What Freedom? Whose Rights?

Oliver Sacks NYRB piece, "The Lost Virtues of the Asylum" (which will appear as the Introduction to Christopher Payne's photographic essay, Asylum: The Closed World of State Mental Hospitals) concretizes contemporary issues in political theology, particularly concerning the shape and effects of rights-talk. Without romanticizing madness or the asylum, Sacks nonetheless reminds us of the "sanctuary" that was provided by them. Originating in, and extensions of, cloistered life, work was a central aspect of the asylum--until the so-called defense of their "rights" and "autonomy" ended this so-called exploitation, turning these sanctuaries into palaces of passivity and atrophy. As he summarizes, recounting his own work in these institutions during this transitional phase of alleged "improvement":

Sadly and ironically, soon after I arrived in the 1960s, work opportunities for patients virtually disappeared, under the guise of protecting their rights. It was considered that having patients work in the kitchen or laundry or garden, or in the sheltered workshops, constituted "exploitation." This outlawing of work--based on legalistic notions of patients' rights and not their real needs--deprived many pateints of an important form of therapy, something that could give them incentives and identities of an economic and social sort. Work could "normalize" and create community, could take patients out of their solipsistic inner worlds, and the effects of stopping it were demoralizing in the extreme. For many patients who had previously enjoyed work and activity, there was now little left but sitting, zombielike, in front of the now-never-turned-off TV.

Radio Interview on "Desiring the Kingdom"

KTIS radio, out of Northwestern College in St. Paul, MN, recently interviewed me about my new book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. I hope it's an accessible conversation that helps folks get a sense of the argument and analysis in the book. You can listen to the interview online here.

"Thinking in Tongues" is Finished!

Well, after some (admittedly long) delays, I've just sent off the completed manuscript for my next book, Thinking in Tongues: Outline of a Pentecostal Philosophy. This will be one of the first volumes in a new series, "Pentecostal Manifestos," published by Eerdmans. (Concurrently appearing will be a monograph by Frank Macchia on justification. I think both are slated for summer 2010.)

As I note in the Acknowledgements,

When I once tried to explain this book to a friend who was not a Christian, I realized it sounded like the plot of a David Lodge farce. Indeed the very idea of “a pentecostal philosopher” has the quirky, whimsical makings of a Wes Anderson film or a Dave Eggers story (you know the sort of plot: “When a one-armed Jewish fashion designer is put in charge of a hog production plant in Pender, Nebraska…”). It’s easy enough to imagine a wizened Bill Murray or naïve Jason Schwartzmann in the lead role.

But I hope the book makes the notion of a pentecostal philosophy--or at least pentecostal contributions to Christian philosophy--a plausible, viable, constructive project. In many ways, this book is working in the wake of Plantinga and Wolterstorff, who carved out the space for distinctly Christian philosophy. I'm pressing that argument one step further, also trying to further the rapprochement between the Reformed anc charismatic traditions.

Here's a snippet from the Table of Contents that provides a bit of a glimpse into the book:

Introduction
What Hath Athens to do with Azusa Street?

Chapter 1
Thinking in Tongues: Advice to Pentecostal Philosophers

Chapter 2
God’s Surprise: Elements of a Pentecostal Worldview

Chapter 3
Storied Experience: A Pentecostal Epistemology

Chapter 4
Shattering Paradigms, Opening the World: Science, Spirit, and a Pentecostal Ontology

Chapter 5
From Beliefs to Altar Calls: A Pentecostal Critique of Philosophy of Religion

Chapter 6
At the Limits of Speech: A Pentecostal Contribution to Philosophy of Language

Epilogue
Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy

I'm lobbying the publisher to include the image at right as the cover image. This is a Rubens, "Teresa of Avila's Vision of the Dove," that hangs in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. When we lived in Cambridge I used to take my kids there with sketchbooks for a quiet afternoon, so the image has some nostalgic significance for me. But in addition to the dove, the image also represents a persistent theme in the book--a resonance between a pentecostal philosophy and developments in feminist philosophy.

For now, I'm glad to have dispatched this and sending off into the machinations of editorial and production. I'll look forward to not seeing it for a while.

Next up: Letters to a Young Calvinist.

Gopnik on Ignatieff

"The Return of the Native," Adam Gopnik's report on Michael Ignatieff is, for me, a kind of literary perfect storm in which a swirl of my own interests coalesce: a cultural critic like Gopnik (an old favorite), talking about a Canadian political philosopher (who has risen to leadership of the Liberal Party in Canada) who spent years abroad, all ending in a closing scene at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, our hometown of sorts. Of course, such a conflation also gives rise to all sorts of narcissistic longing ("Why couldn't I be writing this article?") and guilt-ridden introspection ("Should I be returning to my home and native land?").

