Can hope be wrong? On the new universalism

This ain't your Grandma's universalism (if your Grandma was, say, a Unitarian). The (relatively) old universalism was a liberal universalism of "many-roads-to-God-who-is-a-big-cuddly-Grandpa" (or, more recently, Grandma). Such a universalism was generally embarrassed by Christian particularity and any claims to the divinity of Christ. Instead, Jesus was a kindly teacher like so many others pointing us all to that great kumbaya-sing-along in the the "beyond."

In contrast, the "new" universalism is an evangelical universalism, a Christocentric universalism. If all will be saved, they will be saved in Christ, because of the work of Christ as the Incarnate God who has triumphed over the power of sin and death (the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer).

The question, then, is just what compels one to be an evangelical universalist? Some resort to prooftexting, operating with a naive, selective reading of Scripture. I'm going to do the evangelical universalist a favor and ignore such a strategy, only because I think it can be so easily refuted. (Many of these evangelical universalists would pounce on such selective prooftexting in other contexts.)

No, the motivation for evangelical universalism is not really a close reading of the Bible's claims about eternity. Instead, it seems that the macro-motivation for evangelical universalism is less a text and more a hermeneutic, a kind of "sensibility" about the very nature of God as "love" (which includes its own implicit sensibility about the nature of love). Two phrases you will often hear from evangelical universalists involve hope and our imagination. (For a sample combination of this constellation of concerns, see Lauren Winner's essay on Rob Bell in yesterday's New York Times Book Review.) The concern is often formulated something like this:

1) "I can't imagine" that a God of love would condemn Gandhi to hell. (Always Gandhi. Why Gandhi? As Ross Douthat asks, can you insert Tony Soprano here? Doesn't the evangelical universalist case of Gandhi imply a kind of salvation by works? But I digress...) Or, as Winner puts it, evangelical universalists "can't imagine their secular friends aren't going to heaven."

2) "I don't know if all will be saved but I hope this will be true." I'm firmly committed to the particularity of Christ, the evangelical universalist will emphasize. I just hope that God's salvation is not so particular that he only saves some. And it is precisely God's love and mercy that make me hope in this way.

The question then is: are these hopes and imaginings sufficiently warranted to overturn the received, orthodox doctrines concerning final judgment and eternal damnation? Are these sufficient to overturn the narrative thrust of Scripture and the clearer reading of biblical passages that suggest otherwise. (Let's stop making this just about passages that mention "hell;" at issue here are all passages that discuss judgment.) Are these hopes and imaginings sufficient for me to set aside centuries of the church's theological reflection on these matters? Is my chronological snobbery warranted? Just how do I think my hopes and imaginings are somehow more faithful and merciful and just than the generations upon generations of my forebears in the Christian faith? (I'll confess to being a kind of theological Burkean: it's very hard for me to imagine that I am smarter or better than Augustine or John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards. I'm not generally given to whiggish theology.)

Let's attend to these two specific sorts of claims. I would note that both of these intuitions are fundamentally anthropocentric strategies--outcomes of what Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) calls "the anthropocentric turn" in modernity. A couple of thoughts:

1) The "I-can't-imagine" strategy is fundamentally Feuerbachian: it is a hermeneutic of projection which begins from what I can conceive and then projects "upwards," as it were, to a conception of God. While this "imagining" might have absorbed some biblical themes of love and mercy, this absorption seems selective. More importantly, the "I-can't-imagine" argument seems inattentive to how much my imagination is shaped and limited by all kinds of cultural factors and sensibilities--including how I "imagine" the nature of love, etc. The "I-can't-imagine" argument makes man the measure of God, or at least seems to let the limits and constraints of "my" imagination trump the authority of Scripture and interpretation. I take it that discipleship means submitting even my imagination to the discipline of Scripture. (Indeed, could anything be more countercultural right now than Jonathan Edwards' radical theocentrism, with all its attendant scandals for our modern sensibilities?)

2) The "at-least-I-hope" strategy might seem less problematic. Doesn't it just name what all of us secretly desire? Indeed, wouldn't we be quite inhuman if we didn't hope in this way? (Then you get Winner's obnoxious suggestion that any of those who continue to affirm divine judgment are really trying to "guard heaven's gate," taking a certain delight in exclusion, as if they saw heaven as a country club. I won't dignify that with a response.)

But whence this hope? Can our hopes ever be wrong? Let's try an analogous example: I love my wife dearly. She is the best thing that ever happened to me, and our marriage has been an incredible means of grace in my life. I can't imagine life without her; indeed, I don't want to imagine life without her. And I want to hope that we will share this intimacy as a husband and wife forever.

But then I run into this claim from Jesus: "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven" (Matt. 22:30). Should I nonetheless hope that marriage endures in eternity? Should I profess that I can't know this (since Scripture seems to suggest otherwise), but nonetheless claim that somehow hoping it might be true is still faithful? Or should I submit even my hopes to discipline by the authority of Scripture?

The new universalism is not the old universalism. Fair enough. But those of us who reject even the new universalism aren't gleeful about it. We might even wish it were otherwise. But we also recognize that even our wishes, hopes, and desires need discipline.

"Vague" Religion: Brooks, Taylor, and the "Book of Mormon" Musical

The irreverent musical, The Book of Mormon, is getting rave reviews from all quarters--well, all quarters of secular elites (I read the first review, in the New York Times, on the day that I was speaking at Brigham Young University!). The gist of the South-Park-ish critique is not a scorched-earth approach (it's not a script written by Christopher Hitchens); instead, all reviewers seem to agree that the critique amounts to something like this: "What you believe is unbelievably ridiculous and laughable, but we sure can't deny that you are just so incredibly nice (and naive)."

But David Brooks' column today, "Creed or Chaos," pushes beyond these platitudes--in a way that reminds me of an important point in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. First, Brooks:

The central theme of “The Book of Mormon” is that many religious stories are silly — the idea that God would plant golden plates in upstate New York. Many religious doctrines are rigid and out of touch.

But religion itself can do enormous good as long as people take religious teaching metaphorically and not literally; as long as people understand that all religions ultimately preach love and service underneath their superficial particulars; as long as people practice their faiths open-mindedly and are tolerant of different beliefs.

