On Reading Old Books, Especially the Bible

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It would help if more people with opinions about the Bible, good or bad, had read it. The few who have read it often haven’t a clue about how to read a book older than a J.K. Rowling best seller.

Secularists reading the Bible are too often like ethnocentric tourists visiting a foreign country. The American tourist who misses great feasts by sticking to McDonalds, because the food of the nation he is visiting is different is foolish. In the same way, the person who avoids or misunderstands the Bible is also missing out.

The Bible isn’t what they are used to reading and they read it badly. They don’t begin with sympathy to see what caused the Bible to become such a great book in the first place, but instead assume that if they don’t get it nobody of intelligence would either.

First, let us state the obvious: the Bible isn’t a simple book; it is at least sixty-six different books collected into a whole. Each discrete book is different, some very different. The skills needed to read Proverbs are very different from those needed to read Revelation. Reading the whole of the Bible well begins with reading each of the books well.

Of course, as in any intentional collection of books there many good questions to ask about what these book have in common. What are the themes in the collection itself?

Good hard work, the best kind of intellectual pleasure, is to be found in understanding Sacred Scriptures, but the kind of education most modern people get, with the tendency to specialize in a field, is not likely a good preparation for reading any old books. Most educators have had the experience of anti-intellectualism from otherwise bright people who cannot learn from Hamlet, because Shakespeare did not know about the space shuttle.

The first key to reading an old book is figuring out what is trying to give us and not impose on it some other agenda or expectation.

If we demand of a book something it is not giving, then we will miss what is in it as well as creating a stupid misunderstanding in our own minds.

The Bible has to be read for what it is (or rather what each discrete book in it is), not what it is not. The Bible is not a modern novel, it is not modern history, and it is not a science book. That doesn’t mean it does not contain stories, history, and scientific truths just that is not any of those kinds of books.

Second, the Bible can be the most important book in human history without being to my taste. Liking a particular work and recognizing greatness in it are two different things. Titus Andronicus is not my favorite Shakespeare play. I came close to walking out of a particularly bloody rendition at the New Globe in London, but it is easy enough to see that for a “revenge play” it is first rate. If you have a taste for revenge plays, then Titus must be a revelation, but this is a taste that I lack.

Unfortunately for me, my line of work requires knowing a bit about Titus so my likes and dislikes are not relevant to whether I will watch the play. I have learned to appreciate what is good about it and even have caught hints of its greatness as a result.

My guess is that most students who turn to most great literature, but especially the Bible don’t like it. It is not what they know best, which is film and the story telling that goes with it. The characters, with a few exceptions like King David, are not well developed and they have a hard time “getting into it.” Like the ship lists in Homer’s Iliad, the Bible contains long passages whose interest is nearly incomprehensible to most moderns. Literary genealogy is not good television and those parts of Scripture, which often lead off a book like Luke can kill any desire to move forward.

It is easy to despise what we don’t like, since it gives an excuse not to bother with hard work. Safe to say then any rant about the Bible, such as a Richard Dawkins extended sneer, however much it may fail do justice to the glories and importance of the Bible will find an audience.

Sadly for such a person the Bible isn’t going away. A billion people base some portion of their life on it and their numbers are growing, not shrinking. Islam is connected to it and that adds hundreds of millions more, but it isn’t just the religious who need to understand Sacred Scripture. Even if the Bible stopped selling today, and it is the best seller year after year, any well educated person should read it carefully.

The Bible has motivated much of the great art, philosophy, and science of the past. If you don’t know the story of the Prodigal Son, then you are going to miss the point of a great many paintings. If you don’t read the words of Jesus in the New Testament, then you will miss a great deal of what Abraham Lincoln had to say.

If you don’t like Star Trek or Joss Whedon, then if you are like most educated people, you safely can ignore it and him. That is just not true of the Bible.

You may never learn to like the Bible as a reader, and perhaps few turn to it for pure amusement, but most readers I know learn to respect it.

Once I had a student frustrated with his failure to learn Spanish who complained that everyone should just learn to speak “real.” When pressed about the nature of this mysterious, though evidently ubiquitous tongue, the student admitted, that “real” was English. He imagined Spanish as a kind of perverse alternative English that some people insisted on speaking despite the obvious fact that everybody he knew spoke English. Sadly, this kind of attitude is not rare. If our social group does something, then it must be “normal” or “reasonable.”

In the same way, it is possible to insulate oneself in a secular media or academic culture and become incapable of understanding who any reasonable person could cherish the Bible. Isn’t that positively medieval? Isn’t the Bible full of errors, wickedness, and stupidity?

Not surprisingly the Bible is not as foolish as some popular critics pretend. It has endured generations of such critics for very good reasons. Even if it is not the very Word of God, as I believe it to be, the Bible is a stunning work of art and literature properly understood. Academics, religious and non-religious, find it worth their entire careers to study a single short book in it. Most of the charges against it are old and there are reasonable responses to them.

