To PhD Candidates Patiently Waiting: Well Wishes, Blessings, Convalescence

Just over a year ago, I wrote this:

In approximately five weeks, I will know where, if anywhere, I am going for doctoral work.

Three weeks later, my completed thesis is due to be submitted to my reading committee.

Five weeks following that, I will graduate from Candler School of Theology with my Master of Divinity.

And two weeks subsequent to graduation, if I have been accepted to a PhD program, my wife and I will be leaving our three-year home and friends and church in Atlanta for a new home elsewhere.

I am tempted to platitudes. Instead, let me just say that it is good to know that others also have been in this same position and have survived.

That was in the middle of one of the most excruciatingly stressful stretches of my life. Literally everything was in the air for my wife and me: my career, her job, our life in Atlanta, whatever future awaited us.

Though I ended up receiving good news just a couple weeks later, not everyone does; and that eventuality doesn't negate or mollify the period of absolute lack of control preceding it.

So let me now say to all those patiently (anxiously) awaiting word: You will survive. This is important, and you are not wrong to worry and pray and wonder and cry and repress and all the rest; but you will make it to the other side. Find good friends, some small community of support, and let them hold you up during this time. It is okay. You will survive.

God's grace upon the whole lot. And having invoked divine authority, let me add one more word: Avoid, at all costs, every rumor and nefarious website offering proleptic answers. Friends, that way madness lies. Trust me.

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: Peter Abelard

Reading a bit of Abelard this week for a class, I came across the following beautiful hymn, which, though well known to many, was new to me. This version is taken from A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, edited by Eugene R. Fairweather (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, 1956), 298-99. Enjoy.

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Hymn for Saturday Vespers

By Peter Abelard (translated by John Mason Neale)

O what their joy and their glory must be,
Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see!
Crown for the valiant; to weary ones rest;
God shall be all, and in all ever blest.

What are the Monarch, his court, and his throne?
What are the peace and the joy that they own?
Tell us, ye blest ones, that in it have share,
If what ye feel ye can fully declare.

Truly "Jerusalem" name we that shore,
"Vision of peace," that brings joy evermore!
Wish and fulfillment can severed be ne'er,
Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.

We, where no trouble distraction can bring,
Safely the anthems of Sion shall sing;
While for thy grace, Lord, their voices of praise
Thy blessed people shall evermore raise.

There dawns no Sabbath, no Sabbath is o'er,
Those Sabbathkeepers have one and no more;
One and unending is that triumph song
Which to the angels and us shall belong.

Now in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high,
We for that country must yearn and must sigh,
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,
Through our long exile on Babylon's strand.

Low before Him with our praises we fall,
Of whom, and in whom, and through whom are all;
Of whom, the Father; and through whom, the Son;
In whom, the Spirit, with these ever One.

Robert Jenson on How the Biblical God Avoids the "Universal Moral Disaster" of "Omnipotent Egocentricity"

"It is the fact of God's Trinity which requires that his concluding gift to us, should he make one, must be inclusion in his own life, the gift not of something other than God but of 'all he is' [Luther]. The triune God does not and indeed cannot beneficently affect us causally; for him, causal action, with its intrinsic distancing, would mean exclusion from himself and so cursing rather than blessing. The goal of all the biblical God's ways is the glory of God. Were an otherwise biblical God -- contrary of course to possibility -- monadic, his intention of his own glory would be a sort of omnipotent egocentricity, and the reality of God would be a universal moral disaster. But God's glorification of himself is instead supreme blessing because the triune God can and does include creatures in that glory."

--Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 311

Karl Barth on the Theme and Center of Bearing Testimony to the Neighbor

"When it is a matter of bearing testimony, there can be only one theme and center of what I say. And that is the indication of the name of Jesus Christ as the essence and existence of the loving kindness in which God has taken to Himself sinful man, in order that he should not be lost but saved by Him. This name, and in the strict sense only this name, the name of the Helper, is what we know about help in need, and therefore can and must speak. This name is the word which we do not grudge our neighbor, but with which we have to greet him as a future brother. Where there is genuine love for the neighbor this name cannot and must not be withheld.

"The only word which is praise of God and a witness to the neighbor is a word which is praise of Jesus Christ and witness about Him. Every word which is that is true praise of God and a true witness to the neighbor. Such a declaration of the name of Jesus Christ will be a full recognition of what Jesus Christ is and of what has been done by Him. It will be a critical word, unsettling, pointing away, excluding the claims of all other names in which we might seek refuge. It will always be a word of thankful adoration before the majesty of free grace revealed in this name. But necessarily it will also be a word of confession, i.e., a word in which our recognition of this name as the name of the Lord is irrevocably revealed. But it will depend upon and maintain that assertion of the name which the name has created for itself among men.

"That means that it will be a churchly word, i.e., a word proceeding from the Church and calling to the Church. And its churchly character will consist concretely in the fact that it is basically an expository word, the explaining and applying of Holy Scripture as the primal witness to Jesus Christ which underlies and sustains all the rest. It is when I speak a word like this to my neighbor that I fulfill my responsibility to him. I tell him what I know of the other side of my and, as I hope, his need.

