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.

Christianity is a conspiracy theory

Christians are people who believe in a God they cannot see, in a man who rose from the dead after being publicly executed, in countless phenomena denied by modern science (walking on water, passing through walls, stilling a storm with a word, healing a disease with a touch, hearing a message spoken in a foreign language as if it were in one’s own, and much more), in unseen and immaterial inimical intelligent powers constantly assaulting and accusing and harassing and possessing human beings, in a world beyond this world that cannot be measured or accessed through empirical or other typical instruments of knowledge, in an ongoing contest or battle between that world and this world (carried out chiefly by the aforesaid intelligent powers, some of whom are good, some of whom are evil), in the real presence of a once-dead man’s bodily elements—his very flesh and blood!—available in bread and wine that, Christians readily admit, are chemically and constitutionally identical to ordinary bread and wine, the sole difference being the words spoken over them, words that mediate the omnipotent power of, again, the invisible Creator with whom we began.

Christians are weird. Our beliefs are bizarre. Our doctrines are wacky. We are not ordinary people, if by “ordinary” you mean adherents of the reputable epistemology of the secular West as defined by scientism, empiricism, and Enlightenment.

Being an orthodox Christian, attending a traditional church, will only ensure that you are a spookier person, in all the ways outlined above, and thus less “normal” in your beliefs. You’re bound to become the kind of person who believes that exorcisms happen. Who believes that angels and demons are rampant. That our enemy is not flesh and blood but the principalities and powers and rulers of this present darkness.

Going to church, you’ll come to take for granted that this world of ours is headed somewhere, that it is governed by an all-knowing and all-powerful Intelligence, that despite the charnel house that is this earth and its history the secret heart of the cosmos is infinite Love, that in the end all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Also that, more than occasionally, saints levitate.

You’re weird! You’re a Christian! The blood spilled on a tree by a Galilean Jew two millennia ago saves you from the wrongs you’ve committed against the Creator of the universe! Right? It makes perfect sense to me, but then again, I’m a Christian. Maybe common sense isn’t our forte.

If others suspect of us of a grand delusion, a sort of mass psychosis or hypnosis, who can blame them? Christianity is a conspiracy theory. There are devils hiding around every corner. None of this can be studied in a lab. All of it is taken on trust.

Whether that means they are crazy for not believing it, or we are crazy for buying it, one of us is right and one of us is wrong. More to the point, “what’s reasonable” isn’t the criterion for deciding. We don’t as a general matter know in advance what counts as reasonable. “What’s reasonable” is the question.

And by definition, it’s question-begging to suppose otherwise.

My latest: no to AI in the pulpit

I’m in Christianity Today this morning with a piece called “AI Has No Place in the Pulpit.” It’s in partial response to a CT piece from a few weeks ago about the benefits of using AI in pastoral work. A couple sample paragraphs from the middle of the article:

Pastors are students of God’s Word. They are learners in the school of Christ. He teaches them by the mouths of his servants, the prophets and apostles, who speak through Holy Scripture. There is no shortcut to sitting at their feet. The point—the entire business—of pastoral ministry is this calm, still, patient sitting, waiting, and listening. Every pastor lives according to the model of Mary of Bethany. Strictly speaking, only one thing is necessary for the work of ministry: reclining at the feet Jesus and hanging on his every word (Luke 10:38–42).

In this sense, no one can do your studying for you. I’ll say more below about appropriate forms of learning from professional scholars and commentaries, but that’s not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that studying God’s Word is part of what God has called you to do; it’s more than a means to an end. After all, one of its ends is your own transformation, your own awesome encounter with the living God. That’s why no one can listen to Jesus in your stead. You must listen to Jesus. You must search the Scriptures. This is what it means to serve the church.

Read the whole thing! And thanks to Bonnie Kristian, among others, for commissioning and sharpening the piece in editing.

Four tiers and/in James Davison Hunter

A reader noted that my post on four tiers or levels of Christian/theological publishing last month owed a debt to James Davison Hunter. He’s right, though I didn’t realize it at the time. As the second half of that post explains, my arrival at the “four tiers” framework was rooted in long-term frustration with limited options of high-quality Tier 2 Christian books to assign to my students, especially books written by women and people of color. Teasing out the tiers helped me to see why I kept bumping up against a wall and where the distribution of sales, demography, audience, and accessible style lay.

