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.

Calvin Symposium on Worship

Later this week I'll be heavily involved in the Calvin Symposium on Worship, an annual event organized by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. It regularly brings 1400 people, from across the continent and around the world, to west Michigan on the last weekend of January (!). This year the Congregational Resource Guide will be onsite and regularly sharing news and resources from the symposium.

I'll be doing two plenaries and several workshops, but there are a ton of great things happening--more sessions than I can even possibly attend (check out the program). Here's just a snippet of some of the offerings that piqued my interest:

One of the other plenary sessions: Just Worship—Ruth Padilla deBorst (Central America), Mary Mikhael (Middle East), and Jerry Pillay (South Africa), moderated by Scott Hoezee
We will listen to the cry of the prophet Isaiah, voicing God’s call to God’s people regarding the true nature of worship and the inextricable bond between our relationship with God and our relationship with one another, and particularly with the most downtrodden among us.

Christian Worship in 4th Century Jerusalem: Premodern Wisdom for Postmodern Times—Lester Ruth and Carrie Steenwyk
What might an ancient church have to say for renewing our worship today? We’ll look at how Jerusalem in the 4th century worshiped, including descriptions and resources from that time, to think about new possibilities today.

Parachurch vs. Church: A False Dichotomy?—Todd Cioffi, moderator, with Eric Kuiper and Andy McCoy
How should we think about the relationship between the local church and parachurch ministries, especially in regard to worship practices? What should the relationship be between worship “outside” the church and worship “inside” the church? What are the strengths and weaknesses of parachurch ministries? What can the church learn from parachurch ministry and worship? These and other questions will be considered by a panel of scholars and parachurch leaders.

“Blessed is the Congregation That….” Wisdom for Worship Planners Worldwide—Jerry Pillay and Anne Zaki
The sharing of proverbs and wise sayings is a common practice in many cultures, both in oral and written forms. Join this conversation about the gifts, challenges, strengths and weaknesses of local worship practices, guided by the new working statement on worship adopted by the World Communion of Reformed Churches. Learn how your congregation can both learn from and contribute to the international conversation.

Creative Ideas for Using the Psalms with People with Intellectual Disabilities—Joyce Borger and Nella Uitvlugt
The psalms are the prayer book for all Christians and have as much to say to the person with the Ph.D. as the person with intellectual disabilities. The psalms give voice to both the praise and lament of all God’s children. In this session we will look at ways to assist people with intellectual disabilities to enter into the psalms and make them their own, using a multisensory method of music, drama, and visual ideas. This study of Psalms has a broad use within the Christian community.

Faith: Make it Stick—Lynn Barger Elliott
Recent studies conducted by Christian Smith and interpreted by Kenda Creasy Dean tell us an “alternate form” of Christianity has taken up residency in our youth ministries and churches. This corrupted form has cultivated a faith that is “nice,” “convenient” and “undemanding.” The results are a weakened church and an absent generation of young adults. We will explore Dean’s analysis of the current state of youth ministry and her recommendations for youth ministry.

If you're not able to join us, start planning for next year and follow along this year through the Congregational Resource Guide.

Answers to More Questions about the New Calvinism

Here are a couple more video answers to some questions posed by readers at the Brazos Press Facebook Page.

Q from Devan DeCicco: ‎"Calvinism" (as distinct from Reformed) has always been around - you could listen to Calvinist preachers on the radio and read their books. What, then, has caused this resurgence in interest? To which cultural, ecclesiological, theological, political, and other factors would you point?



Q from Mason Slater: Do you think that some of what attracts people to the new calvinism might be not that far off from what attracts others to the emerging/emergent church?
That on some level both are a response to a church that shunned deep thought and hard questions?

Super/Natural: A Response to Berger

I appreciated Peter Berger's mention of my new book, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy, over at his blog at The American Interest (HT: to my friend, Harry Lew). The context or foil is Rudolf Bultmann's oft-cited (and much maligned) claim that underwrote the project of demythologization: “It is impossible to use electric light and radio, to call upon modern medicine in case of illness, and at the same time to believe in the world of spirits and miracles of the New Testament." It was just this sort of dichotomy that also underwrote the misguided "secularization thesis" (R.I.P.). But as Berger goes on to note, this claim has been "massively falsified":

The world today is full of millions of electricity- and radio-users who have no difficulty believing in spirits and miracles—and not only in the less-developed regions of the planet. To be sure, there is a sort of official secular worldview, supposedly based on science, that is propagated by the educational system, the media and (to some extent) the law. But huge numbers of people are capable of, as it were, holding two worldviews in tandem: Yes, much or even most of the time, reality is a closed system of causal relations. I go to my doctor, assuming that he will diagnose and treat me as “a case” in such a system. But I make very different assumptions when I also pray to a God who is not bound by this system, and who can intervene in it either directly (“miraculously”) or indirectly (via the actions of my doctor). In other words, Bultmann flunks as an amateur sociologist or psychologist of modern man. Given this fact, what he actually proposes is that we should find the mythological worldview “impossible”—which is a very different matter.

Berger sees Pentecostalism as the most blatant counter-evidence to Bultmann's thesis. As he rightly observes,

For quite a few years now I have been fascinated by and studied the worldwide explosion of Pentecostalism, whose worldview precisely fits Bultmann’s definition of mythology. My interest has been that of a sociologist of contemporary religion. Pentecostalism has no personal or theological appeal to me. But more and more I have come to see that Pentecostalism, broadly speaking, is becoming the norm rather than the exception of world Christianity. The demographic center of Christianity is shifting to the Global South (Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia). In contrast with the Global North (Europe and North America, where indeed many Christians live in a “demythologized” world), Christianity in the Global South is characterized by a massive supernaturalism. One could say that more and more Christians in the world today are becoming “Pentecostalized”, way beyond the churches that explicitly define themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic. What is also happening is that this type of religion is becoming more sophisticated intellectually, as an inevitable consequence of social and educational mobility.