This warm theme infuses the play with humanity and compassion. It also plays very well to an educated American audience. Many Americans have always admired the style of belief that is spiritual but not doctrinal, pluralistic and not exclusive, which offers tools for serving the greater good but is not marred by intolerant theological judgments.

The only problem with “The Book of Mormon” (you realize when thinking about it later) is that its theme is not quite true. Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

He continues to then offer an apology for "rigorous theologies"--an apologetic for thick, theological specificity rather than some bland, lowest-common-denominator spirituality. And then ends with a theme that alludes to his new book, The Social Animal, but a point I've also been pushing since Desiring the Kingdom. As Brooks puts it,

Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most.

In a way, Brooks echoes Charles Taylor's critiques of reductionistic, "secular" accounts of religion. For example, as he notes later in A Secular Age, many secular elites work with some sort of "general theory of religion" which sees "religion" (in general) as a vague 'answer' to the question of "meaning." In other words, if you ask a secularist why people believe in the crazy particularities of various faith, the answer is not particular but vague: They're looking for "meaning."

But Taylor thinks this is just the sort of over-wrought balderdash you'd come up with if you were not "religious." "What humans seek in religion," Taylor emphasizes, is not "meaning," and it's certainly not meaning in general. "Indeed, there is something absurd about the idea that our lives could be focused on meaning as such, rather than on some specific good or value. One might die for God, or the Revolution, or the classless society, but not for meaning" (A Secular Age, p. 679). "Anyone genuinely 'into' some good or value," he continues, "must see this particular good as having worth; this is what he is moved by" (680). Vague spiritualities of "niceness" will never generate such commitment.

On Loving (and Being Loved By) David Foster Wallace

I worry that all the hoopla of David Foster Wallace, Inc. is going to overwhelm serious discussion of his work, generating a backlash against the media-constructed image of DFW as the saintly martyr for the cause of "the novel." One of the worst outcomes of such a juvenile, anti-trend backlash would be the dismissal of Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker essay, "Farther Away." Indeed, here's a piece doomed to double-disdain: yet more about Wallace, and now from mega-selling literary phenom, Franzen. (Even the cynical, however, might appreciate Karen Green's recent interview in the Guardian.)

Granted, Franzen's essay is a bit of a set piece, recounting his retreat to the desolate Alejandro Selkirk island off the coast of Chile--named for the Scottish adventurer who is the likely basis of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. So here we have Franzen, burned out on the book tour from his best-selling Freedom, retreating alone to the isolation of this island with a paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe in his backpack. This is the sort of thing writers do only so they can write about it.

But Franzen is also trying to find space to mourn the death of his friend, David Foster Wallace. And so the essay intertwines three threads: his adventure alone on the island, his attempt to come to grips with the death of David (including both lament and anger), and his meta-reflections on the history and task of the novel, very much continuing his famous thesis in How to Be Alone: that fiction is a response, and antidote, to loneliness (a thesis he shared with Wallace). On all three counts, Franzen is worth reading.

Particularly poignant and insightful are Franzen's reflections on love in the corpus of DFW. On the one hand, he notes its absence from Wallace's fictional worlds: "Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe." On the other hand, "[t]he curious thing about David's fiction, though, is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it."

That sounds exactly right to me. But I would ratchet this up a notch, too: it's not just that Wallace's readers feel loved because of his vulnerability and honesty. I think one could also argue that despite all of their addictions and "hideous" characteristics, Wallace also loved his characters. Indeed, I think this is precisely what distinguishes Wallace from Franzen. This is one the things that struck me while reading Freedom: it is a masterful work, but I found it difficult to generate sympathy with any of the characters, and it struck me that this is because Franzen doesn't really care for Patty or Walter or Joey or any of the others either. While Wallace and Franzen are often mentioned in the same (postmodern) breath, associated with hyper-self-consciousness, "meta"-izing fancies, and cynical distance, in fact they're quite different. Franzen ended up settling for quite a straightforward narrative strategy, but his stories ooze with cynicism. In contrast, while Wallace was every bit the pomo formalist, indulging in all kinds of "non-linear" tricks and gimmicks, what emerges through that is not cynicism, but something quite different: a sensitivity and understanding for the messed up worlds of his characters that might just be love.

The Candid Decorator

Another little treasure in my inbox today, thanks to Knopf's "Poem-a-Day" for April. Includes just a whiff of allusion to Oscar Wilde's complex interplay of aestheticism and the soul-burrowing introspection of De Profundis--along with a concluding shout-out to Grand Rapids' heritage as "furniture city."

The Candid Decorator

By James Merril

I thought I would do over
All of it. I was tired
Of scars and stains, of bleared
Panes, tinge of the liver.
The fuchsia in the center
Looked positively weird
I felt it—dry as paper.
I called a decorator.
In next to no time such
A nice young man appeared.
What had I in mind?
Oh, lots and lots of things—
Fresh colors, pinks and whites
That one would want to touch;
The windows redesigned;
The plant thrown out in favor,
Say, of a small tree,
An orange or a pear . . .
He listened dreamily.
Combing his golden hair
He measured with one glance
The distance I had come
To reach this point. And then
He put away his comb
He said: “Extravagance!
Suppose it could be done.
You’d have to give me carte
Blanche and an untold sum.
But to be frank, my dear,
Living here quite alone
(Oh I have seen it, true,
But me you needn’t fear)
You’ve one thing to the good:
While not exactly smart,
Your wee place, on the whole
It couldn’t be more ‘you.’
Still, if you like—” I could
Not speak. He had seen my soul,
Had said what I dreaded to hear.
Ending the interview
I rose, blindly. I swept
To show him to the door,
And knelt, when he had left,
By my Grand Rapids chair,
And wept until I laughed
And laughed until I wept.

An Ode to Rory McIlroy

A lot of my friends love to hate golf--with all its bourgeois trappings and conservative leanings, its generally patrician vibe. And they sure can't understand how someone could watch golf.

I'm guilty on all counts, but won't undertake any apologetics here. As a bit of testimony, let me just say this: golf is the only televised sport that all my kids will watch with me. Go figure.

