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Bullet Points for a Monday

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but was reminded just how much fun they are. So, without further ado…

  • I just got invited to join the Boar’s Head Tavern. More exciting than I’d like to admit.
  • Just ordered a little M-Audio MIDI controller keyboard to hook up to my Mac. Christmas money well spent! Time to start playing around with Garage Band.
  • I have to remind myself when blogging through Stringfellow that it’s not necessarily that I’m reading groundbreaking thoughts, but that I just haven’t read many liberal / Arminian theologians.
  • After a couple of years of not traveling much, my spring looks like it’s settling into a once-a-month travel groove. December: Florida. January: Seattle. February: Washington, DC. March: Wichita.
  • My not-quite-3-year-old daughter correctly used the phrase “That’s what I’m talkin’” tonight. I could not have been more proud. (We’ll get her to add the “about” one of these days.)
  • Excited to hear the news that I will be an uncle come July – first time on my side of the family! So excited for Andrew and Heather.
  • While I’m happy that this nifty daily Bible reading app I found for my phone might help me do the read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year thing, I feel shame that it’s taking my technology addiction to help encourage my soul addiction.
  • I could’ve posted each of these as Tweets or FB status updates, but somehow this was more satisfying.

Second-guessing God

Stringfellow is just full of good stuff. Still in Chapter Two of An Ethic for Christians an Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he says this about trying to understand God:

Biblical ethics do not pretend the social or political will of God; biblical politics do not implement “right” or “ultimate” answers. In this world, the judgment of God remains God’s own secret.
…
It is the inherent and redundant frustration of any pietistic social ethics that the ethical question is presented as a conundrum about the judgment of God in given circumstances. Human beings attempting to cope with that ethical question are certain to be dehumanized. The Bible does not pose any such riddles nor aspire to any such answers; instead, in biblical context, such queries are transposed, converted, rendered new. In the Bible, the ethical issue becomes simply: how can a person act humanly now?
…
Here the ethical question juxtaposes the witness of the holy nation – Jerusalem – to the other principalities, institutions and other nations – as to which Babylon is a parable. It asks: how can the Church of Jesus Christ celebrate human life in society now?

Stringfellow on Revelation

In the second chapter of William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he continues to contrast the two cities mentioned in the latter half of Revelation: Babylon and Jerusalem. The Babylon of Revelation, he says, “is archetypical of all nations.” Those nations are principalities that, Stringfellow argues, by their very nature are anti-human; they serve themselves and work against that which is good. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is representative of Christians as “an embassy among the principalities” or as “a pioneer community”. (These phrases remind me instantly of N. T. Wright’s similar description of the Church in Surprised by Hope.)

But Revelation, says Stringfellow, cannot be read as a “predestinarian forecast”.

To view the Babylon material in Revelation as mechanistic prophecy – or to treat any part of the Bible in such a fashion – is an extreme distortion of the prophetic ministry….

A construction of Revelation as foreordination denies in its full implication that either principalities or persons are living beings with identities of their own and with capabilities of decision and movement respected by God. And, in the end, such superstitions demean the vocation which the Gospels attribute to Jesus Christ, rendering him a quaint automaton, rather than the Son, of God.

While my Calvinist friends will quibble with the thought that humans have “capabilities of decision and movement respected by God”, I find that last sentence to be a compelling thought – that the work of Jesus Christ redeeming the world is magnified if his work is redeeming free and willful men, and that if, as in the strong Calvinist view, the whole cosmic saga is already completely fixed in history, then Christ is, in a way, just one more player in a pre-defined role.

William Stringfellow: “An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens In A Strange Land

Among the many Christmas gifts I received this year, I was quite pleased to get a book which had been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for several months: William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land. I will confess to having been completely ignorant of Stringfellow prior to someone online (I forget who) recommending this book, but he seems to have been a fascinating fellow; an Anglican layman who graduated Harvard Law only to move to Harlem and doing pro bono legal work for racial minorities and sex offenders.

To quote Ben Myers excellent summary of Stringfellow’s emphasis:

The most striking feature of Stringfellow’s work is his powerful analysis and critique of the “principalities.” For him, the principalities are institutionalised forms of death. Institutions exist for the sake of their own expansion and self-perpetuation; they are not subject to human control, but are autonomous entities vis-à-vis all human agency. Human beings often believe “that they control the institution; whereas, in truth, the principality claims them as slaves” (Free in Obedience, p. 99).

