Page 1831 – Christianity Today (2024)

When my husband and I moved from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, we told ourselves and our appalled friends that we’d give it two years. Two years to ascertain whether we could survive summer heat, winter snow, being inland, minimal sources of good Chinese food, and a total absence of Mission-style burritos.

And what we transplants to Utah politely call “the culture.”

It’s a shifty phrase that can refer to, among other things, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and its members, the conservative political landscape, the relative racial and ethnic hom*ogeny, the baffling liquor laws, or the pioneer spirit—which is sometimes manifested in drivers shunning the idea of lanes or laws.

That move was over ten years ago, and we’re still here.

At first, we made fun of nearly everything we observed. We’d tune into the local news and find lead stories about “lake stink”—what happens when the winds blow over the Great Salt Lake in such a way that the smell of decaying algae floats over the valley.

We’d discuss and try to imitate the inscrutable accent that varies from region to region and block to block. Before living here we never knew about wire deer, family portraits the size of big-screen TVs, obsessive leaf-blowing, unironic Jell-O salads, and the Holy War between the University of Utah Utes and the BYU Cougars.

Whenever I traveled and was asked, “Where are you from?” I’d say, “Well, I live in Utah right now but I’m from San Francisco.” Puzzled looks, polygamy jokes, and the assumption that we ski and/or are Mormon inevitably followed.

I laughed along, though I also boasted about our cheap rent, the ease of parking, the beauty of the Wasatch Mountains.

Yet I clung to my California connections and identity. For at least a year after moving, I continued editing my San Francisco church’s newsletter. I kept working for my Bay Area company as a telecommuter. Friends often asked, “When are you coming home?” But I didn’t get the sense that they asked so much because they missed us. The underlying question was, How could smart, cultured people like us possibly make a life in a place like Salt Lake City?

I absorbed and believed in that question, failing to recognize it for what it was. Making sure people knew about my Bay Area roots helped keep me from being typecast in the role of Utahn, which to me and to my non-Utah friends meant: religiously odd, maybe sporting bad hair, possibly not too savvy—at least, not in the ways valued by my motherland. “Don’t lump me in with those people,” my words implied. Clearly, if not explicitly, I was saying, “I’m better than them.” Meaning my new friends and neighbors.

It’s easy for non-Mormons in Utah to feel as though we’re living in exile. And it’s easy to react to that feeling by building walls and pulling up the drawbridge, creating our own little version of Salt Lake where we are Us and they are Them. To always keep one eye on the exit, assuming whatever opportunity may come is better than this.

How can you make home, and love your neighbor, if you believe the lie that you’re superior to the things and people that surround you?

A chronically wandering eye, in any context, is a thief. It steals the joy of living in the present. It keeps you from being fully engaged with what’s right in front of you.

At some point along the way, my pastor spoke on Jeremiah 29. It’s a letter to exiles, and the message from God that comes through the prophet includes:

Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. (Jer. 29:5-7)

My cheating heart convicted, I made a commitment to stop fantasizing about San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver. To stop trolling Craigslist, lusting for apartments in cool neighborhoods all over the country. Anywhere but here.

Still, after my last book tour and the rush of being in new places, I came home resenting Salt Lake and whinily longing to live in a “real” city. I told my husband, “Summer 2011. We’re out of here. Start working on your resumé.”

2011 is nearly upon us and we have no plans to move in the coming year. I do sometimes cast a longing glance westward. There are days and weeks I’m convinced there is “nothing to do” here.

But I know that the reality, should I choose to accept it, is that moving here has brought nothing but blessings. This is where my writing career flourished. This is where I’ve made some of the best friends of my adult life. (And most of them are Mormon, or LDS, as they’ve taught me to say, for Latter-day Saint.) This is where I got mentally, physically, and spiritually healthy. This is where I lived out my 30s and truly grew up.

Now, in the same way I regularly pray that God would increase my love for my husband and family and friends, I’ve started to ask God to increase my love for this city.

It seems to be working. When I fly into Salt Lake, I find myself pressing close to the window, watching for the lights of the valley. When I see the dome of the capitol building ahead and the salt flats below and the outline of the Wasatch Range all around, I can’t help but feel I’m home.

This piece, by YA novelist Sara Zarr, originally appeared in IMAGE Journal‘s Good Letters blog in December 2010. You can read more of Sara’s posts here, and you can sign up for IMAGE’s free e-newsletter, ImageUpdate, here to receive bimonthly news and reviews featuring the best of art and faith.

Sara Zarr recently spoke with Her.meneutics about her new novel for young adults.

I’m not so good with observances, and when Veterans’ Day came round last month, I felt only the most fleeting sort of gratitude or even acknowledgment. Such feelings shimmer and vanish amid daily demands and the related distractions that crowd the collective attention span, such as reports of a spike in weddings on the same day this year, 11/11/11. Before you know it, the day and its intended reflection have passed you by, or you it. So it was splendid timing to attend An Iliad, a one-man show at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre. Rarely has the subject of war—or, better, what the English poet Wilfred Owen called “war and the pity of war”—been so sparely yet effectively staged.

