Whose "God in the Quad?"

In the latest New Yorker, James Wood reviews Terry Eagleton's response to the new atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et. al.), Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. The essay, "God in the Quad," exhibits Wood's familiarity with (and even a kind of backhanded sympathy for) Christian theology (with a bonus, on-the-money side reference to Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre thrown in). While not as tight as his literary criticism, here's an essay on theology, by a critic, that could never have been written by, say, Edmund Wilson (who, despite his Calvinist heritage, seemed to have a tin ear for theology).

Wood is undoubtedly right: even Eagleton's response to the screeds of Hitchens & Co. ends up playing by their rules. And it was refreshing--but somehow expected--to hear Wood call out Eagleton on his lack of interest in the Incarnation. But as a devil's advocate for orthodoxy, Wood gets greedy on two counts.

First, the mission of the incarnate God was not "to secure us eternal tenure in heaven." This betrays an understanding of the story bequeathed to us by Hal Lindsey (or Karl Marx). As even the staunchly orthodox Bishop of Durham has argued, the telos of the Incarnation is a new earth. If the resurrection means anything (as Wood seems to appreciate), it means Christianity is a kind of materialism.

Second, Wood somehow convinces himself that the Incarnation--God's becoming flesh--amounts to idolatry. This is because he buys the slippery logic of Mark Johnston who mistakes idolatry and particularity. True, when God is "laden with" human attributes, created in our image, then idols are the result. But what if God takes on such finitude and particularity? If the eternal God gives himself in the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth (and admittedly, that's a big if), then the Incarnation is an act of condescension rather than the effect of human construction.

Things might be still more complicated.

Reading Habits

Someone writing an article on reading asked me a series of questions, a kind of e-interview, and because they were good questions, I thought I'd post the exchange here. Others might take up these same questions on their own sites. I'd be intrigued to hear about others' practices in this regard.

What is your approach to your reading? (For instance: How do you choose the books you will read? Do you make book lists? Are there any resources or people on whom you depend when you are deciding what to read? Do you have specific categories that you try to read from, or are you a more scatter-shot reader? What periodicals do you read?)

Good question. I don't feel like I have much of a system. I think one issue is the fact that I'm constantly trying to make up for the lack of a proper liberal arts education. That, and the fact that I really didn't start reading books until I was 18. My most passionate reading is not professional--the reading I want to do is in the areas of literature and poetry. And I guess I have a kind of implicit "canon" in my head that I've been trying to work through--a tacit canon that I've somehow absorbed through, well, reading! Over the years I've been trying to build a decent library from used bookstores, church rummage sales, etc., and so now I generally try to read in different "locales." For instance, I have a very loose policy of shuttling back and forth between American, British, (though the latter would also include colonial and post-colonial literature, like Salman Rushdie) and French literature (Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert)--with some "new" stuff mixed in (i.e., books that have just appeared, that are currently being reviewed). My professional reading is compelled by different sorts of obligations--my research requires that I keep up with certain developments, certain "hot" discussions, etc. Though I confess I find it harder and harder to get excited about this "obligatory" reading. I don't keep up the way I used to. (That might partly stem from the fact that I'm quite an unabashed generalist now, so I don't think of myself first and foremost as a specialist in French phenomenology anymore.)

As for periodicals, I subscribe to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and we have a family subscription to Vanity Fair (which isn't the soft schlock you might think). I read the New York Times and The Guardian online each morning.

Professionally, I am a journal junkie and absolutely love the "Table of Contents Alert" services that are offered by most scholarly journals (and in most cases, offered free, though one needs a subscription to actually read the articles). This service sends the new Tables of Contents for each issue to my inbox. I probably subscribe to 25 of these, across a range of disciplines. It's fabulous.

Do you use any tools to plan or track your reading?

I keep a list of what I've read in the back pages of my Moleskin. I started this because my reading is quite eclectic, and I'd remember something, and try to recall where I'd read it, but because I read so many things at the same time, it was hard to track down. So now I note what I read, and when--though I'm not as careful about this as I should be. I should note that in addition to reading books and periodicals, I'm an irrepressible sampler. I'm just constantly dipping into books in my library, have books stacked everywhere in the house (the pile beside my bed regularly totters on the edge of toppling), and am not at all averse to just sitting with a different book for a few minutes. So I'm reading in my library all the time.

I also have kept a "What I'm Reading" blog at http://jameskasmith.blogspot.com, but I've not been very faithful with it, largely because I've put too much pressure on myself to make every post an exquisite review, which is unfortunate.

