"Just as it would be incorrect to attempt to derive a language merely from observing a single individual, who speaks not a language of his own but rather that of his contemporaries and predecessors who have prepared the path for him, so it is incorrect to explain the totality of an outlook only with reference to its genesis in the mind of the individual. ...The first point which we now have to emphasize is that the approach of the sociology of knowledge intentionally does not start with the single individual and his thinking in order then to proceed directly in the manner of the philosopher to the abstract heights of 'thought as such.' Rather, the sociology of knowledge seeks to comprehend thought in the concrete setting of an historical-social situation out of which individually differentiated thought only very gradually emerges. Thus, it is not men in general who think, or even isolated individuals who do the thinking, but men in certain groups who have developed a particular style of thought in an endless series of responses to certain typical situations characterizing their common position. Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him."
Karl Mannheim. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. pp. 2-3.
b.
Mannheim on the Sociology of Knowledge
Thirty Fundamental Things Normal Human Persons Do
In pages 43-59 of What Is a Person?, Christian Smith outlines the following thirty human causal capacities, while acknowledging that there no doubt are others. According to Smith, every normal human person is endowed with at least these thirty causal capacities. To be clear, Smith emphasizes again that it is not the mere collection of these capacities that makes for personhood. "Persons are emergent from -- not simply the sum total of -- these and likely other human capacities. Personhood exists at a higher level of the human than a mere list of capacities. Still, those capacities are the basic facts out of which normal personhood exists emergently at a higher level" (53). Also notice that in the list of human causal capacities that follows, some causal capacities "are dependent for their existence and functioning upon combinations of more basic capacities" (53) -- that is, some are more basic and central while others are more complex and of a higher order. Thus, the list is organized in a rough order starting with the most basic "existence capacities" (01, 02), to "primary experience capacities" (03-06), to "secondary experience capacities" (07-11), to "creating capacities" (12-24), and finally ends with the "highest order capacities" (25-30). What follows here, then, are (at least many of) the human causal capacities from which personhood emerges ontologically as a new, higher order entity or condition.
- Subconscious being: desires, feelings, beliefs, dispositions, goals, etc. that exist and operate 'below the surface' of awareness and recognition, even if shaped by conscious processes.
- Conscious awareness: the ability to be sentient, wakeful, alert, aware, attentive, etc., which is shared with most other animals; subjective awareness of existence as a being.
- Understand quantity, quality, time, and space properties: the ability to form basic ordering and representational categories for understanding the real external environment.
- Mental representation: the ability to form in the mind cognitive depictions and mental images of objects or states of affairs in the world apart from oneself; perception and visualization.
- Volition: the ability to will, to desire, to aspire to, to set something in the mind as a wanted goal or purpose toward which to strive.
- Practical consciousness: a passive or involuntary ability to 'go on' in life in a state of 'auto-pilot,' so to speak, habituated behavior without conscious reflection.
- Assigning causal attributions: the ability to perceive, intuit, or analyze the real operations of cause and effect in the world for relations among events; an understanding of influences.
- Interest formation: the ability amid myriad possibilities to identify and rank those conditions, states, and experiences they believe will serve their well-being or the well-being of others.
- Emotional experience: the ability to feel deep, complex, and intense emotions, affects, moods, and sentiments in the body and in subjective mental states.
- Episodic and long-term remembering: the ability to store and retrieve an immense amount of images, associations, knowledge, and other memory content which provide links to the past.
- Inter-subjective understanding: the ability to at least somewhat correctly understand the subjective beliefs, thoughts, emotions, desires, intentions, interests, moods, etc. of others.
- Acting as efficient causes of one's own actions and interactions: the ability to decide with a significant degree of free will on certain courses of action and then to put them into motion.
- Creativity, innovation, and imagination: the ability to visualize, dream, invent, connect, conceive, and envision ideas, possibilities, and images that do not yet exist in reality.
- Inventing and employing technology: the ability to manipulate the world by fashioning various devices, tools, machines, and other apparatuses to augment their bodily powers.
- Material cultivation and development: the ability to create complex, ongoing life projects and systems to enhance human social and cultural survival and flourishing.
- Self-transcendence: the ability to pass beyond their own interests and concerns in order to be attentive and present to non-personal objects and especially to other human persons.
- Create, grasp, and communicate meanings: the ability both mentally and emotionally to draw connections between different entities in ways that generate import and significance.
- Symbolization: the ability to extensively use some ideas or objects to represent other ideas or objects and their attributes, meanings, and emotional associations, such as writing.
- Language use: the ability to construct and apply complex systems of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax expressed in speech and texts that communicate ideas, questions, etc. to others.
- Compose and recount narratives: the ability to communicate meaning through accounts that consist of ordered sequences of connected events, situations, conflict, resolution, and actors.
- Valuation: the ability to assess in fairly abstract terms the relative goodness, rightness, merit, worth, importance, or virtue of various objects, situations, beliefs, or behaviors.
- Anticipate the future: the ability to 'think ahead' in order to project the likely outcomes and consequences of different courses of action that have not yet happened.
- Identity formation: the ability to have relatively durable reflexive self-understandings of who and what one is as a more or less unique creature; personality, character, social location.
- Self-reflexivity: the cognitive ability to make oneself the object of his or her own reflection, thinking, and evaluation; awareness of oneself as an objective being living in the world.
- Abstract reasoning: the ability to exercise complex cognitive faculties such as categorization, generalization, comparison, analogizing, induction, deduction, retroduction, and abduction.
- Truth seeking: the ability and motivation to transcend one's own interests, preferences, and desires in order to seek out and know what is objectively true and real for its own sake.
- Moral awareness and judgment: an orientation toward understandings about what are right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, that exist apart from our own and others' desires, feelings, preferences, actions, and dispositions, and thus by which those can be evaluated.
