Blue Like Orthodoxy: When Donald Miller met G.K. Chesterton

Donald Miller recently offered this commendation of Chesterton to all of Christians:

Personalities like Chesterton, C.S. Lewis and Kipling are gone now in the Christian world. Or at least they are unknown. Christian thinking is dominated by Americans who choose simplicity over reason. We like thinkers who pick an enemy and attack them. Lost is the humor, a winsome nature and even a robust intellectualism. The same figures who demand “thought” are hardly thinking at all, and instead attack those who do because they won’t submit to their linear, black-and-white view of life.

Now before I get going, I want to note my appreciation for this point. People like Chesterton and Lewis are gone from the world and those of us who are admirers don’t come anywhere near them in stature or quality. They saw things that we can only grasp the outlines of, which is why there is a cottage industry of trying to simply repeat what they said better than us all.

But it strikes me as, well, surprising that Miller is commending Chesterton so highly to us. Especially given that in the same paragraph he chastises those inclined to exhort people toward thoughtfulness for attacking people because they “won’t submit to their linear, black-and-white view of life.” Such titans are gone indeed, but Miller’s own approach isn’t going to bring them back.

Before I give my reasons for finding this all a bit amusing, though, I want to make sure my critique avoids Miller’s recently-articulated description of how internet critics operate: ”Somebody writes a “response” that is filled with vague, passive insults.”* Insults aren’t quite my thing, but I try to avoid vagueness and passivity at all costs too. So let me be as clear as possible and take an aggressive stand: I have read G.K. Chesterton, I have even written an introduction for a book by G.K. Chesterton, and Donald Miller is no G.K. Chesterton.

Consider the tacit critique of a “black-and-white” view of life. To commend the opposite while lauding G.K. Chesterton so fundamentally misunderstands Chesterton’s outlook that the mind boggles. Orthodoxy is a book written entirely for the purposes of describing Christianity’s sharp edges, her boundaries, her beautiful distinctions, over and against a host of fuzzy-headed competitors. Chesterton may have approached things with a dazzling rhetorical brilliance, but he knew how an argument worked, as anyone who has slogged through The Everlasting Man would know.

But Chesterton lived and ate dogma, a word he seemed to have been abnormally interested in rehabilitating and that is no more popular these days. After all, he knew the sharp edges mattered: ”The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world.” That’s from Orthodoxy. But his most complete statement on the matter came at the end of his book he had the temerity to title Heretics, where he named his contemporaries and proceeded to eviscerate them with his cheerful prose. Chesterton is magical because he kept his sense of humor while using it at the expense of his intellectual foes. He has his fun by attacking those with no interest in “black and white thinking.” But that’s only an aside: I’ll let Chesterton sum up his own point in that section, as only he can: ”Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas,” and “Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.”

Now, compare all that with Blue Like Jazz, a book with a subtitle that sums up everything you need to know about it: ”Nonreligious Thoughts about Spirituality.” Continue reading →

Have Christians Lost Their Sense of Difference?

How are Christians set apart or distinct from the unbelieving world? When push comes to shove, would any observer be able to pick today’s edgy/authentic/real/raw/not-your-grandmother’s Christian out of the proverbial crowd? In what ways are we embodying the call to be salt and light, a city on a hill (Matt. 5:13–16), and a “royal priesthood” called out of darkness and into light (1 Peter 2:9)?

These questions have nagged at me for a number of years, as I’ve witnessed younger evangelical Christians (myself included) more often blending in with the dark than advancing the light. When I go to parties with Christian friends, and then parties with non-Christian friends, I often lament that they are observably indistinguishable.

We are the same in how we talk: the petty subjects of conversation, the toxic cynicism lacing our speech, the obscene language, the general negativity … same.

We are the same in the way we dress, the way we drink, the way we smoke, the movies and TV we watch, the music we listen to, the pop culture we consume, and the way we cordon off “spirituality” in a manner that keeps it from interfering with our pursuits of pleasure.

