Summer Reading for College Graduates

It’s late May, which means that across the world, twentysomething college students are graduating or preparing to graduate: departing campuses and communities that have shaped them deeply and venturing off into the wide open spaces of adulthood in a way that is (for most of them) wholly new. The transition from college to post-college life is a significant one for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that for many college grads, being a student (that is: being forced to read things, write papers and take exams for coveted grades) is all they have known for the last 17 or so years.

For many of them, “learning” has largely been something they associate with pressure, stress, and the confines of parental control and expectation. Education is something that has been prescribed, mapped out and scheduled-to-death for them as long as they can remember. To graduate from college, then, is among other things to liberate oneself from the notion of education as bureaucracy (curriculum checklists, units, requirements, pre-reqs, to-dos, tuition payments, etc.) and to replace it with a notion of education as a choice, or (even better) education as a pleasure. That is, if it is replaced at all.

The sad reality, I suspect, is that after degrees are conferred, many graduates consider their education to be concluded. Which I guess is the expected conclusion to an educational system primarily built around preparing students for the next thing, culminating in a college degree that translates into a job. If the telos of education is practical preparation as opposed to, say, the seeking of truth and the ability to ask questions well, then of course it makes sense that once a job is attained or a lucrative skill mastered, education ceases to be a priority.

But practical training and skill development are only part of education’s purpose. Degrees are not the end goal. Education should be a lifelong pursuit. To exist is to always be on a continuum of known and unknown, discovered and undiscovered. “We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T.S. Eliot.

That’s why, if I were to give one piece of advice to college graduates, it would be to find ways to keep the pursuit of knowledge and truth an active and lively pursuit in your life. One way to do that is to keep reading. Embrace the fact that, for the first time in many years, you can read what you want to and you won’t have to take a test or write a term paper about it. Learn to take pleasure in it. Make it a daily habit. Reading for “fun” is one of the most important things one can do to stay motivated to keep learning.

Read anything. Blogs, newspapers, magazines, tweets, billboards, poems (please read poems!), essays, journals, Wikipedia, and so on. Also, watch movies. Documentaries. Blockbusters. TV. Go to concerts. Museums. Take walks. Run. Travel. Try new restaurants. Develop an expertise or a habit. Discuss current events. Debate a friend. Sit on your front porch smoking pipes while discussing theology (or drinking scotch while discussing politics). Do any and everything you need to do in order to grow in your curiousity about the world and your desire to understand it more deeply.

Oh, and keep reading books.

On that note, I thought I’d give a few recommendations. The following are five books that have either come out recently or will be released very soon. They are books that I think are particularly inspiring and motivating for those of us who may be in a transition moment in life but still doggedly in pursuit of the good life: living, growing, thinking, believing and questioning well.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011), by Alan Jacobs

I can’t think of a better book to recommend to a graduate as a first venture into the world of post-college reading. Jacobs dispels the notion that reading should be a chore, or that only highbrow Great Books are worth our time. “Read what gives you delight–at least most of the time–and do so without shame,” he argues, making the case in characteristically elegant fashion that reading can and should be something that gives us pleasure. Happily, Jacobs’ own finesse and wit as a writer makes the book itself a pleasure to read.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013), by Douglas Rushkoff

I recommend this book as a companion piece of sorts to Jacobs’ book, with emphasis on the “age of distraction” part. Rushkoff–the media theorist guru behind the Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders–more or less attempts to connect every zeitgeist-defining thing in our world today (Instagram! Zombies! Tea Partiers!) to shape a unifying theory about how we are both more and less “present” than ever. Obvious at times but mostly quite insightful, Present Shock is the sort of “magnifying glass on your world” book that is important to read every so often because it thinks deeply and critically about contemporary life and, in turn, helps the reader to do the same.

When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is my favorite public intellectual. She has that rare, C.S. Lewis-style combination of being both a winsome communicator and an intellectual heavy-hitter. She knows a lot about a lot of things, and can write better than just about any other living writer, in both nonfiction and fiction (read her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead for proof). She is awesome, and her most recent essay collection is too. When I Was a Child I Read Books is not easy reading, to be sure. It’s challenging. But it will inspire you to want to think as broadly and as deeply as she does about a vast array of things: religion, contemporary economics, “new atheists,” science, literature, geography, Moses, hymnology, and yes, childhood reading habits.

Death by Living: Life is Meant to be Spent (2013), by N.D. Wilson

I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of this book (which comes out later this summer) and writing a review of it for Christianity Today. I can’t recommend it enough. Following and expanding upon themes in his Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl, N.D. Wilson shows that he is not only one of his generation’s most gifted and original thinkers but also one of its best writers. Featuring some of the best prose you’ll see this side of Marilynne Robinson, Death by Living is a beautiful array of memoir, theological reflection and narrative vignette that oozes wonder about the world and humility before God. For college grads cynical about things like religion, purpose-driven lives and “making a difference”–and yet unwilling to abandon these notions entirely–Death by Living is the poolside reading I recommend.