I'm encouraged that Berger sees a growing theological and intellectual maturation in global pentecostalism. He cites the work of my friend, Veli-Matti Kaerkkaeinen, but should have also noted the important work of my dear friend, Amos Yong. And I was encouraged that he sees Thinking in Tongues as further evidence of these trends:

The other book is Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy, by James Smith, who teaches philosophy at Calvin College in Michigan, another significant Evangelical center. Smith makes an argument, both erudite and feisty, which directly challenges the “naturalist” (precisely “demythologized”) assumptions of contemporary philosophy.

My only addendum would be a slight caution: Berger is right that I challenge naturalisms of various stripes. But from the context of his discussion, one might thereby conclude that I argue for a "supernaturalism," whereas in fact the argument in the book (particularly in chapter 4) is also a critique of supernaturalism--or more specifically, what I describe as "interventionist supernaturalism." My point is that implicit in pentecostal spirituality is an ontology that eschews both naturalism and its contrary, supernaturalism, offering instead an "enchanted naturalism," a sense that nature is en-Spirited. In other words, implicit in pentecostal spirituality is an ontology that challenges the nature/supernature distinction. (Thus I suggest there are some surprising resonances with la nouvelle théologie.) Perhaps one could say that within a consistent pentecostal worldview, the cosmos is not "interrupted" by supernature; rather, nature is always already "porous" (following Charles Taylors' account of enchantment in A Secular Age, p. 35).

The upshot is still consistent with Berger's claim and concerns, but I think it offers a more nuanced account that avoids letting pentecostal spirituality seem merely like ressentiment vis-a-vis naturalism.

The Incarnation is Local: On the Poetry of John Rybicki

Comment has just published my article on the work of local poet, John Rybicki. Here's the opening snippet:

I was chaining my bike outside Literary Life, our local treasure of an independent bookstore, and was delighted to run into Rick and Brenda Beerhorst, our resident neighbourhood artists and activists who have been catalysts for redemption and joy right here in the southeast corner of Grand Rapids, Michigan. We were all there to enjoy a reading from a local poet who was unfamiliar to me. Rick, with a hint of desperation in his voice, was leaving a series of messages for his friend John, but I was eager to get inside for the reading, which would begin at any moment.

Just before I excused myself, a wiry, somewhat gnarled character made his way up the sidewalk, his white T-shirt a mess of dirt and oil. Rick seemed to sigh in relief. "Where have you been?" he asked, perplexed and just a little perturbed. And pretty soon I realized I didn't have to rush into the reading: here was our poet, John Rybicki.

This image of the poet-as-auto-mechanic is indelibly inscribed in my mind when I think of John Rybicki's work. Indeed, it is the perfect context in which to hear him, for the connection and contradiction is embedded in his oeuvre as well. Consider, for example, "Tire Shop Poem," in his marvellous collection, We Bed Down Into Water (with a cover graced with a Rick Beerhorst engraving). The poem ends with a flourish of lyrical delight that pulls holiness from the middle of the workaday, finding the music in the mundane (do yourself a favour and read this out loud):

I catch his dare and rubber roll
a tire up my calf and pop

the center cap, clamp and spin,
hammer lead weights onto rim

after dizzying rim. I lug nut smash
and flick the pry bar from one hand

to the next. Fred Astaire in a
tire shop, where we slap our boots

across all that slop to outdistance
fire, outdistance that burning bush

that follows us everywhere.

Read the rest of "The Incarnation is Local."

Favorite Novels in 2010

5. James Frey, Bright Shiny Morning. OK, let me explain a little back story here: first, I found myself sequestered in a Target store, looking for anything to distract me. Second, anyone who has lived in Los Angeles can attest that the cover image on the hardcover of this book intangibly captures the strange light of a crystal-clear L.A. morning. So then third, when I opened the book looking for distraction, within a few pages I was hooked by Frey's colloquial minimalism, though this is probably partly due to nostalgia: the novel describes spaces in L.A. that used to be home for me. So this novel was a way of returning. But for a novel that's probably mediocre at best, Frey does an excellent job of capturing the overwhelming ugliness of Los Angeles--something that would surprise those who know it only from its glitzy PR tentacles in Hollywood and television. Frey is a cartographer of the strip mall geography that is southern California, and an anthropologist of its underbelly.

4. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow. An aging hedonist reconsiders an Italian bohemian romp in the summer of 1970, zooming out to assess the so-called "sexual revolution" on a larger scale--all constructed around the story of Narcissus as told in Ted Hughes' rendering in Tales of Ovid. The perfect platform for Amis' cutting humor and curmudgeonly criticism. The image of the "pregnant widow" is itself suggestive of a strange transition: impregnated by a father no longer alive, the impending child will emerge in a world fundamentally different from the one in which he was conceived. The novel is perhaps at its best when it morphs into a reflection on aging.

3. Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage. I read this after hearing Yglesias on NPR, and in light of teaching a course on marriage, family, and singleness. It is the story told from two ends, cutting back and forth between two periods until they converge: the beginning of their marriage and the end of his wife's life, dying of cancer. The mechanics of this back-and-forth work very well. But the "novel" tracks frustratingly close to Yglesias' own experience with his dying wife so I found myself constantly falling into the trap of reading it as if it were a memoir (sort of the inverse of Frey's Million Little Pieces). Furthermore, on the mechanics front, while this is written in the third person, we don't get any interior insight into any characters except Enrique, the husband. So this is turns out to be a Bob Dole narrator, Enrique talking about himself in the third person. This might also explain the blurring between memoir and novel: Yglesias perhaps thought shifting to an omniscient narrator makes it a novel, but this narrator is still functionally Enrique (aka Yglesias).

But despite those frustrations with form, the story is an honest portrait of the slog that is a marriage, with all its frustrations and joys. Enrique steps up when it counts and unfortunately only learns what it means to be married in the final moments of their story together. We are made privy to Enrique's unfolding revelations of the gift he's been given in Margaret, and one begins to see why marriage is a sacrament.

2. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. Finally. I knew Freedom was on its way, and came to appreciate the friendship and collaboration between Franzen and DFW, so that also got me intrigued. Overall, I'd have to say I was disappointed with Franzen as a stylist (why am I always still looking for Updike?), but was impressed with his narrative abilities. Having come to Franzen from Wallace, the structure seemed pretty pedestrian, but when you step back and compare to others, there's some creative framing of time, and the discrete narratives focused on characters (first Chip, then Gary, then Enid & Alfred, finally Denise) are brought together in a satisfying way in the final "act" as it were.

