Category Archive: Miscellaneous

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Sentimentalism

What do Christians mean, then, when they say that creation is “good”? …

Perhaps the most unfortunate answer to this question is the one most commonly regarded as “Christian.”  This is the sentimental answer.  It affirms the goodness of creation by denying the reality of any disorder or evil within our experience.  For this view, a Christian always “looks on the bright side,” always “sees nothing but good in events or people,” “remembers the silver lining,” and believes that all’s well in God’s world.  The picture of the world fostered here is unbelievably naive: people are filled only with good intentions; frustrations and fears are merely psychological since positive thought will eradicate them; and problems are only there because we do not believe hard enough that they are not there.  This gentle world is appropriate enough for Sunday school.  But when this child’s landscape, filled with ladies, bunnies, fairies, and harmless men with clerical collars, is presented as the Christian understanding of the world — since God’s world is good — Christianity has lost all power and relevance to the problems of life.  No wonder those people who live immersed within the tragedies of existence, amid its real frustrations and insecurities, its deep conflicts of power, and its inescapable sufferings, are offended by the falsity of this picture of the world and suspect that those who hold it find in this sentimentalism a helpful excuse for doing nothing about the world’s various ills (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth, pp. 119-120).

Eating Disorders

On an e-mail list, we were recently discussing eating disorders.  One person cited a lecture by Luke Timothy Johnson in which he said “Anorexia is the body language of gnosticism.”  Another responded by saying that, while that might be true, anorexia is also the body language of narcissism.

Wendy Shalit, in A Return to Modesty, links the increase in anorexia to the decline of modesty and the rise in promiscuity.  Girls are  expected to have sex on their dates.  In the media and elsewhere, it’s sex sex sex sex sex.  Guys watch porn with their girlfriends.  Colleges have coed dorms with coed bathrooms.  And girls react by degrading their bodies in a kind of self-loathing which is also an exercise of power and control.

What do we know about anorexia and bulimia?  What is not in dispute is that ninety percent of eating disorder sufferers are women, and that most cases occur at the onset of puberty or when a young woman begins to negotiate with the men who appear in her life.  Having an eating disorder, I would submit, is the only way our culture allows a woman to find order in a sexually chaotic landscape.  In a culture that permits food hang-ups but not sex hang-ups, it’s become the new way for a girl to express her modesty, to restore distance between men and herself (p. 59).

She talks about one woman with an eating disorder who had no problem with casual sex but did have a problem with hugging and being cared for.  That woman in college met other girls, many of them from unstable homes, who would “brag of the careless use of our bodies, our common disdain for the boys or  men.  ‘I didn’t feel a thing,’ we’d say with pride.”  And yet the “dorm bathrooms rarely worked because the pipes were perpetually clogged with vomit” (p. 59).

She quotes an anorexic student: “I think my issue was wanting to control my life” (p. 60).  Another says, “If I was at my ideal weight I’d feel really in control of my life” (p. 60).  Yet another (Drinking: A  Love Story) says, “When I was starving, I couldn’t think about … the fact that I was young and scared and sexually threatened and angry” (pp.  59-60).

Anorexia appears to be a fairly new thing.  Shalit asks: “Why are none of my grandma’s friend anorexic?” (p. 60).  Here’s her answer:

When modesty was given a sanction, woman not only had  the right to say no to a man’s advances, but her good opinion of him was revered.  Today, on the other hand, when our popular culture tells us that women should lust equally to men and feel comfortable about putting their bodies on display in coed bathrooms, on coed beaches — coed everything — women seem to be reporting that they feel only more at the mercy of male desire.  The anorexic disfigures her body to become unwomanly because if she no longer has the right to say “no,” at least she has her body language at her disposal.

So natural modesty has a way of reasserting itself, even in desperate and neurotic fashion (p. 60).

Later, she writes:

A typical specimen of our times is writer Marya Hornbacher, who whittled herself down to 52 pounds to rid herself of “an excess of general intensity.”  Scattered throughout her book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulemia, are stories of humiliating casual sex, along with these self-criticisms: “Too much fantasy.”  “Too intense and entirely too much.”  “Too emotional, too passionate.”  “Intense.”  “I was tired of being too much, too intense …”  “Beneath the skin I wore … was something horrible, something soft and weak … and tearful and needy.”  “Chaotic, needy softness.”  “The self I’d had, once upon a time, was too much.   Now there was no self at all.”  “If I had been a different sort of person …. less intense …”  Even when she is at a somewhat normal weight, Marya still laments that “I have not become a noticeably less intense person.”  She takes it as a personal failing that, even on Prozac, she has been unable to cure herself of her intensity.

I hear this all the time from women my age, this business of being too intense.  “People say I’m too … intense.”  Head bowed, ashamed.  A quick glance over the shoulder.  Will anyone witness, how intense?  Will they be perhaps arrested?  These are the women who end up on Prozac.  They see their very natures as the problem, and like Marya Hornbacher, they find nowhere to run from themselves.  But women are, generally speaking, intense  creatures. This is not necessarily bad.  Passion comes in handy in the search for romantic love; it is also well suited to motherhood and to the religious life.  But in a cynical culture that trivializes everything transcendent, a woman’s passionate nature will be directed against herself.  As Marya puts it, with her innocent precision: “I felt like yearning was specific to me, and the guilt that it brought was mine alone.”

So she tried to “escape the flesh and, by association, the realm of emotions,” but she succeeded only in sustaining permanent damage to her internal organs.  She contracts infections weekly and can never have children.

But why?  Maybe it is normal for a young woman to be “intense,” and being cavalier is what is strange.  Maybe wanting to forge bonds with others is normal, and it’s cutting ourselves off from enduring attachments that is perverse.  Maybe not having “rejection sensitivity” is what is sick, and invulnerability to loss the real pathology.  If being blase about sex were natural, why would so many women have to be on Prozac in order to carry out what their culture expects of them?

Incidentally, if you’re not sensitive to rejection, doesn’t that also mean you’re indifferent to love? (pp. 169-170).

In short, Shalit appears to be saying that because our culture puts women’s bodies on display and for male desire, values a certain kind of body, and discourages modesty, some girls react to this loss of control over their sexuality and over their bodies with a kind of self-controlling self-hatred. 

Narcissism?  Maybe.  But not in a straight-forward fashion.  The craving to seem beautiful (by which one means “thin”), Shalit is saying, isn’t motivated so much by self-love as by self-loathing.  It’s not “Oh, I look so good.”  It’s “Oh, I look so  ugly.”  Some of that is the product of parents and siblings who tell girls that they’re fat and unhealthy and out of shape and ugly and so forth.  Some of that may be the product of a culture that exalts the slim and despises the fat. 

I suppose you could call that abuse of the body a form of gnosticism.  As another friend pointed out, it does fit together with narcissism.  In a culture of body-worship, some people react with body-hatred.  And some people do terrible things to their bodies, trying to exercise control over them, so that they will find themselves attractive.

I  hasten to add that I have done no study whatsoever in this area.  And I doubt that this is the whole story.  But it does seem to me that Shalit’s attempt to link the relatively recent rise in eating disorders and the relatively recent loss of modesty bears further consideration.

Books and People

“There is no frigate like a book, To take us lands away.”  So wrote Emily Dickinson, who stayed in her cabin and seldom if ever encountered her fellow sailors.

It seems to me that she missed the best part of the trip.  The lands to which books bear us are fascinating, sometimes; but we who are borne to them are fascinating all the time.  I have never met an author, a collector, a bookseller, an editor, or a habitual reader who was not an interesting person.  Some have been detestable; none have been dull. — Gene Wolfe, “Foreword,” Bibliomen: Twenty-Two Characters in Search of a Book (Cambridge: Broken Mirrors, 1995), p. 7.

