Finished reading, an early 2019 compendium

Maybe I’ll start posting these every time again… but for now I’ve got a long-ish list of books I’ve finished already this year. Particular standouts are in bold. Here goes nothin':

All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment by Hannah Anderson
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler
Virgil Wander by Leif Enger

The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar TisbyTisby carefully and methodically lays out the complicity and often encouragement that the American church gave to personal and institutional racism. A painful but needed reminder that we have a long way to go and a lot to make right.

The Killer Collective by Barry Eisler
Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission by Michael J. Gorman
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

We Need Each Other: Responding to God’s Call to Live Together by Jean VanierVanier is a Catholic humanitarian who founded a federation of communities dedicated to caring for people with developmental disabilities. I’ve heard and watched a couple interviews with Vanier and his holiness and humility are immediately evident in a way that’s incredibly rare. (His On Being interview with Krista Tippett is a great one.)His book is similarly humble and holy.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian MalanWritten prior to the end of apartheid in South Africa, Malan, a white South African journalist, tries to come to grips with the system of white supremacy that to him seems both wicked and unchangeable.

Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham
The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblical Hebraica by Ernst Wurthwein
Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty by Gregory A. BoydBoyd makes the case that doubt can enhance faith, and that at times the need for certainty can be more damaging than helpful. I’m right there with him on that one.

Paul: A Biography by N. T. Wright
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Hyperion by Dan SimmonsAward-winning science fiction. Imaginative in a way that only the best sci-fi is.

Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream by Carson Vaughan

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock by Gregory Alan ThornburyA well-written and -researched biography of one of the truly fascinating characters of early contemporary Christian music.

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

Flee, Be Silent, Pray: An Anxious Evangelical Finds Peace with God through Contemplative Prayer by Ed Cyzewski
Cyzewski makes the case for contemplative prayer being not just helpful but necessary, and makes it sound easy enough that even this long-time evangelical feels like I should take up the practice.

At the moment I’ve got another long one going: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. (1200 pages!)

Richard Beck: In defense of heretics

I really appreciated this from Richard Beck today:

People don’t just wake up one day to suddenly and brazenly espouse a heresy. In my experience, you end up a heretic because there’s a gnawing theological issue that’s keeping you up at night. The burden and size of this issue often grows and grows until a lack of progress in its resolution becomes intellectually and emotionally intolerable…

…many people at this point do something very heroic and commendable. They become heretics.

It’s heroic and commendable because faith isn’t being jettisoned. A herculean effort is made to keep and secure faith. Sure, the price is believing in some rather contested, controversial stuff, but the win is keeping you in the orbit of God, the Bible, and the church.

All that to say, heresy might be wrong, but it can be awfully therapeutic. The mind settles and the heart calms and you can get on with the real business of following Jesus in your day to day life. Some people just need to believe in weird, quirky stuff to make the puzzle fit together.

Beck’s reasoning has validity, too, when it comes to beliefs that aren’t heresy but that are outside the theological mainstream of whatever community you’re in.

Our salvation is blessedly not on the basis of mentally embracing exactly perfect doctrine. I’m comfortable, as I think Beck is here, to trust that God knows the hearts and desires of those people seeking Him, and that if He sees it needful to bring my heart around to embrace some belief that I just can’t stomach today, He can do that.

As Beck says at the end of his piece, “a little bit of empathy, understanding and compassion around these issues would do everyone a great deal of good.” Amen.

Today's the day!

Can confirm this morning only a light jacket was necessary.

I know nothing about this movie other than what’s in this trailer...

But I would buy a ticket right this minute if I could.

youtu.be/bs5ZOcU6B…

Opening Day 2019

It’s been a long winter. Heck, it’s been a long week. Which makes today a particularly happy one: it’s opening day for Major League Baseball. (OK, the Mariners and A’s played two games in Japan a week ago that were officially regular season games, but today is the real opening day.)

I’ve enjoyed baseball since I was a kid, having spent many hours as a teenager listening to the Texas Rangers on the radio. Upon moving to Iowa after college I fell in with a bunch of Chicago Cubs fans and have followed them ever since. We took the kids to Wrigley Field last fall for the first time, and I have some kid-made Cubs fan art hanging in my office that dates back to Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. I won’t be free to sit and watch the Opening Day game with them today - darn workday afternoon games! - but I’m doing my best to pass a love of the game on to the next generation.

Play ball! Oh, and: Go Cubs, Go!

