Review of “The Anxious Generation” (part 2)

Review of “The Anxious Generation” (part 2)

Henry David Thoreau once wrote,

“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

He penned those words in 1854, but Jonathan Haidt argues they are even more important now in an age of digital distraction, and the bottomless scroll of social media.

In part 1 of this series, I offered a short overview of Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In part 2, I’ll move beyond summary to a short response from my admittedly limited perspective as a parent and professor.

In short, I find Haidt’s argument largely compelling: By swapping a play-based childhood for a phone-based one, “The Great Rewiring” has created a generation that is more anxious, scattered, and distracted than ever. And I also agree that one positive solution involves more free-play and independence—even if that’s hard for parents who, myself included, worry about our kids’ safety.

Despite this broad agreement, I’d like to focus on some additional factors that complicate Haidt’s book, even if they do not contradict it.

  1. #ParentsToo

A first challenge for parents (like me) is the charge of hypocrisy that easily attaches if we move to limit unhealthy digital behaviors in our children while we too are compulsively engaging in them.

Kids see us. They know our habits. And it’s tough to go all “Molly Hatchet” on your daughter’s screentime if you’re a raging digital addict too. (Picture a 1920s prohibitionist trying to close the local speakeasy by selflessly drinking all the liquor before it harms the kids.) Given this worry, a prerequisite for adopting Haidt’s advice may be to detox ourselves from screens and devices before preaching such an unpopular gospel to our children. That doesn’t mean throwing my phone in the lake, but it does mean making some important changes.

Preteens are attuned to hypocrisy. Thus, it seems insincere to act on the issue in the way Haidt suggests till we “first, remove the plank [read: phone] from our own eye.”

  1. Knowing isn’t Enough

While I hope Haidt’s book makes a difference, Alan Jacobs makes the point that “knowing” is NOT our problem when it comes to the dangers of smartphones, social media, and the zombie-fication of the American amygdala.

As Jacobs writes,

“Everyone knows that living on screens is making children miserable in a dozen different ways, contributing to ever-increasing rates of mental illness and inhibiting or disabling children’s mental faculties.

Everyone knows that engaging creatively with the material world is better for children — is better for all of us.

Everyone knows that Meta and TikTok are predatory and parasitical, and that they impoverish the lives of the people addicted to them.

Everyone knows that social media breed bad actors: each platform does this in its own way, but they all do it, and the more often people engage on such platforms the more messed-up and unhappy they become. […]

Everyone knows all this. Some people, for their own reasons, choose to deny it, but even they know it — indeed, probably no one knows all that I’ve been saying better than Mark Zuckerberg and Shou Zi Chew and Sam Altman do.”

If that’s true, another book or blog post may not move the needle. Our problem is not a lack of knowledge. Our problem is a lack of will, fueled by compulsion and disordered loves.

  1. Already Dated

A third issue for Haidt’s research (and one he readily acknowledges) is that his book is already dated. This doesn’t change the overall thesis, but it does mean the situation is already substantially worse than his data suggests.

Because of how long it takes to publish peer reviewed studies, the The Anxious Generation barely touches on the new developments in the digital landscape: AI, VR, and TikTok. And for those of us in education, we can attest to how TikTok especially has abbreviated attention spans ever further.

To address that challenge, Haidt has a website that promises to add to the conversation as new data emerges (see here).

  1. Beyond Anxiety

Publishers (not authors) determine titles. And it’s no wonder why Penguin chose this one: Anxiety is front and center, especially in Gen Z.

Still, I think we shortchange the conversation by making it primarily about “anxiety.” To view fretful nervousness as the main cost of The Great Rewiring is already to prioritize the individual, therapeutic self as most important: “‘x’ is bad because ‘x’ makes me anxious.” Yes. Indeed. But there are moral, spiritual, and intellectual problems that go far beyond that.

The Great Rewiring is also troubling because it makes us more shallow, stupid, sleepless, sexually stunted, spiritually vacuous, and incapable of normal human interactions. That matters too. But we’ll need a rubric larger than anxiety to appreciate it. (To Haidt’s credit, he works to balance this trend with sections on porn, video games, and a need for real-world play.)

I witness this cost weekly in university chapel services where it sometimes feels like almost every student around me is staring blankly into smartphones, “forever elsewhere.” The same distraction afflicts classrooms, dinner tables, date-nights, Bible studies, and literally every waking moment.

