Generational Blackmail?

It seems like every other day I'm told another reason why young people are leaving the church: because Christians fight too much, or because Christians are too political or anti-gay or don't care about social justice.  Millennials, we're told, are leaving the church because the church won't bless their cohabitation or provide them with contraception for pre-marital sex. They're leaving because they don't care about fights over creation/evolution or abortion or worship style or what have you.  In sum, it seems we're regularly informed that if the church doesn't change, young people are going to leave.

And what exactly are we supposed to do with these claims?  I think the upshot is pretty clear.  Indeed, am I the only one who feels like they're a sort of bargaining chip--a kind of emotional blackmail meant to get the church to relax its commitments in order to make the church more acceptable?

Could we entertain the possibility that millennials might be wrong?

An Engagement with "Two Kingdoms" Thought

In my little corner of Reformed Christianity, there has been a notable uptick in folks who are sympathetic to "two kingdoms" (2K) theologies of culture--a model more traditionally associated with the Lutheran tradition.  There are aspects of 2K thought I appreciate, notably its robust emphasis on the church as a sacramental community as well, its critique of the idolatry of nationalism, and its goal to resist Christian accommodation to partisan politics.  There are other aspects, however, that I'm less enthused about.

I think this is an important conversation and one to which I hope to contribute over the next several years, culminating in volume 3 of my Cultural Liturgies trilogy, which will focus on political theology.  In the meantime, here's a first foray just published: "Reforming Public Theology: Two Kingdoms, or Two Cities?," Calvin Theological Journal 47 (2012): 122-137, reprinted with permission.


"Reforming Public Theology: Two Kingdoms, or Two Cities?," Calvin Theological Journal 47 (...

Confessions, Generations, and the Future of the CRC

Bob De Moor's editorial in the most recent issue of The Banner (the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church) is both symptomatic and wrongheaded.  But given what's at stake in this summer's Synod, perhaps a word or two is in order.

The backstory, for those not previously enthralled by synodical proceedings: our denomination historically requires officers of the church (pastors, elders, and faculty of Calvin College) to sign the Form of Subscription as an expression of commitment to our Three Forms of Unity: the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dordt--three historic confessions of the Reformed faith.  Last summer, a committee proposed replacing the Form of Subscription with a much-watered-down "Covenant for Officebearers" which effectively said something like, 'I agree that these confessions were things people used to believe.' (I'm loosely paraphrasing.)  Fortunately, the committee's proposal was defeated at Synod and sent back to committee.

A revised version will come before Synod this summer.  I think it's still a tepid document, but not as bad as what was floated in 2011.  But De Moor has suggested that this tepid version is still too much.  Instead, he says,

We need to make the Contemporary Testimony what we sign on to instead of the historic confessions.

Of course, this is accompanied by the obligatory nod toward the confessions as "historical" documents that should be "honored"--but not, of course, believed.  As you'll see his the editorial, "we" are clearly smarter and too advanced in our knowledge to ever be able to believe these historic confessions.  Anyone who has read Bultmann will be familiar with this kind of move: 'These are really quite remarkable documents, but seriously: who could believe them in an age of electric light?'

I'm going to try to curtail my disdain for this sort of posturing.  Instead, let me say just three things:

(1) De Moor is once again executing plays from the liberal Protestant playbook.  Anyone who is at all familiar with the slide of mainline denominations will recognize this rhetoric and posture.  (I'd love to recruit a student to undertake content analysis of De Moor editorials and then compare them with similar documents from denominational magazines published by the PC(USA), ELCA, and United Methodists in the 60s and 70s.)  Indeed, I would encourage folks from the denomination--and especially synodical delegates--to prepare for Synod by reading Ross Douthat's Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, especially the chapter on "Accommodation" and then pp. 140-141 on the creeping anti-institutionalism that eviscerates thick confessional identity.

(2) While De Moor is pointing out the supposed historical limitations of Reformed confessions forged in the 16th and 17th centuries, in fact nothing in his argument can prevent the same stance and posture toward ancient catholic confessions like Nicea and Chalcedon.  Should we also just tip our hat to those creeds, Bob, but then pledge our allegiance to an activist document written by North Americans in the 80s?