Current Earworm

I’m accompanying a local friend who’s a high school senior when he sings for state contest in a couple weeks. I have now had this song he’s singing stuck in my head since last Sunday night. “Vagabond”, with text by Robert Louis Stevenson and music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

youtu.be/ITjLHDi7U…

There are worse earworms, I guess, but that little bum-padump-pa-dah signature is starting to wear on me…

My latest fascination

I’ve never been particularly a jewelry or fashion guy. I’ve worn a watch inconsistently over the years, usually a cheap digital for running. My wife has made her best attempts a couple times during our 20-some-year relationship to give me nicer watches, and while I did indeed like them, they never really took. Enough dead watch batteries later I finally just gave up and they got relegated to a box in the closet.

A few years ago I got an Apple watch, and then a couple years later an upgraded Apple watch, and while I really liked it for most of what it did, I couldn’t help feeling from time to time that the last thing I really needed was an electronic device literally strapped to me.

Sometime this past winter I started reading about mechanical watches. Which led to me putting one on a gift wish list. Which led to my dear and patient wife buying me this for Valentine’s Day.

This is what the watch community calls an “entry level” watch. A Seiko 5 Sport, it’s fully mechanical - gears, not an electronic quartz-driven mechanism, and automatic, meaning you don’t wind it and it has no battery - it stores kinetic energy from moving around while you wear it.

I’ve worn it most every day for the past six weeks and I’m really enjoying it. I can’t entirely define why, but there’s something inherently enjoyable about having this finely-crafted mechanical device ticking away in the way that timepieces have done for hundreds of years. Now sure, it won’t buzz when I get a text message (though my wrist still feels phantom buzzing from time to time…) or alert me when the Cubs win a baseball game. But it seems like an appropriate level of value vs. distraction; that is to say, it looks good, keeps good time, and otherwise stays out of the way. And while it cost more than a cheap Timex digital, it was still a lot cheaper than the Apple Watch!

I’ve done just enough online reading about mechanical watches to understand that they call this one “entry level” for a reason. I can’t quite envision buying one that looks a lot the same yet costs the same as a decent used car… but at this entry level it doesn’t feel yet like a too dangerous habit.

Strange Planet

One of my favorite discoveries as of late has been the new webcomic Strange Planet. Apparently only published via Instagram, artist Nathan W. Pyle explores mundane human activities through the lens of aliens. It’s delightful and odd. A characteristic example:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BuHSezngbBW/

I don’t know how long Mr. Pyle can sustain this pace and level of observation, but I’m definitely gonna enjoy these as long as they keep coming.

Democracy for Republicans

There’s a really good essay by Jacob T. Levy (Professor of Political Theory at McGill University) over at the Niskanen Center today in which he argues that the Republican Party needs to renew its commitment to democracy. “One sign of seriousness” of a post-Trump Republican Party, says Levy, “would be a commitment to building a Republican Party that can win free and fair elections, a Republican Party whose strategy rests on appealing to pluralities or majorities and that can embrace more voters rather than fewer.”

Levy goes on to document how over the past 30 years, both at the federal and state level, Republicans have frequently failed to win a plurality of the popular vote and yet still have held majorities in legislative bodies. The Republican Party, says Levy,

…is now the beneficiary of all the countermajoritarian mechanisms that make it difficult to translate voting pluralities or majorities into electoral wins, including those that were deliberate creations of constitutional design, those that evolved more or less accidentally, and those that were opportunistically engineered in recent decades. It is moreover the beneficiary of actions that selectively suppress voter turnout and eligibility to vote. Democrats more often than not command popular-vote pluralities even though many Democratic-leaning voters are discouraged or prohibited from getting to the ballot box at all.

Levy argues that the longstanding conservative suspicion of majoritarian democracy is based more on the Founders’ understanding of classical, zero-sum Roman economic precedents, and that such a system is poorly equipped to handle modern commercial capitalism. And while that conservative suspicion is often justified by an argument that the mob will just vote for socialism to line their own pocketbook (as if the elites aren’t also voting for their pocketbooks?), Levy argues that position is unjustified by history.

While there have been deeply despotic socialist regimes in modernity, these have almost never come about through the domestic subversion of democratic governments; they have been imposed by external military domination or else have replaced domestic oligarchic autocracies of one type or another. The fear of the redistributionist mob exercises a powerful hold on the conservative imagination, and has often served as an excuse for repression and constitutional violation. But we should understand that excuse as an excuse.

It’s a long essay and worth reading in its entirety. While I’m not personally likely to support most of the Republican Party ideals regardless of their political strategy, I’m fully on board w/ Levy’s conclusion:

It would be good, in other words, to have a competition in the direction of freer, fairer, and more open-access elections, with competing ideas about what that means and what to prioritize. That’s compatible with making an issue out of instances of Democratic misconduct that themselves call for future-oriented, general, rule-governed remedies. But it means not an agenda based on fake panic about nonexistent undocumented-immigrant voting or almost nonexistent voter fraud, not an agenda about dressing up restriction as reform. I am not sure that there are currently any powerful Republicans who are willing to try to take part in those debates, Republicans who are willing to embrace the goal of building a party that can win pluralities and majorities of freer and more open elections. I am sure that it will be a good sign when there are.