To be fair, we shouldn’t blame Gen Z entirely. For the first time in history, a generation was captured by powerful tech companies before puberty, and captivated by digital stimuli for which they had no preparation. It happened when they were too young to know it. But the costs go far beyond anxiety.

  1. A God-shaped Hole

Since Haidt is an atheist, it was interesting to find him affirming Pascal’s famous line about a God-shaped hole in every human heart. In his words, “if [that hole] doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” And with the rise of smartphones and social media, “that garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”

Haidt thus joins a line of recent atheistic thinkers (most notably, Richard Dawkins) who want to extol the virtues of religion, but without the actual “God part.” (On this point, Dawkins created quite a stir recently by espousing what he calls cultural Christianity [see here].)

I appreciate Haidt’s respectful posture toward people of faith. Indeed, he seems like exactly the sort of measured, thoughtful, humble public intellectual we badly need. Still, I find Nietzsche’s critique of this brand of godless religion and post-Christian morality to be far more persuasive than the appeals of Haidt or Dawkins to “our elevated nature” and “cultural Christianity.” For all his terrifying faults, Nietzsche rightly saw that we have no basis for prioritizing (or even discerning) “our elevated nature” once God is dead and gone.

  1. Collective Action

Let’s end with application.

Haidt admits that his four action steps are hard to follow alone. If your kid is the only member in a friend group without a smartphone, then that isolation may be almost as bad as the negative effects of being on the platforms. (I can relate to this personally after hearing a child lament that “My friends already think I’m weird for not having one!”)

For that reason, Haidt hopes parents can act collectively. I must say, I’m not optimistic.

But perhaps he’s right to hope for incremental, voluntary change. After all, lots of harmful adolescent activities—from teen smoking, to drunk driving, to kids without seatbelts—used to be completely normal. Now they’re not. We changed in response to evidence. So while these problems still occur, they are not nearly as common.

Maybe in fifty years we’ll look at big tech companies capturing childhood much as we now view Big Tobacco using cartoon characters and product placement during kids’ programming.

Still, how we urge collective action matters. I’m wary of parental shaming that makes others (moms especially) feel like they’re failing because they don’t parent like the latest guru says. Hence, I don’t want Haidt’s work to become the latest bludgeon in the ongoing Suburban pastime of “parenting as competitive sport.”

We need to be clear that phones are harming kids. But we need to communicate that reality with humility and grace.

One of the best parts of The Anxious Generation comes in the form of practical, positive steps to get kids out in the real world, doing things that kids used to do for generations—playing, learning skills, and building confidence apart from screens. After all, the real cost of digital distraction is not just anxiety—it’s all the stuff we miss out on while staring vacuously into a phone. Again,

“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Grace and peace, JM

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

And see here for my own books.

Review of “The Anxious Generation” (part 1)

Review of “The Anxious Generation” (part 1)

Somewhere around the 2010, childhood changed.

In the words of Jonathan Haidt,

“Soon after teens got iPhones, they started getting more depressed. The heaviest users were also the most depressed, while those who spent more time in face-to-face activities, such as on sports teams and in religious communities, were the healthiest.”

“The Great Rewiring” is Haidt’s phrase to describe the disastrous effects of smartphones and social media on young people. Haidt is an NYU professor and social psychologist, and his latest book is entitled, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

His thesis runs as follows:

“overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world are the two main reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.“

I snapped up Haidt’s book on preorder and have been sorting through it ever since. It’s full of charts, graphs, and data—but in many ways, the studies merely confirm what my students know already: those little rectangles rule our lives, rob our sleep, amplify anxiety, and scatter attention. Frankly, I feel it too. As a reader and an academic, I relate to the words of Nicholas Carr: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

We are, in the words of Jean Twenge, “forever elsewhere”—as many of us stare into screens even when surrounded by real people.

HOW IT HAPPENED

With the rise of high-speed broadband in the 2000s, iPhones (2007), the “like” and “retweet” buttons (2009), front-facing cameras (2010), and Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram (2010), our society effectively swapped a “play-based childhood” for a “phone-based childhood”—and in so-doing, we thrust children into a world for which they are simply not designed.

We got overprotective when it came to playgrounds, letting kids walk to school, or trying to socially manage each physical encounter. And we simultaneously became massively underprotective with regard to the new world into which the younger members of our species were suddenly thrust.