The End of Our Exploring (2013), by Matthew Lee Anderson

In a world where “dialogue” and “conversation” are buzzwords but rarely well practiced, and where doubt and questioning seem to be more about a scene than a search for truth, Matt’’s latest, The End of Our Exploring, comes as a breath of fresh air. Clearheaded, personal, witty and wise, the book presents a sensible framework for epistemology that is sorely needed today. How do we doubt, question, probe, debate, discuss and know in a more purposeful and productive manner? It’s en vogue today for young Christians to put on airs of intellectualism (you know: tweed sport coats, pipes, Jacques Ellul reading groups…), but the image of thoughtfulness is not enough. Matt’s book–a short, concise, engaging read–reminds us that actually being thoughtful is far greater (and more nuanced) than just looking the part.

Why Cities Matter: A Review

My latest post on hating suburbia precipitated a great number of substantive responses. I want to continue the discussion by reviewing the new book, Why Cities Matter by Stephen Um and Justin Buzzard. Both men are pastors of Gospel Coalition-ish churches in Boston and Silicon Valley, respectively. They are also aspiring Kellerites. Not only does Keller pen the foreword, but there are nearly twenty citations to his book Center Church, several attributions to his articles like “A Biblical Theology of the City,” and even one reference to his unpublished notes.

The book’s title encapsulates its purpose; Um and Buzzard endeavor to explain why cities are important to the economic and evangelistic future of the world. They do this with both sociological data on how and why cities are centers of power, culture, and worship, and then theological reflection on God’s view of cities.

Their theological insight takes the form of a biblical word-study of “city” from Genesis to Revelation. It is not exactly the most contextually sensitive of readings. For example, they write that Jesus ministered in an “undeniably urbanized environment” because he makes reference to courts, market squares, and interest-bearing accounts, and they write that Paul’s letters are “even more urban than we think” in that they are “written from cities to cities… [so Paul] does not need to argue for the necessity of ministry to cities.” For those of you scoring at home, Jesus is urban even though he’s in the countryside because he mentions cities, and Paul is urban even though he doesn’t really mention cities because he is in the city. Like proverbial men with hammers, they certainly see a great number of nails.

I wish this was the only absurdity in their biblical study of cities, but it is actually typical. Other exegetical stretches include: “Eden may well have included buildings,” “God is the ultimate, creative, entrepreneurial urban planter,” and “When God’s people’s commitment to the urban mandate fizzled out, he personally took up responsibility for the mission, took on human flesh, and was born into the city (Luke 2: 11).” FACT: According to scholars, the population of the City of David at the time of Jesus’ birth was 300 – 1000. I had touched on this odd exegetical phenomenon in my first piece on Metro-Evangelicals, but the sloppiness continues to amaze.

The remainder of the book contains helpful missiological advice for reaching cities and it is here that Um and Buzzard hit their stride. They counsel avoiding twin temptations of city living: “overadapting” by conforming one’s life to the culture of the city or “underadapting” by privatizing one’s faith in order to be approved by peers. One technique they suggest is to understand the storyline of your city—that is, the dreams and cultural values of your locale—and rewrite it with a Gospel ending.

The gospel doesn’t eradicate a city’s story, but it brings completeness to it. Once a city’s story has been challenged, it must be retold. And it must be retold to show that a city’s story can only find a happy ending through Jesus’s substitutionary resolution and completion of the themes of the city’s story line. The gospel resolves the thickening tension in the city’s narrative, and shows that resolution, relief, and rest are to be found only in Jesus Christ.

This is wonderful advice, but it would seem equally applicable in urban, suburban, or rural environments, which brings me to the chief weakness of the book.

Equivocating on the Meaning of “City”

From the outset of the book there is ambiguity as to the definition of “city.” Keller’s foreword lays out some facts about the increasing importance of cities. He quotes the CEO of Gallup that “as goes the leadership of the top 100 American cities, so goes the country’s economic future.” Continue reading →

On Why We should Love and Hate the Suburbs

Like most kerfuffles, the recent dispute over Christianity and the suburbs has teetered on engendering far more heat than there has been light.

Some of that was due to our own Keith Miller’s post, which self-consciously provoked and explored questions rather than laid out definitive hypotheses. (Mission accomplished. The comments have been wonderful.) But one gets the sense that the discussion has been fueled by vagueness, that it’s full of heuristic caricatures set up to illuminate more fundamental points. And heuristic caricatures often breed defensive responses, and around the internet wheel-go-round we spin. That’s my observation, anyway, which I am happy to be wrong about.

But before you point out just how off I am, allow me to add more fodder for your commenting cannons and say some more doubtlessly misguided things rooted in more and less helpful caricatures.

It seems that Peter Blair’s fundamental point that “we should not mistake the normal cultural standards of 21^st century American life for ‘ordinary life’” is well made. Only there’s no reason to limit the problem to the existence of the suburbs: there’s nothing ‘ordinary’ about our cities, either, at least that I can tell. Rome was at its peak a million people, after all, which I suspect provided a very different form of life for its inhabitants than that which our current mega-cities allow.

