My latest: a plea to teach college students about God, in The Raised Hand

The Raised Hand is a Substack run by the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and edited by Daniel G. Hummel of the Lumen Center (Madison, WI) and Upper House (serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison). This school year they’ve been running monthly essays written by Christian academics asked to respond to the following prompt: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”

Yesterday they published my entry, titled “The Knowledge of God.” Here’s how it opens:

I am tempted to begin by saying that the first thing every university and college student needs to learn is how to read. But I’ve written about that plenty elsewhere, and you can’t throw a stone on the internet without hitting someone writing about the crisis of literacy on campus and in the public schools. Since I’m a theologian, moreover, there’s some low-hanging fruit (no pun intended) just waiting for me to reach up and take it.

Here's my real answer: If learning is about knowing, then every college student needs, through teaching, to come to know God. Another way to say this is that every student needs to learn how to pray.

Click here to read the whole thing. Thanks to Daniel for the invitation. And thanks to Sara Hendren, who already read and kindly boosted the piece. It was a fun one to write. Watch for a follow-up podcast conversation (sometime in the next week or two) that discusses the essay, also hosted by The Raised Hand.

Second naivete

Probably the most important element of C. S. Lewis’s conversion, at least in his telling of it, was that for a definite period of time between atheism and Christian faith he lived as a theist without any expectation of reward or afterlife. He knew from experience that one could believe in God, relate to God, obey the will of God just because; that is, just because God is God and one is not. Afterward, believing in the promises of Christ came with a certain sweetness but also a certain lightness or liberty: he did not feel compelled to believe, the way “God” and “pie in the sky” are conflated for so many people, but free to believe. The freedom lay in the gut-level knowledge that grace was grace, neither earned nor automatic.

I feel similarly about historical events reported in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. For a definite period of time it was not important to me whether this or that discrete happening in Scripture “really” occurred, or occurred in the precise way reported, or occurred at the time and place reported. Perhaps Job or Daniel or Esther were pious fictions; perhaps the Israelites came out of Egypt but in some far less magnificent manner; perhaps David’s many origin stories were folk tales “rightly” remembered and surely worth retelling but not exactly what we would today judge to be “historically accurate.”

My faith was not threatened by these possibilities; it still is not. I am not and never have been any kind of strict inerrantist. If it turns out that, like a nineteenth-century painting of a days-long battle, stories in Scripture are not historical in the way we use that term or measure reportage today, the sum total of my response remains a shrug of the shoulders. If you tell me that Acts and Galatians’ chronologies are finally irreconcilable, I will do well if I suppress my yawn.

As I said, though, for a period of time this was my default setting: “The following ‘historical’ passage I am about to read from the canon may or may not be ‘historical’ at all.” A giant if invisible question mark floated above the text whenever I read, heard, or taught the Bible. Let’s say this ran for about a decade, from 18 to 28 years old, roughly my undergraduate, Master’s, and beginning doctoral years.

Then a funny thing happened. The default setting slowly shifted, mostly without my knowing it. I saw firsthand how the historical-critical sausage is made. I digested a good deal of it for myself. And I came to see that the confidence with which its assured results were delivered was entirely unearned.

Lowered confidence—from dogmatic pronouncements to measured statements of relative probability based on the available evidence (often minimal to begin with)—does not mean biblical criticism should be ignored, much less that it’s all wrong. But what it does mean, or at least has meant for me, is that it need not be treated with submission, docility, deference, or fear. The study of Scripture, whether secular or spiritual, is a humanistic enterprise. It involves interpretation, wisdom, good judgment, good humor, humility, and dispassionate assessment. Very nearly every one of the questions it poses admits of numerous good-faith answers, just as very nearly every one of its considered conclusions admits of good-faith disputation. It is healthy when it tolerates and nurtures dissent, unhealthy when majority positions calcify into dogmas that define the well-policed borders of “serious” scholarship. The one thing to hang your hat on in this field is that something “everybody knows” today will be contested, qualified, replaced, or surpassed in the next generation.

With the following result: The question mark has, for me, dissolved into thin air. I now read the Pastorals as Saint Paul’s without a troubled scholarly conscience; I read Acts as penned in the early 60s by Saint Luke; I read Daniel and Esther and Ruth as historical characters; the same goes for the patriarchs and Moses and Aaron and Miriam and Joshua. It all happened, just as the text says it did. Not because I’m ignorant of research that suggests otherwise; not because I’m a fundamentalist who needs it to be so, lest my faith’s house of cards tumble to the ground. No, it’s because I know what it’s like to be a Christian who supposed otherwise, whose faith was as untroubled then as it is now. I’ve weighed the evidence and found it, for the most part, wanting. Wanting, that is, in terms of compelling my and all others’ uncritical obedience to purported academic consensus. (Reports of consensus being always greatly exaggerated in any case.) I could be wrong. But I’m not worried about it.

Most of all, I couldn’t care less what some expert in the field thinks about my so-called naivete. If he wags his finger at me and cites the latest peer-reviewed journal, I’ll just roll my eyes. This time I won’t be able to stifle the yawn his pronouncements so dearly deserve.

The metaphysics of historical criticism

1. I, the historical critic, exist.

2. That is to say, my mind exists.

3. My mind is not deceived by a demon.

4. My mind is not self-deceived.

5. My mind has access to external reality.

6. External reality exists.

7. External reality is apt to be known by a mind like mine (and by other rational beings, should they exist).

8. I am a rational being, in virtue of my mind’s existence and capacity to know external reality.

9. My mind’s access to external reality via my rational nature is epistemically reliable.

10. Natural languages are, likewise, a reliable vehicle of rational pursuit of knowledge of external reality.

11. Natural languages are a reliable vehicle of communication between rational beings.

12. At least, that is, between rational beings of a shared nature.

13. There are rational beings of a shared nature; other minds exist besides my own.

14. (I can know this—I am in a position to know it, with something like certainty or at least confidence—just as I can know the foregoing propositions and many others like them.)

15. Mental life is linguistic and vice versa; human minds, or rational persons, communicate through natural languages.

16. I can (come to) know what other persons think, believe, intend, hope, or love.

17. I can (come to) know such things through many means, one of which is the use of a natural language.

18. Natural languages can be translated without substantial loss of meaning.

19. Rational users of natural languages are capable of mastering more than one such language.

20. Such mastery is possible not only of living languages but of dead languages.

21. Such mastery is possible not only through speaking but also through reading and writing.

22. Written language is not different in kind than spoken language.

23. The living word can be written down and understood through the eyes alone, without use of the ears or of spoken language.

24. The written word offers reliable access to the life—norms, beliefs, hopes, fears, behaviors, expectations, habits, virtues, vices, and more—of a culture or civilization.

25. This truth obtains for ancient, or long dead, cultures as for living, or contemporary, ones.

26. (“Truth” is a meaningful category.)

27. (Truth is objective, knowable, and not reducible merely to the perspective of a particular person’s mind or thought.)

28. (There are truths that both antedate my mind’s existence and exist independently of it.)

29. (The principle of non-contradiction is itself true.)

30. (The prior four propositions are true irrespective of any one individual’s affirmation or awareness of them, including my own.)

31. Records of ancient peoples’ and regions’ artifacts offer a limited but nevertheless reliable window onto their respective cultures.

32. Through accumulation, comparison, and interpretation of evidence, probabilities of likelihood regarding both historical events and certain cultural beliefs and practices can be reliably achieved.

33. The space-time continuum in which ancient peoples lived (“then and there”) is one and the same as mine (“here and now”).

34. The sort of events, experiences, and happenings that mark my life or the life of my culture (“here and now”) likewise marked theirs (“then and there”).

35. These include occurrences commonly labeled “religious” or “spiritual” or “numinous.”

36. Such occurrences, however labeled, are knowable and thus (re)describable without remainder in wholly natural terms.

37. They can be so described because religion is, without remainder, a natural phenomenon.

38. That is to say, as an artifact of human social life, religion is “natural” inasmuch as it is a thing that humans do, just as dancing, gambling, and wrestling are natural, inasmuch as they are things humans do.

39. In a second sense, too, religion is “natural”: it is a thing wholly constructed by human beings and thus without “reference” beyond the human lives that give rise to it.

40. There are, in a word, no gods; God does not exist.

41. Neither are there spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, jinn, souls, astral beings, or any other entities, living or dead, beyond this universe or however many universes there may be.

42. Accordingly, there are no interactions with or experiences of such beings, divine or celestial or otherwise.

43. Accordingly, such “beings” do not act in the world at all, for what does not exist cannot act; a nonexistent cause has nonexistent effects.

44. Accordingly, miracles, signs, and wonders are a figment of human imagination or an error of human memory and experience.

45. What happens, happens in accordance with the laws of nature recognized and tested by contemporary scientific methods and experiments.

46. Claims to the contrary are knowable as false in advance, prior to investigation; they are rightly ruled out without discussion.

47. There are always, therefore, alternative explanations in natural terms.

48. This principle applies to every other form of mystical or transcendent experience, whether dreams or visions or foreknowledge or prophecy or glossolalia.

49. The fact that many contemporary people continue both to believe in religious/spiritual realities and to claim to experience them is immaterial.

50. Any attempt to undertake any form of epistemic inquiry based on any other set of principles besides the foregoing ones is ipso facto unserious, unscientific, irrational, and to be dismissed with prejudice as unnecessarily metaphysical, unduly influenced by philosophical commitments, biased by metaphysics, prejudiced by religious belief, and ultimately built on unprovable assumptions rather than common sense, natural reason, and truths self-evident to all.

2023: writing

Unlike last year, when my output was heavy in the first half then MIA in the second, this year was rather even. All in all, I count one journal article, one book chapter, three academic reviews, five podcasts, nine magazine essays, and a dozen or so talks/lectures/“speaking events” (gag). I also discovered a review I thought hadn’t been published, which had been published more than a year prior. Well then.

So much of my time this year was spent revising and writing, writing and revising two books that are both set to come out next fall. So I’m grateful to have gotten this much out there in the meantime. More about those books in another post. For now, the year in writing and related artifacts…

Speaking

Each year I find myself with more opportunities to speak or teach at local churches. This year I taught about martyrdom, technology, hell(!), and the soul, among other things. I seem to be brought in to represent the tradition on this or that view; or to be an alarmist on digital domination. Everyone has to have a calling card, I suppose.

I also participated in an annual meeting of pastors to discuss the theology of the body. I traveled to Austin to talk tech and catechesis and to Oklahoma City to talk election and God’s word. And in February I gave an “address” to an academic honor society induction ceremony then, two months later, gave another to the chapel service celebrating graduating seniors who received ACU’s honor of being “university scholars.” That one was a treat.

Podcasts

The Church’s Book (A History of Christian Theology, 4 January 2023).

The Church’s Holy Scripture (The Great Tradition, 10 March 2023).

Theology, Technology, and Ministry (Live from the Siburt Institute, 5 June 2023).

Called into Questions (Mere Fidelity, 24 October 2023). A conversation about Matt Anderson’s new book.

Faith, College, and Technology (Know Why, 1 November 2023).

Academic

Review of David H. Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power, in Stone-Campbell Journal 25:2 (2022): 265–267. David is in his tenth decade of life. He was a dear member of my dissertation committee. This will surely be his last book, following his magnum opus, Eccentric Existence. I missed the review when it came out. Short, but gives you the gist.

Review of R. B. Jamieson and Tyler R. Wittman, Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis, in International Journal of Systematic Theology 25:3 (2023): 504–506. I say some very nice things here! Check out the book.

Review of Fred Sanders, Fountain of Salvation: Trinity and Soteriology, in Pro Ecclesia 32:1-2 (2023): 200–204. Ditto and ditto. Fred agrees!

Review of Jordan Senner, John Webster: The Shape and Development of His Theology, in Scottish Journal of Theology 76:1 (2023): 92-93. One of the very first serious works of scholarly reception of Webster’s thought. More, please.

“The Fittingness of Holy Orders,” Journal of Christian Studies 2:3 (2023): 71–86. I’ve had a surprising number of folks reach out to me for the PDF. I never planned to write on this topic, but I loved doing so; in the process I realized, reader of Jenson and Ramsey and Ratzinger that I am, child of a primitivist tradition that I am, that I had some thoughts.

“Liberating the Least of These,” in The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education, ed. Jeffrey Bilbro, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and David Henreckson (Walden, NY: Plough, 2023), 163–174. The culmination of a years-long project begun at the outset of Covid. This one was a fun one to write. Levertov, Aristotle, Coates, Shakespeare, Boethius, Saint Augustine, and Rowan Williams all make an appearance. Buy the book!

Essays

Once More, Church and Culture (Mere Orthodoxy, 18 April 2023). A long-gestating reflection on Niebuhr and James Davison Hunter. I think the story told in the first six or seven paragraphs is on the money. Also the criticisms of pro-work “vocational” theologies that actually function to consecrate upper-middle-class Christian careerism.

Theology in Division (First Things, April 2023). Equally long-gestating, given the number of times the question I open the essay with has been posed to me. Also a tribute to the late Jenson and Ratzinger for their wisdom in answering it.

What Makes Critical Theory Christian? (Comment, 28 June 2023). A review of Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. I really like Watkin—we met and discussed the review in San Antonio; he couldn’t have been more generous—but I didn’t love the book. The review attempts to outline my reasons why.

America the Biblical (The Christian Century, 1 August 2023). A review of Mark Noll’s America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization. A remarkable achievement, says little old me.

Stay the Course: How to Keep Your Faith in College (Christianity Today, 21 August 2023). A fun one to get out into the world. Share with the rising freshman in your life next August!

AI Has No Place in the Pulpit (Christianity Today, 27 September 2023). Can I get an amen?

Living in a WEIRDER World (The Hedgehog Review, 12 October 2023). A review of Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. One of the best books of the year. If not for the tenth commandment, I’d be jealous of Andrew for this one. Thankfully, I’m above all that.

The Brand Called You (Commonweal, 15 November 2023). A review of Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. A fun and insightful romp. I close the review by suggesting the next book for Burton to write so as to round out the trilogy she began with Strange Rites.

The Ends of Theological Education (Sapientia, 29 November 2023). Part of a symposium on the present and future of theological education. I have a 5,000-word essay on the same subject coming out as a book chapter next year; consider this a preview.

My latest: the ends of theological education

Sapientia is the online periodical of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, housed at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They regularly publish series organized around themes or questions, and the latest is on theological education. You can read Joshua Jipp’s introduction to the series here. My entry is the first to be published; it’s called “The Ends of Theological Education.” Here’s how it starts:

The first and final end of theological education is the knowledge of God. The God in question is not just any deity, much less generic divinity, at least if the theological education in view is Christian. Christian theological education is instruction in the Christian God, which is to say, the triune God of Israel. Theological education is about him, namely, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ revealed by his own Holy Spirit. Whatever else it may be, whatever other ends it may have, theological education aims at the Holy Trinity or it misses the mark entirely.

There are many genres and locations for theological education. The modern research university is only one among many institutional habitats for it, the latest and perhaps the most expansive home, if not the snuggest fit. The monastery is one ancient and abiding institution for instruction in divine knowledge. Sunday school is another. Sometimes theological education happens within the Church, sometimes not; sometimes taught by the ordained, sometimes not; sometimes in a catechetical or devotional spirit, sometimes not. There is no one right way to do it.