(3) I have a little hypothesis to float here, and I know it will be somewhat off-putting.  But here goes: I think this is very much a generational issue.  More specifically, I think this is a baby boomer problem.  And for the past 20 years, the leadership of our denomination has been in the hands of baby boomers who absorbed an anti-institutionalism that was in the water in the late 60s and early 70s, which they then channeled toward the faith of their forebears--particularly their immigrant forebears.  This gave us the disastrous attempts by the denomination to turn us into bland "community church" evangelicalism.  It also produced the sort of covert Protestant liberalism that De Moor and others regularly tout.

Hey, baby boomers, I want to let you in on a little secret: you don't own the denomination, though I know you've acted like you do for the past 20 years.  And I know you think that the next generation is looking to eviscerate our confessional Reformed particularity just as you've been trying to do.  But it's a lot more complicated than that.  In fact, I think you should start to realize that those opposing you are not just "old codgers" who aren't as enlightened as you, but also younger folks who have seen where this goes and are actually looking for a more ancient faith.  Some of us Gen Xers and rising millennials are not interested in your "updated" faith: we're looking for the thick, rich particularity of historic Reformed faith, understood as an expression of catholic Christianity.

(If you want just a little confirmation of this, let me ask: have you ever heard of this guy Tim Keller?  Who ministers in Manhattan? [And that's Manhattan, NY, not Manhattan, MT.] Whose network of unapologetically Reformed churches have been growing in one of the most secularized regions of the country?)

I don't want to turn this into a generation-war.  But I do want our baby boomer leaders to know that we're here, that we're invested, and that we're not going away.  So get used to it.

Situating "The Fall of Interpretation" in a Corpus

The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic was my first book, originally published in 2000.  I don't know that one would have projected from that book that I would one day write a book like Desiring the Kingdom.  This clip explores how The Fall of Interpretation--including the new second edition--fits in the trajectory of my work, particularly Desiring the Kingdom, and even the forthcoming Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works.

Theological Interpretation of Scripture and "The Fall of Interpretation"

One of the new intersections I try to make in the 2nd edition of The Fall of Interpretation is to frame my argument--in two new chapters--in relation to the renaissance of "the theological interpretation of Scripture" we've seen over the past decade.  (This theme has also arisen in recent discussions of my review of Pete Enns' Evolution of Adam).  This brief clip introduces why I think there's overlapping concerns between the philosophical hermeneutic I'm articulating and the hermeneutical concerns behind TIS.

What's New in the 2nd ed of "The Fall of Interpretation?"

Video: 2nd edition of "The Fall of Interpretation"

The good folks at Baker Academic have posted the first of a short series of videos introducing the new, second edition of my book, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic.  In this first one I give a brief overview of the core argument of the book.  Get your popcorn.

Once an evangelical...: On Balmer on Douthat

Gee, so Randall Balmer doesn't like Ross Douthat's new book, Bad Religion?  Shocker.

Yes, this morning's Times confirms what anyone could have known before Douthat even conceived of such a book: the liberal Balmer doesn't like Douthat's thesis.  Balmer's predictability is on full display in this review which is pretty much an adventure in missing the point.

Indeed, what Thomas Kuhn called "the paradigm effect" will make it hard for Balmer and his ilk to properly appreciate what concerns Douthat.  The depth of their difference is signaled in a tiny little sentence late in Balmer's review.  As he announces, "institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety."  That, my friends, is pretty much the heart of the matter: it is precisely the devaluing of institutions that Douthat decries, and it is just such an anti-institutionalism that has been woven in the warp and woof of American religion--perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the loose fabric of parachurchism that is American evangelicalism.

Which is precisely why we can now see former (or soon-to-be-former?) evangelicals replaying exactly the accommodationist moves that Douthat documents among the mainline in the last century.  Anyone with an analogical imagination will see in Douthat's chapter on mainline accommodation in the 60s and 70s a preview of some current discussions in evangelicalism.  Whether operating under the banner of "emergence" or "post-conservativism" or even "missional," many of these trends are replays of the accommodationist move that are bound up with the freelance Christianity that has come to characterize American Christianity across the board.  (In a proper review of Douthat's book that I plan to publish elsewhere, I will wonder whether the seeds for this are found much earlier in the American experiment.)

