ab initio, in medias res

From Sara Hendren’s very enjoyable book, What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World:

Desire lines can provide low-tech crowdsourcing for urban planners and architects, letting the habits of the walkers dictate to them how a space is best traversed, rather than trying to decide it up front. Some large campuses have postponed the paving of pathways until desire lines have first been created. One celebrated case was in the remodeling of the Illinois Institute of Technology, a project taken up by Dutch architect Rem Kookhaas and his firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the late 1990s. That campus presented a particular conundrum for achieving social cohesion. It had doubled the footprint of the original institution but had only half the enrollment. What kind of building would energize and unite the school? The OMA group studied desire lines and used them to plan the campus center, unified by a long single roof. The building wasn’t so much a new creation as an observation of extant use: it effectively enclosed the pathways and connections between on campus that were already established. The single-plane building is like an archive, capturing activities in motion. It took its form from travel behaviors made newly visible, not from a series of architectural types pre-identified for recreation, shopping, and the like.

This kind of practice is a human-centered design approach to landscape, paying close attention to the details of movement and patiently observing an area over time. […]

But desire lines may also be evidence of something more than pure practicality. The casual disobedience of a desire path as an alternative to the formally prescribed walkway is remarkably simply as a human choice, willfully out of step with the way things are. Cities and towns are often planned, well, by planners, by people tasked with creating systems that make mathematical sense for groups at the scale of hundreds or thousands. They roll out pathways conceived around the efficiencies of use and cost-benefit, shunting people up and down stairs or elevators , nudging them between turnstiles and onto trains for the fastest transport. And these efficiencies are often to the good. But the emergent, informal, human-made lines are organized not only by efficiency but by desire. The human individual is also making a path through life, through interiors and exteriors, a life that cannot be measured in abstract bureaucratic terms. […]

Interesting enough on its own. But… What if creation is meant to be something similar, or even had to be. What if, to be truly incarnational, the world had to play itself out, to be “caught” in motion by God?

What archive could ever fully house the evidence of desire in the millions of walkers who daily traverse a cityscape, all the wishing and wanting that drives each path, with all their untold forms of assistance, all the getting “organized” that got them out the door and into the street? “Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust.

And walking with is a mode of being in the world as well as making it.

a politics of greebles

From 99% Invisible, Interstellar Illusions: “Greebles” Lend Large Sci-Fi Structures a Sense of Scale:

In the world of physical modeling, creating variations to make things look big can be as simple as gluing small pieces onto models and allowing these accretions to suggest immense structures. […]
One pending suggestion for a dictionary definition of greebles shows that the term’s use has broadened over time, too, including any “cosmetic detailing added to the surface of a larger object that makes it appear more complex or technologically advanced on film sets and on toys to make them appear more realistic and hand tools to give the impression of higher quality.”

Not to hijack the point, but there has to be a corresponding effect for almost all political discussions, especially the ones on TV.

dispositions before discourses

James K.A. Smith at Image:

And how do you teach a body? Through embodiment. This is why the formation of the imagination is fundamentally incarnate. The way to the imagination is through the body, which is why embodied, material media captivate and shape it. Philosopher Charles Taylor talks about what he calls our collective “social imaginary”: “the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings” before they ever think about it, the way we perceive others and our collective life in an instant. Our “take” on others. Importantly, Taylor points out that our social imaginary is “not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends.” In other words, the social imaginary is shaped by the ways artists show us the world: our storytellers, image-makers, and performers of all kinds enact a story about who we are.
This, of course, is also where we go wrong. Our imaginations are susceptible to malformation depending on what images we feed them, what stories they soak up. It’s the imagination—well- or malformed—that determines what I see before I look. . . .
To change our world means telling a different story, inhabiting a different story, transforming my habits of perception to change what I see before I even look. “But this story,” Stevenson concluded, “requires a different symbolic landscape.” Arguments made in a courtroom are important; they might change minds and laws. But it is this sculpture, this memorial, that seeps down to the imagination. The soul that descends into this work of art can never see the world the same way again.

all will be well

Denys Turner at Commonweal:

