Post-FFW April Reads

The past week and a half or so of reading seems to revolve around some major related themes: our cultural crisis, the crisis of evangelicalism in America, and how should we live as faithful Christians in this time of upheaval.

First, let's look at the recent meeting of evangelical minds on the generally anti-Trump side of things. While it's good to see a stalwart group of people committed to seeking the ways of faith, this meeting seems a bit disappointing in its ultimate outcomes. As Jemar Tisby has asked, what is it about white evangelical theology that either tends toward Trumpism, or lacks the resources to stand firmly against it? Beatty's piece points to a few of the spiritual strongholds to which evangelicalism turns something of a blind eye; while I would have liked to see more analysis of these tensions, the fear of addressing racism head on – whether spurred from the threats of their donors or their own sinful hearts – is, if not the ultimate root, certainly deep near the source of the rot in the American Church (more on this later). Ruth Graham's piece on the mutual embrace of Trump and Christian TV networks is a fantastic look at how American Christians are uniquely vulnerable to sentimental appeals to false nostalgia:

• Sarah Pulliam Bailey, WaPo, Dozens of evangelical leaders meet to discuss how Trump era has unleashed ‘grotesque caricature’ of their faith
• Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service, Evangelical leaders discuss future of their movement in Trump era
• Hollis Phelps, Religion Dispatches, Maybe It's Time to Admit That the "Grotesque Caricature" of White Evangelicals Is the Reality
• Katelyn Beaty, New Yorker, At a Private Meeting in Illinois, a Group of Evangelicals Tried to Save Their Movement from Trumpism
• Ruth Graham, Politico, Church of the Donald

So, we have a crisis. Jake at Mere Orthodoxy gives a solid overview of where we stand at the moment, surveying the cultural situation in which we find ourselves, the challenges of racism, sexism, and doctrinal understanding in America's pews (for example, see Abigail Rine Favale's piece on her students' lack of creedal knowledge), and he wonders whether the American Church is adequately equipped to address the needs of the refugees of our collapsing culture: 

• Jake Meador, MereO, The Crisis in Christian Discipline and the Opportunity Before Us
• Abigail Rine Favale, First Things, Evangelical Gnosticism

These cultural challenges manifest in the churches within that culture. For instance, American capitalism makes us skeptical of the Bible's warnings about the sinful allure of riches; our ingrained work ethic and ethos of self-reliance make us prize work above rest:

• John Piper, Desiring God, Do the Biblical Warnings Against Riches Apply to Most Americans?
• Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, America is obsessed with the virtue of work. What about the virtue of rest?
• Rebecca Jones, CT, Lord, Save Me from My Side Hustle

In the white American Church, we have a particular struggle with racism. It should not be hard to admit the deepness of this particular sin in our collective past, and there is no escaping its legacy within our own hearts. We should, as confessing Christians, all be willing to confront sin in all its forms, called as we are to let judgement begin at the house of God, but we struggle even to agree on the lasting legacy of our racial sins. Even churches who ostensibly acknowledge these evils still struggle to eradicate them in practice.

• Kevin DeYoung, TGC, Racial Reconciliation: What We (Mostly, Almost) All Agree On, and What We (Likely) Still Don’t Agree On
• Thabiti Anyabwile, TGC, Admitting Things
• Michelle Boorstein, WaPo, What happens when a church dedicated to fighting white supremacy is accused of it

It isn't just in the Church that these crises manifest. Enormous forces of questionable intent (look, we know it's BAD intent, let's be real) surreptitiously record our every move. The supposedly innocuous pasttime of social media has been hijacked by malicious forces, maneuvering into the malleable minds of young people seeking quick riches. Kyle Chayka's fantastic essay on Big Data's forays into the world of fashion brings up the excellent question of whether capitalism possesses the resources to craft an identity that is not merely an expression of homogeous algorithmic consumerism:

• Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, & Jordan Robertson, Bloomberg, Palantir Knows Everything About You
• Symeon Brown, The Guardian, Fake it till you make it: meet the wolves of Instagram
• Kyle Chayka, Racked, Style Is an Algorithm

Indeed, as many have noted about Patrick Deneen's recent book, the very roots of our political and economic system, despite its many benefits and ostensible goods, undermine the very virtue and moderation necessary to maintaining it:

• Jon Médille, Front Porch Republic, Why Anti-Liberalism Fails
• Jonathan Leeman, CT, How Freedom Became an American Idol
• Jake Meador, MereO, Book Review: Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen

Our culture is death-oriented; it does not value the lives of the poor, or of black people, of children. We can see other iterations in the parallel death-orientations of India and China, with their trends of sex-selective abortion and China's one-child policy starting to show their massive consequences:

• Eve Tushnet, Institute for Family Studies, What's Wrong With the "Success Sequence"
• Linda Villarosa, NYT Mag, Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis
• Mark R Rank, NYT, The Cost of Keeping Children Poor
• Simon Denyer & Annie Gowan, WaPo, Too Many Men

The Church needs a change in how we view politics: a change that focuses on eternal ends rather than opposing temporal sides; a change that humbles us and refocuses our desires towards our neighbors' needs. We need to seek co-belligerents in our endeavors from outside the Church walls; we may well have something to teach them about the need for intentional formation in living a moral life:

• Alex Grant, Christ & Pop Culture, City of God and the Ends of American Politics
• Thabiti Anyabwile, TGC, What Can I Do? / What Do You Want?
• Matthew Loftus, MereO, Stay Woke, Cultivate Virtue

Our view of life must be expanded, inverted even, to see how our own weakness is revealed and Christ's love is reflected in caring for those more vulnerable than ourselves:

• Leah Libresco Sargent, First Things, The Weak Lead Us to Reality
• Corey Latta, CT, My Son's Down Syndrome Showed Me the Real Imago Dei

We must open our homes to others, not as performance to show off our accumulation of cultural signifiers, but as a step towards more fully opening ourselves to the love and service of others – plus, it's a great opportunity to step into a real-life fantasy novel, where good food is abundant:

• Brandon McGinley, MereO, Stop Making Hospitality Complicated
• Lindsey Carlson, CT, Rosaria Butterfield: Christian Hospitality Is Radically Different from ‘Southern Hospitality’
• Anne Ewbank, Atlas Obscura, Why Do Fantasy Novels Have So Much Food?