Do you take notes or write in your books?

Yes! When I was in college, I was averse to this, but I've been converted. I underline a lot and make marginal comments. But most importantly, I make the blank back page of the book a personalized "index" of sorts (I think I learned this from my teacher, Jim Olthuis). On those back pages, I highlight themes (with page numbers) that I'll want to come back to, draw connections, make notes to myself, etc. This makes it easier for me to come back to a book later and dive back into it for writing purposes.

How many books do you typically read in a year?

Hmmm...no idea. From this list http://jameskasmith.blogspot.com/2008/12/2008-retrospective-reading-list.html I'd guess about 30, but this list doesn't include the books I read for "professional" purposes.

Do you set aside time each day or week to read?

Any 3 minutes not doing something else is time to read! (And yes, this is a point of some marital and parental tension sometimes!) I don't have a dedicated block, except perhaps the end of the day, when my wife and I are very happy to crawl into bed early (around 10:30) and read til about midnight. Fortunately my wife is an avid reader, too, so the TV is off most evenings, and by the time we've dispatched the kids to bed, we're ready to unwind just reading. But I also read whenever I can (I always take a book with me when we're running errands as a family, though I ask permission first). I stopped taking books to kids soccer games because it made me inattentive. But in general, I have a book (or at least a magazine) in my hand.

What technologies do you use to aid your reading? (Audiobooks? Websites? Project Gutenberg? Kindle?)

I guess the Table of Contents Alerts I mentioned would fall under this category. I sometimes listen to audiobooks if I have a long drive somewhere by myself, but that's quite rare. Never touched Kindle and can't imagine I ever will.

What would you tell a college student about approaching their required reading lists?

Look, you won't listen to this, but I've got to say it so you feel guilty later: Your required reading lists are a gift. What I wouldn't give to repeat high school and actually take advantage of being "required" to read Shakespeare or Hemmingway. I know it won't feel like that. So just promise me this: you'll read one book from every required reading list as if you wanted to.

What would you tell a recent graduate about establishing a reading practice?

Keep books in every room of the house. Pile them up on the end table or nightstand or back of the toilet. Have the books there, staring at you, inviting you, wooing you, calling to you, shaming you. Keep bumping into them. Pick them up and look at them. And even if you have a first job, resist signing up for cable and spend the end of each day reading. Then find a friend who loves to read (and, if possible, a spouse) and talk about books.

CT Review of "Desiring the Kingdom"

Eric Miller's review of Desiring the Kingdom from the August issue of Christianity Today is now available online. The title, like Miller's review, gets it just right: "Putting Worldview in its Place."

Despite a couple of quibbles, I appreciate how well Miller captures the essence of the book's argument--and does so for a general audience. One couldn't hope for more.

The Mathematics of Despair

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers was an entertaining read at the time, but only one bit has really stayed with me, a number that haunts me more than it ought: 10,000. This is Gladwell's magic number of genius. You might recall that his project is to demythologize "genius" by anecdotally noting the conditions of opportunity that yield the greats and masters. Genius is less a dispensation of the gods and more the cumulative effect of opportunity. And time. That's where the magic number comes in: on Gladwell's accounting, mastery or genius is never an overnight success. Far from it. Instead, even when stars "burst on the scene," they are the products of hours and hours and years and years of practice, repitition, and drudgery. What made the Beatles, for example, was the endless gigs in out-of-the-way Hamburg, Germany, giving them the opportunity to accrue their 10,000 hours--the price of genius. Gladwell tells a similar story of Bill Gates, whose class and location afforded him hours upon hours on emerging computer technologies. The result? You guessed it: he logged that magic number.

That magic number, however, can also add up to despair. For example, I am a fledgling poet. (I won't say a "budding" poet, since that would entail some Hegelian confidence that I'll "bloom!") Given the shape of my family commitments, my professional obligations, my other writing projects, and my general laziness and inertia, that translates into about 1 hour per month writing poetry. So let's do the math: at that rate, I'd be approaching greatness right around the time I'd be giving Methusaleh a run for his money. Sigh.

And it turns out that Gladwell is probably right. I recall Donald Hall, in Unpacking Boxes, describing hours and hours of practice, producing reams and reams of detritus, and perched upon that pile is an iceberg-tip's worth of great poetry. As Hall recounts:

Where I sit today, working at my desk, there are shelves behind me that are dense with abandoned or unfinished work--including the book-length mock epic in iambic pentameter. Behind my neck roosts a rookery of bad manuscript. To write as much as I have done, I have needed often to fail.

