Jenn hit me a while back with this meme:

* Post the rules of the game.
* Tell us about eight random facts/habits about you.
* At the end of the post, choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things.
* Leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

So, here goes:

1. I met Naughty by Nature and Little Richard on the same day. Little Richard rode the same elevator as me, promised to bring David Bowie to hear my jazz combo that night (they didn't show up), and generally gave me the willies. Naughty by Nature ("You down with OPP? Yeah you know me!") hired my bass-player friend to lay down a bass riff which they may or may not have ultimately used. They told us Little Richard was a weird dude.

2. I bite my nails. A lot. Drives people crazy.

3. My first editorial feedback was that I don't share enough of myself in my writing, and I've been overcompensating ever since.

4. I'm the middle child in my family--the second son of a second son. As a consequence, I have what I like to call "sidekick syndrome." I frequently situate myself in relationships in which I function as the sidekick; eventually I grow to resent the disparity and try to break out on my own. This is, incidentally, the life's journey of the first superhero I actively emulated, Robin, the Boy Wonder sidekick to Batman who eventually became Nightwing. You can see me dressed as Robin in a Halloween photograph from my childhood in the back of my book Comic Book Character.

5. I'm more of a music geek than I am a comic book geek--as unlikely as that may seem.

6. I'm cheap. Case in point: for the past month my PDA has been broken, so that I can't read anything onscreen. For the first month I was waiting till I could get a deal on a phone with PDA functioning through my cell phone service; now I'm waiting till my anniversary at work (next month) in the hopes that they'll buy a PDA phone for me.

7. I prefer reading books by authors who are dead over books by authors who are living. (No offense, living authors!) Not sure what that says about me.

8. This was hard.

OK, eight people to tag: How about Lilies Have Dreams, Please Pass the Cheese, Carolyn, Margaretta Musings, Owen, and three to be named later.

I Wish I Were a Speechwriter

I just heard President Bush say of the new immigration reform bill: "Unregistered immigrants will not be treated with amnesty, but also not with animosity." I chuckled out loud; nice word play, President Bush!

When I was a kid and heard that the president uses speechwriters, I was a little bit dismayed and a whole lot intrigued. I think I'd like that job: putting words to the seminal moments in political history, giving voice to the nation's inarticulate pain in the wake of tragedy, filling page after page in historical anthologies. That'd be a good gig--like back-seat driving the president.

I remember Chris Matthews's ("Welcome to Hardball!") reaction to Al Gore's concession speech after the disputed presidential election in 2000. Matthews--a former speechwriter for President Carter, I believe--was nearly in tears as he talked about the brilliance of the speech, the place it will take in the historical record, the punctuation it added to the political process. I think he was a little jealous of Gore--and, I suppose, of whoever Gore used to write the speech.

I learned a bit from 24 about how the speechwriting process works. The president actually is an active participant; for the speechwriter it's partly taking dictation, partly practicing intuition, partly writing creatively. It's probably a little bit (only a little bit, I assure you) like the process of the writing of Holy Scripture.

That'd be a good gig too, actually. To be Luke or Habakkuk or Moses or 2 Peter--to enter into some literary matrix of divine dictation, inspiration and imagination. If I had my choice, I think I would have written Isaiah or 1 Samuel--but I would have called that one the "Book of David" for sure. Which portions of the Bible do you wish had your name on it?

Don't freak out. Just play along.

Quote of the Day

I think it's true that, of all the bloggers I know personally, I'm the only one who hasn't been awarded the "Thinking Blogger Award." That may be because I post things like the following quotation from Martin Luther's "Never Debate with Satan When Alone," made known to me by the great Drew Blankman:

Almost every night when I wake up, the devil is there and wants to dispute with me. I have come to this conclusion: when the argument that the Christian is without the law and above the law doesn’t help, I instantly chase him away with a fart.

Feel free to post your favorite quirky quotations from Christian history. I've got a bunch from the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture floating around my office.