Girls were hit hardest. Haidt argues that teen and preteen girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons (affecting body image), their conflicts are more prone to relational aggression than physical violence, and they are more likely to be approached by predatory men online.

For boys, the digital dangers are more linked to porn and excessive gaming—both of which contribute to a failure to launch as well as other issues. All these findings require the “on average” caveat to avoid overgeneralizing. But Haidt’s data suggest that the worst years for girls to be on social media were 11 to 13, while for boys it was 14 to 15.

As for some good news, teens are involved in less of the “bad” stuff that used to be more common—binge drinking, unwanted pregnancies, car accidents, fist fights, even speeding tickets. But the reason is largely because they have withdrawn from the embodied world of human interaction, not because they are actually healthier in terms of their psyche.

The phones function ironically as “experience blockers” (separating us from the real world for which we were designed), and over-stimulators that drown us in a tidal wave of vanity, comparison, pornography, breaking news, conspiracy theories, and online disinhibition. And yeah, a lot of good stuff too.

WHAT TO DO

Haidt’s practical suggestions are as follows:

1. No smartphones before high school. In their place, parents should opt for so-called “basic phones” with limited apps and no internet browser.
2. No social media before 16. Let kids progress through this vulnerable period of brain development before being connected to the full deluge of social comparison, pornography, algorithm-based influencers online.
3. Phone-free schools. From elementary through high school, smartphones and other devices should be kept out of the classroom and stored in either phone lockers or locked pouches (not just slipped into pockets).
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. Kids should develop social skills, resilience, and independence the way they have for thousands of years—through embodied, personal, (relatively) unsupervised play.

CONCLUSION

As a theologian—not a social psychologist—I lack the expertise to respond fully to these claims. But as a parent and a teacher of Gen Z students, I care about them.

Hence, part 2 of this brief series (forthcoming) will move from a mere summary of Haidt’s claims to a brief response. Stay tuned.

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

And see here for my own books.

The empathetic Judge

The empathetic Judge

I came down sick with COVID a few weeks back and (sadly) missed the funeral for a friend of mine named Charlie.

Charlie was a retired judge, a longtime member of our church, and a constant encourager to me. I came to know him, first, by email. Charlie was wont to send me lengthy emails after one of my sermons or blog posts. And like most pastors, I have some latent anxiety that spikes whenever I open a message to see not sentences but paragraphs. Paragraphs are bad. All preachers know it, even if we only tell our therapists.

But Charlie’s emails weren’t critical. They were funny, encouraging, and (above all) marked by signs of a first-rate mind at work. Invariably, when I referred to an author in my message—Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Becker—Charlie would approach me afterward to chat. He’d read them, even the not-so-churchy ones. And I came to relish his long emails.

At the funeral (which I watched on video), Charlie’s wife shared openly about the prior chapters of his life: the ones I didn’t know. The Navy. His years as an avowed atheist. And the alcoholism that might have killed him. Miraculously, Charlie eventually found sobriety and Christ. And at a mid-stage of life when most men sink into the comfortable ruts of a long-held career, Charlie went back to school to become a lawyer.

Eventually, he became a judge.

One legal story from the funeral struck me. It was of a young mother in Charlie’s jurisdiction who faced serious charges stemming from her opioid addiction. Instead of sentencing her to prison as he might have, Charlie got her help, he provided her a path to drug court, and her life was transformed just as his had been.

He was a just judge. But he was also an empathetic one, partly because of his own battle with addiction. He had been there, and it helped him help others.

On Holy Week especially, Charlie’s story reminded me of another reason Christians find the Jesus-story so compelling. The Messiah is indeed the Judge of all humanity, before whom we must stand (2 Corinthians 5:10; 2 Timothy 4:1). Yet Christ is also empathetic. To be sure, merciful understanding was never absent from the life of God. (Thus it is wrong to say Jesus somehow transformed the Father from a vengeful tyrant to a kindly grandpa.)

Long before the time of Christ, the psalmist wrote the following:

13 As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
14 for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.

(Psalm 103:13–14)

Yet Jesus’s unique empathy flows from his firsthand experience of suffering and temptation. Though Christ was sinless, he experienced the full weight of human frailty, abuse, and death itself.

The Book of Hebrews thus picks up this empathetic thread when speaking of our great high priest:

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”

(Hebrews 4:15)

On Good Friday, this message in especially important.