I also recall that Hall was a precocious only child--as was Updike. A pattern here? In any case, if 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness, what can you get for, say, 636? Upon doing the math, one begins to wonder if it's worth starting.

Desiring the Kingdom: Read an Excerpt

August 5 was the official release date for Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. The Baker Academic site offers a glimpse into the book by providing an excerpt for download which gives you a look at the expanded Table of Contents, Preface, and Introduction, all of which provide a bit of a map of the book.

Last night I was re-reading Oscar Wilde's "Critic as Artist" and was reminded of a quote that, in a way, captures the core intuition of Desiring the Kingdom:

"Do you wish to love? Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies they spring."

"Devil Reads Derrida" Interview

David Opderbeck, a law professor, musician and self-described "theology buff," has started a little interview with me growing out of his reading of my new book, The Devil Reads Derrida: and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts (Eerdmans), with a particular focus on the role of the Christian scholar in relation to the church--the focus of my Introduction to the book, "The Church, Christian Scholars, and Little Miss Sunshine."

You can read an introduction to the conversation, the first round of questions in part 1 , and a second round in part 2.

The Lies of Country Music

Rebellion is relative. For example, given what passes for "conventional" and status quo in our home, my 17-year-old's rebellion takes the form of sympathy for the Republican party, a desire to major in business, and a passion for country music. He certainly knows how to push my buttons.

I'll admit that I can partly understand the soft spot for country music. I was raised on the country music of the 70s--"when country wasn't cool," as Barbara Mandrell put it. It was also when country was "country & western," though one could already see poppish sound making its inroads. But at that time, country stations still regularly played Patsy Cline and Hank Williams--and were the airwave home to Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, George Jones, and Johnny Cash. Even the "next wave" of folks like Randy Travis were faithful to this tradition. (For a beautiful tribute to this earlier era, see Marty Stuart's photo-essay, Country Music: The Masters--at the top of my wishlist.)

But the "new country" of today seems to me something different. And it is a catalyst for daily squabbles between me and my son: as soon as we hop in the car, his finger goes for the pre-sets on the radio, clicking one of the three local country stations. I try to tell myself that this is not a battle worth having--that this is a kind of adolescent "expression" I can live with, like earrings and tatoos. But within minutes my blood begins to boil, largely because of the pervasive nationalism of today's country. It's as if Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" was a required template for all contemporary songwriting. Consider, for example, Brooks and Dunn's rendition of "Only in America":

Sun coming up over New York City
School bus driver in a traffic jam
Starin' at the faces in her rearview mirror
Looking at the promise of the Promised Land
One kid dreams of fame and fortune
One kid helps pay the rent
One could end up going to prison
One just might be president

Only in America
Dreaming in red, white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
Only in America

Sun going down on an L.A. freeway
Newlyweds in the back of a limousine
A welder's son and a banker's daughter
All they want is everything
She came out here to be an actress
He was a singer in a band
They just might go back to Oklahoma
And talk about the stars they could have been

Only in America
Where we dream in red, white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
Only in America

You can understand how, as a Canadian and a Christian, this identification of "the Promised Land"--and the attendant falsehoods about opportunity--are tough to take with my son crooning along.

What's at issue, I think, is not so much what's said as what's left unsaid. For example, while I'll admit that Rodney Atkins' "It's America" is an affecting ditty, its selective nostalgia is deceptive. Consider the idyllic picture being sketched in these lyrics:

It's a high school prom,
It's a Springstein song,
It's a ride in a Chevrolet.
It's a man on the moon,
and fireflies in June
kids sellin' lemonade.
It's cities and farms
and open arms,
one nation under God.
It's America.

What really sticks in my craw is the second verse:

Later on when I got home
I flipped the TV on.
I saw a little town that some big
twister tore apart.
People came from miles around
just to help their neighbors out,
and I was thinkin' to myself:
I'm so glad that I live in America.

Really? So people only help distraught neighbors "in America?" If you lived elsewhere, do you think, Mr. Atkins, that these folks would be left to their own devices? Any chance you think this vaunted American virtue of care for the neighbor applies to health care policy or public education? I didn't think so.