And while decrying the effects of cars on the way of life in the suburbs, we ought to be sensitive to the effects of mass transit on cities. Yes, people have to bump shoulders more with people they don’t know every day, and there’s something to that. But as a daily rider of a bus in a relatively small city I can assure you the transformative effect isn’t all that one would hope for. It is possible to take the bus daily and only rarely recognize people, much less strike up a conversation with them.

Which is to say, Peter mused that the question here goes “much deeper than the discreet issue of whether the suburbs should be praised or damned.” Indeed. And while we’re examining his questions, we should also wonder why we have to choose between these two. The suburbs ought to be praised and damned, because they’re praiseworthy and damnable. And so ought the cities, for that matter.

The irony, of course, is that the critique of the suburbs seems fundamentally anti-secular. (This is a point lost on both Keith and Peter, at least from what I can tell.) There is nothing more secular than the suburbs: they are the perfect embodiment of a world that stands halfway between creation and new Jerusalem, only with distorted views of both. They strive to bring together the amenities and culture of (traditionally) urban existence, while preserving the cultured gardens of country dwellings. Suburbs are the perfect Augustinian paradisical hell, only a quintessentially modern one, with the sort of structures that garden variety anti-modernists of the Front-Porcher temperment hate and all their critics therefore necessarily feel obliged to defend.* It seems strange to me to defend secularity and engage in a critical project of the suburbs, or to offer a critical use of secular while making a defense of them. The thing to do if you want to affirm the secular is affirm suburban living precisely because its what the strange fusion of Christianity and modernity has given us.

A brief aside: I think this point stands on any definition of “secular.” The term is so contested as to not be very helpful (like a few other terms in this discussion, too). But if it means that which comes into Christianity from “the world,” well, that’s an ambiguous category but not necessarily hostile one. And if we mean something like Augustine meant, and describe it as that which is between the times, well, that fits the suburbs too. Modernity, like every other period, is a mess of congmingled goods and vices, which manifests itself in a host of structures and institutions. I think on both terms, though, the suburbs are thoroughly secular and hence unremittingly ambivalent. May they be praised and also damned. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, but don’t make me have to choose one or the other when we can do both.

But back to it: All this mucking up of things simply highlights the relative unhelpfulness of, well, the entire discussion. Can’t we spend a good deal longer wondering what the suburbs are for before we start kindling our torches or building our defenses? We might find that “the city” stands under judgment just as much, and that we should add additional targets for our denunciations. Why explore that question? Perhaps to raise the more fundamental question of what it means to live faithfully within the place we find ourselves, whether its “suburban” or “urban” or “rural” or whatever term we apply.

I myself might commend to us all a Chestertonian patriotism here: we ought to be suburban critics only because we are suburban fans. Loving the suburbs, and the people in them, might be the precursor to properly understanding them and criticizing them. Getting inside the suburbs and seeing the qualities of life that make them so attractive, and starting with that, might be a good step toward actually understanding them. I understand the critics of the suburbs come to bury them and all, but maybe starting with a little praise might make it all go down a bit smoother.

Let me make two related points here, just to ensure that my destruction in the comments will be complete.

First, I realize that the “city” and “rural” dispute has theological undertones. But here, too, I think we have reason to be appreciative about both and so ambivalent about both. As has often been pointed out, pagan means “countrydweller” for a reason, namely that Christianity spread through the cities first. But Christ announced himself to some shepherds before that, who faithfully came and worshipped along with the backwoods girl who’d been blessed with the honor of bearing the Son of God.

Second, evangelicals have for a season wrestled with being co-opted by technique. We’ve let other people amuse themselves to death—we’ve progamatized ourselves to death. (Okay, we’ve amused ourselves to death too.) This background is inescapable, and we’d be silly to ignore it. But it matters for this discussion, as it means that the emphasis on transforming cities will constantly be in danger of being reduced to a project, which is then packaged, made pretty, and sold. (Think of it as the McMansion version of movement formation, and then judge accordingly.) When that happens, people will inevitably be moved to push back, and probably in terms just as overwrought as those they are hearing. Technique is the spirit of our age, even still, and the emphasis on city-living and the repudiation of the suburbs is in constant danger of so being co-opted, as many good and true movements and messages have been.

And now, have fun in the comments. I’m getting off the merry-go-round for a bit, as I feel a bit woozy.

*Again, dealing in caricatures here, you know, to make a point.

Update: I meant to include a nod to Jake Meador’s excellent post at Mere-O Notes, our little tumblr-roundup site that he curates. Go forth and read it too.

Why Do We Hate the Suburbs?