But more than a decade ago, Hunter already explained all this in his book To Change the World. I should know, since I’ve written about the book in two different essays while teaching it to students annually since 2017. Consider this me acknowledging my debt!

Here’s hunter on pages 41-42 (brackets and bold are mine):

…the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs [sic] from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world- making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.

The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.

Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas on to others, then passes on to popularizers who simplify ideas and practitioners who apply those ideas. All of this, of course, transpires through networks and structures of cultural production.

Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation. Change of this nature can only [!!!] come from the top down.

I’ve bolded the “levels” Hunter identifies: (1) popularizers and practitioners, (2) teachers and educators, (3) researchers, and (4) theorists. Pretty much exactly my four tiers. Glad to know I’m in good company on this one. As ever, whatever I know is just what I’ve forgotten I’ve remembered learning from someone else.

In addition, here is a (low-res) image of page 90 in the book, where Hunter lays out what he calls “The Culture Matrix.” It’s three columns of three rows: three tiers or levels (theoretical, higher-ed, and practical) of three types of cultural production (pertaining to the true, knowledge; the good, morality; the beautiful, aesthetics). He puts in bold the types of cultural production Protestant evangelicals focus on and/or excel in—his point being that they neither cultivate nor dominate anything at the level of theory and only some at the level of higher-ed. It’s at the grassroots or ground floor alone that they own substantial real estate:

It’s interesting that here Hunter reduces his number of “levels” from four to three. At least in Christian publishing, I find four more capacious. To use his terms, there’s definitely a difference between lowbrow, middlebrow, upper middlebrow (or low highbrow!), and highbrow simpliciter. In my post, I called these “universal,” “popular,” “highbrow,” and “scholarly.” Another reader suggested a few weeks back that perhaps my use of “highbrow” could be replaced by “professional.” I like that. In any case, the categories would cash out like this: universal/popularizers, popular/educators, professional/researchers, and scholarly/theorists. Some awkward semantic overlap, but nonetheless a general consonance or aptness between the two.

There should be, anyway, since I appear to have taken the idea from Hunter in the first place. For that reason this post should be understood as just one long hat tip to him.

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.

My latest: on holy orders

I’ve got an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Christian Studies. The theme of the issue is “Ministry and Ordination.” The editor, Keith Stanglin (a mensch, if you don’t know him), commissioned pieces from scholars that represent or argue for a position not found in, or at least exemplified by, their own tradition. So, for example, the article after mine is by a Roman Catholic on the priesthood of all believers. Whereas mine is called “The Fittingness of Holy Orders.” It presents just that.

The article was a pleasure to write. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Its guiding lights are Robert Jenson and Michael Ramsey. And it opens with twenty theses—I call them “escalating propositions”— on the sacrament of holy orders that ramp up from the basic notion of some formal leadership in the church all the way to full episcopal-dogmatic-eucharistic-apostolic succession.

Subscribe to the journal (or ask your library to). If you want a PDF of my article, email me and I’ll send you a copy.

Quit social porn

In the introduction to his new book, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, Samuel James makes a startling claim: “The internet is a lot like pornography.” He makes sure the reader has read him right: “No, that’s not a typo. I did not mean to say that the internet contains a lot of pornography. I mean to say that the internet itself—i.e., its very nature—is like pornography. There’s something about it that is pornographic in its essence.”

Bingo. This is exactly right. But let’s take it one step further.

A few pages earlier, James distinguishes the internet in general from “the social internet.” That’s a broader term for what we usually refer to as “social media.” Think not only Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, et al, but also YouTube, Slack, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr, perhaps even LinkedIn or Reddit and similar sites. In effect, any online platform that (a) “connects” strangers through (b) public or semi-public personal profiles via (c) proprietary algorithms using (d) slot-machine reward mechanisms that reliably alter one’s (e) habits of attention and (f) fame, status, wealth, influence, or “brand.” Almost always such a platform also entails (g) the curation, upkeep, reiteration, and perpetual transformation of one’s visual image.

