I finally got around to watching Paul Kingsnorth’s “Against Christian Civilization” lecture. I kept putting it off but had a good friend that kept reminding me to watch it. It does not disappoint. What he has to say is difficult to hear, but I also think it rings true. Be sure to stick around for the Q&A, which was also illuminating.
For more Kingsnorth, this essay (which tells the story of his conversion) is the place to start.
The conversation around smart phones and social media and screens continues, with schools being a primary flashpoint. Two people behind this necessary focus have been Andy Crouch (of The Tech-Wise Family) and Jonathan Haidt (of The Anxious Generation). The two were recently brought together for a conversation by the Veritas Forum. I’ve watched a good chunk of it and have found it enlightening and enjoyable. It’s interesting to see where each speaker starts and how they revisit key presuppositions for their position. And it’s always good to see someone practice what it means to “think Christianly,” something Crouch does amazingly well. Haidt’s line about the unexamined life is hilarious and well-received, too.
I’ve thought a good bit about internal and external motivations since my trip to Yosemite. There’s an echo of that conversation in this recent post by Seth Godin, where he writes about what “fuels” you. Motivation matters, I think. But motivation also changes over time. Sometimes the switch is dramatic and obvious, but other times the change in motivation is subtle and unspoken. I do think Godin is right:
When we pick our fuel, we pick our companions for the journey ahead.
That’s true on multiple levels, I think.
Fred Sanders begins The Deep Things of God with a distinction that is worth making in many areas: the emphatic and the reductionistic. He’s thinking specifically of the Trinity in relation to the many other things that healthy evangelical Christians think about. The emphatic, of course, has to do with emphasis. Sanders asserts that healthy evangelism has landed on a few things for real emphasis: the Bible, the cross, conversion, and heaven. Sanders’s concern is that other key things get loss when things are under-emphasized and forgotten, what he calls an “anemic condition.” An example:
Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionistic. The rest of the matrix matters . . . You do not need to say all those things at all times, but you need to have a felt sense of their force behind the things you do say. When that felt sense is not present, or is not somehow communicated to the next generation, emphatic evangelicalism becomes reductionist evangelicalism.
Emphatic evangelicalism can be transformed into reductionist evangelicalism in less than a generation and then become self-perpetuating.
Remembering things you never really even knew is a tricky thing to do.
One of the interesting things about some healthy evangelical Christianity over the last decade or so has been at attempt at “retrieval,” of revisiting the history of the broader Christian tradition and learning from what has been forgotten. It’s a good shift, though I feel like it’s only happening in some pockets here and there. Even still, it is a good reminder that there are important truths and practices waiting to be rediscovered. And with each rediscovery can be asked many good questions: where and when did it start? why was it neglected? when was it forgotten? how can the Spirit bring edification with this rediscovery?
I intended this post to be about both more and less than theology. Because there’s a lot of reductionism going on in the world today, some of it intentional but much of it accidental. It happens in theologies and traditions and organizations and relationships. In the 21st century, it feels like every body of knowledge is overwhelming and in need of some kind of shorthand. Which is all well and good until something vital is inadvertently lost. We would do well to guard against that, though first we’d have to know what we’re guarding (and why it’s worth guarding in the first place). Emphasis, yes. Reductionism, no.
Yesterday’s readings in the Daily Office brought me back around to Psalm 16. If I didn’t already use the first part of Psalm 27 on test days in class, I’d probably start using chunks of this one. It “works” on a number of different levels: devotional, confessional, Christological.
16:1 Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
2 I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.”
3 As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,
in whom is all my delight.
4 The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply;
their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out
or take their names on my lips.
5 The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
6 The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
7 I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
8 I have set the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.
9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;
my flesh also dwells secure.
10 For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,
or let your holy one see corruption.
11 You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
This time last week I was driving back to Fresno after staying the night in the Yosemite valley floor. I’d been trying to get to Yosemite since some dear friends moved to the area over a year ago. This time, things worked out. And with encouragement from another friend, I stayed one evening in Curry Village.
