Bacevich on American Militarism (Redux)

I can still recall reading Andrew Bacevich's 2005 article in the Wilson Quarterly, "The Real World War IV." (Indeed, it was the subject of one of my earliest posts at Fors Clavigera.) It was a significant turning point for me, and articulated a lot of my growing cynicism about what passes for democracy in the post-9/11 United States. Eisenhower's fears about the "military-industrial complex" have become so true we can't even see it; instead, it has become a monster driven by a complicit, fawning "military-entertainment complex" (as Michael Hanby describes it) that lines the pockets of not only the Rupert Murdochs of the world, but the Sulzbergers as well.

Now, five years later, Bacevich's wisdom still rings true for me, as glimpsed in the New York Review of Books review of his new book, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War. "Washington Rules" is a shorthand for the militarist ideology which has seeped into American consciousness; indeed, it is "so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness, as to have all but disappeared from view.” In other words, it simply parades itself as "the way things are." This is particularly biting coming from Bacevich who has credentials most hawks could only dream of. And Bacevich is no dove or pacifist. Nonetheless, I find his analyses important for Christians who are willing to take a step back from our immersion in the American machine. Gary Bass summarizes the heart of Bacevich's critique:

Bacevich has two main targets in his sights. The first are the commissars of the national security establishment, who perpetuate these “Washington rules” of global dominance. By Washington, he means not just the federal government, but also a host of satraps who gain power, cash or prestige from this perpetual state of emergency: defense contractors, corporations, big banks, interest groups, think tanks, universities, television networks and The New York Times. He complains that an unthinking Washington consensus on global belligerence is just as strong among mainstream Democrats as among mainstream Republicans. Those who step outside this monolithic view, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, are quickly dismissed as crackpots, Bacevich says. This leaves no serious checks or balances against the overweening national security state.

Bacevich’s second target is the sleepwalking American public. He says that they notice foreign policy only in the depths of a disaster that, like Vietnam or Iraq, is too colossal to ignore. As he puts it, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.”

Bacevich is singularly withering on American public willingness to ignore those who do their fighting for them. He warns of “the evisceration of civic culture that results when a small praetorian guard shoulders the burden of waging perpetual war, while the great majority of citizens purport to revere its members, even as they ignore or profit from their service.” Here he has a particular right to be heard: on May 13, 2007, his son Andrew J. Bacevich Jr., an Army first lieutenant, was killed on combat patrol in Iraq. Bacevich does not discuss his tragic loss here, but wrote devastatingly about it at the time in The Washington Post: “Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check.”

It's also no mistake that Frank Rich cites Bacevich in his recent, stinging critique of Obama's presidency. All of those so-called "progressive" (or "red letter") Christians who so eagerly backed Obama need to own up to the extent of his complicity in the new American militarism. Commenting on Obama's recent speech about the Iraq war, Rich appeals to Bacevich:

Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007. Writing in The New Republic after Obama’s speech, he decimated many of the war’s lingering myths, starting with the fallacy, reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that “the surge” did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the catastrophic American blundering that preceded it. As Bacevich concluded: “The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.”

Bacevich also wrote that “common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.” Americans’ common future demands it too. The war’s corrosive effect on the home front is no less egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.

We can’t afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq war at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd prediction that Iraq’s oil wealth would foot America’s post-invasion bills. We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries’ money, and run up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.

So You Want to Go to Grad School: Choosing a Discipline

The students who write me for advice about going to grad school often have a unique challenge: they've already been infected with the "interdisciplinary" bug. My own work tends to range across disciplinary boundaries: from philosophy to theology to literature to social science. Those students who have a wide-ranging curiosity, and aren't easily content to simply burrow deep into one discipline or subdiscipline, often ask about "interdisciplinary" graduate programs. Indeed, many of my favorite students have struggles deciding whether to apply to doctoral programs in philosophy, theology, or literature.

But here's another "I-hate-to-break-it-to-you" reality: disciplines remain the gatekeepers of the academic world. While there's all sorts of interesting inter-, multi-, and cross-disciplinary work now happening in the academy, you earn the right to do that work by first proving your mettle within the rigors of a discipline. Training in a discipline is a discipline--an apprenticeship and a formation, an inculcation into a community of scholarship (this is actually described quite well in Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions). It is within a discipline that you learn to dot your i's and cross your t's. Even if ultimately your interests spill over the boundaries of a discipline, you need to take a sort of vow of chastity and restrain yourself from such experimentation in order to earn your stripes within a discipline. While there are a few "interdisciplinary" programs, it's too easy to emerge from them without this sort of discplined rigor--which is why it also tends to be difficult for graduates of such programs to find jobs. They fall between the cracks.

This is because of the other reason that disciplines remain academic gatekeepers: teaching. At the end of the day, you're going to be hired into a department. (There are a very few exceptions to this rule, but they're so few and far between that you should ignore them.) You're going to make your home in a disciplinary corner of the college or university, even if they might grant you license to roam from there a bit. While you might be permitted, even encouraged, to cross disciplinary boundaries in your research and writing, your "day job," so to speak, is going to be teaching. And the courses you teach are usually going to have a prefix: PHIL 200, THEO 101, ENGL 338, REL 100, etc.

So as you're contemplating which disciplinary portal you should pass through, ask yourself this question: Which 101 course would I be most happy teaching? While you're probably going to be dreaming about all the cool advanced seminars you'll be able to teach with majors, you need to keep in mind that your bread-and-butter is going to be teaching the introductory course in your discipline, the so-called "101" class. While you might find it hard to determine whether you're a philosopher, a theologian, or a literary critic, you do need to decide which introductory class you'd like to spend a lifetime teaching. Is it THEO 101 or PHIL 101 or ENGL 101? Those are very different sorts of courses. You've probably taken all of them. So ask yourself: which of those do I really want to teach? The answer will tell you which sort of graduate programs you should apply to.

Next time: Choosing schools (1): philosophical theology.

So You Want to Go to Grad School: Think Backwards

It seems like every week I get emails from undergraduates who've acquired a taste for academic exploration, or who sense a call to such a vocation, and thus ask for advice about going to graduate school. It occurred to me that I could save myself from writing the same email over and over if I wrote a post or two that summarized some of my thoughts on the matter. So over the next few days I'll try to distill some wisdom into a few posts that might be helpful to those considering this path--though there are always unique aspects of each person's story that will complicate the rather generic wisdom I offer here.

