When I was in doctoral work, I enjoyed taking courses from professors who smoked because they took longer breaks (our seminars met once per week, with a break about halfway through the session).  This was the time when we got to know our classmates, which greatly enhanced class discussions.

One particular evening, a classmate sidled up to me and looked around as if to indicate that he had a secret to confide in me.  “Gene,” he whispered, “I have heard that you are a Christian.  Is that true?”  I looked around, matching his opening gesture and leaning to whisper back, “Yes, I’m a Christian.”  His eyes grew large and he said, “But honestly, you don’t seem mentally ill?  I’m just shocked that you even admit that you are a Christian.  I mean, you seem like a pretty bright guy.”

He was genuine in his inquiry, not hostile at all.  His reaction was that of one who had learned that the moon was not, in fact, made of cheese.  This was my third graduate degree and I was amply sure that his thoughts were the product of too much Freud (religion being a psychosis) fertilized with Marx (religion being an opiate) and not of a particular animus toward me whatsoever.  In fact, I’d had a similar conversation with a professor about that same time.

I couldn’t help but think about that incident this week as I read two bits of news.  First, in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling on California’s Proposition 8, the majority opinion ruled that the initiative failed the “rational basis standard,” meaning it was based on irrational thought, rooted, apparently, in religious irrationality in particular.  Second, in a transcript of an exchange at Vanderbilt, the chief academic officer of the institution scolded students who wished to allow their religious faith to influence their decision-making:

Now let me give you another example, and this would affect all of you. I’m Catholic. What if my faith beliefs guided all of the decisions I make from day to day? (more…)

Over the holidays, my wife and I saw two movies, both on the recommendations of trusted friends: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Hugo.

I was, pre-children, a pretty hard-core film buff.  One week in college I cut an entire week of classes for a science fiction film festival, something like 17 films in one week.  How I avoided becoming a film major is still something of a mystery to me.  Post-children, movies are a rare treat, especially ones that don’t involve talking animals or treacle-heavy plots.

I was looking forward to Sherlock Holmes because I love the character and I think Robert Downey Jr. is one of the great actors of our age.  The film was more like a video game than a movie, with undeveloped characters and a plot of little consequence to the movie itself.  The theater, moreover, was filthy and the previews were jaw-droppingly offensive; the screen that proclaimed that the following preview had been rated for all audiences was embarrassingly inaccurate. When I left the theater, I had been entertained somewhat but was less than satisfied.  At least I wasn’t mad or felt cheated, which has been my sense at the end of way too many movies over the past few years.  What passes for good in Hollywood these days is ennui and nihilism, neither of which is an emotion worthy of the magic of the silver screen.

Hugo, on the other hand, was more of an accidental pleasure.  (more…)

I’m a bit out of my depth when it comes to international affairs, but the convergence of two deaths over the weekend bears commentary.  North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and former Czech president Vaclav Havel both passed the bar into eternity and their leadership could not have been more of a contrast in worldviews.

Kim’s creation of a bubble around his people has led them to poverty, starvation, and isolation.  His bubble has become rather famous for its ability to insulate visitors from the reality of the nation’s conditions, or, rather, for its ability to insulate its people from visitors who can point out the reality of the conditions.  The most visually stunning documentation of this is a snapshot of the Korean night sky from a satellite: bright in the South and dark in the North.

Havel, on the other hand, knew the power of the arts to demonstrate that the emperor (the Soviets) had no clothes (“power” over “the powerless,” as he called it).  While Havel was not per se a believer, his philosophy was laden with the fruits of Christian thought, from the dignity of all persons to the importance of balances that check the fallen nature of leaders.  His motto was, according to some sources, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate.”  James Sire, best known for the classic study in worldviews “The Universe Next Door,” produced one of the signature studies of Havel, “Vaclav Havel: the Intellectual Conscience of International Politics” (IVP 2001), which is helpful reading for anyone who travels in Eastern Europe or wants to understand post-Christian Europe.

We live in dizzying times.  The former dictators are passing at a startling clip: Gaddafi, Kim, and many others.  So too, however, are some of our other leaders like Havel who turned selflessless into an artform (literally in his case).  I am grateful, in such times, for passages such as Isaiah 6:1: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and His robe filled the temple.”  God is not an emperor who lacks for clothes, and we are not a people who lack for a loving King.

The horrifying news out of Penn State has many of us talking about ethics lately, especially those of us who work in academe as I do.  One of the terms I’ve heard mentioned the most is “loyalty,” as many commentators have observed that a misplaced sense of loyalty in the circumstances surrounding misdeeds often enables the accused and delays justice for all parties in the case.