Or finally, consider the lies, damned lies in Justin Moore's current hit, "Smalltown, U.S.A.":

A lot of people called it prison when I was growin up
These are my roots and this is what I love
Cause everybody knows me and i know them
And I believe that's the way we were supposed to live
Wouldn't trade one single day in small town USA

Chorus
Give me a Saturday night my baby by my side
A little Hank Jr. and a six pack of light,
Old dirt road and I'll be just fine.
Give me a Sunday morning that full of grace
A simple life and I'll be okay
Here in small town USA

Around here people break there backs just to earn a buck
Don't ever get ahead but we have enough
I watch people leave and they come right back
I never wanted any part of that
I'm proud to say that I love this place
Good ole small town USA

Look, I'm not out to demonize small towns (I grew up in a village of 600 people), but this simply doesn't tell the truth. It is a nostalgic, selective picture that gives the lie to smalltown life, painting over its dark underside: the racism and exclusion; the narrow horizons and xenophobia; the cycles of poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness; and as Nick Reding has recently shown us, the spiraling cycles of substance abuse (see Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town). (And a story that remains to be told is the growing secularization of rural and smalltown America.) Far from being a "good ole" place, the small town can be one of the ugliest corners of American life--though this never makes its way into Thomas Kinkade paintings or Norman Rockwell pictures or "new country" songs.

As an Argentinian proverb puts it, "A small town is a vast hell." That sounds like material for a real country song.

Mad (Adulterous) Men

Well behind the curve, my wife and I began watching Mad Men this week. I've been underwhelmed: while Donald Draper's suave, dapper character is drawn with a bit of mystery and complexity, the rest of the scenes are populated by cartoonish caricatures who are flat, predictable and--worst of all--unbelievable. And its propagandish attempt to shock us with the gender mores of the period (1960) fails in two ways: on the one hand, the lecherous, boorish men and compliant, unhappy housewives that populate this world are so hysterically drawn that they come off as parodies--which deflates the scandal; on the other hand, we shouldn't underestimate how much the glamor and chic of the staging and costuming actually makes such a world attractive.

Last night, just part way through season 1, with illicit liaisons proliferating, it hit me: This is like watching an Updike novel. And I was reminded of Nabakov's quip that adultery is the most conventional way to rise above convention. In Updike's Foreword to Early Stories, he says his stories are meant "to give the mundane its beautiful due" (p. xvii). But does he ever really settle for the mundane? Is the mundane really so adulterous? Could Updike hallow the mundane conventions of fidelity? That, for art, would be a more remarkable feat. Not great television, I grant, but still a task for the novel.

Arrival

Well, this one was a long time coming. But I just got my first copy of Desiring the Kingdom! The official release date is August 5.

This book has been with me (and with our family, I'm afraid) for several years. In fact, it was just about a year ago that my wife headed up to Canada with the kids, leaving me with an ultimatum: finish the book (there were a number of "or elses" implied, none of them inviting). I camped out in my office for 4 days, finally finishing a complete draft in the first couple of days, and then undertaking the hard work of cutting 20,000 words for the final draft (which still put me 20,000 words over the contracted length!). The good folks at Baker Academic were graciously patient as the project morphed and percolated (and expanded).

In a way, this feels like "my" first book. So many of my other books have been commentaries of one sort or another--explicating, explaining, unpacking and illustrating the ideas of others. But Desiring the Kingdom, while by no means original, feels like its written in my voice, bubbling up from some of my passions.

Of course, now begins the hard part: watching one's little child be thrown to the wolves in the world of reviews! But in preparation for that, I found this little litany for authors to be helpful! (H/T: Comment's Friday Newsletter)

[And yes, the photo above is a lame, narcissistic attempt to see my work alongside Wharton, Waugh, Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Suffice it to say that my bookshelf is the only place in the world where that could happen. The same doesn't even happen in my imagination.]

Remembering Frank McCourt

I did not grow up reading books. In fact, I avoided them like the plague as if not reading was some kind of badge of honor. This ridiculous code was absorbed from a combination of "jock" mentality and the "country boy" image we absorbed in my small-village upbringing that was rural in its essence. I didn't even read the books assigned for school. The only book I can honestly remember reading up to grade 12 was a 1982 edition of Don Cherry's Grapes: A Vintage View of Hockey.

