Monthly Archives: March 2010

General Introduction
- Congratulations to David Grubbs, teacher of outstanding merit
- What’s on the blog this week?
- Buy our stuff!

Renaissance and Reformation Education
- Religious education
- The move toward State education
- Apprenticeships and grammar school
- Calvin as the father of the Christian college
- The birth of humanism
- A new kind of rhet/comp

The Scottish Model
- Where Calvinism meets the Enlightenment
- Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Is this theory still viable?
- Why Critical Theory hasn’t progressed beyond Smith and Hume
- The Scottish tradition in conservatism

The Rise of the German University
- Cf. “research-one” schools
- A newfound freedom
- The “scientification” of the university
- On specialization
- Philological research and fierce competition
- The elective system

Cardinal Newman Protests
- The Idea of the University
- The university vs. the academy
- The necessity of theology
- Perpetuation of the grand unity of disciplines
- Newman gets apoplectic

The Masters of Suspicion
- Karl Marx turns Hegel upside-down
- Nietzsche’s attack on conventional ethics
- Freud and the depths of the irrational
- The word phallus comes up again

Twentieth Century Conservative Revolt
- C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot dislike analytical philosophy
- The Southern Agrarians object to industrial capitalism
- William F. Buckley gets mad

The Battle Royale Begins
- What’s at stake here?
- Is knowledge objective or subjective?
- Where stands the learner?
- Is the canon liberating or oppressive?
- Why Nathan prefers Marx and the feminists to Foucault

Misuse of Critical Theory and Great Books
- Michial is too much of a humanist
- The hegemony of critical theory
- Melville’s Marxist grasshoppers
- The unified Western tradition and free-market capitalism
- The chivalry of Morte D’Arthur
- The self-subversion of warrior culture
- We take yet another shot at Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf

Why the German Model Breeds Curriculum Battles
- Publish or perish
- Newman’s “periodical culture”
- Readings are easy
- The marginalization of the English department
- Is the “elective culture” to blame?
- The vicious cycle
- The loose canon of Critical Theory

Where Do We Go From Here?
- Hermeneutics of suspicion
- An “canonversation”
- Dialectical tension
- Incorporation of Critical Theory into Great Books
- Critical Theory as one in a line of hermeneutic techniques
- Continuities of criticism and research/teaching

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrett, William. Irrational Man. New York: Anchor, 1958.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Booth, Wayne C. “Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self; or, Does Amnesty Have a Leg to Stand On?” Freedom and Interpretation. Ed. Barbara Johnson. New York: BasicBooks, 1993. 69-101.

Campbell, George. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Ann Arbor, Mich.: U of Michigan P, 2010.

Eliot T.S. Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949.

Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1995.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008.

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte Darthur. New York: Norton, 2003.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1992. Three volumes.

Melville, Herman. Redburn: His First Voyage, Being the Sailor-Boy, Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Muir, Bernard J. (ed.) The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2000.

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1990.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. A Nietzsche Reader. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 1978.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: CreateSpace, 2009.

Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006.

Westphal, Merold. Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism. New York: Fordham UP, 1999.

Nathan Gilmour has (publicly and privately) referred several times to Emergent theology—or, so I’m sure not to oversimplify a complex and varied intellectual movement, to the version of Emergent theology set forward in Brian McLaren’s latest book—as a sort of Neo-Hegelianism.

Nor is he the only critic to make that claim. McLaren’s friend Scot McKnight, writing in the March edition of Christianity Today, remarks that “Brian, though he is thinking more systematically, has fallen for an old school of thought. . . . For me, Brian’s new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it’s not old enough.” (McKnight, it must be noted, connects McLaren not to Hegel directly but to Adolf von Harnack, but the nineteenth-century liberalism represented by von Harnack owes a big enough debt to Hegel that in making such a comparison McKnight is in effect calling McLaren a Neo-Neo-Hegelian.) The Neo-Calvinist Kevin DeYoung, meanwhile, notes that McLaren’s theological forbears are “a lot of process theologians from the last century”—another movement that never could have existed without Hegel’s progressive and evolutionary view of history.

I can neither confirm nor deny these claims; I’ve not yet read A New Kind of Christianity, nor have I read Hegel. My notions of what it means to be a Hegelian have been formed mainly from people like Kierkegaard who write in conscious rebellion against him—hardly the most accurate or charitable way to learn a person’s ideas. I still haven’t read him, but at least I’ve now read a sympathetic reader’s account of him (Walter Kaufmann, in From Shakespeare to Existentialism), and I am going to attempt to delineate what I think Gilmour and others mean when they call McLaren a Neo-Hegelian.

First, a disclaimer. My knowledge of Hegel is, obviously, second-hand and limited. Kaufmann himself would be disgusted at this project; he notes scornfully that of the “analysts, pragmatists, and existentials” who criticize Hegel, “very few indeed have read as many as two of the four books that Hegel published.” He spends more than thirty pages savaging Karl Popper’s chapter on Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a masterpiece, we’re told, of shoddy scholarship that relies not on primary texts but on Scribner’s Hegel Selections.

I am even worse, so I will attempt to keep my criticisms of Hegel himself to a minimum. My perceptions of the Emergent Church’s utilization of Hegelian thought is less ill-informed, but they by no means come from an expert. Input from actual experts in Hegel and/or McLaren would be much appreciated.

I should also note that I have nothing in particular against McLaren, that I read A New Kind of Christian in graduate school when I was struggling with reconciling Christianity and poststructural philosophy and that I found it quite helpful. If I’ve turned away from my interest in such a reconciliation now, it doesn’t imply any particular judgment on those who have not; I think what the Emergent Church is doing has value, even if it’s only as a dialectical tension for more traditionalist forms of Christian theology. So I hope no one reads this as an attack on McLaren or anyone else.

