March Playlist (plus Brian Wilson)

Pretty heavy on the Britpop this time - be warned! 

1. April Fools - Rufus Wainwright
2. Delirious Love - Neil Diamond and Brian Wilson
3. The One You Can't Have - The Honeys
4. Mine Smell Like Honey - REM
5. Don't Look Back - Teenage Fanclub
6. You Bowed Down - Roger McGuinn
7. Lift Me Up - Jeff Lynne
8. Blame The Machines - Duran Duran
9. Everyone Says 'Hi' - David Bowie
10. Wake Up Boo! - The Boo Radleys
11. Where Did It All Go Wrong? - Oasis
12. You Know My Name - Chris Cornell
13. Silence Is Easy - Starsailor
14. The Maker - Daniel Lanois
15. Opus 40 - Mercury Rev
16. Trains To Brazil - Guillemots
17. Tonight's The Kind Of Night - Noah & The Whale
18. Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes
19. The Shot's Still Ringing - Embrace
20. Caught By The River - Doves

Bonus Self-Promotion Track: My personal blogging activity will be pretty restricted this week, given all the very exciting things going on with the conference and new website. But if you're absolutely dying for some new material (I pity the fool!), you could do worse than checking out yours truly's recent sermon on the theology of the cross as it plays out in the music and life of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, entitled "You Still Believe In Me." Catch a wave:

Another One from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience

"Where God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things." (517) 

Wendell Berry and the Full Potential of the Individual

From "Men and Women in Search of Common Ground," an essay in a collection called The Art of the Commonplace. A touching depiction of the failure, beautiful and enticing though it may be, of self-intervention and self-industry.


"Some time ago I was with Wes Jackson, wandering among the experimental plots at his home and workplace, the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. We stopped by one plot that had been planted in various densities of population. Wes pointed to a Maximilian Sunflower growing alone, apart from the others and said, "There is a plant that has 'realized its full potential as an individual.'" And clearly it had: It had grown very tall; it had put out many long branches heavily laden with blossoms--and the branches had broken off, for they had grown too long and too heavy. The plant had indeed realized its full potential as an individual, but it had failed as a Maximilian Sunflower. We could say that its full potential as an individual was this failure. It had failed because it had lived outside an important part of its definition, which consists of both its individuality and its community. A part of its properly realizable potential lay in its community, not itself."

Part X and the Death and Resurrection of Hollywood

Lots of interesting connections and disconnections to be found in the New Yorker profile of Barry Michels, therapist to the stars. Michels is an interesting conglomeration of Jungian psychoanalyst, self-help guru, and Alcoholic Anonymous-style breakdown-inducing tough love. You have to slog through a fair amount of nonsense, but the stuff about judgment as it relates to creativity is particularly relevant, not to mention Michels' insights at the end about death and rebirth. One can't help but wonder how much Michels picked up from close family friend Rod Serling?! ht RJH:

One recent afternoon, Michels put on his glasses, pulled out a file, and began to leaf through a pile of yellow legal-pad pages. It was a difficult case—a writer who had been blocked for two years. He was a type Michels sees frequently: someone vacillating between thinking he is God’s gift to mankind and thinking he is garbage. “Mmm, now this is interesting,” he said, looking at his notes. “That voice, the voice that says ‘I’m [crummy]’ or ‘I’m above this,’ is going to increase in volume the closer you get to actually doing the deed. You have to anticipate it, label it, and reject it every time it comes up.”

The voice belongs to what Stutz refers to as Part X, a deeply primitive dimension of the personality he identified after he began to work with show-business patients; its characteristics are petulance, rage, arrogance, hypersensitivity, a sense of victimization, and, above all, a resistance to process. Michels explains it by invoking the behavior of a two-year-old. “It’s the part that’s pounding on the table because nothing’s good enough,” he says. “They’re saying no to everything, even the color of the sippy cup—unacceptable. Most of us grow beyond the expectation that life will meet our needs in every instance. Some don’t. That’s the head of the studio, the head of the agency, or whatever, pounding his fist on a table and saying, ‘God damn it, somebody is going to pay for it!’ It’s the part of the ego that is so egotistical it believes it’s God, king of the universe. At every moment, the universe is telling him, ‘Sorry, bub, you’re not God,’ and he’s screaming, ‘No, you’re wrong and I’m going to prove it to you!’ ” [CONTINUE READING]