If you are a Christian, of course, the same rules apply. The Bible is a book and there are rules about how to read books well. Cheering for the Bible, when one has not carefully read it is as parochial as the American “patriot” all for the Constitution “whatever is in it.”

Christians think the Bible is sacred and holy. That does not mean that we read it in a weird way. It simply means that having read it carefully, men and women became persuaded by its message. Many people on reading the Bible have decided God had a hand in writing it. Thinks God does are different, set apart from the commonplace. That is why believers call the Bible holy.

If God exists, and religious believers know He does based on best reason and experience, then He is radically different and greater than humankind. Anything God does would partake of that quality. Any place God especially touched would be sacred, a God-thing. Christians believe that the Bible is a sacred book.

If God wrote the Bible, then He did so in cooperation with many different human authors. The Bible is not just holy and sacred, but is also human. If it is what it claims to be, then the collection of books called the Bible discloses God to humans as best can be done. It is a Babel-fish from God in the ear of mankind.

How do I know this is true? The Christians believes God will touch the mind of any who reads His book. The Spirit of God will try to communicate with our human spirit. The believer thinks there is a unique experience possible for the reader of the Bible.

One does not have to accept this idea, however, to grasp the essential message and importance of the Bible. The believer reads the Bible like any other book. Since each book in it had a human author, the text can be understood in a fully human way. The message can be examined and subjected to critical scrutiny using human reason.

This human experience of the Bible is open to anybody from atheists to Christians. If there is more to it than that, as I believe, then it begins simply and humanly with something open to all. The Bible’s message can, of course, be rejected by a thoughtful reader, I have known a few such souls, but at least it will have been rejected knowledgably.

As someone who has benefited from ancient literature of all kinds, pagan, Christian, and secular, this much is plain to me:

Charity to text and different times broadens thinking and enriches the reader.

What It Means When Christians Say, “Jesus Is Lord!”

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Understanding people from a different point of view can be difficult.

The first time I read the Koran or an atheist book, there was a strong temptation simply to scoff, attack, and stick with my comfortable point of view. That would have been too bad since looking at the world from their perspective, which is what a good reader should do, helped me appreciate the strengths of their position, helped me find weaknesses in my ideas, and gave me the pleasure of considering perspectives alien to my own.

What is more fun than that?

A few things are more fun, such as Disneyland with my family at Christmas, but not many. A good thing isn’t just entertaining, of course, it is good for the soul. Looking at another point of view deeply can avoid misunderstandings, help make new friends, and increase tolerance. While tolerance isn’t always good—getting along with Mr. Stalin is not necessary to live the examined life—tolerance in daily American life is usually good.

Lately I have read a few people disturbed to discover that I confess that: “Jesus is Lord.” What do Christians mean when they say “Jesus is Lord”? Are they forming militias to get ready for a theocracy governed by Biblical law?

This kind of worry is an example of the rule that knowing just a little bit about a group can be lead to big misunderstandings, but learning a bit more can be helpful. Of course, you may still not like the results, but at least you will know what you are opposing.

Why do I say Jesus is Lord? Why not just think for myself? In fact, thinking for myself is what made me bow the knee to King Jesus.

Taking the Delphic demand to know myself seriously made me realize how small and unimportant I was! At the same time, it taught me that my desires were for something greater than self. My longings were bigger than I was! My heart was filled with love and that love (to borrow from the Symposium) was for something or someone.

What could best fill my heart’s longing? What or who was this known (because I loved it) unknown beloved?

Most people never solve this problem. They live hapless lives lurching from one thing to another. This is not the way to happiness! Others find an ideology that seems to work, but too often this ideology is impersonal and destructive. Christian ideas without a personal God could be that way!

My intellectual journey was long (and continues!) and this is not the place to describe it. Instead, this is my testimony to a few things I discovered and experienced on the way that caused me to say in wonder (and surprise!): Jesus is Lord!

First, my search led me to a person. Why? It is better to submit to a person than to an ideology. An ideology is static and can hurt people. Jesus is a person and so has compassion on our weakness. His rule can cope with changing times in a way that a mere “world view” cannot.

My search led me, as it has every traditional Christian, to God. God would not be knowable for humans, He is so great and “other,” but He revealed Himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ. God became one of us.

When I met Jesus Christ, in a deeply personal experience, certain things followed. The Jesus I met was smarter than I was, He was more powerful, and He knew the best way to live because He knows the past and the future. It was senseless not to listen to him.

It goes deeper. Jesus made everything. He has the creator’s rights over His creatures. When we say Jesus is Lord, we are recognizing reality. We discovered this reality using our best experience and our best reason. We are trying to find out what He wishes of His creations. Following His design plan for our lives simply makes sense!

Of course, if God were an arbitrary or cruel creator, then rebellion against Him might be justified. Instead, like an ideal father (so often dreamed of but so rarely found!), His rule is just and elevates us. We are slaves to our passions, but in becoming His children, we are set free from this bondage.

