Good Books & the Great Commission: What I Meant to Say, Part Three

I recently offered a presentation titled "Good Books & the Great Commission." My goal was to demonstrate the role of book publishing in the church's disciple-making mission. I was planning to talk about the decline of reading in contemporary culture and the need for intentionality in creating cultures of reading in contemporary churches. I was fielding questions about getting yourself published before I finished my intro.

I don't begrudge people their desire to see themselves publish. Honestly I don't. I still stand by my conviction, however, that reading can be missional, that the church can and should be a reading culture. So I'm reposting what I meant to say here, and you're just going to have to deal with it. :)

~~~

Guess how many books are being published in America this year. 300,000. That’s a ton of books—actually it’s more like 150 tons. Here are opening lines to some of them.

"Your eyes are like deep blue pools that I would like to drown in,” he had told Kimberly when she had asked him what he was thinking; but what he was actually thinking was that sometimes when he recharges his phone he forgets to put the little plug back in but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

Here’s another one.

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

And finally this one.

He got down from his horse, which seemed strange to him as he had always believed that you got down from a duck or a goose.

OK, these aren’t from actual books. These are winning entries from the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, where people attempt to come up with the worst sentences to see print.

This contest only works if people come to it with an understanding: some writing is truly awful. That’s not the only understanding, of course: some writing, we all recognize, is truly good. The trick is recognizing the difference. In this case, the finalists in the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest are, counterintuitively, good writing: so bad that they’re good, they fulfill their promise to their readers by creatively crafting the worst possible sentences. In these awful sentences, the writer and reader come together and celebrate the result.

Put two strangers in a room together—people from two distinct cultures, without a common language—and before too long they’ll figure out ways of communicating. Their communication may never extend beyond nonverbal signs, but it may go far beyond that, from constructing new pidgin languages out of their two native tongues, to learning to speak and understand each other’s languages.

It’s hard work, but it can be done, and we do it because we want to: “It’s not good for the man to be alone,” God tells us in the book of Genesis. We also communicate because that’s what beings made in the image of God would do: God communicates from the beginning, speaking the universe into existence, commissioning the man and the woman in the garden, inviting the man to name all the animals in existence—teaching him, in effect, the art of communication before he has anyone to communicate with.

It’s not a long leap from spoken language to written language, and we have evidence of writing as ancient as 3200 BC. Anything that happened before written language, as a matter of fact, is by definition prehistoric—it predates the history we have available to us because it couldn’t be written down and preserved. Ancient writing had a clear audience in mind, and in every case it served a clear purpose—the ordering of society, the explanation of human origins, the assimilation of new people (whether children or conquered peoples) into the culture of the author. It’s no wonder that the first five books of our Bible tell us of our origins, tell us how the best life is to be lived, and demonstrate how a people came to be chosen by God and what are the implications of that chosenness: these are the functions of writing at their most basic, most primal.

Writing is covenantal; at its best it’s not merely consumed or tossed out but creates a sense of intimacy between the two parties and in some small or large way binds together their destinies.

Good Books & the Great Commission: What I Meant to Say, Part Two

I recently offered a presentation titled "Good Books & the Great Commission." My goal was to demonstrate the role of book publishing in the church's disciple-making mission. I was planning to talk about the decline of reading in contemporary culture and the need for intentionality in creating cultures of reading in contemporary churches. I was fielding questions about getting yourself published before I finished my intro.

I don't begrudge people their desire to see themselves publish. Honestly I don't. I still stand by my conviction, however, that reading can be missional, that the church can and should be a reading culture. So I'm reposting what I meant to say here, and you're just going to have to deal with it. :)

~~~

The work of discerning God’s purposes, and translating those purposes into the individual and corporate activity of God’s church, has transpired largely through the written word: often under duress, always with a sense of urgency and an eye to the needs of the world and the mission of God, God’s people have written their way to action.

In his letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. confronted the “appalling silence of the good people” in the face of a violently racist system in the American South.

In the Barmen Declaration a gathering of European Christian leaders rejected the idolatry being practiced by the state church of Germany under the influence of Adolf Hitler.

Martin Luther wrote down 95 laments of the conduct of the church and posted it on the door of the Castle Church Wittenberg.

John Wycliffe translated the Scriptures into the common language of the people against the will of the church hierarchy.

Bishop Augustine of Hippo strove to make sense of the destruction of Christian Rome at the hands of infidels.

And the apostle Paul wrote letters to fledgling churches from in and out of prison.