In an intense performance running less than ninety minutes and without intermission, Timothy Edward Kane is riveting and endlessly energetic as The Poet, a modern storyteller or maybe one who’s traveled three thousand years to speak to us, in Hyde Park in 2011. He speaks in order not to forget. Kane gives fresh, impassioned voice to the main actions of the Iliad, Homer’s ancient poem about the Greek siege of Troy. He first appears hopping down from a backstage ladder, and resembles a Libyan freedom fighter, or, as the director puts it in the playbill’s “Design Notebook,” “an embedded journalist in the Trojan War”: combat boots, soiled trench coat under which is a field jacket, a scarf—linen and cotton reflecting a desert climate. Taking a hasty drink from his canteen, and soon inspired by the Muse, The Poet proceeds to tell, yet once more, the story that is his to carry and share.

Kane stood downstage and recited Homer’s ancient Greek lines (an expert on Homeric dialect was consulted), and then began to search for the best ways to help a modern audience appreciate the story’s characters and dimensions. His explicit struggle— “um, um, um,” eyes darting, as he sought the right word or analogy—was one of the most engaging things about Kane’s character. We could powerfully sense, in his woodpecking hand gestures and verbal stumbling, the difficulty in conveying with a proper depth of feeling Homer’s great poem. But once started, Kane did not stop speaking, however much he wrestled with his task, until the play had concluded. Receiving a standing ovation, he ran from the stage up the aisle through the audience.

The Brooklyn actor and writer Denis O’Hare and director Lisa Peterson adapted An Iliad freely from Robert fa*gles’ translation of the original, and the pointed localizing or modernizing moments featured in their version reflect their collaborative process. The pair would read aloud fa*gles’ text, and Peterson recorded O’Hare’s frequent digressions in between passages, as he explained or elaborated or commented upon the scene or speech. This process could have had a nightmare outcome, making longer an already sprawling poem of fifteen thousand lines, but instead these surprising additions of The Poet accent a highly streamlined narrative. (Homer, too, was known for this skill: the action of the Iliad takes place during a short span near the end of the ten-year war, and Aristotle praised the epic poet for showing a dramatist’s sense of a unified action.)

Thus, An Iliad is not only compressed, impactful theater at its best, but also an incitement to sympathy, sadness, and ultimately a better understanding of war (all wars), the boys involved in it, and the mixed effects upon those who experience it. War can provide moments of glory, as this stage version is honest enough to show us, and there is humor in the show—including The Poet’s surprisingly comic turns as Paris and Helen—but mostly what comes through is the bitter taste of great loss—lost youth, lost years, lost life. We hear, as if it were recent news and not a millennia-old tale, about Achilles’ rage, his and Agamemnon’s dissension, the noble Hector, Achilles’ doomed friend Patroclus and his rage against the advancing Trojans, Achilles’ avenging of his dead friend by killing Hector and raging against his corpse, and finally, Hector’s grieving father, the Trojan king Priam, and his bold mission to visit his son’s killer and retrieve the mutilated body for burial.

An Iliad’s set, as the stage manager and dramaturg explained at a talkback following the performance I attended, is meant to suggest the war zones of both ancient Troy and the contemporary Middle East. The show’s director, Charles Newell (also the Court’s artistic director), first envisioned an empty swimming pool, but with visual suggestions of ancient spaces such as catacombs. Audiences find themselves in a great, dried-out, underground sewer, or a long-dilapidated ancient bath. The sloping concrete is reminiscent of Troy’s ramparts, but for me it also evoked LA’s tagged, concrete storm drains, featured in car chases in numberless films.

Newell, the notes tell us, had only Kane in mind for the show’s demanding solo role, and he delivers a thrilling performance, which is heightened by an awareness that this version of Homer’s story returns us to its original compositional setting—that of oral delivery, speech and song. Kane, who worked earlier with Howell in another fierce war play, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, tries to give the audience some sense of the scale of the Greek mission to Troy—the various towns and regions represented, and the numbers raised—numbers of ships, and of young men filling them from each of these places. The power of the adaptation becomes apparent almost immediately when The Poet acknowledges how long ago this was, and how hard it is to imagine, and so he transfers the areas represented to the United States: suddenly all of these boys sailing to Troy hail from upstate New York, Florida, or Lawrence, Kansas, and all the while the speaker points to these places on a huge imaginary map.

Other similar moments involve a description of a photo of young soldiers in the trenches in World War I, or a long, ridiculously long chronological catalogue of wars, moving from Troy and the later conflicts of ancient Greece, onward and ever onward to Kabul and Iraq. This accumulative rhetoric, which mixes vatic effect with a tired resignation that such conflicts are unavoidable and their costs never remembered, much less fully reckoned, reminded me of a poem I recently encountered in the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s new collection. There he remembers a driver of a hay cart crying out

as men always do when they panic
—they screamed that way in the Iliad
and have never fallen silent since,
not during the Crusades,
or later, much later, near us,
when no one listens.

