Flourishing

I’ve posted before on emerging trends in reading. Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed links to a New York Times dealing with the same topic. As I’ve noted before, Americans aren’t reading less. If anything, we’re reading more. Only, we’re not reading books. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that declines in readership mirror declining standardized test scores. Not that this matters, since universities are beginning to make such tests optional. See for example Wake Forest University. I wish they had done this about fifteen years ago!

Precisely what this portends, I know not. It’s tempting to think that we will become a nation of semi-literate technicians. People who have skills, but no particular creativity or insight. I’ll spare you my lament. You can read it here.

HT: Scot McKnight

Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con links to a fascinating article by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar. Read the article here.

Sometimes I wonder whether (and to what extent) the university aids or inhibits human flourishing. Deresiewicz wonders too. His article, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” raises at least five ways that elite universities inhibit their students:

1. They make their students unable to talk with people different from themselves.
2. They inculcate their students with a false sense of self-worth.
3. They tempt their students to mediocrity (the Gentleman’s B).
4. They rob their students of the chance to not be rich.
5. They are profoundly anti-intellectual in that they value achievement over ideas.

Here’s a quote:

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, perhaps we ought to question the ways we are forming students (both undergraduate, graduate, and post docs) to live their lives?

CNN reports on Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President tour. The tour touts a new book by Claiborne and Chris Haw of the same title.

The story outlines the shifting nature of younger evangelicals’ political identity. In light of my earlier post, its an encouraging trend. Younger evangelicals, it seems, are injecting our faith into the way we vote and voting by principle and not simply by party affiliation. Hopeful sign.

There’s an interesting conversation happening at Jesus Creed on this very topic.

Last week I posted a short piece on the quarrel between Barack Obama and James Dobson. Dobson took offense to some comments that Obama made about Christians needing to appeal to things other than the Bible and our tradition when making moral arguments in the public square.

After the story made cnn.com, there was a flurry of comment from the Christian left, most notably Sojourners founder Jim Wallis. I’ve been familiar with Wallis for about three years now ever since I read his book God’s Politics. I didn’t really enjoy the book. In fact, to this day I’m not entirely convinced that it doesn’t attempt to persuade the world that God is a democrat on almost every issue. I say that tongue in check, mostly. I applaud Wallis for challenging Christians (especially evangelicals) to really examine issues and to do so from a thoroughly Christian perspective not simply a political philosophy baptized with God-talk. I don’t always agree with Wallis, but I respect him.

The ping pong match between red and blue Christians got me asking: where are the purple Christians? Francis Schaeffer once wrote that Christians may be co-belligerents with both parties over different issues, but never ultimately loyal to anyone other than Christ.

Are we anywhere close to that ideal? I don’t know for sure, but it doesn’t seem like it. It seems to me that Christians on the left and on the right are equally guilty of being uncharitable and attributing to the other the worst possible of motives for every legislative or policy decision. We’re polarized more than we care to admit, check out this dialogue as an example.

It seems to me that there needs to be a new day of dialogue and cooperation between Christians of various political persuasions. Perhaps Following Christ can be a place where some of those conversations begin. After all, we’ll be in Chicago together less than two months after a presidential election and day before the inauguration of a new president.

Jim Wallis likes to say that the monologue of the religious right is over. I hope so. In fact, I hope that all monologues within the Christian community are over and that we can move into tomorrow with frank, honest, and charitable conversation.

I opened my browser yesterday morning and pulled up cnn.com. It’s sort of part of my morning routine. Get a cup of coffee. Open the MacBook. Scan my RSS feeds. Check the news. You get the picture.

Yesterday’s headline was the very public quarrel between conservative Christian leader James Dobson of Focus on the Family and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

The issue? Biblical interpretation. Specifically, Dobson took Obama to task for a 2006 speech delivered at Call to Renewal, a gathering of progressive/liberal Christians. Read the text of the speech here.

The original CNN piece is here.

I’m going to go out on a limb (not really) and say that if you’re the sort of person who’s interested in Following Christ 2008, you’re probably also interested in being a redeeming influence in culture. Right? You’re probably also someone who spends most of your life in a that highly pluralistic environment known as the university.

