Jubilee: Reflections

Friends,

Mere blogs will not suffice to express the profound gratitude I have to have attended - even spoken - at this conference. Jubilee is - without reservation - the finest, most thoughtful and most enjoyable conference I have ever attended. It is remarkable not for its academic rigor (it is popular), or merely for the wide array of professionals and public intellectuals it draws, but for the confluence of passionate, remarkable, thoughtful and deeply pious people it gathers.

If there is one conference you make room for, which occupies a most sacred spot on your calendar in forthcoming years that you may not miss, let it be Jubilee. In it you will not (mercifully) find the fine minutia of your discipline, but rather gathering crowds of young and old to the vision that Christ is Lord over every square inch.

To put it simply it is the most authentically neo-Calvinist convention I've been to. I was expecting stock American evangelicalism! I was so shocked by the end of the first night I commented to my colleague that it was like "showing up to a party where you don't expect to know anyone, and it turns out they're all good friends with your mother."

I will save my most persuasive and effusive comments for personal conversations - but make plans in 2010 to go. You will not regret it.

Bell Canada: How I Feel of Thee

Sentimental Jesus

In response to Q Prentice asking tough questions about God, Job and the experience of brokenness in the world I wanted to share a personal worship experience from this past Sunday.

At my home church we make Lectio Devina a somewhat regular practice, something I have embraced personally now for a little more than four years. On this evening we read the story from Mark 4 of Jesus calming the storm. Afterward the congregation shared their reflections.

One of the pitfalls of Lectio is that it necessarily focuses on a very small story or section of Scripture (also one of its strengths!). The reflections that were shared after this story basically came to: Jesus cares about us, he's in the boat with us, and he will calm our storms if we ask him.

These comments come out of good Dutch-immigrant axiom's I grew up with: God never gives you a load your shoulders can't bear; He never gives you more than you can handle; it's all to make you stronger (etc). Thus emerges a picture of a loving, but stern Father God who allows pain because it benefits us - personally, in some future-unknown manner.

I don't know about this. I don't know about this at all. Our pastor asked us what kind of images occurred to us hearing this story. Maybe I have a little "glass-is-half-empty" syndrome, or I study the dark side of international politics too much, but the image that came to my mind was: walking along Atlantic coastal villages in Newfoundland, with good friends, reading the plaques and memorials of ships that went down, all hands lost, at sea. "Poor bastards", I thought. "They obviously didn't get a calm sea like Galilee that day in Mark 4". My experience of the world tells me pain and suffering doesn't always make me stronger, it doesn't always benefit me or allow me new important insights on life and God - sometimes it hurts like hell, it doesn't ever make sense, it breaks us, and we die.

This is a bigger discussion: about judgment, about evil, about suffering, about God. But I don't want to get lost in academic and theological jargon to lose the existential heft. There is a real intellectual and emotional effort to be made by Christians to confess that God is indeed omnipotent, indeed all-loving, but that doesn't necessarily mean He's my personal go-to guy who's never going to let bad things happen to me. Just because Jesus is in the passenger's seat, doesn't mean I won't rear-end that Volvo. I believe the Dutch axiom that covers this is: Trust God, but lock your doors.

Brian Walsh and Polemics

Brian Walsh has a lot of good things to say. That said, Brian Walsh enjoys playing the role of the gad-fly which bites, draws blood and considers that a great victory. Like a gad-fly, I find him annoying. His contemporary lectures and talks have a useful role to play, but they serve, at best, as food to other, higher, creatures and at worst to spread pestilence. Now, call me old-fashioned, but I have very little use for people who -- even in rhetoric -- equate hell with Scripture. I consider the words themselves sacred after all.

Subversion of the empire is not what Paul writes about; it is what Brian Walsh loves to talk about with considerable bravado and as one who has the luxury of never having to deal with the hard choices that those of us in the real world have to make. It is certainly not good pastoral leadership to say to someone about to enter the public service, or who is considering running for public office to say "to hell with Romans 13". Should Namaan say "to hell with the Empire?" Or should he, as Elisha counsels him, "go in peace" even though he knows he will have to kneel before idols? Paul is writing about living as embodiments of kingdom of God, which is a very different thing than subverting the empire. There might be overlap between the two, but Paul does not write with the goal of subverting the empire. That's an anachronism and someone of his considerable intellect should recognize that. And to those who would say "it's just rhetoric" I would reply: it's not even good rhetoric. It's sloganeering mixed with a sneer.

