The next few days are gonna be … interesting
Novelists who help us think theologically about this country’s racial history:
- for 1850–1900: William Faulkner
- for 1900–1950: Ralph Ellison
- for 1950–2025: Albert Murray
These are people to read after you’ve read the ones I name in my previous post, to see what got left out.
All of America’s most theologically rich and provocative thinkers are novelists — and this is true even when they don’t know they’re being theological.
- Marilynne Robinson: theologian of America’s past
- Thomas Pynchon: theologian of America’s present
- Philip K. Dick: theologian of America’s future
[Richard Zhang] said the members of his group had many questions about how to deploy Al in their lives, such as: “Can I have an Al pastor? Should we have Al-generated worship music? Should I get an Al to read the Bible or pray with me, to judge my spirituality?”
I’m gonna say
(a) Are you out of your mind?
(b) Lord have mercy, no
(c) Absolutely not
(d) Oh HELL no
My suggestion to pastors who are tempted by this stuff: Read Brad East’s book on the screen-free church when it comes out, and read Matt Erickson’s book on The Pastor as Gardener now.
The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.
Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.
This is too true to be good.
Romare Bearden, The Visitation (1941)
Here’s Micah Mattix, the editor of Portico, on this new endeavor.