Justin Taylor's Blog, page 106

How to Make the Case for Life in a Post-Christian Culture

Every family and youth group should consider watching this video with their pre-teen kids and older. It is a compelling case for being pro-life and learning how to engage these issues, but it is also a crash course in moral and logical reasoning.

Scott Klusendorf—author of The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture and co-author of Stand for Life: Answering the Call, Making the Case, Saving Lives—makes the case that if you can achieve clarity on three questions, God can use you to start a conversation with the goal of at least planting seeds of doubts with those who disagree. The three questions are:

What is the unborn?
What makes us valuable as human beings?
What is our duty in all of this?

Why Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” Is Not a Great Novel but a Disappointing Melodrama

John Gardner:

No ignoramus—no writer who has kept himself innocent of education—has ever produced great art. One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one’s argument, never understands that the argument is an old one (all great arguments are), never understands the dignity and worth of the people one has cast as enemies.

Witness John Steinbeck’s failure in The Grapes of Wrath. It should have been one of America’s great books. But while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing about the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to, or interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil.

—John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (New York: Vintage Books, 1991 [original, 1991]), 10.

Love and Loss on Mother’s Day

Sarah Kinnard:

If Mother’s Day is about love, it’s also about loss and longing, which are wrapped up with love. Honoring the love of mothers means also honoring the pain that comes with Mother’s Day. Because in all the circles of our lives, women are hurting today. They are mourning losses and unfulfilled longings. Some have lost children; some have lost their mother. Some grieve for the babies they could never bear; some grieve for the mother they never knew, or the relationship with her that was never what they dreamed. Some weep for children gone astray, or for children who face myriad challenges.

Somewhere a woman and her children are suddenly alone, and she finds herself embarking on a single motherhood that she never planned for her life.

Somewhere a woman who made the brave and loving decision to place her baby for adoption aches for the child she carried, but feels judged and demonized for her careful choice.

Somewhere a woman is staring at yet another single line on a pregnancy test; somewhere a woman is waiting for another bland and clinical phone call from her doctor, telling her that this IVF, too, was unsuccessful.

Somewhere a woman is innocently preparing for an ultrasound that will shock her with the worst news of her life.

Somewhere a woman is waiting, wondering if her turn for marriage and motherhood will ever come; and another woman is wondering why other people think she should desire those things when she doesn’t.

For every woman celebrating on Mother’s Day, there must be at least one who wishes it would just go away.

Last year Mother’s Day fell the month after we buried our son. The day was torture—not because I didn’t love and cherish our living children, but because I realized I would never again celebrate with my whole family. This year I have a new reason to rejoice—our sweet Baby Petunia—but every year we celebrate, we will still feel the hole where Simon should be. My mom doesn’t get to celebrate with both her children because my brother passed away almost three years ago. For us, and for so many other women, Mother’s Day holds both joy and sorrow. . . .

To those who endure grief on Mother’s Day: I am deeply sorry. I hope you are touched with love today, somehow, through the pain. I hope you feel that your sorrows are seen, and that your love and your losses are honored.

You can read the whole thing here.

The Key Factor in Someone Becoming a Leader

Part 1 of a fascinating interview by James K. A. Smith with Michael Lindsey about his new book, View From the Top: An Inside Look at How People in Power See and Shape the World (Wiley, 2014), who observes that “there is absolutely no statistically significant relationship between what you do before age twenty and your likelihood of assuming a very senior leadership role later on in life.” The key factor may surprise you:

JS: Your new book on leadership, View From The Top, explores what innovative, catalytic, creative, influential leadership looks like. You begin by suggesting that some of our basic assumptions about power and influence are really mistaken. You suggest that we tend to overestimate some factors that create leaders and as a result we underestimate and miss other factors. Can you say why that is? What those factors are?