Jesus’ goal for us is freedom in His service. He calls us his brothers and sisters and elevates us (as much as humans can be elevated) to become like He is. On earth, this power is not given to any man, because apparently no man could handle it. Absolute power appears to corrupt absolutely. There is, however, one great exception in all of history.

The Son of God emptied Himself of power and became fully human. This God-Man had both divine and human natures. He had great power, but He came to serve us and to fully grasp our humanity. He came to serve. When He took on Himself every bit of human suffering, then He was exalted.

Jesus is Lord, by nature but also by suffering. He earned the power by service to humanity that He had by nature.

God became human so that humans could become like God. Of course, we can never become God, the divine essence is not for us, but we can become fit for His companionship. That is a great thing!

No living Christian is there yet. Death is the final passage on a long journey before we can see as we ought to see, hear as we ought to hear, or do as we ought to do. When Christians cry out “Jesus is Lord” it is an act of love . . . crying out for something better than they have yet experienced.

I have experienced enough of the liberty and joy of His rule to want more. My ignorance, folly, and prejudice that hold me back from the intellectual, emotional, and physical wholeness of spiritual union with Jesus is frustrating.

That is why we often seem so emphatic in our declaration! Nobody needs to fear this declaration, since if Jesus is Lord, then I am not. No consistent Christian could ever confuse his own will for God’s will. We know we are sinners. Only on a few issues where experience, reason, revelation, and history unite do we have the courage to speak boldly. The protection of human life is one of those areas.

We have creeds and ethical systems that sum our knowledge, but they are short and modest compared to the long codes and rules of any modern state. Caesar is much more sure of himself in our age than any follower of the Christ!

Meanwhile, this side of Paradise, how do Christians know what Jesus wants them to do?

First, Christians pray. Prayer is our heart reaching out to God because His heart first reached out to ours and made such communication possible. It is communion with God. We try to hear what Jesus is saying to us.

If you don’t pray, there is no real way to describe what communion with God is like. As this site often demonstrates, I am no saint and often mistake my own ideas for His! Over the years, experience has taught me (some) modesty about knowing God’s will. I want it. I want to know it, but know that it is a great and mighty thing not easily grasped.

Before heaven it is enough for me to know His will for my own small affairs and to do the best I can to work out my relationship with God humbly.

Usually, for me, prayer consists of being open to God’s voice and will. On an average day, this is all I experience. I continue to work out what He has shown me to that point in my life, though even in that I sense His help and power. For me, this is a deep sense of His presence and power.

Sometimes during prayer, there is an impression in my mind of an idea or an emotion that will rise up inside of me. Less often, I hear His voice in my mind encouraging or rebuking me or urging me to do something I should do. This voice is like no other in my experience. I cannot prove to a skeptic that it is God’s voice, but over time this voice has proven itself to me.

When I mediate daily, I first acknowledge reality. There is a physical and spiritual dimension to reality and God is in charge of it. I ask God to make those two things work together perfectly in the world. I ask for help with my physical and spiritual needs and then I ask for the needs of those around me. When I ask for God’s rule on the earth, I am not asking for power for self, but for justice for every human being.

Second, Christians read the Bible. My personal relationship with Jesus is the most important thing, but it could be that I am deceiving myself. The Bible shows me the real Jesus so I don’t miss Him for the Jesus of my imagination. There is nothing unique in that danger, it is a problem in all relationships between people.

People sometimes cannot get through to us because of the clutter of our own mental and emotional life. Nobody who has ever tried to be in love will fail to recognize that danger! We think we love the beloved, but we are really in love with our image of him or her!

The Bible is God’s written exposition of His nature.

The Bible doesn’t change, though over the years as I have studied it, I have learned to know it better. It might seem funny to some people to find wisdom about a relationship in an ancient book, but if the Bible is God’s revelation of Himself to humankind, then it makes sense.

Words allow me to step back from my experience of Him, which can be quite overwhelming, and think about it. Thinking about a relationship is a great way to avoid misunderstandings and to deepen the experience. Also, it is easy to confuse what I wish Jesus Christ was saying with what He is saying. The Bible is a static expression of what He is like so that I don’t fool myself and mess up our conversations.

I keep my wife Hope’s cards and letters to me over the years and reread them for just this reason. She is a wise woman and I want to love her and not just the woman I imagine she is. Reading her words carefully is one way of making sure I am hearing her, and not just what I wish to hear when she talks to me.

Finally, Christians try to follow Jesus in the context of history and what other (better!) Christians have said about Him. Those of us who love Jesus are a family . . . a big family, fractious and sometimes unattractive. Over time, however, we have learned a thing or two about God and about the Bible. We have made most mistakes that can be made and fooled ourselves most ways that people can be fooled. Reading the fathers and mothers in the faith is a great way to avoid making the same mistakes!

Does this always work?

No.

Christians still make mistakes and misunderstand what they are told by Jesus. After all, my wife and I are much more alike than I am like God and I still misunderstand her!

Christians beg your indulgence for our failures and pray (or should pray!) for humility.

