300-309: The Varieties of Human Experience

The 300s, "Sociology," is where we find the familiar "fuzzy studies," or soft sciences: political science, economics, education, and, sadly that this is necessary, military science. The task of 300-309 is to introduce these topics, and it's a lot to cram into 10 little digits.

306, just to pick a random example, ricochets from pop culture to regional culture to the culture wars to consumerism to work to slavery to retirement to the media to... well, you get the idea. I picked the embarrassingly titled Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs because its author, Chuck Klosterman, is having a moment right now. Klosterman is a very funny guy: "breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep." But ultimately, a little of him and his excessively abrasive language was enough for me.

I also selected The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton, because, oh my gosh, that title! I got it on audio, because I thought it would be superawesome to be driving to work listening to some kind of pep talk about how it's worth it. But no. As it turned out, it seemed to be about different people's jobs, just, you know, what's involved in catching a tuna or making a biscuit. Which could also be interesting in its own way, but proved(possibly due to the performer rather than the author) to be dangerously soporific. After I arrived at my destination in an audiobook-induced stupor not once but twice, I realized public safety demanded I give up on this one.

James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son was in 305, but, Langston Hughes' recommendation notwithstanding, I just couldn't. Something about the writing style that I just couldn't get through. I could see myself having better luck with Rich Benjamin's Searching for Whitopia, a sort of Black Like Me with an actual person of color, except that it was just so sad to realize that I myself might be part of the problem. See, my dream retirement home is in Ocean City New Jersey. The beaches... the jolly families... the beautiful homes and gardens... the strong church heritage and influence on the city's vibe... and the 92% white population. 92%! Maybe I will stay landlocked...

As noted last time, 290-299 included books about what Muslims believe, but 305 offered me at least one book about what it's like to be a Muslim: Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, by Zarqa Nawaz. How could I pass up that title? And when I found out she was the creator of "Little Mosque on the Prairie," that charming sitcom about Muslims in Saskatchewan, I was all in. The book is full of incidents that illuminate as they entertain... for example, in the process of telling us about how she self-arranged her marriage, I have learned that a Muslim can be an atheist and that if you believe the Qu'ran but not the Hadith, that's a dealbreaker. This one, I'll see through to the end.

290-299: World Religions

Don't be too hard on ol' Melvil. From his perspective, there was a lot to know about Christianity, and a cursory understanding of other religions was adequate for life in his world. Besides, the beauty of the decimal system is that you can just keep adding digits! So there's plenty of room not only for the big ones, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, but also for the ancient and lesser-known belief systems. I played it kind of safe and picked from three of what are usually called "the world's major religions."

The Ox-Herder and the Good Shepherd seeks to syncretize the Zen Buddhist illustrations and meditations known as The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures with the Christian's quest for God. I really want to be interested in Buddhism, but this presentation, like that of Karen Armstrong, just ended up irritating me, so I didn't get far with it.

Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom, was a very different book that somehow also wound up being inexplicably unreadable. It interwove the stories of a Christian pastor and Albom's own childhood rabbi, and really should have held my interest. It was a memoir. It was about my two favorite religions. It was pretty short. It had been made into a Hallmark movie, for crying out loud! But maybe that was my problem: too much tell, not enough show, and an oversimplification of what Muriel Spark called "the only problem."

Desperately Seeking Paradise is the volume I might have actually read all of if life hadn't intervened. Ziauddin Sardar seems to have assigned himself a sort of odyssey through the Islamic world, evaluating different mazhab (ways; we would say denominations) and ultimately deciding that what is needed is a rebuilding of Islamic culture from the ground up. What little I was able to read of this book before I had to return it gave me an interesting snapshot of one man's experiences growing up Islamic in England, and then of his great ambitions as he got older.

I can sympathize with his concerns: while we might look at the Islamic world and see people who refuse to adapt to modernity, he sees people who have adapted in all the wrong ways. One interesting example mentioned in the part of the book I could get to was science. The Arabic world famously gave us much of modern mathematics, including algebra and the powerful concept of place value, but of late, according to Sardar, intellectual inquiry has been abandoned in favor of Western technologies for resource exploitation. He fantasizes about an Islamic science that would focus on a stewardship approach to the problems of the Islamic world. Not an idea I ever would have thought of on my own, but an obviously good one as soon as one hears it!

