Finished reading: Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Robinson writing on Genesis, but I enjoy her writing enough it was definitely something I was going to read. Structured as a narrative commentary, Robinson doesn’t employ chapter breaks or other touchpoints within the text itself. It’s fascinating to read a commentary by a Christian writer who takes the text seriously but not necessarily literally. If there is a broad “point” to her book, it is to feature the uniqueness of Genesis among the Ancient Near Eastern texts, and to highlight the theme of unmerited grace that runs through it. From God’s forgiveness of Cain to Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Robinson tells us that Genesis is set apart from the other ANE texts this way.

I appreciated her book, but didn’t enjoy it as much as reading her essays. I need to pick them up for a re-read.

I'm not claiming any special prescience, but...

I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:

I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.

Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.

Medieval Christians' perspective on climate change

Well, this is a fascinating perspective: medievalist Dr. Eleanor Johnson writes on Literary Hub about medieval Christians’ view on climate change:

The Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming opens by saying, “We believe the Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing.”

As a scholar of medieval religion, culture, and literature, I am utterly perplexed by this belief, because I study a period and region of history where people were, if anything more devoutly and observantly Christian, and I’m here to tell you: medieval English people had no problem believing in climate change and ecosystemic collapse.

Like contemporary Christians, medieval Christians did believe in a providential God. They also believed Nature’s functionality was guaranteed by His will. But they did not believe that, since Nature was underwritten by divine will, Nature would automatically take care of them.

Instead, they assumed that climate change and ecological disasters were divine punishment for human malfeasance. They believed this, first, because they were living through the Little Ice Age, and everyone could feel its effects; nobody bothered to deny it, because it was obviously happening.

A fascinating contrast to today…

Moving my blog to micro.blog

So on a whim I reactivated my micro.blog site and threw 1275 markdown files at it - the entire contents of 20 years of blogging, first on Wordpress, then last year in 11ty. So far, I’m super-impressed. Micro.blog handled the imports and redirects pretty smoothly, has auto-posting to Mastodon and Bluesky, supports emailing, responses, ActivityPub integration… very slick.

I mean, if a week from now I decide it’s not a good fit, I just go change my DNS and point it back at my old domain. But at the moment, this looks like a thing I’ll stick with.

Bullet Points for a York Tuesday

I’m visiting the UK for work this week - my first visit ever. A few thoughts:

  • Having a public transit system that seems to work: awesome. I landed at London Heathrow, took a subway, a bus, and a regional train and four hours later had arrived in York, some 200 miles away.
  • For my Iowa friends, this would be like flying into Chicago O’Hare and being able to get to Cedar Rapids via public transit. Nifty.
  • In-room electric teakettle: delightful, and quick. Why don’t we have them in the US? Oh, because the UK wall voltage is 240v and in the US they would work much more slowly.
  • York is a lovely place so far.
  • Antique shop here has the same ugly glass display cases that our antique shops in the US have.
  • “Antiques” here include tags that say things like ‘Roman, probably 400 BC’.
  • Felt like the authentic British experience last night when I spent my dinner in a pub next to three guys at the bar who were enjoying after-work pints and arguing about football.
  • Assuming my arranged cab shows up in 30 minutes, now I have to go actually do some work.

More later.

Pictures at an Exhibition for Guitar

I got to know Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition when I was in high school and my piano teacher assigned me The Gnome. I never got it mastered as much as I wanted, but it was such a fun suite to hack my way through. I listened to the orchestral version of it, and love the gong at the end, but overall I still prefer the piano version.

This video, though, has me reconsidering my opinion. Guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita has arranged the entire Pictures suite for guitar and it is amazing. He has captured both the feel and almost all the notes from the piano version. He varies playing techniques to create lovely textures of sound. And while I’m not up on all the modern classical guitarists, I think it’s safe to say that Yamashita has amazing skill.