Sometimes Christians are hypocrites and say “Jesus is Lord” but really believe “I am Lord.” We use religion instead of letting the loving Christ use us. We want love, but we sometimes settle for personal indulgence.

What do I do when I fail?

There is a real person who keeps calling me back to my basic relationship with Him. I did not want to be a Christian at one point in my life, but reality (my best reason and experience) would not budge. Jesus is alive and He loves me. He is there and He is not silent.

If you don’t know Him, then it is hard to describe the internal sense of His presence. It is constant and not so different than the sense of my wife’s presence in the room with me now.

When I say, “Jesus is Lord” this is a bit of what I mean. Jesus Christ is real, present, speaking, and worthy of my obedience.

This Christmas when you stand in wonder listening to the Biblical language used by Handel in his glorious Hallelujah Chorus, you will briefly understand what Christians feel daily. King of Kings! Lord of Lords!

Catholicity, Race and Sunday Morning

By Matt Jenson
Scriptorium Daily

For the last 1600 years, Christians have confessed belief in the ‘one holy catholic and apostolic church’. The ‘catholic’ bit of that confession makes many Protestants fidgety, but it need not. Its etymology renders it simply ‘according to the whole’. Catholicity gets at the universal character of the church, and it does so by two ways.

First, it reminds us that the church is more than our local Sunday gatherings. It encompasses the communion of saints across time and space. That means that the eighty of us who worshiped at Fountain of Life Covenant Church in North Long Beach yesterday are not the church by ourselves. We are the church with those worshiping yesterday in Auckland and those worshipping last year, a hundred, a thousand years ago throughout the world. We are the church, only and ever with our brothers and sisters in the non-Western world, in the non-modern world. Catholicity, then, means diversity.

Second, confessing the church’s catholicity commands our allegiance to the church as well as our commitment to her unity. We have ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ (Eph. 4.5), and the very acknowledgment of this implies a submission to the Lord and his church. Confessing the church’s catholicity and refusing to live a life of being reconciled together is what Karl Barth would call an ‘impossible possibility’ – possible in that it happens, but impossible in that its very happening is utterly foreign to the logic of its own existence. In other words, the blocking of reconciliation in our relationships violates the catholicity we (claim) to confess. Catholicity means unity.

***

Today America celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and martyrdom, a life and death spent fighting segregation in the name of Jesus. (Incidentally, if you’re wondering about the application of ‘martyr’ to one whose death is not directly the result of a profession of Christ, see Craig Slane’s stirring discussion of Bonhoeffer as modern martyr.’) Here is how King describes segregation in his prison epistle:

Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I- it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression ‘of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? (‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’)

It was King who called 11 a.m. on Sunday morning ‘the most segregated hour’ in America. Despite marvelous strides in church and society, our churches remain largely segregated.

It used to be that churches worked on a parish model. If you lived in a particular town, you went to its church. The model reflects the organization of medieval society as well as regionally and nationally established churches. One of its blessings is its inherent catholicity. The local church in the parish model reflects the make-up of the community. Even though not everyone from the community shows up, everyone is represented. The poor are there, as are the rich. Men and women, married and single, young and old, black and white are there. In this, the local church mirrors the universal church.

What makes this model attractive is its inherent desegregating orientation. The person sitting in the chair next to me (or even worse – the pew! I might have to touch them!) could be anyone – young people and poor people and married people, oh my! The church promises to be one of the few places where people who don’t belong together, belong together. It is a place where people who we wouldn’t pick for friends become our brothers and sisters.

It’s for this reason that I’m not a big fan of catering to our felt needs to be with people just like us in church. There’s a place for singles groups, young parents groups, hip tattooed people groups, motorcycle enthusiasts groups. But only a peripheral and penultimate place, one that fills a gap and looks to groups of people who are nothing like one another. The heart of the church is difference. Our small groups should be places of difference, where we live the reconciled life with people to whom we aren’t necessarily reconciled.

Clubs are for people who want to hang out with people like them. Churches aren’t.

The thing is, as attractive as the parish model is, it doesn’t quite work here and now. American society is stratified. We have built whole communities around the idea that lookalikeness is next to godliness. Our churches set up shop, reach a community and, often enough, reflect the homogeneity of that community. But in so doing, they fail to reflect the ‘come one, come all’ character of the church universal. Structures of sin set society up in such a way that we have to be unnatural (moving to or going to church in a different neighborhood, say) to be natural (that is, truly kata holos, truly catholic).

None of this is to sideline King’s vision. Nor is it to prematurely pronounce its realization. It is, though, to remind us that the church’s catholic nature and its call to catholicity include a number of ‘natural’ divisions. The church’s catholicity is the pudding that proves the words of Paul: ‘In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.’ And, in her catholicity, the church points to the future, to a day when every tongue and tribe and nation will be worshiping before the throne of God and of the Lamb.

Thanks be to God for his servant, our brother, Martin.