- Forming virtues: the ability to purposefully integrate a variety of their beliefs, desires, and actions into stable dispositions and habits to think and act in certain ways under certain circumstances in order to foster personal lives of greater happiness and moral goodness.
- Aesthetic judgment and enjoyment: the ability to distinguish, at a sensory-emotional level, differences in attractiveness, beauty, and tastefulness of music, performances, images, etc.
- Interpersonal communion and love: the ability to enter into social relationships with other humans that are characterized by profound depths and intensities of mutual understanding, attachment, solidarity, affection, self-sacrifice, and commitment to the other's well-being.
How to Fight The Man
From The New York Times: "This seems to be a moment when many people -- in religion, economics and politics -- are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them. This seems to be a moment of fervent protest movements that are ultimately vague and ineffectual. We can all theorize why the intense desire for change has so far produced relatively few coherent recipes for change. Maybe people today are simply too deferential. Raised to get college recommendations, maybe they lack the oppositional mentality necessary for revolt. Maybe people are too distracted. My own theory revolves around a single bad idea. For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that's probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview. If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You'll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you'll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition. ...The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn't think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true." Read the rest HERE.
b.
What Happened Before the Big Bang?
From The Atlantic: "Last May, Stephen Hawking gave a talk at Google's Zeitgeist Conference in which he declared philosophy to be dead. In his book The Grand Design, Hawking went even further. 'How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Traditionally these were questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead,' Hawking wrote. 'Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.' In December, a group of professors from America's top philosophy departments, including Rutgers, Columbia, Yale, and NYU, set out to establish the philosophy of cosmology as a new field of study within the philosophy of physics. The group aims to bring a philosophical approach to the basic questions at the heart of physics, including those concerning the nature, age and fate of the universe. This past week, a second group of scholars from Oxford and Cambridge announced their intention to launch a similar project in the United Kingdom. One of the founding members of the American group, Tim Maudlin, was recently hired by New York University, the top ranked philosophy department in the English-speaking world. Maudlin is a philosopher of physics whose interests range from the foundations of physics, to topics more firmly within the domain of philosophy, like metaphysics and logic. Yesterday I spoke with Maudlin by phone about cosmology, multiple universes, the nature of time, the odds of extraterrestrial life, and why Stephen Hawking is wrong about philosophy." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Philosophy: What's The Use?
From The New York Times: "Almost every article that appears in The Stone provokes some comments from readers challenging the very idea that philosophy has anything relevant to say to non-philosophers. There are, in particular, complaints that philosophy is an irrelevant 'ivory-tower' exercise, useless to any except those interested in logic-chopping for its own sake. ...As soon as we stop thinking weird philosophical thoughts, we immediately go back to believing what skeptical arguments seem to call into question. And rightly so, since, as David Hume pointed out, we are human beings before we are philosophers. But what Hume and, by our day, virtually all philosophers are rejecting is only what I'm calling the foundationalist conception of philosophy. Rejecting foundationalism means accepting that we have every right to hold basic beliefs that are not legitimated by philosophical reflection. More recently, philosophers as different as Richard Rorty and Alvin Plantinga have cogently argued that such basic beliefs include not only the 'Humean' beliefs that no one can do without, but also substantive beliefs on controversial questions of ethics, politics and religion." Read the rest HERE.
b.
The New American Divide
From The Wall Street Journal: "America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world -- for whites, anyway. 'The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,' wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. 'On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.' Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s. ...When Americans used to brag about 'the American way of life' -- a phrase still in common use in 1960 -- they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity. Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Plantinga on Properly Basic Beliefs
You can download related work by Plantinga here:
(1) Plantinga, Alvin. 1983. "Reason and Belief in God." Pp. 16-93 in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. Edited by Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
(2) Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press.
b.
What Literature Owes the Bible
From The New York Times: "The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know. Literatures are self-referential by nature, and even when references to Scripture in contemporary fiction and poetry are no more than ornamental or rhetorical -- indeed, even when they are unintentional -- they are still a natural consequence of the persistence of a powerful literary tradition. Biblical allusions can suggest a degree of seriousness or significance their context in a modern fiction does not always support. This is no cause for alarm. Every fiction is a leap in the dark, and a failed grasp at seriousness is to be respected for what it attempts. In any case, these references demonstrate that in the culture there is a well of special meaning to be drawn upon that can make an obscure death a martyrdom and a gesture of forgiveness an act of grace. Whatever the state of belief of a writer or reader, such resonances have meaning that is more than ornamental, since they acknowledge complexity of experience of a kind that is the substance of fiction. ...In its emphatic insistence that the burden of meaning is shared in every life, the Bible may only give expression to a truth most of us know intuitively. But as a literary heritage or memory it has strengthened the deepest impulse of our literature, and our civilization." Read the rest HERE.
b.
The Dark Side of Modern Individual Autonomy
From American Psychologist: "Americans now live in a time and a place in which freedom and autonomy are valued above all else and in which expanded opportunities for self-determination are regarded as a sign of the psychological well-being of individuals and the moral well-being of the culture. This article argues that freedom, autonomy, and self-determination can become excessive, and that when that happens, freedom can be experienced as a kind of tyranny. The article further argues that unduly influenced by the ideology of economics and rational-choice theory, modern American society has created an excess of freedom, with resulting increases in people's dissatisfaction with their lives and in clinical depression. One significant task for a future psychology of optimal functioning is to deemphasize individual freedom and to determine which cultural constraints are necessary for people to live meaningful and satisfying lives." You can download and read the full article HERE.
b.