So you want to go to grad school... You've caught the bug. Your imagination has been captured. You feel like you finally know why you're here on planet earth. Reading Aristotle or Derrida or Barth makes your heart sing. You've been blessed with a professor or two who've modeled the "life of the mind" for you and it's captivated you as the very embodiment of the good life. You feel called to teach. You're in the groove when thinking through difficult issues and then trying to articulate a constructive way forward. You love to write. You're at home in the library. You were made for this. You were born to be a professor. And so you've reached the logical endpoint: you want to apply to graduate school.

Well, let me offer a few words of advice.

First: don't.

Second: Seriously. Don't even think about it.




OK, fine. You seem very persistent. Maybe you're the exception to the rule. When the time comes to find a job--the sort of tenured "leisure" you see your professors enjoying--don't blame me if they no longer exist. When you've spent 6-8 years honing your skills, mastering the canon, grinding out a dissertation, schlepping to umpteen different adjunct posts, playing the game on the conference circuit--when the reality begins to sink in that you might not be able to have what you glimpsed when you were a junior, I won't exactly say "I told you so," but I hope you might not be entirely surprised.

But then again, maybe you're one of the few who can emerge from this whole process and land where you hope. So with all of those qualifiers in place, let's think about how to approach the prospect of graduate school.

First, you need to think backwards. That is, in order to discern the path to take to your vocation of being a professor and scholar, you need to spend some time dreaming your future in order to try to picture where you want to land. There are many ways and places to carry out the vocation of a professor and scholar. And the path to each is different. Depending on where you want to end up, there are different hoops to jump through, different trajectories to follow. So in order to determine where to apply next year, you need to try to imagine where you want to be in 10 or 15 years. So: Where do you think you could be happy? What do you want?

Do you want to be an academic superstar, teaching at Harvard or Yale or at least Notre Dame? Do you want to be at the very pinnacle of your discipline? The go-to guy or gal that NPR calls for comment? Do you want to become moderately wealthy?

Well, then let's be clear: In some cases, you simply can't get there from here. If you're at a Bible college right now, or a little Christian college, or probably even just a local state university, I hate to break it to you, but that route's pretty much blocked for you. I know: it might not be fair. You might be brilliant. You might be smarter than some of those grad students who are going to get into Princeton and Stanford. It might be that you were the first person in your entire family to ever go to college. It might be that you just couldn't imagine these possibilities because of the little rural high school you attended--such a trajectory just wasn't in your imagination. Indeed, where you went to kindergarten was probably already loading the deck against you. Whatever the reasons, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but--contrary to the myth of the so-called "American dream"--you can't get to the Ivy League from there.

If you are at a place where that sort of path remains open to you: Congratulations! But I'm afraid I can't help you. That's not my world.

But: maybe that's not what you wanted anyway. Maybe you don't want to play the elite game. Maybe you can imagine yourself being happy as a teacher and scholar in all sorts of different settings. Perhaps you'd be quite happy teaching at a small Christian college that primarily emphasizes teaching and engagement with students. Maybe you don't care about publishing and research that much--you're just really jazzed by teaching, by being the kind of professor that got you thinking about this anyway. Maybe you'd be quite happy spending a lifetime at the local campus of your state university--at a place like Penn State Altoona or the University of Wisconsin Plattville. Perhaps you simply dream of returning to teach at your denomination's seminary, or the Bible college from which you've graduated. Indeed, maybe you could be pretty psyched teaching at the community college where you were first awakened to intellectual pursuits.

OK, then now we're getting somewhere. Because the paths to those sorts of jobs don't have to run through Berkeley or Cornell or Columbia. You can get there from here by pursuing graduate study at places like Loyola or DePaul or Boston College. You might be able to earn a doctorate at a solid seminary or divinity school and still achieve your goal. We can start talking about specifics later.

But right now you just need to take a few days, even a few weeks, and think backwards: what sort of life can you envision yourself living? In what sort of context can you imagine yourself being happy? If you can do some discernment about that, then we can work backwards to determine where you should go.

Next time: Choosing a discipline.

Summer Reading

The Immanent Frame is running their "Summer Reading" feature again this year as part of their "Off the Cuff" series. They poll an interdisciplinary array of scholars about their reading, including both non-fiction on religion, secularity, and public life as well as literature and fiction. You can see my sample here. (This is just a snippet, since we were limited to 300 words.)

At right is a related "action" shot: my wife and I reading alongside the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan.

In Memoriam: Donald Bloesch

How strange. Just last week, while remembering the influence of Clark Pinnock on my theological pilgrimage, I off-handedly remarked that "Donald Bloesch is another figure who actually plays a towering role in my early formation, though I don't think anybody could know that from the written record." And now, upon returning from vacation, I just got the sad news that Dr. Bloesch has also passed into his eternal rest in Christ, on August 24, 2010.

My memory of Dr. Bloesch is simply one of grace--warm, wise, hospitable grace. While attending Bible college in Dubuque, IA on the edge of the Mississippi river, I sometimes noted a guest at our "chapel" (a Plymouth Brethren assembly) on Sundays. Several of my professors would often be engaged in earnest conversation with this guest, and then one day my professors introduced me to him as Donald Bloesch ("Dr. Bloesch"). Though I was only an eager, anxious freshman, within a week, he had graciously invited me to attend one of his classes at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. And so I first dipped my toes into what would later be my vocation: philosophy of religion. I remember being spellbound as he lectured on William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, but it was our reading of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments that made an indelible impression on me. Indeed, I could honestly say I've been drinking from wells dug in that course for my entire career. The next semester I recall sitting in on his Christology class, encountering figures that were anathema at my Bible college (Barth, Forsyth, Tillich), but read through Bloesch's sympathetic, critical lens--and always with a view to "faith and practice," to what he so rightly called "piety," rescuing the word from its cultured despisers.

Unlike most instances in which we feel like we know someone from their books, in the case of Dr. Bloesch I knew the man before I knew his books. And so when I came to his books later on, they were suffused with his grace and warmth and pastoral concern. Here I was reading a theologian who had also welcomed me into his home, to meet his wife, to enjoy a meal with them.

So I knew it was this same care and concern that later motivated him to write me a rather stern, alarmed letter when Dr. Bloesch felt I was becoming captive to "postmodern" extremes (Bloesch was always the champion of the moderate middle way!). But we maintained a cordial correspondence, and I was both moved and blessed when he would graciously send me a copy of each new volume of his "Christian Foundations" systematics, which still have a prominent place on the shelves in my office. (Like Pinnock, I felt that Bloesch's evangelical pietism really hit its stride in the volume on pneumatology, signaled in that very first volume, A Theology of Word & Spirit.)