Read the rest here.

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?

Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.

I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.

1. It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?

2. Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.

3. Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.

4. Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.

5. Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.

6. There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.

7. Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.

8. Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!

9. All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

10. In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

11. As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.

12. See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
    Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

13. Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.

14. I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.

15. So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.

16. As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.

17. If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.

18. Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.

19. Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.

20. The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.

So you want to get a PhD in theology

I’ve been asked for advice about how to apply to doctoral programs in theology for more than a dozen years. I’ve had the goal, that whole time, of writing up a blog post that I could share with people when they ask. I’ve always found a way not to write it, though, at least in part because the ideal post would be either vanishingly short or impossibly long. In the latter case, a short book. In the former case, a simple sentence:

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

Is it possible to split the difference? I think, at long last, I’m going to try. At the very least, I owe it to the students who meet with me each year with the question in mind, as well as the readers who email me regularly asking the same thing. If I do end up saying something useful to them, perhaps I can put it in writing here.

So let’s do it. The format won’t exactly be FAQ, but I’ll frame my advice in response to perennial queries—twenty in total.

NB: I’m not advising folks interested in English or engineering. I’m speaking to students interested in theology of some kind, or at least a theological discipline. The further one’s field is from Christian systematic theology, the less likely my advice applies. I’m also assuming a Christian interlocutor. Plenty of my answers will still apply to a nonbelieving applicant, but those are the folks who come to me, those are the folks likeliest to pursue Christian theology, and those are the folks who share my reasons and goals for becoming a theologian. Reader beware.

*

1. Should I apply to a PhD program in theology?

Only God knows, but here are some pointers:

• Ask yourself why you’re drawn to it. A sweet job? Love for God? Like being a pastor, but for brainy types? Because you like to read? Because you feel called to it, as in, this is why God put you on planet earth? Let me tell you now: The first four answers aren’t good enough.

• Here are two related questions that can help in discerning an answer to the larger question. (a) Would you be happy that you spent 6-10 years of your life earning multiple graduate degrees in theology even if you never became a professor? Alternatively: (b) Even if you never pursued graduate studies in theology, would you nonetheless find ways to “be a theologian” (read theology, write it, teach it, talk about it with others) in your spare time, outside of your civilian day job? If your answer is an unqualified and emotional Yes! to both questions, then a PhD might be for you. If a No to either, much less both, then don’t do it.

• How are your grades? Have multiple professors pointed you to doctoral studies? If your grades aren’t top of the class and/or your professors seem not to have noticed you, there may be extenuating reasons, but in general it means a PhD is probably not for you.

2. How hard is it to get into a PhD program?

Pretty hard, though I’m assuming that you mean (a) a high-quality program that’s (b) fully funded. The thing to understand is that, at the best of times, applying to programs is a crapshoot. I got into my program, an Ivy, on my first round of applications (and not via the wait list)—the very same year that nine other programs turned me down. (A few of those did put me on the wait list; one program whittled down the applicants to two others and myself. I was the odd man out; they admitted the other two. I’m still friendly with both!) There’s just no formula for this, much less logical predictability.

You need to know, at any rate, that you will be going up against dozens (occasionally hundreds, at least on the job market) of other applicants, all of whom will have impressive degrees from impressive institutions and loads of experience—even, these days, with a filled-out CV and publications. Them’s the odds.

3. Where should I apply?

That depends. For theology specifically, lists of the best American programs generally include Yale, Notre Dame, Chicago, Princeton Seminary, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, Catholic University of America, Saint Louis University, Marquette, SMU, Baylor, Fordham, Boston University, Boston College, Dayton—in something like that order, depending on one’s specific field and areas of interest. I think it’s fair to say the first half dozen or so are typically thought of as the top tier or cream of the crop.

(I should add: These things aren’t especially controversial in ordinary conversation among academics; after all, the rankings reveal themselves in how hard it is to be accepted, funding, stipends, who gets job interviews, and who gets the jobs themselves. Prestige and symbolic capital are by definition unequally distributed. At the same time, it’s a bit awkward to put in black and white, because academics are as a rule fiercely competitive, deeply ambitious, and insecure. But I said I’d try to be helpful, and that means honesty, so there you go.)

Some schools I left off the list:

• British universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, St Andrews, et al. Excellent programs, but not on this continent!

• Canadian schools, like Toronto or McGill. Both likewise excellent.

• Harvard, which so far as I know does not have a PhD in Christian theology. Harvard Divinity School does, I believe, have a ThD, just like Duke Divinity School (which is in addition to Duke University’s PhD in theology via its religious studies department). For those new to all this … yes, it’s complicated.

• Religion programs like Princeton University (≠ Princeton Theological Seminary), the University of Virginia, Brown, Rice, and the University of Texas. (There are others!) Typically these may be excellent programs for Old or New Testament, for church history, for philosophy, and so on, but not for theology. Princeton and Virginia are exceptions; they don’t necessarily produce systematic theologians, but they are happy to produce scholars of religion, philosophy, and ethics who are not allergic to theology; who, even, are theologically literate, informed, and conversant. Mirabile dictu!

• Evangelical schools like Fuller, Wheaton, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dallas Theological Seminary, and the various Baptist seminaries. These programs include excellent scholars and wonderful programs, albeit with two drawbacks. First, a doctoral degree from these schools almost always means that you will be hired “back” at them. In other words, an evangelical PhD means an employer pool of evangelical schools. That’s not a dealbreaker for plenty of folks, since many would like to be hired by such schools and/or have no interest going elsewhere. But forewarned is forearmed, etc. Second, many (most? all? I don’t know the numbers) of these programs are not fully funded. That means you, the doctoral student, will have to pay for the privilege of being a student out of pocket or via loans. That’s a tough row to hoe without a job—or with a job that doesn’t pay much—awaiting you at the end of five or six years. Compare that with, for example, Yale’s PhD students, who are fully funded for six full years and receive an annual stipend of around $40,000 and have access to free health care in the Yale New Haven hospital system. You can see how at a certain point it’s apples and oranges. No salary cap means the Yankees always have the best roster.

• Primarily or exclusively online programs. Speaking only for myself, but speaking frankly, I would advise against this—which is distinct from advising against programs that facilitate part one’s degree being completed long distance. Certain prestigious and well-funded schools have a long track record of doing just that.

I hope that gives you a reasonable lay of the land.

4. How do you or anyone else know all this?

Gossip. The epistemology of academe is gossip. It’s the only way anyone knows anything about anything.

5. How should I choose where to go?

Well first, you don’t choose anyone, they choose you. But from this direction, too, it’s a crapshoot. If you have the time and the money, apply to five or ten or fifteen programs! Cast the net wide and see if you catch anything. Beyond that, there are different schools of thought, and none of them is “right.”

(a) Some advise that you find a particular scholar and apply to where she or he is so that you can work with her or him.

(b) Some advise that you go where your particular sub-field of study is thriving, whether it’s Barth or von Balthasar, classical theism or practical theology, christology or critical theory.

(c) Some advise that you say yes to the most prestigious school that admits you, no matter what.

(d) Some advise that you put your ear to the ground and head to the school with the reputation for the healthiest environment for student flourishing. (For example, for decades Chicago has been known as the program that will take the longest to finish while taking the most out of you. It also has meant that those who do finish are assumed to be mega-scholars bound for greatness. Like an eight-year medical residency for a certain kind of surgical specialist. It’s all about tradeoffs.)

What do I think? Depends on the applicant, her prior studies, her major field, her interests, who lets her in, and so on. My purely anecdotal two cents is that I’d lean in the direction of a combination of (c) and (d), with less emphasis on (a) or (b). I applied to my doctoral program almost on a whim, and got in knowing next to nothing about the culture or the professors or their expertise. If you had given me a certain kind of lowdown in advance, I would have expected to be an odd fit. And yet my time as a PhD student was pure bliss, more or less. So I’m weary of supposing anyone can know, prior to arriving, whether a program is a good fit. You see the fit after you unpack your boxes! But that’s just my story. You should take all these factors into account.

6. Are there really no jobs in academic theology anymore?

Yes and no. Yes, there are jobs and there always will be, in some form. No, they really are shrinking, and fast. You’d be surprised at the number of Apple and McKinsey employees with PhDs in religion.

7. Whenever this comes up, I hear race and gender mentioned. These really do matter—myth or fact?

Fact. In this country, theology and adjacent disciplines (religion, philosophy, ethics, Bible) have been a white man’s game for a very long time. Accordingly, over the last half century seminaries and religion departments have been responding at two levels: PhD students and tenure-track posts. Even still, the fields of Bible and theology remain some of the most male-dominated in the American academy, alongside philosophy, economics, and physics. Most others have reached relative parity or have swung the other way, gender-wise.

What that means for you is, yes, you will have priority as an applicant if you are a woman or person of color. If that’s you, great! Let it put a little wind in your sails, though don’t let it give you undue confidence; you’ve still got to beat out tons of other folks. If that’s not you, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply, but neither should you go in naive. This is simply the way things are, like it or not. Don’t get pouty. I can tell you right now, that will ensure you never advance one inch in this world.

8. You mentioned “tenure-track” posts. I’ve heard that phrase but don’t know what it means.

“Tenure-track” (TT for short) jobs are the most coveted gig for academics. In a word, it signals long-term job security. Non-TT jobs are likelier to pay less or involve higher teaching loads or be nixed when budget cuts appear on the horizon. Tenure track means that you will begin without tenure, but around year six or seven you will “go up” for tenure. This means you will apply to your university to receive tenure (plus promotion—hence “T&P”). This comes with a change of rank (Assistant to Associate Professor) and a raise, usually, but the real thing you get is the other t-word: tenure. You’re now, in a sense, employed for life. (Not really, but this is big picture.)

Tenure functions in theory to protect your free speech as an intellectual. You can study, think, write, and speak whatever you believe to be true or worthy of investigation, and nobody can fire you for having “wrong” ideas or “bad” politics. Now this is an ideal with many asterisks and exceptions. Nevertheless it’s not an empty gesture. It does have teeth. For that reason you have to be granted it; it’s not automatic. Depending on your institution, your application will weight things differently: research, teaching, collegiality, service. Ivy League schools are notorious for being stingy here, lower-tier schools less so. But everywhere occasionally (or more than occasionally) denies professors T&P. If you don’t get it, you finish out your year (or two), and then you have to leave. Yes, it’s that brutal.

9. Say I’m still interested. What should I do to try to get into a program?

Depends on when and where you are in the process. If you’re in high school, as opposed to finishing your second Master’s degree, my advice will be different. But here are some things worth doing:

• Learn languages. Master at least one language beyond your native tongue. If you can manage learning one ancient language and one living foreign language, you will automatically be a strong candidate.

• Study something relevant in college, whether that be religion, Bible, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, linguistics, or classics.

• Get a 4.0 GPA, in both college and Master’s programs.

• Form relationships with your professors. Not only will this begin to induct you into the world of academia, it will grease the wheels for the letters of recommendation you’ll eventually ask them to write for you. Also, just as academic epistemology is gossip, academic training and hiring is nothing but networks. It’s all in who you know.

• Study hard for the GRE, and ideally take it more than once. I’m convinced that I made the cut at Yale because the committee at that time culled applications on the front end with a hard GRE cut-off score. Some programs don’t care, but others do.

• Learn your field. Follow down footnote rabbit trails, ask professors for recommendations—try to get a sense of the hundred or so most prominent names in your sub-area of theology, and if possible start reading their work!

• Read everything. And I do mean everything. The memory that comes to mind is sitting in bed after my wife had fallen asleep, aged 22 or 23, and reading William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist. No one assigned it to me. I don’t know how I happened upon it. I was just reading it because I felt I should, out of pure interest.

• Reach out to professors elsewhere. Email them, see if they’ll chat by phone or Zoom, ask if they’ll meet you at AAR/SBL. No joke, the summer before I applied to programs, I physically mailed letters to professors there. Many of them replied!

• Go to AAR/SBL. That’s the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, held in tandem the weekend before Thanksgiving each year. My first time, as a Master’s student, was a revelation. I met people there (circa 2010) I’m still friends with—for example, my now colleague Myles Werntz!

• Visit the schools you plan to apply to. As you’re able, obviously. I took a little road trip myself; I was able to visit Duke, UVA, and Vanderbilt. Worth it!

• Ask a professor to review your materials, especially your statement of purpose and CV.

• Have a community of support. Not entirely something you can control, but necessary all the same. Application season is brutal. My household had a lot of tears before the happy email arrived in my inbox.

• Pray. I saved the most important for last…

10. I’ve heard horror stories. Is a PhD program bound to wreck my marriage and suck my soul while making me work 100-hour weeks and hate my life?

No. At least, that’s not inevitable. There are programs that function like law school or medical school. But even then, you usually retain a great deal of agency and responsibility for your time allocation. In my view, most (not all) programs permit a disciplined student to get his work done while continuing to function as a healthy person with family, friends, church, and a life outside the library. Granted, I do know people who would reject that proposition. Either way, it is not a foregone conclusion that you must decide between what matters most and your degree. No way.

11. What about my faith? Can a PhD draw me closer to Christ rather than “deconstruct” or diminish or steal my faith?

Yes! It can. That’s exactly what it did for me. But it’s good to ask this question and to be aware of the danger. There are people for whom doctoral studies challenged, complicated, revised, and sometimes destroyed their faith. Perhaps that was bound to happen at some point. Some people, though, just may not be cut out for a PhD, at least in religion.

In any case, your faith will not emerge from your studies unchanged. And here, as elsewhere, naivete is the enemy. You will read books by atheists and anti-Christians and members of other religions and representatives of views you find risible, heinous, or dangerous. You will have professors who repudiate all that you hold dear. You will have teachers who claim to be Christian who openly reject or even mock beliefs and behaviors you supposed nonnegotiable for any confessing Christian. You need to have a spine of steel even as your mind is open to learning new ideas and being challenged by what you’ve never considered. Does that describe you? Or does it frighten you? Your answer matters a great deal for whether you should pursue a PhD.

12. What does a PhD program actually entail?

Briefly: Two years of classes, one year of comprehensive exams (“comps,” written and oral), two or three years of writing a dissertation. Comps test your mastery of basic topics and texts in your field. A dissertation is, basically, a book based on your special area of research, led and read and assessed by a committee of three to five professors, headed by a single professor, called your “advisor.” Your “defense” of the dissertation is usually when you “become a doctor,” namely, by undergoing oral examination by the committee and defending your writing, your arguments, and your research “live”—sometimes with an audience! It’s a stressful day, to say the least. For those who pass, and not all do, the catharsis is overwhelming.

13. What’s the point of a PhD, anyway? How should I think about it?

Opinions differ. Some say: To become an expert in one specific thing, perhaps the world’s most informed expert. I say: To become a theologian. That is, to sit at the feet of masters, to apprentice yourself to them, as to a trade, to be inducted into what it means to be a member of the guild, to learn the grammar and habits that make a theologian a theologian. And thence and therein to learn some concrete expertise.

14. Is the quality of one’s doctoral training really convertible with an institution’s money and prestige?

No. Some of the most brilliant scholars I know and learn from got PhDs in out-of-the-way programs or unpretentious institutions; indeed, some of the world’s greatest minds and writers are effectively autodidacts. Don’t fall for the cult of credentials and gatekept expertise. It’s a game. If you want to be a professor, you have to play it. That’s it.