That changed after my conversion to Christian faith when I was 18. At that point, I became a voracious reader. But I was devouring a very particular strain of "non-fiction" that was a long ways from "creative"--books in biblical studies and theology, and later, works in philosophy. My waking hours were spent trying to inhale all that I could, trying to make up for my readerly sloth up to that point. As I progressed through my undergraduate studies into graduate work, my interdisciplinary interests multiplied my reading obligations but still restrained my universe within a narrow sector of the world of books, a million miles from "literature." Indeed, during this phase I would have looked askance at a novel as "soft." I was doing "serious" reading and refused to be distracted by "stories." Sitting beside the pool I'd be reading Heidegger; on the beach I'd exhibit my "rigor" by reading Derrida; rocking the baby in the basinette I'd be paging through Augustine or Foucault. Little did I realize how small my world was.

Today, almost the exact opposite is true. Reading philosophy and theology is, for the most part, my "job"--an obligation I discharge at the office. I don't bring those books home. Instead, my home library is filled with Julian Barnes and Evelyn Waugh, Updike and Flaubert, Ted Hughes and Charles Wright. But not until last week had I given much thought to what had changed.

And then it hit me: it was Frank McCourt.

It's strange: for almost all of the books in my library, I can recall where and when I got them. But for the life of me, I can't remember how these first two volumes of McCourt's memoirs made their way to my shelf (Teacher Man was a gift from my mom). I know from the dates inside that I read this in my last year of grad school. What would have prompted me to do so is lost in the sands of my aging memory. And yet, as I try to trace this shift in my reading habits--this expansion of my reading world that took me into the environs of literature--the paths seem to stretch back to Angela's Ashes as a sort of fulcrum or hinge, a turning point. McCourt's enchanting style, suffused with the religious in the most sacrilegious ways (all that "wanking!"), coupled with the power of Irish story-telling had me hooked. And his explorations of his own psychic life were, for me, like new adventures in a foreign territory. (Indeed, his persistent description of that experience of a "clouding" of his mind--a dark, swirling interior storm--has stuck with me for years, giving me a picture to name realities.)

All of my "serious" reading to that point had worked with a reductionistic fixation on a certain kind of truth--reading for "information," for "knowledge," for propositions and ideas. Not until I dove into McCourt's memoirs did I come to appreciate the truth of story, the revelatory capacity of narrative, the ability of literature to not only "make up" worlds but to break open our own world. I owe Frank McCourt more than I realized.

O, Canada: A Collection of Hymns by Ex-Pats

I appreciate that the New York Times was even cognizant of Canada Day. In fact, their little collection of testimonies from Canadian emigrants reads like a hymnal that proves absence makes the heart grow fonder. I suppose this is the experience of most emigrants, particularly Canadians, for whom "Canada" doesn't really appear as a definable entity until one has left. But with distance and the cultural contrast, aspects of Canadian culture come into focus. I suppose only a fish out of water begins to reflect on the nature of water.

In response to the query, "What do you miss about Canada?," an array of authors, actors, and comedians weigh in. Sean Cullen's pining is succinct: "Back home, hockey highlights lead off SportsCenter. That is the height of civilization."

Malcolm Gladwell doesn't miss taking a shot at his host country (a favorite pastime for Canadian ex-pats):

In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States.

Sarah McNally laments the disappearance of a distinctly Canadian literature while Bruce McCall pens an encomium to Coffee Crisp candy bars (sorry, "chocolate bars" in Canadian-ese). But it is perhaps Rick Moranis, of Second City and "Strange Brew" fame, who most lyrically captures some of my own memories (minus the prairie wind):

I remember singing “God Save the Queen” every morning in school. “Long live our noble Queen!” we belted, thousands of us tubby little obedient Canadians. I guess it worked. She’s still alive. Now they sing “O Canada” in schools and at most sporting events; usually in French and English. Around the time we were changing anthems, dumping ensigns and renaming holidays, the official use of both languages became mandatory, except in Quebec where the required use of English is a bit fuzzy.

Canada Day comes and goes modestly every year. Sure, there are retail sales promotions and a long weekend. But there isn’t bluster or commodity in Canadian celebration. Canada isn’t big on bunting. Or jet flyovers, fireworks, marching bands or military pomp.

Canadians defer. We save our loonies and don’t jaywalk. It’s illegal, eh. We stand on guard at red lights, even when there is no traffic. We wait for clear, green governing lights to signal our turn and lead us on. Then we tuck our heads down, under wooly toques and worn-out scarves, one eye barely open, squinting headlong into the harsh prairie wind, cautiously, quietly, demurely Canadian.

