If you can’t already tell, I’m trying to use this two-week “break” to find my way back to posting here regularly. This last quarter has been a lot busier than I had anticipated. And while I’ve mostly been able to keep up with regular reading, regular writing has been more difficult for me.
The two thinkers who helped me most at the beginning of the pandemic have gone a little more quiet over these last few months. Andy Crouch’s pieces from the beginning of Covidtide really helped me think institutionally and broadly, particularly his images of blizzard and ice ages. The other thinker, Ephraim Radner, helped me think a lot about the life of faith (and the communal life of faith) in light of The Current Moment. I think often of his First Things piece titled “Theology after the Virus” from just over a year ago. He teases out some of the ideas that he had introduced earlier in 2020 about churches and the quick move to online services, this time wondering about the future of theological education and training across the board “after the virus.”
I think it’s because of these two thinkers that I’ve tried to make clear adjustments to work over these last few months. Working with our school administration (and knowing that gathering everyone back in the gym for weekly chapel wasn’t an option), I pushed for a more “small groups” model to chapel time, where there is still a “chapel talk” and worship/reflection song and even student “micro-interviews” but that also had a greater “conversational” component. This is because conversation is easily lost in a digital (and particularly concurrent) learning environment. And so this quarter has seen my team (my wonderful team) helping with videos but also with slides and scripts to equip our teachers to engage in better conversations with their students. We’ve also been given time to do some of that “faculty equipping” in person, which has been good (I hope).
Church has been in-person for a good while now. Our pastor left back in May. I preached for three weeks in July. Well, I suppose I tried to lead them in some conversations more than anything else. I tried to bring to mind potent New Testament images of the church that are as much about being as they are about doing. They did some talk and turns, some writing and reflecting. I’m now serving again on the pastor search committee, which is mostly meeting via Zoom. Much of the old committee is back, which gives us a decent amount of familiarity. But I’m also trying to ask some questions to build some community and make some connections. We’ll be meeting in person soon (at least once), which I’m looking forward to quite a bit.
Now that we are this far into the pandemic (and now that I’m involved with approximately three search committees), I am more mindful of wondering about “what has been learned” from these last 18 months. Perhaps learning something isn’t the most important thing. Perhaps surviving these days is the more important thing. But I can’t help think that a good stewardship of This Moment would bring some fruitful reflection that could lead to some intentional action.
Having said all of that, I’ve got a stack of articles to post about over these next few days. It’s a hodgepodge ranging over the last few months (with nothing from Crouch or Radner). So consider this the warning. While I’m grateful for things learned and done this last quarter, I’m also hopeful about getting some traction back here (and with getting my thoughts down again, in general). Not that one thing is a distraction from the other- in the best of all possible worlds everything works together well. Maybe the next few days will allow a course-correction for that.
So last week I looked into purchasing an old novel by George MacDonald (an inspiration of C. S. Lewis). When it arrived, I realized that I had not read the “fine print” well- the “scholar’s edition” that I had purchased (on sale) was a replication of the original text in its original setting. Translation: they had made copies of an original printing and had bound it. Which meant, old book that it was, many pages weren’t even legible. So I ordered another copy, a modern resetting of the text. In the meantime, to balance out the heavy reading of A Secular Age, I broke down and cracked open my copy of On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness by Andrew Peterson. I’ve been a Peterson fan for years, just primarily for his music. I’ve known about his Wingfeather Saga for years but just haven’t been ready to cross media like that. But I had some time (at least until Thursday), and I had a copies of books one and two at hand, so I took the plunge.
I’m not sure we’ll get a follow-up to Project Hail Mary, but I am aware of two other sequels that I’m excited about. One will bring to a close one of the most fascinating science fiction reads ever for me. Ender’s Game was a game-changer for me. I read the first book over twenty years ago (and even then didn’t see that ending coming). Speaker for the Dead was a sequel so much better than it had to be. It was a novel that moved Ender’s story in a direction that made total sense, even though the story was completely different in nature. And then Card went back and told a totally different story by following Bean’s perspective . . . and it was a fascinating read! Orson Scott Card brings the series to a close this fall with The Last Shadow. It brings the threads of Ender’s story and Bean’s story together one last time. (Which is a real bummer to me because the events of the previous novel made the one thing I really wanted to see impossible). The book drops in October.
The other sequel is from Dave Eggers and picks up threads from The Circle (a somewhat misunderstood thriller that became a better-than-you-remember movie). The Every brings e-commerce to the world of social networking in way, I hope, that really gets us to think. I also hope it’s a good page-turner. The Every drops in November.
Today’s outer-space Frazz reminds me of my current fiction read: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I was lucky to read Weir’s first book, The Martian, before the movie trailer spoiled things. I didn’t read Weir’s second book, Artemis because it sounded a lot like The Martian. But I was at Books-A-Million last week and saw that he had released a new story. Knowing that I had 11 hours in the air coming up, I made the purchase. It’s a good read, well-paced and interesting. And, much like The Martian, it’s the kind of book where you feel like you’re learning stuff all along the way.
Space Enough, and Time 