Remember Terri Schiavo?

Like Schiavo, Jesse Ramirez, a gulf war veteran who was comatose as a result of a car accident, was slated to have his feeding tubes removed.  They were taken out for five days but then replaced when the Alliance Defense Fund, a pro-life organization in Arizona, sued.

On Tuesday, he “was found to have regained complete consciousness.”

This remarkable turnaround reminds us that perhaps the chief virtue of the ethical decision maker is modesty, a virtue that has more applications than clothing.  Because doctors in these situations are deciding between life and death, it seems there ought be a prima facie position in favor of keeping the patient alive.  Such a position is more modest and more restrained, it seems, than the alternative, as it acknowledges the limitations of our knowledge not only of the future, but of human personhood.
These sort of ethical dilemmas are only increasing, which increases the need for such modesty.  Science is advancing into new ethical terrain all the time.  Consider the chimeras, fusions of humans and animals that William Saletan wrote about recently.  Or the technologizing of humanity, which is so helpfully described in this BBC documentary.  In both areas, science is operating without guidelines that are clear and well defined. Because of the high stakes, it seems a judicious restraint is essential, at least until such guidelines can be established.

Of course, we do not live in a culture that values modesty.  Whether it is clothing, religion, or technology, we lack the caution that is befitting our limited perspectives and positions.

What does modesty look like in bioethics?  I’m not sure, but the weight of such decisions demands a restraint greater than the medical and scientific communities seem to be demonstrating.  After all, more lives like Jesse Ramirez’s hang in the balance.

My camping trip to Wadi Rum and Petra in southern Jordan was a rather exhilarating change of pace after last weekend’s rather plush accomodations on the Red Sea—I’m not sure this opinion was shared with my fellow student though, as his first comment upon learning that we would be staying at the Desert Oasis Camp was, “What exactly is the point of this trip?”

The drive down was an adventure in itself as I had the pleasure of chatting with our driver (named Ahmed, what else?) on just about every subject under the sun, most especially those subjects that are particularly relevant under the Arabian sun—politics, governmental structures, income, and standard of living.  By the time we pulled up to the modern city of Petra my head felt close to exploding from all the effort of keeping up with the conversation, but I can finally say that I can see some sense in studying history, economics, and politics in Arabic…I was able to have a conversation with Ahmed that would have been quite impossible two weeks earlier.

After hiking on foot down to the ancient “red rose city” and alternatively being caught up in wonder at the immense beauty of the ancient building carved into the rocks, and being caught up in wonder at how incredibly hot a Jordanian summer afternoon can be, we made our trek through the desert to a small Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum.  In some ways, Bedouins can be compared to Native Americans living on the reservations in that they are often celebrated as some sort of national trophy or pecularity, but then conveniently shuffled aside to live a rather poor and austere life in the areas of the nation that no one really wants to visit for more than a day or two.

The Jordanian desert is as austere and beautifully arid place as once could ask for, with a strking contrast between huge geological formations that have been shaped and molded by powerful winds and huge dunes of sand so fine that I’ll be picking it out of my ears and nose and . . . for quite some time.  Such dunes are astounding in their size and color…usually a reddish pink and maybe 400 meters tall, and they were just pleading to be climbed.  So, after removing my socks and shoes and empyting my pockets of all their valuables I began the slow ascent to the top.  After getting to the top, I realized that the dunes hadn’t been pleading to be climbed so much as to be tumbled down.  So, once again I obliged and with a shout I flung myself out into space and then rapidly rolled and somersaulted to the bottom, arms and legs and hair flying every direction.

Another highlight of the trip was the party after sundown back at the camp.  Again, my fellow student and travelling companion was less  than impressed with the horde of college students who descended on the camp to celebrate the completion of the spring semester (and graduation for some) with blaring Arabian music, dancing, and hot tea and Bedouin chicken and bread.  I, on the other hand, made quite a fool of myself joining in the festivities and came away with three or four new friends—all of whom were really and truly shocked to meet an American Christian in the Middle East.  They had a hard time understanding why I would be in Jordan and why I could possibly be interested in learning Arabic.  They all told me they couldn’t wait to get out of Jordan and into Europe or America…the exact reason I am in the Middle East and hope to come back again some day; so that people like these young guys might have a reason to stay in their country and even deeply invest themselves in its development.

