That fleeting bestseller designation is one that the pastors have embraced and trumpeted. Until last week, Mark Driscoll promoted himself as a #1 bestselling author. Perry Noble’s Facebook profile says only two things: He’s a pastor and a New York Times bestselling author. While the bestseller designation has its own value in increasing future book sales and inflating speaking fees, its special value is in the appearance of non-church wealth it creates for these pastor-authors.The truth, however, is that much of their spendable wealth is generated by laundered tithe money, so the royalties and speaking fees comprise a second, hidden church salary. By using tithed money and their own pulpits to drive book sales and even buy the books outright, celebrity pastors have turned their non-profits into personal profit centers.
The problem isn’t only an ethical one. Tax-exempt organizations are prohibited from contriving special financial gains for their leaders, a violation called inurement that the IRS can punish by revoking the organization’s tax-exempt status. That seems a risk that these pastors are either unaware of or comfortable with, because their churches’ budgets, branding, and messaging are routinely used to sell as many books as possible to make the preachers even wealthier.
Ed Stetzer: What are the greatest differences that can emerge between older and newer churches?Philip Jenkins: There’s one word that I would come up with again and again – healing. If you want to understand the success of Christianity in the past hundred years around the world, it is in the concept of healing. Not, of course, in the sense of healing physical injuries, but a holistic a healing of the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit, and society is central to church growth around the world.
These kind of mission churches are providing a way for healing a great division in Western Christianity, where they always find this distinction between liberation theology, which aims to cure the material ills of society, and deliverance, which aims to cure the ills of the soul. What the newer churches have realized is that those two words are the same word. Any kind of mission that does not cure both is offering a flawed, partial, and inadequate message.
In late 2008 I put myself through a crash course in the works of Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don,” as Dwight Macdonald called him, who had been one of the founding senior editors of National Review. This was research for an essay that would appear in The Dilemmas of American Conservatism. I’d read some Kendall before—a desultory stroll through The Conservative Affirmation in America, at least—and hadn’t profited much from the experience. But the second, more attentive perusal was different. Kendall himself had told of how R.G. Collingwood had taught him at Cambridge to read a book by asking what question the author was trying to answer. I didn’t find that approach too insightful, but I picked up something else from Kendall’s own methods—the habit of asking “What conditions would have to be true in order for this author’s arguments to make sense?”That’s a more productive thing to ask of a serious work than simply, “Do this author’s arguments make sense?” The latter invites the reader to supply a misleading context: the author’s arguments may not match up with reality, but they must match up at least with his own view of reality, and that’s something worth figuring out and contrasting against whatever the reader thinks he already knows.
Technology comforts, surrounds, and confounds us. When we argue about MOOCs, hydraulic fracturing, NSA surveillance, or drone warfare, we’re arguing about technology. Unfortunately, the conversation is impoverished by the absence of a robust cadre of scholars who can engage with and critique the role of technology in society. Instead, we have the glib boosterism of tech intellectuals like the former Wired editor Chris Anderson, the media gadfly (and CUNY journalism professor) Jeff Jarvis, the British writer Andrew Keen, and the Google executive Eric Schmidt. A fairly homogenous group of white men with elite degrees inclined to champion innovation, disruption, and the free market, these tech intellectuals have usurped the role of explaining technology to policy makers, investors, and the public. Their arguments and advocacy are too often a tepid substitute for robust analysis and honest critique.
Montfort’s involuted, single-line programs give BASIC something of the tang of the Old English of Beowulf—sharp and shorn, barbed and battered by the harsh economies of its habitat. Perl, by contrast, might be the programmer’s version of Occitan, the language (a cousin to latter-day Catalan) of the medieval troubadors, whose poems chimed with the decadent elaborations that flavored courtly life in medieval southern Europe—a fanciful dichotomy, which manages to caricature both the software and the vernaculars in question. Programmers of philological bent will find the comparison to Occitan especially laughable, given Perl’s cobbled-together nature and its reputation for clunkiness; a better example might be the macaronic jargon of the later middle ages, of which Pig Latin is an impoverished descendant.
[gallery] Any comment would be superfluous. Via Sonny Bunch on Twitter.
If history and comparative religion alike offer us perspective on world events from the “outside,” the study of theology offers us a chance to study those same events “from within”: an opportunity to get inside the heads of those whose beliefs and choices shaped so much of our history, and who—in the world outside the ivory tower—still shape plenty of the world today. That such avenues of inquiry have virtually vanished from many of the institutions where they were once best explored is hardly a triumph of progress or of secularism. Instead, the absence of theology in our universities is an unfortunate example of blindness—willful or no—to the fact that engagement with the past requires more than mere objective or comparative analysis. It requires a willingness to look outside our own perspectives in order engage with the great questions—and questioners—of history on their own terms. Even Dawkins might well agree with that.
Old technology dominates life much more than we think. We still sit on chairs and eat with utensils that the ancient Mesopotamians would recognize. Beer (early Neolithic), wine (late Neolithic), and tea (1500 BC) are the most popular beverages in the world. Boeing’s 787 would be worthless without a 4th millennium BC artifact: the wheel. As Robert Sutton says in his book Weird Ideas That Work, “All the excitement about building better products and companies can make us forget that most new ideas are bad and most old ideas are good.”
If Google Glass should fail to catch on, if it ends up on the “meh” list in the Sunday Times Magazine, if most people decide they just don’t want this climactic iteration of the screen after all, there will be many reasons given. Those privacy and safety concerns will likely be paramount because they are publicly definable “issues,” so evident, so debatable. But if people also say “I just don’t like it, I don’t like the experience,” it will be because, in fashioning the ultimate personal screen, Google violated the very conditions that made screens so compelling in the first place: the containment of the frame, the placement of the screen on a device—an entity among others—a placement that allows us to look upon the screen from beyond. The mind’s coherence is grounded in the way our bodies are oriented—left and right, up and down, near and far, in and out—and especially in the way we can face or turn away from other things in a surrounding world that contains us all equally. The hovering fusional image Glass provides will disturb those primal orientations. If people choose to stay true to their old-fashioned tablets and smart phones, it will be because the body of the device, especially the portable device that proffers the screen as its face, turned out to be as essential to the magic as the screen itself.
The game than which no funner can be conceived.