Coming Together on Culture
From The Gospel Coalition: "I don't think you can tell it from reading on the internet, but among many younger leaders with Reformed and evangelical convictions there may be a slow convergence coming on the subject of the mission of the church and the relationship of Christ and culture. On the surface, the Reformed and evangelical world seems divided between 'Cultural Transformationists' and the 'Two Kingdoms' views. Transformationists fall into fairly different camps, including the neo-Calvinists who follow Abraham Kuyper, the Christian Right, and the theonomists. Though different in significant ways, they all believe Christians should be about redeeming and changing the culture along Christian lines. On the other hand, the Two Kingdoms view believes essentially the opposite -- that neither the church nor individual Christians should be in the business of changing the world or society. Again, there are very different camps within this stance. The Reformed and Lutheran proponents of the '2K' view believe that Christians do their work in the world alongside nonbelievers on the basis of commonly held moral standards 'written on the heart' by natural revelation. Christians do not, then, pursue their vocation in a 'distinctively Christian' way. ...However, over the last two or three years, several publications have been produced that critique both the Two Kingdoms and Transformationist views. And these books and articles are pointing in a similar direction and are being carefully read and discussed by a wide number of younger leaders." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Some Lessons for the Church from Apple (?)
From Harvard Business Review: "In the lead up to today's release of the Steve Jobs biography, there's been an increasing stream of news surrounding its subject. As a business researcher, I was particularly interested in this recent article that referenced from his biography a list of Jobs's favorite books. There's one business book on this list, and it 'deeply influenced' Jobs. That book is The Innovator's Dilemma by HBS Professor Clay Christensen. But what's most interesting to me isn't that The Innovator's Dilemma was on that list. It's that Jobs solved the conundrum.
"When describing his period of exile from Apple -- when John Sculley took over -- Steve Jobs described one fundamental root cause of Apple's problems. That was to let profitability outweigh passion: 'My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.'
..."When he returned, Jobs completely upended the company. There were thousands of layoffs. Scores of products were killed stone dead. He knew the company had to make money to stay alive, but he transitioned the focus of Apple away from profits. Profit was viewed as necessary, but not sufficient, to justify everything Apple did. That attitude resulted in a company that looks entirely different to almost any other modern Fortune 500 company. ...An executive who worked at both Apple and Microsoft described the differences this way: 'Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them. Prototypes and demos always come before spreadsheets.'
"Similarly, Apple talks a lot about its great people. But make no mistake -- they are there only in service of the mission. A headhunter describes it thus: 'It is a happy place in that it has true believers. People join and stay because they believe in the mission of the company.' It didn't matter how great you were, if you couldn't deliver to that mission -- you were out. ...Everything -- the business, the people -- are subservient to the mission: building great products. And rather than listening to, or asking their customers what they wanted; Apple would solve problems customers didn't know they had with products they didn't even realize they wanted."
Read the rest HERE.
b.
How and Why Christians Should Read Books
From Books and Culture: "My initial response to a Christian how-to book on reading books is dismay: do we really need a book addressing such basic questions as why we should read books and how to do so well? Since the answer to that question, unfortunately, is yes, my second response to Tony Reinke's Lit: A Christian Guide to Reading Books is thank you -- followed by a mental list of all the people I know who need this book. Because I'm an English professor (and because I recently taught a literature survey to a class of 100 general education students), that list is depressingly long. But I'm a realist, so I go with what we've got. And what we've got, by most accounts, is what Marshall McLuhan described fifty years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy as a postliterate culture. Not only the population at large, but even we putative 'People of the Book,' need a book that addresses questions like the ones that Reinke raises in Lit: (1) What do I lose if I don't read books? (2) Does the gospel really shape how I read books? How so? (3) What books should I read? (4) Where do I find all the time I need to read books?" Read the rest HERE.
b.
We Don't Invite Jesus Into Our Lives
From Jason Clark: "After the first temple is built by Solomon and on the day of it's dedication by him, Solomon declares, 'Can it be that God will actually move into our neighborhood? Why, the cosmos itself isn't large enough to give you breathing room, let alone this Temple I've built.' (1 Kings 8:27). The absurdity that God could fit into the universe let alone a temple is immediately revealed. Yet the Advent hope of Christmas is that God has located himself in relationship and proximity to us, such that (John 1:14) 'The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.' If you are anything like me, I find that my life doesn't fit into my own life, let alone the creator of the universe moving in. Too often He is crowded out and left to fit in when I remember Him, need something from him, am in trouble or worried about others. But most of the time, it seems He is squeezed out of my life and neighbourhood. I've also noticed something about the Advent stories, that the people in them have lives that are at least as 'over-full' as mine. So how does Jesus move into their neighbourhood and how might he move into my over-packed life? Too often we think of inviting Jesus into our lives, the Christian cliche of thinking that we open our lives and let Jesus in, ask him in, when we can remember to. The problem, like the people in the Advent story, is that he just doesn't fit. Something else seems to take place in Advent, as Jesus moves into the neighbourhood and invites people into his life, rather dramatically. Mary and Joseph have their lives not just turned upside down by the arrival of a baby, but have their lives relocated around the agenda of the mission and identity of that baby. ...It seems that when Jesus moves into the neighbourhood, people have to fit into him. And maybe that's the solution to [my] problem today. I don't invite Jesus into my life, he arrives to invite me into his life." Read the rest HERE.
b.
On the Lack of Younger Public Intellectuals
From The Hedgehog Review: "In the course of the twentieth century, intellectuals have made a progressive retreat from commitment to a public and critical prose. The transition from Lionel Trilling to Fred Jameson, or from Jane Jacobs to younger urbanists like David Harvey, or from William James to younger philosophers, illustrates the cultural shift. The previous generations of intellectuals could be read, and were read, by educated readers; the most recent intellectuals cannot be -- nor do they direct themselves to a public audience. They have settled into specialties and sub-specialties. Even as critics have become more sophisticated and daring, they have also become more private and complacent, which belies a critical discourse. A generational grid used in tracing this evolution -- or decline -- expresses the real dynamics of intellectual life in the last 50 years. In surveying current intellectual life, I find not a flat-out absence of public intellectuals, but an absence of younger ones -- and I am using 'younger' in its most expansive meaning: the few public intellectuals are almost all over the age of 50, usually 60. In other words, behind the erosion of public intellectuals, a generational flux is at work. An older generation of intellectuals is passing on, and a new one is not showing up. And this 'missing' generation is more or less the sixties generation; they may have been a force for change and ferment, but today they are scarcely present as an intellectual generation. Who are the younger successors to Edmund Wilson or Dwight Macdonald or Lewis Mumford or even Lionel Trilling?