Another Week Ends: Japan, Facebook & Divorce, Preschool Litigation, more Galli on B(h)ell, The Beach Boys' Smile, Community

1. Two very moving additions to the coverage of the disasters in Japan. First, if you can decipher the google-translation, there's the story of a woman who sacrificed her life to warn a village of the impending destruction here. And two, the footage that made this all very real to yours truly. If it doesn't get you on your knees, nothing will (be sure to stick with it to the end):



2. An amusing report in the Guardian about Facebook and divorce. If ever there was an excuse to take a potshot at lawyers for having a shallow view of human nature...:

A 2010 survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) found that four out of five lawyers reported an increasing number of divorce cases citing evidence derived from social networking sites in the past five years, with Facebook being the market leader. Two-thirds of the lawyers surveyed said that Facebook was the "primary source" of evidence in divorce proceedings, while MySpace with 15% and Twitter with 5% lagged far behind.

A spokesperson for Facebook said: "It's ridiculous to suggest that Facebook leads to divorce. Whether you're breaking up or just getting together, Facebook is just a way to communicate, like letters, phone calls and emails. Facebook doesn't cause divorces, people do."

The NY Times Magazine had a similarly Zeitgeisty take on divorce this past week too, which is worth it for the candid quotes on depravity/original sin.

3. Speaking of the Zeitgeist, there's the outrageous but evidently very real "Mother Sues Preschool For Damaging Her Daughter's Shot at the Ivy League." ht JD. 

4. For those of you interested in the ongoing Rob Bell-univeralism saga, conference speaker Mark Galli's review of the Bell's Love Wins book appeared this week, and it is very much worth your time. Galli rightly places Bell in the context of Protestant liberalism, not in order to callously write him off as such, but in an attempt to discuss the heart of the matter, which as always, has to do with atonement/justification:
[CONTINUE READING]

A Lenten Reflection on the Isenheim Altarpiece

Matthias Grunewald’s crucifixion, one of the panels of the Isenheim altarpiece, was commissioned for the church hospital of St. Anthony in Colmar France, which specialized in comforting those dying with skin diseases. Grunewald kept the background of this powerful piece of religious art intentionally dark to highlight the horrific scene: especially Christ’s smashed feet, his contorted arms, and twisted hands. The cross is bowed to demonstrate Jesus bearing the sins of the world. The most shocking part of the piece, however, is that Jesus also has a skin disease, and his loin cloth is the same as the wrappings worn by the hospital's patients. Completed in 1516, the altarpiece is a creation of such shocking intensity that many initially- and still today- find it offensive and are repulsed by it. Yet the graphic nature served masterfully to define and illustrate the Antonite brother’s powerful understanding of Christian ministry-a ministry defined by the theology of the cross. Apparently patients were brought before the piece in order to silently meditate on it as they died. Profoundly, the brothers were a quiet order, so there was no explanation given as the patient died. There was no awkward chatter and God was not piously left off the hook, “now remember, this is not God’s fault.” There was just silence.

[CONTINUE READING]

Iron Mike Mellows Out

The mesmerizing jumble of contradictions that is Mike Tyson soldiers on! The NY Times magazine published a treasure trove of soundbites on identity formation/deconstruction last week in their profile, The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson. Mike appears to be turning his back on the glory-culture that's defined him lo these many years, and doing so with religious vigor. What on the surface might seem like an outside-in approach to self-improvement has to be filtered through the bottoming-out narrative that has long characterized Tyson, reaching its tragic apex with the death of his daughter in 2004. And then there's his touching relationship with pigeons, which provide quite a foil to the way he has described his nature in the past, i.e. that of a "vicious tiger." Autodidact or no, there's definitely some serious insight here. Fascinating, ht JG:

The astonishing discipline and drive Tyson once put into “the stern business of pugilism,” to quote the boxer Jack Johnson, is now being channeled into the business of leading an ordinary, even humdrum existence. It is impossible not to wonder whether this effort can be sustained indefinitely, whether you can reshape the contours of a personality by a sheer act of will, but there is no doubt that Tyson has committed himself to a wholesale renovation.