This is the social internet. James is right to compare it to pornography. But he doesn’t go far enough. It isn’t like pornography. It’s a mode of pornography.

The social internet is social porn.

By the end of the introduction, James pulls his punch. He doesn’t want his readers off the internet. Okay, fine. I’m on the internet too, obviously—though every second I’m not on it is a second of victory I’ve snatched from defeat. But yes, it’s hard to avoid the internet in 2023. We’ll let that stand for now.

There is no good reason, however, to be on the social internet. It’s porn, after all, as we just established. Christians, at least, have no excuse for using porn. So if James and I are right that the social internet isn’t just akin to pornography but is a species of it, then he and I and every other Christian we know who cares about these things should get off the social internet right now.

That means, as we saw above, any app, program, or platform that meets the definition I laid out. It means, at a minimum, deactivating and then deleting one’s accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok—immediately. It then means thinking long and hard about whether one should be on any para-social platforms like YouTube or Pinterest or Slack. Some people use YouTube rarely and passively, to watch the occasional movie trailer or live band performance, say, or how-to videos to help fix things around the house. Granted, we shouldn’t be too worried about that. But what about people who use it the way my students use it—as an app on their phone with an auto-populated feed they scroll just like IG or TT? Or what about active users and influencers with their own channels?

Get off! That’s the answer. It’s porn, remember? And porn is bad.

I confess I have grown tired of all the excuses for staying on the social internet. Let me put that differently: I know plenty of people who do not share my judgment that the social internet is bad, much less a type of porn. In that case, we lack a shared premise. But many people accept the premise; they might even go so far as to affirm with me that the social internet is indeed a kind of porn: just as addictive, just as powerful, just as malformative, just as spiritually depleting, just as attentionally sapping. (Such claims are empirical, by the way; I don’t consider them arguable. But that’s for another day.) And yet most of the people I have in mind, who are some of the most well-read and up-to-date on the dangers and damages of digital media, continue not only to maintain their social internet accounts but use them actively and daily. Why?

I’m at a point where I think there simply are no more good excuses. Alan Jacobs remarked to me a few years back, when I was wavering on my Twitter usage, that the hellsite in question was the new Playboy. “I subscribe for the articles,” you say. I’m sure you do. That might play with folks unconcerned by the surrounding pictures. For Christians, though, the gig is up. You’re wading through waist-high toxic sludge for the occasional possible potential good. Quit it. Quit the social internet. Be done with it. For good.

Unlike Lot’s wife, you won’t look back. The flight from the Sodom of the social internet isn’t littered with pillars of salt. The path is free and clear, because everyone who leaves is so happy, so grateful, the only question they ask themselves is what took them so long to get out.

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.

Reasons people stay, or leave, their church

• The preaching

• The music

• The leadership

• The politics

• The children’s ministry

• The youth ministry

• The college ministry

• The young marrieds ministry

• The singles ministry

• The senior ministry

• The education programming

• The weekday programming

• The small groups

• The community

• The sacraments

• The production quality

• The liturgy

• The location

• Family ties

• Family history

• Friends

• Children’s friends

• Denominational membership

• Lethargy

• Loyalty

• Class

• Education

• Money

• Feuds

• Ambition

• Employment

• Relative quality of other local churches

• Whimsy

• Personal history

• Hurt

• Social standing

• Peer pressure

• Theology

• Tribal affiliation

• Regional culture

• Looking for a mate

• A single memorable experience

• Inertia

• Childhood memories

• Muscle memory

• Need for God

• Love for God

• Spiritual paralysis

• Spiritual despair

• Spousal pressure

• Parental pressure

• Boredom

• No reason at all

About that famous Léon Bloy quote

From my “Sent” folder. The friends I sent this email to have yet to supply an answer. Perhaps a reader or Google ultra-sleuth or Catholic scholar of French literature can?

*

I've got a question for y'all. You know the famous Léon Bloy quote, almost always rendered this way in English:

The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.

It's rarely attributed to a text, but when it is, it's to La Femme Pauvre. In English, the last line evokes the famous quote, but it's much briefer, at least in translation. So I found a French text online. Here's the French (all caps original):

Il n'y a qu'une tristesse, lui a-t-elle dit, la dernière fois, c'est de N'ÊTRE PAS DES SAINTS.

