Happy Robbie Burns Day

I spent the past weekend in Guelph, Ontario--a university town near my old stomping grounds in southern Ontario. It'd been years since I'd been there, and in coming back I was struck by what I'd never noticed before (the blindness of familiarity): the city is a veritable paean to Edinburgh and all things Scottish--street names, building names, architectural echoes, all pointed back to Scotland. This found me awash in memories of Embro, the village of my youth (so named as a garbled abbreviation of Edin-borough) with its Highland Games (every July 1), Knox Presbyterian Church, the Highland Restaurant, and a phonebook awash in Murrays, MacDonalds, MacKays, Mathesons, Bruces, and Burns'.

This put me in the mood to remember Robbie Burns Day (and to wistfully remember one of our most delightful evenings in England when we celebrated "Rabbie Burns Supper" with Maggie, Gordon and their friends in Yorkshire). So, in honor of the Bard and my fightin' Scots heritage:

There'll Never Be Peace Till Jamie Comes Hame

By Robert Burns

By yon Castle wa', at the close of the day,
I heard a man sing, tho' his head it was grey:
And as he was singing, the tears doon came,--
There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

The Church is in ruins, the State is in jars,
Delusions, oppressions, and murderous wars,
We dare na weel say't, but we ken wha's to blame,--
There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

My seven braw sons for Jamie drew sword,
But now I greet round their green beds in the yerd;
It brak the sweet heart o' my faithful and dame,--
There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

Now life is a burden that bows me down,
Sin' I tint my bairns, and he tint his crown;
But till my last moments my words are the same,--
There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

[And if you have opportunity today, find a few moments to listen to Nickel Creek's charmed rendition of "Sweet Afton."]

Calvinism for the 21st Century

Registration is now open for Dordt College's upcoming conference, Calvinism for the 21st Century, April 8-10, 2010.

Launching from Calvin's 500th birthday, the conference considers the future of Calvinism and will feature several plenary speakers such as Jim Skillen, Vincent Bacote, Julia Stronks, and myself, along with an array of papers in parallel sessions from an interdisciplinary collection of scholars and practitioners (full schedule should be posted soon). Register early.

Reviews and Interviews: DTK Around the Web

My latest book, Desiring the Kingdom, has been generating some discussion and garnering a bit of attention over the past couple of weeks. I'm grateful for these engagements as they've helped me pinpoint some lacunae in my account, and exchanges have provided a welcome opportunity to make some clarifications. So readers might be interested in following up on some of these since they function as "supplements" to the book, in a way. Here's a sampling:

Audio

• If you have opportunity today, you might find a local station of Moody Radio: at 4pm CST I'll be interviewed on their national program, "Prime Time America." (You can now listen to the archived show.)
• You can also listen to another interview at Centered Radio online.
• You can listen to my talk about the book that was part of The January Series at Calvin College--this is a 40-minute "translation" of the book's argument for a general audience.

Reviews and E-interviews

• The most recent issue of the Christian Scholar's Review (Winter 2010) features a review symposium on Desiring the Kingdom, including a response from me entitled, "From Christian Scholarship to Christian Education." This was a very rich exchange for me. Unfortunately, the full text is not available online, but you might check local libraries.
  
• Evangelical wunderkind Matthew Anderson wrote a robust review of the book at Evangel, one of the blogs over at First Things (which generated a little exchange with Francis Beckwith which I hope might continue in other places). And they were kind enough to let me write a brief response there as well. (Agent Smith responding to Mr. Anderson! ;-) And now Mr. Anderson has just posted a reply to my response.
  
• And Trevin Wax, the blogger behind Kingdom People, conducted an e-interview with me that helped us address some concerns and issues.
  

Finally, it was a great honor to have an astute reader and bibliophile like Byron Borger name Desiring the Kingdom as his choice for "Most Important Book of the Year" over at Hearts & Minds.

Giving to Haiti

The Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, to which I regularly point folks here at Fors Clavigera, quickly established a site for donating to aid in rescue and recovery in Haiti. Please give. The CRWRC has longtime connections in Haiti, strong relationships on the ground, and can leverage local, indigenous leaders to show mercy from the ground up.

And over the past years, our children's middle school has also developed a close relationship with the Haiti Foundation Against Poverty. It was heartbreaking to hear our two youngest come home with stories about children they knew of in Haiti who died in the quake, especially as they waited for news to trickle in over the last couple of days. Giving seems so cheap in these circumstances, but it is something.

Let us, above all, pray and work against those principalities and powers that so unjustly distribute resources in our world--against the demons of poverty (which are legion) and the devils of our own selishness and comfort that quietly concentrate wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.