It would be disappointing--but not at all surprising--if so-called 'progressives' in evangelicalism took Balmer's predictable review to be an excuse to ignore Douthat's book.  I think Douthat has named what is at stake for the future of Christianity in the United States.  Some, like Balmer, believe that progressive, revisionist, non- and post-denominational, "updated" Christian start-ups are the way the faith will survive.  Others of us, like Douthat, see such ventures as extending something other than Christianity.  In contrast, we're betting on something that will seem almost completely counter-intuitive: that the future of Christianity in the United States depends on the revitalization of orthodox institutions--even (gulp), denominations.  Or, to put it otherwise, we're betting that the future of Christianity in the United States is catholic.

Place your bets.

Making Christianity Sexy Takes Imagination

At the end of his provocative essay, "Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christians Are Doing It," Stanley Hauerwas articulates a crucial point:

"[W]hat the young properly demand is an account of life and the initiation into a community that makes intelligible why their interest in sex should be subordinated to other interests.  What they, and we, demand is the lure of an adventure that captures the imagination sufficiently that for Christians 'conquest' comes to mean something other than the sexual possession of another."

Young people need to see lives lived that are embodied poems which capture their imagination otherwise.  And they need to be captivated by stories which powerfully portray another way.  Perhaps one could see Merton's Seven Storey Mountain as just such a story.  It would be a start.

Review of Enns' "Evolution of Adam"

I have just posted a review of Pete Enns' important new book, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins (Brazos, 2012) over at The Colossian Forum site.

What kind of love is this?

Listening to a sermon on Mark 10 yesterday, I was struck by a juxtaposition in Jesus' encounter with the rich, young ruler in Mark 10:17-31. Specifically, after the young ruler has announced--quite sincerely, I think--that he has kept all the commandments from his youth, Mark tells us in his typically direct language:

Jesus, looking at him, loved him...

And because he loved him, Jesus then tells the young man something that shocks and dismays him, homing in on the "one thing" that is lacking.

In an age where love is often reduced to uncritical affirmation and unprincipled embrace, we might be stopped short by a love like this--a love that is strangely willing to grieve and sadden and dismay the beloved, but is not for that reason any less loving. Indeed, it is more so, and shows up "affirmation" as a parody of agape.

A Post Card from Q

In case you missed it, see A Postcard from Q, my final post over at The Twelve blog.

Faith, Economics, and Globalization: An Exchange with J. David Richardson

A couple of years ago the editor of Faith and Economics asked me to be part of a published exchange with J. David Richardson, Professor of Economics & International Relations at Syracuse University. Dave and I had some cordial exchanges when I organized a conference on secularity and globalization back in 2005 (which resulted in the book, After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World) and we agreed that it would be fruitful to encourage further dialogue between Christian economists, theologians, and philosophers. Dave and several other economists who were part of the Association of Christian Economists had been reading folks like Milbank, Cavanaugh, and Dan Bell, were puzzled and/or frustrated, and were looking to extend that conversation. The invitation from Faith and Economics was an opportunity to pick up where we left off.

The full-text of our exchange is now available (for free) as: "Economists, Theologians, and Globalization: An Exchange" (pdf). We each begin with an essay, followed by two rounds of responses. My opening essay, "The 'Ecclesial' Critique of Globalization: Rethinking the Questions," is meant to be a kind of primer on the work of D. Stephen Long, William Cavanaugh, and Daniel Bell for non-theologians, and Christian economists in particular.

It seems that Dave and I thought we were answering different questions, so you'll sense our frustration in the ensuing responses. But as I suggest in my reply, I think that even if we seemed to be talking past one another, it was an oddly productive talking-past-one-another.

Read "Economists, Theologians, and Globalization: An Exchange," Faith and Economics 56 (Fall 2010): 5-63.

New College Lectures: Poster and Details

Details have been confirmed for my New College Lectures at the University of New South Wales, May 23-26, 2012. And my romantic medievalism (with debts to Ruskin and Rossetti) just loves this poster.