I notice that the one book I read with real enjoyment wasn't easy or short or full of pretty pictures, and more importantly, it didn't try to tell me that someone else's experience and beliefs were similar to mine. It actually assumed that someone else's experience and beliefs were completely foreign to me, and let me make my own connections if I could. I didn't need to be told that some devout Muslim intellectuals are like some devout Christian intellectuals, seeking renewal not just of their ethics but of their whole approach to culture-- Sardar just shared his own journey, and I noticed the similarity to Francis Schaeffer all by myself. Whether this makes Sardar and Schaeffer both right, both misguided, or locked in an eternal combat of ideas, is another discussion....

Something for Everyone: Jesus Freak, by Sara Miles

Here we are all- again!- signing petitions about gun control and sending money to service organizations. Here we all are again talking about prejudice and about what kind of fear and rage would lead anyone to plan and carry out a mass murder targeting a specific minority. Finally, here we all are talking harder than ever about what in our American atmosphere makes people think that prejudice is okay, and that our beliefs about any one issue put each of us on a team that is in a fight to the death with all the other teams, and and that disagreement is hate. Like all our talk is going to make a difference apart from divine intervention...

We all know that changing our culture starts with changing ourselves, and that's at least some of what this 0-999 project is about. Reading in general, and reading stories in particular, can increase our empathy for unfamiliar groups of people and ways of life. And increased empathy is what enables us to tolerate the discomfort that comes from difference, to disagree agreeably, and ultimately maybe even to find common ground across barriers. Or at least I'm hoping so.

Jesus Freak is a great example of a story that has the potential to do all these things. Sara is a mid-life convert who ministers through food to some of the most marginalized people in America. She's just the kind of person I deeply admire, but that some people find annoying and weird. She herself opens the book with this quote from the rector of her church: "You're such a freakin' Jesus freak, Sara." But then, she's also a universalist and a syncretist, so Jesus' more illiberal and exclusive teachings get short shrift from her.

Oh, and she's a lesbian. The Internet Monk tried to review the book positively for its focus on care for the poor in Jesus' name, but he realized that once his audience hit the phrase, "my wife Martha," they wouldn't be able to think about anything else.

Yup, something for everyone not to like, and therefore, something for everyone to learn from. It's hard for me to imagine the Jesus follower, Christian, believer, or person of faith of any stripe who couldn't find some way to identify with Miles and some point of irreconcilable difference, big or small. And that's what makes her book so worthwhile!

Miles's story isn't really a story so much as a string of long stories, short anecdotes and meditations all strung together and sparkling, more like rain on a nighttime window than a string of beads. I'll summarize one for you and finish with a quote, just to give you a sense of it.

A group of fourth graders had volunteered at the food pantry the week before, and now Sara is going to their classroom to answer their questions about what they have seen. They start talking about whether everyone who receives food there deserves it.

So I talked with the kids about the idea of 'taking advantage,' explaining that it was impossible to be taken advantage of as long as you were giving something away without conditions. 'If it's a trade, then it's fair or unfair.' I said. 'But if I'm going to give it to you anyway, no matter what you do, then you can't take advantage of me.'

...I had to add one more thing. 'In my church,' I said, 'we say that judgment belongs to God, not to humans. So that makes things a lot easier for us. We don't have to decide who deserves food.' 

Kind of like we don't have to decide whether Miles is in trouble for being too Jesusy, being a syncretist, being a lesbian, or saying a bad word.  Not my problem! All I know is that she is a normal human being who gets annoyed and hot and tired and depressed but who nevertheless has discovered that, by the grace of God, anyone can be like Jesus and feed the poor, pray for the sick, lead the bitter in forgiveness, and sit by the dying. And that's hard to hate.

280-289: Christian Denominations

I guess I'll stop complaining about the overlap with other Dewey categories. If you want a discussion of a specific denomination's more or less current status, this is probably where you'll go, and if you're me, you'll gravitate towards the memoirs describing people's current experiences with said denominations.

That's why I picked up Still, the latest installment of Lauren Winner's extended live-tweeting of her every life experience. Sorry not sorry if that sounds a little catty.... after all, I could have called her a "spiritual reality show," as did a commenter on another blog.

But I do feel that she writes as if a mid-faith slump has never happened to anyone else, even while discovering (who knew?) that it's a well-known phenomenon. After all, the famous phrase "the dark night of the soul" was coined by St. John of the Cross in the 16th century. (I myself prefer Douglas Adams' take on the experience, "the long, dark teatime of the soul," which I have experienced just about daily from 3-5 pm.)

Only the idea of writing a book to complain about how the life of faith (or any life at all) turns out to be a bit of a slog is a little rich from someone 36 years old. I am here to tell her that she does not yet know from slog, but also that said slog turns out to have its bright spots.

