Category: culture watch

Dethroning anxiety

I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting this wonderful blog from Nadia Bolz-Weber. On the face of it, her circle and mine (hers is much bigger) do not much intersect: ordained, tattooed, a former addict, divorced, remarried and probably further over on some theological spectrum than I, but she writes and thinks so beautifully that I would recommend her corner of the internet to you and anybody. Here’s the link that should enable you to sign up. And here’s something she wrote a couple of weeks ago, about anxiety:

As a child I worried a lot about quicksand. To be fair, the TV shows I watched made it seem like more of a potential danger in life than it’s proved to be.

And as a teenager I worried that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on us but I equally worried that I wouldn’t get tickets to see Depeche Mode.

In my early 20s I was mostly worried I’d run out of booze, and that I would not be able to pay my $325 a month rent. Sadly, I did not think to worry about how those two things might be related.

And when I got sober and I worried that I wouldn’t be funny anymore never realizing I wasn’t all that funny before.

Then I was told to worry that Y2K was going to make airplanes just sort of drop out of the sky.

And when 9-11 happened I for sure worried the terrorist attacks would just keep going and by that time I had 2 babies and that made it feel more acute.

Then when the economic collapse happened in 2008 … honestly I was entirely free from worry because I was entirely free of money. So it was very a relaxing time for me.

Then I worried that people would think less of me when I got divorced not realizing they didn’t think that much of me to begin with.

Feel free to go home and write your own biography of worry. It’s a humbling project to undertake.

But also kind of calming.

Because writing my own this week helped remind me how worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe, or to prevent bad things from happening or to ensure that good things did. It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in.

… worrying about what might happen didn’t do one thing to make me feel safe … It really only kept me from being present to the gifts of the day I was in

But what I really want to tell you about is how our reading from Revelation helped me this week –

The churches in Asia minor to whom John’s Revelation is addressed had some pretty high anxiety levels too – they were living under the thumb of the Roman empire and the book of Revelation was meant to offer them comfort. It’s famous for 7 headed beasts and heavenly battles and whatnot, but If there is an overwhelming message in this, the weirdest book in the Bible, it would be this: that dominant powers are not ultimate powers. Which is another sermon for another time.

The part of today’s reading that I swear lowered my cortisol levels was this:

In his opening remarks, the writer of Revelation twice refers to God as the one who was, who is, and who is to come. That’s it.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

That is what comforted me this week as I read our texts for today and tried to manage my anxiety while writing a sermon.

That God was and is and is to come.

Or as the hymn goes:

Crown him the Lord of Years,

The Potentate of Time,

creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.

It helped me this week because it reminded me that this moment we are in is a very small moment in a very big story.  A story of God and God’s people that reaches back to the beginning of time, brushes the skin of the present and moves on into a future we cannot see.  

What I am saying is that I think I am most anxious when I invest myself too fully in some Johnny come lately story.

Because looking again at my autobiography of worry, I think that at each of those anxious points in my life I was believing a story I was being told; in the media and by my friends and from our culture. Which is understandable, but in hindsight most of the stories did not end up being all that true, they just ended up being quickly replaced by new ones so we never noticed.

What I am trying to say is that the beautiful thing about being a people of faith is how we are a very small part of a very big story. We tell it, we sing it, we eat it, we paint it, we read it, because it’s the most true thing we’ve ever heard.  And competing stories will always surround us.  Sometimes, maybe a little bit like our siblings in faith from the churches in Asia minor in the 1st century, we too need reminding that the dominant story is not the ultimate story. That that there is only one potentate of time.

When I look back, in all my times of grief and doubt and sorrow and anger and faithlessness, I can in the rear view, see the mighty hand of God.

To be clear, God was not busily arraigning all my desired outcomes. If that were true, had I gotten everything I wanted I promise you I wouldn’t be alive right now, much less standing here in this pulpit.