It isn't merely American Protestants feeling the strain of modernity; the Roman Church, too, is in flux, searching for a new balance between cultural assimilation and distinctiveness, and flirting (perhaps dangerously) with adapting to social changes at the expense of sound doctrine and reliable tradition:

• Tara Isabella Burton, Vox, Pope Francis reportedly denies the existence of Hell. Vatican panics.
• Emma Green, The Atlantic, A Cassandra Cry Against Pope Francis

As James Davison Hunter has observed, we're all Protestants now, enmeshed inexorably in Charles Taylor's "secular age." How do we maintain discipline in a world where an authoritative admonishment might be seen as causing sufficient friction to break with a church, and where another church, more fitting to one's consumer preferences, is readily available? How also do we speak the truth in love to those shaped by such a world, walking a road to recovery alongside sinners that may be longer than we imagine? 

• Wesley Hill, MereO, The Confusions and Dangers of a Church of Mercy: Anglican Musings on a Catholic Dispute
• Wesley Hill, Covenant, Five Theses on Church Discipline

We cannot do better for coming generations by focusing on an imagined future and allowing the present to fall into our mental gutters. As in just about all of Gracy Olmstead's writing, the influence of Wendell Berry looms large in both of these pieces, as she suggests we might start to think a bit smaller for our solutions:

• Gracy Olmstead, Intercollegiate Review, What Wendell Berry Can Show Zuckerberg Types About Making a Better World
• Gracy Olmstead, NYT, Can 'Localism' Restore Sanity to U.S. Politics?

In the interest of locality, then, we turn to Baltimore, to see the manifestation of our more local crises. As with the larger, problems, national or ecclesial, here are no easy solutions, whether it is the closing of small businesses, the reforming of an utterly corrupt police department, the tension between revitalization and gentrification, or the ramifications of the national War on Drugs on a particular city:

• Jessica Anderson, Baltimore Sun, Team overseeing Baltimore Police consent decree assures public of progress despite turnover in department
• Amanda Yeager, Baltimore Business Journal, 'We always joked it was a bridge too far:' O'Flynn's owner says distance led to South Baltimore restaurant's closure
• Fern Shen, Baltimore Brew, “AS OF A NOW” shows Baltimore rowhouses not vacant, but full of generations of “quiet stories”
• Siddhartha Mitter, The Guardian, Gentrify or die? Inside a university's controversial plan for Baltimore
• Jessica Lussenhop, BBC, When Cops Become Robbers
• Ron Cassie, Baltimore Magazine, The Vindication of Kurt Schmoke

In past times of crisis, there are been voices of prophetic wisdom cutting through the melee; Andrea Barnet looks at the overlaps between Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs, who both saw the contradictions and consequences of technocratic modernity and spoke forcefully against its destructive systems. Would that we might listen more closely to the women speaking out with such wisdom now; after all, it is not merely straight, white, middle-class Protestant males that the country is supposed to be for (even if this is usually how the game seems to be rigged):

• Andrea Barnet, Paris Review, The Age of Wreckers and Exterminators
• Nicola A Menzie, Faithfully Magazine, Interview: Karen A Ellis Talks Christian Persecution
• Jill Radsken, Faithfully Magazine, Rachael Denhollander Says Don't Trust the Church or Christianity – Trust Jesus Christ
• Patricia Lockwod, Tin House, How Do We Write Now?
• Rebecca Solnit, LitHub, Whose Story (and Country) Is This? 

We need many voices calling out in alarm to our collective conscious, exposing our blind spots and offering better stories through which to live our lives. We need to build churches with embodied ministries for the good of the cultural refugees around us; we need to build better cities in general. We need to read widely, being nourished with the empathy of great writers, while appreciating that their work is not an unlimited resource to which we are entitled:

• David J Michael, America, Alan Jacobs: A Christian intellectual for the Internet age
• Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, Randa Jarrar, Moral Grandstanding, and Forbearance
• Charlie Clark, The Boro.ist, In Search of Character: The Narrative Concept of Selfhood
• Duke Kwon, TGC, The Underrated Strategic Value of Church Buildings
• Eben Weiss, Outside, The Ethics of Breaking Traffic Laws
• Cathy Lynn Grossman, Publishers Weekly, Reading Is a Spiritual Act, Publishers Say
• Larissa Pham, LitHub, The Bottomless Generosity of the Writer's Memoir
• Megan McArdle, WaPo, A farewell to free journalism

And we must recognize our own limits, too. We are embodied creatures and our bodies are frail. We cannot solve every problem; we must find our rest in the God who made Heaven and Earth and plans to remake them. As Augustine wrote, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him, and these are truly restless times. It is a gift to participate in the emergence of His Kingdom, and part of that gift is that He is not bound by our great limitations and failures.