The Cost of Ownership

As I work on my draft manuscript for Deliver Us from Me-Ville I find myself turning a lot to Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk from the mid-twentieth century. I'm reminded again how volatile the times were before I was born, and how comparatively we've not had to deal with much in our day. Sure, we've seen the evolution of the i-Phone and on-demand television programming, but Merton and his contemporaries sat through a great depression, a world war, a cold war, two American wars in Asia and the civil rights movement. Still, I suspect he wrote the following (in his Secular Journals)not so much for his generation as for ours:

I am scared to take a proprietary interest in anything, for fear that my love of what I own may be killing somebody somewhere.

Merton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are proving to be my main teachers as I write this book. Merton is the spiritual director; Bonhoeffer the theologian. His Cost of Discipleship, written in the same era as Merton's Secular Journals, looks at what Christ calls us to lay down in our pursuit of a life with him. Meanwhile, Merton hints at this idea that what a consumerist, materialist culture calls us to take on makes us complicit in what that culture does to the world we inhabit. That's the hidden cost of ownership: we don't only own what we buy, we own the just and unjust business practices that secured the production of what we buy, we own the environmental degradation that such production causes, we own the hoarding of intellectual property that makes luxury items out of life-saving medication. We own all sorts of things alongside the things we invest in or buy.

Read my friend Chris Heuertz's article "Breaking Her Back to Clothe Mine" for a good up-close look at the cost of ownership and some ways of mitigating it.

A Prayer About Time (part three), Again

My final reposting of Robert Banks's "A Prayer About Time," from his book The Tyranny of Time, is appropriately preceded by the thoughts that were in my head when I originally posted it a couple of years ago. I invite you to comment on the prayer, the navel-gazing, or your own thoughts/experiences of time as sacred experience:

As I think about the purpose of Loud Time, I'm realizing that it demands a lot more self-discipline than I can muster up on my own. I'm purportedly writing about "all things loud and timely," which should give me plenty of ground to cover, but then I fall into navel-gazing and trolling for compliments. . . . Then again, loud time as a sacred practice--which is where I hope to get--is the negotiation of several I's following one big Thou. Or something like that. That's one reason I like comments--it's accountability and virtual mutual affirmation all in one. I am not the center of the universe in Loud Time, but I certainly am one occupant.

Enjoy this third and final section of the prayer about time. It's hopeful and circumspect at the same time, which is a good way for all of us to be. A blessing on your head.

Guard us against attempting too much

because of a false sense of our indispensability,

a false sense of ambition,

a false sense of rivalry,

a false sense of guilt,

or a false sense of inferiority:

yet do not let us mistake our responsibilities,

underestimate ourselves,

fail to be stimulated by others,

overlook our weaknesses,

or know our proper limits.

Enable us also to realise that

important though this life is,

it is not all,

that we should view what we do

in the light of eternity,

not just our limited horizons,

that we ourselves have eternal life now.

God our Father, you are not

so much timeless as timeful,

you do not live above time so much as

hold "all times . . . in your hand",

you have prepared for us a time

when we will have leisure

to enjoy each other and you to the full,

and we thank you, appreciate you

and applaud you for it.

Amen

A Prayer About Time, Again (Part Two)

Here's part two of Robert Banks's prayer about time, from his book The Tyranny of Time. (Read part one here.) This one's weighing on my not because of the oppression I often feel under time's ticking clock but because of my tendency to neglect the realities of finitude as I embrace all sorts of ways of occupying my time. This is a confession of sorts: in my ambitions, in my eagerness to experience life to the full, in my attempts to make people not only happy but dependent on me, I fail myself and my people and my God. Time in this sense is not a tyrant but a parent, teaching me in sometimes difficult ways that I have limits. God, of course, is more parent than tyrant as well, so in these difficult lessons I can take some comfort in knowing I am never alone.

Too often we forget . . . and fail to appreciate your generosity:

we take time for granted and fail to thank you for it,

we view it as a commodity and ruthlessly exploit it,

we cram it too full or waste it,

learn too little from the past or mortgage it off in advance,

we refuse to give priority to those people and things

which should have chief claim upon our time.

Help us to view time more as you view it,

and to use it more as you intend:

to distinguish between what is central and what is peripheral,

between what is merely pressing and what is really important,

between what is our responsibility and what can be left to others,

between what is appropriate now and what will be more relevant later.