Now, what I'm really interested in not so much to debate the usefulness of empire in discussions about the proper Christian response (Though I think we could have a good discussions about that here on this blog) but whether or not it's appropriate to respond with such fervor to such pieces of writing. Is it better to go the route of Yoda, or is there a place for polemics?

Australian Bushfires, Cormac McCarthy, and Job

I've spent the last few days working on a seminar paper that is a reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in light of the Book of Job. The task involved reading a very dark and depressing novel as well as a troubling biblical text. I finished it today at the school and thought, Well at the least the world is not as dark as McCarthy or Job seem to think; reading their struggles in the cold and dark make the world look brighter.

Then I came home to find that a my wife had been on the phone with a friend who had lost a baby and with another friend living in Australia where bushfires have killed over a 100 people, destroyed over 1ooo homes, and completely wiped out several towns and villages.

Margaret Avison, in her poem "Confrontation and Resolution, in Job," writes:

Hard-won are the words
we need to truly
converse with someone close
and yet mysterious to us.
(Avison 126)

I thought these words while I sat with my wife, unable to say them as comfort. I thought of all the words I put together carefully in my seminar. I thought afterwards of the ariel shots of the bushfires I looked up online. I read a section from McCarthy's novel again:

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The night dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle." (McCarthy 273)

And, here, now, I don't want to be too dark or gloomy but I think I have to go back and rework my seminar. Because Job and McCarthy aren't just there to show us, by stark constrast, how different our world is from theirs, but how their world is our world - and that there is an incarnate presence of grace herein. McCarthy's protagonist, in the midst of a burned highway (that very well could be a description of highways in Australia), looks up at his son and sees something holy in his child. Job cried out from an ash heap, screaming "I know my Redeemer lives!" Even though his world had been destroyed.

And, curiously, I just received Comment magazine in the mail: the Signs of Hope issue. And I read the bit by Cal Seerveld: "My own hope is a plodding, quiet, steady awareness of God's providing enduring grace through thick and thin en route during my life" (25). And I'm not quite sure what to make of all this coming in a whirlwind all in a day but it has.

I think I will feel Job's gravity more tomorrow when I deliver the seminar... and, I hope, God's grace. Right now my prayers are with a grieving family close by and with those in Australia who are beyond grief.

Top Mags: The IR Edition

In response to Viator, I want to add what I think are the top magazines/journals that thinking Christians should be reading about global politics. These are not academic journals, and you don't have to be in the discipline to discern "what the hell these people are talking about." They are top opinion repositories, and while there are plenty that could merit attention I will mention my favourite three that I read cover to cover:

Unquestionably Foreign Affairs is the leading journal of ideas and opinion in IR. It's articles are written by people from across the spectrum, in both academic and political positions of influence. While the non-specialist might have difficulty reading each issue cover to cover, the broad range and contemporary relevance of topics will undoubtedly satisfy almost any reader. It's balance and weight make it the logical first stop.

Foreign Policy, while a far more popular and glossy magazine, is like the Time or Macleans magazine of the foreign policy world. It has no pretensions of being academic, no desire to pump its issues with 'big names' and IR pop stars, but succeeds at being accessible, relatively balanced, mainstream and providing stories with a very broad range of interest. It's trademark indexes are always a good time, and it's designed to make global politics interesting to the non-specialist. For this reason it's a bit of a guilty pleasure to folks in IR academia, but that's only if those folks are too impressed with their substantial intellectual girth to realize that its mediums like this that actually capture popular imagination. For that reason, I include Foreign Policy in my list.

The Review for Faith and International Affairs, put out by the Institute for Global Engagement, is one of the best resources I have ever come across for thinking about religion and global politics. Written in public language, and intended to appeal to a broad audience, the initial impression is that the journal is more academic. However, browsing through the reader will find that the writing is accessible, and while some pieces may be more narrowly specialist, most of the content is for broad interest. Not only does this Review position the topic of religion and international politics on the radar, but it regularly addresses core questions of religion, pluralism and politics generally. The last issue dedicated to Islam and pluralism is an absolute must read for Christian thinkers. The Review succeeds where many fail: it creates a genuine dialogue with different religious perspectives on international politics, in a public space, while pursuing an integrated and fundamentally Christian view of justice: no small achievement.

A Little Taste of Monasticism

I have begun a practice, along with several others, of doing this sort of thing during Advent and Lent. I thought some of us would be interested to see it covered in the BBC. Last we were down there was talk of attending Vocation Weeks, in which young men consider their potential calling to the community. Perhaps they'll make monks of us all yet.