If you Google French versions of the Bloy quote, it comes up with all kinds of riffs:

Il n'y a qu'une tristesse, c'est de ne pas être un saint.

Il n'y a qu'un seul motif de tristesse, ne pas être un saint

Il n'y a qu'une tristesse au monde, c'est ne pas être un saint

La seule tristesse, c'est de ne pas être un saint

Il n'y a qu'un seul malheur : ne pas être un saint.

La plus grande tragédie est de ne pas être un saint.

So the question is: Did Bloy say (in print or at some public event) the larger form of the quote? Or has it somehow expanded over time in a generously paraphrased version? One of the French (Canadian) sources I consulted (which had the 'la plus grande tragédie' version) referred to the Maritains (who converted under Bloy's influence, no?) hearing Bloy say a version of the famous quote, an experience that had a lasting impact on them. So perhaps it's something Bloy wrote or spoke regularly, in essays and speeches and not just the novel, in which case the popular English version is not inaccurate?

Any help at all on this would be much appreciated. I'd love to know the truth about this English rendition.

(As a postscript, there's a parallel quote in the English translation of Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, so I looked up the French. I've bolded the relevant echo below. It's much less of a verbal echo in French than in the English, loosely rendered by Pamela Morris shortly after the novel’s original publication.)

Détrompez-vous, lui dis-je, je suis le serviteur d’un maître puissant, et comme prêtre, je ne puis absoudre qu’en son nom. La charité n’est pas ce que le monde imagine, et si vous voulez bien réfléchir à ce que vous avez appris jadis, vous conviendrez avec moi qu’il est un temps pour la miséricorde, un temps pour la justice et que le seul irréparable malheur est de se trouver un jour sans repentir devant la Face qui pardonne.

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.

How the world sees the church

I’ve joked more than once on here that this blog is little more than an exercise in drafting off better blogs, particularly Richard Beck’s, Alan Jacobs’, and Jake Meador’s. Here’s another draft.

Last month Richard wrote a short post reflecting on a famous quote by Lesslie Newbigin. How, Newbigin asks, are people supposed to believe that the first and final truth of all reality and human existence is a victim nailed to a tree, abandoned and left for dead? He answers that “the only hermeneutic of the gospel,” the only interpretation of the good news about Jesus that makes any sense of him, “is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”

Richard then writes:

In a lecture this last semester I shared with my students, “I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’”

I pray for the day when our presence is proclaimed “Good News.” And this isn't just some vague aspiration, it's personal for me. Wherever I show up, I want that to be Good News, unconditionally, no matter who is in the space. And I push my church to have the same impact. This is the work, and really the only work, that should be occupying Christians and the church right now.

There’s a sense in which I couldn’t agree more with this aspiration. The body of Christ should strive to be, to incarnate, to offer the good news in the liberating power of Christ’s Spirit to any and all we encounter—first of all our neighbors and those with whom we interact daily. Yes and amen.

But there’s a reason Richard’s little post has been nagging at me from the back of my brain for the last six weeks. Here’s why.

It isn’t clear to me that the world should see the church and love, welcome, and celebrate her presence. It certainly isn’t clear to me that we should expect or hope that they do. The reason why is fourfold.

First, the only people who genuinely and reasonably see the church as a cause for celebration are believers. Think about it. Why would anyone unconvinced by the gospel be glad that the church exists? That she keeps hanging around? The only people plausibly happy about the church’s existence are Christians—and even many Christians are pretty ambivalent about it. Someone who loves and adores and honors and celebrates the church sounds a lot like someone who believes that Jesus is risen from the dead.

Second, what qualifies as “good news”? If I’m not a believer, I’m liable to find it pretty annoying to be surrounded by weirdos who worship an invisible Someone, follow strict rules about money and sex and power, and believe with all their heart that I should drop everything in my own life and sign up for their beliefs and way of life. Live and let live, you know? You mind your own and I’ll do the same. Yet Christian evangelism is a nonnegotiable, so a nonbelieving neighbor is sure (and right) to be perpetually low-key bored or bothered or both by the fact that the church “has the answer” for his life.