Anthony Bradley struck a nerve in his probing post on the dysfunctions of Evangelical twenty-somethings. He blames two salient ideas: the “missional narcissism” of the Radicals and the anti-suburban dictates of the Metro-Evangelicals. Both trends are animated by the conviction that the comfortable, consumer-driven suburban life of the previous generation of Evangelicals was a travesty. The young people Bradley is encountering are paralyzed for fear that they will recreate their parents’ lifestyle choices and hold down hum-drum jobs in a peaceful ‘burb.

Bradley, while spurring these young folks to action, did not actually defend the suburban lifestyle — chiding the “lukewarm Christians” living in “safety, comfort, and material ease” there — but he just thought that the Radicals and Metro-Evangelicals were overreacting.

In response to Bradley’s mild critique of this reflexive anti-suburbanism, the editors at Fare Forward (HT: Mere-O Notes!) reflexively proclaimed their anti-suburbanism:

[T]here are some things deeply unChristian, and deeply counter to even natural virtue, in the suburbs. . . [A]s the buzz around Rod Dreher’s latest book on moving home, a lot of the anti-suburban sentiment comes from people who support small town living just as much as from those who support city living. And the thing that unites the city and the country against the suburbs is the belief that the suburbs are not, as a matter of fact, ordinary, natural life, but a strange artificial construct that hinders ordinary lives and ordinary relationships.

In other words, “No, really, suburbs are that bad.”

Dalas skyline and suburbs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am prepared to say the unthinkable: suburbs are good. Stay with me now. While suburbs have suffered decades of derogatory propaganda, there is still much to be commended. In fact, I wonder if the only reason we think suburbs are bad is because we were told they were bad and we believed it.

Hating the Suburbs since 1921
Denigrating suburban living has been a favorite pastime amongst the hip-cool set for almost a century. Joel Kotkin outlines some of this history in a fabulous post on his New Geography blog. Since the 1920’s when Lewis Mumford described the expansion of New York’s outer boroughs as a “dissolute landscape” and “a no-man’s land which was neither town or country” the chattering class has been convinced that suburbia is eternally boring and somewhat sinister. F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed this jazz age sentiment in The Great Gatsby by describing the inferiority of the “bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions.”
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What is to be done about the evangelical industrial complex?

Before the church wrestled with how the internet would shape our church culture, we wrestled with how the printing press would shape our church culture.

This essay from Carl Trueman is gold:

It is probably a year or so since I raised the question of the impact of celebrity on evangelicalism. As I was told then, celebrity either does not exist in the evangelical subculture or is of no real importance there. Thus, I suspect the Evangelical Industrial Complex either does not exist or exerts no influence; but it is entertaining to imagine what would the signs be that it was a real issue (which, I am sure you will agree, it is not).

The aesthetics of success would subtly and imperceptibly supplant the principles of faithfulness or would indeed come to be identified with the same. The rhetoric of faithfulness would be retained, but the substance would be less and less important. Thus, the key leaders would be the men at the big churches or with the ability to pack a stadium or to handle media with slick sophistication. Fruitfulness and faithfulness would be rhetorically opposed in a way that would be ridiculous if we were talking marriage, but which somehow seems plausible in a church context.

This isn’t a new problem, of course. In the early days of his work in Geneva, Calvin was strongly opposed to publishing his sermons. He believed that the commentaries he wrote were for all Christians, but his sermons to the church in Geneva were specifically meant for the church in Geneva and shouldn’t be published for people outside the Genevan church to read.

Of course, you can probably guess what happened. Printers in nearby cities simply started selling unauthorized copies of Calvin’s sermons that didn’t always reflect his actual beliefs. Consequently, Calvin had to make a compromise and authorize a printed version of his sermon simply to prevent unauthorized versions from getting out. (As an aside, this is one reason I appreciate it when prominent churches put their sermons behind a paywall. That paywall is going to keep a lot of casual sermon listeners from regularly listening to their preaching and becoming more influenced by that then by their own pastor at their own local church.) The lesson here seems to be that technological developments can make our ideal scenario for church life a bit harder to realize.
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Flesh of My Flesh: Responding to Anthony Esolen on the Boy Scouts

Editor’s note: I am publishing this reflection by Emily Alianello & Eve Marie Barner Gleason because I think this is an important issue and important to frame appropriately. I am grateful for their investment in thinking through this issue carefully.

In a recent essay, Anthony Esolen crafts a gentle gender manifesto against the backdrop of a recent announcement by the Boy Scouts of America. His appealing prose creates an idealized picture of boyhood, joyfully celebrating the identity of a young boy in a caring, functional family. But the lines of this image are etched in the ink of separation. In contrast to cultural confusion about the meaning of gender, Esolen claims certainty about the natural identity of every male, an identity that his description seems to indicate is based in difference from females.