• Kaitlyn Scheiss, Letters from the Exile, Feet On the Earth

April reading – Pre-FFW

First, some Holy Week/Easter pieces – Wes Hill's piece on how Easter vindicates the foolishness of the Cross is especially good:
Wesley Hill, CT, Easter Fool's Day
Malcolm Guite, Good Friday - Stations of the Cross Sonnets
Tish Harrison Warren, CT, The Epic Jesus Follower Fail

Jon Meacham, NYT, Jesus Died Only to Rise Again. Where Did the Concept of Resurrection Come From?
Mike Frost, The only woman to give evidence at the trial of Christ

Some pieces on Jordan Peterson and the wider crises in masculinity that work to increase his appeal:

Scott Alexander, SlateStarCodex, Book Review: Twelve Rules for Life
Ross Douthat, NYT, God and Men and Jordan Peterson

Abby Perry & Kathryn Watson, Christ & Pop Culture, Rearing Boys to Be Peacemakers in a World Bent on War
Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian, The crisis in modern masculinity

Liz Bruenig's spiritual advice is good, both in the generalized form she offers everyone in the Medium piece, and the specific admonishment to the American Church for the Post. Another Post piece on religious literacy, and The Atlantic on the adaptation of Coptic Christianity in the US:
Elizabeth Bruenig, Medium, It Will Happen Again and Again
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Evangelicals' support for Trump will cost them – spiritually
Christine Emba, WaPo, You should read the Bible
Shira Telushkin, The Atlantic, The Americanization of an Ancient Faith

Tech: Silicon Valley is enough of a cultural juggernaut that it needs to step up w/r/t its responsibility as a cultural source (Bogost). Currently, however, it seems its complacency has trickled down – even to church pews – and become into a degraded culture of trolling (Morse). Much of this trolling is related to Freudian notions of taboo, causing repressed older people to lash out like adolescents against perceived cultural restrictions, to the detriment of their family connections (Renner). Deleting one's account is an insufficient and individualized solution in the absence of government regulation (Vaidhyanathan, Glaser). Our social media use should be stewarded wisely to help us to grow in virtue and work towards the common good of our online connections (Sacasas).
Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, Silicon Valley 'Has No Words'
Greg Morse, Desiring God, Internet Trolls in Church Clothes: How to Comment the Truth in Love
Nausicaa Renner, N Plus One, Trolling and Taboo
Siva Vaidhyanathan, NYT, Don't Delete Facebook. Do Something About It.
April Glaser, Slate, The Problem with #DeleteFacebook
LM Sacasas, The Frailest Thing, Vows of Digital Poverty

Also tech-related: How new technologies seek to advance our understanding of emotions and their expression; how we look futilely to fantasies of technological truth; how trying to program an overarching system of social trust is inherently problematic:

Christine Rosen, The Hedgehog Review, Expose Thyself! On the Digitally Revealed Life
Megan Garber, The Atlantic, The Lie Detector in the Age of Alternative Facts
Mara Hvistendahl, Wired, Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking

Cities: Two great pieces from Duke Kwon on Christians coming into and leaving cities, and another on the challenges of missional urban churches and gentrification. Photos of how cities struck by rioting in 1968 have changed since. Self-driving cars are bad, just like all other cars; walk instead:
Duke Kwon, WaPo, The tragedy to communities when church buildings are demolished to make condos
Duke Kwon, TGC, What We Miss When We Say We're "For The City"
Taelor Gray, The Witness, Missional. Black. Gentrifiers?
Latoya Ruby Frazier, The Atlantic, The Geography of Oppression
Matthew Robare, The American Conservative, Self-Driving Cars and the Hostile Takeover of Our Streets

Antonia Malchik, Aeon, The End of Walking

Secular pieces on race: Desmond's has a good goal (analyzing the social changes over recent decades that have prevented or discouraged rioting, leading to citizens more complacent in their marginalization), but it ends up weird, almost as though he takes rioting to be a good in itself:

Matthew Desmond, The Atlantic, Where Have All the Rioters Gone?
Bree Newsome, The Atlantic, The Civil Rights Movement's Generation Gap
Daniel Harris, Baltimore Sun, If Hopkins creates an armed police force, people like me will be at risk

Religious pieces on race: 

Nicole Massie Martin, CT, King's Dream Succeeds If We Study the Bible
Paul Tripp, My Confession: Toward a More Balanced Gospel
Sarah Shin, Evangelicals for Social Action, The Limits of Colorblindness
Thabiti Anyabwile, TGC, We Await Repentance for Assassinating Dr. King
Timothy Isaiah Cho, Faithfully Magazine, Interview: James K.A. Smith On Public Theology And Racial Justice

Three pieces on John Perkins and his new book (Kwon's engaging review is the best):

Duke Kwon, CT, John Perkins Has Hope for Racial Reconciliation. Do We?

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, TGC, The Final Call of John Perkins

Holly Meyer, Tennessean, Why a leading voice on racial reconciliation says evangelicals aren't focusing enough on unity

Other social issues:
Stephanie Sommers, Public Justice Review, Why Immigration Is First About Families, Not Economics or Security
Ross Douthat, NYT, Among the Abortion Extremists

Reviews: A bad Christian movie, a good Christian movie, and finding the faith in a good non-Christian movie; new takes on Deneen and Robinson; a new book about Erasmus and Luther:
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, How the Christian movie series God's Not Dead fails to be Christian
Ann Hornaday, WaPo, ‘Paul, Apostle of Christ’ portrays the early Christian community at its most fragile
Tara Isabella Burton, Vox, Great movies about faith are hard to come by. Enter Blue Velvet.

