Saturday Good Reads: Theology and Faith

Faith is one of main themes of this blog (I deliberately included it in the title in 2008 when I started it). And – no surprise – I read a fairly considerable number of blogs devoted to faith, theology, the church, and related subjects.

You shouldn’t have to look at this blog for very long to know that (1) I’m a Christian, (2) I’m more than likely of the conservative Christian persuasion, and (3) I’m more than likely to be found somewhere in the vicinity of the evangelical camp, although I took a different road than a lot of evangelical Baby Boomers and never embraced the “mega-church” concept.

The local church where my wife and I worship is Central Presbyterian Church in Clayton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. It’s a member of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) denomination, which traces its roots back to John Knox in Scotland and John Calvin in Geneva.

Yes, we are of the Reformed persuasion. I was raised in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, and its theology is not unlike that of the EPC churches. There are differences to be sure but I don’t find them to be large ones (theologians might disagree but I’m no theologian).

The blogs and web sites I consistently visit and read represent a rather eclectic group – Reformed, Baptist, Anglican, Catholic and Greek Orthodox. Here are a few of them; they don’t necessarily fall in what I would call the “popular faith” category but more in the “theology and faith” category.

Taylor Marshall at Canterbury Tales was an Episcopal priest before he converted to Catholicism. He lives with his family in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and is the author of The Crucified Rabbi and The Catholic Perspective on Paul.

Justin Taylor, the vice president of Editorial at Crossway Books, blogs at Between Two Worlds. He invariably has good posts on Bible study, commentaries, and even reflections on Christians in the business world.

Tim Challies is pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto. He blogs at Informing the Reforming, and is the author of The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion. (I blogged about this book yesterday and highly, highly recommend it.)

The John Piper Ministry maintains one of the most robust of Christian blogs, Desiring God, with four to six posts a day (sometimes more) by various members of the Piper staff. The ministry is located in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

Chaplain Mike is the chief blogger at Internet Monk, which is one of the oldest of Christian blogs, It was begun by Michael Spencer in 2000 and he managed it until his death from cancer just a few years ago. Chaplain Mike works with a hospice organization in central Indiana.

Matt Appling at The Church of No People is what he calls “bi-vocational.” That is, he’s a pastor of a house church and also teaches to help pay the bills. He is based in Kansas City.

The Scriptorium is the blog of the faculty of the Torrey Honors Institute in California. There are some 10 or so faculty members who post there.

Matthew Van Maastricht is a young (Reformed) minister who blogs at thealreadynotyet (that’s The Already Not Yet without spaces between the words). He pastors a small, inner city (mission) church in Milwaukee.

There are others I follow as well. So what about you? What are some of your favorite blogs or web sites for theology and faith?

Photograph: Westminster Abbey by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ancient History Lesson

For a large part of my career, I was a corporate speechwriter. A word guy. I would often eat, drink, and sleep the printed word. People who knew me as a child weren’t surprised to learn that I end up making a living with words. I was the family reader. I loved books. There was never a time when I didn’t have too many books.

I was not quite 33 when I got my first desktop computer at work – an IBM 384. I was fascinated as the IT guy set it up, and he was so amused by my interest that he showed me (and no one else in our department) how to type in the command for it to play music that was programmed into it.

Email began arriving in the early 1990s, and by 1993 our company had hit critical mass with the number of people with access. I started an email newsletter on company news – simple text, no images or graphics. Within three weeks, the newsletter had gone viral, saturating the entire system and even being sent by sales people and researchers to customers and academic partners outside the company.

Form there, I graduated to programming a “magazine” on a disk and then to leading the project to create the company’s first web site.

This sound so, well, rather ancient and quaint today, but then it was exciting, cutting edge stuff. Even Microsoft took note of what we had done with the company’s web site.

What I didn’t understand was why this was all so appealing to me, the printed word guy, the book guy. I was grappling with the implications of where this digital stuff was taking me (and the company), but I was genuinely puzzled by my attraction to it. That is, until I read a rather academic book called Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word  by Walter Ong.

Ong was a Jesuit priest teaching at St. Louis University (he has since died). Essentially, his argument was that the digital revolution was actually harking back to the oral culture replaced by Gutenberg and his printing press in the 1400s. Image and feeling (emotion) was becoming more important, propelled first by television and then by the computer and the internet. In fact, the digital world was a kind of “secondary orality.”

It all clicked into place. I was a speechwriter – writing in one medium (the printed page) for communication in another medium (speech) for understanding via a third medium (the ear and then the mind). I was also largely working in an “oral” field when the digital revolution and its “secondary orality” arrived.

It all made sense. What also made sense was that digital technology – like any other communication medium – is not “neutral.” We think it’s all about content, and we are dead wrong. Content is important, but the form the content is packaged in is also a communication vehicle, with its; own assumptions, priorities and biases.

