Tag: Alan Jacobs

The Weekend Wanderer: 20 April 2024

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“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.

“Working With Your Hands Is Good for Your Brain: Activities like writing, gardening and knitting can improve your cognition and mood. Tapping, typing and scrolling? Less so.” – Markham Heid in The New York Times: “The human hand is a marvel of nature. No other creature on Earth, not even our closest primate relatives, has hands structured quite like ours, capable of such precise grasping and manipulation. But we’re doing less intricate hands-on work than we used to. A lot of modern life involves simple movements, such as tapping screens and pushing buttons, and some experts believe our shift away from more complex hand activities could have consequences for how we think and feel. ‘When you look at the brain’s real estate — how it’s divided up, and where its resources are invested — a huge portion of it is devoted to movement, and especially to voluntary movement of the hands,’ said Kelly Lambert, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Dr. Lambert, who studies effort-based rewards, said that she is interested in ‘the connection between the effort we put into something and the reward we get from it’ and that she believes working with our hands might be uniquely gratifying.”

“Finding an Uncontainable God Within Finite Poetic Spaces” – Joey Jekel interviews poet Scott Cairns in relation to his newest collection of poetry in Christianity Today: “Fans of the Harry Potter series might recall the magical tents from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In the film version, when the Weasleys take Harry and others to the Quidditch World Cup, the audience sees rows and rows of small tents, seemingly designed to sleep only one or two people. Harry is confused as he witnesses the others walk into a single tent, which can hold much more than its external size betrays. Once Harry follows suit, he stands in awe at a spacious interior containing several bunkrooms, a dining room, and a large living room. This scene gives a helpful image for the ideas and realities Scott Cairns takes up in his new collection of poems, Lacunae. Cairns is an Eastern Orthodox poet whose work, besides ten poetry collections, includes essays, a spiritual memoir, and the text of two oratorios. Many of the poems in Lacunae concern the mystery of divine things, infinite in scope, somehow fitting within finite spaces and times. Just as Harry Potter was surprised to find all that was contained within an ostensibly small tent, one is shocked to find the fullness of God contained in Mary, and even more so, contained within every Christian by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”

“A God You Can Dance Before: David can sing and dance before God, because God has first sung and danced before him” – Adam Morton at Mockingbird: “Every Sunday the man dances. Middle-aged, thin, and balding, he takes his place on the edge of the chancel with a handful of church youth and, in an ecstasy of long white limbs, performs actions to a series of praise choruses, no matter how silly he might appear. Ostensibly this is a demonstration for those desiring similar kinesthetic dimensions of worship, but one look at his face tells another story. He is not playing to the congregation. Rich is the nearest thing to a walking ‘Dance like no one is watching’ t-shirt, and he knows the truth of that slogan — many are watching, but he only cares about one. It is before the Lord that he dances. I typically do not dance — not in church and rarely otherwise. I don’t do actions to songs, and you won’t catch me putting my hands in the air. Since the church I attend these days is not the sort to occupy those hands with a weighty hymnal, I keep them planted firmly in my pockets. My mind, meanwhile, is governed by an inescapable self-consciousness, somehow only worsened by the gyrating example before me. Doesn’t he care how he looks? What sense of security allows him to dance like that?”

“Terrence Malick’s ‘The Way of the Wind’ Eyeing 2025 Premiere — Shot in 2019” – Jordan Ruimy at World of Reel: “The film is currently three hours long. Malick first hoped to make the film in the ‘90s with Disney and a large budget, but quickly departed the project when the studio wouldn’t give him final cut; he then embarked on ‘The Thin Red Line.’ As I had recently reported, Terrence Malick’s ‘The Way of the Wind’ is still not ready. Long story short, separate sources were telling me that Malick was practically done editing the film. There was an end in sight. However, you could almost certainly scratch off a Cannes 2024 appearance. He’s continuing work on this one until, at least, August — that’s when the final stages of mixing occur. The next best case scenario could have been a Venice premiere. However, we can also scratch off Venice. Géza Röhrig, who plays Jesus in Malick’s biblical epic, has confirmed that the film will premiere at Cannes 2025. Malick has been editing the film, which was shot in 2019, for close to five years now. He also, supposedly, shot close to 3000 hours of footage. ‘“’The Way of the Wind’ conveys passages “in the life of Christ” through the representation of evangelical parables. Jesus Christ’s descent into the world of the dead, also known as his ‘descent into hades,’ rumored to be one of the parables included in the film. The cast includes the likes of Matthias Schoenaerts (as Saint Peter), Röhrig (as Jesus), Ben Kingsley, Joseph Fiennes, and Mark Rylance (as Satan).”