"This absence can be explained by looking first at what might be called the cultural geography: the sharp increase in higher education in the post-World War II years and the corresponding increase in academic employment. What is decisive is not simply the growing academic environment but the decline of the alternative environments, and specifically, the decline of the urban bohemias. If the western frontier closed in the 1890s, the cultural frontier closed in the 1950s. For a young writer or artist, out of high school or college, to decide to move to New York City and live in Greenwich Village to begin his or her novel is no longer a possibility. The big cities, mainly New York, but also San Francisco and Chicago, get too difficult and too expensive. Café society gives rise to the essay and aphorism; colleges and colleagues spur the monograph and grant application. Socio-cultural environment gives a cast to intellectuals and ways of thinking and writing. The density and rhythms of thought itself register the environment. And if this environment is one of lectures, seminars, and conferences, it reveals itself in the prose, the approach, and perhaps the content of scholarship. The presupposition might be crudely characterized as materialistic: material circumstances do affect people, and insofar as intellectuals are people, they are affected by their surroundings." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Matt Chandler's First Book
From Crossway Books: "Too few people attending church today, even those in evangelical churches, are exposed to the gospel explicitly. Sure, many will hear about Jesus, and about being good and avoiding bad, but the gospel message simply isn't there -- at least not in its specificity and its fullness. Inspired by the needs of both the overchurched and the unchurched, and bolstered by the common neglect of the explicit gospel within Christianity, Matt Chandler has written this punchy treatise. He begins with the specifics of the gospel -- outlining what it is and what it is not -- and then switches gears to focus on the fullness of the gospel and its massive implications on both personal and cosmic levels. Recognizing our tendency to fixate on either the micro or macro aspects of the gospel, Chandler also warns us of the dangers on either side -- of becoming overly individualistic or syncretistic. Here is a call to true Christianity, to know the gospel explicitly, and to unite the church on the amazing grounds of the good news of Jesus!" See more HERE and his posts on The Resurgence HERE.
b.
The Cardinal Virtues
From The Catechism of the Catholic Church: "Human virtues are firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith. They make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy in leading a morally good life. The virtuous man is he who freely practices the good. The moral virtues are acquired by human effort. They are the fruit and seed of morally good acts; they dispose all the powers of the human being for communion with divine love. Four virtues play a pivotal role and accordingly are called 'cardinal'; all the others are grouped around them. They are: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. 'If anyone loves righteousness, [Wisdom's] labors are virtues; for she teaches temperance and prudence, justice, and courage.' These virtues are praised under other names in many passages of Scripture.
(1) Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it; 'the prudent man looks where he is going.' 'Keep sane and sober for your prayers.' Prudence is 'right reason in action,' writes St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle. It is not to be confused with timidity or fear, nor with duplicity or dissimulation. It is called auriga virtutum (the charioteer of the virtues); it guides the other virtues by setting rule and measure. It is prudence that immediately guides the judgment of conscience. The prudent man determines and directs his conduct in accordance with this judgment. With the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid.
(2) Justice is the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor. Justice toward God is called the 'virtue of religion.' Justice toward men disposes one to respect the rights of each and to establish in human relationships the harmony that promotes equity with regard to persons and to the common good. The just man, often mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures, is distinguished by habitual right thinking and the uprightness of his conduct toward his neighbor. 'You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.' 'Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.'
(3) Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause. 'The Lord is my strength and my song.' 'In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.'
(4) Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will's mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable. The temperate person directs the sensitive appetites toward what is good and maintains a healthy discretion: 'Do not follow your inclination and strength, walking according to the desires of your heart.' Temperance is often praised in the Old Testament: 'Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites.' In the New Testament it is called 'moderation' or 'sobriety.' We ought 'to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world.'"
b.
Hunter on Evangelical Cultural Production
"...[C]ultural production in the Evangelical world is overwhelmingly oriented toward the popular. Very much like its retail politics, its music is popular music, its art tends to be popular (highly sentimentalized and commercialized) art, its theater is mega-church drama, its publishing is mainly mass-market book publishing with a heavy bent toward 'how-to' books, its magazines are mass-circulation monthlies, its television is either in the format of a worship service or the talk show, its recent forays into film are primarily into popular film, and much academic work is oriented toward translation -- making the difficult accessible to the largest possible number. While there are exceptions to the rule, overall, the populist orientation of Evangelical cultural production reflects the most kitschy expressions of consumerism and often the most crude forms of market instrumentalism.
"As it is with Catholics and mainline Protestants, individual Evangelicals can be found everywhere -- in elite research universities, university presses, think tanks and the like -- and there they make important contributions. But except for a few areas such as philosophy and American religious history, where they have had a significant presence and influence, their number tends to be very small and their broader impact of no great consequence. Likewise, in literature, there are some talented novelists, poets, and critics in these communities, but here again their number is few and they too tend to be fairly isolated in their respective fields. Much the same can be said about the Evangelical presence in architecture, the visual arts (painting, sculpture, etc.) and the performance arts (e.g., theater, film, dance, music, and the like). In all of these arenas and others (such as journalism and advertising), there are individual exceptions -- extraordinary, remarkable, talented exceptions -- but they are exceptions, rather than a normal occurrence. These individuals are present in these spheres, it would seem, more by accident than by design; certainly more as a statistical aberration than through the deliberate cultivation of the churches." Read more HERE.
James Davison Hunter. 2010. To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 87-88.
b.