Christine Emba, WaPo, Liberalism is Loneliness

Wesley Hill, CT, Marilynne Robinson's Celebration of Humanity is Brilliant but Incomplete

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, NYT, Erasmus vs. Luther – A Rift That Defined the Course of Western Civilization

Philosophy:
Amia Srinivasan, New York Review of Books, More Equal Than Others
Diana Popescu, Aeon, What we talk about when we talk about post-truth

Miscellaneous:
Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of Higher Education, Is This the Hardest Course in the Humanities?

DL Mayfield, A Response to the Failed Missionary Podcast
Alex Heard, Outside, Where in the Hell Is Our Cat?
David Auerbach, Slate, The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time
Austin Kleon, Like-minded vs. Like-hearted

Jia Tolentino, New Yorker, The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death

Marcelo Gleiser, NPR, Teaching and Learning at the Boundaries of 2 Cultures

Reads almost to the end of March

Wooo boy, a lot of reading this week! Let's start off with three pairs of loosely linked articles:

Two Atlantic pieces, one on the Crisis Pregnancy Center free speech case in front of the Supreme Court, and on the #MeToo movement's ramification in the Maryland legislature:
Emma Green, The Atlantic, Should Pro-Life Clinics Have to Post Information About Abortion?
Michelle Cottle, The Atlantic, 'I've Personally Sacrificed My Entire Career for This'

Two on racism – the burden of explaining its reality, and the burden of acknowledging our complicity:
Jemar Tisby, The Atlantic, The Heavy Burden of Teaching My Son About American Racism
Andrew Peterson, The Rabbit Room, Waking Up to "Is He Worthy?": An Apology

Two on justice – a conservative take on community conceptions of justice, and a left-leaning take on the history of American incarceration and how it might be reformed:
Charles Fain Lehman, The University Bookman, What Punishment? Whose Community?
Roger Lancaster, Jacobin, How to End Mass Incarceration

What does the religious life look like going into the 21st century? These first two pieces examine how monks and nuns are looking to recruit new members; following from the second, the next two look at the history of black women in the Catholic Church:
Stephen Hiltner, NYT, The World Is Changing. This Trappist Abbey Isn’t. Can It Last?
Julie Zauzmer, WaPo, Urging middle schoolers to consider the convent: ‘Do I want to marry Joe Blow? Or do I want to marry Jesus Christ?’
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, Global Sisters Report, Black spiritual traditions have long history in Catholic Church
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, Global Sisters Report, First black sisters pioneered black spirituality in Catholic Church

Speaking of black women in the church, Ekemini Uwan wrote a great piece on her site (Sistamatic Theology) on the difficulty of overcoming cultural bias in our minds and our churches: Decolonized Discipleship

Several pieces on women's stories – the way we dismiss female-made or female-focused art; Wendell Berry's wife; professional food critic gets mansplained; elderly Japanese women seeking shelter from loneliness in jail; Leslie Jamison is awesome:
Lili Loofbourow, VQR Online, The Male Glance
Robert Jensen, ABC Religion & Ethics, The Woman Beside Wendell: At Home with Tanya Berry
Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken – Here's the Recipe

Shiho Fukada, Pulitzer Center, For Many of Japan's Elderly Women, Prison Is a Haven

Chris Kraus & Leslie Jamison, The Paris Review, Big-Tent Recovery: An Interview with Leslie Jamison

Heck of a week for tech writing, as the world discovered Facebook is actually kind of bad. Highlights: Paul Ford suggests a digital EPA, Tamsin Shaw shows Silicon Valley's shady military-informational complex connections (and how they lead to publicly subsidized profits), Ifeoma Ajunwa and Ethan Zuckerman both show the bigger scale than the current crisis, Jeffrey Bilbro applies virtue ethics and localism to our tech problems, and Ross Douthat reminds us that amidst all the Facebook hubbub, cable TV is the real evil:

Paul Ford, Bloomberg Businessweek, Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here's How to Fix It.
Christine Emba, WaPo, Twitter Is Sick. The Prognosis Is Grim.
Laura Sydell, NPR, Is It Even Possible to Protect Your Privacy on Facebook?
Ifeoma Ajunwa, WaPo, Facebook users aren't the reason Facebook is in trouble now
Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, This Is So Much Bigger Than Facebook
Tamsin Shaw, New York Review of Books, Beware the Big Five
John Biggs, TechCrunch, #deletefacebook
Abby Ohlheiser, WaPo, You want to quit Facebook, but will you really click the button? These folks tried.

Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Technology and the Virtues: Scale Matters

Ross Douthat, NYT, Trump Hacked the Media Right Before Our Eyes

Segueing into the non-digital world, Facebook is building a town, and this is probably bad too. Speaking of tech and our cities, Uber killed a person; we should probably build our cities for people before we bring cars to life:
David Streitfeld, NYT, Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything Is Just Zucky.
Christina Bonnington, Slate, Are Our Roads Ready for Self-driving Cars?
Lewis McCrary, The American Conservative, Drivers Declare War on Walkers

Two pieces on knowledge: the first makes an interesting (but too short) point that we no longer evaluate information itself, but the reputation of our sources; the second is about the uncertainty of faith in a way that is pretty frustrating but very in line with the Charles Taylor "secular-3" thesis:

Gloria Origgi, Aeon, Say goodbye to the information age: it's all about reputation now
Lucy Bryan, The Other Journal, The Weight and Wonder of Everything We Do Not Know

Marriage and relationships: Marriage today seems to symbolize the achievement of two lives rather than inaugurating a new shared life (Cherlin); this individualization should be corrected by a community that supports and holds accountable (Olmstead). Of course, Facebook will not help with this (Sexton). For those not yet in marriageable relationships, hopefully the techno-commodification of online dating doesn't turn you off from human relationships (Alvarez), but be wary of your own desires, too; they are shaped by a fallen culture and assuming they must be indulged can have terrible consequences (Srinivasan). Modern childrearing is also shaped by a fallen culture, which places pressures upon parents that may not be as healthy as the "best practices" they to which they aspire (Huska): 
Andrew Cherlin, The Atlantic, Marriage Has Become a Trophy
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, Marriage Takes a Village
James Sexton, TIME, Divorce Lawyer: Facebook Is a Cheating Machine
Ana Cecilia Alvarez, The New Inquiry, Matchmaking

Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books, Does anyone have the right to sex?
Liuan Huska, CT, Has Attachment Theory Made Us Anxious Parents?

