New Project: After Hours

I've been busy building/posting at this site: After Hours, which is a new project being soft-launched in the last quarter of 2009 by Cardus staffers and associates. It will hard launch (with hope) in January 2010, but in the meantime it's an interesting space to play in. You're all welcome to check it :)

Thesis

Justice, for the victim of a murder, is a misnomer.

Discuss.

Finding Meaningful Work

The Facebook update of a friend of mine today reminds me of the perennial struggle of young people (like me): how do you get paid (lots of) money for doing things you love?

Many of my peers are engaged in this challenge and - as one privileged to have found both meaningful work and compensation for said work - it has led me to a few reflections.

First, the young especially can struggle to find meaningful work because they don't know what they find meaningful. To get paid to do what one loves one must know what one loves and - further - acknowledge that no career, skill or vocation comes without serious challenges and, if it's something worth doing, a high and long learning curve. There is the old principle of dedicating 10,000 hours but what that principle doesn't always suggest is that many of those hours can suck. Finding meaning, like finding what we love, is a process filled with the virtue of patience. And it is aided, I might add, to no small end by tough minded thinking and thorough-going prayer, such as that facilitated by friends like Steve Garber. Wisdom, as Gideon Strauss loves to recall, cannot be taught - but it can be caught; it's contagious.

Second, I am reminded continuously that my generation - and I mean myself particularly here - have hard lessons to learn from Brother Lawrence. The apprenticing curve for my own work in policy and academia is pretty high, but it's also pretty unpleasant at the start (and I count myself still on that curve). As Ecclesiastes admonishes, it is good for a young man to bear his burden in his youth - I can't imagine the first 2000 hours of developing expertise are nearly as pleasant as the last 2000.

Maybe part of finding meaningful work - work that we love - is about finding work we come to love, rather than expect to find excellent from Day 1. Maybe instead of coming in with our skills, ideas and preferences we let the work we do find shape those things, and take - as Brother Lawrence did - each day as a gift of grace, to learn to find the divine in new and unexpected ways; ways that at times defy what we consider our gifts, strengths and loves.

Aids, Africa, Religion

It is natural for anyone facing a terminal disease to ask, Why me? This is an
exasperated, unanswerable cri de coeur in the rational West—one of the steps of
the grieving process, we are told, that we all just need to get through. But
many Africans have their own kind of answer to that question.
African tribes
are not a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, but the vast majority traditionally
held in common a worldview of causation very different from our own. With
reference to illness, it is called the personalistic theory of disease. Even
today, most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two
causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus
causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a
spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real. Edward
Evans-Pritchard, whose ethnography of the Nuer people of Sudan is a foundational
work of anthropology, put Africans’ cosmological outlook this way: One might
understand that a house collapsed because termites damaged it. But the more
important question is, Who sent the termites?

and

As an evangelical Christian, Dahlman believes that the witch doctor’s
powers may well be real but that Christ’s are potent above all others. “There
are powers for good and powers for harm,” he says. “Our Western, Hellenistic
view says that doesn’t exist, so we can safely put it off the map. But I can
bring you people who would tell you otherwise, for whom the spiritual world is a
real, day-to-day concern.” In his years in the field, Dahlman says he has seen
an exorcism that reversed the curse of a laibon—a powerful spiritual figure in
Masai culture—as well as a prayer session that healed a woman whose femur was
fractured by a cape buffalo. She could not walk and, because night had fallen,
could not be evacuated. But as daylight broke after an all-night vigil, “the
American, board-certified doctor who had diagnosed the fracture came to the
woman’s house, and she walked out and greeted them,” Dahlman says. “So you can
say there never was any break, contrary to what this physician said and saw,
with this lady unable to walk or bear any pressure on that leg. Do you mistrust
that easy diagnosis, or do you believe that something else happened?”

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/aids-relief-and-moral-myopia, as found on Rod Dreher's site.

Debating Fair Trade

I have become deeply concerned with the economic orthodoxy developing in the Christian sub-culture in North America regarding so-called fair-trade. My own denomination - the Christian Reformed Church of North America - has recently published an issue of Justice Seekers on the importance of buying fair trade.

But this is pop culture international political economy, and nothing I've read and understand of economics seems to confirm this enthusiasm. What it confirms is an uncritical embrace of Wendell Berry's idyllic mode of production. Fair trade fits with the popular imagination of Africa needing essentially small-scale "mom and pop" stores, which fetch fair prices rather than being driven out of business by the conglomerate chains, like we all witness far too often here in North America.