Of course these moments seek to connect Homer’s ancient battle and the lost soldiers he immortalized with the soldiers, our soldiers, still fighting today and no doubt (the connection implies) having very similar experiences. Fortunately these inclusions merely punctuate The Poet’s primary commitment to telling the Trojan story. The parallels make the originating war story more imaginable and expand its circ*mstances throughout history. They avoid the obvious risk, and do not distract or reduce in merely politicizing or heavy-handed ways.

A few other modernizing touches enliven the play greatly. As I trust my opening description of the story’s incidents makes clear, the Iliad, from its first word onward, largely focuses on rage, and here Kane reserves his greatest display of rage for his turn as Patroclus. Wearing his friend’s armor, which we’re informed is too large for him, and thus must have shifted and jiggled on his body or been filled out with stuffing, Patroclus hurtles his spear and growls and grinds his teeth as he cuts down the Trojan forces, causing their retreat from the Greek lines back to Troy’s plain. Kane then pauses, as if feeling more deeply the raging condition he is representing, and says to the audience that we are all capable of such rage, and it can feel good—as when, for example, someone pulls out in front of us on the freeway. (This met with great laughter.) Likewise, when Achilles is about to face off with Hector, The Poet makes a brief aside about how it might all go otherwise. Colloquially Achilles imagines himself taking Hector out for a drink instead and commiserating on their fighting—remember how four days ago we were fighting, and we killed your charioteer? or how about when we were fighting in front of the Trojan walls and then that bird landed in front of us, an egret it was, maybe?, and wasn’t that so weird? The effect is jarring, moving, and highly satisfying.

The production deftly incorporates the four elements, which contribute to the impression of simple force. For example, Kane at one point dunks his head in a nearby pail of water, cooling himself down after especially intense physical exertion. As Achilles, he relays news of Patroclus’ death to his mother Thetis by the single light of a match, creating a mournful effect. And soon a pipe sticking out of the back wall emits a powerful beam of light, suggesting the way Achilles’ divinely made shield must have gleamed on the battlefield. The collaborators would have been foolish to omit Homer’s gorgeous description of the shield of Achilles, and hearing it spoken renews the impression that all of known life is contained there, rendered by the smith Hephaestus’ skilled hands. To rephrase Erich Auerbach, a clear and equal light floods the world found on that shield.

An Iliad magically captures much of this virtue—each part, each character Kane plays, feels equally close at hand and persuasive. Anyone living in or near Chicago who attends the show—which runs only through December 10: don’t delay!—will be assured of a memorable holiday outing. And if it’s not possible to catch the show now, there will be a next time: in February, at the New York Theatre Workshop, Peterson and O’Hare will be directing and acting it together for the first time.

Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His first collection of poems, The Garbage Eater, was published earlier this year by Northwestern University Press.

Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Watching clips from the new TLC series The Virgin Diaries, which debuted Sunday, is a bit like seeing Borat, The Yes Men, or another feature-length “you’ve been had” films. The show profiles virgins in their late 20s and 30s, most of whom are choosing to save sex—and their first kiss, in one case—for marriage. Debuting as a one-hour special this Sunday, it is casting for future episodes and has already promptedcriticism for exploiting its subjects. The subjects kiss awkwardly at the altar, choreograph their first night while swinging and riding teeter-totters at a park, sing songs about abstinence, and discuss “reclaimed virginity” during a backrub chain in one woman’s bedroom. Only the virgin by circ*mstance is shown in adult settings, like a dinner out with friends.

The trailers don’t specify why the subjects are still virgins, but it’s fair to assume that at least a few of them are waiting because they are Christians. So, if nothing else, The Virgin Diaries is a chance to bravely acknowledge our common ground with the socially awkward and other fellow believers who prove hard to love.

But there are other, subtler ways a show like this challenges us. Even the brief clips in the trailers get into your head as pictures of people who probably got here because they entrusted their bodies to God (at least in some cases). And what kind of God does that conjure in your mind? Be honest.

If you were to work backward from depictions like that to the being who created such people and whose instructions have supposedly shaped their lives, you’d probably think of someone with a flaky scalp, ill-fitting suits that could nonetheless serve as a tourniquet on wayward desire, and a voice not many wavelengths off from a fingernail on a chalkboard. Someone more interested in your adherence to (often petty) rules than your well being and joy.

A god like that is not someone you invite into your life. He’s not someone to whom you cede control in the midst of crisis and success. That’s someone you force yourself to talk to and then retreat from as soon as possible—which may partly explain why 80 percent of unmarried Christians have had sex, as Relevant magazine reported in September.

Is that a true portrait of God, or one of the caricatures author Matt Mikalatos calls an “imaginary Jesus”?