While some of Esolen’s statements would profit from greater nuance, many of them are just common sense (“A boy is not a girl. A boy grows up to be a man”). We share with Esolen both his Christian faith and his delight in the beauty of creation. But Esolen conflates generally accepted and scientifically affirmed common sense about sex differences with deeply troubling metaphysical theories of his own, which veils the sweeping nature of his argument. These claims represent one approach to the complicated question of how Christians ought to understand identity and gender in a secular culture that tells them everything is choice, and all sexual differences are learned patterns. While Esolen’s article is appealing in its vision of simplicity, that appeal smuggles in some worrisome distortions and half-truths about human identity that have deep implications for how we talk about being human, and live in community as men and women. Our ends may be the same, but the words we use to get there are deeply significant.

Esolen describes the habits, mannerisms and body of Luke, a ten-year old boy, and the father who guides him. He presents these as incontrovertible proof of Luke’s essential boy-ness and the continuity this establishes with the men in his life. He writes, “None of this should be controversial.” And in many individual instances it is not. Of course boys model themselves after their fathers and fathers see themselves in their sons. Many boys also behave in ways similar to the ways other boys behave now and have behaved throughout history. There are also proven dissimilarities in the hormones that predominantly influence the development of the male and female brain—dissimilarities which result in observable differences between most men and women. We agree with Esolen where he draws attention to the continuity between fathers and sons, the value of men, and the unique strengths that men, on average, possess. These things are not controversial.

What is controversial, or rather what is faulty, is his untroubled equation of “It’s a boy!” with a full statement of the nature of male being. Esolen’s ontological argument that identity and purpose of males is rooted in sexual differentiation lacks appreciation for both the essential unity of humankind and the full scope of human diversity. The latent premises behind many of Esolen’s assertions are: first, that what is most important about a man is the way in which he differs from a woman; second, that these differences define his purpose; and third, that the healthiest families and societies structure themselves around affirming and encouraging these differences above all else. Although Esolen is right that fathers and mothers transfer their understanding of their purpose as men and women to their sons, assumptions such as these lead to a deeply problematic understanding of what it is to be not only human, but a man.

Original Boy Scouts of America emblem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is the commonalities, rather than the differences, between men and women that are the ground of our identity. Our differences, while real, are not fundamental. Men and women do indeed have different chests and different average heights, but we both have souls. While certain virtues or traits may be, depending on circumstance, inflected toward men or women, the most central ones are not. As Christ followers, both men and women are called to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, and self-control. Both ought to love God with all their heart and mind and strength, and love their neighbor too.

Esolen makes the divide of difference much more complete than either Christian Scripture or our own experience teach us. He says only in married love “does one give of oneself, forever, to someone who stands across a divide in being: the one who begets, the one who bears” (emphasis ours). Here we strongly disagree. Sperm and egg, penis & vagina, these do not represent a divide in being. The anatomy of men and women are different and yet wonderfully similar. We aren’t simply begetters and bearers. We are co-laborers in the forming of our offspring. The paradox and complexity of love making is part of its wonder. Women are not, as the ancients sometimes postulated, mere earth into which the man plants miniature humans. Male sperm is not complete in itself like the seed of a plant. Down to the cellular level, human reproduction is so much more gloriously complex and beautifully complementary. While the sperm determines the gender of the new person, the egg selects the sperm. As when he calls the man the sower and the woman the field, Esolen is wrong—very wrong. It is not necessary, and ultimately counter-productive, to claim this divide in being in order to establish the reality of male and femaleness.

We must think carefully about how we characterize the divide between men and women. We are the same substance: bone of bone, flesh of flesh, as our first father poetically declared. When Esolen claims that men and women are divided in their very being, that they are reflections of the “wholly other,” he stands outside the Scriptural testimony about men and women as common bearers of the imago dei in creation and joint heirs in redemption.

A focus on the totality and primacy of difference risks reducing manhood to ‘being different from women.’ While we are certain that Esolen is aware of the range of wonderful differences among men, we suggest that his argument would benefit from celebrating these differences as well. A man is not most fully a man when he is as completely different from any woman as possible. Rather he is most fully a man as he most accurately reflects the image of God. And women have this same high calling. This change in emphasis does not negate the reality of difference, but it does place commonality and difference in their proper order. As Christian men and women are transformed into the image of Christ, each of us will find that we have become as uniquely masculine and feminine as we are supposed to be – and yet have more in common with each other than we ever imagined.

The reason we as male and female, single and married, old and young, ought to appreciate and honor and serve each other is not because we are wholly other, but because we recognize the ways our diverse giftings strengthen our entire community. The Apostle Paul refers to diverse spiritual giftings as being for the “common good.” Yet, in Esolen’s articulation of gender, there is little sense of men and women collaborating as partners—what Carolyn James has called the blessed alliance. All humans are image bearers—and to whom do we bear the divine image? To each other, of course. In that sense, we are all what Esolen might call alter egos—the joy of our relatedness is in finding in each other a reflection of the same image we ourselves bear. It is difference mingled with similarity, not difference alone that is so joyful, so communicative.