And so it is with sadness, but profound gratitude, that I remember the witness, testimony, and gracious piety of one of my teachers, Dr. Donald Bloesch. May he rest in peace.

Science and the Spirit now available

I recently received my copies of Science and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences, the book I co-edited with Amos Yong (published by Indiana University Press). Gathering an interdisciplinary range of scholars from the sciences and humanities, I hope the volume signals a new stage of maturity for Pentecostal scholarship, without that meaning that Pentecostals have simply learned to tack to the winds of dominant orthodoxies. There is both give and take in this engagement.

A peek at the Table of Contents provides a look inside:

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: Science and the Spirit—Questions and Possibilities in the Pentecostal Engagement with Science / James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong

Part 1. What Hath Azusa Street to Do with MIT? The Big Questions

1. What Have the Galapagos to Do with Jerusalem? Scientific Knowledge in Theological Context / Telford Work

2. Is There Room for Surprise in the Natural World? Naturalism, the Supernatural, and Pentecostal Spirituality / James K. A. Smith

3. How Does God Do What God Does? Pentecostal-Charismatic Perspectives on Divine Action in Dialogue with Modern Science / Amos Yong

Part 2. The Spirit of Matter: Questions and Possibilities in the Natural Sciences

4. Does God Have a Place in the Physical Universe? Physics and the Quest for the Holy Spirit / Wolfgang Vondey

5. Does the Spirit Create through Evolutionary Processes? Pentecostals and Biological Evolution / Steve Badger and Mike Tenneson

6. Can Religious Experience Be Reduced to Brain Activity? The Place and Significance of Pentecostal Narrative / Frederick L. Ware

7. Serotonin and Spirit: Can There Be a Holistic Pentecostal Approach to Mental Illness? / Donald F. Calbreath

Part 3. The Human Spirit: Questions and Possibilities in the Social and Technological Sciences

8. Can Social Scientists Dance? Participating in Science, Spirit, and Social Reconstruction as an Anthropologist and Afropentecostal / Craig Scandrett-Leatherman

9. Is Integrating Spirit and Sociology Possible? A Postmodern Research Odyssey / Margaret M. Poloma

10. Is There Room for the Spirit in a World Dominated by Technology? Pentecostals and the Technological World / Dennis W. Cheek

Desiring the Kingdom App?

OK, this is probably the fruit of a humid Friday afternoon and too much coffee at The Sparrows. It's also probably completely obnoxious and delusional. But I just found myself sketching out the architecture and content for what could be an iPhone app related to Desiring the Kingdom. (I think I was inspired by Gary Shteyngart's app for Super Sad True Love Story.)

So I've got the idea, content, and structure in mind, but absolutely no ability or expertise to actually execute the idea. Any interested designer/programmer/developer out there? This would certainly not be a money-making venture, but if any collaborator happens to be interested, email me.

[By Monday I will probably have thought better of this and deleted this post, so you might want to respond soon. ;-) ]

Memoir, Testimony, and Writing Theology

As I noted earlier, I'm in a period of thinking through issues of genre and style in theological and philosophical writing, and thus I'm labeling my blog reflections on these matters "Notes toward a new genre." My first post generated more email responses than usual, so I'm encouraged that others are also thinking through these issues. It makes me hopeful that we can expect a next generation of theological writing to be more experimental in this respect.

While it's been writing How Worship Works (volume 2 of Cultural Liturgies) that has been the most recent catalyst for this, I might suggest that, on these matters, Thinking in Tongues is sort of a halfway point between Desiring the Kingdom and How Worship Works. In Thinking in Tongues, this arises when I try to take seriously the role of testimony in pentecostal worship and spirituality. It has been suggested that testimony is "the poetry of Pentecostal experience," and I wanted to try to have a philosophical and theological methodology that honored the importance and distinctiveness of testimony in pentecostal/charismatic spirituality. So in the "Introduction" to Thinking in Tongues (which you can read in an excerpt at the Eerdmans site), I argue that we need a genre along the lines of memoir in order to do justice to the irreducibility of testimony:

Thus one might suggest that memoir is the consummate pentecostal theological genre. Or at the very least, something like testimony is integral to even pentecostal theorizing, even if this is not properly “academic.” In fact, this is just one performative way that pentecostal theoretical practice evinces an aspect implicit in pentecostal spirituality: against the Enlightenment ideal of the impersonal, impartial, abstract “knower,” pentecostalism affirms an affective, involved, confessing knower who “knows that she knows that she knows” because of her story, because of a narrative, she can tell about a relationship with God (p. xxiii).

As some attempt to actually undertake this, the book includes both personal testimonies as well as "novel-ish" accounts of Pentecostal worship and spirituality. Here's a little sample from the opening of chapter 3 ("Storied Experience: A Pentecostal Epistemology"):

As she made her way to the altar, Denise carried herself in a way that indicated she already knew her story was “irrational.” Her steps were halting and timid, her eyes cast downward in a shaded look of mild embarrassment— as if the criteria for rational discourse were perched on her shoulder like little devils, mocking her and trying to dissuade her from testifying to such nonsense. Indeed, it wasn’t just the ethereal taunts of demonic dissuaders she was contending with; she could easily recall the flesh-and-blood skepticism of her father and sister as she had relayed the story to them earlier that week. Through a million little channels Denise had absorbed enough of the wider culture’s plausibility structures to “know” that this was crazy. And yet here she was, making her way forward in response to the pastor’s invitation for the congregation to share their “God sightings” for the past week — their stories and testimonies about where they saw the Spirit living and active in their day-to-day lives. Granted, this Sunday evening ritual could easily devolve into a parade of tales about divinely secured parking spaces or supernatural deliverance from failing to do one’s homework. But the “testimony service” was woven into the very warp and woof of discipleship at Cornerstone Vineyard Fellowship — these stories of faith were as important as any Sunday morning sermon.

Grasping the microphone handed to her by the pastor, Denise has to catch her breath and clear her throat.While a week ago she couldn’t imagine standing in front of 300 people and speaking in public, tonight she can’t imagine not doing it.

“Um, hi. I’m Denise,” she says just a little bit too loudly, the mic squealing mildly in response. Jolted, she holds the microphone away from her face and pauses again before continuing — the pastor nodding and smiling in encouragement, a hand on her shoulder.

“Uh, I’ve never done this before. But when Pastor invited us to share our ‘God sightings,’ the Spirit wouldn’t let me sit on my hands any longer. I just have to tell you — I have to tell someone, everyone.” Her words are met with various echoes of “Yes, Lord!” and “Amen!”