I’m only 35 pages into this slim 150-page volume – having read only the introduction and Chapter 1 – but I’m immediately struck by how timely his critique of American government and corporate institutions is. Consider this:

The Fall is where the nation is… Americans have become so beleaguered by anxiety and fatigue, so bemused and intimidated, so beset by a sense of impotence and by intuitions of calamity, that they have, for the most part, become consigned to despair. The people have been existing under a state of such interminable warfare that it seems normative. There is little resistance to the official Orwellian designation of war as peace, nor does that rhetorical deception come near exhausting the ways in which the people have found the government to be unworthy of credence or trust. Racial conflict has been suppressed by an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance or convenience turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered hostile; there is pervasive babel; privacy is a memory because surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary human connotations, is being annihilated.
…
Americans have been learning, harshly, redundantly, that they inherit or otherwise possess no virtue or no vanity which dispels the condition of death manifest everywhere in the nation. (p. 19-20)

If Stringfellow felt this strongly in 1973, what would he be thinking today in 2012?

An Ethic is not quick reading but to this point every page has been worthwhile.

My 2011 Reading

The end of the year means it’s time for a summary of my last year’s reading. Thankfully Goodreads keeps it easy for me to track things; I don’t have to remember to do much more than log my books when I’m done with them (on the handy Android app) and at the end of the year I have this nifty list.

By the Numbers
I finished 51 books this year, which made it an average year for me. 19 of those were non-fiction, leaving 32 as fiction. (You can see the whole list on Goodreads if you really want to.) As usual, my non-fiction is basically theology, with a little bit of science and history thrown in. The fiction is essentially scifi, fantasy, and legal/political thrillers.

Best fiction
I gave 5-star ratings to 3 novels this year that were first-time reads. They were:

  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This is a futurist masterpiece of a novel that reads really fresh even though it was written back in 2000. Really good stuff.
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. A fantasy novel that doesn’t get so lost in the fantasy world that it forgets to have a plot. This is basically your favorite con-man story set in a fascinating fantasy world. I understand that the second book in the series is out now, so I need to get on it.
  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. This one has been at the top of a lot of year-end lists, and while it may not deserve that, it was very entertaining. Set in the future, but full of 1980′s nostalgia, this was a fun, engaging read. (Stephen Granade has a good post outlining some ways that Ready Player One could’ve been changed to be a much better novel.)

Best non-fiction

There are two books that deserve mentions here.

The Stinker

There was only one book that I gave just one star to this year, and I won’t even give it the honor of linking to it on Amazon: Abyss by Paul Hagberg. I can do no better than to quote my review from goodreads:

I should’ve known just from the cover and flyleaf that this particular bit if genre fiction was going to be a train wreck. And yet, like a train wreck, once I started I couldn’t look away.

Ridiculous plot premise, unbelievable protagonist (former CIA director turned bodyguard?!?), uninspired prose and underdeveloped characters fill the 400+ pages of this tome. The author seems contractually obligated to describe each female character in terms of breast size, but mishandles the interpersonal scenes so badly that you wonder if he’s actually ever had an interpersonal relationship.

The cover of the book proclaims it to be “A Kirk McGarvey Novel”, leading me to believe that there are more books out there starring this ridiculous character. My advice: avoid them. Avoid this one, too.

So that’s my 2011. Here’s hoping that 2012 finds me reading the best of books new and old. (Leave any recommendations in the comments below!)

I didn’t know you would be /you/

Karibeth Baumann has spent November blogging letters to her young son Atticus. She finishes up today with a beautiful summary that captures something of the revelation that parenting is:

A few years ago, I was hanging out with some other women who were doing the thing where they complain about their husbands. Afterwards, one of them said to me that she noticed that I don’t complain about your dad. Which is true. I don’t talk about him dismissively or roll my eyes at him (except maybe when he makes a terrible joke). I enjoy spending time with him, and I try to take an interest in things that are important to him.

But for some reason, Atticus, I didn’t realize that I would feel the same way about you. I thought you would be a kid, and I am not so interested in kids. I am sorry, sweet boy, that I wasn’t more excited about you joining our family. I didn’t know you would be a person. I didn’t know you would be you. If I had known how bright and funny and wild you were going to be, I would have been so much more excited to meet you.

I have a friend who, every time that we were expecting a child, would say “I can’t wait to meet him/her”. The first time I heard it, it sounded a little weird to me. But getting to know the amazing people that your children already are is one of the great unexpected (at least to me) joys of parenting.

Kari’s whole month of letters is well worth the read.

[Through A Glass, Darkly]

Last night I convinced myself that I wanted to hit the gym this morning. I packed my bag so I could just go from the gym to work, and then psyched myself up for making sure I got up with my alarm.

Trouble is, I psyched myself up so much that then I slept restlessly all night because I was afraid I was going to miss my alarm. *sigh*

Well, at least I’m up with my alarm and headed for the gym. I’ll be paying for this about 8:00 tonight when I can’t keep my eyes open…