The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon

I just finished up reading Sarah McCammon’s new book The Exvangelicals and I need to take the time to recommend it here. McCammon, a 40-something NPR journalist, has written a book that’s part memoir and part explainer on where Exvangelicals have come from over the past decade, and, more importantly, why.

When I reviewed Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory earlier this year, I noted at the time that he was joining a list of kindred spirits who I found online or by reading their books, and who turned out to be fellow devout homeschooled kids who grew into adults questioning evangelical distinctives and dismayed by the devolution of white American evangelicalism into Fox News-watching Republican sheep. I named McCammon at this point as another one of those people. Little did I know how familiar her story would be.

I first encountered Sarah McCammon when she was a host on Iowa Public Radio. Eventually I followed her on Twitter, and continued to read and occasionally interact with her as she moved from Iowa to the east coast, eventually to work directly for NPR. Her reporting during the 2016 presidential campaign was nuanced and insightful. In hindsight, I should’ve known why.

In The Exvangelicals, McCammon unpacks her own story and uses it to illustrate the Exvangelical movement. She’s a few years younger than I am, but our stories run parallel tracks: growing up in the Midwest, a devout churchgoing family, culturally sheltered, homeschooled, evangelical youth groups, marrying young, eventually finding her own faith torn as she experienced the wider world. Eventually she left the church and faith fervor of her youth, getting divorced, becoming an Episcopalian, marrying a Jewish man. Despite so much Evangelical rhetoric saying the Exvangelicals are only leaving because they want to be free to enjoy sin, McCammon recognizes that it’s actually really painful:

Leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life’s most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of “answers” - about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It also means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you’re sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It’s often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve that community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world and risking that loss.

She has summed up there in a single sentence my experience of the last dozen years.

It was interesting reading this book back-to-back with Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. Lyz is another exvangelical, though I don’t know she’d describe herself that way, who writes with an acerbic fire about coming through her evangelical upbringing and a troubled marriage. (Lyz actually provides one of the blurbs on the back of McCammon’s book.) McCammon’s prose is more NPR, Lyz is more shock jock. McCammon makes me comfortably say “yes, this! Exactly this!”. Lyz makes me uncomfortably say “well, she’s not wrong…” They are both important voices whose words should be read and wrestled with.

The Exvangelicals is a book I would recommend for anyone outside the evangelical experience trying to understand where us weirdos are coming from, and for any one of us Exvangelical weirdos who wants to feel less alone.

Bringing joy to people IS bringing glory to God

Crisanne Werner has a lovely essay up on Substack today about her changing understanding of how the experience of music, and specifically playing music, relates to her spirituality as she goes through a sort of deconstruction.

I, too, have had music be a core part of my spiritual experience for most all of my life. As a worship leader in evangelical churches, I have far too many times heard (and probably used) the “audience of One” phrase that Crisanne wrestles with in her essay. But I love where she lands with it:

…music can, and should, bring glory to God. It shouldn’t be manipulated by false humility; it should have an altruistic motivation. But something that didn’t occur to me as a teen/young adult, was that bringing joy to people is bringing glory to God. Using music to evoke emotions that people otherwise wouldn’t have access to is a gift to them. A gift of love. It falls firmly under the umbrella of loving God and loving others. Other people’s music is that same sort of gift to me- my life, especially my spiritual life, is parched without music. And, despite the proliferation of electronic recordings, nothing moves the soul more than an in-person experience. … On that church stage this weekend, I was fully at peace with my motivation of helping the congregation enter beauty and joy. I was at peace with my audience being One plus three hundred.

I met Crisanne at a retreat last fall and quickly learned that beneath her quiet veneer was a depth of brave wisdom just waiting to come out. I’ve so enjoyed reading her Substack this year. What a treat.