The biblical God is one who provides food for all creatures, from the biggest fish to the smallest mite. Who put many-colored beauty and diverse fragrance into even the most fleeting flowers. Who comforted a eunuch turned back from Jerusalem after a 1,000-mile journey with the words of Isaiah, which explicitly promises eunuchs “a name better than that of sons and daughters … an everlasting name” (NASB). Who gave up comfort, wealth, and intimacy to take up an itinerant life before experiencing a brutal death that cut him off from even his most beloved—all so that he could pardon even his murderers, should they repent and be reconciled to him.

I don’t know about you, but to me that’s a portrait of exquisite tenderness and beauty. And that’s even without considering all the ways I have personally experienced God’s kindness and care.

When I am standing in front of such portraits, revisiting such stories, I want to trust God. In fact, I want to entrust him with even more than I already have, because a God like that would surely bring about much better, more beautiful things than if I were to left to imagine and act on my own.

But when I am doubting, fearful, and tempted to despair that God could ever bring anything good in my love life, or a husband with whom I’d want to share my body, I’m thinking of a different portrait. Not a true one but a plausible one, when you listen to that insidious voice that, since Adam and Eve’s debate on fruit snacks, has whispered: God is not good; he doesn’t know best.

Perhaps this is why the Psalms and other biblical texts so frequently urge the reader to remember God’s faithfulness. Remember how he brought you out of slavery to freedom and the wealth bequeathed with the Egyptians’ gifts of jewelry and clothing. Remember how he stopped a mighty river so you could cross. Remember how he provided water and food in a desert where you had nothing to eat. Remember, remember, remember.

if we have committed our lives to God, we have done so because we are persuaded that he is real and good. But daily acting on that trust means repeatedly reminding ourselves of his character, in specific and concrete ways. After all, we have an enemy bent on spurring distrust.

So if you watched The Virgin Diaries this weekend, go read Song of Solomon or Genesis 2 or Exodus or Isaiah or the Gospels. Or ask a friend to tell you about a time God showed up and took care of him or her. Retell some of your own stories. You may even want to revisit physical artifacts of such encounters with his faithfulness, be they a car or a purse, a scar or a book or even a street.

There are too many sneering caricatures of our God out there for us to just passively trust him. Loving God with our whole heart, might, and soul takes deliberate, repeated retelling and richly embodied practices.

Anna Broadway is a writer and web editor living in the San Francisco Bay area. She is the author of Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity and a regular contributor to Her.meneutics.

What I find most interesting about Tony Jones’ thesis is the way it can explain far more than just the Emerging Church Movement. I think contemporary youth ministry may also help us understand the rise of the megachurch movement in the late 1970s and 80s (and perhaps other movements as well). The number of megachurches exploded in that time from just 10 in 1970 to over 500 by 1990, and most were led to mega status by baby-boomers with youth ministry backgrounds.

The whole notion of a youth culture really emerged after World War II. Television, Rock ‘n Roll, and the economic boom after the war resulted in a generation of young people with disposable income and the opportunity to express themselves in ways foreign to their Depression-generation parents. To reach this new breed of adolescents, first parachurch ministries and later churches started “youth ministries” that mimicked the styles and forms of the secular youth culture but with “safer” Christian content. Contemporary Christian music emerged, Jesus merchandise, and concerts. By the mid 60s, the church youth group became the preferred safe alternative to the popular youth scene marked by drugs and casual sex.

But what the young people engaged in these ministries learned indirectly was that the church should takes its cues from the secular culture; adopt the popular culture’s forms and simply fill those forms with Christian content. It was the youth groups of the 50s and 60s that formed the ecclesiology for the megachurches of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Bill Hybels may be the clearest example. His vision for Willow Creek emerged directly out of his experience leading a youth ministry in the suburbs of Chicago in the 70s.

But as these youth group-formed baby-boomers got older, they no longer took their ideas for church from American Bandstand or Woodstock. They looked to their peers transforming the business world and creating mega-corporations like General Electric, Starbucks, and Amazon. The relevancy value driven into them as teens in the youth group now manifested itself by copying the values and strategies of corporate America.

Pete Ward, in the introduction to his book Mass Culture, explains how the values of youth ministry, namely relevance and contextualization, came to dominate the Western church. “What started as a youth thing very soon colonized the majority of mainstream churches. There is a very simple reason for this–young people grow up. Within fifteen years or so the young people who were first part of the Jesus Movement were themselves the leaders of churches and Christian organizations.”

The question we ought to be asking ourselves is: What values dominate the youth ministries of our churches today? What ecclesiology is being formed in young people who engage our youth ministries? Because the values they absorb are likely to be the ones will dominate the entire church in 15 or 20 years.

We’ve already seen the cycle at least twice. First youth ministry in the 50s and 60s formed the value of relevancy into boomers who then launched the megachurch movement. Later youth ministry in the 80s and 90s formed the value of relational authority into GenXers who gave rise to the emerging church movement. What’s happening now?