“Everyone Knows” – Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony: “Reading this Jessica Grose piece — so similar to ten thousand other reports made in recent yers — on the miseries induced or exacerbated by digital technologies in the classroom, I think: Everyone knows all this. Everyone knows that living on screens is making children miserable in a dozen different ways, contributing to ever-increasing rates of mental illness and inhibiting or disabling children’s mental faculties. Everyone knows that engaging creatively with the material world is better for children — is better for all of us.  Everyone knows that Meta and TikTok are predatory and parasitical, and that they impoverish the lives of the people addicted to them.  Everyone knows that social media breed bad actors: each platform does this in its own way, but they all do it, and the more often people engage on such platforms the more messed-up and unhappy they become.”

“Across the Country, Amish Populations Are on the Rise” – Sam Myers in The Daily Yonder: “The Amish, a religious group living almost exclusively in rural America due to their agrarian lifestyle, have astounded both their rural neighbors and researchers with recent population growth. According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, the estimated population of North American Amish in 2023 was 384,290 (6,100 in Canada), a 116% increase from 2000. Statistics show that the population nearly doubles every 20 years. Unlike some other Christian denominations, Amish communities don’t focus on converting outsiders (there are only a few dozen converts on record), so this population growth comes almost exclusively from existing communities.”

Music: Khruangbin, “May Ninth,” from A La Sala

The Weekend Wanderer: 27 January 2024

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“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.

“Religious but not spiritual? Meet the skeptics favoring ritual over the supernatural” – Kathryn Post at Religion News Service: “From what she eats to how she ties her shoes, religion shapes nearly every moment of Michelle’s life. An Orthodox Jew living in New York City, she follows a line of discipline guided by halacha, or Jewish law. She keeps a kosher kitchen, and on shabbat she doesn’t drive or turn on lights, following ancient strictures against lighting a fire on the Lord’s day. The one part of Judaism Michelle said she’s not necessarily sold on is the whole ‘God’ thing. ‘I have zero desire or inclination to stop being a practicing Jew,’ said Michelle, who asked to keep her last name private out of concern for her employment at a faith-based organization. ‘I recognize about myself that I am skeptical about the God stuff and the Torah stuff. I don’t really believe all that. I don’t feel like I need to.’ The phrase ‘spiritual not religious’ has become a near-catch phrase in American culture, and the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as having spiritual leanings without adhering to a given faith continues to climb. But only rarely have pollsters plumbed for those who separate their religion from their spirituality in the other direction: the religious but not spiritual. While few studies dedicated to the group exist, a December 2023 study on spirituality from Pew Research Center found that 1 in 10 Americans can be categorized this way.”

“The Connection Between Racial and Environmental Injustice” – David Swanson at his occasional newsletter: “I’m glad for you, the readers of this little newsletter to be some of the first to learn the title of my forthcoming book. After a bit of brainstorming back-and-forth with my publisher, InterVarsity Press, and input from friends and family, here’s where we landed: Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share some of the assumptions behind the title. Plunder is a theme that runs through the book, particular in my description of the force which animates both environmental and racial injustice. For a couple of reasons, this is something that felt very important as I was writing. First, it’s been my experience that most people who care deeply about confronting systemic racism don’t see its connection to environmental destruction, and vice versa. If they intuit a connection, it remains vague: both are expressions of injustice. But, as I do my best to show in the book, the connection is precise and deep. I go as far as to say that addressing either racial or environmental injustice without addressing the other guarantees that our efforts will never address the root cause behind both.”