We are the same (maybe worse) in the way we shred each other to pieces in the blogosphere, caddily gossip about each others’ social media posts, and jump to complaining before we think about complementing.

It’s all the same… And we wonder why so few bother with Christianity anymore. By the looks of many Christians, it offers nothing radically different or new.

Of course it’s easy to understand how it came to this. Many of my generation grew up in an evangelicalism that was perhaps too excited about its different-ness; it separated from “the world” and created its own media empires, with churches that tended to pull in and hunker down while the rest of the world went to hell in a handbasket. All of this left an understandably bad taste in many of our mouths for the concept of being “set apart” vis-a-vis the world. If all our difference amounts to is cheaper, sanitized versions of the same consumer culture pervading everything else, it just feels a bit phony.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because previous generations have gone about Christian “difference” in perhaps less than ideal ways, it doesn’t change the fact that the call remains: to be set apart; to “be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 2:16). Swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction to the extent that holiness is altogether absent is not a helpful solution.

The thing about holiness, though, is that the point of it is not to steer clear of all that is unholy; it’s not about retreating from “the world” and existing in some perfect space untainted by temptations and immoral sights and sounds. This only leads to legalism and a neutered, irrelevant witness.

Rather, the point of holiness is positive: to live in the world, reflecting Christ and his holiness outward in the way that we live our lives. Holiness is more complicated than just abstaining from a checklist of vices. Does holiness require us to avoid certain activities? Certainly. But fleeing from potential hazards is only part of the story.

Should there be a noticeable difference between Christians and “the world”? Yes. Christians are called to be holy, set apart, sojourners and exiles in this world, bearing witness to the gospel through the way that they live. But the difference between the church and culture is not a “hard” difference, notes Miroslav Volf in his analysis of 1 Peter (a key text on the nature of Christian difference).

For Christians, the distance from society that comes from the new birth in Christ is not meant to isolate from society, notes Volf, but rather serves the mission: “Without distance, churches can only give speeches that others have written for them and only go places where others lead them. To make a difference, one must be different.”

Volf goes on to describe this “missionary distance” in 1 Peter as “soft difference,” which is not to say weak difference:

It is strong, but it is not hard. Fear for oneself and one’s identity creates hardness. … In the mission to the world, hard difference operates with open or hidden pressures, manipulation, and threats. A decision for soft difference, on the other hand, presupposes a fearlessness which 1 Peter repeatedly encourages his readers to assume (3:14; 3:6). People who are secure in themselves — more accurately, who are secure in their God — are able to live the soft difference without fear. They have no need either to subordinate or damn others, but can allow others space to be themselves. For people who live the soft difference, mission fundamentally takes the form of witness and invitation. They seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even “without a word” (3:1).

Rather than an embattled, separatist, or hard-line “holiness vs. worldiness” approach to culture, I think Christians would do well to adopt Volf’s “soft difference” mindset. Again, this is not to say the church should deny any difference from the world, or that it should be tepid or weak in its different-ness; it’s just to say that we shouldn’t wield our difference as a weapon in a culture war, attacking the world for its worldliness and positioning ourselves arrogantly and with an oppositional attitude. Rather, our differentness should be positive, attractive, desirable. It should be conversational, relational. It’s about witness. We should keep our conduct “honorable” for a missional purpose: so the world would “glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12).

For the sake of Christ-like holiness, it may very well be the honorable thing for a Christian to abstain from some cultural activities or media choices that may be “permissible” but perhaps not beneficial. But those choices should be lived out as a positive affirmation of one’s convictions rather than a negative chastisement of others, as if anyone who does partake in such things is evil and dangerous.

Insofar as Christian identity is different from that of the surrounding culture (and it should be), it is a difference that is, according to theologian Darian Lockett, “constructed along the lines of its own internal vision of wholeness before God, and not through a negative process of rejecting outsiders.”