I think what most sticks with me is Franzen's ability to capture the essence of "midwesternness." While Enid & Alfred embody this, one also sees how this "midwesternness"--its sense of duty, its repression, its guilt--infects even the children who've made it to the coast. You can take the child out of the midwest, but...

1. Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story. My favorite read of the year. As I said earlier: A quirky, prescient story set in the not-too-distant future. Comprised of the diary of Lenny Ambramov, interspersed with the "GlobalTeens" (aka Facebook?) communications of his girlfriend, Eunice Park, the book extrapolates from our current cultural trends to imagine the future dystopia of what will be left of the United States, or more specifically, New York City. It is a world where people are publicly identified by their Credit Ranking, where nation-states have been replaced by corporations (compare Atwood's Year of the Flood, and where the United States has become entirely enfolded into China (with sections parceled out to Norway).

Shteyngart's social commentary is oblique and allusive, again projecting from our current cultural habits into an imagined future. One might describe it as the ubiquitization of a Facebook sensibility, where everything is made public--our Credit Rankings are displayed on "credit poles" that line the street; our emotions and thoughts are made public on äppäräts dangling from our necks; and nothing is left to the imagination as all the young women are wearing transparent "onionskin" jeans.

The story also tackles the identity issues of the 1.5 immigrant generation: Lenny the child of Russian Jews but raised on Long Island; Eunice the daughter of Korean Christians, raised in southern California, transplanted to New Jersey. And in the midst of all of this, Lenny works for a company that is sorting out the science of immortality. Fertile soil for philosophical and theological reflection.

The novel combines strong narrative force with exquisite attention to detail. There are a couple of mechanical moves late in the book that I found lazy and a bit disappointing from a formal standpoint, but these don't obscure its strengths. I hope to write much more on the novel elsewhere.

Favorite Nonfiction in 2010

Most of my "professional" reading (which I don't usually chronicle here) falls into the "nonfiction" category. So my reading "for pleasure" tends to be thinner in this area. But here are five standouts (with one hat-tip to a professional book worth mentioning):

5. David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology. I'll give one shout out to a theology book--as I noted earlier, this is a masterpiece that will need to be digested for a generation.

4. Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel. This little tome--really an extended essay--was mentioned in the introduction to a collection of Wolfe's letters. And then lo and behold I came across it at MacLeod's Books in downtown Vancouver (if you're ever in Vancouver, do NOT miss the chance to visit MacLeod's). In it Wolfe, in his inimitable blend of charming narcissism, recounts the story behind and around the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, a wending tale of drama and relationships. And in the midst of this I was taken aback by a passage which instantly explained why Look Homeward, Angel had become so important to me:

"From the beginning--and this was one fact that in all my times of hopelessness returned to fortify my faith in my conviction--the idea, the central legend that I wished my book to express had not changed. And this central idea was this: the deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man's search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united" (p. 39).

While critics would seize upon this as evidence of Wolfe's Freudian modernism, I hear in it an Augustinian parable.

3. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. This is a strange book: really just a cumulative, chronological assemblage of news clippings leading up to the entry of the United States into World War II. A haunting, non-theological refutation of the so-called "What about Hitler?" refutation of pacifism. While I think Baker is somewhat given to a rather utopian notion about the "effectiveness" of pacifism, he nonetheless recounts why and how World War II did not have to be, and how the Allies were certainly not concerned with saving "the Jews."

2. Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. A solid collection of Smith's prose (some of these essays will be familiar to readers of Harper's and New York Review of Books). The long concluding essay on David Foster Wallace is as insightful as it is controversial, and "The Crafty Feeling"--on the craft of writing--is worth the price of the book all by itself.

1. David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. It was strange to read this a month after reading Wolfe's The Story of a Novel. This is almost the DFW equivalent: Lipsky, commissioned to interview Wallace for Rolling Stone, spends five days with him at the conclusion of the book tour following the release of Infinite Jest. There's a price to pay to enjoy this book: you will end up pretty much detesting the parasitic Lipsky, fawning over Wallace while at the same time trying to keep up with his genius, trying to feel like "the writer" that Wallace has just become. But tolerating Lipsky is well worth it for what amounts to a lit geek's wet dream: hangin' out with David Foster Wallace who has to be one of the most lovable creatures of late 20th-century fiction. It's like he never lost that Midwestern accessibility and earthiness. (Indeed, something like this becomes a theme of conversation: "It's way beter for me to be living in Bloomington," Wallace recognizes.)

It will be no surprise to hear that Wallace's conversational voice is as supercharged as his writing. And in his various riffs you get to hear the sorts of original metaphors and neologisms that cut to the heart of things--like when he talks about the rare kind of book that activates "that kind of stomach magic" that makes you say, "God damn, it's fun to read. I'd rather read right now than eat"--or when he talks about the force of music that gives you "an erection of the heart" (some way, some how, that is making it into the sequel to Desiring the Kingdom!).

By the end of it, you'll feel like Lipsky: sorry it has to end. Which is also how we feel about the life and writing of David Foster Wallace.

Favorite Poetry in 2010

5. Sherman Alexie, Face. I'm a late comer to Alexie, but was immediately hooked. Granted, in the vein of Billy Collins, Alexie is probably one of our most accessible poets, but without the schmaltz of, say, Mary Oliver. I found this collection sincere and searingly honest, opening up worlds for me that would otherwise have remain unexplored territory.

4. Scott Cairns, Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected. I have a dirty little confession to make: if a lot of Christians like a poet, I tend to avoid him/her like the plague. Yes, yes, I know it's stupid and sophomoric and obnoxious. But I've just seen too much Luci Shaw in chapel. For a long time, unfortunately, Scott Cairns fell into that category for me, until someone gifted me with a copy of Compass of Affection. Mea culpa: I should have been reading him long ago. None of the tired cliches I worried about. Indeed, not even the "spiritual" fixation I expected.