“Reflections on the Evangelical Fracturing, Ten Years In” – Jake Meadow at Mere Orthodoxy: “While reading an ARC of Mike Cosper’s forthcoming book, I was caught up in how Cosper described the church planting scene of the mid 2000s, particularly as it existed around the then still embryonic Acts 29 network. There was a blending of innocence and confidence and hopefulness that Cosper captures well. I wasn’t part of it directly, but I remember listening to Mark Driscoll sermons and then Matt Chandler sermons at the time and picking up something of the atmosphere from afar. (I was born in 1987, left the fundamentalist church I grew up in in 2005, spent 18 months in an attractional megachurch more in the Willow Creek stream than Mars Hill, and then found my way to RUF and the PCA in 2007, where I have been ever since.) From about 2005 until the early 2010s it seemed as if Acts 29 might represent the defining movement in the next wave of evangelicalism: They had found a way of blending the best insights of the attractional movement of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren with the theological and missiological acumen of Tim Keller and John Piper. Moreover, because of their particular grunge-inflected aesthetic they naturally avoided some of the worst excesses of the attractional movement, which was a tendency toward the superficial and happy clappy. Their strength here wasn’t necessarily a product of any special virtue—Gen X tends toward the brooding and melancholic, after all, and virtually all their leadership were poster children for Gen X. But the resultant synthesis of their many influences was compelling.”

“How social media algorithms ‘flatten’ our culture by making decisions for us” – Tanya Mosley interviews Kyle Chayka on NPR’s Fresh Air: “If you opened Facebook, Twitter or Instagram about a decade ago, you’d likely see posts from friends and family, in chronological order. Nowadays, users are hit with a barrage of content curated by an algorithm. Passionate about plants? Sports? Cats? Politics? That’s what you’re going to see. ‘”‘[There] are equations that measure what you’re doing, surveil the data of all the users on these platforms and then try to predict what each person is most likely to engage with,’ New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka explains. ‘So rather than having this neat, ordered feed, you have this feed that’s constantly trying to guess what you’re going to click on, what you’re going to read, what you’re going to watch or listen to.’ In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka examines the algorithmic recommendations that dictate everything from the music, news and movies we consume, to the foods we eat and the places we go. He argues that all this machine-guided curation has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.”

“ADD Revisited” – Alan Jacobs at his blog, Homebound Symphony: “On the first day of my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century course — mentioned here — I played for my students a few minutes of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. We paused to talk a bit about the musical language of late Romanticism, about Rachmaninoff’s gift for lush melody, etc. Then I played them this [Rachmaninoff’s Vespers]. Hard to believe it was composed by the same man, isn’t it? But (I suggested) that’s the difference between a young Russian composer in 1901 — he wrote that concerto when he was 27 — and a middle-aged Russian composer living through overwhelming political turmoil and world war. In time of desperate need Rachmaninoff, not a churchgoer, turned to the liturgical and musical inheritance of Orthodoxy to make sense of his world, to begin the long healing that would be necessary.”

“REVIEW: Why Do the Heathen Rage?: Flannery O’ Connor’s unfinished novel raises persistent questions” – Katy Carl in Current: “Staring down our own limitations requires the greatest degree of courage. Writing in 1963 to editor and anthologist Sr. Mariella Gable, novelist Flannery O’Connor forthrightly unburdens herself of the creative and spiritual barriers preventing her next work: ‘I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.’ The revelation is more poignant because we know, as O’Connor knew, that she was slowly dying from complications caused by lupus. The O’Connor who sent that letter was mere months away from death. Yet some of her finest work still lay ahead of her. ‘Parker’s Back’ articulates an incarnational spirituality set sternly against Gnosticism. ‘Revelation’ renders the long-overdue comeuppance of a prejudiced farm wife who, in an iconic final scene, receives a mystical vision that upends the unjust racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South. O’Connor completed both stories during her last months of life. But when she writes to Sr. Mariella about ‘the larger things,’ O’Connor seems to mean not these works for which she ought to be most remembered but her novel-in-progress Why Do the Heathen Rage? In this unfinished work, now available to the public in its first edition, O’Connor strives to grow beyond her comic gifts. She seeks to develop the latent strengths of her Dostoyevskian religious consciousness, chronicling life after the violent moment of grace while also handling social questions in earnest.”

