MLA: I haven’t done a ‘Clips and Comments’ in ages, but it’s one of my favorite formats for the newsletter. Read on for various and sundry links, excerpts, short thoughts, and more.
First, though: the promotion to get a copy of Called into Questions early ends this week. Become a member for a year, upload your receipt, and get a copy of the book as soon as it arrives. The details are below. Now, on to it…..
An Excerpt
My friend Alex Fogelman’s terrific group The Catechesis Institute was kind enough to share an excerpt of the new book. If you’re on the fence about becoming a member and getting a copy, maybe it will tip you over the edge?
The difficulty is holding together the unknown with the known, the mystery with the revelation, the hidden with the gift. The strangeness of Christianity makes sense because Christianity makes sense of the world. Its paradoxes and mysteries are a strength, not a weakness. They allow for both resolution and tension, confidence and questions. We might not be able to explain the mysteries at the center of the cosmos, but those mysteries can explain us, answering the deepest puzzles that humanity knows. The immortal, invisible, only wise God “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.”[37] Yet the true light has come into the world. While no one has ever seen God, God has made Himself known in Jesus Christ.
College and the Liberal Arts
You’ll learn new things in college. Your learning will change you; it’s supposed to. But whatever you learn is meant to build up others, not puff up yourself. Let gratitude absorb whatever vanity threatens. Giving thanks in all things will cover a multitude of sins.
Brad East offers some wise counsel on how to keep your faith in college. Years ago, I wrote a two-part essay on how to keep the faith in a Christian college. There is much I would revise about it now, but I think I regret nothing.
Which brings me to this exhortation based on Daniel’s life, from Andrew Selby and Catie Robertson:
Similarly, Christian college students should avoid the king’s meat and wine. Yes, this means passing on frat parties. But it also means limiting our most intimate social touch points (like regular meals together), and most deeply rooted friendships, to fellow believers.
Sacrificing one’s social inclusion can hurt. But Daniel and his friends were willing to pay this price for faithfulness. Resistant fellowship with other believers must be our default mode from the start.
Sticking with the education theme, Perry Glanzer argues that the purpose of Christian education should be excellence (by which I think he means virtue), rather than understanding:
Thus, we should educate students to be excellent image bearers of God; Christians; friends; family members; citizens; men and women; stewards of the earth, our bodies, and culture; etc. In both general education and the co-curricular domain, we need to help students supplement their faith with aretē/excellence. I find it interesting that “Daniel became distinguished above all the other presidents and satraps, because an excellent spirit was in him” (Daniel 6:3). We should distinguish ourselves from secular education and secular thinkers by the same spirit of excellence.
I deeply dislike the rhetoric of ‘excellence’ in Christian higher ed, as the canons for it in each particular field of scholarship are often divorced from and void of any meaningful Christian content or formation. Moreover, I wonder about the extension of what I take the church’s job to other realms: maybe understanding is sufficient for the distinct community that is a university?
Eliot’s Four Quartets
I have taken up memorizing poetry again, now that I have a regular ‘commute.’ Which means returning to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I have been listening to Jeremy Irons’ version of them, which I now commend to you. Or you can try Alec Guinness! Or Eliot himself!
Womb Transplants
A reader asked what I made of the recent news that the first womb transplant has happened. Here was my reply:
This is an interesting case. On the one hand, uterus transplants could fit the standard arguments for other types of organ transplantation: it provides a form of functioning to women who have been born without a particular organ, in the way a liver transplant might. Yet there are reasons to treat it as a distinct sort of case, I think: hysterectomy's do not necessarily come "risk-free" for the women who have them; unlike other organ donations, the person is not (ostensibly) on the cusp of death when donating or it is not a life-saving/extending procedure for the person receiving it; and the womb (from the story) will need to be removed in five years, apparently, which will means its a doubly-burdensome procedure for the recipient.
Now: does the value of having children offset all of those risks and complications? I am not sure, but I am inclined to say "no," if only because I am very wary about medical interventions that create risks where there had been none previously. "Do no harm" as a first principle of medicine has long been jettisoned, but I kind of think we should keep it alive.
But then I also have worries about organ donation more generally. As Paul Ramsey quipped, the practice risks turning us into a nation of "card carrying pre-cadavers," which is an arresting line. This simply extends that farther.