This leads to our second point: there is in this equation of gender and purpose a willingness to find ultimate ends in the differences of gender. When Esolen says that the sexual form of a boy is a clear indication of his goal and purpose, i.e. for a women, for a family, he is speaking a partial truth that misses a more essential truth. For if sexual union with a woman in order to father children is what a man was made for, then what shall we say of the men who do not father children, or who live a life of celibacy? We must find the telos of both men and women in something other than beautiful diversity of sexual difference or the good of sexual union between a husband and a wife. Esolen suggests this himself when he says that the “essense of manhood and womanhood” is godliness. In shared humanity we find the realest purpose of both men and women, to rightly image and worship the God who made them. Any attempt to rescue a healthy view of sexual order must not lose sight of these ultimate ends.

Finally, Esolen casts a vision of family and society where the healthiest families are those that do most to recognize and encourage sexual difference. Again, there are some truths to this. We agree with Esolen that it is foolish for families to ignore differences between their sons and daughters. But a vision for family that over-emphasizes sexual traits runs the risk of missing that each child is a unique person, a combination of father and mother (and their fathers and mothers) in both physical traits and personality. Sons model themselves after their fathers… and also their mothers. Fathers see themselves in their sons… and also their daughters.

A wise family recognizes the particular strengths and weaknesses of its members, molding training and instruction and praise to suit the needs of each child. Emily’s mother recognizes and cultivates her youngest son’s artistic talent, which is like her own. Emily’s own life has taken the path it did in part because her father recognized and provoked her intellectual curiosity. Eve’s husband has eagerly learned wisdom and compassion from his mother, enriching their marriage in many ways. Likewise, society as a whole is stronger for valuing the diversity of its members’ gifts and offering corresponding opportunities.

We realize that the core of Esolen’s argument occurs in a specific context and is devoted to a defense of gender that is very much centered on the question of sexual purpose. But this is all the more reason to be very careful with words, and to craft a celebration of boy and girl, man and woman that avoids overly broad categories. These oversimplifications threaten to exclude boys whose experiences differ from Luke’s. Further, they diminish the full potential of relationship not only between husbands and wives, but also between brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, friends and neighbors. Western culture swings between extremes of a genderless world and a pornified one; it embraces gay marriage on the one hand and sells endless princess toys on the other. Both GQ and Cosmopolitan are best sellers in the magazine racks. This cultural incoherence is not best responded to with a Christian version of sexual extremes, reducing the end of God’s chief creation to affirming sexual difference. For what is most important about a man is that he is the creation and image of God. It is in this he finds his purpose. So then, as families and as a community, we have an amazing opportunity to raise Luke and Lucy to recognize and rejoice in difference without making it an end in itself, to pursue virtue in themselves and encourage its development in each other, and to love God and their neighbor. If they do this, they will be fortified against the extremes of any culture.

Emily Alianello is a PhD Candidate in English at the Catholic University of America. She teaches writing to undergraduates, tries to write a dissertation, and drinks a lot of coffee.

Eve Marie Barner Gleason is a nonprofit communications professional with a background in public policy. She and her husband are active in their Northern Virginia community and love laughing at the antics of their dog, Coco.

To Malick’s “Wonder”

To the Wonder Malick

Terrence Malick’s latest, To the Wonder, is an apt follow-up to the enigmatic director’s 2011 classic, The Tree of Life. Both films are beautiful experiences of image and sound, deeply personal memoirs and heartfelt explorations of Christian faith.

To the Wonder has received substantially fewer enthusiastic reviews than Life, however. It’s not a film likely to show up on anyone’s “Greatest Films of all Time” list (as Life did for the late, great Roger Ebert). Why is that? I suspect it has to do with the fact that the film is not nearly as flashy and majestic as Life. There are no nebulae or dinosaurs. The world of Wonder is ho-hum by comparison. The Sonics and strip malls everywhere don’t help. And unlike all of Malick’s other films, it’s not a period piece or in any way exotic. Aside from a few dreamy sequences in France, Wonder is about American suburbia and its attendant quotidian struggles.

At least on the surface. Wonder, I think, is a far more substantial film than many assessments have pronounced it. Far from the “minor Malick” some have labeled it (or at best: “a B-side to The Tree of Life), Wonder is a characteristically ambitious, boundary-pushing film that builds upon the stylistic and thematic trajectories of its predecessors in the Malick oeuvre. I’ve now seen the film three times, and each viewing (as is the case with all of Malick’s meticulously assembled works of cinematic art) reveals new details, thoughts, emotions, epiphanies. Malick’s collaborators—especially production designer Jack Fisk—are all detail people, and it shows. Notice the extensive attention given to space, architecture, rooms, furniture, decor (yep, that’s a globe!) and appliances, for example. The geographies and materiality of everyday life are of great interest to Malick, likely in part because of his interests in Heideggerian phenomenology.

