Wanted: Generalists

I should simply link to everything Carl Trueman writes and call it a day! His ongoing series of posts on Martin Luther and Turbulent Priests are the closest thing to required reading for evangelicals of a Reformed bent that you'll find on the present-day world wide web. Plus he's just flat-out fun to read, though his typos drive me nuts. You can find his stuff at the Ref21 blog.

Today Trueman concluded a series in praise of "generalists." The Problem: Western society (education, law, medicine) is increasingly given over to specialization. We're in danger of becoming a dictatorship of the experts. In the groves of academe where Professor Trueman toils this trend manifests itself in the proliferation of PhD students. He argues, correctly in my opinion, that "the cult of the specialist" isn't a good thing for the church. What we need, especially among pastors and elders, are well-rounded generalists. As much as I enjoy being "an authority" on one or two subjects, the type of person Trueman describes is what I aspire to.

Read on:

In Praise of the Generalist I: The Problem

In Praise of the Generalist II: The Possibility and the Imperative

In Praise of the Generalist III: Some Suggestions

Beyond Belief

The story of two 9/11 widows planting seeds of hope among the widows of Afghanistan. . .




via Nicholas Kristof

Should every sentence be easy to read?

When it comes to technology I'm a late adopter. Whether it was getting a cellphone, switching from VHS to DVD, or making the jump from analog to hi-def, I've always been several years behind my peers. I don't have a smartphone and have no plans to get one, nor do I feel the need to get a Kindle or Nook. I'm still buying books at a good clip, which lately have been accumulating in ever taller stacks around our crowded bungalow.

Yet, I suspect in a few years I'll have one of those e-reading devices (maybe I'll get one for Christmas). And perhaps then I'll wonder how I lived without it, as I now wonder how I ever watched sports on my old analog television set. If my buddy invites me over to watch the Gators game and he doesn't have HDTV -- I ain't going! Even if he does have chicken wings.

Jonah Lehrer is one of my sharpest tacks out there and today he writes about the future of reading. He points out that consumer technology moves in one direction.

[Toward] making it easier for us to perceive the content. This is why your TV is so high-def, and your computer monitor is so bright and clear. For the most part, this technological progress is all to the good. (I still can’t believe that people watched golf before there were HD screens. Was the ball even visible? For me, the pleasure of televised golf is all about the lush clarity of grass.) Nevertheless, I worry that this same impulse – making content easier and easier to see – could actually backfire with books. We will trade away understanding for perception. The words will shimmer on the screen, but the sentences will be quickly forgotten.

What's interesting, Lehrer explains, is that there's a neural reason for his worry that making books easier to read could have baneful unintended consequences. He cites the work of French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene who discovered "two distinct pathways" for making sense of what we read.

Most of the time when we read we're using the "ventral pathway" of our brain. This route enables us to easily slip into a sort of autopilot when we're reading familiar words and sentence structures. But when we encounter something unfamiliar, even bad handwriting or an unusual font, this activates the "dorsal stream" of our literate brain forcing us to sit up and pay attention. We're no longer on autopilot. In Lehrer's phrase "the automatic act has lost its automaticity." If that experience of struggling with a hard-to-read text is taken away Lehrer worries that. . .

before long, we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink – to these screens that keep on getting better – that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts. We’ll forget what it’s like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a literate clause. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should be easy to read.

Hear, hear! The future of books and reading may be digital, but I'm in no hurry to trade my pages for megabytes. The idea of settling down with a beverage in one hand and a Kindle in the other doesn't give me as much pleasure as the lo-tech alternative. Then again, with another baby on the way we sure could use the extra space!

