Climate Change Babies, Richard Rohr, and the Madness of Crowds
Considering The Universal Christ
Michael McClymond and Ian Paul on Richard Rohr
Ten years ago, a friend handed me The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective by Franciscan friar Richard Rohr. I was riveted. How did this author seem to know exactly who I was, the light and dark side of my personality, my gifts and my pet sins? I passed the book along, trusting that others would benefit as much from Rohr’s insight as I did.
While in grad school, I picked up another Rohr book entitled Falling Upward. His two halves of life paradigm was compelling, but I found Rohr's relentless use of decontextualized Bible verses troubling, and his casual dismissal of key Christian beliefs rather confusing for a Catholic priest. I concluded that Rohr was a man of keen psychological insight, but not a trustworthy guide to the Bible or Christian tradition.
Rohr's popularity has exploded since our first encounter. His most recent book, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, is his most theological title to date. Given how revered Rohr is as a spiritual guide, as well his undeniable wisdom as a counselor, I’ve been looking for a substantive theological engagement with the book.
Enter Ian Paul and Michael McClymond, the former a British New Testament scholar and the latter a leading expert on Christian universalism. These two reviews unpack Rohr’s appeal, his theology, and how his attempt to distinguish the earthbound Jesus from the cosmic Christ diverges with Christianity at key points. Paul's review focuses on Rohr's "happiness with inaccuracy" in both theology and science, and McClymond explains the inability of Rohr's theological constructs to distinguish good from evil.
Click each scholar's name above for their reviews. For more on the roots of Christian universalism, read this utterly fascinating interview with McClymond. The brave among us can refer to his recent (1,376 page) two-volume work The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism.
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity
An interview with Douglas Murray
In his new book The Madness of Crowds, British journalist Douglas Murray takes on the three most divisive issues of our time — sexuality, gender, and race — and their prevalence in workplaces, universities, schools, and homes across the western world. Each of these hot buttons, Murray writes, are increasingly attended by a crusading desire on the part of many to right perceived wrongs, along with a weaponization of identity. The world is viewed through the lens of power and oppression, as if this were the only dynamic at play.
If this sounds theoretical, a recent article in The Atlantic by George Packer called “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids” describes what it looks like on the ground. Motivated by progressive values, Packer moved his children into New York public schools and was initially heartened by the increased diversity. Eventually, however, his middle-school daughter expressed a wish "not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience”, while other kids started arriving home desperate for the bathroom after holding it all day to avoid using gender neutral bathrooms. Somehow, within the course of a few years, education had became dominated by meta-concepts like white supremacy, heterosexism, and patriarchy.
Listen to Douglas Murray explain how this came to be, or jump in toward the end for a striking explanation of the need for forgiveness in our culture. For more, check out The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity. William Davies provides a dissenting perspective in The Guardian.
Don't Let Climate Change Stop You From Becoming a Parent
Gracy Olmstead
In Paul Schrader’s film First Reformed, a local pastor played by Ethan Hawke meets with a man named Michael who is overcome with deep anxiety. Michael’s home office walls are plastered with charts documenting the rise in average global temperature. A video rendering of this data loops on his computer screen. The two discuss the consequences of global climate change — heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation, declining food production – before Michael asks the pastor his key question: “How do you sanction bringing [a child] into this world?”
With a global climate crisis escalating (and the rhetoric around it even more so), this is a very real question for many people. Gracy Olmstead writes in The New York Times with a perspective worth considering:
...it’s important to argue for children and their parents and for the essential role they can both play in this urgent work of planetwide stewardship going forward.
The act of creation is opposed to the act of consumption: The latter suggests that everything exists to serve our needs and appetites, but the other reminds us of the value and goodness inherent in things themselves, and how creation encourages stewardship and responsibility.
Read "Don’t Let Climate Change Stop You From Becoming a Parent". Check out this recent post from Alan Jacobs for a reasoned perspective on climate change in general.
Other than being thrilled to have scored one more convert for Robin Hobb (it was only a matter of time, Phillip), Andy is putting together a Charles Taylor-inspired playlist on Spotify called Songs of the Immanent Frame full of tracks that convey something of what it means to be alive in our cultural moment.
Speaking of This Cultural Moment, if you haven't dived into the podcast of the same name, it is time. In it, two pastors discuss the past, present, and future of the church in the west. It is illuminating, disturbing, and incredibly hopeful.
Phillip and his family have arrived in Maine for a much-anticipated vacation. He is currently salivating at the thought of lunch at Café Miranda and spending the week cooking from Adventures in Comfort Food. Otherwise, he's packed only two books: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul, and Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb (you win, Andy).
Otherwise, it's lobster time.
Current Thought Projects
Ideas we're mulling over long-term
Andy is deep in Stephen King. He is reading King's giant masterpiece of horror, It, and has plans for The Shining and Doctor Sleep before his November 8 lecture. Mike Duran's book Christian Horror is helping with some of the academic heavy lifting (and drawing stares as he reads it in public). Duran makes the case that not only is horror compatible with Christianity, it can even be edifying.
For those who want to dip into King, but can't handle, say, monsters in sewers that eat children, his new book The Institute is classic King: kids with supernatural powers, an evil government agency, plain protagonists who find strength in their bonds of love to overthrow the bad guys.
Phillip finished up a three-week Sabbath class this weekend and is now prepping a talk for Hutchmoot on suffering and serving in the local church when you feel misunderstood. He's returning to Dick Keyes' Seeing Through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion for help and hopes to paint a picture of the beautifully un-cynical Jesus.