The tale is a boilerplate classic: the return of the philosopher-king, from the abstractions of reflection and purity of philosophy, to the darkness of the political cave and the dirtiness of pragmatic compromise. But, despite my distaste for Ignatieff's stance on war, I found myself intrigued by his work and want to read his biography of Isaiah Berlin.

It also got me thinking about the possibility that we might be able to distill a uniquely Canadian contribution to political philosophy, or at least a uniquely Canadian sensibility, which Gopnik also finds in Charles Taylor. Gopnik (himself a Canadian ex-pat) sees this as a certain communitarianism:

[T]he belief that the right of the community can trump the rights of the individual--and that this is not incompatible with liberalism but exactly what humanizes it--really is a distinctly Canadian intuition. It is arged in different ways, and with different emphasis, by the influential McGill philosopher Charles Taylor--who, as an N.D.P. candidate in the 1965 elections, was defeated by the newcomer Trudeau in his first run for Parliament [never knew that!]--and by the essayist John Ralston Saul and the Queens University philosopher Will Kymlicka.

Food for thought. It's got me dreaming up an "interim" course on Canadian political philosophy, perhaps in Ottawa or Montreal (in January?!), focused on Trudeau, Taylor, and Ignatieff. But that's just in the dream stage right now.

But the article also showcases Gopnik's prose, and seemed to bring out a hint of nostalgia as he recounted their travel to Stratford, a nostalgia that is, I confess, contagious:

We drove through the beautiful and prosperous South Ontario farm country, with Suzssanna [Ignatieff's wife] riding shotgun, and the Canadian lawyer and literary agent Michael Levine behind the wheel. Though it was a lovely summer evening, some small residual breath of the fugue state that makes small boys lose their gloves for good--the sense of scale, of endlessness that is part of Canada--seemed to infuse the scene. Canada is a big country.

Universities and the Pursuit of Doubt

Drew Gilpin Faust's essay, "The University's Crisis of Purpose" is worth a read. While, in typical R-1 fashion, she seems to forget that universities are also about educating people, and not just the advancement of research, she rightly "deplores the growing dominance of economic justifications for universities." There are, she emphasizes, a whole host of social goods that the university serves. Most intriguing, I thought, was this suggestion:

Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?

The university as producer of doubt (note the "also" in that first sentence), doubt for the common good.

I wonder if we could imagine Christian universities having the same role for the church's good--the Christian college as a space where, in psalm-like lament and questioning, we articulate those nagging late-night and early-dawn questions, those Abrahamic protests, those faith-full questions that can only arise for disciples ("How long, O Lord?"). Have Christian universities produced enough doubt? Have we sufficiently called into question our unquestioned assumptions--such as our automatic confidence that what's "conservative" must be right and good? Have Christian universities sufficiently resisted and questioned North American Christianity's complicity with economic greed, nationalist fervor, and possessive individualism? And in failing to do so, have we failed to serve the body, failed to love the church?

Might the production of doubt be the path to a more radical faith?

Summer Reading at Immanent Frame

The folks at the Immanent Frame have been hosting a series of posts on "Summer Reading," asking a range of scholars from the social sciences and humanities to look back on the their reading from the season that's passing, and to look ahead to what's in store for the fall. It's a wonderfully diverse array of interests and books. My contribution is included in Part III, but also check out Parts I and II.

Canadian Letters: Jameson on Margaret Atwood

I was only three lines into Frederic Jameson's review of Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Year of the Flood, when I clicked over and ordered the book. Sounds fantastic: Orwellian, McCarthy-ish dystopia suffused with "religion"--conceived in a way that stretches our categories (as I've been trying to do in recent work on methodological assumptions in sociology of religion). And the religion in question, Jameson notes, is "Americanism" (a religion on which I've commented elsewhere). Atwood is poised to see this, Jameson claims, because she writes from that forgotten outpost of English letters, Canada:

Yet there is a category into which she squarely fits and without which she cannot fully be understood, a category of which at least 300 million English-speakers generally need to be reminded: she is a Canadian, and no little of her imaginative power comes from her privileged position above the border of the lower 48. The Fall is not properly grasped unless it is understood to be a fall into Americanism, as the magnificent rant from Surfacing reminds us:

"It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, my head said, they’re still Americans, they’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference. Like the Late Show sci-fi movies, creatures from outer space, body snatchers injecting themselves into you, dispossessing your brain, their eyes blank eggshells behind the dark glasses. If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them."

