My parents loved the soil, the earth, the outside, and in their garden I saw the freedom they felt with it. The garden announced to them and the world that they were absolutely free to be themselves.
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination. Yale: 2010. p.2
Less a Manifesto than a collection of essays, and as with all collections, a mix of the good and the “eh”.
The great theme is the focus on the local, the particular, the personal/relational as the proper path to the good, the beautiful, and the true. The contributing authors come from a variety of perspectives, new (southern) agrarian, Catholic traditionalists, and Midwest regionalists; their perspective is not unified nor does it articulate a unified policy. Rather, they are better read as a set of refractions on the theme, a series of approaches.
Among the more pleasurable essays: Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, Angels (and Others); Jason Peters’ The Orphans of Success and the Longing for Home; John Cuddeback’s Killing the Animals We Eat; Philip Bess, Chicago 2109: The Metropolitan Region as Agrarian-Urban Unit; Christine Rosen, Technology, Mobility and Community; and D.G. Hart’s reprise of his book, Defining Conservatism Down (although Hart’s suggestion that Evangelicals must become more politically conservative is surely mistaken in an age of national populism).
Being a collection of often conservative writers, political thinking generally lapses to the cranky Right rather than giving localism its proper political weight. Mass ideas and their conformity are no less a problem for the Right than a creature of the Left. In an era of Trump, these essays especially needed to be sharper.
As may be expected in any collection, certain voices get left out. The agrarian bent, for instance, misses the very real place-making perspective of Midwest writers, a good example being David Giffels’ The Hardway on Purpose about life in Akron. Likewise, while the agrarian theme can celebrate the hardwork of life in the country as a good, it skips by the other possible set of reflections on craft, such as Matthew Crawford’s Shopcraft as Soulcraft. Also going missing are the role of minorities and of their own pride of place, of community and the realization of local goods — a stance that informs implicitly the protests against gentrification.
Finally, one notes that much of the longing for places one can invest lives in, return to; places that are human scaled and so shape the soul. These are the places that still exist, especially in the Midwest. Especially in Michigan.
Mark Mitchell, Jason Peters ed. Localism in the Mass Age: a front porch republic manifesto. Eugene OR:Wipf and Stock. 2018.
Emma Green takes a look at the changing face of (Evangelical) Christian philanthropy over at The Atlantic. On one hand the shift from funding the cultural wars is welcome — it is hard to see how this conflict has especially promoted a Christian sensibility in culture. (Everything is given away with Donald Trump). Then again, will the funding build institutions? This gets to the heart of the issue, whether programs (and followers) exist, and if they do not, can the money then be a catalyst for a new identity.
this seems to be the greatest shift in how rich evangelicals are thinking about their influence at a moment of juncture for their church: At least some of them seem more interested in living out their faith than in asserting an agenda onto American culture. “One of our deeper hopes … would be that praxis, which means faith in action, would be the reputation of the church over a long term—not in the brand, but in posture,” said Dave Blanchard, who helped found Praxis along with (Josh) Kwan. “That we would be more known for redemptive action than political position.”
Can money, in short step into the place where the church has historically done its work. Without a change there in the community, the new voice is likely to get lost.
Emma Green, “Evangelical Mega-donors Are Rethinking Money in Politics.” The Atlantic. Jan 2 2019.
Ron Charles at the Washington Post has a reconsideration of Salinger, and explores the distance we as a society have come. The old notion of WASP prep school boy as representative of a type has left the room. We fill it with something else. But Salinger and Holden have left their mark.
Holden is Patient Zero for generations infected by his misanthropy. We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision.
We have met the phonies and they are us
Ron Charles, “J.D. Salinger at 100: Is ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ still relevant?” The Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2018.
An essay from Jennifer Holberg on premature death has me thinking about watery death as a political act. What is lost always is the potential, our own Lycidas, but one unmourned because unknown. Memory guards the heart.
Yet once more, O ye laurels and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.“Lycidas”, John Milton.
Holberg, J. “Wildbells Ringing Loud in 2019.” Reformed Journal: The Twelve.
Creation is part of Christian conviction, yet for the most part Christians continue to struggle with how to express engagement. On other social movements there is often an underlying Christian template of justice or redemption that can sustain political conversation, however on green issues and climate issues there is a missing story.
Of course, it’s not for want of trying. Our Christian language defaults to the celebration of the variety of creation, so Ps 148:
7Praise the Lord from the earth,
you sea monsters and all deeps,
8 fire and hail, snow and frost,
stormy wind fulfilling his command!
9 Mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars!
10 Wild animals and all cattle,
creeping things and flying birds!
This missing internal voice has two consequences: first, it defaults to external frameworks, leaving Christian voices more as allies rather than as contributors to the discussion. Second, there is an internal turn to focus on Creation, ante-Redemption. This recovers a voice but leaves the larger story of God’s intervention and rescue in Jesus Christ as a minor part.