If loyalty is a virtue, it’s one that I relish.  Indeed, I’m trying to cultivate it in my children, because loyalty, rightly understood, is a form of grace.  It overlooks the flaws in others and allows us to sustain relationships in spite of our failings and those of others.

But, loyalty, like all of the other virtues, is not a thing unto itself.  It is always subordinate to an overarching integrity that is rooted in righteousness.  Once it becomes primary, it ceases to be a virtue.  Loyalty detached from justice is a particularly perverse vice; however, loyalty that sustains justice is demanding, in that it calls us to use our relationships to inspire confession and repentance in the pursuit of righteousness.

I interviewed for a job many years ago where I asked the prospective boss what virtue he valued most of all in his team.  He focused on loyalty: “I not only expect loyalty, I demand it.  Without utter loyalty, nothing progresses in this organization.”  A few years later, I found out that he had been embezzling funds from the company and that his assistant managers had been involved.  It’s amazing how quickly virtuous “loyalty” morphs into wicked “conspiracy.”

Charles Colson tells a story that is illustrative in How Now Shall We Live?  After addressing some two thousand Marines, Colson was asked by a master sergeant, “Which is more important—loyalty or integrity?”  The Marine creed is, of course, semper fi, “always faithful,” but Colson, understanding very personally the stakes of unfettered loyalty, responded, “’Integrity comes first.’  Loyalty, no matter how admirable, can be dangerous if it is invested in an unworthy cause.” (p. 379).

As a leader, I expect of my colleagues professional loyalty, but I expect it to be conditional loyalty: it goes only as far as my integrity and righteousness allow.  When I fail in either instance, I have broken whatever covenant for loyalty I have entered into with my colleagues.  To be loyal to me in such a circumstance would be to supplant loyalty with its perverted cousin, conspiracy.

Conspiracy goes way back in human history, all the way back to Eden, when Adam and Eve exchanged their righteousness for corrupted loyalty toward one another, entering into a thin conspiracy to cover their loss of righteousness.  Sinfulness never changes, does it?

Many years ago, I overheard a mother talking about graduation announcements with her teenaged child in a restaurant where I was eating.  Apparently they were going over a list of folks who would receive announcements and the child started asking who most of the people were.  The mother explained that they were co-workers of one or another of the parents, were “old friends,” or were even “extended family” members who had never met the child or had not seen him since infancy.

I have to admit that I felt a bit like I was listening to a couple of Internet phishing experts planning out their next round of extortion of the kindly.  What the mother was doing was helping her child to expand the haul of graduation gifts by casting as large a net as possible.

This sort of crassness really plucks my nerves, though it hardly surprises me that these sorts of things happen.  They’ve been a part of human culture forever, as kinship always has included social obligations like gifts and material support.  What really drives me batty, though, is when Christians do the same thing, commodifying fellow persons as cash cows for financial support.

Perhaps the most extreme case I know of happened to a life-long friend.  She had fallen out of her church for a particular reason and had not attended in over twenty years.  While she still was on the mailing list and received her weekly newsletter, at no time had anyone from the church visited her to see what had happened.  There were no calls from the pastor or the deacons.  No calls from a Sunday school teacher.  Nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  She just fell off the earth as far as that congregation was concerned.

Until an ambitious building campaign came along.

Suddenly a team of deacons arrived at her door with a slick packet of information, asking her to fill out a pledge card and commit to gifts over and above her tithes.  You can imagine what her reaction was.  As a churchman, I was horrified and genuinely embarrassed.  They didn’t care about her soul, apparently, merely her checkbook.

I wish I could say that these occurrences were rare; however, I never cease to be amazed at how often I hear from people I haven’t seen in twenty years – not a call, an email, or a poke on Facebook – who have sent solicitations for their upcoming mission trip, shown up selling wrapping paper for their Christian school, or sent a form letter that offered up some sort of veiled threat to the eternal security of my soul if I did not support whatever cause they have taken on themselves.  (more…)

On Graceful Writing

Rachel Toor has a fine essay at The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Problem Is: You Write Too Well” (full text for subscribers only), which outlines a complaint that is heard with amazing frequency: your writing is too easy to read.  As Toor states,

“People on my dissertation committee,” explained several young scholars, “said that I write too well.”

I personally had one of these experiences.  One of my professors met with me about a seminar paper and he gave me what I thought was going to be a compliment.  He complimented my writing and then told me to stop writing so well.  He said something like this:

 “Gene, your writing style is very clear and concise.  Very muscular.  But it is not academic writing.  It is popular writing.  If you persist in writing clear prose, you will never get far in academic writing.  Academic writing must be turgid and convoluted.  You must force your reader to read your sentences four and five times before she can understand what you are trying to say.  You must obscure the concepts that just anyone can understand.  You must, as literally as possible, grab your reader by the throat and pull her face into the text, holding her captive until she can escape by understanding the essay in full after struggling and wrestling with your words.”