I was surprised how complimentary of Hegel Kaufmann is, given his many connections to existentialism. (His are the canonical translations of Nietzsche and Buber, and he edited the excellent anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.) But he seeks to destroy the myth of Hegel that has built up in academic and popular circles at least since Kierkegaard and Marx revolted against him. He admires Hegel because of Hegel’s attacks on Christianity, frankly, which means that the relatively religiously conservative among us may be biased against Hegel for entirely different reasons after reading Kaufmann’s account.

But the connections to the Emergent Church come rather naturally. Hegel is one of the great proponents of what we today would call political liberalism, positing that “man’s freedom to develop his humanity and to cultivate art, religion and philosophy” is made possible by the State, in fact “are possible only in ‘the State.’” This does not seem to me a ridiculous idea—though it could easily result in a blind liberalism, especially once you throw religion into the mix. (In its rebellion against the “religious right,” the “religious left” strikes me as equally infantile and reactionary.)

One of the major tenets of the Emergent Church—one of its most attractive tenets, in my view—is so-called narrative theology, the belief that (to put it simply) the Bible should not be understood as a series of propositions to be affirmed or denied but rather as a story told by God. McLaren himself notes on his website that narrative theology has much in common with process theology, and he’s right: they both flow forth from Hegelian views of history.

“Hegel,” says Kaufmann, “like Augustine, Lessing, and Kant before him and Comte, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee after him, believed that history has a pattern and made bold to reveal it.” He is separated from these other thinkers mainly by two components of his thought: (1) the idea that history is steadily improving; and (2) his refusal to make real predictions about the future. Kaufmann notes that Hegel lived totally in the present, which in his case meant that he viewed the 6,000 years of recorded history were aiming directly at him, his time, and his thought. (Neither Kaufmann nor I mean this to sound as self-centered as it probably does.)

Narrative and process theology seem also to take this viewpoint, especially once one incorporates progressive revelation into the mix; if the world is not getting steadily better for the narrative or process theologian, we at least know more about God and Christ than any generation that came before us—again, not necessarily in a self-centered way. What else would “narrative” and “process” mean? As the story progresses, there is more story to consider, and if this is indeed a narrative or a process, we’re headed toward a particular end, which God either knows (traditional Christianity) or can make a pretty good guess about (openness theology).

There appears to be a blithe optimism in Hegel’s view of history that I’m not sure I can accept. Says Kaufmann:

His attitude depends on his religious faith that in the long run, somewhere, somehow freedom will and must triumph: that is Hegel’s “historicism.” Those of us who lack his confidence should still note that he does not believe that things are good because they succeed, but that they succeed because they are good. He finds God’s revelation in history.

So do I, obviously, but the revelation I see in history is primarily negative; what seems to triumph on earth is not what is good but what is ugly, unjust, and debased. (Tune into MTV any given night and let me know what you think.) This is the reason behind the traditional Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ—this world is not, in fact, steadily improving, but staying the same or getting worse, and we need a deus ex machina to rescue us. I believe this; the Emergent Church seems to believe it less and less as time goes on. I think there’s a steady Hegelianism behind that disbelief.

McLaren’s alleged Hegelianism may also explain the curious fact that, as many reviewers have noted, his “new kind of Christianity” is in fact not all that new, that it rings strikingly true with traditional nineteenth-century liberalism. But if we believe in progressive revelation, McLaren must claim that his thoughts are new—otherwise, he wouldn’t be a progressive theologian. Hegelianism demands a denial of Hegelianism.

The most interesting section of Kaufmann’s Hegel discussion, for me, was the chapter on “The Young Hegel and Religion,” which examines a series of early essays by Hegel collected under the title Early Theological Writings, a title which Kaufmann dislikes:

Are these early papers really theological? Only insofar as Webster defines one meaning of theology as “the critical, historical, and psychological study of religion and religious ideas.” By the same token, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Nietzsche’s Antichrist, and Freud’s Future of an Illusion could also be called “theological writings”—which would certainly be most misleading.
Hegel’s essays are not antireligious but consistently depreciate theology in any customary sense of that word.

I don’t think it would be fair to call most of the Emergent writings I’ve read “anti-theological theology,” but many of the things Kaufmann reports about Hegel’s religious beliefs seem to apply strikingly to many Emergent thinkers. Allow me to quote Hegel himself: “Objective religion is fides quae creditur, . . . can be systematized, presented in a book or a lecture; subjective religion expresses itself only in feelings and acts. Subjective religion is all that matters.” In this assertion we see the common Emergent distaste for systematic theology—always opposed against narrative theology—which reaches its apex in a pitting of Christ against Paul. (I am not, please note, accusing McLaren or any other individual of such a move.)

Notice also that Hegel’s attack on theology leads to his own “new kind of Christianity”; Kaufmann notes that “he is opposed not only to theology but also to all Christian institutions—not only to the Catholic Church, for which he never developed any sympathy, but also to the Reformation.” Certainly we see a similar opposition in the three-tiered view of history McLaren suggests in A New Kind of Christian—the Catholic Church represents the premodern world; the Reformation represents the modern world; and that “new kind of Christianity” represents some form of Hegel’s “subjective religion,” freed from the strictures of intellectual or systematic theology.

In the end, Hegel’s attack on traditional Christianity comes from the same place as all theological liberalism; for Christianity to be valid in Hegel’s eyes (and in von Harnack’s, Whitehead’s, Schleiermacher’s, Tillich’s, et al), it “must not contain anything that universal human reason does not recognize—no certain or dogmatic claims which transcend the limits of reason, even if their sanction had its origin in heaven itself” (Hegel’s words). In other words, for Christianity to be valid, it must conform to the premises of the Enlightenment—nearly every heresy of the past three hundred years has flowed forth from this pronouncement.

To their credit, I don’t see this attitude in Emergent theologians, which may be where their progressive theology differs from the progressive theology of past movements. The postmodern mind is no great friend to the Enlightenment. With this in mind—and if McKnight and DeYoung are to be believed about A New Kind of Christianity—it may be more correct for McLaren to refer to A New Kind of Hegelianism. From what I’ve been told, it takes an old view and makes minor tweaks to an existing critique of traditional Christianity.