"This other side of the need, if indeed there is this other side, i.e., if God is manifest to man, is simply Jesus Christ. That God should be manifest to the neighbor in his need, that his need should have this other side, is something which I cannot control or foresee. But God can make use of my service to make it true. I have to show myself prepared and ready for this service by not refusing to the neighbor my word of witness. I refuse it if I am silent or if I speak of things which are irrelevant. In the latter case my words are just words: I do not love my neighbor in deed and in truth. If my witness is a witness to the name of Jesus Christ, it is not just a word, but as a word it is the most concrete act, in the strictly literal sense it is the 'expression' of praise of God and love to the neighbor.

"That it is not in my power to give this work the efficacy by which it is to the neighbor the fulfillment of revelation, the imparting of the Word and Spirit of God, by which therefore his need takes on that other side -- this limitation belongs to its very nature as witness. We cannot try to transcend the limitation without destroying its nature as witness. We have to respect the limitation, especially if we do not want to cease loving our neighbor. But within this limitation there can be no doubt that we not only say the right thing but in doing so do the right thing to our neighbor when, because we are really concerned about him, we speak to him freely about the name of Jesus Christ."

--Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, 443-44 (originally a single paragraph)

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: Mary Karr (III)

If you read this blog, you likely know of my love for Mary Karr -- poet, memoirist, irreverent convert Catholic. If you know that, then you also surely know of my love for Christopher Hitchens (RIP). A happy pairing, then, to see that last month n+1 shared a (sort of) elegy, in the form of a new poem, by Karr for Hitchens. It's an odd but fulsome thing, in style as well as content. All the more reason to read and enjoy.

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Elegy for Christopher Hitchens, Whom I Only Met Twice

By Mary Karr

I say mystery is the only certainty
That embracing nothingness
as hard as you did those big
bear arms around the dissipating void
so all the stars squeezed out the sides
you made Nietzsche look
like the crybaby punk
he actually was infected with syphilis
and so forth who said god
is dead and remains dead and we
killed him talk about
Oedipal guilt, which you
spat out like an apple’s
arsenic pit

                   The time I met you first
in London on a green lawn
under a tent with a crowd of swells
you snarled were a bunch of tits
I swear you made me want to start
drinking again and hissing
dragon-smoke from my throat

      You were one of the big
right-wing boys who wore scorn
like a deb does a designer scent
and I hung on the edge of your small clutch
a newly baptized Catholic antique
come from a candlelit chapel an hour
spent talking to dolls since I never
was a child and must be now, must

                  for a time remain
on this side of the grass and you
that and ergo I speak free of your smart
smackdown: If you got to claim
you entered the Great Nothing
I hereby announce you went to live
with sweet baby Jesus
or else no punk gets to say
nothing though what anybody says
matters not one whit next to what
actually IS which is eternal
as you now are Nietzsche Eliot
old Philip Larkin—you now
know what they knew
and I know naught but loss
and its multiples the only
other certainty being mystery.

Glossing Stanley Hauerwas's Definition of Love

An oft-repeated claim of Stanley Hauerwas's is his definition of love in The Peaceable Kingdom as "the nonviolent apprehension of the other as other." The phrase has always struck me as helpful yet surprisingly passive in its force. Why not instead define love as "peaceable hospitality toward the other as other"? As Hauerwas is wont to argue, peace is a deeper reality than violence, and so ought not to be defined by being "not" violence. And the image of hospitality has much to recommend it over against that of apprehension: it is a central theme of the Christian tradition; it is an actual practice; it can be either individual or communal. Moreover, it evokes the sense of both active welcoming, a concrete positive action, and giving (making) space, a negative letting-be that retains the noncoercive component of apprehension as "perception." Finally, the phrase is clearly rooted theologically: in the act of God in the incarnation; in the being of God as eternally triune; and in the kingdom of God as inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Spirit.

What's not to like?

On Biblicisms Possible and Impossible: The Deeper Issue Between Richard Beck and Christian Smith

Last Friday Richard Beck posted a thoughtful piece on Christian Smith's recent book, titled "Why The Bible Made Impossible is Impossible." Thought I haven't read Smith's book, I felt Beck left unexplored an important aspect of what I understand to be the position Smith is representing and thereby bringing to bear on his former evangelical brethren. I emailed Richard and he effectively agreed, having simply decided to go in a different direction (in more than one way, as you'll see below). I thought I would share my response here as well for others' reflection.

In reading the piece, what most interested me was the fact that Beck didn't mention Smith's conversion to Catholicism. And as I understand the Catholic position more broadly -- less so the specific argument of the book -- it is that the ambiguity of the Bible, and the acceptance of that ambiguity, is not a psychological problem in need of addressing in the way Beck presents it. Why? Because we needn't worry about every single person in the pew reading, say, Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes and Chronicles and Revelation, and wondering how to fit it all together. That just is not what ordinary Christians ought to be doing in their spare time. Sure, they should read Scripture: Torah, Psalms, Proverbs, Amos, the New Testament, and the rest. But the call of theological interpretation and authoritative harmonization isn't something laypersons have to worry about, isn't something they must accomplish or achieve on their own, because they trust -- in the most robust sense of the term -- the leading of God's Spirit in the teaching office of the church. That is to say, on this view one's faith as a Christian is just the faith of the church; it is not contingent upon a personal, individual ability to make sense of the Bible on one's own.

Of course, Beck doesn't exactly endorse the latter approach (at least I don't think so -- though perhaps he might say it's not an unworthy endeavor for anyone who wants to try). However, the perspective he finds himself representing at the end of the argument does seem to inhabit that latter view; and this for a simple reason. It's his people and my people, church of Christ-ers -- i.e., the biblicists.

But isn't that Smith's very argument? The issue starts to feel a bit circular.