You can imagine my thoughts as I received this comment.  This advice ran contrary to everything I had been taught by previous professors and contradicted the advice I gave to my own students in composition classes.  I was really confused and brought it up to someone else in the department who clued me in.

“Oh, he’s a total Marxist, through and through.  You have to understand, Marxists do not like consumerism.  And he believes that writing that is too easy to read is complicit in passive consumerism.  What he is doing is criticizing the larger culture of consumerism.  He wants your prose to fight passive consumption.   And if you write like that, you will signal to other Marxists that you are in their club. At their hearts, Marxists are actually elitists who thrive within a private club populated by self-referencing winkers.”

When my next paper came due, I anticipated his concerns and wrote a painfully complicated essay which he liked very much.  After all, I’m a big believer in the concept of audience and wanted to communicate effectively with him, my sole audience for that paper.  But after that course, I went back to what I believed to be a superior rhetorical style.  I believed, and still do, that effective communication is an attempt to overcome the brokenness of language that is the result of fallenness.  In this way, clear writing is a foretaste of grace, that wonderful concept that reminds us that something must bridge the gap between us and perfection, the gap that divides us from other persons as well as God.

Worldview affects everything, doesn’t it?  Even the way we approach our writing.

My academic training is in poetry but I love stout fiction, the kind Faulkner and Joyce wrote.  The kind that clothes life-like characters with carefully interwoven abstraction and emotional chaos.  Nothing emulates reality quite like these kinds of stories.  About a year ago I read Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Pantheon Books). 

Since the book asserts the failures of the classical arguments for a supreme deity, I found it particularly ironic that the press is “Pantheon Books” (“all of the gods,” referring to the Roman gallery of the supernatural figures); that would be a bit like John Piper publishing a book with the “Arminius Publishing Group.”

Nevertheless, as an evangelical, how could I not like a book like Goldstein’s, which includes this cover blurb from Christopher Hitchens: “You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing.  It is faith itself that consists of nothing.  Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something”?

The novel is marvelous, philosophical and sardonic all at the same time.   It is, in some ways, the antidote to the smiling preacher treacle that fills so much of the Christian subculture, though not in the way that Goldstein, perhaps, proposes.  (more…)

While riding on a bus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group I was with skirted Harvard Yard, ground zero for American higher education.  The Harvard seal is ubiquitous there (the letters VE-RI-TAS imposed on open books), on t-shirts, signs, and buildings as far as the eye can see. 

“Does anybody  know what veritas is?” a rider said. 

“I’ve been wondering that myself,” someone else chimed in.  “I know it’s not Latin for Harvard.  Does anybody know Latin?”

Another rider spoke up, “I saw it everywhere and got curious so I googled it.  It means ‘truth.’  And it’s kind of cool that its letters are printed over open books.”

I finally inserted myself into the conversation. 

“Veritas is the Harvard motto, and it does mean “truth” but technically the full motto is “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae.  ‘Truth for Christ and the Church.’  There are a few places around campus that still have this, including over the doors of the Widener Library.  And it’s not just any open books; the way I’ve heard it, one book is the Bible, one represents the great learning of the past in written form, and in some versions, the third book is face down, representing the necessity of God’s self-revelation beyond human reasoning that may be found in books.  In fact, Emerson Hall, which houses the department of philosophy, has a biblical inscription over the doors that reads ‘What Is Man that Thou Art Mindful of Him?’, which is in the Psalms.” [Ps. 8:4].

Stunned silence followed.  Finally one person said, “Well, that’s pretty amazing.  I guess they don’t follow that any more, do they?”  Everyone chuckled nervously. 

I kept pondering the question that originally caught my attention: “Does anybody know what vertitas is?”

Visitors to Harvard Yard tend to have their photos made in front of the Statue of the Three Lies, which is among the most photographed sculptures in America.  It’s supposed to be a representation of John Harvard, the college namesake but the figure is that of a model (lie #1), the inscribed term “founder” is likewise wrong (lie #2), and the date inscribed for the founding of the college is erroneous (lie #3).  I could not help but note the irony that the motto is “veritas” but the most influential image of campus is not the library but rather the “lying” statue.  Indeed, the motto of not just Harvard but perhaps for most of American higher education is more aptly illusio, Latin for “irony, deceit, or mockery,” the root word for “illusion.” 

