Alan Jacobs

My students are often Christians who are old enough to mock mercilessly the people that gave of their time sacrificially to disciple them when they were young but who are not yet mature enough to be able to disciple others. I often find them quick-off-the-draw-ready with a forceful and sophisticated critique of most any traditional religious belief or practice.  

They can be sadly flummoxed, however, by a simple request to explain what is true. If I wonder, “What are some problems with the doctrine of the atonement?” hands fly up all over the room, but if I straightforwardly ask, “What is the gospel?” the room falls strangely silent, and I find myself staring at rows of students quietly avoiding making eye contact.  

To sketch what the gospel is would be to risk a rough draft that someone else would get the joy of critiquing; it would be to express a childlike faith; it would be to do the work of parenting.  

I have therefore increasingly made it my self-imposed task to help my students find their way to their mature identities in a manner that does not make their parents and childhood teachers and pastors the foil in the process. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that they should simply accept what they have inherited unaltered. More and more I have come to value those who model how to no longer hold to the exact version of faith they grew up with while still finding ways to be grateful for and affirming of the community of faith that raised them.

“I have a book-ish nature. I understand faith the way C.S. Lewis did, which is that I like books that help explain the world to me. A lot of theology helps explain the world. I think reading theology is one of the most rewarding things I did in the course of researching this book. Some of it was by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. I read a lot of C.S. Lewis, Augustine, Harry Emerson Fosdick’s ‘On Becoming a Real Person.’ Those books were amazingly useful and were a great education. I wish there were more theology and more religion in the public square for the faithful and those who are not faithful.”

- David Brooks. Some of us are trying, David. Lord knows, some of us are trying.

via tumblr ift.tt/1EWhLaC

robertogreco:

“Some exquisite Katsuhiro Otomo for the morning (from ’Tokyo Metro Explorers’). That last Otomo panel is best seen in sequence.” —@Oniropolis in two tweets (via RT by @timmaughan, links added by me)

I have a book-ish nature. I understand faith the way C.S. Lewis did, which is that I like books that help explain the world to me. A lot of theology helps explain the world. I think reading theology is one of the most rewarding things I did in the course of researching this book. Some of it was by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. I read a lot of C.S. Lewis, Augustine, Harry Emerson Fosdick’s ‘On Becoming a Real Person.’ Those books were amazingly useful and were a great education. I wish there were more theology and more religion in the public square for the faithful and those who are not faithful.

[gallery] robertogreco:

“Some exquisite Katsuhiro Otomo for the morning (from ’Tokyo Metro Explorers’). That last Otomo panel is best seen in sequence.” —@Oniropolis in two tweets (via RT by @timmaughan, links added by me)

Now that I’ve resurrected my Tumblr, I’ll just be using this blog to mirror what gets posted there. So if you use RSS you won’t want to subscribe to both, because you’ll be getting the same content twice.

The invention of ‘printing,’ though ingenious compared with the invention of ‘letters,’ is no great matter.

The chronicles of American Christianity are littered with pronouncements of the shallowness of evangelicalism—set-ups for testimonies of leaving the faith entirely, or (far better) departing for greener pastures within Christendom. But the Lincoln Park Zoo best exemplifies my experience. I have, admittedly, supplemented my evangelical diet with a hearty dose of high church Anglicanism. Nevertheless, as I’ve pursued the study of ancient Orthodox and medieval Catholic Christianity, I’ve been consistently surprised to discover the same things I learned as an evangelical convert. Decades ago someone wrote a bestseller entitled “All I really need to Know I learned in Kindergarten” (including, I presume, how to work the anti-intellectual American book market). Nevertheless, I’m tempted to say that all I really need to know about Christian life I learned in the evangelical culture that I so desperately tried to escape.

It is exceedingly difficult these days to call attention to the dull-minded policing by academics and online activists without being ridiculed in return as a frightened, ignorant old man who bemoans “political correctness.” We do not wish to be assimilated to those old duffers who wear Hawaiian shirts and do not understand why we can no longer call a dame a dame, and so we avoid worrying in public about the phenomenon. We stop ourselves even when we find that our peers have begun half-rationalizing the assassination of cartoonists on the basis of a glancing judgment that their drawings were racist, a judgment that rests only on the overt content of the images, generally without any translation of the French captions, without any consideration of context or pragmatics, and without any concern for the relationship of any individual cartoon to its creator’s body of work. In this age of visual illiteracy, of perfect tone-deafness to satire, the murders get cast as a blow not against freedom of expression, against subtlety, nuance, and laughter, but against racism. So, the thinking goes, adieu.  

Already on the eve of January 7 my peers were transforming before my eyes into grotesque descendants of Jean-Paul Sartre, who maintained his support of Stalinism despite a knowledge of its worst atrocities, and of the craven Western Stalinists who defended the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Hungary, in 1956. How could they not see what was at stake? I became convinced that the root of the moral and political failure I was witnessing lay in the false presumption that humor is but one of the minor protectorates of freedom, when in fact humor is freedom itself, or at least freedom’s highest expression.

Nietzsche saw art, and Lady Philosophy, as a benign illusion that sustains us in the face of the awful truth, which would cause our eyeballs to protrude from their sockets. My understanding of poetry’s consolatory powers has more in common with the concept of psychoanalysis as a way of fortifying the self through the acceptance of perpetual unrest. Our wills and fates do so contrary run that even our wills are not under our control. I wouldn’t be the first to see psychoanalysis in this sense as a trope for poetry (or vice versa). In Adam Phillips’s psychoanalytical version of Bloom’s pragmatism, a text answers the question “what can it get you out of?” One thing it can get you out of is the false hope that you can escape unrest.  

“No one here gets out alive” is the best case scenario. Consolation is not false comfort. Poetry’s a prophylactic, not a vaccine. One way poetry helps you to accept perpetual unrest, to arm yourself to confront perplexities, is by reminding you that you’re not alone (a not coincidentally common refrain in popular song). This just in: everyone you love will be extinguished, and so will you. But this can be said of every person in the universe. You’re not special. Men and women have been living and dying for a long time, and some of them have left records. Those records won’t eliminate your fears; they might help you to live with them. They might help you raise an army.