“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“Died: Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian of Hope” – Daniel Silliman in Christianity Today: “Jürgen Moltmann, a theologian who taught that Christian faith is founded in the hope of the resurrection of the crucified Christ and that the coming kingdom of God acts upon human history out of the eschatological future, died on June 3 in Tübingen, Germany. He was 98. Moltmann is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians since World War II. According to theologian Miroslav Volf, his work was ‘existential and academic, pastoral and political, innovative and traditional, readable and demanding, contextual and universal,’ as he showed how the central themes of Christian faith spoke to the ‘fundamental human experiences’ of suffering. The World Council of Churches reports that Moltmann is ‘the most widely read Christian theologian’ of the last 80 years. Religion scholar Martin Marty said his writings ‘inspire an uncertain Church’ and ‘free people from the dead hands of dead pasts.’ Moltmann was not an evangelical, but many evangelicals engaged deeply with his work. The popular Christian author Philip Yancey called Moltmann one of his heroes and said in 2005 that he had ‘plowed through’ nearly a dozen of his books.”
“How J.R.R. Tolkien Came to Write the Stories of ‘The Rings of Power’” – John Garth in Smithsonian Magazine: “No writer in the English language has ever created a more complete world than John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Middle-earth, where his famous stories take place, was meant to be a version of our own world in a forgotten past. Tolkien mapped out elaborate geographies and built richly detailed civilizations. Every work of fantasy that came later, from the Harry Potter novels and Star Wars movies to games like Dungeons and Dragons, owes a great debt to Tolkien’s astonishing imagination and pays homage to it. Tolkien even invented languages for his elves and other characters to speak, drawing on elements of Northern European tongues such as Finnish and Welsh. In his day job, he was an Oxford professor, an esteemed scholar in Anglo-Saxon and related languages and cultures. And yet his lifeblood went into the books that have since almost eclipsed his academic reputation. He began dreaming up Middle-earth in 1914 as an Oxford undergraduate at the outbreak of World War I, in which he went on to fight as a British Army officer at the Battle of the Somme. He created the mythology to express his ‘feeling about good, evil, fair, foul,’ he said.”
“A World Full of Signs: Maximus the Confessor saw the natural world as charged with symbolic meaning” – Susannah Black Roberts in Plough: “In AD 653 Byzantine Emperor Constans II ordered the arrest of Pope Martin I, and with him, an elderly monk named Maximus. The pope had been elected four years earlier against the emperor’s will, and had called a council to deal with the most pressing theological issue of the day: Did Christ possess a human will as well as a divine one? The council said yes; the emperor disagreed. Put on trial, the pope and Maximus both refused to recant. Sent into exile, Martin died within a few years, but Maximus lived on, until 662, when he was brought to trial once again. Again, he refused to recant. He was tortured, his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off, so that he could no longer speak or write. Cast into the fortress of Schemarum, in what is now Georgia, he died soon afterward. What had he written with that hand? What had he spoken with that tongue? Who was this man? According to tradition, Maximus was born to a noble family in Constantinople and became first secretary to Emperor Heraclius, grandfather of the emperor who persecuted him. He left imperial service to become a monk, and eventually abbot, at a monastery in Chrysopolis.”
“The Ambling Mind” – L. M. Sacasas in The Convivial Society: “A few weeks back I shared a few lines from Kierkegaard about the virtues of walking. ‘Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,’ Kierkegaard advised a friend in despair. ‘Every day,’ he went on to say, ‘I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.’ This struck me as good counsel. Since then, I’ve serendipitously encountered a handful of similar meditations on the value of walking, so I’ve taken that as sign to briefly gather some of these together and offer them to you, chiefly because they collectively remind us that there is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it. I should acknowledge at the outset that I am not a highly accomplished walker, by which I mean someone who has walked extensively, in varied terrains, and has perhaps also reflected at some length on the practice.1 I’m sure, though, that most people who I might think of as highly accomplished walkers would resist my characterization, and, I should add, I certainly don’t mean to encourage a hierarchical framing of what is a thoroughly egalitarian activity. Nonetheless, you get my point. I try to get out and walk a fair amount, but these are always modest and local walks. That said, I’ll first note the Latin phrase solvitur ambulando meaning ‘it is solved by walking.’ The phrase is attributed to both St. Augustine and the Greek philosopher, Diogenes. The sense of it, as I take it, is that when you are stuck on something, you should get up and take a walk. By the act of walking you somehow allow your mind to think more freely and creatively.”
“Through the Rent, Eternity Enters: A Conversation with Marilyn Nelson and Christian Wiman” – Abram Van Engen, Christian Wiman, and Marilyn Nelson at The Hedgehog Review: “Abram Van Engen: I wanted to begin by asking you each about lives and life stories that have mattered to you. Marilyn, you have written several books that are biographies composed of individual poems, including one on George Washington Carver. I wonder if you could share how you came to write on Carver and what the writing of his life meant to you.
Marilyn Nelson: I had spent a year or two writing about evil and about how theology approaches it. I had consulted a couple of friends who were theology professors, and I was really deep into this issue which was incredibly depressing. I finally decided that I had to call an end to it because there is no absolute answer to the question of evil. It was clear to me that no matter what limitations we think we are imposing on human evil there is always some human being who is willing to go beyond that to the next phase. I wanted to write a saint’s life as an answer to this—as a way of finding my own center again and also as a way of exploring the question of whether there is a limit to our potential for good. Clearly, there seems no limit to our potential for evil: Is there a limit to our goodness? So, I wound up writing about George Washington Carver….Carver lived—as I suppose we all do—surrounded by evil. But Carver’s approach was always to find the path of love. In some ways, he was a kind of a foretaste of the theology of Dr. Martin Luther King and other leaders who teach love and pacifism instead of retaliation. There were several specific incidents in his life when he loved people who were blatantly racist. He offered them love as a way of conversion.”
“The Masterpiece of Our Time” – Gary Saul Morton in The New Criterion: “When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate: ‘Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!’ The first translations into Western languages in 1974—just fifty years ago—proved almost as sensational. No longer was it so easy to cherish a sentimental attachment to communism and the USSR….Solzhenitsyn discovered that ‘the meaning of life lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.’ Recognizing he would not have discovered that meaning without suffering, he disagrees with all those writers who ‘considered it their duty . . . to curse prison. . . . I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you prison, for having been in my life!”‘ Strangely enough, then, this book about countless deaths, unimaginable cruelty, and the worst of human nature turns out to be, in the final analysis, optimistic. It tells us how, even in the depths of evil, one can discern and choose the good.”
Music: JJ Heller, “Fairest Lord Jesus“
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Matthew Erickson 