But what I can see now, is how often I was saved from having the thing happen that I was so sure would make me happy.

Looking back I see how often I was carried through things I thought I couldn’t survive, and how I was guided to beautiful things I wouldn’t have ever even wished for.

Because God is like a shimmering, divine filament woven into our lives that provides spiritual tensile strength, and beauty in each moment, even when we forget to trust him, even when we forget to pray or be grateful.

The gospel industrial complex and the big drummer in the sky

Photo by Caleb Toranzo on Unsplash

(I am grateful for the writer Chuck Lowe for this brilliance, which I hope I have not sullied too much.)

You need to make something happen? Here’s what you need:

  • A parts list
  • Step-by-step instructions
  • Hazards to avoid
  • Useful techniques for greater efficiency

Apart from the side effect of turning people into automata, this approach was powerful for simple things like recipes, fast-food restaurants, internal combustion engines, mills, factories and much else. The Industrial Revolution (I suggest) was a revolution because of the discovery and application of this power.

It is such a powerful approach that we humans have totally lost control of it and are applying it to everything, particularly complex systems, where it doesn’t work at all. Here is a partial list where it doesn’t work:

  • Babies
  • Adults
  • Children
  • Societies
  • Economies
  • Medicine
  • Education
  • Business

You get the idea: anything human. I notice (following Chuck Lowe again) how what powered the Industrial Revolution has hijacked the Christian Church, or at least the bits I inhabit. (Perhaps Orthodoxy largely escaped? I don’t know enough. )

Right now, around the world, how many courses are being delivered, how many notes taken, about about how to get the gospel working in lives and churches: evangelistic programmes, discipleship programmes, instructions on how to pray, heal, defeat evil, live well? What colossal percentage of time and energy is wasted delivering and receiving these courses. Because what works for the simple does not work for the complex. Anybody who has spent the shortest time with a toddler knows this.

Abandon it all. What are we supposed to do instead? I think in the Christian sphere it is about the attitudes that flow from a worshipping heart; about love love of God and neighbour; about serving as your passions and circumstances lead and constrain; and about trusting God, the big drummer in the sky, to call the dance.

The church and mental health (some more)

I had the privilege recently of meeting and having lunch with a clinical psychologist, who was soon to retire. In our brief time together I was interested in what (if anything) Christian communities could do to take some steps towards tackling the crisis in mental health that seems to be all around us.

Dismiss for a moment the claim that we don’t have a blooming of mental health problems so much as a blooming of mental health terminology. And dismiss for another moment the further thought that previous generations had it much worse (think, World War I or the great plague) and just got on with it.

Ask instead, if the lived experience of many today is struggles with mental health (anxiety and depression say), can Christian communities do something to help?

Interestingly, my lunch companion thought ‘yes’. I hope I am not misquoting her in that she said many mental problems—wider than just anxiety and depression—are essentially chronic conditions, that is, life-long and to be managed rather than cured as such. But she said she could get good outcomes if her work with people was combined with their participation in community things. If there were two aspects to managing an illness, one was her work, the other was a community.

This was fascinating. But, I asked her, wouldn’t this community themselves need to be trained in mental health issues? Not really, she replied. Essentially they would just need to be able to spot a mental health crisis and know whom to contact. What was more important was normal, non-judgemental acceptance and human interaction.

We have seen this in our own church, and I suspect so have most churches. Most congregations I have belonged to have contained some marginalized people who have hung onto normalcy in large part because Christian communities have accepted them and welcomed them in.

We can do this. The same congregations that, in the 1960s say, hosted large Sunday Schools, or in later decades ran parent and toddler groups and youth groups and foodbanks, can intentionally set stuff up that will give the lonely something to belong to and the anxious a welcome.

Our church started a food hub, and we noticed that people turned up way earlier than the opening time. It wasn’t just to get the first dibs on the food. Some brought garden chairs. It turned out that as much as needing food, they needed community. They enjoyed the queue.