Now, money and prestige don’t count for nothing. They’re often a proxy for a certain quality floor, along with a certain quality ceiling. You’re rarely going to get a poor education at a top-5 school. And the degree will always count for something.

15. Suppose I get in somewhere, and I’m wondering how to flourish. Any tips?

Here are a few:

• Put your head down. You’re there to learn. Study, study, study. Then study some more.

• Set limits and boundaries. One guy I knew treated his studies like a job: he worked from 8:00am to 5:00pm, then he stopped and spent time with his family. Not for everyone, but incredibly useful for some.

• Don’t waste your time. Don’t read online. Delete all your social media accounts. Focus entirely on what you’re there to learn. Some doctoral students “work all day” without getting anything done: Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok see to that, not to mention the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Jacobin.

• Develop good habits now. They’ll stay with you in whatever future employment you find.

• Just as before, devote time to forming relationships and mentorships with your professors.

• Begin networking not just within your institution but outside of it, whether professors or fellow students.

• Don’t try to make a name for yourself yet. Don’t tweet. Don’t write for a popular audience. Don’t, for the most part, publish in scholarly spaces—unless your advisor gives you the thumbs up, and it’s work you think is A-quality, and it’s likely to matter for job applications. If you’re gong to have an academic career, there will be time enough for publishing. Now’s the time for input, not output.

• Learn how to do two things: (a) read for long, uninterrupted stretches of time and (b) write a certain daily word count. Learning how to skim and how to type fast are also useful skills. Best of all, learn how to take quality notes and to organize them in relation to your research and writing goals. These will serve you for a lifetime.

• Keep learning languages. I can’t emphasize this enough: Languages are the secret sauce of theology (and the humanities generally). If you have two or four or six or more, you’re gold. If you’re stuck in no man’s land with one, or 1.5, or a bunch you can only half-read, you’re at a serious disadvantage—for jobs and for your scholarship. Mastering languages pays dividends!

• Listen to your advisor. She knows best.

• Pray. Not a joke! Better to keep your soul than to lose it and gain the whole world. Focus on what matters most, even in a time of stress and compressed study. Focus on God, church, spouse, children, friends, life. It keeps things in perspective. (Also not a joke: Drop out if this isn’t for you. There’s no shame in it if the alternative is ruin.)

16. Any other tips?

Yes, one: Don’t be a jerk. It is not your job to police the opinions or beliefs or politics of fellow students, much less professors. You don’t have to announce yourself in every seminar as the expert or True Believer on whatever topic. Drop the show. Be a normal human. Keep your own counsel. Be collegial. Even if the people around you espouse crazy things, it is not your job to set them straight. It’s your job to get a degree. Do it.

17. Say I make it to the job market, dissertation finished and PhD in hand. What then?

Not much to say here. Apply widely, prepare to move cross-country even as you prepare for nothing but rejections, and keep up those prayers.

18. What about the dissertation itself?

Not every program, not every advisor, and not every dissertation allows this, but in general I think you should write the dissertation as though you are already under contract with a publisher for a book. Write it as a book, that is, not as that unique and uniquely unreadable genre, “dissertation.” Or at least write toward the eventual book.

That, by the way, is what often happens. Your “first book” is the dissertation, in revised form. Not always, not for everyone. But ideally for many, perhaps most. Sometimes it’s chopped up into journal articles. Sometimes it remains background for the next research agenda. How you approach it matters, though, for what it eventually becomes, or is likely to become.

There’s a balancing act to aim for here. You don’t want the dissertation to try to do everything. You don’t want to swing for the fences and decisively answer the biggest question facing the field. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be so niche, so remote, so granular that no one cares. This also touches on the “faddishness” of one’s dissertation topic, its relative “timeliness” or “sexiness” as an academic subject. Sometimes a fad will get you a job; sometimes it will ensure your perpetual obscurity.

I say: Focus on the perennial topics, questions, and figures. They’ll never go away, even if they’re not in fashion for a time. (Miroslav Volf once gave me the advice that Jürgen Moltmann gave him: Always do two things as a theologian. Take up the ultimate questions humans always ask, and do so through engagement with Scripture. That’s what it means to be a theologian, and it doubles as ensuring you’ll never be irrelevant.)

A final addendum: The one thing doctoral programs routinely fail to do is train their students to teach, even as the one thing they never fail to do is train their students to write awful prose. At to the first: Seek out opportunities to teach, and seek to T.A. (be a teaching assistant) for professors who are good in the classroom. Having said that, the best way to become a better teacher is sheer repetition, and you’re unlikely to get that until you have a job, and the truth is that few schools will hire you based on your already being a good teacher. So, in terms of tradeoffs, focus on research and finishing the dissertation, not teaching.

As to the second, then: It’s near impossible not to pick up bad writing habits in a PhD program, for the simple reason that most academics are bad writers, and most academic writing is meant not to be readable but to impress a small circle of experts with jargon, quotations, and footnotes. I suppose the best way to resist bad prose during doctoral studies is by reading poetry, novels, and literary essays on the side throughout one’s time. Another way is to read major scholars in other fields who write for highbrow general-audience publications like NYRB, NYT Magazine, The New Yorker, The Point, LARB, Harper’s, First Things, and elsewhere. Many academics never unlearn their bad writing habits, and for those who do, it takes years. Just knowing going in that your dissertation will be poorly written, no matter how hard you try, is to put you ahead of the curve.

19. What about jobs? Which should I plan on applying to?

All of them!

Besides that answer, which is true, I’ll add that TT academic posts are typically differentiated by “teaching load”: in other words, how many classes you teach per year (or per semester). If you’re at an R1 University (a level-1 research school), then you’re likely to teach a 2-2 (two courses per semester), with generous regular sabbaticals for research. If you’re at an R2 or R3, you’re likely to teach a 2-3 or 3-3. If you’re at a new R3 or teaching university or community college, you’re likely to teach a 3-4 or 4-4 or even 5-5.

A couple years back I wrote a four-part, 12,000-word series on what it’s like teaching with a 4-4 load. Spoiler: Not a fate worse than death! But depending on where you earn your PhD, you might be told that it is. I won’t say much more here except that the mindset that supposes any job outside of R1 or Ivy isn’t worth taking is deadly. Don’t indulge it, and exorcise that demon if it possesses you at any time during your studies.

20. What about serving the church?

Well, isn’t that the right way to end this.

Christians study theology because of the living God, in obedience to Christ’s command to love the Lord with all our mind. We become theologians to serve the mission of his people in the world. Our knowledge, such as it is, exists to his glory and the advance of his kingdom. It certainly does not exist to advance our ambitions or careers.

You do glorify God through academic theological writing, even when such writing is not obviously or directly “applicable” to or “accessible” by ordinary believers in the pews. I can’t say more here to defend that claim—we’re wrapping this post up!—but it’s true. Trust me for now.

More important, it’s crucial to approach the question of pursuing a PhD as an exercise of love for God and service to the church. That will guide you as a lodestar throughout your academic adventures (or misadventures). If this is what God has called you to, so be it. It might involve suffering; it’s likely to involve professional wandering; it’s certain to involve uncertainty. Offer it to Christ; put it in his service. He’ll use it, one way or another. Expect that use to involve a cross, even if the trajectory of your career looks “successful” from the outside or after the fact.

But if he’s not calling you to this, that’s okay too. Don’t do it just because. Discernment works only if it’s possible to hear a No and not just a Yes. Prayer enters at this point for a final time. If the job of the doctoral candidate is study, study, study, the job of the disciple is pray, pray, pray. Prayer will carry you through, whichever path you end up on.

Let’s say, then, that my advice is not for the PhD-curious to abandon all hope. Abandon all false hope, yes. But hope is not optimism. As for pursuing an academic career, put it this way: With mere mortals this may be impossible, but with God all things are possible—even getting a PhD in theology.

How do you spend your time in the office?

A couple years back I wrote a long series of posts reflecting on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load, how to manage one’s time, how to make time for research, and so on. Recently a friend was mentally cataloguing how he spends his hours in the office, both for himself and for higher-ups. So I thought I’d work up a list of ways academics use their time in the office. I came up with twenty-five categories, though I’m sure I’ve overlooked some. The hardest part was thinking about scholars outside of the humanities (you know, people who work with “hard data” in the “lab” and create “spreadsheets” with “numbers”—things I’ve only ever heard of, never encountered in the wild). Here’s the list, with relevant glosses where necessary, followed by a few reflections and a breakdown of my own “office hours”:

• Teaching (in the classroom or online)

• Grading

• Lesson prep

• LMS management (think Blackboard, Canvas, etc.)

• Writing

• Reading

• Supervising (a G.A. or doctoral student, or providing official hours toward licensure)

• Experiments/lab work

• Data collection/collation/analysis

• Meetings with students

• Meetings with colleagues

• Emailing

• Phone calls

• Admin work

• Committee work

• Para-academic work (blind reviewer, organizing a conference panel, being interviewed on a podcast, etc.)

• Vocational work (say, seeing clients as a therapist or making rounds at the hospital)

• Church work (preparing a sermon or curriculum)

• Family duties (paying bills, ordering gifts, taking the car to the shop, leaving early to pick up kids, staying home with a sick child)

• Loafing (hallway chats, office drop-ins, breeze-shooting)

• Eating (whether alone or with others)

• Devotion (prayer, meditation, silence and solitude)

• Social media (call this digital loafing)

• Filler (walking, parking, shuttle, etc.)

• Other (this is here, lol, so you don’t have to think about questions like “how much time per semester do I spend in the restroom?”)

Now suppose you are (a) full-time faculty with responsibilities in (b) teaching, (c) research, and (d) service, and that a typical work week is (e) Monday through Friday, 8:00am to 5:00pm, spent in an office. That comes to 45 hours. How do you spend it in a given semester? That’s a factual question. It’s paired with the aspirational: How do you wish you spent it?

Answers to both are going to vary widely and be dependent on discipline, institution, temperament, desire, will, gifts, talents, interests, and job description. The chair of a physics department with 2/2 teaching loads will spend her time differently than an English prof with a 4/4 load and no administrative duties. So on and so forth.

Here’s how my time breaks down in an average week this semester (numbers after each category are estimated average weekly hours spent on that activity):

• Teaching – 9

• Grading – 1

• Lesson prep – 2-3

• Writing – 3-6

• Reading – 10-15

• Meetings with students – 1

• Meetings with colleagues – 0-1

• Emailing – 3-5

• Committee work – 0-1

• Para-academic work – 0-1

• Church work – 0-1

• Family duties – 6

• Eating – 1-2

• Devotion – 1

• Other – 1

• LMS management, supervising, lab work, data collection, phone calls, social media, loafing, vocational work, admin work, filler – 0

Check my work, but I think the numbers add up: at a minimum, these activities come to 38 out of 45 hours, with an unfixed 7 hours or so in which to apportion the remaining 16 in variable ways, given the week and what’s going on, what’s urgent, etc.

Now for commentary:

• Note well what’s in the “zero hours” category: admin work, social media, supervising students of any kind (including in a lab), and LMS management. Anybody with duties or habits along these lines will have a seriously different allotment of hours than I do.

• Notice what’s low in my weekly hours: email (which I wrote about yesterday), grading, meetings of any kind, and in general duties beyond teaching and research. On a good week, 30 of my 45 hours are spent teaching, reading, and writing. That’s not for everyone—nor is it a viable option for many—but it’s the result, among other things, of how I organize and discipline my time in the office. Teaching, reading, and writing are the priority. Everything else is secondary.

• Well, not quite. Notice what’s (atypically?) high: family duties. I drop off our kids at school every morning, which means I sit down at my desk no earlier than 8:00am, sometimes closer to 8:30am. At least twice (often thrice) per week I leave around 3:00pm to pick them up, too. So if we’re thinking of the standard “eight to five office day,” that’s an average of at least five hours weekly that I’m not in the office. That’s not to mention dentist and doctor appointments, the flu, stomach bugs, Covid, choir performances, second grad programs, and the rest. Not everyone has kids, and kids don’t remain little forever, but this is worth bearing in mind for many faculty!

• (Addendum: I am—we are—fortunate to have an employer and a type of job that permit the sort of flexibility that doesn’t require us paying for a babysitter or childcare after the school bell rings. That’s a whole different matter.)

• Because I’m piloting a new class this semester, I’m teaching only three courses for a total of nine hours. Typically it’s four courses totaling twelve hours. In that case, in the absence of a new prep I wouldn’t have two to three hours weekly devoted to lesson planning. Once I’ve taught a class a few times, it’s plug and play. In other words, if this were describing my semester a year ago, teaching would have twelve hours next to it and lesson prep would have zero.

• I should add, while I’m thinking of it: Sometimes my reading goes way down when a writing project is nearing a deadline or in full swing. Neither of those things is true at present, so I’m doing more reading than writing this semester. But sometimes the numbers there flip flop, and I’m writing 15+ hours weekly and reading only 3-5 hours, if that.

• My institution requires generous office hours for students to come by and talk to their professors. I keep those hours but encourage students to set up meetings in advance, whether in person after class or by email. That way I won’t randomly be gone (at home with a sick kid, say, or in a committee meeting), and we can both be efficient with our time. I’ve mentored students in the past, which involved more of a weekly time commitment. At the moment I probably meet with two or three students per week, usually for 15-30 minutes each. But I know that not only here at ACU but elsewhere there are professors who give five, ten, or more hours each week to meeting with students. So, once again, there’s the question of decisions, priorities, institutional expectations, personal giftedness, and tradeoffs.

• I’ve already mentioned two of the three great timesucks for professors: email and social media. Both threaten to rob academics of hours of time they could otherwise be using on what they love or, at least, what’s important. I gave my advice yesterday for how to resist the lure of the inbox. The cure for social media is simple: Just delete it. It can’t steal away your time if it quite literally does not exist for you.

• The third great timesuck is loafing. This isn’t a temptation for academics alone, but for any and all office workers. Who wouldn’t prefer to shoot the breeze with coworkers in lieu of putting one’s nose to the grindstone? To me, this is purely and simply a personal decision. Loafing is not only fun, but life-giving. Many office jobs aren’t endurable without a healthy dose of loafing. You can often tell the relative health of an office by the nature and extent of its occupants’ shared loafing. So don’t hear me knocking loafing. It’s a kind of social nutrient for office work. In its absence, the human beings who make up an office can wither and die. Having said that, when I say it’s a “decision” I mean to say, on one hand, that it’s active, not passive (one has agency in loafing—a sentence I hope I’m the first to have written); and, on the other, that it involves tradeoffs. I’ve loafed less and less over the years for the plain reason that I realized what loafing I did inevitably meant less reading and writing (not, mind you, less busywork or email or grading or meetings: those, like death and taxes, are certain and unavoidable features of the academic life). And if the equation is that direct—less loafing, more research—then given my priorities and the tradeoffs involved, I decided to do my best to cut it out as much as I could.

• Not much else to add, except that, when I can avoid them, I don’t do “work lunches.” I’m sure the portrait painted here is sounding increasingly, even alarmingly, antisocial; the truth, however, is that every hour (every minute!) counts in a job like this one, and you have to be ruthless to find—by which I mean, make—time for what you value. I like my job. I would read and write theology in my spare time if I weren’t a professor. So I don’t want to waste time in the office if I can help it.