We are a people chosen by God, set apart for kingdom purposes, charged with a task of being light in the darkness. The salt of the earth. But is our light shining? Is our salt losing its saltiness? That question should haunt us. Because it’s not just about us. It’s about our credibility and effectiveness on mission for Christ.

We Christians need to stop overcompensating for the wrongheaded approaches to culture that our forebears might have had. Getting drunk proves nothing other than the fact that we can lift a glass of alcohol. Smoking and cussing doesn’t prove we are “more accessible” or “authentic” Christians; it proves we can suck in tobacco fumes and use our lips to utter four letter words. Oh, and it also might prove that we’d rather look like everyone else than be identifiably “set apart,” which probably also communicates that following Christ is in fact as superficial as some skeptics assert.

Friends: let’s stop deluding ourselves in thinking that by shirking holiness we’re advancing the cause of Christ by “breaking stereotypes” people might have of Christians. All we’re actually doing is demeaning the name of Christ by cheapening the cost of discipleship. We can do better than that.

This is the first in a series of posts on contemporary Christianity’s relationship to culture, based on ideas from my soon-to-be released book, Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty (Baker Books).

Get Chesterton’s Orthodoxy Free (with a new Introduction by…Me)

How do you sell a book when you’ve a smallish audience, no real “name recognition,” and you want to avoid spamming folks with desperate pleas to, you know, buy the book? (See what I did there?)

That’s the question I’ve been puzzling over the past few months. And it’s a question that I posed to my publisher, too, who has been really gracious with my idiosyncratic ways.

In fact, a few months back they came up with an idea that I am really excited about: sell someone else’s book. Or rather, give it away for free.

G.K. Chesterton (Photo credit: giveawayboy)

That’s right. Moody has repackaged their version of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and I’ve added an introduction to it that explains why I think everyone should read it. It’s a fun little introduction, with opinions about the book that I’ve never said anywhere before. But the whole point of an introduction is to have a reason to carry on through the book itself, and in this I think it will be successful. The timing is good, too. If you get a copy you should read it along with my skeptical friend David Sessions, who is giving it a critical once-over during the next few weeks. I am sure he would appreciate the dialogue.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s an excerpt from The End of our Exploring in it as well? That’s in it, too. It’s a bit cheeky, I realize, putting my words next to Chesterton’s. But I’m sure he’ll come out all right in the comparison.

Orthodoxy is on Amazon right now, where your review would be helpful. And it will be on Google Play and Barnes and Noble at some point, too.

Of course, none of this really works unless people spread the word. If you’re on one of those social networks and want your friends to read a book I’ve affectionately dubbed the most important work of the twenty-first century, even though it was written in the twentieth, you know (I imagine) what to do. And if you haven’t read it, I can promise that it will make both entertaining and instructive summer reading.

Get a Free Copy of The End of our Exploring

My next book releases the first week of July and I’m starting to get really excited about it finally reaching the public.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll be hearing a bit more about the project and about how we plan on getting the word out about it. I’ll simply say that if a few of the ideas come together it’s going to be, well, awesome.

But before we get there, we want to give the book away to people who are willing to read it and provide honest reviews on both Goodreads and Amazon. The emphasis here is on honest, as without the truth what do we have?

If you’re interested in receiving an advance copy of the book in exchange for said reviews, please send your name and mailing address to moodycollective@gmail.com. The good folks at Moody are handling that process, which is very kind of them. I am told the first twenty five who contact them will receive copies.

Thanks for your interest in the project and for your support through the years. This is going to be a whole lot of fun.

On substitutionary atonement and disgraced politicians

Why do disgraced, scandal-plagued politicians like Mark Sanford keep making comebacks?

In one of the great skewerings of both the Washington political establishment and modern language, George Carlin destroyed politicians–here you should think of Mark Sanford and Anthony Weiner–who are caught in a major scandal, but don’t see why that should disqualify them from future “public service.”