The trip started with a late morning drive from Fresno with my friends and an itinerary made by my friend. The drive up (and down, actually) was beautiful. And long. So when we finally made it to the Tunnel View stop, I was both amazed and relieved. The view was as beautiful as I had hoped. From there, we drove past Bridalveil Falls and into the valley floor. We parked one of our two vehicles at Curry Village and made our way to Yosemite Lodge for some rental bikes. The rest of the afternoon was spent biking around the valley floor, where we ultimately ended up at Mirror Lake (which was neither thanks to the autumn weather). From there we made our way back to YL, dropped off our bikes, and drove back to Curry Village for a pizza dinner. My friends went with me to check in and check out my lodging for the night: a one-bed vinyl tent on a wooden platform with a metal locker outside for food and other things that might attract local bears. At that point, my friends left and I did my best to settle in for the night. I did some walking around that that point, checking out the general store and the communal lodge with its porch and comfy seating. I wanted to see as much of the quiet night sky as I could, but everywhere I went I found talking people, cars still pulling in for the night, and flashlights shining in all directions. Ah well. I did get a better sense of the quiet night sky when I woke up to tip-toe to the communal bathroom after midnight.
The next morning started with a decent amount of sleep achieved. I cleaned the tent up some and made my way to the lodge for breakfast: biscuits and gravy, eggs, and some Lucky Charms (a pleasant mixture of what I would usually eat at a camp). I checked out of the tent and then made my way by foot to Vernal Falls. It was quite the hike, but the view was worth it. After making my way back to the lodge, I took a cherry Coke break and then took the free shuttle to a few different sites in the valley: the Ahwahnee Hotel, lower Yosemite Falls, and finally the El Capitan Meadows. The meadows ended up being my favorite location, both because there were very few people there and because it had lots of trees along with the river.
At that point, I was pretty wiped out. I had thought about ending my trip with a visit to Glacier Point (at the suggestion of my friend), but after starting on the winding road out of the valley, I decided that I wouldn’t stop until I was somewhere in Oakhurst (a town between Yosemite and Fresno). I have to admit: I’m no fan of winding mountain roads without railing on the side.
Looking back, I think that Yosemite is more of a two-night stay. I got a decent amount of site-seeing in. And while the tent wasn’t the most comfortable sleeping arrangement ever, it also wasn’t that bad. There’s also something cool about “village life,” as loud and flashlight-happy as everyone seemed to be. It would’ve been nice having a “place to land” in-between hikes.
Yosemite is beautiful, and the valley itself is so engaging that sometimes you forget to look up and see the mountains around you. I can’t imagine being there at the height of the summer season when things are super-crowded. The “random Thursday in October” crowd was more than enough for me. Not sure I’ll ever get back. Either way, I’m really glad I was able to make the trip. Beautiful places are great, and I’m glad to visit them when I can.
And just like that, the first quarter of the new school year is over. It’s amazing how time flies.
I’m also amazed at how little I posted over the last few weeks of the quarter. There are a few reasons for that, I suppose, but nothing really work making note of at this point in time. It was a good quarter, but it was also a busy one. And I’m not quite done . . . I need to take care of grades today and prep a little today and tomorrow before heading to the West Coast for a few days.
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I did finish Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures just as the break came to an end. I highly recommend the book. In some ways it’s more Wingfeather Saga than Harry Potter, though maybe that’s not the best descriptor. Rundell does a great job of bringing in layers of backstory without weighing things down. The characters are enjoyable (though surprisingly expendable), and you get to know them just enough. Rundell also creates a fun framework for the magical creatures of the world. So there’s lots of storytelling potential for the second book, which drops this time next year. What I’m most surprised about, though, is that this could easily have been a done-on-one novel and been perfect. Rundell ends the book in something of a risky way. A complete story, just risky. That’s all I can say.
