The Perils of Hipster Christianity
Brett McCracken's column that appeared on the Wall Street Journal website yesterday really hit home for me. McCracken, 27, outlines the increasing efforts that the evangelical church has made to try to attract and keep 20-somethings. Whether it's the obsession with being culturally savvy, or with being technologically cutting-edge, or with using shock tactics ('you've never heard your pastor talk about *this* before'), McCracken argues that they are simply gimmicks that may bring people in the door; "But", he asks "what sort of Christianity are they being converted to?"
Quoting David Wells, he further adds:
And the further irony is that the younger generations who are less impressed by whiz-bang technology, who often see through what is slick and glitzy, and who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them.
McCracken concludes that "cool Christianity" is not a "sustainable path forward", and that, "when it comes to church, [twentysomethings] don't want cool as much as we want real".
It's worth reading the whole post. I, for one, give him a hearty Amen.
Recommended Reading
I've occasionally passed along links here without much commentary. However, my reading pattern has changed a bit, thanks primarily to Instapaper and my iPad. All my long-form reading now happens on the iPad, and it's been a great way to store, read, and archive articles when I don't have time to sit and focus reading in my feed reader.
So, here are my first set of recommended articles. The topics vary, but each has given me some interesting reading over the past few weeks.
Ten of the Greatest Maps that Changed the World - The Daily Mail
A fascinating look at 10 maps from history that had significant cultural impact.
A Review of Ken Ham's "The Six Days of Creation" - Daniel Jepsen, Franklin Community Church
I grew up with Ken Ham's position on creation being the default "correct" position. I remember watching his videos in Sunday School when I was in high school. One of the things I've been wrestling with now is how to best understand Genesis 1 - 3 in context, within its genre, and how to make sense of the apparently ancient universe we see around us. (This challenge has only been heightened now that I have a six-year-old who is fascinated with dinosaurs.)
This particular review is a fair (though brutal) assessment of one of Ken Ham's videos. Worth a read.
What Social Science Does -- and Doesn't -- Know - Jim Manzi, City Journal
A fascinating read on how difficult it is to get any useful results from social science studies. (Primary reason: so many influences, so hard to isolate to a single one for a study.)
Simply Lewis - N. T. Wright in Touchstone Magazine.
N. T. Wright's thoughts on C. S. Lewis and Mere Christianity. A humble and yet not deferential critique of Lewis's classic work. The gracious concluding paragraph:
And, as another imperfect apologist, I salute a great master, and can only hope that in sixty years’ time children yet unborn will say of me that, despite all my obvious and embarrassing failings, I too was used, in however small a way, to bring people under the influence and power, and to the love and kingdom, of the same Jesus Christ.
More links later. Have fun reading!
Doctrine good, stories bad?
I have learned much over the past several years from brothers and sisters of the Reformed theological persuasion. I love and respect them deeply. But the good Dr. Daniel J. R. Kirk today puts his finger on a point which has provided me some unease in my conversations with my Reformed brethren, saying it, as usual, more succinctly than I could.
Quoth Daniel:
Doctrine Good. Stories Bad. That’s the mini-theme of this month’s Christianity Today.
I begin with the most egregious offense. There’s a short inset on p. 26, snipped from a book by J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett (Grounded in the Gospel; Baker, 2010) entitled, “The Lost Art of Catechesis.” The point? Back in the old days, folks used to have to learn their theology. That waned for a bit, but was revived in all its glory in the Reformation. Doctrine. The church has to learn its doctrine.
When did this all go astray between then and now? When Sunday Schools entrusted instruction to lay people and rather than teaching people theology substituted “instilling of familiarity (or shall we say, perhaps, over-familiarity) with Bible stories” (26).
Daniel, though, strongly disagrees, and he hammers it home here:
This is the classic inversion of sola scriptura: no longer do we really want you to do what the Reformers did (read your Bible), we want you instead to read and memorize what they said after they had read their Bibles.
And that is the unease I've always had w/ the Reformed types. So often when asked a question, they don't respond w/ Scripture, but rather with a quote from one of the Confessions or with a paragraph from Calvin or Edwards or Spurgeon or Packer.
I know, I know, those Confessions are a distillation of the church's understanding of the whole Scripture over the years, and useful as a doctrinal reference and as a safeguard against taking any single Scripture passage wildly out of context. But Dr. Kirk makes a great point here: our first priority and focus should be to the Scripture, and the Confessions and Institutes need to come later.
I'd love to hear from some of my Reformed buddies on this one. And yeah, I'm afraid what I might be in for when they pile on. 
Follow Friday, Blog Style
Recommending blogs to follow is a risky proposition. The fact that I enjoy reading these blogs enough to recommend them undoubtedly says more about me than it does about the blogs themselves. Nevertheless, two blogs have emerged recently that I have found quite enjoyable and worth my time; depending on your interests, you might find them worthwhile as well.