Music: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vespers, Op. 37 – II. “Blagoslovi dushe moya“

The Weekend Wanderer: 23 September 2023

Matt Erickson2 Comments

“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.

“The Road Is the Best Parenting Book of All Time” – Kathryn Jezer-Morton in The Cut: “Cormac McCarthy died [recently], and none of the tributes I’ve read have mentioned what I consider his most important contribution to the American literary canon: He wrote the best parenting book of all time, The Road. Not only is it the best parenting book I’ve ever read, it’s the only parenting book I’ve read cover to cover. Sure, I’ve skimmed the big hits out of a sense of obligation, but nothing has come close to resonating with me to the extent, and for the unblinking duration, that The Road has. For those unfamiliar, The Road is the story of an unnamed man and his unnamed son, who are walking through an ashen, ruined landscape in the wake of an unnamed catastrophe that happened years prior, when the boy was quite young. The conditions that surround them are unsafe, so they have to keep moving. They are heading toward ‘the coast,’ but the man isn’t sure there’s anything waiting for them there. What he does seem to know is that the boy needs hope to survive, and a destination provides something to hope for. McCarthy’s prose is spare and devastating. (For those who would rather not read, there’s a very good film adaptation starring Viggo Mortensen in the role of the man.)”

“Wheaton College Releases Report on Its History of Racism” – Daniel Silliman and Kate Shellnutt in Christianity Today: “Wheaton College embraced racist attitudes that “created an inhospitable and sometimes hostile campus environment for persons of color,” according to a 122-page review of the school’s history released by trustees today. Though the flagship evangelical institution was founded by abolitionists, over the next century and a half it turned away from concerns about racial equality. Even when the school’s leadership knew what was right, they frequently lacked the courage to ‘take a more vocal role in opposing widespread forms of racism and white supremacy,’ the report says, and too often ‘chose to stay silent, equivocate, or do nothing’ about racial injustice. ‘We cannot be healed and cannot be reconciled unless and until we repent,’ the task force concluded at the end of an 18-month study. ‘These sins constituted a failure of Christian love; denied the dignity of people made in the image of God; created deep and painful barriers between Christian brothers and sisters; tarnished our witness to the gospel; and prevented us from displaying more fully the beautiful diversity of God’s kingdom.’ President Philip Ryken told CT he believes the report is important and he’s glad the college will be making it publicly available.”

“Against Apps, for Wander Lines” – Alan Jacobs at his blog, The Homebound Symphony: “In 1980, a curiously polymathic Jesuit priest named Michel de Certeau (1925–86) published a provocative book called, in English translation, The Practice of Everyday Life. (The original and more evocative French title is L’invention du quotidien Vol. 1: Arts de faire.) In the book’s introduction he lays out a simple and yet wonderfully generative opposition between strategy and tactics; and that distinction will be key to what follows. The terms are of course borrowed from warfare: strategy (the term derives from the Greek strategos, ‘army leader’) concerns the overall goals and general plans of a military campaign. It is the view from 30,000 feet. But when we speak of tactics we are viewing the situation from ground level: military tactics are the specific ways and means by which the overall strategic goals are pursued. Only strategoi formulate strategy, and they may have a good deal to say about tactics as well, but because conditions on the battlefield may be unexpected or volatile, subordinate leaders will be largely responsible for tactical decisions.”

