A Fiercer Delight and a Fiercer Discontent

Relationships (Part 5) - Pacing Physical Intimacy as an Act of Effective Hedonism

2012-01-24T06:49:00.000-08:00

The talk is tonight[1], so here’s one last brief post for in this series…and I have saved the most bombastic [2] for last.

Here’s my thesis…

Pacing physical intimacy in a romantic relationship is an act of hedonism. [3]

Rushing physical intimacy seems like the hedonistic thing to do, but it is actually a pleasure miscalculation.

It’s a hedonism fail.

Here’s how I figure. By delaying each stage of physical intimacy, you get more out of each one. Holding hands is not quite as magical if you are kissing, [4] and kissing loses some of its allure when the cloths come off. So postponing physical connection maximizes physical enjoyment on a mulit-year time scale.

If hedonism is the intentional pursuit of maximum pleasure, postponing physical intimacy is the hedonistic thing to do…it generates the most pleasure from each progressive stage of connection. Rushing physical intimacy prematurely short-circuits reservoirs of romantic enjoyment that cannot be revisited. Christians seem prudish by advocating physical restraint, but actually, we believe it will maximize sexual enjoyment.

It is popular to advocate that single Christians who are observing the classical sexual ethic are ‘sexually frustrated’ [5] or that their relationships are seething with ‘sexual tension.’ But those who embrace the life stage for what it is worth, enjoy a season of ‘sexual anticipation’ that produces a qualitatively different kind of enjoyment than consummated attraction…which can never be re-captured.
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[1] CL starts at 8:00 in Geit 1001…a couple of cool students even made a fun promotional video.

[2] My brother says that I am definitionally a liberal because I am comfortable auditioning experimental ideas and seeing where they take me. Well if my real life is where I audition ideas, my blog is casting call. To say some of the theses I assert are experimental would be an understatement.

[3] I had a professor for Western Civ in undergrad who told us his grading rules were “if I read your thesis and believe it, you are starting with a B and can only go down…but if I read your thesis and think ‘no way’ you’ve got a shot at an A.” Since then, I have been drawn to the bombastic thesis statement.
[4] e.g. That scene in the latest Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Darcy Helps Elizabeth into the carriage, and touches her hand for the first time, and as he walks away, is obviously affected by that simple touch.
[5] Yes, some of the Tebow jokes have been funny…but they demonstrate the standard reaction to this choice.

Relationships (Part 4) - A Sexual Snapshot of Campus Life: Donna Freitas’ Sex and the Soul

2012-01-22T20:27:00.000-08:00

It has been a few years since I lived in the dorms. So I always question whether my perceptions of campus life, acquired over a decade ago at a small, academically rigorous school in western NY still calibrate. In particular, I wondered if my perceptions of the sexual [1] social contracts that dictate campus life comport with my assumptions. But how would you even test something like that.

Fortunately it has been done for me.

Donna Freitas collected 2,500 narrative surveys from seven different campuses and conducted 111 in depth follow up interviews. Results were reported in the very readable Sex and the Soul.

In particular, I wanted to leverage these data to test two hypotheses I had about the sexual landscape of most college campuses, namely:

1. Students are not finding hookup culture fulfilling. And
2. There is much less sex going on than most students think there is.

The research weighed in definitively on both of these hypotheses and then provided two, unanticipated insights, that I thought were worth sharing

Hypothesis 1: Students are not finding hookup culture fulfilling.

This may have been the overwhelming finding of Freitas research. Many women feel trapped in the hookup culture and a surprising number of men, admitted that they wish it was substantially different.

“In public, women maintain a lax attitude about no-strings-attached hookups, but in private, they express ambivalence and even dismay that they allow themselves to be pressure into sexual behaviors that often make them feel used an unhappy.” 99

“When pressed, few students express a desire to hook up randomly on a regular basis – though most accept that hookups are the most likely way to find a long-term romantic partner…and even greater number wish for more respect and awe about sex from their peers.” 156 [2]

Hypothesis 2: There is much less sex going on than most students think there is.

There is this perception that college is the place where everyone has their best and most frequent sex of their lives, and the college years are a scramble to have those experiences before you reluctantly capitulate to the dull sexlessness of marriage. But the people I knew who were actively seeking out sex in college, weren’t doing a whole lot better at having sex than my celibate friends and I were. I’ve always kind of believed that there is a whole lot less sex going on then everyone thinks there is. Freitas’ research confirmed this hypothesis as well. Apart from a couple ‘alpha-males’ it seems most people think that everyone else is having all the great and frequent sex.

“Students typically perceive hooking up as a social norm at college, even if their personal ‘numbers’ are rather low.” 14

Most students admitted to hooking up (a term with semantic range that may or may not involve intercourse) once or twice a semester.

I have this theory about why the sex-ratios in campus ministries (like the one I serve in) are so unbalanced (i.e. there are way more women than men). It is an economic argument (like Starks’ explanation of sex-imbalance in the Church in the Roman empire). The idea is that men are the power players in the economics of college sex. Therefore, in the (relatively) chaste Christian culture, women can find refuge from this kind of degrading objectification…but the cost is simply too high for the men. But, if it is true that most students are hooking up a couple times a quarter, then what are guys really ‘giving up’ by forgoing ‘the college experience’. 8-16 sexual encounters – many of which are just making out or oral sex (which Freitas includes in the definition of ‘hooking up’). So, intercourse with 4-10 women (and according to Freitas statistics, about half will be sober)? You are going to trade in on the experience of robust Christian community for that? Considering that in the first 10 years of a good marriage you will have sex >1000 times that seems like a regrettable exchange.

In addition to weighing in on these two hypotheses I held but did not have the resources to test, this research provided two surprising conclusions that I had never formed hypotheses about.

Unexpected Conclusion 1: Students don’t date any more.

Freitas concluded that the normative path to becoming a couple is a hookup that becomes a regular hookup where mutual feelings develop and then is labeled a ‘couple’.

“The hook up has replaced the first date” 217

“Claudia informs me about what to her is an obvious fact: dating is simply not an option at her school. “I’ve never gone on a date here…I don’t feel like people date anymore.” ‘the date’ is spoken of as a mythical artifact of a bygone era…some students didn’t even know what to make of it “I think girls want to go on dates, I really do…my friends and I have talked about this before. I really want to go on a date to see what it is like…it seems like such an odd idea in our head just because we don’t do that.” 136-7 [3]

“most relationships seem to begin as hookups. How else are relationships to begin if students are largely unacquainted with what they see as the quaint, old-fashioned practice of dating? Numerous students I interviewed said it was almost unheard of for one person to ask another out on anything approaching a traditional date…romantic encounters…typically happened after multiple hookups and the decision to become a couple. Dates just aren’t a common way into a relationship. Students don’t see many avenues into committed romantic relationships apart from hooking up.” 139

And the death of dating is particularly surprising given the second unexpected conclusion:

Unexpected Conclusion 2: Romance is Chaste

Freitas asked the surveyed students to describe their most romantic encounter. She reported that 79% of the students included ‘no more than kissing’ in their report of their most romantic memory [4] and over half didn’t even include kissing.

All students regardless of institution, religion or orientation, describe romance in decidedly non-sexual terms. “Romance, to them is chaste…Hardly ever did a student story about romance include any suggestion of sexual intimacy. At all the participating colleges and universities, women and men alike, regardless of religious affiliation, tended to disassociate romance from sexual intimacy.” 107

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[1] Note: There is a lot more sexual content in these posts that there will be in my talk. I cut most of it. There will be very little sexual content in my talk.
[2] However, while most students indicate dissatisfaction with campus sexual culture ‘and they disassociate themselves from the problems that are creating it.” 158
[3] Lauren Winner reports that “Groups such as the Independent Women’s Fourm have taken out ads in college newspapers calling for students to ‘Take Back the Date.”
[4] For a few, where sex was involved, several reported that it was romantic because drugs and alcohol weren’t.

Romance (Part 3): A comic interlude (random comics and clips)

2012-01-17T07:24:00.000-08:00

A lot of good speakers/preachers keep topical illustration and content files. I have found that too complicated. I have a single, huge, comics and illustration file. At the beginning of each quarter I brouse it to see if there is anything useful for my upcoming talks. It turns out that in the last few years I have collected more material on romance and relationships than any other single topic. So I gave it its own folder.[1] I chose a handful for the talk…and decided to put a few more up here. Sources include NatileeDee, toothpastefordinner, xkcd, youtube, saturday morning breakfast cereal and a couple others I have forgotten.

Note: This one is not only hilarious but also really insightful.

For some reason this one reminds me of the presidential debate last night.

[1] Second place, it turns out, is existential dread. Apparently sex and oblivion are either particularly funny or are topics I really resonate with. So I have created two topical sub-folders and I’ll do a post like this in a couple months that highlights the comedic material from the second one.

Relationships (Part 2) - A Brief Reflection on ‘Sexual Compatibility’

2012-01-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

One of the main objections [1] I hear to the Christian practice of postponing sexual connection until after the couple forges a public, lifelong, covenant through the exchange of vows is that you lose the opportunity to test ‘sexual compatibility.’

Let me be frank. I think this objection is goofy.

The frequency and quality of sex after a decade of marriage - in the vast majority of cases - has very little to do with anything that you could discover in early sexual encounters. The long term quality of the sexual connection is contingent on the quality of the friendship after it has been subjected to the eventual and inevitable full disclosure of crazy [2] on both sides.

The biologization[3] of sex (i.e. the standard campus narrative where it is simultaneously no big deal, yet something no one can live without) generates the myth that it is primarily a physical transaction. But decades into a relationship, the quality of sex is a function of how much you still like[4] your partner (and how much they like you). This is not something you will learn in the serotonin[5] soaked early sexual encounters. Your best chance at identifying long term ‘sexual compatibility’ is the sober enterprise of character assessment[6]…which is undermined, not aided by pre-vow physical intimacy.

This post was written while listening to the Jon Forman[7] station on Pandora
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[1] This started as a footnote to footnote [2] of the previous post. If you are keeping score at home, this text is the footnote to a footnote to a footnote of a post that began its life as a footnote in the talk manuscript.
[2] Keller argues (I think rightly) that many people come to hate their partner, not because of what they learn about their partner, but because of what they are forced to face about themselves: “the conflict that marriage creates is not conflict with your spouse but with yourself…you cannot run from yourself…in the past if someone revealed your flaws, you could always leave -marriage isn’t hard because it is hard to live with someone else, its hard because it is difficult to face your true self”
[3] Credit – Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. I always feel like citing this text is flirting with Goodwin’s Law…but its not my fault that really clear ethical thinking happens on death row in a Nazi prison. And to not cite one of my 'top 5 favorite books of all time' is a bit much to ask in deference to oblique complience with a goofy-if-helpful internet law.
[4] Not just some abstract fuzzy idea of ‘love’ but actual, concrete, cultivated, sustained affection.
[5] Actually, I think dopamine is the bigger player…but serotonin alliterated, so the writer won over the scientist…but the scientist got to file a dissenting brief in the footnote. Yes, I am aware that I might have a serious problem.
[6] e.g. Is this someone who will consistently own their faults and forgive mine…because that is someone you will still like after a decade of marriage and the craziness carnival of kids and/or career.
[7] I am in a bit of a musical rut. Feel free to leave band recommendations in the comments.

Relationships (Part 1) - The Myth of 25: Divorce, Age of First Marriage and the Importance of Inflection Points

2012-01-10T06:42:00.000-08:00

Note: Tonight we start a three part series on relationships at CollegeLife, the campus ministry our family is involved with. The topics will be friendship, family, and romance. I drew the short straw and will be doing the romance talk two weeks from today. We structured the series this way because my thesis is that romance is the mechanism to turn a friendship into a family (which is the smallest unit of missional community). Unsurprisingly, I have a number of thoughts that emerge from my study and reflection on this over the last couple months that won’t even make it into the manuscript I cut. So I’m putting them here.

I have heard and read several times in my preparation for this relationship talk that “the probability of divorce is significantly higher for couples that get married before 25 than those that get married after.” This is true. Unfortunately, it also fails to convey the important information. You see, it is also true that there is a lower divorce rate for those who get married before 75 than for those who marry after…but this statement also fails to not convey the useful information. The question is not ‘how do the statistics line up on either side of an arbitrary boundary that I chose for polemical purposes?’ but ‘what is the inflection point of this monotonic function?’

Here are the actual statistics that everyone is quoting. [1][2]

The “under 25” stats are dragged down by the 15-20 stats. The meaningful inflection point is at 20. [3] Which means that for the question most college students are asking: “is it wise to peruse a relationship that might turn into marriage right after college” (say at age 22). [4] The answer is ‘sure’. Who you are [5] is more important than when you marry after the important inflection point of 20. [6]

Now for the speculative part. Why is there no significant difference between the early 20’s and late 20’s when so much social and human development happens in that decade? Well, you will be shocked to learn that I have a theory. Those who get married older presumably have more maturity [7] (e.g. self skepticism, experience with communication, the ability to budget, etc…) which will certainly help a marriage. But maturity is a trade off with another marriage asset…flexibility. [8]

I think getting married at 28 is fine and has a number of non-trivial advantages. But the same can be said of getting married at 22 (which is what Amanda and I did). I am not the person she married. But she was there for the process of becoming (and had the opportunity to influence it and be influenced by it) giving us a shared story and convergent behaviors. Our adult lives have been lived together before we formed divergent habits.

So, the answer to the question, ‘is there a higher divorce rate for those who marry before 25?’ is, yes. But it doesn’t answer the real question college students are asking.

The more important question to most college students: “Is there a statistically significant higher divorce rate for 22 year olds than 28 year olds?” returns the null hypothesis.

This post was written while listening to the Charlie Darwin [9] station on Pandora
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[1] Bramlett MD and Mosher WD. Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States. National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 23(22). 2002.
[2]The study also showed that the probability of a ‘cohabitation disruption’ drops from 67% to 53% from the 20-24 to the 25 and over age classes. But this is a fundamentally different phenomenon as the study also showed that couples that cohabitate before marriage have a higher divorce rate (cohabitation – 51% divorced after 15 years compared to non-cohabitators 39%). Bramlett MD and Mosher WD. Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States. National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 23(22). 2002. Which led to this:

[3] And, I would argue, that the selection of 25 as an arbitrary threshold is often intentionally deceptive. The cultural narrative that marriage unnecessarily restricts freedom has worked its way into the public consciousness in a way that is not fundamentally questioned.
[4] Note, this is a non-linear function, so if the inflection point is at 20, we can probably expect that 20-22 behaves more like the previous time series than 22-25, making 22 statistically identical to 28. But given the sample size, it is safe to say that 22 is not ‘significantly’ different than 28, in a statistical sense.
[5] And, as the study suggests, the baggage you bring to the marriage from your family and community…and also your income (which is a whole other post).
[6]Note: this is for “all races” but Bramlett and Mosher thought one of their most interesting findings was how the Latino community diverged from this result. There was no real trend. The 20-24 cohort had the lowest divorce rage followed by the <18 cohort, but all were within a few percentage points of each other.
[7] If they embrace the process of actively converting experience into wisdom. Age is correlated with wisdom, but not predictive. Age is not an automatic vehicle of wisdom. We have to actively harvest wisdom from the fields of our joy and pain.
[8] It is interesting that the numbers are identical after 15 years but don’t take the same path to get there. 5 years out, marriages between older partners take the lead (i.e. fewer ‘disruptions’). Which means that the statistics show that if an early marriage survives the first 5 years, it has a higher chance of making it than an older marriage that survives the first five years. I might argue that a lack of maturity will blow up on the front end…but if you survive it, the flexibility gains are substantial.
[9] By Low Anthem.

2011 A Year in Books: Idea Texts

2012-01-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

This year I split my year end book post into idea books (this post) and narrative or story (previous posts).

Here is the key to the shorthand notes:

(A) - Audio – I listened to this book
(N) – I have a word document of notes and quotes from this book[1]
(!) – I really liked this book
(X%) – I didn’t finish this book – I either ran out of time to comit or felt like I got the gist - this is the percentage I read

I went overboard with the footnotes (even for me) – feel free to skip them, but if they interest you, you might want to open a second browser.

Fear and Trembling[2] - Soren Kierkegaard (50%) (!)(N)

“There were countless generations who knew the story of Abraham by heart, work for word, but how many did it render sleepless” [3]

I was scheduled to preach on Abraham sacrificing Isaac this year before I gave the passage away to my friend Zach. But while I was still planning to do the talk, I revisited my favorite work on the story. SK is my favorite philosopher.[4] I wrote six papers on him during my theology degree, including one on F&T. Unsurprisingly, I found that I had not understood it at all my first time through.[5] But it was fun to revisit an old friend…especially one this playful. I remember back when I was doing my Kierkegaard independent study I told my brother ‘I just read about a thousand pages of Kierkegaard.’ His response was apt; “That sounds good for the soul.”

Not The Way It’s Supposed to Be[7]: A Breviary of Sin - Cornelius Plantinga[8] (!) (N)

“Like some mad charioteer, we now run our lives with more speed than direction.” [9]

I started this book seven years ago, found the first chapter underwhelming, and set it aside. When I picked it up this summer it still had the Olympic National Park bookmark in it, from my first attempt during a pre-kids hiking trip. But it just kept popping up as a substantial influence in books I love by writers I respect. So I picked it up again…and I came to believe that in addition to the explicit references to this work that had prevailed on me to read it, there was a whole body of insight transferred to me uncited by secondary sources, that had its origin in this work. It was breathtaking.

It is a thin work (200 pages) dense with insight. However, unlike Volf (below) this little book yielded its value effortlessly. Plantinga writes engaging, clear, precise, fluid, enjoyable prose [10] and has a knack for fresh language that breathes new life and imaginative energy into tired ideas. [11]

Plantinga’s strength is semantic precision and careful distinction. He takes a clumsy, shadowy concept like ‘sin’ and identifies its constituent parts. [12] Additionally, since he is a psychologist first and theologian second, he makes helpful attempts to ask integrating questions (e.g. what connection is there between addition and sin) and comes away with believably nuanced answers. Really, just a great little book.

Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion - Richard Fenn

"the resurgence of conservative religion...taken together provide a massive falsification of the idea that modernization and secularization are cognate phenomena." Fenn (on Berger)

Every year I try to take on an experimental reading program. Consider it the ‘high volatility’ portion of my ‘reading portfolio.’ For years I have wanted to dive into the literature on the Sociology of Religion, but didn’t know where to start. Fenn’s book was like sending a scouting party in a realm of unknown and promising reflection. Like Joshua and Caleb reporting back from Canaan, Fenn gave a report of a realm guarded by the imposing, troubling, giants (Freud and Weber) but that it was a land of rich reflective resources (Martin and Burger) that made it worth forging deeper.

A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (!) (N) – Peter Berger

“Hopelessness does not have a superior epistemological status.” [13]

This was my most influential book of 2011. I am officially a PB fanboy. I guarantee that future lists will include more. Over the summer I ran overnight flume experiments and passed the late hours easily reading this book. Burger poses a number of startling and fertile ideas regarding how human communities influence individual beliefs. He is most famous for coining ‘plausibility structures’ [14] and ‘the sacred canopy’ and for paradigm shifting work on the causes and influences of secularization. But one of the refreshing things about Berger is that he recognizes that these social components of belief are not somehow limited to religious worldviews and recognizes that ‘intellectuals’ are not somehow magically exempt. [15] He finds the work of plausibility structures and social warrants for belief in most modern worldviews and takes the ubiquitous sociological data of the human experience of transcendence seriously.

AFG included a number of helpful ideas that really deserve their own posts but include:

‘belief clusters’
mysticism’s ‘morning after’ problem
the role of institutions (religious and secular) as metaphysical ‘beasts of burden’
the rise of the knowledge class which led to a split in the middle class and set up our current political landscape, and
the possibility that secularization has not, in fact, been a story of progress but, just maybe, it is a story of ‘epistemological deprivation.’ [16]

“It is quite possible that in the dawn of its history the human race had an access to reality that it subsequently lost, as it is possible that this reality is briefly accessible in childhood and then lost in the basically depressing process of growing up. If so, what we commonly think of as progress may actually be a devastating story of epistemological deprivation.”

Finding Darwin’s God - Ken Miller

Miller is a Christian professor of Molecular Biology (Brown) that travels around debating creationists and famous proponents of intelligent design. [17] He is often mentioned in the same breath with Francis Collins of Orthodox believers with scientific street cred who reject ID and defend the neo-Darwiniain synthesis.

The book is OK. He effectively deconstructs the ID arguments but in his efforts to distance himself from the ID community, he is often uncharitable. [18] But he is a capable author and the last couple chapters where he describes his own scientific-theological synthesis are quite good. He argues that because of the unexpected weirdness of modern physics it is far easier to be a Christian today than it was 100 years ago. [19]

The Goldilocks Enigma – Paul Davies (50%) (!)

“Somehow the universe has engineered not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension. Mindless blundering atoms have conspired to make, not just life, not just mind, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show but to unravel the plot. What is it that enables something a small and delicate and adapted to terrestrial life as the human brain to engage with the totality of the cosmos and the silent mathematical tune to which it dances?”

Davis is a cosmologist at the University of Arizona and is an affable and complicated figure. I read this book to help craft my ‘positive arguments’ lecture for our Apologetics class. It is the current, definitive lay treatment of the fine tuning argument. The book surveys some of the findings of contemporary physics and asks the old teleological question in its updated, more precise, form…Is chance really the best explanation for all this? “Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be ‘just right’ for life in many intriguing ways.”

It is much more a science text than a theology text, but it is accessible, readable and compelling.

Love Wins – Rob Bell

I hate being forced to read a book. So if a marketing blitz makes a book so talked about that I am forced to read it because people want my take on it, I am generally not a sympathetic reader. Reading time is one of my most precious and limited commodities and this author has essentially stolen it from me with clever marketing. Previous offenders include the Da Vinci Code and Left Behind.

Love Wins is not a very good book (though it is not nearly as bad as the other two I just mentioned). [20] Bells’ characteristic, playful, subversive, staccato, conversational style (which, generally, is impossible not to enjoy) does not lend itself to a weighty work of theology. You cannot write a systematic work of theology in 6 word sentences or with a book that is mostly white space. And there are a couple of unfortunate pages where he flirts [21] with a modest form of universalism. [22]

But, these things do not rank as the thing I liked least about this book. What I liked least was the plagiarism. You see, each chapter was essentially a book report (in Bell’s characteristic style) on a text I have read and found influential. First, we get the argument from Wright’s Surprised by Hope, then Keller’s Prodigal God, then Stott’s The Cross of Christ. There is little attempt at synthesis with other authors, the arguments are essentially lifted from these books and put in Rob’s voice. But this simply makes the text unoriginal. The thing that bothered me was that none of these authors were credited [23] for their ideas and only two of the three [24] were included in the ‘for further reading’ list at the end of the book. That is not ok…especially given the kind of money this book made.

With all that said, most of the discussion of this book has been far to earnest (bordering on hyperbolic)…and in contrast, Don Miller wrote my favorite piece on this little book.

Genesis For Everyone Part 1 and Part 2 - Goldengay (!)

“Abraham is a hero on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and a wimp on Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday. Today it’s Tuesday.”