I was in Canada last weekend and was struck by how much it had become foreign to me--enough that I could see it as "other." The accents and lilts of Canadian diction are so noticeable now, and it seems to me that there is a Canadian "look" that is discernable. My kids can pick Canadians out of a crowd. Of course "Canada" shouldn't be confused with or reduced to the rural, small-town sectors that we inhabit when we return to Ontario. And while there is much to praise in its best moments--a charming humility ["Sorry"]; Alice Munro; socialized medicine (despite the horror stories Americans want to hear, universal healthcare is still a good thing--just ask the rest of the civilized world)--Canada has its dirty little secrets, too: its submerged racism that can perversely pride itself on never having had slavery as an institution; its bland cultural offerings which have always seemed parasitic on other national cultures; its ressentiment vis-a-vis the States, all the while eagerly assimilating and appropriating the trinkets of American 'culture;' the vengefulness bred into young men by hockey; the disempowerment of the delapidated First Nations territories that dot the land; the militarism of both our anthem and our history; Kim Cattral. I could go on.

It's an easy sport for Canadian ex-pats to idolize their homeland--and demonize their host country. I'm not about to quit either, but I've got just enough distance to see what I'm doing--and to recognize it as quintessentially Canadian.

Kazin on Magazine Writing

"One of the reasons why so many academic scholars find it impossible to write effectively for general magazines is that they are not used to listening to their own voices as poets are. They find their happiness in approbation, not in the English language."

~Alfred Kazin, "Writing for Magazines," in Contemporaries, p. 473.

Book Launch Event at Literary Life Bookstore, June 18, 7pm

The Devil Reads Derrida: and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics and the Arts is due to the Eerdmans warehouse this week. I'm very excited that the good folks at Literary Life Bookstore will host a "Third Thursday" event on June 18, 7pm as a sort of "launch" event. I will be doing some readings from the new book and talking a bit about the writing process. The event will also include music by the Kilpatricks (about whose music I've raved before). And, of course, Literary Life will have that wonderful Harney & Sons tea on offer. The book will be available for purchase (and I'll be doing book signings afterwards).


If you're not able to visit Literary Life, you can also order the book through their website. They'll be happy to ship it to you.

Hope to see you there!

On Being a "Popularizer"

In academia, one of the most derogatory comments one can make about a colleague is to label them a "popularizer." This is pretty much akin to being labeled a Democrat on FOX News. The irony, of course, is that almost all scholars are engaged in the profession of teaching which is, by its very nature, the art of a certain kind of popularization.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, his very thinly-veiled take on Allan Bloom. (I still hope to post some notes on this over at What I'm Reading.) In the story, Ravelstein (the Bloom-ish character) finally writes a "popular" book which encapsulates the core of the philosophical vision he's been disseminating to students for 30 years. The narrator observes:

To his own surprise, Abe Ravelstein then found himself writing the book he had signed up to do. The surprise was general among his friends and the three or four generations of students he had trained. Some of these disapproved. They opposed what they saw as the popularization, or cheapening, of his ideas. But teaching, even if you are teaching Plato or Lucretius or Machiavelli or Bacon, is a kind of popularization (p. 22).

Poetry Reading at Literary Life

FYI for locals: I'll be reading my first-ever published poem ("The Temptation of Icicles") as part of the Literary Life Chapbook Celebration, an event to launch the chapbook of select poems from their First Annual Poetry Contest. Here are the details:

LITERARY LIFE CHAPBOOK CELEBRATION

Wednesday, May 27th, at 7pm

As you may remember, we recently announced the winners of the First Annual Literary Life Bookstore Poetry Contest, judged by Heather Sellers. Now, you can read the award-winning poems, along with a few select poetry contest entries, in our new chapbook, available for purchase in the bookstore. Enjoy a bit of bubbly (and breads + spreads!) as we listen to a few of the poets read their works, mingle with like-minded literary peers, and peruse the bookstore shelves. For more information, call us at 616.458.8418, or email us at info@literarylifebookstore.com.

The book will include cover art by local artist Rick Beerhorst. (Some Fors Clavigera readers might recognize Beerhorst's work from the etchings that appear in Stanley Hauerwas' Cross-Shattered Christ.) In fact, the Beerhorsts live just around the corner from us and kindly loaned us spigots to tap our maple trees this spring. This is yet another taste of how delightfully local and rooted this whole project is, spawned by the hospitality of Literary Life.

What's Right with the Prosperity Gospel?

