More screens, more distractions; fewer screens, fewer distractions

It’s a simple rule, but I repeat it here because it is difficult to internalize and even more difficult to put into practice, whatever one’s context:

In any given physical space, the more screens that are present, the more distractions there will be for people inhabiting that space; whereas the fewer screens, the fewer distractions.

So far as I can tell, this principle is always and everywhere true, including in places where screens are the point, like a sports bar. No one would study for the LSAT in a sports bar: it’s too distracting, too noisy, too busy. It’s built to over-stimulate. Indeed, a football fan who cared about only one game featuring one team would not spend his Sunday afternoon in a sports bar with a dozen games on simultaneously, because it would prove too difficult to focus on the one thing of interest to him.

Now consider other social spaces: a coffee shop, a classroom, a living room, a sanctuary, a monastery. How are these spaces usually filled? Given their ends, how should they be filled?

The latter question answers itself. This is why, for example, I do not permit use of screens when I teach in a college classroom. Phones, tablets, and laptops are in bags or pockets. In the past I have used a single projector screen for slides, especially for larger survey/lecture courses, but for the most part, even with class sizes of 40 or 50 or 60, I don’t use a screen at all, just markers and a whiteboard. Unquestionably the presence of personal screens open on desks is a massive distraction not only to their owners but to anyone around them. And because distractions are obstacles to learning, I eliminate the distractions.

The same goes for our homes and our churches.

At the outer limit, our homes would lack screens altogether. I know there are folks who do this, but it’s a rare exception to the rule. (Actually, I’m not sure if I have ever personally known someone whose home is 100% devoid of any screen of any kind.) So assuming there will be screens of some kind, how should they be arranged in a home?

1. There should be numerous spaces that lack a permanent screen.

2. There should be numerous spaces in which, by rule or norm, portable screens are unwelcome.

3. There should be focal spaces organized around some object (fireplace, kitchen island, couch and coffee table) or activity (cooking, reading, playing piano) that are ordinarily or always screen-free.

4. What screens there are should require some friction to use, i.e., a conscious and active rather than passive decision to turn them on or or engage with them.

5. Fewer screens overall and fewer screens in any given space will conduce to fewer distractions, on one hand, and greater likelihood of shared or common screen usage, on the other. (I.e., watching a movie together as a family rather than adults and children on separate devices doing their own thing.)

There is more to say, but for those interested I’m mostly just repackaging the advice of Andy Crouch and Albert Borgmann. Now to church.

There are a few ways that screens can invade the space of public worship:

1. Large screens “up front” that display words, images, videos, or live recording of whatever is happening “on stage” (=pastor, sermon, communion, music).

2. Small screens, whether tablets or smartphones, out and visible and in active usage by ministers and others leading the congregation in worship.

3. Small screens, typically smartphones, in the pockets and laps of folks in the pews.

Let me put it bluntly: It’s often said that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. In a different vein, it’s equally true that Sunday morning may now be the most distracted hour in America.

Why? Because screens are everywhere! Not, to be sure, in every church. The higher liturgical traditions have preserved a liturgical celebration often, though not always, free of screen colonization. Yet even there parishioners still by and large bring their screens in with them.

Certainly for low-church forms of worship, screens are everywhere. And the more screens, the more distractions. Which means that, for many churches, distraction appears to be part of the point. Those attending are meant, in a twist on T. S. Eliot’s phrase, to be distracted from distraction by distraction—that is, to be distracted from bad distraction (fantasy football, Instagram, online shopping) by good distraction (cranked-up CCM, high production videos, Bible apps). It is unthinkable, on this view, to imagine worshiping on a Sunday morning in a screen-free environment. Yet a screen-free space would be a distraction-free space, one designed precisely to free the attention—the literal eyeballs—of those gathered to focus on the one thing they came for: God.

I hope to write a full essay on this soon for Christianity Today, laying out a practical vision for screen-free worship. For now I just want to propose it as an ideal we should all agree on. Ministers should not use phones while leading worship nor should they invite parishioners to open the Bible “on their apps.” Do you know what said parishioners will do when so invited? They may or may not open their Bible app. They will absolutely find their eyes diverted to a text message, an email, or a social media update. And at once you will have lost them—either for a few minutes or for good.