Kings, Creeds, Canon: Musing on Wright's "How God Became King"

Over at The Twelve blog, I've just put up a post that critically engages N.T. Wright's argument in How God Became King. In some ways, it's a response not only to his published argument but also some face-to-face encounters we've had over the past few months. It's not comprehensive, but perhaps registers a point of concern that's worth discussing.

One could read this as growing out of the new chapters I've included in the second edition of The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, which reframes my argument as an "ecclesial" hermeneutic, in dialogue with the theological interpretation of Scripture.

Read more at "The Twelve."

Kirsch on Trilling on Forster on Liberalism

Lionel Trilling classic work of criticism, The Liberal Imagination, has been a companion for me over the past several months (and makes a brief cameo appearance in Imagining the Kingdom). It's difficult for us to read now, over fifty years later, because almost everything has changed, including our perception of "liberal"--and so we almost inevitably come to Trilling's book with misperceptions and wrong expectations. For example, we might come expecting some manifesto for an ideology that eventually gives us, say, Nancy Pelosi. That's hardly the case.

Indeed, much of Trilling's concern is a critique of liberalism--not, of course, in the name of a "conservativism," but in the name of a more authentic liberalism, one characterized by a "moral realism" that calls to mind Niebuhr. In fact, I would suggest that both liberals and conservatives have things to learn from Trilling's sketch of "the liberal imagination."

Adam Kirsch's little book, Why Trilling Matters, does an excellent job of contextualizing Trilling's work. In particular, Kirsch shows the emergence of "Trilling-ish" themes in his earlier studies of Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster. The study of Forster (1943), as summarized by Kirsch, would seem to be as relevant as ever today, in no small part because Trilling targets the illusions of moral purity that can beset liberalism (surely no less a danger for what passes for "conservatism" today). Indeed, Trilling chastises liberals for a lack of imagination: "liberalism," he says, "is always being surprised."

Forster embodied such naive-but-confident liberalism in the character of the Schlegels in Howards End. Trilling's observations are worth quoting in full:

liberal intellectuals have always moved in an aura of self-congratulation. They sustain themselves by flattering themselves with intentions and they dismiss as 'reactionary' whoever questions them. When the liberal intellectual thinks of himself, he thinks chiefly of his own good will and prefers not to know that the good will generates its own problems, that the love of humanity has its vices and the love of truth its own insensibilities.

(This is just the sort of holier-than-thou liberal self-congratulation that is excoriated in Franzen's Freedom [is Franzen our Forster?].)

What Trilling will eventually hail as "the liberal imagination" is characterized by a sensibility that is not so easily surprised--by a "moral realism" that has appropriately calibrated its expectations to the mess of our intentions. And this imagination and sensibility is fostered, above all, by the novel as "a kind of mithridate against our being surprised by life."

Here is the province of the novelist, for the novelist explores the realm beyond conscious motivation and knows far better than the moralist that an act or a conscious intention may be good at the same time that there is behind it a lack of innocence or an element of self-assertion which, because it is not expressed, makes the act of virtue either issue in badness or fail of subjective worth. Into this realm law can never penetrate, articulate social judgment cannot go, nor even religion. This is the providence of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, of Henry James, D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, of George Santayana and Aldous Huxley, of all the writers of fiction who are concerned with the question of style in morality.

If political discourse in the United States have devolved into farce, it is in no small part because we lack just this imagination--which is to say, we have become a nation that has largely abandoned "the novel" on these terms.

Professionalism, Virtue, and Education: Ravitch meets Brooks meets Murray

Diane Ravitch's recent two-part essay on education in the New York Review of Books is a must-read, beginning with "Schools We Can Envy" (on the model of Finnish education) and culminating in "How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools." While Ravitch can be polarizing, the quarry of her concerns--the dismal state of public education in the United States--deserves the attention she gives it. Disagree if you want, but you only get to disagree after reading Ravitch.

Her target over the last several years is "GERM"--the "Global Education Reform Movement," which includes agendas such Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' and Obama's 'Race to the Top' (in other words, like Obama's foreign policy, his educational policy differs only in degree, not kind, from his predecessor). GERM assesses teaching and learning on the basis of standardized tests and assumes that the failure of American public education is primarily an 'internal' problem--and more specifically, is the effect of lazy, incompetent teachers who now need to be held accountable by producing results measured by standardized test scores.