ML: There are lots. This is a research project that took me ten years to complete. The last study like this was conducted in 1970 by a team of researchers at Columbia University. It was called the American Leadership Study. For that project, they interviewed 545 very senior leaders in government, non-profits, and cultural sectors like media, arts, entertainment, and business. My goal was to do 546. [laughs] Fortunately, I was able to do 550.

I would have an hour-long interview usually with these folks. For every one-hour interview, we did twenty hours of background research on the individual, so we knew them fairly well when I got before them to ask them questions. We built this very, very large database that was looking at a variety of factors that might be part of their life and try to report patterns across all these various folks.

In my own field of sociology, we have a very strong belief that there are certain things about your family of origin that have a deep, permanent fixture on your possibilities, as well as the formative role of education and youth experiences.

What we found, however, is that there is absolutely no statistically significant relationship between what you do before age twenty and your likelihood of assuming a very senior leadership role later on in life. It doesn’t matter where you went to school. It does not matter what grades you made. It does not matter if you were in extra curricular activities. It does not matter if your family was wealthy or poor. It does not matter in what city you were born. None of those things matter.

At the same time, there are certain things that happen uniquely in Christian institutions of education that make a profound difference in your likelihood to succeed. Principally, it’s about having a formative relationship with a mentor. What we found is that a lot of schools and businesses try to create structured mentoring programs…say, a management training program where you take twenty new people and you match them up with a senior executive; or in my church youth group, we had basically a system where adult volunteers agreed to mentor a Bible study fellowship format with young people who wanted that.

Those are all well and good, but actually those don’t work very effectively. The real way in which mentoring works effectively is through organic relationships. One of the most important things that Christian institutions can do is create the ecosystem of opportunity out of which those relationships can develop. Unlike state-run institutions of learning or public schools in this country, which have a pretty bureaucratic approach to relationships, Christian institutions recognize we’re really about transforming the individual. We’re in this work, not because we’re trying to pass down a certain body of knowledge, but we’re really invested in this young person. I care deeply about this particular student. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to try and help them, if it means helping them get a job, if it means helping them navigate a family issue, if it means helping them learn a subject.

So a lot of your major demographic characteristics do not matter on your likelihood to succeed. What does matter is the formative influence of an adult who speaks into your life and who has a sustaining relationship with you that you carry with you. Each of us could identify one, two, or three people outside of our family who had a formative influence, and my hunch is that the relationship you had was not for months, or for semesters, but for years. That’s what Christian Institutions can create and that’s one of the things that we found that was really special.

[You can read the whole first part of the interview here.]

HT: Andy Crouch

What Miserable Christians Can Sing

From a new piece by Carl Trueman:

True, there are Christian poets and even the occasional hymn writer who have captured the dark complexities of life; but there are none to compare with authors of the Psalter who set forth the riches and depths of human experience and existence with perfect poetic pitch. The church which makes the psalms part of her regular diet provides her people with the resources for truly living in this vale of tears, just as the church which does not do so has perversely denied her people a true treasure in pursuit of what? Relevance? There is nothing more universally relevant than preparing people for suffering and death. I have people in my congregation who have very hard lives, lives that are not going to become easier over time. To them I can only say: suffering comes to us all, but there is a resurrection; listen to how the notes of real, present lament in the Psalms are suffused with tangible, future hope and be encouraged: weeping may tarry for the night, and indeed be truly painful while it does, but joy will come in the morning.

When I married a young couple in my congregation a few years ago, I commented in the sermon that all human marriages begin with joy but end in tragedy. Whether it is divorce or death, the human bond of love is eventually torn apart. The marriage of Christ and his church, however, begins with tragedy and ends with a joyful and loving union which will never be rent asunder. There is joy to which we point in our worship, the joy of the Lamb’s wedding feast. But our people need to know that in this world there will be mourning. Not worldly mourning with no hope. But real mourning nonetheless, and we must make them ready for that.

You can read the whole thing here.

The Fierce Urgency of Bonhoeffer’s Final Questions: In 5 Acts

Alan Jacobs of Baylor University writes, “I can’t remember when I have read a more compelling biography. . . An extraordinary account of an extraordinary life.” He’s referring to Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Charles Marsh, who is professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology.

