Jennifer Knapp: Kansas 25

I was an instant supporter of this album on Kickstarter and now I’m finally getting a chance to listen to it: Jennifer Knapp’s Kansas 25. Back when Kansas came out in 1998, college me was totally drawn in. Smart lyrics, catchy tunes, and a raw honesty that I didn’t hear in a lot of the other Christian music that was on the radio and for sale in the bookstore. I memorized the songs, sang them on my guitar, sang one of them in church, and spun that CD all the time in the car. I have often mentioned it as one of the three “perfect” Christian music albums ever. It’s that good.

Knapp, now 50, has been on a long road since releasing the original Kansas in her early twenties. She moved to Australia in 2002, publicly came out as a lesbian in 2010, recorded some other albums, and became an outspoken advocate for LGBT causes. There’s something incredibly meaningful about hearing her revisit these faith-filled songs in middle age. The miles have taken their toll - the voice is a little more raspy, the tempos a little slower - but the youthful expressions of faith still ring true all these years later.

If you supported the Kickstarter, you probably already have the download. (If not, find it in your inbox!) If you didn’t get in early, head over to Bandcamp where you can preorder it and listen as soon as it officially releases on May 17.

A. R. Moxon: War or Nothing

A. R. Moxon has a brilliant and brutal essay out today entitled “War or Nothing”, in which he describes a theme beginning in 2001 with the US’s response to the 9/11 attacks and continues all the way through 2020’s George Floyd protests and this year’s pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. From it he describes “seven laws of living in a war-oriented society”:

  • Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.
  • The worst betrayal possible is any opposition to killing.
  • The only appropriate answer to killing is not only killing—it must be disproportionate killing.
  • Any hypothetical future threat of potential attack justifies the same disproportionate violent response as an actual attack.
  • Any killing we do, not matter how indefensible it is, can only ever be self-defense.
  • Wanting to wage war makes you correct in a way that overcomes evidence or results or even coherence.
  • Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.

He’s not wrong. A taste:

And millions of us, who have been watching since 2001 or even before, can see how framing the apparatus of killing as indistinguishable from safety helps the apparatus of killing, but not how it helps make us safe. We can see how framing a country as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the country. We can see how framing all a county’s citizens as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the people. And we can see clearly how framing killing as the only way to bring safety, and any act other than killing as nothing favors those who want to see a world of death, but not how it helps honor the dead or keeps any of the living safe.

Millions of us think the bigger problem might be the killing. It seems to us war as the only option represents the greatest possible failure of human imagination there can be, and our wealth and resources and ingenuity seem to present many other options. Perhaps if we put our heads together, we might think of something else to do, that isn’t nothing but isn’t war, either. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant about what that something might be, we think that seeking that something is better than not seeking it. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant, many of us are not, and even those of us who are ignorant fools can see the way the suggestions and solutions presented by those who are not ignorant fools are ignored while those of us who are the most ignorant and the most foolish receive the most attention from our institutions of influence and power, to frame this whole act of imagination as ignorant and foolish.

And even those of us who are ignorant fools can see how this helps promote the ideal of war or nothing, but we don’t see how it helps us find something that is not killing but isn’t nothing, either.

God grant us leaders brave enough to consider responses to killing that aren’t more killing, but aren’t nothing, either.

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.