I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts On Faith. I read some of Bird By Bird, which was recommended to everyone attending the Willow Creek Arts Conference several years ago. That was a book about writing, and it had some sensible advice in it. Reading it did not prepare me for the mixture of vitriolic bitchiness and grave splendor in Plan B.
Anne Lamott is a Christian. She loves Jesus and follows him to the best of her ability. She’s also a liberal Democrat who hated President George Bush. She swears. She refers to God with feminine pronouns. She lets us see her dirty laundry.
Several years ago when I was still single, I was visiting some friends who had a young girl. While I chatted with my friends in the kitchen, their little girl played with another little girl who was also visiting. The two girls were both about four or five years old. After a while, her parents became concerned that they had not heard from their girl in quite a while. They went looking for her and found her with her playmate in the closet in her bedroom. She had pooped on the floor. She and her little friend had taken the poop and smeared it all over themselves and the walls of her closet. I decided it was a good time to excuse myself and go home.
Reading Lamott’s book is a little like discovering those two girls playing with poop. It is at once funny, cute, disturbing, and disgusting. And I’m so relieved that I don’t have to clean any of it up.
Some of her entries—the book reads like a blog—are touching and sweet, like the one about having a dog. Others, like the one about her son’s adolescence, are painful. A few, such as the one describing a peace march in the rain, are infuriating.
Which brings me to why I recommend this book.
I like to think of myself as calm and steady, not easily ruffled. Sure, I have occasional bouts of rage when I yell at my son in that stentorian voice reserved for righteous indignation and motivating teenagers, but I’m a reasonable guy even when others are unreasonable. Yet I have come away from reading Plan B seething with anger and indignation. What’s going on?
It turns out that I’m offended at Lamott’s liberalism. Despite claiming that Christians need not be Republicans, when I’m confronted with a genuine, liberal Democrat, who is obviously a genuine Christian, I am affronted. I want to deny her a place in the kingdom—which is an innocuous way of saying, “She can go to hell.” Not a very charitable response.
Instead I keep reading. I try to see her point of view. I try to imagine living next door to Anne Lamott, borrowing a cup of sugar, inviting her to a barbecue, making small talk about the weather and maybe eventually working around to politics with great caution and deliberate care. I wonder if she will hate me for voting Republican. I wonder: Can we be friends? I hope we can. Because I like her. She’s my sister.
Jim Collins’ latest book, How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, is his best yet. His data-driven approach to business analysis is refreshing in a genre dominated by anecdotal, “common sense” approaches. Collins identifies five stages in the fall of once great companies, and as in his previous studies, he compares the fallen companies to similar companies in the same industry that did not fall, effectively demonstrating that decline was due to choices made by the business leaders, not to market forces outside their control.
Rather than summarize the five stages and fail to do them justice, I will just say this: Read this book. Anyone who leads an organization can benefit from its insights. The biggest surprise was finding that companies rarely fall from doing nothing. Instead they enter a period of frenetic activity characterized by innovation, restructuring, re-inventing, and loss of connection to core values. The key seems to be the loss of cohesive vision. A company that recovers its vision can often pull out of its dive and return to greatness.
Pastor Ken Pagano’s invitation to his congregation to bring their guns to church made the New York Times. It apparently made the news in other countries as well. Great. Conservative Christians are gun-toting sociopaths. Liberal Christians are peace-loving and reasonable, like Jesus.
Only Jesus wasn’t. He told his followers that they would have enemies everywhere. He told them he came to bring division and strife. “A man’s enemies,” he said, “will be members of his own household.” He told his followers to bring swords for protection, even though he planned to give himself up. He deliberately broke the law to call attention to its oppressiveness, and he openly challenged the authorities of his day. He died a convicted felon.
If you want to invoke a role-model for peace and respectability, Jesus is not your best bet.
I think Pastor Pagano’s stunt is ill-advised and unwise but Constitutionally protected. Minnesota had a law for a while requiring businesses and institutions to post a sign if they banned guns. Our church dutifully complied: “The Harbor Church bans guns on these premises.” So did our local YMCA and several community colleges. It sort of made sense in the Twin Cities. The law eventually fell to legal challenges.
