Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture: "Part bombshell, part pastoral epistle"

I sat down to craft a post about my friend David Crump's fantastic new book, Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture: Reading the Bible Critically in Faith (Eerdmans, 2013) because it's a book you should read.  But then I realized that all the things I want to say about it are already said in my Foreword to the book.  So I've embedded that below.

Reformed Gifts for the Church Catholic: My Response to Todd Billings

Since folks had inquired about the text of my response to Todd Billings' inaugural address as Girod Professor of Reformed Theology (noted yesterday), I have uploaded a pdf of my remarks for those who might be interested.  I believe that Todd hopes to publish his lecture in some format.

"Reformed Gifts for the Church Catholic: Five Books I Want Todd Billings to Write"

Reformed, Catholic, Evangelical: On J. Todd Billings

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of participating in the installation of my friend, J. Todd Billings, as the first Gordon H. Girod Research Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, MI.  It was a marvelous celebration of Todd's work and future promise (and comes in the midst of Todd's battle with cancer).

The folks at Western Seminary have shared video from the event that might be of interest to a wider audience.

You can learn more about Todd's story, and the story behind this endowed chair, in this clip:


The Gordon H. Girod Chair of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary from Western Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Todd's (fantastic, manifesto-like) inaugural address, entitled "Rediscovering the Catholic-Reformed Tradition for Today":


Girod Event Inauguration Address from Western Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Matthew Levering, a brilliant young scholar from the University of Dayton, was the Roman Catholic Respondent:


Girod Event Response: Matthew Levering from Western Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

And I brought up the rear with a response titled, "Five Books I Want Todd Billings to Write":


Girod Event Response: James K. A. Smith from Western Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Natural Law and a "Christian Pragmatism": A Note on David Bentley Hart

A long footnote appended to chapter 3 of my latest book manuscript, Who's Afraid of Relativism? Community, Contingency, and Creaturehood, forthcoming in the Church and Postmodern Culture Series (Baker Academic, 2014), in which I obliquely engage David Bentley Hart's recent sorties on natural law:

This is also why a pragmatist account of knowledge and meaning—which I am arguing is the only account that really does justice to our contingency, dependence, and sociality—undercuts most accounts of “natural law” insofar as they treat natural law representationally—as something that can’t be known atomistically, without dependence on a particular community of practice.  Quite apart from a pragmatist critique on this point (but resonating with it), David Bentley Hart has recently pointed out the problems with such notions of natural law.  As Hart puts it, like natural law theorists, “I certainly believe in a harmony between cosmic and moral order, sustained by the divine goodness in which both participate. I simply do not believe that the terms of that harmony are as precisely discernible as natural law thinkers imagine.”  The problem, then, is not the assertion that there are norms for human flourishing that are bound up with the “ends” of nature; the problem is that “the natural law theorist insists that the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind, regardless of religious belief or cultural formation” (David Bentley Hart, “Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws,” First Things (March 2013), 72, emphasis added). What Hart calls “cultural formation” is what pragmatists like Wittgenstein and Rorty are getting at when they talk about social inculcation and “training”—learning with and from a community of practice how to “take” the world, how to “use” the world.  “To put the matter very simply,” Hart concludes, “belief in natural law is inseparable from the idea of nature as a realm shaped by final causes, oriented in their totality toward a single transcendent moral Good: one whose dictates cannot simply be deduced from our experience of the natural order, but must be received as an apocalyptic interruption of our ordinary explanations that nevertheless, miraculously, makes the natural order intelligible to us as a reality that opens up to what is more than natural.”  But such a “concept of nature…is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions” (ibid., 71, emphasis added).  And, the pragmatist account would add, one only comes by such convictions thanks to a community of practice that passes them on, in which one is trained to see the world in such a way.  So the “recognition” of the moral telos of nature is dependent upon supernatural convictions that are relative to a particular community of revelation.  Hence the pragmatist, qua pragmatist, does not deny the ontological reality of natural law; s/he only denies the possibility of knowing that law apart from membership in a contingent community of practice that teaches us to see the world as such.  As Hart notes in his sequel to this piece, “Nature Loves to Hide,” First Things (May 2013), at stake here is actually an account of the relationship between nature and grace.  The Christian pragmatism I’m advocating would simply emphasize (per Romans 1:21-23, but also per Calvin’s account of the “book of nature” in the Institutes) that one needs to be inculcated in the community of grace that is the body of Christ in order to be able to “see” nature as the natural law theorist claims any rational being can.  In chapter 4, in dialogue with Robert Brandom, we’ll see that what’s really at issue here is how to understand “rationality.”

Meet Comment (magazine) Again for the First Time

Over at Comment this week you'll find my rather manifesto-like announcement of our editorial vision for the magazine.  I'm excited about a new focus, a new format, and new energy for the future.  Here's a snippet:

In the past, drawing on our heritage in the Reformational tradition of Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, and Herman Dooyewerd (so many Hermans!), Comment magazine has encouraged evangelicals to embrace a more expansive Gospel, a sense of vocation as wide as creation—what the Protestant Reformers would describe as "the sanctification of ordinary life." You might think of this aspect of our work as post-fundamentalist therapy—helping evangelicals to work through narrow notions of salvation as mere soul-rescue and instead embrace a holistic vision of God's renewal as encompassing "all things" (Colossians 1:15-20). We have celebrated a creation-wide vision of redemption rooted in a holistic theology of creation and culture. (I tried to encapsulate this a few years ago in my Commentessay on "Redemption.") In that sense, Comment magazine has been something of an evangelist for the unique wisdom and treasures of the Reformed (and especially Kuyperian) stream of catholic Christianity. We've been cheerleaders (some might say "pushers!") of our own teachers: Albert Wolters, Calvin Seerveld, Richard Mouw, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others. 