And again, if I’ve got Hegel or McLaren wrong, please let me know. I am open for correction.

A few episodes back, in a wicked jab at the annual NPR radio fundraisers, we jestingly offered to send a listener a Christian Humanist windbreaker. It started as a joke, but it led to some thoughtful discussion about the possibility of offering CHP loot to our loyal audience, and we’ve deemed it a good idea. On one hand, we’re delighted by the idea of generating some love (and face recognition) for the writers and thinkers we admire: theologico-literary fandom is a bit lacking in the swag department, a deficiency demanding rectification. On the other hand, at this point in our lives, we wouldn’t sneer at a little filthy pelf coming our way: we’ve got mouths to feed, some more than others, and our own not least.

Anyway, here’s our debut piece: a coffee mug featuring the iconic visage of Martin Luther, along with the Luther quotation that serves as our standard sign-off phrase. In the months to come, watch for more faces and aphorisms from thinkers and writers the Christian Humanists admire!

The Christian Humanist Store

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 4 April 2010 (Easter Sunday, Year C)

Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 65:17-25 •  Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24 •  1 Corinthians 15:19-26 or Acts 10:34-43 •  John 20:1-18 or Luke 24:1-12

That I can remember, although I’ve likely preached over a hundred sermons, I’ve only preached one on Easter Sunday, and even though it happened almost a decade ago (2001, if I remember right), I still think on it as one of the best I’ve delivered.

Three and a half semesters into my seminary career, I had developed enough vocabulary and had spent enough time with the folks at West Main Street Christian Church that I could preach a sermon that spoke with the help of the scholarly community at the same time that I shaped my message for those people at that moment.  In other words, with my parents and brother in the pews (they were visiting for Easter that year), I really did deliver a sermon I can remember as exemplary for the genre, and that’s saying something for someone who generally finds significant faults with all of his own homiletic work.

Another thing I remember as developing in those years was a tendency in my own theology to overuse the preposition “through.”  I was convinced that one must read the New Testament “through” the Old.  Moreover, I advocated seeing ethics “through” the Christian narrative.  And of course one should read all of the Bible “through” Christ.  Back then, I fear, prepositions were somewhat arbitrary markers in the way I talked about God, nothing like the precise technical sense in which a believer (according to Paul) is a part of the Body of the King and is therefore “in Christ.”  In other words, like many a young grad student, I knew that the intellectual tools were there, and I knew that some of my favorite writers used prepositions in similar ways, and I followed along.

Now, almost a decade later, I’m far more cautious about how I use prepositions, though passages like the Resurrection narrative in Luke remind me that “through” does work when in fact a soul travels from A to C and must spend some time in B to do so.  So I’ll go ahead and say it, cautious as ever that I’m letting my old prepositional sloppiness back into the world: forgivness, in the account of Acts, comes to the nations through Church.

On a surface reading of Acts 10, that much is obvious: Peter quite plainly says that a mysterious election is at play in the spread of the tidings of God’s victory, and the faithfulness that accompanies forgiveness becomes possible because of real human beings’ travels, their delivering real orations in real towns and cities, and the sheer particularity of that election is evident in the fact that many a study Bible produces maps of Paul’s journeys, and those maps are not hard to chart given the emphasis on place in Acts.

In a slightly more philosophical-theological register, that Jesus rarely uses the Greek word ekklesia and never the Latin religio is hard to dispute given the gospel texts, but even harder to dispute is that, when Peter and Paul and Philip travel the Mediterranean rim proclaiming  the victory of God’s anointed King, one of their first impulses was to establish new communities, governed by elders just as the old tribes of Jacob were, dedicated to koinonia and to teaching and to the breaking of bread and to common gatherings.  They might not have dressed like Texas politicians (as do Texas Baptists, in the famous formula of Stan Hauerwas), but in some manner, and following some conventions, they did gather often enough that, by the time the word cirice (the earliest Church-cognate I’m aware of) enters the early English language, it refers as often to the halls erected for common gathering as it does to the people gathered there.

Now I’m not one to say that God must do that or that God can’t do that, but looking at the actual text of Acts and the actual texts of early English Christianity, what strikes me about both contexts is that proclaiming Christ crucified and resurrected is always central, and the forms of common life grow up around the proclamation.  Although “humanity is a political animal” is not at its root a Christian claim (it comes from the text either of Plato or Aristotle, but not from both), nonetheless the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection always brings with it neither simple dissolution of this or that political order nor slavish adherence to tribe or synagogue or Athenian ekklesia but, to paraphrase Isaiah 65, a community in which God creates Jerusalem to be a joy.

By no means would I minimize the pain and sorrow that have come at the hands of this or that iteration of Church through the ages.  By no means will I deny that Church is not only an outgrowth of divine forgiveness or the means by which hear about divine forgiveness but also the place where God would show the world what love looks like.  Such is the complexity that arises when the Creator of Heaven and Earth puts treasure in earthen vessels.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

And so he did: Bilbo Baggins, that is. However, the opening sentence of Tolkien’s story could just as easily describe another hobbit–a girl hobbit, who is now referred to be the name “Flo”. Unlike Bilbo’s hole, Flo’s hole was indeed nasty, dirty, and wet–a muddy cave on the little island called Flores. And, also unlike Bilbo, Flo was real.

The story is too big to recount fully here, so I’ll hit the high points. In 2003, a band of intrepid scientists, digging about on the island of Flores in Indonesia, discovered something they hadn’t been looking for: the skeleton of what appeared to be an adult human, except that it was only about three feet tall. The stature of the skeleton was not terribly unusual–genetic dwarfism can produce people of that scale–but the size of the skull was very unusual: it was the size of a grapefruit and it possessed physical features very unlike human skulls today, especially in the jaw and the brow region.