Other posts on my travels in Jordan:

An American in the Hashemite Kingdom

Over the First Hashemitic Hump

“Live Blogging” on the Red Sea

Refractions

Today the king of Saudi Arabia visited Jordan.  Even if you didn’t have access to television, radio, or any of the newspapers you knew he was in town; every major road was shut down.  Public and private transportation ground to a halt and no one seemed to know when things were going to open up again—not the hundreds of people sitting in the shade of the bus stops or the scattered, not the policemen, and not even the rifle toting soldiers.  A short trip of 10 miles to the neighboring town of Zarqa’ took almost three hours as we had to walk two miles before reaching an open road and then waited another 10 or 15 minutes until an empty cab came by.

Jordan simply cannot afford any sort of international terror incident these days.  With the quasi-civil war raging in Lebanon, the constant strain between Israel and its territories to the west, the lack of stability in Iraq to the north and east, and the rather tyrannical regime in Syria to the north, Jordan is surrounded by instable nations with problems that threaten to spill over the Jordanian borders.  While Jordan is still relatively stable, it has already absorbed waves of Palestinian and Iraqi immigrants—millions of people that first drive up the prices as they bring their wealth into the country and then flood the job market and put the lower-middle and lower classes out of work by taking the low paying jobs for less than native Jordanians are willing to work.

Over the past month I’ve concluded that stability is one of the most cherished virtues among Arab people.  For example, the majority of Jordanians admire Saddam Hussein.  While they may not completely agree with his internal policies, they all think that his reign was thousands of times better than the current situation of instability, strife, and internal conflict.  I’ve been consistently told that what the Middle East really needs is a strong leader who can unite the Arab people; a leader with the wisdom and the strength to solve the numerous problems plaguing the factions, tribes, and sects in the area.  The average Ahmed is taken aback whenever I ask about change on the grassroots level.  They don’t think of themselves as responsible for changing and influencing their country, but look instead to a great leader to make all things welll and all manner of thing well.

Of course it will take more than a great leader to change these people; it will take a change of heart, and most likely a modification of value systems as well.  There is much that the West has to learn from the Middle East, but tonight, I remember that the West has a lot to offer as well—government by the people, for the people, being somewhere near the top of the list.

Other posts on my travels in Jordan:

An American in the Hashemite Kingdom

Over the First Hashemitic Hump

“Live Blogging” on the Red Sea

Refractions 

To speak of the “birth and death of the neoconservative movement” would be a misnomer.

After all, there was no such movement. Rather, as Irving Kristol argues, neoconservatism is a ‘persuasion,’ a persuasion that happened to find its intellectual attitudes in favor after 9/11. After all, George W. Bush ran his first campaign on domestic issues (remember “compassionate conservatism”?), not on the muscular foreign policy that he adopted after 9/11.

But what exactly is the “neoconservative persuasion?” And what future does it hold? And where did it come from, anyway? Is it really a cabal of Jewish thinkers who would want to sell out America for Israel’s interests? And does it have much of a future?

Those are the questions that The Neocon Reader, an excellent set of essays by neoconservatives (and a few friendly dissenters), seeks to answer.

As neoconservatives have largely been identified by their foreign policy, the essay includes essays on what neoconservatives think about domestic issues, including the economy and social mores. But even that is putting it too strong: as numerous articles point out, neoconservatives sometimes disagree with each other about both foreign and domestic policy. If nothing else, they are under a big tent.

What, then, is neoconservatism?

For one, neoconservatives are generally more comfortable putting more restrictive power in the hands of the state than libertarians would allow. Hence Irving Kristol’s classic and self-explanatorily titled, “Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship.”

With respect to foreign policy, neoconservatives are “neo-Wilsonians” in that they support the spread of liberal democracy to countries around the world. However, they differ from what Max Boot describes as “soft Wilsonians” in that they place their confidence in American power to promote liberal democracy, rather than international organizations. But promoting liberal democracy isn’t pure altruism–rather, they see it as in America’s best interest to have liberal democracies thrive.

Undergirding the neoconservative position that liberal democracy is good for everyone is a philosophical commitment to universal human values. If liberal democracy has been good for America, it will be good for the Middle East. Hence the support of Israel.

With respect to the economy, neoconservatives focus on economic growth, which means removing the budget deficit from the center of economic theory and cutting taxes even when the deficit increases.

