The new memoir Surprised by Oxford takes a similar path in its description of a conversion to Christianity. It looks not at the way life led Carolyn Weber to hear about God, but her wrestling once she had. Starting from her arrival in Oxford as a post-graduate, the book takes us through the events, conversations, thoughts — and romantic entanglements — of one year.

The result is an honest description of the issues of someone confronted with faith. It makes clear that, even for a thoughtful person, the process of conversion is not just a matter of addressing intellectual issues but is wrapped up with emotional struggles as well.

It is not perfect. It would have been a stronger book — and be open to a wider audience — if it was more self-contained, if did not assume so much knowledge about Christianity. And the reported conversations are mixed: Some had me gripped, such as a description of the discussion at a college High Table. On the other hand, some felt a little too neat and unrealistic.

But given all that it is a thoroughly enjoyable and immensely readable book. Both Weber and the people who populate her life are a pleasure to spend time with.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

I’ve never thought about whether Emily Dickinson would have had a blog. I imagine the answer is no. Like so many great writers in the 19th century, Dickinson had an incredible ear and she knew, as Mark Twain said, the difference between the right word and the almost right word, which is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Until you’ve got the right word, you probably don’t want to put it down.

via Roger Lundin: The poetic language of leadership | Faith & Leadership.

Here’s my favourite

For more see the Photos for Good Friday album.

McKnight implicitly critiques two attitudes that have coloured our view our fasting in recent times. The first is pure pragmatism, which sees fasting only as a route to a desired end. The second is dualism, which sees the body as irrelevant to spirituality. Addressing these points is vital; in my experience the combination of these two has left the church slightly bemused as to what fasting does or ‘how it works’. Is it there to free up time for prayer? To help us focus? To beat our bodies into submission? To twist God’s arm? (The last of these most often mentioned as something we know can’t be true, but the number of times it is said suggests that we’re not so sure.)

McKnight alternative to these two attitudes is summed up in his description of fasting as ‘the natural, inevitable response of a person to a grievous sacred moment in life’. It is the whole-body expression in the face of events that are so significant that we have to do more than simply talk or pray. These events might be a tragedy or injustice or realisation of our own failings.

Taking this view fasting can be described as, for example, ‘body talk’ or ‘body grief’ or ‘body hope’. In contrast to dualism, where the body is an inconvenience, this views fasting as part of an embodied spirituality. In contrast to pragmatism, fasting is a response not a means. So, fasting is not a way to make our plea heard, but our pleading is so intense that not eating is a natural consequence. And if there are results, McKnight suggests, they are related primarily to that intensity rather than the fasting.

McKnight makes a valuable contribution to the discussion with this refocussing and I found it very helpful. He takes his alternative view and shows how it works in the examples of fasting found in the Bible and church history. This makes his point clearly and, most of the time, convincingly.

I have two criticisms. The first is that his link to the ‘response to a grievous sacred moment’ formula is a little too relentless. Although it does well in countering the pragmatic/dualistic approach, at times I wondered if pushing a single formula limited the discussion when a wider exploration would have been beneficial.

My second question is related to the push against dualism. I think McKnight’s approach is very helpful, but perhaps more is going on than mere ‘body talk’. I wonder if we would benefit from taking the non-dualistic view further. McKnight is clearly concerned with the abuses and extremes of body discipline that have been associated with fasting in church history. And understandably so: When we get to the point where we are damaging our bodies or characterising them as evil that must be brought in to line, things have gone too far. But on the other hand, if we are truly whole persons, then surely the act of not eating does have an effect on us as whole people beyond ‘body talk’? It would have been valuable to explore the possibility that fasting has a wider formative impact on us. (We might think of James K A Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, showing how liturgical practice can shape us.)

But these criticisms should not detract from the valuable contribution that ‘Fasting’ brings to our understanding of the practice, reminding us that responding as whole beings can be an important part of spirituality.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

… most … eventually go home and help their fathers build buildings or grow corn, or become kindergarten teachers or university professors, and would not go to New Guinea with the Wycliffe Bible Translators. And if we were going to be faithful to our theological convictions, we would need to offer a picture to our students of that kind of diversity, viz. some who would go to plant churches in Kazakhstan and some who would go home to raise cattle. And, we would need to say loudly and plainly that these were equally honorable vocations, equally important callings to God in service to the world.

via CAPITALISM WITH A CONSCIENCE: Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, the Tiananmen Square Leaders, and You | Washington Institute.

The first is Does more information mean we know less? which compares modern obsession with information:

The news occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Its main dispatches track the canonical hours with uncanny precision. Matins have here been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin and Vespers into the evening report.

with the approach of religions

Rather than letting us constantly catch up on “news”, religions prefer to keep reminding us of the same old things, according to strictly timetabled routines.

With the implication that secular reading should, perhaps follow religions and return to a smaller number of readings repeatedly (and perhaps we might say liturgically?)

If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity.