Christian stuff: Rachael Denhollander is more theologically sound and persevering in faith than the majority of white American evangelical leaders (Morehead) – except Russell Moore; that guy's cool (Hemingway). Serious Catholics are just as politically homeless as the remaining faithful Protestants (Dolan). Christians are pretty falsely nostalgic and culture-war-y in their responses to ethically fraught current events (Scheiss); this is probably why the March For Life has more of a preaching-to-the-choir, positive-thinking vibe than the working-for-real-solutions March For Our Lives (Unger). Christianity does offer the tools to transcend Americanized individualism without slipping into anonymous collectivism (Ballor). The Church needs to reconsider structures of accountability and willingly accept limits and vulnerability if it wants to stop having to be disappointed when the frauds and hucksters it's put in power fall (Crouch):

Jason Morehead, Christ & Pop Culture, America’s Evangelical Leaders Could Learn a Lot From Rachael Denhollander

Mark Hemingway, The Weekly Standard, Like Sheep Among Wolves
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Wall Street Journal, The Democrats Abandon Catholics

Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Why Do Christians Respond so Poorly to Tragedies Like the Parkland School Shooting?

Andrew Unger, CT, Two Marches for Lives
Jordan J Ballor, The Public Discourse, Madeline L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Christianity: Moving Beyond Collectivism and Individualism
Andy Crouch, TGC, It's Time to Reckon with Celebrity Power

Reviews: As Frank Sobotka said in The Wire, "We used to build shit here [in Baltimore]" – one of the things we built was a massive sewer system, despite misinformed NIMBYism; hopefully, we can overcome it again (Puglionesi). Speaking of The Wire, how do you share art when said art takes dozens and dozens of hours to consume, and is probably dated pretty specifically (Bunch)? I couldn't watch The Simpsons growing up; I'd never have time to watch it all now, and I might not get a lot of the timely references anymore, but David Foster Wallace would argue I'm better off without that injection of bitter irony anyway (Reinke). It would be a better use of my time reading some poetry in nature (Olmstead) or seeing how beautiful paintings can find glory in everyday life (Benfy):

Alicia Puglionesi, Atlas Obscura, The Manmade Marvel of the Baltimore Sewers
Sonny Bunch, The Weekly Standard, Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?
Tony Reinke, Desiring God, Did the Simpsons Ruin a Generation?
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, A Life of the Land, Cut Short
Christopher Benfy, New York Review of Books, Renoir's Onions

Miscellaneous stuff!

Ana Stankovic, Los Angeles Review of Books, I Am Not a Marxist
Charlie Clark, Mere Orthodoxy, Let Us Now Praise Fractious Men: The Hillbilly as Economic Dissident
Elizabeth Weil, NYT Magazine, Alone At Sea: Why He Kayaked Across the Atlantic at 70 (For the Third Time)
Simona Foltyn, Columbia Journalism Review, After US journalist killed in South Sudan, a quest for answers

More March Reads

I've been making it a point to seek out more female writers after seeing the disparities between male and female authors in what I read the first several weeks of this year. This week, it really paid off, because there were so many great things to read by women. Here are a few pieces on subjects that could have been written about by men, but would likely have been approached differently:
Leslie Jamison, NYT Magazine, Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
Abby Perry, Fathom: The Steep, Words shape us
Kaitlyn Scheiss, Christ & Pop Culture, Subtweeting Our Righteousness before Men

Two related pieces on parenting and childcare:
Tara Ann Thieke, The Kitchen Table, Invisible Caregivers, Invisible Children
Katelyn Beatty, CT, Babies Need Their Moms. But Moms Need Paid Leave.

Liz is a socialist and a woman, so it's no surprise that she had to write a response to everyone who mansplained her after the first piece here:
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, It's time to give socialism a try
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Let's have a good faith argument about socialism

These two pieces aren't related other than being long, well-written explorations of complex and esoteric issues. The first looks at Christianity and Vodou in Haiti, and examines the Venn diagrams of Vodou and Pentecostalism, mega- and local churches, NGOs and Christian aid groups, and so much more; it's fantastic. The latter is about naturalistic philosophy and psychology, and looks at the history of a bizarre but widespread trend of materialist thinkers diving so far down the rabbit-hole of their arguments that they end up convinced that there can be no such thing as consciousness:
Susana Ferreira, The Believer, For G-d So Loved Haiti
Galen Strawson, New York Review of Books, The Consciousness Deniers

Food, memory, community, capitalism, food, marketing, nostalgia, food, stories, food:
Tara Isabella Burton, 1843 Magazine, What 24 hours in a diner taught me about New York
Alicia Puglionesi, Baltimore Pizza Club, While the pile of crust goes skyward
Taffy Broadesser-Akner, Saveur, Let's Go to Jerusalem for Soup Again

The connecting link between these pieces is their connection to reads from previous weeks, from porn and the #MeToo movement, to Steven Pinker's new book, to people of color leaving white-encultured churches, to the state of evangelicalism after Trump, to Kate Bowler's new book.