Jesus wrote in the sand; Yahweh wrote on stone tablets; the Spirit writes on our hearts. “What else can one do,” King wrote of his particular ripe time for action, in a line that as well as any reflects the ongoing vocation of God’s people: “other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”

We forget about all that writing in the history of the church, and—more to the point—all that reading. The reading gets relegated to seminary training and sermon prep; the writing is elevated to the point of irrelevance, absolving laypeople of informing and educating themselves and segregating robust discipleship to a clerical core. It wasn’t always the case, however. We’ve seen examples of Christian writing with a general audience in mind—from the mountaintop down, so to speak. But there has in our history been a robustly theological grass roots as well. In AD 381 Gregory of Nyssa wrote the following:

Every place in the city is full of theologians--the back alleys and public squares, the streets, the highways--clothes dealers, money changers, and grocers are all theologians . . .

If you inquire about the value of your money, some philosopher explains wherein the Son differs from the Father. If you ask the price of bread, your answer is the Father is greater than the Son. If you should want to know whether the bath is ready, you get the pronouncement that the Son was created out of nothing!*

This is what good writing produces, when that good writing is paired with a shared pursuit of truth and wisdom between the clergy and the laity, between the scholars and the nonscholars—when all followers of Jesus understand themselves as disciples of a common teacher, a common savior. Good writing, when read well, produces people in all corners of society who are passionate about the truths of God and the advancement of God’s kingdom, and who commit themselves to where the truth and the mission takes them.

