Douthat on Social Liberalism as Class Warfare

In the spirit of pretending this blog is a Tumblr, here's a rich snippet that is the fulcrum of Ross Douthat's long essay, "Social Liberalism as Class Warfare":

[I]s it just a coincidence that this self-interested elite holds the nearly-uniformly liberal views on social issues that it does? Is it just random that the one idea binding the post-1970s upper class together — uniting Wall Street’s Randians and Harvard’s academic socialists, a left-leaning media and a right-leaning corporate sector, the libertarians of Silicon Valley and the liberal rich of the Upper West Side — is a hostility to any kind of social conservatism, any kind of morals legislation, any kind of paternalism on issues of sex and marriage and family? Is the upper class’s social liberalism the lone case, the rare exception, where our self-segregated, self-interested elites really do have the greater good at heart?

Maybe so — but for the sake of argument, let’s consider the possibility that they don’t. Not infrequently in culture-war arguments, conservative complaints about liberalism’s hostility to “traditional values” (or whatever phrase you prefer) are met by the counterpoint that liberal regions of the country seem to embrace bourgeois norms more fully than conservatives communities. (The contrast between family stability in Massachusetts and Alabama, for instance, is often invoked by cultural liberals as an argument-clincher.) I think this counterpoint oversimplifies a more complicated landscape and elides some crucial issues, but it does get at something real: In upper class circles, liberal social values do not necessarily lead to libertinism among the people who hold them, and indeed quite often coexist with an impressive amount of personal conservatism, personal restraint.

But if we’re inclined, with Waldman, to see our elite as fundamentally self-interested, then we should ask ourselves whether the combination of personal restraint and cultural-political permissiveness might not itself be part of how this elite maintains its privileges. Waldman, for instance, makes the (completely valid) point that just telling a single mother to go get married to whomever she happens to be dating isn’t likely to lead to happy outcomes for anyone involved. But is that really just because of wage stagnation and the truncation of the potential-mates bell curve? Or could it also be that the decision to marry only delivers benefits when it’s part of a larger life script, a way of pursuing love and happiness that shapes people’s life choices – men as well as women — from the moment they come of age sexually, and that exerts its influence not through the power of a singular event (ring, cake, toasts) but through that event’s place in a larger mix of cues, signals, expectations, and beliefs?

If it’s the latter — and if you’re not an economic or genetic determinist, I really think it has to be — then it’s worth recognizing that much of what the (elite-driven) social revolutions of the 1970s did, in law and culture, was to strip away the most explicit cues and rules linking sex, marriage, and childrearing, and nudging people toward the two-parent bourgeois path. No longer would the law make any significant effort to enforce marriage vows. No longer would an unplanned pregnancy impose clear obligations on the father. No longer would the culture industry uphold the “marriage-then-childbearing” script as normative, or endorse any moral script around sexuality save the rule of consenting adults.

And following our hermeneutic of anti-elite suspicion, let’s ask: If the path to human flourishing still mostly runs through monogamy and marriage, who benefits the most from the kind of changes that make that path less normative, less law-supported, less obvious? Well, mostly people who are embedded in communities that continue to send the kind of signals that the law and the wider culture no longer send.

That can mean a religious community: In those red states with high divorce rates that liberals like to cite, frequent churchgoers are an exception to the pattern, or course Mormon Utah is the high marriage-rate (and, not surprisingly, high social mobility) exception to every post-1970s trend.

Or, more importantly for our purposes, it can mean a community low in explicit moralism but high in social capital and social pressure, where the incentives not to date or sleep with the wrong person at the wrong time are sharpened by the immense rewards for not making personal mistakes, where divorce and single parenthood are regarded as major threats to the all-important intergenerational transfer of success, where young people are inculcated with the kind of self-control required to dabble in libertinism but not take major risks, and where the influence of a libertine culture is counteracted by the dense network of adult authority figures whose examples matter more than what you watch and read and consume. A place where the norms and rules and script don’t have to be made explicit to carry immense weight. A place where everyone understands the basic secret of success.

