Building for God's Kingdom

One of the interesting things about Saint Paul’s great defense of bodily resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 is that his tightly reasoned argument ends with a practical exhortation: “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:58)

The key word here is the “therefore.” Paul realized that what we think about the future effects (or ought to effect) how we live in the present. This is why, following his lengthy discussion of the Christian hope, Paul basically says, “Therefore get on with your job.”

It’s easy to slip into the Gnostic assumption that our spiritual work is purely personal and private, or that it relates merely to securing a heavenly future for ourselves and others. Now personal salvation is crucially important, and that is why we should never neglect the work of evangelism. However, the Christian hope involves more than simply the renewal of individuals: God is also working to renew the earth itself (2 Corinthians 5:18-20).

Just as belief in our own personal resurrection should spur us to righteous living in the present (1 Corinthians 15:29-34), so belief in the future renewal of the whole earth (Revelation 21:1) should act as a catalyst for us to work to make the world a better place in the present. The doctrine of new creation therefore has cultural, economic, ecological and political consequences.

 

At least, that is what I argued in my Colson Center article 'Building for God's Kingdom.'  To read the article, click on the following link:

Building for God's Kingdom

Worldview Education and Christian Pragmatism

I am delighted that Touchstone: a Journal of Mere Christianity has now put online the article about education that I wrote for their Sept/Oct 2013 issue. My article, titled 'More than Schooling: The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts' arose out of observations on some of the ways the idol of pragmatism has infected Christian approaches to the liberal arts, often in the name of 'worldview education.'

The pragmatic approach to the liberal arts sees their value as deriving primarily from specific quantifiable ends, such as winning the culture war. According to this mentality, when a Christian is taught the liberal arts from a Christian worldview, he is essentially being equipped with a set of tools. These tools can be defensive (helping the student shore up his faith against the challenge of false worldviews) or offensive (giving the student the intellectual equipment to make gains in the ongoing fight to claim our culture for Christ), but in both cases, they are valued for their usefulness.

According to this approach, we need to study the great thinkers and writers of the past, not so much because the things they said are valuable in and of themselves, but because studying them will give us the brain-power to better defend our beliefs and convince others that the Christian worldview is true.

In my Touchstone article I try to show that there is an alternative to this pragmatic approach which is still explicitly rooted in the Biblical worldview. Here are some teasers from the article:

"Appreciating that some artifacts are good in themselves, and not merely because of what they do for us, is the first step towards a proper appropriation of the liberal arts. The best argument for teaching children to love Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Hopkins is simply that these authors wrote things that are beautiful. Just as the best reason for smelling a rose is that it has a lovely fragrance, so the best reason for learning Latin is that Virgil's Aeneid is beautiful. Again, the template for this approach is creation itself.

Christian worldview education is in danger of being hijacked by pragmatists who think that non-utilitarian approaches somehow depart from the imperative to bring all things under Christ....

"The exclusively pragmatic approach does a particularly great disservice to the teaching of literature since it orients us to adopt a didactic and utilitarian approach to texts. We may start to think that the value of a text lies in the worldview lessons we are able to draw out of it and completely overlook the aesthetic considerations. Many, for instance, have the idea that the primary purpose of learning Shakespeare is to understand allusions and figures of speech, or that memorizing poems is mainly good as an exercise to develop memory skills, or that the value of learning Latin is to understand word origins, and so forth. The idea that learning Virgil in the original Latin has a value not tied to any practical benefit strikes them as odd.

When students are trained to think in strictly pragmatic ways, they will find it difficult to enjoy, say, a Shakespeare play if they can't derive a specific worldview lesson from it. They may become so over-active in finding worldview lessons that they discern some Shakespeare never intended. How much better it would be to get them to enjoy Shakespeare plays simply for their masterly use of language and compelling plots and characters. How much better for students to come to love things that are noble and praiseworthy even when they do not have a specific use. As Flannery O'Connor put it in Mystery and Manners, "The fact is, people don't know what they are expected to do with a novel, believing, as so many do, that art must be utilitarian, that it must do something, rather than be something...."

"Being able to just be in the presence of beauty is central to coming to know God and to participate in the sacramental life. As students come to appreciate beauty for its own sake—independent of utilitarian goals—their souls are prepared to receive God at a deep, pre-cognitive level. As Oscar Wilde understood, sensitivity to the beauty of material things prepares one's soul to become sensitive to the beauty of spiritual things. To learn to be still and silent in the presence of great beauty prepares one to be still and silent in the presence of great holiness.