As time went on, entrepreneurial people in our congregation downgraded the food supply and opened a cafe instead. During the recent crisis in energy costs, we got money from the City Council to run a designated ‘warm space’ for people.

And then our little church extended the cafe idea to community lunches and a monthly ‘cafe church’.

This is slow mission but it is also the Kingdom leaking into the community around us.

Slow dating makes a return

Just finished Louise Perry’s book The Case against the Sexual Revolution, which was so informative and eye-opening, even if it isn’t stuff that finds its way into my normal diet. Perry is a journalist and writer, raised in all the tropes of Western sexual culture, but turning away from them. I think broadly her argument is that:

  • Technology and culture change (easy divorce, the pill, abortion) have freed up women’s sexual choices
  • That freedom, in the cultural context that evolved with it, hasn’t served them at all well
  • The forces of evolution are much stronger in our make-up than new social constructs; men and women view and treat sex differently
  • It’s better to rely on structures that have worked OK in the past (monogamy) than speculate on or explore options that are theoretically possible but have not, across the whole of society, actually worked.

A former volunteer in a rape crisis centre, she’s very dismissive of the figleaf of ‘consent’, which is deployed whenever freedom to love is raised. Her problem? It doesn’t work:

[Out of ‘Me Too’ came stories of] a lot of women who described sexual encounters that were technically consensual but nevertheless left them feeling terrible because they were being asked to treat as meaningless something that they felt to be meaningful.

I’m anxious not to quote her too much, lest in my clumsy hands I make her say things she doesn’t say or (more likely) say things without her elegeance and erudition. As a writer she prefers the rapier to the halberd.

Nor does she start from an a priori conservative position (I think) ; more from observation and evidence of how much damage (to both women and men) the prevailing sexual culture is creating. The ones who suffer least are the high-status men; the ones who suffer most, young women. I wish I could quote her better and I wish even more than people would read her book.

It is, finally, a manifesto for slow too. Here’s a taster of her stuff, from near the end of the book:

  • Consent workshops are mostly useless…
  • The category of people most likely to become victims of [sexually aggressive] men are young women aged about thirteen to twenty-five. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: it’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.
  • Get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company.
  • Don’t use dating apps. Mutual friends can vet histories and punish bad behaviour. Dating apps can’t.
  • Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up.
  • Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children – not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb

She has a podcast too.

The ever-widening horizon

The Chicago horizon … one of our summer views

I’ve been enjoying over the summer exploring the brain of former Archbishop. and continuing New Testament scholar, Rowan Williams, not least because I can now read his books for free, ish, on my phone, thanks to the wonderful perlego.com subscription service.

Something he said got me going, though. He described how becoming a Christian made his perspective wider, broadened his view. I really like that idea But how so?

I thought of some examples:

  1. Science is the pursuit of God’s utter ingeniousness. Science is great at ‘how’ and rubbish at ‘why’. But if the ‘why’ is settled, and especially if it’s settled in the idea of a loving God not able to keep his goodness to himself, and creating a universe, then science becomes a rather joyous romp in a playground. Wider, deeper and higher we can go, into the crannies of God’s genius.
  2. Art is for all humanity. Christ is Lord of culture. That is really something. This does not doom us to endlessly paint Biblical scenes, nor only to write theology. So much of the Christian faith is attitudes: set yourself to love God and neighbour, pick up your paintbrush, and see what happens. Wider, deeper, funner, lovelier. And because everyone is in the image of God, everyone is capable of artistry.
  3. The common good. We don’t need to resort to utilitarian arguments to care for the earth or humanity. We have, through the unrolling story of God-with-people, a context of individual, communal, global, and universal thriving. When we set ourselves with that perspective, we can have confidence that we are working with grain of the Universe, whatever our hands find to do. Wider, more imaginative, more creative.
  4. Christ is the Lord of Time. The proper Time-lord. What does this mean? We don’t have to rush. Let’s do stuff well. Let’s not do other stuff. And let’s be OK with failing.
  5. All will be summed up in Christ. So he’s taking the whole ‘completeness’ thing on his own shoulders. That frees us to be partial, incomplete, which frees us to attempt big things, because the final outcome rests just with us following our sense of his leading.