What systemic repentance might look like for the Evangelical church

There are a few big stories rattling around the American evangelical church community lately that I see as being related. I’m not sure that there’s a single root cause, but there are some common symptoms and conditions that contribute to them all.

There have been barrels of ink used to write on these issues already. I’m primarily thinking about:

Recognition of a broad historical pattern of misogyny within the church.

The #ChurchToo movement, recognizing a long pattern of cover up of sexual abuse and assault in the name of protecting church leaders and “the church’s witness”.

The disgrace of several multi-site megachurch pastors.

Reeling yet? That’s all just within the past five years or so. And there are undoubtedly more revelations to come.

Common threads

A few decades from now I’m sure there will be analyses with better perspective on this stuff, but right here in the middle of it I want to suggest two common threads in all of these.

Powerful, unaccountable men. Whether at the megachurch level or the independent Southern Baptist Church level, men craving power find ways to set up systems that will keep them from accountability. They hand-pick their elder boards. They re-write church bylaws and membership agreements to ensure that they have all the control.

Systemic silencing and ignoring of women If you haven’t read Beth Moore’s post yet, go read it. She’s just one of many, but expresses the issue well. In complementarian churches, women who are themselves fully committed to the idea that they shouldn’t be elders or teachers too often find themselves pushed out of any role that smacks of leadership. Tim Challies, no flaming outlier in the neo-Reformed camp, restricts women from publicly reading Scripture in a worship service. John Piper says that women shouldn’t be police officers because they ought not to be “giving directives” to men. I could go on.

Practical steps going forward

It’s not enough to lament. Real repentance includes taking real steps toward change.

When the doctor tells you that you’ve got heart failure and high blood pressure and are going to die very prematurely if you don’t make some changes, you don’t just say “thanks, doc” and then keep your old lifestyle. You re-evaluate your priorities. Sure, you believed strongly in desserts and cheeseburgers and lots of Netflix time. But if you want to be healthy, you may find that a belief in vegetables and desserts in moderation and regular exercise are also acceptable life choices and will allow you to flourish in a way you wouldn’t otherwise.

Similarly, the evangelical church needs to look at its “life choices” and tightly-held doctrinal distinctives and the fruit that has resulted and make decisions accordingly. How serious are we about repentance?

Accountability Pastors and leaders need real, tangible accountability. For denominations that are structured with congregational autonomy, there should be elder boards that can call pastors on the carpet when need be. We need to take the qualifications for eldership seriously. Not argumentative? Not greedy? Heck, we need to take the fruit of the Spirit seriously. Peace? Patience? Kindness? Self-control? A lot of this stuff is obvious and just needs to be followed.

Additionally, stronger denominational oversight, even an accountability hierarchy, may be appropriate. It’s not a silver bullet - the Roman Catholic church is the largest religious bureaucracy in the world and has its own accountability issues - but something needs to be done. If congregational autonomy is so important that it precludes churches from reporting and protecting other churches from known sex offenders, congregational autonomy is an idol that should be done away with.

Bigger is not better Can we all just agree at this point that big multi-site churches with charismatic preachers streaming in over video are a really, really bad idea? How many more Driscolls and MacDonalds do we need to build and then destroy these empires before we’re willing to acknowledge that this model is unhealthy, produces unhealthy churches, and causes serious hurt to thousands of believers who were a part of those churches? Give me an army of Eugene Petersons ministering in little neighborhood churches rather than a Mark Driscoll or James MacDonald or (dare I even say it) Matt Chandler projected larger than life on a video screen at campuses across the country.

Listen to women and believe their testimony When women and young people come forward with allegations of abuse, we must take them seriously. We must have good processes and training in place at our churches to make sure that children and young people are protected. And we need to be willing to expose abuse if it happens, and learn from it, and improve. This is non-negotiable.

Bring women into leadership It seems obvious that if women were included in the leadership of these churches, and if they were listened to and had power such that they could take action, we would not have the systemic ongoing issues with abuse that we have today. (Again, not a silver bullet - Willow Creek has women in leadership - but still…)

I don’t want to add another thousand words to this post to stake out a position on complementarianism vs. egalitarianism. (OK, so I want to, but that’s another post.) But even pragmatically, if people like Scot McKnight and N. T. Wright - neither of whom can reasonably be accused of being wild-eyed progressives - can find a Scriptural basis for women being ordained into ministry leadership, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether complementarianism is a second- or third-level doctrine that deserves another look.

Finally

Repentance requires action. Repentance for particularly painful, systemic sin probably requires painful, systemic action. Whether the evangelical church in America will be willing to broadly repent remains to be seen. I pray that it will, and commit to doing what I can in my own congregation to act out that repentance.