As part of his cleaning-up campaign, he has been adhering to a strict vegan diet for nearly two years, explaining that he doesn’t want anything in him “that’s going to enrage me — no processed food, no meat.” He says that he can no longer abide the smell of meat even on someone’s breath and has dropped 150 pounds since he weighed in at 330 in 2009. “I’ve learned to live a boring life and love it,” he declares, sounding more determined than certain. “I let too much in, and look what happened. . . . I used to have a bunch of girls and some drugs on the table. A bunch of people running around doing whatever.”

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace. One of the few links between his tumultuous past and his more tranquil present are his homing pigeons...
[CONTINUE READING]

Stumbling and Imperfectable

A stunning and poetic few paragraphs in Jonathan Schell's moving reflection in yesterday's The NY Times on the disasters afflicting Japan right now, specifically the tragic partial meltdown of several nuclear power plants:

The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control.

Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind. The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong — and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt.

You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.

These predictable and unpredictable failings affect every stage of the operation. For instance, in Japan, the nuclear power industry has a record of garden-variety cover-ups, ducking safety regulations, hiding safety violations and other problems. But which large bureaucratic organization does not? And if these happen in Japan, as orderly and efficient a country as exists on earth, in which country will they not? When the bureaucracy is the parking violations bureau or the sanitation department, ordinary mistakes lead to ordinary mishaps. But when the basic power of the universe is involved, they court catastrophe.

The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax. It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.

The Joy of Lent

A sweet meditation from Psalm 32 on the huge release that comes from admitting what we are -- and why Ash Wednesday is the happiest of days.

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up* as by the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’,
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Therefore let all who are faithful
offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters
shall not reach them.
You are a hiding-place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

Conference Preview: Death and Resurrection in Church Planting. And Life.

Here at Mockingbird we pride ourselves on being Theologians of the Cross. That is to say, we believe that God works, most often and most powerfully, through weakness and defeat, rather than in strength and victory. As Paul writes, recounting God's answer to him in the midst of suffering:

But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." (2 Co 12.9&10)

Theologians of the Cross take great comfort in the thought that, when they are suffering, encountering difficulties of every kind, it is not a sign of God's abandonment or displeasure, but is, in fact, a mark of His presence and work in our lives.

Of course, the problem is, none of us actually believes this, and I speak for myself first and foremost. None of us actually "delights" in our pains, as does Paul. None of us enjoys failure, or takes it as a sign of God's favor. As Gerhard Forde has written, we are inveterate Theologians of Glory, who always take success to be a mark of God's blessing and failure a sign of His curse. This is just as (perhaps more) true in the "Christian" world as it is in the "secular."

For the past two-and-a-half years, my wife and I have been planting a church in New York City. It has not been without its joys, but it has not been easy. Perhaps most difficult has been the insistence of many voices around us, both within and without, that success is a matter of finding the right "strategy" or "improving our skill set", maintaining a "positive attitude", "projecting an image of success", "creating and capitalizing on momentum" and on and on... This is Glory language, plain and simple.

At the same time, when we have listened and talked to actual church planters, we have encountered much different stories: uncertainty, fear, failure, anxiety, depression. And yet, in and through it all, God graciously, unexpectedly, miraculously at work. I have taken to saying that for every church planter there are two stories: the fundraising pitch (Glory) and what really happened, which is invariably a tale of God's grace and power in the midst of our weakness (Cross).

Of course, this is the story not just of church planting or ministry, but all of life. When we encounter difficulties (which is often!), our gut reaction is to fight them, to run away, to deny, to receive them as judgment. This is the way of the world, but it is not what Paul talks about. This session will be an opportunity for all comers to hear and tell the truth, to share stories and be encouraged. We are weak but He is strong. He is always at work, not just in our successes but also in our failures. His grace is all we have and all we need in the midst of life's up and downs.