It is true that [in her Long Text] the Lord rebukes Julian for her anxieties about sin, but what she thereupon corrects herself for having thought is not that God could have created a world of free human agents who did not sin. Instead, she corrects herself for assuming that all would have been well only in such a sinless world. Her inclinations on that subject, until corrected by the Lord, were the same as Hume’s. They were also the same as those of the biblical Job. What the Lord tells her is that all is well in just this sinful world, and that puzzles her all the more. . . .
It is the “not yet” that matters here, the provisional. What is provisional is Julian’s theological refusal of both the logical completeness of Plantinga, which would purport to demonstrate the formal consistency of an infinite love’s creating just this sinful world, and the narrative completeness claimed by Milton, which would purport to finish the story that “justifies the wayes of God to men.” For all her doubts about how it could be true, Julian accepts that “sin is behovely.” But I think she knows enough about how the logic of the behovely works—as narratives do—to understand that we could see how sin is behovely only if we were in possession of the complete narrative that makes sense of it, and we are not. All we possess is but a narrative fragment, a torn-off corner of the manuscript of salvation history, and it tells Julian of nothing but the paradox of an innocent man judicially executed for a reason he too begs to know of, though he dies, as we will, the reason why denied us all. Somehow, Julian knows that the meaning of sin, its character as behovely, lies in that incomplete narrative of the Cross that is at the heart of her showings, a narrative whose incompleteness is necessary, for “not yet” belongs to the nature of human existence in time. . . .
In the meantime, there is but the meantime, the “not yet.” And Julian does her theology obedient to the temporality in which neither understanding nor living can yet be “completed.” Julian is the theologian she is because she knows that all theological writing submits to a necessary condition of incompleteness, and like Hume she refuses an easygoing and peremptory ultimacy. For writing that is pretentiously “finished” is not theological; it is parody.

“permissioning”

G.C. Waldrep:

As with O’Connor, I had to think and write circumspectly around Faulkner, because he loomed so oppressively large in my consciousness. Some great writers are permissioning—that is, the more time you spend with them, the more permitted you feel to speak, to respond, to participate. But other great writers, whom one can read and return to with just as much or even greater pleasure, have the opposite effect. When I read Faulkner I find myself slipping into Faulknerian pastiche in my own writing and then going silent. So I must ration my reconnaissances.
I think the real legacy Faulkner left with me, which I dimly apprehended even before I wrote poetry, was mystagogy, that leading through mystery and revelation. Not an explanation—and therefore an exorcism or dispelling—of mystery and revelation: rather a leading-through. Faulkner performed that for me, at the time, in terms of a shared southern past, in ways no other writer did or could.

Julian Barnes, on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through a city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. . . . Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in The Beginnings of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says, ‘There are no accidental meetings.’ The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.

Michael Oakeshott:

Philosophy in general knows two styles, the contemplative and the didactic, although there are many writers to whom neither belongs to the complete exclusion of the other. Those who practice the first let us into the secret workings of their minds and are less careful to send us away with a precisely formulated doctrine. Philosophy for them is a conversation, and, whether or not they write it as a dialogue, their style reflects their conception. Hobbes’s way of writing is an example of the second style. What he says is already entirely freed from the doubts and hesitancies of the process of thought. It is only a residue, a distillate that is offered to the reader. The defect of such a style is that the reader must either accept or reject; if it inspires to fresh thought, it does so only by opposition. And Hobbes’s style is imaginative, not merely on account of the subtle imagery that fills his pages, nor only because it requires imagination to make a system. His imagination appears also as the power to create a myth.

Gilbert Meilaender:

My impression is that most people would probably consider [C.S.] Lewis’ theological works to belong to the didactic rather than the contemplative style. Yet, in the course of studying his thought I have come to believe that this is far from true. If his fiction can be didactic as well as imaginative, his “standard” theology does far more than argue for certain propositions believed to be true. He is serious of course; for he has read his Plato well and knows that discussion of how a man ought to live is not trivial subject. And, indeed, he strives to present his theology consistently. But it is, he thinks, a consistent picture of an untidy world. The world as Lewis experiences it resists systematization—which is what we should expect from one who knows himself to be a pilgrim. (emphasis added)

“affirmation [for] antithesis”

From George Hunsinger’s 1980 essay, “Karl Barth and the Politics of Protestant Sectarianism” (emphasis added):

There is an important sense for Barth in which the church is not to be seen as more sanctified than the world, nor the world as less sanctified than the church. The church shares with the world a solidarity in both sin and grace. This inclusive solidarity meant that Barth found what the church had in common with the world to be always more fundamental than any polarity which might arise on the basis of the church’s human response to Jesus Christ.

Or, as Hunsinger quotes it in Barth’s own words:

[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. . . . As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow his example and to sit down at the table with the rest, with all sinners.

sometimes, just use more words

An interesting note for a “roof nail,” from an old email to a friend who was also at the time reading Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction that year:

I told you in Liberia that I’ve never been a big fan of The Message version of the Bible, or at least that it’s never done anything for me. That’s still true, mostly, but every once in a while I find something in The Message that’s very helpful. In this case, I really liked his translation of Philippians 4:5. The NKJV says, “Let your gentleness be known to all men.” The NASB uses “gentle spirit.” The ESV, for some unknown purpose, uses reasonableness. However, for The Message, Peterson paraphrases it like this: “Make it clear to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.” Naturally, since I’m often (and for unknown reasons) an ESV guy, I wondered how he got from “reasonableness” to, well, all that. Turns out, most of the verse spins on one word: epieikés. Here’s the definition I found: “properly, equitable, gentle in the sense of truly fair by relaxing overly strict standards in order to keep the spirit of the law.” Long story short, I like Peterson’s translation better.