I’m not entirely sure, but based on work by David Kinnaman at Barna and Kara Powell at Fuller, I’m concerned that youth ministry is forming the values of isolation and activism into Millennials. They’re relationally isolated from other generations in the church, and their faith is isolated from any connection to their vocations. At the same time they are linking faith to social action toward the poor and marginalized, but this is often emotionally driven without the theological foundations that can fuel engagement when emotion runs dry. Without a robust theology of justice, in time compassion fatigue may set in and activism slip into apathy.

Could these values explain why we’re seeing an exodus of young adults from the church? While it’s always been a problem, adults often returned to the church after getting married or having children. But that’s not the case anymore. Could the values of isolation (separating young people from the rest of the church community), and activism (a sense that real faith happens outside the church and may make church irrelevant) be behind the de-churching of Millennials? Time will tell.

We do well to have a Mr. Holland in our lives—someone who, like the Richard Dreyfus character in the 1996 film Mr. Holland’s Opus, teaches us not merely how to get the grade but how to think. Not merely how to earn a diploma but how to live.

Several Mr. Holland figures (along with a tall, dark and handsome American son of a missionary) wend their way in and out of author Carolyn Weber’s poignant memoir Surprised by Oxford, but the first and arguably most enduring is Dr. Deveaux, a professor of 17th-century poetry during the then-Carolyn Drake’s undergraduate years at a school in her native Canada.

Drake was reared by a mother with very loose, cultural ties to the church and a mostly absent, unreliable father. She emerged agnostic with a strong sense that she knew who her master was: She was her own.

Deveaux, by contrast, was an evangelical, though in the book Weber acknowledges that she would have had no understanding of that label at the time she studied under his tutelage.

Responding to Miss Drake’s assigned reading of John Donne’s Sonnet XIV and her argument for the poem’s “classic subversion by the dominant patriarchy … of the threat posed by maternal power, or the feminine spiritus,” Deveaux challenged her reading, insisting that she didn’t get the point; that she had not untied a subtle and very important knot in Donne’s message.

“The truth is in the paradox, Miss Drake,” Weber writes in recounting Professor Deveaux’s retort. “Anything not done in submission to God, anything not done to the glory of God, is doomed to failure, frailty, and futility. This is the unholy trinity we humans fear most. And we should, for we entertain it all the time at the pain and expense of not knowing the real one.”

Deveaux’s comeback did not stop there. In salty language that reminded me of many a professor I’ve encountered, Deveaux continued: “The rest is all bullsh*t, Miss Drake. It’s as simple as that. And your purpose here in life is to discern the real thing from the bullsh*t, and then to choose the non-bullsh*t.”

Shortly thereafter, Carolyn Drake matriculated to Oriel College at Oxford University, where, leaving a fellow agnostic fiancé back in Canada, she began work toward her Masters of Philosophy, focusing on writers such as Coleridge, Goethe, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron. Through a series of encounters with other Mr. Hollands and just as many anti-Hollands, she cut through the B.S. and found her purpose, just as Deveaux challenged her to do.

That journey is recounted in Surprised by Oxford, a memoir of Weber’s first year there, which is also the story of her conversion. Her narrative is structured around the terms of the school’s academic year, embedded in the Christian liturgical calendar: Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity, with interludes around Christmastide and Eastertide. Weber’s debt to C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy is acknowledged in her title, but Surprised by Oxford is different in many respects from Lewis’ memoir, with a significantly more truncated time-frame, much faster pacing, and more troubled childhood roots that set up the book’s narrative and tension. It also has hints of Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, with God seemingly pursuing Weber at every turn, not only through some of her professors but also via a madcap group of friends (believers and skeptics alike) who frequent the famous Oxford pub Eagle and Child for conversations about the meaning of life—and the music of U2. Finally, Surprised by Oxford has elements of a romantic and yet believable love story through the challenging and consistent witness of that tall, dark, and handsome figure that the author calls simply “TDH” throughout. The love story is an element essential to the book’s conclusion, but one that Weber never allows to become dominant or distracting.

Surprised by Oxford is, in short, a moving portrait of one woman’s intellectual and spiritual conversion. It is a story for all of us who find ourselves uttering on occasion, with the father of the ill son in the Gospel of Mark, “Lord, I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”—a prayer that proved to be a centerpiece in Weber’s conversion.

“That man’s desperate plea for the overcoming of his unbelief echoed deep within me, leaving nowhere to hide,” Weber writes. “God had called out even this very last façade, this trump card of an excuse, this very final resting place of despair. And it appeared that for us particularly hard nuts to crack the only answer is prayer.”

And so she prayed.

And so she believed.