Third, the church is full of sinners. It’s a field hospital for sinsick folk, in the image of Pope Francis. The one thing about which we can be sure, then, is that the church is going to be monumentally, even fantastically dysfunctional. She’s going to cause a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration. That doesn’t mean we excuse in advance our failure to be Christlike to our neighbors. What it does mean is that the church’s appeal to her neighbors is likely going to be a lot less “What a beautiful community of Christ-followers—I love it when they’re around, even though they’re dead wrong about everything important!” and a lot more “What a motley crew of unimpressive failures—I guess they might even tolerate my own humiliating baggage, given what I can see about theirs even from the outside.”

Fourth and finally, Jesus wasn’t exactly “good news” to everyone he met. Now that claim requires some clarification. Jesus was the gospel incarnate. To meet Jesus was to come face to face with God’s good news. And yet if Jesus did anything it was turn off a whole lot of people. He elicited modest approval alongside a metric ton of opposition and murderous hostility. Not everyone saw Jesus coming and said, “Yes! Hooray! I love that guy!” Some did—and they were his followers. Plenty others said the opposite. We know why. Jesus confronted people with the truth: the truth about God and the truth about themselves. He forced on them a decision. And when they declined his invitation to follow him, he let them walk away, sad or sorrowful or resentful or angry or bitter. In short, Jesus was a sign of contradiction.

Pope Saint John Paul II borrowed that phrase, taken from Saint Luke, to describe the church. Like Christ, the church is a sign of contradiction in the world. We shouldn’t expect anyone to be happy about us—up until the point at which they join us. We should expect instead for them to ignore and resent us, at best; to reject and hate us, at worst. Not because of anything wrong with them. But because that’s how they treated Jesus, and he told us to expect the same treatment. They’re only being reasonable. If the gospel isn’t true, the church is a self-contradiction; of all people we should be most pitied. We should be mocked and scorned and excused from respectable society.

We’re only Christians, those of us who are, because we believe the gospel is true. I’m shocked when anyone has anything nice to say about the faith who isn’t already a fellow believer. As I see it, that’s the exception to the rule. So while we should strive to be faithful to Christ’s commission, to embody and enact the good news of his kingdom in this world, I don’t think we should hope or even try to be seen as good news. To be seen as good news amounts to conversion on the part of those doing the seeing. Let’s aim for conversion. Short of that, in terms of how we’re perceived I don’t know that we can expect much from our neighbors who don’t already believe.

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 tech-church show

A week or two ago a clip went viral of a prominent pastor lecturing his listeners, during his sermon, about treating Sunday morning worship like a show. I didn’t watch it, and I’m not going to comment about the pastor in question, whom I know nothing about. Here’s one write-up about it. The clip launched a thousand online Christian thinkpieces. A lot of hand-wringing about churches that put on worship as a show simultaneously wanting congregants not to see worship as a show.

Any reader of my work knows I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t want to pile on. I want to use the occasion to think more deeply about two issues it raises for the larger landscape of churches, public worship, and digital technology.

First: Should churches understand themselves to be sites of resistance against the digital status quo? That is, given their context, are churches in America called by God to be a “force for good” in relation to digital technology? And thus are they called to be a “force opposed” to the dominance of our lives—which means the lives of congregants as well as their nonbelieving neighbors—by digital devices, screens, and social media?

It seems to me that churches and church leaders are not clear about their answer to this question. In practice, their answer appears to be No. The digital status quo obtains outside the walls of the church and inside them. There is no “digital difference” when you walk inside a church—at least a standard, run-of-the-mill low-church, evangelical, or Protestant congregation. (The Orthodox have not yet been colonized by Digital, so far as I can tell. For Catholics it depends on the parish.)

In and of itself, this isn’t a problem, certainly not of consistency. If a church doesn’t think Digital’s dominion is a problem, then it’s only natural for Digital to reign within the church and not only without. You’d never expect such a church to be different on this score.