Conservative voices have been reluctant to pick up the green or climate change issues, since at best it seems little more than politics, and at worst a surrender to a sort of panentheism.
Out of all this, there may be one more item to bring to mind. In an era of climate change, and that often of a disastrous nature, the Christian may bring another, more pertinent voice: that of tragedy. With the change and its destruction comes the grief, the sense of loss: how does one stand before catastrophe? How does one hope? Here, perhaps is where the Christian tongue may be released, not in a language of celebration or of politics, but of lament, of knowing that loss is not the final word.
It began with Scott Culpepper attacking the American syncretism of “Christianity”. An important discussion but one that left out a key detail. As Cyprian noted, “one cannot have God as Father who does not have the Church as mother.” Christianity, however understood, must come with an ecclesial structure; the problem with American syncretists may not be their thinking but their lack of groundedness in the Church.
Enter reader RLG who complains
It’s the church that has gotten Christianity into so much trouble, from the beginning to the present. The Jewish mentality was, you weren’t a true Jew unless you belonged to the Jewish community. And Jesus, certainly, did not support such a concept. How many verses can we quote that suggests that a Christian believe and be a member of the church and he/she will be saved? How many can we quote that suggests, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved? It’s kinda like saying, you need a marriage certificate to really be married.
Contrary to this, the question is whether we can live separately, apart from each other; we are constituted as social beings. Individual commitment stands as part of an ongoing life of the community. Not only are we linked to each other in the present, but we are those who also remember; memory and imagination connects us across time. So we read a Calvin, an Aquinas, an Augustine in part as our contemporary even as we understand them to be distant — this is what empathy, imagination and memory produce. And if we’re honest, we also understand how our current life has been shaped by this remembered past.
Christianity then is not some sort of free-floating, perhaps Kantian entity, but an embodied reality. We start there.
Here’s where Scot is correct. The Christianity is always deeply permeated by cultural assumptions. Always. The Church, tacitly or explicitly functions as a counterbalance to this cultural capture; thus, we cannot speak about Christianity without speaking about the form that Christianity takes. (Note also, the idea that we can drop the label — apart from its rhetorical impossibility — belies the fact that even in disobedience we remain with our identity; it’s much stickier than that.)
And while Scripture may not prescribe the exact nature of this community, there is no doubt that we exist together, linked, a church. Take the vine and branches in John; consider Psalms, “I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the House of the Lord” (and all the Psalms of Ascent); consult Hebrews where we are not to forsake the gathering together. Or simply consider the plural when Paul addresses his letters. It’s all there. We belong together, and that shared life informs and on occasion challenges the cultural form of faith we understand as Christianity.
The counter to a syncretistic American Christianity is not a countering piece of theology, but a better church.
Still from Angels in America (photo by Brinkoff Moegenburg)
The revival of Angels in America has received plenty of notice, this particular review from David Le is thorough, discerning, and often deeply insightful.
As a play, Angels rises above its companions in large part because it helps us grasp the latter: how political and personal disappointment lead us to despair, and how despair gives way to a kind of vertigo, as the projects that once gave our lives orientation come to naught. We are left stunned, breathless to keep up with a life that rushes on unabated. Kushner’s work grapples with the question of what is to be done — what we are to do — in the midst of our collective and individual disorientation, in the absence of progress. He conveys the constitutively human trifecta of responsibility, impotence, and blindness.
Jeff Munroe considers the ways of memory and forgetfulness at The Twelve. Over against our forgetfulness, is God’s remembering. As he concludes:
Our value in this hyper-cognitive world doesn’t come because we remember, but because we are remembered. Certainly we hope in a material way our families remember us as we age. More than that, Christian hope is in God’s memory. The scripture says “God remembered Noah,” “God remembered Abraham,” “God remembered Rachel,” and “God remembered Hannah.” He remembers you and me, too. We are remembered. Therefore, we are.
This leaves me wondering. To nudge Jeff, is this really Christian hope? After all, when Scripture speaks of God remembering it often comes in response to the fear that somehow God has forgotten, that we are left alone, stuck in our exile, our oppression, or in the prison of of our own bodily weakness. Remembrance comes with an act, God delivers. Christian hope does not lie in the idea that God remembers, but that God has remembered and come to us as Savior (cf. Luke 1.54). In the wake of that, we are called to remember, to make memorial; the sign that God has remembered us is the Feast. And there, no one is forgotten.
It’s always hard to see the world as it actually happens, to experience in real time. Thirty years ago or so, Joel Garreau did that with Edge City. Not everything he saw about the emergent suburban culture proved accurate, but the overall picture? Yes, it gave us language to describe our time, and yet, time moves on.
Jeff Blumgart gives a solid overview of Edge City, the book the concept, the reality.
Written and Noted 