As you might imagine, many teachers (rightly!) balk at this analysis and diagnosis. The real problem with GERM, they argue, is that it fails to take into consideration the 'external' factors that impact educational success: adequate nutrition, stable family environments, pre-school intellectual stimulation in the home, etc. In short, the elephant in the room that GERM wants to ignore is poverty. Or, actually, GERM doesn't ignore poverty, it just sees it as irrelevant: if Ravitch and others argue that it is poverty that prevents educational success, the heart of the GERM movement is to suggest that the "right" teachers can overcome poverty. This is the myth purveyed by the Gates Foundation, and in her second essay Ravitch documents how "Teach for America"--that domestic peace corps that is the idyll of so many of our liberal (and liberal arts educated) young people--is one of the primary drivers of this "poverty-is-not-the-problem" ideology. (How many of those Obama-supporting TFA teachers would be surprised to learn that their two years of public service are made possible by $50m from the Walton Family Foundation? Would it give them pause to realize that what they sign up for as an expression of left-leaning noblesse oblige is funded by the Wal-Mart empire?)

False dichotomies abound here. GERM effectively says, "It's not poverty, it's schools (or more specifically, teachers)." So we don't need to worry about income inequality or the systems that foster poverty; we just need to fix schools and teachers. In contrast, 'liberal' responses flip the dichotomy: "It's not teachers, it's poverty." So leave schools and teachers alone and attend to the socio-economic conditions from which students come.

These are, as I say, false dichotomies. Clearly we have a both/and problem here. Unfortunately, Ravitch is usually taken to be a proponent of the "It's-not-teachers-it's-poverty" dichotomy, but I think that's an unfair assessment. Read closely, I think Ravitch is a both/and reformer. For instance, while criticizing Bill Gates for purveying the "it's-not-poverty" ideology (decrying what Gates sees as "the myth that we have to solve poverty before we improve education"), Ravitch pointedly remarks: "Gates never explains why a rich and powerful society like our own cannot address both poverty and school improvement at the same time."

So Ravitch is not saying that there is no need for school reform or modes of teacher accountability. In other words, she is not guilty of what her "conservative" critics fear: that she is out to simply protect incompetent teachers as the darling of "the unions." To the contrary, in these most recent essays I think she puts her finger on a crucial issue that deflects this criticism: teaching as a profession, and hence the nature of professionalism.

The theme arises from the model of Finnish education (celebrated in Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?). What drives Finnish teachers is not the stick of testing or the carrot of incentives, but a sense of responsibility, a "moral mission" that comes from an important sense of their identity: "they are professionals." So the Finnish system doesn't need to be driven by (external) testing precisely because teachers have been inculcated into a profession, which is to say that they have been habituated to a "moral mission" and a vocation such that they now have an (internal) professional compass that guides their work. The absence of testing accountability can only work, however, where this internalized sense of "profession" is operative. (Conversely, the externalized accountability of testing becomes increasingly necessary where the internal compass of professional commitment is absent. It is on this point that TFA comes in for critique. Teach for America is the "short-term missions" of American education, a bit of a socially-conscious sojourn for well-educated elites who, after two years, go on to other work. As Ravitch notes, in 2007-2008 the majority of teachers were in their first year of teaching. That is not the demographics of a profession. And yet TFA holds itself up as a model for educational outcomes: "they believe," Ravitch wryly comments, "that a steady infusion of smart but barely trained novices will change the face of teaching. In no other field but education would such judgments be tolerated, because they reinforce the low status of education as a profession, one where no prolonged preparation is thought necessary." This stands in marked contrast to the standards upheld in the Finnish model.

Summarizing this point about professionalism, Ravitch observes in the second part of her essay:

In Finland, the subject of the first part of this article, teachers work collaboratively with other members of the school staff; they are not “held accountable” by standardized test scores because there are none. Teachers devise their own tests, to inform them about their students’ progress and needs. They do their best because it is their professional responsibility. Like other professionals, as Pasi Sahlberg shows in his book Finnish Lessons, Finnish teachers are driven by a sense of intrinsic motivation, not by the hope of a bonus or the fear of being fired. Intrinsic motivation is also what they seek to instill in their students. In the absence of standardized testing by which to compare their students and their schools, teachers must develop, appeal to, and rely on their students’ interest in learning.