When the narrator was little, the idea of evil was Hitler; but in the world of grown-up violence and Nature, a more sickening metaphysics begins to develop: ‘The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human . . . then I realised it wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both.’ It is a disease you can observe: ‘Second hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn’t help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.’ But ‘American’ is also technology, mechanisation, mass production: ‘The machine is gradual, it takes a little of you at a time, it leaves the shell. It was all right as long as they stuck to dead things, the dead can defend themselves, to be half dead is worse. They did it to each other also, without knowing.’

This then is the world of Atwood’s dystopia, for which, in this global near future, the term American is no longer necessary. Its colours have a loathsome pastel quality, like drugstores; its bunny suits and fluffy fabrics reflect the bad taste of infantile mass production; the bloody physical violence is that of cartoons rather than Hitler. If there is aesthetic pleasure here, it is that of a syrupy nausea that repeats on you; so that the end of the world has some of the cleansing, bracing effect of sand and waste landscape, of the seashore.

Philosophy: Harrowing Tales from "the Discipline"

Lou Marinoff provides a compelling peek inside the process a philosophy department goes through when doing a hire. (For example, while a position at City College CUNY might be a particularly coveted position, it's still jarring to read that they received 637 applications for 1 job.) This should be sobering reading for any young scholar contemplating graduate study in philosophy. It's also quite "convicting" reading for current philosophy professors since it seems that the search committee (and the institution) worked with exemplary virtue. But despite this, Marinoff laments that "[a]lthough we were privileged to obtain two hires, I feel a deep and abiding sorrow that so many dozens – indeed, hundreds – of talented and promising young philosophers will not be hired by anyone."

But I especially appreciated some of his reflections in the conclusion of the article. There he writes:

While philosophy is an excellent component of preparation for a variety of non-philosophical careers – from law to medicine, from journalism to international affairs – philosophy also has intrinsic as well as instrumental values that are, at present, grossly underutilized by our society and unrecognized by far too many philosophy departments themselves.

Many of our finest young minds are being educated by departments and institutions whose myopic “vision” of philosophy limits young philosophers to becoming permanently institutionalized in the academy . They are insufficiently versed in the myriad ways in which philosophy can be usefully applied outside the groves of academe.

I can only add my "Amen!" What is a particular travesty, I think, is when undergraduate philosophy programs get sucked into the same narrow professionalization of philosophy and fail to help students imagine a way of life other than that as a tenured professor. We do so not only in our professional advising but also when we teach undergraduate philosophy as prepatory seminars for studying epistemology and metaphysics at Rutgers. Such a limited imagination is nothing short of unjust given what Marinoff recounts at the beginning of the article--that only the tiniest minority of philosophers will ever land that sort of gig. But on top of that, we are neglecting the revolutionary potential of philosophy to equip a generation of activists who are not just sitting around interpreting the world but trying to change it.

For quite a different vision of philosophy as activist engagement rather than cerebral speculation and puzzle-solving, listen to Eugene Rivers' lecture presented to the January Series in 2004: "On Christian Philosophy and Politics in an Age of Terror."

Decadence, Aestheticism, and Grace: A Theology & Literature Course at Regent College

While summer 2010 seems a long ways off, I've already been thinking ahead as I've been working on the syllabus for a course I'll be teaching at Regent College in Vancouver. I jumped at the opportunity because this will provide a chance to indulge my interests at the intersection of theology and literature. The course will be entitled Decadence, Aestheticism and Grace: Christian Theology and fin de siècle Literature.

Here's a brief description from the draft of the syllabus:

While Oscar Wilde was on his honeymoon in Paris, he discovered A Rebours (Against Nature), a scandalous novel by the French “decadent” writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. This novel—detrimental to the imagination of Wilde—became the “poisonous” book of Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. And yet, the book had a strange ambiguity. As Wilde narrates, “One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.” The goal of this course is to explore that ambiguity. The decadence and aestheticism of literature at the end of the 19^th century seem to be scandalous antitheses of the Christian Gospel. But we will explore how these movements actually share much in common with orthodox Christianity. Thus these works are a kind of “back-handed” witness to the richness of God's creation, the need for redemption, and the enchantment of the world.

We'll be reading Huysmans' Against Nature and Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray alongside selections from Augustine's De doctrina christiana, Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being, and Conor Cunningham's Genealogy of Nihilism. (I'm already hatching a sequel course that would tackle Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, and either Julian Barnes or Nicholson Baker.)

This will be part of Regent College's rich summer programming, which functions as an intellectual retreat in one of Canada's most beautiful locales. If you're interested, watch Regent's Summer Term page for updates.

Whose "God in the Quad?"