The problem with this nostalgia is that it does not actually generate wealth. If it did, "mom and pop" stores wouldn't have gone out of business. Artificially floating unprofitable systems of production is as good a way as any to ensure that Africa (and other regions) stay poor; it ensures that single-industry economies continue to linger on, artificially stimulated by the latent guilt of the global north, when such economies could be differentiating, producing and even competing with the global North. What keeps this dream from happening is not paying higher prices for your coffee, but a profoundly broken system of international trade and global financial institutions.

I embrace Fair Trade as essentially a glorified public-relations campaign. It alerts us depth of our economic and political problems, but solve global economic disparity? Nonsense. The reverse is more true. We do need fairer trade - something tied, I believe, to freer trade. And, as both Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Collier agree, the problem with free trade is that it's never been tried.

* Further reading: I recommend here Collier's much lauded book The Bottom Billion, or his TED talk.

Amazing Grace (with Garlic)

I've been reading a lot of high literary theory as well as systematic theology and philosophy recently and in tackling the grand, abstract questions I sometimes forget the blessings of embodiment. This could be due to the fact that unlike others of you out there with lean abs, a love of physical activity, and metabolism to burn, I bear the burden of being portly, born with a loathing of physical activity that seems unable to be exorcised even with much fasting and prayer (okay, the fasting part is a lie). And yet, today I was able to take a moment to reflect on the embodied life God has given me and how good that can truly be.

I didn't make the chicken stew from scratch but I did authentically defrost it in the microwave and put it to boil on the stove. And before she left for work, my wife pulled out a recipe of drop dumplings from her favourite cookbook, Food That Really Smecks! I should have known or felt that some divine encounter was going to take place because such things happen when making, eating or even thinking about dumplings. While the stew was coming to a boil I mixed the cup of flour with 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and the same amount of salt, cut 2 tablespoons of margarine into the mix, added a teaspoon of parsley and several good shakes of oregano. I was about the add the half cup of milk when I felt called by the Spirit to grab the garlic powder and give it a few good shakes over the mixture.

By this time the stew was boiling so I put it down to simmer and dropped the dumplings into the pot, put the lid on for 15 min. and sat back on the couch. The busyness of my past week seemed to crash through the windows at that point and I found myself again swept away in a tide of "lofty" concerns.

Then the timer went.

I grabbed a bowl and scooped myself up a good portion of chicken stew and parsley-garlic dumplings and went back out the couch to look out over the cityscape out our third story window. The smell of the stew would have been enough to tempt me to break my fast (that is, if I ever actually had the self-discipline to fast in the first place).

I held up the bowl in front of the window and watched the steam curl in on itself and dissipate even as I tuned into the words of the song I had playing on the CD player, "Amazing Grace, I feel you coming up slowly now, like the sun is rising, heat on my face...".

And I was truly thankful for my meal, even the bit that I dumped down the front of my shirt. Thankful in a way I haven't been for a long time. The words "amazing grace" have many connotations for me and many memories associated with the singing of those words but now I have a smell to go with them... garlic.

God of all Creation, thank you for garlic, and dumplings, and re-heated chicken stew! Amen.

[NOTE: To my Reformed friends, cooking with garlic won't turn you into a Pentecostal... think of it as, say, Creational].

Gross, gag-worthy, healthy

Following up on my "On shit" and "On shit II" posts, here is another unsexy, gross, but seemingly very effective thing that would help those in need.

I will file this under unsexy=effective.

Can anyone point me to any data which would belie these predictions? Article from which the graph is sourced is here.

I've become convinced that people in our age bracket are going to have to work very, very, hard to pay for their parents. Not only by doing the right and familial thing of caring for them when they become old and gray, but also by paying for the government debt incurred when they made up the bulk of the voting population.

A prediction to debate: we'll see tax increases in the next five years.

More on technology, this time with favour

"It's my memory. I call it my other brain," said Ms. Walmsley. "It's not a cool gadget. It's my lifeline."

So says a diagnosed amnesia sufferer, referencing her smartphone.

While many of us here at the Lair don't suffer from amnesia (well, let's just say we've not been diagnosed), I think we can identify with that. In fact, I remember a contributor of many a fine morsel at the Lair stating boldly in reference to one such device/program: "It basically runs my life."

I have to say that, as a late adopter, and as one who suffers from amnesia of a certain variety (My beloved prefers to call it squirrel syndrome), such little devices have dramatically improved my life. I'm serious. If I had a blackberry with outlook earlier in my life, I would have avoided much heartache. I'm assuming a hearty "hear hear" from the readers here familiar with my past ways.