A Prayer About Time, Again

Recently I noticed that the clock in my car was forty minutes behind. That happens occasionally, I guess; some short in the clock fuse or something. So I corrected it with a mild grumble and drove myself home from the office. I got home and noticed that my atomic clock--you know, the clock that is regularly updated by satellites, the clock by which all other clocks are judged--was an hour and a half ahead. So I corrected it with a much more pronounced grumble and went on with my life. But it reminded me how significant time as a concept has been to me in my life--it's the subject of countless posts both here and at my other blog, Strangely Dim--and I was reminded of what follows: my first ever post to Loud Time, a prayer that theologian/sociologist Robert Banks recorded in his book The Tyranny of Time. This first part acknowledges God as Creator of time, which has implications for how we look at our own experience of time. I reproduce it here for your edification.

God our Father

you are the Maker of everything that exists,

the Author of the world of nature

and of all living things,

the Creator of both space

and time.

Without you there would be no past,

present or

future;

no summer or winter,

spring or autumn,

seedtime or harvest;

no morning or evening,

months or years.

Because you give us the gift of time we have the opportunity

to think and to act,

to plan and to pray,

to give and to receive,

to create and to relate,

to work and to rest,

to strive and to play,

to love and to worship.

The apostle Paul sums up this prayer nicely for us: "In him we live and move and have our being." Hope you enjoy it. Parts two and three to come.

Signing with the Enemy, Part Deux

So in a previous post I talked about the awkwardness of signing a contract for my now-forthcoming book, tentatively titled Deliver Us from Me-Ville, with a new publisher who is not only not my previous publisher but is not my employer, as is my previous publisher. Does that make sense? It's confusing, I know . . .

But in my previous post I promised a rationale, and not only a rationale, but a rationale that justifies the lamest, most hurtful cliche of the English language: "It's not you, it's me." You'll have to let me know if I succeed. Here goes nothing.

Ahem.

I signed with Cook rather than with IVP for a number of reasons, most of them psychological, most of them in acknowledgment of my inner weaknesses.

1. I've had this particular idea for a book for a long time, but I've been too timid to actually put it out there for someone to scrutinize and (say it ain't so!) reject. I finally worked up the moxie to draft a formal proposal and was planning to submit it to IVP when I started to think, Omigosh, my friends are going to see this proposal. They're going to decide whether it lives or dies. And when I thought of that, I had two visceral reactions:

• (VR1) If they reject it, I will take their rejection very personally, and I will be filled with shame and embarrassment, and I will have a hard time making eye contact with my friends and coworkers, and a psychic barrier will be erected, and psychic distance will build between me and my friends and coworkers, and my effectiveness at my job will suffer, and my friendships will suffer, and I don't want that.
• (VR2) If they agree to publish it, I will wonder from start to finish whether they thought it was a good book worth contracting or whether they thought It's a good enough book to make our coworker and friend happy, seeing as how he really wants to write more and lately he's seemed so anxious and timid and trepidatious, and then I'll be distracted as I write and as I work, and I will have a hard time looking my friends and coworkers in the eye, and my writing and my working will suffer, and I don't want that.

So I went to Cook, for one thing, to build as much stark objectivity into the review process for my proposal as possible, to spare my friends and my coworkers and myself the anguish that I found myself imagining. I wanted to guarantee as much as possible that this idea, that I've wanted to explore in print for a long long time, was really a legitimate, viable publishing project.

Of course, I already noted in my previous post that I did in fact know some folks at Cook, so my experiment in stark objectivity is compromised a bit from the outset, but I'm comfortable with my margin of error--due in no small part to the fact that I got what I wanted, which was a book contract.

2. I get paid for full-time work as an editor, but upon the release of my first book, Comic Book Character, I found myself frequently tempted to devote some of my work time to monitoring the business, marketing and sales concerns of my book. I didn't cave to said temptations too much, but it was a temptation I didn't enjoy, so I wasn't looking forward to the prospects of fretting over the details again, just because I happened to have read-access to the data.