The problem arises when churches say they want to oppose believers’ digital habits, dysfunctions, and addictions while reproducing those very habits within the life of the church, above all in the liturgy. That’s a case of extreme cognitive dissonance. How could church leaders ever expect ordinary believers to learn from the church how to amend their digital lives when church leaders themselves, and the church’s public worship itself, merely model for believers their own bad habits? When, in other words, church members’ digital lives, disordered as they are, are simply mirrored back to them by the church and her pastors?

To be clear, I know more than a few Christians, including ministers, who don’t share my alarm at the reign of Digital in our common life. They wouldn’t exactly endorse spending four to eight hours (or more) per day staring at screens; they don’t deny the ills and errors of pornography and loss of attention span via social media and other platforms. But they see bigger fish to fry. And besides (as they are wont to say), “It’s here to stay. It’s a part of life. We can live in denial or incorporate its conveniences into church life. It’s inevitable either way.”

Personally, I think that’s a steaming pile of you-know-what. But at least it’s consistent. For anyone, however, who shares my alarm at the role of Digital in our common life—our own, our neighbors’, our children’s, our students’—then the inconsistency of the church on this topic is not only ludicrous but dangerous. It’s actively aiding and abetting the most significant problem facing us today while pretending otherwise. And you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a problem and you face it head on; or it’s not, and you don’t.

Second: Here’s an exercise that’s useful in the classroom. It helps to get students thinking about the role of technology in the liturgy.

Ask yourself this question: Which forms and types of technology, and how much of them, could I remove from Sunday morning worship before it would become unworkable?

Another way to think about it would be to ask: What makes my church’s liturgy different, technologically speaking, than an instance of the church’s liturgy five hundred years ago?

Certain kinds of technology become evident immediately: electricity and HVAC, for starters. In my area, many church buildings would be impossible to worship in during a west Texas summer: no air and no light. They’d be little more than pitch-black ovens on the inside.

Start on the other end, though. Compare Sunday morning worship in your church today to just a few decades ago. Here are some concrete questions.

• Could you go (could it “work”) without the use of smartphones?

• What about video cameras?

• What about spotlights and/or dimmers?

• What about the internet?

• What about screens?

• What about computers?

• What about a sound board?

• What about electric amplification for musical instruments?

• What about wireless mics?

• What about microphones as such?

This list isn’t meant to prejudge whether any or all of these are “bad” or to be avoided in the liturgy. I’m happy to worship inside a building (technology) with A/C (technology) and electricity (technology)—not to mention with indoor plumbing available (also technology). Microphones make preaching audible to everyone, including those hard of hearing. And I’ve not even mentioned the most consequential technological invention for the church’s practice of worship: the automobile! Over the last century cars revolutionized the who and where and how and why of church membership and attendance. (In this Luddite’s opinion, clearly for the worse. Come at me.)

In any case, whatever one makes of these and similar developments, the foregoing exercise is meant to force us to reckon with technology’s presence in worship as both contingent and chosen. It is contingent because worship is possible without any/all of them. I’ve worshiped on a Sunday morning beneath a tree in rural east Africa. The people walked to get there. No A/C. No mics. No screens. No internet. Certainly no plumbing. Not that long ago in this very country, most of the technology taken for granted today in many churches did not even exist. So contingency is crucial to recognize here.

And because it is contingent, it is also chosen. No one imposed digital technology, or any other kind, on American churches. Their leaders implemented it. It does not matter whether they understood themselves to be making a decision or exercising authority. They were, whether they knew it or not and whether they liked it or not. It does not matter whether they even had a conversation about it. The choice was theirs, and they made it. The choice remains theirs. What has been done can be undone. No church has to stream, for example. Some never started. Others have stopped. It’s a choice, as I’ve written elsewhere. Church leaders should own it and take responsibility for it rather than assume it’s “out of their hands.”

Because the use and presence of digital technology in the church’s liturgy is neither necessary nor imposed—it is contingent and chosen—then the logical upshot is this: Church leaders who believe that digital technology is a clear and present danger to the well-being and faithfulness of disciples of Christ should act like it. They should identify, recognize, and articulate the threats and temptations of digital dysfunction in their lives and ours; they should formulate a vision for how the church can oppose this dysfunction, forcefully and explicitly; and they should find ways to enact this opposition, both negatively (by removing said dysfunction from within the church) and positively (by proposing and modeling alternative forms of life available to believers who want relief from their digital addictions).

