Blog, page 7

Trevin Wax on why even mundane things like going out to eat have become politicized:

Put those two developments together: (1) the idea that your consumer choices express your identity and (2) the idea that your political views are the essence of who you are. What happens next?

Everything gets politicized.

More and more people invest their shopping or entertainment with political significance. Political evangelists believe they are helping their cause by sticking with this brand instead of that one, by boycotting this designer or that retailer because they associate with heretics.

Today I’m featuring a guest post from Aanna Greer, sister-in-law and blogger extraordinaire over at aannagreer.com. Here’s Aanna:

Last year I spent a little time thinking, reading and praying about Sabbath. (Sabbath is the Jewish and Christian practice of setting aside time in which you do not work.) Even though it’s a key element of my faith (listed in the Ten Commandments!), I seemed to have only a vague sense of what it was, the reason for it and the importance of it.

One of the most important things I discovered about Sabbath is that it’s given to us to remind us of our dependence on God—

We strongly need to see the manifest hand of God in what we are and what we do. We need to be sure He is pulling the load, bearing the burden—which we are all too ready to assume is up to us alone. We must understand that He is in charge of the outcome of our efforts, and that the outcome will be good, right. And all of this is encompassed in one biblical term, ‘Sabbath.’ —Dallas Willard

This was eye-opening for me, because some of my main excuses or fears when facing the prospect of not working for a period of time is that something important won’t get done, that I’ll let down someone depending on me, or that there’s too much to do to take a break. But through Sabbath, God is saying that I must be reminded that my identity is not in what I do (it’s in God), that he is the one who takes care of me and my loved-ones (not my own money or competence), and that it’s actually pride and self-importance that keeps me working too much (the same sins that keep me from having faith in God).

It seems that the very reason it’s hard for me to practice Sabbath is the precise reason that it should be practiced!

There are many different ways to practice Sabbath, but here are a couple to consider:

• Spend some time (in solitude and silence) doing absolutely nothing. Don’t have an agenda. Don’t try to meditate or pray. Just be. Let thoughts rise to the surface as they come. (Leviticus 25:4-7)
• Don’t work for an entire day. Let the laundry sit, don’t check your email, and give yourself some extra time with God. Maybe this means reading a book of the Bible (29 books take less than 20 minutes to read!) or praying about things you usually don’t have enough time to pray about. Perhaps you could read a book about God that you’ve had sitting on your shelf for awhile (like this or this). Enjoy some extra time to invest in your relationship with God. (Exodus 20:8-11)
• Every seven years, take a break from volunteering. If you’ve been active in a ministry, take a Sabbatical. Rest. Pray. Reevaluate. See if God takes you in a different direction or sends you back into your old ministry with renewed vigor. (Leviticus 25:4-7)

If you’re interested in more resources on Sabbath, check out this sermon or this book or this article.

This piece was originally published at aannagreer.com. Reposted here with permission.

C.S. Lewis on becoming a bad person:

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face — that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face — turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel…

Of all the passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

It’s distressingly easy to watch this dynamic at work in virtually every domain these days.

Justin Taylor, citing Peter Kreeft on one of C.S. Lewis’ brilliant observations:

But there is a deeper classification, and Lewis uses it. Science and religion both aim at conforming the mind to objective truth, objective reality (science conforms our mind to the nature of the universe, and religion conforms our mind to the mind of God and our will to the will of God).

Magic and technology, on the other hand, try to conform objective reality to the human will. That is why they both arose at the same time—not the Middle Ages but the Renaissance, not the Age of God but the Age of Man. Both are Faustian, Promethean. The difference is, of course, that technology works while magic doesn’t (usually). But their end, their goal, the purpose behind them, the human values and desires and state of soul that set them in motion, are the same.

Paradigm-shifting read.

Joe Bagel:

You’ll also be inconveniencing yourself in all sorts of unimaginable ways: no Wikipedia? no Spotify? no Google Maps? no Transit? no Uber?!?

Giving up an internet connection disqualifies you from many of modernity’s perks. However, I rarely questioned what those perks were actually costing me — and not just the monthly internet bill. For all of the minutes saved with technology, I was sacrificing hours of my attention, guzzled up by apps hellbent on dazzling me with vacuous content.

C.S. Lewis on the pursuit of culture and learning under all circumstances:

I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective, The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.

Excerpted from Lewis’ address “Learning in War-Time,” given at Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, October 22, 1939.

It’s no secret that 2016 has been decried as the “worst year ever” for reasons ranging from routine to tragic. Central to much of the felt despair, rage, worry, or fear is a sense of loss: loss of a better past or of a brighter future, loss of old relationships or of the potential for new ones, loss of stability or of opportunity, loss of historical understanding or of being understood.

Throughout 2016, my wife and I were comforted and counseled by praying through the Psalms.¹ A few weeks ago as we were nearing the end of the psalter and the year, we read Psalm 148. I knew immediately that it was what I wanted to pray for 2017:

Psalm 148 1 Praise the LORD. Praise the LORD from the heavens, praise him in the heights above. 2 Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his heavenly hosts. 3 Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars. 4 Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies. 5 Let them praise the name of the LORD, for at his command they were created, 6 and he established them for ever and ever — he issued a decree that will never pass away. 7 Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, 8 lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding, 9 you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, 10 wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds, 11 kings of the earth and all nations, you princes and all rulers on earth, 12 young men and women, old men and children. 13 Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his splendor is above the earth and the heavens. 14 And he has raised up for his people a horn, the praise of all his saints, of Israel, the people close to his heart. Praise the LORD.