So that's why the book I'll actually finish (eventually; busy season at work right now) is by someone less like me, someone from whom I feel like I can learn something: Sara Miles. I loved Take This Bread, especially because I read it during a time when I was giving a lot of dinners and lunches to groups of people in the name of Jesus. Thus, the idea that food=love=gospel was a point of connection between me and someone I might not normally have found a lot of connection with.

Miles' new book is called Jesus Freak, so actually, I'm in pretty much no matter what happens next. But the fact that it opens with her annoying her food pantry colleagues by laying hands on someone as she prays is definitely a bonus point....

And, in case you are wondering what all this has to do with "Christian Denominations," well, in some ways your guess is as good as mine, but both authors are in the service of the Episcopal church, so I suppose that's why they landed here instead of anywhere else in the 200s.

Christian Feminist Stunt Memoir: A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans

I was on a long walk with a Jewish friend the other day, and I asked her about what Christians know as Proverbs 31. She didn't recognize it by that title, but when I quoted a few lines, she said, "Oh, the Woman of Valor passage!" She was shocked and appalled to learn that many Christian women view it as a checklist of desiderata at which they will surely fail. She called it a poem and was very eager to explain to me that in Jewish tradition it is memorized by men, not by women, and used for the purpose of blessing their wives, not challenging them. That led into a discussion of Reformed Jewish exegesis, which emphasizes historical context and looks for transferable principles, and an informal poll as we walked of whether it would be actually be useful to our husbands for us to rise before dawn and prepare food for them (conclusion: her husband doesn't get up early, and even Jesus barely wants to talk to me before about 8 AM).

Around month four of trying to literally obey everything in the Bible (and some things that aren't) pertaining to women ( and sometimes to everyone) Rachel Held Evans had the same conversation with her Orthodox Jewish informant. She heard everything I did, and also learned that the poem's vocabulary lent triumphal overtones to the everyday tasks of cooking, providing, shepherding, planning, and maybe even working out, summarizing all these seemingly mundane activities with the phrase "eshet chayil," "woman of valor." This phrase may be sung by the husband to his wife at Sabbath dinner, or used by women to encourage each other upon any accomplishment. Cleaned your bathroom? Woman of valor! Earned a paycheck? Woman of valor! Stayed up all night with a colicky baby? Woman of valor!

Nevertheless, Rachel decided to dedicate one month to working her way through the poem the evangelical-Christian way, like a checklist. She tried to learn to sew. She got up at some imaginary hour of the morning. She cooked three meals a day. She worked out. She went to the city limit marker on a major highway and held up a sign that said "Dan [her husband] is awesome." Because when you are writing a stunt memoir, that is how you roll. And I do love me a stunt memoir.

The idea was to 'take all of the Bible's instructions for women as literally as possible for a year,' but I think she ran out of instructions, because she devoted whole months to Biblical practices that apply to everyone, such as the observance of Yom Kippur and the pursuit of just behavior. Now I'm curious about whether a man would run into the same problem, if he limited himself to commands just pertaining to men. His arms might get tired, depending on how long his prayer times were...

Evans also practiced mindfulness in everyday tasks, cut Martha a break, redefined modesty, waded into the Mommy Wars, called her longsuffering husband "Master" for a whole year, tried to submit to her husband in all things (until he ordered her to knock it off), and learned about Greco-Roman household codes. I don't imagine anyone would agree with every single conclusion she reached, but she sure was an entertaining and thought-provoking traveling companion.

I have spent my whole Christian life trying to figure out what my faith tells me about being a woman, yet I certainly heard some new ideas from this book. If it is crucial to your theology to believe that roles, tasks, duties and privileges vary greatly depending on your gender, you should skip this one, but if you are starting to think that out of the 31,102 verses in the Bible, a very small percent are specific to only one gender, this book may be of interest to you.

The Man Who Destroyed America: Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God.

Okay, I exaggerate. Even  Frank Schaeffer himself doesn't claim that he is personally and singlehandedly responsible for the current election season. But the full title of his autobiography is, after all,  Crazy for God: How I Grew up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. So he cannot be accused of underestimating his own importance -- or that of his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, founders of L'Abri Fellowship.   