Smith says: Biblicism doesn't work because of pervasive interpretive pluralism. Beck rejoins: That's great for psychologically hyper-healthy folks, but not for most! To which Smith responds: Who said you should come to the Bible with that mindset in the first place?

That is: don't merely come to the Bible expecting ambiguity, and prepared to accept it. Rather, don't come at all carrying the assumption/hermeneutical M.O. that it is your job (uncalled as priest, untrained as theologian) to read-it-all, make-sense-of-it-all, put-it-all-together. It's okay to come for other things -- reassurance, faith, edification, devotion -- than just the logical, kataphatic component. And it's okay to come expecting not to understand, and nonetheless believing based on the authority of trusted others by and through whom God speaks and leads. But a chastened hermeneutic primed for ambiguity is not the final goal; the supposed charge to come to Scripture with the task of Comprehensive Understanding is already suspect from the first, and invariably doomed to fail.

Put another way, one ought to avoid being a biblicist on both the front end and the back end.

Thus, what seems to be the deeper point of disjunction here are the respective ecclesiologies underlying Smith's and Beck's perspectives, not their bibliologies per se. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as some may see it), while that clarification opens up space for dialogue on a different front, it also makes quite clear, with Beck's and Smith's (along with one's own) ecclesial commitments on the table, just how deep the differences really are.

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: Czeslaw Milosz

If last year was the year of R.S. Thomas, this will be, at least in part, the year of Czeslaw Milosz. Before Christmas I began his complete New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), and I'll be slowly making my way through it as the months go along. Expect this post, therefore, to be the first of many. Blessings.

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Flight

By Czeslaw Milosz

When we were fleeing the burning city
And looked back from the first field path,
I said: "Let the grass grow over our footprints,
Let the harsh prophets fall silent in the fire,
Let the dead explain to the dead what happened.
We are fated to beget a new and violent tribe
Free from the evil and the happiness that drowsed there.
Let us go"—and the earth was opened for us by a sword of flames.

Goszyce, 1944

On Christians and Modernist Poetry

This week a friend passed along Mark Signorelli's recent article, "The Meaning of Modernism." In it Signorelli argues, first, that artistic (and specifically poetic) form is inseparable from content; though not a propositional statement, the form of a work embodies the philosophical (or political, or religious) perspective of the artist, and more broadly the artist's culture, who created it. He goes on to argue, second, that modernist poetry naturally embodies the philosophy undergirding it, a philosophy whose conception of freedom is damaging and untrue, masking and choking thereby whatever beauty one might otherwise have hoped would emerge in the art. Signorelli believes the temptation to ignore this fact, and to submit to the modernist paradigm anyway, is especially perilous for Christian poets today.

I want to comment briefly on this, though I admittedly need to learn more about the precise terminology in play; "modernist" may be specific enough to mean a particular sort of self-consciously methodological poetry in the vein of T.S. Eliot, or generic enough to mean most meter-less poetry in the last 100 years. If Signorelli means the latter, I think he's missing something important.

For example, the poetry of someone like Franz Wright is formless, meter-less, without predetermined shape, precisely as an embodiment of Wright's central concerns: beauty in brokenness, grace amidst pain, light in darkness. The shape of his poems does embody his content, and from one vantage point (though not the only one), it consequently tells the truth of the gospel better than rigorously defined, beautiful-with-a-capital-B classical poetry.

Moreover, it seems to me that in a real sense, once one's culture has fragmented to the extent that ours has in the last century, so that the world in many ways lacks the kind of fundamental, ordering beauty taken for granted in previous times, the proper response needn't be to impose a towering alien transcendental on it. Rather, Christian poets ought to practice their art from the ground up, within the welter as it stands (and trembles), speaking truth and beauty in the table scraps recognizable by ordinary, fractured people. Mary Karr, Andrew Hudgins, and Li-Young Lee, among others, come to mind in this regard.

I will have to think more about the issue of freedom and form, and the interplay between them in recent non-metered poetry. I suspect there is a substantive answer here, but because it is an important issue, I will leave it there for others to consider rather than suggest a hasty solution.

My Spring 2012 Course Load

As I do at the start of each semester, I have shared below the courses I am taking this spring, with whom, and the respective book lists. I am especially excited about this semester, as three of my four classes are directed readings focusing on theological texts that are either crucial to know or ones I have not read before. In related news, I may not be coming up for air until spring break, given the reading requirements. We'll see.

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Medieval Christology and Atonement Theory (Junius Johnson)

There are two guiding questions for this course: 1) What, according to Scholastic theology, is the work that human salvation requires Christ to accomplish, and 2) what sort of person must he be in order to accomplish that work? This course will examine the answers of thinkers from Anselm (1033-1109) to Luther (1483-1546) on these questions.

• Anselm, Basic Writings
  
• Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
  
• John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings
  
• Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
  
• Damian McElrath, ed., Franciscan Christology
  
• Eugene R. Fairweather, ed., A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham
  

Readings in Patristic Trinitarian Theology (Christopher Beeley)

This course focuses on four decisive patristic figures in fourth-century trinitarian theology: the Cappadocians -- Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus -- and Augustine of Hippo. We will be reading both primary and secondary texts the better to understand these foundational theologians, the particularities of their reflections on and conceptions of the Trinity, and more generally the trinitarian faith itself in its early formulation.

• Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea
• Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate
• Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity
• Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God
• Basil the Great, Against Eunomius
• Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Select Orations
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations
• Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius

Readings in Historical Theology (Miroslav Volf)

This course, like the next one, is in service to preparation for comprehensive exams, both on the horizon and farther down the line. We will be reading a large number of smaller, discrete texts from important thinkers in three eras -- patristic, medieval, and reformation -- regarding four loci: biblical interpretation, faith and reason, Christology, and politics and society.

• Patristic: Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus
  
• Medieval: John Cassian, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Lyra, John of Salisbury, William of Ockham, John Wyclif
  
• Reformation: Martin Luther, John Calvin, Cornelius a Lapide, Johann Gerhard, Desiderius Erasmus, Francisco de Vitoria, radical reformers
  

Readings in Systematic Theology (Kathryn Tanner)

This course, like that above, is aimed at filling gaps and providing space for reading texts which will come up in our comprehensive exam on contemporary theology (i.e., post-Kant); unlike it, though, we are reading multiple works in full from only about a dozen or so influential figures. The three areas organizing the texts and concerns of the course are: theological methodology, the nature and interpretation of Scripture, and ecclesiology.

• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1; I/2
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio
• William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist; Theopolitical Imagination; Being Consumed; Migrations of the Holy (selections)
• Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis (selections)
• Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ; The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative
• Nicholas Healy, Church, World, and the Christian Life
• David Kelsey, Proving Doctrine; Eccentric Existence (Chapter 3B)
• George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine
• Gerhard Lohfink, Does God Need the Church?
• Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith
• Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture
• Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine
• John Webster, Holy Scripture; Word and Church; Confessing God

On Cultivating Virtues in the Academy: Sabbath

The deeper I went into Master's work, the more my Saturdays became homework days. By my third and last year, it was an ideal work day, particularly if my wife was planning on doing something with friends. Sunday was already a work day, but usually better for reading; Saturday, as it turned out, proved great for writing: no responsibilities other than the yet-to-be-written paper sitting before me on the blank computer screen. By spring of last year, writing my thesis, I could apportion a piece of my writing schedule -- one chapter per week -- to every day of the week; so if a chapter was about 25 pages long, I need only plan 3-4 pages of writing per day.

Needless to say, when I began doctoral work in the fall I went into it with the unquestionable assumption that, given what would assuredly be a sizeable increase in workload, weekends would be work days as much as weekdays -- with slight allowances made for fun (Saturday) and church (Sunday). In theory this would relieve each day's work by some slight but meaningful percentage, thus creating post-work time within each day for other things (whether relational, marital, practical, etc.).

A few weeks into the semester I noticed that my fellow first-year in theology, Ross -- he and his wife already fast friends of ours -- was keeping a sabbath day each week. Sundays were intentionally free of homework, so as to create unintruded, unintrudable space each week for worship, family, exercise, leisure, fun, and rest.

Initially, this seemed appealing in the abstract, but impractical in reality -- a nice idea, like how we'd all appreciate an eighth day of the week. Unfortunately, there are only seven.

However, the appeal only grew with time, and I realized -- in discussion with Ross as well as with my wife -- that its impracticality rested entirely on my decision to make it so. If I decided that one day a week was off limits (you know, like an entire people group has done for 3,000 years), then it simply would be.

So I tried it.

And I never looked back.

Since mid-October I have practiced a homework sabbath every Saturday, without exception, and I cannot exaggerate how much of a blessing it has been. I chose Saturday instead of Sunday for a number of reasons, but it has had a significant, though unintended, rest-extending consequence: Because I usually finish my school reading sometime Friday afternoon (always by 6:00 pm), and I don't pick it back up until after lunch on Sunday, the sabbath actually regularly approaches something like 42 hours in total, even some weekends spanning a total of two full days in real time.

Academics are a notoriously anxious bunch, and I am no exception. There is always another book to be read, another article to print, another paper to write, another proposal to submit. What a specifically school-work sabbath does is what the sabbath does more generally: remind you that you are not the still center of the spinning cosmos. (Reminding you also, of course, who is.) Just as the world will keep turning without your busily working self -- and this is good news! -- your academic career (or semester grades, or final paper, or . . .) will, without fail, not collapse in a heap of failure if you take a day off.

Most of us need this reminder.

Among other benefits, it is difficult to describe, in this my eighth consecutive year of post-secondary education (following 13 years of primary+secondary!), what a psychological relief it is to spend an entire day -- or two -- at rest, utterly carefree, sans work commitments and the guilt that ordinarily accompanies leaving them unattended. It is simply extraordinary.

So I commend the same to others: choose some specific amount of time each week, set it aside for whatever you like except academic work, and keep it holy. It may seem like law at first, but rest assured that it will be pure gospel. What seems to constrain will invariably work to free you. Try it.

On Cultivating Virtues in the Academy: Introduction

These past few weeks I have spent some time reflecting on the sort of habits I want to be cultivating as a doctoral student. The fall semester, like all first semesters in PhD programs, was one long exercise of learning as I went, adapting on my feet to the new and unique challenges present in this next stage of graduate study. Following that, the Christmas break afforded a bit of sustained time to reflect on the experience and make intentional plans for how to grow and succeed in substantive ways this semester and on.

I have already begun to share some of those reflections, in the form of goals for becoming a better reader and setting aside time each day for quiet and prayer. The nice thing about being a graduate student and preparing for a career in the academy is that the habits and virtues developed at this point in the track are largely transferable into life as a professor (granting all the various differences between them).