In the latest New Yorker, James Wood reviews Terry Eagleton's response to the new atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et. al.), Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. The essay, "God in the Quad," exhibits Wood's familiarity with (and even a kind of backhanded sympathy for) Christian theology (with a bonus, on-the-money side reference to Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre thrown in). While not as tight as his literary criticism, here's an essay on theology, by a critic, that could never have been written by, say, Edmund Wilson (who, despite his Calvinist heritage, seemed to have a tin ear for theology).

Wood is undoubtedly right: even Eagleton's response to the screeds of Hitchens & Co. ends up playing by their rules. And it was refreshing--but somehow expected--to hear Wood call out Eagleton on his lack of interest in the Incarnation. But as a devil's advocate for orthodoxy, Wood gets greedy on two counts.

First, the mission of the incarnate God was not "to secure us eternal tenure in heaven." This betrays an understanding of the story bequeathed to us by Hal Lindsey (or Karl Marx). As even the staunchly orthodox Bishop of Durham has argued, the telos of the Incarnation is a new earth. If the resurrection means anything (as Wood seems to appreciate), it means Christianity is a kind of materialism.

Second, Wood somehow convinces himself that the Incarnation--God's becoming flesh--amounts to idolatry. This is because he buys the slippery logic of Mark Johnston who mistakes idolatry and particularity. True, when God is "laden with" human attributes, created in our image, then idols are the result. But what if God takes on such finitude and particularity? If the eternal God gives himself in the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth (and admittedly, that's a big if), then the Incarnation is an act of condescension rather than the effect of human construction.

Things might be still more complicated.

Reading Habits

Someone writing an article on reading asked me a series of questions, a kind of e-interview, and because they were good questions, I thought I'd post the exchange here. Others might take up these same questions on their own sites. I'd be intrigued to hear about others' practices in this regard.

What is your approach to your reading? (For instance: How do you choose the books you will read? Do you make book lists? Are there any resources or people on whom you depend when you are deciding what to read? Do you have specific categories that you try to read from, or are you a more scatter-shot reader? What periodicals do you read?)

Good question. I don't feel like I have much of a system. I think one issue is the fact that I'm constantly trying to make up for the lack of a proper liberal arts education. That, and the fact that I really didn't start reading books until I was 18. My most passionate reading is not professional--the reading I want to do is in the areas of literature and poetry. And I guess I have a kind of implicit "canon" in my head that I've been trying to work through--a tacit canon that I've somehow absorbed through, well, reading! Over the years I've been trying to build a decent library from used bookstores, church rummage sales, etc., and so now I generally try to read in different "locales." For instance, I have a very loose policy of shuttling back and forth between American, British, (though the latter would also include colonial and post-colonial literature, like Salman Rushdie) and French literature (Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert)--with some "new" stuff mixed in (i.e., books that have just appeared, that are currently being reviewed). My professional reading is compelled by different sorts of obligations--my research requires that I keep up with certain developments, certain "hot" discussions, etc. Though I confess I find it harder and harder to get excited about this "obligatory" reading. I don't keep up the way I used to. (That might partly stem from the fact that I'm quite an unabashed generalist now, so I don't think of myself first and foremost as a specialist in French phenomenology anymore.)

As for periodicals, I subscribe to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and we have a family subscription to Vanity Fair (which isn't the soft schlock you might think). I read the New York Times and The Guardian online each morning.

Professionally, I am a journal junkie and absolutely love the "Table of Contents Alert" services that are offered by most scholarly journals (and in most cases, offered free, though one needs a subscription to actually read the articles). This service sends the new Tables of Contents for each issue to my inbox. I probably subscribe to 25 of these, across a range of disciplines. It's fabulous.

Do you use any tools to plan or track your reading?

I keep a list of what I've read in the back pages of my Moleskin. I started this because my reading is quite eclectic, and I'd remember something, and try to recall where I'd read it, but because I read so many things at the same time, it was hard to track down. So now I note what I read, and when--though I'm not as careful about this as I should be. I should note that in addition to reading books and periodicals, I'm an irrepressible sampler. I'm just constantly dipping into books in my library, have books stacked everywhere in the house (the pile beside my bed regularly totters on the edge of toppling), and am not at all averse to just sitting with a different book for a few minutes. So I'm reading in my library all the time.

I also have kept a "What I'm Reading" blog at http://jameskasmith.blogspot.com, but I've not been very faithful with it, largely because I've put too much pressure on myself to make every post an exquisite review, which is unfortunate.

Do you take notes or write in your books?