(When I was teaching at a local community college, I was told first that I could not carry a gun anywhere on school property, even if I had a permit. A few weeks later, the policy was amended. I could bring a gun to school as long as it remained unloaded and locked away in my car. I own an ancient shotgun that my dad gave me years ago to hunt pheasant. I don’t consider a gun my best protection against armed criminals or an overreaching government, but that could be because I am not very proficient with a gun and can’t imagine actually shooting someone with one.)
But rural Minnesota is famed for its prime hunting lands. I’ve heard of places where the kids bring their guns to school so they don’t have to go home before going out to hunt. Of course, the guns are hunting rifles, and they are locked up during the day, and the kids are all well-versed in gun safety. But I can’t imagine a school in the Cities giving the go-ahead for such a scheme.
The Constitutional right to bear arms is based on the premise that arming our government without retaining the right of the citizens to arm themselves could lead to the collapse of our democracy. Armed citizens are a check on overreaching government. The history of the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s demonstrates the limitations of pitting armed citizens against an armed government. While the federal government effectively demonstrated its authority, the army was unable to enforce the whiskey tax, and it was repealed in 1803. Both sides could claim a victory.
A lot of NRA members and other gun enthusiasts still consider the right of citizens to bear arms as a protection against the government. That’s why they don’t want a ban on assault weapons. A group of guys with shotguns and hunting rifles would not last long against a trained military force armed with M1s and 50-caliber machine guns. It’s not that they expect the government to turn on them any time soon; it’s a matter of principle. They want to be ready if the government gets out of hand.
For a lot of Democrats the NRA stance borders on insanity. Not only does the NRA oppose restrictions on gun ownership, but they regard the government as a potential enemy. For those accustomed to thinking of the government as the solution to their problems, it’s hard to conceive of people who consider the government to be the source of theirs.
I doubt Jesus would advocate on either side of the gun debate. He always seemed more interested in personal responsibility than in questions of policy, unless the policies were unjust to the poor. When his critics tried to embroil him in the hot-button issues of his day, he always refocused on our obligations before God: “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” He would remind gun advocates that God told us not to kill but to lay down our lives. He would also call the gun opponents to repentance.
Around our house we joke that Obama is the Antichrist.
“Did you hear the news?” my wife will say. “Obama was at some foreign conference, and everybody loved him. He must be the Antichrist.” (For those unfamiliar with New Testament eschatology as commonly understood by many evangelical Christians, read the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Very entertaining, I’m told. There’s also a series of DVDs, of which viewing the first was enough to keep me from watching any more.)
I have an interest in Obama not being the Antichrist because before he was elected, I wrote that he was not. If it turns out that he is, then I will have to eat crow.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I say. “Lot’s of presidents have been popular.”
“Name five,” she says.
We are, perhaps, a little uncharitable.
I like Obama. (”See? He’s drawing you in, too.”) I like listening to him. He sounds intelligent, which is a big improvement. He seems careful and deliberate, which is another change for the better. I hate some of his policies. I hated some of Bush’s policies. I guess I’m one of those people you can’t please all of all the time.
People have notoriously bad memories. Look back at news articles from 2002. Bush was immensely popular. The nation was still reeling from 9/11, and Bush seemed like someone we could trust to save us. Even in 2004, when he was re-elected, he was still riding that wave of popularity. Now Obama is our current savior, helping us out of our fiscal disasters. Wait until 2016. If he is still as popular seven years in the future as he is now, I really will eat crow (properly prepared, of course, roasted over charcoal, slathered with barbecue sauce, and served with grilled vegetables).
While the process is certainly unscientific, I would like to get an idea of the range of views on evolution and how they intersect with belief in spiritual reality. The survey is anonymous. Please comment.
When I received Makoto Fujimura’s Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture, I was wowed by the evident care that had gone into it’s design. It is the loveliest paperback book I’ve ever seen. I expected to find it interesting, perhaps a little challenging, and certainly full of beauty.