3. I actually have several positive reasons for going with Cook. One is my friend the publisher, whose brain I like. I like IVP's publisher's brain too, but I digress. Another is the delightful editor, who has in our few encounters shown herself to be quite savvy about the industry and the craft of editing. Of course, my friends and coworkers are savvy too, but again, I digress. Cook has been the publisher of record for some great writers, among them Leonard Sweet, Brennan Manning and Matthew Paul Turner--not to mention they recently published a book about my hero of heroes, Jack Bauer. That's got to count for something. Of course, IVP has its share of significant writings under its hat, but darn it all if I'm not digressing again. Another reason for going to Cook with my proposal is the momentum I see happening there: with a lot of new folks with a high capacity for creative thinking about the industry and craft of publishing, I anticipate seeing them do some really interesting work on my book. It's an exciting time to be publishing with them, I think. Not that IVP doesn't have momentum and isn't exciting, but . . . what is with all this digression?!?

All this to say, I'm excited to be working with Don, and Andrea, and Cook. They're cool people doing cool stuff. And I'm excited to have a reason to really crack open the ideas behind Me-Ville. And I still think, for those of you who I've suggested publish with my employer, that IVP is a great publisher to work with and for. You can tell both IVP and Cook that I said that.

Speaking of Spider-Man

I recently regained the electronic rights to my book Comic Book Character, so now I can put portions of it online here. I thought, with the third film in the Spider-Man franchise coming this week to a theater near you, it might be fun to take a look at what about Peter Parker captured my imagination at the time. The following is excerpted from pages 23-24 of the book, under the heading "The Fantasy of Strength":

What is it about superheroes that makes them endure the tedium of normal life? And why do we, as readers, allow it? If we had the powers of our heroes, would we stand for the petty meanness of the average people who bully us? If we knew our friends had such powers, would we allow them to do nothing for us or for themselves?

There’s an unspoken rule among superheroes that powers are to be used only in critical situations. We’re not often told why, but the origin of one superhero gives us a look at what could happen without such self-restraint.

Spider-Man wasn’t always Spider-Man. For most of his childhood he was mild-mannered Peter Parker, an orphaned genius being raised by his elderly aunt and uncle. He was a bookish, withdrawn kid, regularly used and abused by his classmates. . . .

Then one day on a field trip to a laboratory, Peter was bitten by a spider exposed to radiation. Over time Peter discovered that he had appropriated the physical characteristics of a spider—the ability to stick to walls and ceilings; greatly enhanced strength, speed and agility; and (we’re told much later in the 2002 film) the capacity to spin his own webbing. He had always been smarter than anyone in his class; now he was stronger, faster, more talented and quickly more confident as well.

So Peter did what you might expect the butt of everyone’s jokes to do: he started showing off. He picked fights with schoolmates and got quick revenge on the people who had abused him for so long, and he started making lots of money by exploiting his newfound talents as an unbeatable mystery wrestler. He alienated everyone he encountered—his employer, his classmates, eventually even the press—with his rash, defiant attitude. And when he could have stopped a burglary without even exerting himself, he didn’t bother. All the average, immature high-school students got their comeuppance from Peter, but no bad guys met justice through Spider-Man.

Peter learned a painful lesson though. His uncle, who had raised him since his parents’ death, lost his life at the hands of the very burglar Peter had let escape. Peter quickly realized that by his inaction he was complicit in his uncle’s death. And by the end of his first adventure, as he meditated on his uncle’s advice—"With great power comes great responsibility"— he grew up a bit and discovered the proper channel for his abilities.

Peter Parker added an adolescent humanness to superheroes that until his debut in the comic Amazing Fantasy had played a minor role, and he resonated with his readers. We learned that to fantasize about having special powers was all well and good, but there was a corresponding ethic to having such powers, and our fantasies would not play out as we might like if we intended to remain the hero of our own stories. We can hope that someday we will be stronger than we are, better equipped to handle the hardships we inevitably face, but we must also hope that we will use that strength with wisdom and humility.

For Peter, that humility meant returning day after day to school and eventually to work, enduring humiliation as well as he could, and seeking the appropriate balance of power and responsibility that his uncle had pointed him toward. He used his powers only against those whose passions could not be controlled by the ordinary safeguards of law, common decency and moral impulse. He alternately used and hid his powers so that he and the people around him could live as normal and happy a life as possible. Such was his gift, and such was the greatest use of his strength.