The researchers concluded that this was a new kind of human, not simply a deformed, but otherwise ordinary, human. They named it after the island on which it was discovered–Homo Floresiensis–and dubbed the single complete specimen “Flo”. However, since many of the scientists were New Zealanders, the countrymen of Peter Jackson, the tiny skeleton reminded them of another cultural phenomenon, and so Homo Floresiensis acquired the nickname “Hobbit”.

Of course, the scientists still argue about whether Homo Floresiensis was really a separate breed of human or just an anomaly: skeptics cite such genetic defects as dwarfism and microcephaly as possible causes for Flo’s stature and proportions. (Also there was bad blood between the Indonesian scientists and the New Zealanders, which further complicated research.) However, the arguments supporting the idea of Homo Floresiensis as a distinct type of human seems dominant at the moment. They were not simply apes: though their brains were on a smaller scale than ours, their brain structures associated with higher level cognition were much like ours in size and shape (“The Brain of LB1″). The caves Flo was found in also contained stone tools scaled to her size and the remains of butchered animals, both signs of higher order (i.e. human) intelligence. (This is the most recent research on the subject, and the article that returned my thinking to the matter of hobbits.)

So, it seems as if there was, at least at one time and in one place, a race of people roughly half our size. This excites me. If little people were in Indonesia, where else might they have been? Were they, perhaps, the original brownies, huldufolk, and menehune? I don’t know, given that there’s been no physical evidence of a distinct group of little people anywhere else, but the notion seems more possible now than it did ten years ago.

(Not that the possibility has never been considered: it was a common theory amongst Victorian folklorists and anthropologists that British fairy lore stemmed from dim memories of a more primitive race that once inhabited the British Isles: a race notable for its small stature relative to that of the invaders. For a scholarly take on this, consult Silver’s Strange and Secret People: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, especially the chapter on “Little Goblin Men.” For a literary imagining of such things, read Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid.)

I must confess, however, that the possibility of hobbits also stirs anxiety in me. What sort of folk were they? Were they our kind of people? In short, were they human in the senses I see myself as human, not only biologically but also theologically? I don’t think this is a question science can answer. Certainly they can comment on the size and shape of brain structures–and they have–but they cannot find a soul in those old bones, anymore than they can find one in a living brain. All we are left with are the physical remains of a creature very like us and very unlike us. Hobbits live in the Uncanny Valley, always a distressing place to visit.

Sadly, I can’t offer answers on this subject. Still, I’m hardly the first to ask it, and perhaps steering our readers to the answer of a wiser man than myself is better, anyway. So, how did Augustine handle this question?

Chapter 8.— Whether Certain Monstrous Races of Men are Derived from the Stock of Adam or Noah’s Sons.

It is also asked whether we are to believe that certain monstrous races of men, spoken of in secular history,  have sprung from Noah’s sons, or rather, I should say, from that one man from whom they themselves were descended. For it is reported that some have one eye in the middle of the forehead; some, feet turned backwards from the heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth: others are said to have no mouth, and to breathe only through the nostrils; others are but a cubit high, and are therefore called by the Greeks “Pigmies:”  they say that in some places the women conceive in their fifth year, and do not live beyond their eighth. So, too, they tell of a race who have two feet but only one leg, and are of marvellous swiftness, though they do not bend the knee: they are called Skiopodes, because in the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves with their feet. Others are said to have no head, and their eyes in their shoulders; and other human or quasi-human races are depicted in mosaic in the harbor esplanade of Carthage, on the faith of histories of rarities. What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men? But we are not bound to believe all we hear of these monstrosities. But whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast. We can distinguish the common human nature from that which is peculiar, and therefore wonderful. (CoG XVI.8)

So, there you have it: Homo Floresiensis was mortal–the bones prove it–as well as rational, so far as we can tell from the skull and tools. Ergo, hobbits are people, too! (But so are dog-headed men, and monopods.)

Perhaps not the most satisfying answer, really, but Augustine’s logic can be readily connected to his theology. The marks of humanity are mortality and rationality, thus distinguishing humans from angels (immortal and rational) and beasts (mortal and not rational). Why are humans rational? Because we were made in the image of God: “God, then, made man in His own image. For He created for him a soul endowed with reason and intelligence, so that he might excel all the creatures of earth, air, and sea, which were not so gifted” (CoG XII.23). Rationality is, therefore, what distinguishes the human from the animal. Why are humans mortal? Because, claims Augustine, death is penal, and all who are of Adam’s race die:

For God had not made man like the angels, in such a condition that, even though they had sinned, they could none the more die. He had so made them, that if they discharged the obligations of obedience, an angelic immortality and a blessed eternity might ensue, without the intervention of death; but if they disobeyed, death should be visited on them with just sentence. (CoG XIII.1)

Note that for Augustine, humanity and Adam’s lineage are an identical set, two ways of saying the same thing. Those who read Genesis differently from Augustine, and those who don’t consult Genesis at all, will certainly object to the equivalence of hominids with the Adamic lineage. Still, I think Augustine’s definition of humanity is worth examining, because it isn’t biological, but in fact an interesting blending of the metaphysical and the experiential. The quiddity of the human is found not in the number and orientation of one’s limbs and organs, but in a particular relationship to time and eternity, to matter and spirit, to entropy and order. To live at the nexus of those contraries is what it is to be human.

Apparently, hobbits lived at that nexus with us, though we may have forgotten them,  or never even knew them.  Which leads me to a concluding question, to which I also lack an answer: will we meet hobbits in Heaven? I certainly hope so!

Another Gilmour-less episode. It may be until tomorrow before it gets added to iTunes, etc. I’m sure you’ll recognize the theme music.

General Introduction
- No Nathan
- What’s on the blog?