As we look around today, we're grateful to see others who now share this vision. Chuck Colson's later work, How Now Shall We Live? was a kind of evangelical translation of Kuyper. Andy Crouch's important book, Culture Making, extended and deepened this invitation (and we can see the fruit of this in Christianity Today's "This Is Our City" project). In The Next Christians, Gabe Lyons invites a new generation to abandon the "truncated" gospel of mere soul-rescue and serve God as cultural "restorers." The Center for Faith & Work at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York equips entrepreneurs and artists to see their cultural labour as kingdom work. The choir has expanded, and we're grateful to count all of these as partners in the task. 

This also frees us up to do something different. We're not here just to celebrate and affirm that it's good for Christians to engage culture. We want to now ask the hard questions—to resource those who are on board with the project and are now looking for wisdom about how to actually do this. Yes, Christians should be engaged in cultural creation and stewardship; yes, God values and affirms our cultural labours; now what does that look like? And what does it look like to do that Christianly? We're all for common grace affirmations; but we're equally concerned about what Abraham Kuyper called "the antithesis." Think of Comment as the magazine where we not only encourage you to see your work as pursuing God's shalom; we also dig deep to consider just what shalom looks like in economics and education, for cities and civil society. 

It is good work that God calls us (in)to—work that is really an invitation for us to participate in Christ's renewal of all things. But the biblical affirmation of culture-making and cultural stewardship is not just a vague admonition to "engage culture." There are plans for creation and part of our task as "restorers" is to discern what it is that God desires for commerce and construction, colleges and food co-ops.Comment magazine is devoted to helping you read the blueprints.

Read more of "Meet Comment Again for the First Time."

Building and Stewarding "Common Grace Ministries"

I'm looking forward to speaking at the annual meeting of the Council of Reformed Charities in Canandaigua, NY on April 28-May 1.

The Council of Reformed Charities is an organization that deserves the attention of a rising generation of Christians who are newly excited about what my friend Rich Mouw calls "common grace ministries"--organizations and agencies that pursue shalom for every aspect of creation, rooted in the conviction that Christ has redeemed "all things."  CORC brings together organizations that are convinced, for example, that God is just as concerned about mental health as spiritual health; that Christ's resurrection gives new life to marriages as well as souls; and that the Lord of the heavenly City also desires the renewal of our inner cities.  As we would say at Cardus, these are organization that tend the "social architecture" of North American society, while also tending to the marginalized and vulnerable.

CORC has been around a long time, but you probably don't know about it because it has been a humble organization, rooted in the Reformed tradition that spawned now-internationally-recognized agencies like Bethany Christian Services, Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services, Inner City Christian Federation, and many more.  It's no accident that these sorts of organizations grew out of the soil of Reformed theology and institutions: we were "holistic" before holistic was cool.  As evangelicals discover the "wide-angle Gospel" of creation-wide redemption, they would do well to look to those who have been cultivating this vision for a century.

I have a burden to see the Council of Reformed Charities thrive.  In particular, I would love to see the rising generation of young Christians who are passionately committed to justice, renewal, and care for the vulnerable become part of CORC.  While they would bring new passion and energy to CORC, they would also find something there: wisdom, endurance, and what Eugene Peterson calls "a long obedience in the same direction."  If the new energy for pursuing shalom is going to endure, it needs to be rooted in healthy institutions and tended by networks of accountability and encouragement.  I think CORC provides a multi-generational space for just such growth.

Imagining the Kingdom: Some Video Introductions

The folks at Baker Academic have put together a short series of video interviews that introduce the Cultural Liturgies project in general and Imagining the Kingdom in particular.  Here's a sample:


There are links to the whole series at the end of each video.

Paternalism and the Pursuit of "the Common Good"

Over at the Cardus Daily blog, I've tried to articulate some of the questions that have made me uncomfortable of late: "'You'll Thank Me Later': Paternalism and the Common Good."

Monday Morning Musing: God Doesn't Need our Help

In our age of post-Christian anxiety, where so many worry about young people leaving the faith and the implausibility of Christianity in a secular age, we get a new apologetics.  The goal of the new apologetics is not to prove or defend the puzzling and scandalous aspects of orthodox Christianity.  Instead, the goal is to show that "authentic" Christianity, or the "true" Gospel, is not offensive--that the "God of love" worshiped by Christians is pretty much the God you would want.

That presents a challenge, of course, but the challenge is not located where you might think.  Instead of spending its energy on articulating, explaining, and defending the coherence of biblical, historic Christianity (including all the "hard truths" that attend it), the new apologetics expends its energy convincing the skeptic that all sorts of aspects of "Christianity" are, in fact, non-essential accretions or downright deformative perversions of "true" or "authentic" Christianity.  This is undertaken in the name of removing "intellectual hurdles" to the Christian faith.  If you look again at how many new apologists frame their "reconsiderations" of hell, or the doctrine of the atonement, or the doctrine of original sin in light of evolutionary evidence, or traditional Christian sexual ethics, I suggest you'll often find they "frame" their project something like this:

"These are aspects of Christianity that are just not believable today.  But that's OK, because it turns out that they're also aspects that are not really biblical and not really Christian.  So don't let those things stop you from believing." [Then cue your favorite tale about "Hellenization" or "Constantinianism" or "fundamentalism" here.]

But it seems to me that this sort of project is predicated on a particular account of faith that is often left implicit.  In particular, it seems to assume that if someone is going to come to believe the Gospel they must be convinced since their belief is a matter of their choice.  Or at the very least, the intellectual hurdles that stand in the way of their believing must be removed.  If we do that, then the way is clear for them to choose to believe.

The new apologetic, in other words, is fundamentally Arminian, perhaps even Pelagian (and yes, I know the difference*).  The drive to eliminate intellectual and "moral" hurdles to belief is a fundamentally Arminian project insofar as it seems to assume that "believability" is a condition for the skeptic or nonbeliever to then be able to "make that step" toward belief.