Hope to see you there! www.mbird.com/conference

Mark Borchardt Confronts The Senselessness

From the brilliant, brilliant, brilliant American Movie doc:

Dehumanization and the Human Mind

Kicking off a day full of neuroscience is the review in the NY Times of philosopher David Livingstone Smith's new book, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others. Those familiar with Smith's work, for example Why We Lie and The Most Dangerous Animal, will not be surprised to find his original sin obsession in full bloom. That is, he's continuing with his exploration of the underbelly of evolutionary psychology, this time describing the very uncomfortable intersection between human nature and genocide. Reviewer David Berreby's conclusions are almost equally fascinating:

Dehumanization is a mind-set, as Smith writes, that “decommissions” our “moral inhibitions” about mistreating fellow human beings. Encased in law and custom, this psychological process has often licensed slavery, genocide and countless other cruelties.

Smith reasonably argues that dehumanization is rooted in human nature, not culture... Dehumanization is possible, Smith argues, because of “our cognitive architecture — the evolved design of the human psyche.” Our innate predispositions incline us to divide living things into species, he argues, and, with the same mental equipment, to divide humans into ethnic groups. And just as we do not believe that superficial resemblance means bats and birds belong together, neither do we trust that surface appearances determine who belongs where on the ethnic map.

In other words, in Smith’s account of the research, we are — for better or more often for worse — predisposed to believe that racial or ethnic identity is immutable. That’s because our instincts tell us it is based on an unchanging “essence” at each person’s core, rather than on changeable appearances. Philosophical experiments have shown, for example, that while most people feel sure that a 98-pound weakling can become a strongman, they also intuit that a black person can’t become white, no matter what physical characteristics he changes.

Smith clearly explains why many cognitive scientists believe this tendency is innate and then links it to another predisposition that seems “built in” to the human mind: our inclination to see living things in hierarchies, as in the “great chain of being” of medieval European Christians, with God at its perfect top, human beings above “higher” animals, and so on down to worms and plants. Because we feel that living things are defined by their essence, and because we feel that each creature has its rank in the world, Smith argues, dehumanization comes easily to the human mind: we accept that someone can look human but have a sub­human essence, and we accept that what is not human must be inferior. “When we dehumanize people,” he writes, “we think of them as counterfeit human beings.”
[CONTINUE READING]

Frank Lake on Confession, Depression and The Dangers of Religious Duty

From pages 350-351 of Clinical Theology, a Theological And Psychiatric Basis to Clinical Pastoral Care (Volume 1), ht JL: 

"There is all the difference in the world between the word 'must' as an ethical obligation which can be fulfilled by an external act of mere attendance, and as an ontological statement, affirming that this is the nature of things, or in this way the Eternal God has covenanted His gifts to man. If churchgoing becomes a duty to be performed in order to stand right with the parson and his religious picture of God (certainly determined by the depressive dynamics of the natural man) then the centre of gravity is displaced from the Gospel of God. It now lies between the unwilling man and the law which stands over him, with the religious pedagogue in the foreground, ostensibly speaking for God, who is supposed to be behind all this. Here is religion. It is not Christianity.

We go to confession in 'order to receive not to give', writes Luther. You go conscious of your misery and seeking help, 'in order to have once more a joyful heart and conscience'. Confession brings joy and healing. That is the clear intention of it in St. James's Epistle. These are exactly what the depressed person needs above all. But the whole gist of the matter in confounded if confession is made into a religious duty by anxious priests, eager to exercise their power with God and man. In New Testament terms it is not an extractive religious duty; it is a donative Christian resource. Luther says, and he has the dynamics of it perfectly straight, that 'it is better to abstain from confession than go to it unwillingly or in order to do a good work'.