Our Emotionally Scarring Experiences
- The Shining haunts Michial’s dreams
- Slasher movies
- Beetlejuice and a man in a yellow wolf suit
- Toy monkeys
- Why dolls are so scary
- FREDDY KREUGER!!!!

Ancient Horror
- What Nathan was going to talk about
- Monsters vs. monster-slayers
- Were these supposed to be scary?
- Lilith
- Scandinavian sagas
- Skipping Renaissance drama

English Gothic
- Horace Walpole
- A list of gothic conventions

American Gothic
- Charles Brockden Brown
- Ditching the castle
- Why Wieland is a failure
- Pseudo-science in Poe and Hawthorne
- The difference between Hawthorne and Poe
- “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the folk legend

Frankenstein and Dracula
- David clarifies
- Scientific anxiety
- Does Frankenstein still resonate with us?
- Dracula and the Victorian nightmare of devolution
- Why Dracula is cooler than Edward Cullen
- Vampiric sexuality

20^th-Century Horror and “Weird Fiction”
- Kafka as pseudo-horror
- Crazy worlds and paranoia
- H.P. Lovecraft
- Existential horror
- “Dover Beach” as horror poem

Movies and Television
- What film does that literature can’t do
- The amorphous and the concrete
- The Twilight Zone
- The X-Files and its real-world grounding
- Jaws as Enuma Elish
- Michial gets very graphic

Why Do We Love Horror?
- Katharsis
- Making anxiety into fear
- Facing your fear
- Corruption of childhood

The Christian Response
- A spirit of fear?
- Didactic purposes
- The Christian and torture porn
- Analyzing the Pig People

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Poems of Matthew Arnold. Boston: Adamant Media, 2005.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Kent, Oh.: Kent State UP, 1987.

—. Wieland; or, the Transformation, Together with Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1926.

Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas. Trans. Gwyn Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of the History of Creation. Trans. L.W. King. New York: FQ Classics, 2007.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birthmark.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 147-164.

—. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Norton, 1978.

—. “Rappacini’s Daughter.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 179-209.

Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” New York: Signet, 1981. 329-360.

Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

—. “In the Penal Colony.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 140-167.

—. “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 89-139.

King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Pocket, 2002.

Lovecraft, H.P. Tales. New York: Library of America, 2005.

Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 597-606.

—. “The Imp of the Perverse.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 826-832.

—. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 555-559.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

I have followed the battle over Texan history textbooks with less passion than the topic probably deserves, partly because of some recent hitches in my own education and partly because of my general weariness with the infantile partisan bickering of which this controversy is a symptom. But I have read some articles and listened to some conversations on the subject, and am, I suppose, as qualified as anyone to offer an opinion. (As far as other opinions, I cannot recommend Dan Carlin’s latest podcast, which deals heavily with history education, strongly enough; and the degree to which my thoughts echo his is a reflection not of plagiarism but of a lesser mind thinking like a great one.)

• The notion of “liberal” and “conservative” history is and is not a valid one, depending on what you mean by “history” Things, to say it frankly, happened; in many cases, we cannot deny what happened, however much our political worldview would like us to do so. Thus: The United States government made treaties with several Indian nations, and when it became advantageous for them to do so, the powers-that-be welshed on the deal. Thousands of Indians were killed; thousands more were displaced from their ancestral lands. These facts (the non-historian said) are not up for debate. A historian’s fundamental conservatism or liberalism comes in the interpretation of such facts, and in the inclusion of more disputed histories.

• The dumbest possible route to presenting people–adults, high-school students or even eight-year-olds–with your political philosophy is to leave out huge chunks of the facts. The Texas controversy is full of examples, but the most notable and horrifying is the exclusion of Thomas Jefferson from the proposed textbooks, on the grounds that he advocated the separation of church and state (and his general status as a counterexample to the premise that the United States was at the time of the Revolution a Christian nation). Jefferson appears on the money, folks; do you think high schoolers are so stoned they won’t notice? (Uh…let me rephrase that.)

• However much I may disagree with the premise that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation” in the sense suggested by Jerry Falwell, et al, if the textbooks these conservatives were proposing took account of the facts and then presented their political philosophy, I could probably sign off on them as intellectually honest, at least. As things stand, the proposed textbooks make as much sense as the Southern textbooks from half a century ago, which (supposedly) claimed that Reconstruction was mere Northern oppression without noting the things white Southerners did to prompt such aggression. (To the degree that modern books focus solely on the latter and ignore Northern abuses, they are also intellectually dishonest.)

• What disturbs me most about this situation is the it is the members of the Texas Board of Education who are deciding what goes into these textbooks. No one on the Board of Education seems to have even the slightest qualification to decide on history standards. Nor do I, though I am halfway to a PhD in American literature and thus have probably had more academic training than the “history buff” dentist on the Board. But of course I am not trying to write a history textbook. Bring in some actual historians, people; Victor Davis Hansen probably agrees with your politics and can bring some credibility to your side of the debate.

Don’t expect this ugly and asinine debate to go away, incidentally. Once this textbook has been written, we will hear about more, as the masses get angrier and more polarized, spurred on by demagogues like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann. The debate isn’t over education at all. Make no mistake, few people on either side care even a whit about education. It’s about ideology, which is the polar opposite of education, and ideology neither listens, learns, nor changes.

I invite, by the way, our readers with actual training in history to weigh in on this topic–I am very interested in what an informed opinion has to say.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 28 March 2010 (Liturgy of Palms, Year C)

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29 •  Luke 19:28-40

I really like that, in this relatively brief story in today’s Gospel readings, common fare for those who observe Palm Sunday every year, those who oppose Jesus and those who support Jesus are at the same time getting what’s going on entirely right and missing the point entirely.  When preachers get to preaching on this passage, more often than not the focus is the punchline, when Jesus tells his opponents that if the people don’t cry out, the very rocks will.  It’s a great little triumphal note at the expense of the Pharisees, who in many modern Christians’ imaginations are some sort of cross between Ben Jonson’s Puritans and that traffic cop who always seems to turn up when you’re in a hurry and aren’t doing anyone any harm, after all.  With the bad guys in that role, the image is something like the scene (that used to appear in music videos as I remember them, though my memory might be skewed) of the wild rock ‘n roll party erupting against the protests of the grumpy librarian or the uptight school teacher.  (I’m quite certain both of those stock repressors appeared in Twisted Sister videos at some point.)