Email

Email is the scourge of just about everyone’s time and attention, at least those of us in the “laptop class” and the broader white-collar workforce. Some people’s jobs just are their inbox. But for academics, the inbox is the enemy. It’s a timesuck. It exerts a kind of gravitational pull on one’s mind and attention. It threatens to conquer every last second you might spend doing something else.

Here are some rules and practices I’ve instituted to manage my inbox.

1. No email on my phone. By this I mean not only that I lack the app, I also can’t log in on a browser. I literally do not, because I cannot, access my inbox (personal or professional) on my phone.

2. No email on the weekends. This rule’s looser, but I don’t reply or feel accountable to my inbox on the weekends. I mostly leave it be.

3. No email until lunchtime. Mornings in my house are harried swirls of chaos getting kids to school; I don’t check my inbox before leaving. When I get to my office, I pour some coffee, pray, then sit down in my recliner and read for 2-4 hours. My laptop remains closed and in my bag, barring an urgent matter or occasional need. I usually open it around 11:30am.

4. Inbox zero twice per day. While I munch on a salad, I take 15-30 minutes to whittle my emails down to zero. Two-thirds of this is deletion. For what remains, it’s a smattering of replies, archives, calendar notes, and snoozes. I do the same thing late afternoon, before I leave the office. Occasionally I’ll do it in the evening, at home, but I don’t plan on it.

5. Little to no email outside of normal working hours. I’m flexible on this one, but the rule is that I don’t make myself accountable to my inbox outside of the 8:00am–5:00pm range. If I receive an email then, it can wait till the next day. And if the inbox piles up outside of office hours, so be it.

6. As few newsletters as possible. I’ve slowly been unsubscribing from newsletters I read and transferring their feed to my RSS reader (I use Feedly). Some still come by email—I’m not sure how to pay for one without getting it via email!—but I either click on them immediately or skim and archive. I don’t want them just sitting there, cluttering up the place.

7. A quick brief reply is better than a delayed reply or non-reply. I still remember an email I sent to a distinguished academic in 2010. I was going to visit his campus to see if it might be a good fit for my doctoral studies. My email must have been a thousand words at least. His reply was a single incomplete sentence. Yes, he would meet with me. But it was so curt I thought he was mad. He wasn’t! He just didn’t have time to match my logorrhea. He had better things to do. And he was right. So when colleagues, students, or readers email me, I’ve trained myself to give them a speedy 1-2 sentence answer, even if it’s not as detailed as they’d like. Sometimes it’s just, “Let’s talk more in person,” or “I’ll have to think about that.” But if the question is concrete, I can typically answer in a single sentence. Brevity is preferable to silence!

8. Every personal email gets a reply. Except by mistake, I never ghost genuine emails from living human beings (unless, I suppose, there are living human beings behind A.I.-generated Ed Tech mass-mailers). Everyone who writes me by email receives a reply, full stop. That includes random readers of my work. Obviously I don’t have a sizable enough readership to make this infeasible; I assume Ken Follett can’t personally respond to every bit of fan mail he gets. But as long as it’s not unduly burdensome, I’m going to keep up this habit. And doubly so for emails from people I know, whether colleagues or friends or family. No email goes unanswered!

9. Every (initial) personal email gets a reply within 24 hours. This one might sound tough, but it’s really not. I’m a fast typist and I’m committed to being brief whenever possible. So once the spam and nonsense are out of the way, I reply until the inbox is clear. Then I do it again later that day (on workdays, that is). That way I stay up on it, and it doesn’t pile up to unmanageable levels. Sometimes, granted, I lack the time to do so, or I’m traveling, or an email is going to take up too much time for the length and thought required. So I email within the 24-hour period to say that I’ll be emailing tomorrow or later that week or once my midterm grading is done or after the holiday or after the semesters wraps up. That way I’m not leaving a correspondent hanging, even if I can’t get to them in a timely manner.

10. Strategic snoozing. The “snooze” button is your friend. It’s a great invention. Right now I have eight emails snoozed (and nothing in my inbox). Only two are emails I need to reply to. One is an ongoing correspondence about a paper I’ve given feedback on; the other will reappear in a couple weeks when I’m supposed to remind a colleague about something. So no one is waiting on me, exactly. Even when I’ve snoozed threads trying to find time to meet up for a meal or drinks, the person isn’t waiting on pins and needles; we both know it’s a busy time and we’ll figure something out in a month or two. Anything pressing has been dealt with; it’s the emails with longer deadline horizons, such as a recommendation letter request, or emails that function as self-reminders that call for strategic snoozing.

All this, I should say, is operative primarily during the academic calendar. I’m looser in the summer, for obvious reasons.

I should add as well that, unlike other techniques for tech management, I don’t feel constrained or stressed by these rules. They aren’t hard to keep. They’re shockingly easy, as a matter of fact. Not everyone is in similar circumstances, but something like these rules would work, I think, for most academics. Of perhaps all “laptop workers,” academics may be the most notorious for simply never returning emails, even important ones. It’s not that hard, folks! And rules like these actually keep you from being on email more. My average daily email time is 30-60 minutes. That’s doable. But I could stretch that out to just about anytime I’m in the office, if I kept my laptop open (or, when I’m writing, my email open). Were I to do that, then I’d see a new email demanding a reply every 10-20 minutes, in which case I’d never get around to anything else. It’s in service of getting around to other things—usually more important and always more interesting—that the rules are worth implementing and maintaining.

Writing for a Tier 2 audience

Last month I published a typology of four audiences for Christian writing: Tier 1 (anyone at all), Tier 2 (college-educated laypeople), Tier 3 (pastors and intellectuals), and Tier 4 (scholars). The post continues to generate a lot of conversation with friends and acquaintances. It’s been generative for my own thinking.

I’ve found myself wondering: What does Tier 2 writing look like? And I’ve got some ideas. What follows is a list of basic mechanics. I’d call them do’s and don’ts, but they’re pretty much all the latter. In another post I plan to think about how to make one’s Tier 2 writing not just accessible but good. In both cases, though, I’m not describing what makes prose in general good. I’m thinking about a particular kind of prose. So this isn’t a list of what makes for quality writing simpliciter. We need to ask first: What sort of writing? In what genre? For whom? With what goals? Those are the questions that matter, at least in this case.

Without further adieu, then, here are twelve rules for Tier 2 writing:

1. Short(er) sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Not much more to say here. Don’t try your reader’s attention. Be direct. Be declarative. Be fruitful and multiply your five-line sentences, trim your flowery filler, kill your adverbs, and stop interrupting your flow of thought with so many em dashes.

2. No footnotes. Footnotes are intimidating and, in a Tier 2 book, unnecessary. Use endnotes, preferably unnumbered. Resist the urge to defend and support every claim you make on the page with a dozen citations. Appropriate elsewhere, not here.

3. No jargon. “Plain English” is the rule here. One editor I’ve worked with on multiple essays uses the “P.E.” line as a shorthand for any time I revert to academese. Remember: No one but academics speaks that language, and then only some of them, cordoned off by rarefied disciplinary dialects. Remember further that, outside of highly technical discursive contexts—you see what I did there?—jargon is a crutch. And if something can’t be said in language a Tier 2 reader can understand, then perhaps you’re writing for the wrong audience.

4. No untranslated words. This means, above all, never use a word from another language as if the reader should know what it means: eschaton, torah, phenomenological, faux pas, Aufklärung, munus triplex, whatever. If you must, on a rare fitting occasion, introduce the reader to a foreign word, then do so gently and seamlessly, and be clear that you have reasons for doing so. (Why, in other words, you aren’t just saying “church” instead of ekklesia.) Furthermore, avoid fancy Latinate words like “omnipotent” when “almighty” or “all-powerful” are ready to hand. Sometimes a whiff of antiquity is pleasant, but more often it reeks of self-importance and showing off.

5. No, or spare use of, massive block quotations. Like footnotes, these break up the flow of a page’s writing and can scare off otherwise curious readers. It also suggests that the reader should maybe be reading someone other than you, since apparently you can’t put it well in your own words. (A friend’s anecdote: Reading famous Evangelical Writer X as a teenager, the quotations and block-quotes of C. S. Lewis were so prevalent that it made him realize he ought to be reading Lewis instead of X. The intuition proved correct.)

6. No incessant, cluttered, or paragraph-littered use of parenthetical references to passages of Scripture. This is a tough one. It’s my own habit, as it is just about any Christian writer’s who engages Scripture for a believing audience. I think this is fine at Tier 3 and for works in the 2.3-2.9 range. But my sense is that true Tier 2.0 readers find this practice distracting, off-putting, and intimidating. It’s not that they can’t handle it. It just doesn’t help you, the author, accomplish your purposes with the reader. There are other ways of citing, quoting, and alluding to Scripture than parentheses constantly interrupting clauses or concluding every third sentence. Be creative!

7. No unidentified authors, historical figures, historical events, doctrines, or concepts. This one’s simple. Don’t write, “As Saint Irenaeus says…” Write instead, “Saint Irenaeus, a bishop from the second century, once wrote…” Or if the reader won’t know what a bishop is, call him “a pastor and writer.” Or, if “from the second century” rankles, then say “who was born about a century after the crucifixion of Jesus.” Or “who died about a century after Saint Paul and Saint Peter were killed in Rome.” Or whatever would least ostentatiously and most intuitively make sense as a chronological point of connection for your audience. (You could always just put the date of the figure’s life in parentheses if that were to fit the nature of your book, too.) The point, in any case, is to avoid random and unqualified mention of “Saint John of Damascus” or “the Great Schism” or “the perseverance of the saints” or “imputed righteousness”—readers run for the exits at that sort of thing, especially when they add up.

8. No preface to quotes, events, books, or authors as “famous.” This is a minor rule, but it’s common enough to call out: Writers call things “famous” out of insecurity. Namely, they want the reader to know they’re not being original, that they’re aware that “everyone knows” the line or text or person being trotted out for display. But in a Tier 2 setting, not everyone knows this. Calling something “famous” to a reader who’s never heard of it is inhospitable and condescending. Drop this tic!

9. No passing reference to what only the extremely-online would know. Some Gen X, many millennial, and most Gen Z writers spend a lot of time online. When you live online, you forget that most people don’t—or at least, that their online living is nothing like yours. Normal people don’t know what “edgelord” means. (I’ve had to Google it more than once to remind myself! My time off Twitter is having an effect…) Normal people don’t follow sub-cultural dramas litigated on social media between no-name writers. Normal people follow Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift. So don’t write like you’re online; don’t write like your book has hyperlinks; don’t make tempest-in-a-teapot episodes illustrative of some larger point. Write about the real world, the one we all live in together.

10. No passing reference to culture-war topics (as though the topic itself, the nature of the debate, or the “right” opinion is obvious or given). Most people are aware of this or that culture-war issue. But most people aren’t particularly informed about it in detail. And most people certainly don’t like it being parachuted onto the page out of nowhere. It raises their blood pressure. If the context calls for discussion of some hot-button issue, then introduce it with care and charity. But let your writing lower the temperature—even if what you have to say is passionate or fiery. Understanding should precede argument, and if argument is called for, then the matter shouldn’t be treated as self-evident.

11. No glib swipes at “backwards” or stupid or wicked ideas. I don’t mean ideas like eugenics or Stalinism. I mean ideas that continue to generate fierce debate, ideas that mark out one tribe from another. Often these are ideas that the author herself has left behind for greener pastures. We always treat our own former selves least generously. Don’t put down readers who happen to agree with your younger self. Even if they’re wrong, they deserve your respect. Nothing loses a reader faster than being talked down to.

12. No presumption of universal or shared agreement on just about anything. This is only a slight exaggeration. Obviously, if you’re writing for Christians, it’s appropriate to assume a general Christian framework or backdrop. But what does that entail? Christians disagree about a lot! Instead of assuming—and you know what that makes of you—address the reader as an intelligent and curious disciple whose specific beliefs and ideas are opaque to you. Make the case for what you think, assuming only that the reader is open-minded and open-hearted enough to hear you out in good faith. Cards are on the table and nothing is being taken for granted. That’s a recipe for reaching readers and not alienating any of them, no matter how strongly they disagree with you or how skeptical they were when they first opened your book.

In the next post, hopefully sometime next week, I’ll return with another dozen or so suggestions about what makes Tier 2 writing not just accessible for its intended audience, but good. Part of that has to do with style, but another part has to do with resisting certain tropes of the genre that bear on substance. Until then.

Four tiers in preaching, denominations, other…

Two brief reflections on my post a month back about four tiers or levels in Christian/theological publishing.

First: I think the tiers/levels I identify there apply to preaching as well. But because preaching is different from writing and especially from the genres and audiences each publishing tier has in view, the levels apply differently. Put another way, it is appropriate and good that there is a scholarly level of writing that very few can or ever will read. It is neither appropriate nor good for there to be preaching like that. Perhaps, I suppose, a chapel connected to Oxford or Harvard could justify that sort of preaching—but even then, it should drop down to a level 3 or even a pinch lower.

The exception proves the rule, in any case. Preaching, in my view, should never be above level 2; and the best preaching hovers between levels 1 and 2. Preaching should not assume a college degree; should not assume much, if any, background knowledge; should not assume much, if any, familiarity with popular culture; should avoid jargon; should avoid mention of ancient languages; should not name drop authors; should not make erudite allusions to great literature. Instead, it should be intelligible, accessible, and immediately relevant to a high school dropout in her 60s who never reads and doesn’t watch much TV, whether Netflix or the news.

Does that mean such a sermon will lack substance, heft, weight, meat, sustenance? No. But it does mean faithful preaching, week in week out, is very difficult indeed.

Second: A friend sent me a link to someone on Twitter—his name is Patrick K. Miller—riffing on my four tiers in relation to both church conferences and church traditions/denominations. I don’t have a Twitter account so I’m not able to look at the whole thread, but (a) the conference tiers seemed both apt and funny, while (b) I don’t think the ecclesial analogues quite worked. Here’s why.

It’s true, in 2023, that American Christians self-sort into churches based on education, class, wealth, and culture. That’s a sad fact. Protestants with graduate degrees like high liturgy; whereas evangelicals on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to attend charismatic, storefront, or prosperity churches. Granted.

The author’s implication, however, is flawed. I take Miller to be suggesting that the market comes for us all, churches included, and it’s best we accept this self-sorting and (for eggheads like me) avoid condescension. Agreed on the latter, less so on the former. Why?

Because this self-selection by class is neither inevitable nor universal. It’s contingent. It’s a product of a very particular moment in a very parochial ecclesial subculture. Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism are all flies in the ointment here (I often group these together as “catholic” traditions). Both past and present, these traditions encompass high and low, rich and poor, over- and under-educated. Nothing could be “higher” liturgically than these communities, yet the type of person who regularly attends them is not indexed by income or number of diplomas.