“As some of you know, Gary and I have been married for almost eight years. And maybe you noticed that we don’t have any children.” There is a crackle in her voice but she continues: “I’ve shared with some of the ladies at Bible study how much trouble we’ve had getting pregnant. It’s been so hard, and so long.” The cacophony of prayers and shouts settles down to a rapt silence as Denise continues her story.

“And I’ve gotta be honest with you: I’ve been pretty mad at God. There are all these women in the Bible who couldn’t have babies. But it seems like their stories always ended with a miracle. ‘Where’s my miracle?’ I kept asking God.” Her voice has fallen off, her face has dropped, and her shoulders are beginning to tremble. The pastor inches closer and wraps her arm around Denise in comfort and encouragement. The congregation’s attention is suspended in a bit of a netherworld, not sure where this story is going. Only rarely have “God sightings” been honest laments. But Denise takes a deep breath, wipes the mascara from her cheeks, and resumes her
story. Gary has joined her at her side.

“A few weeks ago at Bible study I had . . . well . . . a complete meltdown!” she announces in a tearful laugh. Others join in her mirth and some of the older ladies smile at one another knowingly. “I was just so frustrated and hopeless — and angry, to be honest. I was just so sad and so tired. But then sister Rose stopped everything and said, ‘We’ve gotta pray.’ And so all the ladies gathered round me, and laid their hands on me, and they prayed and prayed and prayed. It was as if they were lifting me on a blanket in their prayers and I fell back into them in the strangest feeling I’ve ever had. I heard sisters praying the names of Sarah and Hannah and Elizabeth and I so wanted their story to be my story. But I was too tired to believe it anymore — but I was also kinda too tired to not believe it. So I just let myself fall back into their prayers. I think I might have even fallen asleep!” Denise testifies with a sheepish grin. Gary smiles with her, his eyes fixed on the carpet, his hand trembling around her waist.

“When I woke up, I didn’t feel any different. A little embarrassed maybe. In fact, that’s why I didn’t come to church last Sunday. I was too embarrassed to see all those ladies again.” The ladies’ respond with puckered chins and frowns meant to be encouraging. “Anyway, I pretty much forgot about the whole thing. Or at least I tried to forget about the whole thing. It’s just so tiring to keep thinking about it.”

“But . . . ,” Denise begins, but her breath seems taken away. She resumes her story in a rapid, breathy falsetto, trying her best to get the words out: “Something was sorta wrong this past week—in a way that could be good, or really, really bad. Gary encouraged me to go to the doctor, so I had an appointment on Friday.” She’s now doubled over, shaking her head in disbelief, but then explodes up like a Jack-in-a-box and loudly proclaims, “I’m pregnant!” The words roll out of her in an ecstasy that tilts between joy and sorrow; she is overwhelmed and exhausted by the tale. Pastor and Gary have now enfolded her in an embrace, supporting her as the congregation erupts in shouts of praise and thanksgiving. But Denise has more to say.

“Some people didn’t believe me. When the doctor told me, I just had to tell him about the prayer meeting. He talked to me about hormone levels and stress. Even when I told my father and sister, they looked at me like I was a freak — like I didn’t know what I was talking about. But like
Brother Jack always says: ‘I know that I know that I know!’ I know that I know that I know that God was working my belly! And I don’t care what others think,” she adds, now falling back into the King James English of her upbringing. “I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able!”

Clark Pinnock, 1937-2010

[Update: My apologies that the original feed listed the dates as 1950-2005; I inadvertently plugged in Grenz's dates.]

Many of us have intellectual debts that never surface, as it were. They are not the sorts of debts that one could track in the footnotes of our work. They are more submerged and subterranean than that. Such debts are often accumulated early on in one's formation; indeed, they are often catalytic influences that impacted us in a malleable, impressionable period when we were just beginning to think that theology or philosophy was our calling. And because we so often look on our younger selves with such "enlightened" disdain, we are--if we're honest with ourselves--often just a little embarrassed by these influences since we think we've "outgrown" them. And yet, without them, we wouldn't be who we are.

We are often awakened to such debts in tragic situations. When Stanley Grenz died so young (already five years ago?), I was reminded how much I owed to him, recalling the really pivotal experience of reading his little book, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, during my first year of graduate school. One would never guess from the footnotes of my books how much this little book set an agenda for my career. (This is partly why I was happy to endorse Steven Knowles' recent study, Beyond Evangelicalism: The Theological Methodology of Stanley J. Grenz, which begins to give Grenz his due.) Donald Bloesch is another figure who actually plays a towering role in my early formation, though I don't think anybody could know that from the written record.

The sad news of Clark Pinnock's death is a similar reminder and wake-up call to what I owe.

I first encountered Pinnock's work while at Bible college, specifically his early apologetic work in The Scripture Principle. I then recall a symposium on contemporary theology in Christianity Today, right around the same time, that featured him as a "progressive voice," and I found myself listening to him carefully. (I think the fact that he was Canadian also gave me a sense of implicit camaraderie.) While my professors were railing against him as a "liberal" (a charge that looks laughable from where I now sit!), I found in him a theologian willing to go where the truth led, rather than someone who felt compelled to think the same thing for 40 years. This spirit of faithful curiosity and disciplined exploration was captured marvelously in another book that impacted me more than I might want to admit: Barry Callen's intellectual biography, Clark Pinnock: Journey Toward Renewal. Callen painted a picture of a Christian thinker characterized by both humility and courage--a model that became iconic for me. Clark Pinnock was one of the saints.

I was especially encouraged that he was willing to follow the Spirit into foreign territory, and as I was making my pilgrimage to the pentecostal tradition, I remember hearing reports of Pinnock's visits to the renewal happening at Toronto's Airport Vineyard--a sure sign to other theologians that Pinnock had gone over the edge. But the fruit of his pilgrimage was Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit--a book that quite simply gave me hope.

While Pinnock and I would disagree on all sorts of matters, I'm grateful for his model of courageous, faithful curiosity in the service of Christ.

The Physiognomy of Poetry

In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the bodily nature of our language, ultimately claiming, "Words have a physiognomy." I was reminded of this when I read Ian McGilchrist's recent reflection, "Four Walls," in the July/August 2010 issue of Poetry:

Poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex as language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning.

