” (366).

The point is that people "convert" to positions not on the basis of reasons but on the basis of a certain moral stance associated with the position. It seems to me there's something similar at work in what I'll call "zeitgeist-universalism."

2. What I was probably also reacting to in my original blog post was the general tenor of moral superiority that so often (not always) accompanies evangelical universalists. I'm really tired of all the construals of universalism that basically make it seem that only moral monsters could not be universalists. So was Augustine stupid? Or malicious? Or both?

3. Finally, with respect to my basic claim that hope can be wrong: Surely no one would suggest that hope gets some kind of free pass--as if a hope couldn't be "wrong" in the sense of being mis-directed or mis-ordered. So I take it that, in principle, as a virtue, hope is subject to discipline, one might say. So hope doesn't traffic in some neutral domain where you can hope whatever you want. Therefore, in principle, hopes could be subject to "chastisement" (isn't this half the critique of the prosperity gospel?).

So I take it to be formally true that a hope can be wrong. Then we'd have to discuss on what grounds a hope for universalism could be right or wrong. Just because it's a "nice" hope doesn't give it a free pass; just because it seems to be a "logical" hope doesn't suffice. Indeed, I think Jonathan Edwards would argue that what I hope for is quite besides the point; in other words, there might be a more theocentric way to frame this whole conversation.

C. So I wish I had more retractions to make. You can chalk this up to either my stubbornness or my stupidity, or both. Just a few minor points:

1. Yes, the "new" universalism is not "new"--there are ancient streams of this. Yep, OK.

2. There are people who offer rigorous arguments, biblical cases for universalism, etc., etc. Turns out people have written lots of books on this. (Gee, really? Well, gooolllly...if only uh'd known...) Yep, got it. [See B.2 above]

3. I would say, in response to DeRose, and following from a conversation with my colleague Kevin Corcoran, that perhaps there's a different taxonomy or set of labels that could be used to clarify the positions here. So, for example, on something like Keith's register, I think, one could be an "exclusivist" [only through Jesus] and a "hopeful universalist" [all will be saved]. So what I call "exclusivism" might be better described as "separationism." Fair enough. If I was more invested in this conversation, I might try to master the lingo.

C'est fini (pour moi).

No Country for Philosopher-Kings

2011-05-06T20:38:00.004-04:00

You might not have known this, but the nation to our north just completed a federal election. Not a lot of hype--the election was only announced about 5 weeks ago, so don't feel badly if you missed it. The Conservative government established a solid majority, thus relinquishing the ball-and-chain of a coalition government. No big surprise: they only called the election because they were confident this would be the outcome.

The real story of the election was the trouncing of the Liberal party and the re-emergence of the NDP--what used to be the "left" option in Canadian politics but which has now, it seems, gone the way of "New Labor."

Why should we care? Because embedded in the downfall of the Liberals was a cautionary tale about the role of intellectuals in electoral politics. The leader of the Liberal party was philosopher Michael Ignatieff, about whom I've blogged before. A political philosopher of international renown, Ignatieff returned to Canada like the philosopher returning to the cave, committing himself to the actual task of governing. The end result was the complete obliteration of the party.

Andrew Potter's Maclean's column, "No Country for Good Men," is an instructive analysis. He points out two important factors:

First, the Liberal party has not known what it stood for since Chretien--its only "platform" has been the maintenance of power. This isn't even pragmatism; it's ultimately cynicism. As Potter notes:

the Liberal Party of Canada is a complete disaster, and has been for some time. It was mid-way through Jean Chretien’s second term that people started to point out that the party had no real identity, no sense of purpose other than power for its own sake. And so Michael Ignatieff’s failure to tell a plausible story about his own candidacy for prime minister was the precise mirror of the party’s own existential conundrum: The Liberal Party of Canada has no idea why it exists, so it is hardly surprising that they settled on a leader who didn’t seem to have any idea why he was here.

What is so remarkable about Ignatieff’s tenure as Liberal leader, and with this past election campaign in particular, is how little he tried to take advantage of intellectual strengths and interests. Confronted with a cartoonishly small-minded prime minister acting as chief puppeteer over a caucus of frat boys, yes men, and idiocrats, surely there was an opportunity for a leader who would speak to those Canadians who see themselves as responsible citizens of the world. We spent much of the 2000s telling ourselves that “the world needs more Canada”, and if anyone embodied that slogan, it was Michael Ignatieff.

But while Ignatieff and his handlers failed to communicate a clear vision, and take advantage of his intellectual strengths, Potter also makes a disheartening observation about the Canadian electorate--one sadly confirmed, I have to admit, as I regularly return to Canada as an 'oustide' observer:

Why did Michael Ignatieff – or more plausibly, the people helping devise his political brand and their electoral strategy – stay as far as possible from these issues? Probably because they believe that Stephen Harper actually has us pegged, that we are a nation of Tim Horton’s-addicted moral suburbanites for whom that “the world needs Canada” was always just a slogan for selling books and lattes to the elites downtown. But if the Liberals are afraid to speak to their natural constituency in their native tongue, and if their leader’s CV is largely a cause for quiet embarrassment, what does that say about the party, or the country?