To read my entire article, click on the link below:

'More than Schooling: The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts'

 

Changing our Brains

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr makes a point that echoes some of the observations I made in my Salvo feature 'The Neuro Transformers.' He writes,

“Through what we do and how we do it—moment by moment, day by day, consciously or unconsciously—we alter the chemical flows in our synapses and change our brains. And when we hand down our habits of thought to our children, through the examples we set, the schooling we provide, and the media we use, we hand down as well the modifications in the structure of our brains.” P. 49

Relationships and Presence

In my Colson Center article 'Hollowing out the Habits of Attention (part 3)', I suggested that the temptation with online relationships—or even real-world relationships in which the majority of communication occurs through texting—is that we can act as if we were disembodied and thereby suspend the vulnerability and fragility connected to our body.

Michael Heim warned about these types of disembodied relationships back in his 1994 book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality,

“Today’s computer communication cuts the physical face out of the communication process. Computers stick the windows of the soul behind monitors, headsets and datasuits… The living non-representable face is the primal source of reasonability, the direct, warm link between private bodies. Without directly meeting others physically, our ethics languishes. Face-to-face communication, the fleshly bond between people, supports a long-term warmth and loyalty, a sense of obligation for which the computer-mediated communities have not yet been tested.”

In its most extreme manifestation, the preference for disembodied relationships finds expression in men who do not even want to have sex since virtual girlfriends can satisfy all their needs. Even in less extreme forms, however, the ubiquity of virtual communication is making it hard to be attentive to real flesh-and-blood relationships.

The really scary thing is that the more time we spend in front of the computer, the more our brain structures change so that we become unable to relate to real flesh-and-blood people. As Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan explain in their book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,

“As the brain evolves and shifts its focus toward new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills, such as reading facial expressions during conversation or grasping the emotional context of a subtle gesture. A Standford University study found that for every hour we spend on our computers, traditional face-to-face interaction time with other people drops by nearly thirty minutes. With the weakening of the brain's neural circuitry controlling human contact, our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss subtle, nonverbal messages."

Liberty vs. Liberty

In a lecture urging us to use discrimination in the type of Great Books we elevate, Patrick J. Deneen contrasts two competing visions of liberty that have been given in the literature of the Western tradition. There is first what he calls the 'older conception' of liberty, which focused around self-government and the limitation of boundless desire. This is contrasted with a newer understanding which asserts that liberty gives us the right to pursue our desires ceaselessly. Deneen comments,

The older conception of liberty held that liberty was ultimately a form of self-government; in a constrained world, the human propensity to desire without limit and end inclined people toward a condition of slavery, understood to be enslavement to the base desires. This older conception of liberty as self-government was displaced by our regnant conception of liberty, the liberty to pursue our desires ceaselessly with growing prospects of ongoing fulfillment through the conquest of nature, accompanied by the constant generation of new desires that demand ever greater expansion of the human project of mastery.

Mr. Deneen's insights (which can be read in context here) address the question of liberty as it relates to individuals, although the same distinctions apply when it comes to the state. Should the liberty of a nation be measured by its ability to constrain unbounded desire and therefore to pursue responsible self-government, or is a nation's liberty predicated on government's ability to grant fulfillment to an ever-expanding corpus of new desires - desire which are then converted into, so called, 'rights'?

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Space for Difference

In the most recent flare-up in Moscow Idaho’s ongoing internet controversy about health food, a recurring assumption from one side of the debate has been that our choice is basically between a Pharisaic legalism, on the one hand, and a laissez-faire “God doesn’t care” approach, on the other.

This false dilemma has fortified the notion that anyone who believes God cares what you eat must be (as Douglas Wilson put it) “a certain type of soul, a certain type of heart.” The debate turned nasty when the anti-health food people began condemning as Pharisees and idolaters everyone who doesn’t believe food is a zone of spiritual neutrality. The dominant assumption animating such accusations was an angst that if the area of food is not a zone of spiritual neutrality then it must be sinful to eat junk food.

The controversy goes back to Doug Wilson's claim (see video below) that all people who believe God cares what we eat are food idolaters, if not the ideological descendants of quack doctors seeking quick cures for original sin.