A place like, well, the modern meritocracy.

Read the rest.  

Continuing a Conversation with the Westmont Four

I generally don't respond to book reviews or articles about my work.  I especially don't respond to those reviews that seem the most critical because, in my experience, they're also usually not worth responding to (and often amount to some form of "I hold X; Smith holds Y; ergo, Smith is wrong" Uh, nope!).

In the same vein, while any author soaks up glowing reviews, I don't often learn much from them.  So I'm appreciative, but they don't really advance the conversation.

A real gift to an author is a review that is constructively critical, that appreciates the argument and then pushes back on those points that deserve push back.  I learn from such reviews, and engaging them becomes a way to advance my own project.

It was in that spirit that I briefly engaged the review of Teaching and Christian Practices written by Jesse Covington, Maurice Lee, Sarah Skripsky, and Lesa Stern--who I now think of as "the Westmont Four" (W4 for short).  Since then I had the pleasure of spending a week at Westmont College last spring, leading an interdisciplinary seminar on Christian formation and higher education.  They were wonderful hosts, and I fear I learned more than I taught.

So I was excited to see the Westmont Four's their review of Imagining the Kingdom, "Irreducibly Embodied," in the most recent issue of Books and Culture.  Once again, they have posed some important questions (I won't be able to answer them all), and in the spirit of advancing the conversation, I thought I might take just a few moments to reply.

Is my anthropology "dualist?"

W4 claim that I claim "to be opposed to a hierarchical dualism of mind and body that prioritizes intellectual, reflective, discursive cognition over practical, affective, aesthetic involvement."  This is why they are puzzled "to see repeatedly this very dualism, inverted but reinstated."

I, too, was surprised to see this framed in terms of a critique of dualism, since I didn't recall framing my criticism in those terms.  Re-reading ITK, I note that the word "dualism" only occurs twice, both times in reference to others, and never in the way the reviewers suggest here.

Whence this impression, then?  First, I think W4 might be confusing a duality with a dualism.  Not all distinctions are dualistic.  I take dualism to be, roughly, a hierarchical distinction that devalues one of the terms of the distinction.  So, for example, a gnostic soul/body dualism not only distinguishes soul and body but also denigrates the latter.  In contrast, Thomas Aquinas' hylomorphism also distinguishes soul and body but then affirms that the person is the holistic composite of the two, and that each has their own "operations," as he might put it.

I don't anywhere try to deny the duality between something like "mind" and "body."  What I argue is that too many pedagogies have effectively and functionally ignored the role of the body and its unique "operations" in shaping our being-in-the-world.

Second, I don't know how the reviewers came to the conclusion that I think that "the dimensions of thought and action" are "so neatly distinguished and ordered."  In fact, I spend quite a bit of time trying to emphasize how messy and complicated this is.  That's why I spend so much time trying to explicate Merleau-Ponty's notion of "the between"--this fuzzy, messy, "zone" which is almost impossible to describe, between intellect and instinct.  Here is just one representative passage (and in citing this, I might note that direct citations from ITK are a bit scant in their review):

Merleau-Ponty is attentive to what we might call our “hybridity,” our sort of incarnational suspension between angelhood and animality—as mind and body. He is trying to describe our comportment to the world as neither intellectualist nor merely a reflexive biological response to stimuli. Our being-in-the-world is between instinct and intellect.  Such an account of embodied perception pushes back against Cartesian “thinking-thing”-ism that would reduce us to minds merely carried in the vehicles of our bodies as well as a reductionistic animalism that would reduce all of our action and perception to mere biological response to stimuli. I don’t just abstractly think my way through the world, but neither am I merely a passive victim of impressions, bounced around by instinctual reflexes.23 I’m not an angel, but neither am I an insect (PP 90); I am not merely a mind trucking around in a body, but neither am I just a bundle of biological mechanisms passively responding to my environment. So what we need, Merleau-Ponty argues, is a model of the human person that does not fall prey to the dichotomies of mind or body but rather does justice to our “betweenness”24 and its peculiar preconscious knowledge (ITK, pp. 43-44).