While this might confirm a lot of prejudices, it should be said that this is an odd strategy if one is an Augustinian or a Calvinist--since in an Augustinian account, any belief is a gift, a grace that is given by God himself.  So if God is going to grant the gift of belief, it seems that God would able to grant and empower a faith that can also believe the scandalous.  In other words, God doesn't need our help.

*Readers might consider Charles Taylor's description of the sort of intellectual Pelagianism that he sees as characteristic of the "providential deism" in modernity (A Secular Age, p. 222).

Two Cheers for Javert

I have articulated a few thoughts on law and cultural-caretaking in Les Misérables over at the Cardus Daily blog: http://www.cardus.ca/blog/2013/02/two-cheers-for-javert

What's the Story with "Story?"

"Story" seems to be the new black.  Or the new magic.  Or maybe the new black magic.

This is Alan Jacobs' concern in his recent Books & Culture essay, "Just-So Stories."  His primary target is the "just-so" stories about "story" that are now the darling of "evocriticism"--those (allegedly scientific) accounts that "explain" the power of "story" by explaining them away in terms of reproductive fitness and evolutionary adaptation.  According to these sorts of just-so stories,"story" is important because it teaches us empathy, or trains us to have a theory of other minds, or equips us to be able to make predictions--all of which enable members of the species to avoid getting killed and thus find the time to reproduce.  Jacobs' rightly targets and questions such accounts.  (I would also recommend Jonathan Kramnick's essay, "Against Literary Darwinism," as well as the follow-up symposium in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2012).

But Jacobs' argument gets a little fuzzier when he turns his critical attention to those Christians who have turned "story" into a bit of a cottage industry.  (And I suppose I felt myself a bit of a target here, given the centrality of story for my argument about "how worship works" in Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works.)  So I'd like to extend the conversation a bit, on just this point, precisely because I think Jacobs raises important questions and advances the conversation.

A little set-up: Jacobs' criticizes Gottschall's Storytelling Animal for treating "Story" as an identifiable abstraction; that is, Gottschall "too readily assumes that there is some general thing called Story, rather than considering the implications of the fact that there are many different kinds of stories."  So Gottschall seems to claim that "Story" makes us empathetic.  In reply, Jacobs effectively asks: "Really?  Does the story embedded in Grand Theft Auto do that?"  His frustration is encapsulated in this passage:

I must confess to considerable irritation on this score. When people tell me that “Story” does this or that for us, I always want to throw up my hands and cry, Which story? Haven’t you noticed the astonishing variety of literary productions? Haven’t you noticed that some are brilliant and many are stupid and most are somewhere in between? That some are mean-spirited while others are generous-hearted? And that people don’t agree about which are which? How can anyone who has thought about such matters for five seconds think that you can say anything meaningful about an abstraction as vast and wooly as “Story”?

It is at this point that his exasperation turns to a specifically Christian version of this problem

Christians have been guiltier than most of this tendency, arguing that people love stories because they are responding to the story God is telling through salvation history. Thus Brian Wicker’s 1975 book The Story-Shaped World; which sounds good until you ask which story the world is shaped like. The One Hundred Days of Sodom? The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin? Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? It matters, you know. Now of course, a reasonable person is likely to reply that the gospel is the story Wicker is referring to, which is true. Why not, then, refer to “The Gospel-Shaped World”? Because, I submit, Story is a word to conjure with, as Wicker and Gottschall alike, in their very different ways, know. But it is time to stop conjuring.

You can feel some folks cheering along as Jacobs' boldly deflates the "story" industry in Christian circles.  But I wonder if that might be a bit premature.  Let's consider this a little more closely.

1. We need to sort out the different sorts of claims that are made about and for "story" in these discussions:

(a) There is an important difference between improvement claims vs. formation claims.  If some (perhaps Gottschall?) fall into the habit of regularly claiming that stories "improve" us, then Jacobs critique is right on the money.  However, I don't usually run into specific claims about improvement; rather, I see people talking about the unique formative power of story/narrative--and that formation could be for good or ill.

(b) But even mere formation claims would still be guilty of another of Jacobs' peeves about story conjuring: the very notion that "Story" is a category.  This is a bit of an odd critique.  There's no such thing as "Story," he seems to claim, only stories.  But all sorts of our concepts and categories encompass a vast range of instantiations--but we don't thereby rule them out of court. (Wittgenstein makes the case for "fuzzy" concepts early on in his Philosophical Investigations.)  Categories and concepts like "poetry" or "nonfiction" or "fiction" seem to successfully name an array of phenomena that is at least as "vast and wooly" as Story.  The very fact that I can assemble a collection of stories already means that "story" is a functional concept.

But let's grant that there's a fair concern in the neighborhood here.  Then I wonder if we might introduce another distinction, between those who talk about "story in general" vs. those who are really interested in narrative meaning.  For example, like Jacobs, Kramnick is very critical of those "literary Darwinists" who just keep making vague, general claims about "Story" without any attention to the specifics of particular stories.  (He also notes that the overarching Story that they seem to find turns out to be a version of Darwin's story.)  Again: fair critique.  But that seems different from those of us who are not appealing to "Story" as if there was an abstract plot in the sky, but are rather attentive to the dynamics of storied meaning-making--the unique, irreducible way that narrative "means."  This was the quarry of Paul Ricoeur's ongoing research. It is also this kind of claim that Christian Smith is making when he argues that humans are "narrative" animals (in Moral, Believing Animals).  The point is that story means in unique, identifiable, and irreducible ways. So "story" does something that other modes of prose or expression do not.  (I argue this in more detail in Imagining the Kingdom.)  Jacobs might still want to contest such a claim, but I don't think it falls prey to the critique he offers in "Just-So Stories."