All of this was brought to mind this week as I was reading The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion by Tim Challies. I bought the book about the same time I started The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges, which Challies is leading a discussion of at his blog, Informing the Reforming.

In The Next Story, Challies provides an concise history of communication technology (the revolution really started with the railroad and the telegraph) as he leads up to an extended discussion on how all this affects our faith. He says that television, for example, “has taken us from a culture that learned from print, was entertained by print, was persuaded by print, and trusted print to a culture that now relies on the image. It has changed our perception of ourselves and our understanding of the world around us. Television represents more than flickering images on a screen. It gives us a new identity. A new ideology. A new idolatry.”

I cannot remember a time of not having a television (the first one I recall was a square boxy-looking thing on four wooden legs). My children cannot remember a time of not having a computer in the house. My two-and-a-half-year-old grandson is already adept at using the iPad.

As Challies says, technology changes us. It’s no coincidence that the rise of television coincided with the rise of youth culture and the emphasis on youth. Television also emphasized the hear-and-now at the expense of history. We are very arrogant toward history these days, believing anything older than 15 minutes probably isn’t worth very much.

And why do people on Twitter say things they would never dream of saying in person? Because of the perception that Twitter and other social media are game changers, and can empower the so-called powerless. Social media can also be a form of tyranny.

I was going to review The Next Story and be done with it, but I may have two or three posts about it. What Challies has to say about the impact of technology on faith is important.

Related: A blog post I wrote in 2009 – Social Media and Me

Cat’n’Camels, Big 40s and the Dead Bug

The Saturday before Father’s Day in 2011, I was working in the garden, digging a small hole for a small plant. It was not strenuous work, and took all of about two minutes. I patted the plant in its new home, stood up, and nearly collapsed as a sharp pain erupted in my lower back.

Welcome to the world of the ruptured disk.

The next nine months were not fun. Medication strong enough to control the pain kept me from driving for a while. Sleeping flat on my back on the floor. Using a cane. Parking in handicapped spaces. Physical therapy twice a week, including traction. Two rounds of cortisone shots in my spine. An anointing and prayer ceremony at church.

By February, I could lay the cane aside. In March, I started short rides on my bike. In April, I ended physical therapy. I took about two months off, and then started working with a personal trainer – to start reconditioning, strengthen the core, and hope to avoid back problems in the future.

We meet twice a week. My vocabulary has greatly expanded to include terms such as cat’n’camels, Big 40s, the dead bug, and the cobra. As in, “Let’s get warmed up with some cat’n’camels” (down on all fours, you arch your back and then push your stomach down, usually about 20 times). The cobra is keeping your hips on the mat as you push the upper part of your body with your arms. Big 40s is lying flat on your back and doing four different exercises with your legs ten times each.

And the dead bug – my favorite – is lying flat, arms extended on the floor behind your head, as you use your feet and legs to life a ball as your arms come up to receive it, move back down to touch the ball on the floor behind your head, and then back up to your feet. Twenty times.

All of it is hard work, but I’m feeling the improvements. All of the work and exercise is doing what it needs to do – strengthen the core and get back in shape.

In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges writes as length on the choices we have to make if we are serious about living a Christian life – and the importance of discipline in making and sticking to those choices. Like my personal training being aimed at increasing strength, there is a reason for what the Bible teaches – and that’s to change our conduct.

“The practice of putting off sinful attitudes and actions and putting Christ-like character involves a constant series of choices,” he says. “We choose in every situation which direction we will go. It is through these choices that we develop Christ-like habits of living. Habits are developed by repetition, and it is in the arena of moral choices that we develop spiritual habit patterns.”

Developing new habits is no slam dunk. It’s hard – and it’s hard work. You mess up, and you have to force yourself to get right back at it. But you know where you’re going, and you know the value of what you’re doing.

Every Monday and Thursday morning – early morning – really early morning – I’m getting put through the paces. It’s stretching, it’s weights, it’s core, it’s the bear crawl, it's the bird dog. I force myself not to look at the clock or my watch, because it‘s not about how fast the hour will be over but about doing the things I need to do in that hour. Sometimes my muscles are sore for a day or two afterward, because they’re not used to this kind of workout.

But I know it’s important. I’m feeling the change.

Even with the dead bug.

Over at Informing the Reforming, Tim Challies is leading a discussion of The Discipline of Grace. To see the discussion on this chapter, “The Discipline of Choices,” please visit Tim’s site.

Necessary Coldness

I’ve completed the revisions to the manuscript of A Light Shining, the sequel to my novel Dancing Priest. The basic structure and concept of the original manuscript is there, but the finished story turns out to be something different, and it is due primarily to two things: a dramatic shortening of what had been the final section (dramatic as in a reduction of some 10,000 words; some will be saved for other projects); and the creation of a new character.