“At Sing! Global, a faithful pushback to the spread of megachurch praise music” – Grace Becker at Religion News Service: “The crowds seen buzzing last week outside the Bridgestone Arena, a regular host to the NCAA basketball tournament and a hometown venue for country music acts, were coming not to take in a game or a concert, but to sing, write and bond over Christian hymns. The annual Sing! Global conference, held Sept. 4-6, drew some 8,500 Christian worship music leaders and other church musicians, pastors, vendors and hymn composers from as many as 35 countries. (An estimated 80,000 others in 120 countries participate online.) They attend breakout sessions on congregational singing, songwriting and children’s and family ministry. Others address themes such as ‘Hymns in Hard Places,’ evangelism and singing at home. They listen to speakers, live recording sessions and late-night performances. Most of all they come to sing together — tunes from historic hymnals, from Celtic traditions and new creations — and to share a common love and culture of sacred music. ‘I like seeing all different denominations represented, kind of breaking down the walls and seeing the church at large,’ said Amy Bauman, from Appleton, Wisconsin. Over the hum of strangers getting acquainted in the lunch line, Bauman said she and her fellow singers had come to be reenergized and have their ‘flames reignited.’ But there is another story about a battle for American hymnody that has been on display since the Sing! Global conference was founded in 2017 by Keith and Kristyn Getty, a husband-and-wife hymn writing team.”

“Suffering Work: Pastoring With Cancer – Four Things I’ve Learned” – Derek Sweatman in Mockingbird: “This is my story of pastoring a church while fighting cancer. All of us leaders have something we’re struggling against, be it a disease or addiction or a suffering mental state, so my particular circumstances are just part of the larger reality that all leaders face: being human. That said, I have learned some things these last few years about myself, about the church, and about what it means to lead while dragging along. In the fall of 2020 I was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. If there was a good time to get that news, it was during the heart of the COVID lockdown. Nothing else was happening, at least not in person, at least not for us. Our church closed its doors for nearly 18 months, so in a way I was able to deal with my cancer without having to be around a lot of people on the weekends. I went through 12 rounds of chemo and 28 days of radiation, followed by a short break, followed by my surgery in the spring of 2021. I woke up from surgery, attended church the next day from the hospital (we were a Zoom church during lockdown), and then the next day I threw up in a way that concerned everyone involved. My insides basically unraveled and whatever was in my stomach shot through my whole body. Not good. They put me in a medically induced coma, during which there were two emergency surgeries to save my life and repair my body. I don’t remember any of it, I was busy dreaming some very strange dreams and wondering why I couldn’t wake up. After 2+ weeks in a coma, I did wake up. I don’t remember a time in my life when I felt so much joy to be present and to see and to talk to people. I had a lot of questions, and I was saying things that didn’t make a lot of sense, but I was at peace with my wife by side. I couldn’t walk or even sit up; I lost all that strength in the ordeal. I dropped 35 pounds, which thrilled me, but standing up was temporarily impossible, and I spent weeks in the hospital relearning to function at all the basic levels from eating to grabbing things to walking.”

“Why Is Music Getting Sadder?” – Ted Gioia in The Honest Broker: “I’m told that the top search term at Spotify among teens is ‘sad.’ And it’s more than music. Sadness is so widespread among youngsters (especially teen girls) that the Centers for Disease Control is now tracking it. So we shouldn’t be surprised that music and cultural indicators reflect the same reality. Even the candidates for song of the summer are filled with quiet despair—so much so that Spotify declared it the ‘bummer summer.’ Feeding the trend, the platform serves up countless sad playlists. It’s hard to put a positive spin on this. But Spotify did its best. ‘Gen Z has brought a raw, authentic new reality to expressing their emotions,’ the company declared in a press release. ‘We wanted to celebrate this powerful thing they’re doing.’ The message to teens is a little awkward: You’re miserable and alone. But, hey, that’s edgy and authentic too. So what songs do sad teens want to hear during a bummer summer? ‘The most obvious feature of a sad song is the tempo,’ explains music psychologist Michael Bonshor. ‘It tends to be fairly slow, often between about 60 to 70 beats per minute—like a relaxed heartbeat.’ Not long ago, this tempo was a rarity on the Billboard chart—and when you did hear a slow song it was usually a romantic love ballad for slow dancing. But the average tempo of a hit song has been getting slower since the dawn of the new millennium, but slow dancing has almost disappeared. So we have an odd situation. The slow tune is no longer dreamy music for couples, but sad, lonely music for the isolated and depressed. It doesn’t help that handheld devices, earbuds, and other pervasive technologies have turned music into something consumed alone, not communally as it was in past.”