Third, I don't think W4 have quite appreciated the force of Merleau-Ponty's account of "the body" since they seem to assume that an appeal to "the body" is just an appeal to a biological machine (this is the criticism that they crib from David VanderLaan).  But that is just the sort of materialistic mechanism that Merleau-Ponty rejects, and which I also emphasize in his wake. Again, I'm not confident that W4 have quite absorbed the nuances of the argument in chapter 1 (which could certainly be my fault).  Consider just two passages, both from chapter 1:

This is not a rejection of intellection or “objective thought” per se; neither does Merleau-Ponty mean to consign us to mere biological responses to stimuli. Indeed, his appreciation of the centrality of the body in the constitution of meaning is decidedly antireductionist, resisting both materialism and intellectualism (ITK, p. 70).  

Similarly, following Merleau-Ponty, I emphasize: 

It is just this bodily attunement and perception that underwrites “objective” knowledge and intellectual reflection. It is not either perception or knowledge. It’s not a question of choosing to settle for some crude, unthinking kinaesthetic perception of the world and thus forgoing intellectual reflection; rather, I perceive in order to understand. Merleau-Ponty has emphasized that perception is not just some kind of crude, ham-fisted theorizing of the world; rather, perception is a fundamentally different (and primary) way of intending the world, of meaning the world with the body. Perception does not just provide the raw materials to be processed by intellection. However, that doesn’t mean there is no relation between perception and objective knowledge. In fact, the latter is rooted in the former as its condition of possibility. Reflection is embedded in “primary perception” that is “non-thetic [i.e., non-positing], pre-objective and preconscious experience” (PP 281). Merleau-Ponty’s account does not denigrate reflection or devalue objective knowledge. He simply situates it and emphasizes its dependence on the primacy of perception. So it’s not a matter of valorizing perception over reflection but of reconceiving the nature and task of reflection. What Merleau-Ponty offers, then, is a new account of what we’re doing when we “know” the world objectively in a reflective mode (ITK, p. 72).

If that's not "acknowledging" the "embodied nature of the intellect," I don't know what is.  I think W4 sometimes assess what they think I'm saying rather than what I actually say.  Suffice it to say that

Do I collapse the university into the church?

W4 worry that I don't clearly delineate the Christian university as a site to love God with the mind.  I confess I'm getting a little tired of this mis-reading, but I obviously have to take some of the blame for its endurance.  Once again, it seems odd to think that a book that asks readers to wade through the thicket of the likes of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu somehow devalues "the mind."  And since I hope that this is a book that will be read in Christian colleges and universities, can we safely conclude that I don't envision the university as Sunday school class?

Indeed, I'm not sure how much more explicit I can be; on p. 11 of the book under review I say this:

[W]ith 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. Indeed, some seem to worry that my model would simply have us spending all day in chapel or turning the Christian college into a glorified Sunday school. But such worries stem from a misunderstanding of my emphasis on worship with respect to worldview. In particular, such a worry seems to read my claim that worship is a necessary and important condition for integral Christian education as if I were claiming that it is a sufficient condition for Christian education (and this includes Christian education in the wider sense of discipleship, even though my focus tends to be on Christian higher education). But I’m not suggesting we raze the physics labs and expand the chapel. I’m not suggesting we demolish the literature classroom and just stay in church all week. Nor do I anywhere suggest that a Christian university is not about the business of ideas!  Of course it is. The issue is whether it is just trafficking in ideas. It’s the latter that I’m rejecting.