Cornel West Leaving Princeton
From The New York Times: "Cornel West, the peripatetic public intellectual and political activist, plans to finish out a teaching career that has taken him from Yale to Harvard to Princeton by moving back this coming summer to Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, where he began as an assistant professor in 1977. Dr. West, the author of 19 books, including Race Matters, and a ubiquitous television and radio commentator, said he was taking a significant pay cut to become a professor of philosophy and Christian practices at Union. The school, where the eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, is also known as the birthplace of black theology. James H. Cone, a foremost scholar in that tradition, is still on the faculty. In an interview from Seattle, on his way to visit Occupy protesters there, Dr. West said that his liberal politics were formed in Progressive Baptist churches, and that Union was 'the institutional expression of my core identity as a prophetic Christian.' 'I don't have that much time, and I want to be able to do precisely what I'm called to do,' Dr. West, 58, said. It will also be nice, he said, to be within walking distance of the Apollo Theater." Read the rest HERE.
b.
When Presidents Go to Church
From The Huffington Post: "The Secret Service agents arrived at Shiloh Baptist Church on a reconnaissance mission just a few days before Easter Sunday. They swept through the sanctuary, eyeing every pew from the pulpit to the balcony. Not a Bible or hymnal was left unturned. Church leaders took a vow of secrecy. Even the most respected church members were kept in the dark until the very last minute. Easter service at any house of worship can be a painstaking affair, but this one had to go off without a hitch -- President Obama and the First Family were coming to church. For a sitting president, even the most routine activities become complicated logistical feats. Date nights can be impersonal affairs, with gawkers and special agents lurking around every corner. Sporting events and recitals are overshadowed by the spectacle of a POTUS appearance. Church services, which for many are a time for self-reflection and expressions of faith and fellowship, require the same planning and strategizing as any other presidential event: metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs, traffic snarls and spectators and media displacing regular attendees." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Leadership's New Direction
From Harvard Business Review: "Young businesspeople are thinking about leadership in different ways, and a new leadership ethos is emerging. For starters, young leaders are creating opportunities across sectors -- and borders. One of our survey respondents argued, 'Business leaders will be forced to recognize and serve a broader community of stakeholders than in previous generations.' This 'broader community' transcends both sector and geographical boundaries. Furthermore, the fast-paced nature of globalization was summed up by another young leader: 'Simply understanding national surroundings will no longer be sufficient.' The world is becoming global, and these leaders plan to respond. What is striking, though, is the strong emphasis on the personal and ethical dimensions of leadership. Young businesspeople are viewing leadership with a sense of grace, humility, and serious responsibility. Emphasizing the nature of ethical leadership in the wake of the financial crisis, one respondent argued, 'Leaders will be forced to be more transparent about everything from their decision making to their personal lives.' On the importance of personal authenticity, another said, 'Leadership will be less about climbing a ladder within an established organization -- the 21st century is more about defining the ladder through one's actions.'" Read the rest HERE.
b.
Let's All Feel Superior
From The New York Times: "People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don't. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, Blind Spots, 'When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.' In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties. But we're not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it -- like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey." Read the rest HERE. This article reminds me of THIS.
b.
The Wrong Inequality
From The New York Times: "We live in a polarizing society, so perhaps it's inevitable that our experience of inequality should be polarized, too. In the first place, there is what you might call Blue Inequality. This is the kind experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia. In these places, you see the top 1 percent of earners zooming upward, amassing more income and wealth. The economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley Heim have done the most authoritative research on who these top 1 percenters are. ...Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It's between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Fulfill Your Ministry
"I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry."
2 Timothy 4: 1-5
b.
Philosophy Is What It Eats
From The Church and Postmodern Culture: "It is tough to still think, a hundred years into the linguistic turn, that philosophy is much in charge of anything: growing the food, overseeing the menu, preparing the meal, or even serving it up. But philosophy can still help us chew on things. It can be a second stomach that helps digest the kinds of ideas we're growing, the kinds of machines we're building, the kinds of societies we're composing, the kinds of poetry we're writing, the kinds of love we're making. Philosophy can, as Alain Badiou puts it, help us think the 'compossibility' of our ideas -- ideas that we can't predict, order, or control -- and then fashion concepts that 'weave a general space in which thought accedes to time, to its time.' If Continental philosophy of religion is headed someplace different in our time, it will be because we have begun to incorporate new and different kinds of materials. A steady and disciplined diet of Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida has given us our current pallor and lean figure. For my part, I think the field should loosen its belt. It should eat more and with greater variety. In the future, I imagine it looking more like a rotund and laughing Buddha than a svelte European fashion model. What, in particular, will be different? I see the future of Continental philosophy of religion as shaped by a growing acknowledgement of four conditions: (1) that math thinks, (2) that science thinks, (3) that America thinks, and (4) that I think." Read the rest HERE.
b.
On Being a Conversational Ball Hog
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: "It's hard to create something -- an idea, a sentence, a book. It's easier to pick away at the edges. It's hard to listen, to put aside one's own thoughts, to let the ego take a back seat to someone else's cleverness, observations, or argument. To interrupt is to show dominance and try to wrest control. To be on the receiving end can feel dismissive and disempowering. I've read studies that show doctors wait about 18 seconds before they interrupt their patients. No wonder we're so unhappy with our health care: Attending physicians have stopped attending to us. Sometimes, though, when academics are being conversational ball hogs -- a common tic among those whose job is to profess -- interruption is the only way to engage. Or you can surrender to it. ...When someone interrupts me, it may mean all of the things I tell myself it means: He's excited, he's impatient, he was raised by wolves. But it may also imply that the interrupter thinks his commentary is more important than my material, that he knows a bunch of stuff I don't, that he needs to make arguments he thinks I'm not taking into account, go down paths I've neglected to follow. Often, with a chronic interrupter, I have to say, 'Let me finish,' because I have in fact done all of those things, just not in the order -- or as fast -- as he would have liked." Read the rest HERE.
b.