I also understand the challenges the academy poses to its members to be distinctively pernicious to those of us seeking, at the same time, to be faithful Christians. The temptations run in every direction: ambition, narcissism, snobbery, elitism, greed, deification of knowledge, idolatry of this person or that idea, sacrifice of family for career, lack of belonging to any particular place, locating value in others' esteem rather than God's, substitution of talk for action, entitlement mentality, loss of ability to listen to others, relentlessly critical attitude to the exclusion of gratitude or joy, homogenization of what matters in life in terms of what matters to you (and "your field"), and so on and so forth.

So I thought that, since I'm already thinking about these issues, and apparently writing about them without larger intentions, I would share my reflections in a little ongoing series. Life in the academy today is a strange and unwieldy thing, and I know I have benefited from others' wisdom before me. Hopefully my own small contribution will be similarly helpful, along with the comments of friends and colleagues (prospective and actual) who find themselves on the same path.

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: A Prayer for Concluding Prayers

One of my regular spiritual disciplines is to spend time in silent prayer after lunch every weekday. I have always struggled to find a time "set aside" specifically for stillness, quiet, and prayer, as mornings are out of the question and evenings invariably find a way to intrude with alternatives. But since I spend much of my time each day during the week reading or writing in my office at home, often eating lunch there alone, I discovered early last semester that committing to daily prayer after lunch was both a good idea (spiritually) and a realistic idea (practically).

My praying often takes different forms, whether meditative, intercessory, freewheeling, or whatever. One constant, however, has developed entirely organically, and to my happy surprise: a sort of fixed concluding prayer to close my time in prayer as a whole. Unwritten, pieced together ad hoc as various phrases and petitions came forth naturally, it has coalesced into something like a set liturgical denouement -- even to the point of crossing myself when I end with the triune name, something I had never done before but just felt fitting one afternoon, and which I have continued ever since.

As I have with other similar compositions, I thought I might share this prayer for prayers' concluding for whatever benefit others might gain from it. Enjoy.

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A Prayer for Concluding Prayers

Speak to me, Lord;
help me to listen;
make me to hear your voice.

Let me come to know you as you are,
O God of infinite and perfect love --
you who made the sun and the stars,
and came near in Christ.

Forgive me my sin,
and deliver me into new life.

Free me
from the fear and the power of death.

Make me your servant,
faithful to the way of Jesus.

For I do believe, Lord;
help me in my unbelief.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

The Week's Reads: Marilynne Robinson, Guantanamo Nightmare, Intelligent Design, and More

Here's some of what I enjoyed reading this past week:

• The great Marilynne Robinson writes in the New York Times about the Bible, "the book of books," and its relationship to the Western literary heritage. My favorite turn of phrase: her description of "religious thought," in contrast to "religious propaganda," as "an attempt to do some sort of justice to the rich difficulties present in the tradition."
• Another NYT piece, this time on Haiti's slow recovery from the earthquake two years ago this month.
• A final piece, much more personal, from the Times: Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian immigrant seized from Sarajevo in late 2001 and held illegally (and unjustly) by the U.S. for more than seven years without charges, on his "Guantanamo nightmare."
• Friend and fellow Candler alum Paul Wallace on Christian faith, scientific endeavor, and the swift death of "Intelligent Design." (H/T: David Congdon.)
• A deeply insightful piece by Jay Caspian Kang on "Kwame Brown, basketball player, and Kwame brown, symbol of failure."
• Adam Kotsko with two thoughtful posts this week: the first an interrogation of the apparent gap in compassionate activism relating to food and animals versus that relating to labor conditions of those who make cheap American clothing; the second an affecting, surprisingly autobiographical reflection on class and anxiety in the academy.
• From back in December, friend of the blog and all-around renaissance-theologian Peter Kline analyzes Lady Gaga's music video, "Marry the Night."
  
• Finally, check out PST graduate student Kait Dugan's blog, KYRIE ELEISON, which I have only recently happened upon. It's worth your time.
  

Karl Barth on (Not) Attending to the Center of the Church's Life

"How disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if, on whatever pretext, it can dream of being able to undertake and achieve anything serious in what are undoubtedly the important fields of liturgical reform or social work or Christian education or the ordering of its relation to state and society or ecumenical understanding, without at the same time doing what is necessary and possible with reference to the obvious centre of its life, as though it were self-evident, as though we could confidently count on it, that evangelium pure docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta! as though we could confidently leave this to God and in the meantime busy ourselves with the periphery of the Church circle, which has perhaps been rotating for long enough around a false centre! as though we could put ourselves in God’s hands without a care in the world for what happens at this decisive point!

"Again, how disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if it can imagine that theology is the business of a few theoreticians who are specially appointed for the purpose, to whom the rest, as hearty practical men, may sometimes listen with half an ear, though for their own part they boast of living 'quite untheologically' for the demands of the day ('love'). As though these practical men were not continually preaching and speaking and writing, and were not genuinely questioned as to the rightness of their activity in this regard! As though there were anything more practical than giving this question its head, which means doing the work of theology and dogmatics!

"Again, how disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if it can imagine that theological reflection is a matter for quiet situations and periods that invite contemplation, a kind of peace-time luxury for which we are not only permitted but even commanded to find no time should things become really serious and exciting! As though there could be any more urgent task for a Church under assault from without than that of consolidating itself within, which means doing theological work! As though the venture of proclamation did not mean that the Church permanently finds itself in an emergency! As though theology could be done properly without reference to this constant emergency!