Yes! When I was in college, I was averse to this, but I've been converted. I underline a lot and make marginal comments. But most importantly, I make the blank back page of the book a personalized "index" of sorts (I think I learned this from my teacher, Jim Olthuis). On those back pages, I highlight themes (with page numbers) that I'll want to come back to, draw connections, make notes to myself, etc. This makes it easier for me to come back to a book later and dive back into it for writing purposes.

How many books do you typically read in a year?

Hmmm...no idea. From this list http://jameskasmith.blogspot.com/2008/12/2008-retrospective-reading-list.html I'd guess about 30, but this list doesn't include the books I read for "professional" purposes.

Do you set aside time each day or week to read?

Any 3 minutes not doing something else is time to read! (And yes, this is a point of some marital and parental tension sometimes!) I don't have a dedicated block, except perhaps the end of the day, when my wife and I are very happy to crawl into bed early (around 10:30) and read til about midnight. Fortunately my wife is an avid reader, too, so the TV is off most evenings, and by the time we've dispatched the kids to bed, we're ready to unwind just reading. But I also read whenever I can (I always take a book with me when we're running errands as a family, though I ask permission first). I stopped taking books to kids soccer games because it made me inattentive. But in general, I have a book (or at least a magazine) in my hand.

What technologies do you use to aid your reading? (Audiobooks? Websites? Project Gutenberg? Kindle?)

I guess the Table of Contents Alerts I mentioned would fall under this category. I sometimes listen to audiobooks if I have a long drive somewhere by myself, but that's quite rare. Never touched Kindle and can't imagine I ever will.

What would you tell a college student about approaching their required reading lists?

Look, you won't listen to this, but I've got to say it so you feel guilty later: Your required reading lists are a gift. What I wouldn't give to repeat high school and actually take advantage of being "required" to read Shakespeare or Hemmingway. I know it won't feel like that. So just promise me this: you'll read one book from every required reading list as if you wanted to.

What would you tell a recent graduate about establishing a reading practice?

Keep books in every room of the house. Pile them up on the end table or nightstand or back of the toilet. Have the books there, staring at you, inviting you, wooing you, calling to you, shaming you. Keep bumping into them. Pick them up and look at them. And even if you have a first job, resist signing up for cable and spend the end of each day reading. Then find a friend who loves to read (and, if possible, a spouse) and talk about books.

CT Review of "Desiring the Kingdom"

Eric Miller's review of Desiring the Kingdom from the August issue of Christianity Today is now available online. The title, like Miller's review, gets it just right: "Putting Worldview in its Place."

Despite a couple of quibbles, I appreciate how well Miller captures the essence of the book's argument--and does so for a general audience. One couldn't hope for more.

The Mathematics of Despair

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers was an entertaining read at the time, but only one bit has really stayed with me, a number that haunts me more than it ought: 10,000. This is Gladwell's magic number of genius. You might recall that his project is to demythologize "genius" by anecdotally noting the conditions of opportunity that yield the greats and masters. Genius is less a dispensation of the gods and more the cumulative effect of opportunity. And time. That's where the magic number comes in: on Gladwell's accounting, mastery or genius is never an overnight success. Far from it. Instead, even when stars "burst on the scene," they are the products of hours and hours and years and years of practice, repitition, and drudgery. What made the Beatles, for example, was the endless gigs in out-of-the-way Hamburg, Germany, giving them the opportunity to accrue their 10,000 hours--the price of genius. Gladwell tells a similar story of Bill Gates, whose class and location afforded him hours upon hours on emerging computer technologies. The result? You guessed it: he logged that magic number.

That magic number, however, can also add up to despair. For example, I am a fledgling poet. (I won't say a "budding" poet, since that would entail some Hegelian confidence that I'll "bloom!") Given the shape of my family commitments, my professional obligations, my other writing projects, and my general laziness and inertia, that translates into about 1 hour per month writing poetry. So let's do the math: at that rate, I'd be approaching greatness right around the time I'd be giving Methusaleh a run for his money. Sigh.

And it turns out that Gladwell is probably right. I recall Donald Hall, in Unpacking Boxes, describing hours and hours of practice, producing reams and reams of detritus, and perched upon that pile is an iceberg-tip's worth of great poetry. As Hall recounts:

Where I sit today, working at my desk, there are shelves behind me that are dense with abandoned or unfinished work--including the book-length mock epic in iambic pentameter. Behind my neck roosts a rookery of bad manuscript. To write as much as I have done, I have needed often to fail.

I also recall that Hall was a precocious only child--as was Updike. A pattern here? In any case, if 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness, what can you get for, say, 636? Upon doing the math, one begins to wonder if it's worth starting.

Desiring the Kingdom: Read an Excerpt

August 5 was the official release date for Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. The Baker Academic site offers a glimpse into the book by providing an excerpt for download which gives you a look at the expanded Table of Contents, Preface, and Introduction, all of which provide a bit of a map of the book.