But life intervened, first in the form of a traffic collision, then in the form of a layoff from my job. I found myself with more time on my hands than I was accustomed to having, but the last thing I wanted to do was read a collection of meditations by a Japanese-American artist. I read some, found myself foundering, and put it aside. Then, driven by a sense of responsibility to the publisher for sending me a free copy, I tried again. And again. And again.
I found after all my trying that the book was better than I wanted to admit. It isn’t that I don’t like art. It is that I do like logical, well-reasoned argument. I like a straight highway and a car with plenty of horsepower. Instead, I was forced to meander on a country path through unfamiliar landscapes, never knowing quite where I was going or how I was going to get there. It struck me that this was the sort of book my artistic wife would like. I’m not sure she has ever read a book straight through. She reads the beginning, jumps into the middle, skips to the end, backtracks, quits for a week, resumes from a different spot than where she left off, and generally leaves me dumbfounded. If I tried to read like that, my brain would turn to pudding.
(Full disclosure: My wife reminded me that she read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck straight through and enjoyed it immensely. Incontrovertible evidence that she is a better person than I.)
Refractions is a book of meditations. I find that I cannot simply read it; I have to join in the meditation. Some of Fujimura’s insights are penetrating. Much of what he has to say has been shaped by his proximity to the collapse of the Twin Towers. His studio was covered with dust from the Towers. His child was evacuated from school. He sees the gap where the Towers used to form the backdrop for his working life every day, a gap that seems to him more momentous and intense than any of the presences that still fill his life. Living, as I do, in Minnesota, the fall of the Towers was distant, like the wars that have come since. In fact, the war in Afghanistan has been more present to me because my son spent a year and a half there and is slated to return this fall. But the wars are also outgrowths from the gap where the Towers stood. For Fujimura the absence of the Towers signifies all the absences in our lives that make us incomplete or broken. Every return to Ground Zero is a kind of repentance, acknowledging that brokenness and calling for redemption. He believes that art can facilitate the healing required; that is one of its purposes both for the artist who creates something beautiful and meaningful out of the brokenness and for the one who responds to that creation with understanding and empathy.
Fundamentalist Christians may find Fujimura’s Christianity too inclusive. For example, he draws inspiration from Matazo Kayama, who was a Nihonga master. But like those who say, “All truth is God’s truth,” I think Fujimura would say, “All beauty is God’s beauty.” Wherever the creative process is at work, making something beautiful out of broken pieces, God is also at work because God is an artist.
Reading Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason made me very uncomfortable. The book chronicles the history of anti-intellectualism in American culture from the Revolutionary period to the present. It’s an excellent book, well-written, carefully researched, intelligent, and witty. Jacoby, a self-avowed secularist and freethinker, is evenhanded in her treatment of what she calls “junk thought” whether it comes from the political right or left. Hardly anyone comes off blameless, regardless of their supposed credentials.
What made me uncomfortable, though, was her criticism of Christian fundamentalists. I found it too well-deserved.
Jacoby defines a Christian fundamentalist as anyone who believes that the Bible is literally true. This makes it easy for her to lump together all the right-wing Christians, since most would in fact agree that they believe the Bible quite literally. She doesn’t care about most of the miracle stories because believing them does not have consequences for public policy except insofar as those who believe them must be anti-rationalist or at least irrational. She focuses most on the first part of Genesis because a literal understanding of it conflicts so obviously with evolution. Jacoby points out that America alone in the developed world has a sizable portion of the population that still rejects the descent of humans from earlier, non-human primates. Why? Biologists, geologists, and geneticists know that the theory of evolution is true. The evidence that all life on earth has a common ancestry is overwhelming. Yet “just 26 percent accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Fully 42 percent say that all living things, including humans, have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” (p. 23).
There can be no doubt that the theory of evolution has problems, especially for Christian conceptions of sin and death, regardless of how metaphorically one takes Genesis. However, scientific credibility is not one of them. Scientists use what they know about evolution to make predictions about where to look for additional fossil evidence. They go to those places, look for fossils, and find them. In the same way, unraveling DNA has confirmed again and again that certain species are closely related, descended from common ancestors. Is it possible that God created the world in six days and filled it with living things as Genesis says? Yes, of course it is, but not in any scientifically meaningful sense. It is possible that God concealed his creative act by adding a backstory, going all the way back to the big bang, to everything he made. If so, then one of the aims of science is to unravel this backstory. I am not saying that this is what I believe; I am merely offering it as a way for biblical literalists to reconcile their faith in Genesis with scientific evolution. Unfortunately, this leaves no place for creationism in science and hence no place for the teaching of creationism in schools.