Speaking of wombs, here’s a review of a new book on “natality.” We’ll be talking with the author of it soon on Mere Fidelity. Stay tuned!
Books, by Friends and on my Nightstand
My friend Andrew Wilson’s new book on how 1776 remade the West is releasing shortly. It’s annoyingly good. Here was my endorsement, which I don’t think suffers from hyperbole:
“This is an arresting book. Even though Andrew Wilson is a vocational pastor and not a professional historian, his historical judgment and modesty are exemplary. His narrative is sensitive to the many complex causes of ‘modernity,’ never gets bogged down in details, and is written with elegant and lively prose. I can think of no better book to help Christians understand how our world has (and has not) become post-Christian. In Remaking the World, Wilson has established himself among contemporary Christianity’s most subtle and interesting thinkers.”
I just finished Clare Chambers’ book Intact: In Defence of the Unmodified Body, am partway through Karen Swallow Prior’s book The Evangelical Imagination, am enjoying Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, and being chastened by David Cloutier’s The Vice of Luxury.
Oh, and I just finished Trollope’s Marion Fay—which was sound, but not my favorite. I think I might finish his novels this year. I am also teaching a course on the ‘ethics of reputation’ for Baylor, which will involve reading Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, Othello, and Trollope’s Dr. Wortle’s School.
Mary Magdalene
Today, therefore, the traditional depiction of the Magdalene can no longer be regarded as a fringe scholarly position. On the contrary, a firm case remains to be made that the traditional position makes the best sense of the data. A major implication of this position is its ability to transform Mary Magdalene from being a mostly background figure in the Gospels, typically only mentioned in passing, to becoming one of the New Testament’s central heroines.
I mentioned in a recent newsletter that I harbor thoughts that the unnamed woman who washes Jesus’s feet with her hair in Luke 7 is Mary Magdalene, who appears in Luke 8. This was nothing more than a (nerdy) cocktail party hypothesis, a renegade opinion that I didn’t hold very seriously but wanted to be true.
Well, it turns out, it probably is. This is a magnificent defense of the position that I agree with unreservedly.
Good Things I am Talking about Lately
Look, this is not a “self-help” or “wellness” newsletter. I’m interested in ethics and in helping people live well. But I have found myself advocating for two different programs a lot lately, each of which have benefited me, so I include them here for you:
Optimal Work: I am not really into positive psychology as a field, nor am I a great fan of mindfulness as a practice. But the consistency of thinking about how I am working and many of the practices that Kevin Majeres commends have been extremely helpful for me. If you can afford it, pay for the premium version. I think it is more than worth it.
Les Mills On Demand: “Grit” is the best HIIT program I have found. The music is massively annoying and I don’t care for much of the ethos—but the sheer difficulty and variety of the workouts are enough to overcome all other shortcomings. That link will get you 30 days free.
The *Called into Questions* Promotion
The deadline is the end of the day on Saturday! Here’s what to do:
Subscribe to this newsletter for $20/$32/$40 or the Founding Member level of $100 a year and get a copy of Called into Questions before anyone else. (Sorry—monthly subscriptions are not included in this offer, for reasons that I hope are obvious!)
Receive Called into Questions in September, read, and profit (I hope).Write an honest Amazon review (optional—but recommended!).
If you are already a subscriber at the $20/year level or above, you get a book as well! Just fill in the form here.
Tell a friend. Read together.
The Penultimate Word
“There is therefore a way for you to face the prospect of judgment without apprehension. If you deal mercifully in the ways we have mentioned, if you especially practice the kind of giving that costs you nothing: Forgive us as we forgive (Mt 6:12)—for by doing that you are giving away nothing but charity, and charity increases as you give it—you need not be anxious about the judgment to come. If you are fervent and assiduous in these merciful good works, works which, as we have pointed out already, will not be necessary in the next world because there will be no wretched person there to need your compassionate aid, you can face the judgment without terror, secure not so much in any justice of your own as in the mercy of God, because you yourself have shown mercy to others. Merciless judgment will be passed on anyone who has not shown mercy, but mercy reigns supreme over judgment (Jas 2:13), says scripture.” — Saint Augustine