I like Goldengay. Sure he might attribute more creative effort to the Babylonian editor than I do. And from time to time he might be a block or two left of me. [24] But his insights are penetrating, his prose is effortless to read, and his personal story [25] (which he weaves into these ‘for everyone’ volumes) gives him credibility.

Genesis NIV Application Commentary [26] - Walton (50%)

It is kind of funny that I only read this commentary through Genesis 3, and still read half of it. Walton’s background and commentary on the first three chapters is a long as his commentary on chapters 4-50. [27] But he is great. Walton’s analysis is characterized by two distinctive qualities:

1) Hermeneutical precession: Walton was explicit with his hermeneutics as he undertook the tasks of difficult interpretation in a way I rarely see in commentaries. In some ways, this text doubles as a hermeneutics text by practical and repeated case study. Whenever he encountered controversy, he identified the ‘resistant communication’, examined the semantic range, and brought the synchronic and diachronic evidence to bear (placing the priority on the former).

2) Comprehensive Understanding of the Ancient Mesopotamian[28] Milieu. Walton has a comprehensive mental map of the other stories and civilizations that the Genesis narrative was written into. He employs similarity and dissimilarity as interpretive aids rather than tools for genetic speculation and leverages them to cast light on difficult passages. [29]

Genesis – Walter Brueggemann/Derek Kidner [30] (20%)

I usually try to read 4 commentaries on any passage I preach. [31] One to the right, one to the left and a couple more in my theological neighborhood. In this metaphor, Kidner basically lives in my house. His commentary is incredible because he generally has one or two pages of fragments per passage, but without fail, they have been outstanding. Brueggemann was the commentary ‘on the left.’ I have a complicated relationship with Brueggemann. Sometimes his exegesis is unmatched in its weight and insight. And sometimes it is just goofy. No one had more useful insight on the Tower of Babel but his Genesis 3 analysis made me wonder if we were reading the same text.

Exclusion and Embrace – Miroslov Volf (N) (!)

“Instead of simply affirming plurality we must nurture an awareness of our own fallibility…a world neatly divided into territories of pure light and of utter darkness…exists (only) in the imaginations of the self-righteous…In a world shot through with injustice, the struggle for justice must be carried on by people inescapably tainted by injustice.”

“Perception is a moral exercise.” [32]

Great book. Volf is Serbian and refreshingly unaffected by the ‘pleasant trappings of the western suburban sensibility’ that dominates most of our flaccid and stunted discourse about justice, power, and reconciliation. He has a fierce mind and a humble posture. He interacts effortlessly (and often sympathetically [33]) with Foucault and Macintyre but rests unapologetically on Jesus and the Christian story. He is not cowed by intellectual bullies [34] but sympathetic to de-centered voices. [35] E&E was difficult reading but productive reflection.

Ecological Restoration: Principles, Values, and Structure of an Emerging Profession - Various

Maybe restoration isn’t something you can learn from a text book. At several universities the river restoration research is happening in studio based departments like Landscape Architecture. But I found this text pretty unhelpful. We read a couple chapters and two student assigned papers each week as part of a discussion based class in Restoration Ecology. The papers were, without exception, more valuable. And this is probably why there are not more ecology texts on this list even though I am an currently an Ecology grad student. Once you progress from the introductory synthesis to the actual messy details, debates and paradoxes of a field, the primary literature is where it is at. Most of my professional and academic reading this year was dedicated to journals.

Mere Discipleship – Lee Camp

“We might summarize Revelation this way: in the ring of human history there's a bleeding lamb in one corner and a dragon in the other. 'Common sense' would tell us we should place our bet on the dragon-but there is a new common sense, a new reality, in which the Lamb runs out victorious."

Sometimes it matters when you read a book. If I had read this book a decade ago it would have been paradigm shifting. But on the other side of ‘the new social gospel’ I had a better understanding of the truth and over-simplification involved in the neo-Anabaptist thing. I hugely appreciate the attempt to deconstruct the western evangelical allergy too suffering and our ‘Constantinian’ desire to intertwine church and state…but find something similarly sub-Christian about the moralistic tone and implicit salvation-through-suffering soteriology.

Learning Theology with the Church Fathers – Christopher Hall (50%)

“If I love the wrong things, I will consistently choose the wrong things…an act of choice is not just a matter of knowing what to choose: it is a matter in which loving and feeling are involved. ”

I am a fan of ‘the Fathers’. So I was destined to love this book. It has been on my reading list for a while. I picked it up for a talk I am doing on the historical doctrine of human nature…but could not put it down until I got through the Chrystostom on Providence and Gregory of Nyssa on the Spirit.

Hall is more than an expert of dusty texts, he is a man with dead friends. And he introduces us to them with deep affection and apt admiration. He does the hard work of understanding these men on their terms and delivering them to us as ‘and antidote for theological and ethical faddism’ and argues that due to their ‘hermeneutical proximity’…’they often hear melodies and harmonies in the biblical narrative that modern Christians fail to discern.”

Sex and the Soul – Donna Freitas [36] (N)

“Students at (secular public, secular private and Catholic) [37] colleges may have all the sexual freedom in the world, but it is not giving them much reward.”

It was a good year for me and Boston University. This is exactly what I was looking for. A substantive work of social research (published by Oxford press). [38] Freitas surveyed 2,500 students and interviewed 111 to understand the interaction of spirituality and sexuality on the American campus. Then she delivers her systematic findings through an anecdotal narrative structure (recounting the most memorable interviews that articulated the general findings) that made the text highly readable.

have a post ready to go on this book as part of the 4 to 5 part romance series I am going to run in January (leading up to a talk I am writing on the topic)…so I’ll say more then.

Defining your dating style: 5 paths to the love of your life – Multiple Authors

“We use the other for our own glorification, we bask in the presence of our beloved because we enjoy the image of ourselves that is reflected back.” - Lauren Winner

I pretty much hate dating books. [38.5] For something so shrouded in mystery they are almost uniformly far too dogmatic. I find the dating/courtship debates [39] to be mostly a matter of semantics and have seen both models go catastrophically poorly with approximately the same frequency. So this book was a bit of a refreshing change, offering five different [40] positions and a fair amount of insight. In particular, it was helpful to recognize their areas of agreement and disagreement.

There was a 500 pound gorilla in the room, however. The finest writing [41] and reflection in this text was by Lauren Winner, who referenced her new marriage several times in the essay…a marriage which did not last. Just like bigotry in secular culture[42], divorce is the failure the church often does not allow redemption from. You can almost hear the smug response by one or two of her interlocutors to this event that had not yet happened. [43] But here is the thing. Her thoughts are still kind [44] and wise and helpful. And that is the really beautiful thing about the Christian community. Failure does not disqualify.

The Meaning of Marriage – Time Keller (!)

“single people (need)…a balanced, informed view of marriage…(or) they will either over-desire or under-desire marriage, and either of those ways of thinking will distort their lives.”

After I read this book I sat down and wrote Keller an e-mail to thank him for being my ‘remote mentor’ (thought his MP3’s and books – which is kind of like having an imaginary friend but more profitable) for about 4 years now. This is practically a transcript of a 1992 series he gave on Marriage [45] and has become my new go-to recommendation on the topic (as well as my new go-to wedding present).

From the Front Porch to the Back Seat: A History of Courtship in the US – Beth Bailey

Don’t let the fun title, fool you…this is a weighty and scholarly work. It seems as though Bailey has read every singly ‘teen magazine’ and ‘dating manual’ written between 1890 and 1960 and that each paragraph quotes 2-4 of them. [46] But, despite the dense content Baily writes extremely well. [47] Pages fly by as insights and paradigm shifts pile up. I hope to do a post on this book in the next few weeks too, but for not I’ll just say that it was helpful to understand the generational ebb and flow of romantic mores and appreciate the sheer novelty of each system. Anyone who hopes to do substantive thinking on any social phenomenon has to ask, ‘how did we get here.’ Bailey was an able guide to the recent history of dating in our culture.

Previous year’s posts: 2010, 2009

_________________

[1] And I’d be happy to e-mail them if you want a summary.
[2] Someday I will write a post “5 reasons I like SK” like the Sufjan post I wrote…and the fun thing is that they will share one of the points. Like Sufjan in music, SK is the undisputed champion in philosophy of ‘best titles.’ Consider, ‘Fear and Trembling,’ ‘A Sickness Unto Death’, ‘Either/Or’, and ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’ (which was the follow up to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ and about 3 times as long in a hilarious deconstruction of the ad hoc requirements necessary to make Hegelianism work…I am convinced that the work exists almost 90% as a delivery vehicle for the title…which is precisely the kind of cheeky thing SK did. Seriously, there is just no other contender for ‘favorite philosopher.’)
[3] Like I could have limited the great Dane to a single quote:
“My memory is a faithful spouse, and my imagination … a busy little maid.”
“We are touched, we look back to those beautiful times. Sweet sentimental longing leads us to the goal of our desire, to see Christ walking about in the promised land. We forget the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. Was it such a simple matter not to make a mistake? Was it not terrifying that this man walking around among the others was God? Was it not terrifying to sit down and eat with him?”
[4] I know analytical folks would scoff at the idea that SK is a philosopher, but they can kiss my existentialist butt. (or actually the butt of my pseudonym’s pseudonym…SK is awesome).
[5] I actually wrote a paper on Bonheoffer’s dependence on Kierkegaard without once mentioning the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical.’ That seems like a pretty goofy oversight on one hand…but strengthens my thesis that DB was indebted to SK on the other (which, incidentally, was the topic of the ‘fiercest’ debate I ever got into in a class. I was incredulous when a classmate branded DB a ‘Hegelian’ which was his fancy way of saying ‘too liberal for evangelical utility’).
[7] Great title, after a film from the 1970’s. Of course, if I was to write this book now, I’d go with the title ‘But it’s the other way.’
[8] Who, it turns out, is Alvin’s brother. This surprises me for some reason. Yes they are both brilliant and creative minds, but the think and write with such dramatic peculiarity and almost no stylistic overlap.
[9]Another really interesting idea is what engineers and ecologists call ‘runaway feedback’ – “People not only reap what they sow but also sow what the reap…sow a thought, and reap a deed; sow a deed, and reap another deed; sow some deeds, and reap a habit; sow some habits, and reap a character; sow a character and reap two thoughts…Hence the progress of both good and evil.”
[10] Which is particularly surprising for those of us who have wrestled through his brother’s brilliant works that are about as enjoyable as an engineering manual.
[11] Now this fails as well as succeeds. The reason I didn’t like the first chapter is that the shalom argument got way more play in the 1990’s than it deserved (I wrote a cantankerous paper once that argued that the way progressive evangelicals had pressed shalom into service did not respect the synchronic evidence of the word’s semantic range). Also, ‘spiritual hygiene’ might be the goofiest way to describe holiness that I have encountered. But this is nit picking. In general, much of the lucid value of this work rests on Plantinga’s uncanny mastery of metaphor as pedagogy.
[12] After briefly parsing sin into guilt and corruption he dodges the standard theological debates regarding the former and zeroes in on the various ways that the latter manifests in human behavior and psychology including the perverting, polluting, progressive and parasitic nature of sin).
[13] Actually, this is my favorite quote from AFG, but it was longish…“Reality is haunted by that otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life. Much of the time the otherness is successfully held at bay, seemingly domesticated or even denied, so that we can go about the business of living. From time to time we catch glimpses of transcendent reality as the business of living is interrupted or put in question for one reason or another.”
[14] “Human beings, due to their intrinsically and inexorably social nature, require social support for whatever they believe about the world… There are people (and not only theologians or religious believers) who deny that there is any social context to their lives…I believe that the denial is less than honest…”
[15] “Intellectuals do not have better moral judgment than people with little or no education, they do not live more wisely, they are certainly not more compassionate, they have not fewer but different superstitions, and they are capable of the most mindless fanaticisms.”
[16] This is a not-so-subtle shot at Freud’s classical idea that religion is an adult attempt to recapture childhood. Berger asks the question ‘what gives adults epistemological preference?’ Why do we assume that children do not see parts of reality more clearly and that the damage done to the selves in the traumatic process of adolescent socialization results in epistemological loss that should be recaptured. Essentially Berger is arguing that ‘myth of progress’ writ large also shows up on the individual psychological level. Whether or not he is right (and I’m not sure he is convinced, mostly I think he is asserting a thought experiment) it casts new light on Jesus’ statement that ‘In order to enter the Kingdom of God’ you must first become like a little child.
[17] This is the only non-exegetical book I read to prepare my origins talk.
[18] My brother once said of the Emerging Church folks that ‘they are more charitable to those a mile to their left than they are to those 5 feet to their right.’ I kind of felt this about this book.
[19] This tails off nicely from Berger and Fenn who argue that the prediction that secularization is a unidirectional and monotonic process has failed catastrophically. Berger and Fenn press sociological data to demonstrate that it has failed empirically but Miller (and Davies, next) press the scientific data to demonstrate that science has failed to squeeze God into a smaller and smaller space, but instead, revealed uncharted (uncharitable?) expanses of reality where he may reside and act.
[20] But, let’s be clear. I do still like Bell, very much. I actually have a half finished post called ‘Why I like both Bell and Driscoll even thought you are not supposed to be able to like both.’
[21] Which is actually the best word for it, because he does not commit.
[22] Which, like the two unfortunate pages on justification in the middle of Simply Christian, is unfortunately all that gets talked about.
[22] My brother once said that a lack of citation is a sign that an author is over dependent on a source (because they don’t want to point the reader to the source that would reveal the unoriginality of the work). I reviewed a professional document this year that had large chunks lifted word for word from a text I had happened to read. The text was not included in the references. I got a little of the same feeling reading this book.
[23] In fairness, he may not have even known his cross stuff was from Stott, he might have gotten it mediated through a source on his list that I haven’t read, who got it from Stott. It would be ironic (aihctbu) if Stott, the only author who would be sympathetic to his speculations, was the only author he is indebted to that he didn’t read.
[24] Though he is difficult to classify. For example, more than once he draws applications from the text that most modern worldviews simply do not have the resources to think in generational time scales or embrace children and that the Biblical text is unembarrassed and unrestrained in its assertion that children are the purpose of romance.
[25] His wife has been sick, confined to a wheelchair, and unable to communicate for years. He gave up his post as the head of a seminary to devote more time to her care.
[26] This series has been outstanding almost without exception. If a young preacher had to blindly pick a commentary on a book without any author loyalties, based only on the series, I’d recommend this series.
[27] I also acquired and started his book on origins but after I read Walton’s commentary on Genesis 1 and 2 I realized that I had already internalized Walton’s ‘Genesis 1 argues that the whole earth is Yahweh’s temple…it is about creation’s function not the details of its making.”
[28] Every time I use the word Mesopotamian I think “And no one’s ever heard of my band…Sargon, Hammarabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh…”
[29] Because, as he points out, similarity does not point out derivation in either direction.
[30] Two books by different guys, not one co-authored by both…though that might be the most intriguing and surreal commentary ever written.
[31] We are preaching Genesis this year. MP3’s are here.
[32] This is a short hand form of the longer quote: ““Both the ‘clenched fist’ and the ‘open arms’ are epistemological stances; they are moral conditions of moral perception – a claim which rests on a more general Nietzschean insight that “all experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of perception.” …you must want more than justice; you must want embrace. There can be no justice without the will to embrace. It is, however, equally true that there can be no genuine and lasting embrace without justice.”
[33] Which I appreciate because I think both of these guys have a ton to offer…as well as much to reject, which Volf also unapologetically does.
[34] E.g. Those whose rhetoric generally aims to impugn or shame more than inform or enlighten.
[35] One of the most interesting ideas is that the Bible does not grant the poor a moral advantage but an epistemological advantage (because the powerful control the message – I’ll have more thoughts on this in future posts). Also, I think he could be considered a feminist by even the most rigorous definitions.
[36] My new year’s resolution a couple years ago was to read more women. I have not done well. But there are a few in the balance of the list.
[37] She lumps these three into a category she calls ‘spiritual’ colleges because she found the sexual and spiritual landscape at theses schools to be basically indistinguishable.
[38] Freitas, who had literally ‘never stepped foot on’ an evangelical campus before her research, practically gushes about the intellectual and social formation of the students at these schools (though she also identifies the weird of paradoxes of our sexual ethics with relative clarity). Admittedly, she doesn’t have the insight of an insider to recognize our own special brands of brokenness, but her positive, analytical, outsider analysis made me feel, ‘it might be pretty cool if my kids wanted to do undergrad at an evangelical school.’
[38.5] With that said, my hatred of dating books is exceeded by my hatred of my lack of wisdom on the topic. It seems like I field a constant stream of inquiries from students looking for guidance on how to negotiate the romantic choices they are faced with in college. And I find myself with little concrete to offer. So I undertook a systematic reading program to try to move forward just a little.
[39] If you have not spent time in the evangelical community, I realize that this phrase sounds like something from the 1920’s…on Mars.
[40] Actually, I think there were three basic approaches advocated, but five authors wrote about their perspectives with substantial overlap between everyone except the betrothal guy (yes, there was a betrothal guy, whose chapter was as strange as you would expect). I was actually a little disappointed that they didn’t go out and find a good South Asian Calvinist to make a case for arrangement. I think it might have strengthened the book.
[41] Really, the only ‘writing’ that had artistic value beyond pragmatic reporting of ideas.
[42] Both cultures have an unforgivable sin…which suggests that it is not the failure of the culture itself, but something in the human heart which stigmatizes certain arbitrary actions to the point that it dehumanizes the person and abstracts them to a single behavior.
[43] It is hard not to feel a sense of responsibility for Laruen all too public story. The Christian community is hungry for celebrity…for our own version of rock stars we can idealize and, frankly, idolize. Lauren’s wit and insight made her conversion something we elevated – which made her subsequent doubt something we took personally. In other words, we comodified her, possessed her, and became ‘economically’ invested in her story, losing the capacity to feel with her or give her space for the hard chapters of her life. (Tebow might want to take note).
[44] In particular, despite self identifying as a feminist and, therefore, believing that the courtship culture spawned by Harris’ works led to instantiated gender roles that are goofy at best and harmful at worst (a critique I totally agree with, incidentally) she organizes her chapter around five basic points of agreement with Harris et al, taking a position of fundamental unity in diversity and affirms his central ideas (which, she argues, have been distorted by the ‘courtship movement’).
[45] I have said it before, but Keller is the anti-Lewis in one way. CS Lewis was the one of the best writers of his era but claimed to be a poor speaker. Keller is one of the finest orators of our age, and his winsome, caring, playful tone does not make the leap to the page…but the wisdom does.
[46] Sometimes I feel like the historian’s daily routine is a lot like the scientist’s (particularly the field biologist or geologist)…and sometimes I feel like they are totally different. But I do kind of think that history is often closer to science in its method than the things we call ‘social science’.
[47] Especially in the first third of the book where she outlines courtship. When the book turns to the latter topics it is comparably weighty, moderately helpful but less readable.

2011 A Year in Books: Part 1 – Narrative

2011-12-23T07:56:00.000-08:00

I read a surprising number of books this year…to the point that a yearend book post [1] got longish (even for me). So I split it up. In this post, I will write about the ‘narrative texts’, an next time we will move to the ‘idea texts.’ (Note: I don’t really classify books under ‘non-fiction’ and ‘fiction’ but under ‘ideas’ and ‘story’…’argument’ and ‘narrative’). This year I have tried to include one of my favorite (brief) quotes from each text. And here is the legend for the parenthetical notes:

(A) - Audio – I listened to this book
(N) – I have a word document of notes and quotes from this book[2]
(!) – I really liked this book
(X%) – I didn’t finish this book

(Tip for Footnotes: I went a little overboard with footnotes, even for me. I know it is hard to go back and forth. If you are interested in the footnotes it might be helpful to open a second browser.)

Resurrection - Leo Tolstoy (A)

"every man carries within himself the germs of every human quality.”

I love Tolstoy. Anna Kerennena is easily in my top three favorite books. But there is a reason that this is one of his lesser known works. It operates mostly as a tract against the 19th century Russian court [3] and penal system. I read it with my reading group because we heard that it was Tolstoy’s most explicitly spiritual novel. That might itself be part of the problem. There were some very fruitful spiritual themes. But the book was just too polemical, both politically and ideologically, to work very well as a noel. It lacked the subtle contrast of Leven and Anna that told, essentially, the same story. It also lacked notes of hope that accompanied his more famous (and notoriously tragic) work.

Zombiecorns (!) – John Green

“My regret was immediate, total, and useless.” [4]

I’ve written a couple times about this ‘zombie apocalypse novella.’ I loved it. I defy you to listen to the author read the first page and not want to read the rest.

An Abundance of Katherines – John Green (A)

"How very odd to think that God gave you your life but not think that life asks more of you than watching TV."

One of the conditions that John put on the free, public distribution of Zombiecors is that we would read one of his actual works so that we wouldn’t judge his writing on a hastily written zombie apocalypse novella that he did not like. I took him up on the condition, checking out two of his other works. [5] The irony is that I thought Zobicorns was the best of the three by a long shot.

An abundance of Katherines had flourishes of Green’s characteristic wit and insight and deeply appealed to the teenage nerd I once was (as opposed to the adult nerd I now am). I loved the theme of the fear of unfulfilled potential and a world that is gaining on your head start. But it, somehow, did not seem to be the book I knew its author is capable of.

Hunger Games (A) (!) - Suzanne Collins

I have almost no experience with ‘young adult lit.’ It wasn’t a genre when I was a ‘youth’ [6] and honestly, the idea of an adult reading it conjures the images of ‘Twilight mom’ in my mind. But emboldened by my ability to read An Abundance of Katherines without feeling totally creepy, encouraged by no fewer than four adult friends that I admire, and after observing that a lot of the students in our campus ministry loved the book, I finally read the Hunger Games. I am embarrassed to admit I loved it…especially the first half. I cannot remember being as engrossed in a fictional work as I was in the first two hundred pages. Then the book departed from its central premise to set up the series love triangle…and it lost momentum, but it had built enough momentum that the wheels didn’t come off.

I’m not sure I realized how much I vested in these characters until I recently saw the trailer for the film and had trouble viewing part of it through wet eyes.

Will Grayson Will Grayson – David Levitan and John Green (A)

“I never even paid attention to the score. Baseball was just one of those inexplicable things that parents did like Flu Shots and church.”

I know that John Green loves Catcher in the Rye because of he rejects the idea that a successful literary character has to be likable, but most of these characters were just too self absorbed for me to identify with them. I feel like Green’s successful central idea is ‘the aggressive attempt to see life as the other,’ [7] which is kind of the opposite of self absorption. [8] But this work conspicuously lacked that theme. Maybe it because he only wrote half of it. Levitan’s characters, on the whole, lacked the self skepticism that attend Green’s more successful characters.

Also, this kind of felt like a book by two straight guys about two gay guys…probably because it was.

Anyway, thus ended my experiment in youth lit.

Unill we Have Faces - CS Lewis

I think this is the most difficult and least read of Lewis’ popular works. This explains why it may be the only one I hadn’t read. It was very good. One of the difinitive meditations on the hiddeness of God. But there is a kind of melancholy that attends reading your last Lewis work for the first time. There is a lifetime of productive re-reading ahead of me…but I will never be startled by his clarity and creativity for the first time again.

Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut (A)

"Everything there was to know about life can be found in Brother's Karamazov"

“Maggie was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”

I have heard much about this being the great early ‘postmodern’ novel (where postmodern mostly means an experiment in non-linear story telling). But I have very little to say about this book. I only even remembered that I read it at the last minute when I found a couple of notes about it in my file. And so it goes.

Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (A)

"Everyone suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine. I am one of the few honest people I have ever known."

"He was one of those men who acheived such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savors of anticlimax."
I revisited GG (a text I read in High School but failed to appreciate even a little) as part of John Green’s club.

It appears that in my mind I had conflated GG and Death of a Salesman. In place of two iconic stories of materialism in early twentieth century, I created a single mental category of ‘Americana tragedy of inauthenticity [9]’ that held these two together without distinction. As with most of the books I have reread since High School, I did appreciate it more on the second go-around. There are a few great metaphors but when it comes to Fitzgerald I really preferred…

Short Stories - F Scott Fitzgerald (A)

“The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you will have.”

I liked these…more than Gatsby. FSF is a sort of understated virtuoso…simultaneously sublime and realistic. And in lieu of more commentary, I’ll include more a couple more quotes.

“People over 40 can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look. At 45 they are caves in which we hide.”

"You can't shock a monk. He is a professional shock absorber.”

1984 (A) – George Orwell

“Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some ancestral memory that things had once been different?”

I had never read 1984. It was unexpectedly grim. But throughout, I couldn’t help think about Neil Postman’s thesis that in the two classic visions of dystopia (1984 and Brave New World) it is the latter rather than the former that is our undoing. It is Huxley not Orwell who was our cultural profit. If you want to undo our society, it is far more effective to pander to appetites than oppress freedoms. We won’t stand for political oppression, forced restriction of freedoms, but will gladly trade careful, conscientious lives of just action for increasingly refined entertainments.

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (A) – David Grann

I know this sounds like another zombie narrative…but it isn’t. It is a non-fiction [10] story of a modern reporter’s attempt to recreate, investigate, and relay the events and back story of the most famous attempt to find a lost city in the unexplored Amazon.

It is a well written book…the kind of book that reveals the ending early but still manages suspense and even a twist ending. [11] I listened to it while I was doing field work and found the fortitude and courage of the explorers to be a motivational subsidy. Their tireless trudge into the jungles seemed to make my exertion decisions (am I going to hike another mile in to take another set of samples before I call it a day) seem small and my adventure tractable.

Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay - John Gimlette

I read this travel memoir/historical survey of Paraguay while I was there. It was a helpful and highly readable introduction to a country whose complicated and often tragic history helps explain some of the complexities of its present reality [12]. The author was a fine writer and a capable guide…but I could not help but notice that he did not seem to love Paraguay. [13] I do not a disinterested, ironic observer to guide me into the back-story of a new place and people. I want someone to show me how, despite their complicated story and bed-bug ridden hotels, he or she came to love the people and connect with the place. I wanted Gimlette to be as intoxicated with Paraguay as Grann was with Z.

Film, Television and Music

Since I don’t do a retrospective post on these forms I thought I’d tag my favorites on the end of this since they fit the ‘narrative’ theme.

Film: [14]

Never Let Me Go – My new criterion for a good film is ‘am I still thinking about it two days later.’ This beautifly made film was still turning over in my brain weeks later. I love the idea of a period science fiction peice. And the closing lines...

Tree of Life – TOL is a deeply flawed film. It is about 45 minutes longer than it needed to be. I recommended it to a thoughtful and reflective friend who did not like it at all. But it easily fit the criterion I listed above. I am still turning it over in my mind a couple weeks later (and may have to do a post on it).

TV:

My television competition was a war of attrition. I found that I only had time to follow a couple 30 minute shows (often just before the latest episode fell off the Hulu cue). But Louie and Community were the runaway winners. I stayed in a hotel last night and flipped through a couple of channels struck by how a bunch of shows I had never seen all kind of looked, felt, and sounded the same. If nothing else, Louie and Community are unique. [15]

Community - I have to respect a show that keeps trying. Some episodes are hits and others are misses, but every one tries to be special. And I respect that.

Louie – I started watching Louie half way season 2 when Klosterman declared it the most original and successful show ever. I have always like CK. He is one of the crassest comedians out there [16] but he is also one of the most astute students of human nature that currently has a popular platform and one of the only ones with any semblance of self-skepticism[17]. For example, if you haven’t seen ‘Everything is Awesome and No One is Happy,’ it is characteristic of his voice.

I went back and watched the whole series and it really is fantastic, totally original in format, tone, style, resonance and topical range. Oh, and when he is not busy being observant...he is hilarious...

Music:

Sigh No More – Mumford and Sons : I was mildly obsessed with this album this year. There is only one album I own that can rival SNM for the number of times I have listened to it (Catch for Us the Foxes – my favorite album ever). Mumford and Sons share a couple things with mewithoutYou that makes their music defy the standard process of artistic immunity (the process by which a work of art gradually fails to ignite our passions until the only work it can actually do is to occasionally invoke memories of passions). Both albums are stylistically unique, lyrically sublime, artistically excellent and contain spiritually complicated themes.

The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me – Brand New: This is an older album, but I am new to Brand New and really enjoyed them this year.

Next: 2011, A Year in Books Part 2 – Idea Books

This post was written while listening to Deja Entendu by Brand New

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[1] I have been doing this for a couple years since my friend Joel started doing it over on his blog.
[2] And I’d be happy to e-mail them if you want a summary.
[3] I watched a couple of old episodes of Ally McBeal while I was reading this and found a surprising similarity in themes…we are at the mercy of legal systems that are capricious and arbitrary and subject to the whims and foibles of peculiar humans.
[4] In the next post I will write about Miroslov Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace (one of the finest texts I read this year). I thought of this quote when Volf argued that at the center of the human predicament is the icy and unforgiving irreversibility of our actions…making forgiveness the only real resource for negotiating our condition. But my reading group was amused when I made this connection for them…with a straight face.
[5] The ones my library had on audio, and admittedly, not his best know or liked.
[6] One of the books I will write about next time surveyed the rise and history of ‘youth culture’ from the 1930’s to the 1960’s…crediting this phenomenon with substantial influence in the development of our economy, culture and social conventions. But it is interesting that ‘youth’ as a subculture continues to segregate itself to the point that literature has been subdivided in just the last dozen years.
[7] He also deconstructs the centrality of romance to the teenage life, which together might be just about the greatest service youth literature could offer its demographic…and in stark contrast to the pandering that generally typifies this genre on both topics (see Twilight et al).
[8] There is a great moment in the second season of Louie where CK and a friend are having an argument and then an arguing couple walked by them and they realize the absurdity and self-involvement betrayed by their argument and just kind of giggle and say good bye despite the gravity of the topic. There was no such moment of self awareness leading to self skepticism. I know this is too much to ask of teenagers, but it isn’t too much to ask of thoughtful thirty-somethings writing for teenagers.
[9] I suppose if Babbit had died (rather than nearly bored me to death) I would have put that book in the same category.
[10] So I made this hard distinction between narrative and fiction because I include narrative non-fiction in essentially the same category as fiction. But this is the only non-fiction narrative I read.
[11] In Cold Blood comes to mind as another example of this.
[12] I have also found that an understanding of the 19th century history of a place gives you entre into more meaningful conversations (which basically boils down to better follow up questions) with those who live there.
[13] I once sent a short story I wrote to my friend Tiffany who is an English professor. Several of her comments stuck with me, but the one I have thought the most about was ‘you do not seem to love your character.’ I have given a lot of thought to whether you can write successful fiction without loving your character…but I do not think you can write successful non-fiction without that predisposition to find the lovely and good and the comprehensive observation that characterizes the lover.
[14] I think the best movie we actually saw this year was A River Runs Through It, but to list a mid-90’s film in a 2011 retrospective is too embarrassing…even for me. But it should be noted that we also liked The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Henry Ford, which means that three of the top 8 or so movies we saw this year had Brad Pitt in them.
[15] And their reward for artistic excellence, Community was suspended and Louie could not attract enough advertisers to move from the 10:30 slot to 10:00…on FX. CK told a story that they showed an episode to a mainstream advertiser and the company actually thought that it was a prank – unable to believe a show like this is actually on television. If you show your program to a corporation and it is so original that they think it is fake, you might be onto something.
[16] So some of my friends will find him unwatchable…and I appreciate and respect that. From time to time students will ask me what I think of The Wire and I have started to respond “It is my favorite show ever and I cannot remotely recommend it.”
[17] I have started a post on Louie and self skepticism. But regular readers will note that few posts I mention ever make it onto the blog. I have something like a 30% completion rate.

Purposeful Epistemological Self Limitation (or why Methodological Naturalism is like Soccer)

2011-12-12T06:09:00.000-08:00

I love playing soccer. I love being part of a team built on unspoken communication and the ability to predict each other’s behavior.[1] I love the finesse and the hard work.[2] I love the thwack of the netting as a well struck ball finds the upper corner of the goal. And mostly I love the contact. I just really like getting hit a couple times a week. It reminds me of a part of myself that lies dormant in the coffee shops, cubicle, class rooms and play grounds that compose most of the rest of my life.

So, it does not occur to me to object to the arbitrary limitations placed on hand usage in the game. The self limitation of our most trusted appendages is part of what makes the game interesting. I love the game and so I play by its rules.

In fact, I have gotten so comfortable with these rules, that I have forgotten how un-natural they are…until I had a second born. My two-year-old refuses to limit the use of her hands[3] when we play soccer to the endless frustration of my four-year-old.[4] But this reminds me of my earliest days playing the game. Youth soccer is plagued by ‘hand balls’ because there is nothing more natural for an eight-year-old in the heat of competition than to reach out and grab a contested ball. Part of the early training in soccer is the discipline of self-limitation of highly useful parts of our self.

And we gladly submit to this self limitation, because, as I have established, I love soccer. The rest of my life is enriched by this activity that requires a measure of self limitation. Chasing a ball in a competitive framework burns about twice as many calories per hour than running and, according to my wife, I have more domestic patience if I get to ‘battle’ other dudes a couple times a week.

But when the buzzer goes off, and the game is over, my hands and arms are immediately employed in their standard useful activity. I pick up my bag…I ice my aging joints…I clean off the blood…I drive home…I hug my wife…I hold my baby. You see, the reason self limitation is useful is because it is restricted to an appropriate arena.

If it wasn’t restricted, it would be disability.
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Now there is another game I love. I love science.[5] I love the story. I love the paradox. I love the resolution of paradox. I love that reality is ‘not only strange than we thought but stranger than we could have imagined.’ I love discovery and understanding. I even enjoy the reluctant release of a mistaken hypothesis. And I enjoy much of the technology that the enterprise has generated. I love science.

But in some ways, science is just like soccer. The rules of the game…part of what makes the game fruitful and fun…include counter-intuitive self limitation. Science presumes ‘methodological naturalism.’ It requires a temporary renunciation of metaphysics…the suspension of teleology. And just like youth soccer, this takes some getting used to, because we are fundamentally teleological beings, accustomed to employing our metaphysical faculties and finding them useful.[6]

The lab is a ‘world without windows.’[7] It presupposes a closed universe. Methodological naturalism focuses us epistemologically to recognize the aspects of our reality that are repeatable and knowable through by measurement and experimentation. But we can make the mistake to think that because these are the only things science can know, that they are the only things that can be know. Soccer is a fantastic game, but it would be a tragic lifestyle. Science is a fantastic method, but it is a tragic world view.

When the ‘buzzer goes off’ in the lab and I walk out into a beautiful evening and I hug my wife and I hold my baby and I play ‘soccer’ with my daughters and I read poetry and let a flat screen of my laptop tell me stories and read ancient texts with insight into reality…it is time to set aside the self limitation of methodological naturalism and experience reality as a person…with my metaphysical faculties engaged. It is time to let science feed teleology and live under the auspices of a broader, more robust epistemology.

The reason self limitation is useful is because it is restricted to an appropriate arena. If it wasn’t restricted, it would be disability.

This post was written while listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron and Wine
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[1] In other words, on knowing each other. A soccer team that is also a human community is usually a more competitive team.
[2] Sadly, not in that order. I have aged as a soccer player much more rapidly than others. I was Varsity captain and a league All Star in high school. But it was all speed, hard work, set pieces and an unexpectedly competent shot from outside the box (for a nerd…the ‘surprise effect’ of being a competent nerd on the pitch is considerable). I ran track and had a rigorous physical conditioning regimen for a high schooler…so I was just in better shape than almost anyone in the league. But none of my soccer coaches ever actually played soccer. So I never learned foot skills or developed an appreciable ‘soccer IQ’. This is a problem in my mid-thirties. The speed and conditioning advantage has been lost in the slow march to senescence (and a schedule that includes actual responsibilities). This shouldn’t be a problem in the over-30 league, because we are all in the same position, left only with our foot skills and whiles…only, I don’t have any. So I watch the competitive gap between myself and an average player widen (in the wrong direction) the older I get.

I once posted a ‘free agent’ announcement that read “hard worker, reliably shows for games, pays on time, good motor, decent shot, mediocre ball skills.” The sad thing is that I was overselling my ball skills. The sadder thing is I got offers.
[3] I recently took the girls to several UCD volleyball games because one of the senior starters is part of the campus Christian community we are involved in. We love introducing the girls to admirable young women who are kind and strong…who embody the best of grace and power (which describes or friend Katie). Ever since, Aletheia has asked to play ‘volleyball’ instead of soccer because she has realized that sports exist that don’t impose silly hand restrictions.
[4] Here are some additional, gratuitous, Soccer pics of my 4-year. So far, she is like her daddy. She is an average dribbler, but she’s a hard worker and can drop the hammer. One of the other dads told me his son came home and told him ‘Charis kicks the ball so hard.’

[5] I went to the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco for the first time this week. It is the biggest conference I have ever been to…and the least practical. I usually go to applied science or engineering conferences. But the pure beauty of the explored earth sings. Pure science is like art in a lot of way. It requires public funding (or rare and generous patronage) to be possible…so getting to do it is a privilege not a right. But I think a society is ennobled by resourcing both.
[6] There are a number of famous recognitions of this. Most famously Francis Crick argued that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” Even in my own intro to Ecology class, the venerable Dr Shapiro encouraged us that ‘we have to be ever cautious of teleological thinking.’
[7] Though, for most labs, this is not only metaphorically, but also literally true.

The Interminable Statistical Tail of Plastic Fruit: A Monte Carlo Analysis of Hi Ho Cherry O!

2011-11-30T06:24:00.000-08:00

I remember playing and enjoying the game Hi Ho Cherry O! as a kid. It is just the kind of unskilled experiment where individuals vest arbitrarily in the outcome of a random number generator that children[1] enjoy. But I recently oversaw a game between two three-year-olds that went on, and on, and on. The toddlers patiently awaited the outcome, spinning and obeying the spinner with surprising, unquestioning[2], attention. But I was losing my mind. So I occupied it by wondering if the game was statistically stable. It was a question that occupied me well past the termination of the interminable match. So I wrote a Monte Carlo analysis to answer it.

In case you are unfamiliar, here are the terms of this particular random number generator: The object of the exercise is for one party to achieve a score of +10.[3] There are seven equally likely outcomes for each random event, including four positive outcomes, a +4, a +3, a +2 and a +1 event. On the negative side, there are two -2 events.[4] So far it seems like a problem that would rapidly converge to a +10 solution. However, it is the seventh outcome (the third negative outcome) that adds the dramatic non-linearity. The ‘bucket spill’ event resets a player’s score to zero, meaning that it can register anywhere between 0 and -9…counteracting the convergent positive bias of the event.

The Results: The ‘bucket spill’ event does, in fact, produce a highly skewed distribution of play time. In 50,000 simulated games the average game lasted 9 turns (18 spins) but the longest game lasted 71 turns (142 spins) and there is a non-trivial probability (~5%) of a game that lasts more than 20 turns (40 spins).

Now, aren’t you glad I’m blogging again? I mean, seriously, where would the internet be without this kind of essential analysis?[5]

This post was finished[6] while listening to The Recluse by Cursive

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[1] And adults, if the popularity of fantasy football is any indication…or the ability of adults to vest in one of those ’racing dots’ on the jumbotron at major sporting events. This, incidentally, is why the ‘sausage race’ (which is as near to literal and as far from ‘disturbing euphemism’ as it possibly could be) is one of the great intermission events in all of sports. The outcome is uncertain and anything can happen (including assault by a player). It is easier to vest and cheer with gusto for the Italian Sausage or Bratwurst. There is an insight here about the theology of election or philosophical determinism or openness theology, but I have committed to make this an entirely un-philosophical post, so I refuse to explore it. (Though, actually, I find the philosophy of time practically impenetrable, so really I am just punting. It’s a blog. I am satisfied to make the connection between sausage racing and election – I don’t necessarily need to analyze it.)
[2] Besides a few attempts at “Subtle Cheating.”
[3] The actual length of the game is driven by the difficulty toddlers have in hanging little plastic cherries on cardboard trees. I suspect the pedagogical value is as much in fine motor skills as it is in counting.
[4] Apparently birds and dogs both consume cherries in pairs. We had cherry trees when I was a kid and I can report that this seriously undervalues the consumptive potential of birds and overvalues canine appetite for fruit. But, back to the statistics…
[5] Seriously, though, here is the short term plan. I will run short pieces (mostly of more import than this one), a Fragments and Links, and my 2011 books post through the end of the year and then will do a 2-5 part series on campus dating and sexuality (including another nerdy statistical post, some thoughts on Donna Freitas’ Sex and the Soul, and hopefully reflections on Beth Bailey’s From the Front Porch to the Back Seat: A History of Dating – the two most scholarly yet helpful texts I have found on the topic) in January leading up a talk I am going to give on the topic.
[6] I am actually listening to a play list that is composed of ‘bookmarked’ songs from Pandora that I finally just bought.

Theo-Coleopteraphelia: Actually, “An inordinate fondness for beetles” is precisely what I would expect

2011-11-15T06:41:00.000-08:00

There is a famous[1] exchange between the early, flamboyant, population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane[2] and a nameless, religious inquirer. In response to the question “What can we learn about the Creator from biology?”Haldane responded:

“An inordinate fondness for beetles.”[3]

You see, Coleoptera compose nearly a quarter of all described species. So many biologists cite this quote[4], from this famous, charismatic, atheist,[5] as a sort of snarky shot at all things teleological. If God exists, he is a beetle-fancier. Well, first, that would put him in excellent company:

But upon review, isn’t that exactly what you would expect of the God described in the Christian Scriptures? Doesn’t it seem consistent with a God who said “Blessed are you who hid these things from the wise and revealed them to babes” and “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”[6] and “those who are last will be first” to hide the great pinnacle of his creative glory in an unassuming basal trophic level.

My friend Justin has said something like: “the trajectory of the naturalist invariably gravitates from charismatic species to insects.”[7] I have found this to be true. The deeper I get into the ecology rabbit hole, the more entranced I become with insects. Otters and polar bears are the ‘gateway drug’ to the intoxicating world of biological diversity.

It is precisely this kind of God who would not ‘dance’ for the miracle seekers and who prefers a measure of hiddeness that would make this unassuming organism replete with wonder. It is precisely the kind of God who counter-intuitively embeds his glory in unassuming ‘jars of clay,’[8] and who chooses particularly unremarkable human institutions (e.g. the wandering Hebrews in the first testament and the church in the second) to make himself know, who builds the best part of reality ‘just beneath the surface’, whose ‘theme and variation’ artistry would center for nearly a quarter of its production on the most unassuming of his makings.

Upon further review, a special fondness for beetles is precisely what I would expect.

This post was written while listening to Major/Minor by Thrice[9]

Beetle image from here
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[1] It is uncited and has been considered apocryphal by some. But Gould devotes an entire essay in Dinosaur in a Haystack to the validation of this quote and generates a compelling body of evidence.
[2] Haldane is an interesting thinker outside of his early contributions to population genetics. His other famous quote is: “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
However, less famously, he provided the raw materials for Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (which I don’t love, but cannot totally dismiss…I’ll do a post on it someday…but until then): “It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” -"When I am Dead" in Possible Worlds (1927) This led at least one author to suggest that despite being a Marxist and a materialist, Haldane ‘was an unabashed mystic.’
[3] If this wasn’t Haldane, it was certainly a ‘deutero-Haldane’, of an ‘editor of the Haldane school’ because it has the right content, tone and vintage. And yes, I am extremely pleased with myself for coining ‘deutero-Haldane.’ That has got to be the best biology IM-sports team name in history.
[4] Roughly half a dozen of my professors and introductory texts have related this quote.
[5] What most people don’t know is that the other great, early population geneticist R.F. Fisher, (and a professional as well as personal rival of Haldane) was a devout Christian. None other than Dawkins argued that Fisher was the ‘greatest of Darwin’s successors.’ It is often overlooked that the history of evolution is replete with substantial Christian contributors (particularly plucky Anglicans).

My area of emphasis advisor in the Ecology department gave a lecture where he discussed the complicated relationship between these two men including a widely believed (though, possibly apocryphal story) that Haldane stormed out in protest in the middle of prominent scientific meeting. Only he had stormed out into a closet. But he stayed in the closet until the room had cleared rather than emerging and admitting his mistake.

[6] This is a favorite verse for people to mock because it is so counterintuitive. My favorite shots at it are a vintage onion article where the Pope revokes the blessed status of the meek and the exchange in Firefly (deleted scene) where Captain Mal says “More than 70 earths spinnin' about the galaxy, and the meek have inherited not a one. ...” (btw, how is that for nerd cred, quoting deleted Firefly scenes.)
[7] This is a paraphrase. I couldn’t find the quote. But the insight is his.
[8] Paul’s famous description of the Church in 2 Corinthians 4.
[9] I am going to see NT Wright speak on Wednesday. I described it to one friend as similar to going to see a band live. I like live shows because they infuse a fundamentally consumerist transaction with a modicum of relationship. They help make art something more human than commerce. Connecting artist and patron in a personal venue enlarges affection and helps the relationship transcend a crass consumer interaction. I feel the same way about authors. In the next year I will probably spend at least another 1,000 pages with Tom. It will help a lot if there is a veneer of relationship there. So I am going to hear our generations most penetrating and affable theologian speak, not as a sort of celebrity chasing, but as a personal subsidy to our already substantial (though asymmetrical) relationship.

Blowing off the Blogging Cobwebs

2011-11-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/032007/the-computer-demands-a-blog.gif

Well I went 0 for October on posts. But I’m afraid that occasional black outs are the only way I am going to be able to sustain this blogging thing. October included a stretch of 5 campus talks in 3 weeks…so that is where most of my creative energy went. As always, links to those talks can be found here.

But I have a few things lined up to run in the coming weeks, including a number of short pieces, a mostly music Fragments and Links post, and, eventually, a 2011 in books post. So stay tuned, for a strong (for me) end to 2011.

This post was written while listening to the Thrice[1] channel on Pandora.
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[1] I went to the Thrice concert in Sacramento last Sunday. It was great. And then I found this. Turns out Dustin Kensrue also has three kids abut the same age as mine (all under 4). I love that he can still bring it.