Standing for truth. . . in love

The most anticipated event in Gainesville on Saturday isn't the Florida/USF football game, it's the ritualistic burning of copies of the Qur'an at Dove World Outreach Center church. (I hesitate to call DWOC a church but I'll keep my Reformed ecclesiology out of it.) With counterdemonstrations planned, and the inevitable media circus, the Gainesville P.D. are going to have their hands full! Everyone from General David Petraeus to the Vatican have weighed in on the wisdom of this stunt. I believe Carl Trueman put it best. Qur'an-burning (and book-burning in general) is "legal but stupid."

I went on DWOC's website and it's obvious that "exposing Islam" is the primary mission of this congregation's senior pastors, Dr. Terry & Sylvia Jones. The church displays a sign on it's property with the words "Islam is of the Devil" and you can buy books and t-shirts with the same message. In support of this message the website reads:

Christians must return to the truth and stop hiding. We need to speak up against sin and call the people to repentance. Abortion is murder. Homosexuality is sin. We need to call these things what they are and bring the world the true message: that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6).

Any religion which would profess anything other than this truth is of the devil. This is why we also take a stand against Islam, which teaches that Jesus is not the Son of God, therefore taking away the saving power of Jesus Christ and leading people straight to Hell.

I'm actually going to agree with those statements, and say that the New Testament does too. For example 1 John 2:22-23 says:

Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.

Not only could one say that Islam is of the devil because it denies that Jesus is the Christ -- that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- one could also say that Hinduism is of the devil, and Mormonism is of the devil, and Buddhism, and Unitarianism, and...you get the idea. If we set about burning the holy books of every religion that denies that Jesus is Lord we'd need a lot of wood.

Of course, Pastor Jones would probably remind me that adherents of those religions didn't kill thousands of Americans on 9/11. True, but the New Testament also commands Christians to love our enemies and to do everything in our power to live peaceably with all men. It admonishes us to speak the truth in love and to count it a privilege to suffer for the sake of Christ. What's lacking in Jones' crusade against Islam is what the Bible calls discernment. Tragically this episode will be seen as representative of more than what it is, which is a fringe "church" with a very distorted view of what it means to stand up for the exclusive truth-claims of the gospel.

In Acts 17 we have a counterexample of how to stand up for truth in a pluralistic society. The Apostle Paul arrives in Athens and Luke reports that "his spirit was provoked" (ESV) when he saw the idols that filled the city. "Provoked" actually isn't a strong enough translation. From my limited understanding of Greek, it's more like Paul was enraged -- his whole being was gripped with indignation. Note that Pastor Jones says burning the Qur'an is his way of expressing hatred of Islam.

However, Paul doesn't go out and take a sledgehammer to the idols or go out of his way to provoke the worshippers of same. Rather the text says he "reasoned . . . every day" in the synagogues and marketplaces of Athens. Eventually his apologias for Christ (1 Peter 3:15) gained him an audience at the Areopagus -- the center of Greek antichrist philosophy. Here Paul seeks common ground while at the same time preaching a message of repentance. The result? Some mocked Paul, but others believed.

I won't be surprised if the event on Saturday fizzles. But the damage has been done. No follower of Islam will be tempted to believe in the Jesus presented by the organizers of Burn a Koran Day.

D.A. Carson on the Psalms

I love the Psalms, and I love hearing them taught by gifted expositors of scripture. That's why I was eager to listen to the incredibly gifted Don Carson preach from the Psalms at a recent conference in Australia. Carson chose Psalms 1, 2, 40, 48 and 110. These are dynamite! Click on the link below to access the audio.

http://www.ridley.edu.au/ridley-resources/2010-preaching-the-psalms1/

Redefining the "gospel of wealth"

David Brooks writes about a Baptist minister who's challenging the notion that American-style materialism and Christian discipleship are compatible.

[David] Platt earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. At age 26, he was hired to lead a 4,300-person suburban church in Birmingham, Ala., and became known as the youngest megachurch leader in America.

Platt grew uneasy with the role he had fallen into and wrote about it in a recent book called “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.” It encapsulates many of the themes that have been floating around 20-something evangelical circles the past several years.