As fun as that image is, the Pharisees, of course, were a more complex lot.  Far from being the establishment of the day, they were among the most threatening groups in the eyes of the Roman Empire, and in the generation after Christ ascended a faction of theirs would be among the most ardent supporters of armed revolt against Rome.  (The faction that called for nonviolent responses lived to see another couple millennia and eventually became the Rabbis we know today.)  One could easily imagine the Pharisees in the Jerusalem crowd that day as being among the pacifist faction, beseeching Jesus to quiet this open rebellion lest the Roman army come marching in to put it down.  And to be fair to the Pharisees (not something that many preachers spend much time doing, I realize), in the next scene Jesus does (in the synoptics at least) condemn the Jerusalem Temple precisely for being a den of lestai (a word that the Jewish/Roman historian Josephus uses to name the armed robbers who resisted Rome in the Jewish Wars of the day).  So insofar as they realized that armed rebellion would end badly for Jerusalem, they were precisely right.

But this moment, between the approach to the city and the entry into the Temple, Jesus surprises me every time, rebuking the Pharisees indirectly and claiming that the shouts of praise are something approaching inevitable.  That the people think that armed rebellion is going to give them the legendary Davidic age that they’d spent their youths dreaming about is entirely wrong, but that they see something grand coming into Jerusalem is entirely right.  And the Pharisees’ fears of mob revolt is right on the money, but their identification of Jesus with simple mob revolt is entirely off target.

Such complexity falls on deaf ears, I think, when we Christians think of passages like Psalm 118 as “predictions” that “come true” in the day of Jesus.  To be sure, Matthew often writes of Scriptures’ being fulfilled, but that image is a different one from the simple toggle switch that either falls on “fact” or “not-fact.”  To fulfill means that there was something there already that becomes full, not merely verified, that what generations of Israelites and Jews heard in their Temple and their Synagogues was not some bet placed on a football game that either paid off or didn’t but the very fabric of their imaginations, something that likely resonated in scores of ways in the days of the early Roman Empire (and whose harmonies come to us in at least two very different bodies of literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament).  There were would-be Messiahs before Jesus, and there would be more to come.  To blame these folks for “not seeing” that Jesus was the toggle switch flipped is to miss the whole idea of fulfillment and to point a self-righteous finger where perhaps more appropriate would be a kind of Aristotelian fear and pity, wondering whether we might be the ones next to read wrong.

As Jesus approaches, the response that the universe, whether humanity or rockiness, issues forth is praise.  Such is only natural.  What takes grace is to stick around when Thursday night comes.

For a variety of reasons—beyond and in my control—I don’t have the time to devote the space to this topic that it deserves, but I should say something, anyway.

You probably can’t tell it from my mediocre editing and mixing of the podcast bumper music, but I was going to be an audio engineer and record producer. Not that I took any classes or attended a college that offered them—or even tried to get an internship at a recording studio. But I listened to a lot of music (more in terms of time than I do now, but less in terms of variety), and more significant, I read a lot of liner notes. In the days before All Music and Wikipedia did it for you, I kept a series of Microsoft Word documents listing what each person did for every record. I loved music and spent hours imagining that I, too, would be allowed to create it.

My dream wasn’t really to be a touring musician—that lifestyle stopped appealing to me once I learned what it was really like, and I’ve never really cared for the live rock concert, with its masses of sweaty humanity. Rather, I dreamed of owning and operating a recording studio, where I would create—secondhand—some of the greatest albums of my time.

I listened almost exclusively to Christian rock from ages fourteen to eighteen. My parents didn’t have a rule, as I’ve learned so many evangelical parents do—in fact, I suspect my dad was really confused by this decision, though he did his best to learn to appreciate the music I liked it. I realized even at fourteen that most of what got shot down the Christian-music pipeline was garbage—in fact, my willingness to draw very clear lines in the sand and scream when anyone spoke over them was one factor that led to my estrangement from my youth group a few years down the line—so I had to look hard and cling harder to the bands I liked. My process of discovery is a matter for another essay; I’m going somewhere much more specific here.

I learned quickly that an overwhelming majority of quality Christian rock music came out of two studios. There was Neverland Studios, in Nashville—in which case the record was usually produced and engineered by Steve Hindalong, the drummer for the venerable Christian dream-pop group The Choir. And then there was The Green Room in Huntington Beach, California, owned and operated by a guy who called himself Gene Eugene and whom I knew because he was the lead singer of Adam Again (hands down the funkiest rock band Christian music ever had) and one of the four guys responsible for country-rock “supergroup” the Lost Dogs, along with Derri Daughtery (like Hindalong, a member of The Choir), Mike Roe (The 77’s), and Terry Taylor (Daniel Amos and The Swirling Eddies).

I had no doubt these were the four most talented musicians in the world; and mostly I still hold something close to that opinion, though I have cooled on The Choir as time has gone on. Taylor was always my favorite, but Gene seemed like he was the one who was really in charge, the man behind the curtain.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I preferred the “Gene Eugene sound” to the one coming out of Neverland. (I can’t be the only person ever to have gotten into arguments about this.) Gene’s records were smooth and rich; every detail of every instrument always sounded crystalline, and when Terry Taylor produced the records—he and Gene often worked together—the right elements were always in the exact right place. Hindalong always seemed to record live to me, a technique I don’t particularly care for, as I’ve always been more interested in the illusion of an actual band. Call Hindalong “alternative” and Gene “rock,” if you want—they both crossed that line more than once—but I had my preference.