Why I am a Christian Despite Evidence to the Contrary (or Testing the R-squared of a World View)

2011-09-26T06:52:00.001-07:00

Human brains try to make sense of the data of the world and of our consciousness, organizing it into a system with coherence and correspondence to reality. We craft a world view to explain a diverse range of empirical, psychological and social data. But there is a saying in science that if you want to measure a trend, never measure more than two points because the more data you have the less likely it will be that you can explain it with an elegant model. And that is the problem in the data-rich[1] post-modern culture is that it is hard to hold together with a simple, parsimonious model. Conflicting data leaves any world view that seeks generality in a position of cognitive dissonance.[2]

Science has dealt with this problem for decades. We use statistics to evaluate the ‘fit’ of explanatory models, which allows us to evaluate the extent to which the model explains empirical reality, while remaining agnostic with respect to factors causing observations do diverge from the model. We call this ‘goodness of fit’ analysis.

This gets to the problem with our discourse, be it political, theological, or marital. We assume that singular data points can make and break a model, without considering how the model performs in explaining the overall data set. For example, while there are very good Christian approaches to reconcile the Biblical creation narrative and the evolutionary narrative,[3] the materialist, naturalist, and even positivist world views fit that data point better. However, when it comes to two of the most fundamental empirical observations that our models of reality have to explain: existence and consciousness,[4] theistic worldviews outperform the secular options.

The problem with talk about, say ‘the problem of evil’ or ‘the fine tuning of the universe’ is that it divorces a single data point and goes all in on a single observation, when the way to evaluate a world view is on overall goodness of fit. Consider the following cartoon of a data set of empirical observations.

There is no simple, elegant model that will explain all of the variability in this data. Even the best possible fit will do well on certain data points and poorly on others. World view selection should not be a process of precisely explaining all of the variation, but optimizing the goodness of fit and then going to work on the residuals.

Some worldviews will explain individual observations better than the optimal world view but will have a poorer overall ‘goodness of fit.’ Consider the two following models of reality. Both are parsimonious and therefore, both have ‘residuals[5]’ for all data points. Notice, world view 1 is a better overall explanatory model of the observations, but world view 2 provides a better explanation of some of the data (e.g. it generates a smaller residual with the problematic data point highlighted). In the simplest statistical language, we can measure the goodness of fit of a model by its r-squared (where a ‘high’ r-squared corresponds to a good fit[6] and a ‘low’ r-squared corresponds to a poor fit). [7]

This changes our approach to reasonable discourse; because the ‘best fit’ world view does not have to provide the best explanation for every observation…it just has to provide the best overall explanation of all observations. So it is totally reasonable to say stuff like “Yeah, I think your world view provides a better explanation of this issue. That reduces my goodness of fit (r-squared) but not enough to change my working model of reality.”

Atheism can have a better explanation of the problem of evil[8] and origins but has higher residuals on the ‘anthropic principle,’[9] contingency, universal impulses for justice and beauty, existence and consciousness. Being explicit about the requirement to fit multiple, diverse data points with a world view adds context to the discussion of any one. Atheism is coherent, credible, and compelling, but, from my perspective, Christianity has a higher r-squared. Same with Islam, which has lower residuals on a few observations (different ones than Atheism) but overall has a lower r-squared[10] as I compute the sum of the residuals:

And this is where confirmation bias can be so powerful. By focusing our attention (and the attention of others) on observations that our world view explains well, we can create the illusion of a best fit. This is one of the reasons I try to read and study broadly and outside of my tradition. By reading secular literature and residing in academic disciplines that tend to be antagonistic to my world view, I can honestly identify the places where my world view returns high residuals. But I have also come to believe that Christianity offers the ‘best fit’ to my empirical, psychological and mystical experience.[11]

An alternative to this is to go with a more complicated model that explains more of the data. This is where pluralism has been so successful. Pluralism complicates the model to explain more of the data and decrease the residuals. However, it is not a parsimonious model and so it does not add much explanatory information to the data. It has no generality. It is just a restatement of the data. This decreases the residuals, but is too contrived to be likely.

Additionally, it has been popular for the ‘new Atheists’ to compare Christianity to ‘extinct’ ancient relations (like Egyptian or Babylonian religious systems) or, and arbitrary imaginary one (they enjoy ‘the church of the flying spaghetti monster’[12]).

But this is not a useful argument. Those world views have no serious contemporary adherents because, they not only have dismal r-squared, but they do not provide a superior explanation of a single observation. Their residual is higher than serious contemporary world views on EVERY observation.

This process of evaluating the goodness of fit is something everyone does either implicitly or explicitly. This is why world view allegiances change so infrequently. World view adherence has inertia of past residual computation. So even if a conversation or a book changes you residual on one or two observations, overall goodness of fit only changes over time. ‘Sudden’ world view changes (like Updike’s patriarch in Lilies of the Valley who loses his faith while walking down the stairs in one day, or CS Lewis’ motorcycle ride where he reports that at the beginning he wasn’t a Christian and at the end he was) are really the result of a process of the long term evaluation of residuals finally shifting the balance to a different model.

This post was written while listening to The Animal Years by Josh Ritter

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[1] Re: the famous maxim that a culture that is data rich is attention starved.
[2] There are three major ways that emerging generations deal with this cognitive dissonance. (1) Uncritically adopt the prevailing model and stop taking data to assess it. This leaves more time for economic pursuits, video games or hooking up. This seems to be the most popular approach. (2) Adopt pieces of classical and innovative models ad hoc. It is pretty common for us to maintain compartmentalized and contradictory models of reality and apply them to different problems in our lives. (3)Adopt a well attested, historical metanarrative (e.g. positivism, Christianity, Islam, existentialism**) and either ignore or actively work to resolve the cognitive dissonance that it generates with data that doesn’t fit well, making adjustments where necessary, but keeping the central assertions intact.
**footnote to footnote: Anyone who has read this blog for very long knows that existentialism has been employed effectively by Christians and atheists. Most of my favorite nineteenth century Christian thinkers (Kierkegaard, Pascal and Dostoevsky) are counted as proto-existentialists. And most of my favorite atheists (Camus, Sartre, Foucault) were existentialists. But I am using it here in the later sense as a non-theistic alternative to positivism (because despite the recent popularity of positivism, I just don’t find it credible enough to afford it the status of a ‘credible historic metanarrative’). In my opinion existentialism is, by far, the most workable form of atheism. I have found positivism entirely useless in moving from ‘how things are’ to ‘how should I live,’ which a world view absolutely must do.
[3] I am doing a seminar that will cover at least a dozen such attempts in a couple weeks. Look for an MP3 to show up on this site and/or the preaching site.
[4] Why is there something instead of nothing? And why do we, as loosely bound collections of elements, cohere as a ‘self’?
[5] A residual is a quantification of the deviation between the observation and the model. For example, linear regression optimizes the ‘best fit’ model by minimizing the mean square of the residuals.
[6] Lower sum of the square of the residuals.
[7] I am using linear regression here as a heuristic which, of course, is an absurd analogy…but it is intuitive and makes the case I am trying to make.
[8] We live in a vacant, uncaring universe and only exist as individuals because every generation that donated genetic material to our collection got that genetic material into future generations primarily through violence, seduction or deception…so of course that is how we treat each other.
[9] Seriously, Dennitt, Dawkins et al. seem a little absurd mounting such a virulent assault on theism from their self-declared empirical high ground only to invoke the entirely non-falsifiable (and empirically unattested) Smolinian parallel universes to respond to ‘fine tuning’ arguments. The anthropic principle isn't a slam dunk for theism. But our interlocutors ought to have the courage to cede the lower residual to Christianity and then try to claim the better overall fit. It would be a more honest conversation.
[10] Than both, in my opinion.
[11] It is confirmation bias for atheists to restrict observations to those that are measurable. Our experiences of consciousness and what sociologists call the broad human experience of transcendence (in various forms) are observations the model has to account for. Those of us who have had limited direct experiences of transcendence tend to have a higher tolerance for substantial residuals on the mystical data. But a model still has to account for them.
[12] This is not philosophy, or even rhetoric…this is bullying. To compare Christianity to ancient Egyptian religions may not be accurate, but at least it is fair. The ‘flying spaghetti monster’ stuff is just douchey. It is an example of a common tactic in this literature to shame or ridicule rather than argue. It is an appeal to vanity (you are dumb, you don’t want be dumb do you, be smart) rather than reason. The rhetorical term for this is ‘horse laugh’ and it is effective for changing minds (because of its appeal to vanity) but is an example of precisely the kind of argument outside of the arena of ‘reasonable discourse’ that they accuse theistic proponents of.

Jacob and the Dragon: How Revelation Chapter 12 is like Lost episode 117

2011-09-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Last year I met with a student who was really interested in the cosmic context of the Bible (e.g. what happened before God created, where did angels come from, why did God create…totally impenetrable questions like that). The Christian scriptures are mostly silent on these things. A lot of the most direct information we have on them is near the end of this 1000 page book (in the cryptic “dragon chapter” - Revelation 12[1]). The student posed the obvious question, “why is the first information we get about the beginning, at the end.” Great question. Here is my take on it. The Christian Scriptures are not a paleo-history text, they are a story that we are invited to join. So they often unfold with characteristic narrative flair.

And that’s why Revelation chapter 12 is works in the narrative structure of the Christian Scriptures like the penultimate episode of Lost.

In episode 15 of the final season of Lost,[2] 117 episodes into the story, with scarcely 2.5 hours of narrative remaining, the story went off timeline.[3] It told the story of the ancient history of the island and the cryptic origin of the good and evil characters.[4] As the narrative was building to a climax, JJ took an entire episode to finally let us in on the back story…because the ending would be more meaningful in light of the back story. Back story is tedious until we care about the story.[5] Jacob’s origin only mattered to us because we cared about Jack, Kate and Hurley[6]. This seems like a pretty good parallel for why the pre-Genesis material in the Bible lands 99.4% of the way into the book.

The stuff in Revelation about the angelic fall is temporally situated before the rest of the story. But that is kind of the point. The Bible is a story of God’s protracted rescue of our wayward species…his inversion of the human predicament. Pre-historic[7] cosmic warfare is not the point of the story. It is a different story.[8] And it is only revealed near the end of the narrative where it casts light[9] on the climactic scene of the story being told.

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[1] Generally I ascribe to a preterist interpretation of Revelation (i.e. most of it was apocalyptic code about the Nero persecutions and is neither about the distant past or distant future) but I kind of think Revelation 12 is an exception.
[2] I am considering episodes 16 and 17/18 a single narrative whole, making 15 the penultimate episode.
[3] Which is an odd thing to say about a show that played so much with timelines.
[4] So, I really like JJ. We were into Alias and really liked Lost. But the guy makes things up as he goes along. This is how the Bible is different than Lost. The Bible knows where it is going from the beginning. Genesis points elegantly towards Revelation, through the lens of the gospels. Lost had to add previously unintroduced characters several seasons in just to escalate the narrative enough to sustain a ratings cash cow.
[5] I mean, who would voluntarily sit down and read the Similarion as a stand alone work.
[6] Frankly, mostly Hurley.
[7] I was going to write pre-paleozoic…but I’m not sure I can place it temporally with that kind of accuracy. In City of God, Augustine places the whole angelic narrative in Genesis 1:1. But depending on how you read Genesis 1-3 (something I will be talking about in the fall and, so, will probably trickle into this blog) it is conceivable that these events could have occurred during some era of earth paleo-history.
[8] One I look forward to hearing, but mostly do not know. But it is worth noting, if there is another grand story that we only have hints at, how many other stories are there for us to hear and tell in an eschatological existence. Reality is likely far more drama rich than we know.
[9] Um, there is a bad pun here given that the whole Lost series was about some light in the middle of the Island. I am reserving my thoughts on the Lost finale for another post (in which I’ll argue that the Lost finale left me with precisely the same senses of satisfaction and disappointment as the Battlestar Galacitca finale). This post should come out with my characteristic relevance…which is to say, within a decade of airing.

The ‘Ideal Free Distribution’ of Professional Incompetence: Applying Patch Dynamics to the Workplace

2011-08-14T15:19:00.000-07:00

There is a model in behavioral ecology called the “Ideal Free Distribution.”[1] It argues that as animals look for resources they will deplete the ‘patches’ in their range to the same level of yield (an ‘equal reward rate’). A highly productive patch will attract more organisms until competition is sufficient to justify moving to a lesser quality patch that is less densely populated (and, therefore, has a higher yield of food or mates[2]). Therefore, if the basic assumptions hold[3], all patches, regardless of quality, will be depleted to the same yield or reward rate. Any higher quality or less populated patch would simply attract more organisms until the yield drops to the level of the other patches making the migration unprofitable.

The longer I work, the more I think that this is similar to how the workplace operates. I call it my theory of the equilibrium of workplace incompetence. Any workplace is composed of individuals of varying capability and capacity. Every organization has high capacity people[4] and others that are not so much. But if an organization is looking to optimize total performance, rather than individual performance[5] the high capacity people, with a track record for finishing difficult tasks efficiently, will attract more and harder tasks until their capacity is exceeded, relegating them to a level of incompetence comparable to a low capacity worker muddling through a couple projects.

So, regardless of our capability and capacity, we all go home at night feeling overwhelmed and outmatched. This is part of what Genesis 3 calls the ‘toilsome’ nature of work. But it is also what makes work such an intoxicating and devastating ‘god’[6]. Working harder and building your capacity only make you available for more and harder work. The quest to transcend incompetence has inescapable negative feedbacks.

Post Script[7]: Implications for Sabbath

I am convinced that this ‘ideal distribution of workplace incompetence’ is just one of the reasons why we have to build a stopgap of Sabbath and rest into our lives and refuse to allow our vocation to define our value. I love my job, but it does not love me. It makes a vicious god.[8] It needs to be carefully ‘bounded’ by the discipline of Sabbath. But I think one of the reasons Sabbath is underrated is that it is poorly executed.

In John Walton’s commentary on the opening verses of Genesis 2 he argues that “Both roots (of the word Sabbath) sbt and nwh, move away from the all-too-common misconception of rest and relaxation…The idea of refreshment is most likely.”

We tend to equate the idea of a cessation of work with a commencement of entertainment. The common idea is that “I’ve worked hard, now I just want to veg.” But the discipline of Sabbath is meant to create a boundary around your work to keep it from rising to the level of idolatry and to fill the other time with activities that ennoble and rehabilitate our human capacities that the toils of work deaden. By bounding our work with deliberate and purposeful refreshing we might be able to destabilize the incompetence feedbacks…or at least, we can break their psychological power over us.

This blog was written while listening to Sigh no More[9] by Mumford and Sons
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[1] Fretwell and Lucas 1970
[2] If there is not a sociology study that tests this model with the Friday/Saturday evening bar scene there should be.
[3] And, ecology, like economics, is mostly a study of where, when and how the assumptions don’t hold. The interesting thing about patch dynamics is that it is built on an economic model, so many of the assumptions violated are the same assumptions violated in economics (e.g. rational actors).
[4] Note: I did not come up with this theory initially by observing my own career, but the career of one of my co-workers who is the highest capacity engineer I know, and always has more work than he can execute.
[5] Engineering (and other professional) offices try to individualize productivity and build in accountability with ‘billable hours’. But at the end of the day, you have to pay everyone (especially if you refuse to get rid of poor performers – or even – in the case of federal organizations - non-tryers) so project funds end up spread around at the managerial level. This is an inter-cubicle performance subsidy. It is a helpful way to distribute risk (e.g. sometimes projects run into trouble and take longer than expected and sometimes you bang them out more quickly than expected)…but in most offices there are consistent ‘givers’ and ‘receivers.’
[6] A pole around which we center our lives and derive our meaning and value.
[7] Frequent readers of this blog know (1) that most of my favorite content is in the footnotes and (2) if I add a post script it was probably the point of the post all along.
[8] I really think this is what the Scriptures mean by an ‘idol’. Something that we love that does not love us back. Unrequited love creates a situation of asymmetrical relational power which can diminish the dignity of the lover. In the language of the Bible ‘God’ is different from an idol because he is into the relationship for more love than we are. He subverts the standard power relations of asymmetrical affection by holding all the power but also most of the affection. This allows us to totally vest in him without doing violence to our dignity.
[9] I love this album. I don’t care if everyone else does too. Isn’t it interesting that in most things you have to apologize for loving something people hate, but in music the more popular something is the more embarrassed you are to admit you love it.

Cities Part 4b: Return to Kansas City

2011-08-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

I traveled to Kansas City last winter and wrote a post about it despite spending less than 48 hours in the city. So when I returned there last week, I figured it was worth a brief follow up travel post.

The first thing of note is that in the 6 days I have spent in Kansas City in my life, I have been there for near record highs and near record lows. It was 109 on Wednesday and was well into the negative double digits when I visited in February. That is a 120 degree swing. I left an apple in my car on Wednesday and when I came back it was literally baked. Which was delicious – I love baked apples. I’m just sayin…

But Kansas City really is a surprisingly fun place…with enough stuff for a second (mostly picture) post.

I was teaching a joint sediment workshop with another sediment specialist. His material included a field day at the Blue River.

This was an urban river which was the site of the biggest civil war battle west of the Mississippi (adding archeological issues to the standard economic, statistical, hydrological, hydraulic and ecological complexities). There are severe flooding and channel degradation issues[1] and we did some cool hydro-geotech testing.

I went running at night when it cooled to a mere 96 degrees. Usually I ran along Brush Creek, which has a really nice running trail along it and is surrounded by classic hotels and one of the higher end shopping and cultural districts. There is even a gondola.

But my last day in town, I went running early in the morning

around the World War I museum.[2]

I also made it to a Royals Game. I love going to ballparks. Especially nice ones. And Kaufman field is a really nice one.

One of the reason I enjoy going to sporting events when visiting a city, is that it is one of the few things you can do with 20,000 to 40,000 of the cities inhabitants. It is a social experience of the place. Unfortunately, the Royals are terrible…only they are better than the hapless Orioles who they were playing…so 20,000 Kansas Cityans is a little on the generous side.

But there was a hilarious moment. Before the game teams often play a montage of the team highlights. So before the game they flashed up this graphic on the big screen.[3]

I thought it was hilarious that they would call their highlight reel ‘Major League Moments’ as if that is the best they can hope for. Even better, they left the screen up there for about 3 minutes…and then just took it down. No highlights. Apparently, the Royals were not even able to clear the bar of moments that seem characteristic of the Major Leagues.

Then there was this building.

I heard a rumor that it was the building used for the climactic scene of Ghostbusters. I didn’t bother to verify this, because it seems like the sort of thing that makes a better story in rumor form. But that is pretty cool and highlights the eclectic nature of Kansas City architecture.

This post was written while listening to the Mumford and Sons channel on Pandora

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[1] It also runs through the zoo, near the ‘Lagoons of Africa’ which led to a number of jokes about it being a unique ‘habitat enhancement’ project…for hippos.
[2] At the base of the tower is a mural that I found pretty moving, with soldiers and civilians, some antagonistic, others battered by war, all converging on a strong angelic figure in the center and four verses from the Bible:

“Behold a pale horse and his name that sat on him was death and hell followed with him.”
“Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders.”
“What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.”
“Then shall the earth yield her increase and God even our own God shall bless us.”

[3] Apparently it was the biggest screen in the country until the cowboys put their monstrosity in.

A Musical History According to Youtube – and other short film fun

2011-07-16T15:20:00.000-07:00

I would like to see a Broadway show that tells the story of western intellectual history based totally on Youtube musical numbers. It could start with the Declaration of Independence:

Then it could move on to the great economic debate[1] of the last century.[2]

And then could move on to the history of science with one of the epic rap battles. This one is my favorite (though it contains entirely too much focus on Hawkning’s disability).

“There are one million…million, million, particles in the universe that we can observe
Your mom took the ugliest ones and put them together into one nerd.”[3]

_____________
And while I am punting on a blog post with clips, I might as well make it worth your while. This is one of the finest deconstructions of western plausibility structures I have seen in some time:

“If they eat glitter”

And finally, here are two videos our resident film maker[4] made for our campus ministry. The first one is just fun featuring phenomenal steady cam work:

Hunted. from Matthew Francis Pye on Vimeo.

And, finally, these are just the credits of a telanovella[5] he did to promote one of our events.

La Vida Collegio: Opening Titles from Matthew Francis Pye on Vimeo.

And yes, that is our half-wit bunny that Frank is stroking.

For the second year in a row, a promotional piece he did for us made it into the UC Davis film festival, and, on top of that, a cynical reviewer from the campus newspaper (who panned many of the entries) kind of went on and on about how much he enjoyed this.

This post was written while listening to the Brand New channel on Pandora

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[1] Note: don’t lose patience with this clip in the first 2 minutes. Once they start throwing down, its transcendent. Also, I’d like to say, that the film makers declare Hayek the winner, but portray Keynes so fairly, that I am not sure that they are even justified calling the match based on their own arguments.
[2] Incidentally, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I think the exchange actually demonstrates the difficulty of the choice. I did not understand the stimulus solution and am not sure it was a solution…but can’t refute those who say that we would be catastrophically worse off without it. But I guess that is the point for me. The modern supporters of Hayek (including his rapping self in the video) seem to present their position as an all or nothing alternative...while the Keynesian alternative seems to fit well into an economic ‘toolbox’ where one solution does not fit every problem. The bust/boom cycle is a problem, but I’m not sure that Hayekian models make it better – it seems like they could make it worse.
Incidentally, the bottom-up/top-down processes are at the heart of a lot of the debate about ecological processes over the last 5 decades and, surprise, you cannot account for ecological processes without both.
[3] These epic rap battles are kind of crass, and the earlier ones are better in content than the later ones (thought the production is better in the later ones). But ‘Nice Peter’s’ other stuff is pretty great too. I recommend his picture songs, especially nom, nom, nom, babies.
[4] Matt Pye, a PhD student in plant physiology.
[5] I have asked him to consider to bring this genre back to tell the story of Joseph and Potipher’s wife when we teach Genesis this year.

Judah, Joseph and the Role of Self-Donation in Reconciliation: An Alternate Explanation of Genesis 44

2011-07-02T15:04:00.000-07:00

Introductory Note: I love innovation. I think creativity is one of the things that makes us fundamentally human. But there is one thing I do where I do not value innovation: Biblical Interpretation.[1] In general I try to let the testimony of the historic church and other wise exegetes temper my wild speculations about what a Biblical text means. I do not fully trust my faculties and let the spatio-temporal community offer their checks and balances to keep me honest. Which brings me to this post. I have never understood the story of Joseph and his brothers and have found most commentaries less than persuasive. Last week I finally realized some things about the larger Genesis narrative that seem to put it in focus. I think I finally get it.

Here is the problem. My interpretation seems novel, which makes me hesitant to preach it. So I would like to vet it to a community. You are this community. Please do not hesitate to weigh in with your take on it in the comments section or to pass it on to friends you think might be helpful. Thanks.