But for those of us who have that love-hate relationship with the game (which just is love for the game), this year's Masters was as close as one gets to athletic poetry, the energy of a Greek tragedy played out on a stage of sculpted horticulture whose lush beauty is a dream set--magnolia blossoms framing the perfection of Augusta's fairways and undulating greens. Long shadows trail across the greens during the late-afternoon close of the drama. Augusta is so stunning you can almost smell it on TV.

The real heros of this year's Masters have to be the editors at CBS: with no less than 10 players in contention for most of Sunday, every shot had significance, and you could feel the director barely keeping up: KJ Choi dropping a putt on 15, then cut to Jason Day ripping a drive on 14, cut to Tiger roaring up the fairway on 16, etc., etc. Never has a golf tournament had such non-stop energy (making a mockery of the supposed 'excitement' of either baseball or football which both have tiny bursts of action interspersed with long stretches of standing around and long commercial breaks).

The 2011 Masters cast was international and intergenerational: the top of the leaderboard featured a player from every continent except Antarctica. And their ages ranged from 21 to 40. Between them all it was a weekend of non-stop excellence and heartbreak, genius and foibles, unthinkable shots and lip-biting misses. (I do think one has to have played golf to be able to appreciate the almost superhuman mastery of the game exhibited by the pros.) This has to make the taste of victory all the sweeter for Charl Schwartzel.

All of this included, of course, the meltdown of young Rory McIlroy--the phenom from Northern Ireland who had led the tournament at the close of each of the first three days, coming into Sunday with an unheard of 4-shot lead. And then golf showed up. Every golfer knows that at any moment he, like Jonathan Edwards' sinner, is suspended above the abyss by an ever-so thin thread of intertwined grace, guts, and luck. And that thread can unravel quickly. What makes golf so awe-inspiring and expletive-inducing is the fact that it is a game measured in yards but won or lost by millimeters. (See, for example, ESPN's "Sports Science" account of the physics of lip-outs.) More significantly, golf is an incredible interplay of mind and body: on the one hand, it is an intense example of the mechanics of bodily automation, of what Merleau-Ponty would describe as praktognosia, a "know-how" that is carried in the flesh. On the other hand, in a Yogi Berra-like quip, golf is 90% mental and 10% psychological. It is a game that is played, as Bobby Jones put it, on the 5-inch course between your ears.

It was heartbreaking to watch young McIlroy self-destruct: bouncing off trees, hitting the lips of bunkers, driving into the creek, three-putting holes. Augusta was eating him up. (There's always a Schadenfreude encouragement in this for duffers like me: "Hell, I could do that!" you can shout at the TV.)

But here, too, we see the Calvinist virtues of golf: there's no tapping out; no throwing in the towel; and Rory didn't indulge in any of Tiger's juvenile antics of cussing or throwing clubs or pouting around the course. While he'd cover his eyes and cringe at the errant flight of his drives, he'd also step up for the next shot. And he'd par the last 3 holes. That's a feat in itself.

Heads in the Fiscal Sand

The Times today includes an article that might be overlooked: "Next on the Agenda for Washington: Fight Over Debt." It notes that in the next couple of months, the United States will reach the congressionally-imposed limit on borrowing, capped at the staggering debt ceiling of $14.25 trillion (for the sake of argument, pretend it's possible to imagine what a "trillion" is). As the article succinctly notes,

Once the limit is reached, the Treasury Department would not be able to borrow as it does routinely to finance federal operations and roll over existing debt; ultimately it would be unable to pay off maturing debt, putting the United States government — the global standard-setter for creditworthiness — into default.

The same article is accompanied by the graphic above which documents the exponential growth in federal debt since Reagan (under whom it tripled). In sum, the Reaganite dream of unfettered spending and tax cuts is a fairy tale we've been telling ourselves for over 30 years and somehow we keep believing it. Our grandchildren, in squalor, will wonder how we could have been duped for so long.

To note this, however, is not to concede the slash-and-burn (supposed) "necessity" of the Paulists (Ron and Rand) or the generally "conservative" proposal of, say, Paul Ryan. Yes, the formula that's got us here is unfettered spending coupled with low taxes (where spending, as you'll also note above, includes a rash of military spending on the basis of Bush II foreign policy). But only a lazy, unimaginative take on this would assume that "low taxes" is a given. So sure, one strategy to reduce debt would be to slash spending, which inevitably happens on the backs of the poor and vulnerable, particularly women and children.

But of course there's another (unthinkable) option here: raise taxes. In this respect, David Brooks' Friday column is very helpful when read alongside today's article. As Brooks points out in "The Ryan Journey,"

The best thing about the long-term budget proposal from Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is that it forces Americans to confront the implications of their choices. If voters want taxes that amount to roughly 18 percent of G.D.P., then they are going to have to accept a government that looks roughly like what Ryan is describing. The Democrats are on defense because they are unwilling to ask voters to confront the implications of their choices. Democrats seem to believe that most Americans want to preserve the 20th-century welfare state programs. But they are unwilling to ask voters to pay for them, and they are unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs.

This does seem to be a fair observation of where we're at. I'm less convinced by Brooks' claim that "[r]aising taxes on the rich will not do it," since I would think a graduated tax like most other North Atlantic countries could sure go a long way. But I do agree with his other point: if Obama and the Democrats want to retain programs that care for the poor and vulnerable (as they rightly do!), then we need to face another reality: the middle class need to bear the brunt of this, too. Surely we can give up a few bottles of wine a month, a few of the attractions on our vacations, a few rounds of golf for the sake of the poor.

But as the Democrats know, we're no longer talking about fiscal matters: we're talking about whether the middle-class citizens of this country actually have the political will to care for their neighbor. I think one of the core argument of Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love is to show that Augustine would have expected the church to be that body habituated to care for the neighbor, exhibiting civic virtues which are just the sort of political will and desire needed to address the sorts of problems we're grappling with. But sadly, the church in the United States is just as captive to the selfish atomism of the culture as anyone--indeed, somehow even more so, ardently eschewing any sense of fiscal obligation to the poor, opting for the pious patina of libertarianism masked by calls for "charity."