2. Now look again at Jacobs' specific claim about Christian conjurings of the magic of "Story."  First, Jacobs tells us "Christians have been guiltier than most" in this regard.  Really?  I find that hard to believe, especially if you've had any opportunity to spend extended time in the growing literature of evocriticism.

But second, and more importantly, look closely at the specific claim he attributes to this Christian version of story-conjuring.  Apparently their claim is that "people love stories because they are responding to the story God is telling through salvation history."  Again: really?  I'm surprised to hear this, since I've spent quite a bit of time in this literature, and I don't know that I've ever heard that argument.  And the only evidence Jacobs gives us is an appeal to a 1975 book by Brian Wicker.  If Christians have been "guiltier than most" on this score, you'd think there'd be loads of examples to cite--and maybe a few more recent.  But no.

So I'm worried that Jacobs has erected (conjured?) something of a straw man (a wicker man?).  If Christians were making the argument that Jacobs attributes to them here, then yes: this is a valid concern and critique.  But I'm not at all convinced that the recent spate of works emphasizing "story" are making anything like this argument.  That doesn't mean they should therefore get a free pass; only that they can't be dispatched on the basis of Jacobs' complaint here.  That would have to be a tale for another time.

Imagining the Kingdom: Endorsements

As announced on Twitter, I've received the first copy of Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works.  A long time coming, I'm grateful to see it in print and now wait with trepidation to see how my little creation fares in the cold, hard world.

But I'm grateful that it's been warmly welcomed by others already.  In addition to receiving a "starred review" from Publisher's Weekly, the back cover boasts the following endorsements.


"Imagining the Kingdom is a fit successor to Jamie Smith's remarkable Desiring the Kingdom. The new book is, like its predecessor, learned but lively, provocative but warmhearted, a manifesto and a guide. Smith takes Christians deeper into the artistic, imaginative, and practical resources on which we must draw if we wish to renew not only our minds but also our whole beings in Christ."

Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English, Wheaton College

"In this wonderfully rich and engagingly readable book of 'liturgical anthropology,' Smith makes a persuasive case for the thesis that human beings are best understood as worshiping animals. It has important implications at once for practical theology's reflection on religious formation, liturgy, and pedagogy and for philosophical theorizing about just what religion is. And it develops as an engaging and lively conversation among an astonishing mix of people: imagine Calvin, Proust, Merleau-Ponty, Augustine, Wendell Berry, Bourdieu, and David Foster Wallace all in the same room really talking to each other about being human and how to think about it!"

David Kelsey, Luther A. Weigle Professor of Theology Emeritus, Yale Divinity School

"Jamie Smith shows us that the gospel does not primarily happen between our ears but in all the movements of the body by which we are formed and in turn form the world. I know of no more thorough and sophisticated account of how secular liturgies form and deform us and how Christian liturgies can help. Though sophisticated, Smith's book is also a delight. Its pages are filled with great poetry and insights from films, novels, and everyday life. Smith shows how we encounter God with our whole selves and how God carries us even when we don't know what is going on."

William T. Cavanaugh, senior research professor, DePaul University

"It is heartening to set one's eyes on Jamie Smith's bold and creative endeavor to awaken Christians, Protestants in particular, to the centrality of worship in even, nay especially, our moral lives. Smith's acute insight into the false and lying stories and liturgies generated by the dominant powers of our economy makes his case for a reclamation of worship within the churches compelling; for this thoughtful book is rightly concerned with a restoration of the Christian imagination rooted in habits of virtue."

Vigen Guroian, professor of religious studies, University of Virginia; author of The Melody of Faith

"This book is a thought-provoking, generative reflection on the imagination-shaping power of Christian worship practices. Smith describes and demonstrates how practices, perceptions, emotions, and thought interact and how together they can be shaped in cruciform ways. What an ideal book for crossing boundaries among academic disciplines and between the academy and the church."

John D. Witvliet, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Calvin College, and Calvin Theological Seminary

Favorite Reads: 2012 Minimalist Edition

I'm not sure how this happened, but somehow my 2012 reading was dominated by non-fiction and only some blips of fiction, short stories, and poetry (in stark contrast to my rich year of fiction reading in 2011).  Of the stories and novels I enjoyed in 2012, I think I would highlight just two (though I hope to have more to say about Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood in the near future):

FAVORITE NOVEL IN 2012

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels, the first volume in his Cornish Trilogy (originally published, 1981).  A "campus" novel set at the College of St. John & the Holy Ghost (modelled on Trinity College at the University of Toronto), The Rebel Angels is a bit of an indulgent romp for an academic reader.  The pinnacle of Davies' weird blend of medievalism and Jungian notions of myth, populated with unforgettable characters, it's begging to be made into a Downton Abbey-like miniseries!  

FAVORITE SHORT STORY IN 2012

Just one pristine gem to highlight from my reading this year: "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant.  This might just be the apotheosis of the short story.  I read this in a marvelous collection, The Oxford Book of Short Stories, ed. Elizabeth Fallaize (Oxford University Press, 2002), which also includes Balzac's classic, "The Message."

FAVORITE NONFICTION IN 2012

So 2012 was the year of nonfiction for me.  And looking back, it might also be described as the year I became a conservative (more on that anon, perhaps).  Here are a few highlights from my reading:

When I read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, early in 2012, I found myself constantly arguing with it.  This was a sign that it was making a dent on my imagination.  And now that I look back on 2012, this is one of the bookS that has kept wafting back into my consciousness.  Murray is someone that liberals love to hate, but this book really pressed me to revisit some of my baseline assumptions.