It isn’t natural, in other words, it isn’t just the way of the world for well-off folks to go “high” and less-well-off folks to “low.” In fact, this very distinction doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Go to Catholic Mass or Anglican liturgy in Africa and you’ll see charismatic gifts alongside smells and bells. Eucharistic liturgy is the common inheritance of all God’s people down through the centuries, not just the sniffy or effete. We err when we take our current passing moment as a kind of timeless law. Infinite sectarian fracturing, by doctrine and stye and personal preference, is not the rule in Christian history. Religious liberty plus capitalism plus consumerism plus the automobile plus evangelicalism plus populism plus seeker-sensitivity-ism plus so many other factors—all contingent, all mutable, all evitable—brought this situation to pass. We need not accept those factors. We can reject and oppose them, seek to overturn them.

We are not fated to the present crisis of Christian division. Our churches should not cater to it as a given, but fight it as an enemy. Self-sorting by class is only one way this enemy manifests itself. Let’s not pretend it’s a friend. Expel the evil from among your midst.

The smartest people I’ve ever known

have all been religious. Most of them have been devout Christians. Whether within the academy or without, my whole life has been full to the brim with brainy, well-educated, introspective, self-critical, “enlightened” folks who also believe in an invisible, incorporeal, omnipotent Creator of all things who became human in the person of Jesus and who calls all peoples to worship and follow him.

The fact that a bunch of believers are also intelligent and well-informed doesn’t, in and of itself, entail anything about the truth of Christian faith. Perhaps they’re all wrong, just as Christians suppose atheists are all wrong. It doesn’t make a lick of difference that atheists include educated, thoughtful people. If Christianity is true, then all the smart atheists are dead wrong (at least about God)—and vice versa. On the topic of religion, as with any other topic, a lot of bright people in the world are wrong; their brightness doesn’t ensure their rightness.

I say this to make a point I’ve made before: It is a strangely persistent myth, but a myth nonetheless, that sincere faith or religious belief or devout piety is a kind of maturational stage that persons above a certain level of intelligence inevitably leave behind given enough time, education, and social-emotional health. It isn’t true. Anyone not living in a bubble knows it’s not true. Yet it endures. Not only among tiny scattered remnants of New Atheists but also among graduates of elite universities, the types who congregate in big cities and fill jobs in journalism, academia, and politics. The types who love to celebrate what they call “diversity” but look down on anyone who, unlike them, believes in God and attends church, synagogue, or mosque.

The joke isn’t on the dummies who keep on believing. The joke is on people whose social and intellectual world is so parochial that they’ve honestly never read, met, or spoken to a serious religious person—one who’s read what they’ve read, knows what they know, and “still” believes. Better put, someone who’s read and knows all those things and continues to believe in God because of the evidence, not in spite of it. Someone whose reason points her to God, not someone who has sacrificed his intellect on the altar of faith.

Christians and other religious folks in America are fully aware that there are people unlike them in our society. They know they’re not alone. They know that atheists and agnostics and Nones include geniuses, scientists, scholars, journalists, professors, politicians, celebrities, artists, and more. They’re no fools. They know the score. They don’t pretend that “intelligence + education = believing whatever I do.”

Yet somehow that equation is ubiquitous among the secular smart set. I’m happy to leave them be. They’re free to continue in their ignorance. But I admit to being embarrassed on their behalf and, yes, more than occasionally annoyed.

Three more reviews

I’ve spied three new reviews of The Doctrine of Scripture. One is glowing; one is decidedly not; one liked it, but has some questions. Here are links and excerpts.

Joey Royal in Living Church (published in the print magazine; review not online):

Brad East’s short and unassuming title reveals the simplicity of this book, but conceals its profundity and beauty. Its main objective is simple: to describe the way God uses Scripture in the life of the Church. He does this by “showing rather than telling” in order to help the reader “understand the terms, concepts, claims, and explanations that constitute the Christian doctrine of Scripture.” In this task he has succeeded admirably. This book is clearly written, concise but comprehensive, tightly argued but generous and fair. …

At times East’s writing is beautiful, almost devotional, as when he speaks of the Church’s liturgy as the “native habitat” of Scripture … This book — clear, profound, and beautiful — deserves to be widely read and deeply pondered.

Drew Collins in International Journal of Systematic Theology:

In many ways then, East’s book might be construed as a sort of post-post- critical work of Christian theology. Whereas post-critical theologians like Hans Frei sought, and in the minds of many (including myself), succeeded in offering an account of Scripture that was simultaneously orthodox and responsive to contemporary questions without itself being a systematic apologetic response to such concerns, it is nonetheless the case that the work of postcritical theologians often takes shape in contradistinction to the claims and commitments that shaped the ‘critical’ approach to theology, however construed. Reading Frei, one gets the impression that he found the conceptual pool of Christian theology so cloudy that he could do nothing else but work first to clear the water of silt. This is to say that postcritical theology and its clarifying concern, while of the utmost importance, invites work such as East’s book, which could certainly be seen as a companion to that project. In this respect, and for those of us who remain compelled by much of the work of Frei, Kelsey, Webster, etc., East’s book provides helpful ways of framing and describing Scripture that, while not expressed in a popular voice exactly, does not require background familiarity with Kant or Kermode. Perhaps connected to this is the simple fact that this book is a joy to read. East’s prose conveys not just the significance of Scripture, but to some extent, enacts its celebration.

Kaylie Page in Anglican Theological Review (DOI: 10.1177/00033286231161026):

Brad East’s The Doctrine of Scripture is a perplexing book to review: on the one hand, much of it is both beautiful and helpful, but on the other hand, many Christians will be hard-pressed to find East’s overall position persuasive. East admits that this is a “deeply un-Protestant work,” a claim that proves so true that it calls into question his meaning when he says that “the assumptions of this work are catholic” with a small and not a big C (p. 6). East takes great care throughout the text to problematize Protestant approaches to Scripture both recent and historical, with varying levels of persuasiveness. He returns constantly to the authority of the church as primary, but he fails to account for or even acknowledge the fractured and indefinable nature of “the church” for most of today’s believers. …

East’s desire to keep Scripture from becoming the weapon of any would-be lone interpreter is a worthy one. However, in challenging the Reformation doctrines of Scripture in the way he has here, East leaves the reader with the sense that she must be or become a part of a denomination that speaks with the authoritative voice of “the church” or remain paralyzed in the face of a morass of interpretive issues with no one to help her through them—since Scripture itself cannot.

Four tiers of Christian/theological publishing

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about types of theological writing: style, accessibility, demographics, audience, and more. I think about it both as a writer and as a professor who regularly assigns or recommends authors and books to students. Who’s in view? Who could make sense of this text? Is the prose clear, stylish, or neither?

After some reflection, it occurred to me that there are four levels or tiers of theological writing—by which I really mean Christian writing, in this case (a) books (b) composed in English, (c) published by Christian authors (d) about Christian matters, and (e) meant for a readership in North America. Before I list the tiers, let me be clear that they have nothing to do with quality. They have everything to do with genre and audience, and the way a book reflects those two factors. I’m going to list plenty of examples within each tier, as well as instances of writers or texts that straddle the fence between tiers.

Tier 1: Universal

Audience: Anyone at all.

Examples: Beth Moore, Max Lucado, T. D. Jakes, Sadie Robertson Huff, Bob Goff, Jonathan Pokluda, Joel Osteen.

Genre: Inspirational; devotional; personal; Bible study; church curriculum.

Available: Lifeway, Mardel, Barnes & Noble, airports—and anywhere online.

Description: This level includes authors who write Christian books for anyone and everyone. Teenagers, grandmothers, businessmen, stay-home moms, believers, skeptics, heretics, normie laity: you name it, they’re the audience. These books, when popular, sell in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. They are often deeply personal. You get to know the names of the author’s spouse and children and parents and friends. The content is usually geared toward uplift: the reader is meant to be inspired toward hope, courage, and personal change in his or her daily life. These books often contain practical advice. They’re about how to love God and follow Jesus in the most ordinary life possible—in other words, the life available to 99% of us. Sometimes they assume an affluent readership, but by no means always. You can find these books just about anywhere. Their authors usually (not always) lack formal or elite credentials; if they’ve got credentials, authors avoid flaunting them (that’s not why you’re reading their book) or the credentials have to do with ministry (a Master of Divinity, say, or having founded a successful ministry/church). Authors rarely began their careers as writers but quickly become sought-after speakers. These days they tend to have strong followings on social media, a personal podcast, or YouTube. Egghead Christians like myself are very rarely attuned to this level of Christian writing; often enough we’ve never read these books and don’t even know many of the biggest authors’ names. We suppose “committed Christians” read our books, or our friends’ books, or the books we were assigned in grad school, or the “successful” books put out for “popular audiences” by our academic colleagues. Nope. These are the books Christians reads. If I had to guess, I’d wager they make up more than 90% of Christian publishing sales in the U.S. If neither pastors’ libraries nor seminaries existed, I think that percentage would approach (if not quite reach) 100%.

Tier 2: Popular

Audience: College-educated Christians who enjoy reading to learn more about the faith.

Examples: Tish Harrison Warren, Tim Keller, John Mark Comer, Dane Ortlund, Jemar Tisby, N. T. Wright, Barbara Brown Taylor, Anne Lamott, Wesley Hill, Austin Channing Brown, Andy Crouch, Lauren Winner, Andrew Wilson, James K. A. Smith, Tara Isabella Burton, Esau McCaulley, Ben Myers, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Richard Foster, Eugene Peterson, Cornel West, C. S. Lewis.

Genre: Intro-level introduction to Christian doctrines or ideas; mix of memoir and argument; adaptation of a sermon series into book; Christian treatment of relevant or controversial topic; presentation of Christian faith as a whole; higher-level study of Bible or Christian teaching.

Available: Mostly online, but sometimes in major bookstores like Barnes & Noble.

Description: This level includes authors who write books for Christians with a college degree, usually Christians who would describe themselves as “readers.” These readers, though, are not theological in any formal sense. They did not go to seminary. They are not pastors. They don’t know jargon. Books in this group do not contain words like “eschatological.” If you happen upon that word in a book, you know immediately that you’re already in Tier 3 or 4. The readers in this level may be serious Christians, they may be thoughtful, they may be good readers—but they are not interested in anything with even a whiff of the academic. Tier 2 books, accordingly, are on the shorter side; they don’t shy away from the personal or anecdotal; they lack footnotes (some will have endnotes); they assume faith on the part of the reader; they feel like a gentle conversation between the author (a teacher) and the reader (a learner). Here credentials do matter. The author is almost always a pastor, a professor, or a graduate of a seminary or doctoral program. He or she possesses some kind of expertise, one that invites (without threatening) the reader. The concepts in the book may be complex or abstract, but the language in which the concepts are presented is not. It is as simple as possible. Not only no jargon, but little vocabulary above a high school level. That’s no slam on either reader or writer: as Orwell and Lewis both observed, it’s harder to write this way than it is to rely on fancy words as a crutch. Go read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The prose is flawless, and yet there may not be a single word in six hundred pages that an eighth grader (at least, one from Texas) wouldn’t recognize. That’s a gift and a virtue, not a shortcoming. In any case, Tier 2 books populate the curricula of larger churches with a high proportion of college-educated folks. In churches that don’t fit that bill, it’s almost always books from Tier 1.

Tier 3: Highbrow

Audience: Seminarians, pastors, scholars, literary types, lay intellectuals.

Examples: Beth Felker Jones, Wendell Berry, Alan Jacobs, Fleming Rutledge, David Bentley Hart, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wesley Hill, Tara Isabella Burton, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Cornel West, Miroslav Volf, Stanley Hauerwas, Ross Douthat, Dorothy Sayers, James Cone, Zena Hitz, Francis Spufford, Jonathan Tran, Peter Leithart, Brian Bantum, James K. A. Smith, Esau McCaulley, Lauren Winner, Andy Crouch, Phil Christman, Luke Timothy Johnson, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Paul Griffiths, Tim Keller, Eugene Peterson, Justo L. González.

Genre: Textbook; magazine essay; popularization of academic scholarship; intellectual history; popular genealogy; political screed; think-tank intervention; “public discourse”/“public intellectual” writing; church-facing theological scholarship; work of interest to pastoral ministry; biblical commentary; public-facing scholarship; etc.

Available: Usually only online, aside from a few very famous authors.

Description: This level includes authors who write for a wide audience of non-specialists who are otherwise interested in serious intellectual and academic Christian thought. Think of books in this group as a way of making the insights of academic scholarship available to folks who either are not academics or, being academics, do not belong to the field in question. Likewise books in this tier imagine a lay reader without formal expertise but who has time, energy, and interest enough to devote themselves to understanding a book written with style about dense matters—like an amateur tinkerer dabbling in quantum mechanics. Such a reader is willing to do the work, but don’t treat her like she’s already a member of the guild. If she were, she wouldn’t need to read your book. Books in this category may have footnotes, longer sentences, a bigger page count, and a presumption of literary and historical background knowledge on the part of the reader. Or perhaps the work in question is a textbook written specifically for upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. There may be explanation going on, but it’s in the context of active teaching; it’s not the sort of book one would pick up and read for pleasure. Living writers that come to mind here often publish in highbrow “popular” venues like Commonweal or First Things or The New Atlantis or The Point or The New Yorker or The New York Times or The New Republic or The Atlantic. Readers are self-conscious, if a mite embarrassed, about their status as intellectuals and readerly readers. They expect nuance, expertise, credentials, even authority. Authors, in turn, supply them in spades.

Tier 4: Scholarly

Audience: Fellow scholars and academics as well as some pastors and few laypeople.

Examples: Kathryn Tanner, Justo L. González, Willie James Jennings, Katherine Sonderegger, Sarah Coakley, David Bentley Hart, James Cone, Jean Porter, Fleming Rutledge, Stanley Hauerwas, Frances Young, Luke Timothy Johnson, Miroslav Volf, Eleonore Stump, Jennifer Herdt, J. Kameron Carter, Francesca Murphy, Bruce Marshall, Linn Marie Tonstad, Kevin Hector, Jonathan Tran, Eric Gregory, Paul Griffiths, John Webster, Cornel West.

Genre: Monograph; dissertation; peer-reviewed journal article; scholarly tome; biblical commentary; etc.

Available: Online, university presses, campus bookstores, or academic conferences.

Description: This level includes academics producing professional scholarship for their peers. They have an audience of one: people like them. They do not define jargon; they revel in it. They do not transliterate, much less translate; they write in Greek or Sanskrit and assume you can read it as well as they can. Their pages are full of footnotes: the more the better. They are scholars writing for scholars, often hyper-specialized scholars inhabiting sub-sub-sub-fields (studying only a single book of the Bible, or a specific century in church history, or a particular doctrine like predestination). If any eavesdroppers want to find some profit in their work, they’re welcome to do so, but the content, style, genre, and assumed audience is unchanged: it’s academic. That’s not to say their books won’t have an impact. Their ideas, if good or interesting or widely received and accepted, will trickle down the tiers over the years and even decades until ordinary folks who have never heard of the source material will learn about or even share the ideas in question. That takes time, though, and has nothing to do with book sales. Academics don’t sell books. That’s not the business they got into. Someone or something else pays the bills, to the extent that they are paid. Which is why scholarly books so often do not appear to have been written with accessibility, style, or even clarity in mind. Other goods and ends are being sought (whether or not such a tradeoff is prudent or defensible).

*

Okay. So those are the tiers. Here are some further notes and thoughts, in no particular order:

• If you’re thinking in terms of publishing and thus in terms of sales, we might put it this way: a Tier 4 book sells in the hundreds, a Tier 3 book in the thousands, a Tier 2 book in the tens of thousands, and a Tier 1 book (if successful by its own standards) in the hundreds of thousands.