Such descriptions are grossly simplified, and doubtlessly untrue of certain neoconservatives. Numerous essayists point out the diversity within the neocon persuasion.

In all, The Neocon Reader is a book worth owning. Not only does it demystify neoconservatism, it does so by providing an interesting historical snapshot of an ideology that has had a profound impact on American culture and politics.

I have sometimes thought that the best way to learn history is not to read a textbook or historical synthesis, but to read about one event, one person, or one cultural artifact. In order to understand the significance of any historical particularity, we must understand the surrounding context. But if we wish to understand the context, we can grasp it through that particularity.The philosophical remarks are necessary, as it is that idea–that we can begin to understand the dynamics of a culture through a particular event–that undergirds Adam Nicolson’s methodology in God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

After all, God’s Secretaries is not only about the King James Bible: it is about England and its transition from Elizabeth to James. With tensions increasing between the newly formed Church of England and the Puritans, James saw the creation of a new Bible, a Bible for all of England, as essential to keeping the country together. In order to do so, he commissioned this new translation to be a moderate translation, one that would marginalize the anti-hierarchical translations of the popular Puritan Geneva Bible, which he saw as a threat to his own rule.

God’s Secretaries is the story of the men and the events that shaped that translation.

The end result of their efforts, argues Nicolson, is a Bible that reflects the moderate inclusiveness of the King James court : “[The King James Bible] does not choose. It absorbs and includes. It is in that sense catholic, as Jacobean Englishmen consistently called their church: not Roman but catholic, embracing all.”

Nicolson does not limit his analysis to the abstract generalizations. At points, he reads the text of the King James Bible extremely close, comparing it to previous and later translations. In his discussion of Mark 14:4, where (as the KJV puts it) Judas asks, “Why was this waste of the ointment made?,” Nicolson concludes: “In this sentence, one can see the extraordinary phenomenon of the King James Bible conforming both to Protestant and pre-Protestant ideas about the nature of Christianity. It is both clear and rich. It both makes an exact and almost literal translation of the original and infuses that translation with a sense of beauty and ceremony. It has that peculiarly Jacobean combination of light and richnesss, the huge windows illuminating the densely decorated room, the unfamiliar amalgam of the court–Puritan, both strict and grand…It doesn’t choose between the clear and the rich but makes its elucidation into a kind of richness.”

As much could be said of Nicolson’s prose. As might be expected from someone steeped in the language of the King James Bible, Nicolson is very aware of language–including his own. In comparing the King James Bible to the recent New English Bible, Nicolson concludes that the New English Bible is “a descent to dreariness, to a level of banality below Tyndale’s…The language of the King James Bible is the language of Hatfield, of patriarcy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by a desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.” Nicolson’s own prose, however, avoids the pretentiousness of someone who is self-consciously trying to resurrect the English tongue. His musical and poetic style flows too freely to be intentional.

God’s Secretaries is valuable not only as a window into the England of King James, though it is an excellent window. It contains a rich analysis of the King James Bible and an fascinating recounting of the men and events that shaped the translation. Nicolson’s work contains illuminating comparisons of our own era and language to the era of the King James Bible, comparisons that are as thoughtful as they are wistful.

Through it all, Nicolson is engaging without being trivial and erudite without being obscure, which makes God’s Secretaries a must read for anyone interested in history.

First impressions matter.

It’s been a truism in business and sales circles, but no book has demonstrated it as clearly as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. In the first two seconds of seeing someone, we have already disposed ourselves toward them in a certain way. Life is not just a matter of our conscious thoughts or our willful decisions–our environment and context shapes us in ways that we may not be aware of.

And as a result, these first impressions are malleable. We can change them by placing ourselves in new situations and settings. So Gladwell writes:

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions–we can alter the way we thin-slice–by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions. If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way–who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those you have with whites–it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.
As Christians, we of course want to see the world as it is, which means seeing individuals as made in God’s image and being aware of the demonic among us. Our “first impression” of individuals must go deeper than race or personality–rather, we must become attuned to their spiritual status.

If Gladwell is right, then changing these first impressions demands placing ourselves in contexts that reinforce seeing people this way. Our sanctification is not a matter of our decisions or our will alone, but a matter of repeatedly and constantly placing ourselves in environments that will reinforce the work of the Spirit in the secret parts of our heart. Whether by listening to music, consuming appropriate entertainment or surrounding ourselves with friendships that edify, we must situate ourselves so that our environment reinforces our Christian beliefs.