In this context, W4 also seem to think that the Christian university should have its own liturgies, and that "importing" liturgical practices from the church are inappropriate.  Here I think we just bump up against very different ecclesial sensibilities.  Westmont is a generically evangelical institution, and (from my experience) it seems that many students and faculty locate themselves in nondenominational "evangelical" contexts.  My approach is more forthrightly Catholic and envisions a robust connection between the church and college (without collapsing the two).  So admittedly, my vision of the "practiced" Christian university looks more like the University of Paris at its origin than a contemporary evangelical college.

Zooming Out

I could say more, but won't.  This is already too long.

In conclusion, let's just keep in mind my quarry here: I am not just trying to make sense of how Christian formation works.  My project is to offer a Christian philosophical account of liturgical formation more broadly, including cultural (or "secular") liturgies, some of which will count as de-formations from a Christian perspective.  My quarry is as much a phenomenology of temptation as it is a phenomenology of Christian worship (see ITK, pp. 140-142).

So by all means, we should be asking about the role of conceptual and theoretical reflection in Christian education.  But I am also asking how our de-formation happens, and this is where I think an over-estimation of the conceptual actually blinds us to the dynamics of deformation.  Sure, you can--and should--ask, "How do we form reflective Christian practitioners?"  But let's also keep in mind that I'm trying to answer a question like, "How does a 17-yr.-old girl become an ardent consumerist?"  I'm simply not at all persuaded that "the conceptual" plays much of a role in this at all.  (Though I do think conceptual reflection can play a role in beginning to undo it--that's my point on pp. 186-189 of ITK.)

In the end, I think this is a serious and charitable review still written from within an "intellectualist" paradigm.  And from within that paradigm, any proposal that doesn't conform ends up looking anti-intellectual and irrational.  But of course my project is to try to invite us outside that paradigm.

2013: The Year in Writing

I so enjoyed Alan Jacob's review of his year in writing that I got thinking back over my own 2013 in terms of publishing.

Books

The second volume of my Cultural Liturgies project appeared as Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works.

I continue to be grateful for its reception, especially since it asks people to wade through two of the most obtuse French theorists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu.  But I enjoyed doing some proper "philosophy" in this book, though I still try to enlist it in service of the worshiping community.

Work on volume 3 is maturing and percolating, but slowly.  The working title is Embodying the Kingdom: Reforming Public Theology.  Don't ask me when it will be out. ;-)

I also published a fun little "side project" with the new Calvin College Press.  Discipleship in the Present Tense is another collection of essays, reviews, and interviews--a kind of sequel to The Devil Reads Derrida.

I've been encouraged by notes and tweets and blogs about the book.  This little publishing outfit doesn't have money for promotion, so if you can pass word along to your friends, I'm sure they'll be grateful.





Periodicals
This was the year I assumed the editorship of Comment magazine, so most of my periodical writing energies are now focused there.  Over the past year, this included the following essays (I'm not including blog posts at the Cardus Daily, some of which generated good conversation):

• I kicked off with my "manifesto" for Comment going forward, "Meet Comment Again for the First Time"
• "The Lost Art of Persuasion," my editorial for our spring 2013 issue
• "A Divided Church for the Common Good?" was my review of Ephraim Radner's important book, A Brutal Unity
• "'Naturalizing Shalom': Confessions of a Kuyperian Secularist" gets at something I remain passionate about
• "We Believe in Institutions," my editorial for our fall issue, was probably my personal favorite from the past year
• "The Good News About Power," my review of Andy Crouch's latest book, Playing God
• "Let's Talk About Your Investment Strategy" was my editorial for our latest issue on Patronage
• Finally, I wrote "Reading Culture Charitably," a little rejoinder to Eric Jacobsen's notion of "common grace liturgies"

In each issue of Comment I also write a column of sorts called "World View: An Annotated Reading of Your World."  But that's so good you have to subscribe to get it. ;-)

Also in the Cardus family, I published a Protestant appreciation of Pope Francis' encyclical, Lumen Fidei in the October issue of Convivium.