On Bold Ambition, Organizationally
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: "The problems that confront American higher education today are arguably the greatest in more than a generation. Both public and private institutions have faced significant budget cuts, decreased money for research from federal and state governments, and the specter of a decline in giving because of uncertainty in financial markets. One response, which unfortunately appears to be all too common, is to make modest across-the-board cuts, generally refrain from bold actions, and hope for better days. We suggest an alternative based on our belief that fiscal considerations should not be the sole determinant that drives an academic agenda. American higher education did not become second to none through a bias toward caution or low expectations. John Henry Newman in his 1852 epic, The Idea of a University, wrote of the university's singular ability to 'adjust views, and experiences, and habits of mind the most independent and dissimilar.' ...Such statements point to a vision of higher education in which those in the university have the freedom and courage to speak uncomfortable truths in the hope of creating a better world. The American research university flourished from such visions. What would such bold ambitions, which are so worthy of the American research university, mean to us today?" Read the rest HERE.
b.
Dude, Where's Your Bride?
From The Gospel Coalition: "As I speak at different venues across the country, one of the recurring questions I get comes from women, young women in particular. Their question usually goes something like this: 'What is up with men?' These aren't angry women. Their question is more plaintive than petulant. I'm not quite sure why they ask me. Maybe because they've read Just Do Something and figure I'll be a sympathetic ear. Or maybe they think I can help. They often follow up their initial question by exhorting me, 'Please speak to the men in our generation and tell them to be men.' They're talking about marriage. I have met scores of godly young women nearby and far away who wonder 'Where have all the marriageable men gone?' More and more commentators -- Christian or otherwise -- are noticing a trend in young men; namely, that they don't seem to be growing up. ...Virtually every single single person I know wants to be married. And yet, it is taking couples longer and longer to get around to marriage. Education patterns have something to do with it. A bad economy doesn't help either. But there is something even more befuddling going on. Go to almost any church and you'll meet mature, intelligent, attractive Christian women who want to get married and virtually no men to pursue them." Read the rest HERE.
b.
The Men Behind "The War On Women"
From The Huffington Post: "A group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women's bodies, have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops may be one of the quietest, yet most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill, with political allies that have enabled them to roll back decades of law and precedent. Over the past two years the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has launched one of the most extreme assaults on women's choice the U.S. has seen in decades. Republicans voted twice to slash federal family planning funds for low-income women, moved to prevent women from using their own money to buy insurance plans that cover abortion, introduced legislation that would force women to have ultrasounds before receiving an abortion and, most recently, passed a bill that will allow hospitals to refuse to perform emergency abortions for women with life-threatening pregnancy complications. But the erosion of women's rights didn't begin with the GOP takeover. President Barack Obama's health care reform law contained some of the most restrictive abortion language seen in decades. Lift the curtain, and behind the assault was the conference of bishops." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Steve Jobs and Entrepreneurial Church Leaders
From Faith and Leadership: "When the media announced the passing of Steve Jobs, my twitter feed quickly filled with condolences from fans and admirers to the man they all revered as an icon. Hashtags like '#iSad' and '#thankyousteve' -- even a tiny graphic of the Apple logo -- choked the network's stream with a flood of posts coming in at nearly 10,000 tweets per second. Among the tributes were those from evangelical church leaders who I have come to know over the years, and who spend a lot of time keeping in touch with consumer culture. For them, the gospel involves a missionary imperative to reach people in their everyday lives. They actively orient their ministries to 'connect' with rhythms of mainstream culture. It was no surprise that within an hour of the announcement, these pastors and parachurch leaders had also posted their own brief, solemn tributes. Over time I have seen how Steve Jobs became the patron saint of non-denominational church leaders who value creativity, technology and persistent vision." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Introduction to Critical Realism: Part IV
What, then, is realism? To begin, I will ignore the "naïve" aspect of "naïve realism" and instead simply explain "realism" in all of its varieties. Realism is the position regarding ontology that the world (i.e., everything outside one's own mind) exists independently of human consciousness of it and knowledge about it. In other words, the world -- all that exists or is (except one's own mental states, of course) -- is one certain way whether or not you or I or anyone else is aware of it. That is realism. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it nevertheless make a sound? Realism answers that question with a resounding, yes! Realism, in other words, is the position regarding ontology which holds that there exists an ultimate reality regardless of however human persons --- whether individually or collectively --- think (or don't think), believe (or don't believe), and know (or don't know) about it.
You might be thinking, "Why are we even talking about this? I have eyes to see the world, ears to hear it, a nose to smell it, a tongue to taste it, and so on. We do not have to worry about whether or not the world is really 'out there' and to do so is of little worth beyond philosophical self-amusement." If that is your view, then you have just articulated a position in the philosophy of perception variously known as naïve realism, direct realism, or commonsense realism. As its names themselves suggest, naïve realism is the ontological and epistemological position that human persons can and, in normal cases, do in fact perceive the world (ultimate reality) directly -- without any need for considerations of interpretation, hermeneutics, conceptual schemata, the kantian "veil of perception," desires, or subjective biases. This position is called naïve realism because, at least in its contemporary form, it is unreflexive and uncritical about the nature of human knowledge, experience, interpretation, and perception of the world.
It is noteworthy that this view of perception and knowledge applies equally not only to the structure, nature, and existence of the external physical world (e.g., trees, stars) but also to those (potential) constituents of reality that are non-material and/or abstract (to be clear, being non-material and being abstract are not the same thing). These include the past, the future, causes, human minds other than one's own, meanings, mathematical truths, moral facts and values, the laws of logic, social structures and fields, aesthetics, and even God Himself. Commonsense or naïve realism is at root a philosophical rebuttal to the strict empiricism and skepticism that was epitomized by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume (1711–1776) and Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). Empiricism and skepticism were unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation, after which human knowledge (at least in the West) was liberated from any absolute religious authority (i.e., the Catholic Church).