Socrates and Education: Part I

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Socrates wrote no books. Like Jesus, the only record he left was in the lives of those impressed by his life. Aristophanes, the great comic poet, made fun of him in The Clouds. The prize winning playwright made his Athenian audience laugh at learning, but The Clouds derives its chief modern interest from his assault on Socrates. Xenophan was a conservative student who left humanity a collection of fond memories of his master. In it, Socrates resembles a glorified version of Xenophan. Socrates is the wise and conventional popular sage. It is impossible from Xenophan’s account to understand why Athens would have bothered to kill Socrates.

Socrates survived his execution because Plato made him immortal. No teacher has ever had a better pupil. Plato, especially in his earliest dialogues, captured the essential Socrates. To read the Apology, the defense of Socrates at his trial is to understand the man. Were these the very words used by Socrates? It does not matter. Plato uses his memories of the trial and makes Socrates live again, but even this worshipful student began to outgrow his pain. “Socrates” in the dialogues gains his own voice and that voice matures. The voice of Plato in the Laws, where Socrates does not appear as a character, is not that of Socrates.

Though the Platonic dialogues are not historical documents, they are valuable in knowing the real Socrates. In fact, if the goal of reading them is to know Socrates, they are better than modern histories. Plato uses every tool in his unsurpassed intellectual arsenal to present a picture of the living Socrates. It is not Plato’s concern to get every historical detail right. He invents conversations between other people and Socrates that could never happened in actuality. The famous drinking party or Symposium is a prime example of the liberties with history Plato was willing to take, but he does want to defend his master against the charges brought against him. To do so, he presents a plausible picture to the public. How could Plato hope to swing intelligent opinion behind Socrates if the Socrates he described did not resemble the man Athenians had known?

Socrates did not claim to have knowledge. In fact, Socrates frequently claimed that he did not know anything . . . except that he did not know anything. Of course, by this he meant that he did not know anything he had come to think worth knowing. Socrates had served as loyal citizen of the city in the government and the army. He was a craftsman, a stone cutter, a highly skilled trade. Socrates saw, however, that these external “good” were not enough, since they did not teach him how to live the good life. This integrity came with a price since Socrates did not charge fees for his teaching or mentoring.

Socrates believed that the best way to learn was by examining the opinions of those who claimed to know. At the very least, an exposure of their ignorance would eliminate one way of going wrong. The man who debunks the inflated claims of a healing evangelist does not show that healing does not happen, but he does provide the useful service of showing that healing has not happened here and in this way. It is a negative path to a limited sort of knowledge. Socrates hoped in the process to come to a person who knows. It may also have occurred to Socrates that the communal quest for the truth like that pictured in the Symposium would bring answers. It might be that no one person could teach, but that many persons together could find the right questions.

Listening to Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle”

By Stephen H. Webb
First Things

Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle is a maudlin song, meant to manipulate, and it hits me hard every time I hear it pop up, unpredictably and infrequently, on the radio. The song is a bit preachy, which is probably why it has been used in so many sermons, and why it has also been an easy target of parody and ridicule. It is about a father who is too busy to spend time with his son, who nonetheless admires him and wants to be just like him. When the son grows up, he is too busy with his own work and family to spend any time with his aging father. The son, in other words, has turned out just like his father, though in a way that the father regrets.

The irony of the song is a bit obvious, but it still packs a powerful punch, at least to guys my age. The song is partially autobiographical, because Chapin’s father, a musician, was on the road during much of his youth, but it is also about Chapin himself, since his wife is actually credited with writing the lyrics. She was worried that Chapin would not be around to help raise their newborn son, Josh. She wrote the song as a warning to her husband, and it has served as an effective wake-up call to fathers ever since. The song begins,

My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away.

Chapin took his wife’s words and added a catchy melody that makes the sad lyrics almost bearable.

Cat’s in the Cradle was released in 1974, reached the top of the Billboard music charts, sold millions, and earned Chapin a Grammy nomination for Best Song. In other words, it struck a chord.

The 1970s were a divisive decade. What began in the 1960s as a fairly elite and limited rebellion against traditional moral standards became in the 1970s the social norm, with catastrophic results. College radicals failed in many of their political objectives—the backlash that began with Nixon’s election still has momentum today—but they succeeded in transforming American culture. Even teenagers raised in the Midwest with solid traditional values fought their parents over trips to the barber and what to listen to on the car radio. I know that from personal experience. Rebellion was in the air, and rock and roll provided the soundtrack.

My students, as we would have said back then, just can’t relate. Every year I teach a course for freshmen on Christianity and Popular Culture. I try to persuade my students, all of whom are usually Christian, that having faith should force them into a protracted and messy battle with popular culture, but I’ve seen that message make less and less sense with each passing year. One of the hardest things I have had to learn as a teacher is that my story is not their story. This is a good thing, of course, given how low the 1970s sunk, but it is also something worth thinking about. My generation was raised in conflict. What do students today fight for, and what do they fight against?