The funny thing about truth is that it exists apart from human understanding.  It’s the ultimate question of “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  It mistakes the human part of the phenomenon for the ultimate test of reality.  The truth is (more…)

Apparently it’s open season on the value of the liberal arts in contemporary higher education.  From new studies that reveal the paucity of financial rewards for humanities majors to complaints about the ideological insurgency that some see underway in the traditional study of arts and sciences, a fusillade of complaints and proposals is raining down in the media.  Clearly there are bared teeth aplenty surrounding the tribe of liberal arts proponents. 

In a recent essay for salon.com,  Kim Brooks asks, “Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?”  She holds an MFA in creative writing and has had the typical post-graduation experience of many liberal arts graduates:

I floundered.  I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language . . . .  I mooched off friends and boyfriends and slept on couches.  One dreary night in San Francisco, I went on an interview to tend bar at a strip club, but left demoralized when I realized I’d have to walk around in stilettos.  I went back to school to complete the pre-medical requirements I’d shunned the first time through, then a week into physics, I applied to nursing school, then withdrew from that program after a month . . . .  I landed a $12-an-hour job as a paralegal at an asbestos-related litigation firm.  I got an MFA in fiction.

 Depending on how you look at it, I either spent a long time finding myself, or wasted seven years.

Her story is hardly an exception to the rule.  I could recount numerous tales of friends, loved ones, and even my own experiences in affirmation of the rootlessness that sometimes seems to be spawned by liberal arts studies.

Part of the problem, of course, is that contemporary liberal arts education steers students toward a self-centered worldview that is founded on a belief that the world is meaningless.  The seeds of this worldview were fertilized significantly by the rise of both modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century.  When T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” becomes your guiding text, it’s hard to avoid such a perspective.  And most folks who deal with surviving in the “real” world just don’t see this as a viable worldview.  It’s too impractical, too detached from reality.

Contemporary liberal arts education tends to harvest the fruit of the classical liberal arts and ferment it into an intoxicating, and even deadly, elixir, even as it tries to dig out the roots of the tradition and burn them, making a future harvest impossible.  (more…)

Many of our readers are interested in the question of how Christian colleges and universities evaluate and document their identity.  We can talk about curricula, hiring principles, governance, and many other factors. 

A ruling this week from the National Labor Relations Board has declared that St. Xavier University in Illinois is too “secular” to claim a religious exemption from certain laws and rules governing the unionization of adjuncts.  As one official noted,

There is no evidence that the university would discipline or fire faculty if they did not hold to Catholic values,” he wrote. “A faculty member’s religious values, or lack thereof, play no role in their hiring or retention at the university and are not a subject of their evaluations” or judgments of their suitability for promotion. The university’s mission, he said, is “to educate men and women irrespective of their religious beliefs.

The NLRB report further observed a

lack of any reference to religion in Xavier’s articles of incorporation; the presence of only five members of its founding religious order, the Sisters of Mercy, among the 24 voting members on its Board of Trustees; its reliance on the Catholic Church for only a small portion of its funds; and its lack of any requirements that students take courses in Roman Catholicism.

I personally don’t think it’s the right of any governmental agency or authority to start evaluating the religiosity of an institution; that’s a sword that could cut in a number of different ways that clearly run afoul of the First Amendment. 

Having said that, while I have no knowledge of St. Xavier or their internal representations of their identity (and would prefer to consider the larger question here, not the specifics of that institution), I do think that this works at a problem that is endemic to religious higher education.  In politics, there are “RINO”s (“Republicans In Name Only”); “Christian” higher education has plenty of those kinds of places too: “CINO”s.  We need more, and stronger, institutions of higher education that propagate the Christian Intellectual Tradition, not fewer, but the question constantly comes back to the working definition of what it means to be “Christian.”

If the word “Christ” doesn’t appear in the hiring principles, the curricula, the governance policies, or student outcomes, when how exactly is an education “Christian”?  If the words “Scripture” or “Church” likewise are absent, then I have a hard time seeing exactly what is “Christian” about the identity.  If the historical creeds are absent from any sort of voice in defining the identity, when what is “Christian” about it?

To some extent, this is a question of lexicography: how does one define “Christian”?  The American Heritage Dictionary (3^rd edition) has this as its first definition: “Professing belief in Jesus as Christ or following the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus.”  I think that most of our readers would be able to embrace that definition as a starting point at least, a bare minimum. 

 Too many “Christian” organizations, however, have adopted the fifth and final definition: “showing a loving concern for others; humane.”   That is not a definition of “Christian” but is a synonym for “kind.”  By that definition, a Buddhist, a Muslim, or an atheist can be a “Christian” as long as s/he is good-hearted.  It’s a basic logical observation: All Christians should be kind but not all kind persons are Christian.   In lexicography, the first definition is prescriptive; the latter is descriptive.   Ideally, the two terms should be consonant, but the reality is that the latter definition is not enough; if we follow only the latter definition, we are quickly in contradiction to the first (and primary) definition. 