So the issue raised in this little (and very public) tiff is actually quite germane to your life.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of the quarrel, you can read the CNN piece for that. I do want to consider one of Obama’s assertions. It just so happens that it is one that Dobson took issue with, but never mind.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

- Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Call to Renewal.

I believe that Obama is right.

Christians have for centuries believed that there exist not only the (specific) revelation of Scripture, but general revelation in nature and reason. This general revelation could also be called Natural Law. As a result, it is possible to converse with those outside of the Christian faith on the basis of first things, moral principles that are knowable outside of Scripture. This means that we can discuss policies from a Christian perspective without using explicitly Christian language.

It doesn’t mean (and I don’t think Obama suggests) that Christians/the Church should abandon reflection on Scripture as a basis for views on all sorts of issues. After all, it is not only our “religious selves” that are Christ’s, we are Christ’s in our entirety (whole persons).

Religion seems like its going to be an issue in this election, but not as it was in 2000 and 2004. We’ve already seen a battle over the “reverends,” both with Obama (Wright and Pfleger) and McCain (Hagee and Parsley). Who knows what else we see before November.

For other interesting discussion see Erin Manning’s response to Jim Wallis’s response to Jim Dobson at Crunchy Con.

As promised, here’s a link to the Colbert Report which, among other things, featured Bishop Tom Wright talking about his book Surprised by Hope.

I have to admit, I find Stephen Colbert funny about a third of the time and tiresome for the rest especially when he’s dealing with serious stuff (like Biblical theology in the case of Wright and science in the case of Francis Collins). Satire has its limits.

Will Francis Collins be the only Christian in hell? Stephen Colbert thinks so, sort of. Here’s a clip (two actually) from the Colbert Report:

Collins will be a featured speaker at Following Christ 08. He is currently the head of the Human Genome project, a position he will step down from in August. He is best known among evangelical Christians for his recent book, The Language of God, which seeks to bridge the perceived gap between science and Christian faith.

As you can tell from these clips, Collins has is good humored and pretty wise. A combination that we think will help him be a huge contributor to the conference.

Back in April I wrote a post entitled, “Why Read?” I had been listening to Thomas Friedman making the argument that ours in a “search culture.” We don’t read so much as search out information. This, he noted, is a result of the development of new communication media like the internet which is infinitely searchable.

Inherent in Friedman’s observation is a profound alteration. We are not only changing what we read, we are changinghow we read. Or rather, we are being changed. That is the thesis of Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making us Stupid Stoopid?”

Writes Carr,

“My mind isn’t going - so far as I can tell - but it’s changing….Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. My concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Is the internet changing the way we read? It seems that it is. It is also changing the amount we read. Americans are reading more in 2008 than they read in the 1970s and 1980s. This is largely due to the growing use of email, text messages, and the internet. These are reading-based means of communication as opposed to visual means of communication, like television, which defined pop culture of the 1970s and 1980s. While we may conclude that Americans are reading more in 2008 than ever before, we cannot conclude that we are reading better.

Let’s assume that the way we read is changing. Since my own experience seems eerily similar to Carr’s, I’m a believer. A couple of days after the birth of our son on April 29, my Apple iBook G4 died and I entered a technological detox program. I was basically without a laptop for about a month (two weeks voluntarily, two weeks involuntarily). During that time I realized how much time I wasted each day simply “following links,” reading blogs, and sending emails. I also noticed how few books I had read over the last semester and how easily I was distracted when I tried to read. I had already decided that technology was the culprit and (before this) had blogged about it elsewhere. The inevitable next question is: so what?

As compelling an answer to this question as I have read comes from Tufts developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

We are not only whatwe read, we are how we read,” notes Wolf. The internet promotes a type of reading that places a premium on “efficiency” and “immediacy.” We become, “mere decoders of information.” Carr ponders whether in so doing we are losing our ability to do the deep and sustained reading that emerged with the invention of the printing press.