The senior Schaeffers were vital to my experience of the Christian faith. In the late 60's, Francis Schaeffer, already a deep thinker, teacher and writer about the intersection of Christianity and culture, became very interested in the hippie movement that called into question "bourgeois" and "plastic" values. By the time I became a Christian in 1974, it was almost trite to say that authors like Samuel Beckett and musicians like Bob Dylan-- the artists who were the wallpaper of my secular upbringing-- were asking the right questions, maybe even doing God's work without knowing it. Everyone (except me; I could NOT get through it!) was talking about Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture and its vision of the redemptive power of popular artistic expressions.

But Schaeffer also foresaw the limitations of this new peace culture. Frank quotes him as saying, "You wait; the hippies are going to wind up more middle-class, bourgeois and materialistic than their parents... If they are asked to make a choice between freedom and security, they'll choose security." Obviously it took 9/11 to bring this prediction to full flower, but by the time I was in college in 1978, it was already starting to happen. Hippies were long-gone, and the new fad was pink and green, Muffy and Biff, and "greed is good." My formerly radical church, that didn't even have a name and that taught a Christian version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out" that involved dropping out of college to evangelize the world ASAP (since Jesus could return at any moment, rendering your college degree pointless), suddenly adopted the "Church as Corporation" model and made us all Tom Peters disciples seeking to glorify God through the Search for Excellence.

Meanwhile, we had suddenly become aware of the abortion issue. This, too, was Francis Schaeffer's doing. He and Frank joined forces with C. Everett Koop, soon to become the Surgeon General of the United States, to put together Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, a critique of the "culture of death" they saw developing in America. Roe v. Wade was only a few years old when women-- and a few men-- began protesting it, and our campus movement was no exception. In 1980, we took a bus trip from Kansas to the Democratic National Convention in New York City (and, yes, that trip was exactly how you are imagining it) to ask for a pro-life plank in the platform. Frank feels that there was a critical moment where the Democrats could have owned life issues-- after all, they were already associated with the expansion of civil rights, so this was a logical extension for them. But that ship has sailed...

Also at this same time, Edith Schaeffer and her daughter, Frank's sister, Susan Schaeffer Macauley, were changing the daily domestic lives of evangelical wives. Edith wrote a book called The Hidden Art of Homemaking that explained how a woman could find a creative outlet and a ministry by making her home beautiful-- a practice that not even Frank can deny was extremely important to her at L'Abri. Macauley, who had been Frank's teacher for stretches of time when she was in her teens, had discovered that a homeschooling woman could find intellectual as well as artistic challenge even as she embraced a conservative definition of being a "keeper at home." Her exhortations to use the Great Books-- meaningful and beautiful literature that had withstood the test of time-- was the bedrock of all 11 years of my homeschooling career.

So whether Francis and Edith Schaeffer and their children, Frank and Susan, changed and/or ruined America, their activities certainly paralleled and possibly inspired all the themes of my youth. Even the way Frank resolved his spiritual struggles was almost stereotypical of my generation of evangelicals: he joined the Greek Orthodox church. Some of our fellow Boomers have also found that this ancient communion is the perfect antidote to the rapid change that can take place in newer movements.

Frank's account of these years is full of contradictions. Most spectacularly, there is Frank's obvious and deep ambivalence towards his parents. He can't quite seem to figure out whether he views them with deep affection and respect or considers himself to have been abused in some way. Os Guiness, a former L'Abri worker, strongly defends Francis from Frank's criticism-- if you can't get that article to open, some of the same thoughts are available from less personally involved sources that also address Frank's more general criticisms of the greater evangelical context of that period. Given that some of Frank's allegations just don't hold up to fact-checking, it does make one wonder whether Frank prioritized accuracy at any point in his writing.

Then there's Frank's attitude towards himself. He is by turns self-serving and self-flagellating, dropping names and painting himself as one of the key figures in the transformation of American politics in the 80's, yet also airing his own personal, political and spiritual dirty laundry throughout the book.

Finally, there's Frank's writing style. It's gripping. It's irresistible. It's like a big bag of potato chips-- you suspect it is bad for you, but you just can't stop -- until, all of a sudden, it's not, running aground on pages of name-checking or bizarre allegations or uncomfortably scatalogical reminiscences. All the reviewers agree that this is a (for the most part) fantastically well-written book that may or may not actually have anything worthwhile to say. What kept me turning pages through thick and thin, though, was this sense that I was getting a backstage tour to the backdrop of my life, and that was definitely worth the ride.