In a way, my lesson from Charlie is that justice is not only about retribution. It is also about a battle-hardened empathy that leads to restoration, and—if you’re lucky… —long emails.

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

And see here for my own books.

The beautiful book

The beautiful book

I’ve been on the family farm the past few days, with my wife’s folks in central Kansas. On Tuesday, we woke before dawn to watch a nearby “little house” of lesser prairie chickens (that’s what they’re called, apparently) do their colorful springtime dance, which takes place in the same plot of ground each year.

The kids have been riding dirt bikes, checking baby calves with grandpa, and playing in their palatial tree house. I’ve been cutting firewood and generally enjoying some outdoor time away from the indoor office since it’s Spring Break at the university.

Considering all that, I was struck by these lines that I read yesterday from the Belgic Confession of 1561. (I always save my 16th century Calvinists confessions for Spring Break; or as I call it, Presbyterians Gone Wild.)

In a lovely passage, the confession celebrates that we know God not only by Scripture but also

“. . . by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book, in which all creatures, great and small, are like letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God . . .”

The chief author of the statement was Guido de Bres, who was later martyred for his faith. The language of the “two books” (nature and Scripture) is familiar to many Christians. Yet I was struck less by what the Confession affirms than by how it illustrates it.

Creation is God’s beautiful book.

And all creatures, great and small, are like letters that pour forth from his pen.

In the 16th century, with the invention of the printing press not long ago in recent memory, the accessibility of books was skyrocketing. Thus, the confession locates us in a world that is no longer ancient or medieval; yet not quite modern, mechanized, and disenchanted. In that space between antiquity and the modernity (papyri and iPhones) sits the book—now in our own day increasingly a dusty museum relic in the age of Tik toc, Tinder, and attention spans approaching the breadth of a sneeze, even as anxiety tracks in the opposite direction (see here).

To liken creation to a book is, in a roundabout way, to venerate the act of writing, and the need for careful reading. The Reformers knew this more than most. Their movement would have floundered without Gutenberg’s invention. And they had seen their favorite texts—including the New Testament—banned in common tongue. In the end, their message depended partly on a public that could comprehend (and would want to comprehend) the written works that folks like Luther, Calvin, and Arminius were churning out with a rapidity to make even a chat bot green with envy.

In the analogy of the Belgic Confession, books matter—as does God’s creation.

Yet it is not just any book to which the world is likened by de Bres. After all, a text may be accurate, informative, useful, or just plain dull. Yet the confession calls creation God’s “beautiful book.” To be fair, this beauty is more apparent in some instances than others. (I wrote a whole chapter in Perhaps on Darwin’s haunting question on what he called “the suffering of millions of lower creatures,” and how he came to think that formed an argument against an all-loving and all-powerful creator. I beg to differ. But one can’t deny the force of Darwin’s “reading.”)

Yet amidst the dancing house of prairie chickens, and the smell of storm-felled and time-seasoned elm, one has a sense that Guido de Bres got that part exactly right, even if Hopkins said it more poetically.

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

And see here for my own books.

Why didn’t God simply declare sinners forgiven?

Why didn’t God simply declare sinners forgiven?

As we consider the cross this Good Friday, here’s a blog post I wrote over at the Seedbed on a frequently asked question.

“Jesus’ saving work is about more than simply uttering a fatherly “I forgive you” over disobedient children.”

If you’re hoping to explore the meaning of Christ’s saving work this Holy Week, I’d be honored if you’d check out my latest book, How Jesus Saves: Atonement for Ordinary People.

If you’ve already read or listened to it, would you consider writing a short review on Amazon–or wherever you purchased it.

Grace+Peace this Holy Week,

~Josh

“This is my body, commodified and mass-produced for you”: On Communion and Campbell’s Soup

“This is my body, commodified and mass-produced for you”: On Communion and Campbell’s Soup

When Andy Warhol unveiled his Campbell’s Soup Cans art exhibit in 1962, reactions were closer to befuddlement than praise.

Was this art? Where was the beauty, drama, grandeur, sacredness, or seduction that had previously marked great paintings? And who would pay the exorbitant sticker price of $100 for something that could be purchased at the grocery for ten cents?

Of course, Warhol’s cans now fetch massive sums. One reason was that they offered an ironic critique of modern life. For good and ill, we are now drowning in cheap, mass-produced, pre-packaged, disposable, easily accessible, low quality but quickly replaceable “stuff.” (I originally opted for a different word to end that sentence.)