Heroes who are not Heroic: Interpreting Hebrew Narrative

One of the biggest mistakes that people make in interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures is assuming that it is a collection of hero stories that tell us how to live. We look at the lives of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, Rebecca and Joseph and try to mine their stories for insights about how to live good, just and beautiful lives. There is just one problem with that. These are horrible people![2] The exegetical gymnastics that authors and preachers sometimes do to find an ennobling lesson from the darker chapters of their lives are often comical, periodically embarrassing and occasionally dangerous.[3]

Christians believe that these texts have to be interpreted Christological, as the narrative of God’s peculiar use of an unremarkable, nomadic, middle eastern tribe to initiate his plan of cosmic redemption for our species. The point of the stories is that he uses people who are alternately horrible and honorable to do this (and often, particularly in the case of Jacob, they forget to alternate to the latter). I think there are two reasons for this:

1) The Bible is not about people. It is about God. And he uses douchenozzels[4] to demonstrate that his purposes in redemption are not contingent upon our frailties. He will win. He will tell a story that ends with justice, beauty, and glory…and it will not be subverted by the bokeness of his friends or enemies (who are often morally indistinguishable).[5]

2) If God can use someone as paradoxically cowardly and courageous as Abraham, or someone as deceitful and industrious as Jacob, or someone as vengeful and prudent as Joseph, for his cosmic narrative of species redemption…then he can use me for the small, localized tasks of redemption he has asked me to be involved in. I am precisely the kind of person God likes to use. And so are you. Being an agent of redemption really is something ‘just anyone’ can do. You do not need to be anything special.

Which brings me to the confrontation between Judah and Joseph in Genesis 44[6], a text I have read dozens of times, but never seen. Now stories that include both Joseph and Judah are interesting because these two men become the two great provinces of the Hebrew Nation:[7] the Northern and Southern kingdoms. Following the Assyrian exile, ‘Judah’ is often shorthand for ‘the people of Israel.’ But that’s weird, because Judah was an enormous a-hole. So it is interesting how this relationship between these two most important sons of Jacob plays out. There are four stories that include these two brothers that becomes an underlying narrative, itself.

Joseph and Judah: The Story within the Story (in Four Acts)

Act 1: The Sale of Joseph

Joseph was the bratty little son of his Father’s favorite wife.[8] And so his brothers decided to kill him. Except one brother, Judah, decides, “why just kill him, when we could profit from this.” So he talks them into selling the boy into slavery and staging his death.

Act 2: The Sex Scenes

The next story we get about Judah placed awkwardly within the story of Joseph’s rise and fall and rise and fall and rise in Egypt. It is a tawdry little tale of Judah’s mistreatment of his daughter in law that ends in her deceiving him into sleeping with her and then publically outing him to extort him into honorable treatment.[9] The placement of the story of Judah’s sexual brokenness seems curious until it is considered as a contrast with Joseph’s sexual integrity in the following passage. [10]

Act 3: Judah’s self donation

Fast forward decades. Joseph is running Egypt, which, because of his ‘insider information with Yahweh’ is the only land that has food in a regional famine. His brothers come to get food and don’t recognize him. What follows is three chapters of mind games as Joseph toys with his brothers. Commentators do all kinds of exegetical gymnastics to explain Joseph’s behavior[11] but I think the parsimonious solution is that Joseph is being a d-bag. He is an emotional mess seeing his brothers (he has to leave the room to cry not once, but twice[12]) and he reacts with an illogical string of actions that seem motivated by a messy mixture of affection and vengeance…but mostly vengeance. The story comes to the head with Joseph threatening to kidnap Benjamin (his only full brother, and his father’s new favorite)…when Judah stands up to him and offers himself instead. In response to this gesture, Joseph breaks down, reveals himself and is reconciled to his brothers.

Act 4: The Will

Before Jacob dies he prophecies over his twelve sons. Joseph and Judah both get honorable treatment but it is clear that the trajectory of God’s rescue operation, his plan of cosmic redemption, will go through Judah’s family…even though Joseph is generally thought of as the most important son. In fact, when we talk about the patriarchs, it is Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph…but this is wrong, the Davidic line goes through Judah…and TAMAR!! Both Matthew and Luke highlight Perez[13] (one of Tamar’s twins by her father in law, Judah) as part of Jesus’ lineage. But more than that, Matthew even mentions Tamar by name in the genealogy, making her the only woman included in the lineage, though she would seem to be the one he would want to forget. I think Matthew is pointing out how his lineage is messianically legit, but messy…making it existentially legit.

Volf, Vengeance and the Role of Self Donation in Reconciliation

Which brings me to Miroslov Volf and the role of self donation in reconciliation. In Exclusion and Embrace Volf deals with the problem[14] that we generally privilege the oppressed morally over the oppressors.[15] And, while nothing seems more unseemly than to morally implicate the oppressed[16], he argues that one of the great violences that oppression does to the oppressed is to force violence into their hearts. The oppressor not only takes their resources and/or dignity, they create the desire for vengeance in the hearts of their victims. So the greatest wickedness the oppressor does is to create wickedness, a network of sleeper cells of future oppressors. This is why history is replete with accounts of power shifts, where the oppressed easily slips into the role of oppressor. The evil of the oppressor is complete. They have fashioned the oppressed in their own image.

Thus “one of the most insidious aspects of the practice of evil (is that) In addition to inflicting harm, the practice of evil keeps re-creating a world without innocence. Evil generates new evil as evildoers fashion victims in their own ugly image.” (81)

And this is what has happened with Joseph. His brothers’ evil against him has made him into them.[17] But Judah has become someone different in the decades since Act 2. There is actually a note of who he had the potential to become at the end of the tawdry episode with Tamar. When she publically embarrasses him, his response was simply: “She is in the right, not me.”[18]

These men did not invent their own brokenness. Their parents had their own soap opera. And the gist of it is that everyone resented the children of the favorite wife (Joseph and Benjamin).[19] But here is Judah, the very one who sold Joseph into slavery, offering himself into slavery in exchange for Benjamin not in spite of him being Rachel’s son but BECAUSE Benjamin is the only remaining son of his father’s favorite wife. This does not justify Jacob’s favoritism, but it shows that Judah cares more about his father (who would die in sorrow if he lost both of Rachel’s sons) than he does about his father’s mistakes.

Volf argues that the cross is the key to reconciliation. That self donation is the only way to break the cycle of violence. And that is what we see in this story. Judah makes Joseph in his own image by selling him into slavery. But then he unmakes that image by offering himself on behalf of the brother he should hate. And so Joseph[20] and Judah become synonymous with Israel. But it is Judah[21], not Joseph, who becomes the conduit of the covenant. And this seems surprisingly apt. Because we know the climax of the story. It is God’s self donation which redeems and disarms his enemies and makes the way for our reconciliation.

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[1] Alternately, conveying the content of these interpretations into a particular culture is a place where not nearly enough creativity is applied.
[2] Mark Driscoll said in his sermon on Gen 4 “The Bible is not a book about good people and bad people…it is a book about bad people and Jesus.”
[3] Dawkins has an account in his angry little book “The God Delusion” where an atheist read the Bible for the first time and found it delightfully full of all manner of embarrassing content. This is why Christians generally steer clear of the OT. Our OT hermeneutics tent to just be an optimistic form of this. But both are exercises in missing the point.
[4] I find it semantically interesting that the various derivatives of the word “douche” has become an unseemly but acceptable pejorative that replaces taboo words. It kind of operates like ‘frack’ (the BSG version not the ‘hunting for gas by shattering shale version’ which has led to the same pun over and over – which, to be fair, is funny every time). Our linguistic rules of taboo are static but language is not.
[5] Genesis often goes out of its way to paint an honorable picture of the Canaanite rulers that the patriarchs interact with. Often the former are more admirable than the latter.
[6] Dan and I are preaching Genesis next year. So I have been studying it for about 3 months and will probably devote over half of my personal study to it for the next 8 months. So, this blog is going to get some Genesis.
[7] The tribes named after Joseph’s sons compose “the Northern Kingdom” referred to as Ephrium, and the other tribes compose the southern kingdom and are often referred to collectively as Judah.
[8] It is often pointed out that the Bible doesn’t forbid polygamy and actually includes multiple examples of it. But the consensus in OT scholarship is that God’s tact on warning us against polygamy is to provide numerous examples of how it goes poorly. There are no Biblical examples of men taking multiple wives where it does not cause them problems.
[9] And, of all the brothers, and all their wives, this the baby produced by this lurid little affair becomes the line of the great Davidic monarchy and of the Messiah. More on this later.
[10] We have laid out our messages for Genesis, and in 18 passages that we are going to teach, this is the only one where we think the author is actually holding up a character as a moral example to be imitated.
[11] And, worse, derive moral principles from it.
[12] Actually, he cries 5 times in the larger story.
[13] The relation of Tamar’s twins is curious. One of the themes of Genesis (and the Hebrew Scriptures in general) is that God is not held to cultural convention or expectation. Not once, does he select the oldest son to propagate his people, with the possible exception of Perez. But not really, because it is not entirely clear who the first born is between Perez and his brother…which goes beyond flaunting the cultural expectation that the first born has primacy to the point of almost mocking the convention.
[14] “From a distance, the world may appear neatly divided into guilty and perpetrators and innocent victims. But the closer we get the more the line between the guilty and the innocent blurs and we see an intractable maze of small and large hatreds, dishonesties, manipulations and brutalizes, each reinforcing the other…Paul strips down the pretense of innocence.” (p 81)
[15] Now anyone who reads the Bible knows God favors the oppressed and calls us to do the same. But Volf argues that that is an epistemological favor, and a call to end opression, not a moral or intrinsic prefernce. The key to Christian interactions with power structures is we must act on behalf of the oppressed without loosing the humanity of the oppressor.
[16] It smacks of “they had it coming”.
[17] And it is not just his treatment of his brothers. It is clear from the story that he uses his God given insight not just to provide relief to Egypt and the surrounding countries, but to extort the working people of those nations and enrich the Pharaoh at their expense. There are two attempts I have seen to defend Joseph’s actions here: 1) he puts the serfdom tax at 20% which is a relatively light burden compared to what he could have required or 2) Goldengay suggests he was just deeply committed to ‘nationalization’ of the agriculture industry to moderate boom-bust cycles (which is hilarious given the animosity US evangelicals have for ‘nationalization’ – and I suggest that this is primarily an attempt at tongue-in-cheek, wink at us by a cheeky brit). But it is this policy that eventually leads to the enslavement of the Hebrews and the necessity of the exodus. So I am inclined to think it was a ‘moral blind spot’ for Joseph, like his vengeance. Now, I can’t believe anyone is still reading this note, but this also illustrates something else I believe. It is difficult to quantify moral or spiritual maturity because it is not univariate. Joseph was sexually virtuous and had business integrity but struggled with unforgiveness and, um, oppression. It doesn’t make him a villain or a hero. It makes him a person. But we tend to overvalue the moral categories we are good at in order to evaluate ourselves as ‘good people’ and undervalue the stuff we suck at. We cannot be plotted neatly on a univariate scale of goodness. We all have moral blind spots.
[18] Genesis 38:26 This is reminiscent of the story of Nathan and David.
[19] And this is probably more than just petty jelousy. Leah’s story is the tale of a woman mistreated by all the men in her life, who responds with bitterness and her own vengeance, until she finally finds a love that will not fail or mistreat her in Yahweh. So you could see how Leah’s 6 sons would hold a grudge against Rachel’s side of the family.
[20] Actually, Eprhium, Joseph’s son.
[21] And Tamar!!!!! Which is just great. Judah is selected to be the tribe of promise, but through their patriarch’s messieiest relationship. As I argued at the beginning, it is a story of redemption in spite of…and often even leveraging crass brokenness. As Joseph himself famously said “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” God’s periodic use of evil to bring about a good good does not condone the evil, but is meant to take the sting out of it until he undoes it for good.

Father’s Day and the Death of Sentimentality

2011-06-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

One of the marks of my generation – a mark I share - is a general incapacity for sentimentality. This means that many of the social commitments that used to be enforced by sentimental notions of faith, family, and duty are mysterious to us. So we end up having to re-craft these roles out of motivations that either emerge from idealist notations of the true, good, and beautiful or out of our pragmatic impulses for self preservation. We usually default to the latter and it usually ends up looking something like this[1]:

Pete: You don't ever think about divorce?

Ruxin: I've thought about it. But I would never do it.

Pete: What, you have like a moral stipulation ...

Ruxin: No. If Sophia and I split up, 50 percent of the time I would have to spend 100 percent of my time with my kid. Right now, I'm rocking like 50 percent coverage 30 percent of my time, you cannot beat those numbers. Also - If we got a divorce, she would get half of my money, making me ostensibly poor, yet still paying her to just get pounded by other dudes, which will happen because she is still smoking hot, whereas I look like a Nazi propaganda cartoon.

And even when we are inspiring, we are not very inspiring.[2]

Yet the divorce rate has been steadily dropping since the 1980’s.[3] We are the children of divorce of the friends of children of divorce. We know sentimentality won’t carry us for decades but we know the fallout of breaking a family sucks. There is a great scene in a French film from a couple years ago[4] where a dying hedonist is talking to the woman engaged to his son, a man with a wandering heart of his own:

Daughter in Law: When I met Sebastien, I said: With him it's forever, there'll be no one else.

Dying Man: I hope it lasts, for your sake. Because, you know, love...

Daughter in Law: No, no, no! Not "love." Mom and Dad talked like that. "Love." I love you. I love you too much. I don't love you. You can't build a life on pop-song philosophy. Love Me Tender. Love, Love Me Not. It's ridiculous. My parents divorced when I was 7. For several years Dad continued to come over for Sunday lunch. Half an hour before he left, I'd vanish. I'd be lying on the ground in front of his car so he couldn't leave. My kids won't go through that. So now my nocturnal pleasures are provided by my giant-screen Toshiba at the foot of my bed.

But deep down, we want to believe that there is something beyond pragmatic resignation.[5] While sentimentality seems foolish, we are a generation that longs to be part of something transcendent.[6]

Which brings me to Father’s day, yet another artifact of a generation that found ways to not only build a life on sentimentality but also built an economy on sentimentality. This Father’s day is a little different for me, because two weeks ago we had our third kid.[7] That’s a lot of kids for a couple of pragmatic Xers who thought zero sounded like a pretty good number 15 years ago. But that is kind of the point. Making the move from sentimentality to pragmatism was not enough for me.[8] I had to go beyond pragmatism to purpose and beauty before I could even entertain the idea of children. I needed a picture of reality that intrinsically[9] ennobled parenthood. I needed a theology of children.

I needed to recognize that I was designed to live for someone else and I needed to stare down the fear of failure and accept the challenge of working with God (and, often, against our cultural inertia) to raise agents of justice, kindness, curiosity, beauty and the gospel in a generation that will be lovely and broken in ways we cannot yet imagine. These fundamental commitments have moved parenthood from pragmatic resignation punctuated by moments of happiness to an ennobling passion and one of the great joys[10] of my life.

This post was written while listening to The New Pornographers station[11] on Pandora

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[1] From the hilarious, but crass FX comedy “The League” which follows four high school friends who stay connected through a fantasy football league.
[2] So many great lines: “She told me many stories about the chinchilla in her class room.” “Do you want to know why your father spends so long on the toilet. Because he’s not sure he wants to be a father.” “So I got up off the toilet.”
[3] This is just one of the things that infuriates me when boomers b&m about ‘kids these days’ and how Xers are ruining the world. We are not innocent. We have our unique generational sins. But we have redeemed some of the brokenness of those who are reluctantly bequeathing this world to us…and are not, on balance, more broken.
[4] The Barbarian Invasions
[5] This is why so many of us wait so long to have kids. My brother likes to say that the benefits of marriage are easy to foresee while the disadvantages are difficult to predict…while children are just the opposite: the advantages are impossible to foresee and the disadvantages are obvious.
[6] We are just unwilling to pretend.
[7] A boy. But it really bugs me when people say ‘you finally got your boy.’ We were not ‘trying for a boy.’ We decided to have a third child. My girls are amazing and I would have loved a third. Or, as it stands, it will be fun to experience raising both.
Also, I'll use this as my excuse for a recently quiet blog...though it is really only part of it.
[8] We were married 9.5 years before we had kids because (a) we didn’t want them and (b) we didn’t think wanting them was a good enough reason to have them.
[9] You will even notice a little of this intrinsic argument that ‘this is what we were designed to do’ in Louis C.K.’s monologue.
[10] I have written a couple posts about the unexpected joys of parenthood: here and here
[11] I once posted a facebook status that read: “I wish I either lived in a universe where I did not like The New Pornographers or that they had a different name.” It spawned a lively discussion.

Easter Reflections on...the Honey Badger

2011-04-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

This is the Honey Badger…He doesn’t give a s#$%![1]

At 5 million views[2], it is likely that you have already seen this. But what you may or may not have seen is the connection between the climactic confrontations with the King Cobra @2:33…and Easter. Of course that is the sort of essential analysis you have come to expect from this little blog.

The first time I saw this clip, all I could think about was Gen 3:14-15 known as the protoevangelium:

14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

Historically, Christians have seen in this verse, the seeds of the entire story…an epic foreshadowing of the entire narrative. Humans would live at odds with each other and a malevolent cosmic force until a special human child will take it on and bring down this enemy at huge personal cost. [3] “He will crush your head and you will strike his heal.”

That’s right, in this analogy, the Honey Badger is Jesus. The story of Holy Week is that a cosmic champion in mortal personhood [4] plays out this script from the opening pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. He takes down the serpant but is mortally wounded in the process.

The days that passed between the cross and the resurrection are like the moments in the video where our hero, the Honey Badger, is overcome by the snake bite[5]. In those seeming interminable clicks of the YouTube clock, his bravery looks like foolishness.[6] We don’t have the data to do the toxicology in our heads but we know that the King Cobra is mythically deadly. Surely the Honey Badger could not survive that. The first time I watched this clip, I mourned the protagonist in those moments, sure he was dead. But he knows something about being a Honey Badger that we don’t. He is actually far more bad ass than we ever guessed.

And that is the story of Holy Week. Jesus lets the serpent bite him instead of us…because he can take it. He can emerge on the other side of death and wrap up his victory over the decimated serpent.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (another, more intentional, illustration of the events of Holy Week), when Aslan emerges from death, he says:

“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.[7] Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.[8] She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack[9] and Death itself would start working backward."

The Honey Badger’s fearlessness (he really doesn’t give a s$#%) is motivated by appropriate confidence that the serpent mortal bite can only inflict a fleeting death…that he will emerge the victor[10] and that the cost is worth the prize. It is a deeply flawed illustration[11], but one that I has captured my imagination this week. I hope that you find this weekend reflective and life giving.

This post was written while listening to The Suburbs by The Archade Fire
__________________________
[1] So, there is more colorful language in my latest two posts than in the previous hundred. This should not be considered a trend (though I really want to work a Tim Minchum song into a post I am working on…so there might be a little more to come).
[2] And rightly so. This is a perfect YouTube clip because it works on two levels. The narration is hilarious but the Honey Badger really is remarkable. It works on the levels of joy and wonder, two of the fuels of our humanness.
[3] Revelation 12 paints the picture of these events as an epic battle between a cosmic champion and a serpentine dragon. I am working on a post about how this chapter is like Lost episode 118.
[4] As long as we are making strained comparisons between the gospel accounts and a silly four minute YouTube clip…the comparison is actually uncanny. Jesus spends the first half to 2/3rds of the gospel texts declaring a new mode of humanness and a new reign of Yahweh…demonstrating his authority over the dark forces that plague our existence. Then each of these texts spends a disproportionate amount of time on the climactic confrontation in the final week. This is not unlike the Honey Badger wreaking havoc on lesser serpents and vermin in the first half of the clip and then turns to the climactic death to life battle at the end.
[5] This is really the only place where I question the artistic choices of our skilled narrator. He shows his hand too quickly, not allowing the tension of the perceived death of our hero to strike us with full force.
[6] Along the lines of Schweitzer’s ‘he threw himself against the cosmic wheel and it crushed him” Christology.
[7] Note: The mystery of the Atonement is a rich and multi-faceted idea. In this post I am stressing the Christus Victor aspects of the doctrine (the oldest and most culturally foreign to us), as Lewis did in his story. However, this does not supplant the Anslelmic ‘satisfaction’ aspects of the cross that evangelicals are more familiar with or the ‘moral example’ implications that Liberal (capital L to indicate a precise theological movement not a political leaning) theologians prefer. Any theology of the cross that champions one of these to the neglect of the others is flawed.
[8] My brother pointed out that the film changed this word from “a different incantation” to “another interpretation” and quipped: “a meditation on that script change will say everything about our culture and the caution I was trying to voice above”
[9] There is a picnic spot in Davis, where I sometimes meet the girls for lunch to watch the trains, that is a big slab of rock split in two…we call it Aslan’s Table.
[10] OK, one more strained parallel. In Christian theology, the cross and resurrection initiate the victory but, of course, the world in general and my heart in particular is still full of all manner of darkness. The victory is implemented over time. One author described the resurrection like D-Day. Once we took the French beach heads in WWII, the outcome of the war was determined. But there was still a lot of suffering, and work and war that was still ahead of them. Thus, after the climactic struggle with the King cobra, the Honey Badger turns his energy to a sustained program of snake eradication.
[11] I’m not suggesting that we respond to the liturgical prompting “He is Risen” with “Yeah, the Honey Badger doesn’t give a s$%^.” And like all parables, it is only intended to illustrate a central idea – not to correspond to the prototype in every detail.

My Name is My Name: Four of my Favorite Clips from The Wire

2011-04-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

I have a new favorite show. Sadly, (if predictably) I’m late to the party and it was over before I started. But I am willing to careen into hyperbole and deem “The Wire” the best television drama of all time.

Now, it took me a while to warm up to The Wire. After each of the first three discs (4 episodes each) I gave up on it. But critical acclaim and repeated urgings from people I respect made me give it second, third and fourth chances. But by the end of the first season I was all in.

I eventually came to realize that the very thing that made the series difficult to get into was the thing that made it transcendent. It is a character driven exploration of human nature. In order to tell real, sustentative, narratives about textured, carefully crafted, characters that behave consistently and ‘ring true,’ we had to get to know them. But once we knew them, they were worth knowing. I didn’t anxiously await each disc to see how the writers would resolve some contrive plot cliff hanger[1]…I stayed up late watching ‘one more episode’ because I wanted to see who these people became.

And then there was Baltimore. I have said all I have to say about art that has a sense of place, but the wire is the prototype. Baltimore is as textured and gorgeous, despite and because of its grit[2] and decay as Omar, Freamon, Snoop or Stringer Bell[3].

It is impossible to summarize the series in a post. Do I write about the moments that left me stunned and literally breathless?[4] Do I write about the grief I felt as ‘the game’ claimed character after character with brutal capriciousness and with indiscriminate ferocity? Do I describe the pervasive corruption in the police, politics and press that mirror the wickedness of the street which succeeded in skirting a preachy and false moral equivalency while illustrating the pervasive fallenness of our condition despite our circumstances? Do I pick out the hilarious moments like the British actor who plays Jimmy practicing a bad British accent or every single monologue by Sgt Landsman that registered a 7.5 on the rictor scale of crassness but managed to be not only hysterical, but sublime? No idea. So I thought I’d just post a little commentary on four clips that contain four of my favorite quotes.

Quote #1 - Dan, my preaching partner, and I could not be more different musically. I openly mock him for his love of Sheryl Crowe and he has declared that my indifference for James Taylor is my most glaring personality disorder. But we agree that The Wire is probably the best television show ever…which makes it awkward that we both love a show we cannot recommend in the college ministry we serve.[5] Plus, we both love to illustrate our preaching with our favorite art, and can almost always think of a perfect Wire clip that is totally unusable. But this clip I plan to use.[6]

“You want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.”