Religion is basically effort and striving. Christianity is basically rest and abiding. That is why, in the crisis of depression, religion is a menace, whereas Christianity is a marvel of therapeutic resource." [italics his]

Another Week Ends: Grace & Cutting, Depression & Recession, David Foster Wallace, Burned-Over Generations, Greg McElroy, Supernatural, Arcade Fire

1. Continuing this past month's unexpected foray into gender-related topics (i.e. here, here, here and here), Christianity Today published a doozie of an article earlier this week on its Her.meneutics site, "The Gospel of Grace for Women Who Self-Injure". A couple lines from the conclusion (ht DB):

I’m not surprised that self-punishing behaviors occur among Christians. And this is not to blame the church. For legalism — and I would argue that this is what these behaviors are at their core — comes in guises both religious and secular. The desire to control the destiny of a few moments, if not our lives, is a fact of the human condition. But it is a fact that directly opposes the gospel of grace. 

Also female-related, from Medical News Daily (aka Captain Obvious: The Journal) is "Mean Girls and Queen Bees: Females Under Threat of Social Exclusion Respond by Excluding Others First".

2. On the male side of things, and following-up the Man-Child post, Time reports on the impact the recession appears to be having on rates of depression among men, challenging the accepted finding that the condition is more prevalent among ladies, ht TB.

3. Speaking of men and depression, it's been a big week for David Foster Wallace. The New Yorker published an excerpt of his new book The Pale King, "Backbone". To compare the published version with the version he read publicly a few years prior, go here. I also came across a terrific discussion/defense of his fiction by Rebekah Frumkin on The Common Review, entitled "Our Psychic Living Room", which includes a variation of one of our favorite quotes from the man himself via a 1996 interview (ht CR):

The sadness that [Infinite Jest] is about, and that I was going through [when I wrote it], was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it’s the same thing. . . . I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values.

4. By way of self-promotion, Modern Reformation just published "Compassion, Creativity and Connecting with a Burned-Over Generation" by yours truly, which outlines some of the thinking behind Mockingbird, in case you were curious. I'm proud to say I was able to sneak Axl Rose, Michael Jackson, Whit Stillman, Oscar Wilde, Stuart Murdoch, and David Foster Wallace into the party. UPDATE: Mod Ref has been kind enough to unlock the article, so it's now available in its entirety on their site, for free! For more Reformation goodness, be sure to check out their considerably more tricked-out sister site, The White Horse Inn, and then head over to New Reformation Press to hear Rod Rosenbladt's stunning new must-hear sermon "Christianity in Five Verses." It's raining Reformation!
[CONTINUE READING]

Ideas or the Human Heart?

From a BBC news flash yesterday:

Pope Benedict has rejected the idea of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ's death, in a new book to be published next week.

Tackling an issue that has led to centuries of persecution, the Pope argues there is no basis in scripture for the Jewish people to be blamed.

It’s a good thing for the Pope to say this, of course. But the BBC article (read it here) is misleading in that it repeatedly gives the casual reader the impression that this idea is the result of groundbreaking exegetical research. That’s of course always going to be the bias of a “news” organization (News Flash! Stunning pronouncement changes 2000 years of Christian teaching!). To say “Pope reaffirms again what many Christians from many communions have said for many centuries” -- that’s not quite as sexy of a headline.

More importantly, however, beneath the BBC article lies a worldview: which is that human nature is not in itself a huge mess of evil passions (“If you, being evil…”), but instead tries to explain human evil on bad “ideas.” Centuries of terrible anti-Semitism must be traceable, the BBC and most people think, to some bad idea early in Christian thought. If only we had had Pope Benedict around in the first few centuries, he could have given us the right “idea” and then we could have been saved all those years of pogroms, and Inquisitions, and death camps! A more accurate reading of human history, however, is the Christian aphorism from the late 1500s: What the heart desires, the will chooses and the mind justifies. People would have always have found some reason to commit terrible acts against a vulnerable people; anyone who remembers bullies in the schoolyard knows this intuitively. The BBC thinks that an idea comes first, the free human reason chooses it, and then one’s heart is based on the idea. Thomas Cranmer and others knew better.