Claude Ely and the Pentecostal Roots of Rock'n'Roll

2011-05-05T21:26:00.002-04:00

NPR's All Things Considered had a marvelous little segment on Brother Claude Ely, a backcountry Pentecostal preacher who's probably impacted you more than you might realize.

You probably already know some of Brother Claude's work if you've heard Johnny Cash's haunting rendition of "Ain't No Grave" on American VI, or if you heard it playing in the background of this year's Deadliest Catch trailer--a song Ely wrote when he was 12 years old and miraculously healed. The NPR piece, featuring his nephew's quest to know the man, includes some fantastic archival recordings (including a recording of the night Ely died leading a revival from the organ--he died with his boots on, so to speak).

[Tulane scholar] Fontenot says that it might be hard to tease out where different musical traditions come from. But he believes that Pentecostal music had an impact on rock 'n' roll. He says you can hear that impact in Brother Claude Ely's music.
Many of the early rockers — Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash — all grew up in the Pentecostal church, according to Hensley.

Be sure to listen to it: just reading the story doesn't begin to do it justice. It's a convincing audio portrait in which you'll hear the later music of Presley, Cash, and Lewis prefigured in Pentecostal worship.

Interview on WGVU's "Common Threads"

2011-05-04T20:20:00.004-04:00

I had forgotten about this, since the interviews were done a few weeks back, but the local public radio station program, "Common Threads," has posted a two-part interview I did with Fred Stella about Letters to a Young Calvinist.

You can listen to two half-hour segments: Part 1 and Part 2.

Korean translation of "Introducing Radical Orthodoxy"

2011-05-03T18:54:00.002-04:00

I just received copies of the new Korean translation of Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology, first published in 2004. It is available from CLC Korea.

The Korean cover basically reproduces the cover design of the first English edition. However, subsequent print editions of the English book have a slightly different cover since the Getty Museum, home of the Saenredam painting featured on the cover, stipulated that no text could be superimposed on the image. Go check your edition of Introducing Radical Orthodoxy now to see if you have one of the early collector editions! (Not.)

This new book will soon be joined by Korean translations of Letters to a Young Calvinist and The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic. (And stay posted for news about a forthcoming second edition of The Fall of Interpretation from Baker Academic. More soon.)

Can hope be wrong? On the new universalism

2011-04-25T06:00:00.005-04:00

This ain't your Grandma's universalism (if your Grandma was, say, a Unitarian). The (relatively) old universalism was a liberal universalism of "many-roads-to-God-who-is-a-big-cuddly-Grandpa" (or, more recently, Grandma). Such a universalism was generally embarrassed by Christian particularity and any claims to the divinity of Christ. Instead, Jesus was a kindly teacher like so many others pointing us all to that great kumbaya-sing-along in the the "beyond."

In contrast, the "new" universalism is an evangelical universalism, a Christocentric universalism. If all will be saved, they will be saved in Christ, because of the work of Christ as the Incarnate God who has triumphed over the power of sin and death (the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer).

The question, then, is just what compels one to be an evangelical universalist? Some resort to prooftexting, operating with a naive, selective reading of Scripture. I'm going to do the evangelical universalist a favor and ignore such a strategy, only because I think it can be so easily refuted. (Many of these evangelical universalists would pounce on such selective prooftexting in other contexts.)

No, the motivation for evangelical universalism is not really a close reading of the Bible's claims about eternity. Instead, it seems that the macro-motivation for evangelical universalism is less a text and more a hermeneutic, a kind of "sensibility" about the very nature of God as "love" (which includes its own implicit sensibility about the nature of love). Two phrases you will often hear from evangelical universalists involve hope and our imagination. (For a sample combination of this constellation of concerns, see Lauren Winner's essay on Rob Bell in yesterday's New York Times Book Review.) The concern is often formulated something like this:

1) "I can't imagine" that a God of love would condemn Gandhi to hell. (Always Gandhi. Why Gandhi? As Ross Douthat asks, can you insert Tony Soprano here? Doesn't the evangelical universalist case of Gandhi imply a kind of salvation by works? But I digress...) Or, as Winner puts it, evangelical universalists "can't imagine their secular friends aren't going to heaven."

2) "I don't know if all will be saved but I hope this will be true." I'm firmly committed to the particularity of Christ, the evangelical universalist will emphasize. I just hope that God's salvation is not so particular that he only saves some. And it is precisely God's love and mercy that make me hope in this way.

The question then is: are these hopes and imaginings sufficiently warranted to overturn the received, orthodox doctrines concerning final judgment and eternal damnation? Are these sufficient to overturn the narrative thrust of Scripture and the clearer reading of biblical passages that suggest otherwise. (Let's stop making this just about passages that mention "hell;" at issue here are all passages that discuss judgment.) Are these hopes and imaginings sufficient for me to set aside centuries of the church's theological reflection on these matters? Is my chronological snobbery warranted? Just how do I think my hopes and imaginings are somehow more faithful and merciful and just than the generations upon generations of my forebears in the Christian faith? (I'll confess to being a kind of theological Burkean: it's very hard for me to imagine that I am smarter or better than Augustine or John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards. I'm not generally given to whiggish theology.)