Ultimately, Weber was baptized in the River Thames on Trinity Sunday of Trinity Term, just after a service at St. Ebbe’s Church. At the end of her baptismal day, she sat on an old bench by the river and opened a gift from one of her madcap friends, Hannah. On the underside of the gift box were the words from Milton’s Paradise Lost in Hannah’s handwriting. They read:

And fast by hanging in a golden chain

This pendent world, in bigness as a star

Of smallest magnitude close by the moon

Weber pulled out a beautiful piece of sea glass attached to a fine, silver chain. “I drew it out carefully, admiring how the sea jewel’s brilliant blues and greens shimmered in suspension against the red and orange flame,” Weber writes with elegance and detail. “My breath caught at its seeming fragility, at its bright and bold beauty.

“How can we be so small, and so significant?

“Yes.

“Boxes and boxes of paradoxes! Open them all up, and therein glistens the gift of truth.”

Professor Deveaux did not live to hear a firsthand account of Weber’s surprise in Oxford. But he would have been delighted by her acceptance of the gift of triune truth, in the midst of its paradoxes.

Jeff Crosby is the associate publisher at InterVarsity Press in Downers Grove, Illinois. He is the editor and compiler of Days of Grace Through the Year, a collection of meditations drawn from the writings of Lewis B. Smedes.

Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

We Americans are a people both fascinated and horrified by the notion of commitment. Note the most common sitcom plots, the predictable trajectories of our celebrity marriages, even the myth of the American hero striking out, away from the familiar, toward an unknown future. What is it about commitment that is so frightening, yet so compelling? Commitment scares us because the truth does. At least Wendell Berry suggests something like that:

“Because the condition of marriage is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you – and marriage, time, life, history, and the world – will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.

Forms join us to time, to the consequences and fruitions of our passing. The Zen student, the poet, the husband, the wife – none knows with certainty what he or she is staying for, but all know the likelihood that they will be staying ‘awhile’: to find out what they are staying for. And it is the faith of all of these disciplines that they will not stay to find that they should not have stayed.

That faith has nothing to do with what is usually called optimism. As the traditional marriage ceremony insists, not everything that we stay to find out will make us happy. The faith, rather, is that by staying, and only by staying, we will learn something of the truth, that the truth is good to know, and that it is always both different and larger than we thought.”

I am not so much interested in this as a statement about marriage as I am in it as a statement about how we ought to live. It feels radical, certainly polemical in a society that values unrestricted independence. What a contrarian notion: commitment – not wanderlust – begets discovery, and discovery, even when sorrow or pain follow, is a movement toward what is real and right.

Consider his rather plain line buried in a dependent clause: “that the truth is good to know.” It’s an obvious point, one assumed on its surface. He might have left it out; it doesn’t appear necessary to the argument – until you realize that it is the argument.

Truth as an unqualified good: We would all readily assent to this, but how often do we live at counter purpose to it? How often do we avoid, reject, run from the very things – be it another person, a place, a vocation, a community, an institution – that reveal to us some terrible truth? We turn away from what is difficult or painful to acknowledge, yes, about other people, but more often, about ourselves.

Marriage is Berry’s trope here, but apply it to any of our life’s commitments: an emotionally needy friend, an addicted sibling, a stifling job, an unexciting town, a lackluster congregation. What will we discover by continuing to show up? What will we learn about ourselves, what will we come to know? And do we have the nerve to do this learning, to live into this knowing? Even when it’s ugly? Especially when it’s ugly?

Atlanta-based megachurch pastor Eddie Long will take time off to focus on his family after his wife filed for divorce.

“I’m going to take a little time off to work with my family,” Long told his congregation at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church on Sunday. “I do want you to know that this is, for me and my family, especially with me, one of the most difficult times and things I’ve had to face, and only because my strength, other than God, is in Miss Vanessa.”

The decision came after Vanessa Long announced she had filed for divorce on December 1. An attributed statement released by Eddie Long’s church indicated she was planning on withdrawing the petition for divorce, but an attorney confirmed Vanessa Long was proceeding with the divorce as of late Friday.

The Longs were married in 1990 and have three children. Vanessa Long said her initial decision to file for divorce was prompted after “years of attacks in the media” against her and her husband. In September of 2010, four men accused Long of coercing them into sexual relationships by using his influence and giving them gifts, trips, and jobs while they were teens. Long denied the claims. The lawsuits were settled out of court in May with a non-disclosure policy.

Long’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1985 after Dabara Houston claimed that Long had a “vicious and violent temper,” and that she feared for the safety for her and her son.

“We need to create a country where people don’t feel like they have to leave religion at the door. That means being proud of Christianity, not downgrading it.”Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the only Muslim member of the British Cabinet.The Telegraph

“This brings to close a sad chapter in the history of Whiteville that can best be described as terroristic, cowardly and shameful!”James Bellar, mayor of Whiteville, Tennessee, in a letter to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which had threatened to sue the town over a cross atop one of its water towers. Rather than remove the cross, the mayor removed one of its arms.WREG

“His restitution as a viable theological voice within our tradition might encourage a deeper understanding of sin, grace, [and] free will.”Benno Pattison, rector of Church of the Epiphany in Atlanta, in a diocesan resolution to reverse the Council of Carthage condemnation of Pelagius as a heretic.The Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta

“Our jurisprudence has confounded the lower courts and rendered the constitutionality of displays of religious imagery on government property anyone’s guess.”Justice Clarence Thomas, in a dissent to the Supreme Court’s decision not to consider whether crosses on the side of Utah highways violate the First Amendment. Because of a lower court’s ruling, the crosses will now be removed.SupremeCourt.gov

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Earlier “Quotation Marks” columns are available from November 2011, October 2011, September 2011, August 2011, July 2011, June 2011, May 2011, April 2011, March 2011, February 2011, January 2011, December 2010, November 2010, and earlier issues of Christianity Today

See CT’s news section and liveblog for more news updates.