Blogging Thomas Merton

I'm trying a little experiment over at What I'm Reading: blogging my way through Thomas Merton's classic, The Seven Storey Mountain, which was my meditative holiday reading. I have this sense that one day I'll look back on the season spent reading it as pivotal in my pilgrimage, so I'm combing back through it and highlighting some favorite passages and themes as both an exercise and homage. I hope Fors Clavigera readers might consider following along.

What I'm Listening To: The Charlie Poole Project

Sometimes we don't know what we like. Our tastes operate at a visceral level that often elude articulation. On one level, we "know" what we like, what delights us; but on another level we're often unable to say what we "know" in this sense. (And herein lies one of the functions of good criticism: a wise critic gives us the words to name and articulate our tastes.)

And sometimes we're just not honest with ourselves. We feel constrained to like something--that we ought to like something. Socialization is also a socialization in taste, with all the associated pressures, constraints, and prejudices. And so we might also convince ourselves that we don't like something because we "shouldn't."

I've been thinking about these sorts of dynamics in relation to my musical tastes, largely because I've had a revelation of taste--and perhaps a new realization of self-honesty. It's simply this: the sound of a banjo makes my heart sing, and the sawing of a fiddle can capture my soul from almost any distraction. The pluck-pluck of a simple upright bass and the whine of a harmonica combine into a visceral tug on both body and soul. Combined, these sounds have an uncanny way of making me feel at home. (I chalk this up to my Scots-Canadian heritage whose Celtic proclivities seem to resonate with the Scots-Irish folk who played these instruments in the hills of West Virginia, the Appalachian Mountains, and the North Carolina Piedmont.)

For a long time, I thought this meant I liked "country" music--so you can sort of imagine my hesitancy to admit this to myself (given my critique of country music). But slowly I've come to this realization: what I really love is bluegrass and what is now sometimes described as "American roots music," which informs those streams of folk with which I resonate.

Part of this dawning realization, for me, was hearing a wonderful conversation with Loudon Wainwright III on his latest 2-disc collection, High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project. This is Wainwright's homage to Charlie Poole, a North Carolina rambler who epitomized the cotton mill bands of the 1920s and 30s.

Is it possible to wear out a CD? 'Cause I'm lovin' this.

T.R. Reid on Healthcare @ The January Series

Yesterday kicked-off Calvin College's annual January Series--three weeks of free, noontime lectures by a wide variety of authors and experts. Over its two decades it has become a Grand Rapids institution--the brightness of a little liberal arts education crammed into the dreariness of west Michigan winter. And anyone in the world can listen live on the web.

This year's series started with a bang: journalist T.R. Reid speaking on "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," also the title of his bestselling book. (You can listen to the archive online.) Reid's work is everything Michael Moore's is not. Based on several years of international exploration of different healthcare systems around the world, Reid summarizes a taxonomy of 4 different models--and then points out that all 4 are operative in the United States. So if you have employer-based insurance, you live in Germany; if you have Medicare, you live in Canada; if you're a Vet, you live in Britain; and if you're none of those, you live in Angola or Nepal.

His core question isn't whether we could have universal healthcare in the U.S., but why don't we? Definitely worth a listen, and the book is worth reading.

2009 Englewood Honor Books

I'm very honored that Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation has been selected as "Theology Book of the Year" for 2009 by the Englewood Review of Books. You can read their review of the book (from the October issue) here. But also checkout their wonderful array of Honor Books, including poetry, biography, and fiction.

Rick Warren's 900-ft. Jesus?

A couple of weeks ago, over at The Immanent Frame, I was asked to comment on Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article which drew connections between the prosperity gospel and the subprime mortgage catastrophe. At that time, I suggested the following:

So prosperity preachers are easy targets for blame—and they certainly deserve that. But what about the sort of low-grade, soft-sell gospel of prosperity that is part of “mainstream” evangelicalism? While folks like Rick Warren are quick to denounce the heresy of treating God like a cosmic bubble-gum machine, run-of-the-mill suburban evangelicals are complicit with a consumerism and fixation on property that operates under-the-radar, as it were. While mainstream megapastors aren’t promising Bentleys for faith, they generally extol a vision of the “good life” that has 4 bedrooms and a 3-car garage, with an SUV in the drive. (If you really want to know what evangelicals value, stroll the parking lot at Saddleback Church—and then ask folks where they live.) This is why evangelicals have been so easily assimilated to the American ideal of economic growth and personal prosperity (an American gospel that is certainly not just the property of Republicans).

In other words, while Osteen and his ilk might be denounced by evangelicals, I do wonder if his gospel of prosperity differs by degree, rather than in kind.

Now this morning we have the "good news" that Rick Warren's urgent appeal for $900,000 actually brought in much more: $2.4 million!

Why do I find myself thinking about a 900-foot Jesus?