To the Wonder is challenging, to be sure. It’s not at all clear what the film is chiefly about. Love, perhaps? Marriage and parenting? Suffering? Dasein? In some areas, though, Wonder is more overt than Malick’s last few films have been. Take its treatment of Christian faith, for example. The film is imbued with it at every turn. Malick goes so far as to have a priest (Javier Bardem’s “Father Quintana”) as a central character, with his heartfelt homilies and prayers giving the film a liturgical directness that follows from but goes farther than even The Tree of Life.

Sadly, most critics have failed to adequately engage the Christian elements of the film, which are aplenty. Perhaps that’s because we have such a dearth of films like this, which earnestly—sans cynicism or irony—explore Christian faith without preaching or offering pat answers. (Though there are some out there).

In my review for Christianity Today, however, I try to engage the film on this level, making sense of Malick’s spiritual preoccupations in Wonder as well as his other five films. Below is an excerpt from my review, the entirety of which can be read here.

Though many of Malick’s characters struggle with faith and feel God to be distant (Mrs. O’Brien in The Tree of Life, Pocahontas in The New World, Sgt. Welsh in The Thin Red Line), most of them—through encounters with Love or with beauty—come back to a place of belief. Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) in To the Wonder, for example, remains thirsty for God the whole film, even in the midst of suffering. In a beautiful sequence Quintana quotes part of St. Patrick’s Lorica in a prayer that encapsulates the film’s underlying vision:

Teach us where to seek you. Christ be with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me.Christ in me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left. Christ in my heart. Thirsty. We thirst. Flood our souls with your spirit and life so completely that our lives may only be a reflection of you. Shine through us. Show us how to seek you. We were made to see you.

Immediately prior to this prayer, Malick’s curious gaze lands on a nun, fully outfitted in habit, standing at a kitchen sink alone, washing silverware. We then see that it is actually Quintana looking at her, and we see that he is moved. In one image: the sacred and the mundane; work and worship; washing away the stain; the specter of Eden in a household chore. In a way the moment echoes the final voiceover of the soldiers leaving Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line, looking out on the blood-soaked beaches and the baptismal wake of the departing boat: “Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face?”

I suspect Malick’s answer is yes. Pain, struggle, loss, strife: it’s all an opportunity to see the face of God and to grow in faith. Just as nature was created to be resilient in the midst of difficulty (see the asteroid in The Tree of Life, or the palm shoot springing up from the bombed out beach in the final shot of The Thin Red Line), humans were created to press on and grow, emboldened by the grace, forgiveness and guiding Spirit of “the Love that loves us,” come what way.

If you’re interested and have some spare minutes, read the rest of my review here, as well as this one by Richard Brody in The New Yorker, and this piece which offers great insights into Malick’s creative process on the film. Also, if you have not yet seen the film on the big screen—and I highly suggest this format for viewing any Malick film—check this list of current theaters where the film can be found.

Evangelicals and Foreign Adoption

Editor’s Note: I’m pleased to host this reflection on adoption by Maralee Bradley. As longtime readers know, I’ve kept one eye on the evangelical adoption movement. This is a very personal and very difficult subject for many people, and worth considering carefully.

As the parent of a child who lived for a year in a Liberian orphanage, Kathryn Joyce’s article about the evangelical adoption movement disturbed me. It gave me that sinking feeling in my gut. You know the one—like seeing your cousin’s mugshot pop up unexpectedly while watching the evening news. You knew your cousin was a little troubled, but you still feel protective of his reputation and by extension, yours.

Joyce has strong words about the ethics of the agencies and families engaged in international adoption. As an example of how that movement can go astray she speaks extensively about the adoption of children from Liberia. She details the mistreatment of those kids when they arrived in the US with more problems than their families were prepared to handle and how this led to children suffering in abusive homes, kids being shipped back, and eventually the shutdown of adoptions from Liberia entirely. This all strikes entirely too close to home for me.

You see, we’re one of those “crazy” evangelical adoptive families that anxiously filled out the paperwork, cried over the pictures of our little malnourished baby, prayed fervently when we heard he was hospitalized with malaria, and when it was all completed took a flight to Liberia to meet our son. We were shocked that within a few hours of being placed in our arms he was looking into our eyes with smiles and giggles. I cried with relief when he peacefully let me give him a bottle and rock him to sleep that first night. After four years of working with older boys from troubled backgrounds through houseparenting at a group home, we felt prepared for anything and expected our son to have struggles. We were aware that orphanage life in a war-torn country could be a recipe for attachment disaster and institutionalization issues. Before boarding the plane for Liberia we read books on bonding, adoption, and Liberian culture. We wanted to be as prepared as possible for whatever his needs might be and expected he might have trouble adjusting to life with us.

Apparently that thought process wasn’t shared by many of our fellow adoptive parents.

Which is why it’s hard to read Joyce’s article. She isn’t wrong when it comes to the sad situations some Liberian children found themselves in. They entered families who were woefully unprepared to deal with their issues and were shocked that this child wasn’t grateful to have been taken from their birth culture and everything they had known. These families did not have the coping skills needed and also lacked support from their agencies to help them work through the issues they encountered. There seems to have been a feeling that a child would be better off in US foster care than in a Liberian orphanage so the agencies were prepared to match a child with a waiting family even if they had an inkling that it wouldn’t last. And if they did try to explain to a waiting family that a child had issues, there was a pervasive belief among adoptive families that once they got the child home, love and good nutrition would fix all their problems.