In response to such an epistemic upheaval (i.e., What is true? What are humans? What is authoritative? What is real?), commonsense or naïve realism posited, first, that the triune God of the Bible is real and operative in the world, and, second, that this God, being the loving and compassionate Father that He is, designed human beings with the natural capacity to perceive the world in various ways directly and accurately (to "mirror nature"), and thus to form unproblematically knowledge based upon those direct observations. (One might even call this position uncritical realism.) Commonsense or naïve realism as an epistemological position is clearest in the writings of the Scottish philosopher and clergyman Thomas Reid (1710-1796), a contemporary of Hume. In the next post I will explain the philosophical tradition that emerged from Hume and others --- namely, positivist empiricism --- which in many ways remains the defining philosophy of the modern era, especially as it relates to what is real and how we know.
b.
PREVIOUS POSTS IN THIS SERIES
Part I
Part II
Part III
The Evangelical Rejection of Reason
From The New York Times: "The Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans. Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann dismiss evolution as an unproven theory. The two candidates who espouse the greatest support for science, Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., happen to be Mormons, a faith regarded with mistrust by many Christians. The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious. As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, 'The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.' But evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced. Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary." Read the rest HERE.
b.
The Origins of the Word "Cult"
From www.pastormark.tv: "The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the English word 'cult' was first used in a theological controversy in the early 1600s that emerged out of King James I instituting the Oath of Allegiance (1606), which declared that the Pope of the Catholic Church had no authority over the King and his rule. In its earliest usages, though, the word 'cult' did not carry the negative connotation that it does today. Instead it simply meant 'worship; reverential homage rendered to a divine being or beings' and 'A particular form or system of religious worship; esp. in reference to its external rites and ceremonies.' (Etymologically, our word 'cult' is derived from the Latin cultus, which means worship, a form of the Latin verb colĕre, meaning to cultivate, attend to, or respect). This non-pejorative meaning of 'cult' is still present in most other dictionaries today.
"In sociology, the question of what exactly constitutes a cult started with 'the church-sect typology' by German Protestant theologian and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch in the early 20th century. In short, Troeltsch gave three fundamental types of religious behavior: (1) churchly, (2) sectarian, and (3) mystical. Troeltsch's work was not translated into English until 1931, and so the church-sect typology was actually introduced to English-speaking audiences not from Troeltsch, but from the work of another sociologically inclined theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr's The Social Sources of Denominationalism. In this work, Niebuhr revised Troeltsch's church-sect typology by treating 'church' and 'sect' as poles of a continuum. Unlike Troeltsch, Niebuhr's concern was not merely to classify religious groups but rather to analyze the process of religious history as groups moved along a continuum. (For example, Christianity was once considered a sect of Judaism).
"Howard Becker (1932) was the first American trained as a sociologist to use and extend church-sect theory. Aiming to make the continuum more specific, Becker divided 'church' into 'denomination' and 'ecclesia [church],' and he divided 'sect' into 'sect' and 'cult.' This resulted in the following continuum: cult-sect-denomination-ecclesia [church]. As Colin Campbell explains, Becker's use of the word 'cult' stressed 'the private, personal character of the adherents' beliefs and the amorphous nature of the organization.' This usage of 'cult' caught on in sociology and instead of reading it with reference to Troeltsch's original three-point typology, which basically equated to how well-established a religious group was, the term came to refer to any relatively small group 'whose beliefs and practices were merely deviant from the perspective of religious or secular orthodoxy,' along with 'a very loose organizational structure.' This, in short, is how the term 'cult' came to enter the discipline of sociology and began its trend toward indicating not just 'worship,' but negatively-connoted, deviant religious groups."
Read the rest HERE.
b.
Are Mormons Better Christians than are Evangelicals?
From CNN: "The Rev. Robert Jeffress, a leading evangelical minister, claimed last Friday that Mormons are not Christians. Jeffress went on to declare that Mormonism is 'a cult,' meaning it's not a 'real' religion, and he implored his followers to reject Mitt Romney, a Mormon, as a candidate for president because as Jeffress sees it: 'As Christians, we have the duty to prefer and select Christians as our leaders.' ...Over the last four days I have spent a great deal of time with members of the LDS Church. I'm not saying that I'm an expert on their teachings... But I can now say without hesitation that the LDS Church members we met represented the best of Christianity. They were truly caring and compassionate people. ...While it probably doesn't matter to a person like Jeffress, the LDS members we met proudly consider themselves Christians. After all, the full name of their religion is 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.' If your religion has the words 'Jesus Christ' in its name, it's kind of a tip off that Christ's teachings are important to you. ...In comparing the hate-filled language of Jeffress with the words and good deeds of the Mormons we met, it is clear to me who is best following the teachings of Jesus Christ and truly deserves to be called a Christian." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Are Evangelicals Dangerous?
From CNN: "Here we go again. Every four years, with every new presidential election cycle, public voices sound the alarm that the evangelicals are back. What is so scary about America's evangelical Christians? Just a few years ago, author Kevin Phillips told intellectual elites to run for cover, claiming that well-organized evangelicals were attempting to turn America into a theocratic state. In 'American Theocracy,' Phillips warned of the growing influence of Bible-believing, born-again, theologically conservative voters who were determined to create a theocracy. Writer Michelle Goldberg, meanwhile, has warned of a new Christian nationalism, based in 'dominion theology.' Chris Hedges topped that by calling conservative Christians 'American fascists.' And so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris claim that conservative Christians are nothing less than a threat to democracy. They prescribe atheism and secularism as the antidotes. ...What stories like this really show is that the secular elites assume that their own institutions and leaders are normative." Read the rest HERE.
b.