As I got into the journalism side of the music industry, I began meeting people who had actually visited The Green Room, which, I learned, was nothing more than a residential ranch-style house in a suburb of L.A. Gene lived and worked there. I was sixteen, I think, when I learned this, and it blew my mind. My future was clearly set out before me, and I began walking around my parents’ neighborhood, scoping out houses which I could gut and turn into recording studios.

Then, on March 20, 2000, I came home from school and opened my email folder to find a series of emails from the 77s and Daniel Amos listserves. The subject header was “The Death of Gene Eugene.” Gene, it turned, had died overnight of an aneurysm—his business partner, Anna Cardenas, had found him the next morning, still in his engineering chair in The Green Room. The Green Room was triple booked, we had learned just a few days earlier, when Gene sent an email to his own listserve to counter complaints that Adam Again hadn’t released an album in five years. He didn’t have time to record for himself; he didn’t have time to read or watch TV or use his season Dodgers tickets.

Gene Eugene, it seems, worked himself to death for Christian music, which mostly never knew him and gave him nothing like the tributes it gave to Rich Mullins after his death. There were no Dove Awards, no special issue of CCM Magazine—there was just an email from Mike Roe (“What Can You Say?” said the title, “The Impossible Happens,” a reference to Gene’s best song, “River on Fire”) and a rather lackluster Adam Again tribute at Cornerstone that year.

That was ten years ago tomorrow. Tooth & Nail Records found a new in-house engineer (Aaron Sprinkle of Poor Old Lu, who is far too glossy for my taste), and the Lost Dogs soldiered on without him, though I haven’t liked their records as much without Gene’s plaintive vocals on them. I don’t have much to add, I guess, because I can no longer access the part of myself that connected so strongly to this music and to this lifestyle I imagined for a man who engineered himself right into an aneurysm at 39. I can only provide the following links to his music and some songs about him. Highly recommended.

The video for “River on Fire,” put together after Gene’s death.
Another posthumous video tribute, with the last song Gene ever sang on a record.
“Stone,” from Adam Again’s last album.
Lost Dogs cover Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will.” Gene has the fourth part.
Adam Again at their funkiest.
Finally, Adam Again’s “Dig,” from which I took the title of this post.

Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks
By Dwight J. Friesen
192 pp. Baker. $14.99.

I think I have a new favorite Emergent writer, or at least someone to join Scot McKnight at the top of my list.  Although I have some concerns with some moves that this book makes (which is nothing new for my reviews, no?), I came away from this book with some new ideas to contemplate, some mental tools to try out on the relationships that constitute human existence, and a sense that I’d found someone who is asking the same sorts of questions that I’m asking but who has turned to different intellectual traditions to start forming answers.

Networks and the Basics of the Book

Friesen takes his vocabularies of networks, nodes, connections, and clusters from network theory, that hybrid of computer science and sociology that begins to some extent with existentialist philosophy and picks up serious steam as computer networks become one of the primary media and in some cases the main medium through which human beings in the developed world relate to one another. The main features of network thinking that set it apart from some of its rivals and predecessors are a focus on connection rather than being-in-itself, an insistence that any thing’s or person’s being is nothing less than the sum of her or his or its connections to other entities in the world; and a more focused attention on the ways in which human relationships within those networks differ from one another, this casual acquaintance neither flattened out to be equal with that intimate friendship nor one set in hierarchical preference over another, except in the thick description of this or that “cluster” moment.  (I’ll write a bit more about clusters, one of my favorite parts of the book, later.)

The bad news here is that Friesen falls to the temptation so common to these sorts of books, namely to divide the course of Western history into three segments called pre-modern, modern, and postmodern, and as with most such attempts to chop history into chunks defined by the current power structures, it lacks nuance.  The good news is that he does provide a selection of excerpts from thinkers as diverse as George Bernard Shaw, John Muir, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and the Dalai Lama, each of which highlights the interconnectedness of reality and the sense in which no thing in itself means anything exclusively in itself.  (As someone who studies and teaches 17th-century literature I was quite disappointed that John Donne’s “Meditation XVII” did not feature in the list, but I don’t expect seminary professors outside of the church history department to pay too much mind to folks before Hegel.)  Moreover, he provides a nice argument against reductionist anti-Institutionalism, comparing it to Gnosticism’s nay-saying to embodied community (106).

Beyond those good things, Friesen also holds his own importance lightly, making fun of himself and his neologisims at one point and throughout the book insisting that whatever importance he holds is because of, yes, the good people with whom he’s connected over his years.  He relates this conception of his place in the world as he explicates what he calls “the parable of Google” (83), a vision of authority within the Church that is “revealed, not held” (115), a conception that makes me worry, but I’ll get to that later.

Christ-Commons and Christ-Cluster

By far the most interesting set of ideas in the book (they’re interconnected, dig?) are what Friesen calls Christ-Commons and Christ-Cluster, and I do think that this constellation of relationships is as fine a way as I’ve seen to cut some of the Gordian knots that arise when folks like me (a Deacon in a relatively conservative Christian Churches congregation) and folks like many of my friends (who are parts of various Emergent cohorts, house churches, and other “EC” aggregations) run into when we talk ecclesiolgy.  Rather than imagining such things as opposing entities of similar kind, Friesen locates them relative to each other as parts of a larger body of experience.

Christ-Commons refers to sustained traditions in Friesen’s picture of things.  A venerable institution like the Catholic Church, an intellectual movement like Realism (in the medieval sense) or Calvinism, an Emergent cohort, and an evangelical megachurch’s small group all stand as Christ-Commons, relatively stable groups of connections that exist to serve a larger end but nonetheless exert some energy to sustain themselves.  Friesen points to the genuine human goods like stability, responsibility, and patience that come from belonging to such while noting that they’re not the sum total of human experience, much less the Christian experience.