Music: The Beatles, “Hey, Jude” (live, first premiered on David Frost’s “Frost On Sunday”)

The Weekend Wanderer: 29 July 2023

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“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.

Mother Emanuel AME Church memorial.jpg“Groundbreaking ceremony for Emanuel Nine Memorial set for Saturday morning at Mother Emanuel AME Church” – Ian Kayanja at WACH57: “The groundbreaking ceremony for the Emanuel Nine Memorial will take place Saturday morning. Running from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., there will be a groundbreaking ceremony for the Emanuel Nine Memorial and a dedication of the Mother Emanuel AME Church’s wholly restored pipe organ. At the ceremony, there will be remarks from Eric S.C. Manning, pastor of the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church and co-chair of the Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation, John Darby, co-chair of the Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation, and Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg. The Emanuel Nine Memorial will be located on the grounds of the Mother Emanuel AME Church. It is being built to honor the nine victims and five survivors of the June 17, 2015, racially-based mass shooting. It was one of the largest racially motivated mass murders in recent American history. It will feature a courtyard with two fellowship benches facing each other with high backs that arc up and around like sheltering wings. At the center of the courtyard, the curves of the benches will encircle a marble fountain where the names of the Emanuel Nine are carved around the fountain’s edge. Water will emanate from a cross-shaped source, filling the basin and gently spilling over the names of the nine lives lost. The opening between the benches toward the back of the courtyard will reveal a cross above a simple altar, providing visitors with a quiet place.”

Covenant School Gun Reform“Families form nonprofits to address gun, school safety after Nashville school shooting” – Kimberlee Kruesie in APNews: “Pausing at the microphone, 6-year-old Noah took a breath and softly stated, ‘I don’t want any guns today or any day in my school.’ His mom, Sarah Shoop Neumann, wiped away tears as she held the young boy. It had been more than four months since a shooter indiscriminately opened fire while Noah was at a private elementary school in Nashville, killing three of his schoolmates and three adults. And Neumann wanted action. Joining a group of families from The Covenant School, Neumann and others on Thursday announced that they had created two nonprofits to not only promote school safety and mental health resources, but also form an action fund to push legislative policy changes that would place certain limits on firearms inside the politically ruby red state of Tennessee.”

Moore Evangelical crisis“The American Evangelical Church Is in Crisis. There’s Only One Way Out.” – Russell Moore in The Atlantic: “The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves ‘evangelical’ anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m crazy,’ one pastor said to me just days ago. ‘Does no one see that the Church is in crisis?’ Indeed it is. I am a conservative evangelical—previously the head of the public-policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. For years I dealt with evangelical backlash, including from some of my closest allies and friends, over my opposition to Donald Trump and my views on issues such as racial justice and Church sexual abuse. I hardly thought of myself as a ‘dissident.’ Instead, I believed I was just what I’d always been: a loyal Southern Baptist evangelical trying to apply what I’d learned from children’s Sunday school onward about basic Christian morality and justice.”

My Christ - Wiman“My Christ” – Christian Wiman in Image: “Of course there can be no such thing. My Christ. Two thousand twenty years of permutations, interpretations, hardcore seminars, and wholesale slaughters. My Christ? Of course there can only be such a thing. He is a universal language that only an individual heart can translate. My Christ. I begin this essay prompted by two things, a passage in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in which he talks of the necessity of drinking one’s particular shame to the dregs if one would ever be released from it. My shame is Christianity, sometimes. My shame is myself, sometimes. In any event I too often too-timidly sip of both, savoring my spite. The second thing? As I read the Lewis passage, a hawk flew into my vision and landed on a tree limb I can see from my study. How we want the world to speak to us! But some utterance is too intrinsic to be speech. Some luck is love incompletely seen.”