Meagan Tyler, ABC Religion & Ethics, Leaving Blokesworld: Why You Can't Have Your Porn and #MeToo – Cosign.

Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic, When Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough – this is a particularly interesting take on Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, arguing that "rational progress" has been uniquely detrimental to localism and community, making it harder for people to embrace embodied pluralism, and therefore has led to the resentments at the root of our politics nowadays.
Frances Crusoe, Fathom Mag, Multicultural but Still Homogenous – A frustrating personal narrative to go with the recent NYT "quiet exodus" piece. I found myself kind of arguing with the author, even though I would generally think of myself as sympathetic to black people leaving evangelical churches. This reveals to me how crucial it is to really listen to these stories, because even if I wouldn't want to go to an impersonal megachurch or have a pastoral style that constantly comments on current events, if people are being driven away from a church or the Church, it's time to evaluate where our priorities lie.
David French, National Review, The True Sin of American Evangelicals in the Age of Trump – Also frustrating, a response to Michael Gerson's Atlantic piece that is too concerned with hedging about the legitimacy of evangelical fears. I share a lot of these concerns too, but come on – Gerson has an established career and record as an evangelical conservative; he didn't really need to spend his piece relitigating Roe v. Wade or Obergefell. His down-playing of white Christian's racial fears and hatreds would be a much more appropriate angle for criticism, but it's not here. 
Marcia Bosscher, The Well, The Middle Is Not the End: An Interview with Kate Bowler

Also related to a previous piece was Vann R Newkirk III's brutal Atlantic satire of Farhad Manjoo's NYT piece on print vs. social media news: Unplugging From the Internet Nearly Destroyed Me. This was also a good reminder that some of our most breathless, hysterical takes often hyperventilate too much for their own good. Case in point was the worst thing I read this week, Stephen B Tippins Jr's Anti-Social Network in The American Conservative. While I did get a little more charitable towards this piece once I realized it was from back in 2011, it's still so bad, and shows how a lot of fears about the crisis of the moment have a lot more to do with us and our cultural biases than the reality of the situation, which might not be nearly as dystopian as it seems.

But then a story like this breaks:
Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison, The Guardian, Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Alexis C Madrigal, The Atlantic, What Took Facebook So Long?

And I am reminded why I click on everything like this that I see:

Karol Markowicz, NY Post, Maybe it's time for everyone to give up on social media

And why I remain pretty critical of technology all the same:
L M Sacasas, The Frailest Thing, Why We Can't Have Humane Technology

This is the confessional portion of this week's roundup, in which I admit that I read not one, but two articles about the President and his alleged affair with a porn star. I also read some other bad news about him, and generally regret it about as much as I usually do. Mea Culpa.
Lili Loofbourow, The Week, Stormy Daniels is crushing President Trump at his own game
Matthew Walther, The Week, Stormy Daniels bringing down Trump would be the poetic justice America needs
Ruth Marcus, WaPo, Trump had senior staff sign nondisclosure agreements. They’re supposed to last beyond his presidency.

Quinta Jurecic & Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic, Is America on the Verge of a Constitutional Crisis?

It's pieces like the above that make me long for a more robust and theologically rich politics, like these pieces describe:

Rachel Anderson, Public Justice Review, Citizenship as Craft

Bradford Littlejohn, The Davenant Trust, Protestantism After Liberalism? An Untapped Resource for Christian Political Thought

Two churchy pieces (a review of Alan Jacob's book on the BCP that was actually too dense for me, and an article on inner city churches that reminds us we have to be a body that is true to the parts that it has):
Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, Comment, Living Words for a Living Faith
Tyler St Clair, TGC, Why We Restarted Our Church

Lastly, UMBC's president gets a free ad printed on a major magazine's website because the boys from his school through a ball through a hoop more times than boys from a different school (but it is a good read):
Freeman Hrabowski, The Atlantic, The Secret Behind the Greatest Upset in College Basketball History

Thoughts on Augustine's City of God - Book I

This is my first reading of Augustine's City of God, and to try to get a little more of it, I'm going to try blogging a summary and any thoughts I might have for each book. Book I starts off curiously, with Augustine sarcastically pointing out the failure of the Roman gods to save Rome from the recent "catastrophe" of invasion while contrasting the fact that even non-Christian Romans were spared in the Christian basilicas. Why start here?

Augustine is obliquely setting up the central tension of his argument through a classic philosophical question: why do bad things happen to good people (and vice versa)? Why did God shelter Romans who falsely claimed in His name while allowing some Christians to be tortured, raped, or killed? What greater purpose was served by the sack of Rome? Believing in the providence of God, he sees a variety of reasons God may afflict the righteous or show mercy to unbelievers, some more convincing than others, but final explanations are not really the heart of the matter here. The primary question (set up in I.8) is "What use is made of the things thought to be blessings, and of the things reputed evil?" What is the telos of blessings and disasters? This question is worth asking whether we are seeking the end intended by God in His ineffable plan, or merely the best way to interpret and learn from our perception of a situation. 