Before announcing her bid to unseat Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown, Democrat Elizabeth Warren delivered impassioned remarks on the social obligations of successful entrepreneurs.

Speaking to a small gathering, she insisted that private prosperity rests upon pillars of public investment. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” said Warren, a Harvard law professor, formerly a presidential adviser on consumer finance, and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2010.

You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate …. Now look, you built a factory and turned it into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Warren’s comments went viral on YouTube. Bloggers and pundits pronounced on her argument from every angle. Conservatives spied a worrying pretext for saddling wealth creators with burdensome new taxes, while liberals cheered a full-throated defense of government’s role in promoting the common good.

We do not wish to referee this dispute. People who share our core theological convictions can have different opinions on the scope of government. Except by insinuation, Warren’s reasoning does not entail expansion of federal taxation. Many commentators construed her remarks as endorsing tax hikes, but she articulated nothing beyond the general principle that public expenditure facilitates private enterprise. That corporate titans owe something to satisfy the “underlying social contract” does not determine how much they ought to owe, nor what channels they should use to “pay it forward.”

No line of logic irrefutably links the ideal of social cooperation with the practice of “soaking the rich.” Yet Warren’s statement deserves both nods of sympathy and nudges of reproach. In what it affirms, it exposes a blind spot of the tea party conservatism that many evangelicals espouse. In what it omits, it confirms a blind spot in a strain of secular progressivism that evangelicals rightly reject.

Warren reminds us of our indebtedness to others. Too often, tea party rhetoric fuels a cult of the heroic individual. It sanctifies individual achievement and shortchanges the conditions on which such achievements depend. Human flourishing falters without the protections that a justly governed society provides. Evangelical tea partiers can appreciate this basic truth. There is no need to endorse high taxes or over-regulation.

Our applause for Warren’s illustrations is tempered by their narrowness. She fails to include essential nongovernmental institutions. Where are the families, churches, independent schools, hospitals, service clubs, and trade and professional organizations, as well as the free press? Warren commits the besetting sin of secular progressivism: reducing the complex workings of society to the actions of government—in her formulation, “what the rest of us paid for.”

Warren commits the progressivist sin of reducing society’s workings to government action.

But “the rest of us” are more than taxpayers. “The rest of us”—Christians, at least—belong to, and sometimes lead, churches, families, and other “mediating institutions.” Have these things contributed nothing to the success of Warren’s hypothetical factory owner? If the employees of a factory owner know right from wrong—if they behave honorably, if they do not habitually lie, cheat, and steal—then this may testify to the virtuous influence of pastors and parents.

Evangelicals believe God is sovereign over all. We believe God exercises sovereignty not by manipulating his creatures like so many chess pieces, but by ordaining institutions to which he delegates a caretaking role. Government is one of those institutions. Its responsibilities, though limited, are not negligible. By its movements, peace, prosperity, and justice can either be strengthened or squandered.

Humans are indebted to government for the things it does. Still more, we are indebted to mediating institutions for doing the things government cannot and should not do. Police can lock up crooks who steal the factory owner’s goods. But they are ill equipped to cultivate the conscience that objects, on principle, to thievery.

Fairness counsels against chastising Elizabeth Warren too severely. Her remarks, addressed to America’s present budgetary crisis, did not purport to resolve every last question of social roles and responsibilities. We can only invite her to supplement a keen awareness of what belongs to Caesar with deeper reflection on what belongs to God—and to the institutions he entrusts with governing a fallen and fractured creation.

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CT covers political developments on our politics blog.

Previous CT editorials include:

Fighting Famine Isn’t Enough | Some 2,000 Somalis die of starvation daily. Drought isn’t the reason. (November 4, 2011)

Unexpected Political Hero | Even evangelicals who disagreed with Mark Hatfield admired his passionate faith. (October 3, 2011)

Battle for the Bible Translation | Our movement is wide enough to include a variety of methods. (September 2, 2011)

To a hardworking mom facing a cash crunch, a payday loan can seem like awfully good news—the chance to borrow some money in advance of a paycheck that is days or weeks away. But when that paycheck actually arrives, paying back the loan is often out of reach—the average payday loan customer renews their loan nine times, paying new fees each time. The Center for Responsible Lending has found that the average customer with a $300 payday loan will end up paying $500 in interest and fees, plus the original loan amount.

