This week had a much wider range of reading material (hence this post being a day late, despite only being the second week of doing this). Offline, I went through the book of Colossians in my personal Bible reading, and in keeping with its instruction to act wisely toward those outside the faith, seasoning our words with salt, I'll start with some pieces that speak to Christian apologetics in different ways. First, in the
NYT's "The Stone" column, Agnes Callard examines Pascal's Wager, aspirational faith, and
The Breakfast Club, wondering
Can We Learn to Believe in God? She writes: "
The project is intellectual, involving a change in beliefs, but it is not only intellectual — and its intellectual character is inseparable from its affective and motivational character."
Probably my favorite thing I read this week was an essay by Francis Spufford at
First Things, reviewing some
Spiritual Literature for Atheists by Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich. The latter (and better) book was part of my reading in 2014 when I was spiritually searching, and though I couldn't articulate it at the time, I was disappointed for similar reasons to Spufford. However, his justified critique of the two books in question is redirected at the Church, who has made it virtually impossible for many searchers – even those as probing, honest, and erudite as Ehrenreich – to see God as the answer to their search, the Yes to all the promises they feel implicit in their wandering. This chastisement is crucial for our apologetic approach.
Similarly, this short post from Thomas Kidd at
TGC looks at Alan Jacobs' book on Original Sin, and he sees an apologetic insight here as well:
"Too often, pop Christian apologetics proceeds with the assumption that Christianity is so self-evidently true that you’d have to be stupid or dishonest to reject it. This is a bad approach for a number of reasons, not least that it implies that believers saw the light because they were smart enough to see it. For those of us with a high view of grace, such a smug view will not do.
Jacobs follows in a much healthier and theologically sound tradition of those such as C. S. Lewis who say to the non-Christian world, as it were, 'I know that Christianity’s claims may sound crazy at first. But what if they actually make sense of life’s most besetting problems?'"Alan Jacobs and Augustinian Anthropology
I coincidentally stumbled across this several-years-old post for
Cabinet Magazine from Alan Jacobs that's related to the same Original Sin book; he writes here about Adam & Eve, the exposure of our nakedness, and our shame in the sight of God when separated from Him by sin:
In The Garden
Another Alan Jacobs post is up at
The New Atlantis, in which he digs deep into the mindset of campus protests and the ineffectual discourse on either opinionated side of the issue. A great look at the mythical/quasi-religious views that fuel the passion of many for social justice, and the need for ideological purity that fuels its more performative instances:
Wokeness and Myth on Campus
Speaking of moral sources, Yuval Levin argues at
First Things that our secular, liberal order (both on the Right and the Left) is trying to bypass the intermediary institutions that shape us into the sort of Good-oriented citizens said order requires for stability. It's hard not to see the mythologized thinking mentioned above as a sort of secularized search for deeper meaning (a meaning fueled, indeed, by views of human dignity and benevolence whose roots are more spiritual than the protestors might care to admit). Levin argues that if we are not shaped by institutions (specifically, he mentions families, liberal education, and religion) that give us these deeper meanings and their associated moral formation, liberalism (again, broadly conceived) is likely to overdraw the account that these now-declining institutions had paid into:
Taking The Long Way
The recent issue of
Fare Forward also deals quite a bit with this broad liberal order, as did their
launch party/discussion at the Catholic Information Center. Eve Tushnet is in the issue and was at the launch, and she has some thoughts on her
Patheos blog about the challenges facing the postliberal project:
Off-Key in the Canticle: Some scattered notes on “post-liberal” order
And since there's never enough writing about Augustinian approaches to the intersection of religion and politics, here's Jonathan Leeman review of James K A Smith's
Awaiting The King for
TGC:
Doing Political Theology, Waiting for King Jesus
Meanwhile, the workplace is experiencing a different sort of intersection with spirituality, as employers encourage "mindfulness" practices to improve workers' quality of life (i.e., distract them from their unfulfilling work while reaping the rewards of their higher productivity), as Laura Marsh explores in
Dissent:
The Coping Economy
A bit of a change of pace: this old
Mockingbird article from David Zahl sings the praises of Jeff Lynne (of ELO & Travelling Wilburys fame):
Lifting Up Jeff Lynne, ELO and the Wilbury Sound
Also on the arty side of things, Christian Wiman (
who must have Joy on the mind) eulogizes Richard Wilbur in the
NYT Book Review, showing how his joy puts the lie to the myth that says art can only be made through deep suffering:
The Poet of Light
Another writer, Min Jin Lee, discusses her love of the Bible and how the story of Joseph informs her authorship in
The Atlantic's "By Heart" series":
What Writers Can Take Away From the Bible
Ironically, I have to click on every article about smartphone addiction, even this little snippet from
Crossway to promote Tony Reinke's
12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You.
Will Your Phone Dominate Your Life in 2018?
In that same vein, Haley Bodine admonishes Christians to be Christlike online in
CT:
We Are the Light of the (Cyber) World: Let’s Act Like It
The other contender for best read of the week is Marilyn McEntyre's
Comment piece
In Praise of Forbearance, which has just about too many great passages to pick from:
"'We are one in the Spirit,' we sing—not 'May we one day become one in the Spirit,' though that prayer has its place. The fact of unity and the hope of unity are both real experiences of Christians in community; like so many other truths about the life of faith, they coexist in paradox. But it may be that at this historical moment, we need to be called back to the fact in order to sustain the hope. What unites us is God's own infinitely merciful will. What divides us are digressions and misunderstandings, competing alliances, and political and theological arguments that can be resolved rightly only by a generous, patient, humble, wise, deliberative commitment to continue living with the quarrelsome, myopic lot who are our brothers and sisters, and among whom we must count ourselves.
...Forbearance requires and teaches humility; it fosters authentic hope rather than self-interested expectations; in practicing it we develop discernment, which 'sees disagreement not as a problem to be solved but as an opportunity for maturation in the faith'; it encourages faithfulness not primarily to tenets or doctrinal specifics but to the pilgrim path we travel in relationship to those members of Christ's body among whom we happen to find ourselves. In that body—the beloved community we know as church—we find friendships that don't arise solely from our predilections and affections, but from deep recognition of what we hold closest and dearest, and in common."
Approaching he proper functioning of Christian community from a different angle is Thabiti Anyabwile's reaction to the President's recent vulgar comments (and consistently vulgar attitude) on immigration from countries he deems less desirable at
TGC:
My Immigrant Family
On my mind recently has been how to practice the forbearance mentioned above, how best to love the harder to love members of the Christian community, and one barrier I've encountered in myself is a certain intellectual pride. I'm not yet sure how I should leverage the mental gifts and education privileges I've received in service of others, but I appreciated this 2016
Atlantic piece from David H Freedman about our societal fetishization of IQ:
The War on Stupid People
Finally, to close out this week's post, Dave Eggers closed out last year with this long
Medium post, ranging wide from an immigrant's trial in California to the recent Senate race in Alabama. This piece ultimately left me wanting more threads to tie it together – it seemed like he was hoping the uniqueness of the situations he was examining would provide their own interesting connections and make up for his not really saying very much about them, despite the word count – but I did like his focusing on
A Few Crucial Instances of Grace