But I was also able to publish a few pieces elsewhere.  In March my essay, "Science and Culture Take Practice: Engaging Science as Culture" was published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.   And I published a review of David Wells' latest book in Christianity Today.

But hands-down, my favorite assignment was my article for First Things, "David Foster Wallace to the Rescue."

Favorite Reads 2013: The Year of Biography

I won't even attempt to rank the books I've read over the past year, or pretend to any kind of comprehensive, retrospective evaluation. (You can get a glimpse of my year in reading over at GoodReads).

Instead, a few impressionistic notes about some favorites and standouts.

First, though I wouldn't have anticipated it, 2013 turned out the year of the BIOGRAPHY for me.  This began with what I have to say was a pivotal book for me, Eric Miller's outstanding biography of Christopher Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time.  Lasch--and Miller--are models for our time.

In the spring, during my sabbatical, I was absorbed with Benoît Peeters' sprawling bio, Derrida.  (My review will finally [sorry, John!] appear in the next issue of Books & Culture.)

In the summer, I very much enjoyed James Bratt's comprehensive and compelling biography, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (watch for my review in next month's issue of Perspectives). 

In quick succession I read Michael Ignatieff's memoir of failure, Ashes and Fire, which I highly recommend, and then André Pratte's short biography of a successful Liberal Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, from which I learned a ton (a tonne?).

Finally, in the same ballpark, I was captivated by Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids, which languished on my "to-read" stack for too long.  As I put it in my GoodReads note, I was in tears at the end of the book, "mourning all that is broken and fallen and tragic in this world, yet grateful for all that is beautiful and cherished and charitable nonetheless."

Some other NONFICTION standouts include The Institutional Revolution by Douglas Allen, which all of the Cardus Senior Fellows read for our retreat.  This is one of those books that reframes how you look at just about everything, rooted in scholarship that is unbelievably comprehensive but also accessible.  I still think about this book.

In the "still-thinking-about" category, I would also include Tyler Wigg-Stevenson's very important book, The World is Not Ours to Save.  (I enjoyed the opportunity to interview Tyler and tease out some of his argument in new directions.)  And Andy Crouch's latest, Playing God, deserves all of the attention it has gotten.  (You can read my review for Comment.)

All of this nonfiction reading (on top of my "professional" reading which I don't generally track) didn't leave much time for FICTION AND POETRY this year (alas).  I'm almost embarrassed to report that I finally read The Great Gatsby for the first time and understand all the fuss.  I also enjoyed the comfort food of Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, a follow-up to one of my all-time favorites, The Anthologist.  And I was delighted to discover a Spokane poet while visiting Spokane this summer: in Christopher Howell's captivating collection, Dreamless and Possible.  (I chose one of his as the "page one poem" in the "We Believe in Institutions" issue of Comment.)

Finally, it would be ridiculous to start tracking all of the essays and articles I read, but thinking back, one essay stands out for me as brilliant on many levels: Benjamin Snyder's scintillating article, "Dignity and the Professionalized Body: Truck Driving in the Age of Instant Gratification" in the Fall 2012 issue of The Hedgehog Review.

In the spirit of Josef Pieper's Leisure is the Basis of Culture, I close the year grateful for the incredibly blessed luxury of being able to read.

[If any of these titles interest you, consider buying from a fellow lover of books like Byron Borger at http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/.]

A Flourishing Detroit Requires More Than an Influx of Cash

Over at the Cardus Daily, I've posted some thoughts-from-the-hip on the status of the Detroit Institute of Art's collection in light of the city's bankruptcy proceedings.  Here's a teaser:

“Detroit” is more than its finances (or lack thereof) because cities are more than economic entities. Cities are multifaceted organizations of human social life. There is an economic aspect to any city, to be sure; but a city is not only economic. There are many sorts of “capital” that make a city flourish. 

Read the rest.

Patronage: Being Intentional About our Cultural Investments

We've sent the Winter 2013 issue of Comment to press.  It will hit iPads in a couple of weeks and mailboxes soon thereafter.  It's another rich conversation with contributions by Mako Fujimura, Roberta Ahmanson, Lukas Naugle, and many more.  Check out the Table of Contents here.