This kind of passion can be elicited in short forms, of course. Christian tweets outperform Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber on Twitter.** But the long form of book writing lends itself to the slow curative process evident in all the great documents of the church we’ve discussed so far. Letters, theses, books, translations and declarations were carefully crafted, prayed over, sweated over. They took a while to make, and then they were put in front of an audience to sweat over, pray over, carefully read and discuss. And the world and the people in it changed as a result.

~~~

*Quoted in “Christ Conquers Caesar,” in A History of Christianity, by Charles Scott Kimball, The Xenophile Historian.

**I heard this on NPR. I can’t locate the story on their website, but essentially postings to accounts for Christian authors like Ann Voscamp get retweeted more often and more regularly than posts from million-follower account holders like Gaga and Bieber.

Good Books & the Great Commission: What I Meant to Say, Part One

I recently, twice in one day in fact, offered a presentation titled "Good Books & the Great Commission." My goal was to demonstrate the role of book publishing in the church's disciple-making mission. I was planning to talk about the decline of reading in contemporary culture and the need for intentionality in creating cultures of reading in contemporary churches. I had ten pages' worth of stuff.

About two pages into the morning session, someone raised their hand and asked if I could help them get their book published. And we spent the next forty-five minutes talking about that.

In the afternoon I tweaked my outline and abandoned my script, and I promised to get to getting yourself published by the end of the session. We jumped to publishing before I finished my intro.

Sigh. One in every five adult Americans never reads a book, but it seems like every man, woman and child has at least one book proposal in my in box. It's a participatory, creative culture we're in, with semingly little regard for what happens with the content we create.

I don't begrudge people their desire to see themselves publish. Honestly I don't. I still stand by my conviction, however, that reading can be missional, that the church can and should be a reading culture. And I determine the content of this blog. So I'm going to publish it; frankly, I don't really care if you read it or not. :)

I'll begin with an exercise that we went through at the start of both sessions: two books you love, and one book you hate. After people shared their choices, I shared mine.

***

I knew this was coming, so I brought my three books with me.

Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose, by Brian Mahan. It’s my favorite all-time book; I reviewed it for the book Besides the Bible: 100 Books That Have, Should or Will Shape Culture. It’s about ambition, vocation and virtue, and it’s clever and practical and a bit mind-bending. Loved it; read it every couple of years—I’m overdue to read it again, actually.

The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers. I like those mid-century British authors, and in this book she shows how her interest in drama and mystery draws from (and in return, informs) her deep faith.

That leaves the one book I hate. For the record, it’s not the only one. But I picked The Purpose-Driven Life, by Rick Warren. It was, to my mind, too formulaic, too reductionist, too brand-driven. Beyond that, it was written in such short, unsophisticated sentences, paragraphs, chapters. I’m an editor; I like a little more literariness than that. (It should be noted that I formed this opinion without having actually read the book.)

Imagine my chagrin, then, when my pastor asked me to lead a small group through, not Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose, not The Mind of the Maker, but The Purpose-Driven Life. You’ll be glad to know I set my jaw and heeded my pastor. And that’s where I discovered the power of a book.

My small group was made up of people who were recent converts, recent return-to-churchers, recent discoverers of Christianity as a culture. None were particularly well acclimated to small groups, let alone book discussions.

At least a few of them hated reading. Hated it. Fell asleep one paragraph into it. We are, in many ways, a post-literate generation; books are intimidating and frustrating and boring all at once—one in five American adults read on average zero books a year. The poster children of that generation were circled around me in folding chairs, each having dropped $15 on a hardback edition of one of the bestselling books of all time.

And they went for it! We had long, deep, rich conversations about the nature of faith, calling, struggle, hope, all that stuff. People came prepared every week. At the end of the book each of them could name real ways in which their lives had changed, and each of them signed up for another session.

Behold the power of a book. There’s nothing magical about The Purpose-Driven Life. What’s really going on is something more primal: we were created as creative, inquisitive beings, and we were made to know God by a God who knows us and wants to be known by us, and to discover the similarities and differences in one another, to achieve communion with God and ourselves. A book, like any writing, like any communication, is essentially kindling: a spark to get a fire going.

***

Part two coming soon.

Workers of the World, Good Luck

Several months ago now I read the results of a survey of Harvard Business School alumni that continues to be relevant today, even as the unemployment rate ticks down and the presidential race comes to a head. According to the report, alumni see the U.S. economy as falling behind emerging economies like China, India and Brazil; meanwhile, a majority of companies contemplating relocation outside of the United States winds up doing just that. A paltry minority of those same companies (@10 percent) decides to stay; the rest are still mulling it over.

Respondents suggested that the United States could improve its reputation and retain these prodigal companies through high-level efforts like improving education and simplifying the tax code. Maybe it's a prejudice I have against giant corporations, but I have the sneaking suspicion that these companies are distracting us from the reality that, according to our measures of what constitutes a living wage, most of the world is mired in economic injustice. People vote with their feet, and so we should listen to what the feet have to say:

Among respondents who had decided to move operations out of the United States over the past year, 70 percent cited lower wages as the reason they chose a new location, pointing to what is widely seen as emerging markets' main advantage.