On Writing Ethics (and Theology)

As I'm working on volume 2 of "Cultural Liturgies," I am spending a lot of time and energy on considerations of genre and style, particularly given the argument in Desiring the Kingdom: that we are affective, liturgical animals who are moved and shaped more fundamentally by the imagination than the intellect. (Proust's Contre Saint-Beuve is helping me out with this.) Indeed, as I've noted before, I am more and more inclined to think it is a travesty that so much theology is so horribly written. Thus I'm trying to craft How Worship Works as a genre pitched somewhere between a treatise and a novel, though I can't quite imagine (yet) what that might be.

So I was interested in Mark D. Jordan's recent essay, "Missing Scenes," in the latest issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Arguing that "forgotten forms of teaching need to be restored to the writing of Christian ethics," Jordan rightly notes:

Whatever the causes, the loss of represented scenes of instruction in Christian ethics is the loss of significant power to describe or shape our lives. Since the Reformation especially, academic writers of Christian ethics seem to peel off one after another of their most powerful genres. We'll give this set of forms to the novel. We'll delegate the slow discipline of formation to spiritual writing, to religious education, to homiletics, to sacramental theology. This knowledge will go to a new science called psychology, and that set of practices to psychotherapy or counseling. And in case anyone should still be tempted to write ethics beautifully, we'll create a condescending category for the "merely literary" essay as catch-all. What forms are left then to ethics proper? Some syllogistic skeletons, a few maxims or intuitions, the drone of the monologue, and a little flotilla of lifeboat cases. This does indeed assure boredom--and uselessness.

"The Good News" According to Mad Men

It's surely not an accident that in the episode entitled, "The Good News," Anna utters this beautiful announcement to Don Draper:

"I know everything about you. And I still love you."

Who among us doesn't long to hear that from someone? And isn't that exactly what God whispers, quietly, persistently, in the depths of our dark nights of the soul?

Contra Critchley @ The Stone

Over at The Stone, Simon Critchley obliquely argues for the faith of the faithless under the rigors of love. In a rather Derridean fashion, he seems to suggest that somehow "traditional" believers have it easy, and that those who have faith but lack a transcendent object are somehow more faith-full, more radically trusting, because they lack "security" and "guarantee" for their (faithless, "nondenominational") faith.

But tell me again: how is it, exactly, that, say, the Christian's faith is "guaranteed" and "secured?" How does doctrinal specification take the heat off the undecidability of faith? Do you simply mean that they have hope? That seems quite a bit different than a secure guarantee. Even the hope for a "reward" (which, let's note for the record, is not generally the way Christians talk, despite what you might guess from journalistic sketches)--such a hope would be constantly subject to undecidability, even if it holds out hope for a kind of eschatological verification. But in the here-and-now, such verification is not forthcoming.

And it's not at all clear that doctrinal specification somehow lets faith off the hook of undecidability. It can, in fact, raise the stakes. Given the daily deluge of both horrendous, global evils and local, close-to-home heartbreak, faith that God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself is a belief that requires a certain madness, Kierkegaard would say. I don't see how some generic faith in "love" is any more difficult.

Critchley's argument, while rightly noting that those without "denominational" faith are nonetheless believers, bites off more than it warrants when he attempts to then valorize "faithless" faith as somehow more faith-full. He continues to work with a tired dichotomy and straw man: the faithless are portrayed as more faithful because they're less secure, they take more risks. But nowhere is this claim warranted; and I think one could straightforwardly argue that the opposite is true.

James K.A. Smith @ GoodReads

I've been horribly delinquent about posting over at "What I'm Reading." I have a long shelf of books above my desk here that I've been meaning to blog about, but just haven't found the time--probably because I've lapsed into thinking each post needs to be a "review" rather than just an off-the-cuff take on what I've been reading.

As a way to get away from that, I've just signed up for a GoodReads account and will hope to post more regularly at www.goodreads.com/jkasmith. (This is as close as I'm going to get to anything like Facebook!)

I Love in order to Understand: Newman on Imagination and Intellect

While I was working on Desiring the Kingdom, I led our college's Semester in Britain program, teaching a course entitled "Victorian Britain and Postmodern Culture." The course included units on Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, even Oscar Wilde. But the hinge of the course was a unit devoted to the Oxford Movement, with special focus on Cardinal Newman. The footnotes to Desiring the Kingdom don't do justice to the impact of this immersion on my thinking. But in Terry Eagleton's recent article on Newman in the London Review of Books, Eagleton highlights the overlap between my concerns and Newman's:

Militant atheists today regard religious faith as a question of subscribing to certain propositions about the world. Newman countered this theological ignorance, pervasive in his own time too, with the Romantic claim (and this from one of the towering intellects of the Victorian age) that ‘man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal … It is the concrete being that reasons.’ It is the imagination, he holds, which is primary in matters of faith. Yet this passionate subjectivity was never whimsical subjectivism. How could it be, in a Catholic thinker for whom faith and truth were communal and institutional rather than a matter of private intuition? Newman, like Kierkegaard, recognised that religious faith is a kind of love, and like love engages intellect, emotion, experience and imagination together. There is a ‘notional’ kind of knowledge, Newman argues in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, by which he means a knowledge of abstract ideas, and there is ‘real’ assent, which involves one’s whole personality.

Mat Hoffman, BMX, and the Birth of Big Air

Before I became a Christian at 18 years old, my religion had been freestyle BMX. I lived and breathed to ride. (I remember a corny adaptation of a Harley-Davidson ad that I made the caption alongside my senior photo in the high school year book: "Some people ask me why I ride. For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who don't understand, no explanation is possible.") Even in the long, cold winters of southwestern Ontario, I rode all winter long in my basement, with U2's Joshua Tree as the primary soundtrack (with an eclectic mix of Metal Church and Slayer!). I remember a crew of us scarfing lumber and scrap from wherever we could, building ramps of every shape and size. I remember saving up to finally build my own 8 ft. quarterpipe in the backyard with plans from BMX Action magazine. The feel of riding is something that has seeped deep into my bodily memory. Some nights lying on the couch I can still transport myself into the fluid feel of riding a quarterpipe, can still relive the contortions of freestyle. It's as if my bike is a kind of phantom limb.

Magazines were an alternative universe for me: in a little village of 600 people I waited hungrily each month for the next BMX Plus! issue to arrive, then BMX Action, and later Freestylin'. I lived vicariously through all of those beautiful people who lived in exotic places like Redondo Beach and Torrance, CA! I had always dreaming of making a pilgrimage so I could ride on the Redondo Pier (many years later, I'd teach just up the road in Westchester and regularly spent time in Redondo and Torrance, sans bike). Eventually, back home I started my own 'zine devoted to skating and BMX, with photos, commentary, even poetry! Deep in the recesses of our basement is a milk crate with old issues of the 'zine, my first forays into writing and publishing.