First up is Storied Theology, written by J. R. Daniel Kirk. Dr. Kirk is an assistant professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. I first got pointed to him by online friend Mark Traphagen, and I owe Mark a beer or two for that recommendation alone. I've linked him here a few times already, including his thoughts on mixed martial arts and a couple times on his series on authenticity.
Reading a blog like Dr. Kirk's (can I call you Daniel?) reminds me why I at times think it'd be fun to attend seminary at some point; the level of discussion is stretching but not incomprehensible to this layman. Fortunately blogs like Dr. Kirk's provide a window into that world and an opportunity for discussion even for this engineer in Iowa. Worth reading.
My other recommendation for today is something completely different: Abraham Piper's new blog Downhill Both Ways. Presented as "Views and vignettes from South Minneapolis", Piper observes, thinks, and reports on his urban neighborhood, all the while proving that he is as adept in writing long-form as he is in short form.
I first encountered Abraham's writing on his short-form blog, Twenty-Two Words, where he pithily comments on the world in posts of exactly, well, twenty-two words in length. When he noted on Twitter that he was starting a new blog, I wasn't sure what to expect... but I've been quite taken with it. There's something strangely appealing about late-night walks through a big city, and Abraham's superb writing captures it beautifully. For starters, read his "Why I Now Buy Cigarettes" and "Jumping Trains".
Check these guys out and let me know what you think. Any new blogs you're reading and would like to share?
2008: A Year of Reading in Review
This the only year-end post I'll write; just a summary of my book reading list from 2008.
Some quick details:
Total Books Read: 78. This is down a bit from 86 last year.
Fiction: 57.
Non-fiction: 21.
That ratio is still weighted a little heavily toward fiction, I think, but when I know how shallow and quick some of those novels were and how long and think some of the non-fiction was... well, it evens out.
Favorite novel of the year: A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffery Archer. This was far and away the best, most enjoyable story I read all year. It's essentially a modern-day retelling of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. What sold me on it, though, was that there were characters you could really root for. Good guys that were really good. Honorable supporting characters who remained honorable. Such a good story. I should put it on reserve at the library again.
Runner up: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
Favorite non-fiction of the year: This is tough because non-fiction spans such a range of subjects. Some high points, though:
- James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles by Abigail Foerstner. A biography of the Iowan who played a huge role in space exploration.
- Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover. An inside look at the correctional officers who run Sing Sing prison.
- A Case for Amillennialism by Kim Riddlebarger. Quite helpful.
Worst book of the year: How Would Jesus Vote? by the late D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe. I thought my blog review of it was bad until I read Ron's review. He said, in short:
The book is awful. Simply awful. I can’t stress to you how amazingly awful this book is. Do not buy, read, or borrow this book. I will likely use my copy for kindling in the fireplace this winter.
I love Ron.
OK, that's enough book wrap-up for this year. I'm contemplating a change in format for book reviews next year, doing a full post on each book and cross-posting them to Amazon to build a little bit of reviewing credibility there. Dunno, it's just a thought. [No, Geof, I'm not doing it entirely because you changed the format of GNM.]
Next year's list will still exist in some format. First book on it will be an old one by Stephen Baxter. Almost finished it for 2008, but not quite.
Recognizing the civil-religious disconnect, or, “what to do about ‘gay marriage’”
I've been working through the whole 'gay marriage' issue in my head for a while now, driven in good part by the discussion over on rmfo.net (you've gotta be a member to read it, sorry) surrounding California's Proposition 8. The evangelically-popular, Dobsonian position is familiar to me, but has always seemed (like most Dobsonian political positions) to be harmful to the Kingdom; focusing on divisive politics rather than loving everyone and focusing on the heart issues. Today, though, Andrew Sullivan's piece on TheAtlantic.com really solidified things for me; in other words, he said what I've been thinking - only much more clearly and concisely.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Andrew Sullivan, here's where he's coming from: he's a relatively conservative gay man. That in itself gives you some idea to which side of the debate he comes down on... but don't let that bias you towards him without giving him a listen. He nails it.
[Many long for] a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life...
But that position, Sullivan says, is untenable.
If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis [(state)] with a telos [(purpose, goal)] guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own "objective disorder" to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require... [an] oppressive police state...
Exactly. My dad said much this same thing in a sermon he preached back before the election (which I still haven't posted, sorry, Dad!) when he likened the Dobson-esque conservatives to the proverbial dog chasing a car. The problem for the dog is when it catches the car - what the heck do you do with it then?
Back to Mr. Sullivan:
That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. And that has a clear import for our current moment. The reason the marriage debate is so intense is because neither side seems able to accept that the word "marriage" requires a certain looseness of meaning if it is to remain as a universal, civil institution.
And then he nails it with an example that hadn't occurred to me.