Conference Preview: Freedom to Fail - A Conversation about Grace and Failure in Parenting (and Being Parented)

On December 6, 2006, the doctor handed us an 8lb ball of pure fury that sounded more like a baby pterodactyl than, well, a human baby. Filled with romantic notions of being the perfect mom and dad (always calm, always gentle, always smiling), we headed home with our first born son. When he wasn't sleeping (which was scattered) he was screaming. Within two weeks after our son's birth, everything that we believed would be our parenting experience shattered. Our patience and energy levels were depleted, and our frustration and exhaustion levels were sky high. Rather than feeling nurturing, we felt resentful and angry; rather than going to him when he cried, I (Lauren) would crawl under the covers and cry. We couldn't do it; we couldn't be the perfect parents. We were plagued with guilt and convinced of our failure. We were failing, and our failure would be our son's undoing.

But the Gospel told us something different: that it wasn't all up to us or on our shoulders, that we were forgiven and justified apart from our actions. The Gospel put the lie to the equation that perfect parents = perfect children (or that perfection is possible in either party). The Gospel gave us freedom...freedom to be the parents we were--faults and strengths combined--with the freedom to fail.

In recognizing our own failures and faults in parenting, we were able to begin to forgive our own parents--who are (it turns out) as human as we are, faults and all.

This breakout session was developed out of this experience of feeling like a failure in parenting and the freedom that the Gospel message brings. Come and hear our experience; more importantly, we would love to hear yours.

To register, click here.

No Bag For The Journey - Joseph Martin

This just in: Mockingbird friend and supporter Joseph Martin recently published a truly remarkable book, No Bag For The Journey: One Man, One Bicycle, One Outrageous Journey of Faith, telling the story of his courageous attempt to revitalize his faith via a cross-country bike ride. Part memoir, part travel log, part adventure story, it's a tour-de-force of a testimony, filled with arresting honesty and humility that will speak on an especially gut level to believers who are running/have run out of gas with the Christian life (puns intended). In fact, it's a key resource in that respect. I defy you not to relate! The epilogue, written twenty years after the fact, is a neutron bomb of Grace:

The truth is, reading the story of my bike ride twenty years later literally makes me want to cry. The reason is because I remember the guy twenty years ago who genuinely loved God and tried to do everything he could, even ride a bike across the country, to feel loved and approved by Him, but could never seem to do enough. And to watch him try so relentlessly and painfully is truly heartbreaking. 

Having grown up with an inherent drive to seek the approval of all significant people in my life, it was only natural that when I became a Christian, I would transfer that drive toward God and seek His approval, along with the rest of the Christian community, by being the best Christian I could be. What that meant was trying to eliminate all "worldly" influences that might draw me away from God, while adding all those religious activities and practices that might make me more pleasing to Him, all the while thinking, maybe even subconsciously that He (and they) would love me more, the "better" Christian I became. Not that trying to please God is a bad goal, but when the motivation is to earn His love and approval, the striving can be exhausting and the result devastating.

Now, clearly, that was not the only motivation for making the ride - God only knows what motivations reside in the recesses of the human heart - but suffice it to say that the guy riding his bike across the country loved God and wanted so much to feel His love in return, he would have done anything to achieve it. The heartbreaking part is watching a guy trying so hard to earn something that I have now come to understand was there the whole time, offered as a free gift from a gracious and loving God...

Read the rest of the story by ordering your copy today. 

Self-Criticism, Self-Compassion and Self-Indulgence, Reconsidered

A number of insights to be gleaned from the report in Monday's NY Times, "Go Easy On Yourself." Not just in the sense of horizontalized Law (discipline/criticism) vs Grace (compassion) - though that too - but in the clearly universal discrepancy between head knowledge and heart knowledge, and most remarkably, in the immediate objection that self-compassion will lead to self-indulgence. An objection known in Christian terms as the fear of antinomianism or licentiousness, which crops up whenever freedom is being proclaimed. In fact, I've rarely heard it voiced so clearly in the social science realm. Now, if the "self" part of this equation causes some unease/sets off New Age alarms - which it probably should - perhaps things become more palatable to think of self-compassion as the process of internalizing the Gospel (i.e. at the end of the day, do you really believe God's grace applies to you?). Meaning, I don't think the article is endorsing auto-suggestive nonsense; Christians need not reflexively steer clear altogether. In other words, just because we see the basis of personalized compassion in Calvary, and not some pie-in-the-sky Stuart Smalley sense of intrinsic goodness, doesn't make it any less real or concrete, ht CR:

People who find it easy to be supportive and understanding to others, it turns out, often score surprisingly low on self-compassion tests, berating themselves for perceived failures like being overweight or not exercising.