The best possible thing for public Christian worship in twenty-first century America would be the banishment of all screens from the sanctuary. Practically speaking, it would look like leaders modeling and then inviting those who attend to leave their phones at home, in their cars, or in cell phone lockers (the way K–12 schools are increasingly doing).

I’m well aware that this couldn’t happen overnight, and that there are reasonable exceptions for certain people to have a phone on them (doctors on call, police officers, parents of children with special needs). But hard cases make bad law. The normative vision should be clear and universally shared. The liturgy is a place for ordering our attention, the eyes of the heart, on what we cannot see but nevertheless gain a glimpse of when we hear the word of the Lord and see and smell and taste the signs of bread and wine on the Lord’s table. We therefore should not intentionally encourage the proliferation of distractions in this setting nor stand by and watch it happen, as if the design of public space were out of our hands.

More screens, more distractions; fewer screens, fewer distractions: the saying is sure. Let’s put it into practice.

Local church bans smartphones

Just kidding. But why not? The headline of the latest Atlantic piece by Jonathan Haidt reads: “Ban Phones From All Schools.” The updated version now says: “Get Phones Out of School Now.” (Another one, from earlier: “Phones at School Are a Disaster.” Indeed they are. But why all these different titles for the same piece?)

My question: If smartphones are so bad for school-aged kids, K–12, isn’t it likely they’re just as bad, if not worse, for kids in churches? And not only for 18-year-olds and younger, but for everyone?

What if churches took the lead here, instead of serving once again as a lagging indicator for the wider culture? What if the one place in America where screens and devices, smartphones and social media were not ubiquitous—were not even present at all—was your neighborhood congregation? Humble and out of fashion and perhaps deplorable, that congregation, but not, adamantly and openly and unapologetically not, part of the technological crisis afflicting our society?

Granted, no church is going to ask for your phone at the door. No church is going to frisk you for an iPhone. No church is going to require handing over your Android as a condition of entering the building.

Short of that, churches could do a lot to discourage parishioners from using phones in their buildings or even bringing them inside.

They could begin by not making it a requirement. For parents of young children, having a phone has become a nonnegotiable; you’re expected to be reachable at any moment, given your child’s behavior or needs during worship or Sunday school.

They could begin by not making smartphones an assumption. For example, by placing physical Bibles in (ahem) Bible classes as well as the sanctuary. By not using QR codes. By not inviting people to “get your phones and open your Bible app” in order to read along with the passage from Scripture.

They could begin by not featuring smartphones within worship. For example, by reading from physical books or programs or print-outs rather than from one’s personal device. By not texting during worship—ever, at all, for any reason. (If you’re someone who is on call, a physician or police officer or what have you, you’re an exception here; at the same time, if you get a call, then step out and take it!) By not, God help me, letting your child play games on your phone during the liturgy. By not, God grant me strength, playing them yourself.

They could begin by communicating, clearly, gently, but directly, that the church has a vision for the role of digital technology within the life of Christian discipleship and that it is the job of the church to form and educate the faithful in accordance with that vision. Not in the service of scrupulosity or works righteousness. In the service, rather, of equipping followers of Jesus to be strong and resilient believers in the face of the greatest challenge facing this generation—especially its young people. And given that vision and formation, it follows that within this community digital technology in general, and screens and smartphones in particular, are not “anything goes.” Not “no holds barred” or “live and let live.” That would be irresponsible. Instead, the church is to be on the vanguard of resisting billion- and trillion-dollar corporations’ bald-faced attempts to suck our souls, our wallets, and our attentions dry. How, after all, can we disciples be wise and patient and alert and unanxious women and men of prayer, who dwell in the word of God, who know how to be still, who listen for the voice of Christ’s Spirit—how can we be any of these things if every second of our lives is fixated on our screens, eyes scrolling indefinitely and infinitely for the latest image, the latest scandal, the latest outrage? How can we be different from anybody else if here, in the midst of God’s people, on the Lord’s Day, gathered to worship in the Spirit, we can’t let go of our digital addictions for even one hour?