"Let there be no mistake. Because of these distorted ideas about theology, and dogmatics in particular, there arises and persists in the life of the Church a lasting and growing deficit for which we cannot expect those particularly active in this function to supply the needed balance. The whole Church must seriously want a serious theology if it is to have a serious theology."

--Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 76-77 (originally a single paragraph)

On (Not) Being a Good Reader: Making Goals, Resisting Bad Habits, and Re-Reading Good Books

I am not a very good reader. Though my chosen career entails a life of reading, reading itself does not come naturally to me. Or at least, not always, and not in the same way.

For example, I am an extremely poor reader of novels. I just did not learn the requisite skills in high school, and more or less degenerated in college. Since then I have been trying to recoup what I lost, and gain what I never had.

Furthermore, I am an extraordinarily slow reader. My wife, if "hooked," can finish a 400-page novel in a day, two or three at most if other commitments override. That sort of loss of self, that forgetfulness of the painstakingly slack page-turning rate which swells up in my brain in perfect proportion to the amount of pages staring me down -- it's near impossible to imagine.

However, I do enjoy reading, and have always enjoyed it; moreover, I love my subject of study, so I enjoy reading theology in particular -- and that is fortunate, given that my vocation consists overwhelmingly of reading theology before doing anything else.

Setting aside theology, then, my stamina, and speed, and (at times) motivation have for some time been sorely lacking, alongside a paucity of diversity in both my literary interests and reading skills. I have, therefore, for the last few years made annual goals with attendant strategies in order to slowly address these areas of weakness (or, in PC parlance, "potential growth").

To begin, in 2008 and 2009, which included the end of college and my first three semesters of graduate school, I remained stuck at around 50 books per year, which averages out to a mere book per week. In 2010 I was able to increase that to two books per week, and this past year up to three. Part of that was simply the greater demands of Master's work; another part was intentionally reading more; and still another was introducing variety into my theology-only reading diet. Two genres in particular proved especially appetizing: poetry and essays. I discovered both that I could read these fairly quickly and that I derived great pleasure in doing so.

My newest genre of interest is memoirs (or biographies, though less so), closer to the DNA of a novel while for various reasons containing more appeal as well as an easier dynamic of entry, sticking with it, and finishing.

This year I have three goals: to increase from three to four books per week (or at least somewhere in between); to read at least one novel per month; and to begin the practice of re-reading especially beloved or formationally foundational books.

This last goal is a new one to put into practice, but one I have been working toward for some time. I've heard it said that being an academic means never having to read the same book twice. That may be true in some ways -- for example, as a description of the intellectual capacities of the truly great scholar, or as a prescription of the limited time available to lifetime readers of ever-increasing publications -- but I see it as a mistaken impulse. The life of the mind, the life of reading, ought to be precisely that of refusing to "finish" books once for all before moving on to the next thing. Books, or at least those most worth reading, are there to be chewed on, digested, meditated on, memorized, internalized. For the very few who can recite lines from once-read books, perhaps this is unnecessary. But for the great majority of us who are consistently forgetful of what we have read, in a lifetime of six or seven or eight decades, how can a once-read book actually do the work it is capable of if placed on a shelf forever thereafter?

For that reason I see the practice of re-reading as the height and fulfillment of the academic life, even as it is an active resistance of the institutional habits encouraged by the academy today.

So I chose 12 books to re-read this year, from various genres and of disparate lengths and ages, books which were either important to my development as a thinker or person, or worth re-reading and so knowing well just because.

In poetry: A Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry; Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr; and Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright. These are collections of poems which I would be delighted to read annually for the rest of my life.

In fiction: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (already read twice, each time broken open anew); The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (in preparation for the film this December, as I haven't read it since middle school); and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (no explanation required here).

In academic theology: The Priestly Kingdom (because I want to re-read a different book by Yoder every year); Death and Life by Arthur McGill (because it's that good); and Confessions by Augustine (again, because it's worth it -- and because I've never read Books 11-13).

In pleasurable or formational works: Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (because it's been a while); The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen (because this book fundamentally reshaped my practice of spiritual disciplines); and Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community by Wendell Berry (because reading this book four years ago radically transformed my way of thinking and living for good).

I'm sure others -- including even the most scholarly of scholars -- have similar stories with regard to reading or other related challenges. The felt expectations (to read everything, to remember everything, never to be out of date) combined with their patent insurmountability (no one has or will ever have read everything, much less remember it all or live a meaningful life besides) can prove isolating, suffocating, even brutal. Consider this my small contribution, in via, to the possibility of a common sanity in this odd way of life called academic.

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: Wendell Berry (Christmas Day)

Merry Christmas!

It's not often that Christmas falls on a Sunday. And what better way to celebrate than with a poem by Wendell Berry, his sixth Sabbath poem -- and so unnamed, the title below being mine -- of the year 1990.

Blessings on this day of happy celebration.

- - - - - - -

St. Vith, December 21, 1944

By Wendell Berry

Cut off in front of the line
that now ran through St. Vith,
the five American tanks sat
in a field covered with snow
in the dark. And now they must
retreat to safety, which they
could do only through gunfire
and flame in the burning town.
They went, firing, through the fire,
GIs and German prisoners
clinging to the hulls, and out
again into the still night beyond.
In the broad dark, someone
began to sing, and one by one
the others sang also, the German
prisoners singing in German,
the Americans in English,
the one song. "Silent night,"
they sang as the great treads
passed on across the dark
countryside muffled in white
snow, "Holy night."