The issue, it's important to stress, is not whether a healthy diet is good or bad. It is clear from Wilson's larger corpus of writings about food that he is quite happy for people to eat healthy provided they do it from the perspective that God doesn't care; Wilson is quite happy for people to eat healthy, provided they do not think it is legitimate to get uptight about really unhealthy foods; Wilson is quite happy for people to eat healthy, provided they do not think that those who regularly eat junk food have room to grow in maturity; Wilson is quite happy for people to eat healthy, provided they do not think they have spiritual reasons for doing so. If any of these ideological boundaries are traversed, then health food has become an idol, according to Wilson.

Picking up on Wilson's idea, Toby Sumpter (pastor of Doug Wilson's sister church in Moscow Idaho) has suggested that anyone who values organic food and healthy eating must only be doing so because of deep seated sin issues. As he writes,

So pretty much when anybody tells me they are really concerned about nutritional issues, organic farming, or are just really into healthy eating, I pretty much just picture them going home and kissing little icons of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.

Representing the other side of the debate, we have had some good contributions from Stacy McDonald and John Barach and Brad Littlejohn and myself.

The most recent contribution to this debate is Dr. Littlejohn's article 'The Search for Authority and the Fear of Difference' in which he makes the following observations:

"Broadsides such as those by Toby Sumpter seemed to imply that the problem was that many Christians were legalistic or idolatrous because they were insisting on the necessity of certain food choices as a matter of righteousness. The easiest response to this criticism then was to say, "No, I do care about buying free-range eggs and avoiding processed foods that will destroy my children's health, but that's just my personal decision, and of course no one's sinning to decide otherwise." I'd much rather have this response than Pharisaic legalism, but there ought to be a middle ground somewhere between legalism and laissez-faire. In fact, such a middle ground exists, and within its vast spectrum lie most of the judgments that the task of ethics is called to address, as I've written elsewhere. The person who buys free-range eggs ought to think, I would contend, that she is making some kind of moral judgment, and if it has the status of moral judgment, then it has some kind of universal force: all things being equal, everyone ought to try to buy free-range eggs. Likewise, on somewhat different grounds, one could reason that all things being equal, everyone ought to generally avoid unhealthy processed foods.

"So a moral claim is being made, but it can still tolerate different moral judgments. Why? Because one recognizes, first, that all things are not equal, and there are enough circumstantial variables and complexities that others may quite reasonably reach different judgments. Accordingly, one may deem someone else to be wrong without being at all wicked or stupid. Second, because one recognizes that we are justified by faith, not by works. This means that I can feel confident in my moral judgments and decisions, without indulging in the silly fantasy that this makes me a wonderful special righteous person, and without needing to get too worked up about my neighbor's failure to share these moral judgments. (I should add that all of what I am saying here about moral judgments applies also to truth judgments in the realm of doubtful and debatable secondary matters.) We are both justified by faith, and this gives us space to differ with one another, to think these differences objectively matter, and yet at the end of the day to love and embrace one another."

If there is space for difference as well as space to think those differences objectively matter, then perhaps it is time for Moscow's health food controversies to take on a new tone. Instead of one side condemning the other of idolatry, maybe we should recognize that the body of Christ is large enough to accomodate both camps. Can we have a debate about whether God cares what we eat without one side condemning the other side of idolatry? Can we have a debate about whether it is legitimate to get uptight about really unhealthy foods without one side condemning the other of idolatry? Can we have a debate about whether those who regularly eat junk food have room to grow in maturity, without one party accusing the other of idolatry? If Littlejohn is correct, then the answer is a resounding yes.

Returning again to Brad Littlejohn's contributions to this debate, in 2012 he wrote an insightful article for The Calvinist International which helps to build a fuller context for the type of approach we ought have to these types of doubtful matters. Dr. Littlejohn suggested that matters which are unclear in scripture should be seen as a summons to start exercising judgment, not as a zone of complete spiritual neutrality:

The legalist seeks to compensate for God’s silence by inventing his own rules and attempting to give them the force of divine sanction.  The libertine takes God’s silence as guaranteeing divine sanction for whatever he or she chooses to do. But the godly Christian takes this silence as a summons, a summons to exercise judgment—fallible, human judgment, but judgment that does not take place in a void, for God has not been silent.  Prior to the promulgation of either divine law or human law, God has imbued us with a natural law, according to which we can judge some actions to be harmful and improper even without the express revelation of Scripture.