260-269 and 270-279: Social Justice, Churches and Ministries Past and Present

At this point, I am starting to feel that Dewey felt that he had decades to burn under the rubric of Religion, aka, Christianity. As we have already seen, he assigns a full 10 (240-249) to personal observance of Christianity and 10 more (250-259) to ministers and ministries of the local church. Turns out he then goes on to assign a full decade (260-269) to "Social and Ecclesiological Theology," which in practice means, "discussions of current movements and ministries of the Church worldwide," and another (270-279) to Christian history, which in practice means, "discussions of PAST movements and ministries of the Church worldwide." That distinction, of course, becomes problematic since today' news is tomorrow's history. He wraps that up with 10 more digits (280-289, coming soon to a blog near you!)assigned to various specific denominations (just in case they hadn't been dealt with previously as local, national or international churches or movements past or present.)

Combine these categorizations that seem tidy on paper, but actually split hairs, with cataloguers who may not know much about the book in hand or the subject matter in general, and the overall effect is that various topics in corporate Christian life seem all jumbled up, and all the more so because interspersed throughout are memoirs of people who had specific experience with one of these topics. If you want missionary biography or the lives of the saints, they're around here somewhere (usually, but not always, in 266 and 270, respectively), as are stunt memoirs like A.J.Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically (shouldn't that be in 220?) and all its spawn.

As it happens, I love stunt memoirs and even regular ones, so these two decades were a gold mine for me. They were a peek behind the curtain of my own personal Christian history. Crazy for God is Frank Schaeffer's highly readable, if not excessively accurate, take on his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, who pretty much singlehandedly founded the approach to faith that I came into and practice pretty much to this day. Larry Norman, Steve Taylor, Donald Miller, Relevant magazine, Marilynne Robinson, Makoto Fujimura, all owe a conscious or unconscious debt to the work Schaeffer, Sr., did to give evangelical Christianity a respect for the arts.

Philip Yancey was the editor of Campus Life magazine, and Campus Life was how I came to Jesus, so of course I was interested in his story, Soul Survivor. Or rather, the story of the authors and thinkers who have influenced his faith most positively. From GK Chesterton to C Everett Koop, from Gandhi to Henri Nouwen, it's an eclectic bunch, and the fact that an evangelical leader can find common cause with all of them is, I think, a testimony to Francis Schaeffer's influence on Christian culture.

In college, I joined a campus ministry that defies brief description. One thing's for sure: many of the founding members came from the Plymouth Brethren movement. Thus it was with great interest that I picked up In the World but Not of It, by Brett Grainger. He confirms that it's from the Plymouth Brethren that my church inherited such distinctives as political and cultural activism, the fervent espousal of Creation Science, and the insistence on women covering their heads, at least during prayer.

Women covering their heads... by the time I had read through the Bible once, it was obvious that my newfound faith presented some particular dilemmas for a girl who grew up in a household where Ms. magazine was de riguer. So as I stood before the hot mess that is 260-279 in my local library, you bet I chose A Year of Biblical Womanhood, by Rachel Held Evans. (Did I mention I'm a sucker for stunt memoirs?) I've been curious about Evans for a while now, and anybody who's going to go mano a mano with the Proverbs 31 woman has my attention anyway.

Speaking of Biblical gender roles, various definitions of, brings me to my last selection: Quiverfull, by Kathryn Joyce. I kind of don't want to write about this book, because, gentle reader, if you are unaware of this extreme interpretation of traditional gender roles and family structure, it is unlikely that learning about it is going to make you happier. Apparently some celebrity family called Duggar may exemplify some of its elements, but I wouldn't know. What I do know is that actual people I actually was friends with in my homeschooling days actually completely believed every single thing that's described in the links. It's obvious how some of these beliefs are damaging to women; may I just say that they are also surprisingly damaging to men, at least to those who were not endowed by their creator with exceptionally bossy tendencies, and are therefore made to feel inadequate in communities where this teaching prevails.

By now I've visited, attended, belonged to, or known an evangelist for a variety of churches. I have attended a Latin mass and seen Pope Francis. I have clapped with the happy and stood up, sat down and kneeled on cue with the "frozen chosen." I have met in homes, elementary school auditoriums, buildings with tin roofs, and cathedrals complete with stained glass and statues. I have sat on folding chairs, pews and sofas. And often have I had reason to wonder what a nonbeliever would make of the experience I am having. Jim Henderson did not just wonder. He hired his atheist friend Matt Casper to come with him to twelve of the most well-known churches in the country and report his honest opinions, and then they wrote a dual stunt memoir: Jim and Casper Go to Church. This book promises to be wildly biased, highly entertaining, and as insightful as any conversation with someone who you really respect and with whom you almost completely disagree. Can't wait!

And that's my book haul from 260-279. Now, if you'll excuse me, I better get reading!