Disciple Making in the Family“Disciple Making in the Family” – You can listen to an audio interview with Dallas Willard on this topic at Conversatio: “A group of ministers in North Carolina, the Pastor’s Disciple-making Network, who put out the Serious Disciple Podcast interviewed Dallas four times on the telephone. Because these are interviews with people in ministry, trying to think through and implement discipleship in their churches, some of their questions are as excellent as are Dallas’s answers.” 

Thomas Pynchon“The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America’s Theologian” – Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review: “In 1988, the great Lutheran scholar Robert Jenson published a book called America’s Theologian, conferring that honor on the formidable eighteenth-century Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. Jenson did not mean that Edwards is the greatest American theologian, though he probably is, but rather ‘that Edwards’s theology meets precisely the problems and opportunities of specifically American Christianity and of the nation molded thereby, and that it does so with the profundity and inventive élan that belong only to the very greatest thinkers.’ Quite clearly, a very different America has emerged in the decades since Jenson’s book was published, and the best theologian of our America is by profession neither a theologian nor a pastor. The great theologian of our America, I propose, is the novelist Thomas Pynchon.  This may seem a peculiar claim, and not just because Pynchon is a writer of fiction. No evidence indicates that Pynchon is a Christian, or indeed a religious believer of any kind (though he may have been taken to church as a child).”

Music: Jon Batiste, “Drink Water” ft. Jon Bellion, Fireboy DML

The Weekend Wanderer: 13 May 2023

Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, 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.

Spiritual Timekeeping“Spiritual Timekeeping” – James K. A. Smith talks about his book How to Inhabit Time in Spark: “WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE THIS BOOK?  There were a few inspirations. The first, to be candid, was my own experience of therapy for depression, which was a personal exercise of reckoning with my past, so I could “live forward” into a different future. In counseling, coming to terms with the past allowed me to hope again. But then reckoning with our collective past is also something we have been undergoing as a country, particularly as we grapple with systemic racism and police brutality, since the murder of George Floyd. Finally, my work is part of a broader conversation about spiritual formation (in the work of Dallas Willard and Tish Harrison Warren, for example), and it seemed to me that we had not yet taken seriously the significance of time in spiritual formation. I hope How to Inhabit Time takes us in new directions.”

134512“Western Classics Exclude Me. But Christ Can Redeem Them: As an Asian American, God’s great story helps me value literature that often leaves me out.” – Sara Kyoungah White in Christianity Today: “Last year, I began reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. At first, I was swept away by Ishmael’s beautiful descriptions of his passion for the sea. But I grew increasingly uncomfortable in chapter two, when Ishmael accidentally stumbles into a Black, presumably Christian, worship service. He shockingly describes the gathering as a ‘great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet’ (another name for hell) and the preacher as ‘a black Angel of Doom.’ In the next chapter, we meet the Native American character Queequeg, whose first words are ‘Who-e debel you? … you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e,’ before he is promptly labeled as a cannibal. What do we do with racist passages in classic books like this—especially as readers of color? As a lifelong lover of books, I heartily applaud that many Christians seem to have a vested interest in preserving and championing classic Western literature. In On Reading Well and various articles, Karen Swallow Prior writes about how good books can help cultivate our virtues. Similarly, Jessica Hooten Wilson has said that books help us to be holier. They can sharpen our worldview and help us develop empathy. Reading good books can, as Philip Ryken writes, sanctify our imaginations and nourish our love for beauty; it can even help us be more effective teachers, preachers, and leaders. As a nonwhite Christian, however, I find that most discussions of reading classic Western literature today either fail to acknowledge or only tangentially mention two difficult truths.”