Platt’s first target is the megachurch itself. Americans have built themselves multimillion-dollar worship palaces, he argues. These have become like corporations, competing for market share by offering social centers, child-care programs, first-class entertainment and comfortable, consumer Christianity.

Jesus, Platt notes, made it hard on his followers. He created a minichurch, not a mega one. Today, however, building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshipping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshipping ourselves.”

Next, Platt takes aim at the American dream. . .

Read the whole thing

Happy Labor Day

Learning the art of the craft (Bogdanovich)

One of my favorite moviemen, Peter Bogdanovich, adds blogger to his many titles. From the introduction to Blogdanovich:

The state of movie culture—indeed, the state of culture in the U.S.A.—is at a distressingly low level. At film schools all over the country, most of the students act as though picture history begins somewhere around “Raging Bull”. The knowledge of, or interest in, films made during the fifty-year Golden Age of Pictures—1912-1962—is generally either non-existent or extremely spotty.

I was lucky: The late 1950s and most of the 1960s were terrific years for talk and writing about the great picture work that had been made in America, just at the time it all came tumbling down. New York’s prestigious, influential Museum of Modern Art finally did retrospectives on Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock in l961-62-63. I arranged them. The directors in my generation—Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, almost all of them—had quite a good sense of older pictures. But that doesn’t seem to be the case much of the time now.

Why should it be so important to see the work that has preceded us? Again, I was lucky: My European father was not only a fine painter, he was a vastly knowledgeable expert on the entire history of painting and sculpture; dealers and museum curators would ask him to judge if a work was genuine or fake. He was also a brilliant classical pianist, and knew the whole opus of the great composers. So I picked up at an early age that if you want to be of some quality in your chosen field, you had better have a damn good idea of all the superb or transcendent work that has been done before your advent. Not for the purpose of remakes, but in order to learn the vocabulary, grammar, the humanity, the art of the craft. Bach did precede Mozart.

Where the grapes of wrath are stored

"I think any young man or any man who isn't angry at one time or another is a waste of time. No, no. Anger is a symbol of thought and evaluation and reaction: without it what have we got?"

- John Steinbeck

Recently I've been captured anew by John Ford's 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath. If the Hollywood studio system needed any justification, the fact that it could produce a motion picture like this one is justification enough. Much credit goes to 20th Century Fox Studios chief Darryl Zanuck. Even though Zanuck was an anti-labor Republican he had the artistic integrity to let Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson make a film that was true to the spirit and sensibilities of the novel. It's actually astonishing that a movie this controversial and overtly political emerged at that time.

Steinbeck was clearly a man of the left, though he took flak from some for not being radical enough. By all accounts he had nothing but good things to say about Hollywood's treatment of his work. When watching the movie later on in the 50s he remarked that it made him believe in the book all over again. Ford's politics were a complicated mix of conservative and liberal, but he always had a soft spot for the underdog and the common folk. If I had to label Ford I'd call him a bleeding-heart conservative.

Of course, some of the content of the novel was too shocking to put on film, and the economic and political messages were somewhat watered down. Not only that, the arc of the novel -- ending on a pessimistic note -- was turned around to give the movie version a more upbeat (Hollywood?) ending. This is forgiveable though, since it allowed Ma Joad -- played memorably by Jane Darwell -- to deliver one of the great uplifting closing lines in American cinema history. "We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people!" It gives me goose bumps every time.

Even with some of the hard edges smoothed off Steinbeck's prose, the movie has a visceral power thanks to the stellar acting and Ford's impeccable direction. The Grapes of Wrath unfolds as one pitch-perfect scene after another. There's nary a false step. Henry Fonda's Tom Joad is one of a handful of big-screen performances worthy of the adjective iconic. Darwell won a well-deserved Oscar as the matriarch who keeps the family moving forward on their exodus to a hoped-for promised land. Her scenes with Fonda are the dramatic and spiritual center of the film. John Carradine, as disillusioned ex-preacher John Casy, almost manages to upstage Fonda with his laconic delivery and eccentric mannerisms. Some of the finest character actors of Hollywood's "Golden Age" show up in smaller roles e.g., Charley Grapewin and Ford favorite Ward Bond.