Reimagining Orthodoxy

Dr. Chris Green shared part of an essay today on a theology of disagreement. There’s a ton of good stuff in it. For example, early on:

Truth be told, what seem to be theological disagreements very often arise from and are borne along by other conflicts rooted deeply in hidden personal and interpersonal anxieties and ambitions. But at least some of our theological disagreements, I want to insist, are in fact the upshot of the Spirit’s transforming work taking shape in our as-yet-unperfected lives, moving us toward the “fullness of Christ” in which we find shalom.

This represents a beautiful freedom that I never found in my life in the American evangelical church.

But further, I want to commend to your thinking what he says about orthodoxy. In the evangelical and fundamentalist church, “orthodoxy” tends to be a cudgel used to keep unwanted questions and questioners away, and to scare the flock away from being tempted toward theological ideas that stray from the party line. Green, though, quotes Rowan Williams to suggest a different approach:

[W]e must reimagine the nature and purpose of orthodoxy. Instead of conceiving of it as a wholly-realized, already-perfected system of thought, we need to recognize it as a fullness of meaning toward which we strive, knowing full well we cannot master it even when in the End we know as we are known. Because the Church’s integrity is gift, not achievement, we can never know in advance “what will be drawn out of us by the pressure of Christ’s reality, what the full shape of a future orthodoxy might be.”

He continues, quoting Williams further:

Orthodoxy is not a system first and foremost of things you’ve got to believe, things you’ve got to tick off, but is a fullness, a richness of understanding. Orthodox is less an attempt just to make sure everybody thinks the same, and more like an attempt to keep Christian language as rich, as comprehensive as possible. Not comprehensive in the sense of getting everything in somehow, but comprehensive in the sense of keeping a vision of the whole universe in God’s purpose and action together.

A lot to chew on there, but I love the vision of orthodoxy as a commitment to keeping a vision for God’s continuing purpose and action to which we are only slowly understanding. Beautiful stuff.

Did the Emerging Church Fail?

Richard Beck has a series going right now in which he asserts that the Emerging Church movement failed. I’m usually pretty aligned with Beck but I’m not so sure this time.

He defines the Emerging Church by some familiar characteristics:

  • Engagement with post-modernism
  • Struggle with evangelical doctrinal positions, leading to epistemic humility
  • New awareness of liturgy
  • An “aesthetic component”, including skinny jeans and a “coffee shop vibe”

That group, Beck argues, “never was able to establish a broad network of churches”, and eventually failed because “evangelism became deconstruction”, and, says Beck, “You can’t build churches upon deconstruction.”

I think Beck is setting up a bit of a straw man here to try to make point he wants to make against deconstruction. But I think there’s an alternate history to Beck’s that comes to a different conclusion.

I think we can see two developments from the Emergent Church of the early 2000s.

First, It’s easy to forget that along with Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, people like Mark Driscoll also came along under the Emergent label. The part of Emergent that went the way of Driscoll took an aggressive posture in their engagement with post-modernism, and rejected epistemic humility, but took up at least some pieces of a new liturgy, and were the exemplars of Beck’s skinny jeans-wearing, beer-drinking, coffee shop vibing “aesthetic component”. In short order they would reject McLaren and Bell’s post-modernism and fall into doctrinal fundamentalism, but they didn’t just disappear as Beck asserts.

Second, Beck severely underplays the movement of many in the Emergent Church into mainstream denominations. Rachel Held Evans famously wrote about “going Episcopal”. Nadia Bolz Weber is ELCA. Scot McKnight became Anglican. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk, is the patron saint of the whole movement. Anecdotally, at the less-famous level, I see a steady stream of exvangelicals deconstructing, embracing epistemic humility, rediscovering the historic liturgy, and embracing a more traditional “aesthetic component” by joining high church mainline traditions.

So did the Emerging Church “fail” as Beck suggests? Maybe, if you construct your definitions as narrowly as he does. But look just a little more broadly and you can trace a path from the Emergent deconstructionists of the early 2000s to the exvangelicals of the 2010s and 2020s and into the pews of the mainline. Whether we will bring the mainline to a resurgence or only forestall its demise by a few more decades remains to be seen.