It’s Campbell’s soup—brought to us by Chinese sweatshops and two-day shipping.

I’ve thought about those Warhol paintings several times of late as I have received Holy Communion.

Out of noble health concerns starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches moved away from traditional Communion methods in favor of individually packaged, disposable, mass-produced, plastic “blister packs” (actual description) like the one seen here.

I agreed with this move and gave thanks for it.

The tiny packages encase a single crumb of bread on one side, and—when you flip them over to remove another “blister” coating—approximately the same amount of liquid as contained within a single teardrop.

In evangelical congregations, I am used to Communion being spoken of as a mere symbol that helps us remember Christ’s sacrifice. “It’s not about the elements,” the pastor may be heard to say. So instead of the Gospel line, “This is my body”—many a minister feels compelled to amend the text to avoid misunderstanding: “This bread represents my body,” etc., etc. “This wine—I mean grape juice…—represents my blood.” I’ve grown accustomed to these things. And truth be told, I am not a believer in something like Catholic transubstantiation.

But I’ve also tired of Communion “blister packs.”

Despite understandable concerns for germs (with which I sympathize), I’ve begun to wonder what the “Oscar Mayer lunchable” approach to the Eucharist says about the modern church—not just on the Lord’s Supper, but on how we value symbols, sacraments, and physicality.

At the risk of overreaction, it sometimes feels as if we have set out to take the most beautiful and sensory-laden sacrament and turn it into something that has the aesthetic value of a roll of bubble wrap.

Even if it doesn’t burst like a juice box in my kid’s backpack, one looks around the sanctuary to see some churchgoers struggling with their teeth and fingernails—like racoons trying to unlock iPhones. By the end of the process, the elements usually find their way into digestive tracts—but something is lost from the meal that Jesus gave us. It has been commodified, sanitized, mass-produced, and individually packaged—like much of modern life.

What, then, is the solution?

My goal is not to add one more curmudgeonly complaint to the endless pile that pastors face. (It has not been easy to lead anything these past few years.) Nor is it to shame one or two churches to switch back to more traditional Communion practices. That too might be a malady of modern ecclesiology: (1) Someone complained. (2) So we stopped.

Instead, what we need is a more holistic way of noticing how unexamined modern values of convenience and commodification have caused us to do strange things in the realm of the sacred.

The French philosopher and theologian, Jacques Ellul, is helpful here. Ellul’s most important work, published back in 1964, is called The Technological Society. He sets forth two key concepts for diagnosing the side-effects that come with mind-blowing technology, inexpensive factory production, frazzled busyness, and consumer competition. He calls them (1) technique and (2) efficiency.

For Ellul, technique is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.” Technique aids efficiency; and as we know, being more efficient can save time and money.

To be fair, we can all name aspects of our businesses and bureaucracies that badly need to be streamlined. The trouble, Ellul argues, is that the values of technique and efficiency easily move out of their rightful domains, and they begin to corrupt and commodify the way we relate to people, food, art—and God.

How do you find a mate? Swipe right.
How do I form a nuanced view of Shakespeare’s Othello? ChatGPT.
How do I eat, given that I’m frazzled and rushed? McDonalds.
How do I check “Communion” off my to-do list? Blister packs.

In all these areas, there are costs to maximally efficient solutions.

Moving back to Communion, note how our modern ways of approaching the Eucharist make it difficult to “feel” and “see” what Paul alludes to when he writes to the Corinthians:

“Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.”

1 Corinthians 10:16-17

In the end, I remain grateful for a necessary safety measure in a time of emergency. What’s more, we should probably keep some “blister packs” on hand to love and serve our brothers and sisters who have health concerns.

And as usual, my attempts to be pointed or humorous run the risk of oversimplifying—and overreacting. That too is a byproduct of the marriage of technology and efficiency: What are blog posts if not a maximally efficient form of publishing.

Enjoy your soup. I slaved for minutes over it.

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

See here to purchase a copy of Perhaps: Reclaiming the Space between Doubt and Dogmatism.

Signup here to receive bonus content through my email Newsletter, “Serpents and Doves.”

Christmas Anyway: Why Incarnation matters for How Jesus Saves

Christmas Anyway: Why Incarnation matters for How Jesus Saves

I’m excited to say that my next book now has its own page on Amazon, and is available for pre-order (see here).