When “love” wasn’t able to conquer those behaviors and adoptions had to be disrupted, families were devastated. Obviously the adopted child was hurt. But so were the biological or previously adopted children who may have lived in fear or experienced abuse at the hands of a child who had learned terrible coping behaviors in the orphanage. It has broken my heart to see these adopted children slowly disappear from family pictures and hear whispers about behaviors no one could manage and the trauma these families experienced.

And these behaviors shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone with an understanding of the events of Liberia’s recent past. Continue reading →

Constantine and the Gladiators: Politics or Culture?

Is the legal and political downstream from culture, or vice versa? That’s the debate going on in religious conservative circles today. A rising number of voices, mostly in reaction to the excesses and missteps of the Religious Right, have been arguing that religious conservatives have been largely blind to the way that culture is upstream from law. In an effort to secure legal ground against progressive advances, the Right was ceding the deeper war for the imagination and affections of the populace. Gay marriage is an obvious example of this. As social conservatives secured dozens of temporary political victories, the vision of the general population was being captured through media narratives that were laying the groundwork for the generation-shaping, sea-change in popular opinion we’ve witnessed in the last few years.

While many of us might have been nodding our heads in agreement with this line of critique over the last couple of years, a jaunt into early church history might complicate the picture a bit. Peter Leithart’s fascinating cultural analysis of the Roman spectacles and their proscription by Constantine in Defending Constantine: The Twilight of An Empire and the Dawn of Christendom suggests a more intricate relationship between the two spheres than any strict dichotomy can capture.

A School of Romanitas

“A microcosm of Rome”–that’s how Peter Leithart describes the gladiatorial shows. Identifying a number of threads present in the contest that made them more than just entertainment, Leithart reveals that they were one of the primary means of inculcating the populace with a sense of romanitas–the guiding cultural-political spirit of Imperial Rome.

Roman military culture was a complex of “devotio, patriotism, self-sacrifice to chthonic deities” which supported an attitude and practice “closely resembling human sacrifice”—what better description can one find of the games? (pg. 192) Drawing on Tertullian’s analysis of the bloody spectacles, Leithart points out they were also were called munera because they were regarded as offering services to the dead. In the games, men were trained to kill and die as a sacrifice for gods of Rome. Following the thread of sacrifice, Leithart also sees the combat in the arena as enacting the founding myth of Rome, that of Remus by his brother Romulus. Remus was put down by his brother for daring to cross the line that separated Rome from the “non-Roman.” As the slaves died in the arena, the line between the nobility and everyone else was symbolically drawn and reinforced. (pp. 192-193)

Spectacular events also functioned to show “Rome on parade,” (pg. 193) Rome exhibited itself in all of its many-splendored and hierarchically socially-structured glory in amphitheatres across the Empire. Leithart points to the way that everyone from the lowest peasant to the Emperor himself was present and yet simultaneously carefully separated, “visually and spatially” depicting and reinforcing the social order.

The presence of the Emperor made the games political. Continue reading →

Announcing Mere-O’s Latest Effort: Mere-O Notes

It’s a little-known fact about Mere-O that we were “microblogging” before Twitter or Tumblr was “a thing.” Between 2006 and 2009, we kept a curated list of links on our sidebar that was one of the more popular things that we did. It got lost in one of the redesigns, and we’ve never quite gone back to it.

You know what’s coming next, of course. That’s right: we’re back in the curatorial game, albeit with a bit more flair and hopefully a good deal more energy.

Over the past few years, the main page here at Mere-O has slowly morphed toward essay-style posts and away from a traditional “blog.” That has advantages and I’ve aspirations to keep going in that direction. But one of the main disadvantages is that it means lots of worthy essays and content that we don’t have full essay-style thoughts about don’t get noticed by our readers. Additionally, it means that I personally don’t have a place to put short reflections on things I’m reading or thinking about, which I used to do a good deal here at Mere-O.

To fill those gaps, we are launching “Mere O Notes.” I’ve asked my friend Jake Meador to take the lead at the newly minted site. He should be familiar to readers here at Mere-O: he has written occasionally for us in the past, and will be showing up on the home page more frequently as well. He has run his own website doing a similar sort of curatorial duty for some time now, and will be moving things over here. He’s well on his way to being a first-rate writer, too, and is worth following in his own right.

Go ahead and add the RSS feed to your reader, then, if that’s still your thing. We’re keeping them separate for now, though we may offer a combined feed later. But if you follow the Mere-O feed on Twitter or on Facebook we’ll be linking to everything over there. So go forth and do that, too.

As always, we love hearing from you. Let us know in the comments what you think.

Best,

Matt