So, as you might imagine, I'm a bit of an X-Games geek (downloaded the app on my iPod!). But nothing (re)captured my imagination like ESPN's recent documentary--one of the 30 on 30 docs--on Mat Hoffman, one of the real pioneers of vert. I still remember when this yokel from Oklahoma started emerging in the magazines--crazy, crazy air (=height!) coupled with tricks that were unthought of before his advent. In fact, I would later compete against Hoffman in a halfpipe contest in Grand Blanc, MI. I say "compete against" in a generous sense: all that means is that Hoffman was still an amateur (he would soon turn pro), and we were participants in the same competition. He finished first; I think I finished 31st. But I did see his first attempt at a 900 in competition.

The ESPN documentary, "The Birth of Big Air," is very well done--and for anyone with any memory of this era, quite moving. It tries to set the record straight by showing the extent to which X-Games hype owes much to Hoffman's insane, unheralded efforts on rickety ramps in Oklahoma. Indeed, the contrasts between Hoffman's backyard zaniness and current X-Games televised glamor is striking (and, to be honest, disheartening).

But I'm also quite excited: my youngest son has expressed an interest in learning to ride more seriously. So I'm looking forward to tuning up my old GT Pro Performer still out in the garage.

On the Poetry of Charles Wright

Comment magazine has just published my essay on Charles Wright's poetry, "Show Me the World." The piece focuses on Wright's most recent collection, Sestets, which I highly recommend, along with his earlier collections Negative Blue and Scar Tissue.

Here's a snippet from the opening of the article:

Of late, a stream of Christian cultural criticism has encouraged conservative evangelicals to "look for God" in contemporary culture. Exhorting us to overcome a rather Manichean dissection of the world into holy and profane, this mode of cultural engagement encourages us to "find God" in contemporary music, Hollywood movies, and various forms of popular culture.

I'm not convinced this is the best hermeneutic frame for appreciating the arts. It still tends to instrumentalize the arts as a conduit for a Gospel "message" or "theistic" propositions. The result is too often a fixation on God-language in cultural artifacts or—worse—belaboured allegorical readings which see "Christ figures" everywhere.

We should expect art to be more oblique. And instead of asking artists to show us God, we should want them to reveal the world—to expand the world, to make worlds that expand creation with their gifts of co- and sub-creative power. The calling of painters and poets, sculptors and songwriters is not always and only to hymn the Creator but to also and often be at play in the fields of the Lord, mired and mucking about in the gifted immanence that is creation. With that rich creational mandate, a Christian affirmation of the arts refuses the instrumentalist justification that we "find God" in our plays and poetry. In a way that is provocatively close to the aestheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, such a creational framing of the arts grants license for art to be quite "useless" —to (almost) be art for its own sake, for the sake of delight and play, for the sheer wonder and mystery of creating. Some of our best artists show us corners of creation we wouldn't have seen otherwise—and often because they've just given birth to a possibility hitherto only latent in the womb of creation.

Unhooking the arts from a "theological" instrumentalism also grants space for the arts to reveal the brokenness of creation without being supervised by a banal moralism. A painting or a poem reveals the world with a harrowing attention that will sometimes bring us face-to-face with what we've managed to willfully ignore up to that point.

In sum, the arts can be a means of what we might call "horizontal" revelation without necessarily being connected to "vertical" revelation. Like the book of Esther, God might never show up. Nonetheless, the Creator might best be honoured when we face up to the puzzling, mysterious nuances of his creation.

This is why I have become a devotee of the poetry of Charles Wright—not because I "find God" in his poetry (though he does make some cameos, often in the second person, like in prayers), but because through his poetry I see the world again, the world that's been in front of me this whole time.

Read the rest of "Show Me the World."

Democrat Paradise

Though it appeared in May, I just had opportunity to read Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker story, "Agreeable." It seems to me that Franzen could be seen as something like the heir to Updike, not as a stylist, but in terms of his commentary on suburban, middle-class America. This story is a snapshot of Patty, a high school athlete from Westchester, NY who is basically exiled within her own family. And though she is violated, what's really disturbing in the story is how she is treated by her family, especially her mother. All of this is presaged within the first few paragraphs when Franzen pegs the mother concisely:

Patty's mother was a professional Democrat. She later became a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children, and the Arts.

The ambiguity of that final "of" is brilliant, as is the delectable capitalization of "Arts." But then he follows up with this zinger:

Paradise for Joyce was an open space where poor children could go and do Arts at state expense.

Hitchens' Faith

Amid the hype over Christopher Hitchens' 'memoir,' Hitch 22, I think Ian Buruma's review in the New York Review of Books nails it. Entitled "The Believer," Buruma's rightly notes the provincialism of Hitchens' supposedly contrarian and cosmopolitan perspective. But most importantly, he points out the fundamentalist irrationalism lurking behind Hitchens' black-and-white universe wherein anything "religious" is ipso facto evil. Thus Buruma concludes:

Several times in the book he expresses his loathing of fanaticism, especially religious fanaticism, which in his account is a tautology. As a typical example he cites the Japanese suicide pilots at the end of World War II. In fact, many were not so much fanatical as in despair about a corrupt society going under in a catastrophic war. But if modern Japanese history must serve as a guide to our own times, Hitchens might have mentioned a different category of misguided figures: the often Marxist or formerly Marxist intellectuals who sincerely believed that Japan was duty-bound to go to war to liberate Asia from wicked Western capitalism and imperialism. They saw 1941 as their finest hour, the moment when men were separated from boys, when principle had to be defended, when those who didn’t share their militancy were disloyal weaklings. These journalists, academics, politicians, and writers were not all emperor-worshipers or Shintoists, but they were believers nonetheless. The man who emerges from this memoir is a bit like them: clearly intelligent, often principled, and often deeply wrongheaded, but above all, a man of faith.

Wilde Theology

"In every sphere of life, form is the beginning of things. [...] Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that made us admire and know the man. [...] The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated."

~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist,"
in The Portable Oscar Wilde, p. 125

What I'm Listening To: Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros

I have to thank my brother-in-law, Luke, for putting me onto a new favorite: Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, specifically "Up from Below" (get the deluxe version with bonus tracks and video if you can). What whimsical profundity; what lighthearted sobriety; what cheerful terror; what enchanting haunting! Their sound emerges from a delightful array of playful musicians: they sometimes have the expansive crisp brass sound of a big band; at other times it's the simple plunk of what sounds like a toy guitar. But it's the vocals of the male and female leads that are most captivating.