• I did my best to duplicate names across tiers. I’m not aware of an author, at least a living author, who could reasonably be placed in all four tiers—unless, I suppose, you counted an author, like Lewis, who covered Tiers 2-4 and wrote fiction or children’s stories (and could thus be included in Tier 1). Regardless, although I listed a few dead authors, I tried to giving living examples.

• Who are the platonic ideals for each level? For Tier 1 I’d say Beth Moore or Max Lucado. For Tier 2 I’d say Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary, Ben Myers’ Apostles’ Creed, or John Mark Comer’s Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. For Tier 3 I’d say most everything Lewis and Chesterton wrote; among the living, think Tim Keller or Zena Hitz, Beth Felker Jones or Alan Jacobs. For Tier 4, I’d say just about any academic systematic theologian: Tanner, Sonderegger, Jennings, Tran, Herdt, et al.

• In my experience, when academics refer to “writing for a popular audience” or “writing a popular book,” what they mean is Tier 3, not Tier 2 (and certainly not Tier 1). Jamie Smith is a great example. Some of his scholarship on French continental philosophy is clearly Tier 4. Desiring the Kingdom is Tier 3. You Are What You Love is Tier 2. Early on in my teaching, I assigned DTK to upperclassmen in a gen-ed course. They drowned. Then YAWYL came out. Now I assign that instead, and even still they have a bit of trouble in later chapters—but they don’t drown. It’s at their level. They can tread water and occasionally swim a bit.

• For academics, then, our training seriously warps our ability to tell what kind of writing ordinary people—my term for non-academics—find accessible and engaging. There is a kind of Tier 3 writing, for example, that is full of rhetorical flourishes and feels, to a theologically trained academic, bracing and lovely and passionate and compelling. Hand it to a normie, though, and they can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s impenetrable. The sentences are long; the vocabulary is dense; the presumed audience is not “ordinary person with a day job.” We have to learn how to read with eyes other than our own.

• The fatal symptom of all failed “popular” writing by academics is jargon. The second is complex syntax. The third is the inability to make a simple point with a brief declarative sentence. The fourth is the presumption of all manner of background knowledge on the part of the reader, most of which she has never even heard of. If you’re an academic and you want to write for a wide audience, it’s these four things you must be purged of. (A fifth is name-dropping and ism-mongering. My students always tell me, when they read Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, that they get “lost in the names and dates.” You know you’re writing a Tier 3 book if you refer to “Eliot” or “Auden” or “Cardinal Newman” or even “Luther” without a first name and introduction. Them’s the facts, whether you like it or not.)

• I want to reiterate the point I made in my description of Tier 1 above: These are the books that American Christians read. They sell nearly all the copies; they speak at nearly all the events; they inform the minds and hearts of countless believers every day. Mourn it or celebrate it, it’s best to accept it. And some folks writing in Tier 1 are fantastic! I’ll not permit the name of Beth Moore besmirched in my presence. Just about every Christian woman in my extended family or home church has been reading, studying, and listening to Beth Moore for three decades. Praise God for that. (And if you haven’t read her memoir, get thee to Mardel pronto. Even better, listen to it on audio.) Nevertheless, it’s crucial to grasp that more people know who Sadie Robertson Huff is than, say, Tim Keller or Tish Warren. Sadie’s got five million followers on Instagram, for goodness’ sake. This is the world we live in.

• For people like me—meaning academics who’d like to write for as wide a popular audience as possible—Tier 2 is the sweet spot. My revised dissertation (published in 2022 with Eerdmans) is Tier 4. My doctrine of Scripture (published in 2021 with Cascade) is Tier 3: accessible to pastors, seminarians, and normies who want to stretch themselves. My next two books (more about those here) are Tier 2. They were both the most fun I’ve had writing and the most challenging to write. Why? Because I had to let go of all my crutches and shortcuts. I had to say in ten words what I’m used to saying in fifty. To say in four sentences what I want twelve for. To make a claim without a footnote defending me from attacks on all sides. To say something about God, Scripture, or the gospel that a Christian of any age who’s never read another theological book in her life could understand without a problem. It’s hard, y’all! And for that reason it’s really nice to work with editors who get it. Todd Hains at Lexham was a taskmaster, breaking down my four-line sentences into two; simplifying my syntax and diction; strangling my jargon; murdering my adverbs and adjectives; in general, killing my darlings. Thank God for Todd. Someone might actually read my book next year because of him. Get yourself an editor, or at least honest friends, who will tell you exactly how unreadable your “popular” writing is. Then get revising.

• Here’s a delicate topic that, I hope, I’ll be able to discuss with appropriate nuance and clarity. Because I have a lot to say about it, I’m going to leave the bullet points to make the point…

*

In theology and Christian writing generally, it’s been a man’s game until the last half century or so. It hasn’t been a white man’s game, it’s important to note, since Christian writing from the beginning has come from places as diverse as north Africa, the middle East, Russia, eastern Europe, South America, and elsewhere. Even calling writing from Europe “white” is unhelpful, since it’s overly generic or anachronistic (or both). Saint Paul wrote in Greece and Saint Augustine in Hippo and Saint Leo in Rome and Saint Anselm in Britain and Saint Basil in Caesarea and Saint Athanasius in Egypt and Saint Cyril in Jerusalem and Saint Ephrem in Nisibis and Saint John in Damascus and Saint Teresa in Spain and Saint Thérèse in France—and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. It makes no sense to call such writers “white,” even if much that they wrote is part of the so-called “Western” inheritance or patrimony. Such a term fails to describe their literal skin color, and most of them lived before (and thus innocent of) the invention of race.

Having said that, just as there is a legitimate concern to create space, in scholarship as well as classroom syllabi, for women Christian writers, so there is a legitimate concern to create space for living Christian writers of color, particularly those who come from cultures or groups rendered marginal by the centuries-long dominance of white Christian voices in North American contexts. Stipulate with me that this concern is sincere, that it is legitimate, and that it is worthy of attention and support on Christianly specific grounds. Now think about my tiers of theological publishing above.

For the moment think only of women writers. It seems to me that women are most represented in Tier 1. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if aggregate sales of Christian books favor women authors (though I have no idea if that’s true). I would guess that Tier 4 is where women are next most represented, in terms of authors of books published as a percentage of the whole group. After just a few generations, women swell the ranks of the theological disciplines, and the “big names” that define the field as just as likely to be women as men. (Again, this is anecdotal, but stick with me.)

My sense is that where women continue to be under-represented is in Tiers 2 and 3, and I would submit that Tier 2 is where there are fewest women authors. Allow that I may be right about this. Why might that be?

One reason is that women who enter the theological academy operate from a felt pressure, and often explicit advice, to prove their bona fides to their (predominantly male) colleagues. They do so by producing top-level scholarship without a trace of the popular in it.

Another reason is ordinary institutional pressures: T&P requirements.

A third reason, even following tenure, is a general sense (which applies to men too) that “real” scholarship never descends beneath Tier 3. Maybe you write a textbook. Maybe you “dumb down” your hyper-specialized research for non-experts within the academy. But you don’t try to appeal to the masses. You don’t write “for everyone.” You’re a scholar! That’s beneath us.

A fourth reason is a side effect of the success of women writers in Tier 1: a certain perception of what it means to be “a female Christian writer” who “writes for a [read: female] popular audience.” This isn’t just a genre. It’s a whole sensibility. There are unwritten rules here. You need a social media presence. You need to interact with your fans. You need pictures, and not just of you but of your family (ideally your beautiful children). You need to “let people in.” If you don’t, is anyone really going to buy your books or pay you to speak?

A fifth and final reason connects back to something I said in my description of Tier 2 books above: unlike in Tier 1, Tier 2 books trade on the credentials or authority of the author. But among Christians, men are far more likely to possess credentials, authority, or both. They’re more likely to be ordained; they’re more likely to be a pastor; they’re more likely to have graduated from seminary. That’s what makes a Tish Warren such a remarkable success story. When she published her first book, she was a proverbial “nobody” without a social media following, without a speaker circuit, without a tenure-track professorship. But she was an ordained priest. That, plus her ability to pack theological substance into clear and beautiful prose, made her something of a unicorn. Otherwise Tier 2 is almost all men.

Consider Tara Isabella Burton. Like Warren she’s another exception that proves the rule. To be honest, she’s more of a 2.5 than a 2.0 on my scale. Her books lie somewhere between “popular” and “highbrow.” My students have to work when they read them, though they do eventually make it out the other side, and they’re not upset with me (or her) when they do. Now notice: Burton has a doctorate in theology from Oxford—but she didn’t go the academic route. She became a religion journalist and a novelist. She mostly writes highbrow nonfiction in a public-intellectual vein, even as her two books about Christianity in America are just accessible enough to qualify as “assignable” to my twentysomething college students.

So here’s the thought I want to float. It’s two sided.

On one hand, suppose again that you’re a professor, like me, who assigns books to students. You’d like these books to be authored by a representative swath of humanity, not just white dudes. The books, however, have to be both readable and Christian; ideally belonging to Tier 2. Not just that, but at least in my context, they can’t be morally or theologically liberal; they need to be nonpartisan, mainstream, or traditional. I’m not assigning my students a book that denies the resurrection of Jesus, or one that assumes anyone with a brain is a socialist, or one that argues abortion is a moral good. I’m not even assigning a book that’s outright partisan in the sense that it presumes “no serious American Christian could vote for/against X.” Remember, I’m teaching 21-year-olds who’ve never heard the word “theology” or “ethics” before. They’re babies. And I live in west Texas. So no ideologically progressive books (which is not to say I don’t assign essays, excerpts, and chapters written by thinkers from across the political spectrum: I do).

Here’s my question for you. Remember that I’m a theologian in need of theological texts to assign in general-education undergraduate theology courses for majors in business, nursing, and education. These texts need to be squarely in Tier 2 (with one or two exceptions for quality Tier 3 books). What do you propose I assign? Which authors do you recommend? Who fits the bill?

The truth is, if you’re avoiding Tier 1 and Tier 4, and certainly if you’re avoiding Tier 3, your choices are profoundly, even shockingly limited. That realization is what generated this entire idea about the different tiers of Christian/theological publishing. I assign Warren and Burton in my classes. I assign Beth Felker Jones and Jemar Tisby and James Cone, too. In addition, my students can handle Barbara Brown Taylor, Lauren Winner, and (if they’re Bible/ministry majors) Fleming Rutledge. I’ll give them, as well, small doses of Kathryn Tanner or Frances Young or Ellen Charry. But the sweet spot, as I’ve learned, if I want students to dive deep, to gain from the reading, and not to resent me or the text, is Tier 2. And if you share the goal of assigning women as well as men, black authors as well as white (not to mention others), then there just aren’t that many to choose from—assuming living authors, assuming my other constraints, assuming my context, assuming my subject matter.

That’s a sour note to end on, so let me turn to the other side of the coin. If I were giving advice to a friend already in the academy or to a student just about to begin the long trek through graduate study toward a doctorate, here’s what I’d say. If you’re a woman or person of color and you have any interest at all in writing for an audience beyond the university, then begin preparing today for publishing a Tier 2 book. That’s where the market inefficiency is. That’s where the audience is. That’s where you can make a difference. Aim for any tier you please, but if your desire is to write for a popular readership and you also have the talent and institutional support to do so—it’s there for the taking. Have at it.

And while you’re at it, call me up on pub day. I’ll add your book to the syllabus on the spot.

A decision tree for dealing with digital tech

Start with this question:

Do you believe that our, and especially young people’s, relationship to digital technology (=smartphones, screens, the internet, streaming, social media) is healthy, functional, and therefore good as is? Or unhealthy, dysfunctional, and therefore in need of immediate and drastic help?

If your answer is “healthy, functional, and good as is,” then worry yourself no more; the status quo is A-OK. If you answered otherwise, read on.

Now ask yourself this question:

Do the practices, policies, norms, and official statements of my institution—whether a family, a business, a university, or a church—(a) contribute to the technological problem, (b) maintain the digital status quo, or (c) interrupt, subvert, and cut against the dysfunctional relationship of the members of my institution to their devices and screens?

If your answer is (a) or (b) and yet you answered earlier that you believe our relationship to digital technology is in serious need of help, then you’ve got a problem on your hands. If your answer is (c), then well done.

Finally, ask yourself this:

How does my own life—the whole suite of my daily habits when no one’s looking, or rather, when everyone is looking (my spouse, my roommate, my children, my coworkers, my neighbors, my pastors, and so on)—reflect, model, and/or communicate my most basic beliefs about the digital status quo? Does the way I live show others that (a) I am aware of the problem (b) chiefly within myself and (c) am tirelessly laboring to respond to it, to amend my ways and solve the problem? Or does it evince the very opposite? So that my life and my words are unaligned and even contradictory?

At both the institutional and the personal level, it seems to me that answering these questions honestly and following them to their logical conclusions—not just in our minds or with our words but in concrete actions—would clarify much about the nature of our duties, demands, and decisions in this area of life.

My latest: how to keep faith as a college student

This morning Christianity Today published an essay of mine called “Stay the Course: How to Keep Your Faith in College.” It consists of seven tips for a Christian entering college as a freshman this semester. On my own campus, freshmen are moving into the dorms today and tomorrow, and upperclassmen will arrive later this week. Who said my work isn’t “timely” and “relevant”?

More seriously, I wrote this with my own students in mind. I love giving them Stanley Hauerwas’s wonderful essay “Go With God,” but I’ve also doled out a lot of practical advice over the years to countless young students. Here’s the advice, gathered into one place. In all sincerity, it would fill my heart with joy if pastors, parents, and professors sent their rising freshmen a link to this piece. It might actually make a difference in the lives of a few young believers unsure how to keep their faith in college. I hope it does some good.

The first three tips concern attending church in person, deleting social media, and purchasing physical books. I’m nothing if not consistent.

The Liberating Arts is out today!

More than three years ago I joined a team of scholars on a grant-funded project called “The Liberating Arts.” We created a website and conducted dozens of video interviews with fellow writers, academics, educators, and intellectuals about the present and future of the liberal arts. The interviews are also available in podcast form.

Today is one more fruit of that long-standing project: a book! It’s called The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education. Published by Plough, it was edited by our fearless leaders Jeff Bilbro, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and David Henreckson. And it’s out today. Go buy it directly from Plough, or on Bookshop, or on the Bezos Site, or wherever else you purchase books. Request another copy for your library! And suggest it to your dean or chair or provost or study center as a common read! You won’t regret it.

What is the book, you ask? See below for a description. Let me tell you first whose essays are found between its covers (besides the editors’ and my own): Emily Auerbach, Nathan Beacom, Joseph Clair, Margarita Mooney Clayton, Lydia Dugdale, Don Eben, Becky L. Eggimann, Rachel Griffis, Zena Hitz, David Hsu, L. Gregory Jones, Brandon McCoy, Peter Mommsen, Angel Adams Parham, Steve Prince, John Mark Reynolds, Erin Shaw, Anne Snyder, Sean Sword, Noah Toly, and Jonathan Tran. Those are names worth reading.