Some Fors Clavigera readers might be interested in a new little article of mine just published by the good folks at Catapult magazine: "Abundance for All: What's Right with the Prosperity Gospel?." It's part of an issue devoted to "Life Abundant."

This piece began it's life as a chapel talk at Calvin College in a sermon series on "God's Economy." It grows out of my continued interest in looking for points of intersection between the pentecostal and Reformed traditions.

Catholic Republicans?: Brooks on Ford

David Brooks meditation today on filmmaker, John Ford, is worth a read. As he rightly notes, Ford's "westerns" are not about the rugged individualism that has captured the Ayn-Randish imaginations of the Republican party. As Brooks comments,

the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.

For example, in Ford’s 1946 movie, “My Darling Clementine,” Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.

The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building.

There's an important explanation of this that Brooks doesn't cite: Ford was a Catholic. The lone cowboy that characterizes most other westerns is a distinctly Protestant, and therefore deeply American, phenomenon. Ford's western cinematic imagination stands out, I would suggest, because it is implicitly informed by the communitarianism of the the Catholic tradition. For a lucid and insightful exploration of this thesis, see Richard Blake's marvelous book, Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers (chapter 5).

The Death of Philosophers

Since we've been thinking about the end of philosophy (and the end of the university), it might be appropriate to note a book about the end of philosophers: Simon Critchley's The Book of Dead Philosophers--a compendium of the deaths (and lives) of 190 philosophers, from the Pre-Socratics to relative contemporaries like Jacques Derrida and Dominique Janicaud.

It's one of those books that just about any adequate philosopher could pull off, given the concept--any philosopher, that is, with a year off at the Getty, granting the leisure to browse Wikipedia and an array of philosophical biographies. There's nothing particularly profound or brilliant about Critchley's execution of the concept. And given that it's appearing from Vintage, I was expecting some kind of literary heft, some sort of creative punch. But that never materialized. Indeed, I think the book is a bit like a Will Ferrell movie: the trailer is much better than the movie. In this case, the book's project (and dark humor) is better appreciated in the brief visual distillation that appeared in the February issue of The Believer.

And yet we have the book. So I suppose, in addition to the concept and the leisure to do a bunch of legwork, you'd need a third element: to be a philosopher in Manhattan who cleary has friends in New York literary circles.

That said, it is also undeniably just the sort of book that you can't put down: the plethora of brief entries grants immediate satisfaction. Curious little tidbits show up on each page in an easy-to-digest format. I don't deny that Critchley has done his homework, and I could see this book making for entertaining reading in an Intro to Philosophy class. But when Critchley does get down to being somewhat philosophical, I find he is a bit sloppy. His rejection of Christian conceptions of death (and afterlife), for instance, are simplistic, naive, and rejected with such animated disdain that methinks he doth protest too much. Or consider his plea at the end of the book for a recovery of "creatureliness"--though he wants "a less theistic variant of this thought," which simply amounts to saying "human existence is limited." Well, first, I'm not sure what "less" theistic could mean. Is there a sliding scale of "theistic-ness?" Is there a similar one for pregancy? Second, why invoke the theological capital loaded in the term "creatureliness" if all you're after is "limits?" Is that the best Critchley's non-theistic imagination can come up with? If you don't want the theology, then get your own lexicon. Otherwise, own up to the fact that you're living on borrowed capital.

Finally, while I have no interest in stoking the fires of animosity between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy, I do find myself sympathetic to a diagnosis and claim that Critchley offers near the end of the book, in an entry on A.J. Ayer:

When one considers influential analytic philosophers like Quine, Donald Davidson or John Rawls, it is clear that they led wonderfully successful and influential professional lives and died in an undramatic manner which has absolutely no bearing on their philosophical views. By contrast, if one considers Continental philosophers like Arendt, Foucault or Derrida, it's not so much the case that they led more complex and interesting lives and had more dramatic deaths, but rather that the line between philosophy and life is much harder to draw.

I often--at least lately--find myself disenchanted with my "profession," which tends to reduce philosophy to puzzle-solving. Then--even worse--it convinces some of our best and brightest that philosophy is puzzle-solving, a game we play which has little bearing on either wisdom or a way of life. As a result, "serious" students of philosophy retreat into narrow logical enclaves to parse the Getttier problem and then pride themselves on their syllogisms.