Observations from Bowling Alone

Some more stuff that interested me in Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone:

* Putnam writes, “Fund-raising typically means friend-raising” (p. 121).  That’s true for churches as much as for any other organization.

* In passing, talking about various possible causes for the current social disengagement, Putnam throws this in: “The sixties (most of which actually happened in the seventies)” (p. 187).

* It was disturbing to me to read (p. 352) that in 1987, 46% of those surveyed were opposed to interracial dating.  That figure dropped to 23% by 1999, but still: Almost half of the people surveyed in the States held this view as recently as 1987!  Similarly, in 1963, 61% of those surveyed would have supported laws against interracial marriage.  In 1998, however, only 11% did.  That indicates some change for the better, but it’s still sad.

Television and Social Capital

One of the chapters in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone deals with the impact of technology — and television in particular — on social capital, the bonds which tie a society together and which have been replaced in this generation by increasing civic disengagement and isolation.

What has brought about this disengagement?  There’s no one answer, Putnam says.  But a lot of the blame can be placed on television (or at least television as it is often used).  He quotes T. S. Eliot on TV: “It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome” (New York Post, Sept. 29, 1963, cited on p. 217).

The biggest consequence of television, Putnam claims, is that it brings us home (p. 223), so that we’re not involved as much with other people besides (perhaps) our own families.  We can’t be out on Tuesday night!  American Idol is on!  In fact, the American Idol results are on Wednesdays and we don’t want to miss that eitiher.  Besides, Law and Order is on Wednesdays.  And so forth.

Putnam is not claiming, of course, that television benefits family life; rather, television tends to isolate us from our families, too.  Because not everyone wants to watch the same show, many families now have more than on TV on at a time.

In fact, Putnam also suggests that channel surfing may be linked to superficial friendships (p. 226).  Don’t like the guy you’re talking to?  Switch channels.

(Putnam doesn’t discuss the internet, largely because the book was written several years ago, but I suspect that the internet exacerbates this problem.  Just as we channel surf, we surf the web, jumping from page to page, link to link, and so we surf our friends also.  In fact, it’s my impression that there’s something about the internet which breaks down our ability to concentrate.  It’s easy to surf; it’s much harder — or at least for me, I think — to read something online in any depth.  I wonder if researchers will start to see that the internet disrupts our ability to read — or concentrate at all — for sustained periods of time.  Does the internet give us all a case of Attention Deficit Disorder?)

In the end, Putnam concludes that television watching is “the single most consistant predictor of civic disengagement” (p. 231).  The more you watch TV, the less engaged you’ll be in your society.  In fact, the more you watch TV, the more likely you are to give the other driver the finger, too (p. 233).  TV makes us aware of problems … but less likely to do anything about them (p. 242).

In this connection, he quotes an Amish man speaking about “how the Amish know which technological inventions to admit and which to shun”:

We can almost always tell if a change will bring good or bad tidings.  Certain things we definitely do not want, like the television and the radio.  They would destroy our visiting practices.  We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people.  The visiting practices are important because of the closeness of the people.  How can we care for the neighbor if we do not visit them or know what is going on in their lives? (cited pp. 234-235).

I’m not Amish or Amishly-inclined.  I enjoy TV and radio, watch movies — and read books, for that matter.  But I can see the point this Amish man is making.

I mention books, by the way, because, as Jim Jordan points out in one of his lectures, reading is one of the most anti-social inventions of all time.  When you watch TV, at least you can do that with other people present, but when you’re reading, you lower your head, shut the other people out, and retreat into your own world.  Everything the Amish man says about television here could be said about books, in fact.  If you’re racing through your Dean Koontz novel to see how everything works out, you won’t be inclined to visit with your neighbor.

Nevertheless, I can grant the Amish man’s point only to some degree.  It still seems possible to watch television and listen to the radio — and read books — judiciously.  I admit that many people don’t, but one can limit television watching to a show or two, to read in the evening after everyone else has gone home, to make a point of getting involved in the community and visiting fellow church members and chatting with your neighbours at least sometime during the week, even if you don’t do it on the one or two evenings when your favorite show is on.

