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...

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…

Thankful

On this day set aside to be thankful, I want to review the events of the last six weeks, because they give me so much to be thankful for. Some of you have watched these things unfold in real-time on Facebook and Twitter, but it’s worth summarizing here.

Oct 3 - My parents and grandma came to visit. Grandma hadn’t been here to visit Iowa since Laura (now 7) was a baby. It was great to see her.

Oct 3 - The insurance adjuster called and told me that we had hail damage and that insurance would pay for a new roof for the house and garage.

Oct 4 - My sister Rebecca, who had recently rescheduled her wedding from next summer to Nov 5, called to ask if I would play music for the wedding, if Becky would be the matron of honor, and if our girls would be flower girls. Wedding would be held in Seattle.

Oct 6 - While doing some shopping for dresses for the wedding, Becky gets a call from her sister that her Dad has been admitted to the hospital with intestinal issues.

Oct 7 and following - Frenetic planning ensues. My brother Aaron is the master carpenter and construction guy of the family, so I contacted him to see if he had a weekend free to help me re-shingle the roof. He had one weekend free: Oct 14-15. I’m thankful that Aaron and Emily were willing and able to come and help. We couldn’t have done it without them.

I’m also thankful for the patient customer service rep at Nationwide Mortgage who walked me through the claim process and got a check out promptly so that we had time to purchase roofing materials in time for the appointed weekend.

Oct 14 - 15 - Aaron and Emily come down from Wisconsin to help do the roof. We got the house and garage done between Thursday afternoon and Saturday night. Thankful, too, for my buddy Mike who provided a burst of enthusiasm to our roofing project on Saturday morning the 15th. We wouldn’t have gotten it done on Saturday without him. As it was, we finished the ridgeline of the garage roof by flashlight on Saturday night.

Oct 17 - Somewhere around all of this activity, we managed to find a dress for Becky for the wedding at the first store we looked, and we found dresses for the girls within about 2 stores (and a lot of online browsing).

Oct 20 - The prompt mortgage folks sent the check for the remainder of the roof work. The money we saved by doing it ourselves paid for our tickets to fly to Seattle for the wedding.

Oct 22 - Becky’s dad, still in the hospital and trying to recover from two surgeries, had a really good day, and Becky was able to video chat with him in the hospital.

Oct 24 - Becky’s dad passed away. Thankful for our friends Mike and Kirsten who first offered to bring over dinner. When we told them thanks, but that we already had dinner planned, they stopped over unannounced with a half gallon of Coldstone ice cream.

Oct 28 - Becky was able to fly out to North Carolina to be with her family, and all of her siblings were able to be there. I was able to be away from work and stay at home with the girls.

Oct 31 - Becky’s dad’s memorial service, and I took the girls around trick-or-treating… such fun!

Nov 1 - Becky got home… for which we were all very thankful.

Nov 2 - Packing like crazy.

Nov 3 - 9 AM flight out of the Moline airport. Thankful for the friendly guy we met in the terminal who was flying with two dozen Casey’s donuts and shared a few with us. Thankful, too, for the friendly airline agent who got our seats rearranged so that we were all together on the plane.

Nov 5 - Rebecca’s wedding. Beautiful. Sounds funny to say it, but thankful for the Unitarian Universalists whose standards were low enough that they would let my sister have her wedding there on short notice. (She imported a Baptist pastor to do the ceremony.) Beautiful little chapel. Also thankful that KP the grumpy flower girl stayed quiet on my lap while I played music in the middle of the ceremony.

Nov 7 - Thankful that we got to hang out with Andrew and Heather for a day before we all had to go home. We don’t get to see them too often.

Nov 8 - Flew home. Again, the flights were super-smooth. Thankful for a kids’ play area at the DFW airport right next to our gate on our layover. Also thankful that we could hit Cracker Barrel for dinner after getting in to Moline.

Nov 9 - Back to work.

Nov 19 - Thankful for a pastor who read my blog post about being brain-full and soul-hungry, and rather than preaching at me, bought me a book by one his favorite contemplatives. I’m going to read it this weekend.

Nov 20 - Back on Worship Team, with a good new song that we got to do again as the post-closer. That last time felt like it was just for us, the team. It was amazing.

Nov 24 - at home with the family for Thanksgiving. Thankful for a couple of weeks where we’ve been able to catch up and recover a bit.

We’ve been so blessed by God’s faithfulness to us. For each thing listed here there were a dozen little things that I’m forgetting. He is good, and I am thankful.

Thanks, G.

My friend Geof has been writing a series of “letters” blog posts this month, addressed to family and friends. I’ll admit to idly wondering whether I’d rate a letter or not, but when I saw “Dear Chris” show up in my RSS reader, and then read his post, I was a little bit challenged to know what to say.

One of these days I’m going to return the favor and distill my thoughts into a letter/blog post for Geof, but for now I’ll just say that I’m blessed to be able to count him as a friend, and that I wish there was a way we could merge the awesomeness that is Geof’s Huntsville, AL, crowd with my Iowa-based career path.

[GFMorris.com: “Dear Chris”]

Are we overly focused on the cross?

There’s a thought-provoking post by Bo Sanders up on Homebrewed Christianity today wherein he asks what might be to many a startling question: have we overdone the crucifixion?

Sanders thinks that we may have. He observes that, for evangelicals on the blogosphere (and, I’d add, in the current publishing market) it’s “all atonement theory, all the time”.

He goes on:

Here is my concern: in the resurrection God spoke a new word over the world. I would like to live into that new word and participate with God’s Spirit who was given as a gift and a seal of the promise.