In a similar way, Ross Douthat's Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics offers an analysis and argument of contemporary American religion and spirituality that I believe needs to be absorbed and heeded if any kind of integral, orthodox Christianity is going to survive the assimilating maw of American culture.  There might be points of disagreement about the history.  For example, I think the "heresy" of American religion is as old as the American experiment itself--it's just that American culture lived on borrowed capital until the mid-20th century.  But it's Douthat's diagnosis and prescription that are the most important.  (I would recommend reading this alongside Peter Leithart's very important book, Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective.)

I'm most grateful that I finally found opportunity to read Paul Elie's classic, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage--his stirring, intertwined account of the lives of Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy.  The book left me with a deep conviction about the need to cultivate more time and space for contemplation in my life.  (Not that I'm doing any better on that front.)

Finally, in the sheer-delight category, I was enthralled by Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.   Mann challenges both "Sunday school" and "middle school" pictures of the Americas before European colonization.  He debunks the myth of a-cultural Indian existence, showing how indigenous peoples very much shaped nature by their culture.  While recounting the new state-of-the-art in our understanding of the Americas before Columbus, Mann also tells the story of science, tracking debates and developments in anthropology.  A fascinating book.

Books & Culture Podcast: On (Anti-)Intellectualism & the Church

I received an early Christmas present when I realized that John Wilson and Stan Guthrie were discussing my new book, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, in this week's Books and Culture podcast.  (You can also listen/subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.)

John does a great job of situating the new book--which will be available in late January--in the context of my argument in Desiring the Kingdom.  He does so by focusing on my admission, in the Preface to Imagining the Kingdom, that DTK was a "hypocritical" book--a long theoretical argument for displacing the centrality and primacy of the intellect.  Addressing that concern and dynamic is a big part of volume 2.  (And in the Preface I do so by drawing on Proust--but you'll have to get the book to see how that works!)

I was intrigued (and humbled) by John's discussion of the reception of Desiring the Kingdom as a kind of retroactive confirmation of the book's argument.  At first he was skeptical of my claim about the privileging of the intellect among evangelicals.  Indeed, per The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, John was inclined to think the very opposite: our problem hardly seemed to be a matter too much thinking.  And yet, as John noted the wide reception of the argument over the past few years, he wondered whether the claim was on to something.

I get at this problem right in the Preface of Imagining the Kingdom.  At one point I articulate it this way:

The point, rather, is that we have a tendency, in Christian higher education and even in the church, to overestimate the importance of thinking. Now, many of those toiling in the not-so-ivory towers of Christian colleges and universities would be quite surprised to hear that thinking is being overvalued in North American Christianity. Indeed, quite the opposite seems to be true: evangelical piety tends to intensify a general anti-intellectual malaise that besets our culture. The response to such a situation would be to encourage more thinking, not less—to emphasize the importance of the mind rather than fall back into the soppy mushiness of “the heart” and its affections. In short, with its critique of rationalist or intellectualist models of the human person, it would seem that Desiring the Kingdom plays right into the hands of antiintellectualism (p. 11).

So I completely understand John's worry here. But note that one of the goals of Imagining the Kingdom is to respond directly to this worry.

This gets at one of the most nuanced--and admittedly perplexing--parts of the argument: that those Christians who are "anti-intellectual" are sometimes the most ardent proponents of intellectualIST pictures of the human person.  Those who are suspicious of the university and "book learnin'" are often still "folk" intellectualISTS who think discipleship and sanctification are a matter of information rather than formation.  Whenever sanctification is conceived primarily as a matter of acquiring biblical knowledge--with no account of the importance of habit--then we are on the terrain of intellectualISM, even if we're talking about a community that looks askance at something like Books & Culture, which is rightly pointing folks to the riches of intellectual reflection.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I hope you'll listen to the podcast.  And if that piques your interest, I hope you'll pick up Imagining the Kingdom in the new year.   

Big News: JKAS editor of Comment magazine

I'm very excited to share some big news: Beginning in January 2013, I will take up the reins as Editor of Comment magazine, coupled with an appointment as a Senior Fellow of Cardus, a think tank dedicated to the renewal of North American social architecture, drawing on more than 2000 years of Christian social thought.

I'm incredibly excited to join the Comment and Cardus team.  It's a dedicated outlet for my work as a Christian public intellectual, and the invitation--while coming as a surprise--made immediate sense for me.  It also dovetails in providential ways with my appointment to the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology & Worldview at Calvin College.

I have much more to say about this over at the Cardus Daily blog.  Here's a snippet:

Above all, I want Comment to be a life-giving resource for those leaders, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and creators who are convinced of the importance of Christian cultural engagement but are now looking for in-depth guidance and direction.  In many other venues, we never seem to get beyond the starting block.  We hear a baseline emphasis repeated over and over: that Christians have permission and encouragement to be culture-makers.  While there’s a continued place for “Christianity and Culture 101,” so to speak, Comment aims to take you to the next level—to 201 and 301 levels of analysis.  We want to help you discern the nitty-gritty of how to actually do this and what it really ought to look like.  We’re unapologetic in having a vision for the renewal of North American social architecture.  We’re not shy to say where we think this architecture is crumbling.  And we’re calling Christians to be builders.  

Continue reading at the Cardus Daily and learn more of what's in store for the future of Comment.  And if you're not yet a subscriber, join us today.

Ecclesiology and Ethnography: A Response

At the recent meeting of the American Academy of Religion I had the pleasure of participating in a session on ecclesiology and ethnography, engaging some of the contributors to an excellent new book edited by Pete Ward: Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Eerdmans, 2012).  This has since been complemented by a subsequent volumed edited by Christian Scharen: Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Eerdmans, 2012) in which (full disclosure) my friend Mark Mulder and I have a co-authored chapter, "Understanding Religion Takes Practice: Anti-Urban Bias, Geographical Habits, and Theological Influences."