You would think a business like that, charging effective interest rates that can range north of 400 percent per year, would have trouble attracting customers. In fact, the market is huge—the United States hosts more payday lending stores than Starbucks and Burger Kings combined.

But a Pittsburgh-based organization wants to provide an alternative.

Dan Krebs and Tony Wiles first learned about the dubious practices of payday lenders in 2006, through a sermon preached by their pastor at Allegheny Center Alliance Church (ACAC). Krebs had been running the finance department at a local car dealership, and thought the church should be able to come up with a creative alternative. Wiles, an ex-cop who’d grown up in ACAC’s struggling Northside neighborhood, had been “searching for something to do to give back, to do something in the community that could really make a difference.” The two joined forces to launch Grace Period.

Grace Period is unusual, perhaps unique, in its faith-based approach to actually creating something better than the much-criticized payday lending industry. There’s no shortage of protests against payday lending, and effortsto outlawthe practice are under way in several states. Indeed, for 10 years the state of Pennsylvania has strictly enforced old usury laws that prevented non-banks from charging more than 6 percent annual interest. It’s illegal to offer a traditional payday loan in Pennsylvania—but that wasn’t stopping offers from streaming in over the Internet, nor was it addressing the real financial needs that payday lenders promise to address.

Then Krebs and Wiles launched Grace Period. They were hoping to reach customers like Jameikka Drewery, a medical assistant and single mom with five children. In 2006, she had been burned by a payday lender called Advance America, which was circumventing Pennsylvania’s usury laws until it was kicked out altogether by the attorney general in 2007. “It was a rip-off,” Drewery says. “Every paycheck I had to go and pay them and then borrow back just to pay my bills. I did that for four months or so before things finally got better.”

When Drewery needed a loan in 2008, she was stumped. “I was getting married and I needed a loan to pay for a [reception] hall,” she explains. The place she wanted required a $250 deposit. An acquaintance recommended that she check out Grace Period.

When Drewery called the organization, she heard something different from the usual payday lending pitch. Wiles explained that Grace Period was a savings cooperative, one you join as you would a gym. Clients enroll as a member in the club for at least one year. Grace Period offers the new member an initial loan and establishes a workable repayment plan. Typically about $50 is deducted automatically each pay period from the member’s paycheck to cover loan installments and modest club dues. These automatic payments continue for 12 months. During that time, the initial loan is repaid and additional funds accumulate as an emergency savings reserve for the member. At year’s end, members can withdraw funds and close their accounts or remain members, earning interest on their savings.

“They look at how much you make and how much they believe you can pay back,” Drewery says. “They tell you [that] you don’t want to borrow more than what you can pay back every paycheck and still have enough to live on.”

When Drewery cut back from working two jobs to “just a job and a half” so she could start nursing school, she walked a financial tightrope. Over the next few years, she borrowed several times from her Grace Period account to handle various challenges, such as her car breaking down. “The best thing about them was that when I needed them they were always there,” she says. “They helped me save.”

Largely through word-of-mouth endorsem*nts, Grace Period’s membership has increased 55 percent from 2010 to 2011, to nearly 4,000 members. It’s on track to loan $1.73 million in 2011 through its partnership with Pittsburgh Central Federal Credit Union.

Grace Period wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without support from Krebs’s church. ACAC members raised $750,000 in new deposits at the credit union, providing initial capital for the new venture. “Everybody has got a couple hundred dollars sitting around for a rainy day,” Krebs says. “We just asked people to put their rainy day money where it could help somebody else.” Dan Moon, then CEO at Pittsburgh Central, was already inclined to do something new to service the Northside community. “We were taking a risk on a newly formed business,” he admits. But when he visited ACAC and met the leadership and church members at an open house showcasing the Grace Period initiative, “We saw this whole church committed to this. They were ready to back up these loans.”

Today, Grace Period’s member dues system provides cash on hand to cover the operating expenses of the nonprofit. New club members are constantly being added into the loan pool; meanwhile, older customers pay off their loans but remain in the club. Their capital is then available to help out new members, turning previous debtors into creditors.

Close to Grace Period’s modest storefront on E. Ohio Street, financial temptations abound: a Money Mart shop, two Rent-a-Center stores, and a Jackson Hewitt tax office offering “refund anticipation loans.” To avoid these debt traps, Krebs says, “People need to have a systematic savings program—and that’s what we offer.”

Drewery recently stopped in to Grace Period to close her account. She and her family are moving to South Carolina to be closer to her ailing mother. She and Tony Wiles talked and prayed for a half hour, she says. She could hardly believe it when he reminded her that she’d saved $1,700.

“Who’d have thought that I could save $1,700?” Drewery exclaims. “I keep saying, ‘If I can do it, anybody can do it.’ “

Amy L. Sherman’s newest book is Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good (IVP, 2011). Small portions of this article were adapted from Sherman’s essay “No Such Thing as a Free Loan,” which appeared in the March/April 2011 issue of Prism.