What the acting and directing couldn't do to adequately convey Steinbeck's lacerating vision of human struggle against injustice was accomplished through Gregg Toland's cinematography. Toland would achieve legendary status a year later by shooting a little film called Citizen Kane, but his work here is no less impressive. He and Ford achieve a stark visual style that often conveys more than words would have been able to do. In addition, they modeled the film's look on the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange which gives it a documentary-like quality. What the Italian neorealists would do after the war, Ford and Toland were doing in 1939.

Here are two examples of Lange's photography. . .





And some stills from the film. . .







Tom Joad is a fascinating protagonist. If anything, Fonda's characterization makes him more memorable in the movie. When we first meet Tom he seems like a conventional angry young man. He's a wiseacre with a chip on his shoulder and not very likeable. He's more like the solipsistic characters later glamorized by James Dean than a humanitarian crusader. But the example of Casy's Christlike sacrifice, as well as a growing power of observation, transforms Tom into a rebel with a cause. By the time of his famous farewell to Ma he's come to see his destiny as bound up with the downtrodden everywhere. The story of the Joad family is a microcosm of the larger American story. It's a story of change and movement -- movements of adventurers, settlers and migrants looking for a better life. The Grapes of Wrath celebrates some of the people who paid the price on the road of progress, and invites us to channel the spirit of Tom Joad in the continuing struggle for liberty and justice for all.

Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Help for disciples swimming with sharks*

Back in June I shared an excerpt on integrity from Redeeming Law: Christian Calling and the Legal Profession by Regent Law School professor Michael P. Schutt. Though I'm not a lawyer I found this a profitable read. However, I do work in the legal field (which is why a friend gave me this book) and the picture Schutt paints of a profession adrift in the waters of pragmatism squares with what I've witnessed. The author believes Christian lawyers are as affected as their secular counterparts, and he issues a call for better discipleship within the church geared for believers in the legal profession. One of the things I appreciated most about the book was its emphasis on the role of the local church.

In the chapter "The American Law School Experience" Professor Schutt describes a process that begins in law school in which the historical, religious and moral foundations of the legal tradition are "ignored or suppressed." Instead, aspiring lawyers are taught a pragmatic, technical approach to the law instead of an approach that values virtue and sees practicing law as a "moral science." In this view a good lawyer is nothing more than a skillful technician, and the law is a tool to be used to achieve a desired outcome. Most students are quickly taken in by this approach, and it takes a tremendous effort for a stressed-out first year law student to swim against this tide.

Schutt cites the work of legal thinker Richard Posner as the epitome of this approach. Posner has written that we are merely "clever animals" who need not waste time trying to discover "metaphysical realities." Instead, we should be content in the knowledge that "there is no deep mystery at the heart of existence. Or at least no deep mystery worth trying to dispel and thus worth troubling our minds about." And you wonder why so many see lawyering as, at best, an amoral calling! Judge Posner, by the way, is hugely influential across the idealogical spectrum.

Redeeming Law draws on an impressive array of Christian thinkers (everyone from Aquinas to John Calvin to Lesslie Newbigin) to make a compelling case for a holistic approach to the law that sees it as a moral science once again, and equips Christian lawyers to integrate their work and their faith. Of course, the "law cannot redeem souls" but Christian lawyers should aspire to be "co-laborers with Christ" and "have redeeming influence on our law practices, our clients, our colleagues, and our professors." (p. 11)

I think the book was longer than it needed to be, and I found some of the author's assumptions about the impact of Christian worldview too sweeping, but those are minor quibbles. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this as "must reading" for any Christian attorney or law student.


*The title is cheesy, but I couldn't help myself.