When I tell my students that my father and I had constant battles over the length of my hair and the span of the bell bottoms on my favorite pair of purple plaid pants, they just laugh. They have been spared the ravages of a society trying to redefine itself through bad fashion. When I tell them that rock and roll was meant to tear families apart by promoting promiscuity and drugs, however, they think I am joking. They listen to the same music as their parents. Rock and roll has been made safe by Contemporary Christian Music. Rock is simply the way the world sounds.

Many of my students (I teach at an all-male college) tell me that their father is their best friend. That is great, but I wonder what they have lost when they do not experience fathers as a source of judgment and an obstacle to adolescent excess. As one of my students was talking about his father the other day, I noticed that he has a pierced tongue. When I asked if that bothered his father, he replied that his dad paid for it and thought it was “cool.” Other students have tattoos, although some of them said they had not told their mothers. Moms don’t want their sons to look like Aztec warriors, but dads are proud of the way their sons manage to keep on the cutting edge while still looking clean cut.

Other than piercings and tattoos, my students dress pretty conservatively, which means they wear the typical uniform of jeans and knit shirts with the logos of sports teams or running shoes. They find it hard to imagine a time when blue jeans were missiles in the war between the generations. I developed some of my intellectual cunning from the years I spent negotiating with my father over what was appropriate Sunday morning attire. First, I convinced him that wearing jeans to school was okay. Then I gradually earned permission to wear my school clothes to Wednesday night services. Finally, I fought for more casual wear for Sunday evenings, hoping that the slippery slope of permissiveness would free me from the drudgery of dressing up on Sunday mornings. It was a prolonged series of negotiations that should have made me a lawyer, not a theologian.

By the middle of the 1970s, most parents had given up defending the sensibilities of modesty and prudence, but they did not join teenagers in their flouting of convention. That trend would await another decade or two, when the baby boomers grew up and decided that they wanted to act and look just like their children.

I asked my students the other day if clothing should be used as a way of indicating the seriousness of a social situation. Most of them resisted this suggestion. Clothing, they said, doesn’t really mean anything. If that is right, I continued, why are so many of your shirts walking advertisements? After some interesting discussion, we decided that logos are needed to distinguish people by what they wear, but since so many shirts have logos on them, nobody risks standing out too much. But they continued to resist the idea that clothing could symbolize the sacred. I thought about this for a couple of days and came prepared with a question for the next class. Would they be comfortable with the nine Justices of the Supreme Court deliberating about constitutional issues in T-shirts and jeans? I finally found the place where they would draw the line.

Ordinarily, however, line drawing is not their forte. I envy their easygoing intimacy with their fathers, but I wonder about their lackadaisical approach to spirituality. Until the modern era, Christianity created the high culture of the West, but then it lost much of its creative potency as the arts, one by one, declared their independence from the Church. By the 1970s, popular culture was so alienated from Christianity that just going to public school during the week was a schizophrenic experience for those of us raised in conservative churches. The language of spiritual warfare came naturally to evangelicals because we were forced to decide, almost on a daily basis, whose side we were on. Most of us made a lot of bad decisions, but we learned that decisions had to be made, and that the worse decision was deciding not to decide.

Rock and roll, for example, was not a neutral musical genre. The music at my boyhood church was still stuck in the age of barbershop quartets. My parents thought Frank Sinatra was too racy, so they were hardly prepared for Elvis, Dylan, or the Beatles. Rock has to be played loud to be enjoyed, or at least that is what we told our parents, who were constantly yelling at us to turn it down. Rock deafens the senses, including the moral sense, with its incessant beat and garbled lyrics. My parents were not alone in taking me to revivals where I would be inspired to purge my record collection. Every album I burned in the backyard, putting who knows what pollutants into the air, cost me hours of agony and regret.

When the rumor that Bob Dylan had converted to Christianity reached Indianapolis in 1979, during my senior year in high school, I was overjoyed. That one of the greatest rock stars had become one of us was too good to be true. The three Christian albums he recorded, Slow Train Coming, Shot of Love, and Saved, spoke to my ears as much as my heart, because they brought together, for the first time, my faith and my musical taste. My students, however, have never heard of these albums, and they take it for granted that rock and Christianity can go hand in hand. They listen to Christian heavy metal bands that make me feel as out of it as my parents were thirty years ago. They do not think that the style of music has any affect on its message. Christianity is malleable to them. Faith can be poured into any cultural form without diluting or altering its essence.

Part of me, of course, envies their more peaceful adjustments to the modern world. Part of me too takes perverse pride in the battles my generation fought. Rock was divisive back then, but at least it wasn’t bland! I am actually very glad that my students do not have to fight my battles, because they were destructive, and little was gained. But those battles made me who I am, and I cannot shake the idea that struggle confers our most abiding sense of identity.