“And we know [he must be guilty] because the next thing we hear from him is, ‘I just want to put this thing behind me and get on with my life.’ That’s an expression we hear a lot these days from people in all walks of life. Usually the person in question has committed some unspeakable act: ‘Yes, it’s true that I strangled my wife, shot the triplets, set fire to the house, and sold my young son to an old man on the train… but now I just want to put this thing behind me and get on with my life.’ That’s the problem in this country… too many people getting on with their lives. I think what we really need more of is ritual suicide. Never mind the big press conferences, get the big knife out of the drawer.”

It’s hard not to consider Carlin’s now decade old remarks given the ubiquity of the second chance politician in the contemporary United States. Recently the shameless adulterer Mark Sanford was reelected by a cowardly batch of South Carolina Republicans who sold their morals for a seat in the House. More recent still, the disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner who famously sent pictures of his genitals to multiple young women is looking a strong candidate for mayor of our nation’s largest city. We can also mention David Petraeus, who recovered from an ongoing affair with his biographer to rise to a top position at a major Wall Street investment firm. And there’s also the disgraced former New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer, who both plagiarized and fabricated quotations in a recent book and is now, only a year later, shopping a new book to publishers. Continue reading →

A Few Words on The End of Our Exploring

As you may know, my next book, The End of our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith, arrives on store shelves the first week of July.

Though I haven’t said much about the project to this point, I’m thrilled and somewhat nervous to have it out in the reading public. I think it’s better written than my last one, more accessible, and–well, it’s on a subject that I am deeply committed to and have been for the past fifteen years of my life.

When I set out to write it, I placed on myself what appears in retrospect to be an unreasonable challenge: I wanted the book to be so well written, so well done, that it would “sell itself.” My inner logic was that if the words themselves didn’t move people to tell others, then no marketing technique or “platform” could save them. And even more damningly, such words wouldn’t be worth saving. I wanted the words themselves to be of the sort that might endure to eternal life and the process of writing to be an act of faith, a sign between me and God of my faith in him and in the calling I had once discerned to say things in public.

None of that was particularly reasonable, as my writer-friends reminded me. We should eat, drink, be merry, and let the words flow as they come to us while we tarry beneath the shadow of death. An obsession over creating words that endure can be just as much a denial of sovereignty as entrusting ourselves to the power of savvy marketing. And the actual book itself destroyed any pretentions of greatness: it is a better book than my last one, of that I have no doubt. And some of the people who have read it have told me that they found it personally helpful, a commendation that I take to heart. But if you want great prose, well, there are better bits in Lewis’s diaries before he became a Christian then there are in nearly any living writers‘. We shan’t see the likes of him for a long, long time.

Words, of course, have never sold themselves. That is a romanticized fiction, necessary perhaps to motivate the act of writing, but impossible when actually facing the release of a book. Writers need help. We need people to tell others about our words and commend them. We need gratitude for those who do read, and the courage to ask those we admire to read them as well. We need the people we write for to care enough about the words to pass them along to others, which means the words must be worth caring about.

Finding those people, though, and helping those people find the book is fraught with danger, as doing anything at all will be. The possibility for writers turning into narcisstistic monsters obsessed with sales opportunities is one that is well-known, as is the reduction of the author-reader relationship into the author-centric concepts of “tribes” and “platforms.” Authors have even been known to turn to a trumped up controversy: Dorothy Sayers once anonymously skewered her own book in order to generate interest in it, a strategy that I have been sometimes tempted to undertake.

Against this: faith and works, lots of hard work, and talking with people and writing and trying to explain what I meant and didn’t mean, and lots of saying “thanks.” I live now on gratitude and celebration for a work that is (finally!) coming into light. That gratitude can not only be extended toward those who helped the production happen, but those who will risk their money to buy it, especially those who will make that risk without a long list of Amazon reviews to guide their way. That gratitude extends toward those early readers of Mere-O, some of whom are with us still. That gratitude extends to a publisher who, despite my last book not exactly being a blockbuster still decided to take a chance.