These ultimate ends are crucial to search out, as they orient us on our paths through life. Augustine turns to an examination of Christian concerns: Is burial essential? If not, is it worthwhile? Is one's chastity violated by rape? Is suicide ever justified in the face of others' sin (or one's own)? Here, he is constantly pointing his readers to find their ultimate end in God and the eternal Christian hope. God is concerned with the things of this world, our lives, our struggles, our bodies. Burial, for instance, is a practice worthy of considered thought, because "[a] man's body is no mere adornment, or external convenience; it belongs to his very nature as a man. (I.13)" However, this mortal life is not our chief end; in every beloved detail, it points to something more. God "is concerned with the bodies of the dead, so as to promote faith in the resurrection." Through temporal trials, we should come to be aware of our immoderate love of the things of this world, be convicted of our sin or humbled by our dependence on Heaven, and reorder our hearts towards a greater hope: "what is to be loved is the incorruptible good. (I.10)"

But these trials have not had this effect on the Roman pagans; their reaction to the sack of Rome is to blame the Christians. Even those who were saved by claiming sanctuary in the name of Christ fail to see His saving power at work. In I.30, Augustine exposes the true motivation here: Rome is a decadent society of hedonists, longing to exploit their material prosperity in cheap pleasures without the scolding eye of the Christians looking on. The pagans use the goods of this world for the ends of this world, temporal and fleeting. Their vices were not corrected or mitigated by their recent trials (I.33), and their short-sighted vision allows the pagan spirits to tempt them into deeper and deeper vice (I.32). 

And yet, God allowed many Romans to live, some sheltered dishonestly within his own temples. Why? Augustine writes that the Church must extend sanctuary protection even to those hostile to her, for "[she] must bear in mind that among these very enemies are hidden her future citizens (I.35)." Moreover, many claiming Christian allegiance, themselves participants in the sacraments, are not true members of the Church. "In truth, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgement. (I.35)" 

How are we to discern between the two cities? If their intermingled tension is such that we cannot, how should we best orient our paths toward the Heavenly one? What role do the gods of this world play in distracting us from right paths, and how can we trust that the one true and living God is working in the midst of calamity? 

March Reads week two-ish

Martyn Wendell Jones leads off this week's reads with his magisterial profile of the Bakker family and the surrounding culture of religious enthusiasm in The Weekly Standard: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: A Scandal of the Self

Some articles on modern political problems. Cedric Johnson's essay fits with the second piece due to its discussion of modern policing, and with the third due to its discussion of pre-political identity, but honestly I mostly grouped these together because I thought it was funny to match a journal produced by Jacobin with two conservative magazines:
Cedric Johnson, Catalyst Journal, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now
Adam Rubenstein, The Weekly Standard, Radley Balko: 'The Biggest Problem in Our System is Bad Incentives'

Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, Confiscating the Nation

The tech section. AJ's essay, of course, is everything I've ever wanted; everything else is mostly, as usual, terrible. 

Alan Jacobs, Hedgehog Review, Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future
Anastasia Basil, Medium, Porn Is Not the Worst Thing on Musical.ly
Joseph Bottum, Washington Free Beacon, At the Algorithm's Mercy

Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News
Farhad Manjoo, NYT, For Two Months I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned.

Speaking of the Internet, it's generally a good reminder to reexamine our levels of charity to others when thinking about it:

Katherine Mangu-Ward, NYT, When Smug Liberals Met Conservative Trolls

Jake Meador, Mere O, The Grace of Good Questions

These articles on the changing makeup of the Church are crucial. There have been numerous examinations of craven white evangelicals' capitulation during the 2016 election, and the resultant brutality inflicted on the souls of minority Christians; these are not the full extent of the analysis needed of this moment in history, but they certainly help. Jesus, come quickly, or send us some non-Western missionaries enflamed with the Spirit. 
Campbell Robertson, NYT, A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Worshippers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches
Deborah Jian Lee, Religion Dispatches, Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads
Michael Gerson, The Atlantic, The Last Temptation
Emma Green, The Atlantic, How Trump is Remaking Evangelicalism
Jake Meador, Mere O, The Evangelical Center After Billy Graham
Saba Imtiaz, The Atlantic, A New Generation Redefines What It Means to Be a Missionary

At least there are Christians reporting on science for Christianity Today, even if the profile of Christian conservationists staring down mass extinction is really depressing in its own way:

Cara Daneel, CT, Creation Groans, but God Hears: Many Species Face "Thinning of Life"
Stephanie Zhang, CT, Behaving Like Children or Chimps?

Some theology and philosophy. 
Fleming Rutledge, Generous Orthodoxy: Ruminations, The concept of sacrifice: The latest thing on the hit list?

John Woodbridge, CT, Why Christian Theology Needs (Former) Atheists
Gilbert Meilander, First Things, Virtuous Evildoers

Brian Wright, Desiring God, Read the Bible with Someone Else

On #MeToo and how not to let ourselves off the hook for our own sins; how Christians must speak up, but with humility; on raising boys in a culture of toxic masculinity (the first two-thirds would be a good first quarter of a better essay, which would not include the final third at all).

Ethan McCarthy, Christ & Pop Culture, Louis's Sins and Mine

Phil Mobley, By Faith, Christianity and Complicity
Michael Kimmel, The Cut, Raise Your Son to Be a Good Man, Not a 'Real' Man

Also somewhat #MeToo-related, a brief look at Rachael Denhollander's shot across the bow of SGM:
Ruth Graham, Slate, Larry Nassar’s First Accuser Is Taking On Another Big Target—This Time, Within Her Own Evangelical Community

Reviews: more Lady Bird, an interview with the founder of The Toast, and a look at Christian Wiman's new collection of poems on Joy. 