Ban devices, I say, from all churches. Beat the schools to it. Show the world we see the problem. Show the world we want to fix it in ourselves before fixing it in others. Show the world we mean business. Get smartphones out of churches now. Show Prof. Haidt proof of concept. Leave Apple and Google and Meta in the car. Be blessedly free for ninety minutes (or more!). Give God your all. Model it for your kids. Demonstrate that it’s possible.

Is it? Could it happen? In your church and mine?

All I can say is, the Lord has done stranger things before…

What Christian parents hope for their children

Not wealth or health. Not success. Not intelligence or skill or talent. Not safety per se. Not freedom from suffering. Not a long life for its own sake. Not goodness, considered as a moral achievement. Not even happiness, in the popular sense.

No, each of these things is secondary. Naturally, every Christian parent prays for all or most of them. But they’re not primary. What’s primary, what a Christian parent hopes above all as most important for his children, is that they know Christ. And knowing Christ, apart from having priority, cuts against those secondary desires in two important respects.

The first is this. To know Christ is not to have it all together. Far from it. To know Christ is to know that, far from having it all, one has nothing. Having it all is the illusion from which Christ delivers us. There is no one righteous, not one. Like our children, we sometimes imagine the world is divided between good and bad people. But those aren’t the basic Christian categories. The basic Christian category for human beings is sinner, and we all belong to it. The aim of the Christian life isn’t to avoid being Peter, the betrayer of Christ; Paul, the persecutor of Christ; Thomas, the doubter of Christ. For we are all, every one of us, Peter and Paul and Thomas. The aim instead is to be the Peter and Paul and Thomas we already are on the far side of Christ—on the far side of seeing and recognizing Christ for who he is: the lover of our souls, the One who forgives seventy times seven, the grace of God incarnate. The aim is to know Christ, as the One who sees us for who we are and forgives us as the sinners we are. Kichijiro, in the novel Silence, is not the paradigmatic “bad” Christian. He’s the paradigmatic Christian full stop. His perpetual failure is ours. We are all Kichijiro: believing, confessing, failing, betraying, and in sincere contrition falling prostrate before the Lord, begging mercy once again. And receiving it.

That is the shape of the Christian life. That, therefore, is what a Christian parent hopes for her children. She knows in advance that the shape of human life is failure, so she doesn’t kid herself that her children might escape such a fate. What she prays for instead is that her children’s inevitable failure might be cruciform, that is, formed and defined by the cross of Christ. For when our failures are united to his, then his triumph becomes ours. Per crucem ad lucem. Only by darkness, light; only by death, life; only by the cross—by suffering, shame, rejection, and humiliation—comes resurrection life, which is the life of God: eternal life.

This is the second element of knowing Christ. To know Christ is to follow Christ, taking up our crosses in his wake. For the way of Christ is the way of the cross. To follow him is to be conformed to his image, to the pattern of his life, death, and resurrection. Far from the path of passivity or unrighteousness, this is the path of holiness. What it means, in a word, to follow the Christ, the Anointed One, is to become holy as he is holy. It is to become a saint.

As Léon Bloy famously remarked, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” Few of us, alas, become saints in this life, though all the baptized are bound for it, here or in the life of the world to come. But what does it mean to be a saint?

The answer to that question is found in the lives of the saints. And as C. S. Lewis wrote, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.” Their fundamental differences doesn’t mean there is no commonality, however. The commonality is their proximity to Christ: their having been seized, captured, and won by Christ and for Christ to serve his will alone. What he wants, they want; what he does, they do; what he commands, they obey. The heart of the saint is the prayer of St. Augustine: “Command what you will, and will what you command.” A saint, therefore, is someone whose total life and being are utterly transparent to the desires and actions of the Lord.