Zac Brown Band & James Taylor on the ACM Awards

I have watched this clip way too many times. Be sure to hang in there until Taylor seamlessly weaves "Sweet Baby James" into the medley. Good stuff.

Book Notes and Book Reviews on Scribd

I've decided to upload some of the archive of book reviews I've done over the years, creating a collection on Scribd. I'll hope to keep updating this as I have opportunity.

Review of Peperzak, "The Quest for Meaning: Friends of Wisdom from Plato to Levinas"

On Poetry

David Orr's essay on the instrumentalization of poetry in Oprah's magazine is worth a read for all kinds of reasons, but especially for the concluding paragraph where he rightly laments:

I wish, though, that they had found space for someone — not a critic, necessarily, just someone willing to be honest — to talk about the actual experience of reading a poem. Not why poems are good at rehabilitating people. Not where poems come from. Not what they can help us do, or forget, or remember. Not what the people who write them are wearing. Just what reading one of them is like to one person. If the chasm is to be ever so slightly narrowed, it seems to me this is how it will be done.

The best poems are not messages; they are lingual acrobatics, roiling heart and mind by setting them awash in words. In reading poetry, you don't so much suspend disbelief as give yourself permission to be lost in language--to be carried along on a wave of words that cascades in delight or sorrow. You give yourself to the poem and ride this wave like a kind of emotional and intellectual body surfing, holding your breath the whole way, perhaps with a smirk or growing smile, perhaps with a squint and creeping frown, perhaps with a tear burbling up from inside your soul that finally drops at the poem's heartbreaking end.

In a sense, a good poem doesn't mean something, it does something. Or perhaps, following Wittgenstein, we could just say the poem means what it does.

I can think of no better example of this than the poem that showed up in my inbox this morning, thanks to Knopf's Poem-A-Day for April, Poetry Month (what month isn't poetry month?!). Give yourself over to the delight of Cynthia Zarin's "Late Poem":

Late Poem

". . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern."

I wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
and drove a gas-guzzler
and never wore seat belts

I’d have a baby, yours, cette fois,
and I’d smoke Parliaments
and we’d drink our way through the winter

in spring the baby would laugh at the moon
who is her father and her mother who is his pool
and we’d walk backwards and forwards

in lizard-skin cowboy boots
and read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
I’d wear only leather or feathers

plucked from endangered birds and silk
from exploited silkworms
we’d read The Economist

it would be before and after the internet
I’d send you letters by carrier pigeons
who would only fly from one window

to another in our drafty, gigantic house
with twenty-three uninsulated windows
and the dog would be always be

off his leash and always
find his way home as we will one day
and we’d feed small children

peanut butter and coffee in their milk
and I’d keep my hand glued under your belt
even while driving and cooking

and no one would have our number
except I would have yours where I’ve kept it
carved on the sole of my stiletto

which I would always wear when we walked
in the frozen and dusty wood
and we would keep warm by bickering

and falling into bed perpetually and
entirely unsafely as all the best things are
—your skin and my breath on it.

For the DTK DVD

If I could create a DVD to accompany Desiring the Kingdom, this would be one of the resources to accompany chapter 3:

HT: Mark Roeda

Kierkegaard on kenosis and ascension

Kierkegaard's (or rather, Anti-Climacus') Practice in Christianity--one of the little brothers in a corpus that includes Fear & Trembling, Sickness Unto Death, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript--is sort of an amalgam of Kierkegaardian themes. (And it still includes all those aspects of Kierkegaard that frustrate me to no end; I have a passionate love/hate relationship with the Dane.) But while recently re-reading Practice, this passage about Christ's "abasement" and "loftiness" stood out for me--sort of a rebuff of both a simplistic theologia crucis as well as the typical Lutheran critique of the theologia gloriae. It seems to me a number of different theological schools of thought might come under his critical glare:

"If there were someone who could love him only in his loftiness, that person's vision is confused; he does not know Christ and therefore does not love him either; he is taking him in vain. Christ was and is indeed the truth. If someone can love him only in his loftiness, what does that mean? It means that he can love the truth--only when it has conquered, when it is in possession of and is surrounded by power and honor and glory. But when it was struggling, when it was foolishness, to the Jews an offense, to the Greeks foolishness; when it was insulted, mocked, and, as Scripture says, spat upon--then of course such a person could not love it; then he wished to stay far away from it. That is, he wanted the truth far away from him, but this is actually to be in untruth. It is just as essentially a part of 'the truth' to suffer in this world as to be triumphant in another world, in the world of truth--and Jesus Christ is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness. But if, on the other hand, someone could feel drawn to Christ and love him only in his abasement, if such a person wanted to hear nothing about his loftiness, when power and honor and glory are his; if he (what sad perversity!) with the impatience of a restless spirit, bored, as he would not doubt say, with the good and victorious days of Christendom, if he longed only for scenes of horror, to be with him when he was being insulted and persecuted--then the vision of such a person is also confused; he does not recognize Christ and therefore does not love him either. Christianity is not at all closer to heavy-mindedness than to light-mindedness; they are both equally worldliness, equally far away, and both have just as much need of conversion" (pp. 153-154).

Fishers of Men?

It's pretty easy to domesticate or even romanticize Jesus' call to those first disciples--to those fishermen who would become fishers of men. We've seen enough flannelgraphed versions of those jolly men tending their nets that we now imagine they were made for such a call--as if they were just out of work seminarians waiting around for "religious" work.

What if, instead, we imagine Jesus showing up on the docks in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, calling Sig and Edgar to drop their crab pots and come follow him?

Julian Barnes on Joyce Carol Oates

You can tell a lot about a literary culture by its used bookstores; they are something like the fossil record of a reading public. And one of the things that regularly astonishes me is what you won't find in used bookstores in the United States: contemporary British authors. Nowhere is the old adage ("two countries separated by a common language") more true that in our reading habits. The authors that grace the shortlist for the Man Booker prize hardly make a dent on American literary culture.

The most egregious omission in this regard has to be Julian Barnes, the best contemporary writer you've never read. I was hooked as soon as I read A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, the book that seemed to earn him a place in the pantheon of supposedly "postmodern" novelists. But Flaubert's Parrot is the book that really sealed my devotion, though his memoir, Nothing to be Frightened Of, is a masterful, honest, even humble meditation on mortality in our secular age.