And the celebration, that too should happen. I am glad this book has made it. I plan on throwing myself a party, to which I would invite you if we lived in the same country, but seeing as we don’t I’ll keep it a private affair. For the moment, though, I will extend my joy as I have always done around the internet world: by pointing you to a few words I wrote elsewhere on a question that matters.

Home: An Essay on The Little Way of Ruthie Leming

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot

Home. It’s a mythic notion. Two of the three great epics of the Greco-Roman world trade explicitly in its associations. Odysseus and Aeneas each journey homeward – the former back toward the home he left that yet remains, although not unchanged; the latter, his home destroyed, moves forward toward a home yet to be found. The Odyssey, then, is a story about those who have a home to go back to, and the Aeneid is a story for those who long for home but have no place that answers to the name.

And then there is the story of Cain in the book of Genesis. After Cain murdered his brother, he was condemned to be a wanderer, forever alienated from God and family. His plight presents itself as an allegory of the human condition. But then there was a twist. Cain, we are told, went on to build a city, he would not be a wanderer after all; and his descendants are reckoned the founders of agriculture, metallurgy, and the arts – in short, of human civilization. Out of the dissatisfactions of homelessness, we are led to conclude, flowed the great achievements of human culture. But the narrator has the last word. He tells us that Cain built his city in the land of Nod, a name that echoes the Hebrew word for wandering. It is a touch of literary artistry which poignantly suggests that, even when it is surrounded by the accouterments of civilization, the human soul wanders lost and alienated … homeless.

Reflections on the theme of home and homelessness are not the preoccupation of ancient writers alone. They persist because the condition with which they wrestle persists. Rod Dreher’s The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, recently reviewed in these pages by Michael Reneau, admirably takes its place within this ancient literary tradition.

The book tells the story of Dreher’s alienation from his family and hometown, his sister’s battle with lung cancer, the love of the small town that rallied around his sister and her family, and, finally, Dreher’s homecoming. It is a moving book, but it is not sentimental. It praises the virtues of community without being blind to its vices. It raises all sorts of terribly important questions – about place, identity, ambition, love, family, and more – that we should all consider with great seriousness. It deserves to be read widely, and I hope that it will be. And I hope that it generates conversation, discussion, and debate about the assumptions that order our lives.

My Home and Homelessness

Little Way led me to think again about my own identity. Continue reading →

Catching Up With Time in the “Before” and “Up” Films

A professor I admire once said — while discussing the films of Yasujiro Ozu, or maybe it was semiotics (can’t remember) — that watching the sun set can be both a thing of incredible beauty and deep sadness, often simultaneously. I thought of this as I watched Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, which includes a scene of a couple sitting by the sea in Greece, watching the sun slowly dip below the horizon. It’s there, there, there — and then it’s not there. A fleeting flare of arresting orange. Present and then absent. Perhaps the beauty and sadness of a sunset has to do with the fact that it’s the process in nature we humans most identify with. Ours is a context of ephemerality.

Midnight just released in theaters, and it is certainly one of the best films of 2013 so far. But before you see it, be sure to watch the two preceding films in Linklater’s Before series: Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). Together they comprise a trilogy that is one of the most understated and elegant in the history of cinema.

Linklater’s films follow the love story between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) as it plays out in more or less real time in one Vienna night in 1994 (Before Sunrise), a sunset stroll in 2003 Paris (Before Sunset), and an evening jaunt in Greece in 2012 (Midnight). The films let us peek in on these two lives every nine years, witnessing only as much of their “present” as the 90-100 minutes of movie watching allows us to see. The glimpses we get into this couple’s journey together are snapshots not just of their particular world — compellingly characterized by highbrow garrulity, philosophizing and Gen X angst — but of humanity in general: how we age, how we love, how we fight and how we dream.