Last night I was re-reading Oscar Wilde's "Critic as Artist" and was reminded of a quote that, in a way, captures the core intuition of Desiring the Kingdom:

"Do you wish to love? Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies they spring."

"Devil Reads Derrida" Interview

David Opderbeck, a law professor, musician and self-described "theology buff," has started a little interview with me growing out of his reading of my new book, The Devil Reads Derrida: and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts (Eerdmans), with a particular focus on the role of the Christian scholar in relation to the church--the focus of my Introduction to the book, "The Church, Christian Scholars, and Little Miss Sunshine."

You can read an introduction to the conversation, the first round of questions in part 1 , and a second round in part 2.

The Lies of Country Music

Rebellion is relative. For example, given what passes for "conventional" and status quo in our home, my 17-year-old's rebellion takes the form of sympathy for the Republican party, a desire to major in business, and a passion for country music. He certainly knows how to push my buttons.

I'll admit that I can partly understand the soft spot for country music. I was raised on the country music of the 70s--"when country wasn't cool," as Barbara Mandrell put it. It was also when country was "country & western," though one could already see poppish sound making its inroads. But at that time, country stations still regularly played Patsy Cline and Hank Williams--and were the airwave home to Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, George Jones, and Johnny Cash. Even the "next wave" of folks like Randy Travis were faithful to this tradition. (For a beautiful tribute to this earlier era, see Marty Stuart's photo-essay, Country Music: The Masters--at the top of my wishlist.)

But the "new country" of today seems to me something different. And it is a catalyst for daily squabbles between me and my son: as soon as we hop in the car, his finger goes for the pre-sets on the radio, clicking one of the three local country stations. I try to tell myself that this is not a battle worth having--that this is a kind of adolescent "expression" I can live with, like earrings and tatoos. But within minutes my blood begins to boil, largely because of the pervasive nationalism of today's country. It's as if Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" was a required template for all contemporary songwriting. Consider, for example, Brooks and Dunn's rendition of "Only in America":

Sun coming up over New York City
School bus driver in a traffic jam
Starin' at the faces in her rearview mirror
Looking at the promise of the Promised Land
One kid dreams of fame and fortune
One kid helps pay the rent
One could end up going to prison
One just might be president

Only in America
Dreaming in red, white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
Only in America

Sun going down on an L.A. freeway
Newlyweds in the back of a limousine
A welder's son and a banker's daughter
All they want is everything
She came out here to be an actress
He was a singer in a band
They just might go back to Oklahoma
And talk about the stars they could have been

Only in America
Where we dream in red, white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
Only in America

You can understand how, as a Canadian and a Christian, this identification of "the Promised Land"--and the attendant falsehoods about opportunity--are tough to take with my son crooning along.

What's at issue, I think, is not so much what's said as what's left unsaid. For example, while I'll admit that Rodney Atkins' "It's America" is an affecting ditty, its selective nostalgia is deceptive. Consider the idyllic picture being sketched in these lyrics:

It's a high school prom,
It's a Springstein song,
It's a ride in a Chevrolet.
It's a man on the moon,
and fireflies in June
kids sellin' lemonade.
It's cities and farms
and open arms,
one nation under God.
It's America.

What really sticks in my craw is the second verse:

Later on when I got home
I flipped the TV on.
I saw a little town that some big
twister tore apart.
People came from miles around
just to help their neighbors out,
and I was thinkin' to myself:
I'm so glad that I live in America.

Really? So people only help distraught neighbors "in America?" If you lived elsewhere, do you think, Mr. Atkins, that these folks would be left to their own devices? Any chance you think this vaunted American virtue of care for the neighbor applies to health care policy or public education? I didn't think so.

Or finally, consider the lies, damned lies in Justin Moore's current hit, "Smalltown, U.S.A.":

A lot of people called it prison when I was growin up
These are my roots and this is what I love
Cause everybody knows me and i know them
And I believe that's the way we were supposed to live
Wouldn't trade one single day in small town USA

Chorus
Give me a Saturday night my baby by my side
A little Hank Jr. and a six pack of light,
Old dirt road and I'll be just fine.
Give me a Sunday morning that full of grace
A simple life and I'll be okay
Here in small town USA

Around here people break there backs just to earn a buck
Don't ever get ahead but we have enough
I watch people leave and they come right back
I never wanted any part of that
I'm proud to say that I love this place
Good ole small town USA

Look, I'm not out to demonize small towns (I grew up in a village of 600 people), but this simply doesn't tell the truth. It is a nostalgic, selective picture that gives the lie to smalltown life, painting over its dark underside: the racism and exclusion; the narrow horizons and xenophobia; the cycles of poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness; and as Nick Reding has recently shown us, the spiraling cycles of substance abuse (see Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town). (And a story that remains to be told is the growing secularization of rural and smalltown America.) Far from being a "good ole" place, the small town can be one of the ugliest corners of American life--though this never makes its way into Thomas Kinkade paintings or Norman Rockwell pictures or "new country" songs.