To her credit, Jacoby exposes the pseudoscience of social Darwinism, which came to prominence in the early twentieth century. It was used in ways never intended by Darwin to promote eugenics and justify exploitative capitalism. To this day, there is still confusion, not only among Christian fundamentalists but also among supporters of evolution, between biological evolution and social Darwinism.
Despite her attempts at fairness, however, Jacoby cannot conceal her contempt for fundamentalist Christians. Biblically attested miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea, the virgin birth of Christ, and his resurrection are just so many fables told and believed by naive and intellectually unsophisticated people. She finds the tenacity with which Christians adhere to their faith baffling, though she never says so in so many words.
Despite her careful research, she attributes the origins of the Jesus Movement in the late sixties and early seventies to Campus Crusade for Christ, which she later refers to as the Christian Crusade. She says nothing of Calvary Chapel and appears not to know about the struggles of organized denominations to accommodate the sudden influx of young people who had renounced drugs and alcohol and sexual promiscuity but wanted to keep their rock-and-roll, long hair, and communal living. She also claims that Roe v. Wade occurred in a cultural climate that offered almost no opposition, which, while true, neglects that fact that abortion was presented almost universally as a way to protect young girls and women from the devastating injuries caused by “back alley” abortions. No one foresaw in 1973 that within a decade nearly one in four pregnancies would end in abortion.
Despite these shortcomings, I highly recommend The Age of American Unreason. The chapters on junk thought and the culture of distraction are especially worth reading. Jacoby uncovers the pernicious influence of the ubiquitous audio-video culture. It is not what we expose our children to, though that is certainly bad enough. It is what we fail to expose them to because they are always distracted by what’s on television or on the Internet or playing on their iPod. Previous generations valued quiet. My children think I am odd because I turn off the radio while I’m driving, but I just get tired of always having to listen to something. All my children, thank God, are readers. We have always valued reading in my home, and when they were young, I read to them. We have also deliberately gone without television and video at times just to have time for other pursuits. But there is no denying that we are exceptions. Most families live in a cocoon of entertainment, constantly bombarded by sound and video. Not many people I know read for pleasure. Fewer still spend time in silence listening to their own thoughts. Among Christians there is a tradition at least of prayer, meditation, and Bible-reading, but for many this tradition has been brushed aside. Christians are as likely as anyone else to fill their time with self-medicating entertainment and thoughtless absorption of the prevailing audio-video culture.
I’ve been through half a dozen values clarification sessions in my life. I never liked them. For one thing, I never thought they helped clarify anyone’s values. Typically, the group is presented with a hypothetical scenario requiring the sacrifice of one or more members to guarantee survival of those that remain. Because the scenarios are always hypothetical, they always lack the real detail of a genuine situation. They force you to make decisions based on stereotypes when a real situation would require a much more complete and nuanced understanding. In addition, since no one really dies, the entire process is overlaid with a sense of academic curiosity that I find repugnant. We sit in our group calmly rationalizing the relative value of this or that human being based on gender, race, age, occupation, general knowledge, or usefulness to the group all the while knowing full well that the value of each one is incalculable. The values that become clarified are the values of those who devise the experiments.
God seldom asks or answers hypothetical questions. He has a way of asking very pointed and practical questions: Where are you? Did you eat the fruit I told you not to eat? Where is your brother? What do you see? Is the maker of the eye unable to see? Do you want to be well? What do you want?
One of the classic questions aimed like an arrow at Christians is this: What about those who have never heard of Christ? Are they condemned because of their ignorance? Behind such questions is a silent accusation of injustice. If God requires faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, then those who have no opportunity to hear of Jesus certainly cannot believe in him and must be condemned. This certainly seems unfair. Why would a just God condemn those who have not heard along with those who have willfully rejected Jesus?