There may not be a better summary of Genesis 3.[7]

Quote #2 And while we are talking about Marlo…Marlo is probably the most chilling character in the series. He is devastatingly understated…almost emotionless. Which is what made this scene so powerful:

“My name is my name”[8]

That there is Marlo’s longest monologue of the show and the clearest insight we get into who he is.

Quote #3 Then there was Omar. Omar was, rightfully, the show’s most beloved character.[9] Picking a best Omar scene is almost impossible. But this one was great[10]:

“I shot the boy mike mike in his hind parts, that all.”

Quote #4 Finally, for all of great narrative and characters, The Wire was most powerful when it cashed in those narratives and characters to make some of the most powerful and precise observations about human nature I have encountered in contemporary small screen art. This is most compelling when the ‘heroes’ talk about ‘the job.’

““The job will not save you Jimmy.”

[11] ‘Righteousness’ can be as destructive as ‘wickedness.’ ‘The job’ can destroy you as sure as ‘the game.’[12] Tim Keller could have written this scene.

And a few more….

This post was written while listening to the Ivoryline Pandora station.
________________________

[1] Seriously, I loved Lost as much as the next guy, but I often felt manipulated.
[2] I am going to skip the whole ‘white guilt’ discussion. There were aspects of the wire that I appreciated because it drew attention to the ‘corner’ culture that my Buffalo kids interacted with. But The Wire isn’t great because of it provides a voyeuristic expose on urban life…the wire is great because it told stories that rung true and connected with my experiences of beauty and brokenness.
[3] Its funny how everyone else can be identified by a single name, but it takes two for “Russell.”
[4] E.g. the simultaneous tenderness and coldness of the Chris/Snoop executions. Or, one of my favorite scenes has two Baltimore drug dealers listening to Prairie Home Companion on their way to NY and one of them starts fiddling with the radio as the station begins to cut out. He thought it was broken. He’d never been far enough away from his corner to realize that radio stations are not static entities.
[5] I have written repeatedly about my frustration with HBO’s gratuitous exploration of ‘boob shots’ in what is otherwise excellent, nuanced, art. Also, I usually have a very high tolerance for words with social taboo, but I found myself thinking in a new and colorful vocabulary after banging through a couple discs of this show. Don’t get me wrong, the dialogue is amazing and the language is perfectly apt and believable, but there is one famous episode where the ‘dialogue’ consists of 38 F-bombs in a row (in about 3 minutes).
[6] I’m going to use the middle scene in the convenient store.
[7] Which I am preaching in the fall.
[8] One of the things I love about it is how it makes sense of a seemingly insignificant detail from a former season (this was always happening). There is a great scene when Marlo is in a power struggle with Bodie and decides to assimilate rather than destroy him. He walks up to Bodie and gets his name wrong a couple times. Bodie, responds “You know my name.” This all reminds me of the theme of Yahweh’s name and the demons asking Jesus his name and visa versa in the first and second testaments. It is the classic example of an illustration that ‘cuts the wrong way’ but there is a really interesting parallel here regarding name and power.
[9] SPOILER ALERT – IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE WHOLE SERIES DO NOT READ THIS FOOTNOTE– Nothing in this show was more controversial than Omar’s death. And, I felt outrage…because he was, in some ways, the show’s moral center. “A man has got to have a code.” But Omar had to die, and die unceremoniously, and pass without fanfare. That was the point. We loved Omar, because we knew him, but in the end, he was just another body. The rules were that ‘the game’ could and would claim everybody and an honorable life did not assure you an honorable death. Oh, and he was my favorite gay character in any art…ever.
[10] Though almost ruined by the overacting of the defense attorney.
[11] I think Freamon is my favorite character.
[12] There is an echo of this with Daniels, who has his S#$% together more than Jimmy, but still worships ‘the job’. ‘The job does not love you,’ in the mouth of his wife could be a straight up Keller Quote.

Fragments and Links 9: Zombies, Sex, Science, and the Creative Process (but not at the same time)

2011-04-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

So, this is my 100th post…so I thought I’d do a Fragments and Links post to celebrate. Every once in a while I like to collect ideas, quotes and links that did not warrant their own post. This is one of those times. I like to start sentences with the phrase “speaking of…” to give the illusion of connection and coherence. But mainly it is just a bunch of things I think are interesting. Skimming is recommended:

Topic 1: Sex and Zombies (but not at the same time[1])

The OK Cupid blog[2] is worth checking out. The author has access to the data from a major dating site and essentially mines it for statistically interesting observations.[3] And some of them are VERY interesting.[4]

But this one was particularly interesting. He chose several questions that you might want to ask on a first date to get at information that is inappropriate to ask, looking for highly correlated information that it is socially acceptable to ask about.

For example, do you want to know if your date would consider sex with you on the first date but don’t have the bad manners to ask? Ask “do you like the taste of beer?” Answers to these questions are amazingly highly correlated.

The analysis gets more bizarre from there. But one question was particularly interesting: “Are you religious?”

Try to guess the correlated question. ...got it?

Here it is: “Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?” I was crestfallen. Seriously? People of faith (and presumably, Christians, as it is an American data set) are marked by their legalism and attention to behaviors that don’t matter? So lame. But wait, the question COUNTER-correlates. People of faith are significantly LESS likely to care about spelling and grammar mistakes. This was refreshing to me and should not be surprising to the frequent readers of this blog.

Speaking of having sex on the first date…my brother has documented some of his thoughts on the economics of modern sexuality and how it has been characterized by the “de-unionization of women.” It is a sober analysis (particularly for the father of two girls), but I have two favorite quotes:

“The functional value of male sex is zero.”
“this meant that the R&D cost of switching partners was high”

Speaking of my brother, he has a talk in which he asks the listeners to vote on the following question: Are we are mostly composed of “nature” or “personality”? (i.e. are we more like other humans or more uniquely ourselves)[5]: I think that this needs to be considered in that discussion.

Now I am an unapologetic facebook apologist, but while we are recognizing its flaws, it seems like this needs to be cited.

So as a Buffy fanboy, the current vampire craze leaves me with a “been there done that an order of magnitude better” feeling. But I have recently made a surprising entre into the zombie world. John Green’s opening chapter (which he reads in the below vid) of his zombie apocalypse novella is nothing short of gorgeous:

He released the complete novella “Zombicorns” online with the disclaimer that it is horrible. I disagree.[6] I really liked it. And you can bang it out in an hour.

This work probably resonated with me more than it might have because I have spent a good deal of time thinking about Zombie epidemiology. Two Canadian professors did an epidemiological study of how a zombie epidemic would spread. We learned about epidemiological modeling in one of my ecology classes and, while the prof never mentioned zombies, it was all I could think about.

For future reference, if you ever find yourself giving a dull lecture on epidemiological modeling and how that could interface with Lottka-Voltera predator-prey dynamics and you do not use zombies as your model organism, you can just consider it a breach of pedagogical responsibility.

A couple more things about the vlogbrothers (who are John Green of the zombie novella above and his brother Hank) I just realized why the intro to the old vlogbrother videos is familiar:

This is one of the things I like about these guys. They celebrate non-romantic love and deconstruct the centrality and ubiquity of the romantic connotations of this embattled word. Consider this line from a recent vlog by John.

“Valentine’s day is one of the most potent symbols of our weird obsession with romantic love…if you spend your life singularly obsessed with romantic love you are going to miss out on a lot of what’s fun about being a person.”

****Technical Language Alert**** (This is like a spoiler alert – it allows you to skip to the “end” of the section if it seems unnecessarily obtuse)

One more John Green quote that I really like. "for me fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true." - John Green

I really resonate with his epistemology even though I’m not entirely on board ontologically. John and I see the epistemological problem the same way (and we have a good deal of psychological research to back us up). We do not know most of what we know because we do not actually remember most of what we remember. The brain is a reconstitution software telling stories from relatively few fixed points of actual stored data. But I don't agree that fiction is the only way to deal with this. I think that spiritual disciplines have surprising utility in circumventing this problem. You could make an evolutionary case that this is why they exist…but I prefer the teleological version of this argument: That we were designed to require a regular calibration from a fixed external reality.

****End Technical Language alert****

Speaking of fun Youtube subculture…this is just about the greatest short film I have ever seen.

Topic 2: Weird Science

Speaking of[7] science that is part fun part serious and it is hard to tell how to partition it: I recently encountered the famous Pleistocene Rewilding paper. This is a paper that appeared in Nature (2005) and argued that our ecosystems are degraded because palo-native-Americans hunted the Pleistocene mega-fauna (mastodons and the “American cheetah”) to extinction. Mega-fauna (lions, elephants and cheetah) are also endangered in Africa. So the paper (which was co-authored by over a dozen professors from good programs) argues that we could ‘kill two birds’ with one stone by introducing the megafauna of Africa to the American plains. This is seemingly too bizarre to be true, but there it is in the pages of nature.[8]

Speaking of bizarre science and ‘killing two birds with one stone’…or rather unkilling birds (which also puts me in line with the zombie theme) I have also learned of active attempts to reconstitute lost species(like the passenger pigeon and the auroch[9]) by isolating them genetically from their closes living relatives.

As absurd as these ideas are, one quote at the end of the Rewilding paper really struck me. The authors pose the question: “We ask of those who find the objections compelling, are you content with the negative slant of current conservation philosophy?” I guess this articulates some of my frustration with my initial foray into conservation biology. There is a lot of gloom and a conspicuous lack of innovation. In many ways, it is a ‘conservative’ science. (I mean, there is a guiding principle called "the precautionary principle"). I know that this smacks of engineering arrogance. But I guess that is what makes me an engineer. I got into science to bring it to bear on social and environmental problems. These ideas may be absurd, but my inclination is to evaluate them with a hopeful rather than antagonistic posture…because the current trajectory is entirely hopeless. Which leads me to climate change… …the climate change story is as bad or worse than the biodiversity crisis. I have very little hope that human behavior will change in time to avoid an eventual total collapse of marine ecosystems.[10] Sociology is not going to fix this. In light of this, too little emphasis and too little research funding is going to technology. There is an excellent and accessible paper in Nature that lays out the relative potential of the options currently on the table. I am not a Steven Levitt fan, but he is getting unnecessarily criticized for essentially making the economic argument that we need to start thinking seriously about technological solutions.

Topic 3: Creativity and Music

Several months ago I wrote about the creative process and how most creatives I know or have read about live in constant fear of loosing the ability to tap into whatever it is that makes them creative. Elizabeth Gilbert did a whole TED talk on this that had two really interesting ideas:

1. This is why creatives go mad or turn to addiction or end their lives at a disproportionally high rate. The seemingly fleeting and capricious nature of creativity leaves them powerless.

2. She posits instead a personal version of this force that you can and should talk to…giving responsibility back. This generates a psychological distance between you and the art you participate in and protects you from it. If you work was good or bad, it didn’t reflect on you. “This is how creativity was viewed in the western world for a really long time.” There was a change from having a Genius[11] to being a Genius. “That was a huge error”

Speaking of TED talks I liked, there is also this one.

I feel like the movie Hurt Locker is an artistic expansion of one of the most compelling lines in Audience of One” by Rise Against: “Maybe we've outgrown all the things that we once loved.”

I wrote a bit about Sufjan’s new album and concert a couple months ago. My friend Justin has registered a pretty accurate critique of the new stuff: “It’s like Sufjan got drunk and made an album with Animal Collective, and then they never bothered to edit the raw tracks”

I have watche a little bit of Bones and a little bit of Castle recently and have decided that they are essentially the same show. Take a tall, attractive, professionally exemplary woman who lives by logic and algorithm and put them opposite an intuitive, gregarious Joss Wheddon leading man…boom…you have a show that is not great, but watchable. I think this pretty much sums up why this formula works.

I have been listening to a ton of Brand New lately. Love them. Their track “Jesus Christ” (off The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me) is amazing.

“We’ve all got wood and nails, we’re tongue tied to a hating factory”

Stuff I am working on:

-The Surprising Similarity of Two Uneven Finales: The Final Episodes of Lost and Battlestar Galactica

-“My Name is My Name”: Thoughts on The Wire

-The Two Great Manipulations: Fear and Guilt from the Right and the Left

-Photobox Stratigraphy

-Cities: New Orleans

-A Monte Carlo Statistical Analysis of Hi-Ho Cherry Oh!

-Backloading the Backstory to Maximize Narrative Utility: How Lost Episode 118 is like Revelation Chapter 12

-Theo-Coleoptaphelia: Upon further review, “An inordinate fondness for beetles” is precisely what I would expect

-The Secret World of River Gravel: A Photographic Expose of Riverine Benthic Communities (in 40X Magnification)

-We’ve Been Here Before, and It Wasn’t Good: Climate Change Precedent in the PETM[12]

This post was written while listening to God and the Devil are Raging Inside of Me by Brand New

_________________________

[1] Because that would just be weird.

[2] I owe this to my friend Noam.

[4] Including the standard confusion between correlation and causation.

[5] This is a really interesting exersize, because if we are mostly like other humans, a universal worldview is more likely to be useful because we mostly have the same hopes, fears, and weaknesses. However, if we are all unique snowflakes, then it is absurd to think that one prescription of ‘disease’ and ‘remedy’ could hold universally. Of course, modern psychology has demonstrated that much of our drama stems from our failure to recognize that “we are not as special as we think we are.”

[6] Actually, I picked up a couple of his “real books”, and while I like An Abundance of Katherines and Will Grayson they were not nearly was not as good as Zobiecorns.

[7] You have to go back to the Zombie paper to pick up this train of thought.

[8] I have since learned that most of the authors saw it as a ‘thought experiment’ and not a real study.

[9] The ancestor of the cow. I told my friend Mark this story and he replied “that seems like a species no one has missed.”

[10] The tragic thing about these effects is that they will be locked in in the next 150 years and then will play out for the following two thousand. I am pretty skeptical that standard economic and sociological forces are efficacious against a lagged process.

[11] Which was a spirit that essentially chose to posses the artist.

[12] The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is the only event anything like a historical precedent for the carbon loadings we are putting into the atmosphere. It provides a template for what the long term effects of our impact will be…and it’s not good news.

Paraguay Journal

2011-03-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

So I am in Paraguay and am keeping a travel blog:

http://stanfordinparaguay.blogspot.com/

I will return to regular (well...as regular as I tend to be - about every other week or so) blogging when I return with a new fragments and links post.

Cities Part 4: Caravaggio, Mosasaurs and America’s Hub – Kansas City

2011-01-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

My work took me to Kansas City for a couple days last week, and, as is my custom, I have some thoughts about it.[1] Now I can’t say I had high expectations for Kansas City, but I was excited to test my working hypothesis that most places are repositories of wonder and unique flourishes of humanness if you look hard enough. The data confirmed my hypothesis.

The morning before I got to KC, they got 8” of snow. When I arrived it was bright and sunny, but everyone was in winter storm mode, trying to dig out from under the snow. Now the temperature was my first surprise.[2] I have never been to the plains states[3] in the winter, and assumed that they would be warmish, given their smouldering hot summers. I was wrong. It never got above 20 degrees F while I was there.

KC is a river town.[4] The first hint you get of this connection between the population center and the Mississippi’s major Tributary was in the rental car terminal. Like terminal B in the Sacramento[5] Airport, the floor was decorated with an unmistakable riffle-pool design of a great anastamosing channel.

Driving into KC from the airport is impressive. At one point you drive through a stretch with the City in front of you, the great river on your right and a massive train yard on your left, and you realize that this is a city that is on the way to places...the hub of our economic wheel.

Downtown KC is surprisingly fun. There are about 8 blocks of restraints and clubs called the ‘lights district’ and includes some pretty eccentric buildings:

But the second night, I made my way down to ‘the Plaza,’ about 3 miles south of downtown. On the way, I stopped by the Art Museum, which was free and still open. The art museum was situated in Sculpture Park…which is as fun and idiosyncratic as it sounds:

The Art museum was very good…but really the whole experience was dwarfed by a single piece. I walked into the Baroque room, full as usual with a vast array of paintings ‘inspired by Caravaggio.’ Now I have to say, most of the Baroque reminds me of the second and third Matrix movies. Stylisticly similar to the inspired geneius of the original, but actually a pale shadow of its brilliance. But then, a painting on one wall caught my eye. It was undoubtedly the greatest piece in the room and probably in the museum. “It couldn’t be.” I thought…not in Kansas City. But it was. There in the most rectangular of the rectangle states, equidistant from our country’s self proclaimed cultural centers, was just the second original Caravaggio I had ever seen in person:

If you haven’t picked it up, Caravaggio is my favorite artist. In some ways he tries to do with his art precisely what I strive to do with my preaching…place familiar Biblical subjects in their stark, realistic settings, to breath new and accessible life into the horror and grace of it all. I don’t really have any idea what I am doing at art museums. I generally use them to illustrate my timeline of the fits and starts of western Philosophy. But with The Baptist, I tried to just experience it…to let my eyes follow the brush strokes…to notice the detail and take in the whole. I don’t know why I was so shocked to find this painting in this place, but the whole thing struck me as delightfully incongruous. Normally if a painting is the highlight of a visit to a new city, it does not speak well of the city. In this case, it was because of the city. Of course Caravaggio, the master of capturing narrative tension between grace and grit in a single image…the great virtuoso of contrast…would not be best experienced in Paris or London. John the Baptist BELONGS in Kansas City in melancholy contemplation of the hardships and anonymity of the wilderness.[6]

I was told that the Plaza was the place to be in the summer, but it would probably be dead in the snow and cold. It wasn’t. It was fun. The region is built around several old, opulent hotels that tower over a scenic stretch of the Kansas River (a tributary of the Missouri).

The Plaza continued the theme of the incongruous. The architecture of these 8-10 blocks was unified but totally unique:

Yet, these distinctive buildings mostly housed chain stores and restraints. It was an neighborhood that was as personalized as any I had visited in its built environment and yet totally indistinct in its goods and services. Fortunately, I went armed with a restraint recommendation. I only knew two things I wanted to do on this trip before I touched down…and one of them was Barbecue. Now, I have always been a little self conscious about the propensity for cities to highlight their food. I mean, New Orleans is one thing, we all know they’ve got other stuff going on. But a place like Buffalo, for example, it seems like being that proud of food and football is an implicit capitulation to just not being that interesting. I mean, could the BBQ in Kansas City really be that good or is it like the kid in school that was mediocre at poetry but wasn’t good at anything else so he got tabbed ‘the poetry guy.’ Um…the former. I went to Jacks Stacks and got the special and took all the waitress’ recommendations.[7] It was qualitatively better than any barbecue experience I have ever had.

Finally, I was scheduled to go home on Saturday, but Amada agreed to allow me to push my flight back in order to do the other thing I have always wanted to do “in” Kansas City. First some context…In the late cretaceous[8] North America was split in two by a great, shallow sea. Essentially, Kansas, was equivalent to today’s Caribbean except it was overrun by some of the most remarkable Charismatic Paleo-Aquatic-Megafauna that have ever existed. The late Cretaceous Midwest sea[9] teeming with creatures so strange and startling that you’d be sure that they were the careless products of the imagination of a bad-made-for-cable horror movie author, pushing a deadline with ample weed…if the fossils were not captured in a thin chalk bed in West Kansas.

I have wanted to visit the University of Kansas Natural history museum since I read a really interesting book on the Cretaceous seas of North America many years ago when I was contemplating a career change (to paleontology). So Saturday morning I got up and made the one hour drive to Lawrence.

Now, I collect Natural History Museums…so I am hard to impress. In general, because I have been to way more of these than a normal human should, I generally prefer if they specialize in whatever is locally interesting.[10] So, in my opinion, the Kansas museum would be most successful if it had three floors of Mosesaurs and Xiphactinus. But Kansas 6 year olds need to see a Triceratops too. So they only had a few specimens from the Late Cretaceous…but they were worth it.

My favorite was the shark. It looks like the shark’s head is in the middle…but it had just had a bad ass Xiphactinus (see above) in its belly.

Once again, a dull sounding city teemed with the wonder of locatedness and particularity. For all our legitimate concerns about the Walmartification of America, there is something about human community that seems to always manifest a unique signature of its relationship with place. And that is why when I was asked to go to Kansas City, I was genuinely excited…and it didn’t disappoint.

___________________
[1] I realize that in the Vegas post I said that New Orleans was coming next. Here’s the problem. I forgot my camera in New Orleans and had to buy one of those disposable cameras with old fashioned film…and I can’t find anywhere to get it developed.
[2] Actually, my first surprise was that most of Kansas City is actually in Missouri.
[3] I refuse to call Kansas/Nebraska/Omaha the Midwest. I arbitrarily reserve that term for MI/OH/WI/MN et al.
[4] It is not an accident that I disproportionately visit river towns…I do study rivers.
[5] Another river town.
[6] Apparently, one of his other Johnny B paintings is in Toledo…which works in precisely the same way.
[7] This is my new trick for trying food in a new place. As much as possible, let locals or watistaff order for you.
[8] Come on, when I offer context, I don’t mess around.
[9] Incidentally, Jungle The Midwest Sea is a very good album by flatfoot 56, but every time I hear it I think of the late Cretaceous…surely there is not a better unintentional description of a paleo-era.
[10] Cleveland is the best example of this. Most of my understanding of late Devonian fish and amphibians comes from their display of Ohio-centric fossils.

Pascal Surplus

2011-01-10T23:38:00.000-08:00

I am giving a talk (MP3) on Pascal Tuesday. I didn’t have room for a third of the Pensees quotes I like, so I am posting the rest of them here.

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us…Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future…Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning to be happy it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

“The power of kings if founded on the reason and folly of the people, but especially their folly. The greatest and most important thing in the world is founded on weakness. This is a remarkably sure foundation, for nothing is surer than that people will be weak. Anything founded on sound reason is very ill-founded, like respect for reason.”

“Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be: if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.”

“Justice and truths are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly.”

“Man is nothing but a subject full of natural error that cannot be eradicated except through grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him. The two principals of truth, reason and senses, are not only both genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and, just as they trick the soul, they are tricked by it in their passions, which produce false impressions. The both compete in lies and deception.”

“If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.”

“How tiresome it is to give up pursuits to which we have become attached. A man enjoying a happy home-life has only to see a woman who attracts him, or spend five or six pleasant days gambling, and he will be very sorry to go back to what he was doing before. It happens every day.”

“…as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could not fortify justice they have justified force…”

“It is just as pointless and absurd for reason to demand proof of first principles from the heart before agreeing to accept them as it would be absurd for the heart to demand an intuition of all the propositions demonstrated by reason before agreeing to accept them.”

“Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched…”

“If he exalts himself, I humble him.
If he humbles himself, I exalt him.
And I go on contradicting him
Until he understands
That he is a monster that passes all understanding.”

“This means open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatist or with the skeptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a skeptic par excellence. This neutrality is the essence of their clique…They are not even for themselves; they are neutral, indifferent suspending judgment on everything, including themselves.”

“Let us concede to the skeptics what they have so often proclaimed, that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, bt at home in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it. Let us learn our true nature from the uncreated and incarnate truth.”

“Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God…man infinitely transcends man, and without the aid of faith he would remain inconceivable to himself…Consequently, it is not through the proud activity of our reason but through its simple submission that we can really know ourselves. ”

“Diversion: Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things…That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment…”

“All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.”

“…none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, God himself.”

“When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving.”
“Reason never wholly overcomes imagination, though the contrary is quite common…Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it can make them happy…Imagination exaggerates small objects with fanatical exaggeration until they fill our souls.”

“Our imagination…will grow weary of conciving things before nature grows weary of producing them.”

“I believe with (our) curiosity changed into wonder (we) will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.”

“Do the philosophers, who offer us nothing else for our good but the good that is within us? Have they found the cure for our ills?”

“There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us (from) seeing it.”

“Jesus came to blind those who have clear sight and to give sight to the blind; to heal the sick and let the healthy die; to call sinners to repentance and justify them, and to leave the righteous to their sins; to fill the hungry with good things and sedn the rich away empty.”

“True conversion consists in self-annihilation before the universal being whom we have so often vexed and who is perfectly entitled to destroy us at any moment.”

“Total Submission to Jesus Christ...Eternal bliss, in exchange for a day of hard training in this world. May I never forget your words.”

2010 A Year In Books

2010-12-29T12:38:00.001-08:00

Last year I posted a list of the books I read…and it was fun. So I am doing it again.

Madame Bovary (A)[1] - Flaubert

Definitely more “important” than “good.” MB is a heavy handed morality tale that lacks a single redemptive character. But apparently Flaubert innovated the modern novel…and I can see the template for all of the great ones in it. So there is that.

The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

LOVED it! This is my new favorite novel not written by a dead Russian[2]. I wrote a post on it.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs - Klosterman (A)

This is my third time through SDACP[3]. By now it is a period piece. But it remains THE definitive statement of Xer culture. It led to one of my favorite posts ever. And Klosterman is a bit of a rhetorical mentor for me, so listening to him read his best prose is valuable in its own right. I suspect this will not be the last time SDACP ends up on one of my year end lists.

Robinson Caruso (A) - Daniel Defoe

This book is REALLY old. And, while I am always trying to be aware of “chronological snobbery”[4], my brother described it as “a book that passed for entertainment in a time when there wasn’t anything else to do.”

Jesus and the Victory of God - NT Wright

Over 1000 pages into Wright’s scholarly series I am beginning to feel diminishing returns.[5] I might be a one woman man, but I am a promiscuous reader. I am beginning to feel a little smothered in this relationship and really want to “start seeing other people”. Still, this text has been hugely valuable. My basic take on Wright is that about half the time I think his method leads him to a spurious interpretation and the other half of the time his reconstruction of first century Palestine makes complete sense of biblical passages that were previously obscure. His treatments of Mark 13, the cleansing of the temple, and that weird passage where Jesus talks about driving out a demon only to have it replaced with seven stronger ones were worth the price of admission. Oh, and he demolishes the Jesus seminar stuff without breaking a sweat (and without being a jerk).

Lilith – George McDonald (A)

George McDonald might be best known as a character rather than an author. He was the Virgil type guide in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. But he[6] was also one of the indirect[7] instigators of Lewis’ conversion. I liked Lilith. It started really slowly but there were a couple of sublime chapters near the end. Friends have suggested that McDonald’s children’s literature is really his best stuff…so expect some of that on next year’s list.

Drive – Daniel Pink (A)

Most of the valuable ideas from this book were summarized by his TED talk. This is the classic case of a book that could have been a pamphlet. Still, the big ideas are pretty compelling. They include 1) for creative problem solving type jobs, monetary incentives impede rather than augment innovation[8] 2) success is not correlated with intelligence but how one perceives intelligence.[9]

Pensees: Christianity for Modern Pagans - Pascal/Kreeft

Pensees was the first book I read for fun by someone who had been dead for several hundred years. I loved it. In many ways, Pascal became my intellectual mentor[10] and introduced me to the many many dead friends and mentors I have had over the years. In a couple weeks, I am giving a talk on his life and thought,[11] wanted to revisit the Pensees, and happened on this fantastic book. Peter Kreeft has selected and organized[12] the best of the Pensees and then wrote a sort of midrash.[13] Some of his reflections on Pascal are more valuable than others, but to have an excellent contemporary thinker articulate the current import of enduring[14] insights of one of the all time great thinkers makes for a fun read. Kreeft’s[15] tone (simultaneously serious and playful) is also a good match for Pascal, whose tone is similar.

Paul for Everyone: 2 Corinthians – NT Wright

As usual, Wright’s popular work is as useful as his scholarly work. I read this little text to orient myself to the scope of 2 Corinthians before I began a detailed study of the passages I was going to preach.

Ezra and Nehemiah – Derek Kidner

The post-exilic OT literature is surprisingly difficult. Haggai and Zachariah[16] only make sense on the backdrop of Ezra and Nehemiah, but the historical books are unhelpfully non-sequantial and kind of confusing. So, when I agreed to teach Nehemiah over the summer I knew I was going to have to do some preliminary heavy lifting. Kidner made it easy. This thin little text laid out the chronology and significance of both books in a readable and insightful way. I highly recommend it for anyone hoping to understand the post-exilic texts.[17]

Home – Marilynne Robinson (A)

I have a friend who met Robinson relayed an off the cuff quote where the author confessed, “I hate plot.” Let’s just say, I believe this story. But she writes beautifully. I knew these characters. I can still picture them better than characters from film. And the last page of this book made me cry. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

In the Beauty of the Lilies - Updike [18]

I just love Updike’s sentences. I was lukewarm on the plot, but plot is not why I read Updike. I read him for his lyrical use of our language and his unshakable Christ hauntedness.

Partial Reads

Letters to my Students – CH Spurgeon (50%)

This was easily the most nourishing volume I read this year. It got squeezed out of the rotation by more pressing books, but it will almost certainly end up on next year’s list as a completed book. The book served two purposes 1) It is the transcripts of his lectures on preaching. His insights were enormously helpful not only for my personal preaching but for the class we are teaching on it. I even assigned a few pages for our students. 2) He uses words so well. I try to work some authors into my rotation who have the gift to select and order words in such a way that the product is qualitatively different than most writing. This is why I read Updike and Robinson, and Spurgeon has the same gift.

The Princeton Guide to Ecology – ed. Levin (40%)

I LOVED this book. It is a compellation of 92 six to ten page reviews of the state of the art regarding the most important ecological principles. The papers are mercifully and maniacally brief literature reviews that oriented me to the watershed ideas and contemporary directions. For someone who is trying to get up to speed on a new discipline, I could not have designed a better text. About 15% of it was assigned as readings for my intro class. I found it way more valuable than that.

Foundations of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentaries - ed. Real and Brown (50%)

Someday I will write a post on the culture differences between engineers and ecologists. As I am fundamentally a scientist (who likes the rigor and practicality of the engineering skill set for doing science) there are many ways in which I prefer the culture of Ecology. This is one of them. I have found that ecology has a ‘cannon.’ Initiates are told the story of the major Khunian paradigm shifts that is the heritage of our moment. Case in point, my text for the required introductory graduate course was this anthology of seminal papers. I read half of it, which was, again, far more than required.[19]

The Cross of Christ – John Stott (50%)

I used this for Lenten devotions this year. It was extremely valuable in that context. It is a little more technical than devotional, but was a great way to keep up a sustained and substantial meditation on the cross.

This post was written while listening to Deja Entendu by Brand New

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[1] (A) means that I listened to this in an audio format. Most of my reading time goes into scientific journal papers. So I listen to most of my ‘fun’ reading. I did a post on this.
[2] My wife’s reading group also read and enjoyed this one, so it is not just for nerds.
[3] The second time generated one of my favorite posts of all time.
[4] Which is responsible for my attempt to balance my reading diet to include approximately equal parts books by the living and the dead.
[5] One of my principles of getting the most out of a modest reading program is diversity. Most non-fiction authors offer a maximal insight/time ratio early on and returns diminish pretty markedly.
[6] Like Chesterton
[7] There were direct instigators (his contemporaries) like Tolkein and indirect instigators, authors from the previous generation.
[8] Creatives are motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivators. I believe this. This is how I am motivated. I work harder on (and put more personal time into) the stuff I have less funds to do if I think it is compelling.
[9] I think I am going to do a whole post on this.
[10] Creating the desire to be a philosopher-scientist…which is not easy in the current era of hyper specialization.
[11] Look for it to show up on my MP3 page.
[12] Which is important because, Pascal died very young and not only never finished his book, but never really started it. the Penses are just fragmentary notes and have historically been published in almost arbitrary order. They are also redundant and some have more contemporary utility than others. So, simply selecting them, grouping them and putting them in a logical order was a great service. Incidentally, Kreeft’s take on Pascal’s major themes match mine pretty closely.
[13] A running commentary. It is almost like a Penses blog – in paperback.
[14] And often prophetic.
[15] Kreeft is Catholic – in a fun way. Reading him as a Protestant is like reading Chesterton. You forget that he is Catholic for dozens of pages at a time, until he drops a zinger against Protestants that leaves you saying ‘Ouch, where did that come from.’ Reading Kreeft has the effect of enlarging my affection and alliance with my Catholic friends…while, at the same time, affirming that I am, in fact, not Catholic.
[16] These guys were contemporaries and, presumably, even friends (Nehemiah lists them as both present during a couple big events)…but their writing styles could not be more different. Haggai is a straight forward moral prophet while Zachariah is a “if I didn’t know better I’d think he was high”/ “Predicted things he had no business knowing” apocalyptic type. I’d love to see a HBO quality dramady about the friendship of Haggai and Zachariah (um, minus the boobs – It really sucks that HBO is making some of the best art of our generation but feels compelled to cheapen it with totally unnecessary nudity).
[17] I did some teaching out of Nehemiah this summer. The venue was not amenable to recording, so there are no MP3s. But I did one blog post which revolves around an insight I owe to Kidner. Also, Mark Driscoll’s series on Nehemiah was extremely helpful.
[18] I mentioned in my Portland post that I read this book and home at the same time. They are both about the damaged children of a Presbyterian minister.
[19] No book like this exists for my field. I have contemplated putting one together. Also, engineers do not do meta-analysis like ecologists do…though we could very much benefit from it.

On the 4th Day of Christmas the Internet Gave to Me...

2010-12-20T20:58:00.000-08:00

...Four fun, Chistmas themed Youtube clips.

This year, my two favorite Christmas songs are not really Christmas songs. First, vloger Charlie McDonnell put out an album, that is very clever and entirely unique. It includes a fantastic song called The Absence of Christmas.[1]

Second, I have yet to write about mewithoutYou’s new album and concert a year later…primarily because I have surprisingly complicated feelings about the album. But A Carrot and A String may be the best Christmas song that isn’t a Christmas song written since Joy to the World. With all the pabulum that gets played on the airwaves this time of year, it would seem like an occasional descent new song would squeak in.

Amanda and I have struggled with Christmas traditions for years, and more so since we have had kids. We have decided that the American winter festival (which is extremely fun and most people participate in, in some form or another) can coexist in strained peace with the celebration of the incarnation without the former swallowing the latter up. But no one gets at the tension of all this better than Gaffigan:[2]

Finally, I can’t tell you why I like this clip. On one level, it casts the characters of the Christmas story as annoying Christian facebook stereotypes. But I do like it…unironically…so there that is.

I hope you and the people you care about have a great holiday, and if you are into the Jesus thing, I hope the mystery of the incarnation strikes you with new wonder in the coming weeks.

This post was posted while listening to Charlie McDonnall’s This is Me
_________________________
[1] The album is mostly goofy but has a couple really poignant moments….my favorite track is “Bread”. I have “In the Absence of Christmas” stuck in my head for a day…but it is a thankful reprieve from “Haley G Hoover” which was just creepy…but unfortunately really catchy.
[2] I have been taking Charis running (in the jogging stroller) through Davis neighborhoods at night to look at lights. It has been a fun daddy-daughter time and a good example of why living in California is cool. Amanda and I have been silent on the whole Santa thing hoping we could go one more year without her noticing – giving us 12 more months to decide how we want to negotiate this strange cultural artifact. I thought I had dodged it when we ran by a house with a blow up Homer Simpson in Santa gear and she said “that doggie has a hat…that’s so silly.” But during one of the runs she asked me “why do so many houses have elmo?” (apparently any cartoonish character clad in red is elmo). So we broke out the story of St Nicholas, a guy we have enormous affection, who saved girls from the sex trade - without the graphic details (one of our Christmas traditions is to donate to organizations that do the same in his honor). Now I just need to come up with a good reason that he would use a reindeer with a glowing nose to rescue girls from a life of forced prostitution.

The Altruism Paradox: The Surprising Confluence of Christian Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology

2010-12-11T15:50:00.000-08:00

Altruism is one of the most interesting evolutionary puzzles. Mild forms of “altruistic” behavior have been observed in several distantly related taxa. Some of this has been cleverly and definitively explained on purely Darwinian principles[1] but some of it still seems a little ‘hand waving-ish’[2]…particularly when the theories are applied to humans acting altruistically towards non-relatives.[3] The problem is that pure altruism is not an “evolutionary stable strategy” (ESS).[4] But one of the solutions that evolutionary biologists and behavioral ecologists have floated sounds shockingly familiar to those of us who have spent much time in the ancient texts that compose the normative documents of Christianity.

The story goes like this. Altruism is better than pure competition on the species scale, but selection does not happen on that scale. Advantageous alleles are selected based on the survival and reproductive benefits to the individual. Therefore, in order for altruism to be selected, the bearers of altruist genes have to benefit, on the whole, more than it costs them.[5] This is evolutionarily unstable because cheaters would accept benefits of the altruists, not take the risks, and eventually ‘win’ pushing the altruistic genes from the population. Therefore, altruism requires some sort of ‘enforcement’ on the ‘population’[6] scale. There are some interesting examples of enforcement in non-human altruists, but the really interesting hypothesis is that humans use ‘guilt’ to enforce the terms of altruism on the tribal scale.

But, even with guilt enforcing altruism, it is not an ESS. Therefore, the successful altruistic strategy is that of the ‘subtle cheater.’ In each generation altruistic systems disproportionately propagate individuals that cheat just enough to have a survival or reproductive advantage but not so much that they incur the penalties of the enforcement mechanism.

This is all pretty plausible (especially for non-human species). But the really interesting insight is how ‘subtle cheating’ works out in human populations. If our enforcement mechanism is built into our psychological and sociological hardware and software (guilt[7]) what does it mean to be a subtle cheater? Who do I need to deceive?

Myself.

And that is the shocking and thrilling detail. If human altruism is self enforced through genetic and environmental imprints on our operating systems, getting away with subtle cheating REQUIRES “self deception.”[8] Human success is largely due to our altruistic tendencies…but only if those tendencies include “subtle cheating” which, given our enforcement mechanisms, require “self deception.”

Um, Really? So, let me get this straight. Humans work best in cooperative community. But there is something fundamental in each one of us that will always try to get more than we give. And in order to live with ourselves and our seemingly universal need to perceive ourselves as “a good person”[9] we all engage in self deception to convince ourselves that the real cheater is ‘the other.’ It seems like I have heard that somewhere before. Allow me to introduce: Christian anthropology.

The fundamental premise of Christian anthropology is that we are valuable beyond measure and designed to reflect the altruistic character of our maker but deeply broken and have an insurmountable entropy towards self interested behavior. We describe this causally with the narrative of the fall. Regardless of whether or not you hypothesize a historical Adam and Eve[10] the fall is the process by which we not only tarnish our immense capacity for beauty and generosity with the fundamental entropy of self interest, such that the former merely punctuates than the latter…but then we lie to ourselves about it.

All of this could lead us to argue (with a smile, and hopefully in a cheeky rather than a douchey way) that Christians are more in touch with reality, as specified by behavioral ecology. The Christian operating system which is self aware of our tendency of self deception and our tendency towards subtle cheating, makes it an evolutionary unstable strategy…but also gives it a huge epistemic advantage.[11] But, if Jesus was to talk in the language of behavioral ecology, I think the sermon on the mount might have included something like:

"Blessed are those who are aware of their self deception, it is the first step in actual self forgetfulness.”

Which is actually just my paraphrase of:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[12]

This post was prepared while listening to The Sufferer and the Witness by Rise Against

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[1] The classic example is eusocial insects who turned out to be haplodiploid, which makes sisters more closely related than they would be to their own daughters, making celibate cooperative labor the most effective way to get genetic material into future generations.
[2] My personal favorite is the argument that we have the impulse to save a drowning unrelated child because the act of heroism may be observed by one of the victim’s hot relatives who would then have sex with the rescuer providing a mechanism where the risk is overweighed by the genetic payoff in the long term, selecting for risk taking altruists. If you think about the kind of selective pressure it would take to preference that genotype as broadly as it exists in our species…that would take a lot of extremely grateful sisters.
[3] Adoption of unrelated children cannot be seen as anything other than an ‘evolutionary trap.’
[4] An ESS is a strategy that is resistant to ‘invaders’ or ‘cheaters’. For example, it was hypothesized that the huge, seasonal gatherings of birds, like those that soil our cars at the U-mall or the Arc parking lot – were a type of self-regulating behavior. The birds were taking a ‘census’ of sorts and then would regulate the number of eggs they laid accordingly in order self-regulate and keep the population size proportional to the resources (under the carrying capacity). This has been widely discredited, however, as evolutionarily unstable…because cheaters would eventually take over. If everyone else is self regulating, a few birds that do not would compose a disproportionate portion of each successive cohort, until they quickly took over. Dawkins calls this “subversion from within.” Therefore, most ‘self regulation’ hypotheses have been jettisoned for resource or predator regulation.
[5] i.e. Alturism must be fundamentally self interested.
[6] Tribal.
[7] Note: Police do not count as enforcing altruism. They reduce the ferocity of our competition but do not require cooperation. You could make a case that liberal fiscal policy enforces altruism…but I will argue in a couple of posts that this is simply an outworking of guilt.
[8] All of the phrases I am using in quotes are not my own reading of this…they are the actual language of the theory from my coursework on behavioral ecology at UC Davis…from phenomenal Prof Sih who is one of the rare professors who is uncommonly brilliant AND a thrilling lecturer.
[9] I totally buy the idea as guilt as an altruism enforcing mechanism. There is nothing as ubiquitous as the idea that ‘I am a good person.’ After Imus was publically called out about his comments on the Rutgers woman’s basket ball team he said “I am a good person who did a bad thing.” After Jim Belushi died, someone said “He was a good man and a bad boy.” We all have this compelling need to self perceive as ‘basically a good person.’ And may be no idea that people will fight harder for despite mounting evidence to the contrary…regardless how much violence we have to do to the word ‘good’ or even ‘person.’ Before I was a Christian, there was nothing about the Christian worldview I found more repulsive than the assertion that I was not a good person. Now there is no insight I find more pragmatically helpful.
[10] I do (as the Homo Sapien ancestors that were contemporary with Australopithecine), but I don’t think you have to. And it is mostly a non-issue because it is non-falsifiable. But what is clear about the first three chapters of Genesis is that it is not the whole story. It has a fundamental pedagogical agenda. So I am more than happy to allow the scientific process to fill in the estimable gaps. Regardless of whether the fall happened in a cosmic moment (which I tend to believe) or over evolutionary time, it is the process by which humans, a special creation in the image of God, traded that image for an evolutionarily stable strategy. (Footnote to the footnote: I am working on a post about the Battle Star Galactica finale…if that seems like a non sequiter – you didn’t see it).
[11]Please note: I am not now, nor have I ever argued that Christians are, therefore, ‘better’ than those who do not go in for the Christian narrative. In fact I have argued often (here and here) that the logic of the Christian story gives the counter-intuitive result that Christians are, on the whole, less moral than their non-Christian neighbors…and that this is exactly what you would expect if it was true.
[12] Matthew 5:3

Announcement

2010-11-30T22:26:00.000-08:00

The new Arcade Fire album is unsurprisingly good. That's not the anouncement. There is a verse in the opening track that pretty much articulates how I am feeling about what I have to share:

So can you understand?
Why I want a daughter while I'm still young
I wanna hold her hand
And show her some beauty
Before all this damage is done

But if it's too much to ask, if it's too much to ask
Then send me a son
-Arcade Fire - Suburbs

I've got several posts lined up to run after finals next week. In the mean time there are new posts and MP3’s over at my preaching site (which is where most of my creative energy has gone the last 3 weeks).

The Sufjan Concert

2010-11-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

Sufjan Stevens played in Oakland last week. I have a few rules in life. One of them is: If Sufjan Stevens is playing within 100 miles and you have the opportunity to go with some of your best friends in the world[1]…you do that. He played for almost two hours and it was as much theatrical art as it was a concert. The show opened with Seven Swans and closed with Chicago and was nothing but new music in between. This could have been a recipe for disappointment, primarily because his new music is such a shocking departure from what we love about Sufjan.[2] But I thought it was fantastic. In a sense, the new material works better as a show than as an album…and it really did work as a show. For two hours, a series of short films played behind Sufjan and his 9 piece band as he alternated between the epic, cosmic pieces like “Age of Adz” and “Too Much”, and more familiar “Futile Divices” or “Now that I’m Older.”

If he had just gotten up there and sung the new album without regard for our passion for the old stuff, it would have struck me as self involved marketing. But it was impossible to feel that way with all that went into crafting an experience of his new music. It held together as an intentional and cohesive piece of art. As much as I would have loved to hear “The Wasps of the Palisades” or “Cashmere Pulaski Day” they would not have cohered with the show he crafted. He was not playing a set. He was telling a story.[3] In a sense, he was performing a single, two-hour, piece that he had prepared for us. It felt special.

And then, for the encore, he came up alone and banged out three of his best songs from his earlier work. I would have paid the ticket price just for the encore. Anyway, while I am on the topic, I thought I’d tack on “Four things I love about Sufjan.”

1. His song titles.

They are just way more fun than anyone else’s. Consider songs like:

The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is out to Get Us!
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!!
Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickerel Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? ...)
Springfield, Or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in His Hair
Or the musical interlude:
Let's Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don't Think They Heard It

There was a fun Facebook group[4] dedicated to why members thought their state should get the next Sufjan album. In one discussion we took shots at what a Sufjan playlist might look like for our states. Here is what I came up with for NY[5]:

The last one out of Buffalo turn out the lights[6]
Old movies with the twin towers in them make me sad
Born During the Blizzard of '77
Stuck on 37 high peaks with deteriorating knees
A Resilient People in a Belt of Rust and Weather
Oh, Opalescent Feldspar, The Billion Year Rock Rainbow
The Silent Shafts (or Ore is More Profitable in Minnesota)
More cows than you would imagine
Purple lufstrife is Montazuma's revenge[7]
The surprisingly resurgent Rochester (or, Mr. Eastman[8], was your work really done?)[9]

2. Art with a sense of place

I have mentioned before in this blog that the art I tend to resonate with finds generality in specificity. In particular, I love art that can find something as broad as ‘human nature’ in a very particular sense of situatedness. This is why I enjoyed Garden State. This is why I loved The Wire. And this is why Illinois is one of the greatest albums of all times. Illinois generates the emotion of a Midwest upbringing that connects with our humanity in a study of similarity and contrast. Intentional spatial locatedness gives his work a surprising generality.