What they should not do is say it’s a problem while avoiding dealing with it. What they should not do is leave the status quo as it is. What they should not do is accept Digital’s domination as inevitable—as somehow lying outside the sphere of the reign and power of Christ.

What they should not do is look the other way.

East/West Christianity: an unfinished love story

My brother texted this to me the other day, and he gave me permission to share it here. It’s about the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, i.e., Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (or: Catholicism East and West). I’ve made a few modest edits. Enjoy.

*

Been reading lots on history of East–West divide lately, so here’s me thinking out loud and writing down my thoughts. My analogy that helps me think about the stormy relationship between East and West (obviously from my Orthodox-sympathetic viewpoint, though one that yearns for union!):

100-850 – Honeymoon period. East nods to “headship” of West; they have their differences, but nothing that love doesn’t cover; as Christ died for the church, the West leads through service and love

850-1050 – First big fight. Starting to grow apart; realizing they meant different things by “headship”; East losing trust in West

1054 – West files divorce papers. East says “so be it,” but doesn’t really mean it in her heart

1100-1400 – Trial separation. Ignore each other to avoid fighting; when they interact, it’s only words spoken in anger; in 1204 the West does something the East might one day forgive, but will never forget.

1400s – Marriage counseling. The East needs the West more than the West needs the East; while the East wants an apology and compromise, the West expects submission; the Easts grants it on paper, but doesn’t mean it and takes it back as soon as the West is out of earshot.

1450-1869 – Diverging paths. The West prospers; the East goes through hell.

1870 – Divorce finalized. Irrevocable words and actions taken by the West, followed by the East.

1870-1965 – Fallout. East descends deeper into hell; West also suffers while flourishing in other ways; whether fast-evolving changes count as maturation or backsliding remains to be seen.

1965-present – Second thoughts. Both lovers have regrets; the West realizes it may at times have overstepped its bounds and misses terribly the beauty of the East; the East realizes she’s really missed the West’s leadership of and organization for the family; they rip up the original divorce papers; they exchange meaningful gifts; they go back to counseling; could they make this work again?—they realize that in really important ways, the same candle has always burned in both their hearts; they’re even aligned more than ever in their worldview and beliefs; but they also discover their personalities and eccentricities make each of them feel foreign to the other; the East has had a really rough go of it since they separated and feels that the West sometimes took advantage of her weakness instead of reaching out to help; some words spoken by the West can’t be unspoken; can the East live with them? can the West soften them? can the East forgive and forget? can the West remember and reclaim its first vows? can the West compromise? can the East submit?

Update on my next two books

My first two books, The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book, were published in August 2021 and April 2022, respectively, just eight months apart. Now it’s looking like the next two will be published in a similarly short span.

Book #3 is titled The Church: A Guide to the People of God. It’s in the Christian Essentials series published by Lexham Press; it’ll be the sixth of nine total volumes. The first five cover the Apostles’ Creed (Ben Myers), the Ten Commandments (Peter Leithart), the Lord’s Prayer (Wesley Hill), baptism (Peter Leithart), and the Bible (John Kleinig). The remaining three address the liturgy, the Eucharist, and the forgiveness of sins. The whole series will eventually form a trilogy of trilogies: Creed–Prayer–Decalogue; Church–Scripture–Liturgy; Baptism–Eucharist–Absolution.

I worked out the final version of the manuscript with the wonderful Todd Hains last April, and sometime in the next few weeks I’ll receive and approve the copy-edited proofs before they’re handed on to be typeset. We’re expecting the book to come out next spring (if I’m guessing, let’s say March 25, 2024—the book begins with the Annunciation, after all).

Book #4 is titled Letters to a Future Saint: A Catechism for Believers on the Way. I finished a draft this past May, sat on it over the summer, got feedback from readers, and made final revisions this month. Two days ago I emailed it to James Ernest at Eerdmans (James is the reason I wrote this book in the first place). Obviously he and the other Eerdmans editors have to like the book and formally approve it. On the assumption they will and do, with however many suggested changes, the book should come out late fall next year (let’s say October 1, 2024, since Saint Thérèse is a kind of patroness for the book—though to be honest, my guess would be mid-November, just before AAR/SBL/Thanksgiving/Advent).