Their sound is complemented and enriched by lyrical content that should not be missed. Indeed, sometimes there is a tension or dissonance between the sound and lyrics such that the accessible pum-pum-pum of the instruments might trick you into ignoring what's being sung, as in "Up From Below" which opens with sheer vulnerability to the abyss:

I was only five when my dad told me I’d die
I cried as he said son, was nothing could be done
No all the fists I thrown just tryin to prove him wrong
After all the blood I spilled just tryin to get killed

Cuz I’ve already suffered I want you to know God
I’m ridin on hell’s hot flames comin up from below

There are also some wonderful tunes that can only be described as "love songs," for lack of a better word, including "Jade" but most especially, "Home"--a beautiful, playful paean to true love, with almost campy rhymes that can only be appreciated when you hear them sung in sheer joy:

Alabama Arkansas I do Love my Ma and Pa
But not as much as I do Love you
Holy Moly Me oh My your the apple of my eye
Girl aint never loved one like you
Man o Man your my best friend I scream it to the nothingness
that we got everything we need
Hot and Heavy pumpkin pie
Chocolate candy Jesus Christ
Aint nothin please me more than you

(Chorus)
Home, Let me come Home
Home is Whenever Im with you
Home, yes I am Home
Home is wherever Im with you

This also includes a "talking" interlude on the album which is reminiscent of some of Johnny & June's banter in songs like "Jackson."

But then the album also includes sorrowful songs like "Brother" in a mournful tune which is almost oppressive because the tune itself (a sort of calypso dirge) seems to be fighting to retain any shred of hope:

Somewhere over the earth
A song, a song
Somewhere I have heard
My brother is gone
Away, under the moon
Brother, brother
Away, gone so soon
Please singin his tune
Still singin his tune

And away he gone day
And away he gone night
And away he gone dark
And away he gone light
Up and away he gone away
But in a way he gonna stay
Oh brother of mine
We’ll be singing some day
Oh we’ll be singing someday
Undead audio, yes we’ll be singing someday

Some say I am to blame
Brother, brother
Some days I fell the same
And feelin that shame
Away under the moon
Brother brother
Away gone so soon
Please singing this tune
Still singing his tune

And away he gone dark
And away he gone light
And away he gone day
And away he gone night
Up and away he gone away
But in a way he gonna stay
Oh brother of mine
We’ll be singing some day
Oh we’ll be singing someday
Undead audio, yes we’ll be singing today

I border on being mesmerized by the band. If you really want to be hooked, watch them in the studios of Santa Monica's famous KCRW, performing "Home":

3 Returns to Daytona

A post from my alter ego:

Last night was a big night for the Nationwide Series--the little brother to NASCAR's Sprint Cup elite. Returning to Daytona's superspeedway for the summer race, Nationwide unveiled a new car for the series. What's most striking about these cars is the fact that they actually look like their namesakes, providing at least a hint of justification for the term "stock" car racing. Unlike the cookie-cutter cars in the Sprint series, the new cars in the Nationwide series have incorporated design elements from their on-the-street versions--at least on the front nose design. So the Mustang looks a bit like a Mustang, the Chevy Impala looks like an Impala (I still miss the Monte Carlo). And all those domesticated dads who find themselves behind the wheel of a Camry (remember the emasculating tone of the word "Camry" in American Beauty?) can at least take a little pleasure in seeing it now make its way around Daytona at almost 200 miles an hour.

My favorite design, however, is the Dodge Challenger (my current favorite candidate for "mid-life crisis car"). Check out Michigander Brad Keselowski's lean, mean machine:


But the unveiling of the new car was overwhelmed by a bigger story: as a way to honor Dale Earnhardt's induction into the new NASCAR Hall of Fame, Dale Jr. had agreed to do just one race in the famed, untouchable #3 car (no car has run #3 since Dale Sr. died in the 2001 Daytona 500). And while probably most of us would liked to have seen the #3 in the Intimidator's signature black "Goodwrench" paint scheme, Jr. drove a throwback car decked out in Dale Sr.'s early Wrangler colors. For anyone with even a remote connection to NASCAR nation, it was an emotional scenario. And when Jr.'s #3 car pushed into the lead on the 3rd lap, and the entire grandstand raised their hands with 3 fingers in tribute, well...you'll have to excuse me.

The script ended with what would be a clichéd ending, if it weren't so utterly remarkable: Dale Jr.--who hasn't won a race since 2008, and hasn't won a Nationwide race since 2006--stole the lead with 26 laps remaining. On a late caution, he stayed out when he probably should have got new tires. He was now a sitting duck at the front of the pack in a final, 4-lap drag race to the finish. And with driving skills that surely made Daddy proud, Jr. brought the fabled #3 to the checkered flag for the first time in over a decade.

Perhaps the most beautiful moment was Dale Jr.'s final promise in Victory Lane: "This is it. No more 3 for me."

Even snobby dismissers of NASCAR might enjoy watching the final laps:

Thinking in Tongues / Science and the Spirit

Well, I got to see my first, real live copy of Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy this week--in the bookstore at here Regent College in Vancouver. (I'm out here teaching a two-week course, which has been delightful.) As usual, Eerdmans has done a great job of design--I think it's really sharp. They've developed a nice logo for the "Pentecostal Manifestos" series which is quite distinctive.

I gave a public lecture on the book and was very encouraged by the response, especially from the large international population here in Vancouver and at Regent. I had wonderful conversations with folks from Korea, Brazil, Romania, New Zealand, and more. One of my real goals in trying to articulate the rather scandalous notion of a "pentecostal philosophy" is precisely in order to articulate the shape of a Christian philosophy that resonates with the charismatic Christianity that is "world Christianity." So this first little outing for the book was some confirmation in this regard.

The 4th chapter in Thinking in Tongues, which is focused on issues in ontology in dialogue with the sciences, will be complemented by another book coming out in a couple of months. With Amos Yong, I've edited Science and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences, forthcoming from Indiana University Press. This brings together scholars from across the disciplines (including theology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, chemistry, biology, and technology studies) who engage the sciences from a pentecostal standpoint. It's really the first of its kind and we hope it's only the beginning of what will be a growing conversation in the next generation. Should be out in late August or early September.

An Emergent Ecclesiology?