3. ‘Christian’ makes a great noun but a horrible adjective.'[10]

Sufjan writes about whatever he thinks or experiences. So he writes about Jesus and being a Christian and stuff. I, obviously, love this, because, well, I am also interested in Jesus and being a Christian and stuff.[11]

Near the middle of the concert he performed the sprawling “Get Real Get Right”[12], which ends with the verse:

For you will not be distracted by the signs

Do not be distracted by them

Do yourself a favor and get real

Get right with the lord

Get real, get right with the Lord

After the applause someone yelled ‘Praise Jesus’, which was quickly followed by someone else shouting ‘no.’ I loved this exchange (particularly the latter part) because it demonstrates the difference between an artist who is a Christian and a Christian artist. We do not own Sufjan. He is not ours in a way that a Christian act is.[13] We have not claim of ownership on him.[14] So he is free to do art, and not just produce a commodity for a niche community. It also demonstrates that there is not an insidious anti-Christian bias in the music industry. If Christians make great art, they get to make it about whatever they love.[15]

4. John Wayne Gacy

He closed with what I would consider his three most theological songs from Seven Swans and Illinois…culminating in his most controversial and most haunting piece: “John Wayne Gacy”. Gacy (who grew up in Illinois, hence, the tracks appearance on that album) was a famous serial killer. Known as ‘the clown killer’ he lured boys into his orbit, and then did unspeakable things…eventually collecting their bodies under his porch.

The song hauntingly describes the crimes.

Look underneath the house there
Find the few living things
Rotting fast in their sleep of the dead
Twenty-seven people, even more
They were boys with their cars, summer jobs
Oh my God

I remember clearly the first time I heard it.[16] I was driving from Jackson to Vicksburg. It was chilling. But the final verse held more in store than I could have ever imagined. The song ends, somewhat abruptly:

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

Some have interpreted this song as excusing Gacy…as a behaviorist apologetic blaming the actions of a monster on his environment. They hear this last verse and think ‘he is not just like me, he is qualitatively different.’ But the interpretive key to this song is actually Christian anthropology. Sufjan is not saying that he is just like me except for some bad luck in his environment. He is saying[17] that except for some social coping mechanisms, I am just like him. The difference is quantitative not qualitative. My heart hides its own dark secrets. The monster is me. The remedy…well, I think you might find it amidst a septet of graceful birds:

This post was written while listening to The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens
______________
[1] Amanda, Tyler the winemaker and his wife Byranie.
[2] He described the mood and themes of the new work as ‘cosmic’ and ‘processed based’ which is exactly the opposite of why I love Sufjan, which is universal story telling through the vehicle of the very, very particular (see "Why I love Sufjan #2). For the record, I hope he is not done with albums like Illinoise or Seven Swans…but I think The Age of Adz is a win.
[3] Which is ironic (ITWIHACTIK) because he sees this album as a departure from his fundamental nature as a lyrical storyteller, but the reason he couldn’t sprinkle older works into the concert is because it would have destroyed the continuity of the narrative structure.
[4] Which has mostly gone defunct since Sufjan revealed that the 50 states project was either a joke or WILDLY optimistic.
[5] Mostly upstatecentric
[6] When the steal mills were shutting down in the 70’s someon actually put a sign up that said this on I5 on the way out of town.
[7] There is a wildlife refuge in Western NY called Monazuma’s wildlife refuge. I-80 passes through it. It is overrun with the invasive purple lustrife.
[8] George Eastman’s (of Eastman-Kodak) suicide note read: “To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?”
[9] Some of the other fun titles on the site included:
California: Whose Fault? The San Andreas Fault/ The Worst Day in the Happiest Place on Earth
New York: Go F**K Yourself, Or what the Passerby said to me/What is Eirer than a Canal?/ / One Thousand Islands and not a single soul/ The Longest Island, that Spit of Land
Pennsylvania: A short Reprise for Bob Saget, who went insane, but for very good reasons
[10] From Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis.
[11] I think that sentence set a record for illicit comma use…but I cannot deconvolve the good ones from the imposters.
[12] The title track and a sort of homage to a complicated man who seemed to act as his muse for this album: an isolated, poor, bipolar sign painter from Mississippi who became too enveloped by an alternate reality to be able to live in this one. Apparently most of the cover art and a lot of the art used in the video portion of the show was his.
[13] Nor would most Christian labels have him as his latest album contains a couple (gasp) F-bombs. I am not entirely sure how we got here where an artfully used explative is more offensive than derivative art.
[14] Both ideologically or financially. Sufjan has his own label…which, incidentally has the uncontested best label name on the planet: “Asthmatic Kitty.”
[15] Well, I know it is quite a bit more complex than this. But this idea plays in the discussion.
[16] A good sign of an epic song.
[17] And I think the video underscores this.

In Defense of Not Reading: My Favorite MP3 Repositories

2010-10-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

So, it will surprise no one to learn that reading is one of my favorite activities. But the way I have ordered my life, I only read about 10 books per year.[1] This is not enough to maintain a positive flow of ideas through the control volume of my mind.[2] So I supplement with technology. I have found a discipline of listening to a broad range of quality (and often free) MP3 content while I do chores, perform laboratory experiments or exercise, has become the centerpiece of my reflective life. This week I am talking to a group of students about how I aquire, metabolize and process ideas…so I wanted to post a list of my sources of free[3] audio content.[4]

Bible and Theology:

Biblical Training: www.biblicaltraining.org

Full length and summary seminary classes by well respected professors.

Monergism: www.monergism.com/directory/link_category/MP3-Audio--Multimedia

Monergism comes from a pretty narrow theological perspective but they have compile an excellent compilation of audio resources.

Tim Keller: http://sermons2.redeemer.com/

No person that currently has a pulse has been more influential in my thought and praxis. So he gets his own link.[5]

Apologetics:

The Veritas Forum: www.veritas.org/Media

Recordings of apologetic talks given on college campuses across the country.

Be Thinking: www.bethinking.org/audio

I have not used this site. It was recomended by a friend. It looks very promising.

Classic Works:

LibraVox: www.librivox.org

Hundreds of classic, public domain, books read (mostly) by quality readers. Includes classic fiction (e.g. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George McDonald) and non-Fiction (e.g. Justin Martyr, Chesterton, Darwin).

General Interest:

Ted: www.ted.com

TED is the periodic Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. It started as an opportunity for nerds to get together to be nerds together…but has evolved into something much bigger. Now they get whoever they want to speak on whatever they want. Anyone who has an innovative big idea and can communicate it well gets invited to speak and you can find provocative 20 minute talks on nearly any topic. Some of these make excellent illustration material. It is also a good way to become familiar with the theses of influential contemporary thinkers without having to read their books. Yup, I really like Ted.

MIT: Open Campus - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/audio-video-courses/

MIT has made a commitment to offer most of their class materials free, online. More and more are becoming available by MP3.

The Library:

I get a lot of great free audio content from the public library. There is great fiction, non-fiction, music and, I especially like the full length classes on a variety of topics by The Teaching Company

Do you know of others? Please let us know in the comments.
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[1] A pretty standard example is here.
[2] Meaning, this is faster than the rate at which I lose ideas, making me less insightful with time.
[3] Note, I also pay for audio content. Most seminaries have excellent selections of audio lectures for $40-100. The Teaching Company also has great classes for $30-100 (note: never buy from them if the class is not ‘on sale’ – all classes go on sale at least once/year and usually more often – also, check your local library first). This seems steep, but if you compare it to the cost of a university class (~$1k) or the hours it would take to do the reading to get an equal dose of insight, it turns out to be a deal.
[4] My brother also did a post like this a while ago.
[5] Another link I like is here, where a dude who has a bigger ‘brain crush’ on him than me has organized other free Keller content. This is some of his best stuff.

Lessons From a Year of Preaching Part 3: Beyond Behavior Modification

2010-10-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

So this series has outlived its name[1] and I am going to make this the last post on this topic, for now. My preaching partner and I are teaching a preaching class this year so, if you are interested in my thoughts on this, the MP3’s and resources will be showing up at the class website. But for my final post in the series I wanted to talk about the motivating behavior change in ourselves and others, a topic that has far more nuance, complexity and peril in it than I ever imagined.

Most of us share the experience of trying to motivate behavior change in ourselves. We have a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together (e.g. over eating, carbon usage, prejudging people based on perceived relationships between their easily observable characteristics and behaviors we have formerly correlated with those characteristics[2]). Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (e.g. exercise, spending time with kids, or allocating resources for the poor or the environment) [3]. But one of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us who have undertaken some long term project of behavior change have also failed at it. So, if at least part of the intent of preaching is to help offer cosmic resources for behavior change it would seem like understanding what motivates behavior change in ourselves and others would be fundamental.[4]

But the water is actually murkier than that. Because, from a Christian world view it is not sufficient to do the right things. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons makes them the wrong things. Behavior change with the wrong motivations is not progress. So simple behavior change is not a reliable metric of either personal growth or effective preaching. We are a very clever species. We can often find ways to ‘hotwire our hearts.’[5] That is, we can find ways to modify our behaviors or the behaviors of others[6] by appealing to fears, insecurities or appetites that are themselves unhealthy.[7] This kind of behavior change can leave someone worse off than before.[7.5] So the key to motivating behavior change both in our own spiritual journeys and in the journeys of those in our communities (through preaching or other graces/sacraments) is to reject illicit motivational strategies. But we can’t simply reject manipulation. We have to replace it with something better. So this final post will look at the two sides of the ‘motivating behavior change’ coin: a warning and a proposed way forward.

1. Beware of Moralism

Christianity is not a religion…so you can not treat it like one. The standard religious resources are not available to us. In general, religions hold out the prospect of earning divine favor and avoiding divine punishment as a cosmic ‘carrot and stick’ to motivate the behaviors the religion deems valuable and disincentivize those it considers antisocial. But the Christian story is not one of accumulating merit and avoiding guilt in the cosmic ledger…it is a story of unilateral rescue. If you try to apply the carrot/stick motivational methods to Christianity, it becomes something else.[8]

This means there are tools in the motivational tool box that are simply off limits for Christians. Guilt is very effective for short term behavior change, but it is out of bounds. And this turns out to be pragmatically helpful anyways because, as my brother likes to say, ‘the guilt button is effective but fragile.’ If you push that button too many times, it stops working. Guilt and fear are simply not long term motivators. They require an emotional intensity that we cannot sustain. Trying to earn God’s love and stay off his naughty list is not unlike trying to earn the love of a parent or avoid our daddy’s belt…it can motivate behaviors but it leaves you disappointed and bitter. It can make you do stuff but it can’t change your heart.

2. Offer a Greater Love

But it would be absurd to suggest that Christianity does not have relatively rigorous behavioral prescriptions. So those of us who are ‘all in’ on Jesus are constantly looking for licit ways to bring our behavior in line with many of these counter-cultural practices which, we believe, are fundamentally pragmatic.[9]

The reason that simply telling people to knock it off because God is gonna get em doesn’t work, is because we are fundamentally motivated by what we love. You hear people say all the time that we should all ‘follow our hearts[10].’ This is an empty cliché. But it is not absurd because it is false; it is absurd because it is trivial. We all, always ‘follow our hearts.’ We, without exception, behave in accordance with what we love. If you are going to give yourself or your community a significant chance at spiritual progress, you can’t just try to modify behavior you have to help develop better affections. You have to cultivate and offer a better love that can supplant the parasitic, destructive things that currently fill our hearts. You have to reintroduce us to a God whose beauty and worth dwarfs the paltry half loves that currently motivate us.[11]

Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If someone is stuck in a behavior that diminishes them, strategies will help[12], but fundamentally, they need a bigger God. They need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. And the role of the preacher is to reveal it to them. You need to exalt a beautiful God and call us to his beautiful mission…so that the bleak life of self centeredness looks as pitiful as it actually is.

__________________
[1] I am now well into my third year of regular preaching.
[2] i.e. prejudice or the more insidious racism
[3] I recently made one of the strangest resolutions of my life. I resolved to watch more football this season. I love football (for reasons I will cover in an upcoming post) and watched less than 4 hours of it last season. This is symptomatic of self importance and an unhealthy addiction to productivity. So this year I am going to try to prioritize Sabbath and rest by watching more football. So far, so good. I am already up to 6 hours for the season.
[4] I realize that ‘preaching to cause behavior change’ sounds arrogant…almost like a violation. But in the Christian community it is consensual. We all recognize our need for help and look to each other for spiritual resources. Preaching is one of the formal methods we utilize to look together at the scriptures to find that help.
[5] Credit, Keller…I know, shocking.
[6] Way too many marriages work this way.
[7] The most glaring example of this in college ministry, where spiritual zeal is hypercharged by sexual tension, is students whose confuse their desire to impress cute Christian girls with their motivation to live the Christian life. I honestly think this is an underrated reason why so many people find the transition from Christian community in college to the Church (as a married adult) to be underwhelming…because they lose the powerful sexual components of their motivations and it feels a little flat.
[7.5] This is at least one reason why Jesus recomended that so much of Christian practice should be done 'in secret' whether acts of personal devlopment (e.g. prayer and fasting) or acts of social justice (e.g. generosity). By taking the opinions and reactions of other humans out of the equation we are freed of many (though certainly not all) of the illicit motivations for these activities. You simply cannot read the Jesus narratives without coming away with the overwhelming impression that motivation is more important to him than act. He is more interested in who we are becoming than what we are doing.
[8] I started this paragraph by stating categorically that Christianity is not a religion. But, of course, it often is. Many self identifying Christians have no idea that it was never meant to be a merit based worldview. And even those who understand the rescue narrative find themselves lapsing often into moral performance categories. So, Christianity is not a religion but it is full of religious people…like me…which is why we have our share of self righteous prudes. But the goal of spiritual formation (and, therefore, preaching) is to move from a self righteous merit based belief and praxis to a grace based self understanding and lifestyle.
[9] In that, they do not feed our physical or even social appetites, but we believe they are fundamentally for our good. This is what Piper means when he bombastically claims that Christians are just hedonists with perspective. We are looking to maximize our good on a cosmic scale. The idea has rhetorical flourish and some theological issues but is interesting.
[10] This, it seems, has become the only acceptable polemic for contemporary art to assert. Either art has to be non-polemical (as if that was possible) or it has to offer this cliché.
[11] What the Hebrew Scriptures like to call idols.
[12] Preaching has to be practical. It HAS to engage with the daily life and felt needs of a non-religious-professional. But it is an error to think that practical means non-theological. If worship is the engine of behavior…if we do what we truly love…then it is highly practical to paint a picture of God’s worthiness that creates more space for him in our hearts. But we would also error to think that this justifies turning preaching into a regular lecture in academic theology. Worship is fundamentally holistic, so preaching that generates worship has to engage the mind, emotions, volition and soul.

Cities Part 3: A Grand Experiment in Simulation - Las Vegas

2010-10-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

Las Vegas and New Orleans are among our nation’s most unique cities.[1] In a sense, I know that they are both one of a kind. But in my mind, I have always grouped them: Places someone would go for an epic bachelor party and, if I was invited, I would have to decline.[2] So when my work travel schedule sent me to both within a couple months, I thought it might be a fun exercise in compare and contrast.

This was not my first time in either of these cities, but it might as well have been. My only other time in Vegas was for a 3 day conference. I stayed on the edge of town,[3] got sick on the flight in and stayed in my hotel bed when I wasn’t at the conference. I walked over a mile to the conference each day through low end red light districts and I could not have been less impressed. It just seemed like a ‘dirty little town.’ But I knew that I hadn’t given Vegas a fair chance and looked forward to inevitably getting back there someday.

I have flown into New Orleans a half dozen times. I go to Vicksburg, MS a lot for work[4] and after Katrina it was $1,200 cheaper to fly through New Orleans and drive to Vicksburg…so I did.[5] But these trips were immediately post-Katrina and I was mainly in the suburbs, so the city mostly made me sad, but I looked forward to getting a chance to experience the city on its own terms. It took me years to get back to either city…and this summer, I got back to both. I’ll cover Vegas in this post and a New Orleans post will follow in a couple weeks.

My trip to Vegas began with a study in contrast of its own. For convoluted reasons, I flew directly to Vegas from my childhood home in rural Northern NY. Since I have lived there the family farms have almost entirely disappeared.[6] Farms have either made the transition to industrial farms or they have gone fallow or they have gone Amish (because only a lifestyle of radical simplicity and communal labor can be make a go of the family farm any more).

So Sunday morning I went for a run and on my way home I passed 14 Amish buggies on their way to church.[7] That night, I was in Las Vegas.

The event that brought me to Vegas[8] also brought two of my closest work friends and several other people I know from across the country there. Most of what Vegas has to offer could not interest me less. But fortunately, I my friends and I have one shared interest for which this town provides unparalleled opportunities…poker. So the first two evenings revolved around poker.

The World Series of Poker was going on at the Rio while we were in town. The tournament that was going on the night we went out was a $40,000 buy in[9], short handed table tournament.[10] This was fortuitous, because this is one of the most popular events with the pros. Since the explosion of popularity of the WSOP the pros have sought out refuge in the events that emphasize skill over luck and attracts fewer internet players. So we saw ‘everyone.’ Now, I can only name 5 or 6 professionals…and saw them (Phil Ivy, Daniel Nigranue, Furgeson, Lilly…um, maybe it is not quite six) . But my friends pointed out a couple dozen more. It was fun.

The next night we played in a big tournament at the Venetian. I ended up at the same table with one of my buddies and we both played really well through the first couple hours…and then poker happened. We both got bad beat, but it we had a blast.[11]

The last night in town we ‘did the strip.’ The strip is impressive. Billion dollar casinos. Giant monuments simulating ancient Rome or modern Paris.

Roller coasters inside of buildings…

…chocolate fountains…

…and, of course, the water show (which is even more impressive to a bunch of hydraulic engineers).

It was impressive, but not really beautiful in any way I could discover. The overwhelming impression that Vegas gives you is that of simulated reality. Everywhere you look, something is trying to be something it actually isn’t. There are cheesy replicas of Ancient Rome, Venice, and Paris (complete with a scale model of the Eifel Tower).

The air is artificially oxygenated, there is conspicuous water usage for a desert community, and no list of things that aren’t what they seem would be complete without mentioning boobs. Even the buses were inexplicably decorated to look like light rail.

Come to think of it, poker is fundamentally an exercise in simulation, as you are almost always trying to represent the opposite of whatever your situation of power is.

But the ironic (aihctbk[12]) thing about all this simulacrum is that it generates an environment where people heedlessly engage in being who they actually are.[13] Somehow, being surrounded by simulated reality produces license to drop the social coping superstructure and do the sorts of things that ‘stay in Vegas.’[14]

My conclusion on Vegas is that it is more interesting than my first visit suggested, but it is still one of my least favorite cities.[15] One of the things I think I am pretty good at is enjoying cities that seem unremarkable. My method is to try to figure out “why do the people who live here love it here?” Why don’t they move somewhere else? But Las Vegas is a town that exists almost entirely for people who do not live there. It is the first town I have encountered that completely defies my method.

However, while there was no discernable local community that I could anonymously experience, I ended up enjoying Vegas because I got to experience it with an imported community of people I enjoy.

This post was written while listening to the Vast Pandora channel

______________________
[1] This is a part of an ongoing series I am doing where I reflect on the various cities my work travel takes me to. I describe the motivation of the series here. Also, I will continue posting retro-journal entries on the Odyssey blog for another week or so. Indecently, if you are new to this blog, it is worth noting that it is not primarily a travel blog…it only seems that way because travel has supplanted philosophical and cultural reflection in my life recently.
[2] I had a group of friends that used to take an annual trip to LV. Once, they were making plans while I was hanging out and one of them told me “You know Stan, you would totally be welcome to come with us. It’s just that we gamble, golf, drink and go to strip clubs…and you kind of aren’t into any of those things.” I expressed appreciation for the invitation but affirmed their instinct to exclude me.
[3] It was just after 9/11 and I had just started at my current job. The hotel was $12 per night and the whole trip cost under $250. I didn’t feel like I could ask my work to send me because I had just started, but the conference looked incredibly helpful (and it was) so I planned to take vacation and pay for it. When my work found out why I was taking vacation, they sent me.
[4] The other main lab for my agency is there…and I did my PhD research at their facility.
[5] Once the guy in front of me was complaining about how everyone in the federal government was only self interested and could not pass up opportunities to waste money…as I stood in line, waiting to voluntarily drive 7 hours round trip, on my own time, to save my project $1200.
[6] This was going on when I was a kid, but now the process is mostly complete.
[7] There was a fun trend among the buggies. The first ones had old people in them and traveled slowly (I easily outran the first of them). As I passed the buggies, the families got younger and had more children and were traveling faster (and were, in general, friendlier). I thought it was pretty fun that even Amish families have trouble getting out of the house for church on Sunday mornings.
[8] Every three years all of the federal agencies that encounter sediment problems have a joint sediment conference. This without exception is the most helpful professional event I attend and I go every time. This year I presented two papers and was a judge for the student paper contest (which was way more interesting than it sounds…but sadly I am sworn to secrecy. Um, seriously, I’m not kidding. The deliberations of this contest are strictly confidential. Weird, right?) I know that a federal conference in Vegas sounds like an atrocious boondoggle, but one of the biggest problems I see in the engineering community is the lack of technical development. There are very few forums where we can learn from each other’s mistakes and successes. The journals have become playgrounds for academics such that most practicing engineers couldn’t read one even if, by some miracle, there was a paper that they might find helpful. Conferences are really the only place that we find out about new technology (or, in my case, get the word out on new technology), hear about catastrophic mistakes, meet the people who could solve our problems and get exposed to new ways of thinking about our field. I’m almost certain that a good conference pays for itself several times simply in increased efficiency, contacts made and mistakes avoided. If I ever have a private firm, I will consider good conferences (and, yes, there are bad ones) for self motivated employees a good investment.
[9] One friend tried to win a seat in the Main event in a tournament going on in the other room, and we went to watch. But it turned out to be a fun night to be there.
[10] 6 people per table instead of 10.
[11] The highlight of the evening involved a boisterous Drunk Canadian at our table. Now, since I was just there to have fun, I loved that our new Canadian friend who was sucking back vodkas and red bulls at the rate of about 5 per hour got the table talking…but the serious poker players hated it. They like a somber mood where they can intimidate. Several serious players were visibly flustered by the banter and my buddy and I think it worked to our advantage. Anyway, the highlight of the evening was when another inebriated gentlemen with a European accent joined our table and took the banter up a notch. So the Canadian asked “My friend, which part of Russia are you from?” To which he replied, quickly and with a smile “The German part.”
[12] I always want to use the word ironic in its contemporary vernacular even though I know that it is ‘wrong’ because I lack a really good alternate linguistic construction. In a sense, ironic has expanded its semantic range to fill a linguistic gap. So, from now on in this blog, instead of a long self justifying footnote every time I use ironic “as it has come to be known” I will simply include the abbreviation (aihctbk)
[13] This makes more sense in light of my thoughts on ‘being yourself’.
[14] Mark Driscoll has a great line about this. He likes to say, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, unless it is itchy.’
[15] My friend asked me if I would bring my wife back. I thought about it and decided, I would spend a night on the strip with my wife if Vegas was on my way somewhere, but it is not worth its own trip.