Our schedules often loosen during the summer. We get to travel and spend time at the beach or the mountains. Summer is a wonderful time to invest in yourself.
In view of that, here are five books that I think it would be worth your while to read this summer
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On Saturday I experienced a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. After spending the morning doing various things to serve our downtown community, members of our church went out and invited everyone they met to have lunch with us. Many came.
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I’ve been thinking about what it means to follow Jesus in twenty-first century American culture. The more I think about it, the more I’m forced to the conclusion that there’s a lot about our American way of life that wars against the Christian way of life.
Perhaps it’s peculiar that I used the phrase “Christian way of life.” Being a Christian means being converted–a conversion that begins inside us and works its way out into the texture of our life–our way of life.
Somehow we’ve reached the conclusion that the Gospel can reach into our hearts and change how we relate to God and to a lesser extent we agree that the Gospel can change what and how we think. We’ve got a long way to go in terms of allowing the Gospel to really saturate and alter the ways in which we choose to live. Our way of life is more influenced by the American story than by the Gospel story:
“If you live in North America, you are a prime candidate for a slow death by overstimulation. Your environment is busy depleting you with noise, distractions, and the compulsion to always be in a hurry. If I had set out to destroy my identity as a beloved child of God, I couldn’t have done better than by living in America at the start of the twenty-first century. The greatest threats I’ve encountered are not the arguments of skeptics or the lure of drink, drugs, or sex. The greatest threats are the constant busyness and frantic hurry that demand my allegiance. Author Robert Benson says, ‘We take our place in the race and watch our lives disappear in the daily grind.’ We are rarely grounded in the present moment (where God is to be encountered) because we’re always rushing out beyond it or replaying in our minds our disappointing past. Shame and sadness over our dark past drives us to strive for a brighter future, which generally winds up being busier rather than better.”
Fil Anderson, Running on Empty: Contemplative Spirituality for Overachievers
In order to be effective outposts of the Kingdom, churches need to spend energy helping to guide followers of Christ into a more kingdom-centered, missional ways of life. We don’t need more bedraggled followers of Jesus who limp through life exhausted and overspent. We need joyful disciples who are committed to keeping important things central to their life and who eliminate distractions ruthlessly.
Exploring the what and the how of such a way of life is at the heart of my sabbatical and I hope to write more as my leave progresses.
I haven’t followed the implosion of Covenant Seminary alumnus and Republican representative Todd Aiken’s political flame out. About the only thing I can say about it is that Aiken said something stupid. Of course, he’s a politician. Most politicians are better at the art of getting elected than they are at the art of thinking. They pay other people to think on their behalf and other people pay them to vote on their behalf. Okay, that was snarky–forgive me.
It is interesting to read the responses to Aiken’s gaffe because they expose the real religion of American society–a secular, liberal faith in the autonomy of the individual and the bracketing of religious claims to knowledge outside of the public square. When I say religious, theological is closer to the point. Secular society has effectively come to understand religious or theological knowledge as something other than what it is–that is, knowledge. It is opinion or, worse, some manifestation of a Nietzschean will to power.
L. Z. Granderson writes,
Some social conservatives talk of protecting religious freedom, but what they are really seeking is a theocracy that places limits on freedom based on a version of Judeo-Christianity that fits their liking. That language is also being considered for the GOP’s national platform. Some speak of fighting abortion because of their religious convictions and then belittle the trauma caused by rape.
Granderson here describes in a via negativa the fundamental tenets of the secular society–which is an alternate gospel, an a-gospel as it were.
So what does Granderson’s society look like:
It is free of religious or theological knowledge. Such knowledge can only produce a “theocracy.”
It places no limits on the autonomy of the individual. The limitation of the rights of the individual to pursue what pleases him is oppression–any form of restriction to self-definition or self-actualization is a form of violence fit to done away with.
This is a profound challenge to Christian people. Why? Because the view that Granderson is espousing is a rival gospel and a rival religion. As Christians we’re told that we are to have no other God than God. And yet, the dominant social theory of today and our dominant self-understanding in the political sphere enthrones each of us as god–a profound idolatry.
There is no knowledge that is not first theological knowledge–grounded in an embrace of or a rejection of the God in whom all that is consists. The issue for Christians is how to live faithfully in a post-Christian world where each of us is seen as the sum of our appetites rather than a being made in the image and likeness of God.
The Bearenstain Bears changed the course of my day today. They made me miss a phone date with (my wife) Anna who is at Campus by the Sea this week–a place only slightly more difficult to reach by phone than a federal penitentiary.
I was running in our neighborhood this morning, both kids in the jogging stroller, when I heard the most alarming sound–the throaty crunch of metal on metal that accompanies a car accident. I looked up, pushing 6 pounds of children tends to make me look down, and caught the immediate aftermath of the collision. A pirouetting Oldsmobile span 180 degrees pushing a VW sedan into the curb.
I ran the next block and offered assistance. Thanks be to God, no one was visibly injured. I have my suspicions about the driver of the car which was hit–she had hit her head on the steering wheel with enough force that the mark was present several minutes after the accident. Thankfully, I believe that she was taken to a local hospital with her young son.
Observation and reflection are a natural part of my make up. It’s impossible for me to experience something like this with taking note of things that strike me as odd or ways in which it connects with the rest of my life. So here goes.
There are lessons to be gleaned from even the most mundane or most terrifying happenings of daily life. I’m glad that I learned to do to others as I’d want them to do to me.
I'm a minister, thinker, writer, and practitioner. Since 2004 I have worked to plant and build worshipping communities of young adults on college campuses through InterVarsity. I'm a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church. I think and write about the Gospel's encounter with postmodern culture, about reformed spirituality, and missional theology.