What about endorsements? Check out these:

At their best, the humanities are about discerning what kinds of lives we should be living. But humanities education is in crisis today, leaving many without resources to answer this most important question of our lives. The authors of this volume are able contenders for the noble cause of saving and improving the humanities. Read and be inspired! —Miroslav Volf, co-author, Life Worth Living

In this lucid and inspiring volume, a diverse group of thinkers dispel entrenched falsehoods about the irrelevance, injustice, or uselessness of the liberal arts and remind us that nothing is more fundamental to preparing citizens to live in a pluralistic society attempting to balance the values of justice, equality, and community. —Jon Baskin, editor, Harper’s and The Point

In this series of lively, absorbing, and accessible essays, the contributors invoke and dismantle all the chief objections to the study of the liberal arts. The result is a clarion call for an education that enables human and societal flourishing. Everyone concerned about the fate of learning today must read this book. —Eric Adler, author, The Battle of the Classics

In our era of massive social and technological upheaval, this book offers a robust examination of and an expansive vision for the liberal arts. As a scientist who believes that education should shape us for lives of reflection and action, I found the essays riveting, challenging, and inspiring. I picked it up and could not put it down. —Francis Su, author, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

The Liberating Arts is a transformative work. Opening with an acknowledgement of the sundry forces arrayed against liberal arts education today, this diverse collection of voices cultivates an expansive imagination for how the liberal arts can mend what is broken and orient us individually and collectively to what is good, true, and beautiful. —Kristin Kobes du Mez, author, Jesus and John Wayne

And here’s a snapshot of what we’re up to in the book…

*

Why would anyone study the liberal arts? It’s no secret that the liberal arts have fallen out of favor and are struggling to prove their relevance. The cost of college pushes students to majors and degrees with more obvious career outcomes.

A new cohort of educators isn’t taking this lying down. They realize they need to reimagine and rearticulate what a liberal arts education is for, and what it might look like in today’s world. In this book, they make an honest reckoning with the history and current state of the liberal arts.

You may have heard – or asked – some of these questions yourself:

• Aren’t the liberal arts a waste of time? How will reading old books and discussing abstract ideas help us feed the hungry, liberate the oppressed and reverse climate change? Actually, we first need to understand what we mean by truth, the good life, and justice.

• Aren’t the liberal arts racist? The “great books” are mostly by privileged dead white males. Despite these objections, for centuries the liberal arts have been a resource for those working for a better world. Here’s how we can benefit from ancient voices while expanding the conversation.

• Aren’t the liberal arts liberal? Aren’t humanities professors mostly progressive ideologues who indoctrinate students? In fact, the liberal arts are an age-old tradition of moral formation, teaching people to think for themselves and learn from other perspectives.

• Aren’t the liberal arts elitist? Hasn’t humanities education too often excluded poor people and minorities? While that has sometime been the case, these educators map out well-proven ways to include people of all social and educational backgrounds.

• Aren’t the liberal arts a bad career investment? I really just want to get a well-paying job and not end up as an overeducated barista. The numbers – and the people hiring – tell a different story.

In this book, educators mount a vigorous defense of the humanist tradition, but also chart a path forward, building on their tradition’s strengths and addressing its failures. In each chapter, dispatches from innovators describe concrete ways this is being put into practice, showing that the liberal arts are not only viable today, but vital to our future.

*

P.S. There is a launch event in Manhattan next month. Join Roosevelt Montás, Zena Hitz, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Jonathan Tran to celebrate The Liberating Arts on September 28 at The Grand Salon of the 3 West Club ⁄ New York. Sign up here.

A.I. fallacies, academic edition

ChatGPT is here to stay. We should get used to it.

Why? I’m not used to it, and I don’t plan on getting used to it.

ChatGPT is a tool. The only thing to do with a tool is learn how to use it well.

False. There are all kinds of tools I don’t know how to use, never plan on using, and never plan to learn to use.

But this is an academic tool. We—

No, it isn’t. It’s no more an academic tool than a smart phone. It’s utterly open-ended in its potential uses.

Our students are using it. We should too.

No, we shouldn’t. My students do all kinds of things I don’t do and would never do.

But we should know what they’re up to.

I do know what they’re up to. They’re using ChatGPT to write their papers.

Perhaps it’s useful!

I’m sure it is. To plagiarize.

Not just to plagiarize. To iterate. To bounce ideas off of. To outline.

As I said.

That’s not plagiarism! The same thing happens with a roommate, or a writing center, or a tutor—or a professor.

False.

Because it’s an algorithm?

Correct.

What makes an algorithm different from a person?

You said it. Do I have to dignify it with an answer?

Humor me.

Among other things: Because a human person—friend, teacher, tutor—does not instantaneously provide paragraphs of script to copy and paste into a paper. Because a human person asks questions in reply. Because a human person prompts further thought, which takes time. ChatGPT doesn’t take time. It’s the negation of temporality in human inquiry.

I’d call that efficiency.

Efficiency is not the end-all, be-all.

It’s good, though.

That depends. I’d say efficiency is a neutral description. Like “innovation” and “creativity.” Sometimes what it describes is good; sometimes what it describes is bad. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which, at least at first.

Give me a break. When is efficiency a bad thing?

Are you serious?

Yes.

Okay. A nuclear weapon is efficient at killing, as is nerve gas.

Give me another break. We’re not talking about murder!

I am. You asked me about cases when efficiency isn’t desirable.

Fine. Non-killing examples, please.

Okay. Driving 100 miles per hour in a school zone. Gets you where you want to go faster.

That’s breaking the law, though.

So? It’s more efficient.

I can see this isn’t going anywhere.

I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand. Efficiency is not good in itself. Cheating on an exam is an “efficient” use of time, if studying would have taken fifteen hours you’d rather have spent doing something else. Fast food is more efficient than cooking your own food, if you have the money. Using Google Translate is more efficient than becoming fluent in a foreign language. Listening to an author on a podcast is more efficient than reading her book cover to cover. Listening to it on 2X is even more efficient.

And?

And: In none of these cases is it self-evident that greater efficiency is actually good or preferable. Even when ethics is not involved—as in killing or breaking the law—efficiency is merely one among many factors to consider in a given action, undertaking, or (in this case) technological invention. The mere fact that X is efficient tells us nothing whatsoever about its goodness, and thus nothing whatsoever about whether we should endorse it, bless it, or incorporate it into our lives.

Your solution, then, is ignorance.

I don’t take your meaning.

You want to be ignorant about ChatGPT, language models, and artificial intelligence.

Not at all. What would make you think that?

Because you refuse to use it.

I don’t own or use guns. But I’m not ignorant about them.

Back to killing.

Sure. But your arguments keep failing. I’m not ignorant about A.I. I just don’t spend my time submitting questions to it or having “conversations” with it. I have better things to do.

Like what?

Like pretty much anything.

But you’re an academic! We academics should be knowledgeable about such things!

There you go again. I am knowledgeable. My not wasting time on ChatGPT has nothing to do with knowledge or lack thereof.

But shouldn’t your knowledge be more than theoretical? Shouldn’t you learn to use it well?

What does “well” mean? I’m unpersuaded that modifier applies.

How could you know?

By thinking! By reading and thinking. Try it sometime.

That’s uncalled for.

You’re right. I take it back.

What if there are in fact ways to use AI well?

I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

You’re being glib again.

This time I’m not. You’re acting like the aim of life, including academic life, is to be on the cutting edge. But it’s not. Besides, the cutting edge is always changing. It’s a moving target. I’m an academic because I’m a dinosaur. My days are spent doing things Plato and Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas and John Calvin spend their days doing. Reading, writing, teaching. I don’t use digital technology in the first or the third. I use it in the second for typing. That’s it. I don’t live life on the edge. I live life moving backwards. The older, the better. If, by some miracle, the latest greatest tech gadgetry not only makes itself ubiquitous and unavoidable in scholarly life but also materially and undeniably improves it, without serious tradeoffs—well, then I’ll find out eventually. But I’m not holding my breath.

Whether or not you stick your head in the sand, your students are using ChatGPT and its competitors. Along with your colleagues, your friends, your pastors, your children.

That may well be true. I don’t deny it. If it is true, it’s cause for lament, not capitulation.

What?

I mean: Just because others are using it doesn’t mean I should join them. (If all your friends jumped off a bridge…)

But you’re an educator! How am I not getting through to you?

I’m as clueless as you are.

If everyone’s using it anyway, and it’s already being incorporated into the way writers compose their essays and professors create their assignments and students compose their papers and pastors compose their sermons and—

I. Don’t. Care. You have yet to show me why I should.

Okay. Let me be practical. Your students’ papers are already using ChatGPT.

Yes, I’m aware.

So how are you going to show them how to use it well in future papers?

I’m not.

What about their papers?

They won’t be writing them.

Come again?

No more computer-drafted papers written from home in my classes. I’m reverting to in-class handwritten essay exams. No prompts in advance. Come prepared, having done the reading. Those, plus the usual weekly reading quizzes.

You can’t be serious.

Why not?

Because that’s backwards.

Exactly! Now you’re getting it.

No, I mean: You’re moving backwards. That’s not the way of the future.

What is this “future” you speak of? I’m not acquainted.

That’s not the way society is heading. Not the way the academy is heading.

So?

So … you’ll be left behind.

No doubt!

Shouldn’t you care about that?

Why would I?

It makes you redundant.

I fail to see how.

Your teaching isn’t best practices!

Best practices? What does that mean? If my pedagogy, ancient and unsexy though it may be, results in greater learning for my students, then by definition it is the best practice possible. Or at least better practice by comparison.

But we’re past all that. That’s the way we used to do things.

Some things we used to do were better than the way we do them now.

That’s what reactionaries say.

That’s what progressives say.

Exactly.

Come on. You’re the one resorting to slogans. I’m the one joking. Quality pedagogy isn’t political in this sense. Are you really wanting to align yourself with Silicon Valley trillionaires? With money-grubbing corporations? With ed-tech snake-oil salesmen? Join the rebels! Join the dissidents! Join the Butlerian Jihad!

Who’s resorting to rhetoric now?

Mine’s in earnest though. I mean it. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is. By not going with the flow. By not doing what I’m told. By resisting every inch the tech overloads want to colonize in my classroom.

Okay. But seriously. You think you can win this fight?

Not at all.

Wait. What?

…

You don’t think you can win?

Of course not. Who said anything about winning?

Why fight then?

Likelihood of winning is not the deciding factor. This is the long defeat, remember. The measure of action is not success but goodness. The question for my classroom is therefore quite simple. Does it enrich teaching and learning, or does it not? Will my students’ ability to read, think, and speak with wisdom, insight, and intellectual depth increase as a result, or not? I have not seen a single argument that suggests using, incorporating, or otherwise introducing my students to ChatGPT will accomplish any of these pedagogical goals. So long as that is the case, I will not let propaganda, money, paralysis, confusion, or pressure of any kind—cultural, social, moral, administrative—persuade me to do what I believe to be a detriment to my students.

You must realize it’s inevitable.

What’s “it”?

You know.

I do. But I reject the premise. As I already said, I’m not going to win. But my classroom is not the world. It’s a microcosm of a different world. That’s the vision of the university I’m willing to defend, to go to the mat for. Screens rule in the world, but not in my little world. We open physical books. I write real words on a physical board. We speak to one another face to face, about what matters most. No laptops open. No smartphones out. No PowerPoint slides. Just words, words, words; texts, texts, texts; minds, minds, minds. I admit that’s not the only good way to teach. But it is a good way. And I protect it with all my might. I’m going to keep protecting it, as long as I’m able.

So you’re not a reactionary. You’re a fanatic.

Names again!

This time I’m the one kidding. I get it. But you’re something of a Luddite.

I don’t reject technology. I reject the assumption that technology created this morning should ipso facto be adopted this evening as self-evidently essential to human flourishing, without question or interrogation or skepticism or sheer time. Give me a hundred years, or better yet, five hundred. By then I’ll get back to you on whether A.I. is good for us. Not to mention good for education and scholarship.

You don’t have that kind of time.

Precisely. That’s why Silicon Valley boosterism is so foolish and anti-intellectual. It’s a cause for know-nothings. It presumes what it cannot know. It endorses what it cannot perceive. It disseminates what it cannot take sufficient time to test. It simply hands out digital grenades at random, hoping no one pulls the pin. No wonder it always blows up in their face.

We’ve gotten off track, and you’ve started sermonizing.

I’m known to do that.

Should we stop?

I think so. You don’t want to see me when I really get going. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Young Christians (not) reading, 2

I received some really useful feedback in response to my previous post about the reading habits, such as they are, of high school and college Christians today. By way of reminder, the group I’m thinking about consists of (a) Christians who are (b) spiritually committed and (c) intellectually serious (d) between the ages of 15 and 25. In other words, in terms of GPA or intelligence or aptitude or career prospects, the top 5-10% Christian students in high school and college. Future professionals, even elites, who are likely to pursue graduate degrees in top-100 schools followed by jobs in law, medicine, journalism, the arts, academia, and politics. What are they reading right now—if anything?

(I trust my qualifiers and modifiers ensure in advance that I’m not equating spiritual maturity with intellectual aptitude, on one hand, or intellectual aptitude with careerist elitism, on the other.)

Here are some responses I received as well as a bunch of further reflections on my part.

1. One comment across the board: None of these kids are reading anything, whether they are cream of the crop or nothing of the kind. And they’re certainly not reading bona fide theology or intellectually demanding spiritual writing. All of them, including the smartest and most ambitious, are online, all the time, full stop. What “content” they get is found there: podcasts, videos, bloggers, and influencers, plus pastors with a “brand” and an extensive online presence (which, these days, amount to the same thing). To be fair, some of these online sources aren’t half bad. Some are substantive. Some have expertise or credentials or wide learning (if, often, of the autodidact sort). But to whatever extent any of these kids are acquiring knowledge, it’s not literate knowledge. It’s mediated by the internet, not by books.

2. If someone in this age range is reading a living Christian author, then I was right to think of John Mark Comer. A few more names mentioned: David Platt, Francis Chan, Dane Ortlund, Timothy Keller. I also had The Gospel Coalition mentioned as a group of authors read by some of these folks. In terms of dead authors, in addition to what I called “the usual suspects” (Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, et al), I also heard Eugene Peterson, Dallas Willard, and Henri Nouwen. Which makes sense, since all of them have passed in recent memory, and professors as well as youth pastors would be likely to recommend their work. (I’m going to go ahead and assume John Piper is among those names, too, though he is still with us.)

3. An addendum: Some young believers are reading books, but the books they’re reading are mostly fiction. Typically YA fare; sometimes older stuff, like Tolkien or Jane Austen; occasionally scattered past or present highbrow fiction like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy or Susanna Clarke. But still, not a lot of fiction reading overall, and the majority is page-turning lowbrow stuff, with occasional English-major nerdballs (hello) opting for the top-rack vintage.

4. A second addendum: It isn’t clear to me how to count or to contextualize kids who are home-schooled or taught in classical Christian academies. What percentage of the total student population are they? And what percentage of this small sub-population is being taught Homer and Virgil and Saint Augustine and Calvin and so on? Or, if we’re thinking of living authors, which if any of them are they reading? I simply have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions. Nor do I know what the difference is between such students being assigned these texts and their actual personal reading habits outside of class.