The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.

This idea does seem at odds with the advice dispensed by many doctors and self-help books, which suggest that willpower and self-discipline are the keys to better health. But Kristin Neff, a pioneer in the field, says self-compassion is not to be confused with self-indulgence or lower standards.

“I found in my research that the biggest reason people aren’t more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they’ll become self-indulgent,” said Dr. Neff, an associate professor of human development at the University of Texas at Austin. “They believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. Most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be.”

A positive response to the statement “I’m disapproving and judgmental about my own flaws and inadequacies,” for example, suggests lack of self-compassion. “When I feel inadequate in some way, I try to remind myself that feelings of inadequacy are shared by most people” suggests the opposite.

Conference Preview: Romantic Reality and the Theology of the Cross for a Postmodern Generation

Nothing screams for the Theology of the Cross like The Bachelor, The Kardashians, and Teen Mom. In this workshop, Romantic Reality and the Theology of the Cross for a Postmodern Generation, we will look at  today's uniquely postmodern youth culture through the lens of reality television and romantic comedies. Then we will examine how Martin Luther’s Theology of the Cross outlines the crucial approach for ministering to  this generation and communicating the gospel of grace. Whether it is the description of sin, the engagement of suffering, or simply the overall obsession with romantic love (and failure to achieve it in any lasting way) Luther's theological insights provide the best tools for connecting with postmodern youth. This workshop will be particularly useful for people working with youth or college students, parents trying to understand their adolescent child, or folks whose guilty pleasure is watching reality television and romantic comedies. Don't miss your chance to register today.

What Noel Gallagher Is Not Supposed To Feel

Today brings the release of the first post-Oasis project from a Gallagher brother, the debut album by the Liam-led Beady Eye, Different Gear Still Speeding. And you may be surprised to hear that the record is really pretty good, at least on par with Oasis' 2009 swansong Dig Out Your Soul. So what better week to reappraise Oasis' underrated fourth album, the quintessentially hungover Standing on the Shoulder of Giants? When it was released, the expectations were astronomical - Oasis were still the biggest band in the (rest of the) world, albeit weighed down by/wrestling with the question of how to follow-up the relative "failure" of Be Here Now, a record which has rightly come to symbolize the utter hollowness of 90s Britpop hubris/excess. If you're Noel Gallagher, you toss your brother a few swagger-anthems and spend the rest of the disc getting introspective. There's always been a moral undercurrent to Gallagher's tunes, usually covered up in melancholy, but it's never been as prominent or sincere as his trio of regretful masterpieces on SOTSOG, "Gas Panic," "Where Did It All Go Wrong?," and "Sunday Morning Call" (not to mention the closing prayer, "Roll It Over"). They're all surprisingly thoughtful ruminations on foolishness, mortality and hypocrisy, from a guy known mainly for his incredibly brash self-belief.

The specter of a Roman Catholic upbringing rears its head all over the place, especially in "Sunday Morning Call," in which Noel comes as close as he ever has to a Romans 7 'despair in the flesh' moment: "In your head do you feel/ What you're not supposed to feel?/ And you take what you want/But you won't get it for free/ You need more time/ Cause your thoughts and words/ Won't last forever more/ And I'm not sure if it'll ever work out right." Not exactly the So-Sally-Can-Wait singalong that fans were hoping for. Indeed, instead of glorifying rockstar mythology with slightly obscured platitudes, as he ingeniously did on their first three records, SOTSOG weighs the cost and comes clean about the consequences - and does so with humility. No wonder it didn't sell all that well.

On the next record, Heathen Chemistry, an exhausted Noel retreated from the confessionalism, relegated his more personal statements to Bsides ("Just Getting Older," "Idler's Dream" and "Shout It Out Loud") and handed over the reigns to his bandmates, effectively throwing in the towel. With a few notable exceptions - he is Noel Gallagher after all. But here's to hoping that his forthcoming solo record taps a similarly vulnerable vein:
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