It's this memoir that comes to mind in Barnes' recent review of Joyce Carol Oates' new memoir, A Widow's Story. Indeed, if the excerpt of JCO's book in the New Yorker is any indication, I'll take Barnes review over Oates' book. His prose is probing without drawing attention to itself--kind of liquid without being soppy. He makes an 18th-century meditation on mourning by Dr. Johnson seem utterly contemporary (and what other critics would have that 1750 essay to hand?). He even has the chutzpah to criticize Oates the widow in the concluding section of his essay, though with grace and sensitivity.

But what's really exquisite about the essay is how perfectly Flaubertian it is: in the best spirit of the master, Barnes observes the discipline of self-suppression--achieving that vaunted Flaubertian ideal of objectivity that prevents him from even appearing in the essay. The "I" here is not flaunted, to that point that the reader might not realize or recall that Barnes' own widowhood is still quite fresh (following the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh). But while Barnes the widower--that Barnesian "I"--does not parade itself in the essay, of course it impresses itself on the entire piece. Barnes' the widower is everywhere between the lines, informing an entire sensibility, resonating with Oates' clichéd mourning ("what is grief at times," he asks, "but a car crash of cliché?). And it is the sympathy of widowhood that also gives him license to criticize Oates' silence about her prompt remarriage. In the age of the confessional, solipsistic memoir, Barnes' Flaubertian discipline is to be admired.

Literary Relics

If I had gobs of money just lying around, and a slightly more seared conscience, I could be easily sucked into the world of literary collecting, ardently acquiring the secularized equivalent of relics. I could see my home office becoming a kind of reliquary, lined with first editions and decorated with all sorts of artifacts--say hand-written manuscript from Ted Hughes, quirky photographs of Evelyn Waugh, used pipes from P.G. Wodehouse or maybe one of Elizabeth Bishop's fountain pen, perhaps a portrait of Oscar Wilde or George Sand. It would be a delight to work in such a Wunderzimmer, absorbing the aura of writers gone before

In other words, I would be like a kid in a candy shop if I could be part of the Bonham's auction of the Roy Davids Collection of Papers and Portraits--a veritable who's who of British and American letters from the Victorian era up to the mid-20th century. I'll have to settle for window shopping.

A Reformed Prayerbook

While I have the utmost respect for the Book of Common Prayer--probably the single most important expression of historic Christian worship in my own life--lately I've been using a new resource for prayer: Seeking God's Face: Praying with the Bible Through the Year. Compiled by Philip Reinders, one could think of it as a Reformed prayerbook, embodying the Protestant emphasis on the centrality of Scripture while also honoring post-apostolic tradition (e.g., by including prayers that draw from the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Westminster standards). Like the most ancient and global Christian practices, it encourages a prayer discipline that is centered on the Psalms while also, in the spirit of the lectionary, walking us across the entire narrative of Scripture. It honors the tradition of disciplined (written) prayer while also making room for extemporaneous prayer and devotion.

To learn more about the book, and to see what each daily practice looks like, check out the excerpt that is available from Faith Alive [pdf]. Amazon also offers an annotated image the lays out the elements of each 2-page spread.

In sum, I think this is a wonderful gift to foster intentional Christian piety with a Reformed accent. It would be a marvelous way for those new to the Reformed tradition to connect themselves not just to the doctrines of Reformed theology but also the practices of Reformed piety.

Why is neurology so fascinating?

Colin McGinn's review of V.S. Ramachandran's new book, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human is both appreciative and appropriately critical. McGinn rightly calls Ramachandran to the mat for his unwarranted reductionism and his over-reaching claims, while also affirming the bodily basis of consciousness. He ends with an excellent question:

Why is neurology so fascinating? It is more fascinating than the physiology of the body—what organs perform what functions and how. I think it is because we feel the brain to be fundamentally alien in relation to the operations of mind—as we do not feel the organs of the body to be alien in relation to the actions of the body. It is precisely because we do not experience ourselves asreducible to our brain that it is so startling to discover that our mind depends so intimately on our brain. It is like finding that cheese depends on chalk—that soul depends on matter. This de facto dependence gives us a vertiginous shiver, a kind of existential spasm: How can the human mind—consciousness, the self, free will, emotion, and all the rest—completely depend on a bulbous and ugly assemblage of squishy wet parts? What has the spiking of neurons got to do with me?

Neurology is gripping in proportion as it is foreign. It has all the fascination of a horror story—the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain. All those exotic Latin names for the brain’s parts echo the strangeness of our predicament as brain-based conscious beings: the language of the brain is not the language of the mind, and only a shaky translation manual links the two. There is something uncanny and creepy about the way the brain intrudes on the mind, as if the mind has been infiltrated by an alien life form. We are thus perpetually startled by our evident fusion with the brain; as a result, neurology is never boring. And this is true in spite of the fact that the science of the brain has not progressed much beyond the most elementary descriptive stages.

Conversations on Classical Education

When I was at the Geneva School in Orlando this past January, I sat down for an extended interview about Christian classical education, initiated by Christopher Perrin from Classical Academic Press and the Institute for Classical Schools.

They've rolled out audio of these conversations (video to come). You can listen to the entire conversation (45 minutes) or sample these segments:

Pedagogy Assumes an Anthropology

How Humans are Shaped

The Problem with Worldview Education

Secular Liturgies

Countering Secular Liturgies

How Christian Schools Are Secular

The Church and Christian Education

Pastors and Classical Christian Education

What Secular Education Lacks

Humans as Thinkers Believers and Lovers

Postmodernism and Classical Christian Ed

Neuroscience and Character Formation

Education, Culture and The Arts

Advice for School Administrators

Attention to Craft: Towards being a "Writer"

For a long time--even after I had published several books--I kept telling people that I wanted to be a writer. What I generally meant was that I wanted to be a novelist (and that's still true) or write for Harper's. But I also think I was working with a latent distinction I still want to affirm: being an author and being a writer are not synonymous. Most philosophers and theologians are authors: they publish articles and books bent on communicating content and making arguments. Their goal is conceptual clarity and careful demonstration. But all of that can happen with very little attention to form. Indeed, one can write entire books and yet not take language all that seriously.