Let's attend to these two specific sorts of claims. I would note that both of these intuitions are fundamentally anthropocentric strategies--outcomes of what Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) calls "the anthropocentric turn" in modernity. A couple of thoughts:

1) The "I-can't-imagine" strategy is fundamentally Feuerbachian: it is a hermeneutic of projection which begins from what I can conceive and then projects "upwards," as it were, to a conception of God. While this "imagining" might have absorbed some biblical themes of love and mercy, this absorption seems selective. More importantly, the "I-can't-imagine" argument seems inattentive to how much my imagination is shaped and limited by all kinds of cultural factors and sensibilities--including how I "imagine" the nature of love, etc. The "I-can't-imagine" argument makes man the measure of God, or at least seems to let the limits and constraints of "my" imagination trump the authority of Scripture and interpretation. I take it that discipleship means submitting even my imagination to the discipline of Scripture. (Indeed, could anything be more countercultural right now than Jonathan Edwards' radical theocentrism, with all its attendant scandals for our modern sensibilities?)

2) The "at-least-I-hope" strategy might seem less problematic. Doesn't it just name what all of us secretly desire? Indeed, wouldn't we be quite inhuman if we didn't hope in this way? (Then you get Winner's obnoxious suggestion that any of those who continue to affirm divine judgment are really trying to "guard heaven's gate," taking a certain delight in exclusion, as if they saw heaven as a country club. I won't dignify that with a response.)

But whence this hope? Can our hopes ever be wrong? Let's try an analogous example: I love my wife dearly. She is the best thing that ever happened to me, and our marriage has been an incredible means of grace in my life. I can't imagine life without her; indeed, I don't want to imagine life without her. And I want to hope that we will share this intimacy as a husband and wife forever.

But then I run into this claim from Jesus: "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven" (Matt. 22:30). Should I nonetheless hope that marriage endures in eternity? Should I profess that I can't know this (since Scripture seems to suggest otherwise), but nonetheless claim that somehow hoping it might be true is still faithful? Or should I submit even my hopes to discipline by the authority of Scripture?

The new universalism is not the old universalism. Fair enough. But those of us who reject even the new universalism aren't gleeful about it. We might even wish it were otherwise. But we also recognize that even our wishes, hopes, and desires need discipline.

"Vague" Religion: Brooks, Taylor, and the "Book of Mormon" Musical

2011-04-22T08:12:00.002-04:00

The irreverent musical, The Book of Mormon, is getting rave reviews from all quarters--well, all quarters of secular elites (I read the first review, in the New York Times, on the day that I was speaking at Brigham Young University!). The gist of the South-Park-ish critique is not a scorched-earth approach (it's not a script written by Christopher Hitchens); instead, all reviewers seem to agree that the critique amounts to something like this: "What you believe is unbelievably ridiculous and laughable, but we sure can't deny that you are just so incredibly nice (and naive)."

But David Brooks' column today, "Creed or Chaos," pushes beyond these platitudes--in a way that reminds me of an important point in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. First, Brooks:

The central theme of “The Book of Mormon” is that many religious stories are silly — the idea that God would plant golden plates in upstate New York. Many religious doctrines are rigid and out of touch.

But religion itself can do enormous good as long as people take religious teaching metaphorically and not literally; as long as people understand that all religions ultimately preach love and service underneath their superficial particulars; as long as people practice their faiths open-mindedly and are tolerant of different beliefs.

This warm theme infuses the play with humanity and compassion. It also plays very well to an educated American audience. Many Americans have always admired the style of belief that is spiritual but not doctrinal, pluralistic and not exclusive, which offers tools for serving the greater good but is not marred by intolerant theological judgments.

The only problem with “The Book of Mormon” (you realize when thinking about it later) is that its theme is not quite true. Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

He continues to then offer an apology for "rigorous theologies"--an apologetic for thick, theological specificity rather than some bland, lowest-common-denominator spirituality. And then ends with a theme that alludes to his new book, The Social Animal, but a point I've also been pushing since Desiring the Kingdom. As Brooks puts it,

Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most.

In a way, Brooks echoes Charles Taylor's critiques of reductionistic, "secular" accounts of religion. For example, as he notes later in A Secular Age, many secular elites work with some sort of "general theory of religion" which sees "religion" (in general) as a vague 'answer' to the question of "meaning." In other words, if you ask a secularist why people believe in the crazy particularities of various faith, the answer is not particular but vague: They're looking for "meaning."

But Taylor thinks this is just the sort of over-wrought balderdash you'd come up with if you were not "religious." "What humans seek in religion," Taylor emphasizes, is not "meaning," and it's certainly not meaning in general. "Indeed, there is something absurd about the idea that our lives could be focused on meaning as such, rather than on some specific good or value. One might die for God, or the Revolution, or the classless society, but not for meaning" (A Secular Age, p. 679). "Anyone genuinely 'into' some good or value," he continues, "must see this particular good as having worth; this is what he is moved by" (680). Vague spiritualities of "niceness" will never generate such commitment.

On Loving (and Being Loved By) David Foster Wallace

2011-04-17T00:05:00.002-04:00

I worry that all the hoopla of David Foster Wallace, Inc. is going to overwhelm serious discussion of his work, generating a backlash against the media-constructed image of DFW as the saintly martyr for the cause of "the novel." One of the worst outcomes of such a juvenile, anti-trend backlash would be the dismissal of Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker essay, "Farther Away." Indeed, here's a piece doomed to double-disdain: yet more about Wallace, and now from mega-selling literary phenom, Franzen. (Even the cynical, however, might appreciate Karen Green's recent interview in the Guardian.)