Our theme for this issue is Patronage, inviting you to think more intentionally about all of the ways you invest in culture and the common good.  It's not a question of whether you patronize; only what--which is precisely we need to think and talk about this.

My editorial, "Let's Talk About Your Investment Strategy," invites you into these questions.  Here's a snippet:

We are patrons, not just in our "charitable" giving, but in our day-to-day lives. When we spend our money, we are not just consuming commercial goods, we are also fostering and perpetuating ways of being human. To be a patron is to be a selector, an evaluator, and a progenitor of certain forms of cultural life. You didn't realize you exercised such power, did you? 

When you start to think in these terms, you realize that all of us are patrons. And you start to realize that maybe we should think a little more carefully about how to do this well. By decisions we perhaps don't think about, we are effectively saying "yes" to some version of the good life. In this issue of the magazine we have gathered wisdom from a range of practitioners with a view to equipping you to be a better patron—in philanthropy and charitable giving, but also in our nitty-gritty, workaday lives. We're interested in patrons as culturemakers and helping culture-makers to see their responsibility as patrons.

Read of the rest of the editorial.  Then, if you're not yet a subscriber, I hope you'll sign up today for just $30/year.  Or consider our reduced iPad subscription at just $19.99/year (and get a bonus issue).

Already a longtime Comment subscriber?  Then I have another suggestion for you:

1. Think of three people whose lives you want to invest in: they might be students who are going to graduate this year, staff members you are cultivating, leaders in your congregation, grandchildren who are beginning to make their way in the world.  

2.  Buy them gift subscriptions to Comment. It's a great way to invite them into a wider conversation.  

3. We'll send you a signed copy of my new book, Discipleship in the Present Tense.  (Hurry! Offer ends December 9.)

Whither Oliver O'Donovan?

I'm just wrapping up a doctoral seminar at Calvin Theological Seminary on Oliver O'Donovan's moral and political theology.  We focused on close readings of Resurrection and Moral Order, 2nd ed. (1994) and Desire of the Nations (Cambridge, 1999), along with some critical readings by Jonathan Chaplin and Nicholas Wolterstorff.

We didn't have time to give proper attention to The Ways of Judgment (2005) or his most recent volume, Self, World, and Time (2013), so I promised students I would spend a day trying to summarize the trajectory of O'Donovan's work post-DN.  I thought the resulting notes (notes!, please note) might be of some service to others so I share them here.

Whither Oliver O’Donovan?

Comment Magazine iPad App

When I was enlisted as editor of Comment magazine, one of my first hopes was to launch a tablet version of the magazine within the year.  Given the incredible work of our team, that dream is now a reality: the Comment iPad app is now available.

In addition to its functionality, we see the iPad version as a way for students and young people (and others, of course) to subscribe to the magazine at a reduced rate.  (We all know about those students loans!)  So an iPad subscription is only $19.99.  This is a great way to invest in a conversation that can grow with as you pursue your calling.

We're absolutely committed to print--as our new print design demonstrates.  But we also hope the tablet platform can expand the circle of folks who are part of the conversation.  If you're not yet a subscriber, subscribe today and you'll get access to our most recent issue, "We Believe in Institutions."  If you're already a subscriber, please pass along this news to your friends.

If you have questions, check out our FAQ for the iPad version.

And watch for our next issue, on Patronage, which will be in your mailboxes and on the iOS Newsstand in December. 

"The Enlightened Conservative"

As you'll note, this blog has been languishing (how many first lines of blog posts are some version of that?).  What time I have for blogging is now generally spent at the Cardus Daily.  More significantly, I spend most of my off-the-cuff energy on Twitter (@james_ka_smith).  [If you're not on Twitter, do consider it.  I've found it to be a blast.]  My longer online reflections appear as essays for Comment magazine.