There is one further lesson to tease out, I think, from Gladwell’s insight. I have sometimes met individuals who at one point had experienced something like an Aldersgate moment, but had become burnt out on church sometime later and stopped attending because it had become dull. I have some sympathy for this.

But if Gladwell is right about the incredible number of decisions that are occuring on the fringes of our consciousness, then we must be faithful to put ourselves in contexts where the Spirit is working even when it seems as though He is absent. He may be, after all, rearranging the furniture in the dark corners of the mental room and shaping our subconscious patterns of judgement. We endanger our own spiritual lives if we pursue only the growth that we can be aware of, rather than the growth the Spirit is working in us.

See my review of Blink here.

When I was young, I had a frightening anger problem.

I would throw things, bite people, kick and do whatever it took to get them to understand the depth of my rage and respond as I wanted them to.

As I grew, I began to become less angry with the world. I learned to lose gracefully and not let the full force of my anger descend upon my neighbor. I had beaten the giant.

Or so I told myself, at least. The changes in my behavior were carefully managed changes because I quickly realized a simple fact about the world: cute women don’t like angry men.

Anger, however, has not departed from my soul. Rather, it has taken on more subtle, more pernicious forms. And in recent weeks, I have become to come in contact with the deep, still frightening anger that I have toward God.

I now realize that anger is not a sociological problem–it is a theological problem. It is a theological problem.

In the Epistle of James, James writes:

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

I had heard that part a thousand times. Only recently did the next verse grab me:

Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

The “implanted word” is the remedy for our anger as it is the restoration of our proper relationship with the Divine. The recognition that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” and that we have been created to “be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures” is the end of anger in us, as it is the recognition that we do not have control over our lives or the people around us.

At the heart of our anger is our rebellion against the King. When we cede the throne and acknowledge that it is only in Him that we live, move and have our being, then we will discover the freedom from anger that allows us to have joy without regret.

I have been tempted to read Christopher Hitchens’ latest screed against religion, but have held off in favor of other projects and interests. My main question is whether the new atheists are really any different than the old atheists. I once started reading Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, only to stop a short while later due to his laughingly bad understanding of what Christianity actually teaches.

Mark Roberts, one of the most saintly men I’ve ever met, has read Hitchens’ work and discovered that he is not so different than his atheist predecessor Russell.

The bad news for Christopher Hitchens is that he gets a low mark for accuracy when it comes to his statements about the New Testament and New Testament scholarship. In fact, I found fifteen factual errors in this material. I also identified sixteen statements that show what I consider to be a substantial misunderstanding or distortion of the evidence, even though a few scholars might agree with Hitchens. That’s why I distinguish between factual errors and misunderstandings/distortions, in an effort to be clear and fair.

Roberts carefully details not only the inaccuracies of Hitchens’ work, but his inflammatory tone and oddly unscientific approach (given how much he loves science) to studying religion. What’s more impressive, he does so while still managing to be respectful in his approach. It is most impressive that he takes some of Hitchens’ claims as seriously as he does, rather than laughingly abusing them (as I and other lesser men might have done):

During my interview with Hitchens I said, more than once, that it seems like he and I inhabit alternative universes. I said that because, among other things, his view of what Christians believe and experience is so contrary to my view, and I’ve been a practicing Christian for 44 years. For example, in one place Hitchens writes that believers claim, “Not just to know, but to know everything” (p. 10). Now even allowing for a good bit of hyperbole, this statement reflects nothing of my experience as a believer. I do claim to know certain things, but I freely admit the fallible nature of my knowledge. Has Hitchens ever spent any time with thoughtful Christians (or other religious folk) who wrestle openly with matters of faith, who sometimes struggle with doubt, and who freely admit their own ignorance? If not, I could introduce him to dozens of such people. Moreover, I can’t even begin to think that I know more than a tiny percentage of what can be known. Know everything???? If Hitchens thinks this is what the average religious person claims, then he knows little about the average religious person, at least in my experience.

Thank you, Mark Roberts, for reading Hitchens’ work for the rest of us. It seems it was obviously a gruelling task.
Buy Mark Roberts’ new defense of the reliability of the Gospels here.