In the lecture below, drawn from the beautifully crafted book, Professor Marsh walks through five scenes in Bonhoeffer’s life, from (1) his childhood in a close-knit Germany family, to (2) his encounter with the Roman church in Italy, to (3) his transformation in New York City, to (4) his “new monasticism” in Finkenwalde, to, finally, (5) his final days in a Gestapo prison.

Why Humility and Gratitude Are Better than Pride and Self-Congratulations

Kevin Durant’s 2014 MVP acceptance speech provides a study in contrast with Michael Jordan’s 2012 Hall of Fame acceptance speech:

For more on Jordan, see Thomas Lake’s profile of the man who supposed cut Jordan from his high school basketball team.

Lessons on Writing from America’s Best Magazine Writer

Sports Illustrated‘s Rick Reilly:

Of all the rich Gary Smith tapestries that hang, my favorite is Damned Yankee, the story of a five-year-old boy who accidentally kills his best friend with a homemade javelin and torments himself for 60 years over it, ruining a potentially great catching career with the Yankees.

Read it and see if you find a single “he said/she said” quote in it. There are none, only scenes, woven so perfectly together that you feel as if you’re in a movie that’s too good to go get popcorn. Gary never starts writing a piece until he’s spoken to 50 people. And not just once. Often, he calls them back a dozen times after the first visit. I’ve been in the room when he does it. “Nancy, I’m so sorry to call you again on this … yes, I know, sorry, sorry … right, this is the last time … right, really sorry … but I just want to make SURE I know what that moment was like.” And an hour later, Nancy will finally get to hang up.

Read it and be rewarded with all the detail. With that kind of inexhaustible reporting, he doesn’t need quotes. He can show you. He can plop you down right there, in East Harlem, in 1952, on a sweltering day “up on the roof with Uncle Duffy’s pigeons … playing checkers and eating linguini with red sauce bare-chested.”

Read it and notice how luxuriously he treats you. The blocks of writing are short, the narration is constantly broken up, the time shifted, the scenes changed, the pace furious. You are swept along as if in rushing rapids and Gary has the only paddle and you are happy. You’re in that wonderful place that reading so rarely gives you, hoping it never ends.

Read it and tell me if you can find a single sentence that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. Gary and I and bottles of Zinfandel have ruminated on good writing for hours at a time. But the thing that matters to him the most — and is the most exhausting — is ridding his pieces of every sentence that isn’t essential, no matter how tenderly he loved it. That’s why it takes him two months to finish most of his pieces. That’s why he cocoons himself in his attic in Charleston. That’s why his wife Sally doesn’t see him for days at a time. That’s why, when he comes out, at last, he looks rumpled and bleary and confused, like a man who’s been locked in a hot box. Wait, what day is it?

Deadspin’s Alan Siegel:

In June 2005, I accepted a job as a sports reporter at the Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Mass., and spent the next four years searching for soft-focus feature ideas. Something like Smith’s “Someone To Lean On,” the first story of his I ever read, a seven-page ode to a mentally disabled man named Radio that was full of warmth and pathos and never succumbed to the hideous manipulations and indulgences of so much feel-good longform writing.

When I actually found suitable material, I dug in, but never quite deep enough. In 2006, I wrote about Gwynette Proctor, a nun who coached a local high school basketball team. . . .My take was decent, I suppose, but it could’ve been better. Smith told me so in an email.

One critique today is an old song you’re sick of. But your writing will take another jump if you are harder on yourself in regard to paragraphs like these: Sister Murphy calls Sister Proctor “a very outgoing, committed Sister of Notre Dame. She loves the mission; she loves what she’s doing.”