3. Jeanne Murray Walker, New Tracks, Night Falling. Ditto for Jeanne Murray Walker. And mea culpa redux. Walker and I were both teaching at Regent College last summer. I was immediately charmed by the person, and then when I had the opportunity to hear her read from these poems, I was captivated. Several of these poems were constant companions through a difficult summer. "Adam's Choice" is probably my favorite but I can't find it available online. Fortunately another favorite is, "Staying Power":

In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929

Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say

all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God. And then as if I'm focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there

that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire
until I have to spend the afternoon dragging
the hose to put the smoldering thing out.
Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls,

tells me they've found melanoma,
complains that the hospital is cold, I say God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out.
Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,

wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which—though they say it doesn't
exist—can send you straight to the burn unit.

Oh, we have only so many words to think with.
Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's
a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be.

You don't want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up

and a voice you love whispers hello.

2. Michael Robbins in Poetry, December 2010 (The Q&A Issue). This was a late discovery for me. While I was initially skeptical of the very premise of the Q&A issue (if you want to know what a poem means, don't ask the poet; read the poem), but Robbins' feisty charm only deepened my delight with his semantic energy lexical play. Give yourself permission to lose yourself for a moment in "I Did This to My Vocabulary" (and then listen to Robbins' thoughts about the poem):

The moon is my alibi. My tenders throw hissy fits.
My scalp’s at the foot of the precipice.
My lume is spento, there’s a creep in my cellar.
You can stand under my umbrella, Ella.

Who put pubic hair on my headphones?
Who put the ram in Ramallah?
I’m just sitting here spinning my spinning wheels—
where are the snow tires of tomorrow?

The llama is burning! My heart is an ovary!
Let’s chase dawn’s tail across state lines,
sing “Crimson and Clover” over and overy,
till wonders are taken for road signs.

My fish, fast and loose, shoot fish in a kettle.
The boys like the girls who like heavy metal.
On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom,
on Motörhead, Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem . . .

1. The Best American Poetry 2009, edited by David Wagoner. It might seem odd to extol one of these stock anthologies as a top pick, but this is just a downright exemplary collection--an almost perfect collection, given the constraints of the series. Wagoner does a masterful job of pulling together a widely representative collection, including both senior and junior poets, stars and up-and-comers, as well as poets from a wide range of regions in the United States. In other words, none of the typical New-York-centrism here. And thankfully, this isn't another anthology of "the best of recent MFA graduates." The reader should carefully consider the "Contributors' Notes and Comments" (45 pages worth!) to gain an appreciation for the breadth represented here. Wagoner also valorizes online publishing by selecting poems that only previously appeared in e-magazines. I'm guessing avant garde aficionados will think their favorites are under-represented; I wish I could muster the sympathy to agree with them.

I can't recommend this collection highly enough. You'll find favorites like John Ashberry and Albert Goldbarth and Bob Hicok, as well as less familiar names (at least to me) like Bruce Bond and Jennifer Grotz. At the risk of doing injustice to others in the collection that deserve attention, let me note just one, Grotz's poem, "The Record":

Kisses, too, tasted of iron
the year we lived in twilights. They tilted warily
like bags of groceries I’d carry up the stairs
to find you in boxers, the smell of coffee mixed with vinegar
from the bowl of pickle juice you soaked your fingers in
trying to hurry the callouses. We trafficked in the grief
of incompatible day and night, we stretched the hours
as best we could, but mostly we practiced
a kind of starving, excruciating to recall
how hard we tried. I’d unpack the groceries
and tell you about the day, and after dinner
you’d pick out a tune on the guitar
(it was the year you apprenticed to the blues).
Before each night shift, in uniform and socks,
you’d climb into bed and hold me until I fell asleep.
Then you would slip quietly out.
and when I dreamed, I glimpsed the gods in you,
I dreamt you were Hephaestus with the iron forge,
the sweat covering you when you jogged home
was holy, it was the sweat of the whole city,
even the roses, even the bus exhaust.
The mind circles back like a record spinning,
a little molten, a little wobbly, a record
shiny as your black hair, a record player
crackling and stuttering over a scratch, an urge
to ask forgiveness even though it’s dark now
and you’ve already forgiven me.

Favorite Short Stories in 2010

As with almost all of these categories, it's tough to narrow down to just five favorites, but here goes:

5. Thomas Wolfe, "The Lost Boy," in The American Short Story, ed. Thomas K. Parkes. I've got a big soft spot for Thomas Wolfe, so it's difficult for me to be objective. This story presages the death of the older brother in Look Homeward, Angel and shows the flashes of energy and passion that characterize Wolfe's later corpus.

4. Alice Munro, "Corrie," New Yorker (October 11, 2010). A Saskatchewan affair, but with a Joyce-Carol-Oatesish twist at the end.

3. Jonathan Safran Foer, "How We Aren't, So Quickly," in the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" series. 2 pages of second-person, chronological fireworks on a marriage. Fabulous. Gave me new respect for Foer.

And I have to award a tie for the number 1 spot:

1. Carson McCullers, "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories. Here is one of the tiny treasures of American short fiction--a compressed little hymn to love, sort of Evelyn Waugh with a southern accent, but without his snobbishness or verbosity. What McCullers accomplishes here in about 1700 words took Walker Percy an entire novel. Consider just this little snippet as the old man begins to explain his "science" (starts to make Walker Percy look derivative, doesn't it?):

"It is this. And listen carefully. I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with?"

The boy's soft mouth was partly open and he did not answer.

"A woman," the old man said. "Without science, with nothing to go by, they undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God's earth. They fall in love with a woman. Is that correct, Son?"

"Yeah," the boy said faintly.

"They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love?"

The old man reached over and grasped the boy by the collar of his leather jacket. He gave him a gentle little shake and his green eyes gazed down unblinking and grave.

"Son, do you know how love should be begun?"

The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered:

"A tree. A rock. A cloud."

It was still raining outside in the street: a mild, gray, endless rain. The mill whistle blew for the six o'clock shift and the three spinners paid and went away. There was no one in the café but Leo, the old man, and the little paper boy.

I dream of writing a story that could even be a shadow of McCuller's accomplishment.