Granted, Franzen's essay is a bit of a set piece, recounting his retreat to the desolate Alejandro Selkirk island off the coast of Chile--named for the Scottish adventurer who is the likely basis of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. So here we have Franzen, burned out on the book tour from his best-selling Freedom, retreating alone to the isolation of this island with a paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe in his backpack. This is the sort of thing writers do only so they can write about it.

But Franzen is also trying to find space to mourn the death of his friend, David Foster Wallace. And so the essay intertwines three threads: his adventure alone on the island, his attempt to come to grips with the death of David (including both lament and anger), and his meta-reflections on the history and task of the novel, very much continuing his famous thesis in How to Be Alone: that fiction is a response, and antidote, to loneliness (a thesis he shared with Wallace). On all three counts, Franzen is worth reading.

Particularly poignant and insightful are Franzen's reflections on love in the corpus of DFW. On the one hand, he notes its absence from Wallace's fictional worlds: "Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe." On the other hand, "[t]he curious thing about David's fiction, though, is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it."

That sounds exactly right to me. But I would ratchet this up a notch, too: it's not just that Wallace's readers feel loved because of his vulnerability and honesty. I think one could also argue that despite all of their addictions and "hideous" characteristics, Wallace also loved his characters. Indeed, I think this is precisely what distinguishes Wallace from Franzen. This is one the things that struck me while reading Freedom: it is a masterful work, but I found it difficult to generate sympathy with any of the characters, and it struck me that this is because Franzen doesn't really care for Patty or Walter or Joey or any of the others either. While Wallace and Franzen are often mentioned in the same (postmodern) breath, associated with hyper-self-consciousness, "meta"-izing fancies, and cynical distance, in fact they're quite different. Franzen ended up settling for quite a straightforward narrative strategy, but his stories ooze with cynicism. In contrast, while Wallace was every bit the pomo formalist, indulging in all kinds of "non-linear" tricks and gimmicks, what emerges through that is not cynicism, but something quite different: a sensitivity and understanding for the messed up worlds of his characters that might just be love.

The Candid Decorator

2011-04-16T09:34:00.003-04:00

Another little treasure in my inbox today, thanks to Knopf's "Poem-a-Day" for April. Includes just a whiff of allusion to Oscar Wilde's complex interplay of aestheticism and the soul-burrowing introspection of De Profundis--along with a concluding shout-out to Grand Rapids' heritage as "furniture city."

The Candid Decorator
By James Merril
I thought I would do over
All of it. I was tired
Of scars and stains, of bleared
Panes, tinge of the liver.
The fuchsia in the center
Looked positively weird
I felt it—dry as paper.
I called a decorator.
In next to no time such
A nice young man appeared.
What had I in mind?
Oh, lots and lots of things—
Fresh colors, pinks and whites
That one would want to touch;
The windows redesigned;
The plant thrown out in favor,
Say, of a small tree,
An orange or a pear . . .
He listened dreamily.
Combing his golden hair
He measured with one glance
The distance I had come
To reach this point. And then
He put away his comb
He said: “Extravagance!
Suppose it could be done.
You’d have to give me carte
Blanche and an untold sum.
But to be frank, my dear,
Living here quite alone
(Oh I have seen it, true,
But me you needn’t fear)
You’ve one thing to the good:
While not exactly smart,
Your wee place, on the whole
It couldn’t be more ‘you.’
Still, if you like—” I could
Not speak. He had seen my soul,
Had said what I dreaded to hear.
Ending the interview
I rose, blindly. I swept
To show him to the door,
And knelt, when he had left,
By my Grand Rapids chair,
And wept until I laughed
And laughed until I wept.

An Ode to Rory McIlroy

2011-04-11T08:40:00.002-04:00

A lot of my friends love to hate golf--with all its bourgeois trappings and conservative leanings, its generally patrician vibe. And they sure can't understand how someone could watch golf.

I'm guilty on all counts, but won't undertake any apologetics here. As a bit of testimony, let me just say this: golf is the only televised sport that all my kids will watch with me. Go figure.

But for those of us who have that love-hate relationship with the game (which just is love for the game), this year's Masters was as close as one gets to athletic poetry, the energy of a Greek tragedy played out on a stage of sculpted horticulture whose lush beauty is a dream set--magnolia blossoms framing the perfection of Augusta's fairways and undulating greens. Long shadows trail across the greens during the late-afternoon close of the drama. Augusta is so stunning you can almost smell it on TV.

The real heros of this year's Masters have to be the editors at CBS: with no less than 10 players in contention for most of Sunday, every shot had significance, and you could feel the director barely keeping up: KJ Choi dropping a putt on 15, then cut to Jason Day ripping a drive on 14, cut to Tiger roaring up the fairway on 16, etc., etc. Never has a golf tournament had such non-stop energy (making a mockery of the supposed 'excitement' of either baseball or football which both have tiny bursts of action interspersed with long stretches of standing around and long commercial breaks).