The moral of the story is: practice epieikés.

But also: Sometimes, just use more words.

gritty resurrections

This outstanding essay from Alana Newhouse is…well, outstanding.

…our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And it bears more than a passing resemblance and complement to Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto”:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed….
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Newhouse ends by recounting a rabbi’s words upon hearing that her son’s name is Elijah.

“Ah, the prophet of unlikely redemption,” he said, smiling. “With them, the good news is almost as hard as the bad.”
It took me a while, but I eventually figured out what he meant. Sometimes the task of rebuilding—of accepting what has been broken and making things anew—is so daunting that it can almost feel easier to believe it can’t be done.

But it can.

That is hopeful, good news. Of course, even better news is remembering that unlikely redemption is almost the only kind there is.

hupomoné

to change the world

I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer –

Something I intend to reread this year is James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. I was very late in reading it, but few books have more perfectly and fairly summarized—by the second chapter alone—my entire experience of “evangelical” political engagement. And Hunter’s early description of evangelical politics could not have closed with a more simple, accurate critique: “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”

This has been the ever-increasing sense for me over the past 10 years (again, late to the party): that what I have usually been shown/sold as Christian civic duty is almost entirely a sham.

Hunter:

Though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture more broadly, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, causing harm to America and harm to the church, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ through a strategy of acquiring and using power is identical to the longstanding approach of the established Christian Right. The leading edge of such initiatives is still one of negation. To use words and phrases like “enemy,” “attack,” “drive out,” “overthrow,” “eradicate the Other,” “reclaim their nations for Christ,” “take back” influence, “compel, “occupying and influencing [spheres] of power in our nations,” “advancing the kingdom of God,” and so on, continues to reflect the same language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest. This is because the underlying myth that defines their identity, their goals, and their strategy of action has not changed. The myth continues to shape the language, the logic, and script for their engagement with culture. Circumstances might change as might the players, but if the myth that underwrites the ideal of Christian engagement does not change, then very little has changed at all.

Probably no question than this is more prescient for “evangelicals” right now: How do we change the myth?

For Christian believers, the call to faithfulness is a call to live in fellowship and integrity with the person and witness of Jesus Christ. There is a timeless character to this all that evokes qualities of life and spirit that are recognizable throughout history and across cultural boundaries. But this does not mean that faithfulness is a state of abstract piety floating above the multifaceted and compromising realities of daily life in actual situations. St. Paul, in Acts 13:36, refers King David having “served God’s purposes in his own generation.” This suggests, of course, that faithfulness works itself out in the context of complex social, political, economic, and cultural forces that prevail at a particular time and place.

To that effect, Michael Gerson recently offered a brief analysis, lament, and general way forward, one that seems to me both timeless and, to some extent, specific to our own generation. And it’s one that fits well into what Hunter calls “affirmation and antithesis” (or what I call incarnation and cultivation qua witness):

There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.
The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.

This seems quite obviously right to me, and it seems very closely related to Hunter’s “theology of faithful presence.” But there is one problem with it. Hunter points out in his book what Peter Berger calls “plausibility structures”: the social conditions that make certain beliefs credible and intelligible to a person who holds them.

Right now the bulk of the evangelical vox populi, at least among white evangelicals, is dominated by a plausibility structure that bears very little if any resemblance to a Christ-like social/political engagement. Put simply: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, and reformation are not its hallmarks, if they even make the fine print anymore. Shamelessness, self-assurance, retribution, subversion—these seem to make up the new quadrilateral for “evangelicals.”

I truly do not know a way to change this, and if I’m being honest, I’ve given up trying to find it. My own plausibility structure for Christian faith consists, in part, of a small handful of friends, a list of which I could count on one hand. The rest is almost entirely made up of books by authors who, if they’re even still alive, I have never met or spoken with and who almost no one else I know reads. (These include George Hunsinger, Mark Noll, Gilbert Meilaender, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Frederick Buechner, Flannery O’Connor, Christian Wiman, Alan Jacobs, and David French to name a few.)

More than anything, these folks seem to me to see their role as Christians not as promoting some ethic or denouncing another, but as primarily seeking to display God’s faithful presence in Jesus. As Hunter describes it:

Pursuit [of], identification [with], the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God’s faithful presence means. It is a quality of commitment that is active, not passive; intentional, not accidental; covenantal, not contractual.

Hunter also points out, in at least a partial echo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, that “we must be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not.” I’m no expert on Bonhoeffer, but it seems like in his later years he was more focused on the second half of that objective.

If the “community of faith” seems more intent on loving itself—while, of course, it fights valiantly against its (often self-created) enemies in the (often self-created) culture war—then are Christians justified in, to some extent, turning their backs on the church—or, less dramatically, turning their attention from it— in order to live among and love those “outside” the community of faith—to “affirm” their neighbors while living out the “antithesis”?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s where I’m at.