The thing about the Lord’s will, though, is that it, too, is not primarily interested in wealth, health, success, intelligence, skill, talent, safety, long life, mortal righteousness, earthly happiness, or freedom from suffering. To be a saint, as the lives of the saints suggest, is as a rule to be asked to relinquish or avoid such things. For the crown of sainthood is martyrdom, and all saints are called to be martyrs in one form or another. A saint is likely, as a result, to be marked not by worldly signs of flourishing but, instead, by ostracism, loneliness, pain, mockery, ill health, poverty, neither spouse nor children, a brief life, and, on the part of the wider society, either befuddled neglect or outright repudiation. I might as well be describing St. Paul, after all. Or Jesus.

And that’s the point. To raise children to be Christians is to raise them to follow Christ; to raise them to follow Christ is to unclench one’s parental fists, entrusting them to the Lord’s care, with the full knowledge that the Lord may lead them to where he himself was led: Gethsemane, Golgotha, a garden tomb. The reason why a parent might even consider this is, on one hand, because we know what follows that sequence: an empty tomb. And, on the other hand, because Jesus says that even in this world, even in this life, the only true life is following his way, wherever it may lead. Resurrection life looks like cruciform life even before one arrives in Jerusalem.

“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” As parents, we either take Jesus at his word or we don’t. If we do, our prayers and hopes for our children will look wildly, even scandalously different than our neighbors’. If we don’t, then of all people we are most to be pitied. If Jesus can’t be trusted, we should let our children know as soon as possible, and quit all this church business for good.

Four loves follow-up

Consider the following portrait, all of whose modifiers are meant descriptively rather than critically or even pejoratively:

A man in his 20s or 30s who is godless, friendless, fatherless, childless, sexless, unmarried, and unpartnered, and who has no active relationship with a sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. We will assume he is not motherless—everyone has (had) a mother—but we might also add that he lacks a healthy relationship with her or that he lives far away from her.

This, in extreme form, is the picture of loveless life I described in the last post, using the fourfold love popularized by C. S. Lewis: kinship, eros, friendship, and agape.

Here’s my question. In human history, apart from extreme crises brought about by natural disaster or famine or war or plague, has there even been a generation as full of such men (or women) as the present generation? The phenomenon is far from limited to “the West.” It includes Russia, Japan, and China, among others. Young people without meaningful relationships of any kind, anywhere on the grid of the four loves. They lack entirely the love of a god, the love of a spouse, the love of a child, the love of a friend, even the love of a parent.

On one hand, it seems I can’t go a day without reading a new story about this phenomenon; it’s on my mind this week because I just finished Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Yet, on the other hand, the crisis we are facing seems so massive, so epochal, so devastating, so unprecedented, so complex, that in truth we can’t talk about it enough. We need to be shouting the problem aloud from the rooftops like a crazy end-times street preacher.

But what is to be done? That’s the question that haunts me. Whatever the answers, we should be laboring with all that we have to find them. The stakes are as high as they get.

Dreams and prayers

More than occasionally I dream of people whom I have neither seen nor thought of in years, sometimes near on two decades. I was in high school from 2000 to 2004, and at least once every couple months nowadays a random person from high school—a stranger, not a close friend, someone I might have been “friends” with on Facebook, before I deleted my account—just walks into a dream. Not a weird dream. Not a nightmare. Just populated by people I know as well as the name and face of an almost complete stranger I last saw more than 17 years ago.

Actually, I’ve also dreamed of people I haven’t met before, and not just actors or famous people whose faces and personalities I’ve seen on TV. I’ve dreamed of writers I’ve never met plenty of times. As though they were a regular fixture of my daily life.

It’s always made me wonder: Whose dreams am I rambling around in? What almost or actual stranger woke up this morning wondering why “what’s-his-name, that Brad guy” appeared in his or her mind while sleeping last night?