The 2011 Masters cast was international and intergenerational: the top of the leaderboard featured a player from every continent except Antarctica. And their ages ranged from 21 to 40. Between them all it was a weekend of non-stop excellence and heartbreak, genius and foibles, unthinkable shots and lip-biting misses. (I do think one has to have played golf to be able to appreciate the almost superhuman mastery of the game exhibited by the pros.) This has to make the taste of victory all the sweeter for Charl Schwartzel.

All of this included, of course, the meltdown of young Rory McIlroy--the phenom from Northern Ireland who had led the tournament at the close of each of the first three days, coming into Sunday with an unheard of 4-shot lead. And then golf showed up. Every golfer knows that at any moment he, like Jonathan Edwards' sinner, is suspended above the abyss by an ever-so thin thread of intertwined grace, guts, and luck. And that thread can unravel quickly. What makes golf so awe-inspiring and expletive-inducing is the fact that it is a game measured in yards but won or lost by millimeters. (See, for example, ESPN's "Sports Science" account of the physics of lip-outs.) More significantly, golf is an incredible interplay of mind and body: on the one hand, it is an intense example of the mechanics of bodily automation, of what Merleau-Ponty would describe as praktognosia, a "know-how" that is carried in the flesh. On the other hand, in a Yogi Berra-like quip, golf is 90% mental and 10% psychological. It is a game that is played, as Bobby Jones put it, on the 5-inch course between your ears.

It was heartbreaking to watch young McIlroy self-destruct: bouncing off trees, hitting the lips of bunkers, driving into the creek, three-putting holes. Augusta was eating him up. (There's always a Schadenfreude encouragement in this for duffers like me: "Hell, I could do that!" you can shout at the TV.)

But here, too, we see the Calvinist virtues of golf: there's no tapping out; no throwing in the towel; and Rory didn't indulge in any of Tiger's juvenile antics of cussing or throwing clubs or pouting around the course. While he'd cover his eyes and cringe at the errant flight of his drives, he'd also step up for the next shot. And he'd par the last 3 holes. That's a feat in itself.

Heads in the Fiscal Sand

2011-04-10T15:52:00.008-04:00

The Times today includes an article that might be overlooked: "Next on the Agenda for Washington: Fight Over Debt." It notes that in the next couple of months, the United States will reach the congressionally-imposed limit on borrowing, capped at the staggering debt ceiling of $14.25 trillion (for the sake of argument, pretend it's possible to imagine what a "trillion" is). As the article succinctly notes,

Once the limit is reached, the Treasury Department would not be able to borrow as it does routinely to finance federal operations and roll over existing debt; ultimately it would be unable to pay off maturing debt, putting the United States government — the global standard-setter for creditworthiness — into default.

The same article is accompanied by the graphic above which documents the exponential growth in federal debt since Reagan (under whom it tripled). In sum, the Reaganite dream of unfettered spending and tax cuts is a fairy tale we've been telling ourselves for over 30 years and somehow we keep believing it. Our grandchildren, in squalor, will wonder how we could have been duped for so long.

To note this, however, is not to concede the slash-and-burn (supposed) "necessity" of the Paulists (Ron and Rand) or the generally "conservative" proposal of, say, Paul Ryan. Yes, the formula that's got us here is unfettered spending coupled with low taxes (where spending, as you'll also note above, includes a rash of military spending on the basis of Bush II foreign policy). But only a lazy, unimaginative take on this would assume that "low taxes" is a given. So sure, one strategy to reduce debt would be to slash spending, which inevitably happens on the backs of the poor and vulnerable, particularly women and children.

But of course there's another (unthinkable) option here: raise taxes. In this respect, David Brooks' Friday column is very helpful when read alongside today's article. As Brooks points out in "The Ryan Journey,"

The best thing about the long-term budget proposal from Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is that it forces Americans to confront the implications of their choices. If voters want taxes that amount to roughly 18 percent of G.D.P., then they are going to have to accept a government that looks roughly like what Ryan is describing. The Democrats are on defense because they are unwilling to ask voters to confront the implications of their choices. Democrats seem to believe that most Americans want to preserve the 20th-century welfare state programs. But they are unwilling to ask voters to pay for them, and they are unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs.

This does seem to be a fair observation of where we're at. I'm less convinced by Brooks' claim that "[r]aising taxes on the rich will not do it," since I would think a graduated tax like most other North Atlantic countries could sure go a long way. But I do agree with his other point: if Obama and the Democrats want to retain programs that care for the poor and vulnerable (as they rightly do!), then we need to face another reality: the middle class need to bear the brunt of this, too. Surely we can give up a few bottles of wine a month, a few of the attractions on our vacations, a few rounds of golf for the sake of the poor.

But as the Democrats know, we're no longer talking about fiscal matters: we're talking about whether the middle-class citizens of this country actually have the political will to care for their neighbor. I think one of the core argument of Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love is to show that Augustine would have expected the church to be that body habituated to care for the neighbor, exhibiting civic virtues which are just the sort of political will and desire needed to address the sorts of problems we're grappling with. But sadly, the church in the United States is just as captive to the selfish atomism of the culture as anyone--indeed, somehow even more so, ardently eschewing any sense of fiscal obligation to the poor, opting for the pious patina of libertarianism masked by calls for "charity."

Zac Brown Band & James Taylor on the ACM Awards

2011-04-08T20:45:00.003-04:00

I have watched this clip way too many times. Be sure to hang in there until Taylor seamlessly weaves "Sweet Baby James" into the medley. Good stuff.