But it's just that attention to form that characterizes the writer. To make the move from being an author to being a writer you have to learn to love sentences.

You will know you're on your way to being a writer when you have a love/hate relationship with language: when you can be either thrilled or vexed by the cadence of a sentence or turn of phrase--when you can't quite leave the paragraph on which you're laboring because there's a tic of timing that's driving you mad. Or when you begin to consider the force of a sentence in terms of its ability to move rather than prove. In sum, you'll know you've become a writer when you consider the sheer play of language to be a country to which you'd gladly emigrate.

You will also know you're on your way to being a writer when you find yourself a different reader: when you find yourself gratefully lingering on a sentence you've just read because it has brought an unexpected delight, and you have a deep appreciation for the writer's attention to craft--that she's forged something anew, just for the sheer delight of putting it that way. Or when you find yourself angrily scribbling in the margins because of some hack's laziness and tired, derivative style.

So how does one make that transition from being an author to being a writer? Unfortunately, I have no easily formula. Instead, what comes to mind is Pascal's advice after his infamous wager: "Can't find yourself able to believe?," Pascal asks. "That's OK. Just fake it for a while. Go to Mass. Try on the rhythms of a believer. Practice your way into faith." Something similar holds for becoming a writer, I think: act as if. You're working on a book, for goodness' sake--give yourself permission to imagine yourself as a writer.

And then consider some of these as new habits:

1. Immerse yourself in fiction and poetry. If you don't love fiction, I can't imagine how you'll ever be a solid writer. The imaginative worlds of novels and the linguistic intensity of poetry should be your daily bread. Central to your apprenticeship should be mimesis, learning to imitate good writing. To familiarize yourself with that, you need to be regularly swimming laps in the deep pool of literature. If you can't imagine this being true for you, then stick to being an "author."

2. Apprentice yourself to the craft of writing. Granted, there's an entire industry of wannabe writers out there that keeps Poets & Writers afloat. But there are also some very helpful books that are themselves examples of engaging writing. I'd recommend starting with Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

3. Become a formalist. You will need to train yourself to appreciate form in fiction--to not just be carried along by the narrative force of the story, but to also be attentive to the gritty conditions of that--the minute particularities of how sentences and paragraphs work, the careful, world-changing choices an author makes. To that end, I constantly commend James Wood's How Fiction Works.

4. Be patient. Recall Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours rule (in Outliers): What looks like overnight "genius" exploding onto the scene is usually the product of about 10,000 hours of practice. This is the (admittedly discouraging) math of expertise. Now, I think you can log credit for all the hours you spend reading fiction and poetry as hours of practice. But you also just need to write. And write. And write. Write stuff that will never see the light of day. Write blogs. Take form seriously in your emails. Never miss an opportunity to make language dance and play. Embrace the craft at every turn. You might just become a writer.

(Unsolicited) Advice for Young (Theological) Authors

I don't envy young theologians and Christian scholars today. Fewer and fewer tenure-track positions only ramps up the expectations for landing a job. What might have earned someone tenure a generation ago is now almost needed just to land an interview. The pressure to publish begins in doctoral programs, especially for those outside of elite departments.

At the same time, the proliferation of journals and even publishers has made it easier and easier to "get published." The old gatekeepers have lost their monopoly. There was a day when publishing books in theology required passing through the portals guarded by the publishing establishment: Cambridge University Press or Oxford University Press for one kind of theological publishing; Eerdmans, T & T Clark, Fortress, Baker or InterVarsity Press for another sort. In any case, there were established channels that made "getting published" more difficult. But over the past decade, with easy access to publishing technologies, we keep seeing more and more publishers springing up. Granted, even "back then" there was always the University Press of America, but now we have a proliferation of publishing outlets for theology--not to mention a growing cadre of niche and online journals. The result is that if you have a manuscript for a reasonably coherent book, it's now easier than ever to see it in print, to "get published."

And so my unsolicited advice to young theological writers: Just because you can publish it doesn't mean you should. In other words, don't confuse printability with publishability. If you shop a manuscript to some of the old stand-bys in theological publishing, and you consistently get turned down--then, sure, it's true that I can name three publishers off the top of my head who would probably be willing to publish your book. But I wonder if you would have just missed a teachable moment:

Was there something to learn in those rejections? Was there some feedback in those difficult emails--hard as they were to receive--that might have made you a better writer? Could it just be the case that your project is not worth publishing? Could your manuscript be like that unpublished novel that every great novelist had to write, just to learn how to do it, only to have it end up in the drawer in their desk? (I can still remember Donald Hall, in Unpacking the Boxes, talking about the thousands of poems he wrote that never saw the light of day.) What if it turns out that those editors and referees actually knew a thing or two?

I can already imagine the response: "Well, that's easy for you to say, Mr. Tenured Professor--Mr. Protector-of-the-Establishment-and-Status-Quo. Worried about people hounding in on your turf?"

You're welcome to that retort. Nobody's stopping you. Maybe you're right. However, if I'm suggesting that not everything that gets published in theology today deserves to be published, I'm not thereby claiming that everything that does get published by the "old stand-bys" necessarily deserves to be published either. The established houses are not perfect. But they do keep the bar a little higher.

I just wonder if there might be a few young theologians out there who are willing to at least pause and consider the possibility that there remains some wisdom in the establishment--and so might, for the sake of their work, submit to the disciplines of the process, even find the gifts hidden in rejections, rather than scurrying to find what upstart press will get their book into print. They might be grateful later, and theology might be better for it.

Writing (and) Theology

There's no dearth of publishing in Christian theology. To the contrary, there has been an expanding universe of theological publishers churning out more and more books, now supplemented by the oft-hailed (and over-hailed, I'd say) blogosphere. So at this moment there are countless theologians writing--sketching outlines and plans, whiling away at manuscripts, passionate about their ideas, all with the aim of reaching an audience via the still-exhilirating technology bequeathed to us by Gutenberg.