Just Because: Predictions for the 2011-2012 Lockout-Shortened NBA Season

It's usually an annual October tradition -- see the last three years' iterations -- but, of course, the lockout has delayed and contracted this year's season; so now, the week of Christmas, I offer my usual predictions for how things are going to shake out in the National Basketball Association.

It's odd: continuity and experience take on a bigger role in this sort of season, even as youth and depth absorb the toll of 66 games in 120 days. (You read that right.) All in all, things look basically similar to last season, with the ascension of the Clippers to NBA royalty and my premonition that Indiana will make a leap. Note also the asterisk for Orlando and New Jersey: my pick for the Magic presumes the presence of one Dwight Howard, while if he leaves, they will almost certainly bottom out while their trade partner (the Nets?) will take their place in the playoff picture.

I'm also gunning for a first round Staples Center showdown between the Lakers and Clippers, though I have Kobe's maniacal competitiveness winning out over Lob City's inexperience. (Also a repeat of last year's Boston-New York series, with the same result.) And while the good guys won the prize last year, I have the Heat triumphing in the Finals over the ultimate good guys, the Thunder. LeBron and Wade holding a trophy while the camera pans to Kevin Durant in tears? That sounds just tragic enough to become true. Just know that, after the Spurs, I'll be cheering for OKC all the way.

- - - - - - -

Western Conference
1. Oklahoma City Thunder (53-13)
2. Dallas Mavericks (49-17)
3. Los Angeles Clippers (47-19)
4. San Antonio Spurs (45-21)
5. Memphis Grizzlies (44-22)
6. Los Angeles Lakers (42-24)
7. Denver Nuggets (40-26)
8. Portland Trailblazers (36-30)

9. Minnesota Timberwolves (34-32)
10. Phoenix Suns (33-33)
11. New Orleans Hornets (27-39)
12. Utah Jazz (23-43)
13. Houston Rockets (19-47)
14. Golden State Warriors (13-53)
15. Sacramento Kings (10-56)

Eastern Conference
1. Miami Heat (56-10)
2. Chicago Bulls (53-13)
3. Orlando Magic (44-22)*
4. New York Knicks (40-26)
5. Boston Celtics (39-27)
6. Indiana Pacers (37-29)
7. Atlanta Hawks (34-32)
8. Philadelphia 76ers (33-33)

9. New Jersey Nets (32-34)*
10. Washington Wizards (30-36)
11. Milwaukee Bucks (29-37)
12. Detroit Pistons (18-48)
13. Toronto Raptors (13-53)
14. Cleveland Cavaliers (9-57)
15. Charlotte Bobcats (8-58)

Western Conference First Round
Oklahoma City Thunder (1) over Portland Trailblazers (8) in 5 games
Dallas Mavericks (2) over Denver Nuggets (7) in 6 games
Los Angeles Lakers (6) over Los Angeles Clippers (3) in 6 games
San Antonio Spurs (5) over Memphis Grizzlies (4) in 7 games

Eastern Conference First Round
Miami Heat (1) over Philadelphia 76ers (8) in 5 games
Chicago Bulls (2) over Atlanta Hawks (7) in 6 games
Indiana Pacers (6) over Orlando Magic (3) in 6 games
Boston Celtics (5) over New York Knicks (4) in 7 games

Western Conference Semifinals
Oklahoma City Thunder (1) over San Antonio Spurs (5) in 7 games
Dallas Mavericks (2) over Los Angeles Lakers (6) in 6 games

Eastern Conference Semifinals
Miami Heat (1) over Boston Celtics (5) in 7 games
Chicago Bulls (2) over Indiana Pacers (6) in 6 games

Western Conference Finals
Oklahoma City Thunder (1) over Dallas Mavericks (2) in 7 games

Eastern Conference Finals
Miami Heat (1) over Chicago Bulls (2) in 6 games

NBA Finals
Miami Heat (1) over Oklahoma City Thunder (1) in 7 games

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: G.K. Chesterton (Advent #4)

A bit belated, but better late than never. My assumption is, apart from one more Sabbath post next Sunday, it's going to be tumbleweeds around here for a few weeks. If so, have a blessed rest of Advent, and Christmas, and holiday break for the academics. I hope it's a good end to a good year, as it is for us.

The neat little poem below is taken from Chesterton's 1900 collection, The Wild Knight and Other Poems. And while you're at it, go check out Richard Beck's two recent posts on Christmas carols as resistance literature.

- - - - - - -

A Christmas Carol

By G.K. Chesterton

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
  His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
  But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
  His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
  But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
  His hair was like a fire.
(O wear, weary is the world,
  But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,
  His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
  And all the stars looked down. 

Christopher Hitchens: Rest in Peace

Christopher Hitchens passed away last night. Having done serious battle with the debilitating Stage 4 esophageal cancer that overran his life some 18 months ago -- as he put it, "There is no Stage 5" -- he finally lost the fight he knew would be a losing one.

A lifelong political journalist, Hitchens didn't hit the national spotlight in America until after 9/11, an event that changed his life in more ways than one. Once a card-carrying communist -- literally: in his memoir there is a picture of his "commie card" from the late 1960s -- Hitchens remained a leftist of some sort all his life; but 9/11 marked a line in the sand his former comrades found themselves on the wrong side of. Thereafter he became a recognizable spokesman for two things above all: the West's war on Islamist terrorism, as led by the U.S.; and a radical secularism bent on exposing the poisonous evils of religion.