Similar in many ways to what Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are exploring in the Before series is what Michael Apted has done and is doing with the astonishing Up series. Beginning in 1964 as a British television documentary examining the lives of fourteen 7-year-old children representing a diverse array of socioeconomic positions in 1960s Britain, the Up series has followed its real-life characters every seven years since. 14 Up (1970) checked in on the children at age 14; 21 Up (1977) updated audiences on their lives as they each turned 21; and so on. 56 Up just came out a few months ago and is now available to watch on Netflix, as are all of the other Up films.

In his review of 56 Up, the late Roger Ebert — who once called the Up series “the noblest project in cinema history” — wrote this: “It is a mystery, this business of life. I can’t think of any other cinematic undertaking that allows us to realize that more deeply.”

Indeed, I think that one of the great potentials of cinema — particularly when it is used in the way Linklater and Apted are using it in their respective series — is that it can capture some of the idiosyncrasies and mysteries of the “business of life” that we might otherwise fail to see (presumably because we are too busy wading through our own “business of life”). Things like the peculiar experience of the passage of time: simultaneously the most obvious and yet ungraspable mystery of existence.

The Before series is about love and relationships on one level, to be sure. But the real subject of these films is time, and the frequency with which it is discussed by the characters in the films hammers home that point.

“O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time,” says Jesse (Hawke) in Before Sunrise, quoting Dylan Thomas quoting W.H. Auden. At other times Jesse waxes philosophical about how surreal it is to self-consciously observe himself living in real time, or Celine shares about how she always feels like her life is either a dream of the future or a memory of the past. Meanwhile, the couple walks and talks in (more or less) real time, as the sun — that most vivid of all reminders of temporality — either rises, sets, or cedes its position to the moon. As Hawke said earlier this year when Midnight premiered at Sundance, the star of the Before series “is not Julie or [Hawke] but Father Time himself.”

The Up series is far less meta in its treatment of time; yet like the Before films, Father Time is a palpable presence in every frame. There’s something compelling about observing the passage of time — 56 years, in this case — as it molds, batters, refines and weathers these people on each of their wildly divergent paths. Some of the original fourteen children grew up to be very successful; others not so much. Most started families and now have kids, grandkids, stepkids, and exes. Some (but not all) exceeded the expectations of the social class into which they were born. Some are happier than others (from what we can tell in our peeks inside, at least), and the only thing they all have in common is that none, not a one, has conquered time. They are all aging, and with every passing Up film we feel the weight of this ever more.

Cinema is unique among mediums in its ability to “sculpt in time,” as Andrey Tarkovsky wrote. It’s all about compressing, elongating, speeding up, and editing time to tell a story (that may span millennia or minutes) in the span of just a few hours. But Before and Up are especially compelling because rather than focusing on the filmmaker’s power over time, they focus on time’s power over us. Linklater tries his best to tell each Before film in real time, avoiding cinema’s manipulative power and instead foregrounding the somewhat eerie feeling of just sitting with time as it unfolds.

The Up films leverage cinema’s ability to compress time by including footage from the previous entries in each present portrait. What we get is essentially a moving-image scrapbook of each of these peoples’ 56-years, summarized in about ten minutes each. Watching it evokes the emotions of looking through an old box of photos and reliving an entire past in one quick burst of nostalgia. It confronts us with the expansiveness of what has come before; which seems large to us because our memories are painfully small and cannot hold every special moment we’ve had or beautiful thing we’ve seen, let alone the histories of other lives and lands.

Unless we have cameras there to capture every moment, our pasts are just as inaccessible to us as our futures. Memories, photos, tales of old can only reconstruct former glories up to a point (for a smart take on all this as it relates to “documenting” one’s past, see Sarah Polley’s amazing new film, Stories We Tell). And yet it could be argued that the “present” is the most elusive of all. For in reality, what we think of as the present is really just our brain processing things in the past — even if just a millisecond ago. Time is most relentless in the present because try as we might to slow it down or speed it up, it only goes by its own pace. The past and future are more malleable categories because they exist entirely in our minds, where we can elongate, embellish, or edit our recollection or vision of an experience, to our liking.

