Richard John Neuhaus:

Many pastors report that they do not have time for serious study at all. Or they count the hours dawdled over news magazines and professional manuals as study. Frequently it is the same pastors who say they do not have time for prayer. It is to be feared that the person who does not have time for study and prayer does not have time for Christian ministry. A great temptation of ministry is hollow activism. One tries to convince others, and oneself, that one is doing something important because one is always so busy. A suburban pastor confessed to me that he recently caught himself quickly putting aside a theological book he was reading when a parishioner came into the office. He hastily began working on some parochial reports that were on his desk, remarking that they had to be in that day, and, of course, impressing the member with the burdens of ministry. To his credit, he recognized this as a charade to be confessed. Others are less fortunate. “Is the pastor busy?” asks the caller. “No,” says the church secretary, “he’s just reading.” No, he’s not busy, he’s just thinking. No, he’s not busy, he’s just praying. […]

Reflection, study, and prayer have always had to compete against the imperious claims of other activities. The imperiousness of the claims is reinforced by the fact that such activities are usually more visible, often more immediately satisfying, and almost certainly more likely to be applauded by others. Church officialdom is more likely to take note of a pastor mighty in raising money than of a pastor mighty in prayer. We complain that we do not have enough time. One answer is to learn to do expeditiously what has to be done in order to get on to what must be done. What must be done is largely determined by our own setting of priorities. When as a young priest, Archbishop William Temple deplored the fact that there was so much to do and so little time in which to do it all, his wise father responded, “William, you have all the time there is.” You have all the time there is—it is a thought worthy of more than a moment’s reflection. Finally, before God, we are responsible for what we do with all the time there is.

As Neuhaus makes plain, the pastor who claims he doesn’t have time for study or prayer is, at least in many cases, really saying that such things are not priorities. He does not conceive of those activities as what must be done. He would like to do them; he gives lip service to their importance; he hopes that in a few weeks, after the busy season has died down, that he’ll be able to focus more on them. But, in reality, such things are not integral to the ministry.

Part of the problem, as Neuhaus indicates at the end of the quote above, is that of viewing one’s time as a scarce resource (Michael Sacasas has written perceptively about this here). It is actually quite radical to start from the assumption that you have all the time you need. We have so many inputs that we can’t help but feel overloaded and inadequate to all the demands upon our attention. But, the truth of the matter is, as the wise father put it, you have all the time there is. The pastor, like everyone else, will not be condemned for failing to accomplish ten lives in the course of one. He is finally responsible for how he answers the call issued by the Lord himself—a call easy to miss in the roar of competing demands and urgent requests.

Richard John Neuhaus, warning of the dangers of preaching about controversial social issues (what he terms “the lust for contemporaneity”):

We should not ordinarily address them too directly or prescriptively, because that does not lead the hearer to the deeper controversy with the will of God. The preacher who presumes to declare from the pulpit what should be done about disarmament, or capital punishment, or teenage crime can be readily dismissed as “too conservative” or “too liberal,” depending on the taste of his hearers. In any case, his views on the subject are frequently not as interesting or as informed as what people might receive through magazines, or television, or books. Again, our goal in preaching is not relevance but engagement.

The connections with the contemporary emerge obliquely, suggestively, and troublingly from immersion in the text. The hearer is not so much challenged to come to terms with the preacher’s viewpoint as with the one who is rightly acknowledged as Christ our Contemporary. We are the more persuasive the more we make it clear that we have not confused our opinion with the Word of God. With respect to the particular answers to all problems, ancient and contemporary, we invite the hearer to join in the search for a divine will that always eludes our certain apprehension. This does not mean we end on a note of uncertainty; rather, we begin and end with the assurance of a hope that transcends our differing perceptions of what ought to be done.

Currently reading: Durable Trades by Rory Groves 📚

For whatever reason, this has been the track for summer 2023.

Thesis: The best cultural criticism is at least a decade old, and often a good bit older.

The reason this is so is because incisive cultural criticism penetrates beneath the ephemera to the deeper forces shaping society and human life. These forces, it turns out, have a complex history and, therefore, continue to exert influence even beyond technological innovations or surprising political realignments. The best cultural criticism brings these structural dynamics into view. But it’s difficult to discern a book’s prescience except with hindsight. That’s why Lasch and Bellah (and so on) are still quoted regularly. It’s why Taylor’s A Secular Age seems to be a bottomless well for writers to draw from. And it’s why much of the best tech criticism—e.g., Postman, Ellul, Illich, Borgmann—was published so long ago.

So, a proposal for testing my thesis. Let’s take Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which has been lauded as a brilliant work of intellectual history. Trueman’s narrative seems to offer a level of explanatory power for people trying to make sense of how Western culture has arrived at the place it’s at. To be clear, though I’ve not read the book, I fully expect that all the accolades are well deserved. Trueman is a top-notch historian and I assume his work is well-researched and tightly argued. My thesis would merely suggest that Rise and Triumph, if it is in fact the incisive work of commentary that we currently believe it to be, will be able to illuminate unforeseen circumstances in a decade or two. It’s ability to be uncannily relevant to a later time—where you check the copyright because it feels like it was written yesterday—that, to me at least, is the truest mark of a great work of cultural criticism.