Book Notes and Book Reviews on Scribd

2011-04-08T16:30:00.005-04:00

I've decided to upload some of the archive of book reviews I've done over the years, creating a collection on Scribd. I'll hope to keep updating this as I have opportunity.

Review of Peperzak, "The Quest for Meaning: Friends of Wisdom from Plato to Levinas"

On Poetry

2011-04-06T08:39:00.003-04:00

David Orr's essay on the instrumentalization of poetry in Oprah's magazine is worth a read for all kinds of reasons, but especially for the concluding paragraph where he rightly laments:

I wish, though, that they had found space for someone — not a critic, necessarily, just someone willing to be honest — to talk about the actual experience of reading a poem. Not why poems are good at rehabilitating people. Not where poems come from. Not what they can help us do, or forget, or remember. Not what the people who write them are wearing. Just what reading one of them is like to one person. If the chasm is to be ever so slightly narrowed, it seems to me this is how it will be done.

The best poems are not messages; they are lingual acrobatics, roiling heart and mind by setting them awash in words. In reading poetry, you don't so much suspend disbelief as give yourself permission to be lost in language--to be carried along on a wave of words that cascades in delight or sorrow. You give yourself to the poem and ride this wave like a kind of emotional and intellectual body surfing, holding your breath the whole way, perhaps with a smirk or growing smile, perhaps with a squint and creeping frown, perhaps with a tear burbling up from inside your soul that finally drops at the poem's heartbreaking end.

In a sense, a good poem doesn't mean something, it does something. Or perhaps, following Wittgenstein, we could just say the poem means what it does.

I can think of no better example of this than the poem that showed up in my inbox this morning, thanks to Knopf's Poem-A-Day for April, Poetry Month (what month isn't poetry month?!). Give yourself over to the delight of Cynthia Zarin's "Late Poem":

Late Poem

". . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern."

I wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
and drove a gas-guzzler
and never wore seat belts

I’d have a baby, yours, cette fois,
and I’d smoke Parliaments
and we’d drink our way through the winter

in spring the baby would laugh at the moon
who is her father and her mother who is his pool
and we’d walk backwards and forwards

in lizard-skin cowboy boots
and read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
I’d wear only leather or feathers

plucked from endangered birds and silk
from exploited silkworms
we’d read The Economist

it would be before and after the internet
I’d send you letters by carrier pigeons
who would only fly from one window

to another in our drafty, gigantic house
with twenty-three uninsulated windows
and the dog would be always be

off his leash and always
find his way home as we will one day
and we’d feed small children

peanut butter and coffee in their milk
and I’d keep my hand glued under your belt
even while driving and cooking

and no one would have our number
except I would have yours where I’ve kept it
carved on the sole of my stiletto

which I would always wear when we walked
in the frozen and dusty wood
and we would keep warm by bickering

and falling into bed perpetually and
entirely unsafely as all the best things are
—your skin and my breath on it.

For the DTK DVD

2011-03-30T13:56:00.003-04:00

If I could create a DVD to accompany Desiring the Kingdom, this would be one of the resources to accompany chapter 3:

HT: Mark Roeda

Kierkegaard on kenosis and ascension

2011-03-24T22:15:00.002-04:00

Kierkegaard's (or rather, Anti-Climacus') Practice in Christianity--one of the little brothers in a corpus that includes Fear & Trembling, Sickness Unto Death, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript--is sort of an amalgam of Kierkegaardian themes. (And it still includes all those aspects of Kierkegaard that frustrate me to no end; I have a passionate love/hate relationship with the Dane.) But while recently re-reading Practice, this passage about Christ's "abasement" and "loftiness" stood out for me--sort of a rebuff of both a simplistic theologia crucis as well as the typical Lutheran critique of the theologia gloriae. It seems to me a number of different theological schools of thought might come under his critical glare:

"If there were someone who could love him only in his loftiness, that person's vision is confused; he does not know Christ and therefore does not love him either; he is taking him in vain. Christ was and is indeed the truth. If someone can love him only in his loftiness, what does that mean? It means that he can love the truth--only when it has conquered, when it is in possession of and is surrounded by power and honor and glory. But when it was struggling, when it was foolishness, to the Jews an offense, to the Greeks foolishness; when it was insulted, mocked, and, as Scripture says, spat upon--then of course such a person could not love it; then he wished to stay far away from it. That is, he wanted the truth far away from him, but this is actually to be in untruth. It is just as essentially a part of 'the truth' to suffer in this world as to be triumphant in another world, in the world of truth--and Jesus Christ is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness. But if, on the other hand, someone could feel drawn to Christ and love him only in his abasement, if such a person wanted to hear nothing about his loftiness, when power and honor and glory are his; if he (what sad perversity!) with the impatience of a restless spirit, bored, as he would not doubt say, with the good and victorious days of Christendom, if he longed only for scenes of horror, to be with him when he was being insulted and persecuted--then the vision of such a person is also confused; he does not recognize Christ and therefore does not love him either. Christianity is not at all closer to heavy-mindedness than to light-mindedness; they are both equally worldliness, equally far away, and both have just as much need of conversion" (pp. 153-154).