The world doesn't have a class problem; it increasingly has a caste problem, as emerging economies assert themselves on the strength of disenfranchised workers and as the underclass in the United States and other fading economies are being made permanent. All this while, from my limited vantage point, Western labor unions seem to concentrate on agitating not for decent wages and working conditions for all workers everywhere but for a bigger piece of the pie they've colluded with management to bake--bigger, less sustainable pensions and the like. Recent and highly publicized labor disputes have not focused on solidarity so much as singularity: This is what we, the union in question, want; and you, the management in question, will give it to us. Not to paint the entire labor movement with too broad a brush, but my sense is that it's grown myopic as it's become mainstreamed in the American economy. The mantra of the labor movement was, at one time, "Workers of the world, unite!" From where I sit, it seems to have become something closer to "Workers of the world, good luck!"

What do I know, though? I've never been part of a labor union (my field doesn't require it) and I rarely leave the country. Meanwhile, I'm sure that through my unconsidered consumer practices, I'm unconsciously but actively colluding with these prodigal businesses in the exploitation of workers the world over. My iPhone likely comes at a cost to factory workers overseas; my jeans may well have some poor Majority World child's sweat and blood on them. I'm not exactly sure what to do about that, but I would think that the labor movement could help me know what to do. We talk fairly regularly (and loudly) as a country about "buying American"; seems like we need just as loud (if not louder) a refrain borrowed from Martin Luther King: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny," he wrote from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

That doesn't fit on a sign or a bumper sticker or a tweet, though, and that's the extent of solidarity in action these days. So, workers of the world, good luck, I guess.

This Cross Kills Elitists

In the Year of Our Lord CCCXII, Roman Emperor Constantine beheld a vision in the sky of a cross, made of a spear, bearing the message "By This, Conquer." Shortly thereafter the destinies of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church were married, and they begat and begat and begat, and have been begetting ever since.

Brian McLaren in his new book Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road? briefly entertains an alternative history: What if Constantine had seen, for example, a bowl and towel--reminiscent of Jesus' foot-washing episode on the night he was betrayed--and the message "By This, Serve"? Or if Constantine had seen a table with bread and wine--alluding to the elements of Christian communion--and the message "Around This, Reconcile"? What if Constantine had seen something other than a symbol of war, mashed up with a symbol of deliverance?

Frankly, I think McLaren is being a bit silly. "Conquer" is language an emperor can work with; by contrast, "serve" and "reconcile" are meaningless, even alien terms. The whole vision would have been incomprehensible, easily dismissed. Maybe "By this [communion table] or this [bowl and towel] conquer" would have worked, but I think a more cautionary vision would be more interesting: "By this [cross] shall you be conquered," perhaps--or, the image that's lately captured my fancy: "This cross kills elitists."

The great American protest musician Woody Guthrie decorated his guitars with the phrase "This machine kills fascists"--supposedly an allusion to fighter pilots in the Spanish Civil War--as an implicit message to the powers-that-be that their days were numbered. It was ironic, of course: a guitar can't kill anyone. Oh, I suppose it could if you tried hard enough: if you took the strings off and choked someone with them, maybe, or if you broke the car into shards and splintered someone to death. Highly unlikely though. A guitar, in the hands of most everyone, doesn't kill. The music, though . . . the music could, conceivably, topple empires.

In another era, a different symbol would offer a similar message. Who, after all, is more elitist than an emperor, inheritor of a life station equated by the people with gods? Such a person may be a fascist, but only because why wouldn't he (or she) be? If you had the authority and the funding to make everyone fall in line behind you and do your bidding, wouldn't you? And so fascism, I think, is a byproduct of a more insidious spiritual problem: elitism. And who is more elitist than the most powerful person in the world?

I am, I suppose. We live in an era of democratized elitism. We all (in the West at least) have experienced the privilege of bending reality to our will; we can have whatever we want whenever we want, on demand. We apply our experience of consumer sovereignty to our politics and culture, so that those who don't bend to our will are enemies to be vanquished. We're practical fascists, but we're everyday elitists.

This cross, though: it kills elitists. The ground is level before it; on the far side of it we are all brothers and sisters with one father--all parts of the same body with one head. Our claims to cosmic sovereignty are crucified on it; our wants are purified through it; our lives are transformed by it. As much as we might desire and even presume ourselves to be kings and queens of the world, by the cross all our elitist aspirations are conquered.

The world would look very different had Constantine seen the vision "This Cross Kills Elitists." Only two options would have remained for him: forswear his elitism, lay down his crown and transform the way the world understands power and leadership; or wipe Christianity off the map--in the same way Herod tried to wipe Christianity off the map in the Year of Our Lord I, when Jesus was born, fulfilling prophecies and announcing a different kind of kingdom. That didn't work out so well for Herod, and I daresay it wouldn't have worked out so well for Constantine. He's lucky he saw something else, frankly.

You can't change the past, I guess. But I think this cross still kills elitists--all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding--and that means each of us is faced, daily, with Constantine's choice: side with the elitists, or side with the cross.

The good news is, though this cross kills elitists, by this cross every elitist might become a new creation--a different kind of person, fit for a different kind of kingdom.

A Gentle Force: Brian McLaren's Case for the Book

I've just started reading Brian McLaren's new book Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road, graciously sent me by his editor/publisher, Wendy Grisham. It's good so far--big shocker, as McLaren is a very good writer and has a real command of how a book flows and moves. I was converted almost immediately from my initial skepticism about what I thought was a pretty weird title to enthusiasm for it--simply by how McLaren riffed on and ultimately subverted the contemporary suspicion that religion is a joke. I love that sort of thing.