I am free to be my playful self, because I’m standing on somewhere solid and safe. And beause I’m loved. How lovely.

The pushback against the autocrats (continued)

I’m enjoying the substack of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is a scholar of autocracy and is writing with a wide knowledge and perspective on a subject that can seem very gloomy.

But here’s an upbeat assessment from her:

A growing number of countries are not just turning back autocracy but are also making their reborn democracies more robust. V-Dem Institute’s 2023 Democracy Report, “Defiance in the Face of Autocratization,” analyzes eight cases of countries (Bolivia and Slovenia among them) that have made a “U-turn” from autocracy and now qualify as democracies. Since that report appeared we also had the big victory of democratic forces over the far right in Poland (October 2023), and the successful unity play of the French left against a National Rally victory (June 2024).

Nonviolent mass protest remains among the most important ways to show our support for democracy in situations of creeping authoritarianism; to protest injustices and advocate for policy reforms; and, in autocracies, to show the world the government does not speak for us.

She goes on:

What they all share is a validation of nonviolent protest –people coming together in public spaces to express dissent—as a way of doing politics or simply acting on an inner conviction that what is going on in their societies is wrong and they can no longer stay silent.

Depending on the country, non-violent mass protest can be dangerous. But she quotes Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law:

History in the making. We have no idea whether are in the beginning, middle or end of it. But we are sure that history will mark what you have done as something magnificent. History will treat you well. No matter what will happen, your effort is not going in vain.”

It’s not all bad.

Like a subscription to a sweetshop

So. I just discovered Perlego.com and it is like having a subscription to a sweetshop, or an all-you-can-eat buffet, or a pizza restaurant. I think it was originally for students. It stores a million textbooks and for a simple monthly fee, you can download and read them all. (Note that it is perlego and not perlogo. The alternate spelling in my experience is a site that has been taken over by cybersquatters who intend you harm.)

Here’s my usage over the past two months.

  • Our church has a teaching series on the biblical book of Nehemiah, which I’m speaking on in August. Want a commentary on Nehemiah? Perlego offers 94 of them across the range of Biblical scholarship. I tucked into Derek Kidner’s 2015 Tyndale commentary for starters.
  • I helped myself to Tom Wright’s biography of Paul, which I just read in hardback and wanted to review.
  • I was able to hunt down all John Walton’s books, which are revolutionizing studies of Genesis and read in detail The Lost World of the Flood, very much enjoying his blend of Biblical scholarship, from a conservative perspective no less, and his receptivity to God’s other book, the book of nature as opened and read by modern science. His secret sauce that blends these two ingredients is a renewed study of the ancient literature and an awareness of the cultural flow of the times. If we know what they meant then, today’s science isn’t a problem.
  • I chewed without finishing Joshua Swamidass’ book The Genealogical Adam and Eve, which I have blogged about in a previous year. It claims that you can have a historic literal Adam and Eve and they can be ancestors of everyone, provided they weren’t the only humans on earth at the time. I haven’t eaten my crusts so far as this book is concerned because (a) it’s quite dense and my eyes glazed over and (b) I’m not wedded to a literal Adam and Eve,especially after reading Walton. But still.
  • Fancying something a little more spiritually improving, I looked to see what the scholar-archbishop (and Cambridge resident) Rowan Williams had on offer and dug out probably the most difficult of the alternatives, his book Passions of the Soul which is, broadly, a study of what the Greek-speaking Desert Fathers did all day in terms of scrutinizing the human psyche’s response to God. One wonders if the Desert Fathers rather pushed to the background the Second Great Commandment, love your neighbour, but it’s nevertheless interesting.
  • Then I’ve been listening to Justin Brierley’s excellent podcast series The Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God which is also a book and isn’t yet available on the sainted Perlego, but his previous title Why I’m Still a Christian is. The podcast had an episode on a woman called Louise Perry, who, starting with impeccable feminist credentials, has come to conclude that the best way for most people and for societies as a whole to thrive is to aim at a life not incompatible with many of the Christian values. (I don’t think she herself is at the moment a Christian believer, saying she stumbles on the metaphysics.) She was so eloquent, gracious, honest and deeply, deeply smart in the interview that I put her in Perlego and lo! There her book appeared, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and I can read that too. I can read them all. For my £12 or so monthly subscription.

