The great hermeneutical virtue of the church, therefore, is patience. It is not lethargy or sloth that animates the church’s lumbering and sometimes generationally delayed response to the intellectual Zeitgeist, certainly not in the realm of history and biblical exegesis. It is wisdom. It is a feature of the church’s teaching office, not a bug.
On the Bank of the River by Paul Signac (from MIA)
Currently reading: Stewards of Eden by Sandra L. Richter 📚
Brad East, in discussing the difficult question of reading Yoder, gives this very useful description of the task of a theologian:
If the subject matter of theology is the living divine reality revealed in the person and work of Jesus—together with the whole penumbra of witnesses and mediators, histories and texts, communities and practices that provide access to that revelation—then what theologians offer in their work is contemplative and hermeneutical insights into that reality. They glimpse some detail or truth, some connection or imperative, some implication or sublimity, and bring it to light for the rest of us. We their readers, for our part, sift the wheat from the chaff, testing their offerings not only for goodness, truth, and beauty, but also for usefulness, clarity, and edification. I submit that the theological writings Yoder left behind offer insights into the reality of Christ worth receiving, however critically, both now and into the future. I leave it to others to decide whether that judgment is accurate.
Nowhere are our true feelings about work clearer than in the growth of jobs which pay well and offer high status, but which have little to no social value. Sociologist David Graeber calls them bullshit jobs. (It is difficult to find a non-profane word that combines the pointlessness of these jobs with the necessary deception they involve.) Bullshit jobs are both pointless and require pretending that they are not pointless. One example: being a subcontractor to a subcontractor to the military, whose job it is to drive long distances to move furniture from one room to another. More poignant is the story of the man hired to patch a problem that the higher authorities in the company do not want fixed. He is literally paid – and paid well – to do nothing. He starts out reading novels, then starts drinking at work and taking phony work trips, trying to get himself fired. Finally, he tries to resign and gets offered a raise. His job is a necessary pretense for his superiors – they cannot let him go. What is fascinating about the stories Graeber collects is how deeply unhappy these workers are, people who have money and status without having to work for it. It seems that their hearts long for real work, for service, for connection with their communities. […]
We think of American culture – a culture shared with much of Western Europe – as a culture that values work. But it is not in fact work that we value. What we value is money and status, no matter the cost in other human goods. It is its connection with money and with status that allows work to become addictive or compulsive. […]
Leisure requires cultivation – cultivation of habits and of communities that help to form habits. The pursuit of leisure requires this effort because we resist it. Augustine does not only desire social advancement – he is also afraid of leisure itself. What is Augustine afraid of? What is it in us that flees from leisure? It is, simply speaking, our own emptiness. Saint John of the Cross describes the human soul as made up of great caverns, caverns constituted by our senses and their emptiness constituted by their necessary passivity, receptivity, susceptibility. We seek out distractions in order to hide from this terrifying emptiness that can only be filled with God. The emptiness is our dependence on what comes from the outside, our need to wait for God to act. This dependence and this need are objectively terrifying. What will come? An earthquake? Cancer? Joblessness? More to the point: What will we find in ourselves? That we love status and money more than we thought we did? That we don’t know ourselves, or God, or what matters in our lives?
Finished reading: The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde 📚
A stimulating book. I’m not yet sure what to make of it; there are many threads to pull on. This one will linger with me for a while.
Finished reading: How to Work with (Almost) Anyone by Michael Bungay Stanier 📚
Don’t bother with this one. Could’ve easily been a blog post or, at most, a series of posts. Not sure why I always get pulled back into this kind of book…