McLaren is making the case for a strong, benevolent approach to faith: adherents who wholeheartedly embrace their distinct religious identity while giving honor and kindness to adherents of other faiths, even wishing them well and working toward their well-being. Scandalous, I know. Jesus said it in five words: "Love your neighbor as yourself"; for even as effective a writer as McLaren, such a thesis takes 273 pages (plus two pages of acknowledgments).

Now, some of that length is simply wordiness; forty-five pages in and I find myself thinking Yeah, yeah, you've already made that point. But what a caffeinated and impatient reader like me takes as redundancy is, in McLaren's mind (I suspect) a careful ellipticism, leading the reader slowly and carefully along a spiraled path, with plenty of secure touchpoints along the way, toward a confident embrace of his thesis: that we really should love our neighbor as ourselves. Such is the nature of persuasion in an age of tribalized conflict: any provocative premise must be handled slowly, with great care.

Today I read the following little bit, which is encouraging to me as a book publishing professional (though my colleagues may beg to differ): in McLaren's view, books are particularly useful tools in forming, informing and reforming people's core convictions and fundamental self-understanding. In a world of blaring headlines, in a world where everyone can point to the teeth-marks of at least one sound bite, a book can be as gentle as it is forceful, as careful as it is controversial.

Identity formation--and reformation--takes time and can't be forced or pushed. It involves many dangers, toils, and snares--threats and setbacks, wrong turns and recoveries. Even under the best of conditions, there are limits to the speed by which a religious identity can come of age and face the challenges before it. Perhaps that's why a book like this can be important: it can provide privacy, time, and space for people to consider the unsettling and dangerous proposal of an identity change. . . . [A] book makes no demands. It remains easy to put down and easy to ignore. That very gentleness can be its greatest power. It is hard to defend against something that is not aggressive.

Nice, huh? I may share it with some authors or should-be authors I know. Lest we overemphasize the unique value of a book, however, let me also draw your attention to the potential power of a tweet, as demonstrated in the same passage:

It is hard to defend against something that is not aggressive.

Cry Like an Angel: My Review of Diamond in the Rough by Shawn Colvin

Diamond in the Rough: A Memoir by Shawn Colvin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remember where I was when I first encountered Shawn Colvin. I was in a Best Buy in Bloomington, Illinois, in the spring of my freshman year. Her album Steady On was sitting on an end-cap display in the new music section; it looked good, and I was feeling consumeristic, so I bought it. I probably, quite frankly, put it on my Discover Card, as I was wont to do back then, which means I'm probably still paying for it. That being said, it was worth the money.

Shawn Colvin's music has shown up at a lot of significant moments in my life. Her cover of "Every Little Thing He Does Is Magic" was playing while my wife and I enjoyed a poolside meal at a resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, during our honeymoon. I sat with my sister on the floor of the student center at Northwestern University while Colvin moved effortlessly from her song "Polaroids" into the chorus of "Just My Imagination" by the Temptations. I bought her album Whole New You in a Borders Bookstore that no longer exists. And on September 11, 2001, I sought solace in her song "Cry Like an Angel" as I tried to make sense of the violent deaths of more than three thousand people.

All the feelings associated with those moments came back when I learned that she had written a memoir, Diamond in the Rough. I gobbled it up and enjoyed every nibble, although I'm not sure I would have been as enthralled had I not already been a fan. Diamond in the Rough isn't so much a memoir, in the sense of a book that mines an event or setting or relationship for some universal meaning, as it is an autobiography. It's a book for fans, first and foremost. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but I do think if someone saw my four-star rating for a memoir and bought it without prior connection to Colvin, they'd be disappointed with their reading experience.

That being said, it was, for me, a great reading experience. Colvin is a singer-songwriter, and such people are uniquely gifted storytellers, if not always the most articulate interpreters of stories. Songwriters tell stories in song, and so the meaning is usually intentionally obscured. Not so in a book, though: Colvin tells her life story compellingly, taking us through several distinct chapters--a childhood occasionally disrupted by family relocation; a young life on the road as a traveling musician; a more settled but arguably less stable life as a New York musician; an award-winning recording career; a post-major-label singer-songwriter's schedule--all with a through line that involves addiction, depression, anxiety and turbulent romantic relationships. No great surprises or big new insights here; we sadly have come to expect substance abuse, emotional hardship and complicated relationships of our celebrated artists. They're sad stories in many cases, but they're told here with the perspective of time passed and life recovered. Like a good storyteller Colvin can find the grace and humor in each chapter.

I think one of the best reason for reading books by musicians and other artists (such as Steve Martin and Joe Jackson, for example) is the window such books provide into the artistic mind and the creative process. Colvin's songs are in the foreground of her later chapters--once she's committed herself to songwriting and recording. I learned a lot about the songs on Steady On that has since enriched my listening; I learned about her later albums as well, having my suspicions confirmed, for example, by her comments about the first line of "Polaroids": "Please no more therapy . . ."

It's not just her music, of course; Colvin was part of what might be considered a folk renaissance in the late 1980s bleeding into the 1990s. Her experience writing with Jon Levanthal, touring with Buddy Miller, even just hanging out with Joni Mitchell offer insight into where artists find inspiration and how such inspiration is translated into something that can be received and embraced by an audience.

It should by now be obvious that I struggle in vain to have objectivity about Shawn Colvin. More objective readers might write a more robust critique of her book. More power to them; me, I'll remember it fondly as a story that touches ever so faintly my own story. "If you could show me the story of love," she sings in "Climb On (a Back That's Strong)," "I would write it again and again." If she did, I would surely read it at least once.

View all my reviews

People Are Corporations!