Indeed, this matches the problem we have with defining the Gospel: is the Gospel that Christ has risen and has dealt fulsomely with the Curse or is the Gospel that we are supposed to be nice to one another?   One is a stumbling block (1 Cor. 1:23) and the other is a kindergarten lesson in ethics.

The NLRB ruling raises a question that I’ve heard many a preacher invoke on a Sunday: if you were to stand trial for your faith, would there be enough evidence to convict you?  I don’t like the judge in this case, but I do like the question.

How nice it is to be able to type that title without the slightest tinge of irony.  The May 9 New York Times has a wonderful profile of the relief work of the Southern Baptist Convention.   As the story notes, the SBC is the third largest private disaster relief orgainzation in the United States, counting 95,000 trained volunteers, one of the most well-organized cohorts of chain saw crews in the world, and mobile command centers that can swing into action with only a few hours’ notice.

As a former resident of New Orleans, I can attest to the incredible intervention that the yellow-jacketed horde brought to the post-Katrina chaos.  My aunt who still lives there told me that many residents of South Louisiana openly have asked, “If it hadn’t been for the Baptists, where would we have been, especially in the first months following the hurricane?”

The Times story goes on to note the work of the Mennonites, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, and other denominational groups and while it fails to note the religious history of the Red Cross and the outright denominational status of the Salvation Army (the #1 and 2 organizations), one cannot help but be proud to read about selfless, tangible things that are done in the name of Christ and His mercy.

I wish we could read more stories like this in such a prominent setting; of course, perhaps that should be a challenge to us all to DO more that is worthy of such media coverage.  As Bill Lane once said, “Excellence should be our protest.”

The inimitable Russ Moore spoke at chapel on my campus (Union University) last week.  He preached from Deut. 24: 14-22, making a fascinating link between caring for the least among us and the local church, using orphans / adoption as the illustrating framework for his message. 

As I pondered the verses, my eyes kept falling on this repeated phrase: 

“Remember that you were a slave in Egypt” (vv. 18 & 22). 

The link between doing justice and its memorial value, that we never forget that once we longed for justice, was startling to me as I kept repeating the words to myself.

Forgetfulness is one of the fiercest enemies of the Gospel.  We forget that we once were helpless on our own (Rom. 5:6), and, more than that, we were enemies to the Gospel (Rom. 5:10).  We forget that grace is not of ourselves (Eph. 2:8-10).  We forget that we once were slaves to our sin (Rom. 6:17).  We just forget.

Rick Stearns wrote a pretty popular book, “The Hole in Our Gospel: What Does God Expect of Us?” (Thomas Nelson 2010), that reminds Christ-followers that ministering to the poor and the downtrodden is central to our mission in this world.  It’s funny, isn’t it, just how quickly we seem to forget about the poor and the downtrodden?  The widow and the orphan?  And then, all too often, when we start to minister to them, we find ourselves forgetting about the Gospel itself and the very reason that we are to be about such business: we once were slaves. 

One of the reasons I often pontificate about the power of liberal learning in the Christian context is because it helps us to understand history and how important it genuinely is.  History keeps us from being foolish.  It ought to keep us from being forgetful too.  That’s why I see the power of testimony as crucial to life in Christian community.  It’s why I like to hear people tell the story of how they came to faith in Christ.  When we tell these stories, we are reminded that we once were slaves.  But we were rescued by a Redeemer who bought our freedom with His blood.

In the most recent issue of First Things, Gerald McDermott writes about “Evangelicals Divided,” which explores current trends in evangelical life relative to what he describes as a struggle between traditionalists (who tend to be Reformed) and Meliorists (who tend to be Arminian). 

A line that caught my eye, though, was not about this conflict but about the tendency evangelical thinkers have to seek the approval of the academy:

“. . . evangelical theologians, like other orthodox thinkers, are susceptible to the peculiarly academic sort of ambition that seeks acceptance and recognition by their liberal colleagues.  We want the academy’s approval, and so we are tempted to write and teach a theology that will be consistent with its moral and theological sensibilities” (49).