Cue the rumble of the earth moving around me. I have written about how sad it is that thousands of pieces of excellent writing (in my particular world, Christian academic writing) are hidden inaccessible behind mighty paywalls. Woe to you if you are Nigerian youth leader or a Filipina pastor or, frankly, an ordinary Joe in the West whose budget doesn’t stretch to this literary feasting. The seven titles I’ve mentioned here would empty your wallet of the best part of £100 to buy, even assuming you could find them.

The Internet was always supposed to give us access to every film ever made, every piece of music ever recorded, and every book ever written. Big tech has muscled in mostly, so the films are divided between different streamers, and the music is being buried under a weight of AI generated elevator sound. Amateur films, books and music are everywhere, creators far outstripping the capacity of consumers.

But Perlego is, I think, where publishers’ backlists go, a far superior place to the literary Hades which is the nether end of the Amazon bestseller lists, where books crowd in semi-darkness, waiting usually in vain to be called up higher by an Order. (This is where my books reside, incidentally, at least until I get my move to Substack sorted out, of which more sometime.)

Enjoy it while it lasts.

My challenge now is to find le temps juste when I can moot to my wife the idea of an annual Perlego subscription (£100 or so, so a saving really) and perhaps a compact little Android e-reader like this to read it on.

Faith and patience.

Voting

I write this after voting in our General Election but it will be published after the results are known. As any faithful readers will know, I love voting, and I love General Elections. I’ve bought some snacks to sustain me when I start watching the results in the middle of the night.

Voting in my world involves a short walk to our 12th century church, through the sunny graveyard where an old friend or two are buried, saying hello to the people at the polling station (at the back of the church), voting, checking I voted for the right person, and slotting my ballot in the box. Every part is wonderful. As the American Senator Raphael Warnock said (and wouldn’t he make a good president, methinks):

‘Democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea, the sacred worth of all human beings.’

‘A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire.’

Such a privilege, and so simple. Not an idea, sadly, that has caught in China or North Korea, nor in a whole bunch of other countries, too many to number, where the current leaders fix things beforehand; or whine and worse after the event.

A couple of further things.

  1. The most effective prime ministers since the war, I would argue, are those who’ve led their party to replace the former lot as the governing party (think Atlee, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron; not so sure about Wilson and Heath though). This is quite rare, and so today’s vote is worth cherishing perhaps.
  2. ‘Righteouness exalts a nation’. I’m not too excited by culture-war stuff. But wouldn’t it be good to be good with poor, the broken, the left-behind? Wouldn’t it be good to fix the environment? Wouldn’t it be good to have basic common good things in place so that everyone can thrive, everyone under his own vine and fig tree? Let justice flow like rivers.
  3. The new lot will fade and die. Mrs Thatcher had the poll tax; Mr Blair, Iraq; Mr Cameron, Brexit. Let’s hope someone good is ready to replace them.

Doing fun things with old people

The world is ageing fast. Every day, 10,000 American baby boomers turn 65. Figuring out what to do with them (/us 1) is something we need to think about. Better yet if it can increase well-being across the world.

Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash

A recent Economist article described how some university campuses in the United States are building retirement homes. I hope they will forgive me quoting large parts of their article.