“I didn’t like his face.”

It’s an apocraphal story of Abraham Lincoln and a favorite for preachers everywhere. As a young lawyer, Lincoln allegedly once rejected a prospective employee on the grounds that he didn’t like the man’s face. When his fellow lawyers incredulously pressed him to explain, Lincoln responded that every man older than 40 deserves their face.

In his latest offering, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell examines the snap judgements we make every day and our own inability to understand what prompts us to make them. From the experts who had a vague intuition that an artwork was a fake–an intuition that was later confirmed–to the rest of us, who will choose one product over another because of the packaging and context in which we see it, subconscious judgements affect every aspect of our existence, including race (as Project Implicit reveals).

Much of Gladwell’s work does focus on the fact that these snap judgements can be trained, which often separates the expert from the rest of us. When music industries heard Kenna sing, they knew he was special. The rest of us, though, are still catching on. Yet there is one qualification to this: in one study regarding our responses to jam, college students and experts ranked six jams nearly the same. However, when a different set of college students was asked to describe their reasons for their preferences, the similarities went away. “By making people think about jam,” Gladwell writes, “[the study] turned them into jam idiots.” Sometimes, our unreflective judgements are the most reliable.

To draw a parallel, it seems Gladwell demonstrates what deconstructionists have contended with respect to literature: that the unconscious perceptions of authors shape their texts and meanings. Rather than descend into the world of suspicion, however, Gladwell repeatedly exhorts the reader to have charity toward the subjects of his examples.

Like The Tipping Point, Blink could have been 75 pages shorter. But Gladwell’s style is engaging and readable, which makes the repetition somewhat more bearable. Regardless, Gladwell has produced a provocative analysis of a difficult and intriguing aspect of the human experience.

When some people smile they can give you the impression that they still are frowning; when others smile, it can seem like their whole face can’t contain the joy within themselves. And then there is Mary (pseudonym). When she smiles, her face refracts its smile into a thousand differerent smiles that spread across her mouth, eyes, cheeks and out into the room.

Mary’s face, however, didn’t always know how to smile like this. Mary was born in Iraq and moved to Jordan with her family after the first Gulf War. She was born with a crooked body that made it impossible for her to walk, bent hands that remind one more of birds’ feet than human fingers, and a broken face.  She was born into a Christian family, but for as long as she could remember she wanted to have nothing to do with God.  Even as a little girl she remembers feeling nothing but anger towards God and towards those who told her that God was love.  How, if God was loving, could He possibly have allowed her to born so disfigured that she couldn’t walk, run, and play with the other children—so disfigured that she hardly could find a reason to laugh, sing, or smile?

Mary’s mother grieved to see her eldest daughter so angry and so closed to God, but urged her to pray and ask God to show his love for her by healing her; but from Mary’s perspective, God already had His chance while forming her in the womb: if He couldn’t give her a healthy body there, He wouldn’t give her one after she was born.

So Mary grew up to be bitter towards God and often lashed out in anger towards her friends.  When they hurt her or picked on her, she would fight back and say and do things intended to cause them to feel the pain she was feeling.  It wasn’t a happy childhood, but it was the only way she knew how to survive.

One day Mary’s mother came into her room with some exciting news.  There was a doctor in town, a French doctor who specialized in rehabilitative surgeries, and he was willling to see what he could do for Mary.  She flatly refused.  She was sure that her dream of walking had died long ago, along with her childhood hopes of being like the other girls at school.  But to her surprise, she found that her dream of walking hadn’t died but was only buried beneath layers of anger and hurt and frustration and humiliation.  Once her mother planted the seed of possibility of healing, Mary began to wonder if perhaps she could walk after all.

Quietly, and late at night so nobody would hear, Mary began to pray.  At first her prayers were slow and simple; the desperate longings of her heart could barely be communicated audibly to the God she had rejected so long ago.  Still, she began to pray often that God would indeed heal her; that He would show Himself strong in love towards her and hear her prayers.  The bitter shell wrapped around her heart was ever so slightly beginning to crack.

Finally Mary decided to talk to her mother about the surgery.  Working up the nerve took some time, but Mary had decided to trust that God would heal her after all.  When she told her mother that she had been praying and would see the doctor, her mother was elated.  She had been praying dilligently for her daughter’s heart to change and was sure that God could heal her if only her daughter would act in faith towards him.