Does anyone at the Lair have any examples of technology that has significantly improved their lives?

I love to tell the story

"Mistake me not," said the Cardinal, "the literature of which we are speaking—the literature of individuals, if we may call it so—is a noble art, a great, earnest and ambitious human product. But it is a human product. The divine art is the story. In the beginning was the story. At the end we shall be privileged to view, and review, it—and that is what is named the day of judgment.
"But you will remember," he remarked, as in a parenthesis and with a smile, "that the human characters in the book do come forth on the sixth day only—by that time they were bound to come, for where the story is, the characters will gather!"

h/t Culture Making

I think that there's something slightly amiss here: for some reason, I think it will be our stories that are viewed and reviewed alongside the divine story and not us who view and review the divine story, but nonetheless, I really, really appreciate this bit, and I think I'm going to try to pick up the book from the library.

Isak Dinesen, by the by, is really Karen Blixen (what a name!), of Babette's Feast and Out of Africa fame.

I'd like to ask those in the lair what they make of this, particularly with regard to how it relates to their relationships and the way in which they communicate with friends; those who recognize the divine art, and those who perhaps can't, don't, or won't see it.

For the tech addicts among us.

“Did you know that now, thanks to iPhone, you can use location services to tell your friends where are you are at any given moment, and if they’re on iPhone and have that same app they can find you, and then you can then ask iPhone to tell you if there are any Tex-Mex restaurants within a five-block radius, and what movies are playing at the nearest cinema? Then you can use Twitter (or, rather, one of the 14,000 Twitter apps) to tell your followers what you’re up to, and automatically feed that into your Facebook page so that your Facebook friends can comment on your movie plans, and advertisers can scour your personal messages and use keyword searches to send target messages to each of you, and deep thinkers like Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson will reassure you that you are not just getting sucked into the maw of the brain-killing machine, and this is not just mindless time-wasting twattle but is in fact extremely profound and revolutionary and important and intellectually challenging. Because in the old days you just read books and that was so passive, but now you’re so engaged and interactive, you’re not just a media consumer but you’re also a media creator — why, in fact, you’re a public intellectual — and if you don’t fully immerse yourself in every last bit of this shit then you will no longer be participating in your culture which means you will lose your job and everyone will laugh at you because you just don’t get it and you might as well be some 90-year-old dude sitting in a pee-stained bathrobe drooling.”

Thanks to Alan Jacobs for this.

Steiner on the Bible as Inspired Literature

I've been wrestling with the question regarding to what extent we ought to read the Bible "as any other book." I just got access to George Steiner's review of Alter and Kermode's Literary Guide to the Bible. His basic critique is that the recent trend evident in The Guide reduces the Bible to mere literature without accounting for its otherness. I love this quote in reference to the book of Job:

"I can--just--come to imagine for myself that a man of more or less my own biological and social composition could have written "Hamlet" or "Lear" and gone home to lunch and found a normal answer to the question "How did it go today?" I cannot conceive of the author of the Speech Out of the Whirlwind in Job writing or dictating that text and dwelling within common existence and parlance." (Steiner, "The Good Books," The New Yorker [Jan 11, 1988], 97)

Islamic Superheroes

The BBC runs a spot on Islamic Superheroes today, created by the Kuwaiti psychologist Dr Naif al Mutawa. He writes an open letter to his sons explaining why he created these characters. A quote:

So, at the age of 32, I uncapped my pen to create a concept that could be popular in the East and the West. I would go back to the very sources from which others took violent and hateful messages and offer messages of tolerance and peace in their place. I would give my heroes a Trojan horse in the form of THE 99. Islam was my Helen. I wanted her back.

Two Questions

In conversation with folks last night at Theology on Tap we were reminiscing about "big questions" in how and why we live our lives the way we do. There are always a host of big questions about how to live as Christians with integrity in North America, but we boiled it down to two basic ones that - to me - grabs the great idols of our time (and I think especially of our generation):

1. Do you pray?
2. Do you give?

Consistent prayer - not evangelical guilt-manipulated "I wish I prayed more"; but real, robust, ritual prayer is a statement about time, as much as where we put our money is a statement about value. The only two things we probably ever really control in this life are our time and our money. Surely what we do with them is the most profound incarnation of our beliefs, and the gods - or God - that animates our lives.

There is no shortage of excellent Christian living amongst 20'somethings, but how much of that excellence is the product of socializiation and not out of a deep relationship with God?