This abiding moral law does not neuter Christian liberty.  It does not mean that it is pointless or meaningless to designate something adiaphorous.  Far from it.  If something is adiaphorous, in the crucial soteriological sense that Hooker has privileged, this does liberate us. It liberates our conscience from a burden of fear, since it means that if we do our best in good conscience, we are not condemned just because we decided wrong.  It liberates us from the burden of inflexibility, since it means that we recognise our judgments are provisional, and we can respect differing conclusions that other conscientious Christians may reach.  It liberates from the burden of ultimacy, since we know that there are often much more urgent serious and urgent matters that demand our moral attention and action, and if tending to these means we neglect the lesser matters, that’s OK.   But God’s “silence” on adiaphora is also an invitation to get to work—not burdened by fear, but empowered by love—and to seek what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Part of the confusion here may also arise from the fact that for evangelicals from legalistic backgrounds, the only objective criteria for making decisions is sin-avoidance. In areas where the category of sin does not apply, the only criteria to influence our decisions is personal subjective choice.  There are thus no categories with which to talk meaningfully about the telos of a thing, or the internal logic of nature’s ordering, independent to moral questions about right and wrong. Abstraction from teleology turns creation into a playground for us to do with as we like provided we do not sin, while the criteria for determining what counts as sin is truncated to specific divine commands interpreted independently from the teleological-directedness of how creation is.

Further Reading

• Jesus, Junk Food, and Christian Charity

The Living Room

In the house where I grew up, when you walked through the door you had a choice of three options. You could turn right and you would immediately be in the “family room.” Or you could turn left and go into the “living room.” Or, you could go straight ahead to the hallway, which would usher you to all the other rooms of the house.

I never tended to spend much time in the living room, except during holidays when my dad would set up an electric train around the Christmas tree. Apart from those times, there wasn’t much to do in the living room. I much preferred to go into the rooms that facilitated activities.

I once asked my mother why the living room was called that. She replied it was because it was a place to live. The concept intrigued me. Never before had I thought of living as a separate activity that people did, abstracted from everyday life. I then asked my mother why the family room was called the family room. She replied that it was because that was the room where we went in to be a family.

Keep reading...

The Chicken-ness of the Chicken

Farmer Joel Salatin respects the Chicken-ness of the Chicken

Since food is something that has always interested me, I wrote a series of articles last year about the theology of healthy eating. Although I was careful to frame my discussion in terms of wisdom, cultural reformation, and aesthetics, predictably I had friends who interpreted my articles as a call for culinary Phariseeism, or who thought I was saying that being unhealthy is sinful. It reminded me of another conversation I once had where I had been arguing that diatonic music best reflects the nature of the Trinitarian God, and a friend thought I was saying that listening to pentatonic music must therefore be sinful.

Those two interchanges alerted me to an important point, which is that many Christians do not even have the categories to address questions about the right-ordering of nature independent to questions of sin. Because we are legalists at heart, we are quick to reduce everything to a moral issue before we know how to think about it. However, consider a question that a friend of mine will often bring up to his students. Is it sinful to put a cow in a chicken coup? Well, no. But is it wise? Is it rightly ordered? Is it respecting the nature and inherent telos of a cow? No, no, and no. God did not create cows to do chicken-type things, just as He did not create chickens to do the types of things that bees do.

You see, there is a whole realm inquiry that is prior to questions of sin, namely questions about what is most fitting according to the nature of a thing. To understand the nature of a thing, we must appreciate what is the end, or telos for which it was created, and then respect that end unless it interferes with the telos of something more important.

One of the reasons why it is hard for Christians to embrace a theology of food is because our nominalist presuppositions rob us of the categories with which to talk meaningfully about the telos of a thing (whether it be an animal or a human being), independent to questions about right and wrong. Thus, the only objective criteria many Christians recognize for making decisions in the area of food is sin-avoidance, and since sin is not a category that applies to food in the New Testament era, it is assumed that the only criteria we should recognize is personal subjective choice.

However, both producers and consumers of food would benefit from a strong dose of realist metaphysics. According to the right ordering of our nature as human beings, is it more fitting to eat stuff that was grown in the ground or produced in a laboratory? According to the right ordering of a cow, is it more fitting for a farmer to feed his cows grass or recycled animal products? According to the right ordering of a chicken, is it more fitting to treat them like bees and cram tens of thousands of them together in a barn?