The AAR session included presentations from John Swinton, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Luke Bretherton, and Elizabeth Phillips, all drawing on their chapters in the book.  Here I reproduce the notes of my response as a way of highlighting this new interdisciplinary conversation and, I hope, as a way of extending and expanding it.

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Ecclesiology and Ethnography: A Response

John Swinton’s wonderful chapter in this book names a question I’ve heard often.  When, in different contexts, I used to explicate the social imaginary implicit in Pentecostal worship and spiritual practice, inevitably someone from the audience would ask: “Just where can I find a Pentecostal church like you describe?”  After several occasions with no reply, I finally came up with a stock answer: “It’s in Amos Yong’s head!”  Then I would do some hand-waving about my description being “aspirational” and try to move on.  (This will give you some idea of just why I had to leave the Assemblies of God.) 

            It wasn’t until I read Chris Scharen’s SJT article on “ecclesiology asethnography” that I was able to articulate just what was wrong here and began to turn the corner in my thinking about ecclesiology.  So I am profoundly grateful for this volume that is the occasion for our discussion today because I think, like our presenters, it does a fantastic job of articulating a big-tent approach to this emerging conversation between ecclesiology and ethnography.

            And I should admit that I came to the book with some skepticism.  To be perfectly honest, I was expecting a lot more Paul Tillich and Don Browning, if you know what I mean.  That is, I was expecting a “correlational” approach that would offer “neutral” checks and balances to the “biased” claims of theology, with the social sciences “explaining” what worshipers were doing in “objective” categories.  But as you’ve just heard, the conversation is much more nuanced than that.  Given the impossibility of actually “responding” to our panelists in this time, permit me to just extend this conversation by engaging a few themes that have emerged.

1. Ethnography and liturgical priority

I loved Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s critique of “didacticism” and the “inadequacy of propositional theology” for making sense of the complexity of lived religion in congregations (126-127).  I also think she’s absolutely right that the core intuitions of the ecclesiology-and-ethnography project should upset the usual hierarchies of the theological curriculum.  Far from being an “application” appendix, “practical” theology should be the centering discipline, with  biblical studies and systematics as the “grammars” of our worship.

            In this respect, I think we could pursue a more robust account of Christian worship as a kind of irreducible know-how that precedes—and even, to some extent, eludes—our know-whats.  You can run this account either through Wittgenstein or Charles Taylor or Robert Brandom or Pierre Bourdieu—I won’t do so in my brief time here.  Maybe I could suggest a metaphor, however: in poetry criticism, Cleanth Brooks introduced something of a principle: “the heresy of paraphrase.”  The point is that what a poem means in ineluctably bound up with its form which carries a meaning that is irreducible and thus cannot be paraphrased in any other propositional form.  It seems to me that the know-how of Christian worship—and congregational practices more broadly—resist paraphrase.  This puts practical theology, and even the ecclesiology-and-ethnography project, in a region of temptation: the temptation to paraphrase.  And now we’re on exactly the terrain of Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice.  (I unpack this problem in more detail in James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works [Baker Academic, 2013], ch. 2.)  Fortunately, I think the priming intuitions of your project already sense this tension.  But we also need to remember that ethnography is still propositional, constituted by the epistemological “break” that Bourdieu emphasizes is a social break.

2. When and how do functional theologies trump “official” theologies?  Or: when and how do performed theologies trump articulated theologies?

At the end of her very helpful essay—which is part lit review, part case study—Elizabeth Phillips concludes “that the deeply problematic eschatology of Christian Zionism so alters their Christology and ecclesiology as to disconnect them from the Christological and ecclesiological resources that are necessary for well-formed Christian social ethics” (104).   This left me with some nagging questions, not because I think she’s wrong, but precisely because I think she’s right:

•     At what point do the functional theologies of a congregation—which can only be detected with an ethnographic radar, so to speak—trump whatever “official” theologies that might define them as Christian? 
• ·      In other words, could ethnographic description ever enable us to theologically evaluate congregations vis-à-vis ecclesiological and liturgical norms?
• ·      Or, to put it even more strongly: to what extent are we willing discuss the parameters for a Catholic theological anthropology, and thus consider norms for practice that exceed particular congregations?  Who could do that?  From where? 
• ·      Perhaps this is all just a way of asking: Can ecclesiological ethnography names idolatries and heresies? 

3. Let’s invite the sociologists

Notice who is not here: sociologists of religion. Phillips is right that anthropologists have been much more open to this conversation.  (See, just for one example, the Fall 2010 volume of the South Atlantic Quarterly for a conversation between anthropologists and theologians.)  But then anthropologists, at least after Geertz, have been on the “soft” (or hermeneutic) side of the social sciences and long had a deep-sense of the value-laden nature of observation.  Sociologists—while not as bad as psychologists—still tend to aspire to “scientificity” in ways that get bound up with myths of objectivity.

Yet, more and more, sociologists are taken to be the authoritative voices that distill for us the essence of the church.  And most of that is based on research conducted by quantheads who lack the sort of theological nuance that our panelists have articulated.  Instead, they reduce the church to an organization like others, offering “religious” goods and services, but therefore almost entirely understandable within paradigms for understanding other organizations, including rational choice theory and economic modes of analysis (see: Rodney Stark and his ilk).  With those assumptions, ecclesiology is pretty much irrelevant.  (And it gets really scary when theologians start looking for ‘scientific’ cachet by hitching their wagon to such social science approaches.  Cue your favorite John Milbank quote here.)

            What I find refreshing and promising about this conversation is its refusal of such reductionism, without floating off into aspirational idealism.  As Bretherton summarizes it,

The broader point to draw for the relationship between ethnography, ecclesiology, and political theory is that the church cannot be read as simply a microcosm of broader political processes and structural forces: it has its own integrity.  Yet neither can an analysis of the church be separated from how it is in a relationship of codetermination (and at times co-construction) with its political environment (161).

