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

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

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

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

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?

Register today.

Favorite Reads 2011: Novels

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

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

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)

[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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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"

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

For those in the West Michigan area, just FYI:

Learning to be Reformed from a Jewish Novelist

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

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