To obsess on the cross and related atonement theories is to live perpetually in the old word and to camp in the final thing that God said about the old situation.

As I reflect on my own journey, I can see how the churches in which I grew up did focus on the cross and atonement to the great neglect of the resurrection. Not that we didn’t have amazing Easter celebrations, but somehow we never connected the dots between Christ’s resurrection and our own eternal future. That omission is the reason that when, at age 30, I finally read N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, it so rocked my theological world.

So I think it’s a question worth thinking about. Do we overly focus on the cross as opposed to the other symbols of our faith? Is the focus on the cross a reflection of the evangelical personal sin/death/redemption focus, whereas a focus on the empty tomb and resurrection might drive a more corporate kingdom/social perspective?

To look at it another way: one of my daughter’s favorite stories from the Jesus Storybook Bible (highly recommended if you have kids) is the one on the crucifixion. But if she requests that story, I make sure we have time to read two stories, because I refuse to stop reading with Good Friday; I want to get to resurrection morning. Is our focus on the cross a grown-up theological equivalent of continually reading the Friday chapter without the Sunday chapter? Food for thought, for sure.

[Homebrewed Christianity]

The Axes of Evil: A Halloween Groaner

[HT: Boing Boing]

My brain is full: a quick clarification

I realize after writing these last couple of posts that they may make me sound like I’m deeply unhappy or unsatisfied with my current church. Given that lots of my local church friends read my blog, let me assure you that it’s not the case. I’m happy with where we are as a church. I’m encouraged and challenged by the teaching on a regular basis. I enjoy serving as a part of our music team. I’ve made some good friends in the three years we’ve been at Stonebridge, and I know those relationships will only deepen as time goes on.

We’re also involved in a community group (which is a new addition for us this year). It’s possible that as we get to know our group better it will serve as some of the fellowship I’m looking for. But those relationships take time to grow. We’ll see how it goes. And I’m also enthusiastic about the spiritual goals that our church leadership has set out for us this year. They’re good ones. We just have to follow through on them and make them more than just words.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I get an email from my pastor sometime within the next week saying “hey man, read your blog, anything we can talk about? How can we minister to you better?” I love my pastor deeply and greatly appreciate the fact that he will notice it and be faithful as a shepherd to get with me and see what’s up.

But here’s the thing. I don’t think that what I’m looking for is someone or some group to minister to me in a way that I’ve been missing. What I’m looking for is a community of believers who can join, side by side, in agreement that we are all broken and in need of the Gospel to minister to us on a daily basis.

[My apologies: 300+ words is hardly a quick clarification. sigh]

My brain is full, part 2

Yesterday’s post wandered a bit in talking about the relevance of God’s Word even as it is found in the daily readings and prayers of the church. When I started writing I was aiming for an appreciation of the BCP daily prayers and how they have ministered to me even in just the bit I have used them privately. Where I wandered, though, was to the observation that “my brain is full; it is my soul that needs fed”, and I’d like to work through that thought a little bit more today.

Certainly my personal quirks and characteristics help cause this condition: I read a lot. My mind never seems to let go of details and trivia. (Let’s put it this way: I was the kid who at the age of 9 or 10 was reading through encyclopedias in the morning when I’d wake up early.) I do a lot of synthesizing, by which I mean that I’m not so good at creatively staking out my own position, but that I can listen to two or three other positions, evaluate them, and then pull together the pieces into a unified whole that makes sense to me. I also don’t re-read much, because my brain says “yeah, been there, read that”, and it becomes hard to slow down and concentrate on something for a second time.

As a teenager and into my twenties my voracious book appetite combined with the wealth of good books on theological subjects served me well. I read a lot, learned a lot. My bookshelves are still filled with Lewis, Piper, Keller, Wright, Chesterton, and Spurgeon. I read through a lot of Schaeffer. I had a hard time finding the patience to appreciate some of the older theologians; how can you use so many words to say seemingly the same thing over and over? I could sit and talk theology with my church leaders, and before long that desire and aptitude, combined with the ability to apply it in practical ways, drew me into church leadership myself. (Somewhere along the way we had three kids, I over-committed to almost everything, burned out, and changed churches. But that’s another story.)

Our current evangelical culture, and especially the neo-Reformed subculture within it (wherein I find currently myself) seem to highly favor this intellectual, bookish approach. Pastors like John Piper pen profusely. Pastor Mark Driscoll established his own publishing line of theological literature. Tim Keller seems to crank out a book a year (at least). It’s as if you’re not anybody until you’ve published a book. But with very few exceptions, these books don’t seem to really say anything new; the publisher is just pushing an update or a rehash with new cover art and the current big-name pastor as the author.

Now that I’m in my mid-30’s, things seem to have changed in my reading appetite. I can think of only three or four books I’ve read in the past 5 years that have really made me just stop and go “wow, what did I just read?”. Now, maybe I’m just failing to choose the right books. (In that case, I’m open for recommendations, so please leave me a comment or send me an email, FB message, or tweet with your ideas.)

But maybe I’m at a plateau where more head knowledge is not the answer. And this is where I file my desire (expressed yesterday) for the daily corporate practice of Scripture, prayer, and worship. Even that is undoubtedly not the magic answer. Maybe the struggling pursuit of the seemingly elusive daily “quiet time” is a more practical answer. But that, by itself, seems to private and insulated to me. I need community to go with it. Not community for study purposes; I just want to be with people who, like me, have that need in their soul to pray, worship, confess, and hear the Word on a regular basis. If you know where to find it, please let me know.