Top Reads 2009: Recap (and "Bonus Tracks")

Over at What I'm Reading, I've now completed the retrospective of my Top Reads for 2009. And I've just added an "Honorable Mention" in each category as a kind of "bonus track." The categories are:

• Fiction
• Poetry
• Nonfiction & Memoir
• Short Stories

Remember the Feast(s)

Christmas Is Really For the Children

By Steve Turner

Christmas is really
for the children.
Especially for children
who like animals, stables,
stars and babies wrapped
in swaddling clothes.
Then there are wise men,
kings in fine robes,
humble shepherds and a
hint of rich perfume.

Easter is not really
for the children
unless accompanied by
a cream filled egg.
It has whips, blood, nails,
a spear and allegations
of body snatching.
It involves politics, God
and the sins of the world.
It is not good for people
of a nervous disposition.
They would do better to
think on rabbits, chickens
and the first snowdrop
of spring.

Or they'd do better to
wait for a re-run of
Christmas without asking
too many questions about
what Jesus did when he grew up
or whether there's any connection.

Christianity and the Crash

Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article, "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?," has generated a fair bit of conversation. The core thesis is that something like Joel Osteen's prosperity gospel planted seeds of greed that overstretched many--and that subprime mortgage sharks found these congregations to be, well, "prime" targets.

The folks at Immanent Frame have pulled together a little symposium of responses from a diverse array of voices, including my friends Anthea Butler, D. Stephen Long, and Michael Horton, along with other scholars such as Harvey Cox, Mark C. Taylor, William Connolly, and Jonathan Walton, and several others (including me). [We were instructed to keep our responses to 300 words; I see some of my peers had a little trouble counting words! ;-)]

Consider joining the conversation over at IF.

This also lends a new frame to my article from last spring, "What's Right with the Prosperity Gospel?"

Q&A on "Desiring the Kingdom" at ThinkChristian.net

Over at "ThinkChristian," Nathan Bierma poses a few questions to me about my argument in Desiring the Kingdom. Check it out, along with some of the other cultural commentary at the ThinkChristian site.

Update: A slightly expanded version of the same Q&A is available on the blog of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship.

Top Reads 2009

Not wanting to be left out of the fun, over at What I'm Reading I've begun the annual ritual of reading retrospection, highlighting some of my favorite reads from the past year. I've begun with five of my favorite short stories read in 2009.

I'm hoping to follow up with posts on poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. We'll see...there's a fresh stack of exams sitting here on the desk waiting to be graded, staring at me with an accusatory eye. All the more reason to blog!

Sentimental?

In the midst of grading papers from a Philosophy of Language seminar now past, seeing students wrangle with Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Brandom--with the game-relative nature of meaning, the contexts of our linguistic practice--and looking for any sort of sloth-inducing distraction from this work, somehow Albert Goldbarth's poem, "Sentimental" came to mind. (Perhaps because the overarching question in the course, which I pressed regularly, was this: "What sort of philosophy of language does it take to account for poetry--to account for why we read poetry?")

What counts as "sentimental?," the poem asks. What difference does context make? And why should we think sentimental is simply synonymous with "bad?" Is "sentimental" the charge of cynicism? What if it turns out that sentimentality is part of the fabric of our being-in-the-world?

Enjoy.

Sentimental

BY ALBERT GOLDBARTH

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be
condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages
of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple
in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July
in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air
like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes.
Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues
to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling
out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run
for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues
like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this
slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does
“earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes
in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No,
yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What
if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard,
hammering winter? When my father was buried,
the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said
that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do
to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play
the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that
lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs
we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning
of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . .
Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths
of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke
as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened,
mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers
sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But
they have their validity, don't they, yes? their
sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting
in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time
alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . .
questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face
of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out
the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal,
and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics.
What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde
gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm
to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue
quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if
I wept? What if I simply put the page down,
rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot
the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into
the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising
light, and walked back up to his stone a final time,
just that, no drama, and it was so cold,
and the air was so brittle, metal buckled
out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me,
where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry
all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s
heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.

Two to Remember in Your Year-End Giving

My guess is that, like me, you're receiving a barrage of end-of-year solicitations from all sorts of good organizations and ministries who are struggling to continue their good work--particularly in a difficult economic climate. There are many that deserve our support. Let me encourage you to consider just two:

The Christian Reformed World Relief Committee is a ministry committed to global justice and mercy in all sorts of way. As they put it on their website, the "CRWRC responds on your behalf and with your help to the needs of people who suffer from poverty, hunger, disaster, and injustice." Consider making a donation today, and perhaps becoming a regular supporter.

As Fors Clavigera readers well know, I'm a big fan of Comment magazine (published by the Cardus Foundation). It is a singular magazine publishing material that is wise, provocative, stimulating, and generous. They are especially important in reaching the next generation with a winsome vision of kingdom-building commitment to shalom. Do consider making a donation to help keep this work going.