I've written before (here and here, most notably) on my concerns with corporate personhood. But lately I've been reflecting on another troubling trend: personhood incorporated.

I don't suppose this is a new trend; celebrities, for example, have always had entourages--teams who attended to them and accompanied them everywhere. I think I started to realize that individual celebrities actually represented whole universes of employment and output when (a) I saw Bono from U2 congratulate a stageworker on his retirement during a show in Pittsburgh and (b) I heard some country singer talk about pop singer Adele's 2011 throat surgery and the economic impact on everybody who works for her thanks to canceled shows and delayed recordings. That actually helped me understand the phenomenon of celebrity better: it takes a village, it seems, to keep a fickle public interested in an actor or musician in between releases, and that sustained interest is a driver of success for future products. It's simple free-market economics.

Then, of course, you have celebrities who are famous for nothing. The Kardashians are the most notable examples; they have any number of television series that consist of little more than home movies, with conspiracy theories suggesting that any drama that enters into these meandering documentaries is manufactured to keep the viewers interested. Even marriages and divorces, so the scuttlebutt goes, are contrivances cooked up to make us care about the Kardashians and get us to visit their stores and buy their fragrances or whatever.

The Kardashians aren't exactly what I'm troubled by, though. They were absurdly wealthy before they got absurdly famous, and I think they simply (and very shrewdly) gamed the system that their celebrity friends are forced to play in order to expand an already profitable enterprise. I'm actually more troubled by the likes of "Honey Boo Boo Child," a young girl whose family has organized itself around her as their best shot at fame and fortune: first in the child beauty pageant community and now in the field of reality television.

Honey Boo Boo Child is six. Her mom, I'm told (I don't watch the show), is the real center of the universe on the eponymous reality show, but Honey Boo Boo is the draw--sort of like, back in the day, when Madonna would star in a Guy Ritchie movie because he was her husband and, if she didn't, no one would go see it. Madonna wasn't just a person, she was a brand asset that could be exploited to good effect. Honey Boo Boo, at age six, is exactly that.

Because these corporations are also people, there's a built-in symbiosis. Madonna benefits from the exploitation of Madonna by Madonna, Inc. Honey Boo Boo does likewise (assuming that the benefits that accrue to a child reality star are actually benefits in the long term). But symbiosis is not always a virtue. When resources go scarce, one side's needs dominate the other's. Whatever ecological harmony is achieved in any corporation, much less one that is built around a human being with a personality and personal needs, is vulnerable and easily toxified.

The mind goes quickly to reality television when discussing people as corporations because there are so dang many of them. But I'm starting to realize that this phenomenon is offline as well. The children brought up in the age of helicopter parenting--parents orbiting their children and addressing each need immediately as it surfaces--are now adults, and in many cases the parent-child dynamic has entered adulthood with them. I've heard of parents helping their adult children with their professional growth, their day-to-day work, their housework, their graduate studies. The success of the whole family in these instances, it seems, is dependent on the success of the child because success has been defined around the child. It may take a village to raise a child, but it seems increasingly to take a child to justify a village.

I'm not one to talk about "kids today" and all that. I think it's far too easy for people my age to critique people in their early twenties. I actually think the adult-onset helicopter parenting dynamic is more pressure-inducing on the grown child than actually helpful. With so many people's self-worth and sense of achievement weighing on their shoulders, I envision early-onset gray hair, ulcers and other stress-born struggles. I write this as a non-parent, incidentally; who knows what kind of pressure I might have put on a child by virtue of trying to protect her from all hardship and set her up for nothing but success. The logic of helicopter parenting is obvious to me: kids are your responsibility, and besides that you love them and want the best for them, and so you invest whatever you can in them. Turns out, we learn twenty years later, we can invest more of ourselves in other people than is helpful for them or healthy for us. It's good to acknowledge that no one achieves success on their own. God knows that whatever success I've achieved in life has a great deal to do with sacrifices my parents and other loved ones (and even casual acquaintances and total strangers, if I'm being honest) made on my behalf. The problem is that we've let success be defined by standards that are specific to very specific fields: what constitutes success has been dictated by moguls and heiresses, which places unrealistic expectations on parents and children alike. I can't be a mogul without stepping all over any number of people and neglecting the needs of countless others; if I want my children to be moguls, I'm going to have to let them step all over me.

I once heard Andy Crouch suggest that all idolatry ends in child sacrifice; that's true of cultic religions, he says, but it's also true of the idolatrous inclinations of civilized society. By setting mogul-sized goals for our children, by organizing our families around the success of children, we lay them on altars of our own constructions, and we raise the knife. Only God can save us now.

Good Point, Lesslie Newbigin

For me, 2012 has been, ostensibly, the Year of Overdue Books. I've been reading books that I probably should have read long before this point in my life. I've had little forays into less timeless or more timely books, but on the main I've been playing catch-up all year. Right now that's meant reading something, anything, by Lesslie Newbigin.

Newbigin was a four-decade Christian missionary from England to India, who came back to Britain and found the West a very different place from how it was when he left. The church had lost its lofty position in the culture; its authority had been segregated from the public realm of "facts" to the private realm of "values," and it was struggling to find its footing on this terra nova. In Foolishness to the Greeks, Newbigin suggests that this was at least in part because the church had taken its lofty position for granted.