I heard almost the exact same line at the Making Men Moral conference my campus hosted in 2009, celebrating the anniversary of Robert P. George’s book by that title.  It was a warning that came from thinkers who held important posts at important universities (just check out that speakers’ list!) and resonated with many of those in attendance.  Cultural affirmation is a fickle goddess that never satisfies for very long. (more…)

Few people write about the intellectual core of the pro-life movement quite like Robert P. George of Princeton.  He is a comely figure, whose spirit always impresses foes even as his keen intellect often shames them by exposing the flaws in their logic.  When my students seem to be allowing their pietistic impulses to supplant their rational abilities, I often will point them to his writings as an illustration of someone who successfully (and correctly) joins the two in the pursuit of godliness.

His essays always are insightful, but his recent posting at Public Affairs, a publication of the Witherspoon Institute, is quite moving.  It’s a tribute to recently deceased Bernard Nathanson, the abortionist who helped to push us into Roe v. Wade but then had a change of mind and heart on the issue and began to campaign against the culture of death that was ushered in by that court decision.  It’s hard to read Nathanson’s story and not be struck by its parallels to Saul’s incredible conversion in Acts.

Nathanson admitted that he lied frequently in the defense of abortion, but asserted that he would never lie in the other direction: 

“You said that I was converted to the cause of life; and that’s true.  But you must remember that I was converted to the cause of life only because I was converted to the cause of truth.  That’s why I wouldn’t lie, even in a good cause.”

Amazing words to ponder.

Recently I was in a meeting on the top floor of one of Nashville’s tallest buildings.  The view was marvelous and, honestly, quite a distraction from the day’s agenda.  As the landscape rolled toward the suburbs, I became struck by how many steeples I could see poking out like white onion grass through the wintry grey canopy of trees.  There were, it seemed, hundreds of them. 

As I drove through town that evening, I passed the campus of Vanderbilt University, which stands opposite the beautiful Parthenon in Centennial Park.  The West End is filled with beautiful churches and temples, and the busy road creeps along toward the toney Belle Meade area.  The steeples on some of the churches are marvelous.  One in particular always catches my eye: Vine Street Christian Church.   The spire is enormous, towering over the area before ending in a beautifully delicate cross.  Not too far away is the Woodmont Christian Church  with its impossibly thin uprising that reaches marvelous heights. 

As I continued driving, I was struck by the beauty and craftsmanship of so many of these structures.  Almost all of them were capped by a cross, even the ones that are attached to congregations that many evangelicals would barely recognize as being theologically faithful to traditional Christianity.  Indeed, many of the crosses have likely entered into the realm of visual “white noise” (is that possible?) that goes un-noticed by inured passersby.  Who has time to look at a steeple, after all, when there are texts to send while sitting at a red light?  Who has time to look up when our eyes are so busy focusing on what is just in front of us?

My favorite steeple is in Port Gibson, Mississippi, at the First Presbyterian Church.  It ends not in a cross but in beefy gold-leafed hand that points the way to God.  It’s not a cross, but it’s a testimony at least. (more…)

Today is the anniversary of the most difficult day of my life, February 5, 2008.  On that date, an EF-4 tornado tore a jagged slice through the very middle of the campus of Union University, where I teach.  I will never forget seeing the funnel cloud crossing the highway a few hundred yards away and initially thinking we had been spared, only to exit the back of the main administration building (with our president, David Dockery, and one of my best friends, Greg Thornbury) and slowly see the devastation revealed by the flashes of lightning. 

As a professor, I can tell you that there is nothing quite like grabbing your own blood-covered students and trying to direct them to the triage station our nursing faculty had set up.  As a father, I can tell you that there is nothing at all like feeling the fingers of young people touching your sleeve because you  are the closest thing to their own fathers that they can find in the middle of a disaster.  As a man, I can tell you that there is little in life that can prepare you for the frustration that comes from realizing that you cannot solve the problem that stands at your feet, as you helplessly listen to the muffled voices of young men trapped beneath rubble.

I will never forget the smell of the raw sewage pouring out of pipes that no longer led to dormitories.  I can no longer hear sirens or generators or the sound of trucks backing up without finding my pulse racing or my breath tightening.  When I finally got home that night, all I can remember is breaking down and crying with my wife.  No one had been killed, which was no small miracle at all, and only a few of the injured remained in the hospital.  By midnight, all of the students had been taken to local homes while we tried to figure out what to do next. 

We had nothing but questions that night.  Would we reopen?  Ever?  Did I still have a job? 

Just after the tragedy, someone created this video to articulate how we all felt.  I have to admit that I have never actually watched it all the way through.  I can’t: I lived it. (more…)

Certain news items strike me as so ridiculous that they seem like hoaxes worthy of The Onion or Lark News.  I thought this when I read recently that new applications for passports will now have two slots for guardians: “parent one” and “parent two.” 

I immediately thought of Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat,” where “Thing One” and “Thing Two” help to bring utter chaos to a household while a mother is away from a young boy and girl.  

