Flourishing

The following is cross-posted from John Terrill’s blog, Apprentice Place. John is Associate Director of InterVarsity’s Following Christ 2008 conference and Director of Seattle Pacific University’s Center for Integrity in Business. Read more about John here.

I’ve become increasingly concerned about the well being of our planet. I wish I could say I’ve been a long-term champion of environmental stewardship, but in reality I am a recent convert. My own journey of earth care coincides with my deepening faith journey, as well as the pinch I feel in my pocketbook every time I pull into my neighborhood fuel station.

A couple of months ago I read a fascinating article in WIRED Magazine (June 2008), entitled Screw Organic. The graphics and the title caught my attention. In this piece, the authors offer ten counter-intuitive illustrations of how best to cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses. In their own words, “The war on greenhouse gasses is too important to be left to the environmentalists.” Here are several of their conclusions:

Live in Cities: Urban living is gentler on the planet. “A Manhattanite’s carbon footprint is 30% smaller than the average American’s.”
Organics Are Not the Answer: “A single organically raised cow puts out 16 percent more greenhouse gasses than its counterpart.”
Farm the Forests: “Over its lifetime, a tree shifts from being a vacuum cleaner for atmospheric carbon to an emitter.”
Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work: Despite all the attention, the Kyoto carbon reduction projects will only slow the increase in greenhouse gasses by 6.5 days by 2012.
And my personal favorite, Used Cars, Not Hybrids: “Pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer, largely because of the nickel in the hybrid’s battery.”
This last one hit close to home, when just a few days ago my aunt called to ask me advice on whether or not she should buy a new hybrid Toyota Highlander. The non-hybrid Highlander gets 18 mpg in the city and 24 on the highway. The hybrid gets 27 city and 25 highway, only a slight advantage over the non-hybrid, yet it demands a long waiting period and a $10K premium. Since at least half her miles are driven on the highway, I told her that if she remains sold on this manufactuer and make it was a “no brainer” from my perspective . Given her years of projected ownership, she’d be a better environmental steward and save some money to boot by going with the non-hybrid. From my back of the envelope calculations, she’d be more green by doing the non-green thing. As we continued to talk, I pulled out the above-referenced article and began to quote some of the author’s claims.

“If the new Prius were placed head-to-head with a used car, would the Prius win? Don’t bet on it. Making a Prius consumes 113 million Btus, according to sustainability engineer Pablo Päster. A single gallon of gas costs about 113,000 Btus, so Toyota’s green wonder guzzles the equivalent of 1,000 gallons before it clocks its first mile. A used car, on the other hand, starts with a significant advantage: the first owner has already paid off its carbon debt. Buy a decade-old Toyota Tercel, which gets a respectable 35 mpg, and the Prius will have to drive 100,000 miles to catch up.”

I am a novice when it comes to really understanding these important tradeoffs, but as a person trained in business and a Christian concerned with the flourishing of our planet and the well-being of others, I am determined to pay attention. One place where this conversation will take place in earnest is InterVarsity’s Following Christ 2008 Conference. The theme of the Conference is human flourishing, which certainly includes the care for creation on which human well-being closely depends. One of the interdisciplinary tracks at the Conference will be God’s Green Kingdom, directed by Resource Economist, Dr. Lowell “Rusty” Pritchard. The track will challenge Christians to think holistically and biblically about issues of globalization, architecture, zoology, conservation, climate change, and everything in between. It will be a mix of teaching and discussion with field reports from people working at the growing edge of creation care, environmentalism, and sustainability. I don’t know if they’ll talk about the advantages and disadvantages of hybrids, but I do know that they’ll provide important frameworks and case studies to make wise and faithful choices for God’s creation.

I want to be a better environmental steward, making choices that are guided by what is actually best, not just what conventional wisdom suggests. I commend the Evangelical Environmental Network and Creation Care Magazine to you, as well as the God’s Green Kingdom track at Following Christ 2008. Care of Creation is another great organization and resource. They’re three good places to get started on the path of understanding.

C S Lewis has an interesting article by the title, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” in his volume God in the Dock (1979). The central argument of the piece is:

“…[W]hen we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we have an object, a patient, a case.” (p. 497)

He goes on to argue that by removing the connection between crime and desert (consequence) we make the sentencing of criminals something other than a moral question. Sentencing becomes an experiment for technical experts (who decide on its effectiveness as a cure and/or a deterrent). The maxim Cuiquam in sua arte credendum, rules the day (”we must believe the expert in his own field”). There no longer is room for the public conscience to make value judgments. The public, Lewis points out, is not viewed as having sufficient technical knowledge to make such judgments. What is more, such judgments as are made by these experts rarely (if ever) employ the categories of moral theology.

