Thursday, January 27, 2005

Jayber Crow: The Second Time

My Interim course concluded by reading Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. It's my second time through the book, and different things jumped out at me this time around. Here's the passage that has continued to linger:

My mistake was not in asking the questions that so plagued my mind back there at Pigeonville, for how could I have helped it? I can't help it yet; the questions are with me yet. My mistake was ignoring the verses that say God loves the world.

But now (by a kind of generosity, it seemed) the world had so beaten me about the head, and so favored me with god and beautiful things, that I was able to see. "God loves Port William as it is," I thought. "Why else should He want it to be better than it is? (250-51)


All of us have heard folks talk about how being a parent opens up a new understanding of God's love. In my four years of fatherhood, I've sensed this to be true. Felt it to be true. Berry has helped me to understand how it is true. Our society is one that tends to equate love with an uncomplicated acceptance. The key word there is "uncomplicated." Love includes acceptance. There is no question that I will accept my kids in any situation. I can't help but to do so. But that acceptance is complicated. There's more to it. It is because of my love for my kids that I want them to "be better." That desire for betterment doesn't negate acceptance. The two are intimately tied to one another. The presence of one to the exclusion of the other is necessarily a diluted love that more poorly reflects God's love for us.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Practice

For the next Aslan's Forum at Oak Hills Baptist Church, we're discussing Lauren Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath. Having grown up Jewish and converted to Christianity in her college years, Winner reflects upon Jewish practices that she misses, "places where Christians have some things to learn"(ix). The following passage convicts me every time I read this book.

Jews do these things with more attention and wisdom not because they are more righteous nor because God likes them better, but rather because doing, because action, sits at the center of Judaism. Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity.(ix)


Certainly, I'm thankful that my ability to have a relationship with Christ is based upon faith rather than works. And, certainly, in a mature Christianity the dichotomy between belief and practice becomes almost a false one, as the two undergird and support one another. I do think, however, that perhaps the pendulum has swung a bit too far in one direction. I fear that most of us--myself included--too easily dismiss the spiritual disciplines meant to enrich and deepen our faith and steady us in those times when belief lags or wavers. Combine this tendency with R. R. Reno's discussion of acedia (see previous post), and we risk cultivating a faith that remains incredibly abstract and qualified.

As an academic, I believe in critical distance. I sometimes wonder, however, if our embrace of critical distance is pursued as a corrective to an un-practiced belief. I suspect the conviction I feel from Winner's passage is sparked by the likelihood that critical distance (which comes fairly easily) must be combined with spritiual discipline (much more difficult) if our belief is to purposeful, tangible, and vital.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Dose of Conviction

A few months ago, I discovered a blog written by Tim Keel. Tim and I worked at the same summer camp for several years while we were in college, and he's since become pastor of a church in Kansas City. It's been a blast to drop in on his blog and eavesdrop on his life a bit. He's become a pretty sharp guy :), and I've become a regular reader. A while back, he shared this quotation from Dostoevsky, which has lingered with me for a couple of weeks, as it forces me to consider contemporary views of the intellectual life--especially my own.

These men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish - such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them.

~ Narrator, Dostoevksy’s The Brothers Karamozov

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Acedia

The following post was written a while back in the context of a group blog that never took off. I thought I would go ahead and repost it here, since the issue continues to linger.

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A recent thread on the ChristLit discussion list lead me to the following article: "Fighting the Noonday Devil," by R. R. Reno. Given the goals of USF and LAR, I found the article to be both convicting and fascinating. It focuses on the danger of acedia--"a lassitude and despair that overwhelms spiritual striving"--and explores the manner in which the modern academy, with its emphasis on critical distance, might be inflicting acedia upon students. Reno cites Dante's Purgatorio several times, and has prompted me to take a closer look. I ended up buying Merwin's translation not long ago.

In any event, the article is an intriguing read, and one that generates some questions in terms of LAR goals (particularly the search-for-truth aspect of the Christian liberal arts) and how LAR functions in the larger scheme of USF. Some quotations:

There are no intellectual solutions to spiritual problems. Like each of the seven deadly sins, acedia must be fought with spiritual discipline. Such discipline is profoundly alien to our culture, not because we have alternatives, but because we entertain the fantasy of life without spiritual demands. This fantasy is the most important legacy of modernity. For the great innovation of modern culture was the promise of progress without spiritual discipline.

* * *

We should rush toward our Lord, for we can never become too intimate, and we should wait patiently with Him, for He always has something more to give. To do so, we must place the pedagogy of critical distance and the dictates of conscience within a larger vision of journey toward the truth, a journey in which the warm and enduring embrace of love is to be cherished rather than mocked or feared.


How--at USF, in LAR, or in the academy generally--do we place our instruction of critical distance into this larger context? Or, do we handle the critical distance stuff and let other parts of campus handle the larger vision?

gad

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Welcome

As I was attempting to get this blog up and running, a friend of mine commented in an email that he simply doesn't see the point in blogs. My unverbalized response to his comment, and my rationalization for bothering with this whole endeavor, is expressed in the following quotation from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Seeing is of couse very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it.


So, "37" is a means of calling my own attention to what I see.

Why not a journal or a sketchbook?

Well, a writing experience this past summer has convinced me that I need to be wrestling with a rhetorical audience--or at least the possibility of one. Stated more directly, I simply tend to think more about my writing and thinking when the possibility of a reader exists. And yet, that lurking reader can also paralyze me. This medium seems like a worthwhile means of simultaneously considering and rejecting audience.

Thus, we're off.