The psalmist goes out of his way to name the full scope of the natural order: fauna and flora (both wild and domestic), patterns of weather, planets and stars. He even names things beyond the material world (verse 2). And then he goes on to name categories of the social order, calling out many of the ways by which people organize themselves: rich and poor, male and female, young and old, rulers and citizenry.

Despite all of this cataloging, the thrust of the Psalm is not to highlight the varied and beautiful distinctions of the natural, heavenly, and social orders. In fact, it’s the opposite; Psalm 148 emphasizes a diverse creation that is unified in a song of praise. Classes, genders, ethnicities, partisans, generations, and even the substance of creation itself: plants, animals, wind, earth, and water — are joined in praising the one name that alone is exalted, whose splendor is manifestly above everything else (verse 13.)

The late bible scholar Derek Kidner called Psalm 148 “The Choir of Creation” and concluded that “in these few lines there emerges… the only potential bond between the extremes of mankind: a joyful preoccupation with God.”² In other words, the prayer of Psalm 148 points to the supreme end of created diversity (praise!) and to the only means of deep unity within created diversity (praise!). We learn that even very good proposals for living in an exponentially varied world are at best secondary to a singular design: participation in Creation’s song to her Creator.

My prayer for 2017 is not less than unity in the midst of diversity; it’s much more. My prayer is the psalmist’s prayer: that all people everywhere would be joyfully preoccupied with God, and consequently, live harmoniously along the entire spectrum of created and experienced diversity. When God is high and lifted up — that is, when his Creation is living out its created intent — flourishing happens, from the depths of the seas to the heights of the heavens.

May it be so, oh LORD, in 2017 and forever more. Amen.

Footnotes

1. An excellent devotional guide is Tim and Kathy Keller’s Songs of Jesus, to which I am also indebted for helping to me to form my prayers for 2017. ↩

2. Derek Kidner, Psalms 73-150 (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2009), 524-525. ↩

Dr. Eric Mason message on Matthew 23:23:

Watch on YouTube

Alex Kotlowitz in the New Yorker:

But one issue is rarely raised: year after year, the vast majority of murders and non-fatal shootings in Chicago go unsolved. Last year, the police charged individuals in just twenty-six per cent of all murders. Of the nearly three thousand non-fatal shootings, only ten per cent of the assailants were charged, which means that you have a pretty good chance of shooting someone in Chicago and getting away with it.

Much in the article about the mutual distrust between cops and neighborhoods (that leads to 90% of shootings going uncharged) reminded me of Kevin DeYoung’s mini review of the book Don’t Shoot.

Jemar Tisby and Tyler Burns interview Andy Crouch on RAA’s Pass the Mic:

The call of Christians is to be so deeply prayerful that we respond with creativity rather than just reaction. And what does that look like? Well it looks different for every individual. I think [of] art, music, literature, and poetry. Anything that doesn’t seem to accomplish anything — but is nonetheless transformative because it is so excellent and so beautiful — is really important. In other words, in a world of zero sum forced coercion and violence, one of the most powerful witnesses we can make is do something beautiful and excellent.

So good. I’ve had this in the queue for awhile, and now I wish I would have listened to it when it came out two weeks ago.

WBEZ’s The View from Room 2015:

“No matter where you’re from, what neighborhood you call home, and no matter what your dreams are in life, it is right here at Penn that our children are going to get their start — so that they can have that dream, chase that dream, capture that dream and live it…. There’s no dream you can’t achieve, if you stay focused and persistent.”

And with that, [the speaker] makes very clear that it’s up to the fourth graders — and every kid in the room — to work hard and succeed.

It’s up to them and William Penn Elementary.

Moving piece that challenges the validity of the (deeply American) axiom “dream big, work hard, and succeed” in the context of a poor neighborhood school.

(The visuals on the website are good, but hearing the kids’ and teachers’ voices in the hour-long audio production is even better.)

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the “image of God,” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man.

Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 July 1965.

I came across this quote in Timothy Keller’s Generous Justice, but I have linked to the whole speech above in Stanford’s King Encyclopedia.

Excellent insight and visualizations from The Guardian:

Looking at the risk of gun homicide in terms of sweeping racial demographics, or even in terms of individual neighborhood census tracts, still obscures the real concentration of violence, crime experts said — and that further concentration is crucial to understanding how to save lives.

Even within high-poverty areas that struggle with many kinds of disadvantage, the majority of residents have nothing to do with gun violence.

Within neighborhood areas, the risk of violence is further clustered within specific social networks of high-risk people. Sometimes these are people whom police identify as gang members; sometimes they are not.

Emily Dreyfuss for Wired:

In 2016, rents continued their years-long rise, incomes stratified further, and the average price to buy a home in major US cities rose. The strain pushed the middle class out of cities like Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Austin—the so-called “hot cities.” Some families move to the suburbs. Others flee for less expensive cities. But across the US, the trend holds: cities are increasingly home to high-rollers who can pay the high rents or down payments and lower income people who qualify for subsidized housing.

John Inazu in USA Today:

The more we neglect political nuance and the more we simply blame “those people” for the current state of affairs, the less likely we are to see in others a shared humanity, to say nothing of a shared project of self-governance. For the sake of our modest unity, we can do better. We must do better.

We must remind ourselves that people — and voters — are more complex than labels. We must speak, write and tweet with care, depth and nuance. We must avoid the lazy thinking that encourages stereotyping.

A great read, sure to challenge all bands of the political spectrum. Particularly helpful is the charge to preserve “modest unity,” which Inazu defines as keeping sociocultural disagreements — even strong ones — a war of words rather than a “much bleaker alternative.”

See also this piece from Inazu and Tim Keller in Christianity Today.