But there surely is a dearth of good writing in theology. For a discipline indebted (one hopes) to the Word become flesh, theologians seem rather docetic about publishing--didactically focused on concepts and ideas and argument with little attention to the "flesh" of writing. Fixated on "content," they are remarkably unconcerned about form. The result is a strange paradox: by basically not thinking about language, form, and writing, the theologian treats language as if it were transparent; yet it is precisely when language and form are invisible in the writing process that we get the most obfuscating prose. Some of the most important books in theology over the past twenty years have bordered on being unreadable (and the "bordered on" is a generous qualifier!). Granted, some of this is the product of the weird dynamics of academese and the desire to appear "rigorous." But surely some of this is also the product of a widespread lack of attention to form, to the process and dynamics of writing (well).

There are, of course, some exceptions. Rowan Williams is a model of winsome clarity and accessible profundity; Stanley Hauerwas' writing reached a new level in his recent memoir; Janet Martin Soskice's work is exemplary. And there are others. But for every decent writer in theology, it would be easy to line up 20 examples of boring, plodding, didactic clunkiness.

There have also been some efforts to address this. The recent seminar led by Marilynne Robinson at Princeton's Center of Theological Inquiry was an encouraging and enticing sign. But we need more apprenticeships in writing--or at least need more theologians willing to learn the craft of writing, attentive to form.

I was prompted to think about this while reading the recent Paris Review interview with Jonathan Franzen. The expansive conversation covers the span of Franzen's career and is an occasion for him to reflect on his maturation as a writer. Commenting on the gut-wrenching cuts he had to make to the manuscript of The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen describes an epiphany. After being pressed by the novelist Hugh Nissenson, Franzen recalls,

I set down the phone and picked up the manuscript, which I hadn't looked at in eight months, and I said, "My God, there's two hundred pages that I can cut in half an hour." I just suddenly saw it. I suddenly made the connection between my needs as a reader and what I was doing as a writer, which I had never made before. That in fact I was not interested in punishing the reader, because I didn't enjoy being punished myself. If I wanted the book to be read, it needed to move, and so I had to make the cuts to make it move (p. 57).

How different would theological writing look if more theologians could make the connection between their needs as a reader and what they're doing as writers?

Kindle Edition of "Thinking in Tongues"

I just learned that Eerdmans has released a Kindle edition of Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy. Kinda cool.

In the Kindle Store you can also find an edition of The Devil Reads Derrida: And Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts.

An Ash Wednesday "Hymn"?

It's probably a sign of my malformation, but at the imposition of ashes this morning this Edward Sharpe lyric came to mind (listen to it here):

I was only five when my dad told me I’d die
I cried as he said son, was nothing could be done
Now all the fists I've 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

Air, o, wind and rain blowing out my window pain
Drugs just drug me down killin light killin sound

But now I’ve already suffered I want you to know God
Im ridin on Hell’s hot flames comin up from below
Yes I’ve already suffered I want you to know God
I’m riding on Heaven’s flames coming up from below

Far from below – how high can we go

To all the love I lost – hey just tryin to play boss
To all those friends I hurt – I treated em like dirt
And all those words I spewed – Nothin sacred nothing true!
To all these Ghosts I turn – I’m ready now to Burn!

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

Far - From below - how high can we go.

The ashes mean nothing if they don't speak of our mortality (and, of course, the death of Christ and hence the atonement). And so I think these lyrics came to mind because their opening reminds me of what we need to hear--what I, strangely, want to hear--in worship on Ash Wednesday: "You are going to die. And you are going to be judged. And there is a hell. And, yes, this should worry you." Otherwise Easter is just the culmination of our self-realizations, the cuddly affirmation of our own projects.

Josh Ritter's Novel

Josh Ritter is probably my favorite singer-songwriter, even if his latest offering, So Runs the World Away, is not his strongest. He's one of the great poets among songwriters today, able to pair almost prolix lyrics with illuminating melodies that make them work. I'm constantly reminded of his literary ability with each listen.

So I was very intrigued to learn that Ritter has a novel coming out: Bright's Passage. And what particularly intrigues me is this photo which accompanied the announcement: notice Ritter's novel is here set alongside a collection of Graham Greene novels. I'm hoping that's a good omen.

Culture Shift: Chiasson on Mass Availability

I sometimes tease my wife that we're from completely different generations because she was born before man walked on the moon, while I was born after that paradigm-shifting event (we're only 18 months apart). She emerged into this world in the 60s, whereas I was born in a different decade. (I should note she's not always amused by this line of teasing.) Of course, it's ridiculous to think that a year and a half could mean that we're from different epochs. And yet surely one of the features of late modernity is a compression of generations where cultural paradigms shift at now breakneck speed.

Dan Chiasson gets at this as a bit of an aside in his ranging review of Keith Richards' Life. Chiasson does a nice job of situating Richards' offering in the wider genre of memoir, but in the course of this he also considers just how and why the Stones were game-changers in the very shape of cultural offering. As he puts it:

Anyone reading this review can go to YouTube now and experience Muddy Waters, or Chuck Berry, or Buddy Holly, or the first Stones recordings, or anything else they want to see, instantly: ads for Freshen-up gum from the Eighties; a spot George Plimpton did for Intellivision, an early video game. Anything. I am not making an original point, but it cannot be reiterated enough: the experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records. The Rolling Stones do not happen in any other context: they were a band based on craving, impersonation, tribute: white guys from England who worshiped black blues and later, to a lesser extent, country, reggae, disco, and rap.

When the situation changed in part because the Stones changed it, and suddenly you could hear (and even meet and play with) Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley, the band lost its way. They depended, for their force, on a body-memory of those early cravings for music they knew only by rumor and innuendo. Other cravings, for drugs and fame, were not sufficient, and had much more dire downsides. The early Stones were in a constant huddle, dissecting blues songs in front of the speakers and playing them back for each other and then for their few fans. They thought of themselves, not even as a band, really, but as a way of distributing music the radio never played.

The Spirit of Knowledge: Lecture Video

A few weeks ago I spent time with the Society of Vineyard Scholars when they met in Seattle. One of the many things they did well was commit to some quality audio and video recording of various sessions. I'm happy to share this production of my evening plenary talk, "The Spirit of Knowledge: Outline of a Charismatic Epistemology," which samples and expands on some themes from Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy.