The Apostle Paul tackles these question in the book of Romans. He makes clear that there is no such thing as simple ignorance. Instead, Paul says that people “suppress the truth by their wickedness.” He claims that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” The visible and tangible world testifies to the invisible God. Of course, there are many today who claim that nothing can be known of God—not even whether he exists—based on examination of the natural world. But such claims are based on an incomplete epistemology, one that tends to emphasize method and ignore the knowing subject. Besides, Paul says of those who persist in godlessness that “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” They become unable to know God through his handiwork.
Nevertheless, Paul tells us that we will be judged according to what we have done, not according to what propositions we have given mental assent to. Those born under the Law—Jews—will be judged by the Law. Those who do not have the Law will be judged without the Law. Paul’s position is that everyone—with or without the Law—has done things they know they should not have done. They have acted from selfishness, meanness, cowardice, or malice. Those without the Law will be judged by their own guilt and by their hypocrisy, since they have condemned in others what they themselves have done. This fact, that none of us lives up to our own standards to say nothing of the standards of others, is an important clue about our human nature. Something in us demands perfection, and we are not up to it. What is this something, and where does it come from?
So there are no innocents undeserving of condemnation. Yes, there are some who are ignorant of Christ, but their ignorance is culpable, and they will be judged according to what they know, not according what they do not know. But what of you, O Accuser? If you are really concerned about those who do not yet know Christ, are you spending yourself as Paul did to bring the knowledge of the gospel to them? Or do you seek to divert God’s attention from your own sin by accusing him of injustice? There are some who have not heard Christ, but you have heard. What will you do with what you have heard?
I added a page to my web site about the Liar’s Paradox. I felt it belonged on my web site rather than my blog because it deals with logic and matters of interest to recreational mathematicians. Besides hosting my blog, my web site has a few articles about mathematical curiosities and a couple of puzzles. Check it out.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened or how. Somehow the Minnesota reserve, that diffidence born of snow and ice and too many layers of winter clothing has seeped into my body and made me more frozen, less capable of giving and receiving warmth. Maybe it was the accident. Maybe it was getting laid off. Somehow, though, it seems to go way back, back to my childhood when I idolized Mr. Spock and schooled myself in emotionless detachment.
Yet I am neither emotionless nor detached. I get angry about things that used to oppress me: credit card companies that charge exorbitant interest and then have the nerve to tack on fees for late payments or exceeding your credit limit, phone companies that cheerfully allow your children to rack up hundreds of dollars in messaging fees because all you wanted was phone service, and the kids knew better than to send texts—or so you thought. These things make me angry now, which I find in a way freeing. Because I used to feel guilty about them. I used to think I was the one being irresponsible because I paid insufficient attention to the fine print, because I didn’t check my balance every day or carefully meter my cell phone usage. But the anger is fleeting, and when it is gone, I miss feeling so alive.
My leg was injured in the auto collision in March. It still hasn’t healed. It improves but not with the speed I had expected. For weeks there was a patch of skin next to the wound that felt numb. If I touched it, I could feel the pressure of my touch in the underlying muscle, but the skin was as numb as the head of a drum. It never itched. It never hurt. It never felt at all.
I find my soul has numb places too. Near places where the wounds are recent, numbness sits side by side with injury. So I feel oddly detached from my own efforts to find a job. In the same way, my prayers feel like calls left on an answering machine, and there is a part of me that seems to prefer keeping a certain distance from God, as if he had somehow wronged me.
Yet I have not been wronged, and I have nothing to accuse God of. He seems to expect unlimited trust. The funny things is, I do trust him. I just don’t have the same expectations of that trust that my friends and family seem to have. My leg is healing, but it’s not already healed. I haven’t doubted for a moment that it will eventually be restored completely to health. Yet I haven’t been able to believe in any instantaneous or remarkably accelerated healing. I don’t know why, and I don’t much care. I’m not sure if God is offended by my lack of faith or rejoicing in my childlike trust. I’m not sure I can tell the difference.
For now, I’ll just keep on being numb until my soul grows healthy enough to feel things as it ought again. My leg is improving steadily.
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