1. David Foster Wallace, "Good Old Neon," in Oblivion. In.cred.i.ble. Not sure what else to say. It seems to me that this story is at the core of DFW's entire corpus and gets at some of the philosophical and literary problems that occupied Wallace over his entire writing career. Here we get the classic stream-of-consciousness reflections of a recent suicide--the proverbial "final thoughts" in which your life flashes before your eyes, but which now seem to come to us as a postmortem missive. Thus Wallace both appropriates and deconstructs the cliche--a common strategy throughout his work. So "Good Old Neon" is a story that is constantly aware of the seeming impossibility of telling one's story, what the narrator describes as a "paradox":

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one slit-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc.--and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

But maybe that's just enough.

Favorite Reads in 2010

As per my custom over the last several years, I'll spend the next week recounting some of my reading highlights from 2010. I used to do this over at What I'm Reading, but having effectively abandoned that blog, I'll incorporate the tradition here at Fors Clavigera.

I will choose five favorites from four different genres: short stories, poetry, non-fiction, and novels. Only a few of these will be works published in 2010; instead I'm focusing on some of the works that I read in 2010. Watch for them over the next few days.

Super Sad True Love Story

I've never tried posting a review from GoodReads, so thought I'd try a little experiment here:

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A quirky, prescient story set in the not-too-distant future. Comprised of the diary of Lenny Ambramov, interspersed with the "GlobalTeens" (aka Facebook?) communications of his girlfriend, Eunice Park, the book extrapolates from our current cultural trends to imagine the future dystopia of what will be left of the United States, or more specifically, New York City. It is a world where people are publicly identified by their Credit Ranking, where nation-states have been replaced by corporations (compare Atwood's Year of the Flood, and where the United States has become entirely enfolded into China (with sections parceled out to Norway).

Shteyngart's social commentary is oblique and allusive, again projecting from our current cultural habits into an imagined future. One might describe it as the ubiquitization of a Facebook sensibility, where everything is made public--our Credit Rankings are displayed on "credit poles" that line the street; our emotions and thoughts are made public on äppäräts dangling from our necks; and nothing is left to the imagination as all the young women are wearing transparent "onionskin" jeans.

The story also tackles the identity issues of the 1.5 immigrant generation: Lenny the child of Russian Jews but raised on Long Island; Eunice the daughter of Korean Christians, raised in southern California, transplanted to New Jersey. And in the midst of all of this, Lenny works for a company that is sorting out the science of immortality. Fertile soil for philosophical and theological reflection.

The novel combines strong narrative force with exquisite attention to detail. There are a couple of mechanical moves late in the book that I found lazy and a bit disappointing from a formal standpoint, but these don't obscure its strengths. I hope to write much more on the novel elsewhere.



View all my reviews

Answers to Questions about the New Calvinism

'Tis the season for JKAS videos, I guess. Some might recall that Brazos offered a little giveaway on their Facebook page, soliciting questions in connections with Letters to a Young Calvinist. We recorded short video responses to four questions, and the first two are now available.

Q from Ben Dodd: Are there 1 or 2 things you would like to see the New Calvinist movement in North America learn from the growing Pentecostal movement in the Non-western world? How might they influence one another for the better?



Q: from Rodney A. Thomas Jr.: In terms of ecclesiology, could you address the role that Calvinist theology, the New Calvinists and Neo-Calvinism can play in working to create a more racially inclusive church here in the United States?

The Politics of the (New) Unconscious

While I've been critical of Mark Lilla in the past, his article in last week's New York Times Magazine, "The President and the Passions," hits the nail on the head. In a way reminiscent of Charles Taylor's critique of "intellectualist" philosophies of action, Lilla notes that Obama's failures might stem from his over-estimation of the role of ideas and information. Commenting on Obama's diagnosis of the landslide defeat in November, which Obama chalked up to the inability of the populace to get their facts straight, Lilla suggests:

If this is the way the president and his party think about human psychology, it’s little wonder they’ve taken such a beating. Their assumption seems to be that we are basically rational creatures who, left to our own devices, have little trouble discerning what our interests are and how to serve them. It’s only when our passions get the better of us, when we are angry or fearful or exuberant, that we make bad decisions. That’s really what’s the matter with Kansas, and with the Tea Party activists. So the administration has to work harder to “get the message out” and “sell” its program; to calm people it needs to give them clearer, more complete and more attractively packaged information about how it is working in their interests. Bring in the pie charts, by all means, but print them on glossier paper.

Thus Lilla takes Obama to task for a misguided psychology or what we might call a mistaken philosophical anthropology. As Lilla continues,

The wisdom of [Obama's] approach depends on whether the underlying assumption about human nature is right. But is it? Not, at least, according to virtually every Western philosopher and theologian from antiquity to the 18th-century. From Plato to St. Augustine to Thomas Hobbes, the shared assumption was that human beings are fundamentally passionate creatures and that reason alone is too weak to contain our drives.

The proper response to this is not to lapse into the rationalist whine about people being governed by their passions and keep hoping they'll be be "rational" like us (we're not). Rather, the point is to harness, direct, and channel the passions. Indeed, if you just paint the passions as "irrational," you've already lost. Thus Lilla concludes: "The lesson to be drawn is that the art of politics must be the art of engaging the passions, first by exciting them, then by moderating and directing them to a worthy end, one that reason may reveal but cannot achieve."

Might the art of worship or the art of discipleship be the same?

Lilla closes with an elliptical little story:

George Plimpton used to tell the story of Muhammad Ali going to Harvard one year to give an address. At the end of his speech, someone called out to him, “Give us a poem!” He paused, stretched out his arms to the audience and delivered what Plimpton said was the shortest poem in the English language:

ME [pause]

WE!

The students would have followed him anywhere.

Video excerpts from U of Ottawa lecture

David Robinson, maestro behind The House, the Anglican campus ministry at the University of Ottawa, alerted me to a few clips from my recent lecture, "Beyond A/Theism: Postmodernity and the Future of Religion." A DVD of the entire lecture is available from their website.

Ethnography and Theology

"Practical theology," in our still-Schleiermacherian theological curricula, has always been a bit of a stepchild in the seminary--an appendix to the "serious" work of systematic theology and biblical studies, the place in the curriculum for a few tips and tricks about how to conduct a funeral or do hospital visits, the "touchy-feely" enclave down the hall.