Both books are meant for lay readers of all ages. I was just telling someone yesterday that writing for a popular audience is both harder and more fun to write than anything else. It requires intense discipline not to indulge all your bad habits: not to say everything; not to use jargon; not to presuppose background knowledge, but also not to overwhelm—all while holding the reader’s attention with shorter sentences and paragraphs and chapters, without the crutch of ten trillion ego-padding footnotes.

Each book is an outgrowth of my time in the classroom here at ACU. I have taught the same upper-level course on ecclesiology every fall semester since 2017. The Church is simply that class rendered in print. My special hope is that it reaches readers who love Christ but don’t understand why His body and bride matters; or who “get” the Church but don’t “get” Abraham and Moses and Israel. Let me be the one to tell them!

Letters to a Future Saint is meant for anyone old enough to read it—from high schoolers to senior citizens—but the primary audience I have in mind is the students I teach every day. On one hand, they mostly don’t read books; they largely come from Bible Belt contexts; they’re typically non-denom evangelicals; they’re baptized but uncatechized. On the other hand, they’re earnest, hungry, and eager to learn; they know Christ and want to know Him more; they’re willing to labor and struggle to get there. In other words, they’re young people in the orbit of the Church but in need of meat, not milk. I want to catechize them. I want my book to be a tool in the hands of professors, pastors, parents, grandparents, mentors, volunteers, youth groups, study groups, Bible studies, Christian colleges, and Christian study centers. I want older believers to say, “This is a book that will draw you into the depths of the faith—a book you can understand, a book you’ll enjoy, yet also a book that will show you why living and dying for Christ makes sense.” That’s a high goal, and I’ve surely failed to meet it in countless ways, but it’s my hope nonetheless.

In both books I have sought to be ecumenical without being generic; I have tried, that is, to be at once biblical, creedal, evangelical, and catholic. My Catholic friends observed how saturated the manuscripts are with the Old Testament; my evangelical friends noted how capital-O Orthodox they seem; my academic friends were struck by the devotional and even pious tone. Lord willing, these add up to a holistic whole and not a false eclecticism. I want readers of all backgrounds to find profit in what I’ve written. And even when something is foreign or initially off-putting, I long for it not to lead them to put down the book, but to keep reading to learn more.

Now to wait. Next year feels a long ways off. What am I supposed to do with my time when I’m not obsessively breathlessly writing rewriting revising two books simultaneously? I guess we’ll see.

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.

My latest: a review of Mark Noll in The Christian Century

In the new issue of The Christian Century I have a review of Mark Noll’s latest book, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. Superlatives fail, as they usually do with Noll’s work. The book is more than a “mere” history, though. It has an argument to make. Here’s how I begin to lay it out:

The United States was, from the start, founded and widely understood as a repudiation of and alternative to European Christendom. Whatever the proper relationship between church and state, the federal government would have no established religion—would not, that is, tax citizens in sponsorship of a formal ecclesiastical body. On this arrangement, most nascent Americans agreed. What then would, or should, the implications be for Christian faith and doctrine in the public square? How could Christian society endure without the legal and political trappings of Christendom?

Answer: through the Bible. Not the Bible and; not the Bible as mediated by. The Bible alone. America would be the first of its kind: a “Bible civilization.” That is to say, a constitutional republic of coequal citizens whose common, voluntary trust in the truth and authority of Christian scripture would simultaneously (1) put the lie to the “necessity” of coercive religious regimes, (2) provide the moral character required for a liberal democracy to flourish, and (3) fulfill the promise of the Protestant Reformation. Sola scriptura thus became the unwritten law of the land. Regardless of one’s confession or tradition, the sufficiency of the Bible for all aspects of life—the canon as the cornerstone for religion, ethics, and politics alike—was axiomatic. For more than a century, it functioned as a given in public argument. Only rarely did it call for an argument itself.

Keep reading for more, including a disagreement with Noll regarding how to interpret prior generations’ disputes over how to read the Bible, in this case about chattel slavery.