The new character doesn’t have a large role, but he does have a sufficient role, and it lasts throughout the story. In creating the character and the scenes he appears in, I did something I didn’t know there was a name for – necessary coldness.

In Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, author Kim Addonizio describes the technique of  “writing it colder,” which is a way (or technique) to handle emotion on the page, a deliberate underwriting or stripping out of emotion that actually has the opposite effect. She quotes a letter by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov:

“When you want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold…the more objective you are the stronger will be the impression you make.”

Pity is not the emotion I am aiming for with this new character. It is something altogether different. I introduced the character in a blog post entitled “Watching” in August, and also mentioned him a little later in “Where did he come from?”

But the idea of coldness permeates the scenes in the book with this character. And by writing the emotion down, I believe the reader’s emotion is dialed up. When I went back (several times; make that numerous times) to reread those scenes, I kept rereading and rewriting, and rerwriting in the direction of less is more.

By the time the manuscript was finished, I understood what I had done. When I read the section in Addonizio’s book, I realized there was name for it – necessary coldness.

I would tell you this character’s name except he doesn’t have one.

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, LylaLindquist has been leading a discussion of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius. This week we’re covering Part III – “The poem’s progress.” While she’s focused on poetry, what she’s writing – and the exercises you can do – apply broadly to all kinds of writing. To see what’s up with the discussion, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.

Where Does Art Come From?

For some months, I’ve been working on a novella that has a small handful of characters caught up in an unlikely relationship, and it all spins around a theory of art. Yes, I know, this doesn’t exactly sound like the latest thrilled or anything that will land anywhere near success. But a writer has to write, and this idea caught hold of me and wouldn’t let go. The New York Times Bestsellers List will just have to wait.

The idea is about where art comes from, where beauty comes from. It’s not as an in-depth approach as Athol Dickson took in his novel The Opposite of Art, but instead seeks to explore the subject within a story about an unlikely romantic relationship.

Reading A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God, I was surprised to stumble across what is a concise summary of this idea in my novella. “It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me),” Tozer says, “that every good and beautiful thing which man has produced in the world has been the result of his faulty and sin-blocked response to the creative Voice sounding over the earth.”

The idea in my novella is this: if we are indeed created in God’s image, then everything we do in some way will reflect that image, consciously or unconsciously. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Andy Warhol painting of a Campbell’s soup can and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or Handel’s Messiah and the latest song by Lady Gaga. We can’t help it, because we can’t escape being made in God’s image.

And part of that image is creative – it is our nature to create things, to fashion something, or something new, from nothing, or almost nothing. Tozer suggests this comes from our response to God, that creative “Voice” extending across the earth and beyond. The response is our impulse to create, to establish something that reflects the Creator.

It is the image of God in us.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. This week we conclude the discussion of chapter 6, “The Speaking Voice.” To see other posts on the chapter, please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact, for his post and the links to those by others.

Color and Descent

We sit on a hillside, still

green but the leaves are

turning in the endless cycle

of color and descent.

Between us rests a half-full,

half-empty bottle of dark rich

red, and we drink the liquid

grapes and we drink the prayers

and the sweat of the Rhinelanders

who settled here and dug stones

from the ground and planted and

survived and flourished and died,

adding their bones to the stone

and the clay and the soil, to birth

new memories of bottles of red,

and bottles of white.

About 40 minutes west and southwest, and 50 minutes south of St. Louis begins Missouri wine country. The area around Hermann and Augusta, Mo., was certified as an official US wine district even before any areas of California received the designation (as stubborn as Missourians can be, they managed to agree on classifications before the Californians did). Oktoberfest is big in this region. The wine industry died during Prohibition but began making a comeback in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, some 16 wineries are located in the area.

This poem is submitted for the prompt at TweetSpeak Poetry, which in October is all about wine and beer. (Seth Haines, who’s behind the prompts, must be getting free samples for promoting this.)

This poem is also submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

The bottle of wine in the photograph is Augusta Winery’s Norton, made from the Cynthiana grape, and my personal favorite.

Poetry at Work: The Doctor

Earlier this year I read (and wrote about) Wendell Berry’s The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, a collection of essays and reflections about a theme in the life of “the poet of Rutherford” that is near to Berry’s own heart. That theme is place, or what Berry refers to as “local adaptation,” and he explicitly says that his purpose in writing the book was to examine “Williams’ lifelong effort to come to terms with, to imagine, and to be of use to his native and chosen place.”

It is that phrase “to be of use to” that I want to consider here. For those of us interested in poetry, we tend to think in terms of poets as “poets” or writers before we think of them as people with lives, and sometimes lives where they excelled at things other than poetry. Williams was known as a doctor (specifically, a pediatrician) before he became known as poet. And he was a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey, and he was “of use” as a doctor before his poetry helped put Rutherford on the map.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.