“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.
“Every soul a cosmos; every other infinite: Musings with Josh Ritter, Howard Thurman, and Emmanuel Levinas” – James K. A. Smith at Quid Amo: “I think a lot—like, a lot, maybe too much—about a line from a song by Josh Ritter called ‘California’: ‘Don’t say, “It’s been done a hundred thousand times,” ’cause this one is mine.’ The setup of the song is itself cliché. The aspiring artist from the provinces–whether actor, singer, filmmaker, whatever–is making their way to the city of dreams to take their shot at making it big. But the lyric aims to puncture the cliché, or at least remind us that even the soul playing out the cliché for the hundred thousandth time is utterly singular and unique. So, yes, this is a story you’ve read before; but every single time it’s being played out by a unique soul for whom the story is theirs alone. Every replay harbors a secret. Every rendition is utterly new. I don’t know what it is about my wiring, my personality, or my history, but this elasticity of experience between singularity and universality has long fascinated me. You watch a thousand people skitter by on a New York City sidewalk and they are a mass of humanity, a blob of generality, tiny dots in a pointillist painting that is the human race across time. But if you could zoom in on any one of them and then somehow plumb the depths of their consciousness you would be visiting an unknown galaxy never seen before. I’m teaching Pascal again right now and he, too, is fascinated by this wonder of a human being’s insignificance and infinity. From one perspective, the human being is a veritable nothing—an ephemeral speck of dust in a vast unfurling universe indifferent to our very existence. But from another perspective, each of those ephemeral specks is a microcosm of the whole, a cosmos within the cosmos. Pascal evokes a somewhat strange metaphor: ‘the thinking reed.'”
“Focused” – Lilias Trotter at Renovaré: “It was in a little wood in early morning. The sun was climbing behind a steep cliff in the east, and its light was flooding nearer and nearer and then making pools among the trees. Suddenly, from a dark corner of purple brown stems and tawny moss there shone out a great golden star. It was just a dandelion, and half withered — but it was full face to the sun, and had caught into its heart all the glory it could hold, and was shining so radiantly that the dew that lay on it still made a perfect aureole round its head. And it seemed to talk, standing there — to talk about the possibility of making the very best of these lives of ours. For if the Sun of Righteousness has risen upon our hearts, there is an ocean of grace and love and power lying all around us, an ocean to which all earthly light is but a drop, and it is ready to transfigure us, as the sunshine transfigured the dandelion, and on the same condition — that we stand full face to God. Gathered up, focused lives, intent on one aim — Christ — these are the lives on which God can concentrate blessedness. It is ’all for all’ by a law as unvarying as any law that governs the material universe.”
“Notes from the Second Naïveté: Despite my best efforts not to cause a spectacle, I found myself muttering in tongues” – Elizabeth Oldfield in Mockingbird: “A few years ago, I was in a grand old building on the Strand, itself one of London’s grandest old streets. About fifty people had entered through the Palladian arches (built in 1774), passed under the banner advertising ’21st Century Enlightenment,’ and gathered in a vaulted hall. We had been invited to contribute to one of the many research projects undertaken by the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. The finest minds from across academia, healthcare, and policy were assembled to discuss something usually outside the organization’s secular, intellectual remit: spirituality. The unsaid subtext was, ‘How do we rescue this seemingly unavoidable concept, which research is increasingly showing the utility of, from woo and the credulous religious and make it respectable again?’ They had invited the wrong person. Although at the time I led a serious and credible think tank, I have found gatherings like this always bring out my mischievous side. I care less and less about being respectable. This whole project seemed to be missing the point. The suits, the detached analytical language, the PowerPoint presentations. Not my bag at the best of times, but particularly when applied to a subject as deep, tender, and rawly human as this. I listened as well as I could to the eminent psychotherapists and sociologists, peered dutifully at the charts and graphs, while mainly wondering how we could crack this room open and get to the real stuff. All of which meant, when I got up to give my presentation, I junked my script (it had no graphs anyway, but I had at least tried to play the game with some research citations). Instead, I started with, ‘I pray in tongues.'”
“‘Practicing the Way’ in the Church: Analyzing the Comer Option” – Noah Senthil at The Gospel Coalition: “Protestant circles need a new pedagogical strategy,’ Carl Trueman recently claimed. ‘It is striking that in the New Testament and in the early second century (see, for example, the Didache) Christians and pagans were differentiated not simply by what they believed but by how they behaved. The Christian community must have a practical, moral distinctiveness.’ One could argue that John Mark Comer has accepted this challenge, popularizing a certain approach to Christian living that offers a ‘practical, moral distinctiveness.’ From my vantage point as a Gen Z Christian, it seems Comer is the most influential figure for evangelicals my age. Of course, this comes with much praise (see Brad East) and criticism (see Tim Challies). But whatever we think of Comer, we should try to understand why he’s so popular.”
“We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It” – Charles C. Mann in The New Atlantis: “At the rehearsal dinner I began thinking about Thomas Jefferson’s ink. My wife and I were at a fancy destination wedding on a faraway island in the Pacific Northwest. Around us were musicians, catered food, a full bar, and chandeliers, all set against a superb ocean sunset. Not for the first time, I was thinking about how amazing it is that relatively ordinary middle-class Americans could afford such events — on special occasions, at least. My wife and I were at a tableful of smart, well-educated twenty-somethings — friends of the bride and groom. The wedding, with all its hope and aspiration, had put them in mind of the future. As young people should, they wanted to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well. But when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.”
“The Vagabond King: Further thoughts on the idol of civilisation” – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule: “Recently I wrote about silence, and how it had crept up on me. When God appeared to the Prophet Elijah, he came not in fire, wind or earthquake, but as a ‘still, small voice’ after all these things had passed. ‘The peace of God, which passes all understanding’, is how St Paul described it. Words, of course, can never reach the source. I had thought for a while that I should respond to some of the responses to my October Erasmus Lecture, published last month in First Things as “Against Christian Civilisation,” but the desire to say something has competed with the desire to say nothing at all. It still does. There have been a lot of reactions, though. Almost daily, since giving the talk, I have received emails thanking me for it. People say they are grateful to have been reminded that as Christians we are supposed to be focus on trying live a Christ-like life, rather than getting ourselves tangled up in the worldly business of war, politics, culture and the rest.”
Music: Mahalia Jackson, “Calvary (Live),” from Mahalia Jackson in Concert
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Matthew Erickson 