This is not that new. Catholics, for example, accept the word marriage to describe civil marriages that are second marriages, even though their own faith teaches them that those marriages don't actually exist as such. But most Catholics are able to set theological beliefs to one side and accept a theological untruth as a civil fact. After all, a core, undebatable Catholic doctrine is that marriage is for life. Divorce is not the end of that marriage in the eyes of God. And yet Catholics can tolerate fellow citizens who are not Catholic calling their non-marriages marriages - because Catholics have already accepted a civil-religious distinction. They can wear both hats in the public square.
[Emphasis mine.]
I am convinced that this is the right position. Certainly, Christians need to be free to teach per their convictions on homosexuality, and need to be free to discriminate as to who they will marry, hire, and so on. (Sullivan argues specifically for those protections in his column.) But we need to accept, nay, support a broader, freer civil arrangement; an arrangement that allows for freedom for as many as possible to live as their conscience dictates in a way that is consistent with the peaceful, common good.
Putting that civil arrangement in place will provide a basis for the lively exchange of ideas that should be present in a free society. While it won't look quite like what the Founders set up in the United State more than 200 years ago, it'll be more what they intended. Let's face it - we don't live in 1780 anymore. We will do better if we adapt the principles of 1780 for the world of 2008 and move forward. For this topic that means embracing the civil/religious disconnect and supporting state-sanctioned civil marriage for both hetero- and homosexuals.
Trying to describe Watership Down
I finished reading Richard Adams' Watership Down last night and, when adding it to my reading list, found it rather difficult to describe. Figuring that few of you ever look at my reading list, (which is fine,) and knowing that my attempt amused me, I thought I'd post the description here, too.
This is a hard novel to describe, not because it's nondescript, but because short descriptions would leave out so much. It's a story about rabbits. Let's try this on for size: if Tolkien were to have written a story the length of one of the LotR books, and set it in modern day, and narrowed the scope from "save the world" to "find a new place to live" and written it about rabbits instead of hobbits, you might get something like Watership Down. I enjoyed it.
Shared Posts on the Sidebar
Some of my regular readers will remember that from time to time I'll have link posts that will show up here; interesting things I've noted on the web and wanted to share. I've been notably inconsistent with that type of post, but still link some stuff from time to time. I was surprised, then, when after posting a couple of links yesterday to my del.icio.us account, they didn't show up here overnight. Come to find out that the del.icio.us service that cross-posts apparently hasn't run since March sometime. Phooey.
So I've been using Google Reader as my usual feed reader and it has a nifty little interface to share items which will then show up for any other Google Reader user who's one of my contacts, or anybody who wants to subscribe to the shared items feed. What GR doesn't provide is a similar sort of remote-posting functionality. What GR does provide is a little bit of javascript that will pull in the most recent shared items and list them. So, for the moment I've put that on my sidebar. The obvious downside is that anyone who just reads my items from a feed reader won't be able to see them. (On the other hand, those folks could easily enough subscribe to my Google Reader Shared Items feed.)
If and when I find a better way to do this link sharing, I'll do so. For now, hey, I suppose anything is better than nothing.
I’ve been found out.
OK, rarely will I write a full post to recommend someone else's post, but the latest from software-manager-par-excellance Rands is just too good to pass up. He has me nailed. In his latest post, Rands lists off his "Nerd Handbook". Becky had only to read the first two sentences and she was chuckling in the knowledge that this guy was describing me:
A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.
Guilty as charged.
A few other priceless bits:
Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.
First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.
Yep, that's me.
Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.
The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.
Ah, monospaced font, how I love thee.
Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.
Got me again.
And the most painful:
Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”
And your nerd says, “Cool”.
Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”
Cool. I mean, ouch.
There is a lot of good stuff that I didn't quote here, so if you really want to get an insight into me, yeah, go read the article. For my sensitive readers, yeah, there are a couple bad words in the post. Ignore them. Read the rest of it. Well worth it.
Hypocrisy
I'm not planning to write on that topic today, but Jonah Goldberg did, and it's worth reading his column.
Written in response to the hubbub over the recent coming-to-light of Sen. Larry Craig's actions in an airport bathroom, Goldberg notes that the Left's condemnation isn't typically over the (im)moral act, but rather over the hypocrisy that is demonstrated. Goldberg notes, however, that the Right hasn't cornered the market on hypocrisy. He sums it up this way:
The point is simply this: Hypocrisy is bad, sure. But it’s a human failing that should fall upon the individual in question. What the left wants to do is use hypocrisy as a cudgel to declare that conservative ideals are categorically illegitimate because some conservatives fail to live up to them. But we all fail to live up to our ideals sometimes (just ask John Edwards, who wants get rid of everyone’s SUV, save the one in his driveway). That’s sort of why we call them “ideals.” Most of us don’t fall as far as Larry Craig seems to have fallen, but that’s not necessarily an indictment of his arguments, it’s an indictment of the man.
It's worth reading the whole article.