*

It occurred to me this week that prayers are the same. I’ve been praying the last few weeks for someone I don’t really know. We’ve met once or twice, but we might as well be strangers, and he definitely does not know I’m praying for him. In fact, looking at the little hand-scribbled list of people to pray for on my office desk, I imagine almost none of them, even those I’m close to, know—or at least would assume—that I’m praying for them. Some of them the family members of friends, some of them students, some of them close or distant friends who are expecting a child. (I have a rule: If I know you and you’re pregnant, you will be prayed for.) But like strangers strolling through dreams, the names and faces and sufferings of the prayed-for are “present” in my life and to my mind in a way they wouldn’t guess and I wouldn’t have known to expect in advance of finding myself compelled to “add them to the list.”

Which, naturally, raises the question: Who’s praying for me? What distant relation, what tenuous acquaintance, what absolute stranger is praying for me, not just on a lark or when tragedy strikes, but every single day of the week?

I learned, after becoming a parent, the secret of someone winning my affection in the blink of an eye. The secret: letting me know you are praying for my children. You could be my mortal enemy, worthy of contempt and derision—or, less intensely, just an unlikable or unpleasant person—but if I learn that you pray for my children, my heart swells up like a balloon. All I feel for you henceforth is love and gratitude. Prayer covers a multitude of sins. I have no higher esteem than for the people in my life who, if I told them my children were in peril or need, would stop what they were doing, fall to their knees, and beg God for mercy.

Anonymous prayers are themselves a special mercy. Someone today will say a prayer for one or all of my children; even, perhaps, for me. I won’t know it. But God will hear it. Just as he hears my prayers for the unknowing prayed-for on my list.

This is a great mystery. But I am talking about the communion of the saints.

An update

I've not written much on the blog these last few months, but I've been busy in the meantime. I'm hoping, though, to get back into my self-imposed charter of "mezzo-blogging," some happy midpoint between tweet-length commentary and full-blown (intimating to find the time for) essays. So here's what I've been up to during my absence, together with what's on my plate for the present and near future.

1. Covid, obviously. Everything hit during our spring break, and students never returned to campus. I've written a few things Covid-related, though I've wanted to find the time to write more. We'll see if I get anything out before school returns.

2. I revised an article for publication in the Journal of Theological Interpretation. It'll come out in the first issue of 2021. It's called "What Are the Standards of Excellence for Theological Interpretation of Scripture?" It's 15,000 words, double the usual limit for the journal. I'm grateful to them for making the exception, and excited to see it appear.

3. I wrote a long review essay of N. T. Wright's Gifford lectures for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where I've written similar pieces before on David Bentley Hart, Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith, and Paula Fredriksen. I'm hopeful it will come out this fall. (My editor there, who is supremely gracious, has also extended me some slack on the word count. He's a mensch.)

4. Once the semester was complete—a real endurance test, since both my wife and I teach at ACU, and we had four children 7 years old and under at home with us as we transitioned and taught online—I had 15 weeks ahead of me in which to complete two major book-length projects. The sixth week we took off for a family vacation, and the fifteenth week is full of pre-sessions, meetings, and other "welcome back" activities. So effectively that meant 13 weeks, usually working four days each week, about 6-7 hours per day.

5. The first five weeks were devoted to revising my manuscript (drafted last fall) for The Doctrine of Scripture in the Cascade Companions series. I finished a full penultimate draft, and am very happy with it. I over-shot the word count, though, so this fall I'm going to be working on trimming it down to size. Which, I trust, will only increase its clarity, substance, and readability. I am a fan of small books, but they're harder to write than the larger sort! In any case, it'll be a semester of killing my darlings, all those darn adverbs and dependent clauses cluttering the page.

6. Following vacation, I've given the remaining eight weeks to a revision of my dissertation for Eerdmans, titled The Church's Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context. This one's been a bear, for a few reasons. First, it turns out sentences written by 2015 me are unsatisfactory to 2020 me. So a lot of re-writing. Second, the dissertation-ness of it all. Gotta tear out that academese root and branch. Third, dropping the word count from ~175,000 words to ~140,000. Again, that can only improve the project, but it's been more drudgery than I was anticipating. Writing and even editing has always been a pleasure to me, but this one's been a pain. So be it. I'm grateful for the contracts and the opportunity. Lord willing, both manuscripts will be emailed off by Christmas, and I'll be a free man come January.