That seems just right to me: an anti-reductionism vis-à-vis sociology; an anti-gnosticism vis-à-vis theology.  But you might be surprised how little this would be understanding at SSSR.  I would encourage you to consider inviting Christian sociologists of religion into the “ecclesiology & ethnography” conversation, perhaps even trying to host a session at SSSR, in order to cross-fertilize these conversations.  We might thereby expand the disciplinary conversations, building a collective of scholars who undertake ethnography, as John Swinton suggests, for Jesus, and for his body.

The Mall as Consumerist Cathedral

When I give talks based on Desiring the Kingdom, I often revisit my analysis of the mall as a consumerist cathedral.  The concreteness and universality of the experience is usually a helpful entrée into the core concepts of my liturgical analysis of culture.

A couple of resources to add to that analysis:

When I was in Charlottesville recently, Louis Nelson, an architectural historian at the University of Virginia, pointed me to Ira Zepp's book, The New Religious Image of Urban America: The Shopping Mall as Ceremonial Center--which seems to confirm much of my reading. 

Second, Jeroen van der Zeeuw from the Netherlands passed along this stark image: an aerial photograph of a mall that makes the "cathedral echo" quite explicit!

This Old House

Though I come from a people who made their living with their hands, I make my living with words.  So when I need to work something out, or work through something, I don't go chop wood or tinker with a '67 Chevelle, I write.  So be forewarned: therapeutic musings ahead.

This is our house.

Or was.

In fact this is an old picture from the year we bought the house.  Today you'd see a "Sold" sign out front. So technically this house now belongs to a young couple who, I hope, are excited to move into what has been our home for a decade.

It is the only house we've ever owned.  Indeed, when we moved to Grand Rapids from Los Angeles, part of the miracle was realizing that we could own a home.  What I wouldn't have guessed is how much a house would come to own us--that a house could exhibit its own kind of hospitality.

We thought we were a king and queen (with princes and one pretty princess) moving into our new 1500 square-foot "castle" whose coziness would get cozier as our 10-year-old became a 20-year-old, and our 4-year-old became a teenager.   But when we leave Baldwin street for the last time, we'll walk through this old house (it was built in 1900) and see a part of ourselves in every single room.  Not many remember the dingy "Michigan basement" that I redeemed as a rec room, at least fit for teenaged boys willing to make it their lair.  Deanna and I certainly won't forget the unique delight and benefit of adding a wall with a door for our master bedroom.  Maddie and Grayson both transformed the attic bedroom at different times.  And who can forget our "hobbit room" above the kitchen?

I can stroll through the house in my imagination and see almost every nook and cranny.  Here's the floor that our neighbors Sue and Melissa sanded and varnished for us while we were out of town on vacation.  There are the built-in bookshelves I built for my fiction and criticism collection.  The bright colors on every wall are expressions of Deanna's personality.  All of the work in the kitchen is an expression of our commitment to food and family--from the first summer we ripped out the drop ceiling (what were people thinking) to the more recent bamboo floor I laid down, up to the crown molding whose angles were a veritable nightmare for this amateur.

Outside is no different.  I've written before about the gardens of delight Deanna crafted for all of us.  I know it's going to be hard for her to say goodbye to all those perennials and the spaces of flourishing she has tended with her hands.  And there's the fence I built when we prepared for Grayson's high school graduation open house.  In the back corner is a small stone statuette of a cocker spaniel.  It marks the burial place of our old friend, Reilly, who we had to put down in 2007.  It's surrounded with bleeding hearts.  (We're taking the stone marker with us, as a way to take him with us to our new home, and will plant new bleeding hearts--Coleson's favorite.)

This is starting to sound like a country song, right?  Well, as you might imagine, we've been listening to Miranda Lambert's "House that Built Me" quite a bit!  ("...and I bet you didn't know, under that live oak, my favorite dog is buried in the yard.")

This neighborhood has worked its way into our bones, and we'll miss it profoundly.  It has changed, as have we.  The first summer our kids set up a lemonade stand--and were robbed!  A battering ram shattered the tranquil silence one afternoon as a drug bust took place across the street.   Over the years we tried to be patient with the kids as they complained (and were embarrassed) about how their neighborhood was so different from that of their friends.  And yet we also some them grow to embrace it, to the extent that East Hills has woven its way into their identity.  I try to tell them that they were "East Hills" before East Hills was cool.

The farmer's market has been a steady presence and anchor throughout, a regular part of our routines.  We're going to miss that stroll.  But we've left part of ourselves in it with a brick that reads "Practice Resurrection."

Our neighbors have changed over a decade.  We miss Jo and Jose, Greg and Darlene, but most of all Sue and Melissa--neighbors who became cherished friends.  Celia next door is the anchor of the block, here before us, and no doubt here long after us.  We've said goodbye to some who passed.  I can't quite articulate how much I miss Tom, a simple soul who lived in Celia's basement for years.  We could talk about NASCAR and Jesus all day long (always "the Powerful One," to Tom).  The last time I talked to him, we prayed together on that sidewalk right there, asking God to heal the tumor in his belly.  I owed him more than that.

What I can't possibly enumerate are the untold memories and joys--and heartbreaks--that this old house made room for.  This has been the best hardest blessed decade of our lives.  So as we're working through this, and helping the kids through it, we try to emphasize: home is where we are.  That goes with us.  And we're all excited about the new house (just 1 mile west!), in a new neighborhood (Heritage Hill), with new rhythms and opportunities awaiting us (including our Saturday morning standby, Wealthy Street Bakery, just down the street and a new downtown market nearby).