Unlike my last two projects, this one isn’t academic. It’s accessible for all audiences (not just theologians). And as the title suggests, it aims to unpack How Jesus Saves: Atonement for Ordinary People.

We’ve shot video curriculum to go with it for small groups or individuals, and it includes discussion questions at the end of every chapter.

Essentially, it’s like Long Story Short, but for the doctrine of atonement.

I’d love it if you’d consider pre-ordering it since that can help a lot in the run-up to our release date in early March.

In the meantime, here is a blog post that has just been released today over at my publisher’s website: Seedbed.com.

“Christmas Anyway: Why Incarnation matters for the Doctrine of Atonement.”

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

See here to purchase a copy of Perhaps: Reclaiming the Space between Doubt and Dogmatism.

Signup here to receive bonus content through my email Newsletter, “Serpents and Doves.”

“Thanks”

“Thanks”

Two quick stories:

Last week I began reading a new book from a scholar I have long admired. We’ve only met in passing and I’m almost certain he would not remember me. Nonetheless, I’ve appreciated his work for years and learned much from it. So in a brief fit of thoughtfulness, I took approximately twenty seconds to drop him an email:

Dear X,

We don’t know each other, but I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your work.

I just grabbed your new volume on [x] and began working through it this morning.

I learn things each time I read your stuff and I just wanted to pass along a word of thanks!

All the best, Josh

Now, scholars are busy, and as a species we’re not known for always being “prompt” with email correspondence. But I was surprised to see that—despite being on completely different continents—he responded to say how much my note meant.

Story two: A few days ago, after worship in our university chapel, I overheard our campus pastor telling a student how grateful she was for this student’s ministry through music and in other ways. The student is truly gifted, and I know she has overcome real challenges—as many of our students have—to finish her degree.

The comment from our pastor jogged my memory that I had meant to drop this student a note of thanks a few weeks back just as I had done for this senior scholar. But of course, I had forgotten. Like I said: We’re not known for always being “prompt” with email correspondence.

In any case, I remembered then. I told her specifically what I had appreciated about her leadership. In response, she started crying and said—much like the senior scholar—how much it meant.

I pass along these two stories not because I am the walking spiritual embodiment of a Hallmark Card. (I’m not. And on the same day as these two stories, I also sent a rather grumpy email to my superiors on something that had irked me.) I note these two occurrences only because I was struck by how little time and effort was required to tell someone a simple, and sincere word of “thanks.”

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

See here to purchase a copy of Perhaps: Reclaiming the Space between Doubt and Dogmatism.

and still it is not full: on epigraphs

and still it is not full: on epigraphs

As a reader, I’m a sucker for intruiging epigraphs.

These are the short quotations, usually from another writer, placed at the start of a book or chapter. Since I’m working on a new writing project now, I’ve already started a Word doc with a list of possibilities.

For my last book, the overarching epigraph was a single line from N. T. Wright:

“Sometimes, believing in providence means learning to say perhaps.”

N. T. Wright

Here are a few of my favorites from books other than mine.

EAST OF EDEN

Though it’s more a dedication than an epigraph, I’ve always loved the inscription that precedes my all-time favorite novel, East of Eden. According to legend, when John Steinbeck finished the 250,000-word manuscript, he placed it into a mahogany box that he had carved. Then he sent it to his friend, Pascal “Pat” Covici. When you open East of Eden, these words greet you:

Dear Pat,

You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”
“What for?”
“To put things in.”
“What things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.

And still, the box is not full.
~John

East of Eden

OF BOLDNESS AND REQUESTED BODIES
Then there is this thought-provoking verse from Mark’s Gospel that James K. A. Smith chose as the epigraph for his book on Christian public witness and political philosophy (Awaiting the King):

“Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body”

Mark 15:43

I love it because it seems so purposeful and yet so unexpected. It made me stop and ask, Now why the heck did he choose that!? Is this a Christian attitude toward cynical leaders and corrupt governments? …to ask not for prayer in public schools or Ten Commandments on a courthouse lawn, but for a corpse to bury in strange anticipation of a kingdom still to come? …and to do so “boldly”?

It’s perfect—precisely because it raises questions more than answers them. You’ve got to keep read on. And in this case, you should.