As an Argentinian proverb puts it, "A small town is a vast hell." That sounds like material for a real country song.

Mad (Adulterous) Men

Well behind the curve, my wife and I began watching Mad Men this week. I've been underwhelmed: while Donald Draper's suave, dapper character is drawn with a bit of mystery and complexity, the rest of the scenes are populated by cartoonish caricatures who are flat, predictable and--worst of all--unbelievable. And its propagandish attempt to shock us with the gender mores of the period (1960) fails in two ways: on the one hand, the lecherous, boorish men and compliant, unhappy housewives that populate this world are so hysterically drawn that they come off as parodies--which deflates the scandal; on the other hand, we shouldn't underestimate how much the glamor and chic of the staging and costuming actually makes such a world attractive.

Last night, just part way through season 1, with illicit liaisons proliferating, it hit me: This is like watching an Updike novel. And I was reminded of Nabakov's quip that adultery is the most conventional way to rise above convention. In Updike's Foreword to Early Stories, he says his stories are meant "to give the mundane its beautiful due" (p. xvii). But does he ever really settle for the mundane? Is the mundane really so adulterous? Could Updike hallow the mundane conventions of fidelity? That, for art, would be a more remarkable feat. Not great television, I grant, but still a task for the novel.

Arrival

Well, this one was a long time coming. But I just got my first copy of Desiring the Kingdom! The official release date is August 5.

This book has been with me (and with our family, I'm afraid) for several years. In fact, it was just about a year ago that my wife headed up to Canada with the kids, leaving me with an ultimatum: finish the book (there were a number of "or elses" implied, none of them inviting). I camped out in my office for 4 days, finally finishing a complete draft in the first couple of days, and then undertaking the hard work of cutting 20,000 words for the final draft (which still put me 20,000 words over the contracted length!). The good folks at Baker Academic were graciously patient as the project morphed and percolated (and expanded).

In a way, this feels like "my" first book. So many of my other books have been commentaries of one sort or another--explicating, explaining, unpacking and illustrating the ideas of others. But Desiring the Kingdom, while by no means original, feels like its written in my voice, bubbling up from some of my passions.

Of course, now begins the hard part: watching one's little child be thrown to the wolves in the world of reviews! But in preparation for that, I found this little litany for authors to be helpful! (H/T: Comment's Friday Newsletter)

[And yes, the photo above is a lame, narcissistic attempt to see my work alongside Wharton, Waugh, Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Suffice it to say that my bookshelf is the only place in the world where that could happen. The same doesn't even happen in my imagination.]

Remembering Frank McCourt

I did not grow up reading books. In fact, I avoided them like the plague as if not reading was some kind of badge of honor. This ridiculous code was absorbed from a combination of "jock" mentality and the "country boy" image we absorbed in my small-village upbringing that was rural in its essence. I didn't even read the books assigned for school. The only book I can honestly remember reading up to grade 12 was a 1982 edition of Don Cherry's Grapes: A Vintage View of Hockey.

That changed after my conversion to Christian faith when I was 18. At that point, I became a voracious reader. But I was devouring a very particular strain of "non-fiction" that was a long ways from "creative"--books in biblical studies and theology, and later, works in philosophy. My waking hours were spent trying to inhale all that I could, trying to make up for my readerly sloth up to that point. As I progressed through my undergraduate studies into graduate work, my interdisciplinary interests multiplied my reading obligations but still restrained my universe within a narrow sector of the world of books, a million miles from "literature." Indeed, during this phase I would have looked askance at a novel as "soft." I was doing "serious" reading and refused to be distracted by "stories." Sitting beside the pool I'd be reading Heidegger; on the beach I'd exhibit my "rigor" by reading Derrida; rocking the baby in the basinette I'd be paging through Augustine or Foucault. Little did I realize how small my world was.

Today, almost the exact opposite is true. Reading philosophy and theology is, for the most part, my "job"--an obligation I discharge at the office. I don't bring those books home. Instead, my home library is filled with Julian Barnes and Evelyn Waugh, Updike and Flaubert, Ted Hughes and Charles Wright. But not until last week had I given much thought to what had changed.

And then it hit me: it was Frank McCourt.