The true posture of any authentic Christian movement, Newbigin suggests, is that of a missionary--someone who purposefully enters into redemptive conversation with a host culture. Like Daniel and the Babylonians in the Old Testament, or like Paul and the Athenians in the New, the missionary gets to know the host culture and then asks penetrating questions of it, which ultimately lay the groundwork for the good news that the God of the Universe loves the host culture so much that he lays down his life for it. (Do keep in mind at this point that I'm halfway through the shortest Lesslie Newbigin book I could find on a friend's bookshelf, so my characterization of his philosophy of the church is not especially nuanced.) The work of the church is fundamentally set against the way of the world--not in a combative way but as a means of juxtaposition, showcasing the finitude and correspondingly limited wisdom of the host culture, and the ultimate wisdom and commitment of the ultimate Other, God. The missionary is never quite at home, her mission only accomplished insofar as the host culture, and the individual persons in it, turn progressively toward the God who loves them.

This story demands a happy ending. Missionary meets host culture; missionary loves host culture; missionary introduces host culture to God; God loves host culture; host culture loves God; they live happily every after. Ultimately that's the plan, I suppose, if you read the last couple of chapters of the book of Revelation. But in a universe as yet ordered by time and space, there are no grand finales, only chapter endings and plot twists. The host culture that embraces the missionary God exchanges one set of problems (alienation from the God of the universe) for another (a sloppy love relationship, made complicated by the finitude and correspondingly limited wisdom of God's new loved ones). It turns out that Jesus was right: even in a receptive host culture, for the time being at least, the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.

So, the work of the church is a tricky business. I've been, of late, swayed considerably by the Anabaptist impulse, of which I've read precious little (again, please excuse my lack of nuance) but which suggests among other things that the church was greatly compromised in its mission by the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity and his subsequent legislative and military support of the authority of the church. A church in the center, arguably, has lost sight of the path of Christian discipleship and mission, and becomes more self-protective (in the way of empire) than self-emptying (in the way of Christ). An imperial church doesn't ask questions of host cultures; it makes demands of them. It imposes meaning on them and allows no dissent. It fails the missionary task, and so the work of God must happen elsewhere.

Sounds pretty accurate to me. But then Lesslie Newbigin drops this whammy on me:

The church, in the power of the crucified and risen Jesus, bears witness to the truth and pays the price with its blood. But what was the church to do when the imperial powe lost its will to continue and the emperor turned to the church to provide the spiritual cohesion for a disintegrating society? Much has been written about the harm done to the cause of the gospel when Constantine accepted baptism, and it is not difficult to expatiate on this theme. But could any other choice have been made? When the ancient classical world, which had seemed so brilliant and so all-conquering, ran out of spiritual fuel and turned to the church as the one society that could hold a disintegrating world together, should the church have refused the appeal and washed its hands of responsibility for the political order? It could not do so if it was to be faithful to its origins in Israel and in the ministry of Jesus.

Well, when you put it that way, Lesslie Newbigin, you have a point. But a few questions remain: assuming (as we must assume) that the society that emerged under the authority of the church was fundamentally flawed, what would it look like done right? And how is the mission of the church sustained when the church is forced off the margins and into the center? And how does the missionary church guard itself against the political and material enticements of empire while serving an imperially inclined society with moral and ethical leadership? And what does expatiate mean?

I'm not at the end of the book; I'm not even at the end of a chapter. But these are questions that merit reflection without end until the last tear has been shed and all earthly empires have been supplanted. So I guess we all have some serious thinking to do.

Supervision by Status Update

I hate to read too much into something, but I think I may have discovered an unintended consequence of the Age of Social Media: people who report to you now want to report to you every little thing.

I hasten to add: no one reports to me. The only people whose vocational success I am entrusted with are interns, who work for free, and I am currently internless. So my research pool could not be smaller. But I do observe stuff, both firsthand and secondhand, and it seems to me from what I've observed that people raised on social media tend to give people who, um, weren't so raised updates on the progress of a project in extraordinary detail.

"Just wanted to let you know I wrote that email."

"Just wanted to let you know I finished that filing."

"Just wanted to let you know I got back from my break."

It's really quite conscientious, I guess, but it's also sort of like micromanagement in reverse--"micro-managedment" or "micromanage me!" maybe. I don't know what protocol or even etiquette demands in such a situation: "Roger that"? "Well done"? "Okey-dokey"? I actually think no response is expected; I think there's simply now a new expectation that no task is completed until its completion has been shared.

It strikes me that this is how an early adopter of social media might organize her day: chronicling and reporting every action is the regimen Twitter is notorious for. Older and less networking-savvy folks find this to be obnoxious and a sign of immature self-involvement. I've never subscribed to that opinion and was as early an adopter of these media as I could be, which may be a signal of my own immaturity and self-involvement but I prefer to think is evidence that I got the inherent logic of it: a world that has barreled relentlessly into a culture of atomized individualism--human rocks and islands who have no need of anyone (no, old people, that's not at all obnoxious or self-involved)--has unmet needs for a shared life. We post our thoughts and feelings and actions not because we are so satisfied with ourselves (well, sometimes that's why we post them) but because we can't be sure of what's going on in and through us until they've been at least put in the way of other human beings to affirm or dispute. "I think, therefore I am" has, as a first cause for the Modern Age, shown its limitations: our thinking cannot be independently verified, and so it is in fact the least reliable indicator that we exist.