Fortunately, this is changing. Indeed, I think "practical theology" is poised to become one of the most interesting and important fields in theology, precisely because the old divisions of labor are eroding. We are rightly beginning to realize (a) that all theology should be "practical" and that "systematic" theology is often a project well lost; and (b) that practical theology has its own rigor which is now beginning to flourish. In a similar way, liturgical theology is no longer just the baroque ornamentation of theology; instead, we are beginning to understand how and why it should be the center of the curriculum. There have been enough developments in this direction that we're already beginning to see backlash and critique, which I take to be a good sign.

One of the most interesting developments in practical theology over the last several years has been an emerging conversation between theology and ethnography--taking the engagement between theology and social science in new directions, with more finely tuned nuances. I think this is a necessary engagement particularly for those who would make a certain ecclesiology central to both the theological task and Christian formation. We simply can't shrink from the fact that, as theologians, we are also making empirical claims about the shape of communities and the effects of practices. That means we're also, in some sense, accountable for those claims--otherwise critics can justly charge us with a kind of idealism and abstraction of which we are sometimes guilty.

I was pressed in this direction by the work of Christian Scharen, first in his book, Public Worship and Public Work--a helpful critique of roughly "Hauerwasian" tendencies to make ecclesiological claims about formation without being accountable to whether those really show up on the ground. His suggestions for a necessary engagement between ecclesiology and ethnography also shows up in an important (appreciative) critique of Milbank, "'Judicious Narratives,' or Ecclesiology as Ethnography," (pdf) published a few years back in the Scottish Journal of Theology. This article is an excellent crystallization of the issues and the parameters of debate. One can also see this intersection of ecclesiology and ethnography in Mary McClintock Fulkerson's book, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church.

I don't mean to suggest that we should just baptize ethnography; nor would I claim that this dialogue between ecclesiology and ethnography is without problems. It can still easily head in the direction of a kind of "Chicago school" (e.g., Don Browning) social-science-foundationalism. But it need not do so. Instead, I see it as a promising trajectory for research.

So I was glad to see that Practical Matters, the online journal in practical theology at Emory, has devoted an entire issue to "Ethnography & Theology"--a great way for newcomers to wade into this growing conversation.

Whence & Whither American Presbyterianism? On Hart and Muether's History

There's a lot at play just in the title of D.G. Hart and John R. Muether's Seeking a Better Country: 300 Years of American Presbyterianism. The title itself is a double entendre. On the one hand, it is a backhanded critique of what they discern as a key failure of American Presbyterianism: its assimilation to American civil religion, making the Presbyterian church little more than a chaplain to either left or right wing versions of Americanism. "Presbyterian cultural warriors," as they summarize, "share the assumption that the role of the church is to maintain and defend American civil religion (of either a conservative or liberal expression)" (247). In short, the "country" that American Presbyterianism became devoted to is the United States of America, and that commitment entailed the dilution of the Reformed identity of the denomination(s).

In contrast, Hart and Muether extol a version of American Presbyterianism that eschews such a confusion of church and state, preserving a commitment to the "spirituality" of the church, and thus seeking that "better country" which is a heavenly city (Hebrews 11:16). Only some American Presbyterians, as the story goes, are really committed to the better "better country."

For this reason, I think the subtitle could have perhaps offered a little more truth in advertising. I can imagine at least a couple that would have clearly delineated the book's argument: "A 'Two Kingdoms' History of American Presbyterianism" captures it; or perhaps: "The Orthodox Presbyterian Church as the Faithful Remnant in American Presbyterianism." But I'm guessing that would have narrowed the audience just a bit.

That said, I came to the book with interest and quite a bit of sympathy for their concerns and critique, though I might not sign up for their implied prescriptions. The tone is decidedly not hagiographic (except for the portrayals of Machen and the OPC); indeed, by the end of the book the authors have told such a woeful tale that they have to look for "silver linings" to lighten the jeremiad with some shred of hope. In the course of the story, there are several themes that emerge that have significant contemporary relevance.

The Long March of Americanization. At the very opening, Hart and Muether set for themselves a puzzle: "why a Protestant communion with doctrinal tenets (i.e., Calvinism) running directly contrary to American ideals of freedom and self-sufficiency became attractive to so many successful Americans" (2). This is a constant thread in the story as they note the gradual and fervent assimilation of American Presbyterianism to "Americanism" and the ideals of political liberalism inherited from Locke. This assimilation takes on new intensity in the Revolutionary era, indicating "an unhealthy identification with and disproportionate allegiance to the United States that would haunt the Presbyterian Church, especially during the Civil War" (82). Akin to what sociologist Stephen Warner calls the "de facto congregationalism" of American Christianity, Hart & Muether note that "Presbyterians in the United States could not escape the anomalies inherent in a voluntary church" (88). Their analysis helps to understand what might be a counter-intuitive notion: that the liberalization of the PCUSA in the 1960s & 70s was actually an expression of the same assimilation (246-247).

Here is where I think their "two kingdom" (2K) sympathies provide a perspectival advantage: it enables them to see the long history of what we might have called American Presbyterianism's "Constantinianism" (before Peter Leithart went and complicated that short-hand use of the term!). Ironically, here 2Kers, Anabaptists, and "Reformed Hauerwasians" like me (believe me, it's a small club) share a similar diagnosis, with very different prescriptions. I think this "blend" can also be seen in many of James Davison Hunter's criticisms in To Change the World.

Liberalism and Evangelicalism Amount to the Same Thing. It's hard for Hart & Muether to cloak their disdain for American revivalism and "New School" Presbyterianism. The descriptions of Whitfield and Finney drip with revulsion. But to their credit, this is not just a matter of taste. Rather, I think one of the real cautionary tales of the book is the way in which "evangelical" ecumenism was just as responsible for the dilution of Reformed theology and identity as "modernism" and liberalism. This sort of analysis was broached earlier in Hart's excellent and under-appreciated book, Deconstructing Evangelicalism--a book that plays a big role in my own discomfort with "evangelicalism" as a descriptor for either a church or a theology. "Evangelicals" in mainline denominations often target the "liberals" or modernists in their midst as the threat to true faith, but then seek to retreat to a kind of pan-conservative, parachurch vagueness as the stand-in for orthodoxy. In Seeking a Better Country, Hart & Muether demonstrate, through historical episodes, how vague appeals to defend "conservative" positions entail losses on the same order as "liberal" agendas for "updating" the faith. Same dilution, different pile.