Finally, my friend Geoff Ryan challenges #2 saying it is not merely "do you give," but "how do you give?" The North American church has outsourced mercy, and a committed 10%+ tithe that operates from the suburban margins and never threatens to encounter the other is not sufficient.

Fuhd Me

Cardus has asked me to keep an informal log of my time and research for dissertation research, which can be found here. This site is only for reflections and notes as relate to the PhD and so will be of marginal interest, likely. Regardless it is part of our internal knowledge sharing and a capable enough tool for exchange with my overseas supervisors. You are all also welcome to visit as you are moved to.

John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner

I dare you to click this link

That's right, I double dog dare you to click this link.

At once hilarious, lamentable and grossly generalizing. Enjoy, if you dare.

Rediscovering Celibacy

To my delight I recently discovered a real attempt to engage the vocation of celibacy in Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must be Reinvented in Today's Church. I took a read through this last night and wanted to share a few thoughts.

First, bravo for evangelicalism getting something out on this topic. These are two fine authors with sharp minds, working on a pressing lack at the heart of evangelical theology.

But second, why "reinvent"? Jaroslav Pelikan makes an important point in The Vindication of Tradition that we never recover and we certainly don't reinvent tradition, we rediscover it. To their credit the authors do reach back into church history, but seem far too quick to move "beyond" these models. Rather than reinvent an evangelical theology of celibacy it might be worth looking at the folks that are already doing it more closely.

Briefly, let me explain why reinvention is a very bad idea. The tradition of celibacy would remind us that it is a vocation, a holy calling like marriage, that serves God and others. That same tradition would also remind us that, like marriage, there are specific disciplines that sustain and develop the life of celibacy. Henri Nouwen is very clear that celibacy should never be pursued as an isolated vow: there are reinforcing disciplines that support the celibate life. These are disciplines like silence, contemplative prayer and simplicity. The vocation of marriage has its disciplines which sustain it, why would not celibacy? We admit that marriage is so hard that we have marriage counselling before its administration - to deeply reflect on the disciplines that sustain the vocation. Our loss of the vocation of celibacy is indicative of even more profound losses in evangelicalism. More strongly, the surest sign of a flawed vision of family and community, is the denigration or dishonouring of the celibate life.

Finally, the radical embrace of what some of my students call "intentional living" also seems reflective of this a-historical evangelicalism. These students seem to want to embrace simplicity, contra North America's consumerism, living in rhythm with the land and seasons, focus their lives intentionally on the person of God and find creative spaces for prayer and service. Such institutions exist: they are called monasteries. The reason so much intentional-living in the evangelical community seems to precipitate conflict and betray emotional cataclysm is because these disciplines are damn hard to practice together and monks know that, and have been at it for a very long time. The rituals and disciplines that sustain monastic life are not so much ornamentation, they are critical features without which communal life rooted in the passionate pursuit of God collapses.

I will be giving a talk at the University of Western Ontario this fall tentatively titled thus far "How to do public life and (still) believe stuff." In that process I expect to reflect more extensively on celibacy and its supporting monastic disciplines, and relate this to the challenges of public life particularly. Thus, more thoughts will no doubt come on this.

Craftsmanship

It seemed appropriate given the last post to point to a piece recently done by one of our number: Rediscovering Craftsmanship. I believe - if you are in the Ottawa valley - he will also sharpen your knives for real cheap.

Perhaps the life of the mind needs the balance of carefully cultivating skills of the hands, to reorient us toward the tactile and the material.

the case for working with your hands

I just came across this New York Times article about an academic who more or less gave up his academic life and opened up a motorcycle repair shop. The article is called The Case for Working with your Hands by Matthew B. Crawford (HT Culture Making blog). This resonated particularly with me for a number of reasons.

1. My experience was the opposite of Crawford's--that is I used to be a tradesman and gave that up to pursue academics (though for the first 5 or 6 years of studying I returned to my trade in the summers for income).
2. I love motorcycles and at this point might actually consider leaving my research for the chance to work on bikes full time (okay that was [mostly] a joke)!
3. I recently bought an older motorcycle that needs some work to get it on the road (in case you are wondering the bike was manufactured by an East German company called Motorrad und Zweiradwerk, and though it's a bit rough around the edges I'm not ashamed to admit that I have completely fallen in love with it!).

It's also interesting because I have recently moved from a christian context in which working with your hands is an honoured tradition to a new context made up almost entirely of professionals (seriously, I can count on one hand the number of people whom I have met who do some sort of manual work, be it a trade or some other form of labour). Anyway, I'm not sure I have any great insights into this but I thought I'd throw it into the mix.

cheers!