Fishers of Men?

2011-03-23T15:36:00.003-04:00

It's pretty easy to domesticate or even romanticize Jesus' call to those first disciples--to those fishermen who would become fishers of men. We've seen enough flannelgraphed versions of those jolly men tending their nets that we now imagine they were made for such a call--as if they were just out of work seminarians waiting around for "religious" work.

What if, instead, we imagine Jesus showing up on the docks in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, calling Sig and Edgar to drop their crab pots and come follow him?

Julian Barnes on Joyce Carol Oates

2011-03-22T12:43:00.003-04:00

You can tell a lot about a literary culture by its used bookstores; they are something like the fossil record of a reading public. And one of the things that regularly astonishes me is what you won't find in used bookstores in the United States: contemporary British authors. Nowhere is the old adage ("two countries separated by a common language") more true that in our reading habits. The authors that grace the shortlist for the Man Booker prize hardly make a dent on American literary culture.

The most egregious omission in this regard has to be Julian Barnes, the best contemporary writer you've never read. I was hooked as soon as I read A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, the book that seemed to earn him a place in the pantheon of supposedly "postmodern" novelists. But Flaubert's Parrot is the book that really sealed my devotion, though his memoir, Nothing to be Frightened Of, is a masterful, honest, even humble meditation on mortality in our secular age.

It's this memoir that comes to mind in Barnes' recent review of Joyce Carol Oates' new memoir, A Widow's Story. Indeed, if the excerpt of JCO's book in the New Yorker is any indication, I'll take Barnes review over Oates' book. His prose is probing without drawing attention to itself--kind of liquid without being soppy. He makes an 18th-century meditation on mourning by Dr. Johnson seem utterly contemporary (and what other critics would have that 1750 essay to hand?). He even has the chutzpah to criticize Oates the widow in the concluding section of his essay, though with grace and sensitivity.

But what's really exquisite about the essay is how perfectly Flaubertian it is: in the best spirit of the master, Barnes observes the discipline of self-suppression--achieving that vaunted Flaubertian ideal of objectivity that prevents him from even appearing in the essay. The "I" here is not flaunted, to that point that the reader might not realize or recall that Barnes' own widowhood is still quite fresh (following the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh). But while Barnes the widower--that Barnesian "I"--does not parade itself in the essay, of course it impresses itself on the entire piece. Barnes' the widower is everywhere between the lines, informing an entire sensibility, resonating with Oates' clichéd mourning ("what is grief at times," he asks, "but a car crash of cliché?). And it is the sympathy of widowhood that also gives him license to criticize Oates' silence about her prompt remarriage. In the age of the confessional, solipsistic memoir, Barnes' Flaubertian discipline is to be admired.

Literary Relics

2011-03-21T10:36:00.002-04:00

If I had gobs of money just lying around, and a slightly more seared conscience, I could be easily sucked into the world of literary collecting, ardently acquiring the secularized equivalent of relics. I could see my home office becoming a kind of reliquary, lined with first editions and decorated with all sorts of artifacts--say hand-written manuscript from Ted Hughes, quirky photographs of Evelyn Waugh, used pipes from P.G. Wodehouse or maybe one of Elizabeth Bishop's fountain pen, perhaps a portrait of Oscar Wilde or George Sand. It would be a delight to work in such a Wunderzimmer, absorbing the aura of writers gone before

In other words, I would be like a kid in a candy shop if I could be part of the Bonham's auction of the Roy Davids Collection of Papers and Portraits--a veritable who's who of British and American letters from the Victorian era up to the mid-20th century. I'll have to settle for window shopping.

A Reformed Prayerbook

2011-03-20T15:06:00.004-04:00

While I have the utmost respect for the Book of Common Prayer--probably the single most important expression of historic Christian worship in my own life--lately I've been using a new resource for prayer: Seeking God's Face: Praying with the Bible Through the Year. Compiled by Philip Reinders, one could think of it as a Reformed prayerbook, embodying the Protestant emphasis on the centrality of Scripture while also honoring post-apostolic tradition (e.g., by including prayers that draw from the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Westminster standards). Like the most ancient and global Christian practices, it encourages a prayer discipline that is centered on the Psalms while also, in the spirit of the lectionary, walking us across the entire narrative of Scripture. It honors the tradition of disciplined (written) prayer while also making room for extemporaneous prayer and devotion.

To learn more about the book, and to see what each daily practice looks like, check out the excerpt that is available from Faith Alive [pdf]. Amazon also offers an annotated image the lays out the elements of each 2-page spread.

In sum, I think this is a wonderful gift to foster intentional Christian piety with a Reformed accent. It would be a marvelous way for those new to the Reformed tradition to connect themselves not just to the doctrines of Reformed theology but also the practices of Reformed piety.

Why is neurology so fascinating?