7. The next manuscript isn't due till end of year 2022, and that one's the 25,000-word entry in Lexham's "Christian Essentials" series called The Church: A Guide to the People of God. So while I might draft some chapters next summer, most of 2021 will be reading, reading, reading.

8. Having said that, two other short-term projects worth mentioning. One is that I have the privilege of curating a symposium in the journal Political Theology on Karen Kilby's new book, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. That should come out late this year, perhaps early next year, depending on the ability of contributors to receive books and get responses out. I won't share the lineup just yet, but just know that when you see it your eyes are going to bug out of your head.

9. The second project is part of a Templeton grant, which I was generously rewarded through Biola University's Gratitude to God project (GTG). I'll be researching and writing on the difference that the doctrine of God makes for a Christian grammar of gratitude. That'll occupy most of my time in 2021. I'm honored to be a part of the project as a junior scholar. I can't wait to meet and learn from those involved in it, especially from other disciplines.

10. Speaking of grants, my home institution, ACU, awards internal grants for faculty research, and I was also fortunate to receive one of those this spring, primarily for my work this summer on turning the dissertation into a book. The grant meant my wife and I could rely on childcare for our youngest two kids this summer, and I could afford to decline teaching a summer course. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, by Christmas 2021 I will have not one but two books published, an article in JTI, an essay in LARB, a symposium in PT, an article in the works from my research on GTG, and maybe some scattershot essays online or in magazines. In the midst of a global pandemic, I'll take it.

11. Otherwise, we've been taking quarantine very seriously. Our kids (as of this coming September, 2, 4, 6, and 8 years old, respectively) have borne the lockdown as well as could be hoped. We've reopened modestly, seeing other families outdoors while social distancing. Besides that, we're mostly just hunkered down and are doing our best to stay sane.

12. I've yet to mention the way in which Covid has rocked and is continuing to rock higher education. That's largely because (a) I still have a job and (b) worrying about it is bad for my mental health. Once I knew I would have a job for AY 2020–2021, I did my best to let go of all the anxieties besetting friends and colleagues around the country, put my head down, and got to work. I've waited to prepare for the fall, for the most part, because it hasn't been clear what exactly the semester would look like. But as of now, the plan is that we will be teaching in person, with students returning one month from now. We're taking all the necessary precautions—mandatory masks, social distancing, hybrid pedagogy, larger classrooms for smaller class sizes, no large gatherings indoors, office hours outdoors or on Zoom, etc., etc.—but the truth is nobody knows what the lay of the land will look like come Labor Day, much less Halloween. We'll be done with residential learning by Thanksgiving, anyway. I don't envy those making these decisions, not least when making alternative choices would mean firing scores of people. Everyone in my orbit here is extending one another a lot of grace. My bosses are the best in the business, and understand what it means to have two children in elementary school and two others in preschool while teaching undergraduates with a 4/4 load in the midst of a pandemic. Few are as fortunate as we are, and I am profoundly grateful to be here, now, even amid so much uncertainty. (Did I mention there's an election in November? And perhaps another mutation of the virus awaiting us in the winter? Oh, and a summer-long nation-wide reckoning with a centuries-old legacy of systemic racism? And protests and riots and institutional upheaval? And an as-yet-unreckoned-with crisis of childcare and education facing us down in the public school system this fall? And, and, and, and ... )

It's been a year, in other words. And we're only halfway through. Lord have mercy on all of us. Blessings on each of y'all in these bewildering and trying times.

A very special episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood

In which Daniel, now the middle child with half a dozen siblings, experiences a tiny setback that flummoxes his otherwise unqualified expectation that everything in his young life ought to go his way.

He sits down and cries—but in the chaos of a bustling household and so many other children, his mother and father are unable to pause the family's life, halt the earth's spin, and sing a song to soothe his self-esteem while ostensibly increasing his emotional intelligence.

Soon enough Daniel stops crying.

Eventually he gets up, discovers a solution to the problem on his own, and moves on.