The day of the surgery finally arrived.  Mary quietly allowed her family to wheel her into the doctor’s office, praying fervently under breath as she was moved from her chair to the gurney and into the operating room.  She didn’t stop praying when the nurse came to her side to prepare her for the surgery.  She didn’t stop praying when the applied the sedative and even when her body relaxed into unconsciousness, her soul remained alert and awake.  She remembers seeing the doctor bending over her and begin the surgery, but to her surprise there was another person working alongside the doctor.  He looked into her face and smiled, and in that smile she finally knew the love of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  He bent over her and whispered to her that she need not be afraid.  And then He began to work again alongside the doctor; His hands held the doctors as they skillfully moved to heal her legs.

When the casts were finally removed, Mary could hardly wait to stand up and walk.  There was no doubt in her mind that she would be able to walk since Jesus had been her physician.  Slowly she swung her legs over the side of the bed and pushed herself up onto her feet.  The first step was slow, but one foot moved after the other as she moved across the room to the waiting arms of her family.  “I’m walking,” she cried.  “Look Papa, Mama, I’m actually walking.  He really does love me.”

Now, when Mary talks, she can’t stop smiling and her broken face refracts and breaks that smile into a thousand more smiles that move from her to her friends in the same way that she first moved across that hospital room to the embrace of her family.  The love of God has peeled back the bitter and angry layers that swathed her heart for so many years and shines forth in the smile, the same smile Christ gave her, that speaks the truth of God’s love in a thousand ways to all those who will stop and see.

Arthur McGill is a relative unknown in American theology.

His works have mostly been consigned to the “out-of-print” stacks. A quick Google search for “Arthur McGill” turns up only 1700 results, while Google Scholar weighs in at a whopping 47 and Google blogsearch turns up 7 results, 5 of which don’t have to do with the author.
Imprecise measurements of a person’s relative popularity, to be sure, but indicative nonetheless. McGill is firmly lodged in the back of the theology closets, piled behind tomes better known thinkers.

But popularity is no indicator of value, and in Death and Life: An American Theology, Arthur McGill has composed a gem that is worth serious reflection by theologians and laypersons alike.

This relatively short work–95 pages–is broken into two parts. In the first, McGill analyzes America’s attitudes toward death, where death means not the biological end of man, but rather the “losing of life, that wearing away which goes on all the time.” In the second, he articulates what he takes to be the Biblical understanding of death in this broader sense. Throughout, he is poetic and provocative as he works to tease out how American Christianity has been co-opted by a secular view of death and the resurrection.

His first section, while interesting, is simultaneously stimulating and problematic. He argues that the American view of “life” means “having.” It is “always optimistic, always affirmative.” Death is, in this sense, a disruption, a mangling of the normal. Poverty, sickness, disease and unanswered needs are abnormal and accidental. Wealth is a fundamental state of mind, not simply a fact. As a result, we work hard to become what McGill calls “the bronze people,” people who maintain the appearance of life without having the substance of it. In doing so, we avoid the fundamental reality of sin and pain, a reality that is “intolerable.” “The world is awful,” writes McGill, “but Americans do not usually say so.”

McGill is almost right on this point. Reality is not awful–goodness is. It is goodness that we hate and avoid, a tactic which drives us to believe that the perversion is the deepest reality when it is still a perversion. The world is not awful–it is good, but the sort of good that is demands the redemption and defeat of sin. Sin is the lesser reality–goodness the higher.

While equally provocative, McGill’s second section is somewhat more successful. Despite continuing his error of making sin “a matter…of our basic identity,” McGill demonstrates how Jesus’ identity comes from outside of himself and how as Christians, we must “die” and discover that our identity comes from outside of ourselves, from God. We must let go of the “tecnique of having,” of possessing ourselves and cultivate a posture of gratitude and acknowledgment that our being is in God, not in us.

What compels us to possess ourselves, our possessions and our relationships? The fear of death, in which we refuse to acknowledge that all that we have is God’s, not ours. This fear of death is conquered in the resurrection which “discredits one fearful possibility–that perhaps there is some fatality in the world, or some historical agency, some cosmic necessity or some other power which will disengage us from God’s constituing love, which will establish itself as the source of our identiy, and which will thus give us an identity that will be marked by loss, disintegration, and death.”