Tarkovsky puts it well in this excerpt from Sculpting In Time:

“Time is said to be irreversible. And this is true enough in the sense that ‘you can’t bring back the past’. But what exactly is this ‘past’? Is it what has passed? And what does ‘passed’ mean for a person when for each of us the past is the bearer of all that is constant in the reality of the present, of each current moment? In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight only in its recollection.”

The Before and Up films are powerful because they embody the “sand between the fingers” brevity of the present: reminding us that even the most magical moments in life are fleeting, that our “when I grow up” dreams will be here and gone before we know it, and that as a result it makes little sense to live in search of a permanent state of pleasure or satisfaction. Such a thing would be, as Solomon might say, like “chasing after the wind.” Our hearts will be restless, said Augustine, until they rest in Thee. And perhaps that is “Father” Time’s greatest gift to us: stirring up a restlessness in our souls that directs our longing to something Other, unfathomably infinite and unbound by time.

The Vocation of Writing when Words are Cheap (and other things)

Last week while out at Biola, I gave a short talk on the vocation of writing when words are cheap. It was a strange talk for me, as I actually wrote it out in full on the plane over and then read through it.

There are a few asides and a few hiccups in the delivery due to the new process and because I hadn’t the time to reread the talk several times before giving it, but given the interest I received beforehand I thought I’d put it out here all the same. I’ll be revising the text at some point soon and will post it in the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and for those who are interested, I read through a bit of The End of Our Exploring, too. The book releases July 1st and pre-orders are now being taken by Amazon and others.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Review

Ruthie Leming lived in a little way. While her older brother left their rural Louisiana hometown to chase a big city journalism career, Ruthie stayed, married her high school sweetheart, became a teacher at the local school, and raised her three daughters a stone’s throw from her childhood home. When terminal cancer took hold of her, her brother watched as the town did its best to fill the void of the sick, faithful mother and wife, then cried with them at her graveside. It was the little way of life that drew her big brother back home to Louisiana.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life is a memoir, biography, and meditation all rolled up in one. Rod Dreher traces the divergent paths he and his little sister took in life, from their different experiences as children and adolescents, to their very different lives as adults. Ruthie’s cancer diagnosis rocked the Dreher/Leming clan and whole St. Francisville community, including the many students whose paths she had altered. Dreher chronicles how Ruthie, her family, and community coped during her last days and eventual death. But he also lays bare his attempts to reconcile with his sister and father, who always resented his Francophile tastes and big-city exodus. Dreher’s return alone couldn’t fix the wounded relationships in the family. And it’s in that realization after Ruthie’s death where Dreher does some of his most poignant storytelling.

Little Way shows how exhausting it can be to understand even our own families and why building and sustaining meaningful relationships will always be lifelong work. Dreher’s struggle with his sister and father, and even with Ruthie’s oldest daughter, show how bitterly we fight and how elusive reconciliation can be. In the last chapter, during a trip in which Dreher treated Ruthie’s oldest daughter with a trip to France, she nearly leveled him with the revelation about her deceased mother: Ruthie had never approved of Dreher’s moving or his career and, worse, his attempts to grow closer to his nieces would likely be in vain because of Ruthie’s opinion lingering in her daughters’ minds. Dreher never shies away from telling the truth about complicated family relationships.

That transparency almost wrecks the book early on. One Christmas when newly married Dreher and his wife came back to Louisiana and labored to make an authentic French meal for the family, the Lemings and Dreher’s parents refused to eat, protesting Dreher’s turning his back on his country roots. The episode paints some of the story’s protagonists as so vindictive as to make them difficult to sympathize with. Even with the rich narrative, I occasionally wanted to see more showing rather than telling, and some passages read more as a string of blogged vignettes rather than a connected narrative.

Yet these days we feel the book’s themes more and more, which demonstrates its timeliness. Continue reading →