If you can’t make the reader FEEL—in your descriptions of Sister Proctor in action, her intensity, her shouts to her team, her attention to detail—that this nun is “a very outgoing, committed sister” and that “she loves what she’s doing”— without having to quote someone as saying it, well then…

Just keep asking yourself, every time you’re tempted to run a weak-a*s quote, who’s the writer here? Who’s getting paid to tell a powerful tale? You or Sister Murphy? If it’s Sister Murphy, she’s got to do better than that.

And so did I. In my first few years out of college, I was excited by the idea of narrative journalism. But I didn’t quite understand how it worked. I assumed that a quirky subject was enough. I spent only three or four hours reporting the Sister Proctor story, so I was forced to use boring quotes to spackle over the cracks. The profile fell a little flat, never overcoming its inherent sappiness. Smith, who by all accounts would spend weeks, sometimes months, interviewing his subjects, knew this better than most.

Ask yourself hard questions: Why do I do that? I mean, REALLY why? Is it because it’s faster to write a story that way, and you were on deadline, out of time? OK, maybe, under the gun, now and then, you let yourself off the hook for that. Is it out of guilt? Do you feel that when you interview someone, you owe it to them to run a quote and get their name in the story? Not a good reason. If that’s it, it’s time to address the root of your guilt. Is it because you don’t trust your own writing ability to show those qualities in your main character, in action, rather than trotting someone else out to weakly say those things about her or him?

. . . And as was my habit, I used too many weak-a*s quotes. Smith rightfully mentioned that in his notes. “That was a comfortable read,” he began, and notice right away how careful he was with his criticism, how gently he framed it. He went on:

Here’s what I’d urge you to do: Push yourself harder. Don’t settle for writing sentences that are half yours and half somebody else’s quote. Such as:

As a kid, he says he had to “grab any attention at all,” which in high school, made him the perfect class clown.

Think about trying to go back to the people you interview with follow-up questions that give you real examples of how someone “grabs any attention at all” or is a class clown, so then you can show that in a specific way rather than just saying it. That has much more power, giving people a specific image of a kid doing something crazy to grab attention. Then show it in YOUR words, not in THEIR words.

For sportswriters listing their favorite Gary Smith story, go here. To get 20 of his best stories in print, go here. And here’s a tribute to Smith.

Shai Linne, “Be Glorified”

An explanation, followed by a music video, from Shai Linne, from his album “Lyrical Theology Part 2: Doxology” releasing May 20th, 2014.:

George Whitefield: Lessons from Eighteenth Century’s Greatest Evangelist

This October—two months before George Whitefield’s 300th birthday—Yale University Press will publish George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father, by Thomas Kidd, professor of history at Baylor University.

Mark Noll writes, ”This superb chronicle of George Whitefield’s life is now our fullest biography for the much-studied and much-debated eighteenth-century evangelist. It combines unusual empathy with unusual comprehension.”

Here is Yale’s description:

In the years prior to the American Revolution, George Whitefield was the most famous man in the colonies. Thomas Kidd’s fascinating new biography explores the extraordinary career of the most influential figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity, examining his sometimes troubling stands on the pressing issues of the day, both secular and spiritual, and his relationships with such famous contemporaries as Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and John Wesley.

Based on the author’s comprehensive studies of Whitefield’s original sermons, journals, and letters, this excellent history chronicles the phenomenal rise of the trailblazer of the Great Awakening. Whitefield’s leadership role among the new evangelicals of the eighteenth century and his many religious disputes are meticulously covered, as are his major legacies and the permanent marks he left on evangelical Christian faith. It is arguably the most balanced biography to date of a controversial religious leader who, though relatively unknown three hundred years after his birth, was a true giant in his day and remains an important figure in America’s history.

Later this month Crossway will publish John Piper’s latest book, Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully: The Power of Poetic Effort in the Work of George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C.S. Lewis. And if you want to read Whitefield for yourself, the most accessible resource is Lee Gatiss’s two-volume set, The Sermons of George Whitefield.

Here is a recent lecture on Whitefield from Dr. Kidd delivered on March 25-26, 2014, at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville (which is hosting a conference on Whitefield and the Great Awakening this October):