What does having an “ecstatic identity” look like? For one, it is a position of worship to the Father. Because the Father “engenders and communicates life,” He is worthy of worship. It is in the death of Jesus that the Father is glorified. John 15:8 claims that the Father is glorified by the bearing of “fruit,” which is what happens when Jesus dies on the cross. It is as a result of this self-giving act that Jesus is to be worshipped. When we acknowledge our own position of dependance and need, then we are prepared to worship the Father and the Son, whose “identity does not depend on and does not consist in the life which he holds onto and the life which he offers….Without detriment to his true self, [Jesus] can give away everything of himself.”

It is at this point that McGill demonstrates how the message of Scripture is in tension with the spirit of our age. If we are to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, we must give out of our abundance to the point where we too are in need, as it is in his position of need and dependance that the Son glorifies the Father and the Father glorifies the Son. In perhaps the most personally challenging part of McGill’s work, he argues that the love of neighbor demands the impoverishment of ourselves–that we have more in order to give more away, even to the point of poverty.

McGill’s work is never perfect–he is at points repetitive and at other points obscure. His notion of “reality” could be improved significantly by the resources of Augustinian or Thomistic thought. At points I wanted him to be more clear in his writing. But the subtitle “An American Theology” perfectly captures is project in this work. By setting his theologizing in the context of American beliefs and values, he attempts to convict the reader as much as instruct. In this, he is highly successful.

McGill’s work seems to be forgotten, but it should not be. By approaching Christianity and our culture through the lens of death, he is able to drive beneath the surface of our lives to the heart of our fears, our desires and our actions. Death and Life: An American Theologyis 95 pages of theologizing that is worth any Christian’s time.

For my other thoughts about death, see here and here.

Simon Chan, author of Liturgical Theology and Spiritual Theology, recently sat down with Andy Crouch to discuss Christianity’s contemporary expression.  Chan clearly is extremely thoughtful and very grounded in tradition.

On missional theology:

I think that missional theology is a very positive development. But some missional theology has not gone far enough. It hasn’t asked, What is the mission of the Trinity? And the answer to that question is communion. Ultimately, all things are to be brought back into communion with the triune God. Communion is the ultimate end, not mission.

On technology in the evangelical church:

I believe that if we have a clear, coherent ecclesiology, if we know what it is to be the church, then technology will have its proper place. It’s when we lack a clear understanding of our own identity and are driven by a pragmatic understanding of the church and its mission that technology becomes a threat to the life of the church. For too long, evangelicals have been driven by a rather shallow understanding of the church. We tend to see the church as a kind of pragmatic organization to fulfill certain tasks. And of course, if the church is viewed in this way, then we use technology very uncritically as long as those tasks are done.

This is especially important when it comes to the ultimate meaning of communion. Technology has created what we call virtual reality. It can give you a sense of intimacy. But whether it is real intimacy or not is quite another matter. I think this is where the Christian understanding of community enables us to look beyond what modern technology can offer, because the Christian understanding of real communion is embodied communion. Communion means bodily presence. That’s at the heart of our incarnational theology, God coming to us in person; it’s the meaning of the resurrection of the body. So no matter what virtual reality technology can create, it will never be an adequate substitute for communion.

On what we can learn from Pentecostals:

I think they need to be willing to recognize that God can and often does surprise us. We cannot control God. The Pentecostal willingness to change things at the spur of the moment may not be a bad thing at times! Liturgical churches need to be open to what Jonathan Edwards called “the surprising works of God.”

One of my favorite blogs is Lifehacker, where the motto is “Don’t live to geek, geek to live.” Though not quite a geek myself, I enjoy perusing the site’s daily diet of surprisingly helpful tips for making time on the computer more productive.

Today, the Lifehacker team dished on the top thirteen “book hacks”, i.e. tools and methods to better work with books. And since our readership skews somewhat toward the well-read (or at least, like me, planning to be well-read), I thought the suggestions given might be of interest.

Subjects covered include:

1. Integrate your local library with your computer
2. Book hacks for academia
3. Find books for free or on the cheap
4. Book hacks for the DIY crowd

Also, make sure to check out the post’s comments section, as readers have submitted other great book related tools, such as the Mere-O endorsed LibraryThing .