Students today do not resonate with the idea of being part of a generation. The 1960s generation took so much pride in their radical ideals that they practically invented the idea of a generation of young people set apart by the accident of chronology. Those of us who grew up in the 1970s had to wrestle with the self-important weight of the 1960s. We bore the brunt of our elder siblings’ experiments in altering reality. In my freshman class on Christianity and Popular Culture, I used to teach books about the Gen X generation, which was defined by the emergence of new technologies, but all of that is old hat to today’s students. When I asked my freshmen to name their generation, the best we could come up with was the Security Generation, or the N-Security Generation, but even that did not seem to fit, since they do not feel all that threatened by overseas terrorists.

They are too secure, this generation. They are not forced to choose between popular culture and Christianity. And they are not rebelling against their parents.

That brings us back to Harry Chapin’s song. Fathers in the 1970s were too threatened by the rapid cultural changes to give their sons useful advice about how to negotiate adolescence, and anyway, it was an era when fathers went to work and left the child rearing to their wives. In the words of Cat’s in the Cradle.

My son turned ten just the other day
He said, “Thanks for the ball, dad, come on let’s play.
Can you teach me to throw?” I said, “Not today,
I got a lot to do.” He said, “That’s ok.”

It is emotionally hard for me to type those words on my computer screen. They are too real. We should thank God every day that most fathers (I hope!) have learned their lesson about neglecting their children.

Yet we should also not be too hard on the fathers of old. It is always difficult to be a father, and it must have been especially challenging in the 1970s. We teenagers did not make it easy for fathers to be fathers. We have to forgive our fathers as the first step in becoming fathers ourselves. And maybe in forgiving them, we won’t overreact to the point of giving our sons everything they want, rather than the essential things that they need.

I usually teach a section on marriage and sex in my Christianity and Popular Culture course, and I often tell my students that popular culture has robbed them of romance. Even the most modest young men today, I argue, have been so immersed in a culture of pornography that we have been inoculated to female beauty. We men (I always include myself in this discussion) have been taught to treat the female form in abstract terms and thus to use it as an ideal template by which to measure the women we meet. We no longer know the joys of sensual pleasure that springs not from visual attraction but from the yearning of true knowledge for another. We don’t know how to let a spiritual soulmate shape our desires by teaching us to see others the way God sees them.

Yet something happened the other day that made me think I have been too hard on my students. I often try to describe to them the way their ancestors, not all that long ago, would have chosen the mates of their children, a practice they associate today with some backward part of India. I try to help them see that the choice of a marriage partner should be based on wider considerations than romance alone. To focus this discussion, I ask them a hypothetical question. Suppose you were to be guided in your selection of a wife by one, and only one, of two factors, either your hormones or your parents. That is, would you let your parents pick your wife or would you rather trust your sensual desire, that spark of attraction that makes you light up with sexual longing?

In past years, my students were horrified at the thought of their parents choosing their marriage partners. This year was different. Many of them said they would trust their parents. In fact, more said they would trust their dads than their moms. They thought their moms would look for a good girl and disregard looks altogether, while they thought their dads would probably get the balance of moral and physical attributes just about right.

I found their conversation to be very moving, and wondered if my two young boys, when they reach the marrying age, will have that kind of trust in me. We lose something when we do not have to fight for what we believe, but what we have gained in father and son relationships is so much more important that I do not regret that my boys will never be able to relate to Cat’s in the Cradle. They will have other battles in their lives, but, I pray to God, they will not have to battle me.

How the city hurts your brain

By Jonah Lehrer
The Boston Globe

THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

(Yuko Shimizu for the Boston Globe)

And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we're crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it's become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.

This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. The good news is that even slight alterations, such as planting more trees in the inner city or creating urban parks with a greater variety of plants, can significantly reduce the negative side effects of city life. The mind needs nature, and even a little bit can be a big help.

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There's the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they're going and how to get there.

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it's long been known that human attention is a scarce resource -- focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon -- Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect.

Imagine a walk around Walden Pond, in Concord. The woods surrounding the pond are filled with pitch pine and hickory trees. Chickadees and red-tailed hawks nest in the branches; squirrels and rabbits skirmish in the berry bushes. Natural settings are full of objects that automatically capture our attention, yet without triggering a negative emotional response -- unlike, say, a backfiring car. The mental machinery that directs attention can relax deeply, replenishing itself.

"It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan," says Berman. "They needed to put a park there."

In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.

"We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."

This also helps explain why, according to several studies, children with attention-deficit disorder have fewer symptoms in natural settings. When surrounded by trees and animals, they are less likely to have behavioral problems and are better able to focus on a particular task.

Studies have found that even a relatively paltry patch of nature can confer benefits. In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago.

Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.

"We've constructed a world that's always drawing down from the same mental account," Kuo says. "And then we're surprised when [after spending time in the city] we can't focus at home."

But the density of city life doesn't just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations -- caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that's responsible for directed attention, which means that it's already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it's less able to exert self-control, which means we're more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don't really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it's surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.

"I think cities reveal how fragile some of our 'higher' mental functions actually are," Kuo says. "We take these talents for granted, but they really need to be protected."