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I’m now a few chapters in on the new Rivers of London novella, The Masquerades of Spring. The story follows a younger Thomas Nightingale to America and the Jazz Age. I’m enjoying the book, though I was really hoping that Nightingale would narrate the story. He’s one of the most endearingly enigmatic characters in fiction for me.
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This feels like a very unplanned break for me. I don’t have a stack of books to read. At this point, it’s likely that I’ll revisit some Erik Varden as well as the last quarter of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Varden because he has something vital to say about my own place in life (in a way) and Lewis because we don’t cover much of the final quarter of MC in my spring class and I really feel the need to reread it after it got some airplay in Fred Sanders’s Deep Things of God).
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As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I’m planning on heading to the West Coast for a few days. I found a cheap ticket and have good friends to stay with. My big hope, though, it getting to spend the night in the Yosemite valley floor. I’ve wanted to go there since my friends moved to that part of the states, but it hasn’t worked out until now. So I’ll land and them make my way east to Yosemite. I’m grateful to live in a beautiful place, but I also long to see other beautiful places, big places. And Yosemite fits the bill. (I’ve also got a friend who has visited there often and has put together a nice little suggested-itinerary for me, for which I am grateful.)
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These last few weeks I’ve been blessed by the music of Brother Isaiah of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. Here’s the lyric video to a song I found myself thinking about a lot yesterday, “Holy Hunger.”
Yesterday I shared a quote from Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell. Today I’d like to share a Wendell Berry quote (from his book The Gift of Good Land) that I came across via Hadden Turner’s Substack. Turner is an agrarian and writer living in England. The quote:
The most necessary thing in agriculture, for instance, is not to invent new technologies or methods, not to achieve “breakthroughs,” but to determine what tools and methods are appropriate to specific people, places, and needs and apply them correctly.
This quote resonates with me as both a Christian and a teacher, too. There’s something about locality that matters, something about the specific, that this quote captures particularly well. Makes me want to dig up my copy of the book.
I recently (and temporarily) put aside my re-read of The Silmarillion for a reading of Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures. The book has a lot of buzz (and fans) across the Atlantic. When a co-worker put the book on my radar, I thought it would be worth the possibility. As I write this, I’m about 80 pages in and loving it. It’s a lot like the Wingfeather series while still being something all its own (and wonderfully rooted in our own world . . . via Scotland). Here’s my favorite quote so far:
Some sentences have the power to change everything. There are the usual suspects: I love you, I’m pregnant, I’m dying, I regret to tell you that this country is at war. But the words with the greatest power to create both havoc and marvels are these:
“I need your help.”
Yesterday also marked the 20th anniversary of the premiere of LOST on ABC. Official premiere, that is. If I remember correctly, because I was there, the first two episodes of the show actually premiered a few days before down in Waikiki. There were food trucks. There were ABC gifts (like hand-held fans) and LOST-specific gifts (I still have my season one cast picture and my “I’d Rather Be LOST” license plate holder). It was a great evening, and a nice picture of how the show would contribute to my own life on the island for the show’s duration.
To mark the occasion, The Ringer did a nice piece of “the nine biggest loose ends” from the show. I didn’t remember all of them, but at some point the show stopped being primarily about the island’s secrets for me. Entertainment Weekly put a few pieces together, too. Here’s there list of the top ten episodes from the show. Here’s a “where are they now” piece about most of the main cast members. Here’s a long piece by Jeff Jensen about his own relationship with the show, particularly in his role as “the guy trying to put the pieces together.” And here’s Dalton Ross’s piece defending the series finale, which I agree is much better than many fans give it credit for.
I was hanging out with some neighbors a few nights ago, before the 20th anniversary, and our conversation turned to LOST. I asked them if they had seen the official “epilogue” of the show; they said they had not. For those who might have missed it, here you go:
Finally, I still bring LOST up in class at least once a year. True, my students hadn’t been born when the show premiered (and they have little to no sense of it, which makes me sad), but the first five minutes of the pilot episode set up a great ethical dilemma: if you were Jack, what would you do next?
Space Enough, and Time 