So I find myself sympathetic when Critchley writes:

The idea that philosophy is something transformative or disruptive of a self is...a commonplace in and after antiquity. To this extent, sentences of death, exile or punishment imposed on philosophers seem to respond to a deep need that philosophy and life should fit together, but that its transformative power can come at the cost of one's life. To this extent, Alasdair MacIntyre is surely justified when he writes, "Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror." The effect of the professionalization of philosophy is the sense that it does not and should not matter to the conduct of one's life.

While teaching Plato's Apology this semester--which recounts Socrates' (unsuccessful) defense of his vocation--I was uncomfortably reminded that nobody is going to be executed for improperly exegeting Husserl's Krisis texts or for failures in modal logic. Despite my quibbles with Critchley's book, it has got me thinking that any philosophy worth pursuing should be one worth dying for--and that should be especially true of that scandalous notion of a Christian philosophy, a cruciform philosophy for which martyrdom should, ironically, "make sense."

The End of the University?

The New York Times op-ed page is becoming rather apocalyptic. First we had David Brooks' pontificating on the "End of Philosophy;" now the NYT offers an op-ed from Mark C. Taylor on "The End of the University As We Know It." Any undergraduate contemplating graduate education shouldn't be surprised by Taylor's sobering take on the state of graduate education--unless your undergraduate professors have had their head in the sand. (My default stance is to generally discourage students from going to grad school.) As Taylor rightly notes,

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

But Taylor's prescription for re-tooled graduate training also spills over into a prescribed reconfiguration of undergraduate education as well. His first agenda item for reform is to:

Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

I'm very sympathetic to trying to move beyond the department-as-fortress model which currently dominates higher education, despite all of our talk of interdisciplinarity. While we might have a veneer of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the department-as-fortress rears its ugly head whenever we start talking about curricular reform (say, revising the core curriculum of a college)--very quickly principled discussion of what constitutes a good education devolves into a matter of protecting faculty "lines" in "our" department. Thus Taylor recognizes that such a revision of the curriculum would also require his second prescription:

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

This all sounds well and good and provocative and intriguing and exciting (indeed, something like this is exactly what Derrida was trying to encourage at the College Internationale de Philosophie in Paris). However, when you start poking this idea just a bit, some questions emerge.

Let's say we have a cross-disciplinary faculty group that constitutes "the Water Program." We've brought these faculty together from a range of disciplines in order to tackle this "problem" from a number of different perspectives, yet collaboratively (rather than holed up in different corners of the university). So one scholar will be considering biological issues, another political issues, another aesthetic questions, another ethical and philosophical issues and so. Sounds fabulous. But where did these scholars receive their training in biology, political science, and philosophy? In the "Drought" program that existed seven years ago? Or the "Oil" program from 14 years ago? Or that ancient program in "Security" from 21 years ago? While Taylor's vision of collaboration is welcomed, it still remains parasitic: it needs and presumes some kind of rigorous disciplinary formation that will produce the scholars who can then bring such expertise to the "problem" at hand.

I'm very sympathetic to Taylor's re-imagining of the shape of the university, but I don't think abolishing (something like) disciplinary departments will solve the problem. We're going to have to get just a little more creative than that.

The End of Which Philosophy? On David Brooks

David Brooks' column today, "The End of Philosophy," is a tad over-billed. I think he's right to highlight that recent work in neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology has increasingly made us appreciate that we human animals make our way in the world not primarily as "thinking things;" rather, our conscious, intentional choices and actions are just the tip of an unconscious iceberg of pre-cognitive intentionality of a different sort. (In fact, it's more like a snowball on the tip of the iceberg.) As Timothy Wilson, John Bargh and others have noted, we are oriented to the world in all sorts of ways that are pre-conscious--what Bargh and Chartrand refer to as the "unbearable automaticity of being." Indeed, Brooks himself is familiar with this literature as seen in an old column on baseball. I think this is right on the money.

But Brooks over-reaches when he bills this as "the end of philosophy." Whose philosophy? Which ethics? Brooks is absolutely right that this comes as a challenge to overly "intellectualist" models of the human person and human action--pictures of our being-in-the-world that construe us as always and only thinking, deliberating machines. But that is an increasingly small school of philosophy. Indeed, it's philosophers (from Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty) who have challenged just such an "intellectualist," cognitivist, top-heavy picture of the human person. In fact, one can find philosopher Charles Taylor articulate just such a critique of "intellectualism" in an important essay on Pierre Bourdieu, "To Follow a Rule."

So Brooks eulogy for philosophy is a little premature. And the philosophy that "ends" with these insights is well lost.