5. Back to the brief list of living authors above: Comer, Platt, Chan, Ortlund, Keller, et al. The question arises: Are young Christians who report these names in fact reading their books? Or are they “digesting” their message via sermons, podcasts, and video recordings available on the internet? The same goes for megachurch pastors with an online audience, like Jonathan Pokluda, who preaches outside of Waco; or Andy Stanley in Atlanta, or Matt Chandler in Dallas. There’s a lot of daylight between reading an author’s books and knowing the basic gist of a public figure.

6. To be even more granular: If a young Christian says that she has read Comer’s latest book, what is likeliest? That she used her eyes to scan a codex whose pages she turned with her hands? or that she read it on an e-reader/tablet? or that she listened to the audio version? After all, Comer—like other popular nonfiction authors today—reads his books himself for the audio edition. And since he’s a preacher for a living, it’s very effective, not to mention personalizing; which is part of the appeal for so many young people today.

7. In a word, is it true to say that even the readers among young believers today are often not “reading” in the classical manner many of us presuppose? So that, whether it’s a podcast or a TikTok or an IG Reel or a YouTube channel or a “book,” the manner of reception/intake/ingestion is more or less the same? So that “reading” names not an alternative mode of acquiring knowledge or engaging a source but simply a difference in type of source? In which case, it seems to me, young people formed in this way will not, would not, think of “books” as different in kind from other social media that make for their daily digital diet, but merely a difference in degree. Books being one point on a spectrum that includes pods, videos, and the like.

8. So much for technologies of knowledge production and consumption. Another question: What counts as a “serious” Christian author? That was part of my original question, recall. Not just intellectually serious young Christian readers, but serious Christian books by serious Christian authors. Not fluff. Not spiritual candy bars. Not the ghost-written memoirs of influencers. Not, in short, the “inspirational” shelf at Barnes & Noble. If one-half of the presenting question of the original post concerned a certain type of young Christian reader, the other half concerns a certain type of Christian author. Here’s what I have in mind, at least. The author doesn’t have to meet a credentials requirement; doesn’t have to have a doctorate. Nor does he have to write in an academic, jargon-laden, or impenetrable style. That would defeat the point. To be popular, you have to be readable. And “being popular” can’t be a defeater here, or else no one, however rich or good in substance, could ever sell books: they’d be disqualified by their own success.

As I’ve said, Lewis and Chesterton are the gold standard. Other names that come to mind from the twentieth century (beyond Bonhoeffer, Nouwen, Peterson, and Willard) include Karl Barth, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Madeleine L’Engle, John Stott, J. I. Packer, Robert Farrar Capon, Frederick Buechner, Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas, and Marilynne Robinson. That’s a very short list; it could be doubled or tripled quickly. As it stands, what do the names on it have in common?

Here’s how I’d put it. Each author’s writing draws from a rich, clear, and deep reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, a reservoir that funds their work but does not overwhelm it. Put differently, what a normie reader encounters is the tip of the iceberg. If that’s all she can handle, so be it. But to anyone in the know, it’s as clear as day that there’s a mountain of ice beneath the surface.

Furthermore, one of the consistent effects of reading any of these authors is not only sticking with them but moving beyond them into the vast tradition that so evidently informs their writing. This could be the Thomistic tradition, or the patristic, or the Homeric, or the Antiochene, or the Kantian, or the Reformed, or whatever—but what the author offers the reader is so beautiful that the reader wants more of whatever it is. And so she moves from Piper to Edwards to Calvin to Augustine in the course of weeks, months, and years. From there, who knows what will be next?

That is the kind of book, the sort of author, I have in mind. My original interlocutor was asking about such work in the present tense. Who fits the bill? And who are young people reading? I’m willing to say that Keller fits the bill. Comer does too, in my judgment, though that is a status he graduated into with his last two books. His earlier work was far too primitivist-evangelical, far too dismissive of tradition, to qualify. But to his credit, he has clearly read himself into the tradition and now invites his readers to do the same.

I can certainly name others, like Tish Harrison Warren, who are doing the work and who are selling books. But are they having a widespread discernible influence across a vast slice of 15-25-year olds today? It’s probably too early to tell.

9. Let me think about my own trajectory for a moment. Here are authors whose books I read cover-to-cover across three different age ranges:

• 15-18: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Tolkien

• 18-22: Lee Camp, Douglas John Hall, Richard Foster, Nouwen, John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas, Berry, Walter Brueggemann, N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington

• 22-25: William Cavanaugh, Terry Eagleton, Robert Bellah, Augustine, Charles Taylor, Barth, Robert Jenson, John Webster, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, Kathryn Tanner

These aren’t all the authors I was reading at these ages, but rather the kinds of names I was introduced to that made an impact on me—so much so that I remember, in most cases, the first book I read by each, and when and where I was, and what my first impression of them was.

I’m sure I’m leaving off some important names. But the list is representative. I was a precocious, brainy young Christian who loved talking about God and reading the Bible, and these were the authors that youth ministers, mentors, and professors put in my hands. Not a bad list! Pretty much all living authors, or from the previous century, so not a lot of historical or cultural diversity on offer. But substantive, provocative, stimulating, and accessible nonetheless. The kinds of authors who might change your life. The kind who might convert you, or de-convert you. Who might shadow you for years to come.

And so, once again, the question is: Is the 2023 version of me (a) reading at all and, if so, (b) which authors, living or dead, is he reading? which is he being poked and prodded by? which stimulated and provoked by? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. This exercise has made me take a second look at my own teaching. Which authors do I assign? If you are a student who enrolls in my class, who will you read? A rough summary off the top of my head:

• Dead: Barth, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Athanasius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Saint Augustine, Saint Oscar Romero, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Paul VI, Henri Nouwen, James Cone, Gerhard Lohfink, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Alive: Tish Harrison Warren, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Joseph White, N. T. Wright, Beth Felker Jones, Martin Mosebach, Tara Isabella Burton, Ross Douthat, Andy Crouch, Andrew Davison, Andrew Wilson, Peter Leithart, Jemar Tisby, Victor Lee Austin, Michael Banner, James Mumford

Those are just authors of books I’ve assigned (and do assign). The list would be far larger if I included authors of chapters and articles and online essays. In any case, I’m pretty happy with this list, granting that I teach upper-level gen-ed elective courses to undergraduate students who have never taken theology before.

11. What lessons do I draw from all of the above? First, that people like me have a lot of power and influence and therefore enormous responsibility toward the young people who enter our classrooms. I cannot control whether my students fall in love with the books I assign them. But if I choose wisely, I make it far more likely that they might fall in love. That might in turn set off a chain reaction of reading and learning that lasts a lifetime.

12. Second lesson: Don’t assign “textbooks.” That is, don’t assign purely academic or fake authors. Don’t assign books dumbed down for teenagers. Avoid books that do not look like any sane person would ever cozy up with them in a comfy chair and read leisurely for a whole afternoon. Instead, assign books whose authors are known for befriending their readers. Assign authors who have fanatical followings. Assign authors who have the power to convert readers to their cause. Assign poets and rhetors and masters of the word. Assign stylish writing. Assign passionate writing, writing with stakes. Assign texts with teeth. Don’t be surprised when they bite students. That’s the point.

13. Third, the express aim of Christian liberal arts education and certainly of every humanities class within such institutions ought to be for students to learn to read, thence to learn to love to read, thence to learn to desire to be (that is, to become) a lifelong reader. Every assignment should be measured by whether it conduces to this end. If it does not, it should be scrapped.

14. It follows, fourth, that professors should shy away from assigning online content, whether that be links, videos, podcasts, or even texts on e-readers. That’s not quite an outright ban, but it is a strong nudge against the inclination. Give your students books: physical books they can hold in their hands. Reading a book is an activity different from scrolling a website, watching a video, or listening to a podcast. Young people already know how to do those things. They do not know how to sit still for ninety minutes without a screen in sight, in utter silence, and turn pages, lost in a book, for pure pleasure or simple edification. They have to be taught how to do that. And it takes time. What better time than college?

15. All this applies twice-over for seminaries. What is a pastor who cannot read? The principal job of a pastor, alongside administering the sacraments, is to teach and preach God’s word, which means to interpret the scriptures for God’s people. You cannot interpret without reading, which means you cannot teach and preach without being able to read. Are we raising a generation of illiterate ministers? Is the time already upon us? Are our seminaries aiding and abetting this process, or actively opposing and redirecting it?

16. If professors have some measure of influence, youth pastors (in person) and pastors with a public platform (online) have much greater influence. What we need, then, is for pastors to see it as part of their job description to find ways to encourage and induce literacy in the young people at their churches and, further, to suggest authors and books that are more than candy bars and happy meals, spiritually speaking. For this to happen—allow me to repeat myself—pastors must themselves be readers. They must be voracious bookworms who understand that their vocation necessarily and essentially entails wide and deep and sustained reading. Their churches (above all their elders and vestries and bishops) must understand this, too. If you walk into a pastor’s office and he is reading, he is doing his job. If you never see him reading, something’s amiss. The same is true, by the way, if you do see him reading, but he’s only ever reading a book written in the last five years.

17. Returning to the academy, what happens in the classroom is not all that happens on a college campus. Much, perhaps most, learning happens elsewhere. To be sure, it happens in library stacks and dorm rooms and coffee shops and Bible studies. But it also happens at Christian study centers. The importance of these cannot be overstated. Their presence on public and non-religious campuses is a refuge and a haven for young believers. They can’t be only that, however. They have to be the kind of place that fosters learning, reflection, discussion, and—yes—reading. Reading groups on the church fathers, or the magisterial reformers, or the Lutheran scholastics, or the ecumenical councils: these should be the bread and butter of Christian study centers. Hubs of vibrant intellectual life woven into and inseparable from the spiritual.

18. I’ll go one step further (borrowing the tongue-in-cheek suggestion from a friend): What we need is Christian study centers on Christian college campuses. Sad to say, far too many Christian universities today have bought into credentialing, gate-keeping, and careerism. They do not exist to further the Christian vision of the liberal arts. They exist to stay alive by selling students a product that will in turn secure them a job. None of these things is bad in themselves—enduring institutions, diplomas, gainful employment—but they are not the reason why Christian higher education exists. The presence of Christian study centers on Christian campuses would signal a commitment to the telos of such institutions by carving out space for the kinds of activity that students and professors are, lamentably, sometimes kept from devoting themselves to within the classroom itself. Perhaps this could be done explicitly on some campuses, whereas on others you would have to do it on the sly. Either way, it’s a worthy endeavor.

19. Let me close on two notes, one negative and one positive. The negative: As I have written about before, we have entered a time of double literacy loss in the church. Christians, especially the young, are at once biblically illiterate and literally illiterate. They do not read or know the Bible, and this is of a piece with their larger habits, for they do not read anything much at all. That is a fact. It would be foolish to deny it and naive to pretend it will change in some seismic shift in the span of a few years.

The period in which we find ourselves, then, is a sort of return to premodern times: Granting a kind of minimal mass literacy, in terms of widespread active reading habits, there is now (or will soon be) a very small minority of readers—and everyone else. What will this mean for the church? For daily spirituality and personal devotion? For catechesis, Sunday school, and preaching? For lay and voluntary leaders in the church? For ordained ministers themselves? We shall see.

20. I am biased, obviously, in favor of literacy and habits of reading. I want my students to be readers. I want pastors to be readers. I want more, not less, reading; and better, not worse, reading. But not everyone is meant to be a reader. Not everyone should major in English. Not everyone’s evenings are best spent with Proust in the French and a glass of wine. God forgive me for implying so, if I have.

Here’s the upshot. If young people (and, as they age, all people) are going to learn about the Christian faith through means other than reading, and for the time being those means will largely be mediated by the internet, then what we need is (a) high-quality content (b) accessible to normies (c) funded by a reservoir of knowledge rooted in the great tradition, together with (d) ease of access and widespread knowledge of how to get it. We need, in other words, networks of writers, pastors, teachers, scholars, speakers, podcasters, and others who have resources, audiences, support, technology, and platforms by which and through which to communicate the gospel, build up God’s people, and educate the faithful in ways the latter can access and understand, with content we would call “meat,” not “milk.”

I know one such endeavor. There are others. I don’t want to give up on literacy. I never will. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Time and past time to get moving on these projects. I’m entirely in favor of them, so long as we do not see them as a substitute but instead as a supplement to the habits of reading they thereby encourage rather than block. What we need, though, is the right people, adequately resourced, finding the young, hungry and seeking Christ and open to learning as they are. If this is the way to reach them, and it can be done well, count me in.

Who are young Christians reading today?

The question above was posed to me recently. What the speaker meant was: What living authors are brainy/serious/mature 15-25-year olds reading today?

I’m not sure I have an answer.

My first answer: They aren’t reading. At least, most Christians in this age range aren’t reading anything at all, much less thoughtful theology or rich spiritual writing.

My second answer: They aren’t reading, because if they are “consuming content” along these lines, it’s via YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify. They’re listening, watching, and scrolling, no doubt. The question then becomes: To whom? To what? Is any of it good? Or is it all drivel? But that’s a question for another day.

My third answer: A few of them—the ones actually reading real books, good books, cover to cover—are just reading the old classics many of us were fed at the same age: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Barth. Maybe Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas or Saint Athanasius or Julian of Norwich. Maybe, at the outer limits, Simone Weil or Saint John Henry Newman or Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Maybe Ratzinger! Or John Stott or J. I. Packer. Not sure, to be honest. But those of my students who do walk in the door having read something have usually read Lewis or one of the other usual suspects.

Having said all this, the original question remains unanswered. Are there living authors that have genuine influence on this crowd, minute and dwindling as the crowd may be?

The only name that came to mind as a surefire answer was John Mark Comer. Beyond him, I’m simply not sure. It seems to me there is not a John Piper of this generation (granting that Piper is still with us, and still exerting some measure of influence)—someone who is read widely, loved and hated, discussed constantly, an ever-present “voice” mediating a determine set of doctrines or ideas or practices or what have you.

Maybe Tim Keller. But the pastors and laity I know who read Keller are all my age or (typically) older. I don’t know if his name makes waves among the youth; maybe, but I doubt it.

So who else? Note that I’m not asking about which “names” make waves—there are plenty of popular influencers and pastors and speakers and YouTubers and podcasters. I’m talking about authors whose books are read by 15-25-year old American Christians with a head on their shoulders, who are serious about their faith in an intellectually curious way.

Other names: Tish Harrison Warren? Esau McCaulley? Dane Ortlund? Robert Barron? Jemar Tisby? Nadia Bolz-Weber? Carl Trueman? Peter Leithart?

I don’t know, y’all. I should add, I suppose, that I don’t mean which books have sold the most from the “Christian inspirational” genre. I’m talking about heady, demanding, theologically rigorous works addressed to a popular audience but not silly, superficial, or dumbed down.

I’m open to the answer being that what I have in mind—namely, books written by bona fide authors possessed of expertise, style, and substance—is not how Christian high schoolers and college students today are being reached or even growing in their faith. Though I will admit to my skepticism that it is possible for us to raise a generation of intellectually, spiritually, and theologically mature Christians who do not, at some point, deepen their faith and understanding in this way.

Time will tell, I suppose. But I do invite additional suggestions. I teach college students, after all, but the sample size is small; I only have one classroom for anecdotal observation, and the students who walk in don’t represent everyone. What are others seeing?