The second is Are Museums our new churches. In which he suggests that museums should be arranged in such away to encourage moral formation based on the artistic works they contain. This he bases on the way churches use art (though, I think he reduces the formation that churches are looking at as purely moral).

Both are worth a look. It is fascinating to see ourselves reflected in someone else’s mirror…

–

Addendum

Since writing, I rediscovered the following tweet from de Botton, which says it all…
“Atheists shouldnt denigrate religions, they should steal from them”

…the camera functions a sacrament and bestows sacramentality: it is both a means of grace and an instrument by which the world is endued with grace. Through the lens and in the film, the world becomes sacramentum mundi. At stake here is an ontology which understands the structures of the world — even the most mundane, even the most ‘ugly’ — as harbouring a revelatory trajectory…

At stake here finally is a liturgy; insofar as the camera is a sacrament, the film becomes a medium for grace and revelation … the camera gaze trains our own eye to see differently, so that eventually we can see the world … as a site of revelation. In this way, the cinema … is the site for a discipleship of the eye.

Andy Crouch is the speaker at the conference itself, in March. Should be an interesting day.

A poem, as Mallarme once said, is not made of ideas but of words, and faith also expresses itself through that which is lived, breathed, uttered, left silent.

Kathleen Norris

If I am honest, I am a poor reader of poetry for this very reason: I am always trying to look through the words to reach the ideas. I skip too quickly past the words themselves in a hope to find the reason behind them. I don’t think I am alone. Frequently interactions with art are more concerned with the ideas than the medium.

Our visual world today is dominated by a need for information. Once we have the information, the visual is disposable.

Edward Knippers

We are more worried with ‘What is the artist trying to say here?’ instead of how has it been shaped and formed in particular materials. But the art is not a message that can be transferred without change from one medium to another. If Rembrandt had written novels, they would not simply be his paintings in narrative form, but something utterly different.

We may speak of the theme of a work of art but we should never do so as if the theme is something that can be detached from the work’s form. Form is meditation: it makes something intangible known to us — in and through tangible words, gestures, materials.

Gregory Wolfe

Art is always a wrestling with some raw material, even if that material is something as common place as words or stories or life. In the end, the ideas are shaped by the medium even as the medium is shaped by the ideas. For this reason, art always has a truth component, even if the artist’s ideas do not correspond with reality. Always reality imposes itself through the medium. A story must be coherent with our understanding of the world; and even if we try to express meaninglessness, we are forced to used the meaning inherent in words and images to do so.

With this gospel of incarnation, then, and only then, it is possible to speak of fusing spirit and body, content and form. Christ’s incarnation resolves the most difficult dichotomy that exists for an artist; that is the dichotomy of form and content. … Christ’s uniqueness lies in not just the content (divinity) but also in the form (humanity).

Makoto Fujmura

It seems that, as with art, we have a tendency to run past the particular person of Jesus in our attempt to reach the transcendent and timeless. We skip quickly past who he was and the things he did as we try to get to the ideas. But a life is not made only of ideas but of moments and actions, of living and breathing. If the incarnation is God’s self-giving art then we see Him engaging, maybe even wrestling, with the raw materials of human life, experience and existence. And the life of Jesus is not just an arbitrary form for the content. The expression is found in the way the raw materials are shaped and used.

We must learn to speak in the light of this Jesus about the identity of the one true God.

N.T.Wright

Looking around, it is intriguing to see these two sides of the task translate into the attitudes people have towards culture. Fearlessly caricaturing, we have on one side the progressive inclination, where everything new is implicitly good and tradition is suspect; and on the other side we have the conservative inclination, where everything new is suspect and traditional values, practices, etc. are held tight without question.

We see these opposing views in all areas of life from art and architecture to theology and philosophy to tools and technology. Observation suggests that people tend to have a natural tendency to one of the two. And it seems hard to keep a balance between them, with those of one inclination battling hard against the other as if everything depends on keeping the old or progressing to the new. Take theology as an example, where any, ahem, new perspective seems quickly to be judged interesting or problematic based on the novelty.

Perhaps, we need to keep Genesis 2 in mind and realise that it is precisely a balance that we need. For us to steward faithfully, we need to both progress and conserve. To do one is to grind to halt; to do the other is to run amok with ever changing ideas. But, more than that, if we are naturally drawn to one side, we need to keep in mind that the other perspective is needed for us, corporately, to fulfil our calling.

Makoto Fujimura demonstrates one side of this in a recent talk. Discussing the difficulty of obtaining traditional paper and other materials for his artworks, he notes that without the effort to preserve traditional crafts we will not be able to make culture. On the other side, in Political Visions and Illusions, David Koyzis notes that every part of culture that conservatives hold on to was ‘originally a product of innovation’.

So, true stewardship of creation and culture needs to weave together the threads of both conserving and developing, of tradition and innovation. And this can only be done with communities which can value people with both inclination and find the appropriate blend of the two.