Still Hope?

In Jay Neugeboren's review of Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life (Other Press, 2009), which tracks Greenberg's (relatively late) emergence as a "writer" (in his early fifties), Neugeboren makes the following disclosure, reflecting on Greenberg's tale:

"I found myself noting that I had myself accumulated, by my count, 576 rejections before I sold my first story, and more than two thousand rejections on eight unpublished books before I sold my first novel. What keeps writers going, as it does Greenberg, is a sense that though, when rejected or ignored, we may feel such things intensely, we learn not to take them personally."

Strangely encouraging...

"Wendy and Lucy"

Kelly Reichardt's film, Wendy and Lucy, is a mesmerizing adaptation of Jon Raymond's story, "Train Choir." Reichardt well captures Raymond's Pacific Northwest--a solitary, derelict region, yet populated with quick conversationalists and in-breakings of charity, bringing to mind other Oregon films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or even The Postman (indeed, Will Patton makes a showing both in Wendy and Lucy and The Postman).

I was particularly struck by how Reichhardt takes ownership of the short story as a film. From the voyeur-like opening slide of the camera, long peering at Wendy and her dog Lucy from behind the bushes, Reichardt is a master of suspense on a thread. Indeed, the film regularly points up how thin our securities are--how little stands between us and either danger or destitution. (For example, what looks like the insecure exposure of sleeping in a car can, by the end of the film, look like a veritable fortress compared to the alternatives.)

The very sparsity of the film is also short-story-like (yea, Raymond-Carver-like). Michelle Williams (as Wendy) carries an entire story on her back, wearing the same drab apparel for the entire film. Reichardt never lets the camera give us one of those sprawling, breath-taking panoramic views of lush Oregon hills. Instead, she takes a vow of cinematic chastity and poverty. The environs of the story are equally drab and depressing--which is just to say that Reichardt's camera honestly looks at--honestly sees--the delapidated, broken-down strip malls and car ports of our gutted towns and imploded rural spaces. The only thing that has a shot at beauty in this film are the relationships.

Reichardt also resists the easy supplement of a score: there's no soundtrack save Wendy's occasional humming of a few bars that, from the opening shot, bore their way into your soul as chords of enchanted melancholy. There is a discipline to her visual story-telling which is remarkable.

And she manages to pull off this discipline without falling into either Joyce-Carol-Oates-ish violence or Hollywood's uplifting cliches. As a result, she doesn't buy into the lie that so-called "reality" is only monstrous and merciless. Instead, she makes room for charity--but without falling prey to our sitcom-induced desire for resolution.

An excellent film.

Race, History, and Christian Intellectuals

I'm currently reading J. Kameron Carter's book, Race: A Theological Account with an interdisciplinary group of faculty from across the college (and the seminary). Much to ponder here, and it will take me til next spring to digest it, but I couldn't resist sharing this gem from the end of chapter 3 (on Albert Raboteau, author of the groundbreaking book, Slave Religion). Throughout the chapter, Carter is pursuing fundamental questions about what history would (or should) look like for a Christian intellectuals, and then expands the scope of his question in this way:

"What would it mean to refuse dialectical intellectual arrangements altogether, arrangements that allow us to neatly but insistently sequester the dispositions of faith from the dispositions of the modern academic, and then rewrite history, do literary criticism or philosophy or sociology or political science or what have you as Christian intellectuals? What would the intellectual life then look like? How would [Raboteau's] Slave Religion have to be rewritten? But more to the broader issues of this book, how much more would the pseudotheological backbone of whiteness be broken for the sake of the redemption of us all, were we to escape the intellectual dispositions of whiteness and the ambiguities of blackness that it creates?" (p. 156)

We Learn to Love

Comment magazine, one of my favorites, recently ran a poetry contest--more specifically, a rondeau competition. (Those from commonwealth nations will recognize a familiar rondeau in John McCrae's, "In Flanders Fields.") The contest invited entries focused on the theme of education for their 4th annual "Making the Most of College" issue.

In my tentative poetic scribblings, I've increasingly felt the need to be disciplined by form, so I thought this rondeau exercise would be a good discipline. Well, turns out I was awarded second place! My poem, "We Learn to Love," appeared in the September issue of Comment and is now available online.

We Learn to Love

We learn to love in family,
Protean school of charity,
its mundane halls and humble space
parochial tutors of grace,
an intimate academy.

Then leave behind simplicity
for a sagacious faculty,
unaware even in that place
we learn to love.

Love at the university?
Where learning’s a commodity?
Despite erasing every trace,
schooling of hearts persists apace.
Apprenticed incrementally,
we learn to love.