Well, it’s the time of year where I would love to be able to see Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God tour. Unfortunately, it always wraps long before I get back to Tennessee for the holidays. So I’m thankful for videos like this one, a recording of a recent performance of “Labor of Love” by Jill Phillips (with assists by And Gullahorn). Beautiful.
The second trailer for Spielberg’s Ready Player One dropped yesterday, and it’s just what a second trailer needs to be. Definitely more is revealed about the quest of the story. More than that, the trailer points well to the stakes of the story, the tension that rises throughout the story as the lead character gets deeper into the origins and ownership of the Oasis. Here’s that trailer (in case you missed it):
Funny thing: this is the first year in a while where the end of the year isn’t making me all that excited, movie-wise. I’m interested in The Last Jedi, of course, but even that feels muted on this side of The Force Awakens and Rogue One. I’m interested in Molly’s Game, but mainly for the Sorkin script. I caught Lady Bird in Victoria, and it was good enough. But yeah. So things like this make March feel a long way from now.
Finished most of my “ship to home” shopping this afternoon. A few years ago I decided it was much easier to mail the chocolate mac-nuts, coffees, and calendars home instead of packing it all in the suitcase and then trudging through airports across the country.
Which made this post about G. K. Chesterton and the figure of Father Christmas an appropriate read for the day. The article, from The Imaginative Conservative starts with some commentary on the “dangerous habit” of celebrating Christmas well before Christmas Day. Then it turns into a brief history lesson, focusing on the difference between the American “Santa Claus” and the British “Father Christmas”:
Father Christmas has his roots in the personification of the Spirit of Christmas in the Merrie England of mediaeval times, though he really came of age in the seventeenth century as a spirit of resistance to the efforts of the Puritans to ban Christmas after their victory in the English Civil War. Believe it or not, the Puritan-controlled English government actually legislated to abolish Christmas, considering, reasonably enough, that the celebration of “Christ-Mass” was papist. Since the celebration of the Mass had been outlawed, it was natural that the celebration of “Christ-Mass” should be outlawed also. Traditional Christmas customs were banned and the Purityrannical rulers of England declared, in league with a certain White Witch, that it would be always winter but never Christmas.
As resistance to the tyranny grew, Old Father Christmas became the symbol of “the good old days”, a personification of Merrie England, with its feasting and good cheer, and its celebration of the liturgical year.
It is this Father Christmas that is celebrated with appropriate rumbustiousness by Chesterton, Tolkien and Lewis.
Father Christmas, of course, was the “writer” of a series of letters under the guidance of Tolkien at one point (he drew the picture attached to this post).
The remainder of the article retells a story by Chesterton about Father Christmas called “The Shop of Ghosts,” which is quite the beautiful (and British) little story. You can read the whole story here.
+ + + + + + +
It’s interesting to watch co-workers and friends maneuver “the Santa Claus” question. Some have jumped in gung-ho while others have constructed plans for how to explain things as their kids get older. It definitely makes me wonder if something like Father Christmas, in his own kind of strange glory, might be a better alternative.
So the first trailer for Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom dropped today. Strange to think that we’re at this weird place where a new round of sequels (as in sequels to sequels and reboots) is on the horizon. It will be interesting to see if the sequels of Jurassic World and The Force Awakens transcend or fall short of their predecessors. Granted, it depends on what metric you use. I get the feeling that Fallen Kingdom will have a metric of its own.
Yesterday I mentioned reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity as one of the “practices” that I’m putting in place for the Advent season. Suggestions for times like these usually involve both adding and removing from the routine to help set times apart. So this time around, inspired first by Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family but also by Justin Earley’s Common Rule, I’m trying something with tech.
In the Advent edition of the Common Rule, Earley challenges believers to practice “Scripture before phone.” For many people, phones are both the first and last things we see on an average day. They act as our alarm clocks. They give us an odd sense of security. But for the next three weeks, I’ve got an actual alarm clock set across the room. At night I put the phone away from the nightstand and get some sleep without even thinking about checking for updated feeds. And maybe, just maybe, this can bleed over into the rest of the year, too.
One other aspect of Earley’s Common Rule for Advent that really gets at our need to rethink our practices is the encouragement to stay away from our phones while waiting in line. Grocery store, bus stop, theater, you name it. Not quite ready for that practice, I think. But it definitely gets to the heart of our present condition.
+ + + + + + +
A few days ago, David Brooks posted an essay about technology in contemporary society (which is its own industry at this point). The whole piece, which you can find here, is worth the read. It starts off interestingly enough:
Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted.
Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.
And then it ends smartly enough:
Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life.
Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would be an amazing show of realism and, especially, humility, which these days is the ultimate and most disruptive technology.
Food for thought this Advent season, as we re-learn our ability to wait . . . and to hope.
(image from thecommonrule.org . . . if you’ve heard of it or are trying it, let me know)
One of the few practices I’m trying out over the Advent season is the (re)reading of a book. Because the season last just over three weeks, I thought it was a decent amount of time to do a slow reread of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Sad to say, but Mere Christianity is probably my least-favorite Lewis book. It was also one of the first I read, I believe. I remember liking the last chunk but thinking that the first two-thirds was nothing special. Yet it keeps coming up in conversations and discussions as one of the few books that younger Christians have read. Beyond that, I often refer to excerpts in class (his section on “Rival Conceptions of God”) or the basics of the Moral Law. And so: three weeks with Lewis.