This is largely how Hitchens' death will be received: as that of the secular fundamentalist who betrayed his politics in order to back an imperial invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. And that description is no doubt earned. (Though I do wonder about the extent to which his politics were ever so far from where he eventually landed.)

However, Hitchens' death raises a different set of issues, and feelings, for me. See, Hitchens was (is!) one of my favorite writers. Though our politics were (are -- tense is challenging here) opposed, our worldviews disparate, our convictions contradictory, I loved the man's work. Over time I developed that curious feeling for his writing -- and so for him -- that is somehow capable of attending signs on a page or screen: affection. Whether reading his weekly piece in Slate, his longer monthly essay in Vanity Fair, his random book reviews and speeches to fellow atheist believers, or his fascinating memoir, Hitchens' writing brought me what I know he sought to occasion -- namely, pleasure. The literary world for Hitchens was not unlike a vast and unending pleasure machine; if we learn and grow, enculture ourselves in the process, all the better. I'm happy to know that, churning out material even in his final dying weeks, Hitchens the man succeeded in the singular thing he knew his life was preeminently given and ordered to, that which he so evidently loved with an almost religious fervor. Writing was his life, and he died one of the half dozen or so best living essayists in the English-speaking world. A happy thing, to die having fulfilled your call.

The second set of issues raised by Hitchens' death, hinted at by some of my language in the preceding sentences, is his radical atheism. I am a Christian, and a theologian in training. What does it mean to have affection for Hitchens, a man who in no uncertain terms ridiculed any and all who belonged to the Christian faith, as well as the God of that faith? And what does it mean to remember him in his passing, given traditional Christian convictions about postmortem consequences for those without faith?

The first question, though problematic for some, is not for me. As I knew and know him in his writing, Hitchens was and is a friend -- one gained, to be sure, from books and essays and speeches, and so an odd sort of friend, but a friend nonetheless. Therefore there is nothing strange in having affection for him and his work, just as I have had and do and will have friends in life with whom I disagree fundamentally about ultimate matters. I would have been happy for Hitchens to know while living that he had a Christian theologian -- a "true believer"! -- for an admiring reader. I'm sure he would have laughed, and got on with it. Fine by me.

The second question seems to me the more pressing. How do Christians pronounce the blessing Requiescat in pace on behalf of a man like Hitchens without some irony, doubt, or even hypocrisy nagging at their conscience? Not because we do not want him to rest in peace, but because the overwhelming claim of the tradition is that he will not in fact do so.

The challenge is not solved by a resolute universalism. For, as Hitchens was quick to point out to his still-evangelizing Christian readers, would it not be better for him to retain the integrity of his convictions to the end, rather than abandon them out of fear and self-concern? From the Christian vantage point -- this is perhaps the voice of C.S. Lewis -- should we not afford an unbeliever like Hitchens, following God's own lead, the courtesy of his commitments and so not relegate him to heaven's dark corner of unwilling converts?

I don't have a quick fix for these theological problems. Christians trust the God of cross and resurrection to act in exact accordance with the love, mercy, and grace revealed in Christ. In this way -- in a profoundly freeing way -- the fate of the departed is simply and completely out of our hands. It is just not up to us.

Given this position, then, what are we we left with? What is our "stance" in such a situation? I have two suggestions.

The first is an absolutely steadfast faith in the victory of God's love in Christ. Christopher Hitchens was as subject as you or I to the vagaries and consequences of a world filled with sin, violence, falsehood, and death. And the God who created Christopher Hitchens, who upheld him at every moment of his life, who quite literally loved him into being and sustained him in love for more than six decades -- this God came near in Christ and acted once for all to deliver all things from bondage to death. If Christian faith excludes the Christopher Hitchenses of the world from the scope of God's redemption, it might as well give up the game.

My second suggestion is much smaller in focus, a rather homely theological gesture. I shared above of my affection for Hitchens. Though it did not take much effort -- and, of course, required zero cost -- this could be interpreted as a kind of literary love of enemy: Hitchens' distaste with me-and-mine could not win out against my genuine fondness for him. In the face of the rhetorical violence he perpetrated against "religious people," and even the actual violence he commended against those he deemed unworthy of life, I sincerely desired Hitchens' well-being; I wanted him to flourish, to succeed, to know love and health and long life. (I also hoped he would lose his enchantment with the Enlightenment, and open a book of real theology, and reject the myth of redemptive war -- but then, those are forms of loving him, too.)

In other words, my affection for Hitchens the atheist fundamentalist overwhelmed any other feeling or attitude I might have had for him. And I suspect this is something like the stance Christians should take in relation to all the (radically) unbelieving departed; for when I say "rest in peace," I really mean it. Not because I have worked-out ideas about the afterlife, or a backdoor deal with God, or secret hope that Hitchens was "right with the Lord" when he died -- although, to reiterate the first point above, Christian faith should presume and pray for the universal victory of God's love. No, my blessing on the life of Christopher Hitchens, and on his passing, comes not from intellect or doctrine, but from a love that overrules these other instincts. And my sense is that something like this overruling love is closer to where we ought to be than sure knowledge of any person's eternal fate.

A last time, then: Rest in peace, Christopher Hitchens. May the wordy affection your work inspired in this believer be a testament to your lifelong gift, and a lasting irony you would have enjoyed to no end.