Good news and bad news for the information age

Your brain on news; w/ thanks to Rod Dreher. (Image from Up!; copyright Disney/Pixar)

"Gospel" literally means "good news." To most Christians this is obvious. Yet sometimes the obvious needs to be called out of its obviousness to us. We need to make this word, gospel, appropriately strange.

In his book God and Gadgets, theologian Brad Kallenberg says that as news, the gospel of Jesus Christ is something that must be offered in such a way that it can be rejected. Otherwise it is not news; it is rather propaganda (e.g. "We've always been at war with Eastasia"). Further, to be received as news that is good it must be offered non-coercively. The gospel cannot be shoved down peoples' throats. If it is offered coercively, then it is bad news for those on the hearing/receiving end. Or as Kallenberg puts it, "The Crusader who cries 'Christ is Lord!' while cleaving the skull of the Turk has got something terribly wrong" (48; Kallenberg cites John Howard Yoder in this section).

So far so good? Kallenberg then draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language to argue that absorbing the gospel - if the news is heard as good and is accepted - takes time and practice with other people. How much time? A lifetime. (It is a long game.) How many people? The entire body of Christ across its long and rich history. Our "fluency" in speaking "Christian" is inextricably bound up with the faith overtaking our whole body/mind/spirit in the community of gathered believers. By God's grace and Spirit, embodying the gospel reconditions our seeing of and being in the world.

That's the good news. Now, the bad news...

Mere Orthodoxy: The Frame for Watching Mad Men

Matthew Lee Anderson, the editor of the Mere Orthodoxy blog, was gracious enough to let me contribute a post in their series on AMC's hit drama, Mad Men...

The Frame for Watching Mad Men: When Joan sells Johnny

The MO crowd tends to be - by my assessment - socially, culturally, and theologically conservative American evangelical...but they're part of the new generation of evangelicals that's trying out loud and in public to re-imagine what that means in intellectually rigorous ways. Though my radical neo-Anabaptist impulses set me apart from some of their thinking, I've really enjoyed tracking with what Matthew is up to and the conversations I've had with him over the past year and a half, since reading his excellent book, Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith. Thanks, Matthew!

Voting: Ritual or Responsibility? - A response

[Note: The following text was presented at an on-campus event at EMU today, "Voting: Ritual or Responsibility?" I was one of three main presenters, along with EMU professors, Ted Grimsrud and Jayne Seminare Docherty. Ted and I have had significant conversations over the past weeks, online and at the pub, and Jayne is one of my former professors at the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding/CJP. The discussion was facilitated by Jonathan Swartz and Matthew Bucher, both dual-degree students like I was, in the Seminary and CJP. Thanks to everyone involved at the event, and I welcome more conversation below in the comments! - Also, check out Ted's three posts on this topic, where I also have some comments posted.]

In a 1977 article in Sojourner’s, John Howard Yoder had this to say about the then-current context: “American political culture, a comparatively solid crust of common language and rules of thumb, floats on a moving magma of unresolved debate between two contradictory views of what the state is about.” In this article, entitled “The National Ritual: Biblical realism and the elections,” Yoder goes on to argue that we shouldn’t get ourselves too worked up about this system, or take it too seriously. But nonetheless this weak system is one that we can and perhaps should participate in.  I quote:

[Voting] is one way, one of the weaker and vaguer ways, to speak truth to power. We may do well to support this channel with our low-key participation, since a regime where it functions is a lesser evil…than one where it does not, but our discharge of this civil duty will be more morally serious if we take it less seriously.

This position of Yoder’s I take to be the basic position taken by Ted in his arguments, both here and on his blog. And I’m sympathetic to both, and don’t necessarily disagree. But I want to sound a few cautions.

I’ll start with a quote by Yoder’s one-time colleague at Notre Dame, Alasdair MacIntyre, who made these comments in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. I quote:

When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives.

Update on the Willie Nelson/Coldplay/Chipotle thing

Apparently Farmer Joe here is Joel Salatin

Last fall when I was bellyaching about the Willie Nelson/Coldplay/Chipotle video that sucked me in hook, line, and sinker...it had been some time since I'd actually eaten at a Chipotle. And that continued...until last night. After my family went to a movie we swung by the Chipote here in Harrisonburg, Virginia. As I approached the counter to order, there was a sign posted that the pork being served was sourced from nearby Polyface Farms, run by Joel Salatin, somewhat of a local celebrity and hero of the local food movement.

So I said "mmmm..."and ordered a burrito w/ the local pork. Holy cow (sic)! The pork tasted fantastic, and I was trying to be objective and not think it was great just because it was local. It actually did taste great.

I've been a fan of Polyface since I discovered them in the film, Food, Inc., and I've noticed that the farm has inspired some folks here at EMU. One EMU alum from Iowa did a college internship at Polyface and then moved back to Iowa to put the farming practices to use, which is thrilling, considering my home state is practically ground zero for corporate and industrial-scale ag in this country.

So I guess Willie Nelson and Coldplay were on to something by doing this track for Chipotle's Cultivate Foundation...

The savior of agriculture is...Chipotle?

Consider the following...

This video is brilliant. It works on me at so many levels, it's almost kind of creepy. (Indeed it is creepy, stick with me.)