In place of Rene Descartes' dictum has stepped the tribal African notion of ubuntu, characterized by John Mbiti as " "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am." I reviewed a book about ubuntu here a few years ago, and I've also encountered it in other reading, particularly that of Desmond Tutu and other writing about the South African experience. Its impact on the world, it seems to me, reaches far beyond people's familiarity with the term. We are, I'm happy to speculate, more influenced by non-European cultures than we realize; in some ways ubuntu has transcended its long-officially segregated conceptual location to completely overhaul how we understand ourselves and, more prosaically, how we report to our supervisors.

I'm all for it, although it strikes me as a bit inefficient to have to hear and acknowledge every little thing that every coworker is doing at any given moment. It makes me sort of want to start a new social media platform just to outsource the whole process: call it DoneList, maybe, or Get Out of My Space.

Read with Ears to Hear: My Review of Richard Rohr's Falling Upward

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have never not been preoccupied by aging and death. My friends have observed that about me and exploit it for comedic effect; my younger friends like to tell me what grade they or their parents were in when I passed through some key rite of passage; my older friends like to remind me that I haven't been a kid for a long time and that there is a fiber-rich diet in my future. They laugh when they see me stress out over such comments, but I'll get the last laugh, I think: the younger ones will eventually themselves be old; the older ones will eventually be dead.

The passage of time is certainly fascinating to me, but it's made more profound and troubling by its association with questions of vocation. "What do I want to be when I grow up?" is a question that plagued me for a long time but that has long since been replaced with "What am I doing with my life?" or, worse, "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" In the face of such weighty questions, a simple vision for aging and calling is undeniably attractive. I found such a simple vision in Richard Rohr's Falling Upward.

I saw Rohr speak on this topic at the 2011 inaugural Wild Goose Festival and was immediately won over to his take on it. The basic premise is this: we spend the first half of our life building the container into which we will pour the product of the second half of our life. Our first half is preoccupied with externals--status, yes, but also personal rules and priorities, a vision for how life should be. In the second half we turn our eyes from such externals and start to note both what they've done and failed to do for us, what they've allowed us to do in life and what our preoccupation with them has cost us and those we love. The first half is the search for identity; the second half is the search for serenity.

That is probably oversimplifying things, but Rohr's premise is alarmingly simple. There are two distinct calls placed on us in life; the first is provisional, preparing us for the second. The transition from one call to the next is often precipitated by crisis, but more generally by a sense that the first call is completed, or incomplete: it cannot fulfill a life in and of itself.

The notion of "falling" enters in at this transitional moment. We experience the death of a loved one, or the collapse of a profession that we had come to define ourselves by, or the end of a relationship that we thought was forever. Or we start to notice that the things we have invested so heavily in for so long are simply not returning their investment; they don't prop us up so much as trap us inside themselves. We feel ourselves in free fall, all the while hearing a whisper to some higher aspiration. We are being beckoned beyond ourselves; we are, it turns out, falling up.

This transition calls for wisdom and humility and resolve. "The human ego prefers anything," Rohr writes, "just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future." Rohr suggests that most people actually never enter into the second half of life; rather than fall upward they grasp tightly to some artificial anchor to the present--they make an idol of their kids or their spouse or their job or their car--and drown out the divine whisper with TV and music and corporate worship and even their own inner diatribes against the status quo. People who reject the second call don't become the elders that ground a culture and give it a future; they just become old--wrinkly, crotchety, useless. They have neglected or even rejected the search for their true self, the self beyond the reputation that they've often carefully cultivated. They never ceased being the persona they created to occupy the space they found themselves in, and so never die to themselves only to be resurrected into what their community needs, their God demands and they themselves have always wanted to be. "Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not 'true,'" Rohr writes. "It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die."

That's the thing: we should outlive our fictional selves. The world needs us to, because in order to run well it can't itself be bothered by these deeper truths. We need ourselves to, because we will search in vain for the ultimate meaning of our lives without the perspective of the second call. The people we love need us to, because the grace God invests in us is dispensed best and perhaps only out of this second half of life. "The classic spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian." In other words, only our elders (in the truest sense of that word) can give us what we need for our own spiritual journeys, and they can only do it by forsaking their own impulses toward elitism. The truest elders among us, like Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama, are sometimes the most childlike.

The book wasn't perfect. For as much as Rohr avers that not everyone achieves their second calling (in fact most don't), it often comes across as an inevitability, which will reinforce in some old (but not elder) readers their automatic moral and spiritual superiority over people who are younger than they are. The old, crotchety people I know don't need any such reinforcement, and so I'd be reluctant to put this book in front of them. Rohr also implies that Christian doctrine is the enemy of the second call, that the codes of conduct and the attitude of exclusivity that attends to most organized religion (not just his own religion, although he minces no words about the state of contemporary Christianity) is helpful for the immature but to the person on the second journey seems silly. He may well be right, but his argument feels a little thin (and self-serving), and will be a bridge too far for many readers.

Bottom line: this book, like any book that aspires to call someone from one developmental stage to the next, should be read mainly by those with ears to hear. And those folks should read it more than once. So, probably, should those who read it without ears to hear; the second or third time might be the charm.

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