Most residents are having a ball. They get a university pass, which allows them to attend the same classes and cultural events as students, but with the distinct benefit of not having to take exams. Golf buggies can drive them around the sprawling campus, though many are still fit enough to mountain bike.

In their dorms, four restaurants serve better food than college grub and amenities include an art studio, a pool and gym, and a games room. Only the second floor feels institutional, with a memory-care centre and rooms for residents who need round-the-clock attention …

This is part of a wider trend. An estimated 85 colleges in America are affiliated with some form of senior living. The idea sprang from two college presidents who wanted to retire on campus in the 1980s. Today, universities from Central Florida to Iowa State to Stanford offer senior-living arrangements. Andrew Carle, at Georgetown University, estimates that as many as 20,000 older Americans live like this …

Bill Gates—not that one, but an 80-year-old former newspaper editor—moved to [one of these communities] with his wife, who has a PhD in chemistry, two years ago. They have made friends with residents but also, to their surprise, with younger students. “Being among young people is really invigorating,” says Mr Gates. At “pizza and a slice of future”, a discussion group about AI with pizza served halfway through, one of the topics was whether a lifespan of 200 or 250 years would be desirable. “The 20-year-olds were enthusiastic,” he reflects, but those in their 70s and 80s “had some reservations”, he chuckles.

When I saw this, I thought it was a downpayment on heaven. Being in community, attending lectures and discussion groups, surrounded by young people … oh man … what a fantastic way to spend your life’s teatime.

I heard another example from the UK. Our church used to run a day centre for the elderly. I heard of a similar day centre that had combined with a toddler group. So instead of the elderly looking at each across a circle of high-backed chairs, the elderly were looking at each other across a circle of high-backed chairs over a space filled with toddlers doing toddlery things. I can’t imagine how this wouldn’t be fun, perhaps even for all concerned.

Old people are changing. But the picture I have had of them so far in the UK is people on the edge of things, and unbelievably lonely, and deprived of the things that really matter, namely purpose and people. How astonishing and lovely it could be if they were folded back into new forms of extended families and communities; such healing, such wholeness.

Unveiling the Patient Revolution: 25 Years of Global Transformation

Photo by Duane Mendes on Unsplash

Looking at the news, you have to close your eyes and ears a bit at the moment. But there’s a longer view. As I write it is almost a quarter of a century since 1990. Here’s some of what I came across this week. In that quarter-century:

  • Measured poverty in the two largest countries in the world has declined from 60% of the population in India and 50% of the population in China to 2% in India and O.something % in China 2
  • Solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy have (from almost nothing) joined with hydro (which is much older) to make a third of the world’s electricity generation and a seventh of the world’s total energy use. 3
  • The UK economy has grown by 80% and its carbon dioxide output has halved.4
  • This year (2024) of elections has seen setbacks for those with autocratic instincts in India and Poland, for example, and the ANC in South Africa has been given a good shake and told to swap its self-enrichment and go back to the national enrichment project in the days of Mandela — democracy working.
  • A local charity, the Romsey Mill here in Cambridge, has altered the lives of single mums, autistic teenagers, pre-schoolers, and teens, giving them self-confidence and better life choices and incidentally saving the government a fortune.

It isn’t hard to imagine in the next 25 years, in the UK for example, the mixture of rooftop solar, batteries and electric cars spreading through the nation like double glazing did in the last generation. And just as our forebears build reservoirs in the 1930s that still supply our water today, so we’ll have energy and transport powered by the sun that generations ahead of us, as far down the future as we can see, will no longer have to worry about.

These streams of patient revolution are streams in an ocean full of all kinds of currents. But imagine a Romsey Mill in every town! Imagine the Mill as just one of a swarm, or a hive, of Christian-inspired social transformation initiatives, buzzing through the whole country! Imagine having to go to nowhere and to no-one for the energy to power our lives! Imagine poverty driven back in every place! Imagine reversing the growth of CO2! Patient revolution!