The Weekly, March 18, 2024
Hi all,
This week is a little late. The kids were on spring break last week, and Joie took them to a friend's for a couple days so I could work on my manuscript for IVP. Then we did a night in Omaha at a hotel we paid for with some points we had. A good week, but something had to give and it was the newsletter.
As I'm working on the book, the basic concept is "talking sensibly about Christian basics for dechurched America." The problem we're facing now, as Christians in the west, has less to do with hostility per se and more to do with simple ignorance. People simply don't know what Christian belief is, I think—and that applies to progressive church attendees (for whom church is basically a political accelerant, as Ryan Burge noted recently), conservative church attendees (for whom church is often a kind of cultural signaling and lifestyle component), and the totally non-churched.
Put it this way: When Tim Keller wrote Reason for God in 2008, there was enough vestigial Christianity hanging around (and we weren't all doped up on smartphones) that he could approach his task this way: "Look, we both know the basics of what Christianity is. You think it's wrong or false because of x, y, and z reasons. So I'm going to write this book to help you reframe those objections in order to encourage you to look at Christianity again."
That was the 2000s. Where I think we are now, post-smartphone and post-great dechurching, is a different place, one where there simply isn't enough shared understanding of Christian basics to even have an argument about Christian basics. So that's what I'm trying to address with this book. I feel like I was able to use the time last week to really frame the project nicely for myself and I'm now hopeful of being able to get the manuscript cranked out this year.
If you would, I would immensely appreciate prayer both for that project and for Mere O. We run on such fine margins and we've basically never in the last 2+ years of doing this work FT been in a place where we had more than a 4-6 or 6-8 month financial window that was fairly locked in. Even under those conditions, we're still here after a little over two years, but it does weigh on me.
The combination of a book manuscript to write and that sort of uncertainty is hard. God has been faithful and provided and we're trusting that he will continue to. But if you pray for our work, the biggest need I have right now in it is the ability to think clearly enough about the book and the magazine while being in that relatively vulnerable position. Thanks for reading!
Reading
Books
A few new titles in my stack: Peter Pomerantsev's How to Win an Information War, which caught my eye at a bookstore recently, as well as Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott's The Canceling of the American Mind, which I picked up on the same outing.
I also have picked the Abigail Favale book back up after getting distracted during my first time reading it and not finishing. Lastly, I'm hoping to do some reading in Ralph Waldo Emerson soon, inspired by Jeffrey Stout's work.
Articles
Peter Leithart on Tara Isabella Burton's latest novel
Brad East on Marilynne Robinson's Reading Genesis
Here in Nebraska, empty churches are being converted into houses and museums.
Richard Schiffman on the Bruderhof
Emma Green on the liberal arts
Max Remington on the end of dating
Matthew Rose on the radical right
Leah Sargeant on children and hope
Jonathan Haidt on phone-free childhood
Devin Thomas O'Shea on Panera Bread and capitalism
Elsewhere
I've been thinking more about Malcolm Guite's YouTube channel. Something that strikes me about it, and it is also related to the particular power of video as a medium, is that I think Guite is amongst the closest things we have today to someone who has many of the qualities that Tolkien and Lewis both prized and exemplified—a poetic joyfulness about existence, a deep knowledge of (and delight in!) great literature, and a certain comfort in one's own skin and willingness to go against convention. It's a peculiar combination of medieval intellectual habits with a certain deeply modern individualism—Tolkien invents a literary genre, Lewis decides to just start writing children's literature in middle age despite having no children and having never been married when he started writing.
Some scholars have used the phrase "orthodoxy yet modern" to describe Herman Bavinck. But I think the same phrase very much matches Lewis and Tolkien—and I've found myself drawn into that vision even more thanks to Guite.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake