The Suburban Christian

Rapture Ready! on Christian pop culture and music

2008-07-23T06:06:00.003-05:00

Having just returned from ICRS, it’s been fun to browse through Daniel Radosh’s Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. His explorations include ICRS in Denver, 2006, where he encountered Christian pirates, Virtuous Woman perfume, Good News Tattooz and the “Jesus erases sin” pencil eraser. He takes note of the Smiling Cross, which has “its horizontal beam bent up into a cheery smile. Apparently the traditional symbol of Christ’s agonizing death by torture was just too depressing.”

Radosh mentions a conversation he has with Andy Butcher, editor at trade journal Christian Retailing. They note that all pop culture tends to be imitative, not just Christian pop culture – Christian singers try to be Ashlee Simpson, but the general market is also filled with girls trying to be Ashlee Simpson. And the imitative impulse tends to squelch true creativity. Radosh commented of the Christian market that “from what I’ve seen, it kind of looks like tacky is winning.”

Butcher replied, “When you are born again, God gives you a new heart and a new opportunity. He doesn’t necessarily give you new taste.”

Later in the book, Radosh visits Trinity Lutheran Seminary professor Mark Allen Powell’s course on Contemporary Christian Music. Powell, a New Testament scholar, former rock critic for the Houston Post and author of the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, said that people need to understand Christian music for two reasons. The first is cultural. “Christian rock stars and music celebrities have replaced television evangelists as a primary media connection between pop culture and pop religion. Not knowing about Rebecca St. James or Steven Curtis Chapman may be this decade’s equivalent of not knowing about Robert Schuller or Jimmy Swaggert in the 1980s.”

The second reason is theological. Powell says that CCM offers “a window on American piety” and has become “a way of understanding American Christianity.” He gave Radosh this example: “Probably the biggest Christian rock band of the eighties was named Petra. Petra means rock. It’s a pun, of course, because they play rock music. Rock solid.” In contrast, “the biggest Christian band of the nineties was called Jars of Clay, which is something fragile and breakable.”

So Petra and 80s CCM emphasized triumphalistic, powerful music. On the other hand, Jars of Clay signified that “what was popular in the nineties was vulnerability, brokenness, fragility. That reveals something about our culture and about the culture’s connection to religion.”

(Check out Christianity Today's interview with Radosh, which also has links to Radosh's site, list of top Christian songs, and excerpts on Christian sex advice and the Bible business.)

Final dispatch from ICRS

2008-07-17T10:05:00.005-05:00

It's been raining in Orlando all week, so of course it's finally starting to clear up on the last day of the show just before I head home. I'm in a cybercafe on the trade show floor here at ICRS, and it's a bit of a ghost town. The last day of the show is always pretty quiet, more so this year because of low attendance, and perhaps also because it's Orlando and many folks are taking today off to head to Disney or Epcot or something.

A few more notes of various observations from the last few days:

Andy Crouch had a good word for us at our author dinner. He talked about how at a trade show like this, it's very easy to feel inadequate, to see the big signs featuring the hot new books and faces of the bestselling authors, to always be comparing ourselves to the next bigger author or publisher. And it was a nice reminder that all of us are already in a very privileged location to be in this work and industry, and that we can rejoice and delight in the work we have and the books we get to write and publish. (He said much more, and much more eloquently, but this is just my inadequate summary and distillation.) As Andy's editor, I presented him with a framed book cover, and I commented that when I first met Andy ten years ago, he was handing out copies of re:generation quarterly, which I had written for. And I contributed a few articles to RQ during his tenure as editor. So he was my editor, and now I'm his editor. And I'm grateful for our continued collaborative relationship, especially on his book Culture Making.

Yesterday our author Ruth Haley Barton of The Transforming Center was signing copies of her new book Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, which uses the life of Moses as a springboard for exploring the spiritual challenges of being in Christian leadership. (She spoke on this at the National Pastors Convention in 2007, and you can hear the podcast here.)

There's something of a dueling study Bible smackdown in the works from two major Wheaton-area publishers. In this corner, weighing in at 2528 pages and 25,900 study notes, is the NLT Study Bible from Tyndale. And in this corner, weighing in at 2752 pages and 20,000 study notes, is the ESV Study Bible from Crossway. Both release this fall, and both are touted as the most comprehensive study Bibles ever. Both have impressive lists of editors, contributors and endorsers. And I'm sure both will serve the church well.

I picked up a few more books of interest. The timely We the Purple: Faith, Politics, and the Independent Voter by Marcia Ford (Tyndale). A Christianity Worth Believing: Hope-filled, Open-armed, Alive-and-well Faith for the Left Out, Left Behind, and Let Down in Us All by Doug Pagitt (Jossey-Bass), which is competing with Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy for longest subtitle. Donna Frietas's Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses (Oxford) is a landmark study and an important read for anybody in campus ministry. And as I continue to discover the literature of the field of disability studies and theology of disability, I'm glad that a friend at Eerdmans gave me a copy of Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics by Hans Reinders.

Show closes this afternoon, and after tearing down, we'll head home this evening. It's always fun to be here, but I'm eager to get home.

P.S. Funniest Christian knick-knacks and Jesus junk this year? Perhaps the EvangeBall evangelistic soccer ball, or the "Walk in the Light" flashlight.

Hi from the International Christian Retail Show in Orlando

2008-07-15T10:53:00.001-05:00

I'm in Orlando for the International Christian Retail Show, formerly known as the Christian Booksellers Association convention. It's always fun to be here and to see industry friends. Things seem quite a bit slower this year, in terms of people and activity - a lot of the publishers have smaller booths and have been sending fewer people to attend. The economy has been affecting a lot of retailers and publishers. But it's still quite a gathering. Random stuff:

IVP hosted a breakfast with Leighton Ford, author of The Attentive Life. He talked about how as life has changed, his writing has changed. When he was a public evangelist with his brother-in-law Billy Graham, he wrote on evangelism. When he started developing new leaders, he wrote Transforming Leadership. In recent years he's been moving into spiritual formation and spiritual mentoring. Hence this new book on the attentive life and paying attention to what God is doing. He mentioned how American Christians are too frenzied and busy, and he exhorted us to "ruthlessly eliminate hurry." That comes from a John Ortberg book (which I quoted in my suburban book), and Leighton mentioned that the unnamed person who had told Ortberg to eliminate hurry was Dallas Willard.

IVP received a Logos book award for Gerald Sittser's Water from a Deep Well in the Spirituality category. Yay!

Andy Crouch's much-anticipated book Culture Making is now in print, and it's being received well. Had a good lunch with him yesterday. Andy did a signing and will be talking about it at IVP's author dinner tonight.

I was at an agency reception yesterday afternoon and met Gabe Lyons, coauthor of the much-discussed book unChristian. He mentioned to me that he lives in a suburban area and that he's reading my suburban book. It's on his nightstand. That's cool. His book is on my nightstand shelf as well.

A few new books being featured at this show that caught my eye:

Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers by Eugene Peterson (Eerdmans)

The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why by Phyllis Tickle (Baker). The tagline describing the book is "Every five hundred years, the Church cleans out its attic and has a giant rummage sale." I heard Phyllis give a talk on this at a National Pastors Convention a few years ago.

My friend Margaret Feinberg was supposed to be signing her new book The Sacred Echo about hearing God's voice, but there was a problem with the printer and the books aren't ready yet. Bummer. So she was signing copies of her The Organic God instead.

Ellen and I didn't have any industry/trade show events last night, so we went to see Wall-E instead. It was excellent. I love Pixar movies, and this one was done very well. (See Ashleigh's insightful review and commentary on it.) And there's something oddly appropriate about seeing a Disney movie here in Orlando. When in Rome, y'know.

sub•text: The missional church in the suburban context

2008-07-12T13:11:00.005-05:00

Pastor-bloggers Steve McCoy and Joe Thorn have just launched sub•text, a site and ministry about the missional church and ministry in the suburban context. They've got blog posts and links to articles related to suburbia, including resources on evangelism in suburbia and what it means to be missional. Good stuff. They're based in the Chicago suburbs and will be hosting local forums about suburban ministry and mission. The first one will be held in November 2008 (oh, yeah, I'm the speaker).

One of their posts links to an LA Times article about how recent reports projecting the impending death of suburbia are probably premature. While high gas prices may make suburban commuting less desirable, the fact that more jobs are now concentrated in the suburbs and exurbs than cities will keep people living in the suburbs. High gas prices may encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars but not necessarily to relocate to urban centers. And technology and telecommuting make it more possible to decrease commuting within suburbia without relocating. All the demographic, population and employment trends point toward more suburbanization, not less.

All the more reason for Christians to be intentionally missional about ministry in the suburbs. It's great that folks like Tim Keller are encouraging people to be missional about center cities and the strategic cultural influencers that live there. But since twice as many people live in suburbs than in center cities, I'm encouraged that folks like Steve and Joe and Todd Hiestand are championing the importance of the suburban mission.

Cultural reasons for the absence of John 8

2008-07-10T13:28:00.002-05:00

The passage from John 7:53-8:11 about the woman caught in adultery has long been a problem for biblical scholars because the story does not appear in some of the earliest and most reliable New Testament manuscripts. (Christianity Today recently reported on the latest developments and discussions about this longstanding issue.) As a result, some Christians are unsure whether this powerful narrative of "Go and sin no more" is historically reliable or authentic to the ministry of Jesus.

Well, Ken Bailey's landmark book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes offers a fascinating, culturally plausible theory why the pericope does not appear in some manuscripts:

For centuries traditional Middle Eastern culture has understood the honor of the family to be attached to the sexual behavior of its women. Thereby in conservative traditional village life, women who violate the sexual code are sometimes killed by their families.

Added to this is the fact that in the days of hand-copied manuscripts, the person who wanted a copy of anything usually acquired it by hiring a copyist. This was a private business arrangement. Since printing began, official committees of churches have determined the text of any Bible selected for publication. But in the early centuries of the life of the church it would have been very easy for the head of a household to take a copy of the Gospel of John to a professional copyist and say

"I want a copy of this document. Please leave out the story of this adulterous woman. I don’t want my daughters committing adultery and telling me, ‘Jesus forgave this woman and therefore you should forgive me!’"

The copyist would naturally oblige his customer. Other Christians were brave enough to preserve the story even though it violated deeply rooted cultural attitudes. The end result is that this story appears in some ancient texts and is missing from others. If this view is accepted, or if one considers it an agrapha, the story is authentic to Jesus. Raymond Brown writes, “There is nothing in the story itself or its language that would forbid us to think of it as an early story concerning Jesus.” Brown also notes, “Its succinct expression of the mercy of Jesus is as delicate as anything in Luke; its portrayal of Jesus as the serene judge has all the majesty that we would expect of John." With Metzger and Brown, I am convinced that it is a historical account.

The Last Lecture on living well

2008-07-08T06:17:00.000-05:00

Some months ago I heard about Randy Pausch and his “last lecture.” Pausch had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was expected to have just a few months to live. He delivered a last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University in which he shared what he wanted his students, friends and family to know. That lecture was expanded into a book, The Last Lecture, and it’s a powerful read. Inspirational, even.

One theme that emerges is that people are more important than things. Once he had gotten a brand new convertible, and he was visiting his niece and nephew. His sister was worried that the kids would mess the car up, and she exhorted them, “Be careful in Uncle Randy’s new car. Wipe your feet before you get in it. Don’t mess anything up. Don’t get it dirty.”

Randy thought, “That’s just the sort of admonition that sets kids up for failure. Of course they’d eventually get my car dirty. Kids can’t help it.”

So Randy opened a can of Coke and poured it out onto the cloth seats of the back of the car. No big deal, he said – the car is just a thing. And the kids were amazed. And later that weekend, his nephew Chris got the flu and threw up all over the backseat. And he didn’t feel bad because Randy had already messed up the car.

Another car-related episode happened shortly after he and his wife, Jai, were married. One day Jai pulled their minivan out of the garage and crunched into the convertible in the driveway. Both cars were dented. She put both cars back in the garage and told Randy at dinner, “I hit one car with the other car.” She said she’d get estimates for repairs.

Randy said that it wasn’t necessary. Both cars ran fine. Randy writes, “My parents had raised me to recognize that automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status.” So no need to do cosmetic repairs. The cars still worked fine, so they just drove them, dents and all.

“If your trashcan or wheelbarrow has a dent in it, you don’t buy a new one. Maybe that’s because we don’t use trashcans and wheelbarrows to communicate our social status or identity to others. For Jai and me, our dented cars became a statement in our marriage. Not everything needs to be fixed.”

Pausch is an inspiring figure and an incredible optimist. When diagnosed with cancer, he first asked the doctor, “How long before I die?” And the doctor responded, “You probably have three to six months of good health.” And that reminded Pausch of his time working at Disney. If you ask Disney World employees, “What time does the park close?” they are supposed to answer, “The park is open until 8 p.m.” In other words, the focus is on the opening, not the closing; the time alive, not the impending death.

So he told his wife, “Even if the scan results are bad tomorrow, I just want you to know that it feels great to be alive, and to be here today, alive with you. Whatever news we get about the scans, I’m not going to die when we hear it. I won’t die the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. So today, right now, well, this is a wonderful day. And I want you to know how much I’m enjoying it.”

Randy Pausch is a wise man. He knows not only how to die, but how to live. He says that each of us must decide whether we will be a fun-loving Tigger or a sad-sack Eeyore. Given the choice, whatever the circumstances, Pausch would exhort us to choose Tigger every time.

The particularity of John 14:6 revealing God as Father

2008-07-03T13:19:00.006-05:00

The retreat center I was at last weekend happened to be a Southern Baptist camp, and it had a number of signs with verses like John 3:16 and John 14:6 and the Ten Commandments posted around the grounds. Very intentional and evangelistic of them, of course, that these things are quite visible to any who might visit.

I happened to be glancing at one sign of John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me," and I wondered to myself how non-Christian visitors might respond to that if they were seeing it for the first time. And something occurred to me that I'm not sure I'd thought about before.

John 14:6 is very particular that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus. But does that necessarily mean that no one can have any knowledge or understanding of God apart from Jesus? I'm still playing with this, but it seems significant to me that Jesus is specifically talking about coming to "the Father" here.

Perhaps it's not that Jesus is completely invalidating the religious experience of people in other world religions. John 14:6 doesn't rule out general revelation. Perhaps the emphasis is rather that if you want to know God as a Father, then you need to come through Jesus. That's Christianity's uniqueness among all other religions. Jesus alone reveals God as Father.

I think sometimes Christians misuse John 14:6 to claim that all other religions are completely invalid, or that adherents of other faiths do not know anything of the true God. This probably overstates what John 14:6 actually says. I think Christians, when interacting with other religious traditions, can say something more along the lines of, "I'm glad that you're spiritual and people of faith. It's great that you're committed to your religion, and I don't doubt the authenticity and sincerity of your religious experience. But y'know what? Jesus claims that we can know God as Father, and that's unique. No other religion or faith tradition claims that kind of personal relational intimacy with the divine. And Jesus invites us to know God as Father through following him and believing in him."

Back in the mid-'90s, I remember getting into discussions of postmodernism's critique of propositional truth, and one insight I had was that John 14:6 is not merely a propositional statement about the exclusivity of Jesus. Sometimes Christians wield that verse like a blunt object, as if merely quoting it to people will persuade them of its truth. And I think we need to experience John 14:6 the way the disciples did. Imagine, instead of just hearing it as an isolated verse ripped out of context, you had actually lived and walked with Jesus for three years. You'd heard his teachings, seen his compassion, witnessed his miraculous actions. Only then, after three years of embodied, lived experience, does he say, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." And you'd say, yeah, that makes sense. No one else speaks and lives truth like this Jesus. No one else has this kind of life. Of course Jesus must be the way.

So instead of seeing John 14:6 as a trump card to close the deal and hammer home the uniqueness of Jesus and Christianity, see it as an invitation. Jesus invites us to discover that God is a different kind of God than we might have presumed. Hang out with Jesus for a few years, explore who he is, experience what he does. And then it won't seem so strange that this Jesus claims to be the way.

Yo, Joe! Er, Joseph!

2008-07-02T06:19:00.000-05:00

I'm a child of the '80s, and I grew up during that first generation of deregulated kids' TV that had shows based on toys and product lines like Transformers, G.I. Joe, Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite and all the rest. Well, I just saw the following item in a Christian retail industry e-newsletter:

G.I. Joe creator introduces new additions to Almighty Heroes. When Don Levine created the Original G.I. Joe in 1963, he revolutionized the world of boys’ toys and changed the face of the toy industry forever. With more than $5 billion in worldwide sales, G.I. Joe remains one of the most treasured and collectible action figures in the world. Last year, Levine introduced a new line of action figures called Almighty Heroes, specifically targeted to the Christian marketplace. Continuing on the success of the toy line, this year Almighty Heroes is releasing new action figures: Joshua the Warrior and Joseph, each with their own four-color Bible storybook. In addition to the redesigned Samson muscle suit dress-up for boys, Almighty Heroes is introducing a Queen Esther Dress-Up suit for girls. Another new item to the line is a Goliath blow up bop-bag.

I just looked these up on Christianbook.com, and here are pictures of some of the figures. See if you can guess who they are.

Life After Church

2008-06-30T14:37:00.002-05:00

I'm back home now after speaking at a weekend retreat in Maryland for a church from Virginia. It was a good weekend, though a little draining. I gave a brief introduction and devotion Friday night, and three talks on suburban stuff (Saturday morning, Saturday evening, Sunday morning). Focused a bit on consumerism and materialism, since this church happens to be in the wealthiest county in the U.S., and we talked about ways that Christians can be good neighbors, seek the welfare of their suburbs and be a gift to their community. Plus I did a Saturday afternoon seminar on relationships/dating/singleness/marriage, and we had a separate impromptu open mike Q&A session. So I was pretty worn out by the end. But it was a good time, and I enjoyed getting to know folks. And I was amused that the retreat center had a coffeeshop called HeBrews.

A few months ago I read Life After Church: God’s Call to Disillusioned Christians by Brian Sanders, and I meant to post some quotes from it but didn't get around to it earlier. Most of us at some point have situations where we wonder, "Should I stay or should I go?" Sanders's book is a good resource for helping sort all that out. Here are some nice quotes:

“There are only two healthy choices when it comes to our relationships with a church or ministry. One, we stay in that ministry, fully engaged in its vision and loving everyone involved. Two, we leave to find a place where we can be fully engaged in the mission and vision and love everyone involved. Either choice is good. But too many of us believe there are also choices three and four. Three, we stay but hate it, constantly complaining and feeling unhappy with the vision (or lack of vision) of the leaders and even ourselves in that context. Or four, we leave angry, only to isolate ourselves and actually become less committed to God in the leaving.

“I advocate staying and leaving. Stay if you can do it in a joyful, hopeful way. Stay if you can fully support the ministry and its leaders. If not, leave. But don’t leave God or community or mission. These things make us who we are. They should be a part of our lives because they are rivers of living water and tributaries of God’s grace for us.” (p. 121)

“[A]nother staff supervisor was listening to me talk about how this thing or that thing needed to change. He said, ‘Brian, you may be right in what you’re saying, but you are not right. It’s okay to tip over the apple cart from time to time, but a real follower of Jesus would stick around and help pick up the apples.’” (p. 146)

High gas prices and a return to local parishes

2008-06-26T10:01:00.003-05:00

Several folks pointed me to this article on how high gas prices are affecting suburban life. Here are some snippets:

But life on the distant fringes of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel. The price of propane to heat their spacious house has more than doubled in recent years.

Though Boyle finds city life unappealing, it's now up for reconsideration.

"Living closer in, in a smaller space, where you don't have that commute," he said. "It's definitely something we talk about. Before it was, 'We spend too much time driving.' Now, it's, 'We spend too much time and money driving."'

...In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 a year on gasoline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By April of this year - when gas prices were about $3.60 a gallon - the same household was buying gas at a rate of $3,196 a year, more than doubling consumption in dollar terms in less than five years.

In March, Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles on public roads than in the same month the previous year, a 4.3 percent decrease. It was the sharpest one-month drop since the Federal Highway Administration began keeping records in 1942.

Suburbia was designed around commuter culture. That's how the geographic land-use patterns are generally laid out; neighborhoods presuppose that residents are going to drive, not walk. And commuter culture fragments us across various communities, where we live in one suburb and work in another and go to church in a third. Most commuting is not from suburb to city; it's from suburb to suburb. Suburbia was built in part on the premise of cheap oil, and most of us in suburbia are commuters by default. But high gas prices are challenging that commuter lifestyle.

I'm hopeful that all of this is going to push suburbanites toward a new localism. For Christians, it's a recovery of the parish concept, where we live, work, shop and worship all in the same community instead of driving all over the place. Many folks are finding that driving an hour or more to work is ultimately unsustainable. It eats up too much time, it costs too much gas money, it's bad for the environment.

So not only are people driving less this summer, I think we're also seeing people make larger lifestyle choices. Some, like this article mentions, are relocating to walkable urban communities. Some are moving closer to where they work, whether that's in urban, suburban or exurban areas. Others are finding work closer to home, or are telecommuting from home. As I mention in the commuting chapter of my book, no matter where we live, we can all do our best to reel our lives back in and focus more on our local neighborhoods. Instead of driving twenty or thirty miles to stuff, we can try to live our lives within a ten mile radius, or five miles, or whatever makes sense for our context. I pretty much live the majority of my life within a five-to-seven mile grid, though a few things take me out of that region. For the most part, I stay in my parish and invest my energy and commitments there.

Update: I just came across an article, Will soaring gas prices bring the death of suburbs? that links to a whole slew of other related articles. It summarizes:

What the commentators said
Americans got away with treating “smart growth” as an academic exercise for years, said the Hartford Courant in an editorial. No more. “The prospect of gas going to $5 a gallon and beyond" should force everybody, especially state and local governments, to say no to the sprawl that makes commuters waste fuel getting to work. It's time to “embrace a smart growth policy that encourages workers and companies to move to sites in town centers or on transit lines.”

The market will drive people out of suburbs if nothing else does, said Michael Corkery, Sui-Lee Wee and Nick Timiraos in The Wall Street Journal. Home prices have finally fallen enough to make them affordable again, but $4-a-gallon gas adds hundreds of dollars a year to commuting costs for people in far-flung suburbs. And if gas prices stay this high for a long time, property in some outlying areas will become, in the words of Deutsche Bank analyst Nishu Sood, “effectively worthless.”

The coming death of the suburb is shocking news for baby boomers, said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Attywood blog. “We grew up taught to think that suburbs were like a part of human evolution. I never thought the American Suburb would be the one to go first.”

The exodus from the suburb to cities is no sure thing, said Chermelle D. Edwards and Prashant Gopal in BusinessWeek.com. Cities came roaring back during the real-estate boom, but urban redevelopment came to a screeching halt in many places when prices stopped soaring. And downtown areas still have violent crime and other problems that the well-to-do moved to the suburbs to escape, so not everybody is ready to move back.

The ambiguity of Hello Kitty

2008-06-24T07:30:00.011-05:00

Random item from the book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker. There's a section on Hello Kitty, the billion-dollar brand of the cute little cat with no mouth. There are thousands upon thousands of Hello Kitty licensed products available on the market, from toys and clothing to golf bags and appliances and even a $30,000 diamond-encrusted Hello Kitty wristwatch. Hello Kitty was originally thought to appeal only to young girls, but market research found that a third of Hello Kitty customers were over eighteen and shopping for themselves. So they started producing Hello Kitty lingerie and jewelry.

What's most interesting about Hello Kitty's brand identity is that there's no narrative or backstory behind it. Unlike characters like Snoopy or Mickey Mouse, there are no cartoon stories that give any hint about Hello Kitty's personality. And apparently this is entirely intentional. Hello Kitty stands for nothing, but this also means that Hello Kitty can also stand for anything the consumer wants it to be about.

Walker cites cultural scholar Brian McVeigh, who says that Hello Kitty is about "projectability." Hello Kitty's blank "cryptic" simplicity is "waiting to be interpreted." Hello Kitty could appeal to someone because it suggests nostalgia, or it could seem campy, or it could seem subversive. It could be anything.

The designer didn't know what to do for Hello Kitty's mouth and decided to just go without it. And that may well be the secret to Hello Kitty's success. A spokesman for Hello Kitty's corporate owners, Sanrio, says, "Without the mouth, it is easier for the person looking at Hello Kitty to project their feelings onto the character. The person can be happy or sad together with Hello Kitty." Other commentators observe that Hello Kitty is "an icon that allows viewers to assign whatever meaning to her that they want."

So Hello Kitty is not merely a corporate brand being foisted upon unthinking masses. Hello Kitty is an example of how consumers actually invest meaning into a cultural symbol. So we don't consume just to acquire stuff. And we don't consume merely to buy into a pre-existing brand identity. As we consume, we invest meaning into the corporate brands that we consume and appropriate them for our own purpose and use. We manufacture our own meaning. Consumption can thus be interpreted as a way that we construct our identity and make sense of the world.

Weird. Especially when I just did a quick Google image search for Hello Kitty and came up with:

Hello Kitty Ferrari

Hello Kitty exhaust pipe

Hello Kitty corset

Hello Kitty car seat

Hello Kitty motorcycle

Darth Kitty

Memed: 7 things about me

2008-06-20T08:52:00.001-05:00

Jenell Paris tagged me with this meme.

Here are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

(There was a fifth item, but she and her predecessor both ignored it, so I will as well. Like the telephone game.) Okay. I never know what to say on these things, but here goes:

1. I am a genetic mutant, because I have never had wisdom teeth and will never get any. Dentists have X-rayed my head and have confirmed that I am sorely lacking in wisdom.

2. When I was a kid, during a snowball fight I hit a kid in the nose with the front edge of a snow shovel, and it sliced into his nose and broke the cartilage. I still remember the eruption of blood, his screams of agony, him rushing home and to the hospital. I think this may be the worst thing I've ever done to someone else.

3. One of my favorite childhood books was The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. It's a Newbery-winning puzzle mystery that is amazingly well-crafted and satisfying. Complex but accessible, with a diverse cast of well-developed characters. A modern classic, with humor, suspense, plot twists and surprises. Loved it, loved it, loved it. If you've not read it, pick it up. (And I just realized now that the author's name was Ellen. Maybe the book planted a subliminal thing in me to marry someone named Ellen.)

4. I read comic books. Collected them as a kid, and recently got back into the habit. I blame my colleague Dave Zimmerman for getting me back into them a few years ago when he wrote his book Comic Book Character. I was his editor, so I had to start reading comics again. Y'know, for research and fact-checking. And actually, the comics I enjoy most are the team-ups, like the classic The Brave and the Bold and DC Comics Presents, or the Justice League of America and the Teen Titans, or World's Finest and Superman/Batman. In some ways team-up comics reflect my ecclesiology that we are better together than on our own.

5. Ellen asked me out on our first date. I had seen Aladdin five times in the theatre and told her that it was a great movie. When it came to our college town's second-run theatre, I mentioned to Ellen that it was playing there. She responded, "So when are you going to take me?"

6. I like Hondas. My first car was a white Honda Civic wagon that looked like a rollerskate. But I got in an accident because I was reading a book while driving and totaled it. My next car was a white Honda Accord. After we had Josiah, we got a white Honda Odyssey minivan.

7. I'm starting PhD work at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School this fall. I was accepted several months ago, but I don't think I've mentioned it on this blog yet. It's a PhD in educational studies, and I'm hoping to do some sociology of religion and theology of culture through it. Classes in this particular program are modular, two weeks at a time, and about half of the people in the program are working professionals, some of whom fly in for each course. So I'll be able to stay on at IVP - I'll likely be working on the program slowly. We'll see what's manageable. I was looking into various other options, like Edinburgh's program in media and theology, but I couldn't just uproot my family to head off to Scotland, so I pretty much limited my choices to the Chicagoland area. Peter Cha was my mentor for a leadership development program, and he encouraged me to look into this program at TEDS. I got in, so here I go!

People to tag. Let's see . . . how about:

1. My wife, Ellen, at Team Hsu
2. Fellow IVP editor Dave Zimmerman at Loud Time
3. Another IVP colleague, Lisa Rieck, at Strangely Dim
4. Yet another colleague, Jeff Reimer, at Mode of Expression
5. Publishing industry friend Jana Riess at The Review Revolution
6. Ashleigh the IVP super-fan at Being Redefined
7. Caryn Rivadeneira at Mama's Got a Fake ID

Kingdom Sightings: Grace and Peace

2008-06-18T10:14:00.002-05:00

Christianity Today just posted my latest column from the June issue. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Grace and Peace

How a simple salutation points us toward a new society.

Al Hsu | posted 6/18/2008 09:10AM

I'm a book geek, so one of my hobbies is collecting autographed books. Some I acquire through my work in book publishing; others I find at bookshops. I now have more than 500 signed volumes, comprising authors from Sue Grafton and Walter Wangerin to Anne Lamott and John Stott.

Authors sign their books in myriad ways. Jimmy Carter's signature is a modest "J Carter." Max Lucado's is barely recognizable—what might be an "ML__." Calvin Miller used calligraphy. Eugene Peterson signed off with "the peace of the Lord." J. I. Packer rotated through Bible verses, from 2 Timothy 3:14–17 for a book about Scripture to Psalm 46 for Knowing God. Chuck Colson chose Romans 12:2, but more baffling was his inscription, which looked vaguely like "Burm gd."

I especially treasure signatures from those who are no longer with us. My former Wheaton professor Bob Webber signed several books to me with Dominus Vobiscum ("the Lord be with you"). Spencer Perkins wrote, "In the hope of racial healing." Rich Mullins autographed CDs with "Be God's!" Stanley Grenz inscribed a theology text with "May our Lord guide your steps." And one of my most memorable dedications came from Madeleine L'Engle, who signed my copy of A Wrinkle in Time with "Tesser well."

But my favorite phrase was inscribed by Michael Card, who borrowed the apostle Paul's signature expression: "Grace and peace." This greeting is found in some form at the opening of all of Paul's epistles, most commonly, "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ."

[The full article is available here. I've also created a parking space for my columns here.]

The urbanization of suburbia

2008-06-18T08:16:00.004-05:00

My friend Helen Lee tipped me off to this CNN.com article about the changing face of suburbia. Suburbia is urbanizing, and the urban poor are becoming the suburban poor as people are priced out of gentrified urban neighborhoods. And suburban neighborhoods are seeing decay and decline because of foreclosures and the weak economy.

Here's a significant sign of the times: "some homeowners not only cut their own grass but also trim the yards of vacant homes on their streets, hoping to deter gangs and criminals from moving in."

Also very interesting is how individualistic suburban single-family housing is being repurposed in light of changing economic realities:

. . . Nelson also estimates that in 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes that will not be left vacant in a suburban wasteland but instead occupied by lower classes who have been driven out of their once affordable inner-city apartments and houses.
The so-called McMansion, he said, will become the new multi-family home for the poor.
"What is going to happen is lower and lower-middle income families squeezed out of downtown and glamorous suburban locations are going to be pushed economically into these McMansions at the suburban fringe," said Nelson. "There will probably be 10 people living in one house."
In Shaun Yandell's neighborhood, this has already started to happen. Houses once filled with single families are now rented out by low-income tenants. Yandell speculates that they're coming from nearby Sacramento, where the downtown is undergoing substantial gentrification, or perhaps from some other area where prices have gotten too high.

So many books, so little time

2008-06-16T13:34:00.004-05:00

This past weekend, I took Josiah with me to an annual used book sale and we picked up a box of books. And then we went to the library and checked out a bunch more. And then we stopped at a comic book shop for some comics. And the next day, a Barnes & Noble, and another used book shop. That's my idea of a great weekend.

Now that it's summer, I'm ignoring my piles of serious non-fiction books and catching up on some fiction. I just read Gregory Maguire's Wicked, which was pretty dark and not nearly as fun as the musical version (I just got the soundtrack for Father's Day). I skimmed through For One More Day by Mitch Albom - I expected it to be kind of fluffy but it was surprisingly moving. I read through Stephenie Meyer's sci-fi novel The Host, about human survivors of an alien invasion. The aliens, called "souls," physically implant themselves into human hosts, but sometimes the human's consciousness isn't completely erased, leading to interesting situations of two beings inhabiting the same body (and all sorts of potential for unusual love triangles and quadrilaterals). I've read Meyer's Twilight series of vampire novels, which are not my usual cup of tea but came highly recommended by a friend, so I got into them. And I just cracked David Guterson's new novel The Other. He's best known for his Snow Falling on Cedars, and I've continued to follow his work.

Of the making of books there is no end. Since it's summer and I'm lazy, the following is a repost from IVP's Behind the Books blog from a few weeks ago.

--------
The June 2 issue of Publishers Weekly reports that the number of new books has shot up to over 400,000 a year, but a quarter of these, well over 100,000 of them, are print-on-demand titles, most of which are self-published. The stats:

In 2002:
Traditionally published books: 215,138
Print-on-demand books: 32,639
Total: 247,777

2007 (projected):
Traditional: 276,649
POD: 134,773
Total: 411,422

And if you look at religion books in particular, it's grown from 12,253 new religion titles in 2002 to 18,956 in 2007. (Perhaps 6000 or so of these are from specifically evangelical Christian publishers.) No wonder none of us can keep up with all the new books out there.

The same issue of PW also reports the following on what influences people's book purchases:

60% are swayed by recommendations by friends or family
52% are swayed by cover art
49% are swayed by reviews
35% are swayed by a blurb/endorsement on the cover

Also, 43% of people go into bookstores looking for a specific book, and 77% make additional purchases while looking for a specific book.

This is interesting to me because I've been wondering how many people care about endorsements. I can only think of one instance when I've bought a book because of an endorsement on the back (a blurb by Anne Lamott on the book Expecting Adam by Martha Beck). But I've picked up countless books because I saw them mentioned on people's blogs (which could count as either friends' recommendations or reviews). What makes you buy a book? Do blurbs matter?

A Native American understanding of the Christian story

2008-06-13T08:19:00.003-05:00

One of the other presenters on my panel at Envision was Randy Woodley. I worked with Randy on the IVP edition of his book Living in Color: Embracing God's Passion for Ethnic Diversity. He's currently finishing up a PhD at Asbury Seminary, and he's part of the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies, working to develop and mentor Native North American Christians. Randy talked about how American Christianity has been historically colonialist and imperialist, often obliterating Native cultures in the name of Christian mission. But Randy is part of a new movement working to recontextualize Christianity in thoroughly indigenous ways, to the benefit of both Native and non-Native communities.

For example, Randy notes that the typical Western evangelical understanding of the Christian faith usually goes something like this:

I believe in God because I am a Christian. I read my Bible and help build God's kingdom as a missionary, sharing the gospel of salvation with the heathen. I tell them to repent from their sins and to be born again because of God's great love for them.

Randy points out that each of those bold-faced words is loaded with all sorts of baggage and connotations that are a barrier for many (Native and not). But here's an indigenous, contextualized version of the Christian narrative:

I believe in the Great Mystery because I am a follower of Jesus. I read the scriptures and help build the community of the Creator as an ambassador, sharing the good news of healing to the unversed. I tell them they can turn around from failing and to follow Jesus because of Creator's great love for them.

Some folks might think that this version isn't the gospel. Well, it might not be the Christian story they're familiar with, but I'd much rather have people hear version #2 and follow Jesus as a result instead of rejecting Jesus because they only heard version #1! I'm glad that Randy and others are doing this kind of work. All of us work in particular contexts, and every context demands fresh thinking and approaches.

[BTW, I connected with Todd Hiestand while at Envision, and we chatted a bit about our upcoming suburban church seminar in Philadelphia in August. He also has some notes about Envision here.]

At Envision 08: "us for all of us"

2008-06-10T20:48:00.000-05:00

After a cancelled flight on Sunday, I finally made it to Princeton on Monday afternoon for the Envision 08 conference. I was bummed about missing some of the opening sessions, but it's been great to be here. I've been catching up with people I know and meeting new folks that I've heard of but had not yet met in person.

Last night's plenary consisted of five presenters in something of a "preach-off." One of the speakers was Soong-Chan Rah, professor at North Park Theological Seminary, and he gave a preview of his forthcoming book The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (releasing spring 09). He talked about how the church in Acts 15 was shifting from a culturally Jewish church to a majority Gentile church, and that the North American church today is likewise transitioning from a predominantly white context into an increasingly diverse, multiethnic world. Just as Philip Jenkins has chronicled in The Next Christendom that the future of the church is in the global south of Africa, Asia and Latin America, so to is globalization and immigration transforming the face of North American Christianity.

Soong-Chan used to be a pastor in the Boston area, and people would ask him about how spiritually dead things were there. He'd respond that the church was thriving in Boston - the number of churches there had doubled in the last three decades. But much of that growth was from immigrant congregations, many of which worshipped in languages other than English. So it's not that the church is declining - it's just that the face of American evangelicalism is changing away from a predominantly white culture.

A recurring theme here has been that the gospel must be good news for both the individual and for society. Presenters have talked a lot about shalom theology and seeking the welfare of everybody, especially the marginalized and alienated. We've unpacked what it looks like to seek justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. It's not enough to have a theology of personal salvation; we must also live out a commitment to care for the neighbor, the stranger, the enemy.

This afternoon I was on a panel about the future of the church. Eight of us presented in a pecha-kucha format where we showed twenty slides for twenty seconds each. I've never prepped so much for a six-minute, forty-second talk. It's much harder to put together than the usual PowerPoint presentation; it's really more of a performance art form where image and word go together in a very disciplined, structured format. My presentation was on the missional suburban church, and others talked about different corners of the church, whether overseas or in the cities or the Native American experience or the emergent church.

A common theme was the importance of understanding our context. Several of us talked about needing to understand our history, the legacy of empire and colonialism, and while all of us face challenges, there were signs of hope in every case. So it was tremendously encouraging to hear these reports from other corners of contemporary Christianity and hear how communities are working together to be heralds of the love of God and the peace of Jesus Christ to the world.

During the Q&A, I plugged Andy Crouch's Culture Making and cited something that Andy said about how in today's society, almost all of us are like immigrants, and all of us are missionaries. And I extended that and said that all of us also need to be cultural anthropologists. We need to study and explore the context that we've been called to inhabit and minister to.

Later on another speaker observed that one of the major shifts that the church needs to make is to stop thinking in terms of "us vs. them" and to think more in terms of "us for all of us," that we can partner and collaborate with our neighbors and fellow citizens for the sake of the common good. It's a recovery of our Christian tradition of charity and social justice, like our 19th-century heritage of abolition, hospitals, schools and human rights. We can likewise advocate for justice, health care and education, work to alleviate global poverty, fight sex trafficking and build bridges for reconciliation in our own generation.

Tonight's closing service honored activist John Perkins for a lifetime of work for civil rights and justice, community development and racial reconciliation. Conference co-director Lisa Harper also cited Andy Crouch, who said of John Perkins, "It is funny how little known his name is, but in terms of shaping American evangelicalism as it comes into the twenty-first century, he is right up there with Billy Graham." (Lisa has a new book, Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican or Democrat, coming out soon that references this.) The conference named a new award in his name, and Perkins then gave some remarks. He said that he was very encouraged by Envision, that this generation of motivated and mobilized Christians is in some ways the fulfillment of the legacy that he was working for back in the '60s.

This was the first Envision conference, and the conference organizers told me that they hope to hold it again every two years or so. I was honored to be a part of this inaugural one, and I wish them the best as they plan for the future.

The Economist: Suburbs are the new cities

2008-06-05T07:01:00.005-05:00

Adam Graber tipped me off to a good article in The Economist about how American suburbs are becoming more like city centers, for good and for bad. Population trends continue to highlight the new importance of suburbia. Since 1990, the city of Chicago itself grew by about 50,000 people, while the surrounding suburbs grew by over a million. Suburbs are new centers of industry and commerce, and they are reflecting greater ethnic and economic diversity. Some excerpts:

As they swell, the suburbs are changing. Perhaps none ever quite resembled the colourless domestic enclaves popularised by 1970s television programmes such as “The Brady Bunch”; now, they look nothing at all like them. America's suburbs are ethnically and demographically mixed—sometimes more so than its cities. Many are less dormitories than economic powerhouses.

According to William Frey, a demographer, the white population of big-city suburbs grew by 7% between 2000 and 2006. In the same period the suburban Asian population grew by 16%, the black population by 24% and the Hispanic population by an astonishing 60%. Many immigrants to America now move directly to the suburbs without passing through established urban ghettos. Having conquered suburbia, ethnic-minority groups are now swiftly infiltrating the more distant “exurbs”.

The most important reason people are moving to the suburbs is economic: that is where the jobs are. . . . In a forthcoming report, Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, calculates that 45% of the jobs in America's 100 biggest metropolitan areas are found more than ten miles from the downtown core. Between 1998 and 2004 fully three-quarters of all new jobs emerged in this area. Many of these new positions were filled by local people, who were delighted to drop their long commutes to traditional city centres. But more and more Americans wake up in one suburb and go to work in another. Others, including many of Google's Bay Area employees, wake up in a city and go to work in a suburb.

But as new suburbs become new cities, old suburbs become old cities, with worries and problems of aging infrastructure and increasing crime. Those of us who would seek the welfare of the suburbs (and the whole metropolis) can see suburbia as heralding new opportunities for ministry and outreach as well as greater complexities and challenges.

Next week I'll be at the Envision 08 conference in Princeton on "Gospel, Politics and the Future," and I'm speaking in one of the plenary sessions as part of a panel discussion on the future of the church. I'm going to talk briefly about the missional suburban church and how suburban Christians are grappling with changing realities. Should be a good conference. If you'll be there, say hi!

What Christians can learn from Broadway musicals

2008-06-02T09:11:00.004-05:00

This past weekend for our anniversary, Ellen and I saw the musical Wicked, which was very well done. It was a fascinating homage to The Wizard of Oz, doing a bit of postmodern deconstruction of the traditional story but also reconstructing the narrative in such a way that created a great cultural artifact of its own. Ellen and I love musical theatre - we've seen Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Joseph, The Lion King and others. Below is an article I wrote for a denominational magazine some years ago about what Christians can learn from Broadway musicals, especially in terms of worship.

What Christians Can Learn from Broadway

by Albert Hsu

Balcony seating, third row. For three hours I sat transfixed as the stage before me was transformed into 19th century France. The set itself seemed alive as the actors personified Victor Hugo’s grand themes: poverty, revolution, law, mercy, faith, hope, love, life and afterlife. At the finale, the company sang a prophetic chorus with eschatological imagery anticipating the day that “They will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord / They will walk behind the plowshare / They will put away the sword.”

This was no mere musical. For me, Les Misérables was a worship experience and perhaps even a divine encounter.

I exited the theatre exhilarated in emotion and stirred in my spirit. I was convinced that God had met me in a powerful way during the show. What was it about this musical that brought tears to my eyes? Was it the bishop’s forgiveness of a desperate criminal? Fantine’s sacrificial love for her daughter? Eponine’s tragic, unrequited love for Marius? Valjean’s perseverance and commitment to truth and justice? Was it the epic story, the magnificent music, the fabulous set or the rotating stage?

Certainly the content of the show was in many ways theologically sound. The God depicted in Les Misérables is the God who redeems that which seems worthless in the world’s eyes, a God who accepts repentance, forgives sins and answers prayer. On one level, Les Miz can be construed as a worship event in that its content was largely orthodox and instilled in me a greater sense of gratitude to our Savior. I feel no qualms about calling “worshipful” a production that called me to a deeper praise of God.

But what of those musicals with seemingly flawed or incomplete depictions of God? What are we to make of Jesus Christ Superstar, for instance, or Godspell? While Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat does an admirable job of following the Genesis narrative, it neglects to mention God as the author of Joseph’s dreams. Is it then deficient and unworthy of Christian appreciation? Or what of dramas without an explicitly Christian or spiritual theme—Phantom of the Opera, for instance, or Evita or Miss Saigon?

Some Christian theatre aficionados may spiritualize these plays by emphasizing songs like Miss Saigon’s “Why God Why” as an attempt to make sense of the Vietnam War. Perhaps Eva Peron can be envisioned as a Christ figure, laying down her life for Argentina. Such rationalization seems like a stretch.

But we need not hunt too far to justify a Broadway musical as a worship experience. It is my contention that the medium of musical theatre itself points us to the worship of God.

The Power of Drama

Live stage is one of the few arenas left in society where a drama may be actually experienced and not just viewed. To see a drama enacted on stage brings the story to life in a way far more compelling than watching a movie. At a movie, we are only voyeurs of mere images spliced together on a silver screen, separated from the actors by both time and space. But on stage, those are real live people before us! They breathe the same auditorium air that we do. They hear the same orchestra that we hear. We share the same time and space as the actors, so in a very real way, we participate with them in the drama of the moment.

Thus, live theatre provides a greater sense of authenticity in performance than film or television. There are no retakes on stage. If you make a mistake, it’s there for all to see and you have no choice but to play on. When I saw Joseph, in one scene the narrator began singing the wrong verse. She actually said, “Oops!” and her hand flew to her mouth to cover an embarrassed grin.

When the narrator broke character, the audience saw her not just as an actress on stage, but a real person like any of us. We chuckled with her and shared her momentary discomfiture and chagrin. Such an occasion resonates with our experience and validates our humanity. It reminds us that all are fallen, no matter how polished a facade we might wish to project. While we may not like being reminded of our faults, we can take comfort in the fact that we are not alone in the human condition.

And so it is in real life, that we don’t have the luxury of reshooting scenes or editing out mistakes. That’s why all the world’s a stage—including our worship. Not only in the sense that what goes on in the context of a worship community is “rehearsed” and “performed,” but also that both worship leaders and worshippers are authentic, real-life people who bring our human foibles and propensity to err to the worship experience.

Furthermore, live theatre invokes the senses in ways a movie or TV show cannot. After all, life is not merely visual and auditory, but tactile and olfactory as well. We not only see real smoke and mist waft across the stage—we sniff the air and rub our noses. We feel the wind of a helicopter’s rotors. We draw back when a chandelier plummets from the ceiling and recoil when fireworks are detonated on stage, afraid that the heat will singe our eyebrows.

All this points to the poverty of our worship when our senses are not fully engaged. We do not experience life in one dimension, but three. We are to love God with both minds and bodies. How sad it is, then, that the worship we offer our God rarely involves anything other than what is mouthed or seen.

The Drama of Worship

Many strands of post-Reformation Christianity largely eliminated the use of the senses in worship. Zwingli whitewashed the walls of the churches, believing the artistic imagery of frescoes and paintings to be unbiblical, even demonic. The burning of incense and the lighting of candles were thrown out as Catholic superstition.

But it was not always so with worship. Think of the pageantry of the Old Testament, where God’s people would rehearse God’s salvific acts at feasts and festivals. They would re-create the Passover and reenact the Exodus in a drama that involved the whole community. They sang and danced to the songs of Moses and Miriam in celebration with harp, lyre and cymbals. No dry Scripture reading, this; the Israelites physically re-experienced God’s salvation anew with each dramatized remembrance.

The passion plays of the Middle Ages similarly enfleshed God’s historic activity in contemporary incarnation. Through actors’ mime and drama, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus took on new life. In this way, Jesus walked not only Nazareth and Jerusalem, but London and Paris as well.

This is something else appealing about live drama—the possibility of interaction. Joseph’s Pharaoh can toss a scarf to a fan in the front row. Hamlet may leave the stage and wander up and down the aisles. This dynamic may explain the popularity of Renaissance fairs, where modern suburbanites mingle with medieval minstrels and troubadours. We are somehow fascinated by the opportunity to be insulted by a twelfth-century peasant.

Similarly, live drama can re-create for us the experience of being with Jesus. Our worship is impoverished when we think of worship as merely singing a few songs or reading a few verses. It can instead be a living encounter with the Word who became flesh, not merely a voice.

We must remember that Jesus was a true human, whose physical hands touched leprous flesh. Healing and restoration came through his spittle on blind eyes. Life returned to Lazarus when his dead ears heard Jesus call him forth. This Jesus activated his followers’ taste buds by feeding them loaves and fishes, bread and wine. He taught us to taste and see that the Lord is good.

The elements of the Lord’s Supper are by their very nature dramatic and sensory. We do not merely have an intellectual remembrance of Jesus’ work, but somehow, through tasting the bread and drinking the cup, we enter into the experience of those who ate and drank with Jesus.

I once saw a musical version of the book of Acts. (I regret that I was only able to watch a video instead of experience the live performance.) One significant element was that a jacuzzi-type basin of water was placed at the front of the stage. At every juncture of the book of Acts where a baptism occurred, the actors went right into the water and baptized one another. Those at Pentecost, the Ethiopian eunuch, Saul of Tarsus, Cornelius and his household, the Philippian jailer—all came out of the musical dripping wet! I can only imagine what it was like for those sitting in the front row, to catch some of the spray and to experience in some small way the baptismal joy of the early church.

Perhaps such an appreciation for drama can be rediscovered and applied in the local church in ways more creative than just the occasional skit. Indeed, worship could be as colorful as Joseph’s coat and as profoundly moving as the music of the night.

At a church I once attended, a worship service took place where a person walked around the sanctuary wearing a sign that read “GOD”. The congregation stared in hushed awe; even children stopped fidgeting. All had a heightened awareness that God was in their midst.

This symbolization of the physical presence of God during worship could not have been communicated by mere text or song; it required a dramatic representation. If Broadway has anything to teach Christians, it is that God longs to encounter us in drama, as authentic persons, through all our senses.

And Les Miz points us to a day where somewhere beyond the barricade lies a world we long to see—a world where the lion lies down with the lamb, where every tear is wiped away, where we will experience the incomparable drama of all creation praising our triune God, crying “Holy, holy, holy.”

I, for one, want a front row seat.

From thesis title to book title

2008-05-30T14:23:00.002-05:00

I was browsing through PhD Comics, aka "Piled Higher and Deeper," a comic strip for grad students, and came across this strip about the thesis title. Here's the sequence of components:

1. witty catch-phrase: "Makes people think you're hip and culturally relevant. Only marginally related to the actual thesis? No problem."

2. the colon: "Can't decide what to title your thesis? Use a colon!"

3. length-enhanced superlative verbiage with prolixity: "Nothing says 'academic rigor' like a long string of scientific-sounding terminology and fancy buzzwords."

4. in/of/for: "A good preposition tells your readers, 'Hey, this is not just a futile exercise.'"

5. obscure topic few people care about: "Sad, but true."

How accurate is this analysis? Well, as a case in point, my own master's thesis was titled "Singles at the Crossroads: A Practical Theology of Singleness for Generation X," which is not nearly as obscure as many thesis titles out there. It was accepted for publication by IVP, and after about fifty pages were added and at least a hundred more were cut, it was eventually published as Singles at the Crossroads: A Fresh Perspective on Christian Singleness. It's unusual for a book to be published with its original title, but I had intentionally titled my project as building on the work of Rodney Clapp's excellent Families at the Crossroads. And we just scheduled a book for 2009 with the title Marriage at the Crossroads, so the series continues!

Publishing wing-dings and the Christian literati

2008-05-28T06:21:00.002-05:00

Last night I went to an informal wing-ding that some friends host every year during the Religious Book Trade Exhibit trade show here in the Chicago area. It's attended by various publishing professionals, with book publishers and magazine editors, authors and agents, publicists and reviewers, from near and far. It's always a good time to schmooze and mingle, to connect and catch up with friends, hear industry tidbits, plug and promote books, maybe pitch a book idea to someone.

I chatted with one of our authors, Father Albert Haase, who will be signing his new book Coming Home to Your True Self: Leaving the Emptiness of False Attractions at RBTE today. He gave us an enthusiastic endorsement for Mary Poplin's forthcoming Finding Calcutta about what she learned from her time with Mother Teresa. Haase had served as a spiritual director for Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity for some years, and was delighted with Poplin's book. Fr. Albert asked me what to expect at his booksigning and what to do.

"It's pretty simple," I said. "People will line up, and you greet them and sign your book and give it to them."

"How much do I engage them?" he asked. "How long do I talk to them?"

"Depends on the line. If there are just a few people, you can take longer to talk with them and tell them about your book. But if there are a lot of people waiting in line, then you should probably move them along a little faster."

"Ah, just like confession!"

Ellen and I brought our kids, as we do every year, and it was fun to see Elijah hugging and dancing with editors and publishers. I'm sure every industry has its confabs and gatherings, but there's something particularly invigorating about being in a crowded living room with a bunch of book geeks, all talking about a great new book or a newly discovered author that knocks their socks off. I love being part of this world.

This isn't about the wing-ding, but this is an excuse to link to a few publishing-related items. If you have an idea for a book, first go to The Rejecter's blog to see why editors and agents reject proposals. And just for the heck of it, here's an amusing video that one of my editor friends forwarded me recently. It's from Dennis Cass, the author of Head Case, about marketing realities surrounding the release of the paperback edition of his book.

Deliver Us from Me-Ville on quiet time and loud time

2008-05-26T06:13:00.003-05:00

My colleague Dave Zimmerman, who shares an office wall with me, just wrote a new book Deliver Us from Me-Ville about escaping self-absorption. (I find it amusing and ironic that the inescapable subject category on the back by the bar code happens to be "Personal Growth.") One part of the book contrasts the traditional Christian emphasis on "quiet time" (personal devotional time with God) with what Dave calls "loud time," which he highlights as "the devotional value of time spent throughout the day in the company of others."

This line jumped out at me: "By privileging solitude - 'quiet time' - over fellowship as a means of identifying God at work, we privilege our own instincts over the instincts of others."

In other words, one of the dangers of personal quiet time is that it's inherently individualistic. Left to our own devices, we risk running astray and subjectively misconstruing our relationship with God in terms that merely benefit our own preconceived ideas. We need community to temper our individualism, to provide a corrective to isolation and self-absorption. Of course, there is a place for both solitude and community. Dave highlights Bonhoeffer's famous quotes on this: "Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. . . . Let him who is not in community beware of being alone."

I suspect that personality differences also play a role in this. I remember when Dave started his Loud Time blog, and I thought it was a cool name and idea, as an alternative to evangelical quiet time. He said something about how Christian spirituality tends to prioritize the contemplative introvert who encounters God in solitude and silence, leaving extroverts at a loss as to how to connect with God in ways that fit them.

So I was interested to see Nancy Reeves's new book Spirituality for Extroverts (And Tips for Those Who Love Them). Reeves says that some of us are Tiggers, and some of us are Owls. Owls are comfortable with silent prayer retreats, while Tiggers might feel unspiritual because they don't connect with God as well that way. Some of us are contemplatives, others of us are activists. We need each other to temper our own tendencies and to keep us in balance.

I've greatly appreciated the literature of the spiritual formation movement (especially of my author David Benner, as well as other books in our Formatio line). But I confess that it does not come naturally to me. I've never had anything remotely approaching a consistent (or even occasional!) daily "quiet time." But I've been glad that even contemplatives understand that spiritual life is sometimes activist and sometimes communal, not just private and personal. There's a place for both quiet time and loud time.

The candidates and our “we”

2008-05-23T08:14:00.003-05:00

At the Duke Center for Reconciliation gathering last week, during our closing worship time, a black pastor from Texas challenged us to rethink our “we.” Who is our “we”? Who is our beloved community? And he used the three presidential candidates as illustrations of how society defines the “we.”

John McCain’s age raises questions of generational divides. Is he too old? And do we identify as young or old? Boomer or Xer? Over 65 or under 30? Is that our “we”?

Hillary Clinton’s identity has raised questions of gender. Is the media sexist? And do we identify primarily along gender lines? Is that our “we”?

Barack Obama’s biracial and crosscultural background has raised questions of racial and ethnic identity. Do we identify our community on the basis of race? Is that our “we”?

Obviously all of these factors are significant and unavoidable. But if we are Christians and people of reconciliation, our identities and communities must transcend all of these dimensions and point to a larger reality. Our churches ought to be intergenerational, gender interdependent, and multiethnic and multicultural. Such is the kingdom of God, where the beloved community brings down dividing walls between slave and free, male and female, Jew and Gentile.

Free preview of Andy Crouch's Culture Making

2008-05-20T13:22:00.008-05:00

I've just been going over the final pageproofs for the upcoming book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch. This is an amazing book. It has shaped much of my thinking in the past few years as I've been working with Andy on it. It's a paradigm-shifting big-idea book that talks about how we need to move from condemning, critiquing, copying and consuming culture and instead create and cultivate culture. We don't change culture by critiquing it; the only way to change culture is to create culture.

The book is about to go to the printer and will be in print later this summer. In the meantime, you can get a free preview of the book at IVP's website. The first few chapters are available there now, and several more chapters will be released in a few weeks, for a total of the first 100 pages of the book. And we invite you to share the PDF with others.

If you're on Facebook, you can become a fan of the book at the Culture Making page. Here's a note from Andy Crouch that he posted on the page:

The release of Culture Making is just over two months away. It will be really fun to have the book out there to start lots of conversations about how we can become cultivators and creators of culture, not just critics and consumers of it.

But you don't have to wait until this summer to start reading the book and to start those conversations. InterVarsity Press has taken the unusual step of releasing, not just the introduction or the first few pages, but the first 40 pages of the book, online, in PDF form, for free. (Yes, they are awesome--and thanks to John Holland for originally suggesting this.) And in a few weeks we'll release another three chapters.

You can download the PDF from
http://www.ivpress.com/title/exc/3394-sample-1.pdf

Read. Enjoy. But there's one other thing I'd like to ask you to do. Find at least one way to share this PDF with others. Post about it on Facebook. Blog about it. Forward the link--or the whole PDF file--to your small group, your pastor, your six best friends. (Yes, you can do this completely legally--see the last page for the details on what you can and cannot do with this PDF.)

Then, if you don't mind, post on the wall at Culture Making to tell the rest of us what you thought and what your friends thought of these opening pages.

Bon appetit!

Andy