It's on this score that I think Seeking a Better Country would be instructive reading for those of us in the historically Continental (Dutch) stream of the Reformed tradition, particularly brothers and sisters in the CRC and RCA. Here, too, are heirs of the Reformation that are variously tugged between bland liberal Protestantism and parachurch evangelical pietism. Into this mix, Hart & Muether introduce an important distinction:

In coming to terms with this story, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the pietists and confessional conservatives. Two groups were at odds in the Presbyterian controversy. The Presbyterians who were either uncomfortable with or opposed to the external forms that made Presbyterianism distinct included evangelicals such as Speer and Erdman, who stressed conversion over doctrine, and liberals such as Coffin, who emphasized religious experience over creeds and confessions (203-204).

Confessional conservatives, on this accounting, represent a third way that, from the perspective of the other parties, are easily confused with their nemeses.

The Challenges of Confessional Subscription. The fragmentation of American Presbyterianism, with the rise of "sectarian" denominations such as the OPC, later hinged on matters of confessional subscription and the status of the Westminster standards (217-218). This reflected earlier distinctions between "New School" and "Old School" Presbyterianisms. But by the end of the book, where OPC strict confessional subscription is implicitly endorsed, Hart & Muether seem to have forgotten a sobering lesson from earlier in the story. In the midst of the New/Old School controversies, the Old School party secured a strict confessional requirement for ordained ministers. But as the case of Samuel Hemphill demonstrated, confessional subscription on its own did not guarantee what it sought to secure, namely, confessional orthodoxy. "Despite unanimity on Hemphill's errors, the case did raise questions about the effectiveness of creedal subscription as a means of maintaining the purity of the church. After all, the wayward pastor had subscribed to the Westminster Standards when ordained in Northern Ireland. Then when admitted to the Synod of Philadelphia he reassured his future pastoral colleagues that he had no reservations about the Westminster Confession and Catechisms" (53). This is a sobering vignette for those of us in denominations and institutions that mean to take confessional subscription seriously; but it also seems to be a lesson lost in later in the book.

I have other quibbles and disagreements with the book. The most significant, and unsurprising, will be my skepticism about their valorizaton of "two kingdoms" theology and the constant talk of the "spirituality" of the church. We're not going to settle that here (it's a focus of some of my forthcoming publications). I would only register that Hart & Muether seem to assume a false dichotomy: that somehow concern for "cultural" witness entails aversion to concern for a "thick" ecclesiology and careful attention to liturgical form and theological specificity. I simply think this is a straw man, which explains why I am often very sympathetic to the 2K focus on the specifics of Reformed liturgical theology but demur from their notion that the church is therefore "spiritual" and a-political.

Related to this is a second concern with the book, namely its portrayal of Southern Presbyterianism. In this telling, Southern Presbyterians represent, for a long while at least, the Old School holdouts within American Presbyterianism. But that "orthodox" Presbyterianism was attended by defenses of slavery and segregation along the way. Hart & Muether's 2K sympathies lead them to constantly criticize "activist" versions of Presbyterianism, whether left or right. The result is a picture of the "spiritual" church that seems to be almost "neutral" with respect to the evils and injustices of "this world." Thus they can describe the "activism" that began to beset Southern Presbyterianism as once again a compromise of the "spirituality" of the church. But in doing so, it's hard to see how this doesn't come off as some kind of aversion to questions of slavery and, later, segregation. Thus Hart & Muether can comment:

A modified Calvinism meant a reexamination of the spirituality of the church. In 1935 the General Assembly redefined the doctrine to expand the church's social witness. The Assembly reasoned that the church could not fulfill its "spiritual function" unless it "deals with those actual evils in the individual life, and in the social order, which threaten man's moral and spiritual development." A socially active church in the South, in turn, could not ignore the problem of race (232).

But given that they have consistently criticized a "socially active church" (as compromising its "spiritual" calling), it's hard not to conclude that they would have thought it virtuous to "ignore" the problem of race. This, it seems to me, is one of the serious outcomes of 2K theologies: a big theological justification for the status quo. (What would a 2K approach have meant for apartheid in South Africa?)

Even with those concerns in mind, I commend the book, perhaps especially to non-Presbyterians. I especially think that my confreres in the CRC and RCA might find in this story a bit of a mirror, and thus a cautionary tale.

On Flash Mobs and Secular Liturgies

A number of folks have been sending me links to the various viral videos that document "flash mob" performances of Handel's Messiah in mall food courts and department stores. Here's a sample:



These are coming to me, I'm guessing, because Desiring the Kingdom opens with an extensive analysis of the "liturgy" of the mall--outlining how the visceral, affective rituals of the mall constitute the worship practices of the consumer gospel, training and forming our desires and longings, and thus actually shaping our identities.

I also criticize North American evangelicalism, particularly in many of its megachurch versions, for unwittingly reducing Jesus to one more commodity precisely because, in the name of "relevance," they've adopted a worship "style" that simply mimics the mall. Since I think the form/content distinction is specious, you can't simply take Gospel "content" and drop it into the "form" of the mall's worship because that form is already loaded and primed to another end or telos. This doesn't make the the church relevant; it reduces Jesus to a commodity.

So what to make of these irruptions of the Messiah in the food court? How should we think about these insertions of the church's music in the mall? Does this represent a little "redemption" of the mall, a reorientation of the mall's liturgies?

I don't think so. For at least a couple of reasons.

First, while we might associate this with "liturgical," high-churchy music, in these flash mob performances it only functions as an event. Liturgies are formative precisely because they are repetitive, shaping us over time within the context of the Christian story as it is "carried" in the practices of worship. Too much of North American evangelicalism already thinks of worship as merely an expressive event, and these flash mob events do nothing to displace that.

Second, these irruptive events do nothing to counter the formative effects and disordered telos of the mall's consumerism. Indeed if anything, they provide comfort to such practices--injecting a little dose of transcendence into the frantic pursuit for stuff, thus leaving the shoppers to happily continue on their way after the event.

The church's worship cannot be reduced to--and should not be confused with--a flash mob. (I'm tempted to make a jab at Barthian notions of revelation as an "event" here, but will resist.) If the liturgies of the mall are going to be countered, it will take the plodding, faithful presence of the Spirit in practices that will never be exciting enough to go viral on YouTube.

Letter to a Young Baptist

Dear Baptist Reviewer,

Thanks very much for your interest in Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition--and for taking the time to read my little tome of missives. I really appreciate that you're willing to engage the book. In many ways, it was written with you in mind. I know we don't cross paths all that often: I inhabit a Reformed world that doesn't tend to intersect with your corner of "Reformedom." I knew the book was a bit of a risk and a wager in that regard: an attempt to build bridges where they either don't exist, or at least strengthen collaboration where such bridges remain rather ramshackle, precarious rope-and-sticks connections.

So I really do appreciate your review, and I'm grateful for the positive things you have to say about the book, despite our obvious differences. I tried hard to write the book in a pastoral tone, with an intentional concern about pedagogy: that's why the letters are arranged in a way to bring the reader slowly through what constitutes a cumulative argument about the shape of the Reformed tradition.

And as you rightly note, there is an argument there: I am admittedly pushing back a bit on the so-called "resurgence of Reformed theology," pressing the issue of just what counts as "Reformed." But please note, I'm not doing so in order to call in the "truly Reformed" police force, but because I genuinely think there are aspects of the Reformed theological heritage that have been underappreciated by the young Baptist crowd enthusiastic about TULIP. Reformed theology is a many-splendored thing, and my goal is not to draw new boundaries and issue official "Reformed identity" cards. (Believe me, if the "truly Reformed" police get called in, you and I are both getting thrown in the paddy wagon.) Rather, my hope was that, by showing you new and unfamiliar sides of the Reformed tradition, you might find treasures that were buried still deeper than the TULIP bulbs.

As I said, this is the argument of the book. And if I had one wish, it would be that your review might have treated the book as an argument. As it stands, your review tends to simply treat this as a matter of taste, a matter of preference. So rather than criticizing the argument, you tend to simply point out where, "as a Baptist," you "disagree." Or you simply signal for your readers where I "cross the line," or where I diverge from what "counts" as Reformed in your orbit.

But let me just say, for the future, that what would be most helpful is not simply pointing out where you disagree--since that's no surprise and doesn't really advance the conversation. What would be interesting to hear is how and why you disagree--and, more importantly, how you would begin to refute the argument the book is trying to make. I would welcome that , not because I love polemics (well, I do a little bit, but I'm not proud of the fact. ;-) but because I think you'll better serve our readers--both of your review and my book--by engaging the argument rather than simply naming "positions."

My hope is that Letters to a Young Calvinist could be the beginning of a conversation, rather than a conversation stopper. And so I write with that goal in mind. I hope you'll receive this letter in that spirit.

Advent blessings, in hope,
Jamie

Win a copy of "Letters to a Young Calvinist"

The good folks at Brazos Press are hosting a little contest. Here's the deal:

1. Visit their Facebook page and "like" Brazos Press.

2. Submit a question that you'd like to ask me about the "new Calvinism" and the resurgence of Reformed theology amongst the young, restless, and Reformed crowd.

3. They'll then choose 3 questions for me to answer, I'll answer the questions in a little video next week, and those three "questioners" will receive a free copy of Letters to a Young Calvinist.

Let the games begin!

Local "Letters to a Young Calvinist" Events

For those in the vicinity, just a reminder of a couple of upcoming events this week in connection with my new book, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition.

Friday, December 3, 7:30pm: Talk & book signing at Baker Book House

Saturday, December 4, 10am-12pm: Book signing at the Calvin College Campus Store

Hope to see you there!

The Secularization of Thanksgiving and the Sacralization of the Military

I have a deep ambivalence about Thanksgiving as a holiday. For example, it's not properly part of the (transnational) church's liturgical year, and it tends to be easily conflated with American civil religion--while also tending to paper over the history of colonialism. But while the "official" holiday is at least questionable, certainly gratitude and thanksgiving are central to the Christian life. Indeed, in the organization of the Heidelberg Catechism, the entirety of the Christian life is encompassed under the rubric of gratitude.

So, ambivalence aside, it doesn't take much coaxing for me to take a day to enjoy a feast and football with family and friends (even if that means having to watch the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys). But my friend, Mark, and I both commented again this year on how puzzling it was to see the incessant military references and images on the Thanksgiving broadcasts. It was like the NFL was somehow broadcasting on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. Why would Thanksgiving be so interconnected with the armed forces?

But I think I've discerned the logic to this. I know I've noted (complained!) about this before, but I think I've further crystallized the linkage. For some reason, broadcast television always feels compelled to secularize religious and quasi-religious holidays; this is, in some ways, part and parcel of other secularizing currents in commercial culture. But when Thanksgiving is secularized, what's lost is precisely the Object to whom we would render gratitude. In other words, we end up being thankful for "gifts" without being able to recognize the Giver.

So we come up with a substitute Giver, which is something like the idea of "America"--the land of the free. And while there are alternative conceptual histories that would actually honor how much the United States was conceptually forged--that the U.S. is really the experimental product of ideas--our current anti-intellectual climate would rather think of "America" as the product of force and might (as the national anthem prefers). So if we are thankful for America, we're thankful to the military who, proverbially, "protect our freedom, " "keep us free," "make the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom," etc. Soldiers are thus revered as the warrior-priests of freedom.

And what are we free for? Well, to shop. And so the best expression of thanksgiving is precisely Black Friday, that Dionysian display of consumerist passion when people literally die in the frantic pursuit of consumer goods.

In sum, the secularization of thanksgiving leads to the sacralization of the military as the guardians of consumer freedom. Such secularization, then, is not a-religious but otherwise-religious. Thus a secularized thanksgiving yields a uniquely American idolatry.