Spurgeon on Study and Speaking
From The Gospel Coalition: "If a man would speak without any present study, he must usually study much. This is a paradox perhaps, but its explanation lies upon the surface. If I am a miller, and I have a sack brought to my door, and am asked to fill that sack with good fine flour within the next five minutes, the only way in which I can do it, is by keeping the flour-bin of my mill always full, so that I can at once open the mouth of the sack, fill it, and deliver it. I do not happen to be grinding at that time, and so far the delivery is extemporary; but I have been grinding before, and so have the flour to serve out to the customer. So, brethren, you must have been grinding, or you will not have the flour. You will not be able to extemporise good thinking unless you have been in the habit of thinking and feeding your mind with abundant and nourishing food. Work hard at every available moment. Store your minds very richly, and then, like merchants with crowded warehouses, you will have goods ready for your customers, and having arranged your good things upon the shelves of your mind, you will be able to hand them down at any time without the laborious process of going to market, sorting, folding, and preparing. I do not believe that any man can be successful in continuously maintaining the gift of extemporaneous speech, except by ordinarily using far more labour than is usual with those who write and commit their discourses to memory. Take it as a rule without exception, that to be able to overflow spontaneously you must be full."
b.
A Life Update
It has been more than a year since I have written one of my "life updates," so here it goes: First, since December I have been dating a young woman named Alex. She is from Roseville, MI (between Warren and St. Clair Shores), and is a fifth year undergraduate at the University of Michigan studying chemical engineering. We met two summers ago at the wedding reception of a mutual friend in Ann Arbor. Things are going very well. Second, in terms of academics, I am currently in a rather strange year that consists almost entirely of reading and thinking ---- having finished coursework but not yet started my doctoral dissertation. So here is what is on the calendar academically: (1) present at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, which is in Milwaukee near the end of this month; (2) guest lecture in the Sociology of Religion course at the University of Michigan in mid-November; (3) prepare for and take my second (and last) comprehensive exam in mid-January, which is on sociological theory and the philosophy of (social) science; and (4) write and defend a (40-ish page) proposal on what I will do for my dissertation, which, if all goes according to plan, will end up being my first book. Third, I am working two part-time jobs. The first is as a research assistant for the Center for the Study of Religion and Society here at Notre Dame. The second position is with Docent Research Group, which provides various kinds of research (theology, sociology, history, creativity) for Evangelical churches throughout the country. My primary (weekly) client is Jud Wilhite, the lead pastor of Central Christian Church in Las Vegas, although I have had my voice in a couple of books by pastors at Mars Hill Church over the past year too. So in sum, over the coming months, I am looking forward to thinking through and writing my dissertation proposal and in so doing getting a clearer idea of what the next two years of my life might look like (but see James 4: 13-17) as I gather data for and write my first book, which will likely entail a good bit of traveling city to city. Despite all of that, it still feels for the most part like more of the same. I enjoy what I do and am honored to have the opportunity to help build the Church however I am able.
b.
The Church is Not Your Canvas
From Patheos: "...[T]he church is not a playground for the pastor's talents. It is not the canvas on which the pastor creates his masterpiece. The church does not exist for the pastor, and the church is not about the pastor. The church is a work of God, through the gospel, and through the transformation the gospel works in our lives. If the church is a stage, then we are at best the supporting cast. If we focus upon ourselves when we're telling the stories of our churches, then we've lost the narrative -- because we've forgotten the identity of the protagonist. As Rick Warren famously said, 'It's not about you.' While God's intimate care for each individual is mind-shattering, the story of salvation is ultimately not about us. It's about God. The story of the church is not about us, either. And the story of an individual church is not about the pastor. There are all sorts of images we might use to communicate this. Perhaps it's best to say that the pastor is not the artist; the pastor is the brush, and the canvas. The pastor is an instrument in the hands of God, a vessel for God's creative and redemptive act, and then the pastor too is one of the re-created and redeemed. The Artist is always God, and we are blessed to be both an instrument in his hands and the object of his exquisite care." Read the rest HERE.
b.
If your right eye causes you to stumble...
From NBC New York: "An Italian man tore both of his eyes out in the middle of the priest's homily at a church near Pisa, according to reports. Fellow parishioners watched in horror as Aldo Bianchini, 46, used his bare hands to pull out both eyeballs. Bianchini later told surgeons, who were unable to save his vision, he heard voices that told him to do it. 'He was in a great deal of agony and he was covered in blood,' Dr. Gino Barbacci told the Daily Mail. 'He said that he had used his bare hands to gouge out his eye balls after hearing voices telling him to do so -- to do something like that requires super human strength.' Father Lorenzo Tanganelli said he had just launched into his sermon when he saw a commotion in the back of the church, according to the Italian paper Corriere Fiorentino. 'This man at the back of the knave started tearing at his face and I realized he was gouging out his eyes,' Tanganelli told the paper. 'I called for assistance and the paramedics were quickly at the scene and he was taken away and then I carried on celebrating Mass but a lot of people had left because they were so shocked by what they had seen.'" Read the rest HERE.
b.
This Bitter Earth: 2011 Emmy Award Winner
But, for what it's worth, I think that THIS piece by Travis Wall should have won.
b.
Rob Bell to Leave Mars Hill Church
From Christianity Today: "Rob Bell has decided to leave Mars Hill Church, the Grandville, Michigan, megachurch he and his wife founded 12 years ago, to focus on a broader audience, the church announced today. Flickering Pixels author Shane Hipps will take over for Bell during spring 2012 after Bell finishes his series on Acts in December. Update 9/25/2011: Rob Bell told Mars Hill today that he will leave for Los Angeles to follow a 'calling to share God's love' in new ways, WZZM reports from Grand Rapids. He will move with his family to California to continue writing books and speaking on national and international tours, but he will not start a new church, he said. Bell will launch his 'Fit to Smash Ice Tour' in Canada in November and continue the tour in the U.S. 'We serve a big God and none of this is shocking to him,' WZZM reports Bell said during his sermon. 'All we can do is embrace a future that is going to be brilliant.'" Read the rest HERE.
b.