CUTTING POPPIES
Then there’s this from Søren Kierkegaard’s masterpiece Fear and Trembling—a book that probes the nature of faith in the frightening story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son. Kierkegaard chooses this:

“What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.”

Fear and Trembling

Who’s Tarquinius? And why the cryptic message sent by way of flowers? Once again, the quotation is just strange enough to make me care. It plays upon the universal human impulse that drives attention to ancient oracles, true crime podcasts, and ridiculous Q-drops—a mystery to be figured out.

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
Finally, I’ve long loved the epigraph that opens Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth:

“What is past is prologue”
–Inscription in Washington, D.C., museum

The phrase is a well-worn line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Yet Smith messes with it. Shakespeare’s “What’s” is changed to the rather clunky “What is”; and the origin of the phrase is deliberately mis-cited: “–Inscription in Washington, D.C., museum.”

For careful readers—and it took me auditing a college Brit Lit class to have it pointed out—these small but deliberate changes illustrate the theme of Smith’s sprawling, multi-generational epic on what it’s like to be an immigrant, or the child of one, in modern Britain. Her novel plays upon the complex ways in which the past influences the present, even while the present tweaks and misremembers the received tradition. It’s brilliant. And on the novel’s final page, Smith gives one last nod to the lesson from her epigraph:

“To tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. … It’s never been like that.”

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

LESSONS LEARNED

Over time, I’ve formed opinions on what makes for an arresting epigraph: (1) Short beats long; (2) one beats many; (3) cryptic beats obvious or preachy. But like most writing rules, these may be broken under the right circumstances.

The true constant, and the real magic of a perfect epigraph is that it functions exactly like Steinbeck’s little hand-carved box: As the writer, all you have is there—the whole book–though the words are not your own:

—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.

—and still it is not full.

***If you have a favorite epigraph, post it in the comments. I’d love to see it.

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

See here to purchase a copy of Perhaps: Reclaiming the Space between Doubt and Dogmatism.

Signup here to receive bonus content through my email Newsletter, “Serpents and Doves.”

public library preaching

public library preaching

This past week, I preached – and I spent chunk of my Sunday sermon prep time in our local public library. One motive was mercenary: It’s summertime, the kids are home, and Teddy had been asking to go there.

Normally, I’d be doing that work in my university office, surrounded by commentaries and a trove of books I own and draw from regularly. I’m comfortable there, and the university library has even more commentaries just a few steps from my office.

But increasingly, I’ve wondered if that routine isn’t hurting my preaching.

One danger for speakers is that our illustrations start to come from all same places, over and over, for years on end, until we die or stop talking—which is basically the same thing. I’m guilty of that as much as anyone.

But last week, sitting there near the kids area during library story time, I sensed several benefits of what one might call “public library sermon prep.”

First, the folks seated around me came from a wider range of demographics than I would encounter in my usual prep spaces. And writing my sermon in their presence was a reminder to include them as my intended audience: the elderly couple reading the morning paper, the ESL group learning English, the kids and moms at story time, the homeless man by the magazines, a group of firemen and city employees meeting in the conference room, the grad student huddled over the DSM 5, and even the suspicious teenager googling “how to build a pipe bomb” on the library computer. If the bane of many sermons is that we speak to only one or two types of people, maybe crafting messages in such a diverse setting could help that. (On a related point, see here.)

Second, the library has a trove of magazines and periodicals that speak to our cultural moment—even if I wouldn’t want (and couldn’t afford) to subscribe to them myself. What’s more, these sources come from a variety of perspectives and biases—so you’re less prone to fall into the echo chamber of your choice. This is particularly important in a day and age in which it quickly becomes apparent which “silo” into which your preacher has algorithmically fallen.

Third, walking through the stacks filled with different genres and perspectives made me feel more creative—and it gave me ideas I wouldn’t have had before. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a steady diet of C. S. Lewis and N. T. Wright (two of my favorites), but this week I also ended up with quotes or stories from Molly Shannon (yep, that Molly Shannon), Atul Gawande, and Paul Kalanthi.

All that to say, I’ve decided to take a big step in my vocation as a longtime academic / preacher: I’m getting a public library card. Teddy says I can’t use his anymore.

Click the green “Follow” button to never miss a post.

See here to purchase a copy of Perhaps: Reclaiming the Space between Doubt and Dogmatism.

Signup here to receive bonus content through my email Newsletter, “Serpents and Doves.”