Christ-Clusters, on the other hand, are momentary happenings, things like the ad hoc outpourings of support that happen in the face of disaster and the seemingly spontaneous collaborations that often arise when online acquaintances put their heads together and launch into grand conversations about this or that topic.  Friesen notes that much of what Paul writes about the movement of the Spirit in the letters to the Corinthians fits this pattern better than it does the more fixed organizations that he calls Christ-Commons, and he notes that Christ-Commons are helpful to facilitating Christ-Clusters precisely insofar as they encourage strong, intimate connections and less involved acquaintance among people with a common cause.  The ad hoc character of a cluster, in other words, can derive great strength from prior and intentional communities that arise from the commons.

What causes frustration and sometimes even enmity, Friesen suggests, is that when some folks try to perpetuate those momentary and Spirit-initiated Christ-Cluster moments, they either remain blind to or become resentful of the fact that any network node that persists is going to become a Commons, losing the character of the Cluster when the moment that calls the Cluster into being has passed.  In the case of blindness, the frustration comes from an anti-institutionalism simultaneous with the inevitable solidification of institution, and in the case of resentment, it’s likely to result in posts decrying “the death of Emergent” every three months or so.

Perhaps this relationship was more than obvious to everyone except for me, but since I took this book on, I’ve been thinking differently about relationships between the decline of mainline Protestantism, the rise and self-doubt that I’ve seen in Emergent, the pains that I’ve seen firsthand as evangelical congregations don’t keep up with the megachurch Joneses, and an array of other phenomena.

Friesen Exacerbates My Hangups with Trinity and Church

I honestly don’t know whether to attribute my first worry to my own theological timidity or to genuine problems with the book, but I’m almost certain that the second problem follows from the first.

As I noted in a post last week about the way that I do theology as someone who does more preaching than theological-book-publishing, I tend to make divine revelation the starting point for theological reflection, and more often than not, the form and content of that revelation is enough to fill the time generally designated for a homily, so I generally don’t go much farther.  I certainly confess the Trinity, but I’ve studied just enough Church history that I suspect that any possible articulation of the nature of the Trinity beyond “Trinity?  Yep.” is at least somewhat likely to fall into some council’s or theologian’s catalogue of heresies.  Please understand that I don’t begrudge anyone else’s attempts to articulate the real nature of the ontological Trinity; I’d just prefer to stay safely on the economic side.

With that disposition in place, readers can certainly understand my unease when Friesen, establishing good reasons for using network theory in theology, refers to the Spirit as “the perichoretic relationship of the Father and the Son” (57, italics original).  The implication with which Friesen wants to run is that “We is not simply a statement of relationship but actually suggests our relationships themselves are living beings reflective of the Triune God” (57-58).  Friesen is duly careful not to elevate the status of human relationships to ontological equality with a Person of the Trinity, but the move still troubles me for a couple reasons.  For one, there’s the third-man question that plagues Plato: if the Spirit is the relationship between the Father and the Son, then what or whom is Jesus promising to send exactly in the gospel of John, and what would be the name for the relationship between the Son and the relationship-between-the-Father-and-the-Son?  And once we named that, would there be another name for the relationship between the Son and the relationship-between-the-Son-and-the-relationship-between-the-Father-and-the-Son?  Certainly I don’t need to go farther than that: even if the assertion is compelling aesthetically, it makes no sense philosophically.  My second hangup is that I’ve had people who actually do Trinitarian theology insist that the diminution of any Person of the Trinity from full Personhood is a bad thing, and although I’m not exactly sure what Personhood is, this move seems to diminish it.

All that said, remember that this criticism is from the cowardly lion who runs from his own tail when faced with the task of talking intelligently about the Trinity.

The implications of this picture of Trinity, of course, have directly to do with ecclesiology.  If the Person of the Trinity is a relationship between prior personalities, it only makes sense for the authority granted by that Person to arise not from that person’s mysterious choosing of this person to heal and that one to speak in the tongues of angels and a third to exercise the office of teaching; on the contrary, as I noted before, in Friesen’s vision of the life of the Church, “Authority is revealed, not held” (115).  I recognize that such a vision of the work of the Spirit is not prima facie incompatible with the text of Paul, but it would, I imagine, make certain sustained activities like oversight (what episkopoi do) or shepherding (what presbyteroi do) or teaching (what didaskoloi do) rather difficult.  In Friesen’s vision, like others I’ve seen, the relatively chaotic gifting of the gospel of John and the letters to the Corinthians seem to take pride of place from the more orderly systems of the letters to Timothy and Titus.  I’m not saying that I’ve ever seen an ecclesiology that balances those two in a way that compels everybody, but it is a concern that concerns me.

One more bit of philosophical trouble I had with the book has to do with its use of the words order and chaos.  Friesen admits that he borrows his usage not from philosophical but from corporate-managerial vocabularies, but it still troubles me that he wrote a sentence (fragment) like “A time for chaos and a time for order” (96).  If there is a time proper to one thing and a time proper to another thing, then it’s not chaos.  I realize that this is a quibble, that a simple change from “order and chaos” to “conservation and innovation” or even “tradition and the individual talent” would easily enough make his point read more valid, but I figured I should note this and say as a larger point that part of Friesen’s charm, that he shifts so effortlessly from one vocabulary to another, is also a source of some fuzziness.  For readers alright with a bit of fuzziness, that should not be too much of a problem.

Worth a Look

Overall, although at the end of the day I’m still uncomfortable with its vision of the Trinity and the resulting ecclesiology that flows from it, I think that Thy Kingdom Connected stands as a worthwhile book for contemplating in new terms some of the questions that have really troubled the Church in my own generation, and as with most books, I think that someone doing a different sort of Trinitarian theology (in other words, someone skirting another set of heresies) could easily enough adapt that understanding to Friesen’s philosophical and sociological insights.  This is a book worth a look for a goodly range of readers, and I’m glad that Mike Morell sent it my way.