The bouncy twin troublemakers are very popular with children, even as they inspire anxiety due to their disregard for order and good conduct.  All I could picture for the passport applications was an entire nation of red jump-suited parental units (to use the old “Coneheads” slang) having their names scribbled onto forms for government recording purposes.

The change to the forms, however, is significantly more serious that something out of Dr. Seuss.  According to the report, the terms “mother” and “father” are outmoded relative to today’s culture.  The shift is not, according to one source, “an act of political correctness,” but rather is a response to changing views about how to define “family.” 

Remember in high school when you were assigned George Orwell’s 1984? (more…)

This past week I finally was able to take my family to see “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” which is a marvelous film.  Though it streamlines some of the book’s plots (it’s a favorite of my children), we found the film to be quite satisfying.

As the movie reached its climax, I was dazzled by the levels of allegory that were present.  Mind you, my doctorate is in Medieval / Renaissance literature, so this kind of literature and film is a playground for my imagination.  I love finding the story within the story, where, as Milton would say, there is more than meets the eye.  I adore typology, symbolism, and subtext.  I am gobsmacked by how well Lewis creates symbolic depictions of confession, redemption, and rebirth.  Literature is one of the best ways to communicate elements of the Gospel to non-believers because I believe that God designed us to resonate with narrative in very specific ways (my book “God as Author: A Biblical Approach to Narrative” outlines this in detail).  “Creation-Fall-Redemption” resonates incredibly with “Rising Action-Climax-Falling Action,” somehow inverting the pattern, looking-glass style.  We can find at least a shadow of the Gospel in virtually every human narrative through its very structure.

As I have pondered the Narnia series for the past few days, however, I have been fairly crest-fallen at how ill-equipped viewers and readers are to understand what Lewis (or Tolkien or Milton or . . . , well, you get the point) is doing with allegory.  Most literary theorists view allegory as quaint and out of date.  It certainly isn’t worth teaching to our students.

This is ironic, of course, because almost all literary theory is based on allegory.  (more…)

In once heard Anne Lamott say that the day your first book is released is a real heartbreaker of an experience: your hair still won’t lie correctly, your skin hasn’t improved, and the world just seems to continue on as it always has.  When you go to the store, no one stops you for an autograph.  Little has changed except that you are now an author.  

What she meant was that if an author merely defines herself through her works and their relative popularity, she will find life to be pretty daunting.  Any honest writer will affirm this sense of emptiness (vanity?) that comes from publishing.  I have a feeling that it is one of the reasons so many authors (especially in the realm of fiction writing) succumb to chemical dependencies.  The more one writes, the more vacuous the enterprise may seem.   The first time you see that precious book selling for $.99 somewhere is the ultimate needle in any sort of ego-balloon.  Sometimes it all seems like sand castle-building at low tide. 

I am grateful for my dear friendship with George Guthrie, the eminent New Testament scholar.  George just posed these thoughts, “The Spiritual Disciplines of a Book Release,”  on the necessity of remaining Gospel-focused as a writer, no matter the project:

“Remember that the only reason for the book is to advance the Kingdom in the lives of individuals and churches.  Glory in the gospel and not in your own ‘good news’ about your project.”

Brothers and sisters, for those of us who are blessed with the opportunity to write (or who have such a desire), in reality we have only one audience, God, and one goal, His ultimate glorification and exaltation.  Everything else echoes out from this reality, but those are the only factors that truly last.

During a recent sermon, I found myself meditating on the mysteries of the virgin birth.  As I did so, I remembered a story I hadn’t thought about in years (this is a fairly accurate retelling, I hope, of a real-life incident).

Once there was a seminary professor who liked to be cheeky.  One day out of the blue he started talking about how there were no miraculous births in the Bible.  He went on a mini-rant about how he hated the idea of miraculous births and found the entire concept to be pagan in its entirety. 

“Like Zeus birthing Athena from his very mind, puh-leeze.  Miraculous births indeed.” 

His students were horrified and one of the more assertive students finally spoke up and said, “Are you saying that Christ’s birth was not a miracle?” 

He responded, “Christ, Samuel, Isaac, you name it, there’s not a single birth in the Bible that didn’t happen the way that every other birth in history ever has occurred.  And I dare any of you to prove it.” (more…)

I have the joy and privilege of serving as the chief academic officer at Union University, which is a Baptist institution. Some time ago I was at a gathering of academic leaders from at least nominally Christian colleges and we had an interesting conversation about statements of faith for faculty and other leaders.

One very seasoned leader said that the problem with requiring signed statements of faith is two-fold: the people who will sign them and the people who will sign them. All of us looked confused until he explained.