It's strange: for almost all of the books in my library, I can recall where and when I got them. But for the life of me, I can't remember how these first two volumes of McCourt's memoirs made their way to my shelf (Teacher Man was a gift from my mom). I know from the dates inside that I read this in my last year of grad school. What would have prompted me to do so is lost in the sands of my aging memory. And yet, as I try to trace this shift in my reading habits--this expansion of my reading world that took me into the environs of literature--the paths seem to stretch back to Angela's Ashes as a sort of fulcrum or hinge, a turning point. McCourt's enchanting style, suffused with the religious in the most sacrilegious ways (all that "wanking!"), coupled with the power of Irish story-telling had me hooked. And his explorations of his own psychic life were, for me, like new adventures in a foreign territory. (Indeed, his persistent description of that experience of a "clouding" of his mind--a dark, swirling interior storm--has stuck with me for years, giving me a picture to name realities.)

All of my "serious" reading to that point had worked with a reductionistic fixation on a certain kind of truth--reading for "information," for "knowledge," for propositions and ideas. Not until I dove into McCourt's memoirs did I come to appreciate the truth of story, the revelatory capacity of narrative, the ability of literature to not only "make up" worlds but to break open our own world. I owe Frank McCourt more than I realized.

O, Canada: A Collection of Hymns by Ex-Pats

I appreciate that the New York Times was even cognizant of Canada Day. In fact, their little collection of testimonies from Canadian emigrants reads like a hymnal that proves absence makes the heart grow fonder. I suppose this is the experience of most emigrants, particularly Canadians, for whom "Canada" doesn't really appear as a definable entity until one has left. But with distance and the cultural contrast, aspects of Canadian culture come into focus. I suppose only a fish out of water begins to reflect on the nature of water.

In response to the query, "What do you miss about Canada?," an array of authors, actors, and comedians weigh in. Sean Cullen's pining is succinct: "Back home, hockey highlights lead off SportsCenter. That is the height of civilization."

Malcolm Gladwell doesn't miss taking a shot at his host country (a favorite pastime for Canadian ex-pats):

In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States.

Sarah McNally laments the disappearance of a distinctly Canadian literature while Bruce McCall pens an encomium to Coffee Crisp candy bars (sorry, "chocolate bars" in Canadian-ese). But it is perhaps Rick Moranis, of Second City and "Strange Brew" fame, who most lyrically captures some of my own memories (minus the prairie wind):

I remember singing “God Save the Queen” every morning in school. “Long live our noble Queen!” we belted, thousands of us tubby little obedient Canadians. I guess it worked. She’s still alive. Now they sing “O Canada” in schools and at most sporting events; usually in French and English. Around the time we were changing anthems, dumping ensigns and renaming holidays, the official use of both languages became mandatory, except in Quebec where the required use of English is a bit fuzzy.

Canada Day comes and goes modestly every year. Sure, there are retail sales promotions and a long weekend. But there isn’t bluster or commodity in Canadian celebration. Canada isn’t big on bunting. Or jet flyovers, fireworks, marching bands or military pomp.

Canadians defer. We save our loonies and don’t jaywalk. It’s illegal, eh. We stand on guard at red lights, even when there is no traffic. We wait for clear, green governing lights to signal our turn and lead us on. Then we tuck our heads down, under wooly toques and worn-out scarves, one eye barely open, squinting headlong into the harsh prairie wind, cautiously, quietly, demurely Canadian.

I was in Canada last weekend and was struck by how much it had become foreign to me--enough that I could see it as "other." The accents and lilts of Canadian diction are so noticeable now, and it seems to me that there is a Canadian "look" that is discernable. My kids can pick Canadians out of a crowd. Of course "Canada" shouldn't be confused with or reduced to the rural, small-town sectors that we inhabit when we return to Ontario. And while there is much to praise in its best moments--a charming humility ["Sorry"]; Alice Munro; socialized medicine (despite the horror stories Americans want to hear, universal healthcare is still a good thing--just ask the rest of the civilized world)--Canada has its dirty little secrets, too: its submerged racism that can perversely pride itself on never having had slavery as an institution; its bland cultural offerings which have always seemed parasitic on other national cultures; its ressentiment vis-a-vis the States, all the while eagerly assimilating and appropriating the trinkets of American 'culture;' the vengefulness bred into young men by hockey; the disempowerment of the delapidated First Nations territories that dot the land; the militarism of both our anthem and our history; Kim Cattral. I could go on.

It's an easy sport for Canadian ex-pats to idolize their homeland--and demonize their host country. I'm not about to quit either, but I've got just enough distance to see what I'm doing--and to recognize it as quintessentially Canadian.