If I were "emergent" (if "emergent" still were), I'd hook my wagon to the much-discussed "Provisional Theses" of Kerr, Siggelkow, and Doerge as the (anti-)ecclesiology we've been waiting for. Because whereas Caputo's theology of the event comes with the cost of a low christology, the "apocalyptic" ecclesiology of Kerr et. al. gives you an anti-Catholic, anti-institutional theology of the "event," but with a high Christology. You get a rejection of "religion" and a theology of mission. This is everything Pete Rollins is looking for.

Granted, I'd probably be beset by a bit of a nagging worry, vexed by a bit of a theological thorn in my side which would keep prodding me: "But if it's all about the 'event' of Christ, how would you even know you want a high Christology? Indeed, how would you even know this event of Jesus was the Christ apart from the fruit of the church--the body of Christ--which yielded the Gospels and the Scriptures?" And I suppose it would be a little tricky for me to assert anything like a Nicene or Chalcedonian understanding of Jesus Christ given that such formulations were not part of that original or primitive "event" which was God in the flesh (though, again, I'm not sure how I'd know or be able to affirm that the crucified One was God-in-the-flesh apart from receiving the fruits of His body as authoritative in some way).

But I think I could wriggle out from under these worries with some sort of ontology/epistemology distinction--that the ontological "reality" of the "event" does not depend on our epistemological access to it (I'm pretty sure Barth could help me here). And voila! We'd finally have an "emergent" ecclesiology.

Oscar Wilde on Aspirations

Oscar Wilde "parodied his own love of limited editions by declaring his intention to bring out The Sphinx in an edition of just three copies: 'one for myself, one for the British Museum, and one for Heaven. I have some doubts,' he added, 'about the British Museum.'"

~Thomas Wright, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, p. 151

Why We Go to Church

Some hilarious cartoons in the New Yorker that just arrived, but this one also doubles as an exercise in critical ecclesiology:

A Reading Program for "Eccentric Existence"

Kelsey's Eccentric Existence is, I'll admit, quite daunting (weighing in at 1092 pages in two volumes). I fear that might discourage people from actually reading it. So in a footnote to the article I mentioned yesterday, I suggest the following reading program for those who might be intimidated:

If I were crafting a multiyear reading program for Eccentric Existence, I would recommend the following strategies to help non-theologians wade into its deep waters: On the first reading, I would suggest skipping (or merely skimming) those chapters set in smaller font. They are generally pursuing more technical questions and, at least on a first reading, can be treated as asides—though returning to them on a second reading will yield fruit for nontheologians, too. For an orientation, Introductions 1A, 2A, and 3A are necessary reading. The crucial chapter for understanding the architectonic of the book is chapter 3A. But I would also recommend that, relatively early (perhaps after reading 3A), readers skip to the final Coda (of three) at the end of the book: “Eccentric Existence as Imaging the Image of God” (pp. 1008-1051). This reads almost as an independent treatise (if one is familiar with chapter 3A) and does two important things: first, it explains how the three narratives of God relation’s to humanity are intertwined in Christ (as the image of God), and second, it explains why Kelsey does not use the imago Dei as the orienting image for his project. The latter is especially important given the prominence of appeals to “the image of God” in Christian scholarship.

On David Kelsey's "Eccentric Existence"

While I will have much more to say about this in an upcoming review essay in Christian Scholar's Review, my enthusiasm for David Kelsey's Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology requires a more immediate outlet. So here's a little snippet of praise from the forthcoming essay:

David Kelsey’s magnum opus, Eccentric Existence is a stunning work of profound wisdom, theoretical boldness, and architectonic beauty, hearkening back to the best of magisterial German “systematics” of the 20^th century (complete with long, technical sections in a smaller font)—though Kelsey’s approach is also marked by a deep engagement with Scripture rather than arid abstractions. The architectonic is governed by Trinitarian faith and the Scriptural narrative, not abstract philosophical systems. This is a systematics that resonates with recent developments in “the theological interpretation of Scripture” (developments not unrelated to some of Kelsey’s own earlier work). Indeed, once I began to appreciate the scope and craft of the book, I read with nothing short of critical awe. It is required reading for anyone working in theology. (The six chapters of the Introduction [!] constitute a careful treatise on theological method and might be taken as the most mature statement of “the Yale school.”)

But it deserves a much wider readership than that. As I have lived with the book over the past month, I have imagined a generation of Christian scholars, looking to deepen and “thicken” their understanding of Christian faith and human personhood, devoting themselves to absorbing this book. I can imagine a scholar reading then re-reading Eccentric Existence in order to mine its wisdom; but I also dream of interdisciplinary groups of Christian scholars from across the disciplines (especially in the social sciences) spending a few years meeting for lunchtime discussions, working together to absorb the theological insights and wisdom it contains. Such an investment would unquestionably deepen and mature the level of discourse in Christian scholarship. Eccentric Existence is a deep, deep well from which we could drink for a very long time.

I Miss John Updike

It's quite surprising to me how often I think of John Updike. Though he was not the writer of "my" generation, he became my cherished stylist--a bit of a guilty pleasure, I know, given how baroque, flowery, and lubricious his sentences can be (but then again, I also can't get over Thomas Wolfe). I should be more skeptical and distant toward the suburban environs of his novels, but his characters are so crisply drawn that you can't forget them. And I love every facet of his work: his short stories are exemplars of the genre; some of his poetry has stuck with me like a shard in my imagination; and his essays constitute a veritable school in criticism.

I think the reason I miss him so much is because we heard from him so regularly: with a metronomic regularity one could count on hearing from him in the New Yorker (usually a short story, sometimes some verse) and the New York Review of Books (usually a work of art criticism on an exhibit at MOMA, our only evidence that he'd emerged from Beverly Farm). One could count on his authoritative commentary on culture (with its acquired patrician-like gaze) and the steadiness of that voice gave a sense that things we're still holding together.

So Sam Tanenhaus's essay on Updike's archive is a welcome respite and salve for this absence in my life. It's also a wonderful glimpse of a writer at work--at the hard labor behind the image of his effortless prolificity. And how interesting to see in his correspondence that Updike's reception at Harvard was unlike Thomas Wolfe's! Tanenhaus's own writing is up to the task, and I'm grateful for this preview.

Imminent Arrival: Thinking in Tongues

Word on the street is that physical copies of Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy will be available in less than two weeks!

Copies will be available at a book signing following my public lecture at Regent College in Vancouver on June 30. (It's currently available to pre-order at Amazon.)

Those looking for a sample can download an excerpt at the Eerdmans site (which provides the "Introduction" to the book).