2F97EWN.jpg“Why millennial men are turning to the Book of Common Prayer” – David French in The Spectator: “The Book of Common Prayer is enjoying a revival in the Church of England, despite the best efforts of some modernists to mothball it. Over the past two years, more and more churchgoers have asked me about a return to Thomas Cranmer’s exquisite language, essentially unaltered since 1662, for church services and private devotions. Other vicars tell me they have had a similar increase in interest. It helps that the Book of Common Prayer has had a fair bit of attention recently. The late Queen Elizabeth’s insistence on the use of Prayer Book texts in her funeral rites meant that in September more people witnessed the beauty of this liturgical treasure than watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled as I heard on TV the solemn words echo around Westminster Abbey: ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ And in the lead-up to the coronation, the Prayer Book has once again been in the public eye – although not all the publicity has been good. Cambridge University Press’s beautifully bound new Prayer Book, published in time for the coronation, had to be recalled from its first print run when it was noticed that the text mistakenly included France as a dominion under Charles III. Some priests have held on to their misprints in the hope that they might become rare collectors’ items or in case the sorry state of French politics makes them prophetic. What’s interesting is that the C of E’s Book of Common Prayer revival is overwhelmingly led by millennials.”

MAID - David Brooks“The Outer Limits of Liberalism: What happens when a society takes individualism to its logical conclusion?” – David Brooks in The Atlantic: “Many good ideas turn bad when taken to their extreme. And that’s true of liberalism. The freedom of choice that liberals celebrate can be turned into a rigid free-market ideology that enables the rich to concentrate economic power while the vulnerable are abandoned. The wild and creative modes of self-expression that liberals adore can turn into a narcissistic culture in which people worship themselves and neglect their neighbors. These versions of liberalism provoke people to become anti-liberal, to argue that liberalism itself is spiritually empty and too individualistic. They contend that it leads to social breakdown and undermines what is sacred about life. We find ourselves surrounded by such anti-liberals today. I’d like to walk with you through one battlefield in the current crisis of liberalism, to show you how liberalism is now threatened by an extreme version of itself, and how we might recover a better, more humane liberalism—something closer to what the Mills had in mind in the first place. In 2016, the Canadian government legalized medical assistance in dying. The program, called MAID, was founded on good Millian grounds. The Canadian Supreme Court concluded that laws preventing assisted suicide stifled individual rights. If people have the right to be the architect of their life, shouldn’t they have the right to control their death? Shouldn’t they have the right to spare themselves needless suffering and indignity at the end of life?”

GettyImages-1393206444-1024x683“You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic” – Clare Coffey in The Bulwark: “Recently, the news that minor British celebrity Sophie Winkelman had pulled her children out of a posh school because students there were going to be issued iPads occasioned the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet? Whenever this subject arises, there are more or less two camps. One camp says yes, the kids are fine; complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation. No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why. As useful as the statistical correlations in the detractors’ learned studies are, they are not conclusive in either direction, and we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.”

silence-is-underrated1“The Most Underrated Sound in Our Society” – Joshua Becker at Becoming Minimalist: “A few months ago, my wife and I took our kids on a short weekend trip to the mountains. As we pulled out of our neighborhood and merged onto the four lane highway, we suddenly realized an important detail for the trip had been left undone. Kim and I both assumed the other person was going to make the necessary arrangements. As a result, neither of us had accomplished the task. And now, the trip had already begun. The problem would ultimately be fixed with a little extra time and money. But in the moment, our conversation abruptly ended. Tenseness ensued. And both of us stared silently out the windshield in disgust. After a few short minutes, one little voice called out from the backseat, ‘Umm, are you guys ever going to talk again?’ The silence had become unbearable. I was reminded again how silence has become a difficult atmosphere in our society. In our homes, we turn on our televisions. In our cars, we turn on the radio. When we exercise, we put on our headphones. Even when waiting in elevators or on hold with customer service, sound fills the void. It seems we have become uncomfortable with the very presence of silence in our lives. We speak of “awkward silences” in a room full of people. We fear that brief moment when we meet someone new and aren’t quite sure what to say.”

Music: The Porter’s Gate, “May the Peace” (feat. Josh Garrels), from Worship for Workers