Of course, this passage is looking at the origin of Spider-Man, and he's grown up quite a bit since then. The adult Peter Parker we'll meet in 3 faces problems progressively more complex and more grave. This third movie should once again do what the first two have already done: demanded more aesthetically, psychologically, relationally and even morally from the genre. Let me know what you think of the previews you've seen; as for me and my house, we will buy I-Max tickets in advance.

As Presbyterian as I Wanna Be

Today I got two copies of Presbyterians Today in the mail. Normally I get one, because I'm a subscriber, which is already a pretty incontrovertible mark of my Presbyterianism. But today I got two because this issue includes an article I wrote a year ago. They paid me for it a year ago too, and I was starting to think that the editorial board was sending me a message: "How much do we have to pay you to leave us alone?" But magazines have themes; the content inside must cohere. This month my article "Doesn't Jesus Care?" came close enough to the theme to secure its place. If you read the article and the byline and decided to come visit, welcome! I'm glad you're here. If you didn't even know there was such a thing as Presbyterians Today, let me assure you that there is. Read it and reap.

Signing with the Enemy

I have good news: Last night I received a contract for my next book, tentatively titled Deliver Us from Me-Ville. I'm pretty excited about it; I've had some of these ideas biding their time in my brain for years, so now I get a chance to free up some mental space. I've started writing but currently I'm mostly gathering material.

Here's the touchy part: I signed with a publisher other than the publisher of my first book. Not only that, I sent it to this different publisher before I showed it to the publisher of my first book. Not only that, I'm employed by the publisher of my first book. In a sense, I suppose, I've signed with the enemy.

Now let's be honest: enemy is a bit, shall we say, grandiose a term for the relationship of Cook (my new publisher) and InterVarsity Press (my [hopefully still] employer). Both are known in the industry as Christian publishers, which means that even if they were enemies, they'd be commanded by their Lord to love each other, which by default sort of makes them friends. Still, it's a little awkward for me, and potentially awkward for all my friends at both publishers.

Nevertheless, I feel good about the decision. I actually worked for Cook for about six days in the 1990s, after they bought the company I was working for but before they moved said company across the country. They gave me as nice a severance as an entry-level goofball with no marketable skills could hope to get, so I was fine with it. But if any healing needed to begin, with the offer of this book contract it's certainly begun.

I met the book publisher at Cook while he was an agent, and I always liked the book ideas he sent me and enjoyed him immensely the one time we met. My initial plan was to ask him to represent me, but then he stopped agenting and started publishing, so I had to regroup, to rethink.

In the interim I met the woman who would ultimately become my editor and found her delightful. At the same time I caught up with a former intern of mine who now worked for Cook; she was delightful too. That's three for three delightful people at one company: pretty good odds. So I swallowed my fear and sent my friend the former agent my proposal, and he sent it on to my new friend the delightful editor, who sent me several delightful e-mails that culminated in "Sure, we'll publish it." Delightful!

Meanwhile, I was thinking, Hey, wait a minute. Don't I work for a publisher? Didn't they publish my first book and give me my first blog? Don't they deposit money directly into my bank account every month? Aren't they delightful too?

And they are, don't get me wrong. Some of my most meaningful conversations and significant friendships over the past ten years have been with my coworkers. And they did great work on my first book and were willing to take a risk on an unknown author in the first place anyway. So yes, they're delightful.

Meanwhile, all the authors I have been inviting to write books for my employers are saying things like "Say, I notice you published a book with InterVarsity Press. Do you have plans to write any more books?"

"Yes, actually. Yes I do."

"So that must be delightful, getting to publish another book with your employer, where so many of your significant friendships and conversations have been forged over lo these many years."

"Well, actually, my next book isn't going to be with InterVarsity Press. It's going to be with Cook."

"What?!? Why?!? Do you hate your employer?!? Are they not delightful?!? Should I be talking with Cook instead of with you?!?"

And here's where my rationale sounds thin but, to my ears, makes perfect sense:

"It's not IVP; it's me."

Check back for part two to get my rationale.