As evidence of the influence that technology exercises over reading and composition, Carr offers the German philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche. At some point in 1882 Nietzsche purchased and began to use a typewriter. His eyesight was failing and focusing on a page induced headaches that essentially made it impossible to write.

In correspondence between Nietzsche and a friend (a composer), his correspondent notes that Nietzsche’s writing had changed to become more terse. In reply the philosopher concedes, “You are right, our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” The shift from longhand to typewriter altered the way in which Nietzsche wrote. We may well ponder how email and the internet are affecting our communication.

The fundamental question is whether reading is information gathering, contemplation, or a little bit of both at varying times.

The technician (like Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page) see reading as accessing little stacks of information. Reading can be reduced to an algorithm. As a result, Google seeks industrial efficiency in taking people to the data they need (the right quote, the perfect figure, the exact illustration) by liberating it from the bulky construct called a book of which it typically is a part.

Artists (like playwright Richard Foreman) see reading as a participation in a grand tradition, a participation in the large tradition of which we are part. Lose this and we risk being flattened into “pancake people,” more robot than homo sapiens.

Question: The Christian faith is rooted in the story of God’s redemptive work among His people contained in the Bible. How might this trend adversely affect the reading of Scripture among the community of faith? Will the Church be one of the custodians of the “old reading” in the new wired age?

The professional economist is not really trained to answer, or even ask himself questions about absolute values. The economist is inside the squirrel cage and turning with it. Any question about absolute values belongs to the sphere, not of economics, but of religion.

-Dorothy L. Sayers, “Why Work?” in Creed or Chaos?

In her essay quoted above, Dorothy L. Sayers expressed regret over the undue influence held by economists in her day. There is, she claimed, something inherently unChristian about allowing economic criteria to be the sole (or absolute) means for deciding moral questions. Surely economists can tell us whether or not a given policy will have the desired effect, but they cannot tell us whether or not a given policy is morally right or wrong. Economics is descriptive and not normative. It tells us what is rather than what ought to be.

In their descriptive function, however, economists can dish out some interesting data. Consider an example published by Radha Iyegar and Jonathan Monten of Harvard University. The paper is entitled, “Is There an ‘Emboldenment’ Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq.” Read the study here. It deals with the hot-button issue of terrorism. Specifically, whether or not talk of withdrawing from Iraq emboldens the enemy.

If you’re like me, you’ve listened to the rhetoric of both the White House and its critics and found both to be rather lacking. There have been many assertions since March 20, 2003. Many defended the war and some, even early on, criticized it. The unfortunate nature of political discourse in our country (i.e., through the medium of sound bytes) means that many assertions were effectively made in a vacuum. No data-specific rationale was given. Data, it seems, has been relegated to CSPAN.

However, two Harvard researchers have shown that the Iraqi insurgency acts in a rational manner in the timing and intensity of its offensive action on the battlefield. Specifically, they found incidents of insurgent violence increase by 7-10 per cent in periods following “intensified criticism of the Iraq War by the American public and in the U.S. media.” The effect diminished relatively quickly with violence returning to pre-spike levels within a period of one month.

The researchers concluded that the actions of the insurgents were a “systematic response” to a perceived opportunity to tip the weight of public opinion in the U.S. toward immediate withdrawal.

The Bush administration, and other supporters of the war, have long maintained that criticism of the war “emboldens” terrorist. The data suggest that they may well have a point. It seems then that the next five months may well be very difficult for U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq as we anticipate November’s presidential election which is, among other things, a referendum on the Iraq War.

All things considered, it is still both right and prudent to engage in a spirited discussion of both the morality and the practicality of the Iraq War. After all, reports of weakness in one’s enemy always serve to embolden.

Question: What role should economic realities play in Christian political thought?

Bart Ehrman (of UNC Chapel Hill) and Tom (N.T.) Wright (Bishop of Durham in the C of E) are dialoging (electronically) about the problem of evil at Beliefnet. It’s an interesting conversation. Check it out.

Tom Wright is our keynote speaker for FC08.

(HT: Hank Tarlton)