I've Been Busy!
EXTRA: A Round-Up of Recent Writing and Other Stuff
[Photo by Karen Swallow Prior]
"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil1
Dear Readers,
I’ve been busy!
A couple of things I’ve written have gotten a lot of attention … they are linked below in case you missed them. (I told you recently that I’m in the anger stage, and I meant it.)
But first, I want to share something that hasn’t gotten as much attention. It’s a quieter piece, lovelier (I think), and a bit overlooked amid all the sound and fury. It was published over at the thoughtful and edifying magazine Comment (where I serve as an editorial advisor), an essay on the church over the ages, centered on what I see as several defining metaphors for each age: “The Cross, The Machine, The Cloud.” Here’s a brief excerpt:
There is yet another cloud that manifests the goodness of God. That is the one told of in the exodus, the pillar of cloud (which appeared at night as a pillar of fire) with which God guided the Israelites through the wilderness and with which he shielded them from the sight of their enemies.
Many of us in the church today have a sense of wandering in the wilderness too. We, too, feel pursued by enemies.
The cloud is an apt symbol for the darkness of spiritual warfare too. For the cloud we sense is not always the one that manifests God’s presence and protection. Never-ending revelations of scandal, abuse, corruption are a dark cloud looming over the church and many of its precious souls. These evils have always existed, of course, within the church and without. But for those of us living through a new wave of such doings, the feelings of pain and confusion are as fresh and raw as though carved into soft infant flesh.
You can read the rest here.
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Over at my column at Religion News Service, I’ve had three recent essays.
First, I wrote about a very odd and evocative meme that was making the rounds:
But seeing these two particular men in these kinds of scenes taps into a sense of yearning that some of us perhaps didn’t know ran so deep: We have missed normalcy these recent years past, and we desire normalcy so very much.
You can read the rest here.
Then, I wrote an open letter to the Southern Baptist Convention. I didn’t hold back:
Let’s be clear: No one expects abuse to be entirely absent from the church. Abuse is everywhere. But the church should be the place where it is hardest for abusers to hide, not among the easiest.
Even more importantly, the church should be the place where abusers are dealt with swiftly and justly, where the abused have their needs more than met. The church is the place where, once abuse is discovered, that discovery should be blasted from the rooftops, from the pulpit and in every Sunday school room — in lament, in repentance, in desire to prevent further harm.
You can read the rest here.
Then, fired up again, I wrote about the “biblical manhood” industry, which, like many such industries, preys on vulnerabilities and insecurities in order to sell certain wares but in this case does so in the name of the the Lord:
David wasn’t a warrior wearing armor; he was a shepherd with a slingshot guided by the Lord. Samson’s strength came not from bench presses and leg lifts, but from the Spirit of the Lord. Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 16:13 to “act like men” means in the original Greek to be courageous, and it applies equally to men and women, just as all of the qualities of Christlike character do.
You can read the rest here.
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I do a lot of podcasts and have a lot of great conversations in doing so. Usually, these conversations are about my books. But one recent one was about an essay I shared earlier about not thinking you can change someone or something (like your church). The podcast was Off The Pulpit, and I have to tell you it got real. Really real. These young pastors give me hope. This was a hard, raw conversation. But that’s what we have to do if we are going to have our hopes for the church and ourselves fulfilled. Listen here.
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Thanks for letting me share more of my work here. Thank you, too, for subscribing. Thank you especially to those who support my work by being paid subscribers. By giving to me, not only do you support my work here but also my work everywhere. And you also help me make this content free to anyone who wants to read along. For someone who is a teacher at heart, that means a lot. Reminder that group subscriptions (just two or more people!) are discounted, too.
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It’s “back to class” next week and Shakespeare’s sonnets: 116, 130, and 138.
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I want to give a shout-out to my friend Mary McCampbell who is starting her own newsletter here and offering a course on film! Check it out:
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.
Karen, I find that what I am most broken about the Church is not the past, as dark as some of the deeds were. Those deeds are now being brought to light, as Jesus said they would be. As a millennial, who was brought under the influence of one of the false teachers of the 80s and 90s, I know the Spirit of God is stronger than the lies of those who made merchandise of Christianity to my generation. Despite recieving deep spiritual wounds, I fought clear and find my faith not only intact but maturing and deepening. I will always bear the scars, but in my weakness, Christ's strength has been demonstrated again and again.
What my heart is breaking over is what I see in the present and near future in the Church. I see that to the rising generation, particularly in conservative evangelicalism, the church is no longer merely a profitable machine the way it was in the late 1900's and early 2000's. It is a weapon. It is a means of restoring a nostalgic past that never existed, of fending off the supposed enemies of diversity and empathy, a point of pride to those who think they were dispossessed of something they never actually had. When ISIS arose in the Mid-East, I observed to a diverse circle of fellow evangelicals that the disaffected young men from the West joining ISIS were not unique to Islam, I was seeing such young men in Christianity. My comments were recieved with scorn. But within the next few years, the shooting at Chabad synagogue (2019), the Atlanta spa shooting (2021), and the murder by vehicle of three generations of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, Canada (2021), were all perpetrated by young men who claimed to be Christian and attended churches within evangelicalism.
Not all of the rising evangelical generation would ever resort to murder, but I see a rising desire to assert domination, over women, over other ethnic groups, over society, and what is most concerning, a willingness to distort the Bible to gain such goals. I recently heard a sermon preached by a preacher of the new generation, who used Romans 10 to preach a sermon laced with language that sounded lifted from kinism, the pseudo-Christian ideology first brought to widespread attention in the wake of the Chabad shooter's manifesto. The sermon used phrases such as "blood and soil" (previously known to me as a Nazi slogan) positively and referred negatively to "Marxist" multiculturalism. When I confronted the preacher afterward, he insisted he hadn't been preaching kinism, just meaning to say that we should witness first to our family. But Romans 10 isn't about witnessing to family first. Since infancy, I have heard passages of the chapter used as a message for international missions work - "how shall they hear without a preacher?"
This is no longer just a mechanization of accepted Christian principles in order to turn a profit, but a complete distortion of them into weapons of power. As evil were the results of the former approach, the latter is demonic and deadly - one only need to look at the bloodbath of Europe and Britain's religious wars in the 1500s and 1600s, where the atrocities committed against the innocent were of the cruelest description, to know that Christianity wielded as a weapon is the most sickening kind of evil. Even if the next generation only wields that weapon against their own households and within their own social circles and don't actually shed blood, the results would still be catastrophic. The hardest part is that I, who survived one type of 'Christian' social machine, cannot seem to adequately warn those immediately around me. The older generations who hold most of the leadership offices and are delighted at having a young preacher, don't see the weapon any more than they saw the machine. Christ builds his Church in spite of the gates of hell, but he also warned us that many would perish because of those who led them astray.
Busy, indeed! Regarding the Cross as symbol, I recall the introduction to Kenneth E. Bailey's excellent book, The Good Shepherd: A Thousand-Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament. In the introduction Bailey notes that before the Cross became the symbol of Christianity, the earlier symbol was the Good Shepherd, as evidenced by multiple examples of wall art in the catacombs. The Good Shepherd tells us almost all we need to know about God's character and mission. Just a thought.