2011-03-19T09:18:00.002-04:00

Colin McGinn's review of V.S. Ramachandran's new book, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human is both appreciative and appropriately critical. McGinn rightly calls Ramachandran to the mat for his unwarranted reductionism and his over-reaching claims, while also affirming the bodily basis of consciousness. He ends with an excellent question:

Why is neurology so fascinating? It is more fascinating than the physiology of the body—what organs perform what functions and how. I think it is because we feel the brain to be fundamentally alien in relation to the operations of mind—as we do not feel the organs of the body to be alien in relation to the actions of the body. It is precisely because we do not experience ourselves asreducible to our brain that it is so startling to discover that our mind depends so intimately on our brain. It is like finding that cheese depends on chalk—that soul depends on matter. This de facto dependence gives us a vertiginous shiver, a kind of existential spasm: How can the human mind—consciousness, the self, free will, emotion, and all the rest—completely depend on a bulbous and ugly assemblage of squishy wet parts? What has the spiking of neurons got to do with me?

Neurology is gripping in proportion as it is foreign. It has all the fascination of a horror story—the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain. All those exotic Latin names for the brain’s parts echo the strangeness of our predicament as brain-based conscious beings: the language of the brain is not the language of the mind, and only a shaky translation manual links the two. There is something uncanny and creepy about the way the brain intrudes on the mind, as if the mind has been infiltrated by an alien life form. We are thus perpetually startled by our evident fusion with the brain; as a result, neurology is never boring. And this is true in spite of the fact that the science of the brain has not progressed much beyond the most elementary descriptive stages.

Conversations on Classical Education

2011-03-17T08:06:00.001-04:00

When I was at the Geneva School in Orlando this past January, I sat down for an extended interview about Christian classical education, initiated by Christopher Perrin from Classical Academic Press and the Institute for Classical Schools.

They've rolled out audio of these conversations (video to come). You can listen to the entire conversation (45 minutes) or sample these segments:

Pedagogy Assumes an Anthropology

How Humans are Shaped

The Problem with Worldview Education

Secular Liturgies

Countering Secular Liturgies

How Christian Schools Are Secular

The Church and Christian Education

Pastors and Classical Christian Education

What Secular Education Lacks

Humans as Thinkers Believers and Lovers

Postmodernism and Classical Christian Ed

Neuroscience and Character Formation

Education, Culture and The Arts

Advice for School Administrators

Attention to Craft: Towards being a "Writer"

2011-03-16T07:35:00.003-04:00

For a long time--even after I had published several books--I kept telling people that I wanted to be a writer. What I generally meant was that I wanted to be a novelist (and that's still true) or write for Harper's. But I also think I was working with a latent distinction I still want to affirm: being an author and being a writer are not synonymous. Most philosophers and theologians are authors: they publish articles and books bent on communicating content and making arguments. Their goal is conceptual clarity and careful demonstration. But all of that can happen with very little attention to form. Indeed, one can write entire books and yet not take language all that seriously.

But it's just that attention to form that characterizes the writer. To make the move from being an author to being a writer you have to learn to love sentences.

You will know you're on your way to being a writer when you have a love/hate relationship with language: when you can be either thrilled or vexed by the cadence of a sentence or turn of phrase--when you can't quite leave the paragraph on which you're laboring because there's a tic of timing that's driving you mad. Or when you begin to consider the force of a sentence in terms of its ability to move rather than prove. In sum, you'll know you've become a writer when you consider the sheer play of language to be a country to which you'd gladly emigrate.

You will also know you're on your way to being a writer when you find yourself a different reader: when you find yourself gratefully lingering on a sentence you've just read because it has brought an unexpected delight, and you have a deep appreciation for the writer's attention to craft--that she's forged something anew, just for the sheer delight of putting it that way. Or when you find yourself angrily scribbling in the margins because of some hack's laziness and tired, derivative style.

So how does one make that transition from being an author to being a writer? Unfortunately, I have no easily formula. Instead, what comes to mind is Pascal's advice after his infamous wager: "Can't find yourself able to believe?," Pascal asks. "That's OK. Just fake it for a while. Go to Mass. Try on the rhythms of a believer. Practice your way into faith." Something similar holds for becoming a writer, I think: act as if. You're working on a book, for goodness' sake--give yourself permission to imagine yourself as a writer.

And then consider some of these as new habits:

1. Immerse yourself in fiction and poetry. If you don't love fiction, I can't imagine how you'll ever be a solid writer. The imaginative worlds of novels and the linguistic intensity of poetry should be your daily bread. Central to your apprenticeship should be mimesis, learning to imitate good writing. To familiarize yourself with that, you need to be regularly swimming laps in the deep pool of literature. If you can't imagine this being true for you, then stick to being an "author."

2. Apprentice yourself to the craft of writing. Granted, there's an entire industry of wannabe writers out there that keeps Poets & Writers afloat. But there are also some very helpful books that are themselves examples of engaging writing. I'd recommend starting with Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

3. Become a formalist. You will need to train yourself to appreciate form in fiction--to not just be carried along by the narrative force of the story, but to also be attentive to the gritty conditions of that--the minute particularities of how sentences and paragraphs work, the careful, world-changing choices an author makes. To that end, I constantly commend James Wood's How Fiction Works.

4. Be patient. Recall Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours rule (in Outliers): What looks like overnight "genius" exploding onto the scene is usually the product of about 10,000 hours of practice. This is the (admittedly discouraging) math of expertise. Now, I think you can log credit for all the hours you spend reading fiction and poetry as hours of practice. But you also just need to write. And write. And write. Write stuff that will never see the light of day. Write blogs. Take form seriously in your emails. Never miss an opportunity to make language dance and play. Embrace the craft at every turn. You might just become a writer.