Related research has demonstrated that increased "cognitive load" -- like the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.

City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression. A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.

Long before scientists warned about depleted prefrontal cortices, philosophers and landscape architects were warning about the effects of the undiluted city, and looking for ways to integrate nature into modern life. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised people to "adopt the pace of nature," while the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted sought to create vibrant urban parks, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, that allowed the masses to escape the maelstrom of urban life.

Although Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the "savannah hypothesis," which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.

However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

"We worry a lot about the effects of urbanization on other species," Fuller says. "But we're also affected by it. That's why it's so important to invest in the spaces that provide us with some relief."

When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. As the Berman study demonstrates, just looking at a natural scene can lead to higher scores on tests of attention and memory. While people have searched high and low for ways to improve cognitive performance, from doping themselves with Red Bull to redesigning the layout of offices, it appears that few of these treatments are as effective as simply taking a walk in a natural place.

Given the myriad mental problems that are exacerbated by city life, from an inability to pay attention to a lack of self-control, the question remains: Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge -- one of the densest cities in America -- contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.

The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as "not a nature person," but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she's better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits. Because there always comes a time, as Lou Reed once sang, when a person wants to say: "I'm sick of the trees/take me to the city."

In God We Trust

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

President Obama will take the oath of office on a Bible as is customary. There will be prayers at the swearing in as has always been done and he will ask for God’s help in doing so. He is right to do so.

His actions are only controversial amongst the sad souls who are so sheltered and delicate that the actual costumes and beliefs of the nation shock them out of their bubble. Of course, one tries to be polite, but they are very easily offended. The mere sight of a Christmas crèche on public land can ruin their day. Since we are not willing to flush traditional American patriotic songs from our ceremonies, it really will be impossible to do.

Should we stop singing God Bless America? Should America stop asking God to shed His grace on us? Will the Battle Hymn get rid of the “hallelujah?”

It would require totalitarian force to separate traditional American patriotism from any mention of the Divine!

The just pleas for accommodation by secularists, who should not be forced to sing or to pray, can turn into tyrannical demands that silence the religious majority from living out their beliefs in the public square as they always have done.

A healthy family tries to meet the needs of all its members. Even the desires of one family member should not be ignored. Imagine the family member, however, who decided he or she does not like the way things have been done in the household. The other family members politely listen to what he has to say, but decide that the old ways are good and important to them.

A good family cannot find itself dominated by the eccentric demands and imagined offenses of one of its members.

The harm done by traditional religious ceremonies to secularists is non-existent. If secularism is true, then it does nothing but affirm a tradition of the Republic. It is difficult to imagine the harm in praying to a non-existent God and old forms are comforting. An atheist is not being excluded from a ceremony when he does not agree with every aspect of it anymore than Republicans are excluded from the festivities when they disagree with some aspect of the speech made by the new president.

We are mostly a religious people in a religious nation and when we celebrate religion will be a natural part of the party. Unless someone is forced to pray with the President, it is difficult to see the damage when our religious president-elect decides to pray.

Secularists need to be better members of the American household. They have chosen to adopt a minority position that is at odds with the overwhelming theism of the American experience. That position should be tolerated and when well argued respected, but there is no reason that our ceremonies have to be neutered when we politely disagree.

It is extremism in government that is dangerous and Americans have rightly decided to reject theocracy and total secularism. We have chosen the more difficult middle way between the two dangers and it is has served us well for over two hundred years.

President Obama embraces that position, as do most Republican and Democratic leaders.

As most Americans know from personal experience and best reason secularism is false, therefore, the good done by traditional religious ceremonies is great. God exists and it is good for human beings to acknowledge the facts in their ceremonies. Denying reality is, in the end, not a good move for any culture. The humbling fact that even the most powerful man in the world will acknowledge the limits of human power is refreshing.

Our rights, as the Declaration says, come from God and not government. Our fundamental personhood came from the Creator and not from the state or impersonal nature. A few Americans disagree with those basic American ideas and nobody should persecute them as a result. If they win elections, they should be allowed to hold ceremonies that reflect their beliefs.

It is only polite, however, to acknowledge the Jewish and Christian roots of American ideas. The very words engraved on the Lincoln Memorial make no sense if they are read without Biblical and religious knowledge.

Even though I will not agree with all his policies, like all patriots I am going to rejoice in the ceremonies of the day. I am going to celebrate the peaceful transition of power, the working Constitution, and the wonderful symbolism of an African-American president. I will not agree with some of the things he says or does, but that will not take away from my happiness as an American.

Mr. Obama soon will be my president. As head of government, I will pray for him daily and honor him. When he acts as head of his party, I will act as the loyal opposition. Like all Americans, I am delighted that Mr. Obama is acknowledging the religious traditions and roots of our nation.

Here is hoping my secular friends will not be too offended if on this happy day they listen to the choirs sing the National Anthem and sum up most of our feelings:

Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation! / Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, / And this be our motto: “In God is our trust” / And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!