In the meantime, not wanting to abandon the Ruskinian legacy of Fors Clavigera, I thought I might use this space as a kind of tumblr, a place to collect and curate some choice quotes that double as "notes to self."

In that spirit, I was interested to see that the good folks at The Imaginative Conservative are republishing Russell Kirk's Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things.  Here's a representative quote:

The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learned that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. He apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death. He has no intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics. Men are put into this world, he realizes, to struggle, to suffer, to contend against the evil that is in their neighbors and in themselves, and to aspire toward triumph of Love. They are put into this world to live like men, and to die like men. He seeks to preserve a society which allows men to attain manhood, rather than keeping them with him bonds of perpetual childhood. With Dante, he looks upward from this place of slime, this world of gorgons and chimeras, toward the light which gives Love to this poor earth and all the stars.

"We Believe in Institutions": The Fall Issue of Comment

I'm very excited for people to read the Fall issue of Comment magazine, devoted to the decidedly un-hip theme, "We Believe in Institutions."  If you subscribe by Monday, September 9, you'll be assured that your subscription will begin with this issue.

And, lo and behold, we're also having a summer subscription sale! So seriously, what are you waiting for?

The issue is rich and diverse: a feature interview with James Davison Hunter, articles on the institutional imagination, the role of the institutional church in cultural renewal, reviews of two important books (Thinking Institutionally and The Institutional Revolution), and more.  We're also debuting our new format that includes brand new features like "World View," an annotated take on the contemporary scene.

You can check out the Table of Contents and read some samples from this issue, including my editorial.    Here's a snippet from that:

For a boy growing up in Ontario, it was never a question: you're going to play hockey. Though Embro was a village of only 600 people at the time, we had a new arena, a robust minor hockey system, and a long legacy of the sport encoded in our civic DNA. So at four years old, we all moved from the pond to the ice pad, donning the purple hockey sweaters that many of us wore until we were twenty. 

This was also part of something bigger. You could count on neighbouring villages like Drumbo and Plattesville and St. George having minor hockey systems, all webbed together by the OMHA. 

When you're ten years old, you think this is just part of the furniture of the cosmos; something given, natural, and taken for granted—that Saturday morning clinics and Tuesday night practices are just part of the rhythm of the universe, as if when God said, "Let there be light," the big klieg lights in the rafters of the arena also came on. You never really think about what sustains all this, and if you do, you just imagine some anonymous "them" holds it all together, a vague, distant "they" who are responsible for all of this. 

But when you're an adult you realize: this doesn't just happen. That something as mundane and yet enduring as Embro minor hockey is not a given; it is an institution. It is only because it is sustained by communities. It is bigger than the people who inhabit it, but it also depends on the people who embody it. The "they" you never saw in your youth turn out to just be people like you who have taken the reins and taken ownership. We could only take minor hockey for granted because, in fact, each generation received it anew, owning it, tending it, reforming it, and passing it on to the next generation. 

In this issue of Comment we proudly profess that we believe in institutions. It is part of our creed. The lilt of this profession carries echoes of The Creed in which we profess, "I believe in the holy, catholic church." But that's not theonly institution we believe in. We also believe in institutions like Embro minor hockey, the Hamilton Public Library, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, Surrey Christian School, the Calgary Planning Commission, the United States Congress, and that quiet but powerful culture-making institution that is the family.

Read the rest, then subscribe to the magazine.  This is the conversation you've been looking for.

New Book: "Discipleship in the Present Tense"

Cover image by Madison Smith

I'm happy to share the news that my new book, Discipleship in the Present Tense: Reflections on Faith and Culture is now available from Calvin College Press, Amazon, and hopefully your local bookseller. (A Kindle version is also available for just $7.99, and an Apple iBook version will be available soon.)