Clare Coffey, National Catholic Reporter, 'Lady Bird' inspires memories of Catholic high school and the sisters
Constance Grady, Vox, Mallory Ortberg talks The Toast, The Merry Spinster, and the joys of peanut butter
James Matthew Wilson, Law & Liberty, Joy's Mysteries

Two last reviews on Black Panther:

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, The Tragedy of Erik Killmonger
Kathryn Freeman, Christ & Pop Culture, The Role of Black Women in the Church: A Wakandan View of Flourishing

The last of the Febreads, and Marching on

So many good book reviews this week. First, here's Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler, arguing that superficial positive reviews are infantilizing for women and people of color, marginalizing them from the intellectual conversation under the guise of supporting them: In Praise of Negative Reviews

Here are some negative book reviews of the Steven Pinker scientism joint.
Nick Spencer, Theos, Enlightenment and Progress, or why Steven Pinker is wrong
Peter Harrison, ABC Religion & Ethics, The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker
Ross Douthat, NYT, The Edges of Reason

The best book review (and probably, overall piece) I read this week was Brad East's engagement with Patrick Deneen's How Liberalism Failed and Jamie Smith's Awaiting the King in LA Review of Books. It's a great overview of the debate over political theology and how Christianity should relate to the system of liberalism: Holy Ambivalence

That led me to this overview of Deneen's book, as well as the author's blog:
Patrick J Deneen, ABC Religion & Ethics, The Triumphant Failure of Liberalism
Brad East, Resident Theologian, Principles of Luddite pedagogy

And many other solid reviews here as well (OK, the last one is a movie).
Park MacDougald, American Affairs, Fascists and Revolutionaries

Justin Lee, First Things, Bros Against Humanity
Catherine Cusick, Longreads, An Education in Doubt
Kelly Jane Torrance, National Review, The Struggle for Meaning
Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman, “Senior year burns brightly. There is a vividness in worlds coming to an end”: Lady Bird’s aesthetic of memory

A varied assortment of national politics griping, from (legitimately) fake news, to the President's circle of corruption, to the unmitigated malice even in the face of death on social media, to America's depressing child mortality rates, to the true purpose of guns:
Kevin D Williamson, National Review, An Epidemic of Dishonesty on the Right
David A Graham, The Atlantic, Trump's Real Scandal is Hiding in Plain Sight

Samuel James, MereO (Inklingations), The Wrong Spite of History

Matthew Loftus, America, The United States is dangerous for children. How we can help more of them live to see adulthood?

Christine Emba, WaPo, We All Know What Guns Are Really For

Also on the political front is this great profile of Eric Metaxas and his craven capitulation to Trump, as candidate and now as President. Illuminating but challenging to read is the full email exchange between the author and subject, in which he (Metaxas) begins graciously, but gradually grows more and more towards the very likeness of Godwin's Law (not to mention Poe's). A response to some of his comments by fellow Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh is also intriguing.

Jon Ward, Yahoo News, Author Eric Metaxas, evangelical intellectual, chose Trump, and he's sticking with him
Jon Ward, Medium, My Email Exchange with Eric Metaxas
Charles Marsh, Medium, Charles Marsh responds to Eric Metaxas

Leslie Jamison is simply a phenomenal writer. I wish she'd engaged more with Martha Nussbaum's ideas on retribution at the end of the anger piece, but these are both worth reading.
Leslie Jamison, VQR Online, The Breakup Museum
Leslie Jamison, NYT Mag, I Used to Insist I Didn't Get Angry. Not Anymore.

In the vein of Leslie Jamison, here are several pieces chronicling female pain, from the surrealistic trauma of recovery from an aneurysm, to the difficulty of caring for children when they and you are far from home, to overcoming the shame associated with painful sex, and finally, political ostracism for speaking the truth: 
Emily Carter Roiphe, Longreads, The Hotel of Multiple Realities
Rachel Pieh Jones, The Other Journal, Split Me Open
Joy Pedrow Skarka, Fathom, Having Painful Sex

Mona Charen, NYT, I'm Glad I Got Booed at CPAC

Some of these pains may affect women more directly or frequently, but can be shared by men as well. Matthew Loftus shares the fear of needing medical care for a child when you live where it's not as available; this great profile of Brendan Fraser adds a new voice to the #MeToo movement:

Matthew Loftus, Making the little things available for little people

Zach Baron, GQ, Whatever Happened to Brendan Fraser?

I didn't really like this piece; it basically argues that social movements should appropriate little "tools" from religious practices to strengthen themselves, and it does so in a way that makes it seem that she thinks they function just as effectively stripped of their source and context. I'm open to that argument from some angles, but this one didn't work.
Danielle Celermajer, ABC Religion & Ethics, Shelter in a Hurricane: Muscular Silence and Creative Resistance

Urban issues:
Ariel Aberg-Riger, CityLab, When America's Basic Housing Unit Was a Bed, Not a House
Kate Wagner, The Atlantic, City Noise Might Be Making You Sick

Priya Fielding-Singh, Los Angeles Times, Why do poor Americans eat so unhealthfully? Because junk food is the only indulgence they can afford

Daryl Crouch, CT Pastors, How to Serve Your City When You Aren't a Megachurch

A poem:

Lauren K Alleyne, The Atlantic, Martin Luther King Jr Mourns Trayvon Martin

Gracy Olmstead writing Gracy Olmstead things: The American Conservative, Sourdough Bread and the Cult of Convenience

Science!
Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, Life Can Survive in the Most Mars-Like Place on Earth

Media in the digital age:
Maria Bustillos (with Karen K Ho), Columbia Journalism Review, Erasing History
Quinn Norton, The Atlantic, The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger

Capitalism in a virtue-commodifying age:
Ross Douthat, NYT, The Rise of Woke Capital

On slave narratives and theology:
David Roach, CT, Reprint of Ex-slave's Theology Book Opens 'Underexplored Vista'
Joy Craun, CT, We Need to Read Stories of People Who Were Enslaved

And lastly:
Matthew Miller, MereO, Singing as Part of Family Worship