Keep reading...

Roman Catholicism and Church History

Roman Catholics often appeal to the church fathers to support their ecclesial framework. However, the lens by which they read the church fathers often involves assuming their conclusions prior to the investigation.

For example, in his Letter to the Prelates and Clergy of France in September 8, 1899, Pope Leo XII wrote "Those who study it [history] must never lose sight of the fact that it contains a collection of dogmatic facts, which impose themselves upon our faith, and which nobody is ever permitted to call in doubt." Or again, Cardinal Manning wrote, "The appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the divine voice of the church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be divine." Elsewhere Manning commented, "The appeal from the living voice of the Church to any tribunal whatsoever, human history included, is an act of private judgment and a treason because that living voice is supreme; and to appeal from that supreme voice is also a heresy because that voice by divine assistance is infallible." In other words, you person must begin your study of history assuming that Catholicism is already true. This circular approach makes it difficult for Roman Catholic theologians to come to an objective assessment of the history record, though they frequently make appeals to the church fathers for polemical purposes.

When one reads church history without Roman Catholic lenses on, one finds the church fathers actually challenge Roman Catholic teaching on a number of key points. For example, a survey from Roman Catholic scholar Jean de Launoy found that only seventeen Church Fathers thought of the rock as Peter in the iconic Petrine text of Matthew 16:18-19, whereas a full forty-four believed the 'rock' referred to Peter's confession, while sixteen thought that Christ himself was the rock and eight thought that the rock represented all of the apostles. The significance of this should be obvious: 80% of the Church Fathers did not recognize that Peter was the rock on which Christ was building His church! Commenting on this in his book his book Two Paths: Papal Monarchy - Collegial Tradition, Michael Whelton points out

Many Roman Catholic apologists ignore the writings of the Early Church Fathers, who were equally well versed in scripture, and focus solely on their interpretation of Matthew 16:18-19. "And I say unto thee: That thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.... And I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven...." To them it is so clear, what else could it mean? They will even delve into the Hold testament to find supporting evidence for the imagery  of the 'keys.' In doing so they lapse into the practice of 'Sola Scriptura' (by scripture alone) that they accuse Protestants of committing - by ignoring the mind of the Early Church in favor of their own subjecitve judgment. In addition, they anticipate their own conclusion in their initial premise when they associate any reference by Early Church Fathers to Peter as head of the apostles, the seat of Peter, Peter and the keys, etc., as pointing to evidence of Rome's supreme universal authority.

Michael Whelton's book shares similar examples of discrepancies between the teaching of the Catholic church and the teaching of the church fathers. He shows, for example, that even though the see of Rome was always believed to have special honor, the early church fathers believed that judicially Rome was on the same standing as the other patriarchal sees. Whelton also shows that Rome shed many of the traditions of the early church which have been preserved in the East, such as using leavened bread for the Eucharist (a custom the Roman Church kept for the first 800 years) and allowing children to partake during communion. His book is worth reading in full because it establishes that Protestants are not the only ones who constantly innovate: Roman Catholicism itself is one of the greatest innovations of church history.

Further Reading 

Why I am not a Roman Catholic

Gnosticism at Work

Those who have been following my ongoing series on evangelicalism and Gnosticism will be interested to know that I recently published two more articles in this ongoing series. Both articles deal with attitudes towards work. I show that many of the assumptions that modern evangelicals hold about work are actually more Gnostic than Christian.

Should a Christian consider his secular job to be a zone of spiritual neutrality, or can even the most menial work be offered up to God?

In order to fully serve God, must a person go into full time ministry, or can we pursue our ordinary callings in a way which renders it as a ministry?

 

I have explored these and other questions in these two articles. In the process, I discuss the doctrine known as 'The Protestant Work Ethic' - an idea that can be found throughout the writings of the church fathers. To read my articles, click on the links below:

• Your Day Job is Your Ministry (Gnosticism and Evangelicalism 5)
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• Gnosticism in the Work Place (Gnosticism and Evangelicalism 6)

Jesus, Junk Food, and Christian Charity

Douglas Wilson’s writings are incredibly helpful, and on this blog I have often had occasion to quote him. But I do sometimes weary of Wilson continually defending junk food and stereotyping those who try to be healthy.

It is clear from Wilson's writings and statements over the past decade that he has an animus against any health care practice that is not mainstream, whether health food, chiropractic, naturopathy, home birth, etc.