Think of this book as "James K.A. Smith, without all the footnotes."  Well, there are a few footnotes.  But this book is really a collection of my more popular articles, essays, reviews, interviews, and op-eds from the last few years (sort of a sequel to The Devil Reads Derrida, without the daunting, off-putting title).  My hope is that the book is an accessible read for those who might find Desiring the Kingdom or Imagining the Kingdom still a tad intimidating.  

The book includes reflections on theology, church, worship, and Christian education but also poetry, parenting, politics, and the prosperity gospel.  It also includes some of my reviews of authors like James Davison Hunter, D.A. Carson, and my saucy review of Brent McCracken's Hipster Christianity (the chapter is called "Poser Christianity").  Check out the Table of Contents [pdf].

Here are a few of the endorsements, for which I'm grateful:

Few people are as qualified as James K. A. Smith to write a book on the intersection of faith and culture. Whenever he speaks, I listen. In this book, you’ll find winsome but profound essays on following Jesus in the 21st century. Read it and be challenged.
— Jonathan Merritt
faith and culture writer; author of A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars

Delivering profound insight in stunningly lucid prose, Smith focuses on the importance of both imagination and embodiment, not only in worship and education, but also through the arts. Drawing attention to beauty in architecture, poetry, and music, as well as through sacramental practices, Smith celebrates "creational abundance," which he beautifully presents as our "culture-making mandate."
— Crystal Downing
Distinguished Professor of English and
Film Studies, Messiah College

Anything by James K.A. Smith is required reading for Christians wanting to winsomely engage culture.  He brings philosophy to the street--putting it to work on the great questions of our time.

— Gabe Lyons

Founder, Q Ideas; author of The Next Christians

Discipleship in the Present Tense reflects on the intersections of faith and culture in our contemporary world. "Intersections" may bring to mind two roads meeting at right angles, with stop signs. The intersections in this book are more like freeway cloverleafs: the traffic keeps moving. Suggestion: start at the end, with two interviews that are real conversations, not perfunctory Q&As. Then pick and choose, tapas-style, from the tasty selection of essays.
— John Wilson
editor, Books & Culture

On the American Dream: Families, Flourishing, and Upward Mobility

Over at the Cardus Daily, our think-tank's daily blog, I have just posted a column that engages the findings of the Equality of Opportunity Project out of Harvard and Berkeley: "Families, Flourishing, and Upward Mobility."  Here's a snippet:

If the “American dream” is anything it is a dream of upward mobility: the dream of getting ahead, climbing the ladder, leapfrogging from one class to another in a “land of opportunity”—all if you’re willing to work for it. Too often, fantastic “rags to riches” tales push aside the more mundane stories of generational accomplishments over time, where parents who finish high school make it possible for their children to go to college, achieving some security within the middle class. We shouldn’t discount the unique joy that comes from simply seeing your grandchildren not have to live hand-to-mouth as you once did. 

It is certainly true that this dream easily slides towards idolatry. It can become a nightmare of crass materialism and selfish ambition. But we shouldn’t confuse idolatrous perversions with more humble aspirations of families to simply enjoy a mode of economic security that is conducive with flourishing. Those who are passionate advocates of the poor are often, oddly, knee-jerk critics of the American dream and aspirations to be middle class. How odd. It reminds me of the lyrics of an Everclear song: “I hate those people who love to tell you / money is the root of all that kills. / They have never been poor, / they have never had the joy of a welfare Christmas.” The God who cares about the poor must also be a God who celebrates economic flourishing and stability as features of shalom.

Read the rest of the article.

Naturalizing "Shalom": Confessions of a Kuyperian Secularist

Comment magazine has just published my new article, "Naturalizing 'Shalom': Confessions of a Kuyperian Secularist."  This is part autobiography, part cautionary tale.  Here's a snippet:

I've come to realize that if we don't attend to the whole Kuyper, so to speak—if we pick and choose just parts of the Kuyperian project—we can end up with an odd sort of monstrosity: what we might call, paradoxically, a "Kuyperian secularism" that naturalizes shalom.

Read the whole article.

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.