SVS 2011 Plenary #3: James K. A. Smith from Society of Vineyard Scholars on Vimeo.

Interview @ the Evangelical Philosophical Society Blog

FYI: The first part of a multi-part interview about my new book, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy, has just been posted at the blog of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

Joe Gorra, who I met last week at the Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, asks some helpful questions about the connections between and Thinking in Tongues and Desiring the Kingdom, and helps get at some of the background to this project.

Architectural Criticism: On Gehry's Manhattan Tower

Frank Gehry is an architect that people love to hate, mainly because he is one of the few contemporary American architects who has become a "brand"--to the point that you keep waiting for a Gehry design line to start showing up in a Target store near you (a la Michael Graves). Associating your name with Disney certainly doesn't help.

But I was doubly impressed by Nicolai Ouroussoff's NYT piece about Gehry's new Manhattan tower. "Doubly" impressed because, on the one hand, I think Ouroussoff's article is an excellent little work of architectural criticism and because, on the other hand, he made me sympathetic to Gehry in a way I haven't been before. While he notes that Gehry's residential tower seems "to epitomize the skyline’s transformation from a symbol of American commerce to a display of individual wealth," he goes on to note:

The building is particularly mesmerizing from the Brooklyn waterfront, where it’s possible to make out one of the deep setbacks that give the building its reassuringly old-fashioned feel. In daylight the furrowed surfaces of the facades look as if they’ve been etched by rivulets of water, an effect that is all the more dramatic next to the clunky 1980s glass towers just to the south. Closer up, from City Hall Park, the same ripples look softer, like crumpled fabric.

(The flat south facade is comparatively conventional, and some may find perverse enjoyment in the fact that the building presents its backside to Wall Street.)

The power of the design only deepens when it is looked at in relation to Gilbert’s Woolworth building. A steel frame building clad in neo-Gothic terra-cotta panels, Gilbert’s masterpiece is a triumphant marriage between the technological innovations that gave rise to the skyscraper and the handcrafted ethos of an earlier era.

While the undulating exterior immediately brought to mind Chicago's Aqua Tower, more pointedly Ouroussoff sees a "statement" in Gehry's design:

The building’s endlessly shifting surfaces are an attack against the kind of corporate standardization so evident in the buildings to the south and the conformity that it embodied. He aims, as he has throughout his career, to replace the anonymity of the assembly line with an architecture that can convey the infinite variety of urban life. The computer, in his mind, is just a tool for reasserting that variety.

I've added the building to my hoped-for architectural tour when I visit Manhattan in May.

A Secular Age: The Seminar

This semester I have the privilege of leading what is informally known in my department as "senior seminar": a capstone course for our majors that gives us freedom to design a one-off course, usually focused on some aspect of our current research. In the fall semester this is focused on a topic; in the spring on a figure. I've been waiting 9 years for the opportunity and this spring I'm teaching PHIL 396: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Those who are interested can take a peek at the syllabus.

As part of the seminar, I've created a course blog: asecularage.blogspot.com. My hope is that this will be a space for us to continue our conversations about the book. It will also be a venue for students to share the fruits of independent research on how the rest of Taylor's corpus is reflected in this magnum opus.

Since we'll be posting some summaries and engagements with the text as we go along, others might find the site of interest. If everything goes well (no guarantees!), the blog could function as a bit of a reader's guide to A Secular Age. Comments are open on the blog, so if you're interested, feel free to join the conversation: it could be a little way for students to have interaction beyond their professor and peers.

Cultural Liturgies, Vol. 1.5

I'm just returning from a few days at the Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, which was exhausting but also a blessing. Good people with an exciting vision of how reflection can serve the church's mission: sign me up for more of that. I've also never had a speaking engagement in which I've felt more cared for, buoyed by prayer. I return tired but grateful.

When I was invited to be one of the keynote speakers for the conference, they asked me to do some talks that would draw on themes from both Desiring the Kingdom and Thinking in Tongues because both books were addressing themes of interest to Vineyard folk: DTK picks up on "kingdom" themes that are important to Vineyard theology (tracing back to the influence of George Eldon Ladd's eschatology on John Wimber); and Thinking in Tongues intersects with Vineyard's emphases on the gifts of the Spirit and charismatic experience.

But not until I was putting these things together did I realize something. While I'm at work on volume 2 of the Cultural Liturgies trilogy (of which Desiring the Kingdom is the first), in an important way Thinking in Tongues is already a kind of sequel to DTK insofar as it further develops some of the epistemological implications of the anthropology sketched in DTK--particularly a "narrative" epistemology which makes sense of the centrality of affect and emotion in our construal of the world. I also undertake some methodological experiments in the book that resonate with my claims about the imagination in Desiring the Kingdom.

But unfortunately, a lot of folks who've read Desiring the Kingdom wouldn't necessarily read Thinking in Tongues. So I'm going to start describing Thinking in Tongues as volume 1.5 of the Cultural Liturgies project!

Letters to the Young

I was both honored and intrigued when my friends at Comment approached me with an invitation to guest edit a special issue of the magazine. Their idea was to produce an entire issue inspired by the genre of Letters to a Young Calvinist. And so we came up with "Letters to a Young," the March 2011 issue of Comment. I'm really pleased with the results.

On the inside, this issue features letters written to young people across an array of vocations. You'll find

• a letter to a young farmer by Norman Wirzba,
  
• a letter to a young philosopher by Alvin Plantinga,
  
• a letter to a young musician by Charlie Peacock,
  
• a letter to a young film critic by Jeffrey Overstreet,
  
• a letter to a young pastor by Jim Belcher,

and many more. Check out the full table of contents to get a sense of the range of vocations and writers.

I'm also really pleased with the outside of the issue--the cover. I was able to recruit a local illustrator, Rebecca Green, to do an original piece for this issue. Deanna and I have long been a fan of Rebecca's work: two small pieces entitled "Keep the Love Alive" hang in our living room. So it's a treat to introduce her work to a new audience.

Single copies are available for purchase; but better yet, subscribe to Comment now and receive "Letters to the Young" as your first issue.