I think Ravitch's focus on professionalism in these essays blunts David Brooks' earlier criticism of her work (in a July 2011 column). I think Brooks, like other conservatives, worries that Ravitch's argument gives comfort to incompetence--that she is merely the voice of teachers' unions which, according to this argument, largely function to protect incompetent teachers. (And whatever your view of organized labor, it won't help your cause to ignore the evidence that this is, in important cases, all too true.)

But in fact that I think Brooks and Ravitch can actually come to agreement around this theme of professionalism, precisely because such professionalism is really about the dynamics of virtue (which is also why, contrary to all other intuitions, I actually think one could build an argument that brings together not only Ravitch and Brooks, but Ravitch and--gasp!--Charles Murray).

What we need in this country is a renewed sense of "professionalism," not as the glint and polish of expertise but as the vocational commitment to mission. (I remember first thinking about these matters when I used to teach engineering ethics, prompted by Michael Davis' book, Thinking Like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession.) We need a renewed conversation that solidly locates professionalism in its proper heritage of virtue formation that inculcates in professionals an inner compass of affection that then guides action and nourishes a commitment to mission irrespective of external sticks and carrots. Only then will we get beyond the false dichotomies inherent in current policy and pursue a holistic vision for reform that might actually improve education for the public good.

The Post-Secular in Question

I just got my copy of The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, edited by Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (published by NYU Press). This is the fruit of a conference at Yale University several years ago. My paper, now chapter 7, is entitled "Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a 'Post-Secular' Sociology of Religion" (pp. 159-184).

It's a fascinating collection that represents a kind of vanguard in social scientific understanding of both "religion" and "the secular." (And how many books from NYU Press mention Cornelius Van Til and John Frame? And those citations aren't even in my chapter!)

And the endorsements are notable:

"In the last two decades we have witnessed constant deconstructions and reconstructions of the categories of religion, the secular, and now the post-secular. This volume is the best entry I know to the whole debate. It serves both as a perfect illustration of the shifting terrain and as a helpful analytical guide to its exploration.”

-José Casanova, author of Public Religions in the Modern World

"The quality of almost all the chapters of this book is unusually high. One can learn things one didn't know and see them in a way one hadn't thought of by reading this diverse but very stimulating collection. The book does not solve the murky problem of the secular, much less the post-secular, but it gives new ways of thinking about them that have great promise as our work on these issues goes forward.”

-Robert Bellah, author of Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Twitter clarification - @james_ka_smith

Some of you might follow @jameskasmith on Twitter. I should point out that, in a sense, that's not me. That account was set up several years ago by someone else who merely used it as a feed for my blogs. And since he can no longer remember the account details, I'm unable to use that account.

So I have decided to tentatively experiment with Twitter via @james_ka_smith . Those who are interested in more than the blog feed might consider following the new account. And bear with me as I figure out how to use this wisely.

Re:Tune My Heart to Sing Your Praise: Symposium Audio

Here's a timely resource that might be a fitting follow-up to my "Open Letter to Praise Bands" (and the P.S.):

At the Calvin Worship Institute's 2012 Symposium, I had the privilege of being part of a panel discussion (and hymn-sing!) on the "re-tuned" hymn movement. I was really just an interloper, since the panel, hosted by Greg Scheer, included luminaries such as Kevin Twit, Bruce Benedict, Isaac Wardell, Sandra McCracken, and Eelco Vos. They represented creative collectives like Indelible Grace (home to the fabled RUF Hymnbook), BiFrost Arts, Cardiphonia, and The Psalm Project.

The "re-tuned" hymn movement names a return to hymnody (especially among young, restless, Reformed folk), mining the theological riches of hymns for worship, but setting the hymns to different tunes, often played with different instruments. The discussion about this phenomenon gets at some core issues about what worship is--what worship is for.

The whole symposium is worth listening to, and you might be introduced to new hymns and settings. My own opening contribution (from about 2:00-20:00) attempts to give a "theologically-attuned sociology" of the re:tuned hymn movement and thus gets into some fundamental issues about the nature of worship, the significance of musical form, and raises questions of culture and race.