Good Gossip?

Robert Putnam on the social benefits of close-knit communities and their gossip: “Dense social ties facilitate gossip and other valuable ways of cultivating reputation — an essential foundation for trust in a complex society” (Bowling Alone, p. 21).

Given that some gossip is clearly destructive and sinful (e.g., talk aimed at tearing down someone else’s reputation) or at least not upbuilding, is there a place for other sorts of gossip?  I suspect so.

After all, there should be some mechanism in society for people to know, for instance, that you don’t want to have their daughter babysit your children but you can rely on her to be there anytime you need her or that if you buy a car from him you won’t likely get your money’s worth and so forth.  You wouldn’t want to ask some girl to babysit, have a catastrophe because of her incompetence, and then find out that all your friends knew it wouldn’t work out but didn’t tell you because “We don’t gossip.”

Perhaps instead of condemning “gossip” outright, it would be better to say that there are certain kinds of talk about other people that should be forbidden but other kinds of talk that are sometimes necessary and helpful to build trust and establish people’s reputations in society.

Bowling Alone 1

I think it was Mark Driscoll‘s The Radical Reformission which first pointed me to Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.  I’m now about halfway through it.  It’s not the most exciting reading — analysis of statistics probably bores most people, in fact — but it is important reading (or at least skimming) for pastors.

Bowling Alone is about the decline in social capital in the past few decades.  While physical capital includes things such as money and property, social capital has to do with networks, connections between people, bonds of reciprocity and trust.

In the first section of the book, Putnam examines political and civic involvement, religious participation, workplace relationships, informal social gatherings, volunteering and philanthropy and more.  Time and again, he finds the same pattern: a gradual increase in the early part of the 20th century, with a dip around the time of the depression, followed by a steep increase after the war, but culminating in an increasingly rapid decrease beginning in the 70s and speeding up from about 1980 on.

And again and again, the changes don’t appear to be related to education or finances or ethnic background or geographic location.  Rather, they are generational.  The generation(s) that came of age more recently than the 70s have less interest in politics, church attendance, social gatherings, volunteering, and so forth than previous generations did.

There are, of course, lots of new organizations, but many have relatively few members and few have local chapters.  Many “clubs” and “associations” and “organizations” are actually nothing more than mailing lists.  You don’t attend meetings or discuss issues.  You simply send in your donation and you join the organization which then mails you info about the group and the occasional demand for more money.

Interestingly, Putnam points out that “religious” people tend to be more involved, though they often get involved in their own circles and not so much in the society around them.  But those who aren’t interested in being involved in the activities of the church and in its community are less and less likely to attend, so that there is an increasingly clear polarization between believers and unbelievers (p. 74).

I plan to write more about this book, but if this first taste interests you I’d recommend tracking the book down in a library and skimming it.  I don’t think it’s worth your time for a detailed, leisurely read nor do I know if I’d want to own the book.  But if you’re a pastor,you ought to read this one because part of your calling is to draw hurting isolated people into a warm, loving community and that involves understanding not only that people around you are isolated and withdrawn but also why they are that way and how that can change.

Books

Steven Wedgeworth (whom I haven’t actually met, in person or online: Hello, Steven!) and Jeff Meyers tagged me for a book thing that’s going around the web. Ask me again and I could, of course, give different answers to each question.  But these will do for now.  If you want explanations, feel free to ask.  

1. One book that changed your life: The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God by John Frame
2. One book that you’ve read more than once: Lancelot by Walker Percy
3. One book you’d want on a desert island: The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (but I’d especially want to have The Book of the New Sun and The Book of the Short Sun too)
4. One book that made you laugh: The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
5. One book that made you cry: Born Brothers by Larry Woiwode
6. One book that you wish had been written: Genesis: A Practical and Theological Commentary by James B. Jordan
7. One book that you wish had never been written: The New International Version
8. One book you’re currently reading: Absolute Truths by Susan Howatch
9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: Introduction to Systematic Theology by Cornelius Van Til
10.  Now tag five people: Actually, I’m tagging seven. Anyone mind?