But I don't want to be a Gnostic about this and underestimate the significance of place.  So I find myself --as usual!--thinking about St. Augustine and the sort of dynamics he explores in the City of God.  Yes, sure, we are sojourners and pilgrims in any place.  On the other hand, we are placed and need to bloom where we're planted, looking for ways to foster the welfare of the city.  On a microcosmic level, that's been this old house on Baldwin street for the past 10 years.

We have loved this old house; we've poured hours and hours (and $ and $!) of tender loving care into it for a decade.  We're proud of how we leave it: like a friend that we've counseled and supported and hopefully coaxed into new flourishing.  And we feel like it has loved us in return: sheltering us, comforting us, gathering us,  hosting us.  We are grateful to have been welcomed by this old house.  May it welcome those who follow and may they flourish in its space.  Please take care of our friend.

What is The Colossian Forum All About?

I get this question a lot.  And now, instead of just pointing people to The Colossian Forum Manifesto or other articulations of our mission and vision, I can point them to a concrete embodiment of what we're trying to foster: a charitable, respectful conversation between young earth creationist Todd Wood and evolutionary creationist Dennis Venema.

See my summary and analysis of their engagement over at The Colossian Blog, and join this new kind of conversation.

A Christian Sociology? On Oppenheimer on the Regnerus Affair

Mark Oppenheimer can't fathom what a "Christian sociology" would be, as evidenced by his odd piece on the recent controversy swirling around Mark Regnerus' study of the children of gay & lesbian parents. Published in today's New York Times, Oppenheimer raises questions about "the role of faith in scholarship."  Oppenheimer clearly approaches the matter with a secularist confidence in the supposed "neutrality" and "objectivity" of scholarship.  So the very notion of a "Christian scholar" would be an oxymoron on that account.  So, at best, the "role of faith in scholarship" would seem to be reduced to three closing options that Oppenheimer countenances:

[I]f there is not really a Christian method in sociology, but there is a role for a self-described Christian in sociology, as Dr. Regnerus once averred, then what is that role? One can imagine several answers. 

First, the religious — or atheist, for that matter — sociologist might have a set of topics that she finds particularly relevant to her beliefs. Given their traditions’ emphasis on traditional family, for example, a conservative Catholic or evangelical Protestant could reasonably gravitate toward the study of family structure. 

Second, a scholar might have faith that good research ultimately brings people to God or furthers his plans. A Christian historian might trust that even a modest study of the Spanish-American War, or of Rhode Island history, would do a small part to reveal the providential nature of all history. 

Finally, a scholar might be a “Christian scholar” by virtue of the pride he takes in his faith, especially in the secular academy. Dr. Regnerus was a proud Christian witness, once upon a time. But these days he won’t discuss his faith, even with a Christian magazine. Two weeks ago, Christianity Today ran a lengthy interview with Dr. Regnerus in which he said nothing about his religious beliefs.

I suppose what's odd about it is the fact that Christian Smith, a renowned sociologist from the University of Notre Dame, and Regnerus himself (a recent convert to Roman Catholicism), seem to largely concede Oppenheimer's skepticism.  As Oppenheimer reports,

Christian Smith, one of Dr. Regnerus’s advisers at the University of North Carolina and now at Notre Dame agrees that a sociologist’s religion should affect only his choice of topics, not his methodology. 

“I believe there is sociology that is practiced in perhaps somewhat different ways by people with different backgrounds of all sorts — racial, socioeconomic, gender and religious, among others,” Dr. Smith said. But every sociologist “operates with the same basic disciplinary approach, methods and standards of evidence.” Dr. Smith said that while he had not talked with his former student “about any possible connection of faith to topic/design,” he was “quite sure his faith did not influence the design.” But he said he could “only speculate” whether Dr. Regnerus’s faith led to his interest in the topic.

Now in a way this doesn't surprise me, and I think it's partly Smith's rendition of Catholicism that contributes to this model.  As I pointed out in our recent exchange in the Christian Scholar's Review (with regard to my review of his book, What is a Person?), Smith carves up the world in a classic version of "manual" Thomism--with a "natural" world that can be known by objective, unbiased reason, though one that needs to be supplemented by a supernatural faith.  (This is just the sort of picture that was challenged by Henri de Lubac and le nouvelle théologie.)  On that account, (supernatural) faith would simply and only direct the Christian scholar to select certain aspects of "nature" to consider--but s/he would then consider them with the same supposedly unbiased "methods" that all other "rational" scholars do.  

But I think it is just this ruse of "unbiased" and "objective" scholarship and rationality that has been rightly called into question over the past 25 years--and not just by crazy Frenchmen.  You'll get the same critique of supposedly "neutral" rationality from Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeffrey Stout.  You can see it in action in Nicholas Wolterstorff's critiques of Robert Audi and Richard Rorty, which caused Rorty to back down from his more rabid secularism.  And as I argue in my exchange with Smith, I think his earlier book, Moral, Believing Animals, is actually solidly in line with this Wolterstorffian take on matters.  But that book--which I like a lot--is also predates his conversion to Catholicism.

The upshot, that Oppenheimer can't consider (nor can Smith & Regnerus, apparently), is that there are no "neutral" or "unbiased" scholars.  So it's not a question of whether faith informs scholarship, but which.   Let's just take the example of sociology: maybe there isn't a "Christian way to crunch numbers," but the number-crunching is only an instrumental slice of sociological scholarship.  Social scientific research is governed by deep notions of flourishing that are not "objective" or universal but rather emerge from stories and narratives and mythologies that are believed.  (Here I'm just repeating Smith's own argument in Moral, Believing Animals!)  

This means every social scientific instrument is already freighted with a thick, normative, albeit implicit, vision of what it is to be human and what human community ought to look like.  Those deep commitments don't make it into the data in any explicit way, but they frame every question that is asked, every bit of data that is selected as significant, etc.  There isn't a single social scientific scholar (or journalist) who doesn't believe some fundamental story about the world.  We're all confessional scholars.