+ + + + + + +
Like so many others, I really appreciate what Lewis attempted with the radio talks that became Mere Christianity. The idea of spotlighting the key Christian beliefs and practices in a way that helps us see what we hold in common is something relevant even today. And even though the tone of inter-denominational conversation has changed since Lewis put things together, wisdom can still be found there. Consider this gem:
Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.
A wonderful idea, but one that can be easier said than done. On a “forensic” level, one of the most interesting things about Christianity is its diversity of belief and practice within a kind of basic orthodoxy. Beyond that, Lewis also asserts that
One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of our disagreements.
So a wonderful tension exists between affirming what we agree on while also trying to hash out our differences . . . and all too often for all the world to see. Which is what makes Lewis’s visualization at the end of the preface of Mere Christianity such a good one. When explaining his ‘mere’ Christianity approach:
It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But is it is in the rooms, not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.
Lots of people are in the hall, seem content to live in the hall, really. But Lewis hopes for the best: that people will ask and seek and knock until they find the right room. Even still:
But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.
It’s a good image the house and the hallway and the many rooms. It in an image, perhaps, that can be transferred to other areas of life, too. But for Lewis, it starts with the Christian faith and its expressions. Like Lewis, then, our task is to get people into the hall, point things out, serve the best that we’ve got, and present the truth as it has been revealed to us.
+ + + + + + +
So over this Advent season, between now and Christmas Day, I’ll be posting some reflections on my reading of the book. From ethics to doctrine to wherever else the book goes, I’ll take some time to think through things, if nothing else, through the lens of a high school classroom.
(image from crosswalk.com)
Today marks the beginning of the Advent season which, in turn, marks the beginning of what is known as the church calendar. That church calendar is not much of a Baptist thing, is something kept and nurtured by more liturgical churches. But, over these last few years, that liturgical calendars has made slow inroads into non-liturgical church life.
I spoke on Advent in chapel this past week. Prior to Thanksgiving, I spoke about the significance of rest in the biblical story. I thought there was a nice segue into Advent, which takes the concept of sacred time and rhythm in a slightly different but still relatable direction. I started, as I’ve mentioned here before, with the clash of calendars that can happen for individuals: we jostle between academic, civic, athletic, entertainment, and family calendars constantly. This, I think, is part of the fatigue of our age.
From there I tried to point out the role that a time like Advent can play in connection with the Christmas season. As I prepared for the talk, which always sounds much better in my head, I felt the need to focus on the part of Advent that really takes a backseat to our Advent-as-Christmas preparations: the idea that we are even now preparing for the second coming of Jesus. It really is a necessary “bookend” for things, a key aspect of the telos of the biblical story. It’s one of those things that feels most cult-like for us (which is one reason why we don’t talk about it much). It also possesses an awkwardness because it forces us to deal with the time and timing of that second coming (and how we explain such a long passage of time).
At the end of my talk, I challenged the audience to do one thing in particular as they went about their prayer lives over the next week: pray with the Apostle John from Revelation: come, Lord Jesus. Something necessary to our formation as Christians is lacking because we don’t handle the second end of Advent well. It’s definitely something I need to reflect on more (particularly as it plays out in formation and a certain understanding of ethical faithfulness).
Over the next few days I hope to articulate some of the ways that I’m marking the season. Not a lot of ways, mind you, but enough ways that I’m trying to change some of the rhythm of life for the next few weeks in the hope that the new rhythm will last long after the Christmas season ends.
I have taken great comfort all week in the fact that this week would have been crazy even if I had stayed on-island over the holiday weekend. The relief I felt as I moved through downtown gathering some stuff for the weekend was almost palpable, like a spring in the step after a kind of winter.
Came across this recent performance of “Deadlines and Commitments” by the Killers from their Battle Born album. There songs are always just ambiguous enough to be a little elusive. But the sense of the song is definitely appropriate after a long week of getting lots of things done.
This is the time of year, both school year and calendar year, where things get consistently crazy. I’m hoping to avoid that some, making a point of finding a place of rest whenever I can.
I finally sat down to watch the documentary about the life and work of Wendell Berry, Look and See. I’d been putting off for a month, but a five-hour plane ride can inspire you like that.
The movie begins with a Berry voice-over with some well-shot imagery. Here’s the introductory piece, “The Objective.”
The movie is quote good, though Berry never actually appears in the movie in-person. Lots of voiceovers, clips with his wife, and clips of other farmers. The documentary ends with an extended clip from a debate Berry took part in decades ago . . . One that still feels relevant today.
It was a strange thing, reading Smith’s Awaiting the King off and on throughout “Christ the King” Sunday. Smith is taking his argument about the Christian faith’s political implications much farther than I anticipated, which has made it a good and challenging read.
Here are a couple of more videos of Smith talking about the book and the concepts behind it. First is the idea of rethinking what political life looks like in the first place.
And here’s Smith talking about “faithful political discipleship.”
Space Enough, and Time 