Tim
Gideon
Glenda
Garrett
Toby
Richard
Danny

Work and Organization

As I set out on the project of being a church planter, I realize that I have lots and lots of work to do but that most of it isn’t clearly defined.

For instance, I need to get to know Medford and this region and that will involve meeting people (Ed Stetzer recommends finding the people who love your community) and talking to them about the city, its history, its needs, and so forth. But getting to know your community isn’t a well-defined project with eight steps, so that when you’ve done all eight you know your job is done. It’s an ongoing thing.

So is getting out into the community. Who should I meet today? Where should I go? How do I meet people and interact with them? Talking to people and building relationships with them is part of my calling, but it isn’t something that I can easily schedule.

But other aspects of my work are much more straightforward. For instance, I have to write a sermon and do the bulletin each week. But I don’t want those jobs to crowd out the other, less-defined ones, or vice versa.

Any organizational or time-management tips you’d like to share? Any good books on the subject that you’d especially recommend?

A Tale of Two Dealers

Today, I had to take both of our vehicles into the dealers, one for a recall on a power steering hose and the other to have the struts replaced, a job covered by warranty. Neither would cost me anything.

I arrived at the Chrysler dealership first. When I drove into the rather dingy tunnel which was their service headquarters, I had to track down someone to look after my car. After about five to ten minutes, in which he was on the phone or disappearing to talk to someone else, he finally focused on me, only to fail to find my 11:00 appointment in the computer.

Eventually, he took me down the row of mini offices to another service guy who, in turn, disappeared into another one’s office, where I heard him protesting that he hadn’t been able to take a lunch break and asking if the other guy would take care of me. When he returned, still stuck with me, he told me that a fourth man, not present, would be my service advisor and then changed his mind and told me that he would do it.

I left my car there just before noon, under the impression that it would be ready by the end of the day. Then, I picked up our other car and took it to Lithia Honda, where the difference in dealerships was immediately evident. Honda’s service bay is open and bright. Immediately a man appeared to start taking care of the vehicle, noting mileage and so forth. Jason, with whom I’ve worked before, waved at me through the window before I even came inside.

A couple hours later, exactly on time, Jason called me and I came to pick up the vehicle. When I arrived, it was sitting in the service bay, ready for me to drive.

While I was there, the Chrysler service advisor called. My car, he told me, wasn’t ready. It turned out that changing the power steering hose is a four-hour job and they hadn’t had the time to get to it. (Note that my appointment was for 11:00 and they had the car in their system by about 11:30 and that his phone call was at about 4:30, five hours later.)

They couldn’t keep it overnight and work on it Saturday, he said, because he didn’t want to have one tech start on it (today) and another finish it (tomorrow). What’s odd about that is that no one had started it today anyway. Nevertheless, no tech is going to start or finish it tomorrow. I’ll have to bring it back some other day and probably leave it overnight with them.

When I arrived to pick up my car, believe it or not, the car had disappeared. No one had driven it up to the main service bay for me to pick up. I was sent to find it. But it wasn’t in either of their two main lots. The advisor himself went looking, as did another one, and neither could find it. Finally, a manager found it in a third lot. (The manager, at my request, agreed to a free oil change, though I didn’t receive that promise in writing.)

All of which makes me wish that both of my cars were Hondas.

Brothers and Sisters

My former parishoner, Tym Van Braeden, presents some interesting statistics about brothers and sisters and points out what those stats might mean.

Reform and Resurge?

Anyone out there going to the Reform and Resurge Conference in Seattle, May 9-11? If so, I may see you there.

For me the speakers aren’t really the main attraction. The main attraction is the chance to hang out with a bunch of other church planters. I’ll also get to spend time with my friend Chip Lind, which is always fun. And Mark will be there, too, whom I haven’t seen in over four years (scroll to the bottom of this page for a pic).

If you’re going, find me and say “Hello.”

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