This is interesting to ponder in the case of someone like Radovan Karadzic. Finally, after some twelve fugitive years, Karadzic awaits trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Karadzic’s indictment concludes that there is reasonable evidence to conclude that he committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian War (1992-1995) when he was the political leader of Republika Srpska.

What to do with Karadzic?

Allow me to state this as affirmatively and succinctly as possible. When the ITCY tries and (presumably) finds Karadzic guilty of one or more of the counts specified in the prosecution’s case, the sentence should be retributive. That is to say, its first goal should be to make this man pay for the grave moral evil over which he presided.

Certainly, we may hope that over the years of his imprisonment (there is no death sentence in the ITCY) he may come to some degree of genuine repentance (in both the non-theological and theological senses of the word) and an alteration of character. We may also hope that somehow his punishment may serve as a warning to other wicked men.

But, in the end, we must hope that he will be made to pay for his wrongdoing. He may, one day, find mercy. But as Lewis rightly points out, mercy only has any real meaning when found in the context of (retributive) justice.

What would a just sentence look like? This is a difficult question. I do, however, have a difficult time finding anything particularly just about allowing such a man to idle away his remaining years (he is 63) in the (relative) comfort of prison. Of course, I also find a spectacle such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein to wholly without justification. Hussein was a wicked man, but even wicked men ought not be mocked in the hour of their death.

I’m open to suggestions, but I wonder if there isn’t something redemptive about hard labor. It is, after all, in the midst of hard labor that Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov finds the beginnings of renewal and regeneration:

“…[T]he beginning of a new story - the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life…”

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?

I’m really excited about the three interdisciplinary tracks that are part of FC08. Of the three, I am especially intrigued by God’s Green Kingdom, chaired by Dr. Rusty Pritchard. The Christian community is becoming increasingly aware of our responsibility for creation care. Groups like Evangelicals for Social Action and the Evangelical Environmental Network have led the way in this.

For a long time talk of conservation, hybrids, and simple living was the domain of hippies and liberals. Now the evangelical church is maturing in our theology of creation.

Counselors often tell us that we change only when the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of change. With the price of oil going through the roof and Americans seriously addicted to automobiles, especially big automobiles, the pain of staying the same is intensifying.

And it seems that our way of living is in the process of changing at a fundamental levels. I’m not talking simply turning off the A/C in your F-350 and rolling down the windows. I’m talking profound changes in the way he travel, where we work and where we live.

Rod Dreher of Crunchy Con has an interesting post pointing this out. Read it here. He links to several articles indicating that America is on the verge of a serious economic earthquake. Especially interesting is a web-tool that allows the user to calculate the real cost of living in the suburbs by factoring in the cost of travel (i.e., premium gas for your Suburban). Makes me glad that I live in a little cottage three miles from downtown.

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.

Brian Moss is going to be leading worship at FC08. That’s something that really excites me!!

I first heard Brian lead worship at the Open for Business track of Urbana 06. A little over a year later, Brian led worship at the National Staff Conference for InterVarsity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministries (that’s who I work for).

Leading worship is more art than it is science. It requires, at least in my opinion, a humble reliance upon the Holy Spirit. And more than that, it requires the musician to be willing to metaphorically step aside and allow those present to look beyond into the face of God. Brian is able to do this.

Brian’s also a pretty thoughtful guy. I like that, especially in a worship leader. Brian has a blog. Recently he wrote a thoughtful piece about how we approach art and how that affects the way we approach worship.

Has there ever been a generation with so little time actually to take time and enjoy the world?

–Bauckham and Hart, Hope Against Hope.

Brian uses the quote above to help us think about how we worship. He writes,

“The questions they [Bauckham and Hart] ask reveal the close connection that exists between all of our lives and the making and receiving of art. If anyone is to appreciate or even begin to understand art they must slow down. Try as you might, you cannot read Gerard Manley Hopkins quickly.”

So, how do you worship? It’s a provocative question. One that becomes increasingly so the more we let it settle within us.

Are we rushed as we worship? Is the sense of chronological time ever with us? In our world, it takes a lot of effort to remove ourselves from our society’s default way of life: busyness. It can be nearly impossible to step outside of these patterns to a sense of timelessness in worship, especially when our churches tend to mirror society in the way we design worship services.

Brian’s post challenged me to something more. I hope it challenges you too.

One of the amazing things about Following Christ conferences (and there are, let’s face it, a ton of amazing things) is that it is animated by worship. At its most essential level, FC08 is worship. Of course, its more than that, but its not less. Everything we do, regardless of its intellectual complexity or profundity, is an expression of worship through the offering of our selves, our callings, and our gifts to God.

That’s pretty darn exciting.

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?