The first group will sign the statement and really believe every bit of its contents, but then they use it as a means to club their colleagues to death, undermining any sense of community that exists. They proof-text every jot and tittle of campus life against their own interpretations of the statement and constantly hound anyone who crosses their viewpoints.

The second group will sign the statement not because they agree with it but rather because they will sign anything in order to get a job. (more…)

This past Sunday, on the way to church, I was singing “Amazing Grace” to the tune of the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island.”  When I was in fifth grade, my best friend Steve Gonzales and I sang this as a duet at an evening service, proving that the contemporary worship wars had their roots in my dad’s tiny church in Fredonia, New York, in 1973. 

My kids started complaining that I was ruining the song (whether they meant “Amazing Grace” or “Gilligan’s Island” I’m not sure) and I pointed out that you can sing “Amazing Grace” to almost any classic sit-com theme song: “My Three Sons,” “Andy Griffith,” “The Brady Bunch,” and so forth and proceeded to demonstrate.  It also works to “House of the Rising Sun” and many other popular songs. 

The theological value of “Gilligan’s Island” is manifold (the seven castaways, after all, represent the seven deadly sins and the island is hell itself), but the value of the adaptability of “Amazing Grace” is really quite a lesson for us.  We can sing those words to a plethora of tunes, sometimes slightly altering the melody or adjusting the phrasing of the words a tad, but in the end, the tunes and the lyrics are both recognizable in strange and wonderful ways. (more…)

The fall months are when most churches are putting their budgets together for presentation to their congregants.  I had a really amazing conversation with a pastor recently about how many people now not only don’t know the definition of tithing but have interesting ideas about what constitutes a tithe.  Most pastors are pretty good at citing Malachi 3:9-10: “You are suffering under a curse, yet you—the whole nation—are [still] robbing Me.  Bring the full ten percent into the storehouse so that there may be food in My house.  Test Me in this way,” says the LORD of Hosts.  ”See if I will not open the floodgates of heaven and pour out a blessing for you without measure.”

Obviously there is more to understanding that passage than merely equating the local church with the storehouse, but in our area, there is a habit that I think is more prevalent than most folks think: considering some items “tithe-deductible.”  Kids in a private Christian school?  That’s kingdom work, so we can take that off the tithe.  Supporting a Christian candidate for office?  That’s kingdom work, so we can count that toward our 10% as well.  Ate at Chick-fil-A?  Yes, another tithe-deductible expense.  Buying a copy of “Fireproof” on DVD?  That counts too since a church made the film.  Bought some Ethos bottled water at Starbucks, part of that goes to poverty relief, so it counts too.  

I doubt that most of these folks would do these substitutions on their taxes, but in the case of the local congregation, it means the difference between supporting ministry and not supporting ministry. 

For all of our talk about politicians and debt and spending, I have a feeling that most of us have our own housecleaning we need to do in the area of God’s money.

I try to read several books on management each year (I’m an academic administrator), usually picking up a few things from the bargain bins of the bookstores I enjoy haunting.  This summer I read “Inside Drucker’s Brain,” a collection of Peter Drucker’s principles by Jeffrey A. Krames, who also wrote a similar book on Jack Welch (of GE fame).  The book was a helpful reminder of the scope of Drucker’s thinking and his place in the history of strategic thinking about management.  I know that Drucker has fallen out of favor in many circles, but having cut my teeth within a family business, where I learned a great deal about the benefits of both practicality and the ascription of dignity to one’s fellow workers, I find much of Drucker to be useful.  “The Effective Leader” had a great influence on me in terms of serving in administrative roles.  “Inside” was a very good distillation that may be read on a flight or on breaks between meetings.

Having said that, I picked up “Inside” again after letting it sit for a month or so to shelve it and started flipping through it again when something struck me: there was virtually no mention of Drucker’s faith as a foundational principle of his thoughts.  (more…)

When Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at the Harvard School of Divinity in 1838,

he delivered an address that should be required reading for evangelicals.  Basically, Emerson exhorted these young clergymen to turn their backs on doctrine to explore unfettered the limits of the human soul.  The phrase that is commonly attributed to Emerson is that doctrine is a set of bandages that blinds our vision.  Anyone who knows what happened to the Harvard School of Divinity (and Unitarianism) in the subsequent decades knows that they did just that: placed doctrine on the sidelines, calling it quaint and narrow.

Unfortunately, I hear the same thing from too many young evangelicals, who say that they are tired of doctrine and would rather “be” the church.  History, in their view, wastes our time and doctrine distracts our attention from the more substantial issue of changing our culture.  (more…)