Keep reading...

The Argument of Tears

by Terrell Clemmons, guest blogger

 A typical crowd of tourists, seniors, and schoolchildren on field trips was mulling around the large lobby of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. when a young man, wearing full military dress and carrying a cello, walked toward a chair curiously placed in the center of the large room and sat down. He took up his bow in one hand, stretched his other arm to adjust the sleeve, and began playing with calm, expert finesse.

After the opening measures, another soldier musician approached with a standup bass and joined in. A small riser was brought out, and a graying maestro removed his overcoat and accepted the conductor’s baton from an assistant with a cordial salute. An oboe came in with the melody, followed by strings, brass, clarinets, flutes, even a harp.

How Attentive Reading Helps Relationships

In my article, 'Hollowing out the Habits of Attention (3)' I pointed out that when we read books, especially quality fiction, we empathize with the characters in the book so that their experiences become our experiences. We enter into a world very different from our own but which, through imagination, begins to feel just as real as our world.

A study conducted at Washington University’s Dynamic Cognition Laboratory found that attentive readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in the narrative as if it were really happening. This type of imaginative engagement with other people—in this case, fictional people—enriches the readers’ experience of the world outside the book. This is because the patient attentiveness required to read a literary novel, a play or a long poem requires us to exercise some of the same mental muscles that are employed when we are attentive to real people. In both fiction and healthy relationships, we need to be able to extend ourselves into the thoughts and feelings of others, no matter how different those thoughts and feelings may be from our own. We also need a capacity to accept complexity and tolerate ambiguity. This requires the same type of imaginative attentiveness that reading literary fiction can help us to cultivate.  

For relationships to be healthy, we need to know how to suspend what we think and put ourselves in the mind of our friend, even when we think our friend may be wrong. This doesn’t mean we have to pretend to agree with what the other person is saying, but at a minimum we should be able to appreciate where they are coming from, to listen to their heart, to imaginatively relate to experiences that may be far removed from our own. Empathy enables two people who are vastly different to share experiences, to participate in each other’s struggles, sorrows and joys. To be empathetic requires imagination, creativity, and what psychologists call emotional intelligence. 

In other words, healthy relationships require patient attentiveness. Healthy relationships require opening ourselves up to another, getting outside of ourselves and entering into the other person’s mind. How many divorces could have been prevented if the parties had only been willing to slow down and work at listening, really listening, to what their partner is trying to say? Such attentive listening is hard work. It is hard work because it requires attentiveness, just like the rewards of reading poetry, listening to classical music, or learning Latin require a similar type of patient attentiveness.

The general loss of attentiveness in our culture affects the set of expectations we bring to relationships, eroding our ability to empathize in this way. From fast food to immediate downloads to instant messaging, immediate gratification has become the norm. This makes patient and attentive listening a cognitively unnatural activity. Instead our brain enters into a condition that some researchers have described as “continuous partial attention.” The result is that our listening skills become significantly atrophied.

Media such as the i-touch, the i-phone, the android and even the internet itself, encourage distractedness, impatience and the kind of hurried and scattered focus that finds attentiveness to anything—including people we love—laborious and boring.

Developing the habits of mind necessary for reading good literary works reverses the tendency of our digital distractions and cultivates some of the same cognitive muscles we use when empathizing with others. 

Read more...

Liberation from Embodiment

A number of writers have recently been alerting evangelicals to ways in which their thinking has become captive to Gnostic-type ideas about the body. Instead of treating the body as something good, which is in the process of being redeemed (Rom 8:23), it is easy for Christians to slip into the trap of talking about the body as if it is a prison from which we must ultimately escape. (See the ongoing series we have been doing on Gnosticism and Evangelicalism.)

But it is not only in religious communities that we find these types of pessimistic approaches to embodiment. A theme that keeps reemerging in the wider secular culture of the West is an underlying angst concerning the body. Indeed, if current trends in transhumanism, technohumanism and postgenderism continue, Christians who understand about the goodness of creation may soon represent the last hold-out in affirming the goodness of the body.

This realization has led me to begin a series of articles with the Colson Center on some of the ways that Gnostic-type ideas towards the body have infected secular thinking. The first article in this series, 'Liberation from Embodiment' looks specifically at some of the ways that the goodness of the female body has been under attack from forces as diverse as radical feminism and modern advertizing.